Not Jiu Jitsu. But perhaps relevant to some Jiu Jitsu academies, instructors, and students.
Definitely about self defence.
Crash is not the real name of the organisation. It isn’t far off the real name.
The guy who introduced and initiated me into Crash was named Alick. (Not really).
I did gymnastics for sport and as an interest in high school and university. At the time – 1970s – gymnastics was a decidedly amateur sport, with little expertise or real understanding around in Australia. There was an Australian umbrella organisation with links to the international governing body for the sport, the Federation Internationale Gymnastique. The Australian body was predominantly run by a bunch of ancient deadasses with vested interests – not all of them were like that, but too many.
Maybe one gymnast of each sex – sorry, gender – would go to each Olympics, and they usually placed in the low hundreds, which was right down near the bottom. The only places to learn back then were the YMCA and the various Police Boys’ Clubs (now called Police/Citizens Youth Centres and catering to women as well. This was around fifty years ago).
There was no internet, not even videotape, at the time, and the only information available either came from magazines that cost a small fortune to import from overseas, some in foreign languages, and rare overseas visitors, with probably mostly average backgrounds in the sport, though considering the levels of Australian gymnastics at the time, they still appeared like Jedi. That and the rare copy of a copy of a Super 8 film that some visitor or traveler happened to have.
I started gymnastics at the YMCA in Pitt Street, near Town Hall station. There were a few guys there at the start who were into teaching kids, and I learned a fair bit. I managed to wangle myself into an advanced class with a guy from Switzerland who was a teacher at Randwick Boys High. A whole other level.
He went back to Europe after a while, and all the other older guys, possible mentors, seemed to peter out. Careers, marriages, and stuff. There were only a few career YMCA guys there, whose hearts were in career and administration, not gymnastics. We spent a lot of time doing pointless stuff without direction.
Alick arrived at training one day. He had been at the Y a few years before my time and was the brother-in-law of one of my training buds. He was fired up to start up something new. We followed him out of the YMCA, and into gigs teaching gymnastics to kids at places like The Forest High School and Ryde RSL, in exchange for a space for us to train. It was good for a while and we had some state champions, etc. All the top guys and some girls in the state came and trained and hung out with us. There seemed to be real direction here and something that could grow into a serious venture.
Alick got me a holiday labouring job after my HSC with the waterproofing company he worked for. Hard work on large commercial roofs, but I liked it, and the money. We put waterproofing on the roof of Harbord Diggers towards the end of its construction.
He had a strong work ethic and at the time was a natural leader. I certainly looked up to him. My parents had divorced and my father lived interstate, and I certainly needed a strong male role model.
During one really long, hot, hard week we knocked off work early on a Thursday and met another friend of ours, Steve, at a pub in Edgecliff, I think. I got murderously pissed after a couple of hours of fast-paced drinking and went out to Alick’s car to sleep it off in the back seat. I woke up early evening, opened the car door, spewed in the gutter while still lying on the seat, shut the door, and went back to sleep again. When I woke again it was dark. I went back into the pub just as they were coming out. They’d been on the piss the whole time. Steve drove us back to Alick’s place. He was totally wasted but had experience as a racing driver, so we were as safe as we were going to get. This was 1973, way before RBT.
We went to work again the next day. A full day. We were the walking dead. We drove home through Woolloomooloo, and back then you got onto the Cahill Expressway via a road around the back of the Domain parking station. Way before the Harbour Tunnel. We were stopped at the lights, they changed. The other cars moved off; we didn’t. I looked enquiringly at Alick. His eyes were closed. Asleep. I shook him and he woke up with a start. He told me he nearly nodded off again going around the Cahill Expressway loop on the way to the Harbour Bridge. We cheated death on the roads two days in a row. He dropped me off on the Pacific Highway at Lane Cove and I had to walk home to Longueville. He had to drive on to Dee Why.
Back to the gymnastics. Various obstacles occurred, personality conflicts, disillusionment, etc. A few of us were sitting in the club van once after we’d been to the beach or something, and one of the younger guys said it wasn’t a gymnastics club any more, just a group who did fun stuff together, which occasionally had a tenuous relationship with gymnastics. And was becoming less and less fun, to be honest.
I moved onto university and the gymnastics facilities there were a lot better. I went to Sydney Uni, but ended up hanging out with the gymnastics club at NSW Uni, which was pretty strong. Lots of teen and twenty-something hot bodies of both sexes, and a fair few serious relationships sprung up for varying durations. I had one very sweet and intense holiday romance and another less intense but much longer-lasting friendship with another girl.
After I left Uni, I was drifting. Scared of becoming an adult. I had some near misses with drugs, and found life confusing, especially starting work in Canberra, a cold place both temperature-wise and socially. I left Canberra after 18 months and came back to Sydney, but things were still out of whack for me somehow. Most of the groups I was hanging out with didn’t seem to have any direction, nor any great interest in me and my ideas, for what they were worth, which perhaps in those times wasn’t much.
I did meet my first martial arts instructor David Crook, in Canberra, and that was a pivotal time in my life, though the seeds he planted really only started to flourish years later, as I was still immature AF.
My peers and I were all just young adults, overgrown schoolchildren, struggling with exchanging the carefree hedonism of childhood and teenage years for the responsibilities of careers, finance, relationships, and sometimes parenthood. Everyone seemed to be narrowing their horizons and moving from larger social groups to relationships and nuclear families. Becoming fucking SERIOUS.
My own expectations were greatly reduced. Real relationships with women did not happen because I was not mature enough to sustain them. I had a job, but I felt like a fish out of water among my coworkers and in the place itself. Their goals and concerns seemed to have little to do with my own, whatever they were. I felt isolated and alienated, looking for a group to which to belong.
I did mostly what I thought was expected of me by my parents and society. No effort went into trying to work out what real possibilities I had, and what I really wanted to accomplish in my life. I was looking for guidance. Though, really, there was no shortage of information, just an inability to discern, choose and act.
I still saw Alick on and off. Then suddenly he and his wife started taking a strong interest in me. They spoke about what Alick called “personal power” and spiritual matters, particularly surprising in her case, as she had been a totally practical person with more prosaic (which is not to say worthless) interests in all the previous time I had known her. I was interested in spiritual matters, truthfully for egotistical reasons. And possibly, escape from what I saw as the social programming, and the perceived drudgery of adult life in the late twentieth century.
Alick arranged to take a bunch of the younger gymnastic crowd, including me, on a camping weekend down at Newnes. Michael, his older friend, who was a former gymnast from Argentina, was along. We left Alick’s at about 3:30 am, and had arranged to pick up a mate of Michael’s, and now apparently Alick’s, Ernie.
We arrived at Ernie’s place at about 4 am. The house was dark, no sign of life. Eventually, a chubby man in pyjamas turned on a light inside and stared at us through the front window. We were apparently unexpected at that particular time.
About an hour later, he’d got himself into gear and we were on our way. I was in one car with Michael, Ernie, and maybe someone else. Alick was driving. He started asking me questions about how I was living at the time, with an undercurrent of judgment at my alleged inadequacies and lack of direction. Perhaps that was just my own paranoia, but in hindsight, definitely not. Michael and Ernie were largely listening.
Ernie chimed in at one stage with advice. Okay, I thought, but who the fuck are you anyway?
Alick wanted to run things to a schedule. Meals, when we woke up, went for walks, etc. Alick treated us to a monologue around the fire. One of the other guys there, Simon, told me afterwards that he felt pissed off and uncomfortable with Alick’s schedule and the general vibe of the weekend. He would have no more to do with Alick. Smart lad. Smarter than me.
I had read several of Carlos Castaneda’s books, about his spiritual development under the tutelage of a Yaqui Native American sorcerer, Don Juan. These books were wildly popular at the time. I especially liked “Journey to Ixtlan”.
Alick would talk to me, in interactions better described as browbeating, about the concepts described in Castaneda’s books. “Personal Power” and “Impeccability” were among the themes of these discussions, packaged with the implication that my own way of living was sorely lacking in both.
There were some great lessons in Castaneda’s books. But, it transpired, all of them were first elucidated by others. It later came out that they were pure fiction and Castaneda had shamelessly lifted entire concepts from a wide variety of sources, such as famous philosophers and C.S. Lewis. Castaneda himself was a narcissist and egomaniac who craved adulation and eventually set up his own cult, which lead several female followers, who were also his lovers, to suicide after his death.
So we, like many others, took inspiration from a wholly fictional source written by an idol with feet of clay. Fictional inspiration can be legitimate, myths and legends absolutely have their place in the great inspirational stories of humanity. Horus and Osiris. But you need to be aware of how much wool you are pulling over your own eyes if you take them on.
The perceived ennui of my life at that time, along with regular criticism and challenge from Alick, finally wore me down. He may have even given me some sort of ultimatum that he’d have no more to do with me if I didn’t find a better path than the one I was on. And did he have one? Funny you should ask…
I asked what he saw as the way forward for me. He asked me if I was serious and not playing around. Not that that would have made much difference, he would have kept chipping away at my feeble resistance. I had no better alternative than what he was offering, or so it seemed. So I was invited to an initial interview with these keepers of the spiritual path.
Who was my interview with? Ernie!
Yes, Ernie, the fat bastard we’d got caught unprepared, and rousted from a deep sleep, to take camping. Ernie, the guy whose conversational advice made little impression on me while I was being harangued by Alick about my shortcomings and inadequacies while we were on a road trip. Not exactly an imposing figure.
I went out to his place in Winston Hills IIRC with Alick, We had a bit of a chat and I was invited to attend a meeting once a week at which we would discuss spiritual matters and the business of the group.
I can’t remember if it was that time, or another time shortly after that, I met Ernie’s psychotic dog, a mutt named Soil, not sure how the name was spelt. I like dogs and was patting this one, which he seemed to be enjoying. All of a sudden, the dog tensed, and then leaped up at me with a growl, biting me on the lower lip, drawing blood. As Alick and I drove away I saw Ernie grab the dog by the collar and start smacking it around the face with a rolled-up newspaper. I had little sympathy for the dog, though I later concluded that he probably hadn’t had a great upbringing under Ernie. Alick drove me to Emergency at Royal North Shore Hospital, and I was patched up and given a tetanus shot.
The meetings were sexually segregated. Men only. We all sat around a table in an anteroom at Ernie’s house. I was told I was now a Son of Crash, at the entry level, a Page. Alick was a Squire. Ernie and Michael were Knights. Women Were Maidens, Damsels, and Dames. Husbands and wives mostly, with a smattering of single men like myself. If there were any single women, I never met them.
A Page takes on a vow of Silence. This means you do not discuss your membership of Crash, or the organization itself with anyone outside of it. Nor do you discuss these subjects with those you know inside the order informally, outside of the meetings or other sanctioned events. Ostensibly, this is to prevent you becoming distracted or allowing others to lead you into disillusion while your spiritual commitment was still nascent and fragile.
Of course, what it also does, is make sure you have no opportunity to review the group’s advice, demands, or activities with any impartial observers, or with your peers in the group. It also builds a wall between you and those both inside and outside the group. The ones who spent all the time and effort enticing you in, are now people you only see in meetings and discussing group business, and you are discouraged from discussing anything about the group with them outside of the sanctioned times and places. Those whose approval you sought were no longer accessible to you except under monitored conditions.
You were on your own. You couldn’t talk to one of your mates about it and have them tell you “Fuck that, it sounds like a load of crap, let’s go to the pub and have a beer”. The doctrine had it that you should never put yourself in such a situation of potential skepticism or ridicule in the first place. No one outside would understand.
I’m not sure what pillow talk went on with married couples about the group. Certainly, one partner being in the group and one not would have been unsustainable for any significant period. Both would have to join, and the majority of married members did that. Once you were both in, each would act as a spy and constraint on the other. One wanting to leave and the other wanting to stay would never end well. Your vow of Silence meant you weren’t even meant to discuss it with your partner at all. So Silence was a tool of great power. For those in charge, not you.
A couple of the wives told me, after it was all over, that they had fantasized about having sex with Ernie, the authority figure, though by then they had realized fully how grotesque a proposition that was. He definitely was not George Clooney or Chris Hemsworth. Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, I guess.
We’d perform a type of “discursive” meditation in the meetings, which we were to also perform on our own, though I gathered couples could do it together. You were to concentrate your meditations on one of seven subjects, each one for a month, cycling through. From “The Black Lady”, our baser natures which were were to abhor, right the way through to “The Resurrection of Hes”, referring to spiritual bliss or rapture, at the intensity you might encounter after you had taken a thousand micrograms of LSD. One of us spoke about the subject out loud during group meditations, following a sort of script.
These meditations aren’t secret, you can find videos on how to do them on YouTube. No, I won’t tell you.
Then we would have some documented teachings, to read through and discuss. These appeared to be spiritual texts that seemed to have their own particular flavour, but alluded to concepts found in a variety of philosophies and religions. In one series of teachings I recognised ideas from my own readings on Theosophy, Tarot, Some Alister Crowley, Kabbalah, and Taoism. Though I was only an amateur and piecemeal scholar where any of these subjects were concerned.
I later found out that many, if not all, of these texts were written by low level members themselves. Some people I knew had been tasked with writing a new text which they cobbled together using many references, many of which might have been known to even a neophyte dabbler in spiritual or occult matters. No one in Crash was talking to the Elder Gods directly.
Ernie (or was it Michael?) told us one night that a good meditative practice was to review our day backwards just before going to sleep. Starting with our head on the pillow, the evening, workday, getting up in the morning. Then, when you die, you are prepped to rewind your whole life, and be suitably “woke”, and aware of previous lives, when reincarnated.
I saw a document in 1980 where the writer called that year Year 1 of the Age of Aquarius. A true new age! When we quizzed Ernie about this he said, smiling, that no one was sure, and the guy just did it for a lark. A certain lack of clarity and absolutes, I would have thought.
Just about any minor spiritual revelation we might have had, dreamt, or read in a book somewhere, could be considered as worthy of note. There wasn’t really a central doctrine, it appeared to me. It was slippery and squirrely.
Almost as if it were designed to sound like whatever people wanted to hear…
Ernie and Michael brought Jorge W., the Grand Master Knight and spiritual leader of Crash, out from Costa Rica. We went to Ernie’s for a ceremony with him. He was a short, unimposing man around 50 years old, decked out in a white cloak with seven blue stars, one bigger than the rest, in a circular motif near the bottom edge of one side of the cloak. Like a supernumerary Southern Cross.
I may be wrong about the number of stars, perhaps mixing it up with the Seven Stars style of Praying Mantis Kung Fu.
He also wore an elaborate medallion on a thick decorative chain. He looked each of us in the eyes with a penetrating stare. Alick later claimed he met that stare with one of his own, but nothing happened. I probably just gave the little guy a tiny smile and dropped my gaze.
According to Michael, the Grand Master Knight met Carlos Castaneda once – they allegedly each recognized a kindred spirit. Determining the quality of that spirit is an exercise left to the reader. But, they supposedly talked for many hours.
This all went on for about a year or so. We had a couple of “retreats” at Ernie’s, where we’d basically do the stuff we did in the weekly meetings in more depth, or at least for longer, plus a break in the middle of the day where some of us cooked lunch, and the others undertook some manual labour. Apparently, the group owned a farm down the South Coast, where the higher initiates had longer and more intense retreats.
We were also asked to bring an envelope to the meetings containing an amount of money of our choice as a donation to Crash. I usually gave five or ten dollars. I was told later that Knights were expected to pay a tithe of ten percent of their income. I can’t verify that.
We were seeking the mysticism of the New Man. Which was so subtle as to be almost indiscernible from the mysticism of the Old Man, or the life of any regular working stiff, for that matter.
Then I got a call from Alick on a Saturday morning out of the blue. You’re not supposed to call me, I thought.
He had been on a retreat at the farm with Ernie and Michael, during which he underwent the apotheosis from Squire to Knight. While the meetings I attended were benign and reasonably friendly affairs, this retreat apparently was full on, heavy, and highly pressurized. Alick came out the other end feeling empty and betrayed, his whole belief structure having apparently been exposed as an elaborate construction of emptiness. He told me he had left Crash and wanted to discuss it with me. Immediately I started to think of other ways I could spend the time and energy I was putting into Crash activities, without the constraints of Crash schedules, and agreed.
We all met up at someone’s house, not Alick’s, and spent the rest of the weekend getting pissed off with Crash, Ernie, Michael, and ourselves for being so gullible, stupid, and easily led. It wasn’t just Crash, but so much of civilization that made us follow such silly ideas blindly. We descended on the residences of the various other aspirants of Crash like a pack of wolves and shattered and poured scorn on their delusions about the group, and the illusory self images of superiority that they had created about their membership of it, and their “spirituality”.
Alick was particularly cruel and uncompromising in his demolition of their ideas. He could be a charismatic and persuasive speaker. When one guy hung tough, Alick got a painting dropsheet and hardware store steel chain from his car and decked him out in them in a parody of the Grand Master Knight’s outfit. No mercy. Amazing that no one called the cops.
Alick also made several subsequent trips to Ernie’s house and harangued him from the street. The guy who had got the sheet and chain treatment from Alick was at Ernie’s during one of these times, and came out to confront Alick. Alick grabbed a piece of wood from his truck and went ballistic on him, not hitting him, but hitting the ground all around him. The other guy freaked, turned and ran. One of the neighbours came out, but, according to Alick, seemed to understand what Alick was upset about, and sided with him.
I got home late on the Sunday night of that weekend. I felt like I’d had the skin ripped from my body.
I woke up when I felt like it the next day. I felt like submitting to no authority, and was totally frazzled, after that weekend. I had zero guilt taking a sickie, and went to the beach. If you are searching for the divine and transcendent, there are many less likely places to find it than out in the ocean, where the waves are breaking, on a beautiful Australian sunny day.
My former belief systems and attitudes to life and other people had been vaporized. Rather than feeling suddenly lost and cast into outer darkness, I felt drunk on freedom. Possibilities were infinite, and what I decided to do with them was my choice alone. I would take no orders and submit to no norms.
I am a strong introvert but decided to start pushing back in various areas of my life. Instead of being quiet and shy, I tried being loud and obnoxious. I would sneer at anyone I felt was following a doctrine or following the crowd and not thinking for themselves. I hit a large number of false positives and probably burned a whole conflagration of bridges.
Religious people got nothing but the white heat of my scorn.
Alick told me some Mormons had the misfortune of knocking on their door shortly afterwards. Alick and his wife invited them in and did their best to demolish their belief system and psyches. The two poor bastards would not have been remotely prepared for such concentrated philosophical and psychic aggression coming back at them. Having the door slammed in their faces would, I suspect, have been infinitely preferable.
Pushing back and punk rock were two things I soon discovered were linked. I eschewed Steve Hillage and took up with the Sex Pistols. I really liked The Clash. “Safe European Home”, “I’m So Bored with the USA” and “Police and Thieves” got heavy rotation at high volume on my stereo.
It got to the point where after a few months, a good friend told me I was too angry and rude all the time, I was pissing off many and scaring a few, and that I’d better start dialling it back. I got better at seeing where assertiveness stopped and aggro began, stopped jumping at shadows, and became more adept at staying out of the danger zone. I was never a natural extrovert anyway.
Alick’s wife made a great observation. This was the real mysticism of the New Man. Staring unfettered reality in the face, without dogma, or anyone else telling you what you should perceive. Just you and It.
We are tribal animals. Without other humans and group membership, we are dead. Belonging to a society requires a certain subjugation of our impulses and selfish desires. Even rebels seek the companionship, and adopt the mores and fashion, of like-minded rebels. Sociopaths are among the few exceptions, and even they need the rest of us to exploit. I could act conventional, work nine to five, wear a business suit and all the rest, but that didn’t have to be me, that could be a mask. I could think and feel how I damn well pleased, underneath the costume and the role.
Truly living and thinking for yourself is very hard.
A related video has Tony Robbins addressing a huge crowd, taking them through a mantra of sorts:
Tony: I will lead, not follow!
Crowd: I WILL LEAD, NOT FOLLOW!
I was a total atheist and follower of strictly hard science for decades after. Arguably the wonders of the natural universe far exceed human imagination. There is way more than enough to induce awe and wonder. In later years, when I listen to Tool or view Alex Grey’s paintings, I now feel there is something else sacred to humanity, though I seek to feel, rather than explain or own it, let alone follow.
I am ambivalent about meditation and other spiritual practices. The value of them as a way to calm and stress relief seems well in evidence. These days smart marketers have been keen to sell mindfulness and meditation to governments as tools to produce more contented workers and citizens, that can work with greater efficiency and consistency, and deal better with external stresses. Google had its own meditation guy for a while. He wore funny robes to work, the whole bit.
According to these people, what matters is not the situation, but your reaction to it.
But, I contend, producing more contented and better adjusted slaves is not a legitimate purpose. If your external, objective, situation is bad, or even just sub-optimal, you could accept and mindfully tolerate it. But a less “woke” human might have the temerity to suggest that you would do better to GET OFF YOUR ARSE AND FUCKING FIX IT.
Most, if not all, human progress came from constructive discontent. Creative problem solving, not mindful problem “transcendence”.
Let your irritations inspire you.
Australian Jiu Jitsu pioneer John Will, BJJ Mental Coach Podcast
In my opinion, the purpose of meditation and related tools should be to awaken true awareness, and understanding of yourself, and a revolution from within. To some degree at least, you are swimming against the stream and social conditioning, be it from a government, corporation … or spiritual organisation.
Stoicism is pretty popular at the moment. But, it too, to my mind, is open to co-option by those who wish to manipulate, or who wish to hide from what needs to be done. Being able to handle a level of suffering without change of attitude or expression, doesn’t necessarily mean that you should.
Another lesson I take from this is not to seek a guru, never to subjugate your own will and critical thinking ability to any other single person or organisation. The Church of the Subgenius is a parody religion, though a highly successful, sophisticated, and amusing one, but it does have at least one very useful concept – that of the Short Duration Personal Saviour, or shordurpersav. You can follow many people during your life, and different people in different situations.
You can ask:
- What would Jesus do?
- What would Guatama Buddha do?
- What would Nelson Mandela do?
- What would Bruce Lee do?
- What would Ellen Ripley do?
- What would John Danaher do?
- What would Keanu Reeves do?
- What would John Wick do?
- What would Deadpool do?
No, they don’t have to be alive, or real. Find someone who gives you the inspiration or qualities you need to deal with your current issues or situation, and follow or model them. For a while. You can even be your own Short Duration Personal Saviour, following your former self back at a time when you dealt with a certain situation particularly well.
No one has all the answers. NO ONE. But, a host of ShorDurPerSav’s might come pretty close. Just remember, you are in charge. You do the hiring and firing of ShorDurPerSavs. And maybe rotating them regularly is a good idea.
With this in mind, I saw Alick, once my guru, infrequently for the next decade or so. I realized I had uncritically followed him into Crash, and uncritically followed him out again. I would not uncritically follow him anywhere else.
My experiments with personality change and pushing back, as well as gaining some maturity, started to work for me. I married well, a girl at work, my IT career started to blossom.
With a few hiccups of varying sizes, my involvement with martial arts was a healthy obsession that gave me an insight into life beyond polite society, and life as a corporate drone. It became a vehicle towards individuation, self-actualization and self-transformation, in every sense, even the physical.
Things pretty much worked out extremely well. I was, on the whole, pretty happy, and felt secure within myself.
Then Alick, or actually, a mutual friend and former Crash member, called me out of the blue. Alick’s wife had moved out, and had filed a complaint of assault against him. The mutual friend suggested I could supply him with a character reference. I did. The charges were dropped pretty quickly in any case. I went to Alick’s house and hung out with him maybe every second weekend or so for a few months.
He was renting the rooms of his house out to overseas students. He was sleeping with one of them, a girl in her twenties. He wanted to party all the time, weeknights, work nights, school nights, whatever. His house was full of strangers, some of whom were obvious scumbags and leeches. His teenage kids and their friends ran amok. I had underage girls flirting with me, which was just sad.
It was way too crazy for me and most of his other friends from back in the day. A fifty year old man running around like an irresponsible teenager is not someone you want to spend a lot of time with. Every mutual friend had several horror stories about this new incarnation of the Alick we once all looked up to.
Other male friends of mine from that group had got divorced around that time (from women who had also been in the group) and rented out rooms in their houses in the same way. Two of them ended up in happy and fulfilling relationships with their tenants, one with a Chinese girl, the other a Korean.
Alick managed to fuck his opportunity up comprehensively, and with considerable haste and collateral damage.
He got the overseas student he was living with pregnant. She had the kid and tried to make it work, but got jack of the chaos, and went back to her parents in Malaysia, taking the kid with her.
I moved house in late 1999, and returned to the old place one last time to collect the answering machine. Upon it was recorded a long and abusive tirade from Alick telling me I was ignoring my old friends and was a complete arsehole. I wiped the message, left the house forever, and didn’t return the call. I got a new, unlisted, phone number.
Life went on. And life was good.
Alick’s ex wife and two of his four kids are my friends on Facebook. I recently asked her if she knew if Alick was still around. I thought the odds of him being dead were better than even.
Apparently neither she nor any of his kids save the youngest daughter talk to him, and the daughter lives nine hours drive away. He now has basic accommodation on the Central Coast, but was living out of a car for a long time. “As mad as ever,” was the ex wife’s quote.
Edit: Some REALLY evil shit went on with Alick which I only just found out about. Think of the most terrible family dynamic you possibly can, then ramp it up by a factor of five. Yep, that bad. Gaslighting, violence, abuse, damage, exploitation, the whole gamut. There is a story there, but it’s not mine to tell.
On a positive note, this song and band totally kick arse. And this recording is so much better than the official video.