#silver chalice

silver chalice! ⸻ a presentation that blurs that lines between androgynous, feminine, & masculine! this could be a mix of the three, not being able to tell the difference between them, etc!

symbol source (link)!

for 💤 anon!

Went to Silver Chalice today in the Barony of Hidden Mountain, and our Household SHOWED UP and swept all of the Heavy Fighting Awards.

I didn't bring my armor and now regret it, because it was so chill and comfortable and there was no pressure I absolutely would have fought. Instead, I agreed to I'll be fight in the Novice Tourney next year.

Anyway. Above you will find Earl Robert, champion at Silver Chalice, Otto Mueller, winner of the Novice Tourney, Sir William, awarded Most Chivalrous, and Lord Richard who was awarded Friend of the Barony by Hidden Mountain. Along with her Majesty, Queen Signy, and her Exellency, the Baroness of Hidden Mountain.

TCAS stuff that I don’t think I’ve uploaded here yet.

Silver Van Lawrence Chalice (Silver Chalice) is a gray Spectralist priest. He was an orphan dropped at the foot of the church, raised by holy men and women, and knowing no other life, took the vows of priesthood and entered into ordination. Because of his unique circumstances, he is the youngest priest in the community. As a Faithful, he’s a firm believer in the system of the hierarchy, but he believes the conflict in Acryllican society stems from an inherent flaw in the system. Citing his theological readings and beliefs, he suggests a system in which lower colors work to uphold higher colors, and in turn, the higher colors work to raise the lower colors. He calls this the Color Wheel. He believes with this system, the Palaces can support economically fair, peaceful, and stable societies.

Way back in 2005, Mor and I met up with Geza X at a recording studio he was working at in Los Angeles. It’s been a longtime since, and memories like vision just get worse, but I recall he had one of the late Rob Ritter’s (Gun Club, Bags, 45 Grave, etc.) amps there which he’d purchased from his former Silver Chalice band mate back in the ‘80s. Of all the illustrious accomplishments on Geza’s resume and cool stuff he had around, having Rob’s old amp really impressed me. This interview originally ran on a small website we started (In a Better World), long-since defunct. I want to point out that Mor was only nineteen when she did this interview. I think she did a great job and I wish she’d stuck with interviewing people. Geza was really pleasant, by the way. -Ryan Leach 

Interview by Mor Fleisher-Leach 

Mor: Having recorded so many singles, how do you think the demise of the 45 affected rock ‘n’ roll music?

Geza: Let me back track a little bit, because I grew up in the ‘60s and heard a lot of the one-hit-wonder bands. There were so many groups with regional hits, like The Standells and The Seeds—stuff like that. Even bands like Love, who were very big in one area of the country, weren’t that well known in other parts. I used to listen to these singles. In fact, I used to go to thrift stores and collect all these Dogs and other bands’ singles that just never made it out of their city. Sometimes there would be an incredible song on there. This was the era when The Beatles and all those types of bands had hit singles and the format was so big with radio. Radio was a lot different in those days. DJs would play various genres on pop radio during their sets, so you’d get a psychedelic song followed by Tom Jones. It was just a completely different world and I loved it. I was really interested in music, but I was also a student demonstrator. I was involved in leading all of the UCLA anti-war protest marches when the UC schools went on strike. I was a big activist, but I was always following the underground music scene. There were so many obscure bands who had one really great song. That aspect of 45s caught my attention and I became fascinated with singles. What happened when punk rock hit was that there was naturally some intrigue about the music. Jimmy Carter heard about it and said, “Well, we can’t have that in this country! They’re talking about anarchy!” President Carter sent out a memo to the heads of all the record companies promising them these humongous tax breaks if they didn’t sign any punk rock artists. That’s why none of us got signed by the majors and only the real sugarplum bands like X or The Dickies got record deals on the West Coast. We were a lot more like the English version of punk rock. The first wave of punk rock during The Masque era was very anti-art and Dada influenced.

Mor: How do you think it was different on the East Coast?

Geza: The punk audiences and artists on the East Coast were generally older and came out of this New York Dolls tradition. It was good stuff. The whole skinny-tie thing came from the East Coast. We just wanted beer. Nickey Beat was making these incredible shirts with spray paint and things like that, so we were really going with the razorblades and safety pins aesthetic out here in LA. But back to the singles—when I had the opportunity to start recording bands, there was nobody releasing stuff. We were almost forced to start the DIY movement, so we met the people at the pressing plants. We pressed singles because putting them out was still relatively cheap and we’d cram as many songs on there as we could. Sometimes a single had three or four songs on it. Everybody in those days had a record player and all the punkers were really broke; they’d blast punk singles on cheap record players. Singles were a really good format for punk. I was trying to bring back the one-hit wonders, which I did succeed in doing with a lot of the groups that I recorded. I spotted the bands that were really strong and I was looking for good material.

Mor: You produced the first Germs single, correct?

Geza: Well, it was not technically the first Germs single (“Forming” on Chris Ashford’s What Records?). They took some cassette that they had recorded that was really fuzzy and released it as a single. That was their first single. I did their first major deal for Slash Records (“Lexicon Devil”). It was a single that Slash put out when they became a label after their run as an underground magazine ended.

Mor: When did you first start theorizing about X-Music?

Geza: Between 1970 to 1972, I really started thinking about what was wrong with music. I liked underground music, but I saw the train coming in where everybody was going into this lame stage with bands like Bread. Really terrible ‘70s, post-hippie dumbed-down bands that were pretty tame in comparison to the underground music of the ’60s. I thought the ‘70s were an era where music was dying. I started thinking to myself—what would be the most extreme thing I could do that would be the total opposite of that? I liked Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart and all those really weird, atonal bands, so I started playing with a lot more dissonance and what I called “X-chords”—which were just tritones. I read all these books on music theory. In the Middle Ages, people were afraid of these chords because they thought they would call forth the Devil, so people would be beheaded if they accidentally played them. If the court jester was playing along and accidentally hit a tritone, they would say, “Off with his head!” You had to be really careful around the church when you were playing tritones, so of course I bashed them out as loud as I could!

Mor: How was it different playing with bands like The Bags as opposed to The Deadbeats or The Mommymen were you would play X-chords?

Geza: The Bags was more of a poppy-punky band. I liked that kind of music too, because I liked so many different styles, including good top-40 and stuff that had a hard rock feel to it. I got into punk because in those days we were all starving to hear three-chord songs, but everything sounded like The Eagles, James Taylor and disco. All of that music was like a curse on LA in the ‘70s. If you turned a little amplifier up past “two” on the volume knob, you’d get booted out of these singer-songwriter clubs. Everything was acoustic and really cheesy and there were all these sensitive artists singing about these really sensitive things and I would just think, “Where’s the blood?” Needless to say, The Ramones showed up and played really loud and we were all really excited about it.

Mor: You joined The Bags early on, right?

Geza: Yes. It was pretty much around when The Sex Pistols and The Ramones had just started breaking out, and I was thinking “God this is great music.” My friend Joe Nanini and I said “Okay, we’re gonna join a punk-rock band.” Joe had moved to LA from Santa Maria with me, and he ended up joining The Bags too before he went on to Wall of Voodoo. I’d try to throw in a couple X-chords in with the Bags from time to time, but they’d get really mad at me.

Mor: Why did you go on to The Deadbeats after that?

Geza: I always liked kind of obscure, goofy, weird music. In those days, there was nothing like that. I was the only person I knew that was playing music in that vein. Then I met this band called The Deadbeats, and they were doing something very similar. Nickey Beat introduced me to them and I just thought “I’m home!” X-chords and all—they were ready for me. So that became a really happy outlet for some very arty, Dada rock. I really got to get my art-rock chops out with the Deadbeats. We would also wear costumes on stage which was really a no-no in those days with punk. We would perform brain surgery on stage with manikins.

Mor: After that you did the Mommymen which was your own thing.

Geza: Right. It was a similar thing to the Deadbeats, but it was a little bit more in between. I don’t know what I was thinking; I thought for sure it was going to be the next big punk hit. Now I listen to the Mommymen stuff and it’s so weird.

Mor: What was it like making the Mommymen record (You Goddamn Kids)? I heard you had some studio trouble.

Geza: No, not exactly. What happened was the studio where I recorded the Mommymen record was rented by these guys named Larson and Bobby Paine. Those guys were legends in the scene. They were not exactly part of the punk scene, but they were sort of lurking around it as producers. They were really cool guys and very talented songwriters. They really knew music and a fair amount about the studio. They worked with the Go-Go’s and Fear. They worked with a lot of bands before they came up, and of course they got shafted by all of them because that’s the way the world works. So anyway, those guys were my home team and good friends of mine. Bobby ended up playing bass in the Mommymen for a while. He and his brother Larson had rented this studio and they were cutting demos there. They were recording Fear demos, which I worked on. They were also doing Levi and the Rockats demos. They did the first Josie Cotton tracks, some of which appeared on her album (Convertible Music). I became an engineer at their studio sort of by accident. They’d asked every engineer in the city to help them get their studio running properly. They had rented it, but the gear was just sitting there and it was really old and trashed and none of it was really working correctly. In those days, I was this post-speed freak tweeker fiend, but I had this way with electronics gear. Finally, in desperation after they tried every engineer and they’d all gone running out of there in terror, they said “Look, you want to come in and goof around with this equipment and see what’s going on?” I went in there and thought there was no way to fix it—to have it actually working properly—unless I just took it all apart. They got really nervous, and I asked them to just go away and I’d do it and everything would be fine. So they came back about four days later. I don’t remember this story, but apparently Josie (Cotton) remembers it quite vividly and told me about it. I had every piece of gear on the floor taken apart, including this old plastic 8-track tape machine, and everything was just laying on the floor. They say I was petting the parts and talking to them.

Mor: Was this drug influenced?

Geza: No, I didn’t take drugs in those days, but that’s after I had taken loads of them! In those days, that’s what I used to do because I was always broke and I had very little electronic equipment. But I liked recording, so I would just get whatever was around and I didn’t have any money to repair the equipment so I had to talk to the gear. Anyway, I put it all together and it worked and I made a bunch of records there including my own.

Mor: How was the process of making that (You Goddamn Kids) record?