I've always been ahead of the curve when it came to trying new stuff in the underground scene.
DJ culture always made us aware that the best records were going to come from the small shops
We've become an underground thing for kids, because we never got the love our peers got back in the day. Kids are loving discovering us, and I'm happy to be that band.
When I'm in front of a crowd, I don't think 'Oh, there's some hard-core metalheads and some alternative fringe types, so we should be okay.'
It is a different world, the underground. When you hit mainstream, you hit a saturation level and that turns some people off. When you are on more low-key stuff, it works to your advantage and it creates a buzz on the streets. At that point, the sky is the limit.
I had a year off from the fringe, which was weird for my eyebrows because they hadn't seen the sun for 10 years.
It's definitely been a long, long... long, long, long, long, long journey since I was selling burnt CD's out of my backpack in downtown Oakland.
I don't go to rock bars. Why would I go to rock bars? I can do that every night; it's boring.
I'd rather play in front of people who wouldn't listen to Slayer. That to me, is more like, 'Hey, listen to us.'
That era in the late '80s through the '90s was really when the music was so new, fresh, energetic, but still creative. It hadn't quite gotten corporatized yet.
When I came up in a band - not just in a band, but a kind of underground DIY community - there was such a clear cut distinction between what pop was and what not pop was in very simplistic terms.
Everything's so commercialised it shuts down the underground.
Everywhere I go, there are all these Big Star freaks, and they’re nice little guys who are usually in college, and they’re kind of lonely and misunderstood, learning to play guitar.
I feel like I just wanna go back to being more underground.
I was not a punk rocker, absolutely not, but I certainly knew quite a lot of them, and I definitely went to the Mab - it was raw, interesting intense scene, so I was very drawn to it, but I was a total outsider.
The world that I come from is the world of raves, hip-hop clubs, and rock and roll.
For all its reverb and defiant noise, the sound of Black Tambourine barely reached past the borders of Washington, D.C., in the early '90s.
I'm very underground.
Punk rock wasn't a career choice. It was a hobby that we did for fun. We never thought we'd get as big as our idols in T.S.O.L. or certainly not the Ramones.
When I was a kid, I was into hardcore music. The scene in New York was tiny. Every person hanging out was in a band and played at the A7 Club. There was not much rehearsing or anything. Just doing.
Even within the context of the alternative scene I was a part of, within punk and hardcore and the alt scene, there was a focus on self-destruction.
MySpace was so punk.
I started in the club route. I did the alternative scene later on. When I lived in New York, I did the Luna Lounge and stuff, where Janeane Garofalo and David Cross and all those guys worked out of, but I came from a comedy club background. I'm proud of that background. I'm one of the people that really crossed over and did both.
I don't think any other place puts out music with no promise of success and still works like Baltimore.
I think it's really cool, but Jimmy Eat World and Gin Blossoms did it better than anyone. People don't realize just how awesome the Arizona history is, especially for alternative music. Growing up, that's all I ever wanted to be was those two bands.
