Getting an interview with Big Black wasn't the most arduous task we've encountered, but hey, it wasn't the easiest, either. I'm talking about tracking these guys down. It took numerous phone calls and a 400 mile jaunt to San Francisco. (That's right, they didn't play in L.A.) When we got there, we had to vie for time with their business dealings and sound check, not to mention their undying fascination with the city's street mimes and "Summer of Love" celebrations. The following conversation took place over a charming Mexican repast. Steve Albini and Santiago Durango are the 2/3 of Big Black who were present, while Ink Disease was represented by Thomas, Antonio, Brian, and Chris Houston. Occasional comments were thrown in by Joy, Joe, and Dolores. Photos by Brian Trudell.

(Steve starts out talking about who the band played with at a rock festival in Belgium.)

STEVE: ...Wire, The Mission, The Fuzztones...and how they got on there I'll never know.
SANTIAGO: They thought they were real hot shit.
STEVE: They thought they were really hot on a stick. They really ate. And Toots and the Maytals. That was pretty weird.
ID: How were they?
STEVE: Horrible. They had this scrawny Jewish guitar player who just sat there jerking away on his Marshall stack, it was really embarrassing.
SANTIAGO: Now...is there really any difference between the Fuzztones and the Smithereens?
STEVE: Yes. Not a lot, but there is a difference.
ID: And who would care?
STEVE: The Smithereens were quieter.
ID: How'd you guys like Wire?
STEVE: I really liked them. I mean personally and musically I was really amazed. I thought they were gonna suck, I mean the album is really horrible, but just seeing them play in the little confined, intent environment with no production, no snazzy sounds or anything, just the basic rock band set-up-it was great, it was really really great.
ID: Yeah. I liked the drum kit.
STEVE: Yeah. It was great. It was really brilliant. Simple.
SANTIAGO: After our set Steve took a couple of cases of band beer that was in the back and started flinging them at the crowd.
STEVE: That was good...handing out free beer to a bunch of teenage Belgians. That really got 'em going. We stole all the beer from The Mission. We stole like 4 cases of beer from The Mission and I pissed in their amp cases. Boy...The Mission...they really blow. You looking for a band that blows? Try The Mission.

ID: Have you guys played in LA before?
STEVE: No. We never played in LA.
ID: What happened? It just never worked out?
STEVE: We never really wanted to play in LA for a start.
SANTIAGO: We never really wanted to play in California.
STEVE: Yeah. California seemed like this really strange, sick little pit of snakes that we didn't want to get involved in. All these horrible, horrible bands. We just didn't want to he associated with them, didn't want to come near them.
ID: Which are the most horrible?
STEVE: I really couldn't tell you if the Mystic bands are worse or the SST bands are worse...(laughter ensues)...I couldn't tell you.
ID: Yeah, but Sonic Youth are on SST.
STEVE: That was a big mistake on their part, I think. Them and Slovenly...BIG mistake...and Dinosaur. Big mistake. You're traveling with really bad company, fellows.

ID: What about Homestead?
STEVE: That's a pretty crappy label, too. I mean qualitatively. I like Gerard personally but I think the music that comes out on Homestead generally is pretty horrible lately.

ID: So you started a record label?
STEVE: Well there's a record label that I've been running pretty low key for a couple years...Ruthless.
ID: Are you going to do more with that?
STEVE: Yeah. when I have more time after Big Black is done with, I'll probably he able to do it more efficiently but it'll be the same perspective, the same frame of mind. Basically...

JOY: Why are you going to stop doing Big Black?
STEVE: There's the long story and the short story. The short story was that Sant is leaving to go to law school, so it sort of made sense to call it quits. The long story was that ever since the inception of the band we'd all decided that we would want to break up before we'd embarrassed ourselves...and that's basically what it boiled down to. Once we realized that we had to break up because Sant was leaving, it seemed like it was a real good time to break up anyway.
JOY: What's embarrassing about it?
SANTIAGO: The potential embarrassment.
STEVE: Yeah, the potential of going on much longer...overstaying your welcome, running out of stuff to say but still saying stuff out of habit, you know.

ID: So you're (Steve) gonna do the label?
STEVE: I mean I'm sure I'll get another band together, just because that's the only framework that I really feel comfortable with.

ID: I heard you got a horn in Australia.
STEVE: A low-note Australian infantry bugle, thank you.
SANTIAGO: The heralding bugle.
STEVE: We've been heralding our arrival everywhere.
ID: Yes. I heard you herald your departure on the radio. I guess you also surprized them there.
STEVE: I swear, college radio people are worse than nuns, you know? They're so prim.
ID: Get anything else besides the horn?
STEVE: We wouldn't want to spoil the surprise, but we've got some lovely...think they call them accessories in the garment trade. We've got lovely accessories.
ID: Will we get to view them tonight?
STEVE: You might see some accessories traipsed out on stage.

ID: Despite your dislike of California do you like Texas bands?
STEVE: Yeah, a lot of those bands are really good. There's less well-known ones from longer ago that aren't really great. The Dicks used to be really great, before they moved to San Francisco they were fucking unbelievable. They moved to San Francisco and...
SANTIAGO: They became pretty fucking believable.
STEVE: The Big Boys were a great band for a long long time. Nobody knew about them. Stick Men With Ray Runs were really wild, sort of like crazed rockabilly kind of music. I think Culturecide are from Texas too, aren't they?
SANTIAGO: No, they're not.
STEVE: I like them.

ID: Have you toured around through the Midwest extensively compared to...
STEVE: Midwest, East Coast we do all the time.
ID: What about more South?
STEVE: We played in St. Louis.
SANTIAGO: And we played in Kentucky.
STEVE: We played in Louisville at the Zachary Taylor post of the VFW.
SANTIAGO: It's just too weird down there.
STEVE: Yeah. People with really big foreheads stumbling around in the woods going, "Aaaaaaaa..."
SANTIAGO: The inbred eyes, you know. They've got that weird slant...people who have been fucking each others' families for generations.
ID: Banjo music...
STEVE: Yeah. When you sec some guy who's got one eye way over here and another eye way over here and he's looking that way and he's pointing at you and saying, "I'm talkin' to you boy!"
ID: What was that, Ned Beatty in "Deliverance"?
STEVE: "Squeal like a PIG for me!!! Louder! I can't hear you!" Yeah, "squeal like a pig" is probably one of THE best buttfucking expressions...that and "Shoot it, shoot it, sweet Jesus it's in me!" Those are my two favorite buttfucking expressions.

ID: Do you have any buttfucking stories?
SANTIAGO: I thought we wrote a song about one.
STEVE: Well, I think that's probably in the realm of personal activity.
SANTIAGO: You could say Steve is not a (unintelligible) anymore.

ID: I read about a fairly personal story in Killer about your sister.
STEVE: Oh, when my sister was fucking on the carpet in front of my room. My sister was pretty wild. I still remember when she had to go on an emergency vacation to California to take care of her little problem. Pretty weird.

ID: That must be where your original distrust of California comes from.
SANTIAGO: Who ever said it was distrust?
STEVE: It's not distrust. It's dislike. Really, do you feel good knowing that the cooler was invented here? Do you feel comfortable with the really heavy-handed crappy music atmosphere that you have in California?

ID: Well, I don't like the superficial "everyone needs an audience" attitude. I don't know. I've lived in Ohio and there's some good things happening. Ohio's got the river that caught on fire.
STEVE: Yeah, that's cool.
SANTIAGO: That's Cleveland, yeah.
STEVE: Cleveland is an alright city. There's really good titty bars in Cleveland.

ID: Isn't the Hall of Fame of Rock'n'Roll there now?
SANTIAGO: It's going to be.
ID: It'll just have Elvis.
ID: So you're not from Chicago originally?
STEVE: No. I was raised in Montana. I was born in California. I was raised in Montana and Dave was born and raised in Detroit, Sant was born in Colombia and raised in Chicago--Colombia, the country, not the city. You know where that is, you just go to the puppet government and turn right.
SANTIAGO: Just follow your nose.

ID: What kind of work do you guys do other than the band?
STEVE: Straight jobs? I'm a photo retoucher.
ID: Does that mean you work for the CIA?
STEVE: I work for ad agencies. I do stuff to make ugly little people less ugly so that they'll sell more cars or whatever.
ID: That sounds very California.
STEVE: We do a lot of work for jive people in California, actually. That's another reason I dislike California. And Dave works at a temp service, usually as a file clerk or a legal aide. That's what Sant was doing before he decided to go to school.
SANTIAGO: A paper pusher. Now I'm a registered student.
ID: That makes ten of us.
STEVE: When you go to another country and they ask you to put down your occupation, he puts down, "Student" And he's not lying, either.
SANTIAGO: See, I'm serious. You guys are still undergrads. You're still partying and boozing.
ID: Is that what YOU did as an undergrad?
STEVE: That's what everybody does as an undergrad! That's what I did. I spent four years being a roustabout and a pussyhound...and ended up with a degree.
ID: Where'd you go?
STEVE: Northwestern.

ID: Well, back to the tools...what is that about?
STEVE: I just really like tool company logos. They all have this really cool script.
SANTIAGO: Well it's just the notion; the idea.
ID: Hardware.
SANTIAGO: Yeah, a machine.
ID: Playing the I-Beam sort of goes along with that.
STEVE: That's pretty good. Never thought of that. We were just talking about starting up another company, "Big Black Heavy Equipment." I like the idea of forklifts...and those things with the point on them that bust up the pavement.
ID: A widowmaker?
STEVE: I don't know, is that what they're called?
ID: A jackhammer?
STEVE: No, a jackhammer is the thing the guys stand on. The thing looks like a crane with a point on it, "NNNNYYYYYAAAAA!!!!" There's a song on the new record called "Pavement Saw", because pavement saws are probably the coolest piece of heavy equipment. It's like a six foot diameter saw blade with big huge teeth that wide. They just sit there chewing up the road..."ROWRROWRROWR". They're great. If you're within a mile of them you can feel the earth rattling up through your body.
SANTIAGO: (singing) "I feel the Earth move, under my feet..."
ID: We wanted to take your picture in a hardware store.
STEVE: Hardware stores are great. Did you ever just go in a hardware store and play with all the stuff and look at it?
ID: A little bit...I don't spend that much time in hardware stores, but maybe I should.
STEVE: They're great, man!

ID: Where does the name "Big Black" come from?
STEVE: It was sort of this weird notion I had when I was an introverted college student and I wanted to start this big, scary band. I was sort of simplifying everything as much as possible and instead of trying to come up with some name that implied something big and scary and black, I just decided to call it "Big Black" and forget about it.
JOY: So, is wearing black clothes a conscious thing?
STEVE: No.
SANTIAGO: Who's wearing black clothes?
STEVE: I guess we are. But Levi's and T-shirts are all I ever wear.

ID: You said you were introverted...
STEVE: Sort of an introverted little loudmouth. I only paid attention to myself, but I shouted at everybody.

JOY: What was your major in school?
STEVE: Journalism. Didn't learn a thing. I learned more in my high school journalism class than I did in four years of journalism school.
SANTIAGO: At the best school...
STEVE: Yeah, supposedly the BEST journalism school in America. And the people that I was studying with were such incredible dolts that they couldn't put a fucking sentence together.
ID: Well, what do they teach you, the business of Journalism basically, right? Or the ethics?
STEVE: No. What it boiled down to was remedial grammar for four years. That was just ludicrous. I was just gnashing my teeth the whole time. It was horrible. What I expected to learn was the history of journalism, foundation for journalistic ethics, news-gathering practices, shit like that. What it boiled down to was "Who, What, When, Why, How," and then memorizing the AP style guide. I mean, that's jive!
ID: Did you write for any alternative music magazines or underground type things? I know you do now.
STEVE: Yeah, Matter. Matter was started by a girl who went to Northwestern.
ID: What's happening with Matter. I haven't seen it around.
STEVE: What's happening with Matter? Don't ask me, I haven't seen it in as long as you haven't seen it. And I worked on a straight, regular conventional newspaper in Indiana for a while. That's when I realized that I didn't want to be a regular newspaper journalist.

JOY: What prompted you to get a drum machine instead of a drummer?
STEVE: A lack of drummers. There are very few drummers of any caliber in Chicago.
SANTIAGO: And only a handful in America.
STEVE: I can only think of like two or three really good drummers. Personal favorites are, like, Rey Washam from Scratch Acid, he used to be in the Big Boys--great fucking drummer. Steve Shelly from Sonic Youth is really good.
SANTIAGO: Todd...
STEVE: Oh, Todd Trainer from Riflesport and Breaking Circus. He's a fucking great drummer...he's a machine. He just beats the shit out of his drums and he's absolutely perfect all the time. The thing about drummers is most of them just like to stretch out, you know. They like to really just "play those drums" and they have no smarts. They cannot remember that the reason drums are there is the beat. I'm all for really creative beats and stuff, I just cannot stand these extended freakouts that drummers are doing all the time. And I really can't stand drummers that just sort of piddly-pat away at their drums. I mean, they're pretty sturdy...drums are meant to be HIT. You can hit them really hard, and nothing will happen, it won't hurt anything and I think that's the way drums ought to be approached. Just an excuse to hit something really hard, a lot. That's what my favorite drummers are like.

ID: I noticed during the soundcheck that you had the vocals lower than the drums. Is there a particular reason for that?
STEVE: I just don't like vocals.
ID: Do you consider your lyrics intelligent, or commentary, or what?
STEVE: I don't know.
SANTIAGO: We don't analyze our lyrics.
STEVE: We try not having lyrics sometimes and it just makes it too dry. For some reason your ear wants to hear a human voice in there somewhere, saying something that makes some literal sense. At least that's the way it seems to me.
ID: You don't always have words, like that song about child abuse doesn't really have a lot of words, it's just more like sounds.
STEVE: But if there weren't any vocals in there it probably wouldn't be quite as potent. That's why we have vocals at all, just to convey some sort of emotional content. The literal meaning of the lyrics doesn't really matter to me that much sometimes. I mean, we change them around all the time.
ID: So every night do you just sing different words?
STEVE: Yeah. If I were to say the same things every night I'd get really sick of it.

SANTIAGO: So, do you guys get shot at on the freeway?
ID: No, we've done the shooting.
ID: We thought that's why you guys didn't come to LA.
STEVE: No, I think it's really great. It's really entertaining to see the smiling TV newscasters talking about, "There was another example of freeway violence today." Freeway violence, what a great way to put it.
ID: Pit bulls, too.
STEVE: They used to have those in Chicago, too. The Buttholes have a pit bull. Their band's guard dog, "Mark Farner", is a pit bull.
ID: That's the Grand Funk guy?
STEVE: Yeah. The Buttholes always have their dog with them.

ID: I don't know if you guys noticed walking around Haight, but there's seems to be a lot of hippy nostalgia.
STEVE: We were here last year and it was the same thing.
SANTIAGO: Psuedo-hippy nostalgia.
ID: Is there any of that in the midwest?
SANTIAGO: We're too busy working in the midwest to have that shit.
STEVE: You can always find dopes like that, but over here it seems to be a way of life.
ID: I saw a flier in Berkeley the other day that said, "Kill hippie nostalgia. Burn down the Haight Masonic..." or something like that.
STEVE: Good sentiment. If you think about it, the hippies were a product of their time. Anybody who's wandering around now pretending to be from then is completely antithetical to what the hippies were about.
ID: When the Mekons played they said, "Welcome to the tenth anniversary of the Summer of Hate."

ID: So, where do you go from here? Is this it?
STEVE: No. Tomorrow we're playing Providence, Rhode Island, which is on the other end of the country, which means we have to get up very early and get on a plane.
ID: Is that a nice place? We went through there on a train once. We all wanted to get off. We said, "That looks like a good place." Didn't know anything about it.
STEVE: It was alright when we went there the last time.
SANTIAGO: Yeah...Brown University.
STEVE: I like trains. We took a train to a gig in Minneapolis once, it was great. Sat there in the bar car watching the world zoom by.
ID: We took the train back east and stopped in Chicago...it was fun.
STEVE: And you didn't call!
ID: We didn't have your number...we would have called.

ID: Get and weird mail?
STEVE: Lots of weird mail.
SANTIAGO: But no clever weird mail.
STEVE: Yeah. Not weird mail that you'd be proud of. Just dopes sending me their shoes and stuff. "Here. These are my baby pictures. I thought you might like them."
SANTIAGO: Or 50 variations on that motif.
STEVE: A lot of scrawled pen drawings.

ID: Are you aware of a particular audience or is it just totally diverse?
SANTIAGO: We don't care about our audiences that much. We just go out and play. Whoever shows up, shows up.
STEVE: Obviously we would be more satisfied if it was people that we liked. That's one of the reasons that it doesn't really bother us to be breaking up now. The audiences have been getting more and more repulsive as time goes on. Just more and more people who don't have a fucking clue.
SANTIAGO: They're there because, for some reason, they have the notion that they're supposed to be there.
ID: How do you tell if they have a clue? I mean, I've felt that way a lot of times, you know, "These people don't have a clue." It's hard to tell from just looking at somebody who's standing in the back.
STEVE: If what you're doing is interpreted in a completely opposite way from what you're trying to project. You're trying to do something that's basically unpretentious, honest, and forceful, and people are seeing it as some sort of rock showmanship...it's pretty unsatisfying. It used to be at our gigs that people who would come, would come to see what we were doing, and respond naturally to it. Now, they're coming with a predetermined notion of what we're all about in their head, and they just go through the actions, go through the activities. They've already decided they're going to love the gig. They've already decided they're going to hate it and that we're all sexist creeps...
ID: But people do that a lot.
STEVE: Right, but what I'm saying is the larger the audience is and the more diluted the audience is, the more that's the case.
ID: My sister saw you when you were here last and she described your show as just, "Fun." I don't think she came with any particular idea...
STEVE: Fun? Is that what she said?
ID: Yeah. She just said she had a good time. I wouldn't have expected that from hearing your music and hearing a little bit about you, so at that time I was sort of surprised.
STEVE: Well, it wouldn't really bother me if somebody said they enjoyed the show, but what bothers me is these people standing there in the audience with these blank expressions on their faces trying really hard to look in control; trying to avoid smudging their makeup or messing up their hairdos...and they leave in little gaggles talking about what an intense experience they've been through, you know.

ID: I remember people were slam-dancing the last time you played here. Is that normal?
STEVE: That happens sometimes. That doesn't really bother me, but again, that's not really the point of it either. It's a bit of a strange perspective for me. It used to be that most of the people that would come to see us on purpose would be people that I wouldn't mind having in my house, people that I liked, people that I could talk to and exchange some ideas with and we would both be talking about the same things. But now, more often than not, anybody that you meet who's at the gig and you talk lo them for 5 minutes you realize they haven't got a fucking clue. They have no idea what the hell is going on.
ID: So, why does that happen? Do you think you gel thrown into this kind of genre that people think that you're part of this...
STEVE: Well, think of it this way: If something is going on and it's on a fairly small scale, the people who are going to search it out and find it are people for whom music means a lot, right? People that put a lot of stock into substance. For the people that wait until something is fairly accepted before they even listen to it or whatever, then those are people for whom music is not really that important and for whom the substance behind the style of the music doesn't mean that much. So they'll think of it in cultural terms, "Oh, this is a product of the '80s. This is something that is hep to life NOW. This is part of this movement. This is a trend that I want to associate myself with." And so then they'll go for those reasons. And that's nowhere near as satisfying as having somebody go because they like you.
ID: Do you notice when you're up on stage whether the audience is the kind of audience that you like to play to?
STEVE: Sometimes.
ID: Does it affect your playing?
STEVE: No, not really.
SANTIAGO: We're pretty consistent.
STEVE: We pretty much charge it out no matter what. Obviously, it's more exciting if the people are breaking things and falling over a lot.

ID: I think that slam-dancing at a Big Black show would be kind of unusual considering that you're attracting these gloomy art-fags, they're really uptight, and slam-dancing is more of a...
SANTIAGO: It's usually the kids that get really worked up.
STEVE: Really young kids just get all excited, and their skateboards are already checked at the coal check so they don't have anything else to do.
ID: There's more pure energy there.
STEVE: Given a choice between having an audience full of people slam-dancing with the bomber jackets on or whatever, or a bunch of art-fags smoking clove cigarettes studying each others' vertical hairdos, I would much rather have the kids slam-dancing. But then you run into complete dope kids, as well. I like the young energetic people because they'll get involved in something and not question the motives behind it. They'll just do it. I like that and I appreciate that, but that's about the end of it. The physical part of what we do...it's like the volume and speed, the aggression...but then the content of it is another part of it.

ID: For me, I think your most successful song is that child abuse song, because I don't think about it, I feel something. That was the thing that I was really impressed by at your show. I felt like I experienced something as opposed to a mental exercise.
STEVE: As opposed to having somebody tell you what's going on, telling you what to think about it.
ID: It's more like watching it happen.
STEVE: That's the way that one should be.
ID: So, popularity would be just tragic?
STEVE: We played some pretty mammoth shows in Europe and they were not what I would consider the most fun. It's like twists and turns...a couple of them turned out to be pretty interesting. Like this big festival. We got to meet and hang out with and play on the same stage as Wire, that was really cool. And then a couple of nights later they played with us on stage in London. It was this huge gig and they came up and did an encore of "Heartbeat" with us, and I thought that was really cool. I mean that was really great, but all the hype and crap that's associated with having these big things go on underneath you doesn't really appeal to me at all.

ID: What about Australia?
STEVE: Australia was a lot like it was for us playing in America 3 or 4 years ago, before people knew what the hell you were all about.
SANTIAGO: They were actually on the verge of being hostile.
STEVE: I like that. People show up not knowing what to expect and there's just this incredible tension where they can't decide whether they like you or hate you.
SANTIAGO: Our very first gig in Melbourne was a confrontation. It ended up with us doing a lot of swearing and flipping them off...
STEVE: Calling them "Ozholes" and stuff.
SANTIAGO: ...and them hitting us with enormous barrages of...
STEVE: ...bottles and glasses. They got their $3 worth. $3 Australian.
ID: How did you get there?
SANTIAGO: We bought tickets...
STEVE: You'd be amazed at how easy it is. 'Hey, do we have $6,000 we can waste? Yeah! Let's go to Australia!" Didn't make a dime, either. We lost 6000 bucks.
ID: Did you do anything else there besides play?
STEVE: Moved around, met some people. Met this really cool paralyzed dude. This guy and his brother used to be in a band, and his brother OD'ed on heroin and was in a coma and braindead for 3 months and the doctors were telling him, "He's a goner, he's never going to come back, you might as well sign the papers and let us give his liver to somebody." But his brother wouldn't do it, and 3 months later, DING! he came out of it. His old personality and memory and mental capacity and everything was back to normal, he was just paralyzed from the waist down, and that's even coming back slowly and surely. He's getting the use of his limbs back. Those guys were really cool, really great stories.
SANTIAGO: Some of the bands have very interesting music, as well.
STEVE: Completely different. It's obvious that there's train of thought going through Australian band development. There's all these common roots to all these bands, but it's so inbred--face it, they're in Australia--it's really interesting to drop in and get a little capsulization of the current stat of Australian independent music and then get the hell out again. It's pretty worthwhile.
SANTIAGO: Very different from anything else. They definitely have A SOUND.
STEVE: Yeah, but see, there's a couple of different Australian sounds. The one that everyone hears about is sort of a 60s Stooges-influenced garage rock, and the bands that we played with are the bands who are reacting to that. They're completely diametrically opposed to that, the way that we're opposed to the REM sound. For them, the homogenized culture is this Stooges 60's influence. For us it's this REM/Replacements rock crap. So when you drop in and see that, it's really amazing the ways that they come up with to get around the conventions of rock music to avoid sounding like that stuff, it's really good. But, by the same token, all the singers acted like Iggy Pop.

ID: Would you be willing to bring some of those bands out here?
STEVE: I wouldn't be willing to shoulder the responsibility of bringing them out because it's just impossible.
SANTIAGO: We would put them up.
STEVE: They could sleep on my floor.
ID: I guess they would have visa problems.
STEVE: It's virtually impossible to get into the country now as a working musician.
SANTIAGO: I think it would be worthwhile for American audiences to be exposed to it.
STEVE: This band, King Snake Roost, from Adelaide, are thinking about coming over illegally. They just come over on tourist visas, borrow equipment and then start traveling. I think that would he pretty worthwhile.

ID: What about your label? Would you take up any projects?
STEVE: I wouldn't want to saddle one of those bands with the label because Ruthless Records, which is the label I run, is really inefficient. It does a very bad job of promoting the records and I wouldn't want to take a band that's 18,000 miles away and say, "Sure, you're in good hands," because I know they wouldn't be. I would think they deserve somebody who would do a professional Job.
SANTIAGO: The great thing about Ruthless, sort of to balance that out, is that Ruthless will let you do whatever the HELL you want.
STEVE: The people that I agree to put records out for...absolutely anything that they want to do...The only way I think this sort of stuff ought to go is you find good people and you trust them enough to do good stuff and just turn them loose.
ID: But there must be a judging process somewhere along the line, though.
STEVE: When you decide whether you want to deal with these people or not. The bands that have records out so far: Urge Overkill, who are this band from Chicago who have been around forever and have just never gotten any breaks, I just thought somebody ought to put their record out; End Result, pretty much the same story...great band, been around forever, nobody likes them, if anybody's ever gonna put their record out, it's gonna be me.

JOY: Is Urge Overkill still together?
STEVE: Yeah, they're playing with us in New York, actually. This band from Ohio called Dark Arts, who are really cool, they're sort of a weird trance hypnotic sort of freaky band--it's a bit hard to describe. Then Riflesport, they're a band from Minneapolis that nobody likes.
SANTIAGO: Ruthless Records--bands that nobody likes.
STEVE: Great slogan. Bands that everybody hates but me. In the next couple of months we're putting out a record by a band called The Didjits, from downstate Illinois. They're just like a conventional rock and roll band, but they're so great. I don't understand why I like them, but I really do. They're perverse. It's like Jerry Lee Lewis, but on acid or something. I don't understand it. It's really great.

ID: Have you heard the Flaming Lips?
STEVE: Yeah. I like them...well, I like their first album. Their first album is really cool, really perverse. Santiago's got a special project called The Arsenal. Is it Arsenal or The Arsenal?
SANTIAGO: Arsenal. No "The"s in my name.
STEVE: Arsenal, which is him and the worst bass player in history. Urge Overkill has got a new single coming out, an absolutely killer cover of "Wichita Lineman"...it's so great...awesome, and a song of theirs that's pretty good. After that, I think I'm loafing around a lot.

ID: Have you heard Death of Samantha?
STEVE: Yeah. They think they're really really great. They really think they're really great. I wish I could concur with that thought. All the best bands think they suck. Not enough bands have broken up. I'd like to suggest that to a few bands, if I could.
ID: Any in particular?
STEVE: Most of them, actually. Most bands ought to break up, as far as I'm concerned. Very few shouldn't.
ID: So, who shouldn't?
STEVE: I think it'd be a shame if Urge Overkill broke up because they're this sad little story that hasn't gone on long enough. Slovenly shouldn't break up.
ID: I think the Grateful Dead should break up.
STEVE: They're braindead. That's about the same thing. Pussy Galore shouldn't break up. Pussy Galore are a great band. Again, they're just like a conventional rock and roll band but they've managed to pervert it enough that it's really great.

JOY: You said all great bands think they suck. What do you think of your band?
STEVE/SANTIAGO: Ahh. We suck.
STEVE: Sometimes we'll get off stage after playing a show and the people will be hooting and hollering and we'll look at each other and we'll just be smirking like hell because we know we're just total fuckups.
ID: They fell for the punch?
STEVE: It's not like we're trying to rip people off or anything, but what we do is so bone simple we ought to be able to do it right.
SANTIAGO: Yeah. Our own worst critics.
STEVE: There's not a lot to what we do.

(END OF TAPE)

The photos were taken from SMASH IT UP, with permission. I resized all the photos before using them, so get yer full sized versions there (along with some I didn't use)...