Phthursday Musings: Exit the Dragon

The news dropped Wednesday that Blackie Onassis had died. No details yet which makes it hard to imagine it being something other than what he sang about in 1995.

Blackie was the drummer for Urge Overkill during their glory years in the early-mid ‘90s. I’ve written about this some but now seems the right time to write about other aspects of Urge, focusing a little more on the brief mythos they managed to create.

This also seems like the right time to write about how Urge Overkill indirectly got me fired from my college newspaper and set me on the path to being the insane man I am today.

Blackie Onassis - real name John Rowan, which none of us knew until this week - was the drummer for Urge Overkill from their pivotal album The Supersonic Storybook through their heyday, which peaked with 1993’s Saturation and then the inclusion of their cover of Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon” on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. Last July in a long digression I wrote about UO; if you missed it, it’s at the bottom of “I Voted”:

Blackie joined Nash Kato and Eddie “King” Roeser in time for The Supersonic Storybook which is… it’s a weird album! At times it’s an emphatic rock album but at other times it’s something else, something kind of… cinematic? The emotional center of the album is “Emmaline”, a cover of the 1974 song “Emma” by the British soul band Hot Chocolate - not exactly your standard indie-rock fare. What other Touch & Go band was playing music like that? For me, it was an especially strange entry point to indie rock, but I didn’t really realize that when I started listening to it. After all, my first exposure was through “Sister Havana”, which is just a huge ‘90s guitars song.

I can look back now and realize that what passed for indie rock circa 1992 wasn’t as strictly defined by the likes of Pavement and Superchunk as might have been thought. Bands like Urge Overkill and Afghan Whigs, who maybe aren’t exactly thought of today as especially indie, nevertheless started out on the absolutely coolest indie labels (Touch & Go and Sub Pop respectively) before signing to majors, and were seemingly far more influenced by soul and disco than they were by the likes of the Velvet Underground or The Fall.

If you look just at the album covers and the back covers, at the over the top suits, at a stage name like Blackie Onassis, the very name Urge Overkill was something which both was and wasn’t tongue-in-cheek. The aesthetic of being a retro lounge band with a huge guitar sound, but one they were willing to temper, was absurdly contrived, but also, I guess, something kind of genuine.

When they released Exit the Dragon in 1995, I was super stoked for it, and I got my hands on it, and, and, and, and… it was strangely subdued. Saturation had been a play, a ploy, an over-the-top recording where they’d brought in a production team that was more hip-hop oriented and created something almost classic rock in the process. Exit the Dragon seemed way too pensive for what should have been a dynamic followup.

Having listened to most of the catalog the last couple of days, I was mulling over some thoughts about Exit in particular, the emotional center of which is “The Mistake”, the one song Blackie sings. It all crystalized for me when I found this blog post from 2015 all about the album. I always kind of sort of knew, but didn’t really know exactly, what the very term Exit the Dragon meant, and it turns out, it means pulling the heroin needle out of your arm.

In retrospect it makes perfect sense that this was the unexpected final album of the band, or at least the band in that incarnation. (Nash and Eddie reunited years later and have released two albums since.) The whole damn album is about how they can’t handle doing what they’re doing. Blackie literally sings “beware the overdose” and means it.

The song which broke them is one of the dumbest songs I can think of, but that’s okay:

If any comp seems appropriate here, it’s almost got to be to Van Halen, right? If Van Halen had been a power trio? Not in sonic texture but in kind of the knowing application of something totally ridiculous to an over-the-top guitar sound? Or maybe the James Gang? You could make a case for “Sister Havana” being Gen X’s “Walk Away”, couldn’t you?

That period around when I was finishing high school was such a weird time in American culture. All times are weird but seriously, what is happening here, what are Jon Stewart and Conan O’Brien wearing, what is Conan even doing there, why does Jon Stewart look so much like David Schwimmer? I digress:

Then there’s the song which made them huge… but maybe also spelled their demise:

Neil Diamond was not cool in 1994. I mean, yes, Neil Diamond is and forever will be cool. But it was some sort of stroke of genius, or gutsiness, or whatever else, for a big rock band to do something like this, right?

Except… they’d already done it. It was the opening track on Stull, the EP they released in 1992. And of course it wasn’t their song. And what made it huge was a cultural phenomenon which they totally lucked their way into. I’m certainly not going to argue that they didn’t deserve their fame, but the way it came at them… everything on Exit the Dragon makes sense, in a way it couldn’t possibly have made sense to a dumb 18 year old.

The opening single from ETD was “The Break”, a curious choice for multiple reasons, not the least of which being that King sang lead instead of Nash. It’s really good, but it’s not… anthemic? What is it exactly?

When we saw them play the Riviera in November 1995, we didn’t know it was going to be essentially their last show. I don’t think I realized how long they’d actually been a band, I definitely didn’t pick up on all of the vibes from the record. It was a big deal seeing them. They were one of my absolute favorite bands.

I can’t find footage from the show, though I have to believe someone out there recorded it. The band played as a four piece that night with a bassist, Nils St. Cyr, who everyone agreed looked like a lion. And they closed the show by having Lion Dude take the drums, Nash take the bass, and Blackie come out front to sing - why not? - “Night Fever”.

Nash and Eddie were the core core of the band, but during those halcyon days, this was a tight, sharp band, and Blackie was perfectly suited holding things down behind the long-haired guys.

I know things went south after that final show. Surely they were already headed south. Blackie got busted for heroin in 1996 and the band broke up and Eddie formed Electric Airlines and Nash put together a band under the name Nash Kato and yeah those two guys did eventually get back together but I never really checked it out. And I guess I’m not sure why not. But they’ve been around Chicago for a while. Blackie, I really don’t know. He kind of went off the radar after the split, I never heard about him being in another band, and yeah, it’s a shame that there’s press now all about stuff he did over 25 years ago but those 25 years are just kind of… years that didn’t happen in any of the reporting.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that one of the songs on Wesley Willis’s Greatest Hits is “Urge Overkill”:

Exit the Dragon came out in the fall of 1995, about the beginning of my sophomore year of college. I’d been a staff writer at the Argus, our campus newspaper, reviewing some movies, contributing a couple other articles, the year before. I had wanted to become the Features Editor that year but the new Editor-in-Chief, a guy I’ll call Flumm, passed me over in favor of someone else. Flumm didn’t seem to like me.

For the second issue I submitted a piece - a review of Exit the Dragon. I will admit right here that the review was largely me saying that it wasn’t as good as Saturation, which is a dumb way to write an album review, but I was 18, so what the hell.

Anyway they didn’t run it. Gave me a weird explanation, said it wasn’t really clear which album I was reviewing. That was nonsense. Between this and some other changes that they were instituting I definitely felt squeezed out.

Meanwhile the paper was doing some other really dumb things. Now this all is a story that is best told in person, and trying to write it out, when I’m also not going to include anyone’s actual names, well, you’re going to miss a lot. So I’m going to only kind of sort of explain this, with the idea being that anyone who has actually read this far, and who reads the following paragraph, cannot help but seek me out to actually hear the totality of the story.

The story involves an award-winning columnist, an accused lumberjack, a guy who devotedly read the Weekly World News, the Illinois Christian Coalition, precinct level elections, a fraternity hazing ritual, Newt Gingrich, incompetent editing, F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and the most outlandish usage of an apostrophe to which I have ever been witness.

The end result was that I was told that I was no longer welcome to write for the Argus.

Having been thus thwarted, I moved on from one media outlet to another, and, having that semester started up what would prove to be my surprisingly long-running radio show GOAT-SPIEL (about which I’ve written plenty, and yes, for relative newcomers, META-SPIEL’s name absolutely derives from GOAT-SPIEL), I wound up the following semester falling into being Music Director at WESN, a role I deeply cherish to this day and which proved to be unbelievably formative to my thinking in oh so many ways.

The reality was that at the time I bought Saturation using a Media Play gift certificate in November 1993, I was already on a path to being REALLY INTO MUSIC, but that trajectory was significantly altered by the bizarre course of events that played out after I submitted an allegedly low quality review of Exit the Dragon.

RIP Blackie. Long live Urge Overkill!