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12.03.2004
The following piece originally appeared in issue #5 of Noxious Minutiae, available now. Instructions on how to get it appear in the column to your left. BAND
ON THE RUN:
The Deadly Legacy of the Six-and-Sevens American popular music, since its very inception, has been a dangerous genre. From the sneering raw sexuality of Elvis Presley to the drug-soaked rebellion of the hippies to gangsta rap’s dark mirror of American society gone sour, there has always been a sinister edge to rock, blues, and hip-hop that has never entirely been sublimated by the mainstream. But at no time in the history of pop has a band been as profoundly dangerous as the Six-and-Sevens. Legendary überproducer Steve Albini once described their live shows as “Altamont for people who aren’t total pussies”, and Spin famously dubbed them ‘The Only Band That’s A Matter Of Life And Death’. For nine years, they took the most sociopathic elements of rock music to extremes that no one else had equaled before, and that no one else may ever approach. Founded in the Chicago neighborhood of Ukrainian Village in 1989, the Six-and-Sevens consisted of hyperkinetic frontman Ellis Revere (a west side auto mechanic and DeVry dropout, slash-and-burn guitarist Tony Thoc (a Vietnamese immigrant and part-time fence), snarling bass player Tiffani Riccardo (a low-level mob princess and former prison cigarette snitch) and spasmodic drummer Mick Billiken (a reformed Rastafarian and longtime mainliner of steer’s blood). Playing a frenetic blend of math-rock and cock-rock, the quartet recorded a single EP of passable post-post-post-punk entitled Off Your Backs/On Our Nerves in 1990 before embarking on a series of gigs in Chicagoland that would make them famous – or infamous. The first show that made them a band worth noting (or, better yet, completely avoiding) was a VFW gig in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Revere, having what at first was thought to be an abreaction to some tainted Old Style that was circulating in the area, opened the set with a high-energy maneuver typical of the intense mathcore acts of the period, by spinning his mic stand around his head like a helicopter motor. He had performed this trick before, but always from an elevated stage; before the second number was over, the 5’6” singer had hospitalized three concertgoers, necessitated expensive dental work for six more, and entirely cleared the club. The story is oft-told that only a few hundred people ever heard the Velvet Underground when they were together, but every one of them formed a band; likewise, only a few dozen saw that first gig by the Six-and-Sevens, but every one of them filed a police report. At their second gig in St. Paul, Minnesota, Tiffani Riccardo responded to an ill-flicked cigarette by deliberately starting an electrical fire that burned one of the city’s oldest rock clubs to the ground; and at their third, in tiny Fargo, North Dakota, Thoc and Billiken threw concertgoers who refused to buy a copy of their new CD down a flight of stairs. When they returned to Chicago, there were over a half-dozen warrants out for their arrest, and a legend was born. As with so many bands where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, each member of the Six-and-Sevens played their own unique part in enhancing the reputation of the group as the most vital-sign-reducing and life-threatening in existence. Ellis Revere was the band’s mouthpiece to the press; in his interviews, he would drip acid on his detractors (literally), gutpunch anyone who he felt was not taking proper notes, and drop bombshells like “GG Allin was a failure. He said he’d kill himself on stage, and he couldn’t even manage that. We intend to kill everyone who’s not on stage – and we mean it.” Expanding on tried-and-true techniques of the past, he would run over paparazzi who tried to get snapshots of him; he’d then lie in wait for photographers to come and shoot the scene of the accident, then rush out and clobber them. Tony Thoc became best-known for hunting down writers who had criticized the band, or even given them less than stellar reviews, and carving a huge “6” and “7” on their cheeks with a straight razor. Tiffani Riccardo is best remembered for accusing every man in a given audience of trying to rape her, punishing them by spraying mace in their eyes and nostrils, and then doing the same to all the women because none of them stepped in to help her. And Mick Billiken’s conspicuous consumption led him to smash his entire drum kit after each show (generally over someone’s head), then break into a music store, steal a new drum kit, and destroy it as well the very next day. Their gigs were legendary not just for their musical proficiency, intensity, and feloniousness, but for the tremendous amount of time and effort it took to locate them. Only two years into their existence, they had a cumulative bodycount of nearly 30 people, or close to one fatality every seven shows. With so many people at risk and so many law enforcement agencies on their trail, it became a mark of sheerest hipster cred just to find a show by the Six-and-Sevens, let alone actually survive it. Just as millions more people claim to have been at Woodstock than were actually there, everybody who was anybody in the indie rock scene of the mid- to late-‘90s shows off a scar, severed digit or gunshot wound they claim was inflicted at a Six-and-Sevens show. It’s estimated that by 1998, at least 95% of people responding to internet message board postings about the location and date of a Six-and-Sevens gig were undercover law enforcement agents. With six albums (including the seminal Mail Us Your Address And Prepare To Die), close to a thousand live shows, and as many as two hundred fatalities to their credit, the Six-and-Sevens made such an impact during their near-decade of existence that it’s hard to believe how quickly they’ve been forgotten. The All Music Guide dismisses them with a perfunctory entry largely devoted to scolding them for their failure to put bonus tracks on their CD releases; Rolling Stone seems more interested in long-standing rumors about a Tiffani Riccardo snuff porn video than considering their historical and artistic legacy; and Robert Christgau is far too busy whining about having lost the use of the right side of his body at the one Six-and-Sevens show he attended than fairly assessing their place in rock music. In the end, we must leave it up to Mick Billiken, the sole surviving member of the group after the great Double Door Shotgun Massacre, to summarize what his band meant to the world: “Everybody talks about the east-coast/west-coast beef in rap like it was some kind of big deal. That thing dragged on for five years and there was only, what, two people killed? On our best night, the Six-and-Sevens could do that many before the second encore. Those that saw us know the truth about how great we were – assuming they lived and were left without brain damage, that is. And if they did, we really didn’t do our jobs.” |
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| TODAY'S DRIFTWOOD: "Beware of creating tedium! I know no guard against this so likely to be effective as the feeling of the writer himself. When once the sense that the thing is becoming long has grown upon him, he may be sure that it will grow upon his readers." (Anthony Trollope) |