THE KING OF STATEN ISLAND (dir. by Judd Apatow, 136 minutes, USA, 2020)

BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC In The King of Staten Island, now streaming on VOD, director Judd Apatow returns to the formula that worked so well with Trainwreck : creating a vehicle around a comedian’s perceived public persona. This time around he’s chosen SNL’s resident bad boy Pete Davidson, who’s been going through a bit of a rough patch recently. After a very public and messy relationship/separation from Ariana Grande, he then went on to bite the hand that feeds by publicly criticizing SNL during a sit-down with Charlamagne tha God. Given the tragic outcomes of previous SNL Alumni, I feel like they’ve done nothing but try to humanize Pete, while also giving him a platform to raise awareness of his battles with drugs and depression, which is basically what The King of Staten Island also attempts.

The resulting movie is a hodgepodge of the autobiographical details of Pete’s life intermixed with a fictional narrative. The true parts are as follows: he’s from Staten Island, lives in his mother’s basement, has a younger sister and his father was a firefighter, who died when he was seven years old. Surprisingly, the film surprisingly shies away from the fact that his father died while in service during the 9/11 terror attacks on New York City. The fictional part is that he wants to be a tattoo artist and open the first tattoo shop/restaurant which will be called…wait for it…Ruby Tattoosday’s. The faux narrative has Pete’s younger sister going off to college and his mother (Marisa Tomei) finding love in the arms of another fireman Ray (Bill Burr), forcing him out of the nest. This of course goes how you’d expect: at first he rebels but soon winds up befriending Ray and together they try to work through losing his father while also dealing with living up to his memory.

When I saw that the movie is two hours and sixteen-minute long, I expected that Pete Davidson’s “pothead weirdo” schtick would wear out its welcome long before the credits roll. However, Davidson shines here, and is easily the best thing to come out of this convoluted mess of a narrative, littered with lame comedy clichés, tired tropes and plot threads that go nowhere. The King of Staten Island is constantly battling with whether it wants to be a light comedic romp about arrested development, a la every Adam Sandler film not called Punch Drunk Love or Uncut Gems, or a gritty autobiographical story of one troubled manboy’s rise above his demons a la 8 Mile . One minute he’s hanging with Ray’s with eight-year-old son and spitballing what would make an awesome superhero, and the next he’s involved in a shootout while robbing a pharmacy.

One thing King makes abundantly clear is Davidson has the chops to carry a film and his brand of off-color humor translates surprisingly well to big screen. Where Apatow fails Davidson, however, is not steering this film away from the darker thematic tones and elements that were obviously Davidson’s contributions to the script. It’s those odd tonal shifts and interludes that derail what I realistically think would be a solid 90 minutes instead of a muddled two hours and twenty. The King of Staten Island isn’t bad, but the potential for a great film remains tantalizingly just below the surface and that’s what I ultimately find so frustrating about it. It’s like you can see that tonal battle of egos play out on screen, resulting in a film that simply gets tired of fighting with itself, and runs out of steam before brokering a proper peace accord.

BUZZFEED: It’s a shame that the name “Pete Davidson” is now synonymous with the name “Ariana Grande.” I can’t imagine dating someone in my mid-twenties for a few intense, absurd months, and then having that relationship die like a star burning through its own fuel supply, only after it’s come to define a significant portion of my public persona. Davidson became one of the most overexposed celebrities of 2018, the face of Big Dick Energy and the boyfriend of a few other famous women. But the tabloid coverage from those relationships clearly got to Davidson, despite the fact that he’s plenty talented in his own right.

Though he has continued appearing on Saturday Night Live and released a Netflix stand-up special in February, he has avoided social media almost entirely and has refused most press interview requests (through representatives of his movie, he declined to speak with BuzzFeed News). And in 2019, he moved back to Staten Island, where he grew up, to live in the basement of a house he bought with his mother.

But on Friday, he’s releasing his biggest project yet: The King of Staten Island, a comedy-drama directed by Judd Apatow and written by Davidson, Apatow, and Davidson’s best friend, Dave Sirus, and available on demand. The movie marks Davidson’s first starring role in a feature film and is demonstrably semiautobiographical. Davidson plays the lovable but frustrating Scott, a man in his mid-twenties, stuck in arrested development after his firefighter father dies while saving someone on the job. He aspires to be a tattoo artist, but like his friend says, his work is “mad inconsistent.” He’s sweet and easy to root for, but he’s an idiot. When he attempts to tattoo a 12-year-old he runs into on the beach, he ends up setting up his widowed mother/roommate (played by an upsettingly hot Marisa Tomei in a very Long Island mullet) with yet another firefighter (Bill Burr). The King of Staten Island isn’t Davidson’s first attempt to become something more than a famous boyfriend, but it is his best work thus far.

At just 26, Davidson has lived more than a few lifetimes. He’s been the son of a hero, a celebrity accessory, an asshole, and a self-described crazy person. Yet he still manages to be appealing, charming, and lovable, even if it’s not always clear why. With The King of Staten Island, Davidson finally has the room and the self-awareness to present a fuller version of himself. It’s too simple to paint him as nothing more than a traumatized son who is still grappling with the loss of his father, or to suggest he’s just another white-guy comedian who doesn’t know where and when to punch. In Staten Island, he shows that he’s both and a whole lot more. MORE

RELATED: The Walnut Street Theatre, America’s Oldest Theatre, announces My Walnut Story, a new platform where both artists and audiences can share their favorite Walnut stories online for everyone to enjoy. For its launch on May 7, Walnut artists were invited to submit videos sharing their Walnut Street Theatre related stories. The Walnut has collected scores of unique anecdotes and memories from both artists and theatregoers, ranging from onstage bloopers to their first memories attending the theatre. “You never know who has a story,” remarked Bernard Havard, Producing Artistic Director of the Walnut.  A recent submission came from actor/writer/producer Tina Fey who added her own memories of family outings to the Walnut from her childhood home in Upper Darby, Pa. She remembers seeing one classic comedy that she would like to think “influenced my brain.” SEE ABOVE

PREVIOUSLY: Fred Willard Was The Obi-Wan Kenobi Of White Male Cluelessness

Fred Willard as Elvis Presley on SNL circa 1978

NEW YORK TIMES: Fred Willard, the Emmy Award-nominated comic actor best known for his scene-stealing roles in Christopher Guest’s improvised ensemble film comedies like “Best in Show” and “Waiting for Guffman” and on sitcoms like “Modern Family” and “Everybody Loves Raymond,” died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86. His death was confirmed by his agent, Mike Eisenstadt. No specific cause was given. Mr. Willard made an art of playing characters who, as The New Yorker once noted, are “gloriously out of their depth.”

There was Buck Laughlin, the dog-show announcer in Mr. Guest’s “Best in Show” (2000), who wondered why breeders didn’t want miniature schnauzers to be larger, believed that Christopher Columbus had captained the Mayflower and thought the perfect lighthearted comment to make as the terriers made their entrance was, “To think that in some countries these dogs are eaten.”Mr. Willard received best supporting actor nominations for the role from the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle.

There was Ron Albertson, a travel agent trying his hand at community theater, in “Waiting for Guffman” (1996). When Ron wants a doctor acquaintance’s medical opinion, he begins to unzip his pants in the middle of dinner at a Chinese restaurant. And there was Mike LaFontaine, a laughably crude show business manager, in “A Mighty Wind” “ (2003). In “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” (2004), Mr. Willard was the news-station producer who horrified Ron (Will Ferrell) by promoting a woman to co-anchor. The producer had problems of his own: His son was the kind of teenager who might have a bad day and take a marching band hostage. MORE

NEW YORK TIMES: With his light comedic touch, Fred Willard, who died Friday at 86, made getting laughs seem effortless. His string of now-familiar characters — a daffy late-night sidekick, a blundering dog show announcer — were exaggerated extensions of himself. They were obviously goofier and less self-aware than the real-life Willard was, but they evinced the same kind and cheerful manner he displayed in interviews and on talk show couches. It wasn’t until he stepped outside of his comedy comfort zone that his talent became more clear — when he played the rigid, religious Hank MacDougall on “Everybody Loves Raymond,” for instance, earning three Emmy nominations. In his later years, Willard had entered a dad phase — playing fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers (or all three, as he did across all 11 seasons of “Modern Family,” which also earned him an Emmy nomination). Despite the awards recognition, Willard had more range than those sitcoms suggest. His next (and last) show, “Space Force,” won’t be available on Netflix until later this month. Fortunately, much of his best work is streaming right now. MORE

NEW YORKER: Christopher Guest, the writer-director of “Best in Show,” as well as the Willard showcases “Waiting for Guffman” and “A Mighty Wind,” has observed that “Fred has the patent on characters who are comfortable in their stupidity.” Away from the cameras, however, Willard is a scholar of vanished luminescence. He pores over photos of bygone buildings and makes pilgrimages to places like the intersection near Bakersfield where James Dean’s Porsche got rammed and the motel in South Los Angeles where Sam Cooke was shot. […]

“A few years ago,” he said, after a moment, “I was in Cleveland, where I grew up, and I looked up my dad’s death certificate at City Hall. I was twelve when he died, in 1951. He died after dropping off Christmas gifts to a customer—he worked at a financing company, it was all a little vague. They said he usually turned to wave after he got in his car, and this time he didn’t. Heart failure. I went down to the intersection listed on the certificate, a Buick dealership, and it was very touching. He was Fred Willard, and I was Fred Willard. He was a pretty stern guy, though. I don’t remember much joking, never much encouragement. My wife hates all these visits, going to see the graves. ‘The people aren’t there!’ she says. And I say, ‘But this is the closest we can get to them.’ ” He gazed out at Times Square, perhaps seeing past the JumboTron dazzle to the Tenderloin of decades past. “If it was up to me, nothing would ever change, no one would ever die. On the other hand,” he added, “then no one could have babies, either, because it would get too crowded.” MORE

ROLLING STONE: Brad Pitt portrayed and paid tribute to Dr. Anthony Fauci on the latest episode of Saturday Night Live at Home. Earlier in the month, when asked who should inevitably play him on SNL, Dr. Fauci jokingly told CNN, “Oh, Brad Pitt, of course.” That dream casting became a reality Saturday in the cold open sketch where Pitt’s Fauci attempted to stem the spread of the misinformation that President Donald Trump has been telling the American people. MORE

EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally published in June 2017. We are reprising it now in advance of Kiss’ performance at the PP&L Center in Allentown tomorrow night, the second date on the End Of The Road farewell world tour, with David Lee Roth opening. We will be sending a writer and photographer, stay tuned for a complete report. In the meantime, enjoy.

BY JONATHAN VALANIA In advance of his performance at the Trocadero tonight as part of the Wizard World Philadelphia Comic Con nerd jamboree at the Pennsylvania Convention Center (June 1-4), we got Gene Simmons, commander in chief of the Kiss Army, on the horn. DISCUSSED: Trump, Russia, comic books, codpieces, Beyonce, Nirvana, his $300 million net worth, Elvis, Schvetty Balls, Les Paul, Donna Summer, the Jesus Of Rock, Helsinki, The Beatles, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Kant, Wizard World, the death of rock, inspiring This Is Spinal Tap, why he got himself fired from The Apprentice, the mechanics of capitalism, how supermarkets work, and the prospect of making peace with Terry Gross (Hint: Don’t hold your breath).

PHAWKER: Before we get started, in the interest of full disclosure, you should know I’ve been a member of the Kiss army in good standing since 1976.

GENE SIMMONS: Wow.

PHAWKER: You’ve always been my favorite. I remember spending many hours looking at the cover of the Kiss Alive 2. You were legitimately scary, everybody else the band kind of just looked like weird clowns and transvestites from outer space. But you were intense, I just wanted to put that out there. Don’t tell the other guys I said that, I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. So, what can the fans expect from your show at the Trocadero in Philadelphia?

GENE SIMMONS: What happened was Wizard World was aware that I’m a comic book geek and that Kiss in particular and I have had a long and proud relationship with comic books going back many decades. I mean the first comic book event that I went to was a sci-fi comic book convention called Luna Con in New York in 1968. This was before there was even a Comic Con. And through the 70’s, we had our Kiss comics, which became the biggest selling comic books of all time, at that point. And through various decades, we’ve had everybody from Image to IDW, and now finally Dynamic is putting out Kiss comics. And so every month, there were kiss comics coming out and including my own comic book company called “Simmons’ Comics Group” which puts out Dominatrix and Zipper as well as Gene Simmons’ House of Horrors. So, Wizard World asked me to do five of their conventions, and I said sure. Question and Answer, talk comic books, all of that stuff. And then they had asked me if I would play a few tunes. And I thought, well gee that’s interesting, I never done a solo tour anywhere but maybe I could put a band together of some rockers I know who love this thing and take over a concert hall someplace and do some obscure Kiss tunes that Kiss will never play, and have never played. And that was interesting to me. So that’s sort of what happened and we’ve done two out of them, I think I have three more to go and they’ve been an awful lot of fun. It gives me the chance to kind of step out of the Kiss boots and get up on stage and just have a lot of fun and some of the things that we do with the Gene Simmons band is bring people up on stage and if you think you can sing, you can hold your own against me on stage we pull you up, and if you think your kid, or child, is a rockstar, send your video of your child singing, performing, or doing whatever to WizardWorld.com and if they’ve got the goods, I’ll pull them up on stage. It’s a lot of fun, people just love it and so do I. it gives me a chance to kind of get much closer, because you know around Kiss, it’s tough to get close to us. There are bodyguards between the stage and the audience, there’s that moat, and with the Wizard World relationship, I get a lot closer to people and it’s actually a lot more fun for me to.

PHAWKER: Excellent, so you guys are on tour and Europe right now, I believe your last show was a couple of days ago in Moscow, or in somewhere in Russia? Yes?

GENE SIMMONS: Yes, we played in Moscow, the first show on May Day. Which is when the Russians bring out all of their missiles and stuff, and we played at the Olympic Stadium there in Moscow, a lot of fun. If you go to Kissonline.com you can see photos and stuff, and I’m sure you can go to Google or someplace and get photos. Packed house, everybody had a ball. Right now we are in Helsinki, Finland and you can actually Google this. The international railway station, in Helsinki there is this huge arc, and on either side of this arc are these fifty foot high statues made out of stone. And what the city of Helsinki has done is paint our face makeup on the statues, really quite something. I was just out there, we took some photos and it just, I’m dwarfed by these huge statues, and of course people immediately got that I was one of the guys. And so everybody crowded around and did photos, but when I first approached it I went ‘What the hell, you started a rock band and all of a sudden you’re on Mount Rushmore.’

PHAWKER: Nice. So tell me, what is a typical day in the life of Gene Simmons. Do you wake up at the crack of noon?

GENE SIMMONS: Well there are no typical days. Almost every day is different, because at the same time I am running two different film companies and I’ve got my real estate venture and a lot of other projects happening at the same time and Kiss has lots of projects. So sometimes — when my partners are overseas when I’m in America — I have to hop on the phone in the middle of the night because it’s noon of the next day for my European partners or in Japan. And so, every day is different. Today, we woke up, uh, I don’t know about 10 AM Helsinki time, and went out there at 11 AM to take photos of the big statues and then, you know, running the gauntlet between the fans. They know exactly which hotel we’re staying in so as I leave, you know, you got to do what you got to do. Be nice to the fans, sign this poster this photo and so on. But it’s a real tug of the heart when you are sitting in the restaurant, we sat outdoors because the weather was pretty good, and a few people came over. One guy in particular very young, he had to go back to school, he told me. And he started shaking and said, ‘You are the reason why I am playing music’ and you know all of this stuff. And it’s a real, it puts a lump in your throat when you realize that yeah you can put out a song or two here and there that people might like but it profoundly impacts people’s lives and that’s an amazing thing.

PHAWKER: So, Kiss turns 42 years-old by my calculations.

GENE SIMMONS: Forty-three.

PHAWKER: Forty-three, congratulations. Is it safe to say that you don’t agree with the premise that rock and roll is the young man’s game?

GENE SIMMONS: You know, well this thing called rock and roll isn’t all that old. You know there was blues and rockabilly and all that stuff before it, but really Elvis was kind of the Jesus of rock. Once Elvis started, it opened up the doors to white folks singing black music. White versions of blues if you get what I mean. Because that’s what rock and roll is. And when Les Paul is playing the Les Paul guitars and stuff he was playing a different kind of music and white kids picked up the Fenders and the Les Pauls and started turning up the volume, and that became rock and roll. But, when you really think about it, the Golden Age, were really the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s when there was a music industry, when there were record companies that supported you and all that. And around the mid 80’s, when Napster and that stuff came in, new bands died. I mean you can make a point that rock is finally dead and I’ll show you what I mean: From 1958 until 1988, you’ve got 30 years, during that time you’ve got Elvis, The Beatles, The Stones, Jimi Hendrix and all that. In disco, you had Donna Summer and Madonna and all that. And in pop, you had The Jackson’s, Prince, maybe us, Bowie, you know all of that stuff. An awful lot of music. From 1988 until today, give me the new Beatles.

PHAWKER: The closest thing would probably be Nirvana I suppose.

GENE SIMMONS: You mean if you record two records then you become The Beatles.

PHAWKER: In terms of lasting influence and enduring fan respect.

GENE SIMMONS: But isn’t it true that Foo Fighters is ten times as popular?

PHAWKER: I don’t know. Is that the case?

GENE SIMMONS: Yes, Foo Fighters play stadiums, Nirvana never did.

PHAWKER: Well, I’ll grant you that, but then tell me this. If rock is dead, than where does that leave Kiss then?

GENE SIMMONS: Well, it doesn’t affect us. What I mean is the older bands do fine. The Stones, and U2 and us, and ACDC, you know we still play stadiums and arenas and all of that. But the new bands, will never get the chance that we did.

PHAWKER: Well I agree, the music business is changing fundamentally.

GENE SIMMONS: And there is only one reason for that, the fans killed the thing they loved by not paying for it. Imagine you are a supermarket right? You know what they sell in supermarkets, everything. Right? Fruit, meat, eggs, things, aspirin. Whatever you need, you can get it there. How long do you think a supermarket is going to stay In business if people just walk in and take what they want? That’s downloading and file sharing.

PHAWKER: You could be asking this question about any number of industries.

GENE SIMMONS: All industries, religion, rock bands, everything is based on the premise that to stay in business, you got to pay for it. As soon as people take your stuff for free, you’re out of business. Which means that the new bands simply can’t devote full time to doing their stuff. So, they will never have the chance that we did. Which means they’ll have to get day jobs, which means the songs won’t be as good, which means sooner than later, they won’t be in a band.

PHAWKER: Let’s discuss the economics for a second here, you famously said that you didn’t want to be in a band, you wanted to be in a brand. You are well known for your revenue generating entrepreneurship.

GENE SIMMONS: Well let’s call it for what it is. The hippiest of the hippy bands is exactly the same as Kiss. Everything costs money.

PHAWKER: Absolutely.

GENE SIMMONS: And somebody is either lying, or is a complete moron who thinks “oh no no no, we are just a peoples band.” Really? Don’t you sell tickets and t-shirt? Don’t you, what do you play for free? How do you pay the rent? How do you buy gas for your truck? No. Everything is based on a single premise that if you do something, you need to get paid for it.

PHAWKER: So, online reports put your net worth at $300 million dollars, is that remotely accurate?

GENE SIMMONS: No idea. I’m comfortable. I do have an idea actually. I’m comfortable, I do well, but the most important thing is to get up every day and work your butt off. The people that have a tough time getting to sleep at night don’t work during the day time, that’s the problem. Every day I’m exhausted and can’t wait to just drop in bed and shut my eyes. I have no problem sleeping at night, because I’m tired. I think it’s safe to say Kiss is the hardest working band in show business easily. I would love to be Mick Jagger and Stones, or better yet Bono and U2. Wear some sneakers and a t-shirt, comfortable pair of jeans and never break a sweat. Put any of those guys in my seven inch dragon boots, which weigh eleven pounds each, 12 pound guitar and another 20 pounds of studs and leather and stuff, oh that’s right don’t forget to shoot fire out of your mouth sometimes out of your ass, fly through the air and try to catch your breath during a two hour show. Oh and do that by the way in your late 60’s. They wouldn’t have a chance.

PHAWKER: You have been called the rock and roll Donald Trump, what do you make of that affiliation?

GENE SIMMONS: That’s fine.

PHAWKER: You’ve appeared on The Apprentice you’ve been fired by him, most people-

GENE SIMMONS: I’m sorry?

PHAWKER: You appeared on The Apprentice? Yes?

GENE SIMMONS: Yeah.

PHAWKER: And you were fired by Donald Trump, yes?

GENE SIMMONS: Well actually, plain fact I found out during the filming of the show that we were going to Australia for three weeks, so I had to figure out a way to get myself fired.

PHAWKER: I’m not following.

GENE SIMMONS: Well, I got fired earlier on, I was the captain of both the men’s team and the females team. I won the first project or whatever it was, even before we went back into the boardroom in the very first phone call I made. I beat the other team with the amount of money that I had made and that was with the first phone call and so when Donald Trump saw that happen he said ‘You can’t be in the guy’s teams maybe you can be the captain of the girl’s team because it was just lopsided. Look, celebrity is one thing, but understanding the nature and structure of business, the price of goods and how to make money and stuff it is completely different. As you know most people who are involved in business aren’t famous at all. And most famous people don’t do well in business. And everybody from Sting, to Billy Joel, to you name it, has had the rug pulled out from under them and wind up finding out that their wives are their business managers, or everybody else steals money from them. So, the short cut, the end all is that since Information Is free, and you can get it on the Internet, there is really no excuse for not knowing what is going on around you or how to make money, how to save money, how to minimize your estate tax, and your taxes, way to live, how to have the right things at the right place, and at the right time, and so on. So, I’ve got another book coming out called On Power, about a year or two ago I had another one called Me Inc.. And these were more business-oriented books, less about ‘Look at the new song that I wrote!’

PHAWKER: Okay, well to finish up my question, most people would assume that you voted for Donald Trump. But you’ve never really publicly spoken about who you voted for or what you support.

GENE SIMMONS: Well I think my opinion is that most celebrities are jokes umm, I’m as interested in, I mean I know President Clinton, and President Bush, President Trump, but I’m not interested in what they think about rock and roll. I couldn’t think of a reason why I’d want to ask Beyonce what she thinks of politics.

PHAWKER: I’m assuming you’ve seen This is Spinal Tap yes? The movie?

GENE SIMMONS: Sure.

PHAWKER: I’m just curious what you make of it, do you find this funny?

GENE SIMMONS: Oh yeah. That happened to us. The story about This is Spinal Tap guys getting caught in the elevator not finding the stage is actually a Kiss story, that was based on something that happened to us in Newcastle. We played at an old concert hall on our first tour and the concert hall held about, oh I don’t know, four to five thousand people. But it was in an old building and we were on the third floor putting on makeup and stuff. And you know, we heard the crowd going, “where are Kiss”, you know that stuff. So once we put our stuff on we went to the first floor and it was just a floor, we kept hearing the audience. And then we went to the basement and we just couldn’t find the concert hall, which was on the second floor. We walked underground and stuff and finally we found it on the second floor. And that was based on a Kiss story that actually happened to us.

PHAWKER: That’s hilarious. Um, last question, I wanted to ask you about your infamous Fresh Air interview on NPR. Fresh Air is based here in Philadelphia where I’m calling you from. I’m a long time listener, I remember when I first heard the interview, I frankly kind of thought you were being a dick to be honest, but last time I went through and read the transcript and I kind of revised my opinion. I think that both of you kind of got each other wrong from the get-go. I think you both went into the interview with sort of distorted preconceived notions about each other, she thought you were this insufferable vulgarian, misogynistic, cynical, greedhead who wears make up and high heels and makes music for hormonal 14 year boys adrift in a sea of retarded sexuality and…

GENE SIMMONS: Well, let’s say that’s all true. But as a guest in somebody’s home, the first thing you do is be gracious because you are holding all of the cards. You see it’s your radio station. And it was literally done in her home, and I have never done or heard of NPR and I didn’t know who she was and that’s okay. I was led into her living room and uh, she said ‘Please sit over there and stuff,’ and I immediately got the sense that there was a holier than thou’ at work. Kind of, I’m gonna put this in parenthesis because it was just my impression, ‘Oh look at this, he’s illiterate and so on.’ But, truthfully, if she and I sat down I could quote Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Kant and all of the Existential philosophers toe-to-toe with her but I didn’t wear that stuff on my sleeve. I was in a band and you know, I came to promote Kiss, and so when the first, and I got the stiff treatment right away, I didn’t not like her as a person, but I was willing to go through with the interview. But the first question, it sounded something like ‘Tell me about The Kiss.’ And I’m going “Oh The Kiss! Tell me about this thing called NPR which sounds like some sort of communicable disease.’ I said ‘Oh I hope I don’t catch NPR’ and she said ‘Well we’ve been around a long time.’ I said ‘I could give a fuck.’ To me it’s horrible branding and sounds you know, like people who read too many books and never go out and get laid. She played with fire, she got fire.

PHAWKER: Let me finish my question here — yes, agreed. She thought of you as being this caricature but you thought of her as being this caricature, too. You thought of her as being this dreary/sexless/bra-burning/man-hating/communist/lesbian folk singer – someone who stepped out of the Shvetty Balls sketch on SNL. She asked you some mildly passive-aggressive questions about your make-up and codpieces and you felt disrespected and got your back up and the two of you went at it like cats and dogs. Now I respect both you people, and I think you two have much more common ground than either of you realize — first of all you both grew up in Jewish households of very modest means on the wrong side of the tracks in New York in the ‘60s and you both worked your asses off to get to the top of the heap in your respective professions — and when you come to Philadelphia, I would like to broker a peace accord. I will be the Kissinger that ends this Vietnam.

GENE SIMMONS: Oh no, I don’t think she saw me as a caricature, I thought your first description of what she thought was probably more a sexist and vulgar and all that stuff — you bet. You know, she pressed the button, and I went for it. You know you waive the red flag and the bull charges. Don’t waive the red flag and you know, yes I’ve got horns but I won’t charge. I’m happy to sit and speak with anybody, but I stand by my words. If somebody is a guest in your home, it is incumbent upon you to put the tablecloth on the table and be a gracious host. And when you are not, you want fire, you get fire.

PHAWKER: Fair enough, my question for you is when you are in Philadelphia, would you be willing to go with me down to the station to shake hands and call it even?

GENE SIMMONS: Well, it’s better if she comes to me.

PHAWKER: Where are you going to be?

GENE SIMMONS: Well, we are doing Wizard World.

PHAWKER: Right, I’m aware.

GENE SIMMONS: Yes, and I don’t know what the schedule is but WizardWorld.com folks know where I’m going and I’m also doing a concert at the Troc with the Gene Simmons Band. That happens to be an off time, and I have a lot of fun doing this stuff, and she is certainly welcome to come there and go “oh you know, what’s happening?” and whatever. But the first thing I do when I meet a stranger, is I go “hello”, I don’t got “so.” As soon as you go “so”, you go “okay.” This is not going to be fun for you because I’ll make sure, you know you set the tone. I’m coming to your home, you’re the one setting the tone. You want to play, I’ll play. And by the way,

I listened back to that thing. I stand by every word I said. I thought she was, well wrong. And you know, there is a similar story, when David Letterman first started on The Tonight Show on NBC, he kept poking fun at people because you know some comedians do that. The sarcastic this, and the sarcastic that. So Cher, who I’d known and lived with for awhile, didn’t want to do his show because she didn’t like the way he treated guests. And you can actually Google this, uh YouTube it rather. He kept coming out in the beginning, ‘So we’ve been trying to get Cher, who does she think she is, she doesn’t want to come and do our show.’ You know it was a routine, you know ‘Oh boy, where’s Cher’ and all this stuff. So she finally appeared on his show and he goes ‘Hey, great to have you here. Hey I just want to ask you, how come you never did our show, we kept asking you?’ And she looked at him in his face and she said ‘Because you’re a fucking asshole.’ Just look it up on YouTube.

PHAWKER: Okay.

GENE SIMMONS: By the way, I had the same reaction. It took him a while to grow into this kind of you know, the sarcasm as a soft touch, but when he had guests on, you know, you try to set the table. But in the beginning, you know, he came from the live, he was a live standup comic, and he would try to press people’s buttons. And some people liked it and some people didn’t. But, it’s worth watching that Cher Interview.

PHAWKER: I will check it out. Listen, please consider what I just said to you about brokering a peace accord and if you are interested, you know how to get back in touch with me. I would be happy to do it, I think it would be good for everybody.

GENE SIMMONS: She is welcome to come down and join the fun. But the idea of packing up my suitcases and going to visit somebody, it doesn’t work like that.

PHAWKER: Fair enough my friend, but like I said, the offer stands and otherwise though, thank you again for taking the time to do all of this. Good luck with the rest of your tour.

GENE SIMMONS: My Pleasure.

*December 21st 1973, earliest known filmed performance footage

KISS + DAVID LEE ROTH @ THE PP&L CENTER IN ALLENTOWN FEB. 4TH

[illustration by ALEX FINE]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally posted in 2007, hence the crappy-looking overcrowded layout. We’re reprising it today to mark the sad passing of Monty Python’s Flying Circus performer/writer/creator Terry Jones. Enjoy.

 BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER In 1969 Michael Palin quit smoking, a pasttime he was quite fond of, through sheer will power. Having achieved a victory for mind over matter, Palin decided to raise the stakes — he would keep a diary for the next 10 years come hell or high water. What makes this enterprise interesting to people like you and me is that the decade he chose to document would also see the rise and fall and return of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In clean, dispassionate prose spanning some 650 pages, Palin documents the trials and tribulations of the daring, off-the-wall comedy ensemble from humble-but-edgy beginnings (the name Flying Circus was foisted on the lads by the bullying BBC) to globally-recognized comedy institution (when translated for Japanese television, it became Gay Boy’s Dragon Show). A promotional tour for Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years brings Palin to the Free Library tomorrow.

Phawker: Let’s start out with a localized softball: You mention Philadelphia rather fondly in the book.

Palin: I was just looking at that. That’s the beauty of diaries — you look back in hindsight and say, “Oh I love New York, I always loved going over there” and then I read the little entry and I couldn’t wait to get out of New York and Philadelphia was like the Promised Land. The good thing about diaries is they remind you of things like that. If I hadn’t written that down I would have just carried on with this misconception that New York was more fun than Philadelphia, which clearly it wasn’t. We came to Philadelphia two or three times, I remember once, which is in the diary, we get flown in to do the Mike Douglass show and the helicopter flight from New York landed on top of a huge skyscraper, we rushed down to the studio and then back up to the helicopter and back to New York. Crazy times, not the way I’d like to travel nowadays.

Phawker: You also write in the diary that you went to the local public television station [WHYY] for a brief a 15-minute interview and it went so well you decided to do a whole special.

Palin: It was [public television who introduced Python to America] and when we went to these stations on promotional tours, it was a little like Beatlemania, albeit it on a much humbler scale. And I think we sometimes found it very difficult to play up to that. It’s one thing writing the show, but being spontaneously witty 23 times a day didn’t always work out. But I seem to remember we had a good interviewer that brought some sense out of us, as well as the nonsense.

Phawker: I was surprised to learn that the name Flying Circus was sort of foisted on you by the BBC.

Palin: Yes, we originally wanted to call it Owl Stretching Time or The Toad Elevating Moment or the Algae Banging Hour. We were determined that the show would be our own creation and that included the title. Of course, the title is very, very important. To have somebody else put a title on this mass of unconnected ideas that was Python was insulting. The BBC was very keen on Flying Circus — actually wanted to call it John Cleese’s Flying Circus. John, very wisely, was not to keen on having his name connected to a show that was untested and could be the end of his career. [laughs] So we agreed we should just make up a character and he could take all the blame if it all went badly. So I remember we all sat around one afternoon in John’s apartment off Knights Bridge. Up came the name Python as a surname. The name Mr. Python seemed very funny to us then. What will we call him? Brian Python? Eric Python? And somebody said ‘Monty’ and it for whatever reason made us laugh uproariously. So we agreed to give it the 24-hour test and see if it was as funny in the morning, and it was. So we went to the BBC and told them we wanted to call it Monty Python and they were annoyed, basically. ‘What does it mean?’ Nothing, we said. What does anything on the show mean? And so they begrudgingly agreed but with the famous last words that ‘in the future people will remember ‘Flying Circus’ but they certainly won’t remember ‘Monty Python.’

PHAWKER: And when the show aired in Japan, the title translated as “Gay Boy’s Dragon Show?”

PALIN: Correct. Oh, the names for skits when translated were hilarious: Upper Class Twit Of The Year was translated as Aristocratic Number One Deciding Guy Show.

PHAWKER: In a sentence or two can you tell me what each of your fellow Pythons, in your estimation, brought to the table that made the show what it was?

PALIN: I’ll have a try. Terry Gilliam brought American-ness, which was very important. The rest of us were all from very similar background, all from provincial English towns and cities so he brought this trans-atlantic perspective. Terry also brought the animation, which before then had never been used like that on television show, and I think in many ways that was the key factor why Monty Python was remembered. Also it enabled us, as writers, to go from one sketch which didn’t connect to another. Very very important, helped the free form.

Terry Jones, well, it’s hard, he’s my writing partner. But he had great persistence and commitment to Python, and like Terry Gilliam, very cinematically-inclined. He wanted to be a film director since the late ’60s and that pushed Python beyond being a TV sketch show. Along with Terry Gilliam and myself, he also worked out the stream of consciousness theory of Python. John and Graham weren’t so interested in the theory, they just wanted to write funny sketches with a group of people that were sympathetic. Terry Jones understood that Python could be different and saw intellectually how it could be different.

Graham Chapman, possibly the best actor of us all and had a very manic kind of inventiveness. His mind would go in directions that nobody else I knew could or would, just all these wonderfully weird connections that brought that surreal quality. Like John, he could also play the straight man. When he plays the Colonel saying, “Stop! This is all getting silly!” You don’t think of him as a comedian doing a TV show, you believe him as a colonel telling you to stop being silly. As with John [Cleese], he had this great ability to look just like the Establishment, yet send it up completely from within.

John had a certain manic intensity in his performances, which I’ve not seen anywhere else except Fawlty Towers where he waves his fist at cars that don’t work and all that. Just wonderful to behold, and a very sharp writer. There’s a lot about John that you would think would disqualify him from doing comedy: this sort of intellectual legal mind and a rather serious way of looking at the world and he could turn that a few notches one way or the other and it would produce the most wonderful comedy writing. Also, and this can’t be underestimated, in comedy size is quite important. It helped in some of those sketches it helped to have two very tall men in the cast, especially when the rest of us weren’t especially tall.

Eric [Idle]? Very quick, very deft, very fast with jokes. Loved puns, loved wordplay and could play those cheeky Cockney characters — “Nudge, Nudge” being the best of those. Outside of comedy he was also the best businessmen amongst us, understood rights and deals, which the rest of us didn’t.

PHAWKER: Funny you should say that, if you were the Beatles I would describe you as The Sensible One. At least that’s the way you come across in the diary — a certain serenity and focus. Everybody else seems to be a little bit of a victim of their own excesses — whether it’s ego or alcohol — and you seem very centered.

PALIN: Well, maybe because it’s my diary and history is written by the winners. I avoid confrontation as much as possible, I prefer to get on with people. And I have a longer fuse than, certainly, John who used to get very irritated at things. Quite early in life I realized there were things you just couldn’t change and you were banging your fist on the wall if you tried to change the way the BBC worked or whatever. Not to say I couldn’t get upset about things as well. But I brought a certain conciliatory side to Python. There were times when nobody wanted to work with anybody else or this one didn’t want to work with that one and I just thought ‘well, I like them all so much’ and I would often act as mediator on these occasions.

There was a centrifugal force that kept Python together from the beginning. I mean, we weren’t the perfect six people to write together or anything like that, we all had different lifestyles and ways of behaving, but if you can control desire to fly out from the center, it actually created something very strong, very powerful and very funny. Because the one thing we all enjoyed was making each other laugh, so I suppose I was responsible for keeping that little group together for as long as possible.

PHAWKER: One thing that struck me was that the book covers 1969 to 1979, which is pretty much Woodstock to Studio 54, and yet there is almost no mention of drug use. I think the most tawdry thing that happens is the SNL cast sneaks into your bedroom at the Essex House for a ‘smoke.’ How is this possible? Its the ’70s!

PALIN: Well, you have to be careful what you say these days — you have to say you don’t inhale. When I was editing I would ask myself, “Do I put in that so and so did a line of coke or not?” but it didn’t happen with Python. Eric knew more people that did drugs than anyone else, but we didn’t really get involved at all. Although I think Graham smoked and we all did some marijuana. But it wasn’t central to the work and I think it’s important to say that because there are people who say ‘You guys must have been high as kites when you did this’ when in fact we weren’t and with the exception of Graham, fairly sober. If anything we used alcohol more than drugs.

PHAWKER: I was a little shocked to see how narrow the profit margins were for the Pythons in pretty much all the deals they struck. And likewise it was a little disconcerting to learn that half the Pythons were bankrupt by the end of the ’70s.

PALIN: Well, we never made a great deal from the BBC shows themselves — we were paid something like 200 pounds a week. The only money we saw was from foreign sales, specifically America when PBS bought the series, but even then it wasn’t a great deal of money. And then in 1974 when we made our first movie, nobody apart from a few rock groups were willing to back us financially. We made Holy Grail for [$400,000]. That’s just the way it was, we had a very strong and devoted fan base, but there wasn’t the big numbers that delivered a lot of money. It wasn’t until after Life Of Brian that Python offered any real financial security. And as the diaries show, everyone was off doing other things — commercials, script-doctoring, voice-overs — just to support ourselves. There’s never been crazy money in Python, it’s now coming along pretty nicely but to be honest Spamalot probably pays us more than anything else we’ve done. And that’s Eric’s show.

PHAWKER: One of the most profound passages of the diary is Terry Gilliam’s explanation for Graham Chapman’s alcoholism and how it was connected to him coming to grips with his sexuality and the courage it took to come out publicly back then. I imagine being openly gay in England in the late ’60s was a pretty tough row to hoe.

PALIN: Oh, yes. There were one or two really outrageous people who had sort of gone public, but Graham didn’t fit into that mold at all. Graham was a pipe-smoking, son-of-policeman — and of course none of these things preclude you being gay, but at the time you just wouldn’t have thought Graham was gay. I mean all his work mates and friend and Cambridge chums were, as far as I know, all sort of boring and British and straight. So it was quite a big deal that Graham declared openly that he was going to live with David [Sherlock]. I mean, you weren’t courting imprisonment as you might have five or ten years prior, but there were a lot of voices against homosexuality in the media. I think it’s mentioned in the diary that The Gay News was being prosecuted and the Pythons contributed towards their defense because we thought freedom of speech was being impinged and all that kind of stuff. But in the first instance, it was brave of Graham to do that. Because of his upbringing, he was very provincial, not London-cosmopolitan at all, and once he made that decision [to come out] it really loosened him up and he said “Now I’m going to live how I want to live.” And unfortunately he’d taken to drinking quite a bit as a doctor in training; apparently the bar was open all night at Bart’s Hospital. And it became quite excessive, really, but he was a lovely, lovely man.

PHAWKER: It says on Wikipedia that the Python cast was at his side when he died, is that true?

PALIN: I was there, and John was there. I just happened to be there. He was very ill and in hospital, and I just thought, “I should go down there, it may be his last night.” And I was there with John when he died.

PHAWKER: The British are notorious for bad teeth and in the in the diary you keep a running tally in the diary of your struggles to avoid the classic “skinny English teeth.”

PALIN: It’s funny the things that wind up becoming a running theme in your life. I discovered I had some kind of periodontal condition right around the time Python was starting and so I associated that lovely time with a certain amount of pain. I’m very serious about my teeth and it was the beginning of a course of treatment that took me about 20 years. And now I know that the last thing you do is have a glass of wine after gum surgery, but in those days we just learned from our mistakes.

PHAWKER: Is is accurate to say that the Pythons were the de facto comedy analogue to the Beatles?

PALIN: People say that, I wouldn’t have said that myself, but oddly enough Python was much liked by rock groups, and it wasn’t just the Beatles. Led Zeppelin was one of the investors in Holy Grail. There was something about us that musicians particularly liked, maybe it was because we seemed a little dangerous, we weren’t particularly Establishment. They thought we were friends, and of course we were. And it wasn’t just George, Paul McCartney would stop recording his album just to watch Python when it first came on the telly back in 1969. Also, the Beatles broke up almost exactly the same month that the Pythons were formed, I think it was October 1969. Also in our material, there was a whimsical side as well as a hard side — there was Jones-Palin material as well as the Cleese-Chapman material, so there was a Lennon-McCartney dynamic. You give them the hard stuff, but mix it in with the surreal and the whimsical.

PHAWKER: How did the recent furor amongst fundamentalist muslims over the political cartoons in Danish newspapers compare to furor created amongst fundamentalist Christians when Life Of Brian came out?

PALIN: Well, there never was a fatwah and I don’t think we had a sense of being vilified we just knew that certain people hated what we did. And it wasn’t just Life Of Brian, there were voices in the media back then that just thought Python was subversive and irresponsible and cruel, and of course it wasn’t. Bits of it might have been, but as a whole it wasn’t. But it was a more benign atmosphere then. Now you see images of people burning copies of Danish newspapers or pictures of the Danish Prime Minister — if they can find one — in continents 7,000 miles away. I mean, nobody knew about Python in Asia. Our opposition were much more closer to home — they were churchmen, or anti-gay, or just thought we were trying to corrupt the youth of the world. And they made it clear they didn’t like what we were doing, but there were no threats. And I think now it is slightly different.

PHAWKER: What is the status of Python, any chance you guys will work together again?

PALIN: No plans at the moment and I can’t really see it happening, but there are different views on this. We have always said that Python was six people writing and performing resulting in a balance which for some extraordinary reason really clicked to produce an enormously diverse range of funny material. So without Graham, it’s difficult. We could get together and write, but then to perform who plays Graham’s parts? And if you bring somebody else in immediately Python isn’t quite what it was and I’m wary of that. Everyone is doing other things and so I don’t see a Python reunion on the horizon, but you never know.

VULTURE: [Carrie] caused deep worry that was somehow hidden by the movie crews’ obsession with John’s addiction rather than her own. Carrie—younger than the others—was intensely fragile. She was generous, brilliant, witty, charismatic, caring—and deeply vulnerable: friends could see that. When they all got to the Belushis’ Vineyard house, “my brother was most concerned about her. He had to carry her limp body from room to room. I guess she was conscious enough that he didn’t call an ambulance, but he had a strong sense that she was really out of it.”

It was during that spate of days on the Vineyard, that John, in a moment alone with Carrie, stared at her and said, “You’re like me. We’re not like them.” Meaning he and Carrie had an addiction propensity—a disease, though it unfortunately wasn’t acknowledged that way at the time—deeper than their friends’ ability to enjoy “recreational” drugs without paying a price. He wanted her to know that he knew this and she should know it, too. In 2009, she remembered John’s words as if they’d been uttered yesterday, she told Vanity Fair’s Ned Zeman. On the night of March 4, 1982, Carrie was back in New York with Paul. Michael O’Donoghue and his girlfriend, Carol Caldwell, were living in L.A. now, while Michael worked on the script of Easy Rider Two (which was never produced) with Bert Schneider. Carol, a writer for the edgy monthly New Times, as well as for Rolling Stone and Esquire, was writing screenplays. Carol was friends with Judy Belushi. Judy, who was now back on Martha’s Vineyard, was worried about her husband, who was staying at the Chateau Marmont, working on a script with Don Novello, best known as the SNL character Father Guido Sarducci.

Judy Belushi knew that Carol and Michael were “very close” to John, and she put Carol in charge of checking in with John every day. Penelope Spheeris, a documentary filmmaker close to Carol who knew Judy had put Carol in charge of John, called Carol at 6:00 a.m. “Did you talk to John last night?” she asked. When Carol said no, Penelope said, “I think you’d better call over to the Chateau and see if you can speak to him.” There was a short list of people whom the hotel operator was authorized to put through to his room, and Carol’s name was on it. When she was turned down, “I called Judy,” Carol recalls. It was 9:00 a.m. East Coast time, “and said, ‘I can’t get through to him.’” The Belushis’ assistant called Carol and said, “‘Carol, you’ve got to go over there. They’ve found him, with a needle in his arm.’ We knew John was terrified of needles.”

“And then the nightmare began,” Carol says. Belushi, who’d been partying the night before with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, had overdosed by way of a “speedball”—a cocaine-heroin injection, provided by a dealer named Cathy Evelyn Smith. It was nearing noon in New York when the phone rang in Paul Simon’s apartment. Another SNL staffer was there with Paul and Carrie. They were about to hop in the sauna. The friend on the phone said, “Turn on TV—now!” There was the news: John Belushi was dead. At thirty-three. MORE

If any band on Earth can deliver us from evil, it’s Redd Kross. The brothers McDonald, pride of Hawthorne, California, have been bringing sonic sunshine to punk’s heart of darkness since 1978 and their seventh full-length release, Behind the Door, is here to tell you – yeah, you! – to stop tweeting, step away from CNN, and get your ass back to the party. It’s a goddamned all-American rager and it’s not over till Redd Kross says so, which won’t be anytime soon judging by the 11 rambunctious cuts on Behind the Door, which brings them to Underground Arts on Saturday as part of a 53-city (!) fall tour with proto-grunge sludge gods the Melvins. (Steven McDonald, bassmaster in both bands, is working double-duty.)

The band’s cited inspirations for Behind the Door sound like they came right from SNL club kid Stefon: “K-pop, glitter gangs, embarrassed tweens, long-term relationships (and) a mysterious character named Fantástico Roberto.” While non-ironic adoration for all things pop cultural has been part of Redd Kross’ oeuvre since the beginning, so has their signature blend of sweet harmony and guitar-driven ferocity.

To wit: The opening track, a power-popped makeover of Henry Mancini’s “The Party,” boils over into “Fighting,” a ball of a headbanger that clocks in at a mere 2 minutes, 24 seconds. The title track, an apparent reference to the 1974 B-movie ripoff of The Exorcist (Linda Blair being a McDonald brothers’ muse) is archetypal Redd Kross: take a little Cheap Trick, mix in a lot of KISS, sprinkle with candy-coated melodies and raunchy mega-riffs, turn up to 11, and serve piping hot.

Behind the Door’s closer is another cover, a rowdy remake of the Sparks quirky “When Do I Get To Sing ‘My Way,’” and is the perfect way to end the party on a high note.  While we flounder through the Orwellian shitshow that is life in these United States at present, Redd Kross is here to remind you that somewhere, it’s a sunshine day where everybody’s smilin’and the party is just getting started. — JOANN LOVIGLIO

REDD KROSS + THE MELVINS + TOSHI KASAI @ UNDERGROUND ARTS OCT. 12TH

PREVIOUSLY: Q&A W/ Jeff McDonald Of Redd Kross

BY JONATHAN VALANIA In the last 26 years, Spoon has gone from great white hype to major-label train wreck to “the most consistently great” band of the last decade, according to Metacritic. Algorithms can tell. They are the one band upon which we can all agree. The lion’s share of the blame and the glory rests squarely on the shoulders of singer/songwriter/guitarist Britt Daniel. Spoon is essentially a one-man band that’s had 11 members come and go or stay the course since 1993. MAGNET got all Spoon hands back on deck—not just the currently Spoon-fed, but the exiles and the mutineers, the ex-girlfriend, their first fanboy, the men who recorded their albums and the inimitable Gerard Cosloy—for this brutally honest oral history of the beast and the dragon adored.

BRITT DANIEL (Spoon singer/songwriter/guitarist, 1993-present): I grew up in Temple, Texas. Population: 45,000. There weren’t a lot of Velvet Underground fans around town. My dad was really into music, and when I was finally allowed to run the record player, that kind of sorted out a lot of boredom. But it was a long time before I was allowed to. I was in a band called the Zygotes in Temple when I was in high school. But that was mostly a cover band: lots of Doors, lots of Zeppelin, Cure and Ramones. Then I moved to Austin for school, and Skellington was the first band. I also performed and recorded solo under the name Drake Tungsten. Then there was a country/rockabilly band called Alien Beats. That’s where I met Jim.

JIM ENO (Spoon drummer, 1993-present): I only knew Britt as a bass player in this rockabilly/country band. So, he asked me to go over there and check out some of the songs he was writing, and I was pretty blown away. His songs were pop, but weird and angular, too.

ANDY MAGUIRE (Spoon bassist, 1993-1996): I answered an ad in The Austin Chronicle looking for a bass player. The band clicked very fast; we were playing out within a month. Everyone is Austin was a slacker, but Jim and Britt were willing to work very, very hard to get what they want, and that was very attractive.

JIM ENO: I think we had our very first show booked on a Friday night. We all got together Thursday night and tried to think of a name, and Britt had put on one of the cards, “Spoon,” after the Can song. I think if we would have known it was gonna stick 20 years later, we might have thought a little harder about it.

GERARD COSLOY (Matador Records co-owner): I remember my girlfriend and I were killing time between “official” SXSW ’94 events, and stopped at the Blue Flamingo to see a more metal-ish combo that had been recommended. We saw Spoon instead. Other than making a mental note to give the charismatic vocalist plenty of shit for wearing sunglasses in a dark room, I thought they were awesome.

ELEANOR FRIEDBERGER (Fiery Furnaces vocalist): He used to wear sunglasses onstage because he didn’t want people to see him looking at his hands when he played guitar.

BRITT DANIEL: Eleanor was my girlfriend at the time. Anyway, getting back to Gerard — Cosloy is the kind of guy who would go see punk-rock bands play in a drag-queen bar, because that’s more interesting to him than seeing Beck, who was playing that night two doors over at Emo’s, you know? He didn’t come up to me, but someone told me that he liked us. The next year he invited us to play the Matador showcase at SXSW. And then after that happened, all these labels knew that we weren’t signed to Matador, and a couple months later we had Interscope, Geffen and Warner Bros. all trying to sign us. Which, for a band that was having difficulty getting weekend gigs in our hometown, was fucking exciting.

ANDY MAGUIRE: : It was a bit of a bidding war. They all took us to dinner.

BRITT DANIEL: I remember I ordered eggs benedict for the first time.

ANDY MAGUIRE: : Tensions were high, Britt was only 22, and it got pretty heavy—people were telling him he was a genius, and it kind of went to his head. I had more experience. I was 10 years older than him, but he didn’t want to listen to any advice, so one day they sat me down and told me they were replacing me, and I walked out. And then I got a lawsuit filed against me. They sued me for leaving the band after they fired me, and they lied and told everyone I quit. They just lied openly to their friends; even his ex-girlfriend, she said to me, “No, no, you sued him,” but she worked for a lawyer and looked it up and came back to me and said, “Oh my god, he lied to me.” Nobody really won. I mean, it killed the first album. It was a really stupid move.

JOHN CROSLIN (Spoon producer 1994–2000): The first album was recorded in my garage. Had an eight-track one-inch machine, a fairly crude set-up. But it was a blast. They were a great band for that set-up because they were pretty minimal.

BRITT DANIEL: Telephono was basically just our live show. We would just record it after work for three to four hours a night. That kind of deal. It was good, fun. It felt pro. A lot of people think it’s a picture of me on the cover but that’s Phillip Niemeyer on the cover, he was in a bunch of bands in Austin — he was just a buddy. He’s wearing, like, Dracula teeth in that photo. The title was his idea. I was always checking my messages on the phone all the time. I was like a phone guy. It was before internet. And then he crossed that with phonograph and that was Telephono.

SEAN O’NEAL (Onion A.V. Club senior editor): Freshman year of college, I started the first Spoon fan site. It was called The Sort Of Official Spoon Web Page, and it was hosted on a school server and had this mile-long URL with like a million tildes, so it was impossible to find.

ELEANOR FRIEDBERGER: I remember Britt and I took a trip to New York together and went to the Matador office, and he was very nervous about that. He loved that label; it was the epitome of cool at the time, and he was very nervous about living up to that. I remember him getting a margarita on Broadway at some Mexican place downstairs from the Matador office to steel himself before we went up.

BRITT DANIEL: I loved Gerard and loved (Matador co-owner) Chris (Lombardi), and they were putting out all my favorite bands’ records, and I thought, if we could get to be half as big as Pavement or Guided By Voices, I will be very, very happy, and things will work out in the end. Even though that record sold, like, less than 2,000 copies in its first year and was deemed very much by us and by the label as a failure, I think it was a good move.

JIM ENO: I think it was closer to 1,300, I think I found a SoundScan from the year after it came out. I think it was about 1,300. That blows my mind now—to be out on Matador and only sell 1,300 copies. And we toured a lot on that record, too. We did two tours with Guided By Voices.

BRITT DANIEL: Yeah, we did so many tours on that first record. I don’t know what the people who managed and booked us thought, but they were sending us through North Dakota, Mississippi, Alabama. It fucking sucked. It was not a fun experience. A lot of shitty nights opening for really shitty metal bands. We played for the bartenders many, many times.

JOHN CROSLIN: I filled in on bass for a few tours after Andy left. Telephono had just come out and nobody was there to see Spoon; nobody had heard of them. Some shows there were five people in the audience.

GERARD COSLOY: They had the very dubious “next-Nirvana” tag hanging around their necks without ever asking for it. Things got kinda hype-y through no fault of theirs—and I think most sensible people were suspicious. Some writers and fans alike immediately derided them as Pixies clones (a charge that seems especially hilarious today, but at the time, did Spoon no favors). And to be very fair, it should also be said that not everyone at the record label was totally behind those guys. In those days, we employed a publicist — an otherwise very talented and insightful person — who upon being told by a journalist, “Those guys kinda suck,” would’ve been apt to say, “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

ELEANOR FRIEDBERGER: The first time I saw Spoon was in the student union at UT. I was a freshman, I think, and I wanted to see them play with my boyfriend at the time, and as he said, “Oh, they sound so much like the Pixies,” and I had never listened to the Pixies, I didn’t even know what that meant, exactly.

BRITT DANIEL: There’s always, like, one storyline about an album or about a band that everyone apes, and that was ours: Pixies rip-off. The first review that I saw for that record was in Rolling Stone, and it was two stars out of five, and it was all just about the Pixies. And that kind of set the tone for the whole thing. Yeah, that wasn’t super fun. I’m not saying it wasn’t valid, you know; I love the Pixies. The cool thing is that the next record we made, Soft Effects, is still one of my favorite ones we ever did. That’s where we finally found a little bit of an identity.

GERARD COSLOY: Soft Effects felt like a big creative leap to me—really the first time those guys started using the recording studio as an instrument—a tradition they’ve built on considerably since. But there was little reaction to speak of at the time. There was so much negativity stemming from Telephono, it was super hard to get people to give Spoon a second chance.

JOSH ZARBO (Spoon bassist 1997-2000; 2002-2007): The deal with Elektra was signed after we had recorded almost all of A Series Of Sneaks. So, that record was pretty much made with Matador in the rearview mirror and Elektra not yet happening. I think Jim Eno financed that record completely.

JIM ENO: I was basically paying for the recording, since I had the day job. Near the end, it got a little hairy. It was kind of like, “I think I’m gonna get paid back for this … hopefully.”

ELEANOR FRIEDBERGER: I don’t know why Britt never gave me credit for it, but I came up with the title, He used to drive around town because he would take these secret shortcuts everywhere. I was like ‘Your life is just a series of sneaks.’

BRITT DANIEL: Most of the major-label offers that had been around a year before were gone, but this guy, [Elektra A&R guy] Ron Laffitte, hadn’t been around the first time through, and he was really big on signing us. Matador had just done a deal with Capitol, so they wanted to keep working with us. So, we had to choose between those two. Elektra offered us a lot of money—$250,000—and we were in a lot of debt, and it was like, ‘Should we try something else with this other system that we haven’t tried or go back to the system that didn’t work, which is paying us like a fifth of the money?’ It was one of the hardest decisions I had made, certainly, at that point. But we went with Elektra.

JOSH ZARBO: I remember playing the Noise Pop Festival in San Francisco — that’s where I met Ron Laffitte for the first time. He seemed like an A&R major-label guy, and I mean that in a nice way, and I mean that in a sense like he seemed like he had his shit together and he was definitely ruling the band. I remember we were backstage and somebody from Bimbo’s came back to ask us if we needed anything, and he took out a gold AmEx card and said, “Get these boys anything that they want.” I remember he took us out to eat at a really fancy restaurant, and our tour manager at the time was wearing a hoodie with holes in it and so we’re eating at this five-star restaurant and the concierge is taking our friends moth-bitten hoodie to hang up on the gold rack. It was very strange.

JIM ENO: Weirdly, he stopped returning our calls after we signed.

JOSH ZARBO: Things seemed like they really changed—it went from this guy telling us we were the greatest ever to now kind of keeping us at arm’s length. I think that right away we saw that we weren’t a priority. After we signed, we were all in New York, and we went up to Elektra at the Time Warner building, and they took up to like the 27th floor or something, and we could kind of tell they were going to show us that they were really behind the record, but really what it was was a hastily arranged pizza party.

BRITT DANIEL: A fucking pizza party.

JOSH ZARBO: It was like, “Oh fuck, Spoon is here—let’s order 20 pizzas.” We were coming in and (Sylvia Rhone, then-president of Elektra) was like, “Where’s the pizza? Why haven’t we gotten the pizza yet?” And that’s something me and Brit used to laugh about a lot. She said to me, with like a Brooklyn accent or something, she said something like, “I think we could have a lot of fun together,” and I didn’t know what to say. I was just a 24-year-old musician, you know? I wasn’t primed for the Time Warner building and meeting CEOs and stuff.

BRITT DANIEL: One time, I actually called her because I was told, “Call Sylvia and invite her to the show in New York,” so I did. I waited on hold for … I was at a McDonald’s, like, at the pay phone calling her, like, two days before we came to New York, sitting on hold for, like, I don’t know, 10 minutes or something. She finally came on. I was like, “I just wanted to let you know that we’re playing.” She goes, “You’re on the road?” And I said, “Yeah, we’re going to be playing in New York at Brownies in two days. We’d love it if you’d come.” She goes, “Oh, I know about it,” but she didn’t come. They never released a single, they never made a video, it was never released overseas. A Series Of Sneaks sold something like 2,000 copies, and within four months of it coming out, we were dropped.

JOSH ZARBO: I was concerned that maybe the band was going to stop because I could tell that Britt was living a very meager existence in a crappy apartment. They had taken small advances from Elektra because they thought that by taking a small amount of money we would be less of a liability to the label. I was concerned that maybe Britt was just not going to want to do it anymore. But then out of that is what kind of inspired him to start writing the songs that he wrote that became Girls Can Tell.

BRITT DANIEL: I felt like we were tainted goods, basically. And I guess we were. But for some reason, I didn’t stop writing songs.

MIKE MCCARTHY (producer, Girls Can Tell): I ran into Britt up there in Williamsburg. He said that he and Jim had bought an eight-track tape recorder, and had started a few recordings on their own, and would I be interested in coming down to Austin to work on music with them, to which I said, “Yes, I just need to be able to afford to do it.” So, they agree to pay my monthly child-support payment for a month to go down there and help them record, and that’s what became Girls Can Tell.

BRITT DANIEL: I felt that I was turning a corner stylistically. I was listening to a lot of oldies radio, and Elvis Costello. I started smoking pot for the first time. Maybe that had something to do with it.

JOSH ZARBO: It was less about Wire and Gang Of Four and more about Rubber Soul or Revolver or the Kinks. I remember Britt saying in MAGNET at the time that he started writing songs for himself during that time.

BRITT DANIEL: The title is a Crystals song. At that time, I was really into the idea of trying to make an old R&B kind of record. So, I was just looking through titles and liked that one. It seemed mysterious. Eleanor didn’t like that title, though. She said I was going to get backlash for it. I think she thought that I was saying, like, “Girls can tell that I have a big dick.”

ELEANOR FRIEDBERGER: [Laughs] I really don’t remember thinking it had anything to do with anything as vulgar as that. But if I did, I wouldn’t admit it now. I can remember just not liking “Girls” in the title. It seemed a little insulting.

BRITT DANIEL: I was living in New York, working temp jobs, and I remember taking my lunch break to go over to the Marriott to use their phone bank, because there was a quiet place where I could talk on the phone, calling my manager and lawyer. We would have a talk every week about shopping the album around, and every week it was the same thing—like, nobody is biting.

ROMAN KUEBLER (Spoon bassist, 2000-2002): Britt was always circling his tape around—and people were hearing it. Lots of people were hearing Girls Can Tell before it came out because we played CMJ in 2000, and there had to be 100 people there who knew all the words. I certainly remember (Merge Records co-owner) Mac (McCaughan) saying something about how he noticed how many people singing the words to an album that has not been released.

BRITT DANIEL: The record came out on Merge, and there was a story about Spoon for the first time that people wanted to talk about. Camden Joy wrote this great piece in the Village Voice that sort of set the tone, which was like, “This band made a great album on Elektra and they were dropped immediately. What is wrong with the music industry?” And then add to that that we wrote this single about it—“The Agony Of Laffitte”/“Laffitte Don’t Fail Me Now”—and it was just, like, this fucking story that’s ready to go and everybody wanted to write about, and for the first time, things started kind of happening. The first week, Girls Can Tell sold 1,200 copies, and the record before it sold 2,000 copies in a year, I was, like … I teared up. It was, like, I’m finally doing something right. Within the first year, it sold maybe 15-20,000.

JIM ENO: I remember the day the record came out; we got a little NPR thing that happened on the radio. We were driving around in the tour van, and I think we may have stopped in order to listen to it. That was unbelievable, to be able to hear people talking about our record on NPR. We had a show at the Bowery Ballroom, and I remember that every day on tour we were getting ticket-sales numbers. Every day they were increasing and increasing. We got to Chicago and we were like, “Oh my god, we just sold out the Bowery Ballroom. I can’t believe it.” Then, they added the night after, and we sold out that night, too. That was huge. Up to that point, we’d been playing in front of 60 people or so.

JOSH ZARBO: I quit before the album even came out because I was very frustrated about working with Britt. It was very difficult always for me, from day one, to be in that band. As much as I love those guys, and as much as I learned from them and the many great times I had with them, it was very difficult to work with Britt.

BRITT DANIEL: I think the real issue is that Josh and I aren’t good at being in a band together, and we’ve broken up … it’s one of those things, like a boyfriend, girlfriend that get together, break up, then they realize how much they love each other, so they try again and they realize, “Oh, this just doesn’t work.” And we’ve done that three times.

JOSH ZARBO: It was about trust and acceptance. I was never looking to take over that band or write songs or anything like that. There was something about me as a person and the kind of musician that I was that was difficult for him. I just think he thought I wasn’t cool enough or something. Which is fine, but it was very difficult to deal with. It went beyond just creatively trying to block me; he would get into personal things with me about the way I talked, the way I walked, how I was onstage, whether I played onstage with my eyes closed or open, how I moved, what I wore. It all escalated over the years of working with him where I just felt like it difficult for me to know whether to move left or right because I was so self-conscious about working with that guy. We actually had an email exchange about whether or not I could grow a beard. If I was going to grow a beard, he wanted it to look like Paul McCartney’s from the Let It Be era.

BRITT DANIEL: We just have different ideas of what it means to be in a rock band, and what that entails, and what’s cool about being in a rock band, and what bass players do on rock records, that kind of thing. Like, just a matter of playing with a pick versus not playing with a pick. I say with a pick. Because I want it to have some chunk and some aggression. Josh liked to use his fingers.

ELEANOR FRIEDBERGER: Britt’s one of those people who’s not good at relationships. He doesn’t have a family; Spoon is his life, and he’s really good at it.

JOSH ZARBO: At the same time he could be very sweet and kind. I remember at that Seattle show he announced that it was my last show and after the last chord he played on stage at the end of a show in front of 6,000 people he laid down his guitar and he gave me a humongous hug.

BRITT DANIEL: Josh and I are in touch now. We’re good buddies, and I love that dude, but we’re just not good at being in a band together.

ERIC HARVEY (Spoon keyboard, guitar, percussion, backing vocals, 2004-present): There are some bands where, if you have five of their records, chances are the same people are playing the same instruments on all of those records. Spoon is definitely not one of those bands.

ROMAN KUEBLER: The low point for me was when we did a weekend in Las Vegas. It was a really isolating experience. I remember really not having any money at the time and getting a cab to the strip was $25 and stuff like that. And it was 108 degrees out, so I couldn’t really go outside, I went out one time and it was just unbearable. I think for about two days I sat in the hotel room and then showed up for sound check, went back to the hotel room, ate at the buffet at least three times a day, and we played the shows which were extremely boring because there were very few people there, it was a casino. That was one of the last things I did with them. It was pretty brutal, I hated it.

BRITT DANIEL: We didn’t tour a lot for Girls Can Tell. My idea was, “Let’s strike now while the iron’s hot.” I went up to New London, Conn., and wrote (the songs that became Kill The Moonlight) in solitude. I wanted to go somewhere that wasn’t hot, and Eleanor lived in New York, and things were still kind of on/off with her. And I just wrote every day, and was in solitude. I listened to that Clientele record, Suburban Light, constantly.

MIKE MCCARTHY: He was really coming into his own by this point. You can hear the way with his guitar sound—that janky “jank jank jank jank” thing, and the bass would go “boom boom boom.” It’s all angular, jagged kind of playing. Even the keyboard parts. He’s very insistent. When he plays a piano—I don’t know how familiar you are with piano, but there are pedals on a piano that give you sustain or not. And he will not ever play with the sustain pedal. He’s like, “I’m not doing that. It sounds too luscious, and lush, and slick.” Back then, I think that Britt really would work closely with me, and we agreed on a lot of stuff, you know? Later on, I think he wanted to do what he wanted to do and didn’t care what I thought as much anymore. I don’t mean to say that a bad thing; I just think that’s what it turned into.

JIM ENO: We were recording the hand claps for “The Way We Get By,” and he set his phone to vibrate and put it on a chair next to us. I remember as we were clapping and stomping, his phone started ringing, kept moving closer to the edge, and we were both looking at it. Right near the end the song, it falls off and makes a very loud bang. But we kept going. And if you listen to the record, you can hear his phone dropping at the 2:12 mark. We thought it was really cool when we listened to the playback, so we left it in.

MIKE MCCARTHY: I insisted that Jim and Britt play “Jonathan Fisk” together live. And I had them play it over and over until we got the most aggressive, punk take we could get. I think they actually got kind of annoyed with me, because I kept making them play it over. They got mad, and fired up, and we got a great take.

JIM ENO: I remember doing a lot of takes, and I don’t think he picked the right one. [Laughs] I thought one of the other takes was better.

BRITT DANIEL: In middle school, Jonathan Fisk [not his real name] decided that he wanted to terrorize me, beat me up. He was always challenging me to fight, and I was like, “I actually think you’re kind of funny, I don’t want to fight” [laughts]. But he was just so mean about it, so we got into some fights after school. By the time he got to high school, being the angry little metal head was not working for him any more. He became a lot more liberal, and got really into The Cure. Eventually I gave him a bottle of vodka, and we became buddies, and then years after that, he started coming to Spoon shows.

ERIC HARVEY: I ended up living in this Austin apartment complex where Britt was my neighbor. This schizophrenic guy lived in the apartment in between, and this guy would knock on our door in the middle of the night and accuse us of, like, pouring gas in his apartment and shining lights on him and all kinds of crazy stuff. Britt and I bonded over that, and compared notes on what this guy had been doing lately. This is about a year before Gimme Fiction came out.

ALEX FISCHEL (Divine Fits/Spoon guitarist/keyboardist, 2013-present): The first time I heard of Spoon was when Gimme Fiction came out. I think I was in ninth grade.

BRITT DANIEL: The album cover was the art director Sean McCabe’s idea, based on Little Red Riding Hood. It’s his girlfriend wearing a red hood. He showed me a bunch of the photos from the shoot, and I was like, “This seems very literal.” And then he found this one, and he cropped it so you couldn’t really tell what was going on. I love it. It’s my favorite Spoon cover.

MIKE MCCARTHY: Most of their records have been recorded in a piecemeal-type fashion where one part is done at a time. I don’t know if people know that. “My Mathematical Mind” was one of the only tracks I’ve ever recorded with them where it was actually a band in a room playing the track.

BRITT DANIEL: Josh Zarbo was in a heavy-metal band called Requiem, that’s where that line comes from.

JOSH ZARBO: I was in a heavy-metal band called Requiem, yes. He ended up using that band name in the lyrics for “Sister Jack.” Which I thought was great, and the guys from Requiem thought was just incredible that that band was kind of going to be set in stone to a Spoon lyric like that.

MIKE MCCARTHY: I was really surprised that “I Turn My Camera On” became as popular as it did, because to me it seemed very repetitive and simple. I thought it was such a drastic turn by that point; I wasn’t quite sure how it would be received.

BRITT DANIEL: Gimme Fiction did well. By this point, each time we put out a record, it sold twice as many as the one before. I think it probably sold about 120,000-150,000 copies.

ERIC HARVEY: I just remember the first show I played with them was at this place called Acropolis in northern Oklahoma. I was just hanging out in the alleyway afterward, and these kids come up and ask me for an autograph and hand me a copy of Kill The Moonlight to sign, and I was like, “This is my first show, and I didn’t even play on that album.” They were like “Who cares?” By the middle of that tour, we had graduated from a van to a tour bus.

ERIC HARVEY: My most distinct memory of playing Letterman for the first time was the union guys making me feel like I was always in the way. I remember Paul Shaffer complimenting me on my clothes afterward and saying, “You’re very well-dressed for a young man. I don’t see that too often anymore.” I wasn’t sure how to take that coming from Paul Shaffer.

JIM ENO: One of our worst gigs ever was in Atlanta in one of those big summer radio festivals. We were right after this band called Heavy Mojo, who were sort of like Limp Bizkit. During their set, the festival was selling plastic bottles of beer. They would drink half of it and throw the bottle at the stage. This was before we even came on. I was like, “Boy, this is gonna be bad.” Right when we started, everyone started pelting us with these bottles. I just remember looking at Britt. He was singing into the mic and moving his head like two inches left and two inches right as these bottles are coming at his head. He kept singing and everything. I remember seeing this beer come right at my head from about 50 yards away. I was just staring at it.

MIKE MCCARTHY: The working title for “The Ghost Of You Lingers” was “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga,” because the keyboard goes ga ga ga ga ga ga ga, and that’s where the album title came from later on.

BRITT DANIEL: Why is it five Gas and not four or six? Five just sounds better. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. That sounds better than Ga Ga Ga Ga.

MIKE MCCARTHY: I was trying to retain the unique character of Britt’s voice, his writing style, and his playing style, no matter what instrument it is. We started bringing in (bassist) Rob (Pope) and the other guys to play on stuff, and there was a lot of interaction from the other guys on the record and trying to incorporate them in there. And then you sit back and listen, and not to … I don’t want to downplay anything anybody did, but at the end of the day, the character of Britt’s voice, writing and playing style is the gold of that band. He’s very adamant about style, you know? Like, you know, all downstrokes on the bass. No upstrokes at all. Make sure you play with a pick. Don’t play bass without a pick. When you do guitar parts, it’s all downstrokes. Things like that. If there’s something that doesn’t fit in—no matter how great it is—if it doesn’t support the vibe, if it takes away from it, then it’s not a good part. We don’t want it. And so there WAS a lot of time spent, you know, with other people doing things that wound up getting erased.

BRITT DANIEL: “The Underdog” kind of felt like a hit. It debuted at number 10 on Billboard, and so it felt like we had shit going on.

ERIC HARVEY: We were definitely playing our biggest shows; we were either headlining festivals or close to headlining festivals. The whole thing was just a step up—that was the first album where we had songs on the radio. So, that definitely brought out a lot of people.

ELEANOR FRIEDBERGER: For me, the biggest thing was when they played at Radio City Music Hall and Britt asked me to sing a couple of songs with them. That was when I realized how big a band they were.

BRITT DANIEL: The week before we played Radio City Music Hall, I was watching this cartoon where Donald Duck does a show at Radio City Music Hall, and I’m like, “That’s me. I am Donald Duck.” That just made it feel even more legendary.

ROB POPE (Spoon bassist, 2007-present): Playing SNL felt like a giant party all the time. Everyone was so happy and the staff was very cordial; it felt like they wanted us there, which was awesome. We had multiple people come up to us, and at that point it was kind of a transition period for SNL, too. I remember Fred Armisen being like, “Awesome, we’re finally getting some cool bands.” I bonded with him because I used to go see Trenchmouth at a VFW hall in Kansas City. I was like, “I know that you’re a good drummer because I use to go see Trenchmouth.” He’s like, “What? No one who’s ever been on SNL knows about Trenchmouth.”

JIM ENO: Chevy Chase was watching us during soundcheck, which was pretty insane. I had read the oral history of SNL right before. When it was over, he said something like, “You guys sound pretty good, but you’re playing in the wrong key.”

ERIC HARVEY: I remember you couldn’t quite tell if it was a compliment or not. But it was Chevy Chase, so it’s just amazing. The other funny thing that I remember about that show (is what) they do when the credits are rolling, when everyone is kind of hugging and they are all acting like they just became best friends all week long—most of the cast are just faking it, like they are just saying completely weird shit or just mumbling. That whole thing is a total put-on, but it’s kind of awesome.

BRITT DANIEL: The week that Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga came out and was, like, number 10, it felt like we were this fucking machine that was just firing on every cylinder and, like, we were playing Saturday Night Live, and we were playing these huge shows. Success beyond my wildest dreams, you know? And I remember thinking at that point, like, “I’ve done it,” you know? Like, I remember thinking that my favorite song on that record was “The Ghost Of You Lingers,” which was the weirdest one, and I decided that from now on I should just do the weirdest stuff I can think of. That’s what I want to do right now. Why do I need to prove anything else, you know? Why don’t we just try to do it a different way and see what happens?

ROB POPE: We decided to not have any bridges. We all kind of looked at each other and were like, “Fuck, man, bridges are awful. Fuck bridges. Let’s not do any bridges this record.”

ERIC HARVEY: Transference to me immediately felt like, “I’m not really hearing a radio song on here. I’m not hearing the song that everyone is going to be dancing to.” It’s definitely a fragmented sound. It’s intentional, and it’s very cool, but I think it’s hard for some people to wrap their head around.

ROB POPE: I really enjoy the record. Now it’s become, like, our ugly stepbrother for whatever reason, which it shouldn’t be.

ALEX FISCHEL: I love Transference, and I hate that people talk shit on it. I think it’s an amazing record—all dark and kind of bruising. It sounds very personal and intimate.

ERIC HARVEY: Some of the songs were really hard to play live in a way that offered the same energy as the recording.

ROB POPE: The last leg of the tour was in Europe, and I remember I only saw the sun once in like two and a half fucking weeks. That whole tour felt like an Anton Corbijn Joy Division photo shoot. That was kind of a sign. I remember being in the back of bus talking to Britt, and we were like, “What should we do next?” It was an open discussion with him saying, “Maybe we should take a break for a minute and not schedule anything.” I think it was the first time that happened in Spoon’s career, to not have anything impending on the calendar, which needed to happen.

JIM ENO: We had just been working so hard, for so long. It just got to us, you know?

ERIC HARVEY: Toward the end of the tour, I just remember Britt saying, like, “I think this band needs to go away for a while,” and it didn’t totally shock me.

BRITT DANIEL: I remember saying to everyone, like, “We’re signed up to do a year, year and a half of touring, and maybe this record just doesn’t want to do a year, year and a half.” I was drinking more. I definitely saw that pattern emerging where you drink a lot to get through the show, and then the next day you feel hung over and shitty, and then in order to feel good enough to do a show the next day, you start drinking and just keep drinking.

ERIC HARVEY: It didn’t surprise me that he would want to do side projects with other people, because a lot of Spoon stuff rides on his shoulders. For him to be able to do a project where he wasn’t the guy in the spotlight 24/7, I could see how that could be a big relief.

BRITT DANIEL: The biggest difference between Spoon and Divine Fits for me is that I’m not writing all the songs. I was feeling a little stressed at the end of Transference, feeling like this is a lot of weight I’m carrying. I would love to just be playing bass in someone else’s band. Let them carry the weight and I can still enjoy the music.

ERIC HARVEY: I always knew that Spoon would be making another record—it was just going to be a matter of time.

BRITT DANIEL: We recorded They Want My Soul at Dave Fridmann’s Tarbox Road Studios, deep in the woods in Cassadaga, N.Y., which is maybe an hour and a half from Buffalo. It’s in the middle of nowhere.

ERIC HARVEY: My hometown is an hour away from there. The idea of recording a record in the woods is very appealing to me, and whenever I read about bands who are like, “We all lived in this cabin in the woods and did a record,” I’m like, “I wish Spoon would do that, but we’re all a bunch of city slickers. It’s not gonna happen.” Careful what you wish for. Every day there was, like, three feet of snow or something.

BRITT DANIEL: We were there when the polar vortex was going on, so it was snowing, and it was intense. It felt like The Shining after like a night or two.

ERIC HARVEY: Before I showed up Jim texted me to say it felt like “The Shining” out there. I don’t think Alex had ever seen snow!

ROB POPE: It got a little weird. I showed up one day and I think Britt and Jim had been there for a few days, and I looked in the fridge and there was half a packet of hot dogs and a couple of beers, and that’s all. I was like, “Jesus Christ.” And those guys had more facial hair than I’ve ever seen on them in their entire life. I didn’t even know those guys could grow beards. I was like, “Is everything OK? What’s going on here?”

JASON DIETZ (Metacritic): We decided to highlight the top overall artists of the past 10 years … and the band topping the list was a surprise to us as well, albeit a pleasant one … Spoon may not be the most prolific band of the decade, but they were the most consistently great.

SEAN O’NEAL: There is next to no dead weight on any of their albums. It’s an incredible batting average. The one word that comes up often in Spoon reviews is “solid”—every time they release an album, it’s solid, their career is solid, their songwriting is solid. There’s no holes in it.

ROMAN KUEBLER: Britt’s got a gift with that voice and couple his great voice with being able to write great tunes and after being thrown into an adverse situation, where the music that you make has been rejected so you’re put in a position where you’ve got to innovate and you’ve got to develop, you’ve got to be better than you are, you know? Britt certainly rose to the occasion.

BRITT DANIEL: I can’t think of too many bands that have had our trajectory: The first two records are abject commercial failures, we’re basically critical pariahs, nobody liked us, and then somehow we turned it around. But I never think about the past; I’m always thinking about what I’m doing right now and what comes next. I never think about what happened in 1997 or whatever unless I’m in an interview. It hasn’t been a bad way to spend the second half of my life. It’s been a serious improvement on the first half, all told. Despite everything, I’m still obsessed with making records and otherwise being in a rock ‘n’ roll band.

SPOON + BECK + CAGE THE ELEPHANT @ BB&T PAVILION AUG. 21ST

EDITOR’S NOTE: This Q&A originally published on May 18, 2018. We are reprising it now in advance of Damien Jurado’s performance at Johnny Brenda’s Friday May 17th in support of his new album, In The Shape Of The Storm.

BY BRIAN HOWARD Damien Jurado is back. That statement is more literal than figurative. With his brand new album, The Horizon Just Laughed (Secretly Canadian), Jurado—the heart-on-his-sleeve indie folker who’s spent the last two-plus decades honing his signature style of spare, probing songs that are at once hauntingly beautiful and emotionally devastating—has returned to the real world, in a way. Jurado’s three previous albums, starting with 2012’s Maraqopa, were inspired by a dream that took place in a fictional land of the same name. The Horizon Just Laughed, however takes place in much more recognizable locales, with references to familiar places like the Pacific Northwest (where Jurado had long lived)—including the ethereal heartstring-tugger “Over Rainbows and Rainier” (SEE BELOW)—and characters, including Thomas Wolfe, Percy Faith and Ray Conniff. But lovers of Jurado’s strange, alternate-reality wanderings need not fear that Jurado’s just playing it straight. The singer reveals that this album, too, has been inspired by a dream. It features some Billy Pilgrim/Quantum Leap-style time hopping—and deeply Freudian signals about the singer’s eventual move to Los Angeles, which is where Jurado was when Phawker caught up with him via phone ahead of [his May 18th] show at Johnny Brenda’s.

DISCUSSED: Dream logic, Henry Mancini, time travel, Kurt Vonnegut, Mel’s diner, Mantovani, Chevy Chase, Percy Faith, Brian Wilson, heaven, Thomas Wolfe, Mount Ranier, Flo, Armageddon, Tony Robbins, moving to California, moving sidewalks, Maraqopa, Ray Conniff, and trademarking the rain.

PHAWKER: The three albums directly preceding the brand new album were, according to the lore, inspired by a single dream. It’s my understanding that the latest album is also inspired by a dream? How does all of this dream-inspiration stuff work?

DAMIEN JURADO: The dream that inspired this new record is very much a trailer. My dreams are more like trailers, they’re not these long, drawn-out epics. How do I get a trilogy out of a trailer? I have no idea, but I did. My dreams are very snapshot-oriented—sometimes still pictures, sometimes moving pictures—just enough for me to get a grasp on the narrative, if that makes any sense to you.

PHAWKER: I’m following you so far.

DAMIEN JURADO: So, yeah. Man boards plane in nineteen fifty-whatever—or forties—and is bound for a city. He’s the last to get off the plane, and when he gets off, he realizes that he is in a different time period. So, if he takes off in 1956, he’s going to be landing in 1972. If he boards the same plane, he will go to a different location in the United States, and a different era. And he’s having conversations with people he sees on television. He’s having internal dialogue with composers he might know or actors he’s familiar with. The theme of this is that there is no home—home is over. Home is an over concept—he’s never going back. No matter how many planes he boards, no matter who he talks to, he’s never going back. And I think at this point, if this were to happen to me, I’d start to question whether I was even alive or not.

PHAWKER: Are you a Kurt Vonnegut reader?

DAMIEN JURADO: I am not a reader period. I don’t read fiction at all. [laughs]

PHAWKER: I ask because his novel Slaughterhouse-Five features a character, Billy Pilgrim, who is quote-unquote “unstuck in time,” and he hops around through different eras, which is very similar to what you were just describing. Anyway, a lot of the song titles on the record are names of people, like the composer Percy Faith and character actor Marvin Kaplan. Are these people that the protagonist of the dream is popping in on?

DAMIEN JURADO: Well, he’s not popping in on. He’s just sort of talking to them, by way of his own imagination.

PHAWKER: So based on this idea that “home is an over concept,” your song “Thomas Wolfe”… I guess that’s a pretty direct reference to the novelist who famously wrote You Can’t Go Home Again.

DAMIEN JURADO: That is actually a Chevy Chase reference from a 1970s-era Saturday Night Live bit that he did on the SNL news. And he closed out with—I don’t remember what he was even talking about—but he said, ‘Well, I guess Thomas Wolfe was right: You really cannot go home again.’ I do know that that is a Thomas Wolfe reference, but I am referencing Chevy Chase referencing Thomas Wolfe.

PHAWKER: So, I have a question that I thought sounded pretty weird, and I wasn’t sure I was going to ask it, but now that you’ve told me the album’s backstory, I’m asking it. You’ve got a song called “Marvin Kaplan,” and Marvin Kaplan was an actor best known, if he was known at all, for his role as a telephone lineman on the 1970s Linda Lavin sitcom, Alice, which was set in a suburban Phoenix diner. A character named Alice pops up in that song. In the song right after that, “Lou-Jean,” there’s an actual diner and fluorescent skies in a town called Apache, which is a ghost town in Arizona. And the next song is called “Florence-Jean,” which is the full first name of the character on that show, Flo, whose enduring contribution to pop culture is the phrase “kiss my grits.”

DAMIEN JURADO: That’s right.

PHAWKER: So… is this really a three-song arc about the TV show Alice? [laughs]

DAMIEN JURADO: It is not. That is a good question. I love that you’re asking this. So, during the writing of this album, I was watching a shit-ton of television. I don’t watch modern-day TV, most of the TV I watch is from another era, anywhere from the ’50s and going on until the early ’80s; that’s where it kind of ends for me. But yeah, obviously during that period of my writing, I was watching a lot of Alice, and during my watchings of the show, I start to feel a lot of connection happening with what’s happening in my life—also to the character I’m writing about. To give you kind of a backstory, during my upbringing I was moved around from state to state continually; I never had a sense of what home was, ever. And the one thing that remained consistent throughout my childhood was that, whether I was going from Phoenix to Houston, or Houston to Seattle, the shows were consistent, and the characters were consistent. The people and the landscapes and the environment could change, but the shows were my consistency. So, there’s that influence. But during this time, I found that my mind was wandering a lot—to the pay phone inside the diner in the show. Every time it rang, I caught myself wondering if it was me calling the diner. Like some other me. Some sort of parallel-universe-me calling the diner. So, the reality was that part of me realized that this is filmed in a television studio; but there’s another side of me that is not aware of that, where it is very much a reality, and that side doesn’t want to accept the fact that what I’m watching is on a TV show, but me peering into this alternate world. Does that make any sense?

PHAWKER: Yeah.

DAMIEN JURADO: So, I began to really focus in on the extras in the background. Who was that guy getting coffee at the table? What was his name? What was his deal? What’d he do for a living? Was he married? I wonder what his house looks like. I’d go down these rabbit holes, you know. That’s kind of how the Marvin Kaplan-Alice thing took off. I started building narratives around just human episodes.

PHAWKER: Interesting.

DAMIEN JURADO: [laughs].

PHAWKER: [laughing] This interview has gotten more X-Files than I’d expected. So, is this an autobiographical album? Are you the person in this dream?

DAMIEN JURADO: Yes. I’ll say yes to the first question, and to the second, it is me. I wanna say it’s me coming from another time, but it is me. His name isn’t Damien Jurado, I don’t know what his name is.

PHAWKER: But it’s another iteration of you.

DAMIEN JURADO: On the album I reference to him by the name “Q.”

PHAWKER: The song “Over the Rainbows and Rainier” has got to be one of the most beautiful songs I’ve heard in a while. It’s also got some pretty heavy biblical themes. Is this a song about the end of the world, about Armageddon?

DAMIEN JURADO: You know, yes, in the way that it’s about ending. When I say lines like “We waited for Armageddon to go down,” Armageddon is a very loose term in my mind. It doesn’t mean biblically, it’s more that I’m talking about the shit about to go down. Now here’s what’s crazy: This album, although it was written over a year ago, ended up being very prophetic, and I still can’t wrap my brain around it. You know, the lyric “Over Rainbows and Rainier”; if you asked me two years ago, would I have ever left Washington State, I would have laughed and been like “Oh, hell no!” If you would have said a year ago, “Would you ever move to California, or anywhere else,” I’d be like “Oh, god no.” And that ended up happening, I left. I went over Rainier and I left. It’s funny. When I’ve talked about leaving to go on tour, I’ve always referred to it as “leaving the walls of the Pacific Northwest.” The mountains are pretty much like walls: the Cascades, the Olympics, Rainier, St. Helens: These are all walls to me. This song is me going over the wall.

PHAWKER: It’s almost like you knew, on some level, what was coming.

DAMIEN JURADO: I had no idea it was coming.

PHAWKER: I was thinking that “Over Rainbows and Rainier” almost sounds like a metaphor for death, or going to “Heaven.” With that in mind, there’s also a lot of bleak imagery in “The Last Great Washington State”: The building’s on fire, the sky gets turned off like a light. And you ask, “What good is living if you can’t write your ending?” It does sound very much like a goodbye.

DAMIEN JURADO: It is. And what’s crazy is that I didn’t even know it. You know, when I’m confronted with a line that says, “What good is living if you can’t write your ending,” I’m telling you, man, to even say that line, it really hits me emotionally, because I believe that’s true. Really. What the fuck is the point? There’s a line in the song: “You’re always in doubt of the truths you’re defending”? God, yeah, that is me, that was me. I always had to defend everything I was thinking or feeling. … This time last year I started watching these self-help videos, and some of these people were motivational speakers, like Tony Robbins and Les Brown. And they all have the exact same question: What is it that you want out of your life? Are you living the life that you want to live? And I just kept saying, “No, I’m not.” Now, if I’m saying no, well then what is it that you want? And even if you don’t know what you want, even if you have a smidgen of what you want, walk in that direction, and take a chance.

PHAWKER: So, you’re in California now. Was it the step you needed to take to live the life you wanted to be living?

DAMIEN JURADO: You know, that’s a very complex answer. All I can say about it is… I’ll say this: Love brought me to California. Love for my own life, for my own sanity, love for another person. Love. That’s what brought me to California, which I think is very big and powerful.

PHAWKER: Absolutely. In the song, “Percy Faith,” there’s a lot of angst about, to put it broadly, how things are and where things are going, which feels like a part of this personal journey you’re describing. You talk about rioting in the street, you talk about Seattle trademarking the rain. How people never look you in the eye, there’s no need to talk, the sidewalks walk for you. What does Percy Faith signify for you in this?

DAMIEN JURADO: This isn’t just Percy Faith. In this song, I’m talking about people like Allan Sherman, I’m talking about Ray Conniff, and these are people, in my opinion, that when we’re talking about the greats in music, we’re so quick—and honestly, it’s so cliché—even if deservedly [to worship] The Beatles, The Beach Boys, blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah, xyz blah blah blah, who cares? We’re not talking about innovators. And you know what’s funny? If you ask—and I know this for a fact because I’ve seen these interviews—if you talk to people like Brian Wilson, Brian Wilson will tell you, first and foremost, he is taking cues from people like Ray Conniff, like Percy Faith, like Mantovani, like Henry Mancini. It wasn’t Phil Spector. Phil Spector was of his time, no doubt about it. But, Brian Wilson was very much inspired by these very modern-day pop arrangers. And you can listen—you can put on a Ray Conniff record and be like “Oh, I get it. I now understand where the fuck he was going with Pet Sounds, or Smile, because this all makes sense now.” Now, on the flip-side of that, the commentary that I’m talking about with Seattle’s made a trademark on the rain, that’s a direct reference to Amazon. People never look you in the eye, obviously a smart phone thing. Sidewalks that walk for themselves: airports, escalators, you name it. Because of the Internet, I know everything, but yet I don’t know the guy who works at the corner store that I go to every damn day of my life.

PHAWKER: Having spent three records telling the Maraqopa story, was it liberating to make a record outside of that story arc?

DAMIEN JURADO: Yes, it was. I recently told this journalist working for the Foreign Press that it’s funny because me and the protagonist of Maraqopa have something in common, which is [that] we stayed there too long. We weren’t supposed to be there that long. I did, and it made me unhealthy. I don’t know how else to explain it, other than that I stayed there too long, so to move on, finally leave and sort of move away from that is very liberating.

PHAWKER: Why did you move around so much growing up?

DAMIEN JURADO: A lot of it, honestly, man, had to do with family circumstances. I basically had a father who wasn’t very present in my life, and a mother who wanted to chase him around the country. And during that time, neither of them could decide on a career, what the hell they wanted to do. My parents are polar opposites, but the one thing they have in common is that they are very nomadic. They love to move around, on the drop of a dime, and nothing’s going to hold them back. The trait that I pick up from them is determination. Once they decide something, good luck getting them to waver on their decision. If my mom or my dad decided, “All right. I’m moving to Arizona next week,” that’s what we did. Middle of the school year, goodbye everybody, see you later, have a nice life, see you never, you know, I’m moving to Phoenix. And then, the next year again, mid-school-year, “Hey, I’m going to go to law school in Houston.” All right, goodbye everybody, see you never, moving to Houston. And it was repeating itself over and over and over again.

PHAWKER: You were in Seattle for a good while, am I correct?

DAMIEN JURADO: Thirty-three years.

PHAWKER: Do you think that you stayed in the same place that long as a reaction to that?

DAMIEN JURADO: That’s a good question. I don’t know why. How about this for an answer: When you spend your whole life moving around all the time, you want to finally just stop. And for me, with as much moving as I did, not just from state to state, but within the state I was living—take Arizona, for instance: we lived in Surprise, then Glendale, then Phoenix. We’re going to move to Seattle, Washington, and then we’re going to move to Grays Harbor, and then we’re going to move back to Seattle. So that is basically my existence. I didn’t know it was always looking for that place to land and say, “Enough is enough. I just can’t do this shit anymore.” But I can say I’m home now.

PHAWKER: That is nice to hear.

DAMIEN JURADO: It feels good.

DAMIEN JURADO PERFORMS @ JOHNNY BRENDA’S FRIDAY MAY 18TH

From the Phawker archives, we present this ode to the high priestess of punk written by Amy Z. Quinn, circa 2007, to mark Patti Smith’s induction into the Rock N’ Roll Hall Of Fame:

“She’s hardly the most famous performer to ever come out of Jersey — The Boss and The Chairman Of The Board still hold those titles — but without a doubt, Patti Smith, the High Poetess of Punk, remains the greatest communicator of the kind of nameless electric angst that drives Kids In Search Of Something to head north on the Jersey Turnpike and never look back. When Patti beat it out of Gloucester County, fleeing a factory job and a year short of her degree at then-Glassboro State Teacher’s College, she was armed with a book of Rimbaud poetry bought on a used-book table in Philly, not dreams of becoming a rock star. In interviews, she’s said she didn’t know what she was looking for back then, but she knew it wasn’t to be found in South Jersey. Some things never change.

From Interview Magazine:

Q: How did you discover Rimbaud?

PATTI SMITH: I found him in a Philadelphia bus depot when I was sixteen. I remember seeing a copy of Illuminations for sale on a table of used books. Of course, Illuminations is a great word, but what I was really taken by was the cover. It was a beautiful picture of Rimbaud. That’s why I got the book. When I opened it up, I didn’t really understand it. It didn’t compute. But still, somehow, I knew this was the perfect language. It looked like it glittered. I knew someday I would decipher it. So I carried the book around with me.

My first glimpse of Patti came in April, 1976, when I was barely four years old and she appeared on Saturday Night Live on a night when my sisters were stuck at home babysitting and let me stay up late enough to watch. Wraithlike, raging, all elbows and sharp angles, she scared the shit out of me singing “Gloria,” especially that blasphemous declaration: Jesus died for someone’s sins but not mine. Omigod, I remember thinking, she did NOT just say that! These days, I’m no longer afraid of Patti Smith, but sometimes, if I hear “Gloria” on the right kind of day, I still shiver at that opening line. Maybe in her youth it was a pronouncement against religion, but now, after the years in between, after the time she spent raising her children away from rock and roll, it finally makes sense to me: only you commit your sins, and only you can redeem them.”

We have a pair of tickets to see Patti Smith at the Met Philly tomorrow night. To qualify to win, all you have to do is sign up for our mailing list (see right, below the masthead). Trust us, this is something you want to do. In addition to breaking news alerts and Phawker updates, you also get advanced warning about groovy concert ticket giveaways and other free swag opportunities like this one! After signing up, send us an email at Phawker66@gmail.com telling us a much, with the magic words PISS FACTORY in the subject line, along with the answer to the following Patti Smith trivia question: what Philadelphia neighborhood did Patti Smith reside in as a child? Please include your full name and a mobile number for confirmation. Good luck and godspeed!

Patti Smith – Gloria (Live SNL 1976) from Eric Hatton on Vimeo.

PATTI SMITH PERFORMS @ THE MET PHILLY MONDAY APRIL 29TH 8 PM