Napalm Beach, Snow Bud and the Flower People, Divining Rods, Boo Frog
This is one of the many posters advertising for a show Chris would play that was secretly making Chris the butt of the joke (and of course later, when it was Boo Frog, we were both the butt of the joke. You can decide for yourself whether the Nirvana poster deliberately evokes it. Bound, endangered women were kind of a staple of 1980s punk rock posters. In this case she looks like a 1940s movie star… kind of like Francis Farmer.
What a weird band Black Flag was. I liked Black Flag. I never saw them live. Apparently that was by design. But they seem to have been among a very small group of flagship bands that spread punk rock like a virus and I think that too was by design.
I’ve been trying to decode what their mission was. I never take stories at face value. The black flag as a symbol of anarchy is too obvious. Black Flag as an insecticide that “kills bugs dead” doesn’t seem to quite hit the nail on the head. I’ve speculated before that the black flag was specifically a reference to something to do with Abbie Hoffman and Grace Slick trying to dose the Nixon White House with L.S.D (and at some point hanging a black flag somewhere) but that’s probably too obscure and the part about a black flag being involved is only in some versions of the story – though I do suspect that Jefferson Airplane/Starship was another secret-agenda type band. “We built this city on rock and roll” – what they meant was they built the city on FBI files?
I feel like Black Flag spread something – plans, instructions, finance. Maybe finance linked to the record business, in exchange for nasty stories about, and set ups around, Chris and me. The punk rock “community” drew us in, surrounded us, and quietly stabbed us in the back – all for cash and prizes. Dialing for dollars.
I’ve thought about Greg Ginn, wondered if there was a link to the Bowie song Jean Genie, or Jinn, shape shifting genies. There’s actually a lot of directions I can go with all of this – the Welsh surname, the connection to the color white – or maybe more obviously that, like Steve Martin’s King Tut, he was born in Arizona. Arizona really comes up a lot with regards to all of this. Lots of people seem to be moving to or from Arizona. And what about his artist brother, who made so much of the poster and album cover art for Black Flag and SST, who changed his last name to Pettibon? Why Pettibon? Is it any connection to Pettygrove Hospital in Portland, which I understand to be involved in mind control and various types of medical murder (cancer, violence, etc). I’m not trying to pin anything specific on Ginn or Pettibon, but I do think that something in what I’ve written here is correct.
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.
I’ve shown how some of my journal entries seem to have made it into popular songs including Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun,” Smashing Pumpkins “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” and Nirvana’s “Sappy,” but in fact there are many more instances. In some cases there are incidents that happened that may not have had associated journal entries, or it’s just a phrase taken from my journals, so that it’s harder to make the case. This would include Hole’s “Asking For It,” and Nirvana’s songs “Very Ape,” “Pennyroyal Tea,” and “Something In The Way” (this is just off the top of my head). With regards to Chris, there are links to Nirvana’s “Very Ape” and to “Heart Shaped Box.” And then there are things like Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” which doesn’t reference a journal entry, but is pretty clearly a reference to a photo that was stored in an album along with a lock of my hair. What do you do with that? I don’t know because I’m not a lawyer and so far, lawyers are all afraid to touch this.
There are things I know, but cannot prove, like John Lennon putting a lick of mine into the beginning of the song “Woman” – it’s the suspended riff used in the intro, behind the phrase “for the other half of the sky.” Even though I was a child, I was already playing guitar and I played this suspended lick over and over and over. It’s not that this is actionable in court or that I would want to take it to court, but that it’s like a hidden message. That said, looking at what’s happened to us, I think that some of the more obvious stuff should be under consideration for court cases.
Chris played a lot more guitar than I did over the years, performed and recorded, and his style was copied in a lot of ways, including, I would say, in the theme song of “Magnum P.I.” (possibly a sources of the Zoolander joke about “magnum”). But that’s just style – people copy styles all the time. The reason I bring it up is because the same people profiting from the copying Chris’ style will turn around and say Chris as an artist wasn’t worth a damn.
I’ll note here that I’ve seen hints that the guitar player for The Carpenters took inspiration from Chris’ guitar playing. This would have been in the early 1970s.
Music-wise, the feel of Nirvana’s “Lithium” seems to have been inspired by Chris’ song Pugsley, and this is repeated again in PJ Harvey’s “Meet Ze Monsta.” And if I could access Chris’ archival materials – journals and tapes and that sort of thing, I suspect I’d find a lot more. So the thefts that have happened over the years were just not property thefts, as well as intellectual property thefts, but evidence tampering. This idea that all this crime can somehow be justified with libelous stories collected and distributed by the FBI is beyond absurd. Theft is theft and libel is libel and the repeated pattern is of crimes (theft, libel, medical malfeasance, kidnapping, assassination) committed specifically in order to cover up other crimes (theft, sex trafficking, child trafficking, medical trafficking, nonconsensual human subjects research, malfeasance, graft, murder) along with various other tactics and techniques like control of focus. The depravity of all of this, not to mention the criminality, senseless waste, and stupidity, is honestly, for me, almost beyond comprehension. I think anyone in my position would want to see the perpetrators of this collection of crimes, regardless of who they are, held accountable under the criminal statutes of this nation, same as they themselves do to others. They should not be permitted to kidnap and murder their way out of everything.
With regards to intellectual property theft, a lot would probably be cleared up by access to what must be mountains of stolen journals and other creative materials from Chris’ lifetime. In some cases, Chris was performing songs for years before recording them. Someone recently uploaded a bootleg to YouTube of a Napalm Beach performance from New Years Eve 1985 at Satyricon in which they perform a song called My Master Calls, a song that would not be recorded until 1993’s Curiosities, eight years later. At first I thought that the performance couldn’t have been from 1985 because of the presence of that song, but it later became clear that for whatever reason, the song had not been recorded in the studio until years later. In addition, there seem to be songs that show up on live recordings and bootlegs that were never recorded including in 1982, “Into The Sky” (among the inspirations for Nirvana’s 1993 song “Very Ape”) and a 1986 performance of a song called “Mercury” that was uploaded by Mike Lastra. Chris for whatever reason was ambivalent about both these songs, though I think both of them are good songs. (In the case of “Into The Sky,” Chris said, ironically, that “They didn’t seem to like it in Seattle.”)
When I met Chris in 2009 he either had never heard the 1994 Mazzy Star song “Fade Into You” or he had just recently heard it for the first time. Something I noticed, that he never mentioned to me, was the similarity between the Mazzy Star song and his song Crippled Mind. I don’t know when Chris wrote Crippled Mind, and I didn’t think to ask, because this was before I knew anything about surveillance or intellectual property thefts – I’d seen things I thought were weird coincidences. He recorded Stoned and Alone in 1996 under what seems like almost desperate circumstances. Now of course I wonder how long he was playing the “Crippled Mind” chord progression at home or in performances, unaware he was under this kind of surveillance. But he wrote his lyrics in his journals, and that is one reason the journals are important to unravelling mysteries like this.
Sometimes I speak of Chris as being profoundly innocent. I suppose people who only see the most superficial parts of a person might find that confusing, though that’s a bit hard for me to swallow. I’ve come to learn, though, that people – at least people around us – pretend to believe a lot of things they don’t actually believe. They do this because they feel it benefits them in some way, and they don’t seem to care who it harms, or maybe harm is their intent. So Chris, me, others are framed however is convenient or profitable for them to frame us.
It is very clear to me that Chris’ creative works have been regularly and systematically sabotaged and stolen. This has been going on the whole time he and I were together, though it may have accelerated since we moved to this apartment in 2014. And it was going on before we met. Right before we got together in February 2009 to do the Cramps tribute, Chris had been recording an album with a short-lived project called Lost Acolytes. Sam Henry played keyboards with this band, Dave Minick played bass, and Paul Vega drums. The Lost Acolytes recording session was financed by a guy named Greg Kroell (or Kroll, or Krohl – not sure of the spelling of his name – he was born around 1960 and apparently ran a local magazine called Events) who then, as financier, absconded with the files or demanded the album not be released. I believe the Lost Acolytes recording was made at a place called Platonic Studios and the engineer who recorded it was the same who recorded Boo Frog’s first record in 2009, Gary Schroeder. I don’t know what happened to Schroeder. When we worked with him was I believe in his early 50s and clean and sober and very healthy. I heard he died of cancer.
For all intents and purposes that Lost Acolytes album has vanished.
The setups created by this character Kroell go back to the early 1980s and are worth their own entry.
Another thing worth looking at more closely is how Chris was able to have physical belongings stolen from him his entire life and never realize it was happening. Something similar, on a smaller scale, has been happening to me, so I can basically understand it, but it’s a unique kind of theft. Another examination worth its own entry. But the basic outline of it it that it’s a gradual erosion, and the things that are most often taken tend to be things you store but don’t often go back to, like letters and journals. You only notice they’re missing when you want to go back and find a particular journal or set of letters, and then you might second guess yourself about what happened to them, because why would someone come into your apartment and steal old journals?
On March 31, 1996 Gun Club frontman Jeffrey Lee Pierce died of a brain aneurism at age 37 (another biomedical assassination, same as the 1991 aneurism death of Pandoras frontwoman Paula Pierce). Jeffrey Lee Pierce had been influential on Chris’ music. When Chris found out about this several months later, he created a tribute show which took place on December 11, 1996. Days after the tribute show, Chris’ honeytrap wife Valarie created a scene in a 7-11, causing the cashier to call police who found evidence of heroin in their belongings and arrested Chris for possession. This was a string of traps that led to them becoming homeless, and Valarie to a life of prostitution.
Chris’ memoir over this time is fragmented, he jumps from time to time, so it’s not clear to me at this point how much time he initially spent in jail after this arrest. It may have been a couple of weeks. Here is what Chris wrote in his draft memoir about what happened when discovered when he got home, verbatim.
When I was released from jail our Kelso landlord and my well meaning brother in law, Tim had loaded up all our belongings and supposedly dumped most of it. I know that’s a lie because Val and I had collectesd alot of shit in the last six years we had been married. There were obvious sentimental valuables as well as art and books, rare vinyl records signed by Sky Saxon of the Seeds and Moby Grape’s autographed albums. My sister’s husband Tim was embarrased about My jail term and drug use. He honestly believed the landlord (who was a Kelso Assembly of God church member) was in his rights to confiscate all our belongs. I don’t know if Tim knew we were paid up on our rent. Valarie and I were suddenly homeless on the streets of Portland. The situation was extremely fucked up. I was angry as hell, but as usual a junky is all talk. We never quite got around to sueing the mother fucker, or even talking to the shithead.
I’m sure that Chris would have removed those last sentences if he were going to publish the memoir, but after seeing what happened to Chris, I myself am angry as hell.
US agencies like the FBI seems to have exploited the ignorance and sense of entitlement of people like this to allow them to do all kinds of horrible things to us, and they themselves have facilitated these crimes, and worse. Fraud, theft, trespass, kidnapping, and murder are crimes, regardless of who is behind them. Chris’ innocence or confusion is displayed in his writing, beginning with the adjective “well meaning” and ending with “shithead.” Was he well-meaning, or was he a shithead?
Chris, typically, failed to see where the true losses lay – at least from my perspective. It wasn’t in the vinyl signed by Sky Saxon but Chris’ letters and journals. He lost all his journals, including diaries kept while on his European Tours, and he lost letters, including “love letters” from Courtney Love when she was in England and Ireland in the early 1980s. Also, if my own journals are any indication, there would probably have been significant evidence of intellectual property theft in Chris’ journals.
This whole scenario, by the way, was played out in my life as well, in a honeytrap situation, in the early 2000s. It was something I witnessed, not something that happened to me, but in retrospect it was clearly a set up, because among the belongings that were taken were items that supposedly had once belonged to Kurt Cobain.
There are a lot of things I wanted to do with Chris – not just tour with our band, or make records with distribution so that they would actually sell – but have our own home with a garden, have enough money to do things a lot of people take for granted, travel, etc. There are a lot of things he wanted to do. He wanted to go back and visit San Francisco in good health, and New Orleans where he’d lived as a child. He wanted to see places he’d seen in movies, like Las Vegas. He was fun to travel with. We had some good time traveling back and forth to pick up and drop off my daughter, staying in flea bag motels, but it would have been nice to have an actual vacation and eat at a nice restaurant and stay at a nice hotel. So when I found out how much money was potentially owed to him – back in 2014 – both of us had hope at first. Because we thought the world worked as advertised, and we could make some of these dreams come true.
Chris loved the idea of being fit, swimming, surfing – loved surf movies. In all his years on earth never rode a horse, and it was something he wanted to try. That’s something I kept thinking about, and it became crushing when I realized he was going to die and I couldn’t make these kinds of things happen for him.
Horseman’s Holiday is a song he wrote, recorded, and mixed himself at home (8 track I think) in 2017.