NICK’S RECOLLECTIONS ***THIS IS NOT FINISHED!!!***
It was early summer 1981. The band had split apart in Vegas at the first of the year when I moved to San Diego; I was unaware that Mike and Chris had decided to move to Orange County a couple months later. My circumstances in San Diego ended up changing, I was thinking about what I would do next when Mike called and invited me up to Orange County. When M.I.A. began in Vegas, Mike was the bass player and Todd Sampson was singing. Todd had a great Johnny Rotten vibe at the time, pretty much nailing it in every way. But Todd was just 16 and couldn’t leave Vegas. We tried finding another vocalist in OC, but no luck. Mike said he would be the singer, so I called another Vegas friend who was a killer bass player, Paul, and he agreed to come out to California to be in a no-name punk band. Hahaha! Anyway, though it seems like we moved there as a calculated “career move” — whatever that means in a nascent punk scene where gig pay was very low, record deals were shit, and where I often had no place to live — it really happened organically, as a result of circumstances.
Myself (Nick, guitar), Paul (bass) and Chris (drums), and one other roommate lived together in a small two bedroom place, an apartment over a garage about 5 houses from the beach. We started practicing with Mike on vocals in our apartment — how the hell did we get away with that? We had songs we brought from our short time as a band in Vegas, but we wrote new ones too (New Left, Angry Youth, Fucking Zones, All the President’s Skin, Cold Sweat). We played a couple parties and some shows at the Cuckoo’s Nest which was not even 10 minutes away. Mike actually got a job running sound at the Nest — he wasn’t qualified in any way, just talked his way in, which was a gift he had. And so we WENT to a lot of shows there: Circle Jerks, TSOL, Adolescents, Black Flag, Fear, plus a ton of other well known and up-and-coming bands. It was very formative. For me it was like punk rock guitar school, influencing my playing style and tone, and hearing it all up close gave you the experience of energy unique to those bands at that time. It was fucking great music delivered with insane energy.
It was hard, being out-of-towners, kind of crashing the OC scene. Like, who are these dorks? We for sure didn’t have the OC beach vibe, at least not at first, maybe never for me anyway. Those early days were rough. Mike got punched in the face on stage, we were spat upon, heckled…. probably deserved some of that. I remember our first couple shows at the Nest were on Tuesdays, not big nights, sort of like training wheels for bands in the punk scene (thank you Jerry Roach!). One of those first shows Mike decided to try some advanced Roger Daltry moves swinging the microphone from the cord. Mid song I get smacked in the head by a high speed heavy microphone, I’m not sure how I remained standing and I think I blacked out for a few seconds. Mike would also tell cheesy old-guy jokes on stage, such as the classic, “Met a guy with a wooden leg, the other day his leg caught on fire and he burned to the ground.” Definitely a Vegas thing more than a beach thing.
M.I.A at the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1981
It was cool living and working at the beach though. Pizza shop and record store/headshop were the primary means of employment. We kept going to shows, soaking it in. Soon we decided the next logical step was to get our music played on Rodney on the Rock. Ingenious, right? One Sunday evening we drove to Pasadena during his show and handed him our shitty rehearsal cassette from Vegas at the back door of the KROQ studio. You could actually knock on the door and Rodney would open it — I remember him looking at me and Mike with some caution/suspicion, opening the door just a little bit, glancing up at my tall frame. The studio was small and dark, and Rodney was a smaller dude, seemed a little nervous. I don’t blame him. He was nice. But the fact was, our rehearsal tape was not airworthy and it never got played (parts of this tape, with Todd singing, appear on Lost Boys).
So we decided to up our game. We got a $300 donation from some alternative businessmen and walked into a local recording studio on PCH. The engineer at JEL studio, Bill Trousdale, told us in his experience we might be able to finish one song for $300 recording on eight tracks. Just maybe, he said. So we booked the time, I think it was 4 hours. But our songs were short and fast, and we came into the session rehearsed, pretty much blasting through everything in one take and even spent some time on stuff like hand-claps, piano, and vocal stuff. I think Bill (a rock dude in his 30s who loved the band Boston, so you know his tastes) really took a shine to us, and at the end of the day we walked out of the studio with seven songs mixed of the nine songs we recorded (the final two songs on Last Rites were mixed by Brian at Harlequin). This was a great, raw recording of M.I.A. at the time, and Bill really captured that sound well. This demo became half of the album Last Rites (the other half contributed by Genocide) on Smoke Seven Records and was released July 30, 1982.
M.I.A.’s contribution to the split LP Last Rites for Genocide and M.I.A. was recorded as a demo at JEL Studio in Newport Beach, California, in 1981. Our recording was self-produced, and engineered by Bill Trousdale. The album was released in July 1982 on Smoke Seven Records.
Long out of print, a 40th anniversary edition was released on vinyl in 2022 by Puke N Vomit Records in association with Smoke Seven.
TRACK LISTING (M.I.A. only)
Tell Me Why
Gas Crisis
Cold Sweat
I Hate Hippies
Angry Youth
All the President’s Skin
Fucking Zones
(I Can’t Take It) No More