The Time I Set My Amp on Fire Through the Power of Rock

On one of the U.S. tours to support the album Alien Lanes, Guided By Voices, for whom I played bass guitar at that time, did a show at a club in Los Angeles called Spaceland. It was so new it didn’t even have a stage. The P.A. system was not top flight, either, which is where the trouble started.

On the guest list that night was the main guy from the band Soul Asylum, who was dating the girl from Edward Scissorhands at the time, so we were a little bit excited that a real Hollywood celebrity might show up to our show. Whether the Soul Asylum person or his date showed up, I could not say. This was a time, please understand, before GBV were regularly visited backstage in Los Angeles by, for instance, the guy from Zoolander, the little girl from E.T., that one thin blonde girl from that one movie, and possibly Che Guevara (actually, Benicio Del Toro, who played him in the movie). Because nobody had heard of the band yet, except people who liked rock music, and the guy from Soul Asylum.

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Despite our lack of celebrity clout, the place was packed. The tiny sound system couldn’t cope. Especially the monitors. Things got so bad that our singer, Bob, actually stopped the show at one point and sat down on the floor, and said into the mic that he wasn’t going to play another song until someone fixed the fucking monitors. His voice was almost hoarse because we had been on tour for some time, and had only a couple of shows left on this particular leg.

The soundman at the club did something to the monitors where it was possible for Bob and Kevin to at least hear the vocals, so that Bob didn’t blow out his voice, but I’m pretty sure he was in a bad mood and in a hurry to get off the stage. He signaled that we would play “Exit Flagger,” and that that would be our last song.

“Exit Flagger” was, when I first heard it, and remains to this day, one of my very favorite Guided By Voices songs. It has a very simple structure, and adeptly performs that neat magic trick where a song can be both anthemic and melancholic at the same time. Towards the end of the song, where Bob and Toby keep singing “Exit Flagger” over and over, I used to go kind of crazy with my bass runs.

It was always a blast to play that closing bit, especially when drunk, because everyone knows that when you are drunk your fingers move faster. But what happened next was really a little extraordinary.

To this day, I will never know whether my (quoting Toby Sprout) “smoking” bass runs or some technical glitch in the bass cabinet caused my amp to cut out at the exact moment the song ended. I turned around to look for the reason, only to find that the cabinet was on fire. I mean, literally on fire. Flames were coming out of it. Toby turned around at the same time, noticed the flames, and casually picked up a cup of beer and poured it over them. The flames went out. Toby muttered something about “wasting good beer,” and that was that.

I can’t explain the cause, I can only speculate. And because I can only speculate, I prefer the satisfying explanation that “Exit Flagger” set my bass amp on fire through the power of rock. Having no use for it, and not wishing to load its heavy carcass into the van, I left the scorched wreck on the floor of Spaceland. It stood where it had died, I like to think proudly, or nobly, but dead all the same.
Our next show was a festival somewhere in San Diego. Luckily, our management had already got in touch with one of the other bands, who agreed to lend us their bass rig for our set. The kid who showed me how to use the rig was very nice; I can’t remember his name. He played with a band none of us had ever heard of before, and some of us have not listened to ever again, except accidentally, but I would like to stress: very nice people. The band was called No Doubt, which is fitting, because that is how I feel about the supernatural provenance of my amp’s fiery death.

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