John Wise

It’s 1982, I believe, and this is backstage at a performance of Johanna Went and Mark Wheaton. Johanna is in the middle, and her friend Peggy (last name currently unknown) is on the left. I may be mistaken but I think Peggy helped design the costumes, but I’m writing this nearly 40 years after I watched these performances. Mark was on hand for the soundtrack, which I must say must have fit perfectly because, in the mayhem of what was going on with Johanna, it all felt like it was the same part of the buzzsaw that was tearing through the senses of the audience.

Speaking of the audience, I don’t think everyone in attendance understood what they were getting into when they signed up for this show. I say this because I witnessed many angry people storm out after hurtling invectives at the stage as though anything was going to penetrate the chaos that was unfolding up there.

I have no idea who opened for Johanna that night. I have vague memories of seeing Fishbone, but the punk intensity that would destroy anything that preceded Johanna was too much for memories of what else was experienced. You left one of these shows with your eyeballs packed with visceral carnage and a head full of self-doubt that begged you to question if you saw what you think you did.

Where Johanna began, and the costumes ended as the entire piece was being interwoven in Mark’s accompanying soundscape was anybody’s guess; the blur, once unfolding, only picked up speed. You were either in the vortex, or you were hurled outside before real damage hammered at your well-being.

Just then, things take a surreal turn, and you wonder if the animal parts that are showing up are real. You hope like hell they are not. And what’s under and in the packaging? Do you really want to know?

Hold on because things are unfolding rapidly and are about to go bonkers.

There are goodies up in that box, but what spills out won’t be known in this reading as somehow what followed wasn’t captured. Even I had to pause from time to time to simply watch with my own eyes instead of through the lens.

And before you know it cocks are on stage. All manner of dildos would make an appearance. But what’s this all for, you may ask?

There were stories that were built into what I saw, or at least so I thought. I always took something away from watching these dives into madness as reflections and snippets out of pop culture were mercilessly thrown into a food processor and ground up to show the vulgarity of what we were being spoonfed in the “normal” world.

Have you had enough dick yet?

Maybe you’d be satisfied if, in this performance copulation, you are jizzed on to bring you into an intimate partnership. Just like real sex, it is over all too soon, but the experience will linger long after that.

I can’t figure out where this photo fits among the shows I went to, but it must have been a distinctly different performance than the two featured above and below. I also tend to believe that it was at the next performance where I was backstage with Johanna, Mark, and Peggy, and I showed this image to Johanna and requested to photograph that evening’s show.

There’s a bigger story to this image, though; it is the one that facilitated me leaving the U.S. Military, which was still years away from when I photographed these shows. In 1986 I desperately wanted out of the Army. I thoroughly disliked what I was witness to and simply wanted an exit. But once you signed that contract, you had obligations. Well, I felt differently. By a calculated fluke, I was able to get myself reassigned from my unit in Frankfurt, Germany, to go anywhere; I didn’t care because I only needed to get to work with people who had no preconceived notions about me. I landed in Texas and started to work at Ft. Bliss in El Paso right around the Christmas holidays. Assigned to a desk, I promptly found a special place for this particular image. It didn’t take long for the outrage to grow, and people asked why this photo was on my desk. I was requested to remove it, but I declined, citing religious reasons – which stopped that conversation in an instant. It brought other people around, though, higher-ranking people.

I don’t believe I was at my desk more than 2 or 3 hours before I was asked to collect my stuff and report to the 1st Sergeant’s office. I was asked again in front of this highest-ranking enlisted man and several commissioned officers why I insisted on having this “disgusting” image on my desk. I explained that it had religious significance, and just like the Christmas decorations celebrating Christ were allowed, I thought my religious preferences would also be honored in accordance with federal and military law with me then referencing the particular regulation. That ended that, and I was placed under temporary arrest and escorted to my room in the barracks.

Shenanigans ensued as the coterie of men rifled everything I owned, looking for evidence to show that I was a madman. With four military policemen standing around me, I listened to grown men wonder out loud if I was gay because I owned books such as Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche or magazines such as Fangoria that appeared demonic and satan worshiping to them (it seemed they missed the filmmaking aspect of those). Then they stumbled upon Queer by William Burroughs, and I think at that time they rested assured that I was indeed gay. With evidence in hand, I was marched back to the 1st Sergeant’s office and asked to explain. Nietzsche’s work was translated into Behold the Man, the title is in Latin. The magazines are about filmmaking; I like horror films. As for Burroughs, he was the gay child of the wealthy Burroughs family who invented the cash register and built the computers I worked on in Germany. This man of French letters was a literary genius who kicked off the Beat Generation.

So what about the photo? I’ve already told you. The next question was the one I wanted. What do you want? I want the fuck out of the Army, I’ve had enough of the bullshit posturing, and I’ve seen things I don’t fully understand, but I don’t condone. I should have been warned on entering the military that it isn’t the place for curious people, especially as an enlisted person. How can we do that, was thrown at me. Easy, I told them I failed my last physical training test (that was a lie – I hadn’t), and then I said, you have a PT test coming up. I’ll fail it, you give me a bar to reenlistment. I’ll petition the government to release me as I no longer have a path forward, and we’ll be done. They agreed. The rest of my time at Ft. Bliss was by no means easy as the 1st Sergeant did not like the way this was played and started a rumor that I had been caught in my room engaging in some kind of satanic ritual, sitting in a pool of blood on a pentagram surrounded by candles. That didn’t go over well with my fellow soldiers, who were making threats to kill me or at least hurt me severely.

Hmmm, revenge would be mine. Due to my status, I got every shit job that could be thrown at me. Because of my strange work hours, I started seeing a pattern in who was doing the late-night duty of watching our barracks. This was called CQ or Charge of Quarters. Why were all the soldiers assigned this crappy duty black? I wrote up a letter on their behalf and informed them how to ensure their state senator could become involved in an investigation of Top (nickname for 1st Sergeants). They sent it off, and just before I started my final processing out of the military, I got wind that this old piece of shit racist career military man was under investigation from the highest level of government. I basked in my knowledge that I was getting the last laugh and had to thank Johanna Went the entire time for helping me escape the insanity that exists off-stage. By the way, I believe that’s a cow heart she’s gripping in her maw.

Another show, but the blood should already be indicating that things will get messy.

Why’s all that plastic sheeting on the wall behind you, Johanna? What do you have in mind?

Seriously? Are you sticking that oil dipstick into that man’s cock? And what’s up with all the sex doll’s faces?

A quick change, and now she’s emerging from solar sails ripped out of the future from space.

Looks like real blood to me, and that’s a sheep head on the mic. I never saw Mötley Crüe use animal heads on their mic stands, but then again, I never watched Mötley Crüe live.

Ahh, multi-hued oatmeal goes well with blood and makes quite a colorful mess. Nice touch.

I was 18 to 20 years old when I was following Johanna around Los Angeles. Watching the antics of her and her audience and listening to Mark Wheaton’s discordant soundtrack that was so profoundly appropriate to these situations left a great imprint on me. Forty years later, I learned that I might have been resonating with her work as she, too, was from Buffalo, New York.

While on the one hand, I celebrated living in such a bizarre and open culture that was found in Los Angeles, there was also the dark side with decay and deviancy. Like all things in this city that I experienced in the mid-’70s to the mid-’80s, everything was on view. You could choose to remain in the suburbs, living a Leave It To Beaver existence, or you could crawl through the cesspool of real life that was distributed throughout the downtown area. I chose the visceral and real.

The anger rising up out of the punk rock scene was the rebellion against a candy-coated alternate reality that didn’t reflect the sterile anonymity we teens and young adults were feeling. Music and art hinted at the decay we sensed, but at every step of the way, it felt like we were encouraged to shop our way out of the bleak scenes found in suburbia. When industrial music hit Los Angeles, it felt like the soundtrack to what a city might sound like as it dies.

German band Einstürzende Neubauten with their album Kollaps and Power Electronics group Whitehouse with Birthdeath Experience (introduced to me by this incredible woman at Vinyl Fetish on Melrose Avenue) let me fully understand that there were musicians who were not just channeling their anger against police and politicians as punk was doing. Instead, they showed me that the entire fake morality of society was trying to camouflage the intellectual and cultural decay that was vacuuming all manner of characters from our population.

In the ruins and back alleys of L.A. I could hear the echoes of people who thought they were building the future, but out on stage, we watched the Baby Boomers spiral without function.

Over the debris, I crawled into the abandoned carcass of the industrial machine, wondering why, in a city of millions nestled into a country of hundreds of millions could someone feel alone? The best answer I could come up with then was that it was due to the dominant culture desiring a homogeneously bland populace that would take inspiration from TV shows such as Dallas, Eight Is Enough, and Little House On The Prairie. Only the empty shell would remain, and the bones.

So, I took to scaling the walls following the stench emanating from this cultural slaughterhouse. Rotting bones from lives tossed away stared up at me. On the side of that railway car, I looked into death and wondered, “What do I have to do to escape this system from grinding me up and casting off my bones?”