Over the years people have asked me what is Steev Mike and what is my involvement. First off let me say there is not a simple cut and dry answer to this question, when I am asked in person its a hard thing to articulate because it covers so many avenues of possibilities. I will try my best to write about it. But it is not a simple binary answer, to fully understand what Steev Mike really is you must sacrifice parts of your individual human programming, and open up to the infinite.
First off if you are reading this you most likely know who Andrew W.K. is. Lets just assume you do, and if you don't please type "Andrew WK Steev Mike" or "Andrew WK is not real" into google and read up.
I first met Andrew WK when we were attending community high school, If I remember correctly our art teacher introduced us. At this time he gave me a comic book he was drawing, and it blew me away. The attention to detail was just so beyond the ability of most people twice his age, it was hard to believe. Right then I new something was up, something was hidden behind the walls of the fleshy skin shell. Back then we were really into creating as much chaos and excitement as we could get away with, so and eventually I got expelled from Community High, along with my good friend Nathan Young...who plays in that band Wolf Eyes ya know? Being young and alive is a very magical time.
At that point me and Nathan lived at a sort of experimental group madhouse, it was in Ann Arbor on Jefferson street, thus known as the Jefferson House. In the house we were experimenting with psychedelics, noise music, deprogramming social imprints, theft, guerrilla street art..... being generally crazy as young energetic intelligent outcasts do. I could write a book of that time about the Jefferson House and all the people involved and tons and tons of insane stories.... but back to the point. Andrew would come over during lunch break from school and during one of these times was my first glimpse of what would be unfolding over the last 15 or so years. The Jefferson House was across the street from University of Michigans Institute for Social Research, and a popular paranoid topic at the was that we were unknowingly in the middle of a social experiment designed by some people involved at the University of Michigan. So enter Andrew, a very shy nice young man who was also devious and very talented. So he started coming around more and more, and these paranoia ideas increased within me and I attached them to his presence. When I came to find out later about his father these ideas no longer seemed very far fetched.
edit-- I just got off the phone with Nate Young,,,,
He just finished
reading this and was slightly freaked out because of the
possibility of Jefferson house being part of a mind control experiment. He
told me that there would be times that I would disappear for weeks and
have no explanation or memory of where I had been, this was news to me,
as I don't really remember ever having blocks of time missing. But if
one has blocks of time missing how do you know is its gone? right?
I think like a year later, who knows time is a strange thing...... one night I stayed up for 28 hours then took 7 hits of super super strong LSD-25 black pyramid gels. It was my first drug induced egodeath experience, and of course it utterly blew me to pieces. I made contact with inter-dimensional entities who showed me a flaming spinning vortex and within that vortex appeared my self and everyone I knew. These beings showed me how to use this wheel and I would insert a concept and it would spin around attach to a person (or a cluster of people) and then show me the future. As I was using this luminous time machine, at some point I put myself in the center.... I ended up in the christ consciousness, worlds exploded, I was birthed out of the cosmic egg and then shit back into the hells of earth.... My ground training at this point was zero; alot of what unfolded for me, I had no reference point or idea of these possible states. So in the end that experience left me utterly confused with maniacal enlightenment, for half a year.
edit---- Its of importance that I failed to mention that the black pyramid gels were given to me by this mysterious guy, lets just call him J. Now this J would come over to the house and check in with us quite often. Kinda try to hang out but he was really awkward and always was a little uptight. He out of all the seemingly random people coming and going was one of the really odd characters. He was a clean cut older guy who we assumed worked or went to the University, now Js big thing was giving away drugs, yup, no charge, he would come over and just give us random drugs and hang out. And these drugs were always of super high quality, and he would really not tell us much about these very strange psychedelics, just give them to us and observe. We did this one drug once that didn't get us high it just turned our audio senses into platonic solids, another one made our friend see in black and white for a week. So everyone assumed it was his weird little kick, getting people high and watching how we reacted. So one day he comes over and hands me like 5 'sheets' of these weird little alien black pyramid gels, they were really high tech divided up like a sheet of lsd but made out of edible plastic. And these were insanely strong, its some of the purest (supposedly) LSD I have ever come across. He out of all people could of been directly involved in this secret social/drug/mind control experiment that we in the middle of. If you are thinking hey this is paranoid fantasy, please read up on the US governments involvement with LSD and MK-ULTRA. They have continued to do some pretty fucked up stuff to unknowing people, hell they are currently doing intense sensory deprivation torture at Gitmo, and right now Obama announced that they are infiltrating conspiracy theory message boards on the internet.
During that night when I was blasted on the black pyramids using the cosmic timewheel and was transformed into the christ, I saw the future that is known as Andrew WK. I knew he was destined to be who he is today, as I am who I am today, he out of all the futures I witnessed that night burned bright and strong next to mine. Our were wrapped together like a hypercube spinning in two spaces hidden behinds opposing facades but united in a common mission. The vision was so powerful I got on my bike tripping balls and rode to Ypsilanti to go to his apartment and tell him the future. I observed the perfect incarnation of this entity know as Steev Mike. When I got there he was not home, after that I passed out in his bushes, and ended up wandering the streets collapsing into the woods and knocking on random peoples doors. A few confused days later I finally ended up at Andrews house and we had a conversation about it. All of what has transpired these last 15 years, I saw that night and gave AWK the code: Creating the most extreme pop music with our cultures lowest form of cliche archetypes, Party would be iits call, then using the media arm of the beast to push this package on the population. Basically a 'false-christ' figure, something so simple and universal and with claims that it was just the product of one person Andrew WK. Something that no one could deny its authenticity, but it would really be a simulacrum mirror of the human chained earthly desires. I told him that the only way this grand plan would work if we sold it through the Illuminati music channels. It was a dangerous mission, messing around with these huge corporations is not game one takes lightly. But then the real kicker would be that this dirty white messiah would cease to exist right before every ones eyes, this frontman would disappear and expose the lies by revealing the true nature of mind control, ultimately lifting the veil of ignorance, it would help usher in a new dawn for humanity, universal freedom and mystical revelation would be brought to the people who have been given ears to hear the good news. And this new era would culminate on December 21st, 2012. At this time that date was unknown to me as to its significance, I know it sounds funny now with all the 2012 hype/backlash going on, but its a weird thing to pull out of the ether.
So fast forward a few years, nothing of importance directly about this topic happened. I get run of of Ann Arbor for anti-police actions- move to Chicago open a antique store, Andrew continues to record experimental music, play in metal bands, do tons of weird things, make magazines. Andrew sends me a copy of his demo, hes in New York and really going for it, hes gathering people to help realize the AWK vision. At first when I listened to the demos I was really shocked and actually upset, for some reason I really started to doubt the visions I received that night, since so many never materialized. I really didn't do strong psychedelics for like 10 years because of the spiritual/mental cleaning work I needed to do. So in my life that mirrored his in some way, I was doubting that he could pull it off. I called him up and told him, it bummed him out. I bummed me out. I remember talking to Aaron Dilloway a few days later and he helped me see the light and during this talk was the first time I heard the word 'Steev Mike', Universal Records, and Dave Grohl was apparently getting behind Andrew. I thought about this for awhile and popped in the demos it all just clicked, I knew he was going to do it.
So he did it.
"Well now...... so what, hey twig this is a nice story and all but what?"
"what are you talking about here, whats the point?"
"Who is Steev Mike?"
"Gimmie the goods, give me the truth"
"Well, this might have been an interesting story, if it weren't riddled with mystic prophecy/alternate dimensions/spectral incursions into the space-time continuum bullshit. The parts that do not include that are actually interesting and informative"
So Andrew does his major label record, goes on tour for years and leaves strange little messages in everything he does. All of this is well documented. I go and see him when he comes on tour, have fun, party, he flies me out for a video shoot, good times, I got to see him open for Aerosmith in an arena- that was pretty surreal moment. So he does his thing and establishes a media presence and now people are associating this image of "Andrew WK" with Andrew W.K. For years he maintains a solid facade. But all along there are undertones of something much deeper strange and perplexing if one chose to look at it. So for years these "Steev Mike" concepts were there but hidden in plain sight, and it was really easy to add to them and watch them evolve. All of creation is co-creative, you are a part of god, the more you give your self to it, the more it will give back to you.
A certain point Steev Mike makes his presence known hacks into Andrew WK's web sites and does all sorts of batty shit. Andrew seems to dissappear, rumors fly around, he stops touring. Some people have accused me of being part of the first SM55 hacking incident, and a few times I may have said I was involved. I was not. I will now go on the record and say I had nothing to do with the initial website hacking that eventually destroyed Andrews career. But I am also saying that at that time, I have helped perpetuate certain rumors and develop certain ideas that people have with "Andrew WK" and "Steev Mike" . I am sorry for any confusion, but sometimes someone must destroy something before we can create a masterpiece.
Once the rumors started to develop I created websites making certain claims about Andrew, fed certain concepts and helped create a tangled mess of more unclear concepts and non-linear, multiple time lines within multiple realities. He removed himself from the picture. The phase of crafting "Andrew WK"s non-existence had begun. From that moment on, Andrew W.K. would not be the same as "Andrew WK". You know I thought it was all fun and games, until really strange things started happening. At a certain point I was walking down a trail and found an old small tombstone with the initials S.M. on it. I carried it home. After that moment the more metaphysical concepts of "Steev Mike" started creeping into my being and shattering expectations. At this point in my life things were staring to fall apart at the seams, my life was dissolving right before my eyes, and here across the country is my friend whose Ive known for since i was a teenager is dealing with the same kind of manifestation...... that I basically created. That just seemed huge, confusing, liberating, beyond both of our grasps, yet entirely inside.
In 2004-2006 I was being driven by an unknown possible conspiracy that I have very real intense memories associated with. Steev Mike was triggering something inside of me, and was asking for more input. I gave in, for a few months I became Steev Mike. I made a record of it. Its design was the mystery of existence built on fragile realities that we all touch. I started to have visions of infinite worlds exploding across space and time, and when I reentered I would see this thought form known as Steev Mike standing above me, laughing. Mocking at my limited viewpoint. More ideas that we were all part of a mind control conspiracy designed by people at the University of Michigan actually started to seem like truth. Things started lining up in bazzar ways weird holes in time, set ups and more smoke screens. People started calling me at all hours of the night saying strange things. There have always been strange people in my life who appear out of nowhere and do odd things, in Ann Arbor I had police tap my phone, break into houses without warrants looking for me, shit like that. My father said to me once "Just because your paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you!" You cannot escape you destiny.
I always felt my questions would be answered if I unlocked the door to this other memory mystery that I had experienced since that LSD trip mentioned above. I also was getting these visions of being in a governmental (?) mind control experiment. During this blocked memory that I was only able to get glimpses at: someone hands me an object and asks me a specific question that I know the answer to but it seems obviously obtuse. In 2009 this constant memory of the future came to pass, I took part of a psychedelic drug study at Johns Hopkins University. Since my legal name is not Twig Harper every session when I was dosed, Chad, who ran sessions, would hand me the pill box and read it and say, "James Johnston, you know this guy?". Not until the final session when I had experienced ego-death did it come to me that this was the memory I have been seeing for the last 10 years! I now was standing across the abyss shaking hands with my lower self handing information back through the time stream. The subtle art of time travel.
So I kept having all these strange things happen between me, Andrew and Steev Mike. And you know the handful of times we have hung out in person since 2006 we have both made a point not to talk about it too much. So its all kinda complicated, I was receiving messages from Steev Mike from the dream world and co-creating its will to exist. And when Steev Mikes form would take shape, it as if it was always there. And yet its existence ceases to materialize.One of the few times Andrew and I talked about this, he explained that while he was vacationing in Central America surfing and sunning, he kept hearing the notes DG in his head. DG DG DG. Meanwhile I was sitting in Baltimore typing about Andrew/DG/head trauma. This is just scratches the surface, it gets real complex, and the thread weaves many patterns.
OK back to 2005, I go on tour with Wolf Eyes and Sonic Youth, it was a great time and we all spawned a sorta-complicated hoax called Mothers Against Noise. This was a media experiment to push noise music more to the front of underground culture, by creating an opposing force to something that had fringe cultural appeal. It took off like wildfire and started swallowing my life up. I can only imaging what kind of emails, and questions Andrew must have gotten over these years about Steev Mike! I was getting 100's of emails a day people yelling at this organization. And since some of the groundwork had been worked out by the Louise Harland Corporation, and the Steev Mike concept, Spin magazine ran a blurb saying that Andrew WK was the responsible party. There was alot of funny things happening when people really tried to figure out if the M.A.N. was a legit group or not, I should write about this in more detail somewhere else. At one point the TV show Wife Swap tried to get the supposed M.A.N.organization to be on the show, I tried to organize it but I couldn't convince the only people I knew who could possibly pull it off. So after a point I sent out an update on the M.A.N. website saying that they were going to protest the No Fun Fest in NYC, it was going to be the deciding factor to the groups legit status. As we prepared to hire actors for the protest I realized that this was not the way to go. Me and Carly recorded a statement and sent it to festival. I was playing No Fun this year and hen we arrived at the venue, I was sitting around a circle passed a joint take a hit and then get a phone call saying that our building, Tarantula Hill, in Baltimore was on fire. I was scattered, the ultimate reality punch line of the hoax...... M.A.N. burnt down Tarantula Hill.
Post fire we began picking up the pieces as to what went down. I have a list of possible suspects, any one of them could be possible: A pissed off Andrew WK fan because of my involvement with Steev Mike, faulty wiring and a curious cat, Universal Music (who we claimed at one point to be behind M.A.N.), Government Agents (they did get busted for having agents in the anti-war underground in Baltimore), a past roomate who was very pissed at us, I even am on that list of possible persons who set the fire just to further conspiracies. I honestly believe it was Steev Mike.
Now its 2010, my life is great I am back on track, we rebuilt our building, everyone I know is still taking it to the next level. But now Ive been getting emails and people asking me about Steev Mike again, so I wrote this. For some reason there seems to be interest in this topic right now, and I saw a bunch of new websites, youtube videos claiming all sorts of things about Andrew WK, Steev Mike, Conspiracies, Multiples, Me, Steev Mike, the Occult, Reality, and Steev Mike. I do not know who is responsible for these current creations of the story or what lies ahead. I am trying to open and truthful as possible because I know who Steev Mike is and what Steev Mike isn't and what Steev Mike can do. Its like Pandora's box that has been opened. If you remember in the myth of Pandora she opens the box and releases all sorts of evil on mankind but at the bottom is HOPE.
click here to go back to other writings page
click here to go back to main twig harper page