Kennedy was diagnosed with Hepatitis C almost 20 years ago while living and playing music in New York City. She had been living in Minneapolis for the last 12 years with her girlfriend, and after a long wait, she received a liver transplant at the University of Minnesota in 2008.

Bush Tetras were at the heart of the New York no wave and punk scenes in the late 1970s and early 80s. They are best known for their early-’80s dance-punk hit, “Too Many Creeps.”

Kennedy was the focus of many benefit shows, including a Cake Shop show in New York City in 2008. Bush Tetras have been active in recent years, though Kennedy was not involved.

The Raincoats on Tour
9/16 Brooklyn, NY @ Warsaw
9/17 Washington, DC @ Comet
9/19 Chicago, IL @ Double Door
9/21 Detroit, MI @ Museum of Contemporary Art
9/23 Toronto, ON @ Wrong Bar
9/25 Montreal, QC @ Cabaret du Mile-End (POP Montreal)

Click here for a review of Silent Pictures, Graham’s last book, or check out the book preview below. (via P4k)

Instrument

Mekons formed in Leeds, England in 1977. The current line-up has remained intact since the mid-1980s.

Ancient & Modern Tracklisting
1. Warm Summer Sun
2. Space In Your Face
3. Geeshie
4. I Fall Asleep
5. Calling All Demons
6. Ugly Bethesda
7. Ancient & Modern
8. Afar & Forlorn
9. Honey Bear
10. The Devil at Rest
11. Arthur’s Angel

We are:
Christa Matheu – Vox, Synth
John Deptowicz -  Guitar, Vox
Ivan Gonzalez -Bass
Jorge Herrera – Drums

Where are you based out of (location)?
Los Angeles, California (Highland Park to be exact)

Your music sounds like?
Christa: It sounds horrible. In fact, don’t ever listen to it. It’s so bad we didn’t win the contest.
John: Like a celebration of mourning.

How did you discover music as a creative outlet?
It was different for all of us. We can’t really say exactly when it was we discovered it, but we do know that we’ve been writing songs and playing shows since we were kids and we’re going to continue doing so until the day we die.

What’s the best part of being an independent musician, and how do you get the message out about your music and connect to fans?
The best part is the freedom and control. For example, we don’t sell tickets or work with promoters that charge our fans a ridiculous amount to come see us. If that were the case we’d rather find a venue, round up some good bands and throw a show ourselves.

As far as connecting, we think our fans connect with us because we’re real and honest. We don’t put up a front and we tell it like it is.

What are your future musical projects and goals?
Our goal from the beginning has always been to write, record and perform on our own terms. Right now, we’re in the process of mixing and mastering our debut EP and we’re also working on new songs.

The band has just released the video for the lead single (below).

Gang Of Four on Tour
2/4 Toronto, ON @ Phoenix Concert Theatre
2/5 Philadelphia, PA @ Theatre of Living Arts
2/7 Boston, MA @ Paradise
2/8 New York, NY @ Webster Hall
2/9 Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
2/10 Pittsburgh, PA @ Club Café
2/11 Chicago, IL @ Metro
2/12 Minneapolis, MN @ First Avenue
2/14 Spokane, WA @ Knitting Factory
2/15 Vancouver, BC @ Venue
2/16 Seattle, WA @ Showbox at the Market
2/17 Portland, OR @Wonder Ballroom
2/19 San Francisco, CA @ The Fillmore
2/20 Anaheim, CA @ House of Blues
2/21 Los Angeles, CA @ Music Box

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.

Their Reasons to Be EP will be out later this fall, and the band are hard at work on an as-yet-unnamed second full-length effort.  Verbicide was happy to catch up with the band over lunch and talk about their history, their influences, and their direction as a band on their new recorded efforts

First, introduce yourselves and mention what you play in the band.
Greg: My name is Greg and I play guitar.
Ryan: My name is Ryan, I play guitar and sing.
Chris: My name is Chris and I play bass.

How did My Heart to Joy first come about?
Ryan: My Heart to Joy started a couple years ago with our ex-drummer Allan and myself.  We started as a two-piece, as sort of like a side project, something for fun over the summer, and it sort of evolved into what it is now and got a lot more serious.

A side project for what?
Ryan: We had like a… [laughter] In retrospect, a non-serious high school band — but at the time that was our serious pursuit, and [we] have since changed focus.
Greg: Honestly, I have the demos for the high school band and it’s pretty good.
Ryan: [laughter]
Greg: Uh, it’s alright.
Chris: Wasn’t I supposed to play live guitar or something?
Greg: Chris Teti was also in the band before any of us and then was quickly dismissed — and [now] here he is now back in the band, which is awesome.
Chris: Full circle. [laughter]
Greg: Full circle.  Everyone in our town in the early days of My Heart to Joy was in [the band] for at least five minutes.  It went from being a two-piece to quickly peaking at a five-piece, to going back down to a three-piece, to going to a four-piece, to — here we are — playing live as a five-piece again.  So, about every six months something changes one way or another.

What are your influences musically and lyrically?
Ryan:  I think our influences have changed a lot over our discography, and, I mean, it’s pretty noticeable.  In the beginning — at least for Allan and [me] — we were just trying to recreate screamo bands that we liked, and we weren’t trying to necessarily be very original or anything. We just wanted to be in a band that we liked the way it sounded.  It evolved from that into being more about…we went through a melodic punk stage, and then we went into [what we are] now — we’re more into, like, an indie sort of thing, where we’re about The Smiths and bands like that.  It’s just been an evolution from “We want to sound like a screamo band.”  Ever since then we’ve been kind of distancing ourselves from that, only because we want to try different things, and we’ve gone for a different sound every time we’ve sat down to write.
Chris: Yeah, you grow and you develop, and vocal harmonies sound awesome.
Greg: I’d say, more or less, it went from wanting to be Orchid to then maybe starting to hear more kinds of ’90s style bands — Promise Ring or Braid — and now we’re all just listening to like Guided by Voices and, as we said, The Smiths and just way poppier stuff.
Ryan: We’re no longer interested in trying to recreate even the ’90s — we’ve already moved past that.  So much time passes between when a record actually is written and when it is released, that by the time it’s released I’ve listened to 100 new bands and I’m not interested in what I was listening to before, and we are on to the next thing.

When I saw you guys live, I kind of got a little bit of a Hot Water Music kind of feel.  Would you say that’s an appropriate comparison?
Ryan: I would say that’s a very interesting comparison, because we get that fairly frequently — or, at least, we did more when we were just doing Seasons in Verse. I think that when we come out with the new EP people won’t really compare us to them so much.  The funny thing about that is not one of the members of the band has ever listened to Hot Water Music, or spent any real amount of time…I’ve heard them a little bit, and they’re a fine band, but we certainly did not mean to replicate their sound in any way, shape, or form.

How do your musical influences manifest themselves in the songs that you write?
Ryan: When I sit down to actually write a song, I usually do try to have some sort of sound in mind, and that can come from influences from the past or something I’m currently listening to.  But it’s pretty spontaneous; it just kind of happens.  I have an idea of what I want it to sound like, but I don’t think about it that much, otherwise I think I’d end up worrying too much.

You’ve already touched on it a bit, so I want to ask, what is your writing process like?
Ryan: Usually, I will come up with something on guitar — and maybe bass — and I will loop it and layer it and [formulate] the idea. Then I’ll bring it to everybody else, and they’ll say if they think it’s worth pursuing to the next level.  Greg will change his guitar lines to fit him, and Chris will change his bass lines to fit him, and then, obviously, I don’t do much of the drum writing, but the drummer will do what he does, and then it all goes from there.  Vocals are usually put on top towards the end.
Greg: That’s usually the most “team effort” part of it.
Ryan: Yeah, I’ll usually write lyrics, or sometimes Al would write lyrics, but as far as the melody and things like that, we all decide what it’s going to be and try it out — a lot of trial and error.
Greg: The last time we were sitting down with an acoustic guitar [saying] “that’s good,” [or] “that sucks,” and also we’re getting really stoked on the use of harmonies on this one, and we’re thinking about that a lot more.
Chris: Particularly that side of melody, and trying to be interesting because that’s where we’re at and that’s what we’re interested in now.
Ryan: We did a decent amount of demoing on the EP, and that helped us figure out, hey, this doesn’t work and this works better, so when we went into the studio we had a better sense of everything.

So was that different from the process of doing the Seasons in Verse LP?
Greg: Oh my god.
Ryan: Seasons in Verse was probably the least thought-out album of all time.  We wrote all the songs, which took a little bit of time, but when we actually went into the studio we hadn’t [yet] demoed it — we hadn’t done much of anything like that.  All the music was actually recorded in a 12-hour span all at once in a very live setting, and all the vocals were done over two days in two five-hour periods, and that was it.  We didn’t really retouch anything, or overdub anything, or go back and try to make it better or anything — it was very spontaneous.  And that was sort of our intent, but listening back to it now I think we’d all like to go back and change this, and change that. But [at the time] it was really a spontaneous effort.

If you were to go back, what is something you would change?
Ryan: Probably not anything too major, not anything too drastic, but thinking about it maybe a little bit more, and maybe adding things, or playing it correctly, things like that.
Greg: Because you don’t notice that anything’s wrong, but to us — oh my god, it’s just the worst thing to listen to.  I’m happy with how it sounds, at least sonically, but performance-wise on our parts, we were all really happy with it for like the first two months and then…oh man, this is bad.
Ryan: But if people like it though, that’s fine, I’m not gonna argue with that — it’s just [our own] criticisms we’ve had [of the album] from listening to it a lot.

What’s the future of My Heart to Joy for the rest of the year and beyond?
Greg: Well, right now we have a lot of shows coming up in October.  The idea I think is to play regionally, like New England and Pennsylvania, maybe — hopefully — get down to the Baltimore area. And we’re about to put out a new EP.  The seven-inch is titled Reasons to Be, and it’s just three new songs.

When is that looking to drop?
Greg: We still don’t have a release date, but hopefully late fall.  Fingers crossed.
Ryan: We’ve played a few festivals — CMJ, The Fest — hopefully we’ll be playing South by Southwest, just trying to do some of that type of thing and get out there in that way.  The EP is sort of to tide people over and produce interest, because we’re trying to write the full length right now, and hopefully that will come out in maybe a year, or as soon as it can.

Is there already a label looking at that?
Ryan: We’re trying to talk to people now, but the whole point of the EP, I guess, is to drum up as much interest as possible, so then maybe, I don’t know what could happen, but we’ll talk to other people then.
Greg: As soon as the EP comes out, that’s probably when we’ll start getting a lot more active. But for right now, we might as well just stick around and try to play as much in the Northeast as we can.
Chris: And the EP is different from Seasons in Verse.
Ryan: It’s going to be a decent change of pace for our previous listeners; it’s going to take a little bit of getting used to but hopefully more people will get into it after.

• Ariel Pink\'s Haunted Graffiti

• Ariel Pink\'s Haunted Graffiti

• Best Coast

• Big Freedia

• Big Freedia

• Deerhunter

• Delorean

• Devin The Dude

• Dirty Projectors

• Os Mutantes

• Slick Rick

• Weird Al Yankovic

Amongst the commercialized Lollapalooza and the inflated Coachella, we need smaller, secluded festivals to keep us all grounded. Fun Fun Fun Fest gives Austin a more intimate, personalized, and risk-taking lineup in counterpart of Austin City Limits, featuring some of pop culture’s most surreal un-conventionalists like Yankovic, Gwar, and Suicidal Tendencies. Even the prime headliners MGMT, Bad Religion, Mastodon and Descendents (filling in for Devo) are not exactly main stage fodder, and beckon to a crowd that might not appreciate seeing a band on a “Budweiser” or “Toyota” stage. Fun Fun Fun is fighting the good fight — more promotors should pay attention to what they’re doing.

Who would’ve thought that in 2010, 27 years after he put out his first record, someone as willingly silly as “Weird Al” Yankovic could both curate and kick off a festival filled with some of the biggest names in indie rock? Al has spent his entire career teetering on the balance of the good graces of the pop culture public, but while Carrot Top and Sinbad fell to laughable (and completely justified) ends, something about Yankovic’s pure, undiluted likability has allowed him to prevail. He’s still touring, he’s a regular guest on “Comedy Death Ray,” and, most importantly, he’s still funny.

His performance was more or less the same basic incarnation I saw back in 2003 (coincidentally, my first ever rock show), but the mechanics have been updated. He opened with a bleeding-edge polka, stuffed full of 2010 chart-crashers: Bieber, Ke$ha and Gaga. But that sat right alongside near-ubiquitous *ahem* “hits” like “Dare to be Stupid” and “Smells Like Nirvana.” Naturally, this was all paired with a constant costume shuffle, de-contextualized apropos-of-nothing video clips, and your brief onstage sketches.

Surprisingly, some of this stuff hasn’t changed since 2003. The Eminem faux-interview he aired was the same exact one I remember my 12-year-old self laughing at, same with the draconian, period-accurate germ PSA. But it was all funny the second time around, and his setlist has been frontloaded with Billboard-identifiable rips. But that’s all semantics really — the crowd would’ve been smitten with whatever Yankovic dished up; his personality occupies such a specific spot in pop-ubiquity that he’s become a sort-of godhead. We live in a world where Weird Al can never risk self-parody, irrelevance, or disdain. That’s a good world to live in.

Devin the Dude: he likes his weed, that’s not a secret to anyone, and it occasionally got a little silly hearing the dressed-down street-rap hero offhandedly mention getting high every chance he could, but if Devin was ever going to escape that typecast and dominate a bill he wasn’t headlining, Fun Fun Fun Fest is certainly that show. The glassy-eyed demeanor and languished beats simply isn’t designed to fill an audience, but when the crowd has utterly immortalized the man’s underground mythos it doesn’t really matter. For at least this one afternoon in Austin, Devin the Dude was an utter star — lyrics were tossed back and forth, call-outs were graciously reciprocated, hands were thrown in the air like they just didn’t care, etc. Fun Fun Fun Fest is a celebration of left field goofballs who never took the world at large, and that’s the perfect spot for someone as prolific and hidden as Devin the Dude.

If there was anything that could’ve stymied, and sucked out all the good-hearted energy an underdog like Devin cued up on blue stage it was Slick Rick: former star, current legend, and a hell of a disappointment on stage. The svelte, well-dressed figure you remember is long gone; today, Slick Rick is a hulking, over-blinged, and overweight shell of his former greatness. Mic to his mouth, feet planted, he exhaustingly plodded through the entirety of The Great Adventures without even a modicum of intensity. It was literally the most disengaged performance of the weekend — blame it on age, or hubris, nothing remedies blatant sluggishness. If you can’t control a stage anymore, that’s fine, that’s what a hypeman is for, but Slick didn’t even the courtesy for that — just an absent-minded DJ and a checked-out disposition, amounting into what was probably the lowest point of the weekend.

Os Mutantes, on the other hand — a band whose very career almost exceeds Slick Rick’s 45 years — have aged very well since their 2006 reunion. Their legacy is well-engraved now: they exploded in their native Brazil, got cursory and cultish time-defying respect in the United States, eventually imploded in the mid-1970s due to acid-frazzled nerves and creative differences…but Sérgio Dias and company are looking happy, healthy, and incredibly excited to be playing for studious hipsters 30 years their junior. The music hasn’t changed, rainbow streaks of tropical glitz, but the Os Mutantes sound still stands solitarily unique in the canon of pop. Bad Religion, The Vandals, and Descendents — they couldn’t help but sound retro, while the oldest group of the weekend came off immediately current. Not many bands could pull that off.

I wasn’t sure who Big Freedia was before Friday — the wiki-proof MC more or less evaded me in the days before the fest, but I did know I liked how her press-bio described her as “New Orleans bounce-rap.” What I saw was a gargantuan, near-Amazonian transgendered titan of a woman who plays hyper-sexualized, semi-sarcastic crunk-attacks that completely bypass the brain and shudder right down to the hips. This was not a work-safe environment; in fact, it was the sweatiest, grossest, but still kinda enthralling moment all weekend. By the time she got to “Azz Everywhere,” the pretenses that were already lowered were cast aside entirely — because losing your shit is a lot more fun than judging others in the process of losing their shit.

How great must it feel to be Delorean? Trading in noisy punk for druggy club-rave is an odd and uneasy transition, but to come out the other end with a nighttime slot and a huge showing of American kids singing along? That must feel amazingly rewarding. They deserve all the love, too — Delorean adopted a nothing-but-bangers policy, churning through the biggest crests in electro-pop from both their 2009 teaser Ayrton Senna EP and this year’s hype-delivered Subzia. Basked in throbbing neon lights, songs like “Seasun,” “Real Love,” and “Stay Close” sound just as good as you can picture them. Delorean owe America a full tour, and judged by how they essentially managed to incite a riot with every song they played, they won’t have too much trouble winning us over more than they already have.

For whatever reason, I’ve managed to miss Dirty Projectors at the gaggle of festivals they’ve toured over the past year. Other acts — Fuck Buttons at Lollapalooza, The xx at Coachella — always stole my attention away. So this was the first time I saw Dave Longstreth perform with a band. Dirty Projectors have certainly evolved since their most avant-garde era (and now resemble a “band” more than ever before) — now all the boys and girls can sing along to Bitte Orca. During the jaw-dropping chorus of “Stillness is the Move,” Angel Deradoorian grabbed her microphone and pointed it at the audience, who shouted the incalculable notes right back at her — not something you’d expect out of the Projectors during The Getty Address days. Their performance was so taut, so chiseled, it’s almost as if the band has something to prove — if you ever doubted they could hit these notes, shape-shift their vocals, and ping-pong their verses on stage, well you ought to see them live. These are the most dedicated musicians playing today, and it’s utterly inspiring to see them together.

Of course, RJD2 is the guy who brings a bag full of vinyl to his show. Unlike pretty much every musical collagist these days, RJ Krohn is all analog — his setup included four turntables and a tuned-up drum machine. That’s it; not a laptop in sight. So that means when he cues up a classic like “Ghostwriter” it’s created from the same samples, and feasibly, the same records, which is a pretty cool thought. It wasn’t the most active or danceable set of the weekend, or even the day (that honor lies with Delorean) but RJ’s smoky, chilled-out psych-hop was a good way to end an active day of music listening.

It was clear that anyone who made it out to the Blue Stage at 4:50 despite stiff competition from Best Coast and The Bronx were going to be pretty big rapheads, especially to see such a scene-hero like Pharoahe Monch. The wayward rapper has put out a scarce two records in his career, a stark difference from the mixtape-monster mentality that every up-and-coming rapper subscribes to these days, but that didn’t really matter – Internal Affairs and Desire are both so dense with bangers, a 45-minute festival set turns into a slash-and-burn, profanity-laced rampage. Even the new songs he tried out from his perpetually-upcoming third album W.A.R. were greeted like old-school favorites. Few rappers have garnered so much love with so few songs.

If it wasn’t already clear on Crazy For You, most Best Coast songs sound pretty much the same. Bethany Cosentino finds her greatness by being easy to root for, and naturally, her sunset-backed performance was primarily highlighted by her bittersweet banter. “Just so you know, Bobb is super excited to see Mastodon tonight…but now he has to play in a fuckin’ girly pop band,” she said with a smile. The songs, well…they don’t exactly show well — Best Coast is something that works best with the sum of its parts all added up. They’d rather win your heart over the course of an album rather than during a set, but based on the amount of people singing along with deep-cuts like “Bratty B” and “Our Deal,” Bethany won’t have to worry about her status for quite some time.

And so, in 2010, Deerhunter are no longer forced to close their set with “Nothing Ever Happened.” That duty now lies with Halcyon Digest’s “Helicopter,” a song that exceeds everything else the band has done in terms of potency, humanism, and direct synapse-tugging impact. Like your average Deerhunter festival set, this was a vaguely passive-aggressive, somewhat indifferent attack of the band’s highlights, but those moments of uncomfortable irritation (Bradford giving some faceless crowd-member a quipping “shut up,” the band abandoning a sound-check with a “Fuck it, let’s just do it”) are all quickly forgettable when you consider just how great these songs are. Even at their most slack-jawed torpidity you can’t help but feel wrapped up in a specific guitar sound, or a lyrical snap. Even when they aren’t playing nice and mechanical, Deerhunter is better than nearly any other band going.

From the first piano clinks of “Constructive Summer,” it was all over. Craig Finn skipped across the stage like an enthused schizo, shouting quick-lipped cracks to the audience sans microphone, all with a huge grin on his face. This was the exact and logical opposite to Deerhunter, who played just one space down the bill. The Hold Steady couldn’t be any happier to be in a rock n’roll band. Say what you like about Heaven is Whenever, it doesn’t really make a qualitative difference when those songs are played with this much vigor. The songs were introduced with hammy couplets. which made it that much more fun. (“This song, well, this song is about a boy, a girl, and a horse,” before “Chips Ahoy.”) Truth is, we could barely hear Craig the entire night, thanks to an overpowered mix on the band’s labyrinth of guitar-amps. It didn’t really matter; we knew all the words anyway. The Hold Steady is exactly the band you want to be closing your festival, because regardless of what happened or who sucked earlier in the week, they’re genetically coded to restore faith in music.

John and Nora have asked us to let everyone know that Nora’s daughter Arianna (aka Ari-Up) died today (Wednesday, October 20th) after a serious illness. She will be sadly missed.

Ari Up formed The Slits in 1976 at the age of 14. Their incredible debut album, Cut, was released in 1979; their final album, Trapped Animal, was released last year.

Verbicide spoke with Ari Up four years ago — click here to read the interview.

More info as it becomes available on the death of Ari Up.