From another century (1995):
One Angry Rabbit
I find myself in this situation every year without fail. It’s another Saturday night during the San Diego Comic Convention. I’ve spent an entire day, perhaps two, wandering through the detritus of popular culture, surrounded by hordes of adolescent boys and men older than myself who haven’t quite managed to outgrow their childhood enthusiasms. This bewildering confrontation with my ancient past always leaves me reeling and slightly disgusted, wandering the streets of the Gaslamp Quarter wondering if there’s anything to do beyond watching the annual convention masquerade and its inevitable contingent of overweight Trekkies stretching the elastic of their homemade Starfleet drag. This year I found a seemingly viable alternative: Destroy All Monsters was scheduled to play at Bodies at the stroke of midnight.
By all accounts, the reunion tour of this quasi-legendary Michigan quartet was a once-in-a-lifetime event. Obscure even in their heyday, the members of Destroy All Monsters spent the past two decades moving on to bigger and better things: drummer Mike Kelley and guitarist Jim Shaw are both popular artists in L.A., Shaw being best known for his “Thrift Store Paintings” exhibition, Kelley for his cover art for Sonic Youth’s Dirty album. Vocalist Niagara is a rising underground art star in her own right, but her paintings have yet to command the prices attached to the work of her better established bandmates. When DAM decided to break their twenty year silence and subject the masses to their raucous melange of feedback and bad attitude, Niagara’s exhibit at the Rita Dean Gallery assured San Diego a spot on their itinerary.
Several hours before the concert, I found myself relaxing at the gallery, Niagara’s Warhol-inspired femmes fatales gazing down at me with deadly intensity. While I had never heard a single note performed by DAM, my co-worker Rod was awash in anticipation. “I can’t believe this,” he told me. “I grew up in Detroit, but I’m finally going to see Destroy All Monsters—in San Diego.”
“Yeah,” chimed in a fortyish white guy with graying Afro-styled hair. “I drove all the way down from San Francisco to see them. I’ve been looking forward to this for twenty years.”
Some people are just destined for disappointment.
When we sauntered into Bodies at 11:55, the band was already setting up. Unfortunately for the diehard DAM fans in attendance, the band in question was a local foursome which proceeded to play a forty-five minute set of driving rock that left most of the small crowd restless and apathetic. By the time the openers were finished, the news had already spread through the bar: Destroy All Monsters, furious at the delay, had decided to cancel their performance. While the merely curious nursed their beers in bemused silence, a handful of Michiganites, including Rod, formed an ad hoc committee to dissuade them from canceling. (James O’Barr, noted Detroit resident and creator of the popular comic book/movie character The Crow, was content to hang back in the bar and fulminate about San Diego’s unspeakable inferiority to his usual stomping ground.) A little hometown adulation seemed to do the trick. The band began to set up their equipment, and everyone, including the disgruntled O’Barr, settled down to watch their idols storm the stage.
Around 12:15, Mike Kelley took his seat behind the drum kit and proceeded to test it with a series of complicated exercises in 1/1 time while a demure woman in a silver lamé jump suit revved up a tape of prerecorded synthesizer drones and drum tracks. Satisfied that his kit was secure, Kelley slinked off stage; the woman, left to her own devices, picked up a large styrofoam halo that wouldn’t have passed muster in a Sun Ra stage show, placed in on her head, and turned to face the audience. The dismal truth rippled through the crowd: this wasn’t Destroy All Monsters at all, but another opening act. Oblivious to this wave of disappointment, the woman spread her arms and intoned a cosmic paean to misery while an overhead projector beamed images of young girls and rabbits onto the wall above her head. This accomplished, she removed her halo, placed it carefully on a mike stand, picked up an electric guitar and began to strum crisp, if basic, chords over her prefab backup. The images behind her took a decidedly theriomorphic turn: girls merging with rabbits, growing ears, and sprouting buck teeth. The focus of her lyrics, beyond a general angst-ridden anomie, remained unclear until a few songs had come and gone. “I am not a bunny,” she suddenly announced — “I’m a grown up girl!”
“I get it,” Rod whispered. “It’s a rock opera.”
Strumming harder to underscore the intensity of this all-too-common tale of confused species identity, she repeated the couplet over and over like a mantra. “I am NOT a bunny— I’m a grown up girl! I am NOT a bunny— I’m a grown up girl!” Even her voice— which up to this point had almost driven me to rummage around in my pockets for a copy of the Benjamin Proverb Test or some other handy litmus for schizophrenia— began to take on an emotional depth which nearly rivaled the range of the late chanteuse Nico. This, obviously, was a crucial point in the psychodrama unfolding before us. “I am NOT a bunny— I’m a grown up girl! ”
After a few minutes of this, my attention began to wander. I noticed a quartet of East County cowboys, apparently displaced by Buffalo Joe’s closure for remodeling, standing in the back of the bar pondering the spectacle before them. “Hang on to your chair,” muttered Rod. “You might need it— they look like they’re ready to bust up the place. Just remember: in a bar fight, always hit the guy in the Stetson first.” I strained to hear what they were saying, but all I could catch was “I want to smoke some of what she’s on,” followed by “Let’s just get ourselves a beer before—” The rest of their conversation was drowned out by a smattering of laughter and applause as the not-a-bunny girl segued into her next number by donning a pair of rabbit ears and oversized false teeth. I began to panic. Maybe Rod was right. Perhaps the rest of the sentence I’d overheard ended with the words “and stomp on some of these freaks.” On the other hand, they didn’t look much like the sorts who would risk getting any blood on their well-pressed, pastel-accented Western shirts and designer denims. Just to be on the safe side, I held on to my beer bottle when the waitress tried to carry it away.
Back on stage, the bunny-girl wrestled with her personal demons in an odd but affecting interpretive dance, rotating slowly as she hopped up and down, holding her hands before her in a limp, supplicative position that eloquently expressed her struggle to suppress the deadly rodent within her. Then, catharsis achieved, she cast away her rabbit drag, picked up her guitar and headed into her finale: “Must be happy— must have an a-part-ment!”
Obviously, a very angry rabbit still lurked behind our heroine’s uneasy compromise with the norms of society.
As she ambled off stage to an appreciative ovation, I checked my watch and shook my head in disbelief. It was 1:45… fifteen minutes to closing time. This was lost on the bearded gentleman who stepped onto the stage and lit two dozen large sticks of incense before strapping on an electric bass. Jim Shaw proceeded to unleash a torrent of squealing guitar noise, echoed by the bassist and a thrashing Mike Kelley, who had subtly reappeared behind his drum kit. This gleeful cacaphony thundered on for all of two minutes until Niagara, clad in a green velvet bathrobe, fright wig and sunglasses, took her place at the forefront of the band. “My stomach looks great tonight,” she proclaimed, apropos of nothing. As Destroy All Monsters headed into their first song of the evening, Niagara lurched towards her microphone stand as if it had suddenly moved away from her. (It hadn’t.) Unsteady on her feet, she mumbled obscure, inaudible lyrics as the band forged ahead in its own oblivious fashion. It was unclear where one song ended and the next picked up, although when Niagara removed her bathrobe to reveal a black lace top and black Spandex cycling shorts, it was obviously meant to signal something. If only she could have told us what, exactly, she was trying to convey… but that moment never came. Instead, a member of the Bodie’s staff approached the stage and, with a few whispered words, brought the show to a shuddering anticlimax.
“We’re going to have to stop now,” announced Niagara as she stumbled off the stage and out of the bar. A look of barely contained rage crossed Mike Kelley’s face, prompting him to resume his single-beat warm-up drill with greater speed than before: Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! The guitarists threw in with a renewed squall of feedback punctuated with a few well chosen curses before tossing down their instruments in disgust: how dare they close the bar now, just when they were getting started? The audience, unimpressed by the sight of four middle aged men struggling to cover their lack of professionalism with a poor display of punk attitude, drifted outside and into the street, where Niagara, swaying in the night breeze, offered vague apologies for subjecting us to “such great music.” As I stepped out the door, I turned and glanced back at the stage. The incense was still burning, shrouding the bar in a miasma of futility. Kelley continued to pound away, adamant in his refusal to acknowledge any schedule but his own. The echo of this simple, angry beat followed me down F Street until its steady rhythm merged with all the other meaningless noise of the city.
Copyright © 1995 by Dan Whitworth. All rights reserved. A version of this article appeared in the San Diego Reader in 1995.
