Beat a Go Go

Agusta is a member of the Philadelphia-based rock trio, Stinking Lizaveta, along with the Papadopolous brothers, Yanni on guitar and Alexi on upright electric bass. They've been together for ten years now and tour the US regularly. The Stinkies (who chose their name from a minor character in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, in case you were wondering) have released three albums, hopelessness and shame..., Slaughterhouse, and III. Their fourth album, as yet untitled, is now complete.

The band's crunchy, jittery, thunderous instrumentals don't quite fit any known mold. Sometimes the music has an almost jazzy texture, with each instrument coming through in a trio interplay so elegantly executed that you could bask in it. At other times, everything simply explodes in a fireball of pure rock-and-roll. Their sound is an exhilarating combination of precision and anarchy.

On stage, Agusta is the tempestuous emotional center of the band. The Papadopolous brothers are dark and intense - absorbed by the power of their instruments, they retreat ever further into their wild hair, like possessed Rasputins of the guitar. Agusta catches that energy and helps to radiate it out to the audience.

Even off stage, she's a room-filling force. She has a piratical, yet girlish, swagger - like the young Kate Hepburn playing Captain Blood. Her laugh is loud, deep and rich. In talking, she turns her whole body into an exclamation mark, her limbs shooting out in bursts of enthusiasm. And her conversation is as passionate as her drumming - she holds nothing back.

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What kind of a genre does Stinking Lizaveta fit into? I have a very hard time describing and classifying your music.

I think that's part of the industry's problem too. How about, instrumental guitar freakout hardcore punkrock jazz? [laughter] Lately we've been officially dubbed "doom jazz" in the Rockdetector book, A to Z of Doom, Goth and Stoner Metal, published by Cherry Red Books last May out of London.

I love the fact that the band is all-instrumental.

Instrumental music is really interesting because you're not preaching at anyone. You know, I have a lot of axes to grind, but you can't tell, because there's no one screaming over top of our music! [laughter]

There aren't many instrumental rock bands out there. It seems that everyone has to have a singer. Is it a problem for you in the industry?

It's still an issue for the industry. When we approach people as investors or as people who are going to put our stuff out, then they're concerned about it. But people in our audience love our sound the way it is. They never tell us that we should have a singer.

What were your reasons for being an instrumental band?

The band didn't have political, or even artistic, reasons for starting as an instrumental band - it was kind of an accident. But now that we are, and since we have been for so long, I've appreciated so much the wide variety of responses that people have to the music. It's very difficult to pigeonhole it. And if someone's not up there saying, "This is what we believe and how you should be!" then the gift becomes a lot more personal. People have their own associations with it. It's more abstract. And man, I've gotten so down with that whole idea, just because there's so much preaching going on. I have a hard time with any kind of art that's held down to a local cause, because art seems to me to be bigger than that. And if the cause is really serious, then when we take that cause out of its context and make a broad metaphor out of it, aren't we abusing it? Like, "All these people, they died in Nicaragua..." If I'm supposed to have a personal resonance with that, then it's kind of an abuse of their death, their blood. You know what I mean? It yanks them out of their context and puts them in my personal context which it really doesn't have to do. When I use that metaphor for something personal, it takes away from their need in a certain way.

I guess it can be used as consciousness-raising, making political statements...

But if all the artwork does is create a billboard for their cause, then that's not art! You know, it's too small. That's not art, that's a billboard! And there are reasons that billboards are not art. They're too confined to have that personal heart-opening effect.

With instrumental music, everybody's listening to the music from their own perspective, relating it to their own lives.

Yeah. Exactly. And we're off the hook! [laughter]

To me it's a great thing not to have lyrics, because most lyrics are bad.

Yeah, it's rare for me to find a lyricist that I really dig. And it's not that I don't like songs with lyrics, either, I totally do. But man, it seems that language is a lost art sometimes. [laughter]

How did the band start?

Yanni and I were in other bands, and we started going out together. And he said, "You're the wildest thing in your band, and I'm the wildest thing in my band, why don't we make a band together!" So he and I started to work some musical stuff out. And then we were looking for a bass player, because he wanted to play guitar. He had been playing bass in the other band and he wanted to play guitar again, because that was his original instrument. And we couldn't find a bass player anywhere. His brother Alexi was still living in DC and wanted to play jazz with an upright, the real deal, a double-bass kind of thing. And then Yanni found the Morelli, which is an electric upright, at a party. We bought it for $150. I saw the transformation in Yanni's face - he was SCHEMING the minute he saw it. He was thinking, "My brother wants to play upright - he's gonna play upright electric and he's gonna play in MY BAND!! And this instrument is gonna make it happen. This is his destiny! This is my brother's destiny!" Mastermind at work! [laughter] So we bought it and we were, like, "This is your thing, man, come on!" He totally dug on it, and he ended up moving to Philly and playing in the band.

Does Alexi still play any jazz?

He does. And he has finally, after many years, bought himself an acoustic upright. He's a total jazzhead, he loves that stuff. And he has the groove in his head.

I understand you've written some of Stinking Lizaveta's tunes.

I'm the person who writes the least, but yeah, I write some of our weirdest, most contrapuntal things. I wrote "Running from the Enemy", I wrote "Schuykill", I wrote "Vent" [on which she plays a metal air-conditioning duct]. On the fourth album, which should be out in fall of 2004, I wrote four songs, if they all make the final cut. I'm very proud to say that one in particular, "Out of Breath", consistently gets rousing responses from both US and UK audiences.

Your drumming style reminds me a little bit of Ziggy Modaliste, the drummer of the Meters - maybe because you're so minimal.

That's interesting - Zigaboo Modaliste is one of my favorite drummers in the whole world! Yeah, I am minimal. Everything's very pared down.

Which other drummers do you admire?

Al Jackson of Booker T and the MGs. He played with, I think, Aretha Franklin and others, too. He was just such a gentleman about the whole thing, you know, and yet he was so on. So in the pocket, but he never showed off. He was always just elegant. To me, Al Jackson on drums is like the perfect husband. The guy who can totally get the job done. He can take out the trash with a smile, but he's a complete expert at the things that he needs to be. He doesn't show off, always listens... he's a responsive player, but also can take charge... [raunchy laughter] Oh YEAH, that's what I'm talkin' about!!

Who else?

Stewart Copeland. I think he's just so great. The Police is a great band. I love them. He did whole soundtracks for TV shows. And all that after Sting said he couldn't play the drums!

Sting said that? He's such a friggin' idiot.

He should at least have been smart enough to figure out that it was Stewart Copeland who was part of making that band happen. It's just a rotten thing to say about your drummer.

You said you have a new album coming out soon - Stinking Lizaveta's fourth. What does it sound like?

The material of this album harkens back to the first two albums. We're back to some more odd times and unexpected journeying as opposed to four-four rock, verse/chorus/verse/chorus. We also tried to get back to a more live-studio as opposed to overdub technique, but this is such a difficult thing to do. Only a handful of people in the world can actually make tape tell a true story without monkeying around with a million overdubs! Our main focus in the end was the snare drum. We wanted a killing snare on the order of Bad Brains - just big. We wanted the music to revolve around the KA of that drum like rock should, and in some instances we got close. My experience with the record is that after hours and hours and thousands of listens to each song, each individual track, etc., when I sat down by myself to spot-check the beginning sounds of each song, meaning I had planned to listen, literally, to ten seconds of the beginning of each song, there were seven out of seventeen that I couldn't put down. I listened to those seven all the way through and couldn't stop. So that's saying something. Hopefully others will feel the same.

OK, I have to ask you about gender issues. I don't like to do that, make a big deal about your being a woman and a drummer, because it compounds the offense, in a way...

It sort of repeats the offense of ghettoizing, yeah. [laughter] But also, in society, there are groups - and gender draws a line for two of those groups.

It's interesting to me. Here you are, in the rock world, which is so male that women musicians are an oddity. You must have a very different perspective on this environment.

One of the things that drew me to being a drummer to begin with was that I felt that as a female, I needed to embrace that part of the world that we're not invited to embrace - the manipulation of physical reality, and being aggressive, and hitting things with full-on extended strength, and trying to get your ideas across in a group of guys, and all kinds of things that nobody necessarily invited me to do as a female. But I felt like it was important for me to get over there to the guys' side, and have that, so that I could be completely human.

Joyce Carol Oates once wrote an essay about being labeled as a "woman writer" - she was surprised at this because she didn't think of herself that way. And what does it mean, anyway - how is a "woman writer" different from a regular "writer", who is male of course. The implication is that it's a kind of qualification - you're something less. Do people single you out for being a female drummer - "Pretty good for a woman", that kind of stuff?

I don't have any issues with people drawing attention to me as a female. It rarely happens. Since I'm not playing that game, in a way, mostly it doesn't happen around me. There's not a lot of tension about my being female in the places that I end up - the venues that I play. There's not even a lot of "Wow, it's great to see a sister rock!" kind of thing. There isn't much ghettoizing going on right now for me. And partly I think it's because I dispense with those issues in my own emotional life, so I'm not gathering that kind of energy to me, at least not in the performance context. Personal relationships and male-female communication in the rehearsal room are another story.

I once interviewed a few well-known Nordic folk musicians who are women and they told me that it's often difficult to get their ideas across to the men in their groups. One said, when she makes a suggestion, there's a "strange silence in the room", and then everyone goes ahead as if nobody said anything. After a while she just gives up.

Yes, it's true, women often go along because they're not listened to, in a social context. They try to get their ideas out, but then they go along with whatever it is that the men are doing - they definitely want to be included somehow, so they kind of give up on pushing their ideas. But on the other hand, if so much of this capitulation is going on, and there's a fact that we are different from men, then what is the music of women? When men aren't being capitulated to, and women have a chance to develop, what do we have to offer to the drums? What do we have to offer to the English language as writers? Is going to be fantastically different, or what? How does it change the game? That would be a pretty interesting experiment to run. Let's NOT capitulate! What happens when there is more interaction and less capitulation? What happens when women's values are interjected more into the coed scene, and what art comes out of that, and how does it work? So I think there's just so much to do. There's SO much to do. [laughter]

How does the interaction work? Are the guys open to your perspective?

Well, in my personal, day-to-day experience with the men that I work with, it's still disappointing. The kind of less-visible world of the female side of things STILL isn't getting noticed, and the guys aren't taking that responsibility that I feel that I've taken, to go over to "their side", if you will, for short. Why aren't they interested in coming over to MY side of it? You know what I mean? On their own! I don't want to have to convince anybody. Nobody had to convince ME that it was a cool thing to do. So how come they're not, like, FASCINATED, you know? It's like, "Wow, well, what's over there? What could I be seeing and learning about the ..." you know, I don't even have words for it - the world of femaleness.

Like they're in the high-rent district and you're from a slum - they don't want to go over to your place.

That's pretty much the only thing that still shocks me. And disappoints me. It's still like, "Guys, there's a whole thing over here! Take it on!" Because I took it on! It's like when you meet a friend who you share a lot of stuff with, but they're so reserved, and they don't share back. And you wonder, well, now, is it MY responsibility to draw them out all the time? You know - that's what I expect when I share myself. It just makes sense to me that people would be sparked by each other and share automatically. And instead it's one-sided.

About this idea of the guys "coming over to your side" and finding out about femaleness etc. - I think this is one of the problems with being accepted into the "boys' club" - they may accept you as an "honorary male", which is great but it doesn't necessarily include the concept of recognizing and accepting the perspective you bring to the table as a female. That's something different.

But I do think men and women live in somewhat polarized worlds. Whether or not we are by nature different, or we're functionally different because of societal pressures, it's just as important to the humanity of folks at either end of the poles to forge their own paths toward the middle. I'm not sure that I really want my bandmates to recognize me as female, as much as I want them to embrace for themselves the differences. A friend of mine said recently, "Most men know that women and men are different. There are some men who like that difference and some who find that difference profoundly irritating and wish it would go away."

OK, I can see where you're coming from.

This is a big personal issue, obviously, for me. How it relates to the band... sometimes this comes up only in terms of how we relate to each other and how problems are solved. I have a different way of talking about things and sharing information than they do. And I feel - Yanni and Alexi are brothers, so I feel over the period of years as I've watched them struggle with their history as brothers, that I could actually help a lot in that area. Push that forward, make it go smoother, or whatever. Make breakthroughs occur. I've tried a lot of different methods, and it seems strange to me that I'm sitting right there with some of the solutions - or what I feel are the solutions - and it's not recognized. I have to kind of backdoor them into doing things differently.

This female thing about being more diplomatic? Everyone must get along?

Yeah. And I have to be careful with how I do it because I want to take them to task about it. I want to say, "Look, you're being bad, stop it!" And then I really am Mom, right? [laughs] But that's really the way the voice is heard.

So how do you get your point across in the band?

It's rough - it's very tricky navigation in these waters. [laughter] I will say, "Hey, wanna try it like this?" And that sounds like an easy out. What I'm really saying is, [barks the order] TRY IT LIKE THIS!! [laughter] So you see, I'm in a bind here. My nice voice sounds like a way out for them, and my stern voice sounds like I'm nagging - so what voice can I use that's going to make this effective? How the HELL am I going to get my point across? HOW DO I GET PEOPLE TO DO WHAT I WANT? The thing that I've resorted to many, many times over - and they'll tell you this is true - is to not care that I'm being a bitch, and to insist on my way, and let them deal with their feelings about my bitchiness on their own. It just doesn't matter what they think of me. In a way, that's a "boy thing" to not mind. And that's a really good thing to take on to yourself as a female. It's like, "Well, what does it matter if he thinks I'm crazy? What does it matter if he thinks I'm a bitch? It doesn't. He's still working with me. Something's still happening here." That is a really refreshing thing that I have gotten out of going over to their side and squirreling around and seeing what I could find for myself. "Oh that's right, it doesn't matter what they think! If I have to be bitchy, then I have to be bitchy!" and I thank the guys for that. It's a good example. And women can have it. They can HAVE IT!

Why doesn't this happen more often? Why do we knuckle under?

There's a big fear under there - "If they think badly of me, then they will abandon me." They will push you out into the village square and cut off all your hair and take away your clothes and humiliate you! Huge, huge fear in there. And it's just not true. That's not gonna happen. If they shun you, and tell you to get the hell out of the rehearsal room and tell you they never want to see your face again - you're still YOU. And you didn't need to be there. They weren't the guys for you to be in a band with. Go find some other guys. But back to getting my ideas across - I've discovered that men, at least my two, are very impressed with final product. In general, they are not as interested in thinking out loud and collaborating as they are in the end result. If I can deliver the object itself, I have less frustration in communicating what I want. This would be true regardless of gender, but the differences in styles of communication make the inevitable vagueness even more difficult when crossing gender. I now have a computer program with which I can track entire songs using midi instruments - horrible sounds, but fine for demonstration purposes, and I can also print out scores. That really clears things up and gets me a lot of respect. You know, it's like, "Here's the junk - I made the junk - now you play the junk." Instead of "Hey guys, I have this idea, it goes something like this..." Then we enjoy learning the music together instead of fighting about talking about ways of talking about talking about music. [laughter] Jeez!

Cheshire at the Nyabinghi, May 2003; photo by Marty McAuliff

The folk musicians I talked to said that they found it much easier playing with other women musicians. There was more cooperation and less tension. What's your feeling about playing with other women?

I haven't done much of that. My first couple of bands - no, not my first couple of bands, my middle couple of bands - had women leaders. In Toybox, Bernadette sang, played guitar and wrote. She wrote all the songs for that band. They were a great group to play with. You know, it's funny, because I don't think I even thought about gender right then. We just played. [laughter] And they were a great group, simply because - it was never a question of, "Will we let her have her head and do her ideas or not" - they just dug what I did. So I got to really experiment and do what I wanted, and see if it worked.

I also asked these women - and some other folk musicians - why historically in folk music there have been so many women singers but very few women instrumentalists. The answers were interesting - instruments were expensive, singing was something women could do while doing housework and tending to children, and so forth. That all makes sense but I think there's something else going on underneath. What's your take on it?

In all cultures, from tribal to industrial, you see taboos about women doing certain types of things. Of course, there's a whole lot of monkey-see-monkey-do in every society. Human babies are sponges from breath one. But also, even in the more relaxed tribal cultures, the men, traditionally, for whatever reason, are the people who do things that are focused and require practice of a certain technique that involves a relationship between a guy and an inanimate object. And girls also traditionally, across the board, are practicing and playing, at a very young age - without being visibly prompted - relational games, like hand-clapping and role-playing. There are no tools being employed. There's definitely hand coordination, but it's not one guy with a bow taking aim. It's not a relationship between a human and an inanimate object. It's a relationship between humans who also have to figure out when and how to interact, and this is a different thing. I guess any real discussion of the natural vs. cultural differences between men and women is ultimately impossible, for the simple reason that we will never be able to create a control experiment. We will never meet any human, male or female, who has not been raised in some sort of society. There appear, at least to me, to be a lot of key human inquiries which get impaled on the horns of the nature vs. nurture dilemma. But we do know that more men than women - from a wide variety of different of cultures, past and present - do the stuff of relating to the physical universe, and more women than men do the stuff of relating to other people. Beyond this we can speculate, and mostly fantasize, about the reasons for this. I think our speculations on this subject reveal important assumptions and values that we hold about men, women and the relative importance and sophistication of the strengths of each.

Cheshire Agusta in Philadelphia, 2001- photo by Heather Henderson

I can see some of this relational thing onstage with the band - the two guys are kind of clenched into their instruments, very inward, and you're the one who ties everything together and throws the energy outward, connecting with the audience.

My concept of how the band must work, or be, or the effect of all three of us being there on stage, was always, "Wow, we're three individuals." Look at that guy there, look at this girl here, look at that guy over there. We're all really pumping this into the center somehow, but it's clear that we're each dynamic individuals, each contributing. And that must be the thing that is so interesting about us. But there's something inevitably female about that as a view - "Oh, we're all in this together."

The guys don't see it that way?

That was the big argument in the rehearsal room about whether or not this was going to be melody and accompaniment based music - in other words, guitar freakout and accompaniment music - or if we were going to be this group of people, not trading off solos in a jazz context kind of way, but all getting our licks in, like mad, like crazy. And Yanni was the proponent of guitar freakout and accompaniment.

Of course. [laughter]

And me and Alexi - Alexi the younger brother, and Cheshire the girl and ex-lover - were the proponents of a more egalitarian thing. So you know, this probably doesn't just end with gender - there are power lines drawn that cross gender lines and probably have to do with mammalian structures of existence! I am the big one in the family group and you are not! I am the person who can boss you around because I can do it! That's why I'm in charge! [laughter]

And women bossing people around is still a problem.

It's so amazing at this late date that this should be an issue, but it really is.

What about women in rock today? We hear so much about Courtney Love, riot grrls, etc.

I'm not a big fan of Courtney Love. Really amateurish punk music. The focus on the riot grrl thing - it's a bunch of girls who picked up guitars and drums yesterday and wanted to be in a band. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. They imitated punk music that was amateurish - supposedly inspired amateurism - ten years ago that was being done by men. Boys, I should say, because that's what was going on. And they made a really big deal about it. See, that's the thing. Girls have a right to suck, just like guys. I've seen a million sucky male drummers. I've been all over the country, I know who they are, I know where they live. And they're all carrying dicks. And they SUCK! So women can suck, and that's OK. If you want to do something that you're not so brilliant at, but you're having a good time, go ahead! Have a good time, you know? But don't go around saying stuff like "Grrl Power!" and all this crap, like you're like the first people who ever thought of playing two chords and going boodoo-dadoo boodoo-dadoo on the drums. I mean, you aren't! So like, forget it! And besides that, you can't even DO IT yet! So don't try to tell me you can rock. You're not rocking!

So Grrl Power doesn't do it for you.

That really gets me going - for a couple of years there was all this attention on the scene about the great "women grrl power" thing, and I said, "You know what? I've been doing this for 15 years. Nobody has come to me and said 'Grrl Power!'" And if they did, I'd probably try to choke them out from behind! [riotous laughter] But you know, I have to say that the issue of gender is constantly evolving and revealing itself in my life, and I'm finding out that I hold a lot of contradictory feelings and views. It's not at all simple for me, and sometimes I may try to underplay the impact that gender has had on my experiences in music. Recently we played South By Southwest, the original and most famous and long-running rock music conference. I was blown away by their politics and by their choices of keynote speakers - Little Richard among others. And I was completely enchanted by the whole tone of the event. It wasn't like other industry conferences, with everybody just playing for the possibly-but-probably-not-present A & R guy. It was more like summer camp for musicians. I got to see and talk to at least fifteen different fabulous drummers in one night alone. But my point is, I saw this girl, actually woman - she looked much younger on stage than she did in person - play the SHIT out of some old-school punk rock drums. Now over all these years that I've been playing, on those rare occasions when women have come up to me and said it's inspiring to see a woman on the drums, I'd usually think, "Yeah, but we all have two arms and two legs and eyes and a brain, after all." I believe that might be some internalized oppression - you know, if I can do it, then it can't be all that - type of thing. And it's also just plain old orneriness, and as it turns out, a whole lot of ignorance. How often do I see myself reflected up there amongst the drummers? Not a lot. So when I caught this girl's set I was pretty flabbergasted. I was almost in tears, actually. I have those unspoken subconscious self-doubting words in my head, and it does cut into them and stop the tape to see a female doing it well. All the crap passed on by culture and internalized about women IS still there, at a dull roar, and man, was I glad to see that girl play. I won't ever think again, "Well, we all got arms and eyes" type of thing when someone approaches me about being female and kicking ass.

You're the oldest member of the band, at 43.

Yanni is 10 years younger, and Alexi is 14 years younger.

How does that work, in terms of their taste in music, for example?

The funny thing is that our interests in music are not age-specific, necessarily. Like, Alexi was the jazzhead. Yanni really doesn't want to have anything to do with that. So age doesn't really come up as an issue in this way. When I got into this, I wanted to explore a kind of music that I hadn't before - that wasn't a part of my background anyway. I wanted to adopt a heavy rock style, and that was where Yanni was coming from, so I was more or less learning from him, or from his influences. It was neat, actually. My interests - the influences that are subconscious for me right now, because of the way I grew up - were classical music and folk music. I only hit rock-and-roll as a college student and in my 20s.

What kind of folk music?

I used to go to the cafes at the college where I grew up [in West Virginia]. I used to listen to John McCutcheon. My mom was big into Ravi Shankar and the Beatles. From the classical end, I listened to Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Beethoven, Scriabin... So I had a lot of different musical influences when I was a kid.

How about Yanni's background?

They came up in Washington DC when the underground music scene was really strong. So Yanni's whole life was going to those shows. I don't think he's ever been to a stadium rock concert. He always went to the small, underground shows. Now, he's really interested in that kind of music. We listen to a lot of classic heavy metal now.

You're kidding!

Oh my God, we listen to Journey, we listen to Foreigner, we listen to Led Zeppelin, we listen to Van Halen constantly!

But Yanni never listened to this before?

No, because when he was coming up, the DC scene was against all that stuff. Talk about politicizing! Because it was corporate rock. "We want to control our own musical destinies," whatever. And they did. Fugazi came out of there and really kicked butt all over the world. "This is gonna be music for people, it's gonna be five bucks. Do it yourself. If you want to go on tour, go on tour, don't let these other guys sew up the market. If you want to be a musician, go ahead, be a musician." And of course, the "back to basics" kids are a couple of generations down from the Fugazi kind of idea. Fugazi is relatively rigorous compared to some of the offshoots of the kids who came out of that - the DIY scene. They decided that technique was bad, because Foreigner had technique. So now technique is bad. You see? It's a complete misunderstanding of the concept of virtuosity. And a lousy syllogism to boot.

Like abstract art - throw out all the technique, because you're doing something new.

That's the whole thing - Picasso was not an abstract painter, you know what I mean? He could paint! That's why his stuff looks so amazing when it's all broken apart like that. Because he's breaking apart something that he really is painting! He's not just scribbling.

Tell me about the "back to basics" thing.

"Back to basics" - in these 'zines, a few years ago - it meant never practice your instrument, drink lots of beer, get down with your peeps and play "music" in quotes. Whatever that means. Drinking beer, hanging out. That's OK, I love to do that, but I don't call it music. I make hideous fun of kids who say "back to basics" and don't mean anything like playing music. But I guess, you know, they're doing something. They're there, and they're doing something.

What exactly are they doing?

Their lifestyle is really different from the spandex rock style - they're all kind of urban-primitive kids. A big mistake that they're making is that they're politicizing a sound. So their music is representing something to them which is purely a nonmusical idea, and they're not using music to clearly express that. They're just using the idea of music - the idea of being musicians, of being in a band - to express this social network that they're in. And the music, to me - first of all, it's not successful in doing that. It's defining these parameters that it's not meeting. And if it is successful, then they're going to be saying something to me which has nothing to do with their political idea of how to be a group. A group of people, not just a group of musicians. Although I have seen - before this "back to basics" movement got so rigid in its terms, there was a hardcore scene that was full of what I would call folk art. Like the dance pits that would occur at really rigorous hardcore shows in the late '80s and early '90s, and still do somewhat. Talk about artistic rigor - the drummers are athletes as well as musicians, the players are just insane, fast, extreme - and the people who are dancing to it are just as creative and physically fit and horrifyingly rigorous. The forms are clear, and the styles - you can watch them change and evolve as they go on through the years. Everyone's like, "Oh, punk rock, they're just slam dancin'". JUST slamdancing? Man, if you saw some of these kids back in the day, they were not just muscling around, they were really fluid. Their fluidity and their creativity and the obvious power that it took to do these moves.... The way they interacted was, to me, expressive of the way that we live in a city - crowded together, and always brushing up against and having anonymous contact with people. And these people wanted to step that up. It's like, "OK, we're gonna have slightly violent contact, because that's what it feels like every day to live in an anonymously contacting world, but we're gonna make sure everyone is taken care of." You never saw anyone on the floor getting stomped. They got pulled back up and put back in the group. If someone needed to be protected, there was someone there. It was a beautiful thing. I would be up on the Trocadero balcony, watching these kids. It was like this mass, moving back and forth. And you could see the individuals in there doing their thing. If someone went down they were brought back up. You could see the violence of it, because that was the feeling that was being expressed, and you could see that they were taking care of that feeling by the form itself. They were saying, "Yes, this is the way it is, but we can also make sure that nobody gets hurt. We can have these feelings here." Really interesting. Oh my God. Whew. I was impressed.

You weren't down there in the pit with everyone?

I was very far away from it, 'cause my ribs break easy and there is no way... I was an observer only. [laughter]

So here you are at 43, playing to audiences mostly made up of young kids. You don't feel old?

I never do. I'm just Cheshire. I just feel like me. But you know, I heard my mom say that too. "I still feel like I'm 19," she said one day when she was 40something.

What's your next big goal, personally?

Apart from continuing to practice on my own and improve? Hmmm...well, I'm in an interesting situation goal-wise right now. Fifteen years ago I wanted to play drums in a band that was saying something I wanted to say. I wanted to tour here and abroad and make records. Well, I've done all that with Stinking Lizaveta, so I guess I'm just going to keep doing it!

At my age - close to yours - I've found that there are a few benefits to it. You have more experience, more knowledge. Yes, you have less energy, but you know better how to focus it, so you don't need to expend as much of it.

You figure out how not to. Well, yeah, I mean, at some point people are gonna have to embrace that. We have such a problem here - I guess this is off the subject of bands and music, but it's right along the lines of culture, as we were discussing earlier. Passing things along - how on earth are we going to make a cohesive culture if we separate ourselves from what we learn as we grow up? And we separate our children from that, constantly. You know, they're gonna make their own culture. That's what humans do. If you don't create culture and pass it either around or down, by definition, you're not human. That's just part of what we do. If you separate the older people from younger people all the time, the younger people are culturally taught to not believe, or think about, what older people say, mostly because we separate them at such an early age - they're not allowed in the workplace, they're not allowed to come drinking with us, they're not allowed anywhere. So we've created a situation where our culture is going to fail because we're not passing it on.

We're too fragmented.

That's kinda what I think. And so to me it's a joyous occasion for Mick Jagger to be 60, or however old he is. It's a joyous occasion for rock-and-roll to grow up and to still be doing the same things. So I think that's my next marketing angle. Granny Rocks!!! [laughter] I don't know, I just feel like there would be a definite constituency for someone who was kicking the age boundary limits. Probably the industry would think, "But we're trying to sell these records to twelve-year-olds! Like, how are we gonna do that with this old biddy?" [laughter] But rock has also grown up. It cuts both ways in this country for people - it's a youth culture, and everyone's concerned about staying that way, you know, so someone who is staying that way is potentially very interesting.

So how do you stay that way? [laughter] What kind of advice would you give our readers on how to stay young?

Just play rock 'n' roll! WHOO HOOOOO!!!!! [gives heavy-metal sign]