In May, 2020, Robert Breedlove, 87, and his wife Patricia Breedlove, 80, were murdered in their Grass Valley home by Patricia’s troubled son, Dennis Lee Wallace. The cause of death was blunt force trauma. Wallace, who had been living in a trailer on the Breedloves’ property, was charged with double homicide and sent to prison.
The name Breedlove should ring a bell: Robert was the father of SF punk legend and trans activist Lynn Breedlove, whose raucous dyke band Tribe 8 helped define the queercore movement in the 1990s, and who went on to form band The Homobiles, which just performed at the soon-to-be-closed Thee Parkside this past weekend; launch a nonprofit queer-centric ride share service (the first), also called Homobiles, to help protect drag queens on the way to gigs; and publish several books, including the Lambda Award-winning Lynnee Breedlove’s One Freak Show.
With such an expressive punk rock pedigree, it’s no surprise that Breedlove would turn to music and poetry to process his father and stepmother’s brutal deaths. When I first put on the new album he made about the tragedy with local experimental duo The Living Earth Show as Trust Me, called Why I Like Dead Guys, I expected a howl of cathartic rage, a furious screed against the abject violence of fate.
What came out of the speakers, however, was a luminously detailed, sublimely tender meditation not just on his father’s murder and his tangled relationship with his stepbrother, but on many of the men—and other strong spirits—who Breedlove had encountered throughout his life. (Trust Me plays live Wed/25, 7:30pm at Roar Shack, SF. More info here.)
Looking back, that tenderness shouldn’t come as such a surprise from someone whose work has been steeped in searing honesty and radical empathy. Breedlove told the press after the murders: “I just want everybody to think good thoughts for the survivors of this family. They’re all suffering and in shock. Of course, we’re going to try to make sense of the nonsensical. But I think Bob and Pat would want us to remember, it’s about love, it’s about forgiveness, and compassion. Dennis will have to live with this—and that’s a terrible thing to have to live with.”
Astonishingly, the album and accompanying videos were recorded in the very home where the Breedloves were murdered. Over Travis Andrew’s gently melodic guitar work and Andy Meyerson’s gossamer percussion and keys (including glockenspiel and ancient Casio), Breedlove pours forth a stream of poignant memories and wry jokes. “Don’t get COVID, I said,” he reports from his last conversation with his dad on “Don’t Take It Personal,” just before he was killed.
Later, on the same song, Breedlove quips about his father and his stepbrother’s sentence, “I called a lesbian psychic channeler, and she said you said, ‘Well, at least he’s got a place to live now.’ I knew right then it was you, and psychics were real, because no one else would have the stones to say that shit, that quick.”
Elsewhere he sympathetically imagines his stepbrother’s fate in prison, details the complex feelings he had as a young queer person watching other boys act tough, takes late local club legend Matt Picon on a wild ride through the night as his Homobiles taxi whisked him from party to party, reflects on his hard-drinking grandmother, tells the story of a young man who moved back to the Midwest in the 1990s to die after an AIDS diagnosis, even relates the hilarious singalong tale of his “intact male” small-dog-with-balls Jay Snow, fawned over by his mom as she battled cancer.
The old punk spirit, and some acoustic heavy metal riffs, poke through at times, but while the lyrics can be lacerating, any potential bitterness is diffused by a jocular approach to the afterlife. The album ends with the title track. “Why I like dead guys: They’re safe to approach. You can tell ’em anything, and they don’t give you no back-yack or take offense. Such good listeners! Never need anything, always available to help when you call, never leave unless asked. Unobtrusive.”
“‘Why I Like Dead Guys’ is actually the first song we wrote for the album,” Breedlove told me over Zoom, accompanied but Andrews and Meyerson. “It’s kind of channeling the Tribe 8 days when we had a lot of anger toward men. There was a lot of chainsaw swinging. We had a song called ‘Dead Clothed Boys,’ as a response to ‘live nude girls.’ We would dress up boy go-go dancers like zombies. That particular piece is about being mad at man, but also loving men. Wanting to be men. Push-pull, love-hate, come close, get away. Why do you have to do that part? But that other part’s really cool!
“It’s also an allusion to my spiritual practice,” Breedlove said. “I’ve been just talking to my dad. Like he’s here. I’m walking around talking to birds. ‘Oh hey, Dad, a mockingbird. Oh, look at you, jumping around, doing a little dance and singing a little song.’ Not just men in particular, but being able to stay in conscious contact with the dead of any gender, which there isn’t any once you leave the body—who fucking cares?”
Andrews and Meyerson are also in a raucous, many-membered band called Commando with Breedlove, which describes itself as “gay nü metal,” but after writing a confessional ode to Prince, they decided to pursue working together as a trio, based on Breedlove’s longtime journalling practice, and wander down a quieter path. “We all had to stop performing together because of the pandemic,” said Meyerson. “And we had some tender phone calls with Lynnee when everything was happening. It felt like we got to know each other better during that time.
“When we could, we went up to Oregon, and we were sitting around the table,” said Meyerson. “Lynnee started reading from his journal and telling these stories, which led to more stories—what about that guy? And what about that guy? Travis would improvise a riff, I would start tapping on things around the kitchen table. It was a very organic process, and all these great stories and details just kept coming out.”
Andrews added, “It was important for the guitar lines to have melody to them, even when Lynnee wasn’t singing a melody. Or if not the guitar then the glockenspiel or this little messed up [SK1 Casio] synthesizer that Andy got off Craigslist. We heard that this famous composer from a long time ago had said ‘I don’t think I have any good melodies.’ And how could you say that after making all this music? The somehow spurred us to have melodies running through everything. It felt important.”
“I want say about the boys, as I like to call them, is how much they actually paid attention to the heart,” Breedlove said about Andrews and Meyerson. “It’s a really tender thing to ask people to pay attention to this. At first I was like, no one’s gonna want to see this, it’s just grief and heartbreak. But people do. They need to deal with it, and everyone’s dealing with grief and heartbreak in their own way. They were very tender to carry me through it.”
Recording at the Grass Valley house, when the idea came up, seemed the only option to capture the feeling of the album. “Luckily, it has excellent acoustics, like it was built knowing it would be used as a recording studio someday” Andrews said. While many might balk at visiting the scene, Breedlove had braved it from the beginning.
“When it first happened, I just went straight up there, and immediately just leaned in,” he said. “As I say in the song about Dad, I stood in the parts where the carpet had been cut out because of the blood. I thought, ’OK, what happened here. Let’s try to feel it.’
“I went up with my girlfriend at the time. My older stepbrother was already up there. And I was like, ‘We’re gonna clear the energy.’ We went all the way around the whole land, a couple, three acres, all the way around. Ringing a bell, doing woo-woo shit, clearing it out, praying.
“I slept on the porch like I always did, looked at the stars, and talked to my dad at night. I love sleeping out there. You wake up in the morning, and this light’s starting to stream through the trees. There’s hawks, and there’s blue jays, and there’s hummingbirds. It’s just magical, you know? Why wouldn’t I want to be up there? Why would I abandon that? They’re probably just hanging out there right now.
“When Pat’s family came up, they said, wow, we couldn’t even tell that anything bad even happened here. The energy was so clean and beautiful. It’s how I wanted to hold this whole thing, and this album, and their lives. It’s not how they died, it’s how they lived. That’s what’s important.”
Recording the album was one thing, but playing these intricate, intimate songs live—as they first did at Herbst Theater in February during the PIVOT Festival—is something else. “It’s amazing, fulfilling, and profound,” said Breedlove. “I’m used to jumping around, flailing around at the bar. Everyone’s in the pit moshing around and taking their clothes off, getting crazy. And then it’s over. But this is way more, OK, we’re going to bring it down. Calm, focus.
“My biggest fear was that I would stop and cry, and wouldn’t be able to keep up with the guys playing the music. Don’t fucking cry, just don’t fucking cry! I’ve done a lot of spoken word, I’ve read my books in front of people, I’ve done stuff with Sister Spit. I really do love it when people go, ‘Shut the fuck up, don’t be drunk in the back having your own conversations.
“At Herbst Theater, I could see my friends in the front row, laughing or crying, and I was like, woah, it was like opening up a space just for ourselves in this big fancy place. I could just feel the vibe. That’s the beauty of spoken word, and how quiet this music is. I don’t have to shout to get these songs across. You can just be present with people.
“Afterward, people came up and talked to us about all this grief they were holding onto, that they couldn’t release because they couldn’t have funerals during COVID, or dealing with multiple losses and traumas. They were thanking us. I guess I didn’t expect that. Just as important as letting people run around and yell and be pissed off, is also letting people be sad, and also laugh.
“Laughing and crying at the same time. I got a lot of that kind of feedback, which was cool. That’s my favorite. Make jokes about grief.”
TRUST ME Wed/25, 7:30pm, Roar Shack, SF. More info here.
