A friend of mine once said that Brian Chippendale of Lightning Bolt fame did for drums what Jimi Hendrix did for guitar. And there have been conversations I have overheard in garden parties where people spoke of Lightning Bolt in general as if they were talking of the risen Christ. A Noise duo, bass and drums, with the driving force of a Led Zeppelin but with a minimalist Philip Glass bent and the psychedelic experimentalism of a Sun Ra. I remember a night long ago and myself in a throng of adoring fans pressing against the invisible bubble surrounding Lightning Bolt as they performed in the direct center of the warehouse floor.
But Chippendale is not just a risen brother of Jimi Hendrix on his kit of clouds. He is also a comix illustrator and one of the founding members of Fort Thunder—a warehouse space in the Olneyville district of Providence—a place he moved into with his friend Mat Brinkman in the mid-nineties. The space eventually came to house a number of local avant-garde artists and musicians, was the home to Paper Rodeo, Paper Radio, and of course, Lightning Bolt, until it was shut down in 2001.
At a certain time and among certain people, Fort Thunder was known in the way the speakeasies and coke parties of yesteryear would have been known. It was murmured by rock and roll aesthetes in multiple layers of knitted caps and pronounced boldly at parties to make clear the speaker’s artistic allegiances and general street cred. It defined the world of art rock and noise in Providence, Boston, and perhaps even as far as the Babylon of NYC.
Mostly, though, Fort Thunder was known as a place that threw crazy parties, a place I was always getting invited to, but I never went because I spent my days hiding out in my own windowless cave of a bedroom—which also happened to be in a loft. I was too preoccupied with my own little pond to venture within its larger waters, except for maybe once for Halloween. But it often featured largely in the stories of my friends—with its maze and masked wrestling—where my friends Cave Dave and Scotto once went at it and, as Scotto would later describe it, Dave stumbled towards him while literally SHOOTING BLOOD OUT OF HIS MOUTH—apparently the wrestling area was just a clustering of old mattresses stacked on top of each other and with each step, the fighters would sink in the spring-destroyed buoyancy the mattresses afforded—or the time Cathy Cathodic and Adrianne wrestled their guts out in that same ring and on a bed of cold cuts. I myself once went to a Halloween party there where Cave Dave’s costume was a pair of Gonzo speedos with his penis nestled in the protruding purple nose, and someone kept threatening to kick his gonzo nose, and I have a distinct memory of Dave saying, If you try to kick me in the dick again, I will throw you over the banister. Good times.
But who are these people and why do you care?
Fort Thunder was founded in 1995, in the midst of what was a larger culture of loft-living and underground rock. Hardcor House, where I lived on and off from 1996 to 2003, was sort of like Fort Thunder lite, smaller (one floor of a warehouse, with no maze or wrestling), but also affiliated with a notorious musical act, Neptune, the art rock phenomenon that was a staple of Boston at the time, where all the instruments were built by founder Jason Sanford out of sheetrock. It was also home to such happenings as Performance Art Night and Bedroom Theater, was a common crash pad for bands, was where Sheila Heti performed on her way through town with Trampoline Hall to promote her first book of stories, The Middle Stories, and also through some killer parties.
(Perhaps most notably, the 100 degree party, where they cranked the heat up to 100 degrees and brought in a sand box full of sand. I have sometimes wondered DFW himself attended this party, as he describes something very much like it and lived in Boston at the time.)
Point being, Fort Thunder was just one in a large network of lofts that were sprouting up all over the country in those days—from Boston to Portland, and everywhere in between. Throughout America, there were similar giant buildings interwoven with dry-wall coves and tunnels—places where shows went till dawn and performance art and rock and roll went hand in hand—with vintage toys stapled to the walls and bands always crashed out upon the plywood or splattered concrete of the living room—a playpen for overgrown children and art enthusiasts. Is there a difference?
These reappropriated industrial spaces were as iconic to the late nineties as the long hair of the hippie was to the sixties. And of course, just as the hippie hairdo evolved into the styled manes of disco, the loft culture of the 90’s steadily and finally irreparably was converted into a different kind of loft-living, the high end condo with its McMansion facade.
This transition can be blamed on developers, but we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the dangers and inconveniences of living in lofts. I have lived in three different lofts and been to and performed in innumerable others, and I have had my sewage access shut off, had to shower in a partially demolished bathroom in another abandoned loft, had raw sewage flood the entire warehouse where I lived, had to spend a month cleaning up after the former crackhead/hacker residents, including feces sat in a crumpled nest of agricultural drawings in the air duct, slept in windowless (and in case incomplete, as in the walls didn’t quite reach the ceilings and the door was just where the drywall ended) rooms, and with the barest hint of heat, sometimes none. It has a romance to it, but there’s a reason it was cheap.
Fort Thunder spread from the notorious Nest article.
Mostly when I think of Fort Thunder, though, I think of Paper Rodeo, the periodical they started producing that was always in the bathroom at Hardcor House. I would read and re-read the comix that filled its newsprint pages, always hungry for more, with its psychedelic full-page story murals like the mutant offspring of Family Circus and the “Garfield wars,” and crude zine-like scrawls.
Both the very first Paper Rodeo and an earlier zine, Terra Incognita, have been preserved online, and Fort Thunder also had a website, Paper Radio, full of flash animations as well as a catalog of comix, such as for example Howard the Duck, wherein Howard the Duck is a rockstar periodically plagued by his love for a Miss Piggy type character, and finding himself in a variety of psychedelic situations. You would do well to check these out. Their blatant amateur-ness has a heightened knowing to it, like a key to an underworld. The general aesthetic of all of these products is a more rudimentary and blatantly psychedelic version of Adventure Time or The Midnight Gospel.
And then there were those amazing shows—like when the band Friends Forever played out of their touring van in the parking lot outside. Whereas—Lightning Bolt shows always involved Brian and Brian in the center of the action, like they’d just set up in the middle of the mosh pit and were only fending off the mob through the sheer power of their driving wall of noise. They also usually performed in vibrant knitted masks, which added to the superhero aesthetic.
While the lofts themselves were like hives caked in popular culture. Industrial spaces that had been carved out with dry wall having illegal shows and dance parties. A typical bathroom would be just a toilet crammed between a boiler and an industrial sink with fold-out LP sleeve of Jane Fonda and/or Lionel Ritchie manhandling an oversized tube, screen-printed posters featuring a likeness of Arnold Schwarzenegger at the center of a bright orange spiral and the requisite vintage toys stapled everywhere. With kitchens and living areas that were cobbled together with incongruous finds, an antique light-powered organ or Optigan, a jukebox, scrap metal sculpted to look like a house plant, an exercycle, a dentist’s chair, and often a wealth of Tiki mugs stashed somewhere or other.
Lofts could be performance spaces, practice spaces, with a DIY screenprinting space, and a darkroom, or—they might be carved out of a derelict dance club from the eighties with a fully functioning mahogany bar or a basketball court on the upper floor. I remember one loft I went to had an endless maze of tiny bedchambers like a Mad Max monastery.
Back then, we believed in obscurity—that this is where the wars are won—the psychical wars in which we are combating for our own sanity in a world overrun by refuse. We believed in something silent and bright that would enliven our living rooms, loitering in the doorways of thrift stores and drinking cheap beer at basement shows while we ducked the beams overhead and made cute quips about seduction as a spectator sport.
This is the world that Lightning Bolt won, and they wanted nothing more than this. This is the world that Fort Thunder epitomized.
Paper Rodeo seemed the most brilliant thing I’d seen in a long while. Something like The Realist for comix—or any number of underground newspapers that were so common back in the sixties and seventies specifically. There was something electric about it—Paper Rodeo, I mean—the serialized stories of miniature gobs on the move and giant skeletons—of hairy rock-beasts going about their mundane daily business. It was an odd dream world that I would spend hours poring over, because these amateurish drawings were like something sacred. Like the cut-up maps of the situationists, or the manifestoes of the futurists, this was the perfect artifact for the days of our lives, and it was happening right here under our very noses.
Some issues of Paper Rodeo
The most memorable lofts were the ones that were trying to be 90’s knockoffs of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and Fort Thunder was no exception. It was full of talent, and everyone was working together in an endless cross-pollination of ideas and interests.
There was Mat Brinkman (who played with Chippendale in Mindflayer and has also played in Forcefield), an artist and author of any number of comics as well, producing both anonymous and pseudonymous works. His Teratoid Heights comic was published by Highwater Books in 2001, and his performances have incorporated aspects of circuit bending and drum and bass, like his fellow Fort Thunder-ite, Peter Edwards.
Fact of the matter is comix seems a common theme at Fort Thunder, like DIY fashion, masked performers, and the distinctive style of noise that ties together all the various musical projects that were spawned there. One of the lesser known of these being Mudboy, aka Raphael Lyon, whose compositions have been related to early minimalists such as Terry Riley, i.e. lesser known perhaps because his style is somewhat distinct from the others.
A signature piece opens with “an all-encompassing chorus of insects. Perhaps frogs. Night sounds. Vague illumination is provided by the diffuse glow of the windows and a trio of candles arrayed around a custom-built wood-housed organ, but the scattered stars most draw the eye. As well as, by their barest gleam, the dim form that picks its way between, swinging a bunch of smoldering incense like a somnambulant priest bearing a censer. Organ notes cycle blankly against the swirl of natural sound,” (Nate Dorr, Impose Magazine.)
Fact of the matter is, the deeper you look, the more you find that doesn’t fit the picture we had of Fort Thunder at that time. Cartoonists Brian Ralph and Leif Goldberg fit what I would expect, but not tape artist Mike Townsend. Liz Luisada has a very distinctive aesthetic that doesn’t seem to fit with Fort Thunder’s other artists at all, whereas Jim Drain and his wearable art has come to be seen as synonymous with Fort Thunder. While Joel Kyack stands as a sort of an emissary from Fort Thunder bringing its walls to a wider audience, Andy Estep has developed an anti-Fort Thunder aesthetic in his own habitable spaces.
Locked into their mini universe, “like molecules in a sealed glass,” the various personalities involved pushed in different directions to carve out a niche, and regardless of each one’s unique vision, what will be remembered are the places where a number of visions converged. From the frenetic music of Lightning Bolt and Mindflayer, to the odd vision of Paper Rodeo, to the powerful performances of Forcefield. As a whole they had weight and merit, but outside of that secure community, most of these artists cannot survive.
Forcefield Show
After Fort Thunder was shut down in ’01, it seemed the center went out of the Noise crowd in the Providence/Boston area. Each artist has continued to produce and show their work, true, but what they have lost is what we’ve all lose when an underground movement collapses. It’s the comfort of audience, venue, and artist as one. There was the Whitney Biennial in ’02 that Forcefield performed at, but they disbanded shortly thereafter; and Lightning Bolt?
Lightning Bolt has always been notorious for their enforced underground. When kids across the country were screaming their names, Lightning Bolt continued to play basements and smaller venues, but in 2009 they played the Primavera Sound Festival. In short, Lightning Bolt is blowing up like they should have done ten years ago. What will happen when they lose their enforced underground aesthetic? Will they do it like Sonic Youth, pulling up whichever great noise band they find, slipping from show to show like some latter-day saints of noise searching for their dharma offspring? Or will they start writing songs for Outback Steakhouse like some other bands I could mention?
In response to the Wunderkind show at the Museum at the Rhode Island School of Design, Lyon wrote, “When I first started living here 10 years ago—and I mean really living here, we used to spend as much time breaking into abandoned buildings as we did making anything. I have probably explored more buildings that are now knocked down than I have been in the new ones put up in their place. I was a survivalist then. Wandering around paint peeled rooms peering through at a blue sky gave me the feeling of looking into a dark but exciting future. The world for me was divided into those that I felt could relate to what I saw there, and those that couldn’t… We should not mistake the skeleton for the person it describes.”
—GBoyer
Glenwood, OR, 2011
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
