It’s not the best day. I’ve just got back from Bloodstock and I’m suffering from a bout of food poisoning that has left me hanging on for grim life. Honestly, the thought of sitting in an interview for forty minutes is somewhat terrifying, but the thought of missing the opportunity to chat to members of punk legends Whipping Boy is more so, so here I am, sweating and shaking (with a bucket close by for emergencies) as the screen flickers into life.
The reason for this interview is the re-release of the landmark Maru Maru album. Largely overlooked on release, it has been remixed and reborn as the Dysillusion LP – the sonic cleaning job serving to prove what the band knew all along, namely that this is a great, great album. When it was sent to me to review, it was like some missing part of my musical education fell into place. So, when I was asked to chat to the band about it, how could I resist.
Interestingly, for a pair of artists so intense on record, founding guitarist Steve Ballinger and singer Eugene Robinson are incredibly laid back. They laugh often and look back upon their experiences with a mixture of fondness and regret. However, where some may have been tempted towards bitterness, they’re careful to keep the record in its context as they discuss both its disappointing release and their own lofty hopes at point of recording. It makes for a fascinating discussion, and I hope you enjoy this oral history of Muru Muru – an underrated album now ripe for re-evaluation with this exceptional new edition.
SonicAbuse: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. It’s great to speak to you. How is it to be re-releasing Muru Muru?
Steve: We haven’t really been involved with the band that much because Eugene has all these things that he does and I, you know, stay abreast of those. But I’ve been out of the music business for years. I know what he’s doing, but when anybody mentions Whipping Boy, I’m like “yeah, yeah!” [Pauses for a moment] Are you familiar with our early stuff – The Sound of No Hands Clapping?
SonicAbuse: No – for me this was something new – it was like a piece of my collection that has been missing all these years!
Steve: Well, when you listen to that record, you can see why our fans hated Muru Muru so much! It doesn’t sound like the same band, necessarily. It’s interesting and yeah, it was an interesting time to be in music for sure.
SonicAbuse: For any band that has a cult following, going in and remastering an album, let alone remixing it, is a risky thing to do, because there will always be those people who don’t want anything to change. When you approached this, did you have any rules for how the mix engineer needed to work on it, or did you leave them to it?
Steve: Yeah, well when Eugene told me he’d spoken to Joe Chiccarelli about doing this, my thought was that we were going to go into the studio with him. I thought we’d actually be there going “oh, can you bring this up”, and “I don’t like that”, and “can you change this here?” However, it wasn’t like that at all.
Steve: One of the things that I thought was terrible on the original record was the guitar tone, which is horrible. And, basically, there were three things that caused that. The first was, I had a new guitar that I was playing. I was playing a lawsuit Les Paul, a Hondo 2, which had a really, really hot pick up in it that made this great, awful sound.
Steve: On the first record, that was basically my tone. And then, on the second record I was playing a Stratocaster with a single coil pick up and Kaus assured me, “oh yeah, we’ll make it sound right – we’ll do stuff in post-production”. Anyhow, that never happened. So, what I ended up with on that record was a lot of screechy feedback instead of… I like that fat, creamy feedback that a humbucker will give you. There was none of that.
Steve: And, the other thing was, at that point, I didn’t really understand that there was a difference between a speaker cable and a guitar cable. So, one of the things we used to do, we would set up a big 6 x 12 cabinet along this long corridor, and, at the end, a guitar was plugged in. And we played the singing really loud through that speaker and picked it up microphonically through the guitar.
Steve: And it was a speaker cable – a 40ft speaker cable, not a guitar cable, so it wasn’t shielded. So, all of a sudden, we could hear this radio station, like [imitates tinny voice] “this is KRXW, and now for some commercials, but soon we’ll be back with more music…”
Steve: I mean, I didn’t know any better! I was new to this; I didn’t know anything about recording.
Steve: Anyway, we had this 24-track thing where we had recorded all of these weird sounds and stuff and none of it ended up in the final mix. Klaus just kind of… I don’t know, I think it was hard. It was probably really challenging. Our previous record was probably recorded on an 8-track. So, you know, recording a 4-piece band, that’s easy – just make sure the drums aren’t too loud.
Steve: So, when it came to the remix, Joe just said, “I’ll do it!”
Steve: And he took it and, once he had the tape processed and everything, he kind of did a rough mix. He cleaned up the drums, did some things, sent it to us and asked how we liked the sound of it. And we both thought it sounded really good. So, he just continued doing that. If we had a suggestion, he would play with that and then send it back to us. So, instead of us being there, we were really there virtually, you know.
Steve: Every time he finished something, he would send it to us and ask for approval. And, you know, everything he did, that guy – I don’t feel like I had a lot to suggest to him. He seriously is the most accomplished of all the musicians in the room… obviously [laughs].
Steve: Well, not necessarily a musician, but he really did something with it.
Steve: We had had this fantasy of what it would sound like, and it was so disappointing – initially – what it actually sounded like. It couldn’t be turned up loud enough to make it sound good. In the car, I put the tape in, in my car and cranked it and it was like, “ah, it’s just not doing it for me.”
Eugene: It was one of those kind of things, too, where we were so unschooled that we figured that it was easy – you’d turn the machine on, you’d record it, you’d turn it off and it would sound like us… but there were so many things along the way to getting it done, that we whiffed on, that we just learned later. For example, I love George Horn – really nice guy, the guy who mastered The Sound of No hands… But George was a Fantasy Studios guy, which means that he’d spent the last 30 years of his career mastering music for jazz guys. That’s cool, whatever, but it wasn’t for years that we discovered John Golding, and it wasn’t until five years ago [laughs] that we had the great idea (in this other band, Oxbow) of taking a 30 second segment of a song and sending it to, like, five different mastering people.
Eugene: And we had to pay for it – but we said “hey, can you master this so we can see what it’s like?” And they were all so wildly different that I kicked myself for never having known that, despite doing music since 1980 [laughs]. Like with a mix, you expect the sound to be different but with mastering – we just never thought of it. And, you know, this time (knowing what we knew), we went to John Golding, who’s done the lion’s share of the Oxbow records. And he’s done Black Flag, he’s done a lot of stuff and when there are unusual sounds, he’s not trying to get rid of them, he’s trying to bring them out!
Eugene: And Joe, having shared mixing sessions with him before, he does it in the way that Steve mentioned. We used to do it the old school way – take it from the session, go out in the car, listen to it and make adjustments; but he really doesn’t do that at all. He listens at ear-splitting volume [laughs]. I’ve never seen anybody do it like that. And he’ll flip out if you start to talk because, at one point he explained to me, “you guys don’t understand that I’m mixing while I’m listening! So, if you’re talking to me, I can’t concentrate!”
Eugene: So, I was like “OK, OK, got it!”
Eugene: So, that’s why I’m like totally comfortable with us sending it to him. And this is after all the weird shit that we had to do just to make it possible, like we had to bake the tapes in an oven. Apparently, there’s like one woman in California, and she built her house on this. That’s all she does. So, yeah, they had to rent a two-inch machine cheap enough to do that. They had to rent – rent? – they had to hire a guy who was conversant with a two-inch machine because Joe Chiccarelli, that’s below his pay grade! So, they rolled a machine in, they took the baked tapes and turned them into digital stems and sent those to Joe. And Joe was like, “great, fine, I’m ready!”
Eugene: So, I don’t know how long you guys were talking before I got on, but I couldn’t… I think if I had been as happy with it back then as I am now, it probably would have greatly altered my trajectory in music I don’t know how, although I’d have to say probably for the better. But, yeah, it’s an amazing thing he’s done. I guess that’s what those Grammys are about, maybe. [Laughs]
Steve: Well, Phil had asked me if it felt like sacrilege, remixing the record. I mean, nobody who had ever liked that record is going to say, “oh you guys ruined it by having Joe work on it.”
Eugene: And I don’t want to shit on Klaus, you know. I mean he was learning as we were learning. We just got exceptionally lucky that he worked with us on Human Farm with Tom Mallon. Tom used to drum for Chris Izaac, he recorded with American Music Club, he used to drum for Negative Trend. And Tom was… we didn’t realise how great Tom was until Muru Muru. And sadly, we never worked with Tom again. I hung out with him a bunch, and he used to work with me when I was editor-in-chief at EQ. but, sadly, we never did anything with him again. The third Whipping Boy record, The Third Secret of Fatima, Klaus produced it but then we had a guy who really knew what he was doing, John Cuthbert, but he was a complete piece of shit [laughs].
Eugene: So, he had done tonnes of records for the Dead Kennedys, and he thought he knew what was going on. I mean, yeah, we’re not going to remix that one, but Muru Muru desperately, desperately needed it because they were great songs and they were really… I know they were great songs, because I’d be walking along some day or just driving, and I’d be quoting lines form the songs as if they were philosophical writ, like “I made my mind up today” [Laughs]
Eugene: That’s a line from My Day at The Lake, and what’s special about that is 1, it was the first time we were writing songs that were addressing our emotional lives, right, instead of “America must die!” Which is some agit prop – you know, it was the first time addressing our emotional lives. And 2, it was the last time I really sang somebody else’s lyrics. And it’s a Steve lyric and it’s, you know, a great lyric. “I made my mind up today” – it’s become emblematic a lot for me. I go back to that line a lot. So, I’m glad that the record happened for no other reason than just that.
SonicAbuse: It’s one of those albums, it feels like you were exploring your own potential both musically and the limits of the genre on that record. Do you think that’s part of the reason why it didn’t come out as you expected at the time – you were trying to do things that maybe weren’t in line with the studio skills that you had?
Eugene: Well, yeah, yeah. We didn’t know what we were doing in the studio! But I’m pretty convinced that, had we gone to Joe in 1983 / 1984 and said, “hey look man, this is what we want to do,” he would have gotten it. Because his background wasn’t in… I mean Klaus was one of the first guys in the Dead Kennedys, and this was his reference point. He did solo records that were slightly different, and I know from talking to him that, back in Boston, he used to jam with James Taylor [laughs]. He’s a few years older than us and he had come out West with the intention of either becoming a folky or a punk rocker [laughs]
Steve: One or the other!
Eugene: So, yeah, I don’t think it was an issue of trying and failing, I think we… [laughs] it’s like Yoda – we didn’t try, we did, you know. That’s the record. But, when it came to passing what we did off to him, he was not able to…
Eugene: Actually, Steve reminded me that, at one point, Klaus came to the practice to hear the stuff that we were doing, he thought we were fucking crazy! He thought we were joking and the only time I’ve heard a studio guy say that was Albini, when he worked with US Maple. They had some man come in and they played some of the songs for him and he was like, “you guys are kidding, right?” [Laughs] And they were like, “no man! That’s us!”
Eugene: I think Klaus didn’t really… he wasn’t expecting it, he didn’t really believe in it, and in saying that – that he didn’t believe in it, it feels like I’m taking a shot at him. What I mean is, I don’t think he believed that we were making a good choice, right? And looking at how he’s comported himself musically, there’s not been a lot of experimentation. He’s still playing California Uber Alles, which sounds like a knock, I know [laughs] I mean, all my friends who are still doing that music, I love it – Agnostic Front, Cro Mags, I mean they’re standard bearers. And the Dead Kennedys, outside of legal troubles, they’re still there, they’re still making music and that’s good for them. But we were not interested in making another Sound of No Hands Clapping, 100% not. So…
Steve: I think that was part of the problem. Part of the problem was that somehow Eugene and I, and also Sam and Dave, we all had our vision coalesce into what we wanted to create, and Klaus never really got what we were trying to do, I don’t think. I don’t think he could hear in his head what we were all hearing – envisioning what it was going to sound like. And subsequently, we gave him the paint set with all the right colours, and he didn’t really know what to do with it. Which, I don’t think…
Steve: I bet you Joe could have done it, because he’d already done Joe’s Garage at that point. He’d worked with Zappa and all that kind of stuff, so he had some high, multi-track experience with a bunch of weird noises or whatever. In any case…
Eugene: That’s only half the problem, right? Joe could have done it in 1983, and we still would have released the record, and the hardcore community still would have gone “fuck you!!” [Laughs] I mean that’s why, as we say, we’re not knocking anyone, we’re not putting this off on anybody else. The reality of it is, like Albini said, if you go to the store and ask for toilet paper and they give you sandpaper, you’re going to be pretty pissed off!
Steve: We should have come up with a fake name for the band – Cherry Surprise or something like that!
Eugene: Well, Steve, you remember, we were inching around that. We’ve been inching about some version of that idea – like redo it, change the name, submit different band photos. Over the years, we came up with all sorts of wild schemes, just to do something with this record. I printed up like a thousand of these records and I don’t believe I sold more than 200.
Steve: Oh really? Wow!
Eugene: Distributors ordered, probably 850, and then a lot of those… I had to go back. Like at Rough Trade, I put them in a duffel bag and rode up on my motorcycle. And, in those days there were no cell phones – by the time I made the 45-minute motorcycle ride back from San Francisco, there was a message on my machine, like: “you gotta come get the rest of these!” [Laughs] So, I had to get back on my motorcycle, go back to the fucking city, and collect, you know, I think they ended up taking 20 records, right! [Steve makes exasperated noise]
SonicAbuse: It’s interesting – it seems to always be that fans follow the genre whereas musicians follow their muse – I guess musicians are reaching for something a little different and trying to get out of their comfort zone, whereas fans often want to stay right there…
Steve: Our band, Eugene and I both listed to hardcore and enjoyed it, but it’s not like we were hardcore guys who only enjoyed hardcore and only listened to hardcore. Eugene listened to a lot of James Chance and weird stuff like that. And I was listening to all sorts of synth, Wall of Voodoo. So, at the time, we had a lot of influences. Sam and Dave, at that time, were only sort of tolerating hardcore to play – they would have liked to have played, probably, more like Muru Muru was, well from the beginning, I would say.
Eugene: Yeah, if you think about it, this was… Muru Muru had the greatest number of songs written by Sam of all our records, right? I don’t think he wrote anything for Sands of No Hands Clapping
SonicAbuse: I mean, I’m coming this as someone who started really listening to music in the early 90s, and I was very much into grunge and alternative rock, but it feels to me like a lot of bands started to come around to the trajectory that you were on just a few years later – bands like Fugazi, the Meat Puppets, and the Butthole Surfers – so, it sort of feels like what you were doing became a part of the scene but just a few years down the line.
Eugene: Well, it was funny, when we played in Austin in ‘82 or ’83, we stayed with the Butthole Surfers and famously they were in the van with us and they gave us a tape of their first record, which was Brown Reason to Live, and we took it. We’re gentlemen, we took it. And after we dropped Gibby off and King Coffey somewhere, we proceeded to go to the next town to play. And we listened to it in the van, we were like [makes non-committal noises] “yeah, that’s pretty good, and they good guys, but they’ll never make it with a name like that!” [Laughs]
Eugene: But one thing that should be clear, they were never a hardcore band, right? Their aspirations from the beginning were to do something completely different, so I can’t give them credit for bridging that gap. I don’t give them credit for that. Now Ian is doing a fabulous job of that – from Minor Threat to Fugazi, and even from Fugazi to; I don’t know if you’ve heard the band, he’s in with his wife now; the Evens, I think; or the side projects he’s done with Jourgensen, he’s pushed the envelope.
Eugene: So, you have these two paths of people. There are those who are, like, fucking… “hardcore is all I ever wanted to do” guys. I mean I love them – Agnostic Front or Cro Mags, every time they come around, I go to see them. Those guys are all into Jujitsu now, so the last time I saw Harley pay with the Cro Mags we were both missing Jujitsu so much that we were fighting in the dressing room. [Laughs] Jujitsu is what we do with our friends – I don’t think anyone in that dressing room expected us to start grappling! So, I love those guys, they’re standard bearers.
Eugene: But also, some of those people back then, it wasn’t even a case of Ian becoming a better musician because, between Minor Threat and Fugazi, he learned how to play guitar – he just wanted to do something different. So, from Teen Idols to Minor Threat there wasn’t much of a difference, but from Minor Threat to Fugazi, now that was the shit. And there were some people back then who made that journey. Huske Du did. Minutemen were never hardcore, but I’m sure they would have gotten even wilder had D. Boon not died.
Eugene: So, yeah, there were a few people but not enough where we could say “oh yeah, we want to do what they’re doing.” We just sold so many copies of The Sound of No Hands Clapping that we just figured that was our audience and they’d stick with us… nah! [Laughs]
Steve: Oh well!
SonicAbuse: I know you have always been very detail focused with stuff like artwork – how did the new sleeve come together?
Eugene: Steve did it!
Steve: Oh yeah, the cover I painted! [Holds up painting]
SonicAbuse: Wow!
Eugene: This is a man of many talents. He can sculpt, he can paint, he can fix shit, it’s actually phenomenal. And I’ve been super enjoying the early reviews. Someone gave it 9/10 and praised his guitar playing, and I was like “yes!” That’s what I’ve always thought, you know!
Steve: [With heavy sarcasm] Oh yeah, I’m a great guitar player!
Eugene: You’re a creative guitar player. Van Halen, some people say is a great guitar player, but I don’t think he would have done as well on Muru Muru!
Steve: Nah! But yeah, for me, I really enjoyed having somebody else do all the layout and stuff. I always thought that was totally tedious trying to figure out… especially back in the day, using a plastic letter set for the lettering and stuff. Nothing you did ever looked right when they photographed it and it was just horrible, so having the record company guys do all that stuff for us.
Eugene: Aaron [Turner] did it, I asked Aaron.
Steve Right, right, right. All that stuff that I hate got done for us, which… you know, I’ll take it.
Eugene: Yeah, Aaron from the Hydra Head days has been doing artwork for me and also when I’ve been editor-in-chief of this magazine or that magazine he’s actually done graphics for me. What I like about him is that I like his style, but I also like the fact that he’s willing to take input. Like I had some guy design some t shirts for me, a fighter guy so I figured – a fighter guy, he’s used to defeat, and he submitted some stuff. And I was like “yeah it’d be cool if you could change some stuff…” I had like two notes and the guy crumbled, man. He was a good guy, but he crumbled. I never heard from him again on this t shirt. I saw him plenty of times and he never brought it up, and I realised, like “oh shit, he was in that phase where he was so terrified of failing that he just failed!” But Aaron is great. You can tell him, “If I wanted to put out a record that looked like REO Speedwagon, I’d have done that – fix it!” [Laughs] And he doesn’t get his feeling hurt, he’s glad for the input.
Eugene: Both of these guys, Chiccarelli he had to fit us in – he’s doing stuff with Jack White and Morrisey, so we had to take the ass-end of the schedule [laughs]. And Aaron as well, touring with Sumac. They did it when they had time.
Eugene: But I figured after all this time, we really didn’t want to fuck it up twice, so it made sense to have professionals do it. I mean, no one was asking for this. I’ve gotten zero letters asking us to do what we’ve just done. I have had a few letters asking us to remix The Third Secret of Fatima, but that’s not going to happen.
Eugene: But Muru Muru was like that great line from Devil’s Advocate: “don’t let ‘em see you coming!” No one saw it coming, and I’m happy to have it. And, of course, the world’s hearing has changed. And that record can come out now and people are like “oh shit, this is great!” Because they’re not expecting [barks] “1,2,3,4 1,2,3,4” They’re not expecting that, you know,
SonicAbuse: Have you kept the locked groove on the second side?
Steve: yeah, that’s not on the new record. That’s one of our little things that we thought we wanted to do, be merry pranksters or whatever the hell it was.
Eugene: This was an oversight in actual fact, because I intended to do it, but you forget. We also had secret messages etched in the vinyl…
Steve: The runout, yeah…
Eugene: But I remembered after they finished the mastering, and I was like “you know what, I’m not going to ask John Golding to do some scribbles in the run out, fuck it!” So, the one concession that we made to our quirky, do things differently, was to have every record be different. That is new. There will be no two the same. It’s not like “oh, here’s 200 black vinyl!” Nah, every single record is different, so that’s the one concession we made.
SonicAbuse: I like that idea, that’s very cool. And, in terms of people not writing letters, my site rarely gets comments, but within minutes of my sharing the news someone immediately popped up asking how they could get a copy, so clearly some people are looking for this.
Steve: Right on!
Eugene: The thing is, I’m getting a lot of positive response from the people with the ears to know. But, if you care about puzzles, it’s an important piece. If you care about hardcore history, or if you don’t; if you listen to Oxbow as well, or any post-punk; or if you’ve paid attention; Or maybe you’ve heard the name and, you know, maybe people knew about it.
Eugene: The review we got in Maximum Rocknroll was “this is what happens if you take too much acid!” So, the record didn’t have… It’s like the 1987 movie with Bill Cosby, the reviews were like “Leonard Part 6 is a terrible movie, you should go see it!” The reviews were so bad that it actually made me want to see it – it made money being the worst movie of 1987!
Eugene: So, there was a sort of mythology connected to Muru Muru, but again, we’re probably talking about a mythology that maybe 100 people gave a shit about it. Once you get Google though, you type it in, and you read that people were like “what the fuck was this?” So, if you were paying attention, you could carry that ahead, but I’m glad that people realised that it was interesting puzzle piece to have in your hand.
SonicAbuse: Do you think, maybe, the opening number scared off people from the outset, because if they were expecting something full on, it’s got this eerie synth, drum pulse and jagged post-punk guitar; but there are songs on the record that could fit in a hardcore vein, but maybe they were placed in locations where people just didn’t get to them?
Eugene: No, I don’t think so. Our judgement was… not flawed but hazed because all those songs we’d played live. One of those songs in the middle of a bunch of other hardcore songs would not have drawn notice. But allthose songs on a single record drew some sort of notice. I’m pretty sure we played every single one of those songs live but, you know, if you play eight hardcore songs and then, you know, you throw in My Day at The Lake, who notices? Nobody!
Steve: Here’s something, Eugene. You know, we never played Once in A Lifetime live.
Eugene: I think you’re right. I wanted to say there was one we didn’t play live. I was going to say Cracked Mirror.
Steve: Nah, Once in A Lifetime, we never played it live and I don’t know why.
Eugene: Well, for the same reason people rejected Muru Muru as a record – because we couldn’t figure out how to make it fit the hardcore scene, I think.
SonicAbuse: When I was reviewing that and Myster Magi stood out for me. Once In a Lifetime has that kind of Sonic Youth thing going on, where there’s a lot of harmonics on the guitar and you’re playing with sounds and textures rather than slamming into a riff.
Steve: Well, Eugene’s singing… the melody that he chose to sing, it’s not really directly related to the music that’s being played. It’s like he’s doing kind of like a chromatic counterpoint, so it makes the song sound… I think it’s a great song, but it sounds very unusual and different, especially with all that harmonic pinging, and the bass sounds like the strings are all loose and slappy. I think it’s pretty cool.
Eugene: Yeah. Again, the best part about it is that we don’t feel like idiots for having done it a second time [laughs] You know. There are some guys out there in bands who are like “yeah man, we should go back” but I don’t think the world needs [laughs] a remix of “we won’t play the game!” I love the guys in the Clitboys, but nobody needs to be listening to Clitboys in 2025.
Steve: When we go on our reunion tour, you know… As if!
Eugene: Well, you know, people have asked about that, and I say, “yeah, ten grand!” And they say “fuck, that’s a lot of money for a band!” And I reply, “for a band? That’s for me! Ten grand for me to show up”
Steve: Then talk to the other guys!
Eugene: Yeah, then negotiate with the other guys. [Laughs]
Eugene: But the reality of it is that it’s such a different record from all the other Whipping Boy records. And I know for a fact that Dave just bought a drum kit. [Laughs] But, I couldn’t do it emotionally. I couldn’t. I mean, those songs were written; at least my portions of the songs were written; from a place of uncomfortability. And even though now a lot of that has softened [laughs]
Eugene: Steve, you know: Nevermore was about Josephine, right, and how that turned out in the end… ah, I’ve got nothing but sympathy for some of these people who once tormented me. But it’s still just emotionally…
Steve: It makes it easier to listen to, I guess.
Eugene: Exactly.
SonicAbuse: Was it challenging to hear the remixes and this portion of your life – because we’re talking thirty years ago.
Steve: I tried to listen to that record a number of times – the original one. And one of the things that kept happening is that I’d hear a new song and it was like the joke about the guy who wakes up in the post-op room in the hospital and the guy next to him says “hey, what are you in for?” And he goes, “oh, I had a little procedure, what did you do?” And the guy says, “I got circumcised.” And the other guy says, “that’s the word, not castrated!”
Steve: So, yeah, I hear a song, and I think that’s what that should have sounded like. If you’re familiar with Painkiller, the Judas Priest song – when I first heard that on the radio, I’m like “that’s what Myster Magi was supposed to sound like.” You know, with the drums kind of thundering in and really boomy and stuff. I’ve done that with almost every song on the record and, when I listen, what’s come up again and again is how inadequate the sound was. It’s always like “yeah, this could’ve been like this.” It could have been this KJ / Joy Division kind of a thing. Peter Hook playing the bass or whatever. But it wasn’t [laughs].
Steve: So, it wasn’t so much the emotional timbre – you know, we were like mopey, hardcore emos, Eugene and I, wandering about, taking LSD all the time. But that doesn’t hurt me as much as that it’s an opportunity unrealised.
Steve: And really that record, I would say, if that record had succeeded; if we had sold 50,000 copies of that record; I don’t believe that band, even in that incarnation, would have dissolved in the way that it did. I went off and did something else when the guys quit the band and we ended up moving on. But, if that record had been a big hit, I believe it would have been very different for the band.
Steve: It was more than just a disappointment as an individual product. For me, it was a very big disappointment as something that I really believed in at the time, and I thought it was what we were going to do, the record was going to be huge, we were going to be huge… oops, wrong!
Eugene: [Laughs] Yeah
Steve: [Laughs] Only Eugene is huge. Everybody else…
Eugene: Well, I mean… no, it was a message that we heard as a band that a lot of people shouldn’t listen to when they get that sort of message. And the people I know who got that message, like Al Barile (rest in peace) when the last record by SSD came out, How We Rock – people were like “fuck you guys” and he was like “alright!” and broke up the band and started another one. He wanted to do something else; he didn’t want to be trapped in that fucking ghetto for the rest of his life.
Eugene: Harley, he’s got this movie out now, Wired for Chaos, and I asked him about hardcore, and he was like “hardcore, when I think about hardcore, it was like a shit that I took that won’t flush!” [Laughs] But, you know, he’s not talking about hardcore, he’s talking about pretty much NYHC.
Eugene: So, yeah, I think that we heard all we needed to hear. The world wasn’t ready, we weren’t going to go back to doing “1,2,3,4”. Sam and Dave wanted to finish their educations; Steve and I, we played with a bunch of people, before we found… first Ron Isa, then Steve Shaughnessy (another rest in peace guy) and then it started to make sense again. But even then, you know, a lot of the songs ended up on Third Secret of Fatima, and I don’t have any emotional attachment to that record. I rarely listen to it.
Eugene: But I still listen to Muru Muru and the same thing, kind of like Steve, when I put the record on I kind of go “fuck!” [Laughs] But I’m one of those guys, I’m still moaning in my head about women that IU could’ve fucked in 1975 and I didn’t…
Steve: You’ve got to get over it, Eugene!
Eugene: I’m like “I wonder where she is now?” And then it’s like “bro, she’s 66-years-old, what are you thinking?” [Laughs] So, anyway…
SonicAbuse: Ah man, thank you so much for your time, it’s been so cool to revisit this album with you, and I’m really excited to get the record when it comes out.
Eugene: Me too! I want the record and the t-shirt, man, I’m excited about it!
