The most striking thing about Knife Man is the quality of the lyrics.  Sixteen songs, 16 variations on a single theme:  ”Mean people suck.”  Yet it never gets old or repetitive. Andrew Jackson Jihad are storytellers. The standout track to my ear is the song “Back Pack,” which sounds like nothing else the band has done. It is slow, almost mournful, and it is one of the most troubling “murder ballads” I have heard in a long time:

You were dead by the time that I had found you.
Your blood was spilled on the couch where we had first kissed.
So I carried you west to the sea so I could wash you.
Your body felt just like a back pack.
And I don’t know what they did to your face.
And I don’t like it.

No doubt some listeners will hear the song and question whether it is “punk” at all — but they miss the point. Punk rock is in a new and exciting phase. The ethos is intact, but there is striking diversity in the sounds that constitute the genre. The days when it seemed that punk had been reduced to some simple sonic formula are past — and I hope they are gone for good.

When you hear a record like Knife Man you are opened up to the possibilities, and reminded that great songs are an act of creation. You will also know you are in the presence of a great and important band making music at a very high level.

(Asian Man Records, PO Box 35585 Monte Sereno, CA 95030)

Click here to download the MP3, or click here to read Mark Huddle‘s lengthy interview with Kyle Morton.

At the end of September, Mike Watt joined together with friends Nels Cline, Yuka Honda, and Dougie Bowne to unveil a powerful new project called Floored By Four. Watt composed a bass line for each of the band members and then let the improvisatory chips fall where they may. The result is a record as challengingly diverse as the man himself. We recently had the opportunity to chat with Mike on subjects ranging from Iggy Pop to his own creative process.

Mike, this interview has been a long time coming. We started trying to put it together back in July and you were just getting ready to head back onto the road with The Stooges. How did that go?
It was great. The only bad thing was my knee blew up.

Oh yeah, I saw the pictures of that on your website. How did that happen?
It was the last note of the first song in a town near Marseilles, France, called D’Istres and I just came down at a bad angle. It had been 19 years since the last time I’d had trouble with it. It was at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago [and] I was playing with fIREHOSE. I was born with bad knees — I had surgeries when I was in my 20s. You get older and you forget that riding the bike strengthens them. So I just came down at a bad angle. But it sucks because it takes forever to heal.

So it just sort of went out on you.
Yeah, but I kept playing. (laughter)  I sat on the riser. Iggy didn’t know what was happening at first. He turned around and saw me and started gesturing, “Get up!” like I was taking a breather! I was like, I can’t move.

It has to be kind of daunting playing with Iggy — physically speaking — I mean, it has been about 10 years since I last saw him, but he was crazy on stage. Incredible energy. How has the abuse he’s taken not taken a toll on his body?
Well I was going to say, he’s got bad knees, too. (laughter)  We actually have the same syndrome called Osgood-Schlatter. When you’re young, different parts grow at different speeds. We’re kind of prone to weakness there. Ig has it in the arms…yeah, he’s taken some blows. He’s told me he has about half of the ligaments in each arm.

Yikes…
Doesn’t deter him, though. That’s the trip about it. It’s actually very inspiring — it totally motivates me. “Wow, Ig’s there doing that, I can too.” It is a little easier to sit and feel sorry for yourself, but you see a guy like that — he’s 63 years old. His work ethic is unreal. Reminds me a lot of D. Boon when he plays a gig. He never wants to cut anybody short. He wants to give everything he has. For me, it’s empowering and inspiring. Actually, its very contagious, too. I told his wife that it gets to a point where, literally, if some giant garbage disposal opened up on stage and he jumped in, I think I’d jump after him. I just get so caught up in it. He’s very enthusiastic about music and working the gig. (laughter)

You’re actually the “Young Turk” in that scene–
Finally the youngest guy. (laughter)  But yeah, these songs…I mean, I listened to [The Stooges] when I was growing up, as a teenager. Back then, remember, they weren’t the most popular band. But for us, when the early punk scene came — and especially in SoCal where everything is so spread out and balkanized — they were the one thing we all had in common. So it’s a trip. I do have to focus on them because I get lost. I’ve got to help make these songs live. I can’t just sit back and be diggin’ on them. It’s a trippy thing.

If my research is correct, before you hooked up with Iggy weren’t you jamming for fun with some guys doing Stooges covers?
Kind of for fun and kind of for therapy, too. I was struggling with a long period of illness. I couldn’t play bass for months. It was the first time I’d stopped playing since I was a kid, and I got a little spooked. I was having trouble getting back to form. So I started practicing The Stooges covers. There are not a lot of chord-changes but it is a lot about feel. Then I asked Perk and Peter [Stephen Perkins and Peter Distefano] here on the West Coast, and then J. and Murph [J. Mascis and Murph] on the East Coast to play. J. had just got done with that J. Mascis and the Fog, so he asked me to tour with him and do some Stooges songs so he wouldn’t have to sing every song every night. We came through Ann Arbor and he says, “You know Ronnie [Asheton].” I had gotten to record that Velvet Goldmine thing with Ron. He’d come see me play when I’d come through Detroit. He says, “Hey why don’t you come tour with us. I’ll do the first two-thirds and you come on for the final third and we’ll do all Stooges.” We went out on tour, then Thurston [Moore] got asked to curate an ATP [All Tomorrow’s Parties] at UCLA in SoCal. He said, “Why don’t you get Scotty. Scotty’s livin’ in his truck, he doesn’t even have a drum set.” We rented him a drum set. So me and J. are playing with both the Asheton brothers! I think that’s where Ig heard about it. This is like 2002. He asked them [the Ashetons] to be on the Skull-Ring album. Soon after that we played Coachella, in 2003, I think it was. I’ve been playing with him for almost seven and a half years now. I’ve been helping them now longer than I was a Minuteman!

That really is amazing…
(laughter) Yeah! It is something I could never have planned. It has to do with the sickness and not playing. J. Mascis obviously had something to do with it. There were other people who I would definitely have to credit as well. Things happened the way they did, and now I get to serve in the most interesting classroom in my life.

Well let me ask you this: I know you have spoken in the past about the kind of awe you felt when you first started playing with The Stooges. I’d bet that is still there in some sense when you go out every night and see Iggy right there next to you. But now that you’ve been at this…seven years?
Yeah man, seven and a half years, because Coachella was in March or April 2003.

So how has the experience changed?
Well, I have to tell you, this version of the band — I guess we started in November 2009, but most of it is from the spring and summer of 2010 since Ronnie [Asheton died], so it [includes] James Williamson — it’s different even though four-fifths, eighty percent is the same. It is still way different. In a way, it is kind of like a new band. Although we do a lot of old [material], James is much different than Ronnie. He didn’t play for a long time, but right when he started — when I started practicing with James — that was the signature sound. I mean, of course we’re all individuals — but especially if you’re in The Stooges’ band, you can’t be generic. It is kind of like a new band. So there is a new level of awe. (laughter)

Also, Ig brought on Steve MacKay to play the whole set. Way back, Steve used to come out on “1970” and onward. Now he starts with us. The band is a little different. But not Ig’s enthusiasm — he’s just as intense as always, but he’s working it with a little different material — like all of the Raw Power and some off of Kill City. That stuff is different than the stuff on Fun House and the first album, which were mind-blowing to me, too.

Kill City is almost obscure when compared to those earlier records. Wasn’t that like 1977?
Oh yeah, it was on Bomp! I think that is one of the last ones where James plays guitar. He stopped playing guitar after that. And yeah, I always thought it was a trippy record, but a good one. James Williamson told me that Ig, that he thought it was more demos and it actually helped Iggy get like The Idiot and New Values, Iggy and James worked together on New Values…

And Soldier, if I’m remembering correctly, although I’m not sure how much Williamson played on that album.
I think that is when James Williamson got scissored, or quit, or both. They had a falling out and didn’t talk for a long time. Ig, when he plays with people, he makes serious connections. He’s not just sleep-walking, or connecting the dots. It is so intense. Despite all the years he’s been doing this he’s very earnest about it. And James Williamson, there is an authenticity about him, because back then Raw Power was the next chapter in The Stooges rock bible. (laughter) It is an authentic thing. [Iggy is] looking for this kind of connection. I never served in any of the solo bands, but I know a little about The Stooges thing. It’s very genuine. He has such a respect for music, but it’s not just about playing the notes. In fact, sometimes he’s asked me to play the wrong notes! (laughter) It is so interesting.

Iggy wants the songs to come alive, and luckily they are written that way. They do not sound dated. I remember Fun House — it sounded like it had been recorded next week. (laughter) If I play a Grand Funk album it sounds like 1970. That is not the case with the early Stooges records. In a way, the punks took or appropriated the sound that The Stooges were making. It kept the sound going. It doesn’t sound old-fashioned, and in a weird way I think they were ahead of their time. It is very hard for me to imagine a punk scene even existing without The Stooges.

It is the foundational sound. I mean, there are other bands that contribute to that, but–
Oh sure, you know, like Captain Beefheart in a way–

Definitely, especially for you guys, the Minutemen — I hear a ton of Beefheart in what you were doing.
Big time! Big time! The Stooges and Beefheart. We actually thought they were already doing punk, but there was just no name for it.

Absolutely.
I remember when we first heard of punk — actually, it was just pictures at first, but then we heard it — and I remember thinking, Wow, some people have been [already] doing this, kind of. (laughter) You know, I told James Williamson this, but [on] songs like “I Got a Right,” that guitar sound and Scotty’s drum sound became very much a template for punk, and even hardcore.

When you think, for instance, where our magazine came from — the “Do It Yourself” ethic — and you think about the whole “We Jam Econo” ethos — punk rock was a liberating force. I graduated from high school in 1979.  [During] my freshman and sophomore years we were just obsessed with the new sounds. And yeah, we were the weird kids who weren’t listening to REO Speedwagon and Kansas and all those other bands that dominated the radio…
Yeah man, get this: REO Speedwagon’s lead singer came and saw the Minutemen. In the Valley.

Kevin Cronin? (laughter)
Oh man, you want a weird image? We get done playing and I look out and I see D. Boon, and he’s talking to some cat. D. Boon just got done with the gig and he’s all sweaty, but I notice he’s giving this guy his full attention. And the dude has this really big hair and designer jeans! And it’s the REO Speedwagon guy, and he’s relating to D. Boon. (laughter)  Crazy.

Wow, I’m not even sure what to say to that. (laughter)
Then we played their town. They came from Champaign, Illinois. Those bands — it was huge stuff. When the Minutemen were doing it we used to think all the time about the punk kids who were still in high school. Because, you know, the first punk scene was a lot of glam and glitter people, art people — they weren’t really young people. And then when hardcore came, we thought, Man, these guys have to take more shit than anyone! We had to deal with square johns at work and stupid shit like that, but to be trapped in the classroom with all that peer pressure — God, it had to be terrible!

No doubt. (laughter)
When I was writing “History Lesson – Part II,” I was writing it kind of for the hardcore kids. We were trying to tell them, “We’re like you, but in a way you guys got it worse.” It’s a little heavier. You’ve got to deal with these pricks pushing on you. And we had to tell them, don’t worry if we sound a little different, that’s part of the deal. But we could understand in a way why all the hardcore bands did sound the same. They had to bond together because the “picked on factor” must have been incredible.

It is interesting you bring that up. I mentioned to you before we started recording this that I met you way back in 1984 at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC.
The original 9:30 Club.

Yeah, exactly! I don’t even know where the hell it is now?
Well, you know the back door to Ford’s Theatre was right down there in that back alley.

That’s right, I remember. I don’t know if you remember that particular show, but it got totally out of hand. Largely, it was because the hardcore kids came out in force that night and they were spitting on each other, they were spitting on you guys — it was complete madness. I remember just saying “fuck it” and leaving early. It was mayhem! In the documentary, We Jam Econo, there’s a scene from that show. You guys are on stage and there’s a wall of kids spitting on you, and you’re playing relentlessly against this maelstrom. There is this look of defiance on your faces. Do you think punk rock–
Well, I gotta admit, man, when the Dead Kennedy’s came and played here I spit on Jello. I was all drunk. I had to look at that loogy on his shoulder the whole gig.

Oh no. (laughter)
Yeah man. Jello is a friend of mine. It wasn’t on purpose. We just got caught up in the moment. (laughter)

Sure man, I get that, but what I’m talking about is 500 people.
Oh yeah, you’re right. Our scene was a little different. And smaller.

In ’84 I was 23 or 24 years old, and I was teaching high school kids. The kids spitting were, like, my students and they were just crazy…I guess I just don’t like getting spit on, personally…
(laughter) I hear you…especially when you’re singing or playing an instrument and you can’t block your mouth.

That’s the mind-blowing thing to me! The commitment of the band at that moment. There was no let-up — just balls-to-the-wall punk rock. Do you think that the definition of punk rock — as you would define it — is still the same today as it was when you started out? Is there something happening today that you connect with, or have we simply moved beyond all that to something completely different?
Well, in those days, of course, we had D. Boon, so obviously it was different.

Oh yeah, of course. I meant–
You asked me what is different, and certainly that has been a huge difference in my life. But in the broader sense, I don’t think I’ve ever grown out of punk. Punk was never a style. It was more a state of mind, and I still try to keep that, and I try to challenge myself like with this third opera thing or the Floored by Four project. I’m always writing songs for people to see what will happen. I think I’m using the same kind of spirit that I learned from D. Boon at the very beginning.

I ask because, of course, you mention the operas, and I remember when I was young when I actually had to hide certain records from my friends because they’d either get pissed or even commit an act of violence because I was violating some code of theirs. (laughter) There was a real regimentation and homogenization. Hardcore had a lot to do with that. I was in DC in the early ’80s, and of course no one wants to talk about it now — they all want to talk about the positive politics that eventually came out of it — but the bottom line was it was violent as hell, it was racist as hell, and–
Yeah, but the Bad Brains came out there, too.

True, HR and crew were rising at that time, too, but you had a serious skinhead scene in the city.
Oh yeah, sure.

And a lot of gay-bashing and general deviant behavior. So I think the freedom that you guys represented bouncing from straight punk to free jazz riffs to funk, in a sense, was gobbled up by those who wanted a nice, flat template for it all.
Right. Humans get caught up in that stuff. (laughter)

Yeah, I guess it is kind of a “human nature” thing.
Yeah, because I’ve seen it happen in other scenes. Things get worked into hierarchies, and cliques, and orthodoxies. Even if the slogan is “anarchy,” it is a huge thing to live up to.

How many times have you seen that — if you’re going to be an anarchist you’d better dress this way, or you’d better listen to this music…
Exactly. (laughter) There is something called “irony.” It is the way we deal with — what did Orson Welles call it? — “inconvenient truths?”

That’s right.
But you know what? You have to own up to that and be aware of that or you’re totally in denial. But on the other hand, another part of human experience is mixed up and random and all thrown together — good and bad. Of course, you have to learn how to focus in on the positive.

But back to what you were saying, a lot of people got really fed up with all that and tried to clean it up. A lot of people dropped out of it. They thought it was corrupt. But it was a really homegrown scene, too. People could keep coming up with their own versions of it. I mean look how they sell the clothes in the mall — what is that place called, Hot Topic? Or who is it that has that opera on Broadway? Green Day? There is always stuff like that. But there are guys still making music in their bedrooms. I look at it that way. Those other things are just bizarre and I’m really not interested in them.

Why don’t we go ahead then and talk about your stuff. My tendency is to over-prepare for these interviews, and truth be told that is just an excuse to spend a few weeks listening to a lot of music I really want to listen to. (laughter)  But you, dude, sheesh! About three weeks ago I was thinking I can’t interview this person. I can’t focus it.
Yeah, and I’ve got about 12 or 13 things in the pipeline…

So obviously you’re a workaholic — I think I can safely draw that conclusion — at least, in the best possible way. Your level of production is unbelievable.
Well, the recording stuff was way out of balance. For about 10 years I was doing way more gigs than recording. So about three years ago I started on a bunch of stuff. That is why it is all coming out now. I decided, “Man, I have to do more recording!”  Gigs are important in the moment, but they go out into the air. And also, with the internet, I can collaborate with people. In the old days you had to actually be in the same room with them. Now I can trade files and stuff. I made this album with this young guy in Canada that I never even met! He just sent me these songs and I said, sure, I’ll play some bass. Triclops just sent me a bunch of songs. And I asked for the chords and the guy said, Well I don’t really know what the chords are. (laughter) But we sat down and figured out the notes. Yeah, but its sophisticated stuff. This guy is rocking this 12-string guitar with this wild drummer.

I’ve just come to this point — I’m 53 this December — that I really feel that everybody has something to teach me. So I want to put the bass in places that it will be challenging to me. I never had ideas about operas. I come from the tradition of short songs. I come from the tradition where all my music went through D. Boon. Things changed. I had to re-do things. That sickness came. Having to deal with losing D. Boon — that first opera came about because I didn’t think I could deal with the subject with just one song. And the same thing happened after the sickness.

Now with the “Hyphenated Man,” I’m learning how to do it live with Tom [Watson] and Raul [Morales of the Missingmen], and man, is it fucking hard! There are 30 little songs. It is a butt-load to remember. So it doesn’t get any easier — but I don’t want to do just copies of the same stuff. A lot of are different kinds of things, but also the politics of bass is trippy. Bass players are kind of like grout, if you know what I mean. We’re there to make other people look good. I have to push people up. I don’t try to be the “fake guitar” or anything like that, although I do a few little solos on this new thing. But they’re hard to remember. (laughter)

So this is an important educational process for you.
That’s what it is all about. You can see that in the Minutemen music where we didn’t stick to one kind of thing. D. Boon was always pushing us. The idea was we can play anything and still sound like Minutemen. I took that and moved it beyond where I was with D. Boon. I had to — he’s gone. But the ethic is the same. I use a lot of the stuff I learned in the early days.

Isn’t that interesting. Even though the work itself is so diverse, the aesthetic that informs it is consistent with what you started out with.
Yeah, but if you listen to the Minutemen it’s not like, “here’s the reggae song,” and “here’s the ska song.”  But we are trying to put all sorts of stuff, whatever gets in our head, and put it into a Minuteman song. I’m kind of taking that and moving it to collaborations with other people. Before, at the beginning, I didn’t even consider myself to be a musician. I got into music to be with my friend. A lot of the people I’m working with now I don’t even know that well. But that is the righteous thing about music: you can get get on a level with someone and you’re tight and you don’t even know them that well, but you can share the rhythms and notes.

It is a language all its own.
Yeah. It’s a great and positive thing.

Well then, let’s segue right into a discussion of Floored by Four. The album was released at the very end of September. What a great collaboration this is. How did it all come about?
I had a Stooges gig in New York City. Yuka Honda chowed with me before the gig and we were talking. I’d just done some stuff with Nels Cline; I’d brought him to Tokyo, in fact, for the first time. I’ve done a lot of stuff with him! That’s a guy where you don’t even have to practice — you show up with the songs and he’s ready to go. Talk about that first-take feeling — he’s the real deal.

So I’m telling her [Yuka] about this and she says, “I don’t know his music.” And I say, well, he knows yours. He knows everybody’s. (laughter) He had just gotten an apartment, so I knew he was going to be in town. And Dougie Bowne had shown me his studio a few months earlier in Manhattan, on Ludlow Street. I had played with Dougie. He was with Chris Whitley, and he’d invited me to record a song in the late ’90s.

So here’s the situation: I had brought Nels, the guitar-player I was recording with, to Tokyo, [and] he had heard the first opera, and he said, “Hey I like this guitarist.” I said, “You like him? You want to know him? You’re playing with him!” So I decided to get everyone together. I decided I’d write everybody a song.

The bass is great because it is a springboard for everybody to be themselves. Most people write on a guitar or piano. The bass is…you know where the starts and stops are, but it leaves a lot of freedom. It is kind of an interesting place to be as far as composing is concerned. You are just setting things up to happen. Then a weird coincidence happened: Matt Ward asked us — me and Nels — to open up for him in Central Park. We could have brought Bob Lee. In fact, I’ve got an album with Nels and Bob Lee coming.

Really?
Yeah, a Black Gang album. The same crew that did the last tours of the first opera. It’s about autumn. We just have to mix it. I asked Nels to play his most psychedelic guitar. He went for it man. He overdubbed electric sitar and electric 12-string. It’s a wild record. Not an opera but its built around the concept of autumn.

I see.
Anyway, we could have brought Bob Lee, but because of the earlier conversations I said, “Why don’t we try and make an album?” Three days before the gig in Central Park we went into Dougie’s studio, where I met Ivan Julian of the Voidoids.

Wow. Bonus.
No doubt. Yeah, [for] D. Boon, and me too — that Black Generation album was huge for us. And he was looking great. We go in the studio and it was sweaty as hell. I showed them the bass lines. Then I said, “What do you guys want to do? What do you want to play?” (laughter) That was it. Just like that. It wasn’t calculated so much. Except I’d told Yuka at that dinner, “I’ll get you together with Nels so you can get to know his music before you play.”  And guess what? November 13th they [were] married! (laughter)

Oh, you know, I did actually see something about that. That is totally crazy.
Now that wasn’t in my plan at all. (laughter)

That’s really great. The thing I really love about this record is that each song is named after one of the players, and they all reflect the personality of that person. The Nels tune that kicks off the record is just unbelievable. He sounds like he could have been playing with Miles [Davis] on Live Evil. It has that early ’70s, Miles electric funk band sound to it. I take it that once you lay down that bedrock bass line, they had the freedom to move all over it?
Yeah, yeah. For each person I thought of what I might give them as a starting point. For me, it was James Jamerson; for Dougie, it was some weird Middle Eastern thing.

Let me ask you about Dougie’s song. The other songs are — well, your song is four minutes — but the others are about 10 minutes long. Dougie’s song is nearly 20 minutes long. (laughter) How did that happen? Or is it just a rhythm thing? The rhythm section has to stick together.
Yeah, that might be true. (laughter)  But also because it’s Dougie! I wanted it to be part of him. I thought he should explore with this thing. The long song thing is really very strange for me. I’m not really from that. I was trying to test myself, too. I wrote these big, long fucking things. It was kind of a dare on myself — if I could keep the focus. I know I can throw almost anything at Nels and he’s up for it; he’s never shirked, he’s never complained, he’s never said “Why don’t you change it?” He goes for it. But I’d never played with Dougie or Yuka Honda. It was an unknown thing. I figured, if they have to deal with me for the first time, then I should challenge myself. I didn’t imagine that Dougie’s tune was going to be that long. (laughter) That’s just the way it worked out.

It fascinates me because on the one hand you’re laying down the rhythm for The Stooges, an elemental blast of rock fury. But then you can hook up with Nels, and Yuka, and Dougie and do something… I mean, it’s improvisatory, but because of those really solid bass lines, the sound is rooted.
You know what? Iggy has really helped me a lot with that. He’s really helped me become a better bass player.

It’s great. You can hear everybody almost talking to one another over this bass line that you’ve laid down for them. At the same time, it isn’t a restrictive thing. Every song sounds so different. You run from electro-jazz to Stax soul! The record isn’t even 40 minutes long and you manage to cover most of American popular music since 1965!
I wanted them to be distinct because the people involved have very distinct personas. They’re not generics at all. They deserved their own dealios. Music is music — and what people will make of it to communicate with each other. When more than one guy is playing — when its an ensemble — what makes it interesting to me is that you get a conversation going. Nels is hyper-sensitive to that. I didn’t know the other two, musically. Nels kind of makes it safe to go crazy. They picked up on his vibe and it was like, whoa! Again, the power of music. I was trying to make a good flannel shirt, you know? With all them threads. An interesting plaid. I didn’t want to see the end of the tunes. I only thought about the springboard part. Here it is. Now what is to be done?

Are there plans to get together with these folks again? Is there a tour in the works?
Well, actually I’m playing with two of them tonight.

Is that the Plastic-Ono Band? I heard about that — that is crazy, dude.
Yeah, it totally is. (laughter) It is a totally trippy thing but I’m excited to be doing it. Such a great thing. Experiences like this — I learn so much. I try to let all of the experiences I have musically get me a little further down the road.

Well, that would more than account for the diversity of the sounds you’re making these days. It is pretty remarkable.
Well, you know, D. Boon, man, I could throw anything at him — I never had to teach him. So, again, it comes kind of from my tradition. That’s the way I did it as a young guy trying to learn music.

I spent a fair amount of time over the past few weeks listening to those old records — the Minutemen records. But one of the most useful for me was that sort of greatest hits thing, Introducing the Minutemen.
Oh yeah, the anthology.

Exactly. I think I’ve given that thing as a gift about 20 times over the years. But the thing I like about it is that it’s chronological, so you can really hear the evolution of the band’s sound. D. Boon is amazing by the end of that record — just burning it up!
In that We Jam Econo documentary, Nels talks about that. In a lot of ways, he’s the same way. He soaks up whatever he can from other folks — but he can play like a motherfucker! (laughter) Its not like he expects everybody to do it his way. He’s picking up what’s going on. I try to do it that way. I’ve tried to do it that way since the very beginning. I’ve learned so much, but I want to keep learning.

Few bands better exemplify this latest phase in the punk movement than Titus Andronicus. Formed in 2005, these Jersey kids have embraced influences as divergent as Neutral Milk Hotel and Bruce Springsteen. And while they are happy to acknowledge those influences, their sound is rooted in classic, blazing punk rock. In March, Titus released their second album, The Monitor. A concept record about, of all things, the American Civil War, The Monitor has met with critical acclaim. That same month Rolling Stone named Titus Andronicus one of the seven best new bands of 2010. More importantly, The Monitor has proven to be one of those records that challenge our conceptions of what punk rock is all about. It is a big, bold, raging album that blurs boundaries between history, philosophy, and musical genres. In our age of diminished expectations, can we ask any more from our music but that it broaden our ever-narrowing horizons? I had the opportunity to speak with Titus’ front man Patrick Stickles and get a sense of the group’s artistic vision first-hand.

So since you’re coming off of the big Chicago show, tell me about the Pitchfork Festival experience.
Oh man, it was great. It was a lot of fun. The people who put on the festival really treat the entertainment very well. They gave us all sorts of amenities. It seemed like any needs we might have were handily met in a way that was really exceptional, especially for one of these big festivals.

Have you guys done a lot of those big festivals?
Not a lot. We’ve done a handful of them. We’ve done Pitchfork twice and both times it was a really positive experience. The kids were having fun and we got to see Pavement play, which is always a great treat.

Ah yes, what an amazing experience. I haven’t had a chance to see them since they’ve re-configured, but their shows were serious events back in the day.
They really are one of the best, which has been reaffirmed enormously by having been lucky enough to have seen them three times this summer. Back when I first started getting into them when I was a teenager they had just broken up, so I waited a long time to see Pavement. They definitely did not disappoint.

Did you get a chance to meet them?
I have. We played at a festival in Spain with them back in the spring and I got to meet Mark Ibold on that occasion, and I spent most of my time at that festival and at a festival in Denmark stalking Stephen Malkmus…(laughter)…and trying to get up the courage to talk to him, and I failed at it time and again. But on the last day of the Pitchfork Festival, the rapper Big Boi played right before Pavement did and we were watching him. I saw Stephen Malkmus and I figured it was now or never. I got up all my courage and went over and said hi and it was as awesome as I could have imagined. He actually was a really nice guy! (laughter)

Oh yeah…
It might be a little bit crass to say, but I always sort of assumed that he would be like a bit of smart-ass or something based on legend, and–

That’s kind of the way he comes off in interviews sometimes. A little harsh–
Maybe. But he was really nice. He was asking about what band I was in and where I lived and stuff. It was great, it was an enormous thrill. And now there’s a picture of me and him on Facebook. (laughter)  My girlfriend took it at a reasonable distance so he wouldn’t know what was going on. It wasn’t something we’d planned beforehand, but she saw me talking to him and jumped on the opportunity.

Let’s talk about The Monitor. I’ve read a ton about you guys in preparation for this interview and it seems like everyone is fixated on influences. Listening to the record I can certainly understand why, on some simplistic level, people are interested. But in the context of today’s punk rock, nothing sounds quite like this. It really is quite an achievement.

Thank you very much. I really appreciate that.

It is the structure of this thing that is so striking. I mean, it is a concept album after all, and it’s a concept album about one of the most devastating moments in American history! But there have been other records of recent vintage — for instance, I’m thinking of Neutral Milk Hotel’s Aeroplane Over the Sea – that have the same sort of epic sweep and scope as The Monitor.
For sure, that record was a huge influence on me. It was a great record, and in general it influenced how I conceived of the record. Specifically, I started to think that it could be a singular, cohesive, artistic statement. That record in particular really informed a lot of those values that I tried to emulate.

I don’t want to oversimplify anything, so please, by all means, dissent if I overstep here. But I was really struck by the sound. I know you had a lot more resources to put into this record, more than you had for the Airing of Grievances.
Oh, substantially more.

The production is really rich and full. Your first record much more clearly straddled the lo-fi line. You were trying to do a lot with little. But the complexity of the new album compared to the first is extraordinary. As you started to think your way through the process — you talk about the record as a cohesive unit — how did you get there? How did you start to think about it that way.
Well I guess it is sort of like a house of mirrors maybe, you know? It didn’t really start out as this huge thing. The concept very much revealed itself through the process, you know what I mean?

Sure.
I didn’t really start out with a specific set of goals beyond some very vague ones. I was thinking about the cohesive whole. I was also thinking about the other values that we strive for in our group. Rocking out and emotional resonance and all those things. In moving along, new elements presented themselves and I followed them wherever they happened to lead me. I’m still figuring it all out even now. (laughter) It is an ongoing thing like any piece of art. You create the piece and then there is the inevitable retrospective interpretation of the art. Meanings change even to me.

The meaning can’t be locked in stone. Music isn’t a museum piece.
Well, for sure. And everything changes. I’m not the same person I was when I made it. A good piece of art is one that can mean different but equally important things to a person in many stages of their life, like so many of my favorite records have continued to have meaning. As I’ve gotten older and my perception of the world has changed — the records that can hold up to that test really are the good ones. Will our record prove to be that? I can’t say, but hopefully.

There is something really interesting happening underneath that label “punk rock” right now. When I was a kid and the first wave of punk hit, you had bands like the Ramones who were doing this very elemental thing — two-minute songs and three chords — but you also had, say, the Talking Heads who were experimenting with all sorts of rhythms and synth sounds. Both bands could coexist easily under the label of “punk rock.”
Yeah man, that’s true. That is because punk in its purist form doesn’t sound like any one thing at all. I think about that all the time when I listen to older punk music, especially on old punk compilations where you can really hear a lot of different sounds. It is tough to imagine a scene or genre-umbrella that could be as inclusive of so many different things as it was back then, before punk and indie kind of went their separate ways. The original freedom got replaced by all these genres and sub-genres. Punk bands and indie rock bands were born out of that sense of freedom.

Absolutely. You’re reminding me of this experience I had way back in 1984. I was living in DC. I went out one night to the 9:30 Club to see the Minutemen. Back then, DC hardcore was starting to blow up and the hardcore kids were out in force. That whole scene has been romanticized to hell and back, but it was really violent. It was a pretty weird scene. That night, the Minutemen — you know, they would go from straight hardcore to free jazz. They knew no boundaries. They played anything and everything. And that night those kids just freaked out. They didn’t fit the parameters of what these hardcore kids demanded. And they start spitting on the band. I mean, dozens of these kids hocking up at the stage. There’s footage of this in the documentary We Jam Econo. Of course, the Minutemen just keep playing. Balls to the wall. They aren’t stopping for nothing, and maybe what’s most extraordinary, they didn’t even show any real malice towards the audience. There’s just this resignation, like, “What the hell.” To me, the whole scene was a metaphor for the compartmentalization of the music. It just got so stale after awhile.

But now something is really happening again. What you guys are doing is representative of that. There’s this whole folk-turn that a number of bands are taking that is just so interesting. There are bands like Fucked Up, and Times New Viking, and Pissed Jeans, and those bands that are doing really interesting things. I mean, who knew you could put an 11-minute punk song on an album and it could be compelling? (laughter) But you guys do it. Is there something out there in the culture right now that you think might be contributing to the ferment? It seems like punk is more interesting now than it has been in 20 years!
There definitely could be. And Fucked Up, like you say, are definitely leading the charge as far as recognizing that we need not surrender the immediacy and the visceral nature of punk music for musical sophistication and innovation. You know, maybe the Minutemen are a great example. That is a band I often think about. They were down with Black Flag and the Descendents and all these groups, and is tough to imagine now the leading hardcore bands playing with a band that was as out there as the Minutemen — much less being on the same label. But you know, everything moves in cycles. Maybe it is just time for it to come around. Perhaps it’s a reaction to how kind of neutered that so much of indie rock music has become. Not to point any fingers or anything, but of late so much of the so-called “state-of-the-art” indie rock has been more divorced from punk than at any point previous in the history of these two strands of music.

I think that’s really true. Bands seem to get on a trajectory. They work hard and then things start to break and bands move up the ladder of labels based on the sorts of resources employed to make the records. You guys, for instance, move up to XL — you have access to the sorts of resources that you needed to make a really superior production sound that you get. But then there are other bands for whom it seems they feel the next step is to make a record that has a real crossover sensibility. More often than not, it seems like it breaks the band rather than makes the band. Quite frankly, that path seems almost to be a commonplace. Maybe you have to know where you’re going from the very beginning or else you run the risk of falling into the trap.

You guys are critics’ darlings. That means there’s a ton of buzz and with it a ton of pressure. Now you’ve been named one of Rolling Stone’s “Best New Bands.”  So what does it feel like now? How do you negotiate these treacherous shoals?
Well, you know like you were saying about looking for more success in the indie rock world — I mean, some of these bands have a much higher ceiling than they would have had 10 years ago. Arcade Fire is selling out Madison Square Garden! You have to keep these things in perspective. If you get to into chasing these carrots that you perceive dangling in front of you, that’s the best way of losing sight of actually doing what you want to do. You really don’t want to be seen as pandering. Which isn’t to say it wasn’t cool to be in Rolling Stone. It definitely was. But part of not tailoring my decision to not try and be in more issues of Rolling Stone is to not put too much weight on that stuff. (laughter)  I have to remind myself that real validation has to come from within. That said, it is convenient for me because, like, my parents think its really cool for sure, so…

Well, frankly, it is really cool. (laughter)
I mean, it is cool, don’t get me wrong, but when my parents see us in Rolling Stone they don’t think its so crazy for us to be running around the country in a van. So it is definitely nice in that sense. But I have to treat it like any other stimulus. It could lead me to the “palace of wisdom” or some sort of horrible dungeon. (laughter)

Way back in the day, when I first started doing this stuff for Verbicide, I interviewed both Justin Sane of Anti-Flag and Tom Gabel of Against Me! just as both bands were signing to major labels.
Wow, and one of those guys has remained ethical and the other less-so. And not the one I would have guessed. (laughter)

Those interviews are really telling. Justin Sane was very straightforward, very matter-of-fact about why the band was taking the cash. I appreciated that. I have struggled enough in my life to hate all that rhetoric about “selling out.” I’m not even sure what that means. I can’t fault anybody who says a little extra money isn’t such a bad thing. But there was such rage coming up from the grassroots directed at Gabel and Against Me! Gabel was far more ambivalent about the process. He was less forthcoming and really hesitant about describing how the band’s decision was made. I was a little surprised. It is not like signing to Sire Records is the Seventh Sign.
Well the Ramones did it. (laughter) What is different about that, though, is it was one for Against Me! to have started out being completely opposite of — defining themselves in opposition to all that corporate, big record company stuff. They made such a big stink about putting their values out there and saying they would never compromise those values. To the point where they even had that movie about how they were never going to change. That stuff hurts. You know, when I was younger and just starting to properly understand what punk was all about, that was an enormously important group for me. They taught me a lot about punk’s communal power. For them to turn their back on a lot of that stuff did not put a smile on my face. But at the same time, I couldn’t begrudge them. I feel like I have an understanding of what their lives probably were like. I’ve gone through and go through now a lot of the same things.

I guess my point was that one band just owned it: “Yes, we know it flies in the face of a lot of the things we sing about, but we feel like we can do it and still be politically engaged.” To me, that defused a lot of the rancor directed at their decision. But Against Me! had the whole video mocking the process of signing to a major, but then within a year they turned around and did the deed. I thought maybe the interview would be an opportunity to just lay it out. But instead he got mad. (laughter)
That’s just it. That’s his business. Whatever they want to do, it is not up to me to hold them up to some ideological standard. But now they have that song “I Was a Teenage Anarchist.” To me they’re saying, “Oh, forget about all that stuff that we said before because we were just young and stupid just like you are now.” Now they seem to be telling us reject all that anarcho-punk stuff and get into something else — presumably capitalism it would appear. So that is like trying to put the genie back in the bottle. And that bothers me. Punk ethics are important. They can do whatever they want, but don’t try to belittle something that might be important to somebody else if it’s not in keeping with your priorities now. I think that is despicable.

I’m certainly not defending them. I have no dog in this fight. I could care less what they do. But I think a lot of Against Me!’s more strident reactions to all this is born of a certain amount of pain. The abuse they take is just incredible. I saw them a few years ago at a big outdoor festival and most people were just enjoying the music, but there was a crew right in front of the stage just heaping scorn and abuse on those guys. Really hammering Tom Gabel. It may be immature to lash out in song, but at the same time there is a lot of pain and bitter frustration fueling those songs as well.
I can definitely see that. But I also definitely identify with those people [in front of the stage] just because I can remember how important what they were talking about was to me.

Absolutely. I understand. Let’s get back to the context of this line of questioning. With so many good things happening right now, once you get all the touring behind you, what does the immediate future for Titus Andronicus look like? Do you guys have any idea what the next project will look like?
That is very uncertain. We kind of like to do things one day at a time. We try to be detail-oriented. We like to try to adhere to our own code-of-conduct. It is tough to say what is going to come up this fall or winter. I don’t know, I can’t really comment. The future is extremely uncertain, in indie rock as in life. (laughter)

That’s right. Can we talk for a second about some of your ideas? You mention the band’s code-of-conduct. I spent a lot of time preparing for this by reading older interviews. Of course one of things I’ve read is about your interest in existentialism. Does the entire band subscribe to this philosophy?
Well, we are all individuals. There is one other member of the group who identifies herself as an existentialist. We’ve got another dude who identifies as a “utilitarian,” and the other two are maybe just a little more pragmatic and day-to-day in their philosophies. We all have our own ideas. We’ve spent a fair amount of time discussing what it takes to be a good person. We make a point of respecting each other’s ideas and opinions and sharing and trying to learn from each other. There are definitely things we agree on and those points of agreement shape how we run and take care of our business.

One of the things that really interests me is how these ideas influence the art that you are creating. Central to existentialism is the idea that life is absurd and meaningless, but rather than being an end in itself, that meaninglessness is liberating. We can make of the world what we choose.
That is exactly it! And that is pretty much punk, isn’t it?

Yes, exactly.
Our world is basically fucked, but once we can accept that we can have far greater freedom than we could if we were to insist that world is an orderly and fair place.

Many of the existentialists were politically engaged. They were on the front lines of the political battles of their times. What fascinates me about what you’re doing in The Monitor is that you take this apocalyptic event, the Civil War, and it becomes a vehicle for an introspective turn. This massive conflagration becomes a metaphor and vehicle for investigating and thinking about our personal relationships. So instead of turning outward into the world, it turns inward. In exploring this event, what influenced you to make it personal?
It is because I can only speak with any level of authority about my own experience. To try and talk about something that happened 150 years ago wouldn’t really work. But there are ideas and themes that are present that I thought were applicable to my own take on life. That’s the thing about the study of history. The past can help us understand the present. We have to use the past to make sense of things sometimes. I’m still trying to cultivate these ideas.

How do we craft for ourselves a “useable past?” I don’t think anyone would have thought your second record right out of the box would be a concept album about the Civil War! Maybe that is what I was poking around for when I was asking you about this moment in punk rock. Suddenly, it seems like everything is possible again.
Sure. When it comes to art, anything is possible. We hope that our record sends that message. You can make of your art, your music, your life anything you want.

Verbicide Free Download: Click here to download “A More Perfect Union” by Titus Andronicus

That famous Saturday Night Live performance in October of ’78 burned Devo into the national consciousness. But, in fact, some configuration of the band had been together since 1973 when Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh, Gerald and Bob Casale, and others — art students at Kent State University — formed the group. Both Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerry Casale had been politically active in the anti-Vietnam War movement, and Casale had been present on the fateful day in May 1970 when Ohio National Guardsmen murdered four Kent students. Devo was formed as part political statement, part cultural critique, and part performance art project. The band rapidly metamorphosed into a rock and roll juggernaut.

In a lot of ways, Devo was the perfect vehicle for lashing out at the failed promise of the 1960s. As the country wrestled with the hangover from a failed war, economic stagnation, and political scandal, Devo’s on-going critique of the nation’s mindless consumption and rampant stupidity struck a chord. This was a band with an ideology that was made for an America that seemed to many to be on the downslide. But then the band had no idea that some 30 years later incompetence would be a national character-trait, that a major national political party could run candidates that essentially renounce science, and that a brain-damaged turnip like Paris Hilton could achieve international celebrity.

Q: Are we not men? A: We are prophets!

Devo reached the peak of their popularity with the release of the 1980 classic Freedom of Choice. The single “Whip It” went to number fourteen on the pop charts. But over the next decade, despite some modest success, the band entered a prolonged period of warring with their record company and internal conflicts. In 1990 the band called it quits. Mark Mothersbaugh started his own music production company, Mutato Muzika. He has provided the music for numerous children’s television shows, and most famously he has contributed the soundtracks to a number of Wes Anderson films, most notably Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. For the past few years, Devo fans were tantalized by rumors of an impending album.

Then in June, after a 20-year hiatus, Devo released the critically-acclaimed Something for Everybody. The long hibernation seems to have re-energized the band’s energy domes. The album is the band’s finest since Freedom of Choice. For most of the summer, Devo has been an almost ubiquitous presence on late-night television. By just about any measure it has been an impressive victory lap.

So what does it all mean? How can we assess Devo’s place in our pop cultural history? I had the pleasure of chatting with Mark Mothersbaugh over the phone. This is his State of Disunion Message.

I wasn’t really going to start out with this, but I got the press for the new record and there is a description of Devo’s use of focus-groups to choose songs and the aesthetics of the new uniforms and album cover. As I was preparing for this interview, I began to notice a pretty violent reaction in the music press and in the blogosphere — real frustration — about whether this was true; if you were actually doing this, or if this was yet another Devo put-on. What made me laugh — because it really doesn’t matter to me whether it was true or not — was the fact that you had to tell them one way or another. (laughter)

How has the world changed in the last 20 years? Is irony completely dead? Are people going to understand what Devo is all about today?
Well actually, you know, irony didn’t even exist back when we got together the first time around. (laughter) We were constantly defensive and we were constantly fighting. Almost every interview we ever did turned pugilistic almost immediately. And we became very insular because of it. I feel like that was the reason we were so careful; that’s why it was so important that we were not misquoted. We had to be really careful during interviews when we were trying to explain who and what we were because people would twist things just because they didn’t get it.

Actually, people really took offense to what we were talking about at one time. We had to contend with people being upset that we were suggesting that things were falling apart. At one time, I guess, people wanted to believe in evolution.

The “myth of progress” I guess.
Right. But now I think you just have to look at the oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico 24/7 and it is hard to deny that things might just not be perfect. They might be falling apart.

The funny thing is that I remember the first wave of what they called “punk rock” and how diverse it was, and all of the sounds that were coming out then that were so interesting and so challenging. I was 17, I think, when the first Devo album came out. And Duty Now For the Future was our soundtrack album my senior year of high school. We loved it. And part of the reason was we thought it was so funny. You’re at that age when you’re Holden Caulfield and everything around you is artificial and everyone is a phony. Devo captured that while — at the same time — challenging us with these new technologies.

Now, 30 years later, that technology is ubiquitous. It’s everywhere — or,  in some cases, already defunct. We laugh it off, but you guys were frighteningly prophetic in a lot of what you were doing and talking about. You captured that youthful zeitgeist in the ’70s. But here we are now three decades later, and after a 20-year hiatus. What was different about making this record? What ultimately do you have left to say given the trajectory of our society in that long period? Did you want to say, “See we told you so?”
I don’t even think it is “See, we told you so” as much as it is just [that] we feel like what we were talking about then are the same issues that drive us crazy today. [Those issues], I think, are the key issues that kids — if they’re given a chance to think about it — it’s the stuff that bothers them about the world they’re entering. You’re leaving your moms and dads and you’re going off on your own, and you’re looking around and you’re saying, “Wait a minute, people are assholes!” (laughter)

Humans have this incredible potential and they aren’t living up to it. We don’t have to go for the lowest common denominator, but we do it all the time. Kids are smart. They have brains. They don’t believe things that politicians tell them, and for good reason. They question authority because they’ve been told, “Okay, now you’re free to use your own brains, you can make your own decisions, but these are the only decisions you get to make.” They’re finding out that there is a ceiling to freedom and democracy in a capitalistic society. It is disillusioning when you realize there are these limitations — we talked a lot about that when we were younger. We kept thinking, You know what? People have brains. They can use their intelligence. But it wasn’t happening. We saw decisions being made in our name for things we just didn’t want to be a part of. And we were always kind of anti-stupidity. (laughter)

Now we have access to all these new information technologies. It seems like we have access to more information than we have ever had before. And yet, at the same time, critical-thinking skills we need to be able to filter through this bombardment don’t seem to be there. You’re right — freedom of choice is out there for everyone to partake of, but I wonder if we’re capable?
We’re reaping a lot of the benefits of scaling back on the educational system in this country. I’m not a Democrat or a Republican, a Communist or a liberal or an NRA guy, for sure — but I am pro-education. I’ll vote for any candidate that is pro-education almost every single time. That is my primary concern with government. I feel that is the most important issue.

What made Devo come back now is that we started observing a shocking window of opportunity in the world. I’m in the music industry, so I’ve had to listen to people moaning, lazy record executives who are saying, “Oh no, people aren’t buying our records anymore.” And I want to say, you know what, that is not how people historically have disseminated and listened to music in the history of mankind. It has only been a really short window since Thomas Edison invented the wax disc and then the record companies could start selling platters and then tapes and then digital discs. It has only been a short time. Record companies could control the process of what kids could listen to, which influenced what artists were able or allowed to create.

I think the internet — for all the bad warts and [the] creepy dark side of it — I think the internet is the most amazing thing that has happened. As far as being an artist, I think now is the greatest time to be an artist. If I was a 20-year-old kid and I was a musician — I’m jealous of those people who get to be that young — I think it’s so great to be 20 and have access to the internet and use that as a tool in creating and disseminating art and ideas. When I was a kid, I’d go to a record store and you’d go down the aisle and at the back of the store there’d be this bin, a little section called “Other Stuff.” After I’d walked past Annette Funicello and Bobby Vinton and Lawrence Welk and the accepted rock and roll people — whoever they were, whatever bubble gum music, or whatever the record companies decided you were allowed to listen to — then you’d find this one little area that had, like, Captain Beefheart, or Wild Man Fisher, or Silver Apples, and electronic music. You’d find this stuff where people were dealing with ideas. Now, kids can wake up in the morning and say I want to hear some “cowboy Chinese computer death-metal.” You put those four terms into a search engine, something is going to come up. Some band is playing that kind of music. That is so amazing to me. That is so exciting. It is so inclusive.

There was a time when the thought of being a recording artist seemed so exotic. I was in Akron, Ohio, and I would look at album covers and I would think, How does your band get a record deal? And how do you get to go to a place like a recording studio? It seemed so exotic when I was a kid. And now kids who are 16 have cell phones that have more powerful recording systems inside their telephone than the Beatles had to do their first album. The technology is amazing. And who needs a record company? You start a website and people from every corner of the planet now have access to your music.

In a sense, you must feel some validation, given that Devo as it was originally conceived was about not just music, but art and ideology and performance and film. You guys were among the first to experiment with music video. We used to go down to our local record store three times a week because they had a copy of The Truth About Devolution, and they would run it over and over again on this little television. But now, of course, the use of images is everywhere. You were way out in front of that. I guess that’s why I keep harping on this line of questioning; how things have changed for the band over the last 20 years. Of course, I know that all of you have been involved in a ton of other projects, but by the same token the place that Devo has in the culture is very different — so the experience of it must be very different.
Yeah, it is. It is kind of interesting. I never anticipated what it would be like to be here now. To be a part of the vernacular of music, even on the fringe. I mean, we were a fringe art-band. We weren’t Bon Jovi or Aerosmith or something. We were like off on the sidelines with a smaller audience.  At one time in the late ’80s or early ’90s, I remember thinking, Well, I guess we’ll be some oddity in the future. In a way, maybe we were just that. But the internet has allowed people to be able to go back and find out what we were about and see who we played with and who was around. It kept the memory and music of the band alive. We’re not off on the fringe anymore. Back then, we were talking about things that hadn’t happened. We were ahead of our time. And that doesn’t always feel that good, I’ve got to be honest with you. It’s not that great being ahead of your time. It is more interesting to be in your time and to see the things you’re talking about being realized.

When we were first getting together we were art students and we were heavily influenced by people like Andy Warhol. I liked the idea that he was a filmmaker, and he was a painter, and he was a printmaker, and a photographer, and fashion designer, and he worked with the band the Velvet Underground, and he threw the best parties in Manhattan. I thought, I like that. To him, technology isn’t a barrier. Technology is what makes his art fluid and plastic — it was something that made him able to slip between mediums and use whichever medium was appropriate to whatever concept or idea he was trying to put forth. It just seemed like such a major thing.

So you take something like MTV — MTV, to me, was very disappointing. It was like a baby-step towards YouTube. It was a way for record companies to stay alive, like, 10 years longer, and for dinosaurs like Loverboy or Rod Stewart just to keep selling you the same crap for another 10 or 15 years. It didn’t turn out to be the major change in our culture that I hoped it would be. But that said, we’ve gotten to this place where technology has provided so many great tools for the artist that it has changed the way forever that people will think about music and the visual arts. It has changed the way that artists will create, present, and disseminate their art, and the way you’ll go find it. I think it is such a really good time now. Like I said, if I could be 20 right now I’d love that.

So what you’re saying is that being ahead of the curve was really about…
It was about being able to conceptualize things but not see them realized.

I see, yes, I understand.
Now, you know, on the one hand you see things falling apart. There are these people and they’re obsessed with power regardless of what it means, and money no matter what they have to do to get it. So you have people like this guy who resides in New Jersey who goes by — who proudly goes by the nickname of the “Black Hole of Wall Street,” the kind of guy who made billions of dollars and put us in a place of jeopardy for the country where we had to bail out Wall Street. And then he made billions more off of the bailout! That’s the kind of thinking that makes me crazy.

On the other hand, technology has allowed people who might be in Saskatchewan or some far-off corner of Manchuria or in the Amazon — their ideas, concepts, and creativity are available to the rest of the planet. I mean, the internet is still way out of control. Maybe that is part of what makes it great. It is kind of like when rock and roll became controllable, that’s when it became boring. Once it could literally be contained in a museum — once they could put it in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — that’s when it [became] like a sex museum. In a sex museum you can display everything about sex except the most important part of the sex — that’s the part when it actually happens. That’s the same with rock and roll. You can put Michael Jackson’s glove and jacket in a museum, but that’s missing everything that was important about Michael Jackson.

I think the internet is where it’s at. It is like punk music. There was something really great about punk music that’s lost on kids today. They look at punk music and bands like, say, the Sex Pistols — they went from being something really important and scary and amazing, but now punk rock is a fashion statement. It is like something you buy in a store. It is a uniform that you wear. That is the same thing that has happened to democracy. That’s what Devo learned when we protested the war in Vietnam in the late ’60s. Jerry [Casale], Bob [Mothersbaugh], and I were there at Kent State in 1970 and people got killed. People got killed for saying, “Hey, I don’t want you to napalm Vietnam or Cambodia with my tax dollars and saying I approve of that because I don’t have anything against these people.” That was enough to get people killed in our country.

Devo saw this, and we said, well if it is not rebellion — and we watched the punks and said, if it is not nihilism and anarchy — then how do we make change? The hippies turned into hip capitalists. The punks turned into just another fashion or style. That was a way for capitalism to marginalize what was really important about Sid Vicious or punk rock in general. So we said, how do you change things in a capitalistic democracy? Who was being successful? And we started taking notes from Madison Avenue. Who does it best? Those people. They’re mostly selling shit and they’re talking you into mindless consumerism and conspicuous consumption and selling you crap you don’t need. But their techniques were the best. They used subversion. They entice people.

That’s where our focus groups came from. That’s where the idea of having people weigh in on songs and give us their opinion on everything down to our color scheme, that’s where the idea came from. We could have taken the whole idea further as far as I was concerned. I talked to Jerry about this. I said what if one of the focus groups listens to one of our songs and decides the singing is terrible? What if they said instead of you guys singing it, Adam Lambert should sing it? Or they said you should find Johnny Rotten — who, by the way, at one point wanted to join Devo.

(laughter) Yeah I read that in Simon Reynolds’s book.
Yeah, true story. But the point is if people had said that Johnny Rotten or Adam or that Susan Boyle woman from England would have done better vocals, I was prepared to call them and say, “Hey Susan, would you be interested in singing a Devo song? Just trying it out and seeing what happens?” (laughter) At this point in time, I think people can make a sensible decision and comments on Devo and what de-evolution is because they’ve actually seen it in their time. They’ve watched new technologies show up and give us cell phones and video games, but the quality of life has disintegrated. There’s something that is not being talked about; something is not being addressed.

This kind of corporate concept — or the application of this kind of concept to the crafting of a Devo album — works on so many levels. I read an interview with Gerry recently, and he was talking about Devo as a sort of art project, and he noted that there is a business of art that can be explored and expressed in the same way. The focus groups were a nod in that direction.

By the same token, so much of the power of Devo’s early recordings was your ongoing critique of the consumer society. So what better way to critique contemporary society — especially since everything from hemorrhoid cream to the President of the United States is essentially marketed in the same way — through focus groups and Madison Avenue advertising techniques and the application of new technologies to selling something? I’m surprised that no one got around to doing it before. (laughter)
Yeah, I think it didn’t happen before because people were just lazy. The music industry is in the shape it is now because of its own doing. They were lazy. It was such a great gig — you just show up and randomly pick 20 new bands to promote this year and you made a lot of money off of it. End of story. It was an easy gig. Unfortunately for them, by being lazy and not paying attention to what was happening, the world passed them by.

The whole reason we got lured back to doing one more record for an entity that 20 or 30 years ago drove me crazy and was very frustrating — I swore I’d never sign with a record company again — was that we walked into the same building in Burbank, Warner Brothers, and we had people telling us, “We know that we’re a dinosaur, we know we’re dying, and in five years there will be no more record companies, at least as they exist now. We’re asking you guys to help us reinvent what it means to be a record company.” And I don’t know…it was just such a different take as compared to being called in and pontificated to like we were in the ’70s. I kind of got interested in it. I figured we might not be able to help them, but it would be interesting to see where we could take this.

Then let me ask you this. As I said, I was a big Devo fan when I was growing up. And I have kids, so I’m well-acquainted with your soundtrack work. I mean, I really loved it when you started working with Paul Reubens on Pee-wee’s Playhouse. I thought, Perfect, how cool.
Oh, hey, I just found out that Paul has a new film deal…

Well it is about time. That guy is brilliant.
Yeah, no shit. You know, he did a stage-show out here in LA and it was frightening how good it was. He recreated the TV show set and he just looked so good. He still looks like Pee-wee. He’s smarter now. He has a lot of different things he can talk about.

It’s great to hear that. He was such an important part of my pop cultural existence at a certain moment in my life. But the reason I started to ask this question is that I am well-acquainted with this other musical life that you’ve had. I know that you and Jerry and Bob are a part of Mutato Musika.
Yeah, actually, Bob was, Bob Casale. Jerry was not so much a part. But Bob Casale was my main producer/engineer for over 20 years.

There is something that I think is very dystopian about Devo and the whole idea about de-evolution and the demise of human society. And you have that ideology and critique being expressed in the music. But also, you have a sound that is wonderfully upbeat and danceable. Then you have this other music that you’ve made — the Wes Anderson soundtracks. That stuff is gorgeous. Beautiful, hopeful…do you think there is something, anything hopeful about Devo’s vision? Or is it simply the vehicle for this dark cultural critique of the world we’re living in?
I think the one thing that people fail to get [about Devo] — and now we’re back [at] our discussion of irony. That was one of the things I was surprised that people didn’t get. We were basically optimists. We were saying that there were problems, but that people were looking in the wrong places to solve those problems. We never thought it would have turned into what it is now. No one would have believed that things could collapse like they are now.

The humor of it always sort of balanced the bleak message of de-evolution. I think your subsequent work has provided an interesting counterpoint to the Devo stuff. Then I’d also have to mention that I have a three-year-old at home. When I come home at five o’clock, she’s sitting in front of the TV watching you! The Yo Gabba Gabba artiste — and now she’s trying to figure out how to draw a flying fish, for God’s sakes.
(laughter) Yeah.

I suspect that some people might have a problem reconciling those things. But I think I see a thread that might bind them together after all these years.
I think so. For us, the record is a chance to connect up again with pop culture in a way that focuses on Devo. We’ll see what happens. There are so many records that come out, and you only want to look at old guys so much. (laughter) But what we have to talk about is pretty valid.

To put it bluntly, the Dead Boys freaked people out.  Critics were quick to hang many of punk rock’s excesses on the band.  They were characterized as dangerous nihilists who were more likely to burn your favorite club to the ground than put on a good rock show.  Despite making one of the greatest records of punk’s first-wave, 1977’s Young Loud and Snotty, the band was largely ignored by what passed for the “mainstream music media.”  Except for an ill-fated reunion in 1987, the Dead Boys were no-longer by 1979.

Cheetah Chrome continued to be a dominant presence on the New York scene playing with everyone from his own band, Cheetah Chrome and the Casualties, to Nico.  During the ‘90s, he relocated to Nashville and recorded a great live album, Alive in Detroit, for DUI Records.  Then in 2002, Smog Veil Records released The Day the Earth Met the Rocket From The Tombs, the classic compilation of ur-punk classics. Suddenly, there was new interest in the early Cleveland scene, and a growing recognition that this was the primordial ooze out of which the great punk movement sprang.  In 2003 Chrome hooked up with David Thomas, Craig Bell, Steve Mehlman, and Television’s Richard Lloyd for an RFTT’s reunion.  In 2004 Smog Veil released Rocket Redux, live recordings of RFTT’s back catalog.

In the years since, that collaboration has continued.  This spring, Rocket From The Tombs released a seven-inch single that paves the way for an album of new material.  And if that wasn’t enough, Cheetah has also hooked up with his old pal Sylvain Sylvain of the New York Dolls and the rhythm section of Joan Jett’s Blackhearts to form the punk super-group Batusis.  Their self-titled EP, the sonic equivalent of a swinging haymaker, is one of the most welcome surprises of the first half of 2010.

Just how can we account for this explosion of creativity?  I had a long conversation with Cheetah Chrome to find out the answer to that question, and in the process learned a lot about the early Cleveland scene, the great Peter Laughner, the frustrations of being a Dead Boy, the rebirth of Rocket From The Tombs, and the joy of doing that Batusi!

Let’s start with Cleveland.  I’ve always thought that Cleveland has been given short-shrift in the histories of punk rock.  What do you think the place of Cleveland is in the history of the first-wave?
Cleveland has such a rock and roll history that has everything to do with national acts and nothing to do with people from Cleveland.  Everybody from out of town came to Cleveland and got a great reception.  They got treated like kings.  They got huge fame and accolades.  But if you were from Cleveland, it was like, “Oh they can’t be any good.  I know them!”  (laughter)  You know what I mean?  They just figured if you were from there you had to suck.

It sounds like a part of the city’s famous inferiority complex.
So many people — I mean, everybody played there: the Stones, the Beatles on their first tour, Paul Revere and the Raiders.  You had the Big Five Show, you had great radio.  You had CKLW out of Detroit, and you had two of the first and best FM stations in the country in the country with WNCR and WMMS.  Two of the biggest progressive radio stations.  But as far as local music was concerned, you had cover bands.  You did have the odd hit — you know, The Choir’s “It’s Cold Outside,” and the Raspberries had a couple of hits and so did the Outsiders.  But they never really got the recognition in Cleveland they should have got.  Everywhere else they went they did fine, but when they came home they were treated like just another local band.  Which I get to this day!  I mean, when I go back to Cleveland and they do an interview with me they want to know about my high school days.  They don’t care about what I’m doing musically.  They want to hear about when I worked at May Company.  [May Company was a regional department store based in northeast Ohio.]  “So you’re playing music, you’ve got a new band together.  Does that mean you won’t be going back to May Company?”  (laughter)

It’s all very local.  So it was a very strange and very frustrating place to grow up — at least musically.  Your options were very limited, and I think that’s what all this came out of.  I actually think, the funny thing is, the same thing was going on in places like London, where you had great bands like the London SS who never got heard of.  They were rehearsing in woodsheds around the same time Rocket From The Tombs was together.  So the punk thing was very much a product of the early ‘70s; there were connections to glam and Hawkwind, that kind of scene.  That’s really where the Rockets came from, the Dead Boys came from.  All those influences came pouring into you in Cleveland, and they had to come out some way.

It never ceases to amaze me the incredible ferment that comes welling up from that place at that time.  I mean, the bands that come out of there — just the bands that spin off of Rocket From The Tombs — I think that’s a story that needs to be told, and it needs to be repeated. Too often in the histories of punk rock there’ll be short mention of all of that, but then it’s rendered little more than a footnote.
Oh yeah.  But when you think about that time, think about how boring that book would be.  (laughter)  We’re talking about Peter [Laughner], me, and David [Thomas] in Rocket; you had the Mirrors, there was the Electric Eels, and there was Tin Huey in Akron — and all of us were sitting around frustrated in our own respective rehearsal spaces, playing once or twice a year and bitching to each other how we weren’t getting anyplace.  It wasn’t a happy scene!  (laughter)  It was pretty productive, I guess, if you like watching bands rehearse.  But it wasn’t at all exciting.  It was very mundane.

Right.  I guess there are only so many times you can play Johnny Dromette’s record store. (laughter)
Yeah, which I didn’t even get to do!  That was after my time.  After the Dead Boys went to New York, I didn’t really go back to Cleveland that much — and when I did, all of a sudden, there were 60 bands just like mine.  Which was great.  All of a sudden, there was a thriving music scene.  That didn’t exist when I was there.  The punk scene — when we put together the Dead Boys and got out of Cleveland and Pere Ubu got together and got out of Cleveland — it broke wide open.  I came back and all these kids I’d hated in high school who hated me in high school, a bunch of greasers and nerds, all of a sudden they’re in the front row wearing orange sunglasses and motorcycle jackets.  (laughter) Guys from the football team with safety pins in their lips — it was absurd!  But it grew from there.  There were a lot of great bands and a lot of cool people.

Let’s talk about the Dead Boys for a minute.  I want to read this sentence to you — I did this random Google search of the band, and the first hit that came up was the allmusic site. The very first sentence of the band’s biography reads, “The Dead Boys were one of the first punk bands to escalate the level of violence, nihilism, and pure ugliness of punk rock to new extreme levels.”  (laughter) Is that what you guys were doing?
Well, you know, apparently some people seemed to think so.  And no, that wasn’t it at all.  We were just being ourselves.  Yeah, we were nasty little pieces of work.  The Dead Boys, to my eyes, never got a fair shake in the press.  They loved playing up all the sensationalistic aspects of it [that] got played up and the music got — the fact that we could blow anyone else in town off the stage had nothing to do with it.  Now the record Young, Loud and Snotty has stood up better than just about any record from the early punk days.

There is no doubt about it.
It has to be in the top 10, if not the top five.

I agree.
And I’m talking about the sound, I’m talking about the songs, I’m talking about the playing — everything.  Nobody mentions that.  They’ll mention Stiv [Bators] blowing his nose on bologna and eating it.  They’ll mention getting a blow-job on stage.  God, it was funny!  You know?  People just need to get woken up sometimes!

Well, I’ve always been quick to note that just the title of the record, Young, Loud and Snotty, would to my mind denote a sense of humor, not violent nihilism.  For god sakes.  When I got my hands on that record, it was 1978 or ‘79.  I think I was a senior in high school.  We played it over and over again.  We loved it.  But for us it was hilarious; it wasn’t something to be afraid of.
Oh yeah, I guess they took our line, “I wanna beat up the next hippie I see,” personally.  They didn’t know that I had hair down to my ass six months before the record came out.  (laughter)

That’s one of the more interesting things about this music.  When punk rock roared into existence, it wasn’t a fashion statement–
No!

There were so many different sounds.  So many different kinds of bands that fit comfortably under the umbrella of “punk.”  There was certainly no uniform.  Then, all of a sudden, it was about black leather and Mohawks.  It was about looking a certain way.  And then hardcore blew up and everyone started to sound a certain way.
That was when I really started to regret the whole “anybody can play” ethic. (laughter)  I just wanted to make a whole record that said, “Look everybody can’t play.  You need to fucking learn how to play.  You need to fucking learn how to sing.  Playing fast doesn’t mean playing good.”  It was just miserable to me.

So the Dead Boys phenomenon was pretty short-lived.  There were the two studio albums…
Well, one studio album that was worth a shit.

Right.  And then there was the live album — which was re-mastered, or you re-recorded vocals?
Yeah, Stiv did.

You would think that based on what was a pretty limited output the Dead Boys would be little more than a footnote.  Instead, they are a touchstone of that early first-wave.  What accounts for the band’s longevity?
The thing is, when we were out there we were a very tight working unit.  We were good.  You got your money’s worth when you came to see the Dead Boys.  We kicked your ass.  We pinned your ears back.  So word of mouth about the shows has continued.  Some of those shows are legendary.  That has a lot to do with it.  The power of the live shows, and re-releasing a lot of the live stuff.  You know, in 1997 you could not find the Dead Boys on the internet.  But re-releasing a couple of those albums really helped.  It kept the band out there.  Then there were these fan sites — there was this great Stiv Bators site.  And it all just built from there.  But you are right, I thought we would be just a footnote for sure.  The Rockets even more so.

That’s the other thing.  I was in Athens, Georgia when the Rocket From The Tombs compilation came out and I was in this little [record] collector’s place.  I was looking for some Ubu stuff, and the proprietor saw what I was looking at, and he came running around the counter with the Rockets CD in his hand. He was like, “Look at this!”  It was like it was a sacred relic or something. (laughter)
Really?  Wow.

That gives me a perfect segue into talking about the Rockets.  One of the great things about that compilation is that a wider audience got to hear Peter Laughner’s great guitar playing.
Oh yeah, exactly.  He was great; I’m glad that record got out there.  Peter was a great guitarist,  [who] taught me a lot.  I owe him a lot, because he showed me how to work with a band and how to develop a song.  He really taught me how to work on a song.  A lot of his guitar-playing was brilliant — he could fly by the seat of his pants for hours.

I’ve been hearing these rumblings and rumors for a long time that there was a Peter Laughner compilation in the works.
Oh yeah, there is.  I think it’s Smog Veil.

Awesome.  I wish they’re hurry up. (laughter)  I’ve been hearing about that thing for two years or so.
Yeah, it is definitely coming out.  It’s supposed to have everything on it.

Peter Laughner, to my mind, is almost a mythological character. For so long the only thing that was out there in the wider world was that thing that Lester Bangs wrote about him.  As heartfelt as that remembrance was, it never once tries to explain what an extraordinary talent the guy was as a musician, as songwriter, as a guitarist.
Well, you know, Lester didn’t know Peter that long.  They became drinking buddies later.  Lester got to know him later when he was having more problems.  Peter always partied — we all always partied.  Peter was a very engaging guy and had a great personality; he was very funny and very sincere.  He could make you laugh; he could bore the hell out of you. (laughter) He could do it all.  He was a great guy to be around.  I really loved him.  He had a lot of heart.

All that came across in Lester’s article was that he was a zombie/druggie.  Peter loved rock and roll and he loved writing; he loved people like Lester Bangs who is actually — you know, a great writer, but a really boring guy.  (laughter) I was really let down when I met him.  He wasn’t the guy who wrote the articles — that part of it kind of got mythologized.

Peter was your normal rock and roller.  People don’t realize that he died when he was [24]!  He was a kid!  To me, he was like an adult, because he was like 21 when we formed the band and I was like 19.  That was a big deal back then.  Now, looking back on it, I’m like, my God, how did he shoot his liver when he was only 23?  You really have to try to do that.

When the Rockets got back together, how did you decide on — I hate to use the word “replacement” — but how did you decide on Richard Lloyd?
We tried to do a rehearsal in Cleveland when we first found out we were going to try and do this gig out in LA.  It was just the four of us — Steve playing drums and me, Craig, and David.  We just ran through songs, just walked through the arrangements.  It was terrible, no fun at all.  It became glaringly obvious what we needed, and we started worrying about what we were going to do — how are we going to replace Peter?  We couldn’t think of anybody — we all just scratched our heads.

All of sudden, I was looking through emails or something, and Richard’s name just popped out at me.  I was like, of course!  That’s the guy!  He knew Peter, he saw the original Rocket From the Tombs.  Peter was going to replace him in Television at one point.  There was such a connection there.  Part of the connection was that Peter loved the way Richard played.  I asked him, you know, I told him that “RFTT” was going to be doing a reunion, and did he want to be the other guitarist?  He said, “Yeah, I’m in.”  Five minutes later I get another email saying, “What’s ‘RFTT?’”  (laughter) He just figured if I wanted him to do it, he wanted to do it.

Wow. (laughter)
I had to explain it to him, and he was like, “Oh, that band?  Yeah, you guys were great!  I want to play in that band!”  It worked out perfectly.  Once that connection was made we all worked for a couple days here in Nashville, went out and did the show, and it turned out brilliantly.  And we’ve stayed together this long.

Well, Rocket Redux was just great.  And the new seven-inch is so intriguing.  Are you guys planning a new studio album?
Oh yeah, we’ve got the studio time booked now for August, and we’re going to finish like 12 songs that we wrote at the same time as those two.  We had a big brainstorming session back in 2006 and we wrote like 15 songs.  Those two were the first two we got done.  We waited a couple years before we even recorded those two.  So we’re going into the studio and August and we’re hoping for a February release.

That’s fantastic.  I can’t wait to hear that.
Yeah, and I get to do that and then turn right around and do the Batusis record.  I’m going to be spending most of August and September in the recording studio.

Hey, you’ve done a few of these interviews!  (laughter) You’re jumping ahead of my question outline.  I was going to ask about the Batusis next.  I’m actually getting ready to snag my tickets for your Atlanta show at The Earl at the end of July.  I’m really looking forward to it.  Obviously, the New York Dolls would have been an enormous influence on you guys back in the day.  Have you known Syl Sylvain long?
Probably since 1975?

And you saw him and the Dolls?
Yeah, sort of the second-string Dolls at that point.  It was after Johnny Thunders quit.

So you guys have known each other for a long time.  When did you first start talking about making music together?
Oh, probably about 20 years ago?  (laughter) We’ve talked about doing a project together every so often.  We get together and jam in New York every once in awhile.  We’ve got a friend, John Spacely who played harp and sang blues.  We used to do a little jam with him and a couple of friends — that was mostly Yardbirds covers and Animals covers, all English blues stuff.  We never played any gigs and never really planned to.  I think we might have done one show in like ’87, which was like in a living room.  It wasn’t very big at all.  It was more just to get together for fun and to hang than it was for to really be a band.

Syl ended up moving to Atlanta and I ended up moving to Nashville.  We’re about four hours apart, but you drift apart when you’re not in the same town.  In New York, we’d see each other every few weeks at least.  But then it was if I played Atlanta he’d come out and if he played Nashville I’d come out.  Then finally he got back with the Dolls, and I got back with the Rockets, and it had been awhile since we’d seen each other.  We always sent each other our best through friends.  I saw him in New York at Hilly’s [Kristal] memorial service.  And next thing you know, Frank [Mauceri of Smog Veil Records] sends me an email one day saying, “You’re friends with Sylvain right?”  I said yeah, and he said, what do you think about doing a project with him?  I said “Hell yeah!”  He said he was friends with Syl’s manager and he’s saying you two ought to get together and do something when the Dolls are off the road and the Rockets are off the road.  I said, yeah I’d definitely be open to that.  So we kind of put it together.

Me and Syl got talking about who to get to play.  At that point, I’d been using the Blackhearts as my backup band when I played up in New York and up on the East Coast.  Thommy Price is an old friend of mine and Enzo [Penizzotto] is great.  We love playing together; it’s a lot of fun.  Joan doesn’t care what they do as long as they’re ready to get out on the road with her. I couldn’t think of a better rhythm section in the world to do it — they’re fucking great.  So we all came down here to Nashville to do it, [and] that’s when I got a hold of Ken Kumer.  I’d worked with him before and I liked the way he did things.  And we got together and it totally flowed.

The EP is just great.  It’s what you’d expect.  I do have to ask you a question, though, just for my own knowledge: what is the connection with Davie Allan?  Davie Allan is one of my heroes, and you really don’t get much more obscure.  I just love his playing.  Whose idea was it to do “Blues Theme?”
Syl brought that in.  I was very familiar with Davie Allan because the Bomp! stuff was coming out, and Alive Records was putting out a bunch of that stuff. Syl brought in “Blues Theme” and I was like, oh yeah, let’s do that.  I wasn’t sure Thommy and Enzo even knew who he was, but they just got the groove going for us, you know.

I love those old biker flicks that Roger Corman used to crank out–
Oh yeah.

But as I started to get more into music I started to notice that crazy fuzzed-out surf guitar and I started tracking down who he was.  And I’m pretty sure that Davie Allan is still going strong.
Yeah!  He still plays.

That’s crazy.
To tell you the truth, I would have picked “Wild Angels Theme.”  It’s one of my favorites.  But “Blues Theme” is a good one and it sure worked.  That was one where Syl just started calling out the changes and I just followed him, and you can’t go wrong doing that now can you?  (laughter)

No doubt, it just sounds fantastic.  And it fits. Great choice.  Now, before we wrap this up, I’ve got to ask you about your forthcoming memoirs.  Do you have an official publication date?
Yeah I believe it’s September 15th.  That’s the official date.  Coming soon to a bookstore near you.  I’ve never done this before –  I’m not sure how this works.

What prompted you at this point to sit down and put it all down on paper?
I have a friend who works at the publishing company — this girl I knew from Boston.  She had done a book for this company, and she said, “It’s about time you wrote a book.”  She got me to do a sample chapter and gave it to her publisher.  I had thought about it a few times, but I had no idea how to go about it.  Her book was very nice, very cool.  The publishing company she works for [Voyageur Press] has a big history of doing music books.  I thought about getting a ghost writer, but I didn’t want someone in my face for six months.  So I said I’ll just do it myself.  It just started growing — at page 350 I realized I’d gone way beyond my word limit.  (laughter)  But she told me just write what you have to write, and we’ll figure it out.

Well, I bet you there are a few stories in there, too.  (laughter)
Oh yeah, there’s a few stories in there.

I can’t wait to get my hands on that bad boy.  Fantastic.
Cool man.

Okay, Cheetah, that is it for me.  Thanks so much chatting, I really enjoyed it. You take good care of yourself, and good luck with your many projects.
Thank you Mark, I appreciate it.  And I’ll see you in Atlanta.

But then it always happens.  I encounter an album that reminds me of exactly why I expend so much of my psychic energy listening and writing about this stuff.  That is what happened when I first heard Typhoon’s Hunger and Thirst.  I wasn’t 90 seconds into the record before I realized I was sitting on the edge of my seat.  The adjective that springs immediately to mind is “riveting.”

If you haven’t heard of Typhoon or its intrepid leader Kyle Morton, don’t feel bad.  The band has come percolating up out of the Portland, Oregon house-party scene, so unless you hail from those particular environs, the group is a mystery.  I suppose it is that mystery that contributes to my fascination with a record that, to my mind, has more “wow” moments than just about any I’ve heard this year.  In hopes of filling in some of the blanks and answering some of the lingering questions about this elusive bunch, I had the pleasure of speaking with Kyle Morton recently and trying to understand Typhoon’s creative process.

My usual MO for these interviews is to get online and dig up as much information as I can about the bands we’re going to feature.
Oh, cool…

(laughter)Well, usually it is, except that it seems you guys have assiduously cultivated your anonymity.  All the blog sites that mention you guys, well…you’re almost like mythological beasts.
(laughter) Yeah.

So I’ll start by asking — is that a conscious thing?  You guys have been around for about five years — have you wanted to fly under the radar so you can do what you do, or has it just worked out that way?
It’s kind of both.  I can’t claim that it’s all been intentional.  A lot of it is [a result of] the outlets we’ve played in — we really love house shows, and our fans are really at the grass-roots, do-it-yourself level.  And I guess it fit well with our music.  We weren’t doing anything that we thought could even really be commercial.  So it kind of worked out that way.  I guess this recent interest in us is kind of crazy, but at the same time we weren’t going out of our way not to get noticed either.  At this point it’s just falling into our laps.  I think we’re ready.

I think it’s kind of cool to have that air of mystery around you.  But damn, just finding out who plays in the band is hard.  (laughter) When you have that many members, the logistics must be killer.
Definitely.  You have your work cut out for you.  And so do I.  It is a really big group, and it always has been.  I think the smallest we’ve ever been is like seven or eight.

Well, then, walk me through the history of how this got started and how you all got together.
Sure.  The way it sort of happened was — well, we sort of have this long history.  I met Toby Tanabe and Casey O’Brien when we were 13 in middle school.  We had a band when we were in high school where we met Tyler Ferrin.  He’s still in the band.  Playing around our hometown, Salem, Oregon, is where we met a lot of the people who would end up joining Typhoon.  We met a lot of friends who were in bands and what happened, really, is that we just absorbed each other.  Typhoon started out to be this recording project that I wanted to do and bring in all these musical friends I’ve met in Salem.  That was the year after I graduated high school, so around 2004 or 2005.

Is that where the name came from then?  The recording project?
We were in Japan — Tyler, Toby, and myself.  Tyler and Toby were going to school there for awhile and I was visiting.  And there was this night we met up with one of Toby’s parent’s friends who took us out drinking.  It was during this typhoon in Japan.  We weren’t experiencing it, but it was happening.  This friend we were with said something kind of sage-like about that and we decided to use the word “typhoon” as the working title of this recording project.

So most of you ended up in Portland?
In Portland, yeah.  I came back from Japan and moved to Portland to go to college.  I started writing and we came out with our first album at the end of 2005.  I started writing that stuff about a year earlier.  We recorded it with Devin Gallagher and Dave Hall, my sister Paige Morton [violin], our other friend Jordan Bagnall [accordion, keyboards], Conlan Murphy [banjo, guitar, percussion] — I’m trying to remember everyone–

Sorry, I don’t mean to put you on the spot.
(laughter) No, no, no, I think that is basically what we started with…oh, our friend Leah, Leah Ng [vocals]. That was the original lineup for Typhoon.  I moved to Portland in 2005 and about a year later all of my friends moved up to Portland as well.

Is this the infamous Victorian house I keep reading about?
Ah, no, not yet.  That’s coming — but definitely a lot of the same roommates.  We played in Portland — all that stuff you’ve been reading, it is probably about the last five years in Portland.  The membership has expanded and contracted over that period.  Sort of a process of attrition I guess.  Most of the original members are still there.

I want to talk about your creative process, but first, if you don’t mind, I’d like to run one of my hair-brained theories by you and see what you think.
Sure.

Your music is obviously a collective enterprise.  There is a sense of family in your sounds.  I think that comes off in the few videos that are up on YouTube.  Maybe the more appropriate word is “tribal.”  There’s a tribal quality to what you’re doing–
(laughter) I definitely think that is true…

Are there certain bands that provided you inspiration or even a model for what you started to do, or did this begin more organically from being with one another for so long and playing music over that period?
Well, we have certainly been influenced by a lot of bands, but not necessarily in the “tribal” sense.  In fact, we were already a band when I first of heard of, say, Broken Social Scene or Arcade Fire, or any of these bands we are compared to a lot.  A lot of the bands we all like are a lot smaller.  In that sense, I think, it really did grow organically.  We’d be playing and someone would say, “Hey, we have a friend who can play this instrument,” and we’d just go from there.  It seemed like we had all this potential to do some interesting things, and I didn’t want to leave anybody out of it.  The more the merrier.

I think it is probably inevitable that you guys get compared to Broken Social Scene, but it doesn’t quite work to me; you guys are in a very different…space.
I agree.  I’ve always felt that comparison was pretty superficial.

They aren’t listening hard enough.
Maybe. (laughter)

So you’re obviously very inclusive in your approach to music.  But how do you write a song?  Are you the creative force, or does everybody take turns?
I write most of the songs now.  I’ve always written at least the structures of the songs — and the lyrics.  We have had other songs from other people in the band, but most have side projects outside of Typhoon.  To me, it’s not so much a control issue but more just to make it work.  Given how many people we have in the band, if you just open things up it can turn into a mess, which it has before.  So I write the songs and I bring everybody in and then everybody has a huge hand in helping to make them into what they become.

Hunger and Thirst took you how long to record?  From when you started to when you had the completed album?
The recording process was only three or four months, although it was pretty grueling because we recorded every day after I got off work.  The songwriting kind of took place over a few years.  Some songs were finished as we recorded.

So do you record live?  How did the process in the studio work?
We would have really liked to record live.  In the past, on the first primitive recordings we’ve done before, we haven’t had any live elements.  It is all just kind of layering.  We have been trying to get away from that.  There’s something really cool about recording live, something that happens acoustically that you can’t capture by layering things.  The problem with this album is that we didn’t have the resources to record live and do it well.  So sections of it are live.  All the drums are live.  All the guitars and basses are live together.  There is a little layering, but the foundational stuff is live.  All the horns are recorded together and so are the strings.  We did want it to sound as live as possible, and on our next album we want to go further in that direction.

Your producer, Paul Laxer, really did a nice job with the record.  There’s a nice warm sound on here.
Yeah, he really did his homework on how to make it sound like it did.  He would talk about these other records that he really liked.  He referenced a lot of the reverb stuff that’s on Grizzly Bear’s new album.  And also Fleet Foxes.  It was interesting from that perspective — I mean, I love music, and I’ve been playing it a long time, but I’m not necessarily an audiophile…and Paul is.  He listened to those records for their sound engineering.  It’s cool; it was good to have that.  We’ve never had that before.  You asked earlier why we’ve been off the radar — partly it is because recording hasn’t really been that big of a priority in the past.

I’m not much of an audiophile either, although you probably wouldn’t know it after that line of questioning.  But the thing that blows me away about this record is that there’s no filler on it.  Everything fits together; each song creates its own little universe.  I am kind of struck by how — I mean, I don’t know what your first record sounded like.  In fact, until you mentioned it I didn’t know there was another album.
Yeah, that album doesn’t really exist anywhere besides our hometown.  It’s kind of underground; people here in the indie scene have it.

So maybe you can imagine my surprise when I get this album in my email and I listen to it and there’s this perfectly realized musical world there.  I was like, “Wow, if this is the first album from these guys, what the hell is going on in Portland?  I’ve got to get out there and check this out.”
(laughter) Well, thank you.  Those are really kind words.

Word of mouth is a pretty effective — I mean, I was thinking about this — there are a lot of bands — hell, a lot of Portland bands — that seem to have the knack for getting themselves on every commercial and every video game that comes down the pike.
Man, that’s so true. (laughter)

But there’s something to be said for cultivating a little mystery.  Word of mouth has certainly piqued the interest of the good folks on the West Coast, but what about the rest of us?  You just had your first tour outside of the region?
Yeah, it was really great.  All of us kind of grew up fans of Yann Tierson.  When we got asked to tour with him we all kind of spazzed out for a minute.  Luckily, none of us had to quit our jobs, but we were ready to.  It was really last minute; it was amazing.  We got a really great response everywhere we went.  Yann and his band were amazing.

You basically went from Oregon to Texas?
Yeah: Oregon, California, Arizona, and Texas.

What are the future prospects?
Actually, we are now in the process of finding a national booking agent and figuring out a tour for this summer.  That will really depend on how well the album is received once it’s out.  That is basically what our team is telling me.

How many of you actually hit the road this time?
The whole live band as it is currently configured, which isn’t the same as the one on the album.  I was really happy about it — I didn’t really think everyone would be able to make it but they did, so we’ll try to do it again this summer.  It’s crazy trying to do this with such a big group, but it’s a lot of fun, too.  Maybe I can mention some of the other people who are in the band?

Oh sure, let it rip.
Alex Fitch and Pieter Hilton are playing drums.  Ryan McAlpert and Eric Stipe are on horns.  Shannon Steale and Jen Hufnagel are on violin, and Nora Zimmerly sings and does percussion.  I think that’s everybody.

Very cool.  Can we take just a few seconds to talk about your songs?  I think one of the cool things about the record is that many of the lyrics are introspective, a little dark, but your music is expansive.  It is hopeful.  I’m wondering if you would talk about the tension in your work.  To my ear it is pretty well-defined.
Sure, thank you.  That tension is a good place to start, whether it is intentional or not.  Some things on the album were intentional.  I don’t know if you noticed, but some of the songs are in pairs.  The first two songs flow together almost as if they are part one and part two of the same song.  Usually it starts with something kind of nice with major chords, but then it gets smashed by something more violent or dissonant.  I guess that’s where I feel I’ve been influenced by David Lynch films, where there is this nice surface world, but underneath it is dark and disturbing.

You even have an intermission.  I guess that’s one of the reasons I was drawn to what I perceived to be the holistic quality of the record.  It is almost a suite in the sense there are these connections.  But each song does stand alone in its own right.
Right, cool, I’m glad you think so.  I do too.  You’re right, but the songs were conceived in sequences together before they were written as whole songs.  So I had the idea for the album in its entirety before the songs were completely fleshed out.  But it is like a suite — or, at least, there are movements.

That’s interesting.  So you mean you had the album figured out thematically in your head before you had the songs themselves?
Yeah, I guess I was sort of writing these songs in little snippets, and a lot of times — for instance, “CPR-Claws Pt. 2” — that is actually a combination of different songs that I realized when I got down to it all belonged together rather than separate.  It was more a matter of coming up with a suitable arrangement.  Conveniently — and I’d like to think it is intentional, but I’m not sure — the lyrical themes of the record fit pretty well with the structural themes.

Is this how you’ve always worked?  I’m struck by formalism of your approach.  It is like you’re almost writing a novel.  You have certain scenes–
That have to be sewn together.  Exactly.  That’s a good way to describe it for me.  I really do think the form of the album was influenced by novels and literary influences.

So who do you read?
Nabokov and the way he played with structure and form was definitely an influence.  Not to compare myself.  (laughter)  But also film.  Fellini’s 8 ½ was structured in a way that I wanted to make this record.  Self-referential.  Structurally conscious.

The good news is I think that formalism in the work is subverted by the tension we spoke of earlier between the music and the words.
Absolutely.

Once you have this vision in your mind, the band hangs the appendages on the structure?
Definitely, in a way.  I have ideas about how I think things should sound.  But we’ll start jamming on sections and people start figuring things out.  A lot of times we have to actually reduce it down, for instance, if we’ve been jamming on something for 30 minutes.  But it all works out.

It sure did on Hunger and Thirst.  Congratulations, and thanks for the conversation.
My pleasure, Mark, thank you for your interest.

Verbicide Free Download: Click here to download Verbicide Select Mixtape 5 featuring “Starting Over” by Typhoon

Unless you move in the rarefied world of the Portland, Oregon house-party scene you most likely haven’t heard of Kyle Morton and his massive 10- to 17-piece collaborative Typhoon.  That situation is most likely about to change.  Hunger and Thirst is an album of great emotional power.  Its songs range from austere folk reveries to lush, gospel-inflected chorale arrangements, to a visceral brand of heart-pounding chamber-pop.  Morton’s songs take on the human condition: pain, loneliness, sickness, and death; grace, redemption, and illumination.  It is all there.  And if you think that sounds like a bummer, you’d be very wrong.  While the lyrics look unflinchingly into dark places, the music is hopeful, beautiful; it provides a transcendent counter-point to the struggles that so often give meaning to our experience on this mortal coil.

How have a bunch of kids — all in their early 20s — become so wise about the world?  On a song like “The Sickness Unto Death,” how does a young songwriter like Morton so clearly and painfully express the frustration of an elderly person who’s body is failing?  Or in a song about terminal illness, “CPR-Part 2,” craft a lyric as poignant as:

“Since you have nothing to do with your hands,
you might as well pray,
I am no god-fearing man,
but I am afraid.”

I won’t pretend to know the answers to those questions, but I do know I’m better for taking the journey.  Typhoon’s songs are mature and perfectly realized miniatures, and they fit together as if interlocking pieces.  Hunger and Thirst is its own little universe, and Morton and crew transport us there and make us look dead at its harsh realities.  And somewhere, somehow, along the way, we can’t help but feel that it is all going to be alright.  Great art can be painfully introspective, but it has to let us in at some point; it has to remind us that there are certain universals that communicate that we’re all in this together.

If this sounds interesting to you, please know there is an interview with Kyle Morton in the Verbicide pipeline.  Stay tuned.  In the meantime, know that this is a wonderful album.  Timeless.  Special.

(Tender Loving Empire, PO Box 1058, Portland, OR, 97207)

Verbicide Free Download: Click here to download Verbicide Select Mixtape Vol. 5, featuring “Starting Over” by Typhoon

The band, originally formed in 1975 by the creepy, Svengali-wannabe Kim Fowley, was meant to be a sort of novelty act: five teenage girls playing at being a rock band a la the Monkees or something.  Turns out these women had way bigger balls than Davey Jones and the boys.  Call them post-glam or proto-punk, Jett, Currie, Lita Ford, Sandy West, and Jackie Fox had serious chops.  They didn’t just open the door for women in rock and roll — they kicked the door down.

But, of course, rock and roll mythologies are way simpler than the actual happenings.  The nominal success of The Runaways came at an extraordinary price.  Currie’s book, Neon Angel, is far more than a rock tell-all or coming-of-age story.  It is a cautionary tale and ultimately a survivor’s story.  Whoever thought it was a good idea to send five 15- and 16-year-olds out on the road — and headlong into the world of sex, drugs, and, of course, rock and roll — should have their heads examined.  Currie’s book unflinchingly chronicles the tales from the road, the drugs, sexual assaults, and the petty resistance of rock’s all-dude’s club as they tried to sabotage the band at every turn.  The level of cruelty visited upon those kids is shocking and ultimately pretty heart-breaking.  That the band survived at all — let alone made some serious music — is a miracle.  Currie left the band in 1977, tried her hand at acting, and battled addiction.  Eventually she beat back the demons, became a drug counselor, and made a family.  Somewhere along the way she started to draw and now makes her living as an artist.  By just about any measure, hers is a remarkable story.

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Cherie Currie about the movie, writing the book, the legacy of The Runaways, and what it’s like to make art with a chainsaw.

I really want to start us off by talking about the book.  I was lucky enough to snag a copy of it and really enjoyed it.  But as I understand it, the original version of the text was done in 1989, is that correct?
Yes, it came out through Price, Stern, and Sloan.  It was their very first young adult book.   I actually went to Price, Stern, and Sloan as an illustrator.  I was at that time a drug counselor for adolescents at a Coldwater Canyon hospital.  So I went there as an illustrator because I started drawing in class while the kids were in school.  And when I went in as an illustrator they asked me how long I’d been drawing — I told them about a year, and they said, “How is that possible?”  I ended up telling them about The Runaways and they ended up saying, “This is our first young adult book.”  Anyway, Neil Shusterman, who wrote that book, did a fantastic job.  He’s just exceptional when it comes to speaking to young adults, and he really wrote the majority of the book, no doubt.

I read the book in about 2000 but then being a mother, and also older and wiser — and a lot more brave — I just decided that I wanted to rewrite the book from my perspective, from the perspective of a going-on 50-year old woman.  I wanted to tell the stories I couldn’t tell in that young adult book.  And that’s what I did.  Kenny Laguna read it and thought it was really worthy of publication and he started shopping it.  He ended up getting interest from John and Art Linson to make it into a film.  In turn, it went up for auction and Harper Collins bought it and I rewrote it.  They brought Tony O’Neill in on this one but in the end I just had to do this myself.  He was helpful.  He could take stories I told him and put them artfully on paper.  But in the end, it had to be me.  So I worked feverishly — we were in such time-constraints.  In the end, Harper Collins had to hire six people to work over the weekend to accommodate the hundreds of changes and complete rewrites I had for this book.  So I truly feel like if it goes down in flames then it’s all my fault. (laughter)

You know, I really don’t think that will happen.  I love reading rock memoirs and autobiographies, but this is more than that.  The reason I ask about the early incarnation of the book — in its young adult format — is that obviously there is this cautionary tale at the center of this story.  But that certainly is heightened in the extended version now.  There’s so much of “you” in the book now; it is a survivor’s tale.  You are able to overcome so much — so many terrible things — as well as experience something historic.  I found myself wondering how something like this could be made into a two-hour motion picture.

Well thank you Mark, I really appreciate those words.

So what did you think of the movie then?  (laughter)  I’m calling you from a really small town in middle Georgia and the movie hasn’t quite found its way to us.  What are your impressions?
Dakota Fanning and Kristin Stewart and Michael Shannon are just incredible in this film.  Again, it only scratches the surface of the true, harrowing experiences that The Runaways faced out there on the road as teenage girls.  But how do you take two years of craziness and put it into an hour and a half?  It’s just impossible.  If it had been an epic, sure, but anyway they wanted to get the gist of our experiences on-screen and I think that they did that.  But again, I just think the acting is incredible.  Dakota is just my favorite actress.  Period.  Even before she entered into negotiations for the part.  And Kristin Stewart — I was unaware of her acting except for Panic Room — and this is the best thing she has ever done.  This is a tough role for her.  She just did it beautifully.

I appreciate what you’re saying about the differences between a film and book.  Obviously, they have to tell stories in different ways.  There are going to be things that are left out — or other things that have to be tweaked for the screen.  Is there anything in particular that you would have liked to have seen done differently?
Yeah, when I originally read the script there were some problems I had which they did fix — some of them — and then some they wouldn’t.  I mean, when Dakota cuts her hair — when I cut my hair — there was a reason for that.  You read about that in the book.  [Ed. note:  In the book, the hair-cutting occurs after the teenaged Cherie has been raped.] But they didn’t want my character to lose her innocence so early in the film.  And there is a scene where I lose a talent show when I actually won — things like that — it’s for poetic license.  At the end of the film when I actually made that infamous phone call to Joan I was a drug counselor at the time, and I was at work and not in a shopping mall.  They move things around here and there — and trust me, no dog food was thrown at us either!  (laughter) So they pushed the envelope in some places.  But then again, The Runaways — we really experienced some of the craziest stuff ever.  Is there a part of me that wishes they could have made some of the story a little deeper?  Of course.  But I lived it.

That’s right.  Well, like I said, I’ve only seen the reviews to this point but they’ve been really solid.  It takes a special kind of rock and roll movie to satisfy a discerning crowd, especially if people love the band as much as people love The Runaways.
I’m also pretty keen on the soundtrack.  Having The Runaways music is really great.

No doubt.
I mean, it’s Dakota Fanning, so how could I complain?  I feel very blessed that she was involved in this.

Let’s talk a little bit about the band.  I really appreciated getting the opportunity to chat with you because I did the earlier interview with Joan and Kenny.  Of course, her career has just chugged on and on and on.  When the stories about The Runaways have come up, oftentimes she’s the one they’ve been directed towards.  Getting your take on it has been really illuminating.  I’d love to know what you think the ultimate legacy of the band — and your experiences — really is.
I think — it’s not just about being teenage girls.  It’s about life in general and following your heart and being true to yourself.  If you can do that it doesn’t matter what age, you’re going to make some waves.  I also think the planets were aligned perfectly for the five members of the band to come together at that time with a common goal: we all wanted to go out there and play rock and roll.  Yeah, we were girls where were trudging on territory that was then mostly male.  That we said, “Hey, we can do this, too!”  Yeah, there was an element of that in there.  But it didn’t really become such a fight until we got out on the road and met such resistance from other bands.  They sabotaged our equipment and they tried to embarrass us in front of thousands of people.  That’s when it really became a fight.

I’m curious then — you obviously didn’t have many role models.  You guys, in so many ways, were out there on the cutting edge.  Who did you emulate?  I mean, the Bowie references are all over the place.  You write about your love of Bowie’s music and persona at length in the book.  Glam rock and its androgyny must have been pretty liberating.  But what were your influences that drove you into this?
Let’s be honest – yeah, Bowie, I just loved his stage persona and his larger-than-life characters — but as far as real role models, Suzi Quatro, she was out there kickin’ ass.  It was really impressive.  But at 15 years old, you’re in school, you aren’t doing a whole lot of reading besides history or English, you’ve got homework — as far as really sitting back and thinking about a real role model, I don’t think I had a role model in my life at that time.

Of course, that makes good sense.  I never thought about it that way.  Everybody wants to talk about the gender issue.  This group of teenage women who went out on the road and really did it.  You guys were the forerunners of Riot Grrrls and all these other movements that have risen up since then.  At the time, I was like 15 and you guys were playing a club in my hometown…
Oh, really?

…and I just remember being so excited, not because you were women, but because you were like my age!  We’d seen pictures of you guys in Rock Scene and Creem Magazine and it was more the fact you were 15 or 16 too and you were out there doing it!  Not that we could get in to see you.  (laughter)
That’s it!  Isn’t that funny — you couldn’t get in.  We were 15 and playing all these over-21 clubs.  I mean, it was just incredible the crazy stuff that was happening back then.  They’d actually have to sneak us in to play.  It was pretty incredible.  When my son was 15 — and he’s a very gifted musician — he was offered to go on the road with his cousin Trevor Lukather and I would not let that happen.  So I look at him when he was 15 and I just couldn’t grasp that I was out there at that age on the road and making records and touring the world at his age.  It’s terrifying to me!  I’m so blessed — and all of us were — that our parents allowed such things, because I would have never let it happen to my son.

I noticed on some website that you are currently under contract to Blackheart Records?
Well no, not exactly, they’re my management company.

Oh, I see.  The reason I asked is that I was hoping that meant there was some more music coming through the pipeline.
Well, actually we’re discussing it right now about maybe going in and making a record.  I get to play this summer and my son will be performing with me onstage and that should be fun.  But I’m on the same bill with Joan for some shows at some point.

Oh wow, so just as a solo act?
I guess yeah it is — I mean, as “Cherie Currie.”  I’ll do a set.  Put in some Runaways songs that I really love.  It isn’t anything I really expected.  I’d long given up on this.  But it’s definitely going to be fun to get back out there again.

That is exciting.  You’re doing the festival circuit or you’ll go out with Joan and the Blackhearts?
No, I don’t think so, although I do know there is one show at the Pacific Amphitheatre that I’m going to be doing on the same bill with her.

Wow that’s cool.  I know that the thrust of all this has been the buzz surrounding the publication of the book and the release of the movie.  But you have had such an unbelievable life — not just as a musician and the rough experiences you had — but as someone who beat addiction, became a drug counselor, a mother, and now as an artist.  I spent a fair amount of time looking at the art on your website.  Unbelievable stuff.  How did you get involved with chainsaw art?
It was just a fluke!  I was doing wood-carving at the time but it was relief carving.  And then I was going to the beach one day and I happened to pass a couple of guys chainsaw-carving at the side of the road.  I didn’t stop, but I couldn’t get it out of my head.  There was like this voice telling me, “You have to go back.” And I did.  I walked into their gallery and saw these beautiful, detailed, gorgeous mermaids and this voice — you know, that voice we have that says, “You can do this” — and the following day I talked to the owner and said I wanted to give this a go, and he looked at my artwork and said sure, he said he’d teach me, but he…well, he taught me how not to kill myself with the saw…

(laughter)That’s helpful.
I’m forever grateful to him for that.  But to chainsaw carve you really have to be able to see things in the wood or you wouldn’t know where to start.  But I just started doing it and my third piece was accepted into the Malibu Art Expo which was three sea-turtles swimming around a piece of coral and it is just so difficult to get into.  So I thought I’d stick with it and now I’ve been a professional carver for nine years.

Well I hope that all our readers will take a few minutes and go to your website and see what you’re up to.  It is amazingly intricate stuff.
Thanks a lot Mark, I really appreciate that.

Cherie Currie, thanks so much for talking to Verbicide Magazine.
Thank you Mark, it was my pleasure.

In his touching memorial of Vic Chesnutt, Mark Huddle points out that, before his death, Chesnutt was in medical debt of up to $70,000.  Debt collectors had threatened to take his house, and as Chesnutt himself said, “I could die only because I cannot afford to go in there again. I don’t want to die…just because I don’t have enough money to go in the hospital. But that’s the reality of it. You know, I have a preexisting condition, my quadriplegia, and I can’t get [decent] health insurance.”

Chesnutt was not alone. Alex Chilton, who died last month of a heart attack at age 59, owned no insurance. According to a New Orleans Times-Picayune feature, “At least twice in the week before his fatal heart attack, Chilton experienced shortness of breath and chills while cutting grass. But he did not seek medical attention, [wife Laura] Kersting said, in part because he had no health insurance.”