Favorite Things: John Olson of Wolf Eyes and his original Jesus Figs demo

It was the summer of 1984. I just started skating with my friends. We were total nerds. Wearing loafers. Just dorks. Didn’t know about punk, didn’t know about anything. We were skating downtown East Lansing and this dude rolls up — it was Skater Dave. He’s like, “Hey you guy wanna skate a half-pipe?” And we said, “Nah, we don’t smoke man.” We didn’t even know what a fucking ramp was.

“It’s this wooden thing that’s really high, and there’ll be some other skaters there,” Dave said. So we skated with him. It was way the fuck down Abbot. We get there, I walk into the backyard and I hear “This Ain’t No Picnic,” by The Minutemen; I see skinheads and punks and I’m just like “What the fuck!” Back then, because nobody skated, everybody was cool with each other. It was just like, “Welcome to the community.”

They showed me and my homeboy how to drop in, and then at the end of the night they asked, “Do you want to go to a gig?” We didn’t even know what a gig was. We just said “Huh?”

They told us, “There’s gonna be free beer there and there’s a skinhead band playing.”

We just said, “Uh, all right.”

So we skate to the gig, it was only two blocks over. We go up, and it’s four skinheads on acid — we didn’t even know what acid was — playing in a kitchen on pots and pans with towels over them to mute them. The singer was just singing into a static TV screen; this went on for about an hour. They were passing out beers and me and my homeboy were like “Uh … What?!”

We went home, I woke up my mom and I said, “You’re not gonna believe my day. I know what I’m gonna be for the rest of my life.”

Fast forward to this summer. Dave is like, “Yo, I’m friends with somebody in The Jesus Figs. I’ll let you borrow the demo.” And up to this point, I haven’t been able to find any information about The Jesus Figs at all. Not only was that the first gig I ever went to, it was the first weird shit I experienced. To be honest, it’s such a magical thing I’ve never even listened to it. The image in my head is just too insane. That tape is the only thing they ever did. They didn’t even dub it. It’s the absolute original.

Interview condensed and edited by Skyler Ashley.