Fight club
Picking at Fleshies.

By Duncan Scott Davidson

I DON'T KNOW what made me think Oakland's Fleshies would be violent.

Maybe it was the fact that they'd just returned from a marathon tour of the United States and Europe: 133 shows in 140 days. That's a lot of time to be pickled in your own sweat – and your neighbors' sweat – in the back of a van, only to be unleashed on an unsuspecting crowd of yokels every few hundred miles or so. Imagine if the circus came to town and unlocked the animal cages, letting dazed, motion-sick lions and tigers and bears bumblefuck around the citizenry until their heads cleared and they realized they wanted meat.

Even before I went to interview them in the East Oakland warehouse where bass player Yvan "Vonny Bon Bons" and drummer Brian "Hamiltron" live, I'd been told by vocalist John (variously "John Geek" and "Johnny No Moniker") how they'd beat Black Flag's touring record by somewhere around 35 shows. When I did sit down with the band in a darkened corner of said warehouse, a 12-pack of the King of Beers on the ground between us, the Flag record was the first thing to come up.

"I thought that we don't have enough Black Flag comparisons," guitarist Matt "Mattowar" said. "I'm glad that we could mention them in an interview." I'd read Get in the Van, man. The Fleshies had Rollins and company beat on tour dates, plus the fact that they had quality punk rock pseudonyms. Surely there'd be tales of ultraviolence.

Maybe it was the brutal, uncompromising rock action of their new record, The Sicilian (Alternative Tentacles). There was something in the guitar tone and the ferocity of John's howling that reminded me of '90s noise hatchetmen Unsane, which must've led me to think of their blood-splattered album covers. The Sicilian actually has a severed head on the cover, albeit a cartoon one. And it's the cartoony element to the CD, specifically John's use of a punked-out Prince falsetto in between screams, that kicks it into a higher quantum orbit than their 2001 A.T. full-length, Kill the Dreamer's Dream, as well as placing it worlds ahead of anything the Unsane did.

Their earlier material even sounded a little like Hickey, the now-defunct band who were kings of shit-talking in the late '90s Bay Area punk scene – and the Fleshies perked up when I pointed out a Hickey heart spray-painted on the wall. The admiration was sort of reciprocated. My Lusty Lady coworker Aesop, once a member of Hickey, later said, "They're a Hickey rip-off, but that's OK, because they're a good Hickey rip-off." He agreed, however, that the new album "far surpasses anything Hickey ever recorded." With The Sicilian, the Fleshies take the breakneck skullbash of Dreamer's Dream down the garden path, tiptoeing through the tulips at times, varying the tempo of the destruction, cutting it with some melody as well as levity.

Finally, it could have been the Fleshies live show that made me think there'd be some ribald tour tales of hard drinking and fisticuffs. A couple weeks before the interview, I caught their set opening for prog-punk elder statesmen Victim's Family at Bottom of the Hill.

"This song's about humpin'," John said into the mic. As Brian, Yvan, and Matt launched into "Desperate, Middle-Aged Woman," a tale of emotional estrangement and sexual dissatisfaction involving a Volvo-driving premenopausal seductress, an underage movie usher, "some brown weed and some dirty cocaine," John launched himself into the crowd. During the course of the show, he spent more time off the stage than on it, impressing the hell out of me with his ability to sing a perfect falsetto while upside down.

The manic energy of the music and Mr. Geek's Brownian motion through the crowd was tempered, like the album, by a certain silliness, notably Mattowar's "Oops I crapped my pants" expression. Ralph from Victim's Family said something about never following a band that are half your age and have just played a million shows in a row. The next day I found out John's antics left him with a dislocated shoulder.

Killer clowns from Bloomington

My preconceptions of the bloody-knuckled punk tour got a nut check at the warehouse when I asked about any altercations that might have occurred during the tour and I received blank looks. There were some false starts, as people fished about for the type of story I thought they'd have in spades, when Yvan said something about "Juggalos."

Jugga-whats?

Apparently, Juggalos are Insane Clown Posse fans who walk around in clown makeup and act, well, insane. "It's a social phenomenon," John continued.

"It's got to be a Midwestern social phenomenon," I said, not having seen any myself.

"They're really scary," John said. "Scary fucking white kids."

The Juggalos were at the Fleshies show in Bloomington, Ind., because the opening metal band went down to the park and gave a bunch of them flyers. "So this huge pack of Juggalos showed up, just muggin' everybody and giving hard looks," John said. "During the metal band, they all started fighting. There were eight fights at once. Then they all left."

Frat guys are oppressed too

A bizarre brush with circus-sized danger, for sure. If the Juggalos had stuck around for the Fleshies' full-contact live show, it could've turned into pro wrestling. But they left. Instead of taking this as a cue to focus on the lighter side of the Fleshies' presentation, I kept digging for tales of blood for some reason.

John, perhaps out of pity, came up with another story. "We almost got into a fight in Missoula," he said. "We were hanging out with our friends in the band Suburban Bitch and Brontez and Melissa and Janelle. These three college-frat-jock kind of guys walk by and start talking shit about 'What's your sexual orientation?' and blah, blah, blah. And Brontez and Melissa are both black and gay.

"We were just, 'Why don't you guys just leave?' ... We were just sticking to ourselves. And they started getting closer and closer, and they were talking shit. We suddenly all stood up, there's like eight of us. We were like, 'What? What do you want? We've got three versus eight – what do you want to do?' Everybody's getting mad. There are like broken bottles being clutched."

All right, I thought – here it comes. The punks fall into the clutches of narrow-minded, wide-shouldered linebacker types after hours in a sleepy cow town. The underdog is about to become the übermensch, and our heroes are set to smack oppression on its meaty brow.

Not.

"They kinda realized that they were outnumbered and they were going to be beaten up," John said. "And I think they were really disturbed about the idea of being beaten up by a bunch of black, gay people and their friends. Which is fucking awesome in my opinion." Cooler heads prevailed, another crisis was averted, and the oppressors escaped by donning the duds of the oppressed. At least metaphorically. "They started getting really whiny," John continued. "They got up and said, 'You don't understand. Just because I'm not gay or a minority doesn't mean I don't have a voice!' "

A few days later, via e-mail, John told a similar story about capitalizing on someone's homophobia to rectify an unpleasant situation. "One time, this dumbfuck mohawked Epitaph kid in Reno was dancing like a complete asshole, making everyone else feel threatened. So I fondled his ass and stuck my tongue down his throat. He didn't like that at all, so he punched me in the face and gave me a bloody nose. I blew him a kiss and kept doing my thing. It worked. Despite his repeated attempts to deck me again after that, he stopped dancing like an asshole, and everyone else could have some fun again."

Lovers not fighters

And that's how Fleshies' fight tales seem to go. Someone does something incredibly stupid or assholelike, and the Fleshies rise above, but not quite in the way Black Flag had in mind on Damaged. Either they take one on the nose, Christlike, or they show enlightened, Buddhalike restraint.

Who would've thought that interviewing a punk band would hold a mirror up to my own nature, the kernel of violence down in the core that makes the triumphant "payback's a bitch" type of big-screen celluloid so satisfying. They're revenge fantasies of the impotent, I guess, like the title of the Alice Donut record. Perhaps the fact that I cut my proverbial punk rock teeth on SoCal hardcore bands like Flag, where the ethos seemed to be, "Sure, if the jocks want to fight, we'll bring it to them," brought me to the interview with the wrong set of questions, looking for fight stories instead of turn-the-other-cheek stories. Or, in Matt's words: "If a meathead clocks me, that doesn't make me want to be a meathead, you know?"

A few days after the interview, I was talking to Aesop about how my preconceptions of the rough-and-ready punk tour had changed somewhat. The whole idea about going on tour, at least with Hickey, was to "anger the locals and then band together in your hatred of the townies," which often led to brawls. So what was the story with the Fleshies and their dad-burned Ghandi act, then?

Aesop squinted into the lights of the Lusty Lady's lobby. "I wouldn't say they're pussies, but maybe they just never saw the Quincy punk episode, so they don't know how punks are supposed to act. Maybe they're confusing punks with hippies. But in my day, like, punks razor-danced. And they stole from people." He paused, a little wistful perhaps, and added, "But I'm old."

Fleshies play Oct. 3, 924 Gilman, Berk. $5-$7. Call for time. (510) 525-9926.