Mavericks of Sound

by Ensminger, David

  Rob Younger: Radio Birdman and New Christs

  Originally printed in Left of the Dial, interviewed by Jeremy Saperstein and David Ensminger, 2003.

  Did you ad-lib most of the vocals for the Deep Reduction sessions?

  I didn’t ad-lib those vocals, I sang what was put in front of me, and for the three sets of words I wrote to cassettes sent to me I wrote two versions, “plans A and B.” Not sure why, but in each case plan B prevailed. There wasn’t time for more than two takes for any of them, if I recall, a weird situation considering I was flown all that way to sing on the record. Whatever, it turned out well enough.

  According to an Australian website, the 1989 release of the New Race’s First to Pay was hailed by some, since the original raw vocals are preserved and are considered by many to be compelling in their intensity. These had been overdubbed on the “official” The First and Last album. Were you consulted? Is this true and accurate?

  The simplest and best thing would be for the raw tapes to be mixed properly and put out. I thought the official release of The First and Last was fine, and I only found out years later that Deniz had been unhappy with my re-recording of the singing. The two releases on Revenge were put out without my permission, Ron Asheton having presented them with utterly crap unmixed cassettes of various shows. These cassettes consisted of a one-pass-through “the-desk” mixes made by someone who was not a sound engineer to enable the band members to figure out what was worth putting on an official release. Back then, I used to jump around so much that the vocals didn’t always register on tape, and all I wanted to do was give the songs the necessary focus. Maybe they are better in organic form than what I changed them to. Who cares now anyway?

  How do you gauge fans in America—by record reviews, by letters and emails, or by sales?

  I gauged our profile from all the sources mentioned, except record sales. I didn’t, still don’t, delude myself that there’s a whole lot of interest, but probably we’d have filled a smallish club in the bigger cities.

  “It’s cyclical how raw rock ’n’ roll comes back to remind everybody and make them all ashamed about their wanking and overproduction. Like the latest example, the White Stripes, . . . I felt ashamed to be playing in a band with six people when two people can go out there and generate that shit,” you told the English press. Are you fascinated, since the White Stripes are products of Detroit, the source of much inspiration for Radio Birdman and New Race?

  Not really. It seems to be a coincidence, the Detroit connection. I was being tongue-in-cheek when I said I felt ashamed about having six as opposed to two, to emphasize the point about what a firm reminder the Stripes are that simplicity, directness, good songwriting, and attitude don’t require a traveling circus to support them. It’s that the power of ideas, of art, isn’t, or shouldn’t be, dependant on extravagance and overembellishment. Sorry if that’s badly explained. I suppose I should say that, for me, it wasn’t just Detroit music that got me interested in playing music apart from all the stuff I heard in my so-called formative years, it was the New York Dolls that got me to thinking I could give it a shot. I never felt I could get anywhere near to capturing the atmosphere I perceived on Funhouse.

  On the Long Way to the Top TV series, you said, “This whole legacy thing is a bit difficult. . . . I’ve been accused of a lot of dreadful things, but that sort of pomposity of assuming that ‘godfather’ mantle is a bit odious. Is there something odd about downplaying one’s role, especially since you’ve been a constant presence in Australian music?

  Maybe it is odd, but it’s consistent with most Australians’ character. It’s a national trait, modesty, and its close relative, false modesty, too, of course. Really, I don’t want to think about things like this legend and icon shit. It’s quite meaningless. I’m a fan, in the main. I started out trying to copy Iggy Pop, got over it, and kept on with bands. I’ve outlasted a few people, so I’m now old enough to be this fucking elder statesman. Spare me.

  Do you feel the true meaning of the song “New Race” has been misunderstood for over two decades, not unlike the Rezillos’ “Someone’s Going to Get Their Head Kicked In (Tonight)” and even Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”?

  Deniz wrote “New Race” in response to our then-producer Charles Fisher’s request that he write a teen anthem. He knocked it up overnight. It’s about kids mutating through the power of rock ’n’ roll into a “new race.” It’s a bit of fun. All the bullshit about it being a fascist call to arms is patently absurd.

  Jules from Phantom Records, your former neighbor and even roommate, said, “The one thing I remember about Rob is all the time we were together he never had any photos of himself at an age younger than what he was then!” Is he remembering this correctly?

  Jules has a virtual photographic memory, so I’d be nuts to argue with him. And in this case he’s right. I couldn’t give a damn about photographs of myself. Now, there’s a wild pronouncement.

  You liked the British bands of the 1960s, including the Animals, Kinks, and the Beatles, but why in the 1970s did you become so turned on to American music like the New York Dolls, Stooges, and Alice Cooper (I believe your early band the Rats covered Alice Cooper)?

  I latched onto those U.S. bands because they sounded so good. Their nationalities had nothing to do with it. At the time—the early seventies—British rock was mired in that boring Free, Deep Purple scene, apart from the Faces and the glam crowd, which I really loved, and when I heard Funhouse I completely flipped. It wasn’t like me consciously going “I think I’ll give the U.S. boys a go for a while.” I didn’t think in terms of legacies and stuff. You just follow your heart; it’s not that theoretical. The Rats never played any Alice songs. They were too hard for us to learn. We did about six Dolls, five Stooges, “Strutter” by Kiss, a couple of Velvets ones, “Waiting for the Man,” and “Rock & Roll.” Tried to play “Call Me Animal,” but it was too tough. It didn’t occur to us that we could write our own material, like, that it was allowable.

  Is that what led you to eventually cover the likes of the Who and Love later on?

  No, we needed a couple of songs to make up the numbers for an EP release, and I suggested we learn “The Seeker” and “She Comes in Colors,” both big favorites of mine. Since our drummer played the trumpet really well, too, I thought it could substitute for the flute on “Colors.”

  At the same time, you saw all the prog bands of the time, like Blackfeather, Khahvas Jute, Coloured Balls, Carson, Spectrum, and Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs or listened to albums by the La De Da’s and Human Instinct? How did these bands shape your attitude towards music?

  None of those bands shaped shit for me. I liked the La De Da’s for a few songs, and Khahvas Jute was interesting, but it was more a case of those bands contributing to the reason I got into playing the kind of rock ’n’ roll I’m into, because that scene was a pile of shit to me. A sort of anti-influence thing.

  You booked bands at the Oxford Funhouse, like Johnny Dole and the Scabs and Mangrove Boogie Kings, and the Saints. From what I’ve read, you kept out shitty bands. How did this lead to, say, producing bands like Died Pretty, the Hangmen, City Kids, and Lime Spiders? Do you pick and choose his projects like he used to pick and choose bands to play the club?

  Not really. Apart from being quite full of shit and on a bit of a crusade championing real rock as I then saw it, I booked bands that fitted the style of the place—grubby, unpretentious, rocking bands. The bands I recorded with fell into my lap through my association with Citadel Records, mainly. I wasn’t in any position to be choosy. It turned out that I smelled like roses being associated with such great groups, like Died Pretty and the Hangmen obviously are. I first got production offers because I seemed to be the only one around Darlinghurst that had actually spent any time at all in a studio.

  A scene can’t develop with just bands alone, so could you talk about the magazines like RAM and Bucketful of Brains, and the record stores like Ripple Records, Phan
tom Records, and Anthem?

  Well, Bucketful is an English magazine that is still going, but RAM, or Rock Australia Magazine, was just a mainstream rag publicizing the stuff that was already popular. I tried writing reviews for them a few times, but the editor kept changing my words to ones he preferred and cutting out the more insulting stuff. Those record stores all sold imports, so they were instrumental in people in Sydney getting hold of the hipper releases from the U.S. and U.K. I remember the day Jules got in his batch of the new Lou Reed album, Metal Machine Music. It was meant to sell for $16, but after only a week it was down to $2, and no one was going for it. The best store around that time was White Light, which was run by Mark Taylor, later of the Lipstick Killers.

  In some ways, supposedly the poet Penny Ward was to the Birdman what Patti Smith was to early Blue Oyster Cult. Do you remember anything about her?

  I remember Penny as being a great person, always pleasant, and I was really impressed when eventually I heard some songs she and Angie Pepper [Deniz’s wife now] had written, but there was never any involvement Birdman-wise that I can recall. We were far too insular to incorporate others into the fold. Penny used to be a Funhouse (our rock club in Taylor Square, Darlinghurst) regular.

  What happened to Hard-On and later the project with Richard and Peter from Sunnyboys?

  I’ve got no idea what Hard-On refers to, band-wise at least. Around 1980 though, the guys that eventually became the Sunnyboys and I rehearsed songs. We were playing Jeremy Oxley’s stuff, really well-crafted stuff, good tunes, and a few of mine, “No Next Time,” I forget the others. In the best career move I made on other people’s behalf, I decided they didn’t need me because Jeremy sounded so good on his own songs when he was showing them to me. Also, I would’ve compromised their immense teen appeal.

  Two of the Birdman were former paratroopers or Navy men, and two were med students. Is this what partly defined the tension in the band?

  Actually, our bass player Carl, who left, was a paratrooper, and Deniz was a flight surgeon in the U.S. Navy, but that was well after Radio Birdman broke up. Deniz and Pip were med students in our early days. None of this created any tension, though. Our tensions stemmed much later on from being cooped up together in a crummy flat in Drayton Park in London, and the endless drives in the so-called Van of Hate over there. Previously, we’d only been shoved together for two days at a time, not week after week, getting on each other’s nerves.

  Is there one defining moment that you can recall from the tour with Flamin’ Groovies?

  The endless tuning of their twelve-string guitars between songs, and the accompanying banter about how a guitar is like a woman and you’ve got to treat them with great care, ad nauseam. They were a good band, though. We didn’t have all that much contact with them as I recall.

  How did you feel when the band was dropped from Sire (home of the Saints, too) and were unceremoniously replaced with the street punkers Sham 69, who, besides their cover of the Animals, were a pale comparison to the rootsy thunder of the Birdman?

  I wasn’t aware that Sham 69 replaced us. We were culled from the label along with a host of other bands when Sire was dumped by their distributor or some rubbish. Sham 69? That is an insult. They sucked. Bad note to end on.

  Eugene Robinson: The Oracle Behind Oxbow

  Previously unpublished, interviewed in January 2014.

  I don’t mean to overwhelm or wax too much about punk, but I find it to be important to your body of work.

  Yes, to quote the Minutemen, punk rock saved my life and framed it quite closely to the boundaries and borders of my personality as it is.

  With Whipping Boy’s inclusion on the Not So Quiet on the Western Front compilation, did you feel like you were part of a cultural moment—a zeitgeist of sorts?

  As is typical/usual for me that feeling predated the call to appear on the compilation by a few years. I mean I’m a rare beast. Part of the last throes of punk rock formal, from 1977 to 1980 in New York, followed by a fast, fairly effortless move to hardcore. Only a few others I know made that same trip and can claim to have already been there when I showed up: Harley Flanagan, Stephen Ielpi, Jack Rabid, Lydia Lunch, even though she never really made the jump to hardcore both feet-wise, and a few others.

  So, Not So Quiet . . . seemed a quasi quaint play for placement in something that was already changing what I was doing and thinking about personally and what people I was associating with were doing specifically. It was useful though in that it coalesced the outliers by giving them a frame of reference that was maybe absent wherever they were from.

  Well-known political bands like MDC and Dead Kennedys were also featured.

  I still remember when MDC moved to town (San Francisco), so I find I still think of them as “the new guys” . . . funny, but they had something new going on very definitely: they weren’t ashamed of being able to play well and they were not ashamed of being smart. And that probably both came from being older AND from out of town.

  During the era how did you feel about the politics of those bands? Did you personally embody similar ideologies?

  The last time I used or enjoyed any other ideology not so much my own was probably when I discovered that my long-term interest in physical fitness, something that had marked me as a “jock” in the eyes of the Maximum Rocknroll community, despite me showing up to participate in the early radio shows and all, which dovetailed nicely with the whole straight edge thing. I mean back then Ian was drinking soda, eating meat and candy. So not the greatest diet. But I didn’t drink, I exercised, and while not straight edge was a firm believer in will and control. So it seemed tailor fit for me. The only part of that I regret was the whole sexless no-fucking portion of it, which made sense in light of younger men who were possibly unsure of their sexual interests, but in my life? Well it probably cost me a few good years of fucking, [laughs] . . . but the politics of MDC in my mind were very different from the politics of the DKs.

  MDC had very firm and developed ideas about eating for the long term (McDonalds? Bad . . . which some had never really considered. . . . Vegetables? Good), sexuality, and how the government was working. While I think their cop target was a small and wrongheaded shot at what should have been a much wider target (I have friends who are cops, and it’s a tough blue-collar job not always done by assholes), it seems to me that, drug problems aside, they were earnest and smart cats.

  The DKs were pretty apolitical, strangely enough. I mean it’s easy to not see that given their name and their songs and how their whole history played out, but knowing them, with the exception of Jello, these guys were much more excited about the prospects of what they could do musically and artistically than they were in any sort of agit-prop. Except for Jello, who as a singer and frontman would shoulder the shaping of the thematic thrust of the band, which, in his hands, always seemed a little newspaper-headline driven. I mean Jello is a voracious listener to music (I’ve never been able to get a pause in edgewise with the guy . . . ) but not so much a voracious reader of anything other than newspapers, which will eventually shallow your approach to whatever themes you’re drawn to I think, so it makes sense to ask me about MDC’s politics, not so much about the DKs.

  But my politics were fast evolving, so whether I was arguing with Ian MacKaye about race vis-a-vis “Guilty of Being White” or Jello about why a man should be able to shoot his own lawnmower on his front lawn . . . I always found that politics were the politics of looking deeper into the pond than the newspapers would ever have you do. Though I did happen to sing a song called “America Must Die” [laughs].

  Did you feel magazines like Maximum Rocknroll and punk venues provided true alternative perspectives and spaces, like shaping a new world within the old? Or did you seek out other venues/press, especially as Oxbow began?

  By the time Oxbow started, I was not at all interested in what they were doing, thinking, or talking about. They were trying to serve youth, and I was trying to grow up. I liked the idea of Gi
lman. I liked that the magazine still existed/exists, but I wanted to hear musicians who had gotten better and ideas that had evolved and art that was forward looking, so good for them to be a gateway drug to “doing things yourself,” but it made about as much sense for me to be involved in the same way as it would have for me to still be sporting a mohawk.

  You’ve mentioned vocalists you enjoy like Tom Waits, Al Jolson, and Nick Cave. . . .

  I enjoy Waits and Cave more as lyricists, though I like their ideations of their lyrics as well.

  And Marianne Faithful appeared on an Oxbow record, but why is Darby Crash still so intriguing to you?

  Same reason: his lyrics were much smarter than they had any right to be, and much smarter than you’d ever think having seen them play. An enduring sadness for me is that I never got to see them live or work with him at all.

  You once said your book A Long Slow Screw is about the functioning of “filthy lucre and our relationship to the corrosive power of cash,” which brings to mind both the Sex Pistols and Ezra Pound to me. How do you propose a viable alternative—how do people break free of these chains?

  Philosophically. I mean money is an abstraction, even if the power it exercises is very real. So, what power does is real, but that’s the only thing that’s real about it. I can “buy” a house, I can “pay” to have someone killed, or I can create art that has more than a better chance of being heard because I can just push it and push it like Lana Del Rey and people will give me more of this abstraction. In case I have not been clear, I will take the time to say here: I love money. Make no mistake. It’s one of the best abstractions out there. Second only to love in my mind.