the name, or the man, john p. strohm may not necessarily ring a bell, but the man, in my world, is legendary. he started off playing drums in punk bands in his hometown of bloomington, in – a town i still want to get to one day, then after moving to boston he played guitar in the much beloved blake babies w/ juliana hatfield. the first time i heard their 89 release earwig was in high school, and while i was still into really horrible metal at the time, i would put it up there dinosaur jr’s bug, nirvana’s bleach, soundgarden’s louder than love and husker du’s warehouse… that started pushing me into the right direction. so to say earwig was influential, is doing it a disservice. after the babies disbanded mr strohm went on to work a bunch of bands including the lemonheads, antenna, velo deluxe and polara just to name a few. he’s also released three really outstanding solo records that i cannot recommend enough. nowadays, he’s a lawyer living in the ‘ham, birmingham, al for those of you outside of the south, and has worked with a lot of big name folks, and of course some lesser named ones too, but lets just say the guy is respected, and rightfully so.
you can check out his records via musical family tree, and i recommend doing so.
wouldnt want to be me off vestavia
graduation day off everyday life
as i stated a few days ago, i was re-kicking back off the “tell me something” feature and mr strohm was generous to take time out of his schedule to grace us with this hilarious piece of nostalgia. thank you, john!
The Butt Club
My kids love to talk about butts. They think butts are funnier than anything else imaginable. Like with most little kids (I think), any mention of the word “butt” by anyone ilicits their hysterical laughter. My six-year-old son, Bennett, figured out how to find the video to Baby’s Got Back on YouTube on my laptop and he watches it whenever I’m not paying attention. He’s particularly amused by the use of the word “juicy” by Sir Mix-A-Lot to describe a butt.
I’m afraid my kids’ butt fixation is mostly my own fault. You see, I often tell them stories at night – stories that I usually make up on the spot. I have some recurring characters and themes, but the most popular stories of all are the ones I remember from my own childhood. They love to hear about all of the little humiliations and indignities I suffered as a kid. Once, grappling for a decent story and in a moment of sleep deprived vulnerability, I told them the story of The Butt Club.
The first time I told The Butt Club, I don’t think my youngest, Sophie (now three) was old enough to participate. Bennett must have been four, which means Anna would have been six. Since that time I’m sure I’ve told it at least twenty times, and I’ll probably be asked to tell it at least twenty more times. On long car trips I drag it out, dwelling on the details. I’ve created new characters and scenarios within The Butt Club story that I know are largely fictional. For this first public re-telling, however, I’ll stick to the bare-bones; these facts have been revised after long conversations regarding The Butt Club with my brother and father.
Back in the early 1970s when I was five or six years old my family lived in a house alongside Bryan Park, a delightful square mile of green space on the south side of Bloomington, Indiana, a few blocks from the Indiana Universtiy campus. Many families with young kids lived along our street, Manor Road, which lined the east side of the park. On summer days we played along the connected row of backyards all day with little if any adult supervision. We rode our bikes on the sidewalks, played touch football in the median that separated our yards from the park proper, and spent long days at the olympic-sized pool across the street. It was pretty much idyllic.
My brother Jake, less than two years my senior, had two best friends, Peter and Danny. Danny was the leader, and he lived about a half-mile up Southdowns, away from the park. I guess his mom dropped him off in the morning and picked him up every late afternoon. Peter lived next door. Early one summer some friends of my parents left town and offered to give us this odd little plywood play house that had a flat roof and was painted pale orange. My dad plopped it in the middle of the back yard without much thought. Jake and his friends immediately claimed it as their exclusive clubhouse. The first thing they did was to post a large “keep out” sign by the rectangular cut-out that functioned as the doorway.
A few days after the house arrived, someone wrote “Butt Club” in charcoal above the doorway. I peeked inside and saw that Jake and his friends had illustrated the walls with several large images of disembodied rear ends dropping turds into mid-air. One illustration showed an arial view of a toilet full of turds.
The Butt Club remained an intriguing mystery at the time; however, my brother has since explained their singular mission. A small creek ran from the end of our yard to a larger perpendicular creek that ran to parts unknown (presumed at the time to eventually lead to the ocean thousands of miles away). They hoped to foul the world’s water supply from our backyard creek by dumping dirt into the water and, I assume, by frequently shitting and pissing in the creek. All plans were laid and operations hatched from the headquarters of the Butt Club. The term “Butt Club” referred at once to the union of individuals and to the structure they occupied.
Dave, a kid from my brother’s class who live a few blocks towards the Indiana University campus, wanted badly to be accepted as a member of the Butt Club. Thus began a long initiation process, supposedly for any prospective new member of the club, but designed as a work-in-progress specifically for Dave’s prolonged and very public huniliation. Of course, during his initiation and with his formal membership pending, the boys also put Dave right to work on the water pollution project.
According to Jake, Dave’s initiation rites included running the length of the park with his pants bunched at his ankles, mooning six cars in a row traveling north on Woodlawn Avenue, knocking on doors of several Manor Road houses dressed only in his white underpants, and, if memory serves, drining an entire jar of pickle water. His membership was never made official, and no other member or hopeful ever had to suffer these initiation rites.
The end of the Butt Club came suddenly and definitively towards the end of the summer. I was playing in the back yard with my friend Amy, as I often did in those days. We were playing in and around the Butt Club house, which was of course strictly forbidden, though Jake wasn’t around to enforce the rules. Amy asked me what the Butt Club was all about and I told her I didn’t really know. Apparently she reached her own conclusions.
Later that afternoon, after Amy’s mother picked her up, my brother and I sat watching our favorite show, Cowboy Bob, on our little black and white set. We suddenly heard a commotion as my father came storming into the kitchen from the screen door. He was red in the face and scowling. “Goddamnit, there’s a human turd in the Butt Club!” Being unfamiliar with the word, my mind flashed on a person in a turtle costume. That image was quickly displaced as my father entered the room. “I want to know who took a shit in the Butt Club!”
We ran outside and, sure enough, there was a fresh turd about the size of a man’s shoe right in the middle of the Butt Club’s floor. Jake’s horror was so apparent and visceral that all suspicion fell to me. “John, were you and Amy playing in the Butt Club?” “Yes,” I said. “And what were you doing in here?” “Just playing,” I said. “I didn’t do it; I think maybe Amy did it. She was in there by herself.” Jake let out a loud groan. My dad just shook his head and went inside for a shovel and garbage bag to clean it up.
For at least a year after that no kid set foot inside the Butt Club. Word got around the neighborhood quickly. “Don’t go in there,” they’d whisper. “A girl shit in there.” After that day it always seemed to give off a weird smell. It just sat there in the yard, orange paint peeling, looking forlorn next to the tether ball pole. Eventually we adopted a dog named Augie from the pound and the Butt Club became Augie’s house. Eventually we built a pen around the structure. Ten years after the Butt Club disbanded my mother, then divorced, sold the house to move in with her new husband. On the day we moved the Butt Club still stood in the yard, and if you looked closely at the inside walls you could still see the fading illustrations.
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saw him with Lemonheads…sa-weet