Shark Fetish - demo

Kinda falling behind here, I wonder if selling my soul and doing reviews has taken the wind out my sails (just kidding I kind of enjoy that).   Has the unstoppable force met an immovable object (hardly)?  Sort of feeling like the bridge has washed out on my stroll down memory lane.  Need to think of another gimmick.  Oh well, really wanted to post this band.

We burn our trash out here in the country which is probably not the most PC activity. Actually I have no information on burning vs. landfill, my feeling is that they both probably suck. Human existence in itself especially since the industrial revolution has mutated the whole cyclical order of things, in how it's all about growth, decay and renewal. Or maybe it all goes back to the sixth day when man was created, hahaha.  You know if you're into all that, you have to wonder about the omnipotence of a creator God, because he/she sure made one hell of a mistake when he/she created human beings (and then he/she gave us "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth "...fucked up.  We will one day be able to marvel at our own creativity as we may approach the destructiveness of that asteroid those millions of years ago (unless you follow the thinking that the universe is only 6000 years old...a common way of thinking in my neck of the woods).  The blight of the universe.  I digress...is symbiotic a good word...we're not that.  Anyway my manly job is to take out the trash after it's been separated in the house into burnable, nonburnable and wet. If it's not too windy I usually get the fire burning and satisfy my inner pyro. Once in a while if I'm not paying attention I might get surprised when my wife has hidden an aerosol can (another story on how that fits into the ecology) in a bag. It takes a while for those suckers to heat up but once they reach a certain point the explosion rivals that of a middle eastern suicide bomber or a roadside bomb.  I've learned to wear my sunglasses which are also safety rated, because the shrapnel from these explosions can be violent, but so far I've just been pelted with rotten burning food.  Need to think about composting.

Past due for another Humboldt post, believe it or not I've still got a few more up my sleeve, including Lank, Hockaloogie, the Leftovers and the Raiding the Airwaves and Making Blindness Fashionable comps.  Found a couple more tapes and was sent one so we haven't breathed our last breathe in the Humboldt Kali category.  Shark Fetish was my buddy from the dorms, Doug's band (I didn't know the other guys), while I was playing in WD40.  We must have both started in about '89.  I must say that I remember being a little put off by the harmonica, but I still found a way to enjoy the band, and really who couldn't because Doug was a maniac on the stage and a natural as a frontman.  As usual my memory is shot, but I did manage to find this killer flyer from now long nonexistent Tsunami's (I believe there's a brewery there now).  I asked Doug to do a write up. "Shark Fetish was: Doug Grime, vocals and occasional guitar Jeff Grimes, guitar, harmonica, and occasional vocals Tom Ono, guitar John Jauregi, drums For the last several shows, Jon Quittner played bass We got started in spring of 1989. Tom, Jeff, and I had a creative writing class together and they asked me to do vocals. Tom and Jeff were already playing with John. Our first show was at the Jambalaya with the Jane Maxwell Band under the name Naga Naga the Muses of Sex (which is what Tom Ono used to sing during Train Jam before I came along). The name Shark Fetish was taken from a zine that Jeff Grimes had done back in Ventura before moving to Arcata for college. Our second show was playing on Ophelia Necro's show on KHSU, and the third show was a house show that Aaron Elliot from Crimpshrine reviewed for a scene report in MRR. We played one show out of the Humboldt County area, at the Red Barn in Santa Barbara in the summer of 1990 with Brent's TV. The demo got a decent write up in MRR, and I sold a dozen or so copies by mailorder based on that. My favorite show was when we played with the Yowling Zygotes and Tragic Mulatto . My friend Seth had dropped acid with the YZ kids that afternoon and they had found a sheep's carcass in the Arcata bottoms that they hung up behind stage. Our drummer also made a u-turn on 101 on the way to the show so he could slam some speed. I had been running a massive fever for several days beforehand, so everything had a surreal quality to it--the sheep's carcass swinging from ropes behind the stage, John's eyes sitting two inches inside his skull, the singer from Tragic Mulatto coming out wrapped entirely in cellophane. And, I was drunk. The only other show that really stands out for me was when we played one of the booths at Lumber Jack Days. We set up a makeshift stage on a bunch of pallets, and maybe twenty or thirty serious meathead jocks came out to see us play. I was absolutely shitfaced, and as soon as we started playing the jocks started spitting on us and shoving us. I took a couple of swings at guys but was way too drunk to be very effective, and at one point one of the guys grabbed me and threw me into the drum set, knocking most of our equipment off the pallets. I held my ground and kept taunting them, and I remember grabbing a 40-ouncer and getting ready to fight as soon as the show was over. But, instead, all the jocko guys came up and threw there arms around us and told us how great we were. They thought that, since we were a "punk" band, they were supposed to spit at us, kick us, and hit us. Fucked up. I can't remember exactly why we broke up. I think it just got weird trying to make things work as drug and alcohol habits kept getting worse. A couple of us were shooting up by then (not me), and shows were getting weirder. Tom Ono also took off for a while. And became even more of a douchebag than he was when we were together. ( An aside--After Shark Fetish, I tried getting a couple of other bands together (like the semi-acoustic thing I tried with you and Quitty in the garage at the D Street house). The only one that came even close to getting going was the one with Quitty, Atlas, and Aaron Elliot. Aaron had a whole bunch of post-Crimpshrine songs he'd been working on that Quitty had written guitar parts for. I wanted to call the band Lank and Aaron wanted to call it Pinhead Gunpowder. We played a couple of shows, but Aaron bailed because he didn't think the rest of us (besides Quitty) were good enough and because he wanted to move away from Arcata anyway. So, he took the songs with him when he started the East Bay "supergroup" Pinhead Gunpowder with Billy Joe from Green Day, Mike Hersch from Fuel, and the bassist from Monsula. It fucking burned me to hear Billy Joe singing songs that I had done with the test-drive version of the band.)" Doug wrote some more personal stuff that I appreciated but chose not to share here.  As with any scene, even a small one like there was in the Arcata/McKinnleyville/Eureka/Samoa trapezoid there was no shortage of infighting, drama, addiction and just general mayhem that kept the music from fully blossoming in a unified sense (go figure human nature).  Or maybe that's what defined it and made it special...I don't know.  Amazing what creativity can be fueled by ignorance, immaturity and a generous helping of alcohol and drugs.  Doug, if you read this, thanx for the input to make this post possible and for giving us Shark fetish in the first place (and I really enjoyed that acoustic thing we tried out, what stands out in my mind about that was that you guys were so good and I have absolutely no musical talent even just playing a snare and a cymbal). Enjoy what was Shark Fetish. Skate Jam Train Jam/In Flagrante Delicto Skrew Yourself Deadhead Robin Arkley Milkman Blues Snapdragon Uranium Rock Scheherazade $666 Million Man Signed DC Overload