Interview
with Guy Picciotto |
| After beating the shit out of your guitars for over 15 years (or more?), do you still get that same kick each time you go on stage and plug it in? | |
| I've been playing shows for about 17 years i guess and performing still has the power to completely re-order my mind. it is a little different now because i have alot more experience so i have a sense of the possibilities (both positive and negative) of what could go down. when i first started playing it was almost impossible to contain all the adrenaline and i just felt almost too jacked up all the time - it was literally really hard for me to even execute the songs. now, i still get really heavy doses of energy but i feel more in control, that's the main difference. | |
| How did the lawsuit with that truckowner turn out? He sued you even though it wasn't your fault, right? | |
| The lawsuit was for $300,000 which the van owner didn't get - he had to settle for $3,000 and my insurance was able to cover that. i still have no idea what happened with my car that day - one minute i was parked at the side of the road - the next the car was speeding down the street at full throttle and i smashed into a van. completely crippling it. it was definitely not the fault of the van guy - either i went temporarily insane or else the car had a cruise control malfunction. my car was so totally destroyed there was no way to do any kind of analysis on it. it was an awful moment in my life - completely fucking terrifying. | |
| Please, tell us more about each member! | |
| alright- Joe runs a record label called Tolotta Records which releases incredible records by the band Spirit Caravan. Brendan is recording an album with Lois for the Kill Rock Stars label as well as composing music for television documentaries. Ian works full time managing the band and booking its tours as well as running the Dischord label - he recently did some production work with a new band called "Q and not U". I have a side label called Peterbilt which just released a split-CD with Dischord of one of mine and brendan's old bands called One Last Wish...i also just produced records by Quix-o-tic and DeepLust. |
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| How do you gonna do to break down the barriers between band and audience? | |
| I actually think there is a natural line between the band and its audience- i mean you literally have someone dispensing the music and others receiving it and i'm into that. things get weird when that line gets exaggerated and becomes a barrier in the sense that one side is privileged against the other. for us a good show depends on fluid interaction/communication between the two. i think there are a lot of ways to foster that vibe from low door prices (so there is no sense of the evening being solely a dispensing of "entertainment" and spectacle) - minimizing the presence of security -etc. | |
Why are you so much against merchandise? (Don´t tell me about the baker...) |
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| Basically, we feel we exist to make music not to generate logos, t-shirt designs, coffee mugs etc. As a matter of convenience we haven't had to deal with carrying that shit around both literally and mentally - its like a weight off our backs. What other bands do is their own business but for us avoiding merchandise has greatly increased our sense of freedom. | |
| Why don´t you play festivals? Is it the festivals you´re against or just against to play them? | |
| Mainly because we are control freaks - we like to monitor all aspects of our shows from the entry price to the security and the sheer size of festivals just makes that much more difficult. plus - there is a lack of focus at festivals - there is just such an overload of music that it everything just ends up feeling a bit dilute after awhile - its like an all-you-can-eat cafeteria - after awhile all you can taste is the salt. | |
| How do you think your records have developed/changed through the years? | |
| That is more a question for the people who listen to the records to decide. We rarely ever listen to our albums so it would be hard for us to judge the development. From the perspective of working on them i would say that they have become more and more fun to do as we got more comfortable with the tools of recording. the studio is a lot less alienating for us than it once was. | |
| Who does all the artwork for Fugazi? | |
| All four of us get involved with the artwork and along the way we usually collaborate with one or two other graphics designers to help us flesh out the ideas. on the first records up through "Steady Diet" we collaborated with a guy named Kurt Sayenga. for the last 4 we've collaborated with Jem Cohen the same guy who directed our film "instrument". on the technical end we've gotten a lot of help from Jason Farrell (who also plays in the band Bluetip). | |
| How much
money do you earn? (As a member of Fugazi) Can you live on the music though you´re underground in USA? |
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| The amount of money we make fluctuates every year depending on how much we tour and how many records we sell. For the first 5 years of the band most of us had to work part time jobs on the side. Now, we can mostly make a living from the band though since Brendan has a family with 2 children i think it is alot more difficult for him and he has had to do a lot more work on the side like soundtrack and production jobs. | |
| I read somewhere that you thought it was a failing if people didn´t understood what you had meant with the lyrics to your songs. Please explain | |
| My hope is not that everyone will understand 100% exactly what i meant when i wrote each lyric but that they will at least provoke some interest, that they will engage the listener on some level -even if it just sounds good to their ear. that is my hope but i don't consider it a failure if not everyone gets something from the lyrics - that's kind of an ambitious hope so i just do my best. | |
| The Fugazi documentery is now complete. Are you happy with how it turned out? Can you tell us anything about it that you can´t see on the screen? | |
| We worked on it for so long that once it was done it was initially a bit hard for me to watch but now i can be more objective about it. i do think the film offers a lot of different angles on the band - its not the complete story but it is a lot of good chapters. The only insider information i can think of off the top of my head is that we used one fake sound effect in the film - its the sound of a submarine diving ( that eerie drowned beeping) that we put under one of the studio shots. | |
| Which movies and filmmakers do you admire? | |
| here's a few: John Cassavetes - "Faces", "Husbands" Robert Bresson - "L'Argent", "Au Hasard, Balthazar" Jean Luc Godard - "Weekend", Pontecorvo - "the Battle of Algiers" Todd Haynes - "Safe" Lars Von Trier - "the Idiots" |
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| You used to tour 6 months a year... Have you missed being on the road, or are you happy to take a break from the touring? | |
| Part of me misses it quite a bit because it was so relentless and demanding that really appealed to the part of me that likes that kind of challenge... getting to travel to so many places was always awesome plus playing live itself is just such a blast. But we did that kind of 6 month pace for a lot of years so its is kind of nice to try and find a different kind of rhythm now. we are still fine tuning what our approach will be with touring now that brendan has a family. we'll see how it pans out. | |
| Are there many people still involved in the DC-scene there were involved in the eighties? I mean if there are many people still around or if they had disappeared? | |
| DC does have a strong gravitational pull but there's no hard rule about it some people are still about, others have disappeared, some disappeared and then came back, some disappeared, then reappeared then disappeared again - its like anywhere else i guess. | |
| How long do you think Fugazi will be around? | |
| I have no idea - as long as the four of us are into it we will continue to play - as soon as it starts to feel like a dead end, we will hang it up with no regrets. | |
| As the question above says, Fugazi´s first show was in september ´87. But you got involved in ´88. Right? How was it? Can you describe it? How to turn from the roadie to a member in the band you loved? How was your feelings back then? | |
| Fugazi only
played one show in which i wasn't involved at least in some minor capacity and that was
the first one. by the second show i was already kind of worming my way in on back up
vocals and the position just grew from there. In one sense it kind of felt inevitable that
i would join the band because brendan and i had been playing together for so long (before
Fugazi, we had been in Insurrection, Rites of Spring, One Last Wish and Happy go Licky so
we had a really strong bond). at the time though i wasn't really sure what i wanted to do
and it took me awhile to really commit myself to the group. the early Fugazi thing was
very loose – a lot of people came on stage and played with the band- people would
play trumpet or percussion or dance on stage or play organ or whatever so my being on
stage felt like part of that openness. it wasn't until the band started to tour that we
kind of formalized my position and i started to feel like an actual member. In retrospect.
i'm really incredibly glad things worked out the way they did. |
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| Rites of Spring has often been described as emocore-starters and so on...How do you look at that time now? What is emo? | |
| I have nothing but incredible memories of that band - my only regret is that we were way too volatile to ever get any touring done. we really only played like 14 shows and all but 2 were in DC. Still, the kind of intuitive communication we had as a band was really intense and the shows were always killer. a definite highpoint in my life. as far as "emo" goes - i have no real comment because i have no fucking idea what it is supposed to refer to. Rites of Spring had nothing whatsoever to do with any genre designation particularly one as amorphous, bogus and tacked on as "emocore". | |
| What is "the Positive Force"? | |
| Positive Force is
a organization of young people in DC involved in radical protest and political organizing.
they have collaborated with us a lot over the years, particularly in setting up benefit
concerts and protest rallies. |
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| Which Fugazi-album is your favourite? And why? | |
| Like i said earlier i never really listen to our albums. that said i have a soft spot for "red medicine" - it felt like we had found a new way to attack the studio. but actually sonically speaking, the one i enjoy most hearing is the "instrument soundtrack" because it is the most spontaneous and loose of them all. | |
| What is "The Black Light Panthers"? | |
| The first time brendan and i hung out in 1982 we formed BLP - over the years the 2 of us have performed under that name at parties or small concerts. last year we put out a 12" with the first boombox tape we ever made in his bedroom on one side and a more modern piece from 1997 on the other. | |
| I´ve heard you did a recording with steve albini or bob weston but were disappointed and re-recorded it... It is true? And when was that? Can you tell us about it? | |
| right before we
recorded what became "in On the Killtaker" we did take a trip to chicago and
recorded with steve albini at his old house. it was not intended to be an album - we just
wanted to demo our songs and we also really wanted to get a chance to work with steve. he
was awesome - he is an incredible engineer and a fucking amazing guy. our only
disappointment with the tape had more to do with our performance on it than on the sound
quality of the tape. more than anything the session was the beginning of a long, sustained
friendship between us and steve and by extension his band shellac who we have often had the pleasure of sharing the stage. plus we got to school him in dice. |
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