Michael

Growing up in the Midwest, there was nothing in Junction City, Kansas resembling a punk scene in the early 1980’s. And I was brought up going to Sunday school and church in a strict home, so you really had to be creative and resourceful if you were going to be any kind of iconoclast. For me, the only window to the outside world at the time was late night television with shows like Night Flight. And Night Flight was such a great eclectic mix of cutting edge art and culture of the early 80’s. It was my introduction to Frank Zappa, Devo, John Waters, Judas Priest, New Wave Theater, the Plasmatics, and especially to hip hop emerging out of NYC at the time. Initially, my friends and I were really taken with the visuals and sounds of hip hop. And there’s something very punk about hip hop in its DIY attitude. But I have a really broad range of interest when it comes to music. And growing up in Kansas, my brain was really starving for something new and different. In 1984, my family moved from Junction City to Manhattan, Kansas, a larger college town with a more culturally diverse crowd. College radio was now available and suddenly my high school friends and I were sharing mixtapes with each other and discovering all this amazing music. There were also independent record stores in town, too. So we now had a lot more options to choose from. We were able to find a lot of imports on vinyl and we listened to compilations of punk music both foreign and domestic, made tapes, drew art on them and shared them. Our new soundtrack to high school in the 80’s influenced our dress code, too. Friends of mine were wearing black boots with chains, handmade t-shirts, and long, green, army trench coats. My dad thought he just hated my breakdance phase. But when I began dressing like my friends in a similar uniform of thrift store army coats and boots with chains, he fucking wished I was still wearing parachute pants with bandanas and spinning on my head. My dad hated when I began to dress alternative. He was a lot older and came from a small farming community in Wisconsin. He did not understand what was happening and tried to bring a stop to it. He and I had many heated conversations regarding my appearance. I ended up hiding my wardrobe in the trunk of my car, dressing straight when I left the house, but changing in the senior’s lot into alternative dress before going to class. Needless to say most of Manhattan, Kansas felt the same way about kids who dressed alternative in the 1980’s. And they weren’t shy about letting you know how they felt either.

There wasn’t really much of a scene in Manhattan, so if we wanted to see live music, we drove an hour east to Lawrence, Kansas. On the edge of town, really in the middle of nowhere, sat a small cinderblock building nestled amongst the cornfields. The Outhouse became a legendary Midwestern venue for touring punk, post-punk, and hardcore bands at the time to play at. I was going in the early 90’s so I saw Sick of it All. I was kicked in the head at Gwar. I saw Agnostic Front and it was wild and agro, full of skinheads circling the room and sweat dripping off the ceiling. Dudes with long hair got the side eye. When I saw the Jesus Lizard there, I saw David Yow give a hand job to someone who decided to get naked and jump on stage. Although the guy never actually got erect. So maybe it was performance anxiety?

After moving to the Bay Area and living there for 20+ years, it brought me closer to the source of a lot of punk and great music. For the first time, I found myself surrounded by a thriving and easily accessible live music scene. I saw a lot of great live music while living there. It really broadened my taste in different genres of music. Highlights were seeing Einstürzende Neubauten at the Fillmore, seeing the Damned on Halloween at Slims, Current 93 and Nurse With Wound at the Great American Music Hall, Wolf Eyes at Bottom of the Hill, Michael Gira from Swans and Angels of Light at the Swedish American Music Hall, Throbbing Gristle at the Regency Ballroom, and Nick Cave more times than I can remember.

But my most memorable encounter with punk rock history happened in 2004. I was living alone on Pine and Hyde one block from the cable car stop on California St. I had just got a new cat and needed someone to feed him while I was out of town. The lady at the local pet store recommended ‘Johnny’. Johnny Strike was a punk rock legend in the Bay Area being a former member of the band Crime. And as it turned out, Johnny Strike was also my cat sitter. But I was still naive to a lot of the Bay Area’s punk rock history, so when I met him for the first time, he was just this very nice, well dressed gentleman in his mid 50’s. But I had no idea of his history until the pet store lady mentioned he had been in a famous band but couldn’t remember which one. So Johnny remained my cat sitter until about 2011, but we connected on a deeper friendship level through his love for music and literature. He had a voracious appetite for reading fiction. I got to know him better over the years. He loved Burroughs and had even taken a writers workshop with him years earlier. I’m sure Burroughs inspired Johnny’s lifelong love for traveling to Morocco. He introduced me to J.G. Ballard, Paul Bowles, and Françoise Hardy. Johnny had been a member of Crime in the 1970’s and later battled an addiction, but now he lived a quieter life at home writing fiction, smoking weed, and taking an occasional gig pet-sitting in the area. He really had a way with animals and was the cat-whisperer to my anxiety ridden cat. In 2010, he and I began a sound project together. I had acquired some audio gear and had been making Nurse With Wound inspired soundscapes for a while. Nothing very good. I’m not much of a musician. I was more into making field recordings of the sounds in my area and passing them through effects pedals to alter them and make them sound ‘glitchy’. Johnny became interested in my gear and microphones when he came over to visit my cat once. We agreed to collaborate.

I recorded him reading excerpts from his writing. I processed the sounds a bit and added electronic flourishes here and there. After this we took our project to Hank Rank who is Henry Rosenthal also of Crime. Hank was into it and agreed to join the project on drums. So we began meeting for rehearsals at Hank’s place near Market and 6th. Soon, two other members joined our project, Roger on bass and Joey on guitar. I was in the corner with all my effects pedals, samplers, and minidisc player adding electronic sounds into the mix. We continued to meet about once a month for several years, ultimately piecing together and recording several completed tracks. The members deliberated on a name for our ‘band’ for months. Eventually, Hank came up with ‘Naked Beast’. In 2011 I left San Francisco and moved to North Bay. It became too difficult to continue band practice for me and I lost touch with Johnny. I was saddened to hear he had passed away in 2018. Oddly enough in a weird synchronicity, William S. Burroughs left NYC in 1981 to get away from the drug scene and settled in Lawrence, Kansas, the home of the Outhouse where we had been going for shows. Burrows lived there for the later part of his life until he died in 1997.

You can see Michael’s tremendous body of artwork on Instagram @michaelcampbellart

Watercolor on cold press paper 8.5″x11″ 2025