DAN MAD AT THE WORLD

Dan recently moved to Montreal from NYC, and I did not meet him until a couple months ago when we practiced for a Breakdown cover band. I knew the guy had been in punk-hc for a long time, and considering he's implicated in a lot of things, I thought it would have been great to interview him. That was a great idea and you'll find out why after reading this... -Interview by Hugo

How was it growing up in NYC? When did you get into punk/hardcore music?

Actually, I didn't grow up in New York City. I'm originally from New Jersey and only moved to New York much later. And I didn't even get into punk and hardcore in New Jersey at first; I was living in Germany when I first heard the Sex Pistols from a friend. My initial response was "this sounds like 70's music" to which my friend responded "I think it is." Upon a second listen I found I really liked this music and wanted to find out more about it and started getting tapes of Suicidal Tendencies, Minor Threat, Corrosion of Conformity, and so on. At the time, I didn't draw any kind of distinction between the Pistols and those other bands. It didn't take long to figure out that those albums were actually from some years prior but there was a current crop of these here "hardcore"-type bands which you could find out about if you did a little leg-work. I didn't have any older friends that listened to this music, so it wasn't always the easiest thing to find information about, but you did what you had to and it was particularly exciting when you did. I wound up seeing bands like Quicksand and Wool (short lived early 90's DC band with ex members of Scream) and some others that were touring at the time. When I moved back to New Jersey, a kid in my class came up to me and said he listened to hardcore and his brother was in a band. I wound up becoming good friends with him and his brother Craig (who now plays some nasty ghetto-tech/ booty bass under the moniker Mr Andersonic... good stuff) was in a band called Same Difference, with some of the guys that wound up being in the NJ band the Degenerics years later. Then I started finding out about shows and more bands.

Do you think punk/hardcore played a part in molding the person you are today? How did it affect your views on the world we live in?

Sure, at this point I've listened to hardcore well over half my life, so it definitely had an effect on me. Pragmatically, my life would be very different if I never had listened to it; I would not have to manage all the shitwork from the record label and I probably wouldn't have to pack up and carry so many boxes of records whenever I move. When I was younger the music and the people sure helped me through some tough times. I might not feel quite the same about it as I used to, but the one thing that I definitely still feel rather strongly about is the fact that hardcore was the first kind of music I became heavily involved and active in when I was very young, so it became a big point of reference for me of how to become actively involved in music. On a more fundamental level, because hardcore seemed so important at the time, it felt like hardcore warranted and even demanded participation. I wound up getting involved in bands, record labels, zines, and much more, even before I knew much about the workings of any of those things. I still find it cool that I can have a realistic expectation to get involved in something I really want to do without worrying about knowing much about it in the beginning. There's a charm in figuring it out as you go along and learn from your mistakes that's something I appreciate from hardcore. Perhaps it's made my life more fun.... it certainly hasn't made life more stable.


You run a record label named Mad at the World. Where does that name come from, and how did you start your label?

The name comes from the Y Di song of the same name on their "A Place in the Sun" 7". They're not even a New York band, even though MATW reissues a lot of NY stuff, YDi was from Philadelphia. I remember buying that record in a tiny basement record shop on Carmine Street in the Village not knowing what it was and even thinking at the time it might be the band YDL, but seeing that it was old and they thanked Iron Cross on the lyric sheet so I took a chance. For $10 or $15 or whatever it was then I thought it was worth it. It wound up being one of the best hardcore 7"s I'd ever heard. (And thank god it wasn't YDL; much worse record!) Mad at the World was the name of a zine I did years ago (only a few issues, of course) and the name was carried over into the record label. At the time, it was a bit of a tongue in cheek response to the glut of "positive hardcore" that came about in the mid to late 90's "youth crew" resurgence in New Jersey and surrounding areas. On a very basic level, I always liked my hardcore a little angrier and negative. There's something significantly more moving to me about hardcore music that's expressing some kind of irrepressible frustration, than hardcore that's overly confident in it's own assertions. Don't get me wrong, I don't have the patience for bands that are so self-involved they have to sing constantly how their life is terrible, but the best hardcore always sounds pretty off-kilter. Much as the music of Blood for Blood, for example, is pretty decent (the early stuff not so much), the lyrics always bordered on the comical for me. I guess the same could be said about Negative Approach or Black Flag, but both of those bands sounded like they had a few screws loose. That's what I meant with "Mad at the World," and I think it's an integral part of good music anywhere, whether it's Albert Ayler or Void. Sure, not many jazz, reggae, blues, country, whatever musicians would put it the same way, but that's just hardcore's particular idiom.

What are some of the best punk/hardcore shows you've seen?

I don't really know... but some of the best shows are ones you wind up being surprised by. While it's rare for me to be taken aback, it does still happen...
For example, around 2000, I saw this punk band from Portugal called the 77 which turned out to be one of the best shows of I'd seen for years. There's two shows in particular that popped into my memory again recently; the first is Outburst at CBGB's on St Patrick's Day 1996. It was the second of maybe 3 Outburst reunion shows at the time. Chris B from Fit of Anger/ Everybody Gets Hurt filled in on vocals. I remember this being the second or third of the CBGB's matinees when Tyler King started doing them every Sunday again. The first was Deadguy/ Buzzoven (who never showed up)/ Sub Zero the week before and was practically empty. This show wasn't well attended either, maybe 70 people tops including the bands, but when Outburst went on the place went off. I remember being on stage at one point looking out into the crowd and it looked like the whole place was dancing. There was a big pile on on the stage during the last song, which was captured in a picture in the pages of In Effect. The second one was Warzone at the Pipeline in Newark, NJ sometime just before New Years of 1997. Raybeez was fucked up for a lot of early to mid 90's and Warzone had a bit of a bad rep for being a shadow of what they used to be. But he cleaned up, and the line up that went into the late 90's with Todd, Jason, and Vinnie Value was incredible. That show was awesome-- packed house and a lot of people letting off some holiday steam. I remember cutting my finger down to the bone swinging on some pipe and it bled all over my shirt and pants. It didn't really stop bleeding for 3 days afterwards, and at the show it stung like hell due to the sweat dripping into the wound. I still have a nasty scar from that. I don't know why those happened to pop into my mind; there's certainly a lot more than that.... That Breakdown flyer you posted a few weeks ago on your blog, I snuck out of the house in order to be able to go see. Fun times...

Share with us some crazy stories related to punk/hardcore in general...

Here's a funny one: in the spring of 1995 that whole thing went down with John Joseph turning himself in for going AWOL. They had a benefit for him at Coney Island High. Being from New Jersey, being a big CroMags fan, and knowing there were a bunch of CroMags fans in New Jersey, I got it in my head to do a benefit for him in New Jersey. So, in June of 1995, it was held at the Cricket Club in Irvington, a polish disco/ nightclub that occasionally had hardcore shows, in a pretty poor neighborhood in northern New Jersey, a few towns over from where the Pipeline and Studio One and all those clubs were. Of course.... it wound up being a disaster. That week wound up being one of the biggest weeks for shows all summer, and this show was held on a Sunday. Strike one against the show. A lot of the bigger bands who were considering playing wound up not being able to do it, some at the last minute, and some (Cause for Alarm) didn't show up at all. Strike two. The band that was supposed to provide the cabinets for the back-line "forgot" to bring them. On top of that, one of the guys from One 4 One got into a fight in the parking lot with one of the security people we had to hire for the show, so Ignite (who was in town at the time and asked to play the show) decided to leave.... as did a few other bands. Then the people who did come and pay asked for a refund and left... and I was left standing there with a friend of mine, a skinhead named Terror who some folks might remember, facing these huge security guys demanding to be paid. So when John Joseph came out, the singer for my favorite band at the time, I not only had to explain to him the benefit was a wash, but I actually had to get some cash myself to pay off those dudes. Oops.

Top 10 HC records of all-time, and why?


That's a tough one. I'll start out by saying that the Germs, the Bad Brains, and Black Flag are always in the top tier, but I'd be hard pressed to pick a particular album by them (well, obviously (GI) for the Germs). After that, maybe the Negative Approach 7" and the aforementioned YDi 7" should be in there. The Urban Waste 7" for good measure. I've also spent a lot of time listening to Social Distortion's Mommy's Little Monster and Bad Religion's How Can Hell Get Any Worse. Out Cold has been one of my favorites since I first heard them. Rest In Pieces- My Rage was in constant rotation when I was 16. It changes all the time; I have to admit I can't really listen to 10 hardcore records in a row anymore, so whatever sounds good between Jorge Ben or Donna Summer....


Pre or post-85 NYHC?

I don't how how qualified I'd be to answer that question since I got into hardcore around 1992, which is probably not what you mean when you mean "post-85". But I'm not terribly into the youth crew bands, and while I quite dig Life's Blood, Sheer Terror, Outburst, Breakdown and the like, my vote would have to go with early 80's. Early 80's NYHC gets a bad rap, especially what with American Hardcore (the book and the movie), but I'm still quite enamored with it. It just sounds so fucked up and gnarly, even the very earliest stuff like the Stimulators or the Undead or early Heartattack, which is much more rock-influenced compared with DC and Boston bands of the same time. Comparing them almost doesn't make any sense; obviously other scenes had better recorded albums, more hooks in their song.... they also had significantly more money, better equipment, more stable places to practice/ record. I think you can hear this in early NYHC; it has a feeling and a craziness like nothing else.

You seem to know your shit really well, which obscure bands you think everybody should include in their playlist?


Nah, I'm just curious about stuff when I like something, and for some reason I can remember whatever I hear about music. Ask me about a movie I've seen and I be able to remember what it was about. As for recommendations, it would depend on what people like. It might be a bit cheap to put something here that I put out myself, but I think the Major Conflict stuff is an under-appreciated classic.

East side story ep or 89’ demo?

I'd probably have to go with East Side Story because it came out when I was actually around. A funny side story-- one of the times I saw Maximum Penalty was in a hall in Northern New Jersey with Ten Yard Fight and Cause For Alarm (who didn't show up) that looked a bit like a banquet hall attached to a hotel or something. It was mostly clean-cut straight edge kids there for Ten Yard Fight, along with Rat Bones and Rick Healey. You could tell MP, especially Jimmy, felt REALLY out of place. The band had to convince Jimmy not to leave before the set. He introduced "Coming Home" as "a song about coming home from jail, which I know none of you can relate to." Incidentally, seeing Rat Bones dancing in a near-empty hotel banquet hall was a sight to behold.

Which bands are you into at the moment? Do you feel punk/hardcore is still as relevant as it was back in the 80's?

The past few years that I lived in New York I did not pay much attention to hardcore. I still saw plenty of music, but it just wasn't that much hardcore. I was very busy, and other music caught my interest more. I kind of spoiled myself in the late 90's and around 2000/2001. We had a converted corner store as part of our apartment, which we practiced in in my band at the time and put on shows when bands came around that we liked. We had bands like 9 Shocks Terror, Total Fury, Tear it Up, Down in Flames, Amdi Petersens Armee, DS13, the Oath, Born Dead Icons, Catharsis and plenty of non-hardcore stuff as well. So I didn't have to travel far when I really wanted to see something, we always cooked a lot of food, there was plenty of booze flowing, and something crazy always seemed to happen. After being spoiled like that, it's not much incentive to go to a lot of hardcore shows because a boring hardcore show is really depressing.

When I moved to Montreal, I checked out some bands I was interested in and had some fun at the shows, so I continued going again. Due to the label, I was checking out more new stuff, and the stuff that appealed to me most in the past year or so were records by the Prowl, Government Warning, Career Suicide, and I'm really into Double Negative.
It seems like there are plenty of decent bands out there, and a few very good ones. As long as kids are enthusiastic about the music, hardcore will be relevant. I don't agree that hardcore is in very different from mainstream society, so I'm not using that as a standard, but that's a topic for a different time....

You like living in Montreal? Why did you move here?

You mean, why did I leave my stable, well paying job in a city I love to move up to Montreal and struggle as an immigrant? Good question! A lot of reasons, actually. My girlfriend and I were both teachers in New York, and between teaching, doing the labels, and slowly working on completing work for my doctoral degree there was way too much going on in my life. I knew my dissertation work would take up an awful lot of time, and the labels were swallowing up more and more time as well. I was very fond of teaching, but the changes that were happening in the school system were making it harder to do what I felt I needed to do at work. It's not simply that my frustration got the better of me, but it was apparent to me that I had to reorganize things a bit in order to figure out what I was going to do with the next few years of my life. New York became more and more frustrating as well... constantly getting more expensive, and the gentrification of neighborhoods and the hipster explosion went hand in hand. We always liked Montreal, saw that the cost of living there was reasonable, loved the Jean Talon market, and always thought it might be cool to spend some time living in Montreal. With that in mind, we took the chance. I do like living in Montreal. I'm excited about some of the things going on in my life at the moment, and am happy how things are turning out. The month after I first got here, I started second guessing myself, and all the red tape with immigration was and continues to be a hassle, but such is life.

Final thoughts? ROIR sessions or Rock for Light?

That's a tough one. I don't think I can answer. Sometimes I'd say Rock For Light simply because it's got some extra songs on it that are just ace (Riot Squad, How Low Can a Punk Get, We Will Not)... but on the other hand hearing the ROIR Sessions for the first time blew my mind. I can vividly remember getting it; ROIR was having a sale on their tapes for the holidays and they were $5 a piece, so I bought a whole bunch of their stuff. (Flipper, Einstuerzende Neubauten, the Lounge Lizards, the Dickies, etc etc... all classics. ROIR is one of the best labels, hands down.) I listened to it most of the tapes the day they came in, and when I listened to the Bad Brains, by the time Supertouch/ Shitfit came on I was jumping around my room.

Check out Dan's blog here: http://www.danscheme.blogspot.com/
Mad At The World Records: http://www.matwrecords.com/