by Dale Nixon
It was the winter of 1988.
My punk band S.V.O.E. (Shrieking Void of Emptiness) was revved up for our first "tour".
Well, not exactly a tour, but a single out-of-state show booked in Harrisburg, Penn. by a summer camp friend of our singer Brett Gustafson (now a high school principal in NYC's Chinatown). We were slated to appear with legendary D.C. rawk-punk band Scream along with a couple of local bands. The excitement was palpable; a bona fide road trip with a legitimate touring band. And because we were an out-of-state band, we would get the slot right in front of Scream on the bill, a rare honor for a band used to playing about 10 minutes before the doors of the club were actually unlocked.
I was still playing bass at the time and we loaded half of our equipment into the Toyota pickup of our drummer and the other half went into the Isuzu Trooper of our singer. Our tongue-twisting name was based on a comment of my evangelical born-again Big Value Supermarket boss known semi-affectionately as PumpkinHead, who had stated in one of his Sunday morning rants that "anyone without Jesus in his life had a shrieking void of emptiness".
Not knowing at the time how long band names stuck, nor how many times in intervening years it would have to be explained, we decided this would make a cool moniker. Especially since three of us spent each day with Catholic dogma being tattooed onto our skulls by the Boston-accented-boy-touchers known as the Army of the Pope; the Jesuits. To summarize Jesuit doctrine, pre-marital sex was very, very bad. As was abortion, contraceptives and any other sort of ungodly apparatus, including, but not limited to, other types of Christians, Jews and other assorted heathens.
Bad also most definitely applied to our self-taught musicianship, or lack thereof, but we were in high school, it was a band and we had a gig 350 miles away and parental permission to hit the road.
After a long slog through the coal-mining hills of Central Pennsylvania, we arrived at the club to find our name on the outdoor sign. Somehow the name of the club escapes me, but it was something like Club Tropicale, although I may somehow be confusing it with the chicken chain Pollo Tropical. In any case, it was a glitzy club with a sort of cheap tiki motif, painted blacklight palm trees on the wall and believe it or not a stage with lighting and a fairly decent PA system. By cheap tiki, there was no 50's retro look, it was a combination of free Hawaiian style beer distributor promos, neon bar light amd some sort of palm-trees-in-the-Sahara montage mural on all four walls.
Midnight, it seemed, would be at the Oasis.
Thanks to Google, I actually just found the club, and it has since been turned into a shady strip joint that mysteriously burned down.
20 years of bad karma, coming to get'cha!
But the biggest surprise was that there seemed to be an actual "crowd" waiting to get into the club. Now, if I may digress for just a second, in those days "crowd" at an all-ages show meant about a hundred dudes and two women, usually girlfriends of local band members.
The gender-fication of punk/hardcore did not happen until at least 10 years later and girls at this time were scarcer than, well, the number of females we saw daily at our all boys high school.
Yes, there were actual girls waiting to get into the show. Not haggard purple-mohawked punk rock chicks with plaid Johnny Rotten pants, but honest-to-goodness attractive, unattached high school girls. Probably of Pennsylvania Dutch descent. And if there are two things the PennDutch do well - natural blue-eyed blondes and pretzels would be 1) and 1a) on the list.
We are ushered to the backstage area where we meet Scream, who were already unloading their white van. The brotherly tag team of singer Pete Stahl (who would later end up in Wool and Goatsnake) and guitarist Franz Stahl seemed less than impressed that our own rag-tag band of high schoolers-with-one older dude would be opening for them, as did cigarette-huffing guitarist Robert Lee (Harley) Davidson, who resembled Keith Richards circa Sticky Fingers. Much more amiable was drummer Dave Grohl, who was closer to our age than the Stahl brothers and enthusiastic, even to the point of joining our beer run.
We hit the stage in front of, oh, maybe 350 people. The rough equivalent of the entire room at our high school prom. We played better than we ever had before, or at least it seemed that way, as energy, adrenaline and nerves combined with a few well-placed double agents in the crowd to get people into it. Girls in front of the stage, in front of our amps, while we played. The culmination of years of basement black mold inhalation and rock n' roll wet dreams.
Of course, all bets were off when Scream's rock n' roll juggernaut hit the stage with a fury. Tight. Fast. Melodic. Hooks and guitar leads beyond our comprehension. Jaws collectively hit the floor. Fillings were shaken loose by the relentless pounding of Grohl, a dervish who hit with the fury of Bonham and the speed of Dave Lombardo. The bar, it seems, had been raised. Tight and professional, with songs both powerful and dynamic, Scream had it all.
All, we would come to find out, except their $300 guarantee. We had been promised $100 in travel expenses, but probably would have settled for $50 to pay for our hotel room at the Ramada.
The show promoter, our aforementioned friend, was psyched with the turnout. The PA guy, it seemed, would be paid. The bands would be paid. The club would take their cut. There might even be a few bucks to throw into the kitty for the next show.
We trooped into the club owner's office to pick up our funds, as visions of our case of Budweiser, hotel rooms and potential groupies danced in our heads. The club owner, however, had other plans. First, he berated us as we asked for money in some semi-understandable middle eastern dialect, his gold chains clanking as sweat beads popped off the vein in his forehead while he screamed.
Then, Pete Stahl repeated his request for Scream's guarantee, pointing to the all-too-apparent six-inch high pile of $5's and $10's on the club owner's desk. Pete offered the opinion that the bands would not be ready to leave until we all got our cut of the door, which had been collected not by our friend Tom, but the club owner's greasy-looking brother. The owner then yelled over to another of his brothers (a bartender), who seemed to materialize like an apparition from somewhere in the wall, although he had probably just walked through an Al Capone door camouflaged in the paint of the office.
The brother, was brandishing a loaded, fully automatic M-16 (pre-assault weapon ban). It pointed in our general direction, and screamed at us in no uncertain terms to "get the faaaaaaccccckkkkkkk out of our club, now!"
Needless to say, there was no guarantee for any bands that night.
But it was a good punk rock story.
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