HAPPY NEW YEAR, HELLIONS! Here’s to another 365 days of kicking ass and taking names, and here’s a little slice of ol’ Nic “Speedfreak” Ridgefield to help celebrate. May God Bless You & This Force — Jake C.
Vinyl. LPs. Tracks on wax. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em. Nasty motherfuckers that’ll warp on your ass if given the chance, but when you treat ‘em nice and you got your Hi-Fi jimmied just right, wheeeew boy do they sound nice.
Some of y’all might remember a few years ago when we here at Metröpolis actually served up a run on one of our prized little records: Devil’s Maze. I’ll spare ya the full HSN sales-pitch, but the bitch sold out and we still dig playing cuts from it. Heavy little sonofabitch she was; damn near blew Brett “The Brave” Tsé’s throat on that doom ballad “Take It Beyond The Grave.” But when we was having a fan-signing at Doc’s Oasis on the big day, we kept getting the same question:
“How the hell were you guys able to press vinyl in this economy?”
Or rather in this part of the country. After all, with tapes and discs way quicker and cleaner to mint, there weren’t exactly printing presses lined up to make our lathes and pound our PVC into 40 minutes of good ol’ rock-n-roll. And synth-stations ain’t rigged for the kind of intricacies needed to make a proper record from scratch.
Some of the guys figured it’d be fun to take the piss and tell all sorts of stories. Rory said alchemy, Harry said he hand-carved it, and Brett–bless him–hadn’t the heart to fib to anyone so he just said “ask these idiots.” I told the abridged truth there, but I figure now’s as good a time to give you the uncut tale.
It starts with a chase. And I mean a chase.
Commish has us sicced on a radium gang. Not a pack of scavengers and/or raiders hooked on the stuff, but five-alarm dope-peddlers who were trafficking it all over the place. It’d be one thing if they were just finding stray caches we hadn’t buttoned up with our civilian service program, but this group killed some of the volunteer security guarding the storage site. They wanted the stuff, they wanted it bad, and now here we are chasing their asses over hill and dale to both: A) turn ‘em the color of Christmas on the desert floor, and B) dispose of the junk with a little more finality.
In other words, blow that shit up in a nice empty patch of land.
So there the usual cadre was: one indestructible pickup, one handsome rat rod, and a white-furred maniac on a big black bike. We elected to spare Brett from this one just because it wasn’t really a finesse-heavy gig, but that would pay dividends when the day’s real discovery came.
Now, typical of our usual plan-making skills, we wound up enacting all of Part B first instead of all of Part A. And as usual, thank Rory. This brilliant white bastard was damn-near feral chasing after the old Econoline carrying that good green kush. They were spraying him with every shred of lead they had–electric or otherwise–but Rory’s hand cannons were popping those heads like champagne bottles. And of course, the real big corker’s always the driver. And when Rory’s Colt caps the stocky bastard at the van’s wheel, that’s when all hell breaks loose within the van. That boxy faded yellow Ford went tearing off, hard to the left, and just kept going and going until it found the nearest ledge and sailed right off.
And then, for a solid five minutes: nothing. We were so busy hightailing after the rest of the entourage, we didn’t even have time to realize that the van was taking its sweet time diving down one of the few real canyons we got in this part of the desert. By the time our drug lords were cutting through an old abandoned factory and we were hot on their six, that’s when the almighty thunderclap came and our pint-sized mushroom cloud plumed up in the distance.
When I looked back at Rory, all our white-furred drummer did was shrug. “Well, at least it was remote.”
And fair enough, he wasn’t wrong. That left all our attention to the rest of the goon squad as they filed into the old rusty silver structure. Now I knew where they were trying to cut across; you could see one end of the building clear to the other. Fortunately, one kick of my boot and a kiss from my baby’s bumper, and I knocked those fuckers right into a steel pillar. With Harry and his roadster covering the exit, and Rory popping tires, it wasn’t long before we had the last of the gang boxed in. With my guys having leapt out the front windshield of their busted Chevy pickup to greet the pillar with open skulls, I leapt out and decided to see what we could do for the rest of these bastards.
Now, if they’d been a little tighter with their fancy driving, they might not have made the same mistake and crashed their nice rusty white Impala into the wall. Lucky for them, they didn’t go to pieces so out they scrambled and into the warehouse they bolted. The three of us gave chase on foot and that’s when a good old-fashioned gunfight started shaping up.
This warehouse had enough crisscrossing catwalks and staircases to pass for an MC Escher installation. It was less about hiding and more about vantage points and man, these fellas were getting first pick while Harry, Rory, and myself were bolting for the first staircase up. When they started firing back, we all went for cover and started picking off whatever we could.
One of the drug-lords–white wolf with some black speckling around his head–kept trying to whittle the steel cable above my head. I didn’t know what for until I saw the 10-ton lead weight shoot its way for me and I took another mighty tuck-and-roll away to safety. Dumb move on my part, but I got him on the rebound when he turned to nail Rory only to get his back blown out by the finest Schofield money can buy.
Then came Drugstore Cowboy #2: a fella you could tell wasn’t on the stuff but was on...something with those sunk-in red eyes and that matted brown fur. He was giving poor Harry the throttling of his life, making our wundermutt dance them steel-cap boots of his to keep out the line of fire. Our leather-clad hellfighter was first up on the catwalks with these clowns, though he almost took a nice leg-breaking dive when a few shots sent him swinging over the rail, dangling some 20 feet off the warehouse floor.
Now, Mr. Drugstore starts sauntering up and fixes to do an old Hollywoodland classic. You know the kind. Some evil hound walks up to the hero, takes it nice and slow putting his boot down on the hero’s knuckles, hammering them until the bastard falls. You could see it in those bloodshot eyes too, he musta seen this on the boob-tube last night and thought it was a mighty fine idea. So here this scuzzy brown wolf in ratty denim is, slowly moving his way down the catwalk, ready to savor the moment and have himself a real good time.
Then Harry swings up, blasts him point black in the head, and he drops like a sack of ground beef. Best part: with one flick of his shoulders, our wundermutt didn’t even wind up with a splotch of blood on him.
Now the last guy was clearly the hired hound, the wheel man. Gray fella, much better kept, just a nice simple greaser set of white shirt, black leather, and blue jeans. But he was evidently “for the cause” because there was no mercy-begging from this cat. No pleas for surrender, no plea deals, no pleading of any kind. That or his wrap sheet was enough to let us put him away for everything that wasn’t raiding an official waste disposal site.
By now all three of us were up on the catwalks and closing in from all sides. Now when you put any crook’s ass against the wall, you find out just how crazy they can go. And now you have three lawmen putting the squeeze on a hound with a rifle 20-something feet up in the air. We just kept making our steps and waited for the big blow-up. Whatever it was, whatever crazy gunslinger way this fella wanted to go out, we were ready.
He draws the rifle, sweeps for me, and down that finger goes on the trigger.
And nothing comes out the rifle’s end.
Nothing on this Earth will ever compare to the “oh shit” face we wiped off that bastard’s muzzle as we turned him into Swiss cheese and sent him tumbling down over the rail. He hit some machinery on the way down with a helluva crunch, and that was when we knew we had licked the whole gang. The junk was destroyed, the thugs properly punished, all’s well that end’s well.
And then it gets a little bit better.
Because after I get the report fed to the Commish, I get met with the biggest shit-eating grin I’ve ever seen on Rory Armstrong’s white muzzle. “Check out what the dude landed on.”
I saunter over and to my surprise, it’s a whole-ass record press. Like a proper stamper. Obviously there’s a big chunk of the process missing–no way to cut a lathe, no vinyl to be found–but by gum, there it was.
Now when I phoned back to Brett about this little development, that brave came up with the best damn news I’d heard all day.
“I think I found a guy.”
While we were out running assholes off the road and blowing limbs off, Brett had managed to hook up with this clever cat named Ray Boone. Dark gray wolf, about my size, dressed like an average Joe. Nothing special, just T-shirts, jeans, and sneaks. He’d been collecting vintage record-making gear from lathes to plating baths to all sorts of parts of the process. And lo and behold, guess who was looking for a proper press?
Without a second to lose, the three of us rip the damn thing right out the floor, load it up into the bed of my Hilux and we go hightailing back to Doc’s to meet this fella. Of course we look like we just came back from the front lines of the war, but he was a good egg about the day job. He liked the look of our find and when we explained what we wanted to do, Boone was game.
“Shit, would be fun if the first record I cut was a metal one,” he grinned as we all started shaking his hand furiously. It was a bit funny having this mild-mannered fellow surrounded by all us loud, raucous bandmates (and handing him a slightly bloodstained record press as a welcome present), but we started appreciating that downtempo energy more and more as we kept trudging through the Hell Patrol work.
It took the poor guy a month or two to get everything up and running, and every day he’d say something like “thank God for the bottomless PVC the synth-station can make for me” due to test issues, but in the end, he got us our record. This fine little one-of-a-kind album on a one-of-a-kind format. And all it took was a badass with the know-how like Mister Boone (who you can still get with for all your record-pressing needs), and maybe the body of a well-placed thug in a convenient warehouse.
At least we took care of that bit for ya.