Flipside Interviews Descendents THE DESCENDENTS were interviewed at their "headquarters" in December by Al. Present for the Descendents were: Bill Stevenson (drums) Milo Auckerman (vocals) Ray Cooper (guitar) Al: Let's quickly talk about this big tour you are leaving on in a few days? Bill: It's 4 months long, it will start in Arizona and hit every place imaginable in the U.S. and probably about a half dozen shows in Canada. Al: When will you be in Canada? Bill: March... Al: It's supposed to be really cold in the north east right now, especially in Canada. Bill: March might not be too bad. I've toured in 40 below before, it's not real fun... Ray: We'll be in Canada in February... Milo: We just went yesterday and bought like 3 pairs of thermal underwear, polypropylene underwear just to try to prepare... Bill: "Polypropylene underwear"... Milo: Yeah, it works better than thermal, I don't know why, they're nice. Bill: My mom got me happening, she bought me a lot of stuff -- with Christmas and everything... I've done it before and it's not a big thing. I suppose if you have a lower ambition level -- if you're more into just partying, you might not take too kindly to 40 below. It's just a matter of whether you want to play or not and obviously there's the fun thing involved -- the challenge, you know. It's not like it's nice, I'd rather hang out in sunny California. Milo: The summer tour had its drawbacks too, you deal with sweltering --- our last van didn't have air conditioning, so you either boil or you freeze -- what can you do? That's the way touring is. It's roughing it. It's like camping, you get to go camping but you get to rock out too. Al: What's the Bonus Cup story? Bill: It's just a cup, more a novelty type item than any part of the band's roots -- in a sense it is the band's roots because a lot of the "food" type songs would have never come about if I wasn't into my caffeine problem. I would have never wrote something like that. It's like when I used to commercial fish, my partner was a real speed guy -- he took lots of pills. And I've never taken a drug before, ever. Al: Just caffeine... Bill: Yeah just caffeine. I'm not saying I'm Jesus Christ or anything, but I've never gone so far as to take a drug or take a hit off a cigarette or something. So he taught me like, "...let's go fishin' tonight, and let's go fishin' tomorrow night too, and the next night..." I was into it, and he would have these pills and I didn't have anything so I made these bonus cups up, where I put a real lot of instant coffee in - if you look at a cup there's lines... I've never filled it past here before (second line from the bottom), I mean this is kinda a joke, it's a concept, I mean I've drank here at the second line with sugar and cream and it's a bonus cup. I went through Weinerschnitzel and I ordered a small hot water and I put in one spoon of instant coffee, but I thought this isn't gonna do me, I'm really tired, so I'll make it a bonus cup, I'll put in a few more spoons -- and that was the start of the bonus cup. It's original for a band to have cups available -- I mean everybody has shirts and stickers and we've got cups. Milo: I've heard the Necros have pillow cases. Al: It seems to me that the Descendents have gone thru a few stages of development... Bill: I'd say there were 5 stages, obviously each day is a new stage, but there were 5 stages the way I look at it. The first was the trio, the "Ride the Wild" trio, me, Frank and Tony. It was a more of a heavy power pop thing, it wasn't quite a distorted guitar thing, more like the Last... Milo: Or surf music... Bill: More "let's have fun" with little harmonies and singing, more acoustic based songs. Then there was the blurry period where we had various singers. Milo surfaced as our actual singer at that point. This was our formative period because we said we don't want to be a trio, we wanted to play our instruments and have somebody else sing. Milo: It's a good concept, like division of labor, if you only have one thing to concentrate on it works best. You can really dig in. Bill: So we decide to have Milo sing... We were basically just playing, strictly just to play. Al: At that time you had trouble getting gigs around town... Bill: Oh yeah. "Weinerschnitzel" broke us in that sense, because that even got airplay on comersh stations because it was so fuckin' funny. That was the last thing I expected. But once we got Milo and got started we had a good thing going. Then was like our "Fat" period, we released the "Fat" ep. We were all fat, we were huge boys, except Milo and Tony -- me and Frank were huge. We were into just songs about fishing and food. That was our total "punk" thing if you're gonna call it that. We were beyond anything, we'd play gig, we didn't do sound checks, we'd just show up, set up, play 20 minute sets... fuck we'd go up play "Weinerschnitzel" and leave, it was a joke -- not towards the band, we took it seriously but to try to do things in an original way. Then came the point where we decided to start practicing a real real lot and record an album, it will be hot. And it will be like the last record with Milo, it would be the document of our 4th stage, with Milo, the Milo stage. "Milo Goes To College" got released late 82. Then there was the dormant stage when I was in Flag. I did that, Milo went to college... Now I quit Flag, we're back together and we put out "I Don't Want To Grow Up". "Grow Up..." is the only record that I've played on or produced -- and that totals like 15 albums -- that I can listen to. And I can actually almost get emotionally upset or disturbed at. It is my favorite record. Al: What about "Milo..."? Bill: No, that is not my favorite record in any way. I'm just talking about for me to listen to. I almost not released "Milo...", Mike Watt talked me into that really bad. I guess a lot of people like it -- the whole thing is run through a punk sensibility sort of, and I don't... I'm into originality... Milo: I thought it was original! Bill: See everyone is different. "Milo" is definitely our most well received album. We practiced like 4 times for "Grow Up". It was like, let's go, album. The songs on the lp are totally hot. The performance on some of them totally destroyed the goodness of them, the performance was so weak relative to how we play live, if you see us live now it's insane, it's scary. "Grow Up" is not scary, it sounds more poppy. I like it because it's very soulful, and emotional. I get stirred up in my heart when I listen to it -- I don't get the feeling from very many records. Our next record is gonna be like our live thing, it's gonna be like an ax murder man! We're gonna sink it home, it will be one that's gonna kill. Al: So you went from singing about "fishing" and "food" to on "Grow Up" there's a lot of songs about girls... Bill: Well Milo's got more songs on "Grow Up" about girls, every song is about girls. Milo: We sang about girls on both records it's just that on "Milo Goes To College" I didn't express the kind of stuff I wanted to express the way it should have been expressed. I was basically screaming the whole way through. Which is cool, but when you talk about "this girl left me" it's a bummer, and maybe it's not a good thing to scream because you're not feeling that way. On "Grow Up" I was more melancholy. We're singing about the same things, just approaching it a different way. The way Bill arranged "Good Good Things", or "Silly Girl" was in such a way to bring out the feeling behind it rather than just punking it out. Which is cool too, but you can make a more powerful statement. Bill: I can play those songs everyday, and I can still listen to that record. I never put on any other records, none of the Flag ones, maybe sometimes the instrumental on "The Process Of Weeding Out". But I can't listen to the other ones because they were too much of a compromise for me. Hey, we practiced acoustically for "Grow Up", it's basically a singing album, with primitive instrumentation... Milo: I probably learned to sing those songs in an acoustic frame of mind, so everything is low volume and basically laid back acoustically. I think I could have dug in a little more. Al: Were the sides of the lp recorded at different times? Bill: No, we just mixed them and grouped them in such a way that you can get a certain mood going on one side, and get another mood going on the other. I like records to flow in a natural sense. I like to put a record on to boost me off into this mood, and not contort me and take me over these corkscrews -- although that is a good effect too. Variety is the spice of life. "Milo" is the same way -- one side is more upbeat and aggressive, the other side is more sorrowful, sentimental... All that stuff about writing about girls or about food, it all comes down to the individual song. We can get into one song and the emotions behind it. We're artists, we're not like we're thinking about heading in a pop direction or a metal direction. Some of the songs on "Grow Up" were written before the songs on "Milo" -- so we're not moving in any direction, except the ax murder direction. Our live thing is scary now. It is the most intense thing I've ever seen. We won't release another record until it sounds like our live thing. Al: Do people ever comment that songs like "No Fat Beaver" might sound sexist? Milo: In Lincoln Nebraska a girl came up to me and she said she was real happy to meet me and everything but she said she almost had to cry when she listened to our album because of those two songs: "No Fat Beaver" and "Pervert". And I spent a half an hour explaining to her that when you write a song it's like a flash of something. I wrote "No Fat Beaver", it was like "stay away from me", which is what I felt about this one girl. I may have only felt that way for two minutes then two minutes later I might have felt "well she's not too bad looking" or whatever. In those two minutes I wrote that song. She was bummed because I was making this big sexist statement and that I was influencing the way women would think for eternity. Which is ludicrous. Like I was putting the whole feminist movement back 100 years or something! Bill: You can't please all of the people all of the time. We don't try to, we please ourselves. "No Fat Beaver" is like something me and Milo would joke about in High School. Like one fat broad that was all hot for Milo -- and Milo was like "go away!". Milo: I couldn't deal with girls. Bill: All this stuff is realities for us. Al: People write Flipside letters and tell us that the Descendents were here, and boy are they aggressive girl hunters! Bill: Oh! (Laughter). Sometimes, that depends on the mood you're in. If I have a steady girlfriend, I stay real loyal with her and I don't touch any other girls. But if I don't have a steady girlfriend for any reason, usually because they left more or something, yeah, then I go on a little rampage there. But it's just to maintain my physical thing. I have a real high hormone level or something, I need a lot of sex. I just do, it's not something I can help. I'm not a womanizer, none of us are. We are going to go on this tour and me and Milo have girlfriends, so we're going to stay loyal for 4 months. But Ray and Matt (roadie also present during the interview) they're different, Doug is different too. I do see a definite place in this culture for the kind of shock prevented by several band members whipping out parts of their body or pretending like they're doing gross things or laying down a nice bare ass fart right next to someone. I don't think that is rude or crude, but I think it is good for society to be exposed to that sort of thing. If more of that went on there wouldn't be things like cops or insurance, or nuclear reactors... Someone has to make those go away but I don't think it's by playing songs about getting drunk or something -- you have to stir people up and you can stir people up by offending them. I played guitar in the Nig Heist, that was fucking culture shock at its most! I thrived on that. I felt like I was doing my duty to this world by being in that band. Mugger is like a saint for doing that. (After a phone call for booking the Descendents in Hawaii)... I don't think that bands should be contracted together -- that is the demise of art. In a sense me and Milo have always had a thing like that, where he'll leave or I'll leave at any given time: I did Black Flag and he did college. Now he's gonna do grad school at some point and I'm gonna move to Japan and do the Sado Island (spelling?) thing. Live down there in the jungle for awhile. Ray's got his up coming solo project -- no! I'm just kidding. But I do want to go to Japan, I do want that very much -- I don't know if I'll stay or not but I want to be in a jungle. I do want to be a bear, I do want to do that. I don't relate to civilization. When I go out these doors I get totally flustered. Al: What's going on with college Milo, did you graduate? Milo: I don't know, it's like... Bill: He kinda had trouble with one class, we kept him too busy and he overloaded himself. We were doing a lot of gigs... Al: You were only gone 3 years... Milo: I went to El Camino College for my first year -- then I went to U.C. San Diego... I have a problem, I like to immerse myself in things. I'm obsessed with music and I'm obsessed with biology -- so what can I do? You can't have more than one obsession, you dilute the other out. The only way I can deal with it is to be obsessed with one at one period and the other at the next period. At this point I'm obsessed with music, with the Descendents, with going somewhere and making music. In 5 months I may be totally obsessed with biology, with finding the cure for cancer. Then I'd have to change all my energies to that. Bill: I am totally immersed in music, I write songs and songs and songs. I have hundreds, thousands of songs and stuff, big stacks of lyrics... I usually don't even write them all down, cause what happends is like God just gives me these lyrics and they all come at one time. I'm just like a beacon, they come in and there they are. So my mind is totally cluttered with all these songs, and riffs and ideas. I can't really communicate in the English language, I've learned to communicate with my drums. I feel at home with my drums, they are the medium through which I communicate... Milo: Can you dedicate a page to a drum solo by Bill? Bill: That's what I mean by being immersed in something I am totally out to lunch as far as talking. I talk slow, I say things over and over, I use "ums", "ands" and "buts" over and over, I stutter... but with my drums I talk very different than that. It's universal, it's rhythm, it's timing that has to do with your heartbeat... Al: Do you consciously write songs with that timing in mind? Bill: We do a lot of real super fast stuff, that's just our forte, we are the tightest and fastest of all rock bands, that's just our forte. If we play too slow, I've tried to do slower rhythms in other bands and people say "Oh, you're heavy metal..." and it just kills the fun of making music. Then it makes me not want to play for people. Al: Like it or not you have been classified as a "punk rock" band, so if you don't like punks calling you "heavy metal"... Bill: It goes beyond that -- I don't like heavy metalers as such and I don't like punkers as such. I like individuals. I don't like classifications of bands. I like individual bands, or even individual songs that bands do. Songs are little pieces of art, and they are not to be dealt with so frivolously. It makes me just want to play in there (rehersal space) and then be a car salesman or some capitalistic thing. I play everyday and I don't want people telling me what to play. "Oh you sound a little poppy". "Oh you're going metal". What the fuck, what do they know!!!!! Milo: Also we have four different song writers and each person brings in his own likes and dislikes. I find myself writing songs that have many different types of sounds. At first I was caught up in saying: "Wow, that sounds like a calypso song", and after awhile I say it's just my thing, just a song. You should just write what you write and not because it sounds like metal or... Al: I didn't think that kind of criticism would bother you guys, I thought you'd be immune to it. Bill: I am totally immune to everything. I don't get nervous on stage, I don't see anyting, I don't see these guys. I just play. I just play... People say, "Oh, you're trying to get a little more commercial with that song". I don't believe in beds! I sleep on a fuckin' dirty carpet! I swear I will never have a house. My dad will buy me anything I want -- I do not want material things -- I do not want them. My dad would take total care of me as long as I don't play rock and roll. I live in shit and it's fine with me. Like if someone says something about "Silly Girl", you do't say anything about that, because that's really special to me (Bill leaves the room)... Milo: The first time Bill played "Silly Girl" to me he cried, and probably the second and third time he came pretty close to tears. It's a real personal thing to him. Our songs are real personal to us... Printed in Flipside #48 (1986)