IN JAPAN

New Short Interview by Justin Egli on his great blog about living in Japan: Ikimasho.
JUGHEAD IN JAPAN: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN PIERSON

ONE STEP BEYOND

     I started the evening Jogging down the side streets of Osaka, over the river up hill and back sometimes forgetting to look right instead of left while crossing a busy intersection. It's easy to forget cars drive on the left side NOT the right side here in Japan. I underscored my run listening to a mix of acoustic songs, the likes of Simon & Garfunkel, Donovan, and Nick Drake. Sometimes I want music to blast my socks off to keep me thrusting forward where running is more like a quick paced series of falling and catching oneself in rapid motion. But other times, like tonight, I needed soothing sounds to keep me moving, at peace with myself, at an evenly paced scenically aware zen-like speed. Of course this music makes me a bit more pensive, and when I took off the headphones the quiet of late night Osaka was hypnotic, causing me to reflect on my identity, now and then. I'm constantly in a dialogue with myself debating whether we change or not, whether identity is fluid, or static. I put the headphones back on and ended the run staring up at my U-Shaped Dorm called Kaigandori which stands tall over this part of the city. It's concrete facade lurks over a street by the same name. Here the Universal Studio's "talent" live in single apartments stacked ten floors high amongst factories and strobe light bedecked Pachinko Parlors.

      I underscored this final moment before going back to my room with a Screeching Weasel song, One Step Beyond, from the album Wiggle. It made me sad, the camaraderie I had with Ben was gone, long gone, but in moments like this, it feels still there with me, eerily present, but so obviously gone, the us then and the us now standing in such different places, in completely different time zones, and states of mind, but simultaneously so. We, everyone living now, are all simultaneously so, but at this moment it was about his and my simultaneity. And as I said, it was sad, nostalgic, yet always the pride, the confidence I always have no matter how dark my thoughts about that band, I'm always secure in my love for the band and the dedication we gave it beyond the restraints of our friendship. Fuck, we were good.

      This post was supposed to be about why I really like this song, One Step Beyond, a song with a simple verse and chorus, simple melodic lead and simple muting and strumming, and why I chose it to be played at our last show at the House Of Blues… But I don't think I can explain it well, or at least to a point where an outsider would say, "Yeah Man, that does seem important." And in many ways that correlates to how I feel my role in the band is ultimately difficult to interpret. I am too often for my own good struck with the need to explain my past role, but ultimately I feel incapable of expressing it in a way fitting to its complexity.  So it's always there in my head.

      So… the song was like all the other palm muted to open strum songs but for some reason during rehearsals I changed the setting on my guitar, (some weird tone button that my Westone guitar had that I never ever used) and it altered the sound of my muting. It made it attack a bit more than my lack of confidence in my steady rhythm playing would have normally allowed. But for some reason I committed to it and it worked! And yes, perhaps this slight change may seem so small and mildly insignificant in the face of all the other elements to the song, but I feel it changed everything, something so small, made this song special to me. Subtle, yet I can't conceive of that song recorded any other way.  Perhaps this helps to explain a small segment of my part in SW.

PS. This is the only version I could find of the song on Youtube.  It cuts out at the end, but you get the idea.

     

Ramona Confidential Interview

New Interview of Me as I head out to Osaka Japan to be a Wizard in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.  Come by and visit!
Ramona Confidential Interview of John Jughead Pierson

Interview about the term Pop Punk conducted by Jonas Cannon

The following is from an interview I did conducted by Jonas Cannon for his zine Live Punk. I enjoyed how it came out, so I am posting it here. Somehow in a short article his questions and my responses did a good job of expressing my mixed feelings about the label "Pop Punk." In this same zine there is an interview with Henry Rollins, and you can tell he REALLY didn't want to be talking about the philosophy of pop punk. I on the other hand love melodic music so it only seems fitting that my feelings about it may be a bit more sympathetic to the label of "pop."

Interview With Jughead By Jonas 
 John “Jughead” Pierson is a really cool, really chill guy. We met a few years ago through mutual friends. He was one of the founding members of Screeching Weasel, but he’s also been in several other bands, like The Mopes. Now, he sometimes does theater, sometimes travels around the world to perform with old pals. He’s written a novel. He makes a podcast called ‘Jughead’s Basement,” where he’s interviewed The Queers, Operation Ivy, The Lillingtons and Aaron Cometbus—just to name a few. Occasionally, he’ll throw together a show in his basement; he’ll invite over several people, barbecue up hotdogs in his backyard, buy a keg, maybe sell a few T-shirts along the way. I think he’s punk as fuck, but if you asked him, he would say no, he’s not punk & hasn’t been for quite some time. To him, it’s a label; one that might be necessary within the industry, but ultimately too restrictive to hold as an identity. 

 Jonas: So I guess I'd ask, starting out, what does the term "pop punk" mean to you? 

Jughead: whoa Well... there was a time when there was a Chicago magazine called Illinois Entertainer. They had a section about new bands, requesting all local bands to send in a detailed description. One category asked you to choose what type of band it was, they had things like: Rock. Country. Alternative. Soft Rock.... Anyway. I didn't think they had a good one to describe us so I wrote: 50's Punk.
 This was before the label Pop Punk came to be. I actually have no idea when it surfaced, but I don't think we were considered that until we reformed for Bark Like A Dog. Earlier than that, we were trying to emulate The Circle Jerks and Angry Samoans... Goof Core. The Ramones came in later. So to try to shorten the answer: Pop Punk to me is basically taking the energetic power chord driven music of earlier punk, simplifying it, and making it more infectiously melodic. The Ramones just call it Rock N Roll. I don't really consider Screeching Weasel a Pop Punk Band. Riverdales, yes, but SW was much more.

 Jonas: Yes. That's part of what fascinates me about the term. When I got into punk, I never heard the term pop punk. But then later on, it seemed like a lot of those bands that served as my introduction to punk were considered pop punk. 


Jughead: Pop Punk doesn't usually go beyond 3 basic two finger chords; any more intricacy and it just becomes power pop.

 Jonas: Ah. But people used the term later on? Back then, no one was really saying "We are a pop punk band!" Is that accurate? Because I'm pretty sure I didn't hear the term in the 90s at all.

 Jughead: Yeah, that's what I was saying. Ramones were just a bare bones Rock N Roll band. I keep bringing up the Ramones because they are obviously the forefathers of pop punk. But to answer your question, No, I don't remember ever being called a pop punk band until around 96 or 97 And then a lot of bands were being Grandfather-claused in, like Mr. T and SW

 Jonas: What was the response like? Was it more "whatever, we're just doing our thing..." or kind of "What the hell? We're PUNK--where is this 'pop' word coming from." ?

 Jughead: It never really bothered me. It's a label, like any other. It bothered me more that after The Riverdales, when SW got back together, to the public we lost all our other influences and we were just being considered a derivative of The Ramones. I love the Ramones, but I never wanted a band that was doing what the Ramones was doing. So the label Pop punk didn't bother me, but the limited view and vision of what that meant to the average listener... did bother me.

 Jonas: That's really interesting, because I would've never lumped you guys with The Ramones. Ever. A lot of the stuff from Fat Wreck--Screeching Weasel, Propaghandi, Tilt, Anti-Flag--that was my introduction to punk. To my ears, all of that stuff was world's away from the Ramones.

 Jughead: Yeah, [but] I'm pretty sure it's two affiliations. The Ramones and being on the same label as Green Day. But I must state, I don't have a problem with a label of Pop Punk, I have more of a problem with the audience and derivative bands who think that means they have to wear leather jackets, jeans, and only listen to The Ramones influenced bands. Punk and Pop has always been the other side of the spectrum from Prog Rock or Metal and to me, as a style that is what they are doing, but as a philosophy for life, it gets a little restrictive.

 Jonas: How so?

 Jughead: When you start infusing a single musical styling with Philosophy you begin to shrink the scope of what music and life can be. I constantly think the pop punk scene is one step away from stoning other musical styles. If they had the balls.

 Jonas: YES. That's exactly what I'd been thinking. Which totally bleeds into another question I had, which was what your thoughts are on pop punk as it is now...

 Jughead: Jonas, I really don't have much of an opinion. I don't really come in contact with it much. I still run into people that I am surprised by being so cut off from other music, but then I'll meet someone that loves Cat Stevens, Bach, System Of A Down, and The Lillingtons, as much as I do. SW had a song called Slogans, And I think that song hit a chord. It was in a response to the skinheads and their limited musical likings and violent tendencies. But I think it stretches much farther. Even Outcasts want to fit in--and they can be the most dangerous.

 Jonas: Definitely. That's something that it took me a while to come to terms with. I think I felt a little alienated for a while, because the range was wide in terms of the music I liked, but I felt like in some punk scenes it felt very, well, restrictive. like it wasn't punk to like certain stuff...

 Jughead: The world wants to think in black and white... 0's and 1's, but it's really just a spectrum of grays. I'll end with one more thing. Years and years ago, I saw an interview with Bob Mould from Husker Du, where he had said that his musical tastes had changed, and whether he sounded negative about his punk influences or if that is what I wanted to feel back then... I have made an effort to be critical of my punk scene and to be honest with myself and others that it is just another one of my musical passions out of many others, but it is hard to get that openness of styles across without sounding like you have forsaken the movement that has helped to make you what you are. That is often my dilemma.

Tangent Starting with Jim DeRogatis: GO!

Jim Derogatis, this man keeps showing up in my life! (I even played with him for a single 7inch record under a fake hardcore band named: The Shotdowns.)  Jim and Greg Kot helped Screeching Weasel quite a bit in the early days.  Greg Kot wrote an important article about us in the Tribune many years ago, (I can't seem to find that specific one online.  But, Vapid, Panic, Ben and I had to drive downtown for a proper photo shoot, and the article has a classic picture of the band in leather jackets and Jeans but me, of course, in a colorful suit jacket and baggy pants with tucked in socks climbing bricks behind the rest of the band, looking more new wave than punk.  Here are two other articles that he wrote, keeping our name in the papers: It's Harvest Time, and Cynics From The Suburbs.  Jim Derogatis besides writing about us quite often in the Sun Times also wrote an equally influential yet severely past our prime article about us in Spin Magazine (Screeching Halt).  Jim has always been attracted to the idea of "anti-hero" which is evident in his book Let It Blurt.  I had always thought that Jim was infatuated with Ben as a punk anti-hero (an artistic crush), often letting other interesting things about the band fall to the wayside.  But there is no denying the help he has given to me freely over the years, and quite honestly it has taken me a long time to realize that we have a mutual respect for our places in music and art.  He even was kind enough to write about my other music pride and joy which I keep hoping some day will be appreciated on a grander scale, (We can all dream.) even though I don't think he ever really cared much for our music, Even In Blackouts.   Punk Goes Acoustic.  Here's a major tangent: I was thinking of my writing in Even In Blackouts the other day, which was later accompanied by the incomparable Gub Scot Conway.  Our writing seemed to work so well together.  We are both slightly warped.  Our drummer and bassist, Bice and Phil Hill, often talked about how they had to take our strange musical structures and try to make sense of them in order to create a palpable backing rhythm section.  I felt proud that Gub and I caused such wonderful headaches in such amazing musicians.  Anyway the point I was going to make here is I still believe in the idea of An Album, and even the idea of a Concept Record.  This can manifest in many different ways.  The type I've been interested in is similar to the concept record that Ben Weasel was into with a record like Anthem For a New Tomorrow, it wasn't telling a linear story, it was a grouping of songs sharing attitude, themes, and images.  I carried this into EVERY Even in Blackouts record. (Often this happens, in subtle ways on most records anyhow. Records in varying degrees chronicle what a band is going through during a particular time.  They are little slices of history.)  The step I feel I took farther, more consistently, is the title of a record had to be wholly original whereas Ben most often enjoyed capturing phrases from sub cultures and even the mainstream that struck his fancy, like My Brain Hurts, (Monty Python) Thank You Very Little (Chevy Chase in Caddyshack), Bark Like a Dog (Bill Murray in Caddyshack). (Some I assume are entirely original)  My titles for neither better nor worse HAD to be completely fabricated and meticulously tied to the themes of the songs on the inside, even if unintelligible to the listener.  For instance: Myths & Imaginary Magicians was playing on some references to Screeching Weasel's The Science of Myth, which was originally borrowed from Joseph Campbell.  Myths are the standards we try to live up to, the morals that are embedded in our culture, they help us face a world that can be callous and chaotic, but the use of the word Myth has also come to mean, trying to live up to an unreachable conception of the self which has much more to do with personal identity than social norms.  It's usage on Myths & Imaginary Magicians refers to friends of mine like Ben Foster, Steve Walker, Matt Nelson and Peter Flynn (A radio play I wrote about Peter Flynn), and even myself, we are all too hyper aware of the divide between social personae, caricatures of ourselves, and the less perfect, less awesome, less dramatic, flawed, reality of the actual self.  This rocky balance between self loathing, self aggrandizing, and just being oneself is apparent in a goodly percentage of the tracks from that album. The last part of that album title: "Imaginary Magicians" - a magician that isn't a magician, that isn't there, so that even the tricks are twice removed from being real magic.  That is the metaphor for types like myself. The reality is that "we" are not performing real magic, that we are mere humans, hiding behind illusions, twice removed.  Our intents are often selfish or caught up in justifying ones capricious nature when we think we are being mysterious or intriguingly contradictory.  (Because sadly this makes us interesting.)  All the titles in the Even In Blackouts' catalog have a certain amount of complexity, and they most definitely painstakingly mirror the songs on each particular record.  Like Heidegger in philosophy my goal is to cultivate my own language, my own points of reference, like music itself, to create my own individual path which ironically takes steps towards universality the more honest and truthful it becomes.  I search for the write groupings of words to express the inexpressible moods and emotions that stir in all of us.  That is my grand goal, and even though it might sound absurd, pompous, or just plain ridiculous, it is how I have always felt about creativity.  I don't expect anybody to get that, but it has become an important element in my writing and creative pursuits.



Anyway back to Jim!  He has written a blog post about the Jughead's Basement Podcast.  And I think that is swell.  (I could talk more about Jim, but really you should just go over to his web page, and see all the marvelous things this man has done for the upholding of everything rebellious and beautiful about music.  Jim DeRogatis) And even though going off on the titles of records may have seemed a tangent, even to myself, it really wasn't.  I mean to hold sacred those who still think in terms of a record as an art form.  It was funny when I first started saying each of my podcasts is a piece of art, but truly I mean it.  And to say such a thing isn't implying that it is great, (even though I think they are.)  It just means they are constructed to be something wholly (and even holy) unto themselves, the structure matching its interior, making it it's own THING.

Jughead's Basement Episode 8: Naked Raygun's Throb Throb
NAKED RAYGUN - THROB THROB

In this episode of Jughead's Basement, Naked Raygun's 1985 release, Throb Throb, is examined. This episode features special guest co-host, Dan Vapid.

Interviews with Naked Raygun:

Jeff Pezzati 

Camilo Gonzalez 

Jim Colao 

John Haggerty

Eric Spicer

Interviews with Steve Albini

 (Producer & Engineer of Jawbreaker and Nirvana. Musician in Big Black and Shelac.)

Guest Contributors:

Steve Walker on "Metastasis" 

Eric T. Roth on "On/I Don't Know" 

Jim DeRogatis on "Managua"

Closing song: "Rat Patrol" covered by Cheaper By The Case in 1997 by my friends: Mark Montgomery, Fritz Doreza, and Eric Mahle.

IN THE SHADOW OF JOHN BRAUN - THE TRUE TORTURER

JOHN BRAUN RIPPING IT UP

This is a late night post based on my friend Graham Rae asking me about a band "I was in" that I must have talked about in an early Screeching Weasel interview called TORTURER.  This is my grammatically unchecked response:

I have been working on a new Jughead's Basement podcast this month with Dan Vapid.  The band he recommended working on was Naked Raygun, then both of us said Throb Throb.  But this post is not about Throb Throb, or Naked Raygun, or Dan Vapid.  It's about John Braun and a band that was but never was called TORTURER.

The Naked Raygun members are about a half decade older than me and Vapid, but both Vapid and I have slightly older brothers so there is a common ground when talking about influences.  Vapid was fascinated with asking the Naked Raygun members if the music genre that made "you" pick up an instrument was the same as the genre that propelled "you" to be in the band.  It was mostly unanimous that the two were not the same.  In most cases the members of Naked Raygun were raised listening to Led Zeppelin, The Who, Van Halen, and my favorite UFO.  But these bands, even though causing one to pick up an instrument, mostly frustrated more than inspired.  It was just two damn difficult to play for a novice.  What lead most of them to playing in a band was the arrival of punk music with The Ramones, The Stooges, and one of my favorites The Stranglers.  These bands gave hope that a novice could play like them.  This did not mean you would be able to write songs as melodically interesting but that did not matter at the time one was to be propelled.  Just to know that I could put two fingers on the fret board and it would create a power chord was inspiration enough to continue.

But this was not the case for my best friend since shortly after my birth John Braun.  Technically he wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth, even though his father was a well respected cop who got free fireworks, records, and concert tickets for his son (he has an older sister Lora, also into music, damn she was physically, emotionally, full bodily in love with Aerosmith), John Braun was more or less born with a silver gibson flying V in his hands.  My brother, because of his highly fire conducive room full of posters and pages out of cream magazine dried out from pot smoke and cigarettes, from floor to ceiling, he was the one that gave me the vision to see what rock could be.  For a time I could put down my Mary Poppins record and gaze at his walls when he was gone, the freaky early look of The Tubes, a old school 3d poster of Pink Floyd, concert tickets from the tiny venues called Haymakers and Beginnings that attracted such new acts as The Scorpions, Judas Priest, and UfO.  He took photos from the crotch of his pants and became a master at snapping shots of bands worthy of framing. 

Anyway, I was talking about John Braun.  Damn that boy could play, even when we only had brooms for guitars, or just plain old air, he was leagues ahead of me, in style, and in actually understanding rhythm and melody.  Really at times he was so damn good and deserving of my admiration that I became more of a voyeur of our own playtime, our imagining of ourselves as Alice Cooper or Brian May from Queen.  I did not improve in my imagination or even when we got instruments.  This was about the time my family was falling apart, my dad had left my mom with 5 kids, she never having worked as an adult now had to take care of all of us and pay for food.  There was no time to even entertain the idea of getting me my own guitar.  For the longest time I had to play air guitar along side John playing his actual first guitar which I think was not a flying V but an Ibanez Destroyer.  I eventually got a job at a movie theater, under age, with permission from my mother, and earned enough money to buy a cheap copy brand called a Hondo Stratocaster.  (I got a stratocaster because I thought it would allow me to play like Ritchie Blackmore.)  I would bring it over to John's house at the other end of our neighborhood and we would listen to cassettes called "Guitar Licks" which you could purchase from Circus Magazine.  The first one we had was Hot Licks by Randy Rhoads.  Randy Rhoads was our hero, way more than Eddie Van Halen.  Now that I think of it Randy had some kind of punk aesthetic going, metal yet super melodic, fast yet simple at times.  God damn he walked into those Ozzy auditions an unknown with a tiny peavy decade amp and blew the minds of all listening.  Then of course he had to die in a plane crash, but I got to see him live, YOU BET I DID.  One of the best damn days of my life!

So… where was I?  Yes John Braun.  Fuck, he was good!  So we started a band!  The band was just like our underground fort we never built.  Our bass player and drummer was as non existent as the stove and bunk bed that were to be built 100 feet under the grass in my backyard.  We weren't a garage band, we were a basement band.  But he LEARNED, and I stumbled, I tripped, My fingers wandered the fret board like an elephant in a quadra-pair of skates for the first time on ice as thin as a strawberry fruit roll-up.  But do you know what?  I fucking named that band.  I fucking read a book called The Shadow of The Torturer and declared that our nonexistent band was to be called TORTURER.  And by fucking god, it was!  Without me there would have been no Weasel, without me their would have been no Torturer… well actually there was no Torturer, but while it lasted not existing I was in a glorious spacious friendly and inspiring metal hell with the most awesome air-guitar jammed dreams of Rosemont Horizon Stadium proportions.  

And yes, to this day that fucking John Braun friend of mine is thousands of times better than I'll ever be, and that's as it should be.  He's one of my unsung heroes.

He is the one that accidentally taught me one of the most important lessons.  And that's how I'll end this:  While I was air-guitaring and he was actually playing to a video featuring Alice Cooper's live concert of Welcome to My Nightmare, with blood, spiders, tight spandex, long hair, and plenty of sweaty wanking, wanking.  I stopped, put down my air guitar and stared at the television screen.  "God damn that guitarist sure can rip it up."  Then John said, "Yeah, he's great.  He also plays guitar for Elton John."  And I said, "Wow he most love this so much more!"  And then John stopped, put down his real guitar and asked, "Why would he love it more?"  And I had no answer.  Why would he love playing with Alice Cooper more than Elton John?  Why was my sister's boyfriend hit in the face with a brick outside a Disco Club (that was later set fire and burned to the ground) by a  Rocker just because in the disco they liked to dance instead of thrash their heads?

Here is one thing I learned about music theory, with 1,4,5 you can write a Ramones' song, a Lead Belly blues, an Iron Maiden metal lambast, a Bach sonata, a disco Donna Summers ballad, a Roger Whitaker soft sound, or even a non-existent wank for a band called TORTURER!