I will be very brief in the introduction to the column. You see, today Brad Davidson is offering his soul to us... And I'm not joking... In fact, the following article is so great that I have read a few like it, even in major journals!
Thanks Brad ...
Brad Davidson’s rock and roll story
We were doing a Wipers show in the Midwest in the 80's sometime, somewhere and Greg introduced "Don't belong to you" off of the 'Follow Blind' L.P. with :" this is for president Ronnie"(Reagan, who was president at that time, and having a cancer removed from his nose) " who’s in the hospital having a booger taken off his nose" then did this snotty thing where he did a kind of flicked a booger pantomime, off his nose. It was really cool, and funny too! Pres. Ronnie's booger operation was all over the media at that time.. Then "IT'S CALLED, WE DON'T BELONG TO YOU!"At the end of my last tour with the Wipers (1988?), I called my girlfriend at the time, from Hamburg, Germany. She told me she's "seein' this guy",I'm devastated, I lose it and go on one. We go to Berlin “The Loft” then on to the "Fullham Greyhound" in London.
So, rebounding, trying to recover from THAT annihilation I hook up with an English girl in the band that opened for us "The Birdhouse", his to fight my feelings of desperation, isolation, loneliness & self loathing.
Fast forward…We're back in Phoenix, Arizona, where Greg Sage, my former girlfriend and I lived. She's, of course gone now , and I’m a wreck, going through hell like I’ve never felt ( I suppose I had it comin'!) I ask Greg "what's up with the Wipers" he says "the Wipers are dead" I say to myself "Cool! now I can move to London and be with the chick I met on tour" What about my car though? Then one early morning, on the way to my job, in a sheet metal plant, making garage doors all day 8-12 hrs, some idiot rear ends me, totals my car out and I get over twice back what I paid for it in an insurance payout.
I take this as an omen that I should move to London. I pack up everything I can carry and fly into Gatwick airport they hold me in customs for 12 hours because I had some small hand tools in my luggage. And I remember some twerp, weedie little old grey English customs person behind a desk, reading from a sheet of paper " the inspector…blah…blah..blah.. .doesn’t believe your stated intention for your trip to the U.K. are the actual intentions of your visit"
I kept asking what the fuck that meant and what this inspector blah…blah …thought my actual intentions were.???The english twit keeps reading the same response over and over in the response to every question I ask. I'm having visions of turning a fire hose on the guy! They let me stay overnight at my girls' place and be back here at such and such a time or we'll come after you. So, she came to Arizona, we got married and I moved to London. About 1989…within six months later, I'm hatin' it with a "Eh? eh?" here and a "Whuh? whuh?" There and the "Fuckin' Americans, cammin owver 'ere stealin owuh birds, slealin' ow' jobes" I got fed up in the "Pub" one night and said "Listen If It Weren't for us 'Fuckin' Americans, You'd all be speaking German right now!" I was very nearly physically assaulted.
AND, I'm living in the worst of it, Brixton, South London, kind of a slum! It wasn't all bad though, I had some really good friends there that I still think of. I got to see the legendary HAWKWIND at the Brixton Academy, I saw Helios Creed a couple of times, and there were moments of intimacy, my English wife that made me almost forget how on our honeymoon night, in Vegas in her lingerie, she began crying hysterically and seemed to find it a fitting environment & occasion to disclose to me that she'd been "Really Bad In The Past" but little did she know that our marriage was ruined from that point on.
I always thought I could be man enough to get through it, but the incentives just weren't there. I was drifting into (sp?) melancholia mentally into another world, to escape the unpleasant reality of the one I created. But even my dream world was a sordid, depressing nightmare, insane and grey.
I started a 3-piece Metal /punk combo. Called "Klaw" seemed like a great idea. I was learning to sing, write and play bass simultaneously. I had ridiculous delusions of "Klaw" someday making it and I'd be able to quit my shit construction work and get wasted all the time and have sex with exotic females all the time.
The furthest we ever got was going to Berlin and staying at the flat of Jock MacDonald of the "Bullock Brothers" the drummer, Leo Mortimer's.... friend(?). And, not to mention the guitar player Rob Crow. And, Playing at Jock's birthday party. I did meet a blonde blue eyed east-German girl with a Polish last name (master race). And, there were nights of drunkenness and debauchery that seemed pleasant enough. But, out of the blue I contacted my good friend Rob DeVries, who with Peter Van De Velt (not the Peter VDV later on tour with the Jesus And Mary Chain but they knew each other!) was our roadie, driver, front end sound guy enforcer and technical support. We had stayed up many nights too late bullshitting and drinking after shows and becoming good pals. Then, about 1992 he says he's doing front end sound for the Jesus and Mary Chain, says he's in London at the moment and asks if he can he drop by my flat? I say "sure why not?" He comes over and confides in me that the JAMC is having trouble with their rhythm section, which means Bass & drums , Rob's seen me do 28 shows in 30 days, stay up too late and do it all again, he remembers me as a soldier, before marriage, before London etc. He says "I don't know if I can get you an audition, but if I can I know you've got the job" I stay up till 3am learning 13 songs off cassettes my wife had, none of which were the 5 to audition they called me for the audition and I went straight from my construction job as a "stud welder" w/ holes burned in the clothes (really didn't know who they were at the time, I thought they were some campy, gene loves jezebel type of thing). I aced the audition and in fact had to come back(got to) to audition drummers.
Wiff, the JAMC drum tech and my beloved Nick Sanderson, God rest His Weary soul, Formerly with Jeffery Lee Pierce in the Gun Club, more on my episodes with Nick & Jeffery another time. Wiff got the job on the 1st Lollapalooza tour with Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, Ministry, Pearl Jam, Lush and the JAMC, Nick was on the second rollercoaster II tour with Curve and the Flaming Lips played a couple of dates also. Wiff was more technically proficient but played with a much lighter touch, while Nick had more soul and was "a bit more powerful " So, we’re off to San Francisco... and I’m playing a KISS pinball machine at the 1st venue (outdoor) we're playing at on the '92 Lollapalooza tour. And I’m getting loaded. I ask Jim Reid when we're going on ? He replies, "Brad! We are only here to tune the monitors, and then we're going to Tokyo tomorrow!" So I’m like "ok cool whatever" Then I’m wanting a cigarette, I have none, I see a hot, large breasted chick in one of those tight leather vests that lace up the front cleavage revealer ordeal affairs. She's smoking I ask her for one and it turns out she's friends with the tour manager Jerry Jaffe. She comes to my room later and buys me a pizza. The next day Wiff (the drummer) calls me a prostitute. Then we're off to Tokyo, my lewd behavior progresses until by the end of the following "rollercoaster II tour”, my contract was not renewed and allowed to expire. (I broke my ankle in three places at the end of the '92 lollapalooza tour due to becoming far more fat, stupid and lazy than my constitution would allow).Fast forward…we're back in London. Doing a BBC TV programme called "Later with Jools Holland" ( from the U.K. squeeze) Paul Weller taped that night, I also remember Lena Fiagbee did as well. It was chaotic. I somehow knew I was gonna get fired soon. Nick said earlier, during the tour (rollercoaster II) that, he thought we would both be fired by the end of that somewhat less than blissful outing.. He said we'd probably both be fired for enjoying ourselves. He was only half right and I was 100% correct and when the phone rang within the next couple of days, and I answered to a "BRAD THIS IS PETER MORRISON!!" (JAMC's U.K. manager) I immediately asked him if he was giving me my notice to which he replied "YEA! HA HA HA!" I hung up without another word, and call Jim Reid to ask him why he didn't tell me himself, I was appalled that he or William didn't have the guts to tell me themselves. But, oh well I had been fucking up in a capitol fashion, literally and figuratively. So, I get a building maintenance job at the London ambulance service right next to the waterloo train/tube station. I eventually get fired and my wife kicks me out.
I move in some Scottish lowlife boozer pals, one of which I’m in a band width called "dirt" which was short-lived. (My last name is Scottish/Viking) Next, I'm convinced to move in a girl I met who was working as a barmaid at a pub where "dirt" played one night, She was a farmer's daughter and I did some seasonal farm work for her brother in law in Northumberland, almost to Scotland-far north of England, driving tractors, throwing bales, pulling lambs out of ass of sheep in ewe and etc. etc. And getting yelled at..A lot! but I DID love it and the idea of returning to London at the end of a season always.... well, saying it made me want to vomit would be a nicety. I kept getting comatose, drinking ridiculous overly copious amounts of alcohol. I was always miserable in London I suppose I'd have been miserable anywhere, everywhere, crippled inside. Eventually the last girlfriend I had in London had to send me back to the states Where I floundered for many more years and developed a healthy (ha ha) heroin addiction. Then!..I met Jimi Flynn and Eric Stene! After leaving Portland, Oregon and another disastrous situation, for San Diego, California, I didn't know what to expect at all. They gave me a c.d. of some fairly incoherent jams they had made, but I really didn't know what to make of it yet. So, I took it over to my friend Gabe Serbian's (formerly drummer in the Locust and now Singing in Rat's eyes) He also couldn't figure it out. I knew I liked Eric's guitar, where in parts he sounded like Helios Creed/ Chrome, one of my main influences. And, I was pleasantly surprised, if not a bit shocked to discover later, also Eric's. Jimi' s drums sounded like crap. And, I borrowed a bass from Gabe's downstairs neighbor Will Fairfield,(that I think used to belong to Fugazi.) So just in case I needed to back out, I could say I had no bass. I was however impressed by the contrast of playing with Jimi live and how much better he sounded than the recording they had given me previously. I particularly was encouraged by the way we all jelled together and seemed to have an almost telepathic complimentary connection, hypnotic conjugation! (as in conjurer, is that the right word?)
So, with Eric on guitar, myself-later forced by necessity into vocals/ on bass and Jimi Flynn playing drums and after several hours of jamming straight through the ozone layer, I immediately decide to bring all my gear over to Jimi's house where we did our 1st recording with, the courtesy of our friend Theo Miserlis, who engineered the mechanical section of that particular episode. We all became very well acquainted and grew closer and closer discovering how much we all had in common. Especially after I had revealed, the story, of my shooting heroin behind a dumpster in Portland, in a rainstorm, using water from a puddle to cook my dope in. The kind of behavior, that, thankfully, no member of Phantom Ration is currently involved in. We plan to release our second recording, completed last summer, in the near future. It is not for the faint of heart. We have travelled space and time with our well known, but very top secret, invention. Becoming, a tactically versatile and highly competent, scientific awareness unit. We know how to operate our equipment just about as well as we need to. I personally am far more satisfied, but ironically far less monetarily rewarded with phantom ratio than anything I’ve ever done musically. We are working toward progress in a quantum psycho-mechanical virtual-biolab. A progression from misery, to the evolution of life, all life..and , ourselves, sacrifices must be made. There is much trial and error, research and development, hate, war, love, peace, sex, fire and snakes and...blood, But there is also compassion, maniacal obsession, plans. Formulation and computation, precise decisions must be made in the fraction of a second. Dark secrets and shining revelations, sparks flying and bolts of lightning...and the moaning and wailing of dungeon slaves...... Phantom Ratio---"we've been to hell, so you don't have to!"
Relevant article