WE NEVER LEARN: TALKING WITH TRENT RUANE OF THE MUMMIES

Last week I quit my swank gig in the book publishing biz, trading out steady paychecks, full health coverage, a respectable 401k plan, and employer profit sharing for the nebulous world of semi-employment and a get-rich-quick scheme in commercial real estate. So far all that stuff is working out except for the whole getting rich quick part. At any rate, before I left I spent the bulk of the last three years working with erstwhile New Bomb Turks Frontman Eric Davidson on his comprehensive history of 90s punk and garage music. The book, We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001 is the next chapter in the Please Kill Me/American Hardcore/Our Band Could Be Your Life succession.

The manuscript came in at close to 450,000 words and a lot of good stuff had to be jettisoned, so, rather than send the excess fat out to pasture, I've dumped it on Vice. This is an excerpt from an interview Eric Davidson did with Trent Ruane, frontman for the Bay Area's original "Budget Rockers," The Mummies. Enjoy.

Eric Davidson: When the Mummies started there was a lot of hippie dippie Paisley Underground stuff happening in California. Did you guys take any influence from that or were you more of a reaction to that?
Trent Ruane: Well, the 80s paisley bands and that stuff, they did have an influence on us, but like most things it was the opposite. Those bands really irked me because listening to those original 60s garage records was just such a shock, in a large part because of the way they were recorded. I bought a few of those records and they sounded like shit, really clean, like any other 80s band. Russell and I thought it would be a lot more fun if we did a piss take on that and said fuck the fashion and just do something really stupid.

There was a history of some bands in the 60s who had, you know, matching pirate outfits or swami costumes or whatever. But I think by the mid-80s, that stuff was pretty much forgotten by younger rock fans.
I'm finding now though that the whole "garage" thing, or maybe going back about five-plus years ago, [new garage bands] are influenced by one thing only, and that's the first wave of garage bands, which seems to be very one-dimensional.

Yeah, I would say half of that stuff got old quick, like bands having kitschy record sleeves. You know, like the devil girl in the hotrod on the single cover. Fun for awhile, but pretty predictable. And the level of trashiness in the recordings usually didn't get as noisy as you guys or Teengenerate, or just over-the-top spazzy fast like the Devil Dogs, Dwarves…
I think it's harder for bands to do something like that and put it out and not be embarrassed. If you listen to anything we did, it's like your listening to something that came through an AM radio.

Plus, at least for most of the bands I knew in Ohio who did the whole lo-fi thing, it wasn't because they were trying to go for a certain style—I mean it was fun and quicker--but a lot of it was just economics.
I can't say this without sounding totally cheesy or like a hippie, but it really was like magic. The organ, it was a cheap Doric organ, sort of like a Farfisa, we found it at a thrift store brand new like it'd never been used. Back then, no one really used them, it wasn't like the White Stripes had made old guitars highly sought after. Silvertones and organs for $35! That's fucking magic. It's not like you would find this shit everyday…but you found enough of it.

But clearly, when you did record the early stuff, you were OK with putting it out.
Actually, I wanted them to sound like old garage stuff, to the point where each one was going to sound a little different. I was really into this mystery thing. Are you familiar with the Garage Punk Unknowns comps? Those are my favorites. I liked the Back from the Grave stuff, but the Garage Punk Unknowns were my favorites because there was absolutely no information on those record sleeves. A bunch of blurry pictures with no information, and I thought that was the coolest thing, the whole mystery. Who the hell is this band in a basement with crazy writing on the wall and these dorks playing?

Yeah, I appreciate all the hard work in tracking down information on these completely lost bands who put like one single out, and ended up in AA years later not wanting to talk about their sordid teen years. There's a certain inspiring mystery to the kind of personality that would spend so much of their life tracking that stuff down. Although, Ugly Things is kind of the bible of that mentality, and that can get annoying too. I guess there's also something to be said for leaving some of that stuff alone.
That's why we never put any of our names on our records. Later on our names appeared in interviews, but I really wanted it to be low key. After high school ended, Maz and I took out a $1000 loan, and we bought some recording equipment.

You walked into a bank and they gave you a loan?
Well, his dad or his uncle…

Shit, I was really hoping there was a scene with two high school kids wrapped in gauze sitting down with a banker, explaining how they were going to do this crummy garage band.

INTRO BY AARON LEFKOVE

The New Bomb Turks and Livefastdie are playing reunion sets at The Bell House in Brooklyn on Saturday, June 26 to celebrate the release of We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001.