THE RIVERDALES: Photo by Rudy Rodriguez
BEN WEASEL: Zen & The Art Of The Snotty
Snarl
By Jim Testa
2009 has been quite a year for Ben Weasel:
A new live album recreating one of his most
successful releases, a new original album
from the Riverdales, live gigs by the Riverdales
and new version of Screeching Weasel, and
as I write this, imminent fatherhood (Ben
and his wife are expecting twins in the next
few weeks.) That’s a lot to talk about,
and if there’s one thing Ben Weasel
does well, it’s talk. So here he is,
in his own words, on the rebirth of the Riverdales
and Screeching Weasel, on songwriting and
playing guitar again, on becoming a dad for
the first time, and perhaps most important
to fans, the rift with John Jughead Pierson.
Q: Let’s talk about the Riverdales
first. From what I understand, the idea of
putting the band back together started when
you and Dan Schafer (aka Vapid) were working
on the reissue of Phase III for Asian Man
Record.
Ben: Right. There were some unfinished songs
that we had started and never finished that
we wanted to add to the new version. We had
a song to do vocals on, and there were a couple
of songs that only the drums were done, and
I didn’t really like the original songs
anyway. So since the guitars hadn’t
been tracked, I wrote new songs to go with
the drums. So yeah, we just went in [the studio],
it was maybe half a day, and it was a lot
of fun, so we started talking about maybe
doing a new record. And one thing led to another.
Q: Dan Lumley wasn’t available, Panic’s
in California and not really playing anymore,
you’re in Madison now, and Vapid still
lives in Chicago. So I understand you went
local and found a new drummer who lives fairly
close by.
Ben: Yeah. Adam Cargin, the new drummer we
found, was recommended by Justin Perkins,
who produced the album and who is playing
bass with us live. Vapid switches to guitar
now. Adam’s originally up from the area
known as Fox Valley, south of Green Bay. He
was one of those kids who would drive up to
Green Bay to go to concerts to see the Queers
and stuff like that, so I think he was a fan
from when he was a kid. And he’s a fantastic
drummer, and a full-time musician who plays
in a band here in Madison. And he’s
actually going to be playing for Screeching
Weasel as well.
Q: A while ago when you were doing Weasel
Radio, the topic of a Riverdales reunion came
up and you said that you weren’t sure
you’d be able to get your chops back
on guitar, since you hadn’t played guitar
on stage in years and the Riverdales style
of playing involves a lot of downstroking,
which is really tough on the muscles in your
hand. Yet you seem to have mastered it, you’re
playing guitar on stage again.
Ben: Well, doing the record was easy. All
that downstroking, now that we’re recording
digitally… if you can’t make it
through the whole song, it’s really
no big deal. You can punch it in so easily.
So if I got three quarters through a song
and got tired, we’d just stop and I’d
pick it back up. I did my guitar tracks and
Vapid did his – he’s been playing
the second rhythm guitar tracks as well as
bass since the second Riverdales record anyway.
And then for the first show we did back in
April, I spent three or four weeks just standing
in my basement here, with the guitar on and
a mic set up, doing the set every day. So
I’d spend forty-five or fifty minutes
every day just playing the set. It’s
boring as hell but it was the only way I could
get back in shape. It’s a little bit
easier playing this stuff live now because
we’re not downstroking everything anymore.
We do that on some of the stuff and on parts
of songs, but when we played the show, it
was fine. I made a few mistakes, I think I
played an entire verse in the wrong key, which
was embarrassing, but it wasn’t a big
catastrophe. I don’t think most people
there even noticed.
Q: For people who don’t play guitar,
most guitarists strum the strings –
they move the pick up and down. Downstroking
means you’re always hitting the strings
with a downward motion. Which I assume came
from watching Johnny Ramone, since that’s
the way he played.
Ben: Actually, I taught myself how to play
and I didn’t even know at the time that
Johnny Ramone downstroked everything. If I
tried to strum, I couldn’t keep time
– which I believe I read years later
is why Johnny Ramone played the way he did.
It’s just a matter of when you’re
starting to play, if you don’t have
anyone teaching you, then I think at least
for me it was a natural inclination to do
the downstrokes, because I was able to keep
in time better. And then once you get used
to that, strumming doesn’t seem as natural.
I can do that now but I always feel like I’m
more solid when I’m playing the downstrokes,
and it feels more natural to me. But it’s
also really hard.
In the old days of the Riverdales, we did
all downstrokes live, and on all the records.
And we still did it on the new record, but
live, it gets really tiring. Unless you’re
playing a relatively slow song, it’s
a hard thing to do for a long period of time.
There are people who say there’s no
difference in the sound between doing downstrokes
and strumming, and those people are wrong.
There’s actually a very big difference.
But I’ve had people argue to me that
it’s no different – just producers
and people like that – and I’ve
made mental notes never to work with those
people ever again. Because it does make a
huge difference in the way things sound.
Johnny Ramone was the best at it but outside
of him, Joe King from the Queers is really
the only one I’ve seen who can do it
for an hour-long set and do it at impressive
speeds. Other than that, I’ve never
seen anyone do it for a whole set at fast
speeds. And compared to those two guys, I’m
a rank amateur. But I just enjoy getting up
on stage and wailing on the guitar. I don’t
pretend that I’m a really good guitarist,
I only know how to play one power chord. I
move up and down the fret board but the position
of my fingers doesn’t ever change, because
I’m only ever playing that one power
chord. It’s all I ever learned how to
do and I’ve never seen any reason to
learn anything else. I can write songs playing
that way and the longer I do it, the less
inclined I am to learn how to play chords
the right way. I always say that somebodyI’m
going to learn how to play a real barre chord,
but I don’t know. It’s just not
real high on my priority list.
Q: So what’s it like playing guitar
on stage again? It’s been a long time.
Ben: The thing is, I really enjoy getting
on stage and playing guitar, but I’ve
never been one to just sit around at home
and play for fun. Maybe when I was a teenager
and first starting out, but otherwise, I really
only play guitar at home when I’m writing
songs or demoing. If you do that, you get
way out of practice, so I really needed to
build up calluses on my fretting fingers again
and just get into shape with playing a guitar
with a strap, standing up. Because normally
I’m just sitting on the couch writing
songs.
Q: There was a bit of a learning curve for
Dan too. He hasn’t played bass in a
band in along time.
Ben: The thing about Dan is that he’s
a really good bass player. I don’t think
he’s ever gotten any kind of credit
for it except from me, but from the beginning,
I was always really impressed by his bass.
He doesn’t do a lot of fancy stuff,
he doesn’t do runs or fills or things
like that, but he has an innate sense of what
should be happening on the bass in relation
to the guitar, especially in those Riverdales
types of songs where things are really simple
and repetitive. Those songs would get boring
really quick if the bass was playing the same
thing as the guitar, so he knows how to work
the octaves and stuff.
He doesn’t even own a bass or a bass
amp anymore, but he picked it up again really,
really quick when we did the new record. And
I just really like the parts he comes up with.
Q: Riverdales songs are obviously not Screeching
Weasel songs. Some people would say they’re
just “Ramonescore,” although I
think there’s a little more to it than
that. But what was it like sitting down and
having to write Riverdales songs again for
the first time in more than 10 years?
Ben: If I’m just writing songs for
whatever else I’m doing, whether it’s
Screeching Weasel or when I was doing the
solo record, I don’t take into consideration
anything except what I feel like doing. And
that has its pros and cons. But with the Riverdales…
I don’t think it’s incredibly
limiting, but there are a lot of things that
just wouldn’t be appropriate for a Riverdales
song. There’s a lot of my type of songwriting
that wouldn’t work in that band. So
for me, it’s a very specific type of
songwriting. But there are lot of things you
can do inside that formula. I don’t
think any of the Riverdales records sound
exactly alike, and I think we do a lot with
the songs on the new record.
Q: A lot of people have noticed that most
of the song titles on Invasion USA come from
the titles of cheesy old movies.
Ben: Twelve of the fourteen song titles are
old sci-fi and horror movies, some of them
even fairly recent movies, but they were all
done on Mystery Science Theater 3000. One
exercise I like to work with sometimes is
to write from titles, and when we went into
doing this record, Vapid said that he wasn’t
sure he could write half of a Riverdales record.
He felt like we had done everything we could
do with that formula, and also, he was afraid
that there are a lot of other bands doing
that kind of thing today, that it’s
just passé. That whole 1-4-5 chord
progression and everything has just been done
to death.
I argued that I don’t think that’s
true, and that we’re better at it than
most people. I’m just saying, that might
sound arrogant to some people, but you’ve
got to have confidence in your abilities,
and you’ve got to believe that you’re
good at what you do. And I really believe
that when Vapid and I work together on stuff,
we’re better than almost anybody else
who works in that genre or sub-genre. So I
said, why don’t we do this, I’ll
just put together a big list of song titles
and we’ll just start writing from them.
So I went through and found dozens and dozens
of the most interesting-sounding titles from
the old MST3K series and that really did the
trick for him. I wrote a few songs and then
he started writing, and it really helped him
to have titles to write from. And he started
to come up with some really great tunes as
well. I really like working that way, but
the problem is that you have to come up with
a really great title to start with. Well,
this way, the titles already existed, so the
hard part was done.
The songs are not about the movies, by the
way. I don’t think Dan has seen more
than one or two of those movies, and I haven’t
seen most of them myself. “Gemini Man”
actually comes from an episode called “Riding
With Death” but there were already a
couple of bands that had used that one for
a song, so I chose “Gemini Man,”
which was actually a very short-lived TV series
and they slapped two episodes together to
make a flick called “Riding With Death.”
There were a few of those films I knew but
I had never seen “Rocketship X-M”
or “The Castle of Fu Manchu,”
for instance. So that wasn’t really
the point. Off the top of my head, I think
“Gemini Man” is the only song
where the lyrics actually reference what goes
on in the movie, and that’s the song
whose lyrics we’re printing on the insert.
“Heart Out Of Season” and “Werewolf
One” are the two songs that didn’t
come from Mystery Science Theater. “Heart
Out Of Season” was a ballad that Vapid
had written and I actually had to talk him
into putting that on the record. I think it’s
the perfect Riverdales song and a great ballad.
And “Werewolf One” was actually
based on the end a movie called “The
Great Santini;” I was watching that
one night and at the end of the movie, Santini’s
jet goes down and it was called Werewolf One,
and you hear over the radio, “Where’s
Werewolf One?” and I thought that’d
just be a great lyric.
I actually wound up writing an album’s
worth of songs myself this way, so the followup
Riverdales record is already three-quarters
done. My half is written and Vapid has about
half of his half done. So if this album does
okay, we plan to continue the theme for the
next Riverdales record as well. At this rate,
we could theoretically record the next one
over next winter, but it all depends on how
well this record does. It’s so hard
to sell records these days, so we’ll
have to see if this one justifies doing another
one right away.
Q: Let’s talk about singing a bit. Everyone
knows the patented Ben Weasel voice, that
snotty snarl that you use with Screeching
Weasel. But your vocals on the Riverdales
records don’t always sound like that.
How do you decide how Ben Weaselly to be when
you do a particular song?
Ben: I definitely plan that stuff out and
think it all out. Now that I have GarageBand
and it’s so much easier to demo stuff,
I work all that out beforehand. Yeah, I have
different ways of singing and different levels
of how much I’m going to stress certain
things. When I was doing my solo record, we’d
be in the studio and I’d say, okay,
how much snot do you want in there? And I’d
sing it and the producer would say, well,
a little more or a little less.
These days, I tend to have an idea of what
I want to when I write the song. On the solo
record, when I was working with a producer
I trusted, it was harder for me to figure
out, so I left it in his hands. With the Riverdales
record, that was the first time that I demo’d
out a whole record before going into the studio,
so I had already done multiple vocal takes.
I’d change lyrics or I would go back
and do an entirely fresh vocal take, and I
was able to figure it out that way.
There are a lot of different vocal affectations
that you can use, but, for instance, on “Werewolf
One,” the verse is basically a sped-up
doo wop song, and I like the idea of singing
it in that style. So to do it in that nasally,
whiney, high-pitched way would have sounded
wrong. I guess technically it could have worked
but it would have just sounded kind of dumb
to me. It’s all kind of a gut reaction
to me.
When we do the Riverdales, I talk to Vapid
a lot about that stuff too. I think it’s
important that you’re not afraid to
be… I don’t want to say theatrical,
but don’t be afraid to be just a little
over the top. It’s just a fun goofy
band, we’re not doing something really
deep or introspective. It’s all supposed
to be kind of tongue in cheek and smart ass,
so I think it adds something if you put a
little something on the vocal. Like on the
chorus of “Squirm,” he puts a
kind of cool Bela Lugosi spin on that word.
Just a spooky kind of voice thing. So we talk
about a lot about that kind of thing, with
me how much of that Joey Ramone kind of crooning
am I going to do. And there’s a lot
of vocal hitches and stuff that I do. Your
gut reaction is usually to done it down, but
I think it’s okay sometimes to play
that stuff up.
Sometimes it seems almost silly to take this
goofy, light-hearted music and analyze it
so much. But when I was younger, I took a
really half-assed approach to a lot of things
and the result was that I made a lot of records
that couldn’t have been a lot better,
and that I still have a lot of regrets about,
because I didn’t take them seriously
enough. It’s a good idea not to take
yourself too seriously, but it’s a bad
idea not to take your record and your songs
seriously.
Q: You’ve said before that you feel
the Riverdales are different from most of
the other bands that get dumped into the Ramonescore
genre. Can you elaborate on that?
Ben: I think one of the great failings of
the heavily Ramones-influenced type punk bands
is that they tend to be so by-the-numbers
and so surface that they wind up being boring
and repetitive. It’s a really repetitive
type of music anyway so you have to do these
small, subtle things to keep it interesting.
And I don’t think a lot of the people
who play in those types of bands realize that.
So what happens is that a song that’s
really just three chords, they don’t
vary things up with the bass or the drums
or anything and it’s just boring. There’s
a way to do it that’s not all that noticeable
to the listener but it changes things enough
that it keeps it interesting.
That’s also why sequencing is so important.
In this day and age, the single is back and
albums aren’t that important anymore,
but I grew up in a time when albums were everything;
that’s what I’m used to and that’s
the way I’m going to write. So I always
want to make sure there’s a flow from
song to song, and I don’t have a bunch
of songs in a row that all start in the same
key or have the same beginning. So I spend
a fair amount of time sequencing and resequencing
a record. Even back when nobody was doing
vinyl, I still thought like that because it
works just as well on a CD.
Q: So you’re going to be a dad. Let’s
talk about that. How frightening is it to
contemplate becoming a parent for the first
time at age 40?
Ben: I think it’s a lot less scary
becoming a father at my age than it would
have been ten or fifteen years ago. I’m
fine with it. I don’t think anybody
can really prepare for how time-consuming
it’s going to be, but I’m excited
about it. Obviously I’m concerned with
how I’m going to get work done, because
I’m going to be the one staying home
and watching them. But we’ll figure
it out.
Q: So besides the Riverdales, you’ve
also started performing again as Screeching
Weasel. How did that come about?
Ben: I think for the first time in a long
time, there’s a legitimate interest
in Screeching Weasel again. I was doing these
solo gigs and I was tied up in a legal dispute
with John (“Jughead” Pierson)
over ownership of the band’s assets,
which of course included the name and anything
to do with the band. So I was doing those
shows under the name Ben Weasel and I was
fine with that, but then the dispute got resolved
a little over a year ago. I already had gigs
booked as Ben Weasel so I said I’d do
those, and then when we got into 2009, it
just seemed to make sense and bring the Screeching
Weasel name back.
I think I had a lot of negative associations
with the name for a while; you do something
for that long and there’s always ups
and downs. But getting the legal issues resolved
just changed a lot; everything was back in
my hands, and there was no question that it
was my band, and that I owned everything,
so at that point I realized I was really happy
about it and very proud of what I had accomplished,
and really happy with the fact that people
still care about Screeching Weasel.
We were never hugely popular, certainly never
on a Green Day but not even on the level of
a Rancid or NoFX. We weren’t even in
the same ballpark. But we did carve out our
own little niche, and we do have a lot of
loyal fans. For years I was really ambivalent
about it, but now I’m really into it
and really enjoying it. And I guess it’s
one of the things that happen when you get
older, that you’re able to appreciate
things that you didn’t really get when
you were young. And it’s not very often
that anyone gets the opportunity to experience
that.
Usually if you kind of blow it, which I did
– and by blow it, I mean just not appreciating
what I had when I had it – you never
get another chance. So being able now to go
out and play these shows where a lot of people
show up and actually enjoy it, I really feel
fortunate, and I’m really, really having
fun with it.
Q: A lot of people were surprised when suddenly
there was a Screeching Weasel again and no
Jughead in the band. And then John posted
some things on the Internet that made is seemed
he was very surprised over the whole situation.
What’s your response?
Ben: I’m not going to trash John, I’ve
known John since I was 12 years old. I don’t
know why he chose to take the route that he
did; that’s his decision. He certainly
has the right if he wants to do that. And
if that sets some of the fans against me,
so be it. I’m inclined to believe, having
done this for 23 years, it’s been my
observation that when people get all pissed
off and say they’re not going to support
you any more because of something like this,
they were bound to do it over something else
anyway. I’m not losing any sleep over
it.
John is obviously angry, and I really don’t
understand it; the details of our dispute
and our resolution of that dispute really
aren’t anybody else’s business,
but I’ll just say that I was a little
bit disturbed that he didn’t even acknowledge
that there was this massive two-year legal
dispute that got very ugly. John went on the
Internet and acted like this all happened
out of the blue, and it didn’t; there
were many heated exchanges and accusations
and recriminations and hurt feelings, and
it totally sucked.
I can’t speak for John, but I imagine
it was on both sides; it bothered both of
us quite a bit. John’s a good guy and
I respect him, and he’s a talented guy
and I’m sure he’ll do great things
in the future. But at the end of the day,
it’s my band, and everybody in the world
except John Pierson seemed to understand that.
So eventually it did get resolved, and John
got what is in my opinion a very fair settlement
which gives him a cut of merchandise sales
in perpetuity. And I’m happy to pay
him that money. But in terms of him not being
in the band, again, it puts me in a difficult
position but suffice to say, it was not an
amicable split over the business stuff. And
during the dispute, I told him many times
that he was jeopardizing his future with whatever
might happen with the band down the road,
and I begged him not to do that.
The irony of the situation is that what I
offered him in the very beginning is what
he agreed to two years later. So none of this
needed to happen. I don’t feel comfortable
portraying him as a bad guy or as a jerk,
because I think that he sincerely felt that
his point of view was right. And so we were
at loggerheads for two years over that. But
when the situation was resolved, things had
gone way, way past the point of no return
in terms of our friendship and any semblance
of a working relationship anymore.
