Note: I’m writing this diary 20+ years after the fact, and entirely from memory, as I didn’t keep anything like a journal at the time. There are just so many great stories (and some not so great, but still worth recording) that I want to commit them before the memories fade too much. Any reader who thinks I got something wrong – or that I missed something important – is eagerly invited to get in touch so we can correct and/or complete the record.
I may have seen some stuff earlier – perhaps clips on TV – but I really became aware of Survival Research Laboratories in 1986. I may have just picked up the July issue of Bob Guccione’s Newlook magazine on spec, or because there was an article on The Residents in it – I honestly don’t remember. But there were four pages dedicated to “War of the Robots”. The photos accompanying the piece didn’t show much in the way of machines, but there was one captioned “The Men of Survival Research Laboratories” that still haunts me a little when I look at it – even after spending nine years as one of those men (don’t get huffy – a lot of women have worked there too). It’s a photo of the big catapult, and you can’t tell who the guys operating it are (I might take a couple of guesses from the haircuts, but I wouldn’t have much confidence in the answers). There’s just something about the anonymous figures crouching amid – and orchestrating – the chaos that I found incredibly mysterious, compelling, and even a little creepy. I still think it’s one of the best images to come out of SRL ever.
But I’m getting a little prematurely poetic here – let me get back to the story. What I’d seen up until then told me that, clearly, these guys were making some incredible machines (and doing fascinating things with them), but there was no sign that they’d put any smarts on them. As an embedded systems designer, it was obvious that they needed systems more advanced than the model airplane radio controls they appeared to be using. It wasn’t lost on me that an electronics engineer coming from Calgary (of all places) to San Francisco – a short drive north of Silicon Valley – would be bringing coals to Newcastle. Surely they must have a thousand guys like me not just on the detail already (and more pounding on the door to get in), but I had to know. The Newlook article was the first I found that named SRL‘s three principals – Mark Pauline, Matt Heckert, and Eric Werner. Somewhere around mid-January 1987 I got their phone numbers, and called, and got answering machines, and kept calling, and eventually someone answered. I don’t remember for sure (and I don’t think I kept notes), but I think it was Mark. I explained my interest, and he said “Oh, you know, we don’t have anyone doing that – we can’t afford stuff like that. I can’t really talk now – we’re real busy trying to get ready for a show.” The show was scheduled for the end of the month. My roommate Max spotted me a couple of hundred for the air ticket, and on January 30th, quite without a plan (or a place to stay, or any money, or…) I flew to San Francisco for the first time. The order things happened in is a little hazy now, but I think I made my way to the dead end of San Bruno Ave. by shuttle bus from the airport followed by a bunch of walking. I wandered down the driveway and to the door of what appeared to be the shop. I don’t know whether I was expecting some kind of reception; if so, their committee clearly hadn’t gotten the memo. The evening’s performance was Delusions of Expediency: How to Avoid Responsibility for Social Disintegration by Acting Without Principle Under the Pretenses of Utility – A Totally Mechanized Dramatization by Survival Research Laboratories (which, despite Mark’s typically – and wonderfully – grandiose title, was a rather small show by SRL standards, held in a South of Market taxi parking lot), and the inevitable panicked last-minute preparations were underway. I announced my arrival and someone replied by asking me if I knew how to run a punch press. I didn’t, but told them to point me at it anyway. I spent the next hour cutting up lengths of angle iron into foot-long pieces – I think they were used to stake some stuff down.
The rest of the evening was a bit of a blur. I caught a lift to the site at Townsend & 8th, wandered around a little, trying to take it in, and not doing much. An audience appeared and it started to get dark. Someone – it must have been Mike Dingle, who managed the shows and tours – asked if I’d work security. That means standing around and making sure people don’t wander into the performance area and do stupid (and potentially self-destructive) things. I said I would, but I think later I flaked out and told him I didn’t want to miss any of the action. That’s really not my MO, and I’m grateful that Ding never held it against me.
The show was short, and didn’t feature a lot of machines (Matt’s Inspector and Calliope, Mark’s Inchworm, Eric’s Square-Wheeled Car… were there any others? I’ll have to go back and look at the video. Perhaps Eric’s Ram Car was there too.), but I was enthralled. It was the only time I ever saw the Square-Wheeled Car run – and only for a few seconds – but how amazing. I saw the show from near a big mound of dirt in which the Inspector discovered a buried cache of prosthetic limbs. Butyric acid had been poured all over it – that’s the smell that Abbie Hoffman called a “Froines“. After the engines were all quiet, the Eggman smashed, the smoke dissipated, and the audience gone, Ding asked if I’d stay at the site overnight in case anyone showed up to mess with the stuff. Having no other place to go, I said sure, and crashed under a few blankets in the cab of a big truck parked next to the building adjacent the performance area. I was tired and slept well, but still got a sense of what Mark Twain was talking about when he said “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”.
The next day was all about the cleanup – the limbs, the dirt, the empty 50-gallon drums that had been built into towers on the set, pulling up the stakes, getting the machines onto trucks and back to the shop. The work done, I hung out with Matt. He gave me a tour of the Mission district on the back of his Laverda (as we crested a hill – way too fast – and caught air, he yelled back at me “This where they shot the chase scene in Bullitt!”). That night we rode up to North Beach to Tosca, the bar famous for having a jukebox full of opera. Before we went in he stopped to unscrew some parts from another motorbike parked out front – a prank on a friend in the bar. We went to the back room and played pool for a while, killing some time to see whether Hunter Thompson might show up. He’d been hanging out at the shop of late; Matt told me that when Hunter visited he arrived in a Mitchell Brothers limo, as at the time he held the position of Night Manager at the O’Farrell Theatre (I saw the business card on Matt’s desk) in addition to his duties as Rolling Stone‘s National Affairs Correspondent. Hunter never showed up that night, but a few years later, in a video on him (The Crazy Never Die – put out by The Mitchell Bros.), I found footage of HST messing around at the shop as well as at Delusions. He’d been right around me and that mound of dirt throughout, and I was so engrossed in the spectacle that I didn’t notice. That night Matt headed over to his girlfriend’s place and let me have his bed in the shop – I shared the room with his cat Malcolm (I think that’s the right order – Yasser was later). That’s the kind of guy Matt is – I needed a place to stay, and he didn’t say “I’ll have to check with my partners”; he just handed me the keys.
Sunday I had to head home. Mark was in front of his lathe – we hadn’t really met and exchanged only a few words – all I remember him saying was “So you’re from Canada, huh?”. Matt, Eric, and I got some breakfast en route to the airport, which gave us a chance to chat for the first time about my bringing some microprocessor control to the machines. Matt didn’t have anything cooking that would have been appropriate, but the Torture Machine Eric was working on seemed a good possibility. It never happened, though, and although it would have been a pretty cool machine, I don’t think it would have fit well with the shows as they were evolving at the time. They dropped me at the airport, and they’d no sooner left than I discovered I was at the wrong terminal (a domestic vs. international mixup, since I wasn’t booked on a direct flight) and subsequently missed my plane. The airline got me on another, but it left me with an overnight stopover in Salt Lake City. I sorta schmoozed my way into a hotel room that the airline had supplied to another laid-over flyer, and after experiencing the nuclear winter that passes for Salt Lake City late on a Sunday night, made it home.
(Postscript: When I departed SF I somehow managed to leave behind a pair of white coveralls I’d been sporting for a while. I’d had a big black biohazard symbol embroidered on the back and was pretty fond of them. Matt set them aside for me, but Mark (being Mark) found, assumed, and totally trashed them. Reportedly, Matt got really pissed at him over it.)
I stayed loosely in touch over the next few months, but nothing much developed, mainly because Mark and Matt were pretty deeply engrossed in in making the short non-performance film A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief (or as the in-joke goes, …Hopeless Grease) with Jon Reiss, the filmmaker (ex of Target Video) who documented all the SRL performances at the time. (Attn. completists: Bitter Message was financed, in part, by a non-SRL job that Mark and Matt did – the chainsaw-hedge-trimmer-sporting V8-powered lawn mower that neighbor-from-hell Randy Quaid rolls out of his garage in the Richard Pryor movie Moving. It’s only on–screen for a few seconds, but fun to see anyway. Except for seeing Matt’s name misspelled in the credits, that is.) Eric was already becoming marginalized and made only a passing contribution to Bitter Message; he was gone by the time I really got involved a year later.
Then something happened: Snakefinger and his band came to Calgary, touring their new album Night of Desireable Objects. I was thrilled to to get the chance to see them play at the National Hotel, one of the city’s great punk-rock dive bars of the era. They did a three-night stand at the beginning of April, and I went all three, disappointed at the poor audience turnout, and riveted by the performances. Man, how exciting to see those guys in a really “intimate” (read: with a dozen people) setting. Being with CJSW, I introduced myself to Snakefinger and invited him up to the station for an interview that John Rutherford (who did our blues show at the time) joined us in. We had a good time, and I’m sorry to say the tape was lost by a sloppy Program Director. But I mentioned to Snakey that I’d just recently visited San Francisco for the first time to meet the SRL guys and talk about joining up. He lit up and said to say hi to Matty and Mark for him the next time I spoke to them. In that instant, I got a sense of the warmth and closeness of the SF arts and music community that’s never left me. Later I learned the depth of the connections: Snakefinger and Mike Dingle had been roommates, along with Richard Marriott of Clubfoot Orchestra, who I also met before long. It was all a big, happy family, really; Matt had been in an early SF punk band (Pink Section) before joining SRL, and had also played in Clubfoot. Over the coming years I’d meet a lot more from the Bay Area music scene, including Z’ev, Naught Humon (of Rhythm and Noise), Helios Creed (of Chrome), and many who were associated with Subterranean Records, which was next door in SRL’s building. So after Snakefinger’s casual comment made me feel so welcome, as though I was already one of their community, I was crushed when John called at the beginning of July to say that Snakefinger had died while on tour in Europe on the first of the month. When I think about I still well up.
(For a moment, I’m going to jump forward about a year and a half here. In the fall of 1988, after we came back from the European tour, I was down in SF for the return and unpacking of the sea can and general talk and strategizing. SRL was a pretty straightedge place – not consciously or self-righteously or anything, but just out of practicality, given that a machine shop and the machines themself make for a potentially dangerous environment and everyone has to be clearheaded. But a bunch of us were out for a drink, and in the bar we went to, just by coincidence, we ran into Johnny Ryan (and ?) from Snakefinger’s band. I went over to say hi, and I was surprised – and touched – that they remembered me from a couple of poorly attended nights thousands of miles away 18 months prior. “So you wound up joining SRL after all? Cool.” Yeah, cool.)
By late 1987 I’d spent some time on the phone with Mark, and we’d decided I’d get a controller together for the new Six-Barreled Shock Wave Cannon that he was working on. It was a fairly simple sequencer that accepted user input on the proportions of acetylene and oxygen that power the cannon, ran the valves between it and the gas cylinders, and fired the sparkplugs. Back home in Calgary I was doing a job based on the MC6809 (my last before switching to the 68HC11), and the hardware fit well, as it had a keypad and LCD in addition to the required ports, so my old friend Garry (who was coding for the job) contributed the software for the cannon. It worked, but we got the user interface totally wrong. Having not actually yet had any experience building or using any of the performing machines, I didn’t have a clue what was needed to make it usable during a show, and Mark hadn’t given me any input or guidance – it just hadn’t dawned on him (still might not, actually) that UI issues are important. No matter – it was my point of entry. Many times over the years I’ve been asked how one joins SRL. The answer is, “Just show up and do something”.
Nitpicking Bastard 