by Paul Silver

In the 1980s, Washington, DC was the big thing in the punk and indie music scene, with Dischord Records putting out influential hardcore releases from bands like Minor Threat. That scene evolved, and was instrumental in creating the genre that’s known as emo. Huge bands like Bad Brains and Fugazi came out of that scene. Meanwhile, scenes in Athens, GA and Chapel Hill, NC were producing bands like REM, Neutral Milk Hotel, Of Montreal, Flat Duo Jets, Superchunk, and Archers of Loaf, and the influential Merge Records was born. On the other side of the country, Seattle exploded with the grunge sound, with Sub-Pop Records rising rapidly on the backs of bands like Nirvana, and local acts such as Soundgarden and Pearl Jam went on to national prominence.

Meanwhile, in San Diego, things were also brewing in indie music. Out of the violent southern California hardcore punk scene of the early 80s, a new breed of bands was growing, maturing, and creating unique and powerful music. The growth from the 80s into the 90s was nothing short of astounding, and critics and the mainstream started to take notice. Some people, when speaking of the San Diego music scene, likened it to these other scenes that exploded into the mainstream, and major labels began courting these die-hard DIY musicians, who were never very comfortable with the idea of mainstream success.

What made the San Diego scene different from these others? And why was this prophecy of wider success never quite fulfilled? That’s the subject of a new documentary film from Bill Perrine, entitled, “It’s Gonna Blow!!! The San Diego Music Underground 1986-1996.”

Q: When you’re not making this film, what do you do?

Bill Perrine: Well, I’m a director, and editor, and occasional cameraman. Very occasional photographer. But, I basically work, in one form or another, as a filmmaker. You know, everything from documentaries and features to corporate videos and boring stuff like that.

Q: And the name of your company?

BP: It’s Billingsgate Media.

Q: So tell us a little about Billingsgate Media.

BP: [Laughs] Well, Billingsgate Media is really just me. And whoever I can convince to come along on a shoot, for the least amount of money possible. But it comes out of, I used to do four-tracking, back in the day. I’d record music. And an old girlfriend used to call me Billingsgate as a nickname. And I had the website, so when I started doing films and things, I was too cheap to buy a new website [laughs], so that’s how Billingsgate Media came up.

Q: How long have you been doing video production, and what sort of work do you do?

BP: Uh, god, I’m really terrible at dates, maybe about, six years? Something like that? What was the second part of the question?

Q: What sort of work have you done?

BP: Well, I directed a movie called “Children of the Stars,” which is about a UFO group out in El Cajon (California) called Unarius, and their relationship to reality. I’ve worked as a producer, as an editor, on a bluegrass documentary a guy named Rick Bowman did, another film he did about a turn-of-the-century courthouse shooting back in the south. It’s really interesting. I’ve worked as a DP on another music film about a classical pianist. I’ve done all kinds of stuff. That doesn’t even include commercials for [laughs] glass replacement companies and other things like that.

Q: OK, so tell us a little bit about that.

BP: Oh, that’s, honestly, that’s…

Q: That’s what pays the bills.

BP: Yeah, honestly, that’s going to bore the shit out of anybody listening to that. [laughs] But I do stuff for non-profits. I’ve done a lot of work for local non-profits, like the Media Arts Center, which does education for at-risk youth, and I do low-budget internet commercials, things like that, I mean, anything. I’ve done, god, I don’t even know what I’ve done, everything from, like I said, glass replacement companies to mattress companies to doctors and vets, and Tijuana dentists. That’s what pays the bills.

Q: Why did you start doing documentary filmmaking? What attracts you to that?

BP: Well, I don’t even really think of documentary, necessarily as being entirely separate from narrative or fictional work. To me they’re part of the same spectrum. Working with documentary you’re maybe working more with found materials. I guess I look at it, if you want to make analogies to visual arts, you know, sculptors and artists who work with found materials, that’s what a documentary is to me. Rather than creating a band or rather than creating forty bands, I have forty bands to work with here. Why not work with those and make the story I want to make out of that? So, I don’t necessarily see a difference. The only difference is that when you have great material in front of you, you can work with that, rather than create something entirely new.

Q: It’s interesting, what just came to my mind, is there are different genres of working with found materials, right? You have people who are writing biographies, people who are writing history, current events, and things like that. And then you have people like the Dadaists, who take various bits of found material and put it together to make something artistic.

BP: Well, you’ve seen the video I did for Octagrape (a local San Diego band). The last one I did. That’s an example of that. It’s the same thing. That material’s out there. Those are mostly public domain films that I use, but you recontextualize them and make them into something new, hopefully. And that’s, I don’t know, I mean, especially if you look at a practical level, making a film, no matter how you do it, is an expensive and extremely labor intensive endeavor. So if you have the material there to work with, make your life a little easier and work with it. [laughs] Plus all the resonances that come with it, the historical resonances, you know what I mean? There’s all this stuff there. There’s no reason not to use it.

Q: So you see documentary filmmaking as kind of a combination of telling a fact-based story, as well as creating new art?

BP: Yeah, absolutely. You know, there’s kind of a school of thought for some people when you say you’re doing a documentary, they think in terms of educational films or journalism. And that’s a great element of documentary, but that’s by no means all of it. You can look at something like “The King of Kong,” that documentary about the guy who plays Donkey Kong, or even Werner Herzog’s films, they have a whole different approach to what it is to be a documentarian. And I certainly wouldn’t put myself in there, necessarily, at their level, but I think I understand where they’re coming from. That’s more my esthetic.


Creedle, one of the San Diego's music scene lost treasures

Q: As you mentioned, your upcoming film release is “It’s Gonna Blow: San Diego’s Music
Underground 1986-1996.” How did you come to choose to do a film on this subject, and why that specific era?

BP: Well, I’m a native San Diegan. I’ve lived here pretty much all of my life, and I lived through that era, sort of on the sidelines. I had friends who were in bands. I grew up with Stimy (Michael Steinman), who was in Sub Society and Inch. And after he got signed to Atlantic, I remember getting the demo tape back, or their first studio recordings back, and he had them on a tape, and he was playing them in his car, and I just remember what a crazy thing that was, to be with your childhood friend who’s now on this major label and going on tour and all that. And, so, I like a lot of the bands. I think it was a high point in San Diego’s cultural history that a lot of people, to this day, don’t know about. In San Diego it’s this weird little kind of cult thing. And I know people who have lived here their whole lives and know nothing about Drive Like Jehu or Rocket From The Crypt. But at the same time, I dated a woman who was from Finland and her friends came to visit, from Finland. They never had been to the States before, and we went to see The Sultans at the Casbah, John Reis’ little band, and there were like thirty people there. It was like a Wednesday night, and these people were blown away to be in the same room with John Reis. And they were amazed they could talk to him afterwards, after the show, and, like, shake his hand. Because, back there, it’s a thing. There’s a cultural stamp that’s come out of San Diego. And so, it’s great material for a film, and it really surprises me to this day that no one had done it already. So I was honestly waiting for somebody else to do it, and I finally got tired of it, so I did it. That’s literally the truth, I just got tired of waiting.

Q: It’s interesting that you mention people from San Diego not knowing anything about the music scene here, and people from elsewhere being very familiar with it. I grew up in Chicago, and, I think my introduction to the San Diego music scene came via a Chicago band that put out a record on Nemesis Records (a local San Diego record label in the 1990s), a band called Billingsgate. I was friends with them and that kind of introduced me.

BP: They were called Billingsgate?

Q: They were called Billingsgate!

BP: Alright! Great minds.

Q: Because of their release on Nemesis Records, I started looking at other stuff on that label, and I think the first record I bought on Nemesis Records, other than Billingsgate, was “Saturn Outhouse” (from the band Pitchfork). From there, I started checking out other San Diego bands, spreading out into other labels like Vinyl Communications, Downside Records, and all that stuff.

BP: Sure, I mean, that’s part of it, too. I mean, this is all kind of niche music when it comes down to it, anyway, but, I guess if you want to look at the continuum of sort of post-hardcore music, you have these scenes, like Louisville. People think of that as a scene, Slint and all those bands. Chicago, you can think about Jesus Lizard and on and on and on. DC with Fugazi and the whole Dischord thing. I mean, San Diego really belongs up there with those scenes, if you ask me. Maybe slightly later, if you look at it. Definitely DC and all those guys came first. But if you look at the quality of bands that came out of this place, and the sheer incestuousness of it, it’s every bit the equal of those. And yet we here in San Diego don’t think of it that way. Even the musicians don’t think of it that way. There are guys, fairly prominent, who really, to this day, don’t… Even Rick Froberg (Pitchfork, Drive Like Jehu), you hear him talk about his bands, and it’s almost as if he doesn’t believe anybody outside of San Diego knows about them. [laughs] Now, I think he knows. I think he’s catching on. [laughs] It’s a weird thing. It’s partly a San Diego thing. We’re so self-effacing about this stuff. But, it makes these impacts in all of these strange places. You’re all the way over in Chicago, and there it is.

Q: When you begin a project like this, where do you begin? How do you decide what subjects to include, who to talk to, and so on?

BP: Well, you have to decide what makes it interesting to you, what elements of it make it interesting to you. And, with me, there’s definitely certain bands, a certain style of music I’m more interested in. But there are also certain themes I’m interested in. Like we just talked about, I’m always interested in San Diego, the cultural history of the place, what it means to be from this specific place, and how that ties into this scene. So, you have to kind of decide what interests you before you start, and try to focus on those things. But at the same time, you need to be open to going other directions. And, from a practical level, I just started with Jason Soares (Physics) [laughs], because he’s a friend, and he really has his toes in all these different parts of the scene. And I knew I could start with him. I’d get a good intro to what’s going on. I could test my thesis, so to speak. And I also knew that if I fucked everything up he wouldn’t be furious at me [laughs] and I could do the interview again. So, that’s really it, and from there it goes off in all these different directions, like corralling cats, you just have to get everything back into place every now and then, and reassess where you’re going, and try to keep it all on track.

Q: When you’re at the beginning of this project do you just figure out who you want to talk to and just start filming? Or do you plan ahead of time, maybe create a specific story line and storyboard things out?

BP: Well, it’s kind of hard to storyboard it, per se, but I definitely made a lot of notes to myself, and I think I even wrote out a treatment, essentially the kind of thing you give a producer to let him know what you’re doing. And that helped me clarify where I was going with it and what themes I wanted to do. So there’s kind of conceptualizing it to a point where you’re not just jumping in and going willy-nilly. And I did a lot of research. But, unlike a narrative film, it’s a weird combination of pre-planning and winging it. You have to wing it to some degree. You don’t know what people are going to say when you interview them, and you don’t know where things are going to go. It is, really, a matter of… I’m a firm believer that you really do have to have a theme that you’re pursuing, very strongly. And I see that with people who do documentaries sometimes who’ve maybe never made one, and they just start filming, and they end up with these masses of material that, because they never really thought about what it meant, they don’t know what to do with it. And then they’re fighting with it for five years in the editing room to try to make it make sense. So, it is a weird combination of knowing what you want and being open to pursuing other avenues and other routes. And then, on a practical level, as you go, I had a master list of people I wanted to interview, and it was small, like fifteen people. And then, once you get going, all these different things come up, these little byways, these little weird roads you can take, and you just decide which ones you want to take that you think are conceptually interesting, but also practically interesting. Do they live somewhere I can go, and this kind of stuff. And so, eventually, I interviewed over sixty people for it. Which, of course, is not even… I could have gone for many more. But it’s already so much packed into one film, I didn’t do it.


Truman's Water

Q: So what is the main theme of this film, and where does the title, “It’s Gonna Blow!!!” come from?

BP: The title comes from “Aroma of Gina Arnold,” by Trumans Water. “Your plastic culture sucks / And it’s gonna blow!” It’s about critic Gina Arnold who was sort of an alterna-nation-grunge cheerleader. Glen (Galloway) wrote the song about the commodification of underground culture. That’s my take on it, anyway. And, maybe, the theme of the movie is the virtues and limits of provincialism. San Diego was and is a provincial place, in the good and bad sense of the term. It’s somewhat culturally isolated. And that provincialism, situated a stone’s throw from Mexico, made us unique. So you have a bunch of provincial San Diegans trying to “blow up” the plastic culture and failing or succeeding, depending on how you define success and failure. But the title is also a reference to some people’s belief that San Diego was going to blow up big, commercially. Thirdly, it’s a reference to the possibility that it was going to blow, as in suck. I’m a multi-faceted poet and thief of lyrics.

Q: You’ve been around the San Diego music scene for a while, and know a lot of the people from the bands of this era. Did that make it easier to get access to the people, archival video footage, photos, music, and so on? Or were there still hurdles to overcome?

BP: Well that’s actually something I should stress, because I’m really not that well connected in the San Diego music scene. Maybe now, I am, a little bit more, but I’m kind of a sidelines type of person, in a way. That’s where I’m more comfortable, behind a camera, that sort of thing. And, even though I had a few friends from back in the day, Stimy’s passed away; it’s been years now. The other people I knew, we’re sort of casually friendly; we didn’t hang out very often. And, I think that was good for me, because I definitely had a different perspective on it than I would have if I had been at the parties back in the 90s, do you know what I mean? So I came to it with a fresh slate, and a lot of people who didn’t know me, and I think I had… everybody was very warm and welcoming, but I also think, at some level, I had to prove myself, that I knew what I was doing, and that it was going to be an interesting project. And so, it’s really just a matter of making friends who turn you onto other friends, and it’s a matter of being, hopefully, professional enough so if you don’t know somebody and you call them up, they feel like they’re in good hands with you. And that’s what happened. I didn’t really have any particular trouble getting interviews. Sometimes it took me a few months to get everything squared away. Not everybody’s terribly reliable at returning calls. [laughs] But, with literally one exception, everybody has been incredibly cool through the whole process. They’ve been very welcoming and very warm, and it’s been a wonderful experience. I’ve made a lot of friends through it, but I came in as a bit of an outsider, and I think that helped me.



Drive Like Jehu

Q: How easy or difficult was it to get the archival footage, photos, and music to include?

BP: That just takes a lot of persistence, frankly. That’s just bugging people all the time. And I had the Facebook page, which was a big help for that. Some of my best material came out of nowhere. People just happened to have something in a closet. I got things that have… you know, they’ve been sitting in closets for 20 years. I have some really great stuff. I think it literally would have rotted away if I hadn’t done this film. I don’t think it would have ever come out. That being said, I’m still waiting on material from some other people [laughs] who’ve told me they have these great archives, and they’re good people, maybe they’re just a little bit flaky. I’ve just never gotten it out of them. And, at this point, it is that; I do have an archive. Beyond the film, itself, I’m going to do something with it. I don’t know what.

Q: Some of the bands and some of the people have, shall we say, interesting quirks. Tell us about some of the more interesting characters you’ve included in the film and some good stories you can tell us from the interview sessions.

BP: Oh, gosh, where do I start? Tim Blankenship was a fun one. Tim’s from Creedle and Rust, and a couple other bands. Basically, we all got drunk and did that interview. Actually, that’s not true. I should be honest. Tim got drunk. [laughs] I was sober through the whole thing. We met up at the Waterfront Bar, and Tim had already had a couple by the time we got there. We wandered through all these old haunts. We went to Wabash Hall, over on University, which is an old punk venue. We went to the “old” and the “new” Casbah. We went to all these different places and filmed on the streets, and ended up at another bar and filmed an interview there. That was wild, just because Tim was very outspoken after awhile [laughs] to the point where I cut some of his stuff out of the film, because I was worried maybe he was being a little too honest about things. So that was great. Dealing with the Crash Worship people was really interesting.

Q: How so?

BP: Well, one of them who I wanted to interview, I never got to interview. And, I’m convinced it was all an elaborate Crash Worship style mind-fuck on me [laughs] to this day. Other people tell me that’s just his personality. But it got to the point where I thought I was maybe going insane, because I couldn’t tell quite what he was trying to do to me. I interviewed Markus (Wolff), who ended up being very nice, up in Portland, and completely not what you would expect of somebody from Crash Worship. He was very mild mannered and very quiet. Ian MacKaye and Brendan Canty from Fugazi, I interviewed them. That was amazing.

Q: How does that tie into the San Diego Music scene?

BP: Big Pitchfork fans. They played with Pitchfork, and they… I don’t want to spoil it, but mention in the film… well, there’s really nothing to spoil. They regarded Pitchfork as every bit the equal to Fugazi. They were just contemporaries, and they admired them a lot. And, also, Ian had some funny experiences here in the 80s at the punk shows, when things were still kind of violent and crazy. But that was a hoot, just hanging out at Dischord Records all day long, while Ian played DJ and played me his favorite bands. It was an experience to remember. But every single interview was interesting in some way. All of them are half crazy and wonderful people, so every single one was really a lot of fun. Oh, the Trumans Water guys (Kirk and Kevin Branstetter)! That’s a good one to mention. Because we went up there, and Kirk’s dog had had seizures the night before, and it had amnesia. And, so, through the entire interview it wouldn’t leave Kirk and Kevin’s side. And it was constantly making noise and farting. [laughs] We had to shut down production because of the stench that was wafting through the room. You combine that with Kirk and Kevin being like a comedy team, it was just a lot of fun. That was a great shoot.

Q: Did you uncover any surprises during the process of making this film?

BP: Well, I certainly didn’t uncover any great secrets, in terms of… there’s not a ton of, like, early New York punk scene drama. People didn’t stab each other, nothing like that. I think the surprise is, maybe, what we were talking about earlier, and that’s people’s conception of the music scene, and their place in the musical firmament. There’s this sort of relentless… even somebody like John Reis, who has, especially when he’s Speedo, he has this kind of over-the-top, almost pompousness about him. You know, he’s a god of rock and roll. And you talk to him when he’s out of character, and he’s self-effacing, almost to a fault. There were times in our interview where it was hard to get him just to talk in a straightforward manner about Rocket From The Crypt and (Drive Like) Jehu. I still think he conceives of them, and this is a good thing, as a local phenomenon, a local band that happened to tour a lot. I don’t think he considers the impact they’ve had on a lot of people. And that’s very surprising to me, to this day. You were at the Jehu concert, you saw. People flew in for that fucking thing. It’s insane. And people were crying. There were people crying at that first song. So that may be the biggest surprise. There were lots of little surprises, I think people who are real nerds about this stuff will pick up on. But the biggest surprise is just how, it started out as a DIY thing and it got big. But, at heart, it’s still very DIY, and that’s how these people think of it. They never really changed their perspective on it. At least the people in the core of the scene.

Q: Were there some people you wanted to interview but couldn’t, either because they weren’t available or didn’t want to be involved?

BP: There were a few. The big one was Rick Froberg. And that was probably more of a logistical thing, because he’s in New York, and he was traveling in Spain and all that. But also, Rick’s maybe not the most talkative person, as far as interviews go. I’m friendly with him, he did the art for the film, and he’s seen the film. He liked it, which meant a lot to me. But he really doesn’t like doing interviews. We made some attempts at that. It never happened. Maybe it will for the (DVD) extras. And then, O (Olivelawn, Fluf). O’s such a great part of the scene, but he’s another guy who doesn’t like being on camera, simple as that. Again, I’m good friends with him and he’s been very supportive, but he just didn’t want to get in front of that camera. Otherwise, I got pretty much everyone I wanted, with the exception of Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam), but I didn’t think that was going to happen, anyway. [laughs]

Q: How long did it take, from concept to finished product, to make this film?

BP: It was a little over two years, which is quick. Frankly, that’s a testament to, well, it’s a testament to how much work I put into it. I put a lot of things aside to really concentrate on it. And it’s also a testament to how wonderful people were. Once they got word of the project, once the first trailer came out, people helped me a lot, in terms of getting me material and being available for interviews, and things like that. And my crew. I should mention, I had people helping me on that end who really stepped things up for me. But something like this can take… I think “American Hardcore,” that documentary, took something like ten years to make. And I did not want to do that. [laughs] When it came down to it, I’m very happy with the timetable. It was just about right.

Q: Was it primarily a solo effort, of have you gotten help along the way?

BP: I had a soundman who came with me on 90% of the shoots, and he also acted as kind of everything else, Rick Bowman, who’s a filmmaker in his own right. Rick’s not even a fan of this music. He doesn’t dislike it, but he’s a fairly traditional music type guy, classic rock and that sort of thing. But he was so taken in by the people and how fascinating they were that he did so much work for me, so many shoots. We probably did fifty shoots together. That’s a lot. And I had the occasional cameraman come to help me out when they could. But, in the end, I think I shot 80% of the film myself. And these were two-camera shoots. It was a fairly elaborate thing, as these things go. But, I edited the film myself, I produced it. I guess it’s kind of like being in a band. I was the main dude, but I had a lot of people helping me to get it out.

Q: You talked about the supportiveness of people for the project. Did that extend to helping with funding?

BP: You know, we did a Casbah benefit concert, which raised a little bit of money, which was fantastic. If anything, I haven’t made a lot of effort to get funding from people. Which is my own neurosis, I suppose. I like the feeling of complete freedom, knowing that it’s my ass on the line. So, no, I didn’t really ask for any funding. And, other than the Casbah concert, I really didn’t get much. But I did have people more than hint that they were willing to give me some money, and I didn’t take them up on it. After the film comes out and I need to pursue touring and distribution, things like that, if people like the film, I think I’ll look for more money at that point. I feel better about it, that way. I didn’t want to take advantage of the general DIY supportiveness of this scene to ask for money for a project that they may or may not like. I think they’ll like it, but who knows? Once they see it they can decide if they want to give me money to help it actually get seen more.

Q: You mentioned this little fundraiser at the Casbah, but it was actually pretty epic. So tell us about that. What happened there?

BP: That was San Diego’s Finest. That was amazing. One of the nicest things about doing this documentary is I’ve become very good friends with Rob Crow (Physics, Heavy Vegetable, Thingy, Pinback). We’re a lot alike in certain ways. He’s just much more talented than me! [laughs] But Rob’s been really wonderful through the whole thing, incredibly supportive. And when he heard we wanted to do this benefit, I asked him, and I just assumed he maybe would do a short solo set, something relatively simple. But he immediately volunteered to put together, essentially, an all-star band that would play the history of San Diego music from this period. And that’s what he did. It was crazy! He basically had a… I use this analogy because I know Rob would hate it with the core of his being. It’s like the Ringo Starr All-Starr Band. [laughs] Suck on that, Rob! [laughs] But, basically, it’s Rob as the leader of the band, and he had sort of a dedicated backing band, and he brought in all these luminaries from San Diego’s history to play everything from three-chord straightedge punk to weird-ass Trumans Water and No Knife songs. It was great, it was amazing. And it was a wonderful night, just to see people come out and it was kind of a big reunion in a lot of ways. So that was wonderful, yeah.

Q: Were there times when you wondered if all the effort was worth it, and contemplated dropping the project?

BP: Well, I did briefly drop the project, actually. That was at the beginning. But that was more for technical reasons. Our first few shoots, I didn’t like the way the footage looked. And so I stopped it for a few months. I was doing research and stuff like that on it still, but I just stopped working on it at the very beginning. I never actually considered dropping it, but there are constantly times when I wonder if it’s all worth it, because it really is an insane amount of work. And, as supportive as people are, they don’t understand how much does go into it. Especially, I think people are going to be surprised at how the film looks, because there’s a certain level of expectation with punk rock documentaries, and, to my mind, it’s occasionally a bit low. [laughs] The bar is set a little bit low. And even some of the ones I really love, they really put no effort into making it look like a good film. And that’s OK, but I really did make a lot of effort, on my budget, to make it look nice. So, yeah, there are times when you’ve emailed somebody for the thirtieth time and they haven’t responded, or somebody offers to do an interview and they want to do it in the middle of traffic somewhere [laughs] where the sound is going to be terrible, where I do get frustrated and I do kind of wonder if it’s all worth it. But then, all it really takes is just, whatever, having Pall Jenkins (Three Mile Pilot) or somebody say how stoked they are you’re doing it. Or having Rob say something nice, or having some stranger write to me from Poland saying they want to see it, and it all seems worth it again.

Q: You’re having the first screening, I don’t know if you’re calling it a premiere or a preview, on October 9th, at the Victory Theater in San Diego. Tell us what we can expect to happen there.

BP: Well, technically, I’m calling it the Director’s Cut, even though I hate that term. But that’s what I’ve decided to call it, because there’s some material in there that may have to be cut before it goes out for wider distribution. So this may be one of the few chances to see the film the way I’d like to show it. And it’s just going to be a big party. We’ll keep it real loose. Rob Crow is going to do a little DJ set, we’re going to show the film, and we’re going to go over to The Hideout (a club in San Diego’s City Heights neighborhood) and have some bands and some beer and have a good time. I want it to be special, but also very low key and very San Diego. No red carpet or any of that kind of bullshit. If we want to do that down the road we can do it. [laughs] There had been some talk about doing a “friends-only” screening at the Casbah where people who were in the film could come and see it, and I decided I wasn’t quite as hot on that because I wanted it to be a chance for everybody to mix together. What I like about this screening is that, hopefully, you’ll have John Reis and some kid from Poway (San Diego suburb), who’s never even seen any of these bands live, sitting next to each other. And that’s what I wanted. I wanted it to be something for everybody. After that we’ll get into maybe more specific screenings. But I wanted this to be a chance for everybody to come together, hopefully, to experience it together.


Pitchfork: Before there was a website, there was a band


Q: What’s your plan for the film beyond this preview? Will you take this onto the festival circuit? Will you do a DVD? How will you distribute it?

BP: Well, it will come out on DVD and digital and all that, probably either late this year or early next year. I have some stuff I have to take care of before I can do that. In the mean time we’re going to have, I’m putting it together right now, so I’m a little cagey about it, but we’ll probably have a couple little tours of it. Maybe an east coast and a west coast run. And then, hopefully, some festival screenings, one-off screenings, things like that. It’ll get around, I’d like to show it as much as possible in theaters and alternative venues, hopefully with me present, because that’s half the fun, really. You work on something like this and, it’s like being in a band, I guess. You work on your album and the fun is going out and being able to play the music for people, meet people, and experience their reactions. If I were just to put it out on DVD, that would be no fun at all. So people have lots of chances to see it, one way or another.

Q: Is there anything you would like to add?

BP: Probably not. But thank-you for your interest, and thanks for being supportive all this time. I really appreciate it.

For more information, on this film, check out the website, www.billingsgate.org/sdmusicdoc.