by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
Eugene Stanley Robinson is once again in transition. The Brooklyn native – known for fronting the seminal hardcore band Whipping Boy and later, the San Francisco noise rock band Oxbow – is in perpetual motion, like a circling shark. He’s a journalist whose work has appeared in GQ, The Wire, Grappling Magazine, LA Weekly, Vice Magazine, Hustler, and Decibel, among many others. He’s also the author of the zine The Birth of Tragedy, as well as a book about fighting, a play, a novel in multiple translations, and now a riotous Substack.
Robinson’s career spans more than music and writing. He’s also a bodybuilder, martial arts expert, LSD evangelist, and gun enthusiast. His new memoir, A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight into Murderer’s Row, publishing October 10th, 2023, by Feral House, touches on all these polymathic aspects of his wildly eccentric life, from his childhood in 1970s Brooklyn through his touring days in Whipping Boy.
During our near hour-long interview, Robinson is nothing if not candid, speaking frankly about everything I asked as he seemingly paced his buddy’s art studio. He’s quick to laugh and easily spun into a yarn. Having a conversation with Robinson is akin to being swept up by a narrative tornado. On more than one occasion I had to wonder where the story was going to land me, and if Robinson’s circuitous routes had any relevance to the question I’d asked. Yet, at the conclusion of each story, I found myself in the exact place I needed to go, if not a bit bruised and discombobulated for the ride.
While his band Oxbow has a new album out on Ipecac called Love’s Holiday – it’s great, bracing riffs in a particle collider with neo soul and Robinson’s powerful singing – our interview focused on Robinson’s compulsively readable memoir. Fans of near mythical tales of pathos and hubris will find plenty to love about Robinson’s prose – which reminds me of reading Burroughs if his naked lunch of choice had been Adderall instead of heroin – while those fascinated by the nascent age of American hardcore will discover humanizing stories concerning some of the scene’s most heralded figures.
There’s no hero worship in A Walk Across Dirty Water, and rightfully so. Robinson makes a fairly convincing case that the hardcore royalty of the 1980s, your Rollinses, your MacKayes, ultimately succumbed to insolvency, “mired in a liminal space between having done something seemingly significant and chasing that significance into total insignificance,” Robinson himself included.
The memoir is so much more than another obit for a scene that still refuses to die (Mike Vallely in Black Flag, anyone?) It’s a captivating walk in Robinson’s shoes as he navigates ‘70s New York, college at Stanford, his burgeoning writing career, his brushes with violence, his numerous romantic entanglements with the partners of others, working in the defense industry, and his time fronting Whipping Boy – all told in Robinson’s idiosyncratic voice. Throw in a few hilarious anecdotes about Flea trying to run him over in a Mercedes and a righteous pig-fucking of an Irish band for stealing the Whipping Boy name and you’ve got one helluva ride.
I highly recommend picking up the memoir, but for a small preview of what you’re in for, here's our conversation with Eugene S. Robinson, lightly edited for clarity and content.
photo credit: Phil Sharp
This conversation includes discussions of sexual violence, assault, and suicide.
Post-Trash: Eugene, you’ve had a long career as a journalist and a writer, but this is your first memoir. Why now?
Eugene Robinson: My goal was to make whatever I was writing nothing like other memoirs that I’ve liked. When I finally buckled down and said, okay, okay – because (Feral, Robinson’s publisher) had been asking me for a long time for me to do it and I'd been rejecting their entreaties – I said, okay, well, I'm gonna do it, but not anything like any of these others I've read. Feral did Francoise Hardy's book, which I think I reviewed, actually. So as a journalist, I had reviewed it. And I was like, that was pretty entertaining. And I read Klaus Kinski Uncut, which, of course – the big joke about that was – it was completely cut to pieces. I decided that all the mistakes that I was thinking that they were making I would not endeavor to make myself, up to and including, Rollins’ Get in the Van, which is a great scene study, but it doesn't really end up telling you very much about the man and that's what I really wanted to reveal. If I want to conceal, I can go back to music, but I really wanted to reveal with this one.
PT: Reveal indeed. In the introduction of the book is a metaphor that connects life with prison and that the only way out is by choice, in other words, suicide. Talk to me about what informs this worldview.
ER: Um, well, you’ve hit me at a very strange time with that question, because last night, I had one of those moments when you bolt upright in bed. And the thought that came to me was my life is fucking great (laughs).
Anybody who's had to hear me complain at all for any length of time should show up right now at my house and punch me in the face. That's exactly what should happen. I don't know what the fuck I was complaining about.
I've made the claim that there are only two types of people who have real difficulties in life: if you've been sexually or physically abused as a child – that shit sticks with you, right? And if you have a terminal illness, that shit sticks with you.
PT: There is a fair amount of frank discussion about rape, incest, and sexual violence in this book. Do you think you experienced a greater proximity to this comparatively to others or this just the way things are and we don’t talk about it?
ER: This is the prison into which we've been locked. This is just life. There's a famous case where Freud was dismissing all these claims of early childhood sexual abuse by his women patients because it just seemed to him impossible that it was happening. But, over the course of time, the numbers of people I know who have been sexually abused, either as children or have been destroyed as adults, the number is a lot larger than it should be.
At this point, I can smell it on people. I remember doing a book tour, somewhere in the American South, and there's a guy kind of lingering around the periphery. And he kind of came up to me after, when I could see he wanted to have a moment. He starts launching into his own story – and this is a grown adult male – but still deeply affected by shit that happened to him when he was six years old, you know? So, I think it's constant and continual. Childhood can be fucking hard.
PT: Your childhood was both typical in some sense and unique, punctuated by moments of spectacular violence. There was the incident you describe as inspiring your lifelong pursuit of weightlifting, martial arts and fighting –
ER: You mean when Ronnie tried to kill me?
PT: Exactly. It’s a good story in a memoir full of them.
ER: I remember somebody hearing the ‘70s described using the phrase “post-Vietnam.” And he shat on that. He was like, post-Vietnam nothing. Let's talk about the war back home. And I go, the hippies? And he goes, no, I mean all these damaged fucking cats who came back from Vietnam just changed. You know, modern society. Because nobody was addressing their issues at all. This was 1966, ‘68.
(As for Ronnie and the others), as an adult, I have a sense of the fact that these kids have probably been ritually abused themselves, based on some of the things they said to me. But me as a five or six-year-old, who had a great childhood, violence was not part of the purview of activity that occurred in or around me. Which is why I was perfectly lined up to be a victim for it and had no way to prepare for it at all.
Then I found myself in that field over by the highway and surrounded by these guys who are older than me to begin with, and they say, we're gonna kill you. Get down on your knees and pray. And it was weird, you know. In really horrible moments, it's funny how other humans will typically introduce you to the concept of a deity, right? This all-powerful, loving God. You mean the one that's watching now, and not doing anything to stop this? You mean that one? That's the one you want me to pray to?
I remember my enduring sensation. It wasn’t fear. Out of all those horrible things that happened to me, I only remember being afraid one time, and that's when I was dealing with a grown adult male and I was 13. But otherwise, the prevailing sensation for me was one of anger. And, like I write in the book, I've thought for years – though, I've sort of forgiven Ronnie – I thought for years about tracking him down, because I've got family in his part of New Rochelle. And it would probably not be too hard to track him down. But then I think, you fucking maniac (laughs).
Weirdly enough, I told this story to Jason Slater, who, rest in peace, just died (Ed. note: December 2020 of liver failure). He's the guy who wrote all these pop songs for Third Eye Blind. And he goes, well, you know, I got shot, right? And I go, no…
And Jason says, yeah, I argued with some guy and he shot me. And after he shot me, he did a victory dance, like he had scored a touchdown or something. I went to the hospital. I got the bullet out, dealt with it.
But then, years later – this is after he's already gotten all the money from Third Eye Blind, he's had to sue them to get it – Jason's driving down the street, he sees the guy who shot him in the park having a picnic with his family. So, he pulls his car over and takes a tire iron out of the trunk and walks up to him and starts beating him. Everybody's screaming. The guy says, what the fuck are you doing? And Jason says to him, you shot me. And the guy was like, yeah, but, you know, I just shot you in the leg. Which was instructive, because people's perception of what they've done never lines up with their perception of what's been done to them.
PT: You mention in the memoir that you made some rules for yourself before you moved to California. Two of them were: no hot tubs and no threesomes. Both of which you broke. So, I'm curious, did you make any other rules that didn't make it in the book and did you break them when you came to California?
ER: (laughs) Yeah, yeah, I mean, in terms of how much weightlifting has been a part of my life, I was a real purist and I thought, I don't have any patience for guys who take steroids. I will never take steroids. Not only will I never take steroids, I don't want to lose my mind, so I'll never take acid. I didn't hold down a single one of those. But those were maybe connected to New York. I can imagine thousands of better places to take acid than in New York City, and the same probably with steroids.
PT: The memoir ultimately leads up to and includes your time in Whipping Boy. You’ve said the Whipping Boy album Muru Muru was your favorite. Can you tell me a little bit about why it's your favorite? Or give me a little sense of romance about what that record means to you?
ER: We just wanted to make music. There’s this kind of fork in the road of people who came up in the same scene who in ’77 went to punk rock. And then in ‘79, got into hardcore. You have the doctrinaire ones who are like, I'm not going anywhere else other than here, because I've never wanted to be anywhere else other than here. And these are the people, you know, friends of mine, who were still playing hardcore. They find it emotionally aesthetically pleasing and fulfilling, that's fine.
It seemed to me probably a little bit too early for the world to embrace something like Muru Muru. But it was clearly our declaration: It begins with hardcore, but it's not going to end with hardcore for us. And that's what I hear. I mean, because it was also the first real attempt for me to write about stuff that I wasn't just thinking about, but was also feeling. Specifically, a lot of the things I was feeling that later went into Fuckfest (Oxbow’s 1989 debut).
PT: I’m going to actually ask you about that a little bit later, but there's a couple other things that I wanted to tie in, though. For example, you tell a story about a girl named Josefine. The way that you write about her, it really sounds like this is the first person you really felt deeply for and truly in love with, right?
ER: That's a very direct way of saying it.
PT: You wrote that your experience with her changed the music in your head and your outlook on the world. I'm curious, how has that informed the music you've made since?
ER: I view Fuckest through Thin Black Dude as really being one record. The first record outside of that continuum is Love’s Holiday (Oxbow’s latest album). Interestingly enough, I'm still in touch with Josefine. She actually wrote me today a very long email of which I don't understand any of it (laughs).
There's a great story that I like by Lord Dunsany (a nom de plume), an Irish writer, and it's called “The Three Sailors Gambit.” These three sailors play chess together. It's clear, from a guy who's watching them play chess, that these sailors know nothing about chess. But before every move, they whisper about the next move, and then they make the move. The guy decides to figure out like, what's going on with them?
So, he gets them drunk. He says, like, what are you doing? They say, we sold our souls to the devil. And the Devil gave us this. And it's a little glass ball. In the glass ball, you see a chessboard. And if you set up a chessboard, it appears in the glass. You can see the moves you should make in the glass. After a while using the glass the sailors started to believe they could play chess and they began ignoring the moves in the glass. That's when things got really horrible, really terrifying.
That stuck with me. They looked in the glass, they saw the way the move should go. And they consciously chose to ignore it. And that's when things got horrible. That was the crossroad at which I found Josefine.
PT: Maybe we can tie this into the question I had about Fuckfest, because the memoir ends in a very poignant way. That scenario you paint about being addicted to sensation – what you call “the sensation of being both overmatched and having fucked around and found out” – and then just realizing how everything fades. Then you just got to a place where you're like, that's it, this is over for me.
And in that moment, there’s a problem. You think, I'm a writer, I can't write a suicide note. So, you decide to make an album. You make Fuckfest. There's an immediate response, people respond to it. You get that call from England asking if Oxbow – the band that you basically invented in order to make your suicide album -- can Oxbow come and play shows. So, you go play the shows and thirty-four years later you’re still releasing albums. I'm wondering, what would have happened if you hadn't received that call?
ER: Well, based on the number of guns that I had, I don't see there was anything really stopping me from acting out on my desire to no longer be on this planet. If you're writing a memoir, there's stuff that you can write to get the story across that makes yourself look better. Or stuff that you can maybe slow-walk to make yourself look less pathetic, that I just couldn't bring myself to go into, the nitty gritty details of how bad it was. I didn't want to have to relive it. And I don't want people to have to live it, either. So, when it came to the whole multiyear collapse of Whipping Boy… I don't know if that was an effective way to say it.
(Ed. note: Here, Robinson tells me a story of violence that I’ve chosen to omit due to the personal nature of who it involves.)
ER: Even if you know how to protect yourself, the biggest issue which you can never, ever deal with is coming face to face with somebody who really wants to eradicate you. It’s personal and weird and very impersonal at the same time. But you can't embrace it as anything other than just really personal. And that's a shocker for a lot of people.
PT: What concerns me in a general humanistic way, is what happens when that person who wants to eradicate you is yourself? And I'm sorry that I'm harping on this. It's just, I think it's relatable to a lot of people. And I think that you have an interesting perspective.
ER: I don’t remember if this is in the book since it was during Oxbow times (Ed. note: it’s not) but there was this video director and he had a terrible problem with drugs. And I said to him, listen, you're going about this the wrong way. I think you're really addicted to regret and guilt. You can get that from the fucking church. You don't need to get it from crack. I'm gonna suggest if you're gonna be a crackhead that you can be the best crackhead you could be. Enjoy it.
And he goes, Oh, you don't understand.
And I go, well, I understand that you're doing stuff that you don't like. There's no problem that's so big that you can't run away from it.
He goes, I tried that.
He's a British guy. His family is wealthy and moved him out to San Francisco. And of course, the first neighborhood he goes to move into is in the Tenderloin. He thinks that he's found his people. And ultimately, he said, I got some heroin. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna kill myself.
And I’m like, hey, man, if you want a suicide hotline, I'm not the guy for it. If you're gonna kill yourself, let me take your stuff because I need it. And usually, that kind of boldface selfishness shoots people right to reality.
(Ed. note: Here, Robinson relates the story of the man’s attempted suicide, which Robinson helps abate. Three nights later, while Robinson is away, the man dies by suicide.)
ER: He killed himself as somebody who really wanted to die. Four nights in a row he tried. He was committed to the proposition of dying. Because no matter where he went, that uncomfortable portion of himself that wanted to die was going to be there. So rather than run from that, he decided to run toward it. And I think that was probably a sensible thing for him to do, though I think about him, probably weekly at this point. And I think in the fullness of time it would have been a lot easier for him to stick around. But that's me saying it, right? it doesn't help for me to say it.
The analog here is, when I think about that line from Bukowski, “when I think about all the things I don't want to do, and all the things I don't want to be, it makes my head hurt” – for me, that's not the case. I think about things I want to do, there's a lot of shit that I want to do. I'm probably on the spectrum in a lot of regards. And the stuff I want to do is probably part of that. Also, the realization that the world is full of a lot bigger pieces of shit than I. So, in terms of deserving to die, there’s people that deserve to die way more than I do. That's easily what kept me alive.
Oxbow’s new album Love’s Holiday is out now. Robinson’s memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight into Murderer’s Row is available for pre-order now.