Meat "Hypothermia"

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Meat
live on WREK-FM, November 8, 1994
radio session
(unreleased, 1994)

Yea! It's October again! Like last year, the jukebox has chosen to celebrate LGBT History Month!

This year, I've decided to be an egotistical maniac and start the month off with myself. It's my blog, and I can do what I want!

During my youth, I was a Boy Scout from 1974 through 1981. Back then, I'd not accepted my gayness, despite being well aware of it since around the time I became a Scout (coincidence, not result!). Over the years, I held just about every youth leadership position possible with two different troops (we moved when I was 15), including Senior Patrol Leader. I was inducted into the Order of the Arrow and achieved the highest rank in Scouting, Eagle. My Eagle pin is proudly on display in our curio cabinet, in fact. The current anti-gay policies of the BSA, unfortunately, completely disgust me. The notion that I am inherently immoral simply because of my sexual orientation is repugnant.

Why am I telling you this?

Well . . . page 381 of my 1979 printing (not sure what happened to my first handbook) of The Official Boy Scout Handbook covers what to do for emergency treatment for hypothermia:

HYPOTHERMIA. When you hear of someone having died from exposure or frozen to death, the killer may actually have been hypothermia—from hypo, low, and thermia, state of heat. It is caused by the body losing more heat than it generates. It occurs when a person is not clothed warmly enough for the air around him. Such a person is further endangered if he is exhausted, wet, and exposed to a strong wind as when caught in a rainstorm. Under such conditions the air doesn't have to be below freezing—a moderate air temperature of 40-50° may result in death.
Hypothermia starts with the patient feeling chilly, tired, irritable. If he is not helped at this stage, he will begin to shiver uncontrollably. Soon his shivering becomes violent. He may act irrationally. He may stumble and fall. If the shivering then stops, he is close to death.
First Aid. If you are on a hike or backpacking trip in severe weather and realize that someone in the party shows early symptoms of hypothermia, stop right then and there. Put up a shelter. Strip the patient gently and get him into a dry sleeping bag. A cold sleeping bag won't help much: a rescuer should also strip and get into the sleeping bag to use his warm body to warm the victim's cold body. When the victim begins to recover, give him a hot drink with plenty of sugar and quick-energy candy. Get him under a doctor's care.
NOTE: The body temperature of a swimmer drops steadily in water cooler than himself. The shivering that results is the onset of hypothermia. Get out of the water. Cover up. Exercise to get warm.

When I read that as a kid, my first thought was saving a particular boy I knew back then. Hey, I was in my mid-teens and my hormones were in high gear, OK? He was amazing, and I had a huge crush on him, but, being in the closet so deep that Mr. Tumnus was force-feeding me Turkish Delight, there was nothing I could do about it except obsess.

When I played guitar in a band in 1993/94, I decided to memorialize it in song. I'm not a great lyricist, so I told the (straight) singer what I wanted the song to be about and he took the reins. The music, however, is 100% mine. That's even me on crummy lead guitar. I'm no great shakes as a guitarist, but I relished being the only one in the band and fought attempts to add a second (I was the rhythm guitarist in my previous band, The Love Killers). I'm quite proud of the music I wrote back then (I wrote roughly 70% of the music for Meat), but this radio tape is about all I have left to document Meat. We recorded a four-song demo with our first drummer (our second is on this recording), but I'm not sure where my copy is. Plus, it was recorded by a rather clueless scam artist individual, and it sounded pretty lousy.

The image at the top of the post is the press sheet thing I wrote up to give folks with our aforementioned demo.