Please, please, please never forget Jack Terricloth.
"Not a damn thing you can do about it, except remember."
I walked into the bar on Bushwick Ave. and he was the first person I saw. There was no missing him. He was seated on a stool, swirling ice cubes around in his glass. He had a pale complexion and a dark suit. This was his regular spot and all the bartenders knew him by name. Or, at least, the name he gave people. I walked up and sat beside him. “Jack Terricloth?” I asked. What a silly thing to say. Who else would he possibly be?
Jack Terricloth, eccentric leader of the New York ensemble The World/Inferno Friendship Society, was like no one else on earth. He passed away this week at the age of 50, which still seems impossible. He was a mythical figure. How can a myth die?
Whenever Jack took the stage, the first thing you saw was that grin. It was a maniacal ear-to-ear smile that said, “This right here is my stage, but I will graciously share it with you all this evening.” He was a one-of-a-kind performer. Part vaudevillian ringleader, part punk frontman, and a born showman.
The World/Inferno Friendship Society did not draw in casual fans. To experience them even once was to fall in love with them. I saw them many times over the last two decades, the most memorable of which was in a tent on the East River in Manhattan in 2006. I brought three friends along who’d never heard of them, and I refused to give them much of a primer. I wanted the music and the show to speak for themselves. I remember so vividly when the band started playing “Ich erinnere mich an die Weimarer Republik.” I grabbed my friend Kristin by the hand and pulled her into the mess of people. We danced and sweated along with everyone else, and I saw in her eyes in that moment that she was sold. Jack’s energy was infectious. He would not allow anyone to leave without becoming a World/Inferno convert.
There are so many tall tales about Jack and World/Inferno. So many, in fact, that it was a bit difficult to prepare for the interview he and I did in the darkest corner of that dark Brooklyn bar. It was a challenge to separate the legend from the reality, and Jack liked it that way. We talked for about two hours and he gave me endless stories and one-liners. So many Jack-isms. I realized then that the grinning man I’d watched on stage so many times over the years was no persona. That’s who he was. Total devotion to his art.
He told me the story of the infamous Coney Island show:
It’s happened to us so many times—we’re supposed to be playing someplace and sometimes we’re booked as a jazz band and the club is not prepared for punk rockers dancing, which is all they’re doing. And the dumbass owner, who I found out later was a mobster and was on The Sopranos—how funny is that? His name in Sopranos was Cha Cha, and we were playing Cha Cha’s. It was just a normal show—kids were slamdancing. And the guy was like, “You’re wreckin’ my club! What the fuck? You gotta tell the kids to stop!” And I was like, “That’s the exact opposite of my job, to get the kids to stop dancing.” And he said, “Well, if you don’t do it, I’m gonna fuckin’ turn off the PA.” And I said, “If you turn off the PA, you’re gonna have a fucking riot.” And then we did the next song, which unfortunately—it wasn’t planned like this—was “Zen and the Art of Breaking Everything in This Room.” We started it and the kids didn’t do anything that unusual, they were just dancing. And Mr. Cha Cha turned off the PA.
And it was a packed house. And the kids literally did rip up the place. So to save the fucking club—because they really were wrecking it—I said, “OK, acoustic instruments out.” And we did a marching band thing out to the boardwalk, because Cha Cha’s was in Coney Island. So I led the riot out onto the boardwalk. But I go back in and the guy is screaming at me. And I’m like, “I just fucking saved your club!” And then he threatened to keep our equipment for the damages. And I said, “Absolutely fucking not. I told you this would happen!” And he said, “You don’t know who I am. I’m a made man!” Which, later, that turned out to be true. But at the time, I was like, “You’re not a fucking made man. You’re an actor!” So we did get all our equipment.
Oh! And the best part of this story. The guy hired a publicist to call every club we were playing for the next month and a half on tour and said, “These guys are monsters. They’re gonna wreck your club. You have to cancel the shows.” So every night, we’d get to the club and someone would be like, “We have to talk to you, we hear you’re very violent.” And we’re guys in suits and pretty girls. We’d send the ladies in to talk to them, and they’re very charming. Not one show was cancelled. But this guy did more work than any publicist I’ve ever hired! We got so much press out of it that after the tour, I called the guy and said, “You were fucking great! Can we hire you?”
He told me about becoming friends with Laura Jane Grace, which always makes me laugh:
How did you meet Laura?
Oh, we met in the middle of a brawl.What?
Yeah, I have no problem telling this story. This was right when [Against Me!’s] big record hadn’t come out yet.New Wave?
No, no, no, though we were on that tour too. The Axl Rose one. Which, by the way, Axl Rose—I don’t know why they put that on the cover, bleh. But anyway, we were playing a big festival in Asbury Park, New Jersey—like, 20 bands. Inferno’s on stage and the sound crew had no idea how to deal with horns. So the linecheck took forever. The next band was supposed to go on and they apparently had someplace to be. And their name is Snapcase, from Buffalo, New York. They came up and wanted to play, and unplugged our guitar player’s amplifier, at which point, our guitar player, Lucky Strano, punched the guy in the face, which is completely reasonable. So bam! And then all of Snapcase start jumping on Lucky, at which point, the rest of our band starts beating up Snapcase. So now we’re in front of 4,000 people, not playing music, getting in a gang fight. So Against Me! all get on stage and start fighting Snapcase. So there was a fight on stage that lasted longer than our set. And Laura and I have been friends ever since.
And he told me stories about making some of my favorite records. Records that are truly unique and unlike anything I’d ever heard. I am not prone to recalling how I first heard most bands, but I so distinctly remember hearing World/Inferno for the first time. I walked into my college’s radio station. My friend Nick, a mohawked punk in combat boots, was starting his show and slid a CD into the tower. The garbled intro to “Tattoos Fade” started playing and I said, “What is that?” And from then on, I was hooked.
I think my experience was fairly atypical. Most people find the band’s live show first, and work their way back to the records after witnessing the sheer force of Jack’s stage power. But I did it in reverse order. That prompted one of the questions I asked him: whether he’d like to be remembered for his records or his live show. He said this:
“I will die eventually. I’d prefer the albums to last. To be fair, people do seem to enjoy the live show more. But in the end, the albums should stand out more, and I guess time will tell.”
So I’m writing this to say: Put a World/Inferno album on today and they will live forever. The band was a New York institution. They changed so many lives and built a community. They were a family. Help carry that on.
And please, please, please, never forget Jack Terricloth. There was no one else like him. Raise a drink and swirl your ice cubes around. Remember the way he grinned and commanded the room with his microphone when he welcomed everyone to The World/Inferno Friendship Society.
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Thanks, Dan. As usual, you got it right from go. Myths don't die. Jack Terricloth will live forever. I think Pete knew that, too. "What better place than this? What better choice than us?"
That was beautiful Dan