issue #02 pdf - Razorcake

Resistance. The New had a singer called
Peter Roach and then he left. Then Jim
came, and it became The Crowd.
Todd: [to the wrong Jim] And you were in
Witchcraft?
Decker: That was my high school band.
That had Sandy West from The Runaways.
Kaa: That was Jim's girlfriend, too.
Decker: Now she's lezbo. [laughing] I
broke her down.
Kaa: The Runaways played a couple house
parties before they started to hit the LA and
Hollywood circuit. A couple blocks away
from here, Lita Ford, Joan Jett - before
Cherri Currie was in it, when Michelle
Steele, who later was in The Bangles,
played bass - and Sandy.
Todd: Wouldn't it be broken up by the second
chord?
Kaa: No. You could go 'til 11:30 before the
cops rousted everybody. The band could get
a whole set in.
Todd: What are you guys doing now?
Decker: We're working on a new fulllength
album (tentatively titled "...Goes
Wild").
Kaa: We're doing a bunch of things. We
just released that single, "I'm Not Happy
Here" with Rick Bain on Hostage.
Decker: We're going to record the album
ourselves and put up all of
our own money so we're not
obligated to any label. Then
if nobody wants it, we can
do something with it.
Kaa: Almost all of our
songs are on MP3.com or
on our website. Another
thing I've been trying to do,
with Brian of Grand Theft
Audio, is put out a "bootleg"
thing. There might be
four different versions of
"Modern Machine" from all
different eras. It's going to
be a CD filled with as many
live outtakes from all of my
different cassette recordings
and things I have and as
many flyers I can pile into a
booklet. It's just a fun thing
to do.
Decker: We're actually
going to leave Huntington
Beach and play outside.
Todd: How far is the touring leash going to
be?
Kaa: Right now, I can say Vegas, Arizona,
Northern California. I see us going to
Portland, Seattle, or Texas, but that will
probably be about it. We've also talked
about flying back East and doing a oneweeker.
Trying to do Philadelphia, New
York, or the ultimate goal, a two-weeker in
Europe. On our website, we have people
from Belgium, Berlin, Brussels, and France
saying "We guarantee a sellout if you
come." My last one was from Sweden.
Decker: They don't say it's a six-seat bar...
It's hard when everybody has the forty hour
week and three kids.
Kaa: Fifty hour week.
Todd: So what do you do during the week?
Decker: I'm a construction worker.
Kaa: I do financial and accounting work for
a big restaurant company. Dennis is a postman.
Boz is the general manager of a precision
metal foundry. Cory is a mason in
brick and tile.
Decker: We can get shit built, torn down,
and financed.
Kaa: And we can deliver the mail.
Sean: What type of construction work do
you do?
Decker: I run cranes and concrete pumps.
And before that, I ran fishing boats, when
work got slow.
Todd: Working backwards, on "A World
Apart" (Posh Boy Records, 1980) why are
the guitars taken out of that recording? It
sounds like "tink, tink, tink."
Kaa: Couple things. We were trying to differentiate
ourselves somewhat from all the
other music of that time. It wasn't like we
said, "Let's make this music be short, fast,
and poppy." I think "A World Apart" was a
natural evolution of that because we learned
to play a little bit better. But, you've got to
remember that we worked with Posh Boy.
Decker: Posh Boy has a terrible ear.
Kaa: And David Hines, the guy who engi-
“PUT THE OFFSPRING IN
THERE, TOO. THEY CAME
THROUGH THE SAME DOOR
THE TIME WE WERE START-
ING TO GET BACK UP. AND
AT THAT POINT,
THEY HAD THE TITAN
MISSILE.”
neered it...
Decker: Has even a worse ear.
Kaa: ...we weren't smart enough to know,
to say, "No, this is the way it should be,"
when you're making your second record and
it's the second time you've been in the studio.
When we made "Beach Blvd.," (recorded
July 3rd, 1979) it was the first time we
were in the studio. He mixed the whole
record in one day.
Decker: We got the tape, ran to - I forget
what the music store was in LA - 'cause we
didn't have a tape player in our car. Put it in
a cassette place - an audio store - heard it
come out and we just looked at each other
and went, "That sounds like shit."
Kaa: A big difference in today's world is
digital. When you finish something and
make a DAT or CD of it, it sounds virtually
the same. Something's screwed up if there's
a big difference. In those days, everything
sounded good in the big studio, but by the
time you made a vinyl record, the low end
was missing a lot. None of them had a thick,
big-bottom end. Now you can buy a little
four-track for your house for $500 that you
can record massive stuff on.
Decker: I'd like to get a hold of those tapes,
re-mix some of the songs, and put it out.
There's some really good songs on that
record, but the mix just blows chow.
Sean: Did you write rhythm guitar parts or
any bar chords in those songs, because it
seems like, if you listen to it really close,
you can hear some guitar.
Decker: Right. But it's so
far away.
Kaa: Like the guitarist is
in the other room... I have
a version of "Can't Talk"
that we did on KUCI
radio. That song's just
manic. The ending's of an
undetermined length. It
could go on for twelve
bars or forty. It was just
way more intense. Drak at
Vinyl Solution
(Huntington Beach's premiere
punk rock record
store) would say to me -
this is previous to the last
few records - "You guys
are so great live but your
records never captured
that." I think "Beach
Blvd." did, for the most
part, we went in...
Decker: It was played
live in the studio.
Kaa: In "A World Apart" and "Big Fish
Stories," (Flipside, 1989) neither one of
them were we able to get our live intensity
across in the record. Because when you're in
the studio, I end up taking the time to make
a record, make things that are in the studio
cool, too. It's a different place. But on the
flip side, I don't want to make it weak, diluted,
and crappy. But it's nice - if you want to
put an acoustic guitar in one part, I'm not
going to be afraid to do that. It's okay to be
quiet for eight seconds of one part of one
song.
Brett Gurewitz was the
one - when we recorded the 35