Download Daylong Valleys of the Nile “Life Out Of Bounds”

(from the Daylong Valleys of the Nile demo available here)

Steve, Jeff and Ron—the piano/guitar/drums trio that can turn into Lavender Diamond when you put Becky Stark singing with them—plus Bedroom Walls’ Jeff Kwong planted ten Daylong songs in two days. It’ll be an album soon, but it’s a four-song demo now and you should download it over and over so you can have a copy on each of your various devices. Everyone is saying this sounds like Tiger Mountain Eno, but everyone is right so that’s a reason to be happy. Warm jets lead the start of “Gossamer Station,” the second half of “Memory Bank,” or the verse of “Nick of Time,” all of which loop-the-loop vintage Enoisms the same way a dozen killing punk bands did with the Ramones. And of course there’s good propulsive Roxy Music rockin’, too—giant Manzanera guitar leads that erupt right from the earth itself. But there’s also some kinda link back to L.A. bands like Suburban Lawns or the Eyes—too art for just punk, too punk for just art; collectibility was their destiny!—and maybe even some of the really Velvets-upped paisley bands: the Dream Syndicate’s first EP seems like it ends up at the same place as Daylong for most of the same reasons. The lyrics are completely crucial here, too, reading like fragments of new wave sci-fi by Ballard or Brunner and inspiring Penguin-delic paperback covers to match. (“In the skyscraper name light there was water on your cheek/but we both were illusive/as we ducked in a rat hole and the sentries let us pass/It was like we were flying …”) That’s why this works—it isn’t a copy but the actual thing itself, except emerging so far out of time that there’s nothing much like it left. That’d be a good idea for one of their songs, too. This is great and the album will be something you can live on for days.

—Chris Ziegler

Stream: Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey “Here And Now”

(from hERE aND nOW out now on Bar/None)

Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple were (legendarily) the only people in North Carolina who bought Big Star albums the very first time around, and they’d team up most famously for the power-pop band the dB’s. (Stamey would also release Chris Bell’s ‘I Am The Cosmos’ 45 and Holsapple would go on to play with R.E.M. and Hootie and the Blowfish!) They are now teamed up and touring as a band with no official name. This interview by Dan Collins.

Peter, you joined a band when you were eight?
Peter Holsapple (guitar/vocals): What?
Admittedly, this is from Wikipedia. But it says you were born in ’56 and joined a band in 1964.
Peter: That is true. I played in combos. But they weren’t professional. The first professional band I played in was when I was 12—when I earned money. We lived in a city with a lot of very active places for young people to play. They were the assembly halls for churches. On the weekends they’d get a PA and bands would play. That was kind of fun.
Did you ever cut a single?
Peter: No. Chris and Mitch [Easter] and I had a band that had an album in 1973 called Rittenhouse Square. It was not very good! It was what you’d expect out of 14- or 15-year-olds. We certainly listened to a lot of Yes, a lot of the Move. Things were funny and grind-y, but in retrospect it’s pretty naïve stuff.
Sounds like you met each other early in life.
Peter: Chris and Mitch were ahead of me in school. I do remember him standing in the parking lot of the school with an instrument case waiting for his parents to pick him up. His dad was a pediatrician in town—a lot of people went to Dr. Stamey! I saw him as a sort of inroads in a lot of ways. When I met him, he wasn’t playing music at all. He was learning to record, which I thought was very cool.
Yeah! And Chris, you produced Peter’s band Little Diesel in ’74.
Chris Stamey (guitar/vocals): We made it in an afternoon in my bedroom at my parents’ house. I’d moved the bed a little bit, and I had little tweed Fender amps nailed up to the wall and we made it on a four-track tape recorder. At the time I think they made 10 copies. They recorded it on an eight-track recorder, and by that I mean a little recorder that made 8-track cartridges. There were only literally a few copies made.
Do you have an 8-track you can send to me in the mail?
Peter: No! But a vinyl edition did come out a few years ago. It came out on Telstar records.
Chris: I was talking to Mitch about how we should find that, and he was like, ‘Oh, I’ve got the master tape still!’ So we dug it out and I mixed it up a little better than I had back then, and it’s a really cool energetic record! Anybody who’s heard it loves it.
Peter: There were a breadth of covers that we were trying to tackle. We were doing Free and Spirit and Status Quo. We didn’t really ascribe to the Allman Brothers/Marshall Tucker stuff that was popular there at the time. We sort of rooted for the underdog. That’s probably why we were such huge Move fans. That’s probably why the first song off our new album is by a band called ‘Family,’ who we love very dearly. That’s a band that had really meant an awful lot to us.
Chris: The MC5 had just come to town and just really transformed the Winston rock scene.
Peter: I was in school in New Hampshire at prep school for a year, during which time I did get to play in bands with Bob Tench, who went on to be Tom Petty’s keyboard player. He was one of those guys who was very deeply into the MC5 and the Stooges. The first Mott the Hoople album came out, and we really absorbed that.
Did you see the revival tour the MC5 did a few years ago? Evan Dando and Mark Arm from Mudhoney were singing with them.
Chris: And Marshall Crenshaw playing with them too—I have to say, the night I saw them in Chapel Hill, it was not a huge success, but it was only one night on a tour. It was kind of dark, I guess you’d say—the energy. The singers were reading all the lyrics—it wasn’t totally all together.
Well, enough about the past—tell me about the sound on your new album.
Chris: Well, what’s refreshing about talking with you is that it does remind me of a sixties interview. It’s not the usual questions. But Peter and I think about this as a band that we have together that has its own identity, and we just don’t have a band name for it. We recorded Mavericks in 1992, and in some ways we see this as a continuation of that.
Why is that?
Chris: It makes a connection to I guess what used to be called ‘good guy’ radio, almost like sixties AM radio. My experience with Big Star, for example, was hearing them—they were a hit band in Winston/Salem, and they were on the radio with bands like the Grass Roots and the Seeds. It’s just that they weren’t anywhere else but my hometown. It just isn’t a Porsche—more of a Woody! A family station wagon.
If somebody was a dB’s fan who had never heard this album, what differences would they see between this album and your old stuff?
Peter: dB’s records and the duet records are such that they both have as their main contributors myself and Chris. But if they’re dB’s records, they’ve got Will on drums and Gene on bass and it’s a harder rocking and slightly more frenzied thing.
Chris: The way the dB’s bass player and drummer play together is kind of like you drop an electric blender in a bathtub, and yet it keeps running. It’s a very explosive combustible combination. And we use really good players and we have more drums on this record than we thought we would, but this is more about our guitars and our voices.
Peter: It is two different voices! Even though Chris and I are the main guys writing for both groups. You know, there’s only been one saxophone on a dB’s record—on a single maybe. And here we’ve got Branford Marsalis who played on a couple cuts on this album.
That’s a score!
Peter: Yeah, Bran is a great guy. For years I was the keyboard guy and utility guy for Hootie and the Blowfish, and Branford always came down for their charity golf tournament every year and played. A couple years ago I said, ‘Well, I’ve got these songs that would be really well served if you could find some time to come and play on it. It’s about New Orleans.’ He was like, ‘I’m busy, but let me know! We’ll make it happen.’ Both tracks were lifted incredibly by his presence.
Lou Reed, before he was in the Velvet Underground, cut a single with King Curtis as the session horn guy! But I think you just beat that. Do you want to gloat at Lou Reed for besting him?
Peter: Lou’s contribution is sacred! Even his bad records aren’t that bad. I have no opportunity to diss him, frankly.
A few years back you recorded an album called A Question of Temperature.
Chris: Peter and I just came up with that title, I recall. On a record with a lot of covers, to name it after a cover that we weren’t doing seemed, you know… it was originally called Vote, and it was done as an EP. We did too many things… it became the world’s longest EP! We put it out right before the election that John Kerry lost to try to encourage people to vote. It seems crazy in retrospect. It was then released as a regular record in January. It was never intended to be an album-album.
What songs did you cover?
Chris: We covered a song of mine called ‘Summer Sun.’ The Yardbirds, we did. We covered ‘Venus’ by Television.
Can I get a statement from you about the death of Sky Saxon?
Chris: He was a friend of Chilton’s. I never really met him. When I played with Alex, we used to do ‘I Can’t Seem to Make You Mine’ almost every night. Alex was a really big fan.
How did you meet Alex Chilton?
Chris: I was making a record with Terry Ork. He’d put out the first Television 45, and I’d just moved to New York. And he said that they were putting out a record by Alex Chilton, and he needed a band because he was going to come up for one day—to play Valentine’s Day in New York. And Alex called me up, and we talked, and he asked me what my sign was, and everything seemed to be okay. I was playing bass—I think Tina Weymouth almost got the call, but I ended up getting it. And Alex stayed for over a year, and we kept playing. He’d stay on my couch a lot, and we went up and recorded a lot, most of which never came out.
There was another celebrity death this month as well. You guys once had a song called ‘Neverland.’ Do you think Michael Jackson named his ranch after you?
Chris: I think that would be a stretch.
The dance music movement that came along in the mid-early eighties, with Michael and Prince and Sheila E.—did that eclipse the fame that bands like the dB’s might have earned?
Peter: It certainly didn’t help it get on the radio! But… the music was great. All the music was great. We felt that we weren’t particularly in competition with that.
Chris: I think that for most bands, the whole idea of making it big wasn’t around. Once MTV came along, and it went out into the world, people got the idea, ‘Yeah, let’s make it big!’ But that wasn’t why we were making music. We weren’t trying to win the lottery.
Peter: Even as well known as we are for our contributions to sort of ‘new wave’ with the dB’s, we had already been writing and recording well before that. We just happened to come along at the time. The dB’s didn’t even have an American label for many years.
Of the people who were your contemporaries, who would you say sounded like you?
Chris: I think the Soft Boys! I clearly thought Television had the right idea, but I think the Soft Boys would be the closest.
Peter: Without meaning to be left of center, it appears that we were left of center. My dear friend Mark Brian from Hootie & the Blowfish says things to me like, ‘You’re my favorite eccentric weird songwriter.’ And I listen to my songs, and I don’t think they’re all that eccentric and weird. They’re simple, they’re rock ‘n’ roll, they have verses, they have choruses and bridges. What’s so different? Same thing with a Michael Jackson record. They’re still set up approximately the same way. Yet there’s a world of difference between them. The thing that we’ve all had to learn over the years is that this is not about huge success. That would be wonderful! I’d love it if a song got used in a commercial that would take the load off of being an unemployed musician. If I could ever get my publishing straightened out, maybe I could do something! The great thing is that I’ve got a job that I love. I love to be a musician. I love the reaction of people when they like my songs. Maybe I’m just a ham, but I really do dig it a lot. It feels really good. I’m not really comfortable in the rest of the world. I am on stage, though. Music was just about the most important thing to me until my kids came along.
Can you get your kids involved in music?
Peter: I play at my son’s school. I was the kids’ entertainer at Borders in New Orleans for about five years. I started working on a kids record, but then I realized that practically every old semi-failed new waver had done a kids record! I don’t want to be in that number until I can do something really good. Dan Zanes does a great job! Robert Warren is great! Disney’s got the Imagination Movers—that’s just the shit! I love it! The kids love it! You want to make kids music so that parents don’t jump out the window.
Chris, you haven’t released any kids albums to my knowledge—but you released Chris Bell’s first single on your label, right?
Chris: Right! Again, that was through Alex. Alex told me about it. I was very proud to have done that, but it wasn’t anything very creative except to the extent that A&R is creative. He’d made it a while back. He’d done in a guy’s garage, in a shoe box in Memphis, and then moved to London and mixed it with Geoff Emerick at George Martin’s Air studios.
In the last couple decades, we haven’t heard a whole lot from you! Have you been recording and producing bands or selling crystal meth, or what?
Chris: I do an album or two a month—some mixing, some producing. I probably work on about fifteen records a year. I just did a band called Megafaun. I did Rosebuds, on Merge. The Old Ceremony. Luego, which hasn’t come out yet…
How about some L.A. bands?
Chris: I did a whole bunch of recordings with Patrick Park! I don’t think he qualifies as a ‘band,’ but if anybody qualifies as a one-man band, he can really do it. That would be the most recent thing. I lived there, working there with Scott Litt on a Flat Duo Jets record for a while at Ocean Way, which became Cello. I definitely put in time in California. In a lot of ways, I consider the span I spent with Peter Holsapple to be a California band. We really started in L.A. We live in North Carolina, but the spirit of our birth was really in the Santa Monica kind of thing.
I have the Sharp Cuts compilation you came out on in 1980 on Planet Records with ‘Soul Kiss.’ You’re on there with a lot of other L.A. bands. Did that record come about because of your association with people out here?
Chris: No, I think that would be prior to it. I think we just got a call about it. I do remember they accidentally put the wrong tape on there, which always bugged me. That was a joke mix! It never was supposed to be out like that.
If it makes you feel better, on the album sticker, they list Suburban Lawns twice and forgot to list the Alleycats.
Chris: It figures.
Besides just songs, did people constantly misspell the ‘dB’s’ name on albums and flyers and such?
Chris: I think we knew we were in for trouble. It was interesting to see how things change in translation. I kind of liked that it did change all the time, but I guess it was an uphill struggle.
Did people ever spell it ‘D-e-e-B-e-e-s’ like the Bee Gees?
Chris: I think we’ve had every kind of possible ramification. The embarrassing thing is that we never should have put the apostrophe in there to begin with. It was archaic even then. It’s pretty incorrect.
I was listening to your early discography, Chris, and I feel like you were playing a brand of power-pop that even now sounds a bit more youthful. I feel like other power-pop sounded a bit mannish, and yours sounds more teenaged—even maybe had a bit of a bubblegum feel.
Peter:We listened to everything—depending on what you feel is bubblegum. I was married to Susan Cowsill of the Cowsills, so I love the Partridge Family. I love the stuff that was on Buddah, the Kasenetz-Katz Orchestra and things like that. But I don’t love it anymore than I love Otis Redding or the Dave Clark Five or Big Star. I will admit to having listened to more than the lion’s share of AM radio. Anything that goes from about 1964-1974.
Did you have a hard time convincing your peers to appreciate something more gentle and delicate?
Chris: I always played with good musicians, and we just talk about how to play music. You know on iTunes, they have a little pull-down things for genre when you want to make an MP3? I actually think I do more ‘folk rock’ over ‘power pop.’
What folk rock bands inspired you?
Chris: I would say the Byrds would be the biggest.
Speaking of 8-tracks, you guys did a lot of cassette releases as the dB’s. You did one that came in an actual can! Wasn’t that expensive?
Chris: We didn’t get the bill, but I don’t think it was that expensive. Probably a big waste of chow mein noodles or something! Cans can’t really cost that much—otherwise, they wouldn’t put cheap food in them.
Did the people who bought them actually have to use a can opener to get the tape out?
Chris: Oh yeah!
Why did things end? Why did you shelve the dB’s?
Chris: I think it’s more of a mystery why things continue. I look at bands I like like Blind Faith where they last for five months and a few gigs. It seemed like it went on a long time.
And you guys are still working together as a duo, so it’s like this working relationship that was in the dB’s is still going.
Chris: It had started 11 years before that, really. It’s just that the dB’s got more press because there were press agents involved.
Peter, you had a huge bunch of press when you played with R.E.M.
Peter: I did play with R.E.M. We did a tour for Green, the first album they did on Warner Brothers, and we recorded Out of Time—I played the acoustic guitar on ‘Losing My Religion.’ And then we went to England, and we reached a point where it was ‘untenable’ to work together. Much as I love those guys and respect what they’ve done, it was time for me to move on. I joined the Continental Drifters for ten years, and was serving in the same capacity I had with R.E.M. in Hootie & the Blowfish, which was a great gig I had for thirteen years.
You were saying that the dude from the Blowfish thinks you write weird songs. For our readership the weirdest thing you’ve EVER done is play in Hootie & the Blowfish!
Peter: The guys in the band are remarkable people. They truly are! They worked very, very hard for their success. They did some things that were probably ill-advised—they rushed out a second record out because they were afraid their fans were sick of the first record! They were thinking of their fans, which I thought was really cool.
Yeah, but… Hootie and the Blowfish! Chris, were ever moments where you were like, ‘Peter is killing the brand?’
Chris: I can’t even think in that way! He had been doing flower deliveries in New Orleans before that happened. I can’t think of how many times he went to Vietnam with them. I think it was kind of fun!
Peter: I would certainly rather do this than not work! That’s probably the best job I ever had. I enjoyed playing the music—it was really comfortable music, and really comforting music. It was not like playing with Yes. But to get to back up a world-class singer like Darius Rucker for 13 years was a serious honor. I was able to rope him into a tribute to Sandy Denny—I was the music director for a show that was celebrating the work of Sandy Denny, in Brooklyn, and I asked him to sing ‘Black Waterside,’ and he just tore it up! We got him on the R.E.M. tribute show at Carnegie Hall, and he did ‘I Believe’ with Calexico. People are more inclined to hate Hootie & the Blowfish because they think they’ve heard Hootie & the Blowfish. But Hootie did five really good studio records. Every one of those records had songs that could have been hits on them. The shape of radio changed, and the band stuck with their style. It was tough to go from being nobody, to being a huge hit, to being a punch line. People just think it’s ‘Hold My Hand’ and Darius in a cowboy hat hawking Burger King.
What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever played?
Chris: They all seem so normal! With the Golden Palominos, we played the Montrose Jazz Festival. We were playing after the Herbie Hancock Quartet, with Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock. I think we played after Miles Davis, too.
Have you had any crazy stories recently where you two put out an album or did a show, and some rabid fans did something… rabid?
Chris: I usually hide after shows! You seem to be looking for fun, tabloid stuff, and you’re probably looking in the wrong direction. We come from a very Southern, polite tradition.
I was actually at the 99 Cent Store on York in Highland Park, and ran across the Chris Stamey and Friends’ Christmas album— for a buck! It wasn’t bad! Can you tell me how that came about?
Peter: I did ‘O Holy Night’ on the very first version of the Christmas album years ago. I love that stuff! I grew up in the Episcopal Church, singing in the choir. I love the popular stuff! The Beach Boys’ Christmas record, the Ventures Christmas record, the Phil Spector Christmas Gift for You, the Beatles 45. Love ‘em, love ‘em, love ‘em! And the best part of Christmas albums is that they sell every year.
Chris: Gene Holder, who plays bass in the dB’s, always wanted to make a Christmas record, always thought that would be a fun thing to do. We were so impressed that even after I was no longer playing with the band, I wrote a song called ‘Christmas Time’ kinda with him in mind and got the other guys who had been in the dB’s to record it with me. And we put together other tracks based around that one song.
Who sings ‘Silver Bells?’ That was my favorite tune off the album.
That was Kirsten Lambert. She’s a friend of ours who lives here. That may be her only recorded effort, as far as I know.
That’s a tragedy! Tell her! If she ever goes on tour, I’ll give her an interview.
Chris: Okay—haha!

PETER HOLSAPPLE AND CHRIS STAMEY ON FRI., JULY 17, AT McCABE’S GUITAR SHOP, 3101 PICO BLVD., SANTA MONICA. 8 PM / $20 / ALL AGES. MCCABES.COM PETER HOLSAPPLE AND CHRIS STAMEY’S hEAR aND nOW IS OUT NOW ON BAR/NONE. VISIT PETER HOLSAPPLE AND CHRIS STAMEY AT HOLSAPPLESTAMEY.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/HEREANDNOWPETERANDCHRIS.

Download: Mika Miko “I Got a Lot (New New New)”

(off We Be Xuxa out now on PPM)

It’s hard to think of We Be Xuxa as a “sophomore album,” since Mika Miko have been sharing their music on 7” and cassette since the days when George W. Bush could still get reelected—everybody and their dad has seen Mika Miko play the Smell a billion times and probably stumbled into one of their sets at a college campus, warehouse, or SXSW showcase. Though at first they kinda filled the ecological niche abandoned by the Sharp Ease, Mika Miko’s fame and goodwill has shot far past that—and past anything we expected. They’ve proven to be unstoppable juggernauts of three-chord joy equally at home on a stage with metal hardcore punkers, noise bands, electro hip-hop brats, pop bands, smoke machines and smoky barbecues bursting with Tofurky beer brats.

And what I’d like to do with We Be Xuxa is sculpt a little narrative about musical arcs, and where this album fits into Mika Miko’s happy lifespan, and how it shows a progression or should be showing a progression or has too many extras or not enough. But Mika Miko stands gleefully outside of the spotlight of conventional criticism, as they continue to bang out the most fun-rockin’ sounds of these Smell-y times. They think of themselves as a live band, with recordings being more documentary than sound-crafting, so who am I to even judge? I wouldn’t want to immortalize myself poo-pooing a band whose t-shirts will still be worn thirty years from now by kids in Austin and Greece, but if I write a praise-piece, I may be stroking this generation’s Leaving Trains. (Never head of ‘em? Just ask an Angeleno aged 40-46 and prepare for some teary-eyed adulation).

So fuck history and fuck the scene. This album is really really fun to listen to, and never gives me dry mouth the way, say, bands like No Age sometimes do. (There, I said it!) Whereas so many acts who have “broken out” of the Smell excel at noisy dissonance and minimalist sound, Mika Miko remains minimal in the tried-and-true ways of their forefathers/mothers—three chords, screams and shouts, and short songs that sound nothing like Sonic Youth funneling Steve Reich and so much the better for it. On the surface, We Be Xuxa almost seems like a retread of old school American punk, but actually it evokes without constant copying—it’s fresh-faced punk, yet my heart hears Born Innocent-era Redd Kross in their sisterly choruses, and early early Black Flag or even Ramones in their strumming (minus Greg Ginn’s noodling) and Wipers downturns on the chords, and a Darby Crash-like insistence on writing lyrics too self-referential and profound to sing straight into the microphone. And there’s even a Urinals cover!?! And there’s a Beach Blvd-esque melodicism to Jessie Clavin’s bass lines, one that perfectly matches their Descendants-like love of making up pragmatic gerunds such as “Totion.”

A lot of reviewers have said these gals (et dude) sound like X-Ray Spex, but that is a lazy lie! Jenna Thornhill only seriously plays sax on one song, “Sex Jazz,” and that’s more of a death disco stomp—like Public Image Limited’s “Annalisa” as covered by Suburban Lawns. If I were to compare her to a punker dead, I would say that when Thornhill really sings, and has room to stretch out a bit past the Kipper Kid mongoloid voice she affects, she strongly evokes Mia Zapata’s womanly growl from the old Gits albums. She’s got some seriously untapped talent playing hide and seek with Jennifer Clavin on dueling phone-vocals. But when you hear the chemistry on call-and-response cryptic craziness like “Turkey Sandwich,” you can’t blame them for not exploring new skills when the old ones still work so well.

And the best part of the album is something that I have to admit I have NOT heard yet! Though L.A. RECORD always promises me free vinyl, the most I’ve gotten so far is a Halloween Swim Team single I could have scammed anyway. Ergo, I’ve only heard We Be Xuxa in its digital format, so haven’t been able to replicate the sweet secret I’ve been told exists on the end of the album—namely, that the final groove of the final song never terminates, and that your record player will just keep spinning it over and over again in a sonic loop-de-loop of delight. If that’s true, that puts We Be Xuxa on the par with vintage vinyl such as Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and another PiL song, “The Cowboy Song.” Perhaps this attention to detail, plus the piano plinks on punk-perfect “Beat the Rush” and the bomb drops on “On the Rise,” prove that Mika Miko care more about crafting studio albums than they care to admit. No matter—Mika Miko is a band enjoying a well-deserved rocket ride to fame and good cheer, and We Be Xuxa is a perfect transmission back to home base that will still sound good thirty years from now, even if I’m just blasting it on my way to the latest hip all-ages venue in Culver City.

—Dan Collins

The public demands and Cinefamily provides! A second showing of Joe Rees’ Target Video presentation (co-presented by L.A. RECORD and featuring never-before-seen-except-at-the-7:30-pm-showing clips of first-wave punk bands like the Plugz, the Suburban Lawns and many more!) has been added and will begin at 11 PM tonight! Tickets are available ONLY at the Cinefamily box office. Cinefamily is located at 611 N. Fairfax Ave. (just south of Melrose and just north of Canter’s) and you can visit online at cinefamily.org or call at (323) 655-2510. Read our interview here to find out what wild things you’re in for!

What are we going to see at this screening that no one has ever seen before?
I have some things I’ve never shown before—for example, Suburban Lawns. They were from the Western Front festival. You have to understand that some of these don’t have the best audio quality because in those days we were working with a paper cup and a string for audio. But I tried to select the performances which were the most effective and gave a good representation of the bands. I mean, I love them all but there’s some that I care much more about. The situation was better for a band called Female Hands—they have a song called ‘Get A Job’and it’s a real pounding beautiful performance and you’ll see it in the show. Many of these bands, they may have had one or two songs that were outstanding—I usually got at least three songs from everybody but Female Hands, I got a half hour of their stuff. And then you had some nights that were better than others. When I’m working in a place like Club Foot or the Deaf Club, they had a real problem with AC power and they had a real problem with lights. But you know how it isyou get a good combination of energy and an outstanding performance, like the Flesheaters when they came on—it didn’t make any difference, it communicates. So that’s the kind of thing that goes down. You’re going to see stuff like Geza X. Geza X was the audio person for so many groups for many groups like the Screamers—he was the genius behind the Screamers. But he never really got a lot of his own recognition. Now I know Geza as friends and I admire him but I don’t think he got the breaks that he deserved. I do have a couple of Geza’s records. It was a battle between him working on audio things for the Screamers and various other groups and doing his own work. It was tough. I’ve got the Bags where you have Alice Bag in that band and you’ve got her in another group called Castration Squad. You can see the thread that goes through a lot of these things and that’s what’s really nice—that’s what I really enjoy. Now I didn’t know the L.A. scene all that well—I met these people and I wish I could have spent more time down there but I was living in San Francisco and of course I was dealing with the Dead Kennedys and the Dils and that was my main focus. Negative Trend was one of my favorites. But I always loved going to L.A. and I loved shooting it and of course I was a Screamers fan from the very first day.
Do you think they’re L.A.’s greatest ‘lost’ band?
I think so. This is the honest to God truth because I’ve looked at hundreds of punk bands from all over the world—I went to Europe and spent three years over there shooting punk bands—but the Screamers had a unique style. Tomata, Tommy Gear and K.K. and Paul really had their own unique approach and let’s face it—Tomata did plenty! He was an incredible person and he really projected a performance style—I love it. Sometimes I think it was better that they didn’t get a lot of breaks but on the other hand I’m just so grateful that I have a lot of video tape of them and a lot of audio recording of them because I’m still not through with that. Every time I go back to it, I get excited—I get goose bumps all over my arms. It’s that exciting and that’s why I opened my show at the Museum of Contemporary Art with the Screamers because I really think they had that savage, wild Los Angeles scream.
How many bands are there who were documented only by Target Video? What do you have that exists nowhere else at all?
It’s hard for me to keep up with that part of it because I work with so many different groups. I don’t compare myself to other things that are out there. I do know my experience and the people that were working with Target—you know we had a three-story brick building in the Mission District in San Francisco and people would actually live there for a while, so it was a family thing. We all had business to deal with and that’s the number one issue. We weren’t just screwing around all the time. We wanted to get serious. Especially when I think of bands like Black Flag who would come around. Whenever they would come into town, for me that was like, ‘OK, clear the decks!’ I’ve got from when they had Chavo. Black Flag was an exceptional band just because of their commitment and their dedication, you know—all the miles they put into hauling around in that van. They were great to work with. Chuck—thank God we’re still close friends and Henry, Henry is off doing his own things, but we formed a bond, and Dez, I love him—he’s another person that is so easy to get close to. When I look at—for example, today I transferred over some old material again of Black Flag and Dez is the lead singer, not Henry. But my God, they could stand against any band any day with that intensity. Dez singing—it was just kick ass. It just rips me out. I get energized—it gets me excited, it gets me really pumping. And I can watch Henry, he’s got a different style. I always tried to shoot Henry like King Kong—I tried to get a real low profile on him because he had that real muscular build and he does that song ‘Rise Above’ and I wanted to just drive that thing right through the screen. I wanted Henry coming out like King Kong belting it out.
Is that kind of energy what made you decide to start shooting punk bands?
My background is that when I was a little kid I was totally crazy about rock ‘n roll. I wanted to be a performer myself. I played a guitar and was in a band for a while. A band that was never heard of—just a local band in a little town in Iowa. We went on the local television broadcast and did a pantomime kind of thing but I was only about 11 years old then. I had this determination but I kind of lost that—lost my way for a while because I was also really into being a visual artist. I grew up in a place where it was pretty rough to be an artist period. In the middle of Iowa they always rejected those kinds of people but when I got a chance to go to art school because of my visual art abilities—my talents—I got into that right away. I got into art school as a painter and then I found my way to sculpture but I always had a total fascination with music. I had to have it in my life. When Lou Reed came out with Rock n’ Roll Animal, I thought that was the greatest breakthrough. When I heard punk rock in the ‘70s, oh my God—it just hit a button with me. That was the message. I’m a social-political animal—I’ve always had an anger about life and the way it treats people and to combine that kind of assault with music, I mean—my God, right away I was totally blown away! Obviously the Clash and the Sex Pistols came out, but even other bands like early Killing Joke and then the California bands when they rolled in one after another—the Weirdos’ ‘Life of Crime,’ it just got my blood pumping. So when I got to art school I met the Mutants—they were all friends of mine and they were forming a band and Penelope at the Art Institute was organizing the Avengers at the time and then I met David Byrne from the Rhode Island School of Design and he was doing that band Talking Heads. When he came to town, he came to the studio and it was great. He was enthusiastic about what I was doing and gave me so much support. I shot early stuff of the Talking Heads doing a free concert at Berkeley which was mind blowing. All of this kind of stuff stirred up in a big mixer and I became totally addicted to performance art and noise. We were also going through this problem the whole time. I was into performance artwork myself and the thing of it was we were going through this problem with art galleries and museums—they didn’t want to cooperate. They only wanted stuff that was saleable—that was marketable. So there was this great thing going on about alternative spaces in the ‘70s—an alternative space, an abandoned building. Some place where you could do your thing and invite your friends over to watch and it usually involved song and dance and movement and poetry. So that’s what the deal was. I worked with a lot of those people. Some of them made the change and started to deal with night clubs, some of them stayed the other way and that was what was going on in the ‘70s. And I got really excited about it and one thing led to another.
Why do you think it was necessary for Target to exist? What made this such a part of your life for years?
Back then I was a so-called established sculptor—in other words doing sculpture in galleries and art museums. That was a real disappointment because I was on a roll and had a lot of support. The so-called art critic in San Francisco was spreading the news that I was hot shit but the thing of it was that I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t getting the feedback that I wanted to get—obviously the people who would come to those kinds of events were real saps. I just didn’t like it. I found a need to communicate to my own peer group—my crowd, the people that I respected. And so that’s why I started an alternative art space myself in Oakland in the early ‘70s to present performances and artists that were what I called fringe—front-line people, people taking chances, real edgy stuff. Because it got me excited—that’s where I saw this whole thing going. So I started that and before Target Video it was called Targeted Open Support System. It was a completely different kind of idea but I was experimenting. I was trying things and so that started working. But then I realized that Oakland wasn’t the place to be—there was too much heavy crap going down. Black Panther Party was going down and there was a lot of trouble in the city so San Francisco was the place to be. So I hitched up my horses and moved to San Francisco. I get over there and as luck would have it, I found this three-story brick building in the Mission District. I met the owner and he told me that there was nothing going on here except some pretty heavy crap on the top floor and ‘I want those people out’ because it was too weird. He wanted to get rid of them so he rented me the place. It couldn’t have been better—they had a loading dock, three stories and an elevator and it was only a couple grand a month. Now I didn’t have that kind of money but I did have skills in those days—and a lot of friends—and we went in there and cleaned it and painted it and turned it into a shiny type of jewel. And I rented out the top floor at the time to a company for storage. They paid the rent.
How were you able to sustain an operation like that for so long?
Well, at the time I was on a roll with my sculpture and the art critic in San Francisco at the time got me a job as chairman of the sculpture department at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. As a young snot-nosed guy I got this big buck job. I knew that I liked the fine arts scene but at the same time it was only just a step—it was servicing my desire. I took the job of course.
What was the Target Video TV show like? What would someone have seen if they were just flipping around the channels?
After I graduated with a master’s degree in fine art I wanted to learn more about television production because I was already stirring up the thing with Target and I realized that there was a lot of things that I didn’t know. You’ve got to be in the right place to get any information out of these people because they’re so secretive and I was always beg, borrowing and stealing. I was making one deal on one side and one deal on another to get my hands on a good camera in order to do these shoots. When I first started back in the ‘70s, the only equipment available at that time was Super 8 and if you could afford it, 16mm. So I started with that but it was really difficult because you’d always rely on the whole thing of processing the film and waiting for it to come back to see what you got. It was a real challenge. But back in the ‘70s when I was in graduate school, the Sony Corporation donated a new device called the Portapak and it was one of the first single tube black-and-white cameras. And I did some stuff to alter the camera. Once I found out the limitations of shooting at night—a tech geek guy at my campus, he was always trying to give me advice and he was like, ‘Look, put in one of these security camera tubes because they are more sensitive to light.’ and you could shoot in night clubs which sometimes had only a little light. You’ll see, for example, the Dickies—when they first hit the stage, the lights from the stage would kind of blow their faces out so you get this black background with white silhouettes but as I adjust the aperture to try to deal with it—because it is such a radical change—it comes into zone and it looks pretty damn good. But at least we could shoot those! Otherwise we couldn’t shoot them at all—the early video cameras required so much light and so much intensity, it was a nightmare. So of course I signed up at Merritt College and started to take their video class and their TV production so I could have that access. Through that access I found out about a free cable channel that would service the Bay Area through San Francisco called Cable 25. Most of the shows on there were cooking shows or how to breast feed your children—the Maharishi had a show on Wednesday nights. Well lo and behold, I got my little piece—it was an hour-long section right after the Maharishi. When I first started—you have to understand this was the beginning of video, the beginning of editing, the beginning of cameras, but I had this determination. I said, ‘I want to get this stuff out there.’ The first shows were a lot of poetry and art performance combined with punk music but it was a mixture and then I’d follow Maharishi. The problem with the Maharishi was that by the time he finished with his show, it was always kind of sleepy time and I would go in there with my friends wearing our leather jackets and our defiant look and there was the Maharishi who was just his sweet person but it really irritated the hell out of me. I had to come up with an opening to my show that really was different than the Maharishi because he was doing the lotus position. So I came up with the idea of using a machine gun from an old movie and I would edit this montage of all the faces and issues of social political things that I wanted to talk about during the show—I would open the show with about a 3 minute blast of machine gun fire and it was so irritating. It was so completely the opposite of the Maharishi that at first people were totally distraught at the TV station—they thought, ‘What the hell is he doing? We got everyone all relaxed into a coma and up comes Target Video!’ And it was this punk thing. But listen—the Maharishi being the all-knowing all-wonderful guy thought I had a great idea.
So you got the spiritual support of the Maharishi?
Yes, I did! Goddammit, I swear!
Did he ever mention how much he liked Crime or anything?
No, no, it didn’t go that far. He knows how to handle anything—the point of it was that it served my purpose because we did have to shock the hell out of people to get some attention.
How were you ever able to get Crime into San Quentin? Or the Cramps into the Napa State Mental Hospital?
Because times were different then. We’ve got such an anal-retentive society these days you cant hardly do a thing. We’re destroying creativity—we are really destroying creativity with all the laws and restrictions. It’s a nightmare. Even my own kids—I am so sad about what is going on. It is so difficult to be creative. In the ‘70s people were begging. California was an open place, they poured tons of money into colleges, into art programs. I don’t even know if you were born yet, but believe me I would go to universities as a guest lecturer and they would have these incredible foundries for casting metal and making art. And they would have these incredible studios for graduate artists and they’d pay you a bunch of money—you could actually make a good living being an art teacher. The only problem was that it was still really conservative and they weren’t taking the big chances but that’s cool because when you have a situation like that it allows young snot-nosed people to come and say, ‘I want to try and do something different.’ So that is why we had a whole organization of people who were trying to think of ways to break out of the mold and that’s why when we contacted different places like San Quentin prison. I know all about those prison programs because I worked there for a number of years putting these things together—they were so happy to see you, you couldn’t believe it. That was an organization called Bread and Roses that used to exist in the Bay Area—they put together a lot of shows. Some of them real high-end commercial, some of them art-performance type of things but they were just into the arts and like I said, no one got sued in those days. People were willing to take chances—people were open-minded and that was what was so wonderful about the times. If you could come up with an idea like that, they were happy to hear it. The same with the Napa State Mental Hospital. You think that could go on today? No way! There would be like fifteen lawyers standing outside the gate licking their chops. One of the greatest things about that event—even to this day I am so moved when I watch that video over and over. But the thing of it is—those people who were going through such a heavy experience in life and were confined to that mental institution, the freedom and the happiness that they had that day during that event was almost like a miracle! It was almost like watching something biblical—something from a Cecil B. DeMille film but in a real sense, a true sense. Nobody was acting and I have never seen anything in my life so moving and I’ve been told that a thousand times. We were at the right place at the right time but we had the right thing in our hearts. We wanted to have an experience and it all came together with magic.
Are those the twin pinnacles of the Target videography?
There is one that you left out that was extremely important and that was the Mutants at the School For the Deaf. That was mind-blowing and you had to be there because the happiness and the joy on the kids’ faces and everybody. See, when you get this reciprocal thing going down—nobody made any money! It was the magic of putting these elements together. The Mutants doing a free show for deaf kids. The kids responding because it was exciting and nobody ever pays attention to them plus the energy that the Mutants generated because of their music and the kids responding to it—it was just a phenomenal experience. If you could bottle that experience it would be worth millions of dollars an ounce! If mankind could be like that, wouldn’t we be in a better place right now?
Why do you feel that punk was such a positive humanistic thing? And what do you think of its casual reputation for destruction and nihilism?
That’s because there are so many people trying to cash in on it and trying to find a way to market it and in reality the only good thing—and I got kind of bitter about the way things were going because I could see that there wasn’t enough of that true punk spirit that existed back in the ‘70s—but you know what I think? There are new kids who are innocent and idealistic enough to be able to generate the same kind of feeling. And I’m thinking of my own two boys who have a punk band that doesn’t have a name yet.
Have you filmed them yet?
Not really but they’re 14 and they’re getting close because they’ve been playing their guitars now for about three years. And then I’m thinking of Chip Dil and Tony Dil of the Dils and his son Dewey who has a band called the Plimptons and I heard them—they’re incredible because they’ve got that raw excitement and that energy. And I think if we encourage that, if we really support that—if you think of something that is really clean, idealistic and fresh, that’s where it’s at. That is gold! And the problem with the world we live in is we have a tendency to tarnish everything right away and exploit it to the point that it becomes dirty. It’s not good for us to think of anything like that because if we don’t have these fresh things in our life, then we don’t have this wonderful excitement of creativity. We need something fresh like that.
Why is the time right now for this Target Video resurgence? It seems like there was nothing for years and then suddenly the vaults crack open.
Because I’m not happy with the way things are going. That’s why. I’m not happy at all—I just explained to you what I do believe in. I believe in the young people—I believe in really trying to leave these kids alone and it’s just horrible how we trash the youth. They can see this world and they can see we have a lot of problems. We need a way out and we can’t seem to do it because we’re too prejudiced and I’m saying the only thing I can see as an artist is to open up these doors and let these kids talk and leave them alone.
Does that connect to what Target was doing in the ‘70s?
Well, it does. I was in the ‘60s and the ‘60s was a very exciting time—we had a purpose. We had an army of people going in the same direction and I really think it accomplished a lot of good things but then things got real convoluted. Then in the ‘70s you had another rebirth of excitement—and personally I have to say that the ‘70s were one of the freshest and most creative times. Because not only music but visual art, the poetry and all the posters and John Denney designing clothes for the Weirdos. There were so many levels and it was a profound movement of time that never got the recognition because it was saleable enough right away. We might even see a revisit to that in a phony way.
What kind of practical things do you want to communicate to people now who are still working on these same kinds of things?
To be honest I don’t think this show is going to communicate all of it—I think this show is more like a primitive MTV. I talked to the people at the Cinefamily Theater and they want to give a good example of a lot of bands they’ve never seen before—but for me to try to cram 50 bands into two hours, for God’s sakes that’s not Target Video show! That’s cramming 50 bands into two hours and that’s more like a primitive MTV. So I’m saying this is not really the Target Video show. What I’m trying to do is make people happy because a lot of people are curious to this band or that band they’ve never heard of. But give me a chance—if I get more support, and I’m going to do it anyways, but if I get more support I’m trying to break into a new audience. I think there are a lot of young artists out there and I’m trying to pump up a bit more excitement. I might be moving to L.A. before all this is over—that’s the master plan. I don’t know where else to go. I have got this humongous library of material and to be honest, for the last 30 years I’ve lived in Paris, I’ve been in New York, all over the place, and to be quite honest L.A. is where it’s at. That’s the only place that I could see where this stuff could be put to good use and inspire more creativity.
Why do you say that?
Because there ain’t a goddamn thing going on anywhere else really. There’s all that bullshit going on in London, the French are sucking each other breasts, San Francisco is all involved with who’s got the most money—I mean, that’s not gonna work. Artists can’t survive in an environment where you can’t even rent a studio. But at least L.A., for some reason will hire people and put them to work and they can continue as a creative person and besides that, what can I say? Most of the people that I know in the punk rock scene—the older crowd—are living down there.
What do you want to happen to your archive? What’s the ideal future for everything you filmed?
Without sounding commercial or crass, the big dream at this point is to put together a downloadable website and an underground library of visual images of music that people can download and view when they want to in their home—a digital Internet library. I have a rough estimate of my library—I have over 300 tapes that are in ¾ format and I have another 75 or 80 of ½ inch reel-to-reel tape. Not all of those have been transferred over because of the format jump. A format jump to ¾ and a format jump to DV which I’m doing these days—basically what I’ve been doing over the past few years is transferring this stuff over to digital. By hook or by crook! Either I try to talk a museum curator into using their facility or the college where I work—whatever it takes. The thing about it is that no matter what, it does inspire fun and activity—it just does. The beauty about L.A. people to me is that you can put on some music and a video or whatever—get some people together and things happen. They talk and make things happen—they want to make things happen. It’s an enjoyable thing. It’s a part of life, business or whatever you want to call it—it’s just a good thing. You don’t have to be judgmental. We’re not anal-retentive like the New York scene, oh my God! L.A. people take care of themselves and it’s not a perfect world, but the point of it is that I still have fun there. I’ve been to enough events and I’m like a hound dog—if I smell something good, I go for it and this is where it’s at. Thank God I have Jackie Sharp down there. Look, I’m never going to be a perfect politician—not everyone is going to like my point of view, but at the same time I do love art and I do love music and I do love L.A. bands. There are so many bands that mean so much to me with what they’ve done. I want to stimulate—I want to be a part of it! I want to stimulate the arts scene and I can because I might be a bit of an old soldier but I’m still a pain in the ass.

JOE REES AND TARGET VIDEO PRESENT ‘RAW POWER’ ON THU., APR. 30, AT CINEFAMILY, 611 N. FAIRFAX AVE., LOS ANGELES. 7:30 PM / $12 / ALL AGES. CINEFAMILY.ORG. TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE. VISIT TARGET VIDEO AT TARGETVIDEO.BLOGSPOT.COM.