NAME: Metal Mike Saunders
Born: 5/1/52 Little Rock, Arkansas
grad 1969 Hall High (Little Rock)
grad 1973 Univ of Texas at Austin
grad 1977 Univ of Arkansas at Little Rock
Age -- born the same year as Dee Dee Ramone (1952)
Bands-`1966-1967 people jamming cover songs on the back patio or front
carport on saturday afternoons with no PA probably doesn't count as a
"band" (or ditto inside with the tape recorder, with no name for the imaginary
"recording act") right? 1968 the Livin' Endz / drums (Little Rock)
1968 Society's Outcasts / drums (Little Rock)
1968 - 1969 the Rockin' Blewz (Little Rock) gtr / vocals
14 song lp I'M A ROADRUNNER MOTHERFUCKA (9 covers / 5 originals)
(unpressed due to lack of $$$ -- we spent our entire $10 budget on the 1/4"
reel of tape and a big upgrade with a Radio Shack microphone in plastic
casing and NO "limiter," ie it could distort like crazy and pin right into the red ;
this issued 29 years later as the last 14 cuts on @1999 Triple X cd SURF
CITY OR BUST / metal mike). future angry samoan founder my 13 year old
brother Kevin was the drummer.
1969 - 1973 went to college in Arkansas/Texas, jammed / fucked around a
lot with my brother on gtr/drums on breaks and summer vacation
1973 - 1975 lived in LA, played slappin' acoustic guitar in an 1975 early
lineup of the Ray Campi rockabilly band (w/Jimmie Lee Maslon on gtr)
1975 - 1977 back in Arkansas, repeat of 1969 - 1973
1977- 1978 VOM / drums (LA, i lived in the Valley)
1978 - 1980 Angry Samoans (LA, i lived in the Valley)
1982 - 2007 - beyond Angry Samoans (i lived 400 miles away in the East
Bay, ie got lucky and won a lottery/job ticket out of Hell USA aka LA)
1981 - 1984 Fried Abortions / Lennonburger / drums (name change when
lead singer and 2nd gtr positions changed members) (Bay Area)
1985 - 1988 Electric Koels / drums (Bay Area, 60's garage rock)
1986 - 1991 Sons of Mellencamp
1986 Clash Brothers
1989 Gizmo Brothers
(electric/acoustic 2 man duos)
How did it all begin? In 1964 and 1965 every kid between the ages of 13
to 17 got a) a drum kit OR a b) electric guitar. I got the former and am still a
drummer first (60's Kinks style or NY Dolls style). I don't like singing but
people make me do it, and when you write songs, you gotta put vocals on the
tape for them soooo right, you're basically just fucked.
Who were your original influences? Every record I ever bought. There's
4,000 lps (as in albums) in the racks, you want to count them for me?
or you could count the boxes of 8-track tapes, there's probably only 600 to
700 of them
Who are your current influences? SEC football on TV. If you're
scratching your head at this question, then you obviously didn't see last
January's Florida - Ohio State blood massacre, or weren't born in Arkansas
(or one of the other 9 SEC states), or maybe you're just a dork, or all of the
above.
What is your proudest moment as a musician? VOM had their first
"business/music meeting" (called by founder Richard Meltzer), fall 1977 in the
Turner family's living room (VOM 2nd vocalist and oldest son Gregg lived in
the side room). Meltzer had a BIG folder of clean typed lyrics, like at least 20
pages/lyrics. At some point early in the meeting, he's playing 2nd rate UK
punk 45s on the family turntable, saying "this! Hear this!" huh, I'm having
NONE of it because I'm a card carrying Kiss Army fan (until the Phantom Of
The Park debacle the next Halloween) and that point I'm not buying one
second of the "punk rock" program UK or otherwise -- where's the cool guitar
solos and drum rolls? Sooo. At "let's take a break" time, I borrow the lyric for
"I'm In Love With Your Mom" and go into the small middle room with my
Silvertone/Kay electric, no practice amp.
10 minutes later I come out, and I've got the music finished and done, aka I'M
IN LOVE WITH YOUR fuckin MOM. Yeah I was feeling cocky that day. It was
just weeks (or a couple months, at most) since I'd written "My Old Man's A
Fatso" and "Carson Girls." Punk rock, fuck that shit was my point of view, late
fall 1977. Kiss, the great 1st Boston lp, the Nugent "Stranglehold" album on
CBS = "I'm In Love With Your Mom" was all about the ROCK. And the 2nd
Boston lp is just as good too.
What is your most embarrassing moment as a musician ? Anyone in a
punk band checks all shame and embarrassment-DNA molecules at the door
5 hours before the first gig. If you backslide and actually have an
"embarrassing" musical moment, you will be punished immediately by 10
hours in solitary confinement with the first three Smashing Pumpkins albums
at full volume until you kill yourself. Or more likely, attack and destroy the
source of such god awful music with a 50 pound sledgehammer once your
"shame" molecules run away never to be heard from again.
What do you think would have been your path through life if you had
never gotten involved with music? Never played music "full time," so the
full-time wage-slave corporate-drone white collar career of 21 years in the
finance/accounting profession (in the health care industry) went as expected.
And the following 15 years (beginning in early 1999) of planned part-time
work (i have to wake up TWO days a week, ie go to work to pay the rent or
most of it anyway) now over 1/2 done and now 7 short years away from "early
SSA," (big free money) 4 years from "401(k) early withdrawal" penalty-free
access, bla bla bla. in short = I can stay up till 3am, sleep till noon. You
can't. Because you're stupid and spent half of your 20's riding around in a
van playing for $75 dollar a gig in Topeka (fill in your other 200 favorite
backmarket towns). yeah yeah yeah, hey man send me a postcard when you
get a clue and go back to junior college or State Wotsamatta U and get a life.
Being a broke-ass bum mooching off of dad/mom or girlfriend or wife is NOT
punk rock! It's just....uh, lame.
Tell us something about you that few people are aware of. I quit
completing my baseball card sets in 1962 cause the Topps cards started to
suck that year. If I'd waited till 1964 to pull the plug (I'd bought up friends'
older brothers boxes of cards spanning 1954-1959, these sets eventually
completed during the world's first "card swap meets" in the grade school
cafeteria in Garden Grove, CA, circa 1973-74. Well, some of the sets.
B54/55 and T53/56 sucked ass so i never cared about them, T55 had some
super hard high #'s, and no one in the world could ever complete T52 without
a Rockerfeller family inheritance to hire the interns to track that year's
insanely rare high #'s down)-- well, duh, I'd have had about 100 dupes of the
T63 Pete Rose rookie and could have blown off full-time white collar
drone-work at least five years ahead of schedule.
When you look back on your musical path to this point, what are your
deepest regrets? Stupidest thing I EVER did was not putting "I'm In Love
With Your Mom" (ie, the version on the Bulge "Plays The Songs of VOM" 45)
onto the 1987 reissue "long form / full lp" version of INSIDE MY BRAIN as Side
2 Cut 1, then proceeding with the obvious My Old Man's A Fatso / Carson
Girls / I'm A Pig / Too Animalistic sequence. How on earth did this most
obvious of all obvious thoughts occur to be per song selection/sequence?
Because I'm a stupid motherfucker, that's why.
If you had the opportunity to start over, what would you change?
What kind the fuck of a question is that? Go ask Richard Nixon or Hubert
Humphrey or Gary Hart, someone who actually had an large impact on the
world we suffer through. If I don't write "You Stupid Asshole, " some other
dumbass is going to. If I wanted to spend 15 seconds thinking about "the
past," I'd be watching the fucking History Channel right now, right?
huhuhuhuh he said "ass."
Who has been the most influential person in your life and why?
Jimmy Osterberg brought back 1966 "garage punk" singing back from the
dead, and I mean stone cold dead and buried. NO ONE in 1969-70 sang like
that anymore. It was not cool. American "garage rock" of 1965-66 had
completely vanished by the Summer of Love and was looong forgotten two
long years later, and I'm talking long forgotten by EVERYONE, hardcore
music fans and nascent record collectors alike. Sure, I still had my set of
awesome Shadows of Knight 45s (ie the american Yardbirds and proto-Raw
Power/Stooges), but if someone had said "the Seeds, man" around me I
would've snickered.
Hell, he was such a vocal visionary (not to mention combining the doors /
velvets / seeds into that vocal whine, or lyrics? or whatever) that it took me 2,
3 entire years (until fall 1972) to realize hey, I could do that too! (instead of
singing like T Rex, Ray Davies, or Ricky Nelson, whatever). Jesus, and this
after my having apprenticed an entire year (almost) in the Rockin' Blewz, the
world's most reactionary 1969 pre-Beatles cover song band.
In other words, when heavy rock (and then heavy metal) elbowed old school
"hard rock" all but off the musical landscape (just ask the Flamin' Groovies,
they put out one of the greatest hard rock lps ever in 1971's TEENAGE HEAD
and, stuck on a fair-to-crappy R&B-oriented label, couldn't give the fucking
thing away) the landscape shifted BIG TIME. Nobody was singing like Jimmy
O-berg in 1970, 71, 72, 73, I mean fucking NO body. Of course, his band
couldn't give their records away (1st lp sold 30,000, and the next two took a
nose dive from even that) back then. uhhhhh whatever. Point is = every
"garage" or "punk" singer since 1977 onward should be sending 5 cents
every day back in time to the Stooges' 1969 Elektra royalty account, which as
we know was zero.
What are your thoughts on the current "Punk" scene? Don't have any,
do I look like a politician or an ass kisser? My job is trolling and selling over
1,000 t-shirts/tops (from the insanely great local thrift stores here in the south
East Bay of Hayward / San Leandro) every year for the piles of $5 shirts/tops
(men's/boys/girls) on the table (we play maybe 20 weekend gigs a year),
lining up the "merch table help" (which changes from gig to gig, being a
"regional" southern California band, NOT a touring band) for a fri/sat basically
once every month, doing the slow gruesome load-in/unloading/setup myself
(of 140 lbs of 3 pieces check-in luggage, see above = I live 400+ miles away
from all our gigs) and tear-down/load-up work ditto, annnd oh yeah, running
the Spamspace page which easy takes hours every week. This is my scene.
I don't know about yours. Stay out of my dream, and I'll stay the fuck out of
yours.
Musically, our LA/OC "scene" that we are a part of is the long list of old
1977-1982 LA/OC punk bands who have "played out" extensively at some
point during the last five years. And it is a long impressive list indeed =
Bad Religion
X
Social Distortion
The Germs
The Dickies
Weirdos
Adolescents
Angry Samoans
CH3
The Crowd
the Skulls
TSOL
D.I.
Fear
Red Cross / Redd Kross
How much has it changed or stayed the same since you got into it? I
scammed a drum kit from Santa at the age of 13 in 1965. I sucked at drums
for a couple years, so I learned to suck at guitar. Then I wrote over 1,000
songs over 25 years = ONE ENTIRE YEAR's worth of 8 to 5 work days/weeks,
writing songs (over that period) = and some of them got recorded. some of
the best ones (from the early-mid 70's, ie Stooges hammerdown hard rock
style, which was my strongest style then/now as a singer/guitarist, uh at least
the riffs/songs i wrote myself) NEVER got recorded. uhhhhhh "Gas Chamber"
was written in 1973 in my garage apartment two blocks from University of
Texas at 1912 Nueces, 1/2 the speed of the "punk rock" version and 100
times more hard-rock rocking. (ditto "Right Side Of My Mind," written in Little
Rock in 1976). This is all I know about music, is that the wrong fucking
version/style of "Gas Chamber" got recorded and played on stage.
What are your plans musically in the future? Never had any plans, never
will. Plans are for dumbassed "careerists" who want to play the Warped Tour.
As I said above, kid, get your ass in college because the real world is going
to FLATTEN you when you hit age 30. Do I sound like someone's dad?
WRONG answer WRONG answer WRONG WRONG WRONG! I'm as old as
your fucking grandfather and James Brown was right. You're going to argue
with James Brown?
