Interviews: The Misfits

As we continue to dig through our archives for more interviews, we've begun raiding our friends' as well. This time around, we have an interview from Dave "Monk" of Newest Industry with the Misfits. The interview happened circa 1997, with Jerry Only in the top of their tour bus.

If you enjoy the interview, be sure to pay Newest Industry Records a visit and check out their great roster.

You can click Read More for the interview.

Jerry: So how ya doin'? What's ya name?
Monk: My name's Dave.
Jerry: I'm Jerry, there's my brother Doyle, uh and that's Mosh who looks
like Rodney Dangerfield meets The Creature From The Black Lagoon.
Monk: Ok, so who does the current line up of The Misfits actually consist
of?

Well we don't consider this a reformation, we just consider this
a continuing thing. I mean we were legally unable to do the job until we went
to court and got our name back[…]

Jerry: Well obviously it's me and Doyle as always, and then uh, Dr.
Chud who's the same age as Doyle and who went to school together, and Dr. Chud
has been with us for about three years now. What wound up happening was we got
Doc about three years ago and Mike about two. This is actually like Mike's second
anniversary, this tour, and Mike's young, he's 22, and he looks good, he sings
good, and his mom makes good meatballs and sends them down to practice.
Monk: So who's idea was it originally to reform?
Jerry: Well we don't consider this a reformation, we just consider this
a continuing thing. I mean we were legally unable to do the job until we went
to court and got our name back, and it took a while to, y'know, work Mikey in
because he never knew nothing about the band. He'd heard of the band 'cos he's
from Jersey but he didn't know the songs, so when we got Mike in we tried him
out on a few songs and he sounded great so we learnt all the old stuff and then
we started writing new stuff, and then when we were done writing some new songs,
uh I didn't wanna come back and just play old stuff, so the thing is we started
writing new material and then we came to Europe. Really our first adventure
was coming to Europe last year.
Monk: So it was always your intention to write new music then and not
just constantly play the old stuff?
Jerry: Oh yeah, well that was the thing about bringing back the band
y'know. I had a problem you know because of this punk revival thing. Ok, a lot
of people in the punk revival didn't come back to make new music, they all came
back to just play old stuff and have another fling at being on stage and having
a go at it because, y'know, if you play in a band you really get it in your
blood and you really want to go out and jam. It sucks being away from home for
so long because we're very family oriented, but at the same time it's really
fun to go out and play, like to come here and hang out and we all had dinner
before together, and we're all sitting around laughin' and shit, um, but you
don't get that at home you know, because at home everybody's got a life and
everybody's got things that are going on but when you're on the road it's like
being at camp with a bunch of fuckin' retarded kids. We have a really good time.
Monk: Did you ever consider putting your new album out on an independent
label?
Jerry: Uh, yeah. That was my goal to do it myself. We went on the road
with Anthrax like for the whole of last summer in The States,
and they were opening for us, and we split the money like we had an even split
kind of a situation but when we got off the road with Anthrax we 'd only made
like three thousand dollars each which only just paid our bills. So anyway we
were sitting there after the whole tour saying "Holy shit, we got no fuckin'
money, what are we gonna do?" …(Jerry signs some massive full colour posters)…
uh, this is for the girl inside. We just traded her Danzig shirt for the whole
set of posters! So uh, it's a good thing. I think The Misfits is important.
Y'know, us teaming up with Geffen is a good thing because we've made the situation
with them where we get to do whatever we want, for example coming out here and
playing shows to two or three hundred people as it's not really a major industrial
assault if you know what I'm saying? This is where we feel more comfortable,
um, and in each town you've got your nucleus of old punkers who know who we
are and they don't wanna come see us in some arena, they wanna come see us at
their local fuckin' jam spots so, y'know, here we are in TJ's. This is a really
honourable and classy thing to come and do, you know, so that's what we're doing.
Monk: So do Geffen give you some kind of respect due to your extensive
history?
Jerry: They let us do anything we want. They've even making trading
cards for us.
There's a five pack of trading cards, real nice high chromium ones which I designed.
Anything we throw up at Geffen they let us do and, for example our new CD has
got a six panel fold out poster and they said that it was over cost, so we said
well we'll pay for it then and they were like "Ok", and they put it out. So
I figure we're gonna be selling a gold record, maybe half a million of them
and we're giving half a million people the new Misfits poster of the album cover,
so I mean for me to be in the position to give out 500, 000 posters to our fans
is like the coolest thing.
Monk: But how do you feel about being on a label though that obviously
puts out a lot of shit and probably doesn't care about your music at all, but
rather how many records you sell?
Jerry: I'll tell you the truth man, that's not the case. We went down
to see these guys, and everybody at the place had a Misfits story to tell from
when they were kids, and that was the coolest thing. Each
person was sitting up and going "I saw you're show… I remember this happening
and that happening…" so they were really excited about it because I think
that in modern music we're kinda like an institution. Today we all went to the gym and we all
did our bench presses. The sound man was very late, and so we went down and
did our bench press and we got our work out in, and now we're gonna play, and
uh I think it's all going really well, and I think that Geffen is really gonna
put us on the map as far as selling records is concerned. Everything on that
record, all the music and all the imagery and all the photo's, we picked and
designed it all, and my cousin actually laid the whole thing out. Oh, except
the mix. They brought in Andy Wallace who's a big mixing guy.
Monk: I haven't heard it yet, so is it like less trashy than your old
stuff or…?

Jerry: No, I think it's everything. It's basically a mixture of "Earth
A.D." and "Walk Among Us", but with, I think, a lot more flair in the song writing
and the arranging of stuff. Our tour ended in September and at that point we
knew we were gonna deal with Geffen so Michael Elargo, he's their A 'n' R guy,
he signed Metallica and White Zombie and bands like that to different labels,
so what happened was that he had a very good feel for the kind of material that
would fit our image, uh he used to book us at The Ritz in 1981, so he knows
who we are. He booked that show that's on our live album. Daniel Ray was the
producer, and every Thursday sat down, we got a big conference table in our
machine shop where they produce our products and shit, but we would sit there
every week and go over every song, and every line of lyrics and every new idea,
and six people would vote on it, so on our new album, I like 95% and Chud likes
95% and Mike likes 95%, but it's all a different 95%, and that was the whole
key. This new album has 18 tracks on it and you can listen to it from the beginning
to the end, and you don't ever look to fast forward or rewind or whatever. You're
very happy to hear the next song. The thing flows from beginning to end, and
that's the most important thing about our new song writing. I think it's incredible.
I think that our new album is our best album to date and the funny thing is
it's the one that's gonna get pushed by Geffen instead of Caroline who sit on
their thumbs all day. I think we made the right move and they're very respectful
to us, so the situation is that I get a little bit jumpy when they do something
wrong over there, and I jump down everybody's throat so I'm trying to refrain
myself. I'm more the enemy to myself than them being the enemy. They're more
my friend than I am to myself, so I have to learn to be respectful on the other
side too. Y'know in this world, not matter what you do or who you are, it's
a give and take thing. If you're respectful to people you usually get it back.
I think The Misfits are the band of the next century. I think that not only
did we leave our mark on this century that just passed us, uh really the future
of metal was based upon things that we did. There were bands that we picked
it up from, for example Bowie, Kiss and Queen and stuff like that, and those
bands, they'll always be around and you'll always hear them, but I think that
the eighties was shaped by what we had done and by our influence, and now in
turn it's kinda funny because we had to come back and pick up the pieces because
the eighties imploded. looking back in retrospect, the eighties was a big waste
of fuckin' time. We are back to the seventies because everybody eventually figured
out "Oh, the eighties sucked" you know what I mean? The music that came out
of the eighties was a bunch of shit. Most
of the bands in the eighties you won't hear about in twenty years. You'll still
hear 'Bohemian Rhapsody' and you'll still hear Kiss or whatever, but I think
that The Misfits, with the new song writing team that we've got and the new
energy that we've got, we're gonna have songs that are gonna make it to very
big places and we wanna write songs that are great and we don't wanna write
songs because punk is in and we don't wanna write songs because thrash is in.
We're gonna write you a good song. What it is or where it goes is not our concern,
but we're gonna write some really good songs for ya. Some of them maybe slow
and some of them maybe fast, but that doesn't matter. A good song is a good
song. You'll never hear a shitty song by us.
Monk: Um, what did you think of the "Violent World" album? I heard that
you weren't too happy about it or something…
Jerry: The thing is with the "Violent World" album it was a kind of
a slap in my face because I waited thirteen years to bring back my band and
put out a new record, and they jumped in my face with a whole bunch of cover
songs and made a tribute album which makes me look like an old man. I mean,
y'know, I'm 38 but I don't give a fuck how old I am 'cos that's not how it works,
but the thing is when bands get tribute albums they're usually shit, uh, that's
not the case here but I think that the artwork really sucked but I'm happy that
the bands liked us enough to come up and do the job. I've nothing against the
people on it, it's just the fact that they had that record out before my new
one came out. The new one's out pretty soon, but they coulda waited a couple
of months. You know, July… put it out in fuckin' July. My album's coming out
in the beginning of May, um why's it out in fuckin' February you know? I wasn't
happy about that. I thought that that wasn't cool. The thing was I told them
that i didn't want it and that they had to wait. Um, I owned the name Misfits
for a new record and they didn't, so What wound up happening was that they called
it "Violent World" and that got around.
Monk: So you never had any intention of putting this new album out on
Caroline then?
Jerry: Well the thing was that we have a "Live in Kansas City" album
that Glenn doesn't want out so they won't release it, so the thing was that
I went in and spent all my money retracking it and making artwork for it and
everything, and then they said "Oh no, Glenn said no so were not doing it" and
so I said "Well what if Glenn says you can't sell my new record when it's ready
to go?" y'know? I can't be playing games with a record company that every time
Glenn says "Jump" they're gonna say "How high?". Fuck that. They're kinda Glenn's
buddies more than mine.

I think that punk was a social
statement here in England and that the music is very good. I think the music
was more important than the issue. Now the issue is gone, but the music remains.

Monk: So does Danzig get a percentage every time you play an old track
live?
Jerry: No. No, he wanted to. He wanted 25% of what we were making. So
I said "Well you want 25 percent you'd better come up and fuckin' sing". He
laughed and agreed. You know the thing was that Glenn got sixty thousand dollars
to get out of our pockets. Biggest fuckin' mistake he ever made.
Monk: So what do you think about his musical progression then?
Jerry: I think he sucks!
Monk: Uh, how come whenever I got hold of a supposedly good quality
Misfits video in the late eighties, it always ended up looking and sounding
like absolute shit?
Jerry: Oh, the thing was that we're very easy to bootleg because we
have a very large fan base and that's was always bothered me about the whole
situation was that because we were not handling our marketing correctly and
putting products of quality out there, like when you don't sell something and
it's in demand, somebody else does, and that's the bottom line. So the thing
is we've got nobody to blame about the fuckin' bootleggers except ourselves
because we weren't getting the job done, and our fans are paying through the
nose for pure crap that some guy who owns a record store is putting out because
we're not so I'm hoping that
in the future we get on the ball a little more around here.
Monk: So will you ever be recording videos for any of your new songs?
Jerry: Yeah, we're gonna try and do three of 'em in a trilogy. the thing was Geffen said "Well
look, we need a video. We'll film a show and make a video" and I was all like
well fuck that, y'know? The first thing I said was that I really don't want
a video because that would just make it look like we need a video. We've never
had a video before, and we're selling records, so maybe the best thing to do
is to keep everybody guessing. You wanna see what's going on then why don't
you get off your ass and come to the fuckin' show. So what we decided to do
um, we picked three songs and talked with this guy David Pelzner, and we're
gonna do some of it in the Hammer Studios and we're gonna do some of it in the
Psycho set in Universal, um, the album's "American Psycho" and that's one of
the songs, and the rest will probably be shot up by us. And then there's a story
plot behind it about, uh, I don't want to give it away, but if Geffen likes
the idea then we're gonna do it, but the thing is it's gonna take us all summer
to do, so we're gonna try and premiere it for Hallowe'en which is the end of
our album tour. So if you didn't know the band and come to one of the clubs
that we're playing, now that you see the videos it's just like "Oh man, I shoulda
found these guys and gone where they are", but it'll be too late then because
our tour is done and we're gonna go and record another album then, so there
you go. I think it's kinda funny that our video will trail the promotion of
the album. Um, I think it will make a really big statement about The Misfits
relationship between Horror Films and uh, really indepth thinking about it instead
of trying to be uh, like a cliché.
Monk: If The Misfits were gonna make a movie, what would it be about
and who would play what?
Jerry: I would think it would probably be about an alien invasion and
we would probably be Martians…
Monk: Have you heard of the band Texas is The Reason and do you think
it's healthy for a band to name themselves after a Misfits lyric?
Jerry: Well uh, I don't know where Blanks '77 got their name from, I
don't know if it was from our record company that was set up in '77, I'm not
sure though. Um, there have been other bands like Astro Zombies. I think that's
really cool, because I think that our song titles are probably the coolest that
are out there and, not only that, we're kinda like a bands band because even
though finally now, twenty years after being in existence, and signed with a
major label we're probably the closest thing to the underground phenomena that
there's ever been. I mean you've had your Lou Reed's and your Iggy Pop's and
stuff like that, but I think we've taken that to a whole new level. You know
you see an influence from us from a lot of other major bands that came out in
the eighties, y'know, like everyone was covering our stuff. The only problem
with that is that people look at Metallica's version of 'Last Caress' and think
that that's the way it's supposed to go. It ain't, man! We totally kick it.
There's a big, big difference, and it's a misconception that people have about
us in that they think we're along the lines of Metallica when we're a totally
different animal. They were just showing some homage to us which we do appreciate.

It's hard being in The Misfits and having something
really great to offer and then being legally held from doing it. Sometimes absence
makes the heart grow fonder, you know, and that's the thing with playing, and
also Michael has so much more energy than Glenn and he hangs in there for such
a long time during a set and we didn't have that before.

Monk: Do you still get as much of a buzz out of playing live as you
did, say fifteen years ago?
Jerry: Yeah, even more so. You know when we were going through court,
we were in court for like seven years, it was like I was afraid I'd never get
to play again, so now that I do have the opportunity every time I walk out there
I thank God that I'm doing it. It's hard being in The Misfits and having something
really great to offer and then being legally held from doing it. Sometimes absence
makes the heart grow fonder, you know, and that's the thing with playing, and
also Michael has so much more energy than Glenn and he hangs in there for such
a long time during a set and we didn't have that before. I didn't have that
before and I really think that this band is much better now. Doyle is much larger
and stronger than he used to be, I'm much larger and stronger than I used to
be and Chud is much more accurate and he's durable and he sings. We've never
had a drummer that could sing before, so now we've got three guys doing backing
vocals so everybody's singing, and it makes the band really full.
Monk: So are the crowds as wild as they used to be, or have people generally
calmed down nowadays?
Jerry: Um, I think it depends on the venue and the town. There's a lot
of places down in Texas that are near the |Mexican boarder where you get a lot
of uh, I don't know what they're called, half Mexican, half American guys and
they're always pretty crazy. They feel no pain I think.

Monk: So what's the worst violence you've ever seen at any of your gigs
then?
Jerry: Oh, it was in Detroit on the last tour, and we were playing The
Pontiac, um, Michigan actually, the Detroit area though, but anyway a bunch
of skinheads came and they beat up this one kid and two of them pulled his legs
while another guy held his face on the cement, totally ripped up this kids face.
He was on a stretcher fuckin' moaning when we walked past him out of the place,
and it just seemed to me that that kid did not deserve to get up in the morning
and come to see the show, and have that be done to him. Usually if we get problems
like that either we stop the violence, like physically get off the stage and
stop people from fighting, or we just stop the show if it's too wide-spread
because at the same time we don't wanna jump into a crowd of a hundred people
and somebody pulls a knife and stabs us or something. Usually though if it's
less than like half a dozen kids we can usually grab a couple of them, uh, Doyle
usually just chokes them and then they stop.
Monk: I heard that last year, I didn't go, but there was a gig you played
here in the U.K. and it got kinda screwed up somewhere along the lines… what
actually happened with that?

Jerry: Well it was in Birmingham and we still apologise, and we're actually
doing a free show there on this tour. Ok, what wound up happening was that in
The States the opening acts go on about ten, ten thirty, the second act goes
on about eleven and the headlining band probably doesn't go on 'till about midnight
or one. When we went into the venue they supposed to have a place for us to
get dressed, but their dressing room was smaller than the section we're sitting
in right here, and it had no lights and no running water so we couldn't get
on our make-up or do our hair or anything so we said, "Well fuck it, we'll pay
for our own hotel room", but there was some kind of, - you guys call it a
soccer festival -on and all the hotels were booked, and when we were leaving the venue
they told us that we had 'till eleven meaning, we thought, that we gotta get
back there by eleven, okay so we ran around town and went to three different
hotels and they kept saying no, and I think a lot of the reason as to why they
wouldn't let us in was because we looked kinda scruffy, so anyway we come running
into the club at about twenty to eleven and the club owner wouldn't let us play
because of the curfew, and the kids were all screaming "you guys suck!" and
all this other stuff and shit man, all we wanted to do was do the show right.
All we wanted to do was to get our make-up on and get back to the gig. If the
first hotel hadda put us up we woulda made it. You know, I don't like leaving
gigs, like I'd rather sit in the bus than sit in a hotel five blocks away as
I might not be able to get back. So anyway when we got there we played half
of 'Hallowe'en' and they turned the power off. Me and Michael were standing
in the front and screaming and trying to play with no fuckin' power, you know
what I mean, and the whole place is singing, but after that it just wound up
being senseless. We're just screaming and we're just blowing our voices out
and they had no intention of turning the power back on so we were just prolonging
the inevitable. So after that we sat in the crowd and gave any merchandise that
we had out for free and we signed everything and stuff… We didn't know, alright.
The communication gap was that the bottom line is we shoulda known. The problem
occurred because the club did not supply the right facilities for us to do our
show, and our main concern was to do the show right. I'm supposed to be able
to go out there, get dressed, kick ass and go the fuck home. Tonight they were
supposed to have a shower for us, but the shower don't work so we've gotta go
to some kids house around the corner, um, which I don't mind really. As long
as I can go get a shower, take my make-up off, go to bed and then tomorrow do
it again… The thing is we gotta do it everyday and our priority is the show,
no matter what, and Birmingham we apologise you know. It was kinda funny though
'cause there was almost this ruckus, and we stood up there and took the verbal
abuse and when you fuck up you've gotta take the fuckin' heat. End of story.
It hurt me a bit because one guy shouted "You guys are through after this" and
I was all like "Son of a bitch!", like I didn't go through enough fuckin' shit
to just get there and play, and then this guy yells out that we're through.
Yeah right, fuck you you asshole. We just got here late. So anyway I'm gonna
see if he's there when we get to Birmingham Foundry. Yeah, this is through!
Monk: Does punk still have any meaning or is it just an open ended label
that simply describes the type of sound a band has?
Jerry: I think the latter of the two. I think that punk was a social
statement here in England and that the music is very good. I think the music
was more important than the issue. Now the issue is gone, but the music remains.
So the thing is I think that the music was the greatest thing of all time. I
really do. I think it's like a pendulum, like it swings from one side to the
other side… When rock'n'roll started it was kinda like in the middle, um,
it swings one way and you get a lot of highly produced bands and all your top
forty shit, and then in the middle it's fast, original rock'n'roll roots. Finally
when it swings all the way to the right there's your punk music. I don't think
that this techno shit and all this other crap is gonna ever come close to the
real artistic and energetic value of punk music, because punk music is, in my
opinion, the far end of the spectrum. You could have some crazy synthesiser
thing that makes a million beeps, but are you gonna be better than the Sex Pistols
first album? No. Um, are you gonna be better than The Clash's second album?
No. Are you gonna be better than The Ramones second album? No… You're just
not. Each band has their own sound and their own identity, and we all do it
with three chords and I think that is the beauty of it. Our band has more technology
than anybody out there because we build our own equipment, like our drum kit.
Our guitars are made out of graphite… Everything we do has been thought out
not only to sound great but to perform great and withstand the abuse and, you
know, we're gonna take it to the actual limit and I think that, at the turn
of the century we're gonna be standing on the top of the heap. Once we turn
the corner and people look around you're gonna wind up seeing, out of a hundred
of the top bands of all time only ten of then are gonna continue to be recognised
and the rest are gonna be flushed down the toilet. I think that when the Twenty
First Century swings around you're not gonna hear about Iron Maiden or Judas
Priest or anything like that. Glenn's already gone. Glenn came up in the eighties
and now it's like 'Danzig', what's that? It's a word of the past. Why? Because
of the music. Turn it around though and the Sex Pistols wanna go and do a show.
Some guy gives 'em six million bucks and says "Here, go!", and that's because
their music is good music, and good music is timeless. That's it, I just wanna
be timeless with it and I don't care about the money and I don't care about
the fame or all that other crap. I just want great albums, one after the other.
Monk: So you'd have no problems playing to a stadium audience of like
fifty thousand then?
Jerry: No, but only if we were headlining (!) so we could do it the
way we want. I think we can do it. I don't think that is the limit of our existence.
I think that we should play big shows, but at the same time I think we should
play shows like this. The thing is though it's really hard to play when the
crowd's not in your face. You kinda loose the energy.
Monk: Right. Do any of you actually believe in UFO's and the existence
of aliens, or is it just a gimmick that you've adopted and which has stuck?
Jerry: Sure. Yeah, they've gotta be there. We're just a grain of sand
on the beach, ya know? People just don't realise the odds and the potential.
Mike: You know what happened in America recently with UFO's? Uh, over
Arizona more than ten million, TEN MILLION PEOPLE saw UFO's for the duration
of a whole week. Ten million people saw the same thing and there's over a hundred
different video tapes of the thing. if anything it's the biggest mass psychosis
of our time and it's not even in the newspapers. That's gotta show you something
right.
Doyle: If that many people said I shot JFK then they'd come and investigate
me, even though I was only one year old at the time.
Mike: You didn't hear a damn thing about it, and it was weeks and weeks
and weeks of sightings. This was over metropolitan Phoenix. Kids from like six
years old to eighty year old people say this thing.
Monk: Wow… Um, do you have any legal wranglings left with Danzig now?
Jerry: Well I avoid him like the plague. You know, no positive things
come out of dealing with him, only negative ones. So uh, Caroline with the box
set puts the old band to rest and uh, you know I don't wanna work with them
either. Fuck them. FUCK YOU GUYS! They're very unfair and it just seems to me
that I've got a great new band and we got great new songs, and we'll get that
one percent of people who come along to the shows and say "Well where's Glenn?"
and we're all like "Well Glenn's out there somewhere, go fuckin' see him if
you wanna go!". They can still like Glenn if they want but, you know, Glenn
sold them out. If they don't see that then they're fuckin' ignorant. If they're
ignorant then what the hell do I wanna fuckin' deal with them for anyway? Fuck
it. We're not gonna appeal to everybody and we're not trying to. We're just
trying to do what we really enjoy doing. My dad always said, you know, "If you're
gonna be a street sweeper then you'd better be the best god-damn street sweeper
out there", so at the same time we just play our music. We go out there and
we try and be the best we can be and, out of a hundred people, there may be
five or six who don't like the show, but that's fine. The other ninety four
people in that room are having a good time and it's all about having a good
time.
Monk: Ok, well is there anything else that you'd like to add or any
message that you'd like to give to old and new Misfits fans alike?
Jerry: Well I think that following your dreams is very important. You
have to be realistic because life is short. For example my dreams took twenty
years. My dreams with the old band never really came home, but I'm really happy
now with this band. You know, when I first started it was my intention to become
as big as possible. I was brought up in the Glitter Age and we were seeing David
Bowie's 'Diamond Dogs' tour, so for me the most impressive thing is to do a
really great, extravagant production. Now a lot of the time when we play I'll
tell the light man to turn the fuckin' white lights on. I knew that being large
would involve all the props and lights and synchronisation and all that kind
of stuff, but at the same time I think that we can handle that because we have
as much imagination as anybody else out there. So we will be good when we get
big. I think we'll be better than most because the music is tremendous and our
show is just non-stop, y'know? We kick ass the whole way. Our new stuff is like
the next evolution of The Misfits. You get a caterpillar eating leaves and then
it sits in a cocoon for a real long time and then it turns into a butterfly,
yeah? That's the effect that we have here. The new stuff is just so 'now'. It's
just so nineties. The new race is coming. We've got a good band…