In Daron's life, it's 1989, his band Moondog Three is starting to take off, and although the closet door is open now, he's barely got one toe out. He's told his closest friends and bandmates that he's gay, and he's sworn off sleeping with his lead s...
LINER NOTE: WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Daron: Okay, how about today let's talk about some folks who were hitting the big time in 1989 and who now are elsewhere in their lives or careers.
ctan: Only if you'll give a disclaimer this isn't foreshadowing.
Daron: Oh, yeah. No. This isn't foreshadowing, I promise. The guy I want to talk about was in Nirvana and Soundgarden but went on to do something I would never, ever do. Which is be a Special Forces soldier in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
ctan: What? Who?
Daron: Jason Everman. To quote:
[The sergeant] was reading a magazine, when he slowly looked up and stared at Everman. Then the sergeant walked over, pointing to a page in the magazine. "Is this you?" It was a photo of the biggest band in the world, Nirvana. Kurt Cobain had just killed himself, and this was a story about his suicide. Next to Cobain was the band's onetime second guitarist. A guy with long, strawberry blond curls. "Is this you?"
Everman exhaled. "Yes, Drill Sergeant."
ctan: Wow. Here's the piece that got me: "The first time I met Everman was also the first time I ever stepped foot on a tour bus. It was 1989, which was a confusing time to be in a rock band."
Daron: Well, it was a confusing time.
ctan: The writer of the article, Clay Tarver, was in the band Bullet LaVolta. He writes "Our kind of punk rock was all about creating your own place, doing music for its own sake, usually the opposite of what was popular. If you wanted to "make it," you played pandering cheese-metal like Warrant or Slaughter, the bands on MTV. They were bad. We were good. It was all so cut and dried."
Daron: Why am I not surprised you noticed the writer? Wait, Bullet LaVolta? We totally know those guys. They're not from the Seattle grunge scene. They're from Boston! I think it's funny he called them "punk rock" though. I always thought of them as post-punk hard rock verging on metal. But maybe that goes right along with what I've been saying all along about Moondog Three, that the divisions between punk and metal were really false and were created by record companies who needed to know which bin in the record store you went into.
ctan: Wow. I think I blocked the memory of Bullet LaVolta out of my mind. I had to have seen them in the days when I was managing Sexploitation.
Daron: You promised people in more than three years ago, back in 2010, that you'd tell more about Sexploitation at some point.
ctan: I did, didn't I.
Daron: Go on.
ctan: Okay, so the short version of the story is this. I met Jonathan Kelley on Landsdowne Street at one of the clubs in 1990. It might have been on a Sunday night at the Citi Club, which was "gay" night, and they'd connect Citi and Axis together into one mega-club. I don't know. I had just moved to Boston, didn't have any friends yet, and being me, liked to dress up in some genderbent fashion and go dancing.
Daron: And so the two genderbent people in the club got together?
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