Takin' A Ride

On my first trip to Australia in 2024, I was at the River Rocks Festival and saw Rafa, the singer of Los Chicos, walking around out of his stage clothes. I was wearing a Replacements t-shirt and he was wearing a Poison Idea t-shirt. You don’t really see either of those shirts too often in the wild. So naturally we started talking. I asked him if he had read “Trouble Boys”, the excellent book about the Replacements. He said yes and asked me if I had read Jerry A’s books from Poison Idea and told me they were amazing. I had no idea they even existed. Turns out there’s 3 of them, each covering a different part of his life, and they total almost 600 pages! Naturally, I had to get them.

These books are an easy read. He writes really well and what he has to say and the stories he tells and how he tells them, are really interesting. I read all three books in a week, because I just couldn’t put them down.

They’re also a hard read. He starts off writing Book 1 saying that this was originally supposed to be his suicide note, but things got better. But before it gets better, it gets worse. A whole lot worse. It covers his childhood, getting into music, his first bands, and starting Poison Idea, and goes up until their first album was released. Usually the early years of any autobiography are boring. Not Jerry’s. His childhood was anything but boring. Brutal is just about the best way I can describe it. But he does make it sound really interesting. He is humble enough to say that “I know other people had it much worse”, and that’s the one thing I have to call BS on. No, HE pretty much had it worse than anyone else I’ve ever heard of. Holy crap! His life is a very rough story right from the beginning. And it gets worse from there.

Book 2 gets more into the Poison Idea years. Which sounds glamourous until you read about all the inner workings and what was going on backstage and behind the scenes. Basically, it was all drinking and drugs. Heavy drinking (as a party trick he could down a fifth of booze in one gulp). Heavy drug use. Heavy heavy HEAVY drug use. If you want to try heroin (or any other drug), you should read this book first, as it will completely turn you off about it and make you realize how dangerous and dumb drugs are.

If there’s a constant theme for these books, it’s fighting. Fighting, and fighting, and more fighting. Pitted against friends and family members at gatherings for entertainment when he was a child, school yard fights, fights against jocks, fights against parents and their mates, fighting for jobs, fighting promoters, fighting people in the audience, fighting for heroin, fighting to get the next fix, fighting against heroin. And finally fighting for normalcy and humanity. He’s had it pretty rough. And rough from a very young age, in a crazy home, with crazy parents and after they split, they each had crazy boyfriends and girlfriends. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I won’t go into detail, but it’s pretty brutal.

There is a secondary theme, and it’s death. The books are just filled with death. From his best friend in childhood (just shocking and heartbreaking in itself), to friends and associates in book 2 (not so shocking regarding all the drugs that were ingested), to his bandmate and best friend later in life, Tom Pig Champion in book 3. There’s even a jaw dropping moment in book 2 regarding a drug dealer that I’m not going to say what I think happened, and he’s a little cryptic in it, probably for good reason.

Considering how deep his story is, there is a tertiary theme. And it’s trying to atone and get some redemption. But he admits he has a lot to atone for. He admits all his wrongdoings throughout all the books and knows he can’t make up for most of it, but that doesn’t mean he’s not going to try. He doesn’t want to be remembered for being an asshole. He says he was an asshole and a dick. Now he says he’s just a dick.

But he’s not making excuses and doesn’t have many regrets. He’s just telling it like it was for him. The 3rd book, the shortest at 150 pages, he talks about the one of the main reasons he wrote these books is because he was at the forefront of the beginning of the punk scene in Oregon and it’s important that people know what it’s like from people who were actually there and not from people who weren’t even born at the time trying to tell everyone else what it was like (which is also a big pet peeve of mine). Actually, that’s the secondary reason he wrote these books. The main reason was they were his suicide note, which he goes into more detail later in the book. But more than that, he’s just confessing and getting everything out. And there’s a lot to get out.

These books are great. Well written, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and sometimes just brutal. But 100% honest. Maybe TOO honest. It’s a rough story. And he says many times that he was holding back! Holding back to protect some people (including himself) and bandmates. Maybe even the reader too! He does leave some stories out (and tells you when he does), because they’re not his story to tell. He will sometimes change the names of people and sometimes doesn’t mention others directly by name. This is because he’s talking about his life, not others. But he’s 100% honest about it all and his story is wild enough as it is. He also says that there are a lot more stories to be told which may come about in future books. If and when this happens, I’m in.

☠️☠️☠️☠️ 1/2