May 25 - L'Apocalypso, Bizanos France

I s’pose I’ve been a bit pissy lately. Turning annoyances into typhoons. Whining like a crying, asshole baby. Oh well. This morning Dani, our guardian angel in Spain, made us coffee and we took him out for our last Spanish meal of the tour. Dani works harder than you ever will, but is much more pleasant to be around than Rollins. To thank him, I would like to make Chicago as beautiful as Spain. But I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon.

The Pyrenees Mountains kicked the Alps’ ass. The Alps are bunch of numbnuts that you look at and go “huh”. The Pyrenees are green, gorgeous mounds that flirt and let you feel them up. We stopped to get a random eyeful and found ourselves scaling and mounting their majestic hills. Mike darted high above us, toward a distant cave. He was up there for a while having a religious experience until the concept of mountain lions spooked him back down to civilization, sockless in his chef’s clogs. We cooled off below near a stream that groped the snow.

Later on down the road, Mike and I dipped our heads in the frigid fury of a waterfall. It seemed to baptize off all my petty tour crabbiness. Also, I haven’t showered in a few days, so that was nice, too.

As we entered France we listened to my terrible mix. Six songs were declared unlistenable: Franki Valli’s version of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”, Butthole Surfers “Pepper”, some Darkthrone song, a warbling 8-track dub of “Working For the Weekend”, Jan and Dean’s demo for “Laurel and Hardy”, and the theme from Cheers. This puts me in the lead for worst mix, unless you count John’s mixes that inspired this game.

I was sincerely awestruck by the stamina of this band, for they endured The Blessed Union of Souls, a barking dogs version of “Obladi Oblada”, “Misery Tomb” by Samhain, an 8-minute account of a birthmark removal operation, the Home Improvement theme, Yngwie Malsteem’s “Magical Mystery Tour”, and singing psychic Frances Baskerville’s horribly repetitive ballad about the assassination of JFK, plus nine other dismal workouts. It is my belief that a record collection should contain music that you don’t like.

Last year L'Apocalypso was located in a storage space in the small town of Lons. This year it has moved to the town of Bizanos, named after the pizza chain famous for its pizza patties and buckets of low fat cheesy sticks. Remember this catchphrase? “Bizanos! Buy somethin’ already, you stupid faggot.” Ah, memories.

The van pulled into the loading dock of a squatted factory. Its windows shattered, its walls graffitied, its floor shat upon. This was it. I don’t know how on earth the unreliable GPS found this spot- it didn’t even have an address, just a street. Beyond splintered pallet lean-to’s for rocks and sticks and bottles stood a door. It opened into an air conditioned, carpeted, dry-walled, soundproofed, decorated, live room. A spread of home cooked food sat warmly waiting. It looked like a venue. Relief.

We explored the decrepit cavities of this once functioning I-dunno. Everything looked raped. “Fuck R Kelly” was the mantra on one almost-wall. The world’s worst mattress lay dead, soaked in its own mildewy mix of rusty rain and browned bodily secretions. A neutered shower stood in the center of it all, its purpose having long ago been aborted. A strange fruit. A scarecrow against hygiene. You had to watch your step. While clambering across a caved-in roof, the bridge of garbage doors I was using started to wobble a bit. Mike balance-beamed like Quigley Down Under to a room whose dark pit of broken bones was once a floor. Every other step contained broken glass or blackened human feces. I snapped a grunge photo of the band and caught a good Elliot Smith pose out of Reid before we all got tetanus and jaundice and breathed in a bunch of asbestos AIDS.

Stephan, who put the show together, had prepared the great spread of fruit lentils, ham pasta, and an assortment of flavorful pizzas. After all we were in Bizano’s (“Home of the best fuckin’ pizza ever, you better not be a faggot!”). On the walls of this Bizano’s hung rock portraits of action packed shows. Lo and behold there was Dani from Picore, watching over us with the caring eyes of an abuelo.

The Welter Quartet was a variety of fun. The diminutive singer Clemence Pantaignan wore a short pageboy coiffe and circled the microphone while the quartet alternated between John Zorn jazz rock and unpredictable cabaret. Sometimes a song would find a groove and then a pitfall, sending all the instruments tumbling down onto a pile of nail-covered squatters. Ms. Pantaignan’s best bit was a piece in which she sang a verse as a woman and then dramatically held a moustache-on-a-stick over her lips for the verse as a man, all the while pounding out an Elvis shaky leg tango. They closed with “Blue Moon” and “White Light White Heat.” France!

A Spanish hangover was apparent in our set, as the errant “gracias” or “este cantante” leaked out. Reid’s Reggae Ronald opening still continues to baffle audiences of all origins. The Frenchmen egged on our cowboy sound with hoots and “yee haws”, while a particular girl danced the entire set like a happy lass from a little house on a prairie. Another woman did cartwheels. I talked with the dancing girl after the set, Sara. She said her old band made music "like The Beatles but more beautiful." I asked her if she thought the music was more beautiful than Jesus, to which she modestly chirped “yes.” This was met with polite applause.

Magic Alexis put us up once again in his big ancient country home on the outskirts of Pau. The twenty minute drive was filled with a vile improvised vignette. It starred the Bizano’s guys in a father & son chat about converting homosexuals to straightood by sucking the “faggot” out of their brick-hard cocks, among other things. It turns out the Bizano’s guys are complicated.

I have heard that parents and relatives and good people sometimes read this blog. For this I am very sorry.