Great, really fun. We only had a couple of days notice for advertisement but there was like 400 kids there, but it was great. There were no bouncers there, so it was just like us and the kids, the way it should be. Kids diving without getting the shit kicked out of them. Kids aren't out to fuck things up they are just out to have fun, sometimes mikes get knocked over, monitor cables get knocked out but the kids aren't there to fuck with the band, so it was a great show.
We formed in 1982. We were a hard core punk band in that we played fast aggressive music with political messages. We were all bald and heavily influenced by bands like Minor Threat and Black Flag, Bad Brains, Discharge and Black Sabbath etc. It's funny people are saying with the new records: `Hey you guys sound like Black Sabbath', but actually we have always been into Black Sabbath. One of our oldest songs, Red Neck, were from the South, Red Neck capital of the planet, it was just Symptom of the Universe sped up. We went through a lot of different member changes, put out a couple of records, got a little bit of notoriety because we were one of the first bands to merge Hardcore with metal. In the US, punkers and metal heads used to get into huge fights, but we were some of the people who were really into merging the two. We did a deal with Metal Blade. Member changes . . had a number of problems externally and internally. We had a manager called Dick who had a falling out with the record company and booking agent which ended up in losing a couple of members and breaking up in late 87 and got back together a couple of years later with a second guitar player and a new singer. Karl and Pepper: the new guys.
There have been rough bits, because that is how relationships go, but it's going awesome, we are all really close friends, its not like its a job or something. Very cohesive. It was never that way before, it was fine but we've been going for ten years now.
I Love Faith No More, I've known them since they were on Mordam records and put out We Care A Lot. We have been around as long as they have. It is great to see bands that we know become successful. I remember when my friend Dave Grohl in his first band Dain Bramage before he was in Scream, now he is in Nirvana and selling 6 million records. It is good to see friends of mine be successful. I like that.
We are going to try and work out some shows with them. I know we and our record company have been trying to get together with them to do some political rally shows around a group called Rock the Vote, which pushes for voter registration in young adults in America, trying to make involvement in the political system more appealing and take back the ownership of the fucking country.
No, there are huge differences between the democrats and the republicans. We have had a conservative president for the last 12 years. Our presidents put in the supreme court and we have had a lot of old really cool supreme court justices who were in during the civil rights era and changed a lot of laws to make it more accessible for blacks and civil rights but now there is a conservative court because all of those guys died or retired or something. With the laws they are talking about changing now it is going to push us back to 1955, so that is one of the big issues. There is a piece of legislation that they are trying to make a law which will enable people to sue bands, say for instance, some kid raped and beat the shit out of your mom, he could say "well I was at a Sound Garden show and they played Big Dumb Sex, of course that's `I wanna fuck fuck fuck fuck you', and it made me go out and fuck your mom". With this new law it is going to say that bands can be sued and held criminally responsible for what they say in their music which is pushing back even more the rights of free speech and the rising tide of censorship which is already a huge problem with the PMRC etc. But basically what I am trying to say is that there is a difference between the Republicans and the Democrats because the Republicans are trying to push these issues, they are the ones who are taking away, it's funny because they are the ones who stand on this high moral ground saying that they stand for the constitution but in reality they are the one's which want to ban free speech, they are the ones who hide behind the flag but are really the most un-American people there are, because our constitution is quite a great document if people would live by it.
It is called the North Carolina Progressive Network, its a broad based, issue oriented, progressive or liberal group which is non partisan. It was set up through a bunch of people that were left over from a campaign that I worked on that was trying to defeat Jesse Helms, the infamous racist and very powerful senator. We worked on that campaign and there were a lot of people left over who still wanted to make a difference politically, because as much as people hate to admit it politics affect their lives in every way. No matter how boring it is, once it starts infringing on your rights you have to start taking care of business. We formed this group which gives people the opportunity to remain active within their community. Its an organisational group which works with people like Green Peace, National Abortion Rights Action League. Most people in America overwhelming want women to have the right to choose whether they want to have an abortion or not. But because the right wing republicans are so wealthy and so well organised that they make it an issue when it shouldn't be one, because most Americans don't want it to be one.
We are realistic in that the majority of people that check out music, check it out to be entertained but I think, I think that I and the members of COC and a lot of other people I know are living examples of people who that have been influenced by music. I mean we come from the punk rock scene and that was a very ideological scene. Our lives have been totally changed by music. We learned a lot from the music scene and a number of bands and we learned a lot of different ways of looking at life. We have been inspired at lyrics to want to make us look at certain things in different lights. So I guess we still hold on to that same approach in that it is a possibility because we experienced it ourselves, but we are realistic in that we know that most people who come to our shows come to stage dive. But one person makes a difference.
Even Black Sabbath's, War Pigs still holds up today even though it was written about the Vietnam war, it is still a song that you can still hold onto and be inspired by. Electric Funeral and tunes like that.
I think it should be viewed as a voice for the voiceless. When you have no alternative, no recourse it is an alternative. When you look at the 60s, the right wing when they thought they had no voice they took out Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Kennedy's, Salvatore Yenti in Chile with the help of Jesse Helmes. I like to like Jesse Helmes to a man called Jeffrey Dohmer. The US was disgusted and overwhelmed when they heard the story of Jeffrey Domher, over eight years he chopped up and ate about seventeen young boys, one of them got away and the police sent him back. Now thats pretty atrocious, this is a sick man. But let me put this on a global scale. With the help of Jesse Helms and the CIA, ITT (the communications group), because Chile had elected with nationalist president called Salvatore Yenti, who wanted to do things like nationalise the phone system which would have meant that ITT would have been out of a hell of a lot of cash. ITT wanted to continue do business down there so with the help of the CIA and Jesse Helms they created a cou and got Salvatore Yenti killed and put in a brutal dictator called General Pinochet who over the course of ten years tortured and murdered ten of thousands of people. So when you think of it on a scale, Jeffrey Dohmer and General Pinochet were killing about the same time JD killed 17, Pinochet killed about 100,000. So when you look at Jesse Helms a legitimately elected official of the United States was a co-conspirator to the murder of 100,000 people. I can think of a lot of people who would have wanted to kill Jesse Helms, because maybe none of this would have happened. I am not saying that either is right, it is just a recourse for someone.
It is good to talk to people, I don't read very well but sometimes I get stuff from books. Obviously I read the newspaper and watch the news a lot. Talking to people of all different view points as opposed to just your own. That was one of the big down falls of the punk thing I think, especially in America. One of the downfalls of groups like Maximum Rock n Roll was that the closed themselves off from everyone else. If they want to make any kind of impact on the real world, then they have to deal with the real world, not necessarily on their terms, but at least talk to them. Fuck, the people who read Maximum Rock N Roll generally agree with things written in M RNR politically anyway.
We are going to try and start from shit for this election, raise some awareness and do as many shows as we can before people tell us to quit. We have five songs which we didn't finish for the album, four are covers and one is an original. We did Black Night by Deep Purple, A National Acrobat by Black Sabbath, I've heard it before by Black Flag and Future Now by MC5. We've got tonnes of new material, we did a brand new song at the Marquee last time, that was cool. We all write music except for Karl, he doesn't write. I actually wrote most of the record but we say that all the songs are written by COC, because it is better that way.
I can go either way on it, it depends on how charismatic, how dynamic they are. If they do inspire then that is fucking great. I can look at preaching in two different ways, I can be bored and think that it is really tedious or I can be inspired. I think Ian from Fugazi is inspiring. I think that the majority of people go to shows to be entertained and you can be entertained by a charismatic preacher, you can be inspired, but you can also be really bored. I think it is better for facts, I do better at sitting at home and looking at numbers and absorbing them or going to a lecture on a specific issue. We have all the same numbers and the same facts as Consolidated do, but I guess our approach is different. At our shows in the States, on the table where we sell out T-Shirts, we have a whole bunch of facts and figures on Reproductive Rights, the Environment, Animal rights etc.
However, I think that the North Caroline Productive Network is a more constructive outlet for me, politically, because it deals with all people. We have kids which are in Jr High who are like 11 years old and we've got this guy who is 80 who worked on FDRs campaign, so it is very broad based and it is something I can really sink my teeth into without having to worrying that I'm going to totally bum out some kid who just wanted to listen to the music.