This week, we continue with Eric Becker's stories from the late '80s/early '90s, in which Eric picks a fight with James Hetfield, goes against popular opinion regarding Anton of Brian Jonestown Massacre, and tells of an account in which he had syringes thrown at him on stage with his band The Big Sissy Brigade at the Cactus Club in San Jose. Plus, more!
In 1989, a speed metal band called Kreator played, and James Hetfield was there. My friend went up and asked him for an autograph, and Hetfield was really condescending and said, "Whatever, if you want one." That pissed me off because the friend he mouthed off to was just the nicest guy. He didn't have a negative bone in his body. Plus, I thought I liked to fight at that time.
I walked up to him and said, "You got a fuckin' attitude problem."
And he said, "Yeah, what are you gonna do about it?"
"I'll fix it right here, right now, Motherfucker!"
We got in each others' faces. I was really ready to throw down, and he looked like he was able to throw down but didn't want to. Then the bouncer stepped in and looked really nervous. James Hetfield was 6' 4", and I was 6' 5" and weighed 275. So it was going to be ugly if it did go down. He pulled us apart eventually, and as I was leaving, he said, "Get a life!"
And I said, "I have one. You better check yours before you lose it!" I really should've punched him in the nose.
The Western Addition:
When I first moved to San Francisco, I moved into a flat on Hayes Street at a time when the original projects were still open there, and it wasn't called Alamo Terrace, it was called "Slap a Ho Terrace" by the locals. All sorts of wacky stuff was happening all the time. Lots of gunplay, pitbull fights, and fistfights. The wackiest thing that happened was one night at 1:00 in the morning, I heard gunshots, and there was a guy running down the middle of the street. A few seconds after him was a guy running and shooting: "Pop! Pop! Pop!"
The next apartment I moved into was only a couple of blocks away, but it was a world of difference. It was much better because there were more families.
Brian Jonestown Massacre:
Everyone knows Anton from Brian Jonestown Massacre for being a total nutjob, but I actually had one of the most interesting and lucid conversations of my life with him at this church in the Mission that a bunch of bands used as a rehearsal space, including, I think, Brian Jonestown Massacre. It was always weird to me to hear all these reports of what a nutcase he was when he was really one of the more well-read people I had ever met in San Francisco. He was already familiar with people like Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti. Everybody else would just go, "Huh?" [In reference to Dig!:] Smart went crazy.
The flip side of that is I met Courtney from The Dandy Warhols around the period, too. He was totally uninteresting. He was kind of a vain, shallow dude, which makes perfect sense as to why he was successful and Anton wasn't. He could be whatever they wanted him to be.
The keyboard:
This story is one of my top three favorites. Some time around 1993, I was walking down Haight Street with some friends, and I saw this keyboard at a garage sale. In the early '90s there wasn't much of a fad for retro gear so much. People wanted the newest, best whatever. This keyboard had wood paneling on it, and I said, "What is that?! Keyboards don't come with wood paneling anymore." The guy wanted $35 for it, and like an asshole, I tried to talk him down to $30.
He said, "Dude, no, $35." I tested, and it worked just fine. It weighed like 50 pounds, and I lugged it home on the bus. I got it home, plugged it in, and it's the greatest instrument ever that anybody has ever made. They list for $500-600 normally. So how I got one for $35, I don't know. I was really lucky that day. I introduced the founding members of Loquat and loaned the keyboard to them. They wrote their first song on it. On my Juno. It's the same Juno I'm going to teach my children the basics of synthesis on.
Track Star:
Seeing a band called Track Star at Noise Pop in the early '90s was kind of a pivotal moment. They were the last great, guitar-rock trio I've ever seen until this day, and I've seen literally many of thousands of bands. I was a bouncer at the Cactus Club in San Jose for several years, which was a crash course in diplomacy. I got to see Rage Against the Machine and Nirvana before they were big.
Scary Eric in Big Sissy Brigade
I was in a band called the Big Sissy Brigade down in San Jose from '91 to '93. It was a flash in the pan. We had this incredibly dedicated following of speed dealers. We played in a Vietnamese bar in downtown San Jose that some bookers had managed to book shows in the downstairs room for a period. There were lots of danger signs that these bookers weren't the real deal. One, they had a speed problem. Two, they had a Radio Shack mixer for the entire room, which was woefully inadequate by any measure.
The stage was geared toward showcasing Viet performers. I'm 6'5", so the spotlights were literally in my forehead and I had to do splits for the entire show. I also couldn't see anything. Normally there was a lot of jumping around on stage at our shows, but there wasn't a lot of room for that. Somebody started throwing these little sticks of something at me. I couldn't see what they were until I picked one up between songs, and it was a syringe. Thankfully they had caps on them.
Sleep:
I got to see Sleep in their home town, San Jose, in 1990 or '91, at their height before anybody knew who they were, or even before they kind of fit in. They looked like extras from the River's Edge. They were scary. They were wearing bell bottoms when nobody fucking wore bell bottoms. There was nothing fashionable about them at all. Within a year, everybody looked like them, which was pretty funny.
Cactus Club
