"WE USED TO HAVE
HAIRCUT PARTIES
EVERY THURSDAY
NIGHT. THIS WENT ON
FOR ABOUT A YEAR
STRAIGHT."
SUICIDAL
very big either. We didn't have very good equipment, and it barely fit in there. We had a couple of wars with
the "Comeback Inn," which played live music 365 days of the year. Sometimes until 5 o'clock in the morning.
It was like a jazz place about two doors down. They didn't like us too much. Sometimes we'd come home
from Hollywood at three in the morning and they would still be going. You see, we were the only house on
the block. Everything else was all industrial. We'd try to go to sleep and they'd be doing all this jazz stuff.
We'd come home and figure, "What the hell?" So we'd aim our amps out their way and...I still have that
letter they passed out in the neighborhood trying to get us evicted.
From that place we moved to a small place. The kind of place where it was okay to party anytime you wanted,
no matter what time it was, or who you were with. We had a couple rent parties where we played. They were
so packed, there were people up on the roof. People even falling off the roof. We ended up getting more than
enough money for the rent. Those who attended the party were pretty much a breakdown of what the local
population was like. Everyone had the hand-drawn shirts, everyone had the bandanas. You know, the local
contingency. This was also a time when there really wasn't short hair. You see, much of the beach communities
had long hair, that's the way they grew up. I had the long hair, my brother had the long hair. If you were in
the surfer cool crowd, you had the long hair. Even if you were "Melvin the Geek" your hair was over your
ears. Whereas now, everyone has the short hair and they got the little fruity gay hairdos. So back then, as
short hair styles began to surface, it was shocking, it stuck out.
We used to have haircut parties every Thursday night, cutting people's hair, blasting tunes and everything.
The thing was, if you got your haircut at one of those parties, you had to bring someone the next week. If
you didn't, we'd shave your head bald. This went on for about a year straight, with the exact same adapter
on the haircutter, and everyone had the exact same haircut. We'd walk down the street and everyone had
the exact same, quarter-inch length hair.
When we first started playing shows outside of the general Venice area we really stuck out. We're talking
where there's mostly white people at the punk rock thing, with their leather jackets, and all of a sudden emerge
these people with the same length hair, with these button up shirts with drawings on the back, bandanas,
Levi's and khakis and stuff. It stuck out.
An early show, at the Roller Rink in Chatsworth, I think it was with Minor Threat. We had at least 150 to
200 just from here who attended. At a show where there's the capacity of about 500 people, we really stuck
out. The rest of the crowd in attendance had never heard of us, we're the opening band y'know. So we start
playing and our following starts going off. When the other bands start playing, everything stopped. There was
no circle. We just stood around, all of us talking, rapping and blah, blah, blah. We continued to stick out. A
lot of people in bands resented us y'know. They'd say, "Who the 'BEEP' are these dudes?" When setting
up shows, we'd tell the person involved with booking that we didn't want to play in front of "so and so," 'cause
we'd draw more people. Then they'd mention the fact that "so and so" had records out, and we'd say, "So
what, that don't mean nothin', we'll draw more." When promoters presented "so and so" bands with this situation,
they'd say, "Well, I'm not gonna play below them, fucking wet-backs."
YOU FOUND A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF PREJUDICE EVEN WITHIN THE SO-CALLED OPEN-MINDEDNESS
OF THE HARDCORE SCENE?
That's one of the hypocricies of it. They talk about being an individual, but when we first started out, we
played at the Galaxy, a person came up to me, I won't mention his name, but he says, "You guys are pretty.
good, I can't believe it. You guys could do good, but, you shouldn't dress like that. You should wear leather
and look more punk. You ain't gonna do much, looking the way you do. I'm just telling you as a friend." The
whole thing was that they're trying to tell us to look the way they do-conform-while at the same time they're
talking about being individuals. When we're doing something that's different than them, they tell us to be
the way they are. Trying to deny us our individuality. Look in the old Skateboarder Magazines. My brother,
you see him, he's wearing the bandana. That's what everyone was wearing: the bandanas, the
Pendleton's...that's just the way people dress around here. When I was twelve years old I was dressing like
that. Where we are, that's the way we dress. If we changed, we would be posing.
WHAT WAS THE PROGRESSION OF YOUR NOTORIETY AFTER THE INITIAL RELEASE OF THE FIRST
ALBUM?
Our first record, titled Suicidal Tendencies, was initially pressed under 2,000. That was on Frontier Records.
After it came out we went on tour. No one had heard of us. We had no promotion budget. Obviously, why
would anyone come to see us? Our line of thinking was, that we thought we were good. We knew at the outset
that we weren't gonna make any money, we'd have to skimp and not eat that much. It came to a point where
we'd eat once a day. We'd eat beans and eggs and a gallon of milk at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. We came
back skinny from that tour and we were big kids. It was funny. There are a couple of funny stories. One time
when we were in Milwaukee there was this big warehouse and from there we got these big five gallon things
of beans. Down the road we went into a 7-11 for the milk to complete our feast of tortillas, eggs and beans.
But Louiche went over and grabbed the cheese. I told him, "You know we can't get cheese, I told you before."
He said, "I'm having cheese with my eggs." I told him we couldn't afford it, because cheese is expensive,
it costs more than meat. So he said, "We're getting cheese, aren't we guys?" He looked at the rest of the
band and their heads went down. "You know we can't afford it," I told them. Their heads went back down
again. He goes, "WE'RE GETTING CHEESE, AREN'T WE?" Their heads stayed down, so he said, "Fuck
you guys" and threw it back. After I walked out they talked and said, "Screw Mike! We're getting cheese."
It was pretty funny, but that's the way it was. We were on tour for two months and the most we got was $100
for a show. That only happened twice. We did a number of shows for free and a number of shows not intended
to be free but ended up being free. We played a...well we didn't plan this out...but it ended up being a
black gay bar in Denver, in front of eight people. I could go on and on about the first tour, but when I look
back, it was a lot of fun and it was a great experience. We were young, got to travel around, it was great.
Right now, I probably wouldn't want to do it again. But we figured, if we played in front of ten people (we never
said ten, we said a hundred, which turned out to be ten) and they liked it, they'd go out and buy the album
and tell more people about us. That was the point of the tour and apparently it worked. We couldn't get a
show in Boston the first time. They wouldn't book us. We went back to the same place a year later and sold
it out, did fifteen hundred people and it was snowing. A lot of times when the weather's bad, they won't bother
with waiting outside in line to get into a show.
We had a lot of determination and thought Suicidal Tendencies was gonna do good. And it did.
WHAT WAS, PERHAPS, THE MILESTONE THAT BROUGHT ALL THE ATTENTION TO SUICIDAL
TENDENCIES?
When we first got back from the tour a lot of our friends were telling us, "Wow, you guys are getting big!"
"THE WHOLE THING
WAS THAT THEY'RE
TRYING TO TELL US TO
LOOK THE WAY THEY
DO-CONFORM WHILE
AT THE SAME TIME
THEY'RE TALKING
ABOUT BEING
INDIVIDUALS."
LOCO
Venice
58