KRAM-JAM
The first time I ever saw Barry the Bastard I was 12. I was walking down the street with my mother who'd been buying me some 'cool' clothes for high school. As I waited outside Lowes for her to produce my brand new trackydacks and girlfriend-beaters, my attention was drawn to a young bloke with the hair and body of an emaciated Seahorse. He was shoving a flannelette jacket under his putrid, faded, red t-shirt. The idea seemed so stupid and obvious to me, but with impressively calm confidence the kid walked out of Lowes, past me, and straight into The Coronation Hotel.
This kid was Barry the Bastard, a 15 year old derelict who's mother worked at The Coro. Mrs Bastard didn't work behind the bar, or in the gaming room, or in the kitchen, and she didn't clean up glasses either. If you don't understand what I mean by now, then please stop reading and feel free to go back to looking up naked pics of video game characters on your laptop.
Barry was the well-known lovechild of a junkie-whore and a dead dude. Mr Bastard died after contracting HIV and Hepatitis B, courtesy of Mrs Bastard. His body was found underneath two other dead bodies on the train tracks near Redfern, riddled with lice, syphilis, maggots and dead mosquitos. Apparently all the mozzies had died after drinking his blood. Mr Bastard's legacy was Barry's illegitimacy, which made Barry a legitimate whoreson. But this homeless whoreson was the soon to be king of Sydney Kram-Jam - the latest and greatest new musical craze unleashing its wraith upon inner city dance-floors.
I didn't know who the hell this little bastard was at the time, but I did know that I wanted my 12 year old self to be just like him. The minute I got home I ripped holes in the arse of my new trackies and spilled beer, barbecue sauce and semen all over my new singlets. I put cigarette burns in my clothes, wallet and arms and I stopped washing completely to try to get that single, thick dreadlock that epitomised the trend that Barry set. My mother wasn't happy, which pissed me off, so I just told all my friends that she was a whore, just like Barry's mum. Everyone thought it was so cool! I had blokes I'd never met coming round just to hang out with me and my mum. She hated it and thought it was strange, but, being the overly polite woman that she was, she pretended she was happy to accommodate all of these strangers and welcome them into our home. I've never been so popular in my life, and I'm a self-published writer!
Three years later, when I turned 15, I got my first fake ID. My single dreadlock had flourished atop my head, and all the cool kids dressed like Barry. Skid marks had become the biggest fad, with kids sometimes neglecting to wear pants when they went out just so people could froth over the extensive shit-stains running down the backs of their thighs. Dags were popular with some of the more hardcore kids, and the most hardcore out of the hardcore would get the dags hanging off their butts dreaded into shit-locks. The single dreadlock was still popular, and because I'd been growing mine and copying Barry's style for three years now, I was seen as somewhat of a pre-Kram-Jam era trendsetter. My pants had more holes than anyones, my undies were a unique shade of yellowy-brown, from poo and pee, and all the other stuff that lives
down there, and my skin had almost completely been taken over by a rash of hives from my allergy to gross stuff.
I still wasn't close with Barry the Bastard. He hadn't been seen around as regularly as usual. Those in the know said that it was due to his YOLO habit. YOLO was a drug that swept the Kram-Jam scene like heroin did to surfers in the seventies. It was similar to heroin in some ways, addictive as fuck and extremely damaging to your inner being, yet it was highly synthetic – most of the ingredients of YOLO are still unknown. I didn't touch the stuff until years later, but the high can only be described as feeling like your head is the burning ember of an orgasm cigar that's having sex with a sock made of puppy ears. But the comedown... I'd rather not get into.
Barry was addicted to YOLO. Heavily, in fact. But this was not the reason for his absence. Barry, along with his childhood friend Frieda the Fuckwit, had started a band. They had no experience or talent, yet what they lacked in those departments they made up for in passion, drive and the genuine appreciation of squalor. Together they formed The Scarred Lungs, named after the lung their drummer Dick Hatchet coughed up at one of their parties. Dick didn't die, but this ordeal was the reason why he had to have oxygen delivered to the stage multiple times during every Lungs live sets.
When Barry the Bastard returned to the streets of Sydney, I was there, covered head to toe in filth and feces, to witness the explosion of Kram-Jam. Their first live set, played in the usually tranny-packed basement level of The Gaff, was nothing short of magical. Dick lost his breath and almost died of a heavy asthma attack that resembled a miocardial infarct, Frieda managed to play a couple of chords on a guitar before smashing her amp with it and then sitting on the stacks smoking bongs, and Barry vomited all over everyone. They only played one song before returning to the bar/bathroom/alleyway. It was called 'Puke', and the original lyrics, scribed by Barry the Bastard, simply read: “VOMIT ON EVERYONE”.
The band became an overnight success, and the Kram-Jam phenomenon was born. New scenes started to pop up in Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Glasgow, and similar bands such as The Shit-Turds, Buttfuck and Babes on YOLO came out of the woodwork to bask in the success of The Scarred Lungs and share in the ever-deepening pool of the Kram-Jam audience.
The term Kram-Jam was first brought to public attention by the music critic Tom Dikhennharrey when he wrote about his first Lungs gig in 2013:
“Being a genre of music that essentially is only ever witnessed live, the crowd, refreshingly I must say, seems to cherish every moment of the set. They cram themselves into the tiniest of mosh pits, so much so that it makes it near impossible to dance in any normal way. The audience at a Scarred Lungs gig just seem to jump as high as they can with the limited knee bending room, and as they're doing so they also grind on each other as if they each were a cheese grater and everyone around them was cheese. At extremely popular venues, I'm told, the restricted movement of the crowd, along with their amplified interest in the band, can leave a sticky, sweaty, bloody substance with the colour and consistency of jam on the ground that can sometimes come up to ankle deep. This substance is what The Scarred Lungs want to create at each of their gigs, and has been labeled by die-hard fans, as Kram-Jam."
- Tom Dikhennharrey
TO BE CONTINUED
3RD OCTOBER 2012