In Memory of Sammy Winston

This blog is exclusively for honoring the memory of Sammy Winston. If you have concert flyers, personal, concert or art photos of his, memories, musings in the form of writings, videos, any writings Sammy did for Amp or any other zine or publication, ect, please submit or send them to me and I will add them to the page. 

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Sammy Winston - Ether

RIP Sammy Winston.

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Please, for the love of the Gods and all that is holy, just ignore Jared Leto. This isn’t about him. I’m including the image in the interest of full documentation regarding the piece of writing below. Focus on the photo on top. (credit to Jerry Guzman.) The ghost upon the stage is Sammy Winston. That’s me with the red hair holding up his butt. I feel like I need to make this clear; I did not know Sammy well. I knew him in the sense that close friends of his are close friends of mine, in the sense that his words resonated with me in a way that still brings tears to my eyes, in the sense that he landed on my head a lot, in the sense that to this day All Bets Off is my favorite hardcore/punk band. But for some reason, I always had this sinking feeling that in my lifetime I would here the words, “Sammy the Mick is dead”, and I did not look forward to that day. The following is a piece of writing by Sammy that I transcribed from the AMP magazine pictured above. I used to read this piece over and over again. I just finished typing it up, cracked a bottle of mulled apple mead, home made by a friend. The land wights get their offering early tonight. Sammy the Mick is dead. Long live Sammy the Mick. I know you know that nothing last forever, that your words will fade along with everything else, but I feel called to make them last a little bit longer. Hey, “If anything, at least I care enough to lament my caring.”

AMP West Coast Addition #52 Dec 2006/Jan 2007

SAMMY WINSTON

CONTINUING THE BLEAK THEME OF LAST MONTH’S MISERABLE COLUMN…

“There is so much pain in the world. I ache at the sobering reality of it. Call me hypersensitive, but even the most casual glimpse of the cruelty of the world, the goddamned inevitable and frighteningly casual cruelty of the world, will shake me to the very core. It is nearly pathological. And certainly exasperating.

When I was seven or eight, maybe nine, some single digit age, I took a trip along the highway with my mother. We stopped at a gas station in the heart of Reno. There was a pick-up truck at the pump beside us. Beat truck with a beat dude behind the wheel. He looked to be in his thirties, sitting behind the wheel, crying. A grown man sitting in a pick-up truck at a gas station in Reno, crying. This was terrifically significant to me at such a tender age. And I do believe that this was the precise moment when I recognized the inherent tragedy of the human condition. This fleeing glimpse I had gleaned as a child of this stranger’s moment of absolute emotional collapse and personal calamity set the tone of the life that lay ahead of me. And the bitch of it was that, at that time, I was too young to have any reasonable grasp of on the foul workings of the world. I mean, I was a bright kid. I knew what Reno was and assumed that perhaps the man had just gambled away everything he had. That seemed logical. And I knew something of heartbreak from all the soul music my mother played, so I recognized that a woman could lead a man to such an utter state of despondency and what a significant (and apparently, emasculating) thing it is to reach that place. As the Temps sang: “I need rain to disguise the tears in my eyes. Yeah, you know I’m a man, I got my pride.” So yes, I knew something of money and love and how they could both lead a man to ruin. I didn’t know just how intrepidly rotten the world could be. I knew broad strokes, not the depraved details of the brutality of the world. Hate and shame and pain and injustice and all the ways these things come to be. It’s so distressing to think that I had been confronted with the reality of tragedy’s result before I even knew just how horrible the world could be. Makes you not want to grow up. Makes you not want to live.

I’m not being apathetic; believe me, far from it. Apathy would be a relief. I am addressing the polar opposite. I walk the streets of my city and feel weak. I see the fourteen-year old girl on midnight corners, selling her underdeveloped pussy to men with wives and children in the suburbs so that some greasy big pimp can take their money, feed himself, beat her, fuck her in the ass. I see the derelicts curled up in the doorways like discarded abortions, muttering to themselves, wretched, left with nothing but their own piss and stink and madness. I see old men working as bag boys in groceries stores, with dead eyes and weak limbs, with withered dreams, with nothing to look forward to but death, preferably in their sleep. I see children on the sidwalks, kicking a can or a bottle or a dead rat because they have no toys, and they can’t go inside because their mother is going down on some guy for crack or meth or anything that will kill whatever pain is inside her. Those kids destined to grow up to become failures as profound as their mothers. There is a girl somewhere stumbling home, half naked and crying, having been fed drink after drink and videotaped as she was fucked at the dorms by boys she will share classes with that afternoon. They will wink at her, and they will laugh. She may try to forget, she may develop an eating disorder, may start snorting coke, may jump from the ledge of the majestic Golden Gate Bridge. Somewhere, a boy is losing his virginity to his uncle. Somewhere, a last dollar was spent. Somewhere, a belief was betrayed. Somewhere, a regrettable choice was made. Somewhere, someone is crying. Somewhere, someone is dying. Somewhere is everywhere. And I feel it as if every aching heart was my own. And it is a curse. As I mention these things, remember that these are the high crimes of humanity (note: humanity, not against. Humanity is the criminal here.) Let us not even exacerbate matters with the myriad minor malfunctions of spirit that haunt, taunt and torture like a boy with acne, the girl with baby fat, the ones left alone on prom night, the ones nobody understands, the ones who can’t find happiness, the ones who don’t bother to look for it. Let us not speak of the depressive, the suicidals, the schizophrenics, the anhedonic, the sociopathic, the obsessive compulsives, the glorious phobics who hide in shadows or from them; all those born damages who must suffer mental and emotional illnesses they did nothing to earn and are powerless to conquer. Let’s not talk about those with cancer, tourettes, AIDS, meningitis, any of the Heps, Parkinsons, arthritis, and on and on and on.

So what do you do when teenage teardrops become grown man grit teeth? Do you suck on some metaphorical opiate, like desperate spiritualism or bogus optimism or blissful ignorance, or do you go all MY WAR on these motherfuckers and turn into a monster with napalm for blood and a fist for a heart? Just fucking accept that everyone is a liar and everything is a sham. Know well that all the fixes are in; ice your knuckles for the inevitable onslaught. Or do you attempt this, only to fail as you always fail when you are confronted with the cruelty of the world and it crushes you for a moment, as it always crushes you for a moment. We people go to such extremes and at the root of it all is the desire to escape pain, which is impossible (you can only fool yourself into believing you have escaped it). This is why people become mindless consumers, to fulfill their aching souls with stuff, stuff, stuff that will keep them safe. They are building walls of stuff to keep out the nasties. Or you can go the opposite route, run to the antithesis of the consumerist life and become monastic, eschewing all worldly possessions to pursuit some sense of spiritual enlightenment when really this course of action is no different than the consumerists: whereas they build walls fo stuff to serve as barricade from the dark tinges of life, monasticism seems to subscribe to the notion that if nothing touches you, nothing bad can touch you. Both ends of this ridiculous spectrum are flawed, and ultimately fail at the goal (be that goal realized and accepted or simply blindly pursued). You can’t run from the pain of the world. You have to face it, eat it, and hope you have a moment’s rest before you are served another ladle’s worth. Really, what course of action can you take? What kind of person can you become? Who do you have to be to exist in this world? Optimist or pessimist, you are still going to have to deal with the fact that as I write this, there is an article in the morning paper about a mother in Richmond, California who was being held by police because her 8-year-old son, his tiny body covered in injuries (whip marks, burns, cuts, and scars), had died in the hospital after being beaten and drinking, or being forced to drink, household cleaner or some other such poison. While being questioned, the remorseless mother admitted to having rubbed a caustic substance into her child’s genitals to discourage him from wetting himself. Read those previous two sentences again. Read them and ask yourself not why the world is so fucked up, but how we are supposed to live in it without going completely insane. How exactly are you supposed to live in a world where every single day another police officer somewhere in this country, never mind the world, says, “It was the worst crime scene I had ever seen.” You walk out of bad movies. You close bad books. You stop eating bad meals. What in Christ’s name are we supposed to do with a world so rotten? Look on the bright side? Make lemonade? Turn that frown upside down? I appreciate the need to invoke hope in dire times, but is that a solution or is that a substitute or is that just a cop-out? Isn’t hope just a bottle of whiskey for a broken heart? The world is fucked and that’s just the way it is. Maybe the only hope is that I am not alone in asking these questions; in suffering this aching. A humanity so bothered in its soul offers no hope. If anything, at least I care enough to lament my caring.”