A Quote by Veronica Vasicka
When I reissue these Minimal Wave Record songs, I also re-master them. With Oppenheimer Analysis, it turned out that the band still had the master tapes. So, Martin Lloyd from the band and I baked the tapes to restore the quality.
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All my writing takes place during the recording of the master tapes. I never do have songs when I start up an album. I actually write them while I record.
It's a weird technique but it works. If you bake tapes at a certain temperature - I think it's 130 degrees - something happened to the magnetic particles, so you can restore them. The key is to do the transfer to digital while it's still warm. If it's done right, the new digital version will actually improve upon the quality of the original. If you do it wrong, though, the tapes will melt!
In the late '70s, I had a band - the David Johansen band, for lack of a better name - and I started collecting, not records, but tapes from people I knew who had jump-blues records.
I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. The band write the songs. The band play the music. It's the band's fans who buy the records. The band is responsible for whether it's a great record or a horrible record. Royalties belong to the band. I would like to be paid like a plumber. I do the job and you pay me what it's worth.
I've had a couple tapes out and they weren't really tapes, it was just some songs that I had made, and then I would throw them together as a compilation and put a name on it. And then when I would release my next thing, I would just delete it.
I couldn't afford to go to the record store to buy new tapes, so I'd tape everything off the radio. Just hit record when my song came on. I used to take my mom's tapes and tape over them. I had a nice little collection. Had my own Stephen Jackson mixtapes off the radio!
You don't accidentally turn into a big band. Not even Nirvana accidentally turned into a big band. They toured - they wanted to become a big band. They didn't necessarily want to become that big of a band, but they still wanted to make a really good record and wanted to come out and tour.
I'm not a master. I'm a student-master, meaning that I have the knowledge of a master and the expertise of a master, but I'm still learning. So I'm a student-master. I don't believe in the word 'master.' I consider the master as such when they close the casket.
I never thought of us as a punk band, a metal band, or a new wave band. Just as a band band.
You hope to catch the band on a good night and you hope that it sounds good when you hear the tapes back, and you hope that when you mix it you still have the feeling that you had when you were onstage, but it seems like it never quite works out that way!
Usually I write the songs at home and then I bring them in to the band; when we play them as a band, that's kinda how we figure out the feel of how they're going to be presented on the record or live.
The act of the being in the band has very little in common with writing songs. The songs come out of it, and the band is necessary for the songs to emerge, but the band doesn't exist just so the songs can emerge.
My grandmother loved country music, and she's the one who really got me into country music. She had George Strait tapes, a bunch of them. I remember listening to tapes, taking them out, the covers and the back.
We went from being a band that was recording songs in my bandmate's bedroom to a band that's doing extensive touring and had a record on the Billboard charts and everything happened insanely fast, but it's not something that I sought out. It just happened.
My VHS collection certainly contains videos that I've had since childhood, and also tapes that my mom had taped off of the Disney Channel or HBO - you know, blank tapes with the 'Care Bears' movie or whatever is on there - but I feel like that collection started for real my freshman year of college.
I thought eventually I'd have a family and I really didn't want to be a loser like that guy in his 40s still shopping his band's shitty demo tapes around.
