John Dwyer: There was a bunch of music people I wanted to meet out here. I basically just ran the gamut in Rhode Island. What bands did you want to play with once you got here?
Actually, most if it, I guess, was Greg from Deerhoof. I saw him play drums and it was just inspiring. I didn’t really know anybody out here except one dude who I ended up playing with in Pink and Brown. But my favorite band is this one that used to play around here in the 90s called the Icky Boyfriends. The Sic Alps are out here. Mayyors are great. It’s a smaller scene than New York, I think, so there’s more inbreeding going on as far as people working together. Does that mean it’s more stagnant too?
It’s kind of weird here. There’s some real minor lags and lulls, but for the most part it’s pretty consistent. There’s always new shit starting. It’s always pretty interesting. In Providence, depending on the crop of students out there—because it was such a school-oriented town—there’d be these great bands and then just four years of dogshit and then all of a sudden good stuff again. What are some of your favorite things about San Francisco?
My favorite place to play is this gay bar—they kind of cater to everybody. It’s called the SF Eagle Tavern. It’s a leather-daddy bar. It’s really fucking fun. They only do shows one night a week so it never gets boring. There’s another spot called El Rincon. That joint’s pretty hot. You can play at any other fucking club out here but they’re all boring, black, personalityless rooms. These spots are cool. And you can’t beat the tacos. They’re three bucks anywhere you go. You’d be hard-pressed to find a shitty taco. People from California and the South would marry tacos if they could. It’s a little insane.
It’s kind of disgusting, but yeah, it’s totally true. In New York you can’t find any good burritos. People think that Chipotle shit is good. They need to be locked up.
It’s getting better, man! By the Lorimer stop there’s a place called Mexico 2000. I know it’s the most retarded name. But it’s like a bodega with one little Latino lady working there. There are only three tables, and you can never get a seat. It’s the shit. Is there anything about San Francisco that bums you out?
Right now the art scene is crushingly bad. There are so many great painters out here and nobody can sell anything. Since the economic meltdown, nobody wants to buy anything. I trim weed for a living in Oakland. So I see all these beautiful old-ass houses that are just boarded up. It’s kind of crazy. Everything’s shutting down. Wait. You weed gardens?
I trim weed and I do carpentry. The weed job is kind of new but I really like marijuana, so it turned out nicely. Oh. That weed.
Yeah. I literally mean pot—cutting it down to a smokeable chunk. Marijuana’s pretty much legal. It’s not too hard to get a doctor here to say your insomnia would be helped by marijuana. I totally imagined you outside in the middle of summer furiously hacking at a never-ending field of crabgrass and dandelions.
Out in the woods with a machete with sandals on? No. I sit on a couch. It’s not a bad job. I was too hung over to work the other day and I was laughing because all it requires me to do is sit on a leather couch and cut marijuana and watch horror movies all day, and I couldn’t even do that. That was a pretty blistering hangover.
I think people are numbed by the good drugs out here. The weather’s nice. I’m in a pretty good mood and I have no idea why. I read the paper every morning and there’s babies being raped and shit, and I’m just like, OK, going to work now. But I think a lot of sad shit happens. San Francisco’s got a pretty fucked-up history, as far as I can tell. Meth, crack, and heroin are out of control here. There’s definitely those sections of town that are cordoned off business-wise to keep people where they are. Isn’t the homeless population in San Francisco pretty massive?
Yeah, because it’s relatively comfortable year-round. The homeless situation doesn’t bother me outside of the fact that they shouldn’t be stuck there. But it’s not like they’re harassing you on the streets. Everyone over there seems to have their own special insane homeless-guy story. You?
There’s this one guy that we call “the jumper,” who I actually haven’t seen in a long time so I’m afraid he may have finally done the deed. He’s this naked white guy, all cracked out, standing on the ledge on the fifth story of a building next to my work screaming, “I’m gonna jump! I’m gonna jump!” It would happen so many times that nobody would really give a fuck. The paramedics would show up and know him by name. Eventually they’d send a cop up to tackle him. The cops would have to tackle a naked crazy?
Yeah, they’d send up a zealous piggy to knock him down and be hero for a day. Even the insane people around here seem to be on a routine. You can count on people like that. What’s your band been up to these days?
We play all the fucking time. I think we’ve oversaturated the scene. We’re taking a little break from it to make a new record. When’s it coming out?
I don’t know. We just had one come out in, like, May, but I already got the new one written so we’re going to record at the end of June. It’s already written? God, man.
Yeah, I’ve been busy. Like I said, I don’t work too much and the pot’s really good here so I’ve got songs flying out of my ears. I heard some dude compare you to Lux from the Cramps. Have you ever heard that?
Not really. I saw him when I was 16 on Halloween and I’m sure he had some deep effect on me. He basically ripped his clothes off and was just naked and wet onstage. You know when you’re a kid and you see something fucked up, it takes a few years before you realize that you really dug it? That you weren’t just horrified by it? I think that’s what that dude did for me. What’s with this DVD compilation project I heard you guys were putting together?
The project’s really open-ended. A bunch of people send us just straight live footage. We’ve had people make videos too. But now I want to make it a werewolf movie. I can’t really go into that because the idea is really fetal at this point, but I started writing a movie called Junky Werewolf. It’s gonna be pretty shitty, I think. It would be pretty cool to see what kind of weird shit fans send you.
The stuff that people have actually made is pretty great. I haven’t seen one shit thing yet, which is kind of amazing because I don’t like anything. Yeah, but they’re your fans. You can’t really say anything negative or you’d come off like a complete dick.
No. I would tell you that. I don’t give a fuck. Someone told me you once beat up a guy from the Deadly Snakes. True or false?
I don’t even know who that is. Is that a band? No. I don’t think so. If I did, tell them I’m sorry.