Guitarist Andy Coronado (Wrangler Brutes, Monorchid, Skull Kontrol) presents here his list of “Beltway Outsiders”—DC-area bands that were never a part of the famous Dischord-and-friends hardcore punk world. He will be DJ-ing tonight at Big Freak.

Pentagram Relentless LP (Pentagram, 1984)

“Probably the 3rd or 4th lineup of this (now) highly revered Virginia band, this record was their first official album more than 13 years after the band had begun. Victor Griffin lays it down thick here. The songs are simple and superb. Pentagram always claimed to be disciples of Blue Cheer, but revisionist history has placed them alongside the likes of Saint Vitus, Trouble, Witchfinder General, etc., as part of some budding doom metal movement that doesn’t seem like it was really happening at all. Each band was an anomaly in its own area. Modern day metal archaeologists have connected the dots and cherry-picked certain aspects and bits of imagery to create a picture of an imaginary seminal scene that seems far fetched and less ridiculous than it actually was. Remember Wino’s leather top-hat on the back of Mournful Cries? Ouch! What about all those titties on the Witchfinder General records? Titfinder General is more like it. The one thing that I can see these bands all had in common is they were making amazing music and no one gave a shit. Until 25 years later. But you get the feeling that, unlike their hardcore peers at the time, they WANTED to be loved. Pentagram woulda sold their souls to be Priest. Today you feel smug satisfaction when you put on a Pentagram record knowing that they were underdogs and that if you’d been there then, you would surely have had the good taste you have today and you’d be on the inside to partake in the “Doom Genesis.” In reality you’d have just been some pesky fan at the show who was getting in the way of Bobby Liebling’s hand on its journey to rummage around your girlfriend’s ass crack as you’re all waiting in line to piss in the one working toilet at the Bailey’s Crossroads version of the Boar’s Nest.”

Nuclear Crayons Bad Pieces … LP (Outside, 1984)

“This is the band from your high school where the only freaks in the entire school formed a band because there was no one else to play with. It’s like, “OK, the “Duckie” guy from Pretty in Pink will play guitar, piano tie guy will play drums, hippie “Neil from The Young Ones” guy will play bass, and goth girl from drama class, you sing.” Nuclear Crayons are that band that make you feel awkward and embarrassed at first but then you quickly realize that you are the asshole and they are all that is beautiful, honest, and devoid of ego. Remember Nightmare of the Elf? “Overpopulation” is the jam, but every song here grows on you. Looking at the pics of them in Banned in DC when I was a teenager, I really just wanted this band to go away. Laura Lynch “Lavoison” was a total boner killer and the rest of the band just stood there yawning. I wanted the Faith to just jump over from the other page and beat the stuffing out of these charlatans. Anyway, they managed to put out a single, an LP and a comp all on their own Outside Records without help from the eye-rolling rein-holders of the DC scene at the time. Bernie Wandel went on to play bass in the first incarnation of the Henry Rollins Band, only to be unceremoniously dumped when Henry poached Andrew Weiss from Gone. A few years later Bernie made an appearance in Henry’s dream journal “Black Coffee Blues,” where he was unceremoniously punched in the fucking face when he came knocking at Henry’s front door.”

United Mutation Rainbow Person EP (DSI, 1985)

“Name: A+….. Art: A++….. Music: ehhh……. When I first heard about UM as a teen, I expected them to fully live up to their name and blow my balls apart. United Mutation? The most bad ass name ever. How could it not be good? I picked up a copy of the Fugitive Family EP and was expecting Void’s little brother. I mean, the record scraped in to becoming a part of history with it’s catalog number: Dischord 10 7/8. The “7/8” is kinda telling … it’s like, “We really don’t wanna besmirch the family name, but you guys are our friends and all—how ‘bout this?” I’ve listened to Fugitive Family 70 times and I couldn’t hum one song to you. Mike Brown’s vocals are distinctly original for the time, somewhere between Pushead’s Septic Death screech and Cannibal Corpse’s cookie monster ridiculousness, but predating both. The art on the record is top notch—I made a shirt I still wear to this day that is graced with the cover image. They made great strides by 1985’s Rainbow Person EP. The music is way better … more complicated and memorable, and Mike Brown’s singing bears a strange resemblance to HR’s at this point. They petered around for a couple more years and then faded away …”

White Boy “Sagittarius Bumpersticker” 7” (Doodley Squat, 1977)

“One of the area’s first “punk” acts, White Boy were the father/son team of James and Glen Kowalski taking the stage names Mr. Ott and Jake Whipp. A notoriously aggressive live act, the band released this record themselves and were cited by many of the DC laureates as an early life-changing experience. The record came out when punk was less defined by a certain sound—it sounds like a bar boogie blues band with a dude singing about how wants to puke all over things. Shock value was trading at an all time high, it seems. The behind the scenes exploits of White Boy proved to be more scandalous than anything Mr. Ott ever sang about when he ended up being thrown in prison for a string of child molestation and child pornography charges. Baaarrrrffffff …”

The Hated No More We Cry EP (Vermin Scum,1985)

“The title of this record couldn’t be worse suited for this particular bunch of Maryland crybabies. Apparently they actually did CRY while they performed live. Guh. These guys fall perfectly betweenZen Arcade-era Husker Du and Rites of Spring, with the whining notched up a bit and the lyrics a bit more hippie-drippie. If you’re a sixteen year old boy, everything they ever did will sound amazing to you, even when they kinda started sounding like Rush at the very end. I’ve never met a woman that could stand this band. What does that say?”

Death Piggy War EP (DSI, 1984)

“Hailing from Richmond Virginia, Dave Brockie’s pre-Gwar outfit Death Piggy surely suffered from the fact that they were trying to be funny guys in a climate that was distinctly humor-unfriendly. Songs with titles like “Ceramic Butt” and “Bathtub in Space” make me chuckle as I type. Brockie’s vocals here are a dead ringer for Gibby Haynes, and the music is less psychedelic than the Buttholes but comes from the same “making fun of punks” school which is always a good thing.”

No Trend When Death Won’t Solve Your Problem LP (Widowspeak, 1985)

“The ultimate DC outsiders, No Trend were notoriously hostile towards the entrenched DC hardcore/Revolution Summer establishment and took their anger nationwide. Lydia Lunch“>Lydia Lunch saw they weren’t just another band and put together this collection of tracks from several records. Singer Jeff Mentges belts out the most believable, thoroughly disgusted first line you’ve ever heard on a record; “QUICK!! TWO SECONDS TIL NONEXISTENCE! SO WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WAAAAAANT!!!!” It still gives me chills every time I hear it. I love No Trend as much as they hated all of us. Their ultimate “Fuck You” was their terrible final album they shit out for Touch and Go, which was intended to fuck with their audience’s expectations and managed to do so quite effectively.”

9353 To Whom It May Consume LP (R&B, 1984)

“Where do you begin with these guys? They shoulda been bigger than Jesus Jones but have completely been excluded from the history books. Total weirdo goth pop with lyrics that are so dark and funny and are delivered between Bruce Merkle’s bizarre alternating falsettos and baritones. Former Double-0 axeman Jason Carmer’s brilliant guitar playing is stripped away of it’s hardcore roots and delivers wonderful delay pedal psychedelia. Like No Trend, these guys were antagonizers and you got the impression that something just wasn’t quite right with the singer. I found that out firsthand when I met him at my friend Chris’s place in DC. He had been living in a wooded area by the freeway in Arlington with four dogs. He told us he had just been evicted from his camp by the cops and he’d had to shoot two of his dogs in the head because he couldn’t care for them. He had the other two dogs with him and after he told the story he split and left the dogs with us. Right after he left both dogs started violently vomiting and they collapsed. He’d poisoned them. Sick motherfucker. Great band though!”

Wicked Witch “Fancy Dancer” 7” (Infinity, 1985)

“When I lived in DC you could find this record anywhere for 50 cents. They even had it at Safeway. Everyone I knew had it. You had to buy it because it looked awesome. And everyone displayed it, too. If you went to a party it was always deliberately placed in the front of the host’s pile of 7”s. But did we listen to it? Hell no! Richard Simms was a one-man band who apparently pressed a shitload of these things. The A-side’s “Fancy Dancer” is a freaky funk number that is almost uncategorizeable. The B-side’s “Y Wood U Call It Rock?” is a heavy metal rock jam from another planet that sounds like it was recorded at the wrong speed. Awesome!”

Fury Resurrection EP (THD, 1989)

“These guys were in Swiz and Ignition, who weren’t beltway outsiders in the least, but this side project deserves special attention. It was 1989 and Fugazi were king—skillfully played post hardcore was the sound du jour. This record came out of nowhere—pure shambolic hardcore bombast that barely stays in time and then completely falls apart at the end. They never played a show and never practiced. Chris Thomson’s first attempt at singing in a band and his finest moment, he sounds like he’s ad-libbing the whole thing. Shawn Brown’s bass playing sounds like someone handed him the instrument and a giant question mark appeared above his head like if you had handed a caveman a cell phone. I was living in San Diego at the time and amongst my friends this record became everyone’s “I’m a fucking lunatic, this is what I listen to!” badge of pride. Everyone wanted their band to sound like this band but they couldn’t cuz they PRACTICED.”

ANDY CORONADO DJs WITH ADAM WADE, ADAM NAUSEUM, SHORT SHORTS AND CHRIS ZIEGLER AT BIG FREAK ON MON., APR. 4, AT THE BLACK BOAR, 1630 COLORADO BLVD., EAGLE ROCK. 10 PM / FREE / 21+. TWITTER.COM/HEWASABIGFREAK.

Legendary Australian guitarist Rowland S. Howard has lost his battle with liver cancer, aged 50.

His slashing, reverb-drenched guitar style with bands such as The Birthday Party and Boys Next Door cast a spell over a new generation of guitarists from bands such as Witch Hats and Digger and the Pussycats.

Howard’s last public performance was at St Kilda’s Prince Bandroom in October. [Read More]

Stream: Teenage Jesus and the Jerks “I Woke Up Dreaming”

(from the No New York compilation available now from Lilith)

Teenage Jesus and the Jerks were arguably one of the most feralized bands on the No New York compilation and Lydia Lunch would only penetrate deeper and deeper from there. A one-shot reunion show in New York last year has become a mini-tour that will visit L.A., but after that, says Lunch, it’s done and buried. Brutalization follows. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

When Teenage Jesus and the Jerks played in New York City last year, it was always set up as a one-shot deal. Yet here we are.
Lydia Lunch (vocals/guitar): I never thought I would have done reunions—it’s ridiculous to me. It’s Thurston Moore that’s to be blamed with his no wave book that he put out last year. A few months before it was coming out he was actually in Barcelona on my couch and he turned to me and said, ‘Well, what about a Teenage Jesus reunion?’ I said, ‘What about the fact that they’re all dead except for Sclavunos? Are you ready to take the wrath of the wire coat hanger and play bass?’ And he jumped up and down and said, ‘Yes!’ So that’s how Teenage Jesus got together in the beginning. He decided he’d go under the coat hanger so we did the New York show and then we developed All Tomorrow’s Parties. I guess the final nail in the coffin for the next couple of shows was based in the fact that in Montreal there’s something called a Pop Symposium—they invited me last year with my multimedia thing and then they got the snifter of Teenage Jesus and they were so kind and I said, ‘Well, I’m not going all the way to the States for one fucking show—I don’t even want to come there for five shows!’ Also the fact that I knew Thurston couldn’t do it and so my favorite bass player in the world must be Algis Kizys from the Swans and he’s doing it. This is what you get in L.A.—Jim Sclavunos, the original bass player, now on drums and Algis Kizys from Swans on bass—how could I say no? Mostly to me, it’s kind of ridiculous. It’s absurdist and I’ve always been absurd anyway. I’ve always considered myself a Dadaist and it’s the most Dada fucking music, and it must be the most Dada idea that 30 years later we’re doing this. One of the reasons is there is still not enough women playing ugly fucking music as a counter to all these pop princesses.
Who litter the streets of Los Angeles?
Lydia Lunch: Exactly. Somebody’s got to be bold enough to go, ‘This is fucking ugly. Deal. Deal.’ And it feels good. So that’s it—there’s five more shows and it’s buried. It’s done.
What is that ugliness in music? How do you identify it and how do you respond to it?
Lydia Lunch: With Teenage Jesus it’s just brutality. The music is brutal. The lyrics are brutal. It makes me feel very brutal. When I did the first shows at the Knitting Factory with Thurston I was amazed that I felt so fucking angry—‘Hang on a second, haven’t I had half a century to deal with my fucking anger issues?’ But the music just inspired … maybe it’s because people were so happy to see it.
Happy to be brutalized?
Lydia Lunch: Yeah, and that kind of grated on me. But then when we did All Tomorrow’s Parties I was a little bit gentler. I guess I was used to the bobblehead effect of people bouncing to the beat. I don’t know. To me, it’s personally mandatory to play music that’s this minimal and so uncompromising and to pick up the fucking guitar which is a grand assaultive weapon and then it’s done. Get it out of my system—it’s done.
The Beefheart guitar commandments say don’t point a guitar at someone unless you’re willing to use it.
Lydia Lunch: Oh baby, please! Bend over, I’ll drive it home! [Grunts brutally]
What’s been your most energizing interaction with the crowd at one of these shows?
Lydia Lunch: When they started singing along with the lyrics I just started changing them. I don’t even remember the fucking lyrics. Stop it. Whatever, it’s just hilarious and it’s hilarious that it riles me up.
You said that when you watched the old footage of yourself on Video Hysterie, it was like watching your daughter. So what’s it like to perform this?
Lydia Lunch: Oh God, it’s so primal. It’s almost like watching a bacterial version of myself. That’s why I call it the retrovirus—when people want to talk, I call it the retrovirus. ‘One more dose of the retrovirus.’
So this is your new infection vector?
Lydia Lunch: Exactly. Great title for the article. There is no inoculation against the retrovirus. The disease is the cure because it fucking kills you. Oh, if only …
You’ve talked about how you try and reverse the anarchist saying that ‘Whoever creates, demands destruction.’ So whoever destroys demands creation?
Lydia Lunch: I think whoever’s been destroyed demands a self-mandatory survival—it’s a need to create. A lot of the stuff that I do now—multimedia psycho-ambient soundscapes which I create myself with one or two other live improv collaborators—a lot of the montage stuff that I’m doing is taking a small close-up of a piece of destroyed building, especially this one from the Spanish Civil War time which was destroyed in 1933.
The first city bombed by its own country, right?
Lydia Lunch: Right—Belchite. Taking just a corner of that and montaging it and mirroring it so it becomes almost like this beautiful jewel box—this piece of jewelry. That’s just how I maintain my sanity at this point. I go back and look at all the shit I started saying under Reagan when I first got really political—dot fucking dot dot, man. I could go back and hear those speeches and go, ‘We’re right back to where we fucking were.’ And if I don’t take another route to express that, I would just be literally in the rubber room by now pounding my head against my own .357.
Do you still have that .357?
Lydia Lunch: In Spain we don’t need a .357. It is a credit to the country, it’s so safe. You have to have your guns at the shooting range here because everybody else does—it’s kind of a letdown. But I would just be completely insane at this point because of the round circle of hypocrisy that America has become. It’s so outrageous to me what’s going on with this false prophet of false hope who’s so entrenched in the network of grand corporate thieves creating a more advanced planet of slaves. That’s why I have to fucking rock. That’s why I have a rock band called Big Sexy Noise—we just finished an album. I was literally just listening to the master. The entire thing was just mastered and the album comes out November 2 and I’ll be touring Europe with that band but it’s like—I just can’t say anymore because it’s all the same fucking thing so now I’m just gonna fucking rock. Fuck off!
You’ve said that your moral imperative was to ‘tell the truth about injustices to the individual and scream into the void.’
Lydia Lunch: At the time it was just natural. It wasn’t even really that politically aware because there wasn’t that much information out about the truth that we knew which was only assumed. The truth was the opposite of everything they told us and instinctively a lot of us knew that. And I go back and it’s like, ‘Yeah, duh, of course!’ And how far back do you want to go? Because I can only go as far back as my own lifetime because otherwise I just get completely insane because we could go back to the cave—it’s the same fucking story.
What’s your favorite tomb, crypt or cave?
Lydia Lunch: It’s probably the caves that I have yet to visit, like the caves in Libya that I would love to go to. They just have these incredible mile-long caves that you can take a boat down. Gaddafi’s opening [them] up, let’s hope.
Is it easier for you to travel into Libya than America?
Lydia Lunch: America does kind of scare me. The direction it’s going in and—you’re there, you know it. England is much worse although since I don’t live there I don’t feel it as much. But in England now they’re going to shut off your Internet if you download. It’s so 1984 and that’s where America is going and it’s pretty much there. They just don’t advertise it as much. It’s worrisome.
Why do you think this is all happening?
Lydia Lunch: I think that so much has gotten done in the decades covertly and it’s so widespread. The conspiracies are all true. The corporate global slave traders are fucking the planet and charging you for the inconvenience and to me one of the reasons I live in Spain is because—and no place is perfect—but the quality of life is so much different. People are not in fear of either violence or living on the streets or losing their fucking mind. They’re only 30 years out from fascism and it’s really a big difference. It’s a big difference in the day-to-day quality of your life when you don’t feel the rent or the government or censorship or any of that shit from oppression breathing down your neck. I’ve been living here for almost five years and I have to live in Europe to perform—I can’t support myself in the States. I just can’t. I can do so many other things here. Spain to me at this moment, it’s not perfect but it feels the sanest because people are not fucking miserable. They’re not neurotic, they’re not psychotic, and that’s a recent thing.
So what’s it like visiting America? Stepping into the blast furnace?
Lydia Lunch: I’ll have to tell you in October. I’m just gonna be there for a hit-and-run, but the thing is America has so many great people—so much great music, so many great artists, so many great fucking cities and what are we gonna do? You think you see change in your life? We thought there was change under Clinton, but he was just a bit more sneaky than everyone else. He was still a corporate whore-lord and basically got America into a lot of the problems that it’s in now. They’re Clinton policies. To me, it’s strange because Ted Kennedy dies and I’m like, ‘Ted Kennedy was at least fighting.’ I mean I love the controversy of his whole personal life anyway, but he was the last man really fighting for the right things.
What are the right things?
Lydia Lunch: Education first and foremost. America is fucking stupid. Education is terrible and they’re instituting all these charter schools which is just another way to make people pay to be elite and fuck all the others. Education is the most important thing. The criminalization of a lot of crap—America still leads by now a half a million more prisoners than when I stopped speaking about prison. Decriminalize a lot of shit. The three strikes, you’re out bullshit, man. You’re setting up a prison planet by not educating people, by having minimum wage so low and then by forcing people for petty crimes into a prison environment where once you’re flagged as that, what’s the fucking choice? Start there. Pretend you fucking care. Obama pretends he cares—work on that shit. That’s it right there—raise the minimum wage, improve schools and decriminalize a lot of this bullshit.
Those three sentences are going to terrify half the people who read this.
Lydia Lunch: It’s so basic.
You said something once like, ‘I don’t do fiction—I don’t know why people fictionalize when there’s plenty in reality.’
Lydia Lunch: Well, yeah—how much more outrageous does it get than the reality we’re living in right now? This is Philip K. Dick territory. This is George Orwell. We’re there. The bottom line of all of this is to find whatever it is that can give you the energy, the strength and the stamina to not fall victim to the chronic depression that this leads to if you get buried under the bullshit. That’s the most difficult and the most interesting thing that anybody has to do. No wonder so many Americans are addicted to prescription drugs. First of all they want to call you sick and claim that any of your problems need immediate pill recourse. They want to make sure you’re sick—either mentally or physically. They’ve done everything to ensure that by driving you crazy and making you unhealthy so that they can incarcerate you in hospitals that you can’t afford and bankrupt you. So what are you gonna do? It is truly a fight to find what it is that can give you the energy, the stamina and not only that because that’s just survival. The ability to fucking laugh in the face of it and on top of that have some fucking fun—that’s where I want to win. That’s the game I want to play and I want to win. I’m so compartmentalized anyway, it’s just a matter of not letting the more negative aspects dominate. The more negative aspects of personality have so many more vehicles in which to musically express themselves. It’s like, ‘Shut up and go away—go back into the closet. Let’s bring out the fucking clowns because what are you gonna do?’
Joan Miró said if he didn’t paint he got ‘black thoughts.’ Are you the same way?
Lydia Lunch: I really enjoy having an empty head. That’s the difference between me and a lot of people is they always have to fill up the silence. I love being alone and silent staring into nowhere, emptying out the hard drive. That gives me great balance because when I have to work that gives me a lot of energy that I can muster because I got a lot of shit that I have to do. So I think a place like Barcelona—because the architecture, the atmosphere, walking around—you don’t have to talk to anybody. You can just look at the buildings and leave me alone. It’s not like you have to fill your brain with ceaseless sound waves and cathode rays or the fucking computer. Go outside. Go outside.
Have you been to the Sagrada Familia?
Lydia Lunch: Yeah. I live one block from the Sagrada Familia. I’ve been to the very top of some of the towers. They’re still building it—they’re never finished. I don’t go out of my house every day if I can avoid it, but when I go out of my house I see it.
You’ve mentioned ‘the devastating effect architecture has on me when its murdered ghosts leak into my bloodstream.’ What is the relationship between architecture and the human soul?
Lydia Lunch: I remember when I first decided to move here. I had been coming to Spain since the late ’80s. I was here five summers ago and I was standing on the balcony just looking into this empty window across the street and stories started to write themselves in my head. I couldn’t see anything inside—I could just see the black window—but it was like how many souls and how much emotion has gone through that portal? And how much remains behind? And how much does the stone, the brick, the terracotta, absorb? It’s just part of my sensitivity. I just published a bilingual book called Amnesia and it’s about abandoned space. It’s about amnesia in love and in war. Spain has great amnesia about their own civil war. It’s called ‘the condition’ here because they still haven’t dug up all the graves from the civil war. And when they got rid of Franco they said they had an amnesia now. It’s part of the reason why the people are happy too, but I’m here to remind them—I haven’t forgotten the dead. Even if they aren’t related to me, I haven’t forgotten those who died. I can’t forget and that’s part of why architecture haunts me because it’s part of a hundred different stories in every window and if you wanted to you could listen to them and they would write themselves. That’s just how it affects me. America doesn’t really have that because it’s not old enough. Some towns do. Look at Los Angeles—Hollywood Boulevard at night and Santa Monica Boulevard at night. The strips between La Brea and Vine after dark are some of the most haunted boulevards in the world to me.
Have you ever walked there at midnight?
Lydia Lunch: Of course. And it just screams of wounded ghosts.
What’s the other side of that? When you’re driving through the American West and you find a place where nobody’s ever been before?
Lydia Lunch: That’s why people have more psychedelic and spiritual experiences in those places because they’re tapping into a different type of energy force field. I just saw something last night about the electromagnetic force field of the earth, that it’s changed about 18,000 times. A lava specialist decoded this because all the top lava, the elements of it are all pointing north, but we’ve dug under to more ancient lava and all the elements in it are pointing in another direction. The lava when it’s hardening is going in the same direction of the electromagnetic field in the same way that whales do. When there was a solar flare-up from the sun, it caused blackouts in the Northeast like a couple years ago. So 2012—they said that 2012 is the next time for solar flare-ups and storms, so maybe the Mayans did know more than we know. But when whales suddenly beach themselves for no obvious reason it could be because of a solar flare-up—the electromagnetic pulse of the earth is off for a short while. I think there’s a lot more out there that we can’t see than what we do see.
What do you think is something that people are just completely willfully ignorant about?
Lydia Lunch: I think all of the electromagnetic poisoning that we have going on. From the cell phone, from the computer, from trains, from everything that we get bombarded with. I think it’s what causes cancer.
What do you think is the next big revelation that people are going to be officially surprised about in the next five years even though it’s basically common knowledge?
Lydia Lunch: I don’t know if anything happens that quickly because if you look at the history of the world, I mean, things happen. If you drop a bomb, it happens immediately. But I just think that it’s gonna dawn a bit slower than that. But time is going much faster now than it used to, so I don’t know what’s finally going to make a universal awareness. There was just a great article in Newsweek saying that people can convince themselves with lies even when presented with the actual truth.
Confirmation bias?
Lydia Lunch: They are so ingrained and frightened that even when confronted with the truth they are going to choose the lie if it’s embedded. That’s most of the population, so who knows? Who knows?
Is there a way to combat that?
Lydia Lunch: You just try to not associate with the fucking liars. They know who we are, we know who they are.
I have another Miró quote for you. He said that what he wanted to do was assassinate painting. Is that what you do with your work?
Lydia Lunch: Absolutely—I mean, in a sense. It’s not even assassinating. It’s just carving out a completely separate channel of my space. It’s not even a niche, it’s my own pulse. So that’s what I continue to carry. It’s my own electricity. I have a lot of electricity and it’s not dimming by any means.
Do you walk under streetlights and they flicker?
Lydia Lunch: Oh yeah, of course.
You said before that the word poetry disgusts you. What else disgusts you?
Lydia Lunch: Oh, Christ—you got a lifetime, kid?
Hopefully I do.
Lydia Lunch: At this moment with the window open and I wish I could say a cool but it’s quite a hot and clammy breeze blowing over my sweaty skin, sitting in a black slip with rhinestone stilettos, nothing could possibly disgust me at this moment. Because fuck it, I’m not going there. I know what disgusts me—it’s so huge. It’s a lexicon that I can’t begin.
A vocabulary of disgust?
Lydia Lunch: Exactly. Let’s focus on the positive.
What can you identify as components of the true vocabulary of reality?
Lydia Lunch: It’s very interesting to me because I don’t think it’s so much of a shared vocabulary as it is again some kind of magnetic channel. When people are hooked into that same level, on some intellectual or emotional level it doesn’t really matter what words you are using because they get you and that’s what’s important to me. And this is a strange example, but some of the people who have ‘gotten’ me the most have a lot less in common with me and my range of experience than you would think.
Who’s an example of that?
Lydia Lunch: It’s not anyone I can point out and name directly because you wouldn’t know who they fucking were, but it’s like sometimes it’s just people who are on your wave and locked into your groove and they just fucking get it. It’s just that way. It’s astonishing on another level that some people who should be in tune with what you do just have no fucking clue.
More Miró—he said that the more of an individual an artist can be, the more universal their appeal.
Lydia Lunch: Well, there you go I guess. I’m very happy appealing to the individual—one at a time is fine for me. I like to be able to look everyone in the eyes while I’m performing; that’s how I like to communicate.
What happens when you look somebody in the eyes?
Lydia Lunch: They freeze because it’s like a jolt of electricity. I want to go in there and I want to try to kill off some of their cancer or their insecurity or whatever. I want to go in there and make direct contact.
Have you ever been hit by lightning?
Lydia Lunch: No, but I have been thrown against the wall by invisible forces. I had a migraine and I went to get up and I thought I was gonna vomit and suddenly I was thrown from one wall to the other and thrown onto the ground in my house in Spain. And I got up off the floor and my headache was gone but both shoulders were bruised.
Was that a fair trade-off?
Lydia Lunch: Eh, I guess so.
So it was a therapeutic poltergeist?
Lydia Lunch: Oh yeah, of course. I’m friends with all the poltergeists now. I used to be haunted and now I’m the haunter.
How do you make that transition?
Lydia Lunch: You really have to protect yourself because you can really allow—back to force fields—you can be too open and too magnetizing to negative forces, negative thoughts, negative energies. You just have to learn, you have to find your own way. You have to find the way to delouse yourself and surround yourself with protective force fields.
Do you think music can do that—psychically delouse you?
Lydia Lunch: Of course. De-Loused in the Comatorium—one of my favorite groups, Mars Volta. I love Mars Volta.
A friend of mine is about to have a kid. What is your advice for a new mother in 2009 in America?
Lydia Lunch: Move as far away as possible. Raise them with wolves!
When’s the last time you bent down and picked a wildflower?
Lydia Lunch: Oh, I do it all the time. I steal flowers—bits of plants—all the time.
What were you doing when you lived in L.A.?
Lydia Lunch: I lived there twice: once in the early ’80s and I lived in Glendale for four years which I really liked at the time. I came back out there to spend a little time with Hubert Selby before he died and Jerry Stahl. Jerry Stahl is just fantastic. It was fine while I was there but it was enough. Pico Boulevard is one of my favorite streets in the world. Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles—honey, I’ll be there. Just channeling my inner Biggie Smalls. And believe me, he’s in there.
Who else is alive and active in your psyche?
Lydia Lunch: That’s a damn good question. There’s always a little Buñuel back there probably because I’m in Spain and there’s always a little bit of Genet because I’m always entertaining criminal thoughts and my whole career has a been a criminal activity.
What’s your favorite criminal act?
Lydia Lunch: My existence.

LYDIA LUNCH READS FROM WILL WORK FOR DRUGS ON TUE., OCT. 6, AT STORIES, 1716 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8 PM / FREE / ALL AGES. STORIESLA.COM. TEENAGE JESUS AND THE JERKS WITH MIKA MIKO, THE URINALS AND THE LAMPS ON WED., OCT. 7, AT THE EL REY THEATRE, 5515 WILSHIRE BLVD., LOS ANGELES. 7 PM / $20 / ALL AGES. THEELREY.COM. VISIT LYDIA LUNCH AT LYDIA-LUNCH.ORG OR AT MYSPACE.COM/LYDIALUNCH.

Exene Cervenka helped invent what Los Angeles is now and helped save the best of what it used to be. She releases a new solo album Somewhere Gone on Bloodshot in October and is moving back to California after years in a historic farmhouse in Missouri. She speaks now while camping on the beach. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

How do you feel America’s garbage has changed in the last thirty or forty years?
Ooh—interesting. It’s changed for the worse. The garbage that I used to find on the streets was a lot better because it was regional garbage and now it’s just national garbage.
What specifically have we lost in our garbage?
Flyers for fortunetellers. Candy wrappers that only exist in certain places.
Do you agree with Philip K. Dick that the symbols of the divine show up initially at the trash stratum?
Sure—I think that’s neat.
Lydia Lunch once said that you and her share a similar moral imperative—to tell the truth about injustices to the individual and to scream into the void. Do you think that’s true?
I think that’s something more strident than I would see myself as being. I definitely feel like I’m not giving a voice to the voiceless—now I’m giving myself a voice. I don’t know what imperative means. I understand what it means but I also think that—I don’t know, ‘moral’ is a weird word. I like it. I like the word ‘morality’ but that is a weird concept. I just try to be a compassionate human being. I’m trying to make myself a better person as I go along.
How hard has that been to learn how to do?
Easy once you get the hang of it.
Do you think that’s necessary in music to have that?
Yes. Is it necessary to treat people okay? It is for me. Maybe not for you.
Maybe for me.
Maybe not for the next guy but for you or me, yeah.
You said once that most of your songs are written about love but that’s not to say they aren’t political. The Monks have said that all songs are love songs at heart—what’s the overlap there?
I’m just trying to take that in. Every song is a love song? Yeah, I’d agree with that. Because you love what you’re writing about.
They also said love is the only way to get out of your own ego and connect with something bigger than yourself.
Yes, I agree with that.
What’s a moment in your own life when that became apparent?
Now. Now in the more general sense. I agree with that completely. When I got diagnosed with MS—that is when it became apparent to me.
Did that diagnosis change the way you write and work?
It doesn’t change that, unfortunately. You’d think it would make you more… Well, I work pretty hard as it is so I’m not gonna work harder—but it doesn’t really change that stuff because why should it? At some point it’ll bite me in the ass but right now I’m healthy.
There’s a line by the poet Anna Akhmatova…
Oh, I love her—she’s my favorite poet. She’s great, especially considering she wrote that stuff in the teens and the twenties. Well, not all of it—but the stuff she wrote in the teens and the twenties is so relevant and so good.
In one poem she asks, ‘Why is this century worse than those others?’
I think everyone thinks their century is worse than the others. I think that question can be answered. We don’t know if it’s the worst, or if things will get worse. I believe things will get worse in our culture and our economy and in the world in general—I think water shortages and things like that. I mean we’re dealing with a bad economy, but other people are dealing with much worse and that’s gonna continue.
How do you think things have changed in your lifetime?
It’s kind of a big perspective now. I thank the hippies for health food every day—I’m grateful to them every day I eat and I think that generation changed the world for the better. They didn’t change it completely but I definitely have a lot of respect and gratitude to that generation. The generation previous to mine. And the feminists for doing what they could in their times to try and make women somewhat equal, which will probably never happen.
What makes you say that?
Because it’s so hard. I’ve struggled my whole life and so has every woman and decent man I know—it’s so hard.
How do you reconcile yourself to the possibility that these kinds of things are going to take longer than maybe any person can imagine?
That depends on if you’re doing the right thing or the wrong thing. If you’re doing the right thing then the outcome doesn’t really matter because your goal is to do the right thing, not to change the world.
Mike Watt says when he reads Ulysses now, it seems like a sad book to him—that it seems like the only victories we can have are the tiny victories between people.
No. I don’t agree with that. I think tiny victories are very valuable and personal relationships are very valuable but I think you can aspire to a lot more than that. I would not settle for that, no.
What do you still aspire to? I found a quote where you said you felt you’ve done everything you wanted to do in your life.
Do the same things again better.
How?
Well, that’s the question. That’s my problem, isn’t it?
What do you miss most about the past?
Architecture. The architecture in Los Angeles used to be quite amazing. Architecture everywhere in America used to be amazing—I miss that a lot.
Why do you think that changed?
Because of progress. Yes, that’s what they call it. Because of the economy. Because you have to keep stimulating the economy by tearing down and building again—and sprawl and fear. Los Angeles used to be a really amazing city in the ‘70s, but I miss all that. I wish men wore hats.
And never shorts, either. For decorum.
Yeah—for decorum’s sake.
Can you identify anything in your lifetime that was a tipping point? Where things went the left way and not the right way?
I have those all the time.
Can you identify them as they happen?
No. Immediately after. I’m pretty good at knowing what’s happening. The tipping point is a good thing because it makes you get up and do something about whatever it was that you couldn’t do anything about. It forces your hand.
You once said, ‘I want to be worthwhile in this world, I want to give something—otherwise that’d be selfish.’ Is that the way you feel you have to live?
Yes. Because that’s the way it is. That’s the way it works—because if you don’t do that then it doesn’t work. Society falls apart. Civility is lost. Which may be a good thing. But that’s just the way I choose to live. If somebody came to my door and wanted help, I would help them.
I heard runaways used to show up on your doorstep in the middle of the night.
Well, let me put it this way—if someone needed help, I would help them.
What’s a time when somebody really helped you exactly when you needed it?
You’d be amazed. I have a list of the things since I was diagnosed—I am really, really grateful because I had so many people come to me with advice and help and prayers and thoughts and presents and things. So I think that when that happens, it transforms you.
How does it feel to be living in California again?
Not as strange as you’d think. I haven’t decided yet where I’m moving.
What’s your favorite scene in one of Raymond Chandler’s books?
Oh gee, I read those books so long ago. I can’t really remember. I should re-read those and I should read John Fante while I’m at it. Now that I’m back here I should reacquaint myself with where I am. John Fante—he’s my favorite L.A. writer. Because he just did it the best. I love Raymond Chandler too. And Charles Bukowski and other people. When I moved to L.A. in ’76 there were people just coming back from Vietnam who were hippies when they went that were dropping acid a week before they landed in Vietnam. They still had chops and acid and hippies—it was really neat. And there were still those detective doors in some of the office buildings—you know. The glass doors with the lettering. And the architecture was much more detective-y—much more Marlowe.
When you first moved here, who was the person who taught you about L.A.?
I didn’t have one. It was me and John Doe struggling to find our own way. Everything from the ground up. I came from Florida and he came from Baltimore and we didn’t know anything about California or Los Angeles—we were just trying to figure it out. We’d go to shows, he’d talk our way in—he’d talk the doorman into letting us get in for free to go see the Runaways and Tom Petty and Blondie.
You were talking about punk once and said, ‘We were ghosts then and we’re ghosts now and we’ll haunt your malls and catwalks forever.’
That’s definitely true. Because we thought of stuff that other people didn’t think of and it’s just now starting to disseminate into society—or has been for a while but is kind of starting.
Do you remember the first time you saw the Eagles play?
The Eagles? I saw the Eagles play in Las Vegas about 15 years ago. I was at the Hard Rock Café the night they opened. I wanted to see who they were because I heard so much about them.
Did they live up to everything you’d been told?
Exactly. Hit the nail on the head. They are good musicians—very competent at what they do, very good at what they do.
What a carefully chosen adjective.
Yup. They were very good at what they do.
You use ‘we’ really effectively in your lyrics.
I use ‘I’ too much. I think about myself too much.
Are there any of your songs that you feel have come true?
No. Sometimes they do. ‘New World’ is like that. That comes true every year.
How did you feel on election night last year?
Pretty darn good.
Did you cry at all?
No I didn’t. I had a nice celebration though—we played in Seattle and Eddie Vedder sang ‘The New World’ with us on election night. It was fun. And he slow danced with me.
Did he step on your toes?
No—he’s a great dancer. Are you kidding?
Who’s the best dancer?
John Doe.
Have you ever cried on an election night?
No. I don’t cry for those people. I save my tears for my friends.

EXENE CERVENKA WITH JOHN DOE, AMBER FOX AND DAVID J. CARPENTER ON FRI., SEPT. 11, AT A BENEFIT FOR ANDREA FOLMER AT ALEX’S BAR, 2913 E. ANAHEIM ST., LONG BEACH. 8PM / $10 / 21+. ALEXSBAR.COM. AND WITH JOHN DOE AND KID CONGO POWERS ON FRI., OCT. 9, AT THE ECHOPLEX, 1154 GLENDALE BLVD., LOS ANGELES. 8PM / $25-$27 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. EXENE CERVENKA’S SOMEWHERE GONE RELEASES TUE., OCT. 6, ON BLOODSHOT. VIST EXENE CERVENKA AT EXENECERVENKA.COM OR AT MYSPACE.COM/EXENECERVENKA.

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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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