By Thurgood Walmsley
I remember the time I first used the Internet. It was the mid-nineties and my teen-aged nephew had just run a telephone line from the wall to a slender device, then to the back of my IBM. He pressed a few buttons and the lights began to flash red, then green. It made an ugly, grinding noise, and soon he was placing the keyboard in front of me.
“It connects you with anybody and anything,” my nephew explained. “You can go into any of these virtual rooms and talk to people. Share information and experiences.”
I scrolled through what must have been hundreds of them. “Where do I even start?”
“You can search for people, or ideas, or pretty much anything you want. Anything you want to connect with, in the entire world, you can find here.”
“Anything?” I thought about all the possibilities. But I knew right away what I wanted to find. It was what I’d wanted to find for the better part of the decade.
I clumsily typed a phrase, banging the keyboard with one index finger.
I puke on my girl and she likes it.
As I hit submit, I felt my nephew shift his weight uncomfortably beside me.
“What the bollocks is that?” he asked with a tone like he was going to rip the phone cord out of the computer and run away to his mum. “That’s what you want to connect with?”
“Yes,” I said. But then I looked at his blank face and realized he was going to tell my sister I was some sort of pervert if I didn’t explain myself.
The explanation went something like this:
Sometime between 1986 and 1990, during the hazier nights of my post rave, pre-drum and bass phase of my musical evolution, I first heard it. It was mid-week at one of the regular venues—either Roller Club, Milwaukee’s, or The Sanctuary—where a young DJ, probably filling in for Andy C or one of the bigger weekend names, was spinning new material, to see what would take and what would be trashed come Friday.
I must have been one of the older people in the room, as I was still clinging to a youth that had begun to creep into adulthood. The DJ was sampling various hooks, mostly of American pop-songs that hadn’t hit the UK mainstream yet. Nothing was working (which shows that I had gained some objectivity since the early days of Sassyfras), until he laid out a sensory aggressive, ear-piercing track that both shook the walls and broke the window panes. The kids didn’t know whether to riot or run for safety.
And then the refrain: “I puke on my girl and she likes it!”
There couldn’t have been more than fifty people in the club that night. But when the track ended, it was unanimously demanded that the DJ play it again. And again. And again. And not stop playing it for the rest of the night.
“I puke on my girl and she likes it!” the entire house screamed along with the track in primal, bacchanal union every time the refrain came back.
It was the only audible words, as the DJ wove it in and out of trancedom for what could have been minutes or could have been hours. The only measure by which to track any time at all was the emetophiliactic refrain.
The following weekend I returned, expecting to hear the groove played for hundreds, over and over, as it spread like a virus through the vampire halls of SoHo.
But it wasn’t played. Not there, not anywhere, for weekends on end. I started going stone-sober, just to make sure I wasn’t missing it. But I never heard it played again; I only heard it echoing through my memory.
Finally, after more effort than I should admit to, I tracked the DJ down. I caught him loading up his gear in an ally. He was a non-jovial bloke, a second generation Ghanan if I recall his introduction correctly. I asked him about the track. He didn’t know what I was talking about at first. But when I said something about a girl liking to be puked on, it triggered a memory.
“It didn’t play well in Brixton,” he said.
I knew he was referring to a club in South London—a torture garden in the crypt of a church down south of Lambeth. It was a little outside of my usual circuit.
“What was the issue.” I asked. It seemed like right up the Brixton ally.
“Too much treble,” he said.
It took me some convincing to get him to let me hear the original track. He finally rummaged through his trunk and flipped me an labeled cassette. “Keep it,” he grunted, “I’m done with it.” I didn’t know why, but something about holding that little reel-to-reel made me feel like I’d accomplished something. It was an unfamiliar feeling, because, like most of us technobrats, I had never really accomplished anything before.
I took the cassette home and stuck it in my deck, expecting to hear something similar to the DJs mix. But all that was on it was treble-heavy cymbal beats, an electric guitar, and a cacophonous mishmash of clanking, feedback, and vocals.
Vomit is good, vomit is nice, it started. I like eating vomit with my rice. From there, the song devolved even lower into a fetishist portrait of low gastronomical standards.
Don’t need no bucket, I just use the floor. When I’m finished eating that, I just hack up some more, ohhh! a verse proudly confessed.
I dream of swimming in Vomit! the singer later fantasized.
I eat my vomit by the ton, I drink it by the litre, ohh!! I like to use tabasco sauce to make my vomit sweeter.
This was the dizzying verse that officially addicted me to the song, and, more to the point, the person or people that made it. Not only did it correctly identify a Mexican hot-sauce to be a sweetening agent to the highly acidic intestinal reflux-fluid they were chowing on, but it also combined both the empirical and the metric systems of measuring retroperistalsis, making the country of origin all but impossible to nail down.
I needed to learn more.
As I became more and more infatuated with the song, I found myself spending less and less time underground. How could they have rejected this in Brixton?! My world no longer made sense to me.
I spent less time in the rave halls and more time making phone calls. I re-interrogated the DJ, who said he’d gotten the track from an ex-flatmate—a short, balding fellow that I tracked down at a golf club in Bromley. He looked more like a banker than a rave-hound.
“My brother heard that song at uni,” he told me when I showed him the tape. “He made me a dub. I never listened to it.”
I told him what the song’s theme was. He looked dismayed. Like his brother was probably in the vomitorium cult at his university, ralphing into his classmates mouths in secret fraternal dungeons.
But when I met the brother, some weeks later, in his dormitory in Bristol, it was clear he wasn’t partaking in any of the hedonistic regurgitation that the singer was imbibing in. “A friend brought that back with him from holiday. We had some good fun with it.”
He couldn’t remember where the friend had been, and didn’t know where the friend had gone off to. “Why do you want to know about it?”
I didn’t really have a good answer for him. “I just want to know who they are, and see if I can find any other material they’ve produced.
“There were a few other songs on the tape,” he said. “They were pretty similar in style, but mostly just worshipped Satan. About wanting to go to Hell, and the carnage Satan was going to unleash on earth.”
“That sounds kind of interesting too,” I said.
“Yeah, but barfing on girls to bring them to climax, that’s much more fun.”
Before CDs, digital music, and the advent of the Internet, songs were very much like animals. Each copy of a song was an individual that helped comprise its species. When all the tapes of a song were gone, the song was extinct, living on only in the memories of those that had heard it.
As politicians came down on the promoters, the rave halls were driven from the cities, out into the suburbs, and then into the forests, until they were all but dead. And with them went any hope of hearing I Puke on my Girl And She Likes It. It was lost to oblivion. Extinct. Consigned only to the memories of those that had heard it, which was especially problematic in this case, since the rave culture that had birthed it was a culture centered completely around short-term memory loss. I figured even those that were at the club that night probably wouldn’t remember, even if they’d heard it a thousand times. In fact, they probably didn’t even remember being at the raves at all. They fancied they’d gone from puberty to professional life without anything in between.
But not me. I had my one unlabeled cassette, and I kept it with me among my most favored possessions.
Then along came the Internet.
And when my nephew hooked me up for the first time, and I typed in that enigmatic phrase, I found out that there was another me out there. Somebody else had taken the time to type that lyric.
It was somebody in a one-person chat room that had been idle for months. A user that called themself MikeRavin’, which I correctly presumed was a play on the sixties pirate radio DJ Mike Raven, another reference that I was probably the only person on this new thing called The Internet to fully appreciate.
I started a chat with MikeRavin’, and, sure enough, they too had been at that mid-week show (they were quite sure it was at the Sanctuary) when the Vomit Song was sampled for the first, and possibly last, time. I shared with MikeRavin’ everything I had learned about the song, and told her (yes, MikeRavin’ turned out to be a girl) that I had a copy of the original song. She had moved out of the city, and I didn’t know how to upload analog at the time, so I mailed the cassette to her, after making her promise to keep it safe and return it when she was done with it.
“That’s disgusting,” she wrote one week later. “I wonder what sick fuck wrote that?!”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “But I’d like to find out.”
MikeRavin’ and I stayed in touch over the years, and after she introduced me to Myspace, we decided to start a fan-page. It got taken down a few times for being too perverse, but then Myspace got so overwhelmed with traffic that it finally went unnoticed, existing as just the two member group I Puke on my Girl and She Likes It.
Over time we got a few visitors. Some people joined up that had also been at the Sanctuary that night and had nostalgia for the song. We even sold some vomit-centric t-shirts, just for fun.
Then, in 2009, somebody left a comment:
Same band?
It contained a link that took us to a SoundCloud file. There was a song attached, if you could call it that. It was as bare-boned as Vomit and with even less musicality.
Kill the animals,
Cut down trees,
Satan is my friend!!
It sounded like the same voice, accompanied by the same out of tune guitar and the same pitchy percussion. The next verse sang about cutting one’s limbs off and gifting them to Satan; yet another preached of castrating oneself at the satanic altar. At times the vocals couldn’t even be made out under the cacophony of the guitar and percussion. And then, at the end, the song joyously declared:
Pollute the lakes!
Dump in the oceans!
Push all the buttons in the White House!
We don’t care,
We’re going to Hell and that’s the way we want to be!
I remembered the brother of the flatmate of the Ghanan DJ saying that there were other songs on the tape off of which he’d gotten Vomit —how they had been Satan-worshiping songs of the same ilk. This was, obviously, one of them. There could be little doubt.
Understand, this wasn’t like the thrash metal that had been around since the Head-Banger Balls of the eighties. This song, like Vomit, fit no niche. Aside from the clanging and breaking glass in the background, the songs were recorded with the vocals front and center for the most part, which was the weird thing, because it was pretty much the antithesis of anything that anybody liked.
The song had a half-dozen listens and exactly zero likes on SoundCloud. That was probably more than it deserved. After one listen, I never wanted to hear it again. It was as bad as Vomit, only without the absurdist lyrical refrain. But it wasn’t the quality of the music we were interested in, or even the music at all. It was the story behind it, and this was, to be sure, what we had been looking for.
I engaged the person who had posted it. It turned out he was an Austrian club kid that had been living in Germany and had, apparently, ended up with a similar cassette (if not the exact same one) as the friend of the brother of the flatmate of the Ghanan DJ.
The Austrian told a similar story as ours. How there was a small, drug addled cult surrounding a remix of a song that played once at an after-hours club located beneath the Frankfurt Airport. He said that it wasn’t Vomit, and, surprisingly, it wasn’t the song about castrating yourself for Satan either. It was another song off of the same mixtape that he’d procured, but he wasn’t sure if the songs were all by the same artists or not.
I confirmed that the first two were unmistakably produced by the same person or people, and probably at the same time, perhaps even minutes apart. I asked him to send the other song in question. He attached it to SoundCloud, and we all gave it a listen.
Hell is for me, it’s the place I want to be,
Why must I wait ‘til I die?
The temperature’s right, a million Fahrenheit,
Why can’t I go there and fry?
This one was a little harder to be sure of.
There was a melody, and an actual chord progression, and the lyrics even rhymed. But I felt it that there was still over 99% likelihood that the same band produced it that had as Vomit. The vocals were consistent, and though it didn’t have the same ear-piercing downbeats or an over-bearing noisiness to it, it still had a tinniness and general idiocy that was pretty unmistakable.
It was kind of catchy, though. Like these guys were searching for a pop sound, even though they seemingly couldn’t play their instruments at all.
The Austrian couldn’t provide any further information on the track. There were no other songs on his cassette. But he, too, had a small number of friends that remembered the song from their youth, and they all joined our little fan site. With the added traffic, I decided to produce a little content. I wrote a timeline, and added some pictures. MikeRavin’, a labour organizer and self-avowed socialist, made a few memes that attributed some of the lyrics to the more conservative political figures in London at the time. And I started to build a Homeland style bulletin board, with the DJs, the clubs, and all the other players 
involved, looking for clues and hoping to fill in the missing links.
It went nowhere, of course.
Until 2013.
Do you think this is the same band?
It was posted by a new user and, again, there was a link to a SoundCloud file that contained another minimalist recording with another simple chord progression.
The Man in the Moon is Satan, we bow to him above.
I want to be an astronaut, to visit my one love.
It seemed too mellow at first. Like an early recording of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, back when they were first learning their instruments.
NASA sent the shuttle up, and everybody died.
Now they’re all in paradise, with Satan by their side.
Presumably this had been written sometime around 1985, in the wake of the famous Challenger disaster, which showed the exceedingly poor taste we’d come to expect from our pet band. And then, as the song devolved from there into a cacophonous howl of armageddon and satanic rapture, there was little doubt that we were dealing with the same source.
I asked the person that had posted it where they’d gotten the song from. She answered that it was on a mixtape a friend had lent her when she came back from a boarding school in Connecticut. She’d been going through her old cassettes and found it. It had made her laugh back when she was a student, and wondered if it may be the same band as the one we had been obsessing over.
“Can you find out anything else about it?” I asked her. She said she’d try, and a few weeks later got back in touch. She had tracked down the guy that had given her the tape, and said that he’d gotten it from the ex-girlfriend of a guy that had written the song.
“Can you put us in touch with the ex-girlfriend?” I asked.
“I’m afraid not,” the woman wrote. “She’s dead.”
I went and bought a bigger bulletin board and added Connecticut to it. Somehow the record had crossed the pond. Perhaps it had even originated in the States.
We had four songs now. But still knew nothing at all about them.
Could this be the same band?
It was 2015 now, and, with nothing but dead ends for the past eighteen months, we were excited to get a new lead.
The song he posted was a bit different, and it took me a few listens to see if it fit the criteria. There were four distinct traits that had linked every song thus far: the limited use of musical instruments; the distinct sound of the singer’s voice; absurd lyrics that stopped at nothing to offend; and the general baseness of the recordings.
This one, unlike the others, had two singers, one guitar, and a raw but surprisingly competent recorder solo between the second and third verse. It wasn’t about Satan, or about vomiting, but the theme was only one standard deviation away. It was about gaining pleasure from systemic legalized murder: first as a soldier, then as an executioner. The two singers harmonized parts of the chorus, and the lyrics, though no less depraved, carried a narrative that was slightly more sophisticated than the other songs we’d obtained.
When I confirmed it was probably the same band, the guy that posted it said he’d heard it sung live once and had asked for a CD. All they’d given him was this track, which he’d figured was a demo.
“You saw it performed live?” I typed, excitedly. Nobody had ever spoken of physical contact before.
He told the story of being in Greenwich Village back in the early nineties, and hearing the song at an open-mic night. He couldn’t remember how many people had been on stage. But he didn’t think the band he’d heard had actually written the song. “I was really into this song, and wanted more. But nothing else they did sounded like it. I think they’d picked up the recording somewhere, and tried to pass it off as their own. Nothing else they did that night was even half as good.”
Our little fan site had come along way since its inception. We’d grown to have several dozen followers, had assembled five original tracks, and had a growing investigative bulletin board covering multiple continents. We arranged meet-ups, where we performed as a make-shift tribute band called I Puke On My Girl And She Likes It. I was the designated glasses-full-of-water player, which I’d hit with a metal spoon, emulating the best that I could the trebly percussion that had first drawn me in. It even became a little shtick, where I’d “tune” the instrument (à la Nigel Tufnel) by filling the glasses up with a few measured drops of water to get the perfect Vomit sound.
Our fake tribute band even garnered a following of its own. We became a curio-act, with bar patrons wanting to know more about the songs, and random strangers getting in on the act of yelling I Puke On My Girl And She Likes It. One show we had as many people in the room as there had been that night back at the Sanctuary, and I wondered if more people were hearing our versions of the song than had ever heard the originals.
MikeRavin’ and I had also gotten married after a decade of living together—a coupling that never would have happened had it not been for the Satanic musings of our favorite “band”. It had morphed from a nostalgic interest into an ironic infatuation. But had led to glorious places. We played the Hell Is For Me song at our wedding, and a friend of ours remixed the entire Vomit song with the drum and bass track of our childhoods for our first dance.
To this band we owed everything, whoever they were.
“Hey, are you guys an Alms For Satan cover band?”
I looked at the man that stood before us as we broke down our gear after our set. He was an American, not much younger than myself.
“Um… maybe?” I wasn’t sure how else to answer him. He probably knew the answer even better than we did.
“Your songs, I’ve heard them before. It’s Alms For Satan, I’m sure of it.”
We sat the man down in a booth and had him explain to us who Alms For Satan was and how he’d come to know of them. He told us of how in New York, there was your typical underground music scene, and then there was your under-the-underground music scene. Alms For Satan, he said, was the latter.
He explained that back in the early days of cable television, New York City dedicated a channel to what was called “public access”. He said anybody could buy time and air anything they wanted, uncensored and unfiltered. He described talk shows where the interviewer was completely naked, and voyeuristic shows that were nothing short of public pornography. He said the later it got, the more outrageous the programming became, which included various fetishist and satanic programs. And then, on occasion, a band would appear. They called themselves Alms For Satan and wore dark cloaks and masks while they sang in grainy black and white. “Between songs they did weird shit like perform animal sacrifices.” he said. “It was really sick.”
The reality sounded less attractive than the fantasy MikeRavin’ and I had created for ourselves. The American saw my face drop and quickly added “It was kind of funny, too.”
“The animal sacrifices?”
“All of it,” he said. “It wasn’t real. At least, I don’t think.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I saw them play live once.”
“You did?” I looked excitedly at my bandmates.
“They advertised a gig after one of their TV appearances. A buddy of mine and I decided to go check them out. It was in the basement of an apartment building on the upper east side—not your usual venue. They did their set, which wasn’t really satanic at all. It seemed like it might have been tongue-in-cheek. I thought maybe they were filming a fake documentary or something.”
“When was this?”
He shook his head. “Must have been around 1990 or so.”
“How many were in the band?”
“I think just three of them. It was a very raw sound.”
“And you’re sure it was the same band that sang the songs we played tonight.”
“100% sure. I remember that ‘I puke on my girl and she likes it’ song. They had some other good ones too. It was pretty eclectic. Much different from their public access stuff. There were only about fifteen people at the show. Most of them were pretty disappointed. I think they had gone hoping to see animals killed.”
“You have no idea who they were? The people under the cloaks?”
“No,” he said. “I mean, you could kind of see their faces when they sang. They looked young. Like prep school kids.”
“And you never saw them again after that?”
“Never. Not even on public access television. My friend and I looked for them over the years when we’d be in the city. Never found them.”
“I guess they disbanded.”
The American smiled and shrugged. “I mean, honestly, I don’t think they ever really ‘banded’ in the first place. You guys put on a better show tonight than they did.” I felt strangely satisfied to hear this. “I don’t think they broke up or anything. More likely, their parents got wind of what they were up to and made them stop.”
Somehow, an American had wandered into our ironic bar, during our ironic set, and, like an ironic satanic prophet, told us more in twenty-five minutes than we’d been able to learn in twenty-five years. They had a name now. Alms For Satan. And a place of origin. And, most importantly, according to the prophet, they had more songs, which meant a lot to us, because we were playing the same five songs every gig and it was only about eleven minutes worth of music.
I exchanged emails with the American, who promised to try to get in contact with his friend he’d been at the show with when he returned to the States. Several weeks passed, and then a message arrived: “Good news. My friend has a tape. He recorded it from the show and found it in his among his 90s bootlegs. Digital file attached.”
I summoned my wife and together we pressed play.
Immediately, a guitar lick started, followed by a chord progression, a wobbly bass line, and a thudding drum, like a hammer hitting a book more than a drumstick hitting a snare. Then the verse began. The lyrics weren’t about Satan, or about barfing. It went like this:
I see the light from your TV coming from across the street.
I just went through your garbage to find out what you eat.
I’m onto you baby like white on rice.
Don’t you tell nobody and I’ll be really nice,
Cause I’m a Stalker Man
Whoa, Stalker Man.
You better lock your door, ’cause I’m gonna be your man.
I set myself on fire babe, and now I look all strange.
When you had your tonsils out, I broke into the hospital and stole your tonsils
I took them home and put them on my mantlepiece.
Two tonsils on my mantlepiece!
Then there was a grungy guitar solo, followed by a final verse:
Your parents think I’m quite a guy, they like the way I dress.
But they won’t think so much of me when I mail them your chest!
Cause I’m a Stalker Man.
Whoa, Stalker Man.
And the sick thing is:
I’m your brother, Dan.
If the American was right about this being the same band (and I was convinced that he was, given all we had talked about), this song presented a conundrum for us. Lyrically, it seemed consistent with the other stuff we’d heard. But, musically, the sound had evolved a lot. (This was problematic, as we were going to have to actually learn how to play our instruments if we were going to incorporate the new material!)
I posted the new song, this time under the name Alms For Satan, adding a blog post with all the new information we’d learned from the American. And then I changed the title of the fan page to include the name Alms For Satan.
That was the bridge we needed.
A slow trickle started coming in. Traffic that had noticed the Alms For Satan reference and remembered them from New York public access television. People posted stories of how they’d stayed up all night hoping to catch their antics on television. How they’d scoured the underground clubs and back pages of the Village Voice hoping to find them. And they told of the songs they remembered:
One was a nostalgic romp about growing up with “Charlie” Manson…
Another was a Bonnie and Clyde-like story about an elderly Jewish couple that went on a crime spree before finally being lynched and hung on poles to rot in the sun…
Yet another was about a character dubbed Dwight the Troubled Teen who tormented his parents in what the neighbors ominously referred to as the “Dwight House”…
One guy said he once saw a grainy horror movie about a demon that terrorized the mobsters and Yuppies of Long Island and that Alms For Satan was credited in it (he wasn’t sure if it was for the music, or just for inspiring the filmmakers)…
And One woman wrote about a song she thought was called Say Yes To Drugs, which apparently described the awesomeness of every drug in the queue “I’m pretty sure they’d never actually done any of the drugs they were singing about,” she said. “I certainly had, and they were very, very far off on the various effects. That’s what made it so funny to me.”
The more and more we heard, the more confused we were. Were we an ironic fan site of a real band? Or were we the real fan site of an ironic band? Was it even a band at all? Or a work of performance art? Or, like the American suggested, were they just a couple of kids staying up past their bedtime?
More people posted memories:
One person said they’d heard a cover version of Bob Marley’s No Woman, No Cry, but with alternate lyrics depicting a human sacrifice. Your feet will carry you to the knife, and I will push it into you. But don’t worry, ’cause everything’s gonna be all right, everything’s gonna be all right…”
Another person also reported of a potential cover tune, this time of the children’s song Rubber Ducky from Sesame Street. It was in a minor key and ended in torture and anguish for the poor bath toy. She said it tapped into some dark shit from her childhood, but ultimately proved rather therapeutic.
And then, just as things were dying down, a link to a new track was posted.
It came without a message. Just a link, nothing else.
It was posted by a newly registered user going by the name “Norman”, with the registered email address dwighthouse1992@aol.com.
Clicking the link brought us to another SoundCloud file. It had no name.
I clicked play and a frenetic harmonica erupted from the small speaker on my laptop. Four bars later the verse began:
Well, I’m an old truck driver from Ohio,
I’ve been drivin’ trucks since I was only fo’.
I don’t talk to no one, I just drive my truck,
Drive it all night long just to make a quick buck.
I’m a truck driving man, I’m a truck driving man,
But I only gots one hand.
It was a crossover country song, in duple time, sung with fake twang, about a downtrodden commercial vehicle driver that faced bad luck and amputation everywhere he went…
Run over squirrels, I don’t really care,
If there’s a bunny in the road, I pretend it’s not there.
I’m a truck driving guy, I’m a truck driving guy,
But I only gots one eye.
There were two audible singers and they sounded a lot like the two voices we’d heard before. They were exchanging verses and harmonizing on the choruses…
At the truck stops they all know me,
I just have a cup of coffee, and take a quick pee.
I’m a truck driving man, I wear truck driving clothes,
But I’m missing my nose.
It modulated keys…
I drink beer in my cab, I smoke dope while I drive,
I threw my first wife in a killer bee hive.
I’ve been driving my truck, I’ve been having lots of luck,
But I left my left leg in a swamp full of muck.
It had a tacet…
I love to drive the highways, drive as fast as I can,
In seven states of the Union I’ve already been banned.
I’m a truck driving dude, a truck driving dude,
I got no teeth, so I can’t chew my food.
And a resolution…
I’ve been driving all night, looking for a bed.
Man, I’m missing so many body parts,
I might as well be dead.
It even had a little gospel finish to it as the track came to a close.
The song had, at most, two guitars, a harmonica, and nothing else. And sounded like it was recorded, like the others, in a single take on the same warbly device as all the others we’d heard. But, beyond that, they had come a long way since their days of eating vomit and sacrificing their uncles to Satan. And, furthermore, I knew that “Norman” was one of the band members, or at least somebody personally associated with them. The report of the song about Dwight the Troubled Teen, with the vague reference to a line about the “Dwight House” had been sent to me via private message. Norman, I was sure, was an insider.
I wrote back to Norman at dwighthouse1992@aol.com.
Nothing further came.
Radio silence.
This was early 2016 and, while I was spending my spare time piecing the mysterious Alms For Satan together, the world as we knew it was going through a dramatic change. Brexit, led by some of MikeRavin’’s long-time antagonists, had shocked our country into the reality of a new-wave of conservative nationalism taking hold. And then, while we were still licking our wounds, our mates across the pond one-upped us by electing a Mussolini figure of their own to be their president. I’d heard of Donald Trump, as most had, from his hotels and from his television shows, but I didn’t know very much about him until he campaigned for the Presidency over in the States. It felt like a perfect storm was churning throughout the western world, and an ominous feeling had settled in.
Upon Donald Trump’s election, my wife, depressed since Brexit, became downright despondent. And I was slowly falling into the vortex myself. Pretty much the only thing that was keeping my head out of the proverbial oven was my bulletin board, the people that were joining our fan site bringing fresh stories, and our little tribute band, which had incorporated the song about the stalker, as well as an attempt at redoing Rubber Ducky and Bob Marley in the styles that had been described to us, and a few quasi-original tunes we’d put together based on the song descriptions we’d heard. We were playing pretty regularly now, “in demand” as some of the bar owners described. I had upgraded from the spoons and glasses to an actual drum set to accommodate some of the newer material. I had to practice a lot, which was fine, cause it kept my mind off of the impending doom that the UK and the US was about to unleash on the world.
And then, toward the end of February, with MikeRavin’ passed out on lithium and my insomnia punishing me into jealousy over her stupor, Norman was back.
We got the band back together last night, he wrote in a private message. We want to share with you what we made.
Beneath the message was a link to a drop box. It had four members that had been given access, and one of the four was me.
I have to say, it was one of the better feelings of my life. I knew nothing about these people. I didn’t know where they’d come from, and knew even less about where they were going. But at that moment, after all the time I’d spent thinking about them, and the life I had essentially built around them, at that moment, I felt like I was part of the band.
With a flutter of satisfaction, I downloaded the first track and hit play.
And within seconds my satisfaction had turned to disgust.
It was a fucking love song to Donald Trump.
And the second track was even worse. It was a call to arms entitled Drain The Swamp, railing against the libtards, activist courts, and the Fake News media.
And the third track, Lock Her Up, was – you guessed it – about men reasserting their dominance and re-subjugating women in a post-feminist dystopia.
It was downright depressing. I didn’t even play the last track. I slammed by laptop shut and took some of the wife’s lithium, hoping to fall asleep and wake up either far in the future or, more preferably, back in the past, in the rave halls, when life was simple and I Puke On My Girl And She Likes It was still mysterious and wonderful.
Was this really Alms For Satan? Or was it a hoaxer—a troll with an agenda, passing themselves off, knowing I’d give them a platform?
The more I thought it through, the more skeptical I was. Was any of it even real? Had we created something out of nothing? Or had we been played all along? Did the American, the so-called “Satanic Prophet”, really just coincidentally wander into our fifteen minute gig? Or was that the beginning of a practical joke that had only just delivered a punchline? Everything we knew about Alms For Satan had come through his suggestion that this band had even existed. He tied it all together. For all I knew he was behind all the stories that had been trickling in.
Feeling like I was being played a fool, I decided not to share the songs. Over the past few years I had developed a brand, and our tribute band, which was probably more of a band than the original Alms For Satan had ever been (if they’d ever been) was going too well to sabotage with Brexit undertones. The last thing we needed was to drop political bombs into our set. Fights were already breaking out as it was. We were a fragile country teetering on calamity. So I kept them to myself, not even sharing them with MikeRavin’ in her fragile state.
I never wrote Norman back. He never followed up. Our correspondence was nonexistent.
This was as far as Alms For Satan would go.
It was over.
At least that’s the way it seemed.
Last week I checked the languishing fan site. It had fallen into disrepair, with no active posts for over a year. I had logged on to deactivate an alert for what had been a recurring gig that we no longer played. And there was a message from Norman:
Three new tracks.
I followed the link and, sure enough, there were three more songs in the drop box.
I tepidly downloaded them, more out of morbid curiosity than anything else.
It was more of the same.
A track about how Trump had not obstructed justice or colluded with the Russians.
Another that decried all the haters that weren’t giving Trump a fair chance.
And a last one that seemed to be sung as the character of Trump himself, lamenting how the porn star Stormy Daniels had stolen his privacy by violating the terms of their non-disclosure agreement.
This one, I had to admit, was actually pretty funny, whether intentional or not. And it wasn’t that bad either. It had a jazzy quality. And, somewhere in the rather polished vocals, I could hear a timbre that had once gleefully confessed to dreaming of swimming in vomit.
This wasn’t a hoaxer. It was the same singer I’d carried with me on the cassette for almost thirty years. The same singer that led me to my wife, and led me to my band. I was sure of it.
Thanks I typed as a response. It had been several weeks since Norman had left the message, and almost two years since the first batch of new material he’d sent me. The ones I had let go unanswered. I was about to write more—to tell him what I’d thought of them—but then I decided against it. I didn’t even know where to start. So I just let the thanks stand on its own. It wasn’t sarcastic. It wasn’t spiteful. It was an honest and final end to the matter.
I was about to log out and get on with my day when an ellipsis popped up and began to dance under my Thanks.
A moment later the dots turned to words:
You’re welcome.
And there they were. Alms For Satan, whoever they were, alive, and on the other end of my computer, engaging me.
I didn’t know how to feel. Angry? Starstruck? Disillusioned?
I looked at the drop box. The originals four songs were still in it, joined by these three new ones. And, to my astonishment, there were still only four names granted access.
And then it struck me.
These were the three members of the band and me.
Why are you sharing these with me? I typed. It had been two years and I hadn’t even acknowledged them. Any normal person would have moved on. But Norman had come back.
I watched a new set of dots dance for what seemed like hours, but must only have been a few seconds.
Because we thought you’d like them.
I thought for a moment, unsure of what to say. I decided to be honest.
I don’t like Trump, I wrote.
Once again I waited for the dots on the other end to turn into words. Finally they did:
Well, we don’t really like Satan…. I waited for the next line to come up… Or eating vomit.
The dots disappeared and didn’t come back.
I had a pensive feeling. I may have made a horrible mistake.
I went back into the drop box and re-downloaded the first song. The love song to Trump, entitled Oh, Donald.
I had a rich man, Donald was his name.
Since he grabbed me, I haven’t been the same.
‘Cause I love his attitude
Donald, oh where can you be?
Every night, I cry myself to sleep.
Even in our golden shower I still weep.
You’re a man of the people, but still so far away from me…
Donald, since you’ve been Prez,
I don’t know what I’ll do.
No matter what the Fake News says,
I know you’re true, aren’t you?
I’m alone in our tower, struggling through my nights,
After traveling to your country, and giving up my rights,
Are you bored of the Dwight House? Then please come on back home to me…
There it was, right in front of me all along. The Dwight House. It was an indicator, like the Royal Navy uses in coded transmissions. This line was written for the true fans to appreciate. And, apparently, the true fan it was intended for was just one person. Me.
I re-listened to the next song, this time knowing for certain it was an authentic Alms For Satan fresh track. Drain The Swamp. And then to Give Him A Chance.
It occurred to me: they were still singing about the same stuff, twenty years later. They were just rebranding it to a new time. The American guy had suspected they were mocking something, he just wasn’t sure what. He’d even suspected they were just a couple of kids, messing around with their parents tape recorders and video cameras. Hardly anything had changed. They’d just been brought back together, to satirize, or whatever it was they had been doing all along.
When Norman sent me the songs, two years ago, I wasn’t in a place to appreciate them. Everything around me seemed like satire, even the nightly news. I was too on-edge. We all were. My wife was slowly killing herself before my eyes. I was unable to read irony. I was unable to hear the cues, subtle or not.
But now, with a little perspective, it has dawned on me. These guys hadn’t written some new songs and shared them with me. These guys had written new songs for me.
After thirty years of silence, they felt they had something to say again.
And the only person they had to say it to was me.
But I don’t have to be the only person that hears them.
I’ve shared them with my bandmates. We’ve been hashing out a few of them for a future tribute gig. I have no idea how they’ll go over.
And now, far too late, I share them with you.
Alms For Satan, 2019.
Enjoy.
