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Long before Fat Mike — the mohawked, frequently bratty, always larger-than-life frontman of NOFX — ever set foot on a stage, he was just little Michael John Burkett, an 8-year-old boy with a flair for the dramatic.
Roll the tapes back with us for a moment and witness the child, crouched in front of his parents' television set in Los Angeles, a cassette-tape recorder in hand, capturing the songs of The Rocky Horror Picture Show — the lyrics and innuendo of which he barely grasps. He's transfixed. He had caught part of the movie a week earlier, and then looked desperately through TV Guide to find out when he could see it again. He was waiting, finger on the record button, as the opening credits rolled.
"It was so fucking weird," the singer and bassist recalls now, two weeks before Home Street Home, his own musical — a project about 15 years in the making — is set to debut in San Francisco. "I just remember that I liked the songs so much. And then that was my only record for the next three or four years." His parents, he says, didn't even have a stereo.
No one would call Burkett "Fat Mike" for another dozen years. Nor did anyone have an inkling he'd grow up to front one of the longest-running and most celebrated bands in West Coast punk; co-founded a record label that issued compilations protesting the re-election of President Bush; or become known as much for his nonstop partying, onstage antics, and alcoholic-court-jester persona as for his songwriting, singing, and bass playing. (Examples of said antics: getting banned for life from Emo's in Austin for allegedly urinating into a bottle and then serving it to fans, crafting an alter ego as an evil clown who squirts cocaine out of his lapel flower and, most recently, kicking a fan who approached him onstage in Australia square in the face.)
But NOFX has been at it for 32 years, and when your band is known for the kind of behavior NOFX has become known for, there's a rather short list of things you can do that will shock people.
No. 1 on that list: Write an honest-to-goodness Broadway-style musical. A real one, a big one, with genuinely catchy, sweeping harmonies and choruses that conclude in a proud cascade of "nah-nah-nah"s. For extra shock factor, include the voices and instruments of about a dozen other punk-rock luminaries — members of the Descendents, Lagwagon, No Use for a Name, Alkaline Trio, Dropkick Murphys, Old Man Markley, Dance Hall Crashers, Hedwig & the Angry Inch's Lena Hall, and more — on the accompanying concept record and in the production's live band.
Believe this: Home Street Home, which debuts at Z Space in San Francisco Feb. 20 and runs through March 7 (opening night is already sold out) will catch punk fans by surprise if they go in expecting NOFX: The Musical. Sure, there's some teenage humor; the main characters, after all, are teenagers. It's also truly dark, heartbreaking, and challenging in places: The songs' lyrics and plotlines are heavy on abusive home lives and self-harm. Casual drug use, prostitution, and BDSM (bondage, dominance, and sadomasochism) also figure prominently. These themes are treated with a celebratory air in some parts of the play; in others, they're simply approached with pragmatism, a told-from-the-inside sense of veracity, and a rarely seen absence of moral judgment.
But at the end of the day, "Fat Mike" Burkett and his co-writers — the professional dominatrix and adult film actress Soma Snakeoil (Burkett's girlfriend), and Jeff Marx, the Tony Award-winning composer of Avenue Q — will tell you earnestly that Home Street Home is really a story about family. It's about finding the people who will love, accept, and protect you when your biological family can't, or won't. And if those people also happen to be teenage runaways who initiate you into group sex and hard drugs while living in a squat? Well, that's reality for you.
On a Wednesday afternoon two weeks before the musical's debut, Burkett has one eye on rehearsals and one eye on his phone. An employee at Fat Wreck Chords, his label, is giving him updates about reactions to the concept record, which is streaming online for the first time today. "They said it's getting a ton of shares on Facebook," Burkett reports, with a mix of surprise and relief.
Among the 15 or so other people milling about the rehearsal space, there's a conversation about whether or not it's common knowledge that Richard Pryor set himself on fire while on crack, and whether or not that would make for a funnier lyric in a musical number than the one currently in place about Aaron Sorkin's coke problem. Richard Israel, the play's award-winning director, gives actors verbal notes such as "Remember, the pee bucket is already going to be over there," and "Look toward the center, the tampon will be hanging from the chandelier."
Today is the day the actors are getting their punk haircuts, meaning the crew members — all NOFX friends and extended family — are hard at work trying to make an ensemble cast of mostly fresh-faced, clean-cut young actors who exercise and take good care of their voices look as if they've been living on the street and doing drugs. (A casting call included the directive, "All singing and musical performances are to be delivered with a punk sensibility.")
One crew member brings an actor over to Burkett for an assessment of the young man's new mohawk. "A little shorter up front," Burkett advises, before turning eagerly back to the scenes in action, and looking every bit like an overage high school drama club kid who is finally, at long last, in his true element. At 48, wearing long cutoff shorts and an untucked button-up T-shirt over arms full of tattoos, Fat Mike looks decidedly, permanently adolescent.
Burkett's own signature mohawk, bright red at the moment, matches shocks of Soma Snakeoil's hair. Aside from tattoos, though, that's about the only similarity in their respective aesthetics. Goddess Soma — or just Goddess, as Mike and others call her — is seated next to him, dressed in a tight, shiny black dress expertly laced in important places, and rocking 6-inch stilettos with the nonchalance of, well, someone who rocks 6-inch stilettos every damn day of her life.
As a fetish actress and director for the past eight years, Soma, 39, has won multiple trophies from the AVN (Adult Video News) Awards, often referred to as "the Oscars for porn." In her personal life, she's a domme and matriarchal figure for what Fat Mike calls their "polyamorous family," and her presence in a room is undeniably magnetic — maternal and comforting with a no-nonsense edge, and incredibly self-possessed. NOFX superfans have become familiar with the chain and lock around the frontman's neck; Soma Snakeoil holds the key.
They're also parents to two girls, ages 10 and 15, each from a previous relationship. The family lives in Noe Valley, and enjoys hiking and riding bikes around the city.
The couple have become outspoken advocates for BDSM during their five years together — they maintain a fully-stocked dungeon in their house — but Home Street Home marks the first time they'll present it in such a public space, and it's clear they took it as a chance to de-fang sex work for audiences that have never experienced this world. In one scene, teenage runaway Sue (whose induction into the world of gutter punks, and subsequent coming of age, make up the play's central narrative arc) learns about safe words and other kinky sex vocabulary from her new friends. It's one of the more upbeat and lighthearted numbers, with cast members suggesting new safe words ranging from "kung fu" to "Sarah Palin."
"My heart is very much with sex workers, and I wanted to make sure we were showing the dignity behind what we do — that you can be selling your body on a street corner and still have pride," Soma says. "I think things are changing slowly, but there's just still such a stigma about sex work in Western culture." The actress-director landed the job of co-writer after sketching out some characters inspired by her time as a teenager living in a punk house in Virginia. She's worked in performance art for as long as she can remember, and been part of the fetish world for nearly a decade. But Home Street Home is her first foray into more traditional theater: "A seven-minute choreographed thing on stage with an exploding dildo is a lot different from something with two hours of finely crafted music," she says with a laugh. "Although it kind of comes from the same place internally, if that makes sense."
As for BDSM, Soma saw the musical as an opportunity to dispel misconceptions. "Obviously we wanted this to be entertaining, and there's some salacious stuff on stage, but I think we tried not to sensationalize it too much," she says. "We really do show the intimacy between people, and when it comes to BDSM, we wanted to show the respect within the community, the love and intention, the focus on safety and consent."
Other aspects of the journey Sue undertakes in Home Street Home are harder to swallow. One song serves as the character's ode to cutting, a nonjudgmental explanation of how self-harm has helped the 16-year-old grapple with the considerable injustices and abuses the world has dealt her. (After workshopping the play at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut in January, Burkett says the mostly "geriatric" audience loved it — with a few audience members noting that the scene helped them understand for the first time why people would intentionally harm themselves.)
The cutting theme is semi-autobiographical, Soma says. She had a long-term partner who cut himself frequently and deeply, sometimes landing in the hospital. Soma believes BDSM, as a "transformative experience," helped break him out of the cycle. Though Soma did not personally experience the nightmarish home life from which the play's central character is trying to escape, the playwright did face "all kinds of traumatic sexual things when I was younger," she says. She eventually hopes to found a nonprofit that would be associated with the musical, to provide resources for girls in unhealthy sex work situations.
"I have a heart for survivors, for sure, and I think one of the exciting things for me about the play is that it's so hopeful — that message of 'Don't dwell on it.' There are a few things [Mike and I] try to live by, and I think flavors of them come through in the writing. One of them is 'Living well is the best revenge.'"
So: a musical about punks and BDSM written by a punk and a dominatrix. Makes sense, right? Well, it probably wouldn't — and it almost certainly wouldn't have seen the light of day — without Jeff Marx.
A lyricist and composer with a thoughtful, welcoming way about him, Marx was something of a wunderkind when he created Avenue Q, the musical starring Sesame Street-inspired puppets riffing on decidedly adult themes. It won the 2004 Tony Award for Best Musical, and went on to become one of the longest-running musicals in Broadway history (it ended its Broadway run in September 2009, and opened two weeks later off-Broadway, at New York's New World Stages, where it's still playing). When a touring version of the stage show came to L.A. about four years ago, the songwriter threw a cast party. There, a friend of a friend introduced him to Mike and Soma.
"I remember [Mike] told me, 'I'm a punk musician,' and I had no idea who he was," says Marx, now 44. "I was asking, 'Oh, cool, so you do gigs and stuff?'" He laughs, recalling their first meeting. He didn't know anything about punk before collaborating with the duo, he says, as his tastes skew more toward the "Billy Joel, Carole King, James Taylor" side of the musical spectrum. (The creators have discovered since then that they all can agree on the Beatles.) Marx certainly didn't know that Burkett had seen Avenue Q three times, and was such a fan of the play that NOFX had been including a song Marx wrote for it, "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist," in the band's live sets for five years.
Indeed, Fat Mike and Soma were considerably more excited about the introduction. The couple told Marx they were writing a musical ("'Yeah, I play in a punk band and I wrote a musical,' — you must've thought, this is gonna be terrible,'" interjects Burkett) and later emailed him one of the songs they'd written for feedback. It was "Three Against Me," a song one runaway sings about physical violence at the hands of his brothers; it's one of the musical's sadder numbers.
"I just responded to it in a way I never respond to things," Marx remembers. "And I thought, 'Damn, if the rest of the songs are anything like this...'" He wrote a "two-page" email back to the couple to let them know he loved it and wanted to work with them. Burkett and Soma were in Las Vegas, where they read the missive at 4:30 in the morning. "We both just started crying," Burkett says. "It was so emotional. It was our foot in the door. This was our chance."
Four years later, the trio has gelled into a complementary, if unlikely, theatrical team, combining their collective knowledge of sex work, punk rock, and Broadway into something they believe to be wholly unprecedented. Says Marx, "It really is a motley crew of Goddess, Mike, and me, coming from three different worlds, but blending them so seamlessly and peacefully. I think we've all learned so much from the process." Burkett and Soma credit the songwriter with elevating the work to a point that more traditional, even conservative fans of musicals may enjoy the play almost in spite of themselves.
"The delivery of [the show] paves the way for people to enter a place that may be scary to them — it's authentic, and the songs are so tuneful, they stay with it," adds Marx. "When we workshopped it at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, there were all these people there who came with real reservations, and after...they were saying 'Don't change a thing. Don't let the producer or anybody else water it down.'" He laughs at the thought. "We said, 'Don't worry.'"
Here's where we might as well address the elephant in the punk house.
Fat Mike knows all too well that many people, upon hearing of his involvement with a musical, will say something to the effect of, "Oh, like Green Day did with American Idiot?"
He understands, of course. It's a comparison weighted by roughly three decades of insider Bay Area punk history and something like good-natured sibling rivalry. While Green Day has continued to charge towards broader commercial mainstream success, complete with Grammy Awards, songs in iTunes commercials, and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominations (the band will be inducted this April), NOFX has remained staunchly anti-major-label. In the mid-aughts, the band began wearing its anti-establishment politics on its sleeve in a decidedly less radio-friendly way than Green Day. Nestled comfortably at Burkett's Fat Wreck Chords, NOFX has settled into a routine of touring the world for three weeks every few months, playing to the band's legion of loyal fans — but not exactly trying to convert new ones. Appealing to a mainstream audience, even if it were possible, has simply never been part of the goal.
Burkett says his frustration over the comparison is more about Green Day beating him to the theatrical punch than any deeper sense of competition. And if he's concerned about the musical giving members of the notoriously divisive punk scene ammunition for calling him a sellout, as American Idiot did with Green Day, he's not saying it — likely in part because that word has been lobbed at his band from the moment it started making money.
"I've had some of these songs written for 17 years," he says. "I never thought it'd be big, I just thought I'd write something and it would maybe get done in a community theater." But when Green Day announced it would be adapting the band's 2004 record for a stage show, Burkett admits it lit a fire under his ass.
"I had 12 songs done when I heard they were doing it, and I thought, they're turning this record they already have into a musical? That can't be the musical that represents punk rock," Burkett says. "It became: 'I have to write something that really shows the punk rock lifestyle.' I know some people will think I'm just copying them, but they definitely won't think that when they see it."
Marx chimes in here, looking a bit nervous about how far Burkett is going to take his Green Day riff. "American Idiot had a tough time," Marx says, diplomatically. "It's tough to take a record and build a play around it, to act out a story where you can't change the words to the songs, or anything. What we've done is just completely different."
It's about a week after our first meeting and a week before opening night, and Burkett is feeling decidedly more confident about the play. He's gotten great feedback on the concept record, Home Street Home: Original Songs From the Shit Musical, and the band's first live rehearsal with the cast went well. Everyone is present and energized — with the exception of Soma, who's remaining in L.A. a day longer than planned. She hurt her back while the team was there over the weekend. ("It's kinda my fault," Burkett explains. "Our dungeon has a hardwood floor, and lube is ... it's slippery. ")
Anyway: about that Green Day comparison.
"Jeff made us go see American Idiot," Burkett says, "and at some point, someone had a bag of coke, and they poured it out, and I shit my pants. Who would do that?! That would never happen."
That production, Marx concedes, "seems like it was created by people who don't do drugs."
"I was with NOFX in Germany a couple years ago and we had way too much coke," continues Burkett. "And we were leaving the country, so we pulled over the bus and found some kids in the park and said, 'Hey guys, here's an eightball.' You don't throw it out! You give it to somebody."
This may be where Home Street Home will give even the most free-thinking, sex-positive Bay Area liberals pause. One of the most fun songs in the whole shebang is a ragtime tune called "High Achievers," which asks the question: Where would art, literature, and science be if creators throughout history hadn't experimented with weed, cocaine, and LSD? Sample lyric: "Steve Jobs and Bill Gates took acid and changed technology/The Beatles' trips led to Lucy, Rita, and Eleanor Rigby...When the smartest people are doin' drugs it makes the world a better place to be."
"We weren't trying to make it in favor of drugs," Burkett insists. "It's just something that [these characters] do throughout the musical because that's their life, and it's not a big deal. Look, most of the people I know do drugs. If you see people doing drugs in any movie, there are always serious consequences. Someone has to die. There are a few negative consequences in [our musical]...but let's be real: Where would music be without drugs?"
Conveniently, Burkett says, he and Soma did a lot of the writing of the musical "in bars and on cocaine, some Adderall too. It is nice to write a musical that has drugs in it when you're drunk and on drugs."
One recent upset in this cavalier attitude: The death of Tony Sly, a close friend of Fat Mike's and the lead singer of No Use For a Name. Sly died in 2012 from a combination of alcohol, Xanax, and painkillers. It was less than two years after he recorded guest vocals for Home Street Home's album.
"When my parents died, I was sad, but when Tony died, that was heartbreaking," Burkett says, illustrating the "make your own family" theme the musical so deeply espouses. Sly's death also made him more cautious about mixing drugs: Though "High Achievers" actually began as a fun song about the benefits of "drug salad," it changed after the death of his friend.
As for Burkett, he maintains that he's strict about compartmentalizing his substance abuse: On the road, he parties nearly nonstop ("if I'm having fun onstage, people are going to have fun at the show") but dries out when he's home so he can be active with his kids. At the time of our second meeting, he was coming off 12 days sober.
He's ready for a beer now — plus it's 7 p.m., and time to clear out of the practice space — so Burkett and Marx lead the way out to the street during the last slice of early-evening light, the former wheeling his band sticker-covered bike until we land at a sushi joint to finish talking. On the way, Burkett gives $20 ("He always gives twenties," Marx says) to a homeless man, who in turn asks what the musician's T-shirt says. "Drug dependent," Fat Mike replies merrily.
Palatable to mainstream audiences or not, Home Street Home's values are consistent — and its creators stand proudly by them. Some audiences may see themselves reflected in these characters; others, not so much. The real question is: How many people will actually go see it?
According to Burkett, Marx, Soma, it doesn't really matter. They don't give a shit about how the musical fares commercially, or where it lands after its run in S.F., both Burkett and Marx explain, as our sake and beer arrive at the bar.
"This isn't Spiderman," Burkett says. "We weren't thinking about what would make money.
"It's a socio-political statement," he continues, with a level of earnestness that would likely catch casual NOFX fans by surprise. "I wanted to write something that sticks around for a long time, something that touches people."
Sure, there are dick jokes, drug jokes, and an ever-present strain of exhibitionism in the musical; when Burkett's in the room, a filthy pun and a smirk are never far behind. But whether it's through fatherhood, the process of working on one production for 15 years, or stretching himself to create with people from completely different worlds, a more three-dimensional Fat Mike Burkett has emerged with Home Street Home. There are undeniable flashes of what happens when a class clown starts to do the most shocking thing yet: grow up.
Of course, he wouldn't be Fat Mike without a touch of wise-assery. "It's like the difference between Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore," he offers. "They're both critics, but Michael Moore says things in a more entertaining way.
"And, you know, Michael Moore sells a lot more books."
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