HardLore - Dwid Hellion (Integrity)

Starting point is 00:00:00 We did the incontrastive since 7-inch, that was that I talked about earlier, with victory. If you've ever seen the record, there's like a blue cross of a crucified witch. That's the cover artwork. And then all of a sudden, there's these records, and according to Victory, we didn't sell any records. Nobody liked us and that nobody would buy it. And then we start seeing in stores our record on a different color vinyl with a green cross. Well, that's strange. Because you designed it.

Starting point is 00:00:27 So we called him up and we're like, what's up with that? No, no, no, that's the same record. You guys were mistaken. We're like, no, you repressed them, dude. You know, he was stealing from the get-go. Hello, welcome. It's Hardlord Time. How you doing, Bo?

Starting point is 00:01:00 I'm doing so well, Colin. How are you today? I don't know that I could be better. I'll be honest with you. It's a big day. It's another, we've got it. We've had an incredible month on the show, perhaps the most stacked month in history. That's so.

Starting point is 00:01:14 And we are capping it off with a, with a legendary episode. We've got an incredible guest. Who do we got? Today we have the man that killed youth crew. A pioneer of metallic hardcore, the iconic frontman and founder of the band Integrity. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome. Live from Belgium, Mr. Dwight Helion, how are you, sir? I'm doing great.

Starting point is 00:01:45 Thanks. Thank you so much for being here. It's my pleasure. It's a long time coming. We're psyched. This is a beautiful day. We've had, we've got questions here. We've been waiting to ask for, you know, 20 years here.

Starting point is 00:02:00 So let's just get to it. I want to start with something interesting. Okay. I want to start with the origin of the named Wydd. I've got a visual representation here of the story I've heard. Oh. And you tell me whether or not this is true. I think I know what you're going to say and it's not true.

Starting point is 00:02:19 So you're telling me this. I can tell you that story. That's a strange one. Yeah. So that's not why? No. Wow. So there was a guy from Cleveland, Ohio, named Jason Popson.

Starting point is 00:02:35 He was for a while, the singer for the band In Cold Blood with Aaron and Lenny. As well as Mushroom Head eventually. And Mushroom Head. He was simultaneously with Mushroom Head, actually, at the time. So it's an awkward conversation. I'm not sure how to say it, so I'll just say it. Back in those days, you would talk on a phone that would be either a cordless phone or stuck to a wall. This is ancient times.

Starting point is 00:03:01 And sometimes people would doodle on paper while they were talking. They didn't have FaceTime like this. For your younger viewers, they're going to think this is mind-blowing. But so, yeah, so I'm talking to him. And then he says, has this eureka moment. He says, I figured it out. And I said, figured out what. We were talking about something totally unrelated.

Starting point is 00:03:23 And he said, your name, your name, it's pimp upside down. And I said, what are you talking about, dude? He said, yeah, I'm doodling your name while I'm talking to you on the phone. And I said, okay, that's fucking awkward. I don't know how to respond. And then he explained it to me. I wrote your name in all lower caps and spun it around. And I said, yeah, that's not where it came from.

Starting point is 00:03:48 Oh my God. This is both heartbreaking and incredible information. So J-Man from Mushroomhead discovered the Dwit Pimp connection? He perpetuated the conspiracy, I guess, but it's not true. So the truth is, I grew up. I did not grow up in Cleveland. I grew up in Indiana. And then when I turned, I think about 12 to 13 years old, I moved to Louisville, Kentucky. with my father. And that's where I discovered punk and underground music. Before that, I lived on like a farm,

Starting point is 00:04:26 and they didn't have anything like that. And in the Louisville scene, they had a lot of music, a lot of bands. It was sort of like, you ever see the movie Suburbia? It was a bit like that with, like, young kids, having Mohawks and everything. And I think a lot of it had to do with people who saw suburbia,

Starting point is 00:04:44 and they emulated it, myself included. And there was a place that was called Charlie's Pizzeria. And it was a pizza shop, just a pizza shop. And it had a really old guy who owned the place. And he just, I don't think he had a lot of customers, and he just sort of took on the role of adopting the punk and hardcore scene as his lost children. It misfits toys, children.

Starting point is 00:05:11 And he would let bands play there too. Oh, cool. And I would go there as a 13-year-old kid. and for a couple of bucks I could buy a pitcher of beer at 13. And how 13 did you look? Oh, I looked beyond 13, but I had like a terrible Mohawk kind of a haircut that I had done myself to my parents' the satisfaction. Yeah, to their chagrin.

Starting point is 00:05:37 But so I ended up drinking most of the pitcher myself. And there was an older boy. And at this time, you know, he was just a couple years older, but he seemed like he was like, you know, my age now, but he was just 16. His name is Rat. And he was the singer at the time for the band Maurice and later for the band King Horse. And he's a friend of mine, but at the time he was more like an older guy that you admire, you know. He's also like a really, he's a tough guy, you know, like a chisle guy.

Starting point is 00:06:10 He was Rat Senpai at the time. Now he's Rat Son. he never took any crap so he was like sure he was just you know a guy like that so I was like a young kid and so I wanted to be cool with the older voice and they had a band their band even toured with Sam Hayne some of the guys fromorese split off into the band Slent

Starting point is 00:06:30 which had a lot of success and so this would have been 1984 and so I tried to be cool and say hey dudes something cool whatever would be you know but because I'm 13 and I drank a whole picture of beer. It came out, hey, dwinds. So Rat was like, ah, dwind. Now, keeping in mind, his name was Rat because he had a rat. There were kids named Spike because their hair was spiky, et cetera. And so I was lucky enough to, at the time I wasn't really

Starting point is 00:07:01 happy about it, but I was lucky enough to have a unique name. There's probably a lot of people named Spike and so forth, or if you had a colored hair, they'd call you by the color. Yeah. you know that kind of a thing so that's it it's not really exciting at all it's not as over the years people think it's some kind of a cult thing and it's there's some kind of like alistair crowley kind of lure to it but instead it was just 13 year old drunken slurring words yes beautiful trying to say and hellion is a troublemaker uh-huh there you go and so a lot of people would associate me with causing trouble over the years a controversial figure for sure how common were people and just guys around town having full first and last nicknames.

Starting point is 00:07:49 I don't know. Like these characters, you know? It wasn't really thought out, but the whole idea, I guess, was that we were counterculture and we were like, well, I think mostly, you know, it's like there was Glenn Danzig, you know, this kind of a thing. So, you know, and rats scabies, you know, this kind of. So 1984, Louisville Dwid, what are you into? You know, like, what are the punk bands that really draw you in?

Starting point is 00:08:15 I know you're a big misfits guy. Yeah, definitely. Was that it? But I heard Sam Hayne before I heard misfits. Missfits had already broken up by that time. Right. And I heard of Sam Hayne only because the local kids were on tour with them. It wasn't a means to, like, find out this kind of stuff.

Starting point is 00:08:31 It wasn't really like, there definitely wasn't an internet or anything. So I just would find out from friends, they would make tape dubs, you know, like mixed. tapes and share them with each other. Everybody would do that. You would save up your allowance by one record. If it was good, then you could copy it for friends, and they would copy their thing. Whatever records they had. That was how we

Starting point is 00:08:53 got that stuff. Musically, what I listened to, definitely Sam Hane, septic death. There was a record that I bought early on when I moved there. I wanted to buy Franken Christ from the Dead Kennedys because it had just come

Starting point is 00:09:09 out. But the police had come in and they had taken the records because there was a poster inside that H.R. Giger had designed and the idea of it was to promote safe sex. So I went to buy the Dead Kennedys

Starting point is 00:09:25 Franken Christ or I went there and I saw that the cops were taking the Dead Kennedy's Franken Christ apart. I can't really remember. This is like 40-some years ago. Did Geiger design this poster for them specifically? I believe so, yeah. That's impressive.

Starting point is 00:09:41 Because he just stopped doing original art for bands by what was, I think, heartwork was like the last piece of art he ever made for a band other than the core of Mike Stan. Maybe Tom G. Warrior hooked him up with Dead Kennedys. I'm not sure. That's cool. That makes sense. Did the darkness of Sam Hane and eventually the misfits and what you would see, did that immediately appeal to you as someone who is often, you know, associated with a darker brand of music?

Starting point is 00:10:11 darker brand of music. Absolutely. Yeah. When I was a kid, my favorite thing was watching Friday night. We would get one horror movie. And you're from Chicago, right? Yes, sir. So you're not old enough to know it, but you might have heard of, like, the horror

Starting point is 00:10:27 host that would take place in the 70s? You know what that is? It sounds very familiar. So maybe your parents would have heard of this. There was different horror hosts. And what they were is basically like, instead, of just playing a horror movie, they would have like this character from the, from the local town. And he would be on tell. He'd usually be somebody in the broadcast world within their,

Starting point is 00:10:54 their network. And you'd only have like four channels back then, by the way. So they'd have a guy who maybe like normally just did the weather, you know, had the cue cards. And they'd put a mask on that guy. It's the way about. And we had a guy from Indiana, where I live, which is pretty close to Chicago. I lived in LaFountain, Indiana. Okay. And we would pick up on Channel 55 a show that was called Sammy Terry's Nightmare Theater. Spooky. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:11:23 So I would watch those. And I lived, there was nothing where I lived. So one of the toys I had to play with was a small cassette deck, the kind that you might see it like an old library or something. And I would take that. And there, VCRs didn't exist yet. So I would take this cassette deck, audio cassette deck, and put it right next to this big TV that was more like furniture than TV. And I would record as much as I could onto the tape of the sound of the horror movie,

Starting point is 00:11:51 whichever one it would be. And then throughout the week, I'd listen back to it and try to draw what I was, what I would remember from the audio. Because that was the only way you could like capture. Wow. So visual art, visual art came before making music. for you? Yeah. It came, maybe simultaneously because at the same time, while I was recording those

Starting point is 00:12:15 tapes, I would experiment with the tapes, but I have to say this cautiously because at no point in my childhood did I think that this was making music, and I will add for the people who are about to fucking finish this before I can, the music that I make now probably also falls under that jurisdiction before you think that you're fucking witty. out there. But at the time,

Starting point is 00:12:41 I was just making sounds, and I thought it sounded cool, and I thought it was just, you know, like a toy, I guess, you know, like playing with something. And at the same time, like, we used to have, like, the electric, electricity used to come in

Starting point is 00:12:57 off of these, like, large like poles, like wooden poles that would be down the, down the street. And then they would come to your house. So they'd just keep connecting and they come to your house. And then to ground them off of our garage, they had this tight pole that

Starting point is 00:13:15 metal pole that was tied to the ground, case of like a lightning strike or something. And I used to take like a baseball bat or a broken tree limb or something and just pound on that. Because it was connected to my garage, my garage acted as resonator or like a guitar. And I would just like make music.

Starting point is 00:13:35 So sort of, I would just do this making a racket. That's a better way of sense. You just wanted to hear some cool shit. Yeah, I just wanted to, like, kind of make these sounds that I thought would be fun to listen to. It wasn't like I thought that records could be made of it or touring or something. You're doing harsh noise in LaFountain, Indiana. Doing solo sets in the backyard.

Starting point is 00:13:58 Yeah, solo sets that nobody wanted to hear. That's awesome. But also, I could, like, take apart the tapes after a while of getting bored of listening to the same tapes. I noticed that there were like four screws in the corners. and I would like open it up and I accidentally made like loop tapes and different things like that that I would find oh wow it'll just keep playing that weird sound it was badly done it would have a big piece of tape that would be like dead space something like that and then I would at some point somebody gave someone from my family gave me a second cassette player so that I could like again this is not the way I'm going to describe it is not exactly the way that I thought of it I was kind of of mixing things, but it wasn't thought that I was mixing things. I just thought, oh, wow, I could make more sounds and put it

Starting point is 00:14:44 onto this thing and make it sound even more fucked up or make it sound scarier. The only intention is just having fun, making fun, cool sounds. You're not like this is, this is going to be the next 40 years of my life. I had no idea that I'd be on this past. Think about the fucking, the

Starting point is 00:15:00 talk boy in Home Alone. I had one of those. It's the same, I would like scream into a yak back or the talk boy and then like, you know, I totally understand. very true it was like that and so at some point around the same time as uh moving to louisville but a little shortly after i got this record um i would order records from placebo records i don't know if you know who they were they did j fay mighty sphincter um sun city uh i don't know they did a whole bunch of different things mostly punk based but they did this one record i thought it was going to be punk

Starting point is 00:15:35 and it was called the Dry Lungs compilation. You would just buy stuff because of the cover or because it had a lot of songs, things like that. And I got this record and it had Murs Bowen on it, and it had control bleeding and some other noise bands that I'm not sure if your listeners would know who they were. But I listened to that and I thought, wait, how were they able to fucking make records of this?

Starting point is 00:15:58 This is just stupid shit kids make. And I also thought all kids did it, so I don't know if all kids get it or not. But I thought all kids did it. I was like, why are they making records of what kids do? This is fucking weird. And I listened to it more. And I was like, oh, this is cool. Some of it was cool, some of it I didn't like.

Starting point is 00:16:14 And it sort of opened my eyes that that was a possibility. Very cool. At the time, like, I thought that people who played guitars and things like that, that was like special people touched by, like, you know, talent and God and circumstance that could be able to do it. Only until a little bit later did I realize that. The noise stuff is. Maybe the people touched by something.

Starting point is 00:16:39 Yeah. Not by God, but the other guy. Exactly. Were you making music while in Louisville? In that span of time, when did doing music officially, like not even just fucking around, when did that kind of appear to you? Not counting the playing around as a child. I didn't do that when I was 13.

Starting point is 00:17:00 I kind of thought I grew out of that or something. But I would dub tapes. and eventually I moved to Cleveland with my parents moved to Cleveland and I went with them and I got sent to a bad boy school and my friend I made a friend there and he lived in the

Starting point is 00:17:19 in the dorm room next to mine his name is Bill Gill and we decided that we were going to make a punk band but we didn't have any instruments and so I talked to him about like the toys that I played with as a kid and he was like oh yeah you know what I would do and he would take a headphone,

Starting point is 00:17:37 but it'd be more like the Sony Walkman in 1980s style, you know. He had a headphone, and you plug that into the input jack. And then it would work as a microphone if you yelled into the speaker, it reverses, and it becomes a microphone. So we were like, oh, we have a microphone. Then we just would be like, oh, who's going to sing and whatever. Then we made loop tapes of like nonsense and feeding back from the speakers. And this was all through a stereo.

Starting point is 00:18:03 by the way. Sorry, I missed that part. So it was through his little home stereo that he got for Christmas and we sort of rigged it up so that we could like have this ridiculous concert. And his dorm room happened to open up to a courtyard and he had a window. So we opened the window up and we just bombarded people with this yelling insults, making everyone mad, picking on specific people. You have to. Yeah. So that's what we did. And then we got in trouble for it. And we We like that. But we called that act. I wouldn't call it a band, but it was called Eerie Wax.

Starting point is 00:18:40 So it was like eerie, like scary, but also like airwax. We thought we were. Genius. Triple entendre. Cleveland became this wealth of incredible hardcore music. Like one of the best scenes in the country just pound for pound in terms of output. Output. How did that happen?

Starting point is 00:19:00 Who were the kind of key figures leading the charge? Tell me about the early days of Cleveland hardcore. Well, there's two ways to talk about it. And I guess I'll start with how you introduced me, which I hope isn't true, but youth crew. So the youth crew, they would come through town predominantly youth today. And we became friends with them. And they kind of showed everyone like, hey, you can do this. You can play this.

Starting point is 00:19:32 And, like, also they came in, like, in a van with, like, six or seven people, like, their roadies. Siv was a rodey, for example, you know. And then their roadies would also, like, switch, and then they would play in a band, too, you know? Or, like, Purcell would sing for Project X, where he was a guitar player and he said today. And so they had this, like, crazy thing where, like, they would, like, switch and, like, but they could go on tour. I was, like, this fucking, like, full tour, but it'd be, like, seven guys, you know. Yeah. And so that was...

Starting point is 00:20:03 Amazing. Yeah, and inspirational. And then they weren't like gatekeepers or, you know, if you know them, they're super nice. All those guys are super nice. And they were like, yeah, this is what we do. And, you know, gave you like little clues as we were at the time I was 15, I think. And the reason I say integrity killed youth crew is this is not, these are not my words. Yeah, these are...

Starting point is 00:20:27 As a quote. Anybody we've interviewed from that time says that the rise of integrity co-eastern. coincided with the fall of youth crew. Whether or not you're aware of it. Yeah, tonally, like, aesthetically, there was a shift at that time. I don't know if I'm aware of that. I think that what I would see is, like, Purcell and Ray went on to do shelter, which is a different style, and Walter went on to do quicksand. So I thought that was more, maybe with Salmon shelter, too? I don't know. I'm sure he played with them.

Starting point is 00:21:01 And then you got Judge who's... Sam was always doing something. Yeah. And Judge it, Judge it broken up around the time of Shelter, too. Right. Shortly there, within, you know, I don't know, I don't remember how it worked out, but there was like a window where all that, everything changed. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:21:19 And it just happened to be where integrity could... Yeah, I think it was just a coincidence, but, I mean, it was definitely not planned out or anything. Yeah, right. Now, Dwidd, I've read a lot about you calling into radio shows in your youth. There was a thing that kids could call into radio shows, and we had radio shows like how modern people have podcasts. One of the things you could do, like there would be different shows. There would be college radio. One of the things you could do is calling on your phone, and they would have like an experimental program where they would just put on like echo and reverb.

Starting point is 00:21:57 and all kinds of weird effects. And then you could just yell stuff. And until you started yelling cuss words, then they would kick you off. And the next guy could come on. And we would just like turn on our cassette decks and record the radio channel. And then we would yell stuff and make our own noise tapes like that.

Starting point is 00:22:15 So maybe that's what you mean? Yeah. And then on one of these radio shows, you called in claiming to represent the dark side of straight itch. Do you recall this? Oh, okay. So confront was. interviewed on

Starting point is 00:22:29 on I want to say CSP Cleveland State University or maybe John Carroll University there was like three three different schools and they all had a punk channel an underground channel yeah and one of them had had confront on there and so as friends do we called to fucking prank them

Starting point is 00:22:47 and like big trouble and like haze them and things like that so like that that's what that was but can I jump back to the beginning let's go back please please please so there was so there's two There's two parts of it, the youth crew thing, where those guys took us under their wing and helped. And they did that through throughout the whole country. Yeah, right.

Starting point is 00:23:06 They did that to all those scenes. I mean, without those guys, they were sort of like going around, like planting seeds throughout all of America. And then all these bands came out because of that. Raghunta Appleson. Yeah, yeah. And also, you know, like the breakdown of the walls tour that they did, we followed them around, like how some people would follow a grateful dead. We followed them around. It went to like the East Coast and went to like the anthrax.

Starting point is 00:23:34 We saw them play. And Confront was on that tour too. And they played. And we saw like side by side and bold and youth today, of course. So your upbringing in hardcore is very much youth crew oriented. Yeah. I mean, at the same time, though, I also like Black Flag and Septic Death and Gizum and those bands. And so, but I, I didn't know it was, it wasn't okay to like all that.

Starting point is 00:24:03 Other kids cried about it, but I didn't really give a fuck. And I just liked what I liked. Yeah. Speaking of Gizum, you are, you got them signed a relapse for those reissues. Yeah, yeah. But I got, I also helped Zal get on relapse too. That cherry is an awesome guy. That's our lore.

Starting point is 00:24:24 So there, there was that, there was that, uh, direction with the youth crew guys. But then there was another side of it where we were simultaneously skater kids and there, you might know of

Starting point is 00:24:40 Steve Cavallero. You know who he is? He's a pro-skinned. So he had a band called the Faction. And it was kind of like surfy rock kind of stuff, punk surfy rock stuff. Kind of skatery music, I guess. And a friend of

Starting point is 00:24:57 Charlie Griga, he was a really fantastic skateboarder. And he got a guitar. And all of our friends were like, dude, there's no way you're going to know how to play guitar. What are you crazy? And then somehow he could play guitar. We were like, what the fuck, dude? How can you do that?

Starting point is 00:25:14 He was touched by God. Renaissance, man. Yeah, we were like, wow, you're one of those guys. And then he was like, no, dumb ass. It's like this. You put your fucking hand and you guys move it around. And then we moved our hands around like, holy, shit we're making fucking songs.

Starting point is 00:25:29 We couldn't believe it. And so, so Charlie kind of started a lot of it for us. And at the same time, and this again, none of this stuff was like planned out. It was just like fucking around

Starting point is 00:25:43 that accidentally informed us about this stuff. One of the things, I don't know if it was Charlie or Derek Green or Frank Kavanaugh, I don't know who it was, it had this idea, but we would go to this place. You know what, open mic night.

Starting point is 00:25:57 is like where people have a mic and then they read poetry and sometimes playing an acoustic guitar. In Cleveland they had a different kind of setup where they had instruments and a mic. So you could go to this place and the idea was really like you go there, you're good at it or talented and you get to play with other talented people. But that's not how we play. So we would show up there and we would play, you know, we're mean-spirited kids. So we would be like, all right, whatever seat isn't taken, the next guy in line, like we don't sit, the next dumb ass in line has to take that instrument,

Starting point is 00:26:32 has to play whatever fucking they do. And so when you get up on stage, like I might have to be the drummer, for example, I'm not good at drums, especially back then. So I would have to take the drums, they'd be like, you better do it. And I'd get up, so I'd have to get up and take the drums. And there would be people who are really good,

Starting point is 00:26:51 and they would be fucking pissed, you know, because I'm ruining it for them. And my friends are ruining it, too. I'm not the only terrible player. But then the audience would be able to shout out, play a country Western song, play a reggae song. And my friends, complete assholes. So they would pick something that would be the most difficult

Starting point is 00:27:11 or the least likely that any of us could pull off. Sure. So we would yell that out and have to improvise. Yeah. And even if we did good, our friends would boo us and say that we're terrible. So the point of the story was, this was our like trial by fire. So we would get up there.

Starting point is 00:27:29 And all the guys that did it ended up being guys who still to this day make music professionally. Like Derek is a singer of Sepuletura. Charlie is in Judge and Gorilla Biscuits. Frank, he was in integrity and then he quit integrity because he got an opportunity to be in a bank called Filter. and then they blew up. They were on MTV. They were more of a rock band. They weren't like a tech.

Starting point is 00:27:55 But he was our second guitar player up until he got that call. And then he moved, he jumped ship. But we were happy for it. It wasn't. The first Frank. Yeah. The first of many. That's awesome.

Starting point is 00:28:08 The other Frank was too young to go to those at the time. He's a few years younger than us. That makes sense. A cherubic young man who would grow to be a, I saw a picture a couple weeks ago. I sent it to him, and he had to be like 15 or 16 years old. I almost didn't recognize him he was so young and he had a baby face. He asked me to ask you a question.

Starting point is 00:28:35 Oh, God. He asked me to ask you the story behind Y-U-B-A-G-G. Okay. So Frank and James, the Human Furness and I are, good friends. And especially when they were younger, we would hang around all the time. And we had this idea. There was this other kind of

Starting point is 00:28:57 scene that was like these other skater guys and we called them the GGs because they loved Gigi Allen. Whenever Gigi would come into town, they would go. And then they would like do all kinds of fucking disgusting things like putting garden hoses up their ass and just have these like crazy

Starting point is 00:29:12 animals that would shoot water out of their ass and have context for the distance. And they were kind of like the skaters that would wear like jean jean vests you know this like Lucero kind of black label stuff yeah yeah sure and um

Starting point is 00:29:28 and so like Frank and James and I sort of like were in between just like with the music I was I was into whatever I was into because I liked it and I also was part of the Gigi thing not with the shit stuff though unfortunately and neither were the neither was Frank or James unfortunately

Starting point is 00:29:47 as well but we would also We would do some dumb shit, you know? Yeah. And we would have jeans vests. And so we would prank each other. And we had this device that was called a speak and spell, like children use it, like it's a toy. Yeah. And you could type letters on it.

Starting point is 00:30:02 Yeah. So we would call each other at like three in the morning and then be like, why you be a G-G? R you a-G. Then the other one would pick up his speaking spell and respond back. And it was, yeah, that's what we did as kids. It's fucking stupid. That's awesome. Also, it's not demonic or anything.

Starting point is 00:30:26 It's not a cult. You never know. It could have summoned demons. It could have, yeah. Before we get into Integrity and Die Hard, which came before Integrity, do you remember the first piece of, like, published visual art that you ever made? Because did you know that you did two layouts for me before I turned. 18. Yeah, I remember. That's how I met you. Yeah. Pretty cool. But that was, that was years later, though. But yeah, definitely.

Starting point is 00:30:56 What was the first published visual art piece you ever made? Published, you mean like on a record or something? I said, I made it and you saw it in person and you got to have that experience. When I was a kid in high school, there was a problem with our, there was, there was a problem with the guy who was teaching. graphic arts. The school didn't like him and they pushed him out. And it's a longer story, but it doesn't really have that much significance to this. But he had got let go. And they didn't have anyone else that either they didn't have the funds to do it or they didn't know how to catch somebody to do the teaching or fill in the do a substitute for that. I was the

Starting point is 00:31:42 only person that knew how to do it. And I was like 16 years old. So they came to me and they said, look, if you teach the class, you don't have to go to other classes. You don't have to go to math and other shit I didn't want to go to. All you have to do is sit in this fucking room and print shirts and make stickers and stuff. And then I'm like, oh, I don't know if I want to do that, you know, being, you know, trying to fuck with them. And they're like, can I get paid? And they're like, no, you can't get paid. Are you crazy?

Starting point is 00:32:11 But if you do this, you don't have to take it. And you get credit. And I'm like, can I use the least? in high school, and men are high school, it was called. So they tell you, you don't have to

Starting point is 00:32:21 keep doing high school, teach this class. But I was in high school. I mean, I was, I didn't, I didn't get to go home or something, but,

Starting point is 00:32:29 right, but you got, I mean, you just have to be there. You don't have to take any other classes. Sir, we need you to teach.

Starting point is 00:32:35 You're our only hope. You're like a wonder kind. Not, I mean, it wasn't like I was teaching anything amazing. I showed them how to make screens. I showed them, and then it had a print.

Starting point is 00:32:44 It wasn't like I was, I wasn't teaching them history or anything. So, or math. He said, we heard the demo tape from the courtyard. We got to get you in this classroom. No more math for you. Just make sure it's, please. I got kicked out of the bad boy school.

Starting point is 00:33:01 And then I had to go to public school. This was the public school. The other one was private thing. So, yeah, this was just private school in a suburb of Cleveland called Mentor, Ohio. So at that Doing that I would print stickers for my friends bands for my band which didn't exist yet And other things and I just make stickers and like give them out and put them on everything so maybe that was the first thing I did I'd also make integrity shirts even though I didn't have any songs at the time yet wow yes you had the name very early interesting yeah I read a story of you again you calling into another radio show and saying that

Starting point is 00:33:42 integrity was like a violent straight-edge band before a single song was written? Probably. I mean, like, we would call up and like Tom, Tom from Confront as a good friend of mine. And he also played on it on the integrity demo in the seven-inch. He was the bass player. So Aaron and I would like prank him. So, you know, he would call up and say like, hey, Tom, why do you have fucking shiny rubbery cheeks or butter cheeks, you know, like stupid shit? Like we were kids, teenagers, so we would call up and haze our buddies who were on the show. And then they would be getting interviewed and like the guy would be asking them stupid shit and that we would call in. And like, oh, we have a call.

Starting point is 00:34:24 We have an interview. We have someone who wants to call in it and ask you a question, guys. What do you have to say? And then we would say something stupid and make them either laugh or be mad at us. I had a similar pastime of calling into 104.1 and 106.9 and requesting my. brothers, bands, songs, which nobody had heard. Nobody should have heard. They were terrible.

Starting point is 00:34:48 Sorry, Taylor. And they yelled at me every time. They were like, don't tell us what to play, man. If it's not on our radar, it sucks. So I get it. They would take requests. They would play things. They didn't want to play feedback by, what was the band called?

Starting point is 00:35:07 Breaking Perfection. They didn't want to play that one. and that's all right so now they're now they're kicking themselves so yeah you never know exactly so the name existed the concept for integrity existed in your mind at least like what you wanted to do yeah so how does it come together as a as a band and like the harder they follow demo is the first thing who is that ogy lineup how does it how do you make that happen so i met erin because confront needed a couple roadies. And they were playing in,

Starting point is 00:35:45 I think that they played in Buffalo with Warzone. And it was right when Warzone had that, where's the Warzone woman thing, you know? Yeah, of course. Word. Word. Yeah. It was pretty cool because I had never seen Warzone before,

Starting point is 00:35:57 and I had the 7-inch, and then I had that record. And Ray was a really tall guy, especially for when we were all kids. We've seen his boots, man. His boots are fucking... I've seen his boots. massive. So they were

Starting point is 00:36:10 on stage and they were just like kind of feeding back and like riffing and stuff you know like ringing out notes and then he sat on stage and it was packed it was in Buffalo trying to think of the name of the Pike Dragon I think was the venue

Starting point is 00:36:26 and the guys on stage got into the microphone and they were like hey where's Ray you know the whole skit and then out of the back of the room like behind all the crowd almost like Rocky or something he fucking opens these two doors and it lights up like an angel or something

Starting point is 00:36:43 he comes running out with his fists up and he had this like fucking trucker hat that said war zone on it and he had they all had these like kind of like rain jackets that you can screen print on that said war zone and he comes running upstage

Starting point is 00:36:59 and then they start doing don't forget the struggle don't forget the streets everybody went crazy so that's a side story sorry I fucking cheer real I like that That's cool to hear. But Aaron and I were roadies confronted and played on that show, I think, or maybe it was a different show, and that's the memory that came to mine. But on the trip up there, I didn't know Aaron, and Aaron didn't know me.

Starting point is 00:37:21 And Tom said to Aaron or to me, you know, you guys should start a band together. You guys should become friends. And we were like, why? Because you're both like shitty music. You're like all this fucking stupid music. And all the time, like, only would be like youth crew stuff only. nothing else. And so if you,

Starting point is 00:37:39 like something else, you were like a freak, you know. So, and we liked being freaks. We didn't care. So we were like, oh,

Starting point is 00:37:45 what do you like? And, you know, on that trip up there, we, we created a connection. And we somehow liked a lot of the same stuff, like almost identically.

Starting point is 00:37:55 So that was pretty cool. I think that one of the craziest things about that demo. So this is, this is diehard starting you're talking about. Yeah, this would be die hard after, right after that event. So diehard.

Starting point is 00:38:07 Integrity was born from the remains of Die Hard. Sort of. It's complicated. It isn't exactly like that. I was in Die Hard, but there's a record from Die Hard. There's an album of Die Hard called Looking Out for Number One. And I'm not on that.

Starting point is 00:38:28 Interesting. That's a guy named Stork. Stork Schlochter. He's Paul Schlocter's younger brother. Paul is the singer for the band Enmates, which is also Aaron and Lenny playing in that band. And Chris Smith also,

Starting point is 00:38:42 all three of those guys played on Luce for Tomorrow together. I think the wildest thing about integrity to me looking back, and we've had the luxury of time, but when you go back and listen to, even the demo, the sound is so established right off the bat.

Starting point is 00:39:04 Like the identity of integrity is there immediately. How long did you work on that demo? How quickly was the band incepted and how was it received at the time? Everybody hated it pretty much, but

Starting point is 00:39:20 I mean, the ideas were mainly like, live it down was me beatboxing to Aaron. I'm like, this is kind of what I think would be cool, and then he would be, oh, what if you did this? And we would just sort of beat box back to each other. like riffs like as ridiculous as it looks

Starting point is 00:39:41 I know it looks ridiculous out there but no I do it every day dude we do that's what we do that's what we do that's one of Aaron's things it's like he's really good at like this kind of beat boxing coaching thing when he's writing the song so he'll like he could do the drums with his mouth while he's playing the guitar and this is what I want so he would like direct the drummers

Starting point is 00:39:59 and things like that too and Aaron is a very special guy who can like kind of see the whole picture before I can do that too so we get along very well you know so it worked it worked out well but I mean we just sort of reverse engineered things

Starting point is 00:40:20 that we liked we didn't know like what we were doing at all and Aaron was a bass player he wasn't the guitar player in Dyerhardt he was the bassist and there's a lot of extra parts to the to how integrity came to be, but I'll just go from that part, I guess, where the songs started being made. So, Aaron wanted to get a guitar, and there was a lot of these, like, really kismet moments in my life, and they continue to happen all the time. And this is one that was really special. This was shortly after Christmas, and this girl that I knew, who was a very wealthy girl,

Starting point is 00:41:01 she said, hey, I heard you have a band. And I said, yeah, we're working on it. I got this guitar for Christmas for my stepdad. I don't want to fucking play guitar. You want to have it? Like, all right, so she gives me this guitar. So Heron calls me up and says, hey, man, I heard you have this band. And they'd kick, Aaron had kicked me out of Dyerhart that bastard.

Starting point is 00:41:23 And I'm just kidding. He did kick me out. I'm not kidding about that part. They all kicked me out. They said that I, my lyrics were too weird and they wanted like more straightforward. So when he was ready to get weird, you're the first guy he called. I don't think that he was the main guy thinking of that. But when he came to me, I already had a record deal, but I didn't have any songs. So he goes, I want to be in your band, dude.

Starting point is 00:41:49 But I want to play guitar. I don't want to play bass. And I go, oh, really? And I had this guitar. I don't know. Just, you know, the stars lined up. He goes, yeah, I'm going to sell my bass. And I'm going to get it.

Starting point is 00:42:01 I'm going to get a guitar. I'm going to save him. a little bit extra money. I'm like, no, dude, I have a guitar. You can have it. And he was like, what? What the fuck? And I gave him the guitar. I have a similar guitar if you want. Yeah, I love to know. I didn't plan this. It just happened to be over here. Jackson.

Starting point is 00:42:18 This is not the guitar that Aaron played on all those records. But this is another one. And they sold these at Toys R Us. Okay. And so this is like, this is a guitar, the same style, same color, everything that's what Aaron has. So the integrity demo was written on a Toys R Us guitar.

Starting point is 00:42:39 Yeah, it's called a J.B. player. And it's, uh, it was made, it was made, um, they, they had a, a pro line, but this was the child, child's line. And they're smaller. And Aaron is a little bit of a smaller guy. So for him, you know, he's, he plays like insane leads. And the guitar

Starting point is 00:42:59 fretboard is smaller. So he was able to like, do like stuff what maybe he couldn't have done otherwise. I'm not sure, but I mean, he's incredibly talented regardless, but I think that the size helped him like maneuver the frontboard a little bit easier than it would have been if he got like, you know, a less ball or something. Is it true that while he's doing those insane leads that you would write lyrics over them to piss him off? Not really to piss him off. I mean, we have a thing where like it works good together. It doesn't. It's like, maybe it would be like, hey, I'm trying to piss you. There could be that in some points, but it was more like we knew that it worked right.

Starting point is 00:43:38 Singing over the leads is a thing very few bands do. Nobody does that. I don't think anybody does it, but it became this iconic integrity thing, which is cool. If it started as a hazing thing, it ended as like a part of the identity, which is cool. I don't think it started as a hazing thing, although we would always fuck with each other. But it wasn't like, I'm going to ruin the song just because of this. I love his leads. There's some people who try to have this weird rumor that I don't like leads.

Starting point is 00:44:08 All my fucking records have leads. Even the records that Aaron's not on. So that's not true. I love leads more. If it was up to me, I would have leads the whole fucking song. But these guys are pussies and don't want to fucking do enough leads, you know. There you go.

Starting point is 00:44:23 So the demo's out. You say people hate it. That would not. That would change. Our friends liked it and things like that. But, you know, we had. we had to make a demo to send to Victory. And Victory was a new label at the time.

Starting point is 00:44:39 They had two records out before us. And we were the third band. And you said you had a record deal already. Yeah, we had a record deal. Was that with overkill? Oh, with Victory. With Victory, okay. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:44:54 Interesting. So Victory had two records out. I think it was inside of Billingsgate, maybe. And then we were the third record on the label. And what had happened was it goes back again to the youth crew guys. So I would print these shirts at school and in my basement and whatever. And then I would print them on the inside of like fucking Billabong shirts or whatever. Or like underwear shirts because you couldn't get like comfort colors, blanks.

Starting point is 00:45:27 Sure, sure. Like that didn't exist. Even like band shirts kind of didn't exist. So it was difficult to get blanks, and I would like find shirts at a thrift store in tournaments, that I'd have print on them, things like that. And Gorilla Biscuits came through town, and I gave Walter and a couple other guys like shirts because, I don't know, they're my friends. And then because they, A, are super cool, and B, probably also super sweaty, and their shirts

Starting point is 00:45:54 smelled like shit, they were like, thanks for the shirt and put it on. You know, they don't give a fuck. Probably didn't. That had no songs, so there was no reason for them to put it on other than maybe they thought they'll help this little kid. Yeah. So they leave Cleveland, and the next date they play, Chicago. And this young guy comes up to Walter and says, hey, man, I love your 7-inch. They didn't have the LP out yet.

Starting point is 00:46:15 So he said, I love your 7-inch. And I have this small label. I have two records out, but both fans have already broken up. And I would like to do something more serious, and I want to do an album. And my idea is to do Gorilla Biscuits Out. Would you guys be into that? And then Walter said something along the lines of like, thank you. It's really kind of you.

Starting point is 00:46:39 But we already have a deal with our friend at Revelation. And we've already recorded it. It's going to be coming out pretty soon. But I don't want to leave you hanging. My friend Dwit has this amazing band. You should fucking sign him. So this is all unbeknownst to me. So I get, I was living in like what, what people call it a punk house, you know, like where a lot of kids live in like a shitty house.

Starting point is 00:47:05 So I came back to my house and from working somewhere, I don't know. And there was like a note next to the phone that said, hey, hey, Dwed, a record company called for you. I guess you're signed now. And here's the number. Ha ha. And so they thought that I went to a pay phone and called and was like, hey, how are you doing this? He's a record label because I would do shit like that. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:36 And then I thought that they had done it or Aaron had done it. I thought one of my friends had done this. So I didn't call right away back because long distance was expensive than two and I'd have to pay for it. So I sort of like struggled with should I call this back? Is this a prank? These guys are going to make me call like some strippers or some kind of like, you know, something stupid, you know, some kind of a drive B delivery. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:48:03 Yeah, who knows what it would be, you know, some prostitute, you know, the sex, they used to have this thing sex calls before you had the internet. So people would call that up or whatever. So I thought it maybe it was something like that. Someone was playing a joke. And I called up and then the guy said that it was true and I still didn't believe it. I thought maybe it was a cousin of a friend of mine or something. So then I said, okay, well, what do you want me to do about this?

Starting point is 00:48:28 And he said, well, send me a demo. I said, I don't have a demo. Why not? I'm a 16-year-old kid, man. I don't have any money. I don't have a fucking demo. He's like, well, what if I send you some money? Could you record?

Starting point is 00:48:40 I was like, yeah, I'm sure I can record, buddy. I don't believe it. So I give him my address. Back then you would like with a letter and a stamp mail things. And I received a check. in there in this letter, in this envelope with a letter. And then I thought, I still didn't believe it. I thought, okay, this is some fucking bullshit.

Starting point is 00:49:03 These guys are going to get me in trouble. So I'm going to put the check in the bank and wait for it to clear. Because back then the out-of-state check, you had to wait a few days. So I put it in there. And then it cleared. I was, what the fuck? This is real. And then at that point, Aaron came and said, hey, I want to be in there, too, you know.

Starting point is 00:49:19 So this is another kismet thing. Targets dropped off. You get this ghost check from Tony Rommel. Sorry, the guitar is after. This is out of sequence. Oh, okay. Okay. That's even more insane. Yeah, that's crazy. It's crazy.

Starting point is 00:49:34 So you put together this demo because you have to. Well, we wanted to. We wanted to, but, I mean, we were pretty fearless. We just thought, oh, I mean, these guys are doing it. Why can't we fucking do that? Also, like, we had our friends went outface and confront, and so, like, we knew people who could do it. And we were in Diehard.

Starting point is 00:49:53 We had made a couple of Diehard demos that were pretty awful, but we did them on like a four track, like a Tascam or Fostex, four track. It sounds pretty awful. So who's the original lineup at this time? So this on bass was Tom, who was in Confront, and Aaron play guitar. And Tom's dad, I don't know if Tom's dad was part of that whole, I never can remember the name of it.

Starting point is 00:50:25 Sometime in the 80s, these archaeologists found this old remains of the oldest human being at the time. And it's some kind of a name like, I should remember this because I've told this story like 10 times. And I never can't remember the name of it was like Lola or I don't know. There was some kind of a name for the remains of this mummified girl from the oldest living or the oldest human remains that were found at that. time. And his dad, I think, had something to do with that, or his dad had something to do with some kind of big archaeology discovery. And his dad got offered to work as some important person at an important museum in Washington, D.C. So Tom and his family, they moved to D.C. And now we don't have a bass player. And then there was this bratty brother of Aaron. His name

Starting point is 00:51:19 is Lenny Mishamilnik. And he was like, four, four. I think. And he is the most talented of all the Melnics, and all the Melnics are incredibly talented. But this one, and he's a bastard too. I don't mean it literally, but I'm saying it to be funny. But he's like a guy who's so fucking talented at everything he does, including jokes, including anything and everything,

Starting point is 00:51:45 you can just put this guy in front of anything that he's going to know how to do it. It doesn't make sense. He's always been like that. that when we first started skateboarding with him, I had already been skateboarding for years. And he was like, I would like to try skateboarding. We're like, okay, here, try this. He was immediately doing kick flips.

Starting point is 00:52:03 He was immediately doing stuff. How is he doing that? Yeah. Jesus. We were like, you're full of shit. You had to be practicing like your friends or something. He's like, no, dude, fuck you guys. And he's always a bastard like that.

Starting point is 00:52:17 It's always complicated. Wow. but so Aaron goes Lenny you know why don't you play bass he said I'm playing your fucking stupid band he said come on dude dude we need a bass player

Starting point is 00:52:30 I'm fucking fine dude dude dude dude dude dude and it's doing all this fucking all this shit and it's like what the fuck dude it's always like that so I secretly hate him because of his talents but that's that's how we got

Starting point is 00:52:46 we got Lenny so the Melnix are in the band together who's drawing coming. Yeah, I'd rather pass on that. Sure. Fair enough. So the first tour after the demo was with Judge, you told me on the East Coast and Midwest. Wow. Yeah, that's true. We did a tour with Judge, but we had never played Cleveland. So we did a tour of Judge, and that was a little bit deliberate because everybody was mad at us and they said,

Starting point is 00:53:20 oh, you guys suck and you guys are dicks, you have a record deal. And like there was this kind of thing like that. So we thought all these guys play locally all the time. And, you know, like Taco Tuesday kind of thing. So we were like, fuck that. We're just going to immediately fucking go on tour and you guys can all fucking fuck off.

Starting point is 00:53:40 So we immediately went on tour. And then when we came back, people were like, well, why don't you guys play at home? We're like, fuck you guys. We don't want to play for you. peasants, you know, we go on tour. Oh, it wasn't really as grandiose as that, but, you know, we try to play it up a little bit to be dicks.

Starting point is 00:53:55 Sure. And so how long did it take for you to play Cleveland? So we played Cleveland the next year on January 6th, 1990 was the first show that we played in Cleveland. The fantasy. And it was with Outface and False Hope. And we opened the show. Was it good?

Starting point is 00:54:17 a big riot and people were fighting. The Gigi guys were fighting. All right. That's what you want. They threw a guy through a window in the front of the venue. Good show. And then the owner didn't want to pay any of the bands with the promoters. And they said that integrity hypnotized the audience into violence, which we love that.

Starting point is 00:54:40 And then it got printed in the local newspaper that we hypnotized everyone into violence. So we were feeling pretty good. There's a shirt. That's his shit, you know. They thought we would be upset. They thought that this was not the direction of people. So sorry. Do you remember on that judge tour how, like how it went for you?

Starting point is 00:55:00 Are you saying like where it went or? No, I mean, that is a good point. How it actually went playing on these tours. Did people get? Yeah, were they fed up whenever you guys play? Did they hear you, hear you? Yeah. It was well received.

Starting point is 00:55:16 we even played in Louisville, Kentucky where I was, where I had grown up. Judge played Louisville, Kentucky? Yeah. It's crazy. It's one of the craziest things I've ever heard. Yeah. So, why is that crazy?

Starting point is 00:55:31 Now Louisville is a bastion, huge, booming scene. It's fantastic. But I, you know, late teens, early 20s, Louisville, Louisville was nothing. There was very little going on. You might remember endpoint? Do you remember those guys? Yeah. They were, they were like the big popular band at the time for, uh, for that, for the youth crew type thing.

Starting point is 00:55:51 And then there was King Horse. They were popular. They were on Caroline. Danzig produced their album. Pusshead did their artwork. They were on the cover of fucking like, like, Kerrang and stuff. Like they were like, like, ripped magazine on the cover, like all this stuff. It's also just crazy to think about judge how much they got around, you know?

Starting point is 00:56:09 Yeah. After going away for the longest time. They were like the band for a minute. Yeah, this is before they disbanded. Yeah, right. This was like right after the album came out. Part of this interruption, we've got to tell you about something very important.

Starting point is 00:56:28 You will not sacrifice any personal integrity by going to MADDVintage.com and picking up some unbelievable, old, beautiful, hardcore metal punk t-shirts. What did you get recently from Mad Vintage? I got a typo shirt. I got a deadstock Wolverine blue shirt.

Starting point is 00:56:49 Dude, excellent. Original owner of some Swede who never touched it. I got a youth today go vegetarian shirt and a Allison Chain's jarfly shirt. And the Lord knows.

Starting point is 00:57:04 I need it. Those are tough to find. Yes. And if it's tough to find and we talk about it on the show, he's probably got it. So go to madvintage.com. pick up something unique, pick up something that speaks to you, and use code hardlore.

Starting point is 00:57:19 15 to get 15% off your order. And this stuff adds up, man, 15% could end up being billions of dollars. Luke is also looking to buy, if you have shirts that you're trying to offload, that you got too many of, I'm going to do it myself pretty soon. Get in contact with them. Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. The Bow Archive going to be available on Mad Vintage soon, maybe at LDB, because he'll be there coming. Coming up. LDB tied down. And what was the other one? He said another one.

Starting point is 00:57:47 There's some secret ones. Furnace Fest. Furnace Fest. Ah, he'll be at Furnish Fest. Interesting. Okay. Those dusty old cooks will be able to get some Luke's stuff. Mad Vintage. Code Hardlaw 15.

Starting point is 00:57:59 This episode is also brought to you by Guilty Party, the number one menswear store in North America. Co-owned by Champ from Foundation. We're so honored to support this incredible store when we can on the show. it's our favorite menswear store in North America, not for personal reasons, not just because we love the owner and go way back with him, but they have all of our favorite brands, Ironheart, Full Count, 316, stuff that is built to last your entire life. I look forward. I have a few pieces now from Guilty Party, and I look forward to incorporating

Starting point is 00:58:36 them. You know what I mean? I know it looks good. I feel confident in them. I really, really enjoy so much of what they have and so much of what Champ is suggested. Oh, yeah. There's some days where I'll be like, just give me something. Yeah. Tell me what I want.

Starting point is 00:58:51 And I love that a lot of the Japanese denim rents make a 35, 32. Oh, very nice. Which is like, I guess I'm a 35. I'm a 33, which is common. You find it, but. Yeah, 33's out there. 35 is tough, man.

Starting point is 00:59:05 Yeah, absolutely. But if you're a weird size, guilty party's got you covered. Because some Japanese guy thought of it and figured it out. Okay? Go to guilty party. Dot C.O.

Starting point is 00:59:13 and use code hardlore to get 10% off. And if your orders over $300, which probably is going to be, you're going to get free shipping too. Boom. Change your life.

Starting point is 00:59:23 Quit blowing out your crotch. Guilty party. And I have a couple questions before we move on too far. The shirts that you gave to Walter and the other Girl Biscuits guys, was it like the,

Starting point is 00:59:33 like, do you remember the design that you were printing? Yeah, of course. It was like the candy bar, which looks like Hershey's candy bar. That's why it's called it. But it's not called candy bar because we think it's cool. It's someone who was like, that looks like a fucking candy bar.

Starting point is 00:59:46 You're a loser. It was more like that. It wasn't like we thought that that was a cool catchphrase for it. Somebody was, this is how all of our friends operate. But it was the iconic integrity thin typeface block. Block. Yeah. Very cool.

Starting point is 01:00:02 And did you already have the skull logo at this time as well? Yeah, we had the skull on, not on the shirts though. On those shirts, they had a baseball cross baseball bats that I designed. And that would be on the back of those shirts. And they were white shirts. They were like underwear shirts. I don't know if you know, like if you go to like a Haynes undershirt or something. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:00:23 Yeah. It would be under your work shirt. You'd have a white shirt. So then you sweat on that. That's what you could buy like a three pack of those. And then I would print on those. Gotcha. It was really thin and really crappy.

Starting point is 01:00:37 Did you have, when did you get? get the Judge Hammer tattoo. When did I get it? Yeah, how old were you? Probably shortly after that tour, I think. Incredible. So integrity is founded by the time. You're like, I love Judge.

Starting point is 01:00:50 I got to get this on me forever. Yeah, I love Judge. I still love Judge. I love Judge then as well, and I got the tattoo. Do you still represent the dark side of straight-edge, do it?

Starting point is 01:01:01 I doubt it. I never really did. So I stopped being straight-edged very shortly after. I think I stopped being straight-edged. It's before the seven and she even came out. Oh, okay. Interesting. So let's talk those who fear tomorrow.

Starting point is 01:01:16 Tell me about recording with the late great Bill Karecki. This is three weeks in a row we're talking about Bill Kareki on the show, rightfully so. Oh, yeah. Any anecdotes or stories about him? Yeah, Bill was a... I met Bill because he had a recording studio, and it was the only recording studio that would record us. At the time in Cleveland, most of the studios would do R&B and soul bands. And there was a studio called Wright Track Studio. I actually lived in the building where that studio was. And the

Starting point is 01:01:56 intern there was Trent Rezner, who later became Nine Inch Nails. And he interned there to learn how to use the board and learn how to do all that stuff. So he would like record like Heavy D in the boys and Lavert and like OJs. and stuff they would come in and he would like be the engineer for those jobs and then he learned because you couldn't go to school to learn how to mix and make music so he learned it that way and they they also wouldn't record us and um so bill karecki's place uh i don't i don't want this to sound demeaning um bill karecki's place was like they they main he mainly did uh glam rock bands and a friend of ours had a band, a glam rock band called Fatal Charm.

Starting point is 01:02:42 And there was something in between like Poison and Bon Jovi, and they're really good. And he said, you should go to this guy, Bill, we record our demos there. And most of their demos would be them recording covers of the popular cockrock songs of the time. And then they might throw like one original on there. And they'd sell the tapes to like girls that would come to see them. And then maybe they'd be like, oh, your power ballad that you, your original power ballad, that's a great song. And they would sing along to them or whatever. And so I went to Bill with Aaron and we talked to him and he didn't really want to record us.

Starting point is 01:03:24 And he said, this isn't really the type of music I want to do. And I said, well, we have a record deal, you know. And he's like, you have a record deal, really? I go, yeah, look, we have money stuff. He's like, how do you have a record deal if you want to make music sounds like that? I said, that's what we want to make, and we have a record deal. I don't know, you know. So Bill was not a hardcore punk guy.

Starting point is 01:03:48 No, no, no, no, no, not at all. Not even close. He was a lot older than us. He was probably like, I want to say like in its 30s, early 30s when I met him. And we were teenagers. And he just thought we were complete idiots. she was right, but he would always say

Starting point is 01:04:07 like, you know, this is popular right now throughout the years, because we worked for many years. And like whatever would be on the radio Nirvana or like red hot chili peppers, whatever these trends would pop up, he'd be like, oh, you guys should go in that direction, like be funky and

Starting point is 01:04:23 like whatever like red hot chili peppers or be grungy like fucking Nirvana or be... He was just a guy. Rapping like lip biscuit or whatever. Whatever was the hot thing, he would be like, you guys should go that direction. And we were like, dude, we're not going that direction, you know. Sounds like my dad.

Starting point is 01:04:41 That sounds like my dad. It's so interesting that a guy like that with that mentality would go on to like help define this sound of hardcore for a decade. Through your records and ring. That's crazy. He hated it as far as I know. I don't know what Carl said if he was receptive to. Carl and he went or Scott or he didn't really get into it. He didn't

Starting point is 01:05:07 get into it much, I think, but I mean, Firestorm sounds great. So, yeah, it sounds great. Holds up. Bill was a genius and if we just went to like a hardcore person, then they would have probably miced it in like the way that like a hardcore guy would have done things. But what he would

Starting point is 01:05:23 do is like he wanted everything he did. Like the reason he didn't, I need to clarify because, you know, I joke around a lot about about people that I like. And then people I don't like I try to avoid. So I like Bill. But Bill and I also had a volatile relationship because he wanted us to become more commercial and I wanted to make more trouble. And one of the great things that he did for us is he taught me and Aaron early on. He said, you know,

Starting point is 01:05:53 when you're recording your guitar tracks, you want to double them. And instead of just doubling them with all the same setup, we're going to put a different head, a different cabinet and then you're going to dump so it's as if you had another guy doing it and we were like wow that's fucking mind-blowing like we didn't yeah yeah we had no idea of the stuff so those were like little things you would show us and like little bits of panning little small things like that that we had no idea how to record other than like playing with toys playing with tape checks playing with like little four tracks and things and he he really taught us a lot of things that he didn't have to do but he was a gruff guy as am i and

Starting point is 01:06:33 and all of our friends. So, like, you know, he was a sarcastic guy, too. So there was a lot of that. And ultimately, I mean, he did not want to do that kind of music. It would have been great for him to do, like, to be known for doing Nirvana or be known for doing something. Something like that was a little more accessible. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:06:54 He became really good at it and made a lot of classic records. Those who fear tomorrow. Because he worked in a way as if he would have worked with Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin or, you know, like a real hard rock or heavy metal band. He set everything up in that type way, which really helped us. Big time. You can hear it. Our ideas he did not like, but he would sometimes he would even, there's even, there's a song called Heaven Inside Your Hell. And he does a solo on that song.

Starting point is 01:07:29 Oh, cool. Because we like egged him on, we're like, come on, do one dude. And he did and it was really good. But he had a lot of great ideas and he helped us a lot. And we had no real idea how it worked. And we somehow really quickly, like, understood what he taught us. He was really great at teaching how to record. And also we would record on big reels.

Starting point is 01:07:55 So we also would like, we were inquisitive kids. So Aaron and I would like ask like how to. does that work and why does it work? And then we would like, I would think, like, how can I do it weirder? So I'm like, what if we like flip, can we flip it and make it go like record it backwards? Like we would do like backwards recording things and other weird stuff. And he was like, well, I guess it's possible we're going to ruin my equipment. And we would like bang him.

Starting point is 01:08:19 And then he would like do it, but be mad at us. And then it would turn out cool sometimes. Yeah, of course. And then so those we would like touch the reels as they were going when Aaron would do solace to warped them and he would be like super pissed but it turned out cool that's awesome i thought it's those who fear tomorrow your debut LP again yeah i think emerging as this like that was overkill that you asked about overkill before that was right interesting couple fucking tracks many many tracks um again it's this this fully established vision yeah of like what integrity

Starting point is 01:08:55 would kind of always be. Any anecdotes or stories come to mind from this session or writing these songs? Yeah, so writing the songs earlier, I mentioned that I lived in this building, it was called the film building, and now it's abandoned.

Starting point is 01:09:13 And on the fourth floor is where Right Track Studios was, where Trent was the intern. And I had a part of the sixth floor, which was a full building, was a warehouse. So I went to art school part-time, and so I was able to prove to the landlord that I did, and I needed a art studio, I said. And then I just lived there, we've made music, and did lots and lots of LSD there. The dark side of LSD.

Starting point is 01:09:45 Yeah, Aaron and I and Lenny did a lot of LSD at that time, and we had a friend that we would buy it from, and his name is. is Rich Patrick, and Rich is the guy who, at the time, he was the guitar player for nine-inch Nails, and then later he became the main guy behind Filter. Wow. And a side thing, his brother is Robert Patrick, and his brother is the dude who was in Terminator. He was the cop that turns into, like, Liquid. Oh, of course. That's his brother.

Starting point is 01:10:13 Wow. He was also got X-Files. He was on X-Files after David DeCovney left, and he was on, like, one of those vampire shows. I can't remember which one it was, but there was like a series that was like sexy vampires and stuff. There was a lot of those. It was like a werewolf dad or I don't know. Unforgettable cameo in Wayne's World, of course. In Wayne's World, yeah.

Starting point is 01:10:38 Yeah. So those who appear tomorrow, you're high as fuck on LSD. You're in this art building, putting together these songs. They're still ahead of their time. What were you guys pulling from? to write music like this? Well, the main thing, when we did the seven-inch and when we did the demo, our idea was we want to make it sound like this,

Starting point is 01:11:05 but we didn't have like a lot of, we couldn't see too far. We just thought, okay, we wanted sound like this, and everything was really caveman, like, don't know, you know, this kind of thing, which I liked it, though. But then Eric got really good at guitar, and then we did a lot of LSD. but we also listened again to even more weirder and weirder music. And then we, when we made the seventh, when we made the demo,

Starting point is 01:11:33 we made songs that we wanted to hear. And we made songs that we thought, okay, well, we like this and this and this from these bands. But what if it had like a different kind of vocal? What if it had a different kind of guitar? What have it had solos, whatever questions? And when we did the album, then we were like, okay, what we did? of the seven inch was okay, but we can really go even further. We can go like

Starting point is 01:11:58 be the most fucking berserk version of like lead Zeppelin, but in hell, you know, and on acid. So like those are kind of directions we wanted to take and just like impress ourselves. And we did not give a fuck

Starting point is 01:12:14 if anyone liked it. And we anticipated that no one would like it. And often people didn't like it. A lot of people didn't like it. Still don't like that. Let me ask you. But we didn't because we liked it. On this record, I don't remember if it's on the demo,

Starting point is 01:12:29 but there is a, like the judgment, and Judge Woodin' day in the buildup, as you're, as you're, as you're going into the first verse, there's a low,

Starting point is 01:12:39 altered voice vocal track, which is pretty synonymous. That's a harmonizer. It's pretty synonymous with integrity and kind of ringworm, too, that became like, kind of this iconic thing

Starting point is 01:12:51 of what I, what I take from, my two favorite bands from cleveland so so bill had this even tied harmonizer yeah and i don't know what happened where we got to but we you know like with messing with israel's with messing with things we would fuck around with how the mics were placed because he taught us how we're supposed to do it and then once we knew how we're supposed to do it then we said okay we're going to do it wrong to do this or we're going to do that just because we wanted different results yeah and so he was like i don't know if he suggested hey i have this fucking thing and it does like mom

Starting point is 01:13:24 monster voice if you yell through it. Or if we said, do you have something that could make the voice sound even more evil like Freddie Kruger, I think would have been. Maybe that's what it was. Maybe one of us said, we make what's voice sound like Freddy Kruger. And they probably said, because he sucks. It's singing. And he was like, yeah, I have this thing, this even-tied harmonizer.

Starting point is 01:13:47 And then he turned it on. And then we were like talking into it. We're like, whoa, this is fucking sick. And then we were like, oh, let's hide it under this. Yeah. Not do it in the front, but do it in the back. Very cool. Very cool.

Starting point is 01:14:00 It would be kind of like gospel backing singers, but from hell. Right. So Victory signs you for the demo, puts out the demo, and then is like, we don't want the El Painer. No, they didn't put out the demo. They didn't put out the demo. They wanted a demo to see if we had any songs for it. putting out anything. So when he said,

Starting point is 01:14:24 no, he did. We put out a seven-inch called in contrast of sin. Okay, right. That was the third victory. D.R. O.3. Uh-huh. Was that 90?

Starting point is 01:14:35 Is that 1990? By the time it came out, it was 1990, yeah. Okay. Okay, that makes sense. It was pressed at United in Nashville. They used to do all the records back then,

Starting point is 01:14:47 and they made the seven-inch there. We got to get the plants back in America. Yeah, I'll tell you. I'm looking at... I think that plant still exists. I think Jack White owns it. Oh, that's the one. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:14:57 That makes sense. That's the one that sold his desk presses on eBay. Yeah. And then he was like, ah. I'm looking at the track listing for those who fear tomorrow. And there's staples that I know you still play to this day. Is Misha, I just learned about 30 minutes ago. Is that about Lenny?

Starting point is 01:15:17 No, it's not about him. You know, like in side-by-side when they yell Alex? Yeah, of course. And how amazing that is. You're telling him start the song. Cool. Okay. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:15:28 It was sort of like an idea like that. You know, when Alex Brown comes in and you're like, oh, this is fucking coming. Yeah. It's so awesome. I never put it together that you're just calling for him to start the song. Never. But in our way, it's like, hey, fucking play, you dick. It was more like that than celebrating him.

Starting point is 01:15:47 So like when that came together, so I yelled his name. And then, but before that, it had this, like, serial killer, Henry Lee Lucas talking about destroying humanity. And I had made tape edits from these, I had these two cassette tapes of interviews with Henry Lee Lucas. And then I had them paused. So, because you couldn't edit things, right? So I had to have these two tapes. And I had them queued because there was a chunk of other conversation in the middle that I didn't like. so I played it a little bit like an instrument.

Starting point is 01:16:22 I paused one and then unpause the other. Then it just like, you can hear a little bit of a click in there where I did it because it was before you had computers to do that. And then I liked, there's a noise band, a power electronics band called White House from England. And they have a lot of like infrasonic bass. It's like low, low, low bass that would like vibrate. And I wanted to do that, but I didn't have any kind of synthesizer. at the time. So I took

Starting point is 01:16:51 the back of Lenny's bass and just beat on it so it would reverberate and that's what that sound initially that vibrating sound at the beginning is and then you have my victims never knew what was going to happen. Wow. That speech going over that. That's from the cassette tape.

Starting point is 01:17:07 This is cool. This is learning about things that I thought were meaning no disrespect much more thought out and articulated but come to find y'all we're doing it the best we had at the time. with what we had available. I mean, I thought that I wanted to have a serial killer announcing that we were going to destroy the world. That was thought out, and I'd like to say thanks to my friend

Starting point is 01:17:32 Susie Tucker, who worked at a newsstand, and they had made this Henry Lee Lucas book, and it came with a cassette, and she, like, let me steal two of them, and then I used the tape to make the thing. Without that, we wouldn't have had the intro, so thanks to Susie Tucker. Beautiful. Her contribution to those of her tomorrow. But yeah, I mean, it was thought out what we would do, but a lot of things were improvised because we didn't know how to do.

Starting point is 01:18:00 I love that. Totally. So from 91 now to 95, what is touring like for integrity? The record's out. What are people thinking of it? What are the shows like? One of my friends had a band called Starvation.

Starting point is 01:18:19 Army. And they had gone to Europe with a new, not a new band, but a band that was about to become really popular by the name of Green Day. And they were not popular yet. And they both went to Europe together and they, and they toured. And when he got back, he stayed at my house for a while, my friend from Starvation Army. And then I talked to him. I was like, how did you get, how did you go to Europe? And he was like, oh yeah, I talked to this guy and like, we said a fax. What's a fax? And And then he explained what that was. And your listeners don't know what it is either. But I sent a fax to the guy and said,

Starting point is 01:18:57 we have an album and, you know, can we go on a tour? Because we got your number from these guys. And Green Day was getting popular. So I guess he must have thought that we were like that. I didn't elude that we were like that. I said, I can send you some CDs and you can check it out. And so I did. And he agreed to,

Starting point is 01:19:18 to the tour, and it would be UK and Europe. And so we worked and saved up our money and bought flights, and then we flew over to England, and

Starting point is 01:19:34 he hadn't set it up right. And we also didn't have paperwork, so they were like mad at us and like wouldn't let us in the country, and then eventually they'd let us in on the condition that we didn't play. Right. We couldn't play music because

Starting point is 01:19:48 that would be stealing money from them or something. And so we didn't, we didn't play. And for some reason, we were terrified to actually play. I mean, we could have done it. Nobody would have fucking probably known, unless the venue got in trouble. And the cops came in. But for some reason,

Starting point is 01:20:06 that was one of the rare times where we were behaved and listened to what we were supposed to do. Nine controversial figures, integrity, temporarily. We were deported. And I did. the drummer Chuck Euler and I spent a night in jail and then they deported us and they

Starting point is 01:20:23 deported us to Belgium actually and there was a guy who was going to drive us that his name was is Ali Dorner and he's a German guy so we called him somehow on a phone and then he happened to be home or I don't know

Starting point is 01:20:41 and then he told us how to get to his house which I don't know how the fuck we did that but somehow we ended up getting to his house. And then we stayed at his house for like, well, it seemed to be like weeks. You know, it was horrible. It was freezing cold. It was a wintertime. And we had, we just would like freeze to death and like all sleep kind of really close together up in the attic of his house. Oh my gosh. So you didn't play any shows on the mainland either. Not yet. Not yet. So what he did was he, I think he called Up M-A-D and said,

Starting point is 01:21:11 look, I have this American band that like their tour fell through. Do you like have anything you could do for them. And then they said, sure, we could try something. We have this band called Neurosus that are on tour. Maybe they can open up for them. So they put us on with neurosis. And neurosis at the time was signed to alternative tentacles, which is the Denny's label. They were not yet on relapse. This was before. And then we toured with them and we became friends with them. And we would play a Joy Division cover each night, and they would play a Joy Division cover each night. And this is before every kid had the shirt in the fucking ball. In fact, if you liked Joy Division, then everybody hated you in the underground scene,

Starting point is 01:21:58 especially with the distorted guitars. And they would be kind of very critical of you. Interesting. So first European tour is pouring neurosis the last second. Yeah, so we were touring with neurosis, and then neurosis, and during that tour, all these labels were like courting them because they knew, they had announced that they were looking for a new label. So all these European labels would come there and be like, here's a bunch of fucking acid and mushrooms and alcohol. And then they were like, they didn't do as much of that, so they would give it to me and Aaron and eat it all and Lenny. And so we had a great time. and then that tour ended because we were only on like

Starting point is 01:22:46 the last leg of it and then earlier dieharded toured in America with Underdog and Into Another was on tour and it just kind of like as the neurosis ended

Starting point is 01:23:00 Into Another started so we jumped on the end to another tour opening up for those guys and you know we knew them from from Underdog and from Bold because we had flights to go home, that's the only reason

Starting point is 01:23:14 we just kept going. Do you happen to remember by any chance what flights cost at the time? I think it was maybe, I could tell some cool stories about flights, though. I think it was like $100, $200, it wasn't much, you know, but it was a lot to us bet. It has a

Starting point is 01:23:30 play in it. I'll tell you some interesting things because you're younger, you're not going to believe this. Sometimes you're on flights and you're like, you know what's weird? There's an ashtray on this thing. But nobody's ever been able to smoke. but we were able to smoke back then. We were at the end of the era

Starting point is 01:23:46 where you could smoke and we would smoke on the plane. But here, this was the kicker. Sounds fucking horrible. On the plane in the back, they reserve the last two rows of the airplane. And nobody could buy those seats. All of the

Starting point is 01:24:02 stewardesses were young at that time. And they're still working on the airlines, but now they're my age, whatever. So but back then there were young young girls who were just like, wow, this is fun. And they would just serve your drinks for free the whole time. And it was like a bar in the back.

Starting point is 01:24:20 And people were smoking, yelling, fighting, drinking. It was totally fucking crazy. And we had a really phenomenal time doing it. Those first couple of tours. And then they changed the law. You couldn't smoke. And so one of our friends snuck into the lavatory to smoke. and he got busted

Starting point is 01:24:41 and they were going to do whatever they do to the people that smoke, which I don't really know what they do, but they yelled at him and they said they're going to do that. He didn't want to go, he didn't want to go for it, so we never figured out what that was.

Starting point is 01:24:58 What were the next few years of touring in the States like? I post those who fear tomorrow, how is hardcore receiving this record? What are the shows like? We didn't do any tours with other bands, really. We did like small things. things sometimes with bands that

Starting point is 01:25:14 we would link up with for a few dates or something like that. Like Damnation AD we did a few dates with them at some point. But mostly we would just play like one-offs or like we played a weekend. That kind of a thing. We didn't do like

Starting point is 01:25:30 full tours. But are people receiving the record well? Like the show's good. Yeah, the shows. It was a mix bag. I mean, the shows would be pretty packed, but at the same time, people would be like not liking it, too. Wow.

Starting point is 01:25:49 You, it's complicated. Something that I noticed about you specifically, whether it's promo, pictures, or videos that I've been able to find from way back, are you changing your style often? And this is something that, like, we've had stories of where sometimes you were. were like varsity jacket, Nike's. Sometimes you were leather jacket, bandana.

Starting point is 01:26:16 You know, like you were continually changing. Evolving. Evolving. Yeah, but at the same time, this is, I've been doing music for like 40 years.

Starting point is 01:26:26 So, yeah. You know, like when you were a kid, like you wore different things and then like you two wore different things later and stuff. So there's that. But also your journey is just much more well documented.

Starting point is 01:26:39 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Also, yeah, I was documented. But I mean, I don't want to just keep doing, I don't want to, A, do what everyone else is doing. And B, I don't want to do what people expect. And C, I'm just going to do what I want to do. As far as those varsity things, I mean, a lot of this stuff also comes down, not really coincidence exactly, but just like, we had no money.

Starting point is 01:26:59 So, like, if we found stuff, like, there was a champion outlet in Buffalo, we would go there. And there was a time we went there. and they had these like kind of all blue corduroy navy blue champion jackets that had the sea on the on the sleeve and they were like really thick and amazing and they were like two bucks each and they had like five of them or something so my friends and I we all bought them and then we like embroidered we had this embroidery place put like integrity on it and we wore those and so the whole thing ended up costing like maybe five or ten box but at you were to buy the real jacket, it probably would have been expensive, but it was like, maybe there was a hole in it or the color wasn't right and stuff. So, like, a lot of it comes down to, like, like, the whole thing, like, there's a lot of photos of us all wearing basketball jerseys that had no names on them. I don't know if you've sold those photos.

Starting point is 01:27:51 And people are always like, oh, you guys are really into basketball. I mean, the Melnics are into basketball and good at basketball, but we didn't really give a fuck about that. We could buy those for like 50 cents at the champion outlet. So we bought them. That was all. It wasn't like, it was no special agenda. It was just like, this was inexpensive, and then we were poor. We bought it.

Starting point is 01:28:13 Okay. So when does Lenny Melnick leave the band? When does Misha leave you? Leave? Aaron and Lenny both left after seasons in the size of days. In 95, you're joined by one Frank Novinek, aka Frank Three Gunn, aka Florida Frank. Tell me about getting Frank in the band. band. He was

Starting point is 01:28:36 Ringworm. Ringworm recorded an incredible record in what, 90-91 and then didn't make, seemingly didn't make music again for 10 years. What was Frank doing at this time when you recruited him into integrity? So they started out,

Starting point is 01:28:52 they had a, they were called something else at the beginning. I'm trying to remember what it was called. And James wore like clown makeup. And they had a They had a song on a comp called From Conversion Records. I can't remember what it's called. The clown.

Starting point is 01:29:13 James and the Clown. There's a picture of him wearing the clown makeup. It's them live and Frank is playing guitar, and James has the makeup on. There's a picture in the liner notes of this comp, but I can't remember what it's called. But it's on a label called Conversion Records from California. And Integrity has a song on it, too.

Starting point is 01:29:34 And a few other bands, I think, from Cleveland. And then bands from California predominantly. I'm trying to remember what it's called. I can't remember. But I can't even remember what their band was called. They only had the one song. And then they did a demo. And then they did the Promise.

Starting point is 01:29:51 Promise, right? They sure did. The hardest record ever in East Standard. So tell me about recruiting Frank. How did that go about? well like I said earlier I was I was friends with those guys and they would come to integrity shows

Starting point is 01:30:07 and ask questions like how do you guys how do you guys have a band and what do we do to start a band and things like that and so we sort of like showed them what we knew and helped them when we could and we made those for tomorrow I don't think they had anything

Starting point is 01:30:20 out yet and so in the liner notes it said you were fools forever believing in us we hate you all the only band that we like from Cleveland is ringworm fuck off or something like that and like people were like

Starting point is 01:30:36 some people were delighted and some people were furious that we didn't thank you you were no stranger to controversy at that time you were you're just you're a bad boy making trouble this was you know punk and and everything was like fuck society fuck everyone and so this was

Starting point is 01:30:56 the kind of the mentality now things became different over the years and people want to be more civil than things, but back then, so like what hardcore means is punk and metal together. So sometimes you have these

Starting point is 01:31:11 posers that don't know what hardcore really means. You're like, oh, this is too metal, man, or this is too punk. Those people are clueless because that's what hardcore is. It's half punk, half metal together. And those two components make it hardcore. Without either of those

Starting point is 01:31:27 components, it doesn't work right. So that's something that people often don't understand. That's how it started out. Now, Colin, you are a systems man. I'm a big systems man. Systems overload, 95. Tell me about putting this record together. Is Frank writing at this point?

Starting point is 01:31:49 Yeah, that's a funny thing. It's like Frank joined and we were like, but he joined as we were in the studio, like in the same week. and we were like, just play something, dude. He's like, I'm not going to play on it. We're like, just play something. I mean, whatever. He just refused to play on it.

Starting point is 01:32:09 He just wouldn't do it. He wouldn't do it. But it might have been because he had just joined the band and then we're in the studio and he didn't know the songs or anything. And we had just made up the songs. So there could have been a lot to do with that too. Or it could have just been that he wanted to, he didn't want to play on it if he didn't write it.

Starting point is 01:32:26 Maybe that was it. I'm not really sure. We didn't really push him about it. We were like, okay, whatever. Then don't fucking do it, dumbass. And then he'd be like, fuck you and, you know, just jokes. Sure. So tell me, so four years between records, before and LPs, I mean,

Starting point is 01:32:42 any anecdotes come to mind in writing this, the response to the record and how you felt when it was finished at the time? Yeah, was victory happy? We had done seven inches. So, like, there's a lot of extra parts to it. did the incontrastive sin 7-inch, that was that I talked about earlier, with victory. And then victory was, if you've ever seen the record, there's like a blue cross of a crucified witch. That's the cover artwork that I designed. And that was the cover. And the guy,

Starting point is 01:33:18 there was a guy who was friends with Tony who worked at a printing press and he could do he could do offset printing and he would do the covers and so the first press of our record has the blue cross and then all of a sudden there's these records and according to Victory we didn't sell

Starting point is 01:33:39 any records nobody liked us and that nobody would buy it and then we start seeing in stores our record on a different color vinyl with a green cross well that's strange I don't think they just like I don't think that they just like

Starting point is 01:33:53 more offended you know after some the blue turns into green, you know. So we called him up and we're like, what's up with that? Oh, no, no, that's the same record. You guys were mistaken. We're like, no, you repress them, dude. It's clearly a new pressing. And we had some animosity with him for that.

Starting point is 01:34:09 Wow. So it begins. It begins early. Yeah, he, he, you know, he was stealing from the, from the get-go. So, and he in integrity parted ways. But he continued to make bootleg shirts and things like that. and keep the money and then and then uh we did those for tomorrow with overkill yep and that came out and then ron warderpe who owned overkill ron was the singer of the band brotherhood

Starting point is 01:34:40 you might out of there and um ron had a p and d a production and distribution deal with uh dutch east india which is a distribution company out of new york and they were would help him put out his records financially and put them in the malls and in the stores back then being in the mall was a big thing you had a barcode you could be in the mall and then other normal kids could could catch it instead of like guys who really know about punk you'd go to the go to the mom and pop store but like regular people could get it and then it could maybe like be heard by more people and so he was able to do that and then at some point uh duchist india said uh they wanted to buy him out

Starting point is 01:35:25 So they bought him out. And then they called me and said, yeah, we bought out, um, bought out, uh, overkill records. Do you guys want to continue to work with us? And then I said, well, what does it mean? Cause I, I don't know. I'm, I'm still a teenager. And they said, well, we did this P&D.

Starting point is 01:35:43 They explained it to me. And then they said, if you want, you know, we could do that for you. I was like, okay. And I had done a label called Dark Empire Records at the time. And I had done a seven inch for my friends confront, but I wasn't a good, I wasn't good at having a label. I just like to make things. I get bored.

Starting point is 01:35:59 And maybe that's part of the whole thing. You said, like, some years I wear different clothing. So I get bored easily, you know? So I did a label. I did, and also nobody was putting out the confront record. So I was like, I'll figure out how to do it. And I figured out. And I did it.

Starting point is 01:36:16 And then when Dutchie said, hey, would you like to have a P&D with us? I said, okay. And then we, they arranged to like make, make records that we had, that we would write and record. So they did a lot of things like that.

Starting point is 01:36:30 So in 1990, you think you're like, okay, victory's stealing from us because this isn't selling, but then you go back and... We didn't think it. It was true. It was provable that they had stolen from you. But then you go back long term.

Starting point is 01:36:46 They would have made it with a blue cross and kept the same color way, we would have never known. But then you go back and And they, systems is with them, humanities with them. Yeah, so what happened was we got promised that it was not going to be that way, that now at this point they had gotten bigger and that they were going to change their methods and be more on, be more straightforward with everything.

Starting point is 01:37:16 And is that what you thought you experienced? We thought that that was going to happen, but it did not happen. And so we did systems. and then we were told nobody bought it, but we would go to tour in Europe and everybody do the words. This is four years before the MP3 was invented, so there's no way that people would have

Starting point is 01:37:33 all known the fucking words, you know? And all these stories, you know, I don't want to turn it into this. Yeah, no, no, we know, we know. Yeah, I want to focus on the positivity here of systems overload. Was it a smash hit at the time? I don't think so, no.

Starting point is 01:37:51 Interesting. There's a thing that you have to also understand is like right now in 2025. Everyone has a band. Everyone in the audience has a band, and their fucking brother has a band, and their sister also has a band. And the guy who is the janitor at the venue, he's got five bands. Everyone has a band. Back then, nobody had a band. So we were the only band of any of the guys from Cleveland that ever had gone to Europe.

Starting point is 01:38:19 and they were like, wow, did you guys go? We didn't go very easily, but we did go. And so, like, we just did weird stuff because we didn't give a fuck, and then we got lucky, I guess, with some things. But because there wasn't a lot of bands, and people, you know, we did these stores with these great bands. So some of the people that went to see neurosis into another or judge might have said, that band's not too bad.

Starting point is 01:38:45 And they would buy the records or, if they saw them maybe i don't know how about how about the reaction in the states to once after systems overload came out there's a part of it like oh so when we made those for tomorrow which is a different type of mindset similar to my clothes as we spoke before so it's a different identity it's a different persona it's in the same universe as integrity but there's a lot of differences to it from systems overload which is a different record too they both both have experimental components, they both have solos, they both have the same kind of vocals and things, but there's a difference to the way that it works out. So what had happened was when those for

Starting point is 01:39:30 tomorrow came out, it was definitely not initially like well received. And most people were upset. People even went so far as to making zines that would say like, don't buy this record. These guys have solos and lyrics that we don't like or understand. It wasn't that they didn't like what the lyrics were about because they were controversial. They didn't like what the lyrics were about because they weren't following the recipe of other bands. Sure. And the lyrics would have words that they didn't,

Starting point is 01:40:06 that might have, you know, the way to long. Yeah, Abraxas. Yeah. Hard to pronounce words. And sometimes lyrics that made you have to think about it a little longer than like, you know, something about betrayal or whatever. But you're saying this while we hear bands at that time being like,

Starting point is 01:40:26 integrity was the shit and this is what everybody wanted to be. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, what I think when I hear those stories, I think that the people who are from bands that are saying that were maybe like people who were young who were starting a band, and they were thinking that. And so that maybe that's where it came from. I don't know.

Starting point is 01:40:46 So hopefully that's a comfort to. it's okay but there were some there were people who liked it but there were a lot of people who didn't like it too i mean yeah we wouldn't be able to tour if no one liked it of course so we had we had but there were always people who were like really like against having solos like that for some reason was like really a deal breaker for a lot of and you still to this day yeah still to this day i have people crying about that and i'm glad you have you have the armenian genocide which is a solo for the... Excuse me, Armenian persecution about the Armenian Genocide.

Starting point is 01:41:24 That is a solo over almost the entire song. Yeah. Yeah, that, I mean, that intro is fucking super epic. It's incredible. It's awesome. The guitar being plugged in and all that. Yeah. Yeah, this fucking guy, he just, he, that whole thing came in his head, you know.

Starting point is 01:41:40 Aaron is a genius. He's a crazy guy. And he looks like fucking, I told him that I was going to say, he looks like Rick James, you know. I have to be honest. Now, if Colin is a systems guy, I am a humanity as the double guy. That was when I first discovered and for sure got an MP3 of integrity

Starting point is 01:42:01 and this is where I went, oh, because... And that's a year later. Yeah, I'm looking at the timeline right now and it is crazy howl it. And then even the next record is a year later. It's wild. You got it when it came out. Is that what you mean? No. The year came out? Or you got it when you were younger.

Starting point is 01:42:17 Yeah. 96, I was nine. So I probably wouldn't have gotten it for another five or six years. So once Napster and all the, you know, the, the blueprints. There's a big four-year gap. Yeah. Big four-year gap between first and second LP. One year later, you're following up hard with a, with an all-time classic, Humanity is the devil. We did a lot of seven inches in between there. You've done a lot of seven inches in general. It's, it is hard to keep that. You got a big discography. Big discography.

Starting point is 01:42:48 So if we come up with a couple of songs that are really good, we don't have anything else, then we do a seven-inch. Or we would come up with some songs and we were working on an album, and then someone would be like, hey, do you want to do a split? Like, that's like the curse of the shit is like people, oh, let's do a split. Like, fuck, dude, I'm trying to collect these songs for an album. Do you have a favorite split you've ever done?

Starting point is 01:43:09 Yeah, it would be the split with May Day. Those songs are the most evil songs that Aaron ever wrote on that split. It wasn't on an album, so probably a lot of people don't know that. That's how it goes, man. The album is God. Splits in seven inches are for like the super fans. It's also down-tuned, so it has a different, totally different sound. Oh, damn.

Starting point is 01:43:33 Okay. Very cool. Find that. The song called Kingdom of Heaven and a song called Rebirth. Those are the two that stand out. And then there was a song called 18 Wheels. And then we also did a negative approach cover in that session. to evacuate.

Starting point is 01:43:49 Humanity is the double opens with another iconic song that I know you have to play every time you guys play. Because those are the hardest lyrics I ever had to write. Of course. And obviously that song

Starting point is 01:44:02 kind of defined intro for me as like a young songwriter myself. I was like, oh, this is how you can do that? You can do that? That's awesome. But then goes into one of my favorite songs of all time featuring James Human Furness. which is hollow

Starting point is 01:44:17 is this the first time James collabbed and is the voice under his part is that you or is that him doing the talking thing is that the vocoder what is that? No, no, that's Charles Manson. Under his part? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:44:36 Whoa. The mass murder of Charles Manson. Of course, so it's a sample being played on mine. Hard lore. Hard lore, baby. As far as, is that the first time that James ever collaborated with me or with anyone?

Starting point is 01:44:53 With you? You two. I mean, I would say you two are kind of the two iconic frontman of your... That was the first time that he collaborated with integrity. He was our friend and they hadn't done anything for a long time. And like, we sort of egged him on. He was, I think, at the studio where like, why don't you fucking do something too, you fucking dick? You know, can't just sit on the couch and fucking drink and fucking make jokes.

Starting point is 01:45:15 get to work. Agreed, man. At Bertha's pain should have been a lot earlier, but I'm glad we got it eventually. You had original artwork by Pusshead on this record. Yeah. Yeah. How was that experience?

Starting point is 01:45:30 I was in the Pusshead fan club as a kid. I used to write pen pal letters to him and fan letters to him and send him like drawings and little dolls I would make like little evil dolls and things. And he would send me back these beautifully penned letters and often with a free record or a seven-inch or... Stowed out?

Starting point is 01:45:56 No, I don't have any of that stuff. I don't keep things. Oh, really? And at one point in the 90s, like, somebody firebomb my house and burned it to the ground. So, like, a lot of stuff got lost then. And then I got divorced about 10 years after that, and I lost a lot of things in there.

Starting point is 01:46:12 And then I moved to Europe. So the post-had letters are... Yeah, those are long gone. They were probably in the records that I, my old records of those Septic Death records and stuff, and Pustmore records, and then whoever ended up taking my records, they probably have them.

Starting point is 01:46:30 Someone out there probably has it. Maybe it's going to go on eBay or. If you've got them, let us know. We'll pay you whatever you want. I want to talk about one more track on this record. Please. It's my favorite song is right after Hollow. is psychological warfare.

Starting point is 01:46:46 That I think is the coolest integrity song to me. I love the way it starts with the feedback to the double time part. It's just like one of my favorites. I'm just curious. There's like a Tesla coil in there too. Oh, really?

Starting point is 01:47:02 That's awesome. Kind of noise. You can hear it like frying. Wow. Very cool. I did a tour with Haybreed at the end of last year and I was punishing Frank a lot about this stuff, but he's very...

Starting point is 01:47:17 Frank is on that record. Right. So I was asking about this stuff, and he was telling me that for some songs, pulling from 70s classic rock from a lot of kiss, that he showed me a kiss live thing. And I was just curious if you... We asked the question last night,

Starting point is 01:47:35 or in our last episode, if there was anything specific that you pulled from that someone might not expect. Like an influence, a riff, you are probably full of influences and stuff that people might not expect. I'm just curious if there's anything specifically that comes to mind on this record. I think that the most interesting one would be the song, Incarnate 365, but that's not on that record,

Starting point is 01:48:05 but the beginning of a Joy Division song starts off where Peter Hook is just goofing around, And then he accidentally plays what became the Incarnate 365 RIP, but then goes right into the song he was playing. He just plays it just for a second, just sort of like getting his sound, getting his levels. And then Aaron was like, hey, that's sick. What if I just made that the whole fucking song? Wow, that's very cool.

Starting point is 01:48:30 There's that. So as far as that record is something that would be a recognizable influence. I don't know. The incarnate one is the most obvious. That's a great. That's a very cool answer. I have here a weird victory. I have a weird 10-inch, Colin, your favorite.

Starting point is 01:48:52 Victory one number 539 of 1419. 539. Yeah. Of the black vinyl is 1340. I'm sure these numbers have to mean something to it. 1340 plus 6 plus 73. We weren't consulted about that release and didn't receive anything for it.

Starting point is 01:49:11 So we had nothing to do with it. So those numbers are just someone else did those. Speaking of which, and we're jumping ahead here, we'll get back. Do you remember when Today 4 came out, I sent you a message on MySpace, Wood, about the vinyl track listing, having two tracks mixed up? Yeah. Do you remember me messaging you?

Starting point is 01:49:36 I was probably 13 years old. It wasn't vinyl. It would have been, we didn't have vinyl on it. Or was it the CD or something? Yeah, yeah. CDs tracks were mixed up. Yeah. And Dwyd said, if only Death Wish had had your keen eye, and I was 13, like,

Starting point is 01:49:50 bam, man, he thinks my eyes keen. That's crazy. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people would ask, like, why is it wrong? And it was a clerical error. Wow. There it is. All right.

Starting point is 01:50:01 Let's go back. 96. Humanity is the devil. Frank's writing for integrity now. He's credited. He's on there. Tell me about putting that record together, memories from that time, and the response to it soon after. The record is themed around an end of the world called The Process Church, which is where the title came from.

Starting point is 01:50:24 Humanity is the Devil. And the concept of the album is based off of, yeah, humanity is the devil. And the different elements of the – each song represents a different part of how that would come to be. Vocal test, while to some people it might seem kind of like a comical thing or a trolling thing, it's actually a primal scream, you know? Yeah, of course. When things are so intense that words don't even fucking don't even compare to how you feel, the rage that you feel inside. It's kind of the essence of what it is. and then psychological warfare is using sound or using

Starting point is 01:51:09 pamphlets or any type of way to fuck with people's thinking I mean now you see it all the time psychological warfare used in social media and in politics and things like that to manipulate people into like people who work really hard into thinking that a billionaire gives a fuck about them you know like stuff like that

Starting point is 01:51:31 so I've been in favor of it But that's kind of where the directs. But it's happening. Yeah. Yeah. When did the infamous, I'm not even infamous, just famous warp tour show. When was that? I thought, I think it was before because the picture is on the back of the.

Starting point is 01:51:51 And which also is, you know, psychological warfare from our side is fucking with people. So like if you look at the back of the record, you're like, wow, this must be like, break down the wall of part too. Yeah. As you turn the other side, it's like this is like some kind of fucking death metal record. So like that was that was funny. In our minds, we were like, yeah, let's do that. Wow. And, you know, we were one of the greatest hardcore photos.

Starting point is 01:52:14 We were young and fucking Frank and Aaron and I, we could jump like, we should have been on the fucking Chicago Bulls. And you're all, you're all going to have like. They're all bleached to the nines. It's awesome. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, we would just, like, get together and, like, somebody would buy bleach and be like, maybe Frank was like, hell, let's fucking do our hair blonde, so we would do it. And then if it didn't look good, we would just cut it off. Right.

Starting point is 01:52:45 And then it would grow and then whatever. I mean, it was just, we were bored, you know. There's no, there's no real rhyme or reason to any of it. I'm sorry. Good, good, no, that's good. It's bored and fucking around, you know. Yeah. How is the funny story about Frank?

Starting point is 01:53:00 Oh, go ahead. Oh, no. Please, please. Tell me a funny story about Frank. When Frank was really young, he was a teen, and I was a bit older than him. And it was wintertime, and he really wanted what we called a GG vest, which is a gene vest. And he didn't have any money. So we went to this thrift store on Lorraine called Unique Thrift.

Starting point is 01:53:19 And I talked to one of the ladies that worked there. And I said, oh, you know, my friend, he's really, he doesn't have any money. And it's cold outside. He really needs a jacket. Could you, like, change the price? Because the jeans jacket was maybe $10. bucks. And so she changed it to one buck. So he got this jacket. Then we cut the sleeves

Starting point is 01:53:34 off and fucking put leopard skin and fucking all kinds of patches and roach shit on there. And then he walked around doing his Gigi dance. Beautiful. So how, what is, what is touring like between humanity and seasons?

Starting point is 01:53:50 Are you really seeing a sea change in America of like, oh wow, this band is really working in people know these songs? Victor, he's definitely selling some records that we don't about. Yeah, we had a lot of people that would be at shows. You also asked about the Warped Tour and I didn't answer it. Should I answer that? I just, you know, I was just curious when it happened. If you have any memories, feel free to share it. If not, it's all good. I like that this is one thing.

Starting point is 01:54:15 I don't know how we got on it. I don't know how that came to be. It just accidentally happened, but we only played the one show. And then the bouncers were, the security people were beating up the kids because kids were dancing. And so, uh, I, I jumped off stage to fight the bouncers, and then the kids and the band against the bouncers, and then, like, they told us to get the fuck out, and we're thrown out. There's a video of it on YouTube somewhere, I think. Is there? Awesome.

Starting point is 01:54:48 Yeah, also, that photo that's on the back, you can, like, kind of, like, almost pause it and see that same. There's something in the comments I saw it once, and someone's like, if you paused it at this time, that's where it's all jumping. It's from a different angle, but you can tell it's cool. Love it. 97 rolls around.

Starting point is 01:55:05 Somehow you do it again. You follow up one year later again with what I think may be the hardest integrity record. Start to finish. I think Frank would agree. I heard him get in a screaming match with Wayne over it, Seasons versus Systems. Frank did a lot. Trink did a lot of the writing. So that might be why Frank is also part.

Starting point is 01:55:28 That's understandable. I think Orbital Teleplastic Emination has the single hardest integrity riff in it. So if you're watching this, pause this, go listen to that song. Welcome back. Wasn't that riff incredible? And that title proved what I said earlier that some people just didn't like that kind of lyrics. You don't think a song called Orbital Teleplastic Emination is going to have this insanely hard breakdown in it, but you would be wrong, I promise.

Starting point is 01:55:57 Tell me about this record. you said, you said Frank, that's what happens. You know, when you're possessed by a ghost and it's coming out

Starting point is 01:56:04 and like a plasma like way from your mouth and you know, you gotta have a breakdown. Oh, of course. I'm from Connecticut. I know all about

Starting point is 01:56:11 hauntings and plasma and all that. We got that. So this is the last record with Aaron and Lenny? And Frank. And Frank. Wow.

Starting point is 01:56:22 So how, what would happen there? Why? I think first went off to go and do, he might have to tear it right up. Yeah. I think so.

Starting point is 01:56:30 Yeah, that would have been 2000. Or he went back to Ringworm and then he went to Terror, maybe. That sounds right. Yeah. That's it. I'm not sure.

Starting point is 01:56:38 But we broke up. All of us were... Oh, just straight up. Yeah. Integrity ended after this record. Okay. Yeah. And then I was doing, I was going to do another record

Starting point is 01:56:49 with other people. And then Victory was like, oh, we'll put it out. And it was going to have a different name. And then they were like, oh, no, we should call it integrity. that I didn't want to call it that and that we did ended up calling an integrity 2000

Starting point is 01:57:02 which was like a different kind of branding thing it's a cult favorite now I would say it's a mark of the air I hear that a lot I'm not sure if people are trolling or not I don't think they are I mean I think what was it like writing without Aaron for the first time for that well there's that that's an album

Starting point is 01:57:21 that doesn't have six solos so that's I think that's the component that ruined the record, right? No solos. No solos. Which people got their wish. Yeah, they got their wish. That could be the reason we got it. They got their fucking wish.

Starting point is 01:57:37 But I think the solos are crucial, you know. Yeah. And then you did the project. I mean, do you have anything to say about seasons before we move on? Because it is such a great, insanely hard record. Anything come to mind from that session or

Starting point is 01:57:53 it's reception or or just the process of putting it together? A friend of mine gave me a tape that he had gotten from a guy who worked at the FBI, and it was Jim Jones's last sermon, and he gave that to me. That's at the end of the album. And then I added some percussion, percussive voodoo percussion underneath it, and tried to, like, drive people crazy with that. Beautiful. How was, what was the response?

Starting point is 01:58:25 like to the record. People hated that track. But people, there was a couple things to it. Like, I'm not going to keep complaining and being a downer, so I'm not going to say it. But basically we didn't have a lot of money for the budget.

Starting point is 01:58:40 So we had to like cut everything short and we didn't have the ability to really mix it the way we wanted to. So that became a duller record. I don't know. You said that you liked that record. I love that record. Did you ever hear the record? the record, the version of the record that Arthur remixed.

Starting point is 01:58:58 Yeah. It's on relapse. So that's, you can hear everything on that one. The other one is, is a bit muddy because the mixing, we ran out of money and the label. I like mud, man. I like dirt and mud. I'm a fan. It just seemed like it wasn't finished. Okay. I see. And we felt like it wasn't finished because we had it, we wanted it to sound differently in our heads. And because we didn't have the budget. And, uh, we had to just turn it in as it was. And so that's what we did. It would have been nicer to have done it the way we wanted to.

Starting point is 01:59:32 But I think that pretty close to that is what the relapse version is. And you can listen to Baldwin. You can enjoy the other version if that's what you like, whatever, you know. If you like dirt and mud like me, you can go back to the OG. And if you like, you know, clean and polish and you want to hear the band's true vision, you can hear the Arthur version. It's all out there. And then those who fear tomorrow got re-recorded with the E. Igor on drums?

Starting point is 01:59:55 Yeah. Crazy. So that's out there. You can listen to that. Yeah. A lot of integrity. A lot of, yeah. Part of this interruption, once again, we've got a few quick messages for you.

Starting point is 02:00:07 Bo, how you feeling today? I'm feeling great. You want to know why? I really do. I manscaped this morning. Really? I went straight into the shower because I woke up about an hour before we were supposed to record. Perfect.

Starting point is 02:00:19 At 11 a.m.? Well, no, 1 p.m. Wow. You're sick in the head. Straight into the shower. I use the body scrubber, the body wash, the preserver afterwards. I'm feeling great. I'm feeling clean. It's a beautiful day with a beautiful dick and balls.

Starting point is 02:00:36 Thank God for Manscaped. We're going to use code Hardlore to get 20% off and free shipping sitewide. It's incredible. It'll change your life. It'll change the scent of your hair on all the nether regions. Any region, really. It's built to do whatever you need. Your full body can be escaped.

Starting point is 02:01:00 It doesn't need to be. Some people don't like when it is. Head to toe. You can do whatever you want. Especially toe. Get them toes trimmed with the lawnmower 5.0. Okay, trust me. Code Hardle, 20% off for shipping.

Starting point is 02:01:12 This episode is lastly, so importantly, brought to you by AG1. Colin. It is such a vital part of our everyday routine. You know? Yes. Make up, before you grab a brush and put on a little makeup, you need to drink 12 to 16 ounces of water with one scoop of this delicious green powder. And that's it. A couple drops of the vitamin K and D I do, personally.

Starting point is 02:01:36 If you're feeling, yeah, if you're feeling like you're on the dark side of straight edge, much like Dwyd, you might need them vitamin DK drops. Okay. It's very important. And if you go to drinkag1.com slash hardlore, not only are you supporting the show, you're going to get five free travel packs. There's always fests coming up, and you're also going to get those vitamin D and K drops. It's beautiful, man. It's a great deal. It's a life-changing product.

Starting point is 02:02:00 Get those greens in. You don't want scurvy, okay? I don't want it. I wouldn't know, personally, but I assume I don't want it. Yeah. And I don't, you know, I'm sick of broccoli, you know, I eat it every day. Just give me the IG one, all right? And you're good.

Starting point is 02:02:21 Back to the episode. Integrity 2000 had a second record, the Project Regenesis records. Yeah. With a bunch of wild covers on there. Yeah. What was the source of that? Why two Donna Summer covers? There's a guy from Connecticut who had garbage bags filled of psychedelic mushrooms.

Starting point is 02:02:46 And he said to me, I will give you two bags of these mushrooms if you record. anything for me. And at the time, I had a Roland V-drum kit and a Roland mixing board that recorded on this big fucking hard cartridge thing.

Starting point is 02:03:07 And so we just recorded a bunch of songs so that we could get the mushrooms. Wow. So you're trading Donna Summer covers for bags of mushrooms. Yeah. Pretty good deal. Yeah, it was a good deal.

Starting point is 02:03:21 Yeah, well, see, this is incredible. I thought you were just like really into Donna Summer and Gary Newman at the time. I meant to them too. I like them. I do like them. Closure is you're back to the integrity name now. And this sounds like

Starting point is 02:03:39 you were like, guys, I want to make it. That album was going to, that band was going to be called Angela Delamorte, but again Victory was like, no. And at the last minute, they convinced me to change it. So this is a real Exorcist 3 situation where the studio insisted.

Starting point is 02:03:57 That's good. Yeah. Interesting. This is like your misfits record. It feels like Earth AD. There's all kinds of Danzig-esque pinch harmonics. All the woes. Was this you being like, I gotta get my glen out of my system? I think it was just like the guy who played drums, his name is Brandon,

Starting point is 02:04:23 and he had a recording studio in his basement and he's the guy who did the woes and the they're good singing the better singing. He sounds like David Havoc. It's crazy. He's really a great singer and a great musician. And on the drums he would use like unconventional things to do percussion, chains and you know, spooky stuff. And he did a great job.

Starting point is 02:04:50 That's around this time shortly after this, you moved to Belgium. No, I moved to Belgium. A couple years later, it would have been 2003 after to die for. So what made you move to Belgium? Not after closure. Oh, a lot of things, but mainly, like,

Starting point is 02:05:09 it's a weird and maybe stupid story, but because I lived in Cleveland, and there isn't a lot of bands that make records from Cleveland, and people started to like my records and I would be out celebrating all the time, like every night, all the time. And I wouldn't get anything accomplished. And so that was part of the problem that I had with it.

Starting point is 02:05:38 And I needed to work on things instead of just celebrating all the time. It's ridiculous. So that was a, most people would go the opposite way to be happy to be able to celebrate all the time. Sure. But I was going the other direction. I thought that I was wasting my time. And I also thought that some of the records I was making were were beneath me and not as good. So I wanted to do better.

Starting point is 02:06:04 That was a part of it too. Well, to die for was a great one to go out on before heading to Belgium. So that's a big achievement. Some of the songs are good, yeah. I agree. I was so passionate about it. I messaged you about the track list when I was 12 years old. How did you land on Gent?

Starting point is 02:06:22 Was it MySpace or Friendster? I think it was MySpace for sure. I never had. I was in a Friendster guy. I had a Zanga blog. Then I went straight to MySpace. How did I get to Ghent? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:06:36 Originally I went to Quartreck. And in Cortreck, I have a friend named Hans, Rabiki, and he is the singer of the band Lyer. You might know who they are. And one of the, on the tour that I did for to die for, early in the tour, he said, hey, I just bought this big house

Starting point is 02:06:56 and I live alone. And there's like five bedrooms in there. And if you want, after the tour, between tours, you could like stay there as long as you want, man. And I was like, very cool. Wow, I never thought about that before. Like every time I would tour, I'd just go back home

Starting point is 02:07:13 and never see anything except for what I'd see on tours. You know, like, you go on tour, you don't see the things you want to see. Of course. Go to the next show. You drive past the things you want to see. And they're like,

Starting point is 02:07:25 especially in Europe. Yeah. Especially in Europe. They're like, you cannot see it. It's not possible. And then, this is not possible.

Starting point is 02:07:34 That's, that's the number one, the number one response of all Europe. It is not possible. Yeah. I heard it, I heard it like 25 times this morning alone. So it's like that.

Starting point is 02:07:46 Is it true that you make skate ramps for local kids in Belgium? I made skate ramps. There's skate ramps around my house, yeah. Fuck, yeah. That's awesome. Got to keep the kids skate. During the COVID time, everybody was inside, and the kids in the neighborhood were all just glued to, like, devices and gaming and stuff.

Starting point is 02:08:10 And at the time, my youngest son was, I don't think, like, seven or eight. and he had never climbed a tree. He had never fell on his, he'd never fallen off anything and got hurt. And I thought that was a shame. So I made him get hurt. And I said, well, we're going to build a ramp. And so we just, we built a ramp.

Starting point is 02:08:34 And then we built another ramp. And then we built a few other ramps. And this let's scatter them around the neighborhood. And we also bought a couple basketball, hoops because there isn't anything there is still not anything in the neighborhood to do for the kids so I just sort of

Starting point is 02:08:52 contributed that but it's all around my house. You created an American utopia in Belgium. Little Cleveland. Did he get hurt? No, I ended up getting hurt I broke my elbow. Oh no. Jesus, that sounds bad.

Starting point is 02:09:08 That's the tough one. Yeah. Today four had an interesting lineup on it. We don't have to get into specifics if you don't want, but it made for a really great record. I see people saying this is, this is people's favorite integrity record, some. I think there's a, like people who go into integrity

Starting point is 02:09:30 without the context of each lineup individually, people love this one. Are there any fond memories of putting this together after doing Integrity 2000 and closure? We recorded it at Spider Studios, which is a small studio that was owned by a member of the band Camara. You know who they are? Yeah, of course. And he started the studio, and he also recorded the Kimera records there.

Starting point is 02:10:00 And it was like, it was the first time we ever recorded digital. Before, we had always recorded reel to reel up until then. And closure was also, closure was ADAT. But 2000 and all everything before was all done. Big Reel. Yeah, so you, this was recorded on a computer so you could like move things around and you could like use triggered drums. And he had this like Dave Lombardo CD or something where it sounded like Dave's kit. And he could just like with MIDI like program in the drums and just made it work when it wasn't working.

Starting point is 02:10:43 and turned out really good for what it was. It's a good record. There's a lot of parts where I'm like this thought ended abruptly where it could have continued on, but that's like my side of the heat of listening to it. You know, there's always little things you like wish could have been done differently. Well, sometimes. Some records turned out great without any change. So the Blackest Curse is the first record eventually with your kind of new.

Starting point is 02:11:13 ensemble. Is this still in some capacity the ensemble you've got now? Two of those guys were on to die for as well. Oh, okay. Mike Jocom and Steve Rockhurst. Steve was the bass player on To Die For as well.

Starting point is 02:11:28 And he's the current singer of Mushroomhead, actually. Oh, cool. The high voice. We shared a trailer with them last year. Oh, yeah. Did you meet Steve? To be honest with you, They were in wardrobe.

Starting point is 02:11:43 I have no idea who I met. To be honest, I don't know what he looks like when he wears that makeup, so I don't know which character he would be. But he's the guy who sings, sings, you know, with the higher voice.

Starting point is 02:11:53 God damn, man. That guy? Yeah, convicted man. A couple tracks, man. He was a couple tracks. He was the bass player on my records. That's awesome.

Starting point is 02:12:06 Very cool. And he owns, he owns the Mars mixer and all the whole studio and it's in his basement. Whoa. Wow. Okay. That's pretty sick. Good to know. It's still an option. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:12:18 Do you have a personal favorite integrity record looking back? I think that either those for tomorrow or humanity is a double. Probably humanity because it's shorter and like everything is turned out right. Okay. That's very cool. But I like the dynamic and the versatility and the variety of those for tomorrow. it's huge it's massive and dude it's so early you were so young and just fucking figured it out right away yeah and so like the way that that record was structured in and how it was all um there was a lot of

Starting point is 02:12:54 intricacies to it once people started to like it then we made systems to be a fuck you to them so we made it more simple more like japanese hardcore and and a little bit in a way like you know the 7-inch was where it's more caveman or something, you know, like this kind of, not as that nuance as goes for tomorrow would have. Interesting. You said, okay, this is working. Time to change it.

Starting point is 02:13:23 Fuck you. Because fuck you. That's awesome. Respect. I read a quote from you one time that said, when you want new music to listen to, you write a new integrity record. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:13:35 So are they all kind of... Are they all a window into your mind? Yeah, but I mean, I also listen to other records too. Like, I just mean like people took it out of context and some people cried and said, how dare you like your records? Oh, you're an asshole. No, I get it. I understood right away.

Starting point is 02:13:52 Why would anybody, but that's always been a thorn in a lot of people's side is that I like the records that I make. Because if I didn't like them, why the fuck would I make them? Yeah, 100%. There's some morons out there who think that, you know, you're not supposed to like your your creations. But if I didn't like it, then it'd probably be really

Starting point is 02:14:14 fucking terrible. And sometimes you get two big bags of mushrooms, so who cares if you like it? Well, that record I don't really like. But I like the mushrooms. Okay. Understood.

Starting point is 02:14:27 Dwit, I have an important question for you, I think. Sure. I've been a... As once the primary representative for the dark side of straight edge, now,

Starting point is 02:14:38 as a primary representative for the dark side of all things, do you believe in ghosts? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I believe a lot of supernatural things. I've had experiences like that. Tell me. Tell me more.

Starting point is 02:14:56 Tell me about an experience with a Specter. I can tell you a couple. Yeah, I can tell you a couple. I'll tell you one that isn't as great and then I'll tell you a better one. So we used to do this, Nevinnik and Aaron and Lenny and I, we used to break into this old police building that used to be across from that building I was telling you about before the film building. And it was in a rundown, at that time, a rundown part of Cleveland. And they had an old police building that after Elliot Ness got Al Capone, he was, Elliot Ness was from Cleveland.

Starting point is 02:15:32 He returned back to Cleveland, this heroic guy. and Cleveland had a serial killer or serial killers that were called the torso killer. And he came back to Cleveland, this hero who had caught Al Capone, and they all thought he's going to solve this serial killer thing. He never solved it. And every time he would get evidence, it would disappear from his desk. And the theory is that the police were. in on it. It was sort of like a thing where it was a lot like how our records play out, where it's

Starting point is 02:16:09 like trying to exterminate humanity. That was kind of the concept, I believe, of what the torso killer was doing. But the building where his office was across the street from where I lived, and it was abandoned, and we would break in there and wander around all the time. And his office was still there, and his office still had files that had his signature on things. and like all these documents that were his and like things like that you would just like pick it up and have his his signature and different things and we got a kick out of that the goal of going into the building was to get on the roof that was the goal and for an entire summer almost every night we would go in there often on LSD and try to get get to the roof and so eventually we fucking figure it out and we finally got to the top. And I had a small gun with me and I was in the back because

Starting point is 02:17:11 there's a lot of homeless people and crazy people in there. There's a lot of stories that I can tell you about that. Like one thing, for example, if you ever do exploration and things like that, when you walk into a room where you feel a sense of someone being in there, it's an important

Starting point is 02:17:27 thing to do is to take a very big smell. If you smell the sweet, sugar, candy smell of shit, there's a good chance there's a human in there and they're shitting somewhere because they're in there. And they're not going to have a flowing toilet.

Starting point is 02:17:45 So that's a sign that you know there's a human there so you can be aware that, you know, things could go south. Yeah. So poop, you smell poop. Get out of it. Not just poop because it could be animals. Sweet poop. Sweet with sugar in it because that's animals don't eat sugar.

Starting point is 02:18:02 You know. I'll do some research. Yeah. personal reason. I mean, maybe some animals eat sugar, but you know. So we get to the top and, yeah, we smelled this and there was a guy who came out and it's like tidy whitey and nothing else on. And he walked up to us. He was like a big like Lenny from of Mice and Men type guy, if anybody gets that reference. Of course. And he came up to us like kind of a lurking guy. And he said, I wouldn't go in that room. And then he walked away. And so Mark Kinepka, who was the drummer on systems, and he was in Outforce, he was like, I'm going to go in there anyways, I don't care. So he bursts in the room and he goes in. And that's where the guy was shitting.

Starting point is 02:18:49 So he said, don't go in there because I shit in there, dude. So his feet are covered in shit now. And we had a good laugh. So we end up getting into this guy's kind of chamber. We continued walking around and we found this room. and we opened the door and my friends went in first and I stood in the back because I had this gun

Starting point is 02:19:10 and I wasn't sure what that guy was going to do because maybe he was going to attack us I don't know. And plus we're on acid by the way. So my friends go in and they climb up this ladder and they're cheering. They had all gotten up there. And so I'm like, okay,

Starting point is 02:19:29 I'm going to go up there. So I go into the room and I look across and I see this doorway across this dark, dark room. And I think, oh, I'm going to go into that and let's see what that door is. Because I knew my friends were up and I could see that they were up. And I could see this door. So I'm like walking to the door and I take a step. This isn't, this isn't a shit story. This is crazier. So I put my, I extend my foot out to take the next step. And I hear this voice that says, stop. As loud as like anything. Like, echoingly loud. And it wasn't my

Starting point is 02:20:05 friends. It was in my head. So I stopped. I froze. And I looked down and I was above the elevator shaft and it would just drop all the way down. And I was like, holy fuck. And I leaned back and I was like, fuck. I almost found out of the fucking thing. So I climb up the stairs and tell those guys

Starting point is 02:20:21 they're like, yeah, you're a fucking dumbass. And we hung out up there. And then it was kind of, you know, that was the end of the whole thing. We didn't have any real reason to go in there again. So we never really went in anymore. Mission accomplished. And we went back down.

Starting point is 02:20:38 So then that's maybe an apparition, maybe a ghost, or maybe just like something my senses were waking me up. Survival type thing, I don't know. But it was a loud, like, deep voice that told me to stop. And I did. So

Starting point is 02:20:54 then a few years later, I was married to my first wife. And I was it was Christmas time, and I was staying at my in-laws house. And I hadn't really, I don't think I'd ever stayed there before. I'd been there before, but I hadn't stayed there before. And because it was Christmas, everyone's going to stay together and open Christmas presents

Starting point is 02:21:19 and things like that. Beautiful. And I had either played a show or I was at rehearsal or I don't know what I was doing. So I drove there and everybody else was asleep. I drove there later in the evening. everyone was asleep, including the in-laws. So I went up to the guest room and got ready to go to sleep, got into bed. And at the time, my daughter, Sidney, was a baby, my oldest daughter.

Starting point is 02:21:48 And she was in her crib. And I went to sleep, and then I was woken up. I heard something. So I opened my eyes, and there was an older woman. standing over the crib, looking at the baby, saying, you know, things that you say in the babies. And I saw the woman. I knew that she wasn't a threat. You know, there was no sense of like, oh, this is, you know, someone to be afraid of. I went to sleep again. I had no bad feelings about this person.

Starting point is 02:22:22 I had no bad intuition about this person. And then I woke up in the morning and had breakfast with my in-laws. And I said, you know, as I was eating, I was like, yeah, who was that lady that was in the room looking at the baby last night? And my father-in-law, his name was Bill, but we called him Snake Dick. And Snake Dick said, what lady? What are you talking about? And I said, yeah, there was an older lady. And she was looking at the baby.

Starting point is 02:22:52 Like, I was asleep and she woke me up a little bit because I could hear her saying something. and I looked and I saw her, you know, looking in the crib and like doing kuchikoo or whatever that people do to babies. I couldn't tell what she was doing, but she was just, you know, looking at the baby. And then his face turned totally white and lost expression. And he said, what do you mean? Who, who, there was nobody here. Nobody's here. I said, yeah, there must be some aunt who came here or something, you know.

Starting point is 02:23:22 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I assume that somebody came in for the holidays and showed up. Maybe their flight was late. I don't know. And he said, hold on a minute. He goes out of the kitchen and he goes into the living room and he gets a photograph off of his mantle. And he comes and he brings me the photo. And he says, is this the lady that you saw?

Starting point is 02:23:39 I said, yeah, who is you? What are you fucking? Because he was a brinker. So I thought he was fucking with me. Shit dick. I mean, I would think so. Snake dick. Snake dick.

Starting point is 02:23:49 Snake dick. Snake dick. Yeah. Snake dick is more complimentary. Yeah, 100%. So he was like, that's my mother. And my mother died in that room, you know, a few years ago. Are you sure it was her?

Starting point is 02:24:06 I go, yeah, but are you sure she's dead? This is some fucking pranking shit, you know? And he was like, no, it's totally real. So I kind of regret telling him because, but I told him out of just because that's what it had it happened. It wasn't a prank. But unfortunately, he missed his mother very badly. And he spent the next couple of months, like every night sleeping in that room,

Starting point is 02:24:34 hoping that she would come and visit him. And he never saw her. But yeah, that's one of the good ghost stories I have. Yeah, that's a good one. That's fantastic. That's crushing. So that's irrefutable proof, Bo. Just so you know.

Starting point is 02:24:50 Ghosts are real? I'm the skeptic on the show, Colin. is the... Oh, you're a skeptic. Okay, yeah. I've not had any experiences. That's what it was like. I mean, I don't know if I dreamed it, but I didn't...

Starting point is 02:25:00 I don't know how I would dream that lady, because I never met her. I never met this lady before, so I don't know how any of that could have come to... Be refutable. Can't be refuted. A couple last... The thing is about things like that. It's like the same thing as being an artist. And, you know, the reason, like, most people...

Starting point is 02:25:23 people are not artists isn't because they don't have creative talent or creative intuition it's because they killed their inner child they killed that boy that girl that like to play in the woods that like to imagine things that like to play with the tape recorders or put glue on their grandparents records and then wait to it to try peel it off and play that on the record player and be like wow this is cool there's the stuff I did as a kid I would play in the woods I would imagine things I would do all this stuff and I never stopped being that. I mean, obviously, you could see me in high definition and I do not look

Starting point is 02:26:01 like a young boy anymore, but inside I still have that young boy inside of me who's curious about things, who's curious about how that's going to sound if you do it this way or run it through that or, you know, do it wrong. It might sound amazing or it might be just fun for me and everyone else. I don't give a fuck what they think. So that's the essence. of being an artist. And at the same time, I think that that is the essence of being able to be open to things that are a little more supernatural or things that you can't really explain so easily, logically anymore.

Starting point is 02:26:38 Beautiful explanation. I can see that. But like we talked about serendipity and things like that, sometimes I think that the reason that I have a lot of those, but some people would just call luck, is because I'm receptive to it more than other people are. It isn't that I'm wishing it or manifesting it. It's just that I'm open to it. And so I think that there's sort of, you know, like if you're not trying too hard,

Starting point is 02:27:04 things just come to you like that. At least that's the way it works for me. And I think that that has a component to the supernatural. I think, I don't know. I don't really have just like we talked about my, outfits over the years. I don't have one religion. I don't have one philosophy. I have a lot of different ones that I always am shuffling around and seeing what fits. Yeah. So, you know, whatever works at the time, and it might change from today to tomorrow,

Starting point is 02:27:41 but I think that essentially there's a lot of energy that exists. Quantum physics can prove that, if you wanted to have something that was irrefutable, quantum physics can prove that prayer works, not because of it being prayer, but because of the way intention works. Prayer and religion in itself is essentially just quantum physics intention. That's all. And Christianity deliberately decided to teach everybody how to pray wrong so that they would have power over the people and not be able to achieve a better greatness to this flesh prison that we exist in. And so what that means is, for example, this is Gnosticism. So if you have a sick person in your family that's in the hospital right now,

Starting point is 02:28:38 your first intention is to say, I pray or I hope, I wish, whatever words you would use, that that person is no longer sick. I want them to not be sick. By saying that, you're reinforcing the fact that they're sick. What you have to do is you have to imagine them healthy. You have to imagine them in their most healthy state.

Starting point is 02:28:58 And then if more and more people do it, there is an opportunity. It's not 100%, but there is an opportunity that our bodies are designed in a special way that our minds can heal ourselves by, not PMA exactly, but by

Starting point is 02:29:14 by imagining, by manifesting this, by thinking healthy thoughts, you know? Beautiful. And you see a lot of people who do that. I think that this is a component of creativity as well. I think all this stuff coincides. Whether I think that there are people who are, like, for example, Snake Nick's mother being trapped on this plane and her form, I don't think it's like that.

Starting point is 02:29:38 I don't think that there's like, like, poltergeist or something in the films. I don't think it's necessarily like that, but I think that there's an energy that we have, that I know that I have an energy and I've been able to do remote viewing type things. I've been able to do out-of-body experience type things, not always on acid in case that's where you're going to take it.

Starting point is 02:30:04 I just assume, yeah. Yeah, just assume, yeah. And also on acid probably. But, you know, you have these, we're more than this flesh prison, you know. So that's the mind is powerful. And your energy is going to still, it takes a while for that energy to disperse correctly.

Starting point is 02:30:27 And maybe there's just something that this woman, her entire existence while she was alive, was her family. Maybe she really was hoping to see that first grand kid. And just that was her thing. And she waited for that and then went into like, becoming everything else in the universe. Beautiful.

Starting point is 02:30:47 Or not. I like yes. I like yes. I believe you. I'm with you. I mean, if none of that is true, then this is a very,

Starting point is 02:30:56 a very boring existence. Yeah. I agree. Just to be a meat sack going around arguing with everybody and trying to say that your ideas are better than their ideas. That's not much of an existence, you know. Agreed.

Starting point is 02:31:12 So before we get to, We have some rapid-fire questions from our Patreon, but I want to hear your, before we get to those, your personal, first your Cleveland Mount Rushmore, and then I want to hear your top four hardcore records of all time. Okay. For Cleveland, the Dead Boys, it doesn't have to be hardcore? Can it be anything? No, no. There's not a lot of hardcore fans from there. Dead Boys, for sure. Screaming Jay Hawkins.

Starting point is 02:31:49 I put a spell on you. Yeah. She can't clean one. And I, you know, I'll say, I can't say my band, so I'll say ringworm. And I'll say midnight. Oh, cool. I love Jamie. Although he has a different name.

Starting point is 02:32:03 I don't know what it is. Yeah. Al Thazar, Albaella. I'm not one to talk. I also have a. It's a good name. but yeah but you know i could also have gone like uh james gang or oj's or erin's band the inmates or a filter in nine inch nails i mean nine inch nails did a hell of a lot of a lot of things you know big time it changed a lot of things in music whether people like it like them or not they did a lot of amazing things yeah the new lady gaga is all half the gimmick is like i was those things didn't nine inch nails a lot so pretty cool oh i didn't know that.

Starting point is 02:32:43 Yeah. So what would your top, like your Mount Rushmore top four hardcore records all time be? Hardcore. I probably

Starting point is 02:32:54 already leaked most of this earlier, but geese of detestation. Is that considered hardcore? I don't know. Some people can say not. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:33:03 You know, depends. So, you're talking to me, baby. That's that count. You could today break down the walls,

Starting point is 02:33:09 wishing well, pressing. I love that mix. But, You know, and like how you said to die for is a special record for you, because that was a period for you of a certain time in your life. And it might have been that time in your life where that was your best summer before you became an adult. And you had this amazing summer. And that was a song that was a record that maybe was, you know, played a lot around your friends.

Starting point is 02:33:34 This is how I sort of came to terms with this type of stuff over the years touring. And I'd always see someone, you know, this is my record. This is the one for me from integrity. And I'd always notice I could just, like a tree, I could like, you know, find where that ring is. Okay. You were 17 that year, weren't you? And you were about to go to college. Good year.

Starting point is 02:33:56 You met your girlfriend or your boyfriend. And that was your summer of 69, you know, like Brian Adams. I don't mean it to be crude with 69. No, I understood. Justin Ethan would. Hopefully we all have our own summer of 69. some way, you know? Mine happened to be with systems overload. Yeah, right.

Starting point is 02:34:18 It seems to be like that. It seems like when certain records come out, like some people associate those in a nostalgic way with those time frames. And for me, Eutha Today, Breakdown the Walls is a very special record, not just because it's an incredible energetic

Starting point is 02:34:34 record, but also because and not just because Bo is wearing the shirt either. I believe. What's number of Three and four. Going on the tour was a special time for me. It showed me a lot of things about music.

Starting point is 02:34:49 And I would say negative approach tied down. That's a very incredible record. And just raw. I can say raw power too. You get a little more Detroit in there with the stooges. Septic death needs so much attention. My whole back is tattooed with the artwork of that. That's a special record for me.

Starting point is 02:35:14 Those would be my top four. What I call hardcore, I don't know if everybody else would call it hardcore, but I can also do seven inches, and my seven inches are probably more in the wheelhouse of the youth crew stuff. My top would be Project X, Straitage Revenge. I bought that when it came out, and it was so simple, but so brutal and so true and passionate, it and it really inspired me as a kid when it came out.

Starting point is 02:35:48 A friend of mine, Tyler Davis, who owns a label called Anya Offensive. He had a distro in his basement, and I went to visit my mother in Indiana, and I went over to his house, and he said, hey, man, I got some records to sell. You got some Christmas money. You want to buy some shit. And he was like, you can get this seven inch, and it comes with a zine. It's a good deal. And so I bought that.

Starting point is 02:36:12 And then I brought it back to Cleveland. And nobody had heard that yet. And so, like, everybody was excited about it. And then the next summer, they were playing multiple times in Cleveland, including across the street from my house. Wow. There you go. And my friend Kelly Orix pool party, they played there with all those bands.

Starting point is 02:36:33 Awesome. And beyond it played as well. They only had a demo out of the time. Wow. Another seven-inch that I love is a New York crew from Judge, obviously. You can hear that in our first seven-inch, a lot of Judge. Big time. A lot of Judge inspiration.

Starting point is 02:36:50 We talked about it earlier, but side-by-side, you're only young once, Alex Brown. That guitar sound is just unmatchable. It's just the frenzy of it, you know. I love that. I love that record a lot. I met Jules very briefly in Florida in January because of Frank, who was there. Oh. He was like, Bo, I want you to meet my friend Jules.

Starting point is 02:37:14 And I like immediately realized who it was and kind of went, oh, hey, good to meet you. It was cool, cool thing. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, that's a great record. And a chain of strength, true till death. I love that record. So all youth crew. All youth crew, baby.

Starting point is 02:37:31 Probably my seven inches would be all youth crew. Wow. I'll tell you what I'll tell you what I find it. be the most special component of chain of strength is the production. And the production is done in a way where the vocals are buried so much, maybe too much, and that added an intensity to the performance. I think if the vocals were mixed in the front, it would have lost a lot of that frustration that's bubbling up from the bottom.

Starting point is 02:38:02 At least that's how I interpret it. You know, it seems that his voice is being pushed down because of the mix, and it makes it seem like it's more like a panther trying to break out of its cage. Yeah. That makes sense. Those are great answers, Wood. And you weren't expecting me to go with, like, all these revelations. No.

Starting point is 02:38:20 I had no idea. But I love it. It makes me happy. It makes, uh, the demo warfare. You never stop. Yeah. You never stop. We've got just a few questions here.

Starting point is 02:38:32 Let me rapid fire them through real quick. Who are some of your favorite visual artists that inspire you? Francis Bacon, Joel Peter Whitkin, my friend Stephen Casner, rest in peace, Sakavi from Gizum, he was a phenomenal artist.

Starting point is 02:38:50 Randy Uchita, he's the one who designed detestation. I don't know if you do that. He did the artwork for that. He was a fantastic guitar player and artist. I could go on all day. Max Ernst, I love Max Ernst, I love this collage work.

Starting point is 02:39:07 What's an up-and-coming band from Europe that you're excited about? Well, I could say a friend of mine has a band which is not very originally named Parasite. But he used to be in Dead Stop. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:39:24 And his name is Lino. And he has a cool... He always has cool music, so I'm imagining his band is good. I haven't heard it yet. But I saw him the other day, and he told me he has a new band. And he said, it's called Parasite. And I said, wow, you just really, you got a name nobody else has ever been.

Starting point is 02:39:42 You've gone discounts. There's like 5,000 of those. Yeah, of course. Well, you get to be Parasite number 5,000. That's pretty cool. That's a cool name. Parasite. I put out a band from Japan named Parasite about 15 years ago on my little only there.

Starting point is 02:39:55 And I'm sure they weren't the first. No, no, not all. the story behind the remixing and remastering of those who fear and what was the other one you did it for? Seasons? All of the victory ones. Is that to get them off of victory? No. I actually got all the records back from Concord.

Starting point is 02:40:17 I could put them out. I could put them on in the original mix and I could have saved money by just doing that. but I didn't want to do that. I wanted to make it a new experience. I wanted to be able to experience something new myself, and I think Aaron did too. And I reworked the artwork as well because I wanted it to be something that was re-imagined a little bit.

Starting point is 02:40:47 It's still the same records, essentially. And also, I wanted to add, like we spoke earlier, about Igor being on the record, which he's a legendary. a drummer and one of my best friends. We used to be neighbors, in fact, in Belgium for a while. And also, Brandon Gallagher played drums on the songs that Igor didn't play on. So I have two different guys doing the drums on that.

Starting point is 02:41:13 And Brandon is in a band called Trace Amount from New York. Awesome. And I didn't want to leave him out of being met. But of course, Igor Cavalera, you know, this guy is... It's a big deal. Big deal. Born a legend, you know, so it's kind of, it's hard to not be in his shadow. Absolutely.

Starting point is 02:41:32 Every time I hang out with him, people hand me cameras, can you take a selfie with me and Igor? And Igor's like, sorry, dude. We were at a festival together. We were waiting to see Twisted Sister. And Twisted Sister, by the way, totally blew us off. And even Igor, they blew him off. And we were waiting like complete fans. And these guys came up and they tapped me on the short of

Starting point is 02:41:55 and say, hey, can you take a picture of us with Igor? And it was the guys from Korn. And they wanted pictures with Igor. Even Korn want pictures with fucking Igor. That's awesome. This is the life of Igor, you know. Of course. A true legend.

Starting point is 02:42:09 He has the best name. As a horror fan, he has the best name. He's the best guy, too. Sorry, I took it off the rails. Took it off the rails with my love for Igor. What inspired the song, Judgment Day, and how did you feel about Dying Fetus cover? it. So Judgment Day was the first song that I ever wrote with Aaron and Scott Stearns,

Starting point is 02:42:33 and that was a diehard song. Then Diehard recorded their album, and they used some of the music, but they had different lyrics, because Judgment Day, the lyrics were my lyrics. And when they replaced me with Stork, he wrote his own lyrics. And then when we made those for tomorrow, we always love that song because it has this sort of like Too Fast for Love Motley Crew kind of vibe to it but with Lemmy singing or whatever. And so we put that back into the, we put that into the album. And we still play it live. I mean, that's the one song I think that I've played more than

Starting point is 02:43:11 anything ever. And it was the first song. And so it's kind of crazy to be, I was like 15 or 16 years old when I helped write that song. So it's insane that I'm 54 now, and I still play that song. You had it figured out, man, right from the rip. I'm telling you. Almost 40 years I've been fucking singing that song. As far as dying fetus, it's cool. But they never credited the song as being us. They credited their own song, and the publishing is considered their song.

Starting point is 02:43:44 Interesting. Maybe because they added the blasts and the verse, they could get away with it. I don't know. I think that it wasn't malicious. I think it was just, you know, well, you know, whatever, someone just did it. But because of that, I have a lot of people say, oh, that's a sick dying fetus cover, man,

Starting point is 02:44:00 but they do it better. No. I mean, I've had that a lot. But then I also have people say, oh, I like your version or are they like both versions or whatever. It's not a contest. But I've got a lot of people say, like, yeah, that's a cool cover.

Starting point is 02:44:15 That's hilarious. I laugh. It's fine. unbelievable. And it's super flattering, too. You know, I mean, it was unexpected. Yeah, it was unexpected. And none of us knew about it until like several years after it had already been out.

Starting point is 02:44:31 Wow. And the only reason I knew was because someone said to me that we were doing a cover of the, of dynchitis. That's so funny. Wow. Wow. That's, that's a good piece of info. And I saw you guys singing it in Florida. Yeah, that was awesome.

Starting point is 02:44:46 Yeah, that was cool. I shared it on our... Aaron was there in the... I love that. Yeah, Aaron was there. That was funny. That was the question I had was, why didn't you ask Aaron to get up?

Starting point is 02:44:55 Didn't know. They didn't think about it. I don't think of it. But the answer is, Aaron doesn't look like Aaron. The Aaron that everybody thinks is shaved head, Aaron with like a weird mustache, looking like Mario,

Starting point is 02:45:06 Super Mario jumping, you know, but it's like a bulb, Super Mario. But now Aaron has this lush cherry curl, and he looks younger than he did that. He looks 25. It's crazy.

Starting point is 02:45:17 Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. He's an Armenian vampire. I warned him that I was going to talk about his hair predominantly in this interview. It's beautiful hair. I couldn't believe it. Yeah, he's very vain and he loves to. He puts a lot of cherry curl in it.

Starting point is 02:45:34 Good, good. He's got a lot of shine, you know. He's got it. So what if I could, man. Hello, is it me you're looking for? And what he did with Eddie Murphy, like, Eddie Murphy was just like a phenomenal comedian. but when Aaron helped produce a party all the time.

Starting point is 02:45:51 That was what a banger. Aaron is a brick house, you know. You got more. You're so, you're loaded. Is there a thing you miss the most about living in the U.S.?

Starting point is 02:46:04 Wendy's Beaconator? Great answer. Never flies them. To be fair, I go there all the time. Sure. I'm going there. a couple weeks. We have some shows. I guess the thing that I miss about America the most is that

Starting point is 02:46:23 America does allow you to think outside the box more than Europe does. So if I had to go to the store and I have an idea of something I want to make that is out of my mind. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's out of my mind, but out of my imagination as well, then if I go and I say, hey, do you have this, this, and this, they'll say, no, we don't have that. But they might have something that is exactly that, but just slightly different. Right. It would completely work. They would never, ever think to suggest that.

Starting point is 02:46:59 And I've asked people why that is, and they say that the way that the education system works in Europe is that they don't, they teach the people not to sort of, go off off the path a little bit, you know. Interesting. I don't think that it's necessarily as cold as I like to pretend that it is. I think it's just simply that that was the way they were taught. And it's maybe like essentially manners rather than it being rude or being. And I think that, you know, they think that offering or talking too much is rude.

Starting point is 02:47:38 Or, oh, no, I don't have it. I don't have that in blue, but you know, I have it in green. kind of looks like blue. You could paint it blue if you wanted to. Right. Or whatever. He would never, ever say that.

Starting point is 02:47:49 I asked a German guy one time if there was a bathroom. And he said, well, we don't have a bath, but the toilets over there. Yeah. And it's a funny... You know what I mean, man.

Starting point is 02:47:59 I understand the language. I know I said bathroom. I totally get it. But it is, to your point, it's kind of like, no, we don't have this thing.

Starting point is 02:48:07 Well, we don't rest in the damn restroom either. I'm fighting for my fucking life in there. Come on, man. But I don't know. When I was younger, I used to think everyone is a prick, and that's why they're saying it like that. But over the years, I just started to realize that maybe it's just cultural, yeah. I don't think that there's the malicious intent that I've always been suspecting.

Starting point is 02:48:30 I actually still suspect that it's there, but I think that it's starting to, the illusion is starting to fade. Do you have, do there's some, living in Europe, I'm sure you experience the German compliment quite often? Oh yeah, you used to be much more handsome. This one? Oh, yeah. Last time you played much better. Now look at you, you're old. Maybe it is the judgment day for you.

Starting point is 02:48:59 Oh, my God. Oh, my God. And this vocal test, there's no test anymore. You failed. I was going to ask you if you had some favorite ones, but you just delivered. You nailed them. I just made those up. But I have had people, I have had people, like, say that I don't look 20 anymore.

Starting point is 02:49:22 And I said, well, you're very astute. I'm glad you don't need glasses. You should be proud of yourself that you're able to spot that. Wow. Yeah. About a guy who was born in 1971. You're quite a character. I mean, you might be looking into, like, a new career.

Starting point is 02:49:43 could be like the guy who finds out where Waldo is, for example. I guess the inverse of what you miss about America, what's your favorite thing about living in Europe? My favorite thing about living in Europe, I'm not overly political, but it's going to sound like I am, I guess, because some of the jokes I made earlier as well. But the government is not treating the people like they are employees that they're just desperate to fire and looking for any reason to fire them. these fucking freeloaders again, fuck.

Starting point is 02:50:17 How dare them what social security that they paid into for their whole life. All this motherfuckers. Amen. They don't do that here. Over here, the government, and there's flaws, too. Over here, the government looks at the citizens as if they are, for lack of a better parallel, the parents of the people. And so if you have a child, and your child, like I said earlier, falls down, you teach them to get up, but you, you know, you don't make them afraid to fall down.

Starting point is 02:50:51 And you get them back up on their way, and you help them get into, make things better, you know, help them get on track, help them get their life together and help them develop as people because that helps, that helps your country, that helps your society. if you have if you if you teach the children how to do great things they're going to take care of you when you're older as well that's the one thing that a lot of people don't see it too and that's that's the culture in Belgium and that's sort of the culture

Starting point is 02:51:24 although it isn't the exchange of expecting it from to be taken care of when you're older as much but that's a component but they do the government does look at a situation like where if you had started a business say that hard lure is doing

Starting point is 02:51:40 pretty well but then everything falls a problem happens and you guys fall flat on your face they might come in and say hey we can help you guys get back on your feet again or if you're a person who was a coal miner and they said well you know this is a this is a

Starting point is 02:51:58 job that no longer is available but we can they would this is a real thing you could go to them and they would put you into school and they have a list of jobs that that are in demand. Perhaps it would be plumber, perhaps it would be something in IT,

Starting point is 02:52:14 or whatever it would be, we need nurses. Is that something that you'd be interested? And you just look at the list, and you could say, you know, this is actually something I've always wanted to do.

Starting point is 02:52:23 And then they would put you into the school. They would help you go to school. And school also doesn't cost very much because in Belgium and in most of Europe, they don't have this thing called lobbying. which means bribery, which means that your tax dollars get given to the South African guys who are going to go in and just take care of all the social security. Every good program ever made.

Starting point is 02:52:53 And give him $8 million a day to save $3 million from Social Security or whatever. That's illegal in Europe. And if they even attempted that shit, they would go to jail and be, taken out of office. They also can't, it's illegal for them to do stock market tricks like the American government. Obviously

Starting point is 02:53:21 it does. You can see, you can look at their portfolio and their bank accounts and just wonder how gosh lucky they are. They're just on the money with it. You know, they really have a key eye for Wall Street. So that's not something that is legal here.

Starting point is 02:53:38 And if they do that, they would go to jail. So that's a good thing in the sense of that. But I'm not going to just only praise it. The bad side of it is I see that when they do help a small business or someone who had something bad happen to, say it was COVID, for example, say you're a restaurant and COVID came and fuck, now you're fucked. They would help you get back on your feet. That's valid. But sometimes there's people who are like, hey, I'm going to like half-ass store. this business, they have asked do it. And then because it doesn't work out, then they still

Starting point is 02:54:16 help them try to get back on track with the new project. And while that's great and kind and caring of them, and that's what the system is for, I think that in some cases, they make it so easy for them to help you that people don't try hard enough. So like in America, this is an analogy that I often give to people who ask me better from here. They say, what's the difference? And so I'll say in America, if you look at it as a tightrope walk, you know, in the circus, you walk on the rope. So in America, when you're walking across the tightrope, underneath you is a bunch of

Starting point is 02:54:54 very hungry sharks, broken glass, lava, fucking landmines, fire, everything that's going to just rip you to shreds. If your business fails, there is a 90% chance you're going to be homeless and you're never going to fucking recover. You're fucked. So you don't fail. You fucking do everything, everything you can to succeed. You find every possibility you make it happen. Of course, it doesn't always work that way.

Starting point is 02:55:24 But I think that that's the spirit of it. But in Europe, oftentimes I think that they were walking on the tightrope underneath them is a very soft pillow. with lots of feathers around it and, you know, water beds and all kinds of soft springs that will bounce you right back up. And, you know, I'm not... Overall, a positive. Right, right. But...

Starting point is 02:55:48 The drive maybe isn't the same. There's something, at least how I'm built, that I live from the paranoia of if everything falls apart, I have to just give it 100,000%, not just 100%. A very American way of thinking. Yeah. For sure. So that's kind of how I see it. I'm not necessarily saying that their way is wrong.

Starting point is 02:56:13 And I know for a fact that they've helped a lot of people who did need the help. And the people, you know, they weren't taking advantage of the system. But there are some people who are just like dumb asses or lazy people who are like not trying hard enough because they have a system that doesn't make it as desperate as it would be in America. Sure. The fact that it's desperate in America, do I think that that's great? I don't think that that's great. But that's just how I was born and wired. I got you from my youth.

Starting point is 02:56:43 I grew up in the 70s, so that's different than a lot of your viewers are probably used to as well, because teachers could hit you and neighbors could hit you, everybody could hit you. And it was applauded. It was applauded. It was applauded by your parents. It wasn't like, oh, how dare you fucking touch my kid. It was like, you fucking deserved it. you should fucking hit him.

Starting point is 02:57:03 I'm going to hit him for fucking making you hit him. This is like a real legitimate, like 70s and 80s upbringing. That's how it was. I don't know if it's bad or good, you know. I wouldn't change. It's different. I wouldn't change my upbringing, even though there's a lot of terrible things that happened. But that made me who I am.

Starting point is 02:57:24 And the misery fueled my work with my music and my artwork. They all led to the man we spoke to today. And we sincerely appreciate the time you spent with us today. It was a great episode. We covered a lot of ground. A lot. Three hours of ground. Beautiful, historic.

Starting point is 02:57:44 Before you go, can I ask one thing? Sure. Can we do the Dwidd pose? All three of us? Yeah, I've never virtually done it, but it. Yeah. Good, beautiful. Perfect.

Starting point is 02:57:57 All right, this was incredible. Dwit, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. Have the best time. Have a good evening. good night. Oh, yeah, you got to go to bed. It's after midnight now.

Starting point is 02:58:08 All right. Beautiful. We hope you've all enjoyed this incredible journey with Dwid. Integrity. You can stream the whole damn discography. Most of it's remixed and remastered by Arthur right now. What can we expect next from you? I have a split that came out or is coming out any day now with a guest that you just had on, Carl, from Earth Crisis.

Starting point is 02:58:31 That's beautiful. Beautiful. Love it. And we're making a new integrity album right now with Aaron and Julian and Camille. With Aaron. Yeah. Yeah. Aaron's on the Earth Crisis thing too.

Starting point is 02:58:47 Awesome. Very cool. Well, this is breaking news. Yeah, that's awesome. I can't wait to hear it. Yeah, if you listen to the Earth Crisis, you can hear some of Aaron. I did, yeah. Solos.

Starting point is 02:58:57 Cool. Beautiful. There's a photo. Aaron insisted it in the fucking. the insert would be a photo of us. Just so he could fucking show off how young hair and vivacious and beautiful he is. You got to do.

Starting point is 02:59:15 You know, one of you can. He has this fan blowing his hair. It's ridiculous. It's easy like Sunday morning here on Hardlore. And we thank you, we thank you, Dwit, for joining us once again. My pleasure. We hope you all enjoyed, and we will see you next week.

Starting point is 02:59:32 Bye.

HardLore - Dwid Hellion (Integrity)

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