The Brutality Report - "1,000 Lives (To Die)"

Back in June when I tried to set some ground rules for this column, I wrote:

…no band on Earth is truly brutal. And only a handful of all the songs ever recorded can legitimately lay claim to brutality (and not a one of them was intentional).

This song is one of those songs. In fact, it is most of those songs. Seventy-five percent, to be precise. If you were to make a pie chart of all the brutal songs in human history, this song would be the big Pac Man eating the wedge that is every other brutal song combined. "Give Me Just a Little More Time"? "Dust in the Wind"? All music for a kid’s party next to this track.

Stick Men with Ray Guns formed in 1981 in Dallas, a product of the same 275-mile long cultural petri dish that bred Big Boys, Butthole Surfers, The Dicks, and Scratch Acid. It's a testament to the influence and depravity of the first wave Texas hardcore scene that SMWRG's antagonistic antics have been largely lost to the ages. Their shows, according to local lore, verged on performance art. But scores of bands have since stolen their shtick—fighting audience members, using the mic as a public colonoscopy probe—and in hindsight it's not nearly as shocking 30 years later.

Here's one of the jollier tracks from the band's 2002 reissue compilation, "Some People Deserve to Suffer" (Emperor Jones/Drag City Records). I hereby award the intro to this song a gold Newbery Medal in Apocalyptic Drunk Rambling Preambles. It's best to replay those first ten seconds a few dozen times to let the full impact sink in.

The mythology of the Wild Frontman has masked early punk's capacity to attract people with mental illness. To be a wacko underground vocalist in the early 1980s, especially in places like Texas, meant being someone with an above-average capacity to inflict and receive punishment. Stick Men frontman Bobby Sox apparently excelled at both.

According to his Dallas Observer obit, he was shot, stabbed, and did time in an insane asylum. Two years after the band broke up, he was imprisoned for beating his girlfriend unconscious with a tire iron and then urinating on her body. Soxx was dead by 45, his liver a charred ingot. It was a typical sad death for a typical 20th century alcoholic American.

Except for one detail. When most people drink themselves to death, they don't leave behind a 3:12 document of their descent into oblivion. Soxx left "1,000 Lives (To Die)." To be accurate, in this song he sounds already dead, a cadaver yowling from a mortician's gurney or a croaking piece of slop in the corner of a slaughterhouse. Does the howling human meatloaf sing actual words? The chorus is distinguishable, and several times one can kind of make out the word "Destroy." Destroy himself? Others? It's too hard to discern. It's the brutal wail of a dying man with many years of dying still ahead of him.

Seriously. Jesus. This fucking song.

Previously - Knowledge of the Bug Pit

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