The Few, The Proud, The Independent Traveler

Traveling alone is very primeval at its core. I think that humans are hard-wired to move about. But it is a lot more than the need to shift and learn about other peoples, cultures, and societies. It is about self-realization and new perspectives on life in this crazy world. It is less complicated than going at it with other people that you know because you can carry on at your pace and see what you want to see, whenever you want. In this sense, that defines the phrase "footloose and fancy free," whatever that even means now.

So I ask what is wrong with traveling for the sake of learning? The sake of traveling? That in and of itself is a good enough reason to leave home. In our society, there always has to be a motive. I cannot tell you how many times I say that I am going off somewhere and the response is, "Great! For what?" I always say, "Just because." It is an inevitable eyebrow raiser 99 percent of the time. If you have the desire, I say do it. There is far too much to see out there. That is the beauty of it all!

Tomorrow morning I will be off to Munich, Germany on my second backpacking adventure. I'll hit Dachau, Prague, Český Krumlov, Bratislava, East Slovakia, Vienna, and Salzburg if all goes as planned (it never does!) I am going "just because." I am going to get in touch with my Bohemian/Slovak roots, to explore, and to drink great beer! I'm going to update my blog periodically, so stay tuned!

Time to finish packing my rucksack and get amped for this. For inspiration before trips, I listen to Sigur Rós's album, Ágætis Byrjun, and drink strong coffee. Listening to Ágætis Byrjun is like being born over and over and over. Similar to touching down on uncharted territory, you can start anew for a while. I'm ready to be reborn.

Bad timing.

The U.S. dollar is at its lowest point in my lifetime and I am going back to Europe in a week to backpack, write, and play music if anyone will be willing to let me get on a bill with them. At least most of the trip will be in non-euro countries like the Czech Republic and Slovakia...

Lamson Lodge

When I woke up this morning, I had "Eva" by Coffinberry in my head. I hadn't listened to them in a while, so it was driving music during my morning commute into work after I had my NPR fix. It got me to thinking about something that I have wanted to write about for a long time: Lamson Lodge.

What is Lamson Lodge you ask?

It is this little rinky dink cabin on the campus of Denison University, my Alma. Denison was built on top of a steep hill and Lamson is at the base of this...cliff. There are usually gatherings by sports teams during warmer months and the like there. But for a brief period, Lamson was home to a counter-culture movement in Central Ohio.

It all began in the winter of 2004. Several of us at the radio station (WDUB for all you audiophiles) were not satisfied by the schedule of musicians coming to our school. So we took it upon ourselves to do the D.I.Y. thing.

The first act to come in our Lamson series (if you could call it that) was Tracy + the Plastics, an electro feminist/riot grrrl/whatever you want to call it performance artist from Olympia, WA. The sole performer, Wynne Greenwood, was on tour and by some stroke of luck, my friend Jordan (Music Director at the time) was able to get her on a bill with the Columbus thrash band, Necropolis, and himself, Jordan O' Jordan, a banjo troubadour that resembles a love child between the Magnetic Fields and the Smiths.

It was mid-January. The room holds about 75. Over 150 showed up. BYOB. I will leave the rest up to you.

Apparently people came from as far as Oberlin to see the show. There was this crazy hippy dude in front of me the whole time who smelled like a petting zoo and was high on something. He did this weird interpretive dance for the entire show and I just had to watch because there was no room to move. At least no one was cold after we filled Lamson.

So Tracy, I'm sorry, Wynne, goes on stage around midnight after Jordan and Necropolis do their sets. She starts with the now classic electro-clash song, "Henrieta." She had some interesting visuals in the background. Several songs in, she ducks into the bathroom. No one knows what is going on.

After twenty minutes, her partner, who is rumored to be in Le Tigre, comes out and says "Sorry everybody. Wynne has the flu and can't continue with the show."

Needless to say, it was still a satisfying night. And that was only the beginning.

In the spring, I booked a spastic bunch from Atlanta, GA who call themselves The Orphins (sic). As an Assistant Music Director at WDUB, I received their album "Drowning Cupid" and loved it so much that I asked them to come. They drove 10 hours to Granville in a beater Mark III van from the early 90s. They were a completely spastic bunch that played songs with the intensity of punk, but sounded more like faster and more screwed up surf tunes from the 60s. It was very much a melding of Dick Dale, Talking Heads, Slint, and 80s hardcore. 50 or so people showed up and we made veggie burgers for the band.

Then I brought Coffinberry the following year. We could not get Ted Leo + the Pharmacists and I knew that my friend Nick from high school was the vocalist of Coffinberry. They agreed to come down and played one of the finest gigs that I have ever been to. Unfortunately, the crowd was thin (about 10 people) because of other things going on that weekend I guess. They were unrelenting in their execution and Nick's vocals never skipped a beat. They said that it was their best show in months, and I was proud to have booked them. They gave me a copy of their album, which I was listening to during my morning commute.

After packing up shop in Lamson, nothing resurfaced the following year, or the year after that. Or the year after that. I stepped down from my administrative role at the radio station to explore other avenues like starting my own band. Perhaps all of us D.I.Y. nuts left with no one to carry the torch. Perhaps the funds have been limited the past few years. In either case, it is unfortunate to have sewn the seeds of a movement only to see it fade into that gentile night. The only documents that exist are two live recordings which I copped during my final radio show last spring in order to preserve what we created. No photographs exist to my knowledge and very few people remember.

I hope that we can remember now. As the legendary singer and guitarist Bob Mould once said, "We are living in an age where music isn't sacred." So let's make it sacred again, for the sake of future generations. Our children and our grandchildren deserve better.

Cleveland in winter. Missing Iceland

Cleveland looks
so

clear

in the winter.

Are We Still on Earth?

“I consider that there’s nothing wrong in believing in elves even though their names aren’t on the parish register”

-Bjartur of Summerhouses, Independent People (Halldór Laxness)

Thorsmörk, Iceland, a massive valley in the southern part of Iceland. It is sandwiched between three glaciers and the bus ride is nearly three hours from the city. There is nothing around and the land resembles Tolkien’s world in The Lord of the Rings or Earth before we were here.

I traveled with an English college student, Mexican-American art design professor, an older English couple, a middle-aged man from the Bay Area visiting his Icelandic friend, and our Icelandic tour guide, Dane. The bus was cramped and I couldn’t quite shake the rainwater/canvas smell. I choked down a granola bar and waited.

The bus traversed layers of fog that were so dense it looked like Nosferatu would pop out and drain us all before our arrival.

We made the switch at the bus terminal to another small, damp short bus and headed south. From the city, it was an hour and a half to the village of Hella, where we changed busses at a gas station that looked like it needed renovation. It was raining pretty hard and the bus smelled like wet dog. As with most Icelandic gas stations, there was a hot dog shop inside. This bus was larger and sterile, like the shuttle bus that travels from the airport into the city. The fog was so thick that the visibility was zero. I sat motionless on this last leg, another hour and a half. I was in and out of sleep when the coach abruptly rocked violently like a clipper ship in a North Atlantic storm. I didn’t understand, until I saw the glacial tributaries under the bus wheels when the mist cleared.

The wheels dug into the mud at the foot of a glacier. Nonchalantly, Dane said, “Uh, let’s go have a look!” The air was so crisp that I could feel my nostrils become bone dry, and the tip of my nose was bitten by the unrelenting wind. We made it to the wilderness.

The 10-hour hike up an inactive volcano made the red tape of getting there worth it. A sliver of land straddled me and the end of the cliff. One slip of the foot would have been the end of me. I had to plead with myself to keep stepping forward, but when I reached the summit, all of my fears and reservations absolved into the Earth below my feet. I looked over Thorsmörk and saw glaciers 360 degrees around me, as well as brilliant moss-covered cliffs and snow-capped mountains in the distance. It was like setting eyes upon the Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago as glaciers carved valleys and bodies of water emerged. It is easy to understand how many Icelanders believe in elfish creatures after reaching the peak of a mountain here.

Getting down was a little more difficult. On the way out of Thorsmörk, we stopped at a gigantic waterfall, which I promptly ran behind and photographed. In the process, I became drenched (and it was cold, with a high temperature hovering near 48˚ Fahrenheit). I felt my legs slowly turning to jelly with each step that I took on the boggy and sponge-like terrain surrounding the waterfall. In a warped way, I really enjoyed the smell of the earth beneath my feet. I can smile and sit outside in a t-shirt in the middle of March in the States knowing that I braved the Icelandic wilderness.

END

Bill

Bill

Bill always looked like he just won the lottery. I would see him walk into the grocery store when I wasn’t away at school. Most of the elderly patrons scowled and complained bitterly about everything under the sun. One woman, “Scotch,” would come into the store with Scotch tape over her left eye and frantically argue with any cashier giving her pennies in change. “I said NO PENNIES!” and she would throw them onto the conveyor belt like an angry toddler hurling skittles.

Another woman, Linda, thought that she was Marilyn Monroe and would oftentimes wear her anemic blonde hair with copious layers of green eye shadow and blood-red lipstick spread all over her mouth like The Cure singer, Robert Smith. Did I mention that she is also a registered sex offender in Cuyahoga County? It’s true. She would pace in and out of the store for hours at a time and never buy a thing. She would go to the pay phone, mouth words into the receiver, and walk back outside. She loved to flirt with male store associates too. Fortunately, I was spared.

Bill was a rare entity. He never complained and he was certainly not a sex offender. He was quite wiry, about 5’9 in height, and must have been about 80 –– no younger than 70 though. He looked pretty good for his age. I’m not kidding when I say that he would literally spend an entire day in the store. Mind you, it was a small business even though there is a small franchise of these stores in Northeast Ohio. He would always walk out of the store with no more than two bags. We all knew that he came for the company --- our company.

He moved at a snail’s pace down each of the aisles, combing the shelves in the cereal section for something to his liking and staring aimlessly at the yogurt on the dairy counter. I always loved how he would ask us questions even though he knew the store better than any of us. “Excuse me, my good man! I have an issue here. I don’t know whether to buy the Yoplait light or Fruit-at-the-Bottom yogurt. What do you prefer?” He would always follow-up his questions with an unfunny joke that you couldn’t help but find endearing. We would end our spiels with “Have a nice day sir/ma’am!” He’d always bring his head up and belt out the monosyllabic words, “YOU TOO MAN!” It has been over a year since I stepped foot into the store and I still think about him here and there.

I wonder if he made it through another year. Does he still waltz into the store with his gangly stride? What is he really like? Does he have children? Are they grown? They must be. What did he do for a living? Has he always lived in Northeast Ohio? What makes him so genuine? What makes him laugh and cry?

Granted, I barely knew the man, but good vibes emanated from his demeanor. The grocery store was a rather upscale business, and we had a valet grocery service for the elderly and anyone who didn’t want to haul their groceries to their vehicles called “parcel pick-up.” Whenever Bill drove up to the curb he would always make a remark about how gorgeous of a day it was, even if it was blustery outside. I would load his back seat with his items on the rare occasion that he had more than a handful of goods. He’d tell stories about his daughter or make another joke that I could never understand because of the generation gap. He always tipped well, five dollars when the going rate was one. Then I’d close the door, wish him well, hear him belt out, “YOU TOO MAN!” and carry on with the day. It was always funny how he would say those words because he was such a frail guy. The three syllables boom, boom, boomed like a timpani at the end of a concerto.

My sister is still a cashier at the store. She works there on her summer breaks to pay for college. I ask about Bill and she hasn’t seen him in a while. It’s depressing, really. We hope that he is still living. If he isn’t, then I know that he lived each day as a lifetime. We should all take note.

What we really were --- Happy Campers, the full picture!

Controlled Chaos

For the longest time, Happy Campers was me, myself, and I. I began to play music when I was 13, after deciding that I wanted to play Green Day songs on a guitar. For my 13th birthday, my mom and dad bought me a cheap Fender Stratocaster knock-off which I aptly named “Krusty,” because of the red Krusty the Clown sticker that I stuck to the pick guard. That first summer was hard because my uncle died of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma cancer at 36 and we were really tight-knit. To cope with the loss, I began to write some rudimentary songs focusing on a couple of chords. The following year, I received a four-track tape recorder for my birthday because I was sick of the shitty Fisher-Price tape deck that I was using, and I wanted to multi track.

A lot can happen in a year, and by that point I mastered most of the major guitar chords and wrote a few recordable tunes. It was an organic process. Whenever I had an hour here or there, I would record my little tunes and teach myself how to mix after recording. This was the beginning of an eight-year run of recording. I used the name Happy Campers because my own sounded a bit dull, and I thought of the first nonsensical thing that popped in my head.

For the better part of this decade, Happy Campers remained as my brainchild that I turned to in times of stress or boredom. When I was 15, I upgraded to digital recording equipment with more mixing capabilities. I don’t know where I find the time to do this. From 2000-2007, I recorded, produced, and mixed over 70 of my own songs and released 6 albums. Though, the hard part is always finding people to play with.

In September 2006, I decided to give demos to a couple of my good college friends, Brian and Charlie, and we decided to jam a couple of times in the music building. After all, where else could we find a drum kit on campus that was already set up? The first practice was not too shabby, and we even did an impromptu cover of Joy Division’s chaotic track, “Shadowplay.” We decided to return to the space the following Friday after putting our noses to the daily grind ––– we ended up coming back every Friday for the rest of the year.

It was the culmination of each work week. Brian and I were living together at the time, so we would oftentimes test out guitar and bass parts in our apartment throughout the week. Fridays were always nice. I would wake up, go to my job (writing press releases), eat, go to Charlie’s radio show and hang out, and then play. His car was our chariot–––an ancient Chrysler LeBaron, probably from the late 80s. It was white with a red interior and smelled of the elderly because it was once his grandfather’s. We would load for about 15 minutes after shooting the shit in our apartment about music, Pee Wee Herman, Kids in the Hall, Wes Anderson movies, or any number of topics that came to mind. We are a pretty random bunch of lads.

Our practice space was a small, damp box that always reeked of B.O. and nickel. It would make sense to have foam insulation in the drum practice room, but no. Instead, wall-to-wall metal. Strike one against us. Strike two is the thermostat. It was never less than 90 degrees in the room and our guitars were always sharp as a result, not to mention all of the string breakage! Despite technical issues, we always managed to play as hard as our bodies would allow until we could go no further. Proof of that was our epic 10+ minute closing number in rehearsals and gigs, “Be Seeing You…”

It emerged as many of our greatest moments---in a random moment of improvisation. It gradually built from a feedback-drenched improvisation into a controlled monolith of unified sound. That was the essence of the band---controlled chaos. Even in the hardest times we were unrelenting in our execution. I remember a gig that we played at Denison University in late March 2007 when everything that could have possibly gone wrong went wrong. My guitar stopped working during soundcheck, so I borrowed Charlie’s elegant Gibson SG. Midway through the third or fourth song, I broke a string and continued playing the song! Miraculously, it did not go out-of-tune for the rest of the song and I borrowed Brian’s guitar for the rest of our set. He decided to play the SG with the broken string! I mean, if it stayed in tune, why not?

Song-after-song, we were in complete synthesis. Everything meshed so well that it was like we were sharing moments of ESP on stage. Then we went into “Be Seeing You…” and gave our friends a completely unexpected ride. We kept the song a secret for so long and then unleashed the sonic fury. Perhaps it was the frustration that we felt in the equipment disasters, but the final crescendo into a blur of pink guitar noise and militant snare drum thwarts made all of the trouble worth it. Then the storm calmed, I said my standard closing line, “Thanks, be seeing you,” and we gracefully walked off the stage as if nothing had happened. No matter how tired we were by the end of the week or how cold it was outside, it was always worth the trouble.

We kept playing because it was something we had to do, something that we had to get out of our systems to be alright. It was lonely being one of two campus bands and the only one playing our own blend of punk rock. But people always seemed to respond well even if they did not like the music. We shook things up in a place where people drift through the days idly. Some complained bitterly of being trapped on a small campus in rural Ohio. Most think that they are too cool to care, and some are upset but do nothing to change it. This was our act of protest, our battle cries. I think that Charlie, Brian, and I are three easy-going chaps who are obsessed with music and unsettled with the status quo. We are lucky to have crossed paths and become such good friends.

Our last gig was April 4, 2007 to a crowd of about 40 at our home-away-from-home, The Bandersnatch. It is a cozy spot on the eastern side of campus, a great student-run coffeehouse. We wore ties just because we felt like it. It was always a running gag to begin the shows with the lights dimmed, blasting some terrible song over the P.A. while we were not in sight. This time we chose the Night Rider theme. After a good two minutes, we nonchalantly walked onto the stage, tuned up, and began. It was not as strong of a set as the equipment malfunctions show, but we still retained our ferocious punch. My glasses didn’t fall off of my face this time during “Recurring Dream Scenario,” our most punishing number. After an excessively loud rendition of “Be Seeing You…,” we walked off stage, came back to do two encores, and called it a night. We thought that we would be playing again the following week, as well as several weeks after.

Things never go as planned though, and three gigs were cancelled at the last minute. Talks of expanding our E.P. from four-to-six songs was in the works, as well as early May dates in Columbus and early June dates across the eastern half of the United States. Sadly, nothing materialized. I graduated from Denison University with a B.A. in English Writing in mid May and now we are scattered.

Time was never on our side. But as the clock ticked, the songs got better. They became harder, faster, and more urgent. We played every one of our songs as if it was the last time. So really, there was no last time and Happy Campers never officially broke up. The project is in a state of hibernation. Even if we never had the chance to do the full-blown tours, we made our mark, if not geographically, then for our own piece of mind. We recorded several of our rehearsals that sound more like live albums than a group of friends making noise in a tin can.

Whether we resurface is irrelevant. What matters is the brief moment in time when we created a word-of-mouth buzz in our community, recorded a studio E.P., and played as hard as we could for ourselves. Success was never measured in album sales or myspace hits, but in the few people who saw us play and were unsettled, hungry for something different in a world where apathy was the standard. That made it worthwhile, and I don’t think that any of us will ever be the same.

*Alex K. Fencl, 8 July 2007
Cleveland, OH