#i’m not actually a huge fan of our women’s styles. they’re a weird length

[j-esbian]

the last time i was complaining about how shit clothes are, less than a month ago, i was like “well i should just start getting shirts from work, they’re a little pricey but at least they’re heavy material” and then today i walk in and we’re doing a shrink test because we’re using new material :) and granted it’s white fabric but it’s literally see-through :)

yea i would love to wear an unlined shirt made of this :)

[recentnews18-blog]

New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/the-last-days-of-diarrhea-planet-a-band-thats-too-weird-to-live-but-too-rare-to-die/

The Last Days of Diarrhea Planet, A Band That's Too Weird to Live But Too Rare to Die

For three straight days last week, the symptoms of serious gastrointestinal upset arrived in a flash epidemic to the Midtown area of Nashville, infecting hundreds of people. To the untrained eye, it looked like a mysterious flu had sent 20-something punk kids into delirium: heavy sweating, aching bodies, sore throats, the occasional runny nose. But to the trained eye belonging to any doctor of shred, the sickness was as obvious as the antidote.

The city of Nashville had a serious case of diarrhea.

Playing sold-out shows on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at the Exit/In, beloved local guitar heroes Diarrhea Planet had been the ones responsible for putting both natives and out-of-towners into this sudden feverish state. With their style of raucous performance—where the band crowd-surfed as much as the crowd, where pitch-perfect AC/DC covers were as much a guarantee as their own songs, and where even the most arms-crossed-and-clearly-over-it ticket holders became beaming kids again—no one left feeling the same as they had upon arriving. Diarrhea Planet shows induce an uninhibited madness, a madness for which the only remedy is more Diarrhea Planet.

Unfortunately, the antidote will soon be hard to come by. Though the band announced one final “victory lap” opening for Jason Isbell in October, the headlining shows on September 6th, 7th, and 8th served as Diarrhea Planet’s proper long goodbye. After thousands of gigs over the course of nearly a decade, the scatalogical punk six-piece announced in July that they’d be calling it quits.

It was the end of the planet as we know it, and no one felt fine.

The crowd at Diarrhea Planet’s last show. Photo by Wrenne Evans.

Bob Orrall suggested that this article be titled, “With the Demise of Diarrhea Planet, Is This Truly the End of Rock and Roll?” It was the Friday of the second-to-last show and we were in his office in the Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood of Nashville. Orrall runs Infinity Cat Recordings, which has put out every single Diarrhea Planet release, starting with 2009’s Aloha EP; from there, the band made two more EPs and three full-length records, the most recent of which, Turn to Gold, came out in 2016. He is both the spiritual and literal dad of the underground rock scene in Nashville—spiritual because of the bands signed to the label (DP, Daddy Issues, Music Band, White Reaper) and literal because his sons are Jake and Jamin Orrall, the two founding members of JEFF the Brotherhood. Technically the label is Jake and Jamin’s, but since the duo’s ascent early this decade, day-to-day responsibilities have fallen on dad.

“I think that people are always going to make loud noises with guitars, but [Diarrhea Planet] certainly were”—he stopped himself, remembering it wasn’t quite over yet—“are a great, great rock band. I’m 63 years old and they’re one of the greatest rock bands I ever saw.”

His favorite show of theirs took place in Chicago on his 35th wedding anniversary with his wife, where they both found themselves pressed against a barrier at the front of the stage, his wife telling him after the fact that Diarrhea Planet was the best band in the world. Uh, what about her sons’ band? “She told me they were going to have to step their game up.” Orrall’s favorite DP song is “Kids,” a scream-along anthem about the hard-to-capture innocence of youth. “The first time I heard it, I cried. What an incredible message.” For a brief moment as we talked, he teared up again. On Saturday, I saw Orrall screaming “we’re just kids!” a foot from the stage. Watching him, I cried a little, too.

Anyone will tell you that it’s not just the songs that get you—Diarrhea Planet’s live shows are infamous. Maybe it’s the onslaught of guitar harmonies—not one, not two, not even three, but four beautiful axes shredding in tandem—or the almost impossible energy that each member gives off until the very last second on stage, even when they’re only the opener. “Someone told me yesterday that they had seen one of the shows [when they opened for the Darkness]. DP had the place going crazy,” Orrall told me. When the Darkness took the stage, it was a different story. “They complained about the audience talking through [their] songs.”

From left to right: DP’s Mike Boyle, Emmett Miller, and Evan Bird during the last show. Photo by Wrenne Evans.

Or maybe it’s Diarrhea Planet’s fans that make them who they are. “If you read any article about DP, they talk about the crowd constantly because the crowd is our seventh man,” said guitarist and singer Jordan Smith during an emotional thank you speech Friday. He had just watched The Sixth Man, a 1997 film about a basketball team that gets a ghost as a ringer. Like Marlon Wayans playing alongside that ghost during the NCAA championship, Diarrhea Planet couldn’t have done what they did without the assist of their devoted fanbase.

At the top of that set, Smith had negged the audience. “Last night was a little bit like a Tame Impala show: a lot of people standing around and smelling their own farts.” It was time for the crowd to show up, which they did in immense proportions that night and the following. In the balcony, the bands’ parents, aunts, and uncles were exuberant: taking photos, singing along, buying rounds of PBR tallboys.

After having seen Diarrhea Planet play at least a dozen times myself, nothing compared to seeing them play their final hometown run, with not just a crowd of locals but kids who had come from all over the country. I spoke with fans who had come as far as Indiana, Georgia, New York, California. One Instagram I caught came with the caption, “22 hrs in Nashville with no bags and no hotel to see these goons play one last time.”

“It’s really hard to describe how I’ll continue my life without Diarrhea Planet, but these three shows really will hold a special place in my heart,” Michael Rivera, a 25-year-old cardiologist, told me. He first saw the band at Bonnaroo in 2014, where he said he heard the faint sound of electrifying guitar solos in the distance and turned to his friend to say, “I need to see this. I need to.” I watched Rivera, who has the same long, curly hair as Slash, completely lose it on Friday and Saturday nights, and by the end of Saturday night, he was up on stage with the band during their encore, screaming a song actually called “Ghost With a Boner.”

Which is another thing. It could be the humor in their songs that makes the band such a cult favorite—the juvenility can be a put-off to many, but it’s also the reason that others are drawn to them in the first place. “Ain’t a Sin to Win” is about challenging God to a motorcycle race; “White Girls (Student of the Blues, Pt. 1)” is a love song with the lyric, “I will always save the last slice just for you,” a reference to the Papa John’s that employed several of the guys over the years. “I don’t have one negative thing to say about them,” Laura Lee Volkerding, the manager of the store for 21 years, told me when I visited her. “They were very loyal. You couldn’t ask for better. They started to get much bigger and pretty soon they weren’t able to work as much, but I was so happy that they were able to do something they loved.” Volkerding still can’t say their name, though. “Diarrhea and the restaurant business don’t go together. I call them the DP Band to this day.”

Breaking up when they did felt natural, Smith told me Monday by phone. “It was a sprint from the start. We never really took time off and we never really slowed down. Most bands break up because they get mad at each other,” he said, which he affirmed wasn’t the case for DP. “Everyone was starting to get to know depression, not because of any specific turmoil, but because the lifestyle really ground us down. We just want to be happy and experience life in a normal way again.”

The finale of DP’s last show, in which fans crowded the stage; spot Michael Rivera upfront in the NHL jersey. Photo by Wrenne Evans.

Diarrhea Planet represented a different time, and not just the era of hair metal they sometimes drew from. The band came up in the early 2010s, long before Trump had been elected president, before we began to live in an age of disturbing parody that continues to eat itself. Now that they’d decided to break up, there was an element of “too weird to live, too rare to die” in their passing, for better or for worse. They were funny, ridiculous, and necessarily innocent of the world around them. To pull off the kind of music they made and the shows they put on, they kind of had to be.

I remember a woman guitarist I’d spoken to years ago who lamented the popularity of Diarrhea Planet, arguing that the last thing the world needed was a throwback to cock rock, which was considerably hostile to women. I had always seen Diarrhea Planet’s shows as a rejection of those ideals, like their deference to Marnie Stern’s guitar skills and their insistence on the pit being a safe space for all. “The whole point of DP was building culture,” Smith told me. “I think we made something really special with this community. It was just really cool to see that overall message of positivity and love manifest itself so intensely.”

The face of the DIY scene in Nashville had been changing for a while anyway, according to Olivia Scibelli, guitarist and vocalist for Idle Bloom (Friday’s opening act). Scibelli was a huge fan of Diarrhea Planet as both musicians and people, and she knew that they’d leave a hole in the scene when they retired. While male fans appeared to outnumber women roughly three to one at DP’s final shows, Scibelli acknowledged that something was in the air—a shift away from all-male bands with a predominantly male fan following. “I volunteer at the Southern Girls Rock Camp, and every year I see more and more young women and nonbinary kids wanting to start bands.”

In that moment, the focus was not on the rock scene to come but what everyone could enjoy right here, right now. Julia Martin, owner of an eponymous gallery in Nashville, told her friend Stephanie as DP’s set began that she was gearing up to head for the pit. “You might have to hold my purse.”

The sweaty close of the final show. Photo by Wrenne Evans.

Five hundred people were chanting “DIARRHEA PLANET! DIARRHEA PLANET! DIARRHEA PLANET!” at the highest possible volume. Nearing midnight on Saturday, the band left the stage after covering Rage Against the Machine’s “Bulls on Parade,” and they hardly even pretended that a blowout encore wasn’t coming. “There is literally no tomorrow for this and that’s the best you got?” a ghost voice announced over a microphone from backstage. The crowd began to sound legitimately desperate.

“This is really weird, it’s really surreal, it’s a really emotional thing,” Smith said after he bounced back on stage. “Thank you for keeping people safe in the chaos, thank you for creating an atmosphere of love and acceptance, thank you for enduring years of social strain for going to see a fucking band called Diarrhea Planet.” With that, they launched into a heartbreaking rendition of “Kids.” “I looked out and everybody was bawling, and half the dudes on stage were bawling, too,” Smith told me later. The experience itself felt like the pains of growing up and moving on.

They closed with “Ghost With a Boner,” one of the first songs they’d ever written. By the very end, the band and the crowd had sort of swapped positions: On stage, 50 to 60 fans crowded around the chaos, while Smith spent the song crowd-surfing around the room. He requested that those carrying him hoist his body up until he reached the venue doors. By the merch table, he looked like rock‘n’roll Superman.

“Maybe this sounds dumb because their name is Diarrhea Planet, but I just think that they’re a really inspirational band,” Ale Delgado, former lady of all trades at Infinity Cat, told me after the final show had ended. It was at 12:30 a.m. and she and her friend Michelle were standing in the center of the room looking shell shocked. “Yesterday, there was somebody about to crowd-surf and a guy turned to the girl next to her, who was much younger, and covered her head. They’re so good and the people they attract are so good. There’s none of that rock‘n’roll bullshit.”

Say it ain’t so. Photo by Wrenne Evans.

By last count on Sunday morning, I had seen one man cry, five say they were about to, at least 200 people with clothes so soaked through with sweat that they looked like they’d been caught in a biblical flood, one shirt with a well-endowed ghost drawn in Sharpie, and no fewer than 50 emotional embraces. I’d been shown one Diarrhea Planet tattoo, watched one woman stage dive with a broken foot, heard one guy ask a friend if his ear had fallen off, and been given one horrified look by a future bride out in a very different part of Nashville when asked if she was a fan of Diarrhea Planet. My favorite part of the entire weekend was looking back into the crowd as stage lights lit up fans’ faces: every single person was either singing or smiling, and most often, both.

As fans filtered back out into the humid city in the early hours of Sunday, the fever that Diarrhea Planet had caused finally broke—this time for the last time. Hundreds of people had screamed until they were hoarse. The aches of being tossed around in a pit or stage-diving into a sea of fists would subside by Monday, and persistent ear-ringing was sure to pass after a few days.

The only symptom that would remain after all was said and done was the one that was hardest to cure: heartbreak over the fact that a band that had really meant something to a lot of people had hung up their guitars for good.

Source: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/the-last-days-of-diarrhea-planet-a-band-thats-too-weird-to-live-but-too-rare-to-die/