They squeak when they walk

Three days in, and already I'm feeling the lash of the blogger's whip.

Which is pussyass bitching, when you get right down to it. I mean, how friggin' hard is it to sit down and type up a load of doggerel? Child's play, really.

So here's a blast from the past. Back in 1982, I had some drinking buddies who were in a band called the Authorities, when we all lived in a colostomy bag of a city called Stockton, California.

Stockton was the place where my parents ended up, which is what happens in life when you're not really thinking about where you're going, and then suddenly you wake up to find you're a wage slave in a place like San Joaquin County, not exactly a great place to raise the kids. Not exactly a great place for anything, except getting arrested, crashing cars into trees or irrigation ditches, OD'ing on drugs, or hanging out your shingle as a tent-revival snake handler.

There were a couple of routes for those of us with the attention spans of insects. One involved serial incarceration, which I flirted with but never really perfected into something that would give me the requisite C&W cred in Nashville. The other centered around starting a band. I wasn't very good at that, either, but some of my friends were.

A few of them were in the Authorities, which recorded a bunch of stuff at a studio in Modesto, four songs of which ended up on a seven-inch EP called Soundtrack for Trouble. My favorite was the genius rant by the late "Big Nick Slurb" Kappos; its lyrics went something like: "I hate cops/ They're all fucking piggers/ They all got mustaches/ They squeak when they walk/ I hate cops." There were more words, but that was the gist.

I think those lyrics kill.

Nick was the guitar-playing heart of the band, and I remember his record collection consisted mostly of the complete works of the Mothers of Invention, the Ventures and Throbbing Gristle. He lived in this fourplex on Pershing Avenue just north of the University of the Pacific, across the Calaveras River. We used to get drunk there a lot on cheap beer that we stole from the 7-Eleven up the street, which we justified because the people who worked there were Pontiac TransAm-driving Persian coffee shop hanging out exchange student dicks. Later, around 1984 when I left town, people started playing around with opiates, and there was one John the Baptist of junk who worked pretty hard at convincing the local rockers that you couldn't have real punk cred unless you shot up with him. Which inevitably killed Nick, who met his demise in the men's loo of the Stockton Greyhound bus depot, with a needle hanging out of his arm.

Curt Hall was the singer, Brian Thalken also played guitar, and he'd written a song called "Radiationmasturbation" that was a classic of punk melodicism. Brian had been in the Fall of Christianity with bassist Theron Knight and drummer Gary Young, who later got famous as the vegetable-vending drummer of Pavement. I can't remember if Ron "Rondo" Copetti or Tony Smith played bass on the record, which I no longer have a copy of. The late Dave Kambestad played drums. The other two songs were "Achtung" and "Shot in the Head."

I designed the cover, which means I used a Delta College graphic arts class at night to shoot black and white screened repros of some pictures in a book of Maoist poster art I'd found a few years earlier at Tower Books on Watt Avenue in Sacramento, and to blow up the type. I think the teacher busted me and told me to knock it off, but I went ahead and did it anyway behind his back. Brian had the records pressed up and they sat in his closet for a while. A bunch of them were at Rather Ripped Records, which got raided by the FBI for selling bootlegs.

Anyway, this little record is apparently quite collectable, if you believe what you read on the Internet. We all thought the Authorities were great, but multiple drunken trips to Mabuhay Gardens in Hall's blue Pinto station wagon to launch the band into immortality only succeeded in getting some of us arrested for drunk in public. Multiple times. That jail across the alley from the Keystone Korner was a regular Barney Miller episode, albeit with a David Mamet script.

If you see Soundtrack for Trouble, or the reissue that included a bunch more tracks, pick it up and play it real loud.