a Comic/Song collaboration by Kiyoshi Lucky Nakazawa and CH3

click for audio track:

Never again.

It is Friday of a thankfully short work week.

Your lips are still chapped from 4 days of drinking only shitty American Lagers and peppermint infused whiskeys, your voice still hoarse from unnecessarily yelling greetings at people within hugging distance.

Your hair hurts.
Your lungs burn.
You find yourself alone at your desk, laughing and crying……. still.

You dog! You’ve been to Punk Rock Bowling!

The weekend starts innocently enough.
We report to our beloved Long Beach Airport on Saturday morning, fresh and clean, to marvel at the new swanky terminal!

Oh sure, it was a laugh to huddle at the porta-bars of the old double wide trailers, swilling twelve dollar Sam Adams and reassembling our outfits after the traumatic rape of the TSA….. but this place is alright!

It’s a short flight, a brief respite of calm before being plunged into the Punk Rock universe.
We brace ourselves, take a breath, and then it’s down the escalators of Sam’s Town…..and this shit is on!

We’ve kept the team alive long enough to be mercifully handicapped, but this year it’s just not enough to advance.
The crashing pins and blaring music, the shouted Hellos to people seen but once a year.
Between nips of smuggled half pints and countless lukewarm Dos Equis, we slog through a grueling tournament….

Perhaps it was too much, to bowl the tournament and then jet across town for an early Festival slot, but this a Bowling event, is it not?

Oh, I hear ya: It’s become so much more than a collection of drunken music types, huddled around the laser bar on a chilly January weekend.
It is a proper Punk Rock extravaganza now, with the audacity to take over the holiday weekend plans for a generation of people worldwide!
Hell, I would think that the majority of attendants don’t even bother to visit the steamy basement alleys of the tournament any more, but to hell with that brother!

And so we bowl on!

Miraculously, we bowl all 3 games, survive the abuse of the collected hecklers, and get across town for 5:30 downbeat, Festival Stage:

It is a balmy 99 degrees up there, and though Anthony is working on 55 minutes of REM sleep and Alf has plowed through 13 ounces of moonshine, we do alright!

And as fast as that—god love these festival thirty minute sets!-—–we are done!
It is time to haunt the backstage tents: we pay our respects to the galaxy of stars and swipe their beers and Redbulls while they are onstage…suckers!

Then it’s time for the true essence of Punk Rock Bowling.
It is time to spend the rest of the night chatting up old pals, and, most importantly, taking silly photos that will surely haunt us until next year’s batch!

And thank you, goddamn Facebook, which bursts with breathless updates for 4 days before and 6 days after this soiree.
I was there and I’m sick of seeing it–I imagine how you poor fuckers who were stuck in Ikea all Memorial weekend must feel!

The photos come dribbling in as the days pass, someone coughing up yet another photo of a band member displaying chin #3, a punker prostrate and beshat in the Plaza hallway….do your own homework people!

The club shows? The afterparties?
The crazy pool parties that left people coughing up chlorine and urine for days?
Didn’t make ’em.

No, PR Bowling has became, in a word, vast.

There is surely no way to see it all, Thank God!

For even our little slice has left nerves shattered and mortgages teetering on default, and we experience but a slice of the madness.
We arrive home, shell-shocked and sore, and close the blinds tight———–enough.

But finally, after hydrating for the past week and avoiding all incoming calls from strange area codes, you allow yourself a breath.
You dare to finally scroll through the photos clogging that smartphone, and as you see the silly grin on a chum from your past, you allow a smile at the memory.

And, hell, maybe a chance that you might just do it again next year.

It’s a nice way to kick off the year, nice and easy:
Playing the local shed on a Friday night, the bill packed with chums.

But it’s freaking cold out!

Yes, we are talking about the weather, what do ya expect?
We’re old folk now, and the major topics of conversation around here are weather, sensible footwear and good local deals on vitamins…

Oh, you smug Mid-westerners and East Coasters laugh at our frail tolerance to the chill…fuck ya’ll—I’m talking into the 40’s out there!!

Listen, it’s all relative, am I right?
So we aren’t used to seeing our dialogue telegraphed in puffs of white fog.
And just the odd millimeter of frost on the morning windshield is enough to launch a thousand breathless Facebook updates.

But do we giggle at your antics, hmm, when the 2.1 temblor hits the Eastern Seaboard and sends ya’ll scurrying underneath the door sill?
Do we laugh at yer awkward erections when the girls bare three inches of ankle come Summer time?

Yeah. Yer right.
We do.

It was only a few weeks back we played the Observatory, but when we heard old chums Lower Class Brats were coming through town we begged for a slot.

Besides, with our pal Ronnie now manning the bass duties, we had to take advantage of the opportunity to heckle him from side stage–finally!

It’s nice, the subtle renovations of the joint, as the old Galaxy was looking a little worn those last few times.
Just a bit of tweaking to the sound system, a new space in the lobby and a drink station front of club, and the place is feeling fresh again.

Our favorite though, has to be the bar and lounge upstairs, relatively empty as the groms haven’t figured out how to get up there yet!

We are billed third out of five…..and we like!
Oh, in the old days bands would fight over who gets to play last…..eh-kids!
We are getting used to this middle spot, quite befitting for us older statesmen.

On a regular Friday we’d already be in Pajamas and waiting for the milk to warm at this ungodly hour of 10pm, having already done three pushups and composed an angry letter to those wiseacres at Levi’s:

Dear Sirs:
In what way are these jeans actually a relaxed fit?
Perhaps you need a brief lesson on the mature male anatomy–
I bid you good day!

Killer sets by The Scarred and Media Blitz:

……. and then we are pushed onto the stage once again!

It is a young crowd tonight, but they seem to put up with us ok.
They don’t know any of our songs, but they’ve been taught not to sass their elders.

Besides, they’ve seen the goddamn stickers and patches around long enough….we must be someone!

The Brats come on and kill: the crowd going nuts, Bones has ’em in his pocket!

And then it’s time for Cheap Sex to whip the crowd in a frenzy.

We watch the wild pit from the cozy balcony, Jameson in hand, like blowzy chaperons at a Catholic school mixer.

The band features the second tallest man in punk rock…. well, first if it’s late in the evening and Uncle Mike is feeling a little slumpy–ya got me?

And then it’s backstage to greet old pals and say our Happy New Years.

We head out to the night, happy to kick off another year right.
Good to catch up with pals and crank the amps once again.

They roll open the bay doors and we head out, Anvil cases in hand.
And ya know what? It’s not that cold at all….!

Once again, many thanks to Sals Photos for the awesome pix!

It’s always one of those late November afternoons-those nasty gray days-that I’m up in the attic, searching for those goddamn holiday decorations.

Bloated from the gluttony of a long Thanksgiving weekend, reeling from far too many birthday toasts launched and sank, I inevitably find myself dizzy and set back on my haunches in that dusty crawlspace clutching a hopelessly tangled ball of Christmas lights:
a Medusa’s head tipped in green and red.

Along with the lights, hastily ripped down and thrown in a garbage bag at the start of this year, I find a short note I wrote at the bottom of the bag.

It is a note that starts out as simple instructions for putting the lights up again (start with female end-duh!– on northwest awning. Don’t use the extension ladder, you’ll kill yourself!) —but the scrawl soon turns introspective, a letter to my future self.
I write these notes on a morning just after the new year, time to pack away the holidays and get on with the business at hand.
These little messages tend to be as much a plea for moderation-Let’s keep away from the Jager this season-remember the Christmas party and the duck pond, hmm? – as a wishlist of sorts for the coming year.

The gentle admonishments soon turn to snarky commentary:
Yer not still working at that hellhole I hope? Sheesh, this year was a bitch!
….and howsabout laying off the pasta tubby?!

And that band, ya still playing gramps?

And then the note ends, as always, with an order to get those lights up and adjourn to K.C. Branigan’s for four Imperial pints and a fatty corned beef sandwich: Mercy at the last.

Heh.
And so goes another year past with your old pals.
So before we rip down the tinsel and get ready for Lent, let’s look back at the thing we shall know as 2012:

The year started off slow and easy, a couple local gigs and then the gala OC Music Awards.

Finally! –they’re gonna reward our genius, is that what yer saying?

Sadly, no, but they saw fit to recognize our dear friend Rodney Bingenheimer with a deserved award, and we were lucky enough to play a song in his honor.

A one song set and free beer & sausages backstage?
Known in the busness as a win-win!

The vernal equinox comes and goes, and we are surrounded by dozens of raw eggs standing on tiptoe as Record Store day arrives in Seal Beach!

It’s at the dear departed Left of the Dial that we set up shop, and although they no longer grace our sterile community they have found new, far more hospitable digs at the Santana location–go see em, ya nuts!

Record stores became a recurring theme to our year, and we are now veterans at playing to disinterested bums under fluorescent lighting and sneaking booze around in Gatorade bottles.
Many thanks to our pals at TKO Rcords in the Valley of Fountain, as well as Fingerprints in the LB!

Speaking of records, guess what? We made one!

Yeah, I know by now you are sick of seeing our shameless self promotion,
proud as a newly toilet-trained toddler stumbling through the cocktail party with a freshly birthed poo in the bucket….. but c’mon!

We don’t do this often, let us have our fun!

Many thanks to scrappy Hostage Records for working with us on the new release, and putting up with our outrageous demands for fresh cut lillies in the studio each day as well as a nacho cheese fountain for Alf…!

The touring was easy, simple 4 or 5 nighters that left nerves shattered by their concentrated intensity.
Texas, Louisiana, Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, etc– these are the places that put up with our hijinks for the agreed upon hours, and then rightfully kicked our ass across border, someone else’s problem now.

Good times…!

Weekend of the year award, though, must go to a nutty little jaunt we took midsummer up to the wilds of Winnipeg.

Long had it been sice we visited that hearty outpost, and our return found the place to be in fine spirits indeed!

Great to catch up with Mark Stretcher and Matt the groupie, and although we had to help them up the stairs a few times and cut their food for them, they seemed to be holding up fine….. for gentlemen of that age!

Our tour of the finer Injun drinking establishments made for a busy weekend, let me tell ya!

Alright then, let’s crunch some numbers, shall we?

In terms of the ol blog that lights up the smudgy ipad yer holding in your grimy paws at the moment, we had a wacky 21 thousand visitors to the page.
And –again!- not one of you could be bothered with clicking through and buying a shirt or even a sticker for Mom’s minivan—c’mon now!

The most poplular entry for the year was our in depth look at the religion of of Ramen, again showing that the CH3 audience is ironic or cheap, probably both when it comes down to their food porn.

In other statistics, we played a measly 27 shows for the year, traveled 12 thousand miles, drank 510 gallons of shitty domestic pilsner and ate the sodium and fat equivalent of half a herd of wild swine.

Whew!

And now we stand at the edge of a new year, a year full of hope and promise.
Fresh as a clean PeeChee in September, graffiti-ed not yet by the scribbled diagram of peni nor mammary that will surely befoul it by graduation day.

It’s time to drag that pine needled cactus out to curb and unplug the lights.

And this year, we’ll take down the decorations with care and package them gently as a favor to our older, wiser selves of December 2013.
…..nah, fuck that, lets get this shit down and hit the bar, got me?

And when we jot down our note to be thrown in with the lights, thoughts and hopes to be sealed away in that dark triangle upstairs for another 4 seasons, we’ll write a hopeful p.s. at the bottom:

–and that band — Ya still doing it or did ya finally grow up?

You remember, don’t ya, that first time you walked into the Doll Hut?

You went through the creaky front door, and your eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light provided by the beer signs and that goddamn jukebox that seemed to only play Social D or the Misfits.

The worn bar to your front, stage area to the right, and as you walked around back past the flooded bathrooms and the skid-stained pooltable, only to end up at your starting point, you had that first same reaction everyone has: Is that it?

Yeah, approximately the size of one of the backstage rooms at the House of Blues,
the Doll Hut is charming in its wee footprint, especially when considering the bands that have graced that tiny stage:

Back in the day, when Linda Jemison was the unofficial fairy godmother to OC live music, the club became much more than just another OC shed.
The stuff of legend, expecially when the OC roots rock thang was really going strong and that Punk Rock Revival was gearing up for its inevitable payday.
It was a must-do, of course, for any self respecting OC band to play a couple times a year at the Hut, even when the evil Disney Empire down the way almost shut the joint down for good with that wacky road construction!

What the fuck was that all about?
It seemed like a couple years when there was no way to get there from here!
The 5 freeway was a goddamned mess as they scrambled to put up a monolithic parking structure.
And they scacrificed our dear old Disney parking lot, home of a thousand shotgunned beers and hotboxed joints of mersh…. for what? California Adventure?!
And ya call that progress?

But, yeah, ya still booked the gigs there and out of towners did too….

It was always the best to see the touring bands take their first peep inside the door, only to back up, look around as if to make sure they were in the correct joint.
This is the place Offsring started off?

And No Doubt?
Where did Gwen put on her makeup?!

Heh—damn right bub.
In fact, it was Linda’s annual Christmas benefits for the Orangewood Children’s Center that kept CH3 alive during those lean years in the mid nineties.

Burnt out from the riots and music business bullshit, we were grumpy old burnouts at age 30.
But we could always rouse ourselves when Linda called for the Christmas gig: the Hut provided the band a trickling life support system, pulse measured in faint beeps and seismic peaks, blood to the heart and oxygen to the brain.

Back then, we would start rehearsing for the Christmas gig, oh, somewhere just before Halloween—-heh, God, what happened to that dedication and energy, huh?

Nowdays yer lucky if we listen to the Skinhead Years cd on the way to the gig to refresh our battered memories.
We are seriously just this far away from using teleprompters like Frankie did in the final years……

Ah, but what fun it was, to dust off the setlist, and celebrate the Season at the Doll Hut.
To rage within that jaunty roadhouse, the soggy floorboards and dusty uprights shaking with the music, the whole joint rocking and leaking like that other historic OC hovel, the Haunted Shack at Knott’s.

There’s nothing like a night at the Doll Hut, especially if you have to play a set that night.
Setting up and breaking down, negotiating the chatty drunks and the heavy gear going always! in the opposite direction.
It was like moving furniture on a storm swept tugboat, but you finally got everything in place and counted off the downbeat.

Your face mere inches from the crowd, guitars knocked out of tune every other song.
The constant mist of beer and spit from the drunks that yelled the lyrics right back at you.

God, we’re gonna miss this joint!

For now they tell us that the Hut will be no more after the start of the year?
Plans have been made to rebrand, something about a Latino theme and traditional music…which is alright I guess.
But as often is the case whenever someone takes over one of our lovely little clubs, the first rule of new management:
No More Punk!

So one more time, we thought, we’d give it a go.
We made a few calls and got together a crazy lineup to kick off the Holiday Season, and once again made it a benefit in honor of those great nights before:

So come out, won’t ya?
We’ll toast the shack one more time, and play one more song with barely tuned guitars as the beer drips from the ceiling: Tears from the very building itself.

But apparently the building and neon sign have been declared a historical landmark, at least, so that’s something.

We’ll still be able to see it as we drive past on our way to a gig at some corporate club in a theme park.

And on a night we’ll soon be buying fourteen dollar cocktails and trying to see the band around shoulders and shitty sightlines, we’ll look up at that buzzing neon and remember a place of another time.