Still Suicidal After All These Years

"Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket."
          -H.L. Mencken

I am pondering what I know about Suicidal Tendencies in preparation for a telephone interview I am about to do when I remember, "Oh yeah, I actually saw them once. At the Warped Tour." And I try to remember why I don't remember anything about their performance. "Hmmm" I think real hard "Was that the time I spent almost the entire show inside the beer garden?" and I realize, yes, it was.

I don't know if you've had the pleasure of witnessing one of these 'outdoor festival concerts' lately but, as I learned at this past summer's Warped Tour what was once a lazy day on a sandy field with music and skateboarding has become a giant orgy of merchandisers hawking product. (Oh, and some bands play too.) What used to be billed as "Punk Rock Summer Camp" is now lightly translated into a slogan like "I went to the Warped Tour for the music, but I stayed for the Yoo-Hoo!" It has gotten ugly.

So I remember being hunkered down in the beer garden in the Oakland Coliseum parking lot, trying to figure out which band is playing where and when, drinking five-dollar-beer after five-dollar-beer, when this little bald dude with a Boston accent walks up to me and my friend Steve and introduces himself as a member of the Church of Hare Krishna. I am lightly humored by this and my friend Steve immediately takes the opportunity to point out the nuance of the little man's accent.

"Say 'car,'" he starts berating the guy. "Say 'car'!" The little guy obliges.

"Cah" he says in typical, Quimby-esque fashion. I become somewhat embarrassed by Steve's behavior, so I politely ask what a member of the Hare Krishna is doing in the beer garden at such an impious venue. And, to my chagrin, the little man hands me a couple smallish hardback books titled "Enlightenment" or "The Meditation of the Tao" or some such crap, and explains that he is giving them away for a kind 'donation'. A donation! I am laughing then, when I notice a laminated backstage pass hanging around the guy's neck. The guy was juiced-in somehow! He was part of the whole circus, I realized, and feeling hurt by his whole lack of a 'punk vibe' I decided to offer him something I thought would be mutually beneficial.

"I don't really wanna buy enlightenment today, thanks, but I'll give you fifty bucks for that pass" (which I thought was a handsome offer). He didn't think so, muttering that he would need it every day for the next couple weeks on the Tour.

I might have given him a couple bucks anyway and put the books in my backpack for future use as doorstops, or perhaps for use in the event of a kleenex shortage, as toilet paper. I don't remember. It was then, I think, that I had really adjusted my vision of the scene at the Tour to see that something was horribly awry.

"What has the world come to when Eminem plays side-by-side with Pennywise in a huge outdoor shopping mall where little men are permitted to run amok selling salvation to beer-soaked miscreants!" I started shouting to no one in particular. Steve slapped me in the back of the head, like any good friend would, and almost caused me to spill my beer.

"Shut up and drink." He said "We gotta get over to where Blink 182 is about to play so we can set up for photos."

"Of what?" I muttered dumbly.

He cackled in a sort of evil way, "Only a few hundred topless 16-year-olds, of course. What do you think happens when a teeny bopper punk band like 'Blink' starts yelling at a crowd like this?"

"Show us your tits?" I smiled.

"You got it." Steve said, as we headed into the crowd and waded through row after row of the assembled target market between the ages of 15 and 24 that had come to see Punk Rock and Extreme Sports but was instead immersed in a sea of advertising for everything from G-Shock Watches to All-Sport Endurance Drinks.

Which brings me back to my point, what happened to Punk? What happened to DIY? What happened to Old School? What happened to Suicidal Tendencies, who were practically banned from playing in L.A. for much of the early '80s because of the violent element that came to their shows?

I'm pleased to say of those things I just mentioned, one is still fighting, and will be in Chico this week to play The Brick Works, the Cyco people who brought you Infectious Grooves and 'Institutionalized.' I am speaking, of course, about Mike Muir and his House of Suicidal. And remember-all he wanted was a Pepsi.

Huh?

Oh, hi. How you doing?

Ya, uh...Where are we now? I don't know [laughs], we're on the road somewhere. Our bass player was just sick, he threw up, so I was trying to deal with him, Josh. And then he like, passed out on the floor, so I was cleaning him up. [pauses] He's alright now [we both laugh], and I remember, 'Oh, I gotta do an interview, so...'

Cool, well I guess I wanted to start with how your new tour is going, how the vibe is.

Oh yeah. The first two shows were great. Pomona was cool and we just played in, uh, gosh, my head is frazzled...we played in...Santa Cruz! Right, Palookaville, the crowd went off, great pit, and it felt good to hit it like that, back in the Suicidal thing.

Yeah, the Warped Tours are fun. I mean, they're different than anything you can do possibly with music because of all the stuff going on, the skaters, the motorcycles, and then you got all different kinds of bands and I think it's a good way to get your music across to, you know, the Generation X kids, the skaters and those types of people. It was fun, I had a good time on it. It's a lot different than playing the clubs, which is your dedicated, hardcore fans, and then, like, you get new people too, but the Warped Tour is a lot of people who haven't seen you.

Ice T got on stage with us every day, and he would sing a couple songs with us and he wore a Suicidal shirt every day [laughs].

Not really, I mean there was some of the watches, G-Shock and all that whatever but yeah, I didn't really get caught up in it. I'd watch the bands play, and hang out with them. I'd always watch the Lunachicks, and Black Eyed Peas, and Pennywise, and Ice T, and stuff. It was a big family atmosphere. I didn't really get involved with the selling, and all that, merchandise and stuff.

Eminem was kinda shy. He had bodyguards.

Yeah, he was a little scared of everybody, but he would come and watch us play.

It's fun to play there. And it's funny, because at this last show we played, in Pomona, there were some cops there and they watched the whole show. And afterwards, they were buying t-shirts [laughs]. So it comes around.

Oh, wow...let's see...um...aw, I know one. We were in Zwikow, Germany, and we were playing a festival there and Danzig was going on after us. We played a half-hour set and the thing was in a big soccer field and it was muddy. And we got through playing and [the crowd] kept shouting "Encore! Encore!" And they told them "Well, that's it for Suicidal." And the fans got mad. They started throwing mud and rocks on-stage and they wouldn't let Danzig's crew set up, and when they came out to set up they kept throwing rocks and the promoters freaked out. They ran and got Mike and said "Look, you gotta talk to the audience and tell em you're going to come back and play here because they won't let the other bands play!" And everything was covered in mud and dirt. I was cleaning dirt off my amps for a couple of weeks when we got home. Yeah, they started rioting because we wouldn't play another song.

So, that's what you call loyal Suicidal fans.

Yeah, just, you know, we're back in the West Coast doing a West Coast tour, and it's been good so far and I hope it continues to be. And keep the Sui's rocking... 

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