MONTE VISTA SPEAKS OF LOVINGKINDNESS Tom Holland aka Monte Vista was a staple of the Long Beach music scene in the late 80’s early 90’s until he was undone by steady employment, adult responsibilities and karaoke. Following is an interview with the man, the legend, the mountain. Daniel deBoom: Have you always wanted to be a musician? Tom Holland: Yeah, I guess I always loved music but one moment I remember was in elementary school, we had a talent contest and I lip-synced to “ American Pie”. DdB: The whole thing? That song goes on forever. TH: Yeah, and... people picked on me a lot in elementary school and everybody gave me a standing ovation at the end of it and I thought, “WOW, this is cool!” I found out only later that they were just f**king with me, but for that moment I was like “Yeah, I want to be a musician!” DdB: You have a wide range of musical influences as is evident in your stage performances. Is there a period or style of music that takes precedence above all others for you? TH: No. Nah, I love all music, all different styles of music. What we started off doing was playing mellow love tunes from the 70’s so, but then we branched out and started doing lounge music because no one else was doing that. Basically, we were a punk band that wanted to bother people and punk was passe at that point, it was dead, and we found that was a good way to annoy people. DdB: What year was it? TH: In ’85 with a band called the Hive Give Touch that Greg Gardner, our guitar player, had formed. They were an industrial noise band and I joined the group and we started doing the theme from Love Story. DdB: (laughing) So people were coming to hear industrial noise and they got theme from Love Story? TH: (laughing as well) Yeah… that’s where that whole concept started breeding… DdB: And that’s when you started pissing people off for the first time? TH: Yeah, but it was mainly our friends. Later on we would set up at concerts where we’d be opening for friend’s bands and people were unsuspecting victims to our treachery. DdB: Lovingkindness collected bad reviews like Elvis and the Beatles collected gold records. I mean, in your flyers and stuff you guys use all the bad reviews. Were those serious or… TH: No, those are seriously bad reviews, you know Grobaty does them somewhat in jest but I’m sure he means it. DdB: Like the one in Ben Is Dead magazine where Darby described you as, “The worst band I have ever seen in my whole entire life. God, it was scary!” TH: Yeah, the Ben is Dead, completely real. I knew she was talking about us because we were the only band playing in the lounge that night, and I confirmed it with her later. DdB: So, would you describe Lovingkindness as lounge punk? TH: I would call it Garage Lounge, or I would say we’re a garage band but we play lounge music very poorly, like a garage band would. DdB: So there wasn’t really anything like you back then, right? TH: Well, no, not for that scene, the scene we played in, but of course there was like…the early influences for me were Tony Clifton, of course, the Andy Kaufman character. There was this guy on Fernwood 2Night called Tony Rolletti that was a bad lounge singer that always had to adjust his toupee while he was singing and was just horrible. And another influence was Tom Monroe from SCTV that did lounge versions of Turning Japanese and we ended up doing some of that, we would like, do Black Flag covers in a lounge style. DdB: So people must have liked you at the same time right? I mean your pissing people off; there must have been some fans. TH: There are some people that do like us. At certain times I can sing adequately but people enjoy what we did, you know, it was funny. It’s a humorous thing, so of course people got into that aspect of it. Now, did people get into it because they loved how we played the music? I really don’t know. I would hope, somehow, that that could be true but I kinda doubt it. (laughing) DdB: Other bands appreciated you though? TH: At that time we were one of the Vandals favorite bands. Jazz Butcher was a big fan of ours back then. If you were in the know, you dug it. DdB: What does Lovingkindness mean? TH: Russell Ripple, our bass player, got it from the bible. We were looking for a name and I picked a cheesy name like The Bamboozlers ,which was like really stupid. Russell came up with, “hey I’m some computer programmer nerd and this word is used the most in the bible ‘lovingkindness’ and then I was like, you know that fits with us doing the mellow 70’s Bread, that kind of thing. So yeah Lovingkindness. We’re loving and we’re kind, our audience is loving kindness when we perform, kill them with loving kindness. DdB: Is this when you started calling yourself Monte Vista? TH: No, the first singer for Lovingkindness, which was me, was Che Walter Butterworth. And I wore like golfing hats and sweaters sort of like Bing Crosby and had a pipe, sort of a mellow, nervous cat. And I really didn’t have the whole smarmy

Hidden Challenge - Bodies of water such as this one that borders this tee once provided the Oneidas and other Indian nations with an important means of transportation. And the creation of waterways in Oneida legend reveals the inherent duality of nature. The benevolent brother creates rivers that flow both ways, but his twin laments the ease with which humans will travel and causes the rivers to flow in one direction only.