A year or two after the traumatic tour I wrote about partially here, we were touring with Dynasty, the forgotten providence supergroup. Of course, being forgotten wasn’t because they lacked quality, they were very short-lived and only released one 7-inch.
I can well imagine, someone from Dynasty writing their memoirs and stating, “At the time, we were touring with the forgotten Coughs....”
It’s fun to tour with another band especially when your band has toured a lot. One of the good and bad things about touring as a band is becoming a dysfunctional family. This can be comfortable, but it loses the fun aspect. It becomes hard to remember when you liked having band practice because you got to see your friends. You’ve now spent so much time in the same car and have said every hurtful thing imaginable to each other. Another band to socialize with makes tour like having company over and everyone must be on their best behavior.
We were touring the US again but this time we wanted to avoid Texas. After our first tour through there, we had been scared off. However, we still had a day off where we had to drive through there.
The plan was to take a day off in Amarillo and hang out with some people that Dynasty knew although I’m not sure what the connection was.
I think our connection might have been through someone touring through there and having a good time. I don’t seem to remember anyone that was on tour with us knowing Stanley Marsh 3. I’ll talk more about Marsh in a second, but he was a rich eccentric who had collaborated with the Ant Farm video collective in the 1970s making the famous sculpture “Cadillac Ranch”.
This is how we met LBK who introduced himself as “It’llbeok”
Incidentally, I was thinking last night about a predatory figure in the Chicago music scene who would tag “it’s ok” on venue walls. This took on a sinister meaning given this person’s violation of other people’s consent. “It’llbeok” too sounds sinister, the name that might have witnessed things and endeavored to dismiss them from their mind.
LBK was one of the crew of freaked out youths who had been collected by Stanley Marsh III. Marsh had made a huge stamp on Amarillo with his money and eccentricity. He had a skyscraper downtown that we never went to, had a manor known as Toad Hall that had the world’s largest collection of poisonous snakes as well as a petting zoo. He also employed a lot of young men to help him make art, the town of Amarillo not really questioning this as he had been a fixture since the 1970’s. Even though the youths were assisting Marsh, the only art we saw by him were these strange road signs insulting about the nearby town of Lubbock.
“Lubbock killed Buddy Holly”, “Lubbock is one of the four wickedest cities of ancient and modern times”.
Given that Lubbock was the more successful town of the two, one that had advertised itself as being a home for the arts. It seems likely that Marsh felt resentful and competitive towards them. In truth, reading about Marsh, it seems that his art was the performance of his eccentric life itself. But like a lot of rich eccentrics, his eccentricity was really a way to put a likeable face on a naked exercise of power.
Marsh was not around but everywhere we went with LBK was part of his sprawling compound.
I remember being at a small ranch house where we were supposed to meet up with them where it was dirty but unexceptional and the Dynasty lads were watching “The Goonies” on VHS.
I remember being concerned that my skirt would cause trouble with conservative Texas types and then being relieved that LBK was wearing a tattered skirt. He patched the skirt while wearing it as he talked quickly in his flat Texas accent. He was thin and blonde, and I vaguely remember that he was quite good looking. Later there was a lot of speculation that he was using meth given all the drug paraphernalia we would see around.
This positive first impression was overwritten when he peeled up in his truck. I have a much clearer memory of this because it was genuinely alarming. The outside of the truck had a deer skull with antlers bolted to the cab of the truck and the rest of it was equally covered with skulls and animal bones that had been crudely attached to it.
This began LBK’s day of lightly hazing us, he seemed to enjoy trying to shock us with descriptions of his cruelty to animals and people alike. I’m not sure why he wanted to antagonize us, or if that was just the way he related to people
LBK had an anecdote about how he and the other youths had dealt with a trespasser onto the Marsh’s snake ranch. I don’t remember the full story but apparently a lot of gawkers would enter Marsh’s property.
LBK described chasing a woman with a taser who had trespassed on Marsh’s property and threatening her. This was told like it was a funny story. He also talked about killing different cats something that enraged and upset Carrie and Anya who were cat fanatics.
One of the horrific stories he told us was that Marsh had flown all the teenage boys to Thailand to see the feeding of a giant snake. I don’t remember what he said it had been fed, a human sacrifice? But some sort of animal most likely. ( I texted Anya and she said it had been a goat). I talked to Vanessa from Coughs about this and her memory was that they were all leaving to do this the next day.
As all this verbiage transpired we were lead on a tour of the various Marsh holdings. We went from one filthy warehouse to Toad Hall which was Marsh’s mansion but lacked any feeling of luxury. It was decrepit with drug use paraphenialia strewn about carelessly. I remember hoping that each subsequent location would be less crazy than the last, but no they all were equally filthy and and anarchic with lots of young teenagers coming out of the woodwork.
“I’m Taz and this here is Frohawk” Two young boys introduced themselves as. (I made up the first name because I only remember Frohawk)
Despite the chaos, we were able to cook a nice dinner especially as LBK had bought us a huge bag of groceries. As usual while trying to cook with Carrie and Anya, a dispute had arisen as at that time I didn’t understand the importance of cooking ingredients in order. I had gotten annoyed and haughtily resigned from meal preparation.
I went on my own to the petting zoo where a zebra emerged from the brush and started chewing on my coat. I remember other animals emerging to chew on my clothes, but my memory is too faded to remember what sort of animals they were. Whatever they were, they were hungry and were willing to eat cloth. It’s hard to say if they were neglected and malnourished but given the neglect of everything around us, it wouldn’t be surprising.
Eventually eating dinner with LBK made him act a bit more normal and he admitted that a lot of the things he had been saying were made up. (Or maybe he said that because we were getting upset with him.)
We ended up at a show we were supposed to hop on which it turned out was a Christian hardcore show that was happening. LBK had not been able to arrange a show for us because he was leaving town
The warehouse venue had a large patio. It was surrounded by a bunch of sleazy honky-tonks that had alarming and crudely humorous signs. One of them said something like “Pussy-eating Wednesdays”
It was actually a relatively chill affair if you ignored what was going on onstage. One band started their set in prayer and did an anti-abortion song. Everyone was very young and professional as if they were waiting to be signed by a Christian record label. I remember one band having elaborate and expensive electronic drums.
Dynasty and us were playing last, so we mostly sat outside in boredom. A very cool band from Fort Worth called Man is Mostly Water stopped by to perform and were memorably weird. Link to their record here.
Two girls came around with a box full of kittens they were trying to find homes for, I didn’t look at the kittens but apparently, they were very cute. We finally played last with Dynasty playing dead last and the few remaining attendees watched us, utterly baffled by what we were doing.
I remarked to Carlos that we might have blown some minds, but he posited that it was equally likely they thought we were utter shit. Carlos had a better sense of the context people were operating in than I did at the time. For instance, if you have only heard Christian hardcore and you see a noise band, then that band might just sound like unsuccessful Christian hardcore.
The utter weirdness of everything made the story stick in my mind although there were many other crazy stories from that tour. I kept thinking about this deranged rich artist and his sponsoring of these young, troubled teens in Texas.
Years later, I came back to Amarillo to stay with my friend who worked at an NPR affiliate. After the recycled air of the greyhound, the cool breeze coming out of downtown refreshed me with the smell of cow manure. Jenny picked me up and we went to an Americana concert at an upscale pizza place. Even though everyone was quiet and watching the tedious country, we acted like it was a normal place to have a conversation. It was that or listen to the music.
I inquired about Stanley Marsh and she told me that he had been finally busted for his sexual assaults and grooming of the teenage boys in town. I remember being shocked but with the sense of acknowledgement that something had been wrong all along.
The next day riding the Greyhound, I found an article about the abuses committed by Marsh. I read about the horrible sexual abuses that Marsh had committed against these teens. Many of them were impoverished and young and alienated from their families so were uniquely vulnerable to predation. (These articles are on Texas Montly magazine, worth reading as the writer Skip Hollandsworth is an excellent writer, here)
I feel fortunate that we never saw Marsh, although he would have probably not been very interested in us being a band of mostly women. I was talking to my friend Ossian Winningham about it, as he has a huge wealth of information about DIY scenes. Check out his blog here
He said that he had seen LBK in NYC a little bit later and that LBk had cleaned himself up and looked like a typical curator. He was apparently Marsh’s right-hand man, so who knows what kind of trauma he had been subjected to or caused.
The scene we passed through had gone through just being a kind of questionable thing we passed through on tour to something far worse. So often on tour, you pass through a scene at a particular time where things are happening you only partially understand. You don’t know the people, you don’t know who to trust, you’re supposedly there to have a good time. You’re left afterwards talking about it with your bandmates and the discussion usually amounts to “that was weird.”
Amarillo had gone from us being “that was weird” to us passing through an unfolding atrocity that we didn’t realize was occurring. Life is often like that, not only “that was weird” but realizing we don’t know what upsetting things we are a part of and the horrors that are occurring around us.
I ended up dreaming on that tour about Marsh in a roundabout way. In my dream, I was supposed to perform in a basement of a house. It became apparent it was run by young people doing the whims of a rich artist. The problem was that the basement had been turned into a glass bottomed floor aquarium where you peered through ice to look at the fish, but the ice was melting, and the floor was turning into a writhing pile of dying sea life.
This dream inspired me to do a monologue imagining Coughs performing for the sole audience of Marsh. I would perform this as a anguished monologue in between Forced into femininity songs on one of my last tours. The whole monologue ended with us performing just for “the great artist” as I had renamed him. I wish I had the original text, but the artist says” Go on, let’s see your art!”. And as we perform, he grabs a Little Ceaser’s “Hot and Ready” of off a table stacked with a huge pile of them and sucks the cheese off the pizza with a foul slurp.
Also I had originally meant for all of these pieces to culminate in a third essay where I talk about all the fun times I’ve had playing in Northern Texas such as in Denton and Dallas. I actually love playing in Texas now, if I wasn’t frightened by all the anti-trans laws being passed in red states I would probably go tour their again.
So at some point, that essay may emerge but frankly I’m not sure how good of a autobiographical writer I am.