A holiday present from your friends at the Orlando Punk Archive. Art by Ben Lyon. FREE Soundtrack by Fashion! Fashion! and the Image Boys available here! https://orlandopunkarchive.bandcamp.com/album/2005-danger-room-session
As the German Shepherd circled my beaten-down van I began to ask myself–how had things gotten to this point? It was a great question. If only the D.A.R.E. program in middle school had properly indoctrinated me, I might not be in such a mess. My short life flashed before my eyes–my years of waking-and-baking, the bad acid trip that had made me swear off all drugs, pot included. I hadn’t so much smoked a joint in years, but now, here I was, standing outside a drug dealer’s house in handcuffs, surrounded by cops, basking in alternating flashes of blue and red. It wasn’t until the police dog barked to alert Winter Park’s finest that there were in fact narcotics in my vehicle that I found a scapegoat for what had gotten me into this predicament: it was Rock ‘n Roll that had pushed me down this dark slippery road and rammed me over its snow-crusted rails to Rock Bottom.
Now, I hate to admit it, but sometimes the squares are right–Rock ‘n Roll can be really bad for you. A volatile substance, it can produce adverse effects on your health. Not only can it rot your brain, corrode your moral fiber, and potentially lead to venereal disease, it can also send the participant spiraling into a month-long drug binge… at least that’s what happened to me. But these cases of extremity don’t just happen from listening to any run-of-the-mill bullshit like Journey or Pat Boone–it has to be something really good to cast you over the edge and down the frozen embankment to be caught in the all-out avalanche of icy damnation.
In Dante’s Inferno, the Beast is trapped in ice, so it’s only appropriate that the demonic sounds which kicked up this particular snowstorm in my own life were provided by some of the coolest flakes I knew–a band called Fashion! Fashion! and the Image Boys.
It all started on New Year’s Eve, 2004. My friend Mary brought a drunken party-on-wheels over to my house which consisted of Erik (future Golden Pelicans), Robbie (future Autarx) and some weirdly-tall dude that was all dressed in black. He had a thick Appalachian drawl and to top things off, this clown was also wearing a fedora. I was convinced Mary, Robbie and Erik were fucking with me by bringing this guy around, who’s name was Derek, or Dunx for short. We were pounding beers and listening to the Beatles–one of the early groups that had plagued the masses with Rock ‘n Roll–and Dunx informed me in his heavy accent that their music was complete shit.
“What? Are you fucking kidding? Don’t you realize how influential they were on Rock music–on all of music?”
“Man, I’m from Atlanta, man,” Dunx presented as his sole proof of expertise on the subject. “I know what I’m talkin’ about.”
“What the fuck’s this guy’s problem?” I asked Erik.
“I’m really sorry, man–he’s just really fucked up.”
That much was obvious.
“I’m from Atlanta, man…” Dunx continued on repeat.
The group prepared to cart their intoxicated music critic off to the next party but they couldn’t go anywhere–Robbie’s car had a flat. I helped them fix the tire under an exploding New Year’s night sky, unaware of the potential fireworks that my friends and their fedora’d Atlantean chum possessed… I would soon find out.
It was a couple months later that Rich Evans from Florida’s Dying/Total Punk booked a recording session for a band I’d never heard of despite the fact that I’d played a show with them two years before in Gainesville–Fashion! Fashion! and the Image Boys. I had no idea who was in the group–then who should walk through my door but Erik and his obnoxious fucking friend! “Oh shit…” I muttered.
It turned out Erik was the singer and Dunx played guitar. The band had Orlando’s best and brightest degenerates as the rhythm section–Tracy Blades on drums and Ryan Codone on bass. As the legend goes, Ryan got his surname for being the first guy in Orlando’s Punk scene to get a prescription to Roxicet, or Rapid Release Oxycodone, which he didn’t hesitate to supply to his friends–what a guy!
After the band set up, I prepared my ears for a storm of shit, but when they started playing I was pleasantly surprised.
All my reservations went up in smoke–HOLY SHIT! These guys are fucking amazing! Fashion! Fashion! TORE IT UP–a perfect Killed By Death-style Punk Rock band with all the asshole attitude to back it up.
I was enamored.
The group got their instruments down pretty quick, then we started tracking Erik’s vocals. I quickly realized I had a situation on my hands as Dunx sat in the room to “produce.” His idea of playing Phil Spector was to smoke a bunch of weed while shaking his head at Erik the whole time and condemning him. “I don’t know, man… I don’t know… Can’t you do it like you do it live?” That last word came out sounding like LHIIIIIVE. Erik proceeded to tear his throat out to appease Dunx by belting out such classics as “The Hit,” “Shopping in America,” and “Breakout Tonight” (a cover by Tampa’s U-Boats) at max-intensity. Dunx still wasn’t satisfied, so after a while we had to force him out of the room.
Finally, we got to my favorite track the band had laid down. I hit RECORD then rolled the tape to listen closely to Erik’s vocals on “White Bitch.” Well, these lyrics sound a little sketchy, I thought… What the hell’s this about? Then I began to turn the words over in my mind…
She gonna make you spend your money/She gonna make you stay out all night/She gonna make you act all funny/She will make you cry cry cry
Oh–I get it! “White Bitch” is the greatest jingle for cocaine ever written!
Unfortunately, as awesome as the band played, we made the mistake of listening to Dunx and mixed all the songs that same night at three in the morning while our ears were beyond-shot–the results were not optimal and the band ultimately ended up shelving the whole session. Still, that couldn’t change the fact that the tunes themselves were electric, especially that song, “White Bitch,” which I just couldn’t get it out of my mind… It had woven its way into my head better than a Madison Avenue marketing campaign–or at least way better than the D.A.R.E. program had back in 7th Grade.
Shortly afterwards, my friend Richard and I were hanging out at our pal Jimmy’s house. Jimmy sold a lot of pot and he’d been getting back into doing blow after a long hiatus. I hadn’t tried coke in years–like I said, I’d sworn off all drugs a few years before after a really bad acid trip.
The guys did all their sniff while I was content to drink a Snakebite that Jimmy had made… then I looked over at the empty blow-bag laying on the table. There was some residue left inside it, I noticed. The echo of “White Bitch” kicked up a blizzard inside my head and I thought–Why not? Is it so bad to try a little? It’s not like I’m snorting it…
“Hey, guys–do you mind?”
Jimmy gave me the green light. “Naw, bud–go ahead.”
I dipped a finger in and gave a little taste. Hmmmm… Not bad… Then in no time at all my tongue was in all corners of the bag, scouring each crevice for any microscopic molecule of the precious booger sugar.
Damn. This wasn’t good.
An isolated incident, I assured myself.
But then a few nights later I was at a Fashion! Fashion! show at Will’s Pub. The band was burning up on stage and you could just smell what was fueling them in the air–it teased my sinuses and their dopamine-dealer brain up above. You’re never supposed to take sweets from a stranger, as any D.A.R.E. officer would tell you, but everybody at Will’s knew each other, right?
“Hey,” I begin to ask around, “know where we can get some shit? Oh yeah?”
My friend and I got directions to a house which was behind the Best Buy on Highway 50, though the blow itself wasn’t such a bargain: forty-bucks for a gram. Luckily, the amount of cocaine was so small that I didn’t even have to think about who made the stuff or how the shit got over to the U.S. in the first place… least of all how many lives had to be snuffed out at the hands of the cartels south-of-the-border all so that a couple of thrill-seeking Caucasian Americans could have some fun. Like I said–it was only for one night.
Well, fun we did have–so much, in fact, that I got some more the next weekend. And the next weekend. And then a few days after that. And then the next night. And the next night–
There was no stopping the crazy train. Fuck “Casey Jones” and the Grateful Dead–we were ALIVE and we had Fashion! Fashion!, the F-Pipes, Buttercups, the Hextremors and every other coke-sniffing Sunday Night Mutiny band at Backbooth as the soundtrack. It was a whole scene. Everybody was buddies, everybody was partying like Rock Stars and shit–everybody was a Rock Star. If all you had to do to feel like Motley Crüe was the same drugs as them, this seemed like a very practical shortcut from our white cloud of deluded confusion. Nobody was cruising down the Sunset Strip in the back of a hot-tub-equipped limousine–which Dunx had promised to Tracy Blades laid in store for Fashion! Fashion!–but we were all close enough.
One evening I partied so hard that I was convinced I could still go to work at 7 AM the next day despite the fact that I’d done so much blow my hands had contorted into these weird lobster-looking claws.
I got into my Dodge Ram van, which my band had used for touring. It used to be a very practical vehicle, carting our equipment across the country, but now it was quite useless and even more conspicuous due to its crushed-in roof and shattered rear-window thanks to the only falling tree I witnessed during Hurricane Francis the previous year. I sped to work, beyond-fucked up with a beer in hand, while the van swayed back and forth on the road like my head had the night before, when everybody was calling me Ray Charles.
“You got the right one, Baby! Uh-huh!”
But this wandering trajectory wasn’t all intoxication; in my vehicle’s cargo, not only was there a mountain of trash, but also the burnt-remains of a couch my friends and I had torched a month before at a bonfire in my backyard. I pulled up to the breakfast joint where I work and walked in, still gripping my beer even though the place was packed with Casselberry PD. My manager took me aside and asked, “What’s the matter with you? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine!” I told her. To prove this, I went into the walk-in cooler to stock the servers’ line, but promptly fell over into a five-gallon bucket of butter portions and spilled its entire contents across the floor. I tried to serve a table but holding plates with my lobstrosity hands wasn’t working–plus I forgot to bring utensils. Customers and coworkers alike stared at me in concern.
My manager, a recovered alcoholic, came to the conclusion: “You’re drunk!” She didn’t know the half of it. “Okay, honey–gimme your keys!” she screamed through the kitchen. “Go out to your car and sleep it off!”
I handed over my keys, then went back out to the van where I got cozy amid the sea of trash I maintained within. Before passing out, I stared up at the ceiling to reflect on the time when the Dodge was used to transport musical instruments instead of acting as a dumpster-on-wheels–when life had more purpose. “I’m getting my shit together after this,” I told myself before slipping into unconsciousness…
Yet that same night I was back up at the Copper Rocket watching the F-Pipes, doing coke in my van off of a plate. Somehow, it had become customary to bring fine china to Punk Rock shows.
The next day at work, I blew my nose in the kitchen and a river of blood poured out. My nasal passage was like the elevator at the Overlook. “What’s going on?” my boss asked. “Who all is on drugs around here?”
“Uh–nobody I know of…”
I was done. Definitely no more of that shit. But then that night was Sunday Night Mutiny again at Backbooth–one last hurrah couldn’t hurt, could it?
I was hanging out with Richard at my house and we were trying to score–Jimmy had a couple of grams at his house that he was willing to part with. Jeremy from the Buttercups and Ryan Codone came over to get in on the action–it was amazing to see how many friends I had since this wonderful white lady had come into my life!
Richard and I made the run while the other guys waited back at my place. My undead Dodge lumbered up to the corner of Pennsylvania and Orange, where a cop was posted in the Cumberland Farms lot. No big deal–we were just a couple of pals out for an evening drive in a bashed-out van. So what if it looked like we’d driven in from some apocalyptic alternate dimension? We didn’t have anything on us…
Yet.
I made a right on Pennsylvania, Jimmy’s street, and drove slowly down in the dark. I’d only been to his house a couple times before, and knew I had to make a really sharp turn to get into the driveway which led into a one-lane alley feeding into the back parking area. The street was so dark that I ended up driving right past it.
“Shit!” Richard cried out. “You missed it!”
“Damn–should we just park on the street?”
“No–you can’t do that around here…”
“Fuck it–I’ll just circle back around.”
Big mistake. My obtuse path brought us right back by the Cumberland Farms, where the cop still sat idling. “Oh, Jesus…” This time when I turned down Pennsylvania, the cop put his car in gear.
“Shit…”
There was still a dull moment of doubt when I thought, Hey, maybe it’s just a coincidence that he left the gas station at the same exact time that we circled the block, but that thought-bubble poofed as his cruiser got right on my ass. Jimmy’s house was so close, yet so far away–
I spotted the driveway this time–but what the hell was I supposed to do? That’s when it occurred to me I should behave as any other law-abiding citizen would when alerting another driver of their altruistic intentions…
I put on my turn signal.
“You idiot!” Richard cried out.
The cop snapped on his misery lights at that exact moment and I knew I was fucked; I’d led the pigs right to where our woman in white awaited us.
I rolled the Dodge down through the alley to where it dead-ended in a gravel parking spot and shoved over my gear shift with a heavy sigh. The officer pulled up right behind me, blocking any potential escape. We were trapped. He got out and stepped to my window, told me to kill my engine–which I know you’re supposed to wait for them to do–then asked for all the usual documents: license, registration, proof of insurance. I wasn’t too worried at this point; aside from our bloodstreams, Richard and I were clean as could be.
Then he asked me what business I had up at the residence, which now towered above us.
“Oh–we weren’t trying to come to this spot, exactly.” I informed the officer, genteel as could be. “We were just driving around…”
“Just driving around? So why did you pull into this particular driveway?”
I looked in the side view mirror at the steep, single-lane slope up to freedom. “I was lost, so we were just going to turn around down here and–”
“Kind of a strange place to turn around, don’t you think?”
“Well, I don’t really know this area too well…”
He looked at my license again. “But isn’t Hazel Street only about five minutes away from here?”
I shrugged.
“So, what you’re telling me is that you didn’t mean to pull into this driveway and up to this house?”
“Absolutely not, officer.”
“What were you doing with your turn signal on?”
“Just letting you know I was going to do a three-point here…” I knew there was no way he could prove me wrong–the policy of Deny Everything hadn’t failed me yet in life…
“And you don’t know anybody that lives here?”
“No, sir.”
More cops arrived to further cut off our path towards sanctuary from the law. Escape was an impossible illusion, but it wouldn’t be necessary; these guys had nothing on us. “You boys mind stepping out of the vehicle?”
I looked at Richard but he’d erased all expression from his face. I realized that if we wanted to go home anytime soon, we had no choice but to play their little game for a few moments longer. “Sure,” I agreed with the utmost diplomacy.
“Come around this way,” the cop instructed Richard.
The porker made us stand at the rear of the van where we were blinded by the head lamps of the multiple squad cars slanted down at us–from my skewed perspective it seemed like they had at least half of the fucking force there. This little piggy went to confer with the rest of the swine, then returned.
“Mr. Dobbs, do you know there’s a pull-tag order on this vehicle?”
I’d been content to play my role in their Sunday night drama up to this point, but now I knew that this guy was full of shit. “No, there is not.”
“There is. We don’t have you registered as insured in the database.”
“That’s impossible! I just handed you my proof!”
“You gave me a card, sure–but the state doesn’t have any record of it.”
What the fuck?
One of the other cops waddled down the hill. “You guys say you don’t know anybody up at this house?” he inquired.
“No!” Richard repeated for the umpteenth time.
“That’s funny, because there’s a fella up here that says he knows both of you.”
Yeah, fuckin’ right… I squinted up at the house but couldn’t see anything through the pigs’ infernal high beams and spinning roof lights. It looked like one of the cops was talking to somebody on the porch, but the vague silhouette was too small to be Jimmy–a neighbor, perhaps? Whatever the case, now I was certain these guys were lying. There was no way our friends would snitch on us… Every cop is a criminal, after all. “Nope, we don’t know a soul that lives here…”
You’ve got the wrong one, baby! Uh-Uh!
“So you guys were out here, just driving around, and made this turn right behind a house where somebody says he knows both of you, but you don’t know him?”
“That’s right, officer.”
“Mind if we search the vehicle?”
“Mr. Dobbs, we have a hit.”
Even though I was one-hundred percent certain that we had nothing to hide–besides criminal intent, that was–I’d been prepared for this shoe to drop. “I don’t think that will be necessary, officer,” I told him. This cop had already lied to me about my lack-of-insurance and the pull-tag order–so why should I allow him to search my van? He didn’t have the right and I refused to grant him any single speck of satisfaction. “Absolutely not.”
“Well, okay…” He gave a signal and more officers emerged from the sea of lights to creep around my creeper-van. One of them, I noticed, happened to be a K-9 Unit… The dog’s handler began to lead him around the Ram.
Even though I had been sniffing blow in there the night before, I couldn’t help but think, This dog’s not gonna smell shit.
Of course, that’s when he started barking.
But we had finished all that shit! I knew I had nothing to hide. “Yeah, right…”
“Okay–please step over here,” the cops instructed, then handcuffed us. Afterwards, they implored us to come clean about the drugs we didn’t even possess. “Mr. Dobbs, I know that there are narcotics in this van of yours–if you don’t tell us where they are right now, we’re going to pull every single thing out of there and it’s not going to be pretty.”
“You’re not gonna find anything,” I told him. “Do whatever you want.”
The cops proceeded to do just that. They tore my van apart without discrimination, profiling non-garbage the same as garbage. They ransacked the loft my band and our roadie had built and chucked a supply of band merch out onto the rocks with the rest of the refuse.
One of the cops regarded the contents of a splayed-open box to keep us occupied. “What are those?”
“CDs…”
“Y’all into music or somethin’?”
Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll, I wanted to say, though it was apparent that order was off. The latter of which used to be the priority, but that time seemed like an eon before. “Somethin’.” I nodded.
“The wife and I just went to see a Kenny Chesney concert last month…”
“Kenny Chesney, huh?” Richard remarked. “That’s great…”
“You guys play in bands, then?” another one of the cops asked us–he was much younger than the rest of them.
“Yep,” I said as I watched them throttle a box full of LPs onto the cold hard ground.
“There’s a house up the road where some guys play–up on Hammerlin.”
Recognition struck my face. Oh my God.
“You know those guys?”
I certainly did–that was the Fashion! Fashion! house, where I’d just scored some blow at a house party about a week before. “Sure do…”
“What’s all this burnt wood?” the first cop asked after they yanked open the Dodge’s rear doors. “Part of your stage show?”
“Oh, no–that’s a couch that we lit on fire in my backyard about a month or two ago…”
As the metal bit deeper into my wrists, I began to feel worried–these guys were not going to let up until they found something. Tallying up their lies and the way they were treating us, I didn’t put them above planting some false evidence. Who was I going to call to get me out of jail this time? Could I call my mom again? She’d gotten me out once before on grand theft, but what would she think about a narcotics charge? Had that K-9 really detected something, or had the pigs trained their goddamn dogs to be liars, too?
Perhaps Marvin Lee Aday, better known to the world as Meatloaf, had been right to replace the word drugs with drums in his famous song, “I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)…” What a mess this white bitch had gotten me into…
Please, I prayed to the God of Sex and Drums and Rock ‘n Roll. Please, please, please–please let them not find anything–if they don’t find anything I’ll never touch this shit ever again…
Never.
Again.
The coppers finally grew frustrated–there was only so much of my garbage they could get through and no more of my life left to fling onto the earthen floor. Since they couldn’t produce any drugs, that meant it was ticket time. As it turned out, the crappy insurance company I’d chosen, Esurance, hadn’t seen fit to let the State of Florida know that I was one of their clients. (Boycott!) The first officer issued me a plethora of citations for driving a vehicle that had a pull-tag order on it–then, since my van was no longer street-legal, he informed me they had to impound it.
The pork bellies uncuffed Richard and I and we walked back to my house without another glance at Jimmy’s place. Glad we hadn’t ratted on our friend, we watched the tow truck blow by with my van on it, the only one of us to be taken into custody that night.
Ryan and Jeremy were still at my house–it’s funny how patient people can be when they’re waiting for the man. I gave them their money back with the bad news–snow-snow was a no-go.
Richard’s phone rang–it was our friend Sean. “What the hell happened to you guys?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m over here at Jimmy’s house! The cops knocked on the door and asked if I knew you guys–I told them ‘yes’ and then you idiots kept denying it! What the hell’s wrong with you two?”
You’ve got to be kidding me.
So the dumbass cops weren’t lying about that, either? Perhaps there was a fault or two to denying everything…
Over the next two days I went through twenty-six miles of barbed wire and red tape to get my license, insurance and van back. I bounced around between the DMV, tag office, Clerk of Courts and the impound lot, all while riding around in the back of our roadie’s car sitting on a bucket sans-seat belt since he didn’t have a back seat. I also had to go to the Winter Park police station to find the accursed cop who’d pulled me over to get him to correct something on one of my tickets. It was an unnerving experience, walking into the lion’s den… Through the whole ordeal, though, I kept my pledge to the God of Sex and Drums and Rock ‘n Roll: no more coca. I would take Meatloaf over Eric Clapton any day.
About a month later, I finally decided to clean out my van. I pulled up next to the dumpster behind my work and began the task of purging all the burnt shit and trash that had come to encompass my life. Next to the front seat, I began grabbing up garbage near one of the spots the cops had pored over at least fifty times that night–
And what should I find?
A tiny plastic bag lined with coke residue at the bottom. The cops–and their little dog, too–hadn’t lied about anything. Just as every cop is a criminal, all sinners are saints. “Holy shit!”
And this was some holy shit: finding this little baggie cemented my belief in the phenomenon of Divine Intervention. My faith in the God of Sex and Drums and Rock ‘n Roll was confirmed. Forever. When he made me, he’d created such a slob that those pigs totally missed a bag of coke! Praise the Lord! I’ve still never touched that shit to this day…
But wasn’t it Rock ‘n Roll that I blamed for getting me into this mess to begin with? Like I said before–and as much as it pains me to admit it–sometimes the squares are right: Rock ‘n Roll can be really bad for you–
But that’s only when it’s really good.
In the case of Fashion! Fashion! and the Image Boys, it was proven to me without a shadow of a doubt that Rock ‘n Roll can annihilate your soul. Don’t believe me? The Beatles, for as under-appreciated as they are in the city of Atlanta, inspired Charles Manson for god sakes. Then you’ve Kiss, one of the most demonic, detrimental-to-the-youth groups ever, who cover a song that claims “God Gave Rock ‘n Roll to You”…Now, as much as that song sucks, the sentiment happens to be true. But, much like with life, it’s what you do with it that matters.
Joshua Danger Dobbs 