One of the things I'm starting to think about this morning is the idea of mythology, because so much of the Coctails was about creating this Coctails mythology when we were young, and The Coctails Story that I (or we) wrote, which I am actually having trouble finding right now, was really about developing a mythology for a band that hadn't earned it yet. We hadn't been around long enough to have all these stories, so in some ways we were making the stories ourselves. And we knew no one believed the myths. It was part of us having fun. But now the mythology around the band, both by people who loved us, and my own mythologies, are genuine myth.
I was doing some research on Mudhead last night and came across people talking about Mudhead as maybe the greatest band that ever came out of Kansas City, which is kind of crazy for me to read. Maybe ten people think that. I don't know. It doesn't really matter. What interests me is that there are people who have carried that band around in their heads all these years and have some idea about what it meant, just like there are clearly people who have carried the Coctails around with them. You can see that on I Miss Lounge Ax all the time. People remember us. They miss us. They have photographs and flyers and stories, and they're trying to share those things in whatever way they can.
And then there is this other part of it that I'm only starting to understand, which is that the Coctails are becoming mythology to me too.
I've been reaching out to people lately, Irwin in particular, but also people connected to things like The Bert Boone incident, a piece I did in art school, and I'm realizing that some of these events that are monumental in my own memory are things the other person barely remembers, if they remember them at all. And that's okay. I'm actually starting to think that's part of what interests me about this. Something can have completely changed the direction of my life and, for the other person involved, maybe it was just something that happened.
Then last night I'm on Facebook looking through David Goodrich's photographs of Mudhead. David was married to Lori at one point, and I didn't even realize until last night that he died in 2014. His Facebook account is still there, maybe as a memorial page, and I'm downloading these photographs he made of Mudhead and wondering, where are the actual photographs? Where are the negatives? Does somebody have them? Did somebody know that they were worth keeping? Do they even exist anymore? It’s scary.
And that's another part of what I'm starting to get my finger around with all of this. Facebook can make it seem like something has been preserved because it's still sitting there where you can see it, but we don't own any of that. I can look at David's photographs right now, but that doesn't tell me where David's photographs actually are. Those downloaded images are like 94kb. Still, better than not having them at all, but I deal with archives everyday.
I think maybe this is why I'm doing this project the way I am. I'm not really trying to decide what any of it means yet, and I'm definitely not trying to prove that the Coctails were important. I'm just gathering information and trying to see what is there, and the closest thing I can compare it to is what I do when I go out and photograph in the landscape. I don't necessarily know what I'm looking for when I start. I notice something, I make a photograph, I keep moving, and sometimes it isn't until much later that I understand why I was interested in it in the first place.
That's probably what these working notes are too. I'm trying to gather the photographs and the flyers and the letters and ask people what they remember, and sometimes find out that they don't remember at all, and just keep all of that together long enough to see if it starts to mean something later.
When we were young we were creating the mythology in advance.
Now there actually is one, and I'm trying to figure out what it is.
Mudhead. The Foundry show with Slint? Is that me or Lori on the right?
But here's the thing with myths.
There is a Mudhead show at Volker Park that I have carried around in my head for almost forty years now. I think it was 1987, which means it was actually 39 years ago, which is fucking impossible, but apparently true.
In my memory, this is where I really saw Mudhead. They were playing outside in a park in the middle of the day, which already seems like such a non-Mudhead setting, and they completely blew me away. They seemed enormous to me. They sounded huge. I remember standing there thinking, Whoa. I didn't even particularly like that kind of music, whatever I thought that kind of music was at the time, but I loved them.
At the end of the set I walked up to Archer. I think I walked up to Archer because he was playing drums and was still there breaking things down, while everybody else had wandered off or was doing whatever they were doing. I told him how much I loved the band, and then I said something along the lines of, I know you guys are intentionally playing without a bass player and that's part of what makes you cool, but if you ever change your mind I'd love to audition.
And Archer basically said, Oh no, no, we're looking for a bass player. We just haven't found one yet.
That's part of my Mudhead mythology.
What happened next, at least as I remember it, is that I went to their next practice and auditioned, and they basically said, Yeah, you're great. And I remember Archer telling me that one of the bass lines I played was very McCartney-esque, meaning Paul McCartney, and my immediate thought was, I thought this was supposed to be a punk band.
That's the story I have carried around.
And maybe all of that happened exactly like that and maybe some of it didn't. At this point I don't even know that the distinction matters very much.
Because here's the strange part: the Volker Park show exists on video.
Leo Wetherill from the Human Observation Lab sent me a link to it. He had posted it online years ago, and suddenly there it was, this thing that had existed in my head for nearly forty years, actually moving in front of me.
And they seemed tiny.
Not literally tiny, obviously. But they looked like some young band playing in a park in the middle of the day. There are great little things in it. You can see Beth doing something to her guitar with what looks like a kitchen appliance, which is completely Mudhead. There are moments where I recognize the thing I remember.
But it doesn't look monumental.
It doesn't sound like giants.
And that really stopped me, because I think somewhere in the back of my mind I had assumed that if I could ever see that show again, the video would somehow confirm what I remembered. I would watch it and think, Yes, there it is. That's why I walked up to Archer afterward. That's why I wanted to be in this band. That's why this changed something for me.
But the video can't do that.
It only shows what the camera saw.
And maybe that's the thing I'm starting to understand about all of this. A document doesn't necessarily contain the experience. A photograph doesn't contain the experience. A video doesn't contain the experience. They can prove that something happened, or tell you who was standing where, or maybe settle some argument about whether Beth was using a kitchen appliance on her guitar, but they can't tell me what it felt like to be standing there at twenty years old watching Mudhead and thinking they were giants.
Was that show monumental?
Probably not to most of the people who were there.
It was monumental to me.
And nearly forty years later, I think that has to be allowed to be true too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA3s1BEv-Z8