No Deposit, No Return

Part II: The Local Dirt-Punk Stalwarts Of Music Hates You Talk Songcraft, Perseverance And Passion

originally published June 6, 2007

Last week, Part I of this conversation with members of local heavyweight act Music Hates You - vocalist-guitarist Noah Ray, guitarist Zaxx Hembree, bassist Forest Hetland and drummer Patrick Ferguson - covered questions of the Athens scene, where heavy bands fit into our town's musical pantheon and the relationship between performers and their audience. Missed out? No worries: it's available here.

Flagpole

What makes a great heavy band?

Zaxx Hembree

What I look for in a band, is if I go to a show and after the first 10 minutes I feel like I'm gonna throw up, that makes me feel great. If I can look into someone's eyes when they're playing and know that that's a vicious motherfucker, I am totally in tune with them and that's the right fucking band. Does that make sense?

Flagpole

It doesn't have a lot to do with what they sound like, but what you're saying is at that point they're probably going to be sounding good.

Zaxx Hembree

That doesn't really matter to me.

Noah Ray

I don't think it's relevant, what a heavy band sounds like; not as much as the way they present it. It's more important to me to see people who mean it.

Zaxx Hembree

There's no type of metal that I hate.

Forest Hetland

I believe in a 95-4-1 perspective. Ninety-five percent of any genre, any couch, any window is crap. Four percent is something you'll listen to again.

Zaxx Hembree

Couch?

Forest Hetland

Any brand of couch, or a brand of food, or a restaurant, or anything. Ninety-five percent of restaurants suck. Four percent you'll go back and eat at again. One percent you'll try your best to eat at every day. Music is like that, and those are the bands you really care about. Maybe they did nothing original, but they did it with all their heart, and everyone believed them, and everyone was on the same page.

Flagpole

What's to be said of songcraft, though? There's a degree to which songcraft has been diluted in the past, maybe, 15 years or so, as amps have gotten louder and tones have gotten heavier. I've noticed, especially in this decade, that a lot of times I see a band and all the members seem concerned with is how loud and heavy they sound, and they're not actually interested in whether their songs are anything memorable.

Forest Hetland

But there are still exceptions.

Flagpole

Well, right. Converge is a great example of the one-percent band. It still has awesome riffs while being heavy as hell. I can remember things that these guys do. I saw them a few months ago at the 40 Watt with Mastodon, and I loved Mastodon that night, but Converge knocked Mastodon off the stage because every note seemed memorable. It seems to me in hindsight, 15 or 20 years ago, that there was a reverence for riffs and songs where every note counted that doesn't seem to be as strong these days.

Patrick Ferguson

I consider the first wave of metal to be like the MC5, Cream, later the beginnings of AC/DC and all that, and those guys were coming out of the '50s and '60s songwriting paradigm that was basically verse/ chorus/ verse/ chorus/ bridge/ verse/ chorus. Then, there was this sort of second wave of metal where there was a real possibility that just about no matter how off the charts you were, with the exception of Venom, that you were gonna actually break through and be a commercial success. So they hung on to that sort of pop idea of the verse and the chorus and hooks and all that.

Then there was a ton of super-successful metal in the late '80s like Poison and Ratt, but you always had this bubbling underground of bands like Motörhead, King Diamond, Slayer, S.O.D. Those guys still wrote songs. You can still remember the chorus of "Angel of Death."

There's a lot of doom and black metal right now that is intentionally atonal or anti-pop structure. I'm not really qualified to comment on that because Music Hates You - and I know I'll probably get strangled for this as soon as you turn off that tape deck - we write pop songs in the sense of having verses and choruses and bridges. But there's a kind of no-wave, anti-music thing that happens with bands like Sunn O))) and Boris, and they're deconstructing loud music to the point where it's just tones and the songs, more like weird symphonies.

Forest Hetland

And that can be valuable at times.

It's art. It's still art, it's just not pop or rock and roll. I don't think that's bad or good, it just is.

Flagpole

Bands that are on "Headbanger's Ball" on MTV2 these days, bands like Lamb of God or Chimaera, it's almost like they're just producing tones, too, or might as well be. I can't remember a single riff I've ever heard from a Lamb of God song, even though I've listened to a whole album, because all I hear is guitar heaviness.

Patrick Ferguson

Part of that is mastering. Everything's mastered super loud right now. You go into this room and some guy says, "How do you want to master this?" And most bands are saying the same thing: "Everything louder than everything else." You get this really hot mix that doesn't much convey any melody, and I think there's an innate desire for melody in people who love music.

There are also people, though, who just love to tap into that brain frequency of rage, and for them, the harder it is and the more atonal it is, the better. Again, I'm not making a value judgment here. The kids are going to see Lamb of God and a lot of people love them, but are Lamb of God good? One of the things I learned from Pavement, who I fucking hate, is that just because I think something sucks doesn't mean it's bad. There were people around the band I was in the time that Pavement was popular who loved Pavement, who seemed to live and die to drink piss out of Stephen Malkmus' boot, and I actually thought the guy was a fraud.

But I learned at some point that I was missing something. There was something about Pavement that was good, that moved a nation of picky eaters and bed-wetters. There's something about Lamb of God that people connect with, and I fully support them as a band.

Forest Hetland

That connection is so vital, too, because if you have a high-school kid who's not familiar with, say, Led Zeppelin, and they hear Lamb of God and they connect to it, then that's where they are in their life, right now. That's valuable. For me, a lot of droney bands, I don't like. But the first time I saw Harvey Milk, I had no idea what was going on, but I knew that they knew what they were doing, and they weren't just doing a loud droney show for the sake of it. There was something else behind it, something I didn't see until I listened to some of their albums.

Patrick Ferguson

There's a band [Harvey Milk] that writes from an exceptionally honest place.

Forest Hetland

And they're true songwriters. They write songs that may not have a specific pattern, but they're a complete song.

Flagpole

We could easily have a whole conversation about Harvey Milk. That band comes from nowhere and exists everywhere all at once.

Noah Ray

And it's a totally different take on writing songs in general. They don't seem to feel responsible for making every note 10 million times louder than the last one. As far as songcraft goes, game over. Fucking give it up if you want to try to outdo those guys.

Flagpole

I've wondered how much of their otherworldliness is due to their location. Being from kind of a remote place and time where there wasn't a huge scene, they didn't have a lot of buddy bands, they didn't really have any prospects of getting bigger, they didn't tour, perhaps all that made them feel kind of free to make music as they saw and see fit.

Patrick Ferguson

There were a bunch of guys just like there are now who worked at the Gyro Wrap and Five Star, and worked in bars, and they would go see every Harvey Milk show, but it's true that they never enjoyed the kind of following that some other bands who were playing at the time did. I guess they were free to develop in their own hermetically sealed world.

I would've liked to see Harvey Milk break through maybe at least like someone like Jucifer who tour all the time and have a Relapse [Records] deal, but at the same time, there's something to be said for the obscurity of true greatness. Harvey Milk was never going to be booming out of the frat house like Nirvana because they were working their own genre.

Noah Ray

They've got plenty of songs where you never hear a distorted note or any growling or whatever. I honestly think Harvey Milk are what they are because those guys are just fucking crazy, and that music's maybe the way they deal with it. You could've put them anywhere with any instruments and they would've written songs that way because it's who they are.

Patrick Ferguson

If they had lived in Paris in 1930, they'd be brooding painters. If they'd lived in London in the '20s, they'd have been Dadaists. Those guys live far outside of the mainstream, artistically.

Noah Ray

All that said, personally, I cannot stand that type of songwriting. I love hooks.

Flagpole

They know how to do that, too, though, is the thing.

Noah Ray

They do that, but it's hell to get to it. You could go through a whole album and every minute is different than the last. The thing that draws me into Harvey Milk, though, is that I believe it. Every time Creston [Spiers] opens his mouth, every time they change movements, I don't believe it's something that they sat there deliberating about how to make it "fucked up" or whatever. I just believe them.

I can almost see what you're getting at about Converge and Mastodon, and I have no allegiance to either band whatsoever, but Converge got up onstage and it seemed like that guy could come off that stage and beat your ass at any time. You were transfixed by the atmosphere they created. Mastodon was kinda just playing their songs, which is fine. I have a lot of respect for that, too. Hats off and respect to them. I couldn't play any measure of any of their songs if I practiced it for the rest of my life, but at no point in their performance did I feel endangered.

Heavy music, at its best, makes me feel totally endangered. Black Flag is another example. Songcraft? Where? In a way, no note counted, none of 'em. But Black Flag counted. Part of that was that band, part of it was that scene, part of it was that time period. A heavy band is brilliant when the people up there have taken it so seriously simply because that's just who the fuck they are.

Flagpole

Any band in Athens, or anywhere else I've ever lived where people seem to care about it on any level - even if it's just 12 people who care about it - the reason that that happens is that people see something honest in what the band is doing.

Zaxx Hembree

It's like that every time I see The Dumps. Every time I see Jason [Richardson], the drummer, kick his hi-hat and roll his eyes back in his head, I feel that.

Patrick Ferguson

Now that you've said that, he's never going to do it again.

Noah Ray

There are a lot of bands who nobody gives a shit about in this town who can do that. Like I said, I've got a kid so I don't get out to every show that I want to, but that band Hot New Mexicans? I saw them six months or so ago, and dude, the guy's drum set was such a piece of fucking shit that he spent the whole set literally chasing it around. It was fucking incredible. Sold, man. Every chance I can feel like I'm not neglecting my duties as a father, I will go see that band, I will buy whatever they've got.

Why? Because they were totally themselves and did not give a fuck about what anybody thought about it.

Forest Hetland

Sometimes I feel that way about John Denver.

Flagpole

One of the first times that I saw American Cheeseburger, it was some house show and I got knocked down right in front of James, the vocalist. He was in his berserker rage, and where most people might lend a hand to help hoist me up, he literally kicked me. I thought that was awesome.

Forest Hetland

Certainly no pretense.

Noah Ray

In that regard, David Yow [of Scratch Acid and The Jesus Lizard] was the king. He wasn't going to be nice, because that wasn't his job.

Zaxx Hembree

I can remember shows we've played where fights have broken out between us in the band, or with members of the audience.

Noah Ray

Zaxx and I, New Year's Eve two years ago, somebody mistakenly gave us a bottle of tequila about an hour before we were supposed to go on and…

Patrick Ferguson

They got into it like three dogs in a bag of garbage.

Noah Ray

…yeah, and these two guys never stopped playing.

Zaxx Hembree

I hit him with a guitar.

Noah Ray

But that's part of it, y'know?

Two things happen simultaneously at this point: Forest chimes in, saying we have to end the interview because the establishment we've burrowed ourselves into is closing up, and my tape runs out. We continue talking about various things for a bit longer, and I walk out feeling certain of one thing - not just about so-called "heavy" music, but rock and roll in general in a relatively remote, but not artistically dry, town like Athens: as long as there are suffocating summers and a service industry, it will always exist, whether anyone cares or not.

Jace Bartet

Didn't see Music Hates You last weekend at Repent? Don't sweat it too much; Music Hates You's next local show is during AthFest, when the non-stop band takes the Caledonia Lounge stage at midnight on Saturday, June 23.