I'm bored.............. here is one from the archives. An interview with 'Pocket Full of Change' Seattle Fanzine. May '05.
Clit 45 is incredibly honest about the fact that they aren't trying to reinvent punk rock, they're just trying to do a really good job of playing the style of music they love. Some critics write them off for that, but several releases, including a new album on BYO, and lots of touring have proven that the fans appreciate the band's classic mix of street punk and California hardcore even if some reviewers don't. We went to see the band at the beginning of their national tour with the Lower Class Brats and while it seemed to be a clever idea from a marketing and sales perspective to put together two complimentary bands with distinctly different audiences it resulted in an unusual amount of conflict and tough guy posturing. Seattle is usually an overly polite city, but on this night the assholes were out in droves and we almost got involved in a fight, which put us in bad moods while we waited for the band to gather up their stuff and be ready for the interview. We managed to avoid the fight and eventually met up with the band at a bar down the street and after a few quick beers everyone seemed in better spirits. Jim and I sat down with the band (except for Dave, the singer, who apparently spent the entire time in the bathroom on the phone). Mike, the drummer (referred to as Mike2 in the interview) and Cody didn't have much to say - I don't know if they were shy or if they just didn't like us. It all worked out fine though because Mike kept us informed and Rufio kept us entertained.
Interview by Caryn and Jim
Live photos by Caryn
Normally I would edit out some of the extra rambling, but the band's, um…"confusion" is pretty damn funny so it stays in.
Caryn: What's up with playing the theme song to the Gummie Bears before your set? Was that your doing?
Rufio: Here there and everywhere. The secret of gummie berry juice!
Mike: I wasn't backing that but whatever it was fine.
Jim: Where did you find a copy of that song?
Rufio: I don't know but I have it in my possession. We could play it right now!
Caryn: Do you start every show with the Gummie Bears song?
Rufio: We've been trying to.
Mike: No, this was special.
Rufio: Actually this is the first time.
Mike: One and only. Only Seattle.
Caryn: It worked. People seemed really excited about it. It was a terrible show though. I hated the Gummy Bears.
Mike: It was the only song that was played properly tonight.
Caryn: I meant I hated the Gummie Bears show, not your show tonight.
Caryn: When did you actually form the band? I was looking on BYO's website and it's pretty funny because it says right on your front page that you are teenagers, but in your bio it says you are big kids and you can buy liquor now so what is the truth about that? You're obviously not teenagers. [We're conducting the interview in a bar after all.]
Rufio: We're teenagers at heart. We'll never stop partying.
Mike: We started the band around 1996/97. But I'm the only original member. I was 14 or 15 at the time. But yeah, we're all of legal age now. Yeah, we can drink. So I don't know how that rumor got started.
Caryn: How do you feel about them promoting you as teenagers?
Mike: Whatever works. I guess we're young looking. Maybe. I don't know. How old are you? 21?
Caryn: No, I'm old. 28.
Mike: That's not old. I'm 24.
Caryn: So you're not a teenager, not even close. That's ridiculous.
Caryn: What caused you to want to be a musician when you were 14?
Mike: I just played guitar and I liked punk music so I started a band. I didn't think I'd be doing it for that long. You know, it was just something to do.
Caryn: It kept you busy?
Mike: Pretty much.
Caryn: Did it keep you out of trouble or did it get you into trouble?
Mike: Being in a punk band ruins your life. Don't do it. It sucks everything out. There have been so many lineup changes. Dave joined the band a couple of years later. We just used to play parties every few months, I mean, we were kids, it was just something to do and then it somehow kept going and it never ever stopped. But now we're kind of like a real band. Sort of.
Caryn: What was the first album that you heard that made punk music the music you wanted to play?
Mike: I listened to Minor Threat and through skateboarding and stuff like that I got into punk. I was looking for something different. And Black Flag. It was just about being young and skateboarding and having fun.
Rufio: I came up on The Queers, but no, erase that.
Mike: He's from the east coast so his first band was The Queers.
Caryn: Hey, I'm from the east coast and Minor Threat was one of the first punk albums I bought.
Mike: Yeah they're from the east coast too [gesturing to the rest of the band]. I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm retarded.
Caryn: I'm sure people ask this all the time, but what's up with the name? What did your families think when you first told them the name of your band?
Mike: Mom was definitely bummed. She was like why don't you just call your band cunt 45 that'd be cool. And I was like, mom you just said cunt!
Caryn: That was originally going to be my question – what do your moms think, but I thought you'd think I was a dork asking about your moms.
Rufio: My mom thinks I'm very handsome.
Mike: One of the other guys who is not in the band anymore named it. It means sex and violence and it was really cheesy and he just thought that we wouldn't be a band this far down the line so it wouldn't matter.
Rufio: I hated the name for years and years then someone came to our show and said he got suspended from school for wearing our shirt and then I started liking it.
Caryn: I was wondering if you got into trouble with that. Are you worried that bigger conservative stores like Walmart won't carry your cds?
Mike: They won't. A lot of people won't.
Rufio: Yeah, we're pretty worried about Walmart.
Mike: I don't know. Tower has a Clit 45 section, so does the Warehouse. Hot Topic won't carry the shirts so real big bummer. Actually, I don't care at all.
Caryn: But then you won't be as cool as everybody else.
Rufio: Oh, we've never been as cool as everyone else. I mean no, we've always been cool.
Caryn: You knew that was sarcasm, right? Walmart and Hot Topic do not equal cool.
Mike: So yeah, sex and violence. That sounds so crappy.
Caryn: You formed in Long Beach, do you still live in Long Beach?
Mike: No. We actually moved out of there a few months ago. We lived in Hollywood for a while but that got gross so we moved back to Long Beach. Now we have a house in Silver Lake. We have a nice house and it's in a hip area or whatever but we still practice and work in Long Beach.
Caryn: How has the scene changed there since you were younger?
Mike: When I was a kid you'd have a big crew of people that you hung out with. All these street punk kids and whatever that we used to hang out with and they all kind of died out. The scene, the whole LA scene is pretty young. It seems like the whole punk scene is pretty young. There's the older, 30 year old burnout crowd hanging out at the bar and then there's the young kid crowd. There aren't really a lot of people around our age, just a few of our friends kind of stuck around.
Caryn: So who's coming to your shows then?
Mike: The kids. We have a younger crowd. We don't play bar shows usually because nobody really comes. We've always been labeled as a band that only kids like but now we're trying to play with other types of bands and get older crowds to be into it, which is starting to work. So whatever, whoever. The LA scene is definitely huge but it's really unproductive in my opinion. There are lots of bands that hardly ever go out to tour or do anything at all.
Caryn: How did you end up on BYO?
Mike: I've always been a huge fan of Another State of Mind. All the BYO records, Aggression, Someone Got Their Head Kicked In... We've been fans since we were teenagers. We played a few shows with Youth Brigade. We've known them for years and we're always like come on check us out and their like yeah whatever. Our old stuff wasn't really up to par. So we knew the Stern brothers cause we'd always send them our stuff and they're like try next time, try next time. We recorded the whole album without any label assistance, our manager paid for the whole thing. Then we pretty much just shopped it around and a few labels were really interested. I can't fucking talk, I didn't sleep last night. Portland rots your brain with all the crappy drugs. I've had one hour of sleep in the last three days. So we've always sent our stuff and they actually liked the last thing we did so that's how it happened.
Caryn: You said other labels were interested but BYO was your first choice?
Mike: A lot of people were interested and we had some meetings with them, but BYO was our first choice. I've always wanted to work with them. I'm fucking drunk, is everybody else just on quaaludes? What's wrong with everybody?
Mike2: I'm the only normal one.
Mike: I'm sorry…what's going on?
Caryn: So you recorded the album without label help?
Mike: We recorded 8 or 9 months before anyone heard it. At the time we didn't even have a drummer. It was the biggest longest process ever. We've been writing it for a couple of years. We'd had drummers on and off. Then Mike from A Global Threat came out because we didn't have a steady drummer. He came out to the studio and did it in bits and pieces.
Mike2: I'm the best drummer you've ever had!
Mike: And now he's playing with us, I guess.
Caryn: He must have liked you enough to stick around then.
Mike2: Me? Yeah, we've been friends for a while. It's a very incestual relationship.
Caryn: How?
Mike: Right now three members of Clit 45 were at one time in A Global Threat. And they're from Boston so I don't really know how that works.
Caryn: Besides new members how is this album different? What made this be the one that BYO wanted to pick up finally?
Mike: When you're younger you try to emulate your influences and the other stuff was written when we were really young. So if you're into street punk you only want to write street punk. But as you get older you listen to more music and are less focused on one thing. I don't know, we didn't really become better songwriters, but we just got better at knowing what sucked. We'd go through tons of songs and its like no, throw all that out. We eventually came upon the ones that worked. It's what we've always been trying to go for: american hardcore punk. Like the Adolescents. Stuff along those lines. It's always been my favorite music, sort of.
Caryn: So what other influences do you have that might be surprising? The non-punk stuff?
Mike: I fucking love Morrissey more than anything on the face of the planet.
Caryn: Are you kidding?
Mike: No. I paid $75 to see him last year. I just bought my Oasis ticket. That cost $80. I don't know, Lou Reed, fucking David Bowie, the glam scene. The biggest influences on this record are guys like GBH, Motorhead, Poison Idea, Adolescents, Bad Religion. Actually, there are some Smiths riffs that were kinda copped and changed to punk songs.
Caryn: I just reviewed a punk album that had a Smiths cover so I guess that isn't that strange.
Mike: What song did they cover?
Caryn: Jeanne.
Mike: Wow, that's pretty obscure. Awesome.
Caryn: I read something about how you've stopped writing political songs, is that true?
Mike: I read that too and was like um, ok, we never really wrote political songs. When you're younger it's easy to write songs like fuck authority and simple stuff like that. I think our politics come up on the record. Dave writes all the lyrics and he does a good job bringing personal stuff up and relating it to a real world situation. Like the song "Misery on a mainline" he does a good job. What the fuck am I talking about? Relating the current world situation with our daily lives. I would never have called us a political band in the first place so we definitely didn't make a conscious effort to stop doing anything. Dave just grew as a songwriter.
Caryn: Do you have a favorite song off the new album?
Mike: [to the rest of the band] What's yours?
Rufio: As much as I'm afraid to admit it, what's Rico's song...
Mike: That's your favorite song?!
Rufio: No, actually I like "Misery."
Cody: "Misery on a Mainline."
Mike2: Yeah, "Misery."
Mike: "Misery on a Mainline" seems to be everyone's favorite song. I like every song on the record. My favorites are "Can't Stop the Bleeding" either that or actually, yeah "Kids Aren't Alright" is still my favorite song.
Caryn: How many shows have you done on this tour so far?
Mike: This is the fourth. Fifth? We just left a few days ago. We did Denver, Salt Lake, and two nights in Portland. The second one was just a bar show. It was awesome. We played with The Riffs' new band. They're some of our best friends.
Rufio: They're The Nice Boys now.
Mike: We got all the members of The Riffs to get back together and they played an impromptu Riffs reunion. They fucking ruled. Why are we talking about The Riffs?
Caryn: We were talking about the tour.
Mike: So yeah we only have 65 more shows to go. We get back July 9th. Last summer we were gone for 14 weeks. We're going to get more insane every day and take more things apart. [Throughout most of the conversation Rufio had been disassembling a disposable camera and at this point he loses control of the camera and it flys in the air knocking down a neon sign which falls from the window and crashes down onto Mike and our table. No one was hurt, beers were not spilled, bartender was not angry, and the sign went right back up in the window. Playing with the camera resumed.] Hopefully we'll play better at tomorrow's show, tonight was a little rough.
Rufio: We tried our best.
Caryn: Well, the audience seemed to be enjoying it.
Mike: It was fun. It was just a little bit loose for our taste. We try to keep everyone entertained but be as tight as possible. I'm actually pretty into what our band is doing right now which is pretty weird because I've always hated our band. When people liked it I was like what's wrong with you. You're going to have to do so much editing on this. Rambling and rambling. Laughing and lying. Muttering and stuttering.
Caryn: You seem kind of tired out from the tour already – has anything really happened yet?
Mike: Rufio wants everyone to know he went to a strip club last night and got to take home a stripper who was a lesbian and her girlfriend is really mad at him. Oh, I guess you're not supposed to print this. The amount of stuff that happens on tour in five days you could fill up five tapes with. It's insane, never a dull moment.
Rufio: Four days is a year. A lot of laughing and lying. Leaping and creeping…
Mike: Inside jokes and tour brain. When you hang out with the same people for so long you can't even talk to normal people anymore because it makes no sense.
Mike2: It makes perfect sense to me and I'm normal.
Mike: We all know each other so well and we're always around each other doing the same stupid things.
Caryn: So you said you had a house, do you all live together?
Mike: Me, Cody and Dave all do. Our bass player did but we kicked him out like a week ago and got our older bass player back. Mike and Rufio live in Boston but the rest of us live at the house. So yeah, we do have a Clit 45 house I guess.
Caryn: Have you seen any decent local bands open for you on this tour?
Rufio: That band tonight, The Guilty, they were really a great band. We were really impressed.
Mike: Yeah, they were fucking good. I'm not going to lie to you, most of the time the opening bands aren't very good. Both bands tonight were pretty good, but The Guilty were like 15 year old kids.
Rufio: I hope they do something with it.
Mike: Actually, we played a record release show with the Krum Bums who are from Texas - they were really good.
Rufio: They are the best humans being in the entire country. Krum Bums on TSOR Records. They're really the best people I've ever met in my life. They're an awesome band.
Mike: What's the name of the magazine this is for?
Caryn: Pocketful of Change.
Rufio: Pocket full of Kryptonite? Who sings "Pocket Full of Kryptonite"?
Mike: The Spin Doctors.
Rufio: The Spin Doctors, right. Aren't they from Seattle?
Caryn: I don't know. We're not really from Seattle. And I don't think I would know anyway.
Rufio: The Spin Doctors, buy their new record.
Mike: I think they only had one record. I'm sick and my voice is shot and I'm still smoking.
There is a break in the interview here for some singing and bad impersonations.
Rufio: When do we get to start asking you guys questions?
Caryn: Go ahead.
Rufio: Don't you hate pants?
After a lengthy discussion about pants we were about to leave when one of my favorite Pogues songs - "Dirty Old Town" - starts playing on the jukebox. The entire bar drunkenly sings along and it is a bizarre and beautiful end to a strange night.
As of publication, the band's website (
www.clit45.com) was still "temporarily down" but you can visit
www.byorecords.com or their myspace page for more info.