issue #02 pdf - Razorcake

Kaa: I wasn't yearning for that
much more because you're
already surpassing any goals that
you already had.
Todd: Have you guys ever been
courted by a major, if just for tax
relief purposes?
Kaa: Back in the day, a guy
named John Hewlett was a manager
of The Dickies.
Decker: Worked for A + M.
Kaa: Allegedly, he wanted us to
go on tour with The Dickies in
England, 'cause they were having
the "Nights in White Satin" hit. I
took a semester off from school
because I thought that was going
to happen. It never came to
fruition.
Todd: Is there any such thing as
the Crowd's "Revisited" cassette from
1994? It was listed on your website.
Kaa: Carl (their webmaster) took that off.
We recorded a demo for A + M at a place
called Sound Investment in downtown LA.
We never got any real tapes of it. It's really
the lost Crowd album is what it comes
down to. It was the stuff the original lineup
recorded after "Beach Blvd." and before "A
World Apart" that, would have been much
more of what people were looking for.
Todd: Name the Mouseketeer that charted
two slots below you on Rodney on the
ROQ's August, 1980 top twenty list.
Decker: That was whatshername. Annette
Funicello. I forget what the song was.
Dennis: It was from one of
ON “STARDOM”
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.
those "Beach Blanket
Bingo" deals.
Decker: In the Flipside (where the top
twenty was printed), it had a little handdrawn
wave.
Todd: You guys approached punk rock in a
fun and positive way. Where did that come
from? And as funny as it sounds, do you
think that was a liability?
Decker: Oh yeah. That was just our personalities.
How can you live here and surf
every day and be pissed off?
Kaa: That hits the nail on the head. It's
what it all comes down to. Luckily, none of
our parents are divorced. We're living in an
upper middle class beach community. Am I
supposed to be angry at my parents because
my dad worked hard and was a good guy
and because my mom was a housewife
and took care of the kids?
Dennis: [joking] If she was a heroin
addict that beat me, then I would
have made it.
Kaa: We just celebrate the culture
of the beach. "Suzy Is a Surf
Rocker," that's really the concept of
being tormented by the local surf
girls who sit twenty yards down the
beach from you and torment you all
day long...
Decker: Shooting beaver shots.
Kaa: And then tormenting you that
same night at the house parties. Our
themes were based on much more
relationship themes, which a lot of
traditional music was based on
before you had to be political about
things. I write songs about some
social things, but it's usually more from a
personal standpoint.
Todd: I would see that contiguous with The
Buzzcocks.
Dennis: They're all about love songs, basically.
Kaa: "What Do I Get?," "Love You More,"
and, again, I'm not advocating that every
song needs to be happy or "I love you."
Todd: You're being true to the environment
that's pouring into you.
Kaa: You had the guys in Fullerton (like
Social Distortion) getting beat up in high
school and everything. None of us got beat
up.
Decker: Right. The football team would
come to the house parties after the game.
Kaa: A lot of those guys were guys you
grew up with your whole life, so they
weren't dick jocks. They were guys you
knew, who surfed, and who you'd been
going to the beach with for twenty years.
So, when we started punk rock and people
came to our shows and parties, it wasn't just
certain people - "Oh yeah, you've got to
have a shaved head" or "You've got to have
black hair."
Dennis: There wasn't that many of us.
Kaa: Yeah, when you talk about being a
liability, I think a lot of people slam you
that you're soft or pop because you're not
confronting, "Kill, kill, government's ass."
[makes machine gun noises.] You can make
an album of that in an afternoon - of cliché
anti-kill-death. On the other hand, DOA's
"Thirteen Flavors of Doom" record, I listen
to that, and they're almost like happy songs
about the end of the world. If you listen to
our new stuff, we have a song, "When Satan
Smiles"...
Decker: The melody's real happy.
Kaa: But the lyrics are about bad people
doing bad things and making satan happy.
That's sort of the catch phrase in it. In
"Letter Bomb," Jim wrote those lyrics about
a Vietnam vet. It came from this guy in
Dana Point who went crazy and shot a
bunch of people.
Dennis [the mailman]: Postal worker.
Kaa: The whole postal worker goes crazy
thing, but the lyrics really talk about a tormented
person who's got it buried inside -
regardless if they're a postman or not - some
day it's going to blow out. Over time, our
optimism has been lost.
Dennis: With age, we've seen some dark
things. We just still write about them in a
happy way.
Kaa: In "Can Pipe" [hums in a lilting
melody] "I'm smoking crack all night on a
can pipe." It's a happy melody. That's a toetapper.
Decker: "What are those words, dad?"
Kaa: And that came from Jim working 3
AM shifts pumping concrete and watching
the crack addicts.
Sean: Jim, I see that your daughter's a little
bit of a Brittney Spears fan. How does Jim
Kaa of the Crowd go about obtaining a
Brittney album for his daughter?
Kaa: I haven't been forced to buy the
Brittney Spears, but I did buy The
Backstreet Boys one time. I went to
Tower and I found where it was and
what it looked like, and left it there.
And then I went and shopped at Tower
for all my other goods, and right before
I had to buy it, I put it in my stack at
the bottom...
Decker: We can get shit
built, torn down, and
financed.
Dennis: Kind of whistled up to the
register.
Decker: [in checker voice] "Excuse
me, are you sure you want this one?"
Kaa: You know what the really sad sign is?
I actually started to recognize those N'Sync
and Backstreet Boys songs when I hear
them in elevators and stuff. It's been a hard
thing to reconcile. Being a parent, I feel like
I'm going to live through my Limp Bizkit or
Crowd or Bad Religion that my kids will
bring to me, and right now, that happens to
be in the form of Brittney Spears and
N'Sync. It's my own poison I'm having to
swallow.
The Crowd can be contacted through their
website:
Check out The Crowd’s family tree
at
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