Gen5Dallas
04 September 2003, 05:36 AM
About 10 years or so ago, there was a very tight punk band that played around Deep Ellum/Exposition called UFOFU. I believe they were the first band to play on the back patio at Bar of Soap.
The frontman was a guy named Turner Scott Van Blarcum. He shaved his head and sported tattoos of dozens of skulls over his ear, behind his ear and running down his neck. He made art and musical instruments from [what I presume were human] bones. There was a blurb in the paper once about how the director of some music video here needed some punkers for visual effect, and he said a call to Turner Van Blarcum produced a couple of vanfuls of vegan punks in under an hour.
At UFOFU shows, between songs, Turner would shout into the microphone that "I'M the guy that punched Kurt Cobain! I ran that little sellout shit out of Dallas after he tried to fck with me!" You couldn't doubt it, because it was reported & pretty widely known throughout Deep Ellum at the time. After Cobain offed himself, I saw some video of the show where it happened (at Deep Ellum Live, I think).
Lately I've been trying to fill out my CD collection with music of the past -- my past, anyway -- and while flipping through the Nirvana bin at Tower last night I saw copies of a Cobain biography for sale in the rack just above. Sure enough, Turner Van Blarcum's name is one of the listings in the index of "Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain", written by Charles R. Cross. The story of Cobain's night in Dallas starts on page 208, and is wilder & more detailed than anything I'd heard before:
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"Despite Nirvana's success, Kurt was not happy on the road, and bitched constantly about the state of their van, the 'rat-hole' clubs, and a new complaint -- the frat boys who were now coming to their shows after seeing the band's video on MTV...
In Dallas, on October 19 [1991], Kurt went into meltdown mode again. The show was doomed from the start because it was oversold and the audience spilled onto the stage. Frustrated, Kurt destroyed a monitor console by whacking his guitar against it. When a few minutes later he dived into the crowd, a bouncer named Turner Van Blarcum attempted to help him back onstage, which Kurt mistakenly read as an aggressive act. He responded by smashing the butt end of his guitar on Van Blarcum's head, drawing blood. It was a blow that might have killed a smaller man, but it only stunned Van Blarcum, who punched Kurt in the head, and kicked him as the singer fled. The audience began to riot. Kurt hid upstairs in a closet until promoter Jeff Liles finally convinced him Van Blarcum had gone to the hospital and could do him no harm. 'I know he had drunk a ton of cough syrup that night,' Liles explained. Kurt finally reappeared and finished the set.
But the action was far from over. After the show, Liles managed to get the band into a waiting cab, which sped off only to come right back: No one in the band knew what hotel they were in. Just as the cab returned, so did Van Blarcum -- complete with a bloody bandage on his head. He shattered the taxi windows with his fist as the driver frantically tried to pull away. The cab escaped, but as they pulled off -- with no destination still -- the members of Nirvana sat in in the backseat covered with broken glass."
____________
I read once that performers regard Dallas audiences as pretty tough...
The frontman was a guy named Turner Scott Van Blarcum. He shaved his head and sported tattoos of dozens of skulls over his ear, behind his ear and running down his neck. He made art and musical instruments from [what I presume were human] bones. There was a blurb in the paper once about how the director of some music video here needed some punkers for visual effect, and he said a call to Turner Van Blarcum produced a couple of vanfuls of vegan punks in under an hour.
At UFOFU shows, between songs, Turner would shout into the microphone that "I'M the guy that punched Kurt Cobain! I ran that little sellout shit out of Dallas after he tried to fck with me!" You couldn't doubt it, because it was reported & pretty widely known throughout Deep Ellum at the time. After Cobain offed himself, I saw some video of the show where it happened (at Deep Ellum Live, I think).
Lately I've been trying to fill out my CD collection with music of the past -- my past, anyway -- and while flipping through the Nirvana bin at Tower last night I saw copies of a Cobain biography for sale in the rack just above. Sure enough, Turner Van Blarcum's name is one of the listings in the index of "Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain", written by Charles R. Cross. The story of Cobain's night in Dallas starts on page 208, and is wilder & more detailed than anything I'd heard before:
____________
"Despite Nirvana's success, Kurt was not happy on the road, and bitched constantly about the state of their van, the 'rat-hole' clubs, and a new complaint -- the frat boys who were now coming to their shows after seeing the band's video on MTV...
In Dallas, on October 19 [1991], Kurt went into meltdown mode again. The show was doomed from the start because it was oversold and the audience spilled onto the stage. Frustrated, Kurt destroyed a monitor console by whacking his guitar against it. When a few minutes later he dived into the crowd, a bouncer named Turner Van Blarcum attempted to help him back onstage, which Kurt mistakenly read as an aggressive act. He responded by smashing the butt end of his guitar on Van Blarcum's head, drawing blood. It was a blow that might have killed a smaller man, but it only stunned Van Blarcum, who punched Kurt in the head, and kicked him as the singer fled. The audience began to riot. Kurt hid upstairs in a closet until promoter Jeff Liles finally convinced him Van Blarcum had gone to the hospital and could do him no harm. 'I know he had drunk a ton of cough syrup that night,' Liles explained. Kurt finally reappeared and finished the set.
But the action was far from over. After the show, Liles managed to get the band into a waiting cab, which sped off only to come right back: No one in the band knew what hotel they were in. Just as the cab returned, so did Van Blarcum -- complete with a bloody bandage on his head. He shattered the taxi windows with his fist as the driver frantically tried to pull away. The cab escaped, but as they pulled off -- with no destination still -- the members of Nirvana sat in in the backseat covered with broken glass."
____________
I read once that performers regard Dallas audiences as pretty tough...