Download: Saint Vitus “Look Behind You”

(from Heavier Than Thou available from SST)

Saint Vitus has held a special place in my heart since I first heard ‘Look Behind You’ on the eclectic and inexpensive SST compilation The Blasting Concept Vol. 2. The song is a paranoid trip through hell—an immediate stand-out. It rocked like Black Sabbath—who, thanks to my older brother, I had loved since before I got a real skateboard—and it also had a palpable DIY pulse like Black Flag, who were of increased interest to me after I got a real skateboard. They had a killer logo and made even cooler records while unknowingly creating the sound of a genre of heavy metal that had yet to be named. I spoke with Saint Vitus guitarist and founding member Dave Chandler from his home in New Orleans prior to Saint Vitus’ return to the city where they started. We talked about heavy tunes, getting stoned, punkers, an Obsessed tape I’d like to hear and two-year-old headbangers. Dave Chandler is also not only a forefather of the entire genre of doom metal, he is also one of the happiest guys having the most fun playing it—often with his teeth. This interview by Kurt Midness.

Perhaps you are familiar with the debate among blues dudes about whether or not one must have lived a hard life to play the blues. Must someone be bummed out to play doom metal?
Dave Chandler (guitar): Not necessarily. It kinda helps with lyrics to be angry or depressed. I’m happy now. When I was writing for Saint Vitus, I was more pissed and bummed or wrote songs about being fucked up. I’m writing new stuff now and I’m really happy—but people will probably still see it as being pissed off and bummed out. I do believe bands should have to pay their dues and do it yourself. Every band should have to live in a van for a year. Bands shouldn’t just get a career in music handed to them, which seems to be the way it works now.
Should one be stoned in order to play stoner rock?
Dave Chandler: Nah. Not necessarily. To me that is a vague term. ‘Stoner rock’ to me—that is just rock. I think someone thought they were clever when they coined that term. I do think all music sounds better when you’re stoned, but that’s just me. With me getting stoned helped out, but not necessarily to play doom. Some people get stoned and play jazz. Getting stoned opens your mind and you become more creative. Some people will argue that. Most people I know that play doom metal get stoned—not a lot of straight edgers.
There are a lot of different names describing a lot of different musical genres these days. What do you call Saint Vitus?
Dave Chandler: Doom metal—definitely. We played for years and never heard of that. Then I heard us referred to as ‘doom metal’ in Europe and I thought, ‘Yeah, that fits.’ My mom used to call it funeral music. I think if you didn’t know anything about Saint Vitus, but were told that we are doom metal, you’d have an idea how we sound.
Now that Saint Vitus are seen as progenitors—and masters—of an old school doom metal sound, have you ever thought that the old Saint Vitus credo of ‘born too late’ should actually be changed to ‘born too early’?
Dave Chandler: No, not really—we’re still born too late. We’ve just outlasted everybody. The few fans we had from back then grew up and had kids and now their kids are listening to Saint Vitus and listening with their friends. And there are a lot of new fans that come to the shows. I’ve literally seen a two-year-old at a show with little earplugs giving me the metal horns hand sign.
Is now a better time to be in a doom metal band?
Dave Chandler: I guess I’m not sure. Doom metal to me is an underground genre, but the underground is a lot bigger than it used to be. Here in New Orleans, doom metal is extremely popular, but you go somewhere else and people aren’t into it at all, so it depends on where you are. There is really only one band to play doom metal at an arena-sized level and that’s Black Sabbath.
Having cribbed the name Saint Vitus from the song ‘St. Vitus Dance,’ I’d think Black Sabbath was obviously an early influence. What other heavy shit were you into when you started the band?
Dave Chandler: I was really into Judas Priest, but everybody was into different stuff. [Drummer] Armando [Acosta] was really into Rush, [bassist] Mark [Adams] was really into Lynyrd Skynyrd and I was really into Judas Priest and Mahogany Rush… Alice Cooper, Blue Cheer. That’s how you would get together back then. If you were into that kind of rock, you would hang out. Mark and I have been friends since high school listening to this stuff, so we started a band. When I was real young it was different stuff that got me interested in music—stuff like the Monkees made me want to be a musician. When I started playing guitar, the first group that really inspired me was Alice Cooper. I was already listening to Black Sabbath, but it was Alice Cooper that made me really want to start a band.
Did you identify Saint Vitus as a metal band when you started?
Dave Chandler: Pretty much—back then there was just heavy metal and that was it. Otherwise you were a hard rock or blues band or a pop band or something else. When we hooked up with the punk scene in L.A., we called it hardcore metal. Back then there weren’t a lot of bands that you would call metal. Bands like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest were called heavy metal, but a band like Montrose or Led Zeppelin was considered hard rock or hard rock blues. There were only a couple bands you’d call heavy metal.
Would you say that Saint Vitus—like Metallica—didn’t find a lot to like or support about the L.A. metal scene back then?
Dave Chandler: As soon as we played our first show, we knew we didn’t fit in. We knew we didn’t want to do the whole Hollywood hair metal bullshit. They didn’t want anything to do with us either, so we stopped playing in L.A. You end up playing where people want you to play.
How did you get involved with Greg Ginn and SST?
Dave Chandler: Early on we would play anywhere that would book us. In those days bands did everything themselves. You would make your own flyers and pass them out at other bands’ shows to try to get people to come to your show. There was a band called Overkill that was on SST. They were one of the first metal-punk crossover bands. They were handing out flyers at one of our shows and they asked us to open one of their shows. I asked if they could get the dudes in Black Flag to check us out because I was real into Black Flag. Greg Ginn and Chuck Dukowski came to the show and they liked us. Greg asked if we wanted to do a record for SST and we were like, ‘Yeah!’ and it went from there.
How did the punk scene in L.A. respond to Saint Vitus? Did you bum out folks that came to pogo and slam dance?
Dave Chandler: At the first show they basically ignored us. They couldn’t care less. Mark did something that pissed them off and they did the typical punk thing and started trashing us. I think the punkers thought of us as a typical LA metal band. We confused them, though, when we played the really slow stuff because they were used to hearing fast music. We gained their respect eventually because we never stopped playing when they hated us. It kinda turned around and eventually we played only punk shows in L.A. Heavy metal people in L.A. never liked us.
Is Wino the new guy in the band again?
Dave Chandler: No—actually, we have a new drummer. Henry Vasquez. [Vocalist] Wino’s an old man like the rest of us.
Did you know about the Obsessed when Wino joined the band?
Dave Chandler: We had a mutual friend that gave us a tape and we thought he’d work out. We liked his voice for sure, so it was just a matter of whether or not we would get along.
Are you an L.A. native?
Dave Chandler: I grew up in Lomita which is near San Pedro. That’s where Mark still lives.
How did you end up in New Orleans?
Dave Chandler: I met a girl that was living in Los Angeles temporarily who’s from here. I’d been wanting to get out of Los Angeles, so we moved out here and got married.
What does your dentist have to say about you playing guitar with your teeth?
Dave Chandler: It was really funny when I chipped my tooth one time. He told me it files down your teeth, so after a while you have to get caps. I chipped one he had worked on and he said, ‘What happened to my tooth?’ I was like, ‘That was my tooth.’ Then I told him what happened and he was like, ‘Jeez!’
What made you want to add that to your repertoire?
Dave Chandler: I’ve never been the greatest classic guitar player. I couldn’t just play something like Steve Howe, so I started doing as many tricks as I could. It looks good and it’s fun to do. The audience really likes it when I do it. That’s the main thing—it’s fun.
Is it easier on the teeth if you tune down?
Dave Chandler: No, I didn’t notice a difference. We tune down a half step because Wino’s voice is a little deeper. It’s hard as hell to do, but it’s a lot of fun. I got to learn it all over again to play these shows—but we wouldn’t be doing this at all now if we weren’t having fun.

SAINT VITUS (WITH WINO) WITH SAVIOURS, TOTIMOSHI, ANCESTORS AND CROWNED BY FIRE ON THUR., JAN. 28, AT THE ULTRAVIOLET SOCIAL CLUB, 2684 LACY ST., LOS ANGELES. 7 PM / $29.50 / ALL AGES. ULTRAVIOLETSOCIALCLUB.COM. VISIT SAINT VITUS AT SAINTVITUSREUNION.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/STVITUS.

Download: Om “Cremation Ghat II”

(from God Is Good out Tue., Sept. 29, on Drag City)

Al Cisneros revived Om with Grails drummer Emil Amos and release the megalithic God Is Good this week on Drag City. Chess-playing sunrise-watching Cisneros discusses everything but how his drummer’s name is an anagram for ‘SOMA LIME.’ This interview by Dan Collins.

It’s just two guys making all that racket, right?
Al Cisneros: Always. Me and Emil. He joined in April 2008.
Changing drummers in a two-man band is a 50% line-up change. How has having Emil in the band changed things?
Al Cisneros: He adds a life and an energy to the group. His style and the fluidity of his playing have allowed the very premise of the two-piece band to actualize, which is to have a dialogue between the two elements. And he’s also a songwriter, and so we’ve had prolific tense and positive collaboration, where ideas from one of the other will reflect off me or him, and it results in a higher outcome than we would have been able to arrive at individually. I feel like what we’ve done on this album God Is Good has actually most matched up the original concept to how it turned out in the end.
From concept to execution was pretty straight?
Al Cisneros: It was beautiful. It felt like we were being guided. Parts would just appear, and we would just know. We would get this charge. When the momentum goes into its own orbit, the songs, the whole experience carries with this vibration. The entire process of this recording was like this from the beginning until its here. We even have plans for some songs for some splits for 2010.
You guys have been known to play for hours at time. You played a show in Jerusalem for five hours straight. That’s longer than some Warhol films!
Al Cisneros: That was in December of 2007. That show was totally unique. Many of our sets go very long, but that one specifically… it was pretty overwhelming, being in the region and having been to some of the sites locally prior to performing that night and going to the Dead Sea. We were there on the first or second day of Hanukkah at the Western Wall—seeing so many pilgrims doing their vespers. I was able to go to Golgotha and see that. It was incredibly intense, and by the time we were in the middle of songs, it was definitely a different experience. The show went into a morning, and it was sort of an offering of gratitude in a sense for me. And the audience was with every note of the performance. Nothing like it will probably ever happen again. It was really beautiful. It was overwhelming.
Were you extending old songs or coming up with new material on the spot?
Al Cisneros: Both. Things were extended—on their own it felt like—but were just readily there. It didn’t feel like it went on that long. It was a personal experience of relativity.
You often speak the language of physics in interviews—in discussions of patterns that are present at the atomic level and repeat throughout nature, and time and numbers show up a lot when you talk. Do you think music taps into that somehow in a way regular life doesn’t?
Al Cisneros: They’re one study. There’s no differentiation between music and life in that way. Our songs aren’t preconceived in a numerical pattern or sequence of numbers. Those are found through analysis of the work later, maybe, but they’re definitely more of an emotional response of… I wouldn’t even say the ‘authoring’ of the parts, I’d say the ‘editing’ of the parts. Because the parts seem to be there already. As a musician, I feel like I discover the parts the way an archaeologist might.
Viktor Shklovsky said that the purpose of art is to ‘make the stone “stony”’ again—taking things out of life and making them fresh and new for the first time. Do you think you achieve something like that in your music?
Al Cisneros: I’ve definitely felt personally what he’s said. That’s good to know—ha ha! I’m learning every time we play music. It’s a study constantly.
Do you think Om is a more ‘serious’ band than your old group, Sleep? Not that Sleep was flippant. But I don’t see any Om album titles like Dopesmoker.
Al Cisneros: The work you’re hearing now is relevant to where we are in our journey now. Sleep expired in ’97, and so the themes and lyrics were from that place in the journey. Om is where I am now. I couldn’t sing about dragons and pot trappings now.
Is it that things are darker—perhaps politically—now?
Al Cisneros: Oh no, I think that it’s the same. Maybe the darkness distributes itself differently in each era, but nothing’s changed.
You went several years between folding Sleep and starting Om. What were you doing with your time? Catching up on your ‘sleep?’
Al Cisneros: I went back to school, and I was working—just studying life. I was constantly hearing songs in that interim—constantly internally working on music in that sense. Playing a lot of personal practice. After Sleep had broken up, I felt eventually dead—not in a positive way. I was uncertain whether I would play an externalized form of music ever again. But the songs created mentally during that interim became incrementally more intense until I had to do it.
In the last couple years, a lot of bands have combined metal with almost space or krautrock. Om seems to be part of that tradition. Even your name evokes a space rock band—like ‘Amon Düül’ more than a metal band.
Al Cisneros: I’m not too versed in that school. I wouldn’t say I’m influenced by that genre, but I definitely have respect for it. I’m not moved by things outside my life, at this point. It’s not why I play music. When I was growing up in music, of course I had outside influences and outside inspiration constantly—going to shows, listening to records, ingesting that sonic food. But now it’s to a place that’s in there. My record collection is small. And I leave that space intentionally open so that I can use the music that comes up inside me.
Most of the people who speak about music the way you do wind up, it seems, playing dissonant noise like La Monte Young or Tony Conrad. But you play something that at its root is always metal. Is there something in you that still wants to rock out?
Al Cisneros: For me personally it’s inescapable in this embodiment, because of how important the first four Black Sabbath records were. The Iommic influence will always be there. It’s an element at this point. It’s like fire, water, Iommi.
Have you ever met him?
Al Cisneros: No. I met Ozzy one time, and gave him my Sleep: Volume II cassette and had him sign a Black Sabbath record. He was promoting some record with Zakk Wylde at the time, so I don’t think they were very pleased. All the records I had were Sabbath records.
The Dio-era Sabbath records weren’t your thing?
Al Cisneros: Those first two Dio-era Sabbath records are iconic, and some of the most perfect metal records ever made! But I didn’t really follow them after Ian Gillan joined the band.
Would you be willing to open for a Dio or Ozzy-helmed version of Sabbath?
Al Cisneros: If we were ever given an opportunity to open for any line-up of Iommi and Butler, it would be the highest honor and privilege.
Even if your record collection is small, do you have a favorite band now? Maybe a favorite L.A. band? Who do you play with down here? Who do you love?
Al Cisneros: Of course Big Business. I saw a band a year ago there called Tweak Bird that I enjoyed.
Hell yeah! We had them on our poster. Are you guys having fires up there near San Francisco like the ones we’re having this week?
Al Cisneros: I don’t want to talk about that stuff!
What do you want to talk about?
Al Cisneros: If you want to talk about the new album God Is Good, that would be great.
Okay—what was your personal favorite song off the album?
Al Cisneros: Oh, man, that’s a hard one, because I feel this album is totally balanced! There’s four songs—there’s four mountaintops. There isn’t a valley on this album for me! I’ve only felt that way in my life before once, with Sleep in 1991 on a demo, and part of 1992 finishing it as an actual album with the thing that became Sleep’s Holy Mountain. That also shared that same thing where it felt the songs were manifesting in this way that was beyond yourself. Fast-forwarding so many years, this was the same experience. This visit comes and takes all the things that you’ve prepared and puts them where they need to go. I’m so grateful to be a participant in it.
That sounds very biblical. Was that inspired by your trip to Jerusalem? I wondered about the title.
Al Cisneros: It’s a continuous theme in all the work of this band. The first album was called Variation On a Theme and essentially God Is Good is a variation on the theme. Or the other records are variations on the theme God Is Good. You can look at it from both perspectives. Same subject, essentially. All of the subject matter and all of the lyrics—all of the verses—tap into that same summary point.
You’ve said your music was often emotional, but it sounds like since the start, you’ve had a game plan.
Al Cisneros: No, each one is its own thing. They continue in sequence.
Not like Queen’s Day at the Races and Night at the Opera?
Al Cisneros: Oh God—ha ha ha! Definitely not!

OM WITH LICHENS AND TWEAK BIRD ON FRI., SEPT. 25, AT THE ECHOPLEX, 1154 GLENDALE BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8:30 PM / $15 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. OM’S GOD IS GOOD IS OUT NOW ON DRAG CITY. VISIT OM AT OMVIBRATORY.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/VIBRATIONSONATHEME.

Download: The Sonics “Strychnine”

(from Here Are The Sonics! available now on Norton)

The Sonics weren’t pioneers so much as cavemen—the first humans to discover tools, fire and the absolute rudiments of chemistry. Their original ‘60s songs still sound wild and feral today, and their debut Here Are The Sonics! devours most of the million punk rock records that timidly followed it. This will be their first Los Angeles-area show ever. This interview by Dan Collins.

When was the last time you guys played the Los Angeles area?
Larry Parypa (guitar/vocals): I don’t think we ever did. We recorded down there a bunch. We went to the Whisky a Go Go and the Turtles and the Doors were there, before they got really popular.
Gerry Roslie (vocals/organ): We saw Ike and Tina Turner! It was extremely happening down there. We were like wide-eyed country boys.
A lot of L.A. bands really emulated the Beatles. But you guys didn’t seem to be Anglophiles.
LP: We loved the Beatles, and we even played some of their songs, but in no way did we try to emulate the Beatles. We were a very minor, dark sounding group for those days.
GR: We’d try to do a pretty song, and it’d just end up getting ‘nice and rough!’
Rob Lind (sax/harmonica/vocals): We loved the Kinks. We actually traveled with them and opened a number of shows for them.
LP: We played the way that we played, which was without a whole lot of technique, and real hard. A live performance—I mean, the room would almost breathe because it was so powerful. Knowing that we weren’t masterful musicians or anything, knowing that we weren’t a vocal group, we were there to pound it out. It was our style. Nobody was doing 1-3-4 progressions, real minor progressions. And they weren’t singing about the topics we sang about. And nobody was screaming!
You both had brothers in the band. Did Larry and Andy ever fight like Ray and Dave Davies did?
GR: When didn’t they? They had some real sessions. We were heading down around the Portland area, and Larry had a brand new Buick, and had his radio on real loud, and me and Andy were in the back seat. Andy was like, ‘Turn that volume down back here at least!’ And finally Andy had enough getting Larry to do it, and he was drinking a bottle of grape pop, and he poured it down Larry’s speakers while the car was going down the freeway, and the speakers go ‘bloooblublublublublublublu!’ And he pulled over, and I think they were just about ready to go to blows right there on the side of the freeway. Andy was always on Larry’s case for playing too loud.
Why did you decide to scream about things like drinking strychnine? It seems like that would kill you.
GR: Well, I’m kind of crazy by nature. I do crazy things and think of crazy things. But I’m not dangerous—heh heh. Honest, judge!
RL: The PA systems were normally pretty bad. Sometimes we just had metal horns. And so Gerry started screaming so he could hear himself.
GR: It’s a wonder I’ve got a voice left! I screamed myself silly. I was inspired by the voices of Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis of course. I liked their energy, but I don’t remember anybody doing witchy stuff. It’s just a crazy, psychotic thing. After we got going, there did start to be crazy, witchy things, like Ozzy. Everything was kind of like, ‘love and marriage, la la la la la,’ and I went ‘Nah! That’s not dirty enough! That’s not the way I feel!’
A lot of your songs seem to be about revenge—particularly upon some girl! Was there a particular relationship in your life where you’re like ‘I’m going to get even with her and write a song about it?’
GR: Do you have a couple hours, my friend? Who hasn’t been screwed over—guys or girls?
Do you secretly hope to yourself that some day, that girl is going to walk into a record store and see a Sonics poster and think to herself, ‘I blew it!’?
GR: Oh, yeah, I do hope that happens! That would be sweet!
You guys are often cited as the original punk band. Did you feel a kinship with bands like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols?
RL: The Clash, I thought they were hard-rocking gods. The Sex Pistols, I didn’t like a whole lot of the stuff they did, but I liked their attitude, and every once in a while I’d hear one of their songs and go ‘Whoa, that’s good. Way to go, guys!’
LP: After the late ‘60s, I didn’t listen to music much. If I did, it was probably more country.
RL: Yeah, more the Seattle guys—that’s really where garage rock started with us, and it was like Nirvana, and Pearl Jam, and Mudhoney, and Screaming Trees, and Alice and Chains—it was kind of like those guys were our sons! We were real proud of them.
Let’s talk about the earlier Northwest scene. It seems like the first breakout bands were instrumental combos like the Ventures and the Frantics.
RL: The Frantics and the Ventures and Paul Revere kind of predated us. I think one of the first rock songs I ever heard was ‘Walk, Don’t Run,’ and I thought that was the coolest thing ever.
LP: God, the Frantics were just a fantastic group! Even today, they really stand up. The first interest I ever had in guitar was Duane Eddy—actually it was ‘Rumble’ by Link Wray, but then Duane Eddy had a song out that was all instrumental, and just really got me stimulated to want to play guitar. Not long after that, the Ventures came out with their stuff, and I tried to learn every song on the Ventures album. Another band that was more regional was the Wailers. They came out with instrumentals that had much harder rhythms than what the Ventures were doing, but then they got Rockin’ Roberts, and Gail Harris, and they would do vocals.
I used to have their album Live at the Castle. Did you ever play at the Castle in Tacoma?
LP: Yeah! In fact, we turned down Jimi Hendrix there, before he was the Jimi Hendix. He came and wanted to sit in, and we told him to get lost! It was a big club—a big dance spot for the Seattle area. You’d maybe get a thousand kids in there. There was a place called the Crescent Ballroom in Tacoma, where the Wailers played a lot. It’s like the first time I ever played there—I was 14 or 15, and probably didn’t have a clue about what I was doing. Lesley Gore came through town and for some reason, my brother [Andy] and I were part of the backup group for her. We did that with the Shangri-Las also, and we just ruined them! We knew we were going to back them up, but we didn’t learn their songs! Their songs had a lot of breaks in them, and we’d play right through them.
RL: The lead singer of the Shangri-Las said something snarky about us. So next time we played with them, we made fun of them. They were doing ‘Leader of the Pack,’ and Gerry was riding his piano like a motorcycle, and I was down on my knees, being like, ‘No, Danny, please please don’t go!’ We just humiliated them. You don’t come to Seattle and trash the Sonics! So they said they’d never play with us again.
We interviewed Mary Weiss last year. Do you want to tell her publicly that you’re sorry?
LP: We’re sorry! We played in Barcelona last year, and she was also on the bill. And she remembered! Oh, yeah!
RL: We smoothed things over. She’s playing with the guy from the Smithereens, Dennis, and we drank a lot of Scotch in the hotel in Barcelona, and we sat and chatted with Mary and her husband. Things are fine now.
How about Paul Revere and the Raiders? Any bad grudges there you want to settle? Like, who played ‘Louie Louie’ better?
RL: Oh, I think we did! I don’t think there’s any question!
Did you get just a little pissed off when the Raiders got to be on TV and in Teen Beat and you guys didn’t?
RL: Not at the time. I used to know Paul Revere, and Paul is the epitome of a businessman. The problem with Northwest rock ‘n’ roll bands—with the exception of the Ventures who broke out and became worldwide—was that us and the Wailers got trapped in the Northwest.
LP: We didn’t even think too much about what we were doing musically or where we were going. We’d hardly ever practice or anything. We would throw our instruments in the van maybe Sunday night after doing some weekend stuff, and wouldn’t pull them out again until we’d play again. We were more interested in whether we could get girls into the motel rooms that night.
It was kind of the cusp of the Summer of Love! Did you guys get to have drug orgies?
LP: We’d have the bathtub full of beer and stuff—to try to ply them with liquor. That really was a key objective. The music was just a vehicle to get us in some parties! You’d hit the road in summers, just playing one-night-stands all over the place. That was an exciting way to spend your teenage life!
The Meters recorded a live album on the Queen Mary—are you guys planning on recording one there too?
RL: No, we’re not doing that. We’re actually planning on going back into the studio in July. All new material. We need to get new stuff out.
LP: We don’t know what’s going to happen because we don’t practice. We go months and don’t touch our instruments. For this show we’re going to get together for an hour and a half at my house before going to L.A. and run through the songs again just so we can make sure we remember them. And sometimes we don’t!
I’ve heard a couple cuts from your previous 1972 reunion, which Norton added as a bonus on the Sonics Boom album. It sounds even more hard than your sixties recordings. How did you guys resist the urge to get all bluesy like Foghat?
RL: We never sat there and scratched our heads and said ‘What could our gimmick be?’ We always played real hard. Larry played guitar as hard as he could. Bob Bennett played drums as hard as he could. Jerry screamed and banged on the piano. I tried to play sax the way Larry played guitar. I tried to play as hard-dirty-nasty as I could. We used to play dances in armories or big roller rinks, where we’d have three-four-five thousand people. And we didn’t want people standing around with their arms folded staring at us. We wanted people to start dancing immediately. What a lot of bands would do is blow two or three songs and get the level right and then get into it. We wanted to get into it as soon as we hit the stage, so we came out blasting from the get-go! And that’s exactly what we do now. We are going to come out blastin’ and attempt to blow the place up.
GR: We don’t tone it down! We don’t try to blow people’s heads off, but… well, yeah, we might try to blow people’s heads off. What the heck?
Ar the end of your career, suddenly a basketball team starts up in your own town and calls itself the ‘Supersonics.’ Did you feel your name had been usurped?
LP: We thought it would be good publicity to sue them, even though we’d lose—just to say, ‘Hey, the Sonics are suing the Sonics!’
GR: It was kind of a shock! But we were out of the business. But now they’re gone, and we’re back!

THE SONICS WITH THE FUZZTONES, THE WOGGLES, THE VOODUO, GIZELLE, THE NEW FIDELITY AND MANY MORE ON SAT., JUNE 6, AT THE INK-N-IRON FESTIVAL AT THE QUEEN MARY, 1126 QUEENS HWY., LONG BEACH. DOORS AT 11 AM / BANDS AT NOON / SONICS AT 10 PM / $35-$70 / 7+. COMPLETE FESTIVAL LINE-UP AND MORE INFO AT INK-N-IRON.COM. THE SONICS’ RECORDS ARE AVAILABLE NOW ON NORTON. VISIT THE SONICS AT MYSPACE.COM/THESONICSBOOM.