What’s in a name? (part 1) Goners/Untouchables/Napalm Beach

What is in the name of a rock and roll band? Nothing and everything.

I want to start by talking about Napalm Beach, with the idea that I’m now moving toward the idea of Nirvana and Napalm Beach as mirrors of each other, because that seem to have been an intent. “One above, one below.” I believe this is what you see indicated on Tarot Card number 1, the Magician, with the double edged wand that looks like it has a candle flame at each end, one arm pointing up, one down. What is magic but a potent type of mind control? That’s how I see it, anyway. Obviously there’s a lot more at work (global finance), but it’s really clear beyond clear there is an occult element to this running all down the west coast – Los Angeles, San Francisco (Monterey, Marin, Sonoma), Portland, Seattle.

With regards to Chris’ history in Portland, he seems to have formed this band called The Goners while living in San Jose, where his family had relocated in the 1970s. After trying and failing to get traction with his first all-originals band in Los Angeles in 1974, he’d spent a few years working as a sign painter. His family was going to a Pentecostal mega church in San Jose, where his two sisters would meet their husbands and marry young. His sister Becky’s husband (the one who in 1996 helped dump all of Chris’ belongings) had a father who worked for Boeing in San Jose, and I think that’s significant for a number of reasons. For one thing, that particular Boeing plant is closely linked to Stanford University. Both my parents have their PhD’s from Stanford. There is also a link to directed energy weapons.

So in that world, Chris formed this band called the Goners. Then Chris and his band relocated back to Longview. When and why Chris moved back and forth between San Jose and Longview is a bit murky to me, but I think there were tensions between him wanting to pursue rock n’ roll and trying out other more conventional ways to make a living. He had been in a covers band called Bodhi 1971-74 which had done pretty well, but he’d always been trying to transition to a band that did all or mostly originals and could still work regularly, progress, make records, etc. There was a whole thing going on at that time period with regard to managing the expectations of small town wanna be rock n’ rollers which is worth another entire essay (I swear I could write a thousand page book) – but I’ll leave that for now, except to say, things that Chris and I thought were just reasonable life-advice in the 1970s and 1980s often were in fact calculated, top-down, control and expectation-management programs. (My working theory right now, fwiw is that the punk movement was a CIA op.)

So the Goners, which I believe was basically Chris, maybe Dave Minick, and probably shifting drummers at first – moved to Longview, and then, because Longview was a small town, to Portland, which to them, was the big city. Chris had lived in Seattle in the past so I’m not sure why they chose Portland rather than Seattle, but they did. It may have been influence of people around Chris, like the band they first played with in Portland, another Longview band called Alost. What Chris wrote was that it was Alost who told the first club they played the band name was “Untouchables” and then the name stuck. As I said earlier, it shows how suggestible Chris could be. Where I would spend months trying to come up with a band name, or tweaking lyrics, Chris tended to go with first thoughts. He often wrote out songs fully formed. No draft one, draft two, crossouts, etc. If he was drafting and editing, it was all in his head.

Under the name Untouchables, between spring of 1980 and summer of 1981, the band blazed a trail through Portland and Seattle. They were playing constantly at Portland clubs like Urban Noize, The Met, 13th Precinct, The Long Goodbye, Euphoria; and in Seattle at The Wrex, Gorilla Room, and Metropolis. They opened for Joan Jett in Portland, Johnny Thunders in both Portland and Seattle. They were given a spot opening for a band called April Wine at the Paramount Theatre (not the best fit for them as it turned out). Then, in the summer of 1981, an LA ska band wrote a letter about the name Untouchables. Chris has described this in diffrent ways. At first it sounded like a cease and desist letter, but in his biography he indicates something subtler – that the band asked if he “owned” the name Untouchables. And Chris responded that they did not own the name, and the ska band thanked them, and began to use the name. What Chris wrote in his biography is this: “When we played our showcase gig at the Paramount a few months later, Double T productions changed our legal name to Napalm Beach.” Honestly, it boggles my mind, that as late as when he was writing these memoirs, 2010, Chris thought that a promoter could change his band’s “legal” name. As for how that name was developed – my understanding is it was Mark Nelson’s idea. Chris was obviously ok with it, and again, how he was thinking at the time, and the different influence pushing and pulling on him are worth examining in part because it speaks to where music was at that time, but also, what kinds of influences were beginning to surround Chris, and how they were – I think the word is manipulating – him. Mark Nelson was one of those influences.

The reason why I bring all of this up is, it seems to be part of a pattern. I wrote earlier about how the band was forced to slow down when in 1983 all of the clubs suddenly closed in Portland and Seattle. In this case, before that even happened, they’d spent a year creating buzz under the name Untouchables, only to get pushed from at least two different angles to change their band name. A name change is not the best move when you’ve already established recognition and momentum.

The reason why I started thinking about all of this right now is, as I’ve said, I’m now looking at Napalm Beach as the other side of the Nirvana coin. Nirvana’s show dates are, for the most part, all archived online now, and in taking a look at them, I realized something that wasn’t really clear from the biographies I was reading prior to 2010, which is that Nirvana also went through several name changes early on. Yes, this gets mentioned – but I never realized that, for example, Nirvana was actually playing shows under names like Pen Cap Chew or, more notably to me now – Skid Row.