Positive Affirmation of Creative Destruction-ism

2008-12-01T15:50:00.000-08:00

RIP JOHN SPALDING

My good old buddy, ex-band mate and roommate passed away last Sunday (11/23/08) after a 4+ year battle with cancer. What a horrible week it has been. But I'm also glad that John is now in the presence of God enjoying restored health.

John and I were room-mates in '98 for about 6 or 8 months and we played in Ninety Pound Wuss together for about a year. After that, we started Raft of Dead Monkeys together. John was one of the warmest, kind hearted people I've ever met, a generous room mate and a maniac on guitar.

There was a candle light vigil on Sunday and a traditional mass today both of which were beautiful. Anyone who knew John knows how much of a sweetheart he was. I was honored to write a short bio about John which appeared on the Tooth and Nail site. See below for the unedited version.

John Spalding, former guitar player for late 90s Tooth and Nail band Ninety Pound Wuss, died on November 23rd after a grueling four year battle against cancer.

Spalding was a mild mannered, working class man beloved as much for his uncommon warmth and generosity as he was respected for his mad genius when he wielded a guitar. Spalding cranked out the most caustic, angular, yet memorable riffs imaginable showcasing some of the best, and highly underrated, creative moments of the Tooth and Nail catalog.

After Spalding’s time in Ninety Pound Wuss, he went on to play in the art-damaged, classic rock meets punk infused Raft of Dead Monkey’s with other Tooth and Nail roster alumni. Spalding then studied abroad to finish his culinary schooling before going on to work at hip, fusion inspired Seattle area café’s until the time of his cancer diagnosis.

Over the years, Spalding amassed a sizeable library of home recording demos that, after his diagnosis, became a music project titled LoveLand. Members of Seattle area bands Minus The Bear, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Botch, These Arms Are Snakes, Roadside Monument, Blood Brothers, and others contributed to the recording that simply defies genre classification in a yet-to-be release titled, “The Beautiful Truth”.

LoveLand music is equal parts Prince, Minor Threat and Van Halen that becomes a rock-pop amalgamation showcasing Spalding’s spirit, grit, joy and frailty in a near real-time musical documentation of his battle against cancer. From the claustrophobic sounding buzz saw riffs of “Beautiful Girls Have Beautiful Apartments” to the anthem laden “Good People” to the gospel tinged lyrics of “Give Me Grace”, Spalding cuts through pretension and leaves the listener to face the bitter-sweet, beautiful truth of a life cut short but well lived by a young man desperately loved by family, friends and fans alike.

While most people’s spirits would be utterly ravaged by the experience of debilitating disease, John Spalding was the rare exception of a man that embodied redemption in his remaining days. John invited others in to his life and pulled people together for the sake of faith, hope, love and music. He will be sorely, sorely missed. John is survived by his wife, parents, brother, sister, grandparents and countless extended family and friends.

Brother John, rest easy, pain-free in the loving arms of your savior.

1 Thessalonians 4:13-14

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep.

2008-09-19T14:48:00.000-07:00

WORKING FOR A LIVING PART V

Shipping/Receiving clerk

Between rock band tours (bout 10 yrs ago) my Mexi-buddy Benito hooked me up with a job working in the shipping department of a handmade-rustic-log-furniture company. I was one of the few white dudes on the job site.

There were two main operations at the factory. Operation one was production which took place in a huge open warehouse space where a group of about 20 Mexican men sanded, assembled and finally shellac-ed the furniture. The second operation was packaged and delivered the furniture. That part was up to me and Ben.

Our job sucked. Unfortunately, the owners of the company were control freaks that didn't allow the production managers any say on how the manufacturing was done. Which meant, in effect, second rate products (due to defects) and stalled shipments. This meant that I stood around a lot waiting for product so that I could actually do my job.

Ben and I had good times working together. Being bilingual, he was my cultural bridge into another world. Unfortunately I didn't work on my language skills during my time there since most the workers were brushing up on their English which meant I wasn't trying out too much Spanish. But somehow we figured out a way to communicate. This was mostly done through dancing. Allow me to explain.

I drove a box truck between two warehouse spaces that were about a quarter mile apart to pick up product from the production floor ---> take it to shipping. I'd back the truck up against the open bay door, hop out of the truck, throw the back door open, cock my head back cupping my mouth and give my best Mexican yell: "Aaaaaaaahhaaahhhaaahaaahaaaaaa!!!!" You know, the kind of drunken falsetto holler you hear in mariachi music that plays at a mexican resturaunt? I was / am a professional at this yell. And all my Mexican brothers at the factory knew this. It was how I gained respect with the tribe. Though I didn't speak Spanish, this was my communication for building camaraderie.

After I'd graced my co-workers with a perfectly authentic holler, I'd turn around and perform a little dance whilst standing in the back of the truck. All the guys in the shop would holler back and chant my name: "Mateo, Mateo!!!" If time had elapsed since my last dance, I would get fan requests. The request was actually a little bit more like and demand and went like this:

"Mateo! Nalga's!"

According to Ben, "nalga's" loosely translates as "buns" and or "butt-cheeks". Essentially, I was being asked to dance and shake my rump-aaaa.

I loved my Mexi-bros and they loved me. I was like their pet gringo. But one of them ended up loving me a little too much.

I used to wear my hair in a very particular early sixties kind of greased/Clark Kent look. Periodic hair maintenance was required to maintain this look which involved me running a black toothed comb through my hair, oh, every hour or so. One time, while on the production floor I was caught in the act of combing my hair by a Mexican co-worker. Word spread quickly that this simple sign of vanity meant that I was a homosexual. At break time I was the butt of all the jokes for being gay. One particular co-worker, who was nicknamed "guy-oh" (sp?), gave me a lot of heat by making kissy-noises at me every time I came into the room. This hazing was cute for about a week but it got old. Fast. This went on for months.

I was sick of being harassed and quit taking breaks in the designated area. Instead I opted to eat my lunch alone in the box-truck. Vinny my Mexican compadre (who sported the sweetest hockey mullet ever) helped me sort through this debacle so I wouldn't have to be the day-shift outcast anymore. He suggested that next time Guy-oh started teasing me, I should just sit on his lap and give him a hug. Vinny was convinced this would put a stop to the ongoing hazing. So I tried it out. It worked. I was never teased again.

2008-09-11T18:11:00.000-07:00

WORKING FOR A LIVING PART IV

Building Maintenance Man

Once high school was in the rear view mirror and I had a year or so under my belt as a (community) college man, I decided to "take a break" from my classes in order to...I can't remember. Be 19 and foolish? Instead of continuing my education I took a job as a "re-lamper". This is not the best educational / vocational decision I've ever made.

Basically, it was my job to wear scratchy light blue coveralls and change each and every light bulb at a large downtown law firm. The sheer volume and variety of light bulbs in an average commercial workplace is astounding. This is not a sexy as it sounds.

To this day, the Light Bulb Changer-Upper gig may be the only job I've acquired without the help of a friend hook up (i.e. every job I've ever had came through a friend's recommendation) but before I explain the job, I should back up.

My buddy Aaron and I interviewed at a local building maintenance company that placed their employees into jobs as janitors, junk haulers, and--ta, da!--light bulb changers!

We both got scheduled for interviews at the same time. I crashed at his place the night before--since the offices for the interview were in the city and he lived down the street. We woke up early, got gussied up in clothing with buttons and groomed our hair. The career seminar advice I'd acquired had paid off. We were dressed for success.

The American Building Maintenance offices were located in a ghetto-ish part of town on Jackson street half way between China Town and the Central District. We walked into a cramped, dimly lit room with low, stained popcorn ceilings and bad, striped curtains. The room was packed with a dozen other prospective employees half of which looked to be homeless and or about to be homeless. We were clearly overdressed. There wasn't enough seating in the office and the mood was awkward. People bumping into each other, not sure what to do with their hands.

Then out came a short-ish, loud Asian woman that began barking like a drill seargant. She explained what kind of employees American Building Maintenance was looking for and that most of the people in attendance were not those people. She ordered us to sit back down (or stand around awkwardly due to insufficient seating) and advised that our names would be called for an interview.

Aaron went first and disappeared into a small office before exiting not five minutes later. He was wide eyed and silent which was a signal that he'd just had a weird experience. I was called in next and the little Asian lady spent the bulk of the interview time talking loudly on the phone while using F-word profanity. Not knowing quite what to do, I stared at the floor. She chain smoked throughout the entire interview. I don't ever recall answering interview type questions.

Both Aaron and I were hired on the spot (must have been that clean pressed shirt!) and told that work assignments were forthcoming within the week. We requested that, if it were possible, we be placed in a job together. Thinking back, that's a pretty a ridiculous request, to ask to be placed in a job with your best buddy. For some reason, they went for it.

Prior to the above mentioned "re-lamp" gig, our first job was moving furniture from a vacated office building down into the basement. All of it. The offices were located in a red brick, turn of the century charmer called the Jones Building on 3rd Ave. The Jones has since been leveled and is now the home of Benaroya Hall.

The building was falling apart. The plaster on the walls was cracked and the hallways were thick with a hundred years of dust accrual. The bathrooms smelled of years old piss and the huge porcelain sinks and ancient toilets were stained with rust.

We worked alone without supervision while the boss from a couple buildings down kept tabs on our progress via walkie talkie. One set-back to the job was that the radiator heaters in the building were broken and stuck "on". And the windows were all boarded up. We worked in 90 + degree heat all day long. It was miserable.

We lifted ratty old office furniture into a cramped elevator and took everything down into the basement. We'd last about 45 minutes at a time till exhaustion from the heat set in and we'd crash out on a crusty couch in a back room. The heat was so oppressive that it lulled us asleep on occasion during breaks. I was not developing a healthy work ethic. But the conditions were so brutal my body couldn't keep up. Musta been that vegetarian diet--imposed by the meat market job-coming to haunt me with muscle atrophy.

After a week of heavy lifting we were promoted to a "re-lamp" gig at the Washington Mutual Tower down the street. We started our shift after regular work hours and worked into the night changing hundreds upon thousands of light bulbs in an empty law firm. Florescent tube bulbs, desk lamp bulbs, the bulbs in the restroom, bulbs at the elevator, bulbs upon bulbs.

One perk to the job, extended to us by the boss, was an open invitation to use the soda machines in the cafeteria as often as we wanted. So we did. I must have ingested a gallon of soda each workshift. Every night was a Carbonation Inspiration Celebration. This newly found beverage fetish unwittingly hooked me into a a six-pack per day Coca-Cola habit for years afterward. My teeth enamel and adrenal gland function will never be the same.

The law firm was up 40 floors and had a spectacular view of the city and Puget Sound. We'd be in the middle of a relamp, standing on a desk in an executive suite, oblong florescent bulb in my hand, my head bumping the ceiling, asbestos tile dust falling into my face when a hypnotic reflection from off the water would catch my eye. The view was amazing. Mid re-lamp we'd plop down into plush leather chairs, turn off the lights and soak in the Seattle skyline sipping on our Cokes.

Eventually the boss caught us slacking and the jig was up. I got kicked off the job. Aaron finished the relamp without me and I was assigned other random janitorial jobs thereafter.

To this day, I have light bulb aversion syndrome and bad teeth.

2008-09-10T14:52:00.000-07:00

WORKING FOR A LIVING PART III

Waiter - Old Folks Home

My high school buddy, Bryan, helped me land a job at the old folks home as a waiter. Bryan was a white kid that liked Reggae music. A lot. So much so that Bryan had salon-made dreadlocks. His hair was short, the dreadlocks uncooperative. So Bryan wrapped his Tootsie Roll hair logs up into rubber bands. It looked funny. But bad hair was excusable because nobody was at the height of fashion in 1990.

For some reason or other the folks in charge of the kitchen at The Old Folks Home hired all the teenaged freaks, punks, skaters and stoners in the South King County area. The chef in charge was a very gay, sarcastic, mustachioed rolly-polly man (who was later replaced by "Carlos", also a mustachioed man. But Carlos was Mexican--and to my knowledge not gay--with looks and mannerisms similar to Seinfeld's "Soup Nazi" who we played practical jokes on constantly)

Not only was it the job of the wait staff to serve the tenants lunch and dinner but to also (unofficially) make the most of opportunities for self amusement. This included role playing while waiting on tables. We pretended bad, exaggerated fake European accents. We were entertainers, of course. Most the tenants, being that they were senile and all, did not know the difference between our regular speaking voices and our stage voices. On occasion, however, we were one upped by some of the sharper tenants who would shoot back to us their food orders in like manner.

Ordinarily there were two choices on the menu. Something like, say, creamy garlic chicken with a side of carrots or skirt steak and a baked potato. Instead, we'd offer the earthworm patte or the honey glazed curd of Spam. We made it up as we went along. You know, improvisation. I'm sure it was great fun for the old folks.

Other ways of entertaining ones self as a waiter at The Old Folks Home involved playing out elaborate (fake) dramas for tenants. As an example, there were usually a few folks that either

a.) preferred to have their meals delivered vs. eating in the dining room or
b.) were not well and needed room service or
c.) were crazy and urged by management to stay in their rooms and have their food delivered.

We did not make it a habit to "entertain" sick folks.

Steve was a manager of sorts in the kitchen well known and loved by the tenants. Steve was of Latino decent. Steve and Bryan frequently paired up to improvise for Betsy, a crazy, old, jolly tenant on the 3rd floor. The scenario went like this: Latino Steve delivered the food to Betsy's room. As Steve situated Betsy's food, Tootsie Bryan pounded at the door.

"Open up! It's the border patrol!" cried TB
"Oh, no!" Latino Steve would say "help me find a place to hide Betsy, quick! I don't have my green card and they'll throw me in jail if they find me!"
"Oh goodness!" Betsy would say, flustered, as she proceeded to point out the way to the nearest closet.

TB would then burst into the room carrying on about the "wetback" that had gotten loose. TB would rummage through Betsy's apartment (careful not to make a mess, of course) and finally find LS hiding in the closet, yank him into the living room and pretend to smack him around a bit. Betsy seemingly loved watching the drama unfold. (To the best of my knowledge, Betsy believed these scenarios to be real. But I'll never know for sure.)

Latino Steve and Tootsie Bryan would repeat this routine frequently for weeks on end. For Betsy, it was brand new excitement each time as she customarily did not remember the happenings from the day before.

When I was trained for the room service run, Bryan and I played out similar scenarios but instead of me playing the role of the illegal alien, I was an escaped prisoner.

I got paid for this.

2008-09-09T11:34:00.000-07:00

WORKING FOR A LIVING PART II

Butcher Cleaner-upper

When I was sixteen, in addition to my paper-boy gig, I took on a job cleaning up at a meat market after hours. I scraped fat buildup off the butchers block and washed the tools, knives and saws for the butcher after he'd gone home for the night. When I was lucky I even got to wrap plastic over steaks and I fed frozen meat into a grinder which spat the wormy looking cow product into a giant churning machine that mixed the ground beef into a giant, formless mass of red and white speckled rawburger. Yum.

There was a walk-in fridge locker at the back of the market where sides of beef hung on oversized hooks. When nobody was around, and when the meat wasn't too frozen, I'd use the sides hanging from the hooks as punching bags Rocky Balboa style.

It was common for the beef to drip blood onto the concrete floor and after the blood quagulated and froze, I had the distinct privilege of scraping the quarter inch thick spots up with a garden hoe type tool. The smell of stale, frozen cow blood is indescribable. But one thing I can tell you, it doesn't smell like cotton candy.

I also disassembled the table saw which had about 25 working parts that had to be soaked in a huge stainless sink filled to the brim with nearly boiling point water to wash the grease off. Thin rubber gloves are not quite thick enough to keep from burning your hands in almost boiling water. This requires care and proper timing.

The table saw had an inside compartment and a catcher that collected all the "sawdust". Except it wasn't wood chips, of course, but meat and bone dust. This sticky concoction was made for balling up into softball sized blobs and pitched onto the wall when customers weren't looking. 9 times out of 10 the spherical meat amalgamation byproduct stuck when it slapped onto the wall. It was a little game I played.

The butcher was an old, white hair bespeckacald guy named Ray who, unsurprisingly, happened to be missing a finger or two due to sloppy butcher practices from back in the day. Ray was not politically correct. Never in my life have I heard someone handle profanity as creatively as Ray. Listening to Ray's sailor-speak was like the aural equivilent of expert knife juggling.

I was a punk rocker back then with a wardrobe complete with the obligatory uniform of leather, studs, chains, bad hair and other such accessories. My being a punk rocker required of Ray that he call me a fag. I never was, and presently am not, nor ever will be, a fag. But it was Ray's joyful duty to name call. I didn't take it personally.

Needless to say, after working at the meat market, I became a vegetarian for a little while.

2008-09-08T19:24:00.001-07:00

WORKING FOR A LIVING Part I

I was recently thinking about all the ridiculous jobs I've had over the years. From cleaning up after a butcher to Insurance Property Adjuster, I've done lots of junk. These jobs have taken a third of my life away since my mid twenties (but I've been working some kind of job since 13) and though I'd prefer to be a couch tester, you know, they pay the bills & stuff. Numero uno es Paperboy.....

My first job was a paper route. I was thirteen and I worked the route till I was sixteen. My being hired for the route came at a good time and served nicely as a ready made excuse for not having to play football. I tried out for the team, I discovered that football sucked, being tackled hurt, and I saved face having to commit to something else that was a time conflict.

I'd inherited the route from a smart-alec, bullying preachers kid from up the street who, when we were little, used to throw rocks when we were playing in the culdesac. Yeah, that kid.

My buddy Jim wanted the route too so we agreed to split the responsibilities down the middle. We raked in a whopping $48 each month in profits (per) which was, in rote teenage fashion, systematically blown on 7-11 nachos, big gulps, video games, punk rock cassettes and skateboard accessories.

I'd usually do my portion of the route on my skateboard if the weather was ok. The weight of the shoulder bag I carried the papers in made for awkward skating but it helped me develop an unshakable balance on my board.

there were a few drawbacks to the route, though, which included newspapery smelling, stained hands and evening deliveries. On weekdays I frequently had to bail on my friends mid hangout sesh to get the route done on time.

On summer weekends, I'd sneak out of the house at about 2 am (right when the papers were delivered to the pickup station outside our house) to get the route out of the way so that I could sleep in late. After I finished the delivery rounds I'd often go skate by myself till the wee hours. There's nothing like having a strip mall parking lot to yourself at 3:30 am. I didn't have to worry about weaving in and out of cars or getting yelled at by shop owners. It was just me, the sound of hard, urethane wheels on the pavement, the occasional automatic sprinkler system in the lot planters, and my thoughts.

Another highlight memory of the route included a Hangover Sunday when I puked on the ground next an an old lady walking her dog. There are few moments in my life that I recall feeling as crappy. Nothing like the smell of Olde English beer puke at 7 am and still having a solid mile to go. Good times.

2008-06-25T11:52:00.001-07:00

LOOKING FOR A JOBBY-JOB

Uncle Matt is on the hunt for a job that will pay the mama's bills. Rose quit working a year ago, I live in Sea-town, it's stupid expensive and I gots me a mortgage. Check out the "Profesh Portfolio" tab to your right for a link with a resume etc as well as a new link to a virb page with my discography / music samples etc.

Being an American, I believe I can land a job I don't hate that will make me much mo money. This is the goal as things of interest in my world don't seem to produce the cold hard cash. So if I don't hate the job, I win. The dream? Give me a stack of interesting books, lots of time to read them and I will think deep thoughts, share them with you and even write book reports if you want. If I could get a little over $65K a year plus benefits, that would be fantastic. Thanks.

2008-06-24T10:42:00.000-07:00

I FOUGHT THE LAW AND I WON (FOR ONCE)

Tired of getting nickled-dimed-by your bank, the cable company, the student loan people etc? Yeah, me too. So this week I decided to fight back and I won. Kind of.

I was a US Bank customer for about 20-ish years, always thought the service sucked but just put up with it cos, you know, everybody's got to have a bank, right?

So about this time last year I decided I'd had enough, I closed my accounts and went to a new bank that actually treats me well. I did, however, decide to keep a creditline open with US Bank because it's my longest running credit account and it will help me with my overall credit score if I keep it open. So I paid off my balance when I changed banks and forgot about it.

Every couple months I would get mail from US Bank saying "hey you've got a credit account and you can use the money if you want!" so I ignored the mail. But eventually my annual fee was due but I was ignoring the mail. I didn't pay the fee and late fees start to accrue. Victim of circumstance.

I was made aware of this when I started getting calls at dinner-time from the cardmember services peeps. But see, most those people aren't too bright and they couldn't tell me what I was getting charged for specifically. So I didn't pay it until somebody was able to explain it adequately. Long story longer...I called the bank and asked them to waive all the fees and I'd keep the account open. The first person waived one of the fees but couldn't do away with one of the fees and the annual fee. So I started pestering Cardmember Services by email. Here's my smart alecky exchange for your enjoyment:

" US Bank is whack. I paid off this account a year ago and now I am getting stuck with late fees on a unpaid annual fee. The sweet lady (beverly) that helped me with this issue voided one of the $15 fees but likely doesn't have the authority to reverse other fees. But see, me and Beverly, we're gonna fight the power. I banked with US Bank for 20 plus years and they have always been a complete pain to work with (if there's an employee that actually reads this, they know I'm right). US bank nickles and dimes people to death and last year I finally had enough and closed my accounts to bank with BECU who actually treat me fairly. If anyone with any decency is reading this, you should reverse my annual fee and late charges and pay me back the fee I just paid on for being such a good guy and actually staying with US bank for so long putting up with the fees etc. C'mon, be a sport. Help the little guy. Then maybe I won't tell ten other people how crappy US bank is. Surprise me. C'mon. I dare you. Apply the golden rule. Feel good about your job for once. Please give me my money back, let me keep the stupid account open for credit purposes and then leave me alone.You know you want to. All it takes is a phone call, an email and a boss to push an approved button on a computer screen. Do it. You know you want to. "

"Nancy T Service Advisor" from US Bank basically responded by saying "sorry for the inconvenience, we have closed your account and you will not be charged" To which I replied:

"Hello, I just recieved an email from 'Nancy T Service Advisor' who wrote this: 'Dear Matthew E Johnson: Good afternoon. Thank you for contacting U.S. Bancorp Service Center, Inc. via our website. We have valued your relationship and regret to learn of your decision to close your account. We have closed your account per your request. All fees and/or finance charges have been credited. These credits will bring your account to zero.'

The thing is, I don't want my accound to be closed. If you note my previous comment I never requested this. I want the account to remain open and have the fees revoked. This is the longest running credit account that I have. If I keep it open, its better for my overall credit. So, obviously I'm wasting my time once again and I'm mostly just entertaining myself here but please, please, please if there is a human being reading this with an actual heart and soul, apply the golden rule. reverse the fees. Keep the account open and maybe I'll use it again someday. Be a sport. I know you want to feel good about your life and job today. You can do it. I believe in you".

"Tess M. Service Advisor" responded thusly:

"Dear Matthew E. Johnson: Good morning and thank you for contacting U.S. Bancorp Service Center, Inc. via our website. Let me begin by apologizing that your account was closed without your request. Therefore, we have reopened your account and it is ready for immediate use. Also, all fees have been credited to the account and it currently has a zero balance. Please contact us again if we can be of further assistance. You are a valued cardmember Matthew and we appreciate the opportunity to be of assistance. Sincerely, Tess M. Service Advisor"

I fought the law. I won. This time.

2008-04-30T21:51:00.000-07:00

TEAM JOHNSON IN FULL EFFECT

Our beautiful baby girl, Dahlia was born on April 11. Nothing but props to the mamma with the mad birthing skills. Get this...first contraction till baby was a whopping two hours. TWO HOURS. Unfreakingbelievable. We will never be the same and I'm so glad. For further reading on the momentous occasion, you can check my sis in-laws blog about it here.

I am a blessed man, very very tired and pissed to have to go back to work after two weeks of baby oodling happiness. Me and baby girl had a great tradition going in the mornings. After about a 3 hour evening resting period which eventually turned to daylight I'd take the baby for a bit so Rose could sleep between feedings. I'd swaddle her up real tight, get a cupa joe and watch a few episodes of Twin Peaks in my jammies. Bliss.

I am eternally grateful for this blessing. There are a whole lot of unexpected turns in baby world. This is all very obvious information of course but life is now fundamentally different. But different in simple but profound ways that a person just can't understand until you're actually living it. Here's an example. See, I tend to be a pretty introspective dude always testing hypotheses in my mind, arguing with alter egos, trying to figure out the secret meaning of the last book I read, rearranging my iPod playlists thematically, intellectually defeating opponents in my mind, etc, etc. This often causes me to be mind-tired and cranky. It is a real relief to have my thoughts filled with someone else other than me for a change. Frankly, I was getting tired of mentally exhausting myself. Who ever thought that dirty diapers, spit-up and sleepless nights could be such a beautiful remedy for self-addiction. There is a profound, spiritual, trinitarian reality here that is too involved to go into for a mere blog. But I will say this...

For those atheistic materialists out there still sticking to their guns after peering into the eyes of your first born, I am truly sorry you're stuck in wishful thinking having to pretend that love for your child means anything other than electrical impulses in your brain caused by the genetic necessity of species survival. It's time to get your heads checked.

2008-03-07T10:18:00.000-08:00

INVISIBLE CREATURE GALLERY SHOWING APRIL 12TH

OK, my buddy Bill Power insisted I post something new (Frankly, I've been a little busy blogging for Jesus here) But I suppose it's about time to revive this jam anyway.

So aside from doing indigenous-incarnational-missiological-music-contextualization, this is one of the other things I've been up to lately. Check out my bio for this Seattle gallery show that's coming up.

Invisible Creature has been blowing up. They do design/packaging for tons of hot-shot bands (including Foo Fighters) and the Clark bros--the co-founders of IC--share three Grammy Nominations between the two of them over the last couple years for "Best CD Design". So basically, in case you hadn't heard, the Clarks are a pretty much a big deal. I'd say more, but the bio at IC pretty much sums it up.

Hello once again Positive Affirmation of Creative Destruction-ers (all three of you) [maybe] I'm back!

2007-01-25T09:00:00.000-08:00

FULL CARDUCCI INTERVIEW IS UP!

I was having blog issues momentarily but it's all better now. Anyway, for the sake of manueverability here is part I of the interview. And here is part II.

Enjoy.

2007-01-23T14:29:00.000-08:00

MORE ELECTRIC CHURCH GLOSSOLALIA

As promised, Joe Carducci's interview part II.

2007-01-22T08:45:00.000-08:00

JOE CARDUCCI'S TESTAMENT FOR THE ELECTRIC CHURCH

In '03 me and my good buddy Papa Chris Estey interviewed the author of the fan-effing-tastic book Rock and the Pop Narcotic. His name is Joe Carducci. (See my Bandoppler article on Carducci here and part I of the interview here.)

Back in the '80s Carducci used to work at SST records. In the early '90s he wrote the criminally underrated Narcotic which is a kind of stream of consciousness armchair philosophy rant on the state of rock and how we got here. He chides the rock-write intelligentsia, the inability of "rock radio" programmers to understand the rock aesthetic and the life sapping approach of pop music production. There's also some very interesting class oriented stuff which I mostly didn't understand but plan on re-reading. Since then I've been steeping in Carducci-isms for years. I haven't listened to or written about music the same way since.

Setting up the interview was no problem at all. Estey did a couple Google searches, found an email and within a day heard back from Carducci himself. This was a surprise as it was customary for us BANDOPPLER-ITES to get the publicist run-around from labels and publishers. I was pretty nervous conducting the interview--it was my first--but Estey acted like an old pro. About half way through Estey took over--which was fine, I was choking anyway--and Joe was totally easy going.

Perception is a funny thing. There I was thinking I'd really nailed what the philosophy of Carducci's book was all about. I approached the interview like I was a student interviewing a professor or something--like I was trying to talk through a hypothesis that the proff would then confirm or correct. But Joe was just another music obsessive like me and he just wanted to talk.At any rate, my involvement in the interview is awkward and largely inconsequential.

Thanks to Estey for transcribing the tapes and refereeing the conversation and thanks to Joe for the interview and the periodic email correspondence over the years. I will post Part II of the interview in coming weeks.BTW, you can check out Carducci's latest projects here.

2006-12-15T09:01:00.000-08:00

COALESCE VOCALIST TAKES IT TO THE PEOPLES COURT IS HARRASSED BY DRUNK CHICKS, GETS MUMPS

Got an email from Sean Ingram (of legendary hardcore band Coalesce) saying he was going to appear on the TV show The People's Court. Yes, THAT Peoples Court. As in "don't take the law into your own hands, you take 'em to court." As in Judge Wapner. Sean runs a merchandising company called Blue Collar Industries and had a gripe against a band's manager that didn't pay up.

Here's a little snippet of his unbelievable trip to NYC to appear on the show. He's describing the ghetto-fabulous waiting room at The Peoples Court before his case begins:

"They then took me to make-up and then to a second holding 'room'. This room was barely a room. It was 4 walls barely held up by 2×4s with no ceiling, and you had to whisper becuase they could hear you in the court room. It was exactly what you would expect from a back stage room at a club. Writing all over the walls, drawings of dicks, KKK, swastikas, phone numbers for a good lay, the works. After about 30 minutes there they took us to our marks to walk in the doors and the case got under way...." Do yourself a favor and read the full story here.

Reminds me of the time that Derek from Murder City Devil's / Pretty Girls Make Graves was on the Jerry Springer show.

Awesome.

2006-12-14T11:34:00.000-08:00

[LESTER BANGS SAYS THERE'S] NOTHING BETTER THAN THE SHAGGS

About 10 years ago my buddy Josh Golden turned me onto the brilliance of the late-60s-sisterly-trio-without-a-lick-of-musical-ability band The Shaggs. He was puttin' me and my bandmates up while we were out on one of our many Peanutbutter and Jelly fueled DIY tours. Our van had broken down, we missed a couple shows and were stuck in Boston at Josh's trying to figure out our next move. Were we going to get train tickets home and scrap the van? Would we soldier on? For those out there in rock-band-dude-land you know the kind of dispair of which I speak when it comes down to being stranded out on tour with nothing in yer pocket but lint.

Anyway, The Shaggs provided the perfect soundtrack to our effed up situation. I thought the Shaggs were perfectly appropriate. Doug, our guitar player, thought TheShaggs sounded satanic. Just today I came accross this article by Lester Bangs when the 1969 original Philosophy of the World was re-issued in 1980.

Enjoy.

2006-11-11T12:00:00.000-08:00

TORTOISE VS. SHELLAC: A CASE IN OVER-DOCUMENTATION

I've added a few items to the side-bar under "Off-line Articles". First is a piece that was written for--surprise, surprise--Bandoppler on the band Tortoise. There's also a complete interview with Bob Weston from a couple years ago. (Bob plays bass in Shellac and has a sort of Albini-esque approach in the studio as an engineer)

Eartly this summer I thought I'd lost a bunch of content to a computer that was on the fritz. Fortunately though I recently found many of MIA files. So now you've got a couple more reasons to waste time at work. I've also got two extensive interviews with Damien Jurado and Joe Carducci--author of Rock and the Pop Narcotic--on the way soon.

2006-11-09T21:29:00.000-08:00

THE BLOOD BROTHERS ROCK YER FACE OFF!

I've been listening to the crap out of the new Blood Brothers disc "Young Machetes". I could go on and on about how great this band is but read the review for yourself and I'll save myself the typing cramps. And while you're at it you can also check out a review of Other Desert Cities here.

I'm not sure if you've seen this on the news recently but apparently "Rock music in the 21st century has been subject to an unprecedented emotional arms race of Cold War proportions." And apparently the Killers new album Sam's Town is at the forefront of said arms race. Golly, I had no idea things were so dire! Thanks for being committed to public awareness PitchforkMedia! And as pointed out by my good buddy Chris, Pitchfork are not only reviewing music, they're also reviewing religions now too! The debate has been officially sealed. Sorry but Christians can't rock.

And remember kids, listening to Deathcab For Cutie makes yer balls smaller!

2006-08-21T22:08:00.000-07:00

PATROL IS BRINGING THE ROCK TO SEATTLE

For those on the prowl for some good rock my old band-mate Doug Lorig from Roadside Monument is in a new band called Patrol. They've got a new CD out on the Japanese Label Stiff Slack and it's damn good. I wrote a review for a local online zine that grappled with the possibility of my conflict of interest. But when I was editing it I figured my association with Patrol band members didn't really matter and that I wouldn't mention the connection (and it's not like any readers would be clued into the connection anyway. Roadside monument sold like, 5 records anyhow). Now you know. My interests are conflicted. So sue me.

I can't recommend this record enough. Patorl rock. hey're heavy without being metal, vocally melodic but not poppy, psychedelic at times and there's a hint of really nice moody moments...I think this is the band that Dougie always wanted to play in.

When you're in your twenties one often has the urge to blaze a new trail without having to rely on "embarrassing" influences from youth (i.e. classic rock). For the folks that are tapping into their early radio listening years for inspiration these days there's often a tongue-in-cheek element to the song writing results. But why be ashamed of liking The Who, Zep or ACDC? (Not that Patrol really sounds like any of those bands) Anyway, I don't know if Dougie was self aware of potentially uncool youthful listening habits or not (At lest for me it took a while to admit that I really like Sabbath) but I remember conversations with him back then about what we grew up listening too. Now we're old enough to let those influences hang out with no shame. And the best part is Patrol absorb all the good stuff without trying to be cutsie about it. I appreciate that. Anyway, check out my review here.

For some reason the Three Imaginary Girls web folks assigned a 6.9 rating to the record when it was posted but I actually rated it at an 8. I've emailed the authorities so hopefully they'll make the correction.

Enjoy.

2006-07-13T19:30:00.000-07:00

LIFE IS LESS LIKE A BOWL OF CHERRIES AND MORE LIKE A BIG 'OL ONION

So I gots a birfday coming up. How old you ask? Old enough. And there’s nothing like smart alecky remarks from a nephew to drive a few more nails into the coffin. I was out at my sister and brother in laws house a week ago or so sun bathing and making good use of their backyard pool.

While I chaperoned my nephew in the hot-tub he say’s to me “uncle Matt! You got a HUGE belly!” Rose was laying in the sun nearby listening in and trying not to laugh. Well, I let that one go. Later I remind my niece that she has a birthday coming up and that we have birthdays that are only a couple days apart. I ask her to guess how old I’m going to be but she doesn’t want to take a stab at it even though I give her a hint that I’m close in age to her dad (she’s opts out of situations like that now in fear that she’ll say the wrong thing like the time she asked my mother in law why her teeth are so green…snicker…) so then my nephew pipes in again and asks “hey uncle Matt!” they always yell stuff ya know “are you like, dead-old?!” I say no and that “dead-old” is reserved for grandma and grandpas. Then he asks “are you like 80!?”. Nice. The kid’s only 4 so I’ll give him a break. Even though I get the distinct feeling that he’s fully aware that he’s bustin my balls.

Well, I don’t have a complex about the age thing but there’s definitely something about crossing over the 30 yo threshold that definitely feels a lot different than yer mid-late 20s. Maybe it’s that you rehash the same old crap in conversation/thought life that you used to mill around a decade previous. Only instead of life being like a series of fresh ideas fueling you along, it’s more like life starts to resemble an onion. Layer after stinky layer of the same thing (this is how I explained it to someone lately anyway) I don’t mean that in a morbid kind of way at all. It’s just that life becomes more complicated and simple all at the same time. Isn’t life just the same constant with tiny variations of the same themes? I’m still pretty amazed at all the layers but I think I’m kinda starting to get what the onion’s all about.

2006-06-14T19:37:00.000-07:00

RETURN OF THE FROG KING (AND A MESS OF SEMI-RELATED USELESS RAMBLINGS)

Ten years in coming, Jeremy Enigk has finally recorded another solo project. I’ve got to admit that I’ve never been a big Sunny Day / Fire Theft / Enigk fan in the past. But my disinterest was never anything personal. But you know when everyone around you has a stiffy for the latest thing and they just can’t shut up about it and it kind of ruins it for you? Well, that kind of thing can really have an effect on a guys enjoyment of music. Especially me. I know it’s shallow but I’ve always been that way. I couldn’t get into Teen Spirit era The Nirvana for the same reason. I originally saw The Nirvana during the Bleach era at a local community college for like, six bucks. Then about three years later everybody’s wearing long johns under their baggy cut-off army pants and listening to Pearl Jam like they were the ones that just made it all up. And these were the same a-holes that made fun of me in high school just a few years earlier. True story. I appreciate The Nirvana now but it took a while.

But back to the subject at hand:

It’s funny how things come full circle despite my Sunny Day lukewarm-ness cos I was actually one of the five drummers who recorded for the New Enigk Album Sessions. I think I laid down like, 4 or 5 tracks and one of the songs made the cut to the final collection. According to Jeremy the other tunes may eventually appear on a B-sides collection. A mess of stuff was recorded.

The recording session was great. Previous to tracking my buddy Josh Meyers (the main collaborator and engineer on the recording) called me in to demo a few songs. Apparently they were tracking drums early in the recording process and were adding instrumentation on top later on. As in, these songs didn’t come together with multiple human beings in one room rehearsing their parts together (mistake). The project was almost entirely performed by Enigk himself bit by bit (sans drums). So the first drummer came in, laid down the tracks but once the rest of the song started taking shape there would be big swells in the music or a certain phrase would back off in the dynamics department. But given that when the drums were tracked, the drummer wouldn’t have known where to play more intensely or where to lay back. Well that’s when me, Casey Forbert (from the recently defunt Crystal Skulls) and James (Ester Drang) McAllister—both of whom are fantastic drummers—came in. Though the approach taken to track the songs was the exact opposite of how I prefer to record (several human beings in a room communicating together musically) the end result still sounded pretty good. Does anybody know how hair-ball and nerve racking it is to play drums to a click track for a song that’s been ¾ of the way tracked? Well, it was a good experience anyway despite the robotic music making approach and it was fun hanging out in the studio.

The newly mixed and mastered version was played at a listening party we attended last Saturday night at an Episcopal Church-owned office building up on Capitol Hill. Apparently Jeremy’s managers wife is the caretaker for this immense, brownstone mansion of a building at the top of a bluff right off 10th ave overlooking Lake Union. The sun was setting when we got there and the view was amazing. As far as the building goes, I think it’s a place where the Episcopal bishops for the area have office space or something. Nobody actually lives there though.

The inside of the building is a little bit gaudy but it was a nice place for a listening party. The sitting area off the side of the entryway (where the listening part of the party was held) had these gigantor ceilings, big open spaces with balconies, the works. All the walls had really ornate wood carved panels with lion faces and stuff carved into them and there was lots of marble and other heavy duty building materials accompanied by the smell of old musty church holiness. Very cool. I got a few picks of the room we were sitting in but they’re too dark to show here. I was kind of scared to poke around the space though. I thought I might get lost and wind up in some kind of Scooby-Do fiasco where there are specters (aka the janitor) chillin in suits of armor in the corner standing there way still waiting for people to sneak by so that he can take them by surprise and chase them down long, dark corridors. Well we opted to stay safe and just kicked it in the main room and listened to the record instead.

Though the listening party was mostly a social for super important types (the kind of socials I totally abhor) who just stand outside on the patio smoking and talking trash, I was glad we went. The end result sounds great. I’ve always known Enigk was a fantastic song-writer. I just couldn’t get over my thing. I think I might just finally be able to enjoy Jeremy’s music after all these years (but not because I played on one of the songs.)

Allow me to explain.

Have you ever had a room-mate that was obsessive about a good band and overplayed something so much that it ruined your own enjoyment of it? Well, that’s kind of like my relationship to Sunny Day and Enigk. Well in actuality it’s a little bit about obsessive room-mates, a little bit about Christian rockers.

Anybody remember Enigk coming out in like ’94 saying he had experienced a conversion and had become a born-again Christian? All the too cool for school indie kids can scoff but I for one was happy for him. Though we were never really pals per se, Enigk and I were on a first name basis and had some of the same friends. Many of us attended the same college ministry group at a local church on Thursday nights. Well it was this throng of holy little posers (a term coined by Papa Estey) none of whom would ever think of buying a “secular” record that were now praising Sunny Day cos of Enigks recent conversion (even though there probably wasn’t anything particularly “Christian” about the lyrics on the album Diary. Some how the irony was lost…) These same kids would have NEVER listened to Sunny Day on the merit of the music alone. But because Enigk was now one of “them” they were able to leach off his then current cultural relevance. It was kind of like the U2 Factor on a small scale and it was annoying (on a side note, I have this nasty habit of entering Christian rocker message boards that are on the topic of U2 and I’ll weigh in by posting—go ahead and feel free to use this just don’t over use it—“Bono is a bed-wetter”). I’ve always hated the cultural sacred cows of evangelicalism and that’s why I didn’t like Sunny Day. That and my room-mate across the hall played them like, 24/7. I know. I’m totally lame and that’s such a high school mentality. But once you’ve got a bad taste in your mouth…

Well obviously it’s been a couple years since then and I can appreciate all of the Enigk output. I don’t own any of those records but I recognize what I’m hearing when it’s playing somewhere. I totally get why people like it. Jeremy has a great, unique voice. The music and lyrics are good. But I’ve never been able to get into it due to my prejudices. OK, nothing was really forced on me. But I coulda really enjoyed something great if it hadn’t been for people ruining the whole thing. I’m a jerk about this stuff for true. I try not to vocalize my opinions much though around my wife cos since we’ve been married I’ve ruined a couple records for her due to my half-baked philosophies. Sorry babe.

2006-05-25T20:45:00.000-07:00

NASHVILLE’S ANSWER TO THE DEAD KENNEDY’S – THE TED KENNEDY’S!

My buddy Bill emailed me a couple days ago to tell me he started up a band called the Ted Kennedy’s. Funny. This in turn reminded me of when I originally fell in love with punk rock 20 years ago. Yes, I am old.

The first punk-ish oriented music I heard while growing up was The Clash’s Should I Stay Or Should I Go. Mostly my listening up to that point was your run of the mill classic rock radio--stuff passed down by my older brothers. You know...The Nuge, Foghat, Deep Purple, Zep,
ZZ Top, Trower etc. I think I was about eight or nine when I heard Should I Stay... on the radio. The local srock station, KISW (Seattle’s Best Rock) had it in rotation but because it was a punkish tune that didn’t bode so well with the Hessian, ape-drape, bud swillin’ smoke on the water mustachioed community, they let the audience decide whether it would continue on in the playlist or not. People would call in and say yay or nay, they tallied up the votes and in the end it was axed. My brothers made a big deal over it (kind of like they did about the whole disco sucks fiasco) and all their buddies were hanging out in my brother’s room listening to the broadcast and debating the issue. I remember when the chorus kicked in with the lyric “should I stay or should I go now”? they’d all chant “GO! Go! Go!” in unison to voice their disapproval. I didn’t see what was so bad about the song though…

A couple years later I checked out Husker Du’s Zen Arcade double LP from the local library. I had no idea what I was listening to but I was blown away. I figured “it must be punk since it’s not regular rock”. About a year later a skateboarding buddy of mine played The Dead Kennedy’s Holiday Inn Cambodia over the phone for me. I was hooked. I bolted over the second I hung up the phone like I was in some kind of skateboard marathon so that I could make cassette copies of all the cool music he had. After that it was The Cramps Bad Music for Bad People, 7 Seconds Walk Together Rock Together, Black Flag Loose Nut, Minor Threats two Eps etc. That was a good year. I don’t think I wore a single article of clothing without holes in it for a couple years straight after that. And I started sporting the skater pirate bangs / devil lock look Misfits era Danzig style. I also rocked the Pushead Evil Eye Misfits T-shirt. All that went over real well with my dad let me tell ya. Good times.

But listening to punk around our house was kind of a precarious enterprise. I had to turn down my stereo at just the right time so that Ian’s “what the f—ck have you done!?” or Jello’s “god told me to skin you alive” wasn’t heard down the hall by my pops. This made for the development of some quick reflexes though. So there I’d be chillin in my room laying down on my bed rocking the boombox while I was reading a Thrasher and I’d have to strategically jump up to turn the volume knob at just the right time. It would have made more sense to just listen more quietly or rock the headphone’s but that would have been less fun

2006-05-11T17:08:00.000-07:00

ICE CREAM LOVIN’ AMPUTEE

This is a one sided conversation I overheard coming from my co-workers cubicle the other day. I wrote it down and just found it amongst a pile of crap on my desk. Enjoy…

“Hi.”
….

“Should I get you some ice cream?”
…

“Are they going to amputate?”

….

“Are they going to amputate!?”

….

“NO, it’s not because you married her…”

….

“OK, I love you too.”

I’m not one to eavesdrop but sometimes you can’t help it.

2006-05-10T18:59:00.000-07:00

THERE'S NOTHING LIKE HEARING THE COMFORTING VOICE OF STEVE ALBINI AS YOUR LIFE FLASHES BEFORE YOUR EYES

What’s the best way to quell the fear of being swallowed up by the existential void after spending yet another meaningless day in Cubicle Land? Play Shellac - At Action Park obscenely loud as you peel out of the parking lot at quitting time.

I’ve got to admit…I kinda feel like that guy from the movie Office Space who’s rocking it to gangsta rap on his commute to work. You know…white-guy-working-a-dead-end-corporate-job-that-listens-to-aggressive-music-during-the-commute-to-funnel-aggression style? I know, I’m totally lame. At least in my situation there’s no reason for me to sink into my seat and turn down the stereo when a black dude is walking by…

So anyway I’m on my way home and as I cross over the 405 to I-5 interchange the song Crow is rocking hard. It’s just as the guitar riff gets some momentum when Bob Weston comes in on the vocals. The drums segue after the bass-line has been throbbing on oppressively for about 3 minutes. I’m curving around on the onramp feeling the G-force as I merge onto I-5 and…

CRACK!

A big-ish rock gets flung into my windshield that’s been kicked up from a truck sporting an oversized load sign. There’s nothing like experiencing one of the best rock moments of all time accompanied by a holy-shit-I-feel-like-I-coulda-just-died adrenaline rush. Somehow the windshield didn’t break but that rock was easily big enough to have made a real nice spider web shaped crack. It didn’t.

I caught my breath during the choppy riff where the drums back off and the hi-hat is keeping time as the bass and guitar play in unison. I thanked Jesus for at least a few more moments on planet earth and then I got to thinking about how bad ass it would be—if that rock had been bigger and embedded into my skull—to explain to the Apostle Peter how my last living moments were spent rocking out to Shellac.

Speaking of the afterlife, who came up with the imagery of St. Pete chillin in the Box Office at the Gates of Heaven anyway? It probably has something to do with that pesky Catholic hermeneutical error of Matthew 16:18 that wormed its way into my consciousness. Well, as much as Constantinianism and pedophilia have been such a bummer and even though I’m a Protestant, they’re still the Mutha Church.

Listening assignment of the day: rock some Shellac now!

2006-05-07T18:40:00.000-07:00

CRACK LOT EXPANSION PROJECT MAY BE A GOLD MINE!

My previous post was about construction going on in the lot next to our house. One of the construction workers mentioned that our slice of the pie might be worth a lot to the developer. Well, I’m not ready to move anytime soon. My house is dope swas to the 5th power. But I got to thinking about the sitting on a goldmine thing. What if I could make like, a zillion dollars by selling my house to a developer? I could buy a newer, radder house. It’d have a giant McDonald’s Playland for adults out back with a big netted area full of those red plastic balls where my friends could jump around (no urinating in secret while you’re covered with balls when the other kids aren’t looking is allowed!). I’d have one of those old-school Coke machines filled with Pabst Blue Ribbon on the covered patio. Everything on the inside of the house would be 1990s era hip-hop white. The living room would have a mammoth sized bright white leather couch. And a huge gaudy crystal chandelier hanging from the middle of the ceiling. But nobody would ever be allowed to actually sit in the living room. It’d be for show only. There’d be an airbrushed painting on the entryway wall of Biggie Smalls. Every room in the house (bathroom included) would have obscenely huge fish tanks (including a chair with fish tanks for arms) filled with crazy looking fish that look like those blue and white rainbow colored popcicles. I’d have a Zen fish pond or some crap in the back next to the tennis court. And a hot tub overlooking a cliff where I could sit and watch the sunset every night just soaking it up with a glass of sparkly Pimp Juice chillin with Rose and my main man Immanuel Lewis*. Then one day some camera crew would come over and want to see what I stocked my fridge with. It’d be packed with Jello pudding cups and Marie Calendar chicken fried chicken and gravy.

Naw, I dig my house. But I guess I’ll have to just put up with six months of pounding, sawing, rheumatic drilling and dust.

Sigh…

*I’m gonna start a band called Immanuel Lewis Overdrive someday. Don’t take the name tho…

2006-05-07T09:32:00.000-07:00

YOU CAN JUST CALL OUR NEIGHBORHOOD LITTLE BEIRUT

It’s like a bomb got dropped on our block. For reals. The other day while I was driving the home stretch coming from Cubicle Land, I damn near drove into a giant pit. Well, not really. It was more like a pot-hole.

You know when a construction crew rips up a street and it looks like a fifty foot rake was dragged across the freshly jacked pavement? Well, that’s what our street has looked like for the last few weeks. And there’s lots of dust. Now it seems like there’s always the same old lady waiting at the bus stop squinting with a shawl over her face cos of the dirt. It’s like she just hangs out there every day to remind everybody of the fact that it’s dusty out on our block all the time. And she’s right. It sucks.

A couple days later big yellow tractors and backhoes were getting parked in front of the crack house looking building on the corner. I figured this had to be good cos that building looked like ass and couldn’t have done much for the property value of the surrounding houses (namely ours). Plus a tattoo-less Dan Higgs looking dude with dried urine pantalones stays in a Winnabago on the same lot. I’m all for living peaceably with Higgs lookalikes with bladder control issues but he’d be rummaging around on the other side of our fence at say…oh, 1:30 AM on weeknights fairly consistently. I hope dude found another lot to park his rig on.

So I wake up one morning about a week ago at about 7 AM to the house rumbling. I knew right away what was up. DEMOLITION DAY! We were finally going to get rid of that eyesore of a building! I opened the window in the bathroom to get a looksie while I was washing my teeth. As I was turning on the hot water in the shower I realized that the backhoes digger claw thingy was seriously swinging around about 5 feet from my house! So while I was in the shower trying to keep my soapy footing while the house shook, I kept thinking “maybe they put the new guy on the backhoe today”. I mean, if you work for a demolition company, you’ve got to learn how to wreck crap sometime right? So I’m thinking to myself “what if he gets an itch on his nose while he’s pulling those levers and he pulls the wrong way?” That claw arm thingy would swing over, crash into my shower stall leaving a gaping hole in the corner of the house. I’d be standing there stunned deer-in-the-headlights-like with a lather-mohawk, a bar of Irish Spring in one hand in front of me sporting George Castanza I-just-got-out-of-the-pool(!) Syndrome. Thankfully, the big machinery operator didn’t have to scratch his nose and I was able to finish taking my shower.

After a couple days of absolute chaos (poor Rose has to hear that crap all day long since she works from home) Dan Higgs Crack Central was leveled. And guess what they’re building there? Yep. Big. Giant. Condos. Right on the other side of our fence. I swear we’re never going to see the light of day situated in the shadow of that monolith. Well, I guess that takes care of the property value problem, right?

So I’m gearing up to be a very conscientious neighbor and citizen as this project starts. Though there’s not much I can do about it now, (we just moved in October and were unaware of the building plans) I’m looking for an opportunity to gripe if I need to. I mean, we’ve got to live there for the nine months or so that this is going on!

I decided it would be a good idea to at least be on a friendly basis with someone on the project so I waltzed over there when a dude in a safety yellow shirt, graying fox-red stache and leathery brow was poking around in the hole in the dirt. I can’t remember dudes name but it was a cool construction guy type name like Hank or something. He says “if your lot is zoned for condos, you might be sitting on a gold-mine!” I wasn’t sure what he was talking about at first but then I realized he was saying that maybe the developer would be willing to buy up my lot to build more condos. Uhhhh, no. Anyway, the guy was cool and said to give him a holler if anything was disturbing us during the construction. Well, it’s pretty much going to suck around our place for like half a year so I figured I’d take that with a grain of salt.

2006-05-06T16:52:00.000-07:00

EMP POP CONFERENCE

Went to the EMP Pop Conference last weekend (on Saturday anyhow). Overall I’d say that it was a pretty mixed bag. You have to go to that kind of thing and get what you can out of it I suppose. One thing is for sure, there were a lot of over educated folks making half-baked music/social theories sound really scholarly. But hey, I’ve got my own ridiculous theories too so whatevs.

It was particularly surreal sitting a few seats away from Greil Marcus and Robert Christgau. It’s weird to think about these white haired college proff looking dudes writing gigantic dusty books about punk rock. Marcus’ wife (I think that’s who it was based on her name-tag and age) was sitting there politely ignoring each forum while she knit the whole time grandma style. Awesome!

Highlights included Dave Thomas’ essay titled “Morphic Resonance, Siberian Rock Bands, and the Brotherhood of the Unknown”. I don’t even know what the crap that title even means but Thomas was on fire like some genius Pentecostal tongues speaking preacher all froth-y mouthed and hopped up on crystal meth goofballs glossolalia. I still don’t understand what his spiel was about exactly but hot damn, the man was prophetically inspired. Papa Estey would glance over periodically with a knowing “see, I told you so” look in his eye as I picked my jaw up off the floor after comments like (I’m paraphrasing) “The answer to ‘can foreigners play rock music?’ is no. Not under any circumstances. But sometimes they can sure sound good if they don’t try”. And during the Q&A after the paper was given he mentioned flippantly “I don’t believe that human beings think. Sound is the basis of consciousness.” He has admitted to being tone deaf by the way “But I can’t explain that now. This is just the result of not having had a job for thirty five years.” Ridiculous and brilliant.

Another highlight was a piece read by Tom Kipp titled “Kim Fowley’s Outrageous: The Plan 9 from Outer Space of Rock Albums!” For the unannitiated, Fowley was (or is...I'm not sure if he's dead yet) an esoteric record producer type. I’d never heard of the Outrageous album before but Kipp played a fair amount of it during his presentation. Think second rate MC5 with a guy trying to put a funny spin on a Charles Manson rant about nothing in particular. Christgau at one time gave Outrageous and "E" rating (something he'd never done before) and members of Sonic Youth laud it as the best recording of all time. Aftger that a too serious exegesis of black metal was given by Seth Sanders. I had high hopes but that one kind of fell flat. But at least he played a Sunn0))) song during his presentation...

Between sessions me, Estey and Dodd walked around the Seattle Center plotting world domination. They mostly talked shit and I mostly rolled my eyes at their shit talk. This is a passtime that all three of us have forgone for far, far too long. Good times. By the way Estey, what ever happened to your "Ghetto Chicken" blog? The world needs it. Well, I need it anyway.

One tid-bit of controversy from the rock-write fest was a select few utterances from Magnetic Fields crooner Stephin Merritt who has been accused by J. Hopper of potential racism based on some comments surrounding his mistakenness regarding Celine Dion being black (maybe he meant Beyonce) and liking the melody of Zippity-Do-Da or some crap. To be honest I think we’d all be listening to paint peeling if we were to run all our music collections through an asshole detector machine.

2006-05-04T18:03:00.000-07:00

SITTING THROUGH TWO HOURS OF ICELANDIC GLACIER DOCUMENTARY SOUNDTRACK MUSIC IS LIKE DRINKING THREE BEERS FAST ON A HOT HUMID DAY WHEN YOU HAVEN'T SLEPT IN TWENTY FOUR HOURS.

You guessed it. Me and Rose went and saw Sigur Ros last night. The ticket prices were steep but it was at the Benaroya Hall so it was worth it. I hadn’t been to this theater yet and I’m really glad Sigur Ros gave me my first chance to see it. I’m not sure how to describe the space other than its massive, beautiful, modern and cavernous. I’m a little afraid of heights and since our seats were on the third tier, I was a little freaked out at certain moments. So yes, it’s that big. The Benaroya also reminded me that we have a great city that I rarely explore—I can’t think of the last time I was downtown—and that I am largely un-cultured. C’mon, I grew up in Kent (South Kentral) and still like heavy metal as a thirty-ish year old man.

The show itself was great. The acoustics were stellar and they also projected some really interesting, muted images up on a screen while they played. At the beginning and end of the show, they played behind an opaque screen. You could just make out the figures of the musicians behind it and the way that the lighting shone on them cast gigantic shadows onto the curtain. It was a really beautiful effect that thematically went along nicely with the minimalist swell and spaciousness of the music. When the show was over I realized how anesthetizing that music can be at high volume. I felt like I’d just woken up from a long Saturday afternoon nap and I was all groggy and discombobulated when we walked back to the car.

I truly appreciate what Sigur Ros do as a band aesthetically but there’s something about them that just doesn’t send me into over the top into fanatic mode…not quite sure what it is. As beautiful as dudes voice is, it’s not my cup of tea. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that their (I think) third record is simply titled “( )” and there are no proper song titles. That and their other albums have song titles like “oiuwerkn09uw4t”, “koilknuwekdjkjg;ad” and gloobin, gleepin, gloppin globin and that they sing in either Icelandic or a made up language (ala The Cauctau Twins and Dead Can Dance) called “Hopelandish”. Puh-leeez.

Ok, ok, they’re Icelandic, I get it. But it still seems kind of pretentious considering that their keyboardist mentioned in Pitchfork that for them to sing in English would be “dishonest”. C’mon duder, English is widely spoken in Iceland and many if not most of your fans are English speaking. I think I’d like them better as an instrumental band. Then again, that angelic half dude-half chick voice is pretty crucial to their sound. I dunno.

Anyway, it was a very nice, grownup and dignified kind of evening with my lovely lady and we really enjoyed the show (despite the abovementioned gripes). If they come through town and you can afford the ticket price, check them out if you can.

And take someone you love to the show.

2006-04-22T09:12:00.000-07:00

ROCK-WRITE DOESN'T COME EASY, BABY...WELL IT SHOULDN'T ANYWAY

So welcome to my new bloggy-blog. Since I like writing and am delusional (or egotistical) enough to think that there’s someone out there on the interweb that cares about my day to day life, opinions and other random and useless information, I’m going to plant my Matt Johnson Land flag right here and now.

You’re welcome.

For anyone that gives a crap, the name of this blog is derived from something I wrote about six-ish years ago. It was a four part essay the first of which was titled Positive Affirmation of Creative Destruction. This same essay was also used in the Raft of Dead Monkeys* liner notes and was also passed out as a one-sheet public service announcement at our shows before the band lost its propagandized vision by aiming to legitimize itself as a real band (pshhht!). The PAOCD title was also used as the tagline of the print version of BANDOPPLER magazine when it was still in print-production a couple years ago. Thankfully BANDOPPLER has made another heroic comeback and is online with the new tagline “Your Zeitgeist Assassins Since 1997”. That Treble Bandoppler is one clever cat.

I’ll admit it. My writing is sporadic. To write about things I’m not completely stoked on, utterly confused by or loathsome of doesn’t make any sense to me. Some folks write about whatever or whoever because maybe they’ve got a paying gig. More power to ‘em. But it seems to me that this kind of writer would be required to employ schmoozing skills which I am not very good at or comfortable with. I remember being in NYC with my old band some years ago doing a meet and greet at Caroline distro and it sucked. Since I’m old-balls now, I’ve learned a few social graces in how to un-retarded-ly relate to different kinds of folks (for about 5 minutes at a time at least) from all walks of life with interests beyond savant armchair philosophizing, theologizing and rock-talk. But mix business—or worse—business and music and or art, and I’d like to projective vomit, thank you.

Maybe I’ll learn to b.s. people better someday. Maybe I’ll take a rock and roll course at a community college and really learn something. Or maybe I’ll just keep at my snails pace and taste, chew and digest what is worthwhile slowly as usual. Geez, I’m still obsessed with Ozzie era Black Sabbath so whatev yo.

Anyhoo, once I become a professional blog-o-nator, I will update this crap with regularity, some links and all that. As previously mentioned, I’m rocking it Bandoppler style again, (though I don’t have anything in the chute for them just yet) I wrote a kind of not that amazing review (I wish I woulda taken more time on this one and not quoted a famous rock-write hero…a faux pas I hope to not repeat anytime soon) of the fan-effing-tastic Black Angels album, Passover and I recently did a write up on the new Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter recording project with Tucker Martine which PASTE magazine hacked to pieces. Oh well, that’s the way that the world of editing goes. Oh, and I also did a Theology and Death Metal thingy for my church newspaper. I guess I’m used to the old ‘Doppler who let me ramble ad naseum about nothing in particular.

And on that note, I’ll go ahead and wrap up my first legit bloggy-blog and save more for later.

*RODM was a concept band that had existed in my mind since about ’96. I told my buddy Jeff Bettger/Suffering (call him Suff-a-luff-a-gus, he loves that) about it and then Doug Lorig came on board too. Eventually John Spalding joined us and blamo! Jeff and I loved the idea of doing performance art type shows and went over the top with uniforms, an onstage posse including a dude that gorged himself on bananas and puked them up into a fish-bowl mid-show etc, etc. I eventually quit since they betrayed the original vision to become a real band. But they went on to put out another great full length record called Thoroughlev (aka “thoroughly leveled” a saying that came courtesy of Lorig-itte Say It Jon)

2006-04-20T17:16:00.000-07:00

Testes...testes...1, 2...3?

Checking out my new blog yo

2005-12-09T21:03:00.000-08:00

This article appeared in print of ’04 in Bandoppler #6

Admit it. Someone mentions the band Tortoise and you hear music in your mind that tends to embody a modern, elevator Muzak utilitarianism. It’s somewhere between pop, soundtrack, indie rock and jazz. Not too cold, not too hot, just right, like nutritious porridge for Little Red Riding Hipsters lost in the woods—poured into lengthy records of avant garde sound installations for pseudo intellectual scenester types bored with “catchy song-craft”.

A Tortoise record sounds like the perfect accessory to your coffee table in case anyone should arrive to your pad unannounced. It says: “I’m still keeping up on the pulse of the urban underground, it’s just that I’m adult about it now and happen to have responsibilities and a car payment.” Music has become an ambiance accessory for entertaining guests. It’s kind of like mood lighting or home décor right? For shame aging hipster, for shame.

But not to despair, there’s hope! You’ve just been going about this music fan thing the wrong way! Tortoise’s new Thrill Jockey endeavor It’s All Around You is truly meant to be listened to—as if it were a rock record—loud without distractions.

The stretched improvisations and yet more cranking Tortoise was one of the benefits the band received when Jeff Parker joined on axe in 1998.

“IAAY was basically constructed in the studio from the ground up, with
very little preconceived material” Parker says of the new creation. "Salt The Skies" and "Unknown" were the only songs that had skeletal frameworks that we had been exploring
in various live settings for a while, but everything else was constructed in the studio from scratch. Both processes are equally rewarding, and quite different. Personally, I think this particular aggregation of Tortoise creates it's most compelling work in the environs of the studio, simply because we've been doing it for a long time and have grown quite accustomed to working in this fashion.”

I ask Parker about his feelings regarding the getting-axiomatic dichotomy between the generally beloved analog treatment or the getting-more-loathed-by-experts Pro Tools.

“To my ears, tape sounds better. But, it's a whole lot easier to edit and mix with Pro Tools, and that's an integral part of how we create our music. We create a happy medium (much of the time) by recording to tape and chasing it with the computer for doing edits, etc., and we always mix to tape.”

I hear an Almost ‘apocalyptic wasteland’ sensibility to Tortoise’s sound at times…

“We in Tortoise are all of the opinion that these are difficult, trying times that we're living in. A lot of societal issues, on many levels, are coming into question and there's a lot of tension in the air, everywhere in the world. The dark undertone of the album was not intentional on our part, just an expression by a few compassionate, observant people living life during what will surely be looked upon as one of the darkest times in modern history.”

“I hope our music can enhance the environment that it finds itself in, and maybe make you ask a few questions about the world you might think you're living in. Ambiguity can be a wonderful quality in instrumental music, as it is in the visual and literary arts. When something is implied, rather than stated, it can (but certainly does not always) say a lot more than what's obvious, because the observer is free to draw their own conclusions. It functions more like a question than a statement.”

“Down with George W. Bush!” Parker concludes, with thought into action. “Power to the People!”

2005-12-09T17:43:00.000-08:00

For the uninitiated Bob Weston plays bass in the band Shellac (with Steve Albini) and is a fantastic studio engineer. He has recorded some great records over the years (Rodan, Rachels, Polvo, June of 44, Six Finger Sattelite, my old band Roadside Monumet etc.) We talked about engineering, being a member of Shellac and going vacation in Hawaii. This interview took place in the summer of 2004 for a feature in Bandoppler issue #6. Many of the quotes from this conversation were used for that article. Here’s the interview in its entirety. Enjoy.
Me: So you recently recorded Mission of Burma? You've worked with them before in some capacity right? Is there a Boston connection there somehow?

Bob: I'm originally from the Boston area. One of the first bands I played in was The Volcano Suns, starting in 1987. That was Peter Prescott's (MoB drummer) band. We toured a few times with Roger Miller's (MoB guitarist) No Man band. And I met both Clint Conley (bass) and Martin Swope (tape loops) through Pete and Roger...at Suns shows...etc. So I've known them all for quite a while. When Burma started talking about playing a few shows in 2001 (was itthat long ago already), I happened to be recording Clint's new band,Consonant. I heard that Martin was living in Hawaii and wasn't going to be involved, and so I offered my services as live sound guy. And if they were interested in having me try and do the tape loops too, I waswilling to try. I guess I was just sort of the natural choice for thejob. I'm comfortable messing with tape machines and loops and am able to do an adequate job at live sound. So, I suppose I've filled the Martin role as an offstage band member. When they decided to make a new record, it just seemed natural that I would be the engineer. I can't begin to express how amazing this has all been for me. Burma has always been one of my very favorite bands.

Me: How have the MOB sessions been so far and any ideas about what people can expect to hear?

Bob: Everything went really well with the recordings. These guys are justamazing at playing their music. The only way I can describe it is to say that the songs and performances are extremely vital. The songs aregreat. It blows my mind that this band can make such truly exciting music 20 years later. It's like they never stopped.

Me: So Shellac recently played in Hawaii? Have you guys played there before?

Bob: Nope. It was pretty cool. We played two shows for 80 people in theweird back storage room of a Korean Transvestite Karaoke Bar. A ratdied on our soundman's wife's foot. Obviously, the shows were just acover to have a little vacation time (as most of our tours are). Wewere able to afford it because we had some free plane ticket voucherssaved up. Otherwise it would have been impossible to even come close tobreaking-even on a Hawaii show. The people at the show kept begging us to tell our friends in otherbands about Hawaii; that there are people who will come to their showsin Hawaii. I had to explain to them that 80 people paying $9 each willnot buy plane tickets to Hawaii for a band. And that, "trust me, every band I know would love to come to Hawaii; nobody’s avoiding you".

Me: The way you engineer records has always interested me since you take such a rock approach. It seems like the point of the process should simply be to document the music rather than getting in the producer chair and messing with arrangements and overdoing production. Have you been asked to take on more of a producer role or do the bands you’re working with usually know where you're coming from going into it?

Bob: No bands have ever asked me to do the full-on style producer thing. I guess a band who wanted something like that probably wouldn't approach me; they'd hire somebody who does that all the time. I assume bands hire me after talking to other bands who've used me in the past, and so would get a feel for how I normally work from these discussions. On most records, though, I'll have ideas about an overdub, or maybe a different way to sing or play a part and I'll bring it up. Or, if something sounds wrong or bad to me, of course I'll let the band know and try to help. I'm not completely hands-off. I'm just not "in command" of the session the way a "real" producer is. I assume that the band knows what they want. They are producing the record; or we all are producing the record together.

Me: Are there particular reasons ethically or otherwise why you don't approach the recording process in a big production sense or is it just because you just see your role as simply being hired as the engineer?

Bob: I'm not sure. I don't really think about it. I just do what seems to come naturally. I was playing in bands before I was recording them. Maybe that has something to do with it. I just do whatever needs to be done to help the bands make the best record they can. My role may be slightly different on every session. But I don't really think about it, I just do what seems to come naturally. Also, the low budgets that most bands hiring me have make it impossible to spend much time in the studio, let alone in pre-production. Speed is always necessary due to the financial constraints.

Me: Last year I came across a really great book called Rock And The Pop Narcotic. (written by Joe Carducci--one of the gurus behind SST in the eighties)The main idea that most stuck out to me is this: A truly rock aesthetic hardly exists in reality in popular music and especially what's popular on the radio. As Carducci puts it, rock is a played/performed music--a group oriented music--but most of what happens in the process of putting out records, promotion and attention to image etc takes away from that essential rock element. Simply put, I think there are fewer and fewer bands that understand this and the result is there are fewer truly great rock bands. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Bob: Huh...I hadn't thought about that. I suppose it's true. It seems like young bands are thinking about managers and lawyers and record deals as much or more than just writing songs and playing. Is that what you mean? There are just so many bands. Everybody's in a band, which is fine. It's great for people to be making music with their friends. But that's going to make the percentage of great bands go way down. Just because you're in a band doesn't mean people want to pay to see you play or buy your records. It's so diluted. Plus, what's your reason for playing? I get the feeling that many people start bands with the goal of making a living now. Those people have less of a chance at making good music than people who simply NEED to rock; or those who just want to play for the fun of it, or play with their friends as a social activity. Also, there's the weirdness of making a record in a studio. Many would argue that the only "real" or "true" recording of a band would be a live recording of them playing in their normal environment: either live in their practice space or live in front of an audience with no overdubs. And that when recording in a studio, you're trying to recreate that live "true" sound of the band in a very unnatural way: by putting different pieces together that will hopefully make a realistic simulation of the band actually rocking. So, often when in the studio, a band that can actually rock is trying to build a simulation of themselves in a convoluted fashion. It's weird. I read some quote recently where a songwriter talked about how he worked extremely hard to make songs seem like they were written effortlessly. So the songwriting and the recording processes seem to be about illusion. You want the music listener to feel like the band just naturally comes up with these songs and recordings. You don't want the listener to know what really goes into it all. So, are/were there ever bands who simply ooze the rock? Write awesome rock songs effortlessly? Rock so amazingly in the studio that overdubs and repairs and studio tricks aren't even necessary? Back when the recording technology wasn't quite so advanced, the tricks weren't available and so the answer was YES: the bands that sounded like they rocked on your record player probably actually rocked. Of course there are bands who use the studio more as a tool or instrument and aren't trying to recreate some idealized live version of themselves. But we're not talking about those bands here.

Me: What seems to happen in the over technologized process of making a record is that whatever made the music ROCK in the first place is squeezed out of the end product. It ends up sounding flacid, overproduced and essentially non-rock. Obviously the efficiency ofrecording technology these days makes the process of making "the perfect sounding record" easier and it seems like more and more bands indie or otherwise are taking this approach. Do you think that the relative ease of making up for musical deficiencies on the part of the musicians in that type of setting contributes to the relatively mediocre music these days?

Bob: Of course. There are so many things wrong with making everything "perfect" in the protools. It removes all the life and energy of the band's live performance, provided there was some there in the first place. Didn't we already go through this in the 80s when MIDI was going to replace all the live musicians? I guess the technology can wreck music in both directions: it can suck the life out of a band that truly rocks, and alternatively, it can make a band that couldn't rock if it's life depended on it sound at least technically competent. The best records from many bands are the first few before they really get proficient at their instruments. Their songwriting, and the parts they come up with to play are so much more interesting when they haven't learned the rules yet...the formulaic or expected chords or arrangement ideas, etc. There's always so much more energy and abandon. But just being an amateur at your instrument doesn't mean your ideas are necessarily good or interesting. The young bands that really rock are intuitive about it. Their ideas are just intuitively great and they can realizing what they're hearing in their heads on these new instruments they've just started playing. The songwriting is tied up with learning how to play the song. They can't play guitar, but they can play their own songs on guitar. Do you know what I mean?

Me: Yeah, I completely know what you mean. There are certain bands that I like or have liked in the past where the players may not be that technically skilled but the band works together compensating for each others deficiencies and the result is a real combustion. It's that element that gives a band or a song a quality that's all it's own. One of my all time favorite rock records is Husker Du's “Zen Arcade”. Areyou familiar with that record at all?

Bob: Oh yeah. That's my favorite Husker Du record (that and “Metal Circus”). A part of the amazing SST double LP juggernaut: “Double Nickels on the Dime” and “Zen Arcade”.

Me: I like the fast songs especially cause they feel like they're going to fall apart at any moment but somehow they learned how to play together and the result is something unique only to them. If they had made that record using really slick techniques trying to get it "just right", I don't think the end product would have the same effect.

Bob: Yup. But I don't think I'd call the playing on “Zen Arcade” naive or amateurish. In a way I guess we're talking about two closely related phenomena here. One in which the enthusiasm and raw talent make up for a lack of technical proficiency, and the other where a band has real particular and idiosyncratic way that they play together...probably because they learned to play their instruments by starting a band together and figuring out their own way to play.

Me: Agreed. Are there any records that come to mind that you appreciate in a similar way?

Bob: Umm, how about Pavement? Those first two Pavement singles, the "Perfect Sound Forever" EP, and to a slightly lesser extent, "Slanted and Enchanted" are just unbelievably great records. But the playing and songwriting is so weird and interesting and innovative in a really naive and wide-eyed-exploration type way. I really get the impression from those records that Steve and Scott hadn't played guitar for long. But the stuff that they came up with is inspirational to me still. And then when their engineer, Gary, started adding drums...man, he was coming from a completely different musical world than them...adding the sort of prog-rock style drums to these noisy underground pop gems. That's the other side of the coin (the enthusiasm-makes-up-for-chops vs. band-playing-together-in-their-own-idiosyncratic-style coin) . He could really play, but the way his playing fit in with the guitars and songs was completely idiosyncratic, and weird, and just perfect. It helped to make those records memorable and special. Another slightly different example would be the Rolling Stones. The early records are just amazing. But listen to them...things are out of tune, they miss parts, the timing can go all over the place. They just wouldn't be allowed to make records like that today. Everything would have been "fixed" in the computer. But it's just so apparent to anybody that the old records are SO much more pleasurable to listen to than their newer records.

Me: So when did you start working with Steve?

Bob: We first got to know each other when he recorded "Career in Rock" for my old band, The Volcano Suns. We really got along well in the studio and became great friends. A year later, after the Suns had broken up, he flew me to Chicago a few times to wire up the new 24-track studio gear he was putting into his house. A little after that, he hired me to be his full-time studio maintenance tech and I moved from Boston to Chicago. That was in November of '92. I worked for him at the studio in his house for a few years. But at the same time, I was starting to get more and more recording work. Eventually I was doing a terrible job at keeping up with the tech stuff as I did more engineering. So I decided to quit my tech job with Steve so he could get a full-time tech and I could pursue recording as an independent freelance engineer.

Me: How did Shellac come about?

Bob: Todd and Steve had known each other for many years and had talked about playing together sometime. A while after Rapeman broke up, the two of them started playing together. Steve would go to Minneapolis or Todd would come to Chicago for a weekend. I don't really have all the details about exactly how and when that got started. But they had been playing together for a few years when I moved to Chicago. Steve asked if I wanted to try playing bass with them. We first played together a few months after I moved there and it went really well. It felt really good to all of us and so they asked me to join. They had played with another bass played named Camillo Gonzalez a few times before I joined. He used to play in Naked Raygun. Bob: When I joined, many of the songs that ended up on the singles and Action Park had already been written. In fact, Camillo had bass parts. I learned these songs from a cassette the three of them had done as a practice recording. I'm not sure if I play them exactly as Camillo did, but those songs were pretty much ready to go. Steve and Todd had put them together in the two years before adding a bass player.

Me: How did you know him since you were from the northeast? Tour connections?

Bob: I had met both Steve and Todd while touring with the Volcano Suns in the late 80's. The Suns played a bunch of times with Todd's band, Rifle Sport. And we were introduced to Steve in Chicago by a mutual friend: Clark Johnson (Squirrel Bait).

Me: You and Steve seem to have very similar approaches toengineering. Did you move to Chicago and start workingwith him because you had those ideas in common?

Bob: I had always wanted to be a recording engineer and was working towards that in Boston. After hearing the Pixies record and a lot of his Touch and Go recordings I felt that this was the style of recording that I was interested in learning about. It was like a light-bulb suddenly clicked on when I heard his work. I knew that that's how I wanted my recordings to sound, even though I had never heard recordings like his before. I felt like we were kindred spirits sonically. I learned so much from him at the Volcano Suns session and would get advice from him on the phone all the time after that. He was a real mentor and a great teacher...always happy to pass on ideas and information. So, working at his studio as a tech seemed like a dream come true. I was able to absorb so much from him while I was working in his shop. And when I would bring bands into his studio, I could always go to him for advice.

Me: How were you involved with Electrical Audio when itwas built? Do you still do a lot of work there?

Bob: I wasn't an employee anymore when the new big Electrical Audio was built. Steve hired me as an independent contractor to design the electrical system, design the audio wiring, and do the audio wiring. I had a lot of help doing the actual pulling of cables and soldering and crimping etc. I really love recording at Electrical, but sadly haven't done a session there in something like 2 years. One reason being that I simply haven't been hired by bands as much as I used to. The other reason is that most of the bands that hire me now aren't on a label and so have an extremely limited budget to work with. This forces us to use cheaper studios. I'm dying to do something there again.

Me: So you mentioned you've been away from home. What'veyou been up to lately? You did some work with NPRrecently is that right? What did they have you doing?

Bob: I've been traveling a bit to do live sound for Mission of Burma and the Magic Band...any reunions with the initials M.B. I recently finished making the new Mission of Burma record. I've also been working on a new Shipping News record, and have some upcoming sessions with some of Ken Vandermark's jazz groups. I've been working a lot with Ken over the past few years. I've worked for NPR as an audio engineer for the past 5 or 6 years. I work as a freelance engineer for them at the NPR Chicago News Bureau. We service NPR's midwest reporters: recording, mixing and feeding their news spots and longer pieces to Washington, DC. Also, if somebody at NPR in DC (or NY, LA, etc) needs to interview a person who's in Chicago, we'll have that person sit in our studio for the interview. Things like that. It's a great job for me in that when the bands aren't calling, I can take up the financial slack by working more at NPR. The bills need to get paid even when I'm not recording a band.

Me: So you've recorded June of 44, Rachels, Boys Life,Jawbox, Six Finger Satellite, Polvo and Hurl...over the years, what bands stick out as your favoriterecording projects over the last ten years?

Bob: Man that's hard to answer. There are so many bands who I've become great friends with and have great rapport with in the studio. Also, there is a huge percentage of records I've worked on that I really truly just love to listen to for enjoyment. Let me try to list some of my favorite bands that I've worked with: All my Louisville friends in Rodan, The Rachel's, June of 44, and the Shipping News; Sebadoh; the Thinking Fellers; I really love listening to the 2 White Octave records that I did; Pony and Speed King; all the Vandermark bands: Vandermark 5, Spaceways, Triple PLay, FME; I've made 2 records with a fun group of guys from Japan: 54-71; Consonant; the Archers of Loaf and especially Eric's solo record Barry Black; New Brutalism; the Kahoots; Shuttlecock; The Oxes; a Belgian band called JF Muck; Plush; Lynx; The Letter E; Arcwelder; Victory at Sea; the Wicked Farley's; Polvo; Spatula; the Bicentennial Quarters; Delta 72; the Regrets and Vitreous Humor; Kepone; A Minor Forest; the Coctails; Eric's Trip; Shiner; the Metroschifter; Six Finger Satellite......... I could go on at length about all these bands and records. Either I remember the session as being particularly enjoyable, or I still listen to that record a lot, or I have long associations with the bands in this list; I've worked with many of these people on more than one record. This makes me feel really good. I really treasure these relationships and the music that comes out of them.

Me: Do you ever get tired of recording rock bands? Isthere other audio work you'd like to be doing? Do you do other work besides audio stuff?

Bob: It's always a nice change when I get to work on a Rachel's record and I record strings, winds, mallet instruments, pianos, etc. On the last record I got to record a small chamber ensemble in a wonderful recital hall. It's incredibly satisfying from both a technical and an artistic standpoint to be able to make good sounding recordings of these different instruments and groups of players. It's a huge challenge, and the music can still give me the goose-bumps and gut-level reactions that make me know how much I love the music. Over the past year and a half, I've gotten to record a number of albums (listed above) for some jazz groups that Ken Vandermark is involved with. It turns out that he and I and these bands are an excellent fit in the studio. I really enjoy working on the records and being able to stretch out into this other recording direction. We record live with everybody close in the same room; no headphones; and using minimal tracks. I record in what I assume to be a sort of old-fashioned jazz recording style. Although haven't really studied it, so I could be totally wrong. We just try to keep it real simple and direct while using high quality modern equipment. We never do any overdubs. We just record multiple takes of each song. The band takes home CDR's of rough mixes and picks out the best performance of each for us to mix later. None of the songs are "perfect"; the overall feel of the entire take is far more important. I really like this idea. It's incredibly refreshing to get to work this way. I feel like rock bands often remove the energy and life from a song when we go back and try to "fix" too many things with repairs and overdubs. I wish more rock bands wouldn't sweat the minute details during the recording process. Often these little "mistakes" become some of the more fun or memorable parts on albums.

2005-11-22T17:55:00.000-08:00

This interview was done in '04. Quotes from the interview appeared in a Paste Magazine feature that did. You can find a link to that article on the front page of this blog under the heading "Rock-Write"

M = Me R = my wife, Rose D = Damien.

M: Your songs aren’t in first person, but the songs sound really intimate. I’m assuming they’re not first person? It seems so personal but I’m assuming that it’s not.

D: Well, it’s funny cause it comes easy. I feel detached from my writing. When I make a record, I don’t listen to it. I’m sure it sounds good. Obviously it sounds fine cause I was in the studio listening to it. But it’s not like I go home and pop [the mixes] into my CD player and analyze everything. I don’t. I leave it as it is. The [lyric] writing process just sort of happens. The image of someone will come into my brain, usually people I’ve never seen before. They’re usually in a situation like in a car or sitting in their house, it’s usually a bunk situation. For some reason it’s not a happy situation. I’ll sit down and write about what’s going on with what that person’s feeling. I have no personal attachment to the characters that I write about at all.

M: It seems like you abandoned the first person account type writing from the past. Like with The Guilty, Coolidge and all those other bands. Was it a conscious decision?

D: I just thought to myself, “who the hell wants to hear about me?” My life’s boring. If I write about me, what am I going to write about? I work at a preschool, I live in Shoreline—that’s not exciting. I think it was easy for Kerouac to write about his journeys and about his life because he did adventurous stuff. If I did think like that, or if I actually did have multiple relationships with women, or I murdered people, then I’d probably write about that in the first person. But I don’t [have those experiences] so I write about that kind of stuff in my lyrics.

M: Do you think that shift in writing style had anything to do with the influence of folk music for you?

D: That definitely played a key in it but it was also ‘how do I fit this story into a few lines?’ Because let’s face it, I have little patience to sit down and write an entire story. I barely have the patience to sit down and write the lyrics to the song. So I think-- how do I pack enough information into this one sentence to give you the visual of what’s going on? I don’t know how that [writing process] came about. But I tapped into it and figured out a way that I could do it. It’s just taking bits and pieces of information so that you can get it into your brain as to what’s going on. It’s very minimalist. A little tells a lot.

R: that song on your new record where you’re talking about White Center, what’s that about?

D: I knew that the [drive by shooting] situation existed because it was always in the news. ON the street I lived on, it was fine. We never had shooting or whatever but I know on the other side of town where Doug [Lorig] was living, I knew it was all happening. We saw police helicopters and heard cop sirens all the time. We also had a catholic church about a block from me. It was packed every night for either a wedding or a funeral. That’s what the story was based on. Even that wasn’t written in first person. My life in White Center was fine. But it’s funny cause I’m writing it from a first person perspective, but it’s not what I’m experiencing. It’s more .from the perspective of what Doug is experiencing.

M: I get so sick of hearing solo artists talking about problems with their Dad or something. Nobody’s telling stories anymore. Nobody writes stories that everybody can relate too anymore. Everything’s so subjective and introspective. Sure, everybody can relate to feeling lonely or alienated, but when it gets so detail oriented into the me, me perspective, there’s less to what you can relate to. If you’re talking about situations in a song like what we were talking about earlier, as in the broader scope ideas, people can relate to that on a bigger level rather than a personal, introspective level.

D: I don’t know if you’ve seen that movie House of Sand and Fog or not but on the DVD, there’s some extra stuff and commentary the Actor Ben Kingsley plays the most amazing character in that movie. I was listening to the director’s commentary and the director was asking Kingsley about certain scenes. He said “I was moved, I was bawling throughout a particular scene on the set. How do you do it?” and Ben Kingsley said “it’s not me, it’s the character—I have to be the character, I cannot draw my own personal experiences into this.” And I thought “gosh, that’s exactly how I feel about songwriting”. I can’t let my own personal life go into it because it becomes muddled and I’m not speaking for the other person.

M: I think about the idea of people using music as a vehicle for the message, whether for evangelizing in Christian rock or espousing political ideas—in the context of the indie rock word where a lot of folks tend to lean a little bit more left politically--but in the middle of that, the music itself ends up taking a back seat.

D: Right

M: It’s not about “The Message” as much as the music itself is the message. But it’s not that those two elements have to be separate all the time. For instance the Clash have been able to effectively mix those two elements but most people aren’t very good at it. So like you were saying—it’s good for a songwriter to get out of their own skin and put themselves in a particular situation to see how the story would play out.

D: The other thing is too is I’ll be asked by interviewers sometimes, what kind of books do you read? The truth is I hate fiction although I sing about it. I won’t read it unless it’s about someone or it’s about something that happened already. I just won’t read it. I have no interest in it. Fairy tales I have no interest in. But it’s really funny because I’m writing songs that I made up. Are the songs based on real things? Sure, not for ME but maybe for somebody else out there. So in some ways, it’s fiction but not fiction.

M: I’ve noticed that over the years you’ll go through listening phases. For a while you’ll fixate on Ska, Hardcore, Soul, Prog Rock or whatever. Why is it that you’ll fixate on something specific like that?

D: First of all, I’m in love with music as a whole. But it’s got to be interesting. Just recently I’ve been listening to King Crimson and Reggae. It’s got to be interesting to listen too. The flipside to that is, when I listen to pop music, I want don’t want interesting pop music, I want pop music. My favorite music of all time is the early Beatles. Love Me True, I wanna hold your hand. It’s all surface, there’s nothing deep about it. It’s pop, it’s beautiful, and it’s rock and roll. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, stuff like that. I don’t think anybody does rock and roll anymore. I think some bands do it but they’re few and far between. A lot of bands today pay attention to being intricate….but it just doesn’t work. If I want to listen to something interesting, I’m not going to listen to Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band or the White Album. I’m going to listen to a Jandek record or a Captain Beefheart record. If I’m going to go avant garde, I’m going to go far—I’m going to go to the deep end. So what I’m saying is, for me, like everything in my life, I don’t like the middle. I want either left or I want right. I want black, or I want white. I don’t want something that dabbles in this, but yet we’re still this, I want to go to the extreme.

R: You want either vegan or Atkins.

D: Right. I think that’s the problem with so many bands. There’s a billion bands out there that you can name that are like this but it’s like “yeah, this year we’re punk but punk is out. So now we’re going to sound like Jimmy Eat World or Deathcab. Then we’re gonna be metal.” It’s like, dude, just be what you are and forget about it. Just do a genre and stick with it. That’s what was the great thing about so many punk bands. The Dead Kennedy’s were never like Dag Nasty.

M: The Dead Kennedy’s didn’t worry about their “artistic development.”

D: No! At all! Which is awesome!

M: Imagine if the Ramones had done that over the years. Some of their records are better than others especially since they’re career has spanned so long. But if they had decided to really “push themselves as musicians”, the song maybe wouldn’t have been very good. But they consistently put out good records because they stuck to the basics. They knew how to rock.

D: But it’s different as a songwriter. You’re not stuck in these genres. So you can dabble in things here and there. Beck is a really example of this, the guy can do whatever he wants. He can get away with that, because he’s a songwriter. Take for example a band like Blink 182. On their last record, they were trying to “mellow it out”. But they’re loosing their fans. Because the fans want that [older style].

M: They stopped doing what they did best.

D: Right. Because their fans expected it. But I’m a singer songwriter but that doesn’t mean that your nailed down to one genre of music. I think I’m lucky in that aspect. If I had to play rock music my whole life that would suck.

M: How about the Gathered in Song record that was more rock oriented, was that conscious?

D: Oh yeah, that was very conscious.

M: You missed playing a good riff?

D: Yeah. And being loud. It was funny cause so many critics, they didn’t know what to think about it. They either hated it or loved it. And those that hated it, they were saying, “this isn’t a Damien Jurado record”. But what is? I don’t know. I just write songs dude. (laughter). You don’t have to put me under the genre file.

M: So people have a particular expectation of what a Damien Jurado record is. You write something different and people think that it isn’t as good. That gets me thinking: generally as a person, you’ll kind of have these conflicting themes. As an example, we were talking about politics earlier. In the indie rock world—whatever that means—it’s almost a given, it’s fashionable, almost a given that you’d be leftist in your politics. You understand where you are in your subculture and yet you don’t see eye to eye with other people of that persuasion so much. Politically, you tend to be a little more conservative which is really rare in the music community in general. Do you have any feelings about running in those circles and being at odds and getting resistance from people? Does that bother you at all?

D: If a fan asks me about it, I’ll talk about it. Someone will come up to me after a show or something and say “hey, doesn’t that suck about such and such issue?” I’m like, whatever. I just won’t even talk about it. If they keep egging me on, I’ll just lay it out. Then it’s almost like they got punched in the face when you lay it on them. I think there is room in music for more of a right wing perspective. So many artists have been more right wing. But in some ways, they themselves are blacklisted. A lot of artists out there that are more of that persuasion aren’t saying anything for fear of being blacklisted.

M: But how did it ever get that way? If music is just about “The Cause”, then the music is taking a back seat. Why aren’t the discussions about the music itself?

D: Yeah, once an artist starts talking about his politics, the music does take a back seat. And if you’re more conservative, they’re going to view you differently. But part of me thinks, “who cares”? My music isn’t about that. It’s about me. But then again, I’m not singing about me anyways. They don’t even know me, so who really gives a crap?

M: Why would a fan care if there’s a difference in views?

D: If you like the music, then who cares? But many people do care about the politics being correct.

M: Maybe people want to have a personal connection to you somehow and then they realize they don’t and it taints their appreciation.

D: but they never had a connection with me anyways. The songs aren’t about me. I’m just the messenger. That would be like blaming the postman. If you are a pen pal with your friend, and they’re across the country sending you all these letters, and you have your own views and then you find out the postman is a conservative fascist, do you hate your pen pal? It’s just weird. The postman’s not to blame. He was just delivering the letter. That’s the way I feel, I’m just the postman. I’m just delivering the shit.

R: What do you say to people when that political aspect is a part of who they are in their music and it’s all incorporated, it’s all one.

D: I think for a lot of songwriters it might be that way, but for me it’s not. Like Connor Oberst of Bright eyes, I think he’s a phenomenal singer songwriter and artist, a very talented guy. But as soon as he opens his mouth about politics, it turns me off. I don’t care. Then I begin to think, who else cares about this? Then that gets me thinking about this last election. Here you’ve got Michael Moore making these ridiculous movies and all these Hollywood stars…then you watch television and think “this must be the way that the rest of America feels”. Well, obviously not, cause George Bush won the election. It’s always this façade that’s being created. It’s like, this is the way the whole world feels.

M: and the entertainment world has the “important spokespeople”

D: Right!

R: It’s so disappointing to go to a show and someone spouts their mouth off. For me, the whole evening ends right there.

D: Can you imagine if you went to a baseball game and before Randy Johnson throws his first pitch for the game he wants to talk to everyone about the election. No one cares. They came to watch a sports game. There’s a time and a place for politics and I don’t feel that the public arena in music is the place for it. You know what? A folk song and a rock song—I think—and this is just from personal experience, doesn’t change anybody’s mind. A Slayer song never made me want to go sacrifice my family with a hammer. And a Bruce Springsteen song never made me want to vote for Kerry.

M: But some people would say otherwise. A lot of people get really wrapped up in that stuff.

D: Then I would say, then you’re not thinking for yourself.

M: Yeah but, people share ideas in different ways.
D: That’s true.

M: There’s an exchange. You could say that yeah, people don’t think for themselves. As though people are saying “he’s my guitar hero, so I’m going to trust what he says”. But then there are some people that may hear something put in a really poetic way and think “wow, that really makes sense to me.” And the music has just made it that much more powerful. Obviously there are a lot of people that think that way. Otherwise, these musical subcultures wouldn’t exist.

D: But you see, I think you’re wrong. I think the subcultures exist based on marketing. Not in the politics. I think it’s a marketing scam and peer pressure. I started listening to punk music because I had friends with cool older brothers that were into it. So I thought, “That’s what I’ve got to do”. So, why would someone start smoking? Because they think it looks cool. I just don’t buy…I can see how a song effects you, but I don’t necessarily believe for me from a personal standpoint—and people I know—where a song has changed your mind and made you go out and do something. There are those people. But those are the people that listen to a Judas Priest record and shoot their families.

M: So using the music as a vehicle for The Message…in the early days of your hardcore band The Guilty and Coolidge, it seemed like you were definitely using the music as a vehicle. Being a new Christian, you were into evangelizing people…was there something specific that changed you’re point of view about that. Can you think back and nail down a time where you thought I think I’m going to stop doing this?

D: Yeah, I think what is was I knew that if I did a certain thing like that, I’d always be pegged as that which would give me no room to do anything else. It’s like my analogy of people who do punk and all of a sudden they’re country, people get bummed. It wasn’t fair to me, and it wasn’t fair to my audience. My ideas changed, your theology changes, you view things differently, you question things. And if you don’t grow, all of the sudden you’re ruined. It reminds me of bands that are on major labels and they go to an independent and nobody will touch them. I just didn’t want to be tied down. Nor did I want to be anybody’s mouthpiece. Although I believed and I still do, I just didn’t want to be a mouthpiece for it. It’s dangerous you know? And I wasn’t willing to walk that firing line.

M: was it that you didn’t want to be identified with a certain subculture?

D: Mmm hmmm. That and I felt like it was propaganda. All of the sudden I was this guy that went out and tried to convince people to either believe a certain way or vote a certain way, and I just thought. I don’t want to be that. And also, there was a lot of me that was coming through in that. And that started to bum me out.

M: I started learning in my late 20s that as you get on in life, and you take on more responsibility, I realized, I don’t care about me as much anymore. Whatever it was that I was struggling through as an individual—the ideas and the philosophies and trying to figure out life—it’s just life man. You’re just living. I don’t care about the details and intricacies about how I work as an individual. I stopped caring about that. I’m sure that my wife would say that that I deeply care about that (laughter).

D: Right.

M: On a grand scheme, I don’t sit around thinking about my feelings all the time.

D: Exactly. I think that’s definitely happened to me. As you grow older…some people grow out of it, and some people don’t. Because there are still artist out there that are into themselves. I just didn’t care. Who the hell wants to hear about me? That’s stupid. Nor do I want to hear about you. I just don’t care. I think that’s why I’ve gotten into so much music—like so much of the reggae that I listen too or the prog rock singer about unicorns or whatever. As long as they aren’t singing about themselves, I could care less what they sing about. Which bums me out about a lot of Hip-Hop. Because I think that Hip-Hop is going in a totally different direction from where it started. In the beginning, it was more about social awareness. Now it’s about check out my things, my car, and my chicks.

M: And you’re all sucka emcees except for me. (laughter)

D: Dude, why would I want to buy a CD to hear someone bragging about themselves?

M: There are certain genres that I won’t tolerate that with. Like the newer rock. One of the reasons I don’t identify with it is because it’s not about anything objective. There are a few redeeming qualities about that stuff here and there, but because of the content of it, it’s just unlistenable to me. But on the other hand, like with Hip-Hop, there’s certain stuff where I can get my head around the theme itself and listen to it on its own terms and I can be down for it. There’s almost a novelty factor to it.

D: Yeah, well I don’t mean to make that blanket statement, because there’s tons of Hip-Hop artist out that that are that are in the mainstream that are talking about themselves. Talib Kweli, Mos Def, those guys, they’re not singing about themselves or what they’ve got. They’re keeping it on the old school tip. And why aren’t these artist more popular? It’s because they’re not selling anything like a BMW. That’s a commercial right there. It’s the same funny thing with Hardcore, it was originally about social change, politics within the family, religion, and then when Emo started becoming an influence, I just didn’t understand it anymore.

M: But you’ve got to admit, that a lot of the mid to late 80s Hardcore—specifically the Straightedge stuff—it’s all about brotherhood and betrayal like, “we don’t have a friendship anymore, how could you do this to me?” There’s that self absorbed element to that too.

D: But even with that, I didn’t find myself identifying with that at all. My friends weren’t betraying me.

M: All that drama was probably just suburban kids that just needed something to complain about.

D: Maybe they needed more attention from their parents? (laughter)

M: Cause that’s where a lot of the Hardcore was bred, I guess it’s arguable that its beginnings were in the inner city but Hardcore would have been furthered by kids that could afford instruments and were still living with their folks with a place to practice.

D: I was talking earlier about being so disconnected from my music. I don’t know if it bugs me or not. At this point I can’t tell. In the studio, I do it, I write it and it’s done. There’s the finished product, I hope you enjoy it. And back to the mailman analogy, the mailman that’s delivering the letter, he’s not attached to the person that’s reading it.

D: I’ve got the same problem with Bazan. I don’t know man, I just don’t get it.

M: you mean with the politics?

D: The politics, the stories about trying to make a moral point, I’m just not getting it. Even fellow singer songwriters that I know that are writing mellow music, I just wish more people would take the focus off themselves and turn it to something else. They should turn it to the outside instead of the inside. Cause the inside’s just…what the hell is that? Who cares. Go outside of your world a little bit buddy.

M: Do you think you’d ever be compelled to write in more of a personal record again?

D: No. If I was dead and gone and twenty years from now somebody wanted to write a book about me, good luck. There may be some depressing, interesting stories because my life has been pretty shitty up until now, until I met my wife Heather. I myself will read biographies but these people have to be very interesting for me to read about. I’ve started biographies and autobiographies and I’ve put them down. You can read a story about someone like Kerouac, that’s one thing. But a book about Tommy Lee or Dave Navarro. Who-gives-a-shit. I’d rather read about Churchill or somebody that made an impact on people’s lives with their personal life from their writing or speeches. I mean, I’m all about entertainment. I’ll go and see any movie you put in front of me. And I’ll probably like it. Sometimes I want to watch something stupid, I want to be entertained. I watched 24 Hour Party People recently. It’s a piece of shit. The first half of it is awesome—it’s about Joy Division. The Joy Division story is awesome. As you watch it, you wish the story could be about that instead of this moronic, asinine record label owner. He’s a complete dildo. He was just an idiot with a business degree and a television show that started this record label. He was just lucky enough to have Joy Division as his first band. What I loved about Joy Division, even though they were kind of bad musicians is the sound of rawness, it rocks, and there was newness.

D: you know how I stay excited about music these days? I started up Made In Mexico again. It’s great cause you’re seeing these young bands who haven’t even recorded their first record yet. They’re still young, they’re so fresh and they’re just full of energy and life. They have no idea what the road is like or what critics are talking about. Not a clue. I’m seeing a lot of new bands lately. Not that I would sign them. I probably wouldn’t sign half of them. But I’m so excited about their energy. And this is one of my biggest struggles these days: how do I revitalize my music? How do I get excited about my own music? I feel like I’ve been doing this for years. I remember when I recorded my first cassette, how freaking excited I was. That was like gold. You’re so excited about it, you let everybody hear it. You’re friends are liking it. And then the next step is, oh my god, they’re playing it on the radio! You can never go back to that feeling.

M: I try and keep that feeling going by going to shows and supporting independent music but after you’ve gone to a million shows and have played as many, sometimes it’s hard to keep that feeling of newness alive.

D: That’s why I think that most bands should have a life span of about 3 years tops. You don’t want to burn out; you don’t want to ruin friendships. Say for instance if Curt Cobain was still alive, and they just put out Bleach, Nevermind and In Utero that would have been enough. The Beatles, they should have stopped at Magical Mystery Tour. After they did that record, they started hating each other. To me, that record isn’t even good.

M: It’s funny, the idea of the Rock Band is a democracy of 4 or 5 people—or at least it’s the guise of a democracy—it only lasts so long. You’ve got these creative people that are butting heads. With the inter-workings of friends in bands—it’s really just doomed for destruction from the beginning. I don’t understand how some of these rock bands will last for decades. Unless it’s about having a nice house and living high on the hog. Image what would have happened if you did The Damien Jurado Band? Same thing with Dave Bazan. If you guys weren’t doing solo type music, it wouldn’t happen. Maybe some people will could critique Bazan for having a rotating lineup but if it Pedro the Lion existed as a band—a democracy, it wouldn’t work. They probably would have broken up in like ’97 or something.

D: But I think that most bands don’t want to face that point where people get sick of you. They’re thinking to themselves “where do we go from here”? Some of my favorite band only put out 2 or 3 records. Beat Happening only put 4 records out and that was it. Minor Threat put out 2 EPs. That was it. But when you’re a solo artist, you can’t break up with yourself. The only thing you can do is fade out.

M: But the idea behind the solo artist is that it’s more lasting. The vitality of what a rock band is, it’s about that tension between the members that’s a little bit different from the solo thing. When you’ve got a long spanning career as a solo artists, it makes a little more sense.

D: I remember when people were so bummed when Coolidge broke up. But all of us were happy. We knew it was the time. As soon as record labels started talking about us….we sat down and said “what the hell are we doing”? We started to loose our focus. We went from making our own T-shirts and handing out cassettes to who do we want to sign with? Well, I’m not going to sign to that label. It’s like you said, you’re just setting yourself up for failure when you start a band.

M: It is what it is.

D: Part of the great thing about rock is wanting more.

M: More in the sense of what?

D: Wanting more albums from good bands. But what if they did put out another record and it sucked? Like “why wasn’t there another recording of Minor Threat?!” Probably because it would have sucked!

M: It’s a good thing that they stopped when they did.

D: Yeah. And what’s the deal with Fugazi? No one knows if they’ve broken up, if they’re taking a hiatus. It’s like, dude, I hope they broke up. Call it a day man and leave your history. They put out amazing records, they played amazing shows, and so do other bands now. Move on.

M: right. Why have this weird limbo and loose a bunch of momentum. But I suppose that for a band that’s played that long, maybe they could be not active for a couple years and then jump back into it and still do something vital…but for most bands, taking a break and then coming back—it’s really hard to get that back.

M: so moving to another subject, you don’t like touring do you?

D: No, I hate it.

M: Do you look back though and think about when you first started going out, did it seem like it was fun the first couple times you went out?

D: No! It was never fun.

M: You never look back on it and think “oh yeah, those were good times.”?

D: (Pause) No.

M: So the whole thing, the memory of actually doing it was a total drag?

D: It was a drag. It wouldn’t have been a drag if I didn’t have a wife or rent to pay.

M: You toured as a married guy. It’s not like you went out as a single guy having fun….

D: That’s what I’m saying. If I were single now, would I enjoy it? Ahh…maybe. I might. Any band that tells me that touring is fun, that tells me one thing: you have no life OK? You don’t make house payments, you don’t have a wife, otherwise you’d probably be divorced. If you do have kids, they’re probably living in another state, you’d never see their face. You cannot have a life and tour at the same time. Unless you’re on a huge major label and touring on a ridiculous bus.

M: It seems like it’s more apparent now with younger bands that they live with this idea that they’re gonna go somewhere with it. You’ve these MTV Cribs type shows…you can’t perpetuate the rock thing forever. Because then you’re not going to have anything to give to the music anyway. So what are you going to do? Just talk about The Rock? Do you do that from the time you’re 18 to 30 and not build a life at all? And I’m not just talking about not having something to give to the thematics of the lyrics….because you’re life isn’t getting rounded and there’s responsibility being taken and seeing the bigger picture, you’re not going to have anything to bring to the music. So it’s probably good that it fizzles out anyway…

D: For sure.

M: It sort of documents a period like “ok, this is me from 18 to 23 and I’m calling it good.”

D: Did you read Get in the Van by [Henry] Rollins?

M: Yeah.

D: That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever read in my life. It’s like, dude, why didn’t you just leave the band? Why didn’t he just go home? When you don’t have any responsibility…that’s what I’m saying—why don’t you go home? Cause he didn’t have anything to go home to.

M: But he hated what he was doing. He knew what he was doing. He knew that he could withstand it because he’d been doing it for 3 years already.

D: That’s how he survived. It’s like that Hoover story we were talking about (Hoover was a DC based Dischord band that recently got together for a couple shows for the sole purpose of seeing Europe) Somebody will tell me “I’m going to go to Europe” and I’ll say “yeah, go ahead. Have a good time. It’s going to cost you a lot of money.” But I’ve been to Europe many times and it’s been free because I went as a musician. So I think if you want to go to Europe, you should just start a band. You want to see the world, go start a band. You won’t be staying at the freshest hotels; you may be staying in some shitty hostels. Cause some idiot is going to pay your fee to bring you over there. Rosie Thomas, Eric [Fisher] went to Sweden, Denmark and Norway and then we went to the UK. We were there for a month and a half. The entire time all I’m thinking is I’m eating this amazing food, looking at these beautiful people, going to record stores…all to play for 45 minutes. (Laughter) And when I’m done, I’m going to go back to my 5 star hotel that they put me up in and watch cable. (Laughter) For a 45 minute set.

M: How many shows did you do?

D: We only had 2 days off the entire time. It was ridiculous. Yeah, you know, I want to go over to Europe and play.

M: I’ve been out to play festival shows before in Arkansas to play for 30 minutes. We had a 2 day stay there in a hotel to play for 30 minutes. And it makes you think—what? It’s really strange. There were other times when I’ve been on tour—we’d be in the van all day long for something like 8 hours, the weather sucked we were burnt out to go and play for 40 minutes. And you think to yourself, the people that you play to, do they get that?

D: They don’t know. No.

M: It’s funny too cause we’d show up—we were so not a cool looking band, we were a bunch of nerds. You wonder if these kids expect you to show up and you’re just cool. You’re just a bunch of scumbags living in a van and you’re tired…

D: You don’t wanna talk to anybody

M: Yeah, you wonder if people get that.

D: They don’t

M: it’s like; do you understand what I had to do to play for you?

D: It’s funny, cause now when I see a touring band, I think to myself: “God, they were just in their van for hours and their playing to 10 people”. If that’s what you want to do dude, go right ahead. You chose this life. There were shows on this last tour like in Alabama, I got paid $50. But other shows I got paid $350, $500. I got paid the most in my own city so why the hell should I go on tour?

M: thinking back to my touring days, we were killing ourselves. Half the time I liked it, half the time I hated it. I am glad looking back that we did it. But financially man, what a freakin’ drain. Why did we do that!? We went out on a 5 week tour without a record. We had no product…I have no idea how we pulled that off. We were just freakin’ killing ourselves…

D: (laughter) The best is when you get certain journalists. They’ll ask “how’s the tour going?” And I’ll say, “you know, whatever, I’m about to have a nervous breakdown” and they’ll ask why. Because touring is horrible. And they don’t understand. I’m away from my wife and son…

M: Why do you do it then?

D: I do it as a thank you to the people that bought the record. The reality is I don’t even enjoy playing. Why would they want to come see me? I’m not jumping around; I’m holding a guitar and sitting down. That’s why I don’t go to singer songwriter shows anymore. Because they’re boring! (laughter)

M: so you wonder, why would people want to go out and see you?

D: Yeah. I don’t want to insult anyone’s intelligence. I think it’s great that they’re there and that they’ve bought the records. I think it’s awesome. I think that every show I play. Why are you staring at me? Do I just go to your house and watch you eat food and watch television? It’s boring. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care if you’re Connor Oberst or Nick Drake. Boring.

M: Yeah, but there’ something to be said for hearing it live that you don’t get by listening to a recording.

D: I can guarantee you though, if you come out to see me live, don’t expect to see anything special. Seriously. I’m going to sing the songs and that’s it.

M: but the songs are different live

D: You want a different version of a song? I’ll record it different. Again, that’s not to insult the intelligence of my audience. Cause I know they’re coming out and maybe thinking “this is great”. But I would never do that. I get in arguments with promoters. I ask if we can set up chairs. And they say, if we set up chairs, we won’t be able to get as many people in here. Well then just do 3 shows for God’s sake. But who wants to stand there? Not me.

2005-10-11T11:43:00.000-07:00

For the uninitiated Bob Weston plays bass in the band Shellac (with Steve Albini) and is a fantastic studio engineer. He has recorded some great records over the years (Rodan, Rachels, Polvo, June of 44, Six Finger Sattelite, my old band Roadside Monumet etc.) We talked about engineering, being a member of Shellac, dying rats and going on vacation in Hawaii. This interview took place in the summer of 2004 for a feature in Bandoppler issue #6. Many of the quotes from this conversation were used for that article. Here’s the interview in its entirety. Enjoy.

Me: So you recently recorded Mission of Burma? You've worked with them before in some capacity right? Is there a Boston connection there somehow?

Bob: I'm originally from the Boston area. One of the first bands I played in was The Volcano Suns, starting in 1987. That was Peter Prescott's (MoB drummer) band. We toured a few times with Roger Miller's (MoB guitarist) No Man band. And I met both Clint Conley (bass) and Martin Swope (tape loops) through Pete and Roger...at Suns shows...etc. So I've known them all for quite a while. When Burma started talking about playing a few shows in 2001 (was itthat long ago already), I happened to be recording Clint's new band,Consonant. I heard that Martin was living in Hawaii and wasn't going to be involved, and so I offered my services as live sound guy. And if they were interested in having me try and do the tape loops too, I waswilling to try. I guess I was just sort of the natural choice for thejob. I'm comfortable messing with tape machines and loops and am able to do an adequate job at live sound. So, I suppose I've filled the Martin role as an offstage band member. When they decided to make a new record, it just seemed natural that I would be the engineer. I can't begin to express how amazing this has all been for me. Burma has always been one of my very favorite bands.

Me: How have the MOB sessions been so far and any ideas about what people can expect to hear?

Bob: Everything went really well with the recordings. These guys are justamazing at playing their music. The only way I can describe it is to say that the songs and performances are extremely vital. The songs aregreat. It blows my mind that this band can make such truly exciting music 20 years later. It's like they never stopped.

Me: So Shellac recently played in Hawaii? Have you guys played there before?

Bob: Nope. It was pretty cool. We played two shows for 80 people in theweird back storage room of a Korean Transvestite Karaoke Bar. A rat died on our soundman's wife's foot. Obviously, the shows were just acover to have a little vacation time (as most of our tours are). Wewere able to afford it because we had some free plane ticket voucherssaved up. Otherwise it would have been impossible to even come close to breaking-even on a Hawaii show. The people at the show kept begging us to tell our friends in otherbands about Hawaii; that there are people who will come to their showsin Hawaii. I had to explain to them that 80 people paying $9 each willnot buy plane tickets to Hawaii for a band. And that, "trust me, every band I know would love to come to Hawaii; nobody’s avoiding you".

Me: The way you engineer records has always interested me since you take such a rock approach. It seems like the point of the process should simply be to document the music rather than getting in the producer chair and messing with arrangements and overdoing production. Have you been asked to take on more of a producer role or do the bands you’re working with usually know where you're coming from going into it?

Bob: No bands have ever asked me to do the full-on style producer thing. I guess a band who wanted something like that probably wouldn't approach me; they'd hire somebody who does that all the time. I assume bands hire me after talking to other bands who've used me in the past, and so would get a feel for how I normally work from these discussions. On most records, though, I'll have ideas about an overdub, or maybe a different way to sing or play a part and I'll bring it up. Or, if something sounds wrong or bad to me, of course I'll let the band know and try to help. I'm not completely hands-off. I'm just not "in command" of the session the way a "real" producer is. I assume that the band knows what they want. They are producing the record; or we all are producing the record together.

Me: Are there particular reasons ethically or otherwise why you don't approach the recording process in a big production sense or is it just because you just see your role as simply being hired as the engineer?

Bob: I'm not sure. I don't really think about it. I just do what seems to come naturally. I was playing in bands before I was recording them. Maybe that has something to do with it. I just do whatever needs to be done to help the bands make the best record they can. My role may be slightly different on every session. But I don't really think about it, I just do what seems to come naturally. Also, the low budgets that most bands hiring me have make it impossible to spend much time in the studio, let alone in pre-production. Speed is always necessary due to the financial constraints.

Me: Last year I came across a really great book called Rock And The Pop Narcotic. (written by Joe Carducci--one of the gurus behind SST in the eighties)The main idea that most stuck out to me is this: A truly rock aesthetic hardly exists in reality in popular music and especially what's popular on the radio. As Carducci puts it, rock is a played/performed music--a group oriented music--but most of what happens in the process of putting out records, promotion and attention to image etc takes away from that essential rock element. Simply put, I think there are fewer and fewer bands that understand this and the result is there are fewer truly great rock bands. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Bob: Huh...I hadn't thought about that. I suppose it's true. It seems like young bands are thinking about managers and lawyers and record deals as much or more than just writing songs and playing. Is that what you mean? There are just so many bands. Everybody's in a band, which is fine. It's great for people to be making music with their friends. But that's going to make the percentage of great bands go way down. Just because you're in a band doesn't mean people want to pay to see you play or buy your records. It's so diluted. Plus, what's your reason for playing? I get the feeling that many people start bands with the goal of making a living now. Those people have less of a chance at making good music than people who simply NEED to rock; or those who just want to play for the fun of it, or play with their friends as a social activity. Also, there's the weirdness of making a record in a studio. Many would argue that the only "real" or "true" recording of a band would be a live recording of them playing in their normal environment: either live in their practice space or live in front of an audience with no overdubs. And that when recording in a studio, you're trying to recreate that live "true" sound of the band in a very unnatural way: by putting different pieces together that will hopefully make a realistic simulation of the band actually rocking. So, often when in the studio, a band that can actually rock is trying to build a simulation of themselves in a convoluted fashion. It's weird. I read some quote recently where a songwriter talked about how he worked extremely hard to make songs seem like they were written effortlessly. So the songwriting and the recording processes seem to be about illusion. You want the music listener to feel like the band just naturally comes up with these songs and recordings. You don't want the listener to know what really goes into it all. So, are/were there ever bands who simply ooze the rock? Write awesome rock songs effortlessly? Rock so amazingly in the studio that overdubs and repairs and studio tricks aren't even necessary? Back when the recording technology wasn't quite so advanced, the tricks weren't available and so the answer was YES: the bands that sounded like they rocked on your record player probably actually rocked. Of course there are bands who use the studio more as a tool or instrument and aren't trying to recreate some idealized live version of themselves. But we're not talking about those bands here.

Me: What seems to happen in the over technologized process of making a record is that whatever made the music ROCK in the first place is squeezed out of the end product. It ends up sounding flacid, overproduced and essentially non-rock. Obviously the efficiency ofrecording technology these days makes the process of making "the perfect sounding record" easier and it seems like more and more bands indie or otherwise are taking this approach. Do you think that the relative ease of making up for musical deficiencies on the part of the musicians in that type of setting contributes to the relatively mediocre music these days?

Bob: Of course. There are so many things wrong with making everything "perfect" in the protools. It removes all the life and energy of the band's live performance, provided there was some there in the first place. Didn't we already go through this in the 80s when MIDI was going to replace all the live musicians? I guess the technology can wreck music in both directions: it can suck the life out of a band that truly rocks, and alternatively, it can make a band that couldn't rock if it's life depended on it sound at least technically competent. The best records from many bands are the first few before they really get proficient at their instruments. Their songwriting, and the parts they come up with to play are so much more interesting when they haven't learned the rules yet...the formulaic or expected chords or arrangement ideas, etc. There's always so much more energy and abandon. But just being an amateur at your instrument doesn't mean your ideas are necessarily good or interesting. The young bands that really rock are intuitive about it. Their ideas are just intuitively great and they can realizing what they're hearing in their heads on these new instruments they've just started playing. The songwriting is tied up with learning how to play the song. They can't play guitar, but they can play their own songs on guitar. Do you know what I mean?

Me: Yeah, I completely know what you mean. There are certain bands that I like or have liked in the past where the players may not be that technically skilled but the band works together compensating for each others deficiencies and the result is a real combustion. It's that element that gives a band or a song a quality that's all it's own. One of my all time favorite rock records is Husker Du's “Zen Arcade”. Areyou familiar with that record at all?

Bob: Oh yeah. That's my favorite Husker Du record (that and “Metal Circus”). A part of the amazing SST double LP juggernaut: “Double Nickels on the Dime” and “Zen Arcade”.

Me: I like the fast songs especially cause they feel like they're going to fall apart at any moment but somehow they learned how to play together and the result is something unique only to them. If they had made that record using really slick techniques trying to get it "just right", I don't think the end product would have the same effect.

Bob: Yup. But I don't think I'd call the playing on “Zen Arcade” naive or amateurish. In a way I guess we're talking about two closely related phenomena here. One in which the enthusiasm and raw talent make up for a lack of technical proficiency, and the other where a band has real particular and idiosyncratic way that they play together...probably because they learned to play their instruments by starting a band together and figuring out their own way to play.

Me: Agreed. Are there any records that come to mind that you appreciate in a similar way?

Bob: Umm, how about Pavement? Those first two Pavement singles, the "Perfect Sound Forever" EP, and to a slightly lesser extent, "Slanted and Enchanted" are just unbelievably great records. But the playing and songwriting is so weird and interesting and innovative in a really naive and wide-eyed-exploration type way. I really get the impression from those records that Steve and Scott hadn't played guitar for long. But the stuff that they came up with is inspirational to me still. And then when their engineer, Gary, started adding drums...man, he was coming from a completely different musical world than them...adding the sort of prog-rock style drums to these noisy underground pop gems. That's the other side of the coin (the enthusiasm-makes-up-for-chops vs. band-playing-together-in-their-own-idiosyncratic-style coin) . He could really play, but the way his playing fit in with the guitars and songs was completely idiosyncratic, and weird, and just perfect. It helped to make those records memorable and special. Another slightly different example would be the Rolling Stones. The early records are just amazing. But listen to them...things are out of tune, they miss parts, the timing can go all over the place. They just wouldn't be allowed to make records like that today. Everything would have been "fixed" in the computer. But it's just so apparent to anybody that the old records are SO much more pleasurable to listen to than their newer records.

Me: So when did you start working with Steve?

Bob: We first got to know each other when he recorded "Career in Rock" for my old band, The Volcano Suns. We really got along well in the studio and became great friends. A year later, after the Suns had broken up, he flew me to Chicago a few times to wire up the new 24-track studio gear he was putting into his house. A little after that, he hired me to be his full-time studio maintenance tech and I moved from Boston to Chicago. That was in November of '92. I worked for him at the studio in his house for a few years. But at the same time, I was starting to get more and more recording work. Eventually I was doing a terrible job at keeping up with the tech stuff as I did more engineering. So I decided to quit my tech job with Steve so he could get a full-time tech and I could pursue recording as an independent freelance engineer.

Me: How did Shellac come about?

Bob: Todd and Steve had known each other for many years and had talked about playing together sometime. A while after Rapeman broke up, the two of them started playing together. Steve would go to Minneapolis or Todd would come to Chicago for a weekend. I don't really have all the details about exactly how and when that got started. But they had been playing together for a few years when I moved to Chicago. Steve asked if I wanted to try playing bass with them. We first played together a few months after I moved there and it went really well. It felt really good to all of us and so they asked me to join. They had played with another bass played named Camillo Gonzalez a few times before I joined. He used to play in Naked Raygun. When I joined, many of the songs that ended up on the singles and Action Park had already been written. In fact, Camillo had bass parts. I learned these songs from a cassette the three of them had done as a practice recording. I'm not sure if I play them exactly as Camillo did, but those songs were pretty much ready to go. Steve and Todd had put them together in the two years before adding a bass player.

Me: How did you know him since you were from the northeast? Tour connections?

Bob: I had met both Steve and Todd while touring with the Volcano Suns in the late 80's. The Suns played a bunch of times with Todd's band, Rifle Sport. And we were introduced to Steve in Chicago by a mutual friend: Clark Johnson (Squirrel Bait).

Me: You and Steve seem to have very similar approaches toengineering. Did you move to Chicago and start workingwith him because you had those ideas in common?

Bob: I had always wanted to be a recording engineer and was working towards that in Boston. After hearing the Pixies record and a lot of his Touch and Go recordings I felt that this was the style of recording that I was interested in learning about. It was like a light-bulb suddenly clicked on when I heard his work. I knew that that's how I wanted my recordings to sound, even though I had never heard recordings like his before. I felt like we were kindred spirits sonically. I learned so much from him at the Volcano Suns session and would get advice from him on the phone all the time after that. He was a real mentor and a great teacher...always happy to pass on ideas and information. So, working at his studio as a tech seemed like a dream come true. I was able to absorb so much from him while I was working in his shop. And when I would bring bands into his studio, I could always go to him for advice.

Me: How were you involved with Electrical Audio when itwas built? Do you still do a lot of work there?

Bob: I wasn't an employee anymore when the new big Electrical Audio was built. Steve hired me as an independent contractor to design the electrical system, design the audio wiring, and do the audio wiring. I had a lot of help doing the actual pulling of cables and soldering and crimping etc. I really love recording at Electrical, but sadly haven't done a session there in something like 2 years. One reason being that I simply haven't been hired by bands as much as I used to. The other reason is that most of the bands that hire me now aren't on a label and so have an extremely limited budget to work with. This forces us to use cheaper studios. I'm dying to do something there again.

Me: So you mentioned you've been away from home. What'veyou been up to lately? You did some work with NPR recently is that right? What did they have you doing?

Bob: I've been traveling a bit to do live sound for Mission of Burma and the Magic Band...any reunions with the initials M.B. I recently finished making the new Mission of Burma record. I've also been working on a new Shipping News record, and have some upcoming sessions with some of Ken Vandermark's jazz groups. I've been working a lot with Ken over the past few years. I've worked for NPR as an audio engineer for the past 5 or 6 years. I work as a freelance engineer for them at the NPR Chicago News Bureau. We service NPR's midwest reporters: recording, mixing and feeding their news spots and longer pieces to Washington, DC. Also, if somebody at NPR in DC (or NY, LA, etc) needs to interview a person who's in Chicago, we'll have that person sit in our studio for the interview. Things like that. It's a great job for me in that when the bands aren't calling, I can take up the financial slack by working more at NPR. The bills need to get paid even when I'm not recording a band.

Me: So you've recorded June of 44, Rachels, Boys Life,Jawbox, Six Finger Satellite, Polvo and Hurl...over the years, what bands stick out as your favorite recording projects over the last ten years?

Bob: Man that's hard to answer. There are so many bands who I've become great friends with and have great rapport with in the studio. Also, there is a huge percentage of records I've worked on that I really truly just love to listen to for enjoyment. Let me try to list some of my favorite bands that I've worked with: All my Louisville friends in Rodan, The Rachel's, June of 44, and the Shipping News; Sebadoh; the Thinking Fellers; I really love listening to the 2 White Octave records that I did; Pony and Speed King; all the Vandermark bands: Vandermark 5, Spaceways, Triple PLay, FME; I've made 2 records with a fun group of guys from Japan: 54-71; Consonant; the Archers of Loaf and especially Eric's solo record Barry Black; New Brutalism; the Kahoots; Shuttlecock; The Oxes; a Belgian band called JF Muck; Plush; Lynx; The Letter E; Arcwelder; Victory at Sea; the Wicked Farley's; Polvo; Spatula; the Bicentennial Quarters; Delta 72; the Regrets and Vitreous Humor; Kepone; A Minor Forest; the Coctails; Eric's Trip; Shiner; the Metroschifter; Six Finger Satellite......... I could go on at length about all these bands and records. Either I remember the session as being particularly enjoyable, or I still listen to that record a lot, or I have long associations with the bands in this list; I've worked with many of these people on more than one record. This makes me feel really good. I really treasure these relationships and the music that comes out of them.

Me: Do you ever get tired of recording rock bands? Isthere other audio work you'd like to be doing? Do you do other work besides audio stuff?

Bob: It's always a nice change when I get to work on a Rachel's record and I record strings, winds, mallet instruments, pianos, etc. On the last record I got to record a small chamber ensemble in a wonderful recital hall. It's incredibly satisfying from both a technical and an artistic standpoint to be able to make good sounding recordings of these different instruments and groups of players. It's a huge challenge, and the music can still give me the goose-bumps and gut-level reactions that make me know how much I love the music. Over the past year and a half, I've gotten to record a number of albums (listed above) for some jazz groups that Ken Vandermark is involved with. It turns out that he and I and these bands are an excellent fit in the studio. I really enjoy working on the records and being able to stretch out into this other recording direction. We record live with everybody close in the same room; no headphones; and using minimal tracks. I record in what I assume to be a sort of old-fashioned jazz recording style. Although haven't really studied it, so I could be totally wrong. We just try to keep it real simple and direct while using high quality modern equipment. We never do any overdubs. We just record multiple takes of each song. The band takes home CDR's of rough mixes and picks out the best performance of each for us to mix later. None of the songs are "perfect"; the overall feel of the entire take is far more important. I really like this idea. It's incredibly refreshing to get to work this way. I feel like rock bands often remove the energy and life from a song when we go back and try to "fix" too many things with repairs and overdubs. I wish more rock bands wouldn't sweat the minute details during the recording process. Often these little "mistakes" become some of the more fun or memorable parts on albums.

2003-01-23T14:21:00.000-08:00

Joe Carducci interview

Joe: It looks like EMI is going to be a stand-alone record company, in the music business. They may be bought by somebody but right now that’s always fallen through, so they’re stuck on their own. And I think they’re going they’re going to buy Warners, away from the record division, away from Time Warner.

Chris: I used to work for a small label that was basically a farm league for EMI, to pitch bands up to the majors.
J
oe: What was it called?

Chris: It was called Tooth & Nail, out of Seattle. Bill Stevenson does a lot of production work for the label.

Joe: Yeah, right.

Chris: I remember all of the bands we’d send to Bill, and he was very encouraging and everything, but I always wondered what he thought of the aesthetics of some of the bands. To be honest, the punk period had us turning out some pretty generic groups …

Joe: The bands that couldn’t play, you know, the ones that had to restructure the drumming, beat by beat … those are the works that are, you know, (Laughter.) He likes fast music, he likes finding new bands too, he likes to work, and there’s bands that can’t play, which puts a lot of pressure on him in the studio.

I would say now that the problem is that the industry cracks up enough to allow some bands to develop outside of that aspiration and pressure, perhaps we’ll find out whether younger players have enough musical encoding left, or whether MTV and bad radio … I think generally, my generation, the ‘70s group of people, there was another point I made in the book, the bands that kind of got together at the end of the 70s were the last people who remembered good radio. Which sort of ended in ’72. And radio and television, and the kind of music you just ran into at the town fair, or the church social, and the music’s been professionalized in this country, and you know I have two Filipino sisters-in-law, and the Philippines is still a singing culture, they all sing. And they do in the rest of Asia, too, but I think the Filipinos are better singers. They’re a Catholic culture, but music hasn’t been professionalized through most of the islands – probably in Manila, but the rest are distant, and they have to make their own music. And it’s kind of shocking.

Matt: It’s something they do as a family, as part of their every day lives kind of thing.

Joe: Yeah, it’s a thing like it was in the South, for the back porch, or the front porch, or the church …

Chris: As Robert Crumb said, about collecting (early) 78s, these are people basically singing to each other on their back porches.

Joe: The real purists say that anything after 1930 was recorded by musicians who were influenced more by recording than live music. So they say, ‘Well, that’s not real American music anymore after 1930.’ In the ‘20s, you have people who just happened to be in front of a microphone that somebody put there, they really played music because their family played music, and they got an instrument by happenstance, or a lot of them were obsessed and would be strings on a cardboard box, you know, until they could afford a real ukulele.

Chris: There’s something eerie about a lot of those songs, because do they sound accidentally recorded.

Joe: I do think a lot of that stuff changed in the recording. They put ‘em in a hotel room, and set up the equipment to record, or brought ‘em to New York or something, you know. Those people were Because they were used to playing in a bar. And so I think probably a lot of the recordings are unlike the way that normal arrangements was, even in the ‘20s. My roommate here is in a band called The Stop & Listen Boys, and basically what he did was take the acoustic blues of Son House or Charlie Patton, and try to put a jug band around it. So it’s like the Memphis Jug Band with Charlie Patton in it, and you know, you subject maybe the brass and stuff and keep it a string band. His focus is all on the ‘20s. But he’s also a Dylan freak, I know Dylan mostly through him as well, I never really paid that much attention to Dylan.

Chris: It’s interesting what you were saying about Filipino culture. I’ve only really played music in the past ten years with a Filipino girl in her 20s, who was dead set against doing anything live or recording anything officially. She just liked to play music with me in private, in her apartment.

Joe: Well, that’s all kind of a modern thing. I don’t know how that goes. There would be a lot of Filipino young kids in metal bands in the early ‘80s, and it seems like things are changing a lot, you know. I got a nephew who’s half-Asian, and you know twenty years ago an Asian girl had an entrée to American society generally, culturally, moreso than an Asian male did, where there weren’t the kind of models in the public that there are now. So these kids won’t have the same problem that maybe – but I thought that what metal’s attraction to them was, ‘Yeah, we’re men. We’re short and thin Filipinos that just got here. We’re macho, and we’re doing it!’ And things are opening up.But you didn’t mention if she sang or not.

Chris: She does, but when we played together she tended not to. She would sing on her own stuff. When she was alone.

Joe: You know, I’m the kind of guy who never really participated in music class, even when we had to have it. It was a point of pride not to blow through the recorder. So the nun would come over and make you play a couple of notes! But singing is sort of like, nothing is sublimated, you’re really singing, that’s your voice, it’s not sublimated through an instrument or a craft that you learned. And like Dave, my roommate, his band because it’s acoustic it’s mistaken for bluegrass, because there’s so much more bluegrass than there is acoustic blues, from that period before electricity. And he hates bluegrass generally, but what was good in bluegrass was the brother and family bands. Because he said, if you want to hear good harmony singing, they’ve got to be family. And there was something on television last week, where it was (Del) McCoury and his son (Rob) were on stage with a bunch of people. It was a spooky gospel ballad that they were playing, and it was very low key, and is very much a vocal performance rather than all of this picking. Because bluegrass to my ears modern bluegrass suffers from what modern metal does – all of this nonsensical soloing. And it really doesn’t accomplish anything musically.

Matt: It doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s not moving.

Joe: Yeah, and then of course it’s because they can’t sing. (Laughter.) They’re singing maybe, and maybe technically they’re okay, but that’s what he means about that. There are the Everly Brothers and other brother bands, but checking on his collection I understand what he’s talking about. There’s no substitute, really, that doesn’t mean you can’t do something, that doesn’t mean the Minutemen aren’t an amazing band because they weren’t from the South and they weren’t family, but I think even if things got more hospitable industry-wise to good bands, I’m not sure the same sort of – the culture is drying up, or has dried up too much. And if the band is formed in college – well, you know, in college if you form a band, you’re a hipster, but if you form a band in high school, you tended to be a nerd, someone who is kind of outside the loop. Maybe once, after a couple of years, you got your shit together, you earn your date or something, you’d be a social person again.

Chris: That would be your reward. Becoming a part of community through what you do.

Joe: Yeah. When I was in grade school, in fifth or sixth grade, there’d be an assembly, and you’d find out that these four people (you knew) were in a band. And there they were playing ‘Gloria’ and ’96 Tears,’ you know, just a bunch of bone simple tunes, ‘Louie Louie,’that were current in that period, but you don’t really develop out of covers any more.

Chris: I have a theory that bands should be doing covers again. There seems to be a myth that every band has one or more great songwriters, they have to be like a Dylan in each band …

Joe: I think that’s right. You identify a kind of root book of tunes, like say, take the Velvets, or the Stooges, or let’s start from the Ramones, let’s start from Carl Perkins or somebody like that. You woodshed from that stuff. The best guitar player around here had a band called the Custom Caravans, and he moved down to Colorado probably to find a better rhythm section to work from, but he started in my building here, we ran a coffee house for awhile, and his set at first was ‘Paranoid,’ ‘These Boots Are Made For Walkin’,’ just a hodge-podge of stuff. All he did was play the verse until the chorus, and then he’d start soloing on the verse, and they’d stretch it out, and he was an amazing soloist. I keep trying to convince Stevenson that he has to bring him in …

Chris: Yeah, Bill should record him at the Blasting Room …

Joe: Hook him up with Carl, and see if there’s anything there. Because there really aren’t that many people who can solo beyond scales, he can really improvise the melody and work it out.
And eventually he’s got a set full of originals. Yeah, I think you’re right about that.
Chris: While you were talking about the voice, and people singing, I remember what Henry Rollins said in one of his books about the Red Hot Chili Peppers recording and how every sentence of a song is kind of patched in. I wondered what that would do to the quality of the music. I know we’ve discussed it, but this idea of the human voice not actually singing the song anymore, you’re getting a certain kind of texture, which can be cool, but in terms of connection …

Joe: Well, what if by doing that, you get it perfect? That’s not so good. If it’s perfect, then it’s not really breathing. You know, we had to patch a couple of notes that D. Boon couldn’t hit. One of the songs on I don’t even remember what it was, it was just a high note that he couldn’t hit. And you know, that kind of patch doesn’t really matter, but Metallica records, Red Hot Chili Pepper records, those people aren’t really musicians, they’re fans. You know, John Lombardie, I don’t even know what else he’s written, but he had a real good piece in years ago, and he was basically trashing Springsteen, probably the first person to in a major publication, and what he was saying basically is that you got Dylan, Neil Young, and Hendrix, and Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison, you got all of these flaming geniuses, who all took risks, but now we’re in a middle class world, and people prefer Springsteen. Because he’s safe and he’s not going to destroy himself in the pursuit of some crazed muse. And he was saying that Springsteen is middle-class, he’s an imitator, he’s durable, and a ‘better product’ for the ‘sensible ‘80s.’

Chris: Well, they’ve been working on that for awhile on all levels, haven’t they? Pop punk from punk, everybody (in the music business) are trying to make sure that everything is a better And the so-called ‘underground’ has lost its dangerous element over the years.

Joe: Yeah, there’s certain characters who can’t be satisfied, to quote a blues lyric, and that might be Ryan Adams, who does a lot of stuff, and does different kinds of things. He’s got a lot of machinery behind him, but I was just reading that they rejected – I guess he’s put out two EPs on top of the two albums he’s put out in the last year, and they rejected the EPs, in favor of the album, which I haven’t heard, but that album is what they wanted to spend money promoting, and they put the EPs out without promotion, whatever that means. But it means they’re probably spending close to $100,000 to roll out a new record, so you’ve got to be selling gold, or have the prospect to sell gold, to make back that huge amount of money. I’m sure it’s more than that because he’s playing in every city, and there’s an advertisement in every city, all kinds of shit, it never ends. But you know even then, he’s the most interesting person with a label behind him that can do something, and I think there’s a better chance that country radio will get interesting, rather than rock radio. I mean, what’s interesting in rock radio to me are the stations that are mixing classic era rock with the (new) rock.

Matt: It’s horrible.

Joe: Well, you know, you’d like more, but I only listen to the radio in the car, and that’s good enough. You know it’s different in the Midwest than it is in LA. The mix is different. They still do that, and they’re going to do more of that, and the question is, is Weezer and Linkin Park the best music (now) -- that would have been, not the worst, but the low mediocre, in ’72, when you had stuff like Steppenwolf and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and all kids of other stuff.

Matt: Do you think that there’s anybody, are there any rock bands out there right now, that you dig?

Joe: Well, that’s what I mean. Only hearing these one songs by these bands in New York, still there’s so many of them that I like, and they’re not obviously this or that scene, they’re kind of what you hoped for from a New York rock band. There’s so much garbage out of New York, you weren’t maybe even asking that question. ‘What we need is a good New York rock band.’ Well, we don’t need that Patti Smith kind of rock music, the Ramones were what they were, they weren’t like the Strokes, or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Those are basically the bands that I’ve heard that are touted, so that gave me some hope. Because if there’s good bands in New York, the media will eventually sort of have to deal with them, because it’s very difficult, they all have to be in Brooklyn and Queens, they can’t all be in Manhattan, it’s impossible to live in Manhattan, if all you are is a rock band, you know. It’s just too expensive.
But things are accessible in Brooklyn, things are happening there, and things are still accessible in Chicago, so stuff is happening there. But you still need to make your way with a good musical thing through the media and the industry, and that hasn’t opened up, that you can tell.

Chris: I always get kind of sad this time of year, because I’m an SST fanboy, remembering the death of D. Boon back in 1985.

Joe: Yeah.

Chris: You recently had Spot out to where you are, with someone doing a documentary on the Minutemen?

Joe: Yes, someone’s doing a documentary, and he’s 35, the guy making the movie, Jeff Bowers, and he knows Watt. So he sort of started with an idea of Mike Watt, and then sort of expanded it to basically be about the band. And he’s somebody from Cal Arts, so he’s got an artistic idea of how to handle it, how the film would look and work. There’s somebody else doing a Minutemen documentary too …

Chris: Wow! Two Minutemen documentaries coming up!

Joe: Yeah, I know … the other one is more like famous people talking about the Minutemen, this is more about the people who were there and worked with them. So this will be more to the point than the other one.

Chris: This has nothing to do with Provisional? (Joe’s film company.)

Joe: No, no, we’re basically not functioning at this point as a film company anymore. We had a plan to try to build up distribution and we had a couple of films, I didn’t want the plank exactly, we had to distribute ourselves, and it wasn’t working. We didn’t want to make the jump to DVD, and I wasn’t committed to doing that myself, on that level. I’m just mostly a writer, so I’m focusing on that.

Matt: What’s happening with the Owned & Operated label, I went to the website -- ?

Joe: Wretch Like Me was our workhorse, and they threw in the towel after they had some band members changing, and their guitar player had brain cancer and survived, but there was weird stuff going on. They’re still around, with members from Tanger, but at the moment there’s nothing going on. We did a Someday I record, and they take between two and three years between records. I think there’s a Drag The River coming, and then an Armstrong spin-off that’s really good, more like country instrumental stuff, like Link Wray, that kind of stuff, I’ve only heard practice pad. Which I’d release it myself, I think they’re good enough, the drum sounds aren’t that good. But it has what we’re talking about – that fresh musicality, that you’re probably going to kill in the studio. It’s miserably difficult to do anything. Spot has his new album, and that’s also good, but then he’s spent three years tweaking it, so it’s really done!

Matt: So you’re reprinting and that’s going to be a lead off book for several others you’re releasing?

Joe: I’m going to put it out, to get back in business. I could get somebody else to put it out, but I have these other things to do, so I figured I’m doomed to self-publish, and leverage the one for the others. I actually want to publish some of my screenplays, and have a record, even if I were to sell them, have a record of what I wrote. No matter what happened to them later on.

Chris: Matt and I always wonder if you’re working on any other new criticism.

Joe: Well, I have a film book, I still have to write that. It’s about actors. There’s kind of an interesting review of the new Eastwood movie in and it says a few things about his acting style that a few people kind of forget, but he says it fairly well. There’s a film style of acting, and there’s a theatrical style of acting. The previous issue of I had an article on Bronson, who had just died, and I’d done all of this research, threw all of that together.

Chris: I like how, in your article in #1, you compared the (problems of the music business) to the development of the action adventure movie in Hollywood. I noticed how when they show bits of (James Cameron’s) on IFC right now, it looks like an art film compared with what they turn out these days.

Joe: Is it on IFC?

Chris: Yeah, the standards for action adventure movies used to be so much different.

Joe: Oh yeah, if you see it’s a tiny little movie, and of course it got completely blown out of proportion. It’s a parallel problem to what we’ve been talking about in music. Part of it is the internationalization of the audience. American culture is a superior, bastard culture, but when you’re making it with an eye towards the South Asian market, the Latin American, and European audiences, those Leone movies are cartoons. They’re not as good as American westerns. They’re not deep enough. They’re style experiments. They’re great ones, but they don’t resonate with American themes. Which are really elemental themes, superior themes. So you just get into that kind fo a difficulty. was an American movie, but is a movie for the world. Those Afghanis play it over and over again. You remember ?

Chris: Yeah.

Joe: There’s a scene where they’re all watching a spaghetti western in a movie theatre. It’s a Jamaican movie crowd, and they’re all rowdy, throwing things, they’re watching this kind of cartoon. Leoni’s are the best, though. The other ones have trick banjos with a machine gun in them, all kids of circus-y bullshit, which is a real Italian sensibility for that kind of thing. It just doesn’t work. It’s not an American thing anymore.

Chris: One thing I’ve noticed, as a fan of your work, that you deal with the spiritual and philosophical as an intrinsic part of the music, and I think that a lot of the times the failure of rock criticism has been that it doesn’t really understand practical cultural development like what you were saying about Catholic singing. It’s interesting how these sociological things don’t tend to get into modern rock criticism. The important backgrounds of people’s lives don’t exist there.

Joe: The reason I pulled away from politics as a prism to see the world, is because I wanted to be a good writer of screenplays. I wanted to write real human-like characters, and not just one, and then have cardboard cut outs for him to knock down. That’s a certain kind of action movie, it’s also a certain kind of sophisticated movie. You know, where characters are props for the hero, who’s got a very negative, nihilistic, corrosive sense of humor. And it’s very sophisticated, and might be very funny, but it’s not masterful art, because it’s not humane. So you know, the quote from my childhood that echoes through my head all the time, echoing from my mom on one hand and the nuns on the other, was, ‘You don’t have to like everybody, but you have to love them.’ And you have to love people to write characters, otherwise you’re just trapped in politics, and you’re bitter and resentful and you’re not in control of your ego. You can’t let someone be a full person if you’re writing a character – as in literature, I think the critics are writing novels. That’s why the novels suck.

Matt: Too much of an agenda?

Joe: I don’t know what the novelists are doing. It’s not like you can go make movies. Scorcese has problems all the time. NPR wouldn’t let him do things with ‘The Blues’ series, though that wasn’t fictional. They couldn’t let run any song for very long. This sort of structural thing they had to limit themselves to.

Chris: I know nothing about the film business, but I read recently, and I can’t believe that people actually still try Scorcese> to make movies, considering the limitations.

Joe: I know. It’s horrific. What’s worse to me is when you go see something that’s touted as important and progressive and artistic, like and it’s so uncinematic, and self-congratulatory. They don’t like narrative. They destroyed the narrative power. They showed a film I worked on at a festival here at the University, it was my script, it was first and second takes, a $14,000 16 mm film with mistakes, but it has its moments. But it’s really surprising how an imperfect script still has incredible narrative power, if the shape of the story is related to classical structure.

It’s a mistake to – you’re trying to destroy the art form if you depart from that. There’s a negative vibe from anybody like Luis Bunuel, or Warhol, they wanted to destroy certain things. There’s a place for that, but there’s a ‘stunt’ aspect to that’s almost like the Sex Pistols on EMI or Virgin, I was into that at the time. It had a potency (in the music business) then. There’s just too many people like that in the film business, and they’re just making it impossible for anybody to make a movie. Scorcese’s to blame for that, Coppola, anybody big in the 70s, coked out of their minds. Now it takes eight years for someone to make a movie. The old factory thing was obviously preferable. You didn’t labor over your work that much, but you did a lot of work. And so good stuff still got made.

Chris: We’re going to let you go. We really, really appreciate the conversation.

Joe: Yeah, it was fun. I enjoyed it.

2002-12-18T11:20:00.000-08:00

2002-01-17T13:34:00.000-08:00

Joe Carducci:
A conversation: 12.13.03.
By Matt Johnson and Chris Estey.

Matt: At first I'd like to talk you a little but about Rock & the Pop Narcotic. I really, really love that book.

Joe: Thanks.

Matt: It's inspired a lot of really great conversations between Chris and I.

Joe: You guys been in Seattle the whole time? Since the music scene took off?

Matt: Yeah.

Joe: Yeah, I was in Portland in 1977, ’78, and ’79, and went up to Seattle once. And there was nothing really going on up there at that late date.

Matt: Oh, yeah.

Joe: The Blackouts, the Lewd …

Matt: So, did you grow up in Chicago? Is that right?

Joe: Yeah – the suburbs, Naperville.

Matt: And then you moved out to Portland in the late 70s.

Joe: Well, I moved to Hollywood – I went to school for a year and a half in Denver, at the University of Denver. And then moved to Hollywood in the fall of ’76. And I was there for a year before I went to Portland.

Matt: Oh, I see.

Joe: I only went to Portland because it was hard to move around, hard to leave Hollywood and get closer to the coast. And I didn’t like permanent summer. And I knew a guy who did a fanzine called And he had moved from Fresno up to Portland. When I got there, he moved down to Torrance, and I didn’t see him again until I moved first from Portland to Berkeley, with the record distributor Systematic, and then went to SST. And then went back down to Los Angeles.

Chris: What was his name?

Joe: Archie Patterson – I think it’s Eurock.com. You know, it went – what he was interested in was a lot of great stuff in the early 70s, when all of the late 60s stuff was working its way through the German rock scene and the French rock scene and the Italian rock scene. Everything got to be kind of New Age-y, solo stuff, as far as I can tell, all through the 80s and 90s, whatever that – that radio show -- A lot of it was space music.
I reviewed the Sadistic Meka Band albums for I didn’t really write much for it, but when I was moving to the West Coast, the idea I knew someone who did a fanzine, I wanted to stay in touch with him, because I didn’t know anybody that interested in music, back where I was coming from.

Matt: How long did you work for SST? You worked there until the late 80s, right?Joe: No, I was there from fall, ’81, just after Henry came out with them, and then I left of March ’86.

Matt: Okay.

Joe: They were just prepping the Sonic Youth record.
Matt: I think I read somewhere that you weren’t super-excited about signing Sonic Youth?

Joe: We weren’t really – we didn’t have a formal system. I didn’t like their early records, I only heard ‘em (because) Pettibone was playing ‘em, and he said, ‘You know …’ and I said, ‘This is just racket.’ And he said, ‘Uh, these are the neutral records,’ of whatever, the early stuff …

Chris: ?

Joe: No, no, I like that. I liked ‘em good enough, from on. I think they’re best because I think there’s something contrived about their experimentalism.

Matt: Right.

Joe: I’d listened to all that German electronic stuff, so I didn’t mind it, but I was in a rock scene, and I could see that, since I’d just come back down to Los Angeles from the San Francisco area, you know, I was kind of in the mindset of, I quoted Will Shatter from Flipper, he was on and that was like a testy interview, because they weren’t doing what MR’n’R wanted punk rock bands to do, and Will told (Tim) Yohannon that he left Negative Trend and he wanted to experiment with the music, without being an art band. And an art band in those days was Tuxedomoon, and Aldo Ray, and Voice Farm, you know, basically, synthesizer stuff.

Chris: The Ralph Records style.

Joe: Yeah, all of those bands sort of gravitated to Ralph later on. I mean, I worked with Voice Farm at Systematic, and Negativland, but what he meant by it was that kind of fey stuff that you know, he was into the Stooges more than anything else. That’s when I came across Sonic Youth. To me, you know, there’s not much naturally occurring rock and roll in New York City, or the East Coast generally, until – I was just surprised recently by that compilation that Steve Blush put together, that is just called …

Matt: The guy who wrote

Joe: Right. And he’s been putting on live shows where he kind of reinvented a kind of non-hardcore, non-metal, hard rock. And there’s twenty-two bands doing one song apiece, and half of them are really good.

Matt: I’ll have to check that out.

Joe: And none of them, I’d ever heard of.

Matt: And this just came out?

Joe: Yeah. He sent it to me about a month ago, and it’s alright, it impresses me, because I don’t know if there was ever that many good New York bands in one day, in ’76.

Chris: What did you think of ?

Joe: The book?

Chris: Yeah.

Joe: You know, he had interviewed me a couple years earlier, and I forget how it happened, but he called me and said he had a writer’s block. And whatever he thought the book would be, he turned it into a basically verbal history. The task would have been too great to write it up.

Chris: I always think that’s the origin of those ‘oral histories’ – the writer gets kind of overwhelmed.

Joe: It’s difficult. I’ve spent four years basically on the first edition of and no one in their right mind does that. And I didn’t think I was going to take that long. One of those years, for eight or nine months, I’d bought a building in Chicago and worked on it for nine months, but I was thinking about the book, because I was in the middle of it. And so I had more time … no writer like this Jim DeRogatis, is cranking out books, any daily music writer, they don’t have time to do what I did.

Chris: Do you think that’s a deficiency on their part?

Joe: The PR concern of all of these publications is just overwhelming, they won’t let you write unless it’s hinged to a new product.

Matt: Oh, right. We were just talking about that.

Joe: I mean, I don’t know what your guys’ experiences are, you’ve written for who in the area?

Matt: (For me) mostly online stuff. Chris and Jason have written for a weekly called

Joe: That's weekly now?

Matt: Yeah. It's like now. Do you remember that (tabloid)?

Joe: I think was good. I remember when it was a bi-weekly, I guess.

Chris: And we're on the third issue of our rock magazine, … The hardest thing we’re dealing with now is publicists.

Joe: Well, there were no publicists before. The bands didn’t have managers. All of that (enforced) professionalism of the underground is, all it does, is make it impossible to communicate anything.

Chris: It does, it’s a bureaucracy that’s very depressing. I was talking to a band manager before I spoke with you (setting this up) yesterday, and it was how she regarded the music of this band itself.

Joe: Well, it’s parallel I guess to what happened to the majors in the 70s. But it’s sort of, also added to it are all these people I assumed came out of colleges, which had some sort of rock and roll course. And they interned at a hip magazine, or you know, a radio station or something. So to them they have a ‘media job,’ not an ‘arts job,’ and the media is completely different.
There was a girl in Portland who had really, probably the best band of the year – they never recorded properly, and they were stuck in Portland. They were called the Neo-Boys. Their original guitar player Jennifer, after she left, you know, she was really into the Velvet Underground, she was from the East Coast, she was sophisticated, the other girls were kind of – they were good enough. The girl who replaced her had a kind of rock and roll style to the guitar. And then they weren’t very good. That’s what the record is, unfortunately. The twelve inch, anyways. But (Jennifer) said one time in a local interview, trying to explain what the punk scene was to one of the free papers in Portland, she summed it up by saying, ‘We’re fans of the media.’

My partner was a hippie, this was the company that became Systematic, and he had a problem, a moral problem with that, and I took it – she had a Warhol sensibility about her, she didn’t care if it was a negative, she was beyond that. I took it as a very telling critique of why so few, such a low percentage of the music underground, really cares about music, or knows anything about it.
It’s just the nature of it, it’s a social game mostly, and then fans of the media now are a little bit different from someone who is interested in painting or music or film. The media, it’s sort of like this conveyer belt, it’s nothing to be a fan of, really, it’s what’s new in the culture, so it’s If you’re a news junkie, you watch the news, not just to learn the news, but to study these people in the media telling you things. I watch every night and I was just telling my roommate yesterday, when that show was on, ‘Eleanor characterized Mort what’s-his-name, the guy who owns the as (having) the redneck position, and Mort is a New York Jewish billionaire.’ And so they kept calling him a redneck for the rest of the show. If this was the first that someone saw, they wouldn’t understand anything. They wouldn’t find it funny, or surreal, or whatever. But that’s the media that brings these characters together, in a mix that becomes a kind of culture. But it’s not the news.

Matt: It’s really contrived. They’re kind of forcing it.

Joe: Well, yeah, but they’re less contrived than what there was before them, these public television shows that are scripted, (like) and stuff like that. Anyways, I’m just trying to make the point that she’s right: There’s fascination with the film business, and the television business, the radio business, that has very little to do with the product, that those media are delivering.

Matt: Right. If it’s okay, I’m going to move on to some of the formal-ish questions that I have here. This might be an over-simplification, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but, in is when you talk about class, that white suburbia was pretty much the breeding grounds for the rock aesthetic.

Joe: I think the way it really happened was, once the music left the south, where it was pretty much the product of black gospel, and white gospel, and black blues and white country, what you’d see next is Johnny and the Hurricanes from Cleveland, and Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Wailer from up where you guys are, and Dick Dale and His Deltones, his first record was also in ’59. So in the late 50s you get these sort of barely middle class, middle class enough to have instruments around the house, but they’re really a blue collar phenomena, and so they tended to do instrumental music. Because they were middle class enough to be bad at singing, they didn’t come from a singing culture in the church that they went to. I’m a Catholic, there’s very little good singing (that) would come out of the congregation I grew up in. You know, just different things than the South. So white guys could sing in the South, and they couldn’t in the North. I mean, Mark Lindsey was a good singer, there were a few good singers.
So then you get this instrumental-based music, but now with colleges, and all of these colleges’ effect on the music industry, it’s also affected the music itself. So you can sort of say that these little jumps in the timeline – Beatles and Dylan both inspired wealthier, better-educated kids, that the music might be worthy of their interests. So you get people higher than the middle class starting bands, or doing stuff with music, that they would have just rejected outright.
And then before you know it, you’re in the upper middle class and upper class, with different people – it’s easy to see, comparing them to the people at Sun Records, or all of those crazy rockabillies that get compiled, there just isn’t the direct, hard-wired, musical, psychic product. It’s all conceptual.

So I didn’t necessarily think that Sonic Youth was a good sign at the beginning, partly because they were not together, I mean, I think they got interested in the SST bands, and then they changed drummers and got to be a coherent musical project, instead of just a concept.
Ginn told me he had seen them, you see I didn’t see them until I had left SST, but Ginn thought they were making fun of rock music!
We had talked about it, and I think Henry and Pettibone thought they were great, and Greg had seen them and wasn’t really convinced. But I guess they were trying to impress them by throwing themselves around the stage. So I guess the music suffered that night.

Matt: You mention “the new redneck” in the book, how kids in small towns had their regional influences and kind of scattered record collections, and maybe a few zines, and tons of times to practice, but taking into account the homogenization of MTV across the board culturally, is there any hope for “the new redneck”?

Joe: Well, I think there’s less and less, partly because I use that term to describe the South Bay – LA bands, and there’s really just, I don’t know, half a dozen of them. And I thought you could kind of generalize and say that they weren’t concerned with how they looked, or whether there was anybody out there who would be interested, they got to be inspired by each other, and I think that’s almost geography down there in a way. It’s not like Orange County was, it’s a little different now, but back about twenty years ago, Orange County was all white, mostly Protestant suburbs. Everybody’s raising kids, so you got a kind of music that was very two-dimensional. Even when it was good – like the Adolescents – it’s still kind of reductive in a way, in a way that Black Flag is never reductive, it’s straight-forward, 4/4 rhythm. Whereas in the South Bay there’s just a mix of middle and lower class, more Hispanics and blacks and Asians, and the beach has kind of a surf culture continuum, that’s always kind of a bohemian thing that’s around, that’s not too pretentious.

Chris: And that’s where Black Flag came out of, right?

Joe: Yeah --- and so like the Minutemen, or the Descendents, or Black Flag, they would kind of work together and they would start drifting, because they spent so much time together doing their music, they weren’t big record collectors, I think Watt had a lot of records, mostly singles. But Greg never had any records, his brother Raymond (Pettibone) had records, but not Greg. Greg would go out to see live music every night, but in working their own music together, their personality quirks, and their frustrations, meant that they weren’t doing their band the way people were doing up in Hollywood, where they were trying to learn parts, and fit the parts together in a kind of visual theme, that would go with a concept of a band, you know, they would look and move in a certain way, and all of this crap. You know, the Descendents are probably the purest form of what I’m talking about; the Minutemen are a little unbalanced because Mike was so much the engine of the band. But both of them did make allowances for a member who had a serious job, and so they didn’t go touring till about ’83, and the Descendents even later, because they were local, local types, bitter, frustrated. They were megalomaniacs, they thought they should be big, but…

Chris: I remember the press on the Minutemen back in the day, like in Creem or something, like on and it seemed the reviews were really good, but I imagine there wasn’t a huge financial success going on at the same time.

Joe: Yeah, none of those bands really sold any records.

Chris: So those reviews didn’t really count for a whole lot.

Joe: The first records didn’t get reviewed – Creem was in its first incarnation at the very beginning, they folded, then started up again, they had some good writers, but their tone was wrong for punk rock, and again they weren’t going to parse all of these seven inch records coming out, and they were in Michigan, and kind of had a New York/East Coast bias. They weren’t really looking for anything to be coming out of California in that period. And the first records that came out of California, you know, like F-Word, or the Gears, or the Crowd, paid attention to those records. Rodney would play them on KROQ, and they might sell thousands of records in LA, but that stopped in ’81 or ’82 or ’83, as KROQ became a trend station that was succeeding, they formatted it, and they were no longer playing X or Black Flag, five songs off of their albums, in rotation day or night, that that was done before KROQ was a big station. So conversely a few years later, suddenly we don’t have five to twenty thousand sales in LA because of KROQ, instead you have that maybe nationwide, because LA has sort of mellowed out, and there is no radio reach anymore into the whole area.
But suddenly the rest of the country, at least on an underground level, is aware now. So the Black Flag records and the TSOL records are going into stores.

Chris: But they weren’t selling a huge amount of copies.

Joe: No, they’re just selling a few. I was at Systematic in 80 and 81, and so I remember Jim Nash at Wax Trax in Chicago was interested in having everything. But Steve at Wax Trax in Denver, he was going to pass on (Black Flag’s landmark EP) and I told him that it was really moving. And he just disapproved of it. And I sort of convinced him he had to have some in the store. Yeah, it was probably “White Minority” or I don’t know, (reports of) the violence (at shows), that he disapproved of.

Chris: That EP seemed so shocking for the rock critics and the zines at the time. It just seemed, ‘This thing’s kind of wrong.’ It was one of the first punk records that was released in the past couple of years that had any real sense of danger to it.

Joe: LA is a non-Politically Correct city, and what surprised people is that they didn’t know LA, they didn’t know it was a real city, because it didn’t look like a city. They thought it was just Hollywood, and Beverly Hills, and the beach. I mean, that’s what was going on. Nobody really thought much beyond Hollywood until NWA and the Rodney King riot. And then it was like, ‘Oh, I see, that’s just a slightly different urban environment, and meanwhile Pettibone is respected all over the place, and we need a handle on this new kind of city.

Chris: How did you make the jump from Systematic to Sold State Transmissions?

Joe: I was buying their records, and while I was still in Portland I mailed away for a sample of “Nervous Breakdown” when I saw the ad in And we moved the early morning – (Black Flag) played Portland with Dez, the night before I left. I didn’t know, I wish I would have seen that gig, but we were leaving at 5:30 in the morning, with a rented truck, carting everything down to Berkeley, to meet up with the Rough Trade people and try to build a distributor bigger. So when I got to Berkeley, that’s when the “Nervous Breakdown” single came re-routed through the post office to our new address. And they were out of them already, because in LA things were heating up, and so they were selling thousands of those singles! And weren’t even paying attention at that point to the rest of the country, it was just hard for them to figure out how to do this, how to keep it in print, they were doing their own distribution essentially, running it around to the important stores. And so then I was ordering records from them, and I had to wait until they next played Berkeley, with Flipper, and that must have been some time in the summer of ’80, it was very hot, in a little place. And it was exhausting, I get up in the morning very early, and Flipper was at their peak, so I felt like leaving (after they played), but I really had to see Black Flag. So I could say, ‘I know what they are now.’ And Dez was still in the singer, and it was really bizarre, because there was no stage, it was in the basement of the Barrington Hall, like a cheesy dorm, and you couldn’t really see much, and the amp sounds goes right into the people at the front, they’re not that powerful.
I found out in the Bay Area that a lot of the good bands weren’t really going to tour, Flipper didn’t tour for a while, Toiling Midgets I don’t think hardly toured, those were the bands I was into the most. Negativland was a concept, Voice Farm was a concept, there was no pressing plant, there was college radio, but there was nothing like Rodney or KROQ, you know, when I was down there they’d play “Sheena Is A Punk Rocker” (Ramones) and “Science Gone Too Far” by the Dictators and that was regular daytime airplay. It was rock, I don’t really remember, I just remember hearing those songs on KROQ.

I got the sense that everything interesting was happening in LA, where there was Rodney and and pressing plants all over the place. had come out of there. I had gone out there to write screenplays and really get into the film business, but that was a little too daunting. Whereas punk rock was laying there and you could just start doing stuff.

So I was thinking I might as well go back to LA or go back to Chicago. I was in Chicago when they played one of the last Dez shows, and they were traveling with Henry back to the West Coast, and that’s where I told Greg, ‘If you need somebody to run the office,’ which I knew they did, because I’d try to get records when they were on tour, there was nobody there, because Spot went with them and Mugger went with them. He was interested right away, he thought I owned Systematic, and I thought I owned Systematic, but my hippy partner – it ended up not being worth anything to him. It was just as well. I wanted to move the distributorship down to LA, but the Rough Trade people were pretentious, they wanted to be in the Bay Area, and relive the 60s, never mind that the 60s were better in LA anyway. Or they had an idea about Texas, because they were into Mayo Thompson and Geoff Travis, the tag team producers who did most of Rough Trade’s stuff, they were going to choose between those two places. And you know, San Francisco was full of people from Austin, because there was interesting people doing interesting stuff in Austin, but you couldn’t really do anything down there, there just wasn’t a culture like in LA, where all this stuff was happening. It had this entrée to the media, and to reach people. is literally like five or seven, seven and a half minutes, so they were going to put it on another seven inch, and be perfectly happy with it. But the guy they worked with at Jem Records said that if they put it on a twelve inch 45, they could sell thousands more, so they did that. And so because it was a twelve inch they advertised it in the Calendar section, and tag Licorice Pizza with it, the major chain, and the next ad they did they’d tag it with the Music Plus chain. Or the Wherehouse, or Tower, so that way it could get stocked. So they were already putting a rationalized distribution model together, while I was in the Bay Area. When I was in Portland I’d go to the Yellow Pages, looking for addresses of record stores around the country, because you figure there had to be some kind of collector’s store that had a punk shelf in each city. It was really hit or miss, there was no circuit for touring, no circuit for distribution.

Chris: Import sections were so important and so different back then. Damned seven inches with space rock records.

Joe: Those sections were first for German psychedelia.

Matt: I’d like to move on to another question about the book, if that’s all right.

Joe: Sure.

Matt: I’d liked what you said about the combustion of rock, its musical elements that set it apart from pop and rock and roll. “It’s about the band playing together, and the tension they create.” I was listening to stuff with that in mind recently, recently listening to the first Ramones record, and I started noticing how the tempos of the drums are always rushed on the down beat of one, at the beginning of measures, and it kind of creates that surge, you know? Another one of my favorites is Husker Du’s and how it’s, especially on their fast stuff, it sounds like it’s going to fall apart at any moment, and I think if both of those bands had an electronic metronome or something like that to keep it in check, if they were to record it closer to today’s context in trying to keep the precision in mind, I don’t think it would have been as good. What do you think?

Joe: Yeah, well, part of the problem with the metronome is just that you’re not listening to the music, you’re replicating it, and that’s the catch 22. You want to play together and sing to as perfect in synch that you can, but at a certain point it pays less dividends – accuracy, perfect accuracy. And you know, I myself can’t listen to Tony Levin King Crimson style of progressive rock, because the earlier style was full of unresolved tones and chords and rhythms.

Matt: And it created tension. It wasn’t too clean.

Joe: Yeah. It’s human. It’s human music. And you know, I just don’t listen to later King Crimson. And that middle period of Crimson with John Wetton and (Bill) Bruford is probably my favorite band!

Chris: Tony Levin is back with the band, a lot of people are very excited …

Joe: Who is?

Chris: Tony Levin. They’re working on something with him.

Joe: Yeah, well, like a Van Halen style, everything is bend-y, kind of like, the inference is thrown off, it’s so smooth, wiry, and you know Jeff Beck is the only guy in that style I can listen to. Because it’s – generally, I like physical music, or ethereal music, whatever you call it.

Matt: That creates like texture and stuff like that.

Joe: Yeah, and even that stuff, I like the German stuff before ’75, when it’s kind of human scale metronomic psychedelia, rather than when they got – I mean, I like Kraftwerk, but once they got these sophisticated synthesizers and started putting stuff together on machines or in the computer. I saw the guys from Neu! and Harmonia do a duo thing in LA not too long ago, and they just sat there with two laptops and it was boring. And what’s-his-name () had been the guitar player on Neu! and La Dusseldorf records, and that’s what I wanted to see, him playing guitar! But he didn’t really play guitar, he just used it as a simple noisemaker.

So at a certain point even Neil Young stopped playing guitar on his own records, because he was intimidated by Van Halen and all of these metal guys, and that was the wrong thing. Same thing with John Lennon, nobody wanted to see him play piano, you can’t do anything with a piano. But guitar has a real expressive range, no matter what your skill level, it’s just you can’t do without guitar very often, in a rock band.

Matt: Like with the way that recording is going now, I mean, obviously for decades we’ve been able to multi-track and splice tape and all this, and take some of those human elements out of recording. I’m just starting to notice more that, in your book, that people are taking such a pop approach to their music, that essentially just cuts the rock out of it altogether. We’ve taken different approaches to it and I’ve always really prefer, as much as we can, just documenting the moment, trying to record us playing together, rather than just isolating everything and just doing it over.

Joe: There are built-in problems that most bands suffer from, and one is that they tend to record their albums touring on that material, and so the records could be so much better if you could afford to tour that album before you release it. And it’s very difficult to contrive that live familiarity with a song and then record it. Again, marketing and PR demands sort of – that’s why Dylan is sort of autonomous, and he does all these sort of things people consider weird, playing stuff live that no one’s heard, or radically rearranging stuff, he has a lower tolerance for boredom I would guess. Everyone else is trying to replicate the album.

Chris: And that’s what gets really confusing. Did you see the latest Dylan movie?

Joe: No.

Chris: He has a lot of recorded reinventions of his stuff by other people, like a Spanish language version of “Like A Rolling Stone” and everything, and I thought it was very effective, these variations. It just seems that sometimes this is a case of an artist willing to and the audience just wants a certain kind of thing over and over again.

Joe: Well, he came up in a certain place in a certain direction, and no one else did, he had a personal mystique. I like it when Neil Youngplayed with Crazy Horse, or a configuration like that, more than when he plays solo. But there’s people who like his solo thing, and they don’t like the electric thing so much. But that’s – you can do things different ways – but when the guys who build a personal mystique, they end up doing shitty records, because they just use session guys. That is where Dylan and Young are kind of unique on that level, even Warren Zevon, those records are pretty boring musically; they’re just session guys. If they don’t know each other, it’s sort of reductive. You could do that in the ‘50s, when all the local guys were playing the same classic repitoire, so Chuck Berry could just put his guitar in a case and bus around the country and just play with three hired guys. It didn’t help his music, but it was do-able, and it’s not do-able anymore.

That’s what I mean about this New York comp – there’s nothing on it that’s hardcore, there’s one song that had a kind of metal guitar sound, and it’s actually a very good song. It’s sort of like there’s certain perimeters, Ramones and garage, with a couple other things, and that New York kind of attitude in a lot of the lyrics, that’s a thread through the record. That’s kind of interesting.

Chris: I notice your last paragraph in the first issue of was regarding the idea of creative destruction – and how one distinguishes oneself these days, with all of this marketing and all this product, is primarily to have character in your work. Do you think that’s a fair assessment?

Joe: For a band? Yeah. I was just guessing about the breakdown of the commercial model of the industry. It’s under real stress, so all of these multi-national entertainment conglomerates may get rid of their music division, or at least reduce it, because it’s a money loser. But until they stop selling CDs because they solved the delivery problem on the Internet, and they can almost only do that on a “cable” model like cable television. And then they will get out of the young band youth culture stuff, where novelty and crazy shit might work. They’ll get very conservative with their signings. I mean, they have already, but it’ll be moreso when there’s only two or three major labels left.