Weekend Clusterfuck: The Sequel
Mike Krol, Jackass, the Weakerthans, Touché Amoré, etc.
Hello and welcome to ZERO CRED.
Every Sunday I send out a weekly column like this one where I don’t think too hard and just start typing about random things that happened that week and there are probly lots of typos but oh well what can ya do.
Usually it’s for paid subscribers but once in a while I lift the paywall, like today. Please consider upgrading your subscription to get every edition. It helps big time. Here, I will even take 40% off:
I didn’t realize it at the time, but last week’s column was post number 300 over here at ZERO CRED. In bowling, a 300 is the best you can achieve. In blogging, it’s just fine to below average. To commemorate the auspicious occasion, I finally made an official Instagram account. So follow that if you wanna see ZC in your IG feed.
Anyway, in that unceremonious 300th post, I mentioned that I got to see a surprise set from my comedy hero Conan O’Brien. Right after that published, I had another comedy hero spotting when I went to Pasadena to catch Mike Krol with support from Twisted Teens and Voilà.
Mike hasn’t put out an album since 2019’s Power Chords, one of my favorite records of the last decade. And he plays shows so infrequently. I am something of a Krolhead and the last time I saw him play in Los Angeles, where he also lives, was in 2021. Five years between shows in your own hometown is ridiculous dedication to scarcity! So when he does announce a rare appearance, I buy tickets the minute they go on sale like it’s the Eras Tour or something.
Anyway, the “point” of this “story” is that at some point I looked over at the guy standing next to me at the show and what do you know it was Tim Robinson. I wish there was more to this story but I have nothing further to report because, being a huge fan, I was not about to punish Tim in public! His comedy has become so ingrained in my vernacular over the last few years that it would’ve been impossible to strike up a normal conversation with him without embarrassing myself. Surely, a “triples is best” or “don’t do the voice” would’ve slipped out. In fact, let’s all make it our resolution to allow our comedy heroes to enjoy their favorite power-pop/garage rock bands in peace.
If I’m being honest though, I am very curious to see if he read FAHRENHEIT-182 and if he noticed that Mark and I snuck an I Think You Should Leave reference in there. Did anyone else catch it? I am shocked by how infrequently I am asked about it. Thought for sure that would’ve become A Thing online. Oh well what do I know I guess.
I mentioned recently that the Twisted Teens’ garage/cowpunk album blame the clown didn’t initially wow me the way it seems to be doing for a lot of people right now but seeing them live with their double steel pedal setup definitely increased my appreciation level. Sometimes you just gotta get your ass out into the real world and experience something for yourself to fully get it. You can definitely just feel when a band is having a moment—either the line for their merch table is very long or the crowd is going way harder for an opening band than is called for. Whatever it is, Twisted Teens has it going on right now.
And there isn’t much available about Voilà online aside from their Instagram account so I didn’t know much about them going in. I didn’t even realize they were a new project featuring Shannon and the Clams frontperson Shannon Shaw. Caught the second half of their set and will definitely keep an eye out for anything they release because they sounded great.
Thank you this has been Dan’s Show Report.
Now onto Dan’s Film Report…
I got to see a screening of one of my all-time favorite movies Jackass 2 last night at Vidiots where a lot of the cast and crew was in attendance and did a quick and mostly pointless Q&A afterwards. I say “pointless” because the moderator specifically and forcefully reminded the audience beforehand that if anyone was going to raise their hand they’d better have an actual QUESTION in the chamber. (As someone who has moderated his fair share of panels, I know the pain of the more-of-a-comment hand-raisers. These people are dedicated to bringing the momentum of public events to awkward and screeching halts. Let this be a lesson: If you’re gonna raise your hand at a public event, you best come correct with that shit, homie.)
The first “question” came from a guy in the third row who just asked Johnny Knoxville for a hug (Knoxville obliged) and then, while he was getting the microphone taken from him, told Knoxville to please follow his Instagram where he posts his own Jackass-style stunts. I tried to jot down his handle out of morbid curiosity but couldn’t hear it over the crowd’s groans. The second question was from a guy asking how he could join the Jackass crew. After that, the Q&A was shut down pretty quickly. Still a five-star movie though, and the greatest piece of comedic art made in this century. The line “I would never use an electric card-throwing machine on you” gets me every time.
Clear a path, mother fuckers, new Drug Church just dropped. Any excuse to repost this classic:
ICYMI I HAVE DECLARED WAR ON KACEY MUSGRAVES
I am still not over this Kacey Musgraves lyric and how it makes no sense! I will not be silenced. If this post doesn’t reach one million views, it means Substack is shadowbanning me for my beliefs.
PROFILES IN COURAGE: CONAN AND THE WEAKERTHANS
A few good profiles got published this week in what is left of the media. There’s this one on the aforementioned Conan O’Brien in the Hollywood Reporter as he prepares to host the Oscars. Not particularly illuminating but the photos by Guy Aroch are a lot of fun.
And then there’s this one by Luke Ottenhof, a rare glimpse into the life of the Weakerthans frontman John Samson Fellow (f.k.a John K. Samson). This profile is giving me real writer’s FOMO but then I remember that to have written it I would have had to go to Canada where it is simply too cold. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in suffering for art but I also don’t want to have to wear a coat.
It would have been a dream career for so many musicians, but at a certain point, Samson Fellows began to feel like he was “feeding and fuelling” a ruthless machine. Was he writing songs because he wanted to and had something to say, or was he doing it for the paycheque? There was also a third, worse option: Had songwriting, the thing that first connected him to his surroundings, started to shield him from the complexity of the world? “It can become pathological, right?” Samson Fellows reasons. “You want to interpret the world so that you can control it and you can be safe in it. I felt that that’s sort of what was starting to happen.”
This piece was way heavier than I anticipated. Ultimately it’s a sad look at how one of the most revered lyricists of his time simply lost his connection to his art. There are also a lot of updates on his life I didn’t expect to read. Here are a few of them in order of how surprised I was to learn them, from least surprised to most surprised:
He got super into using a loom and weaves his own intricate scarves.
He lost his love of performing music thanks in large part to the ubiquity of cell phones at concerts.
He got addicted to benzos.
He converted to Quakerism.
This reminded me that when I was working at Noisey in 2016, one of my writers, Jonah Bayer, said to me, “OK so John K. Samson agreed to be interviewed but only if we do it via postcard.” Which, from what I knew of him, sounded appropriate. Amazingly, the scans of the postcards are still up in the post, a rarity as HTML time moves forward and ravishes all its once beautiful creations. Here’s one:
New episode of No Disrespect went out this week in which I do a surprisingly decent Jello Biafra impression.
The folks at The New Scene were in Los Angeles recently and interviewed me in front of Danzig’s House about my obsessive art project. You can even see me wrangle a passerby into letting me take their photo. Witness my PROCESS! My segment starts around 21 minutes in. There’s also a chat in there with Touché Amoré’s Jeremy Bolm.
Speaking of Touché, I am very proud of this interview I ran this week with their guitarist/visual mastermind Nick Steinhardt. It’s an in-depth chat about the complexities of bringing intricate vinyl box sets to life, which is something I’m not sure I’d ever considered.
I really loved this bit about the few personal art projects he’s made. As someone who collects hundreds of photos of Danzig’s house, this was very relatable:
Well, the only personal projects that I’ve done are things I can quickly design and get out into the world, and I don’t have to mull over the decision-making too much. Several years ago I had an idea to make a zine of gas station ice machine typography. I was on tour and seeing this stuff every day—this degraded sign or this machine that looks different or the side of this truck has this really cool hand-lettering in Spanish that says “ice.” That fascinated me, and then my pragmatic brain was like, “Oh, you should make a series of these.” It was called Tour Does Not Equal Tourism. It was a three-pack of zines. The other one was domestic airport carpets—just iPhone photos, face down, of the patterns of all the different carpets of all the airports I’ve gone through. And then the other was buildings that were formerly Taco Bells.
Just an aside but boy do I love a good in-person interview, let alone one at the subject’s home, because I also get to take photos. I didn’t end up using it but here’s a good photo I took of Nick with Benny.
Nick mentioned the band’s 2020 album Lament a lot in that interview, which he views as the record that reflects on the band’s entire body of work. There’s a song on that record that truly breaks the mold to me and for like six years now I’ve been meaning to take a stab at putting my feelings about it into words, so here goes…
LONG OVERDUE REFLECTIONS ON TOUCHÉ AMORÉ’S “COME HEROINE”
Being raised in an Italian family, we always ate the salad at the very end of the meal, after the main course. When I asked my grandmother why we did it in this order, she said it was because salad was cheap and that “you’ve got to show your guests the good stuff upfront.” That said, I’m a sucker for opening tracks. For me, an opening track makes or breaks the album. Either it shows me the good stuff right away or I quickly lose my appetite.
“Come Heroine,” the opening track on Touché Amoré’s Lament, has a firecracker start to it that absolutely earns its spot at the front of the line. I might be way too far up my own ass here, but I’ve always thought the opening lines, “From peaks of blue, come heroine,” have a sort of Walt Whitman quality to them, like the immediate imperative that begins “O Pioneers!”: “Come, my tan-faced children, follow well in order, get your weapons ready.”
Thematically, “Come Heroine” is one of the most atypical hardcore songs I’ve ever heard. Hardcore is a genre largely defined by what it’s against. Most hardcore songs have identified a problem—be it global or interpersonal—and are hellbent on voicing opposition to it. Less often does hardcore express what, if anything, it’s actually for. Rarely does it offer solutions or lionize positive traits like heroism and bravery. It’s usually just a firehose of grievance and anger. “Come Heroine” is one of the rare songs willing to lay bare the singer’s vulnerability.
It’d be easy to simply write off “Come Heroine” as a hardcore love song, but I think there’s more to it than that. In it, Jeremy recognizes and admits his faults and limitations, another rare trait in the confidence-heavy hardcore genre, and expresses appreciation and gratitude for his partner.
But even though the song lacks the tough-guy bravado of its peers, “Come Heroine” is anything but sonically soft. Everyone in the band is at the top of their game here, but Jeremy, in particular, does something I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him do. I’d go so far to say that it’s his single greatest vocal performance in the band’s entire catalog.
As revealed in his recent viral interview, he’s got a one-in-a-million voice and has more range than most people understand. On this song, he is masterful at controlling it. He knows exactly how much force each verse calls for and exactly how many degrees to dial it back when needed. It all builds up subtly and gradually to the last chorus. When that part hits, you can feel him completely empty the tank. The final shout of “come heroine” sounds like a man expelling his demons with his last breath.
With all due respect to their live show, the band never quite captures the specialness of that moment you hear on the recorded version. That’s probably because it will never match the production of Ross Robinson, who will forever be known for putting the nu metal sound on the map but who has had a much more nuanced career since then, expertly honing chaotic punk acts like Blood Brothers and At the Drive-In. He is known for doing whatever it takes to harness raw emotion and dial up the adrenaline in the room. When I interviewed him for my book SELLOUT he told me he sees his job as “capturing ghosts.”
Jeremy once told me a story about how he went to the studio early one morning while the band was recording Lament, and Robinson was already there, sitting at the boards alone, mixing “Come Heroine” with tears in his eyes. I believe that story because I also get hit with a wave of emotion when I hear it. You can really hear that the guy recording it truly and deeply understands the singer’s message—the overwhelming power and beauty in the idea of killing your ego and submitting yourself to love.
OK that’s it for this week. Thank you immensely for the support!
Oh and a quick reminder that my store is currently pretty well stocked with vinyl, zines, shirts, etc.
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That Samson/Weakerthans article was amazing. Thanks for calling it to my attention. I'm sad he will give us no more music, but happy he has a loom. I just wrote an essay pairing a Weakerthans album with a book of poetry. If you might dig, def check it out. Thanks again!
This post makes me want a new Mike Krol record 😭