Pinball, Smash Hits, and Whiplash Soul: The Bellrays
an interview with Tony Fate and Bob Vernum

In the time of impending war, with people practicing wearing gas masks, what should drive people to go see music, what’s the point?

Tony: Well, if you think it’s more fun to sit at home and worry, then you can just do that. I mean, I could sit at home and worry about the fact that I am a diabetic and I gotta take insulin twice a day and I’ll probably die before my friends, but I don’t sit around and worry about that. There are just so many things you can handle in your brain, and I don’t see rock’n’roll as just some release form, like some people just see it as an excuse to go and get drunk all the time…

Like escapism?

Tony: Escapism. It can be that. It’s a multi-faceted entity and it can be utilized in a lot of different ways, and uh, one of those ways is to look into yourself. Use it as a doorway to see your own soul. It’s kind of a mirror in a lot of ways. And if George Bush would do that, maybe he wouldn’t declare war. I mean, that’s a pie in the sky idea, but we’re all human beings. George Bush is not as human as the rest of us, but we are human beings, and it can start a chain of events. If one person comes and sees the Bellrays and gets real turned on by it, maybe they are not a musician, but they will go home and they will go to their fast food restaurant, or the restaurant that they work in, and they might cook something the didn’t think about before. Some guy goes in and eats that and says, “This is the greatest hamburger I’ve ever eaten in my life!� Then he feels a lot better, then he goes home and sits on his computer and he writes an article for the local punk zine, and maybe he just starts thinking about things he’s never thought of before, and it’s just a chain of events. Somebody reads that, then they’ll write a song that’s a little bit different. And somebody says, I don’t write songs but I wonder if I can do something to help the homeless and it just spreads out…

It channels the energy in unexpected ways?

Tony: Yes. And that is the whole idea of punk rock. When punk rock first happened in the mid-1970s, people…Well, it wasn’t just a musical thing. It was touching literature, filmmaking, and art, and fashion, and a lot of things that are just seen as pop culture but they have a lot of deeper resonance and it has degenerated into just pop culture, but it didn’t start that way, and the seeds have spread out quite a bit, and the wheel starting with punk rock is still here and it’s affecting a lot of things.

You’ve said before that the Bellrays’ live shows are like a conversation, with a level of intent and breathing space.

Tony: Yeah. Well, yeah, we approach our music that way, the songs and the show because not to sound all new agey and spacey and all that, but you have to get a vibe going with other people or else you’re just standing up there being television, not the band Television, but a TV set. This whole idea of music being a spectacle that you should look at and be able to turn off and on at will just kind of runs counter to the way I think and the way the rest of the band thinks. It’s more of a living force.

How does that relate back to your love of painters like Jackson Pollock, in terms of the difference between cerebral (minimalism) and animalistic (action painters)?

Tony: Well, there’s an amount of cerebral quality to what we are doing but I think we are more in tune with the animal side, which is just the action part of it. Like Jackson Pollock was dubbed an action painter, and I think we are action musicians. We play action music, not that every single thing we do has to be blasting loud on ten at one hundred miles an hour, even quiet things can have a lot of action to them. Stasis is a form of action. It’s a pause in the action. I think we are directly linked to that kind of thought, which has a lot of parallels with a lot of filmmaking and even a lot of political action, even though we are not a political band, but that’s the general germ that starts all that kind of thinking is action.

And that would link you back to that first wave of punk?

Tony: Yeah. And punk was equal parts reactionary and revolutionary. And in recent times it’s become strictly reactionary. They lost the revolution side of it. And that’s where the dichotomy of the animal and cerebral working together works, you know, so you can have the reaction and the revolution at the same time, and we are very much into that. I think it’s the only way, and especially if you realize your place on the musical continuum. I mean we know what came before. We are very aware of what exists now.

Do you think most listeners pick and choose what they know about the past, so they may always identify you with Tina Turner, but they would know little of the jazz artists you really enjoy?

Tony: We are aware of that and we are aware of the fact that in a lot of these interviews that we do the people don’t know who we are talking about half the time. And we are aware of that. The best we can hope to do is point them in that direction, Maybe they’ll go hear something that they did not know existed before. And I think a lot people get angry because something existed that was great and they didn’t know about it. Uh, like a lot of people, when you tell them you are in a so-called punk band, they say, where do you play, how do you get your records out, what do you do? They don’t realize that this whole world exists underneath and they don’t know anything about it, then they get a little bit angry that they have been missing out. You know, and I think people have that idea. Here’s a jazz album that was recorded forty-five years ago that can blow away any avante-garde guy you can name today, and yet they never knew about it.

Bob: Or they don’t want to look stupid. They just don’t want to just think that they haven’t been participating. They think that by going out and buying a Green Day record that they’re punk, the first Green Day record! That’s being punk, buying the first one ten years after the fact.

You’ve also spoke about your reticence when dealing with the press. Often times you ask them questions, and they are surprised by the way you operate, and you engage them. Are you mocking their general lack of preparedness, or does this just go to show how the music industry, including the press, is relatively shallow and doesn’t care about you one week after they hyped you.

Bob: Yeah, you know, I think about this stuff a lot and I just kind of think that it has do with this whole technology that is available now. I mean, just because everyone can put out a web zine or fanzine or whatever doesn’t mean they should, you know. The stuff is really terrible should be labeled as really terrible. People should let a bad fanzine know that it is bad, or a bad web zine, or a bad magazine, whatever, as well as bad bands. They shouldn’t be given credit for just trying and that kind of stuff. I applaud the effort and everything, but you have to understand where your limitations are, you know, and how hard you have to work to get better at what you are trying to do. You really need to, when you are dealing with music, and you come and want to ask us a question, then you have to realize the fact that we are very schooled. We listen to a lot of stuff, we pay attention to a lot of what is going on, and if someone comes in ad they haven’t, you know, again, they don’t want to look stupid and I think that a lot of times we come across as these condescending, egotistical kind of people, but we’re not. We’re just very interested in what we are doing, and not just what we are doing, but what we are doing as part of a greater musical whole kind of thing. Like Tony said, we understand our part in the pantheon and timeline, or whatever, and we just take it very seriously and we know what we are trying to pull out of the history and out of what we have listened to and if somebody just brings up these catchwords and stuff, it just kind of pisses us off, you know, because they are in a position to relay our message to more people, people that we’re not probably going to get to see, and our only control is what we tell them, and if we shoot the shotgun and we’re aiming at a little pinhole, there’s only so much that’s going to get through.

You’ve even said that previews are pretty ridiculous because it pegs a band and people see a band based on that. I believe Tony said that he’ll go and see a random band on a Tuesday night without any foreknowledge because the experience seems a bit more legitimate or real.

Tony: And that whole preview thing just gets way out of hand, like “Tina Turner meets the MC5.� And these people come and I think they expect the whole Motown review or something. They expect a bunch of horns and fifteen guys and tap dancing and bubbles and I don’t know what they fucking expect. And then we get guys calling us on the phone to interview saying, so, are you guys going to do a soul album or are you going to add an organ? They expect us to be the fucking Motown review. That’s what they want to hear. They don’t want to hear us as the Bellrays as they are, they want to hear us as Aretha Franklin’s oldies but goodies review, because that much they can understand, and that really pisses me off. I really ain’t got no patience for those guys. They are fucking morons. Man, go listen to Aretha Franklin, she ain’t dead. Don’t they want something new?

Bob: The other thing that goes with what I was saying before is having a vocabulary…

You’ve insisted they have all kinds of adjectives and adverbs at their disposal, but yet they constantly associate you with other bands.

Bob: Exactly. They don’t use those previews to describe what you are going to hear or what you are going to see, they just say well, this is like red. That’s what they do.

So it locks down the associations rather than open up the discussion?

Bob: Yeah. And it just doesn’t do anything for your writing career. It doesn’t advance your ability to communicate.

Well, Alejandro Escovedo basically suggested that those people aren’t really even writers, because the difference between them and say, Lester Bangs, is that he used reviews as a jumping off point to create art of his own.

Bob: There was an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation that I kind of dug because it was a thing where Piccard was on this planet and he couldn’t communicate with this thing, well there was this whole thing, and he couldn’t communicate the guy until he found out the guy was speaking in metaphor. His whole language was based on metaphor, so they always just compared things to what happened in their past, so you had to break through that thing, but that’s what they do with us. They just compare things to the past. They don’t use the whole 14 million words that we have to describe something.

The present line-up, minus the drummer, kind of solidified around 1993, the same time as the LA riots. The tenth year anniversary happened not too long ago, but have things really improved in LA?

Bob: from what I’ve seen, to me it seems the same. I haven’t seen any huge change from the times I have been there. the only real things I notice are clubs closed down, and other clubs opened up, and you know, new museum shows come out, stuff like that. That’s what I see. I don’t get the day-to-day stuff that maybe Tony or Eric would.

Tony: Yeah, I don’t think it has changed much. No. And, you know, the riots and all that, that concerned mainly the blacks and the LAPD, and that hasn’t changed. There’s going to be more riots. The LAPD does not change. It stays the same no matter what you see on TV, and they are going to pull some dude over just because he’s black and in the wrong part of town.

You guys actually played with Public Enemy in France and have even mentioned that you’d love to tour with Public Enemy, so what was it like to play with a revolutionary hip-hop band?

Tony: I felt that we are on the same page as far as what we’re doing, though they are a little more political than we are, a lot more than we are. But to me, Public Enemy is punk rock. They are a black Sex Pistols. They are America’s answer to the Sex Pistols. That’s hat they are. Everything they do is punk rock. It’s just a different form. It’s slightly different. It doesn’t sound like the Ramones, but how can you say they are any different than the Sex Pistols? They are not. We didn’t get to meet them because they had such a big entourage that they stayed off to themselves.

Bob: It was a bit scary, actually, because after the show I was wandering around backstage when they were done and Flav a Fav rounded a corner and I was just standing there, it was just me, and for a second it was just him, just before I took a step forward towards him, or as I took a step forward, these two big bodyguard guys just closed him off. There was a wall between me and him. They made it, just by their stance and the way they looked at me, they made it known that I was not to even go forward or even think about touching him, or anything. I just turned around and walked away, because they just hustled him by, so that was weird. The show and what they do musically is really inspiring. I was kind of bummed about the accessibility thing, but I understand why.

When you were in England, you did an in-store at Tower Records, and you were signed to Poptones (home to the Hives too), which is run by the guy who started Creation Records, home to My Bloody Valentine, Oasis, and Primal Scream, yet you are on Uppercut Records in the states, which is much smaller. What is appealing about Poptones?

Bob: The thing that makes it appealing is Alan McGee and Ian Johnson, who is the guy who actually saw us at SXSW and actually got us involved with them. First and foremost, they are music fans. They absolutely just got what we were doing. It wasn’t a thing where they plugged us into their algorithm and said, well, if they’d do this then we can generate this much revenue. It wasn’t about that at all. Alan had done Jesus and Mary Chain and Oasis and all that and he had made his money. He had done all that kind of stuff. He’s at a point where he’s doing it because he likes doing it. He’s just a fan of it. You mentioned us and the Hives, but I think that year that he signed us he put out about 30-35 records.

And twenty we’ve probably never heard of?

Bob: Exactly, but actually a bunch of them you probably have heard of over here, but he liked them, and he put them out, like El Vez and people like that. He put them out because he wanted to put out music, that was his thing, music he liked. And now he’s into managing bands, I think he manages the D4 and a couple other bands.

You’re fans of D4?

Bob: Yeah, but to me that is the single biggest thing, because it’s not about a dollar and cents thing and stuff like that. He just comes to us after shows and says, “I think that song Street Corner is just great. It’s got to be a single. Is that recorded yet? I need to have it.� And he gets real excited about stuff like that, so to me that’s neat.

At one time didn’t Alternative Tentacles express some interest in the band?

Bob: There were several people that were interested and it just came down to the deal pretty much, what we thought we needed to get out of something to be able to do it and going back to the independence issue there were just certain things we needed out of the deal, the licensing and that kind of stuff that seemed to all come together with Poptones.

Wayne Kramer makes it well known that you are one of his favorite bands, and funy enough, at the Amazon.com United Kingdom we page you said that his album Hard Stuff saved you at a time when grunge died. That record on Epitaph really changed your spirit. What is about Wayne that is so inspiring?

Bob: Ah man, just that he is doing it. The life he’s lived, and he’s just doing what he does, you know. That Hard Stuff record really is one of my three or four favorite albums of all time. I mean, it was weird because we had heard that he had put out a record, and then Tony found a copy of it on the floor of the Blue Saloon, or something.

Tony: Yeah, we played a show and we were talking earlier that day about, I think tomorrow I am going to the record store and buy this album. We’re playing the show and I’m looking behind the PA speaker, and there is a CD of the Hard Stuff by Wayne Kramer, and I pick it up and say, “Is this yours Bob?� It wasn’t anybody’s, so I just kept it…

Bob: You know, it was just created in the matrix or whatever.But really, it’s one of those albums like Robert Johnson’s record, or for me, the first or second Creedence Clearwater Revival records or early Beatles records, just everything on it is fucking great. It just really nailed me. The whole freedom of what he singing about and what he was playing and all that stuff. It all just came together on that one record for me.

Tony: Another thing that he embodies is that he’s not giving into commercial concerns and his music is very provocative and he does what he wants to do without any commercial concerns. He’s doing it himself, he’s putting out his own records now, he owns his own label now, and he doesn’t try to repeat the same record. He didn’t do the Hard Way four different times. maybe the label (Epitaph) didn’t like it, but an artist has to follow his own path.

Bob: A lot of times you just can’t. Most of my favorite records are by bands that had put out at least five or six, and it kind of pinnacled.

But Robert Johnson only put out two.

Bob: Yeah, but he recorded thirty some odd, 35-36 songs, and it was compiled into those two records.

But it represents a kind of crystallized experience for the listener.

Bob: Yeah, it was entire body of work on those two records.

Can you draw a link between that and a more contemporary band?

Bob: Like the DB’s or something. That first record they put out.

You consider that a crowning achievement of power pop?

Bob: Yeah. Just every song on it is a solid hit, or the XTC English Settlement, or an album like that, Sting’s Dream of the Blue Turtles, something like that, when everything just comes together on that record, where he picked all the right songs to out on it and they were played the right way and it all just worked.

It’s interesting that you are talking about picking the right songs, because if I am right, when you record in the studio and play a song twice and it doesn’t work out, you walk away from it?

Bob: Well, that day.

But why not say, let’s nail down this song, time is money, let’s fix it and make it happen.

Bob: Because it starts to sound stale. When you start to play it just begins to sound stale because we don’t do, well, we really just don’t do the same thing twice every time we play it.

You allow for flux, variation, and imperfection?

Bob: Yeah, you know. You play it, and you do it one way, and the singer goes off and does this thing that way, ten you play it again, then you are going to do it differently, and he might not play the same guitar thing he just did, so you’re used all these ideas already and just like anything, if you go back to those ideas a second time, when you’re creating, it kind of gets to sound re-hashed.

You are not cutting and pasting the best parts and using hi-tech computer technology?

Bob: Number one, we don’t have the technology, number two we don’t own that stuff, and to me that is a big part of why, not only because Clear Channel owns all the radio station, but everyone is buying into that and they think that by picking the best parts of all those different versions they’ve made some super song.

Readymade for the airwaves, a Frankenstein song?

Bob: Yeah, the best parts of everything we’ve done. You know what it sounds like is that the guitar player was playing over there and the drummer over there…

Even on separate days!

Bob: Yeah, you know, they weren’t listening to each other. They weren’t there when each other was playing and it sounds mechanical and cold. There’s no…

You’ve talked about changing things from the inside, and that’s one of the reasons you played SXSW and played only new songs. What do you think would happen if a major label executive decided to sell all the records on his or her label for five dollars, meaning a really cheap list price?

Bob: Ah man, I think it would revolutionize the whole thing. If he did it and he gave it time to settle in. if it was just a one time thing and then they went back next week because they just lost so much money, then obviously it would die, but I think the long term effect would be insane. If somebody did that and just stuck with it, you know, man, it was just be…

Much more revolutionary than a band standing on the sidelines complaining and sloganizing all the time?

Bob: Oh yeah.

Tony: Here’s the thing, they could put them all at $5.99, but it might still be Maria Carey and Celine Dion and In Sync. They would still crank out that stuff, right, it would be $5.99 but still be all that same computerized, contrived crap, but I do think it would leave more room for bands like us to take over. It would level the playing field a little bit as far as the marketplace.

Bob: I just think it would drive out the profiteers, the profiteering that goes on with it. maybe if they all just saw that he was selling everything for $5.99, that’s what we are going to do now, then we have to get really competitive with what we are selling. We really have to go in and be focused on what is getting pushed and what we are going to sign and how we are going to push it and stuff like that. I think that’s a big thing and a big part of what they need to do too…

You’ve spoken about role playing with an audience and having high expectation of them. Why would you have any expectations on the part of the audience?

Bob: Because I know what I go into a show wanting to bring. I want to get excited when the band plays, I want to be involved in the moment. Why shouldn’t I expect that of people I am playing for. I realize I am getting paid to be up there, but if that’s all it is then I don’t want to.

You don’t want to be the worker bees for James Brown’s band?

Bob: Well, they did not last in James Brown’s band if they couldn’t bring a certain level of heart and sex to it, pretty much. If it was just a day job, they knew how to make it sound like it wasn’t. Otherwise they were gone. They weren’t around. He wouldn’t have picked them in the first place. And if they didn’t want to be there, they wouldn’t have hung around, because working for James Brown is like working for Ike Turner or somebody like that. You have to really love it to be treated, or take the chance of being treated that badly by somebody.

Tony: You mention those guys, you mention all those band leaders, including all the old big band leaders, Count Basie or Duke Ellington or any of those guys…

Or even Sun Ra?

Tony: That’s where that whole mindset comes from, that everybody in the band has got to be in top form. You can’t have one dude that is just not good enough. Everybody has got to be good enough and they all have to be operating on ten at all times and it didn’t have a slacker mentality, which is unfortunately big now.

Bob: It’s how to get by on the least amount of energy possible.

The rise of mediocrity?

Bob: It’s a rise of mediocrity and a celebration of it, you know. Just look at TV. All these reality shows and stuff like that. All they’re doing is just being themselves and it’s freakin’ on TV. They are wasting all of this time, maybe it’s not wasting, who knows, maybe TV is not that important of a thing, but it’s not entertaining me to watch it. I can sit here on the corner and watch these people pass by and it’s the same thing. I’d rather see something that I can be engaged in. It just seems, again, that the whole technology thing has just made it so it is possible for two hundred dollars for someone to build a home studio so they can a digital movie studio or they can buy a digital camera and do all this crazy stuff with it. Anybody can do it, that’s great, but everybody shouldn’t do it.

You don’t even have to be able to sing anymore, because the computer can do all the work.

Bob: But it sounds like a computer is helping you sing.

But like Guitar Wolf, can you be a rock star (in Japan in his case), but still make essentially basement recordings? Can you resist a big label coming forward and telling you, you can have all the total artistic and copyright control you want, as long as you have much bigger production?

Bob: I don’t have a problem with pumping up the sound. The records we have done have been basically recorded with what we have, which was barely enough mics to put on everything in a very small room. Very, very basic equipment in an effort to capture the moment, sure. A lot more expensive equipment or just a lot more equipment or whatever, you can capture the moment better. I have no problem with that.

You would argue that the Beatles’ Let it Be is much more interesting than their earliest material?

Bob: Um, just from the production quality and all that. I am a freak for the bass sound the second half of the Beatles career, but other than that, what they did with the equipment they had is kind of akin to what we are doing. If you really listen to those things, its not, well, if you tied to put that record out now, they’d laugh. This can’t go on the radio, it sounds like shit, you know. “Listen to how loud the vocals are, where’s the drums, the drums aren’t loud enough.� They’d laugh it out of the thing. But I don’t have any problem with getting a hold of a lot of technology and recording the shit the way we record it. I think that would be great, really cool, because I know we would still do it live. I know it would be us in the room, and it would still sound like that. You don’t need all the stuff that these guys use, everything doesn’t need to be compressed and everything at the same volume and stuff like that. I think that we are kind of starting to see now with the Guitar Wolf and stuff like that that people are starting to back off from that whole technology thing. I mean I was getting phone calls about recording people, recording these bands, because of what Let it Blast sounded like. They thought it was this calculated thing. It wasn’t. Jesus, we were in a 15 by 15 room with a 6-Track Sansui recorder and eight mics, that’s why it sound like that.

Six days of recording?

Bob: No, it was six months. We basically just practiced and sometimes we turned the machine on and sometimes we wouldn’t. Sometimes it was a conscious effort top record stuff, sometimes it wasn’t, and after that, we culled from that and put the record together, all the best versions of stuff.