We Americans are kind of soft. When we say Machete it kind of sounds like "ma-shed-ee." When Machete himself says it, it sounds as sharp as the blade itself: "Ma-chay-tay." Danny Trejo really emphasizes the correct Mexican pronunciation of his latest character. If there were Suicide... more

We Americans are kind of soft. When we say Machete it kind of sounds like "ma-shed-ee." When Machete himself says it, it sounds as sharp as the blade itself: "Ma-chay-tay." Danny Trejo really emphasizes the correct Mexican pronunciation of his latest character.

If there were Suicide Men, Danny Trejo might be their leader. Although, he wouldn't have to worry about committing social suicide, because nobody's going to mess with him. His rugged face, chest of tattoos, handlebar moustache and long man hair have gotten him cast as bad guys in movies for the past 25 years.

Machete is a hero though. A betrayed former federale, he now works as a day laborer. Instead of Home Depot jobs, Machete finds himself hired to kill an anti-immigration senator. It's a setup though to make the senator a champion of border patrol. Well, Machete doesn't go down like that so he takes out the bad guys with his trademark blade, in over-the-top gory Robert Rodriguez style.

In the movie, Trejo wears badass leather. In person, he wore a tan suit that hid his inked up chest. Trejo was discovered by Hollywood when he was in prison, when director Andrey Konchalovskiy cast him in Runaway Train. With the success he found, Trejo has always given back, counseling inmates and drug addicts on finding the right path. Still, based on his movies, most fans might be surprised to find Trejo smiling and giggling. Guess all that badass stuff isÖ acting!

SG: Is this how you dress when you're not making movies about badass motorcycle guys?

DT: When I'm not killing people. [Laughs] Yeah, this is actually my Eddie Bunker suit. Eddie Bunker was one of my dearest, dearest friends. He always said, "Have a tan linen suit for summer days." He was a bank robber but he always dressed really well.

Suicide Girls: Who makes your suit today?

Danny Trejo: You know what? I bought it in Thailand. I saw it and he'd just passed away so I bought it in his honor and I always just wear it to nice hot summer days, special occasions because you can dress nice and even though it's hot, you're not uncomfortable. It breathes well. That's what he said, "It breathes."

SG: Another interesting thing about your appearance though is tattoos. Are you familiar with the Suicide Girls?

DT: Yes, absolutely.

SG: For us it's alternative beauty. Was it ever trouble for you having tattoos like that?

DT: No. I came from an era when tattoos meant bad. In the early ë60s, the tattoos were either if you weren't in the army, you were a troublemaker. If you weren't in the navy, you were a troublemaker. Most of my tattoos are prison tattoos, so you kind of knew I was in trouble.

SG: Do you like girls with tattoos?

DT: You know, it doesn't matter. To me, tattoos are accessories. Beauty comes from within anyway. Even though we love beautiful packaging, if they're not beautiful inside they ain't worth a shit.

SG: I know from meeting you over the years that you've been happy playing villains and badasses. How did you feel about your transition to leading hero?

DT: Well, you always bring your best no matter what you're doing. It just means you've got to bring your best every day. Usually when you have a part in a movie, you show up for three, four days, bang, bang, bang, you're gone. Well, when you're the lead, you're there every day. There's no "you're not on the call sheet." You're there because basically it's your movie. Any time I work I always work like it's my movie, so the transition wasn't bad. Everybody asks me, "Are you going to change?" I'm not changing. My situation's changing a little bit because now I can't walk down the street, but other than that, nothing's changed.

SG: Is this the first time you've been on the movie's poster?

DT: Well, I've been on other posters but never just me. People in England, boy, when I was in England doing autograph signings, people in England were getting that tattooed on their back. The picture is a gorgeous picture and Machete is the first Latino superhero. So it's kind of a unique picture and I guess they didn't want to put the Virgin Mary up there.

SG: We Americans say it kind of soft, like "ma-shed-ee." Should we say it "ma-chay-tay" like you?

DT: You know, say it however you want. Just go see the movie.

SG: Even the announcer who says Machete Kills and Machete Kills Again at the end says it soft.

DT: That's Robert Rodriguez. That's him. I didn't even know it. We were arguing who it was, who it was. Finally Robert said, "Machete, he kills the bad guys and gets the women." I thought, "Wow, it is you, Robert."

SG: After you'd done the trailer for Grindhouse, were you surprised to find out what the rest of the story was when Rodriguez finished the script?

DT: Robert and I had been talking about this movie since we did Desperado. He came up to me and said, "You know what? You're perfect for this character that I want to do. It's Machete and he's a badass. He's going to be the first Latino superhero. He doesn't take any step backwards. He stands up for the downtrodden poor." I said cool, and after we did the trailer, it kind of took on a life of its own because everybody loved the trailer. So Robert just said, "We've got to do this movie."

SG: Did you imagine back then it would have to do with immigration and a senator and border patrol?

DT: You've got to remember, the idea for the movie became a reality before any of that happened. That was just God giving us some PR I guess.

SG: Do you weigh in on the immigration issue?

DT: No. I know that smarter minds are going to prevail. Something has to be done, I don't know what. I think in the next five or six years, this whole planet is going to be changing so it's like I'm just doing whatever I can do for whoever needs help. That's what I still do.

SG: Do you still work with drug centers and prisons?

DT: Absolutely. I still work for Western Pacific Med/Corp in Glendale. I work for them and I do a lot of their PR. I work for community and schools which deals with gang intervention. I speak at high schools, junior highs, juvenile halls, youth authorities and state penitentiaries.

SG: In the last few years, have there been new ways of battling addiction or avoiding a life of crime?

DT: Right now there's a huge budget cut to cut certain modalities of drug treatment, methadone being one of them. That's going to be chaotic if that happens because right now if they cut the budget for Medi-cal drug treatment, they'll literally turn about 59,000 drug addicts loose on L.A. So the drug cartels love the fact, "Yeah, stop that" so they'll have all new customers.

SG: So not so much new methods, but there are always new problems to solve.

DT: Right, exactly. There's always new problems.

SG: Are you making progress on that issue?

DT: Well, we're dealing with Governor Schwarzenegger and we're dealing with Sheriff Lee Baca who wrote us a letter to say, "Hey, we can't do that." He understands because he's down here in the trenches. Schwarzenegger who's up in Sacramento, he's getting bad advice as to what to do.

SG: When people meet you for the first time, are they surprised that you're all smiles and laughs?

DT: Yeah, a lot of them. A lot of them don't know how to approach me so I have to disarm them immediately, just say hello. I say hello to everybody. I say, "Hi, how are you," walk up because you see people standing there with a camera and they don't know how to approach you.

SG: When did you find your peace?

DT: Oh, a long time ago. I think that when I dedicated my life to helping other people, this peace comes the minute you start helping somebody. I ran into a kid one time at about 12 o'clock at night at Jons Market in Winnetka, which is out in the San Fernando Valley. I love Jons because it used to be Vons but the Mexicans bought it. You can still see the V under the J, but I was walking across the parking lot and this kid stopped me and he was collecting the baskets. He said, "Hey, Mr. Trejo." I said, "Yeah, what's up?" He says, "I want to thank you. I was in juvenile hall two years ago and you came up and talked. You really made an impact on my life." Wow, what a blessing to be able to make an impact on somebody's life. That is worth everything in the world, just being able to make an impact on someone's life.

SG: Boy, you hear so often that helping others is the key to happiness. Who do so many people still not get it?

DT: You look in the backgrounds of all the people, especially in Hollywood, who are having problems in your lives. I'm not talking divorce and normal kind of problems. I'm talking about drugs, going to prison, going to jail. You look at them and they're not giving anything back. That's one of the reasons why. It's all selfish, self serving. It's all what do I get, what do I get, what do I get. Until you get the eye off of you and start talking about what can I do for you, that's when you find the peace. That's when life gets better.

Machete opens September 3.

by Desiree Marsau “Don’t wear white after Labor Day.” Not only is it the stupidest rule of fashion ever written, it’s also the most outdated. Forget what your Grandmother told you. White is hot all year round and it’s also the easiest way to make a vintage wardrobe feel a little more modern. more

by Desiree Marsau

“Don’t wear white after Labor Day.” Not only is it the stupidest rule of fashion ever written, it’s also the most outdated. Forget what your Grandmother told you. White is hot all year round and it’s also the easiest way to make a vintage wardrobe feel a little more modern. Add some crisp white and it always brings a sleek edge to whatever you are wearing.

Hours spent researching WHY this ever became a rule of fashion in the first place kept leading me back to one main reason: season. White deflects sunlight, therefore white is not warm enough to wear in the winter. I call B.S. To wear white in the winter simply wear heavier fabrics or knits, solid shoes or boots rather than strappy sandals, or pair lightweight garments with heavier garments like cardigans or woolly tights. Stick with heavy cotton, wool, cashmere, down, leather and most other natural fibers for the best protection from the elements.

I am, of course, biased towards vintage clothing so I pulled together a few examples of extra cute white vintage garments for you to check out.



The outdated “No white after Labor Day” rule seems to, most often, be referring to shoes, so let’s start with some shoes and boots that could easily be worn in the winter paired with jeans or heavy sock and tights.

1980’s White Leather Lace Up Boots by Laredo, $44, available at JL Vintage: I would wear these boots over dark denim skinny jeans or pair them with light grey tights and a charcoal grey wool mini skirt.

1970’s White Platform Wedges, $10 (!!!), available at Violette Slippers: Try wearing these with ribbed chocolate brown tights for a play on the textured wedge. Pair with a belted white eyelet lace 60’s dress.

1990’s Leather Corset Pumps, $22, available at Greatest Friend: Pair with olive green tights and a printed long sleeve dress.

1970’s White Leather Cowgirl boots, $30, available at Becky Drolen: Try these over heavy leggings or denim. A pair of tall woolly socks would look great popping out of the tops.

1980’s White Leather Studded Ankle Boots, $19, available at Santoki Vintage: I think these ankle boots would look best with dark denim and a heavy cotton trench coat, belted at the waist.

Now let’s work our way up and build an outfit. Here’s a selection of white garments and white accessories that will look amazing in the winter.

1960’s Mini Dress, $54, available at Lucky Vintage Seattle: Try pairing this with brown tights and tan boots. Throw on a cropped bolero jacket for warmth and a nice silhouette.

1980’s White Italian Sunglasses, $40, available at Et La La: Wear these with anything. DUH!

1980’s High Waist White Cotton Shorts, $27, available at Becky Drolen: To wear shorts in the winter, pair with heavy cable knit tights. Try slate grey with these shorts.

1960’s YSL White Felt Cloche Hat, $86, available at Pinky A Go Go: This would look amazing worn with a nicely tailored trench coat for a sort of sexy Russian spy look.

1970’s White Mini Dress, $32, available at 2 Treasure Hunt: This dress is really lightweight, so just layer, layer, layer! A tank top style bodysuit is an invisible layer that will add lots of warmth. Next add heavy leggings, a colorful cardigan, woolly socks and knee high boots.

1970’s Crocheted Top, $32, available at Raleigh Vintage: Anything crocheted always looks great with jeans. Just add boots. For warmth wear a thick bodysuit underneath.

1970’s 1/2 Length White Trench Coat, $20, available at Zawnbo: Trench coats look great with everything because they give you a perfect hourglass silhouette. I’d wear this with black skinny jeans and white leather oxfords.

1960’s Crocheted Cape, $34, available at Mouse Vox: Capes look best paired with jeans or leggings.

1970’s White Wrap Dress, $37, available at The Church of Vintage: Pair this lightweight dress with dark blue heavy tights, white platform wedges, and a navy cashmere cardigan.

People tend to gravitate towards wearing black, grey, and most darker colors as fall and winter sets in. Wearing white always guarantees that you’ll stand out in the crowd. As always, all of these items are vintage and one of kind so if you see something you like, don’t hesitate in snatching it up! Once a vintage item is gone- it’s gone for good.

Pat Tillman was a safety for the Arizona Cardinals. In 2002, instead of renewing his NFL contract, he decided to enlist in the Army. As a Ranger, he served tours in Afghanistan, where he was killed in 2004. Early reports said he died taking enemy fire, but further investigation showed that it was actually... more

Pat Tillman was a safety for the Arizona Cardinals. In 2002, instead of renewing his NFL contract, he decided to enlist in the Army. As a Ranger, he served tours in Afghanistan, where he was killed in 2004. Early reports said he died taking enemy fire, but further investigation showed that it was actually a friendly fire incident. This would simply be a tragedy if the facts came out. It became a cover-up when the military tried to spin a different story.

The Tillman Story is a documentary that shows what we were told about Pat Tillman, what actually happened to Pat Tillman, and why the government lied. Director Amir Bar-Lev follows Danni Tillman, Pat's mom, and Kevin Tillman, his brother who also enlisted, as they pieced together the truth and brought it to light. They clarified redacted documents and kept asserting that Pat was not some gung-ho military icon. He was actually a very private person and serving in the Army was just a choice he wanted to make.

Beyond the Tillmans, Bar-Lev speaks to others in the military who knew Tillman or were involved directly. Some suggest that the military myth was intended to create a portrait where soldiers are wise, mature warriors instead of simply 19-year-old youths who can make mistakes. It covers Jessica Lynch, another military scandal where a camera crew joined the rescue of PFC Lynch and Pentagon officials embellished the extent of her injuries.

The week of the film's Los Angeles opening, Bar-Lev sat in the conference room at The Weinstein Company as journalists rotated in to discuss the film. Exposing the cover-up only leads to more questions. Bar-Lev, whose previous film My Kid Could Paint That chronicled a child artist, was enthusiastic to address further development of The Tillman Story beyond seeing the film.

Fred Topel: How did you first become aware that there was more to the Tillman story?

Amir Bar-Lev: Well, I can't take too much credit for it. I can say this. I am definitely not the only person who knew there was more to the story about Pat's death. It didn't take long to realize that there was more to the story about how he lived and who he was. That's actually when we got very intrigued by the story is when we realized that the myth making about his life was comparable to the myth making about his death. So we knew there were two records to correct, so to speak. That was right from the beginning, in the spring of 2007.

FT: How did that come to your attention then, through his family?

ABL: It was his family. It was our initial conversations with his family once we finally got in touch with them. It took us a little while to get in touch with them, maybe six or seven months to get them to agree. It took about seven months to arrive at an agreement to work together. It was in the initial conversations with them that we were made to understand that they felt they had lost Pat twice: Once to death and the second time to this cartoon character that had taken his place in the public imagination.

FT: Still, you say 2007. That's three years since his death. You were watching all the coverage for four years, when did it dawn on you that something wasn't right?

ABL: It's a good question. The thing is, I was busy with my last film until Spring of 2007. We didn't decide to undertake this story until then. You're correctly pointing out that we sort of got involved at the end. What you see as basically the end of the film is really the beginning of when we got involved. I know there were others who were on top of this story before I was and a lot of those guys were fiction filmmakers. The family had a steady barrage of requests to make a fiction film. In fact, we shot a scene that didn't make it into the movie of Marie Tillman, Pat's widow, going through these spec scripts that are very comical, that landed on her desk.

FT: The scripts were still doing the propaganda version of the story?

ABL: Yes. That's why I shot it and it didn't make it into the movie.

FT: I wonder if one of those will still get made.

ABL: God, I hope not.

FT: It was encouraging to see how they could reconstruct redacted documents. Is that a process people can apply to cover-ups?

ABL: That's interesting. I don't know that it's something applicable because don't forget, Kevin Tillman was in the platoon. So Danni had two assets that most people wouldn't have. She had a son who could help her with some facts and names and contacts. Then she had Stan Goff, a retired special ops soldier who knew some of these people and could help her find ballistics experts. They engaged in, as Stan Goff describes it, this game of an elaborate crossword puzzle. Once you began to fill in some, it worked like a Rubik's Cube where you could fill in others.

FT: Even figuring out how many spaces were blocked out on each person's name sounded like some genius detective work.

ABL: Some of them had the dashes and some didn't. I'm speculating, but they probably went after the dashes first. That was another whole thing they got wrong for a while. They had a totally wrong idea because there were two soldiers I think with the same number of letters in their name.

FT: So that was all Danni's legwork and you captured it?

ABL: Yeah, all that was basically done by the time we got into it.

FT: This idea of expecting our young soldiers to have this wisdom, has it always been that way at war or is it a modern idea?

ABL: I absolutely think that this isn't something that began with the Bush Administration. This has to do, to my mind, with who we need our soldiers to be in order to tell ourselves a sanitized version of war. It actually benefits us more than it benefits the soldiers, that myth. The soldiers probably, I can't speak for them, but I would imagine that soldiers want us to face the reality of what war-making is because in a way it makes them more heroic. But for us, back home, it's more comfortable to have a sanitized imagination of what war-making is all about. Part of that involves turning our back to the youth of the soldiers and telling ourselves these are these reluctant men who go out far from our homes to defend our homes. Of course there is a kernel of truth to even that but I think one of the things that led to Pat's death is the inexperience and youth of these soldiers and, quite frankly, the fact that few soldiers want to get fired on and have their life in danger. But also, few soldiers want to go home and tell their grandkids in the future that they didn't see any combat, they didn't see any action. That's something we don't want to face as a culture but it's true. Soldiers at the same time don't want to have their lives in jeopardy but also want to see action. When those young men have these kind of weapons, it's right there in the documents. They say, "I wanted to stay in the firefight. I was excited."

FT: Is it better that we understand those complexities of sending people to war?

ABL: I think the truth is always favorable to a lie. I don't think this is a referendum on whether or not we should go to war. It's just if we're going to go to war, we should be honest with ourselves about what war is.

FT: Shouldn't we do that in all decisions? If we're making decisions, it should be based on what's actually at stake.

ABL: How can you make decisions based on [incorrect information]? I think this has to do with the military. It also has to do with Hollywood. It's interesting also thinking about how these soldiers are in part trained by their superiors and in part trained by movies which tell them what soldiering is about. What's really funny is those movies get their idea from the military who gets their idea from movies and it goes on and on and on, all the way back in time. There's always been war, there's always been warriors and there's been stories about warriors. The two mutually feed off each other. Since way before there was even a United States, there have been statues about great heroes and things like that. If we make our decisions plugging every action into what movie it reminds us of, which is exactly what we do most of the time, that's what this movie is about. The Jessica Lynch thing, it's really a mistake to blame it all on the government. The government fed us through the press a character from our own movies. We gobbled it up.

FT: Isn't it our responsibility to not fall for it, to not buy what they're selling?

ABL: That's right. That's something I think people can take away from this. Like they say if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If it sounds too much like a movie, you should be very, very wary.

FT: Did the story even work for the government? Did recruitment go up after they told their Pat Tillman story?

ABL: Well, that remains to be seen, doesn't it? As far as recruitment, I don't know how you would figure that out. I would venture to say it has worked so far because nobody's ever been held to account for this Hollywood myth. Same goes for Jessica Lynch. Nobody ever paid a price for that. I think the final chapter of the Tillman story has yet to be written. It will have to do with whether or not we decide to let people get away with it.

FT: Would Pat want this story told? It seemed he might have kept details to himself, the real story or the military story.

ABL: Would he want the movie made? I don't know but I do know that the family has told us that he'd love the movie. That meant a lot to us and I think it's hard to speculate about what a dead man would feel. I think it's clear that he would hate the way he's been portrayed. The film is an attempt by the family to correct the record. It just becomes speculative at a certain point, right?

FT: What has the effect of this movie been so far, from festivals to its initial limited release?

ABL: I can say we've been very gratified. I'll tell you one thing that happened on the very first day we premiered it at Sundance. Michael Moore came up to us afterwards who's a guy I admire a lot. He came up to us afterwards and said some very nice things. Then he went to the press, The LA Times, and said this is a very important movie. That was helpful to us. A few hours later, a guy came up to me and said, "I just want you to know I'm an American exceptionalist. I'm an arch conservative. I'm pro-military, I'm pro-war and I love your movie. I think it's a great American document." That was all within literally about four hours. That's when we began to feel gratified with the way it's being received.

FT: Has it brought any peace to his family, like his father who's still trying to piece together the complete story?

ABL: I'll answer that by not answering it and I'll tell you why. We as filmmakers found time and time again that we would ask people stuff, not the Tillmans but we would ask Stan Goff or other people in the film who knew the family. We'd ask them questions like that, questions about the family's thought process. Time and time again we'd here, "I don't want to speak for the family." Now I find myself on the other side of that. You know, they have such an admirable sense of their own privacy. They are so articulate about their own perspective that people who get to know them shy away from things that normally you would say about people you know. Like, "Yeah, they're happy about it." Also we don't speak for them. Nobody speaks for them. They speak for themselves quite accurately. So I don't know that they found any peace.

FT: What is the next step for us, after we see the film and learn about the story?

ABL: I can answer that by directing you. The most recent thing that's happened in this story is Stanley McChrystal. He was then kicked out but more applicably, he was confirmed to lead all soldiers in the war in Afghanistan. That's a chapter that happened after our film was completed and after the Bush administration was gone. He was confirmed by a Democratic Congress and the press and Congress gave him a pass. If you look into it, you'll find it really interesting. It's very hard to explain. The lie that Stanley McChrystal told successfully is a lie that's actually more childlike than "The dog ate my homework." It's too elaborate probably but there was a Silver Star. The Silver Star said, "[Corporal Tillman] put himself in the line of devastating enemy fire" and he "was mortally wounded," but was still calling out commands to his platoon. So somewhere where the period is between those two sentences is the whole real truth that he was killed by our own men. When Stanley McChrystal was asked about it, he said, "You know, I didn't read it carefully enough to see that you could mistakenly think that the enemy killed Pat by the Silver Star." It's such a stupid lie. It's such a childlike lie that it reflects poorly on you and me and everybody else that he got away with that. I think people, when they see the film, they're going to be outraged that those type of people are in charge of our military and they're going to ask very pertinent questions about who confirms them and how the press lets this kind of thing slide. So I hope that the film provokes a sense of outrage. I think it will in people from both sides of the political spectrum. The next steps are making sure that those people are held accountable.

FT: That's the age old question though. How can we hold them accountable?

ABL: There are real world ways and real tangible ways that people who lie at the highest level of government are held accountable. It's built into this Constitution and that can still happen.

The Tillman Story is now playing in select cities.

by Angelita I won’t lie, I love vampires. I’ve read all of Anne Rice’s vampire novels, watched just about every vampire movie there is, even all the lame 80’s ones, and I’m still slightly convinced vampires could possibly exist. However, the world seems hell bent on ruining this little internal... more

by Angelita

I won’t lie, I love vampires. I’ve read all of Anne Rice’s vampire novels, watched just about every vampire movie there is, even all the lame 80’s ones, and I’m still slightly convinced vampires could possibly exist. However, the world seems hell bent on ruining this little internal pleasure of mine. 

First, they made Vampires teen-friendly, which is just the epitome of lame. What the hell kind of vampire wants to spend eternity going to high school?

If that wasn’t bad enough, now vampires are pro-abstinence. A pro-abstinence vampire is an oxymoron; vampires survive via penetration and sucking. If that’s not sexual, I don’t know what is. Then, vampires came out of the coffin and became mainstream on True Blood. So now I have to share a common interest with screeching preteens AND their parents.



Still, I held on, and replaced Lestat with Eric Northman in my myth-based sexual fantasies. Then, one day at the sex shop, we received a shipment that officially ruined vampires for me: vampire themed sex toys. For women, the Tantus’s Vamp, a white and sparkly realistically shaped dildo. For men, the Succu Dry Sex in a Can from Fleshlight, a male masturbator that resembles a vampire’s mouth.



What happened to using your imagination? For the love of Dracula, I’m pretty sure Edward Cullen is technically under-age. Also, I think becoming a vampire effectively ends your days of giving a successful blow job. We’re talking about a creature who survives on sucking blood putting an appendage that swells with blood into their fanged mouth.

Despite the faulty logic, the Tantus Vamp and Fleshlight’s Succu Dry are actually really awesome toys. The Vamp is made out of extremely body-friendly materials and the Succu Dry felt pretty good to my finger. I show both toys to every customer that walks into my store. At first they laugh, agree that the vampire obsession has gone a little too far, and inevitably end up buying one or the other.

So, if you are not suffering from vampire burnout like me, and your Edward Cullen shrine just doesn’t feel complete, vampire sex toys might just be for you.

by Pandie Suicide Welcome to a new series of “Brief Histories”, where I attempt to tell you a little about the history of certain aspects of heavy music, condensed into 600 words or less. If you have any suggestions of further topics to discuss please leave a comment here on the blog, here, or here. more

by Pandie Suicide

Welcome to a new series of “Brief Histories”, where I attempt to tell you a little about the history of certain aspects of heavy music, condensed into 600 words or less. If you have any suggestions of further topics to discuss please leave a comment here on the blog, here, or here.

But for today’s topic: Headbanging.

That heavy metal tradition of sore necks and long locks swirling around in the air to the tune of a frenzied double kick and wailing, crushing guitars, known as “headbanging,” is described by Wikipedia as “a type of dance which involves violently shaking the head in time with music, most commonly rock music and heavy metal music.” As this instructional article, on “How to Headbang” will tell you, there are several different styles of headbanging, such as the “windmill” and the “headslam.”



Headbanging and heavy metal have been linked to all sorts of things from Satanism and church-burning to eating the heads off bats a la Ozzy Osbourne… but things have evolved. There is now Headbanging for Jesus, and even grandparents are getting into it. While it can be hazardous to your health, as Tom Araya will attest to (see notable headbangers below), some find catharsis in this “expression of heavy metal abandon” of “violently nodding their heads in furious motion, as if in the grip of some spiritual possession” as many a metalhead will attest to. Once the adrenaline gets going and the blood gets pumping – it’s all on like Donkey Kong.

Closely related to moshing, crowd-surfing, slam-dancing and other forms of “Getting into it” heavy-metal style, the origin of the term “headbanging” has been linked to such greats as Led Zeppelin, Lemmy Kilmister from Motorhead, and Deep Purple, as a relatively new tradition, born somewhere in the late sixties to seventies, when musicians began experimenting with the heavier territory, that would eventually lead to the likes of genres such as death metal, black metal, thrash metal, doom, hardcore and grindcore.

While we might never know which story is the truth, “Metalologists” such as Ian Christe, author of “Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal” and David Konow, author of “Bang Your Head” agree that the type of music we now call “Heavy Metal” was birthed by Black Sabbath. Yet, it’s thought that the word “headbanger” was created “during Led Zeppelin’s first tour in 1968.” At a show at the Venue, The Boston Tea Party, front row fans were seen to be “banging their heads against the stage in rhythm with the music.”  Yet Motörhead were originally called “Motorheadbanger” which could just as easily have been headbanging’s origin, as Lemmy mentions in the documentary “The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years,” and Ian Gillan of Deep Purple, has also been quoted in interviews as saying it was a “definite possibility” that he invented the thing. So who’s right? Your guess is as good as mine.

Notable headbangers include:

George Fisher, aka “Corpsegrinder”, current lead vocalist of death metal outfit, the legendary Cannibal Corpse, is renowned for his “windmilling” style of headbanging, where he spins his neck to the music, whipping his long hair around in a frenzied windmill–style fashion.

Tom Araya, vocalist/bassist of “big four” band, Slayer ( before he broke himself!) was previously known for his “aggressive” style of headbanging, to Slayer’s epic thrash/speed metal time signatures. But thirty years of headbanging meant surgeries recently for a “cervical radiculopathy” (which according to healthscout.com basically means that your neck/back is FUCKED UP dude), cancelled Slayer shows, and no more headbanging for Tom. (And don’t we all know the old “metal neck” the next day after going to a good show!)

Almost everyone in Dragonforce! (including fellow New Zealander Sam Totman!)

Check out this kid’s awesome school project for some more sweet headbanging history:

“Inception was the action film I always wanted to see.” William Gibson By Ryan Stewart 
William Gibson will always be the cyberpunk prophet, the man whose Hugo-winning 1984 debut novel Neuromancer, about a future underworld dystopia where radically advanced computing possibilities exist in tandem... more

“Inception was the action film I always wanted to see.”





William Gibson

By

Ryan Stewart





William Gibson will always be the cyberpunk prophet, the man whose Hugo-winning 1984 debut novel Neuromancer, about a future underworld dystopia where radically advanced computing possibilities exist in tandem with sex, drugs and political skullduggery, introduced the notion of “cyberspace” to the public and predicted the emergence of a world wide web, along with computers of ever-increasing intelligence and dubious motive. In the post-September 11th world, however, his attention has increasingly focused not on a new imagined future (the branch of Matrix-style cyber fiction his work spawned chugs along regardless) but on the complexities of the present. In a recent NYT op-ed about Google’s tightening grip on our lives, Gibson conceded that “science fiction never imagined Google” and characterized the search engine as a “coral reef of human minds” with an impact so potentially transformative that it should cause us to consider new ideas like “training wheel” identities for today’s minors, whose every stupid, impolitic thought is being cached to their potential future detriment.

Gibson’s recent fiction has echoed his contemporary concerns. His aughts-focused Bigend Trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and the newly-released Zero History) follows the atypical adventures of a handful of iPhone-obsessed, cosmopolitan scrappers such as ex-rock star/freelance journalist Hollis Henry, myopic drug addict and talented translator Milgrim, and the titular Hubertus Bigend, an amoral advertising entrepreneur and “cool hunter” whose appearance has been described by Gibson as “Tom Cruise on a diet of virgin blood and truffled chocolates,” and whose latest ephemeral fixation in Zero History is a high-end toy called a Festo Penguin, which is a remote-controlled airship shaped like a flying bird. The rootless nature of these characters, the flexibility of their identities, the volume of cultural data they must process moment to moment: it’s all indicative of a decade of whiplash change, and one in which the future points in infinite directions, depending on your vantage point. SuicideGirls recently called up William Gibson in a Seattle hotel to discuss his current state of mind.



Ryan Stewart: How’s the room service there?

William Gibson: Well, I haven’t had a chance to get into it yet, but I think it’s going to be okay!

RS: I was surprised to learn just now, from Google, that those Festo Air Penguins you write about are real. What is it about them that fascinates you?

WG: Well, I was initially attracted by their extraordinary beauty and elegance. And I assumed that, as with everything I’ve published since Pattern Recognition, that someone somewhere will Google every term and gizmo mentioned in the book just to figure out which ones are made up and which ones are real. [laughs] If you check out any of the Festo balloon remotes, they’re just hypnotic, I think. They’re hypnotically beautiful. The company has this really interesting design philosophy, in that they base everything on biologics. They actually move because they’re like animals, not because they’re built to move like animals. They work because they’re shaped like Manta rays and penguins, and I find that to be an inherently, extremely interesting way to design. So, they’re there in the book as these gorgeous things that a very wealthy man can buy to play with, but which have been turned to comically sinister usage.

RS: Speaking of sinister, you open the book by giving the lay of the land in Myrtle Beach, where the main character is traveling, and he casually notes Confederate flags among many other details that fill that environment. I’m sure that wasn’t meant to go unnoticed, though. Was that a comment on the inescapability of geography?

WG: Not exactly, but I wouldn’t be unhappy for someone to assume that. In retrospect I think it was an instinctive move to indicate that geopolitics – even local geopolitics – survive in what we increasingly take for granted as a post-geographical world. And Milgrim is really good at noticing details, but he’s also good at not telling you what he thinks about them. [laughs] He just sort of slides it by, like ‘And there’s a Confederate flag…’ What’s more telling about that chapter for me would be the traditional concrete lawn jockey boy who’s been painted green like a Martian in order to be more politically correct. And that’s something that I’ve actually seen. That’s an option in concrete lawn jockey boys, and I assume it’s done for that reason.

RS: The recent Wikileaks scandal was also a good reminder of the continued battle for preeminence between geography and cyberspace, I think. The long arm of the law couldn’t reach him.

WG: Well, yeah, and that’s something that’s been around as a concept since the early days of the Internet, but I think it’s the biggest and bluntest example. It’s the biggest one-shot example that we’ve seen. Organized Internet piracy of copyrighted material is some ways similar, in that it can become business as usual and we can become used to it. The Wikileaks case is sort of like all of those Bruce Sterling rants about the post-national digital world. There it is – it just happened!

RS: The federal agent character in the book, Winnie, was one I couldn’t help but find irritating because of her phonetic twitter grammar, which is frequently displayed. “Where R U?” and so forth.

WG: I may have been stretching a bit, with that. She was obviously texting, in a sense. I assumed that she wouldn’t have had any presence on twitter other than as a Fed and a mom, so I gave her that texty thing, you know?

RS: Do you tend to notice that, when people you’re communicating with do it?

WG: I’ll tell you where I notice it a lot -- I notice it in Youtube comment threads. But I didn’t think that Winnie would waste the keystrokes on Milgrim until something really started happening. Actually, something I was working on last night required me to look at all the tweets that appear in the book, and her tweets do become terser, but more grammatically correct. Once she’s got something to work with, she’s sending like one-word tweets, but they aren’t really abbreviated.

RS: She’s able to get her point across.

WG: Yeah.

RS: When a pop star like, say, Britney Spears puts out an album and the song titles have those deliberate misspellings, what message do you think is being communicated?

WG: I don’t think of it as a message, necessarily, although I haven’t actually thought of what Britney or her songwriters might see as a motive in doing that. I suspect that they would be shooting for identification. They want the reader to recognize them as just another person. I think they want to be relatable.

RS: The English major in me bristles at it, I guess.

WG: I was an English major too, but I married a socio-linguist, and that sort of cured me. [laughs] It really cured me of looking down on people who don’t use proper English. Languages don’t stabilize until they’re dead. That’s rule number one of socio-linguistics. And societies that have these huge, formal governmental bodies that attempt to keep their language from changing – they have languages that change just as much as anybody else’s. Like France. So, yeah, I think that God help us, Britney Spears is what’s happening to the evolution of our language. It’s an evolution that is, in my view, nothing more than an infinite number of accidents. Some of the things that are going to change the English language are incredibly stupid. But it’ll happen because that kind of evolution works, apparently, the way biological evolution works. If we could access spoken English from fifty years from now, I’m not sure how much of it we’d be able to understand, but I wouldn’t necessarily assume that the people fifty years could be said to be speaking some degraded form of English. I mean, God only knows what the Elizabethans would think of us.

RS: The book’s ostensible subject is marketing, but not really mass marketing; you’re interested in exploring a kind of niche, anti-marketing that attracts by making a product seem scarce.

WG: Well, I’m inclined to think that many of the people I know are functionally immune to a lot of mass marketing, but they’re not immune to other kinds of marketing. And if marketing is what we now do, in our supposedly largely post-industrial society, then marketing will find new ways. People will be coming up with marketing that gets you in the places the old marketing couldn’t.

RS: Marketing that sells us on the exclusivity of a thing is something I would normally associate with the rich, but the book’s vibe seems to be that there are other, positive attributes to it, in that it can attract pro-active types. It’s deep, sociological stuff.

WG: Yeah, interviews after the fact of writing a book are difficult for me, because I don’t want to present myself as someone who knows what he’s talking about. [laughs] If a book is working for me, I sort of help it write itself. I don’t start with a number of ideas that I’ve come to and then attempt to illustrate them with an act of fiction. When I commit an act of fiction I often find within it questions that I’m unable to answer. So, my position after the fact is to gesture, to point at the text and say ‘What do you think it is?’ There’s an assumption that I serve a didactic function, but I actually don’t. My motive is just to try to get people to wonder about the place of marketing in our culture and our society. I’m not going to hand them a token that says ‘Fear marketing, flee now!’ or something like that. If we did that, how would we even make a living? It’s what we do.

RS: It’s interesting how this trilogy of present-day books you’ve now completed falls neatly within a decade that’s still very undefined. Do you imagine that this decade will continue to be thought of as a decade of interruption? The September 11th decade?

WG: I don’t know if I’ll ever live to see this, but I keep waiting for the first person to call it the turn of the century. [laughs] There’s going to come a day when someone says ‘Back at the turn of the century…’ and everybody will instantly nod and go ‘Yeah...’ and ever after we will refer to it as the turn of the century. I think that will be what we call the first ten years of this century by the time we get to the 2020s or the 2030s. As to what it will be characterized by, there’s really no telling. If I were somehow magically offered a body of knowledge from the real future, but only one body of knowledge, what I would want to know is: what do they think of us? I think that would tell me everything I need to know about where they are at, and it would tell me so much more about the world I live in than I could possibly know now, because so many things are going to happen in the meantime. History is a speculative discipline, it’s not the study of a fixed body of information. Our view of the Victorians is nothing like the Victorians’ view of themselves, and I would assume that our view of ourselves is nothing remotely like the future’s view of us. And I’m inclined to think that we know way more about the Victorians than they knew about themselves. So, I don’t see any reason to think that we know more about ourselves than the future will be able to uncover.

RS: Do you feel like you’ve been well-placed to give the aughts some degree of shaping, through your work?

WG: Well, I sort of feel like I came to it with the oven mitts of genre science-fiction, which turned out to be marvelous things with which to heft the crazy, steaming casserole of the first decade of the 21st century, the contents of which we all still find quite baffling. I basically came to the task because I had the toolkit, you know? I had my standard-issue science-fiction writer toolkit that I earned sometime around 1981, and it’s really the only toolkit that I ever learned to work with. Having been an English major, I was taught that the only way to look at the science-fiction of the past, historically, is to look at the past in which it was written, which is invariably what gave it life and meaning for its author. So, when I began to write near-future science-fiction around 1981, I was very self-conscious about that, like ‘I’m writing some 1980s science-fiction here, and one day if anyone cares to look at it they’ll have to make sense of it in terms of what was going on at the moment I wrote it.’ So, I’ve kept that awareness as I’ve kept writing, but as I’ve kept writing the world outside the window was getting weirder and weirder.

RS: Weirder in what sense?

WG : Because of exponential technologically-driven change. I would look at the imaginary future on my computer screen and then look out the window or look at CNN and think that pretty soon we’re going to be past this [piece that I’m writing]. The window or CNN will offer a higher quota of cognitive dissonance than this stuff I’m sitting here imagining, I’d think. And that was really the beginning of the project that led to these three books, although the three previous books were also a kind of conscious segue into the present, but I did it in a way that was much less obvious. Those books were set in what is essentially now, or what has become an alternate past, and the thing that I kept to myself was my assumption that almost all of the characters were characters from the day in which I was writing those books, rather than the result of any attempt of mine to imagine how someone from the near future would perceive things. A character like Rydell, the hapless policeman [in the Bridge trilogy], really feels like a 90s guy. He thinks like a 90s guy and he speaks like a 90s guy and he basically is a 90s guy – there’s a lot of that in those books. And I found that this delighted me to do that, and to my amazement nobody complained. Nobody called me on it and said ‘Why do you have these archaic protagonists running around in this near future that you want us to believe in?’

RS: Your protagonists in Zero History , along with ones in Spook Country and other books, are very cosmopolitan. Their ability to function in a culturally dense cityscape is a key to their success. Do you think cosmopolitanism should be taught? Is it a form of literacy?

WG: I suppose it is a form a literacy. I try not to be too didactic a novelist, because I think that if I was I would be serving a fairly low function as an artist. But none of us are free of our biases, and I would think that it would be quite remarkable for me to write a protagonist who was a sympathetic character to any degree, who was either a racist, a tribalist, a nationalist, or a fundamentalist ideologue. Those are negatives for me, so I guess I would see the sympathetic characters in Spook Country as being defined more by their absence of characteristics like that than by anything in particular that they are into. They all seem to be people who are, to some extent, capable of caring about the people who are immediately around them. They also tend to be what I would see as not overly ambitious, although sometimes they just kind of take off. I sort of wind a character up and then set it down in a book and it goes off and develops its own mean, competitive edge, in which case I just let it do what it’s going to do, and I think that way in the end I’ll have a more naturalistic depiction of how people actually behave.

RS: Another author recently described to me a book he’s writing, which takes place in a future decimated by worst-case scenario global warming, but that’s in the background because the characters are focused on their own lives, finding happiness. That reminded me of your work, which often deals with thriving in whatever reality is given.

WG: Yeah, yeah, and the book you describe sounds like an entirely worthy project, as described. I’ve often thought about the real future, what it might be, since that’s the way science-fiction works in our society, but the kind of book you describe is one that we too seldom see, in which there’s been some extremely big and possibly bad change, and yet if you’re shooting for high naturalism you have to depict the characters going through everything that humans go through as they grow and get old and die. It’s not all about your plot points, you know? But closer to the traditional core of genre science-fiction, it’s all about the plot. The traditional version of that [book] would be that it’s all about the climate change. And it would also be about androgenic climate change, and the characters would get some time machine and go back and kill the guy who was about to invent the internal combustion engine. That’s a deliberately childish example, but that’s closer to what genre science-fiction has done, something broad like that. There are very few books that have attempted that sort of future. It’s probably easier to do something like that with alternative histories. You change one factor and Protestantism never happens and the Catholic church is ruling the world and you come in on characters who are just fully living their lives. So, it’s been done, though we think of works like that as falling outside the genre, but nonetheless they’re obviously science-fiction.

RS: What did you think of Inception?

WG: I loved it! Loved it. And I don’t love movies because of what I imagine the director was trying to do, I just love them when they work so brilliantly. I think the previous twelve months have been a really rich film year for me, because there have been three science-fiction films that I found, for different reasons, to be wonderfully satisfying: one was Moon, one was Splice, and one was Inception . I hadn’t thought about the fact that they all have single noun titles. That’s actually kind of scary. [laughs] Inception was the action film I always wanted to see. There’ve been so many times that I’ll be watching an action film and thinking ‘I could so love this if only it was ten times smarter.’ And Inception felt that way to me.

RS: I liked it too. I thought it was bold of Nolan to sort of radically re-conceive the idea of a dream state as a kind of stable holodeck.

WG: Yeah, after thinking about it and reading some reviews, what the script suggests that they’re doing doesn’t really have much to do with any psychological model of dreaming that I know of. I say this only having seen it once, and having subsequently read quite a few reviews, although I was fortunate to see it with almost no idea of what it was about. Just through sheer luck I got a completely spoiler-free viewing, partly because I went to see it the day it came out, which is something I never do, but a friend dragged me along. What they’re doing has very little to do with any experiential model of dreaming that I’ve had in my own life of dreams. They talk about building dreams. If what the characters are saying is true, in terms of what is going on in the movie, they are making these hard constructs into which they will go and also take the victim and play some psychodrama out. But those hard constructs also aren’t really stable, because they start breaking up with spectacular and surrealistically gorgeous CG effects, for no particular reason. Somehow I don’t think that’s what it’s about. It amazes me that people approach Inception as though it were a piece of hard science-fiction, as opposed to being a Borges story. The modality that it works in is the modality of a Borges story like The Aleph or The Circular Ruins . Those are stories that are closer to myth and fairy tale than they are to hard science-fiction. So, when people attack the premise as though the premise was a failure, I think it’s probably one of those cases of the critics’ expectations being the whole thing. Maybe it didn’t meet their expectations, but that could be because it was actually something else. I loved it, and I felt this extraordinary feeling of gratitude on leaving the theater. I think it was gratitude that it had actually been possible for somebody to spend that much money on a movie that I really loved. It’s been a long time since I had that feeling.




Zero History is available in bookstores everywhere.

by Bob Suicide Geeks in general are often characterized as the archetypal introverted boy: thick plastic-rimmed glasses, suspenders, and high-waisted pants. (Sounds pretty hot to me!) Just look at Crispin Glover’s talented portrayal of stammering and painfully timid George McFly. We’re the ones who... more

by Bob Suicide

Geeks in general are often characterized as the archetypal introverted boy: thick plastic-rimmed glasses, suspenders, and high-waisted pants.

(Sounds pretty hot to me!)

Just look at Crispin Glover’s talented portrayal of stammering and painfully timid George McFly. We’re the ones who stand in the corner of the dance hall; afraid to talk to girls. In movies like this, nerds rarely “get the girl” without some sort of “coolness” makeover to bring us up to speed with popular culture.



[Lumi in Catch 909]

To us nerds, well that’s just it…”us nerds.” Everything in society and marketing has drawn lines between “us” and “them.” Most commonly, the “us” is associated with the uncool and the shy; while “them” is generally the outgoing popular crowds.

But, the movies are confusing an important point. At the end of the day, after the credits have stopped rolling, and “the geek” goes home with “the prom queen” after learning to play by the “cool rules”…what do they have to talk about? Is he going to teach her how to play magic cards? Will he care about perfecting that star basket-toss? (Now, there is one cheer stunt called a “Superman” which does have some appeal.) In reality however, they don’t have a lot of common interests to sustain a relationship.

You geeks deserve someone better! Someone you can really get into co-op mode with!

As we’ve learned over the issues, it’s that you can find geeky girls out there with the prom queen physique and the mind of Charles Xavier. Don’t try to change yourself to go for the popular chick. Have confidence in who you are and land yourself a hot Orion slave girl who knows just how to press your “Konami code.”

Don’t let hundreds of movies and years of marketing tell you otherwise; you’re cool! If you have confidence within yourself it’ll show in everything you do. Trust me. It’ll effect your posture, your tone of voice, even your topics of conversation.

You don’t have to be part of the popular crowd to be cool…to a truly nerdy lady real coolness lies in your gamerscore or your ability to speak fluent Klingon. Now, those are real accomplishments to be proud of!

All this being said, sometimes following George McFly’s example is a good move. Try to pick up a girl by saying:

If she’s the right kind of girl (truly a geeky goddess) she’ll understand that she’s found her density.

by Desiree Marsau “Don’t wear white after Labor Day.” Not only is it the stupidest rule of fashion ever written, it’s also the most outdated. Forget what your Grandmother told you. White is hot all year round and it’s also the easiest way to make a vintage wardrobe feel a little more modern. more

by Desiree Marsau

“Don’t wear white after Labor Day.” Not only is it the stupidest rule of fashion ever written, it’s also the most outdated. Forget what your Grandmother told you. White is hot all year round and it’s also the easiest way to make a vintage wardrobe feel a little more modern. Add some crisp white and it always brings a sleek edge to whatever you are wearing.

Hours spent researching WHY this ever became a rule of fashion in the first place kept leading me back to one main reason: season. White deflects sunlight, therefore white is not warm enough to wear in the winter. I call B.S. To wear white in the winter simply wear heavier fabrics or knits, solid shoes or boots rather than strappy sandals, or pair lightweight garments with heavier garments like cardigans or woolly tights. Stick with heavy cotton, wool, cashmere, down, leather and most other natural fibers for the best protection from the elements.

I am, of course, biased towards vintage clothing so I pulled together a few examples of extra cute white vintage garments for you to check out.



The outdated “No white after Labor Day” rule seems to, most often, be referring to shoes, so let’s start with some shoes and boots that could easily be worn in the winter paired with jeans or heavy sock and tights.

1980’s White Leather Lace Up Boots by Laredo, $44, available at JL Vintage: I would wear these boots over dark denim skinny jeans or pair them with light grey tights and a charcoal grey wool mini skirt.

1970’s White Platform Wedges, $10 (!!!), available at Violette Slippers: Try wearing these with ribbed chocolate brown tights for a play on the textured wedge. Pair with a belted white eyelet lace 60’s dress.

1990’s Leather Corset Pumps, $22, available at Greatest Friend: Pair with olive green tights and a printed long sleeve dress.

1970’s White Leather Cowgirl boots, $30, available at Becky Drolen: Try these over heavy leggings or denim. A pair of tall woolly socks would look great popping out of the tops.

1980’s White Leather Studded Ankle Boots, $19, available at Santoki Vintage: I think these ankle boots would look best with dark denim and a heavy cotton trench coat, belted at the waist.

Now let’s work our way up and build an outfit. Here’s a selection of white garments and white accessories that will look amazing in the winter.

1960’s Mini Dress, $54, available at Lucky Vintage Seattle: Try pairing this with brown tights and tan boots. Throw on a cropped bolero jacket for warmth and a nice silhouette.

1980’s White Italian Sunglasses, $40, available at Et La La: Wear these with anything. DUH!

1980’s High Waist White Cotton Shorts, $27, available at Becky Drolen: To wear shorts in the winter, pair with heavy cable knit tights. Try slate grey with these shorts.

1960’s YSL White Felt Cloche Hat, $86, available at Pinky A Go Go: This would look amazing worn with a nicely tailored trench coat for a sort of sexy Russian spy look.

1970’s White Mini Dress, $32, available at 2 Treasure Hunt: This dress is really lightweight, so just layer, layer, layer! A tank top style bodysuit is an invisible layer that will add lots of warmth. Next add heavy leggings, a colorful cardigan, woolly socks and knee high boots.

1970’s Crocheted Top, $32, available at Raleigh Vintage: Anything crocheted always looks great with jeans. Just add boots. For warmth wear a thick bodysuit underneath.

1970’s 1/2 Length White Trench Coat, $20, available at Zawnbo: Trench coats look great with everything because they give you a perfect hourglass silhouette. I’d wear this with black skinny jeans and white leather oxfords.

1960’s Crocheted Cape, $34, available at Mouse Vox: Capes look best paired with jeans or leggings.

1970’s White Wrap Dress, $37, available at The Church of Vintage: Pair this lightweight dress with dark blue heavy tights, white platform wedges, and a navy cashmere cardigan.

People tend to gravitate towards wearing black, grey, and most darker colors as fall and winter sets in. Wearing white always guarantees that you’ll stand out in the crowd. As always, all of these items are vintage and one of kind so if you see something you like, don’t hesitate in snatching it up! Once a vintage item is gone- it’s gone for good.

I’ve done about 800 original interviews for SuicideGirls and probably a couple thousand more for other venues, so I think it's fair to say that I’ve gotten pretty good at working around people’s tertiary expressions like “oh man” and “yeah.” But when you’ve got a legend like Bootsy Collins... more

I’ve done about 800 original interviews for SuicideGirls and probably a couple thousand more for other venues, so I think it's fair to say that I’ve gotten pretty good at working around people’s tertiary expressions like “oh man” and “yeah.” But when you’ve got a legend like Bootsy Collins saying "yeah mama, baby and man," it would be sacrilegious to delete it.

Collins is best known as one of the co-founders of the seminal 1970’s funk group Parliament Funkadelic, but I really got into his work in the early 90’s when he teamed up with Bill Laswell and Buckethead. As Collins and I discuss in this interview, that was a golden era--and it's still going on today. Bootsy’s latest album, Christmas is 4 Ever, features many new songs by Bootsy and his crew.

Buy Christmas Is 4 Ever

Daniel Robert Epstein: How are you?

Bootsy Collins: Everything’s cool man. Just working down here in the studio trying to keep it together. Everything’s coming along great.

DRE: That’s cool. What are you working on?

BC: Actually we’re working on new theme song for the Bengals. We’re going to the Super Bowl this year. So I’ve got to get it together.

DRE: Are you going to be performing at the Super Bowl too?

BC: Well, we’ll see. We’re working at it. Oh yeah. We’re going to see what happens.

DRE: Who’s up there in the studio with you?

BC: Actually I’m just laying a little bed down by myself here. Then later on we’ve got some guys coming in, a couple of keyboard players and a drummer. We’re just trying to piece it together a little bit here.

DRE: It’s really awesome to talk to you. I’ve been a fan for so long.

BC: Aww yeah. Like I said, we’ve been kicking around, working with different people and trying to keep it all happening. It’s feeling pretty good right about now. It’s coming back around.

DRE: What made you want to do a Christmas album?

BC: I’ve wanted to do a Christmas album forever, but I never really got the chance or the time to really think about doing it and putting the effort in it. Shout Factory had contacted me about doing one and I was like, “Wow. I always wanted to do one of those anyway.” It was like one of those right on time things. Some of those songs were from before so it was good to go back and revisit that stuff.

DRE: Have any of the tracks been ones that have been laying dormant and then you decided to spruce them up a little bit?

BC: We redid I’d Rather Be with You and we dedicated it to Roger Troutman. Me and Zapp [Troutman] redid that. That was one that’s been out before on I’d Rather Be with You on Bootsy’s Rubber Band’s first album. Then the other one would probably be Christmas is 4 Ever. I did that maybe about three or four years ago as a track and just never finished it or never done nothing with it. It seemed like it was perfect for this record. It actually turned out to be the title song.

DRE: I would imagine that you’re a big fan of Christmas. You dress a little Christmasy.

BC: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I’ve got to be, not Santa Claus, but Boota Claus. Then Bootolph too. Not Rudolph, but Bootolph, the funky soul reindeer.

DRE: Are you religious at all?

BC: Not religious. I got my higher level of anticipation, but I wouldn’t say I’m religious. I do live on another frequency.

DRE: What’s your Christmas like?

BC: It’s just having a good time and watching people just get off and have a good time, receiving gifts. Just that joy of seeing people get off. It’s like a big 1999 party that you always look forward to. It may be the last time, so you better go ahead and just enjoy yourself with it while it’s happening. We go all out for it. We just have a blast with it.

DRE: Do you do a show around Christmas time?

BC: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. One time we did one out in San Francisco. It was like a carnival nude thing. It was wild, man. They had them freak scenes going on out in San Francisco anyway. They asked us to play at this big carnival freak show on Christmas. It was wild, but it was cool. I guess they said, “Let’s get them crazy mugs out here, man.”

DRE: Of course you’ve got some of your guys who often work with you, like Buckethead, when did the two of you first meet?

BC: It was about 1990. We met back then and actually I did his first CD, Bucketheadland. We recorded it here when I first got my little studio happening. Actually that’s what broke my studio in. We just got back there and just started jamming and coming up with stuff, man. It was fun. That was like a Christmas man. So yeah.

DRE: Who first put you two guys together?

BC: Actually Bucket sent me a video out of the clear blue. When I saw it, I was like “This cat is gone. This is the cat I like.” He had a note with that video that said he had two heroes and they were Michael Jackson and Bootsy Collins. I was like, “Wow. What was that all about?” I said, “I’ve got to meet this cat.” Sure enough, I was working with Bill Laswell at the time and he was saying “Let’s do some sessions or something together.” That’s when it all started.

DRE: That kicked off a great run you, Buckethead and Laswell had.

BC: Yeah, man. Yeah. That was fun time. That was all the way back to musicianship and just having fun playing and vibing in the studio together. That was great time, man. Every musician looks forward to that time instead of the headaches of serious responsibility. That’s what throws everything off.

DRE: Is this Christmas album the first time you’ve worked with Charlie Daniels?

BC: Yeah it is. Actually right now I’m doing that hit song of his…

DRE: The Devil Went Down to Georgia?

BC: Yeah. I’m redoing that for him for his album. It’s going to be an ongoing relationship here. We just hooked up. We were doing Monday Night Football thing on ESPN with Hank Williams. That was fun. It was like all these different crazies from different bands, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, The Roots, Little Richard. This was the craziest all-star band in the world. We all on the set, man, just grooving. Charlie came over and I started doing this little bass line. He was like “Yeah. Yeah. I want to record that. I want to record it.” So we hooked up man and just going on and on from there.

DRE: It’s cool to see that you’re working with Snoop Dogg too.

BC: Yeah, well Snoop and I go back a ways. I’ve been working with him for awhile now. For him to show up on the album, it was like, man you’ve got to do it. We wanted this to be relating back to what I do, but at the same time put a tad of today in it so it’ll go on and on. Who better to do that than the Snoopster?

DRE: With bands like Outkast so popular right now, do you feel like funk is at a good place?

BC: Yeah, but I would say that it has evolved into other music forms and other musical versions of funk. It’s not funk as we knew it, but it is funk as today describes it as. I can’t take nothing away from it because everything evolves and changes. To me, that’s the process. It’s about evolving and changing. Everything will not remain the same so as long as I’m here. I’ll always add what I add to the table. That’s the fun part of it. You take that and you add it with whatever somebody’s doing today and it changes the flavor. I like that. After about five or six years of doing the same thing and doing all the same groups you want to stretch out and do some different things. That’s why you’ve got me with Bucket and me with Deee-Lite and me with Keith Richards, Cyndi Lauper. That stuff to me is challenging and it’s fun because it keeps you sharp. It keeps you on it. You don’t keep repeating yourself and doing the same thing.

DRE: When you produce work for someone else or with someone else, of course you’re in there playing and doing vocals, but do you actually sit down and produce like the way Laswell might produce?

BC: Yeah. I learned a lot from Laswell. Oh man. Come on. Heck yeah. I’m pulled more towards that now. Now after I’ve laid the bed down, then I would come and do my part. That’s different from the way I used to when I would just go out with the band and just come up with the groove, put it down and somebody else was engineering and producing. But now I’ve changed seats. It’s fun for me. You’re talking about challenges. That’s a challenge. I like it. It gives me balance. It makes me feel like I’m not doing the same thing over and over. I think the time with Bill Laswell really helped open my mind, helped get me with a whole lot of different artists with different music approaches and just watching him and the way he worked opened up my whole producing mind. It showed me that it just wasn’t about playing and performing. It’s about how to get what you really want.

DRE: Do you ever see you and Andre 3000 doing something together?

BC: Actually, we had talked about doing something before Outkast even got big. They always would come to my shows even before anybody even knew anything about them. They make fresh work now by taking stuff and putting it with what they do. It’s like new because they’re doing it. To me that’s a part of the evolution. You have to put a new face on some old stuff and then it becomes new. That’s exactly what they’re doing. They’re adding their techniques and their vision of what it was all about today. They came up with a whole new thing. They did just what Funkadelic did back in the day. When Funkadelic hit the scene, it was so crazy. It was only certain people that really got it. We didn’t have all of maximum exposure like Outkast is getting from record companies, videos and all that. It was just people that would dare come to the gig. That’s the only way we got exposure. That went on until around 1976. That’s when we started really getting some record play.

DRE: Do you listen to a lot of new music?

BC: Not a lot but I try to stay up on certain things that’s going on, but I’ve never been a fan of listening to a lot of music because I was always the one that was like a receiver from the other planet. I didn’t want nothing to distract me or interpret or influence me in any way. I probably listen more now than I used to.

DRE: How much of your work is done with computers now?

BC: I still record analog. We do all our mixing on ProTools. The Christmas record was mixed all on ProTools. I’m in the process of learning ProTools myself now which is a challenge. I just want to be on top of things. I just can’t see myself just putting myself in a box and saying, “Well this is it. It’s either my way or the highway.” I just can’t see that. However the world goes or however it evolves, I feel like I can take what I got and add it with it. That’s my take on all that.

DRE: Is the reason that you record analog just because that’s what’s in your studio?

BC: Actually, I’ve got both analog and digital. I just got a brand new Mackie X200. It’s a touch screen. It’s got two computers in it. I finally learned how to work that mug about three weeks ago. I’ve been at it for about three or four months. At first I wouldn’t touch it. I was scared of it. Once I got on it, man, I can’t get off of it. Everything is so easy. You just press the screen. You don’t have to plug this in or plug that in. It’s like, “Wow, man. This is crazy.” It’s just preparing me for my ProTools adventure. I just built another building to have more musicians in. The room is great and I want to put in the HD ProTools system, the big one. We want to have a balance going on. We want real live drums and the pads with the sounds you can mess with. We want to have the best of both worlds.

DRE: Your look with the clothes and all that is very famous but I can’t imagine you sitting around your house dressed that way.

BC: Well, you know what? It took me a long time to really realize that you can take them glasses off, man. You can come out of those leather crazy outfits. You don’t have to sleep in them. It took me a long time to really realize I didn’t have to dress like that at home and everywhere because people would be everywhere I was at. It was like, “Wow. So I got to be Bootsy all the time.” That came from just trying to create that monster. Once he was created, that mug came back and wanted to bite me, man. I was like, “Wow. Wait a minute. Frankenstein trying to get me, man.” So I had to learn how to calm down, take the big boots off, put some sneakers on and chill out in the woods a little bit. Yeah, that was a learning process for me. I think I got it down now.

DRE: How old are you now?

BC: I’m 54 now and I’ll be 55 on October 26th.

DRE: Happy Birthday in advance.

BC: Oh, thank you, man. Thank you.

DRE: I was lucky enough to see the Parliament reunion tour about ten years ago with you and George [Clinton] and everybody. Do you guys see doing something like that again?

BC: Probably. It depends on George and what he really wants to do. We actually did the grand opening of Experience Music Project in Seattle with James Brown, the Godfather. We was the original JB's. Then we did it with Parliament Funkadelic. It was the best of both worlds, man. Those were two extremes. To be a part of both of those things was like wow. Anytime that opportunity comes around, it’s like, “Man this is incredible.” I look forward to it.

DRE: So you and George are getting along?

BC: Oh yeah. We have our little spats here and there, but I think with musicians, it has always been a continuous relationship. There’s just something about musicians. They don’t think like producers not to say something producers and singers and stuff like that, but musicians got a whole another way of thinking. I think that’s where I came from. I know how musicians think. Now that I got a chance to work with a lot of producers and actually become one I know how all of them think now. It’s good because it gives you a balance of how far to take different things.

DRE: Besides the Super Bowl, what else are you working on?

BC: I’m working with a couple of groups. I’m now talking to P-Nut, the 311 bass player about doing a whole album with Buckethead, myself and Brain. It got started when P-Nut was here about four weeks ago. We had started laying a couple of tracks down. It’s coming along real good. Buckethead will be here in October and we’re going to do about a whole month down here. He’s going to stay off the road. I’m going to just be here. We’re going to just add on to what P-Nut did and then cut some more tracks too.

DRE: Are you designing any more equipment for yourself?

BC: Well there’s the Traben Bootzilla bass and now we’re getting ready to do a Star bass. Actually they were just here last week getting all fitted up and how I want it, how I want the electronics because the electronics are very important. So we went over that. You’ll be hearing something about that around the end of November.

DRE: I read you may be composing music for a movie called Beowulf.

BC: Yeah, I’m working on that too. I’m doing stuff for different scenes like Viking music, Asian stuff. The things that Bill Laswell does, I’m getting a chance to really experience now. So far everybody seems to be very pleased. So it’s another challenge, man. I love challenges, man. You get down there and you don’t know what the heck you’re doing. You just go ahead and go for it, man. That, to me, is the challenge. Then when you play it for somebody and they just get this big smile on their face, it’s like wow. Yeah. It’s real cool, man. It’s real cool to go ahead and not be in that box, man. I’ve worked so hard to try to get out of just that one box. I think it’s really paying off now. I think it’s really a good thing for me because I get a chance to work in different areas that I really want to do. We just finished the soundtrack for the cartoon Loonatics Unleashed. That’ll be out really soon and actually I have a character that is going to be on Loonatics Unleashed in 2007. All that stuff people said George and I was really crazy for even talking about then, is happening now.

DRE: Who should play you when they do a P-Funk biopic movie?

BC: Who should play me? Wow. Probably Andre. He would fit right in on that one. He would be the bomb, man. Heck yeah. That would be more closer to home.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

by Nathalie Moody Jealousy. Why was this emotion created in the master-planning of the emotions? There must be some involvement from the devil here. He must get off with twisted satisfaction as the most rational and mature lot of us, struggle to ignore the evilness of this illogical envy! It creeps under... more

by Nathalie Moody

Jealousy. Why was this emotion created in the master-planning of the emotions? There must be some involvement from the devil here. He must get off with twisted satisfaction as the most rational and mature lot of us, struggle to ignore the evilness of this illogical envy! It creeps under our skin and skews are sense of reality. Jealousy can distract us from moving on, moving forward and functioning as a rational human being.



[Chloe & Vice in Strip Tease]

It is just a mental wiring issue that I am sure could be resolved in this age of science and medical brilliance. Why can’t there be some Survival of the Fittest/ Generational eradication of this unnecessary emotion? We seen this occur. Like the deep water fish that no longer has the once necessary sense of vision since it has been completely unnecessary for survival. This evolutionary process seems very appropriate for something like jealously but this could take too long for humankind. Evil envy only increases stress leading to chronic health conditions like high blood pressure, heart disease, and loneliness. So my challenge to the medical community would be to develop some harmless pill or procedure that effectively deactivates the part of this brain. Results? Quick movement past personal hardships so we can all avoid jealousy-related stress and serious conditions.

I wish we could just experience a methamphetamine rush instead of such ugly distress! When your co-worker is recognized for the team’s hard work and gets the big promotion instead of you – BAM! a rush of pure luscious dopamine. When your current boy crush doesn’t call back and he sends an adoring wall-to-wall FB note to your best friend- Blast! a slam of delicious neurological warmth soars through your veins as you instantly forget the origin of unfounded distress.

But as I move back to reality and face the potential for another stealth bomb slam of envy, I wonder how others have experienced and dealt with episodes of jealousy? I can’t be alone in my stumbles and fumbles to manage the emotional roller coaster of daily life. After a bad break-up or a hurtful discovery of infidelity, how do you cope and move on from the silliness of Jealousy?

“You’re so pale,” Blair says to Clay near the end of Imperial Bedrooms, the highly-anticipated sequel to Bret Easton Ellis’s seminal 1985 book Less Than Zero. Fans will remember that Blair made the same off-handed comment to Clay near the beginning of the earlier book, only this time there’s... more

“You’re so pale,” Blair says to Clay near the end of Imperial Bedrooms, the highly-anticipated sequel to Bret Easton Ellis’s seminal 1985 book Less Than Zero. Fans will remember that Blair made the same off-handed comment to Clay near the beginning of the earlier book, only this time there’s a touch of menace to it, because after all he’s seen by the end of the book, Clay should be pale, from fright. In the 25 years since they snorted, lied and fucked their way through a living dead existence as massively over-privileged, disaffected Beverly Hills teenagers, Ellis’s golden Gods have seen their youth mercilessly evaporate and their universe contract into a noirish bubble where naked power grabs, bottomless secrets and bad plastic surgery are the norm. They may still be at the summit of society, living and working in the movie business in upscale L.A., but they are no longer enviable. They are cursed beings now, seizing and devouring youth and beauty wherever they find it, while failing to arrest their own inexorable slide into ugliness and irrelevance.

Devotees of Less Than Zero who scratched their heads at its 1987 film adaptation, which morphed the tough source material into a Reaganesque anti-drug parable starring sympathetic junkie Robert Downey Jr. and snipped its most significant scenes – the characters’ dead-eyed reaction to the running of a snuff film at a mansion party and later, an actual rape – will howl with laughter at Imperial Bedrooms’ opening passages, which see Ellis’s characters watching the candy-coated film about their lives and reacting to it. The film did happen in their universe, thanks to a book one of them happened to later write, but hey, it was just a movie. You want to know the real story, right? It’s a classically Ellis spin into the metatextual, blending character and actor, fiction and reality, author and reader into one whirring margarita mix in much the same fashion as his last book, 2005’s maybe-autobiographical Lunar Park. Imperial Bedrooms even sees Ellis using Clay as a surrogate to relate some of the author’s own experiences as a producer on 2008’s disastrous film adaptation of his own 1994 short story collection, The Informers.

Ellis has never been a stranger to the movie business – fans of the Christian Bale-starring adaptation of his grisly 1991 classic American Psycho dog him at every book reading. But in recent years he’s embraced the business with a newfound gusto, diving into a number of original projects, including a collaboration with Gus Van Sant on a biopic about the mutual suicides of artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake and a long-simmering collaboration with Roger Avary on a film adaptation of what some consider his masterpiece, 1998’s Glamorama, a Kubrickian horror story about a shadowy organization of supermodel terrorists. Avary and Ellis are also in possession of what’s becoming an urban legend, a feature film called Glitterati that Avary shot on the sly in Europe while filming scenes for 2002’s The Rules of Attraction. Legally unscreenable in any public forum because it contains (very) intimate scenes featuring non-actors unaware they were in a movie, as well as other scenes that both parties curiously refuse to discuss, Glitterati is already Hollywood folklore. SuicideGirls recently called up Bret Easton Ellis at a hotel in Portland to discuss as many of these things as possible.




Ryan Stewart: How’s the book tour going?

Bret Easton Ellis: It’s going really well. I’m in Portland right now. It’s been surprising. I’m surprised by the crowds.

RS: A mix of book fans and movie fans?

BEE: All kinds of fans. It’s a bit nerve-wracking, but I suppose it’s a really good thing. It’s been positive. I don’t know if it’s necessarily good for me in terms of my ego and my narcissism, because it does feed those things to an incredible degree. But then, you know what happens? The tour itself kind of bitch-slaps me and says “Snap out of it!” The tour itself is a lot of work. It brings you back to the reality of a 9 to 5 job. You’re out there for hours with people who, for whatever reason, your work has meant something to them. They’ve showed up and they have stories they want to tell you and books they want to have signed. It’s a strange life, and life isn’t that strange in the years when I’m just myself working on whatever I’m working on. But every five or six years when I go out on tour it’s a reminder that there’s another Bret Easton Ellis out there, one that people respond to very differently than, say, my friends do, who really couldn’t care less, you know?

RS: Do the horror fans still show up?

BEE: Oh, completely. It’s a wide array, but I’ve noticed that there are groups of people who are into, like, one book. There are different factions, and some of them were introduced to the work through some of the movies and yeah, there are the factions who are definitely interested in American Psycho, and also Lunar Park. It’s interesting.

RS: Do you get offers to do the comedic TV interviews, like The Daily Show?

BEE: None. I get no offers to do that. I also don’t think I’d be any good at it. It takes a lot of deep breathing and some Xanax just to get in front of a large crowd and read the book and answer questions coherently, in a long-form format. I actually read for a very short amount of time and then I just like to talk to the audience, do the Q&A and have an interactive thing going. And as long as I’m kind of in control of that I can relax a little bit and loosen up, though it takes like ten or fifteen minutes and maybe a shot or two of tequila before moving on to that part of the night. But no, I haven’t been offered any of that. I’ve done no television for this tour.

RS: Are you quick with a joke? Would you do well in that format, maybe with some coaching?

BEE: First of all, I wouldn’t want coaching, and I’m not that interested in the format. I’m more or less relieved that there hasn’t been any television this tour, for any number of reasons. For most morning shows you have to get up at around 6:00am, and I also hate looking at myself on screen. And also, just the way you have to sell yourself in those four minutes that you have -- it turns you into a kind of ad man. You’re out there shilling for the publishing house and you have to be presentable and you’ve got to get it all focused into four minutes and also have the funny stories prepared. It’s just more artificial than what I guess I’m used to, so in a way I am glad it hasn’t happened. I did do one TV thing in Atlanta, this Fox morning show and it was fine, but it was still just, like, if there’s any other way to talk about the book and help out the good folks at Random House, I’d rather do that.

RS: I’d imagine this is a very socially active time for you in general, just because you’ve got so much movie business going on.

BEE: Yeah, it is a more socially active time. Even this tour has a lot of social activity just because I know more people in more places now. At every stop, I’m seeing a lot of friends. But also, in terms of my life in L.A., yeah, if you’re involved in projects you have a lot of meetings and you’re trying to get people to give you money to make a movie and yeah, it is social. Part of what I find enjoyable about L.A. and that business in particular, is that there’s something about working together with people towards a goal of making a project that you believe in…there’s a team spirit to it that I like. Very, very different from working on a novel, where you’re just alone with this thing for many years. As fun as it can be, you’re alone and that’s just the way it is. It’s not pink or black or bad or good, it’s just how it is. They’re two very different ways of working and one is social and one is a-social.

RS: Are you embracing your new role as a producer? Do you hang out in clubs and meet the up-and-coming actors?

BEE: Well, so far we’re only talking about one movie as producer and writer.

RS: What about Lunar Park and, hopefully, this?

BEE: We don’t know about this one. No one is attached to anything on Imperial Bedrooms. Whenever someone tells me they’ve heard that a project is going forward, and that it was on IMDB, I look on IMDB and I scratch my head and think ‘But that’s not going anywhere, it’s not in pre-production.’ What you read on IMDB isn’t always correct, and no, that’s not happening. And Lunar Park I’m not involved with. I know the guys who are making it, and I’m friends with them, but I’m not involved on the creative level with that movie even though I might have some kind of producing credit. And hanging out in the clubs is not part of the process! [laughs] It’s more low-key than that. It’s drinks. It’s dinner. It’s a social function at someone’s house. It is not hanging out at clubs, trolling for young actresses and actors to be in my movies. I know that might disappoint some people, but it’s just a fact.

RS: I read your recent quotes about how actors aren’t particularly smart. Were you including emotional intelligence in that?

BEE: Actors have to be emotionally smart. Or, good actors have to. And most of the actors I’ve met are emotionally smart. And yeah, I was making a distinction between emotional intelligence, which is a big thing to have, and an important thing to have. And having a college degree doesn’t necessarily make anybody smarter, I guess. I have plenty of friends who are very successful and did not finish college, so I’m not making judgments on that. But actors usually have not gone to college and actors have usually not gotten an education. They usually start their career when they’re in high-school or very young, and that’s what they’ve been focused on. That’s just the way it is. But yeah, they do have to have that emotional intelligence to move forward and that can be just as important as having an M.F.A. from some liberal arts college. I do like actors, I would never diss them.

RS: I know you’re an admirer of David Thomson’s writing. Did you read his biography of Nicole Kidman?

BEE: Yes, I did.

RS: I was riveted by that book. I’d never before read a book by a film critic where the critic admitted to having emotional feelings for the actress he’s writing about. He more or less cops to being in love with her.

BEE: I think what he captured is what we all feel. That’s what movies engender, and that’s a movie star engenders in us. They do make us fall in love with them, by the very nature of the medium. It’s us gazing at them alone in a dark room. There’s a very intense, sexual, voyeuristic thing about the way we look at actors and actresses. So, to me that was not such a huge surprise. What was a surprise was how naked he was in admitting it. But all of his writing is like that, really. I had read everything up to the Nicole Kidman book, and when I read that book it wasn’t really a surprise, it was more like ‘Oh, finally someone has placed this emotion within a context, within a critical essay.’ And that was exciting. Anyone who reads David Thomson knows that he’s had a hard-on for Nicole Kidman for a long time.

RS: Have you ever been so taken with an actor or actress?

BEE: Not to the point that I’d devote a book to it! Off the top of my head I can’t think of anyone. There are certainly a lot of filmmakers that I have been, but we’re talking about a sexual and a visual response to an object, in a way. When you’re younger, that happens. As someone who is older now, it doesn’t happen with the frequency that it happened when I was younger, but I’m sure I have. And if it comes to me over the course of this interview I will tell you! [laughs]

RS: The struggling actress/femme fatale in Imperial Bedrooms, Rain Turner – is she a composite of real actresses you met or is she just something you thought up?

BEE: I would say she’s a combination of both. She was a composite of what I sensed – and to a degree, experienced – in terms of the desperation factor among actors in L.A. It was something I had never really had to deal with before. I’d had friends who were actors, but they were successful. I had never before been involved in the casting process of a movie like I was with The Informers. And I was very surprised by what became available to me during those months, as someone who had written the script, written the book it was based on, and was a producer on the movie. I was surprised. I didn’t know that that was really something that happened. And in the book it’s dark, but I think of it as a kind of comedy, in a way. It’s not that bad. I mean, what? Trading favors with studios is worse. “If I write this movie, will you do my passion project? Will you guys fund the development for The Golden Suicides, the movie I want to make with Gus Van Sant, if I write your shark movie?” That’s how it is. It’s mutual exploitation and people just doing favors for each other. But the disappointment and the sordidness of managers lying to you or lawyers or agents fucking up something – that’s much more stressful than the casting couch. Which is a joke, and pretty harmless. In the book, because of Clay’s pathology and his masochistic-romantic tendencies, it becomes something much bigger for him. But yeah, it was based on things that I witnessed. I’m not going to say that there were things I partook of, but there were things I was noticing while I was putting together Imperial Bedrooms.

RS: Did you have a long-standing desire to try your hand at writing a Raymond Chandler vixen -- one of those human onions that you can never get to the bottom of?

BEE: Not particularly, but I was reading a lot of Raymond Chandler. And I did want to imbue Imperial Bedrooms with a noir quality. So, yeah, a femme fatale entered into the picture. Now, because of who Clay is and because of his narcissism, she really doesn’t get the kind of play that maybe another narrator would have given her. Clay is only interested in his own desires and his own needs. He’s really not interested in anyone else’s at all. He doesn’t care about them at all, so he doesn’t really ask the right questions. Nor does he uncover enough about her for her to become a full-blown femme fatale. And therefore, the novel doesn’t really become a full-blown noir. It has noir elements, but not really the resolutions that a lot of noir has, just because of who our narrator is. He’s not a detective, he’s not solving the crime, he’s much more interested in his own needs. That was something that was very interesting to me, as a writer, to explore within a novel. But to get back to your original question, I had not really been feeling that, been thinking about creating a character like Rain Turner, but she needs to be there.

RS: I would think the noir framework gave you some cover to write rotten females without the usual suspects coming down on you again, like they did with your recent comments about women directors.

BEE: Well, but I’m not really thinking about writing rotten female characters. The men in my books are so much more rotten than the females that I really don’t get the misogyny label. I do think I misspoke when I said that thing about female directors. I think I should have couched it by saying ‘Look, the movies that I really respond to were made by men, not by women, but women are fine!’ Or something along those lines. Yet, in the last year or so I find myself confronted by the fact that a lot of the movies I’ve responded to are directed by women. My favorite movie of the year is Fish Tank, by Andrea Arnold, this British filmmaker. I’ve tweeted about how much I love it. But yeah, I made some comments that I’m not taking back at all, but I probably should have prefaced them a little bit more. [laughs] I should have been more aware of what the reaction would be. I did get a lot of women quite angry with me about that comment, and oddly enough, no men. I looked at all the tweets and all the blogs and not a single man came to defense of the female directors, which was telling.

RS: You made it a little weirder by saying later that Kathryn Bigelow is a more exciting female director because she’s good-looking.

BEE: Well, I feel that way! I stand by what I think about The Hurt Locker. I think that if a man or an average-looking woman had made The Hurt Locker it would not have been as interesting a movie as it was by the fact that a beautiful woman made it. That is something that’s just….true! I can’t self-censor myself. That is something that I was thinking about while watching that movie at the ArcLight last summer or whenever it came out. I was thinking ‘God, a lot of this is kind of been-there-done-that, but it’s pretty well-made’…but I could not get it out of my head that this really beautiful woman made that movie.

RS: Full stop?

BEE:Yep. There you go.

RS: You’ve said elsewhere that you refuse to believe that Imperial Bedrooms could affect Less Than Zero’s reputation in any way. Did that mindset give you the freedom to migrate these beloved characters into what’s essentially a different genre?

BEE: Completely. As a writer you have to write what you want to write and your need to write a novel can’t be predicated on what the audience wants or what the readership demands from you. If that happens, you’re screwed. You can never write a novel based on people’s feelings about your other books. If that was the case, I’d be trying to write American Psycho every other year. I’d be trying to appease the fanbase. So, I never feel pressure. I never feel any kind of weirdness. It’s never a struggle to write a book. It’s an emotional thing, and it’s not pragmatic or logical. And because it is an emotional thing, there really isn’t any stress. These feelings keep pouring forward and that creates a novel and sort of makes the book appear. None of it’s hard or difficult, though it might have been at a difficult point in my life. The creation of a novel, or a lot of novels, stems from pain and stress and drama. But working on the novel and figuring the novel out? That’s what releases you from the pain and stress. It’s a transporting experience to lose yourself in the writing of a novel, no matter how painful the basis for it might have been.

RS: I couldn’t help but notice that this novel and Less Than Zero both have these terribly sad Black Dahlias that wander into each book’s final passages and get eaten alive by the city. Are you haunted by the idea of a hayseed stepping off the bus in downtown L.A.?

BEE: Of course. If you’re working in L.A. that is something you’ll be confronted with on a daily basis. That’s how the town works. I imagine it would be the same in another context in Las Vegas, which is another gambler’s town. Actually, there’s probably more logic to gambling than to how this business runs. If you learn to gamble you can probably make a lot more money than you’ll probably make in Hollywood. Am I haunted by it? Yeah, I was haunted by it. I’m not haunted by it now, but when I was first confronted with it, it was haunting. But at the same time not everything ends up being tragic. A lot of people come out to that town at a very young age to become an actress or an actor, and they do work it, but there’s an expiration date, you know? There’s a timeframe in which they can make it. And when that timeframe begins to reach its close, it can be upsetting. It can be upsetting for you, and for the person who is trying to make it and it just isn’t happening, and they know that in a year or so they’ll be selling real estate. That is the reality of the situation. And you know what? A lot of people make the move, and then it’s okay. They gave it a shot, it didn’t happen, it hurts, but you move on with your life. You can’t let it haunt you forever. A lot of the people who I know that didn’t make it are probably – if you want to know the truth – more content than when they were hustling for auditions and being rejected twelve times a week.

RS: You’re still in contact with those people?

BEE: Oh, yeah. I know a lot of people who’ve moved on to other professions, people who before I even knew them were actors or actresses. When we talk about the business and the system, they’ll be like ‘Oh, God, when I first got here at age twenty I did that and my self-esteem was shredded.’ A lot of the people I know who came out here to make it in the business have the same war stories, and they’ll start telling them as the night nears its end.

RS: Did you make a conscious choice in the book not to linger on how L.A. has changed over 25 years? The city doesn’t intrude on Clay nearly as much this time.

BEE: He doesn’t care anymore. He’s now the fully-formed person. He’s no longer a vacant party boy, drifting around and noticing stuff and being bored, and not a lot is going on and he doesn’t have a lot to do. Clay has appetites, and he’s hungry and focused and successful. He wants what he wants, and I think that’s why this novel is so much more focused, simply because of who Clay is at this age and what his personality is like. When I was working on the book, I did what I do with every book: I did a very long outline that’s just about how this narrator is going to narrate this book. I’ve done that with every narrator, whether it was Patrick Bateman or Victor Ward or even the first Clay in Less Than Zero. And this time it was ‘Okay, Clay is not going to notice this, this, or this.’ I would write a scene for the Clay of Imperial Bedrooms and then I would realize ‘Oh, I have to cut those two lines out because Clay would never notice that.’ Or ‘He would never pay attention to that particular line of dialogue.’ Everything really had to be about whatever situation he was in. It had to be much more focused than, you know, rambling dialogue that the first Clay in Less Than Zero would have overheard someplace. So much depends on where the narrator is now in his life, in terms of what is noticed and what is not noticed. I think what you’re talking about, in terms of how each Clay perceives Los Angeles, just has to do with age and time. Maybe if Imperial Bedrooms was narrated in the third person it would have much more of a feel for how L.A. has changed. Though I don’t really know if L.A. has changed that much. I don’t think it really has. I mean, it’s pretty much the same city it was when I left at 18 or 19. I’ve changed since then, I think, but I don’t think the city has. Not that much.

RS: I think you mentioned somewhere that you’d prefer directors to adapt your work who had your same upscale L.A. background. That might have been in reference to The Informers, maybe?

BEE: I was talking about The Informers, where I realized almost near completion that a fatal mistake had been made that none of us realized. And the mistake was that it really did need someone who had grown up out here and got these characters, lived with them, grew up with them, to make a movie about them. Regardless of how much the producer, the director and I all seemed to be on the same page with the script, once the movie started to be shot and cut together, it became apparent that – no – this has been misread. It happens in slow-motion, at first. And you think ‘Huh. That’s a little off. That’s not really how it was in the script. Let’s see what happens.’ Then, suddenly it becomes like an avalanche. You’re like ‘Oh God, the tone of this is all off.’ And yes, I really do think that a lot of it had to do with Gregor being Australian and Marco Weber, who was the main producer on it, living and working in Germany for so long. That was his first American production and it has this strange, disconnected feel to it. With someone who lived out here, understood those people, knew them well, I think the movie would have been a lot funnier. It was written with a lot of humor in it, and none of it is apparent in the film. There are a couple of obvious laughs here and there, but overall there should have been a looser, more comedic tension to the movie that it didn’t have.

RS: A making-of documentary about The Informers would probably be more interesting than the movie turned out to be.

BEE: Well, there wasn’t one made, I can tell you that! I was there for some of it. But I was not there once the production moved to Europe. They did shoot a lot of it in Uruguay and Argentina. And the writer’s strike hit, and that prohibited any writers from visiting the set of any film. I had been on set while they were shooting a lot of the stuff in L.A., and I was able to work with the actors on any problems they had with their lines and I was even there on the set re-writing stuff, but once it moved to Europe I wasn’t allowed on the set. And I heard some things. I heard that it was a fairly wild set once it moved out of L.A. So, maybe you’re right, maybe a making-of documentary of The Listeners – Ha, I’m already moving back to Imperial Bedrooms! – maybe a making-of documentary of The Informers would, in fact, be more interesting. And that is sad to me, because there was so much work done on that movie. And there was so much hope for it to be really good. But by now I’ve learned that that’s true of every movie, it’s always a miracle when a movie works out or even becomes halfway-coherent. So many things can happen out of the blue that will just derail a film.

RS: Do you regret signing away the perpetual rights for Glamorama to Roger Avary? You couldn’t have predicted his misfortunes, but still.

BEE: Yes and no. I do regret doing it, but at the time it seemed like a really good idea. In retrospect, I guess I do wish that I’d kept the rights. But only because it’s such a different movie culture now. Back when Roger bought the rights it was still possible to conceive of a movie like Glamorama and to do it within the studio system. Now that’s no longer true. The studios won’t allow a movie like that to be made. It could be made as an expensive independent film, but that would be incredibly risky. It’s also a very long book, so how do you prune it down? I had dinner with a pretty successful British TV director who has also done features – an action director – who has been following Glamorama since its publication, and we mused about the idea of doing it as a series for HBO. We’d do it as a one-season series, a ten-part or twelve-part miniseries. But then you realize that HBO doesn’t do miniseries’ like Glamorama, they do miniseries’ that win Emmys. They do John Adams and The Pacific and Band of Brothers, movies about big, important historical subjects. Glamorama doesn’t really fall into that category.

RS: Speaking of Roger, the legend of Glitterati is sort of growing by the day. It’s like that Jerry Lewis clown movie. I can’t pass up the opportunity to ask something about.

BEE: Ask me specific questions, and I’ll give you yes or no answers.

RS: I’ve heard that certain famous people pop up during the film, and maybe they’re acting, but maybe they’re not acting? Is that true?

BEE: To a degree. [laughs]

RS: Who pops up? Come on, tell me.

BEE: I really can’t say. Until Roger feels comfortable enough to show the movie, I personally don’t feel comfortable talking about it. I kind of wish that I never had talked about it. I talked about it once because I had just seen it and I was kind of shocked. I just thought ‘Whoa.’ Roger came over to my place and showed it to me on his computer. We watched the entire movie on his computer.

RS: How long is it?

BEE: Oh, maybe 90 minutes. And I just felt like there was nothing you could do with it. I really don’t know what you can do with it! Roger’s got to figure that out.

RS: If you were looking at it as a film critic, would you say that it’s a valuable piece of art?

BEE: Yes, I would. It’s good. I like it.

RS: Are you in correspondence with Roger?

BEE: I was in correspondence with him, but I haven’t talked to him in a couple of months. I was actually in the middle of doing a project with Roger and James Van Der Beek, we were all working together on this project, and Roger was…he was not in jail, what was that?

RS: He was out on work furlough during the day, I think?

BEE: Right, exactly. He was in the work furlough program, and we were working on our project, and then I guess that’s when the twittering started.

RS: Sarcastic twittering about “life in jail.”

BEE: Which they did not find jokey. And then he got into a lot of trouble. So, no, I haven’t [corresponded recently], but I think he’s getting out shortly. I was just talking to James -- James is in touch with Roger a lot -- and I think Roger is supposed to be out very shortly.

RS: If they do end up making a movie of Imperial Bedrooms, it will need to be heavily sentimentalized in order to tonally match with Less Than Zero, right?

BEE: [laughs] Right! My first response to that would be that there’s no way they can sentimentalize Imperial Bedrooms because of the nature of the book, but they did it with Less Than Zero! If they did it with that, they can probably do it with Imperial Bedrooms. But I really don’t know if Imperial Bedrooms will be turned into a movie. It would depend on a lot of factors, and I just don’t know if in today’s movie culture it’s viable. Unless Robert Downey Jr. says “Yes, I want to do it” in which case it will be made next week.

RS: I think Jami Gertz is retired, right?

BEE: Doesn’t she do television?

RS: Maybe, I don’t know. Unless I’m mistaken, though, her last screen appearance was in Twister.

BEE: Well, she’s got a big family. I think she would do this, though. And I’ve talked to Andrew McCarthy many times and he would totally do it. And there’s some talk that James Spader would totally do it, so it really just depends upon Downey, and also how you figure out how to make the movie. The movie would be “These are the real people, and Less Than Zero the film was just a movie.” You’d have to show them watching the movie Less Than Zero, and then commenting on it as they’re leaving the screening room – then we cut to their real lives. So, I think it might be overly meta for an audience, but maybe not.

RS: If they have to watch Less Than Zero, you’ll have to recreate scenes from Less Than Zero with new actors so that they’re not watching themselves on screen.

BEE: Right, yes. And then they leave. The idea of doing that is very intriguing, but I don’t know how realistic it is.

RS: When I was reading the book I kept having this vision of James Spader with excessive plastic surgery. Very upsetting.

BEE: I know, I know. I gotta tell you the truth, though, when I’m working on a book I’m not thinking of any actors, so I never had those images in my head. I wasn’t picturing Jami Gertz as Blair, I wasn’t thinking of Andrew McCarthy as Clay, I just had these vague, vague, anonymous people in my head while I was working on it. I was not thinking about what James Spader looks like now in terms of how Rip would look now.

RS: I noticed that on your twitter page you recently made lists of American things and people that are delineated as “empire” and “post-empire.” For example, porn star Ginger Lynn is “empire” and Sasha Grey is “post-empire.” Why is Shia LaBeouf post-empire?

BEE: Hmmm….why did I write that? When I think about who the big action stars were during the empire, they seemed to be much less boyish. Now, everyone seems to be kind of a boy. So, Shia seems to me to be emblematic of a post-empire sensibility in terms of an action guy. And Shia is post-empire. Post-empire is really post 9/11. That’s the spike, and then let’s say it really starts in ’04 or ’05. Wouldn’t you say his career really started in the last six years?

RS: Oh, sure. His career pretty much started with Disturbia, and that was in early ’07.

BEE: Yeah, so he’s post-empire.

RS: So, it’s basically just a time delineation.

BEE: Yes, I should have prefaced with the fact that it’s a time delineation. Empire is 1945 to September 11, 2001, with a spike in the early Aughties and then once you get to ’05 or ’06, we’re really in a post-empire world. But it’s interesting, because when I play this game with some people they throw out some weird ones and there are arguments about it. Sarah Silverman?

RS: She was a name stand-up in the mid 90s. She was on HBO shows during that period as well, like Mr. Show.

BEE: Right! But half the group said “Oh, empire!” and some people said “Post-empire!” and there was this weird discussion about how you can be empire and still somehow be relevant in the post-empire age. Or something can be a post-empire thing and still have its roots in the empire. [laughs] This could go on and on and on! It really just depends on your sensibility and what you think is empire. But basically, if you do really just follow the time constraints, there’s a clear delineation between empire and post-empire.

RS: Someone else gave me a good question to end on, they wanted me to just ask what your favorite book is and what you’re currently reading.

BEE: Well, what I’m reading right now on tour is not really representative of anything, but I’ll tell you what I’m reading on tour. I am reading a collection of short stories called Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It, by Maile Maloy. I have also started a novel that I picked up at Jay McInerney’s house, because I was staying there in the Hamptons over the weekend. I picked up this book called Mergers and Acquisitions by Dana Vachon, and for some reason I’m carrying that around and I’ve read the first chapter. I am also reading a book about the making of the movie Nashville, and it’s called The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman’s Masterpiece. So, those are the three books that I have with me at the moment. My favorite book of all time – and I’ve said this many times – is L’Education sentimentale by Flaubert. But again, I’m just telling you what I’m reading. I’m not saying these are fantastic books and I’m loving them, I’m only telling you what I have on the road with me. And of course I’m always looking for new things in Imperial Bedrooms to read at each reading to mix it up a little bit. I found myself getting a little bored with the section I was reading, and I’ve been trying to find something else, but it’s hard to find stuff in the middle and later sections that will make any sense to an audience that hasn’t read the book.

RS: The opening must be the crowd-pleaser.

BEE: Oh, yeah. That’s basically what I stick with. And you know what? I only read for like five minutes anyway, I don’t read for a long time at all. I’ll leaf through it today if I have time, to try to find three or four pages, but I have a feeling I’m just gonna go back to the very beginning.

RS: Sounds like a plan. Thanks for taking the time, Bret.

BEE: No problem. I like SuicideGirls and I was happy to do it.





Imperial Bedrooms is available in bookstores everywhere.

"I'm going to write songs about fucking blowing my head off and giving in to apathy," says Filter founder and frontman Richard Patrick during our interview. It's not that he's going to do either, it's just that he understands what anger combined with a sense of hopeless can... more

"I'm going to write songs about fucking blowing my head off and giving in to apathy," says Filter founder and frontman Richard Patrick during our interview. It's not that he's going to do either, it's just that he understands what anger combined with a sense of hopeless can do to a person's psyche.

In 2008 he released Anthems For The Damned, which served both as a protest against the Iraq war and a tribute to a friend it had claimed. (Anti-war, but very much pro-troops, Patrick has traveled to the Middle East twice to play concerts for those who risk their lives to serve our country.) Two years on, though our president may have changed, the status quo (or lack thereof) remains the same in the Middle East. After too many years listening to grim reports from the frontlines of a war that was misguided from the start, both the troops on the ground and the masses here at home are suffering from a severe case of fuck up fatigue. With dissent now largely falling on deaf ears, and, even worse, serving to remind the proletariat of their powerlessness, Patrick gets why it's therapeutic to embrace indifference, shrug your shoulders and say "fuck it" to the world.

Thus, at least on the surface, the latest Filter release, The Trouble With Angels, channels the middle finger up attitude of Patrick's drug and alcohol dependant youth - and of his band's 1995 breakthrough debut, Short Bus. Featuring songs with titles such as "Down With Me," "Drug Boy" and "The Inevitable Relapse," the new Filter full-length – which is undoubtedly one of the band’s best – explores topics such as addiction, murder and suicide. Inspired by the music, but puzzled by the message, SG checked in with Patrick to find out where his head was at.

NP: I have to say I fucking love this album. I really, honesty do. I was blown away by it.

RP: That's awesome. I'm really happy about that. Thank you.

NP: Last time we spoke was a few months after the release of Anthems for the Damned. Even back then, you spoke about how this album was going to go in a very different direction. What was the overall inspiration for this album?

RP: The overall inspiration for this album was the meaning behind the title, The Trouble With Angels. It just seems that religion has kind of left its mark on the land. [For example], a guy like Galileo - you know the guy who invented the telescope and discovered [the four largest satellites of] Jupiter and Saturn - 400 years ago they imprisoned him because he was going against the teachings of the church...Superstition imprisoned a man because he made an incredible scientific discovery. [Galileo challenged the belief rigidly held by the church that all heavenly bodies circled the earth.] He was answering questions about the universe, and doing us a favor, and he was imprisoned for it.

I don't think it's as overt as "end the Iraq war, my friend's dead." It's not as on-the-nose, but yet, if I'm going to put out music, I'm going to always try to have a statement. That's my one little scream in the night that I'm allowed to do. I just kind of drew attention to the imprisonment of Galileo, and I pay tribute to him a little bit.

I'm just leaving hidden messages all over the record - and maybe some not so hidden. I got to say the packaging on our record is absolutely amazing. It's so cool. You open it up and there's this pop up angel that's either swimming or drowning, just kind of symbolically surrounded by science. There's enough [left] to the imagination that most people wouldn't get it, which is cool, because I don't want to smack them in the face, I just want them to be inspired to think about things.

NP: Right. On a surface level the tracks are totally satisfying. They're raging, with monster choruses.

RP: Yeah, I'm kind of famous for my choruses. I really want them soaring.

NP: Which is interesting because there are others in that circle where you came from roots-wise, Nine Inch Nails and that industrial camp, that are almost anti-melody.

RP: I cut my teeth in industrial. I was more inspired by the Ministry end of things, beyond the Skinny Puppy end of things, and that's exactly what Trent did. Trent went for the sound design kind of craziness of Skinny Puppy and I went for the more guitar-driven stuff of Ministry. But after the first record, Short Bus, I was fully, OK, I'm going more rock. That's where this record picks up because it's definitely more of just a rock record. This is actually the record I probably should have made ten years ago, but, you know, it comes out now. It comes out when it comes out.

NP: I understand on "Fades Like A Photograph" you worked with your old Short Bus collaborator Brian Liesegang.

RP: He did a little sound design. He colors things. He puts some textures on things. I kind of [enlisted] some of these guys because I really didn't want it to be the Richard Patrick band, because I felt like I really wanted to distance myself from my former boss. But the reality is, I've been the only main original member the whole time. So as much as I love Brian, he didn't write anything. He never wrote anything. He just added some keyboard type stuff on the top of the songs that I'd written. I don't mean to diminish what he is, because he's really great - he's got a great band called Ashtar Command. Truth be told it was actually [screenwriter and producer] Harald Kloser [and] his friend [film composer] Tom [Wander] who was working on the movie 2012, they called me and wanted to work on this song. I grabbed their music and rearranged it, and then I wrote vocals and put it on top. I pretty much did the melody and wrote most of the lyrics with a couple of little changes from Harold. This is the song I wrote for 2012 and I just reworked it [for the album].

NP: Another track that really stands out is "No Love." That has some interesting lyrics: "Twenty years ago you tried to take my eyes..."

RP: Yeah, "Twenty years ago you tried to take my eyes. Thought you loved the world, and I believed your lies." Very specific. [laughs]

NP: It's very specific, twenty years...

RP: Twenty years, I wonder what I'm talking about? I mean, I had a lot of amazing things [happen to me back then]. We were so young, and there's so many great things when you're younger. It's tough looking back sometimes because hindsight is obviously 20/20. It's kind of sad, you know, we should have had more fun. As twenty-year olds, we should have had more fun.

NP: I was talking with Steven Adler from Guns N' Roses recently, and he was talking about that same thing. How you don't realize what you have until you don't have it anymore. Especially because when you're that age, and it comes so easily, you don't stop and smell the roses because you don't even realize there's anything special to stop and smell.

RP: Yeah. It's bizarre. Like all my twenties were drenched with alcohol and drugs, and it made things just so hard. You just go through life and you're like, well, I made pretty much every mistake I could make, and you just start writing lyrics: You crossed a million miles, and you lost a million times, and the disrespect you've earned is the disrespect you've learned. I really love that song. Mitch Marlowe really brought his A-game. Mitch is the Asian kid that was in my live band a couple of years ago. He brought such an amazing originality and he just really brought his A-game on that song. It was the first song that [producer] Bob Marlette and I and Mitch really wrote together, and I got to say, if I'm allowed to make another record, I would love to have Mitch come out for a month or two and just write with me and Bob, because I think it would be insane. I think it'd be really great. I hope I get that next chance.

NP: Were there any other tracks on the album that Mitch and you collaborated on?

RP: Yeah, he wrote the music to "Clouds" with Bob.

NP: That's another track I have written down to talk about. I loved that one too.

RP: Thank you. I appreciate that. I'm really diggin' it. This record, to be honest, it wrote itself. Bob Marlette just accentuated everything that was good and just really helped to finish it properly, and re-wrote stuff. I call him "The Finisher." Mitch wrote the chorus to "Drug Boy," Mitch wrote the beginnings of "Down With Me" - I love the lyrics on that. It's like it literally just paints a scene, a crime scene, and you find out it was a murder suicide. The last thing you hear, he goes, I found a note and it said "If I can't have her, then no one will." It just sounds like a short story come to life or something.

NP: And we should talk about the first single, "The Inevitable Relapse."

RP: I really struck a nerve with "Drug Boy," and I've struck a nerve with "The Inevitable Relapse." I think a lot of people are confused. I think they think I'm saying I'm going down, and I'm going down in a ball of flames. People don't understand it's a song. It can be fiction. There's no method behind it other than the phenomenon. It's like, "Hey Man, Nice Shot." A guy held a press conference, blew his head off, I wrote a song, and there's no judgment. It is what it is. It's a song describing a suicide scene.

So "The Inevitable Relapse," before I got sober this last seven years, this last time I got sober, I relapsed every other day. Like I quit drinking, and then a day later I was out getting wasted. When you're in the disease of alcoholism or drug dependency, it's a fight. The song is about losing that battle. And the video, I'm so proud of that video. It summed it up perfectly. Have you seen the video?

NP: Yes.

RP: You see this guy getting his ass kicked by someone beautiful and hot. He escapes and then he comes back for more abuse. That's it. That's drug addiction. In that case it's like a love addiction. Again, I was really not trying to make this huge message. I mean, I used to chant, "Drink it, drink it, snort it, smoke it. Drink it, drink it..." At my studio back in Chicago, I'd call a drug dealer and I'd get in touch with him, and he would be like, "I'm on my way." And I'm like, "Yes!" That was the best I was going to feel all month, knowing that the drug dealer was on his way...I'd binge for an entire three or four days. It was terrible. It was horrible. But in that song, I'm not saying I'm relapsing, come and join me. I'm just talking about the phenomenon of losing - losing the battle, fucking up, that kind of thing.

NP: I know you have "September 28th, 2002" tattooed on your arm, which is the day you finally got sober. What changed for you?

RP: When I went into rehab I knew in my heart and soul that I am just incapable of drinking. I just can't do it. I was so obvious. I cancelled a tour, I lost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars - there was just no getting around it. I couldn't go on stage and sing anymore, it was horrible. So when I walked into rehab, I was done. I was like, take a good look around, because this is the first and last time you're ever going to go to a place like this and check yourself in.

On the confines of my record, in the imaginary world of lyrics on my record, some of the people relapse and some of the people are still on drugs. "Drug Boy," it's all based on the early years of my life. I used to drop acid and run around the streets of Cleveland with this pack, I don't want to say gang, but a pack of twenty-year olds [who were] totally disenfranchised, loser, falling through the cracks [types]. Some of them died, some of them got arrested, but no one ended up doing anything really great except for what happened with my career.

We would break into an abandoned jail, and go into the basement and read the files of criminals that had lived entire criminal lives in the 1920s. And there was this whole thing where we went into a cemetery and inevitably someone would break into a mausoleum and grab a skull and just walk out with it - just bizarre behavior.

Bob Marlette, our producer, was just like, "You really should talk about that stuff." Because you know, on Army of Anyone I talk about growing up, and I became kind of mature. He was like, "You know what dude? That's cool. I'm glad you're growing up and you're maturing, but at the same time, we all miss that knucklehead, that crazy man from your youth - you as a youngster." And he goes, "Remember that, let's talk about that, and then let's put that into these songs, these first couple of songs on the record so that it really embodies our original work, Short Bus." So we did that, and people are freaking out because they're like, "Wow! Is Richard back on drugs?"

I just don't want to be the guy that's mellowing with age. Because I don't feel mellow. I mean Anthems was this big tribute record to a friend of ours that had been killed in the Iraq War Part Deux, and I just was like, I really want to make sure that I tap into my craziness as well because that was a fun thing to listen to...I kind of wanted to sound reckless again. I wanted to not try and do anything with my record. I didn't want my record to have an agenda. I wanted my record to reflect the darkness in life. It sounds cheesy, but at the end day we walk around and it's so confusing. The world is so confusing and it's so insane. It's fucking insane.

Sarah Palin and the conservative right wing is just [Richard puts on his best crazy Palin voice], "This country should be way more Christian. We can't have a mosque two blocks away from Ground Zero. And we got to build a wall up between us and all them Mexicans." It's so far away from what Jesus Christ was teaching, and it's just so astounding that someone would impose their beliefs. And at the same time they're like, "I ain't got no charity for no Mexicans." It's unbelievable.

NP: Right, the level of hate they spew in the name of Jesus is spectacularly inappropriate to what he would have wanted, and they have no concept of the irony.

RP: You just walk around and you're like, am I the only one who gets this? So as opposed to trying to do anything, it's almost like I am recognizing the chaos, and, without any judgment, I'm just going, I understand that chaos. I understand wanting entertainment.

When I went to Iraq I was shocked. The soldiers were like, "Hey, we really appreciate you saying what you want to say about the war. We really appreciate you coming out here and we really appreciate that your friend has been killed out here. Same with us. Let's fucking rock. Let's have a fucking great time and sing that song about that guy fucking killing himself."

And it's kind of like, I guess you're right. 'Cause honestly, if you take a broom and you try and sweep back the ocean, it's impossible. So as well as the confusion and the chaos, there's a certain amount of apathy on this record. At some points in this record I'm literally like, "Oh well, whatever, nevermind" - straight out of Kurt Cobain's mouth. It's literally at that point with me in so many ways, so I am throwing up my hands in the air and going, "You're right! Fuck it! There's nothing that can be done. I'm going to write songs about fucking blowing my head off and giving in to apathy, and who gives a shit. Let's turn up the amps and fucking play loud rock music." There has to be that too.

NP: I completely get that. If I think about things too much I get so angry at the world, and trying to change it is like pissing in the wind, so sometimes you've just got to say "fuck it."

RP: Yeah. I mean, I think what people loved about Filter in the early days, and that's literally what I'm figuring out, is they were like, "Please take yourself seriously but at the same time just try and break it. Just try and destroy it. Have fun destroying it." And I get that. I understand that...Sometimes it's better to just destroy a guitar and fucking trash a stage and fucking break shit and not care so much about something because that's exactly how the audience feels.

When we played in Corpus Christi [see video from Filter's July 25th, 2010 show], we were literally over it and we kind of tore down the stage and threw shit around, and broke cymbals and laughed. It was funny because the audience had never seen anything like that. Nowadays musicians don't have gobs of money. They're like, "That guitar cost five hundred dollars." Most bands, they see it in terms of you have to sell 500 CDs to pay for that guitar - and selling 500 CDs is a fucking hard task these days. Back in the day they'd give us $500,000 checks every couple of months. But we destroyed the stage and we were throwing shit around and the audience was like, I understand that. I'm in my cubicle and in my construction worker job, and we hate the world too.

So I've kind of come full circle. I'm like, "Yeah I've relapsed, and yeah, I fucking don't care, and yeah, I fucking want to blow my head off, and yeah, I fucking hate god. I'm with you. Fuck this world. Fuck this shit." It's come back to that. I'm with you. Fuck reality.

And it's fun to have that again. On "Absentee Father" I play a 32 bar solo and there's not even one approach at trying to play a guitar with any musical rules or whatever. I literally took a screwdriver and fucking started breaking strings. It was the most amazing thing I had done in ten years. It was the most fun I ever had, and it's way up at the beginning of the record. The third song on the record is my avant-garde guitar solo that fucking flips off every guitar hero on the planet because I'm totally just taking a shit on the guitar and handing it to the public like, "What do you think of that?"

I just had so much fun on this record destroying and being crazy and being a nut. And, within the lyrics, relapsing and killing people. That's what rock & roll was all about, and that's what I realized I needed to get back to.

NP: Well that's a basic function of music. It helps people escape from their daily lives.

RP: That's the thing, there's my hidden meaning in the record. If you get it - great. If you don't - I don't care either. Fuck it. Who cares? Let's smash a fucking guitar, and, at the end of the day, let's have that cathartic release that we need.


The Trouble With Angels is available now via Rocket Science Ventures. For more information go to OfficialFilter.com.

April 11, 1983 was the definitive day in Dave Mustaine's professional life. As lead guitarist and contributing songwriter for an up-and-coming thrash metal band called Metallica, he had been living out his dream of making a living at playing metal for over a year and a half. Like many at the time,... more

April 11, 1983 was the definitive day in Dave Mustaine's professional life. As lead guitarist and contributing songwriter for an up-and-coming thrash metal band called Metallica, he had been living out his dream of making a living at playing metal for over a year and a half. Like many at the time, he was also beginning to sense that his band was something truly special, a ferociously talented foursome that had the potential to go where no metal band had gone before. A musical virtuoso with unlimited ambition, Mustaine's eyes were fixed on the future, but he was badly neglecting the present. A problem with drinking and drugs, owed in part to a rootless childhood, had plagued him for years, and as success drew closer his reckless behavior increased and lines were crossed. No one knows what the final straw really was, but on the morning of April 11, while Metallica was in N.Y.C. on business, Mustaine was awoken by singer James Hetfield and unceremoniously handed a Greyhound ticket home to L.A. He was out of Metallica, without so much as a warning.

He spent the next four days in hell, traveling from N.Y.C. to L.A. by bus without a dollar to his name, bumming bags of chips off of seatmates and wondering how his dreams had vanished into smoke. Despair and heartbreak couldn't stifle his talent, though. Reading a handbill about nuclear war he picked up in a Greyhound station, he noticed a catchy phrase: "The arsenal of megadeath…” He began scribbling lyrics on the back of a muffin wrapper, and by the time he was deposited in L.A., he had a new mission: to rise from the ashes and form the fastest, most savage metal band of all time. Twenty-seven years later, Megadeth has earned its reputation as a pioneering metal band, one with landmark platinum records like Rust in Peace, Countdown to Extinction, and Youthanasia and one that can (and frequently has) shared a bill with those other metal godfathers, Metallica. SuicideGirls recently called up Mustaine to discuss his new autobiography Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir, and discovered that age, success, and a newfound devotion to Christianity haven't mellowed him in the slightest.



Ryan Stewart: I like your hotel's answering machine. It told me to have an inspired day.

Dave Mustaine: An inspired day? It should say to have an infused morning!

RS: I thought maybe we could start with something fun, instead of the dark stuff. Can you talk a little about Megadeth groupies, back in the day? What they were like in terms of quality and supply?

DM: Well, I'm not really sure that I want to go too deep into that question. We all had relationships with people when Megadeth started. You can't really speak for what's in the audience, and as far as what was backstage, I didn't really keep track of what was going on with the other guys. I had a girlfriend named Diana for a long time and I've been married to Pam for twenty years. I'm sure that there was a lot to choose from, but my whole thing was really playing music and being loud and obnoxious and I wasn't really the big romantic type.

RS: There's a passage in the book, though, where you talk about how bandmates can sometimes bond through the sharing of groupies.

DM: That was way, way back when Nick (Menza) was in the band. That was back when we were all single. That particular story that you're referring to was at a time period when we were the Rust in Peace lineup and we were all single still.

RS: It's hard for me to even keep track of the lineup, so many changes over the years. Do you feel like you've missed out on anything by not keeping a consistent lineup, even if it's just the camaraderie of long-time collaborators?

DM: Nope. Go ask any athlete if they liked having somebody who didn't give 100 percent to the game on their team. If they have a different vision than you, then they obviously can't give 100 percent because their vision is going to be looking elsewhere. And I'm not saying anything about the band members that have been with us in the past; if they've had a change in their vision where they don't want to go where we want to go, then obviously we're going in two different directions and it's not going to work. It's my band, I'm the leader, and that's what this whole thing is based off of. It wasn't based on "Let's all get together and see what the common thread is that we all have.” It was something I wanted to do and these guys joined me. And I've been really fortunate to have some really talented people playing with us. And when Marty [Friedman] got in the band he wanted us to become a pop band and we turned ourselves inside out to make that little dude happy, but in the long run, even after Cryptic Writings, even after Risk, as melodic as Risk was, he wanted it to still be more alternative. And I said "I can't do this.” It's not inside of me, Ryan, to write a record that's more melodic than Risk. That one was as deep-reaching as I could go. Believe it or not, it's easier to write songs that are less melodic than songs that are more melodic. When you're writing something that's melodic, you've got to have something that resonates with a lot of people and it's a lot harder to find that simpler melody that's gonna make people say "Oh yeah, I like that melody.” So, there were people in the past that would have different visions, and we just went different ways. It doesn't mean we don't care about each other. Some of us are still friends, some of us ain't. That's the way the cookie crumbles.

RS: Do you feel like, particularly in recent years, you've sort of let new bandmates know up front that it's your thing and they need to be on board with that?

DM: (long pause) Hmmm…I hope I can get you to recalibrate, because it's really not about me pushing people around. I want to help you have a good interview, and the thing with me telling people whose band it is and stuff like that…that's all unnecessary when you have people who you treat with dignity and respect. Everybody knows who the quarterback is, and I'm not like that. Unfortunately, a lot of people have this perception of who I am that's the same as who I think you think you're talking to. But that's not how I do business. The point about the musical direction is that if you're going in two different directions, you're gonna rip in the middle. We've tried to the best of our ability to accommodate everybody. The biggest culprit out of everything has been me needing to say no when I should've, and I didn't. We even had the record company telling us "Change your logo, cut your hair, wear flannel, and grow facial hair.” And we're like "Whaaaat?” You wouldn't really know all those things unless you were there, and if I say, "Hey, Ryan, this is what was going on” you might say "Well, you were Megadeth, so why couldn't you say anything?” and it's because we couldn't. It doesn't matter. Even if you are Megadeth, they don't give a shit. You'd have to be Guns n' Roses! (laughs)

RS: Has it ever threatened to become more business than pleasure?

DM: Yeah, that's why I did the MD.45 project, because it was becoming all about songwriting and percentages and publishing. If you saw in the beginning how we did songwriting splits, you wrote the music or you wrote the lyrics. If you co-wrote the music you would get 25 percent and the other guy would get 25 percent and then whoever wrote the lyrics would get the other 50 percent. And then melody came into play, and it started getting divided from quarters into eights and sixteenths, and it was like, ugh, God. Yeah, it lost its fun. And that's when we parted ways with everybody and I just figured that I would go solo, but then EMI told me "We love the fact that you're going to go solo, but until you give us this last Megadeth record we own you.” So, the record that was called The System Has Failed was actually supposed to have been my first solo record, and during the middle of the record I found out I couldn't release it as a solo record, so I went "Okay, it's a Megadeth record.” And I called up the guys and asked if they wanted to get back together and play and it didn't work out. Of course, Nick (Menza) came and tried out with us, but he made a pretty bad mistake. We had Shawn Drover on the phone because we had called him up as a drum tech for Nick – this is a funny story – and Glen, Shawn's little brother was playing guitar for us, and Nick doesn't think about what he's saying. So, Shawn's on the phone and we say "Hey, Shawn, we want to talk to you about being a drum tech” and remember that Nick got Chuck Behler's position by being the drum tech and Chuck got Gar Samuelson's position by being a drum tech, and Shawn was gonna be Nick's drum tech! And he ended up getting Nick's gig, and here's how: He goes "I want to fucking know your name!” I'm sorry for swearing. But anyway, I was like "Oh my God, are you kidding me?" And I looked at Glen and Glen took me outside and he goes "I can't play with this guy” and I said "I know, I've already fired him once before myself.”

RS: It seems like you run a tight, no-nonsense ship all around, business-wise. The band's official website is very sophisticated. In the book you talk about understanding the power of the Internet early on, and getting a presence on there.

DM: We tried to, we wanted to make sure the fans had a fun place to come to. A lot of our fans were younger and we wanted them to go to a place where they would have a sense of community. That's one of the things that was really great about the heavy metal business in the beginning: you would go somewhere and meet up and everybody would hang out together and there was a sense of community. And I really like the way the Internet has been able to transcend the state lines, you know? You can hang with people from different cities. I don't know how old you are, but when I started we were still using cassettes and shit like that, and when you wanted to talk to people it was by mail or telephone, certainly not by email.

RS: I'm 32, and my few-years-older brother and uncle were big Megadeth fans back in the day, as well as just angry young kids. Do you still connect to kids like that, who are in trouble, or just angry at their parents and/or the world?

DM: Yeah, I can say that I totally identify with them. It's like that Steve Martin movie from a long time ago where he was a pastor and he says: "Who better to talk to someone struggling with pornography, addiction, prostitutes,”…whatever it was that he was naming off. The point is I've been down all of those roads and I know the ups and downs of every one of those things. It's easier for me to go up to someone who is struggling and say "Dude, look, I know” as opposed to saying "Well, I've never done that myself, but…” It's like explaining an orgasm to a virgin. You can't tell someone who has never gotten loaded what it's like to stay sober. Unless you've been strung out and you've experienced how hard it is to stay sober, you won't know. It's the same thing with any kind of disease or any kind of addiction problems.

RS: Did your drug use develop out of a genuine need to self-medicate, or was it partially borne out of a desire to live up to a metal image?

DM: Well, I didn't have a lot of emotional pain in the beginning – what I felt was a lot of emotional relief. There was a lot of feeling like an outsider and just feeling like you didn't quite fit in. I went to a school in Huntington Beach called Green High School and there were two ways in and out of the high school – there were two bridges that went around this water aqueduct around the school, which we called the moat – and there was a third way to get into the school, but you couldn't take a car across, it was just a walkway that we called the bridge, and that was where all the stoners went. And I could go up to that bridge and fit in, no matter what I was wearing or what I looked like. It was just the way of life there, and I remember thinking: ‘Wow, this is so pressure-free.' With my mom and dad's divorce struggles and us moving so much, it was always another school, another school, another school, you know? I had to figure out a quick way to meet people and get past that initial barrier, or else I was going to spend the rest of my life being a loner and I didn't want to do that. So, I learned some fast and hard rules of how to meet people.

RS: Michael Jackson's parents were also Jehovah's Witnesses, like yours, and he sort of escaped into music. Did you ever feel a kinship with him because of that?

DM: [laughs] You fucker. Oh my God. No! I guess I can tell you this much: when I found out that they were practicing Jehovah's Witnesses I felt the same thing that I felt when I heard that Prince was, which was just sadness, kind of, knowing what I went through. But to each his own, you know? If you're cool having a little kid who goes out and knocks on doors and taking them away from sleeping in and watching cartoons to try to push magazines, then more power to you. I hated it. Unless your kid really has, like, a calling to do that…I mean, I know that we're supposed to bring up our own children and stuff like that, but you have to think about the serial killer in all of us, you know what I mean? [laughs] And going back to what you said earlier about being able to identify with angry people, if you go up to anybody and piss them off enough, they are going to retaliate. That's just human nature: it's all about ‘What is your breaking point?' And I've been able to galvanize myself to a degree, from what I was before. A lot of people got off on me going crazy on people. It's like that poor bastard Riki Rachtman -- in a weird way I think even he liked it when I used to make fun of him. And it wasn't that I liked making fun of people, it was just kind of a shtick, you know? But the problem is that I wasn't a comedian, I was a musician, and it came off as very believable. I didn't have any ill will towards that guy, I barely even know him.

RS: Did you ever lose anything important that you attribute to drugs?

DM: Yes, a lot of things. My job in Metallica. I also died once. I've had a lot of friends that I've lost. And there's a lot of credibility that you lose in the face of doing that. I also lost a lot of respect with my son. I remember one day when that Behind the Music thing came out – you don't really think about this when you're doing it, but when that Behind the Music came out some kids cornered my son on the bus and started saying "Your dad's a crackhead, your dad's a crackhead!” And I was like "Yeah, and I'm gonna crack your dad's head!” You know? [laughs] And I hadn't thought about that, but it made me start to really reflect on my behavior and how it was affecting my son. I don't think that a lot of parents' behavior really out-and-out affects their kids, unless they're celebrities. My son said something to me one time, Ryan, about having to live up to me, and I was like ‘Oh, Justis, son, you don't ever have to live up to me, please don't think that.'

RS: Do you feel like Megadeth fans have been generally supportive of not only your sobriety, but also your newfound faith?

DM: Yeah. There are some people that don't like it, but they are the ones who haven't kept an open mind to things. I play better than I did before I became a Christian. I think our music is just as pertinent and relevant, and we just got done recording Rust in Peace live. I mean, hello? For anybody who thought we couldn't do it, we just did it. And I did like being unpredictable and all of that, but I think that if anybody needed to have a life-changing experience like that, it was me. I mean, do you know what you get when you sober up a drunk fucking horse thief?

RS: A horse thief?

DM: You've got a horse thief. And I was just sitting there thinking ‘Now what?' And fortunately for me I still had my guitar, I still had my sense of humor, and I still had a pretty incredible work ethic that I wasn't going to give up, and I think that's probably what's kept us successful to the degree that we've been successful. I want the absolute best for myself, for my family, and for our fans.

RS: Has your faith realigned any of the political views you used to espouse? Do you still rock the vote? Do you still worry about war and peace?

DM: Yeah, to a degree. There has been some moving of the goalposts and stuff that you change your opinion on as you grow a little bit older. As far as me being a Democrat or a Republican, I've never been either. I've always been somebody who is in the middle. I vote for the lesser of two evils, basically. And when I did the Rock the Vote thing for MTV, I went there to represent the youth of America. I didn't go there representing Democrats, I went there to ask questions. We unfortunately don't have a lot of people who can be spokespeople for us and go and ask those hard questions and talk with these people. I mean, you'd go up and talk with some of these people and their skill is in speaking -- you'd ask them a question and they'd answer you and you wouldn't have the faintest idea what they just said.

RS: When you go out on the road these days, do you try to surround yourself with like-minded people?

DM: Well, I don't care what people do on their own. One of the work policies we have with our staff is that you can do what you want after the show, that's your business, though of course we don't tolerate any hard drug use. We have our band meetings and our band dinners and stuff like that and there is no chocolate milk being served, you know? If someone wants to drink, that's fine. We're not the sobriety police, and looking at our fan base, you know, young people like to throw back a cold one in the summertime. I used to be an alcoholic, and when I got saved I was totally set free from that whole thing. I can have a couple of glasses of wine now, but I can't handle hard liquor. I just stopped. It was a thing for me where every single day I drank Vodka or Cognac like it was going out of style. Now, the only time I drink is before I perform; I'll have a glass of wine before I go on stage, and maybe one while I'm on stage, and that's it. It's really weird to think ‘Oh my God, I've been completely set free from this incredible bondage of drinking like this.' You know, when all you can think about is drinking, that just sucks.

RS: Is there still temptation?

DM: There's still temptation, but I know what it looks like now. It's sort of like, whose fault is it if you walk between a dog and a fire hydrant?

RS: You recently did those "Big Four” shows with Metallica. Did that meet your expectations, sharing a stage and jamming with them?

DM: Well, we only did it that one day, where we jammed with them. But to be on the same venue and the same lineup and to play like that, I thought it was really rewarding on a lot of different fronts. For once, so many people there were really cognizant of the whole scene and how it started and who the players were and what their roles were. And that was great, to be able to go back in time and tell the whole story of how the West was won, basically. And it was a great feeling. I'd love to do it again. I don't know that it's in the cards, but I'm certainly open to it.

RS: What was the extent of your interaction with Lars and James? Did you share a meal?

DM: We did. That was the first night of the tour. All the bands got together and had dinner, and it was fine. And just about every night that we played, Lars would come over and visit or James would come visit, or the guys in my band would go over and visit those guys. So, yeah, we did a lot of hanging out and it was really cool.

RS: Don't take this as a combative question, like before, but in the book you sort of end on a very detailed explanation for why you declined to attend Metallica's Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Basically, you feel that your contribution was enough to be inducted with them. Did that event sort of reopen the wound?

DM: [long pause] That pregnant pause probably worried you, didn't it?

RS: Yes.

DM: I was just kidding. I think that if you really look at things for what they are, and what my role was in that band….I know what it was. And I think that the way it went down was exactly how it was supposed to take place, in order for me to go through this…season…and just handle myself in as respectful a way as possible. It didn't feel great. I wanted to be there. I couldn't, under those circumstances. And also we were really busy at the time. And I told those guys how I felt – I was proud of them. And I think that's all that really needs to be said about that.

RS: Do you think Megadeth's time will come?

DM: I would expect that it's probably going to happen, I hope so, but then again there have been things that I expected in this business that I haven't gotten. And there's been a lot of stuff that I never expected, that I have.

RS: Would you be cool with having everyone who's played with Megadeth up there?

DM: Well, unfortunately one of them is deceased so that couldn't happen. And that's a question left up to the other guys. I have nothing against them. There's been a lot of stuff that's been resolved over the years and there's been a lot of growth on a lot of people's parts, but I can't be responsible for the resentment that other people still have. I've obviously been a part of it, but if you clean up your side of the street and someone else is still sitting in their debris, you can't really do anything about that. But yeah, I think it would be fun and fine, but I don't know that there would be a lovey-dovey feeling for everybody. I certainly know that other guys in the band, Chris [Broderick] and Junior [David Ellefson] and Shawn, would love to see a lot of those guys. And I get the feeling there would be a couple of people there who would be rotten apples, but that would be okay by me because I'm willing to forgive and forget. God knows I'm not without fault for some of the stuff that happened.

RS: The Hall of Fame is pretty lenient about letting in blues artists and other distant branches of rock; do you think they'll be equally lenient in recognizing metal in years to come?

DM: I don't really know enough about the organization. I know that when it comes to metal none of the organizations in our fine country could be quite as inept as the Grammys, which gave Jethro Tull a metal award. As long as that is in the annals of history, I think the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is pretty safe to do whatever they want.

RS: The book doesn't really dwell on the competing strands of rock that were sprouting up in the early 90s. Grunge is barely touched on, for example, even though it ultimately eclipsed metal in the popular culture.

DM: It certainly did, that's an accurate statement, but there were a lot of things that eclipsed metal! One of the cyclical things about the music business is that it's all about what it is now. There are people who want the flavor of the month and will go whichever way the wind blows, and then there's the loyal fanbase, which is usually about one tenth of whatever someone's biggest record sales are ever going to be. Unfortunately for us, with the advent of P2P file transferring and stuff like that and our fanbase being so computer savvy, we – myself included – do a lot of interacting on the net and trading stuff back and forth, and in some circumstances when left in the wrong hands it's been used against us, which has been unfortunate. We've figured out how to survive and continue playing music and travel and do our live performances, but sadly that's the last bastion of hope for bands, because once a fan gets their music and puts it online, the only other chance they have to survive is off of live performances and t-shirts.

RS: Your life story would be good grist for a movie, don't you think?

DM: I don't really think like that, because I know where all the bodies are buried, Ryan. [laughs] You know, I look in the mirror and I still think ‘God, Dave, you're not living up to your potential. You could do so much better, you could help people out so much more and you're just…not living up to your potential!' I guess that's just the perfectionist in me. And there are times when I'm standing out on stage and I'll think for one split second that I'm okay and I'll crack a smile. The little boy in me will surface and he'll say that this is pretty damn cool. And I know this isn't possible, but if there was a chance that you could stand right next to me during one of those moments it would pretty damn cool for you too, because there's nothing quite the same as the feeling of having people losing their minds and screaming bloody murder for you. And there are a lot of opportunities to be able to do good things for people now, and that's what I want to do with all of this new interest and popularity. I want to take the opportunity, right now, to do something for the younger bands that didn't have a Dave type of guy who was hanging around and wanting to help people. I don't know what that's going to be, but I have a studio out in San Diego, where I live, and we're talking about putting a school in there for helping underprivileged kids, and so on and so forth. The sky is still the limit for me.





Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir is available in bookstores everywhere.