-Photo by Kevin Statham
Joey Keithley had to have been one of the best interviews I did for Dark Entries. He was extremely friendly and easy to talk with. There were no awkward moments and I wanted to be friends with him after the interview. This was conducted over the phone sometime last year so it is a little outdated but still a fun read. Enjoy!
DE: Hi it's Marisa is it okay to talk?
JK: Yeah hang on one second, okay how you doing?
DE: Very well thanks. I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to do this. So how long has it been since you started D.O.A.?
JK: Uh well it's getting close, next year will be our 30th anniversary. We started in February of 1978. I guess we run pretty well continuously. We broke up for about 20 months in the end of 1990 to mid 1992.
DE: What is the current line-up?
JK: Me on guitar, Randy Rampage (original bass player) on bass, and we have a new drummer named James Hayden.
DE: Cool are you guys recording and new stuff?
JK: Well we will start recording in December or January for our new album next year. Then we'll probably do a big tour: Canada, the States, and Europe. In the meantime we're just working on songs and have a tour in Australia lined up in October.
DE: Are you excited about that?
JK: Yeah! I've been busy too. I recently put out a solo record which is called "Band of Rebels," and that just came out a couple of months ago. We haven't really haven't played live. It sounds like ska/roots and punkabilly. It's got a lot of energy but doesn't sound like D.O.A..
DE: Awesome! So how is your label "Sudden Death" going?
JK: It's going good. It is not the easiest time to sell records. I just think we're going back to...our label is doing well because we're picking out the right things to do. I mean not every record, of course. You put out records that go absolutely nowhere
and you pull your hair out and ring your hands and say "why the fuck did we do that!" type of thing, ya know? (Laughing) But hey you can't think everything through that way right? Yeah...so we have about 75 releases out and that's going well. I think culture in Western society, Europe, and North America is changing. So is what people are looking for and what they will buy. There are a lot of reasons for it.
DE: So how do you feel about current music?
JK: Well.. I guess there are good underground bands right? Some you probably never heard of that may or may not catch a break. What the public sees is not totally prefab but mostly prefab, take it from pop on down. I think we are in a period now where it's almost like back in the 1950's. I'm talking about the mass public, not the underground
punk scene, or a kind of alternative thing. For the main public it's all about making singles and not making albums. If you think back to the 1950's, it was all pop records like Frank Sinatra, Frankie Avalon, Elvis and stuff like that. People really didn't make great albums right? When the Beatles came along in the 1960's (followed by the Who and Rolling Stones) then people started making great albums. Now record companies won't put money into this, it's all singles. This has really accentuated the publics desire, infatuation, or brainwashing with stuff like reality shows and "American Idol." People aren't really going for 15 minutes of fame they are now going for 3 or 4 minutes.
DE: I agree, so yeah what else?
JK: That was a very long winded answer! (Laughing)
DE: It sure was! So are you listening to any other bands?
JK: I don't know, what was the last thing I heard that was pretty good? A band called "Raised by Wolves," but yeah they'll probably never be big. They are a kind of a garage, punk, rockabilly type of thing. Um I just kind of listen to you know, um what was the last show I went to? I just saw ZZ Top the other night.
DE: Oh yeah? I'm sure they were great.
JK: It was really great, I was amazed! I mean one out of my three favorite guitar players and I was totally thrilled to sit up close. What I'm saying by mentioning that is that I like a lot of styles. I like jazz, I like rock,I like some original metal. I like punk rock and hey I like Tom Jones and Willie Nelson! For every type of music there is 10% good, 30% pure shit, and 60% mediocre. It's always around that line right? (Laughs)
DE: What made you want to start playing music? What
were you influenced by?
JK: Well shit, I grew up in the early 1970's and was in high school back then. In those days I was influenced by Black Sabbath and Jimi Hendrix. A big influence early on was listening to folk music with my family. We listened to Leadbelly, Bob Dylan, The Weavers, and stuff like that. I think that's where my politics came from. Later on when I got out of school, around 18 or 19, we kind of had a rock band that was completely hopeless. We would do Led Zepplin covers and stuff like that.
DE: You've got to start somewhere!
JK: Exactly! We were conscious of Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls and thought "yeah this is pretty cool stuff," but we really didn't know much about it. This is around 1973 or 1974 right? Then the Ramones came along. They had a big influence on our attitude. People would always say that D.O.A. are more influence by the Clash sound wise. I think that is true but not completely. There is also a tinge of Iggy Pop in D.O.A.. The Ramones came along and played this one show in Vancouver, where nobody knew who they were. They could not sell tickets and the place held about a thousand people. The radio station said to come down and get free tickets. About two hundred of us who were vaguely familiar with the Ramones showed up. They played their first album and... thats all they played! We walked out of there saying "holy fuck that was great!" There were a couple of punk bands in Vancouver and we started the Skulls (not to be confused with the Skulls from LA) around 1977. The reason I got into punk is because it represents what rock music is supposed to be, it's alive and involves rebellion. I didn't see that happening out of rock in the mid 1970's. Big bands were like Foghat, Fleetwood Mac, and disco. Music was at one of it's all time lows, it may be at another one right now. I'm not very optimistic. I mean back in the 1960's and 70's you would look at the top 10 chart and there would be one or two cool albums. I have a hard time seeing that at all now.
DE: I haven't heard anything new that I really liked in a long time.
JK: I go to clubs and hear vocal bands and they usually sound pretty good. It's hard because you are usually imitating someone you like right? We did the same thing when we were kids. You can find one sort of aspect that's original in your sound. I guess what I am saying to younger bands is to stick with it. That will make you unique and if you are any good you will get a following.
DE: I want to talk about your autobiography "I, Shithead."
JK: Sure.
DE: I read it about a year ago and loved it. Where did your DIY ethic come from?
JK: When we were putting out our first record "Disco Sucks," Biscuits, Randy, and I had a conversation. The conversation was that everybody hates us, nobody will sign us, so we may as well just put out our own record right? It's not like today where you can use a home studio, burn some CD's, and put it on Myspace. If you are lucky you'll get it on iTunes or some derivative thereof.. So we got some money from unemployment insurance and we used the money from that to book the studio time and press the records. Then we would drive around town to the 6 different record stores and drop them off there. Then we would go to the record stores in Vancouver. We didn't have any money to buy the rock magazines so we would look at them in the store. We would then copy down addresses and mail people records. People who would sell D.O.A. records or put on a D.O.A. show. So yeah I realized that when ... well "Sudden Death," started in 1978 and we did about 6 singles. It wasn't really a record company, just a name that we put on the record. When I started "Sudden Death" ten years ago, I realized that if I run my own record label and I could be my own boss. I can make the decisions about what I think is good music and what's not. Of course, not every decision I make is right or popular, hence you have CD's in the warehouse with a big pile of dust on them! (Laughs) My philosophy is to be your own boss, think for yourself, and try to affect some positive change in this world. This is one of my ways of doing it. It allows me to keep playing and being involved in music.
DE: Thats great. Do you still enjoy playing
live?
JK: Yeah, it's a real thrill because every time you get up there it could be your first or last time playing that town. Also there is a new group of people. You got to go out there and try to knock them out. That's what good rock n roll is all about right? You try to give them the knock out blow with some great songs and a really shit kicking performance. It's working out pretty well, we're having a good time. We get along pretty well. Randy and I are like...I mean he started when he was seventeen.
DE: When did he leave the band? Pretty early on right?
JK:Yeah he was in it for the first four years. He played on the first two albums and then came back a while in 2001. He also came back again in 2006.
DE: Do you ever talk to Chuck Biscuits?
JK: Yeah a little bit. He is doing alright. He doesn't seem to have too much interest in playing music and I can understand that. It can be a pretty rough ride at times. You think you are doing well but end up being ripped off. It's pretty easy to be cynical about it in a sense. So yeah, he's a good guy and an absolutely fabulous drummer that's for sure.
DE: After reading your book, I was wondering how you remembered everything. You were very detailed, did you keep some sort of journal?
JK: No, not really, we had tour schedules. Basically, the book kind of started when we would be traveling around in the D.O.A. van. I would start telling stories to someone new in the crew or somebody new in the band. I would have my top five stories in the first tier, fifteen or twenty in the second, and maybe another twenty or so in the third tier. I started to write down what I thought were the main funniest stories right? I actually put them into perspective because I couldn't quite think "was that in 1981 or 82?" So then I realized the way to do it was to go back and look at the old tour posters and tour schedules which are in chronological order. That's how I wrote the book in linear fashion. As I put the skeleton together I remembered other things that went on at the time.
DE: Would you ever do another book?
JK: I have a couple in mind. I've written a sketch for one and I've got a pretty good start on another. I just got to get the time. I've been really busy with the label, my new album "Band of Rebels," and I'm writing songs for the new D.O.A. album. I will but I don't know when. I'll probably have one next year because it will be our 30th anniversary. It won't be the same though. It will have elements of "I, Shithead," but won't be a band story or an autobiography part 2.
DE: So how was your experience doing "American Hardcore," how did you get involved?
JK: They just phoned us up, it was pretty natural. We didn't think of the term but we popularized it. What happened was that we were going to record our second album. We saw an article in a rock magazine in San Francisco and the author said "this is a new type of music on the west coast of North America." I forget the author's name but he called it "Hardcore," and that is what he called bands like Dead Kennedy's, D.O.A., Black Flag, The Dils, and The Circle Jerks. So then our manager Ken said that would be a great name for a title. We recorded the album and called it "Hardcore 81." It kind of fit with Black Flag and 7 seconds. Then we did the "Hardcore 81" tour around North America for two months which kind of put the term on the map. So when they went to do the film it was obvious you had to include D.O.A., even though it was "American" Hardcore. We were the only Canadian band in there right! (Laughing) When they showed it at the Toronto Film Festival, my friends came up to me and said "that's a great film but where the fuck are the rest of the Canadian bands?" If you noticed it's not called "North American Hardcore!" It was a good film but not perfect,obviously not having the Dead Kennedy's in there.
DE: So you still jamming with Bachman Turner Overdrive?
JK: I'm still friends with Randy Bachman. They really don't play around anymore. They kind of do the reunion thing. There is a great tape. It was a TV special on Much Music and it was like a national broadcast. It was D.O.A. and B.T.O. playing in a maximum security prison in Saskatchewan.(Both laughing) It was fucking great! The concert almost got canceled and I personally talked to the warden into extending the hours so that the guys could be out in the yard.
DE: That sounds amazing. Where can you see it?
JK: You can't, it's in the much Music archives. We have a couple of songs on tape that we'll probably put on a DVD some time or other. Oh yeah here's the new thing we have coming out. I might as well mention it because it's coming out now. It's called "Smash The State," which is a DVD of D.O.A. from 1978-81.
DE: Awesome
JK: You can find it at "SuddenDeath.com." It's cool, it's like some interview stuff and the band mostly playing around the San Francisco and Bay area
DE: Sounds great. Thank you so much!
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