The following is the full text of an article written by "The Phantom Reviewer" for The San Francisco Club Scene (now out of print).

Last Rites/John C. Lind

First things first, Last Rites is John C. Lind, and John C. Lind is Last Rites – without him the band does not exist. I’ve been a fan of Last Rites for some time, ever since I first heard rumors about a new “guitar legend” playing in some of the local punk dives. That’s not to say Last Rites is a punk band, far from it, but they’ve come out of that crowd. I’ve talked with John, or JC, as he sometimes offers, off and on for a while and I’ll include portions throughout the article.

“I was never really into the punk thing. Honestly, it seems to be an excuse to be obnoxious. I did like the Sex Pistols, tho. I thought they were pretty amusing. I was a lot more influenced by Joy Division, which wasn’t really a punk band. I’ve heard it called ‘new romantic’, or some such bullshit. What the hell was that, anyway? The shortest trend ever (laughs)”

The influence is there, but it’s obvious his main influence is Jimi Hendrix. In fact, some of his early ads for musicians posted in Rough Trade records said “Joy Division + Jimi Hendrix.” It doesn’t end there, however, you can hear traces of Motorhead, music of the Middle East, Iron Butterfly. That’s what makes the sound so unique.

So it was in late ’83 or ’84 when I first heard a demo from a new band, Last Rites, called “The Pillar of Fire”. It was a fairly straightforward song with a wall of sound guitar and JC’s trademark apocalyptic lyrics. Then a few weeks later another demo arrived, “The Iron Tree”. “Holy shit, this is scary stuff!” we all agreed. To see the guy you’d never guess it. He’s very understated, except for his eyepatch, which he says is the result of being assaulted on Dolores St. in ’81. He wears a leather biker’s jacket, but absent the buttons and pins that everyone else wears. There’s no clue that this is the writer of some of the heaviest acid rock I’ve ever heard.

The Iron Tree, he explains, is the story of the Virgin Mary descending into Hell to see the sinners and the tortures they endure. Uh, wow! He says he got the idea from a Russian literature class he took at SFSU. He does speak Russian, by the way, having learned it in the USAF at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey.  “I had a chance to get into the CIA, but they scared me off with their talk about assassinations and stuff. It’s not exactly the sort of stuff I care to be around. Let’s just say I didn’t like the occupational hazards I’d have to assume ... a conscience can definitely get in the way in that line of work”. When he got out of the service, he moved to SF from Monterey and eventually started Last Rites.

So what makes Last Rites so scary? They don’t wear strange costumes or otherwise give any indication of the darkness of their music, although their flyers hint at it. I finally put my finger on it, it’s the sound of JC’s guitar, more than anything, plus his lyrics. He’s known for using all sorts of effects, and whatever it is he does, it really gets to you. The sound is vast, overwhelming, intoxicating – it takes you places. You have to surrender to it.

My guitar player friends say it’s probably a combination of the endless sustain he gets from his amps and his fuzz/distortion pedals. He uses several for different sounds. Then there’s his echoplex, which he later replaced with a couple of digital delays. It gives a vastness that’s unmatched by any other guitar player I’ve heard. And I’m not just talking about local bands, but any I’ve heard anywhere.

But there’s still more. Lots of guys use lots of effects. JC is the only one, however, who seems to get an infinite range of sounds from them. The first time I heard him at the old Sound of Music in the Tenderloin, it was in the early days of Last Rites when they’d just play 3 or 4 songs, and jam to fill the time. The prevailing mood of the day was solidly anti-jam bands, but they’d never heard Last Rites. Not knowing quite what to expect, I was stunned to hear, and SEE, with my own eyes, a guitar player on the level of Hendrix, Van Halen, Jeff Beck, you name it. I’m known for being reserved in my praise of guitar players, but I’m comfortable making these comparisons. I’m not even sure Van Halen could keep up – JC’s solos make Eddie’s meanderings appear childish, trivial. JC takes you on an excursion into unexplored realms, while Eddie VH just strings one flashy lick after another and tries to pass it off as a solo. I’m going to go out on a limb and put him above even Jimmy Page on some levels. I’ve seen Led Zep live a few times and was always disappointed that Page couldn’t do a decent solo. JC’s got him beat in that respect by light years.

Where JC really shows his Hendrix influence is in the howls, moans and groans, and the feedback he wrenches out of the amp. This is what also reminds me of Jeff Beck, back in his early days with the Yardbirds. Then JC’s fingering is very Hendrix-esque, but there are also major differences. Whereas Hendrix was heavily rooted in the Blues, JC is not nearly so, if at all. I guess all rock is somewhat derived from the Blues, but when you hear JC play, the Blues is not what immediately comes to mind.

There’s something off about his sound, well, not off, but almost otherworldly. He explained it once, “I use a lot of church modes. I stumbled upon them accidentally. I used to compose a lot in E minor, but so many guys use that already that I wanted to try something different. So I shifted the whole thing down two frets and liked how that sounded, plus it worked out well on the neck. Later I looked in a music book and found out it was this weird church mode called Locrian. It said it was the ‘Devil in music’. Sure, why not?” He adds, “I also discovered I used a lot of jazz picking techniques. Once I read in Guitar Player about something called slip picking. ‘Hey, that’s that I’ve been doing’, I thought. I also like playing octave notes instead of chords. It sounds really nice on a Strat with single coil pickups. That’s actually a jazz thing, too. Listen to Wes Montgomery or George Benson.” I’d never have guessed there were any similarities between those two jazz greats and JC!

One of the problems Last Rites has encountered has been in keeping a consistent bass player. “The problem with a lot of bass players is that they want to go all over the neck. Well, if I’m going all over the neck, and the bass is all over the neck, you just can’t follow it unless it’s really worked out note for note. You can’t discern the accents. What we need is someone who’ll keep up the rhythm end of the song. Too many guys these days want to do funky, dance stuff. That’s fine if you like it, but it’s not what Last Rites is about.

Then there’s the problem with guys who want to change the band to their own suiting. Several times we’ve had guys who will at first agree that they’ll play what we want, but then after a few rehearsals they expose their hidden agendae, and suggest adding backup vocals. Once again, backup vocals is fine if that’s what you like, but it doesn’t work in Last Rites. Let’s say we give in and let the guy do backup vocals, meaning, of course, I gotta change the songs around to work it in. What happens if he leaves and the next guy CAN’T do backup vocals?

Plus, what kind of annoys me is that these guys think, at least some do because they’ve made it apparent, that they can step into an established situation and change it around to suit their own tastes. That’s really disrespectful of all the time I’ve put into this, writing the songs, getting the people together, everything. I’ve always made it clear up front, this is what we’re doing. We get the existing material down, THEN we work on new stuff, and we’ll discuss then what happens. We had a bass player, Dave, who was a nice guy, played really well, and after a while it was apparent he had a lot of his own ideas. As time went on, he grew more dissatisfied because he wanted to work on them, but they just didn’t fit with what we’d been doing. I’m not saying they were bad, just that they didn’t fit with what we’d already done. Finally we agreed to part company. I wished it didn’t have to come to that, because he was a nice guy, but it’s all part of having a band.”

It’s true that Last Rites is definitely not following the trend that a lot of others have followed when it comes to a “danceable” sound. It takes a lot of guts to present something that’s really different, but some of the most successful bands ever have done just that. JC is an individualist, if nothing else. He is clearly not the least bit interested in anything resembling a trend, and has told me he even distrusts them in general. I asked why, then, does he seem to follow the trend and wear a bikers jacket, like so many other rock musicians. “I like ‘em,” he replies, “it just so happens a lot of other guys do too”. Good enough for me.

In ’87, Last Rites began renting out their PA to the Rock on Broadway theater, above the old Mabuhay. I was amazed to see how they’d amassed a large amount of nice equipment, and that JC had maneuvered them into a really prized position. Not only did they make some cash on the weekends providing PA services to the club, they also had free rehearsal space in a theater during the week – NOT BAD! I can’t think of another local band that managed to set themselves up so nicely. I was convinced that this would only lead to a major deal in short order. I recall how another local act, The Seahags, had managed a great deal with Chrysalis, and there was little dispute that Last Rites could blow them off the stage any day. JC was running the PA and became the de facto stage manager. He related to the other bands really well because he was a musician himself. He could be firm or conciliatory as the situation demanded.

But there was trouble on the horizon. The club’s future was in jeopardy as it became a pawn in the politics of the SF Filipino community, and there were internal problems in Last Rites itself. They were still without a permanent bass player, but finally came across Shawn Malone, who fit in really well. “He’s just what we’ve been looking for, “ said JC. But JC’s partner and drummer of 5 years (name deleted) was showing signs that all was not well. In the spring of ’88 the Rock on Broadway finally stopped putting on shows and Last Rites moved back into Jump rehearsal studios on Folsom.

I ran into JC in the fall of ’88 and asked how the band was doing. “It’s not, at this point,” he stated with resignation. “What happened?” I inquired. “Oh, (name deleted) finally quit, after 5 years of work.” He further explained that there were, shall we say, differences in opinion regarding the use of certain controlled substances. “I used to be really open minded about that, and I’m not going to say I haven’t done my share of experimentation, but I never liked needles. It’s a really shit for brains thing to do these days with AIDS and stuff. So the first junkie fucks me over and I think, ‘ok, that was that one guy’. Then the next, and I think, ‘well, that was TWO guys’.  Then the third one fucks me over and I have to admit that there’s a pattern to all of this. It’s like a curse, more heroin junkies have caused this band problems than anything else, by far! Now if I even suspect someone’s a junkie, I won’t have anything to do with him.”

I was really sad to hear this, because I, and lots of others, were looking forward to Last Rites breaking into the national scene. Some of JC’s ideas for a large venue were really exciting, and I have yet to see any other band do anything even remotely approaching what he had in mind. Part of his ideas revolved around having a dark stage, as opposed to the super bright, lights on motors shows that are too common today. He also talked about using the snare to trigger a strobe to hypnotize the audience. THAT I’d like to see!

We kept in touch off and on and in ’91 he said he was returning to Florida for a variety of reasons. He’s from there, and said he could stay in his grandmother’s house for free because she was in a convalescent home. SF had gotten too expensive, and he’d put too many other aspects of his life on hold. He wrote me later on that he’d returned to school to finish his BA in Russian. He also promised that he would eventually pick up from where he left off and finish what he’d set out to do. I believe he will, for it’s clear that this music is the core of his being and he’ll never be happy until it’s been brought to a more satisfying stage of completion. He speculated that he’d produce a CD eventually, and then at least he’d have decent copies of his stuff. I sure hope so, because we need more of this kind of music. It's also painfully obvious that the situation with (name deleted), his drummer of 5 years, and the substance problems really hit him hard.

"I never expected to have this sort of problem with him, but sure enough, it happened. It really hurt me in a lot of ways because it caused divisions in the band, and when there are only 3 people in the band there's not much to divide! He and one bass player in particular, Mark (former drummer in a number of local bands who later turned to bass) got into heroin really heavily, and it caused all sorts of totally unnecessary tension. I warned them how they were playing Russian roulette, and sure enough, Mark winds up dying of AIDS hardly 2 years later! The last time I talked with (name deleted), he was still in denial, deceiving himself into thinking that Mark had gotten infected from sexual contact. I was his roommate for 2 years, and I know what he was and was not doing. He got the AIDS from needles. What a total fuckin' waste of one's life! Honestly, tho, I got to where I didn't care. He'd changed so much that he wasn't even the same person I'd been friends with since 1980. (Name deleted) changed too, and I don't know if I'll ever be able to completely forgive him. I gave up a lot to pull this off, and to see it all imperiled by some bullshit like heroin really burns me up."

He also added, “I could have gone to LA and gotten into some existing metal band, or let some producer turn me into his idea of what a ‘hit band’ should be, but I’d never have been happy with it. Either I’d have to dress up in Spandex and look like something from comic book, all the while feeling like a total fuckin’ idiot! Or I’d have to play some shit I couldn’t care less about. The danger is that once you get identified with a certain sound or style, it’s very difficult to break away from.”

I sure couldn’t imagine JC playing anything other than what he wants. “Hell, it’s the whole damn reason I STARTED this band to begin with, to hear what I wanted to hear. Shit, not just started the band, but first started playing the guitar. Well, I also was really obsessed with trying to figure out how Jimi Hendrix got the sounds he did from a Strat. But I always knew inside that if I could just create the music I always had in my head, that it was a pretty sure thing others would like it too.”

He was sure right about that! We miss you. You owe us to finish this, and at least give us a CD of you songs...