Interview with Fat Mike of NOFX

Fat Mike, the old punk who won’t lie down, tells Truepunk about success-hungry kids, the Scarface of Ecuador and NOFX’s new old-school album Coaster.

NOFX – May 2009 By Steve Tauschke

Hi Mike, are you guys still only touring about three or months a year these days?
“Yeah although it just so happens I went to Japan last week and I have to go to Europe tomorrow so I’m only home for seven days. But we rarely do that but there’s a couple of really big festivals we had to take so ..”

Japan – do you enjoy it there?
“It’s probably my favourite place in the whole world to go but not for normal reasons, my festish-y weird reasons. They’ve got some really weird creepy bars there that I love going to. There’s a place called Osaka Jail I like to frequent, your basic bar with a dominatrix and you get a good tie-up and some needles through your tits, that kind of thing.”

I imagine your new DVD Backstage Passport chronicles such footage from your travels.
”Yeah, there’s some footage from Osaka Jail in the DVD actually. It’s hard when you’re in places liken Singapore or Indonesia finding some creepy places because the countries is so creepy already that you really don’t want to find the underbelly. But we did, we went to our share of cool places. Once in Ecuador, which is a pretty poor country, we played a show at a country club and we asked ‘who’s the richest kid in town – let’s have a party at his house!’ So we had an after-party at his house and that was awesome. He was like the Scarface of Ecuador.”

You mentioned last time we spoke how CD piracy pretty much generated your tours of various third world countries given your albums aren’t officially available in these places.
”Right, it’s all word of mouth and kids giving it to each other somehow. But when we used to tour Europe in the 80s we didn’t have distribution there either and kids still knew who we were and knew our songs. Back then it was cassettes tapes from person to person and now it’s a lot easier.”

Having flogged yourself across US and Europe so many times, it must be fun to play to new audiences?
”It sounds stupid but it was really exciting and fun for us because it had been really long time since we got off an plane and were thrown into a culture that you’re like ‘what the fuck is going on here?’. We got off the plane in the Philippines and it was weird.”

You’ve sold six million albums without mainstream promotion and yet you advise young bands against pursuing the whole DIY thing these days. Why?
“I just don’t think kids these days have the stomach for it. The first six years we were touring no-one liked us and there was no hope of ever getting bigger. But it’s fine for us because we’re alcoholics and we really like being on the road. But kids today they want to make it, they don’t want to play in garages for six years like us with no hope. They want to get in a band and within two years they want to be big and if it doesn’t work out for them then they’ll start a new band. They’re worried about their career rather than having good times. You see them gang up on one band member for being too drunk one night. I’m like ‘are you fucking serious – this is rock n’ roll and it’s about fun and excess. Fuck moderation!’.”

Is that a generation Y instant gratification attitude?
“Absolutely! Instant gratification! So if you’re in band and get a major label opportunity then go for it because those labels will be going under within a year or two anyway. I mean with the record industry, our depression started four years ago.”

People are still buying records though.
“It’s not like it’s totally dried up. I don’t think people can just live off songs, a single here and a single there. People still for a long time will want an album. Bands put 12 or 15 songs on one album for a reason, because the songs belong together. It’s a point in your life that you can remember, an album you were listening to, whereas you don’t really remember just a song you were listening to.”

So how do you look back on your 90s albums such as Punk In Drublic?
”I think White Trash Two Heebs and A Bean is really our first listenable record, that I can listen to. And Punk In Drublic is our biggest but at the time it wasn’t a big deal at all, it wasn’t like that album came out and we got huge. It happened slowly and we’ve held onto it. And I’m just really stoked and flattered and couldn’t be happier that the attendance of NOFX shows hasn’t gone down at all.”

Not bad for a band that recently celebrated its 25th anniversary!
“Yeah it’s pretty crazy. We did I think make a really good move in the mid-90s when a lot of our friends were making videos and signing to majors but we thought ‘you know what – I’d rather have a long career. Let’s just go with what we do and play clubs and not fuck with success’.”

There’s nothing flashy about new album Coaster .. it has that consistency we’ve come to expect.
“I think we’ve made a record that I would have enjoyed when I was 14 more than any other record because it does kind of have an old school sound. NOFX started from hardcore and we got more melodic whereas with this record it’s more of a throwback to ‘81/82 LA punk rock. It’s slower and kind of more manic and the sound is a lot cleaner.”

Producer Bill Stevenson must have helped there?
“You can’t go wrong with Bill and Jason because they’ll give you the sound that they want and they know how to get it. You’re not going to get bad-sounding record with them. And Bill, he listens to old punk every day, he’s obsessed with it and if he’s not listening to it he’s talking about some old Black Flag story. He made us listen to this Suburban Lawns song every single day and we watched the video called I’m A Janitor and I can actually hear some of the influence of that song on our record.”

www.nofxofficialwebsite.com

www.myspace.com/nofx

NOFX

“Punk rockers are shit”, NOFX’s singer-guitarist Fat Mike tells Truepunk.

Archival December 1994 Interview by Steve Tauschke | steve@staff.truepunk.com | with NOFX’s Fat Mike.

The band has been kicking around for 10 years now…why has it taken the better part of a decade to sustain yourselves?

I know why we haven’t and that’s because we were shitty for a long time and it took us a while to get good, and then it took people a while to realize that we didn’t suck anymore. But there’s a lot of bands that you know, Pennywise for instance, they were only together two or three before they got popular. Rancid has only been together two or three years and they’re goin’ gold out in the US, so I don’ think it takes that long if you start off good. I think a lot of bands start off bad.

So what attributes should a good punk band have?

Well, you can’t have an attitude. There can’t be any rock stars in the band. Punk rockers are shit. Punk bands are not very good musicians typically and even if you are a good musician, I think it’s harder to type than it is to play to guitar. It doesn’t take much to play guitar – or to yell. It’s like, fuckin’ easy! Anyone can do it, anyone can learn bass guitar in about half an hour. Actually I taught my 78-year-old grandmother how to play a song on bass. So if you’re a bass player and you get into some band that becomes popular then it’s no reason to think you’re better than everyone else just because you got lucky. If you’re in a punk band you can’t think you’re special but a lot of people do.

So is NOFX a DIY band?

No, not at all. You have to do everything yourself anyway. We used to do everything ourselves, the four of us in a van would drive and set up everything and put out our own records. Now we’ve got a label, now we’ve got crew members to carry our stuff, now we’ve got a manager guy. I used to book our own tours but now there are too many things to worry about.

Are you the scout, so to speak, for the Fat label? Do you do the hiring n’ firing?

Yeah, I don’t have people searching for bands or anything. When I’m on tour and I see good bands or i hear a good demo that’s the band I sign. I just signed band in Germany in fact, a band who we played with called Wizo. They were really good!

Speaking of touring, your stats are exhausting; Europe six times, the US ten times, Canada twice, even Argentina and Japan. Do you subscribe to the school of thought that punk bands ought to be constantly on the road?

I don’t really believe in it. Touring is just something that we do. If people like touring, then they tour. I mean there’s a lot of punk bands that I’ve never seen that I still like.

Such as?

Such as the Sex Pistols – never saw them. Or X-Ray Spex.

Does the reggae side to the band add another dimension?Sure. It makes the live show more fun so it’s not just one punk song after another. It makes us fun for us too because we can get bored.

Your recent Punk In Drublic album has a song about Jewish skinheads. What’s the story?

I was just driving in LA one day and you know how like orthodox Jews shave their kids’ heads so they all looked like little skinheads but actually they’re really just kids. They actually looked like a gang of Jewish skinheads…but it’s just a made-up story.

NOFX

On the eve of the mid-90s neo-punk expolosion, NOFX’s Pied Piper-like leader Fat Mike, already a ten year veteran of the San Francisco Bay Area scene, offered his own prerequisite on attaining punkdom’s esteemed high office.

INTERVIEW WITH NOFX By Steve Tauschke

“There can’t be any rock stars in the band,” he cautioned me during a break on a Punk In Drublic tour in Europe back in 1994. “Punk rockers are shit, they’re not very good musicians typically and it doesn’t take much to play guitar – or to yell. It’s like, fuckin’ easy! Anyone can learn bass guitar in about half an hour. Actually I taught my 78-year-old grandmother how to play a song on bass.”

The quartet’s new album Wolves In Wolves’ Clothing tackles everything from drinking songs to the more serious matter of America’s flawed foreign policy, as illustrated in the ship-headed-for-the-iceberg analogy of USA-Holes.

“Yeah, it’s funny how many kids say ‘why are you singing about the Titanic?’,” laughs Mike. “God, fuckin’ stupid kids! It’s a pretty easy metaphor for America and there’s no escaping this either. I just think this country is on its way down, maybe we won’t be wiped off the face of the earth but we’re just going to turn into a country like South Africa where urban places are super dangerous, the economy sucks and everything will slowly turn into chaos.

Notably, Fat Mike, born Mike Burkett, was instrumental in releasing on his own Fat Wreck Chords label the War On Errorism album in 2003 followed by two instalments of Rock Against Bush, leftist politico-punk compilations that in the build up to local elections re-jigged the ‘wake up America’ template of the Reagan-era Dead Kennedys two decades earlier. Back then, Mike was a teenage misfit with punk rock aspirations. He spawned NOFX in 1983.

“If you wanted to put out a record in 1984 or ‘85 there were maybe only 5 or 6 labels in the US; SST, Discord, Mystic and a few others,” he says of the group’s long-held DIY ethos. “You had to put out your own stuff if you wanted a record out and that’s what most bands that we knew did, they just put out their records and then later more labels popped up. I always thought going to a major would be the wrong career move for us. Now we’re even more DIY than before because we put out own records – we’re not even on Epitaph – and we book our own tours and pretty much do everything ourselves.

Ask Mike for his thoughts on the myspace phenomenon and his tone turns to indifference.

“There’s kind of some good and bad things about it,” he shrugs. “For me, the whole downloading of music is bad for my record label but it’s kind of good for new bands. I’m not really one to bitch about it because that’s just how it goes. I used to tape records for my friends when I was a kid but there’s just so many bands to choose from now, it’s just really hard to find new bands – they’re so much mediocrity out there.”

“Anyone with a Pro Tools rig and a computer can get a CD out to thousands of people. It used to be that if you were good somebody would sign you and pay for you to go into the studio and then distribute your record. Now anyone can do it and maybe that’s good or maybe that’s bad, I’m kind on the fence either way. All I know is there’s more fuckin’ mediocre bands now than I’ve ever seen before. When Epitaph signed their first bands from ‘89 they were pretty good bands; NOFX, Pennywise, Rancid, the Offspring and Bad Religion; they all made an impact in the punk world.”

Despite citing Against Me, Arctic Monkeys and the “new Chemical Romance record” as recent musical highlights, Mike does concede his enthusiasm has waned considerably over the years.

“I think I’ve got 10% of the enthusiasm I used to have,” says the 39-year-old father-of-one. “One thing though, when I find a band I really like, it does make me really happy. There’s this band called The Spits, I don’t know if you’ve head them, I heard one of their records and it totally gave me faith in music again. Once in a while you see that but mostly it’s just fuckin’ depressing.”

Currently plotting a world tour of locations as yet untouched by NOFX, Mike says 2007′s road trip adventures will be documented, bloopers included, on a DVD package hopefully later this year .

“The third world crowds are the hungriest and it’s where all the craziest shit happens. They don’t have a lot of experience staging shows and so you never know what’s going to happen. We’ve already got permission to play Beijing and Taiwan and we’re going to Russia and Israel and South Africa and hopefully all over South East Asia. And we’re playing Tasmania, we’ve never been there before!”