sandiegopunk.com

An interview with...
Adam Gnade

SDP: Briefly, what led to the collapse of Fahrenheit? Adam Gnade: There were a few things, but the biggest one was two groups of people that didn't see eye-to-eye. There are two kinds of people in this world: wild ones and well-mannered ones. Both are perfectly fine and - really - it's not our choice as to which one we are or which one we become, but they don't mix well. What was your main goal with Fahrenheit? While you were in print, do you think you accomplished that? What can people do to continue to fulfill that goal in a post-Fahrenheit San Diego? We wanted to make San Diego a more live-able place. Jessie Duquette,

Did we pull it off? I'm not sure; that whole time period was such a blur, and I have to admit I've lost perspective. The main thing I got out of it - the most important thing - was friends: Demetrius Antuna Fahrenheit's art director; our news editor Jamey Bainer who goes to NYU now; Evan Martin the intern, who graduates from high school this week; Elizabeth Thompson who was our calendar editor before going on to become our circulation director and one of my best friends; Annie Bethancourt and Kinsee Morlan, a couple of our first interns; Robin Wise, another great intern who now lives in Portland; our "Get Outta Town" columnist Rich Biaocco; Tim Pyles; Fahrenheit photographer Rob Queenin who stayed with me all last week in Virginia, and Sohrob Nikzad who started as an intern and was hired up a couple weeks later as events editor/staff writer, and went on to cross the country with us after the paper went down.

We also met some incredible people that ended up becoming story subjects: the staff at Pirate Radio 96.9; Tim Mays; a lot of great bands - not to mention some of the talented fuckers we came across. Tim McCormick, Jason Vissers, Guy Burwell, Charles Glaubitz, David J who just got back together with his band Bauhaus, Sergio Hernandez, Scott Saw, Josh Krause, Bart Schaneman who moved to Omaha - people like that.

Besides that, I really don't know if we did anything or not. It was fun to try, though, and I think there's a ton of things people can do to fulfill that goal. Be helpful and patient with kids new to the scene. Help a touring band by letting them crash at your house. Don't put up with style over substance bullshit. Don't talk shit unless you're willing to say it whoever's face - and willing to fight over whatever you've said. What else? Publish a 'zine. Turn your basement into a studio - or a venue. Book shows. Be altruistic and not out to get famous or rich. Help your friends and help people you don't know. Do things for free. I know that may make me sound like a hippy, but I don't care. Art is about love and fuck anybody that can't see that.

Oh, and another thing we wanted to do was make a magazine run by writers instead of journalists. We went into the thing with such an extreme, violent contempt for what the press has become, especially the music press, that we figured our backgrounds in creative writing would make something that stood out above the CityBEATs and Readers and Reviewers. Before we started the magazine, I e-mailed up a dream team of my favorite writers from San Diego as well as around the country and asked if they'd be down to write for us.

I'm not sure how well we pulled that one off. I dunno, I still hate scumbag journalists, and it makes me sad to see great writers out there that don't know they're writers and still operate under the restraints of journalism. If you're a writer or an editor reading this, unshackle yourself from journalism. Make your own art and tell your own stories. It's all valid. Don't sell yourself short.

I should say, I was a piece of fucking shit the whole time the magazine was around and couldn't enjoy it. I was depressed, just horribly chipped down and raw-nerved and hopeless and I sat at my desk under a cloud of doom while I should've been cherishing what we had. If you talk to Jessie it was one of the best times of her life. Me, the direct opposite.

What have you been doing since Fahrenheit?

The first eight months were spent on the road. Jessie, Sohrob and I drove across country in 110 degree heat, went crazy in New Orleans, and then stayed on an island off the coast of Florida, where we spent a couple weeks decompressing and soothing our fucking Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or whatever we had.

Elizabeth, who was living in Georgia at the time, met us a little later, as soon as Hurricane Frances finished having her way with us. So, lots of sun, lots of quiet days and writing. (It was then that I fell in love with the South and decided to move here.) After that, we went up the east coast. I dropped Jessie off in Norfolk with an ex boyfriend, and his group of insane sailor friends, and went to stay with Jamey Bainer in Brooklyn, where we drank whiskey and listened to records all day for a week and a half and made fools of ourselves and pretended we were Henry Miller. I wrote my new record on his apartment's fire escape, overlooking all of old Brooklyn in the dead center of summer.

Then it was back down the coast, across to the Midwest, which I love, back to San Diego, up the coast to Portland, then Seattle for a month where I finished writing my new record, then Canada, then to Portland for two weeks where I assembled a band and recorded the album, then back down to San Diego, then back across the country - in one nonstop three day drive - to Virginia, then back to San Diego, then back again... a few times. I'm in Virginia right now. Next stop is Portland. Again. I can't stay away from that city. It's like the holy land for me.

Tell us about your spoken word CDs?

I'm not really sure if they're spoken word anymore. They started that way. I wrote the words to be read off a page and only later decided to put music to them. Since then the music's become just as important as the words, if not more, and each track is written no different than a song - only I talk instead of sing. (And yeah I do talk, but it's in plain conversational voice, not anything you'd hear at a fuckin' poetry slam or a book reading any of that horseshit. No theatrics, just talking.) I kinda consider it in the American folk music tradition, because it's storytelling. Storytelling backed by music. It's no different than old blues or mountain music.

Why are these prose, not poetry?

I like prose better. Poets are lazy. Except the symbolists, mainly Rimbaud, and he's dead, so he doesn't count. Poetry in the past was a vital thing. Now it's just a bunch of coffee shop idiots who live with their parents and assign some kind of great, mystical importance to what they write. San Diego poets are the worst. The ones I've met make me want to cut off my face with an Exacto knife and then eat it. Especially the ones that read at Claire de Lune. Just horrid fucking people. I'd love to get into some newer poets, but I haven't read anything worth a damn.

What do you like to write about for these CDs?

I try to write about American life from as personal a point of view as I possibly can. There's the old cliché that says everything that can be sung or written or painted or said has already been done before. I don't believe that. By making things as personal as possible, you're creating something unique. You know, there's only one you so anything you write about your personal experience - if you're honest and candid and thorough - will be unique.

I used to think the best-selling books should be people's diaries published unedited and without any explanation as to who they are or were. I felt like that would be the only real way to publish pure honesty, and that the stories would be more exciting and true and unique and emotional than anything ever published. I now realize that's fucking retarded and that it would - generally - be boring as hell, but the sentiment wasn't far off. Art from the bottom of your soul - when articulated well - is always better than anything.

Where does that inspiration come from? For my records, I don't get much inspiration from music or writing. Most of it comes from smells, tastes, things I see, nature, water, nightmares I have, swamps, rivers, lakes, rocks, sounds. Like the taste of pasta with fresh tomato sauce when you're hungry and broke and beaten down and you haven't eaten in fucking two days. Or the sound an old house makes at night, creaking, settling, like the inside of a ship or the ribs of a whale. The sound cicadas make inspires me... driving, city names, road names, highway names, river names, bus rides across country, fistfights, the feeling of being hungover on a Sunday morning, porches, catching fireflies, shooting guns, glass bottles with light shining through them, the feeling of throwing a beer bottle at a wall... cows, watching the neighbors mow the lawn, happy Mexican kids, listening to old country and blues records with my girl, the Midwest, drinking wine. My friends inspire me a lot... just their big hearts and the things they say and the things they do. I also like boats. I want to die on a boat, maybe of scurvy. I've always been pulled toward the sea, and boats feel magic to me. How has the response been? Shitty up until now. My first record was a piece of dog crap. I recorded it in 1999 in bed, as one take on two tracks with improvised guitar. The second one, Shiv

The Fahrenheit crew at work.

The response to the new one, although it's not out yet, has been great. There really seems to be a lot of people into it, downloading the tracks online and writing me about it. I don't know if they're into it for what it is, or if they just like it because it's something different, whatever it is, it's going well. I just need to find the right label to put that one out. I'd like to have that done by this summer, so I can get a band together and tour.

Upon finishing listening to one of your albums, what do you want the listener to be left with?

With the last one, Shiv shiv shake, lyric-wise, I wanted people to be left with a sense of place. I wanted to describe, as evocatively as possible, the feeling of late-afternoon in Golden Hill -right before supper when the sun's going low over Downtown and all the Mexican families are cooking the best smelling food ever and your hardwood floors glow and look warm. I wanted the music itself to sound like the things I was listening to at the same, Album Leaf, Tristeza, Her Space Holiday.

Run hide retreat surrender is a little more complicated. It's more about realizing that a) we all lie to ourselves about everything and b) we're terrified most of the time and our fear dictates how we act. Also, there's a lot about how we - as punks or indie rockers or bohemians or whatever you want to call us - buy into things like protesting US militarism and being socially conscious just because it's hip at the moment. We don't care about the poor Iraqi child whose guts just got blown out all over his sister's face - and that's just cataclysmically wrong! And even when we get riled up about something, right after the movie or book or song is over, we're happily back eating our fucking hamburgers or watching our sitcoms and laughing over our stupid jokes. We have such short memories and waste so much of our lives being selfish. But it's also a travel story, so I want people to get a feel for the places the characters go, and the horror, pain, and joy they're going through at the time.

Are you doing live shows?

Yeah, the first one's a rock festival called 40/40 Fest on the 4th of July in North Carolina.

Have your travels made you look at San Diego in a different light?

Yeah they have. Oh man. Shit. I've realized through traveling that San Diego has a long way to go before I'll ever move back. There's a reason people move away, why great bands like the Robot Ate Me and Minmae or artists like Guy Burwell decided to try their luck elsewhere. The scene is so inexorable, and so grossly sentimental for what Chuck from The Plot (to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower) calls "old dinosaurs." Plus, San Diego's getting all the terrible qualities of LA without the cultural distinction. It's sad for me, because I love San Diego and I'll always be a San Diegan, but it's paradise lost.

One of the big things that got us down during the Fahrenheit time was how unsupportive people in San Diego are about art. People there are just so apathetic! And stingy; they don't want to go out of their way to buy their friends' CDs or go out to shows outside of their, like, 10 mile comfort zone. It's like the land of Lotus Eaters; San Diegans are lulled and hypnotized by the perfect weather and it makes them lazy and self-centered and ineffectual. Whereas, say, in Seattle or Portland it's fucking cold and gray and depressing out, and you have to get out there and do things and be proactive and be a part of something or you're gonna slit your fucking wrists. San Diego just sits on its collective couch with a giant bong and drools and grins.

Take the art scene for instance. There are so many great artists doing shows, producing amazing work, but nobody cares. Any other city in the world would go crazy over the stuff people like Pamela Jaeger or Scott Saw or Yoni Laos or Douglas Thompson x or Poor Al produce. I spent April in LA and came down at one point to visit Scott Saw and his new stuff was incredible! I wanted to roll myself up in it and die happy! It was just righteous and beautiful and transcendent! Do people care? Not enough of 'em.

Even at the really hip art shows, the ones everybody wants to be seen at, nobody buys anything. They drink the free wine, eat the free cheese cubes, schmooze and smile their big fake smiles at people they don't even like! What a buncha useless lives, y'know? Where's the passion?

Is the San Diego music scene/culture distinctly different from the other cities you've stayed in, or is it comparable?

While San Diego's music scene is fractured and disorganized, it still has the best bands of just about any place I've been. As far as nationally-recognized bands, there are just so many it's just fucking astronomical! Traveling the country this past little bit, I've read and heard and seen so much about Pinback, the Album Leaf, the Locust. People really care about San Diego music - and a lot of them romanticize certain scenes and time periods, like the Heroin, Struggle, Antioch Arrow San Diego hardcore thing, or the Drive Like Jehu bands - which I always thought were overrated crap, but still. Plus there's so many great, lesser-known bands that are fucking national-class: Matt Curreri, Dmonstrations, Joanie Mendenhall, Business Lady, the Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower, Spacehorse, Goodbye Blue Monday, Via Satellite, Holy Molar, Kill Me Tomorrow, Head Wound City, Castanets. Which is great, because I'd hate for San Diego to be known for shit like Louis XIV. My friend Jimmy's in that band, he plays bass, but they're so bad! And so huge! You hear about that asinine crap everywhere. Besides my friends and family and my old neighborhood, San Diego's bands are the main thing I miss.

Is San Diego setting the trends, or falling victim to them?

San Diego was setting trends for a while, but it's gone quiet for a long time. Which isn't necessarily bad. Who cares about trends? San Diego has great bands, and if people idolize them, or live through them, or pattern their band around something, say, Justin Pearson or what's his name (John Reis) from Rocket are doing, or have done, fine. It just doesn't concern me much.

How do people outside of Southern California view San Diego?

Hardcore kids think it's a paradise of screaming punk bands. Everyone else thinks it's surfers, lazy college kids, and rich Republicans. Both are right.

Would you describe San Diego music, arts, and culture as thriving, stagnate, or declining? What bands, people, etc (or loss thereof) has led to this?

It's definitely thriving band-wise, but one thing that worries me is the lack of venues. The Casbah, the Che and the Epicentre are great but a city as large as San Diego needs five Casbahs, five Ches, five Epicentres. It doesn't need any Somas, though. Soma can fall off into the ocean for all I care. Goodbye, fuck you, eat shit and die, thanks for being so "supportive" of local music... assholes. Oh, and the Voltaire space in OB is one of the biggest things that's keeping San Diego alive. The art events and dance parties and shows they've been booking have been insane! The Akron/Family! They booked the Akron/Family and had them play a free show.

ThreeOneG records is really good for the scene, so is Gravity and especially Loud and Clear, Pokez, M-Theory Music, Whistle Stop, Hot Monkey Love, RE:UP, Mario Orduno's label Art Fag, Imputor?, and SDMusicMatters, I guess it's just Music Matters now, also helps the scene out immensely. Troy Johnson called them out for doing puff pieces, "blow jobs" I think he said, but the way I see it is they're not out to be critics or journalists or run bands over the coals for their "artistic sins." They want to support music and art and that's that. I think it's noble. There's enough critics.

How did you get involved in San Diego music and arts? Were you born in SD?

Yeah, I was born in San Diego but didn't get into the scene until I saw a coffee shop band called Loam play with another coffee shop band, Dryve. After that I went sporadically to shows and didn't really go wild on San Diego music until my first Che Cafe show - which I think was Physics. Then I got a job as music editor for the San Diego Union-Tribune's online version and was neck deep for about a year. Around that time, I did an online 'zine with AnnaMaria Stephens that was pretty involved in localish stuff. After that I moved to Portland and came back a year later and went even deeper. Then I drowned, floated to the surface and here I am. Pale, deathly, waterlogged, but happy. Happier than ever. I feel oddly reborn.

Who were your favorite local artists growing up and now? What about them grabs your attention and keeps you listening?

I don't listen to any of the bands that I cut my teeth on anymore. There was stuff, like I said, like Dryve and Loam, maybe Fishwife, but none of that does anything for me now. I've never been sentimental for old scenes. Right now I'm into Matt Curreri - actually, I've been into him for the better part of last year. He has great lyrics and sounds like he gives a shit while he's playing. Jessie pulled his demo out of a pile on my desk, listened to it, and was like, "What the fuck?! How could you not have listened to this until NOW?!" I'd had his CD for months, but was too busy to listen to it. So Jessie turned us all on to Matt.

Also, the Locust has always been one of my favorite local bands. The first time I saw them play the Che it ruined me forever. I remember screaming at my friend Avery, "that song was fucking 30 seconds long! Argh!" It really changed the way I saw music, and they've kept their sound fresh, evolving, which is amazing. Though I should admit that I write their official band bios for them, so take whatever I say with a grain of salt. There's definitely a conflict of interest there. But I don't care - the new EP, the one on Ipecac, is like the sounds of the Earth forming and amoebae evolving and primordial waters churning. It's so next-level it makes me laugh.

What are some of San Diego's best-kept secrets (places to eat, hang out, see bands, etc)?

If I told you they wouldn't be secrets anymore, would they? I'll give you a coded answer for my favorite one: Blue arches strongman life-force. Only Bryan Welch and Elizabeth are gonna get that.

What advice do you have for people interested in getting involved or starting their own print weekly, zine, etc?

If you want it to be your magazine, don't let anyone be your boss. Make sure you have creative control and that you love everyone you're working with. With Fahrenheit, we started with total creative control but pretty quickly it became 60 percent our ideas and 40 percent stuff we fucking hated. Though to be perfectly fair, I'm sure the people that were in charge of that 40 percent hated our 60 percent. We published some insane shit. Good shit, but insane. Joan Hiller did an essay on Steely Dan for us that was full on De Capo Best of Whatever Year in Music Writing. Jamey Bainer did some brutal, exciting stuff, just totally slanderous brilliance. We did a story about how to illegally pool hop and one about starting up your own - also illegal - pirate radio station. I wrote a piece about Jessie, Jamey and I beating up this coked-up meathead we caught killing grunion at Blacks. And for one of our covers, Frankie Chan painted a picture of himself pissing while his friends did heroin and made out with each other.

Anything else?

Yeah, if anybody sees Rob Queenin in San Diego in the next little bit, tell him he left beer cans all over my yard here in Norfolk.

Adam Gnade interview conducted via e-mail, June 2005 by Joel Scheingross.
http://www.adamgnade.com
http://www.myspace.com/gnade