Courtney Taylor-Taylor: One Model Nation

Well Donovan started geeking out on the internet and he was like, you’re not going to believe this. I had never heard of the Baader-Meinhof gang. That was at the same time that some anarchy people were going to blow up the space needle and apparently had a warehouse around the corner from our studio so we had cops over at our studio all the time. They weren’t bad, but we were definitely feeling like, they’re cool, but I can see what it would be like to really truly get hassled by the man.

I’m thinking about that all the time while Donovan is telling me that a bunch of basically just jerkoff haters in Germany in the late sixties and seventies got together and without any sense just started killing people in the name of this anger that the youth of the country felt about having to inherit this war guilt. It was like, wow, it just started to work. I ended up sitting with Karl Bartos from Kraftwork. He was the one who was like, don’t even try to make it real. Your idea of what it was like and what made these bands look so cool and do such cool things is far more spectacular than it really was, so just go for it.

Yeah. I could have just made the whole thing up since it’s really science fiction. Berlin in the seventies seems very science fiction, very industrial wasteland-y. Donovan was way into it. He was feeding me all these outrageous events. Andreas Baader being interviewed out of prison with just a few guards. These two two college kids that show up. I mean who else is going to come bust him out? What the fuck did they think was going to happen? Was it just too obvious that two kids showed up and said they wanted to do their homework there? I mean how does that happen in real life? Do you know how hard it was for me to write that? This is so unbelievable.

The real things are the hardest to believe. If I had to make up a whole story, it could never have been as deep as this one. I’m just simply not that powerful of a creative person, I think. That was the good part about using actual history. It was nice to use history, but smoothing out those seams where you stitch it together was a really big bite to swallow. I mean opening with a shootout at a show. That actually happened at a college, but I wanted it to be like a rave. In Portland we had crazy ones in the early nineties, late eighties. Portland was a really empty town back then so there was a lot of warehouses and a lot of cop violence.

I did a bunch of research. I just talked to anyone I could. I was doing some college radio stuff in Germany and this teacher told me about when he was in college when bands played and the cops showed up and it was a little like Kent State. Also there are just movies. Donovan would find Fassbinder and Herzog films and we’d watch them and go, what the fuck is that?

Wasn’t that fun? Isn’t that great? I really wanted that, for people to poke around and find out.

And then having them have a fulcrum part in it, even on a personal level. His relationship with Ulrike Meinhof is pretty fucking believable. It’s like relationships I’ve had in my life. I love that part of it. What’s real and what’s not.

Well it’s hard to say, isn’t it? How much is in your head. How much is what people say. How much is coincidence. Some weird thing happens for a different reason but you put it together with something else that happened and now you’re actually just being paranoid. That’s the big thing in the book. How much is just weird coincidences and timing? That’s a thing that I really wanted to get across in the book. I guess I just wanted to make people aware that I think about that shit. I mean if you think about that, it might be interesting for you to know that I think about that shit too. A lot. Am I being paranoid or is this actually happening?

I had never seen a screenplay in my life. I got this screenwriting program and I was like, I’m not going to learn how to use this, so I ended up writing the thing more like a play. I’ve read a lot of plays. I started having other people read it. I don’t know the film industry. It starts to get out of your control and I don’t really care to see any of my work get twisted and manipulated and wrongly put out there. I ended up having Mike Allred read it because he’s the guy. Red Rocket 7 is this perfect rock and roll/science fiction/shoot ‘em up with introspection. In the record producing industry you would say the dude has the ears of a thirteen year old boy. That’s why he’s so good. Mike Allred is that person in the comics industry. Mike and the Image Comics guys hooked me up with Jim Rugg. He had done Afrodisiac which has a seventies look and it’s fucking awesome. I knew this guy could go as far as he wants stylistically.

Donovan and I tried to write it at first together and that was a disaster. We were just goofy. And we didn’t know what we were doing.I started over. I was jetlagged a lot for eight years because it was constant touring and I was wide awake at three a.m. and working [on the book]. I’d put it away for months and come back and be horrified. You learn to whittle away the words. That’s why it took me another six years to make it not suck.

Making the record was so easy. It was about just making cool shit. We didn’t have to make it fit into anybody’s sensibility. It was just however far we wanted to go. It was great. We just camped out in my house in the country, we set up a bassline and spent days out there. It was super fun and really easy and it was like a dream. [laughs] The jerkoff teenage fantasy of what it’s like to be in a German art noise band.

My family’s from Portland. We’re probably one of the oldest Portland families left. We predate the Civil War.

I don’t get lost in it.

I was pretty bitter about it for a long time. It started happening in the nineties and it was not pretty. You grow up being the outsider and dream of this world where everyone is hip and culturally aware and then it actually started to happening to Portland. This depressed economy armpit town that I lived in. To hang out at coffeeshop and have a fucking piercing is a fucking cliche. It’s basically just a glut of the kind of people I always liked. To the point where it’s embarrassingly horrifying. It is Portlandia.

We invented a German art noise band that disappeared in 1978 and then I wrote a book about the last three months of their career. It’s pretty weird and interesting.


One Model Nation, the book and the album, will be available January 31st.