Not long before the final tour of the A Fire Inside EP, a mutual friend asked Mark what type of AFI record he planned on writing to follow our third full-length. His earnest reply: “Unlistenable. Something everyone will hate.” Though this was the type of chaos I would have certainly supported, he never said this to me. He’d stopped speaking to me sometime in the fall of ‘98. Jade took his place shortly thereafter.
The first time I wrote with Jade was in my room beneath the stairs at the defunct frat house that AFI lived in at the time.* That evening in 1998, promptly at our scheduled hour, a knock came upon my thick wooden door. I opened it with an anticipatory smile and nod. “What’s up man?” Jade walked into the shadows of my ill-lit room carrying his acoustic guitar. My mattress and boxspring, set under the flight of stairs leading to the third floor, was the only place to sit. Our new guitarist sat on its edge. I sat on the floor with my microcassette recorder, facing him. The room was scented of cheap vanilla candles. Peter Murphy stared at me from a poster behind our new guitarist. I was excited. Jade was then and is now one of the greatest songwriters I’ve known. My band of seven years was about to begin its metamorphosis. “So, I was thinking,” he offered. “I miss the melodic stuff in AFI. How about we add some of that back in? Nothing crazy, just a bit.” As genuinely ready as I’d have been for Mark’s repellant HXC vision to take AFI down a path that forked toward cacophonous supernova (or 2024 Taco Bell commercials?) I felt Jade’s as well. Limiting myself to screaming limited my abilities of emoting and evocation as well. It was becoming unfulfilling and suffocating.
Jade picked up his acoustic, strummed some chords, and in falsetto sang, “We all begin to burn…” He’d come prepared with these parts and I was immediately hooked. Working from the scratch lyric intended to act as a gang callout, I expounded with conceptual responses and so came the rest of Malleus Maleficarum. I believe some weathered copy of the tome itself had been lying about my room—if not, some witchy text that referenced it. Malleus was the first song we’d ever written together. I can recall our writing of Clove Smoke Catharsis and God Called in Sick Today in that tiny dark room as well. With those tracks, I felt certain our next record was going to be well beyond anything I’d ever thought I would have been capable of being a part of. I was utterly inspired. In our latest writing sessions together, 25 years later, I’ve felt beyond this. What a luxury.
During that late '90s East Bay winter Jade, Hunter, Adam and I put BSITS together in our tiny Oakland practice pad, off 20th, then tracked it with Andy at the Art Of Ears in Hayward. I shredded my voice during my allotted two days of time, screaming out 15 tracks that defiantly sat steadfast at the top of my range. Oh, but to have my 23-year-old healing powers back.
Weeks later, I pulled the advanced master from the mail and squirreled to my parking space by the dumpsters behind the frat house. Sat in the faded burgundy upholstery of my driver seat, I slid the cassette into my ’83 Accord’s silver player and depressed the play button. Click. Adam’s ominous preface to Strength Through Wounding began. The gang of Skinhead Rob, Fritch, and our buddy Dan followed the warlike beat. Then came the impure chant, ominously brooding through my crackling speakers with all the blasphemous piety I’d hoped. I was so happy with what we’d made.
When Dexter Holland, singer of The Offspring and owner of the label we were on at the time, first heard Black Sails in the Sunset he told our A&R guy, “I don’t get it.” Commercially, this wasn’t a great sign. Artistically, it was affirming.
Be they pretty fly, or even barely fly, BSITS did alienate a lot of fans (as had Shut Your Mouth and every record thereafter), but with it we gained more fans who were ready to join us on the ever jagging sonic journey we’d begun. My look at the time was arguably even more confronting than the relatively unorthodox sounds of Black Sails. The rigid regulations of the extremely masculine ’90s hardcore scene didn’t make much room for a singer in whiteface, black lipstick, fishnet, and PVC. Philosophically this remains unacceptable to me. Our fierce and fabulous ancestors gave us our glitter. I’ll leave you with one of the more delightful heckle memories from the unparalleled Life on the Ropes Tour with Sick of It All, Hot Water Music and Indecision:
INTERIOR: a compact second story theatre, packed with hundreds of hardcore kids. AFI is onstage somewhere in the midwest. Clouds of fog spill over the carmine valance as Jade begins the opening riff to their final song. God Called in Sick Today whispers to life as your author crouches in the crawling billows, his vinyl pants reflecting red light into the baffled eyes of dreadlocked white boys in capacious corduroy JNCOs and commodious VOD tees. They impatiently await the NYC legends, SOIA.
A heckle bursts through the gentle riff. “Let’s go, Trent Reznor!”
Your author rolls his heavily shadowed, lined, and mascaraed eyes. How elementary, he thinks. The opening riff continues.
“Come on, Peter Murphy!”
Begrudgingly impressed by the boor’s finer reference, your author’s plucked brows slightly raise with imperceptible surprise. He gives the heckler no acknowledgment, remaining in the song. The opening line of the verse is seconds away when the boy barks,
“Ok, Count Chocula!”
Grinning, your author chuckles for the first and last time ever before singing, “Let’s admire the pattern forming…”
25 years later, the pattern continues to shift.
*see: Channing House Pt. 1
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