issue 6: Jefferson Mayday Mayday
Discussed: The Immaginarium, cooking, Waffle House, sun cycles, beats, UFOs, militant dream states, spells, South Carolina, Australia, dreams, CZCHA BAINGs, Kinko’s, QAnon, public dilemmas, aphrodisiacs, propaganda, Trickle Up theory, Avoid The Band, Kurse Go Back, Miles Davis, rainbows, weapons, antennas, rats, development, Spencer’s Gifts, etc.
[note: I’ve realized a lot of geographical details from this introduction are factually incorrect on my part. If you’re trying to make a pilgrimage, don’t follow them as a guide.]
According to the lore, if you drive your car to Old State Road, in [West] Columbia, South Carolina and park it on the train tracks, you could feel a push, or find some tiny handprints on your back windshield left by the ghosts of dead school children once hit by the train there. There’s also a story about a lady in white who hanged herself around there and occasionally turns up on the road. Surely there are confederate ghosts killed when Sherman set fire to Columbia in 1865, and a lot of Cherokee ghosts from well before that.
There isn’t much around there otherwise. On the city side, it’s mostly dirt as you near the tracks, and you only hear the clanking of trains changing cars, which happens all through the night. Once you cross the tracks it’s mostly sleepy and residential, except for some kind of factory in the distance. If you drive another five minutes you reach a fork in the road, a sort of triangle made of grass, and to your left is—was—a brick residential house, which was Christened “Immaginarium Noveau” by Jeffery South in 2005. If there’s something happening that night there’s likely a sound coming from the crack in the front door, an organ or a record spinning endlessly on a fixed groove. Inside, all of the windows are covered with fabric, leaving no indication of what time of day or night it is. It’s perfect for maintaining a nocturnal schedule, or for working on a drawing for eight hours without distraction. Nearly every inch of the place is adorned with velvety fabric and paisley, gold dust, mirrors, or ephemera. Everything appears to be a shrine. There are glow-in-the-dark stuffed animals and glittery stickers and collages tucked into every crevice.
When I was 18 the house was one of the only places around to hear strange music live. Actually, before “Immaginarium Noveau” there was another Immaginarium in a different location, near the old mental hospital. I went to a party there where you had to enter the front door through a womb. At both locations the shows the events would last well into the night, often ending with locals and audience members playing together aimlessly for hours.
These shows represented a type of playful abandon that I took for granted. Audiences were sparse, which provided a great atmosphere for experimentation and possibility. Those few who did attend were a peculiar group. It wasn’t a scene so much as a handful of people that didn’t fit anywhere else. There’d be a graffiti kid on pills, a stray punk, a librarian, a belly dancer slathered in essential oils, and a middle-aged guy with a camera who everyone thought was a cop. It was the kind of place where people felt encouraged to bring something to share or show off. A college professor might invite you to sample his array of infused vodkas, for instance.
Touring acts would come through just to see the place and play to four or five people. They could play as long or short as they felt like. I imagine they left with a lot of gifts from their host.
Jefferson was one of a handful of older people who indulged me as a precocious teenager. I’d send him emails asking naive questions about samplers or jazz records. He’d write back, at length. He was cryptic, but never aloof. The emails, like our spoken conversations, would web into a variety of topics on interests like science, improvisation, graffiti, piano, astronomy, precognition, percussion, hip hop, symbolism, the occult, jazz, drugs.... The list goes on.
Jefferson’s style is easy to recognize, but he’s surprisingly hard to pin down. “Jefferson Mayday Mayday,” the moniker used here, is one of many aliases. He creates constantly, and when he archives, the archiving ends up becoming part of the creating, feeding back into itself.
The Immaginarium is only one of a multitude of projects, which span music, video, illustration, installation, fashion, food, collage, and beyond. It’s a useful entry point to his life and work, the two of which are inseparable and indistinguishable.
Jefferson fell in love with an Australian named Maia, and in the end of 2011 he moved to Sydney. Years after his departure, the building was flooded and infested with spiders. Eventually, it disappeared mysteriously on a flatbed truck.
We chatted online, across hemispheres, over the course of a week or two.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What time is it there?
Oh, it’s early, like 11:30. I’m having this chicory syrup—reminds me of Waffle House.
I was thinking the other day about when you said whenever you were in a work rut you would sit there and watch people cook.
It’s one of the few things I miss [about the US]. Dearly. I used to go for the coffee though. I was always nocturnal.
Have you been cooking lately?
Well yeah, but only for kicks really. Like therapy. I work at four music schools, and on Saturdays I fill in at maybe the only authentic Mexican place in Sydney. It’s run by my homegirl that used to have a vegan Tex Mex place. She taught me the difference be- tween real authentic and what we knew as authentic. I work with an all Mexican staff. It’s helping revitalize my Spanish. And the Northern Rodeo tracks make me feel back home again.
I remember coming over for a dinner party one time. There was some really good spaghetti squash, but no utensils.
[Laughs] Oh God, yeah. I used to cook at shows at the house because I thought it made shows more aphrodisiac-tic. But the idea was no utensils. Or sometimes I had sea shells. I’m not really sure why. I was just really involved with food at the time in that way. Putting weird aphrodisiac food into collages. I was into stuff like Satyricon, even though I’ve still yet to see it. Catering is always at the center of what I try to do.
It felt like a practical joke at the time, though not a mean one.
Yeah, it was definitely an absurd joke. I’m trying to get back to that with shows, with edibles. I bought a cotton candy machine– or ‘fairy floss,’ as they call it here.
Immaginarium shows were really formative for me. For a while I didn’t realize things weren’t like that in other places.
I still believe they are, somewhere.
They really played with one’s sense of time.
Yeah—playing with sense and dimension was a big thing. I heard around that time that they make houses that change shape to prevent dementia. I always wanted things to be different every time, or ridiculous. In the earlyish days I was playing drums on a table when folks walked in. These days I try to make things more permanent to prevent accidents. [laughs]
How do you mean, about permanence?
Like falling into a stone, like a fossil. Although Immaginarium did do that, in a sense...
In SC it seemed like you had to play up the oddity of the whole thing to attract people, which was maybe a double-edged sword. Curious if you think of it like that.
Noooo. Maybe some, but not really. It was more about myth-reality, or fantasy. Not exactly escapism, but sure, if that’s what you wanted. It was more like making reality better than reality. I think it stemmed out of conversations with our friend Shiggy about making our hometown better as well. Everyone complained all the time. I just wanted it to be psychedelic-worthy, in all truth.
When you live somewhere you get used to it, so it becomes a game to make it continuously whelming. I try to do that with a similar place now, yet I’m mindful of driving roommates crazy through constant change. But also, experiences were sort of encoded into the walls.
At your current place?
Both. Thing is, I was really weirded out by hype about Immaginarium at first, because I thought it wasn’t anything extraordinary. So I eventually just decided to go hard on the walls and everything, if that makes sense.
Well, South Carolina can be such a void. No pun intended. I think it was especially charged for that reason.
[Laughs] Well, we were sorta religious about creating ‘voids.’ Did you ever know my theory? The layout of that area being completely surrounded by train yards... Tons of international recognition from a phenomenon like the Satanic Church that had burnt down, or the bus of kids killed by a train in the 70s. It being off GPS because of this insane steel mill.... All these factors, combined with countless psychedelic experiences, could play with quantum mechanics and such, with the minerals in the air from the daily strip-mining dynamite. Time travel stuff, being a Cherokee trail that Sherman marched down before burning Columbia down, etc...
How many Immaginariums were there? Could you maybe explain those, and the CZCHA BAINGs?
There was this guy–I think his name was Chan? He had a house venue in Olympia [neighborhood] in the 90s where In/Humanity was playing. We were always trying to check it out and were interested in the band. I always dreamt of having a house venue.
In 2000 this place opened called Millenium Buffet, which replaced this long-running strip club called Twin Peaks. We got a menu and we were living in Olympia. At the first party we filled my bedroom with shredded paper. We took the door off the hinges and snuck in my window, busted it open, and started playing. It was so much paper the sound was all dead. [laughs] We had the menu plates xeroxed as a time schedule. Stuff like badminton with a real dead bird, or stupid stuff like 666 Card Pickup.
Then there was the first Immaginarium, which is a tiny house literally next to that one on the same street. Moon named it that. We quickly moved in together across from the abandoned mental hospital on Bull Street.
Ok, I’ve been to that one.
We were really interested in noise. We knew it was really popping off in, like, Detroit. But an old booking/noise/jazz guy from Senseless Beauty, a hangout in the 90s, said to me once, “People tour down and skip Columbia for Atlanta.” So I was determined.
We were only doing the weird outsider acts from home at the time. Our first out of town act was Ghenghis Tron in 2005, and the show was spectacular. We hadn’t had a show in a while, and a police chief moved in behind us [at the Bull Street location]. It was perfect timing, though, because my Dad was moving out and said if I wanted cheap rent I could move into his house one week later.
And that’s the one that was the longest running Immaginarium, on New State Road.
Yeah. And so I ran it until I moved to Australia. Tried to maintain it across the sea, but it was impossible, so we sold it.
That was the house you grew up in, right?
Yeah. Which was rather depressing.
I remember being able to see old drawings on the walls, from childhood.
Yeah, I convinced my parents to let me paint the walls in high school, and it just ran amok with detailed drawings. I had visions of Immaginarium in high school, I think. I even had lots of dreams about people I’d later meet from places like Austin and Chicago. (And there’s always UFO dreams.) Did you know it disappeared?
The house disappeared?
It was loaded on a flatbed and hauled off.
Wtf?
Yeah. I’ve had tip offs as to where it ended up, and people have tried to find it but never can.
I’m curious about the UFO dreams. But also, why did they remove the house? Seems like an insane task.
Not sure where it went, or why. We gutted it, but the attic was still full of black light plushy dolls and posters.
Hadn’t it been flooded? And there were spiders or something?
Ooh man. Flooding was part of the dreams, even. I had endless raining and flooding dreams. I even had a dream that very much predicted the 2015 flood*, which happened within two days of arriving back in South Carolina from Oz.~
My clues as to where the house is: I hadn’t seen the UFOs in my dreams for what seemed like two years. They’re magical, like what you see of drone formation at the superbowl now or something. Right before someone in the neighborhood sent me pics of the house on the flatbed, I had a dream with Andre Benjamin at Parkland Plaza, in Cayce (up the road a few miles.) [He was in the dream because I used to have a limited poster of his someone gave me, in the center of the house.] We watched the UFOs together, above the trees, and they were more colorful than ever. If that dream is correct, maybe it’s near the bridge. If I ever make it back I’m going hunting to find it.
Did you ever think of leaving South Carolina before you moved to Australia? I’m impressed you stayed so long.
I tried endless times. It always failed because I tried to move with people. I’m not very good with certain things, like paperwork or anything formal. These days I’m better at it, but I was impossible at the time, so I needed peoples’ help.
Where did you try to go?
Like everywhere. I eventually gave up and started getting bank loans to travel when I could. I was set to move on my own when I met Maia. It was miraculous timing. It’s insane. Do not try to move to another country.
Mexico is tempting.
Yes. We wanted to move to Austin because the border was right there. This was in 2005 when I felt the country was kind of running aground, when Bush got in for a 2nd term.
Do you think that feeling repeats itself? The feeling of America on the verge—is it cyclical?
Honestly, my mind goes everywhere imaginable. On one hand, I kind of listen to the experts a bit and entertain the idea that every 250 years an empire falls. But also, to me, it seems like this empire in decline. It keeps getting closer to the end every time it circles back around.
2026... I could see it.
I think it’s a bit on autopilot. The boys are tossing around insiders in power to keep kicking the can. Or it’s just all totally fronting at this stage. Jan 6 is a great example of how anyone can just rock up and take the thing. At 250 years an empire dies, and we’re seeing all the classic symptoms of that, where the elite retreat and save themselves but eventually get caught up in it, too. Lotsa rich doomsdayers.
Jan 6 was puzzling. A lot of people think it was a psyop, which is plausible for sure. But that’s an easy diagnosis for almost anything these days.
We stayed up and watched it unfold [from Oz], because for two months we were reading everyone saying they were gonna do it.
It was in the air for sure. That’s part of why the security response was so odd.
America is concerning in the Fyre Festival sense, but I’m eerily hopeful for people in general. So much has changed with peoples’ sense of independence in my lifetime. I have a lot of faith in good people, I guess you’d say, working together.
Oh, I wanted to ask you about the Omit Punk zine.
Oh wow, you’re truly digging deep. I almost didn’t remember what you meant for a second! [laughs] Omit Punk is one of a zillion ideologies, back from when I used to roll with Robby Phillips’ crew of absurdists. In the 90s we were all trying our best to break our archetypical molds of what we were expected to do. He had this idea that only we could play true free jazz as we were punk, and only they could play true free-punk, as they were jazz guys.
[laughs] I like it.
For the record, I’m a bit weirded out by white guys claiming free jazz, in a way. But the idea was, I was often working with ideas of negation and the void. Still do. I refine things by negating what doesn’t stick.
You always left a lot of gifts or totems around. I gathered that it was also a type of cleaning, probably.
Wish I still had it in me. [laughs]
I’m not sure I believe that you don’t still do it.
Something the Internet has made convenient while living overseas is communicating things of psychic value through digital imagery.
In high school we had this burned CD you gave us at a show. It was hand painted, and we spent a lot of time trying to decide whether or not this pubic hair stuck in the paint was intentional or not.
[laughs] It was probably a brush hair. That’s definitely not my style. I was never one for gore or filth. More fantasy and luxury.
That makes sense. Anyway, what I mean is, those objects felt very charged.
I was quite into the mystical. Obviously I still am; I’m just not as naive anymore about the potentials of such power and what they can do.
When did that change?
When things you’d never imagine that are always what you wished for all come true, countlessly, over and over and over, exactly how you want them. The experience of being careful what you wish for, through getting exactly what you wished for.
Except this one thing: I always wish for dandelions, like every day. I haven’t got that yet. I’m kinda giving up on it and just going with world peace these days.
Seems like a solid wish.
I think people these days are more prone to the mystical, but maybe a bit misguided, with a branding sort of sensibility about it.
People want to believe something.
People wanting to believe have run amok. Things like Q really demonstrate that. Or people getting medical advice from the comments section. In a way it’s sort of interesting, if not hopeful, in a sense of distrust regarding institutions that are, in fact, often inherently corrupt. But generally it’s all pretty dangerous stuff.
But it’s not, in my eyes, just some conservative far right thing. For example, I get a tiny bit frustrated with the notion that people can openly lunge their emotional epicenter into astrology to the extent that it rules their sense of judgment without knowing their astrologers’ background. Side note—I lied that I was an Aquarius for like 15 years, and professionals were totally convinced I was the most Aquarius.
It can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, for sure. But people seem to need those.
Sometime around 2001 I read that the stars had changed. Virgo was three months long and Scorpio was five days long. So I had this idea that, since we were entering into the Age of Aquarius, everyone should change to that sign to understand it. And we are very much in this psychic lightning-fast communication where everyones’ actions are like one body. This was around the time I lived with Avoid The Band, in that house in Olympia.
You guys all lived together?
Yes, it was horrible. I also began studying pop culture regarding 11 and 22 year sun cycles as a way of sorta one-upping astrology. How the sun affects peoples’ psychic nature. So I thought I should hit on cycles. Studying Cycles Rules Everything Around Me.
S.C.R.E.A.M.
The truth is, I do see it as cyclical... Pruning the public ping ponging back and forth, satiating the right and left with various stages of appeasing their needs... Optics, as they call it, yet under the rug. The stakes just keep getting higher and higher, with steady decline and exploitation of resources and such. Gaps widening... So let’s just take a look at how it was, say, in the mid 90s for me and my friends in Columbia:
The 90s in Columbia was pretty great for music. It was like a competition between us and Chapel Hill to be “The Next Seattle.” I dunno, some magazine... [Laughs] Anyway, Chapel Hill beat us out because of the whole Archers of Loaf /Polvo scene. It made everyone kind of fame-crazed, perhaps. This was still a bit before I was hanging out, like in the early 90s.
In the mid 90s it was really wild. Seemed like hundreds of punks and freaks out, and street preachers, like three a night, in 5 Points. But there was this crazy duality. You’d hear stories on one end like, a famous scene king punk guy took too much acid and ran around naked for a week. On the other end, you always hear about peoples’ teeth getting smashed in by skinheads on the concrete. And straight edge stickers like Kill Your Local Drug Dealer would be about. Everyone was super straight-laced to a degree, and almost antagonistic with their cleverness.
Lots of straight edge... Christian hardcore was getting rolling... It was all super silly to us, but at the same time kind of threatening to a degree. My point is, there was a 180 of the reality we know now—in mind expansion sensibilities of psychic health and scientific outerstanding, or at least openness.
There were hippy kool-aid mushroom parties about. We wanted similar, but different. I had these ideas that I guess birthed Immaginarium at that place Senseless Beauty. Did you know that place? The guy went away for a while for selling books of acid.
It was before my time, but I’ve heard about it.
You used to catch mixed bills. We’d play a festival with hardcore groups and thrash metal bands. It was amidst the mid 90s punk resurgence. But we tried to play strange riffs. I was a hip hop kid getting into 60s psychedelic albums and trying to get the guys to play trippier riffs. I was starting to do experimental stuff, like mixing tapes and records over beat tape recordings and field recordings. A lot of us were all trying to hear those 70s groups.
Regarding cycles and openness, things were so constricting, in my opinion, that punk literally made people stupid. You couldn’t listen to certain groups. We used to stare at colored lights and listen to Yes; we knew it was taboo and it just seemed ridiculous. We just felt everyone was massively uptight. We started pushing ourselves, and it went on for years. A lot of antics.
It started as these tests of the senses. We’d plan “nights out” for each other. We felt, it’s one thing to try to be better than all this, but it’s another to better ourselves through, like, training. It got kinda culty. Multiple cults, almost. Between us, Robby Phillips’ group of nonstop absurdist jazz freakout people, and Plain Crash’s performance art/anti-punk....
What would a “night out” be like?
I remember one was specifically about the senses, like [when in heightened states] putting on a cleaning glove and it’s full of Vaseline kinda weirdness. I had to do “taste,” and it was like a raw potato, cheese, lemon juice, Kool Aid powder... It was suddenly really sour. I wanted water and ran and put my head in the bathtub I knew was full, forgetting that earlier we threw a plug-in radio in it hoping that it would blow up. I was fine. [Laughs]
We’d smash shit all the time. We had parties inviting people over to the basement to break things we collected, old vintage electronics and such. At some point I realized I had the same birthday as Ken Kesey, and Steven [the singer of Avoid] had the exact same as Jerry. [Laughs] It was like, fuck, is astrology real?!
At some point things got more mystical through the desire to transcend. We were about ripping the veil. We’d often seek “voids,” like quiet shipping yards in the middle of the city that no one noticed. We were into these Wes Craven themes, Mouth of Madness stuff, Ken Russell aesthetics. I was getting into classic late teen stuff like Aleister Crowley, Jung, the Necronomicon, etc. I feel like this shit is so normal for a teen now.
I think a better way to explain this, regarding how time can work and how things trickle up....I remember talking to Jeff Hartford [Noise Nomads] and Jonathan Coward [Shams] about Hanatarash. In 2007 when YouTube came along I’d dig for stuff like that and come up with so little. In 2015, it’s everywhere! I was laying in bed a few nights ago like, fuck, what is the next five years yields jocks being all about Hanatarash? Seems really plausible, like a Tik Tok craze where people smash shit... [Laughs]
I could see it.
I had a lot of frustrations with sci-fi, and the analogue is peoples’ weirdness in the 90s. Everyone was out-clevering each other. Sometimes you had poser types being annoyingly weird, and often people thought I was one of them. But what I did always stemmed from meta data; it always had reference. By the stage of the Immaginarium everything was encoded. There’s a story behind every story behind every story. Every collage I Xerox’d was made from something specific that had charged energy.
Funnily, now that I’m older I feel better about sci fi. When people say ‘Orwellian’ every other day it’s like, well, sci fi was a mechanism to explain the past in hopes of preventing repetition. (Unless you’re Philip K. Dick and you’re kind of a prophet.)
I think we’re living out a misreading of cyberpunk right now, in real life. We’ve built a world in the image of those stories, but it’s not a critique or a satire; it’s very literal.
With cycles and, say, cyberpunk, I have a template:
Seven years and it’s new again physically, so in the mind you can sense it again. It’s kind of avant-garde sarcasm at that stage. Ten years and it’s a conversation. 15, it’s fair game, but people still won’t relate. 20 years and everyone’s hungry, maybe it’s showing up in the mainstream. 25 years, it’s your Mom and Dad.
I was telling Adam Drawdy in 2009 that if sun cycles were correct we could expect a resurgence in beach vibe. In 1988 it had been Fat Boys’ “Wipe Out,” Kylie Manogue “Locomotion,” Beach Boys’ “Kokomo.” And then, seven years ago, I predicted that 2021 would be a grand 44 year cycle of the new punk, but really the new everything. Because ‘77 was like new wave, dub, hip hop, Star Wars—everything we hold abnormal homage to.
I remember in 2015 thinking, by 2019 even your Mom will be Vaporwave. And I remember all the sea punk kids in like 2010 starting to push cyberpunk rehash.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot since the reemergence of bucket hats and Friends memorabilia in the past few years.
[Laughs] Yeah. I was just talking about seeing the first bucket hat in 1995, and thinking, damn, are even jocks listening to Cypress Hill now? I say “jocks” as it was quite divided in those days, you know. Things now, it’s so much more where everyone gets along.
I don’t know about that! But identities are carved up differently, for sure.
Ok, so by the late 90s and into 2000 when we started having parties, my dream coming true. Art shows, too. We just wanted to play, but no one would give us a show. We played elongated improv sections of jazz-influenced prog/trash/punk... We played through shitty amps, scrappy drums, and a headphone for a mic. We’d have experimental noise sections. I dunno what you’d call it. it. Not many people liked us. The punks didn’t really want us. Venues knew we wouldn’t sell beer or attract a crowd. So if we had our own parties or art shows, we could play.
House shows were better. We could trick out the environment and do the sound how we wanted it. We could just work on our setup for two weeks, and also make the coziest environments to lounge in. (Which was what I was doing at Senseless Beauty in my head. I’d see shows back then, go to high school, and sketch out these plans... like a show could have plants, pillows, people serving hors d’oeuvres, fans for emotional effect. 5-10 years later it slowly started to happen.)
We had all these giant globes from old campus lights that were thrown out. We put a light modulation system on, and I got lots of weird lamps and dimmers. We even had a party where you brought your own lamp, and we had 30 lamps all going on and off together. Stuff like that.
You described a fairly vibrant underground in the 90s. Is that part of the cycle we can look forward to?
First let me kinda say what I mean by a cycle: Nothing I say is matter of fact. Everything in my heart is speculative. And I’m no economic analyst. I studied anthropology, and I’m merely interested in why humans do the rituals they do.
A lot of it is not so much coming around again, retro-oriented, as much as it is trickle up. Or, the exponential nature of seeding and saturating, reaping what you sow. I heard that if you can get 10,000 people behind a concept it’s likely to get to the stage where congress debates proposing a bill. I came to grasp this kind of thing studying the Aztec calendar’s concentric cycles—cycles within cycles that repeat exponentially.
It’s called days and nights 1-7, and 7 is only a day, no night. In 2011, we entered it. The last time we’d been in 7th day was when everything went almost upside down, due to the long road of saturation of culture that it was gentrified & commodified into household names & products. That’s in, say, 1991. You had Vanilla Ice and Marky Mark, upper class white kids listening to white rappers. A long walk from Flash, Bambaattaa, and Kool Herc in the late 70s struggle of the Bronx. I think we’re there again now. People can relate to the art of Emory Douglas now, with the state of displacement and disenfranchised American dream, almost across the board.
You don’t seem to ride those cycles personally. Or do you? Does it seep into your art?
I do ride it. I try really hard to be contemporary. And, this is kind of awkward to say, but I always seem to be seven years ahead. Everything I did seven years ago starts to be seen, I’ve found, to an uncanny extent. Not sure why.
I always thought your style was consistently singular. You could tell it was one of your prints or flyers from a block away.
Well, in a way that was bad. It cross-contaminated my gigs. It was a huge lesson—how to split “branding,” for lack of a better term. People would think a SinDoolah [local DJ] dance night was a Kurse Go Back show. Even the papers could never get our bands straight. I had to create much more specific looks for specific things.
I could see the pitfalls, from a promotional standpoint.
Yeah. Like, I told you about The Whig kicking me out of SinDoolah. First, they were mad because my altars had knives in them. Then it was because I brought a tree. But I never thought I was burning people out. I thought people were expecting it, if not more. I really didn’t think it was that crazy. I was trying to exist in the now, honestly. To define what now was.
Something about the level of ritual peeved people for some reason. Maybe it was received as an attack on practicality. Wasn’t there some controversy surrounding a pineapple?
Oh, I got beat up by tweaked hippies over a pineapple. After that I started putting pineapples on everything. I loved pineapples. I’d always serve them in the instrumental sections of shows when I wasn’t playing drums and rub the juices on me to ‘activate’ my playing. Again, it’s all rooted in superstitious yet magic philosophy. Sort of like blasphemy, to a degree.
What about it got under their skin? The hippies, I mean.
I don’t know. It was at their place, and they kept being like, uh, yeah brah, about that pineapple... They came to Immaginarium during a show, tagged the place up and tried to burn it down in several places. I doused them with a water hose but couldn’t defend myself when they went off on me; I was in a sling from a hand injury.