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| Tony Kinman (RIP), left, and Chip Kinman, right, with Ford Madox Ford. (Lisa Reed Kinman photo) |
Chip Kinman, Ford Madox Ford and The Dils: "With The Dils, it was full speed ahead (like other punk bands), it was a lifestyle, that's all we did. You woke up, it wasn't like I'm gonna wake up and I'm not in The Dils until I go to rehearsal, I'm not in The Dils until I go to a show. You woke up and you're in The Dils. We lived in San Francisco, so it was really easy to have the feeling of revolution inside you -- musical, cultural and otherwise. Everything was new: the smell of roasting coffee was new, pesto was new, beatniks and poets who still lived in North Beach, that was new, Chinatown, all of that was new and all of that added to the sense of (cultural) revolution, like moving forward and this is real and I'm a young man and this is what I'm supposed to be doing. And that gave everything a real sense of urgency, a real sense of getting it done. And that lasted us for about a thousand nights, about three years and that was it. You always gotta know when to leave the party, and that's the trick."
(Chip's brother, bass-player and low-end vocalist extraordinaire Tony, passed away from cancer this year. Chip has some gigs planned with The Dils in the new year.)
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James Williamson on his new album with the Pink Hearts: "Maybe the beauty and the strength of this album is that it's kind of old school in a lot of ways, but by the same token, it sounds oddly current at the same time.
"It's very diverse in the material and very listenable, which really to me is key because there's so many albums that you listen to three or four tracks and that's all you'll ever listen to. This one, I feel like you can listen to the whole thing, and you can keep listening to it and it doesn't really get that old."
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Andrea Vidal, Holy Grove, on their new album: "For me, the album is a celebratory one despite the heavier sound and darker lyrics. I think when you listen to the album, you get a sense of just how excited and grateful we all were to be able to write this album. We’re not firmly entrenched in any one genre -- so for ‘II’ each of us were able to explore and create a sound that naturally represents Holy Grove as a band, and gives you some insight as to where we intend to take it."
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Andy Cairns, Therapy?: "I can sometimes look at my parents or some other parents' friends or even contemporaries of mine who are nothing to do with music and they've got themselves in such a stale rut. Samuel Beckett the writer said one time that habit is a terrible deadener. It deadens all your senses and it deadens all your energy. I think he's true, if you just get into such a routine habit, then the attrition of just the everyday, the normal, it can just eat away at your soul, and you don't learn anything new, you don't feel as if you've grown.
"I love it whenever I see like people that are 60-70 taking up new languages or deciding to go free-falling from an airplane or deciding to run a marathon or something like that. These are the things that keep you active and keep you alive."
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Lee Lawrence, Arctic Flowers: "For me it's rewarding to hone your craft and create with others. We've all become good friends and it feels great to create something that belongs to all of us. Performing is just fun and always a challenge to make it better each time, so I'm always motivated by trying to do better. I also like to create a feeling and an energy that can be shared with the audience. Seeing live music that's meaningful to be has been core to my existence and ability to survive in society and I love being able to catalyze that for others too."
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Alfie Agnew, Professor and the Madman: "We decided, 'You know what? We don't care if nobody else on the planet likes what we do.' We're gonna do what we want, exactly how we want it, with who exactly we wanna do it. If we could get Paul Gray and Rat Scabies, that's because they're the perfect people for the music we're writing. Not because of anything else. You know, it's funny, because that's what Social D, the Adolescents and all those early bands did that made them so popular. They did what they wanted to do, there was no punk guide at the time, it was being invented. That's what I think has informed me the most."
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Taiga Miyama, Criminal Code: "I think we all like writing songs, which is the plus of it. Also, I think we can all lock in on ideas of what we want and it's easy to talk about how we want to do a song or an album. I love punk songs, but it's easy to write them, so it's always a challenge to do something completely different. I think that's the important thing of being in a band, instead of just becoming a cookie-cutter, just writing the same stuff over and over."
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Kenny Chambers on reforming Moving Targets: "It's kind of funny, I hadn't played Targets songs, and then when I did 'Less Than Gravity,' that kind of got me thinking, 'I gotta try and play these songs again now.' I was just out in the back yard with the electric and I started playing punk shit, because I was thinking when I was writing these songs and playing these songs, I was listening to punk rock. Started playing the first Dead Boys record and stuff like that.
"I'll be 55 this summer, so I gotta get my chops back."
