Wild in the Streets…
CVLT Nation Interviews Mike IX Williams
Part I

The other day I got the chance to interview Mike IX Williams of EYEHATEGOD. We had an awesome, real conversation about how growing up in NOLA hardcore scene during the 80’s impacted his life. I guess the words of Keith Morris and the Circle Jerks sum up both of our teenage years: “wild in the streets”. Mike is a real easy going human and passionate as hell about the music that he is into, which I respect him to the max for. I’m not going to give anything away, just read this totally killer interview, then you’ll see where I’m coming from!

Did you have a crazy uncle or weird family member that opened your mind to punk or did you find it on your own?

I found it on my own…well, I had an older brother who was into weird stuff like Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath, so from that stuff I got into KISS, and started buying KISS magazines in the mid-70s. They would show stuff like the Sex Pistols, and I was like, that’s weird looking, and I wanted to check it out. That’s pretty much where it came from in my life. My brothers weren’t into punk; my oldest brother hated it when I would bring this stuff home, he thought I was crazy. He’s kind of like an old hippie.

Do you think that your disdain for the police had any thing to do with the way you were treated by them during your teenage years as a hardcore kid?

I don’t know about personally, but I think that everybody in that era, all my friends that would hang out, the police would target kids that looked like us – spiked up hair, a mohawk, shaved head or weird, whatever you looked like, they were going to come after you. Then they realized that we hated them, so then it started back and forth between us.

How have your years as a hardcore kid helped to shape your worldview ie. about community, loyalty & authority?

I would say 100% man…I think about this stuff every day. I was like most punk kids or hardcore kids were back then, I was kind of an outcast, real shy and introverted at first, and I didn’t have many friends. But when I started going to these shows, and relating to people – that was like when you could walk down the street, and if someone had a Clash shirt or a Ramones shirt or green hair, you stopped and you talked to them. So it was a huge family, and that became my family – I still talk to people from back in the day on Facebook and it’s still a whole community. So I would say it shaped me 100% to be the person that I am today, whether that’s good or bad, it seems mostly positive.

Do you feel that DIY has been something that has given EYEHATEGOD a foundation that other bands wouldn’t have?

Yeah, that’s possible. I mean for me personally, yeah. EYEHATEGOD as a band, everybody came from different backgrounds, we’re not all punk kids. Jimmy grew up a little metal kid, and we could relate on all that. He was this metal dude who played in a local hardcore band, and that’s how me and him ended up meeting. Gary, our bass player, grew up in the punk/hardcore scene, but way later because he’s way younger than me, he grew up in the mid-80s hardcore scene. For EYEHATEGOD as a band, I guess DIY does bring us together in some strange way.

Was there one gig or moment that made you say, fuck this, I want to start a band?

There’s been so many…I know one, a lot of people may think this is stupid, but seeing DEVO on Saturday Night Live…

Sorry, I’m clapping right now, because fucking DEVO was awesome!!

When I saw them on SNL, I was like, holy shit! And later on, when I saw FEAR on SNL, that blew my mind too. A lot of the local bands in New Orleans definitely made me want to start a band. Nobody’s ever heard of these bands, but there was a band called The Normals, The Sluts, Shell Shock…when you look back on it, it wasn’t the heaviest thing in the world, but at the time it was sick to us, and they were friends of ours too.

Did Shell Shock ever have reviews in Maximum Rock n’ Roll? You guys had scene reports from New Orleans I think, but I remember Shell Shock dude!

Yeah, they did have reviews…I was their roadie, and Jimmy Bauer, the guitar player for EHG, was their drummer later on, and on the Shell Shock tour, me and him talked about, “let’s do a band like Black Sabbath, but hardcore punk,” and that’s how the concept of EHG really came up. But there were also old Black Flag shows that inspired me; we would go and see them down here, I’ve seen them like 7 times with Henry. I even saw them with Dez once, that’s how old I am…

Why do think California bands had such an impact on the New Orleans punk rock scene, in particular black flag?

Probably because they played here so much…I mean, that band, they played everywhere so much, but they were one of those bands that would come through Texas, and we would drive to Houston to see shows all the time. We just had so much respect for them as a band, and as people, they were such nice people too.

Speaking of Black Flag, the way they got into Sabbath, when they did My War and Slip It In, do you think they’re the foundation of a lot of what people think of as doom or sludge with a punk vibe?

Definitely, man. They used to have a shirt – it had the cover of the My War album, and on the back it just had “Side 2,” which was the side with the three slow-ass heavy songs. So that was definitely something that influenced us. But we took influences from everywhere – we were into early Swans. I know me and Gary were into Flipper, they were just slow, obnoxious punk rock. There was a band called Kill Slug out of Boston, they were real heavy and slow. We just took all of that, and the faster stuff that EHG does is also Black Flag influenced, more of their Damaged stuff.

One of the things that was so great about that band is they made people realize that being punk wasn’t about the way you dress or look, it’s about what’s inside. and it’s about your work ethic…

I was about to bring that up, man! The work ethic is something that’s a part of EHG – I mean, we’re lazy a lot of the time, because we’re from the South, from New Orleans – but when we go on tour, we push ourselves to the limit, and every show has got to be the best. We try to put as much into it as we can. And I think we got that from Black Flag. I mean, we don’t tour as much as them, they pretty much toured constantly. They played here one time for the Damaged tour, and all these idiot mohawk kids hated them because they came out with long hair, but we thought that was the most punk thing you could do! We were like, you’re going to grow a beard and long hair and play heavy, fast hardcore? That’s punk rock as fuck! Fuck having a mohawk, it made those people look silly. But they played that night, and gave it 100%, and the next day they had a night off, and they were like, can we get a gig somewhere? And they played for maybe 8 or 9 people that second night, and still just went nuts.

Yeah, I’ve seen them play for 14 people, and 1000 people, and it’s the same show. The thing is, nowadays, with bands booking their own tours and running their own labels – punk rock bands, metal bands, indy rock bands – it all started with bands like Black Flag and DOA and all those heads…

Yeah, with those two bands mainly. I was reading that somewhere recently, that the circuit that exists now, that wherever you live, you follow this certain path, that Black Flag and Greg Ginn pretty much invented that whole thing.

Who was your favorite Black Flag singer, Henry, Keith or Dez?

I have to say Dez, man.

Why?

I don’t know, I just really like him…he was on the Six Pack EP, right? And the stuff from the first 4 years, I just love it. I mean, I like everything they did, I liked that guy Ron, Chavo, too, on the Jealous Again EP. So I would say Dez and Chavo, but you know, Henry was great when it first started, he just seemed to get too much into his ego towards the end, and I think it kind of destroyed the whole thing.

You mean when he was wearing his black speedos and no shirts?

Yeah! It started getting like, this band’s all about me! That’s what it seemed like at that point, and the music started getting weaker and stuff.

Did you ever see them on tour when they had Kira on bass, and Bill Stevenson on drums? As their heavier shit went, that was good, dude!

I saw them on the Loose Nut tour…the first time I ever saw them, I was in this boys home that my brother had put me in, and we snuck out because we had heard about this band Black Flag on the Tom Snyder show or something, I think Chuck had done an interview on one of those old talk shows. So we snuck out of the home – me and these two clueless kids that I just took with me – we jumped the fence, walked like 35 or 40 blocks or something. We stood outside of this club called Jimmy’s here in New Orleans, and listened to Black Flag when they played, and it was with Dez.

So you couldn’t even get into the club?

Well, we were little kids, I was probably 12 or 13 years old. I can’t believe nobody called the cops after seeing these three white kids standing in the street. Nobody said anything, we were just walking around, these three kids. That was the first time I saw them, and I saw them on every tour since, until that last tour they did…I don’t know if it was In My Head or what…

In New Orleans, did you guys have to put on your shows in some fucked up neighborhoods? Did things ever get gnarly with the locals?

We definitely put on shows in fucked up neighborhoods…but nothing ever bad happened. The only thing that would happen was the cops would show up and try to shut it down. I had a band called Teenage Waste when I was 15, and we used to play at this place called The Rose Tattoo, which now is in a pretty nice neighborhood, but then it was in the middle of this bad, pretty much ghetto neighborhood. The locals loved it, because people would come into their neighborhood bar, they would drink and the bar would make money. So yeah, we never had any problems with the locals at all. Just the police.

It was the same in LA, we used to have shows in South Central at black biker bars or at the Elk Lodge in the hood, or just the most random places. Like you said, the only people we had to worry about was the LAPD. Punks were disenfranchised, and people of color were disenfranchised…

Right, yeah, I’ve heard of some of those LA shows…we were kind of related to each other in a way. There was another bar where we would do shows called Spots, and it was even worse than the Rose Tattoo joint, and they thought we were funny. There was a band called Disappointed Parents who ended up with a black drummer and guitar player from playing at these clubs, and they were a total hardcore band. It was really cool…we never felt scared in those places.

Do you think reading zines like Flipside or Maximum Rock n’ Roll inspired you & your homies back in the day?

Oh yeah, a million percent! I mean, being from the South, down here we would get things late. If it wasn’t for fanzines like those, we wouldn’t know about a lot of stuff. You know, like Touch and Go out of Michigan, they had a magazine called Hymnal out of Texas, even New Orleans had a bunch, we had Public Threat, Null and Void, Crispy Christ…we had a bunch of zines from here too.

Did you get into the Ohio sound, through the Process of Elimination 7 inch, with the McDonald’s on it?

Oh god yeah, man! That was one of the thing that I didn’t put on the mixtape that I wanted to, that hardcore band The Fix. You were saying that a lot of California bands influenced the New Orleans scene, but it was really just Black Flag and maybe a few others. The Midwest scene and the DC scene, they musically influenced this city a lot. But the straightedge thing never caught on here. This city is too full of alcoholics.

It never caught on in LA too, man, at least in the heyday. How did you feel when you first heard the Flex Your Head compilation out of DC?

Oh, man, we freaked out on it! I still try to look for it, to this day! And that’s like 30 years ago probably…I’ve still got that Deadline album from Flex Your Head, because that’s all you could find was that one song. That band Artificial Peace, they recently put out that demos-only thing. I heard there was an unreleased Void album coming out…Void is one of my all time favorites. They weren’t even straightedge or from DC, but somehow we related them to that scene, probably because of the record, Flex Your Head.

Yeah man, when we were in Jr. High, we had no way of playing albums, but we would take Flex Your Head out at lunch and just look at it.

Yeah, definitely man…we did the same thing!

Let me ask you this weird question…how important do you think logos were for 80s punk bands? Logos that kids could draw.

I thought it was cool as hell man. Like the Flipper logo, where you could draw the fish, or Black Flag’s bars, I mean that’s just like iconic, I mean you see those bars and you hear the band, and it’s powerful. And even up until early Corrosion of Conformity, the skull with the spikes, that was cool. I remember being in my little band, Teenage Waste, and we were having a practice or something, and I was like, man, we gotta get a logo!

Did you get one?

I think we had some shitty looking thing…it didn’t look cool at all. Some kid drew it and we never even used it. That band never even recorded. We probably played about 14, 15 shows. We used to play every Tuesday and Friday at Rose Tattoo with The Sluts.

You played with The Sluts? I like that song you put on the mixtape, by the way.

Yeah, they were the closest thing to a real hardcore sound for that era in New Orleans, which was the early 80s. I mean, other cities were catching on, but New Orleans was a little slow.

What did you think of Necros’ album Conquest for Death, when they started going a little bit more metal?

See, when I heard the album, I wasn’t as impressed as I was with the 7 inch. The album was a little more clean-sounding or something. I liked that 7 inch they put out on Touch and Go, IQ 32 and I Hate My School.

Were you affected at all when you first heard Venom, Voivod or Motorhead?

Definitely, man! After Teenage Waste broke up, we had a few years of fake bands, and the next band I got in for real was in ’85, and we were called Suffocation by Filth. And we used to cover Sodom and the Bad Brains and Discharge in ’85 and ’86, that’s when all the tape-trading was going on like crazy. Venom had already been around for a few years, and I used to get beat up for wearing a Venom shirt, because punks didn’t get it.

They didn’t get it? In LA, Venom became a punk band pretty much, all the punks were into them.

Well, put it this way, only the cool ones in New Orleans got it. We used to call ourselves HCMP, we used to write that on our knuckles, and it stood for Hardcore Metal Punks. We loved Venom, Slayer, Motorhead, plus Black Flag and all the hardcore.

Did you like Exciter?

I loved the first Exciter record. I saw them play with Megadeath in some little club down in New Orleans, and Exciter blew Megadeath away. Their first album is still awesome, I haven’t heard it in a while, but I can hear it in my head right now, and yeah, it’s great man!

What about when you first heard Metallica’s Kill Em All?

That is one album that never left my turntable…that and the first Slayer, when those two came out, Show No Mercy and Kill Em All, they changed a lot. I know you’re from LA, bigger scene, people probably a little more open-minded than in the South, but the metal-punk thing took a while to catch on here. People were just like, you can’t play like that if you’ve got long hair, but we were just like, fuck it, we listened to all of it.

I can’t front…I’m from Venice, so I listened to Suicidal, they were my boys and my crew…but when they got that long-haired guy to be in the band for their first album, at first, we were all like, what the fuck??! But once we heard that dude play, and what he brought to their first album – he wasn’t punk, he was metal – he could play! What do you think of Suicidal’s first album?

First Suicidal? We listened to that on the last US tour we did, we were listening to that every couple of days, and I hadn’t heard it in a while, you know? Somebody had it on their iPhone or whatever, and I was like, fuck man let’s hear that Suicidal again! I got back into it. It’s great, man! That fucking first album…it was a big crossover record for the metal-punk thing, it totally melded the two together perfectly.

What influence would say that blues has had on EyeHateGod’s sound?

Massive. I mean, I was actually born in North Carolina, I moved down here when I was like 10 – the other guys can probably say “since the day I was born”, but for me it was since I was 10 – you walk around NO, and you hear blues, you hear jazz, coming out of people’s houses and clubs and cars or whatever back then. And my brother – not the brother that was into Alice Cooper, but my older brother – he had a lot of blues records, and I never really paid a whole lot of attention to them, but I remember how it just kind of seeped into my consciousness, like Leadbelly and Lightnin Hopkins, and stuff that he would play led me to later on say, damn, that was some good stuff! Like right now, we listen to Booker White and John Lee Hooker, who’s amazing, and we listen to that in the van constantly. We even call ourselves a hardcore blues band…like if the blues guys from those days grew up listening to hardcore, they could be like us.

If you think about it, blues was the music of the underground, and so what you’ve created over the years is underground. I wouldn’t say it’s ironic, but it’s interesting how the two worlds have converged.

Yeah, it’s true, and even with EyeHateGod, we have other influences like Southern Rock, like Lynard Skynard, that’s something I’ve been hearing since I was a kid in North Carolina. My cousins were freaks for Lynard Skynard, and Jimmy too; we all grew up hearing those kind of “slippery riffs” – the riffs with the grooves to them – a lot of that came from Lynard Skynard. And on the total opposite end of the spectrum, we get influences from SPK and noise bands like Throbbing Gristle. That’s kind of where the feedback in EyeHateGod came from, we were like, let’s make this noisy racket. it kind of all blended together…I mean, we didn’t do it on purpose, it just happened that way.

Yeah, it’s not like you guys think about it, it’s just in your DNA, and because it is natural, it just flows from one influence to the next, and you never really know where one starts and the other one ends…

That’s a good thing, you know. I mean, I think we do it in a good way. There’s some bands that have different influences, but you’ve got to kind of put them together right. Instead of having one song that’s blues, and one song that’s hardcore, I think we kind of mix them up and melt them together in a subconscious kind of way.

Would you say that as EyeHateGod as a unit, all of your life experiences come together in your music?

I would say that’s definitely true, man. I mean, that’s what music’s all about for us. It’s about feeling – that 2, 2 1/2 hours we’re on stage, it’s such a crazy feeling you can’t even describe it, it’s just a combination of all this stuff, coming out in this certain way, so I would say definitely.

From an outsider looking in, it seems that the NOLA scene has had a strong brotherhood & sisterhood going back decades. What impact has this had on life in New Orleans?

When we were younger, everybody would be like, man, the scene’s so small down here, we wish we were in New York or California, but now, I’m so glad we grew up in a small, tight scene like that, because that’s where the family thing probably comes from. Back when I was with my band Suffocation by Filth, we made these stickers, and I don’t know if it was intuition or what, but we put New Orleans on it, so it was like “Suffocation by Filth, New Orleans.” And then a lot of other bands started doing that, putting New Orleans on their shirts and stuff, and it became like this pride thing. We were proud of this city – it’s a fucked up city, you know, but it’s just one of those things you appreciate more as you get older. And then of course Hurricane Katrina, that just quadrupled the whole friendship and family, because that was something that everybody has a story about, and that really brought everybody even tighter, you know.

So you feel like Katrina brought people closer?

Yeah, I mean any time you go through something like that, it’s going to bring everybody closer. But EyeHateGod as a band, just the 5 people in it right now, I mean, we’ve been through so much together, you know, we’ve been together for a while, in this line up. We’ve just been through bad times, good times, so that brings another tightness to the whole thing. Which I think adds to the music, man, I think that chemistry is important in a band. If you’re in a band with some guy you barely know, you wouldn’t have that connection.

Yeah, when I watch you guys perform, you aren’t like running around hugging each other, but there’s a sense of respect on stage and honest enjoyment.

We have fun, man! I want that to come over to the crowd too, to see that we might play this real serious music, but it’s all for fun. I like when everybody gets together like that, and there’s that kind of energy in the crowd.

When you perform for people in Japan or Europe, is the energy of the crowd different that your American crowds?

It used to be when we would perform in Europe, the crowds would just kind of stand there, you know, but they would really respect you as a band, they would clap and scream and everything. But the last two or three times we’ve been over there, there’s been huge stage diving and it’s been crazy. I don’t know if that’s the younger kids getting into it or what. It also depends on the country; you can play in Holland, and they’re so stoned that they’re just standing there…and there’s cities in America where people are just standing there. It all depends on how many bands you played with, what time you play, there’s a lot of stuff it depends on. Usually though, in the past 10 years or more, we’ve had just killer crowds constantly, which is awesome.

In the 90s when you toured, did you do a lot of shows with Buzzov-en or Cavity?

Yeah, we did two US tours with Buzzov-en, back in the early 90s. Those were some crazy-ass tours, man! Just everybody drinking and every night we would stay at somebody’s house, and just destroy the house, and destroy the club, people fighting and having a crazy time, you know.

It sounds fun!

It was…and then every time we played in Florida, there was Cavity on the bill. We probably played with Cavity five, six times. Grief too, we would go up to Boston, play with Grief…

What was it in the 90s that you guys were creating your sound, Grief with their sound, Cavity with theirs…there was a sound, like you guys were all kind of seeing the world sonically through the same mind’s eye. How do you think that came about?

I always wonder that, man. That happens in a lot of scenes, musically; it’s like they’re all thinking this cosmic thought. I think it’s people having the same records in their collection. Like Black Flag and Black Sabbath to begin with, and then for us, we have a different style because we’re from the South, so we brought something different to it. But I think it’s having the same tastes in music, and just an idea to do something different.

Stay tuned for Part II of CVLT Nation’s interview with Mike IX Williams, where we delve into the present of EyeHateGod…