Matty Luv
interviewed by Aaron Thornhill 06/08/02
Aaron: What’ve you been up to since last you came to Tulsa?
Matty: The last time I came to Tulsa was, I thought you said the date yesterday…
A: Yeah, it was October of ’97.
M: And that’s when we played that house show that was busted by police helicopters?
A: Yes.
M: I’m not very good with dates and stuff like that. I guess essentially after… I guess that was probably our last tour. You said that was in ’97 or ’98?
A: Yeah, that was ’97.
M: That was either our last tour or we might’ve done a shorter one where we didn’t make it to Oklahoma in the beginning of ’98. I remember Hickey as breaking up in ’98, but then again I’m kind of bad with dates and years.
A: Why’d you guys break up?
M: I’m not really sure, there’s no like, really specific reason. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that our bass player didn’t really want to do it any more. And it’s nothing so much that he said he didn’t want to do it any more as we just kind of got the vibe that he felt he was just getting older. Didn’t want to spend all his time hanging out with kids, you know? Which, you know, is a valid point of view, and also, I think around that time I also had some strange idea in my head -- anyways that I was going to retire from punk rock music at 30.
A: Oh, really?
M: I had this feeling like I shouldn’t be doing it after 30, which is really kind of weird if I think about it! All the more popular bands are well into their 30’s and even their 40’s. Like a lot of your Epitaph…
A: Bad Religion?
M: Yeah, all those. I mean even some of the bands that are even newer, like not from the early 80’s are still older than I am.
A: Are you thirty…?
M: I’m 33 now. I’ll be uh, actually 34 this month.
A: Happy birthday!
M: Thank you. And so there’s a little bit of that, but also we had pretty much done all we really wanted to do. We’d done more than we ever set out to do. And the question of whether or not to kind of just keep on doing the same thing we were doing or uh… there was no way to really go up from there that we felt comfortable with, you know? In doing things the really extreme DIY way that we did, it gets to be kind of hard to maintain. Like, we still hand-screened all our own T-shirts and stuff, and it was getting to the point where that was really difficult to do. We’d end up having to screen on the road all the time. We just didn’t have enough time to screen that many fucking shirts before we left! And so it’s questions like that, you know? Did we want to start paying somebody else to do our merch? And you know, we tended not to want to look at merch as just product, and it’s like there is some artistic quality to silk-screening, and being that one of the band members screened this shirt it was a little more than just a product, you know? So the DIY thing was getting a little difficult just to maintain, and touring that much just kind of wreaks havoc on your life. You can’t hold a job, and we certainly didn’t make enough money off of Hickey to support us when we came back, we just made enough to live while we were on the road. So it was kind of like a combination of all those things…
A: So you and Aesop kept playing with Yogurt and Dr. Dre Del?
M: I guess we took a break for awhile and didn’t really do anything, but Aesop and I had always been doing 4-track stuff contiguous to Hickey, which I’ll explain later with the Yogurt thing. So I guess the first thing that happened was Aesop had decided he wanted to do this rap thing. I borrowed a sampler off somebody and… so we decided to do it on the 4-track. You know, I had never used a sampler before, or a sequencer, or any of this kind of equipment. So I taught myself how to use all that stuff, even taught myself how to scratch a little bit and just set about recording this really hilarious rap album. Pretty much all the lyrics and ideas were Aesop’s, and I was just the person who put it together technically, did all the looping and sampling and stuff like that.
A: You were the engineer?
M: Yeah. There’s also a lot of not live music, but music that’s just not samples but you know, we had sampled drum beats and I played guitar and bass on a lot of it. Some of it is original compositions, but the bulk of it is sampled. One of the really funny things about that was at some point we had met some woman from Japan who was running a label that was being distributed through Polygram, and for some reason she wanted to re-release some Hickey stuff on that. We certainly didn’t feel comfortable having any Hickey stuff associated with Polygram, who manufactures weapons or whatever, you know? So we just told her well, you know Hickey’s broken up. We don’t want to do anything like that. But she was interested in doing a Dr. Dre Del thing and she needed a list of the samples to clear. Aesop provided her with this extremely detailed list, even down just the little snippets of conversation and shit like that. We knew she was never gonna get clearance on any of this! The thing opens up with a very recognizable bit from Metallica, you know? I didn’t know Aesop was gonna go ahead and do that. My idea was just to not tell her at all, and just let them put it out. Let them deal with the lawsuits or whatever, they weren’t going to do anything to us! I guess she did put actually out some calls, but she never got a call back from anybody! I’m certain Metallica would not have let us use their little riff.
A: The Master of Puppets beginning?
M: Yeah. Anyways, so that was the first thing we did. Also around the same time I ended up in another rap project…
A: Off Da Pigz?
M: Yeah, which was this gangster-rap thing. That didn’t involve Aesop. That may have even started right towards the end of Hickey. Basically that was myself, and it was this guy Noah’s band (Noah was in the Faggz and 50 Million). He had met these two Latino rappers at this thrift store he used to work at. The main one was Big Dog. He was this like, 350 lb., 6’7”, just huge Latino.
M: In the past they had done some 4-track stuff together. Actually what happened was I was in the studio doing some recording for this Mission comp that was put out on Dill Records, I don’t know if you ever heard about it. It’s a double CD. It’s not really available now ‘cause Dill went bankrupt and since they were a real label they had to destroy all their product, but it was a compilation of a bunch of local Mission bands. And even though Off Da Pigz wasn’t really a functioning band Noah and this dude Scottsy, who was then in the Faggz and later went on to play in Artymus Pyle, came in with Big Dog and just kinda did this improvised thing. I was recording a bunch of the bands for the comp. We would do two bands a day, me and this guy Aaron Nudelman, whose studio it was. While they were recording they just kind of drafted me to play guitar on it, on this kind of improvised jam, and I did. Then like a week later they called me up and were like “yeah, somebody wants us to play a show”, so I found myself drafted into this band. So we set about writing some songs, ended up writing a 4 song e.p. on Probe Records, which is really good. The sound on it is just incredible, recorded on 16-track, 2” tape, pretty much a luxury considering most of the shit I’ve been doing in the last few years had been on 4-track cassette, you know? So it’s a really good record, good songs, good sounds. We played some gigs around, it was pretty fun! We were pretty much a straight up gangster-rap band. Big Dog and his crew were a little bit older, so they were kind of out of the lifestyle, but they still did some bangin’. Like before we would practice, they were Nortenos, and they had to come into Sureno territory to practice, so I always thought that was pretty dedicated of them, but then later on I found out they were doin’ shit on their way to practice. Jumping Surenos and shit. We also got into arguments about Big Dog wearing colors when we played gigs. We told him “we don’t want you wearing colors, you know”, but he’d always have this red rag in his back pocket and he’d bust it out. One time we were playing some gig in Sureno territory and just as we were leaving apparently some dudes showed up with guns looking for some Nortenos. So it was a little sketchy because of that, and I guess it actually just fell apart when Noah moved to New York. But I was already a little unhappy with it for various reasons. But it spawned a good record. And then the Dre Del thing was just a one off thing. We actually did two live performances where we just had all this shit on tape, and I played, just running tape decks and stuff, and Aesop did the rapping. They were gigs we were really self-conscious about, ‘cause you’re out there with nothing, you don’t have the big volume and everything, you know? We were dressed up in these silly rap clothes. It was just the most uncomfortable thing we ever did, so we limited it to two. One of them was just a benefit to pay back my bail from one of my arrests. That was why we did it, and the other one was just because Atom and His Package came to town and it seemed like a good match, you know, having people singing along to tapes. So we decided not to do that any more. Then the idea to do Yogurt came along.
A: Because you guys had songs…
M: Yeah. The way that came about was, Yogurt had always existed, pre-existed Hickey even. Aesop and I had uh, I don’t know how you would want to spell this, but it’s called “inheroined.” It’s like inherited, but with the word heroin on the end of it, and that’s when somebody, usually from the East Coast, who’s out here to go to school or something gets all wrapped up in drugs and gets horribly strung out on heroin, and their parents hafta come and get ‘em and you get all the stuff they leave behind. So we inheroined a 4-track. I’d never used one before so I set about learning how to use it. We basically had the 4-track, maybe a couple guitar pedals and a mic or two. We didn’t have anything like drum machines, samplers or sequencers, no outboard gear. I think I had a Casio keyboard that had five different drum rhythms on it. We would create drum tracks by finding portions of albums that had just drums on them, play, stop it, put the needle back down and play it again, you know?
A: I had a Yogurt Vol. I & II tape that Probe sent a friend of mine and then I got my hands on. It had some really terrible drums on it…
M: Yeah, well -- see a lot of that is the Casio, the good stuff is… if you think about it on Vol. I I’ve got Dale Crover playing drums, I’ve got Peter Crisp playing drums, you know, all shit that I took from the albums. And they don’t know about it of course. So we’d have to write songs around these really hackneyed drum tracks I could get down. Of course there’s gonna be a pause where I had to reset the needle, so that’d have to be a break in the song. Some songs were written like that, others were written in various ways. We had this big folder full of lyrics that both Aesop and I had, dating back to high school and shit we had written in the present that was just garbage really, and wasn’t suitable for Hickey or anything else. So it all went in this folder. And so we would pretty much finish a piece of music and then dig out one of these lyrics and sing it over it. We actually ended up coming up with some really good songs, really good stuff. Just because of the limitations in our equipment a lot of really interesting sounds came out of it. Vol. I is pretty much me learning how to use the 4-track. The first track is probably the first thing I ever recorded on it. The way the volumes came about is after we had a certain amount of songs we just wanted to mix them down to cassette so we could listen to them, just enjoy them, you know? Then people would come over to our house and hear them and be like, “What’s this? Can I get a copy?” and so we started dubbing copies of Vol. I off and before I knew it someone was playing it on a college radio station here. We just kept recording another volume that was Vol. II, and everybody would be involved! Like if somebody just dropped by my house I’d be like “Hey you! C’mere, you’re gonna do a vocal on this Yogurt thing”. So there were a lot of people involved in Yogurt. Over the years we kept doing this, all through Hickey. After Hickey, we sat around for awhile and I guess we kind of started missing playing live music.
A: Were you just working and sitting at home?
M: I can’t even remember if I had a job or not. I was doing something… I think I was involved in the needle exchange. I started the Needle Exchange Program
A: Oh yeah?
M: Actually that is what I was doing. That’s what I focused most of my energy on after Hickey, towards this needle exchange that we started illegally and from scratch. Now it’s grown to where we got grants from private foundations. I’m no longer involved in it, but it’s still there, only the Haight-Ashbury free clinics here in SF took it over. But it still runs the way we designed it, like the protocols, and it’s actually nationally been cited as a model for a needle exchange, how it should be replicated throughout the country. We used to get flown to conferences and shit, it was pretty wild stuff. My partner in it had some college, but I didn’t. I didn’t have any college so I was kind of just bluffing myself in this world of pseudo-medical stuff, you know? I even ended up working for the Dept. of Epidemiology at U.C.S.F. for awhile because of that. So I was mostly doing that and then what happened was Chubby, Hickey’s first bass player, ended up moving back to S.F. and living in our house. And he was like, “I really want to play music with you guys again” you know, “we don’t have to do Hickey, we could do Yogurt, we could do some of those songs” and so we said it sounded like a good idea.
A: He started playing guitar?
M: Yeah, and what’s funny about Chubby is he’s a real bass player. He’s not one of those people who played guitar first and then ended up playing bass out of necessity. He’d never played guitar before and is one of the best real bass players I know. So we gave him a guitar with four strings on it and set about teaching him some rudimentary chords and stuff, because we didn’t want to do just the standard bass, guitar, power trio lineup. A lot of the Yogurt stuff sounds better with two guitars anyways. I really like the way it ended up sounding with two guitars and no bass, it had a really nice clean sound, you know? The drums always came out really crisp without the bass frequencies fighting for the bass drum and shit like that. So we set about learning those songs, which was really difficult in itself, because of course we didn’t remember any of them! Pretty much we’d write a song, record it and that’d be it. Fifteen minutes and then that song would be forgotten. So we had to go back and relearn the songs, and a lot of them were just really weird arrangements with keyboard, various instruments and all these parts, so we kinda had to translate these songs into this new format and then learn them.
A: I really like the production, on that CD that just came out…
M: The five song one right?
A: Yeah.
M: See, that stuff wasn’t recorded on a four-track. I can get a lot of good sounds out of a four-track I’ve recorded albums on four-tracks for other bands that are just amazing! Like the 50 Million album.
A: So how come Yogurt’s not doing anything?
M: Well, I guess we played for awhile. We played some shows and it was really low threshold. We weren’t really dedicated to it, it was the opposite of Hickey. The whole goal was not to put a whole lot of pressure on ourselves, and to just take it easy. None of us have driver’s licenses, not that we ever did before, but we couldn’t get a vehicle or drive it legally so we’d always have to bum rides. Which is kind of a drag for you, to do your band… so we would just play sporadically. There was this short period where we were really good, but for a lot of it we weren’t very good at all. Chubby just couldn’t really master the whole concept of guitar, never really understood that it’s the same thing as the bass. You know, when I’m showing you a song
you just follow me. The first note of the chord is where you would play bass, you just add these other two notes, that’s it. He was also doing a lot of drugs at the time too, which uh…didn’t really help him out. Drinking very heavily.
A: Do you guys all get along?
M: Chubby’s in L.A. and I don’t talk to him anymore. Actually, I’ll come back to that, let me finish the Yogurt story. We were doing the Yogurt thing and we recorded those nine songs at Joe’s Garage on the 16-track, which was just a field day for me because everything had been 4-track up to that point. I decided I was going to use every inch of tape I could, overdubs galore, drenched in effects and stuff like that! It sounds great. Joe pretty much did the drum sounds, then he left and I did everything else. We’d just keep coming down and adding more shit, you know? I’m really happy with that. And then Yogurt kind of ended badly with just this really bad show where everyone was pissed off at each other. Chubby was really wasted… didn’t know the songs anyways. Aesop didn’t want to do the show in the first place and I made him do it. It was nothing serious, it was stupid and so we broke up. Within a month after that I ended up getting arrested on some pretty serious charges, basically five felonies.
A: Does this involve a knife and the police?
M: Yeah, and I don’t really want to say anything more about it (laughs), even though it’d be nice to maybe quell some rumors…
A: Well, we’ll… it’ll put some suspense in the interview.
M: Basically the knife and the police thing is accurate, but the rest of it is just stupid and not worth repeating… actually nothing really happened. Nevertheless I was in some pretty serious trouble. I was in jail for a little while ‘til my family could borrow enough money and bail me out.
A: Your parents, or your brother?
M: Yeah, and some aunts and uncles and shit. Given my propensity to be involved in illegal things when I’m in San Francisco, while I was awaiting trial I decided to spend time with my family in Florida. So I was there for the whole time I was fighting those charges. I would come back for court dates and shit, and you know the way the legal system works… that takes like almost a year. So I was gone for close to a year. The arrest was October ’00, and by the time I copped my plea I think it was August ’01, so it took almost a year.
A: What were the consequences?
M: I got three years probation. One year of felony probation, which is if I complete the first year successfully with no violation they’ll drop the charge to a misdemeanor. I’ll do two years misdemeanor probation. If I do that successfully the whole thing will be expunged from my record. But the thing is, if I fuck up and committed a felony within this first year I’ll end up spending the rest of my time in the penitentiary.
A: The next three years?
M: Yeah.
A: So when’s the first year up?
M: The first year is up this coming August. And I’ve had no violations since, but I might violate by going on tour with Unit Breed! (laughs) But I’m getting ahead of myself because I wanted to get back to your last question, do we all get along. So I was out of town for a long time anyway, and in that time Chubby moved back to L.A. and he was in rehab and stuff. He and I don’t really speak to each other ‘cause I guess when he split town he ended up owing a bunch of people money. I don’t like to say bad things about people, but… that’s kind of typical though. I mean, whether people have drug problems or not, when people move out they always just end up sticking you with at least a phone bill, you know? (laughs) And Aesop in that time had a baby. He’s a dad. His baby’s almost a year old. His baby’s birthday is two days before mine, June 23rd, mine’s on the 25th. He’s been working, living with the baby’s mother, raising a child, and he plays in a black-metal band called Ludicra. They should have an album out on Life Is Abuse really soon. They are a totally amazing band. It’s good for Aesop, the people in that band are a little bit older. Or at least our age, and they have kind of settled lives and stuff, so it’s a good atmosphere, considering he has a child. He and I get along. He doesn’t live at the Hotel anymore because there’s no way CPS (Child Protective Services) would let anybody raise a child in the Hickey Hotel. He moved out and got a one bedroom apartment with his partner. Chubby’s in L.A., presumably still in rehab. Matt Rissler, the bass player for most of Hickey, lives in the East Bay and just recently opened up a kind of funky-
Here’s where the tape ran out (and I didn’t notice for a few minutes) so there’s some missing conversation. Dang. At this point Matty went and got me some band’s demo for me to record over, so as to continue the interview.
M: Matt just went for it. Him and this girl that he got involved with basically got some loans and rented, or leased this building. It’s called Taco Town, and it’s always been this center of Oakland, just a really social gathering place. They’re rebuilding it to kind of cater to both the local Latino population, and also the white hipster population that’s moving into that area. And they’re gonna eventually have some bands play in the upstairs area. It’s a huge space. Actually, when I got back to California after my whole trial I worked over there for awhile, ‘cause Rissler and I had done like, sporadic construction, carpentry jobs. So that’s what he’s doing. That’s pretty much all he’s involved with, he’s not playing music or anything.
A: Aesop and Matt kind of went off with the girls…
M: Yeah… (silence)… I mean, from what I know about, uh, I don’t know how much I should talk about Aesop’s relationship, but basically he had met… aah, just forget it! (laughs) Uh…
A: So where does that leave you?
M: That leaves me here. Basically serving my probation. Trying to stay out of trouble. Things were kind of… a little bit, you know… being arrested and being charged with a bunch of felonies is kind of a big deal. I was actually looking at at least a year in the pen. It’s pretty disruptive to your life. Actually, conveniently enough, my life had already been disrupted when I got arrested! Yogurt had already broken up, and the relationship that I was in with a girl for awhile, it busted up. It was kind of good timing as far as my personal life goes. It was already a wreck. Since then, the state has mandated that I be on all these medications, which for awhile just really fucked me up. They were just really hard to be on. I finally got them to change the medications to a much more tolerable bunch of meds that, uh… I hardly take them anyways! After a year of trying I convinced my psychiatrist to prescribe my Klonipin, which is like a Valium, a drug I used to take for fun! But now I get a prescription of it paid for by the county of San Francisco, so I’m pretty happy with that situation! But the meds made things difficult for awhile, and I didn’t really want to do anything.
A: Yeah, a friend of mine went through that. He took a little too much acid and kind of went crazy.
M: Uh-huh.
A: …well that’s another story, but yeah, he had to go through the drugs that they make you take when you… start doing things that get you in trouble!
M: Yup!
A: He said he really hated it.
M: Now the first bunch of drugs I took I fucking hated. I mean I was taking like, four or five different ones, and three of them were to counteract the side effects from the first two! I ended up just going off them on my own at one point and ended up…
A: Withdrawing from other drugs?
M: … Yeah, I was using heroin too. So I stopped taking those, was withdrawing from heroin, and ended up in a psych ward down at General Hospital, first on a 5150, and then a 5250.
A: What are those?
M: 5150 is the seventy-two hour one, the 5250 is like, the fourteen day one, but they only made me do nine of it, because I kind of caught on quickly about what I had to say to get out of there. All I can say is the psych ward is a whole lot better than jail, but even by not taking my meds I’m in violation of my probation! But at least while I was there I had someone listen to me about the problems I was having with the meds I was taking. And prescribed me different meds, a lot less of them. Now I’m only supposed to be taking two, plus the Klonipin. A lot of times I just haven’t taken the Klonipin. So yeah, once I first got back I was just a little, just confused on the meds, and didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I didn’t really do much for a long time. Became involved here working at the record store. Whereas before I hadn’t… I’d always been involved in putting on the shows and stuff, but I started working here at the store every day, doing a lot of the booking for the shows here. I’m like an in-house booker here. And I also, I mean I‘ve always found sound gigs here and there, like even back when I was in Hickey. It was just a skill I acquired by, mostly by doing recording, you know? One day I was sitting in this bar called the Night Break and this dude walks up to me and he goes, “Hey, do you wanna start working sound here next week?” It was because I had just recorded and released the Hickey/Fuckface split, and he thought I had done a good job recording it on the 4-track. He was like, “I’ll pay you sixty bucks a night! Cash!” I was really drunk, drinking with this girl and he walked away and I was like “Did that guy just offer me a job for sixty bucks a night working sound here?” and she was like “Yeah, I think that’s what just happened.” “Wow!” So I worked there on and off between tours, and I still do occasional sound gigs. I work a couple nights at C.W.’s, which is a bar here, I work at Kimo’s occasionally, which is the bar where you’re playing tonight. And I take care of all the sound requirements here (Mission Records). Those are always good gigs ‘cause you get paid cash at the end of the night! So that’s basically how I get by. Then after awhile I decided I wanted to play music again, and I’d always gotten along really well with Joe Demery, from Unit Breed, who put out that five band comp, did the recording with Yogurt and stuff. I’d mentioned it before at some point that I wanted to play some kind of music with him, I wasn’t really looking at joining the Unit Breed, but I wanted to play some kind of music with him. One day he called me up and said “Hey, do you wanna start practicing with the Unit Breed?” And I was like “Yeah, sure” and I went down there and learned some songs. It’s really cool, ‘cause it’s Joe’s band, Joe’s songs. I kind of, I’m pretty much overdoing like, the guitar, singer/songwriter, front-person kind of thing, you know? That’s not why I started playing guitar at all, I’d never actually planned on singing. I don’t really consider myself a very good singer at all. The only reason I ever started singing was because way back in the Fuckboyz the singer, who had been singing for us for the past few years, just quit by not showing up to a gig. We were opening up for the Lunachicks in L.A.
A: Did you sing on songs before he quit?
M: I did sing on I think maybe one… one, if not two songs, I sang the lead vocal.
A: What were they?
M: One song was called “Hallucinating”, it’s on the Rock’n’Roll Problem 7”…
A: I have a whole bunch of those songs, you can get ‘em on the computer.
M: Really? That’s good! And the other one is called Boracho, it’s sung in Spanish.
A: What do the words to that mean in English?
M: Uh, doesn’t mean much. Me and my brother pretty much wrote it from a Spanish/English dictionary, so it’s a lot more written in like, proper Castilian Spanish than what we were going for, which was supposed to be like Mexican slang. It was about our neighborhood, you know? We showed the lyrics to a Spanish speaking friend of ours and he said they really didn’t make much sense. I don’t remember the song well enough to remember what the translations were.
A: Your brother was in that band?
M: Yeah. He played bass for that band. I’d done a lot of back up singing too, even though by this time I was writing the majority of the songs, lyrics and all. It was just that our singer, Seaweed, had a good voice, and I didn’t think that I had a very good voice. Then he just didn’t show up at a pretty important gig. Since I’d written most of the songs I knew all the words anyways…
A: So you started… what all, uh… ‘cause we have all those recordings, but a lot of times we honestly can’t tell any difference in the singing. We were always curious.
M: Yeah, I mean we don’t sound that different, especially on the recording. And on a lot of it – it’s like, me and Seaweed both singing at the same time.
A: Are those 4-track recordings?
M: No, those were done at a studio called House of Faith, by Bart Thurber down at Palo Alto. He’s kind of this legendary punk engineer down in the South Bay area who would offer these special punk deals where you come in and record as many songs as you can record and mix in one day for, I don’t know, ninety bucks, some really good deal…
A: They’re mixed really well, you get them on mp3 or whatever, but they’re a little like…
M: Yeah, it’s probably because they’re all taken from records that probably weren’t mastered properly, pretty old. And that was done through shitty pressing plants like United, you know? So that’s how I started singing. After that gig it didn’t make any sense to get a singer. We just couldn’t think of anybody who we would want to sing, so it was just decided that I would continue singing. And I guess we did that for about a year before the Fuckboyz broke up. We just kind of continued on in Hickey.
A: Did Hickey come straight out of the Fuckboyz?
M: Yeah. Pretty much right after the Fuckboyz broke up Aesop decided that he still wanted to continue playing with me, and I wanted to play with him, and we pretty much immediately started writing songs and getting ideas together, before we even had a bass player proper, you know? We knew Chubby, was living in L.A., playing in Schleprock. He had been becoming increasingly unhappy with Schleprock. We always got along really great with him! Like, when we’d go down there we’d have so much fun, he was like our brother, the obvious choice. I think he had mentioned wanting to move to the Bay Area before anyways, so we called him up and told him he was gonna be in our new band and to move his ass up here! He said “ok”.
A: When did the idea for it being a cult come around? Not many bands do that. It’s kinda weird to see a band have a kind of pseudo-religious undercurrent…
M: I almost distinctly remember the conversation, coming up with that band name. Me and Aesop were at some show seeing the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion of all things, at some big rock club. We were out in the park by the club drinking forties kicking around band names, and horribly I wanted to call the band Wookie for whatever reason. And this is right before the big Star Wars craze in the underground, and I‘m so fucking glad we didn’t call it Wookie. But I always thought it was a real funny word, you know? And that whole Star Wars fascination in punk just wasn’t there yet, and Aesop suggested Hickey, which appeased me ‘cause it sounded like Wookie. I think I had just, through writing down some rants and stuff in my notebooks and stuff I had come up with the idea of wanting to call the band the naked cult of something, and have a cult aspect to it. So Aesop came up with the Hickey part and it worked really well.
A: We thought you were called Hickey because you liked Kiss.
M: Uh, there’s a good parallel there, but that’s really not what actually happened.
A: It’s more just a random word?
M: Yeah. Damn good band name too! Gotta give Aesop credit on that one.
A: So what’s your brother doing now?
M: My brother just two weeks ago graduated from Berkely, the poly-sci department… and he’s going on to law school.
A: Really! How old is he?
M: He’s two years younger than I am. He dropped out of college in Florida after a year, and obviously fucked around for quite a few years playing music. One of the reasons actually, why the Fuckboyz fell apart was because he got all strung out on heroin. So it’s obvious he’s really turned his life around, you know?
A: Do you have a view in general on heroin? It kinda got out of hand in Tulsa actually the last couple of years. Everyone at my house got really strung out for awhile, and I ended up moving out of Tulsa for awhile because of it. I don’t know, I just got sickened… my friend’s band fell apart ‘cause they all got strung out. It just seemed like… I don’t know. I really hated it. I never did it so I never knew what all the hype was about.
M: I didn’t start using heroin until the last three years or something. I mean, if you really want to do something serious with your life, and be committed to a band, then you can’t do heroin. Hickey would have fallen apart if we had been using heroin. Very, very few bands, especially DIY bands, could maintain a band and a heroin habit. Plus it doesn’t work for touring and shit. You would have to detox before you go on tour or… it’s impossible to cop in every town. I usually can, (laughs) but it’s not easy. I would generally say heroin is bad, and I would generally say being physically dependent on any drug is bad. Recreational drug use of course is ok. You know, you control drugs and don’t let drugs control you, you’re fine. Heroin is just very difficult to use recreationally, you know? If someone who’s had a dozen habits and quit them, you know…it’s like I know what it’s like to think I can go back to using heroin recreationally. I mean, I hated it when my brother was using it, because I didn’t use it at all back then. He was involved with this girl, and they just really went off into heroin land, and I never really saw him. And my brother and I were very close. It was just a miserable year. My views are mixed also ‘cause I’m coming from both sides, working at the needle exchange and stuff like that. And also designing a program on overdose prevention. As far as safe injection practices it’s a must, you know… do not share needles at all. Overall, heroin I’d say nah, don’t use it. Not a good idea.
A: Yeah there’s this girl I’m friends with who had an abscessed vein removed. She has a scar.
M: That’s another thing we did that we did at our needle exchange. We had MDs there and would have an abscessing wound care clinic. Because if you go to a hospital where they hate drug users, what they’re gonna do, and also to cover their asses and liability and stuff, is they’re gonna take out a hunk of skin around the infected area and basically with a knife just scoop out all this tissue. It leaves a horrible scar and it’s totally unnecessary. You can actually just use a local anesthetic, slice the abscess with a scalpel, not remove a bunch of tissue, but let all the pus drain out, pack it with gauze, keep repacking it with fresh gauze every day or two, and eventually the infection will drain out. You’ll have a scar, but it won’t be a huge one. It won’t be the ones that look like bullet wounds because some fucking judgmental butcher at a hospital decided to teach you a lesson. But if you always use brand new clean needles and clean your skin, you’ll never get an abscess, you know? I’ve obviously been involved in a lot of drug use throughout my life, and a lot of drinking. I don’t really drink very much anymore. The Hickey years were all about amphetamine use.
A: I kind of got that impression.
M: Yeah, (laughs) I won’t do amphetamine at all anymore. If someone was sitting here doing some right now and offered it to me I’d say no. It’s really bad for you. It does tissue damage. Maybe for the first year of using it it’s great, you get a lot of shit done. I think we got a lot of shit done in Hickey because of that, but…there’s definitely things that got done that might not have gotten done otherwise. Before tour and stuff. You really have to use it in the right way. After using it for awhile we were doing things like bashing it out, staying up for days and days on end. And anything you do when you’re that sleep deprived is gonna be shit, you know? What I would do during the two months before tour when I was booking I would use speed. I would stay up doing whatever work, the mailings, all that kind of shit that I had to do, ‘til maybe five or six a.m., go to sleep and wake up at ten a.m. So at least get four hours of sleep every night. It’s a lot easier to maintain, but I wouldn’t recommend doing speed to anybody here. As a responsible adult now talking to impressionable kids, I gotta say be smart, say no to drugs, stay in school! But seriously, speed is a really bad trap to get into, and it was really hard for me to get out of. Aesop managed to get out of it on his own. It just does so much damage to the tissues of the brain, which cannot regenerate themselves. It’s really bad for your liver, really bad for your lungs, just bad for your health. So is sleep deprivation. You gotta be smart about it, like a lot of times I would sleep, and I would also eat, which is another important thing. I could always eat on it. I could usually sleep on it. It works for a little while, then it becomes detrimental. A coworker of mine cooked it for years, was, uh, twenty-three or four, and it was his first job working with me at a bagel shop. He was in the Marines for a couple years, but before and after that he was in the goth scene manufacturing…
A: So he was a cooker? Did he suffer any negative consequences?
M: No, he was still convinced there were no negative consequences as long as you ate and weren’t staying up.
M: In doing it I believe that’s kinda true, but as far as the manufacture of it, it’s really dangerous because you’re exposed to chemicals in a raw state, stuff like that.
A: Tulsa’s a pretty big speed town, I think we’re like number one or number two in meth lab busts in the country.
M: Well we’re number one, so you must be number two! (laughs) I think we’ve always been number one in use and manufacture. What they do here is they bring up illegals from Mexico to manufacture, and the cookers only last for about two years before their health goes out. They go back to Mexico rich, but with just ruined health. But if you’re gonna do speed, that guy has the right idea. Sleep, eat, stay hydrated and do enough to get you to where you want to be. There’s no reason to be super gacked and high all the time. But nonetheless it does do tissue damage, so even if you do all these things you can’t do it forever. Eventually it will fuck up your liver, whereas heroin is actually organic and doesn’t do any tissue damage at all. The negative things that you see around heroin are all the lifestyles that go along with it, all the infections and diseases you can get from poor injection practice, not having the money or the desire to eat, or take care of yourself…
A: And stealing from other people…
M: Yeah, but as far as the actual drug itself, excluding the things that it may be cut with which could be completely toxic, you could do heroin for twenty years and provided you don’t overdose, and you inject properly, the only thing that might happen to you is you might have some kidney failure later in life. But that’s ‘cause it’s a real drug; speed is entirely manmade.
A: Cleaning products. On a different subject, what have you been listening to lately?
M: Actually, I don’t listen to music. I really couldn’t give you a top ten. I’ve never really been a consumer of music, I don’t buy CDs or records or anything. I mean right now I work in a record store, so I can listen to whatever I want to. Overall, I listen to a lot of Flaming Lips, I like all the new hardcore, thrash, a lot of the emo, most of the stuff that comes through here, but it’s not stuff that I would sit down and listen to. What I would sit down and listen to would be more song based. I think the last record I bought was a GODSPEED,YOUBLACKEMPEROR!
A: I was about to ask you about those guys, that’s one of my favorites!
M: Yeah! They’re incredible! I was gonna go see ‘em live but I got arrested the night before! (laughs)
A: Which one did you get?
M: I think I got the “Raise your Skinny…”
A: That’s the best one!
M: I think the first one’s better. It’s the first one I got and it tends to be my favorite. I still listen to a lot of Birthday Party now and again, some Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I’ve always lived in a house with five other people, and they’re also listening to music… and everywhere I go there’s music. So there’s not really all that much of a need for me to own a lot of music, you know? Especially once I was in Hickey and it was just my life. Between Hickey and working sound at clubs my life was so undulated with music that…
A: You didn’t really need to spend money on it?
M: Or spend much time listening to it. Like right now I see upwards of twenty bands a week, so when I have some free time I spend it reading.
A: Any favorite books?
M: I have a really horrible memory too… one of the books I read recently that really moved me was Angela’s Ashes. It’s just a really good book.
A: I’m currently reading a Star Trek book. It’s like an episode but it’s a book.
M: I read a lot of non-fiction too. In fact I read mostly non-fiction. Not any titles I can really remember… titles like “War and Television and the Role They Play in Society”, not very exciting stuff to list in a top ten or anything! (laughs) I read voraciously, like two or three books in a week sometimes…
A: So you still live in the Hotel?
M: Yeah, same place.
A: Anyone else living there?
M: Yeah, nobody really worth mentioning, uh…
A: No names to drop?
M: Yeah.
A: So when’s this big Parole Violation Tour going down?
M: If we go it’s gonna start the twentieth of this month, and I guess we’re gonna do a western loop kind of thing. We’re trying to figure out how to violate my parole with out getting caught! We’ll see. The other thing musically that I did, besides the Unit Breed, was this acoustic project called Me, You and the Boy.
A: Yeah, I heard about that from Tommy Lasorda.
M: Unfortunately we broke up, and I was really enjoying playing in it, much more so than the Unit Breed. Basically the way that came about was I guess “Me” was John, or Shellhead, from 50 Million, his girlfriend Jennifer who used to be in Thundersweet and played in 50 Million sporadically, plays drums, and ran Star Cleaners, which was kind of a legendary illegal warehouse space down the street from here. And “the Boy” was Matt Powell from the Rudiments. They played very sporadically, maybe once a year, and one time I was hanging around and they were practicing and I picked up an acoustic and just started playing along with some of their songs. They decided to let me join the band and changed the name to Me, You and the Boys. They had a few songs, and we wrote a few more. So it’s pretty much like a Mission super group! You’ve got members of Hickey, the Rudiments, 50 million and any of Jen’s bands. Basically, anyone that put in a song would sing it. We had four people who could sing, three guitar players, and Jen either playing a small drum kit or just banging on buckets.
A: Anything recorded?
M: No. Things went really wild for Matt Powell and he had to leave town in a hurry, so we didn’t get a chance to record. We did record every live show that we played, and there’s talk of going through that and making a “best of” kind of compilation thing. We would just hand-burn on CDs.
A: So that kind of fell apart when he left?
M: Yeah, which was real unfortunate ‘cause the band started out the way bands really should, we were all friends just sitting around wanting to play music you know? And being an acoustic band was great because we would just practice in their living room, John and Jen’s living room and shit or we’d practice here. Live it’s a little more tricky. It’s hard to get an acoustic band to sound good live. It was a nice change, I could still do the singer songwriter thing but it wasn’t all on me…
A: Spotlight on Matty…
M: Yeah, I would just sing three songs per set. Jen and John just wrote amazingly great songs, so did Matt. We’ve talked about maybe getting together without Matt and doing something, but I don’t know if it would be as good or if I would feel right about it.
A: Any chance of him coming back?
M: I don’t know what he’s up to. It’s a story I don’t really want to go into… it’s kinda doubtful. If he did come back for a little while I would at least like to record that shit properly. I don’t know what the chances of that are! It’s really too bad ‘cause S.P.A.M. Records were talking about releasing whatever we recorded. We were instantly popular! That wasn’t the goal of the band at all, we just wanted to get up there and play a few songs, always play first, play our nice little songs… but we broke up. It was something I really loved doing.
A: So, for Unit Breed are you using the same gear that you had in Hickey?
M: No, I’m only using half of it. I don’t need to use quite that much gear!
A: What did you use for your effects and stuff? I was always curious because I have no luck with effects.
M: I believe the effects I was using through most of Hickey were a Big Muff distortion pedal, then we had this thing we called the Mystery Pedal. When I found it, it was one of those kinds that have the name of the effect on the battery plate, which was missing. We never knew what this effect was, and it didn’t really work when we found it, but me and Matt Rissler fixed it up so that it worked… and that’s the one that made the really crazy helicopter noise. After all these years we figured out that it might be an Auto-Wah that we put together wrong, but I‘m still not sure. The other effect I used was a Stereo Flanger, but I basically used it as a splitter to go to both my amps.
A: You used two amps?
M: Yeah, I would bi-amp. I had one MusicMan head going to a 4x12, and then my secondary head… I went through many different ones. I think the last one I was using was an Ampeg, and that would go to a 4x12 on the other side of Aesop’s drums. Running two amps simultaneously, splitting the signal from the stereo effect and going into an input on each amp. It makes for really good sounds. Both heads going full-bore, one to each cabinet! The stereo thing is a good idea, bi-amping always sounds better. And it’s not even just the volume thing… you get two totally different tones to play with, you know? I think for awhile even Rissler was bi-amping, or he’d at least put one of his cabs on my side!
A: I seem to remember you guys always having a lot of gear…
M: It was always funny, we’d be playing like, in these little living rooms, loading in a Slayer’s worth of gear! We had that shit down! We had a hand-truck. Towards the last couple of tours we had it down to like a military precision…
A: You could set up real fast?
M: Yeah, and we could go and look at a space in a house and be like, “OK, that’s gonna have to move, this couch has to come out here, this has to go there…” get all that done, load in the cabs, put everything up. With a real quickness, look at what we needed as far as power or whatever.
A: That’s cool. We sort of bumble along with half the equipment, then we can’t find the cords…
M: It took awhile to get down. One really good thing about Rissler joining the band is that he’s an equipment geek like I am. He just loved everything about amps and gear. He was actually more knowledgeable, he could fix amps well beyond what I could do. It’s one of the reasons Hickey was able to what we did… we were so DIY that we had very little overhead. Rissler did all of our van repair. Either Rissler of myself fixed all of our gear. People would actually give us shit a lot too, broken cabinets, broken amps, ‘cause we could fix ‘em and put them to use. These people were down for the cause for Hickey, it’s how we got most of my secondary amps. I always had the MusicMan, but…
A: You’re still using the MusicMan?
M: Yeah. But the other amps would last a tour or two.
A: Are you using different effects for Unit Breed?
M: Mostly yeah, because in the Unit Breed I‘m not really settled on what I use. The Mystery Pedal finally broke beyond repair. For Yogurt I was using a pretty solid set up. I was still doing the bi-amp thing, I was still using the Big Muff, and I was using one of those guitar pedal EQ’s, which you could just jack up everything up like when you use a distortion pedal, but you could really dial in with the EQ the tone. So it could sound vastly different than, say, a Big Muff. So I had kinda had these two distorted channels to choose from. Then I bought this really cheap Vibrato pedal that would kinda sound like the Twin Reverb vibrator. I’ve always loved that sound. And then just some kind of Chorus or Flanger or other stereo effect to split to the two amps. Me and Rissler used to love gear… I remember one time lamenting over this guitar cord that broke. I thought “that was the coolest cord, man…” I think we had made it out of some broken cords, it had these big burly jacks on it. It was a beautiful, beautiful cable you know? When it finally broke we found ourselves lamenting over it going “that’s a bummer, man. That was a great cord.” Finally, I was like “Matt, we are total geeks.” (Laughs) When Matt first joined it was really exciting, ‘cause we found we were into so many similar things, as far as gear, you know.
A: He never would talk when you guys played.
M: He was the quiet one.
A: On the recordings I have of you guys he doesn’t say a word.
Again, the tape runs out and we chatter on unwittingly. Then we flipped the tape.
A: Ok, so basically some good came out of the early nineties influx of bands. It kind of made bands come out a little more about where they stood and what their intentions in being a band were.
M: Yeah, it was kinda crazy, ‘cause there were bands that I knew from the city. One day we’re hanging out and the next day they’re going out to dinner with major labels and shit. It became really imperative to say exactly which side you were on. With a band like Fuckface it’s pretty apparent what their intentions are…
A: Or definitely what their intentions aren’t!
M: Yeah. I’d say Hickey was the same way. Our actions, our words… nobody’s gonna put up with that, you know?! We could barely get along in the average rock club environment, never mind the step up to the bigger venues. In a way, it would have been fun, ‘cause there’s so much to steal! (laughs) Actually, in a way, Hickey’s really sticking to the DIY ideal wasn’t something we thought of at the outset. It’s not some idealism we got from some fanzine or something. When we started the band our only intention was to play. The Fuckboyz always had a “play anywhere, at any time” kind of philosophy. Bars, or whatever the fuck. And Hickey played bars, it was no big deal. But once we started playing out, we found that when we played rock clubs and stuff we got into a lot more trouble. Bad scenes and stuff. Whereas when we played cool DIY underground shows there was no friction. So we just felt more comfortable doing those kinds of shows, so that’s why we went that way.
A: It’s kind of weird imagining Hickey going in any other direction than it did.
M: Yeah. I don’t even think we were even emotionally capable of going any other way… I think we were just too full of fire or whatever. We were just a band that wasn’t really able to play the game, you know? Even on the small levels, like playing little rock clubs or whatever. Hence the Voodoo Glow Skulls incident, a prime example of us being incapable of playing by the rules.
A: Any explanation of the Tabasco Incident? What was Hap’s Bar?
M: Hap’s was a little cowboy-themed restaurant bar down in Pleasanton where Aaron from Probe Records was putting shows on.
A: Where’s Pleasanton?
M: It’s somewhere south of here. The very end of the South Bay. It’s not like total redneck country or anything! That was maybe our fifth gig, in our first ten gigs. It was written about in “Us vs. Them”. “Us vs. Them” comes with a booklet that covers the antics of our first ten gigs.
M: I don’t know. . . Hap’s always had a policy of bands can drink all they want, so we were pretty sauced by the time we took the stage. We were just feeling really rambunctious that night and you’ve heard the tape . . .a lot of ranting and stuff.
A: A lot of talking, and a little rocking’. . .
M: Yeah! Every time I listen to that tape I still laugh, even after all these years. It’s the same thing with the VGS record, when I listen to the Frank side, I still laugh.
Even after I like had to edit it and put it together, and master it, I’ve heard it a hundred times I can still laugh.
But uhm, I know some girl wanted attention or was pissed off by some of the stuff we were saying, I don’t know – we didn’t know her or what her problem was – she started out by throwing beers on me – and then I noticed – like one of the beers had a weird acidic flavor to it, which now in hind sight I know she was adding Tabasco to the beer because each one that hit me was a little stronger and kinda burnt my eyes. a little bit.
A: She was running up to the stage and throwing them at you?
M: Yeah, it was really great – it was during the last song, she came up with a cup of something, from behind the kit Aesop took his drum stick like some kind of Ninja star and knocks the cup out of her fucking hand – it was beautiful. She yelled, ‘Ouw”, and got all pissed off, so she got on stage-- and I won’t hit a girl so I pushed Chubby into her, then she fell into the drum kit knocked half the drum kit over, and then we got her off stage. But uh, this was amidst other chaos like dudes coming up the stage with pool cues calling us faggots and stuff. And us just going “fuck you! Get off our stage, you little wussies!” It was a pretty chaotic night altogether, we managed to get everybody in that bar riled up. So, like half of the drum kit was down and Aesop had ninjaed the drink out of her hand, she stormed off stage and I guess she went to the bar and got a full cup of Tabasco-- and we hit the last note in the last song and she hit me square in the face. This was like being maced, essentially. I was instantly blinded and it fucking burned like hell. Fortunately someone knew what to do, and took me to the bathroom and poured milk in my eyes, but I mean they were like welts on my skin, like all the way down. It was some pretty serious shit, it fucking hurt! But I don’t know, it was somehow great, triumphant gig for us, I don’t know.
A: Well, you definitely left quite an impression on people, I guess.
M: That gig was the talk of the town for a few weeks afterwards, and we had it taped too.
A: Yeah I got that tape from the drummer of Brother Inferior -- I thought it was great.
M: It’s a fucking funny tape man. At that point, I don’t think we even knew that many songs. I think that attributed to a lot of the ranting.
A: I think there are only five songs on the tape.
M: I think at the time we maybe knew one more song that we could play.
A: Someone told me that Yogurt has like a bunch of other stuff recorded. Is it coming out at some point?
M: I plan on compiling another volume. We’re up to like volume 5 now. We don’t produce as much anymore because Aesop doesn’t live with me, ya know. I mean, Yogurt was a very casual thing -- like “Hey, let’s put some stuff on tape. But as far as like unmixed, unfinished stuff I might have enough for two volumes. And volumes are pretty much like an albums worth of material, ya know. So Yogurt has like six albums worth of material. At one point, Joe Demery was talking about putting those out. It would have to be a double CD. We were trying to figure out how to do that economically, and package it correctly. This is while Yogurt was stopped playing live. And he still wants to do it, but I’m not into having something out for a band that doesn’t play. It’s just impossible to sell. I think those tapes were good and a lot of people really, really like them, so they might sell on their own merit, by word of mouth. I still think it would be a risk to not have a live band back it up, ya know.
A: Yeah, it’s hard to sell stuff without playing live.
M: Yeah, if Yogurt were still playing I would definitely do it. But, I don’t know… I still might do it. Joe bugs me every once in awhile. It’s something I’ve always wanted to see happen. It’s funny because Yogurt was never intended for anyone to hear except me and Aesop. And now a lot of people will ask me to make them Yogurt tapes. And I do want people to catch that music. Actually, I’ll go as far to say, if somebody sends me two, ninety minute tapes – well how much do you think those are? Two bucks? OK, so if someone sends me like two, ninety minutes tapes and two bucks or two bucks worth of stamps, I’ll send them the Yogurt volumes. But they gotta be patient! (Laughs).
A: What address should they send it to?
M: Send it to the same old address, 2864. It will fit in my mailbox. I gotta get a new I.D. anyway.
A: So S.P.A.M. is going to re-release and Various States of Disrepair?
M: Yeah.
A: And the Voodoo Glow Skulls?
M: Uh, I’m not sure about the Voodoo Glow Skulls thing, and Various States is almost done.
It should be out in a couple of weeks.
A: Are you guys going to release like uh, one of your live recordings?
M: Maybe. With the Voodoo Glow Skulls thing, Spam just asked me about that for the first time, two days ago. And uh, that’s really consideration of, (I’m going to have them turn down that music.) With the Voodoo Glow Skulls thing it’s really a consideration if the zine is actually going to shrink down to a CD packageable size to where it can be read, you know. And I’d like to do it because I’d like for people to be able to get that, but I think Probe is thinking about repressing it.
A: Oh, really.
M: And it’s kinda pathetic, ‘cause it’s definitely the highest selling Hickey album and it’s a fucking novelty record, ya know?
A: I really like the song on it.
M: Yeah, it’s a really good tune. But um, cause, the first couple of pressings came with the zines were photocopied, that I photocopied myself from… or more accurately, from Matt from Fuckface was working at a copy place and we’d do ‘em at night. I think the first pressing, the first thousand actually even came with a two color cover. You know they have photocopiers that can run red, so we had to run the covers twice, so it was red and black. So we did a thousand of those, got you know, went on tour, sold a lot of those. Aaron sold a lot, then we did another thousand where we did the zines. And then there’s another pressing and at that point Aaron went to newsprint because Matt didn’t have that job anymore, and there’s no way I can steal this many photocopies, ya know?–( laughs). So we went to newsprint. So over 2,000 of those sold, that’s a lot.
A: Your stuff has continued to sell, like far after the break-up of the band?
M: Yeah, I mean Aaron says, usually once every two weeks he’ll get some mail looking for Hickey stuff, ya know. I still get mail for Hickey all the time.
A: Are you like. “sorry, dude”?
M: Huh? Yeah. I mean, I don’t have anything, ya know? And Various States wasn’t available because the record company that put it out folded, and I think Aaron still has some CD’s. We must of sold quite a few of those CD’s too of that album. I’m not sure how many. But uh, I mean, the first thing, the first run was the vinyl and that was a thousand. Then I know we sold through, I think another thousand on CD, so that might’ve sold as much as that stupid Voodoo Glow Skulls record.
A: The first self-titled one?
M: Yeah.
A: Who’s that singing on the second side?
M: That is, um, our friend Erica. She is now the singer in a fairly popular metal band called Lost Goat.
A: Oh really.
M: She wasn’t in Lost Goat at the time but she just lived across the street from us and we’d known her for awhile, and I’d come up with the idea that I wanted a girl to sing on that, cause I think we’d done a version of it with me singing it, but it was really terrible! (laughs) And, so I decided I wanted to get a girl to sing it. And I asked Aesop if he knew of anybody who would be good to do it. And he’s like yeah, I think Erica could sing it really well. I didn’t know she could sing quite so operatic. But, yeah, so we had her over, recorded her vocals in my kitchen. And yeah, she’s amazing.
A: That’s pretty cool!
M: Yeah, you never imagined those are recorded in the kitchen when you listen to them.
A: Do you guys ever play that song live? As long?
M: Yeah, there were times… at least once, where we played just that song.
A: Did you have her sing it?
M: Yeah. At a gig, at a bar here. Ya know, it was just kind of a way… to be dicks to all the people who liked us! (laughs) I mean we were becoming pretty popular around here and were just kinda getting of sick playing the songs and hear people yelling for El Farolito all night and shit, ya know.
A: Oh yeah. I Actually I just ate up there for the first time.
M: Oh yeah, El Farolito?
A: Yeah, it was really good.
M: Did you go to the one on Mission Street or the one on 24th?
A: Uh, we walked there from here.
M: So it’s on this street?
A: Yeah.
M: Yeah, because there is two of them really close together. One’s at Mission and 24th, I live at Briant and 24th. And the other one’s at Alabama and 24th, which is five blocks away from the one you ate at.
A: Really?
M: Yeah, so I was more singing about the one by my house, but they’re both good. (Chuckles)
A: Was the Spanish on that one another Spanish/English dictionary composition?
M: I think so, we repeated it to a Spanish friend and he said it didn’t make sense. (laughter)
A: That’s funny.
M: We’re not as like, international as we appear to be, ya know? And yeah, so we did play In the Beginning once at this bar and pissed a lot of people off. Yeah, people came up to us afterward and said, “I wanted to hear El Farolito”, and we’re just like “too bad.” And I guess sometimes we’d play it if we were like feeling particularly antagonistic towards an audience. Maybe half way through our set we’d say, “all right, fuck all y’all.” and do this. But also the live version of El Farolito would get pretty long too ‘cause we’d do a long jam ending to that.
A: Oh really.
M: Yeah really, like after the end of the song, we would just go back into the main riff and I’d play guitar solos for 15 minutes.
A: Yeah, that Rockn’n’Roll Problem solo, that’s pretty long. (Laughs)
M: Yeah. (Laughs).
A: It makes a pretty long song. About the time it’s over, then the dub in solo comes in
M: Nice solo though, huh?
A: Great song, it’s really a good song.
M: It’s really good for like a semi-joke song that, ya know having it be long kinda fits the lyrics or whatever. The whole idea for that song actually came from a flier that I saw on a telephone pole for some church. It said, ‘Do you have a rock-n-roll problem?’. I think it maybe mentioned Ozzie Osbourne and some Satanic influence in music and they had some kinda program that could get you out of your rock-n-roll problems.
A: I think my favorite one from that band is Postal Employee.
M: Yeah, it’s a nice well written song. That’s actually from the best Fuckboyz seven inch, which is called Love American Gladiator Style. All the songs on that are pretty good. Also something that was supposed to come out but hasn’t, but still might...
A: Did you sing on that one or was it Seaweed?
M: Uh, Seaweed sings the lead and I sing the back ups.
A: OK
M: Oh uh, something that was supposed to come out along time ago but hasn’t but still might is a CD anthology of all the Fuckboyz stuff.
A: We’ve got a CD actually, and it’s like 26 songs.
M: Is that something you got off the net?
A: It’s like 26 or 27 songs and it’s all mp3 that you can find off the computer.
M: Yeah, actually I think a lot of stuff got on there because when we mastered the anthology, the guy from the label made dubs for his friends. And I think one of his friends might have put it up there unless they’re from the records. But I can’t imagine-- there have gotta be a very few people who have all those records. I’m not even sure I have all those records.
A: Yeah, they’re quality, the mix is good and you can tell they were recorded well but, I don’t know, some of. .
M: I remember looking on the net once, I don’t know too much about mp3, but it’s like the least efficient way, you know the different…
A: Yeah, it’s eh -- well, it’s the sound quality, it’s the most compact way to cram information…
M: Uh-huh.
A: So you lose…
M: It’s like the slowest one. What is it 27 kilohertz or something?
A: I’ve heard other mp3’s where the sound quality is pretty good, so I don’t know. It’s definitely good enough to listen to.
M: I got one --I downloaded one once when I was at my dad’s house, it was definitely from the vinyl. But anyways, quite a while back, Farmhouse records wanted to do the anthology, so I actually managed to find decent masters of all that stuff, sequenced it all together, mastered it and then it was just up to me to do the artwork. And at the time, Hickey was still together and I was just like way to busy. And I fucking hate doing CD artwork. It’s just no fun. I wanted to show elements of all the covers and shit like that, and it was just a fucking nightmare. I kind of just lost interest in the project, then after Hickey broke up… not that I ever looked at my playing music as a career before, but I was kind of in this funk where I didn’t really care if people ever heard the Hickey CDs ever again, or Fuckboyz or anything ever again. But I came around and thought it would be nice to have all that stuff available. So I’ve been talking to those guys again and they still want to do it. It’s still a matter of me getting the artwork together, but they said they would actually construct a booklet. So much for D.I.Y., I just don’t want to do it! (laughs)
A: You have some stories and stuff?
M: Yeah, I would have to write some stuff. The hardest part would be remembering and writing out the credits for recording and shit like that. I’d probably have to write a couple things, have Aesop write a couple things But then those guys said they would slap it together, so it’s very likely that…
A: That’d be pretty cool.
M: It’s a lot of good songs, and uh… Anthologies can be weird, because they’re not cohesive like an album is, but this one does sound pretty good altogether. I actually used to hate Various States because it was an anthology.
A: That was the first thing I heard, Various States. I’d seen you guys a couple times and then I got a copy…
M: The Probe thing flows together so well, it’s like really intentionally, too…
A: See, I didn’t even know those existed for like, uh… I had Various States for about 2 years when our bass player was like “Oh man, I found this CD”, and he played it for me.
M: Have you ever seen the vinyl?
A: A friend of mine in Tulsa actually has it. The hand-made…
M: Hand-screened…
A: Yeah, it’s pretty impressive… did you see ours?
M: Yeah, with the glitter on it?
A: We did only 550 of those and we still have 100 something more to make…
M: We did a thousand, man!
A: I really appreciate anyone that will uh, hand-…
M: Yeah. We were thinking “we can do a thousand”, we really had no concept of how many a thousand is, and all these fuckin’ boxes show up in our kitchen and we’re like “oh, man…”. We actually farmed out entire boxes to friends to help us do the backs! Punk houses like ours, we’d give them a whole box and let them do it. This was even more interesting for us because then we’d get them back and see these, and have the same interest or the same thrill as when somebody buys it.
A: Yeah, we let some traveler kids… well, they decided they wanted to help, but then I threw a hissy-fit, I got pissed off at some of the stuff they were writing on our records.
M: (laughs)
A: They would just write stuff, sometimes mean stuff, and it was like, I don’t want to sell this to people!
M: I think the best one I saw was, a box came back from I guess this girl’s apartment. Very simply in glitter, you know how you put the glue down and then put glitter on it? In cursive “My boss is a cunt”! I think that was my favorite!
A: We got some someone wrote “Street Fighter II” on…
M: (laughs)
A: One said “sluts” and there were these glitter women coming out of the ocean…
M: I think all the ones that we got were pretty good.
A: I freaked out because people put swastikas on ‘em and stuff…
M: Yeah, that’s no fun.
A: You know, not to be a bastard or anything, but I’m throwing this away. I’m not gonna come to some other town and be like…
M: Yeah, I totally would too. Yeah, we didn’t have any problems with anything like that. Most of them were pretty good. Initially we intended to do this snooty, indie kind of thing, and only have like a thousand of those, and that’d be it. Which is actually kind of a dumb idea, ‘cause that’s an album, you know? Pretty much immediately, once we got into it, Aaron was like “I wanna do CDs of this once these run out.” We argued for about five minutes, then we were like “ok.” Which was a really good idea.
A: Well, you can get your five bucks for it, or people that really want it are gonna find it on the computer.
M: Yeah. See, that wasn’t even an option back then.
A: I don’t have a computer, but my brother still lives with my parents, he has one. He’s fifteen, seven years younger than me, and has heard more music than I have!
M: Actually, you were asking about what music I listened to and stuff. The time I spent with my folks I downloaded some stuff. I downloaded a bunch of Locust stuff. I like the Locust.
A: I like them too. My friend Rob who’s also from Tulsa roadied for them last summer, so I’ve seen ‘em a few times and met a couple of them in San Diego about a year and a half ago. I think they’re a pretty interesting group, and they wear funny costumes when they play too!
M: Yeah, they usually play here.
A: They just got a new record out with Melt Banana.
M: I think they’ve started to outgrow this place though.
A: Yeah, they’re gonna sign to a label I heard. D.I.Y.’s crushing them, I guess.
M: I think that’s totally fine too. I don’t think that they’re a band that has ever gone around saying “we’ll never sign to a major”, you know? It’d be shitty if a band like Hickey did after all that talk! I see nothing wrong with that.
A: They toured Japan opening for At the Drive-In, playing for like thousands of people. And I don’t know how much of what they do is D.I.Y., I don’t think they press their shirts or anything like that.
M: No, I’ll bet they don’t.
A: But nonetheless, there’s a certain point where you’re trying to go to school, and have friends, and work, and you can’t do it all.
M: Yeah, that’s what I was saying about the Hickey thing, is once we were there it was really hard to maintain. And another reason we broke up is like, one of our goals was to prove that the D.I.Y. thing could work, and we did get to the point where we were self-sustaining. Like on the last tour we home with like a thousand bucks. A thousand bucks is like nothing, but for an entirely D.I.Y run outfit… that’s pretty good.
A: That is pretty amazing… we lose thousands of dollars doing this!
M: That was like a three week tour, too.
A: Really?
M: Yeah, it was a really short tour. So we proved it could be done, but maintaining it is something entirely different.
A: It’s hard to write new music on tour. It’s hard to live a life that inspires writing music…
M: Yeah, because you end up being very removed from life.
A: It’s a totally different life when everyday you’re in a new place, you meet new people and you forget their names an hour later.
M: Mm-hmm. I was probably way more inspired to write when I was working my drudgery job.
A: Yeah, I’ve noticed that having crap jobs makes for better writing.
M: And another thing that sucked about Hickey and the whole D.I.Y. thing was that I actually got to play less music as the whole thing went on, less and less time. At the beginning of Hickey I used to play every fucking day, a couple hours at least, you know? Then it got to a point where I was barely even playing at all, except to practice, work on songs or play shows. I just got to play less music. It seemed really paradoxal, being in a band! So that is something to be said for signing to a bigger label, having a lot of free stuff for you, so you actually have time…
A: And you’re not having to be such a business man?
M: Yeah, and it is impossible to write on tour. I think I wrote one song on tour. I wrote The Only Lesbian in Tulsa on tour.
A: When was the first time you guys actually played that in Tulsa?
M: That gets back to my having trouble remembering things… maybe the third or fourth time we were there, because I think it was the second or third time that we met her.
A: My band opened for you guys the last time you guys came…
M: At that crazy house show.
A: And it was all controversial and everyone hated us… and I’d seen you guys and I’d videotaped it, the show before that at the Eclipse. But before that for two years at least, I’d seen patches or T-shirts floating around. And for years, not any more really, but every now and then I’ll see a Hickey patch in Tulsa. But for awhile it was on every hoodie.
M: Yeah, I noticed that too, when we came back after the first two times everybody had us…
A: The badge of scene credibility.
M: I can remember the people that set up our first show kind of bitching about it, you know “ It’s fucked up, man! At my high school I see kids wearing those Hickey patches and they’ve never even seen you guys!” or “They don’t even have any of your records!”
A: (laughs) Poseurs!
M: “They’re poseurs” (laughs) Kinda like that whole Nirvana thing, “I liked Nirvana way back on Bleach, man!” you know?
A: I didn’t like Nivana until In Utero came out. When Nevermind came out I think I was like, I don’t know… twelve! A little over my head. But I was I think 14 when In Utero came out and I thought it was great. I listened to it constantly.
M: So how old are you?
A: I’m twenty-three. I turned in April.
M: Ok. I guess I find it amazing that I’m still involved…
A: Yeah, I was eighteen, like five years ago, the last time Hickey came to Tulsa. I had just moved out of my parent’s house. The pre-show party was at my apartment!
M: Uh-huh! (laughs)
A: I wish I had a photo of it. Until I moved out of my parent’s house I didn’t know anyone. I went to shows for years and never knew anyone, my bands never did anything, but all of a sudden by word of mouth “some kids having a party!” So there were probably sixty people in my two-bedroom apartment. There were probably 150 beers in my refrigerator. They brought bags of ice and filled my sink with ‘em. I don’t know, it was pretty hectic. And then no one told me where the party was afterwards, so I just went home.
M: Especially since like I talked about before, I had these notions of retiring at thirty. I had no plans of what I was gonna do if I did retire.
A: It’s hard to project…
M: Yeah, it really is. I kind of only really intended on retiring from playing music. I still intended on recording bands and doing sound and doing all this other shit.
A: We’re running out of tape so if there’s any final spiel that must get out there…
M: Uh, I guess if people really do want to they can send for Yogurt tapes and I’ll do my very best to get them to them. I’m not as quick on the mail as I used to be, but I try. And that’s about it. It was nice talking to you.
A: Do you think the Unit Breed will ever come down South again?
M: I have no idea what Unit Breed is gonna do.
A: They hit it off quite well at their last show! I think all of them got laid.
M: Huh…that’s nice! Yeah I don’t know what’s…
A: I think that partially had to do with everyone yelled at them to get naked. It was an outside park show, and they did it… quite the crowd-pleaser in Tulsa.
M: Like I said, it’s Joe’s trip, and I’m just basically hopin’ to make it through this tour without going to jail or anything! (laughs) If I can pull off this probation violation there may be more to come.
A: Awesome. This might appear in two or three parts…
M: Yeah it’s pretty long.
A: Pretty thorough.
M: Actually I like reading good thorough interviews. I hate those banter interviews where everyone is just trying to be funny, just quip after quip. It’s nice to have something of substance. But I gotta get to work now. I’m glad we got to do this.
Some Random Dude: What are you doing this for?
A: I do a zine in Tulsa
SRD: Tulsa? For what?
A: It’s just a little crap zine with one issue out.
This is where the tape stops, which is too bad ‘cause then the dude then asked me what Matty had done just as Matty walked back up. He told the guy he played second guitar on the first Nirvana album! “Wow!” he said, sticking his hand out for a shake. What’s your name? “Jason”, said Matty.
