The Road Less Traveled
loobie New Angeleno Lou Barlow of Sebadoh talks with fan and Jim editor m bates about the Western Mass mentality (it’s bad), his new sunnier environ (it’s good), the flag he flies (none), and his career of being determinedly wrongheaded about playing music (it can work).
How’s LA treating you so far?
Oh, fine.
Kath was raving about the house that you guys have.
Yeah, we have a nice house. I mean that probably 70 percent of why I’d be happy here. I think if I didn’t have a nice house it might probably be a different story.
Is that a big transition?
Definitely, oh totally.
Like what kind of stuff?
Socially. Driving all the time, you know, that’s a big deal ‘cause I didn’t drive for years and all. The weather of course.
That’s kind of a nicer thing down the line.
Yeah. I’m totally digging it. It’s just different. I really needed the change real badly. I really could’ve never predicted I’d end up here.
I thought it was really cool the New Year’s goodbye thing you held-- I wasn’t there. That’s unlike what most any performer would do.
You think so? Well it was mostly b/c of Billy Ruane, the guy who booked the show. I mean, I thought about doing a show. I didn’t really verbalize it, but he called me up ‘cause he’s an amazing promoter. He gives his life to music and perpetuating some kind of scene in Boston.
I just liked the whole thing of getting a really great bunch of musicians who are also yr friends and giving away personal items b/w acts.
Yeah that was cool. I had a really great time at the show. I must say that was one of the highlights. And Elliott Smith played too.
Yeah, you can’t beat that. Do you get bummed out by any of the regular stuff people bitch about LA, like the plasticness of many of the people?
Not really. It’s weird. It’s just such a huge city. It’s a city for one thing and on top of that culturally it’s like far more complex than anyone has any idea. “Well it has no culture”-- it’s like, fuck that.
It’s almost like people are bitter b/c it’s got this domination over the pop culture of the country.
Oh, totally. Y’know, I just can’t... I’m not really that judgmental about things. I just think it’s funny. I mean, I usually go to Glendale when I need to go someplace. There’s different scenes. You could run into the actor scene and all that stuff. It’s definitely... It’s just, you can find yr life here. It takes money of course. I think even if you didn’t have money, I think that like just watching the way bands and stuff exist here, there’s just more of an idea of scenes and people try to make it. It’s just the friends that I have here, like the guys who play in Beachwood Sparks, they find places to play shows. Not like the one place that they do in Boston. They look around. Music is much more important here, it seems like to me. It’s more a part of people’s day-to-day lives than it is in Boston and New York, probably b/c they drive a lot. Someone told me that that was it-- the stereos-- b/c there’s so much driving going on music is so much more of...
Yeah, you have the radio in yr car.
Yeah yr radio and yr tapes.
[Lou asks, so we talk about my educational career.]
I didn’t go to college myself, so...
Well it was more like concentrating on music for you, b/c high school was just...
Well high school, I feel like I barely graduated. Then I just got out of high school and I was like, “I’m not working a job.” And I had bands, y’know, so when I finally did get jobs I spent all my money on amps and stereos. Somehow it took care of itself. I’m extremely fortunate.
There’s no one around who writes songs quite like you. You can’t chalk it up just to luck.
No, I guess not. [jokingly] “That’s right, goddamn it!” No, I mean I’ve worked really hard for the last ten, twelve years or whatever in a strange, totally backwards way.
Well in terms of maybe like the ascendance of Sebadoh, if you can say that...
[laughs]
I don’t know.
Well we’ve done really well for ourselves by really not ever doing what bands do... like practicing. [laughs] Y’know, we just always cut a lot of corners, and it’s just all about trying to make a living really. Basically that was pretty much the bottom line. I think a lot of people who are in bands who have a lot of ambition... it’s hard to even make a living, ‘cause the level that they want to succeed at takes money and takes an attitude I just have no connection to whatsoever. Which is fortunate, but it’s also funny too, that I was able to make it work by listening to total antisocial and totally noisy, very purposely abrasive music in my teenage years.
Yeah, I’ve heard you talk about how yr mom was afraid for you ‘cause you’d lock yrself in the room and pump up The Swans.
Yeah, she was afraid of The Swans. She said, [concerned mom voice]“Oh man, that makes you want to kill yrself.” [stoned voice]“No mom, it doesn’t.” It’s just hard to, I mean, that stuff-- The Swans-- it’s extreme. It’s hard to explain to somebody what’s uplifting about a band that’s just [strums] uuhhhh [strum]. I had a whole philosophy worked out about it.
It’s funny. I have similar stuff w/ my mom in terms of what I’m a fan of. It’s not as much the abrasiveness as much as the sadness in yr early stuff, the sadness in Elliott Smith’s stuff. She’ll hear me listening to it and I’ll be like, “This is beautiful.” And she’ll be like...
[concerned mom again]“Why are you so sad?”
Y’know, [my concerned mom]“Doesn’t it make you feel like killing yrself?” I’ll be like, “No, it’s the sad that makes you happy.” I don’t know. She likes Michael Bolton, so I love her anyways.
[sarcastically]That’s good that you don’t hate yr mother b/c she like Michael Bolton, that’s very tolerant of you.
[dejected]Just joking.
I know. I’m joking too. [faking alarm]Wait!
Now that you’ve gotten to this level-- you did sign to Sire recently, right?
We didn’t sign. It’s just that Sub Pop is kind of working w/ Sire.
Oh, is that what it is? So I guess I heard it bass-ackwards in that case. It’s not as much a question-- I mean, the sellout thing, given that that’s bullshit...
Especially now. God.
...given that that’s bullshit-- I still kind of... when a band I love is making that transition and they’ve sort of been doing their own thing at that indie level, sometimes I’m a little afraid b/c even bands I don’t dig but I might respect, you sort of see them selfdestru-- not really selfdestruct, but they can’t exist at that level.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
That level of pressure.
Yeah, that’s really hard. It’s insanely hard. It really is. There’s just... no bullshit and I don’t really have any kind of confidence about it. Y’know its just like somehow I’ve been able to make it work, but it’s not been easy at all. It’s been really hard.
I think I read an interview you did along w/ Jon Davis. You actually expressed a little disappointment-- that might not be the right emotion, but... in how Sub Pop had reacted to Harmacy’s sales, like they wanted it to blow up...
Yeah.
...and even though it was an increase and aesthetically it was a success, they felt it was a failure b/c it didn’t make you their next Nirvana or whatever.
Well, it wasn’t that so much. It’s just there was a lot of pressure going on at Sub Pop and they were in a transitional period of just... their group of friends who weren’t really friends who were all working at this record label... and just that whole Nirvana thing just fucked things up for those people. It just made everything really complicated. It’s like when Folk Implosion hit w/ “Natural One” or whatever, when it happened I was like, “Oh, cool! Oh, everyhting’s cool. Everything’s gonna be great. This is neat. What a cool bonus for me.” Y’know? I watched that success just tear shit apart, even though it wasn’t like real success. People, I don’t think, can really deal w/ it all.
Yeah.
People can’t deal w/ success. People don’t know what to do when they get success. Unless yr sort of really ambitious and then... But the people I know... Everything I do, like all my bands and stuff, it’s all about my relationships with those people. It’s not about them doing something I tell them to do. It’s not like, “Do that. Do this.” It’s about this weird friendship and creative thing trying to evolve.
And chemistry you have.
Right, and trying to preserve that chemistry. And it was funny how that success really did just tear that chemistry up.
Really?
Or at least put it through some tests, y’know. I mean, we all came through in the end but it was tough.
That’s how it seems from the album.
Yeah. When yr younger or whatever and you look at the bands and you look at the way you make all of these totally righteous statements about it. Like, [whining judgmentally] “I’d never do that.” And, “How does that happen? That’s bullshit!” But the actual mechanics of the whole situation... it’s amazing. You gotta be vigilant. And then if yr vigilant, that’s not even talking about the music.
Yeah, it’s pretty much the business side that’s...
Totally fucks it up.
The thing that was cool about yr work on the KIDS Soundtrack... What really-- it didn’t give me the personal reaction of a Sebadoh album or Sentridoh stuff or whatever-- but what blew me away was the total shifting of gears there. B/c I don’t think that much stuff that you’d done before that hinted at the sort of hip hop direction. And to me that’s what the KIDS material was. I reacted to it as like, “Wow! Lou and Jon put together some really good hip hop.” And somehow it wasn’t reacted to like that. I read some reviews where they compared it to Donovan stuff.
Yeah.
And I was like, “What are they hearing?”
Well, I think they were just hearing the voice on “Natural One.” That’s all.
I guess you’ve been listening for a while now to stuff like Wu-Tang Clan...
Not so much Wu-Tang.
You don’t? What other...
I like Timbaland, the producer who does Missy Elliott. When the NWA record came out years ago I liked that. I’ve always liked that stuff.
[A bouncer takes my ticket and stamps my hand. I apologize for acting like a spazz. We talk about the area we’re from in Massachusetts.]
It’s a boring town. I appreciate coming from there, ‘cause it was really good in terms of growing up...
Yeah. Yeah.
...but everybody I knew who had something going on usually wanted to get out.
Yeah. It’s weird. Just moving here and stuff, it’s funny because people who are younger are so much more positive than people that I remember. Like in Westfield and stuff, people from Amherst, it’s kind of interesting ‘cause Jason [Lowenstein, the other songwriter in Sebadoh] and I were both total Western Mass guys and our humor... we freak out this guy Russ [Pollard, no relation to GBV’s Bob Pollard], who’s the new guy in Sebadoh. It’s just like, he doesn’t know what to make sometimes of how negative we are or how our humor just always goes right to something completely morbid. I freaked out a lot of people here. And they’re just like, [concerned] “Why are you so depressed? Why are you saying that?” I’m like, [puzzled] “What? This is just the way I am.” There’s just a whole different... it’s not cool to be excited, in Massachusetts, about anything.
No. Like someone will flip it on you the second you’ve got some sort of...
Yeah. I’m ready to buy that whole cliché now, and it’s also like I feel somewhat... Westfield was beautiful. Western Mass is a beautiful place.
Yeah. It’s like I said, you appreciate it but some of the stuff just kind of fucks you up.
Well, you have to deal with it later. You have to all of a sudden find out, [surprised] “Oh. I’m really like that. I am. Oh, I’m negative.” Like, I never thought that. I’ve always thought I was more positive. But I’m not. My years of hanging out w/ J Mascis and Eric Gaffney fucking took its toll.
It’s a buildup of negative energy. You mentioned the new drummer, Ross Pollard. Is he likely to take a songwriting role?
Yeah, a little bit definitely. B/c he can play everything. There’s a couple of riffs that he wrote that we’re probably gonna jam out.
Are you guys-- you say “jam out”-- are you guys heading towards a more collaborative thing or is it still gonna be everybody brings their own songs?
It’s totally weird. I can’t tell right now. We jammed for months. We really jammed for weeks and just came up w/ really great riffs and stuff, but we didn’t put them together as songs. And now that we’re approaching recording, all we have is these songs that we’ve already... y’know, I’ve wrote 4 or 5 songs that have parts, and we figured them out in classic Sebadoh fashion or whatever. But were really leaving it pretty scarily open ended. We’re already in the studio right now. I don’t know what’s gonna happen. I really don’t know.
That’s fair. That’s really honest. I guess there was sort of that separation when Jason moved fulltime to Louisville, so when you were jamming toward the album you were sort of flying there once a month.
We never, we didn’t jam no matter where we lived. Ever.
Oh, really?
Oh, totally. There was a time when I lived in Northampton with Eric and Jason, but I think all of us have always made sure that there was other things in our lives. We always made our relationships way more important than the band. We’ve never sacrificed anything. It’s always been about “Girlfriends come first.” That’s why it’s tough moving forward b/c as a band we’ve never done anything other than making crazy records and making sure we go on tour. We just never had any type of ambition to like, [anal rock dude voice] “Man, we gotta tighten up! We gotta fuckin’ put the screws down, figure it out.” It was always just about trying to make sure that it was as easy for everybody as possible.
It’s funny, especially w/ the touring and the live shows, almost every time you come through town some of the free papers, which are like the only ones I read around here, will trot out the “Sebadoh sucks live” thing or the “Lou will freak out” thing.
Sure.
That’s perfectly cool?
Well, I mean I did it. I did that for years. You don’t live that shit down. It just doesn’t disappear if you play one show or do one tour where you didn’t freak out much. I think playing live music in a band is extremely fucking hard, and when you have a band like Sebadoh that doesn’t-- y’know, we’re not practicing in front of a big mirror, we’re not getting our shit together at all before we go out on tour...
Well, wasn’t there more of an effort w/ the Harmacy tour to do that? Or not really?
Yeah, there was. Definitely. ‘Cause I was sick of hearing people complain about it.
It did pay off.
Oh, it totally did.
When I saw you guys on tour, aside from the songwriting and everything else that the fans normally love, you guys actually rawked out.
Yeah. We just got to the point where it’s just like... I mean, I spent how long just totally alienating people, from Dinosaur on. It’s like, making people really uncomfortable. Into that, thinking that’s what I want to do. I just want to make people really uncomfortable, ‘cause I feel uncomfortable.
The folk terrorist thing.
Totally. But then, I don’t know what really happened. Now I feel like I have more to gain by just being... it just happened one too many times, where I would talk to somebody after a show [demanding redress of grievances]“I drove 10 hours here from Tallahassee, and you guys got up on stage and...”
The tuning breaks.
Yeah. It’s fucking legitimate stuff. And the time to be the fucked-up band that could be either alternately brilliant or alternately like just a fucking waste of time live... we did that. Y’know, I feel like I did that. It’s like, “Okay, it’s time to see how good we can get with the band.” But it was also that the band was still a group of friends trying to make it work w/o firing anybody for musical reasons... or just about being a group of people that liked each other and went out on tour to make some money. Which I’ve now realized is very... It’s pretty rare. People don’t really... It’s hard to do that and actually make money like we did.
It’s like two almost opposing things.
It’s tough if yr gonna be a band. I mean a lot of people don’t bother being in a band unless they’re like a kick-ass band. And I’ve just never thought twice about it. “It’s good enough for me. Let’s go. It’s good. I’m having a good time.”
It’s worked.
Totally. It really has.
Well, I guess you’ve sort of established this-- ego and issues that a lot of bands go through aren’t as much at play w/ you guys. Sometimes I wonder if Jason gets frustrated...
He totally gets frustrated.
I don’t know. I’ll battle through this. It’s more of a media thing. But something that’s annoying even from the standpoint of a fan is, with each album at least one major magazine that reviews it has talked about how yr songs are great and Jake’s are so-so or Jake’s are getting better. And then they’ll attribute one of his songs to you.
Oh, totally.
They did it w/ “Happily Divided.” I don’t know if Rolling Stone did it or... And I mean, it’s like, “Check the liner notes, dude.”
I know. They don’t care. But it’s funny, though. That does happen and it takes its toll too. I think it does. Jason would say no, but it does. It totally does. And all that kind of shit came down on us the last few years.
There always seems to be this thing where everybody except the band wants to, or the people involved want to, get this competition going of “whose songs are we gonna call the best songs” when you’ve got this cool thing of a band who lets everybody get their try on the mic...
It’s The Beatles, if you think about it. It’s the classic White Album...
It’s true, and you guys’ve been compared to that, but how many bands are frustrating their members b/c in the more business-oriented or ego-oriented thing of someone’ll bring an idea to the band and they’ll laugh him off.
‘Cause they all want the publishing.
[laughs]
No. It’s true. It becomes a real... but y’know, I’m proud of the pretty fucked-up way we’ve managed to exist.
I think that’s some of the attraction to the band besides the actual music.
That’s what I’m starting to realize. For a while I was pretty down. Just this last year I got really depressed about it. We fired Bob. And that was pretty tough. It was necessary creatively, but it was really tough personally. And it kind of just put a different light on things. But the more I’m starting to think about it, I’m just talking to friends I’ve made out here about Sebadoh. We just seem to be like, as a band, it’s almost like a philosophical thing we’re kind of pushing. Every band, when you say talk about bands, you hear a sound in your head. That’s that band. Like Black Sabbath or The Melvins or anything is like that. W/ Sebadoh its just been this constant, like some people would call it, a very purposeful refusal to have any sound. But it wasn’t purposeful. It was just that we like too much music. We respect too many things.
But it’s a great thing b/c the songs are ultimately what it’s all about. And when those are in place, you can-- as you’ve shown, sort of redoing a few of yr songs over the course of Sebadoh’s career so far-- the sound can change as long as quality of the songs are there. I wouldn’t so much accuse Sabbath or maybe The Melvins, but when you think of maybe lesser bands that are more about the sound they produce, it wears thin on even the fans...
It wears thin on them too. That was what it was like w/ Dinosaur. We had a sound and we pursued that sound. And then it eventually became greater than the personal thing that was involved in the band. And it just began to corrupt what I imagined could be the potential of it. But then again, people just have a hard time working together. That’s just the way it is. But bands who have a sound, its like God bless ‘em, y’know. And then bands that have sounds and then songs, it’s just completely rare.
Well you guys have not had a sound over the what, 11, 12 years you’ve been releasing stuff under the name Sebadoh, it’s just... early on you could say the sound was that sort of static-y, acoustic, let-the-lo-fi-ness-ride, and Bakesale over the course of the album had a continuity of the sound...
Yeah, ‘cause we did it really quick. But that was good. When I think about it, really it’s really cool that I’m able to do what I want after basically, by any kind of traditional terms, I’ve been totally undermining myself for years now. I’m very proud of that fact and I also like the fact that the stuff that I did that’s called lo-fi or whatever, I put so much fucking time into that stuff. People notice. And that’s the thing. Some people notice. Not a lot, but the people who do notice really understand. And that’s so rare.
That was something I was gonna ask. There’s a tension b/w the media portrayal-- “All that Sentridoh shit is him basically farting on a tape and releasing it”-- and you obviously care too much about yr craft...
Yeah, I really did.
I mean, beyond the undermining question, you show more selectivity than they realize.
Oh, totally. [mock emphatically] Yes I did!
Guess it’s not much of a question...
Oh, no. I’m just making fun of myself really. I don’t know. I put so much time into that stuff. And the other thing is I happen to like the way it sounded too. I really like the way it sounded and also on top of that music is about being able to do it on the moment you feel it and being able to do it like that economically. That was totally impossible for me to do so for someone who’s not a musician, like myself, who doesn’t feel like I’m a musician... Like my playing is crude. My ideas of what’s good music are not shared. Most people don’t share my tastes at all. No one. It’s weird.
But they’re all over the place enough. I mean, a common mechanism of the press on you is to talk about, “He loves Black Flag and Joni Mitchell,” or “Even though he came from being in a hardcore band like Deep Wound, he can admit a love for Jim Croce or Bread.”
Yeah. Man, I still find that amazing, that that’s even a big deal. A lot of people in LA are like that too. They like one kind of music. “I like this. I like that.”
A lot of people everywhere. ‘Cause its about yr self-definition.
Totally.
What flag you fly.
Totally, and I think that that’s probably sort of the crux of it. I fly no flag ever, and I don’t think any band is the greatest thing in the world. It’s like, yeah, there’s a couple of bands in the world that made a couple of good records-- not that-- there’s tons and tons and tons and tons of great music, but for me it all comes from completely... I have no... it’s hard to say... it’s like, when I meet some musicians, what they want to do, it’s like they want to get Keith Richards’ guitar sound. I just don’t care about that stuff at all. I hate the cult of rock or this idea that, [goofy hipster voice?]“Oh yeah, man. The Velvet Underground are like the greatest band that has ever existed.”
Well it changes depending on what’s in fashion or what subgroup yr talking to. Sabbath has made a big comeback in terms of everyone saying that was their big influence, and they are. But it’s not the only thing either, as yr saying.
No. Pretty close to it though.
[laughs]
That’s funny though. Thinking about Sabbath... I think they’re better than Velvet Underground, The Stooges, all that stuff that punk rock is, and I’m supposed to... and I’m like, “No way. Sabbath is it.” They were like the beginning of indie rock. They were so crude and then on top of that the way they put their music together was just truly visionary, but not in any kind of premeditated way. It was just in this totally [Homo erectus imitation]“wuuuhhhh,” lunkheaded, kind of really soulful but very stilted... just, y’know...
In [early-years SST Records staffer and underground rock radio stalwart] Joe Carducci’s book, Rock and The Pop Narcotic, he has a really interesting thing where he charts the critical, and maybe also fan reevaluation of Sabbath, where early on when the records first came out, everyone except for maybe the fans who really loved the music were trying to say it was shit on a platter...
Oh yeah.
...and then when the influence and visionary quality of what they were doing came through later, the same people who’d been dogging them early on called all their early records classics and even the people who stuck to the line of, “Oh, they’re overrated. Oh, they’re crap,” it still raised them in their estimation.
That’s... yeah.
Again I don’t know if there’s a question there.
No, no, no. Yr talking about the people who just... that’s kind of what I was talking about: “That’s good. That’s bad. That’s good music and this is bad music. No, that’s a bad band.” Do you know what I’m saying? People who draw lines about what they like, what they can like, what a good musician does, what a good band does. And I’ve always just really... I hate that. I like, I like everything. I’ll like anything. When I make tapes at home I don’t care about continuity. And when I play it for people, they’re just like, they can’t handle the fact that you put Missy Elliott next to Sepultura, and I just think it’s funny. And it makes life interesting. But that’s how I naturally arrived at music, and once I stopped wondering what was cool, finally when, my senior year of high school, when I started listening to Neil Young and stuff. I didn’t care about what was cool, y’know. I just don’t care. But it still amazes me how people are really concerned with like what cool music is, what cool people...
It won’t stop.
No, it won’t.
It drives the industry to a large extent, I mean...
But what’s going to happen? But the thing, it’s like something’s gotta happen. B/c everything’s happening at once and there’s more and more types of music.
Well, the style could change but underlying drive for hipness and cool probably won’t.
Of course not.
Maybe it’s incongruous but what it brings to mind: You brought Elliott Smith along w/ you on tour. September ‘96 you came through town and played the Roxy and everybody in the back sat there and yammered through his set and it got to the point where he-- who’s a quiet guy-- was saying, “Could you guys shut the fuck up please?”
Right.
And you came on and you had the rapt attention, ‘cause that was when “Ocean” was pretty much breaking, and you said something along the lines of, “I know he’s not on KROQ, but you could at least show him some respect.” It’ll be interesting now that he’s starting to get that play b/c of the movie song. [I babble for a while] But ultimately it can’t hurt for even the people you dislike, in terms of just a complete clash of values, it can’t hurt if the mainstream picks up on something really great, ‘cause it’ll only raise the bar for everything else.
Well that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, was for people to listen to my music. That’s why I started. I think we’re fortunate enough to be such a kind of strange band that’s done really good. I dunno. It’s worked out pretty well. But I totally can see kids who were into my 4-track stuff, if I was them and I was really into that, and I heard Harmacy or whatever, I’d totally just be like, [angered yet whiny] “What the fuck? Nnyyuuh!”
So you can sympathize w/ their point of view?
Absolutely. But I’m just trying to do things that I haven’t done before. Sometimes that’s not the best choice musically, but it always makes it interesting for me. It’s always a challenge and what-- it’s always about, too, is supporting a group of people, trying to make sure that we all have money to live on and to make a life out of music and see what happens.
On the one side it would be more untrue for you to stick to the old stuff when you really want to move on.
Yeah.
And if you don’t bring it to a certain level where it’ll reward you, then you can’t continue to make the music.
Well, on top of that, I have so many 4-track recordings that I did. I put out so many records like that that I’m totally proud of, that I actually still would say are the best things I’ve done creatively or whatever. But at some point I made a very conscious decision to just go... I have to challenge myself. I have to figure out a way of making something as normal as being in a rock band, I have to figure out a way to introduce the emotion that I was trying to express in that early stuff somehow into a band format, go on tour and play shows and try to be a guitar player who can tune his guitar and get a good guitar sound. It’s like a huge fucking challenge, and I totally did not succeed in a lot of ways. But I don’t, but I’m not kicking myself for that, going like, “Oh, man.” ‘Cause I know that I’m just lucky. I’m just lucky that I’m 31, I’ve got so many different records. Whatever we’re trying to do, whatever Sebadoh is trying to do, whatever I’m trying to do, is just kind of weirdly unprecedented. And that’s what I’m starting to pick up on about it. It’s just something weird. It’s not a very good thing to imitate, I would say.
[laughs]Stumble along, follow what...
But like you said, it’s always about the song.
This more goes a few years back, but I’ve never seen this raised in interviews w/ you. When Sonic Youth was coming out w/ Experimental Jetset, Thurston Moore in the press was saying he was very much influenced at that time by listening to Sebadoh, listening to like Pavement. And Bob Mould said something along those lines too. That kind of stuff-- in Thurston’s case he was a little more specific about maybe looking to shorter songs and making it more about the song and less about the jamming that they did-- how did that feel? For people who were influences or maybe inspirations for you to in turn be that inspired by your music?
It’s awesome. It’s amazing. It’s just like one of those things where once it happens yr like, “Wow. I never thought that would happen.” But it’s like, where do you go from there? But I mean, that happened w/ Dinosaur. It’s like you go on tour w/ Sonic Youth. Yr like, “Oh my god! This is the fucking greatest thing ever!”
Yeah, Bug and Yr Living All Over Me are some of their favorite records.
Yeah. We’d go on tour w/ them, and the next time we’d see them... Kim would be playing a Rick through a Marshall and Thurston would have a bunch of pedals, and its just like, [amazed] “Holy shit! You mean we’ve actually had an effect on these people?” It’s like totally surreal, but once that sort of fades it’s like, okay I’m not gonna forever be like... I just don’t fetishize bands. I always thought that was a bad idea.
It usually leads to some unhealthy things one way or another.
Yeah. I don’t know. I just don’t think it’s really creative. But I’ve done plenty of things that are not particularly creative.
[I talk about how the press can fixate on Sebadoh’s few songs about smokin’ weed and masturbation.] What I thought was more interesting is-- and I think this jumps out at some fans-- is the concept of friendship, even w/in romantic songs. And there are songs where you’ve said, “Well, you guys think everything’s about Kath, but not every song is a mash note to her.”
Right.
But that comes out a lot, the word “friends” and the concept of trying to deal w/ friendship.
That’s the whole band too. The most important thing, more than anything else with us, more than how we record our records, more than how we... y’know, its all about trying to preserve friendships and trying to create some kind of family of people. But also the other part of that is just a constant process of learning about what... you can make all the conditions right for everybody and make your family and everything, but it doesn’t mean shit. People do what they want, y’know? And it’s amazing. But b/c of the way I have done things like that and b/c it is all about friendship and it’s all about writing songs about that as well, somehow I think that that’s probably the right thing to do. And that’s worked out really well ultimately.
I think that that’s a good ending.