The Dick Poythress Co-op

"Play 'til You're Gay"

Musicians

Upcoming shows

None scheduled

Genre: Jam

Sound description: Part jazz fusion, part atmospheric rock, and part noisy jam band, this group of Goleta-dwelling cohorts refuse to take themselves too seriously. The proof: the oddly explicit “Play ’Til You’re Gay.” —The Indy

Web site: http://www.myspace.com/thedickpoythresscoop

Contact this band via E-mail

History

Our seven paths crossed in October of 2005 on a Ukrainian puppy freighter sailing the disquieted waters of the Black sea. The water was like an old man that autumn, asthmatically wheezing, and the wind on the sea was an ax wielded by a centaur who guarded the Straits of Bosporus from metro sexual robots who experimented with other male robots in college. Revolution hung in the air like an nun on a meat hook, silent and seemly dormant…but waiting.
I was put in the brig one day, for exposing myself to a deaf Armenian Christian missionary. It was then that I met Dick Poythress. It was as though God had come down and violently smothered me with a pillow, all the while telling me “It’s okay. Everything‘s okay.” He was the embodiment of respect and fear; nothing about Him was safe or flaccid. When I first saw Him, He was naked and crafting a clown out of cold iron. I believe that if He had wanted to, He could have made it live, and then just as easily chained it to a toilet and let it die. His body was a beacon in that damp dark belly of the ship. His chest was like a Barracuda, and His nipples could cut diamonds.
Seeing His triumphant form permeate the shadows stripped the blinders from my heart and moved me to tears. And when he spoke, he lit my soul afire. He said, “I am the executor of your fate. I am the ender of days.”
Through my tears I replied, “I know.”
He stripped me naked and guided me through a dark and winding passage. In that corridor, I began to wonder if I was really meandering through a ship or if I was really inside of Dick’s labyrinthine mind. We came to a cabin at the end of the hall, and Dick led me inside. It was there that the seven of us came together for the first time, naked and wet with the amniotic fluid from the womb of Dick Poythress’s soul.
Inside that rusted dreary birth, Dick laid out his plan for us all.
“You will create a band in my image”, he said. None of us could defy him, for his day job was fighting God. We submitted and then Dick marked our acceptance of his bondage by lifting his head and emitting one pure tone from his gaping maw. As the sound resonated with the room, the walls began to tremble. He stopped but the ship kept creaking. “Come with me”, He said. “The ship is going to sink.”
We doubled back through the passage and emerged back at the brig. There Dick halted, and then walked into a cell, closing and locking the door behind him. The seven of us were struck with horror and confusion. As we stood there Dick gave us one last singularity of wisdom. ”I am not what is called a civilized man. I have done with society the way I think is right. Therefore I do not obey its laws”, He said. That was all He said. That was all he needed to say. With that we left him to become one with the essence of the Black Sea.
His loss was almost too much to bear. But we could never dishonor his sacrifice. He was the ether in which human consciousness resides. He was a man with a shining barracuda chest, He was a man whose father defeated robots for a living, but most importantly, He was a man.
Or was He?
We all jumped ship and submitted our naked bodies to the storm. We were thrashed with the fury of a thousand robots, my consciousness was flayed, and my innards served to be feasted upon by carnivorous shame and chaos. Before I sunk into the overwhelming fear which permeates my sleep, I looked up and cursed the sky. The sky didn’t care. Robots feel no emotions aside from envy and selfishness.
When I awoke the seven of us were all in a daze on a Bulgarian beach. Memories of the previous night flooded my mind littering it with dolphin corpses of regret. I thought about the sacrifice Dick had made and I broke down in tears. As I wallowed naked in the arms of people I’d barely met, I knew we had to honor Dicks plan.
We roamed the Bulgarian country side naked, cold and alone. We had only three bibles between us to use for food and warmth. Without Dick we were lost in the ether waiting for a bookmobile that would never come; and even if it did it would be filled with books filled with dispassionate robot pornography. On the 4th day though we came to a cottage on the great plain. It was the home of a knight by the name of Mike Uhl. His long golden hair flowed like salvation, but his chest was wrought with danger and sin. It reminded me of Dick‘s chest, and brought tears to my eyes. When we came to his door in desperation, he said nothing and motioned for us to enter. In the cottage were life-size wax figures of each of us sitting at the table and being devoured by cats.
“We started without you,” He said. His vocal cords sounded like they were made from silk and iron, and his countenance was wrought with complex inner workings and subtle rage. His pain was beautiful; he was the post-office in angel form.
We all walked in and Mike handed each of us a two leaf clover, then he told me to move. I did and then he took my place in front of the window. We had so many questions, but all of them went unanswered because soon after he took his place by the window, a flaming arrow crashed through the glass and struck him in the heart. As we were removing his pants from his body, we found seven plane tickets in his pocket along with a Henry Clay action figure. To this day, none of us have any answers as to who Mike Uhl was or how he knew that I was sexually aroused by the concept of the Missouri compromise, but often times I believe that he was on the leading edge of human thought. He didn’t need to stand on the shoulders of giants to see greater horizons. Mike had a jetpack.
When we left the burning cottage we stood silently for a long time looking at each other, each of us with a plane ticket to freedom in hand. It may have been the extreme emotional fraying of the past few days, or maybe we were just afraid, but there on the Bulgarian grasslands we began to wrestle. We wrestled for days and nights on end, only stopping to defecate where we sat, and to howl in anguish at the heavens. We weren’t man enough to poop standing up. None of us were Dick. It was the most real experience of my life. It was something which robots will never understand.
In our ruthless upheaval of anger and animal sexuality, we all realized that it was okay to feel. It was okay to make love to the night and never return the day’s calls. As we laid there, soaked in the oppressive oil of regret and helplessness, we looked at the sky and saw a rainbow in the distance. Something inside me stirred and I began to cry; the others cried too. I cried loud to let them know it was okay, but they all chose to cry silently and/or laugh.
What I and presumably all the others realized was that it’s never to late to lasso a rainbow, put it in a jar, and feed it Vicodin through little tubes. We need to harvest every organ of our rainbow, because before you know it, you’ll be too old to shoot the robots who aim to steal those organs for themselves.
After a long while of watching the rainbow and aggressively sobbing, I managed to croak through my tears, “That rainbow’s a fucking asshole.”
Everyone silently agree. Someone asked if I was crying, probably to make sure that he wasn’t the only one.
That night we burned our tickets and devoted ourselves to Dick, and accepted Him as the executor of our fates. That night we vowed to forever be The Dick Poythress Coop.
We’ve been playing in IV for a couple of years now. A couple of the venues we play at regularly are 6648 Sabado Tarde and 6693 Del Playa Dr.

Formed

Isla Vista, CA

Influences

Our greatest musical inspirations, Dick Poythress and Jackson Pollock, aren’t even musicians. That’s because we don’t base our music off of the sounds of other bands, we base it off of images and feelings, regardless of the art form. We like to think of our music as being beyond post-modern. Post-modernism is all about tearing down concepts; our band is about building them back up. A lot of people call our music Dadaist, but they’re wrong because our music has a structure and a purpose beyond the destruction of order. We’re not opposed to putting labels on our music. We typically describe ourselves as a world jam fusion-core band, but we also dabble in psychodelatronic scream-core. Basically we don’t put any boundaries on where our music can take us. We think it’s better that way because we’re working with raw unrefined emotion all day. In that sense we’re kind of an unrefined emotion-core band, but it’s hard to tell if we’ve been playing together long enough to be put solidly in that category.

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