“No Generation” Birdie Jo- from the album “Transient Knows The System” You don’t listen to a word I say And when you do, you don’t get it anyway We’ve got No Generation- To be like you! We’ve got No Motivation- To be like Your video eye watching me in your store- So I just rip you off so I can even up the score We’ve got No Motivation- To be like you! We’ve got No Generation- To be like you! You want to pass a law to legalize discrimination The ignorance you force on me denies all my relations! We’ve got No Motivation- To be like you! We’ve got No Generation- To be like you! ================================= This is a video from this year’s Birdie Jo reunion show at Sam Bond’s Garage, shot by Laura Strobel and Jill Catino on my iPhone. We opened for Petunia and the Vipers, and Mood Area 52, who was throwing an album release party for their new album “1952 Philanski House.” Every year I go back to Eugene for Thanksgiving, we have a big crazy feast at Michael and Leah’s, and Birdie Jo plays a show. It is always a high point of my year. My folks come down from Portland, sometimes my brother will fly in, I haven’t missed a Thanksgiving in Eugene since I moved to L.A. Birdie Jo started out as a band in a movie. Our friend Laura wanted to shoot a short with Scott K., myself, and my neighbor, Ty Connor, as troubled band-mates. Scott and I stayed up all night and wrote “First Among Equals” in this freezing theater/garage loft I was living in at the time, for Laura’s video. (Scott K. had a skate-punk band when we were in high school called Dogwater that kicked ass, I had auditioned to sing for them at one point. I played a song for them that I wrote called “Festival,” that sounded a lot like “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” by Bauhaus. They passed. Not punk enough. “Festival” became the first song for The Good Madmen, my first post-high school band.) We shot a bunch of stuff with Laura, silly scenes of rehearsals, band fights and getting kicked out of John Henry’s (the OLD John Henry’s.) Scott K. and I wanted to keep rehearsing and writing new songs, Ty wasn’t that into it, he was writing and listening to Miles Davis on vinyl and didn’t really want to be in a band. I had been working with Michael at the Glenwood Café, a 24-hour joint on Campus that was Christian-owned, but forgiving enough to have two white boys with dreadlocks running the floor. We would have late-night neighborhood talent shows in Michael’s apartment on a stage that consisted of a palette in the middle of a doorway. I basically forced Michael to be the new drummer for Birdie Jo. He didn’t have a drum set, he just pieced together some suitcases and pots and pans and that’s how we started. I wanted to have a band consisting of people I admired and wanted to hang out with, I figured the music would come from there. A super-hot blonde girl moved in next door to Michael. We had been staying up all night, riding our bikes through Eugene, going for midnight swims in the river, stealing ears of corn from the canning plant and throwing them like newspapers onto people porches. We drank Mickey’s Big Mouth’s and made a walkway in the backyard of the used screwtops. I told him if he didn’t make that girl next door his girlfriend, I would. Her name was Leah, he’s married to her to this day. I had this vintage 1939 Epiphone F-hole archtop hollowbody that would serve as the Birdie Jo guitar, an unlikely axe for a punk-rock band. Scott K. could make that thing sing, we played over 200 shows on that antique. He played with a wiry, rough intensity, I plodded along aggressively on bass, with Michael flailing wildly on his pots and pans. We attracted a strong local following with our lo-fi brand of edgy punk, becoming the house band at John Henry’s, opening for some great touring acts, The Dickies, Zeke, Turbonegro, Heatmiser, The Stinky Puffs, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, to name just a few. We usually played for free beer, and often left the bar feeling extremely well-paid on the rich array of strong, local microbrew beers that had become popular. Scott K. had just had a baby with his wife Tracy, I was there the day little Ruthie was born. For all his hedonistic glory, Scott was a really responsible dad, driving trucks for Organically Grown Co-op, waking up at 4am 5 days a week. While we played a ton of local shows, Scott’s priority was his family, Michael was finishing college, and with the exception of one wild roadtrip Scott and I took through Mexico and Central America, we would never tour extensively. We produced one album, “Transient Knows The System,” which featured a picture of the real Birdie Jo on the cover. Birdie Jo Hoaks was a woman who was arrested on Christmas Eve of 1995 in Salt Lake City for impersonating a young boy in order to obtain social services. She was homeless, and had sought entry into a woman’s shelter, but was turned away because