I saw that you referenced Van Halen on your Twitter. Unless you are pro-DLR, we are going to have a problem.
I always end up playing “Unchained” at the beginning of the year because of “Nothing Stays the Same” and “Hit the Ground Running.” It’s very empowering if I give it my own meaning.

I would propose that David Lee Roth is just as deep as Bob Dylan or Tom Waits, but people overlook it because the music rocks so hard.
I would agree. You know what he did? He injected too much sexuality into it, but that only made him bigger and better.

How did you get interested in punk rock?
I’ll skip over hearing Exploited for the first time, which is right around the time I first heard Guns N Roses. I was aware of punk around 6th or 7th grade, but that’s not when I got into punk.

When I was a senior in high school I got into punk. I started to go to shows and actively buy CDs from punk bands. It was kind of happening in the mainstream. I don’t have some cool underground story. I was in the suburbs in Michigan. I went and saw Green Day at their first stadium tour. I didn’t feel “punk,” necessarily, because I went with 40 kids from my school.

The first punk show I went to was Rancid in 1995 because I went to that show as a fan of music. I liked Rancid’s music. But, that was hardly underground either because “Salvation” was on MTV and Green Day was already playing stadiums.

I didn’t get into punk until I went to my first punk show. It was kind of scary and dangerous, and there were lots of weirdos there, and I liked it. That kind of changed everything. Up until then, I was going to like Grateful Dead and Steve Miller and shit. It was more like a party situation.

What attracted you to underground punk rock?

That it was so much different. I still don’t think of myself as an angry person. When I first got into punk, there were bands that were too angry for me. I couldn’t go there yet. I couldn’t entirely get behind a song that was about hating something. I’m still kind of a jolly, posi, stoner hippie dude.

I’ll bet you have a good relationship with both of your parents?
Absolutely, I do. Jumping way ahead, it took me time to find empathy with those songs. I had to grow up myself and meet other people and understand other people’s situations. I didn’t have much experience when I went to my first punk show. I never had compassion for other people, even though I was a hippie dude. There’s a lot of differences between hippie culture and punk culture, even though there are some similarities on a broad scale.

Now, you didn’t actually start Tankcrimes Records and really, Tankcrimes wasn’t originally called Tankcrimes.

Not only that, I saw my buddy Bob yesterday. The guy who started it all was down in the Bay for Neurosis and I just ran into him. What happened was that I didn’t want to start a record label. I wanted to be in a band with a record out.

I started a band in 2000-2001 called Deadfall with three of my best friends. I just wanted to have a record out and someone offered it to us. At that time, we were getting ready to send demos to Havoc and Max at 625. A dude came up to us at Burnt Ramen, a venue out here in Richmond, California, and was like “Hey, do you guys want to put out a record on my label?”

We immediately said “Yes.” It wasn’t something to think about. Right away, we recorded it, did art, got it together and gave it to him. When the records arrived, Bob said, “We did a first press of 1,100 copies, they all just arrived at my house. “ And then he was like, “There you go. There’s your record.” And we were like, “How many of these are ours?” He said, “They’re all yours. I’m going to go train hopping all summer. Maybe I’ll be back in the fall. Who knows?” That was it.

Was Bob Scammon independently wealthy? How could he afford to do that?
He was the type of guy, and I’m not sure if he still lives his life this way, he would do well-paying seasonal labor jobs and travel throughout the summer. He would hop trains and stuff like that. But, he didn’t hop trains and spare change. He worked all winter and hopped trains in the summer. I can only imagine that he had a surplus at that time.

Around then, I had been playing an instrument for a year maybe and I was already the guy in the band who took the managerial role. Somebody always has to be in charge of any band to book shows, studio time and arrange practices. I was already playing that role. I had these records.

A lot of kids ask me what to do for the first release? If you play in a band, do your own band first. For me, it was a great experience. It was mine. I didn’t want to just sell a record. It was my music. I was already 24. I didn’t play in bands as a teenager. I didn’t see that coming in my life. So, there I was. I sold all of those records like five and six copies at a time to all the labels that advertised in Maximum Rock and Roll. I was e-mailing labels and that was it. I was sending out six packs all around the world.

The people that helped me figure out what I was doing -- one directly and one indirectly. Jeff from Capitalist Casualties who runs Six Weeks Records. He gave me all the addresses to send out for promo copies including addresses in Japan that I was completely naïve about and a list of people who might be willing to trade with me. At this time, I was so interested in every single piece of music that was coming out at the time, I was trading with everyone. I was keeping stuff for myself; I started a box distro at shows. It was so exciting and so fun. The record got a good response and we got a big Maximum Rock n Roll handjob off the bat, which was awesome, so we booked a tour right away.

I think being in the Bay Area really helped us. We could have been from Iowa or Nebraska and we may have never gotten noticed. There certainly wasn’t a MySpace or a Bandcamp to share our music. We may have had a sample MP3 on our website.

The second guy was Felix Havoc. We didn’t meet each other until I started touring. His column in Maximum Rock n Roll -- as a joke it was called the Wall Street Journal of punk. Every month, he would publish an article about how to do what I wanted to do. He was the hardest working guy when I got involved. Not only was he writing this column, he was taking bands out on 40-day tours and trading records the whole way. No one really does that in the USA anymore. That’s very much a European way of doing things.

Was there one point where Tankcrimes shot up in popularity, or was it a steady growth?
It was kind of a steady growth. The label kept growing even when I wasn’t releasing stuff because I was an active member of the Bay Area scene. I was at shows with my distro. There were times in the mid-2000s when I would book seven shows a month and every band would stay at my house afterwards. So, even when I wasn’t actively putting out stuff I was active as Tankcrimes.

Right after the release of Deadfall, a friend of Bob’s teamed up with me. He had a settlement or a trust fund. He was very enthusiastic and we became friends very fast. I didn’t have much at the time, but he had a load of cash. I didn’t pay for the second release either!

But, I paid for the third release! He stuck me with the bill because he had previously been into drugs, got back into drugs after the settlement, and blew through like $70,000 in two months. When his money was out, he broke into my house, he stole all the distro.

Then, I was back at square one. My third record was coming in the mail. At the time, you could do C.O.D. So, I had 1,000 7-inches coming and UPS left me a notice saying I owed a lot of money.

The guys in Deadfall threw down the money so I could get the third release out. That’s how quickly my partnership was…

Did you ever get revenge, or did you let bygones be bygones?
I’m not a revenge person. Also, I knew that this guy was making such poor decisions with his life, it didn’t matter what I did. He was a total wreck. I haven’t gotten an update in a few years, but he’s around. His life is in such bad shape. I don’t know if he dwells on it. I certainly don’t. Those were only a handful of the choices that he made. To think that he blew through his whole settlement to be part of such a small thing. I don’t know. That has a lot to do with his personality. He and I had different backgrounds. He came from a troubled childhood. Honestly, looking back, I wish him the best. We’re even. He loaned me like $2,500 bucks and then stole back $1,000.

What made me feel bad was that he stole some of the small bands that I traded with and took it straight to Amoeba Records. Bands had new 7-inches, but he sold Amoeba like ten unplayed copies of 1,000 titles, so a bunch of bands had their records devalued because their brand new 7-inches were in the dollar bin.

The name of the label, Bob’s label, was Controlled by Plague. I changed the name of the label when I needed it to be mine. Tankcrimes didn’t really mean anything. It was a name that I came up on the train in San Francisco as the name of a band. When I needed to make the label my own, I used that name.

The future of physical music -- do physical records have a future?
Yes, they absolutely do. They have a future because people define themselves by the music that they listen to. Different genres of music have different histories. Once you find what you love and it becomes part of your own definition, whether you only listen to one type of music or if you listen to all types of music. Not every genre writes its history in a physical medium. There will always be a desire to collect.

I’m sitting here looking at a wall of records in my house. They are important to me because I’ve had some of these records longer than fans of the label have been alive. Physical music is a way to connect with the bands and labels that you like. That is still important for at least 1,000 kids for even the smallest sub-genre. My old roommate has a super-successful noise tape label. It’s super successful because he sells out of every release. Every release is out of 100 and he knows his fan base. There are only 100 kids, but they all have to buy the tape.

Listening to the music in a physical medium and having music in a physical medium isn’t the same. I can’t say that everyone who buys my records listens to those records every time they hear the music. It’s more important to be a part of something with that physical product.

A record at your house and how people define themselves with music -- no one puts their music collection in the closet. I’m sitting inside my living room and right by my front door my records are ready to play. When people come over, they can flip through them and play them.

Profound! Scotty, where do you think I have my rarest, hand-printed Melvins CDs?
I’m going to guess on some sort of display.

Precisely! Right where people can see them. That really is an astute observation.
I can’t speak for every kind of music, but if Urban Outfitters is selling tens of thousands of copies of Lana Del Rey, people might mostly listen to Lana Del Rey on Pandora, but they still invested that $20 to bring home that 12-inch square of Lana Del Rey to put on display. With punk and metal, it’s even more than that. It’s your posters, it’s your flyers, it’s all of that stuff. It holds that much more importance for our genres, for whatever reason.

Nothing exemplifies this more than metal CDs. If you go to mainstream record store, like Rasputin or Amoeba, they are record stores that in, say 1998, still kept metal CDs in its own little small section, like a boutique section. Punk 7-inches and metal CDs. Metal compact disc is now front and center at Rasputin, in Berkley, Walnut Creek -- the suburban Rasputins have huge metal CD sections.

A lot of metalheads are getting into vinyl. But, metal head collections are not in drawer. They are stacked high on a case or on a bookcase. As long as it stays that way, I can keep selling physical music.

Come back Tuesday for Part Two of this interview where we cover illegal downloading, bands currently on Tankcrimes, and how to make cas$h!