I have a thing about sticking up for the over/underdogs–the highly successful musicians that people just can’t wait to hate on.

Whether it’s journalists in the 70s turning their noses up at the Archies while praising Toto and Chicago, or oddly spiteful faux-journalists who hate Kreayshawn to the point where they’re taking solitary, reasonable quotes out of context and then linking them to Wikipedia entries about black youth being shot in Oakland two years prior to somehow make it seem that Kreayshawn is a whiny entitled race exploiter, too often my fellow music journalists take the easy way out: they find a target to hate that they know a lot of “hip” people would be eager to take issue with, and they hate on ‘em good. “Ooooh, look at me, with the balls to call pop music ‘vapid!’” How clever. How brave. And for anyone who likes the rawness of rock, country, and hip hop, how hypocritically selective. Compared to the dexterity of jazz or the sober precision of classical, we’re all retarded perverts flinging blocky chunks of musical clay into a three minute sludge. We’re cavemen, and I thought we were proud of that!

But there’s one musician whose works I am slowly coming to love who indisputably is kind of lame: Hank Williams Jr. In fact, he’s kind of a monster. Yesterday’s quote about Obama being like Hitler that got him kicked off ESPN was actually relatively rational compared to some of the things he’s done, if you’ve been paying attention to his PR ouevre. His advocacy for Sarah Palin a couple years ago was outright weird, as was his ridiculous version of “Family Tradition” that he made for the McCain/Palin ticket, which blamed the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bailout on Clinton and said that Obama had friends linked with terrorism (as though Sarah Palin’s husband wasn’t an anti-American separatist). And of course, his creepy fantasy song from 1988 about how good things would be if the South had won the Civil War gave a boner to thousands of rednecks while sidestepping the fact that millions of black people wouldn’t find that scenario quite so wonderful.

And yet, and yet… if you, dear reader, are building up your country music fandom, can I just strongly recommend that you please don’t pass up this man’s stuff?  Despite the annoyance of his Monday Night Football anthem, ol’ Bocephus was once a solid country musician. Even Little Richard thinks so.

Look, love is an emotion that infects both the smart and the dumb, and it’s not necessarily the politically savvy who can sing with the most conviction about the joy of living or the pain of longing. Hank Williams, Jr. has had a lot to long for–a dead famous father, an accident that left him scarred and forced to wear his trademark beard, hat, and sunglasses at all times, and he must be upset that all his “rowdy friends” in country music are actually liberal pinkos who love prisoners, government programs, and true American freedoms, i.e. Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, the late Johnny Cash, you name it. While I agree with folks like Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon that rich millionaires who pretend to be down-home are scum, I disagree that Hank Jr’s wealth alone makes him inauthentic. Whatever his crimes against human decency, it hasn’t prevented the man from occasionally making BLISTERING country that can pull at your fucking heartstrings:

Even a song like “Dinosaur,” which has a mean anti-gay streak, also paints a picture of a time that to me is fascinating–blue collar workers being shoved out of their own clubs by corporate disco. Despite how I might feel about disco (Giorgio Moroder is my boy, and I love muted hi-hats), this character sure hates it, and you can feel the pain of this dude who just wants to go drink whiskey and listen to some old “country and rhythm and blues” but is being force-fed this alienating music that has no place at his saloon. Do I have to agree with his politics or even his mores to feel this character’s pathos?

I guess what I’m saying is, I acknowledge that Hank is far from perfect, but sometimes I’d rather cry with the sinners than laugh with the saints. When I listen to Hank Williams, Jr., I’m going to focus on the young man he once was, the poor little boy whose mother made him dress like his dead father, the figure he had to struggle to overcome. And when I listen to the modern Hank Williams, Jr. (and remember, he’s like a senile senior now) opine about politics, I’m going to pretend I’m watching C.S. Lewis, Jr:

-Dan Collins

Chicago’s Permanent Records is coming to L.A.! Specifically, Eagle Rock, the new home of their second shop. The grand opening party is this Saturday, and they’ll be hosting performances by the Cosmonauts, Francis Harold and the Holograms, and Amanda of Not Not Fun (DJ set). We spoke with Permanent co-owner Lance about what’s in store. This interview by Lainna Fader.

What’re you gonna carry in Permanent L.A.?
It’ll be real similar to what we have in the Chicago location—new, used, rare vinyl, CDs, 45s, DVDs, cassettes, zines, a few books here and there.
How’d you find the right spot for the shop?
We were just in town visiting, scouting out different locations, and we were having a bite to eat at Fattie’s in Eagle Rock and stumbled across this empty storefront. We inquired, and the landlord is this super cool guy. We signed a lease that week we were here. We weren’t really planning on it.
What do you have planned for the grand opening this Saturday?
So far we’ve confirmed Cosmonauts, an Orange County garage-psych band, Francis Harold and the Holograms, a weird punk band from Huntington Beach, and then we have Amanda and Brit from Not Not Fun DJing. And some other special stuff, to be announced.
Got any secret killer records you’re gonna drop just for opening day?
We may unload some out of print Permanent rarities—a few test pressings—loads of used records that I’ll be selling from my personal collection—I’ve collected over the last ten or fifteen years—lots of rare and out-of-print stuff and a bunch of new releases, stuff we’ve been digging in the Chicago store. Lots of goodies that have never been for sale before, all available at the same time.
Is crate digging culture in L.A. different from in Chicago?
No, I think it’s the same across the planet. Once you get bit by the vinyl bug, you’re in for life! There’s rabid record collectors here, just as much as anywhere else in the world, especially major metropolitan areas. Aside from the fact that there’s probably a lot more people who spend a lot more time indoors in Chicago, it’s probably about the same as L.A. We’ve already run into loads of people who’ve popped in to the shop and said how stoked they are that we’re moving into the neighborhood. We figured L.A. was great anyway and Eagle Rock’s an awesome shop to have a store. I don’t think there are any major differences but that remains to be seen—I’ve only lived here for three weeks!
If you had an unlimited budget, who’s record collection would you buy for the shop?
Oh wow—I’ve never considered that before. Johan Kugelberg is a notorious collector who comes to mind. Byron Coley—he and Thurston Moore both have crazy collections that span four or five decades. Those two guys and Kugelberg. Clint Simonson from De Stijl records has bitchin’ collection. I’ve never thought in those terms though cuz I bet you those guys wouldn’t sell their records for anything. But if money was no thing, and those guys were willing to sell, those are the guys I’d approach first.
What collector in L.A. do you most want to meet?
I don’t know a whole lot of guys in L.A. It’s such a great distance between Chicago and L.A. and I’ve only been to a handful of record fairs out here and haven’t really reached out or gotten acquainted with too many collectors here yet. I know the Shaws live here, Greg and Suzy from Bomp, and I bet their record collection is amazing.
What record in your personal collection are you most proud to own?
Oh wow, that’s a really good question. Shit. I own thousands of LPs and thousands of 45s. I think I should keep it simple and say the test pressing of the very first release we put out on our label—Warhammer 48k’s An Ethereal Oracle. I own lots of rare records but really, that’s the one I’m most proud of. The first thing I ever did on my own, as far as the label’s concerned, and that record just means a whole lot to me in general. I’m really good friends with all those guys and I have been for, shit, ten years? Fifteen years now? Let’s call it ten years; I’m not that old!

PERMANENT RECORDS L.A. OPENS THIS SAT, JUN. 4 AT NOON AT 1583 COLORADO BLVD., LA. VISIT PERMANENT RECORDS.

Download: Mainsail – “Clean Line”

(from the self-titled, self-released album Mainsail available on Amazon, iTunes, and Velvet Blue Music) 

Mainsail makes the kind of music that could be described as “soaring,” and they themselves describe it as “Indie Rock for the Soul Surfer.”  But there’s a little saccharine in that rushing water, and more than a little sun on that surf: songs such as “Clean Line” and “Wilson Pacific Ocean” are sweet, escapist odes to the ocean, and in fact, nearly every song on the album ties into So-Cal’s skies and waves, whether directly extolling their virtues, or using them as metaphors for happiness, sadness, love, and abandon.
 
Maybe it’s just because he recently escaped from Chicago’s icy gales, but in his infatuation with our famous coastline, singer Joel C. Bennett lets our famous undertow carry his songwriting out to sea sometimes,  drowning songs such as “Wilson Pacific Ocean” in trite, predictable lyricism: “Let’s go to the hoooo-cean, and we can cast our cares away…”  Where, we ask knowingly, do we cast such cares?  “Into the sea!”  Of course!  The Pacific is already so full of broken syringes and Palos Verdes Estates sewage, why not throw in vague metaphors as well?
    
To be fair, Bennett’s lingering, Band-of-Horses-esque almost-falsetto works a lot better in arrangements with true Beach Boy harmonies, such as, well, “Better Days.” And the beachy love and aural references to surf rock actually attain a kind of plaintive cohesion in the last track on the album, “Wave Hymn.” Though Bennett is singing about an endless wave, the layers of slide guitar and percussive backing vocals make it one you actually want to ride.  If only the surf wasn’t so dead on the rest of the album.

-Ayse Arf

Download: The Mekons “Dickie, Chalkie And Nobby”

(from Natural out now on Touch And Go)

The Mekons lived Leeds but dreamed Texas and Tennessee and after finding their feet in first-wave punk songs like “Where Were You,” they left the world of Rough Trade for the open range. They are working on a new album tentatively called 100 Years and singer-guitarist-activist Jon Langford speaks as he takes his dog to the vet. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

Is it true that the son of Donald Rumsfeld is a really big Mekons fan?
Jon Langford (guitar/vocals): That’s a good question. It might be true, but he has not revealed himself to us. I never got to the bottom of that but I heard he was wandering around the clubs of Chicago with a Mekons t-shirt on. Donald Rumsfeld sort of wandered around Chicago as well. He was a congressman from here so he was occasionally spotted in sushi restaurants. And I know people who actually know him and I always wonder what I would do if I actually ran into him.
Do you think you could beat him up? Mekon vs. Rumsfeld?
He’s kind of like some sort of crazy cockroach. You’d probably keep treading on him and he’d just get up and run around.
Do you think that might be an effective way for art and music to provoke social change? By specifically targeting the hearts and minds of the children of the rich and powerful?
I’d like to think something of what we’ve been singing about for the last twenty years may have rubbed off on him—he’d probably want to wrestle his dad to the ground as well, you know? But you know what? I think I know about as much about that as you do. I don’t know. Our songs were never particularly aimed at the sons of the rich and famous.
Where were they aimed?
They weren’t really aimed at anyone. They were aimed at ourselves, I think. Most of the songs we made to sort of please ourselves or to exorcise things that are in ourselves. I think a lot of the Mekons songs are quite sad, which is interesting because we’re not necessarily sad people. I think what’s good about the Mekons is that there’s always been a kind of cushion—the fact that there are a lot of people and we all kind of share the duties. There’s never been one person with the whole burden. A lot of the people in the Mekons have been through quite a lot together. I wouldn’t even say our politics are necessarily the same or our life stories are the same but there’s definitely a shared instinctive feeling about the world. Obviously, or we wouldn’t be doing this project together so long.
What is the essential sadness in the Mekons discography?
Well, we don’t come together and act sad. We come together and have a good time. But the music that comes out is often very—I don’t know, maybe gallows humor? We always try to describe the world we live in and anyone with half a brain would find it pretty difficult to write happy songs all the time.
I’ve heard that they did a neurolinguistic study of various genres of music and that country music is overwhelmingly objectively the saddest type of music they found. Do you think there’s anything to that?
Have you ever heard the music from the Bahamas? There’s some traditional vocal and solo vocal stuff that’s mostly unaccompanied that I think is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. People who are poor and have crap lives will probably make sad music. I guess rich people who have lots of money and an easy life, they might be sad as well—but they probably don’t bother to write songs about their lives. Probably too busy spending their money.
In ‘Big Zombie,’ is the line ‘I’m just not human tonight’ a Chandler reference?
Absolutely. Yeah. It’s an L.A. song and we’ll be playing it. When we kind of started up again in the mid-’80s, we were very interested in Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. We were touring the States a lot and that was our reference for what we thought the States should be like. Dashiell Hammett was our version of San Francisco and Raymond Chandler was our version of L.A. Every time I walked into a room, I’d expect to find a body. Most of the time we didn’t.
What drew you to honky-tonks like Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge when you came to America?
When we first came to the States we got obsessed about music and it was kind of like… most of the cowboy shops we went to seemed to be full of black people, Hispanic people, Asian people and English rock bands. So it was funny—just how you can literally claim a piece of this fantasy mythical America by buying a Stetson or a pair of cowboy boots and then going back home to Leeds and strutting around in your cowboy boots. They’d ask, ‘Where did you get those?’ and I’d say, ‘Aw, I got these in Chicago,’ you know? People would come ’round my house after the pub and I’d be playing Ernest Tubb and Merle Haggard, and these were all people who thought they wanted to go listen to acid-house or something. They thought we’d lost our minds.
There’s a quote from Ernest Tubb I wanted to ask you about. People would say, ‘Aw, Ernest, you’re so flat, anyone could sing the way you can. You just got lucky.’ And he would say, ‘Well, I sing that way on purpose. I want everyone who hears this to think that they could do it. I want them to feel that I’m no different from them.’
Is that from that Peter Guralnick book? Lost Highway? There’s another great quote in there where he says he’s singing for the boys back on the farm but he says by the end of his life the farm wasn’t even there anymore. But he wanted those farm boys to be able to sing his songs. Yeah, that’s a very Mekons-type thing. When I read that, I thought, ‘There is a connection between that and punk.’ It’s been said before that there was a connection between the Mekons and country music and I thought that was ludicrous, but as I listened to that stuff and really began to love it, it became more and more interesting to me. And then to have someone articulate it like that… We always meant the Mekons to be like ‘Anyone can do it.’ Anyone can pick up the guitar. There’s a quote from Mary Harron about the Mekons that kind of sums it up: ‘Rock ‘n’ roll is probably better played by people who can’t play it very well.’ She said the Mekons were the only people to base a band solely on that fact. It was kind of a jab as well as a compliment, but I think that’s true. That really struck a chord with me—I’ve always being drawn to music that was functional rather than virtuoso. Music that kind of has to be made because there was a need to make it.
Who are you thinking of?
Well, actually I was talking to Peter Hammill of Van der Graaf Generator who came to town the other night. I got to hang out with them and I was talking to them about what they were listening to on the bus and they were telling me about Olivier Messiaen who is an avant-garde composer who wrote something called The Quartet for the End of Time while he was in a P.O.W. camp or a concentration camp. As Hammill said, that was music that had to be made. It was a quartet because that’s what he had at the camp and they thought they were going to die, so they wrote this music. I’ve been listening to it and it’s like—you’ve got something as primitive as the Mekons when we first started and then you’ve got Ernest Tubb and reggae music that was there because it was on the street with a message that people could dance to. And then you’ve got Olivier Messiaen which is like music that couldn’t be kept in. It had to come out. It wasn’t anything to do with any commercial desires or all that. It’s just music that had to exist. There’s a lot of music like that and I find that I’m just drawn to it. It was actually great talking to those guys because they’re much older than me. To be sitting on a tour bus with a bunch of old guys drinking wine and talking about things you’ve never heard of—it was really, really cool. Peter Hammill said, ‘Yeah, that’s the secret, as long as you don’t pander.’ ‘No pandering allowed!’ he was shouting. ‘That’s the trouble with all this bloody music nowadays. It’s all just fucking pandering!’ And I thought that was pretty good. That’s what the Mekons do.
Steve Wynn said that it’s better to make a record that is just one person’s favorite in the entire world than to make a record that everyone thinks is just pretty good.
I totally, totally agree with that. I think that something happened to music when the idea was that everyone would like it. I think that’s completely unnatural. When we were on A&M, they told us that 25,000 records sales wasn’t very good and we were like, ‘That’s good enough for us!’ We’d feel very uncomfortable if more than 25,000 people bought our record. That’s more people than ever go to see any of the football teams I supported! But that was a failure. There’s a hierarchy in the music industry where you have all these people floundering around not making a living who are—to me— doing what they should do and doing a good job of it. And then you have these people who managed to hit on the magic formula—finding what it is that everybody wants and it’s all backwards. They should be punished for learning that secret. Paul McCartney should be taken out and punished.
What particular punishment would be appropriate for that?
A good lashing. No, I’m only joking, I’m only joking. Again, the structure of the industry is the problem. That’s what it’s geared to—it’s just not geared to having lots of different types of music for lots of different types of people to enjoy. It doesn’t recognize the fact that people are different—that not everybody wants to listen to the sort of crap that’s on the radio everyday. It’s very hard anywhere in this country when you listen to the radio to find stuff that’s worth listening to. I don’t think that makes me weird.
You said once that ‘society dehumanizes from the top down.’ I’m wondering if that reproduces within pop culture.
Yeah—most of the stuff that I’ve written and the paintings that I’ve made about country and western music, it was kind of about using that as a microcosm for the whole society. The trend is there and you can see it so obviously in what happened to country music. I think that goes through everything. And actually that quote, that’s not me—I didn’t say that. John Peel said that. I might have been quoting him because he said that about ‘God Save the Queen’ when that record came out and everyone was up in arms and he made that quote defending the record. He said it was a pretty simple record and that the message was society dehumanizes from the top down.
I have to commend your memory for quotes.
I know where I pinch all my best stuff from. You know, Peel was a Radio One DJ and to come out with something that profound was pretty powerful. To have somebody in the BBC defending the Sex Pistols when it looked like—when that record came out, you know… they could have been hung from lampposts and the majority of people in the country would have been really pleased. It was a very scary time for a little while.
Have you seen that kind of response to anything else in music?
Ice-T’s ‘Cop Killer’ was kind of interesting as well. It brought up an interesting debate about whether he really wanted to kill a cop or talk about someone else. It brought up the debate about what you can write about. Why is a song always in the first person? People always think when you write a song that it’s you talking. I had that problem singing ‘Cocaine Blues’ which, you know, is a Johnny Cash song. Obviously I’m not someone who takes cocaine and kills people, but it’s still a great song. The history of those songs is old and ancient.
Someone once asked you if there was a light at the end of the tunnel and you said that now that you have kids, you’re going to hijack the train, turn it around and drive it back.
I just felt like a lot of people tell me to shut my mouth because I’m not from here. I’ve got that a number of times. Mostly in hate mail, especially when we were doing the anti-death penalty stuff. I really got some quite extraordinarily vicious and unpleasant stuff. But I just felt like having kids was definitely a galvanizing moment for me. It made me feel like this is when you have to get involved. I can’t just be like non-American anymore and just shrug my shoulders and go, ‘Oh yeah, they’re just all fucking crazy.’ Because I’m one of you now.
What kind of world do you want to build for your children?
We need to dismantle what was created over the last fifty years, really. The food industry for a start. It’s a fucking hideous Frankenstein that’s killing us all, you know? I really believe that. I don’t think I’m some kind of freak. I’m not some kind of hippie vegetarian. Not that there’s anything wrong with hippie vegetarians, to be honest. I was always prejudiced against people who had, like, strong views about things like that. Now it’s kind of like, ‘Fuck, things are really, seriously wrong.’
How do you avoid becoming discouraged?
I see a lot of people feel the same way. I see the election of Obama, which I thought was impossible, you know? I’m encouraged because it wasn’t just me sitting in my bedroom. Wow, that’s change. That’s real serious change. A lot of sort of naysaying cynics that I know were like, ‘Aw, it’s never going to happen in America. The only reason this happened is because he’s just the same as the other people.’ I don’t think he is, you know? I don’t think he can be. It’s got to change, you know?

THE MEKONS ON SUN., JULY 26, AT McCABE’S GUITAR SHOP, 3101 PICO BLVD., SANTA MONICA. 9:30 PM / $16 / ALL AGES. MCCABES.COM. AND ON MON., JULY 27, AT THE ECHO, 1822 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8:30 PM / $12-$14 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. VISIT THE MEKONS AT MEKONS.DE OR MYSPACE.COM/THEMEKONS.

Shellac of North America record when they want and tour when they want and defuse all hecklers with the confidence and acumen of thirty-year bomb squad vets. Guitarist/vocalist (and engineer) Steve Albini speaks now 36 hours after returning to America. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

In an interview you had with the Boston Phoenix, you explained how Shellac gets caught in these conversational ‘loops,’ like fake Italian or ventriloquism—what’s the current loop?
Steve Albini (guitar/vocals): Just recently I discovered that a Canadian hockey fan used the word ‘pylon’ as an insult. It’s a derogatory term for a bad defenseman—‘He’s a pylon,’ meaning you just have to skate around him. I’ve taken to calling just about any idiot a pylon. I think that might develop into other traffic control devices that show up in the lexicon before long.
What was your former go-to term for ‘idiot’?
Wow, there have been so many. In Chicago there’s a particular kind of asshole wearing cargo shorts and generally a white baseball cap and those guys are just called ‘white caps.’ But the thing is that when you run into one of those you really can’t call them anything else.
The trick those guys have is that when they buy the white hats, they run it over a few times with their raised pick-up truck so it looks respectably old and legitimate.
I did not know that. I believe you.
You also said in that interview that you hoped Shellac would be able to insert an insult into the American language—do you think you’ve come close?
Probably not. Those things take so much popular momentum that we don’t really have. We don’t really have that kind of juice in the culture.
But the Internet is designed to propagate this exact kind of thing.
Right, but you need an adorable kitten video to go along with it and we don’t really have that.
What baby animal do you find the most cute?
Oh, there’s just so many—basically any baby animal is adorable.
How about baby humans?
Ah, not so much, but whatever. Whenever one of your friends has a baby, they are always so in awe of this thing that they made that they think it’s adorable and you have to go along because it’s kind of a big deal to make another person. But objectively, all babies look the same.
Is there such thing as an ugly baby?
The ‘baby’ aspect sort of overwhelms anything else.
What’s something that instantly turns you off about a band?
It’s hard to say—there’s so many little intricacies to it. There’s some YouTube clips of a band called Brokencyde and they’re kind of a compendium of all the things that instantly make me hate someone or a band. So basically if you share any trait—apart from something like cell mitosis—if you share any similarity with a band like Brokencyde you’re almost guaranteed to have me not like your band.
What has disappeared from the world in your lifetime that you’re glad to see gone?
There’s currently a kind of nostalgia for a kind of corporate disco music which I thought we were finally done with, but I guess the kitsch engine has to run on something. So a few year ago you might have been able to say that. That kind of bouncy European music they called house—that music disappeared finally. It lasted for a while in a kind of bastardized version in things like NBA trailers and perfume commercials, but it kind of disappeared. That was the only music that was capable of annoying me in the last twenty years. You know how a guy that works in a kitchen develops really leathery hands from handling hot pans and sharp knives? Or carpenters have really calloused hands?
Are you saying you have really leathery taste?
Yeah—my attention span and my hearing. I have developed callouses on my hearing and my sensibilities. A lot of stuff that would have driven me absolutely crazy when I was a teenager, I don’t even hear it. It doesn’t even register. The scar tissue that forms is infinitely tougher than the original mind.
How would you rate your ability to judge a stranger’s character on first meeting?
I’ve gotten a lot better at it since I started doing it every day. Meeting someone in person—it’s a little bit easier than speaking to them over the phone or corresponding with them but there are always some clues in any kind of interaction about whether or not somebody is reliable, honorable or on the level.
What are some of the universal indicators of trouble in the human character?
When you ask someone a direct question and they look upward and to the left or upward and to the right before they formulate their answer, that indicates that they are inventing part of the answer. That means that the answer is not something they know but rather something that they are having to create.
Is this something that you apply at poker games?
Only in the conversational parts—what’s called ‘the meta game.’ The great majority of poker is not the daring psychological battle it’s sometimes presented to be. Most of poker is just counting, simple math, and knowing probabilities of certain situations. But there is a psychological aspect to it. That’s a pretty good example. Another one is when someone is overly specific about trivial details and then unnecessarily general about fundamental elements of a deal. When a promoter tells you that you will be given a certain hotel room and certain kind of catering and that you’ll have this many towels backstage, but then can’t tell you the capacity of the venue or can’t tell you the size of the PA or how many stage hands he’s hired, then you can tell that someone is not speaking from a base of knowledge but is inventing a story that he wants you to go along with.
Has there ever been a show when Shellac was caught at a loss for words by a heckle?
I’m sure there has been. But I’m not super good at everything. That might be one thing that I’m not that good at sometimes. Don’t get me wrong—I’m super good at most things. I tend to not to embark on things where I’m an underdog to be competent. A friend of mine put it much more simply—he said, ‘He’s only interested in doing things that he’s instantly great at.’ I don’t know if this qualifies as great but I’ve hit golf balls three times in my life and the guy that I was walking along with on the golf course—I can’t really say that I was playing golf, but the three times that I’ve hit golf balls, the person that I was with said that I had a good natural swing. So there’s that. And snorkeling.
How does one become super good at snorkeling?
You enjoy it. My girlfriend was born in Honolulu and we go back to Hawaii pretty regularly—I want to say at least once a year. Well, that’s not true. We go there often—I don’t know how many times. A lot of places in Hawaii, you can rent snorkeling gear and the first couple times we went I didn’t rent snorkeling gear because I assumed that you had to learn how to do it and you could drown and die and that sort of stuff. It turns out that no, you don’t. You just stick the thing in your mouth and you’re fine. And also swim around for a while and you’ll realize that fish in their natural environment are fucking amazing.
How so?
They’re just super great. They look like they’re having the best fucking time. I’m really captivated by the notion that I’m looking at the fish and he’s hanging out by his house—this is his normal fish environment. And if he wanted to he could just fuck off to China. Start that way and if he didn’t wear out, he would end up in China—how cool would that be?
Does this ruin the experience of going to the aquarium for you—fish prison?
Yeah—I don’t really enjoy aquariums or zoos.
You’ve got kind of a soft spot for animals.
Who doesn’t? Come on. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t have any problem eating them or having them enslaved for farm labor. None of that stuff bothers me in the slightest.
What’s the cutest animal you ever ate?
Squirrels.
Did you shoot them yourself?
Yeah.
Are you a good shot? Deadeye Albini?
Not so great. My dad is a fantastic shot.
And he’s a rocket scientist?
Well, he worked in the aerospace industry for years and in that regard you could call him a rocket scientist, but his major contribution in the last third of his life—he worked in the science of forest fires. He and a very small number of people developed the science out of nothing and he’s the most published scientist in the field. He died a few years ago and there was an award named after him. He was the first recipient of this award called the Ember Award which was for contributions to the science of forest fires, and that award was then named after him. That’s probably what he’s most known for in the scientific community—his work on the incredibly and almost impossibly complex paradigm of forest fires.
What is the crucial conundrum of forest fire behavior?
Well, it was described to me once as a house fire on a freight train in a hurricane. There are so many things going on. There are things happening in forest fires that occur literally nowhere else on Earth. Imagine a fire so big that it creates its own weather and that’s what we’re talking about. And as a result of creating its own weather it can prolong itself or it can germinate by hurling pieces of itself into the rest of the world. It’s incredible. And when you take into consideration all the complexities of just the fuel matter—all the different things, what different things is it burning, how wet are they, what’s the ambient temperature—the forest fire changes all of that as well. It’s almost like a living thing, a forest fire.
Have you ever planned to incorporate or maybe already incorporated the science of forest fires into Shellac’s music?
Well, there’s a book by Norman Maclean called Young Men and Fire which is about the Mann Gulch fire in Montana, which he witnessed when he was a teenager. There was an incident that happened in the Mann Gulch fire where some expert smoke jumpers—outdoor fire fighters who parachute into the middle of a fire to put it out—some smoke jumpers burned to death on a ridge and one of the party survived. The way he survived was that they were part way up a hill in the middle of a draw—a shallow one-ended valley—and they saw the fire break around the base of the hill and they could see the fire coming up the hill at them. All but one of the firefighters tore ass up the hill and tried to outrun the fire and crest the hill. One of the guys stopped, opened his pack, pulled out some matches and set fire to the grass in front of him, creating a large fire which he then jumped into so he was in the middle of this grass fire as the grass fire was burning around him. He just curled up into a ball in the middle of this fire that he just started. His intuition was that if he burned out the fuel in the immediate area, then the big fire would go around that area because it would already be burned. He survived the fire and the guys who tried to outrun the fire didn’t—they all got burned to death. And when somebody burns to death it isn’t like, ‘Boom! You’re dead.’ What happens is your flesh cooks and your blood curdles and the fat in your body renders and your skin breaks and all these things happen and it takes a very long time to die.
Do you think that’s one of the worst ways to go?
Oh hell yeah. That would be number one of how not to die.
What do you think is number two?
I don’t know—maybe being thrown into a very slow woodchipper. Anyway, the long and the short of it was—this fire and this single event made a very deep impression on Norman Maclean and he wrote a book about it called Young Men and Fire and there’s a line in a Shellac song called ‘The Guy Who Invented Fire’ that says, ‘I’m going to invent a fire / I’m going to lay down in it’ and that’s directly stolen from Norman Maclean’s book. The reason that I mention that book and Norman Maclean is that he was a friend of my father and he was a scientific consultant on that book and he actually is mentioned in the book because the book is about Norman Maclean as an old man, revisiting this fire and his memory. He goes back to the location of the Mann Gulch fire and he retraces his steps of these guys that went up the hill and burned to death and he actually finds little artifacts. There’s kind of a touching scene where one of the guys is really badly roasted. One of the things that happens when you’re roasted is you get an insatiable thirst. They had packed their provisions with them and one of the things that they packed in their provisions were cans of potatoes that were packed in brine. At one point this guy is doomed and dying and cooked but he’s beseeching the other guys that he is with to give him something to drink because he just can’t take it anymore. So this guy opens a can of potatoes and lets him drink the brine out of the can of potatoes. And Norman Maclean finds this fucking rusted can in precisely the spot where that must have happened and it’s a really chilling moment in the book. So anyway—I don’t know what we were just talking about to bring me to the potatoes but it’s an incredible book and Norman Maclean was an old man trying to make some sense of this thing that’s been haunting him his whole life. My dad kind of helped out with his understanding the general behavior of forest fires. I came to Chicago at the same time that came out—to go to school at Northwestern and at the time Norman Maclean was the head of the English Department a the University of Chicago.
What’s the most affecting historical site you’ve ever visited?
Maybe Wounded Knee. I’m trying to remember if I’ve actually been to Wounded Knee. I want to say Wounded Knee.
Nothing in Eastern Europe?
I have to say, it’s weird driving through some place like Zagreb and seeing buildings with the corners blown off. Or like you realize that you’re at this nightclub in Serbia and that big burly motherfucker at the door probably did some shit during the war. Shit like that. I think that has more of an effect on me than the location. Yeah, like you see somebody and you’re like… you know? Or for example—being somewhere inland in Germany—and this was more true in the ‘80s when the Wall was still up—and you’d see a guy old enough that he must have been of fighting age during World War II. So then you have to wonder, ‘All right—were you a Nazi? Were you a soldier? Were you some kind of apparatchik? During the most important period in history, what was your role? What did you do? What did you see?’ That kind of shit.
If you ever got time to write a book, what would be worth exploring at length?
I don’t think I have a novel in me. I have written short fiction for my whole life, as a diversion. I have a feeling I would probably just carry on doing that. I have written some technical articles about the recording scene and I write pretty regularly on the forum for the studio and I think that satisfies my writing impulse. I’m a terrible correspondent otherwise so I guess that must satisfy me. At any rate, I don’t subscribe to the David Bowie school of creativity where because I’ve made records I am therefore also an actor and a poet and a painter. I think that’s hubristic, if I may use a word that I may have invented. But I really don’t feel like that’s necessary. I have a perfectly satisfying outlet for my creative impulse—the band is perfectly satisfying to me. So I don’t feel like I need to do anything else. And also—I don’t like admitting this because I think all musicians are generally intelligent people and well-spoken and in coversation are even articulate—but I think almost all of the books that I’ve read by musicians and all of those that I’ve even flipped through at the book store, whether it be one of Jimmy Buffett’s novels or one of Nick Cave’s or Lydia Lunch’s or Henry Rollins’—virtually all of them have been atrocious. Just embarrassing writing. I think the one exception is the stuff I’ve read that Eugene Robinson has written. He’s writing about fighting—I’m not a fighter. I don’t have any interest in fighting. I don’t think that it’s a noble or worthwhile or rewarding pursuit. I’m not entertained by it. I think it’s in every sense barbaric and I’m not interested in it, whether it’s dogs fighting or people fighting—I’m not interested in it. But his writing about fighting is so matter-of-fact and so self-aware that you can’t help but be completely charmed by it and I think he’s great. I also think his sensibilities and sense of humor are akin to mine and I enjoy reading stuff like that. He’s written a bunch of articles, some of which have been collected and expanded in a book called Fight. The hardcover of it is kind of hard to read because it was made as sort of a coffee-table item rather than a piece of literature, but it’s a great book—a great read. And also his band blog for Oxbow is great reading because he gets into some stuff on tour. It’s kind of weird that he does inspire this kind of challenge-match mentality with the bigger lunkheads in his audience.
What do you think is your great topic—something you’re endlessly fascinated by?
There’s like a half a dozen things. Generally my areas of interest outside of being in a band are probably cooking, billiards, poker, general superficial scientific interest—nothing academic but at the speed of the Discovery Channel.
Have you ever been to El Bulli?
No, although I have to say—intuitively I’m kind of grossed out by molecular gastronomy. There’s something about the industrial-process element of it that I have a hard time embracing. A lot of the sensations and a lot of the things that happen in molecular gastronomy are inevitably unique because it’s never occurred to anybody to put sea urchin pureé inside of a caramel shell. So of course they’re going to be unique experiences and as an eater, I enjoy unique experiences—I have a very expansive palate. But something about the amount of effort and convolution of the processes that need to occur in order to get to the finished product makes it seem unsatisfying. It makes it seem like that one bite of frozen carrot foam can’t possibly have been worth the three days of preparation and the team of assistants. There is something about that fundamental inefficiency that galls me. It makes it seem grotesque and indulgent and like a gilded toilet or something. I’m in this weird quandary. I would very much like to have that experience—I would very much like to respect it, but it is so indulgent and so reserved for the truly decadent that it’s like boutique heroin. It makes me hate the people who are into it. If there was like a DIY version where people could do it without wasting 90% of the ingredient to get the two drops of salmon essence—if there was a way that it could be made more like normal eating, but still have these unique sensational experiences… If there was a way that it could be made more normal so that it wouldn’t seem so indulgent and pampered and fucking Monopoly money, then I would be into it.
How much of that is what exactly people are paying for?
I don’t know. There are a couple of restaurants like that in Chicago that have these things like laser-grilled packing peanuts, but I’ve never eaten at any of them. I have friends who have and they truly enjoy the experience and say that they were breathtaking, memorable, life-changing meals. I believe them, but there’s something grotesque about it that makes me—in the weakest part of my personality, the reactionary part of my personality—makes me hate my friends a little bit for that. It makes me think that they’re creepy and I don’t like feeling that way about my friends. Because these are the same friends that can go to the ballpark with me and have some churros and a hot dog and enjoy that. They’re the same friends that appreciate the things that I do, like a fresh peach. What the hell is wrong with a fresh peach? It’s thirty cents and it’s awesome. So I don’t like feeling that way about them, but I can’t help myself.
Is this because you’re worried that there’s some tiny chance that you could become some totally decadent hedonist?
You know what? I thank Christ—assuming that He existed and was not a historical metaphor—that I have never had money. Because if I ever had money I would do stupid shit like that. I would come to think of private jet travel as normal. I’m that lazy and that weak. I’m pretty sure that it’s a normal human failing that I would fall victim to.
So you’ve been forced into principle by financial circumstance?
Exactly. When you’re dead broke, you can’t help but be honorable.

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Singer isn’t easy on expectations, described best as a blending of spastic, freebase jazz with a hint of Three Mile Pilot.  The band is full of the best Windy City noisemakers, including bassist Robert Lowe of 90 Day Men and guitarist Todd Rittman and drummer Adam Vida both of U.S. Maple.  Rittman’s delicate guitar started soft but turned into a trainwreck set to feedback (looped over and over again). Lowe’s wandering bass lines only came to a stop when he’d harmonize with his band mates like a barber-shop quartet, as all the members temporarily ended their ear-splitting jams and sustained a beautiful, calming accord. The tranquility was fleeting, though, as Vida quickly chimed in with his fast, furious drumming, driving the band back into a noise jam that once again abruptly stopped as Rittman mumbled a few inaudible words to the mic. Very avant-garde.

— Carlos Villarreal