Turbo Satan at Mike Koretzky's apartment.

In the summer of 1989 the Hardback Cafe opened (which is another story), and immediately became the best place in town for quote-unquote "punk scene" bands of all stripes. The new, wide-open venue encouraged a lot of musicians to start EVEN MORE BANDS, which was always fun.

I have a longtime friend named Derrick McNab (kid brother of Roan McNab from NDolphin), who is a real smartass, in some ways quite different from Roan, who is more reserved. Derrick had been telling me about this experimental/joke noise band he was sort of doing called Stoag-A-Matic, except that it never really got off the ground and gigged. Derrick and I were talking one day and I was telling him how I had a gig coming up at the Hardback with Butter The Heifer and we started talking about forming a joke/noise band designed to be as stupid and low-maintenance as possible.

Derrick had this idea for a dumb stereotype speed metal song called "The Legions Of Bone-Crushing Steel," which had exactly two lines -- "WE ARE the legions of bone-crushing steel/IT'S NOT a dream, you know that it's real." I thought it would be fun to perform it, so we decided I'd play guitar and he'd beat on a trash can, and amuse/annoy the crowd for five minutes between "real" bands. We also decided that we wanted a name that was the absolute epitome of evil, and started talking about names with the word "Satan" in it, and decided we needed something more than "Satan," something that would super-charge it -- hence, TURBO Satan. So we performed the song and it went over pretty well -- I just played a few random chord and screamy bits as fast as possible and Derrick beat on the trash can for all he was worth. This immediately caught the fancy of Greg Ceton (Just Demigods) and we started talking about making the band a little more permanent. Derrick dropped out shortly after, I think because he went back to school in Vermont. Greg and I hooked up with Mike Hager (Number Two) and Brian Doherty (Target Practice/The Jeffersons), with me playing guitar and singing a little, Mike on vox, Greg on drums and Brian on bass. We wrote songs in about the time it took to play them the first time, stuff like "Turbo Satan Theme" AKA "Come And Take A Ride With Satan" (which, I realized later, sounded like "One Way Or Another" by Blondie with more distortion), "You Can't Possibly Know How I Feel" (a Smiths-style world-weary ballad), "Meat Curtains" (promoting cunnilingus), ""Pax Romana" (a sort of historical sci-fi epic about aliens taking over Earth during the Roman Empire days), and my favorite, "Pinata Full Of Drugs."

We played a few gigs, and started trying to make each one a bigger and bigger spectacle with costumes, stage effects, etc. The basic idea was not unlike GWAR or KISS with a $100 budget. We also tried to be as obnoxious as possible, insulting the audience and turning various rock-concert cliches on their heads, like our song "Thank You, Good Night," which was a few minutes of end-of-song chord crescendos and drum fills and Mike saying "Thank you, good-night!" over and over -- we usually did that one early in the set.

So, long about August we got a gig set up at Mike Koretzky's apartment right behind the Independent Florida Alligator building on SW 1st Street -- Koretzky had been editor of the Alligator and also recently-dethroned editor of the entertainment section of the paper, APPLAUSE, and actually got "fired" for running a "dirty joke contest" in APPLAUSE, that drew a lot of criticism from the more conservative elements of the paper.

Anyway, we put an unprecedented amount of effort into the gig. Among other things, we did the following:

• Made stencil/spray painted T-shirts with the Turbo Satan logo. These we threw to the crowd.
• Made a spray-painted TS banner, which we painted in the backyard at Butter The Heifer singer Robert Hanrahan's house (where I lived at the time). While we were making it, a little girl (probably no more than 5 years old) who lived in the house behind us came up to the fence and asked us what we were making. I told her it was a sign for the band I was in. She asked what the name of the band was. I told her it was called "Turbo," which was like a car that went real fast. I didn't have the heart to tell her the full name, and I figured she might report the incident to her parents, and they had enough reason to hate us for our frequent loud, late punk-rock parties. The sign was put on the wall behind the band.
• I had a huge promotional poster from the movie Jaws 2 that I had gotten from my former roommate Mark Underberger (Cuddlefish singer), which was just the image of that famous shark's head rising upward -- no logo, no swimmer, no background, nothing. The whole poster was in several sections and when put together was about 20 by 10 feet. We put this on the ceiling and down one wall of the living room where the band played.
• I had an old, old, 8mm home movie I made in 3rd grade on a school trip to Camp Crystal Lake in nearby Keystone Heights, so I cut and spliced together a strip about 3 feet long that was shot from the inside of the school bus as we pulled away at the end of the trip, and showed the camp directior, Jane Driscoll, waving and receding. We got a 8mm projector, put the film loop in it, and projected it on the wall for awhile.
• Brian got a hot plate and cooked some kind of hors d'oeuvres, I think little sausages. These we gave out during the show, though not a lot of people wanted them.
• Greg and I bought a whale-shaped pinata at Toys 'R' Us and filled it with fake drugs that we laboriously made by putting things like Skittles and confectioner's sugar in Zip-Loc bags, fake marijuana I made by lightly baking an oregano-and-honey mixture, fake blotter acid I made using decorative tape I swiped from the Alligator production room (it was clear adhesive tape about half an inch wide with repeated images of a witch on a broom) and then Xeroxed on a color machine that could print the images in the color red, and dried grocery-store mushrooms. This was going to be a production piece for "Pinata Full Of Drugs," and we were going to act out the song lyrics by pulling up an audience member, blindfolding them, and having them whack the pinata until it burst, releasing its festive harvest of fake drugs. The idea was to make the crowd go nuts. More on that later.
• Black-light bulbs in all available sockets.
• "Demo tapes" that were genuine demo tapes of bad metal bands I had received in my "job" as a heavy-metal rock critic. These we gave out to the crowd after exciting them by saying, "we've got demo tapes tonight, who wants a demo tape?" This got some actual enthusiasm going until we threw the tapes out and people realized they were getting demos by bands like Realm and Strong and Candlemass and crap like that. At which time the audience threw them back at us. Note to future smart-alecks -- plastic cassette cases can HURT when thrown at your head.
• Costumes to make us look like the Ayatollah Khomeini, which consisted of sheets dyed blackish purple and bad fake beards and turbans. The overall effect was more like an impoverished ZZ Top at age 80 than the Ayatollah, plus they made it hard to play, so we took them off after a couple of songs.
• Live crickets, which we bought at a bait shop and spray-painted day-glow orange just before the gig started. The idea was to release them at some point into the crowd, where they would fluoresce under the black lights and disperse, highly agitated by the paint and the loud music, whereupon they would jump and crawl all over the horrified crowd. More on that later.

Needless to say, it took awhile to set all this crap up. It took most of the late afternoon and early evening to get ready, including setting up the PA and the amps and drums.

We started with a new jam number, "Women Dressed As Cops," which had a cool title but not much else going for it.

Oh yeah, we tape-recorded the whole gig. What we really should have done was VIDEO tape the gig, because no audio recording could do justice to this spectacle of stupidity. But the audio tape is all we have, and it's pretty funny. Kind of. To us, anyway.

Anyway, we had a packed house when we went on, and people were in a good Turbo Satan state of mind, meaning inebriated and belligerent. Mike hurled abuse at the crowd. We had a joke contest and when Mike "Woogie" Wohlgemuth stepped up to the mike as the first contestant, Mike cut him off with a warm "thanks, get the hell off the stage" before he could get to the punch line -- I always wondered what it was. I mostly stood still and concentrated on playing rad, mind-bending Hendrix-meets-Jeff-Beck-meets-Greg-Ginn-meets-Dave-Mustaine guitar, as usual, and failed miserably, as usual. Greg provided a voice of sanity from time to time. Brian kept cooking sausages. We all made the usual truckload of bad chord changes and other mistakes. It was great.

The pinata full of drugs was a mixed success. Drummer Brett Olsen (Just Demigods, Butter The Heifer) jumped at the chance to whack the pinata and ended up busting it wide open after a few tries and taking off the blindfold. But the hoped-for stampede for free drugs didn't materialize, and believe me, we tried to hype this to the crowd a LOT. I think the problem was that we (especially me) had been so pleased with ourselves about this little stunt that we had told everyone we knew about this gag well before the show took place, and by the time the fake drugs came a-tumblin' down everybody in attendance knew they (the drugs, not the audience members) were nothing but cheap imitations. A few people did start throwing the confectioner's sugar at each other, and eating the candy. Mike Koretzky told us later, after the gig, that a squad car from the Gainesville Police Department showed up about the noise and the crowd outside and wanted to speak to the resident of the apartment. Koretzky talked to them and the cops said that at some point they heard TS talking over the PA about the "avalanche of free dope" that was coming. One of them said to Koretzky, "we heard people talking about free drugs and they were throwing pills out the window. These are fake drugs, right?" Koretzky answered in the affirmative. the cops said they'd had no noise complaints and to carry on. Score two points for GPD for not busting the party on the spot.

The crickets were a bigger disappointment. It seems the orange spray paint clogged the breathing holes in their sides that they need to live, and they mostly died in captivity, falling pathetically to the floor when released. A few less paint-coated specimens crawled feebly away, only to be crushed by the half-interested crowd. Some animal-rights types got upset with us for that, and we were criticized for a few days. Oh well, the only bad publicity is no publicity, right?

The gig ended with a half-baked impromptu "Dazed And Confused" cover and someone blasting a soda-acid fire extinguisher all over the apartment, which was very irritating to the eyes, skin and lungs. Keep that in mind for future reference when you need to end a party FAST.

The audio tape came out alright. We released it commercially, entitled "You HAD to Be There," with cover art showing devils with large penises using pitchforks to herd people into a house. The tape is pretty funny if you were at the gig, but not that great otherwise. I am rather proud of the guitar solo I played on "Pax Romana," where I kicked on Greg's echo unit and did my best to do a sound painting of flying saucers destroying and subjugating most of the known world circa 500 B.C. Greg said it sounded like I let my id run wild on that one, and that's a pretty good description.

Turbo Satan ended up being probably the most joyful band I was ever in, because we had zero career ambitions and didn't give a flying flip if we played badly or looked like dorks. None of us ever got mad at each other about band stuff, either. Everybody should try this kind of thing at least once. We played a couple more gigs, one of them in January 1990 that was about as good as this one. But my fingers are tired and you're probably bored by now.

Until next time, "Thank You, Good Night!" Tom Nordlie, 9/27/99

I'm really glad Tom wrote this article. As far as I remember, this was one of the absolutely MOST freakin fun shows I saw in Gainesville in the course of 11 years. I think we were all more amused by the whole thing than the Turbo Satan guys realized. (Alcohol may have contributed slightly to that... but nevermind.) I still have the "You Had to Be There" tape too. It's everything you would expect it to be. I'm not sure why... but I just can't seem to throw it out.

I thank my old partner Tom for remembering all that, and for allowing me to be in the band to begin with. It almost all jibes with my memory except on a couple of points: 1) I'm pretty sure I managed to bum rush my way into thumping on bass alongside him and McNab on that very first "Legions of Bone-Crushing Steel" hardback gig. 2) The crickets, I think, didn't come along til our LAST gig---an even more aggravating and maddening performance in early Jan 1990 at 1231 9th street---former home to Freddy The B. and Dave Lowe and then me, J. Mark Hardy and Pat Sicard and at this time Kevin Regan---in which we--upset that the people of Gainesville didn't love us for our gift of drugs in the orig. "Pinata Full of Drugs"--rewrote the lyrics as "Pinata Full of Bugs" and filled it with flourescent crickets which, as Tom remembers, were mostly dead by the time the pinata was busted open. For that show we also wrote a song about Snuggles the Fabric Softener Bear which we "acted out" that night by filling a stuffed bear with raw meat and encourating the (unsuspecting) crowd to tear it to shreds; cut off all my (4 years worth hair and tossed it at the crowd; had blacklight strobes going off all night; did Kiss makeup with no mirrors and opened the set with three Kiss covers; mocked local funksters Bumble with the ridiculous "Jail James Brown" "funk workout" ("the godfather of soul/belongs in the hole/the godfather of soul/won't get no parole.") I don't remember if we only rehearsed that one or actually played it; same with "That's Why I Am A vegetarian," a "Me and Mrs. Jones" style soft sultry soul workout where Mike would ask Gville crowd members to explain why they were vegetarians, which they ALL undoubtedly would be at that place and time for social and sociological reasons that would take too long and hurt too many feelings to get into. In retrospect, yes, Turbo Satan might have been the best band I was ever in. I'll leave with the lyrics as I remember them to first Pinata Full of Drugs and then the sequel "Pinata full of Bugs" What if you were at a party They had a special treat Pinata full of drugs For Everyone to eat? I'm not talking bout a little A major quantity! Enough drugs for you, pretty baby Enough drugs for me. Pinata full of drugs.... Now it's really happening In Turbo Satan's lair Because you know that we're the best Because we really care. Pinata full of drugs... Sweet, huh? Here we are, three months later and ornerier... What if you were at a party They had some loathesome pests Pinata full of bugs Attacking hosts and guests We're not talkin bout a little We mean a major plague Just like back in Egypt In the Bible Days Pinate full of bugs.... Now it's really happening In someone else's lair Because we won't help to clean up Therefore we do not care Pinata full of bugs.....

Hey Brian -- No, I'm really sure that we used crickets spray painted fluorescent orange at the Koretzky gig, and un-painted "natural-style" crickets at the last gig. Other notes -- I can't recall one way or the other if you played bass at the first gig or not; I don't think we actually played "Jail James Brown" live anywhere; I just barely recall "That's Why I Am a Vegetarian" and I'm not sure if we ever played it live or not. Also, regarding "Night of the Snuggle," (note that "Snuggle" is singular, not plural) -- let's not forget that the song was interrupted by Bumble bassist Andrew Freivogel coming "onstage" to announce that Jen Canal had been struck by a car out in front of the "venue," and that a couple of days after the gig our friend Trinity told someone (Greg?) that she had been working at the Krispy Kreme on 13th Street that night and that two acid-addled young men had stumbled in, absolutely stricken with horror, explaining (through clenched teeth, no doubt) that they had just walked into some party where they saw a band that brandished a lovable stuffed teddy bear and then PULLED OUT REAL GUTS FROM IT AND THREW THEM AT THE CROWD. (By the way, it was chicken livers and gizzards, about 1.5 pounds worth, from Albertson's). Postscript -- I had to go back to that house the next day to retrieve the lens cap to my camera and the living room reeked something fierce. Think about how your trash can smells a couple of days after you throw a bunch of chicken bones/fat/skin/guts in it after a big feed. The residents were not amused. T.N.