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article by jennifer kelly | photos by terri nelles
No one, least of all Mick Collins, expected The Dirtbombs to last for 12 years. At most, they were supposed to be a transient side project, one of many conceptual bands for the Gories founder, distinguished mostly by the fact that you could dance to their tunes. Yet this powerhouse party band -- two drummers, two bass players and one very charismatic guitar player/singer strong -- has persisted through multiple line-up changes, style shifts and varying degrees of media hotness (remember when every White Stripes article was required by law to have a paragraph on The Dirtbombs?).
Misunderstood and underestimated as the quintessential "garage" band, The Dirtbombs often give flippant and amusing "rock 'n' roll" interviews that barely scratch their surface. Yes, this is a hard-partying, hard-rocking live band, but that's not all it is. Mick Collins, with his encyclopedic knowledge of music, intelligent take on the business side and, well, I have to say it, philosophical bent, is one of the smartest, most interesting guys I've interviewed all year.
The recent release of If You Don't Already Have a Look, The Dirtbombs' 52-track, career-spanning singles compilation (available now on In the Red) gives us as good a reason as any to catch-up with the frontman for one of the best bands working today. We talked about everything from Chess Blues to Jimi Hendrix, Detroit radio to New Zealand touring standards, downloading to t-shirt economics, but mostly we ruminated on how The Dirtbombs turn everything they touch into pure rock 'n' roll.
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Splendid: So, twelve years of The Dirtbombs. You didn't think it would last this long, did you?
Mick Collins: No, it was really only supposed to go about three, and that would be the end of it, and I would have another band. By now, after 12 years, I would probably have had two or three other bands after The Dirtbombs. But, you know, it just kind of kept rolling and kept rolling. I didn't really want to stop.
Splendid: In the CD's liner notes, it sounds like you're already thinking about moving on to something else.
Mick Collins: Oh, yeah... I think every band should have a beginning, a middle and an end, really.
Splendid: Where are you now?
Mick Collins: Ahhhh... I would say that The Dirtbombs are definitely past the halfway point.
Splendid: Oh yeah? That's too bad.
Mick Collins: Oh yeah.
Splendid: So, I know you always get lumped into this category of "garage rock" which is sort of a Stooges/MC5/Stones/Sonics kind of thing, but it doesn't sound like that's where your influences are at all.
Mick Collins: No.
Splendid: You're more into the post-punk. Those four bands you cited as influences (Pere Ubu, Wire, Swell Maps, Mission of Burma) are more sort of difficult, post-punk, political bands. Can you talk about that? Where you're coming from and why you always get perceived as something a lot simpler than maybe you are?
Mick Collins: Sure... Sure. Let's see, I need to figure out where to start here.
Splendid: We know you're not a Stooges cover band.
Mick Collins: I think what it is, is that I always approached it as more of an art rock type of thing. An art punk band. That was always my intention. But by the same token, rock 'n' roll is to be danced to. The problem with a band like Delta 5, let's say, is that they were great, but you couldn't dance to it. Not really. And also there's the issue of all of the different influences that I have. You know, I'm a chronic record collector, and I grew up in Detroit. So just about everything is in there. I wanted to make a dance band, but at the same time I wanted to make a band that could play every different type of rock music. The Dirtbombs was the band wherein, if I had an idea for a rock song, this would be the band to do it. And then, to keep it interesting for myself, I put in an extremely rigid musical instrumentation, an unorthodox musical instrumentation, that would keep it interesting because of its very unorthodoxy.
But then, you know, the other projects that I was working with never really came to fruition. Basically, The Dirtbombs was never meant to be a main project. It was always meant to be one of a number of projects I was doing. It was never meant to be the main thing. But then, none of the other projects were working, or were working out, and The Dirtbombs kind of became the one. All the musical ideas that I had wanted to do, The Dirtbombs just kind of did them.
And so, because the early recordings have this sort of punk orientation that I might have had with another band, The Dirtbombs just kind of did it. And also, I liked the idea. I went to see the Fleshtones once, somewhere in North America. I'm not sure where I was. It wasn't Detroit, although they did play Detroit. The first time I saw the Fleshtones was in Detroit and it was a really amazing show, -- this was a band that was really active on stage, that engaged the audience, that came dressed up in weird costumes... I really liked that whole idea of, for lack of a better example right now, the whole New Romantic thing. Everybody dressed up in wild outfits. I always really liked that in the after-punk years. The weird stuff. I was always into the weird stuff, so I was really trying to do that and it never really happened because you can't really be that weird when you're making dance music. When the music comes out, it has to be danceable, so we heard all these records where no one ever saw the band. No one ever talked to the band.
And I was also hampered by -- and when I say the band, I mean me --
Splendid: Okay.
Mick Collins: -- I was also hampered by the fact that I had just come off of The Gories and Blacktop.
Splendid: I read the liner notes to the Blacktop record. That sounded like a hellacious situation, but the music is really good. You know, in the liner notes about this guy in The Blacktops with the heroin addiction and all the crap you went through. It sounded like a horrible story, but it's a good album.
Mick Collins: (laughs) It was not fun, but I really wanted to make a record, so I just kind of slugged it out, basically. I'd come off of The Gories and Blacktop, and everybody sort of assumed that I would be doing garage rock exclusively.
Splendid: That was because of The Gories? I've heard people say that The Gories and The Oblivians basically invented what we know as garage rock.
Mick Collins: I suppose. All the current musical acts can be traced back to one or the other. I never looked at it that way, but I have to concede the argument.
Splendid: But still, these four bands that you cite as influences: Pere Ubu, Wire, Mission of Burma, Swell Maps.
Mick Collins: Those were great bands and they make great music that you can dance to. It's just not the only thing that they do. Whereas I was sort of concentrating on just making music you could dance to, but coming from the same musical territory that they were.
Splendid: Right. I spoke to Peter Prescott from Mission of Burma about a year ago, and he said that one of the things that he sort of regretted about their first era together was that they didn't have much of a sense of humor, that the music was very serious. It's almost like what you're saying, there's this intellectual/political element to it, but you've got to be able to enjoy it as well.
Mick Collins: Right. That was sort of the territory, but I was approaching it from a dance, party perspective. When I would listen to those bands, I was too young to know any better. I didn't know what they were about. I just thought they were great music. Everybody assumed that because I had been in The Gories, because I had been in Blacktop, and the other various things I had done around that time, that The Dirtbombs was going to be another one of those bands. And then we came out and everybody got mad, because the only people that knew about The Dirtbombs were garage punk people, who hated it.
AUDIO: Little Miss Chocolate Syrup
Splendid: Really?
Mick Collins: Yeah. And my response didn't help. My response was, "I wasn't making it for you motherfuckers anyway."
Splendid: It's a pretty narrow little subsector of the musical world.
Mick Collins: (laughs) Umm, yeah.
Splendid: I'm not going to ask you about the Detroit scene, because it's one of those "blah blah blah" questions on your FAQ.
Mick Collins: You read the FAQ! I'm surprised how many times I get asked those questions, even though they've been up for two years now.
Splendid: But I did want to ask you about growing up in Detroit and being introduced to music there, because it's always been this crossroads of black and white music, all this great stuff in jazz and rock and soul and punk. What was it like growing up there and becoming aware of what was out there?
Mick Collins: That's just it. There was no awareness. It's so all-pervasive that you don't think it's different anywhere else. We would hear punk records, punk bands... We would hear those bands on the radio. To this day, I don't own any Ramones records, because they were always on the radio. I can't even think of some of it now, but all that stuff... I first heard the Dead Kennedys on the radio.
Splendid: What stations? I used to listen to CKLW late at night. I lived in Indiana. You could only get it certain times, but there must have been some smaller wattage stations that were better that you couldn't get in Indiana. Were there?
Mick Collins: Not in the early 1970s there weren't. In the early 1980s, basically every radio station in town had some kind of a program that was all new rock, like new wave rock or punk rock, just generally weird stuff. Anything interesting. We listened to CBC here, which has always had a tradition of playing non-commercial music, and so the late nights, it was always CBC or one or another of the college stations. People were always playing stuff. Even the album rock radio stations had programs that played non-standard music. And it was all mixed together. The same station that would be playing Martha and the Vandellas one minute would be playing some local rock band the next.
Splendid: See that's what I remember, that even the commercial stations mixed it up a lot more.
Mick Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah, all the time. But we didn't think we had it any better or any worse than anybody else in North America. It wasn't until years later when I started travelling and touring with bands that I would get to these places and find out that, no, it wasn't like that anywhere else. We really had it good up here for a while. So I can't really answer the question, because it was just like living anywhere else, except that the music was... there was a lot more good music in the air and we didn't know it.
Splendid: Yeah. Now, you said somewhere that the first concert you ever went to was Bo Diddley.
Mick Collins: Yeah.
Splendid: And you were quite young?
Mick Collins: I was probably seven.
Splendid: Oh wow. I have a little boy who went to Siren, to your Siren, when he was six. So you see, the circle continues.
Mick Collins: (laughs) I suppose so.
Splendid: I think it would be really easy to draw a connection between what you do, this very rough, sort of raw, very rhythmic guitar sound and Bo Diddley. Was he, and some of these other old blues guys, a big influence on you?
Mick Collins: Yeah. Well, after playing guitar, yes, but overall no more or less than anything else in the world, musically speaking. I didn't start playing guitar until The Gories. I'm actually a drummer. It turned out, roughly speaking, that the easiest stuff to learn how to play on guitar is Chess blues. All those Chess bands, especially the Willie Dixon stuff, all those early rock tracks from Willie Dixon, that stuff is stripped down as far as it can go and still be considered music. So when I started playing, I learned how to play from listening to Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry and all those guys, Hubert Sumlin, that's where I learned to play guitar. It's basically my... If I were to say I had a style -- and I don't, I'm one of the worst guitar players I know, by the way -- but if I were to lay claim to any style or major influence on my guitar playing, I've got to lay this at the feet of Chess Blues, right? (laughs) I would think that my guitar playing would be a grave insult to the people who made those Chess Records.
Splendid: I like the way you play guitar. I think it's interesting that some bands are very heavy on technical skill and others aren't, and it doesn't seem to have any relationship to whether the music's any good or not. You know what I mean? The Ramones were great, but they weren't as good guitar players as Joe Satriani or somebody like that. I don't know what that is. I don't know what I'm talking about.
Mick Collins: I hate all those guitar-wank guys. Satriani and that cat whose name escapes me.
Splendid: Yngwie Malmsteen?
Mick Collins: No. I really can't stand him, but there's another guy... one of those guys. (Steve Vai? -- Ed.) They can play anything, and as a result, they sound like nothing.
Splendid: Right, but you like Jimi?
Mick Collins: Well, you know, he, actually, in comparison to these other guys, his guitar playing was actually kind of limited.
Splendid: Oh, I don't know about that... You mean technically? I think he got more out of a guitar than anybody before or since.
Mick Collins: I have a dozen or so of Hendrix's live recordings, you know? Stretching from 1967 all the way through 1971, and believe me, I've listened to them. I've tried to play like them. I've heard him enough. His style was very distinct, but given enough time, a reasonably talented person could completely ape Hendrix's guitar-playing style. It's not so varied that it can't be imitated. There are boundaries to what he could do. In context there weren't. He was far ahead, light years ahead of anybody who was playing rock 'n' roll at the time. But now, he can be imitated. It's a matter of perspective.
Splendid: I think that what he does is not just what he does with his fingers, but it's so expressive.
Mick Collins: Yeah, I agree. He has excellent phrasing. I do love Hendrix's phrasing. My own guitar playing lacks phrasing, frankly, because I still don't know what I'm doing.
AUDIO: Trainwreck
Splendid: Again, I like the way it sounds. So... if you learned guitar from the Chess Records guys, you learned how to sing from...
Mick Collins: Radio. That's one of those things where it's everywhere. That's just how we sounded. The way I sing is what singing sounded like in the late 1960s or early 1970s. If you didn't sound like that, you weren't going to get anywhere. That was the biggest lie. I consider myself to be a fair to middling vocalist. If I were in my 20s in 1967, trying to get gigs, I probably wouldn't make it very far. I'd probably be able to get some records out, but I doubt I would be able to cut it at Motown. I'm just not that good.
Splendid: Well, you'd be playing with the Funk Brothers. Anybody would sound amazing with them. I could probably cut a record with them.
Mick Collins: Not true. I've got some dogs coming out of that studio. Oh yeah. Most of the things... There's a quality baseline at Motown that, in comparison to other record studios, was set extremely high. But there's stuff that didn't make it. It does happen.
Splendid: Yeah, I suppose. So, the stuff on this singles comp... I really like what you wrote about singles, how they're more like a live experience and they're short and cohesive and there's no filler. But when you put 52 of them together, doesn't all that stuff go out the window?
(He laughs. He has a great laugh.)
Mick Collins: Yeah, it kind of dilutes the idea, doesn't it?
Splendid: What was the impetus for doing this?
Mick Collins: The record label wanted it.
Splendid: They had a bunch of singles they couldn't sell separately?
Mick Collins: It was an excuse to slap them all together. I had wanted to do a singles comp. I didn't quite realize that there were so many singles. I figured eventually one would happen. It was just like, "Okay, at some point, a singles comp is going to happen." And it has been 12 years.
Splendid: And a lot of those singles had become hard to find, hadn't they?
Mick Collins: Yeah, totally.
Splendid: So, the songs -- there's really amazing variety, the types of songs, but I think if you put it on for anybody who had ever heard The Dirtbombs, they would know immediately that it was you.
Mick Collins: Oh, yeah, there's no getting away from it. That was really part of the original idea. The music is varied, but at the same time, it's still The Dirtbombs. Most bands, their punk aesthetic comes in challenging the audience on stage, by confronting the audience on stage. That's not where I do it. I confront the audience on the record.
Splendid: I was reading that about you. I've seen you three times, twice at SXSW and once at Siren, and all the shows were really great. But I was reading that you don't really like playing live.
Mick Collins: No. Nah, overall, I really could take it or leave it. I don't consider playing live to be essential for me, personally. I do understand that people want to see the band that I'm doing. People want to see them live. And you know, insofar as I'm willing to deal with it, okay, but I could live without it.
Splendid: Why, do you get nervous? Why don't you like doing it?
Mick Collins: Ahh, you know, there's a large number of factors there. Most of my issues are only enhanced by The Dirtbombs because our stage set-up is so unorthodox. It's a logistical nightmare sometimes. But I also get stage fright. I don't like being cooped up in a van for eight hours. There's a lot of things involved. Taken all together, it's like, "You know, I really could do without this." But the thing about it is that we are past the stage, as an industry, where you can survive on record sales alone. You can't do it. Not unless you make techno. So you've got to go out and play some live shows. You've got to do some live shows somewhere.
You can't do it anymore. We're basically back to where we were in the 1940s, musically speaking, where you have the band make a single and then you go out and you tour a lot. That's the only way you're going to get paid, because you're not going to make a lot of money from records. And that's just the way it is. If you're in a band, and you want to be able to make money, if you want to be able to pay your bills through the music that you make, you've got to hit the road.
Splendid: Do you count on The Dirtbombs to make money? Because I know you've got this computer programming thing that you do that must make decent money.
Mick Collins: That was never... That's in case I ever lose a hand or go deaf.
Splendid: Which could happen.
Mick Collins: If I go deaf, that's when I go back to IT. As long as I have ears, I am going to be making music. The Dirtbombs became -- and I personally believe it's on the strength of the tour -- they became a marketable entity. It wasn't through anything but sheer dint of being on the road forever. It seems to have worked, at least in Europe. We haven't quite gotten there in America. We can tour. We've reached the point where we can tour without having a new record out. We can just go out on the road.
Splendid: I don't understand that. So many bands that I like are bigger in Europe than they are in the United States. Why is that? Are people smarter in Europe?
Mick Collins: No, it has a lot to do with the fact that electronic dance music took over Europe in 1992 in a fashion that we have not seen the likes of in North America, so the market that is there for rock music is an absolutely rabid one.
Splendid: Because they can only get it live?
Mick Collins: Yeah. There's no rock music on the radio.
Splendid: Yeah, I go to Europe, and I think, wow, Calexico and The Dirtbombs and all these great bands are huge in Europe, so I'll tune into a radio station in Rome and there will be good music on there... but there never is.
Mick Collins: No, rock music is not on the radio in places like Italy. But you're right, Calexico is huge in Europe. I saw Calexico once in a bar here, but they headline festivals in Europe.
Splendid: Yeah, I know, I got this DVD of them playing the Barbican in London and it looks like the opera. People are all dressed up and they're sitting down and there are balconies and the seats are velvet and there are probably 2000 seats.
Mick Collins: Oh yeah.
Splendid: It's all different from here.
Mick Collins: But their records are all right. I probably have a couple of them in the basement somewhere.
Splendid: I like them a lot.
Mick Collins: But I would never think that they would be selling out the Albert Hall.
Splendid: Yeah, it's interesting. Have you been to Japan, too?
Mick Collins: I've been to Japan twice. The Dirtbombs have been once. I went once with The Screws and once with The Dirtbombs.
Splendid: How did it go?
Mick Collins: Both times it went fantastic.
Splendid: Have you been to Australia, too?
Mick Collins: The Dirtbombs have been to Australia twice and we're getting ready to go a third time.
Splendid: That's so cool. Even if you hate touring, it must be kind of fun to get to go to all these places.
Mick Collins: Those parts are great. Touring Australia and New Zealand and Japan, touring the Pacific Rim, basically, is so different from touring the US and England that you sort of ...after you've done it, you say, "All right, this is the way to do it." And you can sort of muddle through another UK or US tour.
Splendid: Is it just more comfortable, better transportation and places to stay?
Mick Collins: The main difference is that the promoter takes care of more stuff.
Splendid: So you're not driving around looking for clubs?
Mick Collins: Exactly. You're not looking for a floor to sleep on. There's a hotel room for you. It's taken care of.
Splendid: I wanted to talk to you about the single. A lot of people are talking about downloading as having revived the single, because even if people buy their music, they're buying one song rather than the whole album. Even if people are paying for it, it's still really different from you guys deciding that you're going to do this song and this song, and put them on a vinyl single and do the packaging and all that. How do you feel about that, people picking their own singles?
Mick Collins: Let 'em. I have no problem with that whatsoever. In fact, you probably haven't heard this yet -- I only heard it because I was watching the news tonight. Warner Brothers has started a division whereby the artists that are signed to Warner Brothers release a few songs online. New songs. They don't have to put out an entire album anymore. People just pay for the one or two tracks that they like. You might put out four songs, and people can pay for them. They apparently have seen the light.
The actual vinyl 45, the way that we do it right now, that's more of a boutique thing. That becomes a collectible item. You can get the single online, but if you want all the packaging and whatever other cool stuff, you buy the vinyl single. While we were on the road, I heard of a couple of different labels that are basically going for... the single. The few MP3s will be online. They'll release records as MP3s and vinyl also. They basically are bypassing the CD. If you want a take-home product, we have the vinyl here. If you just want to throw it in your iPod, we have an AAC file here for you.
I'm perfectly fine with that. I have no problem with people getting their music online... in any way they want to get it online.
Splendid: But you're a collector. You probably want the packaging.
Mick Collins: I'm a record collector.
Splendid: Do you download stuff?
Mick Collins: Yeah, I do. Most of the music that I have online is from labels that put their records online for free. I am a wholesale endorser of the internet archive. If you haven't been, you should go to archives.org. There's so much stuff there for the taking, and it's all stuff for free. There are whole record labels that are putting their entire catalogs online. With all the graphics that would have been on the packaging and everything.
Splendid: I talk to a lot of bands who say, you know, we just want people to listen to it and come to the shows. Maybe they'll buy something later...
Mick Collins: Well, you know, I'm going to let you in on a secret. Most bands make more money from their live show than they do from records anyway.
Splendid: And also, when the RIAA goes out and sues these people that have been file-sharing, none of that money is ever going to get to the artists.
Mick Collins: Exactly. None of that money goes to the artist anyway. It's just the labels suing people, not the artists. Most artists know better. I would never bite my audience on the hand like that. You know? People have told me that they have found bootleg MP3s of albums of Dirtbombs songs, and they got them, and that's fine. Did you like it? The answer is, they came to the show. They must have liked it.
Splendid: I would never say that to the artist, though. That seems kind of rude. I stole your record, and it was great.
Mick Collins: Well, you know, they're saying, "I liked it and I came to the show and I'm buying a CD here." That's great. The thing is, it doesn't matter. They came to the show. If they liked it enough to come to the show, that's great. Given the $20 ticket prices, Dirtbombs make $13 from the ticket price, and we make 30 (cents, I think, not clear) from the record. And we make our own tee-shirts, so we make all of that.
Splendid: So if you're going to go to a Dirtbombs show, you should buy a t-shirt.
Mick Collins: Well, if we have one that you don't already own.
Splendid: Yeah, yeah... I've got to buy one.
Mick Collins: Buying the record is okay, but if you really want to support the artist, go see them live. Do whatever it takes to see them live.
Splendid: Or just hand them $20 bills.
Mick Collins: That'd be great, too.
Splendid: Can you explain the "innocent bystander" rule?
Mick Collins: I don't know where it came from, but yeah, I have an innocent bystander rule. If you're standing around... If you're unlucky enough to be nosing around the studio while I'm recording and I need someone to do something, you're it.
Splendid: I see.
Mick Collins: Need hand-claps? You're it. Need backing vocals? You're it.
Splendid: This has resulted in all kinds of strange people being on your records.
Mick Collins: Yes, it has.
Splendid: Does it always work out okay?
Mick Collins: Usually it works out just fine. Only once, and I'm not going to give you the situation, but only once did it actually work out where I was not happy with what I got at the end. And only one person has absolutely refused to sing, to do back-up vocals on the song when they were there. Absolutely refused, and there was no amount of cajoling that could... You know, most people can be talked into it.
Splendid: You figure, you could probably be buried if you were really bad. So I wanted to ask you about a few of these songs on the compilation. One is "Cedar Point 76". I just have to mention, I was at Cedar Point in 1976, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the girl in the song, because I didn't have breasts at the time. You didn't write that. Didn't Jim Diamond write it?
Mick Collins: I wrote the music. Jim wrote the lyrics. We helped each other a bit with both. Like, I distinctly remember writing the bridge... like a fillip during the chorus. Diamond wrote the chorus and there's a bridge with a guitar solo that Diamond came up with. I helped with some lines, helping him rhyme the different bits that he came up with.
Splendid: Did you go to Cedar Point when you were young?
Mick Collins: I used to go to Cedar Point all the time. I haven't been in years, but I used to go all the time. I was there in 1976 when they opened the Corkscrew. I was there the first year of the Gemini as well.
Splendid: Now you say that "Little Miss Chocolate Syrup" is your favorite Dirtbombs song ever?
Mick Collins: Yeah, it's one of them, sure. I have three or four songs where I could not be prouder of the song as it turned out, the finished recording, and one of them is "Little Miss Chocolate Syrup".
Splendid: What, in your opinion, makes the difference between a really great Dirtbombs song and one that you're not all that happy with?
Mick Collins: Let's see. Time spent mixing would be one thing. Making it sound exactly right. Quite possibly having a lineup that can actually do it. A lot of times, I'm sort of working with whatever I have. In that particular case, I had a line-up that everything about it was dialed-in that day. "Little Miss Chocolate Syrup" was absolutely perfectly dialed-in, and it's funny because Jim and I had a really big fight during the mixing of that record. We got into a huge argument about the echo. He was trying to make it sound like it was very natural, and I was like, "No man, it's got to be its own thing, like in a glam record. It's got to be really artificial sounding. You have to know its echo." We yelled about that for about 20 minutes, and finally I won.
Splendid: Glam is sort of an influence for you guys, too, isn't it?
Mick Collins: I deliberately told people that we were a glam band. Only because glam was the least cool type of music I could think of at the time.
Splendid: But it's cool now.
Mick Collins: Now it's cool. If I were doing that now I'd have to think of another...
Splendid: Tell them you're a disco band.
Mick Collins: Now I'd tell people that we're a drum and bass band. But at the time, I'd tell people that we played glam rock, and I actually tried to make a glam band, very briefly. I tried to do this just for a few shows, because I thought it would really piss off the garage people. It didn't work.
Splendid: Too bad....I was looking at the notes on "Trainwreck", which is also a really great song, and it says that you don't do "Through with White Girls" in shows any more?
Mick Collins: No, Diamond wrote that one entirely. And that was his spotlight song, so with him not in the band anymore, we just don't do it.
Splendid: But you had to have a song where you all say, "Hey".
Mick Collins: (laughs) Yeah, we had to have another song where everybody went "Hey."
Splendid: There's something about that. You can tell a lot about bands by the way they say "Hey" and "Baby" and stuff like that. Whether they're sincere or not. I also really like "Candyass", and I think one of the things I like about it is the count right at the beginning.
Mick Collins: "Candyass" turned out way better than we thought it would at the time. During the period of time that "Candyass" was recorded, the line-up was in flux. We would call people up and say, "Can you be at the studio at six?" We'd be like, "What are you doing around 7:30?" You know? At the end of that one, after we got that one mixed, we were like, "That one's pretty good. Maybe we can play that one live."
Splendid: That was before Ko was in the band?
Mick Collins: Ko's only been in the band for a year.
Splendid: She was at Siren. Wasn't that her?
Mick Collins: She was guesting at that point. Yeah, she wasn't actually in the band yet. Ko joined the band in September of 2003.
Splendid: Does that change the dynamic, having a girl in the band?
Mick Collins: Slightly, yes. It seems to be something I can't get away from. My record label has been taking great pains to tell me that this is really a great, cool thing. And I say, "You don't tour in bands that have girls in them." Yeah, I've had to do it my entire life, basically. Every band that I've been in, there's been a woman in it at some point. I can't get away from it. I'm not saying it's good or bad. It's just something I would like to not have to do, just once, so I could see what it's like.
Splendid: I don't know. I think women can be, you know, sort of civilizing influences. I don't know anything about Ko, so maybe she's not, but in general...
Mick Collins: I like that. Civilizing influence. I'll have to use that.
AUDIO: No Expectations
Splendid: So the covers -- you've got all these great covers of wildly different bands. You've got an Elliott Smith cover and Soft Cell and Flipper and the Ohio Players. How do you go about picking a cover?
Mick Collins: I just listen to it. If it sounds like it would make a good cover, I'll give it a try. That's all. I don't have any method. There's no methodology for picking a cover. It's like, let's see, the guitars could play that horn line and then there's, you know, we could do this and that.
Splendid: Have you ever tried one that you just couldn't do?
Mick Collins: Oh yeah. "I Want to Destroy You" by the Soft Boys. It totally did not work. And there was a James Brown cover that we tried, "Don't Tell a Lie about Me and I Won't Tell the Truth About You". I thought it sounded pretty good, but nobody seemed to like it. And, oh, oh, oh, the most recent one that everybody helps is "Psi Power" by Hawkwind. The drummers absolutely hate it. We know how to play the song. We've done it in rehearsal quite a bit. But they won't play it live.
Splendid: Do they hate the original song, too, or just the way you guys play it?
Mick Collins: I think they hate my guitar playing. Yeah.
Splendid: I wanted to ask you about "No Expectations" where you sort of settle the whole Stones/Beatles debate by doing both of them.
Mick Collins: (long laugh) I would like to take this moment to publicly thank The Residents for giving me that idea. I totally stole that idea from The Residents.
Splendid: So next you could to a Sex Pistols/Clash cover. Go down the list and ...
Mick Collins: My next trick is to take a Bauhaus song and make it sound like Curtis Mayfield.
Splendid: That'd be awesome. I have one more question for you. In Ultraglide in Black, which is one of my all-time favorite albums, you're a black guy in an otherwise all-white band, and you're singing songs by black people which are mostly about race to, I assume, mostly white audiences. It just seems like there are so many angles to approach the race thing. Is it something you think about? Is it a factor?
Mick Collins: There was no conscious effort to make a record like that, one with any political leaning. I was really trying to pick songs that The Dirtbombs could play that would... Well, I take that back. They were all songs that I thought would make a really good rock record. That was why they were all picked, at the heart. They were songs that I thought would make a great song if a rock band did them. I wanted to prove that it's the singer, not the song. You know what I mean? The songwriter could be from anywhere. The song itself is the song, and it's your interpretation that makes it yours. If the Impressions did this song, it would sound one way, but with The Dirtbombs doing it, it sounds a different way. Suddenly it's a rock record. Like the Barry White song. Well, suddenly, it's a rock record, even though it's obviously a Barry White song. You know, it's obviously George Clinton, but it can still be a rock 'n' roll record. That was my intention. I tried to pick songs from the 1970s, because I got tired of being called a 1960s R&B band. And then, of course, the label shot me in the foot by making me include a song that was written in 1960.
Splendid: Which one was that?
Mick Collins: "The Thing".
Splendid: It's such a great record. It really is. So, you've made a punk record. You've made a soul record. You've made a pop record. Is there one more genre that you want to cover?
Mick Collins: The next Dirtbombs record is the long-awaited bubblegum LP.
Splendid: Covers or originals?
Mick Collins: Originals. There might be one or two originals.
Splendid: You're about to head out on a little bit of a Canadian tour.
Mick Collins: Yeah, we're playing Calgary and Edmonton and then we come back to this side of the continent and do Montreal and Ottawa and Toronto.
Splendid: I don't have any more questions, unless you have something else you want to talk about.
Mick Collins: You've covered all The Dirtbombs basics... except for the comic book part.
Splendid: The comic book part?
Mick Collins: You even managed to work the IT angle in. That was really funny. But yeah, I'm a big comic book collector. Media fandom -- that media fandom take on pop culture is a large part of the songwriting aesthetic. The Cramps use a lot of B-horror movies for their imagery, whereas I use a lot of Dada art and comic books ... and bad television.
Splendid: Yeah...you have that Gilligan's Island song, "Tina Louise".
Mick Collins: Perfect example.
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Jennifer Kelly is available in 512 megabyte and one gigabyte versions.
[ graphics credits :: header/pulls - george zahora | photos - terri nelles :: credits graphics ]
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