WHY ARE YOU GUYS SUCH CRIMINALS?
Well, we used to be into a lot of crazy shit
when we were younger. The rest of the guys,
they did their shit, but I was breaking many laws.
And it just seemed like an apt name for the
group. It kind of takes on that "Where you
comin' from?" vibe. It just seemed to work.
Tell me about the song "Smoke 'Em."
I was in the Marines for a little while, and
when you're in the Marines, you do dumb shit,
like jump out of planes, storm beaches, and you
do crazy shit like that, and right before you get
to do all that great stuff for George Bush and all
the other fuckin' idiots, they give you like five
minutes, and they say, "Smoke 'Em If You Got
'Em," and what that means is you've got like
five minutes to look back on your life and think
sible to everybody, which was blues music.
Anybody who was feeling bad could understand
what the fuck was going on. And back in those
days, and these days, most of the people are
feeling bad about something or other, and I
think anything anybody does that's, I don't want
to say complaint rock and I don't want to say
alternative, because we're alternative, but a lot
of those bands, it's angst, and like it or not,
that's blues as well. It may be blues about their
parents didn't buy them the Volkswagen Jetta
this year, but whatever, it's still them feeling bad,
it's just they're feeling bad about different shit,
and that's all I really can look back on is that it's
kind of like a floor plan to do my stuff, because
that's all I really listened to when I was growing
up, and that's all I really felt that was real.
Fun Lovin
CRIMINALS
about what was important to you, what is impor-
tant to you, what you want to do if you get
through it, and it's like a time of reflection
almost, and I think with the song, I tried to break
it down to like the actual thought processes.
The chorus I always think it's like the call, so
you've got the guy telling you you've got five
minutes, and the first verse is you're thinking
about your girl and stuff like that, and by the
end of the verse you start feeling your oats,
you're feeling like you're ready to jump out of
that plane and shoot some motherfuckers, and
then the second verse is coming to terms with
what you did, knowing where you sit in the uni-
verse after you do all that, forgiveness and so
forth.
I read that the other guys were into techno.
I'd have to take the credit for getting those
boys out of that crazyful music. Fast grew up lis-
tening to electronic music. As far as I know, he
never really heard classic rock styles until we
started hanging out a couple years ago, and it
was like a natural progression in the techno
music. If you listen to electronic music like back
in the eighties, it kind of progressed into that.
You guys use a lot of live stuff, right?
The first song is "The Fun Lovin' Criminal,"
we've got that acoustic guitar bit going, that's
all me playing the acoustics and shit. And then
the horns are fast. That's actually a pretty live
song, but there are drum loops going through
this song.
I do get some blues influence in there, too,
and myself, I'm a big fan of the blues.
Me too, man, that's where it all comes from..
That's all I can do, really, as a guitar player, and
anything I do that sounds like it's coming from
the blues, it definitely did. American music kind
of started taking on its own persona with the
blues. There was always classical music, and that
kind of transcended in early America, and there
was jazz music, but then it started getting acces-
Who's John Gotti?
John Gotti used to be the crime boss in New
York City, like the Don of Dons, the boss of all
bosses, and they called him the Teflon Don
because everything just slipped right off him
and he was somewhat of a cult here to certain
Italian-Americans and other people who live on
the fringe of society, and "King Of New York"
is about a crazy guy named Frankie, who
decides he's going to break John Gotti out of
jail because he doesn't like the way things are
going after this guy left, which doesn't really
have anything to do with John Gotti, it just has
to do with the way society makes left turns
every once in a while, and this guy trips on the
fact that John Gotti, his hero, is locked up, so,
not having a real bond with reality, decides he's
going to go to Illinois and break him out. But
John Gotti's in Colorado. I mean, he was in
Illinois at one point, but they moved him to
Colorado, and Frankie doesn't know this, so
Frankie goes there and gets killed.
I like how you guys were saying that every
song has a life, and where each song is not
like just one thing, but it melds a whole bunch
of different things.
When we started this band, Fast and I
were just buddies, just being roommates, and
we were just playing and putting stuff together
in our house. And we worked at clubs in New
York City, and we have MTV, so we knew what
was going on out there, and we didn't really like
it much, because everybody was becoming their
genre of music, like you were saying, "I'm
this," and we figured, "We write songs," and
there's so much musical influence in the city that
we lived in that it all just naturally came togeth-
er, and we didn't really want to stick to one
type of music. I guess a lot of people say it's
kind of hip hop and it's kind of rock.
Do any of you guys skateboard?
I used to when I was a kid because it was the
only way to get around Manhattan, but when I
was in the Marines, I hurt my leg, so I can't real-
ly do much of anything anymore. I mean, I can
walk and run if I'm chased, but other than that,
I really can't fuck with any sports.
How'd you hurt yourself in the Marines?
I was jumping out of a plane and hurt my legs.
What do you guys do for fun?
Luckily we're in that city that never sleeps, so
there's always something to amuse us. We like
doing graffiti and stuff like that. We hang a lot,
we play a lot of music, we do a lot of movie
watching and try to find different movies and
shit like that. My boy Fast in the group, he has
like a home theatre set-up with the surround
sound and the laser disc player, so we do a lot
of that. We're just trying to stay out of trouble,
that's what our lawyer told us to do. We go out
and like one thing will lead to another, and we
can't do that shit now, because we have a gig or
we've got to do something, we can't be locked
up. But, yeah, just pretty much try to stay out of
trouble until the record comes out.
-Brian Brannon
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