Well, I grew up with and still have severe allergies and it just seemed kind of appropriate to have a hero who had something that... I mean most people who don't have allergies- it's no big deal. It's kind of like they just don't get it, so it seems almost like a joke. If it's not a cold or a flu or an ailment- it's like allergies are kind of misunderstood. So I thought It'd be kind of funny to have a character that had allergies that caused him to hallucinate, because both myself and Sam Coomes (of Quasi)- he used to work here and we'd always be suffering so bad that we could barely just function. And so the idea of just seemed to be to create this character that had trancescapes that are kind of created by hallucinatory affects of the allergies.

I KNOW ANOTHER PERSON WHO HAS LOTS OF ALLERGIES...

It's weird! You outgrow certain ones, then get new ones and it's just very odd. My son has really bad allergies too, so it's been a trip to watch somebody so young- just under three- just swell up because they eat something they've never eaten before. And all the sudden, you're like, "Well, it's not gonna work..."

Allergies just seem so not epic, and it's such an epic story that it seemed funny to me.

SO YOU'VE BASED THEM LOOSELY ON THE EXPERIENCES YOU'VE HAD? (I know... dumb question. Chalk it up to nervousness! -JS)

Not at all, really. It's pretty fanciful... when I wrote it I kind of came up with a real basic outline, because I didn't really want to have to force anyone... they would write songs on these ideas I had, but I didn't want them... I didn't want to write too much so that you would feel like they were being weighted down by my ideas too much and that they couldn't expand on them. Some of them are really whimiscal and some of them are pretty serious. So it was a good balance there, and I didn't want them to feel that I was leaning one way or the other. And with a concept album, I just knew that I wanted it to be kind of outlandish, in terms of topics and subject matter.

Besides allergies being the main focus of it, I've never fought in the underground fire battle, or the underwater fire battle. I've never been reincarnated... as far as I know. Actually, I may have (laughs). But, you know, you just come up with those really grand plot points that just went from there.

THAT KIND OF LEADS TO ANOTHER QUESTION... DID THE BAND EMBELLISH UPON YOUR STORY?

Oh completely! Well, yes and no. It's funny because I didn't know what kind of relationship I'd have with the bands as they committed to doing it. They were all so excited and eager, and I was really pleased with that. It was just an unusual project. But some of the bands needed more information from what I gave them. They just wanted to make sure they were on the right track. Others, they took what they had and just ran with it.

Like the Weird War song, which is a eulogy (the people from The Makeup doing it). They were like, "Well, what kind of funeral do you want?" and I was like, "Well, I want it to start out really kind of proud and serious, and then in the end, kind of just deteriorate until the point where they were like, 'You know, I don't even know, really, why we're gathered here today. I mean, we really don't know who this guy is! The guy was just some warrior.'" And they nailed it.

Once in a while you just talk things through, and sometimes you get stuff back like Steve Malkmus's allergy freak out, and it'd be WAY more freaked out than you expected it to.

THAT SONG WAS REALLY DIFFERENT!!!

It is- it's totally different. And the cool thing is that there were all these happy accidents that happened on the record too, where like, the Guided By Voices' song had the same tempo as Steve's song, so crossfading them worked perfectly. And then taking... I told Ann (Magnuson, of Bongwater), "You know, I would like you to play some sort of doctor or nurse figure that rehabilitates out of Steve's allergy freak out, and kind of gets him in the outside world." And so her little operation sequence on top of it just worked so well.

I LIKED THE PART WHERE SHE (ANN'S NURSE CHARACTER) GOES "THAT'S WHAT MOTHERS ARE FOR..." IT WAS REALLY TWISTED.

Yeah. And see, she's the one who came up "Dr. Mom" and the whole mother thing. But she was like, "Well, what kind of nurse?" and I'm like, "Well, someone who probably thinks he's still kind of infantile, but he's obviously a grown man." And she just ran with it.

Most of the people I tried to pick, first of all, had a really good sense of humor about what they do, and about music, and they take it seriously. But at the same time, they have a large sense of whimsy about them. And also a lot of people that just would be willing to try something odd... that idea. They'd just never done something that was so collaborative. Usually, I think they're used to being asked to give things for compilations. But to write things that are specifically... they had to be really specific with it, or else they were afraid that they would be the one all the other bands would be like "rrrgh," about.

It was fun to get the stuff as it came in, and just putting them together.

DID ANY OF THE BANDS WORK TOGETHER?

No, none of them worked together, although they were all equally impressed... they'd be like "Oh, wow... they're on that? That's great!" The other band would say the same thing about them. And when I got the visual artists involved, it was the same thing. It was a matter of a safety-in-numbers kind of thing. Having so many good people involved. So many people I knew, but a lot of them, I didn't and would just call them up or e-mail them out of the blue and say "I'm doing this... what do you think?" The response was good.

DID YOU HAVE A FEW THAT WERE LIKE "NO..." or "We tried, but..."

No- only this band from Olympia called The Need- they were commited but they were also working on a record, so they just didn't have the time. Everything else worked out fine.

THEY ROSE TO THE CHALLENGE.

Yeah, everyone was really up to it. I called people last February- February 2000 was when I first started calling. And it comes out in March. That means all of the songs were recorded- they wrote 'em all, they did it all- and I mastered it, put it all together, and it's being printed in a little over a year. They worked really fast and hard on it. It was cool. They took it really seriously. I was lucky.

BEFORE YOU'D THOUGHT ABOUT CALLING THE ARTISTS, DID YOU CONSIDER WRITING THE MUSIC YOURSELF?

No... I used to be in a bunch of other bands in town, and I thought for years that this would be a really cool idea to do. To listen to a record where everyone kind of told different parts of the story.

Growing up, I used to love The Residents, and things that didn't give you much information, but obviously created a really cool world. I was like, "What if you got a bunch of people to do that about one specific person. That'd be pretty cool." But I just assumed that it wouldn't ever get done.

One night I just brought it up to a couple of people, and they said "You should try it." And the next day I called and I got four of the people, and it just got my confidence up- it went from there. But I never really wanted to be on it.

It always really funny whenever you get records, and it's all these great bands. And then you're like, "Ohh, the guy's band who's put out the label's on it" (laughs). As well, it's like, "Aww... Why?" And you know, out of all this, there was just no place for me. Besides, I just wanted to coax these people into doing things based on my little idea... so I was special (grins).

WHO DID THE INTERMEDIARY MUSIC BETWEEN THE SONGS?

That's Charlie Campbell, who was in a band called Pond, on Sub Pop. He does this thing called Gold Card. Although, he's not interested in music anymore. It was really hard to get him to do it. He's more interested now in computers.

OH, SO HE WAS KIND OF LIKE "I DON'T PLAY ANYMORE..."

Pretty much. And between us and Grandaddy coaxing him out to do it, he did it and he's really happy with it. I knew that I wanted some sort of theatrical kind of music to go throughout it, at certain points. So as the music came in, Charlie and myself kind of figured out the parts where it was needed, and then came up with these elaborate titles. He did a great job. The only piece of music I played on was the first one (the prologue). I played the piano. That was the one thing. He'd written three minutes of music for the prologue and then was like, "I need an ending... why don't you sit down and try something." And I came up with it, and he was like, "Oh, let's just throw it in." Then the next time I saw him, he had gotten rid of everything but THAT part, and played guitar over it. So I was like, "Okay... fifteen seconds is fine." But it was great- he was a really big supporter of the project.

THIS IS KIND OF UNRELATED, BUT I WAS DOING SOME RESEARCH ON THE INTERNET AND I CAME ACROSS HIS "BUY A FRIEND.COM." IT'S REALLY FUNNY ALTHOUGH HE DOESN'T MAINTAIN IT ANYMORE...

Yeah, um... (laughs). I saw that too. I can't really remember what it is, but... he's definitely into the computer world. He's doing our website too, for it. Which is going to be pretty cool, 'cause my brother designed a Colonel Jeffrey Pumpernickel Stratego board. Do you know that game Stratego?

NO...

It's kind of like a chess game for kids, and it's got all the characters on it, like Dr. Mom, the caterpillars, and Colonel Pumpernickel, and it's got all the figures, and there's going to be some really strange stuff on there. Some of the sound samples are on there, and a little bit of the art. But a lot of original art that was made for the website, specifically, to kind of confuse and help the album. It'll be interesting.

On the record, I didn't really put much about what the story was about at all. I kind of did that on purpose, because my favorite albums growing up- pre-CD's- all you had was just the cover and occasionally an inner sleeve. I spent years trying to figure out some of my favorite records, and I kind of want people to do the same with this. And if they don't really get it on the first try, that's kind of the point. It's all kind of there, but you're gonna get out of it what you get out of it. And if you don't get everything, that's fine.

AND IT SHOULDN'T BE TOLD TO YOU...

Yeah. A couple people have been, like "Oh well, I'm kind of trying to figure it out." And it's like "That's good!" If you don't know who Dr. Mom is, that's fine. Eventually it'll make sense. My favorite records... it took me years. All of the sudden, I'd be like "Oh, that's what that sound was..." - something that I didn't understand before.

ARE YOU GOING TO PUT ANYTHING ELSE OUT ON OFF RECORDS (THAT HE AND WIFE TINA O'NEIL HAVE SET UP)?

We're not planning on it. I know from being on the opposite side, being a band on a label, you expect so much from a label. Even on a really friendly relationship, because when you're a band, you want to go out, you want to tour, and you want to find your records in the store. And I'm at the age where if I put out an album by one of my favorite bands, I'd want to make sure that I could really afford to do it right. And I don't know if I could. But maybe I'm just fooling myself into thinking that.

I had some people ask. I don't know. Right now, I don't think so. When your love of a band turns into a working relationship, it changes things a lot. With a project like this, there was enough people involved where everyone just did their portion and everyone was really excited. But when you have an album by someone, it's like you're sweating blood trying to make the world listen to it. It sounds fun, but it sounds like hell too.

BEING THAT THIS WILL BE FEATURED IN A PORTLAND-BASED 'ZINE, ARE THERE ANY BANDS RIGHT NOW THAT YOU REALLY LOVE OR COULD RECOMMEND?

Well, it's funny, cause most of the time... well... we have a three year-old now, so I don't see music at all. At all. I mean, he's the one putting on shows at our house, doing all these songs about forks and spoons and stuff.

It's really weird because a lot of the people on the album are not new musicians at all. They're bands that I've loved for years, and they're like the old indie war horses. Poster Children have been around since, like, 1985. Guided By Voices, since 1986. Steve from 1990's. You get a really clear sense that I've got a lot of old loyalties to that kind of music, which isn't that old in itself.

I feel really naive about stuff in Portland. I'll read a review and I can't tell if they're out of town or in town, and I feel old. I'm like "Awww... this is so lame!" But a lot of the bands that I like... let's see. I like the Maroons and Sean Croghan. These are all old. There's gotta be something that I'll regret not bringing up... Well, Quasi, of course. The Minders, I like. Um, it's just hard. I know there's a whole... I don't want to feel or seem totally out of the loop. I mean, I know about the Swords Project, and all that stuff. But I'm just a guy with a three year-old kid, a video store and an album on his back (laughs). No, I haven't seen much.

WHAT WAS THE MUSIC COMMUNITY LIKE WHEN YOU WERE IN THE BAND SPRINKLER?

That was in nineties. And Svelt. Well, even before that, in 1985, my first band was Death Midget, and we were around for five years. That's more interesting because there was Hell Cows, Poison Idea... there weren't that many bands. And the cool thing about it was that one week you'd play with D.R.I. and Suicidal Tendencies. The next week, you'd play with Soul Asylum. And the next week you'd play with Flaming Lips. And so there was still college rock. People would by a Kill Dozer record, a Green On Red record. Like a psychadelic album... a freaked-out, noisy album. Everyone was really all over the place, musically. And the cool thing was that Death Midget was around for five years, and we put out a couple cassettes, and a lot of stickers. We had no aspirations to make records, tour, whatever. It just wasn't part of the thing.

Now people get really itchy if they've been around six months and they haven't put out that first '45, or haven't done a West Coast tour. It's kind of weird, because it was such an innocence and I totally lost it with Sprinkler. It happened so quickly and things changed so fast. All of a sudden you're putting out singles, and labels are talking to you. You're playing with Nirvana the day their album went gold. And it was just a trip, but it was totally unrealistic and kind of horrible too, because everyone started thinking, "Well, this doesn't make any sense. I guess it could happen to anyone." And I think people still have lost that innocence, in a way. They still clamor. They have high aspirations.

Actually, during the Cavemanish Boys a couple of years ago, it was a real nice return. We played twice a year, on holidays. Bastille Day and New Year's. Recorded the album in a day. Somebody wanted to put it out and we did it. We've never played outside of Portland or anything. Whenever we'd get together at practice a couple of times a year, we were just having so much fun. We were cracking up all the time, because it was it was fun. And I'd missed that. I didn't realize how much I had gotten out of that. (With Sprinker) It just got to the point to where it was very supportive, but very weird, too. It was a trip to be like, "Wow, you know, Spinanes are playing on Conan tonight... weird!" Constant surprises. It was great. It was awesome. But at the same time it was destined to die it's own death, too. Sorry... kind of a long answer.

NO. IT'S OKAY.

That's why this has been so fun. After playing music for so long, it was fun to do something where I just had these ideas in my head, and hear what other people thought.

GOING BACK TO THE CONCEPT ALBUM... DID YOU WRITE WHOLE CHAPTERS OUT?

I basically came up with an outline that I kept revising. Some of it's on the CD, and I threw that on there. It's got misspellings and fingerprints and stuff. I was like "I'm gonna put that one there to confuse people a bit."

Like I said... I wasn't sure. I went to Sam and I asked "You're going to be on this project, and I want to ask you, since you're one of the early people to commit... how much information do you want? How much information do people really want?" Because I could go nuts. I could write a whole ten-page chapter on the great underwater fire battle or "Whose Side Are You On?", the great debates of the day, animal vs. robots... you know, I could just go nuts. In the end, it just seemed better to let people write it and just get the essence from looking at the whole thing.

It's really cool- The Poster Children will reference something about a message from a silent friend, which is the character that's singing the eulogy in the end. Even though they don't really say that. There are all these little hints, and I thought that was cool. I didn't tell them to do that. They just went for it. I tried to keep it vague- purposefully vague. Because I just didn't want them to feel like, "Well... he wrote this long thing, and I gotta write lyrics to it now." I wanted them to create the vibe and the verse.

THEY'D GET MORE ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT IT...

Yeah, it'd be easier for them. Some of them, I could tell they wanted more, and so I'd have to give them more. But a lot of them just ran with it.

IT WOULD MAKE FOR A GREAT COMIC BOOK.

That's why I had those illustrators involved. I'm hoping that it will be a really good off-Broadway or children's theater production (laughs). That some elementary school will take it on. Or have Ken Russell make a movie out of it that only has people who were in other movies based on rock operas playing in it. So you could only have, like, Roger Daltry and Jack Nicholson and people like that in it. That'd be hilarious. But that's somebody else's job. Not my job. Somebody else is going to have to do that.

But it would make a great comic. And I'm kind of curious. On the web site that'll be up by the time this comes out (March 20th), I'm actually doing a contest where I have people send me prose, screenplays on whatever they think the story's about, or the album is about And I'm going to choose the one that was the closest to my concept, and the one that was just so out of left field that it was great. I've got some pretty cool things. My brother, Nate Slusarenko made some military dog tags for allergies for Colonel Jeffrey Pumpernickel, and there's some silkscreened posters for the show, and I'm going to throw those out as prizes. I'm trying to get Richard Meltzer to agree to autograph a box of Kleenex or something like that (laughs).

I'm kind of curious to hear what people think. The cool thing when I was doing music was when people would come out and they'd have better lyrics than I had written. You know, they're like "Oh, that line!" They just tell you something, and your jaw would hit the floor... "That's so much better than what I had." I always thought that was great, because I'm really bad with remembering lyrics anyways. So I always am kind of disappointed in myself when I read a lyric sheet after a bunch of times, and I'm like "Oh... that's not cool at all! What I had was way better."

The first ones I did... I talked to Charlie Campbell, and he put me in touch with Grandaddy. Then they put me in touch with Howe Gelb. I knew Sam from Quasi. And that was like a day's work there. When I was done, I was like, "Okay, well this is going well." And I knew Robert Pollard... Ann Magnuson. But a lot of them I didn't know, like Macha, the Poster Children and Lou Barlow. I just had to, when they came through town, go back, introduce myself and say, "I've got this idea I think you'd like." Everyone was really cool about that. They seemed like they were intrigued and they were like, "When I get off tour, give me a call and we'll talk about it." And they said yes.

But it was funny... when I met the Makeup, Ian was talking about SF Sorrow (the first full-length rock opera, released in 1968), which was a big inspiration for my record. It was helmed by (legendary British band) the Pretty Things. And it was like, "If you liked SF Sorrow, I've got project I'd like to talk to you about. That's why I'm here." And he was like, "Oh, that's interesting."

I think a lot of people were just excited to be asked to do something that was a little out of the norm. It wasn't a tribute record or a typical comp. Because they get asked to do a lot of favors, I think they were really happy to do something that was kind of more freaky.

AND THE ILLUSTRATORS?

Same thing. Joe Sacco was a really old friend of mine. He and Erik Reynolds up at (alternative comics publisher) Fantagraphics preliminarily talked to artists about this project, and whether it would be okay if I called them. And, in terms of getting them material, it was kind of like what I did with some of the musicians. Like I knew that I wanted the Black Heart Procession to do the underwater war. I did the same with the art, where I thought Jim (Woodring) would be great to do the secret order of the caterpillars... the stuff that is so organic and creepy. And Pete (Bagge) would do a really funny cartoon of him hallucinating somehow. Adrien (Tomine) did the cover completely on his own. Just vibe-ing out on it. Pete was like, "Well, what do you want?" And I'm like, "I think him being carried through it in Dr. Mom's arms as he's hallucinating." And then he drew the whole setting for it. But they basically did their own thing too.

Then I gave it all to Richard (Meltzer) to write my liner notes, and I thought that was really great because so many of the bands and artists- he's a total legend to them.

It was nice to get a visual, a musical and a literary side to it all.

-end-