Melvins interview in Denmark.
When future history books will be written, who from
the underground rock
scene will they put in there? Um, Velvets, Stooges,
MC5, Buttholes, Sonic
Youth... And most certainly, Melvins. Even among the
best of the better,
like, a band who have 1) Originality, 2) Innovation,
3) Tremendous playing
skills [I mean, Buzz and Dale, for Christ’s sake...]
and 4) An extraordinary
ability to just rock. Melvins score max point in every
field, this totally
objective writer thinks. This interview was conducted
by Kasper sometime in
the fall, October I think, and Mads checked the levels
on the DAT-machine.
It's somewhat long, so you could go straight to Buzz
on Atlantic and major
labels in general, Buzz on Kurt, Buzz on Seattle and
just what is a Stoner
Witch?
Qrt's Garage: All right, let's start, um...
Buzz: Hello, my name is Buzz.
QG: You formed the band around '84 or so?
Buzz: '83.
QG: What was your initial idea to form a band, why did
you do it?
Buzz: Don't know. Uh, uh, the answer I'd like to give
is that I did it for
the chicks.
QG: Did you get any?
Buzz: I got married didn't I? No, uh, uh, I don't know
really why, I just for
some reason wanted to play guitar and playing in a
band seemed like a fun
thing to do, I guess. I didn't have any big dreams or
anything like that.
Just the idea of playing live maybe would be good,
y'know. My idea has
changed since then [laughter].
QG: Who were the bands you were listening to at that
time?
Buzz: Made me want to start a band you mean? Um, I was
listening to a lot of
Flipper, Blag Flag, uh, Motorhead, um, uhhh what else?
Sex Pistols... Stuff
like that. Swans a little bit.
QG: It seems that Melvins is some kind of fusion
between some avant garde,
and some heavy metal bands, and some punk stuff...
Buzz: A CONfusion. [laughter] Yeah yeah, a
conglomeration, a mishmash of
unintelligible cacophony, I don't know.
QG: Why did you wanna play so slow?
Buzz: Well, Flipper was doing it, so we decided we
wanted to do it too
[laughter]. Part of it was that lot of bands weren't
doing it, and we were
really influenced by that Blag Flag "My War" record,
SIDE 2, took it from
there. Did it to be different, did it to be difficult
[laughter]. STILL are.
QG: Yeah, because there is an element of some avant
garde thing in the
Melvins, there's always been that...
Buzz: More so now than ever before, I'd say.
QG: Especially the "Prick" album.
Buzz: Yeah. There you go.
QG: How much of that is joke and how much is...
Buzz: It's a very serious joke [laughter]. Me more so
than the rest of the
guys in the band, certainly. Left to my own devices,
as of late, the Melvins
records would be far more difficult to listen to, more
along the lines of the
"Prick" album, you know, but um...
QG: How did you get a major label deal? Because to me
your music seems to be
pretty inaccessible...
Buzz: Don't ask me. I don't know, I mean -
Mads: The Nirvana effect?
Buzz: Certainly, yeah. I think Nirvana's helped a lot
of bands get signed. I
have no faith in major labels - uh - having any more
brains than they did any
other time in music history, but the opportunity came
for us to try this out,
see what's going on, so we tried it, I mean, uh. I
have no reason to believe
we'll be on Atlantic Records for a long time, or
anything like that, I mean,
we could...
Mads: You tried them out during the "Prick" album
then...
QG: No that's only on AmRep isn't it?
Buzz: Yeah, well, they would 've put it out, they
wanted to do it, and uh, we
wanted to do it on AmRep just for... KICKS!
QG: Yeah? You must have a funny kind of contact with
them. Usually they are a
lot harder with that.
Buzz: Well, they kind of complained about it a bit,
and we just pushed it,
and I really don't care what they think. In a lot of
ways it's like, if they
really wanted to get tough with me, I would just cease
to function, and they
would've wasted all of the money they've already put
into us, so we're kind
of in a position of power as far as like saying,
"We'll do whatever we want,
and if you guys don't comply to it..." which they
don't, because they're
really confused by us. They don't know what to do with
us. They know what to
do with the Stone Temple Pilots, but they don't know
what to do with us, you
know, which doesn't surprise me, but it irritates me a
bit, and it also makes
me lose faith in the record industry in general.
Y'know, we're a hard sell,
we're not an easy band for them to market, or anything
like that. They're
gonna really have to work to sell our records, and I
don't think they know
how to do that.
QG: Could you see yourself doing an album like "Lysol"
or "Eggnog" on
Atlantic?
Buzz: Uuum - yeah, that certainly is a possibility.
One thing that people
have to understand is that we make the kind of record
we want, Atlantic don't
dictate anything to us. They don't tell us: "We don't
want this kinda song on
your record, we don't want this kinda song..." They
make suggestions, but
ultimately it comes down to us doing exactly what we
want, that's it, that's
really it. Atlantic might bitch and complain about
certain things, but we
don't answer to them for anything. We don't ask them
what they think, or
nothing has to pass a test in order for to get put
out. You know, we have a
lot of weird stuff on both our last records that I
think are pretty far out
there, as far as like noisy... I mean, there are some
very challenging things
on there, certainly things they wouldn't be playing on
commercial radio. And
they put those out... I have to give them credit on
one hand for letting us
do exactly what we want. The "Stoner Witch" record and
the "Houdini"
record are exactly the kind of records we would have
made anyway. We've made
those records and they sound the way they do because
that's what we wanted.
QG: It sounds the metal element is becoming more
predominant on the last ones
- with the exception of "Prick."
Buzz: I think so, a little bit. However I don't think
we'll ever get to the
point where it's palatable enough for a Metallica fan
to swallow, on the
whole. I think we have too many other confusing things
on the records that
balance it out for me to call it... It certainly isn't
THE direction we're
going in, but it's A direction. A little bit.
Mads: But you made a Kiss cover on "Houdini."
Buzz: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean - yeah. It's kind a big
joke, I guess.
QG: It's a really good song, though.
Buzz: I love that song. I don't think we'll put any
cover songs on any more
of our albums, because you don't get as much
publishing if you cover people’s
songs as you do if you write your own [laughter].
QG: When you released "Bullhead" you were still pretty
much an obscure band,
it seemed. Around '92 or so, you were a band that was
always being name
dropped in fanzines and stuff. How did you feel that
transition from being
something rather obscure to becoming a pretty big name
on the underground
scene?
Buzz: It didn't seem fast to me. We made our first
record in 1986. That was
four or five years before we made the "Bullhead"
record, so...
QG: But also, I think your music is pretty
inaccessible even compared to a
lot of other big American underground bands, like
Jesus Lizard or whatever...
Buzz: It surprises me. When I think about what my
initial ideas of why I
wanted to start a band, what I wanted to do, it
surpassed that stuff a long
time ago, y'know. I never entertained the thoughts of
doing major label
records, I never even thought about it - 'cause I
never thought that it would
ever happen. It never even came up. Just the fact that
we've done as much as we've done, I'm happy about it.
I guess I'm surprised
that people are into it, yeah. There was a long time
when they weren't - a
long time. And when we put out the "Bullhead" record,
we toured in Germany
right then - we played here actually, too - a lot of
people didn't like that
record. They accused us of selling out with that
record. That European tour
kind of was the starting point for why we wanted to do
the record called
"Eggnog,” which is a total noise wipe out, pretty
much.
QG: A lot of people think it's your greatest work till
today.
Buzz: I like that record, I think it's good, and I
think part of the reason
it’s good is because it's an EP and it's very short,
it goes by really
quickly and then it's over...
QG: But not "Charmicarmicat."
Buzz: The whole thing in general is only about 18
minutes long, the entire
record.
QG: Yeah that's true, the A-side is very short.
Buzz: Both sides together don't even last 20 minutes.
I think that's a good
idea. We wrote and recorded that record very quickly.
All the songs were
brand new, and we did it for, I think, something like
$600 [laughter].
QG: How can Dale do that drumbeat thing? It goes for
like...
Buzz: "Charmicarmicat?"
QG: Yeah, the whole drum riff goes for like, two and a
half minutes before it
starts again.
Buzz: Yeah, he's got a good memory. Practice. It's not
perfect. It sounds a
lot more difficult than it is. We're good at faking
it. We're good fakers.
QG: Do you have signs or what? Like, "Here comes the
snare drum?"
Buzz: Certainly. Certainly, we got all that kind of
stuff. But every band
does. You know, musicians when playing together - I
don't know if you guys
play guitar [gee, he's a psychic] or play in bands -
that's part of it, the
visual aspect. I mean, if you had to play with a
blindfold on, you could do
it but it would be difficult.
QG: I saw Codeine do it and they have these extremely
long pauses and they
were just...
Buzz: Looking in opposite directions? Oh yeah, you can
do it, there might be
some trickery to it, you'll never know. I mean, I can
do it, and make it look
like I'm looking in another direction, when actually I
can see him out of the
corner of my eye [laughter].
QG: So that type of song, like "Charmicarmicat," and
the one on "Lysol," is
that a direction you want to pursue?
Buzz: You mean again? Well, the first song we play
tonight is along those
lines, it's new, it hasn't been recorded yet. I
haven't written vocals for it
yet, but we're gonna play it anyway. Our next album
we're gonna start working
on as soon as we get home. It's gonna be much more
extreme in those natures,
it's gonna be like a lot more things like that, along
with a lot more things
that are wimpy. It's gonna be really weird. I'm really
looking forward to
doing it.
QG: So Kurt Cobain was your roadie or what?
Buzz: Kurt Cobain was never our roadie. The bass
player from Nirvana was.
Kurt Cobain weighed about 90 pounds and could barely
hold up his own guitar.
But we were good friends of Kurt for a long time, and
I've known him since he
was 11 or something, or knew him, so... Went to school
with him and stuff.
QG: Somewhere, he said that they started to play
because of you.
Buzz: That could very well be.
QG: So... How did you feel when he committed suicide?
Buzz: Hm, I felt bad but not surprised. I think that
anybody who deals with
that kind of lifestyle that he was pursuing certainly
has a possibility of
ending up dead at any time. I'm sure you all know
people who have overdosed
on drugs or something like that. So it's never a big
surprise to me when
people end up dead under those conditions. I literally
think that's it.
People can say whatever they want, they can write
whatever they want, but I
think if you take the drugs, and the drug lifestyle
out of the picture of his
life, he would still be alive. No doubt. Anybody who
wanna soak it any other
way is just fooling themselves, they're living in some
rock'n'roll fantasy
world that I really want no part of, and, you know, I
was upset about the
whole thing, but ultimately it doesn't really affect
me so much. No, not
really. Better him than me.
QG: Is it true your first bass player, the guy from
Mudhoney, you threw him
out because he drank to much?
Buzz: That was part of it. We moved to California too.
QG: Two years before the whole thing started.
Buzz: Yeah, we moved down there in '87.
Mads: Why did you do that?
Buzz: Why? Have you guys ever been to Seattle?
Mads: Yeah.
Buzz: Seattle sucks, it's horrible, there's nothing
there. I'd much rather
live here in Copenhagen. I'd much rather live here
than there. It's horrible!
It's ugly, there's nothing there.
QG: So how did you feel when Mudhoney and Nirvana
started to get famous, when
that whole Seattle-thing started?
Buzz: I thought it was good, um... I was happy for
them.
Mads: It's no wonder that all the bands do all these
drugs in Seattle,
because the city is so boring, there is nothing else -
Buzz: It's boring as hell.
Mads: Because it is a big problem there...
Buzz: It's a big problem everywhere. I think this
place [Cristiania] is a
good example of that.
Mads: There's no hard drugs here. There is only hash
and pot.
Buzz: Well, that's hard enough. Drugs are a problem
regardless what form or
shape they're in. People who do drugs don't have
anything that I want, so I
have to view them all under the same umbrella. But I
don't really care what
everybody else does. I mean, that's fine. Do what you
like! Do hard drugs!
Make more room for the rest of us!
Mads: So the title "Stoner Witch," does that have
something to do with it?
Buzz: That was like a slang term we had for heavy
metal girls when I was in
high school. Just thought it was funny. I don't try to
put a lot of political
meaning or reasoning in any of our music. Try to keep
ridiculous, and...
QG: But you've just begun to write proper lyrics,
haven't you?
Buzz: "Stoner Witch" had more lyrics than any other
album I ever did. We'll
see what happens with this next one. I've written a
lot of lyrics for this
one though. Chances are... we won't go political - but
then you never know.
QG: How come Lorax is not playing bass with you
anymore?
Buzz: Well, we tended to wanna work a little harder
than she was willing to
do, and I was going out with her for a long time, and
I basically got sick of
her. Dumped her. Just rid her from my life completely,
and there's no way I
could see playing in a band with her. That had a lot
to do with it, plus, I
thought she was lazy.
QG: Do you tour a lot in the states?
Buzz: Yeah, we tour a lot. We've been to Europe a
couple of times in the last
two years, and...
QG: Why don't you come here?
Buzz: I don't know why we don't play in Scandinavia, I
have no idea. We were
supposed to play tomorrow in Stockholm and the show
got cancelled because
they said there weren't enough ticket sales. So, I
don't know what the deal
is up here. It kind of surprises me, seems there would
be at least 150 kids
that would be into it, generally speaking, so I don't
know. I don't know why
we don't play up here. Because we're afraid of the
Vikings, that's why. All
the stories we've heard, and those ferries aren't as
safe as they used to be.
We're too afraid to get on the boats, that's what it
is. Airplanes, that's
what we should do, airplanes.