Two webhosts (only one of which I recommend, Bluehost)
Four laptops (Don’t get me started…)
Three iPods (I finally upgraded to a 120GB model!)
One iPad
Morning Musume and AKB48 both making their American concert debuts – and way fucking overdue to return to these shores on a regular basis… no excuses, please, just book the dates and get on the plane! And yes, I know AKB were just in DC last week…
Twenty-one Morning Musume singles
Nineteen (soon to be twenty) personnel changes in Morning Musume
Two personnel changes in C-ute
No personnel changes in Berryz Koubou
More personnel changes in AKB48 than anyone can keep up with… (and I’m not even going to bother trying to anymore!)
Seven and a half Morning Musume albums (the “half album” being the 7.5 Fuyu Fuyu EP)
Twenty-one Berryz Koubou singles
Five and a half Berryz Koubou studio albums (the “half album” being their misnumbered (3) Natsu Natsu Mini Berryz)
Eighteen C-ute singles (all of their major-label releases)
Six and a half C-ute albums (I still consider 2 mini ~Ikiru to Iu Chikara~ to be an EP)
Seven Koda Kumi studio albums (I lost track of compilations and singles!)
Four Ayumi Hamasaki albums (Go ahead and yell at me, Vee…)
Two albums and three EPs from Maki Goto
Three albums, two EPs, one best-of, and four guitar tab books from SCANDAL
Three post-Whiteberry EPs from bands led by Yuki Maeda (One Yukki, two The Husky)
Nine Stooges albums (two of those being the remastered editions of their Elektra albums, another being a 180-gram pressing of Raw Power, and counting 2010’s 2CD and four-disc deluxe reissue of the original Bowie mix of Raw Power and the Raw Power Live album released last Record Store Day)
The entire Koharu Kusumi solo discography
The entire Buono! discography to date
The entire AKB48 singles discography to date
Six New York Dolls albums (three of those being vinyl editions of the first three studio albums)
Eight Puffy AmiYumi albums
Five Mission of Burma albums (and a new one on the way)
Three Panic! At The Disco albums
Three Meat Puppets albums
Three Cannibal Corpse albums and two DVDs
Three Deicide albums
Five Hank III albums (counting the Assjack album and the overdue legit release of the This Ain’t Country sessions as Hellbilly Joker) – and Hank III finally getting to say “fuck off” to Mike Curb.
Two copies of Flyleaf’s first album (one autographed)
Three autographed Sick Puppies CDs
One guitar autographed by Iggy Pop and the Asheton Brothers
One Asheton brother being transferred from the Stooges to Rock N’ Roll Heaven’s Helluva Band (I’m sure Ron is trading Mike Watt stories with D. Boon!)
James Williamson rejoining the Stooges
The Stooges finally making the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame (Next targets: The New York Dolls, Black Flag, and The Minutemen… and that’s a fucking vow and a promise from me!)
Lux Interior being transferred from the Cramps to Rock N’ Roll Heaven’s Helluva Band
Captain Beefheart succumbing to Multiple Sclerosis after several years… and the original version of Bat Chain Puller finally being released by the Zappa Family Trust a year later!
A Sex Pistols reunion
A Public Image Ltd. reunion
Malcolm McLaren, the former Sex Pistols “mis-manager” dying of cancer… followed by Johnny Rotten NOT singing “Celebration” or “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” (good on ya, Johnny…)
A fIREHOSE reunion (!!)
Seven books autographed by Henry Rollins
One book autographed by Sen. Arlen Specter
Three e-mails from Henry Rollins
Two e-mails from Jello Biafra
Three day trips to New York where I spent over $700 combined in one store (Virgin Megastore) alone
One day trip to New York where I didn’t spend any money in any record stores (Virgin Mega closed two years prior!)
Four visits to Apple Stores where I spent $0 (and wish I had been able to spend several times what I spent at Virgin)
One visit to an Apple Store where I finally bought something (my iPad!)
Six day trips to Philadelphia
Three day trips to Syracuse, NY
One Stooges concert
One Bon Jovi concert (goddamn motherfucking fuck!)
Two Flyleaf concerts
Two Evanescence concerts
Two Sick Puppies concerts
Two 3 Doors Down concerts (Which makes four times I’ve seen my fiancee’s favorite band, versus zero times I’ve seen my favorite band… that’s gotta be corrected quick-fast)
Two opening sets prior to 3DD by Hinder (Most boring band not named Nickelback or Daughtry, by a long shot)
Two Breaking Benjamin concerts (and unfortunately, although they played well as always, the sound at the second sucked! What was up with that, Ben?)
One Michael Angelo Batio personal appearance
One missed Puffy AmiYumi concert (goddamn motherfucking fuck!)
One missed Morning Musume concert (yes, that concert!!)
One missed Mike Watt & The Missingmen concert (which I made up for on April 2, 2011!)
Six 100-count spindles of CD-R’s
Two Palm Treo 680 smartphones
Three Blackberry smartphones (never again!)
One iPhone
Four SD cards
Three phonograph needles (I’ll be needing a fourth soon.)
Morning Musume CDs finally being released in the United States (until a certain “label” dropped the ball… REAL indie labels like Matador and Merge, the opportunity is now…)
Ten WordPress themes
Seven domain names (on top of the previously mentioned ones, there’s TGML’s URL, the one for the Meetan blog, and a second one for the Reina blog)
Two different Reina Tanaka/Robert Fripp header graphics at MotokoAoyama.com (Vee improved on the original)
Ai Kago finally making a comeback… then blowing it… then joining her fellow ex-W in the world of MILFdom.
One W album that’s gone the way of the original version of SMiLE
The original version of SMiLE going the opposite direction of W3: Faithful (and in a big way… five CDs PLUS double vinyl and two 45s? Got it!)
One Guns N’ Roses album finally being finished, handed in, and released!
Ace Frehley beating his ex-bandmates to record stores with new material… and not having to sell out to Wal-Mart to do it!
Four of the many Mike Watt-related albums that were recorded during this blog’s and its predecessor’s lifetime finally seeing release… and getting sneak previews of a couple of them from the man himself the day before hypenated-man came out!
Two animes with Reina Tanaka doing voice work
The return of most of my favorite O.G. MoMusus
Three knocked-up MoMusus
Two instances where I bitched about Nozomi Tsuji getting knocked up
Three instances where I remarked about what a lucky bastard Taiyo Sugiura is
Three snarky remarks made by me about Avril Lavgine
One snarky remark made by “Reina” about Jamie Lynn Spears
One snarky remark made by me to “Reina” about Beyonce Knowles
Countless snarky remarks about American Idle
More American Idle contestants losing their recording contracts
Five Reina Tanaka photobooks… and a sixth finally on the way!
Two tires
Three illnesses
Three NaNoWriMo wins
Three book projects (two simultaneous, one on hold)
One published short story (”The Man In The Hummer” in Deliver Us From Evil, available from Jaded Silence Press)
One novel coming out on my own book label next month!
All four versions of American Wota
All three versions of International Wota
No getting the Sunn O)))-themed IW 4.0
One nomination at the IntlWota Awards
The debut of IdolMinded
Two jokes stolen from Jeff Dunham
One joke stolen from Nothing Nice To Say
Three times I got under the skin of Tony Brummel at Victory Records… that I know of. (Might as well make it four: How does it feel to lose Silverstein AND Bayside on top of Hawthorne Heights and Atreyu, baldy? I hear Aiden’s next…)
Seven (or was it eight by now?) times my partner at My Sweet Meetan, Chris (CK) went to Japan
Reina Tanaka’s 18th birthday
Reina Tanaka’s 19th birthday
Reina Tanaka’s 20th birthday
Reina Tanaka’s 21st birthday
Reina Tanaka’s 22nd birthday
My 40th birthday… I stopped counting after that.
Mike Watt’s 50th birthday… and counting
Iggy Pop’s 60th birthday… and counting – face it, he’s one unstoppable motherfucker, for which we should all be grateful.
Several boxes of CD sleeves
Countless mouse and camera batteries
Five new electric guitars, all named after J-pop idols
Five effect pedals (two formerly owned by essential brother/up and coming guitar shredder/fellow MoMusu fan Maxxxwell Carlisle!)
Several packs of Ernie Ball Slinky guitar strings… and then I wised up late last year and switched to D’Addario .10′s, except for the Dean MAB3 I named after Erena Ono which will still get .09s!
A year and a half of experimentation with different kinds of guitar picks before I finally settled on 1.50mm Dunlop Tortex Sharps (heavy and pointy is best, it seems… – I could probably do a whole blog post on that subject!)
Countless VitaminWaters
Countless instances where I took to heart David Peel’s adage that “fuck” is not a dirty word
A year and a half of lost blog archives (Don’t trust your webhosting to anyone who stage-names himself “Vikki Stixx”… or for that matter your real estate matters)
Not enough trips to Starbucks or Sonic (yeah, N.E. PA got one of those in 2008!)
Two coffee pots
One K-Cup machine (about fucking time I got one of those… the aforementioned second coffee pot is now on reserve duty)
More money spent at CDJapan than at Gallery of Sound
Not as much money spent on vinyl since 2008, at least I don’t think so… but then again I’ve still taken that option whenever offered)
Virgin Megastore going out of business in 2009
Five Record Store Days (counting the forthcoming one this Saturday, which I’ll be honoring)
And one girlfriend, since upgraded to fiancée and then to wife on 6.26.10

The whole time she was in ICU, my life consisted mainly of working more than I am usually expected to at my present day job (partly because my mother is also the store manager/bookkeeper there while I usually do a whole bunch of other administrative stuff and occasionally wait on customers), then heading home, dropping off my messenger bag and laptop at my apartment, and heading right back out the door with my wife to drive the 45 minutes from Hazleton to Wilkes-Barre, my wife at the wheel of her car and me with my iPad in hand either catching up with things or just taking my mind off of all the insanity as best as I can – often not getting anything to eat until after we’d visited for awhile. By last Monday or Tuesday, I was burnt as close to a fucking crisp as possible, and was wondering how soon I’d be landing in the hospital myself, either in a hospital room from exhaustion or in the Mariah Carey suite at the nearest mental ward. It wasn’t until the day after my mother had her pacemaker installed that I could stay home rather than have to do the drop bag/grab iPad/bail routine again.

Not surprisingly, this slowed quite a few things down – not just mine and my wife’s personal lives, but my blogging, getting everything ready for the people who participated in the crowdfunding campaign, and trying to get back into playing music live. By now, if all of this shit hadn’t happened, I was expecting to have already sent off the formatted manuscript (which I was in the middle of doing the final edit for on March 10th) and the final front cover with Chris Mendoza’s fine artwork to the printer, an e-book file to the people that are handling that format, ordered the T-shirts for those that pledged to get one with their book, and finished all the other premiums for people that wanted them. Fortunately, the night the crowdfunding campaign closed, I explained what had happened the night before and that things would be delayed a little bit. Now that the home stretch is here, I can start to resume my life all around.

Ray Mescallado’s retiring International Wota and starting Idolminded in its place gave me even more of an excuse to “restart” my blogging even while all this was going on, and I delibrately chose April 1st – which would have been the 54th birthday of the Minutemen’s D Boon – as the “restart” date, even though this finished blog post is getting posted after midnight on the 2nd – coincidentally a year after I last saw Mike Watt play live. (My own 5th blogging anniversary is coming on the 11th of this month, but honoring one of my much-missed heroes was a better target date for TGML’s relaunch.) I’m getting back on track with both the blogging and the prep for Resonant Blue‘s release and the pledge fulfillments, which leaves the last thing I mentioned… The getting back to playing music live.

As I mentioned back when I reviewed AKB48/BabyBlossom’s live performance of “Give Me Five” a while back, I’m a trained musician. For several months, on and off, I’ve been trawling Craiglist and local music giveaway papers in search of either a working band. A week before the medical incident with my mother, I had an audition for one of two guitar spots… and I’ll relate how all that went, and maybe a little more, tomorrow.

While I am sad to see IW itself cal it a day, I am excited for the next step that Brother Ray will be taking to keep the J-Pop (and K-pop) blogging community – the readers as well as the writers – in the loop and then some. Having been a part of all this since Ray was doing his blog roundups on Cult of Pop, I’m looking forward to see what he comes up with… and TGML and it’s two sister sites, Music is Like Oxygen and So Hot She Shits Fire, will be a part of that just like everyone else in the J-Blogosphere.

The only thing that sucks about the retirement of IW? No way for Ray to make good on his promise for a Sunn O)))-themed IW Version 4.0!

Friday afternoon, ex-Romeo Void singer Debora Iyall had discovered my overview of It’s a Condition at Music Is Like Oxygen and posted the link to it on her Facebook page. Since I’ve been Facebook friends with her for awhile and had participated in her Kickstarter campaign for her new EP, I knew about it because she had linked to my personal Facebook page in her status update about the post. I hadn’t told her about the post (I didn’t want to be spamming her page or whatnot) so I was happy that she had found it and was giving me props right back for giving her old band props.

For whatever reason (a bit of ego, maybe?), I went to click through the link on my iPhone (I was at dinner with my mother at the time) and found myself getting rerouted to a .ru page that was basically dead. What?

Thinking it was some odd Facebook quirk, once I got home I got on my computer and checked the link. Through Chrome, I got the same dead page. Through Firefox, I got a fake virus scan site that (thankfully) Norton had cockblocked before any damage could be done.

Yep – some fuckers — probably Russian hackers — had somehow gotten into the account that holds all of my music blogs (The Groove Music Life, Music Is Like Oxygen, my Reina Tanaka worship blog So Hot She Shits Fire) as well as the blog for Resonant Blue and a blog for a friend’s charitable work (Sounds For Scoliosis, a series of benefit shows in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area booked and promoted by my friend Lucia Peregrim). Going directly to the main sites was fine… but anyone clicking through a link from just about anywhere (Google, Bing, Facebook, whatever) was getting redirected to some Russian pecker’s malware festival instead – and making me look bad. So bad that one of Debora Iyall’s friend had gotten hit with that shit, forcing the link to be removed.

So, after a few phone calls to my hosting provider, here’s what happened – the hackers had gotten into a file called .htaccess that, in the case of these blogs, works within WordPress installations and makes sure whoever visits one of my blogs is seeing one of my blogs. The hackers had replaced it with their own version that, within its hardly-complicated code, tricks links from search engines and social networking sites into taking people’s browsers into the Russian assholes’s virus playground instead.

Thankfully, a little Google research – a few seconds worth, more than most Tea Party members do – turned up how to fix this shit, using only Notepad and an FTP program. But I had to do it for every WordPress installation on my account – a minor pain in the ass, but it had to be done. Now all links should be fine.

Now, I don’t know if this kind of thing can affect the “free” WordPress blogs hosted on their own server farm, but if you’re independently hosting your own WordPress blog elsewhere, here’s what you should do to make sure these hacker motherfuckers aren’t messing with your hard work. With your FTP program (like Filezilla), check the size of the .htaccess file on your server. If it’s a little more than 200 bytes, you’re fine. If it’s bigger than that – the hacker’s version was over three thousand bytes – delete it immediately, Google for “.htaccess wordpress” and you’ll find a proper code to get your blog back to normal. Boot up Notepad, cut and paste (or type it up) it exact, and use your FTP program to upload it to your server. Note that you can’t simply just upload the clean version over the dirtied one – some of their code in the dirtied one prevents that, so you have to delete just that file.

My apologies to anyone who had been affect by visiting one of my blogs – in fact, at the time of this writing there was still a malware alert for So Hot She Shits Fire, which I’ve already applied for a correction on with Google. (Right now a direct search in Google warns that the site might harm people’s computers, especially if they don’t have something like Norton installed.) Everything on all of my blogs should be safe.

Girls Generation did a performance of “The Boys” on Live with Kelly this morning that I didn’t find out about until someone tweeted to me about it last night after my last post went up. I somewhat dreaded it because of how ridiculous the format of the show has been for decades, but I still set my DVR (and ended up watching it live anyway – thank god I have Wednesday mornings off). Regis is, thankfully gone (adios, you babbling idiot…), the monologue was thankfully shorter, and Girls Generation got off a relatively complete performance of “The Boys”, albeit one where there might have been one verse left out of the song (I didn’t replay the performance this time around). They did, however, perform over a backing track rather than use a live band like last night on The Late Show with David Letterman, which was a bit of a letdown.

They also got their first US TV interview courtesy of the show, with host Kelly Ripa being somewhat serious and guest co-host Howie Mandel being a slightly less obnoxious asshole than Regis Philbin. There could have been a bit more research and thought going into the questions asked of the band, but since the show was geared mainly toward a more general audience that is to be expected. The show’s producers also had a shot of the band’s tour bus and the crowd of hardcore Sone (at least one of them holding up a copy of the tin-packaged Korean edition of the new album) waiting outside, which was good because America got to see a crowd of discerning American pop fans who wouldn’t listen to thoughtless, overproduced, and undercomposed dreck like Katy Perry or Scotty McCreepy if you put a loaded pistol to their heads.

So, two for two as far as SNSD’s first two performances on American television go. Let’s see what happens from here (An album or EP with English versions of “Genie”, “Hoot”, and their other earlier hits would be a nice start…)

PROS: Girls Generation and the session musicians backing them – a curious three-piece unit of keyboards, drums, and DJ – could have done a note-for-note performance of “The Boys”, but surprised me by switching up the arrangement a little bit, throwing in a new instrumental break that isn’t on the original recording in the process. Their vocals were live and not lipsynched, which was another plus (there were a few pre-recorded effected vocals running underneath the live mics – more on that in a moment – but those were there to help replicate the production of the original recording while SNSD sang live over them, not for them to mime to). They also handled their choreography well despite the relatively small amount of real estate on the stage floor they had to deal with (and even though Sunny, at least for a second or two, in danger of bumping her ass cheeks into Paul Schaffer’s keyboard stands).

CONS: Firstly, whoever David Letterman’s director is needs to be repeatedly pimpsmacked, as there were quite a few times when the cameras were focusing on members who weren’t singing. The vocal mix wasn’t 100% perfect as a few of the members seemed to have had their mic levels lower than the rest of the group, and at one point a pre-recorded effected vocal almost cancelled out one of the other members’s live vocal. And who said Regis Philbin (who had participated in a field-goal skit with Letterman and guest Bill Murray) could obnoxiously blow his referee’s whistle right after Girls Gen and their band stopped playing? Isn’t that old fart supposed to be completely retired from being on television?

So, that’s SNSD’s American TV debut in a nutshell. Are there going to be other TV performances to follow this one? Or are Interscope going to drop the ball and not push them any further this cycle, just like they unnecessarily delayed the American release of the album Girls Generation are supposed to be promoting for months after its original Korean release? Time will tell…

For now, Third Man are already taking pre-orders for the first single, “Love Interruption”, which will contain a non-LP B-side, and be released on vinyl on February 7th and through iTunes tonight at midnight. Tide yourself over in the meantime with this stream:

And since Record Store Day is happening before the album’s release, I’m sure Third Man are going to have something special coming out that day as well. After all, it was on RSD in 2009 when the first Third Man single, The Dead Weather’s “Hang You From The Heavens”, was released…

Upon learning that Fugazi were about to release a new album, The Argument and a related EP, Furniture, this fall as well as reissue Instrument on DVD (yay!) with bonus footage, I contacted Dischord Records by e-mail. That was mid-August. By late September, Guy Piccotto, one of the band’s two guitarist/frontmen, initially replied that an interview might not be possible with everything that was going on both in the band and in D.C. in general. Being a more understanding journalist, I told Guy in my reply, “No problem — let me know when anyone’s free.” Last Monday, Guy said Brendan was available and passed on his e-mail address.

Fugazi. The name was found by vocalist/guitarist Ian MacKaye (co-founder of Dischord Records and lead singer of the influential early 80′s punk quartet Minor Threat) in a book about Vietnam, a slang term which is actually an acronym for “F’ed up, got ambushed, zipped in.” Their music shed’s punk past in favor of meshing such disparate influences as reggae, funk, go-go and hard rock. MacKaye and the band’s other vocalist/guitarist, Guy Piccotto [pronounced "ghee"], are probably the two most distinctive vocalists in rock today — MacKaye’s Joe Cocker-influenced “melodic shouting” style (honed during the three years that Minor Threat existed and refined with various side projects between 1984 and Fugazi’s formation in 1987), and Piccotto’s one-of-a-kind, full of raw emotion vocalisations. Ian and Guy’s guitar styles — thick powerchording and searing lead lines eminating from either or both guitarists at the same time — stand out in a sea of tenth-generation Ramones/Dickies/Buzzcocks/Descendants copycats and detuned unwashed KornSmackParkVayne slackers to this day, while bassist Joe Lally and drummer Brendan Canty anchor the whole thing.

“You know what?” Brendan said, “My youngest son son is having a hard time going to sleep. Is it possible that you could call me back in about a half an hour?” It was possible, so I said no problem, thought of a few extra questions to ask in the meantime, and rang Brendan. What follows is one of the most enjoyable things I’ve ever done to date. There were literally a lot of laughs in the close to an hour we spent on the phone, as the transcription will reveal over the next couple of days… [Note: The transcription had originally been spread out at Project X by its editor over the course of a week.]

CJ Marsicano: Hello, Brendan?

Brendan Canty: Hey! How are you?

I am good.

[My youngest son] actually fell asleep about five minutes after you hung up. [CJ laughing] He was playin’ me. Where are you right now?

I’m in Pennsylvania. Hazleton, near Wilkes-Barre.

OK, yeah. Oh OK. I know the area, more or less.

Oh, you do?

Yeah, a little bit.

Oh my god! Small world.

Yeah [laughs] We’re not that far from you guys.

You’re not that much older than I am, too. I’m 34.

Oh yeah, that’s right. You are my age!. Do you work for Project X?

Yeah, I think I’ve done about half the writing so far for that site. I don’t know if you’ve been to it yet.

Yeah, I’ve looked at it.

Oh, that’s wonderful!

So, did you get a chance to listen to the record at all?

No, I didn’t hear the new record yet.

Oh, you haven’t gotten it yet?

No, not yet. What can you tell me about the new album?

Well, it was very long, and now it’s shorter. [laughter]

That’s why there’s the separate EP [Furniture].

Right. We were trying to sequence it with all the songs on it and it was just getting, it was horrendously unlistenable. And then we picked out a couple of the really harder and faster songs and one older song that we just did on the fly in the studio, this old song called “Furniture”, which we started playing back in ’87 or whatever. And we took those off, and the album just fit much better. It suddenly all clicked into place. So we just decided to have two separate entities.

I tend to feel like, if you start to just put out as many songs as possible [on an album], you put out 16 songs, it’s just unbearable, you know. I think an important aspect of the whole thing is the editing process, of getting it down and treating it like one body of work so that people can actually digest it all, as opposed to slogging their way through 16 songs. Even with those songs taken out, it’s still fifty minutes long, so it’s still plenty long.

What else about the record – it probably took more than a month to record, and we had a second drummer on quite a few of the songs, this guy Jerry Busher, who was our roadie for years, and then when we started writing songs, I started throwing double drums on some of the songs on End Hits. He started playing some of those songs live with us, just the few songs from End Hits with double drums, like “Arpeggiator.” Then we have this woman named Amy Domingues play cello on a few of the songs. And then we also put a little bit of piano on there. It gets kind of expansive. I don’t know, it’s up to you to decide, it’s up to the general population to decide what they make of it. I can’t really put a spin on it. I’m not really comfortable putting the spin on it.

Yeah, you can’t really put a spin on your own work after you spend a month recording it and however long beforehand writing it.

Yeah, it took us years to write, really. When I think about writing some of these parts three years ago…

Jeez!

Yeah, it’s ridiculous. But it’s just that we’ve had a lot of things going on in our lives. We haven’t been working on it constantly for that long, but it’s certainly taken a long time to get us into the studio. Finally, we just had to say “let’s just go book the time and have done with it.” [Laughter]

I can imagine like, promoting the movie [Instrument] was taking a lot of time over the past couple of years.

Well, making the movie was. There was making the movie, and there was also, at the time when we started making the movie, I was having kids. I’ve had a couple of kids since then, and that’s sort of one of the reasons over the last few years that we’ve slowed down touring. And so, Guy [Piccotto] and Ian [MacKaye] and [filmmaker] Jem Cohen, who shot the film, they all worked together more than I did on the film. It was really kind of lucky for me that we had a project like that for them to work on, and also it was lucky for me that they were willing to work on it without me and to maintain the band through their spotty schedule over the last few years. You know what I mean. Anyway, they did a lot of that work while I was, you know, losing my mind. [laughter]

Kids.

Yep.

That’s why I don’t have any yet.

[laughter] You know what I mean, Just don’t rush it. If you don’t want ‘em, don’t feel like you have to have ‘em. [laughter] ‘Cause even if you want them more than anything in the world, they’re still a challenge.

Yeah. Jello Biafra said “they don’t give a [mandatory] class on the most important thing in life, and that’s parenting.”

Yeah. Well, actually they do give classes on that… [laughter] Jello might not be tapped into the parenting thing [laughter]

Unfortunately, he’s been divorced since the Frankenchrist trial, so that’s a moot point for him. [laughter]

Yeah, that’s right! [laughter] Yeah, but once you have kids, you realize that there’s an entire universe there that you previously knew nothing about… [laughter] thankfully! Because you’d never get pregnant if you knew about it beforehand! [laughter]

Anyway, that’s pretty much the deal with the new record. It’s called The Argument, and it’ll be out on the 17th of October. And it seems to be getting, people seem to be interested in it. That makes me happy.

I understand you’ve been doing some scoring outside of the band.

Yeah, I’ve been working for some producers that I’ve known for a long time – basically friends, there’s a few different producers that have been making documentaries for TV for the Discovery Channel. So I did [the score for] a mini-series a couple of years ago called Buildings, Bridges and Tunnels, and then I did a score for this show called High Speed Impacts, which is basically like a Butthole Surfers video [laughter] for an hour…

[laughter] Without the penile implants.

Right! Without the penile implants! It was just shit blowing up for an hour! [laughter] It was all test footage from the Sandina Rocket Test Facility in Arizona or Nevada – I can’t remember where it was. You’d think I’d know after I’d watched the damned thing a thousand times. [laughter] But it was just the greatest documentary to work on, ’cause it was literally like – my friend was at Sandina doing a different documentary and he came across all this footage of shit blowing up, and ten different camera angles running at different speeds and super high quality – and he decided to piece it all together and make a storyline out of it and make some sort of documentary out of it, but it was really just, “let’s put as many cool shots [laughter] of shit blowing up in one hour that we possibly can fit in. That was just the greatest one to score, too. It’s very easy, and as far as I’m concerned I can be me and I can rock out a little bit, you know. Don’t have to worry about appeasing people. I’m allowed to be aggressive…

You have to lock yourself in your basement and do the Danny Elfman thing for however many days you get to do the soundtrack.

Yeah, ’cause you don’t get a lot of time to do it, so you really have to cram. I don’t know if it’s exactly … sometimes I think I’d be happier selling real estate! [laughter]

Don’t let my mother hear you say that, she sells real estate!

I won’t. [laughter]. [Doing that instead of recording soundtracks] would bring me into contact with more people, anyways. [laughter]. You kinda crave it after awhile. Luckily I have both outlets in my life, I can be in the basement and I can also get out of the house with Fugazi and go and play in front of a thousand people. When we want to.

You have the luxury now, basically.

It’s pretty nice, I have to say. And the crowds have been so great in the past couple of years. Touring is an absolute pleasure. There’s no skinhead armies out there fucking with little kids, which used to happen. It used to be all messy, but not it’s not messy, it seems to be quite… I don’t know if I’d call it “tame”, but it’s pretty awesome. I think the crowds might understand what we’re going for and maybe don’t think we’re assholes. [laughter]

For awhile, people didn’t know who we were; I think [Instrument] has kinda helped people know who we are better.

People think you’re this dour band, but there’s this sense of humor coming out from all you guys [throughout the film]. I can’t understand the dour thing anyway, I don’t know why they even think that!

I don’t know either! I do understand that we stopped giving interviews a long time ago to major publications, like to Spin, and so they paint us as being stick-in-the-muds. And so, the mass media, a lot of people don’t get [adequate] information about us and they also can’t talk to us point-blank, face to face unless we’re in their town. So, if silence sort of breeds suspicion, I think definitely people get suspicious of people who don’t speak to them. So, anyways, I think the movie helped people to realize that we’re human beings [laughter], so people are relating to us better, and us to them.

I’m looking forward to the DVD of Instrument coming out, ’cause one of these days, I’m gonna stick the videotape of Instrument into the VCR, and the VCR’s gonna spit the tape out of the machine and say, “Fuck you! Play something else!” [laughter]

I appreciate that. [laughter] DVD is actually a great format, isn’t it?

I got about 100 DVD’s right here in my office, I love them!

It’s not a real expanded DVD of ours, but it does have about five extras things on it. There’s the first thing we collaborated with Jem on, which was this movie called Glue Man [based on the closing track of the same name from the band's first record], which I think we did, I can’t remember, exactly, ’88?

Wait a second, the record’s right here. [I had the vinyl editions of all of Fugazi's albums on my desk handy as reference for the whole interview. I grab the first self-titled 12" EP and turn it over to check the copyright date.] 1988.

It is ’88?

Yeah.

I would think it was ’88. I think Ian and Guy actually some of those lyrics together, and then we recorded, the music of it was from an earlier, dubbed-out version of “Glue Man”. [Jem] had released it previously through C-100, which is Mike Stipe’s film company out of Athens. [Editor's Note: Yes, it's that "Mike" Stipe from R.E.M.] But we figured we’d include it because most people probably haven’t seen it. And then it’s got a couple of live things, and there’s another film that Jem made about the Gulf War “celebrations” [laughter] – I don’t know if it’s about them, it’s maybe about humans more than that, but it’s got a slowed down soundtrack from a four-track [recording] that we actually put on it very recently. Yeah, and I guess the other three things are live, just more live music.

Yeah, ’cause you get through the two hours of the [original] movie and you’re like, “That’s it?” [i.e., you're disappointed that it's over.]

Aw, c’mon! [laughter] It’s the longest fucking movie ever made! [laughter]

It’s not!

It is!

[NOTE: Brendan and I were both chuckling through the above sentences, I don't want anyone to get the incorrect impression that the conversation turned into an argument.]

It’s not! [laughter] It’s not The Longest Day, Brendan! The Longest Day is like, four hours!

The Longest what? [still chuckling]

The Longest Day, that war movie with John Wayne and like, sixty other people [in the cast] that took three directors just to make the damn movie!

Oh yeah, that’s right. [laughter] Ever see Shoah? Shoah was ten hours long, that was a movie about recollections of holocaust survivors.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it.

That’s a great movie. If you ever see it – I saw it in sitting down in a theater, it was just brilliant. That was the longest film I’d ever seen! Ten hours! [laughter]

I don’t think I could sit through ten hours…

You could! I tell ya, if you see Shoah in a theater, you could sit through ten hours, you just get totally into it, totally captivated. I tend to think that there is a point past an hour and a half where every minute seems like an hour, but then if you know that you’re gonna sit there for ten hours, then it never feels like that, because you’re just adjusting to a completely editing time frame, a different aesthetic completely. So I don’t think you actually ever fall into that. Anyway, that’s my recommended movie of the day. [laughter]

I’ve been on an Asian foreign film kick lately.

Oh yeah?

Yeah, I’ve been finding all these obscure Asian films from Netflix and just renting them, eight at a time.

What, more like, kung-fu things?

Not just kung-fu things, but there’s stuff like this Japanese movie called Tampopo which is all about food.

Oh yeah! That’s a great movie. There’s that funny scene in the noodle bar there where [Tsutomu Yamazaki, playing the male hero] flips that fish cake in the guy’s face.

I think that was a vegetable, actually…

A radish?

Yeah!

That’s pretty brilliant… [Brendan wanted to mention this famous Iranian director but he couldn't remember his name.] Next time you go to the video store, you have to ask him about it, because I’m sure they’ll know who you’re talking about.

I’m trying to think what else is going on in Fugazi world… You know our bass player [Joe Lally] just had a baby?

Yeah, Guy told me over the E-mail. Two [members] down and two to go. [laughter]. I can only imagine how an offspring of Ian MacKaye would be like. [laughter].

Yeah [laughter]

He’d probably have Henry Rollins for a godfather. [laughter] [NOTE: Ian MacKaye and Henry Rollins grew up together in Washington D.C. and are still friends to this day. Henry used to roadie for Ian's first band, The Teen Idles, and Henry's first recording was a 7" EP with his first band S.O.A., released in early 1981 on Dischord!]

He probably would [laughter]. Those guys are still pretty tight. That’s D.C. for you. D.C.’s like Mayberry R.F.D. [CJ laughing even harder] It is, it’s just a dinky town, you know everybody here. A sleepy southern town… with a massive target on it.

Oh god! We’re not even going to go there. I can’t imagine how it was on the 11th.

Yep.

Oh my god.

It was pretty bad, I can remember it well.

I don’t think anybody’s going to forget it.

Nope.

Speaking of unforgettable, there’s this scene in Instrument that’s one of my favorite scenes, the scene where you’re in Philadelphia at St. Joe’s Gym [in 1988] and Guy’s hopping on the basketball hoop right above your head during “Glue Man”. What were you thinking when he did that?

I was thinking, “God, it’s just like Rites of Spring [a pre-Fugazi band both Brendan and Guy were in in the mid-80's, their only album and EP are still in print on Dischord], which basically when we were in Rites Of Spring, he would… actually, he did that kind of shit a lot! But in Rites Of Spring, it was constantly, there was shit flying everywhere, we would smash all our shit [instruments] all the time, [laughter] and it was jumping off, just, you know. You have to understand, I’ve played with Guy since we were sixteen, so we were always just going as crazy as we possibly could. In our first band Insurrection, definitely that shit came first and music came second. [laughter]. It was like juggling or something – try to play the song while going as crazy as possible. [laughter] That was just… we had so much footage of Guy doing stuff like that, too.

That could have been a bonus section of the DVD in itself! [laughter]

Yeah, I know! Well, we put a lot of shit in there anyway. Nothing Guy does – not that it doesn’t surprise me, but I know that when I’m playing, the most important thing is to keep the atmosphere consistent. When he’s up there in the hoop, you don’t stop and watch him. [laughter]

Even though you’re like, “Oh, shit! I hope he doesn’t fall on the snare drum or something!” [still laughing, even while Brendan continues below]

Yeah, it’s the last thing you think about… actually, what you’re thinking of is, “I hope he falls on the snare drum, that would be kinda cool.” [several more seconds of laughter]. Definitely. But you’ve gotta keep going, you’ve gotta push it.

You do whatever [it takes].

If you’re really gonna attempt to reach a climactic moment in a song, to push it, then you really have to push it. It’s kind of an unconscious thing, and it only works if everybody in your band is shooting for the same thing, which you never know exactly when you get there, but you try to arrive at the same time. And you’re just pushing and pushing and pushing, so behind the drum set, that’s all I’m thinking about, elevating the environment. There’s not much thinking going on, it’s basically pretty primal, I think, what we’re going for. It’s the dance of death, man, you know? [laughter]

I knew about Rites Of Spring and some of the back history of you guys from reading the book Michael Azerrad did [Our Band Could Be Your Life].

Oh yeah. I haven’t read that yet.

I’d gotten the book two days before I talked to Mike Watt on the phone, and he telling me, “There’s this book out that’s got stories on the Minutemen and Black Flag…” and I said, “I know which book you’re talking about, I just got it the other day!” And coincidentally, by the time I was talking to him on the phone – I got the book on a Sunday and I was talking to him on a Tuesday – I was already up to the chapter on you guys.

Oh yeah? Just whippin’ through it, huh?

Yeah. I re-read books all the time.

Do you like that book?

Oh yeah.

Is it one of the better books about the stuff?

I think it’s one of the only books I’ve actually seen about the stuff, ’cause Mike was telling me, people, when they compile rock history, they gloss over punk rock and say, “Oh yeah, punk rock… Sex Pistols and Nirvana. Let’s move on to the next thing.” And you want to grab whoever’s putting this history together and say, “Hello?! You missed about fifteen years of stuff!”

Yeah, that’s really true, but they’re thinking about mass culture, and this was never about mass culture. This was about communities, small groups of people, all playing for people very esoteric music that other people will appreciate, that people cultivated and fed on the same wellspring and aesthetic will understand. That’s the most interesting music.

This year would have been [John] Coltrane’s 75th birthday.

Yeah, that’s right. Herbie Hancock’s going to be downtown doing a big concert on [Coltrane's] birthday. When is his birthday?

September 20th, I think.

Oh, so it’s just a few days away then… [oops!] Oh, no, we’re in October now. I missed the show. Son of a bitch.

I know. I missed Mike Watt last night in Philadelphia.

Oh, is he on tour?

Yeah.

Is he playing in D.C.?

Let me see. My computer’s on. He should be there soon ’cause he’s in New York tonight… [On the tape, you can hear the keys clicking on my computer keyboard. I end up misspelling the URL to Watt's homepage.] I just spelled it wrong – and I’ve been touch-typing since I was seven.

[Overhearing the keys clicking] Yeah, you’re fast, huh?

Yeah, I’ll be at my day gig and my boss’ll see me and he’ll be like, “How do you type so fast?” [laughter] [Brendan inquires as to where I work, initiating a little more small talk. Meanwhile, I'm looking up Watt's tour dates.] Oh, he’s gonna be in Baltimore on the 15th and in D.C. on the 16th at the Black Cat.

Great! That’ll be awesome. The Black Cat just moved three doors down, but [now] they’ve got this great huge space that’s really nice. Very pleasant place to play, very pleasant place to see a band. Not that your readers will be there checking it out – but I don’t know, you know? Actually, I don’t know who your readers are, but…

[page 8 missing] [CJ's Note: At this point, I was asking Brendan about the ship's bell that was part of his drum kit. He mentioned that Guy had found that bell for him after years of trying to use other things as percussion during their days in the improvisational band Happy Go Licky.]

… I don’t, … no. Not really. To me it’s more like going back to the Wire live record, you know? Or some of the more super-experimental shit that was going on – Einsturzende Neubauten and stuff, all the more experimental noisy stuff…

Yeah, like Einsturzende Neubauten banging on a bridge tunnel and stuff. [An early Einsturzende Neubauten single, "Stahlversion" ("Steel Version"), was a recording of the band members drumming on the hollow underpass of a steel bridge in Berlin. Check out the CD 80-83 Strategies Against Architecture.]

Or Sink Manhattan – ever hear of them?

I might have heard of them.

Yeah, they were sort of like that, they were brilliant. It’s sort of a reference to that sort of thing, and it’s also atmospheric, trying to bust the genre a little bit.

You push everything so that it doesn’t sound like the last record or whatever else is going on.

Yeah, that’s the idea. And it’s also a feeble attempt to try not to get bored playing drums. [laughter]

Well, how bored could you be when Guy’s usually in danger of toppling the drums over? [laughter]

I know, don’t worry, I’m just… [several seconds of laughter] … being facetious. [laughter] I wouldn’t say it’s boring to play drums. What I mean is, you’re limited to the four or five different things you have to play, so it’s kind of cool to break it out a little bit and bring some trash in there. Just bring some reality back to it. Perk your ears up.