webpage: http://www.dementlieu.com/~obik/ email: obik@dementlieu.com MDC interview from FE4. We interviewed guitar player Ron of MDC after their show at Gallery East. Jimmy) So how come you moved to S.F.? Ron) Just because the Austin scene was getting real stagnant. The clubs that are there closed down. They closed just about everything. We were putting on all the shows. We had to do everything. It was kind of risky. It was the same bands all the time, same crowd. We just got tired of it. The main thing a band has got to do is get out of their home-town and see what kind of response you get from other crowds. Also, if you've got a message, which we do, you can't keep it confined to your hometown. It's only worth it if other people get to hear it. That's what's good about albums. Jimmy) Is it a permanent place? Ron) Right now we've been there for 6 months and we like it there. I just like the west coast. There's a lot of air play and media support. There's a lot of bands you can get gigs with. Katie) Why'd YOU change you name from the Stains to Millions of Dead Cops? Ron) Well, the first gig we played with Black Flag In L.A., it was Henry's first gig, and we played with the LA Stains. There was a third Stains also, so we were sitting around trying to think of a name and the bass player of the Dicks was there at the time and he said "Millions of Dead Cops" and we said that's it. Katie) Does it give you problems? Ron) Well it gave us problems in Lansing. Someone made a poster with all these obituaries on cops and things about cops getting harassed. They put them up all over town and the cops found out about it and they showed up at the show. There were like four cars. After the show I was driving real slow and knew they were gonna pull me over anyway. Then the cop pulled us over, searched everything, checked our ID'S to make sure we were legal. Jimmy) Were there any cop problems in Austin that inspired the name? Ron) Not really, but in LA I've seen them go up to 13 year olds and push them and scare them. They got cops everywhere fuckin with everybody, especially the punks. Cops have been known to take punks to black housing areas just because they know the punks will get the shit beat out of them. They just dump them there and stuff like that. Jimmy) What about Texas cops? Ron) Texas cops are fucked. In Austin once they came into one or our shows. The cop came into the show and somebody lobbed a beer bottle at the cop and the cop called like 8 squad cars. They came in with flashlights and searched everyone after after the show and moved everyone out. They just closed it down. But it's not just cops. MDC stands for being against the police state, the military upper class rule, whatever. Jimmy) You guys suggest anarchy on the album. What kind of anarchy do you mean? Ron) Well, anarchy to us is--things got to start somewhere. It means what we gotta solve in the world right now is people need basic things like clothes, food and shelter. It's like, those things are being denied to people. 70 thousand people are starving a day. This country isn't doing anything to help solve it. People's basic needs need to be satisfied and it's better to start off small. Like the punk scene, because like Chicago's got it and like you guys are supporting the Boston scene, it's local, everybody's working together. DC's the same way with Dischord and Ian. And like Biafra and S.F. It's like little communities working together to support the whole. If we all work together in the end it's gonna be like a unified effort. Right now, capitalism isn't working and communism isn't working, so I'm not like all for one or the other, 'cause both of them are fucked up. There's got to be some medium to start from and anarchy is saying--I don't have the right to indulge my own kicks, I'm just gonna do what I want to do with my life. Take any example, like being a minor, you're deprived of all your rights, whatever. Take sex, it's illegal. Think about all sorts of things that are illegal. Anarchy is like fuck this, I want to be an original and do my own thing without being hassled by the system. I'm not saying, anarchy is a political movement that's gonna solve the world's problems but it's a start. If there's a war, I'm not gonna be fighting in the war. Jimmy) So you're saying, just trying to start a gradual thing from the punk scene. Ron) The punk scene is gonna happen, it's like the world scene isn't getting any better. The world scene is fucked. It's getting worse and people aren't going to be able to escape by listening to disco or whatever. Billboard top 10 and thinking everything is peaches and cream. Things are getting worse and people are going to have to find some outlet they can relate to. Punk's the only kind of music that's saying--hey, this is what's happening. Every everybody snap out of it now. Quit playing a little game and trying to fit into a node. Homogenized America or whatever because it's not working. It's a waste of time. I mean you're born then you go to school and the whole pattern of class president and sports are just prepping you for the big scene. Then you go to college and all college is, is a role choice. You pick what role you want to be when you graduate, you go to the bulletin board and get a job then the natural progression is find somebody, get married, have a kid, and you're trapped because you have to work 'til retirement to support your family. You can't risk fuckin' with that. Then by the time you reach retirement, your life's just gone. Jimmy) Do you think there's an alternative to going to school? Ron) Well, the way I look at it, going to school's like having a baby. The worlds fucked, it aint going nowhere. Going to school to me is just a waste of your youth, it really is. I went to college four years, I had two classes left and I just said fuck it, there's no future in this. I'm just kidding myself. I'd rather be doing what I'm doing now. Save it for when I'm older. Maybe when I'm 35 or something. It's just a waste of time. Jimmy) Do you guys work at all? Ron) No, this is it. The band supports us. What we're trying to go for is like Dischord or Alternative Tentacles. We are trying to get where we can print 5000 albums with a profit from that. Put out compilation albums or produce somebody else and try to get a record thing going where we can support other bands like Negative FX or whoever, like they need somebody backing them so they can get their trip together. That's basically what we're trying to do now and also be a touring band. (Ron starts to talk about the band's political attitude.) Ron) Now what's happening, the unemployment rate is going up and Reagan just got his tax raise, I don't know how many billions of dollars. Plus he's taking this 340 billion, 3 year defense spending-savings which means getting all this money to spend on defense by taking away welfare. So what's happening is the jobs are fucked, welfare and social security, all that stuff is being revoked, there's no CETA grants or anything. The people who have no alternatives end up joining the forces. Once they've got everyone joining the army, it's the whole scam. The people that would be starting the revolution, or because they're sick of misery or whatever, so they call in the army, and they start a war, ship 'em all over seas and kill 'am all and that will be it. All the people that would be dissenters would be gone. That's what Reagan's scam is. The industry supports the defense. That is why I don't want to support the system at all. It's a fucking joke. And everything's supporting it, you name it, Exxon all the way. Exxon and General Motors have more money than any single country in the world except for the U.S., Japan, Germany and Russia you know. So they're a country in themselves. That's saying "What's good for GM Is good for America". It's true all the way and Reagan is just a puppet for the whole scam. There's this quote on our album, that says "Socialism for the rich. Capitalism for all the rest of the U.S." What that means is the rich people and the corporations are cooperating together as a unit, everytime they make a decision like price raises, everyone follows in the industry and they're all working together. Meanwhile we're all down at the bottom pinching pennies to survive. It also has to do with their scam about labels and boundaries like "Hippies hate punks" and "Jocks hate queers" and "Protestant hate Catholics" and everybody at the bottom hates everybody else. They got everybody busy with their own little egos. Shitting on everybody else. Malcolm X said, "We're the people, our sweat and our blood and misery has made this country what it is and we're the only ones that haven't enjoyed it," and it's like payday retroactively. All these people are working to create this whole thing and it's only enjoyed by the upper middle and middle-classes. They're really scamming on it and everybody else. Their whole life is getting up, going to work every day, any money you make goes to pay bills. You figure it out. Like we've got this poster about American achievements, it's like all your money goes to either your landlord, bills, Cable T.V. or whatever, clothing, food, insurance, medical payments, traffic violations. Barely any of it you get to spend on yourself and it's all sucked out of you so basically if you have no money for yourself, maybe you'll save up for a vacation or get a bank loan, but you're still a slave to the system. So you realize your whole life is being sucked and used just to produce products you're gonna buy or whatever. In the end your life goes by, you've worked for nothing, cause you didn't get anything out of it but survival, 30 it's a fucking joke. In this country right now, all the money...they don't care about the U.S. anymore, that's why England is decayed so bad. Their economy is so fucked up, here we're talking, what England did is the same exact thing we're doing. We're taking all the money and investing overseas where we can get, if we come into and underdeveloped country, we tell 'em we want to produce all these things here, #1 we do it cause the labor's cheaper, 2nd all the country's are underdeveloped so they want us in there. They give you tax breaks, free trade, no import or export taxes, you can do anything so America takes through the banks all our money, invests it overseas and they produce all these products and bring them to the country but their not supporting American industry at all. They don't give a fucking shit. This country is just gonna stagnate and the unemployment rate's going up and it's cause they're investing all the money overseas so they can scam on it. It's like U.S. steel is supporting Japan's car industry. Jimmy) What about the Klan? Ron) Well, don't kid yourself. It's a typical Hitler kinda trip with Aryan race, white supremacy, white minority is what it really is, but all those dumb ignorant people want, they're so miserable. They want to find something to give them some kind of satisfaction and gratification. So you figure "I'm white and I'm proud of being white, that makes me feel better". So therefore they join the Klan. The way they look at it is, "Oh the niggers and the Mexicans", not that I'm saying those words, but that's what they're saying, "They're scamming our jobs" for one thing or another... In Texas it's real bad. Like the Klan cane to a punk gig and they're handing out pamphlets and one of them got punched out and knocked unconscious and then an ambulance came with a black nurse and a black driver and they put Klan stickers all over the guy and said "take him away", y'know, it's fucked, it's like Reagan can appeal to everybody and go "we're America and we got to fight and all these minorities are trying to destroy the America we're for, all these punks, hippies, whatever... The next year is gonna be like that with white supremacy, and it's just fucked. Racism is just totally fucked and sexism, any kind of "ism" you want to think about, like in S Africa they got people working in diamond mines or coal mines or whatever for pennies a day. Plus, the whole thing about white minority; the whites in S. Africa are a minority and like Latin America, there's more latins and black skinned, brown skinned people, and then in China, there's more orientals. Thousands of what we call minorities, more than there are white people really. It's all just that the white people are always in the position of economic-political control. So it's like we dominate what's going on but actually, to me, we are the minority. There's more of what we call minority out there and one of these days when they get backed up against the wall to the max and they'll all fuckin turn around and trash us. It aint gonna be no fun for us at all. Like in Oakland I was on the bus and it was me and my girlfriend, and we were the only white people on the whole bus and I was thinking, one of these days, all these people are gonna fuckin kill all of us or whatever. America's just this little white dream, out of sight, out of mind. Jimmy) What was the incident with the Bad Brains? Ron) The whole thing about the Bad Brains is you might as well be talking to a pentacostal Baptist moron. Like H.R. was gonna talk to me and he sits down and opens a bible and they've got this whole sexist trip about "Bloodclot faggot this, friends of faggots are faggots". I'm not sexist, I don't really give a shit what anybody does with their life or their sex, that's their business. But he's bound to kill all the fags, quote/unquote, in the world and that's his big mission. Daryl especially was telling me how "God sent us on earth to stamp judgement on you, mash you out like cockroaches". They told me "You got to read the bible and know God before you talk to me". Rasta phonies is what we call them. Babylon babble and Jah-bah y'know. It pissed us off too cause we did a gig with them and they liked us and said "you guys are great, come on tour with us and we'll print 2000 of your albums"...all a bunch of lies. They took us all the way back to Austin and they were cussin at everbody and there's two bands in Austin and one of them's got a gay singer and they were cussin him right out "lustful, queer, bloodclot faggot" and all that shit and then they stayed at the guitar player's house and we said "fuck you guys, I can't stand this shit man, sexism and racism is the same shit, you guys are drawing boundaries and you guys are trying to unify the world. How? You don't even give a shit." H.R. was telling me "I don't give a shit about this goddamn America, I'm sick of it." Y'know, we're vegetarians or whatever, big deal, it's not like we're telling you "you eat meat, you're gonna burn in hell." You don't see Ian telling people "I'm straight edge, fuck you, you're crazy, you're wrong." It's his life, you do what you want with it. The Bad Brains were telling us "smoke pot, give thanks", y'know and "oh, you drink beer, oh, hell fire water, burn in hell," or whatever. They ripped off Big Boys, they fronted them a lid and then they didn't pay them. They left this note that said "about the money, we'll send that in the future, meanwhile, may your soul burn in bell forever" with a star of David with a little cross in it. In Dallas they were at this house and they were smoking a ton of pot all day and they were there and the cops came and busted the place and H.R. came up to the cops and said "Oh, it's not our pot. It's the people in the house, they own the pot", he narced on them. Then this other girl was telling us they came to her house, they stayed there and they said to her, "you put makeup on, you got short hair. You should read the bible and realize your natural role as a women, in the house," or whatever and then they ran up like 80 dollars worth of phone bills that they didn't even tell her about. The whole time they were there, they were lecturing her on how to live her life, they were ripping her off. They are so hypocritical it's sick. It really pisses me off cause they're a fuckin great band, great musicians. Actually, it pisses me off cause they're in our scene. They could be doing a lot for it, but it's dead. They're playing people off across the whole country, I don't know why they are so elitist but they are just religious fascists...