Forest Of The Megalomaniac.

Not a real post this time, just a quick announcement (or quick advertisement, as you wish). Most of you are probably aware that the Nike Company just released Pushead Lamorte SB Dunks. Now if those shoes weren’t so damn ugly and/or limited/expensive I would consider buying a pair, but seeing pictures of the packaging makes me want to find a pair anyway. So if there is a Pusfan, or sole collector, out there that, for whatever reason, would not like to keep or want the shoe box and wrap paper you can send it to me, I’ll paypal you the postage costs with $10 extra. Feel free to get in touch with me, thanks. Just check out how great-looking this is, would be perfect to put in my living room next to my Cleanse The Bacteria poster.

Oh yeah, here’s something weird. While trying to find some more info on these Dunks I googled “Pushead Nikes” (on Google Belgium) and check out what result number eight was that I got…really check it out yourself… What are the odds??


http://www.google.be/
http://www.pusfan.com/
http://www.besound.com/pushead/home.html
http://www.septicdeath.com/
http://www.nike.com/nikeskateboarding/v2/main.html
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=7721634836&rd=1&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWA%3AIT&rd=1

The grim reaper will come to call on me soon…

I’m about to finish Choosing Death, a book on the history of death metal and grindcore written by Albert Mudrian. Actually I don’t know if I will read the last few chapters any time soon as it focuses on Pig Destroyer, Nasum and even Earth Crisis. As a matter of fact I don’t really care much for death metal or grindcore anyway, with the exception of the British pioneers and the Western Mass godfathers. So far the book for me has gone from being very interesting in the beginning (the rise of the Birmingham scene and Earache Records) to plain rambling from the second part of the book on giving too many facts about the bands, their members and their record deals…and eventually it all becomes a bit too predictable. There’s no real storyline throughout the book and so it ends up being rather stale and factual, though, as mentioned before the first part of the book is pretty interesting. What follows is an excerpt from the book when Albert Mudrian goes a bit deeper into two bands that were very influential to bands such as Napalm Death, Heresy and Extreme Noise Terror, and is possible the best part in the book for people with a love for hardcore and a not so big love for death metal.

[…] Though sometimes overlooked, Boston had a powerful scene of its own. To most, Boston hardcore is forever defined by SS (Society System) Decontrol and their controversial brand of punk, which, along with Minor Threat, helped characterize the straight edge movement. But the Boston area, quite simply, had the fastest bands, several of which actually hailed from small suburban towns in western Massachusetts.
Amherst was such a place. A two-hour drive west of Boston, the picturesque college town was also home to a young local named Joseph Mascis. In 1982, the 15-years-old Mascis -simply known as J to friends- wasn’t much different from the town’s other few proud punk rockers, often spending his free time roaming the racks of local record store Main Street Records in North Hampton.
“I met this kid in that store that looked kinda like Dee Dee Ramone,” Mascis recalls, “I talked to him a little bit and he seemed to be into some of the same hardcore stuff as me. The next week I saw a flyer up in the record store and I figured it had to be that kid because I didn’t know anybody else that was into stuff like Discharge and Minor Threat.”
That kid was Scott Helland, who, along with his friend Lou Barlow, sought a drummer to play “superfast beats” –as their flyer bluntly stated- for their fledgling hardcore band. The group was practicing for several months before the painfully shy Mascis answered the advertisement. After joining, Mascis insisted the band draft his friend Charlie Nakajima to sing. Days later, Mascis christened the group Deep Wound, and within a few short months they began playing sporadic gigs with local hardcore punk groups, such as Helland’s other outfit The Outpatients.
“We just wanted to play as fast as possible, and, I think, sometimes it was to the detriment of our songs,” says Mascis. “All we were concerned with, really, was playing faster and faster.”
For that crown Deep Wound would have some competition. In another small western Massachusetts suburb named Weymouth, local drummer Robert Williams and his 10th grade classmates, guitarist Kurt Habelt and bassist Henry McNamee, had been instigating a racket since 1981, shortly after their first exposure to Minor Threat and Discharge. On the weekends, the trio frequently made the half-hour journey east to Boston’s premier independent record store, Newbury Comics, to feed their appetites for scorching punk rock.
“It was such a special time to be discovering music,” recalls Williams. “I can remember coming home from Newbury Comics –which was just a closet, with cardboard boxes of comic books and 7-inches on wooden shelves- and my hands were shaking I was so excited to play these records. I remember the look of absolute snobbery and disgust on the face of the cashier –a young pre-‘Til Tuesday Aimee Mann- when I came up to the register with an original pressing of the Meatmen’s ‘Blood Sausage’ 7-inch, which had a used condom with pubic hair on the cover. I had a rating system –the faster my mom would run upstairs to get me to shut it off, the better it was. I couldn’t get through a side of Black Flag’s Damaged. Flipper couldn’t even get through a song.”
Further inspired by their trips into the city to see Black Flag and NYC punkers the Misfits, Williams devoted more time to his musical project, which he had recently dubbed Siege.
“The three of us were jamming together in Hank’s garage and then later in a church, making absolutely hellish dissonance that resounded through the neighbourhood,” Williams remembers. “Locals still come up to me, now grown, and talk about how they used to drink beers in the woods with their friends and listen.”
Soon the quartet recruited singer Kevin Mahoney, from yet another western Mass. Suburb, Braintree –a town rich in hardcore heritage and home of the original Gang Green and Jerry’s Kids. By 1983, Siege began playing shows in this rapidly developing western Mass. community.
“It was a healthy, awesome, real DIY scene out there in western Mass. –a clique of very excited groups,” Williams explains. “It was one of the places that you played when you made the rounds, another being Stamford, Connecticut. They were very positives scenes, but very few of them made the ride to Boston to play shows. They were younger, artsy types and they weren’t the most driven, savvy entertainers in the world. These were just punk kids and they happened to live in a remote place. More often, Boston would go out to western Mass. to play.”
That community had already accepted the speedy Deep Wound, but withstanding the sheer velocity, violent lyrics and developing metallic leanings of Siege would be an even greater test. After all, this was a band both faster and heavier than the crossover thrash punk of Cryptic Slaughter and Septic Death, which was then regarded as the pinnacle of aural intensity in the US.
“There was a time when we made a deliberate decision to set out to be the absolute fastest band,” says Williams, whose speed training included playing AC/DC’s Highway To Hell LP at 45 RPM and duplicating the drum beats while wearing headphones. “The track ‘Beating Around The Bush’ becomes galloping Brit punk when played on 45,” he notes. “I loved metal, too –Venom, Priest, Motörhead’s ‘Iron Fist’. In fact, we covered Venom’s ‘Warhead’ at our first show, which was at our high school’s battle of the bands –we got disqualified for obscenity, plus our bassist Hank smashed his bass. But it was about speed. We would listen to the fastest punk and hardcore bands we could find and say, ‘Okay, we’re gonna deliberately write something that is faster than them, because we are going to be the fastest.’ We took it very seriously.”
Williams and the rest of Siege, however, didn’t hold Boston’s straight edge movement in similar regard.
“I was a heavy pot smoker,” says Williams, whose drug use was in direct contrast to the prevailing sentiment within the hardcore scene at the time. “And we were younger guys, newcomers, certainly not straight edge, and didn’t fit in with the original Boston crew, who were bullies. Their thing kind of grew into the jock-infested macho one-dimensional shit that half of hardcore is now –the baseball cap-wearing, smack a kid up shit. The other half being the Maximum Rock n’ Roll peace-punk, crust leftist, reverse conformism –but this was before all those terms and before things were so clichéd.”
By the time Siege was making its own way in early 1984, however, their kindred spirits in Deep Wound were simply going away.
“The hardcore scene was kinda dead to us,” says Mascis. “I was more into the Birthday Party and the noisier types of bands after that. Scott, the bass player, was really busy with his other band the Outpatients, too, so basically he went in the Outpatients full-time and the rest of us formed Dinosaur, but we were called Mogo then and we still had the same singer from Deep Wound, Charlie, but then after one gig we decided that Charlie was a no go and then we officially started Dinosaur [which later became Dinosaur Jr]. We had a totally different concept. We went from being a kinda really loud country band or something, because hardcore had just died out for us.”
Before Deep Wound officially disbanded, however, the group managed to record a self-titled 7-inch EP and a few tracks for the Bands That Could Be God compilation with local producer Lou Giordano at Boston’s Radio Beat Studios. Giordano recorded Boston’s top punk and hardcore acts, such as SS Decontrol, Negative FX, the FU’s, Jerry’s Kids and the Proletariat in the tiny reconstructed AM radio station in the heart of Kenmore Square.
“There was a small staff there.” Giordano explains. “There was the owner, Jimmy Dufour, and then I joined up in late ’82, and that was right about the time that the Boston scene was really exploding. Black Flag had come through town and basically just freaked everybody out, and it was never the same after that. And the Boston bands were kinda racing to catch up with the rest of the country, and all these bands sprung up overnight with a completely different sound than anywhere else –it was like they passed them all.”
Unsurprisingly, Siege elected to make their first recordings there as well, entering the studio with Giordano in February of 1984.
“The way our studio operated was that anything that comes in –there’s no value judgements made about the music,” Giordano recalls. “We just record it. Still, one of the things that I guess was cool about being a staff engineer is that I wouldn’t have sought out a band like that. I wasn’t philosophically into anything that they were doing, but they were all good musicians –you would have to be to stay together at the speeds they were playing at. So there was that aspect of it, and just the whole pushing the envelope thing. It sounds like it’s just gonna completely break apart going 700 miles through the sky and then all of a sudden everything just comes right together again.”
“And they were some of the most unassuming, laid-back people to ever work with,” he continues. “I mean, they had no attitude at all. They just came in and they were just really polite and very thankful, and then when they turned on the amps and made that noise, it was just unbelievable that it was coming from them.”
“He had seen a lot of that kind of thing, but we were serious about equipment, and that may have been one thing that set us apart,” Williams remembers. “But it was nothing new to him. He was really adept.”
Siege would return to the studio in October of that same year, recording three more tracks –“Walls”, “Cold War” and “Sad But True”- for a compilation assembled by artist and Maximum Rock n’ Roll scribe Pushead called Cleanse The Bacteria. That session would be this line-up’s last. A little over a year later, with internal tensions mounting, Siege imploded before what was to be their first ever New York City gig at the celebrated rock club CBGB’s. “The vocalist was bickering the guitarist,” Williams explains. “The van was loaded for our show. We never played the show. Kev never showed up, and I really can’t blame him. After that, we stopped playing.”
There were several false starts over the next few years, the last of which occurred in 1990, when Williams and guitarist Kurt Habelt were joined by local Boston vocalist Seth Putman.
“We were recording and writing, and I had written a bunch of revolutionary stuff, like violent lyrics, and the same guitarist changed some of my lyrics with weak rhyme, making them pacifist rather than revolutionary, and really changing their context,” says Williams. “He delivered that to Seth in the studio behind our backs. And he went so far as to erase one line of Seth’s singing and put in his own voice. I still have genocidal resentment about that. We never planned on compromising our extremity.” […]

Check out these links for some more stuff on the book, Deep Wound and Siege:

http://feralhouse.com/press/choosingdeath/

http://www.damagedgoods.co.uk/deepwound/

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cch223/usa/info/siege_SVinter.html

http://www.scotthelland.com/

What’s that noise?! (pt.3)

Here’s the third and final part of the interview Dolloff The Rat did a couple of years ago for his Sit Home And Rot fanzine with Dan Lilker. If you still wish to read more about Dan Lilker and the old days you should check out this interview conducted by Billy Milano, an interview that has only one purpose from Milano’s side: get Dan to talk as much shit as possible on Scott Ian.

I’ve seen a video of a NYC Mayhem show where you sing Life Of Riley with them. Were you into NYC Mayhem? What about Mental Abuse?

Oh, yeah, I forgot fucking Mental Abuse. That vocalist Cyd Sludge was a classic! And of course I enjoyed the short-lived NYC Mayhem, who went from death metal in ’78 to insane ultra-fast hardcore in a matter of what seemed like weeks.

Was it mainly bangers, hardcore kids or skins that moshed for you guys? Or was it a combination of the bunch?

Probably mostly bangers, but certainly a healthy amount of the other two categories. There were plenty of hardcore kids who could tell that we were not that serious with the lyrics and enjoyed us live for the intensity and the ‘moshability’. For that matter, I must say I thought it was pretty dumb to put ‘mosh part’ in the lyrics of Speak English Or Die. I only saw that when it was too late to do anything about it.

Will S.O.D. ever consider playing another show? I know you guys played CBGB’s once a year or two ago.

Although I very highly doubt it at the moment, it is possible that with time (and the right offer) it could happen again.

What do you think of Anthrax? Is it true that they were hated back then?

Well, the thing with those guys back then was that they had a little habit of latching onto certain trends and activities and trying to associate themselves with these things in a rather clumsy and obvious manner. So when they put the NYHC symbol on one of their shirts, more than a few people got a little pissed. It didn’t help when metal journalist Don Kaye mentioned in some widely distributed magazine that ‘it was rumored that they had actually tried to copyright the symbol’. That is not true, but it fanned the flames. Especially when they could compare Anthrax to Nuclear Assault. John and I were regulars at the CB’s matinees. We played a few of them and we didn’t pull kiss-ass-maneuvers if you get me. Scott later tried to get out of it by claiming that by putting the symbol there they were promoting it, thereby ‘supporting the scene’. That tired old expression. Hardcore kids weren’t fooled and pointed out that they could have supported the scene in a much less misleading way by simply mentioning bands they liked in interviews and wearing their shirts.

Are you really into horror movies? Do you like The Exorcist? Freddy Krueger’s a great song.

Oh yeah, I love all kinds of horror movies. From total humorous splatter to mind-bending psychological terror. Favorites include Evil Dead 2, Suspiria and Bad Taste.

Any closing words?

This has been a real trip down memory lane for me. It was quite nostalgic doing all this reminiscing and shit. I’m glad there’s people like you out there that are still enjoying and supporting the old style. After all, look at mainstream metal today… Papa Roach?!

What's that noise?! (pt.2)

He was responsible for Craig Ahead picking up a bass guitar, he formed Anthrax, played in S.O.D. and had his say in the infamous Phil Donahue Show about NYHC. There’s a huge chance that this dude saw all the great bands you wish you saw at their best, plus he has some cool things to say. Here’s the second part of the Dan Lilker interview.

S.O.D. or M.O.D.? Who had better mosh parts? I say S.O.D., but the mosh part in Aren’t You Hungry is pretty ridiculous!

Well, if I were brutally honest, I always thought M.O.D. was highly derivative of S.O.D. Aren’t You Hungry was actually written by me and Scott. For anyone who has seen American Pie 2, it’s like this: If S.O.D. was Stiffler then M.O.D. was Stiffler’s little brother.

Did anyone in S.O.D. ever get hassled at CB’s back in the 80s doe having long hair?

No, not really. The hardcore people were pretty friendly as I remember. There would always be, maybe a few, shit talkers, but they were a minority and were probably just trying to impress their friend, much like I alluded to before.

Speaking of that, when’s the last time you cut your hair?

I cut off most of my hair in May ’97 to get rid off the dreads I had for almost two years. But only a few times since then. It’s pretty long now!

What are some memorable shows you played back then? I have a flyer for a S.O.D., Motörhead, Cro-Mags show at Rock Hotel, that must have been crazy! Did you ever play with Metallica during the Master Of Puppets days?

That show ruled. Some of the first S.O.D. shows were done with Suicidal Tendencies when they still did a lot of stuff from their classic first album. Nuclear Assault did a show with Samhain, M.D.C. and Celtic Frost once. The only time I ever played with Metallica was way back when I was still in Anthrax at Kirk’s first show.

You still talk to or hang out with any guys from S.O.D.? What are you doing with yourself these days?

Well, S.O.D. just broke up for good due to some fatal misunderstandings concerning how much touring we were gonna do when we reemerged in ’99-’00. I still talk to the guys occasionally via e-mail. Now I am doing shit with Nuclear Assault again, ironically. I have joked that I have to reform all the 80s bands I played in because I’m getting sick of nu-metal, because I got to show these fuckers how to play real metal, which doesn’t involve jumping up and down and rapping.

What were your favorite NYHC bands to see back then? Favorite metal bands? And least favorite?

Crumbsuckers, Ludichrist, Krakdown, Adrenalin O.D. (from New Jersey), Agnostic Front, The Psychos, Cro-Mags, Murphy’s Law, Straight Ahead, etc.

What were you guys thinking when you wrote United Forces? That’s probably the most vicious song written in the last 95 years. It just puts everyone I know into a frenzy!

That was a song Scott brought to the band. He had already written like half the songs before I came into the picture. I helped writing Milano Mosh, Milk, Pussywhipped, Speak English Or Die, Chromatic Death and Fist Banging Mania. I can’t take credit for United Forces.

Could you talk a little bit about the Phil Donahue Show you were on in ’86? How did you get on that? Did you really get rejected from a deli?

Oh Christ, I did not really try to get a job at a deli. That was the first thing that came to mind only because I was contemplating getting a job at a deli. The reason the show was done was that New York Magazine did a big article on some teenage hardcore chick from Long Island and her crush on Jimmy Gestapo from Murphy’s Law, yawn… So, Phil somehow got wind of that a lot of us thought the article was gay and wanted to see what we thought. By the way, after the magazine came out the girl (her name was Bekka) got a really big head and did a column for some magazine dissing metalheads. Shortly afterwards Nuclear Assault dedicated Buttfuck to her at a show we knew she was at.

Who were your good friends back in the day? Was there anybody in the scene that you were scared of?

I had a lot of good friends in that scene to the point where if I start mentioning some I’ll forget others and feel bad later. I guess Craig, Billy Milano and pretty much everyone from the bands I mentioned before would be a good start.

I’m gonna jump out of your speaker right now and slab you in the bum. Cheers!

I don’t know how it goes with you people, but whenever I come across a website that has a ‘links’ section I usually am not that tempted to click on that button in order to find more links when I am not necessarily looking for something specific. So I decided to write a little piece for you with a bunch of links included so if you are somewhat interested in what I mention, say or suggest you can click-away the night. You could say that this is my first news to use sorta post with useful links for those who care.

Let’s kick this first piece off with some news from the Belgian hardcore scene, more precisely about my punkmetalling bros in Rise And Fall. This week an MP3 of The Void from their upcoming record Into Oblivion was posted on their label Reflections Records’ website. Listening to Into Oblivion, release date 11/24, you won’t have a hard time hearing their varying influences though those create a rather unique sound. People that can appreciate some Slayer, Entombed, Tragedy, Discharge, Integrity, Black Sabbath, Eyehategod, Integrity, Cro-Mags, Leeway, Ringworm and Dead Stop in their lives need to give Rise And Fall a shot. Punkmetal to the bone. Speaking about punkmetal, Integrity’s live intensity of the early 90s has been immortalized by means of a slab of vinyl. Aurora Borealis has put out a live LP with a set from back in ’92, a show in Cleveland on Palm Sunday. Only 500 copies were pressed and the record has been out for a few weeks now, so if you want this you gonna have to act fast. This week I’ve been listening to two other Cleveland bands quiet a lot, two bands that are still around, I assume, Upstab and Cider. Both bands play filthy raw punk with a lot of distortion and a straight forward sound. Upstab have some old Clevo dudes in the ranks, I don’t know who exactly, but I bet some of them have played in Integrity or Ringworm at one time. I know about one EP they have, put out by Even Worse Records/Way Back When Records from The Netherlands, that should be still available. I have some more stuff by Upstab as MP3s, but I don’t know if that stuff is from a demo, another EP or perhaps unreleased stuff. One thing is sure, it’s hard hitting. You can listen to an Upstab track here. Cider feature a better known Cleveland legend, namely Aaron Melnick, though in the insert of the They Are The Enemy EP on Painkiller Records he’s credited as both Brainwashed Aaron and, the classic, A2. They Are The Enemy EP was rereleased earlier this year by Painkiller Records, but I don’t think it’s still available. Next to They Are The Enemy EP Cider put out the Out To Get Me EP on Non Commercial Records in 1994, that is sold out of course. Basically it will be hard to find a Cider record anywhere, so all I can offer you till you do is this MP3. Maybe some day Painkiller Records will put out a Cider discography or do a repress, just like they are about to do with another raw Clevo punk project featuring a (only one?) Melnick, The Inmates. Their Asshole Anonymous LP was released a couple years ago on Human Stench Records, limited to 300 copies only. So if you want to find out more about this obscure Cleveland outfit, be sure to order the LP from the fine folks over at Painkiller Records. I don’t know if their Government Crimes EP will be on the repress as well, but it def would be a nice extra. Listen what The Inmates were about here. To end this part about Ohio’s filthiest there’s one more thing I have to say, and again it involves Painkiller Records, The Darvocets have recorded 6 new songs that will be on a one sided 12”, listen to their Eyes Like Ants to get a little hint as what they might sound like. A lot of info on all these Clevo bands can be found on the Non Commercial Records website.

That’s all I’ve got for you for now, I have a lot more news line-up that I will be posting soon. You might have to recheck Megalomaniacal Supernauts sooner than you think…

What’s that noise?! (part 1)

Can you do the Milano Mosh? Good, because now you are ready to take your second step in S.O.D.-ness. I found back this 2001/2002 interview with Dan Lilker about the old days of the New York hardcore and metal scene, about the origins of S.O.D., Anthrax and Nuclear Assault and about other related stuff. A pretty interesting read I’d like to share with you. It’s a pretty long interview, so I’ll be posting this in different parts. Here’s part one of the extended interview I took from Sit Home And Rot issue #2, a hardcore fanzine done by early 00s east coast scene star Dolloff The Rat. When I approached him recently to ask some sort of permission to reprint this interview this is what he replied to me: “Do it fag…I’m hard as hell.” So I guess that meant it was a go!

What was your first show? What were some of the bands you grew up seeing back in the day? Craig Ahead told me about you taking him to his first show…

Well, since I came from the metal side of things and this interview appears to be mostly hardcore orientated, I’ll give you a twofold answer. My first metal show was probably Priest and Maiden in ’81. The next year I saw Riot, Anvil and Raven at a show put on by Johnny Z before he started Megaforce. My first hardcore show was Adrenalin O.D. and some other bands at CBGB’s at the end of ’83. I think this is the show Craig is talking about. Other bands I saw back then are too many to mention, but include Agnostic Front, Metallica, Cro-Mags, Possessed, The Psychos, Dark Angel, Murphy’s Law, Exodus, etc.

How did S.O.D. get started? Are there any unreleased S.O.D. songs from the Speak English Or Die days? What were you thinking when you first played March Of The S.O.D.?

Scott started S.O.D. because he wanted to play fast hardcore. He called me in April ’85 and offered me the job on bass. No, there aren’t any unreleased tracks. The first time I played March Of The S.O.D. (at the rehearsal for the record) I liked it, but I had no idea it would come out so heavy on tape.

How do you do the Milano Mosh? Have you ever seen it? Describe it.

I think the Milano Mosh is more of a mindset than an actual dance style. It was part of the S.O.D. mentality of being plain obnoxious. Everything we did should have been taken with a grain of salt since a lot of it was pretty much tongue-in-cheek. Not everyone got that…

Did anyone ever try to fight or hassle any of you because they thought you were racist?

That depends on your definition of hassle. No one ever got in my face or anything, but we certainly got a lot of flak from people in the hardcore scene. I learned from the whole thing that there are certain subjects you shouldn’t joke with. Then again, a lot of people who dissed us were probably almost happy that we were around because it gave them something to moan about so they could have a platform to prove how ‘down’ they were. I think about twenty English crust bands wrote songs like Fuck Off Billy Milano.

How did Nuclear Assault come about? Was it much different than being in S.O.D.?

Nuclear Assault formed in early ’84 after I was no longer in Anthrax due to the then-vocalist hating me for some reason. So I said ‘OK’ and formed a band to do more intense shit anyway. John was there from the beginning and we eventually found Glenn and Anthony, signed to Combat and the rest is history. It was quite different than being in S.O.D. We played all the time and put out a few albums. And of course our lyrics weren’t an obnoxious sociological experiment, as in ‘Let’s see how many people we can piss off.’ Similarities would be the crowds we’d draw and their reaction to our live music.

Who are some of your favorite NYHC bass players?

Dude, it’s been a while since I even paid attention to NYHC, so I’ll try to remember the oldies: Harley Flanagan, Chuck Valle, Craig, of course, but since I taught him everything he knows that’s like complimenting your own son. Outside the NY scene other good bassists were the dudes from MDC and The Offenders.

Who’s Kill Yourself about?

Although Scott wrote the lyrics to this I’m pretty sure it’s not about anyone in particular. It’s just a nihilist proclamation intended to rid the over-populated world of useless losers.

Are you proud that you wrote the song Fuck The Middle East? Explain if your opinions have changed since you wrote it in the mid 80s.

As mentioned before, our lyrics were made to be taken with a grain of salt. However, it’s tragically iron how that song is always in vogue! I can certainly see how some people would see the lyrics as some racist, mindlessly patriotic knee-jerk rhetoric, but once again I must emphasize that we were just having fun and went a little far with the shock value. Scott wrote the lyrics, but I stand behind them as long as what I just said is kept in mind.

What year did you first tour and who’d you play with? Were the shows violent? Any good stories you’d care to share? Did you ever play with Carnivore?

I believe we started touring in late ’86 when Game Over came out. Please keep in mind this was a long time ago and I’ve smoked a lot of weed since then! I think we toured with bands like Overkill… The shows were violent only in a good way, no fights, just thrashing, moshing and diving. My friends are encouraging me to write a book like Tom G. so then I’ll try to remember all the stories. And yes, we played with the mighty Carnivore.