It’s pretty scary. Just to be safe, check yourself into that abandoned college in Holly Springs before you listen to this Halloween Jam from Clay Otis and and the Dream Sheiks.
Tag: Jam
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In Search of the Subteens
What makes a popular band just disappear?
“You want to hear about me sitting alone in a room doing coke and listening to the phone ring?” asks Mark Akin, the lanky guitarist and charismatic frontman for the Subteens, a hard-rocking trio (and sometimes quartet) that spent nearly a decade earning a reputation as Midtown’s best bar band before vanishing without a trace. “I was doing a considerable amount of drugs, and that became more important than everything else,” Akin confesses. “Obviously, I never expected that to happen. But nobody ever does.”
The Subteens story sounds a lot like a Subteens song. Although the band’s reunion on Saturday, April 28th, at Young Avenue Deli will likely draw a considerable crowd, when the band formed in 1995, nobody paid them much attention. During their first four years, the Subteens went through drummers like Spinal Tap and played in almost total obscurity to an audience the band describes as “girlfriends and bartenders.”
“The running gag was that we were too stupid to quit,” says bassist Jay Hines, who calls the Subteens “a band built for self-destruction.” But stupid is as stupid does, and the Subteens stupid fortunes began to change for the better when drummer and vocalist Christene Kings from the all-girl California duo the Chubbies joined the group in 1998.
“That’s when I first started noticing people showing up for shows,” Akin recalls. “And that’s also when we started putting boobs on the flyers we’d put on telephone poles.” The band wasn’t any better, he says, just better looking.
By the time Kings was replaced on drums with John “Bubba” Bonds (previously with Kenny Brown and the Verbs), the Subteens were drawing enthusiastic crowds. In 2000, the group released Burn Your Cardigan, a modish nine-song rocker that one critic accurately described as “harkening back to the days when the Clash could share a stage with the Jam.” Buried amid Akin’s originals, which vividly chronicle such tried-and-true subjects as beer, Midtown melodrama, and suburban malaise, was an unlikely cover of Billy Joel’s “You May Be Right.” Although the Subteens would crank out many more originals and cover more obvious material such as AC/DC’s “Whole Lotta Rosie” and the Ramones’ “Chinese Rocks,” “You May Be Right” became the band’s standby and a rallying cry for fans who thought Akin was just the lunatic they were looking for.
“I always thought it was fun to play a song that everybody would immediately dismiss as dorky,” Akin says of the song, which turned out to be less dorky than prophetic. As the Subteens’ popularity grew, so did Akin’s ego and habits.
“I got my head up my ass a whole lot more,” he says. “I was somewhere backstage dumping out piles of my favorite party favor. The guy I was doing it with was in the opening band, and he looked at me and said, ‘Man, what do you think you’re in — Aerosmith or something?’
“I wanted to live that [rock-star] life,” Akin says. And when people started showing up [to our shows], I took that as permission to start behaving like a jackass without the whole part of selling millions of records.”
As Akin sank deeper into his habits, Subteens sets became shorter and more unpredictable. The band might pull off a brilliant show or Akin might throw up on himself. “Either way, it was entertaining,” he says. And no show was over until Akin had stripped down to nothing but his guitar and a drunken grin.
“I think I may have started performing to strip buck-naked rather than to play the music,” Akin admits. “My idea of what a Subteens show was was debauchery, nudity, and alcohol. That’s fun, but you’ve got to put the music first.”
Things got worse.
“I pawned my girlfriend’s guitar — as all good stories start,” Akin recalls. “She had been bearing down on me to return it, but someone else had bought it. [The Subteens] were playing at Young Avenue Deli, and she lived around the corner. I remember calling her on the phone from backstage and telling her what happened. She understandably freaked. The place was filling up, and the opening band was playing. I left the Deli and walked to her house and found her standing on the porch smashing plates.”
Shortly after the release of the band’s second (and much better) album, So That’s What the Kids Are Calling It, Akin stopped showing up for shows. Instead, he sat alone in his room doing coke and listening to the phone ring.
Akin isn’t worried about returning to the stage mostly clothed and fully sober, although his last attempt at playing it straight left him feeling a little awkward.
“I’d been off drugs for maybe two or three months of a five-year coke bender [at the time of the band’s last show a few years ago]. Your head’s still pretty twisted. Usually I was half-drunk and half-naked and babbling all kinds of insane stuff to the crowd. But immediately I was more self-conscious.”
Whether or not this show is a one-time-only event for the band’s fans, who never got to say a proper goodbye, or the beginning of a new, more responsible chapter in Subteens history, depends largely on the show. “If we can get through this show without anybody getting arrested or divorced, we’ll talk about it,” Akin says.
“It’s probably a one-off,” Hines concludes, pointing out that he’s the only member of the band who is still married.
The Subteens Reunion Show
Young Avenue Deli
Saturday, April 28th
Door opens at 9 p.m.; admission $10
Categories
In a Jam
I brought home 30 pounds of strawberries the other day, having acquired them at a pick-it-yourself place.
I poured the berries into a large pot full of water and began pulling them out one at a time, cutting off the crowns with scissors and placing the berries on drying racks. I employed the time-honored quality-control method of “eating the suspects” (not the disgusting ones, mind you, just the suspects). Most of the suspects I ate tasted delicious, indicating that I was erring on the side of caution in weeding out the berries.
Then I raided my stash of rhubarb, collected in the spring when it was perfect, then cleaned, chopped, frozen, and now ready to co-star in my strawberry/rhubarb jam.
There isn’t space here for me to walk you through the whole process, but that’s okay, because the wisest thing I could possibly tell you about jamming is that you should simply follow the instructions that come with your pectin.
Pectin? That’s a plant fiber commonly found in the cell walls of certain fruits, and it’s what gives jam its thickness. Each brand of pectin has the potential to act slightly different, which is why I recommend using the instructions included in whatever pectin you get. You have to be rather anal about following these directions, or it won’t work. It may still taste good, mind you, but it won’t be jam.
Most pectin requires massive amounts of sugar in order to thicken. This is a bummer for people, like me, who don’t like their jam super-sweet, preferring instead to taste the natural sweetness of the fruit or berry they have jammed. I get around this by using “low-methoxyl” pectin, which gels by reacting to a calcium solution that you mix separately and add to the jam. This may sound intimidating and scientific, but it’s pretty easy, and it allows you to add as much or as little sugar as tastes right to you. If you shop at a cool store, there should be boxes of the low-methoxyl Pomona’s-brand pectin alongside the other kinds. Or you can order it online at pomonapectin.com.
When I jam, I like the berries to be as unaltered as possible. So I don’t cut or mash my berries — making them difficult to measure — and I cook them as briefly as I think I can get away with. This approach can be problematic when making low-sugar jam, because sugar acts as a preservative as well as a sweetener. Determined, but in need of guidance, I called the telephone number printed on the jamming instructions that came with my Pomona’s pectin. The number was called the “JAMLINE.”
Alas, it was Saturday, and I could only leave a message. But the berries couldn’t wait, so I jammed on. Following the instructions for no-sugar jam, I blended the pectin in hot juice — frozen apple cider from last year — and added it to my berries, which I brought barely to a boil. I added lemon juice and a little sugar to taste. When I processed the jars in a water bath, I left them in the boiling water a mere five minutes, conveniently forgetting to add an extra minute for each thousand feet of altitude above sea level that I was jamming at.
The next day as I was eating some of my excellent jam on French toast, the phone rang.
It was Connie Sumberg, the JAMLINE operator and, to my surprise, owner of the company — which makes her the first company owner who has ever called me on a Sunday to talk about strawberry/rhubarb jam. She spoke with the slow drawl of someone with a lot of common sense, and I desperately wanted her to approve of my unorthodox and undercooked methods.
After listening to my story, she said, “If you see mold in a few months, and the seal on the jar is still good, then you know that live mold spores were sealed inside because you didn’t boil it long enough.”
Can you just scrape off the mold and eat the rest of the jam?
“That’s up to you. It’s a personal decision. In the old days that’s what they did, because they couldn’t afford to throw it away — unless the whole thing tasted moldy. Then you know the tendrils of mold have permeated the batch.”
But, when pressed, Sumberg couldn’t recall a single instance of poisoning from undercooked low-sugar strawberry/rhubarb jam. That’s good enough for me.