Back in June when book promo was in full swing, I did a number of radio interviews, and at one of them, I mentioned something about coming into the studio wearing a dress I bought on Etsy. The show host then asked me if it meant I was “all indie all the time”, to which I replied, “no, I drive a Honda.”

As I re-read my way through Rob Walker’s Buying In (I’m teaching it in one of my courses this semester), I’m reminded again about this odd dichotomy of identifying ourselves so strongly with things we buy, wear, and even drive, yet feeling a core aversion to associating ourselves with corporate brands. As a person who’s become associated in my teeny, tiny way with indie, being asked by a radio host about my buying habits was disconcerting. Sure, I buy things from Etsy when I can afford them, but most of my clothes come from H&M, or the occasional JCrew sweater (Jcrew offers teachers a 15% discount, did you know?), jeans from my beloved Slash in Berkeley, or something from Anthropologie. And that last one is troubling because I totally hammer Urban Outfitters in the book for ripping off indie designers, but Anthropologie is, of course, owned by the same company (which itself is owned by a notorious conservative… see chapter 10). Yet Anthropologie is one of the few places where someone who is (a) almost six feet tall, (b) not shaped like a pencil, (c) too old for teen wear and (d) doesn’t want to look like a drone can find reasonably stylish things. They also have a store in the East Bay, which is nice because I loathe shopping in San Francisco’s mega downtown malls. Most vintage doesn’t fit me — aside from Julia Child there were very few women built like me in the past — and I have a job where I can’t wear crafty tee shirts and hoodies and old jeans to work, so my sartorial options are limited. Also, I can’t sew, don’t craft, and have zero desire to do either. I have to buy clothes somewhere, but boutiques with stuff by local, independent designers are staggeringly expensive and typically only run up to size 6 or 8 at the most. And it’s thus that choices about how we look and who we are are sometimes made for us.

Walker talks in Buying In about this conundrum when it comes to Converse. We all know Converse is owned by Nike, yet many of us continue wearing Chucks because we have fond associations with them from punk days of the past, in spite of having pretty negative perceptions of Nike as a company. So Chucks came to represent an alternative to big bad Nike, and we imagined our idols running around in the same shoes we were wearing. Yet if you look closely at the first Ramones album, you’ll notice, as Walker points out, that they’re not wearing cool counter-cultural Chucks — they’re wearing Keds.

I bought a Honda Fit in 2007, because I needed a car that I could drive for at least ten years (buying your first new car at 36 means you’ve had time to grow into the understanding that you won’t be able to afford to buy another new car for a very long time). It had to be warantied, get good mileage, and have just enough room for tall me and schlepping stuff around. So I looked online and researched which subcompacts fit my criteria and had good safety features, and the Fit won. Also, frankly it looks cool, and has cool design elements like fold down seats that can be configured to fit three huge Ikea boxes or a surfboard or a bike. Soon after, two friends of mine also bought Fits, partially on my recommendation. But unlike the hipster, techno music loving youngsters Fits were being pitched to in ads, my friends and I are all twenty/thirtyish feminists involved in independent arts (these two women used to co-own a gallery/cafe), we’re all in long-term relationships, and both of them have babies (including Jen’s brand new arrival, Ginger. Jen’s Fit came before Ginger, but you get the point). 90% of the Fits I see driven around the Bay Area are not being driven by hipster, techno loving youngsters, they’re being driven by 30-50 somethings. Old farts like myself are pragmatic, but we still want to be, you know, coolish.

I’ll be honest: I love my car, and I know I buy clothes from evil corporations but I don’t feel brainwashed — when I go to the dealer for servicing, I don’t feel temped to buy the Honda seat covers, travel mugs, and car bras they have on displays. I try to balance buying clothes from corporations by buying music and art from independent artists. I suppose that radio host expected me to say I drive a veggie oil car and only eat locally sourced food and only watch independent films and don’t own a TV. All of those choices are excellent ones that I support, but the fact of the matter is that I am just as much of a consumer of corporate made goods and mainstream entertainment as anyone else. This morning, I heard a woman on NPR talking about how she can’t afford to shop at the farmer’s market anymore because prices have become so high there, and in some ways living independently is the same. It’s expensive, and at a time when my employers are squeezing the students, staff and faculty, sometimes I have to go for the Trader Joe’s canned tomatoes instead of the organic heirloom ones. Maybe that’s less independent, but it’s an act of necessity. And perhaps one necessity is really the new guilt.

It’s miserably, horribly hot in Oakland, which makes your author puffy, oily and grouchy. Perfect time to update the blog! New reviews and a pretty awesome upcoming event, so this is going to be an updatey kind of post.

# Item the first: I’m heading to LA to do a panel at Skylight Books on Sunday, September 27 at 5pm. Here’s the blurb from their site:

We’re looking forward to this panel discussion on the development of indie culture in America. Kaya Oakes, author of the new book on the topic, Slanted and Enchanted, will be joined by Ben Bush, editor of The Fanzine; Courtney Knopf of Everloving Records; and Daniel House of CZ Records. Justin Gage, founder of the fantastic music blog Aquarium Drunkard, will moderate.

Kaya Oakes is the co-founder of Kitchen Sink magazine, which won the Utne Independent Press Award for Best New Magazine in 2002, and currently is a writing instructor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Based in Los Angeles, Justin Gage is the founder of both the influential music blog Aquarium Drunkard as well as Autumn Tone Records. He also hosts, and is the program director, for the weekly Aquarium Drunkard show on Sirius/XM satellite radio. His first book, Memphis And The Delta Blues Trail, was published in May via Countrymen Press.

Hopefully, this event will turn out to be as great as I anticipate, and if it does, I’m thinking of putting together a similar panel in Oakland/Berkeley/SF for some time this fall. If you’re a Bay Arean and would like to participate, let me know.

# Item the second: two new reviews, in The Fanzine (former Kitchen Sink contributing writer and Skylight panelist Ben Bush is one of The Fanzine’s editors, and I’m working on a review of two poetry books that will appear there soon). Also in Fast Forward Weekly out of Calgary.

That’s about it. Trying to decide if it’s worth going to my non-air-conditioned gym this morning for what would inevitably be a pathetic attempt at working out. Lethargy may triumph.

Back when I was writing a chapter about Olympia, my research queries kept leading me to articles about “twee pop”, the offshoot of indie rock some people believe started with the Calvin Johnson/K Records scene in Olympia. Arguably, the turn toward even more amateurish musicianship and tuneless singing represented a democratzing force in the naescent indie movement of the time; after all, K’s credo, “learn not to play your instrument” is much more aspirational than the guitar god wankery that came before. But the primitive, sweet, innocent music made by the early twee poppers is not to everyone’s taste. Even today, you can put on a Beat Happening album and clear a room pretty quickly.

This summer, there were a couple of films that came out that struck me as very “twee” in sensibility. The cutsey poster fonts, jangly sing-songy soundtracks, tales of (hetero — it’s still Hollywood)) love and woe, and the whole tonal sensibilities of 500 Days of Summer and Away We Go were, for lack of a better term, Juno-esque. And Juno was perhaps the original twee movie, even featuring K artist Kimya Dawson on the soundtrack. Being one of the folks who would rather have my eyes gouged out with hot pokers than to ever watch Juno again, there was no way I was going to see anything else that was even remotely close to being that damn twee. But I’m also not really a fan of twee pop either, so perhaps the sensibility of youth and sweetness and cupcakes and mini skirts is wasted on a grouchy bitch like me. Well, maybe not the cupcakes.

Years ago, I worked for Viz Communications, one of the first American publishers to bring Japanese manga and anime to the US. Many Japanese women worked in my office, all smart, no nonsense pragmatic types. But as soon as one of them started talking about Ranma 1/2 (Viz’s first blockbuster and a super, SUPER twee manga/anime about a boy who turns into a girl when splashed with water), they’d instantly turn into five year old girls, shrieking, “kawaiiiiieeeeee!” at the top of their lungs. This word, meaning “cute”, has many of the same associations as twee. Hello Kitty is totally twee. Heck, all of Sanrio is pretty twee.

Lots of stuff I see on Etsy would probably fall into the twee category as well, like this too-cute-to-be-true teacup ring (sugar shock radiates from it). Crafting seems to sometimes invite the twee sensibility, perhaps because it’s mostly done by women (no, not that we are twee by nature, but that more women seem to be attracted to “cuteness” than men, and no, nothing’s wrong with that). Maybe I’m just too cynical to get the whole twee thing, but the conflation of twee and indie seems to have intensified of late, what with all the indie music on those twee film soundtracks, the rise of crafting, and the escapist sensibilities inherent in many twee lyrics. After all, Beat Happening’s best known song, Indian Summer, combines lyrics about delicious food with romantic longing, and nothing’s cuter or sweeter than that, and what with the economic meltdown and celebrity deaths and so on, maybe twee is kind of like a blankie. Warm, then smothering.

Hello Kitty painting by Andrew Demcak.

First things first, I am woefully behind on blogging. I had a very overdue book review that needed to be written, classes start this week, my employers have gone bananas, and so on. But if you read this, please take a minute and do me a favor if you can; I’m trying to get to Austin to present at South by Southwest on the evolution of indie (you know, what I wrote a book about) and could use your help because they rely on a “panel picker”. Here’s a link to my proposal. I believe in reciprocity above all things (that’s the indie credo, dig?), so if you have a panel proposal, let me know and I’ll vote for you.

Note: after reading this earlier, I realized it didn’t make sense and got pretty ad hominem, so I edited out some of the rants [in brackets]. Happy to provide an unedited version upon request.

I slept poorly last night, so I’m not going to be able to articulate this well, but thinking about SXSW in turn made me think about the reviews Slanted and Enchanted has received in the months since its publication and whether or not enough people have read it to get me to Austin. There’ve been a decent number of reviews, although the one that was supposedly going to maybe happen in the New York Times never materialized (if you know Dwight Garner, could you nag him about this?). But an odd phenomenon has occurred in a few of them. Primarily, it seems like male book critics tend to attack the book for leaving out things they wanted me to talk about, whereas female critics have been much more generous and have recognized the inherent limitations at play in a shortish cultural study. Is this sexism? I don’t know [insert rant about book critics here]. But let’s be frank: indie is pretty sexist, which is why the whole Riot Grrrl thing happened in the first place. The fact that I came from working on a magazine published, edited by, and written for by a majority of women meant that I was somewhat buffered from this for the last six or seven years, and my agent and editor for this project are also both women. But indie is in many ways just as sexist today as it was in the 80s and 90s. Maybe more women are playing in bands, but who’s running the labels? Maybe more women are drawing comics, but who’s publishing them? And maybe more women are writing for indie magazines (if there are any of those left) and writing books about indie culture, but who’s reviewing those magazines and books? I could be wrong about this (and I welcome correction if I am) but it seems that the majority of book critics who pay attention to nonfiction titles are men. Why is that? [insert other rant about book critics here]

[insert other rant about book critics here] What do you think? Is indie sexist? Are book critics sexist? Can women write about a loaded topic without being treated like dumb little girls?

Kathleen Hanna is a hero to many women (and men) of my generation and the next one, many of whom discovered feminism through the Riot Grrrl movement. Her band Bikini Kill were trailblazers in the indie scene, and coming from Olympia, Washington, they also played a major role in establishing the Olympia music and zine subculture (including K Records and Kill Rock Stars Records) that continues to thrive today. She’s also a multimedia artist who does visual art in addition to music. Her current band, Le Tigre, is back in the studio and it’s rumored that they’re working on a collaboration with Christina Aguilera, interestingly enough. Le Tigre’s feminist dance punk should be an interesting match up with Aguilara’s mega loud voice.

Although Kathleen and I attended The Evergeen State College at the same time, we didn’t know one another as students (although during our conversation I realized we used to ride the bus to campus together as we both lived off campus in downtown Olympia). We spoke early in 2008 about the roots of Riot Grrrl, Olympia’s reaction to Bikini Kill’s success, and life as young feminists.

KH: There were a bunch of really young girls, just total wild, freaks, who started bands kind of in kindredship with us, and ____ wrote us this really funny letter, that was about how her and her best friend told people that they were in Bikini Kill, and would like get into things for free, because nobody recognized what we looked like at that time, and then they started a band, and she would do fanzines and we just had a real connection with all those girls…
KO  so… what do you think it was about Olympia and living  there — my memory of it was that there was nothing to do, was that part of what sparked you getting started with doing art and doing zines, or was there a confluence of people that started that, or anything specific that happened?
KH For me it was mostly just that there was a music scene there, and that I was really lucky that I didn’t live on campu… I wanted to live downtown – I was from Portland,  you know, not a big city, but kind of a city, and I kind of wanted to be downtown as opposed to living in the woods like most people lived or these weird dorm-type apartments. So I actually got to sort of see the music scene, and… there’s not much to do  so you have to make your own entertainment… if you want to see good art you’ve got to bring it there, and make it happen.
KH There was all this stuff where you had to learn to go to a community member and figure it out… So I feel like that at least for me and some of my friends really influenced me to be like, oh, there should be like a girl band singing about feminism – why isn’t there? We should make that happen.
KH In Olympia we had some support, but there was so much resistance to what we were doing… it was really strange for us to go places and there’s such a mythology about Olympia as an area, that we used to open every show with “we’re Bikini Kill from Olympia, Washington,” because we were really proud of it and we were also really into the idea of kind of addressing the thing that all good bands aren’t from LA or New York… you didn’t have to be from a big city, we could claim our selves center of the world for five minutes and love it. It was really important to us that we were from Olympia and we were from the small town and we had pride in that.
KH [Resistance to Bikini Kill in Olympia] Whether it was from weird, local skinhead people who were fucking with us or if it was guys in the scene, like vegans in the scene who had these huge arguments with us about how meat is murder was more important than feminism, and how dare we try to take the stage away from the things that are really important – especially in that kind of environmentalist environment, it was totally the leftist, feminist resistance, like the real issues are foreign policy, the real issues are the environment, the real issues are – and they’re all real issues. We never said the other issues aren’t real issues – we saw them as a huge part of feminism, but it was alwayslike people were really mad when we started playing. girls were mad, guys were mad, we were labeled man-haters… people in a small town, too, talk all the time, so it was really hard to deal with people coming up to you in the grocery store and saying really mean shit to you.
It was really weird because people hated us because we were getting famous outside of Olympia, and what really changed things was when Olympia got a magazine store downtown, and people all the sudden knew we were famous – this we pre-internet. So all the sudden there’s this fucking magazine store, the bane of my existence—you could go to England and be in every single magazine and no one knew, then all the sudden the magazine store came, and then everyone knew that we were big for like our ten seconds in England. And then we came back and everyone hated us, we had new shoes on… but at the same time because we were feminists, it made people’s anger about the fame even more exaggerated. So it kind of felt like we each had our three friends and that was it.

And then we’d go outside of Olympia and people would talk about how everyone in Olympia is a femi-nazi… Olympia’s like this—people were either mad at Olympia because it was all about K Records and K Records was gay, K Records is twee music, it was just this totally weird homophobic K thing where they wouldn’t really say “gay” but that’s what they meant. Like it wasn’t hard rock, [ ], Seattle, that’s how they perceived it. Or, they perceived Olympia because of the riot grrl thing as this feminist enclave, which—you know something about Evergreen: how many feminist classes were there?
KO Yeah, none that I remember.
KH There was one!
KO Yeah, and no Womens Studies program-
KH No Womens Studies program, and yet people were like, ‘oh yeah, you should go to Evergreen for Womens Studies’  — maybe they have one now because of the demand, but in terms of regionalism, I think it’s really interesting that these different places have really strong reputations, and as someone who’s toured a lot, I’ve seen how the idea of Olympia has kind of evolved…
Because of K [Records]! I mean, it was because of what Candice and Calvin did. But in a way all they did was rediscover punk rock… that’s all it was—taking the idea of punk rock, and not thinking of punk rock as a genre, but thinking of punk rock as an idea, and then being like, you can apply it to different styles of music you’re making up… It’s just punk rock more in the Jonathan Richmond, you know, Jad Fair way—and less in the Sex Pistols way.
KH Beat Happening is an incredibly sexy band, what they sounded like to me was incredibly sexy, and I wanted to be a part of it. And it was also the thing of demystifying rock and roll – I went to shows when I was in high school too, in Portland, I went to see hardcore speed metal, and reggae – those were my things – and because I went to small shows, I didn’t go to stadium shows, I already had this idea that the musicians weren’t a thousand million miles away, and in Olympia that got brought home even more because they were literally five feet in front of you, and people played at parties at people’s houses, and the separation between you as an audience member and them as a musician was so small already, it wasn’t a huge step to be on the stage, and everything was so immediate, it was like, ‘oh we need to raise money for this thing we’re doing, let’s start a band and have a benefit.’ That was always… we need a band, we don’t have a band, well we’re going to have to be the band.
KH what I think was remarkable about us was the fact that we were women and that made it ten times harder. Because the other thing that we were surrounded with was… there’s already the stigma that you’re a total fake-ass if you’re a woman. The fact that we were like, not only are we women who are singing militant feminist lyrics, but also we’re not gonna play by your rules and we’re not gonna be oppositional to the idea that we suck before we even started, by taking three thousand lessons, because that’s kind of a typical thing, you know? The fact that we weren’t taking guitar lessons and getting really good before we let anybody see us, was really perceived as the hugest ‘fuck you.’

Richard Nash was kind enough to contact me recently when I started following his Twitter. He was one of about a million people I wanted to interview for the book, but for various reasons (mostly because both of us are quite busy), it didn’t work out. But he was generous enough to write a blog post about the end of indie and the unfurling of the whole post indie landscape, which references my book. And it brought to mind the issue of whether or not indie is really and truly over. To be honest, I have to agree with Richard: “indie” is totally over. A few reviewers have likened my book to a eulogy, which is fine with me. The indie community as we knew it even a few years ago has scattered and divided and moved on. What’s next? Who knows. But more than a few people have good ideas. Richard’s one of them.

I’m of two minds about this funereal climate. On the one hand, Richard is correct in his assessment that indie as we knew it in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s is no more. As he puts it, “All is changed, changed utterly. Indie doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s dead. Which is OK, because it won. Open source, Twitter. Indie won. Etsy. The irresistible decline of major labels and network TV and corporate publishing. Indie won.” The fact that the tools are in our hands now means it’s open season, game on. Plus the branding of indie makes it pretty distasteful to those who know where it came from originally. So the post-indie landscape is here, and it’s one in which we have more tools to work with than ever before. When we talk about book publishing in particular, it occurs to me that almost all the small press books I buy these days are POD.  It is easier, faster, cheaper than ever to get a book out there. But then the onus of where that book goes and who reads it is very much in the author’s hands at that point. Even is you get a corporate publishing deal, you are not going to be paid to travel, get ads in newspapers, or any of the traditional promotional things unless you’ve written what they perceive as a blockbuster. 90% of the promotion that’s happened for Slanted and Enchanted has been DIY — just me and my Macbook, baby. That’s no diss on Holt, who have treated me quite well. It’s just the way things work.

And that too can lead to the syndrome I also address in the final chapter: too much shit. Those small press books I buy? I have a pile of at least twenty poetry books I’ve bought at readings and have not found time to read. I was shopping for bags on Etsy yesterday and quickly found myself overwhelmed at the sheer volume of choices. I’m still newish to Twitter and cannot keep up with the 80 something people I follow (how do you manage when you follow thousands?). There are a billion bands circulating their music online, for free, which is great, but what’s good? What sucks? Do you just believe Pitchfork’s reviews? How do you find time to filter it all?

I’m not sure. I think Cursor sounds like a great venture, combining 21st century social networking tools with printed material, but strategically, rather than in the scatershot way most of us do it now. I’m no fan of the closed-source Kindle model, but I like the idea of readers playing a greater part in the publishing process. An open source electronic model is sorely needed. Several people have asked me recently how the book is selling, for example, and I have no idea. Yet I know a few people are reading it. I wish I had a better way to talk to them and get their feedback.

So it’s anyone’s game to try and figure out what’s next. I only hope that people keep in mind where indie came from in the first place (that’s the reason I wrote the book, after all), and hold true to its tenets of community, self sufficency, and constant reinvention as we move on. And the corporate part of me supposes that’s fodder for a sequel, isn’t it…

The past couple of weeks have seen your author slide into the kind of lethargic state with panic bobbing around the edges that’s pretty common to college writing instructors who have only a wee bit of time off remaining before they head back to the coal mines (this analogy of course reminds me of my favortite Monty Python sketch, Working Class Playwrite. “What’s wrong wit gala luncheons?”). Since our particular coal mine will be a lot more crowded this semester due to furloughs and course cuts, I’m feeling extra misanthropic and have been avoiding blogging, Twittering, and emailing all week, going so far as to take vacation in a place without internet or cell phone service (gasp). BUT that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate two things: one, a wonderful, thoughtful review of Slanted and Enchanted in the new Bookslut by Gina Myers (herself a great proponent of DIY publishing as the editor of Lame House Press and The Tiny, and a fine poet herself, to boot), and a brief mention in the Huffington Post. I’m a bit puzzled as to how my book “scuffed up the [80s] nostalgia” (unwashed bands in vans?), but thanks, Kevin Smokler. Love yr name.

Starting this week, I’ll be posting excerpts from transcripts of some of the interviews I did for Slanted and Enchanted. These are edited mainly to remove my own annoying interjections (”yeah, yeah, right right right!”), and occasionally you’ll see an ellipses where I cut something out. But otherwise they’re verbatim extended versions of the shorter quotes you’ll see throughout the book.

Mike Watt and I spoke in January of 2008, shortly after Dos, his band with Kira Roessler (formerly of Black Flag) played at the no-longer-extant San Francisco club 12 Galaxies. If you’ve seen We Jam Econo, the excellent documentary on Watt’s seminal band The Minutemen, you’ll recognize his speaking style (and it you haven’t seen it, please do). We had a great conversation that lasted more than an hour and covered everything from the early punk days to stand up comedy to politics and poetry. Here’s a section about the roots of The Minutemen’s DIY philosophy. With yesterday having been the the 25th anniversary of Double Nickels on the Dime’s release, hearing some WATT speak seemed appropriate.

Next up: Kathleen Hanna and I explore the roots of Riot Grrrl in Olympia.

MW: Watt
KO: Hey Watt, this is Kaya Oakes calling.
MW: Hi
KO:  Good.  How was your trip to San Francisco?
MW: It was intense.
KO: Yeah.  What happened that night?  I know you had to play someone else’s bass.
MW: Well.  (uh) ‘Cuz I was flying from Massachusetts –
MW: Couldn’t carry –
MW: - Other stuff.
KO: Yeah, yeah.  Well it was a really good show.
MW: Aw, you’re very kind.  It was tough for me.
KO: Yeah, yeah.  Well, it sounded fine.
MW:  Thank you.
…
KO: It’s a book that looks at punk and indie from the 80s, from…It looks at the 60s and how the kinda the culture evolved and then 80s and then there’s a whole section on what’s going on today.  So the reason I wanted to talk to you is cause you’ve been in it and you’re still in it.  So, I’m talking to people who are still involved in it to this day.
MW: Yeah, in fact that band we saw has been in it for 22 years.
KO: So, you guys have been playing together for a long time and I heard that you guys have been recently recording at home or you started recording –
MW: Yeah.  We’re almost done with our fourth album.
KO: Cool.  So how has that been different kicking it at your house and doing it –
MW: Well the guy we have recorded with before in our other records, but died of cancer.
KO: I’m sorry to hear that.
MW: It was terrible and we had to change.  He also recorded Double Nickles on the Dime
…So we decided to do this next one on the proto of the past.
MW: Yeah.  It’s different.  I mean this time you can take your time and go at it a little piece at a time and you’re all in control.  We’re all learning as we go along.  One big differences nowadays than the old days is the technology got way more econo.  A lot of ethics….We didn’t out grow any of them.  Actually I don’t come from the 80s but come from the 70s punk scene.
KO: Right.
MW: I started playing until the 1980 but I graduated from high school in 1976 and that’s just when the thing came on and we went up in song and dance in Hollywood.  There was a record store called Zeta London.  They had punk record albums from England and that’s when it we really got turned on by it. You know I’m thirteen in the 1970s so all my teen years were in the 1970s.  I didn’t really know the punk scene in the 1960s, the whole club scene.  I was only a boy
I found out later, you know that there was a whole thing that was kinda parallel to punk in the 1960s like garage bands and little labels.  You know.  The labels were more regional.
MW: And there was a lot of Do-It-Yourself.  So there was a big explosion of little bands.  But the time I’m a teenager my first gig is 71 GMT-Rex.  It’s arena rock and I’ve never been into a club until punk came.
KO: Yeah.
MW: So I’m listening and aware of that kinda stuff where you can actually see the bass and the strings and…
KO:  Nice [laughs].
MW: The music scene too was way different.  There wasn’t the Guitar Center like there is.  Instructional videos and I’m not as….what would you say….
KO: Paint by numbers.
MW: Well, the awareness thing was just…the accessibility was…especially when you didn’t have older brothers like us.  We had to just stumble through everything and we had to just jam econo.
MW: Yeah.  And it kinda talked about – we didn’t fuckin’ know you had to be in tune with each other.  I don’t know what the fuck we were thinking.  We thought if you weren’t in tune, if you played down on the corner and that sounded right then you were in tune.  We didn’t know down on the corner had to be the same as the other guy’s down on the corner.
MW: Gladly we didn’t have any takes from then, that God-awful…Because one thing about that culture was that we learned to play in.  It was you just copied songs off records and the idea of playing in front of people was a backyard kegger or something.  But the idea of music was a means of expression …. barely fathom but never even entered the picture like the guys who played black dog in the back.
MW: There’s just no connection with the stuff you might have inside and want to get out and use music as an artistic vehicle.
MW: And you know that sounds naïve… but anyways, you see these guys in Hollywood and it was really apparent they didn’t know how to play and they were just starting.  A lot of them were from the glitter and glam scene or artists and or…. They weren’t caught up in this big crisis in what is talent and what is virtuosity and being proficient.  And the big music when coming out of high school was Return of Forever because you know that record is a romantic warrior or whatever and something -
MW: and this fusion!  And all these notes!  And you see these guys.  Obviously there were some bands doing it ahead of time.  I actually didn’t know what punk was at first.  It was just pictures from England and somehow they stopped at Ramones that it was their own kind of music.  And it was really mind-blowing to see these guys not know what they’re doing and playing in public but still writing their own songs.  You know.  That was mind-blowing.  And the empowerment by witnessing such a thing.  The empowerment on us.  I mean, the first thing I said was to these two people in a gig.  I turned to them and said we could do this.  And I never had this much confidence (conciousness) in arena rock.  It was more like we were the pews and they were pretty much above the altar.  It’s a whole different deal.  You’re watching the Germs and when they get done playing - five minutes later there’s a guy you can talk to –
MW: It was just a whole different deal on a lot of levels.
MW: And then we meet the Black Flag guys and they start their own label and we never knew about that shit.  You pay a guy to press records…you know.  And the idea of touring and playing with other bands and going to different towns.
MW: And the fan scene.  That’s how you knew it was going down in other towns.  And for the touring a guy would rent out the Ukranian or Italian, American, Polish…some kind of ethnic club.  A lot of the clubs were hard to play in because of the rock and roll.  Rock and roll hated punk…probably did hated punk more than the square johns.
MW: They sensationalized seditious images spinning and this…But rock and roll really hated…So you had to play at gay discos, ethnic halls, and stuff like that.  Moose lodge and….Well anyway, that cat, he would rent out the thing.  His band would probably be opening.  He’s probably konking at his pad.  In those days it was a lot about people.
MW: Douski’s phone book.  Black Flag built that entire tour circuit that we use now you know.
MW: We still use now 30 years later.  Which is a trip when I think about it.
MW: But I don’t try to think about it [laughs].  When I talk about the old days there’s a lot of curiosity.  One thing I always talk about is that what surprised me is that punk got big.
MW: I always thought that it would stay little on the fringe somewhere.  Who would know Warped Tour and fifteen year olds and stuff.