The Mutaytor - 3/14/05 - San Francisco

i love my friends… we drink from each other’s freshly-poured cups, eat off each other’s plates, giggle in the dark at all hours… a complete sense of family and love. we clean up after ourselves, leaving no trace and when it comes time for rockenating, we live for it. for them the rocking happens on stage. for me it happens post-show, although i do share the stage for usually most of the show. i just now start to turn my focus to my camera and all the treasures within it. for now, i ride highway 5 south back to l.a. brady is rocking out to billy idol, beating the steering wheel with his drumtool rings. amy’s sleeping in the back. white pinwheels line bright green hilltops. the cloudless sky, black cows in bright pastures, seamless hillsides, fences that scale up into oblivion. last night was simply rediculous. besides the show kicking ass and the after-parties, mutant sleepovers are so much fun! naked hot tubs, champagne in haunted houses, topless pillow fights. mucha lucha couch wrestling and when crunchy mama tries to reprimand us that we’re being too loud at 5am we sit in a pillow and blanket circle and throw green glow sticks at each other, making eyes and mouths and different expressions by bending the sticks. someone announces that they’ve given me a new name… PMK… ‘pixie’s mom’s kid’… then when i sing in my high-pitched faerie speak monica says ‘only DOGS can hear you!’ and we all roll around laughing. repeating it over and over… and laughing more, fearful of crunchy’s return. brady made ‘quesadillas for no reason’…. it’s usually ‘bacon for no reason’ but he made an exception. and then there was more naked hot tubbin… i tried to sleep but giggled alot instead, awaking to a group breakfast of liquid chickens and bagels. we ate together quickly and ran to the venue to load out. i carried drums and cymbals to the smashvan where crunchy was fitting it all in saying ‘a bazooka player… i shoulda married a bazooka player’… then it hit me… i was tired… i passed out in the hot front seat of my car with my celtic tapestry over me… awakening to brady pointing at me thru the window screaming ‘CHEATER! no sleeping!’ and everyone peered in to see if i was really sleeping… one sip of brady’s iced coffee and i was up and ready for round 2 of toiling. the load-out toil is near complete. the smash van and the vini-man are loaded up, everyone on their way to being properly caffeinated. we rip down the set lists from the dressing room doorways and lean against the overly-staple exterior of the club as the last sandbags and congas make their way into the expanding vans. last night redcap, russ, meridian and dave showed up to the show and most of them came to jimmy’s house afterwards, where as everyone partied on the ground level, brady and i crept upstairs to the top room that looks out over all of san fran. a small square room where anton lavey carved his pentagram into the floorboards and where he kept his lion that scratched away some of the wood at the entrance. red paint now covers it but the claw marks are forever embedded. i ran my hands over them and shivered… drafts came quick… with no windows open… i was spooked to high hell… and loved it… brady and i climbed out the window at the top most part of the room and leaned on the wrought iron that separated us from certain death. i leaned back and took a photo of that magickal space and then we crept inside the room and sat on the pentgram wood floor. i stood in the center of the room before leaving, looked up at the hollow wood spire. a persian rug now covers where the pentagram was but the backs of my knees seized up and tingled prompting a mad dash for the door. deep breaths looking up at dead deer heads and fangs of tigers looming above me… their eyes seemed to follow us… i ran from room to room breathless and full of wonder, snapping photos like a fish… we peeked in dark victorian rooms one level down and then brady remembered that he left his sunglasses up in the pentagram room. he begged me to get them as the chains on his outfit were too loud. so with wide eyes and surging fear i climbed back up the dark stairs to the room, looked around, felt with my hands on the floor, almost expecting to feel a fuzzy paw or for the roof to explode off above me… no glasses… ah outside… so i open the window and reach outside and there they were. i got spooked again and made a mad dash down the stairs, louder than any brady chains would’ve done perhaps…
lying in the backseat of my car with amy driving. two glasses of merlot into an evening meant for separating the rockstar weekend from the looming work week. instead i revel in the love between us all. the laughter, the gifts, the comfort, the music.. always the music… the caring, the combined ego that makes us all work so well together, the team color… i’ve never felt so much like i belonged witha group as i do with mutaytor. i’m a very lucky girl to have these people in my life. the fact that art comes through as a byproduct is a gift…

From Wolfie ~ “Traveling with the mutaytor is one part rock star, one part spinal tap, and one part teen sex movie. packed houses friday night and saturday night. Our accommodations were the living room floor of two different houses. One is this absolutely otherworldly victorian mansion, so much history. Many a rock star has partied there. It’s the house that anton lavey frequented. He kept a tiger cub up in the bell tower. You can still see the scratches on the bannister from it. The place is more a portal into other dimensions than a house. You can almost hear the house talk to you. Then, theres always the part of the trip where Pixie screams “PILLOW FIGHT!!” and all the mutants are swinging away at each other in their pajamas and lingerie. As a small boy, i always thought that my teen sex movies were pure fantasy, never to be experienced in reality. Thanks to the mutaytor dance team, i have been proven wrong. I coined a phrase this weekend. its “tyranny of the naked people”. the way it works is this- a bunch of people get naked, and get in a hot tub. Then, some prudes stand arround, still dressed, smoking and talking. Then, when the naked people in the hot tub need something, they make the dressed people go get it. “MORE WINE!!!” “we need smokes!” “someone change the music!” See? its like democracy is the tyranny of the masses, so then hot tubbers become the tyranny of the naked people. And of course, they’re sunday, when everyone else is down at the venue moving drums, and im on my hands and knees scrubbing black makeup stains out of the hot tub, so we get to hang there again….”