Here was the question, as posed to me on Facebook:
“Bill, do you think prednisone had anything to do with your OCD? You are the second person I know to have Crohn’s and depression, I have taken the drug in the past and it definitely messed with me mentally.”
The short answer is that I don’t know. I’m not a doctor and I can’t speculate on scientific questions I know nothing about. All I have are scientifically unsupported theories based on personal experience. I’m willing to explore the question from that perspective.
Of this I have no doubt:
Prednisone had brutal side effects that linger to this day. It damaged my vision, making glasses necessary at all times. It sparked migraines that still come and go. It gave me mood swings that have never really left me. And it had plenty to do with the binge-eating habit that has hounded me as an adult.
Prednisone does an excellent job of cooling down a Chron’s flare up. If not for the drug, chances are pretty good I wouldn’t be here right now. More than once the disease got so bad the doctor’s were talking about removing my colon and tossing it in the trash. Each time, the medication brought me back from the brink.
But there was a heavy price — literally and figuratively.
The drug quadrupled my appetite, which was already in overdrive because of the food restrictions imposed upon me during times of illness.
It corrupted my relationship with food forever.
But I can’t say it was the cause of me developing OCD. There are many reasons I developed the disorder. Prednisone may have had a role, but I’ll never know for sure.
But that’s fine with me.
At this point, it doesn’t matter how I got it. I have it, and the best I can do is manage it with all my coping tools, with extra help from Prozac and the 12 Steps of Recovery, which I use to control the addictive behaviors.
You’ve heard the sorry old tale of the addict who cleaned up from the addiction that made his life unmanageable, only to pick up three more vices. That’s me. Take the surprise Erin got when opening my work bag.
Mood music:
She was cleaning and found earphones that belonged to me. She unzipped a front compartment in my laptop bag to put them away and had the unpleasant shock of discovering where I’d been hiding all my smoking products.
Everyone knows I like cigars. What people don’t know — and what Erin discovered — is that I’ve been sneaking cigarettes, too. Two packs were hidden in the pocket.
She took it better than I expected. I probably deserved a far harsher reaction. But she knows how addictions make someone like me tick. Instead, she talked me through the things I might be able to do to replace this crutch.
I agreed to stop smoking immediately — the cigarettes and cigars. And you know what? I’m pissed off right now. Not at Erin, but at my lot in life. I can’t seem to do anything in moderation, and so I have to put everything down.
I resent not being able to have vices. It makes me want to put my fist through a wall.
It’s nobody’s fault. It’s simply a problem with how my brain ticks. This is just the latest in a big shift I resolved to take three years ago when my binge eating compulsion brought me to my knees.
When you give up your worst addiction, you go looking for crutches to help you through. In the first year of not binge eating, I used alcohol as a crutch. Then I put that down, too. I picked up cigars, and, more recently, cigarettes.
If you think that’s pathetic, that’s because it is.
As I write this, I’m on day three without my smokes. I’m pretty fucking irritable. Nicotine cravings have nothing to do with it.
Like I said, I resent having to give up all my vices.
Coffee is all that’s left.
If you think I’m giving that up, you’re out of your fucking mind.
My initial reaction to that was irritation. Too fucking bad, I thought. So sorry I allowed Mr. Sunshine to take a sabbatical. How inconvenient for everyone.
After a few minutes of that, I realized I was being a prick.
People simply care about me and they are worried.
Thank you for caring. Sorry for being a prick.
I guess it has been a long, rough road. I’ve been back and forth to the rehab center each week, and it’s an hour from my home and my office. Seeing Dad in the wheelchair, plainly depressed, has had a rub-off depressive effect. I know how hellish the inactivity is for him, because he passed that trait down to me.
Meantime, I’m keeping it full steam ahead with my own work. And it’s taking all I have to keep from sliding back into binging.
Naturally, trying not to binge means I’ve picked up another destructive crutch. I put that crutch down on Friday, and while it’s the right thing to do, I’m resentful as Hell about it. More on that tomorrow.
The bottom line is that I am not a sunny guy right now. But don’t worry. I’ll be fine. This is life, and despite all the toil and trauma, I am a lot better at this shit than I used to be.
In the meantime, thanks for being patient and caring. I do appreciate it.
Yesterday was a big family wedding and it was wonderful. My cousin Andrew married a great gal, and a lot of people who don’t usually get along managed to peacefully co-exist.
Mood music:
I gotta give my mother a lot of credit. Despite all the trouble between us, she gave me and Erin hugs and was very friendly. That couldn’t have been easy. My stepfather kept his distance, but given the tension in the air, who could really blame him?
My Aunt Robin didn’t say more than three words to me, but that’s ok. She hadn’t seen us in a very long time and that has to create some awkwardness. I watched her being a good, nurturing and loving aunt to several cousins, and that made me happy. It was really good talking to my Aunt Dee. The two of them look great. Aunt Robin has such a close resemblance to my late grandmother that I was taken aback at first. It goes to show that the dead live on in others. Also very comforting to see.
One of my cousins was there and it was the first time I had seen her in over 20 years. She’s not on speaking terms with much of the family. She didn’t remember me on sight, but last time we saw each other I was a skinny, long-haired metal head. Now I’m a husky, bald-headed metal head.
Funny how things work out in families.
Ours has been through the meat grinder. There has been a lot of mistrust and misunderstanding along the way. There’s been way too much sickness and death. I’ve gone through the last few years thinking of myself as the black sheep of the family. I still do, but I feel a lot less isolated in that role.
The family seems to be littered with black sheep. I just happen to be one of them.
I don’t think yesterday did anything to change the family dynamics. The people who are not on speaking terms need a lot more than a family wedding to resolve the overwhelming tangle of misfiring wires.
But everyone getting along in the same space showed that despite everything, despite the divisions, everyone still fundamentally loves each other. That’s important, because as one of the refrains in the second reading of the wedding ceremony made plain, you can have everything in the world. But if you don’t have love, you have nothing.
I’ve had a lot of love and blessings in my life in the last few years. I’ve come far in overcoming addictions and mental illness. Even the family discord has served a purpose. Simply put, me and my mother are still too explosive a combination to get along right now. I’d like that to change someday, but I’m not sure if it will.
My Uncle Bobby, the last of the siblings that included my grandmother, took me aside at one point and said life is too short to hate.
He is absolutely right.
But hate has nothing to do with it.
Mistrust, hurt feelings and deep disagreements over right and wrong? Absolutely. But not hate.
I still love everyone, and I forgave my mother a long time ago.
So why, you’re probably wondering, can’t we just let the past lie in its grave and move on? Because relationships are deeply complex things, and it is never that simple or easy.
For now, I’m simply content to see that everyone is doing well. It’s not all peace and harmony. But it’s still family.
–She has two awesome kids, Lilly and Chase. Lilly is a carbon copy of Stacey as a child in both looks and attitude. This amuses the hell out of me. Lilly is also a sweet, loving kid. Chase is a ladies man. One of my favorite lines from his is, “Think about it, willya baby?”
–She loved her Cabbage Patch doll as a kid. Probably a little too much. That’s why I eventually cut the thing’s head off. OK, I shouldn’t have done that. But readers of this blog know by now that I was an angry little bastard.
–I’ve given Stacey plenty of ammo in return with my OCD behavior. The best example is described in the post “Fear and Duct Tape.” Stacey loves that story, and tells it every chance she gets. Of course, there’s always more to a story that you have to wait years to hear. Stacey’s friend Taimee was there the morning of the events described in that post, and says that Stacey was puzzled that her driving lesson was canceled that day. Why, after all, would a driving school cancel classes during an expected hurricane?
–She has stuck by her mother through thick and thin, when idiots like me were too busy with other things.
–She is arguably the smartest among us kids when it comes to money and business-sense.
–She is a brand-new Marblehead resident.
–She is awesome and her step-brother loves her, despite all the childhood fighting.
Actually, I don’t regret the childhood fighting. We have some fun stories to tell today because of it.
Former Warrant singer Jani Lane was found dead last night in a Comfort Inn in L.A. at age 47. It’s unclear at this point what the cause is, but his death is making me re-think a few things about my attitude.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/cSdvxocgbAg
I remember when Warrant came out in the late 1980s. I couldn’t stand them. Sure, they sounded good. Crunchy guitar sound. Good vocals. But it all sounded so fake. I thought “Cherry Pie” was the dumbest song I’d ever heard. Again, the sound was good. But the lyrics were stupid and the feel wasn’t real to me. Admittedly, though, I liked “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and hated the fact that I liked it.
The band also came out at a point in the late 80s when every band was starting to sound and look alike. I decided I was too cool for it all.
I did what a lot of other metal heads did in the early 90s when the metal scene imploded under the weight of all the copycats: I started listening to so-called grunge: Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains. My own band, Skeptic Slang, sounded a lot like the grunge we were listening to, with hints of old-school metal here and there.
I still listen to all those bands, but in recent years I’ve returned to my 80s hard rock roots. Warrant has not been part of my playlist.
I’ve seen interviews with Jani Lane over the years where he lamented writing “Cherry Pie” and took a crack at reality TV. He looked and sounded like a troubled man in those clips, and he did indeed wrestle some demons. He was recently sentenced to serve 120 days in jail after pleading no contest to a 2010 DUI charge — his second in two years.
As for his death, no one really knows what happened. We can speculate, but I won’t. I’ll just wait for the follow-up news reports.
Instead, I’m examining my own reaction to his death and what it says about me and human nature in general.
When I first saw the news an hour ago, I felt bad. I went on Youtube and started playing Warrant songs. I was thinking that they sounded much better with age, then I had a “what the fuck?” moment.
Here I am, thinking these songs sound pretty good. And I’m sneering at all the nasty comments people make about being glad he’s dead. Then I catch myself, because in my self-righteous anger I quickly remember that I used to say things about how bands like this sucked and needed to be destroyed. I’m pretty sure I’ve joked from time to time about how it would be nice for bands like this to go down in a flaming plane wreck.
That’s not nice. It’s certainly not a good fit with my Christian beliefs. But there it is.
It’s funny how we get when musicians and celebrities we don’t think much of die. I found it amusing that people were tearing Michael Jackson down in the last decade of his life because of his alleged pedophilia, yet, when he died, everyone magically forgot that stuff and acted as if Jesus Himself had been crucified again.
When Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx opined about Jackson being a “child rapist” and I wrote about it, the comments section of this blog descended into all kinds of name calling. Most of it came from people who love Michael Jackson’s music.
More then one person noted that Jackson was never found guilty of such things. When he was still alive, people were not defending him so ardently.
We do this stuff a lot when famous, tarnished figures die. We play up the good stuff they did and conveniently forget the bad stuff. Or, at least, we minimize the latter as some unfortunate little interlude between the acts of greatness. Richard Nixon comes to mind.
And now we’re remembering the good stuff Jani Lane contributed to the world in his 47 years.
You know what? That’s how it should be.
Everyone deserves a shot at redemption, and making music I personally didn’t care for doesn’t mean there was something wrong with Jani Lane. He wrote the music he wanted to write. It spoke to him, and it spoke to others, even if I wasn’t one of them.
The band’s success in the late 80s and early 90s happened because the music made a lot of kids happy, just as Motley Crue’s “Shout At The Devil” and Def Leppard’s “Pyromania” gave me moments of happiness during a troubled youth.
We all have our tastes and opinions. We all tend to think our opinions are better than everyone else’s.
That’s part of the human condition. We don’t just do it to celebrities. We do it to everyone. We are judgmental savages sometimes.
Rest in Peace, Jani Lane. I apologize for any of the bad stuff I said about you over the years.
I’m in my therapist’s office, going over the things he routinely asks about to make sure I’m playing with a full deck. He asks if I’ve talked to mom recently. No, I tell him. But, I expect to see her this weekend — the first time in two years.
Mood music:
He asks if I’m nervous about it. To my surprise as well as his, I tell him I’m not — and I actually mean it.
I won’t repeat all the background of what happened between my mother and me. You can get the back story by reading an earlier post called “The Mommy Problem.”
Let’s just focus on the present…
The last time I saw her was the summer of 2009. I met with her for lunch and told her all about my treatment for OCD and how I was in a 12-Step Program for the binge eating disorder. She seemed to get where I was coming from. I was certain this was the start of the healing.
Then she sent an e-mail a week later asking when she was going to see her grandchildren. I told her Erin needed more time but I was ready to sit down with Bob on my own. I expected he’d sit there and call me every name in the book and tell me how much I had hurt the family, and I was ready to just sit there and take it. He was entitled to that.
But they were having none of that.
My mother sent another e-mail suggesting I was whipped and controlled by my wife, and that I was the laughingstock of the family as a result. Back to square one.
That was in August 2009. We haven’t spoken since.
So why am I calm about the expected Saturday encounter? I guess it’s because I feel comfortable in my own skin and I feel like I’ve done a lot of hard soul searching in the five years since our combined mental illnesses imploded the relationship and took a few people with it.
I’ve taken it to the confession booth at church too many times to count. I tell the priests I wrestle with the whole “Honor thy mother and father” commandment. I’m always told that honor thy mother and father doesn’t mean sit there as you’re repeatedly run over by a tank.
I did make a big effort at reconciliation two years ago. I even connected with her on Facebook, for heaven’s sake. When I realized my efforts were going to fail, I de-friended and then blocked her from my profile.
Looking at the whole sorry affair, I still think she did the best she could with the tools she had. The problem is that she’s really lacking in the tool department, mainly because in her mind she has no problem. She’s a victim. Pure and simple.
We often look at abusive relationships in black and white. There’s the abuser and the victim. But it’s never that simple.
I forgave my mother a long time ago for the darker events of my childhood. I doubt I would have done much better in her shoes. Her marriage to my father was probably doomed from the start, and the break-up was full of rancor. My brother and I were sick a lot, and one of us didn’t make it.
I didn’t fully appreciate what a body blow that was until I became a parent. After Michael died, she became a suffocating force in my life. I did the same to my own kids until I started dealing with the OCD.
I hold nothing against her. There’s a lot I can get into about this, but the reality is that this relationship is a casualty of mental illness and addiction. This one can’t be repaired so easily, because much of my OCD and addictive behavior comes directly from her.
For the sake of my immediate family, recovery has to come first.
Without it, I fail EVERYONE.
Right now, I don’t see how saying much to her will be helpful in that regard.
I’ll be nice. I certainly won’t be mean.
And despite what has happened in recent years, I expect her to behave the same way.
After all, the day will not be about us. It’ll be about my cousin and the awesome gal he’s marrying.
I’ve always been fiercely protective of my children. Part of it is that fear of loss. I’m like Marlin the clown fish in “Finding Nemo.” Like Marlin, I’m starting to realize I need to let the kids have some adventures.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/E5H8DwJI0uA
Any good parent is going to be over-protective to a point, and that’s how it should be. God gave us these kids to nurture, and we have to make sure they make it to adulthood and beyond.
But we’re also supposed to teach them how to survive adversity. For all my talk in this blog, I haven’t always done that part very well.
Some of it is my own background. Having watched my parents divorce, a brother die and a best friend commit suicide, I’ve had an overwhelming urge to shield Sean and Duncan from danger at all costs. That kind of compulsion is tailor-made for someone with OCD, because we drive ourselves mad trying to control all the things we are absolutely powerless to control.
I’ve gone crazy over all the usual things. I see a mosquito bite or two on their legs and I go into a fit of lunacy because mosquitoes can carry dangerous diseases. Letting them out of my sight would fill me with dread.
But I also remember something else from childhood: After my brother died, my mother, who was already overbearing, became absolutely suffocating. I think she wanted me to stay in whatever room she was in straight on through adulthood.
Naturally, I rebelled.
Thank God I did, because without taking some chances in life and breaking free of your protective sphere, you amount to nothing.
I can’t put my kids through the same thing, no matter how much I worry about them.
Learning to better control my OCD had been helpful. When I learned to break free of the fear and anxiety, I stopped going crazy over the little things.
This summer I’ve suddenly realized how far I’ve come.
Sean and Duncan have a couple new friends from the neighborhood. One boy’s family runs the farmland all around us and is accustomed to exploring all the woodland trails. Sean and Duncan now run off with their new friends, hanging out in a secret fort they built in the woods and digging holes in the mud by the culverts.
A funny thing has happened here. I find myself kicking the kids out of the house on sunny days, telling them to go explore and enjoy the outdoors.
A couple years ago, the prospect would have terrified me. Now it feels natural.
This doesn’t mean I no longer worry about my kids being in danger. I worry about it all the time. I don’t think that’s the OCD. I think it’s the normal reaction from a parent who adores his children.
But now, when I get uncomfortable about it all, I remember a scene from the movie I mentioned at the beginning of this post: Marlin and Dory are inside a whale, and Marlin laments that he failed to keep a promise to his son. The exchange went something like this:
Marlin: “I promised I’d never let anything bad happen to him.”
Dory: “That’s a funny thing to promise. If nothing ever happens to him, then nothing will ever happen to him. Not much fun for little Harpo.”
Kids need adventure. They even need to experience adversity. That’s how they learn to be good, strong adults.
Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over (insert addiction) — that our lives had become unmanageable.
Mood music:
I am powerless. Or, you could say, my addictions have absolute power over me. Even when sober and abstinent, they are right behind me, doing push-ups, waiting for my one reckless moment of weakness.
Now that I know this, life is a lot better. I can do what I must to be well and I’m a lot happier and healthier for it.
The problem with addicts is that we’re experts in the art of denial. It takes many years of damage before we are ready to even consider that we have absolutely no control over our lives.
When we really hit bottom and spend some time there, things become so desperate that we become willing to admit how weak we are. How pathetically powerless we are. When that happens, we arrive at the first of the 12 Steps of Recovery. Simply put, admitting there’s a problem is the first step in dealing with the problem.
My most destructive addiction involves binge eating. That is followed by other addictions: to alcohol, tobacco, caffeine and, to a lesser extent, pills.
I’ve often lamented that mine is the most uncool of addictions. We need food to survive, after all. This is certainly not what most of society would accept as a “normal” addiction.
Still, it makes perfect sense that food would be my problem.
As a kid sick with Chron’s Disease, I was often in the hospital for weeks at a time with a feeding tube that was inserted through the left side of my chest. That’s how I got nourishment. I wasn’t allowed to eat or drink anything. At a very early age, my relationship with food was doomed to dysfunction.
It didn’t help that I was from a family of over-eaters who would stuff themselves for comfort in times of stress and fatigue.
In our society it’s considered perfectly OK to indulge in the food. Time and again, I’ve heard it said that overeating is a lot better than drinking or drugging. But for me, back when I was at my worst, binge eating was a secret, sinister and shameful activity.
Here’s how it works:
You get up in the morning and swear to God that you’re going to eat like a normal person. You pack some healthy food for the office. Then you get in the car and the trouble starts before the car’s out of the driveway. Another personality emerges from the back of the brain, urging you to indulge. It starts as a whisper but builds until it vibrates through the skull like a power saw.
The food calls out to you. And you’ll do whatever it takes to get it, then spend a lot of time trying to cover your tracks.
Before you know it, you’re in the DD drive-thru ordering two boxes of everything. It all gets eaten by the time you reach the office. You get to the desk disgusted, vowing to never do that again. But by mid-morning, the food is calling again. You sneak out before lunchtime and gorge on whatever else you can find, then you do it again on the way home from work.
You pull into McDonald’s and order about $30 of food, enough to feed four people. From the privacy of the car, the bags are emptied. By the time you get home, you wish you were dead.
The cycle repeats for days at a time, sometimes weeks and months.
For many years I hid it well, especially in my early 20s. I would binge for a week, then starve and work out for another week. That mostly kept the weight at a normal-looking level.
Call it athletic Bulimia.
In one inspired episode, I downed $30 of fast food a day for two weeks, then went a week eating nothing but Raisin Bran in the morning, then nothing but black coffee for the rest of the day. After the cereal, I’d work out for two hours straight.
In my mid-20s, once I started working for a living, I kept up the eating but couldn’t do the other things anymore. So my weight rose to 280. In the late 1990s I managed to drop 100 pounds and keep it off through periodic fasting.
Then I started to face down what would eventually be diagnosed as OCD, and I once again gave in to the food. The gloves were off.
The binging continued unabated for three years. The weight went back up to 260. I also started to run out of clever ways to mask over all the money I was spending on my habit. I was slick. I’d take $60 from the checking account and tell my wife it was for an office expense or some other seemingly legitimate thing. But she’s too smart to fall for that for long.
One I admitted I was without power over all this insanity, I was ready to do something about it.
That’s when I discovered Over-eaters Anonymous (OA), a 12-step program just like AA, where the focus is on food instead of booze. I didn’t grasp it immediately. In fact, I thought everyone at these meetings were nuts. They were, of course, but so was I.
Thing is, I had reached a point in my learning to manage OCD where I was ready to face down the addiction. If it had to be through something crazy, so be it.
Through the program, I gave up flour and sugar. The plan is to be done with those ingredients for life. Put them together and they are essentially my cocaine. I dropped 65 pounds on the spot. But more importantly, many of the ailments I had went away. I stopped waking up in the middle of the night choking on stomach acid. The migraines lessened substantially. And I found a mental clarity I never knew before.
I can’t say I’ve slaughtered the demon. Addicts relapse all the time. But I have a program I didn’t have before; a road map unlike any other.
My odds of success are better than ever.
But before I could get there, I had to unravel the wiring in my head, learn to live with a mental disorder and then make a bold change in my way of eating.
It’s not cool at all. If you’re laughing because I let the food drag me to such a state, I don’t blame you. In a way, it is funny. Crazy people do stupid things. And stupid is often funny.
Hard to believe, but it’s been a year since the death of Joe “Zippo” Kelley. I listened to Zippo Raid’s “Punk Is In Season” disc on the way home from work and smiled the whole time. In the year since he died, Joe has had a big impact on my own life.
Here’s the second track on that CD, one of my favorites:
http://youtu.be/nnyVCQrFN7Q
I’ve gotten to know his awesome parents, Joe and Marie, and a lot of other people from other local bands. I’m richer for that. It would have been a million times better if I was making these new friends with Joe still around, but there’s no use in trying to figure out God’s master plan.
We fell out of touch after college because I let my demons turn me into a recluse for a long time. What’s done is done.
There’s a great lesson for all of us, though, one that has gotten clear as the months have gone by. The soul of a person who lives to the full and impacts so many people for the better never really dies.
His presence has been at every local rock show I’ve been to, most notably the two benefit shows in his honor last October and this past January. He’s very much with us whenever we listen to his music.
Another favorite off the “Punk Is In Season” disc is about Greg Walsh, drummer of Zippo Raid, Pop Gun and other acts. I’ve known Greg for almost as long as I knew Joe. We worked together when I was in my first reporting gig in Swampscott and Marblehead, Mass. The first time I heard the opening lines I laughed till I hurt:
Greg couldn’t make it to the fuckin’ show
It was rainin’ wasn’t even fuckin’ snow
What else can we say
Greg is a fuckin’ pu-sey!
Greg knew how well that lyric nailed him, and during the chorus you can hear him gleefully chanting: “Oye! Oye! Oye!”
That’s the Joe I remembered. He could poke fun at you and make you feel like one of his best buddies in the same breath. In fact, if he needled you, you knew he liked you.
When you hung out with him, you always knew you were in the presence of someone with a heart of gold.
That’s how it was at Salem State, when we’d stand outside the then-commuter cafe smoking cigarettes and talking about Nirvana. He could take to people effortlessly, even a guy like me who often had trouble knowing how to act in front of people.
It’s been said that when you went to a Zippo Raid show, everyone who showed up was in the band. That’s just another telling example of how welcoming a presence he was.
Right before the January benefit show, I ran a post where Joe’s friends shared memories of their time with him. On this one-year anniversary of his passing, it seems very fitting that I re-run those narratives. So read on. Peace be with you all.
–Bill
Greg Walsh, drummer for Pop Gun and Zippo Raid, who once worked with the author in a dingy little weekly newspaper office in Marblehead:
“When Zippo Raid first started out I was studying a lot of the drummers we played with because I really needed to get up to speed – so to speak – with punk rock drumming. I was seeing what worked and didn’t work – and what I noticed was a lot of bands did breakdowns where they’d be playing fast and then suddenly cut the tempo in half – it was like pushing moshers off a cliff and they gladly went along for the ride.
“So I begged Joe to find some spots in our songs for breakdowns, but anything we tried sounded forced and honestly kind of trite, and we took pride in not doing punk rock “by the numbers.”
“Then one day Joe came to rehearsal and said he wrote a song with breakdowns in it – called “Work.” But we always referred to it as “The Breakdown Song.”
“I have a recording of that rehearsal where he says he wrote that song for me. Probably just to shut me up, but the sentiment was still there.”
“Joe Kelley, when I first met him, was a DJ at WMWM Salem State College Radio 91.7 FM when Pop Gun was in it’s hey day. Well, if we ever had one.
“Anyhow, we used to goof around and play a version of Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever” for kicks (a song which we all secretly like but didn’t actually fit our musical motif). Se we decide to play it live in the studio at WMWM when we’re in there one day, and Joe, with his terrific sense of humor, decides to get revenge on us for playing it on his show. So we play about 10 Pop Gun songs and then, for a less than Grand Finale, we break into Cat Scratch. Joe is miffed, amused, but quickly acts. At the end of our show he tees up the actual Ted Nugent live recording of Cat Scratch complete with stadium crowd noise which he blares into the studio as we finish our tune.
“We were totally confused, but eventually got the joke. Joe was sitting in the booth very pleased with himself. The guy had a great sense of humor, like I said.
“I miss that most about him.”
Stu Ginsburg, owner, Platorum Entertainment, one of the planners for this Saturday’s benefit show:
“His first appearance on WMWM was when he came back to school and found the radio station during my show. He rang the buzzer and asked me if I was f—ing his girlfriend, then he thought it was cool anad came back wth me a few times and became a DJ and so on.
“Prior to WMWM, he and his girlfriend were going to many Grateful Dead shows and other hippy events. Joe never played gutair at that time, but WMWM changed him into Joe Zippo. He was a rightous dude. I miss him.”
