[Editor's note: I'm re-running this piece from the vast North of Onhava archives in celebration of Guided By Voices' appearance on Letterman the other night, during the course of which bass player/lawyer Greg Demos fell on his ass. That's actually a quote from Greg to Mr. Letterman: "I fell on my ass." My point in re-running the piece is, as you will see, that it is not uncommon for members of Guided By Voices to fall on their asses. Or, in my case, to slice open their wrists while doing so. Enjoy!]

It happened in Philadelphia, which is a city on the Northeast coast of America, for those of you who don’t get out much. It features the Liberty Bell, which is famous for (inscrutable) reasons of its own but is best known for its cameo appearance in a Guided By Voices song called “Echoes Myron,” from the Bee Thousand album. We were playing a club in Philly’s Chinatown called the Trocadero, and a curious feature of the Trocadero was that it had two levels, on both of which you were able to buy beer in bottles (this was back when America was still a lawless and often awesome place, in other words in 1995). The show itself was unremarkable except in the sense that we were of course insanely great, as usual, and as a result, were called back for three encores. By the time we got to the third encore in those days there was often some discussion as to what we should play, because having released at that point only two or three albums that everybody knew, and learned not every single one of the songs on those albums for the purposes of playing live, our repertoire was somewhat more limited than that enjoyed by later iterations of the band, who were known for sometimes playing for three days straight without repeating a song. It doesn’t really matter: I remember the discussion, but I don’t remember what we played.

For whatever reason, my drink of choice that evening had been some kind of vodka concoction, consisting of vodka, ice, and a glass, and probably another ingredient I’m forgetting. It may or may not have been the famous “Pink Drink” surrounding which there has grown over the years some mythomania, mostly due to the song called “Pink Drink” that Robert Pollard wrote and had slated for inclusion on The Power of Suck album we never made, for reasons which have been detailed in earlier installments of The Further Adventures. It’s irrelevant, anyway. The point is, I was very drunk, all of us in the band were very drunk, and so as a consequence my memory in this instance has had to be padded out with the help of an obliging friend who happened to be in the audience that night.

What happened, in short, was this: between encores, our presence was requested back onstage both in the usual manner — by cheers and stomps and applause and the ritual chant “GBV! GBV!” that Bob inadvertently and artificially invented at the beginning of the album Propeller, and only slightly regrets — and by a shower of mostly-empty beer bottles rained on the stage itself, many of which shattered upon impact, so that by the time we shuffled back onstage for the third encore the stage was covered in shards of broken glass. Making that an inopportune time for Mitch Mitchell, in an admirable excess of rock’s natural spirit of excess, to awkwardly bear-hug/tackle me from behind. We both went down in a heap, and I cut open my right wrist on one of the bottle shards. It started bleeding. A lot. I noticed, but in a detached, third-person, kind of “huh” way. Pete Jamison, Manager For Life, also noticed and quickly found a towel to which he applied a quantity of soap (obtained where? obtained how?) and between songs I would go over to him and he would apply the towel to my wound in an attempt to staunch the wound. It didn’t work, because playing bass requires a lot of right-wrist movement, which obviated any amelioratory effects from the soaped-up towel. In my memory, I bled quite a lot, but I’m never sure how far I can trust my memory, which is sieve-like at the best of times, and through which entire events have sluiced under the effect of alcohol.

Here’s where audience member John Golden came to my rescue during a recent correspondence, through which it transpired that he had been there, and had been impressed enough by what he saw that the memory remains clearer for him than for me.

In John’s words (edited here because this is a family blog): “I was geeked enough to be right up front, but also clever enough to be sufficiently soused. The bad news is I have no recollection whatsoever regarding opening act(s). I don’t even remember if I saw them and forgot them, or spent that time working on the aforementioned sousing. The good news is that from the moment the first set ended and the encores began, the memories are indelible. To answer your question: yes, OH YES, I most certainly saw the blood. Everyone in at least the first 20, erm, rows (?) must have seen the blood. When I tell the story, I always say (I really do) that the blood was “pouring down (your) bass.” I also remember the meteor shower of beer bottles directed at the stage by an audience starving for another encore and reciting the obvious chant while putting said bottles into flight. One whizzed right past my ear — one of those delirious and dangerous moments that seem profound when one is young, drunk, and at a rock show. You know, in a no guts, no glory kind of way. So yes, you ambled back on stage, a stage positively strewn with broken glass, and Mitch tackled you from behind. You both went down, you both came up. You, with some major artery seemingly severed. The rest of the band came out. Bob launched into song. And you played, as I mentioned, with blood pouring down your bass. The other thing I often mention when telling the story is that at that point, it no longer mattered that I never saw a Kiss show back when they were in their prime.”

I have no idea who “Kiss” is, probably some local Philadelphia band, probably not as good as the Strapping Fieldhands (few bands were or are) but I appreciate his confirmation of my own impressions of that night. Here’s what I would add: in my memory, there was girl videotaping the show from just to the side of the stage, and I think she may have fainted. Bob didn’t notice that anything was wrong, because when Bob is in rock mode he notices nothing, literally, that does not directly impinge on his delivery of the song. I’m not sure what Toby or Kevin or Mitch noticed, because I was too busy trying to stop the bleeding and the urge to scream in pain. We made it through the three or four or eleventy-seven songs that constituted the third and last encore, and when I went backstage I was surrounded by well-intentioned people who urged me to go to the ER and have my wound (which occurred on the soft part of the wrist just below the hand, and was deep, but did not sever any arteries, obviously, or I would not still be alive) stitched. I refused, because there was still some alcohol left, and I believed, back then, it was bad form to go anywhere while there was still alcohol left. “I must have lost a pint of vodka,” I remember saying, and then tried to replace that pint as quickly as I could. Bob’s comment, when he saw the extent of my injury, was that “Guided By Voices don’t get stitches.”

Back at the hotel later that night, I began to regret my decision to leave my wound untreated, as I had trouble sleeping because of the throbbing pain in my wrist. And at the next show, in Washington D.C. (either at the Black Cat or the new 9:30 Club), I regretted it even more, because no matter how I bandaged the thing, the wound kept opening up, and Pete had to stand by the side of the stage and apply soaped-up towel after soaped-up towel to my wrist in a fruitless attempt to get the damn thing to stop bleeding. Luckily, that was the last show of the tour, and except for a taping of a few songs we had to do for a D.C. radio station, I then had two weeks or so to let the thing heal. And like all things eventually either do or do not, it did.

I’m left with a scar that will stay with me until I die, and what I guess is a funny, if gory, story. As for the bass — that poor early 1964 Thunderbird, I believe it suffered the worst. Try as I might, I could not get all the blood cleaned out of that thing. I took the strings off, and the pick guard. I used rubbing alcohol and q-tips, but the blood had poured down into the pick-ups and dried there, and I was not in the mood to open up the guts of my instrument and mess with its mysterious mojo. Somewhere, today, in the pawnshops or music stores of Dayton, Ohio, or possibly in the hands of a new owner — who if he or she knew its sanguine history would freak out at its indelible but essential grossness — you can find that bass, and in it, some residue of my blood. I am between happy and sad about that idea.

p.s. a late amendment via the aforementioned John Golden:  “I directed my brother to your blog post. He was at the concert as well and, I can’t believe I didn’t remember this, the self-same Strapping Fieldhands opened the show, along with Portastatic. That was probably the first time I ever heard “Ussysses,” which remains a favorite.

 Another fun note, the Trocadero’s usual policy is to allow drinking on either the upper or lower level, not both. They decide which based on the band (and their best guess at the audience’s degree of alcoholism). The both-bars-open policy that night was a concession I’ve never seen repeated.“