Charlie Drown

Driving on Holy Gasoline

"It seems so real, until the light turns green" - 'Keep Driving', Meatloaf

Retired at 32

Most guys my age had the sense not to drink, fight, and fuck their way through their 20's, and as such have real jobs that involve offices, or cutting down trees, or shooting people for traffic violations, or whatever it is the square world is up to. Of course, most guys my age that I actually know work at coffee shops, copy shops, or the record store, or on the street as bike messengers or purse snatchers. I'm not into that either, so while I wait for the Village Voice, or fuck- Hit Parader, even- to call, I shuttle cars, a job usually filled by retired guys. It's an interesting experience. Most 30-somethings living in the city rarely even see older people, never mind spend 8 hours a day working with them. Over the past year I've spent smacking into barricades and getting lost in cavernous parking lots, I've quietly observed these 'senior' citizens and their strange ways. I haven't actually learned anything- I hardly do anymore, having reached my saturation point somewhere between 'How girls get pregnant' and 'Drugs kill', but I have gotten a vivid glimpse into the world that awaits us all. Be afraid, young rock soldier, be very afraid.

Blood is Everywhere

In a lot of third world countries, the average life span for a man is about 40 years, which spares them a lot of indignities, as they drop dead before the temple starts collapsing into ruin. Old men have health problems that you didn't even think existed anymore. Just recently, I noticed that one of the retirees I work with was wincing every time he climbed into a car. When I asked him what was wrong, he said, "Ah, Christ. It's these Goddamn Shingles!" Another guy had a tangle with "The Gout" last spring. I don't know what either of those things are, but I hope I never get them. The other thing is, older fellas always seem to be bleeding for no good reason. Eddie, the head driver, has a Kleenex stuffed up his nose all the time to stem the flow of blood that mysteriously trickles out of his left nostril, and last week, Ed, the 73 year old ex- ragtime band piano player, went to the doctor because his ass was bleeding. The doctor told him it was a completely natural occurrence. "You could have stepped off of a curbstone, or sneezed, who knows?" He rhetorically asked. "At you age, it just happens all by itself." This wasn't exactly good news for Ed. "Well, what can I do about it?" He asked. "Keep some napkins around", the doctor smugly answered. 

Nobody Wants to See Your Grandma Naked

All the men I work with are married, most of them for 20-30 years or more. If you ask them how their sex lives are, though (and I do- the road goes on forever, you know), they roll their eyes or grimace. "I haven't gotten any in 10 years", one of them admitted to me, "And if you ever saw my wife first thing in the morning, you'd be happy for me." This doesn't make them any less horny, however. Whenever we cruise by an impressive set of legs or a tight skirt, they howl and whistle just like frat boys. Older guys also get away with a genial sort of sexual harassment around the office. The resident hottie that works in payroll endures wrinkly leers and jeers all the time. "What a pretty smile", one of the guys will harmlessly greet her with, and before she gets cozy with the compliment, they'll add "Pretty everything else, too", with a lascivious wink. And then there's the old stand-by, "If I was younger, you'd be in serious trouble, young lady." Just like a wolf with false teeth. I guess that even when the rest of the body is falling apart, the libido is still working overtime. A couple of the guys have even built dens in their basements so that they can "Drink whiskey and watch porn in peace". Well, when you put it that way, retirement sounds sweet.

Just Keep Eating

Old guys will eat anything. No wonder their stomachs are always bleeding. Listening to these codgers talk about last night's dinner is an alarming experience. "Last night I had the calamari in the ink gravy", Pat will announce. Ink gravy?! "Delicious. Gratzi du gusto!" (Or whatever it is that he says- it's hard to figure out what's going on when they slip into Italian, what with the phlegm and the bad Boston accents.) As if squid swimming in it's own ink wasn't nasty enough, it gets worse. "Eels are delicious", Ed once told me. "My mother used to make it. She's slice them down the middle, like, and roll them in bread crumbs. I wouldn't have even known they were eels if she didn't tell me", he said. But even after she told him they were fuckin' eels, he ate them, and continues to do so today. When I groaned at the thought, he said, "You know, just because something is disgusting, that doesn't mean it doesn't taste good." Sage advice. I've also heard many discussions about how best to cook tripe, which they tell me is the stomach lining of an animal, and I've also heard mention of "creamed brains", but they might have just been fucking with me at that point. 

A Pale Horse Rides

Senior citizens are a lot less afraid of death than younger guys are. This seems strange, seeing as the grim reaper is snatching up their friends and loved ones left and right. Maybe nature has a way of putting you into some kind of fugue state, where death becomes some kind of abstract concept, and you just don't think about it. Or maybe it's because they're so distracted by golf. The golf course seems to be like some kind of breezy, grassy waiting room for the soon-to-be-deceased, like maybe it's a practice run for what Heaven's going to be like. Most likely, though, their lack of anxiety about their own mortality is just the result of being so damn tired. These are men that have fought wars, gotten married, divorced and re-married, raised children, worked 40 or 50 years at back breaking jobs only to retire and start new jobs because the pension wasn't cutting it. No wonder they fall asleep all the time. Death probably just seems like a long nap to them, splayed out on the couch with Frank Sinatra buzzing quietly away on the Victrola and the smell of boiling cow stomach wafting in from the kitchen, only forever. Cats like you and I, we're just not through yet. We still have all the speed and sex and noise and crashing about to immerse ourselves in, but we'll learn eventually, I suppose, somewhere out there, as the years unravel and white shoes suddenly seem fashionable. Death, it turns out, is not the enemy. Shingles are the enemy. Oh yeah, and jobs, family and friends come and go, but a well-stocked liquor cabinet and teenage pussy is forever.

The Road is Loud
Pale Imitations  - Maximum R&B!
www.pantycopter.com/pi

The Pale imitations are only as new as the bruises on your thighs, baby. It all started years and years ago with rockn'roll secret agents Ron Raymond and Dimitri Monroe sitting in a filthy, piss stained basement just outside of Rock City, high as kites on paint thinner and glue and the kind of booze that comes in a plastic bottle, fighting over some crazy but beautiful glam rock chick and writing songs that always ended up sounding like Van Halen blasting out of blown speakers in a Trans Am driven by white trash punks that couldn't even tell the difference between Social Distortion and Motley Crue anymore. Over time, the Pale Imitations have come back to screaming life like Ghostrider in whatever town either of the boys in the band found worthy, or at least available, co-conspirators. They would once again rev up the Deathtrip Studebaker in their dreams and hurl themselves into any stage that would take them, ripping open these suicide glitter anthems like they were enemies to be vanquished, done away with for good. But these songs will never really go away. They may have been written as loosely as a Charlie Manson parole hearing speech, but over the years they have been honed down to razor sharp points, and they fit so neatly into fancy , modern day sub-genre buzz phrases like 'Motorpunk' and 'Action rock' that you almost forget they were composed in the days when we just called it 'rock and roll'. The Pale Imitations still do. The new Gotham City version is snarlier than ever, but the songs remain the same. Anorexic teenage sex gods, it seems, never go out of style.

Sistas Ass - demo
www.sistasass.com

There are many things that the name Sistas Ass conjures up that don't involve a metal band from Medford, Massachusetts, but let us roll over the ghetto-porno implications of it all, and get to the meat of the matter. Back in the early 80's, Medford was the home of teenage heavy metal dirtbags and the girls that drove their drunk asses home. I visited myself a few times, standing on the corner near the bus stop amidst the sleeveless denim jackets and back patches, staring at the sun and occasionally muttering something about 'Slayer' and 'Thrash metal' and 'That record is fuckin' death, dude.' Well, things have changed, citizen. They got themselves a mall and baseball field now, and all the metal kids moved west to Worcester. But Sistas Ass remember those halcyon days and embrace their leather and spikes legacy without shame. They play street metal, all flying shrapnel and thudding chunks of sonic concrete, with a nod to the punchy aggro stomp of Pantera and even some doomy, sub-COC southern fried boogie thrown in, as well. Not exactly rock and roll, mind you, but it's as heavy as a hangover and as pure in intent as a junkyard dog baring it's fangs. 

Maiden Mine - Spitting Rosie
www.maidenmine.com
Portland- the left coast version- is host to all manner of down tuned weirdness. They go crazy from all the cold and rain too, you know, they just don't do it as publicly as the dope fiends in Seattle do. Maiden Mine aren't guilty of all that subsonic Melvins rumble or the faux sincerity of the post grunge alt rockers, but they are fucking weird. All the guys in the band wear duct tape on their mouths when they play, and Mary Elizabeth, their lead singer, wears some kind of leather strap S&M mask. It makes her look like Green Lantern. Sexy, in a straight jacket kind of way. Musically speaking, they're a metal band that takes tangential runs into other, spacier avenues, like a hip tourist getting lost on purpose in a new city. Threads of industro-rattle and barroom funk and even a little druggy jazz swims in and out of the melodic metal mix. When they dip into slower, moodier numbers, Mary sounds like a cabaret singer that's been dragged into the aftermath of an all night Wrestlemania party, keeping a graceful composure when all around her there are blood stains and empty bottles, and when the band is cooking, it's somewhere between the power prog of Dream Theater and the estrogen powered flash metal of vixen- Iron Maiden Mine, if you will. Schizophrenic but resourceful, these muzzled cats and masked kitten are both familiar and alien all at once, like some one night stand you forgot but owe money to. Pay up, sinner.

The Sins - demo
www.nightmareboy.com

The Sins are a brimstone and eyeliner darkwave band from Seattle, who sound not unlike an early Cult, back when they were Southern and Deathly. They originally sent me a CDR that turned out to be blank, so this is actually the first time I've had to resort to listening to a record at home in these pages. As such, I can't give you a valid description of how they sound when you're tearing ass down the highway, narrowly avoiding death by drunken cabbie, but I can tell you that sitting here listening through tinny computer speakers that make everything sound like infants being strangled on a static-y AM radio station, The Sins are as dark as the soul of an alcoholic preacher, and just as tragically heroic. They are thankfully devoid of the pretense usually associated with the bleak romanticism of goth rawk, and get straight to the stoic business of painting their tales of steely eyed dust devils squinting under a blood moon in broad strokes of crimson and nightshade, aided greatly by the washes of almost black metallic funereal keyboards and epic guitars that sound as thought their clawing their way up some unholy mountain with bloodied hands. Actually, I guess I better get a hard copy of this demo- it'd be the perfect soundtrack next time they make me repossess a hearse.

Pretty, Negative: Inside the Metal Thrashing Mad World of Charlie Drown

The image of a beautiful tattooed goth chick, like the airbrushed masterpiece on the side of a van full of satanic ink slingers on their way to a biker rally- is not the first image that springs to mind when you hear the name "Charlie Drown". But Demona and Satanika were already taken, and Charlie's not one to follow convention anyway. The multi-talented Miss Drown is young and angry, but hardly a Riot Grrl. Her rage is not channeled through barrettes and brat punk, but through heaving shards of metal, cyber-thrashing guitars, and solemn odes to violence and despair screamed with vengeance by an operatic tigress with a head full of napalm. Her debut full length, last year's 'Silent Rizing', was a throat gripping temple of spite and aggression, full of menacing Ministry industro-metal with just a glimmer of snaky dance floor slink to lighten it's noisy barrage. Imagine Lydia Lunch's sense of outrage trapped in the body of a heavy metal super model trading musical punches with Marilyn Manson back when he was still attacking caged go-go dancers with chainsaws, and you've got some inkling of the thunderous lust and terror that fueled "Silent Rizing" and put Charlie Drown on the aggro-rock map. That might all change soon, what with an opera on the way, but more likely Charlie will just make you think twice about the sonic possibilities of classical music, once she sinks her pearly fangs into it. Hardly demonic in real life, I caught up with charming Charlie a couple of months after she left her adopted home of Vancouver for the soggy confines of the pacific Northwest. As she shivered from a late season frost, we talked about the perils of beauty, the beauty of peril, and other heady concepts from the wild world of Charlie Drown.

A Girl Named Charlie

Hear the name 'Charlie Drown', and you're more likely to think of some dusty emo-kid in a sweater than industrial metal priestess in leather. "A lot of people expect it to be a guy, and they're shocked", Charlie agrees." Sometimes I think it hurts what I'm trying to do, and I should just call myself 'Charly!', you know, with a 'y', and like a heart next to the name, but I don't think I want to go that route." She got her name, she tells me, during a fateful bout of word association. "When I was a kid, my dad used to call me 'Charlie'. I used to work for him in his garage. He had an auto mechanic shop, and he'd go, 'Hey Charlie, hand me that wrench', or whatever. So, Charlie was always there, and then I was reading this book. This was when I was thinking about doing this whole solo thing, and I didn't know what to call it yet. So I'm reading this book called 'Asylum', and this was this part...well, I really can't remember the book", she laughs, "but it had a part where they said, 'We're going to let Charlie drown' , to benefit somebody else, or something. And when I saw them both together, it reminded me of what my life was really like, like I was always the underdog, getting pushed down, and I kept having to compete with everything around me to get attention- and it still feels like that sometimes- but it all just clicked." Although Charlie is a girl, it's also a band- of sorts. "I've always just wrote, and got the band together afterwards", she tells me. "It's been hard to get a solid band together, to tell you the truth." She's got an agenda, you see. "I look for pros. People that don't have commitments to other bands, or to families. I know that sounds pretty shallow, but I don't need any babies being born on the road, or anything." Besides being orphans, she also likes band members that know she's the captain of this rock and roll ship. "That usually gets taken care of the first time they call me", she laughs. "But yeah, that has been a problem in the past. I'm pretty quiet, and I don't like to throw my weight around, so unfortunately, I have had to deal with some pretty big egos at times. But it usually works out in the long run", she says, a bit mysteriously, as if there's a deep dark cellar somewhere where the ego stars are left to fend for themselves, punishment for mistaking Charlie's cobra-cool for passivity. Currently, the band consists of herself and Kull, her goth metal axe slinging sidekick, who made the journey with her from Vancouver to the states. With her feet firmly planted in US soil, however, she's planning on finally getting that dream band together. "Yeah, because here I don't have to do anything to get them out of Canada", she explains. "That was always the thing, touring out of Canada was a huge pain in the ass, so I didn't want to go there again. I'm an American and a Canadian at the same time, so for me it was no problem, but for the other three guys- I mean, because it wasn't an actual band, I had to pay for everything, for their visas, for the vehicle, the gear, everything, so it just got crazy. It got to be such a huge problem, that I was just like, I don't want to do it anymore, I just want to leave. So I left."

Back in the USA

Charlie spent her childhood shuttling between Pittsburgh and Toronto, which is how she ended up making a home for herself in the great white north. Although she enjoyed a fair bit of success and notoriety in her adopted city of Vancouver, where she tells me that she "did a lot for the underground, industrial type of scene there", ultimately, it became to difficult to keep the rock rolling all the way up there. "It just got ridiculous, trying to tour in the states, with the cash that I got in Canada", she sighs. "I was basically paying double for everything, it was just horrible. You get like 52 cents on a dollar, or something." I laugh. She does too, but she's quick to note, "It's not funny when you're there." She moved just outside of Portland at the end of last year. "I quit my job back in Vancouver", she says, "and I said, 'fuck it', I'm just going to go for it. So since I've been here, I've just been trying to figure out ways of making money from shows and CDs, things like that." So far, the plan has worked. "Ever since I left Canada, things have been going really well. I got a really good review form some guy in Vancouver, and ever since, I've been selling CDs on the internet like crazy", she's happy to report. "I manage to sell enough CDs off of the website that that's pretty much all I have to do." This run of good fortune, however, looks to have no effect on the dark, gnashing teeth aggression of Charlie's music. In fact, she only plans on getting meaner, sonically speaking. "Yeah, I am, definitely. I plan on getting way more pissed off", she says. "I'm sick of sitting here and waiting for people to come to me, so I'm just going to go. I'm not waiting for a record company anymore, I've pretty much convinced myself that they're going to be obsolete, so I'm just going to try to put as much money into this as I can myself, and probably by next year, I'll be pretty well known, I'm hoping." In the meantime, she's still getting acclimated to her new surroundings. I ask her if she's sized up the local talent yet. "Yeah, I have, and it's mostly really down-tuned, heavy, inaudible lyrics, screaming...I don't mind it, I like that old-school, kind of punky music, it's really different than Vancouver, which is more of the Noise Therapy, Nickelback, kind of sound." Yikes. "Right. I hated it. So being out here with all this heavy, dirty kind of music is nice." All these depressed and dirty rockers have also embraced her in a way that never happened in Vancouver. "The people in my town are super-friendly, even though I have pink hair, the old ladies are like 'Hi! How are you?'" She laughs. "The people in the music scene are friendly too, it's more of a family. Like, I was accepted right away, which shocked me, because everyone in Vancouver hated me." I ask her why she found such hostility up north. "Because I was very ambitious. I started out with a handful of guys that were all in previous bands, and they'd go, 'You can't do that, you can't go out onstage like that', and I pretty much made what everybody was afraid to do work for me, so after two years of doing that I made a name for myself in Vancouver, and I guess people were jealous or shocked, or whatever, but I just stayed true to myself, and I guess people don't like that sometimes." Besides a supportive rock scene, the stormy weather and dark days of the Pacific Northwest have helped the Charlie Drown cause as well. "It's really rainy out here, and it's freezing in my house", she says, with teeth chattering. "That's the thing- in Vancouver, I had to light candles and close the drapes to get into the proper mood for what I wanted to write, but out here, it's amazing, it's totally dreary, so I don't have to do anything."

Sadly Beautiful

"It's just the things that we go through, you know? The little things, the big things- life, pretty much." Charlie's talking about her songs-monstrous, lurching, attacking things that seem far removed from the soft spoken woman on the phone. "All my songs are about things that I've gone through", she tells me, "And yeah, I did have it pretty rough growing up. I'm happy, though, that I can be aware of that and use it for something that benefits myself, and maybe others, who can listen and get that anger out." But surely, she can't always be angry, right? Wrong. Happy Charlie Drown songs are not in the offing. "Like, 'Lalalala'? Happy? I don't think so", she laughs. "Even when I try, when I sit down and go, 'Ok, I want to write a nice, happy song, even when I actually plan on that, I listen back, and I go, 'Christ, I just can't get out of it.' If I ever wrote a pop song, I'd have to change what pop is. Like the song 'Momma' on the CD. It was a nice thought, but it came out just as gloomy as anything else." 

It's impossible to delve into the savage world of Charlie Drown without mentioning her formidable beauty, looking, as she does, like the goth-erotic cover model for some glossy cyber-rock magazine from Venus. Although far from denying her sexuality as a marketing strategy, she admits that it's a double-edged sword. "Guys in other bands always say things like, 'The only reason you've gotten anywhere is because of your tits.' I hear that a lot, and I always think, well, what can this guy do that I can't? I can play guitar, I can sing, I can write my own music, I can sequence, I can do all these things, and I can smoke them on stage, even", she says. "So the way I look at that is, I'm going to use every single one of those things. It just so happens that I might have a look that's pleasing, so I'll use it. As long as it's my choice, as long as no one's telling me to dance a certain way, or to do a tit shot or something. If it's my choice, then why not? I figure, why not have it all? Charlie Drown isn't just about music, it's about me, it's about my life, my experiences, everything. That's why I have a diary on my site, because it's about everything in my life." I ask her about the picture on the front page of said site, a striking mock-up of Charlie committing Hari-Kari, opening her belly with a big ass knife. Hardly a glamour shot. "It's probably my favorite image for what Charlie Drown is about", she tells me. "It's about the 'cutting out' of something. Like during a show, I'll have a blow up doll mask on, and the skin of it, and I'll kind of use the knife to slash it off of me, and it's almost like I'm saying..." Charlie pauses to gather her thoughts. "I don't know, it's just a really gutteral feeling of escaping from preconceived notions of what people expect of me."

Like the Lilith Tour with Teeth

When it comes to the live arena, Charlie has her own ideas about what constitutes a rock show, and it doesn't involve opening up for slovenly nu-metal bands in sports bars. "I'd rather put together my own shows, I like to put together these all ages 'balls', like for Valentines day or Halloween, because the energy of playing in bars is usually pretty bad, like twenty drunks going 'Yeah! Take it off!' or something", she sighs. "So I got into putting on all ages shows, and I discovered that when the kids come to the show, that's who they're there to see- you. The energy is just amazing. That's what I'm planning on now, I'm going to put together a mini festival, just women. Either all girls, or with a woman up front." This strategy, she explains, is how Charlie Drown first started playing live. "Yeah, the very first Charlie Drown show was like that. I did a show within a month of starting the band, and it was enormous. I had huge advertising, and there was about 500 kids there, and that was in the middle of nowhere, in New West, which is like an hour out of Vancouver. There was just a ton of kids, and when I saw that, I thought , 'Wow, there's a scene here', and I was just really impressed that it can be done, that an unknown band, with the right promoting, can fill up a hall." Look for Charlie's all girl multi-media extravaganza at a city near you soon. But first, expect a new twist. "The next thing I'm going to do is an opera", she tells me, matter of factly. "I'm an opera singer. So, I'm taking that, and I'm making a metal-ly thing." A black opera, then. "Kind of. Not like King Diamond, though. Not gay", she laughs. "A classical thing, with some heavier moments. It's just something inside of me that I have to get out." She also plans on releasing another full length of ferocious Charlie Drown material later this year as well. Whatever her next incarnation will be, you can bet that it'll be loud, beautiful, and just a little bit dangerous.

For more on Charlie, check out her website - www.charliedrown.com

Next issue - Noisadelic cyber lust a go-go with NYC's own princess of the long knives, Rainbow Blight.

I am the one baby, that's for sure - Sleazegrinder 4.22.02