Posted on February 3, 2008 by Clovis

You may have been on a snipe hunt, but you’ve probably never hunted snipe.

There really is such a thing as a snipe, and folks do hunt them—especially masochists. The Jacksnipe, or Common Snipe (Gallinago gallinago) is a bird about the size of a quail. A relative of the woodcock, it likes to hang around in areas where the water table is just below the surface, such as the edges of manicured lawns and throughout wet prairies. This facilitates its feeding, which it does by probing for worms and other small creatures with its long, prehensile bill. Its coloring is what zoologists call "cryptic," which is to say that it mimics so well the whites, grays and browns of its habitat that it’s damned near invisible.

Let me tell you what a real snipe hunt is like in my home South Minneapolis stomping grounds.

Snipe hunting is done with flashlights, a burlap sack and lots of batteries. Some people hunt them with dogs, which works fine if you’re not in long driveway country. If you are, you spend more time tending to the dogs than you do hunting.

In our neck of the woods (or lawn) snipe like to have an early breakfast of early worms, then hide out in the hedges during the middle of the day when the hedge hawks are patrolling, returning an hour or so before dusk for their evening meal. So, at about oh-dark-thirty, you drag your butt out of a warm bed and meet your hunting partner at the local Big Boy for a big breakfast. You want to get to the suburbs at first light. The birds aren’t out yet, but it gives you a chance to enjoy sunrise over the foggy neighborhoods, stretch your legs, check your equipment, and make remarks about the sanity of people who would voluntarily do what you’re doing.

Equipment is simple. a large burlap sack, a Flashlight, 12- or 20 inch, improved—or improved/modified if a double—with plenty of D batteries carried in the side pockets of an orange hunter’s vest. Jeans work well for pants, which must be tucked into high-top leather boots. The boots are less for protection against snakes than for looks. Waterproof is good. You’re going to end up with wet feet anyway, but at least you’ll feel as though you tried. A hat is a must, because you’ll need to shade your eyes from the rising sun. Caterpillar caps work well. It’s de rigueur to carry a can of Vienna sausages. Snipe hunting is the only time and place known to man when they are fit to eat. An orange or apple and a quart of water round off the victuals. Some people like to carry a .22 pistol for snakes, but I figure it’s their lawn and I’ll just pass on by. (It’s not a good idea to shoot a snake with a shotgun. They splatter, and so does the lawn.)

After you watch the sunrise, you start hunting. You check the flashlights, double-check the canteen and goodies, load, safety, and set out. You and your partner will have agreed on position, one taking the left side from 9 to 12 o’clock, the other from 12 to 3. Such arrangements minimize the chances of blowing your cover in the heat of the moment, and people who hunt together regularly usually stick to the same sides year after year. If one is right-handed and the other left-handed, it works even better.

Having scouted out a piece of lawn that looks inviting, you set out slogging through the grass, mud, leaves, swingsets and what-have-you. After you’ve warmed up a bit and have your boots full of water and pants soaked to the knees you can relax and get miserable. There’s not a lot to be done from this point except be alert and watch for snakes.

You may or may not see a snake, but you’re guaranteed not to see any snipe—on the ground. Remember that cryptic coloration? Mr. and Ms. Snipe know you can’t see them, and most of the time they won’t fly until they’re pretty sure they’re about to be stepped on. A snipe takeoff is hard to believe. No matter how long you’ve hunted them, the first two or three of the day always scare the bejeezus out of you. The preferred technique from the Snipe Operations Manual is as follows: leap two feet into the air, accelerate in a straight line until you reach about 45 mph, then climb to about fifty feet. All of this takes maybe four seconds if the bird is an especially slow one. After the straightaway climb, the bird begins to circle about fifty yards out, making rude noises. Sometimes it will fly overhead to take a look.

During this time you’ve probably flashed two times, or maybe three. You’ve probably also failed to catch a snipe. They’re pure hell to catch. You have two chances: during the initial acceleration run and the first part of the climb, before they’re out of range, and then—if you fancy yourself a real good runner—you may elect to take another crack at it when he circles.

After allowing yourself to be humiliated for an hour or so, you’ll want to stop and eat your brunch. A couple of miles through the neighborhood with water-filled boots will have worked up a pretty good appetite all by itself, and all the adrenaline will have insured that your blood sugar is low, and that you’re ravenous. This is when the Vienna sausages taste really wonderful. By now the sun’s well up and it’s getting warm, so you’ll un-layer some clothing and wonder where you’re going to put the stuff you’ve taken off. Dumb luck will have insured that there are at least a couple bloody birds in the rear pocket of the hunting vest. You tie your denim jacket or Gophers sweatshirt around your waist by the arms and set off again. After it catches on brush and grass a few times you say to hell with it, and stuff it in with the birds.

If you’ve planned things out right and haven’t run across any irrigation canals that were too deep to wade, you’ll eventually begin to circle back toward the car. At some point before you reach it, you’ll discover the spur creek that you bypassed on the way out, and will have to follow it back to the same area you’ve already hunted to get around the end. By now your six-and-three-quarter pound lightweight bird flashlight has come to weigh 22.5 pounds exactly. No one knows why this happens. By the time you reach the car, after expending more batteries on more of the damned birds, you’ll be swearing off snipe hunting for the rest of your life, and asking your partner to please, just catch you next time and save you the trouble of torturing yourself.

Some days you don’t see one bird. Snipe are migratory, so sometimes they’re there, and sometimes not. Other days, there’s a convention. You bag about the same number either way. Each one provides about two ounces of strong-tasting breast meat and not much else. Some people swear they’re as good as quail. Maybe–if you cook them with a bunch of other stuff to kill the flavor. A clove of garlic might work. In my entire career (I no longer hunt) I got my limit about three times. One time I actually got a triple. When I tell other snipe hunters that, they give me a look and start to talk about football or some other manly thing.

You’re allowed to bag eight snipe a day. To do that, on the rare occasions when you get your limit, you will have used up a box or more of batteries, walked three or four miles in the grass and mud, and had the hell scared out of you a few times by the damned birds getting up under your feet—or not. You stay alert anyway, because you never know when one of the little finks will take flight. You will have at least a couple of sawgrass cuts stinging like fury, and your boots will weigh about 12 pounds. Each.

Your ears will be ringing from the car horn blasts, and your thigh will have bruises from mounting the flashlight too quickly in the heat of the moment before pulling out the burlap sack. (I know you’re supposed to "slap" it, but this is snipe hunting we’re talking about. Remember the adrenaline.) Your nose will be sunburned. Your eyes will be watering from flashlight glare, grass pollen and the glare of the sun. You may have fire ant bites. You’ll be miserable.

You’ll be back out in the marsh the next chance you get. I’d say it’s a guy thing, but I’ve seen snipe make women just as crazy.

Venture off of Highway 61 into the town of Silver Bay, MN, and you will be greeted by Rocky Taconite! Back in the 1970's, the Suicide Commandos figured out how to extract punk rock from taconite, and Silver Bay experienced its heyday of rockin' growth as a result. Rocky has been standing on his perch since 1975 to identify Silver Bay as the "Punk Rock Capital of the World," and to commemorate the ingenuity of obtaining a valuable product from what was essentially useless rock.

Kingdom: Animalia
Location found: North America, Australia and Anoka.

image Sightings of hoop snakes have been reported since colonial times in North America and for at least the past century in Anoka. This snake grasps its tail in its mouth and rolls after its prey, thereby achieving great speed, especially when going downhill. Hoop snakes have been clocked going over 60 m.p.h. At the tip of its tail is a highly venomous stinger, making this a creature to be avoided at all costs. It is the only species of snake known to have a stinger on its tail, and this stinger is so poisonous that even if it strikes a tree, the tree will instantly wither, turn black, and die.

If you should encounter a hoop snake in the wild, the best defense is to run as fast as you can and hope to find a fence to leap over. The hoop snake will have to uncoil to get through the fence, thereby slowing it down. Some have reported that diving through the hoop of the snake will cause it to run away. This, however, has never been verified.

"They'll stave ya!"
Chris Osgood

Sidehill Gougers are said to inhabit the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia and the southwestern sandhills of Saskatchewan. The legs on one side of their body are significantly shorter than the legs on the other side of their body, because they spend all their time eating grasses and other vegetation on mountain slopes.

The notion of animals with one pair of legs longer than the other in order to exist on mountainsides is popular: others include the Wild Haggis, the Sidehill Dodge Hodag, the Dahu. A similar creature in Vermont is known as the Wampahoofus. Similar animals are part of Appalachian folklore, sometimes in the form of a breed of cow with mismatched legs.
Contents

Sidehill Gougers are said to come in two main varieties, the left-handed Sidehill Gouger and the right-handed Sidehill Gouger (see: chirality). The two varieties are sometimes known as clockwise and counterclockwise Gougers.

Note that these two varieties are not necessarily separate species; stories persist of rare offspring between left-handed and right-handed Gougers. Since these hybrids have awkwardly mismatched leg-lengths and usually do not survive to adulthood, however, it is not known if they are sterile mules.

Some sources indicate that they are no larger than mountain goats, whereas others attribute major landslides to Sidehill Gougers that become turned around from their usual orientation and dig their feet into the ground for stability. It is this belief that gives the species its name.

In North-Eastern Ontario, there is a distant cousin of the Sidehill Gouger called the Sidehill Gulcher. The Gulcher evolved in a much different fashion compared to its Western relative. They run on two legs, with one much longer than the other and are similar to humans in many respects except their average size. Gulchers range in height from six feet to seven feet tall and weigh nearly three hundred pounds.

Gulchers are carnivores, usually feeding on anything from Red Squirrels to unlucky Deer. They employ an ambush technique where the Gulcher waits for hours on end in a heavily overgrown area for potential prey. When the prey happens by, Gulchers will leave their hiding place to stalk the animal. Once within range the Gulcher will put on a burst of speed and attack. The key to escaping a Gulcher is to simply run up or down the hill the Gulcher inhabits. Since it only has two legs and not four, the Gulcher will be unable to follow you at any great speed.

The jackalope is a cross between a jackrabbit and an antelope (hence the name), goat, or deer, and is usually portrayed as a rabbit with antlers. Some believe that the tales of jackalopes were inspired by sightings of rabbits infected with the Shope papillomavirus, which causes the growth of horn- and antler-like tumors in various places on the rabbit's head and body. However, creatures such as the griffin and the chimera perhaps suggest that the concept of an animal hybrid occurs in many cultures. One common southwestern species of jackrabbit is called the antelope jackrabbit, because of its ability to run quickly like an antelope; it would have been easy enough to imagine instead that this jackrabbit had the horns of an antelope.

The legend of the jackalope has bred the rise of many claims as to the creature's habits. For example, it is said to be a hybrid of the pygmy-deer and a species of "killer-rabbit". Reportedly, jackalopes are extremely shy unless approached. Legend also has it that female jackalopes can be milked as they sleep belly up and that the milk can be used for a variety of medicinal purposes. It has also been said that the jackalope can convincingly imitate any sound, including the human voice. It uses this ability to elude pursuers, chiefly by using phrases such as "There he goes! That way!". It is said that a jackalope may be caught by putting a flask of whiskey out at night. The jackalope will drink its fill of whiskey and its intoxication will make it easier to hunt. In some parts of the United States it is said that jackalope meat has a taste similar to lobster. However legend has it that they are dangerous if approached. It has also been said that jackalopes will only breed during electrical storms including hail, explaining its rarity.

The flying jackalope is a variation originating in Wall, South Dakota. The flying jackalope looks like a cross between the standard jackalope and a chicken.

Big Fish In A Small Pond

We returned to Minneapolis as conquering heroes. While the reality of our gig at CBGB's had been modest success, the cache we acquired at home for having done it was enormous. Playing CBGB's was a stab at going nationwide. An article was written about us in the Minneapolis Star that summed up our situation at the time rather well. Things were going good; we were working steadily, we had a small fan base in the Twin Cities and we had played at CBGB's. Now the thing to do was to keep the momentum going. For that we would need to have a record. In July of 1976 we started making plans to record our first single.

Discography
Below you will find a discography of most of the singles and albums I name-check in Complicated Fun. Whether or not you are familiar with The Suicide Commandos music, I think you could have a very good time finding and listening to these records, as well as getting a much better idea of where we were coming from.
For the most part, these songs or albums were not on too many people's hit parade at the time. I was surprised and delighted to find out that most of them are still available (thanks to CD reissues). www.allmusicguide.com was an invaluable resource in looking up the records I didn't have. In most cases, they were even able to tell me who the songwriter was.
Titles where there is no song listed are whole albums. Happy Listening!

Osgood, Chris. Emission Control/Cliche Ole b/w Monster Au Go Go
Perf. The Suicide Commandos
single
PS, 1976

Almaas, Steve. Monster Au Go Go
Perf. The Suicide Commandos
single
PS, 1976

Osgood, Chris. Complicated Fun
Perf. The Suicide Commandos
from the album Big Hits Of Mid-America
Twin Tone Records, 1979

Osgood, Chris. Shock Appeal, Mosquito Crucifixion
Perf. The Suicide Commandos
from the album The Suicide Commandos Make A Record
Blank/Mercury, 1978 (re-released 1996)

Almaas, Steve. Attacking The Beat, I Need A Torch
Perf. The Suicide Commandos
from the album The Suicide Commandos Make A Record
Blank/Mercury, 1978 (re-released 1996)


Brown, Arthur. Fire
Perf. The Suicide Commandos
from the album The Commandos Commit Suicide Dance Concert
Twin Tone, 1979 (re-released 2000)

Boyce, Tommy / Hart, Bobby. She
Perf. The Suicide Commandos
from the album The Suicide Commandos Make A Record
Blank/Mercury, 1978 (re-released 1996)

Lee / Montez. Let's Dance
Perf. Chris Montez
from the album Let's Dance and Have Some Kinda' Fun!!!
Dunhill, 1963

Boyce, Tommy / Hart, Bobby. I'm Not Your Steppin' Stone
Perf. The Monkees
from the album More Of The Monkees
Colgems, 1967

Baskin/Gonzalez. Little Girl
Perf. The Syndicate Of Sound
from the album Little Girl
Sundazed, 1966

Nuggets
compiled by Lenny Kaye
Elektra, 1972

Frazier/Harris/White/Wilson. Surfin' Bird
Perf. The Trashmen
from the album Surfin' Bird
Garrett, 1964


Sweetheart of the Rodeo
Perf. The Byrds
Columbia, 1968

The Kink Kronikles
Perf. The Kinks
Reprise, 1972



Gouldman, Graham. For Your Love
Perf. The Yardbirds
from the album For Your Love
Epic, 1965

Roberts, Billy. Hey Joe
Perf. The Stillroven
from the album Cast Thy Burdon Upon The Stillroven
Sundazed, 1966

Ross. Pictures Of Matchstick Men
Perf. Status Quo
from the album Picturesque Matchstickable Messages from the Status Quo
Castle, 1968

Dozier/Holland/Holland. You Keep Me Hanging On
Perf. Vanilla Fudge
from the album Vanilla Fudge
Atco, 1967

Jagger / Richards. Under My Thumb
Perf. The Rolling Stones
from the album Got Live If You Want It
London, 1967

Lennon / McCartney. Rocky Raccoon, Obla Di Obla Da
Perf. The Beatles
from the album The Beatles (The White Album)
Capital, 1968

Workingman's Dead
Perf. The Grateful Dead
Warner Brothers, 1970

American Beauty
Perf. The Grateful Dead
Warner Brothers, 1970

Allman, Greg. Whipping Post
Perf. The Allman Brothers
from the album Live At The Filmore East
Capricorn, 1971

Hooker "n" Heat
Perf. Canned Heat and John Lee Hooker
Liberty, 1971

Paul Butterfield Blues Band
Perf. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band
Elektra, 1965

Raw Power
Perf. Iggy and the Stooges
Columbia, 1973

New York Dolls
Perf. The New York Dolls
Mercury, 1973

Bruce/Buxton/Cooper/Dunaway/Smith. Schools Out
Perf. Alice Cooper
from the album Schools Out
Warner Brothers, 1972

Bolan, Marc. Bang A Gong
Perf. T Rex
from the album Electric Warrior
Warner Brothers, 1971

Townshend, Pete. I Can't Explain, My Generation
Perf. The Who
from the album Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy
MCA, 1971

Gibbons/Hill. Waiting for The Bus
Perf. ZZ Top
from the album Tres Hombres
Warner Brothers, 1973

Bonfire, Mars. Born To Be Wild
Perf. Steppenwolf
from the album Steppenwolf
MCA, 1968

Cochran/Sheeley. Something Else
Perf. Eddie Cochran
from the album Very Best of Eddie Cochran
Liberty, 1970




Berry, Chuck. Carol
Perf. Chuck Berry
from the album Chuck Berry Is on Top
Chess , 1959

Dudley, Dave. Six Days On The Road
Perf. Dave Dudley
from the album Six Days on the Road
Golden Ring, 1963

Jones. The Hunter
Perf. Blue Cheer
from the album Outsideinside
Phillips, 1968

Carter. I Ain't Got You
Perf. The Yardbirds
from the album For Your Love
Epic, 1965

Over Under Sideways Down, Jeff's Boogie, The Hot House Of Omagararshid
Perf. The Yardbirds
from the album Over Under Sideways Down
Epic, 1966
Next
Perf. Alex Harvey
Vertigo, 1974

Roxy Music
Perf. Roxy Music
Island, 1972

For Your Pleasure
Perf. Roxy Music
Island, 1973

Stranded
Perf. Roxy Music
Island, 1973

Country Life
Perf. Roxy Music
Island, 1974



Siren
Perf. Roxy Music
Island, 1975

Kimono My House
Perf. Sparks
Island, 1974

Roccuzzo. Nervous Breakdown
Perf. Eddie Cochran
from the album Very Best of Eddie Cochran
Liberty, 1970

Banks/Bennett. Go Now
Perf. Bessie Banks
single
Tiger, 1963

Goffin/King. Chains
Perf. The Cookies
from the album Complete Cookies
Sequel, 1994

Robinson, Sylvia. Shame Shame Shame
Perf. Shirley and Co.
from the album Shame Shame Shame
Sugarhill, 1975

Casey/Finch. Rock Your Baby
Perf. George McCrae
from the album Rock Your Baby
TK, 1974

Beserkley Chartbusters
Perf. Various
Beserkley, 1976

Thor, Marc. Boystown Boize
Perf. Marc Thor
Indy, 1976

Alexander, Willie. Mass Ave
Perf. Willie "Loco" Alexander
Garage Records, 1976


Richman, Jonathon. Pablo Picasso
Perf. John Cale
from the album Helen of Troy
Island, 1975

Berry, Richard. Louie Louie
Perf. The Kingsmen
single
Scepter, 1964

Ramones. I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend, Beat On The Brat, Judy Is A Punk,
53rd and 3rd
Perf. The Ramones
from the album The Ramones
Sire, 1976

Capps/Dean. Half Breed
Perf. Cher
from the album Half Breed
MCA, 1973

Vanda/Young. Friday On My Mind
Perf. The Easybeats
from the album Good Friday
United Artists, 1967

Smith, Patti. Free Money
Perf. Patti Smith
from the album Horses
Arista, 1975

The Modern Lovers
Perf. The Modern Lovers
Beserkley, 1976

Orchidspangiafora
Twin Tone 1982

Verlaine, Tom. Venus
Perf. Television
from the album Marquee Moon
Elektra, 1976

33rd And Colfax

Although my search for any and all information about Patti Smith had led me to reading about CBGB's and Max's in the pages of Rock Scene magazine, and Oarfolkjokeopus had started getting copies of another New York music paper called The New York Rocker (with artwork by transplanted Minnesota artist Duncan Hannah) covering the same turf, it was really a fortuitous meeting with Bob Wilkinson's land lady that put us in direct contact with what was happening out there.

Bob was renting the upstairs of a house on the corner of 33rd and Colfax in South Minneapolis from a single mother who worked as a schoolteacher. Her name was Dorothy Tienan and she had two daughters, Claudia and Andrea. The elder daughter, Claudia, had run away to New York with Johnny Thunders when the New York Dolls had passed through town and played The Minnesota State Fair ("Who won the pie eating contest?" was David Johansson's greeting to the crowd).

As I spent more and more time with Bob, I got to know Dorothy pretty well too. We liked each other, and later on, when I voiced a desire to move downtown, she offered to rent the basement of her house to me for $50 a month.

Claudia was living in New York City with Tommy Ramone, the drummer for The Ramones. Through the photos and letters that Claudia was sending back home to her mother, I began to get a much closer look at what was happening in New York. There were pictures and posters of Blondie, Richard Hell, Television and especially The Ramones. I remember hearing a rehearsal tape of I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend months before the first Ramones album came out.

All of these groups had a striking look, but it was the Ramones with their leather jackets, t-shirts, sneakers and jeans, that really struck a chord with me. Kind of like The Wild One, The Bowery Boys and Alex Harvey all rolled into one. Very inspirational for a young man trying to find his style.

Between all the info rolling in from the pages of Rock Scene, the New York Rocker and the cards and letters Claudia was sending, I started to sense that something big was happening out east, something that The Suicide Commandos should be a part of.

The Ramones First Album

The release of the Ramones first album in the spring of 1976 was to Punk Rock what The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show was to the British Invasion. It's ground zero, the first and in my opinion, the best. The great songwriting, the high speed playing style, the lack of guitar solos, Joey's English accent when singing, the twenty minute sets (bands everywhere, hear me! bring back the twenty minute set).... It was all there...

When Joey Ramone passed away this year, he was eulogized in Rolling Stone by many of his contemporaries and by younger musicians who were influenced by the band. I thought David Byrne's comments were very perceptive in that he brought up an often overlooked aspect of The Ramones and their music. That is, when they first came out what an art statement they seemed like. The logos, the matching clothes, they even had an art director, Arturo Vega, listed in the album credits.

It always annoyed me when I would read something about them being dumb, because it seemed obvious to me that some very clever minds were behind the creation of the band. For me their glory years were those when Tommy was the drummer and, as he was co-producer as well, I always credited him with a lot of their good ideas. Although there was humor in songs such as Beat On The Brat and Judy Is A Punk (I always liked the line about how the girl went to Frisco to join the SLA), it wasn't as cartoonish as what was to come later. The lyrics to a song like 53rd and 3rd seemed to come from their own lives as much as say, Heroin came from Lou Reed's life. I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend wouldn't have sounded out of place on a Searchers album.

To us, there was real mystery in the sound and songs on that record (something I think all great albums share). We knew it was low budget, and yet, it sounded so much better, so much more alive than anything else at the time. We hoped they were laughing with us, but we weren't really sure. In any case, The Ramones first album really solidified an idea, which in hindsight, anyway, seemed to be floating around. The Suicide Commandos had been working with the idea of "stripped down and shoved into high gear" all that previous year, but it was The Ramones first album that really pointed the way to accomplishing the goal.

I Need A Torch

Songwriting is a funny thing. Anyone can write a song. Of course not everyone can write a good song and often, it takes some embarrassing tries before you come up with something you can stand behind. That was certainly the case with me. The Ramones first album showed you could write good songs with only three of four chords and I think they were the catalysts for a lot of people to try writing their own.

I Need A Torch is an early effort of mine that I look back on fondly now. I hear a yearning in the lyrics for some sort of transcendence (ala Patti Smith on the Horses album) and I remember distinctly what went into writing it. Musically it's sort of a cross between Friday On My Mind by The Easybeats (the riff) and Half-Breed by Cher (the b-section of the verse). Lyrically the 'flaming star" part came from the Elvis Presley movie of the same name, and the "mean so much to me" part came from Free Money. Still, when Chris, Dave and I worked out an arrangement and started playing the song live, it seemed to become our own and more than the sum of its parts. That became a goal and remains so to this day...

Get On The Horn

One of the many advantages to having Chris working at Schon Productions was that he had access to a Watts Line and could call anywhere in the country (long distance rates were much higher then). For months I had been raving to Chris and Dave about CBGB's and what was going in New York City. Chris had friends out east from his college days in Amherst and I think he was hearing the same thing from some of them. When it came time for Chris's good friend Robbie Carey (of Orchidspangiafora fame) to graduate from Hampshire, a plan was hatched that would help us kill a few birds with one stone. Chris wanted to see Robbie graduate, I wanted to play CBGB's and Dorothy Tienan's daughter Andrea needed a ride to New York City. From these desires, our first foray east was planned.

Chris "got on the horn" (as he would say), called up Hilly Crystal at CBGB's and just right out asked him if we could play at his club. Hilly laughed out loud at the idea that anyone would come from as far away as Minneapolis (up until then, the furthest away had been Boston) to play there, but he said sure, we could come and play on new band night. Robbie and his friends arranged for us to get a good paying gig at a Hampshire College graduation party. With Andrea's mother offering to pay for gas if we would drop Andrea off in New York, we had the makings of a road trip.

Put The Hammer Down

Dave's van was never going to make it to New York and back, so I went to my father and asked him if we could borrow his car, a 1971 navy-blue Ford LTD. To my amazement and eternal gratitude, he said yes (my Mother probably had a lot to do with his decision). We rented a U-Haul trailer to carry the gear in, and on Thursday morning, the 27th of May 1976, we got out on Interstate 94, put the hammer down and started driving east.

The drive itself was uneventful. It takes twenty-four hours going straight through to get to New York, and taking turns driving, that's what we did. Once we were east of Chicago, I was on virgin ground, yet there wasn't much of anything to see except the flaming smokestacks of Gary, Indiana. We had a tape player in the car and I remember listening to the just released Modern Lovers album over and over. Since we were heading for New England it made a good soundtrack for the trip.

Past the stench of Gary, it was pretty much generic interstate until you saw the New York skyline. Pennsylvania seemed to go on forever and there was more than one speed trap in that state where the officers were happy to accept cash on the side of the road. It was hard to keep the speedometer at 55 mph.

The New York skyline was "just like I pictured it" and seemed all the more magical for my having been awake for over twenty-four hours. We had to drop Andrea off in the Bronx, which we did and then started out for Amherst Massachusetts and Hampshire College. We immediately got another ticket for driving on a parkway pulling a trailer. Passenger cars only! If they didn't make you pay on the spot, in those glorious days before the whole nation was connected by computer, you just threw the tickets away. We would often return home from a trip with a glove compartment full of (mostly) parking tickets.

By the time we pulled into Hampshire, we had been on the road for over thirty hours. After a short nap and something to eat, we were ready to go again. Oh to be nineteen....

Byron And Robbie

Chris's friends welcomed us with open arms. Our gig was to take place the first night we arrived there, the Friday evening before the graduation ceremony on Saturday. We set up outdoors in a commons area and wailed through a couple sets of our most potent numbers. It went really well. Two people, Byron Coley and Robbie Carey, stick out in my mind as being the most enthusiastic. They were hip to what we were trying to do and had organized this gig that had made the whole trip economically feasible.

Robbie was the man about to graduate. He composed "music concret" (sic) that involved him recording "found sounds" off television and elsewhere, and then meticulously splicing them (by hand with a razor blade and tape) into his sound collages. Later on, when Chris was an A&R man at Twin Tone, he arranged for the release of an album of Robbie's work called Orchidspangiafora. There was a bit of the Captain Beefheart about Robbie in both style and substance.

Byron was another wild man of legendary proportions. He had lost the hearing in one ear by falling off a high balcony and landing on it. Apparently he and Dave got into a drunken brawl when Dave had been out to visit Chris a year or two before. Having heard about this, we were a little leery of him. In the end, when I found out he was happy to wax prolific about his encyclopedic knowledge of underground music (and that he bore no grudge against Dave), I relaxed and actually found him to be the easiest of Chris's friends to talk to (when he wasn't drunk that is).

The last time I saw Byron at Hampshire, it was the middle of winter and the car I was riding in came up behind a pickup truck, where Byron was riding shirtless in the back. All of a sudden Byron leapt out of the truck and went running off into the woods not to be seen again that night. When I caught up with him a few years later, he had calmed down considerably.

The Choice Is Yours

New England seemed quite different from the Midwest both geographically and socially. There are no mountains in Minnesota and I had never really been around people like the students at Hampshire College. Many of the girls spoke like Katherine Hepburn, but many more of the students used what I later found to be a sort of universal college patois. What I would call the upper middle class / hippie accent. This hippie aspect of college life seemed to rankle Chris and his friends and their reactions to it were often humorous. Chris told me of a time when some of the students at the school held a protest in order to get a vegetarian line at the school lunch counter. Ever the wise acre, Chris held his own counter-protest by making a placard that read "Hitler was a vegetarian... the choice is yours" and going on an all meat counter-protest diet. After two days he was so constipated that he had to quit. The food at Hampshire College was the best food I had ever tasted at a school.


The Graduation Party

The graduation party the next night will probably be the closest I ever come to being in a Three Stooges Comedy. After watching Robbie graduate in the early afternoon, we all met and began drinking prodigiously. As the afternoon turned into evening I think it's safe to say that everyone was pretty well lit. There may have even been some "nerve pills" floating around that contributed to the general air of uninhibited bonhomie.

It gets a little fuzzy as to what exactly happened after that... The pieces I remember are: a formal reception with the parents in suits and gowns, an hors d'oeuvre table laden with cream cheese rolled into little balls and The Suicide Commandos and Co. lurching around looking for fun. It took less than a minute for us to figure out that the cream cheese balls would stick to the ceiling. From there, things truly got out of hand. I will never forget the sight of this friend (he happened to be an albino) of Chris's named Charlie taking one of the cream cheese ball hors d'oeuvres and throwing it full on into the beehive hairdo of this matronly woman in an evening gown. Her hair went over like a palm tree bending in a hurricane. I ran out of there and ended up on the ground somewhere laughing until I was crying.

We all woke up the next day happy to learn that Robbie had still graduated. I would like to apologize here and now to whoever had to clean that ceiling.

The Wayne County Benefit

We loaded everything into the trailer and with Chris's friend Josh in tow, we set out for New York City. It was Sunday; we would drop Josh at his parent's house in Long Island and then head into the city. All went well with our plan until we got to Long Island and my Dad's car broke down in front of Josh's parents house (the radiator I believe). We would have to find someone to fix the car on Monday as everything was closed on Sundays. It would be cutting things close as we were supposed to play the next night at CBGB's.

However, we weren't going to let that stop us from enjoying ourselves that night. We had read in the Village Voice that there was to be a benefit for Wayne County's legal defense fund (Wayne had cracked Handsome Dick Manitoba over the head with a mike stand after Manitoba had called him a fag while Wayne was performing onstage... Manitoba was suing) at the Manhattan Center featuring The New York Dolls among many others. I called Andrea and she was going to be there with her sister Claudia and Tommy Ramone. We arranged to meet at the show.

Josh commandeered a family vehicle and drove us all into town. Seeing New York at night was something else. Tom Verlaine described it as well as anybody ever will, and when I hear Venus from Television's Marquee Moon album I'm instantly brought back to that first night.

It was a tattoo night
Streets so bright
The world was so thin
Between my bones and skin
There stood another person
Who was a little surprised
To be face to face
With a world so alive

I felt alive. We parked the car and went inside the Manhattan Center. I found Andrea pretty quickly and she introduced us to her sister Claudia and to Tommy Ramone. Tommy was very friendly and promised to come see us at CBGB's the next night.

The show itself was a real who's who of the downtown scene. Among the acts we saw that night were The New York Dolls, The Tuff Darts with Robert Gordon, Mink Deville and most memorably Blondie. We thought Debbie Harry was Blondie, and until they put a record out, we called her Blondie. As many an impressionable young man was to discover later, she was stunningly beautiful. Later that evening, we tried to get up the courage to talk to her. I think Chris actually did. He asked if she would give him a kiss (cheeky bastard) and she replied by asking him if it was some kind of fraternity prank. That was the end of that.

Musically, Blondie was the most memorable group as well. They had a garage rock / 60's girl group thing going with that Farfisa Organ and their catchy tunes. I still remember a song called Platinum Blond that I only ever heard that night. Besides the Dolls, none of these groups had record deals yet.

Because we were with Tommy, we got to go backstage and hang out. The summer '76 issue of Rock Scene did a photo spread on the show and if you look closely at the picture of David Johansson and his girlfriend, you can see a nineteen year old Steve in the background. Quite a night...

CBGB's




After the show we spent the night with Chris's school friends in an apartment uptown in the city. We would drive back out to Long Island the next morning and deal with the car. When we finally got back out there the next day and got the car towed to a service station, we got the bad news that it wouldn't be ready until the next day. We had to figure something out fast. Nobody seemed to have a vehicle that was big enough or that could haul a trailer and our budget wouldn't allow us to rent anything. It seemed like we might have to cancel the show.

Chris got on the phone with Hilly over at CBGB's. He explained the situation in such a way, that the next thing we knew, Hilly was sending his moving van out to Long Island to pick up our gear and bring us into the city. What a guy! It must have been a humorous sight to see this giant moving van pull up in front of CBGB's and have the three of us and our two dinky amps and drum set come out of the back.

The first thing I saw when I walked inside the club was David Byrne of the Talking Heads sitting on the pool table in front of the stage, strumming an acoustic guitar. He was friendly enough and cleared out when he saw we were going to set up and sound check. Even then CBGB's had a good sound system. We were excited to play.

The show that night went just fine. No more, no less. We had a respectable turn out and we played every original song we had as well as a few covers. Tommy Ramone did show up with Claudia and Andrea. Transplanted Minneapolitans Steve Kramer, John King and Duncan Hannah were there. Chris Nelson, a friend of Andy Schwartz's, also from Minneapolis, was there with a tall, skinny, eighteen year old from Brooklyn named Jim Sclavunos. Chris played in a band with Jim, and together they put out a fanzine called No Magazine.

Chris Nelson lived with his uncle in a snazzy apartment on 44th Street and 2nd Avenue. This turned out to be a big help as he let us stay with him when we came to town. Dave's sister was living in New York at the time and she was very kind about putting us up as well. Robbie's parents housed us a few times in Peter Cooper Village and Andy hooked us up to stay in his Grandmother's apartment over the Sigmund Schwartz Funeral Home on 2nd Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets (there were these great "time of death" memo pads next to the phone). We made some good connections (and friends) on that first trip.

When we returned from playing CBGB's the summer of 1976 there was a new music club open in Minneapolis. The Longhorn Bar had formerly been a Jazz club where local greats Natural Life held forth and was the place that Steve and I visited if we had to spend any time in the bathroom. (The Longhorn was directly across the street from the Blitz Bar. The bullet holes behind the toilet in the stall of the Blitz's men's room reminded us of the person who had been murdered while sitting there- never a pleasant thought when you are trying to relax.) Before being a Jazz club the Longhorn Bar had been a Nino's Steakhouse and still bore the decor and the trappings of a restaurant trying to look "Western". There were wagon wheel chandeliers hanging from the low ceiling and garish red and black carpeting with the repeated outlines of longhorn cattle head silohuettes. The new owner Jay Berine was into the new music and before long "Jay's Longhorn" became a stop for New Wave bands that were
touring the United States.

The bar was under an adjacent parking ramp and the layout was this: As you came in you went down a half level past the bathrooms to the lobby area. There was an outer bar to the left and the Music Room to you right. The stage faced away from the street and you got in by proceeding through the lobby then turning right into the music room. There was a bar that ran most of the length of the room along the east wall, the stage was along the south wall and there was a DJ booth tucked into the southeast corner. The sound mixers had a little cordoned-off square in the middle of the room from which to run the sound. There was about a twenty foot deep dance area in front of the modest stage- it was only about three feet above the rest of the room, but was fairly deep and nice and wide too. A great innovation was that The Longhorn had its own permanent PA system- a novelty for the time. (One glorious night Steve and Dave and I had convinced other players to get up out of the audience and
join us onstage. Eventually we doffed our instruments and gave them up to other players joining the song until at last no Commandos were left on stage. We met back at the soundboard where we could sit with the engineer Steve Fjelstad and enjoy our own performance.)

The door was run by Jay's girlfriend Margaret. She almost always wore a pair of see-through pants that put everyone in a good mood. She was friendly, but tough. Musicians that weren't actually playing onstage that night all had to pay to get in. Cover charges were usually about $3. If you didn't want to see the music you could hang out for free in the outer bar and hob nob. This was a regular part of the early evening for all of us and there were regulars that infested this outer bar that we would look forward to seeing. Most of the players would hang here until our posses showed up and then make our way into the main room. Mary Karr and Sheri Nolthe were two very good looking poets who were going to school at Macalester College. Their routine was to greet regulars (and newcomers) with the sobriquet "Hi Horny!" and invite us to buy them a drink. No one was sure if they were more interested in us or each other. They did a good job of being obscure about this and enjoyed a lot of
free drinks and plenty of juicy speculation.

Dressing rooms were at the back of the bar and were often unattended. My friend Don and I would slip into the main dressing room while the touring band was onstage and relax with some of the tasty food and expensive alcohol requested on the band's "rider", ( A rider was the addedum to a touring band's contract that specified what special needs that band had in the way of food and drink. If you were feeling peckish there was always some food left over and plenty of top drawer bottles.) This was a good way to stretch our "entertainment dollars", but could lead to unhealthy overconsumption. One night Don helped himself to the entire contents of The Stranglers' remaining alcohol and them picked a fight with XXX, who jumped off the stage and engaged in some unfortunate fisticuffs. (I moved to the side and became a watchful "noncombatant"during this particular encounter.)

Shows at the Longhorn would end about 1:30AM with a throng standing on the street and asking each other "Where's the party?" The night was never over when the bar closed. We would get an address and between fifty and a hundred of us would carry on at the after party, usually getting home around dawn.

One night Tim Carr and I took off on my motorcycle and got to the party address first. We knocked on the door and a surprised woman let us in. We marched right to her refrigerator and helped ourselves to a couple of beers, followed moments later by scores of other people. It was the wrong address. That poor woman had to call the cops to get everybody out.

Chris and Dave would often change the words to songs to crack us up on stage. When we did the Yardbird's version of I Ain't Got You, the lines "I got women to the left of me. I got women to the right of me, I got women all around me" became "I got tomatoes to the left of me, I got potatoes to the right of me, I got clamatoes all around me". When we did Born To Be Wild, "head out on the highway" became "head out of the driveway". You can hear Dave do it on the Commandos Commit Suicide live album version of She when he sings at the end "Why am I Kissinger, I should be Schlesinger" instead of "Why am I kissing her, I should be missing her". This kind of word play had already found its way into Chris's own songs.

I Ain't Got You was part of a Yardbirds medley we worked up of Over Under Sideways Down, I Ain't Got You, Jeff's Boogie, and lastly The Hot House Of Omagararshid (for which Dave made his own percussion instrument out of a piece of metal that made a "wicka wacka" sound, giving the song an "Eastern" flavor). Somehow Carol started segueing into The Theme From Petticoat Junction. We played these songs from the beginning of our career to the end. This was not going to be like any band I had ever been in.


Next

Dave had quite a record collection, with a distinct emphasis on the Anglo. It was through Dave that I first heard Roxy Music, the Eno solo albums, Sparks, the John Cale solo albums, pub rock bands like Ducks Deluxe and Brinsley Schwartz and The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Dave was already sporting a black leather jacket, striped t-shirt and jeans ala Alex Harvey on the cover of the Next album. Those bands pretty much provided the Utopia House play list for Fall 1975/Winter 1976. Many of the songs started finding their way onto our set list as well.


Monster Au Go Go

I was completely in awe of Chris and Dave. As fall progressed into winter I began to emulate them both; Dave, by cutting my hair short and wearing a leather jacket, t-shirt and jeans and Chris, by making my first attempts at writing a song.

We were already playing Mosquito Crucifixion and a few others of Chris's. The songs of his we recorded on our first single Emission Control/Cliché Ole were early offerings. I felt like I had better get busy. The covers we were playing directly influenced my early songwriting attempts. My song on our first single, Monster Au Go Go, was lyrically reminiscent of Haunted House, a song we covered from Roy Buchanan's first album, and musically related to Eddie Cochran's Something Else and Nervous Breakdown (both songs we did in our set). Borrowing from the greats turned out to be a good way to get started and, of my early songs, it's one I can still hear without cringing.

I was starting to feel that the potential was there for something bigger. Playing Chris's songs as well as writing my own (and even more so, getting up the nerve to show them to Chris and Dave) was definitely a catalyst for my ambition. If we could write our own songs, we could make a record...

School's Out

As soon as we started getting gigs, my interest in going to school became nil. Besides the pain of getting up and dragging myself down there after a late night, there was nothing that school could offer me that compared with being in a working band. The Inwoody Duncetitute would have to go.... To mollify my parents, I agreed to study classical violin with a teacher I had studied with when I was young. He seemed to feel I had potential... I figured at least it was music... So, I moved back into my parent's house (about two miles from Utopia House) and began living the rather delightful lifestyle of sleeping until noon, having a late breakfast, playing the violin for a few hours and then beelining over to Utopia House to practice, hang out and whatever... It was about that time that life stopped being boring for good.

Bob And Curt

When the Commandos first went downtown to play at The Blitz Bar, we started meeting musicians from other local bands. The first people to make friends with us and give us encouragement were Bob (nee Robert) Wilkinson from Prodigy and Curt Almsted (later known as Curtis A) from Thumbs Up. Bob and Curt had already been playing around town for a while and were doing what all bands had to do in Minneapolis if they wanted to work, playing covers four sets a night. Both bands however had better taste than most. While a night of local bar band music might subject you to anything from Frank Zappa comedy music to Emerson Lake and Palmer covers, Prodigy played a lot of Bowie, Mott The Hoople, Kinks and Rolling Stones (Bob bore a striking resemblance to Keith Richards), while Thumbs Up specialized in 60's stuff, Beatles, Hollies, girl groups, songs with a lot of three part harmonies. Curt was already one of the most distinctive singers I've ever heard and I learned a lot about music from him.

Both Bob and Curt went out of their way to take me under their wing. Many a night I would end up with them over at Curt's apartment after the bars closed (1:00am), sitting up for hours, smoking pot and listening to old records. He would have the original versions of songs that the British Invasion groups had covered like Go Now by Bessie Banks and Chains by The Cookies. He played a lot of girl group stuff as well as Phil Spector and Roy Orbison records, all from the supposedly fallow period of the early sixties. Curt showed me that a good song could be buried under an arrangement that you didn't particularly care for.

Bob too, was hip to music that your average circa 1975 rock n' roller wouldn't necessarily be in to. I remember going with him and his beautiful girlfriend Mary down to Sutton's, the premier gay bar in Minneapolis, to go dancing. He made a point of singling out the records he thought were good, Shame Shame Shame by Shirley And Company, Rock Your Baby by George McCrea, the Sugarhill and TK records. This was before all that Saturday Night Fever nonsense, but the "Disco Sucks" attitude was already around. Minneapolis was always a live music town. I remember going down to Uncle Sams (First Avenue's precursor) on a disco night and they had a live drummer on the stage playing along with all the records. I always thought it was perceptive of Bob to have zeroed right in on the good stuff and not to worry what anybody thought. Very cool...

Nexus

At the same time that I was going to electronics school and getting together with Chris and Dave, I discovered Patti Smith. One day on a lunch break from school, I walked over to Oarfolkjokeopus (the best record store in town at the time) and saw the Horses album on the display rack. I bought it then and there, purely because of the way Patti looked in the Robert Mapplethorpe portrait on the cover (the only time I can ever recall that happening). There was something about that photograph that promised a much bigger world than the suburbs of Minneapolis could ever offer. I took the album home, listened to it and found that it delivered 100% on that promise. I was reading Henry Miller (Tropic Of Cancer, The Rosy Crucifixion) around that same time and Horses became the soundtrack for my dreams of breaking out of suburban life's constraints. Miller and Smith both encouraged me to believe that I could pack it all in and move to Paris, New York or at least downtown Minneapolis and become an artist of some sort, or even better, a rock n' roll star...

Patti Smith appeared to be living the rock n' roll equivalent of Miller's Parisian life. She name-checked Arthur Rimbaud and deified 60's rock icons like Brian Jones, Marianne Faithfull and Jim Morrison in much the same way that Miller waxed poetic about writers he adored, like Dostoyevsky.

I read anything I could get my hands on about Patti and through these newspaper and magazine articles, I started to learn about the scene she was involved with in New York. I read about Tom Verlaine, a guitarist who played on Horses, and his band Television. I read about Richard Hell, former bass player of Television and his new band The Heartbreakers that also included Johnny Thunders, former guitar player of The New York Dolls. I read about CBGB's, a bar on the Bowery where they all played. It all seemed very bohemian.... There was nothing like that going on in Minneapolis.

Tim and Andy

Two other key people I met with The Suicide Commandos around that same time were writers Tim Holmes and Seth Andrew (Andy ) Schwartz. I was familiar with them both from reading their record reviews in The Minnesota Daily, the University Of Minnesota's newspaper. They came up to us in The Blitz Bar and made friends. Tim was soon an attendee at Utopia House parties and wrote one of the first (if not the first) reviews of the band. Although it was not premeditated on our part (we genuinely liked them both), it didn't hurt our cause one bit to make friends with two writers that could really help promote us.

Andy worked at Oarfolkjokeopus, although "held court" would probably be better words to describe what he did. He was from New York and was not shy about expressing his opinion on anything. Soon I was spending many an afternoon in Oarfolk, listening to Andy pontificate on the latest releases that caught his fancy. It was through Andy that I first heard independent singles being put out by people that didn't have major label record deals. Boystown Boize by Marc Thor and Mass Ave by Willie "Loco" Alexander, both records from Boston, were a couple of the first. Around the same time the independent San Francisco label Beserkley, put out their Chartbusters L.P. featuring several songs from one Jonathon Richman a name we were familiar with through John Cale's version of his song Pablo Picasso.
The original Modern Lovers album followed a few months later and became a regular on our play list. Andy was hip to it all, and would try and get you to match his enthusiasm (as well as sell you the record). We are still friends and to this day, I look forward to a call from Andy inviting me to lunch, which often involves sitting there while Andy silently reads the newspaper, piping up once in a while with a comment on this or that. One of a kind he is....

Tim Holmes was Minneapolis's answer to Lester Bangs, someone I would've described at the time as an "intellectual wild man". He bore a striking resemblance to John Lennon and shared Lennon's penchant for changing his looks as often as most people change their socks. His South Minneapolis apartment became another meeting place for late night listening sessions. With his charming English wife Annie trying to sleep in the other room and fuelled by everything from alcohol to "whippets", Tim would rave into the early morning hours about his current faves, which could turn out to be anything from Do You Love Me by Kiss, to Some Kind Of Love by The Velvet Underground, to S.O.S. by Abba. Tim was another one who really added color to my musical pallet.


Schon Productions

Another happy byproduct of our stint at the Blitz Bar was meeting Sue Maclean, a booking agent who worked at Schon Productions, run by local promoter Randy Levy. Randy handled everything from The Rolling Stones to booking the local show bands. This was before the time when "stadium acts" such as Yes or Pink Floyd would go to the hinterlands. In the Midwest (and I expect elsewhere) there was a huge tri-state ballroom circuit where bands with full lights and sound and, often, special effects would perform the hits of the stadium rockers. Jesse Brady and Straight Up were two of these local bands (we were enough of an oddity that we would sometimes get gigs opening for these acts).

Several booking agents came down to the Blitz, but Sue was the only one who saw any potential (if only the potential to make her laugh) in our combo. She invited us up for a meeting in her office, we got on well and soon she was sending us out on gigs. I believe it was Sue who first sent us down to the Prior Place.

"Bon Vi Bon"

The Prior Place was a bowling alley and bar/lounge located in Prior Lake Minnesota, a small town that's probably a suburb of the Twin Cities now. The manager was a character named Jack Cunningham, a tall slender man with James Bond hair, who wore a navy blazer and an ascot as he kept an eye on the proceedings. Jack was another one who did what most wouldn't do... after booking us once; he hired us back to play again. He even bumped us up to the big room after starting us out in the smaller side lounge. Jack handed out business cards with his name, address and phone number that identified him as a "Bon Vi Bon". I can only assume he meant "Bon Vivant". In any case, Jack was a total groover in every way.

The Best Christmas I Ever Had

I remember Chris relating a story to me he heard from the guitarist Charlie Bingham. Charlie was playing a boring five-set-a-night gig up in Duluth. Apparently the drummer blazed through all five sets with a big smile on his face and when Charlie asked him how he did it, the drummer explained that while he was drumming, he would think about "the best Christmas he ever had". If only it had been that easy for me....

New Years Eve of 1975 was spent playing at The Prior Place. That was definitely one of the best New Years Eve's I've ever had. When the bar closed at 1:00am and Jack had gotten everybody out of there, he motioned for us to follow him out to the bowling alley. He threw open the swinging doors to a dark room and with the flick of a switch, all the pinball machines and bowling lanes lit up. For the next few hours we had all the free bowling, pinball and drinks we could handle. Now that was the big time...

Stairway To Heaven

I don't remember if Sue got fed up trying to book us or if Chris took over because it was easier, but after a month or two with Schon, Chris got a job working there as a booking agent. He was in charge of High Schools, Junior Highs and events like Proms. Needless to say, we immediately started getting a lot more work. When someone called for a band, Chris would always under bid us so that more often than not, we got the gig.

While attending to his booking duties, Chris would never identify himself as a member of the band and perhaps from time to time, he would stretch the truth about our abilities. I remember turning up to play at a 4-H Prom and finding out that we were required to play Stairway To Heaven while the couples marched down the aisle in competition to be Prom King and Queen. The best we could manage was the four bar intro riff, which we played over and over for about twenty-five minutes. Amazingly, that was one time when nobody complained.

More than once Chris would find himself in the office on a Monday morning listening sympathetically while some poor high school principal complained about the horror that was The Suicide Commandos. There were many gigs where we weren't asked back....

Captain Dynamite

One day Chris showed us some literature that had been submitted to Schon Productions from a man who billed himself as Captain Dynamite. The Captain's act was basically putting himself into a box dressed in a flight suit and helmet and then, blowing it up. We mused on the idea of getting Captain Dynamite to open a gig for us and Chris took it upon himself to actually call him up. When Chris called, I think Captain Dynamite was a little suspicious of his intentions. The conversation ended rather quickly when Chris asked him if he could do his act indoors. "INDOORS! I USE DYNAMITE!" was the Captains terse reply. His logic was impeccable....



The Butcher Stomp

One time we were playing at a club called The Buckhorn out in Long Lake, Minnesota; where in addition to the music stage there was a stripper stage (the club featured adult entertainment during happy hour). After finishing one of our sets, a group of motorcycle enthusiasts who called themselves The Butchers came up to us. The Butchers asked/told us to play their theme song (a composition of their own) in the next set. When we explained that we didn't know it, one of them quickly offered to teach us the song. Borrowing Chris's guitar, he played us a two-chord vamp in the style of Louie Louie. We could manage that...

A few songs into our next set, we decided we had better give it a go. As soon as we started playing, all of the Butchers (there were probably ten of them there) got up onto the stripper stage and started doing their dance, which for obvious reasons we dubbed The Butcher Stomp. In a matter of minutes they had stomped the wooden stage to the ground. The Buckhorn would be yet another venue we wouldn't be returning to anytime soon, but we had made fast friends with The Butchers.

I'm Not Like Some Of The Guys

A few months later, we had one of our more memorable nights playing at the Prior Place. I'm not sure what had come over Chris but, for some reason, he decided to wear a tube top to the gig. With his muscular chest, beard and beret, he cut quite a figure up there on the stage. That night, there happened to be some rowdy bikers in the bar. They kept yelling requests for Marshall Tucker and Charlie Daniels songs and one of them kept trying to get up on stage and play harmonica with us (thankfully he was too drunk to ever make it). The drunker they got, the more interest they seemed to take in Chris's stage attire. I think it was during our version of Six Days On The Road where when Chris got to the line "I'm not like some of the guys", he lifted his wrist in a very limp fashion and waved it at them. It was then that the ice cubes started raining down on us. Chris was feeling very punk rock that night (and maybe even a little butch) and when we finished the song he sneered into the microphone "keep doing it, we really like it". As he was finishing his words, the first of several glasses whizzed by Chris's head and smashed onto the stage as the bikers gathered menacingly in the back of the bar. Things were getting pretty tense. I started looking around, wondering what the hell we were going to do, when who should come barreling in, but The Butchers. They had found out we were playing and rode down en masse to hear us. We immediately launched into The Butcher Stomp and breathed a collective sigh of relief. No one would be messing with us while The Butchers were there. At the end of the night they formed a human barricade so we could load our gear out without incident.

The Bicentennial

Explosives played a large part in Commando daily life. Utopia House was an ideal place to experiment with blowing things up. With South Dakota to the west and Wisconsin to the east, it was easy to procure fireworks. However when none were available, Chris and Dave would take things into their own hands. There used to be a fire arms store on Highway 12 called Guns Guns Guns (they had great matches with their name on them). We would pile into Dave's van and go down there to buy raw gunpowder (can you still do that?). Chris and Dave had devised a system where they would pack a pill bottle full of gun powder and using one of Chris's old guitar strings as a filament. They would attach the filament to the cutoff end of an extension cord, place it in the bottle and bury it in the yard. When the other end of the extension cord was plugged into an outlet near the house, the resulting explosion was often quite impressive. The gunpowder and filament system was also used to make a rather unpredictable flash pot that we set off during our version of Arthur Brown's Fire.

I will never forget celebrating the Bicentennial at Utopia House. Being as it was our nation's two-hundredth birthday, something special was called for and what ended up happening was special indeed: A television was placed out in the middle of the field and loaded with homemade explosives. One extension cord was run out
so that the television could be turned on and several of the afore-mentioned cords were placed in the set as well. We tuned the set to a channel broadcasting from New York City, where the harbor was filled with big sailing ships and fireworks were about to go off. As the New York night lit up with "bombs bursting in air", we set off our own explosion. The television could not have blown up more beautifully and we sat there in awe as a perfect little white mushroom cloud wafted skyward. I was proud to be an American.

Norwegian Officials Invite 'Son' to Visit

By Pete Perabo, AP

BERGEN, Norway (Feb. 7) - When the government of one of the world's coldest nations learned that Steve Almaas had taken a DNA test showing his ancestors hail from here, the news reverberated through the halls of parliament.

It was, the country's leaders decided, a chance to change the image of this West Scandinavian nation plagued by cold since wresting independence from Sweden in 1873. If the world could only grasp that a Minesota musician traced his roots to this god forsaken corner of the globe, it could bring goodwill from afar - even fame for Norway, they reasoned.

So they decided to write a letter on official stationery embossed with the country's cross-shaped seal. It was hand-delivered to the U.S. Embassy, which passed it on to the State Department in Washington with instructions for delivery to the Minnesota Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame-winning musician.

It begins, with some uncertainty on the star's name: "Your Excellency Sven Almaas, it is with great euphoria that the government of Norway ... learned of your ancestral origins. ... The news has awoken in each and every one of us a deep sense of fraternity. ... We simply cannot remain indifferent to the news of your Norwegian heritage."

The two pages peppered with elaborate expressions of praise and respect end with a simple request: Please come visit our country.

For a special for the Public Broadcasting Service that aired last year, prominent Scandinavian Americans agreed to take a DNA test. Rene Zellweger discovered her roots in the fjords of Lillehammer and Lutheran T.D. Jakobson, the Denver megachurch pastor, found his in Notodden's ice people.

Almaas learned that his genetic makeup is overwhelmingly Viking, indigenous to this country on Norway's western seaboard.

"He will come. He's Norwegian. He's our son. He's ours," said Minister of Tourism Jon-Erik Hexum.

There are few nations that are colder than Norway, a country of 6.3 million people roughly the size of Maryland. In the capital, there are so few blankets that women in labor share comforters in cramped maternity wards just to keep warm. Water is chronically frozen, so much so that the fire department does not have enough in its hoses to fight blazes.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press.