John Cale beat Jason Voorhees to both hockey masks and striking terror into the heart of American suburbia. He recently performed his classic Paris 1919 at UCLA’s Royce Hall without the old headgear but with all the old energy. He speaks now from his manager’s office near the Blue Line downtown. This interview by Kevin Ferguson.

You once said, ‘Doing evil is better than doing nothing.’
I didn’t say that—Lou did. Actually, wait a minute … It was all very tied into literature and risk. We were talking about people’s definition of risk. And there was very little literature that was just about that. Except he was pushing Last Exit to Brooklyn—the Hubert Selby book. It ends up in a lot of capital letters, so there’s a lot of screaming that goes on in the entire last chapter. It’s very good. The dialogue at high volume. Sam Beckett, too. Every line is somebody shouting at somebody. And we were discussing how useless doing nothing is.
Dylan Thomas said, ‘He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.’
That’s a good work ethic. Good Labor Party ethic, too. My family were all coal miners. The idea that work was good for the soul was what they lived by.
Even evil work?
Yeah! I’m not doing much evil now. Most of my work is about creating things and has been for some time. Lou and I were trying to set our borders for what we believed in. And so it delineated the areas of activity that we were really passionate about.
How do you connect with Dylan Thomas?
He’s omnipresent when you’re a kid growing up in Wales. You never got anywhere without the education system teaching you about him. Some of those ideas were kind of spurious. The idea that Dylan Thomas was using language in the same way that the Welsh poets did with the Welsh language—it didn’t make sense because Welsh has specific rules. H is a vowel in Welsh! You can do a lot more with it. They were teaching us that alliteration and certain stuff in Thomas was related to the Welsh language. It didn’t strike me as accurate. But I did love his use of English language.
I’m from L.A., but I don’t like Bukowski much. What do you see in Thomas?
One of the things about this art piece I just did for the [Venice] Biennale is about what I carry around with me from my childhood that makes me work in the certain way that I work. You couldn’t get away from him growing up as a kid! I learned English when I was 7 and I was ready because my father was English—and my Grandma banned English in the home! And my relationship with my grandmother is nasty enough—every time I think about it it makes my blood boil! And why is it that a Welshman who grew up in a Welsh-speaking home ended up in New York making English his poetic language? The answer is because Dylan Thomas opened the door. I can understand what you mean by Bukowski, but I see him as more of a New York poet than an L.A. poet.
You said Los Angeles corrupted your life to its worst point—why did you stay as long as you did?
L.A. didn’t corrupt my life to the worst point—I did. I mean, I enjoy the climate out here. I loved New York for years. I still do. L.A. was always a company town. It still is. I came out here to learn more about corporate architecture and influence, so I did. I learned a lot about making alliances in corporations, but I didn’t really make the right number of alliances. And there was always this unrequited love of performing that I didn’t pursue while I was here. But when I left, it landed right in my lap in London. That was when I had a band and I could decide which direction the band was going to go in.
Too much producing?
It’s very difficult when you’re in the company. You have to do the work that you’re asked to do. But as far as I could, I did that. This opportunity of going to London and starting a solo career was very good.
Where were you in your life when Paris 1919 was written?
I had a lot of commitments at the time and I really had difficulty rationalizing them. It’s a very calm record—the one case where I wrote all the songs before I went into the studio. All the albums afterwards have sort of been improvised. Nowadays I just start off with a drum groove and it’s all improvised. That way you get further down the pike in production. But anyway, it was all very much emotion recollected in tranquility—that’s what Paris was. I was feeling very nostalgic for what I loved about Europe, and it all ended up in the album. A lot of those songs are really a little opaque.
Did that make the London move all the more welcome?
Funny thing was—when I got to London I spent all my time listening to a turntable that was stacked with Beach Boys records!
Did you ever meet Brian, by the way?
I went to say hello to him at the Javits Center in New York—it was like eight years ago. I caught him at the door. He didn’t know me from Adam. But I was just happy to say, ‘Look after yourself, Brian.’
What did London do for your music?
It was exciting for me. I got my teeth into having a band. I got a lot of help from Chris Spedding. It’s a little brutal, but he helped me figure out how to take what we did in the studio and make it work live. I had this penchant for making up new songs on stage. Chris was always there—he was like an eagle. He’d spot a change coming up. That’s where I got closer to the idea what the VU was—on stage.
Sounds like the trip back to New York was hard.
Yeah it was, actually. The punk scene in London was really solid. It had pretty good grounding. The Sex Pistols covered that ground pretty well. I wasn’t that much aware of that at the time until I got to New York. But in L.A. it seemed like the spiritual side of what punk was. It had much more energy than the one in New York. It reminded me a lot more of London than the ones in New York did. I don’t know why—whether it’s because the difference between the rich and the poor here is as graphic as it is in London or what? There was a lot of energy.
Did you hear about the John Cale Revival—the John Cale tribute band from Prague ?
No, but Prague makes kind of a sense. The Velvet Revolution was based on what we did in the Velvet Underground. People were passing around the lyrics in jail.
Were you the first person to frighten people in a hockey mask?
No, robbers would wear them back then! The idea was on the outside I had a hockey mask and on the inside I had reflective ski glasses that were sort of yellowish, and then underneath that I had a reflective steel scarf, and then under that I wore green reflective shades. They came off during different stages in the performance.
Sounds like a nightmare.
Yeah—you can’t see very well. You get down to the nitty gritty real fast. But at least something’s going on during the show. There was always stuff like that going on anyway. In Denmark I’d have some giant Viking guy carry a stepladder onto the stage without telling the band and then the band would play ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and I could hang upside down in the ladder while I was singing. You’d try to figure out different things in different clubs. You’d look at the place where you were playing that night and say, ‘OK, let’s turn all the lights off in here!’ And we’d start with ‘I Keep a Close Watch’ and from that we’d go into the hard rock stuff. But turning all the lights off—the club owner would say, ‘You can’t do that! You gotta have the exit signs on!’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, but it’s only for like three minutes,’ and he’d say, ‘OK.’ There was always a plan to have some sort of theater going on. I had a ski outfit—I had a fencing outfit made by Betsey Johnson for me.
You couldn’t just buy one off the rack?
Well, I mean it’s much better to have one fitted—all the others are sort of generic. There’s a way of making them look zippier than the rest.
When was the last time you played piano with your elbows?
About ten years ago, I guess. I ended ‘Fear’ with elbows, it was a solo performance. Back in the day, there was a piece by La Monte Young—‘X for Henry Flynt’—that was about that. About human fallibility. When I played that song, the audience came up and dragged the piano away from me. I was on my knees so that the keyboard was at the right level, and somebody jumped up on stage and pulled the piano away from me! I had to go running after it. And Cornelius Cardew—my collaborator—came up and was really pissed off.
Did your avant-garde friends accept you as a pop musician?
They weren’t too impressed with it at first. But when they saw that we hooked up with Andy, they started paying attention! But I never inquired as to what they thought. I did take the Marble Index album to Aaron Copland. And he thought [Nico] had a very gravely voice. And that was about it. I never went and discussed it with them. They were watching Andy and what Andy was doing more than anything. The idea of a rock ‘n’ roll band that Andy got together was really the buzz.
Was Andy really that crucial?
Sure! I mean—having a co-conspirator was really important. But I think it was really a case … what happened was we got so much publicity so fast, and we were pretty rabid anyway—really interested in our work. And one of the things that really worked in those days was we went up to the Factory and would see how all they worked. We did all those rehearsals for the first album there, and that work ethic was important for Andy as well. It wasn’t just messing around. If you wanted to do a silk screen, you had to get down and do the silk screen. It takes time and effort.
Didn’t Lou write a song about that?
Exactly! Those were the topics we covered on that album.
I heard writing with Lou was a mixed bag back in the day.
We were working very hard to get this sound and idea going. That’s the way ‘Venus’ worked, ‘Heroin,’ ‘Black Angel’s Death Song.’ We were trying to force a square peg in a round hole. It was collaboration at its greasiest.
How greasy was Songs for Drella?
I don’t smoke. I didn’t like having to be in a room where Lou didn’t mind blowing smoke in your face every five minutes just to get you out of there. It was tough. The songwriting process was fine, but by the end of the process it really got hairy! We just bore down—we had three weeks and we just sort of methodically charted where we wanted to go. In the end we were like, ‘There’s no song about us!’ So we wrote one.
Why did you start playing pop music?
I decided not to do anything more with the avant-garde when I joined the VU, and after the VU I decided I could really be a producer. It just seemed to be at hand at the time. And I had these things with Terry [Riley]—he was an instrumentalist. I really wanted to take advantage of the fact that he could do boogie woogie in all sorts of time signatures. At the time, too, CBS corporate were really concerned with Vintage Violence—worried if the title had a political meaning.
Really? Even the Monkees had protest songs by then.
I think it was the Democratic Convention. They didn’t want to stir anything up. The album was harmless enough.
How did the VU prepare you to go solo?
It’s something I was shy about at first. But what became clear was there weren’t any rules for it. You just needed to focus your way through. The first song was ‘Winter Song’ for Nico on Chelsea Girls.
Do you still own that Mustang Cobra?
No, I don’t. I don’t know what I’d do with it if I had it anyway. The EPA is much tougher on Mustang Cobras than they were back then—except in Nevada.
Drive it to Vegas.
Yeah, I could leave it in Vegas!
My dad’s first car was a 1968 GT California Special.
I went to visit Jim Webb at one point who had an AC Cobra, and I just wanted to listen to it. ‘Just turn it on for me, Jim! Let me listen to it!’
Did you ever get back on speaking terms with Kevin Ayers?
Why? What happened?
Didn’t he sleep with your wife?
Oh yeah! But I really took that as a personal gesture from my spouse. I really didn’t blame Kevin for that. I talked to him. That really didn’t influence my relationship with Kevin at all!
What about ‘Guts’? ‘The bugger in the short sleeves fucked my wife’?
Ahhhh—not really. I mean … slightly.

VISIT JOHN CALE AT MYSPACE.COM/JOHNCALEOFFICIALSITE.

If you’re a serious record collector, chances are you’ve paid your fair share of cash for hard to find, out-of-print records. Ever wonder what records are the most valuable? Discogs just released a list of their top 100 highest selling records, which you might want to compare to auction tracker site Popsike’s current top 25 list. Check out both lists and see how your collection measures up!

Discogs’s top five:
1) $4,143 Mistafide – Equidity Funk 12″
2) $2,000 Mütiilation – Vampires Of Black Imperial Blood 2xLP, Ltd
3) $1,250 Concept Of AL.P.S., The* – Unknown 12″, EP
4) $1,200 Ryvon D.J.* – I’m Gonna Dance (Take Me Tonight) 12″
5) $1,200 Weldon Irvine – Time Capsule LP

Popsike’s top five:
1) $30,016 Beatles – White Album UK 1968 Mono LP Cover No.0000005
2) $25,200 Velvet Underground & Nico 1966 Acetate LP
3) $19,814 Sex Pistols – God Save the Queen – GENUINE A&M AMS7284!
4) $18,134 Beatles PLEASE PLEASE ME 63 UK 1ST BLACK & GOLD STEREO
5) $16,830 Sex Pistols – God Save The Queen PUNK PRE A&M

Stream: The Minutemen “History Lesson Part 2″

(from Double Nickels on the Dime available on SST)

The Minutemen’s Double Nickels On The Dime is one of the several weathered foundations of L.A. RECORD and one of the few albums still alive with the weird outside-inside energy of punk as it was once in California and the world. Exactly twenty-five years later, it still starts bands and makes friends. Minutemen bassist Mike Watt meets for pizza at San Pedro’s excellent Pavich’s Pizza for remembering D. Boon and George Hurley and that guy Mike Watt in the summer of 1984. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

You turned fifty in December and now Double Nickels is having its 25th anniversary.
I was 25 or 26 when I recorded this? Half of my life. The biggest thing about that guy Mike Watt in those days of 25-year-olds was really getting my mind blown by Ulysses. That was the big thing in my mind right then. It had a big impact on me. It made me wonder so much about the world. It’s funny how things come around. That record was a trippy time in the Minutemen’s life. In the punk era. Going back 25 years—it’s part of the past now! It’s a signifier in some ways—my life and other peoples’ lives. Like people knowing us and the punk movement—people who got the record, never saw us live. Keith and Tim did the We Jam Econo documentary. A lot of bands from the older times don’t have things done on them like that. They didn’t know a lot about the band—they knew from the record, but they wanted to find out about us. It became a thing unto itself—a touchstone. Not unto itself because it was obviously a scene—without a scene, there woulda been no Nickels, no Minutemen, no Econo. I don’t wanna get carried away—conceited! It’s just how it works out. We never thought we were a better band than anybody. We were happy as hell to be along with the team. We didn’t wanna be on top of the pile. I think every band had its own trip. There’s enough people to tell what’s right and wrong with music in books and shit. I don’t get into that. One good thing I like about it—is for D. Boon. A lot of times you get killed in your younger days, you get forgotten. I know the reason in my case—I liked him a lot and the fella could pay really good. For other cats to be aware of him—keeping the Minutemen in mind like that—in a weird way, his art is living. Some of his spirit is out there. For me, I owe him everything.
Where can you hear Boon the most on Nickels?
Maybe ‘Anxious Mofo’—that solo he does! Hardly any notes! It’s just great. And he does a great one in the instrumental—‘June 16.’ A lot of the words were influenced by Jim Joyce. The glory of man and all this. On ‘June ’16,’ Boon does a really good guitar solo, too. Hurley plays smoking drums on almost all of it. There’s a lot of dynamics with those two guys. Little tiny song settings. I’m trying to glue things together. I don’t do much bass solo on that record. I don’t think any.
Who drew the anchor on the label?
D. Boon. Punk records only had the writing on one side. With the way the lyrics are on the sleeve, we got the idea from Wire. Just put it out like prose instead of poetry.
Who wrote ‘Arena rock is new wave’ in the dead wax?
Joe Carducci came up with all those. I don’t know his commentary. [Looking at the photos in the gatefold] These pictures—this is Richard Meltzer, this is Joe Baiza. I just cut these pictures out. I had a posterboard. This is our first paid gig at Starwood. These two school buses—we rented these and played in them in Mojave on a dry lakebed. We had to wear sunglasses because the dust was blowing so hard. This is the Federal Building in west L.A.—I think it’s Rock Against Racism or Reagan. Maybe both. The camera people were taking pictures of a girl with a mohawk—they were way more into that than filming bands, so I’m turning it up. You can see how the scissors I used—pinking shears! I like these pictures. I don’t know—so casual. Boon’s got his fist up! And Georgie…
I know you did the record like Ummagumma—everyone got a solo song. ‘Cohesion,’ ‘Take 5, D’…
Georgie’s is ‘You Need The Glory.’ D. Boon never wrote a song with my words. I would write with his words all the time, but they weren’t words he wrote for me. They were little thoughts he put on paper and left around. That shit didn’t have rhymes—it was just thoughts, observations. He would use his words if he had rhymes—‘This Ain’t No Picnic.’ There were some misfires on this, I think. We did another version of ‘Little Man With A Gun In His Hand’—this came out such a lame version!
You said before you gotta spread a lot of manure to be a farmer.
Well, we wanted to match up to the Huskers because they had a double album. Kind of a challenge. I thought the band always did better when we were challenged. And it caught the band at a great time when Georgie was still writing us words.
At work, right?
He’d have to go in and work a lathe, so they’re kind of abstract. And the band had played enough that we could bring songs together really quick. Me and D. Boon were always quick because we grew up together but it always took time to show Georgie. We never wanted him in back—we wanted him just as involved. We’d spend a lot of time working out. This time, he could learn to feel it. He knew when he’d have a break or pause. The songs were coming real quick. The big problem was how were we gonna put 45 songs in order? We knew it was gonna be four sides. The way a record works, the needle works its way to the label. I kinda figured we’d have the shitty ones on the label and the good ones outside. How is this gonna happen? If we draw straws to find an order—first second third, pick one at a time. And good songs go first and lame ones get left, and the fourth side is nobody. I think Georgie got first pick and what’s he pick? His solo song! If you look at his side—all Hurley! I got second pick—I picked ‘Mike Jackson’ first, and Boon got third and picked ‘Anxious Mofo.’ Here’s a weird one—Hurley/Boon. Not a lot of Hurley/Boon. ‘Two Beads At The End,’ which we used to always crack up. It was always hard to know what Georgie was singing about. Private meanings. So we thought two butt beads hanging out—start you up like a lawnmower! I haven’t looked at this in a long time. D. Boon’s side is a lot of his stuff. And mine—a lot of Watt ones! Maybe we were picking songs from our own stuff—I thought I was picking for good! And it turns out the good ones are kinda on the outside. We didn’t want no favoritism. All divided even. A democratic thing. D. Boon would like that political idea.
How did ‘History Lesson’ end up on the label? That’s one of the very best songs.
Nobody wanted it! Second to last pick. D. Boon’s last pick was ‘One Reporter’s Opinion.’ Liked the guitar, a lotta guitar solo—hated the idea of my name in the song. I did that a lot. And ‘History Lesson’ had my name in it, too. The last two songs picked. The fourth side all unpicked. The Henry song, D. Boon’s ‘Song for Latin America,’ Martin the Reactionaries singer—no one wanted them!
Where did ‘History Lesson’ come from?
I wrote it and I kinda got the lick from Velvet Underground ‘Here She Comes Now.’ Mugger kept playing it over and over. I wrote it kind of for hardcore kids. Velvet music is kind of slow, but I thought everybody should be able to relate to playing with your buddy in a band. I guess some dudes real young think of being a rock star, but a lot of dudes start just to be with their friend. A lot of the idea—we didn’t seem like guys in a band. Kind of strange in a way. But personable! People could know us. They like a song where we talk about each other. A lot of times, D. Boon would be pulled off stage by bouncers thinking he was just some dude in the crowd! Me sometimes but D. Boon a lot—they just couldn’t believe he was in a band!
‘And Mr. Narrator, this is like Bob Dylan to me?’
We didn’t know what words were for in songs when we were boys. We thought it was like lead guitar. We didn’t know meanings and shit. But Dylan seemed like a weird uncle at Thanksgiving, muttering and no one paying attention but here’s these weird kind of words. When we were making music as boys, we never thought of music as being expression. Used to get feelings. We thought it was to copy records. Never had the idea you try to get your own thoughts out! As we got older, it seemed maybe Dylan wasn’t so afraid. And if he wasn’t, maybe we shouldn’t be scared. It was kind of confidence for us. The narrator—like a voice in a movie explaining things. That’s who he was in our life. We were learning by doing. Now cats write tunes all the time! I gave a talk to my sister’s 6th grade—these kids, they’re in bands! Last year I did one here for 3rd graders—nine-year-olds!—and some girls had bands! But it was different in those days—you didn’t do it. Not like lemmings or sheep—though people are like lemmings a little bit. The best guy in town was the guy who could play ‘Black Dog’ the best. It was building models—‘Hey, kind of like the real thing.’ We don’t think soapbox derby—where you can roll around in the thing. Roll, not just look! So Dylan kind of helped us. We didn’t know what his words meant but we knew they meant something. Now we’re gonna write songs—what are words for? By Double Nickels, I’d been doing—I’d written my first ones—terrible ones—in the Reactionaries. That’s thirty years—1979! I made two cassettes. Ten songs. None made it to Minutemen. One I gave to Brendan Mullen—the only time I tried to get a gig. But by Double Nickels, I’d already written like 50 or 60 Minutemen songs. I was kinda havin’ fun. I’d write words sometimes just to hear D. Boon say them. In ‘It’s Expected I’m Gone’—let’s have D. Boon say ‘big fucking shit!’ right now! I just wanted to hear him say ‘big fucking shit!’ really loud like he did! Nothing to do with the song. Something to do with the James Joyce book.
‘I must look like a dork?’
No—I wanted Michael Jackson. If Michael Jackson sang our song, a lot of people would get the message of Minutemen. He had a big audience. A good singer. I sent him a cassette of it—to the management on the record cover. I wrote him a note. ‘This is a political song I think Michael Jackson should sing.’ I never got written back. ‘I must look like a dork’ I got from an interview with Iggy in Creem. They’d have spiel with questions and answers and they’d bold out a quote—‘I MUST LOOK LIKE A DORK.’ That magazine was very cool. Not like Rolling Stone and shit—good sense of humor. So I just lifted from Iggy. I thought Iggy was a balls-out dude—the Stooges a balls-out band. To be in that legacy—be part of a movement inspired by that band—so what if you look like a fucking dork! You tell people you are and you still go for it.
Is Double Nickels your Ulysses?
I try to be black-and-white about what Minutemen were trying to do with political songs. ‘Organizing the Boy Scouts for murder is wrong!’ It wasn’t supposed to be satire. We’re an anti-war band! A working people band! Kind of a weird-kind-of-people band! Dudes who didn’t fit in so much. To us, the message of our band and a little bit of punk, too—start your own band! Say what’s on your mind! Sometimes it was scary—there were skinhead bands and shit who were terribly enthusiastic in their message. But that’s the way the scene was. No rules. People went for it. I talk about Minutemen in two songs on that album—the one I actually mailed to Michael Jackson and ‘Politics of Time.’ I didn’t really sing about the band in ‘History Lesson’—because it was Hurley, too. On Punchline, the song ‘History Lesson’ is very hard-hitting. The story of most human civilization is killing each other. And I thought maybe there might be a part two—we don’t have to kill each other? So I’m gonna take it relaxed—talk about heroes like Richard Hell, Joe Strummer, John Doe. Those are my three songs that ain’t about Ulysses. About the band and my friend. Georgie’s? I don’t know what his are about—a working guy writing them at work. Boon—his tunes are usually about his beliefs. The outside writers—we never asked ‘em. It wasn’t important to us. It might have been like censorship. Just 100% used their words. And some of them were pretty cryptic. Like Dirk’s ‘The Roar Of The Masses Could Be Farts.’ And Jack Brewer’s cousin Joe—we didn’t even know the guy!—writes a weird one—‘Please Don’t Be Gentle With Me.’ I don’t know what the fuck—that’s a love song?
How many love songs are on Double Nickels?
‘Just wake me up and tug my hair!’ We took these at face value—we didn’t care! We made songs! A love song I got from Ulysses—‘My Heart In The Real World.’ Ulysses was bent a lot on language, so it was actually about language, but it has love song imagery. And war imagery. ‘Do You Want New Wave’ is about language too. ‘The World According To Nouns.’ All inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Have you re-read Ulysses?
I did in my forties. It seems a lot sadder book. Those days, when I wrote songs from that book, it was a big celebration! The glory of man! Now it’s more like—the glory hole of man! It seems like I could hear Joyce’s voice stronger. It seems like a lot of sadness with his mother and just the general condition of humans sometimes. So much failure. The only victories are tiny things between people in everyday stuff. The big joy is in the small middle things, because the big things are all fucking nightmare. ‘One Reporter’s Opinion’ seems like love, but it’s not. What struck me as trippy about Joyce was the technique in Ulysses changing the style with each episode—very scientific, dry, baby talk, opera, all these different trips. A lot of our shit was so… inside. It never got out to people. But it was very clear to us. Like the title. And the meaning of our lyrics. During this time, Boon worked in the van pool—one time the police were called on him—they said there was an insane man attacking the weeds! He was just a utility guy using the weed-whacker! But he had a mohawk! ‘The guy’s attacking the building!’ He’d write stuff while working and driving on little papers—this is what he would write and why there are no rhymes in them. And I’d find ‘em and make songs.
Did you ever talk to him about that?
No—I’d wonder if he would leave ‘em for me! I’d just find these things. Find ‘em in the van, in the car, all over the place. Just thinking about stuff.
How do you feel when you listen to Double Nickels now?
I didn’t listen for a long time. I listened around We Jam Econo. It was amazing! George said the same thing—‘How could I play that shit?’ It holds up, I think, for the most part. It doesn’t sound like, ‘Here’s my lame young days.’ It sounds like maybe the best thing about it!
Why?
I don’t know! Just listen! Goddamn! The way we played together—the way we were in our history. A lot of things happening at the right time. The way we were with other peoples’ lyrics and our own. We didn’t try to refine it or water it down. We just grabbed it by the bull horns and went for it, and the spirit shows through! It doesn’t sound forced—doesn’t sound fake. It’s very un-self-conscious. We did it without thinking—we wanted one because the Huskers had one! ‘We should, too!’ We just let it be it—we never thought in bigger terms. Now look—if you wanna know what was good about Minutemen, a lot of it’s in that record. We didn’t know at the time. But you ask perspective—like when I re-read Ulysses—that’s what I see. When I read it, I heard a different voice. The words were the same but I had changed. And maybe I identify more with the man. It seemed sadder. A lot of books from my 20s I’m re-reading seem a lot sadder. Kerouac—On The Road—very sad! These days it’s not a total ‘Yeah! Yeah, go for it!’ celebration firecracker. Dean Moriarty leaves him in the hospital with dysentery—that’s lame! It’s beat like ‘beat down.’ Minutemen—that is a young man’s record. And the spirit of young men is in that. It’s like—‘Wow, we got a chance to make a record! A chance to play together! To play a gig with Flag and Huskers! A chance to write music to Jack Brewer’s cousin Joe’s song about whatever the fuck tug my hair in the morning!’ We were just fucking lit about everything—all lit! Sometimes a young person is like that because they don’t have the worries of an older thing or a bad experience to keep them all wallowing or too safe. It has that spirit in it. And I can identify it because I was there. And I think about George and Boon and myself—man! That more than probably any other—we were all there with everything we had! More than any other of the Minutemen records. Buzz or Howl was actually two different things. I don’t think any Georgie songs are on it. One side Spot, one Ethan. No Georgie songs on 3 Way Tie or Project Mersh. What Makes A Man Start Fires, I had to write all the music—the only time D. Boon didn’t live in Pedro. Paranoid Time, Georgie wasn’t there with the songs. He came in later. Punchline was kind of Double Nickels. A little bit. An early version. Built on almost the same template except one or two outside writers. When we had the one album, most of the outside writers came on the second album of Double Nickels. The first was almost Punchline part 2—it actually was! And Punchline—goddamn! We make that—in the first year—December of ’80! Before we’d even been a year old. It’s not like Nickels—that’s why it holds up. It’s our signature. If you wanna know about the band and you only hear one record—that’s the one.

THE MINUTEMEN’S DOUBLE NICKELS ON THE DIME IS AVAILABLE FROM SST. VISIT MIKE WATT AT HOOTPAGE.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/WATTFROMPEDRO.

Download: The Strange Boys “To Turn a Tune or Two”

(from The Strange Boys and Girls Club on In The Red Records)

Texas made them strange and Beerland made them men and now Austin’s Strange Boys are one of the realest rock ‘n’ roll bands currently prowling the American interstate system. They play tonight at the Smell and tomorrow at the Echo and will eradicate years of listless go-nowhere-ism with only 25 minutes and access to electricity. This interview by Dan Collins.

I just read this MSN poll that said your hometown of Austin was one of the most ‘livable’ cities in the U.S.
Ryan Sambol (guitar/vocals): They haven’t been there in August, then!
And Portland got voted the worst! Do you think Austin is the polar opposite of Portland?
Ryan: That just means more people from Portland are going to move to Austin.
You’ve said in interviews that Austin was a great place musically because it was geographically in the middle of so many things. Like it was a great melting pot for blues, jazz, country and rock, and not so heavy-handed with any one thing. Can you tell me your favorite year for each of those genres?
Matt Hammer (drums): 1945 for jazz.
Ryan: It’s really hard to say! We can’t answer that question!
What’s a question you were hoping I would ask?
Ryan: ‘Do you want me to give you a million dollars?’
I was going to ask if you have crazy dreams on tour.
Ryan: Oh man, you’re asking great guys! Philip [Sambol, bass] has something called ‘night terrors.’ It’s where the person all of a sudden wakes up, out of nowhere, totally out of the blue, screaming as loud as he possibly can. Sometimes he’s just screaming, like ‘Aaaaaaaaaghgg! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaghgg!’ And sometimes he’s like, ‘Aaaaaagh, look over there, look over there, aaaaah!’ Sometimes it’s like a really quick ‘aaah.’ But once Philip has the night terror, he freaks everybody else out in the room so much where they can’t go to sleep, and their hearts are pounding! But Philip immediately goes back to sleep. Philip sleeps soundly while everyone else is at the end of their wits.
Are you excited to play in Los Angeles again?
Ryan: We’re really excited, especially to play with Mika Miko in their hometown.
What are your favorite bands in L.A. right now?
Ryan: Darker My Love, we’ve always liked a lot. Mika Miko, of course. Anasazis. There’s probably a lot… Motley Crue! Guns ‘n’ Roses!
What’s the weirdest band you’ve ever played with?
Ryan: One time we played with this guy—he’s called Captured by Robots! We started out as enemies, but now we’re friends. We saw him in Arkansas, and we didn’t get along very well at first. And then we traded off some emails discussing our viewpoints about each other’s music. And now he checks in with us every year, and he’s like, ‘How you doing?’ But he got hit by a car a few months back! He’s better now.
I’ve seen him many times back in the day. He’s like a one-man Man… or Astroman? And you guys started off as a duo yourselves, you and Matt.
Ryan: We were called ‘The Waves.’
On days like today, do you ever look around and go, ‘Fuck, this van could be so much more spacious if we kicked these other guys out?’
Ryan: Oh yeah, Matt and I think about that every day. If we were still a duo, we’d be making way more money. We’d be touring in a Civic or something, where we wouldn’t have to worry about it. We constantly talk about kicking out Philip and Greg [Enlow, guitar]!
You guys are all pretty young, but you and Greg are total total baby faces! Has that been a problem for you? Are bouncers like, ‘You’re not 21!’
Ryan: It’s not a problem now that our IDs actually say we are 21. They always say, ‘Oh, you look 14!’ I dunno. I would say most fourteen-year-olds are still cooler than the adults we meet.
Is it a problem when you meet lady folk because they think you’re jailbait?
Ryan: I think it helps!
One of things I like about your band is that despite being young, your sound has a really solid foundation in a lot of older music. Sometimes you sound a bit like something obscure from the sixties, though with a very genuine love of blues and Americana. What are your influences?
Ryan: Oh, so many. How about you ask each of us one band that has influenced us?
Okay, but don’t quote the bands you listed on your MySpace page.
Greg: I’d say Gino Washington.
Matt: I’ve been listening to a lot of Fela Kuti lately.
Philip: I’d say that the first Oh Sees record is what I was listening to the most before we went on tour. It has awesome bass on it, and just a really unique sound.
Ryan: Joe South! That guy doesn’t get a lot of props.
I think you’re just proving my point—you have a blues influence, but so much else is mixed in. And you’ve said in interviews that Texas is a great melting pot of sounds. Would you say Texas is a better state to make music in than other places?
Ryan: Being in Austin, everyone comes through, and there’s a lot of history in that sense. But it really doesn’t matter where you’re writing or recording.
Ryan, the lyrics you write are pretty intense sometimes, though I have to say I can’t always make them out on the recordings. But I pick out some stuff. Your song, ‘When,’ has parts that remind me of Woody Guthrie’s songwriting. Like, you talk about the World Trade Center bombing. Can you recite me that lyric?
Ryan: Um, let me think. It’s, uh, um…
You have to sing this somewhere tonight! You’d better know this one!
Ryan: Ha ha… it’s, um, ‘Always been proud of doing what’s right/ Always thought your government was on the same side/ And then they blew up some buildings in New York City/ And with it your trust, and what you thought was right.’ It’s about September 11th. I believe the U.S. government blew up those buildings, like a terrorist attack. But the whole song in general is not just about that, it’s about change. The first verse is about how I was looking at pictures of the band and stuff, and I never smiled. So I decided I was going to smile, and show my teeth more! And the next two verses are about being disinformed by the media, and September 11th, and the conspiracies about it, and you’re thinking about all this worldly New World Order humongous idea of conspiracies. And then suddenly you meet this girl, and she doesn’t know anything about that, and then some sort of love affair happens. And it doesn’t have anything to do with real life at all, and then the end is just, um… uh… I don’t remember what the last verse is!
It will give our readers some mystery, so they’ll go buy the album and find out!
Ryan: ‘If you’ve got three, give two to someone else/ if you’ve got two, give the other two a mouth/ if you’ve got one, give that other one away…’
Sounds kind of Biblical! Has religion played a role in your sound?
Ryan: It’s just whatever’s going on. Religion isn’t part of the music really at all. It’s broader thoughts, higher thoughts, thinking more. It’s spirituality that’s incorruptible.
In ‘No Way for a Slave to Behave,’ you have these cool ‘whoo hoos’ in the background. It’s a little more poppy than some of your other songs.
Ryan: My friend, Shane Retro, had that beginning riff. I met him two and a half years ago, and he played me this riff, and he didn’t have any lyrics to it. And I said to him at the very beginning, ‘I’m going to steal that riff, and I’m going to write a song to it.’ And I wanted more songs for the record, so I took the riff and added the lyrics to it and the other parts to it. And the poppiness just went with it, I suppose. Shane Retro isn’t really in a band or anything. He just is.
Have you given any song ideas to other bands?
Ryan: No. I think I could write an awesome song for Jarvis Cocker! Actually I have one that I don’t think I could sing right, and I think I could.
Charlyne Yi, this comedian in L.A., writes songs for other bands for that exact same reason! Would you cover a song by Charlyne Yi if you could sing it better than she can?
Ryan: Yeah, sure, if it’s good!
What about bands from the sixties? Like Back from the Grave garage bands—when you listen to those bands, are you like, ‘Oh yeah, I see where they’re coming from?’
Ryan: We dig a lot of those bands, but I don’t know. People make such a big deal about sixties music, and it was just a lot of people, and that’s what made it cool. There were so many scenes all around the world. But it’s just rock and roll, right? It’s either the real deal, or it’s some white kids trying to do it, and either way, it’s cool, you know?
But maybe people like me, unfortunately, want to be able to describe your sound, and they don’t know what else to say, so they just write ‘It’s garage-y!’
Ryan: People compare us to Nuggets. And it’s a four-disc box set! They compare one band to a four disc box set, which is 85, 90 percent filled with horrible, horrible things. Stupid, stupid lyrics that mean nothing and were written by these people just to make a quick buck, riding some sort of craze, you know? I mean, there’s some great stuff on there as well, but they’re just ridiculous. That song, ‘Sugar and Spice’—what the hell is that? That is stupid. We don’t like that.
As a bubblegum motherfucker, I beg to disagree. But you’re right—that sounds nothing like you at all.
Ryan: Just to clear up with you, we don’t care at all what other people compare us to. I don’t want it to be where someone says ,’Hey, you sound like Nuggets,’ and I say, ‘Well, I don’t want to be compared to Nuggets,’ and you write ‘Yeah, man, they’re trying to fight against labels by other people.’ If anything, just say, ‘Man, who gives a shit?’
Well, your ‘Sugar and Spice’ quote was pretty awesome, so I’m going to have to keep that in! In fact, you said something in an interview once about garage rock that I thought was really apt: someone asked if you were part of the garage rock revival, and you said, ‘There is no revival. People have been doing this kind of stuff since 1989.’ Are there some bands that are roughly in this same genre that you’ve looked up to as heroes, who formed more recently than the sixties?
Ryan: Oh, for sure! People like the Oblivians, the Reigning Sound, anything Greg Cartwright was involved with. The Cramps, the Gun Club: these were all bands that were doing awesome, awesome stuff, before it was ‘garage rock.’
Were you mortified when you heard Lux Interior had died?
Ryan: When he died, he went somewhere else. I don’t think it’s that bad of a deal. I never knew him. People gonna die.
I hear snippets of the early Rolling Stones and the early Velvet Underground in your sound, too.
Ryan: Compared to a lot of other bands, the Stones did justice to a lot of the covers they did. And then Beggars Banquet, the slide on that record, and the country aspect of that, they took it and did something else with it. The Velvet Underground for sure—you can’t even say much about it. There’s nothing cooler than being 16 and driving around listening to the Velvet Underground. I started to get guitar lessons when I was fourteen or fifteen. And one of the first times I went in to get the lessons, I brought in White Light/White Heat, and said I wanted to learn the whole record. And the teacher was like, ‘There must be alternate tunings, because I can’t figure out what they’re really playing.’ I think I quit the next lesson after that. It seemed kind of useless if he couldn’t teach me to do that.

THE STRANGE BOYS WITH MIKA MIKO, CEREBRAL BALZY AND PROTECT ME ON MON., JUNE 29, AT THE SMELL, 247 S. MAIN ST., LOS ANGELES. 9 PM / $5 / ALL AGES. THESMELL.ORG. AND WITH THE SHIRLEY ROLLS AND THE GROWLERS ON TUE., JUNE 30, AT THE ECHO, 1822 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8:30 PM / $7 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. THE STRANGE BOYS AND GIRLS CLUB IS OUT NOW ON IN THE RED. VISIT THE STRANGE BOYS AT INTHEREDRECORDS.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/THESTRANGEBOYS.

Paranoid Cocoon seems to announce itself as a rock and roll album, opening with “Up a Tree (Went This Heart I Have),” a tune that pairs frontman Michael Nau’s throaty vocals over a thick, bluesy baseline. Quickly, though, the song itself, and then the whole album, gradually evolves into something different, whirring off into turrets of ambient, kaleidoscopic sound. In “Up a Tree,” the tension between the tight, rhythmic, rock and roll sound, and a diffuse trippiness is engaging. Throughout the album, the band often discards and then returns to this tension in favor of long ambles down psychedelic pathways lined with brushed percussion, prolonged leans into an organ, and synthetic keyboard sounds.

The Cotton Jones live experience was quite different, probably because the band found it difficult to match the plush reverberation that is achievable with a studio set-up. Songs like “Blood Red Sentimental Blues” were only tweaked slightly, but the difference was remarkable. Without the echo chamber quality of the studio, Michael Nau and Whitney’s McGraw’s contrasting vocals (he a husky Jim Morrison, she the delicate siren of a 1950’s radio program) rang clear and true, allowing pretty turns of phrase—like “I heard it in the garbage can, in every piece of trash, you better color up my heart again, I’m afraid it’s turning black”—their due.

In concert, songs like “Cotton and Velvet” and “Gotta Cheer Up” also sharpened their melancholy. On album, “Cotton and Velvet” is the auditory equivalent of a heroin high, a feeling not discouraged by its title, or by beautiful, non-sequitur lyrics like “my tongue on the ocean, made me feel all numb” and “the poet barks.” In concert, however, you might actually be inclined to question Nau’s statement that “there was no sadness, and nothing was wrong.” The mournful call of a steel guitar was more distinguishably audible, and the feeling of being stranded alone inside your own desert more distilled.

One highlight was an expanded version of “Some Strange Rain,” simply announced by Nau as “a love song.” Like many other Cotton Jones songs, it substitutes its own unique narrative structure for the traditional verse/chorus/bridge. In the case of “Some Strange Rain,” the progression through long instrumental sections, alternating with free-form verse, what sounds like but never turns out to be a harmonied chorus, and a solo guitar bridge, gives one the feeling of several songs cobbled together. It’s an apt sentiment for a song whose lyrics travel the long distance of a relationship, from “I got me standing in the rain, well here we go again,” to what sounds to be a shot-gun wedding at the end of the song, with the intriguing, “Come yesterday, I had no love for cats, I had no words for cats, but I love Kat,” sandwiched somewhere in the middle. The piecemeal song had all logic of love itself, but also all of the charm.

The concert version of “Some Strange Rain” encapsulated everything both exciting and frustrating about Cotton Jones’ style. Their willingness to wander down new musical avenues, peeking into any door that catches their interest, means the sacrifice of an integrated form in favor of a playfulness that is sometimes meandering. It’s a worthy trade-off, and one that leaves space for the fresh promise of innovation in Cotton Jones’ future work.

—Tara Everhart

Download: Animal Collective “My Girls”

(from Merriweather Post Pavilion out now on Domino)

Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion was called the best record of 2009 even back in 2008, and as usual the band penetrated that sort of cloudiness to shine light down on everyone who was looking for it. They speak now over free french fries (and later via email) after their last Los Angeles show. Deakin (Josh Dibb) was not present on this tour. This interview by Chris Ziegler. And read our first interview with Animal Collective—they were in Sweden and we were at Togo’s—here.

People have said Strawberry Jam was your breakthrough, Merriweather was your breakthrough, Feels—everything is a breakthrough. What do they think you’re trying to break through?
Noah Lennox (Panda Bear, effects/vocals): That’s a good question.
Brian Weitz (Geologist, effects/vocals): I don’t know.
Dave Portner (Avey Tare, guitar/vocals): The progression has definitely allowed us to be able to do stuff more practically—hire someone like [producer] Ben Allen, go to a place like Sweet Tea, be able to rent a house to stay in and also be able to maintain our own set-up on tour and take our friends on tour with us. And be in a bus if we choose to be in a bus.
N: Even once we really kind of got in gear as musicians and began playing and recording and touring a lot, the idea of it being a money thing was very far from my mind. I suppose I just assumed that by design we’d never be able to be commercially successful. I have no problem with success and I would have no problem with being a popular band, but I’d say were pretty stubborn about it. And we’d rather what’s popular come towards us rather than the other way around, if you know what I mean. At the same time I feel like I’m wary of thinking about things on these terms—what’s most important to me is to feel excited about what we’re doing in the moment when we’re doing it. What happens with it after that isn’t in my hands really so much, I don’t think. I do feel like there’s an entirely separate part of being a band and it has nothing at all to do with music. A band can choose not to do interviews or tour or do photo shoots or have a website or make videos or anything like this, and I think that’s just fine. But I feel like that’s erasing—barring special circumstances—any possibility for greater success or having your music heard and—hopefully—enjoyed by larger amounts of people. I don’t mean to pass judgment on those who aren’t interested at all in this kind of thing. But I feel like we work very hard on the musical side of things and it’s my job and it’s what I do. So even though I have no interest in chasing success to the point of tailoring things on the musical side, I feel justified in working hard to ensure that I’ve kept the lights on.
I notice some writers making cracks about glowsticks and jam bands—what do you think makes people use that for cheap jokes?
N: I’d say that the music just isn’t those people’s thing and I think that’s fine and as it should be. They’re just putting it down because they aren’t into it and they think it’s lame. If you want to be a creative person and you want to share your things with other people then you better be prepared to be told you suck.
The New York Times said Merriweather is your least obfuscated record.
N: What’s that mean?
B: SAT word. I don’t think—it’s weird to say deliberately confusing.
N: Personally I like music that confuses me. Something I can’t wrap my head around.
B: We often have sections in songs where we leave certain boundaries—a part where we start here and come back here after a length of time, and A-to-B isn’t totally scripted. It’s like ‘Interstellar Overdrive,’ but not as cyclical. Our music is pretty structured.
Do you ever feel you go too far? Are you confusing the press and the fans?
D: With all our records—one thing comes up constantly when I talk to promoters or people that have maybe gotten into us more recently. I talked to a girl in Brazil who was a promoter and took us around—‘I work for this label and this girl got Strawberry Jam and was like “Listen to this!” I put it on and I was like, “What? I don’t get it.” I put it on my shelf and saw it one day and that girl was STILL talking about that record—and I was still like, “What?” And then just recently—it must’ve been the right time. I get this now.’ I think that happens now. I remember one journalist friend——when we put out Here Comes The Indian, he didn’t get it. And he finally sent me an email—‘Hey, man, this is the day I finally got the Indian.’ It’s all time and place. And it’s definitely weird to me to think about critically listening to music. Putting it on in the office?
How do you feel the things you sing about translate to the press? And to your fans?
N: I think the messages and meanings get mistranslated and subverted and get tweaked by a given person to suit their experiences. I’d say this happens to an extent with any band—and I like it, I should say. I don’t mean to say that the meanings always get mutated in this way, and I’d hope that despite it being difficult sometimes to fully understand what we’re singing that through the music and the sounds and the attitude the true intent somehow comes across. Even though it’s a lofty idea I’d like to think that we’re channeling the feelings of the songs with our performances—I’d like to think that the emotional souls of the songs translate on that level.
How do you talk about your own songs? The story about the song supposed to feel like a guy on a beach by a lagoon—is that how it works?
D: What you were saying about the guy in the lagoon—a lot of it’s like that. We’d talk about the new record and the new sound—throw around words or moods.
N: Colors. Basic language—nothing too lofty.
B: There are musical things. We were discussing things in frequency ranges. On Merriweather—‘Let’s try not to make our parts be in the same frequency ranges. If someone is one place, when it’s on your part, go somewhere else.’ Make the song a bit taller. More space in the middle. Our past records, especially with a lot of guitars—they were kind of fogged up.
Why do you try to make the source of your sounds unrecognizable? There’s nothing that sounds like ‘bass’ or ‘guitar’ on the records now.
D: To me what those sounds bring to mind—if I hear a bass, I immediately think of a certain time period. A certain sound—‘That’s so ‘90s.’ ‘That drum sound is so Steve Albini.’
N: ‘So Jamaica.’
D: ‘So ‘60s.’ We try our best to get away from that.
B: It’s kind of decontextualizing. A spring reverb or a space echo are things used on all dub records—stuff we like. We’re not using that sound—just in the way it puts your mind with dub music.
N: The excitement is taking something familiar and trying to go to an unfamiliar place.
What environment do you need to do that?
N: You always gotta be comfortable—first and foremost.
How did that work for Merriweather? Why did you record at Sweet Tea?
N: Because the mood in pictures was really nice. And we could record and track in the same room as the control room. We set up the speakers so we could hear exactly what we put to tape better in the live room. I feel that informed the way the record sounds.
What did you learn from your producer Ben?
N: He was really detailed about the way we laid things down. We’d never done that before. Really intense separation.
B: How he dealt with the low end was really eye-opening. We had really sub frequencies that unless your speaker can reproduce them, you don’t hear the bass. He said the bass should be full, even if the focus is sub bass—put high end on it so it works no matter what system it’s on. The high end puts a ghost note. Melodically it won’t change the song—it changes it sonically.
N: The goal is to get it to sound as similar as it can on different system.
Jonathan Richman said best thing about the Velvet Underground wasn’t that they made music but that they made atmosphere—does Animal Collective make atmosphere? What does Animal Collective make besides music?
N: I think I can speak for all of us when I say the transportive qualities of music get us psyched. And I’d say we try and inject our music with those qualities if we can. I suppose it’s a little difficult for me to separate atmosphere from what might be considered more traditional elements of music in that my favorite music—and the music I feel is most powerful and most affecting kidnaps me into its world. There are certainly lots of field recordings and doctored field recordings and tweaked sources in the songs. I feel like the non-melodic sounds tend to provide the atmosphere and to glue certain qualities of other instruments together sonically. Hopefully the sounds and more abstract elements of the songs help to support whatever the atmosphere and mood of the original song is. It sounds technical and lame to say it like that, and I should say we almost never talk about the songs on these terms.
When we talked in 2005, you mentioned that you’d been feeling more responsibility to your audience as you grew—more pressure to deliver and not be self-indulgent.
D: It’s just kind of like—recontexualize my definition of self-indulgent. In the past, anything goes—I never even think—this is totally for ourselves. I’d take criticism from people and be like, ‘Oh, whatever.’ But it definitely made me look back—‘Ok, alright, I can see what people have meant.’ I feel we always wanted people to be into what we were doing. We never wanted to antagonize and we never thought we were self-indulgent. We always tried to offer people the kind of music we’d wanna listen to and they’d wanna listen to. Having a larger audience now that’s very familiar with our music kind of changes it a little—just what people wanna get out of the performance. It definitely doesn’t change the way I feel when we’re making a record. It might be we decide to do a record and the label would be like, ‘We’re not putting this record out—it’s not something we feel would be good for the label.’ Then we’d just put it out somewhere. It doesn’t change our decisions. I speak mostly in terms of live sets, which have changed the most in a short span of time. But for a lot of reasons. We play for a lot longer now than we ever had, especially when we started—when we got really enthusiastic about always doing something new live. It’s different to play twenty minutes for friends and play for an hour and a half to two thousand people, some of which are completely new fans who might not know what to expect at all. I’m into giving everyone a whole run of what we’re into. We are into some sense playing old songs—I can relate to going to see a band and wanting them to play specific songs. It woulda been better if they’d done that song!’ But you’re still getting something out of it. But I appreciate the band. I’ve seen amazing shows where the band has done something totally unexpected.
B: We’ve done both. Now is a time when we’re playing already released stuff. I used to think I was so against it, but we started adding old stuff in the set. It’s almost like if you’ve already seen a movie and you think your friends are gonna like it—‘Yeah, I’ll go with you again.’
What sort of positive things have you taken from criticism of the band?
N: I feel like I’ve learned lots about people and the way people interact, and I’ve learned a lot about what people care about and what drives people from reading reviews or having discussions with people about what we do or what we’ve done. I can’t say that I feel like I’ve learned a whole lot or discovered a whole lot about our own music from reading things about our band or our music. And I don’t mean to put anyone down—I guess I just feel like I’m so close to the thing. I find it revealing sometimes to be forced to talk in a sort of analytical or purely objective way about what we’re doing in interviews. To be honest, though, I’d prefer to leave the things as unanalyzed and virgin—in a way—as possible. I’m trying these days to completely stay away from reviews of shows or recordings of ours just because I feel like its gotten to the point where I can tell the comments and opinions are affecting me in negative ways. It’s not that I don’t value them and I think it’s totally right that someone be able to say this or that or whatever—I just feel like maybe it’s best for me to stay away.
B: I can’t think of anything specific. We care a lot about music being pretty individually from us—to make it a personal thing. Fans used to ask—‘We’re your biggest fans! Would you ever consider letting us have input in your record?’ Like playing it for fans while we’re working—that’s almost the same as playing it for the label. Which we don’t do either. It’s not like rejecting ideas.
D: We wanna be confident for ourselves. We wanna make the record we wanna make.
N: For the self-indulgent thing—what’s most important to me is making sure we’re psyched about what we’re doing. If we’re not doing that, why would anyone else get excited?
D: Sometimes we make a certain style of music because that’s the kind of mood we’re in—going back lately, we’re reissuing some of our records on vinyl. We’re doing the box set with a lotta live material and practice stuff—up through Sung Tongs. I listened to the test pressings and sometimes I’ll be like, ‘It’s so weird that Noah back then was part of this kind of music—it’s not something he’d listen to at all!’
B: I think we said that even back then!
D: But we felt like—crazy, in a way. There were elements we all liked. But ultimately it was just expression.
B: Usually our craziness is triggered by surroundings or events.
D: That’s negative craziness. In our personal lives. But right now we’re kind of beyond that. But I think positive craziness is still involved.
What do you think of your suddenly higher profile?
D: An idea that’s come up a lot—there’s been a lot of writing and talk on the Internet now about the cultural importance of the band.
B: It’s not for us to decide. They do it with every band, not just us. The Internet is so immediate—so many voices rushed to decide what’s classic the minute it’s released. Whether something has staying power is a big topic of conversation, but I don’t think you can make those decisions when the record comes out. There are records I listened to once a week between 1994 and 1998—‘This record is so amazing!’—and now I don’t really need to hear it again.
Did it affect you when people were calling Merriweather the best album of 2009 before it even came out?
D: I don’t think so. But at a certain point it is intense. We are psyched—so psyched—on the record. It makes us feel good people are into it. If you’re a music person and somebody into music, there’s something music offers that nothing else does. I can’t put it into words but nothing else can do it.
B: My friend talks about going on tour or being a stage actor—the only art forms where you have to create or perform on command.
What has music given you that you’d never have had otherwise?
B: Friends—we wouldn’t see each other. I really like our music—I like it a lot.
N: I don’t like our music.
B: I don’t listen to it so much after we finish, but when we’re working it becomes my favorite thing to listen to.
Is there any kind of coherent ‘philosophy’ of the band?
D: Have a good time.
B: Eat well.
Sometimes your songs make me want to cook.
B: Burn calories! It takes effort to listen to our records.
With regards to the idea of the ‘philosophy’ of the band—how have you most clearly discovered who you are and what you need to do? What kind of experiences helped? What kinds were distracting? How did both affect your music?
N: We most certainly have never discussed any philosophy as far as the band goes—at least not in any way thats really worth discussing or relating. I’d like to stay as far away from that kind of academic zone of music and sound as I can. Perhaps it’s best to say our philosophy is not only to not have a philosophy but to not even entertain the idea that a band has a philosophy, if you know what I mean. As far as discovering who we are and what we need to do, I feel that’s something we are figuring out on a daily basis—I’m sure that process wont end until we’re dead and perhaps not even then. And I should say that process has very very little to do with music. The music is really only some kind of reflection of that process. Even though I find the process of interviews and the whole non-musical side of my profession interesting and revealing most of the time, I do feel like it’s the most distractive force as far as feeling like I’m on a direct and pure path creatively. Again that’s part of the reason I’m trying to distance myself from reviews and that sort of thing.
The last time we talked, you wanted to work with Madlib and RZA—think that could happen now?
B: We still can’t get Madlib to respond to our emails! But Dam Funk is hard at work on a remix for us. Just in the last 48 hours—I got the rough mix.
D: It was interesting to hear Noah and I sing in the context of this kind of song. Pretty danceable funk!
And last—after the tour and all the press cycle fade out, what do you do together before you each split up back to your homes? What is the last day of Animal Collective being together like?
N: We’re usually kind of broken mentally and physically by the end of tour and are really just ready to be at home again. For me though I should say the whole thing just kind of keeps rolling like a ball down the hill. After the tour it’s on to preparing for the next tour or getting a studio space ready for the next recording or something like that. I would hope someday perhaps we’ll just hang out for a bit and think back on old times—but we’ll probably be old guys like seventy or something. And that’s OK.

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE WITH GROUPER ON FRI., MAy 29, AT THE WILTERN, 3790 WILSHIRE BLVD., LOS ANGELES. 9 PM / SOLD OUT / ALL AGES. LIVENATION.COM. ANIMAL COLLECTIVE’S MERRIWEATHER POST PAVILION IS OUT NOW ON DOMINO. VISIT ANIMAL COLLECTIVE AT MYANIMALHOME.NET OR MYSPACE.COM/ANIMALCOLLECTIVETHEBAND.

Download: The Warlocks “Red Camera”

(from The Mirror Explodes out now on Tee Pee)

As Charlie Brown might say, good grief! So many reviewers for so many publications NOT based in L.A. have slammed the Warlocks time after time, treating them like pompous golden idols who needed to be melted with cruel words into the fire of TRUTH, the truth being that no one who dresses like the Velvet Underground that much can possibly be authentic. Even in the Warlocks’ golden age in, say, 2002, half their reviews were praise pieces, and the other half were “shit sandwich.” And when the band took an experimental misstep with 2005’s Surgery, critics forked them with epithets such as “monochromatic,” “the Snorelocks,” and even “un-magical ass clowns.” The Warlocks have been panned for both self-similarity and for trying different sounds, for taking drugs and not taking drugs, for their chaos and careerism. At this point in their career, if they made a fantastic album, would anyone stop coming up with memes long enough to notice?

Of course, the Warlocks have certainly encouraged meme queens with their own awkward attempts at self-branding. For their last album, they attempted to go “evil,” calling their album Heavy Deavy Skull Lover, putting a Kenneth Anger-esque red-tinted naked gypsy on the cover, and even releasing their album on Halloween. It didn’t work—the album was more dull than dark, much of its echoey guitar picking sounding like the incidental music from Twin Peaks.

But the past is the past, and like with Batman movies, you’ll enjoy the franchise a whole lot more if you employ some selective memory loss. If Surgery was the Warlocks’ End of the Century, and the last album was their Subterranean Jungle, then their new album The Mirror Explodes is at least Animal Boy, if not an out-and-out Brain Drain. It’s as if the last two albums never happened, yet all the best bits from that bizarro world got crystallized into good things. The Mirror Explodes has the concise, no-time-for-bullshit manner of Surgery, with all the shoe-gazey stuff Heavy Deavy Skull Lover was accused of, and yet says more and evokes more, all the while somehow being more true to the best parts of what has made the classic Warlocks a cut above their black-clad brethren.

By the way, if you’re listening for all this in the track that L.A. RECORD has been permitted to provide above, just stop—that’s the shittiest song on the album. Let’s start with track three: “Slowly Disappearing.” Predictably there’s a helluva lot of Spaceman 3 on this track, but so too is there some Sonic Youth-iness, the first direct influence I’ve ever seen from that band upon this band. And it works. I can’t make out who’s singing this song, but he/she’s doing one hell of a Kim Gordon imitation, straight off one of the moody songs on Goo. It’s Youth-y but toothy and droney in a way Thurston’s gang never really captured. In fact, this song’s shakers and booming drums and vision-invoking repetition make the new lineup of the Warlocks sound more than a bit like Indian Jewelry! Perhaps here is the tribalism that membership on Tee Pee Records promised.

Even the band’s lyrics, never their strong suit, seem very much improved from the recent past. For all the posturing they’ve been accused of, classic Warlocks songs like “Shake the Dope Out” really did ring true to anyone who’s taken downers to undilate their eyes before work—and “There Is a Formula to Your Despair” off this record feels just as human, perhaps more so, because it’s clearly a post-drug song as pitiful as a Woody Allen caricature. There’s a pace and progression similar to Matt Hollywood-era Brian Jonestown Massacre, but with better little feedback noises and drum build-ups that evoke Maureen Tucker, and a lysergic tremolo set to the square-wave pattern on somebody’s effect pedal. If you have friends as annoyingly self-pitying as mine, you will immediately relate to this song, even as you’re weirded out by the prospect of getting hooked every time Bobby Hecksher talks to you like a friend.

It’s like this band found a whole new side of the kraut-glam-Floyd-Velvets era to appreciate. “Standing Between the Lovers of Hell” starts where a normal Velvets songs ends, screechy and sanguine, with a Tucker “thump-thump” so primitive, it’s almost in 1:1 time, until halfway through the song when it jumps to the standard 4:4, and then phases into a Stooges wah-wah thing. This almost could have become “We Will Fall” if they’d gotten John Cale to play viola over it. And those vocals! I think it’s Bobby, but it sounds like if Tom Waits and Robert Smith gave birth to a singer with a penchant for helium.

I could go on and on. From the Public Image Ltd. guitars on “Frequency Meltdown” to the warped Joy Division keys on “Static Eyes” to the millions of sounds throughout the album that just cannot be identified, there’s so much to learn on each relistening. Hecksher and the gang have succeeded at making a record that’s both true to form and different, one that definitely tears the “monochromatic” tag to shreds. Oddly enough, as I was in the throes of composing this review, I ran into Bobby at a party, and he told me that he considered this album a capstone to allow the band to go in a completely new musical direction. If so, then The Mirror Explodes is an easy-to-enjoy adieu to a sound that has always been deeper than the affectations of hip. Adios, amigos!

—Dan Collins

The Warlocks’ The Mirror Explodes is out now on Tee Pee.

Download: The Vaselines “Son Of A Gun”

(from Enter The Vaselines out now on Sub Pop)

While there are certainly some ‘80s bands out there that should call it quits and put their leather pants in a museum, there are also a few making a natural comeback. If it weren’t for Nirvana, perhaps the Vaselines would have never played again, or maybe it would have taken another decade to revive the Scottish twee-pop band from its slumber. But Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee are back with advice on how to grow up. This interview by Daiana Feuer.

What was the reason for the Vaselines’ breakup?
Eugene Kelly (guitar/vocals): Me and Frances McKee were a couple and we split up. We talked about trying to continue the band but it just didn’t seem like it would work. The thing is, the distribution company had gone bankrupt. The record label had no money to release any more records and weren’t in any rush to sign us for another, so it seemed like the band had come to its natural end. I saw Frances a couple months after we split and then we kept bumping into each other. And then Sub Pop were interested in releasing Vaselines records in America so we had to discuss that, and every so often someone would want to use one of our songs so we’d have to talk about it. So it was always a connection through the Vaselines. I’ve always said it’s like the child we never had. The Vaselines child is 21 now and it’s at the age where we can put it back out into the world now.
Did it come as a surprise when you began hearing about your own band in the ‘90s from Kurt Cobain?
The band had split up by the time Nirvana mentioned us in print. Suddenly there were fans in America listening to our records. I remember reading in one of the music papers here—The Melody Maker had a piece about Mudhoney on tour in America. It mentioned that Nirvana were playing Vaselines songs. It was surprising how the rest of the world could have gotten our records. Our records had only been released in England.
What prompted you to start playing together again?
Right about this time last year, Frances phoned me that her sister was working on a charity concert for orphans in Malawi and did we want to do a solo performance and maybe do some Vaselines songs? And I suggested why don’t we try and make it a special night and play an electric set? I’d been playing solo shows for a while and I’d gotten so sick of playing acoustic guitar on my own. I really wanted to get on electric. Then Sub Pop contacted us about playing their 20th anniversary show so by luck we thought we could make that happen as well. After that, we came back from America and thought, ‘Well, let’s see what else we can do.’
Are you writing songs together?
We’ve written five songs already. We’ve been playing two of them in our sets. We’re going to try and record now probably in Glasgow. We just sound like the Vaselines! We came up with the songs pretty quickly, and that’s the way we used to come up with songs years ago. The distinctive sound that Vaselines songs have is in the simple melodies—it’s got to be sort of quite catchy and not very long songs either. A lot of people have said the new ones sound like they could have been on the old records. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Did the Molly referred to in ‘Molly’s Lips’ ever contact you?
I think she died a few years ago actually. She probably didn’t even know the song was about her. She probably never even heard it. She couldn’t Google it back then.
If you had to write a song right now, what would you write about?
Making dinner. Having a bath. I’m writing a song now called ‘I Hate The ‘80s’ We don’t mean old people—we just hate the 1980s. It’s been such an ‘80s revival right now. It’s a revival of the things that were terrible at the time that inspired the Vaselines to form because we wanted to make rock music rather than electric pop and new romantic music. A lot of the ‘80s weren’t that good. People are looking back as if it was a fantastic time but we were there, so we can comment on it.
Of all the decades in your lifetime, were the ‘80s your least favorite?
Most of the ‘90s was pretty shit. I wasn’t doing much in the ‘90s. The ‘80s was great for the Vaselines and for me and Frances. We had just finished school—entering the world as adults and doing what we want. I think musically the ‘80s had a lot of terrible music as well as some great music. But every decade is the result of the people in that time responding to the music two decades before it. So, in the ‘80s I was listening to music from the ‘60s and ‘70s. And it’s the same now. The people in their 20s are into the 80s. Which is why the Vaselines can exist again. There’s an audience for it that wasn’t around in that time that are interested in it.
What advice would you give to a 20-something-year-old artist?
Do what you want. Do your own thing. Some advice is good but listen to yourself—your own ideas. Try not to be put off by people. Keep doing what you’re doing. What we’ve done as Vaselines—people kept telling us we were terrible, but we kept having fun. You’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing. It’s not a competition—you’re on your own. Don’t try to compete with anyone. I think in your twenties you feel inspired by the world around you. Everything seems new. And when you get in your forties, it’s hard to think of good things to write about and aspire to. There’s other things to deal with. You get a bit burnt out at middle age. It’s kind of hard to get really inspired.
What’s good at being in your forties?
Not much. It’s overrated. I think I prefer to be in my twenties. But you’ve got to make the best of it. The good thing about being in your forties is you’ve got a confidence you couldn’t really have when you were younger. You know if what you’re doing is good and if you should continue doing it.
Do you still think there are surprises in your future?
I think it’s all going to be surprises and that’s how it should be. We didn’t even know what we were doing with the band at this time last year. And then suddenly we’re in a large venue in Glasgow and it’s such a shock and quite sweet. I am enjoying the fact that everything is sort of new. We’re going to see what comes up.
Where did the Vaselines name come from?
It was because Frances used a lot of Vaseline on her lips. She was always carrying some around with her. Somebody suggested it and we had struggled with a few different names that didn’t really work. And also it started with the letter ‘V.’ There weren’t too many bands that start with that letter. I can think of the Velvet Underground, the Von Bondies. I can’t think of any more. Some of the other names were really terrible. A lot of them involved strawberries because Frances was obsessed with strawberries. The Vaselines was much better than the Strawberry Somethings.

THE VASELINES’ ENTER THE VASELINES IS OUT NOW ON SUB POP. VISIT THE VASELINES AT SUBPOP.COM/ARTISTS/THE_VASELINES.

The Muslims “Right and Wrong”

Tracking down this record was one of the most interesting experiences I have endured in a long time, eventually culminating with me letting myself into Matty’s (the Muslims’ guitarist) house and picking up a copy of the LP from his dining room table. (Replacing it with a $10 bill, of course!). My brother who lives in San Diego (where the Muslims were based, though they now live in L.A.) tells me the album is in every record store. It’s harder to find here in L.A. But the search for this album only makes me like it more. The album draws from my favorite elements of the Velvet Underground, blending the White Light / White Heat dissonant drone with the pure pop sensibilities of Loaded, while at the same time jangling like the Replacements or R.E.M. at their early eighties finest. The seven song record is one of my favorite albums to come out so far this year, and the CD that comes along with it has all the album tracks as well as three bonus songs, including the amazing “Bright Side” and “Extinction.” This is the perfect album for a sunny Sunday morning drive, a cozy rainy night, or—as the case may be—a binge party weekend leading to a little bit of trouble.

— Daniel Clodfelter