BCR: So have Tales of Terror heard the album?
Mark Arm: Two of them are dead, I know that. The guy who got stabbed in the mid-eighties and Dusty, the bass player, OD'd recently.
Steve Turner: Ratsass, the lead singer, showed up someplace around 10 years ago. Weird beer belly, wearing a tattered old vest. Still had the dyed black hair.
BCR: Rodney from X, he's dead too.
Steve Turner: This album is just a tribute to the dead. Just not Jerry Garcia.
BCR: Agreed, I was never grateful for The Dead.
Steve Turner: Me too, I tried a few times, really hard, but... There are parts of their stuff that are really great and then there are parts where they're the truly the worst band I've ever heard in my life.
BCR: So are you going to do a big tour for The Lucky Ones?
Mark Arm: We've just done a big tour!
BCR: Well, you did a mini tour of the states but..
Mark Arm: We did 18 shows in 18 days!
Steve Turner: Also a tribute to our youth,
Mark Arm: I don't think our youth held up...
Steve Turner: It was a hard job, Mark had a hard job on that one. He's just popping around like a mad man and screeching.
BCR: That must have been a lot of fun though, to just thrash around.
Steve Turner: Oh yeah! It was a lot of fun for all of us. That was another part of the inspiration apart from seeing if we could write songs quicker was seeing him doing stuff with the MC5. Who knew the man’s a monkey?!
BCR: How was that? That must have been... wow.
Mark Arm: That was amazing. Really great thing to do.
BCR: You did Inside Job with them and you did a collaboration with Mike Watt and Thurston Moore...
Mark Arm: Well, the key thing was Ron Asheton.
BCR: Ok.. Why was he key?
Mark Arm: It was Ron Asheton.
Steve Turner: The Stooges are basically Mark's world.
BCR: Was that a bit of a shell shock recording session?
Steve Turner: Watching Mark meet Iggy for the first time. That was amazing.
Mark Arm: That was in 1990. We were in New York and a friend of ours, Michael Vine, had recently taken pictures of Iggy Pop and he was like "Hey, Iggy's in the crowd tonight, want me to bring him back here?". I was like, " Yeah... No, no!" I got so nervous I went and actually hid in the bathroom. I was going round the corner afterwards and I ran into Iggy Pop and I was like "Hi!" and I realised how silly it was.
Steve Turner: And Iggy's so personable, he's totally different from what he's like on stage. When he's with his wife and he's very calm and funny and very gentlemanly.
Mark Arm: But I had no idea what he'd be like. From the records and from seeing him live and I didn't want someone I thought so highly of… I didn't want to meet him and him be a total dick. I didn't want the view changed of those records I'd loved for so long. I was just, do I want to do this?
BCR: Do I want to destroy my world as I know it?
Mark Arm: Exactly, yeah.
Steve Turner: He was shitting bricks.
Mark Arm: He was actually really, really, really nice.
BCR: You've had a lot of bands linked to you, not least Pearl Jam and Nirvana but a host of others. What was it about that scene that you guys were in that turned into such a fertile thing?
Steve Turner: It had a long gestation period but I think one of the biggest things was in late 83 an all ages club, a punk club, opened in Seattle and for the first time there was a place where local bands could play and touring bands, underground, smaller punk and hard core bands could play. Any of the bands that get mentioned can be linked back to that club and went to see the same shows together. And getting some of their first shows… it was the first place I ever played on stage.
BCR: What was it called?
Steve Turner: It was called The Metropolis, it ran for like a year and a half? It was really the first place that was running for a while so bands like the Replacements and Husker Du and Circle Jerks, they could go to Seattle and have a show. All the other places would get shut down by the cops 'cos they were in halls and people's houses.
Mark Arm: Obviously, Seattle was a lot different from what it is now.
Steve Turner: And it's not a huge city. Often British or underground bands wouldn't go there, they'd play Vancouver BC and go straight to San Francisco. They'd skip this whole area. There was another club that was organised right after that that allowed a lot of bands to play but the owner was nowhere near as benevolent as the other owner. Hugo, he wasn't really that interested in music, he just saw that a bunch of kids needed a place to hang out.
Mark Arm: His initial intention was a kind of youth centre like you have in Europe, some super thing for kids. You go to Switzerland or Zurich there's all these state funded artist workshops and you don't really see that in America.
BCR: Do you agree that Grunge was really the last "scene"...
Steve Turner: But that's because everything is so connected now. By the Internets... There are all these cool underground scenes, like this whole house party scene is pretty cool where they just decided to do away with clubs. I'm not involved in it at all but I hear about it, read about it occasionally.
Mark Arm: No Age totally came from a scene like that.
Steve Turner: Yeah, totally and that scene's been building quite a bit and it's great. It's taking it out of the hands of promoters, labels, everybody and it's because you can be so connected at this point. It seems like that would be one scene that seems fairly underground.
BCR: I don't mean these pockets of scenes, but rather like grunge, that that little pocket of something became such a global thing and a lot of people point at you to say... you started it.
Steve Turner: Our pat response to that is do not blame us for creating Creed. Don't put that on us. Don't blame us for Stone Temple Pilots. It wasn't us.
BCR: It really seems, though, that there are some people who have heard of you and totally love you and then there's the other camp that's never heard of you at all. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground.
Mark Arm: I'm pretty sure there's some people who have heard of us and not excited at all. They listened to what they got and said, "nope, not for me"...
Steve Turner: Well, We're pretty low profile at this point. You've got to do a lot more than we do to remind people that you exist. We're really comfortable doing our little things.
