Tag: Bret Bowman

9 years since Introducing Napalm Beach

We are now approaching the ninth anniversary of the publication of my article Introducing Napalm Beach. In these years it’s become really clear that the sit back and wait, be cooperative, don’t rock the boat strategy has been a sheer and utter failure. I can’t fault Chris for the choices he made because the situation he was put into was completely impossible. I can’t believe what he managed to pull off in terms of an artistic career and legacy under the circumstances.

As I sat back and tried to untangle whatever mysteries I was supposed to untangle with very little to work with, we were bulldozed by the wiping/destruction/death machine, and so were a lot of others.

Casualties included our band, Boo Frog and all the associated dreams we had (putting out records, touring, etc), as well as my Boo Frog YouTube page, my Skullman Records YouTube page, several loved ones, and 9 years of my life. Chris and Sam.

After Chris died, I no longer had to worry about him worrying about the disapproval of his community. I don’t know why people disapprove of artists who want to make a living off their art – or just this artist I guess, and I guess I don’t really care.

I know people are talking dirt behind our backs, behind my back, and I don’t care. It’s garbage talk. I know who I am and who I am not.

I also know something else now, because I was able to move forward a little bit – under the circumstances, from what I see of the structure built up around us, there is no way in the world that The Music Industry or The Pacific Northwest Music Community writ large will gracefully accept an unburied Chris Newman, and I know why. It’s nothing to do with Chris, and it’s everything to do with Kurt Cobain, Elliott Smith, Bret Bowman.

That said, there is no legitimate reason that Chris’ music should continue to be blacklisted, and I feel absolutely no obligation to protect those that led little lambs to slaughter, especially those who also profited, and continue to profit financially from the crimes and cover-ups (which include additional crimes). So I’m going to continue doing what I’m doing, and if you are out there trying to stop me, well I guess that says a lot more about you than it says about me.

It is incredibly frustrating to have been going through what we have been going through and I can’t even imagine what Chris went through after 1983 and especially into the 1990s.

I don’t know exactly why Kurt Cobain was taken down, but it increasingly looks like it was part of some bizarre set up planned out long ahead of time, same as Bret Bowman. I consider the entity behind all of this Satanic, because they seem to take pleasure in doing the biggest most heinous crimes to the most innocent people.

That cat is out of the bag. It’s out, everybody and it is NOT going back in.

Picnic – 1955

Sub Pop Sundays

Untouchables/Napalm Beach played shows at Wrex going back to at least March 1981. Wrex closed in March 1982 and Vogue opened in the same location January 1983. (source: https://threebandsthreebucks.blogspot.com/2018/02/wrex-1980-81.html )

Claudia Gehrke aka Claudia Lemon was the booking agent, and invited Chris and Napalm Beach to play her 27th birthday party on August 25, 1987. Supporting Napalm Beach was H-Hour who must have just arrived from Idaho. Tad Doyle who later fronted TAD, played drums. And then there was Bundy Creature. The following year, August 26, 1988 Chris’ side project Snow Bud and the Flower People headlined again for Claudia’s 28th birthday, this time at Squid Row.

Sub Pop Sundays seems to have begun on September 13, 1987 – 19 days after Claudia’s 27th birthday. According to something she wrote on Facebook, she let the Sub Pop guys (presumably Bruce and/or Jonathan) book whom ever they wanted on those nights. Sub Pop Sundays seem to have been once a month, ending on June 27, 1988. This, again, is according to the 3band3bucks website. But June 27, 1988 was a Monday, not a Sunday, and 3bands3bucks does not show a band for that date, just “Sub Pop Monday.” I have tried to figure out who, if anyone, played on this date, so far without success.

For context, here is the full calendar as listed on 3bands3bucks from June 1988

Vogue – June 1988
1 – The Beatnigs (SF), Skin Yard
6 – Jayne County (NY), Fastbacks
7 – Pop Defect (LA), Kristen Barry
8 – Feast, Lethal Gospel
13 – The Pink Slips
14 – Accused, Derelicts
15 – Bundle Of Hiss, Nirvana
20 – Ash
21 – The Option, The Groove
22 – Catbutt, Babyteeth
27 – Sub Pop Monday w/….
28 – Action Buddie, URU
29 – Napalm Beach (PDX), Coffin Break

And here are all the listed Sub Pop Sundays bands

Sub Pop Sundays 1987
September 13 – Sub Pop Sunday w/Swallow
October 25 – Sub Pop Sunday w/Chemistry Set
December 27 – Sub Pop Sunday w/Dead Moon

1988 Rocket advertisement for Vogue

Sub Pop Sundays 1988
January 31 – Sub Pop Sunday w/ My Beerdrunk Soul Is Sadder Than All The Dead Christmas Trees In The World
February 28 – Sub Pop Sunday w/ Snow Bud & The Flower People
March 27 – Sub Pop Sunday w/Doll Squad
April 24 – Sub Pop Sunday w/Nirvana
May 28 – Subpop Sunday w/The Derelicts
June 27 – Sub Pop Monday w/…

Aside from June, the only month missing is November 1987. Maybe it’s missing or maybe it didn’t happen. Of the nine Sub Pop Sundays listed, two are headlined by Portland bands – Dead Moon and Snow Bud and the Flower People. Both those bands were three-piece bands. There was a common member in both of those bands, drummer Andrew Loomis. Of those two bands (five people), only one person survives today, and that’s Toody from Dead Moon. Everyone else has died of cancer. None of them lived to see their 70th birthday. Andrew didn’t live to see his 60th. He died in 2016 at age 54, with his brother Matt dying four years later at age 55. Chris and Sam died less than a year apart. All of cancer.

It’s hard, at least for me, not to look at all these Sub Pop Sundays band line ups and see something like a storyline. Because there’s another thing about the calendar and that’s that last date, June 27, 1988. That’s the date that Bret Bowman was hit by a car.

Bret was my neighbor. He was about 2 1/2 years older than me. I’d known him since we were both young children. In June 1988 I was living in St Paul, Minnesota and it seems like Mike Payne was back and forth between Humboldt County (where we had lived) and St Paul. Bret had been hit while walking along Highway 101 in Crescent City, California. He was with a schoolmate of ours named Jimmy Shaw. They were high on L.S.D. They were on their way to Oregon Country Fair (aka “the hippie fair”) where they had planned to meet up with another classmate of ours named Scott Gear. Bret struggled to survive, and ended up in a coma for more than a decade. This is where it gets very confusing to me because no one has ever been fully honest with me about any of this. Bret’s obituary states that he was in a coma for 16 1/2 years. I had heard rumors that he came out of the coma and died by suicide. I tried to get more information but people would at first seem receptive, then suddenly not want to talk about it. Also, while Bret was alive, in this long term coma – something that is very unusual, by the way – I never could get good information about where he was, nor did I understand his condition. I thought he was brain dead. A “vegetable” they sometimes called it back then. Everyone around me who had known Bret pushed that idea, that he was “gone” – but I now think they knew better and were working from a script or an agenda.

I had a dream relating to Bret exactly one year before he was hit, and I had ominous dreams about Bret in weeks and months before he was hit, and I dreamt about Bret the night before he was hit. Being as I was in Minnesota, I didn’t find out about the incident until later – maybe a couple of weeks later.

Last time I spoke with Jimmy via Facebook, he was living in Washington State and I asked him what kind of acid did they do and he said “please don’t ask me anymore questions about Bret.”

Jimmy and Scott might be one year older than me. It seems like Jimmy befriended me first, then Bret later. I never really was friends with Scott, but I knew who he was. He seems to have gotten a job with Sub Pop sometime that same year, 1988.

The Oregon Country Fair is potentially linked to Courtney Love’s family, or family connections.

1986 – Snow Bud and the Flower People – Uppers Downers Inners Outers
Snow Bud Sub Pop Sunday at Vogue

A momentary reflection on the narrative and my research to date

Contrary to the narrative pushed so hard by nearly every medical provider and law enforcement officer I’ve had to interact with over the past decade or more, I don’t possess a set of “fixed beliefs” (delusional or otherwise). In fact, I’ve spent my whole life involved in developing research abilities. It’s the only way I’ve ever managed to achieve anything. I definitely did not have someone telling me what to do and handing out favors as a reward for obedience, not to mention malfeasance, thank God. I would find it very difficult to live with myself, were this true.

I backed off of writing about Chris’ history while he was alive because he was experiencing social and psychological pressure from family members and from trusted members of the community that he believed supported him, and this pressure made him uncomfortable. He didn’t like disapproval. The biomedical mind control technology in use seems to be really good at controlling certain things, and that includes “obsessive” or habitual behaviors (including those linked to addiction – but also things like training, guitar practice, etc) – and it includes pattern recognition. Chris was able to listen to a song once, hear the instrumentation and chords, and instantly play it on guitar – but he was literally unable to recognize what to me were very obvious patterns of unusual phenomena or malfeasance. When we came into conflict over these things he tended to get triggered and to revert to black and white thinking. He couldn’t see the reality of the situation. I don’t think the damage done by so many people promulgating and refusing to let go of a lie of this magnitude can be overstated. It is a big lie made up of millions of “little” lies.

Since I’ve come back to the project, there is a bit more information available, and certain things are coming increasingly into focus, and that includes that not only was I correct about Chris’ music being deliberately buried by what can accurately be called a well-financed global conspiracy – and this is increasingly supported by evidence – but that there were actually a number of people in our orbits who were targeted for destruction, and some of them, like Kurt Cobain, Elliott Smith, and Bret Bowman, were particularly significant.

At this point in the process, I have lots of information about Bret Bowman, and I know that there are links to Sub Pop. I have an increasingly solid grasp about Kurt Cobain, and Elliott Smith is coming into focus. With Kurt Cobain, there also seems to be a solid link to malfeasance by Sub Pop. With Elliott Smith, there may be a malfeasance link to Jackpot and Kill Rock Stars, but there also is a link between Elliott Smith and Sub Pop as well, in the form of a band called Crackerbash, and specifically founding member Sean Croghan.

Boo Frog’s drummer Doug Naish was also an original member of Crackerbash. His brother, Brad Naish, had played drums with the Wipers. Doug played with Chris from 2012 until the pandemic shuttered live music. Chris liked Doug’s reliability, his willingness to follow Chris’ musical direction, that he would help Chris with moving equipment, and the fact that he had a van. But it is clear to me that Doug was always deceptive and his intent was always destructive. He readily took part in a plot to destroy Boo Frog and to set Chris up in a situation where he could be manipulated and controlled.

After Chris died, Doug tried to keep his amplifier.