Ten Grand/the Khayembii Communique Split 10
For about 4 years, we played in myparents living room. No, not the garage: the living room. Our equipment wasalways set up; three large amps, a drum set, a PA, guitars, etc. We had run ofthe place, but we did have to move our amps around for a month or two everyyear to accommodate the Christmas tree over the holiday season. To say that myparents have always been incredibly supportive would be a huge understatementand I think ceding the central room of their house to their son’s burgeoninginterest in playing louder and louder music makes a pretty strong case. Our style was less of a style andmore of us playing cover versions of whatever songs we were into at the time.We cycled through musical genres in a way which tracked our own evolution anddiscovery of new music. We also changed our name from one embarrassing thing toanother every few months, never coming close to settling on a name.
Forexample, we played a short cover set at our high school battle of the bandswhen we were 15 and the set list had songs by The Pixies, Nine Inch Nails,Black Flag, and Nirvana. For very ‘inside joke’ reasons, our name was Granja(“farm” in Spanish - there’s a story there, but it’s not very interesting, asthey say). We got second place, but the judges somehow got the impression thatwe wrote the Nirvana song and gave us points for our original composition. At some point, Trevor was no longera part of things. In a very connected development, when we were around 17,Mark, Brian, and I landed on being a screamo band, though I don’t believe thatterm existed (and, to editorialize, I really really hate that word and use itvery grudgingly). We had kept changing our band name with increasing frequency,and whatever name we had that month was terrible and we needed a name thatstuck. Sitting outside a two day punk festival that occurred on the Universityof Minnesota campus, my friend Andy Pace happened to mention his idea of a bandname: the Karl Marx Brothers.
Obviously, the name is somewhere between naivelypolitical and outright silly, but I liked it and appropriated for our band. Atthat point, I believed we were going to find a way to be political in ourmusic.
With our new name, The Karl MarxBrothers began to sound less like Nirvana and more and more like the bands onthe obscure seven inches that nobody but me and a couple of friends had everheard. Nick Blood was our closest friend and adviser, spending long nights onthe phone with me dissecting together the records we both bought at ExtremeNoise Records rather than doing homework or ever sleeping. We found bands weloved like Shotmaker or Portraits of Past, or local bands like Man Afraid orDisembodied. But I didn’t consider the local bands ‘local’, because theMinneapolis basement scene seemed far off, the unattainable big time. Wewere small fish out in the suburbs, the main show The Karl Marx Brothers hadwas at our high school, though there was the occasional show in a some nearbysuburban space booked by friends, like a garage or a community center. I had taken the trouble totranscribe our lyrics onto a single sheet of paper, and give an explanatoryparagraph or two.
Let’s just say I wasn’t a designer: the cut and pasteassemblage was in 5 point font so that all my verbosity could be crammed ontoone side of a single page. But I earnestly handed these out before weplayed, so that nobody would miss the point of communication. People wereable to read along as I shouted about how “ lastnight I yearned to drive away ninety miles an hour and refuse to look back, butaddiction to this pointless routine shatters the desire to be impulsive!” and wondered aloud about the audience, askingthem “ do you sense the urgency with whichwe bring these issues forth? Does it amount to anything more, than noiseand screaming in your closed ears?”. And we played, under thefluorescently lit room of the nighttime cafeteria, the same sterile space inwhich I ate the one vegan option day after day: a plain bagel with peanutbutter.
Explore releases and tracks from Joel Anderson at Discogs. Shop for Vinyl, CDs and more from Joel Anderson at the Discogs Marketplace.
The sound was subpar, to say the least, but we didn’t care. Afterall, we were communicating! My fellow students were sure to be awakenedto new realizations about the world through our performance! I hit myguitar so hard as I screamed out my angsty lyrics that my fingers bledprofusely. I would surreptitiously look at my bloodied hand between songs witha sort of pride. When wefinished our set, I could read on the faces of the crowd an array ofexpressions, ranging from bewilderment to terror. “What the hell wasthat?” asked Joe, the viking-bearded fundamentalist-Christian hall monitor.
I couldn’t respond, as I looked from disengaged face to disengaged face. Ourlyrics sheets lay about discarded, presumably unread. Who wants to straintheir eyes like that, anyway? Apparently the urgency with which we broughtthose issues forth went unheeded, and in retrospect, the only surprise is thatback then. I somehow managed to be surprised. As highschool ended, we played a final show in my parent’s garage right before I headedaway to go live in Sweden for a year.
The opening band was Om, which was a fun,fast punk band from the next suburb over. We met them while playing anothergarage show at a friend’s house. The guitar player and singer was Stef, wholater became known as POS.
We played for a group of maybe 30 friends, I made aheartfelt speech about what it all meant - my parents’ neighbors must havebeen deeply moved to hear my teenage sentiments emanating out from the PA intothe otherwise quiet suburban neighborhood - and then we hugged each other andsaid goodbye to the band, forever. We started playing together again inearnest, practicing in my parent’s garage this time, having ‘grown up’ anddecided to give them back their living room.
I’m sure the neighbors werethrilled to hear that we were back together, continuing to play the mostabrasive genre we could find. We ditched most of our old songs, except we keptthe beginning and end of one song which was rewritten to become Death of anAspiring Icon, and we kept another song in its entirety called Lacking.
Lackingwas unique because it was only Brian singing (I mean, I yell some things in themiddle there, but it’s pretty much a Brian song), and it was one of a couplesongs that we spontaneously wrote together, which made it feel special. Inthose early reformed days, we had another song that came into beingspontaneously, called AM1200.
Brian started playing a bass line and it justevolved into a completed song without much conscious thought. I’m always abigger fan of the Brian songs, but that might be a bias because, frankly, thelast thing I want to hear about is me complaining about my own problems, realor imagined. Our other songs, however, certainlytook a lot of conscious thought from my part. I never was a big improvisor sosongs like A Year and an Ocean were very deliberately written through a lot oftrial and error as I stood alone all night chain smoking and playing guitar inmy parents garage. Sometimes a friend or two would be hanging out and Iremember after some number of days or weeks developing that song, it justclicked into exactly what it is today. I remember my friend Sarah happened tobe there for the moment, and she nodded at me through the haze and said,‘that’s it’ and I knew that I had finally landing on solid ground afterstumbling for who knows how long.
We played a show at the end of thesummer at the 1021 House in Minneapolis, where our old friend Nick Blood hadmoved in. The house was obviously a former business converted into a livingspace. Most people believed it was a dental office at some point, but to myknowledge that was never verified. It was a large box with a high-ceilingedjoint living room and kitchen space half-ringed by a five rooms, up just 4stairs, separated by a half-wall where one could stand and survey the goings-onin the kitchen/living room. In the large basement was a showspace that had beendoing shows for a few years previous to Nick’s arrival. I had even gone therewith Nick to see a hardcore show once in high school.
To me, given my totallack of a sense of proportion, Nick moving in there was, you know, kind of abig deal. Mark J., for his part, managed to find an apartment less than a blockaway. Brian was.somewhere. His location was always quite fluid in those days.I was still out at my parents, staying up all night, every night; reading,drinking coffee, smoking, listening to music. We designed the packaging ourselves.We stole borrowed the materials from Kinkos, weused photographs taken by Brian.
Ten Grand/the Khayembii Communique Split 10 000
We personally assembled the bulk of thethousand records the summer of its release. In a twist of fate, I ended upgetting mono that summer while friends in other bands went out on tour, so Isat home and put one record after another together while I waited for time topass and my friends to return. To this day, I can tell which of us put togethera given record because, in lieu of a printed list, we simply wrote “thank you”in silver marker on every one of athousand pieces of specially cut black paper.
I will always be able topicture our own unique handwriting styles when I think of that record. The restof the steps involved in putting the record together are too numerous to gointo, but suffice it to say that each record took ten minutes to complete, ifwe were efficient. One thousand records times ten minutes each: I didn’t do toomuch else that summer. We had bands playing in our basementas often as several nights a week, usually punk or hardcore bands touring indecrepit vans traveling from basement to basement, playing for gas money.Our house would get phone calls from all over the country and evenEurope, bands asking to play their Minneapolis show in our basement. Khayembiiwould often play, practically becoming the house band that one summer we alllived there. We would set up in the middle of the room, on the floor,surrounding the drummer, and facing each other underneath the light of a candlechandelier.
The attendees of the show surrounded us in a circle, on thesame level as us. To the ears of the layman, we sounded the same as wedid in high school.
In reality, we had honed in on a sub-sub-genre ofpunk, and were competent at it. That is, some people actually liked us.Sure, they numbered in the tens, but I unironically believed that to be asuccess.
Though we occasionally played a ‘real’ venue like the all-ages Foxfire or onceat a local sub sandwich shop called Bon Appetit, the basement suited us and wewere most comfortable there. It wasn’t as though we aspired to something biggeranyway.
Back in high school, instead of actually going to class andlearning things like math, I learned through experience that most people don’tparticularly appreciate their music to challenge them, either aurally orphilosophically. We knew what we were doing was obscure, unembraceable for theaverage person. The world would never hear us, and we were resigned tothat. Even if they did hear us, they would never be able to figure outhow to pronounce our name. We existed within a subculture and expected tobe judged only by the standards of that subculture. If somebody who was more intune with the pop music of the times - say, a Backstreet Boys fan - decided to discredit our style as beingunmusical, we could only shrug and laugh, realizing that the critique missedthe point entirely.
Kerry did the bookings and then hadthe itinerary (including name, phone number, and directions to the venue)typewritten on a single piece of paper. Somehow we didn’t lose that paper,which was good because we really needed that info. When you would roll into atown, you had to find a payphone to call the landline number on the piece ofpaper, hope for an answer, hope that it wasn’t just some random personanswering at some random punk house, and then try to get more detaileddirections to supplement the very low-detail maps in our crappy road atlas. We borrowed my parents minivan - aforest green Mercury Villager - and put a topper on it to carry our bags. Wedid make it all the way to New York, but there was no show. Instead, we justwandered around, checking out the city with little or no plan. We played atBremen house in Milwaukee twice, the first time we were well received and thesecond time, the basement was overflowing with people.
That was the closest wecame to the big time. We played in a classroom at Depaul University in Chicago.We played with Good Clean Fun (look ‘em up) in Columbus at a place with astage. We played on the stage, and then Good Clean Fun played on the floor,joking about how they “out-emo’ed” the emo band. I think I was a little tooinsecure and self-serious to really appreciate that at the time, but inretrospect, it was a pretty good one. We played afew one off shows as well, playing a big anti-racism hardcore punk show in thequad cities area.
The Vida Blue (later to be known as Ten Grand) played aswell. We knew those dudes to be a great band and really fun guys from playingat 1021. On the neutral territory of Rock Island, Illinois, we decided it wastime to put out a split 10” with them on, naturally, Blood of the Young.
Wealso played in Lafayette, Indiana at least once, though it might have beentwice, at the Usurp Synapse house. All I remember was a lot of dyed black hairand a lot of fun. We repeatedly tried to play inElgin, Illinois (ie. Chicago, but not really Chicago) with our friends fromBaxter and that constellation of bands. Unfortunately, we unwittingly learnedthat there is an Elgin curse, at least on us.
On the morning of one show, MarkJ. Seriously cut his hand, preventing us from going. Another time, Mark J.
Losta grandparent the morning of the show and needed to attend to the familyemergency. A third time, we tried to trick Elgin by playing at Gabe’s in Iowacity with the Vida Blue. The next day, driving the yet-again-borrowed Villageracross rural Illinois, Brian lay in the backseat, despondent, his illnessvisibly escalating. Brian lay suffering as we sped through the flat Illinoislandscape, passing Walmart after Walmart after Walmart. By the time we got toElgin, it had already been clear for hours we wouldn’t be able to play.
Insteadof a show, Brian went to the hospital with a super high fever where he remainedfor a few nights. While there, it just so tragically happened that hisgrandfather passed away. After that, we gave up on trying to play Elgin,especially me, since it was clear I was due to be struck down by the curse. I don’tknow the objective truth of what follows, but in my memory, our live show was abit of a catastrophe, at least most of the time, and the blame for the liessquarely with me. Mark’s drumming was always phenomenal so that was never theproblem; Brian was generally solid in performances. I, on the other hand, hadwritten songs that were at the upper end of my guitar playing ability, and thenI wrote a cascade of lyrics over the often very fast and/or intricate partsthat I had to scream at full volume, leaving no breaks in between parts tocatch my breath. And at that point in my life, my only real hobby was chainsmoking.
I often was just physically unable to play what I set out to play. Ijust couldn’t do it, and I would find myself on the floor, doing someapproximation of whatever I was supposed to be doing. I hoped that, to theobserver, it was somehow powerful, like I was so overcome by the music thatthey couldn’t help but be similarly overwhelmed. I’m not so sure that was theusually the case, but I think sometimes it worked out. Other fun facts were that I didn’t yet knowabout stage tuners, so we would just tune at full volume, rather than silentlytuning with a tuner. What’s worse, my guitar back then had a floating bridge.If you aren’t familiar with what that means, the bridge is the part of theguitar where the strings connect with the guitar, at the other end of thetuners.
A fixed bridge is set against the body and doesn’t move, but a floatingbridge means the tension of the strings held the bridge in a relative position.Floating bridges exist so that people like Eddie Van Halen can do things on awhammy bar. So if one string broke the tension changed and the bridge moved,knocking all the other strings were hopelessly out of tune. This prevented mefrom bravely soldiering on with the 5 remaining strings. When I broke a string,the song pretty much had to stop. Professionals, we were not.
But I know myself well enough to know that I’m apt to rememberthe negative more strongly than the positive. My hope is that those cringe-worthymemories feature more prominently than many of the times things went right. AndI’m so amazed and grateful that there were people there who cared about what wedid back then. Whatever else I remember over the past 20 years, the bestmoments were those of connection standing in the middle of a basement with myguitar feeding back, literally surrounded by a group of friends who alsomanaged to find their way to this type of music. There were times itreally worked. Like, really really worked. The community I felt in those sweatybasements, getting hugs after shows from strangers, could never be replaced.Our journey was just us groping in the darkness, hopefully moving forward, andthose moments show me that it was all worth it.
Mess Of Zero from the The Birth Of Tragedy 12'01. Racebannon - Waltz Of El Diablo, Part I02. Racebannon - Satan's Kickin' Yr Dick In, Part IV03. Racebannon - Waltz Of El Diablo, Part II04.
Racebannon - Satan's Kickin' Yr Dick In, Part V05. Song Of Zarathustra - Establishing An Introduction, Part I06.
Song Of Zarathustra - All Cries Of Accidents, Part II07. Song Of Zarathustra - A Plan To End All Plans, Part III01. We Scholars02.
Shakes In Pain03. Find A Grave04. Pill Catcher05.
A Poisonous Movement07. Inaccurate Accuracy08. The Messenger Of Heat09. The Passing01. A Poisonous Movement02. Inaccurate Accuracy02.
Quantity At Hand04. Messengers Of Heat01. Mess Of Zero03. With Hands That Bleed04. The Great Longing05. The Evening Beat06. Deep Yellow And The Burning Red07.
The Birth Of Tragedy08. Science, Science09. Cry Of Distress10. The Stillest Hour11.
Machinist Union12. Song Of Zarathustra - Recommend For Digestion02. Song Of Zarathustra - Black And Blue Award03. Johnny Angel - Mercks04.
Ten Grand/the Khayembii Communique Split 10 Day
Johnny Angel - Yearbook01. Spread The Disease - Cyst Of The Unborn02. Spread The Disease - Black Eyed03. Songs Of Zarathustra - Theme For Bastard Children01. One Strike At Romance02. Murder In La-Jolla03.
Save Our Ship04. Science, Science05.