Go! Read!

Head over to DCist and read the abridged version of my interview with Travis Morrison. The original transcript was over 3,500 words, so Sommer rightfully had some cutting to do. The gist is all still there though. Enjoy!

Also, I have a plus one for tomorrow night's show, so let me know if you're interested.

Update: Here are some of the bits that were left out of the final cut.

That being said, it occurred to me that if we could get together a reunion tour with Joan Jett, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I’d pay so much money to go see that show, but I wouldn’t have to, cause I’d be in one of the bands.

OK, I’ll talk to Joan Jett’s people and see what I can do.

Oh man it would be so incredible to tour with Joan Jett! And if we went to like crazy countries we’ve never been to. A reunion tour, with Joan Jett, in Sardinia, and North Africa. That’s the kind of thing that’s a good reason to do any tour.


What it comes down to, is I would never say never, but I don’t look at the four of us and see a situation where we have that kind of hunger where we just need to get together and go on a voyage in a basement. Which is where it all starts anyway. If we don’t have the revelations alone in a basement, it’ll never… I mean we could go make mediocre records and maintain our popularity, but again – we’re kind of weird dudes. I don’t think we’d be very good at that.


I mean, I was thinking before, well what can I do with my music to make people like it so I can have a career. And that lasted for like 7 months and I was like, fuck that! And then I started listening to really weird Miles Davis, and I just kind of said to myself, well, the people who criticize me for not tending to my little career, I’m not going to even try and make them happy. What a bummer that would be! So in terms of what I want from my career now, I guess I see it as a life in the art form. And I can definitely say that my dedication to the art form is stronger than it’s ever been. And I’m not even sure I’d want to go back to where I was in 2001, where really the main thing I was doing was running a small business. Those are not warm memories for me – that period where I was “making it.” I just remember working with Quicken a lot. I mean that’s cool, if that’s what you’re into. Again, I’ll take the million dollars, if I get a hit, but ya know, so much money I don’t even have to learn Quicken! If I fuck up my finances, I’m still rich. I’ll take that. Definitely.


Like I said, my main memory of when the band was successful was Quicken. And the feeling that we had accomplished something within the parameters of what the Plan was – which was a band that was kind of just an around the way punk band, but also wildly ambitious stylistically. And at the time that it was kind of a weird thing to do. Now you can put whatever you want up on your MySpace page and it’s cool. But back then it was, “is it indie rock? Is it not indie rock?” It was like niche marketing. It was really kind of repressive. And looking back on the crazy things we tried to do as a “local punk band,” and trying to mean something to a specific community at the same time, it was like, “We did it!” To play those shows and raise that money for them is proof that we did do that.

This next question comes from our technical guy at DCist, Tom. What's your favorite Javascript library? dojo? jQuery? Prototype/Scriptaculous? moo.fx?

Tell him I hate them all. Because they have unintended side effects. I’ll go with jQuery for now. I can feel that resonate with your soul Amanda.