Interviewing King Buzzo from The Melvins is akin to listening to one the band’s songs. It starts, stops, turns, twists and evolves from one thing into another. Over the last quarter century Buzz Melvin and drummer Dale Crover have been the center of a musical movement that his influenced bands from Nirvana to Boris and a hefty cross section in between.
Speaking to me from his Los Angeles home during what sounded like lunch, Buzzo seemed just as curious about me as I was about him. After a few minutes of bandying back and forth I realized the best way to approach this interview was to let it go where it needed to go. By the end we had touched the band’s legacy, their musical ideals, the horror of music journalists, the Pixies and what might save music in the digital age. Buzzo allowed me one of the most erratic and enjoyable interviews I’ve had in some time.
CRAVEONLINE: How are you?
BUZZO: Oh I’ve never been better.
CRAVEONLINE: Why is that?
BUZZO: No reason, just wanted to start this off on a positive note.
CRAVEONLINE: I appreciate that. How did that AmRep (Amphetamine Reptile) showcase go?
BUZZO: It was the greatest show ever. No, it was good. We’re big fans of AmRep so we were really happy to play it. You missed it, it was great, and you missed out. You should’ve come.
CRAVEONLINE: I don’t travel much with work and school.
BUZZO: What are you taking?
CRAVEONLINE: I’m thinking social work for troubled teens.
BUZZO: Ah those troubled teens. All teens are in trouble in one form or another. Were they criminally troubled?
CRAVEONLINE: Some were, it depended. I stopped doing it to move to Ohio. Are you still in Los Angeles?
BUZZO: Yep.
CRAVEONLINE: Good point. So tt the AmRep show did you only play your AmRep era stuff?
BUZZO: Nope, it was nine bands and we opened the whole thing. We didn’t want there to be any discrepancies. Even though we technically were the headliner we didn’t want problems with what bands played where. So we said, “We’ll play first, you guys can blow me.”
CRAVEONLINE: Would you ever consider doing another tour just playing one album all the way through?
BUZZO: We did that with Hodini in 2005 and recorded that as an album. It was okay. I’ve always considered us to be severely contemporary so I’m not into the whole oldies but moldies act. We always play old stuff to some degree, we certainly can’t play something off all our albums or it would be a really long show. The thing about us is even if we play old songs if there’s something we don’t like we’ll just revamp it. A lot of the old songs from the eighties to me are like playing cover songs.
CRAVEONLINE: With The Bride Screamed Murder Out do you still think Nude With Boots is your best album with the new guys?
BUZZO: I like our new one as much as that one. I think these records are as good as anything we’ve ever done but then we don’t have an era thing. It’s not like “this is the era of the Melvins when they were really good”. Everything we’ve done has always been good as far as I’m concerned. We’re not like David Bowie where you can go “I don’t really like that record” or “Everything sucked past the glass spider tour”, we’ve never had anything like that happen.
CRAVEONLINE: From where you guys started to where you are now what’s the biggest difference for the band?
BUZZO: I think we’re better than we ever were. I’m certainly a better songwriter than I was when we started, way better. I understand that stuff way better now. I understand the journey I want to go on with how I’m doing what I’m doing. I’m much more comfortable with it. We’ve done a lot of it.
CRAVEONLINE: Well you do put out records more often than most bands.
BUZZO: Oh yeah much more. Obviously some things work better than others. I can’t say I’m one hundred percent behind everything we’ve ever done or that I love everything that’s ever happened for us. By and large I don’t hate any of it. Some of our songs I didn’t like, a decade goes by and I think, “I don’t remember why I didn’t like that”. I think it has to do with the fact that we’re not afraid to do whatever we want to. I don’t have any pre-conceived ideas of what’s right or wrong in the least. It makes it where the possibilities for a band like us are more than what most bands are willing to do.
Take a band like the Pixies. We can write stuff like the Pixies but the Pixies can’t do what we’re doing, no way! They don’t have it. They can’t make that work. They can do what they’re doing. We would be way better at writing Pixies style stuff, because we’ve done that stuff, then they would be at writing the more heavy metal stuff that we do. They couldn’t do it. That’s what we want to do. We want to be well rounded and do all kinds of crazy stuff.
CRAVEONLINE: Is that why you work at this kind of pace? Even if not Melvins stuff you’re always doing something.
BUZZO: By and large musicians are pretty lazy; they don’t do a whole lot. They’re usually very busy doing nothing. I don’t really think we work that tremendously hard, maybe compared to most bands. I’m not really sure what motivates those people. I have no idea. By and large they’re a bunch of layabouts, ne’erdowells, curmudgeons blaming others for their sorry state, whatever it may be.
CRAVEONLINE: Is there a moment on The Bride Screamed Murder that you really like?
BUZZO: I like the first song, The Water Glass that one came out great. I like Pighouse and Hospital Up. I really like those songs.
CRAVEONLINE: How hard is it to choose a Melvins set list?
BUZZO: You just have to make sure it all fits together somehow, which is easier said than done. The songs have to flow together in a way that makes sense, that ain’t always easy. Our performances are more like performance art, the whole thing is important. I don’t like bands that go out there and say “Here’s another little song for ya, here’s another little song for ya”, I’m not into that. We’re playing an hour set and the whole hour is important, between songs and everything. The work is to make it as seamless as possible.
CRAVEONLINE: People expect a lot from a Melvins record, does all of that ever get to you?
BUZZO: It think it’s great, it doesn’t bother me. I’m glad there are people out there who think that but how it translates into something tangible is anyone’s guess.
CRAVEONLINE: Do you ever want to just be a band and not deal with the pre-conceived notions of being The Melvins?
BUZZO: No because that’s not what I think. We’re not just a band; we’re not like another band out there. We don’t have a brother band; we’re the opposite completely from anybody else out there. There’s nobody out there like us and if there is who is it? I never wanted to be part of any scene, I never wanted to be a part of anything, I wanted to do my own thing. Those are the lessons I learned from punk rock.
CRAVEONLINE: You think that’s why The Melvins have survived every musical trend that’s come along?
BUZZO: Yeah pretty much, that and the fact that I won’t let anything stand in my way. I don’t want to be a brother band or part of anything like that. I’m way too much of a Groucho Marxist. I don’t want to belong to any club that’ll have me as a member. It’s just not for me. We got lumped into a whole lot of that stuff and I never said any of that. The Grunge Movement, what are they talking about? Who? Nirvana? Alice In Chains? I never had anything to do with that stuff.
CRAVEONLINE: It was weird when you guys got lumped into that. Did you hate that whole thing?
BUZZO: No, it’s fine. It’s kind of confusing I never saw it personally. Some of the bands were into us and influenced by what we were doing, that was about it. After that you take these music journalists who want to, conveniently because they don’t like us but like the bands influenced by us, pretend that we don’t matter. That gets annoying.
CRAVEONLINE: Who the hell did that? You guys are one of the mot influential bands of the last twenty years.
BUZZO: Tell that to somebody like Charles Cross. A guy like Charles Cross, what he doesn’t understand is that without us his little God Boy doesn’t exist. The reason he doesn’t want that to be the case is because he doesn’t like our band. He has no reason to think we had anything to do with the God Boy he’s writing about. He has no reason to think we have any influence with that because he doesn’t get it. It shows you from the beginning what an intimate understanding someone like him really has about the person he’s trying to make money off of, which is none. That is the case with every biographer of that nature.
(Charles Cross wrote Heavier Then Heaven about Kurt Cobain. Cobain was a long time fan of The Melvins—I.R.)
CRAVEONLINE: They can’t step out of their own opinion of it to see a bigger picture.
BUZZO : Yeah we’re just a footnote to all of it. It is what it is. It’s never not been the case. It’s reality, reality for me to deal with.
CRAVEONLINE: How do you deal with it?
BUZZO: Keep moving and keep working. The proof is in the work. That’s it, that’s all there is. We don’t have to get back together because we never broke up.
CRAVEONLINE: True, outside of the bass issues you guys have had.
BUZZO: Even the bass issue if you look at the longevity of our career. We had the first guy Matt in the band until about ’88. Then we had the girl until about ’93, and then we had a guy in there for about a year. Then we had two bass players in there for about seven years and now the new guys. Over twenty-six years that’s not, I mean, it’s not like we had fifty members. We had people sit in with us that were never members.
CRAVEONLINE: So music journalists have it wrong. Do you just hate all of us?
BUZZO: It’s not the journalists; it’s the critics that I can’t understand. I’ve never understood what kind of a person would want to criticize someone else’s work. I did an interview once where it was my job to ask this journalist from DC questions. I said I have an opinion on why you as a music journalist will talk shit about any band you want to but you’ll never talk shit about publications, ever. So why don’t you now talk shit about music publications that you hate, you have no trouble talking about bands. He wouldn’t do it. I wrote that the reason he wouldn’t do it is he was afraid they wouldn’t hire him. It was about money and that makes him a fucking pussy because if you’re a good writer you don’t have to worry about that.
He’ll talk shit up and down about every band he can but he wouldn’t say anything about Rolling Stone and there’s nothing good you can say about that at all. He will not do it, no journalists will. Where are the articles talking about the shit music publications out there who understand nothing about music? They will not write them yet they will write critical essays about bands who work to put out albums. Doesn’t make any sense to me.
(Next Monday I will be writing an article for Craveonline about 5 music publications I hate—I.R.)
CRAVEONLINE: Wow, I feel terrible now.
BUZZO: Where does that come from? I don’t know, I’m not a writer. I don’t write reviews of other people’s music. I can talk about it but I’m not a journalist. I’m also a musician, a working musician, so it’s my territory. I have an opinion about it because that’s what I do. I couldn’t get my head around that. I could write a good review if I was a journalist but I could never write a shitty review. Unless it was something so horrible like Madonna but that’s just shooting fish in a barrel but to take a band like us and write a crappy review about us? Where do these people get off?
CRAVEONLINE: I do it and I’m mad at us.
BUZZO: Some people get off on it. There’s always been a subculture of that, since I’ve been in a band. Hipsters who think they know everything. Most of these people with highfalutin opinions wind up out of the music industry and doing something like selling canoes. That’s one thing I’ve learned after this long is if you wait the assholes will disappear. Just wait them out. Just continue what you’re doing because if you’re really good it won’t matter.
There are some music journalists out there I think are really good. My favorite would be Nick Kent and the Dark Stuff book. That to me is really good, that’s a guy who thinks. He’s writing from a place, even if he’s writing something shitty, he’s a fan of that stuff. He cares. When he writes negative stuff about Miles Davis or Roky Erickson or Brian Wilson he still loves that stuff. That’s the difference.
CRAVEONLINE: Why even write a review about something you hate going into it?
BUZZO: It’s just so perverse and weird to me that people would actually do those things. Why bother? Whatever. It’s nothing new. It’ll never go away so you say “oh well” and just move on.
CRAVEONLINE: Are you writing new material?
BUZZO: I’m always writing stuff for a new record, I always have lots of stuff going on all the time. Our big plans for the near future are to tour some in the US and a lot in Europe. I like plans I always have plans.
CRAVEONLINE: Then it’s time for a new record?
BUZZO: I don’t know, maybe. With the state of the economy and the music industry we might have one more record in us before the whole thing collapses. The Internet is going to change everything, it already has. Music is going to be free.
CRAVEONLINE: Think the Internet will destroy the whole thing?
BUZZO: I don’t know, for everything bad about it there’s something good. The exchange of information has never been better. We can put our tour dates up in one spot and everybody in the world knows where we’ll be playing, there’s something to be said for that. Distribution of our music could never be easier. We have to figure out how to turn record sales, which are nonexistent and getting worse every day, that loss of money into something you can deal with. My thing is to make something tangible and turn it into an art project. We’ve done a thirteen CD box set that’s getting ready to come out that’s all hand made letterpress in very limited edition.
That’s going to be our focus for the future. Something that people will want to put their hands on. That’s what I like and I think there are enough people out there on a smaller scale that will be willing to pay a little more for something they can’t go down to the fucking Best Buy to get. So the music is going to be free and the art will cost money. I’m in a position where I’m really good friends with Tom Hazelmyer from AmRep who is himself an artist and my wife is a graphic designer who does letterpress printing. We’re going to be able to do a lot of things other bands can’t do and do them in house.
CRAVEONLINE: Well thank you for one of the most non-linear but enjoyable interviews I’ve done.
BUZZO: My pleasure and thanks for the interest, believe me. Oh by the way when I was talking before I meant more about critics, music journalists have always been good to us.
With that Buzzo thanked me again and hung up. I feel a little bit wiser having had this experience.
For more on The Melvins check out
http://www.myspace.com/themelvins
