Photo by Jody VB
Welcome to 5-10-15-20, where we talk to artists about the music they loved at five-year interval points in their lives. Maybe we'll get a detailed roadmap of how their tastes and passions helped make them who they are. Maybe we'll just learn that they really liked hearing the "Kids Incorporated" theme song over and over when they were kids. Either way, it'll be fun.
Buddy Holly: "Rave On"
I had the radio on all the time. I would wake up to it, go to sleep to it. I had one of those devices that seem so hilarious now-- it was a little speaker that's shaped like a White Castle hamburger bun, and you're supposed to stick it under your pillow and fall asleep to music. It was a hard plastic. I don't know why they thought that would be a good idea [laughs]. But I had it.
I was young as shit, but I do remember a lot of good radio. Elton John was everywhere, and I was also into bubblegum pop like ELO. There was already a lot of weird nostalgia for 60s stuff like Buddy Holly and the Beatles, too. If I was going to pick one song from that age, I would say Buddy Holly's "Rave On".
Pitchfork: That's funny, because when I saw one of your shows in Brooklyn in 2008 you played an impromptu version of "Rave On" after some drunk kid started stripping onstage.
Yeah, that was totally wild. Somehow, among the many possessions of his that wound up cast all over the stage was this Buddy Holly biography, and I just happened to pick it up, and I was like, "Hell yeah!" That's how ingrained some of that stuff is in my head-- I could just go, "Oh yeah, I can probably play 'Rave On' right now."
Can I tell you a little funny story? So that show was in December, and then at the stroke of midnight on that New Year's Eve, I was at Penn Station in New York waiting to get on a train. And the first conversation I had in 2009 was with that naked guy. He came up to me and was like, "You're Ted Leo!" And I was like, "Yeah." And he was like, "I'm naked guy! I'm so sorry. I had all this stuff going on in my life that night." I was like, "Wow, is this what the new year is going to hold for me?" [laughs]
Adam and the Ants: Kings of the Wild Frontier
Between '75 and '80, I started getting into some loud rock. I was really into the Who, especially The Kids Are Alright soundtrack. But the biggest record for me from 1980 was Adam and the Ants' Kings of the Wild Frontier. That record blew my mind, and it was one of the first things I could actually piece together and have a perspective on as opposed to, like, "Yeah, it's music on the radio!" That record never really left rotation for me. MTV had just started, and they were playing "Antmusic", which was just a goofy pop song, but most of the rest of that record was pretty intense. There are these heavy songs about Native American issues. They were the first band I ever saw in concert, too.
Run-D.M.C.: "Jam-Master Jay"__
Between ages 10 and 15 I really got into hip-hop. I went to see Run-D.M.C. in 1983 at the Ritz Theatre in Elizabeth, New Jersey, which was insane. It was Lovebug Starski, UTFO, the Real Roxanne, Run-D.M.C., and New Edition headlined. I wish I had some way to go back and document it. "Jam-Master Jay" was the heaviest. It's one of those early hip-hop songs that had nothing but percussion and vocal on it-- such an amazing step forward. More than any rock I was hearing at the time, hip-hop of the era got me thinking about my surroundings and politics as well. On that first Run-D.M.C. record, there's this song "Wake Up", and they're like, [raps] "When I woke up this mornin' and I got out of bed/ I had some really fresh thoughts goin' through my head." They were envisioning the world the way it could be.
I grew up in an area where it was like "Sesame Street". I didn't even know that there was racial tension [laughs]. When hip-hop started getting more of a presence on the radio, I had a break dance crew-- we lugged our cardboard around, did our thing on street corners for money from time to time. We were called Breaks, and we had a routine set to Kurtis Blow's "The Breaks". We weren't the best, but we had fun with it.
In my late teenage years, I just got deep, deep, deep into hardcore. I certainly would listen to other stuff-- like Billy Bragg and the Smiths-- but by the end of the 80s, it was 90 percent hardcore. The concerns of a lot of New York hardcore was so immediate to my life, especially when you think about that era of straight edge, which I was into. This isn't meant to be a diss to straight edge, but it's so perfectly tailored to a late-high-school-aged kid who's actually confronting all of these issues about drinking and coolness and peer pressure. I think that's probably why I clung to it so intensely. When you hit those later teenage years, you find those things that you can connect with more deeply and you start to develop your own identity.
This was a period when Fugazi had just started playing, and I saw one of their first shows at the Anthrax in Norwalk, Connecticut. It was the first time I had ever heard anybody suggest that there was something wrong with slam dancing or moshing. And I was like, "Huh! OK, if that's what they want, I'll respect that." But I wasn't necessarily buying it. At that point, Fugazi shows were so intense and violent because people were incensed that anyone would suggest that they should not have a pit. People would just fucking scream at them. It was really, really confrontational. That was happening at this show and a couple people from DC were grabbing people in the pit and physically trying to stop them from dancing, and I was like, "That's just as fucked up, man."
So I wrote Ian MacKaye this big long letter [affects high-pitched whiny voice]: "Man, I'm trying to respect what you say, but what you're doing is just as fascist and blah blah blah!" And he wrote me back, and was like, "Look, those people came of their own accord. I don't support that. We had nothing to do that." And I was like, "OK, that's cool." [laughs] Years later he and I became friends, and he still had that letter-- which he threatens to pull out to embarrass me from time to time.
The Small Faces: Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake
For most of the 90s, I spent more time listening to my contemporaries and friends. My band Chisel started getting more into the mod thing and we were all going down that record exploration path-- everything from James Brown to the Small Faces, who were probably more important than anything else to me, musically. I feel like the Small Faces are kind of glossed over in the history of rock, but they always seemed a little more street and a little less art school than the Who. And the soul screaming that Steve Marriott did was something that I always aspired to but was too chicken to actually try. Their LP Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake was when they started making the transition to a heavier and more psychedelic sound and that was a huge record for me. The Chisel album Set You Free was definitely made under the influence of Wire and the Minutemen at one end of the spectrum and Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake at the other.
Mad Professor and Ruts DC: Rhythm Collision Dub__
After Chisel broke up in '97 I started playing solo almost immediately and, for a long time, I was playing alone or with back-up tapes that I'd record myself. I also did a couple other bands during that period, including a short-lived band called the Sin-Eaters with my brother Danny, which was like a return to punk. I was just listening to Crass all the time again. I also got really heavily back into reggae and dancehall like Beenie Man and Buju Banton. That stuff was a political minefield in terms of things like homophobia but, musically, it was an amazingly fruitful period.
I was living in Boston at the time and, believe it or not, Boston has a pretty vibrant reggae radio scene. WERS has a show called "Rockers", which I would listen to for hours. Mad Professor was still really doing some interesting stuff in the dub realm and merging more modern dancehall ideas, too. The Mad Professor remix of the Ruts DC album Rhythm Collision is an incredible record. It was a weird dream come true for me, because it was validation of a white punk band who appreciates reggae by an actual dub genius legend. The Sin-Eaters never made a record, but I had plans to record a full album and a whole other dub version of the album. It never panned out.
Around 2005, I was in such a transitional period. We were just on tour all the fucking time. It was such a confusing time. I can't even express how dejected I was that Bush won the second term. That was one of those soul-crushing condemnations of humanity that I haven't entirely gotten over. I was just running around the world like a chicken with his head cut off. I was banging my head against the wall hoping that I would finally smash my skull and it would be over, you know? The music from that period was just such a blur.
Daft Punk's Human After All came out around then and it's like a punk record to me. Discovery was a great record but Human After All really clicked with my mood at the time. It's pretty friggin' dark. I think if Daft Punk had made another Discovery, I probably would not have been as into it. It was a bit of a struggle over the next couple years to climb out of that mood-- I thought Shake the Sheets was a dark record with a glimmer. Nobody writes in a vacuum, and you can tell a lot about what an artist is going through just by listening.