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I know you’ve never heard of the Weird Lovemakers. It’s okay. Most people haven’t. I talk to music fanatics all the time—people who work at record labels or work in record stores or put together punk rock zines or write for this one—and they always ask me, “Who have you been listening to lately?” I always say, “The Weird Lovemakers, man. They’re fucking great.” And all the music fanatics, invariably, pause while they try to decide whether or not they’re going to lose punk rock points by admitting it, but they finally decide to come clean and say, “I’ve never heard of them.” It’s okay. That’s the beauty of underground music. At any given moment, there are a dozen bands out there who none of us have heard of and who are fucking great and we’re just waiting to discover them. I lucked into a Weird Lovemakers live album, “Bigger Than a Cookie, Better Than a Cake,” about eight months ago. It was exactly the kind of album I love—songs that sound trashy but are really well-constructed and vocals that sound so wild and reckless that they hide the incredibly lucid lyrics underneath. Since then, it’s grown like a virus inside of me. I listened to the live album until I realized I was obsessed, then started hunting down their earlier releases like their first Empty Records album, “Flu Shot” and the incredible split seven inch “Four Fiends Who Pose as Friends” [with the US Impossibles on Star Time Records]. I waited for, then snatched up their collection of unreleased rarities, “Back 20” and they’re newest album on Empty, “Must Die.” I started hanging around their web site [www.weirdlovemakers.com] too often. Finally, I found myself in Weirdlovemakerville [formerly known as Tucson, AZ] and hunted these guys down. We hung out for a couple of hours chatting about punk rock, pornography [guitarist Jason Willis works for an internet porn company], drug use, and pop culture. After I typed up that conversation, I realized two things. First, you have to read this interview because the Weird Lovemakers just might be the best band you’ve never heard of, and second, after you read this, you will hate me because my obsession is contagious.
Weird Lovemakers are:
Hector Jaime: bass, vocals
Greg Petix: guitar, vocals
Jason Willis: guitar, vocals
Gerard Schumacher: drums
Sean: What are you guys thinking? I listen to your music and it sometimes sounds like four guys are playing four songs individually, but when you put them all together, it works as one song. Where does that come from?
Greg: Improv jazz? [laughs] I thought we were all playing the same thing, weren’t we?
Jason: I don’t know. Are you talking about the disparate kind of stylistic influences?
Sean: Exactly.
Jason: Then that’s a product of the no-veto rule. We all write songs.
Greg: You know how a lot of bands will have the one guy who writes everything? I’ve been in bands like that. We all have, probably. So we have a no-veto rule. If somebody wants to play something, we’ll play it. When we first started out, the first month Hector was in the band, he wrote this norteno song which I imagine a lot of punk bands would’ve been like, “It’s too weird.”
Jason: I hated it for a while. And yet, I continued to play it, night after night.
Greg: And I have a doo-wop song on the “Back 20” album.
Jason: I hate that song.
Greg: A lot of people do. I just had to get it out of me. It’s my Sha-na-na.
Gerard: Well, from the drummer’s point of view, I feel like the songs are hard. That’s why. It’s difficult music to play.
Jason: We all bring a lot of stuff to the table, too. I mean, every band does, but our record collections are all pretty different. Like, if you listen to a comp tape that any one of us makes to listen to in the van, there’s gonna be new wave stuff, regular old punk stuff, show tunes. I like a lot of dub. Gerard likes a lot of ska. So somehow a lot of that stuff makes it into our songs. We’re definitely four different guys writing stuff.
Sean: Do you guys ever fight about the music?
Greg: The music we write, yeah, I guess we argue about it. But I think in a way, the no-veto is what keeps us from arguing so much. I’ve been in bands where there’s one guy who’s like, “We’re not gonna play that.” And that leads to huge arguments, like, “Fuck you, I want to play this song.”
Gerard: I feel like our arguments are pretty productive in that things never get stagnant. We do work through them.
Jason: I think the arguments have diminished, too. If you listen to the early stuff, it’s definitely like, here’s the new wave song, and here’s the ’77 Brit punk song. Now there’s an overall sound that we have. I mean, there are still some oddball tunes. A lot of them are on the “Back 20” album. That’s definitely the weirdo album. We did a bunch of stuff that we wouldn’t include on a straight rock album.
Gerard: Yeah, that’s our oddball album.
Greg: But the things we do argue about are really dumb. The biggest arguments we’ve ever had—I think one of them was about three being the magic number. One of them was about the definition of the word scatological. We were in the studio…
Jason: [laughs] We wasted an hour…
Greg: We were arguing for about an hour over this. Getting really heated. Probably more heated than any time we ever argued about the band.
Sean: So what is the definition of the word scatological?
Jason: Greg was right.
Greg: We both understood what it was, but let’s not get into it again. I’ll cry.
Sean: So you guys are all, what, early twenties, right?
Greg: Yeah, right.
Sean: What keeps you charged about being in a punk band after the age of thirty?
Greg: I don’t know. It’s fun.
Jason: It’s just, punk rock is great. Honestly, it is. It still sounds great. Even if it’s the most regressive music there is, it totally still resonates for me when I hear it.
Gerard: I feel the same way. Even though I like to listen to a real broad range of musical styles, nothing else is fun to play except punk rock.
Greg: Even if I loved other music more than punk, I wouldn’t want to have to play it. I love Tom Waits, you know, pretty music like that, but I’d hate to be on stage doing a five minute pretty song.
Jason: If a song of ours is over three minutes, we’re all like, “Jesus, can’t you just cut this song in half?” It’s funny, we’re all conditioned to cram a song into a minute, a minute and a half. It’s got everything in it—verses and choruses, you know. It’s just energetic music. And we’re all hyper guys, too.
Gerard: We’re all neurotic.
Jason: Gerard teaches kids, and they all hate punk rock. He plays it and they all think it’s crap.
Sean: How old are the kids you teach?
Gerard: Ninth grade.
Sean: Really? And they hate punk rock?
Gerard: There’s always a number of kids who like punk rock, but true punk rock still isn’t mainstream in that, there’ll be a ton of kids who like Blink 182. But I put on a Motards album and the kids just could not handle it. All the Blink 182 fans ran screaming.
Greg: So do you get the impression that, when you play punk rock, they don’t like it because they think it’s too… well, they don’t think it’s too jarring and loud, do they?
Gerard: They do. They think it’s harsh, dissident, jarring, angry music.
Jason: And this is something they don’t like?
Gerard: They still like the pretty vocal melodies, because, you know, Blink 182 still has pretty singing over the top.
Greg: I think they like the crisp production, which the Motards don’t have.
Gerard: Yeah. They really like well-recorded things. They don’t get lo-fi or low budget production. But I suppose you have to go through that before you can look for something more.
Sean: Do you guys have any connection with the Motards?
Greg: We played with them a few times, and they’re really nice guys. One of the first times we played with them, we went out to Austin, and they really made a good impression on us because the gave us all the money even though nobody was there to see us. Everybody was there to see them. The place was packed. They were the hometown heroes. Nobody even knew who we were. They were just like, “When are the Motards coming on?” And it was like three hundred and eighty dollars. Probably more than we’d ever made. And they gave it all to us so we could drive home.
Jason: And that fucked us up until… It continues to fuck us up because every time we play with an out of town band, we give them all the money. There’s always one guy who brings it up. “Remember that fucking Motards show?” We’ve never made any money locally since then. [this leads into a long conversation about how much all of us love the music of the Motards. Then we return to the interview with…]
Sean: How’s the smut business, Jason?
Jason: The smut business is great. It really is. It’s a cool job. I mean, I just got into it because I was doing graphic design stuff, and I like smut. I like porn. It’s cool. And I get to travel all around, learn tons of cool new stuff. I’m in a fucking porn film.
Sean: Doing what?
Jason: Fully clothed. It was shot at our offices where we do all the internet stuff, and they made use of all of our things. I play a computer technician who comes in and tells this woman who’s just finished doing an online masturbation chat that, as a result of her amazing masturbation, she’s clogged all the lines. We’re going to have to shut down the whole system. You know, that kind of bull shit. And it was fucking hilarious because this gal, she’s pretty cool. SaRenna Lee. She’s like a Marilyn Monroe with really big boobs. She was in some Playboy thing that Russ Meyer hosted. Anyway, she had to be told how to masturbate for this scene. She’s like, “I don’t know how to fake this.” And the director is just like, “You’re a porn actress. You can’t fake an orgasm?” It was really weird. Totally surreal. And I’ve got it all on tape. All of the outtakes. I’m wearing an Empty Records shirt and I stuck Weird Lovemakers posters in it and a Fells record. And there’s a character in it called the Weird Lovemaker. He’s the one who’s making her do her whole masturbation thing. The gal who directed it works with me and really likes our band. So she has SaRenna saying, “The Weird Lovemaker is back on line. Oh, the Weird Lovemaker is telling me to do all these curious things.” It’s great. And in one other scene, Lisa Lipps comes in and gives me a massage. Kisses me.
Greg: And his girlfriend is cool with this.
Jason: Well, if you saw Lisa Lipps, she’s no competition for anybody. She’s a nice gal, just kind of a leathery exterior, roomy interior.
Sean: The Cadillac of porn stars.
Jason: Yeah. It was cool. Total fluke.
Sean: What’s the name of the movie?
Jason: It’s called “A Return to Boobsville.com.” It’s made by this company and their whole fetish is insanely huge breasted women. It’s totally not my thing.
Gerard: When’s it come out?
Jason: It’s out now. I can show you a copy.
Gerard: I’d like to see that.
Jason: I used to have links to porn sites on the Weird Lovemakers web site, but Gerard’s students were giving him a hard time about it, so I took them off.
Greg: I don’t think they were. I think Gerard just didn’t like it.
Gerard: No. When this one kid would come into my classroom and say, “So, Mr. Schu, tell us about Boobsville.” I’d just be like, okay, that link is going. That’s the end of Boobsville on our web site.
Jason: It’s pretty funny, though, because there’s supposed to be this whole porn/rock connection. I saw the special on VH-1 or MTV or whatever. I’ve met a couple of these people. I’ve seen the bands play at the porn conventions, and they fucking suck. They’re so bad. They’re the crappiest bar rock bands covering current rock sounds. I really want us to play at one of these things so that we could be hated.
Gerard: So that we could clear the room.
Jason: The gal who directed the one I’m in wanted us to be in a movie. I don’t know if she’s still gonna do anything. She wanted us to be a band in the movie. It was gonna be called “Big Tit Mosh Pit.” She was gonna write some script like a Quincy episode involving punk rock and big tits.
Gerard: That would be so amazing.
Sean: What about the movie, “The Pornographer”? You guys had a song in that, right?
Greg: Yeah.
Sean: What’s the movie about and how did you get hooked up with it?
Greg: Through Hector. It’s about a guy who likes pornography and is convinced he can do it better. He’s kind of like this lonely loser who can’t get a girl so he makes his own movies and it gives him focus. The weird thing about it is, I didn’t know we were in this movie. My friend had to review it. He’s a local film critic and he got a videotape to review for this film festival. I saw it with him and I didn’t hear our song at all. It was so annoying because that would’ve been such a dream of mine to be watching a movie and hear a Weird Lovemakers song in it.
Sean: So your song’s not in it?
Greg: No, it’s in it. I just somehow did not hear it. It’s in a party scene or something.
Jason: He goes to a guy’s house and the guy’s playing it. It’s only for ten seconds or something. We signed away our rights for, like, two bucks.
Gerard: You know, I never cashed that check.
Jason: It’s like a total anti-pornography flick. There was a big gala opening for it here because the guy who did it used to live in Tucson. There was a Tucson film festival and this was one of the movies. Hector and I went to go see it. And the guy who’s in it, what’s his name?
Greg: The guy from “Body Double” is in it. Craig Wasson.
Jason: Yeah, and he gave this big speech about pornography—“It’s a killer, folks.”
Sean: But he’s only been in two films and they’re both about pornography.
Jason: Exactly. That’s what I was thinking. Who the fuck is he fooling? Then I bumped into him on the way to the bathroom and he’s like, “Excuse me, brother.” He called me brother twice in this two second exchange. But it was pretty funny.
Sean: What were the two songs that were in the movie?
Jason: It was something off the first album and something off the second. I think it was “Jetboy Helena” and maybe..
Greg: Was it “Teenage Porn Addict”?
Jason: I don’t know. You’d think it would be “Teenage Porn Addict.” I really don’t remember.
Sean: As long as we’re talking about movies, tell me about the movie “The Weird Lovemaker” that you got the band’s name from.
Greg: You know, I’ve never seen it. I had the preview. I lived in Chicago with Gerard. We were roommates in ’91. And I got one of those goofy “hot, exciting movies of the fifties” videos that was just trailers. And we thought The Weird Lovemakers trailer was really funny. I taped it and put it on this audio fanzine I had at the time. Then, we played in Chicago once. Me and Gerard and this other guy—Dave Riley from Big Black. He played with us for one show. For one night. He was a real fucked up guy. And we called ourselves The Weird Lovemakers. But it wasn’t really a band. Then, years later we actually started playing for real. We had all these other names. Then, when Jason joined, we picked the Weird Lovemakers. But I’ve never seen the movie. It’s just a badly dubbed fifties movie made in Japan.
Sean: All right. I’ll ask one more question about movies, then I promise we can talk more about music. Jason, I understand you read a lot of history on pornography.
Jason: Yeah. I like a lot of books on sexuality. But just any kind of pop culture stuff, and pornography just seems like one of those shadow mediums. I think, honestly, that you can tell a lot about a culture through its pornography. It’s the shadow side of the culture. Like Germans are so fastidious, and then their porn is just so fucked up. It’s like shitting and eating shit and dwarves in leather gear. And of course there’s all this power/subjugation stuff. The whole repressed nazi stuff that you’re not allowed to deal with over there. And then Japan has practically no rape. Rapes are super-prosecuted. And their pornography is all underage schoolgirl stuff…
Greg: And getting raped. It’s not like a seduction. The girl the whole time is crying, saying, “Please stop.”
Jason: Right. It’s full-on bad news. And the same thing with the French. It’s all defilement. And American stuff is all excess. It’s just funny. It’s really weird.
Greg: My theory is that, just like in Victorian England where they got really nasty after being so repressed, I noticed that, ever since the big anti-child pornography thing on the internet, that basically pedophilia is so mainstream now. It’s huge. I just saw in a fashion magazine, there’s a fourteen year-old model. She’s the daughter of Nastassja Kinski, and she’s completely looking like she’s twenty in all these sexy poses. And it’s in Vogue or something. And Maxim. Maxim’s woman of the year one year was a sixteen year-old girl. And she’s just like all the other girls in Maxim—really salaciously posed. And then you have Brittany Spears, obviously.
Jason: “American Beauty.” That girl in “American Beauty” was sixteen. Conrad Hall—the cinematographer for that—said so. Mike Plante (editor of Cinemad, a highly recommended independent movie zine) did an interview with him. But she’s topless and those are her sixteen year old breasts. It’s a shot that could’ve easily been faked because there’s that window break. But it wasn’t faked. Just a straight shot. How the hell is that not being prosecuted under child pornography laws?
Greg: I think you can say it’s not in the prurient interests.
Jason: No, because technically, even if it’s a ninety-one year-old woman and you say she’s sixteen, stick her in pigtails or something, you can prosecute. And the whole prurient interest thing deals with community standards, which are completely fucked now.
Sean: Are you a college graduate, Jason?
Jason: No. I’m the only one in the band who’s not.
Gerard: And he’s the highest paid one of all of us.
Jason: I went to art school but I didn’t graduate. I have a year to go.
Sean: What did you get your degree in, Gerard?
Gerard: Education and Interdisciplinary Studies. I’m a Humanities teacher now. We’re starting World War One tomorrow. I want to teach a lesson in punk rock to my Humanities class when we get that far.
Jason: Do you think you’ll be like one of those horrible old baby boomer teachers who shoved the sixties down our throat in high school? “We stopped a war!” you know. Gerard’s gonna be like, “We did it ourselves. No major label interest.”
Gerard: There’s a teacher at our school who has an acoustic guitar in his room and every now and then, he’ll break out the acoustic guitar and play James Taylor and Jim Croce songs. And he sings the lyrics to his kids, too.
Jason: What was that film with Michelle Pfeiffer where she got the ghetto kids in love with Bob Dylan?
Greg: “Dangerous Minds.”
Jason: Right. Can you imagine those kids really connecting with Bob Dylan?
Greg: “Down in the basement/ Mixing up Medicine” (lyrics from a Bob Dylan’s song “Subteranean Homesick Blues”).
Sean: So are you gonna bring your drums into class and play drums for the kids?
Greg: Gerard can play guitar better than me and Jason. Gerard played bass for years in a band called the Lonely Trojans.
Gerard: Greg was a drummer for years.
Sean: Why’d you guys decide to switch?
Gerard: It happened by accident.
Greg: I hated drums. I played drums from when I was fifteen until I was twenty-six. I ditched it because I wanted to write songs.
Gerard: I was twenty-five when I first played the drums, really.
Jason: I was twenty-four when I first learned to play the guitar.
Gerard: Hector’s a phenomenal guitarist, and he’s on bass. I’m a better bass player than I am a drummer, but I’m on drums. Jason’s a better cocksucker, but he’s on guitar.
Jason: That’s right. I’m not better at anything than I am at guitar. I’m just not very good. [laughs]
Sean: You’re a college graduate, too, Greg? What’d you get your degree in?
Greg: Creative Writing with a History minor.
Sean: Is it doing you a lot of good?
Greg: Oh yeah. I write lyrics. It, uh, it was just the easiest way to get out of college. I wanted to get a degree for my parents’ benefit. Creative Writing was really, really easy. I had teachers who were just like, “Write a poem every week.” And that’s all you’d have to do. I didn’t even go to the library for the last two years of my college education. I didn’t have to study once. I just wrote shit. You should tell your readers, “If you want to get out of college quick, become a Creative Writing major.”
Jason: A lot of those stories Greg wrote have turned into Weird Lovemakers songs.
Greg: Yeah. I cannibalized almost everything. Because I had a comic strip (Swonk). I used some things that were stories adapted from poems made into a comic, then made into a Weird Lovemakers song.
Gerard: Now you just have to break into movies.
Jason: No. Broadway.
Greg: That’s my dream. To do a musical.
Sean: Let me ask some questions about the between song banter on your live album. Jason, what’s your fascination with sake?
Jason: I don’t even really like sake that much. Greg likes sake.
Greg: When we went on tour, we discovered—we don’t have these in Tucson—bars that just serve wine and beer. And in that situation, sake’s one of the best things you can get. It’s pretty strong. So when we get free drinks, that’s all we get. We drink sake because it’s the closest thing to hard liquor.
Jason: You know, that night, we’d all gotten pretty fucked up before the show. There are several points on that album where I pull my guitar chord out of the amp. The Kent 3 guys got us pretty drunk. We went to their house beforehand. They got Hector high. Then people did buy me a bunch of liquor.
Sean: At the end of that album, you say, “Stick around for Bell and Steel Wool.” Did it make you feel a little weird to record a live album when you’re the opening band?
Gerard: We didn’t know we were recording an album.
Greg: I did. The sound guy told me, but he was just like, “Oh, we’re recording. We’ll send you a copy.” That’s all he told me. Then, I guess Blake [from Empty records] just liked it. He called us up and said, “I want to put this out.” Me and Gerard didn’t want to do it. I personally hate live albums. Even bands I love, I never want to hear their live albums. Hector and Jason wanted to put it out. So, because of the no-veto rule, we put it out.
Jason: It’s my favorite thing we’ve done until “Must Die.” I like that one a lot. The studio albums we put out are cool, but they definitely sound like studio records, but the live album is what we really sound like. Just a live rock band.
Sean: Why do you guys say that you’re from Albuquerque, New Mexico on that album?
Jason: Because the sound guy said that. It happened a bunch of times throughout the tour. For some reason, people just get Albuquerque and Tucson confused.
Gerard: They just think, southwest. It’s all the same. Something with peyote and a coyote. Tucson. Albuquerque.
Jason: The turquoise and silver towns. Actually, when we were doing that, I was like, “Maybe we should take this off the album, guys, because people are going to be confused.” I was totally outvoted.
Sean: Where’s the no-veto?
Jason: Exactly. And then there’s the part where we stop for like a minute. There’s a minute of silence. But the decision was made to keep it as is. No overdubs. No changes in the mix.
Gerard: We didn’t edit it. We were lucky in that we were in the middle of a tour and well-rehearsed.
Sean: One more question about the live album. Who’s the coolest neighbor you ever had?
Greg: This girl Fen. She used to live next door, and she moved to Seattle. She was there at that show.
Jason: That was her favorite song.
Greg: I was giving her props, as I like to say. A shout out.
Sean: Does the hippie girl still live next door?
Greg: I don’t know. It’s weird. I never see her. I saw her once. I don’t know if she lives there or not. She built a fence around her backyard. I think she was afraid of me.
Sean: What can you guys tell me about pirate radio?
Greg: It’s good.
Gerard: You should come down tomorrow night, if you’re going to be in town. We all do shows on Tuesday nights. Petix at six, Jason at seven-thirty, and I’m on at nine o’clock.
Sean: What do you do? Do you read news or play music?
Greg: We just play music. We used to have a phone line but we kept getting caught. We’ve gotten shut down twice and had four locations.
Gerard: We’re gonna confiscate some kid’s cell phone tomorrow and take it down to the show, give out his phone number so the cops can call him.
Greg: We’ve been going for about three years now. We took maybe a year off if you add up all the time we’ve been shut down.
Sean: How’d you get started with it?
Greg: This guy in town is a genius. He designs microchips. I’ve known this guy for probably fifteen years. Ten years ago, he told me he was into this idea of pirate radio. His first plan, before he realized it was feasible, he was going to string it through the trolley lines on Fourth Avenue. He was going to actually hook the radio station up through the trolley lines so that area would get a huge signal. Then he finally did it. He called that guy, that guru from Radio Free Berkeley, the guy who will, for like a hundred dollars, send you all the start-up stuff. He talked to the guy from Berkeley and the guy helped him out. So then he started it up. He doesn’t even have a show. It’s just that him and his wife like doing it a lot. He let’s anyone do it who wants to.
Jason: He used to be in a punk band in Tucson a long time ago. The Johnnys.
Sean: Do you want me to leave that out of the interview so the FCC can’t trace him?
Greg: No. It’s fine.
Gerard: I could just see the FCC digging through punk rock archives.
Jason: [mocking the FCC] The Johnnys! They were named after a restaurant that Chrissy Hynde worked at for five days when she lived in Tucson in 1975!
Greg: Really?
Jason: Yeah. It’s a Denny’s now.
Sean: How did the FCC bust you?
Greg: Well, once they found the antenna. And once it was weird. Everyone suspects someone must’ve told them because they sent a letter to this guy’s house basically saying, “We know something’s going on” and then… it was kind of nebulous. But they didn’t just track us through the signal. I don’t know why they didn’t just do that.
Sean: How do you know they didn’t track you through the signal?
Jason: Well, because the first time, the name on the warrant was wrong. It was the first name of the guy who was doing it but the last name of a local scenester. So it was a cross-pollination that obviously would’ve happened through word of mouth. At that time, we had a phone number. We had a PO Box. There was a lot of traceable stuff, but they didn’t know any of that.
The most recent one was kind of weird because we actually were tipped off to it beforehand. So we shut up shop and moved it. And there isn’t an FCC office in Arizona. They made a trip to come in and bust us. They had a warrant and everything, so they were all pissed off. And at the time, there was another pseudo pirate radio station in town. The FCC went to these guys, who were fairly open about what they were doing. They were a right-wing crank station.
Gerard: They were called Rebel Radio.
Jason: Right. And they were going to keep going until the election.
Greg: Did they get shut down?
Jason: No, because the FCC didn’t have a warrant for them. They had a warrant for us. And Rebel Radio was like, “You don’t have a warrant for us? Fuck off.” So the FCC basically came to town, found nothing there, and got told to fuck off. After that, the thought was that they were gonna be really pissed off and totally nail us, but nothing happened.
Gerard: Is Rebel Radio still broadcasting?
Jason: No. God, man, they played the worst shit. There was some song [Jason singing a folk song] “Twelve dead in Waco.” It was pretty great, actually, because it was so weird.
Gerard: The radio station was at my house at one point, but my neighbors started calling the cops because they thought it was a drug house. The local news ran a spot “How to spot a drug house in your neighborhood.” And I guess my house fit the profile. Weeds in the front yard. Lots of comings and goings at strange hours of the day and night. You know.
Sean: So what happened when the police came by?
Gerard: They didn’t come to my house. They knocked on some of my neighbors’ doors and started asking questions about what the neighbors had seen at my house. I’m friends with one of the neighbors, and he came up and said, “By the way, some federal policemen were asking questions about your house. You’d better move the radio station.” And we said, “Okay.”
Jason: We were shut down for a while after that while we looked for a new place.
Gerard: We were shut down for about six months, then. That was the longest we’d been shut down.
Sean: Jason, you wrote a story for your web site about smoking pot with the guy from Nazareth. Any other stories about drug use with minor celebrities?
Jason: I dropped acid and went to see the Laughing Hyenas once and that was an incredibly fucked up evening. I tried to write a thing about that, because we met up with the band afterwards…
Sean: And they were more fucked up than you?
Jason: They were crazy. That bass player looked like a leprechaun, and he was also tripping, which made it extra weird. And there was Brannon (John Brannon, lead singer of the Laughing Hyenas, Negative Approach, and Easy Action). He was doing smack in the other room. And before the show, someone had been playing Negative Approach at the show, and he was lip-synching to it. It was kind of freaking me out because I was a big Negative Approach fan. And he was kind of making fun of it, stomping around. It was almost too much. That night, we went dumpster diving and found a huge bouquet of roses and we’re like, “Let’s give these to the Laughing Hyenas.” So we go over there where they’re staying and they’re all playing with this snake. Somebody had a snake at the house and the owner of the snake is like, “Can you guys put the snake back in his cage.” And Brannon said, “No man, I have to see if he’ll bite me because I’m a sinner.” It was just a completely horrific kind of night.
Gerard: I smoked bongs with Mike Watt, but that’s not that rare of a thing.
Scatological: preoccupied with excrement or obscenity