My Time in The Weasles
An Immemorial Rock Autobiography
I’ll never forget it, like everything that happened before I was born: A band got together. My band. Well, it wasn’t then. At first it was a traveling band of German itinerant musicians. So it was a band and a band. In a way, they were a proto band. The Ur Band. But not The Band. They came much later. In those days, the mid-1860s, Europe was rife with itinerant musicians. They were mostly gypsies, freethinkers, Waldensians, serial fornicators, religious from the various mendicant orders, and people with syphilis. Some could play instruments. Any town they didn’t get chased out of they fled out of habit after incurring ludicrous debts. You know, musicians. Back then, bands weren’t “bands,” they were roving tribes of penniless, sexually-fluid orphans. But they were also bands, like, just groups of people. Some things never change.
This band — my band — was traveling through England when they stopped in the town outside that famous school, Eton. I want to say it was called Eton, but it was Slough. Well, this happened to be the day that some haemophilic child of Queen Victoria’s was getting married, so the band charged up the hill toward Windsor Castle, bashing Eton boys in their heads with their tubas and their anachronistic susaphones along the way. When they got to the top, they played God Save the Queen, hoping to get tossed a few shillings for their trouble. Unfortunately, they knew their tunes better than their tunes’ names. It was actually Gounod’s Funeral March for a Marionette. They were exiled to St. Helena. Metal.
Some decades of itinerancy later, long about the 1910s, we were in the American South. I say we. I wasn’t in the band yet. Nor born even. By then it was also a totally different group of people than those who had insulted the British royal family. The details of our escape from St. Helena are left to the history books. Suffice it to say, it was awesome. Anyhoo, we were in ol’ Dixieland at the behest of the dandyish scion of some old plantation family. He’d hired us out of the tremendous guilt he bore for the inhumanity of his family’s Antebellum history. He paid us to play in Congo Square “to keep the people’s spirits up.” We started playing a lot of ragtime then. We’re nothing if not versatile. We were really good at picking up the music of oppressed people and just jamming about our own stuff. We were The Vampire Weekend of being Vampire Weekend in pre-World War I Natchez, Mississippi. Of course, several of us were wearing bound up sticks for shoes and eating ants for protein, so we weren’t exactly [The] Eagles. We also recorded our first album The Tubercular, Blood-Soaked Rag.
By 1940 we were blowing up the swing scene. In Berlin. Did I mention we’d all become Nazis? Probably not.
1958. We’d long since fled Brazil in disguise after scoring Aquarela do Brazil, and were in Birmingham, England. We were into skiffle, beat, blues, amphetamines, and just chewing unwrapped batteries for the pain. We were also a totally different group of people once more. One guy, Roy, played a cigar-box fiddle. Another, Barnaby, played that whole comb/wax-paper thing. Amelia played the tea-chest bass. Delilah slapped her stomach, and Cornelia rustled taut aluminum foil with her fingers while they were held in that “this is the church, this is the steeple, open the doors and see all the PEOPLE!”-position. Like, at the end when you say “people!” One guy just clapped. Actually, maybe he was in the audience. We first appeared on the Decca compilation, Merry Birmingham Presents the Latest Musical Craze to Sweep the Nation: Skiffle! Try It and You’ll See, It is the Latest, Most Clean and Modern Way to Spend Your Musical Shilling. Featuring Several of the Most-Swooned Over Young Boys to be Found Fleeing the Council-Demolished Dickensian Tenements That Have Long Blighted Our Fair Borough But Which Are Soon to be Replaced by Prime Minister MacMillan’s Programme of National Shelter-Improuvements. EMI put out our first single, Does Your Hula Hoop Lose Its Angular Momentum (On the Bedpost Each Night)? It was followed by eight others in three fortnights, culminating in The Ballad of a Sputtering Beechcraft Bonanza, which peaked at #8 in the UK charts and was covered by Buddy Holly in a terrifying foreshadowing of his death later that month in that very type of aircraft.
Back to America. ’64. This is when I came on the scene. I was in high school in Marin County with the guys who invented the term, “4:20.” I played guitar. I made my own strings by melting down my sisters fillings in that toy that could mold wax Hot Wheels cars. I heard from my drug dealer that this travelling band was playing the Cow Palace, doing this huge folk act with like forty people on stage. After the show I kicked down their dressing room door, mid-orgy.
“Guys,” I said, “this is my band now. And first order of business is, we’re not a nine-hundred-year-old band of German itinerant musicians any more. We are a regular band. That means all but three of you, get the fuck out.”
And they did.
So we were left with Chester “Chest” Chesterton on drums, Leslie Marion “Man” Manley on rhythm, Aloyisius “Sauce” Bernaise on bass, and me, Lee Dern, on lead. I actually played all the instruments. And sang. They just took orders. And heroin.
“First things first, we need a name,” I ordained. “And it has to be a pun. And a homonym, or something. And, like, you can only notice it when it’s written out. And it has to mean something. Ideally, it’s an animal. But not The Animals. Or The Beatles, obviously. Or The Oneders, that one’s taken in the future — don’t ask how I know. But like that. But it’s not like a synedoche or a metonym quite… I don’t think. Anyway, ideas?”
I will save you three years of debate. We were:
The Weasles
Because we were as sick as the measles. (And we were also crafty like weasels, but only when our name was spoken.) “Sick” meant good then too, irony having been invented some weeks before. I’ll grant you maybe it’s better after six benzos, two bottles of wine, and a joint the size of a sixteen-ounce beer can.
I married my grade-school sweetheart, Patricia Xaviera McGoon, in ’65. We had three children in sixteen months. For several moments we were happy.
In studio, we also had a rotating group of hired guns who actually recorded the records. We just smoked spliffs and unfiltered Pall Malls and absently adjusted knobs on the mixing board while drinking Pernod. Come to think of it, the set guys started playing on tour too. We just drank our faces off. (We also drank The Small Faces under the table. We let Faces out-drink us, though, just to save face.) Lucius Diamond played keys and reminded us when we were being racist.
The Weasles released eight albums in 1966. Our chart topper was Sick Spastic Plastic Elastic Fantastic Flicked-Hat Trick!
We recorded our twenty-third album, Voyage to the Hot, Wet, Spongy Center of Your Soul, in ’67 while on an intravenous drip of LSD and a pregnant mare’s urine.
I divorced Patricia McGoon by telegram.
We proclaimed Sauce’s back a sovereign state where war was against the law.
We played the Fillmore in ’69, while on tour in support of our album, Bon Chants, and set it on fire while wearing jeans with special testicle-separating inseams.
The ’70s are where things get blurry. What was amazing was that despite our steadfast diet of alcohol and steaks we could not gain weight. No one could in the ‘70s. I think it was because high fructose corn syrup hadn’t been invented. People were hairier then. I don’t know why. All genitalia were bigger. And my God, we were always covered in just a thin layer of perspiration. Why? Oh, yes. The drugs. So much drugs…
Man became a Jain.
Chest married a Danish princess and lived on a yacht in a narrow strip of international waters within the Irish Sea for six months to protest The Treaty of Versailles.
I am told I married Linda Ronstadt in a private ceremony on Bequia.
Man was involved with Stevie Nicks and narrowly escaped mass suicide at a commune near Goa by his sheer cowardice.
Sauce had an open secret with Bowie and was in Supertramp for one record.
Our album, Molar, sold twelve million copies.
I legally adopted a… young… ish… groupie I was sleeping with so I could travel with her across state lines without violating the Mann Act.
We once made a snowman out of all the cocaine on our private 757. It had its own seat. His name was Coke O’Chanel.
For a while there, I really lost my shit. I do remember that. I got sort of androgynous and started getting involved with some dark, fasc-y S&M stuff. Then I bought a farm and snapped out of it. A new wife helped, Adolpha Paz de Staucho Guiniviera Maracho. I think her ancestor discovered the Azores. (I don’t even remember being married to Adolpha, actually. Or Linda. Apparently I had three kids with each of them. They filled me in.) My new life looked nice in the photos. I’m told we had a pony. Everything appears to have been in yellowey soft focus with lots of lens flare. According to tax records, we grew gords and had a servant orchard.
I moved to Kenya for tax purposes.
Adolpha and I had a side project called Ambrosia Peppermint and the Candied Unicorns. Wow, was I huffing a lot of nitrous… My kids played on it. I spent three millions pounds on an in-castle studio to record it. What. The. Fuck. Was. I. Thinking?
The ’80s are sort of hit and miss for me too. The band was barely on speaking terms and I was snorting ground up PCP, Quaaludes, Special K, and Ecstasy, a drug cocktail I called Ambrosia Peppermint and the Candied Unicorns… What is wrong with me? Why can’t I die?
The Weasles recorded an album in Leipzig that was just us smashing a slaughtered pig on a Roland hooked up to an amp, accompanied by a string quartet from Łódź. The record was called The Ineffable Maus. We were going to actually, like literally literally, be killed by a Polish firing squad in the video until our manager intervened.
I stabbed Tom Verlaine with a beer bottle back stage at CBGB for fucking with my rig.
I went to Zurich to have my blood transfused with a giraffe’s. The idea was it would maybe help my liver regenerate. It worked but my skin turned the color and texture of grapefruit.
When The Weasles played the Meadowlands in ’83 for GlobeStarz’Hands HelpPoorPeopleLive, I and a full grand piano were parachuted off a C-130 on a pallet. During the three-minute descent, I played the full eighteen-minute instrumental intro track to our first album released on CD, The Weasles? Present. It was radioed in, instantly slowed down by six times by a reel-to-reeley computer, and then played on the sound system in the stadium. The piano was destroyed on impact. I crushed my spine but finished the show suspended from opera wire. The track was called Fingerbang/I’ll Wait for You (Forever Is Just a Number). It had a three minute drum solo, which I played on the side of the piano with my hands. It was released as a single, but you can only see the original cover in person at the Swedish Royal Sexual-Anthropological Library while accompanied by a social worker.
Then we broke up for five or six years, The Weasles did. My wife, Adolpha, and I stayed together, but I was sleeping with Victoria Principal and one of the girls from Double Trouble.
I appeared on An Alan Thicke Christmas Special in a visibly apparent zombie-like state.
In ’88 we fired Chest and hired a Teddy Ruxpin to play drums. I did a solo duet with Gorbachev’s wife called Pair o’ Stroikas. Michael Jackson named one of his giraffes after us. (Not the one that donated my blood.)
We answered Skorpions with our own song about the end of the Cold War, Stalin Will Rise Again. It did not chart.
We all had work done.
We scored an unreleased Saved By the Bell movie.
In ’94 we rediscovered cocaine and were actually Blur for two years. It was Albarn’s idea.
We backed up every artist on the Space Jam soundtrack. I was never in the same room as R. Kelly.
Man died. He was replaced by his son, Shannon.
In 1997 we got into Alt Country on our eightieth album, Isolation Avenue, Shitsfield, Pillinois. Ryan Adams trashed our tour bus and punched Sauce in the face. We played the Ryman Auditorium in green-screen suits with Junior Brown and The Jayhawks as openers. We discovered oxycontin. In retrospect, it was sort of shitty and depressing. Why do you think Wilco became Wilco and Son Volt is still Son Volt?
In 2001 we wrote that sing-it-into-your-hair-dryer, prosaically motivational, PopRock 1.0 song that opened the Shrek knock-off, Sherk. It was called You Can Blow Yourself Away. It wasn’t until the Tuesday before the movie came out that we and the studio realized the title could also be taken as referring to auto-fellatio. Not until Thursday did we realize the title could also be taken as encouraging suicide. The movie was shelved. We publicly blamed 9/11. The Japanese single had been released the prior Monday, however, and led to a spate of auto-erotic suicides. The CD currently sells for $1,500 on eBay, though it is illegal to possess in the UK and Australia.
I sold bonds secured by my royalties in 2004.
One of my illegitimate children was nominated for an Oscar for something. Annë something. (Yes, with an umlaut. Don’t ask me why.)
In 2009, our mid-’70s anthem in only-barely-disguised praise of MDMA and unprotected sex, Inner (In Her) Sweat With My New Soul Mate I Just Met at this Disco in Capri, was licensed for an Apple commercial.
We got super into trip hop.
Elton John opened for us at the Grammys.
I reconciled with my first wife, something something McGoon.
She died.
I forgot to go to her funeral.
We played Bonaroo.
We played Steve Jobs’ funeral.
Chest died.
I got really into breeding Airedales at my farm in Wrexham.
My daughter has more Instagram followers than me.
Recently, I noticed that Statutory Rachel, a song we did in ’77 about dating a high school sophomore, hasn’t aged well. At least we’re not alone.
I deleted Jeffrey Epstein’s number from my Google Contacts.
I replaced Sauce with a Microsoft Surface Pro 2 and released our latest record, LXTCZ.
#weasles #EDM #lit #djlife #dj #trap #hiphop #house #party #bottles #producer #sidehustle #modellife
For financial reasons and under threat of jail for tax evasion, we reunited and are on tour now.
And there you have it, My time in the Weasles.
