Oregon Voice Magazine

Nasal singing, check. Emo crowd, check. Feeling the music in your black heart check. The Mountain Goats at the WOW Hall was a relaxing evening for a warm Wednesday night. John Darnielle opened the set with a solo performance. As he ran up to the stage I hear a young boy in the crowd say “Here he comes!” I noticed this young man was also drawing with crayons the whole time to the music. The lyrics seemed to call the crowd to a stand still, literally.
“I’d like to ask my band to join me,” Danielle proclaimed. As the show continued, the crowd roared out requests, “ONIONS! COTTON! FREE BIRD!” Someone screamed, “Haven’t you heard of a set list!” The basest commented on the crowds requests including, “I want to have your babies.” His sweet banter and demur in his three piece suite reflected his tall and slim geeky persona.
If the Audience were all sitting, like many were, I think the narrative of The Mountain Goats lyrics would have seemed like an old age fable. My 10% Emo really felt like I was personally being sang to with songs like, “I’ll miss you when your gone.” The show seemed short, but sweet for that warm Wednesday night. The encore was by far the most enthusiastic performance. “This Year” was seventeen years young singing to all those angst high school kids and the nostalgic college students like me.

Just an update on the next OV issue: it will be out finals week.
Gunther has sadly opted not to grace us with his presence until April, so look for an interview with him in issue 4. The upcoming magazine, however, does have an interview with Lloyd Kaufman, who is arguably cooler than Gunther, though not quite as sexy.
Today we gathered some random opinions and thoughts from UO students, which will of course be in the next issue. Also look forward to a hula hoop DIY guide, comics galore and dream interpretations by yours truly.

Don’t forget to check out our poll at right. Stay cool, Eugene (and world).

As I watched the Academy Awards post show, where common people get to ask the great directors and writers about their works I really got inspired by Diablo Cody. She is pretty punk rock for Hollywood and has some sweet bangs. A questioned was asked by a USC film student, how to become successful? Her answer was to spread your work everyone as many eyes that can see it, show it to them. She emphasized if you write a zine make everyone read it and I think we here at the Oregon Voice should seriously make it happen. We may be a little magazine, but I think we have a lot of heart in us. lets go team!
D-girl out.

Once again, we have born witness to one of the more heinous aspects of the human condition. A young man has taken away the lives of several college students with an action of utmost selfishness. There is nothing that can justify this kind of killing. Murder is barbaric even with motive, and it is all the more deplorable when the victims have committed no wrongs.

This tragedy brought several things to mind. Firstly, helplessness. There are wackos out there like this man, and guns readily available, and there is simply no way to police all of them. Things like this can happen, even as you are about to fall asleep from boredom in lecture.

Second, wonder. Wonder at the brink on which we find ourselves. As incidents like this increase in number, I think, how long until we become like the Middle East? How long until we must fear for our lives not only on campuses, but at markets, at shopping malls? The waves of extremism has long been lapping up against the shores of North America — how long until the tsunami comes? There was a bombing in Mexico City on Friday near their police headquarters; no group has yet claimed responsibility, but it is indicative of the kind of fanaticism that plagues places like Iraq today.

Third, distress. I cringed when I read this quote: “Run, he’s reloading the gun.” Run. Certainly, a fight-or-flight survival mechanism is innate within us, urging us to flee danger when we feel that our lives are in jeopardy. But where are the heroes? This gunman was a “skinny man” — why did nobody attempt to take him down, if not at the beginning, then while he was reloading? It is estimated that he fired 20 or more shots. There had to have been a pause.

I don’t know how I would react under such conditions. I might have hidden behind chairs and fled for the exit like everyone else. But I would like to think that I would try to stop a man like this. It is hard to be the hero, and sometimes foolish, but we have seen what heroism can accomplish. This is what those aboard flight United 93 taught us: a brave few can sacrifice themselves to save the many.

Look at the numbers: five have died so far from this shooting, and 16 others are wounded, many critically. It takes a lot of courage to stand up to somebody with a gun, but if somebody had, or if two or three people had, perhaps a few other families would have been spared the grief they are now experiencing.

We cannot prevent every manic depressive from invading our lives with their violence. But we can stand up to them, saving lives and depriving them of the ultimate cowardly exit of suicide. Death is too good for them. Let us have them face justice.

While my mind contemplates the possible thoughts that could ooze out of my finger tips and to your lovely eyes, I would like to make a blanket statement about dedication.

Firstly, I want to personally thank the people reading this that put a decent amount of pride into your work. It really makes life a whole lot easier and entertaining for everyone. Personally, it’s frustrating for me to work with such awesomely dedicated people like the OV staff and the DPS crew, and then go to a class that people pay to participate in and work with people who shit something on a spoon and present it to the general public. I would name names, but you know who you are. Don’t worry, we do too.
Honestly, what’s the point in writing, producing, and editing material that is so obviously poor quality? I suppose I fail to understand the flawed logic of doing just enough to scrape by. I mean, I understand that my life might be less laborious, less tedious, and more prone to boredom, but if the crap you publish is so shitty it’s alienating, then you cease to be an artist. You become a wannabe. Wannabes are scum. Scum are bad people. Bad people steal. Stealer’s lie. Lier’s kill. And killers go to Hell. Why would anyone want to go to Hell?
So, if you’re reading this and you recognize the fact that you just plain don’t give a fuck about something creative that you do, please. Just stop. Save us all from the shit on a spoon material that will somehow be fed to awesome people like me, and go ride a bike. You probably need the exercise.

I’ve always done fairly well with the philosophy of, “Ignore it; it’ll go away.” It works for that crazy Jesus guy when he comes to campus and calls me a whore for having a hole in my jeans. It works for unwanted attentions on the Indigo District dance floor. It works for the mysterious bruises that appear on my knees after said fun-filled nights at Indigo. But it’s not working for the Oregon Commentator, the illustrious campus “Conservative Journal of Opinion”.
After their attack on the Oregon Voice in their issue late last year for not having come out with an issue of our own yet (to which I’ll just point out, since we’re on the subject, that we’re a 32-page, quarterly magazine, which means we come out four times a year) I chose to pretend the whole slip-up on their part never happened. But now, we’ve got a whole page and a half in the new OC issue (pdf here) dedicated us, so here I am.

First of all, let me just say the comic was cute. I liked the peeved-looking bird in the middle particularly. Nice play on the cover we used last year for a story on the Cascades Raptor Center.
Oh, wait, that wasn’t a clever spin on something that happened recently, was it, OC? Yes, now I see, the date on the bottom of that comic says 2004. As in, before anybody on our active editorial staff even thought about coming to school here (we would have been juniors in high school then, and the comic’s portrayal of us as academically casual semi-slackers wasn’t that far off).

It’s ok, as a fellow slave to an independent student magazine, I know how difficult it is to come up with fresh, interesting material. Which is why I also understand how easy it is to slip into petty criticisms of other students and people who are trying to do constructive things, rather than to do something positive yourselves. Writing humorously can be difficult; writing humorously for the higher purpose of encouraging other people to think or to facilitate a change in behavior is damned near impossible sometimes.

Luckily for us here at Voice, there are fine people like Janae Schiller on staff to strike that difficult balance between silly and thought-provoking. She managed to poke a little fun at Uncle Phil (Knight – see our issue with the gay flag on front to read the whole essay) while pointing out the fact that his racially profiling shoes are unacceptable to a good segment of Nike’s targeted market. The Oregon Commentator, on the other hand, seems to choose the subjects they rant about from a giant beachball with the words “ASUO”, “liberals”, “how we’d rather be drunk”, “ASUO”, “popular culture”, “something else (limit once per issue)” inscribed on the sides, which they toss up into the air with hateful glee to see which topic their fingers will land on.

Well, OC, sorry you chose us for your token non-ASUO, non-liberal, booze-sodden rant. In the next one, let’s see a little punctuation and something resembling a point. Cheers!

Hey Voices.

Cori Here the unofficially appointed D-Girl of Staff. I like to develop ideas and brainstorm. I’m thinking this issue looks fab and for the next I was thinking about instead of Best of…we could do Most’s like Most Wanted Material Good and Most Appealing Feature of the Voice.

Pick up the new issuse, on new stands NOW!

D-Girl OUT!

words Jason Thayer
photos Daniel Arnold

If you ever get your hands on a flux capacitor-equipped Dolorean, forget the 50s. Set your sights on Atlanta, 2003 and find a Black Lips show. The sound will be kind of shitty – duct tape will do that to a PA – and the Lips’ songs will still be miles away from the dark country and doo-wop infused “flower punk” that landed their latest release, Good Bad Not Evil on just about every top 10 list for 2007. No worries though, you’re not there for the sound. You’re there for the spew—the cocktail of spit and piss that might make its way out of guitarist Cole Alexander’s pursed lips. You’re there for a shower, a little mist of history because it was, after all, these stage antics that earned the Black Lips nationwide notoriety and a spot on the blacklist of damn near every club in the South.

Recently, the Lips have traded in flying fluids and faulty equipment for trans-Atlantic tours and a whole slew of praise from the hippos at Pitchfork. Even without the piss, Rolling Stone anointed them one of the best live acts in the country.
While The Voice won’t compete with The Stone in terms of tits-per-issue, we still scored an interview with Lips’ drummer and co-vocalist, Joe Bradley. Ask him about anything we missed when the Black Lips bring their brand of refined sleaze to the WOW hall on February 6th. OV: Every thing I read about the Black Lips at least brushes on some of your crazier shows of yesteryear. You guys have tamed down the more lewd aspects of your live show. Why?

JB: In the past one of the reasons our shows were so crazy was because we weren’t the greatest musicians around. Sometimes our equipment was a little questionable being held together with duct tape. Back in 2004 and 2005 we didn’t even have cases for our guitars and they would just ride on tope of all the equipment in the back in a big ol’ pile. Most the time we wouldn’t even have money for replacement strings or anything. So to sum it all up, the music wasn’t that great at our live shows so in order to entertain people for the performance aspect of it, like, if the music doesn’t sound that great, it should at least be entertaining to watch, to be a part of. So things would get kind of crazy and we’d get a lot of crowd interaction and a lot of spewing of bodily fluids. But times have changed. We’ve gotten better at playing our instruments. We’re performers as well as musicians but we’re musicians first.

OV: I was really hoping to see you guys spit some piss at the Conan crowd.

JB: They we’re pretty strict and they were already taking a chance having a band like us on there because we weren’t that well known. I mean, we’re still not that well known. They normally have more established acts. Someone put their neck out on the line for us and luckily with as much chance as there is for things to go wrong in a situation like that, everything went great. Even the sound was really cool. It sounded really raw when they broadcast it, which is awesome.

OV: What was Conan like?

JB: Ah, he’s a bad ass. He’s really huge and he even took time to hold this thing called a post-mortem meeting which is just a meeting that happens after each one of his shows. But he took time off of that to come down and take pictures with us and hang out for like tem minutes before he had to go off and take care of business. But he was really nice, and I guess, he’s never out of character. When he came to meet us, it still seemed like he was being a talk show host. He’s just really cool. I heard he was a collector of old rockabilly seven inches.

OV: So you guys were right up his alley, then.

JB: Yeah.

OV: On the new album especially, I get a real country feel. Especially on “How do you tell a child someone has died.”

JB: Oh yeah, that’s like straight up country. That’s more influenced by this whole darker area of country that most people don’t know about. Hank Williams Sr. had an alter ego for all his darker country called Luke the Drifter. There’s a whole compilation of these really dark songs on Crypt records called God Less America instead of God bless America. That’s the type of song that influenced “How do you tell a child someone has died.”

OV: I feel like you guys have a knack for writing about dark, really tragic events without making them come off as melodramatic at all.

JB: It’s good to have that kind of juxtaposition. You listen to Emo music and it’s so sad and heart breaking but the chances are these people haven’t had anything bad happen to them their entire life. Most of the time you’ll find that the most happy go-lucky people are those that have experienced the most misfortune. They’re normally a lot more optimistic about life than everyday people because they’ve been to the depths of despair and they only way to go is up. They’re a little bit more positive about it but there are still very dark undertones to their lives.

OV: Well you guys have certainly been through some shit. What effect did Ben’s death have on you as a band?

JB: It helped us keep on going. We had a tour planned but then he got killed. We only canceled the first date in Chattanooga so we could have his funeral. And since a bunch of our friends from different parts of the country had flown in for the funeral we crowded them all in our van and in our friends, the Carbonas’ van and we all went out on tour together. We are all really close knit and it helped us get through it all. We just did the tour as a three piece and we asked one of our friends, Jack Hines, to move back to Atlanta and play guitar with us. He was on our second album and he was with us through the shittiest times. The times when we were eating out of trash cans and going to homeless shelters for meals, making more money on the street than we would for playing the show the night before. Things have gotten a lot better, a lot more organized, a lot easier.

OV: Did I read somewhere that you guys used to sleep at homeless shelters on tour?

JB: No, we’d normally just kick it in the van and wake up covered in sweat or freezing cold. We’d just go park in a hotel parking lot and sleep there because we couldn’t afford the hotel room. It used to be we’d play some shit town in the middle of nowhere and try our hardest to make friends. We had this thing called vulture mode where you seek out any thing that your body needs like food or shelter. You got no cigarettes? Get an empty pack and bum one from everyone in the room, then you have a full pack of cigarettes. If some dude’s walking out of the restaurant with his girlfriend, you ask him, “Sir, I’m hungry can I please have those leftovers” and he doesn’t want to seem like a chump in front of his date so he’ll give you the leftovers. Basically, you learn how to make friends real quick so you can stay at their place, maybe take a shower. One particular instance in Bowling Green, OH, I met this guy and he was like, “You can stay at my house but I don’t anything good to eat.” We’re like, “That’s fine.” And the next morning he brought us donuts and a two-liter of Coca-Cola for breakfast.

OV: Well you guys have come along way from scrounging leftovers. You’ve got features in Rolling Stone, Spin, Pitchfork, and I think even the New York Time called you the hardest working band at South By Southwest.

JB: That’s right. They did a video segment about us, it’s up on the internet somewhere. We’ve got a good work ethic and he know no one else is going to do the hard work for us. Plus it’s fun. It’s our job, as well as our life. Nothing’s better than working for yourself.

OV: Can you pinpoint a moment when you were like, “Wow, we’re kind of a big deal?”

JB: The turning point was October of like 2005. There was a point where we had been in Europe for four months—we did a two week tour then traveled for 6 weeks and then we did a full two month tour. After we got back to the states we noticed a real difference. Things have been rolling ever since.

OV: No joke. You guys are even going to be in a couple movies. Tell me about “Let it Be.”

JB: We’re supposed to be the stars in that movie. It’s your run of the mill movie about a do-it-yourself band roughly based off this band called the Altar Boys that existed in the early 1980s based out of New York. The guys who wrote the script we’re actually in that band so they wrote it based on their own experience. It’s basically the ups and downs of being in a band. The band sees a little bit of success and it all plays out from there. They want us to write some songs for the movie too. It should be an interesting experience. We’re supposed to start shooting on June 1st. Most of it’s going to be shot in Buford, SC and Savannah ’cause it’s a lot cheaper to shoot there. And all of the outside shots that are supposed to be New York are going to be shot in New York. It’ll be a nice break from touring. Before that we’ve still got to do a full U.S. tour and a full European tour and a full U.K. tour so we got our work cut out for us.

OV: Any nervousness about having to act?

JB: Nah. I mean people know we’re not actors so the expectations are low. We don’t have to do that great of a job. That doesn’t mean we’re not going to try. It just means we don’t have to feel terribly depressed if our acting is really bad. Look at the Ramones who did “Rock and Roll High School.” They were terrible, especially Dee Dee and he only had one line. Supposedly they made him do it 70 times.

OV: You guys are also going to be featured in a documentary on the Atlanta music scene.

JB: Yeah, it’s called “We Fun.”

OV: Atlanta’s just chock full of good bands right now.

JB: There’s a good punk scene there right now. The Carbonas are excellent, the 4th Ward Daggers, the Frantic, the Coat hangers—bands that are determined to get out there and tour no matter how detrimental it might be to their finances. That’s what we need to see. That’s what we’d do in the beginning. We’d save up for six weeks to go on tour for 12 days, lose all our money then come back and work again. Record labels, especially nowadays, are reluctant to put money into any band that hasn’t done something for themselves.

OV: It’s pretty collaborative down there, right? You and Jared and Cole are in a band with some of the guys from Deerhunter called the Spooks.

JB: Yeah, there’s also a couple of other dudes from different bands—it’s a whole collective and it’s a changing cast of characters. It’s a fun project we do when we’re all in town together. We’re almost done recording an album that should have been out four years ago.

OV: I hate the question “What does it sound like?” but, what does it sound like?

JB: It’s kind of spooky. We’ve got two Theremin players a keyboard player and it’s just real spooky rock. I think there’s some dark metal influence and some psychedelic and some noise. It’s a real hodgepodge, mish-mash group of people coming together and making music.

OV: When can I hear it?

JB: Hopefully it will be out sometime in the next few months. It just depends on how much money Die Slaughterhaus (Records) has.

OV: You guys recorded your live album in Tijuana. Is there a particular reason you chose that venue?

JB: You see live albums all the time: “Live from Atlanta” or “Live from Minneappolis” and that just seems really boring. We wanted it to be kind of an event so we worked with Vice and got some corporate sponsorship to help pay for the expenses. They got a shitload of Tecate and Tequila and it was all free. We just tried to make it the most debaucherous experience possible it being in Tijuana and everything.

OV: What was the club and the crowd like?

JB: The club was this old dance hall, just a big open room and the stage was like six inches off the ground in the center of the room so while we were playing we were surrounded by people who were constantly intruding onto the stage and at some point we had to fight them off to get them off stage so we could actually play.

OV: You guys are going to be tour through March. Do you hang out when you’re not touring?
JB: With each other?

OV: Yeah.

JB: No, we usually don’t see each other. I mean, we’re with each other 24 hours a day, nine months out of the year. We all like each other but it’s good to have time apart. It’s good to get a little breathing room.

OV: You guys have toured everywhere. Is there any place that really sticks out?

JB: It all kind of blurs together. Going to Israel and the West Bank was awesome. Playing on the street for all those Palestinians that was pretty fun. We really didn’t know what to expect, like if we were going to endanger ourselves by doing that. We rented some acoustic guitars and went over to the West Bank and found a decent looking square to set up in and just started playing. One of the shopkeepers saw we were setting up and he took me up to his shop and he was going to give me this little finger drum but then he told me he hadn’t had a sale in two days so I just ended up buying it from him. But it all went really well and after we played this other shopkeeper invited us in and served us this really good mint tea. The Palestinians were really welcoming. We weren’t there on a political journey or anything. We were just there to play music.

Hello OV fans one and all -

Here we are with an updated website. Infinite thanks to Scott Carver for dumbing down the process so even a three-year-old - or an editor-in-chief with the computer skills of a three-year-old - can update it. If you haven’t had a chance to check out our latest issue, do it now.

I said DO IT!

In other news, I am changing things up a bit by allowing all our contributors free access to the blog, thus allowing them to release their need for outside communication without actually unchaining them from the OV desk. So far it has resulted in some interesting posts and I hope to see the ranting and randomness continue.

Finally, look for Issue 2 on stands sometime in early February. In general, we’ll be taking a look at the state of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll in the great new year of 2008, with an interview with the Black Lips (who will be playing at the WOW Hall February 6), an all-new sex advice column, and an exposé on a popular, legal hallucinogen that is about to become the latest victim of the War on Drugs.

Thanks for reading and check back here for further updates (I promise).

Tuula

I remember why I hated this place.