Interview with Mass Giorgini of Squirtgun by Aaron Colter
Tipp-C: the Lafayette Cities’ Arts, Events and Entertainment Magazine (Vol. 3, 1),
December 7th, 2005 – January 11th, 2006.
I met Mass for the interview at Village Coffee Shop. Thankfully, I had already seen his face at the Squirtgun show about a week before. Mass Giorgini does not look like a punk rocker, or even a soft
rocker for that matter. One of Lafayette’s biggest stars, a man who co-produced an album with Billie Armstrong, produced an album for Rise Against, Anti-Flag and Alkaline Trio, bassist for Common Rider, Screeching Weasel and Squirtgun, toured with Jimmy Eat World and Blink-182. For Christ’s sake people, Squirtgun’s song “Social” opens Mallrats. Fucking Mallrats! Maybe I’m too easily won over, but this man has had more productive influence on music than that fat slob Axl Rose. And here he is ordering coffee, looking like a teaching assistant for Physics 101. As I found out Mass actually teaches Italian at Purdue, for fun he says, and is a graduate student in Spanish. Incredible. Now at 37, I got to sit down with Mass and find out what punk rock does with someone over 22.
What is the first instrument you ever played?
I started on the sax. And in fact, I played a lot of sax in Common Rider with Jesse from Operation Ivy.
When did you first pick up the bass then?
I started playing bass in seventh grade, so I must have been twelve at the time.
I guess we’ll just dive into it from here. So, why punk?
I was drawn to punk when I was about 12. I started playing in a punk band by the age of 15. Remember the island of misfit toys in that reindeer movie? It was like that — an island of misfit kids. Back then, being punk was definitely not a cool thing. The punks were the ultimate misfits, beyond being square pegs in round holes – we were four-dimensional fractals trying to live in Flatland. And by “punks,” I definitely don’t mean that they were bad kids, but like me, nerdy kids, just… outcasts. I think that the “misfit island” of punk was what made me want to be a part of it. I had felt like an outcast of sorts from an early age for not understanding the language – I was raised in Italy my first several years, and came here not knowing any English – that was probably enough on its own to guarantee my getting picked on or beat up… but add on to that the fact that my mother had schizophrenia, and all of a sudden I was the kid with the “crazy mom.” But in the punk scene, I fit in. At least in what I call my punk scene – because for me there were three waves of punk: the first wave was made up of American groups like the Ramones, and before them Iggy and The Stooges or MC5. Real basic, loud rock — fast and simple. The second wave was British, with the Sex Pistols and The Clash. And this was when, you know, the politics came in, when the bands first got involved with social issues. But the third wave — that was the most important to me, that was… no, is my scene. We kept the politics, and the fast, simple, hard music. But we also added this sense of anti-commercialism, community. We cranked up the dial on our resistance to the status quo – we brought the Mohawk to the masses, declared ourselves an alternative to the mainstream, claimed a different sense of justice and morality that we felt exceeded those of the powers-that-be, and, whether we knew it or not, we were preaching a form of socialism, within the scene — essentially semi-Marxist stuff, as I see now, in hindsight. Sure, we were to a large degree deluded, dreamy-eyed kids that thought we could completely change the world with our music and ideas, and our actual effect on the world may not have been as dramatic as our dreams, but I do think that we made, and still are making, a difference. Groups like Black Flag, Minor Threat, The Dead Kennedys – they engendered this scene. It was all about D.I.Y., Do-It-Yourself, you know? And with it there was the birth of the zine culture – our own underground, independent press — starting with MaximumRockNRoll, and later with zines like Punk Planet. And then, of course, came the whole concept of “unity” – which first came to punk from ska via the Clash, who brought in the word through Desmond Dekker of Jamaica. “Unity” was meant to symbolize how a music scene could improve race relations, and used the black and white checkerboard as it’s symbol, to represent the idea of unity with individuality – the colors are together, but still distinct. But, even though the notion started in the “second wave,” it really came to life in the third wave, in the U.S., through Operation Ivy.
I was drawn to these kinds of social issues. I guess I can add to that the fact that my parents were not like many other parents, not W.A.S.P. or conservative, they were actually rather liberal, and very anti-war. My father grew up a prisoner of war of the Allies in Africa during the second World War, and mother grew up in wartime Italy, as the Nazis and the U.S. fought each other on Italian soil – every bombing of a “Nazi stronghold” was another Italian church destroyed, every “U.S. Munitions Armory” blown up was another Italian school. Maybe that is part of why I like championing the underdog, why I try to see things from the side of the oppressed. Anyway, that’s what punk is supposed to be about – championing the rights of those whose race, culture, or beliefs do not reflect the majority.
(Laughing) And, yeah, I admit that you have to include the “teen angst” factor, too… I mean, honestly, plain-old youthful rebellion had something to do with it – just like it did with early rock’n’roll – but also just like it has had to do with any social revolution throughout history. The rebelliousness of youth can be powerful. But, it’s also short-lived, ephemeral. Just how many thirty-seven year olds go to punk shows? It’s only a phase of two years for most people.
Why stay in the scene then?
I love it. And I’ve made it my life to some degree. But I would have made a living easier any other way. When people say, “Oh you must be so lucky.” Well, yeah, I am lucky, yes. But I’ve worked an average of over a hundred hours per week for most of the last 15 years. You do that because you want to. It’s something you do out of passion. It’s not about the fashion, which I love, too — it’s all kinds of stuff. It’s the combination of the music and the message. I still believe it can change the world.
Punk seems to be coming back, it’s “cool” now. How do you feel about that?
The classic punk reaction to that trend is that it’s cheapening what we started, or that the “cool” bands are selling out. I don’t think it’s that simple. In many ways, it has made the punk scene more powerful, therefore more able to affect the changes that were part of our credo. But, honestly, like the naysayers, I do miss some things. Back then, in the punk days of yore, if I saw a guy with a Mohawk walking down the street, instantly there was a connection. Chances were that we listened to the same bands, thought the same way about wanting to rid the world of racism, or homophobia, or sexism. I can’t say that anymore. With all of the popularity, the message has been diluted, there’s not enough unity to pass on any focused message. There’s division now, which is sad. You know, now that we have such a wide scene, there really is the possibility to band together and accomplish something. But unfortunately, there’s a tendency to separate. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want everything to be the same, homogenous — I’m not saying that. But maybe there’s just one thread to connect all of us together… we just need to find it.
As a scene, we’ve gotten big and fat. There’s a lot of in-fighting, weird inner band back-biting, discord between the subgenres, and so on. If we’re not careful, punk will become the same as dinosaur rock. It doesn{t necessarily have anything to do with commercial success — Green Day still has most of what made them. But some other bands . . . there’s a bloated carcass in the music industry now that calls itself “punk.” It’s no more punk than PokÉmon. Commercialism creates these bands with no knowledge of what punk is. People are looking for another Green Day. But those guys busted their butts, they slept on floors, their vans would break down and they had to find a way to make it to the next show. They are the real thing. These new, pre-fab, wanna-be “punky” pop-band pretty boys — they can’t rise above stuff like that. Not without living it, learning it. …and I’m not saying there’s no hope for the newest wave of punks. We all can learn, and change. It’s up to the old guard to talk about what was special about our cultural revolution, and not bask in the glory of our records sales, or gloat over how well we’ve done compared to what anyone else would have believed. We must not become what we hated. Otherwise, all will have been for naught. The new generation must pick up the torch and banner, raise their fists in the air, and fan the flames of the fire we started. They just need to know it exists. It’s not as if you can’t learn it, or become it, if you didn’t live back then. None of us were “born punk.”
What has changed over the years?
Well, when I first started, locally, it was almost impossible to hold all-ages shows. We had to resort to playing parties, which was not always a good idea. But then in ’85, ’86 there was a huge push to have all-ages shows, so barriers were broken down. We got to start having some of the very first shows at the Morton Center and University Church. In ’87 I took all of my college savings, without telling my dad, and opened my club called Spud Zero. Many other music fans – punk or indie rock – would volunteer to help me run the club, just to keep it open. All of these great bands were playing right across the river, two or three shows per week. Sometimes only ten or twenty people would show up, but then bands like Naked Raygun, Dag Nasty, or Material Issue would come and get two hundred. It worked for a year. And during that time is when I met most of the people I know in the music scene now — the same basic group of people who started labels like Lookout and Fat Records. It was so much work though.
Sometimes bands like Operation Ivy would only get thirty people. And they were great! They went on to sell over a million copies of the record they were promoting on that tour… but played to 30 people in Lafayette, and slept on my floor. Later, when I closed that club, the group of kids would help me put on monthly shows – back at the Morton Center, the Conservation Club, and places like that. All of the fans that had gotten used to several shows per week were hungry for live bands, so we would get up to 700 hundred people on some occasions. But overall, locally, “The Scene,” if you can call it that, was the biggest back then. All these different bands played, and everyone supported everyone else. [Alternative” meant underground back then, you know, this was before Nirvana or before MTV cashed in on that name, before you’d ever hear that word on the radio. So it included everything, everything you wouldn’t hear on the radio. We found power in banding together. But bands today have that power through numbers, through the internet. Back then, it was all about calling people who knew someone, who maybe knew someone that knew someone else in a band, and we would try to get them to come down from places like Chicago to play. It’s so much easier today. And I don’t understand why there’s not a bigger scene as a result of that connection.
Even as for our local scene — so many great bands have come from here. But no one outside of town seems to hear of the bands that are still here. The funny thing is that a lot of great, unknown bands have recorded at Sonic Iguana, some that later went on to be very influential bands on an international level. None of them were local – they came from far away to record here. But even while they were in town, they did not play here, because no one was putting on punk rock shows anymore.
We could be making a huge splash here, now, with so much cutting-edge music being done in the area. Huge bands have come out of here before… Blind Melon, Guns N Roses — one of the biggest rock bands of all time. But those guys left, and didn’t really come back. There was no reason for them to, because when they were here, they weren’t encouraged. …but I would hardly want to paint them to be saints, either.
We only need a strong group of, fifty people or so, regulars… people who come to every show, and push, beg, or force their friends to go with them. Movements, at least in the rock music scene, start with the fans between about 16 and 22 years of age. With a major university of over 40,000 students, there’s no reason why this town cannot be a major music scene on a national level. But there are caveats, you have to protect the scene too. Don’t trash the place where there’s a show. Don’t bring alcohol. If the rules say you can’t, then don’t. Stay at home and get drunk if that’s what you’re looking for. Being punk doesn’t mean throwing bottles, breaking windows, spitting on random people – that’s just asinine. If we agree that the music and its presence is important, we have to be willing to respect the rules of the people willing to allow us to put on shows. I know of at least one place in town, with a perfect location, that decided to no longer put on shows because of precisely such problems. (Laughing) I should have been a preacher.
How was the last Squirtgun show here, in
your opinion?
That was an example of the unity that we need to see more of. I felt very good about the number of people that came – about 300, give or take. Sure, I would have liked to have seen more people. But it was Thanksgiving Weekend, so I understand. The kids at the show accepted all the of acts – I saw punks with Mohawks clapping and cheering for the Pat McClimans Group – which is anything but punk. Sure, he was involved a lot in the old scene, but his acoustic bluesy set was far from his punk roots. The fact that at the show people that were into punk accepted bands outside of their genre, and that fans of hip-hop, blues, or country were so accepting of punk bands is exactly the kind of solidarity that can build a great scene.
And, of course, playing with Squirtgun… that line up hasn’t played together for two and a half years. It has always been like a little family to us. We’ve toured the world together, been on MTV, played to stadiums of over 6,000 people, been in movie soundtracks – but it really doesn’t get any better than playing a basement show in your hometown. Actually, some of the very roots of Squirtgun, they go back to that basement at the University Church. …our first show in that basement was in ’86. Shows in venues like that one are at the core of the scene that built all of what is DIY punk rock — whether you speak of Screeching Weasel, NOFX, or Green Day. So it was a little like coming home, back to the start. (Laughing) Almost the entire front row knew all the songs. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, those kids were eight at the time our first record came out. Many weren’t even born yet when we first played that same stage. Yet, I felt there wasn’t really an age barrier. We felt great. Some people thought we were poppier than they had first thought, others thought we were edgier.
More importantly, though, as a benefit concert, it was a success. The graduate student for whom we had the concert was truly moved. She couldn’t believe that so many people would get together to help her. She feels like she has a family here now. By working together – let’s just say it, through “unity” – we were able to make a real difference in someone’s life. That’s a start.
What do you think of some of the new, local bands?
I really have a limited knowledge of a lot of the new local bands. But there is definite potential to have a national music scene here. Groups like Clayton Miller have talent, no doubt. Pat McClimas Group, he has a punk background, yet his new sound is a blend of country, blues, and rock, but with a new twist. CounterActive, the punk-punk band that was at the show… I heard some people say that they’re nothing original, just ’77 punk. But the truth is that they have lots of energy, passion, and dedication. Besides, there’s nothing really new in musical genres or sounds anyway. I could find a cow chip out in a field, hit it hard with an electric guitar and record it, and it would possibly, probably be “new” – but it would sound like… well, we can all guess what it would sound like. Back to my point — a good song done well, with passion, will rise above any style or genre.
But looking ahead, as a scene we really need to get people to try to go to every show possible, just to check it out. If shows are well-attended, there will be more shows. More shows means more outside talent coming to town, and more exposure for local artists to other styles. Also, we can’t let the scene fall into infighting between bands, all wanting to be the “most popular,” and discouraging people from going to other bands’ shows. It’s too easy to fall into rivalries, and that destroys music scenes.
We should take a cue from Operation Ivy, who took it from the Clash, who took it from Desmond Dekker… and focus on the unity of our scene.