What She Said - Body On Fire
Friday, January 30th, 2009
What She Said - Body On Fire from Radio Silence on Vimeo.
For years I had heard about a band called What She Said and the infamous video where Mr. Christopher Bratton ends an intense set by running through the crowd with his cymbal stand completely possessed by the sound. No one ever had a copy of the video so it was just a bit of hardcore trivia wedged in my brain until I met Mike Down. The first time I hung out with Mike in New York City we went to his apartment and he showed me the recently digitized version of this storied performance. I asked the ever verbose and articulate Chris Bratton to expand on the images and sounds captured that day. Chris gave me the freedom to cut and edit as I chose. I struggled for a minute because there was something about the band’s mystery that added to their myth but I realized that once it’s on the interweb for all of us to see the mystery is gone and what we don’t have is context. Luckily, Chris has a razor sharp memory and an unparalleled style of story telling when it comes to hardcore folklore so I decided that this should run it it’s entirety with minimal edits. Chris’ recollection reads partly like the liner notes to a jazz album and the details of a fucking crime scene. I can’t help but think about the savvy chaos that would have transpired immediately in the hardcore scene if What She Said had improvised a set in every major scene in their day.
What struck me immediately about Chris’ anecdote is that it bears all the identifiers of the Mike Down I know today; someone with an infectious energy, that runs on passion and imagination who makes shit happen. It’s funny to me that anyone would say he’s changed in anyway but for the better. From the first note there’s an aura around this collection of individuals, everyone is bringing something to the whole without sacrificing their individuality, it’s unique performance in hardcore’s history that was lost on a VHS tape for years. Enjoy.
In November of 1990, Mike Down became unreasonably fueled by the recent Miles Davis biography. This book unflinchingly chronicled the life of the most dangerous Jazz legend, a man who not only invented hard bop, cool jazz, psychedelic jazz rock, jazz funk, etc., but was a massive hard drug abuser, unforgivable woman beater, and victim of police beatings for the “perceived unforgivable” crime of openly being with a white woman in public. To his credit, Miles was deep into cross-pollinating with other newly emerging genres, such as acid rock, funk and new wave. This was a guy who in 1971, was savvy enough to not only go see Iggy and The Stooges in New York City, but to go back tage and bump some rails with the Asheton brothers! Fuck man!
So this was Mikes’s state of mind when he called me up, with his characteristic electricity on 11, to tell me, “We gotta do a one-time-only band, but it’s gotta be all improv!!….it’ll be you, me and Josh, (bass player of Forced Down), no vocals, just jazz improv, but hardcore!”.
Of course this made perfect sense to me, as my one-and-a-half-year-old band, Statue had already begun experimenting with ancient jazz imagery, visuals, suits and graphics. Mike wanted to call the band Said, which i liked, but felt it needed some spice, so I added What She Said in a nod to The Smiths song of the same name, as well as a line in the famous Doors song Touch Me which featured the lyric “What was that promise that you made? Why won’t you tell me what she said”? We never quite agreed on which one was correct, so technically, it’s both, but the video has an on-screen graphic that clearly says What She Said and the theme song of the band is called What She Said, but it can be both.
Without any practice, Mike got us a spot playing live on the radio in San Diego mid-afternoon and then a real live show in San Diego that same night opening for Amenity. We didn’t even think what a risk we were taking, we just knew it was gonna be thrilling and crazy, like jumping off a high cliff into the La Jolla Ocean. We played as a three piece, on the radio show and it went amazingly well, like we had played together all year. The performance lasted about 35 minutes, all parts blending into each other and it was recorded for the archives.
Mike and I were deep into this jazz idea, so we went all proper, with slicked back hair and the vintage suits. Josh wasn’t having any of that shit, and went as a civilian, as did Alex Barreto who had come down with me, just out of boredom and to be supportive. Alex and Josh’s style that night was kinda A Tribe Called Quest / Jungle Brothers, and actually provided a nice counter point to our suits. On the way to the show we thought, “Hey Alex, do you wanna try to add vocals to this”? He was up for it.
In the parking lot outside the show, I dictated and added bits and pieces as Alex, nonchalantly poured out a set of lyrics in an amazingly short amount of time, while Mike did skateboard tricks in a suit and Josh narrated to the camera. This was all documented by the talented cinematographer, Matt Anderson. It was all the most natural thing.
My idea for a “jazz” kit was a standard single rack tom kit, with high-hats and one single 22″ crash on my left and one 8″ bell cymbal on my right where a ride would normally be. for some reason this wacky cymbal set up was really liberating and made me play differently than i normally would in Inside Out, Chain of Strength, or Drive Like Jehu, whom I’d just left two months prior and probably brought a hefty amount of what i’d wanted to do with that band to What She Said.
From the onset, the heavily Amenity fan base that was there to see them didn’t know what to make of our suits and attitude and were looking at us kinda cock-eyed and waiting to see if we were going to be all wimpy and poppy or something. this wasn’t going to be the case. Josh’s high and melodic opening bass riff was kinda poppy and you can see one kid just off the front left, start clowning us, like we were gonna be all soft, but 4 seconds later we unleash the firestorm on that kid, as we suddenly erupted into full tilt action.
The first song is called Body On Fire and rages with the Alex penned lyrics: “Her body’s on fire/ she’s screaming/ because she knows that she can’t be caught up/ in all the luxuries/ she’s caught up…in the fucking luxury!“.
I’m still not sure what these lyrics are on about, but i do know that they still make me wanna kill somebody when i hear them. Possibly the eternal conflict/balance between style and substance, excess against minimalism, decadence versus discipline, only Alex knows for sure…
The phrase “body on fire” was suggested by me and was the name of the little known and short lived project band that Vic DiCara and i did, during my time with him in Inside Out that would much later come to fruition with 20 songs in the year 2000 with the band i did with Vic and Frosty from Chain of Strength.
“Body on fire” refers to the famous photo of the Vietnamese monk that set himself on fire with gasoline, in protest against the government. this photo became even more famous when used for the cover of the first Rage Against The Machine record, but this photo had been floating around the Inside Out camp for years, and likely would’ve been the cover to their record had they not been broken up and scattered when the controversial “blue” graphics were put together independently of the band by Revelation Records.
Mike Down actually is on fire in this song, as he is pulling some absolutely stellar guitar leads from the heavens. His lead work on this video is still some of my top favorite of any guitar players I’ve worked with. The only real hint of the intended jazz style, comes at the end of this song when I pull a Gene Krupa/Buddy Rich feather-touch flurry, that no one was fast enough to catch. The next song is Temple Wall with more lyrics by Alex that were heavily influenced by the Shelter and Quicksand tour he did playing drums with Inside Out earlier that spring 1990.
Alex, like a lot of hardcore people, was questioning the integrity of the Krishna leaders that were becoming involved in the hardcore scene. His questions later became totally valid as many of them were later unmasked as greedy manipulators, embezzlers, and even child molesters that had been preying on the vulnerabilities of the outcasts and misfits that were attracted to the krishna lifestyle. This song also directly mourns the loss of Vic DiCara to this lifestyle. We felt he had tricked himself into becoming a prisoner inside the “Temple Wall” for what was to become 7 years. “Temple wall, can you remember? / he questions me and i question him“. “Inside Out” indeed.
In the next song, Alex was so hypnotized by the spirits being raised, that he becomes a member of the audience and is transfixed by the stunning beauty of Josh’s crushingly melodic basslines. this song worked fantastic as an instrumental, and served as a unique interlude between the storms. Throughout the set, you can really see the special chemistry between us, as quick facial cues and lean-ins become whole new sonic vistas, that we all seemed to know exactly where we were going. the funny thing is, these songs mostly sound like finished, written songs, with breaks, stops and starts. i don’t know how we did that, these songs were just in the air and we were lucky enough to tap into them.
The final song is the tribal theme song, What She Said, featuring more cryptically powerful lyrics by Alex: “washed in this world, yes, you can’t/ remember your thrill of…stop doing all that the world/ remember what you watched in your heart/ is washed in your mind/ (...this next bit is a direct reference to Statue…), and it’s just like a reflection/ and it’s a seduction we/ recall… recall… recall…recall…recall… / What She Said/ What She Said/ What She Said...”
As this song keeps building in intensity, Josh and i start to really come unglued as he smashed his bass head stock down on my crash cymbal, dramatically swinging down on the one. Alex used to do this in Chain, but his bass would be unharmed, because he is right handed. Josh is a left handed bass player that plays a right handed bass strung right handed, so it’s upside down on him and when he bashed my cymbal, the tuning keys were smashed every which way. As the song gets more chaotic, Josh unleashes an even more violent attack on the cymbal, knocking it over, that being my cue to stand up and bash even harder, all the way tribal- on the toms only. This channels Alex into a relentless chant of “What She Said” and that sends Josh over the edge as he gets down on his knees and starts bashing the head stock of his bass as hard as he can, into the ground, over and over again, which puts mike into overdrive with a grinding, rusted knife of a riff, until Josh dramatically snaps off the head stock of his bass. keep in mind Josh was not a rich kid, and he had just bought that Fender Precision Bass, brand new, from the Guitar Center after saving up all summer. He then starts slamming the body of his bass even harder into this solid, heavy cabinet/table thing that was holding up his bass cab. By this time I’m foaming at the mouth and kick over the drums and hurl the floor tom, sending a shower of sticks, but that’s not enough, because now I’ve got bloodlust and want to kill, as I pick up my cymbal stand horizontally, and charge the crowd, like a police barricade. As i’m flat out running back to smash myself really hard into the wall, Josh picks up what’s left of his bass and hurls it as hard as he can against the wall. as I rebound off the wall, I totally step down on his bass, audibly crunching it somewhere around the pick-ups, further damaging the bass. The crowd goes fucking wild and you can tell, dudes cannot believe what they just saw, as a chant comes up, “Let’s break Mike Denny’s stuff”!
Mike had a really expensive, new Mesa Boogie rig and brand new Les Paul Custom sunburst. Some dudes were actually considering it, as I saw it in their eyes. Mike Down was and remains a controversial dude in San Diego.
After viewing the amazing and intuitively shot footage, it was pretty obvious that we should just become the new best band in Southern California, but after calling all the shots in Forced Down, Mike wasn’t sure he wanted to deal with two more volatile opinions from Alex and myself and we, conversely, attempted to just have Mike and Josh join Statue with our great momentum and incredible catalog of over 30, ultra catchy, well written songs. Mike definitely wasn’t having any of that and the whole thing was just stalemated, for the time being and we let Drive Like Jehu have the honor of best new so cal band. Later that spring, mike wanted to try What She Said again and got us a show at the Che’ Cafe, opening for the newly mighty Drive Like Jehu. Although the chemistry was still strong, our approach had noticeably changed. Wthout planning or practicing, we did a long and dramatic intro which featured Rick Froberg playing on a piano that happened to be a stage prop at the Che’. Our set was sprawling and epic, with some truly genius parts but the improv had gotten bloated and the style of short, crisp, almost finished songs of the previous show was nowhere to be found. This spring 1991 Che’ show was also audio recorded for the archives. So that was that for What She said as we never played together again.
NOTES
The original November 1990 show was 4 songs, in roughly 16.5 minutes. we SAID a whole lot in a very little amount of time, which later on influenced Statue to play some shows in the ground breaking format of “3 songs, then total auto-destruction”.
Mike Down’s superb leads also influenced Statue to break out leads, for the first time, on our Filter The Infection record that was recorded just 3 months later at Epitaph’s West Beach in Hollywood.
What She Said’s “improv” style had massive influence on Statue, who up until then had written songs in the Dischord “hit song” format. as we got more into studying Led Zeppelin and found out that they were dramatically improving, this seemed the way to go and we were good at it too. That kicked up our 30 songs to over 50 songs by the time we broke up in the fall of 1992, but eventually i longed for concrete, well written songs that were like sniper bullets, over the hit or miss improv style.
Almost exactly one year to the week of our show, Miles Davis died, bringing us back, full circle, to where we started.
This show remains the most perfect release of any show I’ve played in my 25 years of playing, in that we all four completely lost ourselves in the moment, with no self-consciousness. it was exactly how you always dream a show would be, but rarely goes down like you envision.
Jive Time records in Seattle + Beautiful World Syndicate in Philly. My current fav. record shops in the USA. Mostly killer, very little filler, reasonable prices.
