The following paragraph was from my original intro...

with Karrin V.

Karrin:  Geza how did you come to be such a notorious figure in the early punk scene in L.A.?
Geza:  Being in the right place at the right time. Before punk rock, circa 1975, I had started getting into sound engineering. I would go around sleeping on floors at various studios around Hollywood and I began to learn how to record music. L.A. in the mid-Seventies had been totally devoured by disco and these singer-songwriter, ãcoffeehouseä types. Then one day a friend of mine told me there was this new kind of music called ãpunk rockä and that this (punk) band, the Ramones, were going to be playing at the Whisky (au Go Go, folks). There was absolutely no hard rock in Los Angeles at that time, and we were just complete hard rock maniacs, so we went down to see them when they played. There was nobody there except for maybe five or ten people. It was actually me, Charlotte Caffey (who later joined the GoGoâs), Joe Nanini (who became the drummer for Wall of Voodoo) and a couple of other friends of ours. We were just thrilled because it was the first loud rock music to hit Los Angeles in years. We all loved the Stooges and things like that and were just dying for something to happen where you could actually go play at a club and turn up an amplifier.
       Well, a lot of things started to happen very shortly after that gig. People rented halls to put on shows and bands like the Screamers, the Germs, and the Weirdos would come and play. Also not long after that Brendan Mullen came over here from England and started up the Masque . I was lucky enough to be able to rent a room from him so I was among the first, like, six people who were living at the Masque during the whole time that it was happening. I was also the resident sound guy at the club, since I had a bunch of PA equipment and stuff like that. I wound up getting drunk out of my mind every night so most of that episode is a big blur. I did end up recording a lot of the later shows, like a Germs show at the Whisky and the whole Elkâs Club Benefit (massacre) show for the Masque, when the Hollywood fire marshalls shut it down. So I was in the scene early on and involved in a lot of what got it off the ground in that first wave.

What was it like recording some of those early punk bands?
G:  It was really fun.  Darby asked me to produce the first Germs single for Slash Magazine and that kind of got me started because I had already begun spreading the word that I was an engineer and Darby had enough foresight to take me up on it.  People interacted a lot beyond the grassroots of that whole Masque scene and we all just started working and doing stuff together.  Then I went up to San Francisco and saw the Dead Kennedyâs first ever show and they were just phenomenal.  It was their very first show and right away they were packing people into the Mabuhay Garden's. Thatâs when I first heard ãHoliday in Cambodiaä and swore that I would do anything just to get a chance to record that song.  I would cut off my arm, basically.  Interestingly enough, about six months later Jello Biafra called me and told me that he had heard about my reputation as an engineer and producer and wanted me to record their second single, which turned out to be ãHoliday in Cambodiaä.

Youâve recorded a number of people...
G:  Yeah, and basically itâs been a labor of love.  I have almost never made any money from it.  Then you know itâs been about fifteen years and I still get checks from the Dead Kennedyâs.  But, for just about everything else I did, I mightâve gotten like lunch money and that was it. And it takes a while to record an album so some of these projects went on for weeks.  But it was something I really loved doing.  I was doing something that I earnestly adored.  I had the opportunity to try and make these bands that I thought were so great sound as good as, you know, a hundred dollar budget would allow because I had this skill in recording and it was a pleasure.  I was doing something that I really wanted to be doing.  I wanted to help make there be a scene.  Recording was one of the main powers that I had in my possession to do that.

What was the drug scene like at that time?
G:  At that time it was mostly drinking and Quaaludes.  People took drugs then but it wasnât the big heavy thing that it became around 1980.  Hard drugs took off in a big way a few years after the real genesis of the punk scene, which was around late 1976-77.  In 1979-80 the drug scene really hit hard, along with when it turned into more of a gothic type scene.  Prior to that it was mostly intense alcohol guzzling, continuous, day and night hangovers and more drinking.

What bands were you in at the time?
G:  The first band I was in was the Bags.  The early Bags were super punk.  I think the girls had seen a picture of the Damned where they all wore bags over their heads.  I had this bag with, like, bloody tampons all over it and we all just had slits for eyes and we would play like that.  These girls knew everybody in the punk scene but, when we would go mingle with our bags on our heads, nobody knew who we were. There was this real aura of mystery and, of course, we were an overnight smash.  We played one time and the Masque got shut down, and there was a riot when we played the Whisky during one of their Sunday afternoon gigs.  It was really, really fun.  You would have loved it.
        The next band I was in was the Deadbeats.  The Deadbeats were this avant/ sci-fi/ punk-type thing that was sort of jazzy and atonal, very complex musically.  A lot of people in the scene were so into the three power chord punk rock that they just didnât understand it at all.  We were doing brain surgery onstage, taking mannequins and pulling calves brains out of them, performance-art type stuff.  A lot of people thought that wasnât punk enough for them.

That wasnât punk enough for them?
G:  No!  We got dissed really hard but that was one of the first Masque bands.  We were doing incredible stuff. One time I showed up with two Hefty bags filled with seaweed I had scavenged from the beach after a storm and threw it out all over the audience and we would do that sort of thing at every show.  We did a Dangerhouse (hooray! - ed.)single that got a lot of critical acclaim but the scene really wasnât ready for it, which is interesting to me because later on everything sort of evolved in that direction, but we were just too far ahead of it at that time.  The Deadbeats now, I think, are finally going to be vindicated because weâve released a live tape that kind of shows how good we were.  Musically it was really, really advanced stuff, and it was hard to play-  very intricate, interesting stuff, sort of like super loud punk jazz.  It was very, very far ahead of itâs time.  That was about 1978.
       Then I started the Mommy Men, right after the Deadbeats.  The Mommy Men had Brendan Mullen playing drums and though he wasnât, like, the best drummer in the world, he was loyal.  And he was Brendan, I mean what can I say?  It also had Paul Roessler and (his sister) Kira Roessler who, of course, is not Kira "Roessler" anymore ( I think she was still Kira "Watt". at the time - ed.). Paul and Kira are both really talented musicians even though they were both very young at the time.  Kira was the bass player.  She and I were going together at the time.  She was really, really cute.  For a while Bobby Paine played bass.  He was a producer and he and his brother had produced Josie Cotton, Levi and the Rockats, the GoGoâs and FEAR early on, so they worked with a lot of people just before those people went on to do bigger things.  Pat Delaney was also in that band.
       So I put an album out  and I did the entire thing myself.  It sold a few thousand copies, but mainly it was an exercise for me.  I wanted to see if I could do the entire thing myself, from writing the songs to distributing the album and I did it but it just about blew my mind to find out how truly exhausting it was.  How some of these labels like SST built themselves up really amazes me.  Although I know a lot about independent recording and how the stuff is done, it is an amazing amount of work.

It makes it a little easier to understand why Slash and BOMP! couldnât really exist as both magazine and label at the same time, being that they both involve so much time and hard work to pull off. Itâs really quite to their credit that fLIPSIDE has managed to do it for so many years, actually.
G: fLIPSIDE built itself up gradually over a long period of time.  I have seen that whole commemorative history of fLIPSIDE and that Îzine really remained true to itâs roots and grew gradually.  It simply evolved out of extreme fandom and I think that itâs integrity allowed it to reach itâs own level in a slow, non-pushy kind of way.

The album ãYou Goddamn Kidsä is one of your most noteworthy and notorious endeavours from that time, isnât it?
G:  No, not really.  During that period of my life when I was most well-known as a "scenester" I was involved in a lot of activities that were instrumental in bringing many later things into being.  That was a time in which I contributed towards getting a lot of things off the ground. Later on I just went off the deep end, along with a lot of other people, getting heavily into drugs and mysticism and a sort of darker side.  At that point I pretty much retired myself into my little Hollywood bungalow for a couple of years on speed and heroin and just tried to move keys with my mind and jack off as much as possible.  To be incredibly honest, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.  There were people I knew, I wonât name any names, who exuded this kind of weird power and I wanted to know what it was all about.
       Iâd had a major drug episode in the Sixties on speed and acid and Iâd pretty much fried my brain then and spent years trying to get myself back on an even keel, so I was already quite vulnerable.  I had spent so many years taking vitamins that, at first, I was very strong and felt practically indestructible but then I ended up just shooting speed for three years and getting weirder and weirder.  It was fun for like, the first year and a half, and then things just started going really, really negatively.  I had to have a very, very long convalescence afterwards.

Were you making any music at the time?
G:  Yes and no.  I mean, I took a few stabs at it.  With me and my creative juice, I guess you could say that Iâm so close to the lunatic fringe already that all youâve got to do is add enough drugs and Iâm instantly in schizophreniaville.  And I was able to work in that world for quite a while so I didnât realize how far out I was getting because I was already too far out.  I really am the lunatic fringe.  My whole life is a case history of someone being out on the edge between madness and brilliance or something.  Itâs really a fine line.  One slip up and Iâm basically dusted for ten years, you know?

So that brings us through the early Eighties. You disappeared for awhile.....
G:  Yeah, I ran away to West Covina and lived in a barn, a real dirt floor barn, for a couple of years.  I would wash up in a horse trough and walk a mile to the busstop.  I went to the community college out there because I had to give myself some kind of mental discipline.  My brain was so fried that I was seeing snakes come out of the walls constantly.  I took a lot of psychology classes, thinking that the teacher and I were exchanging secret hand-signals and communicating telepathically although I was way off drugs at this point.  It was much weirder off drugs for about four years than it ever was on drugs.  I was doing hard drugs like shooting speed for two years and before that I was sniffing Black Beauties for a year.  But I was also taking MDA and heroin big time and my liver took a hike.  I was cramming things into every orifice I could find, basically.  I had always been extremely sexual back in the Sixties.  If I would take acid or something like that I would just disappear in the bathroom and get into some tantric-like thing with my dick.  It always came really naturally to me (Quick, summon the National Guard!- ed.)
       I must preface this by saying that I have a kind of natural yogic ability to reach a trance-like state, as it is considered by or connected to yoga, so that all it would take was some kind of focus like being high on speed and being able to completely discipline my mind.  All kinds of strange, physical and sexual things would follow very quickly.  I loved the way speed made me feel because it would make me just impossibly horny, which is not what happens to a lot of people, but itâs what happened to me so I would get into these tweaked out sex/masturbation and experimentation marathons.  A lot of people get into that on speed but most of them donât cop to it.  This would happen the instant I took it. It was never when I came off of it as much as when I was on.  To this day that ability has stayed with me.  In other words, once I had been wound up to that level of sexual and trance-like elevation it never went all the way back down to normal, so Iâm about half way in between where I was then and where I had been previously.
       During that time I began to observe certain fundamental things about society, some of which were conclusions I had come to in the Sixties on acid where it was like, the ãFree-Loveä era.  But I found myself really refining the concept of how society has taken sexuality and turned it into this form of societal human abuse.  You could compare it to multi-generational child abuse.  It is the abuse of human beings where our religious, political, and social institutions abuse us psychologically in order to gain some leverage over us so that they can then force us to compromise our own biological identities and bring us into some kind of self-suppression.

A lot of people donât realize that you are back and there seem to be patches of your life where you didnât exist there for awhile. What happened to you then?
G:  My whole life has been like that.  I live in episodes where Iâll go into a situation, extract all I can out of it and conk out, disappearing for a while to recover.  West Covina taught me that I had to master self-discipline.  You see, I had always done whatever the fuck I wanted all my life.  In the Sixties, I hitchhiked around and I flopped on peoples floors.  In the Seventies, I flopped on studio floors, getting welfare and foodstamps until I reached a point in my life where I found that I needed to develop self-discipline.  I joined a gym and went back to college with the deliberate intention of getting good grades.  I stayed away from social contact even though I had always been an incredibly social person.  I did a 180 degree turn-around because I felt that I had taken that other route as far as I could and pretty much fried myself in the process.
       I wanted to learn a different way of going about things, so I deliberately and actively chose to find a different way and did a lot of interesting stuff in that time.  I was living in a storefront in Pomona right next to the train tracks and these gangs would come through there at night making all this noise.  Meanwhile, I would be locked in behind three deadbolts with a shotgun to my head because I was still so freaked from all the speed, acid, MDA and heroin I had taken over the years that I thought that if I couldnât cope, I would just blow my brains out.  I went on like that for a couple of years.  I was really a mess.  But I was also having a lot of fun.  I built an entire studio out of borrowed equipment because I was writing reviews for Spin and articles on independent recording.  I got a computer and started getting into that and a lot of the MIDI electronic music stuff when that started happening.
       I basically locked myself in like a hermit and noodled with my inner world.  I was scared and depressed lot of that time, too, because I was still so brain damaged that it was hard for me to function.  I couldnât stand to be around people for more than fifteen minutes at a time.  I was too overwhelmed.  One of my detours was that I started writing userâs manuals for database programs.  I met someone who had written a program and needed an author so I wound up writing this killer manual for this boring database program, like what people in banks use when they fill in your name and address and bring up your whole checking history.  It even progressed to the point where I was going to be the person to teach the LAPD how to use their new computer system and at the last minute I just bailed.  I couldnât do it , run training seminars for cops... This was the system they are currently using in their squad cars.

You are kidding me!  You were going to be teaching the cops...?
G:  For this major computer company that had installed computers in the White House!  Here I was still as brain dead and weird as you can imagine and I was being interviewed for this particular job.  I had it together enough by that time to put on this square veneer.  Almost taking that job was the moment of truth.  I realized that, had I taken it, my career as a musician would have ended.  This threw me into such a state of spiritual collapse that I ran out of that situation screaming and came back to L.A. in 1985.  That was when I really re-found myself and nursed myself back to emotional health.
       When I came back I didnât make much of a showing about it.  I didnât want to get all tangled up in the scene.  It had nearly killed me.  I went more in the direction of pursuing personal projects. I took a couple years of film and television production at L.A.C.C. and rented this really cool storefront apartment.  I went to G.I.T. (Guitar Institute of Technology) because, as nerdy a place as it is, I hadnât ever had any real musical training.  G.I.T. was going to be my re-introduction to music.  I gave myself permission to think as a musician again, but I wanted to do it in some kind of controlled environment and I heard that G.I.T. really cranked out guitar wizards, but it didnât do anything for me.  Basically, I was just too old and I didnât get the hang of it.  At first I was all gung-ho, but by the end of it I was slinking into the back of the classrooms, because while these other people were (playing like pros), I was just going like, ãboink-de-doink-de-doinkä.  But, what it did do for me was re-light the flame in my spirit.  There was this whole long, dark period from the time I left L.A. to the time I came back where I felt as if all of the spiritual, artistic, and social fire that I had as a person was just a very weak flame that could go out any moment.  Even when I first met you I was still on really shaky ground, drifting in and out of that.  Sometimes I was cool and had strength and other times I really had to keep to myself.

That was a weird little place you had there, too. Right off Normal Street, oddly enough. You wouldnât have known anyone even lived there. It was like something out of a H.P. Lovecraft story.
G:  That place was great except that it was on the wrong side of the street, so there was no sunlight.  It would breed a sense of isolation and depression but it was really perfect for me at the time, trying to re-emerge into life in L.A., because it was part of my recovery and healing to come back into reality gradually.  I was on and off heroin from the minute I got back, like on a weekend basis and I started going to AA meetings at the tail end of my living there.  My system was so fried that if I got high even once in a week I would just go out into an astral plane for like a week afterwards.  In other words , everything would just send me into orbit.  I had no buffer, no safety zone.  I would basically turn into this disembodied spirit floating out into the ionosphere.  I was pretty much clean, but like I said, it was on and off.  Actually by the time I met you was when I had first started into flat out 100 percent sobriety.

After that you disappeared again. I think you left the country.
G:  What happened was that around that time I really began to take charge of my life.  I had finished my courses at G.I.T..  Then one of the computer programs I had written the manual for got picked up by this enormous manufacturer called Foxbase.  The book I had written for the program went with it and I got this huge chunk of money all at once, like a years worth of income in one check.  So I said fuck this, Iâm going to France.  I was going with Josie Cotton for a couple of years at that point so we decided to go to France together.
       In France, I found the thing that would light the artistic spark in me again and bring back my passion for music.  The reason we had chosen to go there in the first place was that Josie had torn something out of a magazine about this new kind of music called äRaiä music.  It was kind of like Arabic funk and rock, but it was all based on Arabic scales and rhythms and stuff like that.  This sounded so interesting to me.  I had always loved the Arabic sound of things, you know, perhaps being Hungarian and having a little Gypsy blood myself.  There were some parallels in terms of the scales and Iâd always had a penchant for that sort of thing, so when I read about it I said ãGod, we got to go thereä.  When I got the money later on that year, we took off to France.  I was living like a king.  The exchange rates meant nothing to me.  I didnât really have to be thrifty, so I wound up living in France for three months in all these different really neat apartments.  One was right on the Seine River.
       For me, who had basically lived in hovel after hovel and on welfare all of my adult life, here I was living Phat in France.  It was really cool.  I didnât have to worry about money or anything so I went into the Arab District and just bought a fucking suitcase full of tapes of this music.  That was where I discovered Cheb Khaled and Cheb Kader and Cheb Mami - all of these ãChebäs!  Cheb means ãkidä in Arabic. Itâs as if theyâre in the 1950âs, where all of a sudden theyâre wiggling their asses, drinking beer, smoking pot, driving fast cars and all that stuff.  Within their culture this is a very, very radical thing that theyâre doing.  They are total rebels.  I started recording stuff off of this radio station there called ãRadio Barbesä on this little micro-cassette recorder and go into the Arab Quarter and in my worst, absolute pidgin French, I would play these little snatches of music and try to collect these tapes.
       Interestingly, by the time I was done, I came home with every record I had recorded a little chunk of.  I had the whole collection.  These guys would be chasing me out of their stores because they just couldnât stand me.  Theyâd be like ãOh, itâs him againä, you know?  (Utters some guttural Anglo-Francais sounding noises to mimic the stilted speech he relied upon as his only means of communication.  Itâs not pleasant.)... and I would play this little snippit off the micro-cassette.  They would have their music blaring in the background going, like ãI donât know what this is...ä !  It was just crazy.  This was just so colorful, you know?
       Then one time I was playing one of these little snatches in one of the stores and this guy was telling me ãI donât know... I donât know what this is... ä and another guy, who was looking through the records, was kind of listening to it and he goes, ãWhat was that again?ä  And I played it for him over this little speaker that was about an inch wide.  He held it up to his ear and goes ãWhy, thatâs me!ä and I go, ãYouâre kiddingä.  But he goes äNo, thatâs me!ä in French. Moussa Kharbache (pronounced something like ãMoosa Garbageä) was his name.  They all have these really horrible sounding names.  Anyway, he wound up taking me on a tour of Barbes, which is in the Arab District.  If it hadnât been for him, I would have come home empty-handed, or at least with only half of the tapes that I wanted.  So Moussa Kharbeiche gave me a tour of this whole district.  By that time I had mastered enough French  to get by.  It is incredible the way their scene works.  All of their recordings are on tape or bootlegged and they are completely independent to the point where theyâre making these tapes in the back of each store.  Every store has its own collection of tapes by certain artists, so you have to go from store to store.  There is no distribution, you know what I mean, to find these certain records on cassette.

So one record store might never have even heard of these other artists...
G:  Right, or theyâll say ãGo next door, go next doorä.  I thought that they were just trying to get rid of me but it turned out that this was the only way to do it.  So Moussa knew where all these tapes were and I wound up going with him into all of these stores that had nothing but hookahs and rugs, okay?  This was so deep - these old men with beards a foot and a half long and people wearing veils and all this crap, you know?

Where was Josie at this time?
G:  Josie had come home by that time.  After about a month and a half she just couldnât take anymore.  I was totally obsessed by my quest. This time I was tweaking on tapes.  (Moussa) helped me find every tape that I wanted and I came home with a suitcase full of the finest Rai collection in the land.  I know for a fact that no one in L.A. has as many good tapes of this stuff.  It is really brilliant music.  Rai is a combination of the Arab scales and beats set to American blues, rock, funk, reggae, Spanish and Moroccan music so it has a multiplicity of styles and they are always bringing in new ones.  Rai is truly the (musical) jewel of international cross-pollination.
       When I came back I took some of these Rai tapes and gradually tried to get inside the music.  I started dissecting the beats on a drum box, taking the scales apart and figuring out how the music really worked, not so much that I was interested in playing Rai music but simply because I loved it so much.  Since then I have found myself working on some Rai projects.  It left me so inspired that I wanted to take it one step further and form a new hybrid.  The starting point was Rai music and some of the African stuff I had also collected while I was there and I was basically trying to create another style of music around it.  I mean, my roots had always been in hard rock, letâs face it, but I also had the ability to play things that were much more complex than that.  Now I was taking that same music which had so inspired me and combining it with things I had always loved.  It is kind of difficult to put it into words, but it has an Arabic and African feel while still being kind of a rock thing.  I donât know how else you could explain it.
       I figured that I was going to go back into production eventually so I took a job at this place called Paramount, which was like the craziest recording studio in town.  They had four 24-track studios and it was just a madhouse, very poorly maintained and the equipment was very old to begin with.  It was a big place but it was really nutty.  It was actually pretty punk.  I did (production on) a lot of rap records there and worked with all kinds of people.  Everybody from Ice-T to, in passing, Sir Jinx, who did Ice Cube, and a lot of other people who I didnât wind up really getting along with.  But I (worked with) tons and tons of rappers, like Funkytown Pros and The Uzi Brothers - a lot of different acts.
       I hate to say it but many of the rap acts get into reverse racism.  They get a little bit into the Koran and think they are Muslims and just go off . Or they get a little bit of money and start acting conceited and mean towards white people.  But, you know me, Iâm like a puppy in that I usually get along with everybody and love all kinds of music and I was a really good rap engineer.  I was just a maniac with the sampler because I had learned all that MIDI stuff in Pomona and really understood how to do it.  I consider myself to be a qualified guy who was into it for the love of music and I didnât want to go into work and get sassed or put down.  So, sometimes I did get hassled there but I also met a lot of people who were just incredible to work with, as well.  I was working with a lot of R & B, rap, and rock acts at that time.  My motive being that I truly wanted to get back into engineering and I needed to re-develop my chops because I had not done any engineering in a long time and was rusty.  I needed that job as a springboard for getting back into production, which is what eventually happened.
       At that point Josie and I were at the tail end of our romantic relationship but still maintained a very close friendship so we decided to build a studio of our own, changing our relationship to one of being house-mates and business partners.  It worked out so well that we started doing our own label as well, after completing a small but really nice 24-track studio in the garage of her house.  It is a super sounding place, too.  It is pretty basic, but the wiring is really clean and weâve done several records out of there that just sound killer, like (fLIPSIDE Record's roster- mates), Butt Trumpet and Trash Can School, and a ton of others.  I also worked on a really interesting Rai project with this French producer by the name of Jean Benoit, who produced a lot of the early Rai hits on Mango Records in the UK.  He and I had both wanted to do an international project where we would bring together talent from all over the world and he wound up presenting me with this project.  He had gotten Sheikka Rimitti, who is the woman who practically invented Rai music herself by bringing this sound that was just starting into the more rural areas which later really developed it.
       These people were like nomads and here they were inventing this new style of music.  She brought it from the tents and into the cities in the early 1930âs and made it punk rock.  She took her veil off and was smoking pot to the extent that the Muslim priests would come and sanctify the buildings after she had played because they thought she was possessed by devils.  There have been well over twenty assassination rumors, one quite recently.  This is one very heavy, powerful chick.  She is now about seventy years old, so to do this record is really like recording history, like recording Muddy Waters or Chuck Berry.  The Algerian producer had recorded her and her band of nomadic flute players and goat-skin drummers in Algeria to a click-track, which is a steady, metronome beat.  Then he added tracks that he was recording.  Jean Benoit is a computer maniac.  He works for Apple Computer in France and he has this arsenal of computers so they were creating all of these high-tech sounds.  Then they had all of this MIDI gear and were doing all of this synthesized stuff.
       So, the Algerian guy, who had been jazz trained, was writing all these MIDI tracks that he laid into these.  Then they took the MIDI tracks and the Algerian tracks of the nomadic band and brought it to L.A., where I added over-dubs.  I got Flea, Robert Fripp, East Bay Ray (from the Dead Kennedyâs), as well as myself playing Beastie Boys and NWA loops and guitar.  Robert Fripp would start a song with about ten minutes of 'Frippotronics' and then it would go into the Algerian section, with the whole band.  I got Frank Zappaâs horn section to play on it and recorded all of that stuff at my studio.  Then East Bay Ray would come in and play this punk rock guitar over the top of it.  It is just incredible.
       It is the most massively diverse record of multi-idiomatic forms probably ever recorded.  I finally got some of the final mixes back and secured the exclusive right to shop it in the United State, so I will be showing it around to record companies very soon.  Already just from the buzz on the street, it sounds like a lot of people are really getting into it. Since itâs a foreign language thing I hope to do two sets of mixes.  One which maintains the integrity of the song structure, and another one in more of a trance-like way.  That would be a really fantastic thing for the clubs.  It has really been a very interesting project.  Flea was such a champ.  Once he heard the basic rough tracks he fell in love with Sheikkaâs voice and said he wanted to play on the whole album.  He was an incredible blessing because he became the anchor that held everything else together.  Itâs just amazing.  I mean, he is like the most excellent bass player, one of the very best in the world, and he told me that so few people ask him to play on their recordings, even though he loves to contribute to peopleâs projects.  He really would like to play on a really wide variety of musical styles.
       Then, I am also in the midst of producing new music through the collaborative efforts of my bandmates in "Live, Nude Psychics", with whom I have been performing.  We  have recently produced a four-song demo which has garnered some major label attention.  We'll see how that goes.

You did a cover of one of Dr. Johnâs ãNight Tripperä songs.
G:  ãWalk on Gilded Splintersä, yes we did.  Thank you.  And we also did a re-make of the Beatlesâ ãTomorrow Never Knowsä in addition to our original songs and it is just the most swirling, Arab/African, psychedelic, guitar-crazed thing you could ever imagine.  Itâs loud and full of rich insanity.

I have heard the demo but have yet to experience the live phenomenon. What can be expected from you in a live setting these days? (bear in mind this info is dated - ed.)
G:  (Live, Nude Psychics consists of...) David Kendrick ( DEVO, Sparks) on drums, Paul Roessler (the Screamers, Nina Hagen, 45 Grave, Twisted Roots, et al...) on the keyboards, Jimmy Hanes, who has played with Sly Stone and the people from Funkadelic, on bass and this cat named Steve Snow, who is this brilliantly talented dude, who also plays guitar, and (is an) engineer and producer, himself.  He did a whole hip-hop opera at my house.  That is how I met him and he is just incredible.  Josie Cotton and Beth Hart are doing background vocals and then there is also a percussionist named Scott (?), who is actually playing with Lindsay Buckingham right now.  It really is quite a massive band.  Everyone is a star in his or her own right.
       But  no, I am not pulling my dick out onstage anymore....  I did, for a while, but I got a lot of flack for it.  I donât know why. (laughs)

You mentioned that you and Josie Cotton had started up a label of your own. Tell me about that.
G:  Josie started up Roxco Records as an outgrowth of the studio in order to release her new album ãFrightened by Nightingales,ä which has also been released in France by Jean Benoit on his label, called Silences.  We showed it to some labels here but it was just a little too much on the extreme musical fringe to get any kind of deal so she decided to put it out herself.  Her album is sort of like Kurt Weil meets Frank Zappa or something.  It is a really brilliant album, very well recorded.  Well, one thing lead to another.  She pressed the record, then  found someone to do promotion, who has since become involved in the label.  Then I started pitching in and wound up, somewhat inadvertently, starting this label which has since escalated into like a real thing now.

So tell us, oh omnipotent Sage, Mr. Mommyman,wherein do you think the future of the rock music lies?
G:  ( Guffaws) Isnât that great? That is like the fucking, um, blueprint textbook last question for an interview.  (Nervous laughter as he ponders that....)  I loveit.  Um, okay...  I think rock and roll has run the gamut of shock theater and so there is only one place left to go, and that is live dismemberment and execution onstage so, if anyone wants some wild ideas, there they are.  (The Aztec's &Roman's have beat us to the punch on that one !-ed.)
       Yeah, weâve seen virtually public spanking, piercing, mainlining, bloodshed, racism, and sex - either carried out on the stage or incited from within the throngs...
As far as I am concerned there hasnât been enough sex, but thatâs just because I happen to like

To wrap it up, who all have you recorded?
G:  God, you probably know more of them than I can remember.  I just do this stuff.  I just shit this stuff out and forget about it, really.  I know this sounds ridiculous, but I really have a hard time keeping track.  There is a difference between bandâs I have produced as opposed to those I engineered.  I produced, as you mentioned, the Redd Kross album ãTeen Babes from Monsantoä, which was what got them their recording deal, I think.

That was one of their best albums.
G:  A lot of people say that.  Iâve recorded a lot of peopleâs best work.  No, seriously.  Itâs a fact.  If you listen to the Dead Kennedyâs 12ä single for ãHoliday in Cambodiaä - which I did, and the one that they re-recorded, you can hear the difference.  And a lot of people have told me that.  I also recorded a whole bunch of bands that are not that memorable, but we know about the Germs. I recorded a lot of Screamersâ stuff that was unfortunately never released. (FOR SHAME !! - ed.) I also recorded a Weirdoâs single that was never released until quite recently, when Frontier Records released it as part of a compilation of archival stuff.  I recorded many of the Dangerhouse singles.  Dangerhouse was one of L.A.âs first two totally independent 7ä single-type labels and it was started up by Black Randy, David Braun, and I think K.K. from the Screamers, although I could be wrong. What?! Records was the other one, and then Slash put out a couple of things.  But I did the Bags, the Deadbeats, the Germs, Magnapop, Black Flag, collaborated with Kim Komet & 45 Grave to come up with Silver Chalice, Celebrity Skin, Redd Kross, the Creamers, the TVTVs, Butt Trumpet, 1,000 Mona Lisa's, and a few Ethyl Meatplow (which has since divided into the "Geraldine Fibber's" & "E.Coli" -ed.) songs, just prior to their album.  I did a whole bunch of others in between, probably too numerous to mention.
Fuck if I know.  I canât remember.  Iâll give you a list. . .

....fin