I picked up my copy of Collateral Damage: The Zodiac Mindwarp American Tour Diaries from the late, lamented Polyester Books on Brunswick Street, Fitzroy in 2004.
Ever the savvy economic manager, I dropped ten percent of the 500 bucks I’d earned (at roughly $7.50 an hour) making my mates Neon’s debut video clip for a major label on this and Fucked By Rock.
Both tomes were penned by Mark Manning, the notorious Zodiac Mindwarp, a reptile in SS leathers I’d encountered on some old Rage tape doing a song I’d misremembered as ‘Presidents of the United States of Love’ (it was actually ‘Prime Mover’).
Manning, a slippery former comics artist and graphic designer who’d sniffed the skirts of the ad world - hang on a moment - is a dab hand at Wagnerian sex and drugs and rock and rutting in both the musical and literary senses.
Wrap your oculars around his other books - Get Your Cock Out!, Bad Wisdom, The Wild Highway and so on - and you’ll no doubt clock that the author is prone to flights of Caligula via John Milius fancy.
Collateral Damage: The Zodiac Mindwarp American Tour Diaries came out in late 2002, and is purportedly a record of the band sleazing around America in the wake of 9/11. I’d imagine Twitter’s collective heads would have exploded if that knotty cyst on our collective unconscious had existed in the Bush era, such is Manning’s casual, cynical dismissal of the moment the 21st century hit the clogged s-bend.
Zodiac and his band of ageing, lardy pork swordsmen are far more concerned with snorting, buggering and puking their way around the States, and if that’s not a sound metaphor for the whole sorry state we find ourselves in nearly twenty years later I don’t know what is.
Mark Manning definitely casts a long shadow over Home Brewed - his gear was the first (for me) that connected the Gonzo self obliteration of Hunter Thompson’s American Dream with the sleazy, take it to the limit emptiness nihilistic excess of all the bands I used to love and now find desperately sad, even if their songs still do sort of own.
2004 has a lot to answer for, as this reading series will attest. Home Brewed often skates the razor’s edge of Manning’s brand of filthy gonzo autobiographical fantastia - it’ll be up to you to discern just when.
(My copy of Collateral Damage is presently worth 40 bucks, so who’s a canny investor now, eh?)