The Von Bondies are one of the best of bands out there right now. But recently much of their time has been spent stepping out the shadow of The White Stripes, a fellow band from Detroit. Much of the press on the Von Bondies has been due to the attack by White Stripes frontman, Jack White on lead Bondie, Jason Stollsteimer. Certainly, the press hasnt hurt the band because their name is on everyones lips. But now they will be humming their songs from the Bondies latest album Pawn Shoppe Heart. They are proudest of Pawn Shoppe Heart because of the unhappy recording of their first album, Lack of Communication, which was also produced by Jack White. Sire Records founder, Seymour Stein, discovered the Von Bondies in of all places a club in Amsterdam where they were headlining a show for unsigned Detroit acts. Their new producer is former Talking Heads guitarist Jerry Harrison. Many critics have called them the next guaranteed hit out of Detroit and listening to their polished sound might convince you of that as well.
Check out The Von Bondies official website
Daniel Robert Epstein: Hows it going?
Jason Stollsteimer: I'm alright, man. Just here in El Paso, Texas.
DRE: You doing a show today?
JS: Yeah, were on a ten month tour and this is our second month in. The shows have been really crazy. With the new record out, it's been going so well.
DRE: I read that the title of the new album has something to do with you buying a ring.
JS: Yeah I got married. I went to go buy a ring and I ended up not buying it because it was just kind of a depressing scene. So I just waited until I saved up some money and then bought a ring.
DRE: What depressed you about it?
JS: Actually, the last two interviews that I did the two women who were interviewing me started crying. It was pretty sad. Everyone who hears the story gets sad except for the men [laughs]. I wanted to ask this girl to marry me for like the last two years almost, but I never had any money. We never had an income because we were in a band. I really wanted to ask her to marry me and she's not a groupie and I wanted to get her something nice. I went to a pawn shop that was basically next door to where I lived in Detroit and I asked to see some rings. They brought out this shoe box type thing full of rings and I asked the guy, Are these wedding rings? He goes, Yeah, they're all wedding rings or engagement rings. So I go, So, you're telling me these are all like broken off engagements or marriages or relationships. He said, Yeah, every single time, it's someone coming in here crying. So I thought that it was a bad way to start off a marriage.
DRE: Do you feel this album is a cleaner sound than the first one?
JS: Not at all. The guy who engineered our first album, Jim Diamond, said, it was one of the worst sounding records that he'd ever done. The reason was not because of where we recorded it or where we produced it or anything like that. But it all dealt with the fact that we only had fourteen hours to do fifteen songs. We did it in two days. We had no money. We were so broke. We even paid for it ourselves.
DRE: Did you do anything differently for this album?
JS: No, we wanted it to sound as good as its supposed to sound. We've always wanted our new record to sound like it does in general. From day one, we had this in our mind. It wasn't cleaner, it's just the way that the Von Bondies sound in real life. After six months of touring on the first record three years ago, everyone who came to our shows kept saying, Wow, you guys sound so much better live. Why didn't you guys do this on your first record? Within six months after our first record came out, we were getting complaints about it. But what did we know. That was our first time ever in the studio and we'd only been a band for three and a half months. Carrie [Smith] our bass player had only been playing bass for three and a half months.
DRE: Someone must have thought you had a good sound.
JS: Well, no. We paid for the recording. Nobody thought that. We didn't sign with anyone.
DRE: Now youre on a big label.
JS: We're on Sire [Records], the biggest independent label in the world.
DRE: What made it better to work with them besides having more studio time?
JS: Compared to bands like Beck and Garbage who spent a year and a half on a record. We spent four weeks on this new one. We were a few hundred thousand dollars under budget compared to most bands that are on the label that we're on because we're a rock and roll band. We don't write epic songs. We play from the heart. We don't sit there and try and wank away on guitars.
DRE: You dont need to hire a $100,000 a day producer to sit there and do nothing.
JS: No, no, no. When we went into the studio to record this, we already had the songs written. So there was nothing to do except get a good tone from the producer. The producer and engineer's whole job was to get the songs that we already had written just down on tape. It wasn't to tweak it so much, but more to bring it out.
DRE: I read you got a good compliment from Iggy Pop.
JS: Oh yeah, Iggy, Ron Ashton and everyone. It's been going well. Siouxsie from Siouxsie and the Banshees came to a show in London that we played. All of these people that we kind of looked up to started flocking to our shows. It was really cool; Siouxsie told our drummer that he was one of the best drummers that she's ever seen. She knew all of our songs. It was kind of scary because we're just like, Oh, yeah, we're just a Midwestern band, who knows us? Then when we go to the big cities, all of these people that we really respect like us and respect us. It was really flattering and the fact that Seymour Stein signed us onto Sire records. We were the first band signed in fifteen years, since The Smiths. Hes put out The Ramones, The Smiths, The Dead Boys, and in the last fifteen years he hasn't been inspired to sign much. He said that us and The Distillers kind of resparked something in him.
DRE: Whats the trick to writing a catchy song?
JS: Oh, God, I don't know. See, we wrote this album before we got signed and we never planned on getting signed. It just kind of happened. So we weren't writing songs for the radio.
DRE: But you must have known there was a different feel to a song like Come on, Come On.
JS: Yeah, No Regrets, Come on, Come on and Tell Me What You See have already gotten tons of radio play over in Europe. So, so far, there have been five songs on major radio all throughout Europe which is crazy. The Strokes only had two songs.
Instead of sitting in a studio and writing songs, we wrote them all on tour. So there was no pressure because we wrote the songs over time.
DRE: What do you think when your records label tells you that songs are going to work on the radio?
JS: I don't know. We're a live band. I don't have any say in that, and I wouldn't want to either. That's not my job; I'm not a businessman. None of us have any idea of what people like. I think that certain types of music should be on the radio, but I don't think that anyone seems to agree [laughs]. There's a lot of bands that I like that I think should be on the radio, but I don't think that the mass majority of people who like Creed and Korn would agree with me.
DRE: What about this whole Detroit thing, that Senior VP at Warner Bros said that you guys feel yourself to be the younger brothers and sisters of Detroit. Is that just like a bullshit line?
JS: Did Perry Watts-Russell say that?
DRE: Yeah.
JS: He's the guy who signed Radiohead and he's our A&R guy. Yeah I agree with that. But everyone talks about this Detroit scene, but no one seems to know anything about it. There are tons of good bands, but you have to keep in mind that most of these bands have been around for ten years. Like, I'll give you an example; three of the best bands that have been around for a long time are The Dirt Bombs, The Detroit Cobras and The Henchmen. They're also fifteen years older than me. When I was a baby, they were already in high school. We are all part of the scene, but the age range and the gap in what they grew up listening to is totally different than me. I didn't grow up listening to The Stooges, they did. I didn't discover The Stooges until a year and a half ago, but we'd already been a band for two years by then.
DRE: So, is it a good thing that you'd heard them before Iggy complimented you?
JS: Iggy knew. He had already heard that I didn't know anything about The Stooges. He thought that was cool, but I was actually kind of embarrassed. I met him and I wasn't a die hard Iggy Pop fan or a Stooges fan. I think that their songs are awesome, but it's not like I wore Raw Power t-shirts to school.
DRE: What shirts did you wear?
JS: Probably the same t-shirt I'm wearing now. Just the standard shirts that are blank and a brown leather jacket. I wore that to school everyday and Levis and Converse. I didn't wear music shirts. I didn't get into music until I was about nineteen or twenty years old. When I was in high school, I didn't listen to music, not one note of music unless it was on like some oldies radio station.
DRE: Did your parents keep that stuff from you?
JS: No, my parents weren't really into music. I was one of those kids that just sort of drifted through school and never found what they liked to do. But what was on the radio when I was in middle school was like New Kids on the Block.
DRE: You seem to be doing pretty good for someone who didn't get into music until late, where did it all come from then?
JS: When I started writing music. Our drummer explained it. Whenever we do group interviews he always explains it best. When he met me, he would ask me questions about bands and I knew none of the answers. He was just amazed that I'd write songs that had a similar feel to other bands. I couldn't tell you a Misfit's song from a Glenn Danzig song. I thought that they were the same and when I met him, I thought that Iggy Pop was from New York. It just didn't matter. It wasn't being played on the radio and I didn't own any records. So, how would I have heard it?
DRE: Its sad.
JS: No, it's good. I was a very naive person to music when I was growing up, in the last two years; I've learned tons, probably almost too much so I can only imagine how the next record will sound. I believe that it'll totally influence it.
DRE: What's it been like to work with Jerry Harrison?
JS: Just fun. It was a lot of hanging out just getting to know each other. It was a lot of fun. Everyone in the band, but me, stayed on a houseboat in Sausalito.
DRE: Why didnt you stay on the boat?
JS: Because I had to write more lyrics, work out melodies and I sing really loud. So I just got a shitty hotel room at a Holiday Inn Express. When I would go into the studio, they wouldn't come in until I was finishing the songs. I'd stay later and do more lyrics and work on it because I had to co-produce some stuff on it so I'd stay a lot later than anyone else.
DRE: Did Jerry bring a different feel because he's twenty years older than you guys?
JS: Well, the last producer was five years older, but yeah, that's closer. Producing is when you sit down and talk about the songs one after another and spend like two days on a song trying to get the right song. The first record, none of that happened. The new record that happened every single day. Jerry was more of a conductor in that he listened to what we had to say about each song and his job was to try and get that down on tape, not to try and change the songs but more to just capture what we wanted on tape. It was much more relaxing. The new record was absolutely fun compared to doing the first one.
DRE: I didn't think that you'd be doing this interview because you've probably been talked to a million times about the fight with Jack White.
JS: Now that he admitted in court that he was guilty and that he attacked me, people stopped asking me those questions because there was no fight. He went down on record saying that he attacked me unprovoked. I don't fight. I'm twenty five years old and I learned a long time ago not to fight. I'm not a little kid anymore. So I never even raised my hands to defend myself.
DRE: Why did he attack you?
JS: I don't know. I hadn't talked to him in almost two and a half years. I had no idea that it was even him. I was holding hands with my wife at the time. It was a total surprise. There was no confrontation, there was just an attack and he admitted that in court. All of us are just really happy that he admitted that he attacked me unprovoked and that I did nothing wrong. He admitted that he has an anger problem and he's seeking help through anger management and that's all we want, for him to get some help for his problems.
DRE: What happened the last time that you hung out with him two years ago?
JS: I don't know. I barely knew the guy. That's kind of a media make-believe thing. I only knew the guy when we worked on a record for fourteen hours. [laughs] I never went over to his house and spent the night or anything. It wasn't like we were watching movies together or talking on the phone. I had a girlfriend at the time. I was a busy kid. I worked at a bar. I barely hung out with anyone let alone someone else in a band that was on tour like we were.
DRE: Wasn't it freaky to see yourself all beat up like that?
JS: It sucks because it was annoying and it leaked out.
DRE: Now your name is attached to his forever, is that annoying too?
JS: No. It's actually been really good in the last month. In Europe they stopped asking because our record went to number twenty one in the major charts. In the U.S., our record hasn't even gone to radio yet. It doesn't go for another week and a half, but it was number four in Australia. Since we're really happy with our record that actually really helps a lot. If we would've made a shitty record I'd probably be a lot more upset but we now have something to back it.
DRE: Did you grow up in Detroit?
JS: No, none of us did. Carrie was born in Oakland, California and we grew up in a place that's closer to Ypsilanti like where The Stooges are from. But the first time that we ever practiced and the first time that we wrote a song was in Detroit. So that's what counts as a Detroit band.
DRE: What were you into as a young kid?
JS: I just hung out with my friends. We'd go out to clubs and go see shitty punk bands. We'd just hang out at each others houses. That was it. I didn't start drinking until I was nineteen. So I had a late start on everything.
DRE: What happened at nineteen when everything happened to you?
JS: Ironically, the girl that I'm married to now, we broke up when we were eighteen. When I was nineteen, I was just out of high school with no goal in life but to just go out and party. That's not much of a life, believe me. I'd just go out drinking and go hang out with my friends and I was like, Oh yeah, I'm going to end up at some car factory like my dad did.
DRE: Were you and your girlfriend high school sweethearts?
JS: She was my first girlfriend at sixteen.
DRE: Do remember why you even broke up?
JS: Because I was an idiot. Isn't that why we all break up while we're in high school? It's probably because I was turning eighteen and going, Well, I want to go to college and I want to be free or something. Then I just looked for some girl that reminded me of her. I'm a sad, hopeless romantic.
DRE: But that's where you get a lot of your good songs, right?
JS: Yeah that's where I get a lot of inspiration.
DRE: Is SuicideGirls the kind of women you're into?
JS: I'm sure that there was a time. I like a girl that's kind of wild. We just saw some SuicideGirls. I think that they were at The Hives show that we did at South By Southwest. David Cross was the host and SuicideGirls were there handing out fliers.
DRE: Are you a big fan of David Cross?
JS: Mr. Show is just genius.
DRE: Were you into comedy growing up?
JS: Oh yeah, I'd stay home a lot and just watch comedy movies, Bill Murray stuff. Some Steve Martin with movies like The Jerk, The Man With Two Brains. That was good comedy and now there's this new whole thing with Mr. Show and Chappelles Show. Its just genius when he goes, I'm Rick James, bitch. They can get away with more on TV now which is kind of nice.
DRE: Have you guys done any TV yet?
JS: Yeah we did Carson Daly and now we're going to do David Lettermen in June and we've done a lot of stuff in the UK. We've got a bunch of stuff coming up. Everything is kind of falling into place right now.
DRE: I read you like Paris.
JS: [Laughs] I like the fans except for the last time. The first two times that we played in Paris, we just had a horrible dinner experience. I can't even begin to explain how bad it was.
DRE: Bad food?
JS: No, I went to a really nice restaurant with my girlfriend at the time and I tried to order crab legs and if you've ever been to Pairs, you have to understand that they don't work on tips. They don't get anything. So, they're always in a pissy mood and they don't want to take care of you unless it's a really, really nice restaurant. But this was an okay one and I tried to order crab legs and I pointed at it on the menu and they're like, Okay, we'll bring you crabs. So, they brought me crepes. I tried to order French fries and I didn't know it was pomme frites at the time so they brought me shrimp instead. So by the time that I got an order of French fries, I'd already spent $60 on the bill and none that I ordered. They won't take it back either. My second experience in Paris was that I was walking by the Moulin Rogue because I wanted to go sightseeing with a bunch of my friends who are French. Some crazy, drugged up guy that was all dripping with sweat was saying that I offended him because we walked through his turf or something. He heard me speaking English and probably just hated me because of that. He was jabbing me in the ass with dull rusty steak knife. It didn't hurt me at all. This guy was holding this knife saying, I'm going to cut you in your asshole in French. Those were my first two experiences in Paris but the rest of France is good,
DRE: So, if you saw Jack White today would you talk to him?
JS: Man, I haven't talked to him in two and a half years, what would make me start now. I never planned on talking to him again anyway. I was never friends with him. He was just another guy in the same city that I live in. I've got enough people in Detroit to talk to. I don't need him.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Check out The Von Bondies official website
Daniel Robert Epstein: Hows it going?
Jason Stollsteimer: I'm alright, man. Just here in El Paso, Texas.
DRE: You doing a show today?
JS: Yeah, were on a ten month tour and this is our second month in. The shows have been really crazy. With the new record out, it's been going so well.
DRE: I read that the title of the new album has something to do with you buying a ring.
JS: Yeah I got married. I went to go buy a ring and I ended up not buying it because it was just kind of a depressing scene. So I just waited until I saved up some money and then bought a ring.
DRE: What depressed you about it?
JS: Actually, the last two interviews that I did the two women who were interviewing me started crying. It was pretty sad. Everyone who hears the story gets sad except for the men [laughs]. I wanted to ask this girl to marry me for like the last two years almost, but I never had any money. We never had an income because we were in a band. I really wanted to ask her to marry me and she's not a groupie and I wanted to get her something nice. I went to a pawn shop that was basically next door to where I lived in Detroit and I asked to see some rings. They brought out this shoe box type thing full of rings and I asked the guy, Are these wedding rings? He goes, Yeah, they're all wedding rings or engagement rings. So I go, So, you're telling me these are all like broken off engagements or marriages or relationships. He said, Yeah, every single time, it's someone coming in here crying. So I thought that it was a bad way to start off a marriage.
DRE: Do you feel this album is a cleaner sound than the first one?
JS: Not at all. The guy who engineered our first album, Jim Diamond, said, it was one of the worst sounding records that he'd ever done. The reason was not because of where we recorded it or where we produced it or anything like that. But it all dealt with the fact that we only had fourteen hours to do fifteen songs. We did it in two days. We had no money. We were so broke. We even paid for it ourselves.
DRE: Did you do anything differently for this album?
JS: No, we wanted it to sound as good as its supposed to sound. We've always wanted our new record to sound like it does in general. From day one, we had this in our mind. It wasn't cleaner, it's just the way that the Von Bondies sound in real life. After six months of touring on the first record three years ago, everyone who came to our shows kept saying, Wow, you guys sound so much better live. Why didn't you guys do this on your first record? Within six months after our first record came out, we were getting complaints about it. But what did we know. That was our first time ever in the studio and we'd only been a band for three and a half months. Carrie [Smith] our bass player had only been playing bass for three and a half months.
DRE: Someone must have thought you had a good sound.
JS: Well, no. We paid for the recording. Nobody thought that. We didn't sign with anyone.
DRE: Now youre on a big label.
JS: We're on Sire [Records], the biggest independent label in the world.
DRE: What made it better to work with them besides having more studio time?
JS: Compared to bands like Beck and Garbage who spent a year and a half on a record. We spent four weeks on this new one. We were a few hundred thousand dollars under budget compared to most bands that are on the label that we're on because we're a rock and roll band. We don't write epic songs. We play from the heart. We don't sit there and try and wank away on guitars.
DRE: You dont need to hire a $100,000 a day producer to sit there and do nothing.
JS: No, no, no. When we went into the studio to record this, we already had the songs written. So there was nothing to do except get a good tone from the producer. The producer and engineer's whole job was to get the songs that we already had written just down on tape. It wasn't to tweak it so much, but more to bring it out.
DRE: I read you got a good compliment from Iggy Pop.
JS: Oh yeah, Iggy, Ron Ashton and everyone. It's been going well. Siouxsie from Siouxsie and the Banshees came to a show in London that we played. All of these people that we kind of looked up to started flocking to our shows. It was really cool; Siouxsie told our drummer that he was one of the best drummers that she's ever seen. She knew all of our songs. It was kind of scary because we're just like, Oh, yeah, we're just a Midwestern band, who knows us? Then when we go to the big cities, all of these people that we really respect like us and respect us. It was really flattering and the fact that Seymour Stein signed us onto Sire records. We were the first band signed in fifteen years, since The Smiths. Hes put out The Ramones, The Smiths, The Dead Boys, and in the last fifteen years he hasn't been inspired to sign much. He said that us and The Distillers kind of resparked something in him.
DRE: Whats the trick to writing a catchy song?
JS: Oh, God, I don't know. See, we wrote this album before we got signed and we never planned on getting signed. It just kind of happened. So we weren't writing songs for the radio.
DRE: But you must have known there was a different feel to a song like Come on, Come On.
JS: Yeah, No Regrets, Come on, Come on and Tell Me What You See have already gotten tons of radio play over in Europe. So, so far, there have been five songs on major radio all throughout Europe which is crazy. The Strokes only had two songs.
Instead of sitting in a studio and writing songs, we wrote them all on tour. So there was no pressure because we wrote the songs over time.
DRE: What do you think when your records label tells you that songs are going to work on the radio?
JS: I don't know. We're a live band. I don't have any say in that, and I wouldn't want to either. That's not my job; I'm not a businessman. None of us have any idea of what people like. I think that certain types of music should be on the radio, but I don't think that anyone seems to agree [laughs]. There's a lot of bands that I like that I think should be on the radio, but I don't think that the mass majority of people who like Creed and Korn would agree with me.
DRE: What about this whole Detroit thing, that Senior VP at Warner Bros said that you guys feel yourself to be the younger brothers and sisters of Detroit. Is that just like a bullshit line?
JS: Did Perry Watts-Russell say that?
DRE: Yeah.
JS: He's the guy who signed Radiohead and he's our A&R guy. Yeah I agree with that. But everyone talks about this Detroit scene, but no one seems to know anything about it. There are tons of good bands, but you have to keep in mind that most of these bands have been around for ten years. Like, I'll give you an example; three of the best bands that have been around for a long time are The Dirt Bombs, The Detroit Cobras and The Henchmen. They're also fifteen years older than me. When I was a baby, they were already in high school. We are all part of the scene, but the age range and the gap in what they grew up listening to is totally different than me. I didn't grow up listening to The Stooges, they did. I didn't discover The Stooges until a year and a half ago, but we'd already been a band for two years by then.
DRE: So, is it a good thing that you'd heard them before Iggy complimented you?
JS: Iggy knew. He had already heard that I didn't know anything about The Stooges. He thought that was cool, but I was actually kind of embarrassed. I met him and I wasn't a die hard Iggy Pop fan or a Stooges fan. I think that their songs are awesome, but it's not like I wore Raw Power t-shirts to school.
DRE: What shirts did you wear?
JS: Probably the same t-shirt I'm wearing now. Just the standard shirts that are blank and a brown leather jacket. I wore that to school everyday and Levis and Converse. I didn't wear music shirts. I didn't get into music until I was about nineteen or twenty years old. When I was in high school, I didn't listen to music, not one note of music unless it was on like some oldies radio station.
DRE: Did your parents keep that stuff from you?
JS: No, my parents weren't really into music. I was one of those kids that just sort of drifted through school and never found what they liked to do. But what was on the radio when I was in middle school was like New Kids on the Block.
DRE: You seem to be doing pretty good for someone who didn't get into music until late, where did it all come from then?
JS: When I started writing music. Our drummer explained it. Whenever we do group interviews he always explains it best. When he met me, he would ask me questions about bands and I knew none of the answers. He was just amazed that I'd write songs that had a similar feel to other bands. I couldn't tell you a Misfit's song from a Glenn Danzig song. I thought that they were the same and when I met him, I thought that Iggy Pop was from New York. It just didn't matter. It wasn't being played on the radio and I didn't own any records. So, how would I have heard it?
DRE: Its sad.
JS: No, it's good. I was a very naive person to music when I was growing up, in the last two years; I've learned tons, probably almost too much so I can only imagine how the next record will sound. I believe that it'll totally influence it.
DRE: What's it been like to work with Jerry Harrison?
JS: Just fun. It was a lot of hanging out just getting to know each other. It was a lot of fun. Everyone in the band, but me, stayed on a houseboat in Sausalito.
DRE: Why didnt you stay on the boat?
JS: Because I had to write more lyrics, work out melodies and I sing really loud. So I just got a shitty hotel room at a Holiday Inn Express. When I would go into the studio, they wouldn't come in until I was finishing the songs. I'd stay later and do more lyrics and work on it because I had to co-produce some stuff on it so I'd stay a lot later than anyone else.
DRE: Did Jerry bring a different feel because he's twenty years older than you guys?
JS: Well, the last producer was five years older, but yeah, that's closer. Producing is when you sit down and talk about the songs one after another and spend like two days on a song trying to get the right song. The first record, none of that happened. The new record that happened every single day. Jerry was more of a conductor in that he listened to what we had to say about each song and his job was to try and get that down on tape, not to try and change the songs but more to just capture what we wanted on tape. It was much more relaxing. The new record was absolutely fun compared to doing the first one.
DRE: I didn't think that you'd be doing this interview because you've probably been talked to a million times about the fight with Jack White.
JS: Now that he admitted in court that he was guilty and that he attacked me, people stopped asking me those questions because there was no fight. He went down on record saying that he attacked me unprovoked. I don't fight. I'm twenty five years old and I learned a long time ago not to fight. I'm not a little kid anymore. So I never even raised my hands to defend myself.
DRE: Why did he attack you?
JS: I don't know. I hadn't talked to him in almost two and a half years. I had no idea that it was even him. I was holding hands with my wife at the time. It was a total surprise. There was no confrontation, there was just an attack and he admitted that in court. All of us are just really happy that he admitted that he attacked me unprovoked and that I did nothing wrong. He admitted that he has an anger problem and he's seeking help through anger management and that's all we want, for him to get some help for his problems.
DRE: What happened the last time that you hung out with him two years ago?
JS: I don't know. I barely knew the guy. That's kind of a media make-believe thing. I only knew the guy when we worked on a record for fourteen hours. [laughs] I never went over to his house and spent the night or anything. It wasn't like we were watching movies together or talking on the phone. I had a girlfriend at the time. I was a busy kid. I worked at a bar. I barely hung out with anyone let alone someone else in a band that was on tour like we were.
DRE: Wasn't it freaky to see yourself all beat up like that?
JS: It sucks because it was annoying and it leaked out.
DRE: Now your name is attached to his forever, is that annoying too?
JS: No. It's actually been really good in the last month. In Europe they stopped asking because our record went to number twenty one in the major charts. In the U.S., our record hasn't even gone to radio yet. It doesn't go for another week and a half, but it was number four in Australia. Since we're really happy with our record that actually really helps a lot. If we would've made a shitty record I'd probably be a lot more upset but we now have something to back it.
DRE: Did you grow up in Detroit?
JS: No, none of us did. Carrie was born in Oakland, California and we grew up in a place that's closer to Ypsilanti like where The Stooges are from. But the first time that we ever practiced and the first time that we wrote a song was in Detroit. So that's what counts as a Detroit band.
DRE: What were you into as a young kid?
JS: I just hung out with my friends. We'd go out to clubs and go see shitty punk bands. We'd just hang out at each others houses. That was it. I didn't start drinking until I was nineteen. So I had a late start on everything.
DRE: What happened at nineteen when everything happened to you?
JS: Ironically, the girl that I'm married to now, we broke up when we were eighteen. When I was nineteen, I was just out of high school with no goal in life but to just go out and party. That's not much of a life, believe me. I'd just go out drinking and go hang out with my friends and I was like, Oh yeah, I'm going to end up at some car factory like my dad did.
DRE: Were you and your girlfriend high school sweethearts?
JS: She was my first girlfriend at sixteen.
DRE: Do remember why you even broke up?
JS: Because I was an idiot. Isn't that why we all break up while we're in high school? It's probably because I was turning eighteen and going, Well, I want to go to college and I want to be free or something. Then I just looked for some girl that reminded me of her. I'm a sad, hopeless romantic.
DRE: But that's where you get a lot of your good songs, right?
JS: Yeah that's where I get a lot of inspiration.
DRE: Is SuicideGirls the kind of women you're into?
JS: I'm sure that there was a time. I like a girl that's kind of wild. We just saw some SuicideGirls. I think that they were at The Hives show that we did at South By Southwest. David Cross was the host and SuicideGirls were there handing out fliers.
DRE: Are you a big fan of David Cross?
JS: Mr. Show is just genius.
DRE: Were you into comedy growing up?
JS: Oh yeah, I'd stay home a lot and just watch comedy movies, Bill Murray stuff. Some Steve Martin with movies like The Jerk, The Man With Two Brains. That was good comedy and now there's this new whole thing with Mr. Show and Chappelles Show. Its just genius when he goes, I'm Rick James, bitch. They can get away with more on TV now which is kind of nice.
DRE: Have you guys done any TV yet?
JS: Yeah we did Carson Daly and now we're going to do David Lettermen in June and we've done a lot of stuff in the UK. We've got a bunch of stuff coming up. Everything is kind of falling into place right now.
DRE: I read you like Paris.
JS: [Laughs] I like the fans except for the last time. The first two times that we played in Paris, we just had a horrible dinner experience. I can't even begin to explain how bad it was.
DRE: Bad food?
JS: No, I went to a really nice restaurant with my girlfriend at the time and I tried to order crab legs and if you've ever been to Pairs, you have to understand that they don't work on tips. They don't get anything. So, they're always in a pissy mood and they don't want to take care of you unless it's a really, really nice restaurant. But this was an okay one and I tried to order crab legs and I pointed at it on the menu and they're like, Okay, we'll bring you crabs. So, they brought me crepes. I tried to order French fries and I didn't know it was pomme frites at the time so they brought me shrimp instead. So by the time that I got an order of French fries, I'd already spent $60 on the bill and none that I ordered. They won't take it back either. My second experience in Paris was that I was walking by the Moulin Rogue because I wanted to go sightseeing with a bunch of my friends who are French. Some crazy, drugged up guy that was all dripping with sweat was saying that I offended him because we walked through his turf or something. He heard me speaking English and probably just hated me because of that. He was jabbing me in the ass with dull rusty steak knife. It didn't hurt me at all. This guy was holding this knife saying, I'm going to cut you in your asshole in French. Those were my first two experiences in Paris but the rest of France is good,
DRE: So, if you saw Jack White today would you talk to him?
JS: Man, I haven't talked to him in two and a half years, what would make me start now. I never planned on talking to him again anyway. I was never friends with him. He was just another guy in the same city that I live in. I've got enough people in Detroit to talk to. I don't need him.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
I have bought a copy of their newest CD and it's about 50/50,
I always knew that Don Blum was a great drummer, but I never expected that Jason would write anything as catchy as C'mon C'mon.