An Interview with Mark Prindle

We are proud to announce the first Roswell Motorpark interview! We have several more on the way, but the Mark Prindle interview is the first that we have successfully posted. More to come soon.

Mark Prindle is an American and a music critic. His website, http://www.markprindle.com/, is home to boatloads of album reviews, from the Monkees to Slayer to Pavement, and interviews with rock legends and comedians. He can also be seen on Fox’s Red Eye occasionally. He was kind enough to do a phone interview. The call dropped halfway through and the data file I had been recording got corrupted. Prettay, prettay frustrating/embarrassing. I kept mum about it until near the end of the second half of the interview when I tried to ‘subtly’ mention that things had gone awry. The first half of the interview is a combined effort to recollect the corrupted half of the interview; the second half is transcribed verbatim. Portions of this interview originally appeared in The North Park Press from April 2009.

JEM: Markprindle.com has been up for 13 years now. Are you surprised it’s lasted as long as it has? How did it start?

MP: No, I’m not surprised. Not really. I took a break for about a year at one point, but it’s something I love doing. It gets me writing and I feel like if I wasn’t writing I wouldn’t be doing anything creative. It’s something I love, and I’m always going to be writing. It started because my brother and I moved to New York together in early 1996 and were talking one night, and he asked me, “If you were going to write a book, what would it be about?” I answered that I’d like to review every album I owned, and he said, “Oh, you could do that on a web site.” And I said, “What’s a web site?” He designed the original website layout, coded the HTML and everything, and that’s the way it’s stayed. That’s why it looks like it does, because I don’t know how HTML. I wouldn’t know how to update the design! But I keep doing it because it’s fun for me, and people seem to enjoy it.

Are you still making music?

No, not for awhile. There seems to be more attention and encouragement for my website rather than my music, so I mainly invest myself in my site these days.

Did you used to play shows when you did?

My high-school band the Low-Maintenance Perennials played three or four shows, my college band Lima played maybe three or four times, and then one time I did a solo show. But I haven’t done any since I moved to New York.

When did you start doing interviews?

About five years ago, when I lost my last job. I had more free time, so I decided to try to spruce up the site a little bit. I’d been corresponding with some artists through my web site over the years, so I started with them. Then I had some old interviews I’d conducted for my college paper, so I re-inputted those, and it grew from there. One of the interviews I was most excited about was my recent one with Ian MacKaye. I’d tried contacting him several times over the years with no success, but he apparently read the Black Flag interviews I conducted for Citizine – Greg Ginn, Kira, Henry Rollins, Chuck Dukowski and Keith Morris - and liked those enough to let me interview him.

Who have been some of your favorite interviews?

Well, I get excited over small things. For example, I loved interviewing the two guys from DRI. But one of the best is the one where I interviewed Billy Zoom, because I was really drunk when I called and got even drunker as it went on. So I kept repeating things and apologizing and forgetting what we’d already talked about, but he was really polite the whole time. Sometimes he’d poke fun a little bit, but he was just really nice. The David Yow one was awfully funny too. I don’t know; there are a lot of good ones! Even people who hate my writing style seem to enjoy my interviews.

Is there anyone that you’ve wanted to interview that you haven’t been able to yet?

Jello Biafra. I was actually all set up to interview him for a Canadian metal magazine, but when he found that it would be me conducting the interview, he told my publisher to re-assign it to a different writer or he wouldn’t do it. Apparently he’d seen my interviews with the other ex-Dead Kennedys, and was pissed off that I kinda sided with them. I apologized to him, but it’s pretty hopeless. He doesn’t trust me. Actually, a few years ago the Dead Kennedys got back together with a guy named Jeff Penalty singing for them, but apparently he eventually quit too. It turns out that he had a lot of the same problems with them as Jello had had!

Do you go to shows often?

Not really anymore. I just burned out on it because during college I would go to two or three a week. Once I got up here and had to start getting up early for work, I just lost all patience for it. I got sick of the heat, the crowding, and having to sit through boring opening acts. My wife and I will occasionally go see somebody if it’s at a sit-down place. We saw Norm MacDonald doing stand-up comedy not too long ago. That guy’s hilarious. His delivery is perfect. And we’ve seen Henry Rollins do spoken word, and Sarah Silverman. As for music, we saw Nick Cave maybe five years ago, and then Morrissey after that, which was actually pretty good. And I saw the Van Halen reunion show at Madison Square Garden, which was wonderful.

Did you get a chance to see My Bloody Valentine on their reunion tour?

No, though I did see them in college back when Loveless was released. They were playing with Dinosaur Jr. My wife was actually at that show too, though I didn’t know her at the time. I heard that the reunion tour was painfully loud, like you could feel a wall of sound waves wash over you.

Did you see the Pixies when they were still together?

Yeah, actually it’s interesting that you mention that because there was a place on campus – an actual campus building – that would occasionally host a rock performance. And the only two shows I ever saw there were My Bloody Valentine/Dinosaur Jr. and the Pixies! It was the Trompe Le Monde tour, with Pere Ubu opening. I remember a lot of people being really disappointed because they played so many songs from Trompe Le Monde, but I love that album so for me it was great. But I also remember Kim Deal looking extremely bored the whole time, so I guess their breakup shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Pere Ubu was really boring though. It was during that point in the early ‘90s when they were playing really streamlined, boring music. I had listened to some of their earlier stuff that I liked, but I don’t think they played any of it because I just remember it being boring.

Do you ever update the reviews that are already on the website?

Sometimes I do, like I rewrote most of the Rush page a few years ago. But there are so many things I’d like to change about those old reviews, and who has the time? Unfortunately a lot of my early reviews are the bands I love the most, like the Ramones, but there’s just too much on there to go back and edit everything, even if the older reviews don’t do service to the bands. So I keep forging ahead. I guess it’s good that my old writing bothers me now; it means I’m growing!

Have you reviewed any Guided by Voices yet?

No, not yet. I’m working on getting through the Gang of Four stuff right now; Guided by Voices is next. The thing with Guided by Voices is, well, on my own albums I’ll have a lot of different songs, but I try to make sure each one sounds distinct or different or something. But Guided by Voices put out all these albums with like 30 songs, where every song is just a basic pop rock song! How much effort could they possibly have put into making sure that each song was as good as it can be?

What were the first bands reviewed on the website?

AC/DC was the very first band on the website, and then Pink Floyd and some others. The way you can tell which ones are the oldest is by looking at the url – if there’s an out-of-place ‘a’ at the end, like www.markprindle.com/pinka.htm for Pink Floyd, then that means it’s from the first couple years of reviews. I may have added additional reviews to that page over the years – like the AC/DC site when a guy sent me something like 30 bootlegs for review – but the main entries on those are pretty old. I wrote them when I was in my early ‘20s.

Any bands that everyone tells you to review that you refuse to?

There are none that I’ve refused, per se. But if people expect me to spend my money on the full discography of a band I don’t even like, then forget it. If someone sends me the full discography of a band, there’s at least a chance I’ll review them some day, but probably not any time soon. There are just too many bands I already want to review. Also, I’ve been getting rid of a lot of CDs I never listen to – selling them on ebay because I’m out of work, and I’m glad because now there are certain artists I don’t even have to consider reviewing. Like Elvis Costello! I sold my entire Elvis Costello collection. I don’t know why I had those albums in the first place. Some of the music’s good, but I can’t stand that fucking voice.


Do you feel like websites like Pitchfork Media or Myspace have a positive or negative effect on music?

I wrote something about Pitchfork in one of my Hip Micro-Reviews recently. Let me see if I can find it. Ahh, here it is: “Shame on Pitchfork Media for influencing so many young people to play music with no guts or energy at all.” I was just joking though. Really, I think that the most negative effect on music right now is just the fact that the music coming out now isn’t very creative, but it doesn’t matter because it’s being pushed to kids who weren’t born until like 1996. So it’s easy for bands to just copy the sounds of earlier generations – like ‘60s r’n’b, ‘70s disco and punk, ‘80s new wave and ‘90s indie rock – because kids don’t know that they’re just getting cheap copies of music that was already ground into the dirt by weak imitators decades ago. Another problem is that there either there aren’t very many creative people in the world, yet they’re making music anyway because it’s so easy to make your own music and put it out yourself these days – or that there are a lot of creative people in the world, but they haven’t been introduced to enough different types of music for them to put it all together into their own unique sound. I was talking to another interviewer about this recently. I consider myself a fairly creative songwriter. Not everybody likes what I do, but it at least doesn’t sound like anybody else. However, when I first started playing the guitar, I was listening only to punk music so that’s all I was writing. So I was still the same ‘creative’ person as I arguably am now, but I hadn’t heard enough different types of music to inspire me to create my own sound. Incidentally, on the topic of my Hip Micro-Reviews, I’ve really been enjoying doing those and people really seem to like them. And it’s good because now I can open a Spin magazine or something and know all these bands they’re talking about, which I honestly haven’t been able to do in like 15 years. Some people ask how I can write off new bands after only hearing four or five songs by them, but look – I’ve heard over 20,000 albums. At this point, if I hear four songs by a band and they all sound similar and I HATE all of them, then there’s a pretty good chance I’m not going to like the rest of their discography. If I hear four songs and they all sound different from each other, that’s one thing, but that rarely ever happens. And there are some genres that just don’t appeal to me – like alt-country and alt-folk. I’m sorry, but no amount of listening is going to make me suddenly start liking somebody like Bon Iver. At least not until he loses that fucking falsetto and starts writing less boring songs.

Here begins the actual interview transcription. The following statement was in response to comments about the new nostalgia bands and high-school music trends:

But a good way to put it actually, is that, if you go back through time, you find that in the seventies music was all really mellow and relaxed and laid back, and then the punk rockers -- I mean a lot of people came along, the disco people came along, but punk came along and became more and more aggressive, and then Green Day came along and said “Well, okay, we like punk rock, but we’ll make it a little more accessible,” and they weren’t the only ones that did it, a lot of bands did it, but they were the ones that hit it big. They hit it big with this thing on the radio with people who didn’t know punk rock, so it made people think that punk rock is this thing ‘dun-du-dun-du-dun-du-dun’, a little simpler, a little choppier, and the guy sings with a snotty voice. So then a whole bunch of those bands came out, so the kids at that age, that’s what they were listening to on the radio, was the Green Day and Blink 182 or whatever, and those kids grew up and formed these new emo bands; at least I have to assume that that’s the problem. Like Fallout Boy, that kind of music. Which, it sounds like to me, when they were young they heard Green Day and said, “I’m going to do something like that, but, you know, a little more mainstream.” So we’re to the point now that this music that once started off so aggressive, in response to wimpy music, or what was perceived as wimpy music, is now wimpy music. But if you see these quote emo people, they’ve got really dark hair and dark eyes. Like, before I’d heard these bands, I assumed that new emo was either this ‘screamo’ stuff, you know, guys screaming and wailing, or maybe an even more depressing goth. You know? Just from their looks. And then I started listening to these bands, on Myspace, and was horrified because I had no idea that emo now means pussy pop music. I just couldn’t believe it! Because emo, to me -- I wasn’t into punk rock at the time emo started, but retrospectively I thought it meant Rites of Spring, and Embrace, and Dag Nasty, you know, really intense, fast, energetic music that was emotional. This new stuff is just bad pop music!

I think that’s why it’s been able to overtake the mainstream of what most high-school kids listen to is, because it is bad pop music. Because if it was something that still had some kind of countercultural, subversive sound to it, it wouldn’t be able to gain as much widespread popularity as it has been. I think it’s overrunning what most high-school age students listen to. And even into college age students still.

Really?

Yeah, not the majority, but it’s still present. A lot of college-age kids are listening to things like Radiohead and Coldplay and Dave Matthews Band, but it seems like there’s still lingering effects of emo music from high-school that transfer to these college age kids.

What year are you in college?

I’m a senior this year.

Oh, okay. So I was going to ask you, you haven’t been in high-school in a few years, but still, what were people listening to when you were in high-school? Obviously there are different groups. When I was in high school, I hung out with people who listened to old sixties music, or punk rock. But there were also little groups of metalheads who listened to really intense metal, and then there was the normal people, who listened to, in my day, it would be…Phil Collins, or that kind of thing I guess. But that was before Nirvana hit, basically. Really before Nirvana hit. So Guns ‘N’ Roses was popular, you know, that kind of thing. When you were in high-school, what were people listening to?

I guess a lot of girls were listening to Beyonce-type stuff, maybe Jack Johnson and I think a lot of guys were listening to things like Linkin Park…oh, who was the other one that I was thinking of that’s really awful?

Limp Bizkit? Staind?

Yeah! And Nickelback, Dave Matthews Band. And then a lot of my friends, we would listen to Radiohead, Pixies, and there were a lot of people that I knew that were really into pop-punk stuff, like Anti-Flag and Less than Jake.

Were there people, and when I ask ‘were there people,’ I’m kind of also asking ‘are there people,’ who were really into older music, be it eighties hardcore, or seventies punk, or sixties music, or were people mostly listening to their generation’s music as it were?

In my group of friends, some of us were really into sixties pop music like The Zombies and Donovan um, and…

Were you considered weird for it? Or do a lot of young people still listen to older music?

No, I think it was getting more popular. I mean, this was like when I was 15 or 16, so a lot of people were listening to The Beatles and stuff and warmed up to the idea. Because before, like in middle school or something, that stuff is something that your parents listen to, but in high school you kind of go through this process where you start to warm up to it. So there were a lot of people who were listening to The Beatles, and then there were people that I knew that really liked Velvet Underground…

See, that’s interesting to me because I was born in ’73, and you’re talking about people who were born in the eighties? The early eighties? When were you born?

’87.

So the sixties were a really long time ago for you guys.

Yeah, and for a while that was really some of the only stuff we were listening to. And a lot of it had to do with we were all kind of going through our parent’s possessions, like record players, and going through their old records, so we would get informed through that. My dad was really good about opening me up to a lot of old music that I hadn’t heard before, from the seventies, sixties, eighties. I grew up listening to a lot of Pink Floyd and Yes around the house, but I would listen to a lot of Radiohead that my dad would bring home, or Meat Puppets, Nirvana. I grew up in Seattle, so a lot of this stuff was very regional for me.

Oh, yeah!

And Screaming Trees and stuff like that.

Hey are—okay, sorry, I should quit asking you questions I guess.

No, no. It’s cool. Were you going to ask something else?

I was just going to ask if the Screaming Trees were any good because all I’ve heard by them is Uncle Anesthesia, which I wasn’t really too fond of. Have you heard their stuff before that, like their SST stuff or whatever?

No, I haven’t really listened to them since I was pretty little. The stuff that’s carried over from what my dad played a lot when I was younger is like Meat Puppets and Nirvana and Radiohead and Pink Floyd.

Here’s something I want to throw out there. This was something my brother mentioned to me a long time ago, so it really came from his mind, and I think I mentioned it somewhere on my site because I thought it was really insightful, and I should’ve thought of it on my own. It’s that, if you go back to that sixties and seventies stuff like Pink Floyd and Yes and uh…well, I’ll just start with those two. Even like Led Zeppelin or whatever. You’ve got to remember that these are people who grew up before Rock and Roll was even invented, or when it was just starting to be invented. So they all have backgrounds in different kinds of music, whether their families played classical music around the house, or played jazz around the house, or blues or whatever they played. All we have now is kids who have grown up on recent rock music. So, their influences are just not…their music isn’t going to be a conglomeration of different things, like you would get in the old days. Which is why…I really like Radiohead, I think they’re great, great songwriters, but quite frankly, Pink Floyd kinda did what they did, but with less pretty vocals. At least you can tell that they’ve heard Pink Floyd. I really do think that one of the big problems is that Clear Channel took over so many stations and made them where they played ten songs and that was it; ten songs over and over again, all day. I think that was a big issue. Another big issue was that MTV died. Because when MTV was around, they had to fill their programming with videos, before they started doing all the shows. So there was just tons and tons of stuff being played on MTV -- probably only about forty percent of it was any good, but at least it got played. Nowadays, where do you go to hear music? You go, uh…well, where do you go? Oh, they must read about it and then download it. Right?

Yeah.

They read about in Pitchfork and then go download it. That makes sense.

And it’s different too, because there’s such an emphasis on only digital music now, as opposed to actually having something tangible to pass around.

Yeah. And that’s another thing that my brother and I were talking about, or thinking about separately, just recently is how I still have all my dad’s old albums, and his old 45s, as well as strange records I’ve bought on my own over the years. You know, they’re these really old things that were never put out on CD that I have on album, and they’ll never be put out on CD. They’re just weird -- weird old sex records or weird old comedy records, or whatever, just weird old records! And, you know, unless there’s a fire or something, I’ve got this stuff. These are my possessions. Just like anything else I have as a possession, like chairs or computers. People who have their entire music catalog on MP3s, or computer-type stuff, what happens when we go to the next level and you can’t even play MP3s anymore because they’ve moved on to some better technology? Do they have to repurchase their entire stock? Like thirty years ago, thirty, forty years ago, you could get a turntable anywhere. These days, it’s harder to find a turntable. I mean, you can still find them, but you’ve gotta work for it. Same with VHS. If you’re still buying VHS tapes used like I do, it’s harder to find a VHS player. But my point is, twenty years from now, are people going to be going and buying really old iPods so they can listen to their really old MP3s, or are they going to have to repurchase their entire collection, or is it even going to matter because nothing goes out of print anymore?

I was going to ask you about exactly that, actually. Because The Beatles collection was just re-released on CD and the Pixies discography is going to be re-released on CD, but these are seen as some of the last CD releases, before everything goes entirely digital (though I don’t know how factual this is). But basically, I was going to ask what your thoughts were on all of this.

Man, I hadn’t even heard about that.

I was just reading about it the other day. I was talking to a guy, I volunteer at a home for the blind, and there’s a guy that I work with there who’s been really freaked out lately because he’s afraid he’s not going to be able to buy CDs anymore, and because the CDs are gone he’ll have to buy them digitally and that’s something he’s not able to do. And so I just heard about this extinction for the first time yesterday, and I researched it a little more after I talked to him. It’s pretty crazy.

Yeah, I know they’re not making any money on CDs…yeah, that’s sad, but one thing of interest though…well, for me, it’s kinda unfortunate because I would much rather listen to music on my stereo than on my computer, but that’s really just a matter of me getting better computer speakers. That’s really interesting. So that’s gonna make music a completely audio thing. There’s not going to be any visual.

That’s the thing, though. Because as I hear about CDs going out of print, vinyls seem to be becoming more and more popular.

Yeah, because the sound is supposedly better.

Yeah, that’s the big thing. And I think that people also just like having physical proof of bands that they like, and buying a record is the biggest and most aesthetically pleasing way to do that, I guess. But it’s been really great with the boom in vinyls, because a lot of them are the same price as CD, and then you can also get a copy of a digital download.

Oh! You buy an album and you can get a digital download for free? That’s nice.

Yeah, there have been a lot of record companies, well Touch and Go is gone now I guess, but I think they were one of the labels that started doing it, and then there have been others.

See, this is hilarious to hear you say that about CDs -- how they’re going to get rid of them completely -- because there was such, such pushback from people when vinyl was replaced by CDs. You know, there were artists saying, “Don’t buy my stuff on CD. CDs suck, vinyl rules.” Even recently – well, not recently, but more recent than that, when Shellac put out one of their albums, they put it out on CD and on album, and they didn’t announce this, but if you bought the album, there was a CD inside. So basically there was no reason to buy the CD. Which is…interesting. You know, there’s that new Neil Young song, that I just reviewed actually, where he says, “Download this, it sounds like shit,” which is probably a good point if you’re an audiophile and you want to have the best sound possible. But then again, I have two Gang of Four albums that are -- I bought them used, and I also have the same albums on CD-Rs, made from somebody else’s CDs, and those sound much better than my used albums. My used albums just seem to have been mixed too quietly, so maybe the CDs were re-mastered. I have to turn the vinyl up really loud and still the quiet moments are buried under even just really light *krsshhh*, you know that sound? It really buries the quiet parts of the song! So maybe vinyl sounds better than CD, but if so, it only does so for two or three listens before it starts deteriorating. And obviously the people that owned these things before I did listened to them like ten times, so now it’s just like, it’s not horrible, but the CD really enables me to really hear what’s going on. Which, with the vinyl, you know, it’s just harder.

They’ve been making a lot more 180-gram pressings, this super sturdy vinyl; with this, they’re supposed to be built to last and have the strongest vinyl sound.

Well, I do have plenty of albums that sound really good too, but they tend to be newer ones. Or newer reissues. Albums bought used and stuff, I mean, I’m not a huge audiophile. I have no problem listening to albums that go *krsshhh,* but it’s harder as a reviewer to tell what’s going on in the quieter moments, if they’re buried under *krsshhh*.

Are you excited about any of the three upcoming big releases? The Meat Puppets’ new album, the new Sonic Youth, and the new Bob Dylan?

Well, I downloaded the new Bob Dylan last night. On first listen, it wasn’t too impressive. But first listens can be deceiving. All I can remember about it was that one song sounds exactly like Tom Waits. Like, it’s unbelievable how much it sounds like Tom Waits. The voice and the music. The Sonic Youth album, I’m not thrilled or excited about it, but I liked their last album a lot more than I expected to. So, yeah, I’m looking forward to hearing that one. I didn’t know the Meat Puppets had a new album coming out.

Yeah, it’s called Sewn Together and I think it’s coming out in May or something.

That last album I liked but it was very, very slow.

That was Rise to Your Knees?

Yeah. What’s the name of this new one?

It’s called Sewn Together.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I’m going to pull it up on Amazon so I can add it to my wish list. Oh wow, yeah, the album cover looks like one of their old album covers.

Yeah, and they’re going to be on tour pretty soon to promote it.

Let me see…because there were a few other upcoming releases. Oh, the upcoming release that I’m looking forward to most is that Coalesce has a new album coming out. They’re a pretty neat band and they broke up several years ago, so the fact that they got back together and made an album is pretty exciting to me. It’s going to be called “Ox”. So that’s one I’m really looking forward to.

What’s Coalesce like?

I reviewed them on my site. It’s a combination of like metalcore and seventies rock and deathmetal, and they just a mix a bunch of different things up in their sound and they’re really good. I’m also looking forward to…The Meatmen have an album of covers coming out called “Meatmen Cover the Earth” and the cover is a cartoon drawing of the entire band ejaculating onto a globe, so that looks nice.

(laughs)

I’m looking forward to the new Iggy Pop album, which is supposedly a jazz album inspired by a French book that he read. I’m semi-looking forward to it anyway. And there’s others that I’m looking forward to for review purposes, like CKY has a new album comin’ out, the New York Dolls, or what’s left of them, have a new album coming out, and Eminem has—boy, his last album sucked total ass. But hopefully this new one won’t be quite as bad, although I am pretty sick of that guy. I’m doubtful that I’ll like his new album, but I’ll give it a chance. And both Tori Amos and Dinosaur Jr. have new albums coming out soon. Also there’s apparently another new live Yes album called Symphonic Live; I need to get that at some point. And I want to get those new Pavement reissues with the bonus tracks, I’ve gotta get these at some point.

Oh yeah! The last one was Brighten the Corners, right?

Yeah. I haven’t gotten either of the last two, the Wowee Zowee or the Brighten the Corners. But I love the two before them, so I’ve gotta get these…once I have a job and can spend money again. There’s a great site called Did it Leak, it’s diditleak.co.uk and it’s just a list of albums, and people get on their twitter and type in if an album leaks. So that’s how I got the Bob Dylan yesterday. And I also want to say something: I download these things, I listen to them for review, I put them on a disc, and I never listen to them again. If I really like an album, I want to get it on CD so that I’ll actually listen to it, because I never listen to my MP3 discs. So if what you’re telling me is true and stuff’s never going to come out on CDs, then I either gotta start listening to my MP3 discs or just stop…I don’t know. You know what I mean? For fun and good times I play music on my stereo, so…

Yeah, and don’t take everything I say as the gospel truth because I’ve only looked into it a little bit, so there could still be hope. But it does seem like CD production, and CDs in general, are kind of dwindling. And they’re getting a lot more expensive too, I’ve noticed. I was looking at some store the other day where I had remembered the CDs always being around 13 or 14 dollars, but now they were mainly around 18 or 19 dollars.

Seriously???

Yeah.

I thought they had lowered them! Nobody’s going to pay that much! You know, the only time I can imagine anyone paying that much is at a holiday, because at a holiday you just want to get this shit done. ‘Oh, I’ll get the new Springsteen for Dad. I’ll get the new U2 for Mom. Oh, twenty dollars? I don’t care.’ You know you’re going to spend 100 dollars on your mother, 50 dollars, ‘Okay, there’s twenty dollars for that, I’ll get a book, 200 dollars.’ That’s the only time I ever pay full price, and I rarely do even then, quite frankly. But you know, hopefully the rest of the world—see, people like me are the problem, not the solution. First of all, I never, ever buy CDs new. Ever. Even before downloading I would buy them used. Especially when you started being able to use eBay and Amazon and Half.com—you can always find stuff used for a better price in those places. Record companies aren’t sending out promo CDs anymore. That’s another way you used to be able to get so many of them used, because people would get the promo for free and then sell it. Well, that’ll be interesting. I’m kind of treating this whole “Hey! New album! Free download! New album! Free download!” thing as a temporary thing, because eventually they’ve gotta find a way to stop it; there’s just no way something this illegal can keep going for so long. But I’m just treating it like that. It really helps, as a reviewer, especially as a reviewer who has stuff on their website of bands I don’t like at all—you know, Tori Amos is going to keep putting albums out; I’m not going to be spending money on them. They better leak, or my site’s just going to fall into disrepair.

It’s been good for me as an occasionally unemployed college student, because I haven’t been able to afford buying albums, but being able to download them has allowed me to get informed about a lot of new bands that I’m able to support later when they come to town and tour; I feel kind of justified.

You should, because apparently it’s always been the case that they make most of their money on shows and merchandise. Like T-shirts and stuff. From what I understand, album CD sales are just for the record companies. They’re the ones that make the money, I think, generally. Unless it’s like a trillion, trillion seller. Like Nirvana got rich off of that album, but I don’t think it’s generally like that. For bands at our level. For bands we listen to. Britney Spears? Yeah, sure. Alright, well, did you have any other questions? I know I’ve kept you longer than you wanted.

No, no. This is great. Actually, I have some bad news…

At this point in the interview, I reveal that the first half of the interview has become corrupted because of a data file error and only the past half hour has been recording successfully. I will not post this portion here for the sake of brevity and pride. Needless to say, it was pretty embarrassing.

What five essential albums would you recommend to every college-age person? This is pretty much as broad as possible.

A college…well, geez…am I assuming these people don’t own any records? What level should I assume they’re at in listening?

I would say…

Actually, y’know what? Fuck ‘em! I’ll just say five albums I love and they better buy them. How about that? (laughs). Let’s see…the first Dirty Rotten Imbeciles album, that says college. Okay. You gotta have The Dwarves, Blood Guts & Pussy. Gotta have that. The Cows…actually, let me think about it. Don’t put those down. Every college student should own…what level do you think I should I say? ‘Well, yeah I want some Beatles?’ Y’know.

For people who have some working knowledge of music history, sixties, seventies, eighties. People who are more informed about music.

Oh, okay. Well I will go ahead and say The Cows, Cunning Stunts, because I love that album. Wire, Pink Flag. I’m really racking my brain here trying to…The Fall. What album though? You know what, forget The Fall. God, this is too hard!

Sorry, sorry. A few is fine.

No, no, no. I want to do this, because it’s an interesting question. Okay, let’s see. Forget what I said before. These are the real ones. I’m going to say five albums that I love, and other people can love them or hate them, I don’t care. I love the first Dirty Rotten Imbeciles album. I love Charged GBH, City Baby Attacked By Rats. Slayer, Reign in Blood. Oh, I gotta put The Cows on there. They’re too good. Put The Cows, Cunning Stunts. And how about Yes, Fragile.

Are there any so-called essential albums that you see as completely overrated?

Yeah, I can name some of those! Neutral Milk Hotel, under the whatever, the aeroplane or whatever. And Patti Smith, Horses. Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde.

(ten second silence)

I haven’t died. I’m thinking. I want to get a couple more good ones, even though you said just a few. That’s a really good question.

You’re not as big on Velvet Underground, right?

Oh!!! Perfect! Thank you! Velvet Underground & Nico. That’s enough. You nailed it on that one. I’ll also say this: I really like Television’s Marquee Moon, but I don’t know why it is so beloved, because it’s not that interesting a record. I think it’s really good, but I don’t see why so many people love it so much.

I like some of the Richard Hell & the Voidoids stuff better. Blank Generation.

Yeah.

I like Marquee Moon a lot, but Blank Generation’s way weirder.

Yeah.

I think that’s about all the questions I had really.

But that’s…you know…I’m just really, there’s this question about the five albums for college students. I thought of a new way to answer. I’ll answer as five bands that I didn’t get into until college. So, some of them will remain the same, but others will change. So my five now, will be: Wire, Pink Flag. That’s one. The Fall, Early Years 1977-79. Go ahead and put The Cows in, because I love ‘em. The Cows, Cunning Stunts. Ooh, ooh, ooh! Ween! Put Ween in there. Put The Mollusk. I’m in college now…who am I listening to? Ooh, Meat Puppets II…no, no. People would know that actually from Nirvana. Dump that and put The Jesus Lizard, Goat. You know, what you may want to do is just put every single one because I couldn’t decide. (laughs).

Yeah, I might do that.

That’s just too good a question.

Hey, thanks! I think that’s about all the questions I have. This interview will be greatly shortened for my school’s paper for space, but I was wondering if I could post the transcription on my website as well?

Absolutely. That’ll be good. That way you’ll definitely be able to get all my albums in. “No, no! I changed my mind again!”

(laughs)

You know, I really, really wanted to put Killing Joke in there, but I couldn’t decide on an album. Because it’s kind of like I love their whole catalogue, but on every album there’s one or two songs that aren’t as good as the others. Alright, well I better take the dog out.

Thanks so much.

Mmhmm. Thank you!

jem.