My friend Mike Woods committed suicide recently. It's the first person that I've been somewhat close to that has ever done such a thing. I'm not sure how to deal with it, so I've taken to writing a blog in his memory. I think he would have liked that. He never would have told me this, but I think deep down it would have made him smile.
Mike Woods seemed like a very misunderstood character. People saw him and thought he was a psycho or crazy, and I think this was all simply based on how he looked. He was a hard looking dude, and I think seeing him around at shows may have intimidated me a bit before I actually met him. But once you got to know him you soon realized that there was a lot more to this guy than his tough looking exterior. He was really smart, and like me, he had a very dark sense of humour. Because we both housed anti social tendencies it was funny to me that the two of us could get together and talk for hours. Every time I saw him in the grocery store I would stop and talk to him until he told me to fuck off, and that was the kind of guy Mike was. Never sugar coating a thing, and just straight up telling it like it is. He was one blunt dude. After we had finished talking about this and that and bands in the scene he would say, 'OK, fuck off, I've got to go get some groceries.' And I would laugh and walk away. I'm going to miss those chats we'd have outside of Safeway.
Mike Woods was also an avid supporter of the local music scene. After we had become friends he was someone I could always count on to be at the show. He would sometimes call me up on a Thursday night and we would compare our preferences for shows we wanted to go to on the weekend. On weekends with lots going on we'd usually never be able to agree on which were the best shows to attend, and even after he'd tell me he didn't want to go to certain gigs that I'd recommended I'd still bump into him at the show, and when I'd say things like, 'oh, but I thought you hated this band?' or 'I thought you were staying in tonight?' He would nonchalantly shrug it off and that would be the end of it.
Mike's writing was insanely creative. He would always ask me questions about my writing, and I think in a way we kind of competitively fed off of one another in this category. He would tell me the basis to many of his stories and ask my thoughts, which were always, 'sounds heavy Mike, you know me, I just write about bands and fart jokes.'
At one point Mike called me up and said he was setting up a show and wanted me to perform. No big deal. Then he explained that it was not a show for bands, but a show for writers to get up in front of people and do some spoken word. He also said that he wasn't going to take no for an answer. I reluctantly told him that I would do it, but instantly became nervous about what I was going to say. He said 'just tell some stories.' It's a shame that the show never came together, because I was most interested in what Mike was going to get up there and say. But him pushing me to do it was going to broaden my horizons and make me a stronger person. It's funny to think that Mike Woods made me a better person, but I believe he did.
Playing with Mike's band was always a blast. He had some of the best stage banter I've ever heard. One night when The Winston Campaign played the last ever show at the El Dorado all the regular rednecks showed up to bid their favourite watering hole adieu and were rudely awakened to the fact that the punks had taken over to play some loud music in the corner. During their set some guy came up to fuck with Mike while he was trying to play, and Mike kept his cool even though his microphone had fallen off the stand. He calmly finished the song, put the microphone back into its stand, and then went on a verbal tirade. I wish I could remember what he said because we were all laughing so hard. He called out the redneck saying he probably couldn't even do 20 pushups. Then he went off about how everyone came here to have a good time if they liked the music or not, and simply finishing with, 'if you touch my mic again I will rip your head off.' Amazingly it was this moment that brought both sides of the crowd together and had the rednecks respecting the rest of the show for what it was. There was a great clip of it on youtube at one point, but I have since searched for it and unfortunately it looks like the user has taken it down. Maybe Hugh the bassist can get it back up, as I think it was one of his friends that uploaded it in the first place.
My favourite memory of Mike was when I invited him and Dan over to my place to do an interview about The Winston Campaign's epic journey down to Mexico to "play" with NOFX. His humour shined through all night long as him and Dan reminisced about their travels, and I sat back and laughed. We enjoyed a few beverages, and ran over 2 hours of tape. I'm posting an unedited version of what I transcribed from the interview on my other blog, as it had to be seriously cut down to fit in the pages of the magazine. Part 1 is up right now: http://www.undergroundvancouver.blogspot.com
Later that night we went to Dan's girlfriends house as she was having some people over, and in these situations it was always good to have Mike around. Sometimes I feel uncomfortable in social situations where I don't know many of the people around me, but I could always count on Mike to make me feel less awkward. Not because he was more awkward than me, but mainly because, OK yeah, because he was more awkward than me.
I remember another party at my house that I invited him to, and he had no excuse to not come as he lived only two blocks away, and I think he felt out of place. I saw him trying to sneak away and I ran up to him to stop him. He said he didn't know anybody here and couldn't relate to the ones he did try to strike up a conversation with. I told him that he knew me, and that was enough. I don't know what it was, but I wanted to see Mike have a good time and I wanted him to conquer awkward social situations. Then Dan, Juli, and Zoe arrived at that very minute, and he quickly changed his mind about leaving. And he always came back too. Every time we had a party at our place Mike was there to support whichever one of my bands was playing. He was good like that. Even after Jones Bones stopped playing gigs he'd still come out and see Real Problems perform, even though it was obvious that he preferred The JB by a lot.
I think Mike was angry about a lot of things in this world, and I really wish he hadn't felt that he needed to kill himself. I don't know if going back to Cranbrook was a bad idea, and of course I'll always be left with wondering if we had stayed good friends would he be dead now? If I made more of an effort to not drift apart would he have felt he needed to commit suicide?
Part of me hates myself for writing this. Why am I spending all this time on Mike now that he is gone, but over this last year I spent barely any time on him at all. All of a sudden I feel I can be his friend again when it's way too late. The last few times I saw Mike was at shows, and he was hanging out with a really attractive girl. We didn't get a chance to talk much like we used to when we bumped into each other at shows, but he didn't seem to have changed much as he told me to not stand so close to him, a joke of course. A couple days later I wrote him an email to say he needed to come to our next party. He never did reply, or come by, and I never saw him again.
On more than a few occasions Mike would tell me that Jones Bones was one of his favourite local bands, and I always got a kick out of that. And I also remember a time when I bought him a couple beers at a show and before he took them from me he said, 'you know what Denis, you're a really fuckin' nice guy. You mean well and I like that.' I also got a kick out of that. The things he did to boost my ego meant more to me than he could ever know, and as mean as people might have thought Mike looked, he wasn't. I think he was a really fuckin' nice guy that meant well too, and now I wish I could tell him that.
