DOA: Still Raging After All These Years
 It’s
been a year of reflection for Joe Keithley (aka Joe Shithead).
After 25 years of fronting DOA, one of the most politically
charged bands to emerge from the original punk rock explosion
of the 1970s, Keithley is celebrating his longevity and the
trail he’s left behind after a quarter century of touring,
many, many line-up changes, varying degrees of interest, and
a back catalogue that stands up as some of the most potent
that punk rock has produced.
During this time, he’s also
run for office on the Green Party ticket, created his own
record label (Sudden Death Records), and still managed to
raise a family. When we were e-mailing back and forth setting
up this interview, he e-mailed me at 6:30 a.m. PST. When I
asked him why he was awake so early he told me he was up taking
his 16-year-old son to jazz band. Such is the dichotomy of
one of the world’s original punks. Smashing the state
one minute . . . throwing the kids in the back of the minivan
the next.
So maybe it isn’t so strange
that Keithley is celebrating DOA’s 25th with War
+ Peace = 25 Years of DOA, a compilation CD documenting
the band’s greatest achievements, or written I
Shithead, an account of his years travelling the world
during punk’s early days. People change in different
ways and as their lives becomes more complex, it’s always
comforting that there are people like Joe Shithead who still
spend time stirring up trouble for those who deserve it --
and who will rock the house in the process.
Shred spoke to Joey Keithley by
phone from his home in Burnaby, B.C.
Did you ever think that DOA
would still be going after 25 years?
Joey Keithley: Well, I knew that I’d
be playing music but I didn’t know in what form. When
we started we figured it would last maybe five years. If you
asked me way back when if DOA was going to last 25 years,
I would have said you’re fucking crazy.
When I interviewed
Steve Diggle from the Buzzcocks, he talked about
being around during the early days and he said that one of
the reasons it was so exciting was that he didn’t know
if it was something that was going to burn out or if he was
witnessing history. Was that something you guys were thinking
about back then?
No, I thought it was something that
was really building up to a peak and had lot to say about
how the world was, and I still think punk still does. I thought
of it as an underground revolutionary movement, this cool
phenomena or cultural movement that was like the counterculture
of the late '60s or underground jazz of the '40s or '50s.
There’s a thread that runs through that whole thing
where people were making a statement with their art and punk
kinda took its form around musical anarchy, shall we say.
So do you see the politics coming
before the punk, then?
No, I think rock music is going to have
its rebellious side, and its hedonistic, nihilistic side and
if you can say something in there, too, then you’re
doing pretty well.
When I hear people say that
music and politics shouldn’t mix I think of a class
trip I went on in high school to Expo ’86, and it was
hyped as this greatest thing, and when I was in Vancouver
for that I picked up a copy of the “Expo Hurts Everyone”
compilation you put out and I was surprised because it had
a completely different perspective on Expo that you just didn’t
hear otherwise.
Well, I think there’s a bit of
a difference between east and west as far as countercultural
punk goes. On the west it was a lot more on the anarchistic
side or on the left wing side, if you ask me. There were some
good bands from out east, but there was a different perspective.
When we first started doing shows, there were no clubs in
Vancouver, you had to rent community halls and stuff like
that. I lived in Toronto for a while and played in a band
called the Skulls and it was like, there were clubs to play,
and bands were playing because they liked punk rock, sure,
but they were also playing because they thought they would
get a record contract out of it. Whereas, we were really out
here in the boonies, so to speak.
At the same time, though, Vancouver
has often been touted as an area where punk rock really grew
up.
It was a fantastic scene. My buddy Jack
Rabid, who does a magazine in New York called The Big Takeover,
says Vancouver had the greatest undiscovered punk scene in
North America. It was an area people didn’t really pick
up on as opposed to the bigger areas like San Francisco and
L.A. It was a good scene but it was hard to sustain. For us,
once we got some success with the “Disco Sucks”
EP, and a couple of the early singles, we just started travelling
a lot. And it’s funny, most of the people in the scene
that had bands didn’t sell. I think I’m the only
person from that time who still plays full time.
Now, though, with punk rock
being such a trend and just so commercial these days, do you
still think it has the ability to inspire people politically?
Well, yes and no. Just from my reading
and watching Music Music, which I don’t watch a whole
lot, and hearing some stuff on the radio, bands sometimes
have something to say, but I don’t think they have as
near as much as the generation that came from and that includes,
y’know, Black Flag and bands like that. But it’s
a different time and it’s the times that you grow up
in that beget a different response, so to speak. And if this
whole thing keeps up with George Bush, if the whole Iraq affair
turns into another Vietnam, then you’ll get some of
these bands starting to say something. I think they will.
They’ll get inspired sooner or later.
And you have these kids whose sole exposure
to punk rock is the Warped Tour, and they think wow there
are sure a lot of bands and a lot of people here, like six-
eight- ten-thousand people and they think every show should
be like that. Kids are a lot more business-oriented than me
and my peers were. I mean, business didn’t even cross
our mind. I learned sooner or later, obviously.
What got me thinking was that
six or seven years ago, there were some mainstream bands like
Rage Against the Machine who had a overt political message,
and that was when times were apparently good. Now,
we’re going through an extremely unpleasant time, where
people and artists are getting blacklisted for voicing contrary
opinions, you’d think that punk, of all things, would
stand up and say, Fuck This.
Yeah, it’s funny, some of the
older bands are starting to say something about that. NOFX
put out that last album [“The War on Errorism”]
and Bad Religion has always kept up over the years with lots
of songs about various political subjects. You just hope that
bands like Blink 182 or whatever would take a more, what’s
the right word, philosophical assault on what’s happening
right now. We’re going through an extremely dangerous
time, it’s not quite there, and it’s a bit of
an exaggeration, but it reminds me a bit of what I’ve
read about pre-Word War II Nazi Germany. I sort of call George
Bush the head of the American Nazi Party.
Some people have to react to that. We
can’t have one set of billionaires with their cronies
in the White House and Pentagon running the whole world for
their own benefit.
So what keeps you going these
days? What keeps you from saying I’m getting too old
for this, let’s try something else.
Joe (laughs): Well, I still really like
playing. If you want to get up on stage, you should get a
real charge out of it and get up there like you mean business.
You can’t be going through the motions. I think if you
do, people pick up on that pretty quickly. We try to make
new albums with new songs and new ideas and I think that’s
why DOA has been a forward-looking kind of band. And by doing
some new stuff, and there is some sense of nostalgia, absolutely,
it stops us from being a nostalgia act.
The other part of it is having a philosophy
in life. If you don’t, you’ll just get pushed
and pulled from all of the forces around you. My philosophy
is that you should be your own boss, think for yourself, try
and do something positive or good in this world. Plus, I like
to play loud, obnoxious music. That was a mouthful answer
wasn’t it? (laughs) Cut me off if it gets too much.
So what inspired the I, Shithead
book (Arsenal Pulp Press)
Well, basically, we were travelling
around about five years ago or something like that and one
of our soundmen said something like “Joe, you talk so
much why don’t you do a spoken word show like Jello
or Henry [Rollins], they’re doing pretty well, right?
They charge 20 bucks a head and don’t have a band there.”
So I started doing spoken word shows around Vancouver, a few
in Ontario and some in San Francisco about three or four years
ago. Sometimes I combine it with acoustic music, and then
I said “I have all these stories, why don’t I
turn it into a book?”
The lyrics and flyers were a
nice touch to round out the story.
Yeah, we tried to make the picture and
poster connect with whatever the story was saying at that
point. When you look at some of the flyers, people go like,
Wow. There’d be like four or five really great bands
all in one spot. It’s hard to do that these days. It
was a really dynamic time for this type of music.
So how do you plan to spend
the next 25 years?
Oh god, people keep saying that to me.
(Laughs) I get all these well wishers now. It’s really
nice though that a lot of people have taken note that it’s
been 25 years. But they keep going “Another 25 years!”
and I’m thinking “Are you fucking kidding, I’d
be 72 years old!” That’d be ridiculous, right?
I mean, we can go for along time, another five, ten years
easy, but you can only do it for as long as you think it’s
fun, and if it’s not, then don’t do it.
Here’s my thing: If people want
to find me 25 years from now, they should drive to Vancouver
and look for the local legion bar on a Saturday night and
I’ll be there with my guitar. I’ll play for beers.
So when someone 50 years from
now writes The Big Book of Rock, how do you want to be remembered?
Like this: Joe Shithead: Professional
Troublemaker. And he did well at his chosen profession. They’ll
probably put that on my grave.
-- Keith Powell
Related:
Sudden Death Records - http://www.suddendeath.com
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