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SCREW 32 INTERVIEW

Stubble Interview by Ken Zebbyn

SCREW 32 is: Andrew Champion - vocals, Doug Sangalang - guitar & backing vocals, Mark Mortensen - drums, Jimi "the cheetah" McCluskey - bass, and J. Grant McIntire - guitar and backing vocals.

Ken: (reference to promo sheet listing band members statistics and abilities)Oh, you haven't seen this. Did you guys write this or is this prepared for you?

Doug: Yeah, Andrew and Jimi and John, our all around working man / road manager, did that with Jeff...

Grant: A lot of this is kind of like tour humor for us, like personal jokes. We spend so much time on the road together living in a small confined space so certain concepts for this probably don't make any sense to anyone else but to us this was hilarious.

Ken: There are many allusions to super heroes in there. Are you guys comic book fans?

Grant: Quite a few of us are.

Ken: Favorite titles?

Grant: I think John's the man to talk to. John "the working man"...he put us together and those are comments towards us based on his impression of super heroes.

Ken: How true is the comment about chili, "Doug can eat a bathtub full of chili"? Maybe I shouldn't light a cigarette or the whole place could blow up.

Doug: Well, I love chili.

Grant: I think that bath of chili thing was more tour humor. At one point we all had the record for eating the most french toast at a trailer park in Buloxi where we play. It started out at 21 and I think Andrew and John now have like 23 or 24 pieces of french toast at one sitting.

Doug: What does that have to do with chili?

Grant: I think the whole super hero reference, being able to eat huge amounts, was based on that concept.

Ken: I think a tub full of chili sounds better than a tub full of french toast.

Doug: I think it also goes to the fact that you're on tour, six guys in a band, confined quarters, so like the master gas theory is in effect.

Grant: Every single thing here is compiled from like five experiences, then put together to create one characteristic.

Ken: Well, the promo sheet definitely caught my eye...I notice Jimi the bass player writes his first name like Hendrix. Are you into him at all?

Doug: I can't really say that we're big into Hendrix. The main reference there was the fact that his name is spelled the same as Hendrix, Jimi as opposed to J-i-m-m-y or J-i-m-m-i-e or whatever. Plus the humor of the throw back aspect of being in a Jimi Hendrix kind of thing.

Grant: We're not saying we don't like Jimi Hendrix. I think we all totally respect him as a musician but it's funnier in there to see a punk band being compared to him.

Ken: We were waiting for that distinctive Hendrix hook to show up. We're still waiting... You also talk about "bad people" in the promo. Define bad people and how they influence you if you know they're bad?

Doug: Well, they know who they are.

Grant: And we know who they are.

Mark: Not always though.

Doug: In the context that the bad people influence other people in charge of running the nation or big business or whatever...

Ken: So it's a political statement?

Doug: ...that you don't have control as far as decisions they make in your life style.

Grant: Or whether it's a bad promoter or anything that has to do with us.

Ken: You mention buloxi?

Grant: Buloxi, Mississippi. What a place to play. See, that's hilarious by itself.

Ken: You guys aren't from there, right? But you've played there enough to accumulate french toast records?

Grant: Every single band that comes through there and plays at this trailer park...The guys dad makes french toast every single night cause it's really cheap and you can feed a whole band. He gets like five loaves of bread and each band gets like six pieces for each player. When we came in they told us there was a record of like thirteen pieces so I just started eating. I got up to twenty one and was all "oooohhh". We came back the next time and we broke our record again. It's a big thing cause a lot of bands come through there and they come to the bay area and talk to us and they're like "You guys have the record!"

Doug: And I say no, it's a CD. (groans from Grant and Mark) I couldn't resist.

Ken: What kind of stuff do you listen to for enjoyment?

Doug: I got a lot of GENERATION X, RAMONES, ROLLING STONES all the way to stuff like ROCK FROM THE CRYPT or HEROINE. Everybody in our band is different so...Andrew would have more of the punk staple, CIRCLE JERKS, BLACK FLAG, DEAD KENNEDYS, MODERN THREAT. Jimi would have everything from Tom Waits, CHEAP TRICK, Johnny Cash...

Grant: I think all of us...every single question you ask, if you asked every single person in a separate room you'd get such a complete different answer.

Ken: What binds you guys together? Is it your differences that bring you together?

Mark: (In a soprano voice) I wanna rock!

Ken: Nothing wrong with that.

Grant: I believe it's a "Dungeons and Dragons" kind of a thing. You wouldn't want to leave on tour with everyone being the exact same cause you wouldn't have a strong characteristic. You need certain people to have their strengths; one person who is always on top of things, one person who can control the paper work, one person to control the money. Whether it's song writing or whatever, you need a separate strength in every single person. You wouldn't want to leave in "Dungeons and Dragons" with a bunch of knights or all elves. When you go on tour and you're pretty much fighting your way through all the bull...all the shows.

Doug: It's ironic that Grant's the drinker and the driver.

Ken: Don't try this at home kids.

Mark: I don't know what he's talking about.

Grant: That's my answer.

Ken: If you weren't in music, what would you be doing?

Doug: I'd be watching a lot of videos or skateboarding on my friends ramp. Hangin' out at Kay's. It's a bar in Oakland. Probably doing some kind of blue collar work.

Grant: I think I'd be doing physics and hangin out at Kay's too, at night.

Ken: What's Kay's?

Doug: It's like a local hangout, all the people...lots of bands go there.

Mark: Not all of us hang at Kay's, but us three do frequently. It's probably less than ten feet wide and maybe what...

Grant: ...thirty feet, twenty five feet long. It's an old mans bar that the punks kind of took over.

Ken: Any weird road tales you'd like to share with our readers?

Doug: I can't really talk about the alien abduction. Gosh, there's been so many stories and now I can't even think of one. Wait a minute. I got one. This was an early tour one. It was our first tour ever. It was the tour of the Pacific northwest with our friends band SCHLONG. Our roadie at the time, Steve, made a bet with Andrew which he lost and the consequences of this was that he had to pound a gallon bottle of prune juice which he did. He drank the whole thing and we got back on the road after the show and maybe a half hour into the drive we had to pull over for Steve who was jumping out of the van pulling his pants off while he's shitting.

Ken: Great story. We did an interview with RUTH RUTH for this issue also and the highlight of their interview was a shit story so maybe we should make this our totally full of shit issue.

Grant: I've never met them but I really like their music a lot.

Ken: How do you feel about being labeled a punk band?

Doug: It doesn't bother me at all. I don't think of it as a negative or a positive. I just think of it as the way it is. You know, when you're stereotyped as a punk band, OK...we don't have mohawks but...

Grant: We don't live in the gutter. We've been homeless quite a few times. We live in the ghetto not the gutter.

Doug: Anyway, about Steve though, it gets better. Steve rarely showers. As a matter of fact, on this whole tour he didn't shower once. He didn't change either. Want me to tell the rest of the story?

Mark: This is extreme, this story.

Doug: He was our roadie at the time. This is for "mountain dew" drinkers only...So he did his thing, you know, wiped off with a leaf or whatever he could find on the side of the road, pulls his pants back up, we get back on the road, we stop at another town where sometime, two days later after a show, a girl decided to crawl into his sleeping bag and perform oral...We'll leave it at that.

Grant: I've got a thirty second story. We just broke down a few days ago in Detroit and we had to go to five different places to fix our van cause everyone like incorrectly, in the motor city, couldn't even...

Doug: ...change a twenty three dollar part. We have a Ford and there's nobody that fixes Fords in the place where they build 'em.

Ken: How long have you been on the current tour with THE QUEERS and what's up next?

Doug: We've been on the tour for six weeks and have four more weeks to go. We leave THE QUEERS in New York next week. That's the end of the tour for them. We tour our way back home. We go home for six weeks, do some local shows around California, like at Gillman street and hopefully in Santa Cruise and then off to LA to play with YOUTH BRIGADE. Then we get back on the road. We tour Canada, the east coast and the south through May, June and the first week of July.

Ken: How often are you guys on the road?

Doug: We've done nine months of touring since we've been a band, not including this tour and we're planning on doing more. It's tough cause Jimi's got a daughter and its hard for him to be away from her.

Ken: Can you name three bands from the Oakland area that nobody's heard of but that are cool?

Doug: ST. JAMES INFIRMARY, STRICKNINE, EL DOPA and O-HO-RO-HO, THE UZIE'S from Stockton.

Grant: THE GOODFELLAS, FURY 66 from Santa Cruise. Incredible band.

Ken: Are you glad to see the Raiders back in Oakland?

Doug: No, not really.

Grant: They left us.

Mark: But everybody out there though is pretty juiced about it. But they came back and are losers so, I don't know? My pops was a niners fan.

Doug: Everybody hates niners fans, don't they? So we played in Green Bay with THE QUEERS and the flier said "The QUEERS are from New England, therefore they're Patriots fans, therefore Patriots fans are queers." You got to go through Green Bay to see how die hard they are about football, it's scary.

Grant: We stopped at a Wendys and there were like seven cars in the drive through and there was at least either a flag, or a jacket, or a hat in each car, all seven cars in a row.

Doug: When we were out there we asked how many people were excited about the Superbowl and they went crazy. Then I asked how many people don't care about football at all and like two people raised their hands...at a punk show. It's crazy. You ask that in California punk show and nobody cares.

Ken: Who writes the material for the band?

Doug: It normally starts with like a guitar riff and then just grows from there and we'll write lyrics and then we'll work out melodies that work over the chords of the choruses and the verses and the changes. Mark kind of sets the pace of the rhythm and...

Grant: Yeah, in our band nobody really tells anyone else what to do when it comes to song writing so if you bring something in, you have to know that its going to really be manipulated and changed. I could come in with a whole song and when we left it would sound nothing like what I thought it would sound like. Everyone has their own hands on it and there are five sets of hands in the band.

Ken: Any predictions for the turn of the century?

Doug: I think everybody is going to be required to get bar code tattoos.

Grant: Same old same old. The band keeps on going.

Ken: Do you have any cosmic words of wisdom you'd like to share in parting that our readers could ponder upon.

Doug: Yeah, write to us at P.O. box 4442, Berekley, CA 94704-4442.

Grant: You can write us with complaints or with positive things. We'll send you free shit.

Doug: If you send a self addressed stamped envelope and if you don't you can always e-mail us at www.fatwreck.com It will get to us. Fat Records are on the ball. Also, check anything out for yourself and don't listen to your buddies or anyone else for that matter.