A.Cave #4 — BRAVE MOVES

Talking with Jim McHugh [The P.I.T. - Sunwatchers - Eugene Chadbourne - Arthur Doyle - Dark Meat]

Jim McHugh has been doing underground, grassroots shit since bands booked tours with a tattered copy of Book Your Own Fucking Life. In the following conversation—part one of a two-parter—Jim tells us about the radical activism and gnarly music endemic to the area where he grew up; he then moves to a bohemian enclave that encourages him to fly his freak flag, before dealing with scumsucking big city dickheads. Strap yourself in to the Greyhound and take a cross-country joyride into the heart of dankness.

woodcut by John Vasquez Mejias

When did the musical journey start for young Jim?

The first musician I ever knew was my great-grandmother who played 6 or 7 instruments. Nobody can remember how many she played. My first experience learning and playing music was with her as a 5 and 6 year old. She taught me how to play harmonica. Harmonica was my first instrument. I can't find an applicable use for it because when you play harmonica, well, it's kind of a weapon you hold by the blade, because it makes everything sound like a certain thing.

Appalachian type jams.

I'm from the land of banjos, that's for sure. The first superstar of the banjo is from my home county—Rockingham County, North Carolina. Charlie Poole. This dude typifies and embodies the most Rockingham County, North Carolina thing, because he developed a signature banjo style, which came before Earl Scruggs, who is also from nearby where I'm from. The dominant banjo style which Poole developed because he was drunk on his lunch break, working at the textile mill playing baseball and he broke his right hand and paralyzed it. I consider Charlie Poole the ultimate embodiment of being a musician from Rockingham County, North Carolina, because that motherfucker broke his hand playing baseball, drunk on a lunch break at the textile mill beside the polluted river. You know what I mean? It's redneck as fuck. 

You said you grew up in a town called Reidsville.

It's just fucking rural and small, man. I studied writing in college and my teacher, Michael Parker, used to call it your postage stamp. Your postage stamp is the little area that you're from and you can never get rid of it. The thing that defines you and the things that you despise about it and the things that you love about it. But it's kind of your fingerprint in a way and it's burdensome to almost everybody. But it also can be a great thing, if you can work it out. So my postage stamp is being from this small fucking town in North Carolina, right? Where it's rural. What happened in my hometown explains a lot of my radicalization, because I'm an anarchist and I founded this anarchist community space P.I.T., right? That is sort of like my life's work. My town was destroyed by NAFTA. What's in my hometown is the Lucky Strike factory. The town was pretty much created to make Lucky Strike cigarettes. My grandfather played for the Lucky Strike baseball team. That typifies what capitalism does and the hearts and minds aspect of capitalism. Because the self image, the economy, the way of life of the hometown was propagated and created and sustained by this capitalist entity, American tobacco. If you sweep the floors at American tobacco, you make more than the public school teachers, which is what my mom did. You can have a life, you could have a home, you can own a home, you can have kids and support them. It was part of the identity of the place. Then NAFTA happens. American tobacco is allowed to move for its own benefit and move to Mexico. The town's economy crumbled and will never recover. What happened in that vacuum to people's self-image, self-regard and their ability to support their lives is fucking dark. I saw this happen in 1995. So my postage stamp is coming from this small place, Reidsville. The ability to sustain itself is gutted by this policy. I'm not trying to blow hard about this, I'm just saying that where I come from typifies a lot of small town experiences. This happened in the prime of me becoming a teenager. Another thing my teacher Michael Parker used to say was when you hit puberty the hormones that make you weird or whatever, he would argue that it's your burgeoning sense of self and how that separates you, how that's like a schism for the rest of your existence up to that point. So, like, you're essentially coming into yourself aesthetically, psychologically, emotionally. For me, that was all about finding punk rock, because punk rock represented something much different than my experience to that point. 

Young Jim discovers punk.

I remember I literally found a JFA CD in the gutter, not in a case. Live JFA from 1984. I took it home and lovingly cleaned it up and made a case for it. I was clamoring for it. My brother had an issue of Guitar Player magazine laying around and it was one that they talked about Raw Power. I was just clamoring for whatever I could find and there were these instruments laying around. So I was really trying to figure out how to play. It's funny because there was a lot of musicality acknowledged in my family. I had my brother's shitty 10-watt Crate bass amp and his $70 Stinger bass and the action was about two inches high and I’m trying to fucking play “Forming” by the Germs over and over and over. There was like a fair amount of dismay according to the musicality I was perceived to have and the music I was trying to make. So I had to search for support elsewhere. I found it catching rides to Greensboro, which is nearby, to skateboard and to go to house shows. I started to play in bands when I was like 15 or 16. My first band that played shows was called Young Life. We named our band to antagonize this white high school Christian youth group shit. We named our band after that and it was like crazy antagonistic to those people. 

What was the Greensboro scene like?

One thing that's unique about the Greensboro punk scene is that the most significant shows I saw were in houses. Bands like Los Crudos. There was a band called Blown Apart Bastards. They lived at this punk house and they called themselves eco-grind. The way that Discharge is obsessed with nuclear war, Blownapart was obsessed with animal rights and it was like gnarly, fucking slobbed-out grindcore.  And the drummer, who I'm still friends with, Brian Tippa, was at UNC Greensboro where I ended up going to college. He did a study abroad in Scotland where he joined Oi Polloi. Oi Polloi would come and play Greensboro. They did a split seven-inch with Blownapart. I saw a Blown Apart Bastards/Oi Polloi show at a club in Greensboro called The Turtle, which was a total Greensboro situation because it's inundated with hard drugs and the dude who ran the Turtle lived in the back and it was this dark fucking dank place. So all of these fucking skinheads from Chapel Hill showed up. The skinheads in Chapel Hill  typified the thing where it's like the more something is, the more extreme the behavior in its name has to be, to prove that it's real. Because they were the sons of well-to-do liberal professors; they were masquerading as nationalist fucking warriors or whatever, but dressed to the nines in Ben Sherman and all this shit. In Greensboro there was this group of semi-terrifying skinheads that we later got to know; but the thing is, they were basically group home orphans who liked the style. But they were quite criminal. They would steal cars. So the Chapel Hill skinheads come to the show because they thought Oi Polloi was a skin band because of the name. The first thing Oi Polloi does is burn a flag and a fucking riot broke out. I was just a young hick from Reidsville. Like, what the fuck? But I stuck because it was exciting. So many people bothered by burning the American flag. They tried to turn over Oi Polloi's van. They broke my friend Zach's nose.

The shit went down.

Greensboro has a real tradition of hard-ass radical activism because the first sit-ins were there. It's always been a seat of radical black political movement and that's a big part of what politicized Greensboro’s scene. It was its affiliation and its alliance with these leftist black radicals who would organize a pipeline between radical action and punk shit. Highly organized, incredibly radicalized political action. I'm grateful that that's part of my postage stamp. Do you know about the Greensboro massacre? The KKK and undercover cops colluded to murder a coalition of black and white leftist labor organizers at a rally, and they did it in broad daylight and they got away with it. Through, I think, five civil and criminal trials, they got acquitted. This happened in my lifetime, man. 

One of the people who were organizing in Greensboro was Nelson Johnson. who is a reverend. He's still alive, but he had shotgun scars from that. This is why the punk scene in Greensboro versus Chapel Hill, where there was a cliquish aspect, and then this reactionary nationalist shit. The punk scene in Greensboro was largely anarcho, leftist, and highly organized in this way because of its alliance with people who had shotgun scars from a police massacre. I remember Rev. Nelson Johnson having a rally and march at his church that was opposed to the Contract on America by Newt Gingrich.

Ha. Although that’s a far more apt name, it was “Contract with America.”

Exactly. Yeah. So we met at his church to march. You had anarcho-punks who looked the part and members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and working class black folks, because if they didn't do it, who would? It was for their survival, period. Reverend Johnson said to us—”We're glad you're here and we welcome you and we need your support. You better believe in what you're doing, because they'll make you disappear and get away with it.” It was incredibly powerful and definitive and this is from someone who literally has bullet wounds.

So that was an incredibly powerful moment for me, to link the intentionality of music and subculture. It wasn't good for your social life or your sex life or your physical health to be involved in underground scenes in places like Greensboro. So you had to be committed to it for another reason. And that commitment is still definitive for me and working with those activists helped define that commitment. There's something bigger than you that needs to be fucking confronted and the only way you're gonna solve it is by joining and helping to create something bigger than you.

That’s intense.

Greensboro is similar to Chattanooga in that it's socially acceptable to hit a crack stem when the sun is out on a bar patio, or at least it was back then. That's cool on the one hand because it's not a stigma, and we know it's part of that stigma which is racism and classism. Powder is good and smoking crack is what these other people do. I'm not endorsing smoking crack, but it was like—Oh, he's doing his thing, which is whatever, but it fucked a lot of people up and a lot of people I love are dead now. 

One thing I’m proud about in Greensboro is that there's a lot of committed activists that were part of that scene who I still work with through P.I.T. Zach, who got his nose broken at the Oi Polloi show, has been a part of the AK Press collective for over 20 years and is still a super supportive comrade. That's some Greensboro shit, being committed in that way because it wasn't easy. And because of the stakes that we were aligned to, through connection to people who survived the Greensboro massacre. You had to make music like that in that social atmosphere. And that's definitive for me, that's part of my postage stamp too. 

Setting the bar high.

I'm never not disappointed in New York when you deal with a fucking person who you realize, like—Oh you make fucking grant-funded mouthfart music. Not because you're committed to it socially or ideologically or aesthetically, it's because you were trained that it could be your career and you can make money and prestige out of this and you self-commodified as a rule and you're a fucking asshole capitalist to deal with.

And they ruin mouthfart music too, which should be by the people and for the people.

I think my commitment originates in terms of where I'm from. I don't need a cookie or a medal for that. I'm just saying that a real part of who I am, is why I do what I do. 

You'd rather see more people with you though. 

Exactly. Being a musician, being an anarchist, running P.I.T., is acknowledging what I'm grateful for and who's there. And there's quite a bit, you know what I mean? Including Eugene Chadbourne, who was a huge influence on me. 

Let's talk about Eugene. 

I used to see him play all the time. He's lived in Greensboro since the early ‘80s.

Playing guitar with a balloon, among other things…

We used to call it balloonacy when he did that. By the time I came around in the early ‘90s, Eugene was playing for free at the record store. His records were in the dollar bin. I was like—What is this shit? I found the record that he made with Sun City Girls with the Matt Groening cover art. Eugene would come to this cafe where I worked and he'd be like—Hey, uh, can I get a pound of Sumatran ground? I'm woodshedding with this drummer and we're playing a free show at the record store down the street on Saturday. So I go and it's fucking Han Bennink. My exposure to this deep avant-garde shit happened really organically through him. Also, I can't underestimate this effect that he had on me as I remember being a teenager and watching him play and he goes from doing crazy improv to hillbilly music. My interest in him at that point might have been that I'd heard that he’d made a record with Jello Biafra, because I was hungry for punk rock. But I was coming from growing up hearing country music and banjo music, which he does. So these medleys where he would do “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” on a banjo into an Albert Ayler song. So this is linking shit that I'm obsessed with, with music that I know about because I came up hearing it, with stuff that I want to know about, which is incredibly validating.

It opened your ears.

It also validates the shit I grew up hearing. You don't have to leave it all behind. That can be a part of what you do. It doesn't have to be a hard break. And the fact that he's a hard-ass leftist, sings protest music, singing songs about what happened in the news that day. You know what I mean? All of it was incredibly encouraging and validating and opened my mind and my heart and my ears to all this shit.

Careful with that axe, Eugene

How many other people were at a Eugene Chadbourne in-store? 

Probably eight. Eventually Eugene came to play at our space, the Onion Cellar. I was loaded and I got up and played drums with him. I was 20 or 21. Then years later we became friends.  I had the great privilege of playing with Arthur Doyle and producing his last record and I asked Eugene to write some liner notes. That's how we began a relationship. He was like—I remember the Onion Cellar. One of the times I played some crazy maniac got up and played drums and I was like—Oh, that was me. 

You had all these connections and interactions with him back then, but it wasn’t until many years later that you actually hook up—like a romantic comedy where they don't get together in high school, but then in their forties, they discover they always loved each other.

sick Guru Guru shirt, Eugene

Tell me what being an agitated weirdo punker was like in 1990s Greensboro.

Around the same time I found that JFA CD, I bought the first No Trend record for a dollar and the first Butthole Surfers record for a dollar. That fucking changed my life. Those are definitive for me. So we had a space called the Onion Cellar. It was a storefront. We had all sorts of touring bands come play. That's how I first met John Dwyer—Coachwhips played there with Burmese.

Switching to slightly younger anarchist agitators, Crimethinc is from Greensboro, no?

For sure. So again, the part of the Greensboro radical history and dissemination of ideology is pretty deep in this way, because Crimethinc is from there. I was in a band in high school called President's Choice, named after the shitty discount food brand.  

I don't even know that. Is that a Southern thing? 

You would go to Kroger and it was like President's Choice. The brand stickers on the shelf were hanging and you could rip them off and reuse them for the band. We were on a comp with Capitalist Casualties. I have a really sweet memory of Brian from Crimethinc and Catharsis. I was 16 and President's Choice was playing with Catharsis at this really fucking gnarly, drugged out punk house in Greensboro. My grandfather had died that day and I grew up next to my grandparents, so we were super close and I didn't know what to do except go play a show, which is what I lived to do. Catharsis was like a youth crew straight-edge band at this point. In my memory, he has a flat-top. I remember being like—I don’t know what to do. My grandfather died today. He looked at me and he was like—Are you OK? Like, really caring. It meant a lot.

So when do you move to Athens (Georgia)?

I graduated from UNCC (University of North Carolina Greensboro), where I studied writing. I wanted to make music and I was in bands, but it was largely a frustrating scenario. Greensboro was a really fucked up strung out scene at this point; just really dysfunctional. We did cool shit, but I was really frustrated with the inability to keep a band together. So I moved to Athens with Ben Clack, who I went to college with. Athens was a little more happening and I went there to ostensibly join this band that had some records out.

Pylon?

I wish, dude. When Pylon would play, I would stand as close to Randy's hands as I could to try to see what the fuck he was doing on guitar. I love that band. It would be word of mouth, like—Hey, Pylon is playing a show at 1 AM. Vanessa is so sweet and awesome. Her daughter was a big Dark Meat fan. All of Dark Meat worked at this soul food restaurant, which is part of our name. I didn't know that this woman who would come in and talk like my aunt or something was Vanessa from Pylon. She's like—Hannah loves your band and she'd be like—I love the macaroni and cheese here and just like, a nice person you see once a month or whatever. Then Pylon got back together and we go to the show and I'm like—that's Vanessa. 

She loves the mac & cheese.

Yeah. 

So how does Dark Meat come together?

Because we were coming from Greensboro, which is a fucked up, drugged out crazy ass dysfunctional scene, me and Ben were kind of like wild freaks down there. Athens is a freak scene, but it's normalized in a way. We were kind of rowdy and raggedy. Elephant 6 was going on and we were involved with those people and they are our friends and comrades. We love them. I worked for Orange Twin Records. But we were coming from, musically and personally, a way more fucked up place and louder and gnarlier. It didn’t work out with the band I went down there to play with (Disband, not to be confused with Disband). I needed to do something. The idea was that we would start a Neil Young cover band to play the frat bars, because we were all into Crazy Horse and getting really fucked up on acid and smoking tons of weed and playing songs like that. That lasted maybe a half of a rehearsal. Me and Ben lived in this big blue house near downtown. It was really cheap. We could play there all night as loud as we wanted. Behind the house, there was a ravine under a train bridge. It was the perfect place to do acid and we'd be thundering out, playing half of a Stooges song for an hour and people would show up and be like—Can we play? Because it's Athens. This is the thing about community support. People were ready, they had their shit together to be in bands. Then later, to tour, because that's what you do in Athens. There was social encouragement and support in a way that didn't happen in Greensboro. Me and Ben were really fucking negative when we got there; angry, you know. That’s still there in the music certainly, but we had to be accepting and open to this thing because people were ready. They wanted to be a part of this. In Greensboro, there was a lot of pathological, weird resentment and competition because of the lack of resources and support. People felt like they had to compete for whatever. In Athens, it was like—If we do this, people will be there. Our jobs are used to people going on tour, they'll let us tour and come back. The smallest amount of support makes the biggest difference for people.

Dark Meat became a 12 piece band. We wanted to be free jazz Stooges, with a horn section. And the whole thing was—How are you gonna tour? It’s like—we'll fucking figure it out, mind your own fucking business. So we did and we toured a lot and we put out records and that's when we realized Athens was really good for that. We can come back, maybe find work, or get unemployment, be a substitute teacher or whatever. People were ready to do that and we did it a lot over the four years that we were a band. In Athens, I was always impressed by and grateful for that, because Greensboro was like pulling teeth to get three people in a room, because everyone was fucked up or whatever. We were fucked up on drugs in Dark Meat, but we were doing stuff. Athens was a good place to get shit done.

Tell me about working for Orange Twin.

Orange Twin was great. It’s run by Elf Power. Their efforts fund a 155 acre land conservation community. 

Whoa. Explain that.

It's a commune, like five miles outside of Athens in the country on a former Girl Scout camp. They live there, it's called Orange Twin Conservation Community. Money from the label funds this thing and people live there. They have a farm, there’s springs, and it's been put in easement through the state of Georgia. So it will never be developed. People live there in a cluster housing situation to maintain the natural parts. It was well established by the time I got there. Some of the best shows in Athens would be out there. They built and maintain an amphitheater. The night Dark Meat started, we were all on mushrooms. We were trying to do the Neil Young thing and we were watching Tall Dwarfs in the fucking woods in an amphitheater in summer, hundreds of people there. It was pretty idyllic and we were like—Let's just do our fucking own thing. 

This mushroom makes you tall.

OTCC is another link between music and radical community activity. Laura Carter is in Elf Power and one of the main organizers of the land conservation community. Working with her and working with the Elf Power folks is just like—This is how a band should be. It should be working towards something that is not only for the glory of this music, but for something else too.

I never would have guessed that Elf Power were such eco-radicals. That's pretty cool. I've always liked their music. They're my favorite out of all those bands. 

An important aspect of it was that it was really fun. Like, it's not po-faced, it was fun to do it, it was fun to be a part of it and they'd be like—In the amphitheater next month, Vic Chesnutt is gonna play with Neil Hamburger. Neil Hamburger at your fucking eco-radical land conservation community. That pretty much sums it up. It's also testament to the support of the Athens music scene. Like, Michael Stipe was a supporter. The biggest selling thing on Orange Twin by far was Neutral Milk Hotel t-shirts. Jeff Mangum gave Orange Twin the rights to sell them. OTCC is not only this organizing thing that's really beneficial and impressive, it's fun too. It involves people from the town and it's like, um, fun might be a shallow word—

Fun is important!

Yeah, it was really crucial. Not only because I was broke as fuck and they helped me in this way, but also to be involved with the nuts and bolts—even with on a pissant level—that I, as a young self-obsessed musician, seeing this intentionality, moving these musical and organizational efforts towards something that's lasting and beneficial for a larger community. It was really important. 

Not to belabor the point, but with Elf Power’s music, you wouldn't expect this cool political kind of social aspect, because their music is more psychedelic, weird, internal fantasy kind of thing. That speaks to that it isn't po-faced, like Crimethinc would be. But in some ways that's almost like their [Crimethinc] strength, you know, because it's like—This is fucking serious. It shows two different ways to do it. 

Exactly. And I'm really grateful. And Eugene, to a more individualized degree. Eugene being all over the map musically and—his wife is a journalist—seriously fucking dedicated radicals who know their shit and who make it ideologically forward in the art and what they produce, but also fun, crazy and weird. 

Balloonacy.

Yeah. 

Dark Meat did a lot of stuff. How did you hook up with Vice? Because you weren't in New York yet. And this is early on of them putting out records right?

First off, I got to say that if I have a fucking regret in what, I hate the term “career,” but if my musical career has an asterisk, it’s my association with Vice. They fucked us over, they ripped us off. Fuck them. I fucking hate them and they never paid us. The original Dark Meat CD came out on Orange Twin. Vice thought that we were this crazy circus band, but we're not The Polyphonic Spree. 

pic by Rebecca Smeyne

They were offering us money, which we need because we’re a 12 piece to 14 piece band that tours a lot. They told us—”We want to put out whatever record that you have coming up that you're working on. But we also want to reissue this first record. So how do we do that? We have money.” OK. Cool.

They would come to our shows in New York and by that point we were playing quite often here at Death By Audio and the old Silent Barn. So it was like—You gotta come to terms with Laura [from Orange Twin], because that money is gonna go to something important and then you got to come to terms with us. So they came to terms with Laura and put it on a double LP. That's cool, but they never came to terms with us. They basically bootlegged it. They didn't count on us having our shit together, because they just thought we were a bunch of fucking dumb psychedelic redneck Vikings who didn't know shit. They believed their own ad copy about us. But we had a lawyer, an entertainment lawyer who was like—Wait, you’ve got to come to terms with the band, this is already in stores. Their response to this was—You're dropped. You're getting no money from us. Sue us, we’ll win. We were like—Wait a second, this isn't what you said you were gonna do. Let's make this work. And they were like—No. 

That’s fucked up.

Never mind that they're smarmy, fucking lame asses, and then the fucking association with the Proud Boys and stuff. I despise them. Fuck them and fuck their attitude. That's how they ripped us off. That's how they came to put out our record. And I'm sure there's a lot of other artists and bands who say the same thing about them. We have to take responsibility because we needed money. Honestly, the reason I said Yes and we said Yes is because they put out the Boredoms records and I was just in the thrall of the Boredoms at the time, and still am. But also we needed fucking money and I wanted Orange Twin to get money. So we stayed on the road. It was fun. We toured a lot. It was crazy. We got crazier by the week because there were 12 to 14 of us, we had a Greyhound bus that we remodeled into our tour bus. We put bunks in it. Our drummer Forrest Leffer is a fucking mechanical genius and would repair it. That's the reason we were able to do what we did for about two years, but it put us in debt, put me in debt.

Just filling up the tank of the bus alone.

Dude, it's crazy. We did crazy shit at this time, like make a record with Diplo. 

Wait, what?

We played in Philly where he was living at the time with this fucking awesome band called the Po Po. One of my favorite bands of the era. Three Pakistani brothers who lived in North Philly and sang like fucking angels. It sounded like early Spaceman 3 covered in goo with these beautiful Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan vocals. It was Philly as fuck. The one guy was like—I started this band so my brothers wouldn't become drug dealers. I was like—You guys should come to Athens and hang out. They were like—This is our last show because nobody gives a shit. I was like—Yo, we care come to Athens, come hang out. So they do and they hang out for a while and record with our organ player Tim Schreiber, who was like a four track genius and they made an awesome fucking collection of songs. I mention it because Dark Meat played at South By Southwest. We did 11 shows in three days. And Diplo was at one of them fucked up on some kind of drugs. He was like—I'm gonna record you guys. I didn't know who he was, but some people in our band did. So he comes to Athens while Popo is there and we make a record together. On the road we covered “Success” by Iggy Pop, because it was ironic because we were so broke. We recorded it in Portland, Oregon, at four in the morning. He remixed it and it's on a split seven-inch that Henry Owings put out on Chunklet. In Athens, we're collaborating and making music with Popo, they're playing it all the time and Diplo’s like—This fucking band is awesome. Where are they from? Well, they're from your fucking backyard, Mr Svengali. Oh, really? I sent the album they made to Dwyer. I was like—John, dude, you got to put this out, and he wanted to put it out, but Diplo was like—I wanna put this out. I remember Zeb from Po Po being like—What should I do? I was like—John 100%, and he was like—No, I think we're gonna go with the more famous guy. They ended up signing to Mad Decent. Diplo proceeded to shelve the album, put out a short run single and then basically turned them into his rodeo clowns that would come out on stage once or twice during his weird fucking set. 

And Dwyer wanted to put it out on Castle Face.

Yeah. 

There's a lesson to be learned there.

Next week: the second half of this conversation.

Jim moves to New York City, plays with Arthur Doyle, forms Sunwatchers and opens Brooklyn anarchist space The P.I.T.