Saving Their Own Community For Last

Touring bands acted as emissaries of early 2000s punk culture. In vans came unwashed youths from Little Rock, Arkansas, to remote outposts like Starksville, Mississippi, or to my own city of Athens, Georgia. Roadies saddled with crates of vinyl set up merch tables peddling 7-inch records from their scene. They sold singles from bands that saved for months for a day in a studio, and might never do so again. One yawp for posterity, then done.

The Pipe Bomb offered more than that. And my band, Carrie Nations, hoped to follow suit. For thirteen days on the road, we trailed the Pipe Bomb like elephant calves. More than giving us a practical education in how to be a band, the Pipe Bomb introduced us to the rebels and wingnuts hidden throughout the South, a more feral and peculiar place than we could’ve imagined. We met a fierce crew of anarchists in Asheville, North Carolina. The resource center they operated housed an anti-capitalist newspaper and an organization that sent books and personal letters to prison inmates. We met envoys from off-the-grid queer communities in the mountains. Despite the seriousness of their daily rigors, or perhaps because of it, our new comrades could lose themselves in dance for a night. In an old New Orleans furniture warehouse-turned-artist’s commune, our bands played on old fat floor beams that bowed under our janky rhythms. Before the show, we served soup to the homeless. Afterwards, we lounged in a backyard garden, exotic plants stretching toward the moon, and watched a film projected on the building’s aluminum wall.

More than giving us a practical education in how to be a band, the Pipe Bomb introduced us to the rebels and wingnuts hidden throughout the South, a more feral and peculiar place than we could’ve imagined.

These and so many other punk hostels would succumb to the pressures of the housing market and blasts from hurricanes. Few survived the Bush presidency. Far worse, by the end of Obama’s final term, holdouts like the Ghost Ship in Oakland, California, became graveyards of smoke and ash. But in 2002, these spaces flourished, even in the South. They proved life at the margins could satisfy both belly and mind.

The Pipe Bomb saved its own community for the last stop on tour. Rymodee and his then-girlfriend Jen regularly hosted travelers long-term. They were ambassadors for a city that few, outside of the military, knew much about. Instead of remittances from the road, the Pipe Bomb sent back punk kids decked in old denim and duck canvas. Longing to inhale the same Gulf breeze that had sustained their favorite band, they hitchhiked to the Panhandle to pop tents in backyards. Arriving in Pensacola, the possibilities we collected for our own lives—the soup kitchens, guerilla gardens, and junk bike hospitals—overwhelmed us. Bodies splayed out in chairs on their porch, photocopied zines drooping from hands, we’d digest it all and draw up plans between naps.

Jen and Rymodee spent free time in the kitchen when they weren’t busy at Jen’s vegan restaurant, the End of the Line. Their fridge overflowed with leafy greens, sleeves of bread, and trays of tofu. Flies buzzed around a mason jar full of compost. Well-loved pots hung from hooks in the window trim. A light film of dust on the counter countered the burnished perfection of Jen’s classic appliances. She cherished her heirloom baby blue gas stove so much that she’d tattooed its image on her shoulder. As Florida weather rarely required sleeves, the homage was always on display.

In their living room, Rymodee cared for a menagerie of anachronistic instruments. Out of materials culled from trash piles, he reconstructed a folk orchestra, replete with hammer dulcimer, singing saw, and a stand-up bass. Jen and their friends joined Rymodee to form a house band, the Tube Smugglers. They recorded murder ballads and shanties about cast iron care and cannibalizing yuppies. Rymodee’s musical gizmos held starring roles. Naturally, Rymodee had drawn a fanzine of blueprints to replicate his Frankensteins and a few days at his house allowed for plenty of time to dabble with his creations. If punk was about opting out of capitalism, making our own instruments felt like the pinnacle.

That point could be taken further: we didn’t need bars or clubs. For our first gig in Pensacola, we even refused a roof. On a spring evening, once dusk fully settled and afforded a little cover, musicians and fans lugged amplifiers, microphone stands, drum sets, and a generator down the CSX rail line that split Pensacola Bay and Bayou Texar. We slipped off the tracks onto Hobo Beach, a slim stretch of white sand interrupted by driftwood obstacles. Under a tree canopy, we arranged a stage and attacked our instruments. Bay winds pushed back against our vibrations, muting our noise. Nobody else could hear us, but that was by design. Punks chose vacant spaces on purpose, inhabited bubbles outside the cast of streetlights. The solitude was fleeting. Our hubris urged us back into the glow, flitting at high-watt bulbs like city moths, either clueless or careless.

A decade later, the Pipe Bomb would break up. Terry invested deeper in Sluggo’s. She doubled down on her diet by offering only vegan options and opened a second location in a blue-collar section of Chattanooga, where she moved with her boyfriend. In a few years, yoga studios, crossfit gyms, and specialty grocers would engulf the restaurant. She country-fried wheat gluten steaks as global brands encroached.

Rymodee and Teddy scattered to San Francisco, where, with a Whole Foods on every corner, urban development incorporated healthy living. Teddy opened a bar. Rymodee landed a job at a long-running food co-op. He worked in the stockrooms and the freezers, where he learned the business motivations for dropping decent food into dumpsters.

Thousands of miles apart, the trio remained counterculture fugitives as authenticity and community became corporate mantras. They grew older and shed recklessness and found the future they aged into wasn’t exactly what they’d hoped for. More people cared about what they ate, which is what Rymodee always wanted, but the interest seemed superficial. Waistlines and image mattered more than animal welfare or farmworkers, and that was a bummer.

“You’ve wanted [a better world] to exist forever, and then it happens, and it’s not how you wanted it,” Rymodee said. “Like, if R. J. Reynolds controlled legal weed.” But, for a slew of nights in the early 2000s, Rymodee and the Pipe Bomb preached simple truths about living nourished lives in the narrows and assembled a utopia from cast-offs. They compiled a network of fellow travelers with excellent manners and kitchen chops, who placed food and community above all else. We couldn’t know that, in a few years, the ideals they espoused would stare back at us from the glossy pages of magazines and in the curated storefronts of lifestyle outfitters. The hideouts where dirty kids collectivized kitchen work and scheduled punk ragers would be renovated as condos and “makerspaces,” our DIY ethos run through the spin cycle and marked up well out of reach.