Episode 11: Phil Franklin (Caroliner, Faxed Head, Sunburned Hand of the Man)
The Who Cares Anyway Podcast ·
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Transcript
I mean, somebody asked me that years ago as an art student, would you still make art if you knew you were never going to be recognized? You know, you're never going to be in a gallery show. You're never going to no one's ever going to see your art.
The answer was yes, of course. Hello and welcome to episode 11 of the Who Cares Anyway podcast. My guest on this episode is Phil Franklin. Now, Mr. Franklin or Phil, if I may be so informal, is really someone who I should have interviewed for the book itself, given that he played in not one, not two, but three different bands that receive at least some coverage. And that would be Carolina, actually gets three different chapters, faxed head and the heavenly ten stems. What can I say for myself here? Well, because of the way things worked out, I had interviewed multiple members of each of those groups pretty early on in the process and I was aware of having a whole lot of material that I was already going to cut and so if I can make an excuse it would be that I feared having to cut even more material given that I would probably get some pretty
good stuff from Phil Franklin and so this interview here is in some sense a make good for the fact that I I did not interview him for the book but there's also a lot of other stuff that we get into that would have been beyond the scope of the book and that is because in addition to his time in San Francisco Phil Franklin has done quite a bit in other places on the East Coast both before moving out to San Francisco and after eventually moving back. I recently back in January of this year, had an opportunity to see a couple of those projects of his on one night when Sunburn Hand of the Man and Franklin's Mint played in Durham, North Carolina. And it turned out that on that particular night the lineups of those two groups were identical. The other members of Sunburn served as Phil Franklin's backing band during the Franklin's Mint portion and then he rotated over onto drums and they took off doing what they do as sunburned toward the second half of the set. What I did not know until sort of doing a little bit of additional digging and thinking maybe I should have him on as a guest was that he also did some very interesting stuff before moving out to San Francisco. In particular a couple of groups or acts with Chris Ballew who would go on to found the presidents of the United States of America and go on to some pretty unlikely but pretty big pop success in the mid 90s and so we connect back to that and then his time in San Francisco and what he's done since then with Sunburn and Franklin's Mint and sort of wind our way through all of the above. One little factual correction at one
point we were talking about a Carolina album that was mastered on to Wire Spool and I volunteered that that might have been Sell Hill Holler but no that's not correct. The album of Carolina's that was mastered on to Wire Spool was Rings on the Awkward Shadow, a double LP. So with that out of the way we'll go ahead and step aside and get on with the interview with Phil Franklin and it starts out with some discussion of Chris Ballew, how he got to know him and what those projects were that they worked on together in the late 80s. Yeah, I mean, we met in college at SUNY Purchase, and they had another band called The Sleep Standing that was more like, you know, The Only Ones or kind of English -influenced rock, you know. I don't know if I... Or post -punk. I don't even know what you call those type of bands, Buzzcocks or, you know.
And that was at the college band. And then Chris and I, after college, did the Dukes of Pop. We recorded that out in Seattle. And then we moved to Boston together, and we started that band Egg. And a lot of those songs became presidents of the United States songs and stuff. But that happened after we both moved away from Boston. I moved to San Francisco, he went back to Seattle, so. Okay, was it real, like a street busking kind of thing? Was that kind of the idea, or? That's kind of how it started. We used to busk in the subway and on the streets in Boston. Our first road trip across, My first time in San Francisco was a road trip in 87, and we played in San Francisco, we played in LA, we played in Texas, we went to Graceland, we were just driving across the country back to New York, and we just started playing on the street, just busking for money.
Was it just the two of you, or it just guitar and drums, like with brushes? Is this guitar? Yeah, it was guitar. And he had one of those little pig -nose amps, battery -powered amps. And then I had a little drum set, a little splash cymbal, some percussion instruments, I think pair of bongos and stuff. I mean, it was kind of very inspired by, what's the band, those two guys from New York. They have that record called Flood. Oh, they might be giants? They might be giants.
Oh, okay. It definitely took a lot from, you know, or Violent Femmes, you know. And so that was already a pretty big transition, but I guess thinking in terms of the age, it probably went from like, Borscht was probably high school then? Yeah. Yeah, Borscht was high school. It's funny because I met a lot of kids from the New York hardcore scene in college that were still playing hardcore, but I'd sort of moved on from just playing music like that. If I look at my quote -unquote career, I've jumped from a lot of different genres, playing playing a lot of different types of bands, even in San Francisco,
playing Fax Ted and then playing The Wandering Stars, which was like Christian country folk slash. Yeah, I didn't know you were in that. I would play their shows. I'm not on any of their records, But I was really into their music and knew John and Andrew, and I just got my way in there and so let me play drums for you guys. Okay. Because I saw them in 2002, it was a reunion show, but was playing drums and singing. So had thought that was how they. Yeah. But anyway, what you were saying about all the different kinds of. So, you know, I've always just been, you know, I don't have like a set thing that I do, you know, like I just play loud and hard, fast drums or something, you know, I played percussion for the Secret Chiefs, you know, I played in Heavenly Tense that like, there's all these bands I played in that, you know, they sound different, you wouldn't be like, oh, that's that guy who plays drums and, you know. And as I, as I, um, I guess I knew somehow vaguely, but I didn't, you know, when I, when I saw the show a few months ago, uh, you didn't play guitar and sing and write songs. So not just drums either. Uh, Yeah. That, well, that sort of happened when I moved back to New York finally and, or the East coast after San Francisco. So around 98, I left San Francisco in 97. And I sort of met the Sunburn guys again in Boston. And I started writing, you know, my own songs and they would back me up and we would just play Dylan covers. And, you Neil Young would just play other people's songs, my songs, Sunburns, you know, was just getting kind of started. They'd already had started, but they were sort of picking up steam and a lot of stuff happened in that time, the early 2000s for Sunburn that, you know, still, you know, paying off in dividends as far as getting the tour and make records. Yeah, and I would definitely want to bring it
back to that. I reminded of, when I was talking to, when I talked to Trey or I interviewed him a few months ago, it was just after, I think it was days or 10 days after I'd seen y 'all. Cause I saw y 'all on a Friday and I talked to him on a Monday, but we were, I was mentioning to him just seeing the show and I was kind of thinking, you know, I didn't realize he had done this and this other thing as well. And, but anyway, we kind of decided that you are New Weird America in a sense of encompassing the whole range of from Carolina, who else has done West Coast to East Coast, Carolina to Sunburned and all of that stuff. But maybe to bring it back to San Francisco, what led you out there? Was it personal connections or was it just a sense of the city? Well, when I first, people would always tell me about San Francisco and what a great city it is. But they would say, oh, it's really expensive.
People had grown up there when I was going to college. It was on the East Coast. What got me out there was my friend Eric Mark Cohen, who I went to SUNY Purchase with. He was a drummer for Carolina, and I'd gone out to visit him, and my ex -girlfriend, Kathy Fitzhugh and James Goode, they all lived in a house together, and I think I went to go see Carolina for the first time at the Chameleon, which was called the Chatterbox. Was that called the Chatterbox back then? Yeah, I don't know.
It had a different name, and that was the first time I saw those, Carolina. I don't know if I met them or met anybody, but I used to print shirts for Carolina in Boston. And I just was like pen pals with Grux, and we'd just send packages, he'd send me records. And then Eric told me he was leaving San Francisco and Carolina needed a drummer. And I wrote Grucks and said, you know, I'd love to come out there and play drums for you. And he's like, well, we got a room available for $150 a month, this little sewing room in their Victorian on Scott Street. Right, okay. And he's like, and we need a drummer. So I packed up and moved out there. Wow. Okay. So that makes sense because you also took Eric's place in the Job's Daughter's Heavenly Tentstown sort of continuum there.
Right. Right. Yeah. He was the drummer for those Job's Daughters singles. Yeah. Okay. So when you got out there then, that would have been like the... Was Dame Darcy still in it or was it Laura Allen at that point? Laura was in it. Darcy was still in San Francisco, but she was out of the band. She wasn't playing with Carolina anymore. It's hard for me to... I want to say it was 92, but it might have been the end of 91. I really remember. It's not like those records leave any clues as to what era they were recorded in, you know, sonically or otherwise. And, but 92 was the year that three different LPs came out, Carolina LPs. Oh, really? Okay. I can't name them off the top of my head. Cooking Stove Beast is Eric. Strike him hard and drag him to church, I might be on.
That might be the one, Because I, you know, all, you know, playing drums for Carolina, you know, making your own costumes was all part of the, you know, all came encompassed being in the band. I also brought silkscreening, you know, they had silkscreen covers before, I think, but I had a whole t -shirt and silkscreen set up at the house. So we started doing record covers and our own shirts and stuff. Grok was always doing that stuff anyway before I came along, but we really could do a lot more. And there was a single I put out on the label I had at the time, La Brea, which I think was the first Carolina single. It's like these two kids walking in the snow and has like this cloth glued on the back. Is that the one with the yellow cover? The yeah, okay. Yeah, so that was something, I think I asked to put that out. I think it was right before we did a tour, a US tour. So that tour might've been 94, 93. Yeah, that was, you know, I wasn't aware of any of that. I was still in high school at that point. So I didn't, I mean, I saw a version of Carolina in Chapel Hill in 98, but it was long, you know, that was a totally different incarnation of the group. I mean, that's where I was in college. And so there was, there were some people who were definitely fans around the radio station, like a few who had, who were familiar with earlier, but it's not like if you were outside, well, you wouldn't know, nobody knew who was in the band, really, at that point. Right. It was still kind of a guarded secret, I mean. Yeah, I feel like, you know, the statute of limitations is maybe up, or, you know, I did kind of wrestle with that early on in the writing process, and I mean, I still don't go through and say, partly because I don't necessarily know, but even if I did, I wouldn't say, you know, this person, this person, this person, but it still is quoting.
It's, all out there. I I was, I was thinking we were, you know, talking about like the residents and, you know, who was in the residence, but I think that's how people know who the residents are. Right. Yeah. Yeah. They've even posted pictures of them. Yeah. Yes. But that was also, you know, that was always a band And that I always looked up to and loved that idea of like, you didn't know who at all was in the band. Yeah. I actually got from, I asked some people, you know, who were around in the late seventies and the only people who really knew were people who worked with them in some capacity and others would say like, maybe they knew, but maybe if you pointed them out to me, they'd recognize them, but they didn't really, they really didn't know. Whereas with Carolina,
it seemed like it was a little more of an open secret if you knew people. But if you were somebody like me on the other side of the country and you, you know, it would be, you wouldn't have any idea and the names wouldn't necessarily mean a whole lot anyway, unless you were really included into a lot of other bands. Right. Right. Unless, you know, you're following, Right, if you're following all this other stuff. But yeah, I'm just trying to think as a drummer, or a musician in general, like the idea of, because at one point in the book I made an analogy that's maybe not very original, but thinking of, you know, Carolina as being like an alternate world kind of musical academy in the same way that Miles Davis, I mean, Sun Ra would probably be a more apt kind of thing, but Miles Davis in the sense that you would have all of these people passing through, often on their way to doing other stuff. It's
just that it wasn't in the jazz world. But on the other hand, you know, the kind of musicianship involved in Carolina is just a different kind of thing. But what was it that, as a drummer, that led you to want to play, kind of knowing what might be involved as far as like playing with bulky costumes on and all that kind of stuff? I guess, you know, when I used to listen to it before I was in the band, before I really knew what it was about, you know, you can't really make heads or tails of a lot of it after just even a couple listens. It really takes a while to get into it and to hear the parts and decipher the lyrics. But being in the band, I guess it's a little bit, you'd always hear about Captain Beefheart with these regiments and everyone's eating peanut butter and oats for a week and they're locked in this attic room. I there was a little of that sort of idea, you know, being in that band. But it wasn't. You weren't chained to your instruments. The doors were locked. But, you know, I always like the, you know, being in all these different types of bands and learning the songs, I was like the challenge of parts. And even if somebody else did the drum parts and like, oh, we want you to play this reunion show. Here's what you're going to play. Of listening to a drummer and learning what those parts are for a song or for a live show, even a one -off type of situation. So another band would be like the Secret Chiefs Three where I didn't write those parts. I'm not on the records, but I toured with them for a few times and did my best to learn William Wynott's percussion parts. And I knew Willie, he kind of got me that gig, and there's a lot of things that are on those records that I can't do. And they would either simplify it, or there was stuff that was sampled, certain percussion parts. And then when I worked with Danny Heifetz, who I still work with now in Australia, he's out here.
And there are things like that for Carolina that, you know, Grux would have a vague idea of what he wanted and he would just, you know, just make, you know, do like that, you know, fast drum roll and then go into a Cars beat and then, you know, do the, you know, there was a lot of pop elements that I think a lot of people wouldn't know that Carolina, that he would, you know, pick and choose of other, you know, mainstream music, you know, I mean, I just remember there was like a Cars thing. Do a Cars, you know, Ric Ocasek or whatever the drummer, you know, he wasn't the drummer, of course, but you know, some riff and just, just fuck it up. But yeah, you know, there's, there's a lot of, it's a lot of very, if you saw it laid out, you know, the ideas of, if you could write out the drum parts for Carolina and the violin parts, the banjo parts, anybody could play it, you know, it doesn't really, it almost had that sort of, I mean, I can't play a Miles Davis song, but, you know, or Sun Ra part, but if you were accomplished, you could play that music, I guess. But then maybe the question is, I don't know, if somebody were more accomplished, maybe not more accomplished, but if they
were a chops -oriented drummer, would they have to unlearn things to play that kind of music? or would they have to check their ego, or check their... Yeah, you'd have to... I mean, if you said, all I do is like these blast beats, you couldn't be in the band. You had to be open to... Yeah, unlearning or playing it in a fucked up way, you know. I guess, you know, if you had to be like, OK, don't use drumsticks here. Just use these weird sticks or something. Don't use brushes.
I guess being accomplished could also just mean just being open to any of the possibilities of how you play music. Being accomplished. That's a loaded term. I I guess, accomplish that. As soon I said it, it came out that I was like. Well, I said it, I before you, and I thought, well, yeah, it's that. Maybe I said it.
Well, I was just thinking because of a certain, it would apply to different instruments as well. I mean, I grew up, my instrument was guitar. And so there would be the guitar magazines where, yeah, they would feature other players. But the cover, say, in the late 80s, late 80s when I'm picking up guitar, You know, that's the Steve Vai, Joe Cetriani era. And those are kind of the ones with all the product endorsements and all that. And I imagine if someone's picking up the drums in the 80s, I don't know who the equivalent drummers would be. But there is that kind of orientation. And then the motivation to play with a Carolina would be almost a 180 of that.
Maybe. Maybe. It's just, you know, those type of, like, I grew up listening to say, you know, ah, what's his name? Well, Neil Peart of Rush, and the guy from the police, Copeland. Yeah. Stewart Copeland. You those type of drummers where, like, I just remember the, like, cassettes of myself when I was, like, 14 playing, you know, some police song and singing along, doing the drums, 15. And like those drummers, you know, just ridiculous to me, like, especially Neil Peart with all his, you know, percussion instruments and just like parts you need a thesaurus to, you know, understand the lyrics and stuff. But, you know, those types of bands, Yeah, Carolina was totally not like any of those bands, but yeah. Was it, I don't know, was it at all confining in a way, like in a narrow kind of like, they're only going to do this kind of stuff?
Or did you feel like as a drummer, was it, I don't really know where I'm going with this, but I would sometimes just wonder about like, for anyone playing in Carolina, they would have to basically almost like surrender a part of their personality to this entity, that's this anonymous entity, and with that, you know, really more so than in, I mean, maybe not more so than other bands, I'm not sure, but like it seems to me that there's a lot of surrendering of kind of, at least on the surface level, like individuality for this collective thing, but maybe there was more room for like individuality than there seemed from the outside? Well, like you said, you could never tell
who was in the band seeing the show. And that was a big part of like, Crux's thing, not to have this big ego and stuff. And it was sort of, it was his band. I let's be honest, you know, Carolina is the singing bull. Yeah. And you know, the whole story behind it, you know, finding these books of lyrics and that there was a singing bull. And now we're just, this band is just doing his songs from the 1800s. So it's already like removed from, you it's not even his band, you know, we're just, we're in service to the music. And that's really what we were, you know, we were, he would come up with some parts, he said, this is my idea for this song. My biggest, you know, regret is that, and again, this was part of the process and the beauty of Carolina was that it wasn't recorded in a proper studio and that things were more defined and clear, you know, if you wanted that. You there was, I was thinking about this one record that was mixed onto Wire Spool, I forget which record it was. And, you know, I just remembered it sounds horrible, but Wire Spool would sound horrible if you recorded a band on any band on... I think Heel Holler, I I that's... Is that what it is? Oh, it's like a bird on... I think that's it, but I'm not 100 % sure. I again, even after...
I mean, there's a Cliff Notes document that you might be familiar with that Brandon prepared and shared about where things were recorded, and some of them were recorded at Brandon's place in Richmond, and then some of it was recorded at Greg Freeman's studio, but was that mostly where you were recording? No. So I had never been there with Carolina, but yeah, Lowdown. Well, it's a funny story, and maybe you've heard this from Brandon or somebody, but after we had all left the band, we went to Lowdown and tried to record our own Carolina record without Grux. I never heard this. And was gonna, all right, now I'm probably, you know, I'm still friends with Grux up to now. Let's see what happens. Okay. I mean, the idea, this never, it never got finished, never came out, but we recorded this record. And the idea was with these ex -Carolina members, and then was going to get somebody to sound like Grux to sing like Grux and put out this Carolina record, just release it out in the wild.
And again, this is kind of like when Grux and Plainfield did that Jello record. I was going to say. It was like a little taste of his own medicine. And he may have loved it. Grux may be like, oh, this is like, if it sounded good and it would have been good. I remember some of it was recorded, you know, I don't know if it's 24 track, maybe it was, but it was, there was a lot of ideas on that that Brandon had. And I think Laura might have been involved. Maybe she wasn't involved at that point. I don't know. I know there was talk of getting like, Greg to sing on it. Trey might have been part of it. It was definitely, you know, all the people in that circle trying to finish this record and if Brandon still has it, you it would be amazing if that ever did could get finished.
Were they were they songs that were in the repertoire already or were they? These were like, I think we just wrote all these new songs. I think it was it was going to be this, you know, 12 song record, but recorded really well. And that's kind of my biggest regret with Carolina. All the other, you know, I mean, there are, I haven't even listened to a lot of those records in years, so I don't even know like banknotes, dreams and signatures. I that was recorded a little bit better. It's funny, and just to bring this back to my present, you know, and I have my band where I play guitar and write songs. And that's sort of like my great love, you know, that's what I love to do is just write songs. You know, I don't have any other, you know,
ideal of what's gonna happen after I write the songs and try and record them the best I can. But a band like Sunburned also like Carolina would just record stuff on MP3 cassette. There's still stuff coming out that was recorded, in the 2000s, maybe even like the late 1900s, when they started. And the recordings are pretty dirty sometimes. They don't sound as good as when recently they've been going into real studios with a producer or a engineer and recording these songs, these records that I think are far superior than this other stuff, more concise songs or more concise ideas. And the quality is very good. Now, yeah, they're on three lobes, and there's a record coming out in October. We just did, we recorded in January, and it's got a lot of vocals, it's got a lot of spoken and word and poetry, and it just sounds so good to me, when I listen to other Sunburn records, comparatively. If Carolina had something like that, I would love to have just one record that was quote unquote slick, it would still sound insane. And you know, you don't need to have it all muddy and recorded, you know, on wire spool. Right. Yeah, that's kind of like, yeah, I understand it. It makes perfect sense, you know, you know, it's like, yeah, it seems like maybe there was some concern again, I can confess it fear earlier, the wrong word, maybe not, maybe concern isn't the right word, but the idea of this being slick. And again, it's so far from that, from being that, like, I mean, I think you could probably put Carolina in the same studio setting where Steely Dan recorded and it still wouldn't be slick. Right. I mean, it would still, there would still be a lot of, of, it wouldn't, or it may be slick isn't the right word. It wouldn't be obvious music. If you talk to, excuse me. If you talk to Brandon again, ask him about this record. Okay. Cause I'd be curious to hear if he still has the tapes, if more was, if vocals were ever added to it, cause we were just doing the music. Okay.
And then again, like I said, they're going to get somebody, you know, you know, who knows, it could be a big celebrity name, you know, vocalist, who could do what Grocks does, you know, and just have some crazy name. Maybe they could have got Jello to sing on. Well, you know, the Magic Band, it wasn't a new album, but with John French. It was like 2003. So I interviewed him because I was briefly writing for a publication where that came up as an opportunity. So I interviewed John French and it was right around the time they were doing this Magic Band tour with kind of a reconstituted, like it wasn't a particular lineup that had ever played together, but members from the Magic Band. And he did the vocals. And it sounded amazingly similar to Captain Beefheart, like eerily similar. But was almost like the way he was talking about it, it was almost like some kind of therapy or like to be able to do this stuff and come back to it because he almost described it as like what you were saying earlier about peanut butter sandwiches and an oatmeal, you know, as being like a really kind of not traumatic, not cult -like, but kind of like talking about in the same way that one might talk about a difficult family situation, growing up under a domineering father and sort of like having these issues that needing to achieve some
kind of closure. As far as like seeing the positives in it, but also feeling like he never got credit for the stuff that he did, or that he was doing all this work in service of someone else. And I can only imagine, like, yeah, but anyway, Yeah, I yeah, it was a different, I mean, yeah, it's a different band, a different time. I mean, it, I could go back and describe all these, you know, things I remember about Caroline, about, about Grocks, about 539 Scott, about, you know, the band on tour. But ultimately, it was a joy, you know, it was fun. It was really fun. It was great to be were part of that band. And you said, it was something going through that, you know, coming to San Francisco, being in Carolina for two, three years, I felt like, you know, I could beat any band after that, you know? And I, like I said, I was playing in all these other bands at the time, doing other musical projects and stuff. So even though Carolina might be like,
you have to play like this, and you have to wear this crazy costume on your back, and you have to do all this stuff. I could then go play with, you know, the Wandering Stars and just play, you know, kind of country, you know, Gene Pitney style drums, you know. Or you could play with Fax Head and wear another crazy costume. Yeah, another box on your head type of band. Did that, did that, because you replaced a different drummer in that, but how soon after After you got out there, did you end up in FaxTed? Not too long after. I just found a photograph. I was a roadie before I was the drummer. So there's a photograph of them playing at the Chameleon. And I think his name was Scott? Scott, yeah. Scott. And he was Washington DC head. And it's just me and Brentley Pusser as roadies. Okay. He was he was shithead and I was fuckhead or something. I forget what my name was as a roadie, but it wasn't soon after that first single came out. I think I was a roadie for two or three shows and then I became the drummer. There's a track on a compilation and Accredited Defects had roadies. Is what? It might be, but I think that's after, I think that's when I was in the band. That might be Harvey, Harvey, Brantley. Okay. Was there another roadie? I don't know, but I think it was the tribute to Hannah Tarasch or something. Right. And that connects into the whole Japan angle. And you did have two different trips to Japan, right? with Carolina and then with FaxTed?
That was my only two trips so far. Only trips. Yeah. Of the people who went to Japan, Brandon was the only one I was able to talk to. And so he has his view of it. But I mean, the main thing he told me was that it was just completely unprecedented for being in Carolina as far as the treatment
or the audiences and there was just the overall reception. but do you remember anything that stands out about that? You know, I was trying to remember a lot of it. I, you know, I remember we played Bears, the club in Osaka, which is still there. I just, I just saw Aaron Dilloway played there and I wrote, is that the same Bears? He's like, yeah, it's the same, same club. And that was a small, you know, chameleon like type club, as I recall.
I think we opened up for the Boredoms, and that was a big show. I'll be honest with you, I remembered parts of taking the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka, or going to Kyoto to the temples, just as a tourist. Yeah, just being put up in Japan just to go there was amazing. and Fax Ted also, I memories of these shows. I there's that video, like three cameras and the way it's edited, and amazing to me that all that happened for those bands. And it's like, I wish we were still doing this more of that kind of stuff, you Well, Fax Ted in Carolina, I think, has been back to Japan, and the Crux has gone back there as Rubber O. I think so, but yeah, it was sort of unprecedented that we got to go there and play, and I remember making a lot of costumes and you traveling on the train with our, you know, guitars. And good thing about Japan is a lot of these clubs have drums, have amps already there for the band.
So was... Some people described like playing over there, whether it was Trey with the fax head or Brandon, I can't remember exactly, but as if like the noise thing over there it already happened. And a lot of these people are sort of almost coming out of retirement. But from my perspective, I was just finding out about that stuff, maybe even after. And lot of those, I like MertzBau is still doing stuff, certainly, even the Boredoms did that Super R. So a lot of that stuff, I mean, it wasn't dead by any means, it seems like to me. bit. I didn't feel that way. I really know a lot of these bands, Masana, Soulmania, which I think Soulmania just played with Aaron in Japan. Like, yeah, you think of like, oh, these Noise guys, are they still doing stuff? I guess they are, you know? I mean, there are other, I'd love to go back, you know, and being in Australia right now, I'm like, I got to find a way to go back to Japan because it's, I'm so close. But I mean, Sunburn would be the closest band that I could maybe go back with, and Sunburn
I think would be, if they could arrange a tour there, they'd be welcomed by audiences there, hearing them. But at that time, yeah, it was just a big adventure to go there and get to play and and get get to stay there for a while. It seemed like there was definitely a lot of mutual appreciation. Well, I don't know about a lot, but a certain amount between Japan overseas label and Banana Fish, you know, things in San Francisco covering or releasing or distributing Japanese stuff and the Japanese label at least putting out some San Francisco stuff. and there was a quote that I found in this zine called Browbeat that had an interview with I from the boredoms and I quoted it at the top of the Carolina in Japan chapter but he basically has said that you know San Francisco is more more more crazier or something like that as is basically he looked and what he's seeing what he knows of Carolina, FaxTed and whatever else,
he sees that as San Francisco from Japan and sees that and thinks, wow, what is this place like? And people in San Francisco or in the U .S. we could look at Japan and say, boredoms, Masana, Murtzbau and all this stuff. That's the craziest place in the world. But then it's in both places, it's a very, very, very tiny sliver of the population that's gonna be interested in these things. But yeah, I mean, both those musical communities, yeah, it's extreme, right? It's like taking it to the extreme. And, you know, you mentioned New Weird America and how, like, you know, that wire cover about Massachusetts, mostly, and that kind of free folk, New Weird America, you know. Again, it's like, you know, it's somebody writing about it and coming up with a term like that and it just sort of sticks and it's interesting to be associated with something like that. I I never really thought about this when I was in San Francisco and playing with these bands, you know, it was just making music and people that became friends and getting to play, getting the tour, getting to play, you know, music in other places. But yeah, Japan always seemed like this, the more insane, crazy culture to me, being on the outside. But I'm sure if I grew up in Japan, we're in all these bands, you know, she could be like, oh, you know, I got to get into the boredoms. Like, that's like my dream.
And like, if I was Japanese, maybe I thought came from a different culture. But yeah, those bands, I don't really, I still don't follow a lot of, you know, what happens nowadays in Japan or San Francisco, and San Francisco, I guess, has changed tremendously. I'm sure Japan has too, but the fact that like bears is still there, you know, I mean, the chameleon, I think is now. I don't even know, it turned into the elbow room. No, no, not, that's not true. It turned into amnesia. Sorry. Amnesia. Yeah. Amnesia. Elbow room, I think. It was a different space. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, amnesia. I don't know if that's, if that's what it still is. I'd say I can't remember, but I don't, that's not for me. Last time I was San Francisco was about nine years ago, so. It changed, yeah, apart from last week, it was 2016, and it was a big, it was already a big change. I mean, you'd see one place that's like, that place is exactly what I remember. or, and then next door might be completely different, or, yeah. And, and yeah, it's, that's a whole nother, nother story. But oh, so back on the new weird America, I guess, well before I forget, then I'll backtrack to another question. But when that came out, like, did you feel like, because if I look back at say, like, San Francisco of the early of the 90s and that kind of period, there's still, I wouldn't even attempt to give it a label, but it's almost like retrospectively or retroactively, that was almost pre -New Weird America. And, you know, you could throw in, say, Sun City Girls and certain things that were happening in the 80s and 90s, but there wasn't a name for it then. And then and only when this new weird America comes in,
it's not the exact same thing, but when I saw you all play a few months ago, it kind of hit me that, and when you did a Sun City Girls song, and kind of the way that you all approach playing and the looseness of it, or the allowing for certain things to kind of, mistakes or wrong notes to kind of be part of the process, or maybe they weren't wrong, but like, you know, but it's definitely not like, it's just a different way of musicians interacting than somebody who, you know, somebody grew up practicing or, you know, recording in Cubase and Pro Tools with a click track
or just, it's a totally different way of like a group, even if it's not totally improvisational, even the songs that y 'all playing or played with a certain kind of looseness. And I was thinking, well, the last thing I can really remember seeing that felt that way was Sun City Girls, and then I'm kind of stepping back and saying, well, all of this stuff, you can kind of see it as a continuum. But 2002 or 2003, whenever the new Weird America thing comes out, I don't know where I'm going with this. I don't know if it felt like, is it really new? Or does it felt like I'm just doing the kind of thing I was already doing all along, and they're just giving it a new name?
Well, it's funny you bring up the Sun City Girls because I met Alan and Rick and Charlie, you know, through Grux. Grux playing me their records and back in 94, 95, you know, and we'd go up to Seattle and play with them. They'd come to San Francisco, they'd play with Carolina, you know, everyone sort of knew each other. Trey knew those guys, Brandon, you know. And then coming back to the East Coast and playing with Sunburned, they on their own sort of made contact with them. And had a few shows with the Sun City Girls in Boston on the East Coast.
I don't know if we ever played their place in Seattle, but we played, you know, now I can't really remember if we played with the Sun City Girls proper, or do maybe just Alan, Alvarez B. I know... They were the master musicians of blank that were also going kind of in the same... Yeah, and the Diminished Men, we met those guys. But it was funny just to have them as sort of this anchor between those two bands. Because I remember when I first joined Sunburned proper, where I wrote to Greg Turkington. I you know that band Colonel Truth, the Berkley Street Cougars? Like, yeah, I joined them, East Coast version, for real. And, you know, back then they were very much like barefoot hippies, dogs, playing bongos in the dirt type of band. You know, but great, you know, and, but had so much more than that. But yeah, New Weird America, I guess I like that term. I don't have a problem with it.
I don't really know what it means. It's, I guess, musically, bands that fall out of the proper way that you play music. There's a lot of bands in New Weird America then. I guess the main difference between the way that was at least characterized in something like a Carolina, for example, would be that there was more of a, dare I say, like hippie -ish framing of the New Weird America. It was kind of like taking some elements of psychedelic era, hippie era music, but explicitly not being jam bands in the jam band circuit sense. And but like being experimental, but also there was a certain kind of looseness to it that was that, but, but still, I mean, even Sun City Girls, like when I taught, when I interviewed Alan Bishop for, for this thing, you know, I asked him what, what, how they perceived San Francisco back in the days. And he was saying that, you know, that it, it represented, you know, not just what was going on at the time, you know, whether it was maximum rock and roll, but, you know, search and destroy research, but also beats, which they were interested in and the hippie era. And he said that, you know, a lot of their friends in San Francisco weren't interested in that stuff, but he saw all of it. And if you listen to them and, you know, torch of the mystics, it's kind of like one foot in psychedelic hippie stuff, but it's still coming out of this after punk post -punk kind of thing. So it's, it's kind of walking a, kind of walking a tight rope between not just being cheesy, hacky sack, drum circle, hippie music, but on the other hand, it's taking some stuff from that. I don't know.
Yeah, well, kind of like how I was thinking, how I mentioned before, there was this 50s jazz and beats thing and writing, the 50s, early 60s, and then the whole hippie, you know, hate Ashbery scene, whether you like it or hate it, a lot of those bands, like growing up, the first Jefferson Airplane record I heard was After Bathing at Baxter's, and that record is off the wall. That's a bonkers record. You know, whether you're into punk or, you know, 60s music or jazz, you listen to that record and that's like a true, amazing psychedelic record. And I don't know if you know that record, but that was like the first taste of San Francisco I had being, I don't know, 12 years old, 13 years old, hearing that. My father had all these, you know, Columbia House records that he must have gotten, you know, like. And it's funny, I just wrote a story about this, I'll send it to you, about Columbia
House Records, 10 CDs for a penny. He must have did this with records in the 70s, because he had like Jethro Tull, Benefit, he had Rolling Stones, Flowers, and he had After Bathing Baxter's record. My father was not into any of this type of music, he was into opera. So I don't know what they were doing on our record shelf, but I would just sit with headphones on and listen to these records, you know, before I even played music, before I played drums, or right around the time I started playing drums, which around 12 or 13 years old.
But yeah, San Francisco, it has that draw. It has this weird, there's something in the water, there's something, you know, in the land that probably if you went back to the Native Americans, the music that was happening on that piece of land, there's something there, you know, there's undeniably something under the ground, in the air, in the water, I don't know. And yeah, that's kind of my favorite time, you know, of making music, being in a city and just living life with San Francisco from 92 to 97, those five years, six years. Was, was there anything particular that, that led you away from San Francisco before the sun burned? Was it, was there any, uh, thing that drew you back there or was it just getting out of San Francisco? Well, yeah, it was getting out of San Francisco. Um, I mean, you know, I'm from the East coast. Yeah, it was just coming back. You know, I didn't really have a definite reason, you know, I definitely got into some bad habits coming back, you know, which threw a wrench into a lot of music making activity, AKA drugs, but other than that, that was a detour, a big detour, which I'm happy to say I have left behind finally. There's a song about that on the Franklin's Mint CD. Yeah, that last Franklin Mint record, Temporary, is a lot about becoming sober and, you know, not drinking anymore and not getting involved in that lifestyle. But yeah, for a long time, the East Coast had that draw on me, you know, I mean, you There's heroin in San Francisco, but somehow being in New York City and it's close to the confines of New York City
has always had a pull on me. Yeah, it's just my personal history. It's not a sunburn thing. It's not a band thing or music thing. It's just something that's always been inside of me. You know, and yeah, getting sober, being welcomed again in the Sunburn Camp, because for a long time I wouldn't tour, I wouldn't play with them, you know. You know, it was just a mess. And stood by me, you know, as friends, as people. And Greg and, you know, Danny and, you know, people from FaxTed, you know, just, it's just great to, you know, to be sober and to still be friends with these people after all these years, be able to maybe do future musical projects together.
So, yeah. I mean, I've certainly, I talked to a lot of people from the early era of the punk era, and these things were really prevalent. And I was maybe naive in thinking that that wasn't something that surfaced later on, it wasn't as prominent, at least. Yeah, I mean, a lot of those bands in San Francisco at that time, nobody really did, it wasn't like hanging around and drinking and doing drugs and like, yeah, let's play some music now. And Sunburn had a little bit more of that, East Coast had a little bit more of that, you know, not, you know, not hard drugs per se, but just practices at eight o 'clock and show up at practice.
And we had a case of beer to drink before we actually played music, you know, like that was still happening, you know, and, you know, whether it added to the music or not, that's not really relevant. Yeah. You know, if you like to drink, you gotta drink. if you want to get drunk, right? If that's what you want. But if you're happy just to play music and get serious, well, then don't bring any beer. A little tip to the kids out there. It's just something, you yeah, San Francisco, there was plenty of bands that were of like, you know, getting high and getting fucked up. But the bands I was associated with and where my head was at, I was trying to keep away from that. And I did. Soon as I got back to the East Coast, that all went out the window. So, you know, that has more to do with me and my environment and just whatever, you know, my will. But yeah, I'm sure in San Francisco
So all those, you know, pre kind of Amarillo, just to put that under an umbrella, bands, you know, grugs would tell me stories of living with, uh, uh, well, shatter, I think you lived with them for a while and you know, yeah, it's crazy stories of, you know, drugs and whatever. Yeah. I didn't feel like, on the one hand, I'm not getting into detailed accounts that would glorify it in any way, like any kind of poetic portrayal of it. On the other hand, I'm not moralizing about it because it's kind of like from the quotes from different people, you just kind of see what happened. I mean, you know, you just hear what happened and it kind of speaks for itself. But on the other hand, it's not going out and scolding people for past decisions because it's kind of like, those are the decisions or those are part of people's things that they've dealt with just like everybody else deals with stuff.
Yeah, it's out there, right? You know, like I remember, you know, there are certain things like I've never murdered somebody but I don't want to murder any, like that's not my thing, you know, but sticking a needle in my arm, I always wanted to try it. So I did, you know, it's like, it's like, what do you want to do? You know, you know, I'm not proud of it, but I don't regret it either, you know? So I'm glad I'm still here to talk about it because there's plenty of people I know who,
you know, didn't make it, you know? Yeah, I only picked up from the Franklin Smith album. I gathered that there was some sense of, you know, it's not nostalgic, but there's a past feeling about it, but only little bits of it would relate overtly to that. I'll have to listen to it again. Right. Well, I mean, this is sort of in the back of my head, like that's kind of the first record I wrote after getting clean and stuff. A lot of those songs I think subconsciously refer to it in some way. I mean there are certain songs that are very obviously about it. Did you feel like that with Franklin's Mint, I almost hear it as a continuation of that of like Ag and Duke's A Pop kind of era stuff that you were doing? Yeah, in a little way. It's definitely, you know, more structured. You these are like these songs I, you know, and not to like compare myself to Neil young crazy horse. But that would be like, sort of how we go about recording and doing those songs. It's like, you learn it just enough and then record it or play it, you know, whatever happens, happens. If it breaks down in the wrong place, you just go with it, you know, there is still sort of this improvised form within the songs. And especially when you saw us play like, you know, me Me and that drummer, John, we've played together for a long, long time. But the other two guys was the first time playing in Franklin's Mint and were not sort of structured song guys per se, you know. So I don't know, especially that show you saw was not very good, in all honesty. It was hard to know what to measure it against, but I mean, it was clear that nobody in the
band was the kind of person who's going to say, I missed this part, we must start over. Like everybody's pretty much rolling with the punches or going with the flow as far as, you know, if you played the wrong note here, you just get back on the next chord or try to figure out where the next chord is. And that process of sort of, say in the 90s, I got a chance to see some of the 60s free jazz guys. And I don't mean to like make it sound, you know, it's kind of like that that's a way of playing that people can learn but it's not really, that's going to come naturally. And I was realized that, you know from when you came up playing music you're not that much older than me. I mean, I don't mean to make you sound like old, old but like that, that, that like the era in which you learn music is it's, you know, it is you know, pre -digital and it is in addition to all the like different experience you have playing different kinds of music But it struck me as that you all have something as a group that you don't just pick up by just picking up instruments or learning, even like learning, watching YouTube tutorials or something, that kind of thing. It was like it's an interplay thing.
And even if you don't have, yeah, sorry, I'll stop there. Well, I was just thinking coming up in the pre -digital, like now if I want to learn a song I will sometimes go to YouTube and you realize like oh that's how you play it like these songs that used to seem so difficult and these chords and of course like you mentioned Steely Dan like I just learned a Steely Dan song but it doesn't sound like Steely Dan just playing it on acoustic guitar but you can really learn all these chords and then you can use those chords in one of your own songs. And that's usually what I do. And I learn a new chord, I'll write two or three songs with that chord in the song and then pick the best one that I like. But that's just, you know, Franklin's Mint has always just been about me writing songs and getting these guys to play with me. Now I get Danny and Bear here in Australia.
you know, they have their own thing, but we're happy to play with, you know, they're happy to play with me, and I'm glad that they do play with me because it's always been better for me to play with people who are better than myself. I that's probably true for a lot of musicians, you know, that it pushes me to try and be better because I'm more of a, I think of myself more as a drummer than a guitar player and songwriter, But that's really what I love to do. And, you know, if I could go back, maybe I would just do that from the beginning. But, you know, I picked up, I picked up drums because where I grew up, there were six or seven guitar players on the street. And they're like, we need a bass player or a drummer. I'm like, well, I'll be a drummer. Okay. Yeah. I wasn't sure which one you'd picked up first, But from seeing that Borscht video, I knew that you were playing drums from an early age at least.
Yeah, you know, pre -hardcore, pre -original music, you know, I would play like, get together with the local guitar players who are all older than me and play, you know, Eric Clapton songs, Cream songs, Jimi Hendrix, you know, like, just play all the 60s blues oriented rock and roll, you know, jam music, I guess, you know, they just want to play, you know, leads endlessly while a drummer and a bass player would just be in the background. But yeah, that was just sort of my first bands. It's funny, I just contacted somebody from my high school, this guy Jim Ehrlich, James Ehrlich, and in high school, you know, I was playing in Borscht and I, you know, would play whatever, just songs, structured songs, but there was an early band that I was in called Oddbah. I never put out anything. And was just, we just, you know, either just be under the influence of something or just just playing music, just write these weird songs. That's kind of pre -Carolina and sunburned type of band. And he's going to send me a CBR of some of the songs because I haven't heard him in 20 years or something.
How do you spell it? O -D -D -B -A -O -D -B -A. Okay. There's nothing on YouTube. There's nothing anywhere. Therefore it doesn't exist. No, no. That's interesting. I mean, because getting back to the Franklin's Met, I mean, you mentioned Neil Young, but that your songs still have again to bring up Alan Bishop as a reference point, some of the Alvarez B, I mean, in one sense, it's kind of, it's this idea, it's the singer -songwriter thing, but it's bringing in these elements that you're not really going to hear. You can't point to them and say, this sounds like whoever, Fred Neal or Tim Buckley, or I don't know, I don't even know what the reference points would be. Yeah, no, all those, you know, I was thinking about Tim Harden, because we play a few Tim Hardin songs. But yeah, all those sort of singer -songwriters, you folk musicians are all influences, all stuff I really, that's kind of music I'd listen to more than say, you know, some crazy loud band. But yeah, Alvarez B and Alan Bishop, we've played together,
but, and, you know, we just, Sunburn just did cover a Sun City Girls song, but I could never put myself on the same, you know, trajectory as where he's going with his music. Well, not in terms of comparing, I mean, but I just hear like, it's kind of like, it's almost like parallel world singer songwriter in the sense that, you know, it doesn't sound like anything really current and doesn't sound like anything that was happening then. And it's not like somebody's trying to say, I'm going to be a weird singer songwriter. It's just kind of effortlessly or not effortlessly, but it doesn't sound like it's trying to be different, but it sounds like that's just kind of, if you sit down with a guitar and write songs, it comes out a little bit, a little bit different. Yeah, I guess that's, yeah, just trying to, like you said, just sitting down with a guitar and what, this is what comes out. It's like, this is like, whether it's good or bad, it's just, it's true music. and it's just, it's not trying to,
I'm not trying to sound weird or yeah, or like write something. And just be, you know, that, that record, that last record that you were talking about earlier is a little bit more confessional in that these elements of these things that I was going through at the time really, you know, I just wrote them, I just wrote them out as, as I was thinking about them. Was there ever a time, I'm just kind of thinking, not that this was ever your goal in music, but there's a brief time when presidents of the United States are selling millions of
albums and you're probably at the same time playing drums with a cardboard box on your head. And did you ever look at that and say, not again, not that your goal was to sell millions of albums, but did you ever ponder the directions? Interestingly, Chris Ballew came to see Carolina once at, or faxed in Seattle. And I didn't see him at the end of the show. We didn't talk about it. But I did invite him, he did show up, but it was definitely not his cup of tea. When Egg was playing, and it was me and Chris, I'd always wanted to make records. Like, let's make a single, let's put this out. And he was always like, no, I'm just doing this art for art's sake. And he's another sort of chameleon person. He gets into something, he's in it all the way, 100%, you know? And next thing I know, we wrote these songs, not together, he wrote all the songs, but I came up with the drum parts, whatever, we had these songs. Next thing I know, he's doing the President of the United States and they're on Sony Records. And I'm like, what happened? Now he went from one extreme to this other extreme. I don't fault him for it and I don't feel any, you know, sour grapes about it. I would never have wanted to be in the presence of the United States
at that time where I was, where my head was musically. Now, I would have loved to have been in the band because I could probably play the shit out of those songs and the paycheck would be good. But, you know, I didn't, you know, money to me is not really an issue because to make great art, less money you have sometimes, better the art, is to kind of be under, to some sort of parameters that you can't get out of. If Carolina had access to these great studios and, you know, Steve Albini mixing Carolina record, you know, we're not going to be the next Nirvana and it's going to probably sound like shit. It's not going to work, you know, and playing it low down. I wish I had done more stuff like that, you know, back then. You didn't ask me about Barbara Manning because I was in her band for a little bit. We can save that for another time. Oh, but I see there's so much. There was another band I was in, and, you know, there's, I, yeah, I don't have any regrets about that, you know, as far as like, quote, unquote, my career as a musician, you know, it's like, I was gonna be doing this whether or not any of these bands got any recognition,
I mean, somebody asked me that years ago as an art student, would you still make art if you knew you were never going to be recognized? You're never going to be in a gallery show. No one's ever going to see your art. The answer was, yes, of course. And it's like, that's really where my true calling is, is just to be creative, you know? You could think about the stuff abstractly and like what happens after I'm gone. I'd like to think that maybe some of it will inspire somebody else 20 years, 30 years, 40 years from now, but shit, you know, might be nothing here to inspire, you know? ♪ Happy birthday baby, we're such a mess Another year around the sun Another year without a relapse We're not over the hill yet I wouldn't say we're young, the thrill might be gone, but we can find another one. Happy birthday, sweetheart, try to be glad. We don't drink, we don't smoke dope, it's just this day we had. We're not over the hill yet, I wouldn't say we're young Our vices might be few, but we can find some new ones
Happy Birthday to me and you