Transcript (auto-generated, may contain errors; songs left out)
Hi there, this is Franz Nikolai and you're listening to Sound Scene Revolution.
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And this, for those of you who didn't happen to catch the unrecorded part, this is the second time we're doing this introduction. So I just kind of ruined the illusion of internet podcasting there. The first time Sound Gallery Nereman forgot to hit the record button. So I'm going to take that moment to capitalize on his error because he doesn't mess up very often. Most of the time if there's a mistake with something going wrong, with a battery dying or a mic cutting out, that's my fault. So I'm pretty stoked he made a mistake. Anyhow, thanks for tuning in. We're going to try and keep this going for a little while longer. We were gone for like three months and so we're going to try and get at least a month or two months worth of new shows going before we take another break. So we'll see. We got another one all ready to go after this.
And then I'm going to punk rock bowling and I'm hoping to catch a few interviews there in wonderful Las Vegas. So hopefully I can do that because I hear it's a lot of dudes getting drunk and a lot of dudes looking for drugs and I don't look for drugs and I'm not really a good interviewer when I'm drunk. So maybe I'm all right. We'll see. It's debatable. Well, anyhow, so this week we have the wonderful and talented multi-instrumentalist, Franz Nikolai. He's been in World Inferno Friendship Society, The Hold Steady, Anti-Social Music, another group with members of Mischief Brew whose name escapes me right now. Not important. He's got a couple of solo albums out and that's primarily what we talk about in this interview.
We got him when he was down at the Rickshaw stop in San Francisco with Frank Turner. Their paths were just sort of crossing. They weren't actually on a tour together. So yeah, we're going to jump into the interview here. But before we do, we're going to play a track off of his latest EP. It's a 10-inch called St. Sebastian of the Short Stage. It's available on Team Science Records. We're going to play the track The Ballad of Hollis Wadsworth Mason Jr. And then we're going to play the first half of the interview. We don't have anything to avoid this week. We still are running our contest for Nobunny, which went up last week. We're trying to get more press on that, but Punk News apparently has scorned us on that, which is weird, right? You think as an editor for the website...
Can you just push that? I can. I submitted it through the regular news cycle, and I'm pretty sure it got deleted. But I'll just put it... Yeah, I know. They were like, fuck this guy. But I will put it through eventually. I'll just use my powers. But it'll get up. But anyhow. So yeah, we got... Oh, I got that. That was good timing. But so we got the Nobunny contest still for copy of Love Vision. And nothing this week, because I forgot to contact Darren Danger at Team Science. So otherwise, we probably would. But anyhow, this is The Ballad of Hollis Wadsworth Mason Jr. off of St. Sebastian of the Short State. Oh my god. I'm like slurring and lisping. And no one could hear that. There was a guy who just lost his shit outside. And it was pretty amazing.
Anyhow, that's it. We're going to the interview. We'll be back in a little bit.
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Start off with the saddest thing you know.
My butt's tired. But other than that, I'm rested. From Portland to San Francisco, 16 hours? Give or take? No. No, no, no. No? It's like... Oh, no. 12? It's 7 to Redding and then 3 from... So like 10 hours probably if you did it straight. Yeah? Because I... Yeah, I guess. Because I do... Yeah, I go to Southern Oregon and it's about 8. So, yeah. I guess about... It's the eternal question if you're on tour of like, what do you do between Portland and San Francisco? I played Eugene half a dozen times. I played Grant's Pass, played Medford, played Ashland, played Redding once. Yeah. I mean, I've come to the conclusion there's no good place to play. It's just as well to keep. It's just keep driving and have a burger somewhere and sleep.
Redding, I think, would be your best bet, but I don't even really know how that goes. Redding's all right. I mean, I had a... There was a place called the Downtown Eatery that was doing shows for a second, but I think they just shut down that I played last year. My only issue with Redding last night was I got there at 8 o'clock and there was nothing to eat except Taco Bell. Yeah. The whole town was totally shut down except for the one bar that had the band doing Alice in Chains and Van Halen covers. Dude, that's the place to be on a Tuesday night. It was the only place to be. That or Taco Bell. By default, it was the place to be. Oh, there was a Wienerschnitzel, too. Ooh. Well, Sound Guy and Airmen, right?
You're a significant other is from Redding, so... I live there, not from Redding. Oh, right, right, right. Yeah, they make that distinction. If you weren't born in Redding and you just happened to live there for a little period of time, you're not from... You only went to high school there. Yeah, it was a... One year, junior high. It was a transition period of her life, right. All right. So, back... I believe you. I've been there. Now that you've lost us, our one Redding listener. He wasn't going to any shows. He wasn't doing anything. So, I guess the easiest place to start is... Is there kind of a brief history of how you got involved in music? You've been doing it for a while now, so... Yeah, I've been doing it for a while.
I mean, all the usual ways. I started playing music when I was a kid and picked up guitar when I was 15, as one does. And I had a band in college, and right after, it was sort of a baby band. And then I hooked up with World Inferno Friendship Society, which is the circus punk band out of Brooklyn. And I played keyboards and accordion with them for seven years. And I'm still sort of tangentially involved, but I haven't toured with them in a couple years now. Yeah. Well, that seems to be kind of the norm for them. People get picked up, people get dropped off, things kind of... It's a loose conglomerate, yeah. And then I joined up with The Hold Steady in 2005, and I played with them for five years and just left.
And then I've done a bunch of other stuff in addition to that. I've got a chamber music collective called Antisocial Music that is actually a non-profit. We do new chamber music in basement shows and punk clubs and stuff like that. Nice. And then a band called Guignol with Peter Hess from Balkan Beatbox, which is accordion, clarinet, tuba, drums. So that's kind of a Balkan klezmer circus thing. Nice. And other sessions and touring and guest appearances and stuff. I played on a bunch of Leftover Crack and Starfucking Hipsters stuff. I was going to say, looking on your website, you have a rough discography of what you've been on. I would say that's a very complete discography. Is it complete? Well, it's huge, so it's just kind of startling.
I was going to ask, what's the most surprising thing you think that you've played on that you don't think people would expect? That I played accordion live with the subhumans. Really? That's one of the things that I'm most proud of. That's kind of awesome. On several different occasions. Inferno was opening for them on a couple tours, and after a while, I started playing accordion with them on Work, Rest, Play, Die. Oh, no way. Yeah. That's good. So they were just like, why don't you come up one day? They were like, you want to kind of swing it? Pretty much, yeah. That's pretty cool. Pretty much. I mean, because that song's got kind of that Irish, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. You know, it lends itself to that kind of similar instrumentation.
Yeah. The only thing that was weird is they tuned it up or tuned it down or something. It was in F-sharp, which is a weird keyboard key, accordion key. But other than that, I'm not going to nitpick. Nice. Nice. So you have your own releases that you have. And real quick, I want to ask about Vox Inferno, the World Inferno Friendship Society 7-inch that just came out. Sure, yeah. A couple weeks ago. Well, I guess the schedule. I mean, it was February-ish. Yeah, February got delayed. February got delayed. Yeah. They're out now. Yeah. I have them on this tour. And basically, what Vox Inferno was is an a cappella project that Jack Cherrycloth and myself and Peter Hess did. And it came about like this. It's kind of a funny story.
So we were friends with the Dresden Dolls going way back. I think I met them at their second New York show. And we were trading shows in Boston and New York for a long time. And so I got to know them as they started rising and signed to Roadrunner. It was sort of interesting to watch. But I knew the A&R guy who signed them at Roadrunner and one year at South by Southwest, we were having beers at some show or another. I think it was actually the – now that I'm thinking about it, I think it was the – remember Punk Voter, Fat Mike's thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was at that show with Rise Against and Against Me and all that stuff. That's a tangential detail. Yeah, but there's kind of an unusual place for the business to occur.
That's exactly where the business occurs. But he was talking about the Dolls and about the guy who runs Roadrunner, I guess this crazy Dutch millionaire whose name escapes me. And he was like, yeah, you know, he's excited about this. He really thinks that like Punk Cabaret might be a new big thing. He's looking – I'll tell you, he's looking for this like maybe a punk rock barbershop quartet or like a Weimar-era cabaret vocal group. And I was like, that's funny because me and Jack and Hess are always sort of joking that we're going to start a barbershop quartet. And he was like, well, if you're serious, I'll see if he's serious and, you know, go from there. And I got an email from him the next day saying, okay, we got you three grand demo budget.
Record a couple songs. Which, yeah, three grand for a demo budget is pretty impressive. Well, yeah. I mean, it was like – it didn't break down that way. It was like 1,500 for the – if you want to know, 1,500 for the engineer and then 1,500 split six ways between the rest of us. Yeah, once you get that many people in there. But that's not important either. Anyway, we did it. We sent them in. They didn't – they ultimately decided that they didn't want to do a full length of that kind of stuff. But we got to keep the recordings and we just sort of had them sitting around for a long time. And I always thought it was cool. We were going to press them up as a seven-inch giveaway for one of the Halloween shows one year.
But it didn't end up happening. And then they recorded a record last year that they've sort of scrapped and they're starting over. And we thought it might be a cool way to have a release sort of that tied people over until if and when they do another record. Yeah. I was going to say because it was done in 2005. And so it's been almost five years since then. So it was just kind of – you figured, yeah, let's put it out there, let people get a chance to hear it then. Yeah, it was our friend Brain's idea actually. I'll give him credit. Who's done the graphic design on the last couple and runs the website and stuff. And he was like, why don't you – looks like there's not going to be an Inferno release for a while.
What about those a cappella tracks? You're like, why not? Nice. I mean, there's a bunch of stuff from the vaults that would be cool to release at some point. I have an amazing live recording of the show we played in Germany on September 11th that I always kind of wanted to release. The day of? Oh, yeah. I'm assuming, yeah. Not September 11th, like 2008. September 11th, 2001. We were on tour in Germany. We'd been there two or three days at that point. We kind of rolled up to the club and it was on the TV. You know, pretty bummed out for a couple hours trying to get on email, you know, and finally Jack was like, I hate to bring this up, but should we go sound check? And we played – I think a lot of people came out just because we were the only American band on tour at the time and had this reputation of being inflammatory anyway and wanted to see what we were going to do.
And I remember it as one of the best Inferno shows ever. Nice. And you just happened to be recording it or were you recording everything? The sound guy, I think, realized that it was going to be a really interesting show and hit record about halfway through the first song. Wow. Nice. So. Hopefully some way, somehow that'll make it out there. We'll see. I remember Jack at one point – this is the line that always stuck with me – he pulls it, reaches into his pocket, he flips a coin onto the ground, he goes, go ahead. And it's an American quarter. It'll be worth something someday.
Probably the handful of people in the audience that got that were – Yeah. We were laughing. You guys thought it was good. We thought it was funny. Maybe everyone else. So yourself, you keep pretty busy. You got, obviously, the different things that you record with your solo music. You recently put out a zine, actually, that it's called – Complicated Gardening Techniques. Okay. I want to make sure I got it because it didn't really seem to make sense to me. I don't know if there's a story behind the title. It'll make sense if you read it. Well, I don't – it's sold out. I went to the website. It's not sold out. That's actually not true. That's a sham. I don't know why he put that. It's on the website. The website. I know.
Okay. Man, it's not my website. Well, I don't want you to think I'm making it up. I'm not the liar. I have 200 copies. So if anyone wants them, they can email me or come to a show. Come to one of your shows and get one. So you have the zine, Complicated Gardening Techniques. The idea is that it'll – it's one of a series of chapbooks, story collections, whatever you want to call it, over the course of the year. I'm going to put one out over the summer and then one in the fall. And then early next year, we'll do a hardcover-ish anthology. Nice. Nice. And so how many stories roughly are – It's five stories in this one. Oh, okay. Well, it's just kind of – I'm hoping for 15 to 20 in the final. Now, is it fiction or personal stories or – They're stories.
They're loosely fictionalized versions of mostly of things that have actually happened. Fair enough. They're not like tour stories. It's not that kind of thing. Yeah. Well, every band has those. That's what interviews get done for. That's why interviews get done, right? I mean, I could do a lot of that, but then there's a lot of – there would have to be names changed and people would be identifiable anyway. It could be a lot of – There could be legal issues. It could be a lot of problems with that. So better – best we just let that go. Yeah. So you just released recently – well, I guess it was a little while ago on Team Science, the same one that did the Vox In Front. You did St. Sebastian of the Small Stage, right?
The Short Stage. The Short Stage. Yep. I am – that's two names today I've messed up. St. Sebastian of the Short Stage was a 10-inch vinyl EP, four songs. Yeah. Yeah. And it came out on Team Science, same record label that did the Vox In Front. Yeah. Yeah, they've been really, really good and really helpful. I'm extremely pleased. So I want to – It was kind of like – but basically their deal was that they came to see – I put out Major General, my first solo full length in January of last year on Fistolo. Mm-hmm. And I did a tour behind that, and the Team Science guys were at the Chicago show, and they contacted me about doing – they went about doing Major General on vinyl. Yeah. And I was into it. It hadn't occurred to me to do a vinyl release, but I figured I should run it by Fistolo first and see if they wanted to do it.
Yeah. Which they did. To be fair. So then I was like, hey, Team Science, do you want to just do a different release? Right. So it's – you know, St. Sebastian is sort of a grab bag of other tracks that I had around. Right. And just kind of like extra stuff to chat. Because I was going to say the – there's the first song, which is very kind of a happy kind of melodious song. And then there's some, like, just incredibly – I don't want to say sad per se, but emotional music on there as well. I don't think you can say sad. Okay. Well – Those are sad songs. They are, but I don't know. I mean, people view sad differently. I mean, especially in something as subjective as music. Yeah. So I try to steer away from, you know, those kind of adjectives.
Those two songs were both older songs. They were from about 10 years ago. Oh, okay. So they were kind of from a different period in my life. They're the kind of song that I would never write now, I don't think. But I didn't want them to disappear, you know? And that seemed like a way to get them out there without having to really commit to them. If that doesn't sound too walking back from the songs. No, no, no. Because I really – you know, that – I think that's a – especially the very last song, you know, it's the kind of song that you can only write when you're 21 or something. Yeah, at that period of time in your life. And that's a snapshot that sometimes you kind of want to have. No, no, definitely. I mean, there's a number of bands who, you know, they're happy with what they put out, you know, when they were 20 and 21.
And they all say, well, it's not something I would do now, but, you know. Yeah. For that time being. And it's, you know, it's good to have. Yeah. Definitely. So, excuse me, do you play any of those, the ones that you wrote a while back? Do you play any of them live or do you keep them? I did them a couple times. Yeah. But it's a little tough with the kinds of shows that I play. I have mostly tended not to be, like, morose singer-songwriter type shows. Yeah. They're usually, like, folk punk type stuff or things that need – that I need to keep it a little more upbeat. Yeah. Just for the audience purposes? Yeah, you know, and because I do want to entertain at live shows, you know, and it's – what's the best way of putting this?
I get a lot of that – I get a lot of a sense of what I feel like I ought to be doing from audience feedback. Yeah. And it's not always easy to tell with the more melancholy songs whether people are buying it or whether you're just boring them with, like, a sad songwriter shtick. Yeah, yeah. So you've got to really – I really pick and choose those, you know? Yeah. Makes sense. Well, I was going to say on that note, I've heard from reading up that you kind of have been – I don't want to say taking, but you're inspired by the vaudeville acts of American past. Mm-hmm. And so you've considered yourself more of an entertainer in that regard. And I was going to ask, in your act, do you typically just play songs or do you try and banter with the audience at all?
I talk a lot. Yeah? Yeah. I mean, I talk – it depends how much time I have, you know? Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes there's this guy I've been listening to, Todd Snyder, that somebody turned me on to after seeing my show. He was like, this guy – you've got to check this guy out because he talks even more than you do. And he'll do, like, a 15-minute story in front of a three-minute song. I'm not that bad. No. You know, but I can be. Oh, yeah. But, you know, it's – I guess it's all part of – let me put it this way. If you're in a – if you've got a band, that sort of takes care of itself in terms of taking up the sonic space and taking up the what are people going to look at space. And I like playing with bands, but economically it makes more sense for me to go out in a compact rental car by myself.
Yeah. And, you know, and that suits me just fine. Yeah. So, if I'm going to get up there and not have it just be a dumb songwriter act, I've got a little more of a responsibility to entertain, you know. And I've seen from a lot of people who do that kind of act that what works, you know, Mark Eitzel's really good at this. Billy Bragg's really good at this. John Darnielle's really good at this. Where if you're going to have a lot of heavy emotional content in the songs, it really works to make it almost like a stand-up comedy act in between the songs. Because it lets everybody off the hook, you know. It lets them take a deep breath and, like, laugh and, like, not have to feel so weighed down by the – you know, by whatever it is you were just singing about.
Not that all the songs are depressing, but, you know, you understand what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah. And as far as the vaudeville thing, that's just, like, as a general concept of being someone who's on stage for a living, I really appreciate the idea of that era of entertaining that – of people who were on the road 300 days a year, managed to still have meaningful lives doing it, and really honed their act in a way where, like, maybe they weren't all that good at any one thing, but they were pretty good at a bunch of things. Yeah. And they could throw it all out, take, you know, take a gauge of the audience, you know, stop on a dime of one thing that's not working, do a different thing, and that's sort of what I think of as the consummate stage – stage – stage person.
Yeah. What's the word I'm looking for? Stage person? Performer, I guess. Performer, I guess, yeah. Yeah. Entertainer? Yeah. Works. All right, we're going to take a quick jump out of the interview to play some more music from Franz Nikolai. I know a bunch of you are probably, like, hoping for some Hold Steady songs, but I have no urge to get sued by the Hold Steady. So we're going to go with one of his lesser bands, actually, and we're going to play something off the World Inferno Friendship Society, the latest seven-inch they put out called Vox Infern. It's also on Team Science Records. Maybe I just really don't think Aaron Danger of Team Science is going to sue me. Maybe that's it. I just – I don't have any respect for the guy, but we'll see.
He'll probably be the one who sues me, because he's from Texas, and he's a Mexican, but he looks Asian. You never guess. Anyhow, something like that. He's Mayan, something Chupacabra. He looks Asian. He looks like – well, the first time I met him, sidebar, first time I met Aaron Danger, he had, like, long hair and, like, a little, like, pencil-thin, like, John Waters child molester mustache, and so the first thing that went through my head was, it's a Mexican guy, or it's an Asian guy, and, no, it turns out, Mexican. His last name's, like, Sanchez or something like that.
Oh, the last letter. I thought you meant the first letter. I'm like, how do you spell Sanchez? So, I think it's with a Z, so I don't know what that means, but I don't think it makes him Chinese. There's not many Asians with the Sanchez last name. So, anyhow, so Aaron Danger probably won't sue me, I hope. He's less likely to than the Hold Steady. True story. So, we're going to play something off Vox Inferno. It's the a cappella album that we talk about in this interview, and we're going to play Paul Robeson, which is a song, if you're familiar with World Inferno, they've recorded about 4,000 times in different albums and in different takes, so this is probably one of the most interesting versions. So, hopefully you enjoy it, we'll get back to the interview, and then we'll be done with this.
So, stay tuned.
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said anything about that does it get brought up a lot at the at the time that i did that interview that seemed to be the thing that people latched on to i just it just came up when i was reading an interview and i was like really oh i did this interview up with this like one one interview right after i left to hold steady and and she was like you know we did i was talking about vaudeville and she and we were about to sign off and the lady was like you should you know joking was like you should you should uh you know integrate some tap dancing or something i was like it's funny that you would say that because why do you ask why do you ask well because i've always kind of wanted to tap dance like a pipe dream of mine and i had the six weeks off at that point because i wasn't doing hold steady stuff and my new tour didn't start yet so my girlfriend for christmas bought me six lessons of tap dancing at the at the mark morris school in brooklyn not bad so uh so that was just like it was like a fun thing that i was doing but um you know it's harder than it looks it's not like not like i'm gonna be the next gene kelly as much as i'd like to from my own perspective i don't think it is harder than it looks because to me it looks really it looks really hard i mean i know i know a couple steps now but uh do you feel more comfortable at least a little smoother do i feel a little smoother i mean i'm up there with a 10 pound accordion around my neck so it's hard to be that smooth it's there's way more stomping than soft chew involved that's most accordion players that's kind of what i seem to note yeah a very heavy instrument to do it can be yeah yeah well i was gonna ask is uh again one of the interviews i mentioned the weight of the banjo i think it said 15 pounds is the banjo really like a heavy instrument because uh 15 pounds may be an exaggeration but it can be a heavy instrument because there's two kinds of banjos the open back banjo which is incredibly light yeah like weighs like a you know less than five pounds um but the one that i play has a resonator that is essentially a giant hunk of hardwood oh so the back of the banjo you know it's solid is solid oh so it is quite heavy yeah see from someone i it's heavier than a get that one's heavier than a guitar really yeah wow see from someone who's never played a banjo before i always assumed they sound very light and so i in my head i was like yeah clearly it's hollow yeah and they're not all hollow no so what do you drive around with in your car in terms of instruments for this uh an accordion and acoustic guitar okay so you're no just the three on this yeah well i shouldn't say just that's i mean that's like that's what i that's i don't bring a keyboard it's too much hassle i don't really like the way it looks on stage to have one guy sitting at a keyboard yeah you know if more places had upright pianos that might be different but they don't so it's really not worth my preparing any material what if you did what if you came to the rickshaw stop and this is where the upright piano they do they do have one there yeah i don't i'm like where it's not out here in the room no it is it's up front to the right um and that happens from time to time but the amount of times that they're in tune is incredibly rare and the amount of times that anyone actually wants to mic them is even more rare yeah so really really don't like micing acoustic pianos why is that um because there's because they've it's it's hard to really get the sound i mean when i discovered when when i when i started doing bigger shows with the whole study that um that that's what sort of one of the secrets of broadcast tv and like and like big stage shows is that if you go see for if you see like tori amos on the letterman show for example they'll it will be an empty shell of a piano with a keyboard with a with an electronic keyboard stuck in where it is really yeah well for i mean that'll be on on i should i should amend that on stage like when we opened for for counting crows they had a thing like that was they actually had an upright empty shell and a grand piano empty shell with like keyboards in them how strange well and then on letterman it was actually it was a grand piano but it was all it was all wired up for midi and it was running the same synth module that is the keyboard that i played with that i play anyway on stage that sounds 20 times more complicated than just here's a keyboard but well i guess from a from a sound guy's point of view there's so much bleed from the other instruments in a giant that just starts bouncing around a resonator and and you know making all the other strings vibrate and stuff and it's just like not worth the hassle like the first time did you see that were you like what the fuck is this guys this piano is fucking empty yeah there's nothing in here we need to get somebody screwed up oh they might be letting people in they're like yeah we need to get wires in this fucking piano i mean people do it all different ways i've seen people do do it like with a with a keyboard where they'll they'll make a little cardboard shell for it and then kind of spray paint it to look like the back of a piano if it works you know yeah i guess it's all about aesthetics i was draped for a long time i was draping a piece of black velvet from the top of the keyboard just to oh yeah like a like a table skirt like a table skirt exactly yes nice but um eventually you know it's it's just a keyboard and as a guy who played keyboards in bands for a long time i understand that it's not cool but you know it's part of rock and roll what you need to get is the guitar that that will never go out of style i will not pursue this line of questioning any farther i don't blame you i don't blame you um so real quick i want to ask i don't want to get too much into the whole study because i know you've talked about it in and out but the one thing that i have read that kind of struck me is one of the main reasons that i was getting was they were very focused on doing what they do very well which is kind of the thematic literary style the very uh lyrically based albums and you which is obvious from you know your history with music branch out you like to do a million different things you kind of you know everything you do is a little bit different and my only question regarding that is kind of when you started the band did you think that you could stay on this and stay focused with this and kind of go that same very defined direction or did you think well maybe at some point they'll change it up or you know switch gears when i when i joined the band uh i i don't know i mean i didn't when i joined the band it wasn't like it wasn't a major life decision at that point it was just joining another band it was you know it was one of the portfolio yeah you know um and and i made it clear to them at the time actually that it wasn't that that i was going to keep doing other stuff and that it wasn't necessarily going to be my number one priority at the time um obviously it became that um and it really i thought it grew in an interesting way um i mean i don't know it's i basically they they sort of wanted me to stop doing other things period yeah and uh and it just it you know it was nice it was nice doing it for five years but it wasn't worth it to me to do it all the time yeah um and there are a lot of other people who would be psyched to do it all the time and and it's better that they should do it you know yeah yeah no definitely and you know again i don't want to it's one of those things you've been over and i don't want to like i'm not here to dig something up i don't know yeah i mean there's all kinds of ways that i could talk about it but people people read so closely into this stuff there's i don't you know there's no well especially i'm not trying to say i'm uh you know i'm i'm i'm better than them or more interesting than them which i think is how some people are taking it i'm just saying they like to do that to rock yeah and i like to rock too but it's but i like to do other stuff also yeah well i think especially with a band with a hold steady like where people get so invested into it like you know it does it's one of those things where fans take it as more than just a band which is good and bad which is yeah which is super yeah which is great well it's great but it's also the same people who get really bent out of shape whenever something changes in that regard but it is what it is it's good people who buy music at least so yeah which is always a plus so uh i wanted to ask you wrote a song uh it's on your uh first the the full length about uh the singer well not really the singer of the dead kennedys i guess the person who was singing for the dead kennedys that would make him the singer of the dead kennedys at the time at the time singer of the dead kennedys the time has uh do you know if he's heard that song or has he talked to you about that yeah oh yeah for sure uh he came to the show i mean i emailed him when the when the penalty by the way in case when we did the video for it just to sort of give him the heads up um he uh or i sent him like a myspace message and uh and and he was aware of it because his mother had a google alert of him uh and so i think my mom has that too that's kind of awesome and so he found out right away he's like yeah you know i know the song blah blah blah um and he came to the show in la last year um and it was nice to meet him i had i don't think i had actually met him you know except in passing when we actually had played the show together yeah and uh and and i i asked him if he liked it and he said it was weird i agreed that it was weird fair enough i mean it was the it was the first time i think that i had sung a song about about someone in particular yeah with that person in the audience when that person and i had not previously been romantically involved in some way but uh but he said that so that we did this video that includes a painting of him that's sort of huge five feet long and he and he said uh that his mother wanted to know could she have the painting um at which to which the answer of course was yes because it was really taking up a lot of space in the director's living yeah and he needed to get rid of it so you don't need the you don't need the five foot painting of him in the house somewhere yeah wow so his mom has a five foot painting of her it's a pretty cool painting it was actually the guy thomas bain is the guy who directed it and sort of came up with the concept yeah he works for uh venture brothers the adult swim thing um and he had this idea of doing he made he got this canvas and he made he did sort of did a picture of jeff singing into a mic like hardcore style with the you know the cable wrapped around his head uh out of masking tape white masking tape on a white canvas and then the video is him like throwing black paint on it and then peeling off the white uh peeling off the masking tape so it then it sort of reveals this white on black i have not seen the video yet i'm you should i'm gonna look it up now i know the song it's a good video well it sounds very cool and sounds like kind of a new painting so maybe it'll be a collector's item one day mom will cash in that's what my mom would do i don't think moms that's not what moms do if anything of mine becomes worth money it's memorabilia it's out come on it's why my parents have boxes of my stuff in the attic and just like god if you ever make it one day yeah that every day gold every day that hope dwindles a little bit they're kind of like you're not really talented and i'm like oh oh mom i'm sorry i love you too thanks mom let you down but uh all right so one last question i want to ask before we wrap this up is again you're a multi-instrumentalist you play a ton of different things um the one thing that i've heard you have difficulty with or just can't outright play are the drums i'm a terrible drummer and i kind of wanted to ask what about the drums just doesn't makes doesn't click for you i don't know i just suck you know bobby drake really made it a personal goal of his at one point uh a year or two ago to he he like gave me a practice pad and a pair of sticks and and uh and a printout of a bunch of uh um you know rudiments and stuff yeah and and i i actually practiced rudiments every day to a metronome for a couple months on one of the tours i don't know there's a there's plenty of good drummers in the world i don't i don't need to be a shitty one lots of good ones no need for a really bad one i suppose plus you do pretty much everything else at this point so well i mean let me to answer that seriously actually um a lot of the reason that i that i pick up certain instruments is as as a as a as an aid to songwriting like i've i've kind of find that the learning process on a given instrument makes me is is the same as a songwriting process you know i rediscover some chords and and sort of uh things that are really idiomatic to a particular instrument and um and the drums aren't really the kind of instrument that you can accompany yourself with you know it's not a tool for songwriting yeah it's a it's it's something that i hire somebody else to do to play with me while i'm accompanying myself on an instrument that i'm good at that i wrote some songs on probably makes it easier that way yeah better excellent well um i think we're good on time and uh they're probably gonna let people in here so before we get overrun uh is there anything else you would like to add anything you want to push or plug anything like that i think we covered it mostly the vox and fern seven inch guignol mischief brew fight dirty that's a great full length just now out on cd oh finally it was only out on cassette for a while uh the ever enduring medium yeah well i tell you what if you want guignol and fight dirty on cassette i got 40 of those too so you got 200 copies of the magazine 40 of those on cassette the chapbooks you know i'm a i'm a one man merchandising uh you got it all merchandising thing yeah the cassette man we we were on we were going to do a week a week-long tour when that record came out guignol and mischief brew mischief brew eric peterson from philly and eric's label was supposed to put it out there was some kind of a problem and it was the eve of the tour and i called him up i was like eric you know we're about to go on tour what's up we need to have the record and he's like no it's no problem it's no problem here's this guy's number meet him on this corner in providence rhode island on the way to the show he's that sounds totally legit a 21 year old art student and he handed me a sack of cassettes and a and a pile of of xerox coupons with mp3 download codes and he was like don't worry it's don't worry people will buy them people buy them you're fine yeah do you know who did that with the the person famous who did that the guy's name is kyle kyle william campbell the kyle campbell yeah yes the cottage records yeah you know yeah yeah i'm i i don't know i hesitate to say friends because i always feel like a dick when i'm like oh yeah i'm friends with that guy he's somebody you know yeah he's he's a good dude that's why when you were like oh he's an art student he's from providence it all started to come like he does digital downloads yeah he makes cassettes so he me they're nice cassettes i've you know i'm young enough yet that i had never had a record out on cassette so it was a little bit of a novelty for me well there you go i think and whatever if you know if you're gonna sell if you're if it's gonna be mp3s on your computer anyway what does it matter whether it's a cd that you buy or a cassette you buy it's just a little widget that happens to have the code attached to it it's the way to transfer yeah is it a cooler widget than a cd i don't know some some people would say you can play it in your car that's if your car is old enough the old plastic cassette yeah now they have the cassette to cd it's all moving his uh technology is secular anyway i'm looking forward to whack sick whack cylinders whack cylinder that's what's coming back i'm waiting for him well they already do you can still do a track and reel the reel uh with fucked up out of toronto didn't those but fucked up did an eight track they did an eight track of uh of course they did of course why wouldn't they of all bands but uh all right somebody had to before we get more ridiculous i want to thank you so much for taking the time and yeah my pleasure good luck with all the ridiculous millions of things that you have going on and with the show tonight and all the best man cool thank you all right uh thank you so much for listening to the whole interview i want to thank france so much for taking the time um i have a brief history with france like not like we're super good friends like he probably wouldn't be able to id me out of a lineup of two but um back when we started we did an interview with world inferno and he actually set that up for us and so he's always been super cool to us even though we're not really like legit media and so i'm pretty excited that this interview panned out and uh i hope all the best for him i mean if you talk to the guy he's got a million different musical projects in the pipe so i'm sure he will be uh busy for quite some time anyhow we're gonna wrap it up um no new contest this week we are still running the nobody contest last week um so listen to that and figure out how to enter um yeah all right so last track we're gonna play for franz nicolai off of saint sebastian of the short stage is the latest ep that he put out um the reason i'm going to tell you that i'm playing this is i do have his uh other full length which is available on fistolo records uh major general i'm going to say that's it i might be blanking but we'll see it's on fistolo records but i have it on an lp and so i don't have digital format and so that's why we're not including that one not that it's a bad album but uh i lack digital access to it i actually have the ce on order right now so i can let them do it in my car sorry but uh team science run by aaron danger gives you mp3s with every record that you buy and they're not shitty mp3s either if i can just drop an ad for team science since we're stealing their media these are 320 kilobytes per second that is a high quality mp3 included you have to download it but i mean other than that it's totally included so there you go my little uh rep for team science so we're going to play um off of uh the saint sebastian of the short stage i'm going to play uh one of the sadder songs that we were talking about there are two like really depressing songs on this album like not depressing but they're sad uh so we're going to play when the war came which friend said he wrote like 10 years ago so it's kind of a neat uh look into his mind 10 years ago so enjoy it listen to the nobody interview from last week and figure out how to win a copy of love visions and we'll be back next week and hopefully the week after and i'll have tons of really awesome stories from punk rock bullying about how i tried to talk to people who are in bands and they didn't want to talk to me so i'm looking at you fat mike you're not you can't you can't see me but i'm i'm doing this finger thing where i'm doing the fingers and he's gonna it's gonna happen he's gonna offer me a drink and i'm gonna be like he's so nice that was shit liquid shit you just drank so uh we'll catch you guys next week enjoy this is when the war came
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