To kick-start 2012 and chase away the winter blues, Visual Vitriol author David Ensminger is hosting a South Punk explosion, with bands zooming in from San Antonio (Say Revenge!), Dallas (Here Holy Spain), Missouri (Molotov Latte), and New Orleans (Opposable Thumbs and Sparrowhawk), who will be sharing the stage with zealous locals like the Biscuit Bombs (featuring guest members from Really Red, Anarchitex, London Girl, and more), No Love Less (half of the Mydolls), Busy Kids, The Drafted, Vivian Pikkles, Jealous Creatures, and maybe others! The Friday night proceeds will benefit the legacy of Esme Barrera, our ally in Austin, who was killed recently. One extinguished light dims us all. We will not forget her: walk together, rock together, and defend the night together! No justice, no peace. The events will likely start at 7:00 and cost approx $10.00! Super Happy Funland, 3801 Polk Street  Houston, TX 77003-4837,  713 – 880-2100.

author David Ensminger, 1989, Machesney Park, IL

Leon Neyfakh, a vivid writer for the Boston Globe, recently tracked me down to discuss “punkademia” and the irony of studying a slippery group of rebellious people who often distrust academic aims, institutions, and language. I was deeply intrigued by the concept, and I think he navigated the issues wisely, starting out with his own perspective and experience discovering a punk rock graduate student in his midst during his keen school years. In the piece, which can be read here, he highlights new and old punk academic texts and speaks to a few key people working to explore the complex discourse and cultural history of punk, like the eminent writer Alex Ogg. Below, I am offering up meaningful portions of my emails with Neyfakh, for I think my own blurbs warrant further context. I offer no complaints. He dealt with my insight in a quite balanced and fair form.

For those Visual Vitriol readers who might also wonder about the topic too, I simply wanted to add clarity and depth. In the pursuit of transparency and a sense of immediacy, I tried to present my text below in a format akin to the actual email transcripts.  Also, this does not employ straight argumentative aims – my logic is circular,  de-centered, and conversational. This is the ‘way of the blog.’

There’s Gonna Be a Blackout in the Academy Tonight!

Leon, thanks for the inquiry! Actually, my book extends its scope beyond visual culture and discusses the role of women, gays and lesbians, Hispanics, and black punks! My articles on queer punk were published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, while my work on black punk was published by Postmodern Culture, both last year. I also have blogs dedicated to similar subjects, like:

www.punkwomen.wordpress.com
www.blackpunkarchive.wordpress.com

My collected interviews are being published by PM Press in 2012 — a who’s who of punk personalities over the last ten years, from The Buzzcocks and Dead Kennedys to much newer acts, like Strike Anywhere. Visual Vitriol is really about punk multiculturalism and pluralism. The flyers are one mode of documenting that diversity. You can see my interview a few weeks back in The Economist here:

As you may know, the singers of Bad Religion (science), the Descendents (science), and Articles of Faith (history) were/are academics, as is the guitarist Gregg Turner of the Angry Samoans (math). But yes, plenty of people also study punk academically as well: for instance, my mentor Daniel Wojcik, a former L.A. punk and Professor of Folklore at the University of Oregon, wrote a book on punk tribalism, death/transgressive culture, and body art in the mid-1990s.

We made this youtube video together on the topic, seen here:

I think you’re asking — knowing that punks tend to be anti-intellectual (or at least that’s what the discourse written about punk promulgates) and Do-It-Yourself/anti-expertise leaning, is it ironic, and even futile, to integrate and incorporate punk studies into the academy?

Well, for one, punk has always had one foot firmly entrenched in colleges — especially in places like the U.K. — The Mekons, The Buzzcocks, Gang of Four, even members of The Clash attended university. Certainly, this was also true in San Francisco, and even New York, where college nerds Talking Heads held sway at times, as well as art-dissidents Sonic Youth.

First wave punk is, though, a different kind of scene, trend, genre, and body politic than hardcore, which tended to be younger, suburban, male, and street tough. As punk exploded in the “outliers,” it lost some of its formerly built-in diversity, like having shows at gay clubs and even The Deaf Club in San Francisco, and the music transformed into a more stripped down, choleric, chauvinistic, severe, and conformist version to a degree. But, plenty of bright spots did exist in hardcore, like the Big Boys and The Dicks in Texas, who proved that hardcore did not have to adhere to cookie cutter sameness. Both bands added a heavy dollop of performance art, savvy politics, skate-punk tenacity, street art gumption, and gay tolerance (both singers were openly gay punks).

Academics DO have a large role to play because for years a misguided, slanted, and even wrongheaded assessment has been the norm. Punk, for instance, was not solely an Anglo, male, middle-class phenomenon. Yet, very few academics have documented another side to that story — the true democratic impulse, the blurring and fraying of gender norms, the polyglot dispersal of the punk impulse and style across borders, and the huge impact of women, gays and lesbians, and people of color that truly made punk of and by the people, of all stripes, creeds, and kinds.

Many fault lines do exist.

For instance, if you have time, see my work on black punk rock, which outlines some, here:

In my texts, for instance, I argue that punk was a convergence culture, punk street art was an interrogation of contested space, and punk spaces like clubs and squats were liminal zones. People wholeheartedly disagree. And punks have attacked my emphasis on punk pluralism as well — they’ve said demeaning things about my profession, my sexuality, and my research, but they have also been flat wrong, in most cases. For instance, I am not a sociologist, I am a folklorist: two very different fields!

Folklorists often place high value on self-reflexive ethnography –
participation, embodied knowledge, and having cultural currency within a group being studied. Other fields do not readily use such approaches, and in fact may frown on them on for being less empirical or scholarly.

Also, if academics only know punk through discographic analysis, like analyzing records and reviews, or skimming and incorporating secondary sources rather than primary or ethnographic research, their perspective might be shaped by previously misleading, inaccurate, or slanted “truths.” In my book, I call punk a series of “contested truths.”

Even when progressive academics, say, focus on Riot Grrrls as a subject matter, which has been quite popular among a generation, they might, perhaps unconsciously, create a narrative bias and series of misconceptions sewn into their analysis of that sub-group. If we don’t focus on the variety, multi-vocality, and diverse nature of female participation, like women in garage punk, Oi, and performance art bands, then those women fall into the gaps of history, while the Riot Grrrls are elevated, creating distrust amongst women who might feel neglected and ignored because their bands didn’t adopt the stage strategies, rhetorical stances, or musical hallmarks of Bikini Kill.

This is not the fault of Riot Grrrls. It’s the fault of academics.

Part II

I was drinking a beer beneath wallpaper made from old punk flyers at a gastro-pub on the freeway edge earlier tonight when these old conversations came to light, re: your question about the irony of studying punk culture within the academy.

They reinforce my notion that punks are not anti-intellectual (both of these informants are very well-read, fluent in theory, and avidly articulate), but they do harbor ambivalences about academic institutions.

I was interviewing International Noise Conspiracy’s singer, Dennis Lyxzen, around 2001 — they were a heavily politicized Swedish post-hardcore band — and this conversation about the academy emerged:

In “The End of History,” Fukuyama states that liberal democracies have won the ideological battle.

I don’t believe in the end of history bullshit. I hate that sense of post-modernism. It’s like they’re saying, we haven’t figured out what to do, so we’re going to paint up this really bleak picture and then get on with our lives as university professors. All those post-modern writers have to come up with new theories so they can maintain positions within the university hierarchy.

INC at the time of the interview, Mary Janes, Houston, TX, by David Ensminger

It’s just another selling point?

It is a selling point, totally. Many of them even admit that they have to come up with something new so they can maintain their position within the hierarchy of intellectual thoughts, so I don’t believe in the end of history.

Is that what you mean when you’ve said, “We don’t want to fall into the trap of exploited nihilism”? Those professors are exploiting such nihilism to maintain a job, nice car, and two-story home?

Yeah, definitely. And you read them. I like Baudrillard because of a lot of his points. I’m really into post-structuralism, but I think that a lot of the stuff is just bullshit. A lot of those people talk about the end of history, that there’s no real…

THEN

I recalled another conversation, one with Thomas Barnett, the singer of Strike Anywhere, a melodic hardcore humanist-leftist band from Richmond, VA. Note this discussion:

What does the band see as the most immediate, specific threats right now to the collective underground, musically, politically, and personally?

Politically: …  I’d include the recommendation that bands take a wider view and focus on common threads right now. Punk doesn’t need to mimic the failures of the Left: picking fights over theory and aesthetics, narcissistic teacher’s lounge shit that has consumed, contained, and cancelled too many good ideas. Those which wait for synthesis and practice outside the cloisters of intellectual auto-erotic asphyxiation. Punk also needs to acknowledge the importance of all of its branches and eras, its legacies resplendent with contradiction and self-reflection, and now needs to find harmony and admit a wholeness. This will give a fuller fabric and make it at once more explainable and nourishing to the post-millenium kids.

SO…

Their critical tone, probing choice of words, and rhetorical stances are illuminating. They find fault in the academy’s institutional empowerment schemes, self-serving methodology, and divisive and alienating “intellectual auto-erotic asphyxiation” (not unlike condemning masturbatory guitar solos), and defeatist effects.

These conversations remind of the time when I was pulled aside in the mid-1990s by a radical lesbian government professor at the Univ. of New Mexico, when I was protesting the New Gingrich “Contract with America” and disturbing the Board of Regents. She told me that I should hit the books, not the streets. Perhaps she was delivering a friendly warning, but I felt that she was undermining the efforts of progressive students. After that, I felt she was a mere armchair radical compared to the punks I knew. It changed the way I understood academics forever.

To give you a recent slice of testimony, since my book came out in July, only one person — the chair of my division — has come forward to discuss the subject matter with me at length; in fact, he catalyzed me to organize the women in punk poster show at the college the last few weeks. The subject still makes me keel like a kind of outsider, a black sheep. Then, add street art, Xerox instant art, and multiculturalism polemics to the research mix, and the divide may even get deeper. When do English literature “researchers” use ethnography? Almost never.

Back to our earlier discussion. Punks bands have always borrowed, hijacked, and appropriated material from the academy, since year zero.

Within the the last decades, J Church blithely tapped into Baudrillard on their record The Procession of Simulacra/Map Precedes the Territory, while Milemarker wordplayed Salmon Rushdie on their EP Satanic Versus.

Milemarker at Notsuoh in Houston, TX by David Ensminger

As soon as a punk professor tries to pin down and describe punk, an outlier explodes, and a new subgenre emerges, like screamo, queer-edge, D-beat, or powerviolence.

Or a band like the Make-Up arrives, declaring themselves cultural exiles within America, converging French pop music, gospel gusto, and post-punk underground ethos, all while actively pursuing a Situationist style cultural insurrection. They name a record, the lo-fi Sound Verite, after French film terms, act vaudevillian, and look like a band from a  John Waters’ movie.

They don’t fit with the Clash or Minor Threat — or do they? Academics have done a poor job reckoning with punk’s tributaries, the specialized community insiderness of punk: the academics keep repeating cliches that amateurism is the main thread, or anger, or volatility. Can they square wayward experimental Pere Ubu with straight-edge Youth of Today, even though both bands wound up in the same fanzines?

Not likely. Punk kicks against the constriction imposed often by academic terms and methods, by neat categories, easily digested capsulized variants, and the orthodoxy of experts. Another cliche is that punk was more spectacle than active socio-political agent of change, and even I admit that punk was more rhetoric than action, but my newest blog asks: did punk put money where its mouth was?

So, I use my flyers, as usual, to do the heavy work, the documentation:

http://punkandpolitics.wordpress.com/

My goal: place one such political, social, or environmental punk flyer on the site every day or so for the next year, so academics and fans can get the fullest possible picture of punk’s political-social-
cultural concerns, strategies, and outreach. This is one way to bypass an academic construction of a “meta-narrative” of punk and a way to examine its living history, its close-to-the-ground operations, which again, academics have often shrugged off, omitted, or ignored.

In fact, if the first wave of punk was at least partially indebted to Situationism, Foucault, Bataille, and Barthes, which has been debated as well, then the second wave, hardcore, was closely aligned with Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. Maximum Rock’n'Roll covered C’s work, and  Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys features him on the Alternative Tentacles website.

Punk was, and is, at least to me, still anchored in anti-authoritianism impulses, reflecting Chomsky and Zinn, so those icons became kind of punk doppelgangers or avatars in the academy. If punk prided itself on resistance, shape-shifting, spontaneity, flux, and symbolic disorder, the academy did seem like an opposite, antithetical pole. It was the realm of reason and rationality, cool-headed observation, calculation, the discourse of reason, and the creation and maintenance of canons and codes — the nomenclature of expertise.

I actually tried not to pin punk down in my book: I resisted the notion that I have the truth in my pen scope, or can encapsulate punk in well-meaning, tightly controlled, academically adroit phrases. I tried to expose the dialectic of punk, the dizzying array of attitudes, the multiple perspectives that clash and conjoin, the democratic cultural soup of punk.

Some of my academic, scholarly readers found fault with this. They wanted pigeonholed answers, glib quotables, ready-to-use jargon, a stack of references ready for their own intended projects.

If the authorities said punk was a white cultural production, I complicated it. Punk is people, perfect for folklore. Therefore, it varies so much it lacks concise cohesion. But folklorists are also skeptical of folk groups that may actually be just a hodgepodge of idiosyncratic people too, lacking in clearly disseminated traditions.

Many punks, like the Riot Grrrls, were knee-deep in the academy, others saw it as just another bloated bureaucracy, inherently conservative, reactionary, distanced and elite. Yet, many 1970′s punks went to radicalized universities in the 1970s and early 1980s, in which teachers taught Fredric Jameson with ease, and led efforts on Sane/Freeze issues, anti-apartheid divestment campaigns, and pro-Solidarity events. They saw the potential in the academy to be propelled progressively.

I also think that the language and rhetoric of the academy, its narcism, self-importance, territorialism, and sheltered pomposity, was exactly what punks detested. They culled what they desired from intellectuals, some basic tenets and frameworks, and fitted them to their own agendas and modus operandi, their engine of anger and subversion, their vitriol and  ugly beauty. The logos of the academy is no match for their pathos, they contend, implicitly.

They are the raw, their teachers were the cooked. They were rough and ready, their teachers were denizens of the cool and calculated. Punks offer the lightning bolt in the heart, while the academy dissects the heart as a weather system.

Did it frustrate me, to put my heads in both worlds?

Somewhat. But I feel as one who has only spent one and a half years of his life not in school (as student or teacher), that punks need to worm through the core of the academy, because their story, their truths, depend on it. The discomfort is a measure that I am doing something pertinent. If I didn’t feel challenged, uncomfortable, and caught in-between, I would not be very punk.

The academy will resist, it will impose, it will mandate, and it will attempt to corner punk and earn prestige and ranking from it, but then part of punk will always be too shambolic, too messy, and too uncontrollable. Punk is not a poem, it is people.

People are messy.

Visual Vitriol and the Center for Punk Arts is proud to sponsor a photography show that will be projected on a large screen in the outdoor covered patio of Domy Books in Houston, Texas starting at 7:30 pm. Featured work by Ben DeSoto will highlight his documentation of punk in Austin and Houston during the 1980s and early 1990s, including avid shots of Suicidal Tendencies, the Swans, Big Boys, Butthole Surfers, Circle Jerks, and many more. David Ensminger will present a decade of Montrose street life documentation, focusing on contested spaces and street art, homemade signs, urban landscapes, and the ever-mutating skin of the neighborhood. The flash art event is free, open to the public, and each photographer will be on-hand to discuss the work. Ensminger’s continuously updated catalog can be viewed on-line here, plus his folklore blog featuring similar material can be found here.

Big Boys in Austin, 1980, by Ben DeSoto

Space is not a neutral and passive geometry. Space is produced and reproduced and this represents a site of struggle.  

Montrose, Houston, TX Oct. 2011

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 1991

The Second Skin of Cities: David Ensminger

Graffiti, stencils, stickers, and flyers invoke often-unseen communities creating public spectacles that distress and fray official boundaries of civic space. Each art site becomes a micro-world, a confluence of personal meaning and identity that occurs in the fissures of the local terrain. The pieces become nomadic signs negotiating their own legitimacy while juxtaposed next to nearby domestic, commercial, and municipal space. As such, they subvert the semiotic signs of civil society — street signs, bus depots, railways, utility boxes, and housing. Inundated with vernacular street art, the sites mutate, displaying a rough vernacular environment, like a spontaneous democracy misbehaving. The contested space – the skin of the city, a topography tingling with meanings and counter-meanings — is an ever-changing recombination of signs and captures the algorithms mapping each generation. Each piece of street art becomes ideological shorthand. For my full-length article on the topic published in Popmatters during Spring 2011 , click here.

Montrose, 2005

The Lee College Art Association, Instructor Jen Herzberg, and myself just installed a Visual Vitriol poster show at the Cyber Cafe student lounge on Lee College campus in Baytown, TX, celebrating women in punk! The exhibition will adorn the walls of the cafe seating area until the last Thursday of October, so stop by and check it out, and post more ‘lady-punk’ flyers! The advert promo flyer was designed by my student Mickey Holiday, who used a photo I snapped of Mel Hell from Zipperneck, local Houston legends!

The curatorial crew!

Thanks to those of you living in the Gulf Coast and deep South that swung by the Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans on Oct. 8th to see the one-night ‘flash art’  Visual Vitriol poster show at Trouser House, co-sponsored by Osa of the No More Fiction collective.   Nervous Juvenile and Sparrowhawk rocked the crowd nearly into the midnight hour, and due to the local art walk and nearby galleries (and beer and sidewalk eats) , tons of people swept through the space. We were able to chat with folks that immigrated from Texas, Oregon, Wisconsin, the Carolinas, Virginia, and other disparate locales to the Big Easy. The distinctly southern city is throbbing and thriving right now, and we appreciate all the efforts of people to celebrate and preserve traditions, local community activism, and touring shows like Vitriol. You can read the blurb for the exhibit in the Times-Picayune here, and my interview in the NOLA Defender here. Please scan the photos below to enjoy the works we highlighted in the antique home.

Trouser House

David in back room of Trouser House

Julie in front room of Trouser House

Visual Vitriol would like to thank Paul and Gram Cooper for co-curating a Visual Vitriol show at Rough Trade East in London, which will be on display through the end of August! The works are culled both from the collection of David Ensminger, author of the book Visual Vitriol, and the efforts of local contributors as well. A small essay on such punk street art is posted to explain some of the content, which tends to focus on the contributions of people of color, women, and gays and lesbians in punk rock, though those bands are interspersed throughout the whole wall and not relegated to certain sections. These posters will be donated to the local community after the show closes, so you can email leftofthedialmag@hotmail.com for further information. Visual Vitriol hopes to venture to your town next!

Domy Books in Austin, TX hosted a Visual Vitriol release party, where I was joined by fanzine editor John Slate  (Control Rat X), Jeff Smith from the Hickoids, and Bob Weber from Really Red. The audience also featured a member of the Negroes and other historic locals as well!

From left to right: Russell Etchen, Domy manager, Lee Daniel, filmmaker, and John Slate, archivist, historian, and fanzine editor

Bob Weber of Really Red at Domy Books Austin gallery

Visual Vitriol’s paperback copy image was just released by the University of Mississippi Press. Slated for July 1 release, and currently available as a pre-order here, author David Ensminger has set-up three upcoming events to highlight, celebrate, and preserve punk posters arts as well as stimulate discussions about the book’s topics, including the roles of people of color, gays and lesbians, and women in punk history. Currently, panel discussions and/or art shows are coordinated in Austin, Houston, and London, with further art actions being planned in Dallas and elsewhere. If you would like to co-host an event, which could include hundreds of flyers, a punk film, and perhaps a panel discussion in your city (plus some copies of the book!), please contact Ensminger at leftofthedialmag@hotmail.com. In the meantime, review the details for the current events below!

See the interview and overview in the Houston Press art blog !

See the interview in the Houston Free Press !

Really Red drummer Bob Weber at Domy Books Houston for the Visual Vitriol book release July 8th with David and Julie Ensminger

Get autographs from local punk luminaries, though I'll be happy to sign ones too!

Zipperneck roars and thunders for the July 8th late-night book party at Rudyards, by David Ensminger

August in London!

Visual Vitriol will be co-curating (with local fanzine maker and DJ Paul Cooper) a show for the entire month at Rough Trade, the infamous label and record shop, in the East Side annex.

Be sure to check out our archive: www.europunk.wordpress.com

See the relevant info here.

Sarge at Fitzgeralds in Houston, TX by David Ensminger

Interview with Elizabeth Elmore of the Reputation and Sarge

by David Ensminger, originally published in Left of the Dial

Do you think people would prefer that you be less blunt?

Probably depends on whom you ask! I don’t know if I’m that blunt in person in the sense of lacking tact or anything. But I do say what I think, and I’ll challenge someone on what they say or how they behave if I need to. I’m not aggressive, but I can be assertive if it seems necessary. In the law world, it’s seen as a good quality, and the gender thing doesn’t come into play but in the rock world. It probably rubs some men the wrong way because they’re not always used to it. I think it antagonizes them sometimes.

The mix and match, cut and paste, alter-ego musical sensibilities of Elvis Costello seem almost a perfect fit for your growing and expanding musical persona. What led you to covering the song?

It’s sort of strange. I actually discovered the song a long time ago through the movie Georgia where Jennifer Jason Leigh sings the song. I figured out that it was an Elvis Costello song and immediately got the original. I fell in love with it and mentioned once to Chad Romanski (Sarge’s drummer) that I wanted to cover it some day. He said that if I ever did it, I had to let him play drums. Around that same time, I was hanging out at Jay Bennett from Wilco’s loft and mentioned that I loved the song. He said that if I ever recorded it, I had to let him do it, and I made him agree to play piano at the same time. Anyway, four years later we were getting ready to record this CD and I decided I’d like to put it on there. I was trying to figure out how to sucker Chad into playing on the CD anyway, so I convinced him that since he’d have to come into the studio anyway, he might as well do the entire record. Then I called Jay and held him to his promise to record and play it and suckered him into co-producing a few other songs as well!

“There are people who are truly songwriters and then there are people who whatever the best work that they do is a product of where they are in their life and what their experiences in a short, condensed period of time have been. I get worried that what Sarge had going for it was a product of me being at that crazy age where everything is exciting and interesting and new…”`As you now settle in with the Reputation, have these anxieties about the songwriting process been assuaged, or do you worry that you, like Paul Westerberg, will be much less interesting as an “adult” than as a young frantic songwriter?

Well, I suppose the Westerberg thing is a matter of opinion. I’m not that familiar with his new stuff, so I don’t want to implicitly agree with your statement by ignoring it. But yes, I did worry about it with Sarge and I guess I continue to worry about it. Whether it’s true or not? I could say, “that remains to be seen,” or “that’s for other people to decide because I don’t have a clue.” I suppose it’s combination of both. Anyway, to answer your question, no, my anxieties about writing songs haven’t lessened, and I sorta doubt they ever will.

Punk rock seemed to be a two-sided coin or ying-yang experience for you. “It’s weird. I definitely saw the whole punk rock thing through rose-colored glasses. I was such a fan of the fact that there were all these kids out there…It was a strange feeling to realize that there were people across the country who I don’t even know that actually care enough to hate me.” Have those short-sighted folks finally fallen away from your rear-view mirror, or will there always be groups of like-minded people hovering around music scenes even as you grow older, just to remind you how pathetic their lives are?

This is definitely something I’ve come to terms with as I’ve gotten older. Before, I was only a little older than the kids who were, um, less than kind to me. Now it just seems sorta laughable and pathetic. It still gets to me occasionally – it’s never fun to find out people are saying really fucking mean things, and I know it still happens these days. But whatever. Clearly, even if I try, I can’t please those people, so there doesn’t seem to be much point in trying. I think it was law school that made me realize the difference between adults and all the silly overgrown kids running around the rock scene. More than anything, I’ve realized that I have to appreciate punk rock on my own terms and remember why I love it regardless of whether I love all of the people involved in it.

For many of us who played in bands with women, Sarge, like former bands Discount and Velocity Girl, and now bands like the Paybacks from Detroit and the Bellrays from L.A., offered/offer a viable alternative to inflexible feminism. Do you see the Reputation as a level and flexible playing field?

Well, first I should say that I’m a HUGE feminist and have a huge amount of respect, love, and worship for a number of the bands that came out of that scene. That being said, I liked the bands I liked because I thought they were good bands regardless of the gender of the people in the bands. Which seems to me like the most obvious, most reasonable, and most feminist way for anyone to determine what they like. In terms of whether this band is a level and flexible playing field, I’m not sure what you mean. I deal with all the business stuff (with help from the guys sometimes), book all the shows, negotiate contracts and deal with the finances. I write the lyrics and the songs (though everyone helps flesh out the music by writing their own parts). It’s not like I’m not empowered in this band. And they’re all great men who appreciate and choose to associate with strong women who are their equals (Matt’s wife and Joel’s girlfriend are both awesome and total bad asses).

You once said, “I think it’s really weird to put a bunch of people on a show together just because they’re girls. I can maybe understand ten years ago, people saying there is sexism in music. There’s sexism in music now, in the alt and punk rock scene, but it’s very subtle and very nuanced and it’s not that women can’t get shows anymore. Now it’s become this girl ghetto and has become the last bastion of marginalization…So, then we are telling girls or girls think that they need female role models, so then we have mostly sub-par female role models they are looking up to.” Has the Reputation dealt with the same subtle and nuanced sexism? Has the girl ghetto been liberated, or have the walls become just more invisible to the naked eye?

I don’t think the girl ghetto can be “liberated” in the sense of some heroes flying down to set all the poor girls free – mostly because the gender-focus is largely self-imposed and frequently created, validated, and celebrated by women as a form of empowerment. I don’t happen to view it that way (though I love the fact that Lilith Fair was conceived of as a way for women artists to show their collective economic strength. That’s rad.) What I don’t understand, as I mentioned in the Punk Planet article quoted above, is why gender needs to be an issue at all. I’m generally pretty offended when I realize we’ve been booked onto a bill with bands we sound nothing like and have nothing in common with simply b/c the bands contain women. I think it’s patronizing, marginalizing and most importantly, really reductionist of women as musicians. The music we play, what we sound like and what we believe in seems to hold no weight with certain booking agents – we’re all girls so group us together. It’s annoying and condescending.

Yes, women are sometimes treated differently, but I think there’s a pretty broad spectrum depending on the individual women at issue. We’re talking about musicians here, and if someone’s getting the job done, they’ll be respected. And there are women who complain that they’re being treated differently when honestly, they’re just not holding their own. More than anything, I notice women are perceived differently in the first place – there’s a presumption, due sometimes to the fact that many women in the music community seem to be content to be sort of silent girlfriends/participators or adulating groupies, that we’re there to be supporters of the community, not playas. I see it all the time and it sucks and it’s not fair. But I guess my main disagreement with the stereotypical feminist view in rock is how a level playing field can best be accomplished. I think women accomplish a lot more by walking the walk than by theorizing and philosophizing about how best to accomplish the walk or pointing fingers at people they believe are preventing them from making the walk. Women are frequently dismissed as musicians because audiences have seen a lot of women who have not made the effort to learn how to play their instrument well and seem to think they have no obligation to (well, that, and sometimes guys are just moronic assholes. But that’s sort of a given). Due to a sort of misguided PC effort, I think clubs or shows run by men tend to give women shows faster (i.e. before they’re ready) so that they can make some sort of declaration about how progressive and liberal they are – that they’re not part of the problem – without ever having to examine the ways in which they are part of the problem. And then the people with entrenched views about how women can’t hold their own are given one more piece of evidence supporting their beliefs.

Sarge at Fitzgeralds in Houston, TX by David Ensminger

You seem to be slightly torn between your background in music and social work — between your interests in Civil Rights, Child Welfare, Foster Care System Issues and musician-related issues, but, “Music lawyers can be very sleazy and even if you’re an advocate for the bands, you have to deal with music industry lawyers. The last thing I want to do is take something that I love and deal with the yucky side.” Yet, was there something more gratifying and vital about participating “in an NBC investigative report to investigate the Cook County State’s Attorneys office because they are blatantly refusing to enforce Illinois stalking laws,” after your ordeal with a older man who stalked you? It’s a terrible thing to experience, but can your help on the expose, like work on Child Welfare, have very concrete results, and not just generate record sales?

Well I think all three examples are totally different things. My interest in law is academic because I love it, and my interest in child welfare issues is simply where I want to devote my legal efforts – due in large part to my experience being a part of a foster and adoptive family and being the daughter of a parent who is the associate director of Department of Children and Family Services, both of which gave me strong beliefs as to what problems currently exist with the system and how kids’ interests are best protected. When I went to NBC to create public attention on the lack of enforcement of stalking laws, it was self-interest. I was acting as an advocate for myself and for the other women and men I knew had come before me and would come after me if the problem weren’t resolved.

You’ve said that Chicago has been a “toughens-you-up experience” and that the band is the low man on the totem pole. Everybody from Milemarker, Wilco, and Tortoise call it home, but why is it a rewarding city to live in, besides being the fictional home of television’s ER, the land of knee-deep pizza, and the epitome of visions by writers like Carl Sandburg and Nelson Algren?

I don’t know if we’re the low band on the totem pole. We’re a brand new band, and therefore we’re starting from scratch, which makes sense, of course. The above comment (which I think was slightly misquoted in the original article) about having a tough time in Chicago when I moved here was more about my personal experiences, not the band’s experiences b/c the band didn’t even exist then. As to whether it’s rewarding to live here, I guess I don’t think about it that way. There are a lot of people I love and a lot of people I don’t. But there are some cool things that happen in Chicago that don’t happen anywhere else just b/c of the particular music scene that exists here. And of course there are a million great bands and a ton of venues and we’re the main stopping point in the Midwest so we get to see a lot of great shows.

Sarge was able to find a place in the music scene almost by way of association, “I lived with the guys in Braid my last two years of college when sarge was starting and I suppose that was a big influence. We got our work ethic (tour till you want to kill each other) from them and we got a lot of phone numbers for shows from them, met a lot of bands through them, etc. And then everything just ran it’s natural course.” Is it impossible to imagine the Reputation, without, um, a reputation that precedes the band? You even did a split single with Bob Nanna from Braid and Hey Mercedes, which made the connection even clearer. Can the band start from tabula rasa, a clean slate, and does it matter?

Well, I think braid and Sarge were pretty closely associated in 96 and 97 when Sarge was first starting just b/c we lived in the same house, played a lot of shows together and hung out together all the time. They taught me a lot about just getting out there and touring your asses off instead of sitting around complaining b/c your band isn’t getting the attention you think it deserves. Similarly, I think most people who knew Sarge knew us b/c we almost forced them to. We toured 6+ months a year and just hit the same towns over and over again ‘til at least some people knew who we were. As far as how people conceive of the Reputation – well, not that many people knew who Sarge was in the first place and certainly not that many know who we are yet. What’s fun now is meeting kids at shows who really like the reputation and now want to buy Sarge Cd’s even though they’d never heard of Sarge before. As far as any continuing connections w/ Bob or the Braid/HM guys, I stay in touch with all of them, but there’s certainly no association between the bands. We all moved out of Champaign over 4 years ago. But I love those guys – they were a really big part of a very important time in my life. Bob and I don’t see each other very often, but we tend to hang out every few months when we have a chance to really talk. We actually both went to see Kind of Like Spitting last night and went out with all those guys which was really, really great.

You’ve said, “Playing a show in someone’s basement was about the height of my aspirations. I never thought about recording or touring. I just really, really wanted to be in a band. In that sense, Sarge was a really amazing experience for me – my expectations were so low that every single good thing that happened exceeded my expectations. Mostly, all I wanted to do is write songs that I liked. That’s what made me happy.” That seems to be the essence of a garage band, but can you ever go back to those simple joys, and has your experience in music forever raised the bar of expectations?

- I remind myself all the time, even when we’re playing shows to 40 people and especially if we’re playing shows to 500, that this is more than I ever hoped for. I’m not into people who are always looking at what they don’t have. It’s really important to me to appreciate how lucky I’ve been – even if it seems like nothing compared to bigger bands. And yeah, writing a song that I like still makes me happier than anything else.

Can you now look back and slyly laugh at the coverage by Rolling Stone, Spin, Interview, and the Village Voice, or do these things really matter because they helped put the band in perspective better and sell records?

It just seems (and seemed) sort of surreal (though this band has been really lucky with press again, esp. in Interview and the V.V.). I mean, how weird was the Rolling Stone/ Spin thing? We were this band that was so freakin’ small we weren’t even on people’s radars and then all that shit happened. It was bizarre. And this was before the days when every band we knew was in RS and Spin. I don’t know how many records it helped sell b/c our CD’s weren’t really in stores frequented by RS readers, but it did help us get our foot in the door with clubs. And if nothing else, we appreciate and love the writers who thought we were worth writing about.

The old music business adage goes, “Solo records don’t sell.” Just ask Mick Jagger or members of Kiss. Only Ryan Adams, Peter Gabriel, Joan Jett, and some lucky others tend to reach success. You’ve said, “Even though in a literal sense, I am, I don’t think of myself as a “singer-songwriter” at all. Not my thing. I want to be in a rock band.” Could you sell records and be happy as a solo artist, or does the fan base demand something else, just like you demand the musical input and interplay of others? I mean, you can play piano, drums, guitar, and now even violin, so why not lock yourself in the studio and dream?

Whoa. I can play piano and guitar. I played drums for many years a long time ago, but I’m certainly not anywhere near a competent drummer now and while I’m attempting to learn violin, I certainly wouldn’t describe myself as being able to play it.

Anyway, it has nothing to do with the desires of other people or fans, I just like being in a band. When I said that, I meant I didn’t want to truly be a “solo” singer-songwriter, as opposed to the people you mentioned who all play with backing bands. But yes, I wanted to be in a “real” band not solo or with a backing band. I think it’s too emotionally and mentally draining to do it by yourself – the camaraderie is what makes it fun and worthwhile. I’d sorta like to do a solo record sometime, just to do something a little more country-ish and lo-fi. But it’d just be for fun, not anything I’d want to invest a lot of time in.

You once had a dream that went a little like, “My secret little fantasy is to fund a DIY all-ages space for kids to run shows in — buy them a PA and pay the rent so they can give all the money to touring bands. So many little clubs go under just because kids can’t keep up with the financial end of it. I’d also love to do pro bono work for bands looking over contracts and everything.” At this point, what does this dream mean to you, and what is it really about?

It’s just something I’d like to do if I’m ever financially stable. It seems pretty simple to me – there may be an age at which I’m no longer participating in the independent community as a band member but I’d love to stay involved in some way. Given the financial difficulties that make it hard for DIY spaces to stay afloat and especially given the municipal regulation problems they frequently face (see Philly), it seems like that would be a great contribution to make when I’m older and have more money. Plus, there’s a dearth of older community members and parents actively supporting punk rock kids and venues and recognizing how invaluable punk rock can be to certain kids’ happiness. I’d just like to be able to do my part some day.

One of your favorite books is James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” Baldwin himself was no stranger to controversy and a reputation. “I read it about a million times my senior year of college. I hadn’t read it in a few years and just read it again the other night. I bought Giovanni’s Room a while ago but haven’t had the chance to read it yet.” Do you read on the road, and do you consider yourself a reader?

- Actually, “Sonny’s Blues” is a short story – about 35 pages I think. And I actually lost Giovanni’s Room on a tour and never got to read it! I consider myself a reader but how much time I have to read fluctuates a lot. I love to read on the road but unfortunately, I do all the booking so a lot of my time in the van is spent doing band work or at least beating myself up for not doing band work that I should be doing. I still get through a few books on tour, but I so wish I could read more.

Your idea of a lovely marriage gift might take someone by surprise. “If I ever get engaged, I don’t want a ring; I’d rather the guy get me all the TV episodes of Fame on videocassette…” Why Fame? And what is the link between your favorite shows like The Practice, Judging Amy, and Law and Order and the performing arts drama?

The link isn’t really between the two, it’s from me to the two things I love. I love the law, hence my love of The Practice and Judging Amy. Law and Order is OK but unbelievably enough, it looks like the new Fox show Girls Club might actually be decent. I was involved in all sorts of cheesy theater and musical stuff when I was a kid so that’s where my love of fame comes from. When I was 5, I used to get dressed up in all my “dance” clothes an hour before Fame came on and then I’d spend the next hour stretching so that I’d be prepared to fling myself around the basement whenever they started dancing. Honestly, right now, my two favorite shows are Alias and Buffy. But Judging Amy and The Practice are pretty close.

Probably the song that has stuck with me more than any other is that theme song from “Pretty in Pink” — I can’t even think who it’s by now, probably OMD or something. It’s just one of those songs that has a thousand memories attached to it and they still play it on the radio all the damn time.” What is a song you’ve written that may evoke similar qualities?

This is a little out of context – I think the question was something about a song from my childhood that had stuck with me. That’s not the song overall in my life that has stuck with me the most. But anyway, good lord. I have no idea. It seems sort of insufferably presumptuous for me to even think that something I wrote could. Can I gracefully bow out of that question?

For some heavy duty NYC flyers, go here:

http://nypunkandhardcore.wordpress.com

For deep south Florida punk, go to:

http://floridapunk.wordpress.com

To see the intersections between politics and punk, go here:

http://punkandpolitics.wordpress.com/

For Oregon punk, go here:

http://oregonpunk.wordpress.com/

To venture across the ocean and see European flyers, go here:

http://europunk.wordpress.com

In the meantime, to explore Austin’s rich legacy, go here:

http://austinpunk.wordpress.com

To discover the secret treasures of much-overlooked Houston, go here:

http://houstonpunkart.wordpress.com

To rummage through the evocative and electric visual history of the Midwest, be sure to search here:

http://midwestpunk.wordpress.com

And to visit the Mecca of punk flyers — San Francisco — which I have just begun compiling, see the enticing selection here:

http://sanfranpunk.wordpress.com

Agent Orange at Fitzgeralds in Houston, TX Jan. 2010 by David Ensminger

By David Ensminger

For another current interview and photos of Agent Orange by David Ensminger see here:

http://blogs.houstonpress.com/rocks/2011/01/last_night_agent_orange_at_fit.php

As a member of a bridge band, like Social Distortion and the Adolescents, that spanned both the first punk wave and emerging hardcore, how did you see the scene or genre change?

The hardcore era took over pretty quick, and once again I think it was mostly due to the press. You can trace this all the way back, well I don’t know about New York, maybe they were a little bit ignored, but by the time the whole thing was picked up by the English press, God, everybody knows what they did with that. In the States, especially in L.A., one of the big things right off-the-bat was, I don’t know how people remember this, but there was a LA Times article where they coined the term “slamdance.” In the same article, they said we were a band “banned forever,” along with other bands as well. The article said all these bands had been blacklisted from all the clubs. I don’t think a blacklist really existed until they printed that article. It was like, “It’s well known that all these bands are banned…” So, for me, I felt like, I don’t care. If they don’t want us, I don’t want to go there anyhow. We’ll find some place to play. I just had a “never give up” attitude, really, no matter what happened like that. I just figured that Agent Orange would find some way somehow to keep playing. I always looked long term at things. Yeah, maybe we’re banned this month, but we’ll just get out of L.A. How about that? That’s a novel concept (laughs).

Steve Soto stresses that media coverage ended up bringing in a thuggish mentality because the “violence” was highlighted by the press. All the people that were psychotic or had violent tendencies started showing up.

I think that was inevitable anyway. Yeah, advertise it as such, who’s going to show up with a flowerpot on their head? They are going to show up with a leather jacket and a switchblade. That’s what everybody thought it was. If you didn’t know, you certainly weren’t going to come unprepared. This whole false picture that the press painted, a lot of kids followed it. You still see it in out of the way places. I hate to use any place as an example, especially now, because it took a lot of years, but basically everyone is pretty well clued in who needs to know.  There was a time when we would fly to… I am going to use Alaska as an example, even though it’s not a great example. There’s probably other places. Out of the way places where you fly in and some kid would meet you at the airport with an orange Mohawk. He just cut it that morning because he made damn sure he was going to fit in, no matter what. Agent Orange is coming and it’s going to be punk as hell. Then they took one look at us and they’re like, “Oh man. These guys look so tame” (laughs). Cause it’s not all visual. That’s not what it is all about. Plus, some people think they really need to … Well, punk rock is a visual thing as well. It’s just funny (laughs).

Agent Orange at Fitzgeralds in Houston, TX Jan. 2010 by David Ensminger

In early Flipside, you describe the rivalries between Huntington Beach and places like Riverside.

Exactly. For me, I had a girlfriend in Huntington Beach. I lived in Placentia, inland. It was all I could do to ditch school, get on the bus, ride for three hours, get to Huntington, spend the weekend there, barely make it back to Orange County for school on Monday morning, or whatever it was. There were scenes going on all over the place. Once again it was one of those things where people had preconceived notions of what was going on, and the preconceived notions became… well, played out. Huntington is the only place which I would say was really like people think it was. Maybe Hermosa Beach, pretty violent. There was definitely factions that planted the seeds of hardcore and kept it simple.

When you look back at the media coverage of places like Cuckoo’s Nest and Fleetwood…

The Cuckoo’s Nest was notorious, but I tell you what. As far as what anyone thinks about the Cuckoo’s Nest, it was amplified times ten at the Fleetwood. I saw so many things go down there. I don’t know if people have any original footage of photos from that whole scene, but that was something incredibly unique. If you try to imagine the meanest, nastiest, Southern California hardcore scene going on… Well, the one thing, I will say that I did avoid was that place where they did all the Golden Voice shows. The Olympic. I avoided a lot of the Olympic shows, and I hear there was a lot of senseless violence. A friend of mine got beat up real bad and ended up in the emergency room. It turned his life around, changed everything.

Do you blame hardcore for pushing women out of the scene?

What girl wants to get in a pit with a bunch of guys that, you know, it’s physically impossible? I wouldn’t say it excluded them. The same way it didn’t exclude the people who didn’t have the guts to get their teeth knocked in. There were enough guys out there making a big thing, that’s the thing that probably attracted the most attention. There was a lot of energy going on. But there were always a lot of women in punk rock, especially in the L.A. scene. One of the first bands I looked to, and I ended up kind of hanging out with them a bit, is the Avengers. It’s the only band the Sex Pistols acknowledged in America. They’re a great band. The list goes on and on. Don’t even get me going because for me, personally, everybody has their own preferences. I personally, I mostly listen to female vocalists.

Really?

I don’t know why? It appeals to me. I don’t care if it is punk rock or jazz, bossa nova, whatever.

Agent Orange flyer by Victor Gastelum

Do they capture something that male vocalists don’t?

I think so. There’s a certain quality to a female voice.

Were you at all aware of Darby Crash’s ambiguous sexuality? People say it might have drove him towards misery.

I don’t know if that is really the case. I don’t think he was being tortured by anybody or anything. I think he had his demons. He had a little plan there too, you know, that maybe wasn’t much based in reality. The suicide thing was probably a bad plan (laughs).

People say that as he became more aware of his own homosexuality …  he was worried about how he night be treated.

I suppose that may be true. It never occurred to me. He always seemed so confident to me. It wasn’t something I ever considered to be some sort of issue whatsoever. That’s one of the things early in the scene, there was a certain alliance, you know, with… I can’t even explain it, to tell you the truth. People gravitated to… Guys like that got it, they got it. Much of it was based on pre-punk stuff. For me, it was like Ultravox, Roxy Music, Brian Eno, and I probably would never have known about any of those bands if I hadn’t been running around with the guy that ran the AV dept. at my junior high. He was a really super cool guy. He was really knowledgeable about art and music and performance art, and he exposed us to so many really brilliant things, like the Los Angeles Free Music Society. If it would have been some old woman teacher running the AV stuff, I wouldn’t have learned a thing (laughs).

Didn’t your older brother and cousin turn you onto surf?

My cousin was the bass player of the surf band, the original Surfaris, and my older brothers lived through that whole era. I guess those records were mostly passed down from my oldest brother. That’s one of those things to. Back then, they just moved on to the next thing, whatever it was — the Grateful Dead, Rolling Stones, whatever it was. The old surf records just got passed on immediately. A big stack of 45 records.

Why did it speak to you so strongly whereas they moved on?

I don’t know. It’s weird, I almost feel like a natural archivist or something. I don’t think that everybody has that in them. I find myself trying to save things that I think may be lost in the mist of times. If there is something that I think is important, I’ll steal if I have to, to make sure that it doesn’t disappear forever (laughs).

Agent Orange at the Prescott Fairgrounds in Flagstaff, AZ

That’s sound like Greg Shaw of Bomp.

I didn’t go as crazy as someone like that. I remember back in the days, people would find records or books from the U.K. or different things that I assume no one could find, or I wouldn’t see them anywhere, or never expect to find them again. I just knew those people were flaky and those things would be lost in a matter of days, so I’d trade them for a stack of Flipsides or something. Whatever it took to make sure that thing didn’t get destroyed or lost. I sort of think of myself as an archivist and historian, I guess. I value musical history so much. That’s the main thing. It’s fascinating to see how things go from one thing to the next, how people are influenced.

Do you feel connected to the sound of 1950’s rock’n’roll?

There’s no denying that that old technology cannot be beat in terms of audio fidelity, which is another thing I have to say. It’s kind of a shame. At the time, we all acted like we didn’t care because it was the punk thing to do, but the punk rock era really produced a lot of substandard recordings.  It’s too bad that many more bands weren’t recorded better. I was listening to the Screamers today, for instance. There’s a band that was never recorded properly. I saw them live, and they were so incredible and different. No guitars: just keyboards and crazy treatments. It never came across recording-wise, and I know for whatever reason they chose not to record, but there’s an example. A lot of bands chose to record and ended up with recordings that could have sounded so much better.

What do you think of the X records with their production?

They sound pretty good. They sound pretty close to what that band actually sounds like. I think they probably fought pretty hard to get that sound, just the way it was supposed to be, rather than over-produced, which is what everybody from our era battled constantly. That’s what it was like back in the day. You had to fight with the engineers and try to get what you wanted. Half the time you didn’t get it anyhow (laughs). That’s what’s so great about now. We’re in an exciting era. It’s the first time since the 1960s when, well, even in the 1960s you couldn’t even really record things at home. Now, you absolutely have the ability to record at home. No questions about it. It’s cheap. With a little bit of investment, with a little bit of thought, you can come up with perfectly acceptable recordings, especially for punk rock. Format wise, you have your choice now. You can do downloads, CDs, vinyl, whatever you want.

Agent Orange at The Cubby Bear in Chicago, IL by B. Otis

Did you know the engineer Chaz Ramirez (Eddie and the Subtitles, Social Distortion records)?

I didn’t.  It’s funny. There were guys in the Fullerton scene I never really kind of got close to. I think part of that was because I spent so much time in Huntington Beach. Once I met my girlfriend up in L.A. , she was from Huntington, I was used to hanging out down there. A few years earlier my brother had a bike shop right next to the pier, so I spent a lot of time down by the beach. It made sense for me to hang out down there. I thought what was going on in Orange County was just going to get me into more trouble. I didn’t need to be hanging around the Black Hole (the Mike Ness apartment). That’s no place me, anyhow (laughs!).

Punk always gets pigeonholed by academics as a white, male, middle class phenomena, but even tonight there were many women and Hispanics.

By that’s over how long, you know.

But even back in the day…

There were black punk rockers. Of course, they were out there, and for the most part, they were accepted. That was the great thing about punk rock, up until that time. If you weren’t one thing, or another, you had to be accepted by “those” people. Punk rock was the first unified group to not be a group of the very same people, and if anything, that was what created more frustration than anything. And all the things I complained about in those early interviews. The early days of the scene were just so vibrant. You just never knew what to expect. It was always something totally spontaneous. The more different, the better. The cooler you were if you just came up with something totally outrageous.

The Adolescents spoke about being locked out of the studio when tracks were being mixed.

That was common practice at the time. I think so. I poked my head in a couple of times to see what was going on. It was a fiasco. They were smart to keep us away. We would have beat the hell out of someone (laughs). It’s too bad we didn’t have the control. That’s the thing. We were young, we were naïve, we signed contracts we shouldn’t have signed, we didn’t have proper representation, no one was looking out for us. To this day, I know I am getting the short end of the deal. It’s all going to come down someday. Hopefully, it will go smooth like it should because things haven’t been right for a long, long time. I think there is a lot of guys who can say the same thing. It’s too bad there wasn’t someone there to look out for all these guys. Somebody in Flipside had an interview and they talked about Robbie Fields was an idiot because all he had to do was keep everybody happy. He already had them under contract. He could have gotten multiple records out of each of those bands. Instead, he pissed everybody off and got one record out of each of them. That was it.

How did you not end up on Frontier?

That’s a good question. My brother ended up working for Lisa Fancher for quite awhile. I consider Lisa a good friend. She’s still interested in working with us. At this point, I am not sure what any label could do. Now that everything is back in artists’ hands, I think it’s a good time for us to take advantage of that. Posh Boy came forward, and he seemed interested. We did the Rodney on the ROQ album. That was main thing. After that came out, he saw the potential, and stepped right in. I wasn’t opposed to the situation.

The Angry Samoans mock Rodney, others praise him…

He’s an easy guy to mock.

He’s a straw dog, easy to knock down?

Especially if you’re a punk. He’s an easy target, a funny little guy.

How do you feel personally about him?

I think he’s a great little guy. Everybody knows his history. He’s the mayor of Sunset Strip. The whole thing with the L.A. scene. Being a DJ with KROQ, he definitely had some power there. His show was very influential. For me, I honestly sat there with a tape deck and taped his shows. I would start a song, and you never knew what he was going to play, and he was always playing something that was always so new. You didn’t know what it was. You didn’t know what you were going to get. It could be…

Like the John Peel of America?

I haven’t really heard enough of John peel to know what that means, I just know that if you’re into punk rock and you’re in Southern California, you would absolutely listen to Rodney’s show on Sunday night. There’s no question about that. In fact, when we started playing parties, playing more punk rock, we played  a party in Huntington Beach. About half way through the night, everybody was getting kind of lubed there, and we decided to pull out “You Drive Me Ape” by the Dickies. Well, the thing is, they hadn’t released it yet. They had gone and played it on Rodney’s show the weekend before, and here it was two days later, and we had already learned it, but we could play it twice as fast. We pulled it out and played it, and guess what? There were only two guys who recognized it, and it was the guys from The Crowd! (laughs). You know they were home listening two nights before! They heard it too. Everybody tuned it.

That show was an epicenter.

Really. He had certain connections. I think he was friend with the guy from Zed Records in Long Beach. I don’t know what the situation was, but somehow, due to his day job, I think he had frequent trips to London where he was able to make personal buys and hand carry those records and put them in the racks of Zed Records. I think he was passing that stuff right on to Rodney, who got such advanced copies of that stuff. Hot off the pressing plant in London, right into Rodney’s hand. It was great. What could be better? It was free too. Just tune in.  The two things that were the biggest influence for us were Rodney Bingenheimer’s radio show and the Capitol Records swap meet. I don’t remember how often they did it, but it was an all-night event. I had to be like 14-15 years old then, and we’d stay out in Hollywood in the Capitol Records parking lot all night until the sun came up digging though records and magazines, eating this stuff up. Spending my entire inheritance (laughs) between the Capitol swap and Zed Records.

How involved were you with the visual representations of the band — flyers, record covers, graffiti, etc.

That was one of the things that appealed to me from the beginning. I kind of always figured I would end up a graphic artist. That was sort of my aim, and then I get this impression that everybody in the world wanted to be a graphic artist, and that I was wasting my time, so I decided to be in a band instead. Funny how that worked out. Now everybody and their grandma’s got a band (laughs). But it gave me an outlet for my art too. I was able to design all the record covers and T-shirt designs and the logo. Unless the record label took that away for whatever project that was going on, but especially in the early days we were finishing it all up ourselves. Turning it in as a finished product. I remember we turned in This is the Voice and the record label could not believe it was so subdued. They were expecting something very punk, and we wanted to do something understated.

You ended up on the same side of history as Green Day and the…

Offspring. I’m a huge music fan. That’s why I got into it in the first place. I wasn’t looking for the money potential or my goal wasn’t to get chicks. My brother worked at the Fender guitar plant in the 1960’s. I grew up with the whole thing of rock’n’roll as rebellion, doing something completely different, which is what everyone is looking for, especially in rock’n’roll. So, it all fell in place.

What bands today speak to you now like bands did in 1978 or 79?

My brother is a guitar tech. He is getting ready to go out with Interpol. Listening to them, there was something that struck a chord. I really like the two guitar interplay. I sorta like the monotone vocals, the drummer is really great, and the bass player  has a great tone. Everyone once in awhile I’ll go back and listen to something from back in the day, and Ultravox is one of the bands. In the last couple weeks, I’ve gone back to listen to that stuff. No wonder I like Interpol (laughs).  Once John Vox left the band, they shifted pretty drastically. But I really started liking other things like Gary Numan in the early days.  I’ve had multiple opportunities to see him play, actually bought my ticket, was absolutely gung-ho, then I ended up with some crappy punk gig somewhere where I had to do an Agent Orange set (laughs).  I caught him one time. The other thing is all the amazing opportunities I’ve had that I missed, like the times when he had the big stage sets. It’s one of those things I kind of miss now from rock’n’roll. A lot of bands really did have great stage sets. I know, it seems like, what are we talking about? Pink Floyd? You know who always had the greatest stage sets? Johnny Rotten. No matter what band he was in, he always had something super cool. Not necessarily expensive or over-the-top, sometimes something understated and simple and cool.

Did you see that legendary PIL show at the Olympic?

I did. I was there. It was a great show. A very simple stage set up that was very effective. He had one of those florescent halos. He just held it over his head. Simple. What do those cost? Three bucks? That is genius. Just something to dress it up (laughs).