Riffing on a Bridge

by Wilson Freedburg

I spent a summer touring with Abysmal Crucifix, and it was the best time of my life. Their original bassist, a fine-ass redhead by the name of Robin Kelley, wouldn't tour with the boys, so they invited me to go. I didn't have anything else to do that summer, so I figured, "Why the hell not?" I didn't know it then, but this was the biggest mistake of my life.

Have you ever played with a band? You're basically living in a van — you get to stay at a fleabag motel maybe once a month, if you're lucky — and dealing with constant car troubles, equipment failures, eleventh-hour shopping trips, venue managers trying to fuck you out of money, groupies just trying to fuck you (which I'm sure is one of the only bright spots normally, but I was engaged!), playing to an ungrateful audience who's never heard of you and doesn't want to hear from you.

"Come on," Girth always used to say. "We're building up our audience. We've done our job if we go in there with them throwing bottles at us and leave with them cheering." By those standards, we never did our job once on this tour.

I'm not saying it was all bad. I got paid to play music, for the first time in my life. I'd played in garage bands for years, but this was the first time I could say, "I toured the country. People saw me in Seattle, in Phoenix, in San Antonio..." It wasn't just me and the boys in the garage trying to impress some girls from up the street.

There was one night when I was feeling really awful. I'd been out on the road, missing my Katie, for over two months. We were in the middle of nowhere, I think in Oklahoma, and I was sitting on the roof of the van, having a drink and watching the night sky.

Girth hopped out on the bumper and stared at me. I stared back. He nodded and said, "Things aren't going too good, are they?"

I shook my head.

"One thing you gotta remember," he said. "You can think about how you're away from her, or you can think that being away from her means you'll get back to her that much sooner." He nodded again, and his head disappeared from view. I heard the van door slam.

I listened to the crickets chirp, breathed the sticky air, and it dawned on me: this man who had been leading me around all summer was absolutely, batshit crazy.

Abysmal Crucifix's second album, Two Berries on a Twig, came out recently. It's not a particularly good album — it'd be a stretch to call it a "noble failure." The great thing about it (and subsequent albums) is that it's almost like a chronicle of insanity. You can buy Abysmal Crucifix records and listen to a man's slow descent down a rabbit hole. He can pull you into that world and make you understand what it's like to be so detached from reality, you can't even recognize that telling hispanics to "go home" in their native language is probably not a good idea.

I urge you all to check out Two Berries on a Twig. It's a tough listen, but it's well worth it.

Reprinted from Hemlock Monthly, June 1996