It’s an amazing world, everything is ridiculously beautiful and at the same time cruelly ugly. Everything has ultimate meaning, yet ultimately doesn’t mean shit. My parent’s met at chuck a burger on the rockroad in the 60′s, they were the last of the 50′s greaser hotrod hold outs, too young and stuck in the midwest to be dirty hippies. They lived to cruise on the weekends, my dad can list all the cars he built back then, and he get’s starry eyed when he does it. He got drafted and went to Nam, they staid together and my mom got pregnant when he was on leave one time, that makes me a bastard, technically. They weren’t married when I was concieved but they were before I was born, I’m not really sure how but I was baptised catholic, probably if this would have happened before vatican II I would have had a chance for this early salvation.
My mother saw rosemary’s baby at the movie theater alone while obviously pregnant with me, it’s still her favorite movie. She once told me that’s why I’m “weird”, she says she never said that, but I really think she did. I think I’ll digress right here and lay out my little rosemary’s baby connection rant. The Dakota Hotel, magnificent building on central park, is where most of the movie takes place, John lennon was shot outside it. Prudence from the song dear prudence, is mia farrows sister, both mia and prudence accompanied the beatles when they went to india to meet the maha riji and got inspired to write the white album. Manson was inspired by the secret messages in the white album and sent his family off to kill sharon tate who was pregnant at the time with roman polanski’s unborn bastard child.
Not that that means anything, it’s just strange how all those people and things are interconnected. You can also tie in the assassination of RFK, roman and sharon had dinner with him the night before. You can also tie in “Catcher in the rye” since Lennon’s assassin was reading it and obsessed by it and then that ties in to hinkly obsessed with the same book.
So back to my childhood, I grew up at the dragstrip, my first memories are of drag racing, my first word was “car”. I remember VHT and leaving on the last yellow light. My fathers cars were never sponsored, we pulled the car in on tow bars and had to change the wheels to slicks when we got there, we sprayed the radiator down with a bug sprayer, the first time we camped at atrack it was in an old station wagon, then tents, then a really crappy truck with camper shell; all this while most of the cars around us were peppered with sponsors and they were brought to track on enclosed trailers behind big mobile home campers that rivaled our actual house at times. The weekly meets we didn’t stick out too bad, but when we treked across the country to go to a big event we must have looked like the clampets showing up in the hills of beverly.
So what did I take away from all this? You can do what you want and be successful without selling out. The value of statistics, facts, formulae, and variables; my father after every run what meticulously write down temp humidity pressure track conditions, various settings on the car etc. etc. and could figure out down to the thousandth of a second what the car would run the next time around. Bracket racing where you don’t have to have the fanciest car, or even the fastest, you just have to know what it’s going to do the next time down the track, oh and you have to be able to leave the line as close to that green light as possible without jumping the gun and getting that red light. Timing and predicting are everything folks, and you can’t argue with numbers.
My father was a union man, my uncles and grandfathers were union men. I’ve spent a good portion of my working life as a union man, hard thing to do when all you can do is cook (barely) and print tshirts.
They call me Freaky Steve, I’ve tried to escape this name in the past but it always creeps back, and nobody knows who Stephen McClenahan is, but they remember my adjective. Originally it was because of my hair, there was already a steve in the warrensburg crowd I fell in with, and I had the “freaky” hair. At one point I had freakysteve.com but when I let it lapse for like a day some porn king from canada jumped on it, so now if you look it up you get that, sorry mom. The name first became big when i was the front man for a schlock rock industrial band named “Spleen”. Spleen was a cult. We played small college bars and keggers. We used an atari ST computer with a very weak sampler, a tg33 synth I had bought at the end of highschool when my grandfather died and left me some cash. We were influenced most by skinny puppy, one of the greatest bands of all time, troy hewitt was my main partner in this endeavor he was a fellow artist in school with me, he had every industrial record on vinyl you could think of, he made incredible percussion sculptures we would haul on stage. Don brandon the third main member played trippy hippie guitar. We were something else, monsters really, if you came to one of our shows and were trashed on some mind bending substance you would have thought we were amazing. I meant every word I sang, full on passion, intense soul searching angst, I was screaming at the world, at my heartbreaks and at myself
you and me and all that we see wont last much longer
rotting meat deacaying flesh, death to the stronger,,,
KILL ME, KILL ME
forgive me for what i’ve done
killing off my first born son
offer up my servitude i’m in need of a little grace
you will not be satisfied until I’m face down in a shallow grave
stephenmcclenahan
alexarchie
Know God's Will (by Stephen McClenahan)
