These guys are the best
by Brendan Rafferty (lead singer of SFA)
After we got off stage in Baltimore, the soundman came up to us, said it was a cool show, and asked if we wanted to come to a party at his house. I thanked him but said we couldn’t because we had to follow KRACK back to their house because we were crashing with them. He told us we could crash with him and there’d be lots of booze and drugs. Hmmmmm. Sounded great. I asked him if he was sure we could crash there. Before I tell the guys in KRACK to take off and not wait for us I wanted to be sure we had a place to crash. He said it was no problem and he’d pull his car out front for us to follow him. Cool. I cancel with KRACK, they take off, and we go outside and start loading our gear. Outside, the sidewalk in front of the club is empty now because it’s starting to rain. So we’re the only ones out there. As we’re loading our station wagon up, the soundman drives by, rolls down his window, laughs at us and speeds off, leaving us on the street with our gear in the rain. Mother fucker. No we’re fucked with no place to stay and it’s starting to pour.
We spent the next hour driving around the neighborhood, just hoping to find the fucker and kill him. At a red light, a car with some local HC kids pulls up. They roll down the window and tell us it was a cool show. We tell them our problem and how we’re going to kill this soundman if we ever see him again. These kids tell us they know where the soundman lives and we follow them to his place.
We knock on the door and some drunk HC kid lets us in. The soundman is in the corner, but so fucked up he doesn’t even recognize us. He’s stumbling, drooling on himself, and is incapable of pronouncing words. Good. The party is in full swing… lots of underage punks, lots of booze and drugs. We partake in both and we wait. The soundman passes out while my guitarist fucks the soundman’s girlfriend upstairs. After a few hours everyone has either passed out or left. I piss on all the food in his fridge, steal his best porno, call the partyline and leave the phone off the hook. He has paintings on his wall that are tilted on an angle… I tilt them on the opposite angle and rearrange his records right to left, instead of left to right, just to fuck with him subliminally. I take the trumpet from the mantle in his living room and go outside and start blasting away on the trumpet. I have no idea how to play the trumpet… it sounds excrutiating. As I’m drunkenly blaring away I shout challenges to all the neighbors that I’m waking up. I yell for them to all go fuck themselves and tell them if they have a problem with me playing the trumpet at 4:00 in the morning they should come on over to my house and I’ll kick their asses and fuck their wives. I keep yelling out the soundman’s address between screeching blasts on the trumpet. I then go back in the house and gather up the rest of the band. We tiptoe over all the passed out punks and load up some stuff from his house and leave… but we have one more final thing to do to him before we go.
We pull up to the 24 hour store on his corner and, as we’re stocking up on cheap cigarettes, I place a call to 911. I sound like I’m in a panic. I tell the operator that I was at a party. I give the soundman’s address. I say there was a lot of booze and drugs and one girl had OD’ed. I was scared she was dead. I described the soundman and said he moved the body and is trying to hide her rather than take her to the hospital in case she’s still alive. I refused to give my name because I didn’t want my parents to know. I was prettty convincing. We waited in the station wagon for a little while and left as soon as the first police car pulled up to his house.
