Deep in the underground of the
surrounding Los Angeles area music
scene lurks an esoteric sound ready
to emerge. The sound, which was
well-received when eventually
brought to the UK, has only been
heard here in the US by a selective
audience of rave enthusiasts and
unsuspecting kids as they exited LA
gigs. Captivating the audience with
their cacophony of noise from the
automatic
head
detonator
back of their flatbed truck, Automatic Head
Detonator was able to introduce their unique
combination of hip hop sampling, techno, and
garage rock punk. Live-Outside the Hollywood
Palladium Sonic Youth Gig, the second release
on their own independent label Lo-Fi Records,
captures one such gig, while the first record, Whar
The Fuck Do You Know?, did extremely well
through mail order sales.
So... How did the band get together? What sort
of issues concern them and are a source of
Inspiration when writing lyrics? What initially
made them want to be in a band? And, now that
they seek acceptance from a broader audience,
how can one acquire copies of their records?
Zeke Wray, their lyricist, had this to offer:
"I'd seen those guys around. We lived in Los
Angeles, taking a beating doing all these shitty
jobs, and then once we found each other, we
moved up to [Death Valleyl. There was cheap rent.
so we lived up there for like a year-and-a-half,
but then when we got back from England, we got
evicted because we were behind on our rent, so
now we live in a trailer outside of Los Angeles.
What The Fuck Do You Know? we recorded at
home on our four-track. John (Stone) plays the
drums, Tommy (Loyal plays the bass, and I just do
whatever else that's left to do.
All of the business practices just seem corrupt.
and everything else-politics, ecology. It just
seems like the whole culture is fucked. I don't
know exactly what all of us kids are supposed to
do. Yeah, you can go to college, but whether you
get out, you can have a job or not have a job,
but it's like nobody makes stuff in America any-
more. It's all made in China or South America, and
they're exploiting cheap labor. That's what rich
people do. They exploit one area, and when that
area gets built up, when people start expecting too
much, they pull the plug and move all the jobs and
resources and money somewhere else where there's
poor people who will take a low amount.
We're becoming like a third-world nation where
there is no work, and once everybody gets poor and
desperate enough, businesses will come with, "Okay,
now will you work for four dollars?" It's really scary.
I look at America as like a Nazi Germany. I don't
see much of a difference between ghettos in Chicago
and LA and New York in that it's the same thing as the
Warsaw ghetto in Poland. If you go out of
your bad neighborhood, the cops
stop you. Every week in LA
you read about another kid
where all the police has
to say is, "Well, we
thought he had a gun,"
and they can shoot a
fourteen-year-old kid and get away with it.
In the seventies, everybody was using regular gas,
then they realized there was this hole in the ozone, and
the big businesses realized, "It's not a matter of profit,
It's a matter of we're going to fuck everything up if we
don't stop using leaded gas." Recycling was nothing ten
years ago, but now they're realizing we better recycle.
What I think is positive is that people of our gen
eration and younger, they're growing up learning this.
It'll be interesting to see what happens when it
becomes time for the first generation of punks, people
our age, when they become the power brokers. But,
you can never tell. It was the people who grew up in
the sixties, which was supposed to be this radical
changing time, they're the ones who became the
Reagan people. In a way it's a bummer, but it's also
positive because people are definitely more aware.
We're not trying to be a huge rock n' roll band
selling millions of records. We're not that concerned
about getting signed, that's why we started our own
label. We make records, and if we want to put them
out, we save up, and we put them out. We just like
music, and our stuff is pretty weird and noisy. We're
old-fashioned guys, doing it for fun, and we find it
really exciting. People like the energy and the excite-
ment and the fact that we're putting our heart into it
because we like it. It makes us feel good.
We don't rehearse. We know the songs, and we all
are good at playing our way of playing, so when we
play a gig, we haven't played for a couple of weeks,
and it's really fun then. We may be more unprofes-
sional, but it's all about expressing yourselves. We all
like all different kinds of music, and without really
thinking about it, we're just taking all the things we
love and throwing them all in a pot. We're not
careerists, trying to get ahead. We just want to play in
front of people."
-Jasmine K Huynh
You can write to Automatic Head Detonator at
Midnight Music Management, 8722 1/2 West Pico
Boulevard, Los Angeles, California, 90035
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