A LITTLE LESS THAN A week ago, I got a text message from Nick: “You requested free bird from the locust?!”
I hadn’t been in touch with Nick for some time so I had no context for the comment. It took awhile to register as anything more than a string of words. But then I texted back:
“You know it!”
And that was that.
Yet the story behind the text remains unwritten. Whatever Nick heard to prompt it was but a fragment of the whole tale, a tale about to be told with much more care than it warrants.
It was my senior year of high school in Darien, Connecticut. Darien is all white picket fences (or the New England equivalent — walls of loose stones harvested from dirt) and apple pies on window sills to be pilfered by grubby children after a hard day of hoop-and-stick. The town’s appearance is inspired by Ronald Reagan’s fuzzy memories of the 1950s — an idyllic period that never really occurred — and, every time I go back I notice one or two more buildings on the town’s main stretch have been renovated to seem older and quainter. This is all done to mask the truth: everyone in Darien does lots of cocaine.
Growing up, we believed the former to be the case. I did. So I was genuinely shocked to learn that Andrew W.K. — a one-man, non-Jewish version of KISS whose hard rock anthems celebrated girls, sex, and partying in the most literal manner — would be playing just a few towns over. One night only. Toad’s Place in New Haven.
First, a bit about Andrew W.K…
Andrew W.K. had gotten press some years back for releasing his debut album with the following cover:
Most places wouldn’t carry it without covering the photo with a black bar from the nose down. The story circulating at the time was that Andrew W.K. smashed his face into a brick wall to get this shot (years later, he released an album titled, “Close Calls with Brick Walls,” sparking debate about what Andrew W.K. considers a “close call” to be).
With this an album cover, it really didn’t matter what the music sounded like — kids were going to buy it anyway, in droves — but it was good. Very good.
Andrew W.K. remained remarkably consistent throughout his first album, almost all three-minute-and-under songs played fast and loud with three guitars and a keyboard, lyrics such as:
So let’s get a party going (let’s get a party going)
Now it’s time to party and we’ll party hard (party hard)
Let’s get a party going (let’s get a party going)
When it’s time to party we will always party hard
Party hard (party hard, party hard, party hard party hard, party hard, party hard party hard, party hard, party hard…)
His second album, The Wolf, added some variety and lyrical sophistication:
I want to have a party
I want to have a party
I want to have a party
I want to have a party
You cannot kill the party
You cannot kill the party
You cannot kill the party
Long Live The Party
What made Andrew W.K. such a compelling presence were the constantly circulating rumors. His songs featured keyboards pounded brutally with no sense of finess, yet some said he was a classically-trained pianist with savant-like abilities. His lyrics were some of the most idiotic ever written, yet some said he’d been a child prodigy with an off-the-charts IQ. Most baffling of all, W.K.’s stage persona and most of his songs were about partying, having a good time, and keeping a positive outlook, yet there was a stray song on each of his first two albums encouraging the listener to either murder someone or be murdered (at the hands of Andrew W.K.). “Ready to Die” featured the following lyrics:
Your life is over now,
Your life is running out,
When your time is at an end,
Then it’s time to kill again,
We cut without a knife,
We live in black and white,
You’re just a parasite,
Now close your eyes and say good-night.
You better get ready to die,
You better get ready to kill,
You better get ready to run,
Cause here we come,
You better get ready to die!
Get ready to die!
Get ready to die!
The equivalent entry on his second album was called “Free Jumps.” It was about being wronged by someone and responding by jumping on them repeatedly until they’re dead. “Free Jumps” is sandwiched between a song about being yourself and one where Andrew assures you he’ll be your friend for life.
Everything about him appeared to be a ruse, leading to all kinds of speculation, even when none was warranted. Born Andrew Fetterly Wilkes-Krier, the “W.K.” should be self-explanatory, yet his entry on AllMusic.com would suggest it’s only the third-best option:
The California-born, Michigan-bred W.K. — the initials stand for everything from “White Killer” to “Women Kum” to “Wilkes-Krier,” the surnames of his mom and dad — began classical piano lessons at age four…
“Women Kum”?
But back to the subject at hand: there was an Andrew W.K. concert a mere 40 minutes away and we had to be there. When I say “we,” I refer to a cast of four characters I will introduce now (names have been changed, where noted):
–First, our ringleader, who found out about the show and bought the tickets. Irish-Catholic in a mostly-Protestant town — not that our respective religions had anything to do with anything, though I frequently bombed his house — he could identify with W.K.’s debaucheries in a very personal way. I’ll call him “Red,” since he’s Irish.
–Then, a friend of mine who is also Irish, and has red hair. I’ll call him “Bill.”
–Pete was the third. Pete’s hands are enormous. It may sound like I’m pandering to the ladies reading this article by bringing it up, but it’s the truth; they’re like baseball mitts of flesh. He blocks out the sun and destroys whole ecosystems just by waving hello.
–Finally, yours truly.
Red had the tickets and the four of us were desperate to go. But, as I mentioned, Darien is a town whose values are lifted wholesale from Leave it to Beaver. How would we get our parents to let us drive all the way to New Haven, on a school night, in my car, to see Andrew W.K.? It seemed impossible.
But it wasn’t. None of our parents put up any sort of resistance. I think they were just glad we weren’t all coked out like everyone else.
So we were off. The drive was mostly uneventful, aside from a brief drizzle and the always-under-construction stretch of I-95 around the city of Bridgeport. The car was my family’s 1994 Ford Explorer, the particular make and model that flipped over if you turned too sharply or hit any bumps.
Adding to the danger was the matter of visibility. The dashboard was covered end-to-end with stuffed animals. Several friends and I had gone through a phase in which we ate frequently at a diner with a claw machine game in the lobby. I got pretty good, to the point where I was more likely to win than lose, and walked away with about fifty prizes in a matter of weeks. I laid them across the car’s dash like a trophy hunter would a prized buck. Later, we found another diner with even bigger and better prizes in their claw machine. I got greedy and put a ten dollar bill in only to realize that the game was obviously rigged. The claw would drop onto an item, close, open, and then rise back up. Because there was no “money return” option — and it was still a quarter per game — I had to watch this process occur exactly forty times in a row.
We got to Toad’s Place early and caught the first opening band. They had a definite Judas Priest vibe going, in that they dressed like bikers and sucked. My opinion of their set may be colored somewhat by their fans, a male/female couple who cheered when song titles were announced and knew all the words, swaying and headbanging as if they were part of an enthusiastic, metal-loving crowd and not the only two people within twenty feet of the stage.
Intermission. We took a look at the merchandise table. All of Andrew W.K.’s t-shirts featured violent and stupid imagery and they were all the wrong sizes.
Then The Locust showed up.
The Locust are a band who dress in tight, full-body outfits resembling fencing uniforms with masks covering their entire head. They play their instruments fast, and jerk their bodies around spastically, as if you were watching a film with frames missing. They keep a synthesizer at center stage that creates a buzzing noise (like a locust) just to turn up as loud as they can. In one of their songs, that’s the song.
They are utterly humorless about all of this (their Wikipedia entry cites these elements as a means to reflect on “how our brains have to function in order to be able to do anything in the Western societies we live in”). So, when they came out onstage and said, “We are the locust” — in an evil, menacing tone — I yelled back, “Freebird!”
The lead locust pointed directly at me and said, “Youuuuuuuuuu,” like he was performing insect witchcraft.
Then a funny thing happened.
Toad’s Place is an all-ages club, but unlike most clubs where they slap a wristband on the over-21 crowd, Toad’s puts all the drinkers in the back of the room behind a chain-link fence to separate them from everyone else. I never understood the appeal of watching a concert from the perspective of a junkyard dog, but that’s not relevant. What is relevant is that the drunks were packed in a tight area and sufficiently uninhibited. They helped finish what I began:
“Freebird,” “Freeeeebird,” “Freebiiiiiiiird” — and all other combinations thereof.
A full minute of Freebirding took place before the lead locust dropped the entire performance art shtick and said, “Guys, come on. Stop.” He had the tonality of a nerd whose hat got stolen by bullies playing keep-away too long.
To his credit, they followed up the rough start with a blistering set that split the audience about 30/70 between moshing and covering ears to avoid permanent hearing loss. That split is approximate; some were in neither camp, such as myself. I just stood there and took it. I now use an ear trumpet.
Andrew W.K. followed and lived up to the hype, constantly pumping his fists and swinging his hair at the crowd. His backing band almost matched him in intensity; one guitarist wasn’t even plugged in, which freed him up to jump all over the stage and not worry about tripping on wires.
At one point, someone from the crowd climbed onstage and started dancing. Rather than have him removed by a bouncer as is usually the case, Andrew W.K. invited everyone else up too. Before long there were 30 or 40 people up there. This wasn’t the end of the show either; it was the middle of the set. They stayed for several songs before wearing themselves out. Andrew kept going.
Red used to say Andrew W.K. was a prophet, perhaps the second coming of Christ, for his boundless energy and positive messages (minus two obvious culprits, “Ready to Die” and the song about jumping on someone to death). We even caught an Andrew W.K. sermon during the show; he took an individually-wrapped toffee candy from his pocket and preached about “tasting the sweet candy of being alive.” Red will tell you that he followed up his speech on the sanctity of life immediately with “Ready to Die,” but I don’t recall it that way. Andrew W.K. isn’t that dumb, or that smart.
Then the show ended. Right after we’d been blown away.
We decided to hit the merch table again, no matter that the shirts didn’t fit. I ended up with a t-shirt of a wolf, size SMALL. Given that I’m 6’2” and was into bodybuilding in high school, I looked like a WASP from Jersey Shore. Bill got a T-shirt with some combination of a skull and bones, entrails hanging off both. Red got Andrew W.K.’s bloody face from the album cover.
We wore our new shirts into school the next day. I think I was the only one who managed to last the full day without being asked by a teacher to turn my shirt inside out; after all, it wasn’t obscene, it just fit like a surgical glove.
I lost track of that shirt over the years, as every time it got washed it would end up in my younger brother’s dresser. He wore it sometimes, then he got too big for it. It’s a fact of adulthood that we grow out of the things of our youth, but what if they’re two sizes too small when we first buy them? Such was the case with this shirt, and Andrew W.K. But I’ll never forget him nor the Locust, and the events of that fateful evening.
Does that answer your question, Nick?