HAMMERDOWN TURPENTINE NEWSLETTER

"The Saloon Tribune"

OCTOBER 2002 Vol. 1, No. 3

Forward to a friend. This is not a "golden handshake."

CALL TO ACTION: Hammerdown Turpentine will play Club Deluxe this Sunday afternoon (10/27) at 4pm. Club Deluxe is located at 1509-11 Haight St. (Haight @ Ashbury). This is HDT’s LAST SHOW OF THE YEAR.

The show is FREE (donations welcome).

Dear Friends!

This Sunday afternoon is our last show of 2002. Probably.

Without a scintilla of braggadocio, I here report that when I’m not flying fearless into the eye of Hurricane Lili, to New Orleans, with a pocketful of Lord-have-mercy to see the Steelers almost beat the Saints in the Louisiana Superdome and then throwing down a Ferdi Special and getting loaded while sweating my brains out during an involuntary shoe-shine, I’m thinking of you, and how Hammerdown Turpentine can better entertain you.

This perennial brainstorming has led to the following list:

1. Those who compare incomparables expose the wasteland of their thinking. (I read that somewhere. HDT will try to avoid such comparisons.)

2. Stop breaking mic stands. (I will try to curb this new habit.)

Well, that’s about it.

Masochistically,

Jif Johnson

President of the Presidium of the legislative Supreme HDT Assembly and P.A.H.C.’s liaison to the ceremonial head of state where the different "perfumes" which the earth produces are kept perpetually burning in censers of gold.

www.hammerdownturpentine.com

P.S.

This show will be Hammerdown Turpentine’s final performance in 2002 and will commemorate the birthday of Brian, Grand(pappy) Chancellor of the P.A.H.C and a national board member of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Moonshine (SNTAM). It’s likely we’ll be taking photos during the show for our new album so perhaps everyone can get in the shot and be a part of history. Hammerdown Girls Gone Wild!

THE GRAND FINALE

How depressing. With the holidays and assorted vacations coming up (see HOLIDAY PLANS, below), Hammerdown Turpentine will not be playing any more shows this year. We’ll be finishing up our new album, kissing our moms, and writing new tunes. What will you be doing? Eating turkey and pining for HDT, I suppose. You’ll have to make do with the many fine HDT cover bands playing around town, like Hammerdown Tupentina, the all-girl cover band, or Camperdown Turpentine, the cover band made up of former members of Camper Van Beethoven.

In these end-of-the-year autumn months, Hammerdown Turpentine reflects on a rowdy, fattening year and prepares resolutions for the porky year to come. What will 2003 hold? More of the same, most likely. Or perhaps I’ll drop dead.

Yes, it’s no statistical secret that the holiday season turns many a world-weary man to the suicide solution. Let’s keep our chins up, however, and resolve to make next year sparkle.

NEWS PASTICHE

The archdiocese received an accusation that Chief Moose had kissed a teenager on the mouth at a christening: a victory for Vatican bureaucrats and recalcitrant bishops. The next day, teachers said, a small group of students showed up out of uniform. They moved through the hallways like a threatening storm cloud, whispering to others of their newly realized rights. A quiet guerrilla war was being waged. This was an obsession in search of a justification, a chimera, if not a canard. And that justification would be degraded by publication of nude photographs. One girl said the pictures had been taken without her consent while she was changing clothes at a Hammerdown Turpentine show. She said the band talked about going to Miami and "bringing it down,'' though she wasn't sure what "it'' meant. "The news is in the symbolism of this, not so much in the details of the lessons they are putting forth," said Dr. Blix and the inspectors, "Redheads require more anesthesia."

HOLIDAY PLANS

Fans like Gerhard Sessler, Michel Houellebecq, and 10-time World Women's Horseshoe Champion Vicki Winston want to know: How will the members of Hammerdown Turpentine spend their holidays?

Don (bass payer and granola eater) will be reenacting the birth of his "personal savior" by retrogressing in a barn. He says, "Sweet! Reenacting is a hobby that is growing around the world. Search the internet, and you can find people who reenact everything from the ancient Romans all the way up through the Gulf War." (For example: http://www.angelfire.com/wv/mesawmi/ ) See Don about starting a "reenacting club" or having him join your band.

Clint (drummer and bummer) will continue to fulfill his self-appointed state assigned service--to engender public amnesia and divert attention from the truth surrounding "bum bites" (some days Clint says this has to do with people bitten by bums and some days he says this is about some kind of bum snack food or snack food made out of bums). Like quantum physics, Clint is notoriously weird. Clint’s contempt for holidays is well known in the San Francisco music scene--Mark Growden once called him a "Grinch."

Dave (unemployed multi-instrumentalist #1) is the manager of the softball team at "High Times," a New York-based magazine for marijuana enthusiasts. Since 1996, the team, the Bonghitters, has gone 50-8-4, and only recently ended an amazing three-year winning streak. He’ll be signing baseball cards of other, Major League, players for morally-flexible inner-city children over the holidays. Prices per card may vary but not Dave’s commitment to philanthropy. Dude!

Oliver (unemployed multi-instrumentalist #2) will spend November and December wearing nothing but a soupcon of agitation in Aspen Hill hunting down the last of those who claimed to have discovered the works of "Ossian," the lost father of Gaelic poetry. Best of luck to him. He will celebrate the New Year quietly, with his dolls. Oh, and he has a little pink Christmas tree. FYI.

Lynn (multi-instrumentalist and professional fiancée), called "The Country Crippler" and "The Damsel of Death," has admitted she killed six middle-aged men in 1989 and 1990, luring some of them by posing as a stranded motorist on north central Florida highways. She will be executed Christmas day, becoming the 10th woman executed in the United States since the death penalty resumed in 1976. Know any girls who can play fiddle and piano? You’ll have to date me!

Jif (singer and sex symbol) will continue his "life work" of exposing that chimp-fucker, Jane Goodall. He will spend Thanksgiving alone with a can of finnian haddie writing angry letters to the 1985 Broadway cast of "The Pirates of Penzance," all of which begin: "Socrates warned us long ago--the human mind is very weak," and all of which end with a complaint about "pedestrian" performances of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General."

HALLOWEEN TURPENTINE

Dressing up as your favorite member of HDT this year? Get your fake beards and banjos! As for me, I’m getting my apples and razor blades ready and dressing up as a cell from Henrietta Lacks (http://slate.msn.com/?id=2072092). You can dress up in a costume for our show on Sunday if you want as it is reasonably close to Halloween. Halloween is the OTHER thing shaving cream and toilet paper have in common and is embraced by Danzig. Like candy, it was better when you were a kid. The best thing about it is that the day after, you can buy cheap skulls from any drugstore.

HAMMERDOWN TURKEYTIME

Thanksgiving’s great. Who doesn’t love food? You’d have to be a real idiot! When the Indians came to scalp us for giving them small pox, for some reason they brought corn. Cheap-ass Indians! Anyway, the pilgrims ate until they had to loosen the buckles on their hats and the Indians took the feathers from the turkey and made mighty headdresses. Look around and it’s pretty clear who got the bigger piece of the wishbone! Today we celebrate eating by gathering with friends, or at least family, and thanking God for food. You’d have to be a real idiot to believe in God but not quite as big an idiot as one who doesn’t love food! That’s about all that happens in November.

REGARDING CHRISTMAS/HANUKKAH/KWANZAA

Besides being incredibly hard to spell, Hanukkah is observed by millions of Jews around the globe and commemorates the victory of faith over tyranny. Kwanzaa is apparently a holiday celebrated by many African-Americans, started in 1966 by Doctor Maulana Karenga. Who knew? I bet Arab-Americans had a December holiday in the works–that’s fucked for sure now! Anyway, there’s lots of religions, etc. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about Christmas! Santa rules! Ho Ho Ho! And how about those gifts? Fucking-A! I even like the tree that you cut down and put inside your house! Now, don’t get mad at me, I like Jesus just fine. Hey, if Tolstoy likes him, I like him. Of course the President likes him, so I guess they cancel each other out. Jesus might be the reason for the season but Santa does all the lifting. Not only that, but once you find out Santa doesn’t exist you still get presents–try that with Jesus. And how about those stop-animation Christmas specials they’ve been running for twenty years! Christ!

HAPPY NEW YEAR BLUE ANGELS!

Right. New Year’s Eve. Drinks. Resolutions. Sounds like every day of the year to me. Ho-hum. I think this holiday is only a big deal if you own a calendar. Besides, it depresses me to think that people sit around watching Dick Clark’s balls drop. You know what else? Sorry to get off topic but as I write the Blue Angels are roaring around downtown. Now, forgive me, but I hate the Blue Angels and not just because of their dopey name. You know why you never see regular planes flying over downtown? Because it’s fucking dangerous. Also, where were these jingoistic top guns when we needed them on Sept. 11? Doing loop-de-loops over Atlanta, probably. I think I got in a fight with Clint and Dave about this before*, but I just don’t think the propaganda’s worth the cost of fuel. Are they supposed to be training for a war? With whom, the Red Baron? And can someone explain to me why they’re a part of the Navy? I’m no expert but if you attack in that "diamond formation" don’t the planes in the back of the diamond shoot the planes up front? And if the one up front gets shot down, don’t they all go down like bowling pins?

*Clint and Dave have denied this conversation occurred.

PEOPLE ARE TALKING: JIF JOHNSON

Said of Jif Johnson, by Arthur Ellerd, Psychologist

In July, Pete Bruno, the psychologist at the Mental Health Center in Forsyth, told me that I am probably the smartest human ever born in the world.

"You have an I.Q. that is out of this world."

Said of Jif Johnson, by Gus Anderson, Missionary

"No one who ever lived on the earth, has suffered as much as you have."

Said of Jif Johnson, by Dr. Martin A. Ruona Billings, Mont. Neurologist.

"You aren't normal, Jif, tremendous minds like yours are only found in insane asylums."

Said of Jif Johnson, by Rev. Hubert C. Robinson

"It tastes like a Twinkie but it has a little extra flavor because of the frying," doctors said. "And the powdered sugar just tops it off."

My intellect is gigantic, monstrous, terrifying.

FARE YE WELL!

TO UNSUBSCRIBE

Reply to this e-mail with the phrase: "But that night, in that bar, he was no one's hero." in the subject line.