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'Every Revolution Starts With Some Drunk Fucks'

Filed under: Imported

So sayeth The Hangdogs, who have been schlepping around the country in a van for roughly a decade now, playing angry, booze-sodden country rock. Their stellar fifth album, Wallace '48, is named in honor of the late vice president and Progressive Party standard bearer. After two albums on Shanachie, the Hangdogs are back to putting out their own music.

The New York-based band plays Lee's Liquor Lounge this Saturday evening. I spoke with lead singer and songwriter (and author of the hillarious Hangdoggerel newsletter) Matthew Grimm on the phone last week about music, politics--and taking it up the ass:

Paul Demko: What happened with Shanachie?

Matthew Grimm: They fired us. What do you call it? I guess they're still calling it a recession. Except we're out of it now. Everything's swell now economically in the country. It was a couple months after the September 11th thing, a full two years after the recession had begun, and they bombed the city so that gave everybody the excuse to downsize and we got downsized. I don't think we sold a lot of records for them either. I think that was an issue. I could get into some of the other issues on why we didn't sell a lot of records for them but I'd probably be broaching certain libel issues.

PD: You're originally from Iowa, right? Whereabouts?

MG: A little town called Stanwood, near Cedar Rapids. Unless you have a real detailed map of Iowa it will not be on the map.

PD: The song "Monopoly on the blues" [from the Hangdogs' debut disc Same Old Story] is about Stanwood?

MG: Yep. All the stuff referenced in there is pretty much Stanwood. There's a hardware store that went out of business. There was a real Don's Grocery. And there is indeed Wal Mart in the county seat, which is Tipton, about nine miles south of town. So all that shit is very true, and for some reason that song went over apeshit in Texas. Everybody thought it was just a metaphorical story about their town and blah, blah, blah. And that's because it's happening everywhere. There's a professor at Iowa State who did a sort of hard metric survey of the effects of Wal Mart. It shows that Wal Mart is this event horizon of a sucking black hole and it like fucks up towns for 20 miles all around. I'm actually working on, or I've actually just done a half assed outline and written a few chapters of Hangdoggerel, the book, and that kind of figured into one of the chapters.

PD: Hangdoggerel, the book? Did I hear you correctly?

MG: (Laughs) Yes. Somebody in the publishing industry who gets our newsletter said, 'You guys should do a book.' I'm trying to figure out how to weave something together that actually addresses all this shit of why we're being fucked up the ass every day of our lives, but do it in a fun way.

PD: Why write about Henry Wallace?

MG: I wrote that song during the last Nader campaign. We really have no choices politically and that was smacking me in the face daily. I bought The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry Wallace in some used bookstore in the south and had read that. It kind of occurred to me as I read that--not the '48 campaign, but actually 1944 when he got ousted from the vice presidency at the convention in Chicago and they put Truman on the ticket instead of him--that things could have been really palpably different had a man of vision, by some lark, inherited this vast groundswell consensus that FDR had amassed, especially given how powerful the country was coming out of World War II.

I read about all these musicians and artists who got behind the Progressive Party campaign in 1948. There was an organization called Sing Out! that was formed around then and a bunch of songs were written, like stump songs. Wherever he went there would be a folk band that would bring him on stage. So I started looking around for those songs, and of course the only place you can find them is on a Bear Family compilation. And of course it's like an eight-cd compilation and it costs you $500 at the cheapest. So I said fuck that, I'm going to right my own song. I tried to write it in that kind of street corner stumping style.

PD: Do you have any regrets about supporting Nader now that we've had two years of Bush?

MG: Well, no. Rob's a democrat, the bass player in the band. So he's the right-wing voice of devil's advocacy on that. Yes, it's Nader's fault if history is completely mono-causal--and it's not. There's not any way that trying to advance the cause of the best candidate for the job is the wrong thing to do. I want the Democrats to be the party of progressive politics. As long as they continue not to be, then they're not earning my vote. Al Gore has to be a dynamic, trust-busting guy who tells the Democratic Leadership Council to take the corporate dick out of their ass and go fuck themselves. And he's got to live up to all that environmental bullshit that he cloaks himself in. The worst plague of locusts couldn't happen to George Bush from my point of view. Don't get me wrong. It couldn't be more apparent that you need something distinct, that you need a different voice and a different way as part of your message against this particular status quo. If in fact the Democrats do what they did in the early '90s and say, 'We have to move close to that in order to beat it,' then they're defeating the whole purpose of political discourse and they're selling us all out to boot.

PD: Why do you guys keep coming back to Minneapolis?

MG: It's a good town. I like Lee's. I like the Turf Club. It seems like it's a good music town, even though we've had good nights and bad nights there. What are the towns that maybe a) will have a predilection for this kind of music, and b) would support it on a semi-regular basis as long as you get the word out. We're old guys who are still trying to break down those fucking walls so it's kind of incongruous in that regard because it's not like we've got our whole lives and careers ahead of us to make those inroads for people.

PD: What's your motivation at this point in time? Presumably you're not making a ton of money doing this?

MG: No. Especially if you don't qualify a ton as any. I don't know. I ask myself that every fucking tour. Because you know, for two hours a night you actually control something in your life. I hate to give the morose psychological answer. It's still fun as fuck to play a great show. It's still fun as fuck when people you've never seen before and have never heard you before move into the middle of the room and start dancing. The older I get the more I kind of appreciate that there are very few moments of liberation in this life, and that Friday and Saturday nights are those. It's part of why I drink. It's part of the festivity of the ritual, even if it is just a weekly ritual and not particularly pregnant with spirituality. But after awhile, call it a drunk's gross rationalization, but there is a spirituality. There is a spirituality to the union of people who are--going back to the old catch phrase--fucked every day of their lives, and you've got to do something together to sort of collectively reaffirm that you are not completely insane for bending over and taking it every day.

PD: How do you pay the bills?

MG: I'm a freelance writer. I write for American Demographics, Brandweek, which is the magazine I used to edit, and I recently did something for Cable World magazine. Most of it on media issues. I know that, in juxtaposition to everything I just said, those may sound like really weird outlets for my polemics, but they actually do let me write shit.

PD: So are you excited about the FCC ruling that just came down?

MG: I'm just picking up the Brandweek magazine that just came out this week. I'm going to read you the first sentence of my new column: "Michael Powell did his part to destroy civil society last week, according to news reports." My kicker is: "In other news, Leni Riefenstahl turned 100 last year. Maybe she needs a job."

You read about the Jessica Lynch thing right? That it was stage managed and everything? I think that story was reported a week or two weeks before this whole Powell thing. There are so many news resources in this country for people to actually do their jobs. But instead they took this canned, stage-managed thing and plastered it everywhere. You could not escape. It monopolized people's consciousness. And that's under the current ownership system. Which is maybe twelve golfing white guys who set the standards and practices for all those news gathering organizations, most of which are already in bed with the Pentagon. So that twelve golfing white guys is gonna go down to five golfing white guys and that's gonna be good for the discourse in the country? Right.

Posted by Paul Demko at June 18, 2003 7:47 PM

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