Dear Friends,
I used to look forward to the Sunday paper. It was big and filled with good stuff. You could spend a whole lot of time with it and always feel like you got something good out of it, too. There was a method to my madness, too.
Most days, I would peruse the front page and if something really grabbed me there, I would stay in the first section for a bit. If not, I would go to the Valley and State section and see what was going on locally in the news. As a sports fan, I would usually hold off for a bit so I could really savor the sports page.
Sometimes I would even go to the entertainment section before the sports page. I loved the sports page on Sundays during the baseball season because they would list all the batting averages of every major league player with enough at-bats to quality. I loved that.
Eventually I would make it to the comics and the ads. If I was looking for a job, I would scour the want ads. If not, I used to like to look at the section of musical instruments for sale and would often look at all the other stuff people were selling, too. It was kind of fascinating.
I would also look at the obituaries. This was in hope, of course, that I wouldn’t see anyone that I knew, but occasionally I would see a person I knew. Now, I bet I would see someone I knew or was a degree or two separated from almost every week. This is how it is now.
I miss those days. I also miss the days when you felt like you could trust the newspaper to give you an unbiased opinion on what was happening in the world. Those days are gone. Long, fucking gone. It’s hard to be part of the journalism world and be proud of it anymore. People expect some sort of fuckery from you.
Over the last couple of years, I find myself explaining my approach more and more to the people I interview. I have no agenda except to tell a good story. I hope I come across as genuine and I guess I do. People open up to me pretty well, I think.
It’s really embarrassing to see that newspapers have given themselves over to pandering to one side or the other when it comes to politics. I’m so tired of it all. Many authors have written about this stuff and, if you know your history, this is either happened before or was close to happening. The authoritarian state where the government controls the information we receive is here and it sucks.
Call me crazy, but I like honesty with my news and frankly, I don’t trust any of them anymore. Both the left and the right are more than happy to spread things that just aren’t true because they want to keep people watching. How fucked up is that? At least when I was a kid, people didn’t watch the news if they didn’t like what they were hearing. They didn’t just go out and find a channel that fed them exactly what they wanted to hear.
I have to believe that AI will be used to give everyone the news they want to read in the manner they want to consume it. There will be algorithms based on each person’s consumption of media that will just feed us what we want to see and hear and keep us docile. It will be easy, too.
There isn’t a paper in the US right now that I would go out of my way to read.
That’s sad.
*****
As much as I really like the entirety of the Might Sphincter catalog, and I do, I have to hang my Halloween hat with the first 7”. It was a self-titled thing of repulsive beauty. That record is a favorite of mine.
Yesterday, which was Saturday, I was driving with my kids, and I used my phone to pull it up on YouTube. It didn’t take long for Liam to ask, “What the fuck is this?”
“it’s Mighty Sphincter.”
“Oh, are they a thing again?”
“No, Doug’s dead. Well, shit, wait…three of the four guys on this record are dead.”
“That sucks,” was Liam’s reply, and it does suck.
It really sucks.
Over the last several years of Doug Clark’s life, he became a friend of mine and a valued friend at that. I loved Doug. There was something about him that was so endearing to me. Sure, he could be exasperating a lot of the time, but he was mentally ill. He didn’t mean to be exasperating. Life was exasperating for him, I think, too.
The work he did with his beloved band was pretty fucking amazing. I don’t know how many musicians I have talked to over the years from other cities who wanted to know about Sphincter. It’s a pretty high number.
Even on this first 7”, you can tell there is something pretty warped and pretty special going on. It’s not just Doug, either. Joe Albanese (RIP) played a monster bass and was one of my all-time favorite bass players to watch. The guy was smooth and powerful.
Ron Reckless was intimidating to watch, but a kind of a weird, sweetheart of a guy on the occasions that I got to talk to him at any length. He was also a tremendous frontman and had a way of delivering lyrics that made you wonder just how much he was fucking with you. His work on this 7” is nothing short of batshit crazy excellence.
What more would you expect from a band called Mighty Sphincter?
Lastly, drummer Greg “Mr. Wonderful” Hynes leaves no stone unturned and undeterred here. He had a way of bringing all the ramshackle craziness together in a spiffy, jazzy, and powerful way. I loved watching Greg play drums.
“Heathouse” is a wild one that is either about the legendary Phoenix punk house, “Hate House” or about working out a gym and getting cruised by musclebound dudes. I’d say it is the former because the second song on side one is called “Fag Bar.” This one is definitely about getting cruised by some Greek gods and sodomized.
Brand New Christ covered this one when we recorded back in 2017. It came out pretty well. My children were not impressed with the lyrics, but I explained to them that a lot of the early Phoenix punk rock happenings were in gay bars and there was an actual affinity between the early punk scene and the gay scene.
I was definitely called a “fag” many times for the way I dressed in my teenage years. Punk rock and homosexuality made narrow minds nervous. People haven’t really changed, either, but they are less vocal about the punks.
“Exterminator” is a song I’ve wondered about the last few years. I am curious if it was a nod to Doug’s first band, The Exterminators. I wasn’t part of the scene yet, so I don’t know if that was the case or not and I don’t really want to ask Greg about it.
“Electric Hose Bag” is just a hell of a lot of fun. There is something truly tasteless about the song that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I like it a lot.
This is punk rock from Arizona. Weird, butt-lovin’ punk rock and I’m proud to be a small part of the scene it helped create. Viva Mighty Sphincter and I miss my buddy, Doug, a lot. May he rise again.
*****
See you tomorrow.
This is probably not what Ron Reckless was talking about, AI. Nice try.
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