Dueling dreams
The road to this battle of the bands is paved with hope and leads straight to San Francisco.

By Duncan Scott Davidson

'WHAT'S UP? We are Hope Kills, and this song's called 'Untraceable,' " said Matt Petullo, his large sneakers glaring white in the bruised blue-purple of the Pound S.F.'s stage lights. If his nonchalance seemed fake, the reason was that as the third act to play in the final round of Sugarlight Productions' Battle of the Bands, it probably was. The band went to work, and the overdriven crunch of twin Ibanez guitars battled ear-splitting trills of high school girls for supremacy – a sonic battering ram that was somewhere between a Motörhead show and the tarmac at San Francisco International Airport. Maybe that's why the drummer stuttered, allowing the groove to sneak out the stage door. "Oh shit," I thought. "A false start on their first song." But Petullo turned around and mouthed something to the drummer – encouragement? a threat? The band played on.

After a pair of metal-tinged emo tunes, Petullo acknowledged the crowd: "This is my brother Chris; he's a guitar player filling in on drums, which he's never played before." I took this as a jibe: the drummer fucks up and big brother bust his nuts publicly. When I stepped out after the set to talk with the band as they loaded out, I discovered 17-year-old Chris Petullo really wasn't a drummer and had been playing guitar since he was in third grade. Matt, two years older, was the drummer, as was their father. In another band they have, Matt plays drums, and Chris plays guitar. But in Hope Kills, Matt sings. When the band's "real" drummer failed to show up for a last-minute practice, they phoned, and he told them he'd decided to quit.

Most bands would've called Geo Jones, Sugarlight's western booking agent and band liaison, to cancel. Hey, sorry about that – our drummer took a shit in our tapioca, we're not going to compete for the $500, the 20 hours of recording time, and the submission to Epic Records. Hope Kills are, except Matt, high school students from the Vallejo-Benicia area. Matt, a Yoda-like 19, attends Diablo Valley College. They'd come too far to give up.

"We worked on songs from 11:30 at night until 9:30 in the morning – straight," Matt told me. "Then we went home, slept for two hours, came back to the practice place, practiced for another two hours; then we went to the show."

The force be with me

I had – until that moment – been unable to feel the force that attracted me to the Battle of the Bands. I hadn't been thumbing through the club listings, seen that the BOB finals were coming up, and said, "Holy Christ! I've got to call in sick for work so I can catch that!" The fact is that – despite the many hours I've spent hearing live music – I'm still easily filled with the spirit of the Marshall, I'm still easily moved to testify and handle snakes and sign on for baptism in fonts of cheap beer at filthy clubs that sweat vomit on hot nights. But just because I'm a true believer, it doesn't mean I find what I worship each time I go to a show, and until that moment, like I said, it hadn't arrived for the Battle of the Bands.

The lowdown on the Battle of the Bands: each band gets a certain number of tickets – 100 for a regular round, 200 for the finals. They hustle their asses off, selling tickets to everyone they know – the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, Grandma and Grandpa buy a gross at eight bucks a pop – and whoever sells the most goes on last. After the last band plays, there's one of those Amateur Night at the Apollo shout-offs, and the winner takes all. To win, your band has to move the crowd, but first, you've got to bring the crowd. To some people this formula seems like a scam: whoever sells the most tickets, thereby supplying the most lung power and money, wins.

Full Throttle, hailing from Willits, "the Gateway to the Redwoods," sold 89 tickets. Their banner read, "FULL THROTTLE: HIGH INTENSITY HARDCORE," and their fans were all about high intensity. Before the drums were set up, they were screaming like a wet T-shirt contest had erupted at a witch burning. Drummer Isaac Hanes, 19, looked somewhat baby-faced, but when the band launched into opening crusher "Evolution," it was clear he was long on skills, including precision double bass pedal-stomping. Guitarist Chris Lyman played a mean-looking, angular guitar with a spike on the headstock – serious Braveheart shit. The dual-vocalist setup could've been a recipe for some sort of crossover nu-metal-rap get-down, except for the fact that Kennan O'Shea, a sleeved-out lumberyard worker who looked like he could wrestle a redwood out of the ground, had a Sepultura-circa-Chaos A.D. sound to his vocals, whereas his slightly less burly counterpart, Pat Gray, went for a more Tabasco-throated, Speedealer-esque delivery. My favorite by far was bassist Mike Hayes: hair cropped into a curly Mohawk, he hunkered down over a black Music Man in a Master of Puppets shirt – with the intensity of Flea mixed with the unadulterated menace of a Harley Cro-Mag – all the while chewing gum as though he were torture-testing a set of prototype dentures and mugging it up with a serious lowered-brow, heat-ray stare. Someone should make an action figure of this guy.

"People want to bounce," Hayes told me after their set, and bounce they did. A pit opened up in front of the stage, starring two younger metalheads. I found Philip, the Bay Guardian photographer, and told him he should definitely get some shots of the kids. As soon as the lens found one of them, he threw up a perfect set of devil horns. He introduced himself as Anthony and claimed to be 11, though his dad said he was still 10. He's Hayes's nephew, and his moshing pal, a bald-headed 11-year-old named Randy Tyler, is O'Shea's son. At some unspoken cue, the entire pit squatted down, buttcheeks to heels, and started doing a modified, full-contact frog hop. I must've looked confused because Anthony Sr. leaned over and yelled, "They're doing the midget mosh."

An American Tradition, a three piece from Rio Nido, Sebastopol, and Santa Rosa, had set up a merch table earlier in the evening that included not only T-shirts but also bandannas with iron-on transfers of the band's name. They were folded up Willie Nelson-headband style in red, black, white, navy, and baby blue – whatever set you were claimin', they had your dome covered. Bandannas began to crop up everywhere; hot girls slapped AAT stickers on each other's asses; beer drinkers and hell-raisers shouted, "American Tradition! American Fucking Tradition!" between every song, especially when another band tried to introduce themselves. Full Throttle faired a little better, perhaps, with O'Shea's size and Hayes's superhero stare-down, but when they false-started the aptly named "Pressure," they were heckled by the vociferous AAT crew. Still, toward the end of what O'Shea referred to as Full Throttle's "power half hour," I turned my head to see a guy in the telltale bandanna hopping and headbanging with the rest of the room. "Fuck yeah," he said, caught in the act of enjoying the "enemy" band.

Gateway to the Redwoods

"Meet us at Jim's Cheaper," Hayes said when I called him from the 76 Station after passing under the "Gateway to the Redwoods" sign and into Willits proper. "I mean Tower Mart. It used to be Jim's Cheaper. I think it's Tower Mart now." These are the landmarks in Willits, a town that straddles 101 for a few clicks of highway, then disappears before a serious relationship develops: gas stations, mini-marts, places where you can get a carton of GPCs for a 20 spot, a broken-down hippie bus with an American flag showing through the windows and "LONG HAIRED FRIENDS OF GOD" Krylon-ed down its length.

I'm not being dismissive; I grew up in the 'burbs where strip malls bloom like adobe-colored, stucco wildflowers in the heat. At least Willits has trees and culture. "Everyone's either a hippie or a redneck here," Lyman said. "And if your parents are one, you're the other. No one's into metal." A good deal of long-haired friends of God break down on their way back to nature, and they start businesses like the burrito shop that features faux meat, or Mad about Tie Dye, which has recently opened a skateboard shop annex. Full Throttle were deemed too aggro to play the benefit held for the local skate park. "They were just scared we were going to scare off potential investors and straight-laced people," according to O'Shea. A good deal of townsfolk who aren't trying to get back to the trees, man work in lumber, cutting them down. The Willits Pharmacy advertises fudge and "real creamery butter" – real creamery butter, for chrissakes, and you thought it was a myth.

"This is the most exciting thing that goes on in this town on the weekends," Lyman told me as the interview started winding to a close, handing me a flyer for something called Storytellers at the local theater. "That's when the community really comes together." It's some kind of play based on the lives of the actors, all of whom seem to be in their early twenties, photographed in different group-hug formations with sensitive looks that scream "I care."

"This is our record store," he continued as we walked down a gravel path. "It's all movies." We laugh and look in the window. "There's the reggae section right there. There's about four rows of metal."

San Francisco has a music scene, or, rather, a set of scenes, each regimented and stratified – calcified, maybe – a set of special-interest groups lobbying for the continued isolation of "their little thing." Bands get booked with other bands of similar style, who bring with them audiences who share a style. Indie rock: boys in too-tight Adidas zip-ups and corduroys, girls in white belts and ankle boots, the '80s unisex alterna-mullet on everyone. Metal: the black-hoodie set with an obscure, silly-sounding, polysyllabic name like Morticus Pusmortification hand-screened on the back. Punk: slight overlap with metal, unless it's a poppier punk variety. Life in the S.F. music scene is decidedly not what Forrest Gump's momma told him life would be; it may be a box of chocolates, but, sadly, you know exactly what you're going to get. Glance at a newspaper entertainment section and you not only know what kind of music you'll be hearing, you also know what kind of shoes people will be wearing.

It'd be an overstatement to say the scene in Willits is dead because there is no scene. There's one bar, John's Place, that has a series of "Metal Brew" shows, and there're Full Throttle and one or two other bands. A Battle of the Bands final there wouldn't have been much of a fight. But the Battle of the Bands shoot-out in San Francisco attracted high school kids from Marin and Vallejo, metalheads and hip-hoppers from Mendo, kids in the pit and parents up passed their bedtime, and blue-collar types from the Russian River corridor. It was like family bowling night at the local lanes, only louder. More important, these people had come to represent, to show their love for music in a way that's seldom seen in S.F. nightclubs: they weren't there to chit-chat, stand with their arms folded, and drink cocktails.

A goddamned Grammy?

People drove three hours down Highway 1 from Point Arena to catch the next band up, Dysphunctional Species. Point Arena's a small town. The sign says "Population 440," but Andrew Johnston, one of the band's singer-MCs, said it's mushroomed to at least 500 now. The band sold exactly 100 tickets, which means one in every five people in town were in the house.

They filled the stage with a full-on P-Funk ensemble cast – two MCs, Johnston and Ian Gleason, a guitar, a bassist on a five-string bass, a percussionist on timbales, congas, and the ever important cowbell, and a drummer who also rapped. The regular drummer was in Texas with his father, who was sick with cancer, so Jameson ("like the whiskey") Hodder, son of original Steely Dan drummer Jim Hodder and "born with drumsticks in his hand," was sitting in.

If Hope Kills had the high school kids and Full Throttle filled the mosh pit. Dysphunctional had the girls. "Let's get funked up!" their opening jam went, "everybody slow down – shake that ass around." And, indeed, good-time booty shakin' was in abundance. "I know a lot of people drove a long way to get here," Johnston said. "There's a little competition in the room, but there's no competition – we're all number one."

But, of course, someone had to win. As An American Tradition set up their gear, it looked like it might be them. They'd sold the most tickets, 112, and their crowd was loud. "Our fans changed our name," singer Chad Leeburg said later at his canyon cottage in Rio Nido. "We became 'American Fucking Tradition.' " Leeburg sat down with his acoustic and kicked off a set of groove-heavy rock. At first I thought they were opening up with an acoustic jam and were going to lead into some plugged-in, rocked-out numbers, but he kept to his chair the whole time. Leeburg's got a heady, emotive voice, and his songs have energy, but AAT can do with a bit more presentation. Musically, they weren't doing a quiet, unplugged thing; they were rocking – rocking hard enough to stand up and maybe even to play an electric.

But it's not for me to try to run Leeburg's shit. Listening to bands outside of what I'd thought to be my "wide-ranging" musical tastes, I realized I'd become as niche-marketed and pigeonholed as everyone else. "People with opinions just go around bothering one another," the Buddha said, and if anything, the Battle of the Bands clued me into the fences I'd built around myself with opinions. It's been said countless times by countless people in countless bands, but it never gets any less pithy: who gives a fuck what a music writer thinks? (P.E.: "Who gives a fuck about a goddamned Grammy?") What chance has an army of music writers got against one kid with a guitar? The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it's shit next to a six-string.

Judge and jury

Nathan Lourenco, Sugarlight's man on the scene, came out of the box office and stood in front of the stage. He's a nice guy, and, to quote Full Throttle's O'Shea, he "didn't seem too comfortable up there" in front of the screaming, unwashed masses. The decibel meter he'd used to determine the winner at the last battle was nowhere to be found on the night of the finals, so the decision as to who was louder fell on him. "He was really new to the deal," O'Shea continued. "I mean, he was lucky to get out of there without an ass beating." The first round of shouting narrowed it down to Full Throttle and An American Tradition, though some people thought Dysphunctional Species should've been in the top two. It went back and forth between the top two, until a bewildered Lourenco called for a show of hands. From where I was standing, the hands thing seemed asinine and inconclusive, but probably no more than the repeated rounds of histrionic wailing, and, anyway, the man was in a bind. Full Throttle came away with the win, but it wasn't a clean victory.

Really, though, who gives a damn? That's what I keep hearing, and that's what I keep feeling. At first I thought the competitive element detracted from the communal atmosphere, the unlikely lineup of sounds and people – "when the community really comes together," as Chris Petullo might've said. I wouldn't have been surprised had the room morphed into a massive, sticky group hug. We were connected by something deeper than pointy shoes, asymmetrical haircuts, and the same concert Ts.

Among the bands themselves, the battle was probably the thing they liked least about the show. "It was easily the most fun I've ever had playing," AAT's bassist, Luke "Nard" Albrecht, said.

"It was fun, man. I liked it," his bandmate Leeburg agreed. "I just don't like competing against bands. Because instead of all of us being out there enjoying each other, we're sizing each other up. I don't know; that's not what music's about."

And no one was naive enough to lack perspective as to what winning the Battle of the Bands really meant relative to the Rock and Roll Dream: some studio time, 500 bucks – which doesn't even cover expenses for a band as big as Dysphunctional, which had to drive down to the city and get motel rooms for the night, and a coveted spot in a pile of demo discs on an overworked underling A&R guy's desk.

What mattered is that they gave it a try. I know giving a damn is passé, but sometime, early in the postwar years – when people believed in "better living through chemistry" and that General Electric brought "good things to life" – technology, even as it was wrecking the world, saved it with the electric pickup: "In every bar, there was a superstar," Bon Scott said, and he knew what he was talking about: he lived for rock and roll and died for it too. Like I said, all of sudden I remembered why I wanted to write the story, because I knew what Matt Putello said to his kid brother Chris, when Chris fucked up the beat. I think it's good advice for bands from towns with triple-digit populations, for metalheads out in the sticks, for high school kids with guitars who believe in the promise of rock and roll. What he said was "Don't stop."