To preface this homepage, I would like to correct a great injustice in the American vernacular: Use of the word “pig” as slang for police. I, for one, think this is wrong. I love pigs -- indeed bacon is one of this life’s only pure pleasures, ham is fantastic, and I can go on and on about everything sausage has done for me lately. Any reasonable person would agree, to make the analogy that a cop is swine is a vicious insult to pigs; which are wonderful, delicious animals, and make great pets. From now on, I would like to see “pig” replaced by some bland, mundane vegetable such as zucchini, broccoli or brussel sprouts. These also make excellent short names – for example: “Her come the zucchs!” or the “Watch out for the sprouts”. Wake up people! We need to stop insulting pigs!
And now on with this weeks story…
This is another tall tale of DIY tour madness from 1995 with the band I was managing (mind you, I was in the military at the time, and decided to persue a career as a manager for some garage band...hey, I was just in it for the chicks, okay?). We had three shows in a row booked in Florida with our friends' band: Jacksonville, Tallahassee, and Panama City Beach. I had a brilliant idea: Instead of taking two separate vans, we take one van with a trailer with both bands riding in it; thus lowering the expenses. Who knows? We might actually make money for once!
Suffice it to say, the plan went off gloriously. If you have ever booked your own out of town shows, you’ll know what I’m talking about – they are usually just a string of catastrophes that do little to forward your music career. Not this time. Three nights in a row: great crowds, awesome shows, we got paid (even overpaid), got free beer, a few random groupies, drugs – the whole nine. Such rock-godom has rarely been seen on an indie tour. It was during this time, we started experimenting with ice and no - I’m not taking about frozen H2O. Sure, I’d done my share of “America’s Most Expensive Laxative” and quite a bit of meth, but not being able correctly gauge the potency of this new amphetamine -- what was supposed to be a little pick-me-up before a show turned into three day geekfest. And you know what? IT WAS GREAT! Well let’s skip the good shit…
I awoke on Sunday morning on the floor of some chick’s house in Panama City to “Oh, fuck! It’s not going to start! Fuck!” from outside the window.
See, I had this cheesy starter switch on my van; to start it, you needed to flip the switch on, and then flip in off or the starter would keep running and burn out. Scott and Shane, apparently on an early morning quest for waterslides (waterslides?!) had left the switch up for a full ten minutes. The starter was toast. So, we get one of our friends to give us a ride to the auto parts store. In the full brutal heat of a Florida afternoon and I go crawling under the van on the hot 120 degree Florida asphalt toiling to change out the starter. Look, I am far from being mechanically inclined, so the shit took forever. It was sheer torture. I get the starter on, crank it up – nothing. What the fuck? Maybe the new part could be defective – they are all rebuilt, after all. We go back to the auto shop, get another starter, put it on, and, thankfully, this one works. By this time, I had spent countless hours boiling alive in the Florida heat under a greasy van. I assure you, if there is Hell on Earth – this was it. Or was it? The infernal depths of Alabama still lay in wait.
It’s nearing dusk by the time we can finally roll out of town. The roads from Panama City to Atlanta are a mixed bag – consisting of mostly back country roads that wind trough Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. Kelly is driving and most of the other guys were passed out of roofies; which somewhere had crept into our collective drug stash. With no AC and six people in the van; the summer heat that night was excruciating. It was just the six of us, a giant stack of porno mags, and an axe handle with “Nigger Beater” inscribed with magic marker on one side of it, “Jew Basher” drawn into the other surrounded by swastikas, upside-down crosses, and 666’s.
If you’ve been reading some of my past stories, you might be wondering about my obsession with racism and swastikas. I can assure you: I am neither a racist nor a Nazi – I simply enjoy such imagery for shock effect. Words and symbols are completely neutral. It is the intent of the user that makes them good or bad. People need to wake up and realize that they don’t need to be worried about “bad words” – you need to be worried about the bigoted, racist, redneck asshole that’s using them.
There is a universal truth about such taboos:
If the hate is in your heart: You suck.
If you can laugh about it: You are the better person.
If everyone would stop taking their stupid race so seriously – this world would be a better place, I assure you. I digress.
We are driving through Dotham, Alabama when we run out of rolling papers. We stop at the convince store and buy some. The redneck asshole running the place sure had a racket going; because the inbred bastard was selling customers rolling papers and then informing the police as soon as they left the store. 187 on deez broccoli sympathizers! As soon as we leave the parking lot a cop gets on our ass with blue lights. We have little time to get our shit together. Dave, the drummer, takes our weed and stuffs it in his tightey whiteys. Shane and I try to wake up Scott and Timmy, who are passed out on roofies. Scott comes to, but Timmy appears to be down for the count. Kelly stops the van and waits.
Two serious redneck zucchini come up to the doors on either side of the van and immediately drag Kelly into the back of the cop car. Next we are all asked to step out of the van, one by one, and we all magically transform from John, Scott, Dave, Timmy, Shane, and Kelly to the Alabama Zucchini Profiles -- which go as follows;
Shane got out first, with green hair and wearing a “Bitch Goddess” t-shirt. The cops get started, “Boy, you’ve already broken the obscenity laws here in Alabama by wearing that shit. Why don’t you tell me where the acid is at!” - making Shane “the guy with the acid.”
Next out is Scott. Despite what can be described kindly as an enormous beer gut – he informs Scott that he fits the profile of an IV drug user. Ok.
Next in line is me, “Hey are you the guy who owns this van?’
“Yes”, I say.
“When we find that dope you are hiding, we are going to confiscate you van, and it will be auctioned off by the state of Alabama.” Thus, I was dubbed the “guy who is going to loose his van”.
Next out of the van is the drummer Dave (aka Phil A. Cunt). They pull him aside and say, “Alright boy, you look like the straight shooter of this bunch. Why don’t you just tell us when the dope is?” Little did ole inbred Buford Broccoli know that it was the “straight shooter” was the guy with the dope!
Next out of the van is Timmy, or err – well, it was supposed to be Timmy. Timmy was so roofied out of his skull that he was unconscious again - two of us climb back in the van and drag him out. Guess what the cops say to the guys who is so passed out on narcotics that he can’t even walk or talk…NOTHING! THEY LEAVE HIM ALONE!? WHAT THE FUCK?!
Once they have us all in a group they tell us that the driver was already under arrest for DUI and has narced us all out. We all know that Kelly hasn’t been drinking, but the way that these assholes are convinced that we MUST have dope almost makes me wonder for a minute.
Soon after, a few extra cop cars are pulling up. So, there we are standing in a circle – this other dweeby looking brussel sprout is standing there nervously shifting back and forth from foot to foot with his flashlight trained on us and his gun drawn. When the next cop car arrives – the fat redneck pig in charge tells him to search the van. Now, mind you, that there is nothing in the van except a giant stack of porno and the racist axe handle. All of our gear, personal effects, and loose drugs are in the trailer. He goes into the van to search it.
Redneck fatty resumes his tirade, “Hey why are you boys so shifty? I bet you wanna hurt me? Don’t you?”
The group stands there in silence .
“I don’t like musicians. My best friend was killed by some musicians.” (Killed by musicians?! Ok…)
More silence from the group.
“Why don’t you boys just tell us where the fuckin’ dope is? We’ve already called for some dogs to come out here. Tell us where the dope is?”
This was making me more uneasy, but still more silence.
Over and over, the cop repeats mantra of intimidation for forty five minutes; meanwhile, we haven’t heard a peep out of the other cop who is still in the van with the flashlight routing through nothing.
Finally after about the umpteenth “I know you boys just wanna’ hurt me” comment I finally break down, “Hey man, you are the only one talking about hurting anyone, we are just trying to make it home.”
This was the start of a strange turning point in events.
“Which one of you is the lead singer? The lead singer gets all the girls.” in comically thick redneck accent.
The respective singers raise their hands.
“You guys know any Molly Hatchet? If you are going to be playing down in Panama City you had better know some Molly Hatchet!”
“Sure, we know a little Molly Hatchet.”
“Well hell, yeah…ten four good buddy…”
An hour later, the other cop finally emerges from the van – his shirt is completely soaked in sweat – with like a giant ring of it around his collar and dripping off his head.
“Hey Sarge, I checked the whole van – they’re clean…”
Now, he could have looked through everything in that van in less than ten minutes, but judging by the time that had lapsed and the ring of sweat soaked around his collar…there was little doubt in my mind what this horny little brussel sprout had been up to…
HE HAD BEEN IN THE VAN DOING THE KNUCKLE SHUFFLE TO OUR PORNO!
“Well, I’ll be…how do you all of you boys ride in there? It must be fucking hot.”, says the head hancho as he walks over and shines his flashlight in to the empty van for the first time.
“What the hell?” He picks up the “nigger beater” and looks at it for a second and puts it back. We pick Timmy off the ground, Kelly finally gets let out the cop car, and we get a royal police escort out of town. Amazing, I didn’t think we were going to get out of that one.
By this time it is 3AM and we still have a four hour drive ahead of us. We travel till we are about seventy miles outside of the ATL when WHOMP! - the van’s engine cuts out suddenly and we are stranded on the side of the road again. We walk off the interstate to the nearest exit; go to Waffle House, call to have the van towed and for our girlfriends to come pick us up.
While waiting for our rides, I am reflecting on the past twenty four hours in the early morning light - how a glorious tour had gone straight to hell? There was a strange thing about it:
I felt lucky.
We should be stuck in jail in the middle of Alabama. It’s true, there were drugs in the van, lots of them – in the trailer speed, weed, xanax, and roofies were hidden in with the gear. For some reason, the cops never even bothered to look. As a matter of fact that trailer could have been full of dead bodies stuffed with cocaine for all they knew. I seemed those Zucchini really had a hard-on to bust us. So why didn’t they look? I believe was some sort of divine intervention that had saved us. But what was it?
Was it the porno that had inspired the cop to jerk off to that saved our ass?
Was it the fact that we know how to play Molly Hatchet that kept us out of the Graybar Motel? Maybe.
Or was it the fact that we proved that we were nothing but a bunch of good ole boys, like them, by toting around a trustworthy Nigger Beater / Jew Basher axe handle?
I’m inclined to believe it was C, the axe handle, that had been our Guardian Angel, but you can decide for yourself.
That was the Alabama Zucchini Profiles
