Bradley's Buzz

Rhinelander

In 2002, my pal Patrick who also runs Flexible Records decided to set a story I wrote, really just a long rambling, to music and thus became "Rhinelander", the title track of a Swivek EP released in February of that year. I thought it was time we revisted that little short and see just how far I've come, I mean really, really...

I was born in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, twenty some odd years ago. Rhinelander is, as everyone should know the home of the hodag. A land and river loving furry animal with claws and teeth like a dinosaur. When the ice age passed through what is now Wisconsin it forgot to take the hodag, so even now in the deep woods you can still hear the cry of the lonely hodag. His name is Howen. My name is Bradley.

My mother moved us to a brand new house when I was quite young. She called it a mobile home I called it hell on wheels. It wasn’t as bad as one might think, it was after all brand new, driven right off the lot like so many exquisite homes are. It was probably a good thing we lived in a house that you could hitch onto a Gremlin because my mother had a free wheeling spirit and we moved all over. Rhinelander, Sugar Camp, my Grandma Ferlie’s backyard and finally Mosinee, Wisconsin.

That’s when they shipped me off to first grade. My most exciting moment of these times was the tornado. Being a blonde in my youth I didn’t’ know what a tornado was until one day all the boys of the trailer park (yes, I said trailer park) stopped playing baseball and started running towards the shelter. I put down my sunglasses and cocktail and asked, “what is going on.” They told me “the tornado is coming.” Now I didn’t know who this tornado person was but apparently he was pretty big news so I ran home to tell my mother. That’s when our grill went flying through the air. I discovered what a tornado was.

By the second grade, we lived on a farm. The trailer had been given to some unsuspecting relative who thought it was a steal. The farm didn’t last long as the only two experiences I really recall are playing house outside and wondering what the hell a cow udder was doing in my kitchen and walking through a blizzard hoping to hell that the shades of red I saw in between the battering snow was the frame of our house and not the fires of Hell.

So finally my parents bought a house and we were back in Mosinee, Wisconsin. This is where most of my childhood memories come from. Every single horrid one. It was in 1979 when two amazing things happened. The first event actually has two elements. The first is I saw Blondie performing on a New Year’s Eve show. I fell in love. I thought they were the coolest thing I had ever seen in my whole 7 years. Then I found out my aunt Sarah had the “Parallel Lines” album, so it was the very first album I ever stole. Then a couple of weeks later my aunt Carol (who the family always thought was nuts but has always had the best taste in music) bought me Pat Benatar’s “In The Heat Of The Night.”

I was hooked. I had found my inspiration. It wasn’t long before I knew I had to take a cue from these rocking ladies, run away from home and go live above a bar in New York City. I even tried one night, I wrote a note to my dad while he was in the shower that I was running away. I was going to New York. I made it to the Red Owl grocery store before our neighbors Smokey and Evelyn picked my ass up.

From the point of my introduction to Blondie and Pat, I knew I was going to do something with music. I wrote lyrics and songs constantly. Most of them were just poor imitations of other people’s songs but by 1981 I had a whole handful of songs and I formed a rock group, The Cats. It was me as the lead singer and sexy one, Bobby Hallas pulling a Buddy Holly look on guitar, Todd Greeley doing bass and Pat Hoen on drums. Pat’s dad was in a band so we played at his house. No one could really play well but boy could I sing. I ripped apart my lyrics for such ditties as “Red Dye”, “Anew” and the scorching rocker “Dragon’s Fire.” I recorded my vocals into a tape recorder and one night as I lie in bed I heard my mother and uncle listening to my songs. I couldn’t tell what there opinions were because they were laughing so hard but something tells me they liked it. I even perfected my stage presence around this time. My Aunt Dianne had a wood stove in her living room, which sat on a little stage. I would put the needle on the record player and perform Pat Benatar for all the family to see. They were immediately impressed. I also toned my look, printing out my headshots at the 3 for 1.00 picture booths. I still have one and I must confess I had the attitude even then.

I continued writing and making pseudo albums under alias names through out the years. After The Cats broke up, I went solo as Pat Beste, because I wanted to be like Pat Benatar and I wanted Jeff Beste, a highschooler whose father ran the local mortuary to marry me, then I just settled on Pat Jacobson, after my infatuation with Jeff ended. In my mind the tabloid would have had a field day with that story.

Most of these dreams faded as I entered high school and realized how much I hated life. I had decided by this time also that New York wasn’t going to be the place for me. I was going to go to Los Angeles. I wanted to be with all the boys who started the punk and new wave bands when I was little. I was sure there was going to be a resurgence of Josie Cotton and the GoGos were bound to have another hit soon. I hated school but continued on because I knew the minute I had that tassel on my head I was heading to LA. I told all of my friends (Monica and Melissa) of my plans and even recruited them to be my back up singers. After all Melsie was totally new wave and Monica and I had been stealing 45s since we were in junior high. Everyone at school may have made fun of me but Mona and Melsie (as we called them, I was Bubba) knew the rock star that lived within me.

Melsie and I created Swivek. Actually, I created the band and said she was in it. I came up with totally cool and hip session players who would want to play with us. By the time spring semester was over, Swivek had done three albums, Melsie and I both had solo albums in the charts and the band was folding due to internal problems. All of this was done in my mother’s kitchen with crayons, a tape recorder, and Grandma Ferlie’s old typewriter. So it was time to move on. I changed my band’s name again and decided to write under plain old Brad Jacobson. The superstar. Then those plans got a little sidetracked around the age 16.

I ran away from home when my mother took my puppy dog Blondie to the pound. It was the final straw in a long line of problems. Her boyfriend at the time, Leonard, thought my leaving was a big joke. He had taken the keys to my car and just smirked each time I took a box of stuff to Nellie, my 1980 Plymouth Horizon. But I don’t think he was smirking when Nellie started up and took off with me and my belongings inside of it. You see I had made extra keys months before just in case something like this were to happen. So I took to living the rock star life by boozing it up, having sexual flings and struggling with my identity. I moved in with some friends from my job at the local Burger King. I lived in a two bedroom apartment with my friend Dave, Ted and Ted’s older brother Tim, who bore a striking resemblance to Sylvester Stallone. Two more defining moments were to come from this. The first happened late one night when I was drinking some Southern Comfort and grape kool aid, listening to the radio when the DJ announced, “Here’s the new single from Pat Benatar.” They played “All Fired Up” and I was excited beyond belief. The second big moment came when Tim decided it was time to lose my virginity. All I kept thinking in that alley between 3rd and 4th avenue is, “Why did I wait so long for this?”

Finally, everything seemed to straighten out when I turned gay. Ironic isn’t it?
Still my rock star life was on hold. After spending a summer living in Tim’s 1967 Camaro with ralley sport options, I decided it was time to get a little more serious. I moved back home, and did it quite snidely I might add. I just started spending a couple of nights at my mom’s house here and there until finally I was there every night. Eventually, my mother asked, “are you home for good now,” and I said, “Of course I am.” I moved out two weeks later.

I decided to go to college. I took classes at the University extension in Wausau, where I learned to write short stories and poetry instead of just lyrics. Never actually learning a musical instrument, my lyrics were all pretty useless. So I continued going to school, deciding on what I was going to be. I started with the desire to be a rock critic so I declared myself an English major.

Two years later and I was ready to move on up and out. I was going to transfer to a four-year college, so I applied everywhere. I was accepted everywhere too so I had to decide which town was best for me. And which town I hadn’t slept with many people in. I opted for Minneapolis after all it worked for Mary. At the last minute, I couldn’t decide what I really wanted to do. I was torn between selling hot dogs on the beach in California or going to college in Minneapolis. My friend Dawn, wise beyond her years told me to go to school.

So like Mary Richards I drove into Minneapolis but since it was the 90s not the 70s I drove in with my Farfie, the wonder Fox, the Volkswagen I bought from Lisa Glassford listening to “Love Is All Around” by Joan Jett instead of Mary’s original. I enrolled at the University of Minnesota and my life was in fast forward.

I went to school where the older than dirt professors bored me and partied at night at Over the Rainbow where the older than dirt drunks adored me. A black drag queen named Mama adopted me as one of her kin and everything was going great.

I met a boy, moved in with said boy and fought day and night with aforementioned boy until one day I decided I had enough and sent him packing to Korea. Then I was truly feeling like Mary. I had my own little one bedroom apartment, I was working at a bank at night doing reconciling, going to school during the day and on the weekends I worked at a museum. Summer was coming and everything from the past year of freeze was melting away.

Then I met him. He will continue to be called him because that loser doesn’t need to be recognized by his real name, which is asshole. Anyhoo, him and I met and had what can only be called treacherous relationship. Finally after another year of fighting, I called it off and sent his ass packing to Montana. It was around this time that I also decided to leave Minneapolis. I had found that my life of trying to emulate Mary Richards wasn’t working. Not only was I not Mary, I wasn’t even Rhoda. I had become Phyllis!

So one stormy winter night I packed up Farfie with my Pat Benatar and Blondie records, two pairs of thermal underwear and a carton of cigarettes. I pointed the VW to the I-90 interstate and headed west. My plan was to visit my uncle in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. To take a sabbatical in the northwest woods and forget about gay men, gay bars and the city in general – for just a bit. Then I’d keep heading west to Seattle. My desire was to go live in Los Angeles but no one I knew had moved there, and I wasn’t sure Farfie had the gumption to head into the California sun. So it was a vacation to the mountains!

My vacation lasted two years. Little did I know there was a net formed around Coeur d’ Alene Idaho and Spokane Washington that kept you from leaving. Sure it let you take little vacations to Seattle, it even stretched to Portland but you were really stretching the wires there. I met good people though and after so many years of trying to find a beat for my lyrics I met Patrick Jacobs, who introduced me to the world of electronic computer music enhancements!! I was going to be a rock star after all.

Patrick discovered Acid DJ, a way to make recorded loops, add your own music, burn it to Cd, record your vocals. Do anything you wanted to do. I was so excited. Patrick taught me how to be experimental and do new things musically. Basically, he told me I wasn’t Pat Benatar. So he’d call me up at my wonderful job as a desk clerk in the Idaho mountains and give me a song title. I’d write lyrics and he’d write the music. He wrote a lot of songs during that time and handed me such inspiring titles as “Dressy Afterchurl”, “Biped Misleads Ether” and “Twinge Decipher.” Amazingly enough, all three eventually became songs. The titles did change however.
So Patrick re-started a musical project he had worked on when he was younger, Orange Television. I wrote some songs, sang on some of them, even did a Blondie cover song. I gave lyrics to our friend Tara Fisher to sing and just sat back and watched. Until one morning I couldn’t take it anymore and started finagling around on my own.

I worked on the song “Dressy Afterchurl”, I had always liked the lyrics I wrote and decided to tinker with music. By the end of the afternoon I had written my first complete song! The process I had started back in 1981 had finally been completed. Now I just had to pick a name. AT first I was just going to continue with Orange Television but I needed to grow and be my own entity. I chose Bradley Buzzee, for press releases I was going to say I was Ruth Buzzi’s illegitimate son. Very dramatic, very Knots Landing. Patrick even released a compilation of local artists with “Dressy Afterchurl” on it credited to Bradley Buzzee. The name wouldn’t stick though. I tried to think back on other names I had used and although the Cats had fond memories, I didn’t want those boys suing me when I became rich and famous. So I went back to good old Melsie and the gang g and decided to use Swivek.

After that, I was on a roll. Patrick began doing songs for the first Swivek album. He wrote half of the songs, I only wrote four by myself and we did a couple together. Finally in August 1999, my first CD “Drab” was done. I listened to it every day and every night for two weeks. Looking at the cover with my face on it. WE had run to Staples to have them blow up a picture of me in the shower. My nude body was all over that store for a while.

For my second CD I decided to concentrate on everything myself. I started writing songs and for the first time in my life, I could actually go in and do the music. I wasn’t just writing lyrics. So the second CD “Pissant” was all my own words and ideas. Just as I was finishing up however Patrick came along with new great beats and asked if I wanted to sing on them. Well, of course I did, so we did two more songs for the CD.

Finally, I was doing music and loving it. I was not however loving Coeur d Alene. It was time to move on. Luckily, around October of 2000, Patrick and I sent our friend Brian off to Los Angeles. He was moving there heading for a better life. I was so jealous and angry that I wasn’t going anywhere and he was going exactly where I wanted to be. I decided to get rip snorting drunk and not give a crap. So I did. I missed work the next day and I didn’t care. I drove over to my friend Jay’s house and just sat on the couch, drinking coffee contemplating why my life had gone so horribly wrong.

Meanwhile, my uncle, Patrick and everyone else I knew was on a manhunt for me. Brian had even contemplated turning around and coming back. I was forced to deal with my situation when Patrick came strolling in Jay’s house asking if I had lost my mind and my uncle came in two seconds later, telling me I should probably move out of his house. I decided to straighten up and get some stuff together (again.) I moved into a house with Patrick after I apologized and kissed the ass of my boss. Kermit, by the way, had also gone to my boss to explain to them that I was crazy and I would do my best to stay responsible.

This whole charade lasted about two months. I had had enough of Idaho and I was leaving. I had already tried to leave once with $50 in my pocket. I was going to head to Portland but for my going away my friends took me out and I spent $45 at the bar. Seeing as how $5 wouldn’t get me to Hayden Lake, Idaho I had opted to stay in town, but this wasn’t going to happen to me again. I got on the horn and talked to Brian. I asked if I could come and stay with him, and as he loves me he agreed.

Two weeks later, I was on a bus headed to LA. By this time Farfie, the Wonder Fox had seen the last of her days. As if she wasn’t sick enough, a garbage truck had finally done her in as she awaited a new radiator. It was sad and I peeled my rainbow sticker off the trunk with tears in my eyes. So it was the b us for me.

Over a year and a half has passed since I arrived in Los Angeles. It is everything that I thought it would be all those years ago. Now I have also started working on new music for what will be the third Swivek album. I have finally done what I set out to do. I’m not famous (yet) but I am so happy just doing what I want to do and being where I want to be. My music has even changed, from the dark wave pop of my last album to the new stuff I’m working on. It’s more fun, more bubblegum, more California sun. So there, I may not have been Mary Richards in Minneapolis but I might just make it after all. She did do her filming here anyway.

posted by swivek @ 11:09 PM