round 1
(15) throwing muses, “not too soon”
neutered
(2) stone temple pilots, “sex type thing”
378-357
and will play on in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 9.
I Wanna Get Close to You: jim ruland on “Sex Type Thing”
We heard “Sex Type Thing” the first time Stone Temple Pilots was played on the radio and, like so many things about this band we were getting to know, we knew it was coming.
We were the employees of Eagles Coffee Pub in North Hollywood, California. We were actors, dancers, musicians, and writers. We came to L.A. to make our mark, but at Eagles we mostly watched others make theirs.
We were surrounded by dance studios, rehearsal spaces, and tiny theaters with more actors than seats. Our customers were former soap opera stars who read Shakespeare on the regular, the Fly Girls from the show In Living Color, and musicians, so many musicians. Thanks to the recording studio next door we might turn away from the cash register and find Steve Perry, Lita Ford, or Angelo Moore standing at the counter.
Up until the moment we listened to “Sex Type Thing” on KROQ, I had been skeptical of Stone Temple Pilots. My co-worker—let’s call her Sandy—had a crush on Dean, the band’s guitarist, and I had a crush on Sandy, an auburn-haired beauty with glacier-blue eyes who wore ripped-up jeans and knock-off Chuck Taylors.
I didn’t know I was smitten with Sandy until my coworkers pointed it out to me. All of the women who worked at Eagles were beautiful. There was Maria from Taiwan who was a magnet for rockers, especially when she teased out her impossibly long hair. Amber was a dancer with long legs and the sweetest Texas drawl. Jen was from somewhere in the Midwest where she’d worked at a biker bar and excelled at sweet-talking customers.
I liked working with the women of Eagles because the tips were better and the guys were all lazy stoners. Also, I was terribly shy. I hated working the counter. I preferred to stay in the back, making sandwiches and washing dishes, instead of getting all tongue-tied when Lita Ford wanted to know the price of a gingerbread cookie.
But I especially liked working with Sandy. She wore dark chokers that accentuated her pale skin and brought out the hints of blue around her collarbone from the blood vessels under her—oh my god—I had a crush on Sandy. Unfortunately, so did a lot of other people, like the guitarist of a band that was about to become ultra-mega famous.
I wasn’t working with Sandy when she met Dean, but I heard all about it afterwards. It was one of those thunderous collisions between ancient souls that only seemed to happen to beautiful people who, quite frankly, didn’t need the help. Dean, however, had baggage. He had a wife back home with whom he was estranged? Separated? It was a little murky. Plus, he was super old, like, over thirty.
He’d invited Sandy to their next rehearsal. She wanted to go, but only if I came with her. Would I come? Did I have a choice?
The Stone Temple Pilots were going to be L.A.’s answer to Alice in Chains. At least that’s what they told us. The irony was they weren’t even from L.A. but San Diego. Legend has it vocalist Scott Weiland and bassist Rob DeLeo met at a Black Flag show, but who knows? The two were in a couple bands together. Eric Kretz replaced the drummer and when the guitar player bailed they added Robert’s older brother Dean and changed the name to Mighty Joe Young, a funky rock band that owed a debt to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. After signing with Atlantic in 1990, the label insisted on a name change. The band went with Shirley Temple’s Pussy. The label said try again and Stone Temple Pilots was born.
A lot changed between 1990 and the fall of 1992 when this story takes places. Nirvana happened. Pearl Jam happened. Lollapalooza happened. All of which opened the doors for a guitar band that was fast but not too fast, heavy but not too heavy, good looking but not too good looking.
I’d graduated from college in May and spent a few weeks in June roaming around Ireland before presenting a paper on Finnegans Wake at the International James Joyce Symposium in Dublin. My goal in life—don’t laugh—was to be a James Joyce scholar. When I returned from Ireland, I moved from Virginia to L.A. to secure residency in California so I could apply to grad school at UCLA or Berkeley and embark on a brilliant literary career. Instead, I went to work as a coffee jerk at Eagles Coffee Pub and everything changed.
I picked North Hollywood because an old shipmate from the Navy had a spare room. He and his wife lived in an apartment building with a Barton Fink-sounding name, The Biltmore Palms. The apartment sat a few blocks from a gloomy park filled with Cypress trees. On the other side of the park my cousin Mark lived with his wife Theresa. Mark was a working screenwriter who’d had a couple horror movies made, including Neon Maniacs and Pumpkinhead. The only two people I knew in L.A. lived about a mile apart so off to North Hollywood I went.
For those who aren’t familiar with the third largest city in North America, North Hollywood is geographically remote from Hollywood, separated by the Hollywood Hills. Technically, it’s north of Hollywood but that’s like referring to Brooklyn as “South Manhattan.”
North Hollywood is part of the much-maligned San Fernando Valley. Originally, North Hollywood was known as Toluca back when the Valley was part of the largest wheat-growing enterprise in the nation. Wheat needs water and the drought-prone region was more conducive to fruit trees. Eventually the farms and ranches were replaced by miles upon miles of single family tract homes. In an effort to make the region more attractive to the rest of the country, the name was changed to North Hollywood.
The difference between Hollywood and North Hollywood was cultural as well as aesthetic. Hollywood had the Walk of Fame and Mann’s Chinese Theater. North Hollywood had Circus Liquor and Eagles Coffee Pub.
A customer at Eagles once explained the difference between the two Hollywoods in terms of its strip clubs. In Hollywood, he argued, the dancers were so high on heroin they used the pole to hold themselves up while oozing languidly to the dreamy pop of the Cocteau Twins. At so-called gentlemen’s clubs in the Valley, the women danced to Danzig while amped on speed and if you left your beer bottle unattended it might get used as a prop.
In Hollywood, everyone was someone even when they weren’t. In North Hollywood, we knew what we were. We were bartenders, bookstore clerks, deliverymen, non-union carpenters. We had dreams just like the people on the other side of the hills, but we were blue collar and proud of it.
Eagles was a place where these two worlds intersected. This was the center of our universe, and if the stars revolved around Eagles, what did that make us?
“Want a shot?”
In retrospect, it seems like an ambush; but in the moment I welcomed the attention. As soon as we walked into the rehearsal space, Scott hit me up and he seemed relieved when I told him I’d take one.
“I’ll do one with you!” he said.
Scott took me aside where a bottle of Jack Daniels sat on a little bar cart beside a stack of Dixie cups. He poured our shots and we took our medicine and high fived one another. I’ve never liked Jack Daniels but that day it was a revelation. Wow, rock stars really do drink this stuff. It tasted terrible, but seemed to make sense in the dark rehearsal room.
Looking back it seems obvious to me that Scott was helping out his bandmate by distracting me while Dean wooed Sandy. At 6’3” and over two hundred pounds, my potential as an obstacle was obvious. But the maneuver worked. I immediately felt at ease with Stone Temple Pilots. They weren’t a bunch of dicks. They were the opposite of that. They were extremely laid back and, I would soon discover, talented.
Rob picked up his bass and started riffing in a way that suggested he was Flea’s equal in the funk-rock realm. Atlantic may have purged the Yabba-dabba-doo funk from the band’s repertoire, but Rob could do all kinds of interesting things with the bass. Whatever he was playing, he was doing it at one-and-a-half times the speed. Some kind of loosening up exercise, but he didn’t miss a note.
Dean came in next, slashing at his guitar in a way that felt inspired by Dave Davies rather than Jimmy Page. There are guitarists who strive to make noise with their instruments and those who shape music out of the noise, which is much more interesting.
Then Scott took the stage and Stone Temple Pilots played for 30 or 40 minutes without much chit-chat between songs. There are three things for which there is no substitute: sex, travel, and live music. When deprived of these things, our judgement becomes impaired, which explains the popularity of cover bands. STP had just come off the Lollapalooza tour where they’d played on the side stage so their set was tight. They were about to embark on a series of shows that would make or break the band. That afternoon in an anonymous rehearsal space in North Hollywood they seemed prepared for whatever came at them.
I was impressed, but I didn’t have much to compare them to. I’d spent the last four years in southwest Virginia where the best local act was a punk band called Cock Ring. But I’d gone to Lollapalooza and had seen Pearl Jam and Ministry and Rage Against the Machine. Was STP as good as those bands?
Yes, maybe even better, though it was hard to say because I’d taken acid and the highlight of the afternoon was peaking during Jesus and Mary Chain’s centuries-long performance of “Reverence.”
But it didn’t matter what I thought. What mattered was what Sandy thought and she thought Stone Temple Pilots sounded amazing, which meant I officially had no shot.
In 1992 people didn’t drink coffee like they do today. Sometimes when I’m waiting in line for coffee I think about how I’d freak out if I ever had this many customers to wait on. It’s not that we didn’t have customers, we did, loyal customers, but it was the kind of place where people didn’t take their coffee to go. If there was a long line our customers would sit and chat with a friend or read the paper and eventually we’d bring them their drink because we knew what they liked. It was that kind of place.
One of the owners, a woman named Star, told me she took her inspiration from the coffee shops of San Francisco’s North Beach in the ’60s. Eagles had an actual bar where people sat and chatted with us and with one another. There were a few tables scattered around the shop where people would sit and read the paper. Smoking was permitted. Needless to say, there was no internet. People drew in their sketchbooks and penned poems and read books. And talked. We brewed gallons of coffee and talked and talked and talked. It really was like a pub.
A co-worker had talked one of the owners into letting us do an open mic for poetry on one of the slower nights. Eagles had live music most weekend nights and an open mic for singer/songwriter types on Thursdays but nothing for poets and writers. My co-worker called it Skinny Leonard’s Free Verse, a terrible pun that very few people appreciated. My co-worker quit soon afterwards but the name stuck and I ended up hosting the weekly show, which I found less and less terrifying as the weeks went on.
In the beginning, Skinny Leonard’s was sparsely attended and I challenged myself to come up with new pieces each week. I encouraged participation by starting a group poem that everyone contributed to exquisite corpse-style. Soon word got out about Skinny Leonard’s and poets and performers from around the Valley and all over L.A. started dropping by. We didn’t have featured readers. It was the kind of place where you read new work, not rehash the old. Show us what you can do, not what you’ve done. The women tended to be much better than the men who typically drew their inspiration from Henry Rollins or Chuck Bukowski. My stuff wasn’t any better but I stuck with it and soon became more comfortable in front of a microphone. There was something about setting up the P.A. system and breaking it down again each night that helped me lose my fear of it. That was the first step.
Getting my heart stomped on, which was no one’s fault but my own, was the next step. It’s not exactly a news flash that poets, especially young poets, thrive on misery.
The third and final step was the discovery of Skinny Leonard’s Free Verse by Fishbone’s Angelo Moore.
The day KROQ played “Sex Type Thing” was full of excitement. Sandy, who was usually supremely chill, the kind of person who exuded a glassy-eyed calm in the most stressful situations, could barely contain herself, which, frankly, was hard to watch. I stayed in the back, clanking dishes around the sink.
And then the song came on. We all huddled around the radio to listen.
There’s no denying the colossal riff that opens “Sex Type Thing,” a nasty little hook that’s catchy and mean. Once Scott’s vocals come in Dean’s fingers slither along the fretboard. It’s not as attention grabbing as a Greg Ginn solo but just as jarring, like driving at night and hitting a patch of black ice. The rhythm section pummels the song along, keeping it on course. The beauty of “Sex Type Thing” is how the players make space for each other, making the song sound simpler than it is. “Sex Type Thing” excels at creating an aura of menace and sustaining it throughout the song. After half a decade of over-the-top, look-at-me hair metal theatrics, Stone Temple Pilots was far more subtle. Even Scott’s use of a megaphone serves to flatten his vocals rather than amplify them. “Sex Type Thing” was a canvas, a tease, a mood, and a preview of things to come.
After “Sex Type Thing” aired, the DJ took some calls. Listeners were flipping out. “Hey, that song was great! Play it again!” Call after call. The verdict was unanimous: “Sex Type Thing” was a hit.
Was this real? Was it part of the package? Clearly Atlantic had thrown its muscle behind the band to get them on the Lollapalooza side stage and now KROQ. But a label can only take a band so far. A radio station can play a song and a DJ can say it’s the hottest song in the universe, but people still have to like it. Those of us huddled around the radio like a scene out of a black and white film from the 1940s liked Stone Temple Pilots, but so did others out there in the wide weird world where nothing was predictable and even less was guaranteed.
We liked the song. We were happy for Stone Temple Pilots. We were happy for Sandy but we were also a little worried. It didn’t seem like a good situation for her. A young woman and an older man in a complicated marriage. We’d all seen that movie before.
We hadn’t seen the video—none of us had televisions—but we’d heard about the controversy about the song’s lyrics, that people thought the song was somehow glamorizing date rape, which we all thought was absurd. It was 1992 for fuck’s sake. Hadn’t we consumed enough art to understand that the artist is not the protagonist?
We were not conservative at Eagles and we didn’t like people who were. One of our customers had nailed a Bart Simpson doll to a cross and inserted in in a framed painting of Golgotha. We begged him to let us put it up on the wall, and he did. We were all so proud of the piece that when Steve Perry of Journey came in one night we asked him what he thought about it.
“Honestly,” Steve Perry said, “I find it offensive.”
“Get the fuck out of here Steve Perry!” we said and never felt quite the same way about “Wheel in the Sky.”
But Angelo was different. Fishbone was recording an album in the studio next door and the band seemed to be taking its time because Angelo was always around, especially during Skinny Leonard’s Free Verse. Angelo had one of those first-generation motorized scooters and he was a daredevil on the thing, zipping around North Hollywood. I didn’t matter if it was busy or slow at Eagles, he’d throw some poetry into the mix. One night it was super dead, just me and a handful of customers that I considered friends, and Angelo came in hollering. He’d started his poem out on the street and continued it as he came through the door. He didn’t ask for permission. He didn’t put his name on the list. He just did it. Even though there were only a few people there to witness it, he let it all out. A gift I have never forgotten.
Fishbone was in a very different place than Stone Temple Pilots. The band was working on its sixth studio album and things were starting to unravel. Angelo was also going through some issues with his family. I’d never seen a performer own their work as completely as Angelo did that night at Eagles. Most of it was memorized. Some of it was improvised. All of it was essential and true. I learned more about poetry listening to Angelo that night than anything my professors taught me in four years of college. He was absolutely electrifying.
Did we know how popular Stone Temple Pilots was going to be? I like to think we could sense it, even if Stone Temple Pilots didn’t. The members of the band seemed so at ease with themselves, like they were taking it all in stride. Maybe it’s easy to give that impression when you only see someone every so often. Maybe they expected it to fall apart. Maybe on the inside they were torn up with anxiety, but I doubt it.
I’d gone with Sandy to a poorly attended gig at the Road House in Orange County before KROQ played “Sex Type Thing.” Aside from a handful of friends of the band, the place was empty. They were opening for Dio or Dokken. I can’t remember which because we didn’t stay. Sandy didn’t know anyone at the show and seemed uncomfortable being around STP’s inner circle and wanted to go.
I went to another show with Sandy not long after STP’s record came out. STP opened for Soul Asylum at the Roxy, and it was an amazing show. The place was packed and people were into both bands and we could feel the energy in the room. Sandy and I got separated somehow. She was my ride but I couldn’t find her after the show. Outside, I saw Scott and asked him if he could give me a lift back to the Valley. He told me he was staying in Hollywood, but he knew some people, two attractive young women my age, who were heading that way and hooked me up with them. They seemed eager to do whatever Scott asked of them. This was his new reality and I was grateful he was using it to help me.
“What do you do?” Scott’s acquaintances wanted to know once we were in the car and on our way.
“I work at Eagles,” I said like it meant something, because it did.
“Oh,” they said.
We drove the rest of the way in silence.
Sandy didn’t ask me to go to any more shows. Things didn’t work out with Dean. She dated a guitar player in a band that struck me as a druggier version of Porno for Pyros, which is really saying something. When that panned out she started seeing a crust punk named Nimrod who was actually homeless. I sometimes feel that through the duration of our friendship we grew further and further apart and now I have no idea where she is.
Stone Temple Pilots sold something like eight million copies of its debut album and it’s safe to say that it all went downhill from there.
I didn’t became a James Joyce scholar but I kept Skinny Leonard’s Free Verse going until I went back to school, not at UCLA or Berkeley, but at a mountain town in the Arizona desert. Eagles isn’t there anymore. It’s a hot dog stand now. They built a metro stop down the street and every year they tear down another anonymous building and put up more condos. They call it the NoHo Arts District now. I wish I was kidding, but I’m not.
My writing got a lot better after Eagles, for whom I have Angelo to thank. I committed to my work, got closer to it, owned it. When I performed at Eagles, I let everyone know the work was mine and no one else’s. At the end of the night I broke down the P.A. and put away the chairs and mopped the floor like always. I owned that, too. The crowds got bigger and bigger and one day it became clear that one of the ladies who came out each week, tall and pale and kinda goth but kinda not, wasn’t there for Skinny Leonard, or the group poem, but for me. We started dating and I never saw Stone Temple Pilots again.
Jim Ruland writes for Razorcake fanzine, America’s only independent music magazine. He wrote My Damage with Keith Morris of Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and OFF! and Do What You Want with Bad Religion. His next book, Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records, will be published in 2022.
Heidi Czerwiec on “not too soon”
*Gasp*
There’s a gender gap in grunge.
Despite Hole and Sleater-Kinney and Liz Phair (exceptional, but exceptions, not rule). Despite Lilith Fair.
I know her. I knew it even then. Throwing Muses’ “Not Too Soon” on a mixtape I made myself in ’92 titled Girls With Burly Voices, a cassette full of Riot Grrrls, the word a growl, a girl in babydoll dress or vintage slip with shitkicker boots, walking contradiction, Vamp on my lips as I sang along—sexually-liberated—about blow jobs, my choker necklace an erotic asphyxiation; a time when I plucked my eyebrows and pussy bald as a baby, but insisted I wasn’t infantilized, attended strip clubs not for my own pleasure but to perform transgression, to prove to the guys I was cool with it. Back then I was fearless, desiring to be desired and feared, a bottom and a top, wrapped up like a doll in bad dreams and broken arms.
I know her, Tanya Donelly asserts, and she did. Some sensitive poet dude wrote “woman is muse or she is nothing,” and bandmates Tanya and her stepsister Kristin Hersh threw that right out, rejecting woman as projection for woman as projectile.
And they threw down, nucleus of the feminist punk movement – Pixies opened for Throwing Muses in ’86, and Donelly and Kim Deal would become Breeders in ’89 before Donelly left to grow Belly in ’91, a swelling that birthed girl band after girl band.
But first, I know her in ’92, a girl with a burly voice belting “Not Too Soon,” a song the BBC described as “probably the catchiest song she ever wrote, which is impressive given that the chorus is essentially her clearing her throat.” The singer knows romantic tropes, knows this guy’s a manipulator, and she is not having that shit. She recognizes and declines the role she’s supposed to play: the chorus growls I know herrrrrr before outright sneering, Neer neer-neer neer-neer. The bridge, spoken in hushed, halting tones à lá “The Leader of the Pack,” addresses whoever you is in quasi-romantic rock mode—The last time I saw you, you were standing in the dark—only to coldly mock and reject you: and with a freezing face, I watched you fall apart.
And yet. To return to that chorus, right after she growls I know herrrrr and sneers, her voice dissolves into a soft, girlish baby-babble, punctuated with a *gasp*, words reduced to sound, to silence.
There was a moment in the Nineties, as Riot Grrrls organized and wrote zines and formed bands, when it felt like equality, when I was fearless and loud and unafraid to use my mouth. In my mouth You might as well be dead…if you’re afraid to fall sounds like empowerment, but it’s a weapon in the wrong one. I fell for him. It doesn’t matter which one. He used that mouth to abuse me, he a weapon made of silence I wanted to fill with words. When a woman in another couple got her tongue pierced, he was fascinated. You should do that, he murmured to me later in bed. True, I had tattoos, as well as several piercings, some of which I’d inflicted myself. Why wasn’t I willing to alter myself further? Mark my tongue a tool for his pleasure, a swelling that swallowed my words, jammed with pearls and no nirvana, a clacking behind my teeth, cliché. Reduced to sounds, to silence. I couldn’t look you in the face/ And tell you that it turned me on/ It makes my stomach turn.
That moment may have felt, fleetingly, like equality. Or so we convinced ourselves. When I hear “Not Too Soon” now, I want that girl with the growl again, want the badass back, her gone to history both mine and changing times. But those sensitive slacker dudes, who wounded us with withholding, who led us to believe we were in charge—of saving them, or sexually so long as we pleased them—though they seemed kinder and gentler, still dominated. Since then, we’ve backslid: Gamergate doxing the doxies, gone from Riot Grrrls to Pussy Riot imprisoned and gulagged to grabbing pussies.
I know her. I’m not alone, lots of me in #MeToo.
*Gasp*
Essayist and poet Heidi Czerwiec is the author of the lyric essay collection Fluid States, selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, and the poetry collection Conjoining, and is the editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets. She writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she is an Editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com