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['On the Boarderline' is an ongoing segment on the Movies About Girls Show, in which I talk about my high school/post-high school band Doctor Rock. As the intro goes, it's done 'song by song', meaning there's probably around 100 episodes to come eventually. What follows is the script of the segment, as well as the .MP3 of the episode's featured song.]
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening or goodnight, listeners. Welcome to what we’ve decided to call ‘episode the sixth’ of ‘On the Boarderline: A Doctor Rock-umentary’. Over the coming weeks, months, maybe even years and possibly even decades, we’ll be working our way through the back catalogue of these long prophesied messiahs of the Ballarat, Victoria music scene, song by song by song by song by song.
The last few weeks have seen us going through the band’s first demo in order. If you remember back though, in the first week of the rock-umentary, we went through track four of ’45 Minutes of Rock’ – Your Last Fucking Waltz – so it’s on to track five this week: That Clemo Song.
That Clemo Song was, as the title may suggest, one of the only songs the band performed that had been written by Clemo, Doctor Rock guitarist. Clemo was, at the time, a red-headed 16 year old – the band’s youngest member by some months – who had recently started playing guitar.
Prior to that, he’d fancied himself the manager for Mr Feenjeen, organising a grand total of zero shows for the band over a 12 month period. As far as anyone can remember, the only task he actually completed was to fire Mr Feenjeen’s very first drummer, Johnny H. Still, he was obviously very into the whole band thing, and if he couldn’t actually play in Mr Feenjeen, hanging out with the band as ostensible manager was probably the next best thing.
After Jake and I started the band that became Doctor Rock and decided to get new members, it was an obvious decision to ask Clemo to join – he was taking lessons at the same time as Jake, and we were all buddies after all. We felt like the whole “buddies” thing was more important than any musical skill Clemo may or may not have possessed. Unsurprisingly, he said he’d love to join, with barely a pause. And at some time after the first gig, and before the ’45 Minutes…’ practise, he wrote this song.
This is, I suppose, the song as Clemo envisioned it when he wrote it. Maybe, anyway. Something like that. Clemo came up with some other title for the song, along with his lyrics, but it was rarely referred to as anything other than That Clemo Song even in this state, and never as anything else afterwards.
And surprisingly, it ended up being around for practically the entire run of the band. As with a lot of other tunes from the ’45 Minutes of Rock’ practise session, this song is in such an early formative state and evolved so quickly as to render this version utterly unique. It’s the only recording of the song that features Clemo’s original lyrics, before Matt decided he didn’t like them at all and rewrote them completely. It’s also the only recording of the song that doesn’t feature an excerpt from Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King in the middle.
Even on the ‘More Ways to Have Fun!!’ EP, it’s there on the back cover as That Clemo Song. We were pretty lazy with titles though, and as you’ll see over the coming weeks, it’s hardly the only composition known only as The Something Something Song. In fact, at one point around mid-2001, almost a third of our set list was comprised of songs titled in that manner.
This is a particularly rough rendition, but I have something of a soft spot for this song. It’s simple, but that same simplicity is probably what kept it in the set-list for so long – it’s short, and in every version but this one, Matt puts in such a spirited vocal performance there’s not really anything to dislike (although I guess your own tastes will decide whether there’s anything to actively like).
But here it is, the original version of That Clemo Song, written by Clemo, performed by Doctor Rock, from ’45 Minutes of Rock’. Please look for the .MP3 below. Next episode, we talk about another cover song – one played by, well, probably every single garage band at one point or another. Until then, this has been yet another episode of ‘On the Boarderline: A Doctor Rock-umentary’.
['On the Boarderline' is an ongoing segment on the Movies About Girls Show, in which I talk about my high school/post-high school band Doctor Rock. As the intro goes, it's done 'song by song', meaning there's probably around 100 episodes to come eventually. What follows is the script of the segment, as well as the .MP3 of the episode's featured song.]
Hello listeners. How are you? Me? Oh, I’m pretty well, thanks. You? Oh good. Good. Welcome to the momentous episode five of ‘On the Boarderline: A Doctor Rock-umentary’. Over the coming weeks, months, maybe even years and possibly even decades, we’ll be working our way through the back catalogue of these black, black sheep of the Ballarat, Victoria music scene, song by song by song by song by song.
This week, it’s track three of ’45 Minutes of Rock’, a song that sprung at least one quarter formed from the first show the band played, at Josh Feenjeen’s 17th. Josh, lead singer of Mr Feenjeen, had been ready to kick me out of the band at the exact same time I decided to quit. As we’ve seen over the past few episodes, this lead to the formation of Doctor Rock, just weeks later.
Was Josh jealous? Bitter, as if his ex had gone off and immediately started not only sleeping with someone else, but doing all kinds of things with the new love interest that they never would have even considering doing with Josh? It’s possible. I don’t want to assume, or put words into his mouth, but there was one thing that happened later that night that makes me think maybe, just maybe, there was something a little on the irritated side floating around that head of his. It was hours on from the time of doctor rock’s debut.
Much had happened in between – alcohol and other intoxicants were imbibed in great quantities, and for some inexplicable reason, I’d brushed off the advances of a quite lovely girl named Eleanor. Mr Feenjeen had played their set, rushing through their pop punk songs within a half hour or so, but reappeared later on.
Mick – Feenjeen bass player and future doctor rock drummer – began playing a Red Hot Chili Peppers bass-line (I’ve no idea which one, because frankly I do not care for the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the least). then Josh began to sing, improvising something that would stick in the minds of the newly formed Doctor Rock for years to come, influencing self-image in a way Josh would never have predicted.
“Doctor Rock suck!” Josh yelled enthusiastically. “They’ve got the right stuff!”
It didn’t make sense, but it did have a certain ring to it. And as any teenage loser will tell you: there’s no defence against criticism like laying it all out there before other people can. So we stole the catchy couplet, and wrote our own song around it. We called it Doctor Rock Suck.
Now, you may or may not have gathered this from previous episodes, but it was early 2000. we’d all lived through that nasty Y2K business, and things were kind of looking up. It was a time when combining rap and rock seemed not only a viable idea, but one to be celebrated. Lower middle class white males rapping was THE hot thing. So we gave it the old Ballarat high school try.
Or, to be entirely accurate, I did. Yes, it’s true. I fancied myself, to some degree at least, a 17 year old rapper. I spent part of last week’s episode apologising, but I could quite easily spend rather a similar amount of time doing it again this week. Aside from breaking up with my high school girlfriend Kirralee via text message and then using an un-erase program on the computer I had lent her in order to try and read supposedly deleted fragments of her diary, there’s not actually anything I regret more from that time of my life than my attempts at rapping.
I am so sorry. It won’t happen again. Obviously, at the time, we were pretty stoked about the song. It was something different by Ballarat standards, and it was novel to perform. As time went on though, it went from being novel to feeling more like a novelty. We never really stopped playing it – even by the end of the group, even once the song was hated by pretty much everyone in the band – because we couldn’t.
Doctor Rock Suck was our novelty hit, and the audiences (limited though they might have been) responded to it, in quite vocal favour of it. By that time, it was 2004. we’d been playing the song for more than 4 years – a song for which the lyrics had been written in a media studies class, and for which Clemo had quite blatantly ripped off the guitar riff from a rather horrible Australian band best forgotten. We were sick of playing it, and I was ashamed of its very existence. I still am, to some extent.
But that was all quite some time away. This version – the version from ’45 Minutes of Rock’ – was ebullient, maybe even voracious. We were certainly having fun, because who knew in 2000 that lower middle class white males rapping along to rock music wasn’t something to be celebrated? Not us. Not a lot of people, it would seem.
The .MP3 is below, as per usual. Maybe you’ll like this one. More likely you’ll hate it. Either way, it’s there, it happened, and now we must deal with it. And this? Well, we have to deal with this too, because it’s been another episode of the increasingly apologetic, ‘On the Boarderline: A Doctor Roc-umentary’.
['On the Boarderline' is an ongoing segment on the Movies About Girls Show, in which I talk about my high school/post-high school band Doctor Rock. As the intro goes, it's done 'song by song', meaning there's probably around 100 episodes to come eventually. What follows is the script of the segment, as well as the .MP3 of the episode's featured song.]
Oh well hey, it’s my good pals the listeners. Hi listeners, i’m not on the show this week but I still want to welcome you to episode four of ‘On the Boarderline: A Doctor Rock-umentary’. Over the coming weeks, months, maybe even years and possibly even decades, we’ll be working our way through the back catalogue of these sooty-faced, raggedly-dressed little blind matchgirls of the Ballarat, Victoria music scene, song by song by song by song by song.
This week, it’s time for track two from ’45 Minutes of Rock’. When I started thinking through this whole rock-umentary thing, it all seemed like a thoroughly good idea that would be filled with some amusing tunes and funny stories and laughs and good times for everyone. I got a little caught up in that. I forgot how fucking weird and awful some of the early demos are, and how uncomfortable some of it is. ‘How fucking weird and awful and uncomfortable?’, you may ask.
Well, you’re about to find out today. But uh. Really fucking weird and awful and uncomfortable – that’s the answer. As you may know by now, if you’ve been following this series and why wouldn’t you have been, ’45 Minutes of Rock’ was recorded at drummer Mick’s place, at the band’s second practise. As such, not a lot of songs were written at the time. It’s probably the same for most bands, I imagine – first few practises, you don’t have a lot of songs ready, so you end up playing odd covers because of the novelty and thrill of playing in a band. Anything you can think of really – anything that most of the band can vaguely play.
But here’s the thing – this particular cover that we’re talking about today, seems very much a premeditated effort – I seem to know when everyone else comes in, and I seem to have at least some grasp of what’s going on, and everyone seems to know how to play it. My memory’s a little foggy on the exact degree of premeditation, but perhaps it was intended as a song that would be covered on a regular basis.
Could that be right? I mean, it almost sounds right, but boy does it feel wrong. So wrong. So fucking wrong.
Fortunately, this is one cover we never performed at any live show – or, at least, not in full. Occasionally, we would play an excerpt from it in the middle of another song; one that we’ll discuss next week. So here’s the thing, right? I guess, to some degree, I’d forgotten just how embarrassing some of the material we had recorded was. It’s easy to give a copy or two of ‘Boarderline’ to [Movies About Girls host] Ken, for example, because Boarderline is late period stuff; it’s well recorded stuff, relatively well performed stuff, and it’s well written stuff.
What you’re about to hear today is the other end of that scale. It’s the earliest of the early, practically. And it’s not well recorded, or well performed. Oh but it gets worse. Not only is it a cover, and not only is it badly performed, but it’s badly sung by yours truly and at one point features a wretched attempt at MC Shan’s mid-song breakdown rap from Snow’s Informer (something I can recall and perform at will, for some odd reason, even to this day). It is a badly sung cover of Everybody Get Up by late ’90s boy band 5ive.
So listen, I’m sorry. I really am. But if we’re going to do this thing right, there’s got to be no skipping of songs. If I’m going to open every episode by describing this segment as a look at doctor rock “song by song by song by song by song”, then some weeks are going to be more interesting than others, I guess: depending on whether you find good songs or bad songs more interesting. Occasionally you’re going to have to put up with some serious crap – especially amongst this early stuff.
But hey, maybe that’s what you want to hear. Maybe you want to hear horrible boy band songs covered in a screamy fashion by a dubiously talented teenage rock ‘n’ roll quintet. Maybe. I dunno. If you do, boy are you in luck, because that’s exactly what you’re about to hear, and then you can even download the .MP3 below and listen to it all day everyday on your .MP3 playback device of choice.
If not, well don’t worry, because the clip’s a short one and no one’s going to force you to download the .MP3 (probably not, anyway). For now, let’s all do our best to enjoy this week’s song, and maybe things will be better next week. Or maybe not, actually, now that I think about it, because we’re talking about one last anecdote from Josh Feenjeen’s 17th, and discovering how some drunken on-stage teasing from the birthday boy lead to one of the more unique and inexplicably enduringly popular Doctor Rock songs. And of course, that’s assuming that Ken even lets me keep going with the series after this effort. Guess we’ll find out. Until then though, this has been another episode of ‘On the Boarderline: A Doctor Rock-umentary’.
['On the Boarderline' is an ongoing segment on the Movies About Girls Show, in which I talk about my high school/post-high school band Doctor Rock. As the intro goes, it's done 'song by song', meaning there's probably around 100 episodes to come eventually. What follows is the script of the segment, as well as the .MP3 of the episode's featured song.]
Well hello there listeners. Welcome to episode three of ‘On the Boarderline: A Doctor Rock-umentary’. Over the coming weeks, months, maybe even years and possibly even decades, we’ll be working our way through the back catalogue of these young behemoths of the Ballarat, Victoria music scene, song by song by song by song by song.
This week, we finish our in-depth recollection of Doctor Rock’s first gig, at Josh from Mr Feenjeen’s 17th birthday, and begin our examination of the ’45 Minutes of Rock’ demo in full. We’ve already talked about Your Last Fucking Waltz and Abasid from the show. That just leaves two covers: one of which was played at practically every single gig from then on, and the other of which was never played again and talked about even more seldom.
Fortunately for you, listeners, as there is no audio of the show, you won’t have to put up with listening to Doctor Rock’s take on Duran Duran’s Girls on Film. Actually, it was more like Doctor Rock’s take on the Wesley Willis Fiasco’s take on Duran Duran’s Girls on Film, which suggests it was probably a bad idea from the start, really. When you consider the fact that it was being performed by three under-prepared 17 year olds and a red-headed 16 year old, it seems even worse. And when you add in the fact that the drums were coming from Scrappy’s keyboard, one guitarist wasn’t interested in actually performing, and I was trying my inadequate best to sing and play bass at the same time, well, it’s probably for the best there’s no audio.
As for the other cover song, there’s probably no more important tune in the band’s history – after all, it was Ween’s Doctor Rock that we named the band after. Or I did. Or something. I guess if we’d called the band Captain Fantasy, we would have ended up having to cover that at every gig.
Let’s do things a little different this week, and familiarise ourselves with a little bit of Ween before we get to Doctor Rock’s version. Here, from 1991′s classic ‘The Pod’ album, is the first version of the song released.
And here, from Ween’s live album ‘Paintin’ the Town Brown’, is a little of a live version – stylistically, probably more of an influence on Doctor Rock’s cover than the album version.
As for Doctor Rock’s version, we’re going to take a particularly strange version of the song, from ’45 Minutes of Rock’.
As noted before, this demo was recorded on a little blue ghetto blaster at one of the band’s first two practises – most likely the second one. It was only a short time after the first show that the band scored new members – Matt, a guitarist of some note who’d previously been in a metal band called Oxide with Josh Feenjeen, but wanted to try his hand at singing. And Mick, a handsome and rascally new kid at the school who played drums and bass. In fact, he’d replaced me on bass in Mr Feenjeen, and already played drums for a metal band named Imune (with one ‘m’). The two guys approached me, and we quickly set some times to get together at Mick’s house, once on the weekend and once after school, to run through some songs in Mick’s lounge room.
Jake, unfortunately, couldn’t make it to the ’45 Minutes of Rock’ practise. Or the one before. Or the one after. Combined with his reluctance to actually play guitar at Josh Feenjeen’s party, this suggested a problem soon to come to a head – a sad state of affairs considering he was effectively one of the co-founders of the band. But that’s a story for another week.
The initial idea was to have Matt sing Doctor Rock, which made sense because Matt was the singer. Matt wasn’t much of a Ween fan, though. Matt was mostly just into metal. And industrial metal. And death metal. And black metal. So, not so much with the Ween then. This slight issue was compounded by the fact that we didn’t actually supply Matt with a lyrics sheet – just told him to make something up over the song as we played it. Which he did. As far as i can tell, he sings: “your mum and your dad get drunk and then fuck on your bed”. Maybe.
Despite the inventiveness of said lyrics, we later came to the conclusion that perhaps I should sing the song instead of Matt, and so began a Doctor Rock tradition of mid-show instrument swapping between him and I.
Mick, it’s worth noting, also wasn’t familiar with the Ween song – he was a metal and punk fan. Fortunately and to his credit, he also happened to be a quite skilled improviser, with a knack for playing along with and anticipating changes in songs he’d never even played before.
The day after recording this, I played it to my dad and sister in the car on the way to school. They were mostly unimpressed. ‘Why can’t you go back to being in a good band like Mr Feenjeen?’ Dad asked.
We played it to everyone who ate recess and lunch in the year 12 common room. They were also mostly unimpressed. Of course, listening back to ’45 Minutes of Rock’, it’s not hard to understand why.
But hey, why take my word for it? Judge for yourself! Here’s Doctor Rock, the opening track of ’45 Minutes of Rock’, by Doctor Rock. Next week, we’ll be talking about a particularly uncomfortable cover. Until then, as always, look for the .MP3 below, and join us next week for another episode of ‘On the Boarderline: A Doctor Rock-umentary’.
['On the Boarderline' is an ongoing segment on the Movies About Girls Show, in which I talk about my high school/post-high school band Doctor Rock. As the intro goes, it's done 'song by song', meaning there's probably around 100 episodes to come eventually. What follows is the script of the segment, as well as the .MP3 of the episode's featured song.]
Hello listeners, and welcome to episode two of On the Boarderline: A Doctor Rock-umentary. Over the coming weeks, months, maybe even years and possibly even decades, we’ll be working our way through the back catalogue of these fondly remembered superstars of the Ballarat, Victoria music scene, song by song by song by song by song.
In this episode, we continue looking back at the very early days of the band, and their growth from nothing to something [Gratuitous band in-joke that I will probably explain later]. When we left off last week, the band were midway through the first ever live show, at Josh from Mr Feenjeen’s 17th birthday, and about to begin a song that would prove, possibly more than anything else written at the time, just how purposefully, irritatingly and obtusely different Doctor Rock were aiming to be.
Abasid was a loosely structured instrumental Middle Eastern styled jam, normally lasting somewhere between five and ten minutes. Sometimes less, sometimes more. Eventually, almost a year later, it became a proper song called I Swear to God, with lyrics and structure and a regular running time of around 3:50 and everything. That was later though and before all that, Abasid was a lumbering behemoth of a song; an ambitious jam played by musicians who, given their experience and ability, should have had no place playing ambitious jams.
In fact, if there’s one thing particularly memorable about the first gig, it’s just how unready Doctor Rock were for an audience. Probably that’s true of every single band, and it didn’t matter, of course – debuting at Josh Feenjeen’s party wasn’t exactly playing an industry showcase or anything – but there were problems. Problems aside from, as mentioned last week, our lack of a singer and drummer, which had forced me to attempt to play bass and sing badly at the same time, and had required the use of keyboard drums from Scrappy’s Casio.
There was also the guitar situation. At this time, we had Clemo and Jake on guitar – in theory, one of them was probably rhythm and the other lead, but I doubt anyone could have worked out which was which. Frankly, Jake and Clemo probably didn’t know which was which, and neither seemed in a rush to nominate themselves for one position or the other. Mostly, I would say this is because Clemo was barely capable of power chords at the time, and Jake was apparently completely incapable of doing anything other than standing there blankly looking at the rest of the band while holding his guitar. It’s kind of the defining image of the band at that time.
It’s probably a sign that maybe the practice should have continued all day before the party, and the band should really have skipped two hours spent waving at the Queen as she drove around the lake. But you know, it’s the fucking Queen – what can you do, right? Can’t ignore the fucking queen.
What, you may be wondering, is an Abasid? It’s a Baghdad based dynasty that ruled from 750 to 1258. It’s also the first sort of vaguely Middle Eastern sounding word in the dictionary. There is, now that I think about it, some possibility that the song wasn’t actually yet known as Abasid at this early stage – for a very brief period, it was known simply as ‘Prince of Persia’. Because, you know, nerds.
I don’t really recall what the first version of Abasid, played that night, sounded like. Maybe it wasn’t bad, but more likely it was dreadful, overlong and ponderous for the audience. As with last week’s episode, we’re light on actual audio from the show in question. However, while last week we heard a selection from the ’45 Minutes of Rock’ demo, this week we take Abasid from another early demo – ‘Sing Along With the Doctor’. ‘Sing Along With the Doctor’ was a demo put together by Scrappy and I – just keyboard and bass – to allow incoming Doctor Rock singer Matt to write lyrics. The kind of sparse weirdness you’re about to hear is probably quite similar to that first gig.
So enjoy this week’s selection, friends, and please, do look out for the .MP3 below. Until next week, this has been ‘On the Boarderline: A Doctor Rock-umentary’.
['On the Boarderline' is an ongoing segment on the Movies About Girls Show, in which I talk about my high school/post-high school band Doctor Rock. As the intro goes, it's done 'song by song', meaning there's probably around 100 episodes to come eventually. What follows is the script of the segment, as well as the .MP3 of the episode's featured song.]
Hello, and welcome to episode one of ‘On the Boarderline: A Doctor Rock-umentary’. Over the coming weeks, months, maybe even years and possibly even decades, we’ll be working our way through the back catalogue of these towering giants of the Ballarat, Victoria music scene, song by song by song by song by song.
This week, let’s start at the start, with the very first song written by the band. Doctor Rock began life in early 2000. I’d spent the previous year and a bit in a Greenday-esque pop punk band called Mr Feenjeen. I found artistically unsatisfying, although it did result in a girl named Claire from Ballarat Grammar School touching my penis in a playground one night at 2am after playing at a party. So, following practice one day I decided to quit, which was convenient timing because the band was going to fire me anyway.
But lack of a band wasn’t going to stop me, though, and my considerable musical genius could not be held back. I’d had a taste of the rock and roll lifestyle: booze, parties, playing hard, staying up past bedtime, adoration from the audience, girls touching my penis, the whole deal. If I started my own band, surely there would only be more of this kind of thing.
Now might be a good time to mention that this was an entirely incorrect assumption. Yes, Doctor Rock was nothing if not a gateway to large quantities of booze, and a couple of parties, some moderately hard playing and even a couple of late nights. However, adoration from the audience and girls touching my penis turned out to be something related more to being in a pop punk band than simply being in a band. Doctor Rock, as you have probably heard by now, was not a pop punk band.
In fact, in the beginning, Doctor Rock was almost not even a proper band. Doctor Rock was almost not even called Doctor Rock. It was almost an electronic duo called The Tokyo Joystick Allstars, featuring my guitar playing buddy Jake and I. Unfortunately, we quickly realised neither of us knew how to be in an electronic duo. So we gathered up a few more likely members – another guitarist, Clemo, and a young keyboard prodigy named Scrappy – and started a real band. A real band called – after a little brainstorming of various names – Doctor Rock, after the Ween song of the same name. It was down to either that or Captain Fantasy.
Granted, it wasn’t a complete real band, but it was certainly getting there. We didn’t quite have a drummer, for example – the first few practices, and the band’s first public appearance, featured Scrappy on keyboard drums. and we didn’t have a dedicated singer – I had my hand up for the position, but wasn’t what you’d call capable in regards to playing bass and singing at the same time. At all.
Nonetheless, it was time to write some songs. The first was written in instrumental form as a direct response to being in Mr Feenjeen – a tune written in 3/4 time called Your Last Fucking Waltz, a halfhearted protest against Feenjeen’s regimental devotion to 4/4 timing. We practiced it a few times, in my dad’s shed (among the 14 strung up drying pot plants), my bedroom, and elsewhere. Eventually, we secured our first show: opening at Mr Feenjeen singer Josh’s 17th birthday. We practiced the whole afternoon leading up the show, over and over, except for a couple of hours during which we went and waved at Queen Elizabeth II as she drove around Ballarat’s Lake Wendouree.
So there we were, standing awkwardly in the middle of Josh’s party – Clemo, Scrappy, Jake and I – ready to invite the world to experience Doctor Rock for the first time. Future Doctor Rock members – drummer Mick and singer Matt – were there watching. And we, well, I don’t entirely remember what we played first. Maybe it was Your Last Waltz. Maybe it was our ill-advised and never repeated cover of Duran Duran’s Girls on Film. Maybe it was our oft-repeated cover of Ween’s Doctor Rock. Maybe it was an extended Middle Eastern jam we called Abasid – but we’ll talk more about that one next week.
Sadly, no audio of the show has survived – just one single photo, above (left to right: Clemo, me, Jake, and do note guitar hanging loosely at Jake’s side) – nor any audio from the keyboard-drums-era practices. So, instead, we fast forward a month or so to hear Your Last Waltz from one of the group’s first practices as a full band – a demo cassette that later became known as ’45 Minutes of Rock’. Enjoy, listeners, and please look for the full .mp3 below, if you’re into that kind of thing.
['Quiz Me Quik' was a weekly GameSetWatch column, in which I picked offbeat subjects in the game business and interviewed them about their business, their perspective, and their unique view of life. This time - an enlightening chat with Matt Hestill.]
It’s been interesting reading Michael Walbridge’s series of interviews with prominent games journalists, and Simon Parkin’s recent column on the same subject. It’s really given me pause to think about some of the people I admire in the field; Michael is actually interviewing a number of them. There’s plenty of other people who I think exemplify the great things about games journalism – intelligence, an ability to think critically and a desire to move journalism past its occasional stagnancy in the mass-market commercial field. While a disappointing number of people writing about games are all too satisfied with towing a line of mediocrity, these people are pushing forward and asking, ‘Why can’t we expect more?’
Unfortunately, all of those people were too busy to talk with me, so I contacted my old acquaintance Matt Hestill instead.
You might know Matt from his blog, It’s Matt Hestill, Stupid - a surreal collection of self-obsessive rants and reviews, all written in Hestill’s somewhat underwhelming stream of consciousness style, punctuated with the odd bit of freeform poetry.
Or it was, anyway, until Hestill snapped in late January and deleted every single post because “the comments were just annoying and you people don’t deserve my insight into the games industry anymore so you can all just get fucked”.
“Hey Matt,” my initial email read. “I want to interview you for GSW, man. What have you been up to since you stopped the blog? Are you even still writing? Haven’t seen anything around lately. I thought you were meant to be doing some stuff for 1Up or something.”
“Wallis,” he replied. “Busy always. Here’s the interview’s focus: I am the next evolution of games journalism. The blog was my chrysalis. I was the pupa. Shutting the blog was the pumping of the hemolymph into my wings so that I might emerge stronger and more beautiful; flowering and rocketing. Now I am the butterfly, Wallis. Soon I will fly above the caterpillars of games journalism. Skype me.”
So, it quickly emerged that Matt had recently had something of an epiphany while rereading Kieron Gillen’s reknowned New Games Journalism manifesto. And then reading everything he could find on games journalism’s need for a Lester Bangs. And then reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And then, the following is what transpired, immediately after connecting to Hestill via Skype.
['Quiz Me Quik' was a weekly GameSetWatch column, in which I picked offbeat subjects in the game business and interviewed them about their business, their perspective, and their unique view of life. This time, we get a little weird.]
This column seems to be turning into some kind of weirdly self-absorbed trip down memory lane for me, at least in the introductions, though it has on occasions made its way throughout the column proper like some kind of terrible beard-stroking, sky-gazing virus.
It’s like I’ve just discovered informal first-person journalism or something, except that I’ve been writing like this for other places for a while now.
Anyways, given the lack of angry comments calling me out on my egotism, I assume it’s not getting up anyone’s nose, which is lovely. And, on the odd chance that it is – and, by extension, I am – getting up your nose, hoo boy are you going to hate me this week.
Back in early 1992, while in Mr Harris’ grade four class, I was engaged in some kind of cartooning cold war with my best friend Sam. I had created – amongst other things – a family of anthropomorphic radishes. He had created a family of anthropomorphic echidnas. And though we were best friends, we did have more than a few blow-ups: he copied me, you know? I like to think I was ahead of my time in regards to intellectual property protection rights.
Anyways, the one thing I had going that he didn’t was a video game design document. It was, admittedly, not a finished design document, but it was better than nothing. Unfortunately, I didn’t know the first thing about programming, and nor did any of my friends, so the Jaton the Radish game never really got underway – discounting a brief, unsatisfactory, jaunt into the world of Macromedia Director later that decade.
The documents, however, survive, and have been scanned for your enjoyment in an extraordinarily painful and time consuming manner: the scrapbook I used at the time is something like A3.75 or some inconvenient measurement. As such, the scanning was done in four sections for each page, before they were all stitched together. Goddamn it.
Back to the point at hand: since this column is called Quiz Me Qwik, and not – I don’t know; Show and Tell Hour or something, I’ve decided to interview myself about the project and its influences. Narcissism ahoy!
['Quiz Me Quik' was a weekly GameSetWatch column, in which I picked offbeat subjects in the game business and interviewed them about their business, their perspective, and their unique view of life. This time... I went a little off the rails.]
I’ve become mildly fascinated with this little mystery lately. It’s a FAQ detailing the ‘programmers door’; an un-openable feature of the designers ending of Chrono Cross. According to the FAQ, there’s a lot of really weird things that can happen in that ending, if certain conditions are met. But, of course, it’s random whether or not they will be met, and so results may vary.
The overwhelming cynic in me suggests pretty much immediately that this is complete crap. It’s entertaining crap, at least, and seems to have enough basis on what really happens in the game to be believable for some people, but crap all the same.
But then, some people – especially younger gamers – will believe anything. I’m not talking about the EGM Sheng Long prank style stuff so much as simple playground stories. Things like the hidden level on the island above the Top Secret Area in Mario World; hidden characters in Wrath of the Black Manta, and so on. Stories that are products of a time when technology hadn’t quite caught up with the imaginations of nine year olds yet.
There are two examples that stand out for me. When I was younger, I only really had a 286 for games; we did have an Atari 2600, but it was pretty well broken by the end of 1988. Most of the games played on said 286 were “gifts” from a friend of my sister, and didn’t come with any documentation. Therefore, I had little idea of how to actually play them, and so when my friend Michael Trewartha told me in year four that he knew how to get further in two particular titles that had stumped me, I was all ears.
In a way, that’s something infinitely more insidious than April Fool’s jokes in magazines. That’s taking advantage of the trusting innocence of someone who doesn’t even know how to play the game. That’s not making up tales about how you found a secret ending for Double Dragon II which involves the evil clone end boss turning into a two headed dragon – it’s deliberately misleading someone looking for help in a basic sense.
And so, I tracked down Trewartha to ask about this gross displacement of trust, and to fish for an apology that should have occurred 16 odd years ago.
Another pill-popping episode of the internet’s wildest party awaits you!
