When I was 19 and going by a different name, I answered "yes” to an unpaid student internship at Evergreen's radio station before knowing what was involved.
The job involved cleaning the basement. The space I cleared became the headquarters for a group I was starting with my best friends, Arrington de Dionyso and Amber Bell — The Happy Squad, a straightedge, 3-2-1 Contact meets teenage guerrilla street busking company. We plotted and staged our first schemes in that space.
We also found a hatch that led to a long-forgotten tunnel. In the following weeks, I painted HAPPY LAND on the wall, and then kept painting — stripes.
Happy Land stripes.
Courtesy of David Scherer Water
While the paint dried, I got to know the other basements and the chain-link cages that divided them into storage areas. Each had a padlock that could be removed without a wrench by loosening the nut on the back. Moving at the speed of enthusiasm, I helped myself to a lot of cool stuff, locked the gate behind me and carried it all back to the tunnel. I installed wall-to-wall carpet and outfitted the space with anything I could fit through the hatch: bookcases, televisions, projectors, typewriters, a life-sized metal Colonel Sanders, a wooden boat, an iron caboose brake, beanbag chairs, steam irons, and a church organ.
Happy Land decorated.
Courtesy of David Scherer Water
Happy Squad (cult radio show)
Arrington and I got the Wednesday evening primetime slot and co-hosted The Happy Squad of Earth radio hour. Soon after, the station offered me another slot (Sundays midnight to 7 a.m.). The overnight show was a seven-hour blitz of noise, call-ins, sound effects, records played backwards, and sideways. There was no shortage of people eager to come on and rant. I enjoyed it, but it was college cliché and redundant. I wanted something stranger.
Happy Squad was stranger. Each week we scrapped the previous format and came up with a whole new show. You'd think that would have made it hard to build an audience, but it was the 90s. Every day was Backwards Day. We soon built a strong following.
Our first episode involved a dozen junior high students talking to one another in the performance studio. We were immediately suspended.
The program director, the late Diana Arens, appealed our suspension since we were the only teenage-hosted show on KAOS. They let us back so long as we got new formats preapproved.
This included an arithmetic episode where callers solved math problems at high speed, and a spelling episode where a panel of language experts discussed linguistics while spelling every word they spoke. We ran a karaoke show where the singers heard music in their headphones while we broadcast only the vocals — raw and unfiltered. One episode featured a group limited to a single recurring sentence: "There will be time to get ahead tomorrow." There was an episode where we described graphic sexual acts using confusing G-rated innuendo.
Publicity poster for Happy Land.
Courtesy of David Scherer Water
We hosted debates where the sides couldn't hear each other: poetry versus prose, meat-eating versus veganism, God versus the Devil. We split the station's stereo signal: one side left, one right. Each side was in a different room. Listeners without a balance knob heard both at once. We had a live wrestling show. We had a call-in show where we gave out driving directions. We had a nonscientific show about bugs. Once, I went solo and just counted out loud for the whole hour. I got to 1,889. Nobody called in. My favorite episode was the fake protest one. It opened with a fiery speech about the injustice of our supposed cancellation. Station management was bewildered. Our show was popular. We had not been canceled. We were literally on the air talking about how we had been taken off the air. Why were we protesting? It was wonderful.
Conclusion
Eventually, we were canceled for real. This was for the episode where we claimed to be breaking the world record for urine. It had been a good run. We made a big spectacle at our hearing, but lost the case even though the format had been preapproved. The next month, we started a live cable-access home shopping show. That got canceled because I tried to sell my 3-month-old son. Naturally, we started a rival school newspaper.
Post-graduation, I bounced between an AM news station, a government TV station, and a film company. The work was boring and the pay was worse. Eventually, I landed a job as a super for a company that owned 27 buildings. This put me back where I started: cleaning cluttered basements. But, this time, I wasn't stealing keys, I was in charge of them. I had thousands of square feet and started making new Happy Lands. I returned to creative, good-humored mayhem, this time with the real estate under my control.
I have that job to this day, which gives me enough free time to write things like this column.
A photo by E. Lord of Fezdak Clamchopbreath taken in 1992
Courtesy of David Scherer Water
David Scherer Water went by the name Fezdak Clamchopbreath from 1991-1997. During that time, a local newspaper (a competitor of JOLT) famously wrote, "The Happy Squad is a cult of morons led by a clown accomplishing nothing while promoting a dogma based on the merits of purposeless creative expression. The 1960s are over. People need art with a message, not merry pranks or silliness for silliness' sake. This group should be retrained for use in a hospital, resort or preschool." The Complete Works of Fezdak Clamchopbreath is available here. Excerpts from old episodes of Happy Squad are available here.
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Snevets
Thank you for sharing... Sounds like a kick ass time! Carry on!
Saturday, January 10 Report this
RBautista
"People need art with a message, not merry pranks or silliness for silliness' sake. " This is very true. I would love to know which sensible newsletter wrote that to support them.
Tuesday, January 13 Report this