I heard the anthology, and had my first hallucinogen, peyote, in October of 1959, and I just recently realized that both the peyote and the Harry Smith Anthology made me realize that the world was far more strange than I had dreamed, and far more vast than I had dreamed… So yeah, Smith is absolutely a template for this whole project.
The most striking moment was seeing a couple hundred people shouting along in the most rapturous manner imaginable with the lyric, “you will always be a loser.”
It’s like Twisted Sister – a “Sister Fister” is a sister who fists. We’re not saying it’s RC, but…
Jimbo – he goes, ‘I looked over at the dance floor, and it was all guys, and there was this black cowboy French kissing a white cowboy.’ And he said, ‘at that moment I knew we were in the wrong place!’
Hearing that Kasso’s victim kept insisting, while being stabbed to death, that he loved his mother, is heartbreaking, and no less so because I can imagine myself as a young man somewhere in this story, myself.
I never worried about trends. Magma just flies through time and periods.
An an intimate, honest album, drawing on a unique and complex life.
The Tesco Vee character I crawl into – if I lived that persona 24/7, I’d either be dead or incarcerated. But it’s like – there’s a certain element of satire and tongue-in-cheek in what I do. I’m going for the throat, I’m going for reaction – I want people to react, if it’s laughter, anger, whatever. I don’t want them to stand there and be bored. That’s where I’ve been coming from my whole career – I want a reaction, thus the song titles like “Crippled Children Suck.” And obviously I don’t think crippled children suck – or as I say on stage, ‘they only suck when they can actually reach my zipper.’
I don’t think anybody in the band is interested in just unfreezing the old Red Herring. What made that band really exciting to be a part of was creating together; I get the feeling that we got back together again because we all believe that the best is yet to come. We just had to take a break for a couple of decades to go gather more skills and experiences to throw into the soup.
The audience is there simply to observe. It doesn’t matter whether they applaud every song or at the end or at all. It has nothing to do with the music. We are not on stage for them. We are there to make music in the presence of an Observer. This is all made clear if you have a fundamental understanding of Einsteinian Relativity.
When we started off playing punk rock, when I was a young man, the world was filled with warmongering, sexism, racism, greed – and it seems to me all these same things are still here. And they need fighting, they need people to rally against issues like that.
My Mom had it in her mind that (Nardwuar) was interviewing me and someone was going to be playing the tape, so she had to keep really quiet in the background… She and my son were, like, whispering and staying really quiet, and then Nardwuar goes, “TELL ME ABOUT THE NIGHT WHEN YOU WERE GOING TO PHOTOGRAPH IGGY AND HE PULLED HIS C**K OUT!” And I just went bright red.
“I definitely was NOT attacking Lady Gaga, for God’s sake. I just didn’t have any lyrics finished for the song yet, and she seemed interesting, so I thought I’d invoke her demon spirit and I liked the way her name sounded. She’s obviously a master magician.”
Sid Vicious once got emotional about [a Kinks’] song with me in the Speakeasy Bar in London (forget which one), but I didn’t take it seriously…
It was like being the passenger in a stolen car piloted by reckless young men with a serious death wish, and every time I thought we were going to crash, they somehow steered around the obstacle and kept on going. Some nights I was physically and emotionally drained after writing all day, and I would lie in bed thinking about the story and wondering how they managed to keep going for so long.
It was easy to yodel after I heard some guy on a tape doing it in a very cool old-fashioned way. I mean, the style, the history, the nostalgia for a time different than the present, there was so much romance in the music that… learning anything musical from that era came charged with all these other feelings and sentiments.
The only thing we couldn’t find was stuff from when DOA played with the Clash and a couple of things with the Ramones. But everything else I have in this endless amount of boxes of crap!
Obviously I think it’s a shame what Christianity did to different cultures, not only to Paganism but to cultures all over the world when they kind of pushed their religion onto everybody else by force. Their ideology is everything that Norse mythology doesn’t stand for.
“There’s a spiritual underbelly here that’s basically emerging, and we’ve got to get through the shit before we can get to the flowers.”
“I think Doueh tries to acquiesce to what he thinks western audiences will like, and he tends to get away from the foundation of what I know he’s capable of doing, when western eyes aren’t upon him. That’s a battle I have to fight with him all the time.”
I was looking at these hipster kids on the various music websites. It’s like I was thinking about raping them and killing them, only I couldn’t figure out which one – it was sort of from the point of view of a murderer that would be stalking these fashionable youngsters.
“I really had a thing about the seriousness of folk music. I mean, with oldtimey – Dr. Smith’s Champion Hoss-hair Pullers, these old ‘20’s groups —they were all fuckin’ goofy-ass, weird nutty shit, you know? I thought the weird nutty shit was more, like, the point of it than the serious meaningful ‘People’s Rhetoric’ approach.”
I don’t like injustice, and cops – fuck, they got guns. I don’t like people with guns. I don’t like 22 year old cops walking around with guns – I think it’s stupid. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t think that’s political, it’s like logical, or something.
I watched the old DVD, and I thought, “Ohh, I wish we had, back in 1986, the digital technologies we have today, in order to amp this up and make it much crazier.” And then I thought – “but wait, we DO have the digital technologies that are available today!”
It was inspiring beyond anything I expected to see the 52-year-old singer — who has endured criminal charges, lawsuits, physical assaults, and much abuse in his time — performing with all the vitality and passion that he brought to the stage in the 1980’s.