OUR SCREAMING YOUTH

OUR SCREAMING YOUTH

Back to the future with Pageninetynine’s Mike Prophet

Tim Abbondelo

It took half an hour before anyone knew they had illegally crossed into Croatia, when the border police, humorless and armed to the teeth, caught up to them.

By then a confrontation erupted, with the most violent burst being between two band members on the far-back bench seat. The year was 2002, and the band was the legendary Pageninetynine. That tour would have taken them to 52 shows across a dozen countries in nine weeks. But after numerous setbacks, any one of which would have derailed a group with less grit, the band ultimately canceled their remaining dates in the U.K. and flew home, defeated, to Virginia from Wolfenbüttel, Germany.

When the band originally split, rumors spread until an update filed under “news” appeared on their web page later that winter. Never the kind to come or go quietly, they announced three last shows, including a final one in D.C. that spring. Their fans scrambled, with some traveling internationally to attend. During the last song of their last show at Casa Del Pueblo United Methodist Church, the stage collapsed. Pageninetynine finished their set and nobody was hurt, neither of which goes without being said. (Full disclosure: I was there and performed in an opening band.)

Before I had ever heard Pageninetynine, I’d seen their name in the company of bands like His Hero Is Gone, Pig Destroyer, and Dystopia (all of whom, to their credit, sound like their names suggest) xeroxed across fliers for shows in the years leading up—then counting down—to Y2K. Before I ever saw a show or even caught a glimpse of the band, a friend’s account of Mike Prophet (né Taylor, Prophet being his nom de punk—a nod to Olympia, Washington’s Behead the Prophet NLSL) and his radical morning routine set the scene. The story went: Mike Prophet from Pageninetynine started every day the same, rising from bed and summoning all his strength to hock a giant loogie on an American flag that hung from his bedroom wall. My friend could swear to it, having seen the crusty flag in person at a house show in the Taylor family basement. By the time I finally heard Pageninetynine’s music, there was no questioning the tale’s veracity—or the immediate and outsize impact their songs were having on my teenage brain.

Across five impactful years (or high school, if you were held back a grade), Pageninetynine busied themselves with 14 releases (sequentially titled Document 1 and so on). They booked nine tours (themselves), played several hundred shows (typically on floors, sometimes out of necessity, though more striking when chosen over a stage), and turned a lot of heads (most often in a forwards-to-backwards banging motion). Since the band’s breakup in 2003, they’ve resurfaced only briefly, but something changed during their return to one-off festival appearances in 2023, which has led to present day and their most ambitious spate of shows since 2002. This April, Pageninetynine will return to Europe for a three-week tour, the first time since that breakup. With the addition of a fourth guitarist, it’s their largest lineup ever, set to conquer their longest run of shows to date.

It’s Inauguration Day, and I’m driving north toward D.C. from Richmond on 1-95 to interview Pageninetynine’s de facto leader, mouthpiece, and author of the band’s newsletter missives signed: lovemikeprophet. The traffic is as bad as you’d expect.

Unrelated save for a certain cosmic energy, David Lynch died four days ago, and today would have been his 79th birthday. Yet, knowing the late pompadoured auteur and transcendental meditationist believed that “life is a continuum, and that no one really dies,” his birthday it remains. To mark the occasion, Lynch’s family is hosting a global 10-minute meditation at noon. I don’t know how to meditate, but I turn off the radio and try to transcend my surroundings: all the cars, namely, an aggressive preponderance of trucks, to go with our crappy country right now.

It’s also Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, not to mention his Day. How typical, I think, that every four years MLK Day gets overshadowed by the day America thrones its king. My meditative thoughts spiral. I think about the evils that pervade around the globe. I think about how quaint the end of the world seemed last century. I think about stopping for lunch. I think about how the Lynch meditation is probably Pacific Standard Time, so I’m three hours early. I think about Pageninetynine and all the bands they’ve championed and spawned. I’m thinking about Ghastly City Sleep when my mom calls.

Are you driving? It sounds like you’re driving.

Yeah, I’m on my way to interview Mike Taylor in West Virginia.

Why is your tailor in West Virginia?

No, Mike Taylor. From Pageninetynine. From high school. Remember?

That’s great. Why are you interviewing him?

His band got back together and they’re going on a big tour in Europe.

The traffic is swapped for snow heading west on Route 17, with two hours to go. The suddenly rural surroundings and frozen shimmering vistas invite retrospection as much as they hint at straight-up nothingness: just a glint of cold, white expanse.

Even with more eyes on Pageninetynine now than ever before, the band will, arguably, never be as important to anybody else as they are to the members of Pageninetynine—past and present. But the renewed attention helps as their significance, maybe, ebbs and flows, shifting from old fans to new ones. I count myself in the company of the former and was in and around their circle-pit orbit long enough to be swept up and pulled in. (Fuller disclosure: I once joined Pageninetynine, impromptu, as their third vocalist for a show at the Dixie Tavern in New Orleans during the summer of 2001. They never had me back.) I’ve seen some of their reunion shows and missed others. I had my fill of nostalgia and remained full, oblivious to the next gen.

It feels right to talk to Mike about Pageninetynine’s return, since I met him first. Also, it’s unlikely the entire band will get together again before practice and their departing flights to Brussels. When I first asked Mike to share his story of Pageninetynine’s European escapades, he emphasized that there are seven other people who have their own versions, including valued band members Jonathan and Kevin, who haven’t joined the reunions.

For my part: I started booking Pageninetynine during high school at a variety of ill-equipped spaces without stages or reliable PAs. It started at the Kaffa House, an infamous Rastafarian dive bar on D.C.’s famous U Street, run by several men named Elias, which I now imagine was my mishearing “alias." Before long, Mike joined my teenage metal band to replace our Juggalo bass player. We played with Pageninetynine regularly and occasionally toured, but never for very long or far from our childhood homes. Still, it meant the world to us—and our parents, too, since Mike, in all his charm, was seen as a responsible role model (headline: teetotaler; withheld: flag defiler, or that at 24 he still didn’t have a driver’s license).

It’s my first time at Mike’s new place out of state, and I get the grand tour. I’m impressed but not surprised to find his wife’s framed concert posters—all jam bands that, put gently, don’t rank among Mike’s favorites— on display and in harmony with a Garbage Pail Kids Collectors Series 1A poster I know he’s been after for years. We end up in the record room, where he shows off the shelves reserved for the Cure and Madonna, along with a Born Against demo tape he traded for a copy of Document 1. A series of Madballs (the toy, not the band) is on display all along the built-in shelves to either side of where he’s seated in front of the Cramps’ Flamejob poster, and further flanked by his collection of Bloggins and miscellaneous monsters, a Gremlins lunch box, and a throng of Teen Wolf and Back to the Future action figures, still in their packaging. Mike adores Michael J. Fox and once described meeting the actor at a fan convention as the most nervous he’s ever been.

PG.99 EUROPEAN TOUR, 2002

“LOOK AT HOW FAR THIS BAND’S COME.”

I ask Mike what everyone in the current lineup of Pageninetynine’s role is, besides their instrument. He likes the question, which is good because it’s the only one I’ve prepared.

“Blake’s always been one of the two singers, and at this point, he’s kind of like the spirit,” Mike explains. “He’s also maybe onehalf of the people who think we’re the best band, no matter what.

“Chris, my brother, is the other half of the vocals,” he says. “If Pageninetynine were divided into four parts by what people cared about, a quarter of it is going to be Chris’ artwork and lyrics.” Indeed, few bands have imagery that takes on a life of its own, a la Black Flag’s bars or the Misfits’ skull. Chris is responsible for more than one Pageninetynine design of this ilk.

“Chris is kind of a tortured artist,” Mike adds. “Honestly, I think Johnny is that way too. Johnny’s like the backbone. Johnny’s like the architect. Or maybe I’m the architect,” he says, laughing. “But Johnny’s like the one thing you need to make it work.” I sense Mike getting ahead of things, or falling behind—Johnny bowed out of the band after a reunion in 2019. (Fullest disclosure: Today’s also Johnny’s birthday, but it doesn’t come up.)

“George is logistics. He’s a mechanical guy, so he used to always work on all the guitars. He can work on the vans. He’s also super responsible. He’s a band dad.

“Cory is the heart. Just like Blake, he believes that we’re utterly special, and he’s always earnestly humbled to still do it. He’s also Mr. Reliability, along with George.

“Brandon’s another beautiful artist. He’s a super creative writer and a captivating performer, too. He’s got an intensity about him. He’ll stand on the edge of the volcano for Pageninetynine.

“Andy loves playing with the guys. He’s kind of diagnosed the emotional intensity of the band, and he’s gotten pretty emotional and says, ‘Thank you for letting me be in this band.’ He is one of the most technically proficient drummers I’ve ever played with.

“Widman and Nate being in the band are the two most solid—they’re the wingmen,” Mike says, and I’d add that this is true of how they’re positioned in concert, at opposing ends of the stage. “Wid pushes us to get together more and play. He’s all positivity. He’s definitely very spiritual with the band,” Mike continues. “Nate is an embarrassment of talent who’s wasted in Pageninetynine. I hope that, with the new stuff, he dives in and writes.

“I would be the architect,” he says with a grin. “I’m the mover and the shaker. I book the shows, I write the songs, I essentially sculpt everything. But really, I am in a different role than I was.”

That’s it for my prewritten questions, and I sit there like a dolt waiting for Mike to have at Pageninetynine’s epic past, present, and future; where no detail is spared or greater meaning in their hero’s journey left unexplored. Mike starts near the end: the last time Pageninetynine toured Europe.

Looking back, that ill-fated trip can be read, variously, as a handy, clearly marked signpost or a mile marker; their own crossroads deal with the devil in the pale moonlight or choose your own “Life Is a Highway’’-esque metaphor. Whatever the case, it was pivotal and split the band’s existence into two parts that span out in opposite directions: before and after.

Going in, the premise of an eight-piece band between the ages of 18 and 25—many of whom had never traveled outside the country before—touring without a booking agent, manager, translator, GPS, or reliable access to banking, let alone smartphones to approximate all of the above, was foolhardy. But so was the band, at their core. Maximalism was always their guiding principle. “Pageninetynine was a very spirited band,” Mike tells me. “Every next show or next record or song, we wanted to be more over-the-top and weird or different to the point where it was just its own thing."

Mike explains that their formation was originally less auspicious, with two guitars, bass, and drums. Their having two vocalists was more so a product of the times, if you were in the market for a certain patently anti-capitalist brand of ’90s East Coast political hardcore band with dual male-female vocals. Mike name-checks Nausea, Mankind?, and Kill the Man Who Questions. It’s the later addition of a third (and eventual fourth) guitar and second bass that—to try to lend a term to the ineffable here—is Pageninetynine’s whole deal. On the road, it could also be a liability.

Coming off of thorough winter and summer tours in the States, Pageninetynine were primed, if not road-worn, when they landed in Trier, Germany, the first week of August ’02. Despite the early disappearance of Mike’s only guitar after a show with German death metal band Mörser (who’d discover and return it a few weeks later), he remembers the first 10 days going well, highlighted by shows with Submission Hold (a popular Canadian group) and a memorable festival in the French countryside of Luzy, a commune in Nievre, with hundreds of punk rockers congregated in a valley surrounded by rolling hills covered in sunflowers. There, true to form, Pageninetynine had a showstopping set, where they blew the power, repeatedly.

A new driver, van, and backline awaited Pageninetynine for the remaining month and a half of shows ahead. There was a day off in Saarbrücken to regroup. For some members that included partying in the capital city prior to embarking on the next leg of their tour in Spain. But before that could happen, their driver—not to mention ersatz guide and translator—quit, taking the van and backline with him.

“It was a comedy of errors from then on,” Mike says. The band’s disorder didn’t jibe with their driver or their European label, Scene Police (no surprise), who distanced themselves after the snafu. “We were fish out of water,” Mike says. “We didn’t really know how to act. And some of us were so young. In hindsight, being 18 or 19 years old and in Europe, and getting drugs and beer thrown at you, see how you withstand the fury of something like that.”

But they kept going. And after a show in Barcelona without a snare stand came that fateful wandering into Croatia. There a solemn armed guard stuck his head into the van window and was greeted by Johnny saying, “Fuck you, pig,” as he cracked open a can of beer. Simultaneously, Mike reacted and clocked Johnny in the back of the head. Another time, they followed the “directions” to drive to the center of Budapest and call their host on a pay phone. They waited and waited until finally they all started yelling the host’s name from the van and miraculously their host appeared, bounding down the street. Later that day Mike and Chris phoned home to the news that their beloved childhood dog Doc had died. Days later Blake had a sudden health emergency on the ferry from Travemunde to Malmo, one that nobody in the band took seriously until he was rushed through the Swedish border by authorities and taken to a hospital for strep throat. Still, after all that, they kept going.

“It was too much,” Mike says. “And you know, for what it’s worth, we left. So it wasn’t quite two months, because we quit 12 days early.” It was actually nine days early when, as Mike puts it, “we just decided that we were going to fly it back home. And at that moment,” he says, “everybody was happy and chill with each other.”

The night before, at their show in Wolfenbüttel, Mike watched Pageninetynine for the first time as a spectator. “There wasn’t enough equipment,” he says. “I think two people sat out, and I watched the band and I was just like, ‘I don’t wanna fucking do this anymore.’” Now Mike sees value in the experience. “Watching them play, but not playing with them, was incredible. It gave me a little perspective on what people may have thought of our band. I was completely captivated.”

Mike believes the band effectively ended when he hit Johnny in Croatia, but also that they probably didn’t have to break up over it. "I remember thinking, ‘This is the way to salvage the friendships,'" he says. “Knowing what I know now, all that band needed was to take a break from each other and get back to it. But we were so gung ho."

PG.99 STATESIDE SHOWS 1998-2001

Pygmy Lush, the band Mike started with fellow onetime Pageninetynine members, including Johnny, will have been together for 20 years next fall. “One of our mantras the whole time is: No matter what happens with this band, it doesn’t break up. There are just hiatuses,” Mike says. “And that just meant that we loved each other, and we were going to give each other space. And that, we learned from Pageninetynine.”

“I was definitely a bully and ruled with an iron fist,” Mike says of his decision to break up the band. “I know that now a hundred percent. I think Mannequin and then Pygmy Lush, those bands continued to help me grow from Pageninetynine and not be like the dictator or whatever.”

These hard-earned lessons from Pageninetynine’s swan song of a European tour have been easily employed for their triumphant return. Gear and transportation are covered, with enough amps to go around and a pair of vans. People know about the shows, and they’re selling out. A new generation of Pageninetynine fans, however, isn’t something anyone counted on. Mike characterizes their previous reunions more as a rehash of the past, with a crowd that had grown up with them. When the band returned in 2023, something new developed. “The shows were mostly attended by a much younger crowd, a much more diverse crowd,” Mike explains. “We’re a bunch of old cis white dudes, and we appreciate them letting us be here for this. Being a part of this new scene,” he says, “we’re learning a lot more, and to be accepted in that gives us life again."

Broadly improved resources and newfound support will go a long way in this tour’s success, but so will Mike’s more democratic and cool approach to the band. “All the personalities combined collectively make the right decisions now. It doesn’t have to be me pushing the band too far. ”

This played out at Fest—that eponymous festival in Florida endlessly doing the “Who’s on first?” bit—last fall, when the band had to decide yea or nay to play an unofficial latenight after-party in a parking lot. It would potentially violate their Fest contract, along with eliminating any chance of a full night’s sleep before their next long drive. Mike voted not to play, but a majority of the band wanted to do it. “Look at how far this band’s come, where we make this adult decision to stay up till, like, five in the morning to play the most absurd show. And you know what? It was worth it,” he says. “It was the best show we’ve played since we’ve been back." On reflection Mike admits, “That conversation wouldn’t have happened 25 years before. It would have been an uncomfortable one. Probably with me ruling with an iron fist and not knowing if people wanted to play or not, because I never asked.”

Sunday and Monday are Mike’s days off from his job as a chef; a term he doesn’t use himself, but it accurately sums up his role running a kitchen. More recently, Mondays are his day for band stuff, which has expanded to include a three-day music festival called Dark Days, Bright Nights, hatched last year in Richmond with Paul Hansbarger (who runs Persistent Vision Records). It was a success, and they’ve announced the follow-up next fall. Mike is quick to divulge a few highlights they’re working on, off the record. But I can tell you he’s psyched.

When asked about Pageninetynine’s influence in an interview from 2003, shortly after their last show, Mike stated: “Honestly, I don’t think it will last. Few bands have staying power and stand the test of time. But if you told me that Pageninetynine records would still sound fresh and powerful 10 years from now, like how Born Against still destroys me every time I listen to them today, then I’ll be happy. Until then I honestly think they are there for the young kids when they need them.”

Present-day Mike can happily check all those boxes. Pageninetynine records still sound fresh and powerful, at least to somebody (and really, it’s more somebodies now than ever); he still celebrates Born Against’s entire catalog; and yes, Pageninetynine records, along with the band, are still here, for now, as needed.

Mike knows the makeup of a band and the connection to its fans are as fragile as they are ephemeral. Inspired by the next generation, he’s written new Pageninetynine songs and shares his hope to debut one or two on tour. “If it brings us to a full album, that’s what I’d like to do,” he says, stretching out his legs and crossing his feet. “This is my legacy. This is my baby.”

“THIS IS MY LEGACY. THIS IS MY BABY.”