Album Stories: R.I.P. RFTC
"We did this song back in 1993. We invented this type of music. It's called Rock and Roll!"
Album Stories is an ongoing series, in which I wax nostalgic about an album and how it fits into my life. There isn't an Album Story for every album I own, but there are certainly enough for a recurring segment.
Previously on Album Stories:
British Sea Power’s The Decline of British Sea Power
Ultimate Painting’s Ultimate Painting
The (International) Noise Conspiracy’s Armed Love
Today’s album: 2008’s R.I.P RFTC, a live album documenting the last ever* performance by Rocket From The Crypt
Before we get into it, some editorial notes:
As time moves on and life changes, the last time ever sometimes just becomes the last time for a long time. While 10/31/2005 was very much planned as the definitive end, Rocket From The Crypt reunited in 2013 and have been playing live shows sporadically ever since. In fact, I just saw them play on Saturday, and it was great! Long Live The Dead!
I’m not much into the idea of writing about live albums, but this is very much the one exception.
The physical release of this performance contains a CD and a DVD. The CD contains a shortened and edited version of the full performance, for a variety of reasons1. For the complete experience, check out the DVD version. The digital version is the same as the CD version and seems to only stream on Spotify, unfortunately, but here it is:
The DVD version does not appear to live anywhere online, but I found this “fan cam” version that does use the sound from the DVD version:
Or you can just watch one song, via this officially released clip of Boychucker:
August, 2005 - Preston, England
2005 was a transformative year in my life. Almost everything changed in one way or another, mostly for the better. My long term memory is really bad, but the things I do remember from 2005 are all positive things. But the number one thing from 2005 is that I saw my favorite band play their final show and it was as close as an atheist can get to a religious experience.
2005 isn’t really that long ago, in the grand scheme of things. Like, it’s in this century. But 2005 technology wise? It was basically still the late 1990s. No smart phones and no social media2 meant you had to be proactive and persistent to engage with your online circles. (It also made it harder to keep track of people, more on this later.) So for those of us in the Rocket From The Crypt fandom, the Swami Records Forum3 was still the only place to be.
Anyway, it was a big shock to read on a post the forum from the Swami himself4, one August day, announcing that Rocket From The Crypt was bringing an end to their storied 15 year hot streak and would no longer be a band, but would be throwing one final party to celebrate their life and their death. It would be in San Diego and everyone is invited. Hotel room packages were available, given they knew people would travel from all over the world5 to come.
This is how I found myself making plans to split a hotel room with three strangers on the internet, none of whom I ever met before (or since) and who I hadn't even really engaged with on the forum that much before this. More than that, due to time-zone issues and international credit card billing reasons, I had to trust in one of these other people to book the room/ticket combo and hope it all worked out6. Even though I was 24 years old, I did not tell any of my parents that this was how I booked my trip or that I was staying in a hotel room with strangers because I knew that they would not understand, would try to talk me out of going and/or assume that I would be murdered in my sleep7. They already thought going that far to watch a show was an interesting strange choice.
Daytime, October 31st, 2005 - San Diego, CA
This was the first time I ever took the Amtrak Surfliner to San Diego, which has to be one of the most scenic train rides going8. I made my way to the Westin Horton Plaza and met up with my room-mates for the day.
I also used the hotel house phone (I love these, cannot explain why) to call up to the room and leave a message for Dr Scotty Pavarotti, a Swami fan I knew from previous Swami Record concert expeditions in the UK. We didn’t end up catching up until the show and there’s a real parallel universes scenario there. I have often wondered how my day went if I had fallen in with the UK crew for the day. Not better, not worse, just different. Like I said, 2005 was still the stone ages. If this had been a few years later, between WhatsApp, iMessage, Find My Friends, Dropping A Pin on a map or even DMs on a social app, we’d have almost certainly found each other but with only texts but also not texts (because I wasn't using international roaming), it wasn’t to be9.
It also didn't ultimately matter that I didn't find that crew. I have come to realize that I am more comfortable spending time with strangers than the average10 person, plus my new room-mates were super friendly and interesting11 people, and we obviously all had a common interest, so it wasn't hard to have a fun time with strangers.
We had lunch at the House of Blues. We took the bus to Hillcrest and North Park to go record shopping: M-Theory, Thirsty Moon (RIP) and Off The Record (RIP). We drank beers and played pool at what Google Maps tells me is now called The San Diego Eagle. We headed back downtown and had tacos at what Google Maps now tells me is called Pokez Tacos. We made a really good day of it and I had a truly great time.
In retrospect, and we had no way to know this, this was actually a very bad way to prepare for the show. The correct preparation would have been to have gotten pre-hydrated via an IV drip while visiting an Oxygen Bar. Because, if you’ve even spoken to anyone that was there, we will all agree on one thing: there was no goddamn oxygen in that room and the temperature was somewhere in the range of one million degrees. At least we were not stood under the stage lights. (John Reis states in the liner notes: “You people breathed all of my air.”)
Nighttime, October 31st, 2005 - Westin Horton Plaza, San Diego, CA
After getting show ready with some cheap face paint, and a tatty, “bloodstained” shirt and heading down to the hotel ballroom for the show, things started to get weird, in the good way. My costume was cheap and half-assed because I had to bring it with me across an ocean and a continent, but other people went big with their costumes: cardboard (blood) robots, a group dressed as the Royal Tenenbaums, a handmade dress made from fabric printed with the Circa Now album art (hi, Emily!), multiple King Diamonds, multiple Tiger Masks and every kind of horror themed creature from the Halloween pantheon.
The most legitimately terrifying costumes? Well that would be when I was in an elevator with one other random person and the five members of The Bronx, who are tough looking alpha male punk type dudes12 when they wear street clothes but were all attired in Olympic wrestling singlets which just made them look even tougher.
Photo: Zombie boy says “ Long Live The Dead “ 10/31/2005
In terms of the actual show itself, the best details are in the liner notes that came with the CD/DVD release. Probably the best liner notes on any record I own and they cover almost everything you could really want to know.
They played 28 songs, covering 2 hours worth of live music, which factoring in the breaks for costume changes/negotiating with the hotel staff/etc made for closer to a 3 hour show length. I often wonder what the other guests at the hotel thought about a loud and long show happening in one of the ballrooms and all the costumed weirdos wandering around. I suspect more than one group would have asked for refunds/make goods/etc.
The set list was close to perfect. They started with French Guy (Album 1, Track 1) and from there they went on to hit the highlights of each era of the band, with only a few notable omissions: the RFTC record gets relatively short shrift, with fan favorite Dick On A Dog the key missing song, Human Torch was on the list but not played and a personal live set favorite White Belt was missing from the Group Sounds section.
The moment that hit closest to the heart that night, and which continues to resonate seventeen years later, is Glazed, later described in the liner notes as “the emotional closer that failed to close”. More specifically it’s the mid-song soliloquy in which Speedo takes the scenic route to perfectly outlining what makes this band so special and what makes being a fan of this band so special.
I bought one of those disposable cameras and I saw my favorite band play their last show on stage. I took a picture, and I rushed home before the show was over and I put it in my own little semi-professional darkroom. I opened up a jar of chemicals. I took a sniff, poured the chemicals in the tray, put the film in there and started sifting…I waited for that picture to poke through that white paper.
I started seeing a shape: I didn't know what it was at first but I knew it was a beautiful shape. The chemicals were wafting in the room. My head started to spin but my eyes fixed onto this shape, almost like a punk-rock litmus test.
Did I see what I thought I saw? Oh my god, this picture started to come through and it looked like one of those Maxfield Parrish landscapes. It was a beautiful world: like Heaven through the eyes of Greece. Big columns, reaching to the sky! A beautiful sunrise, or was it a sunset, I don’t know. ORANGE. I never saw an orange that looked like that ever before. I saw red too13. I saw a naked little impish character laying down on some marble.
IT WAS ME, fifteen years ago, laying down, looking out at a perfect world that only exists in this music.
So, to all the naysayers, all the people who don't believe, we tell them: TAKE THAT. TAKE THAT. TAKE THAT. TAKE THAT...
I printed it here in full, because anytime I need a kick in backside to remind myself that something perfect exists and I was lucky enough to find it, often in the context of putting a happy ending of events instead of a sad one, I will listen to it and just like that night, I often get tears in my eyes.
Glazed was perfect, with the emotion level best illustrated by the I-can’t-tell-if-its-real-or-part-of-the-show where Speedo, as if the finality of the moment has just hit him, says “I can’t believe it”, looks shell shocked, then approaches every member of the band in turn and says something private to each of them.
It boggles the mind that they came back out and played more after that, for one final encore. Certainly, I was already spent at that point. Only with the benefit of the DVD, years later, was I able to appreciate that with that encore, they managed to add another layer to the ending with classic versions of Ditchdigger and traditional set closer Come See, Come Saw pulling down the curtain.
But after that encore was over and the house lights came on? The vibes were HEAVY. It sucked all the air out of a room that already had no air. There were 1,500 people, and most of them were wandering around in slow circles, openly weeping and not knowing what to do next, either next this night, or in some cases, next in their lives.
I went back to the hotel room and the emotion, exhaustion and dehydration hit me hard. I threw up a bunch and eventually drifted into a fitful sleep. Turns out I missed all the hotel room after-parties, many of which are legendary notorious (Naked Superman, anyone?) but it didn’t matter. I was done.
It felt a lot like the end of a chapter.
November 1st, 2005, Amtrak Surfliner, Southern California:
I recharged myself the next morning, with an early morning Dave’s Triple from a nearby Wendy’s, then made my way to the Amtrak station and onto a train back to Los Angeles.
I listened to Glazed on repeat for at least an hour, thinking back over the events of the previous day and focusing in on that Speedo soliloquy, about the perfect world that exists within the music of Rocket From The Crypt and how all the people that don’t believe in it can ‘take that’. As I watched the Pacific Ocean roll by outside my window, before the train had even left San Diego County I realized that this wasn’t the end of a chapter.
It was a roadmap to how to make a life in the image of that perfect world: finding the right people, doing fun things with them and creating the experiences that you want to have, rather than just doing what you’ve always done with the people you’ve always known. And I did.
Rocket From The Crypt and the other people who love them are a huge part of my found family. The connections and memories I have made with these people are lasting a lifetime. And what more can you really ask for when you buy some records and then decide to sign on to a web1.0 bulletin board?
RIP RFTC (Live Show) Rating: B+ (The heat and oxygen issues stop this being an A)
RIP RFTC (CD/DVD) Rating: B- (You can’t capture the feeling of being there in a disc)
Life Rating, Halloween 2005: A+
In short it omits some the issues that occurred during the show: guitar strings breaking, a toy gun hitting Speedo in the face, the physical assault and/or shit talking of stage divers by the band, complaints about the very over-heated room, etc.
Not only did we not have smart phones, we had almost an informal contest for who could have the dumbest looking Nokia phones. Pretty sure the winner was the “squared teardrop” nightmare also known as the Nokia 7600.
I hear you crying “but Chris, what about Friendster, Live Journal, MySpace, etc.” to which I say a) those were really blog platforms, not what we now consider social apps, b) their adoption levels were below the pervasive user number thresholds later social platforms would achieve, mostly because the average person wasn’t on them and also c) I wasn’t on any of these (see item b.)
The only thing John Reis has ever done that legitimately annoyed me as a fan was letting the hosting lapse on the swami records forum and all of the its content consequently being lost to the trash cans of the internet. We (the members) would have paid for the hosting ourselves and he didn’t have to hang out there any more if he didn’t want to, but we still wanted to. Twitter, Reddit and/or Facebook are all pale imitations.
This might get confusing for the non-RFTC fans that read this, so to disambiguate: “Speedo”, “The Swami” and John Reis is all the same person.
I personally met attendees from all of these places: the UK, Ireland, Germany, Spain, France, Australia, Japan, Canada, Sweden and the USA. I’m sure there were other places too.
I remember the day the tickets went on sale was the same day as a Reel Big Fish show in Preston and being distracted all night at that show until I could get back to a computer and check my DMs on the Swami Forum to see if the tickets were obtained. Also, yeah you read that right, it was a Reel Big Fish show. What can I say? Touring bands basically never came to Preston. You had to support the ones that did, in case that meant more would come later. (Spoiler: more bands did not come later.)
This caught up to me on the day of the event when my dad was trying to get hold of me to make sure I made it there. My cellphone battery had died, so they called the hotel and asked to be put through to my room and of course there was no room under my name. I don’t even know how I explained this away afterwards. Not convincingly, is my guess.
I just found out this stretch of the line is closed due to coastal erosion, so don’t book a trip just yet…
I also missed the mai-tai fueled party for out of town guests the night before due to family obligations in LA and it sounded like it was quite the scene.
I note this as self-awareness stuff I’ve come to realize over time, not as like a brag. My brain has many faults, but this is probably a helpful gift because feeling semi-comfortable talking to anyone about anything in almost any situation has been somewhat of a career superpower for me, and wait, turns out this is a brag, after all.
My limited experiences with Canadians and Swedes tells me that ‘nice and interesting’ people is on-brand for both places.
Looks can be deceiving, in my experience all the members of The Bronx are total sweethearts.
How red was it, John? (I’m sorry I couldn’t resist.)
This is one show I will always regret missing. Watching that DVD makes me tear up every time I watch it.
Whoops, I missed this when it came out. Brought back a flood of memories. Wow yes I remember everyone dazedly stumbling around after the house lights came on not knowing what to do. I remember that so well, and Zpy gushing tears. I remember being so hot and so tired and probably dangerously dehydrated but telling myself I needed to keep clapping as hard as I could for all the fans that couldn't be there.