My Favorite Martian

"Leave a comment, bitch!!"

Many of you are by now familiar with my co-conspirator Mars aka Tony Emmons-- he's the man responsible for bringing Raven's "Back to Ohio Blues" to your attention (one of the most popular posts we've had). What you most likely don't know is that he is an accomplished musician himself, wearing many different stylistic hats (or should that be afro sizes?) since the early 1990's. His story begins, as he describes it, as an "oedipal revenge tactic, on December 12th, 1970 to a teenage white girl and a middle aged black man in Cincinnati, Ohio." He and his younger brother J.R. were raised "by his mother and a small cadre of hippies, perverts and drug addicts in Central Maine until 1978 when, losing battle between a boyfriend and a mountain of cocaine, S.A. & J.R. were given up for adoption." Like so many of us, he found solace in music, picking up a guitar at the age of fifteen. Since then, he's played in a multitude of bands: Rumford, Squirm, Technicoloreds, FKTRN and currently, his one-man guitar-skronk outfit, S.A. Emmons. So, whether ya like or not, here's the first ever SLN full-length interview to fill in the blanks (and yeah, there's music as always too). Hope y'all enjoy!

Let's start with something extremely clichéd: what artist made ya wanna pick up the guitar?

It wasn't actually an artist. It was three things. In 1981 when I was 9 years old my adoptive parents sent me to a Catholic summer camp. Other than mass on Sunday, it wasn't any different than your typical camp. The cabin councilor was this teenager and he had a this eight pointed star shaped electric guitar. It was, I believe, the first electric guitar I ever saw for real. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Also, being that the camp was in Maine, we had a bunch of Franco Canadian kids from Québec there. There was a group of them that were total proto-poodle hairs: zebra shirts, spandex pants, pube 'staches and bandannas. They couldn't speak a word of English, but they knew all the words, phonetically, to Def Leppard's High N Dry LP. We had some kind of camp wide party and the Franco-Heshers got up and mimed 'Bringin' On The Heartache'. I was like, "Shit. That was awesome. I wanna do that", but for real! That same year at St. Joseph's Elementary, some kid got this toy electric guitar thing that had one thick string and had a speaker and distortion on it. It basically sounded like the intro to 'Iron Man'. I loved it so much I almost stole the fucking thing. So, yeah, the Catholics were very nervous about rock music, so my interest in music was completely ignored. Even though WASP in 1984 prompted me to actually spend money on my first electric guitar, I was hooked far earlier.

How about a quick rundown of your various bands/projects...

RUMFORD: Good trashy rock ala mid period Mudhoney, Legacy-era Misfits, Cramps, Stones. Jeff Evans (Gibson Bros. '68 Comeback) was gonna toast us to Long Gone John at Sympathy, but we broke up in an ego explosion right as the album hit.

FKTRN (aka fukktron aka Fucktron). This was Miami electronic wunderkind Dino Felipe's (also of Old Bombs with Carlos Giffoni) old band. I was in the last incarnation as we transitioned from guitars / tapes / broken electronics / drums to slick semi-expensive modern sequencers and samplers. Once Dino realized computers meant he didn't need collaborators, he didn't need collaborators. Great time, good friends, and one hell of an education. I'm on the FKTRN / Hair & Nails split cd on Public Eyesore playing guitar on the tracks A/B B/C & C/D.

SQUIRM was a short-lived attempt of mine to trick younger musicians into playing with me. It's comparatively commercial to just about everything I've done outside of 'Rumford' and employing the tried and true verse chorus verse structure. I was freaking out. I'm almost 40 years old. Most people my age are either established, married with children or otherwise 'retired'. I'd failed miserably in all of my attempts to start an original forward thinking band over a six to eight year period. At this point, I just wanted to play. So I totally over-thought what I figured kids were going to shit their pants for in 2008.

The Technicoloreds was/is a rehab project. After nearly giving myself carpel tunnel syndrome with SQUIRM's guitar histrionics, the idea of writing music in the guitar/bass/drums realm was just completely unappealing. So I turned to machines.

OK, so I actually did some research on Rumford. It appears to be a small town of around 7000 in Central Maine-- very Victorian. What is it about the place that haunted your soul so much that ya named a band after it?

Rumford, Maine is also known as Cancer Valley due to the fact that the smog that rises from the Boise Cascade paper mill that sits in the valley is trapped in the mountains and kills a lot of people that live there. When I was thirteen I was placed in The Rumford Boys Home (later renamed The Rumford Group Home). Having garnered myself frostbite in an earlier adventure, I couldn't go to school for the first two weeks i was there, so the psychos I lived with spread the word: "There's a NIGGER in the Boy's Home!"

At the time, I was the only black person for miles. Rural Maine's views of blackness came from Hollywood circa '83. Not very flattering. Looking back, if I didn't attack every John Deere hat wearing goofball dropping 'N' bombs, maybe life would have been easier - but violence was MY LIFE! Even teachers got in on the fun! I spent junior high in SPECIAL ED because I was a distraction to all those poor white kids who just couldn't keep their mouths shut. Once I got to high school, they attempted to keep me in Special Ed, but I somehow fought my way out of it. I'll never forget the Special Ed teacher looking at me like "You UPPITY LITTLE BASTARD!".

In my history class, the business teacher filled in for a while. Unfortunately, it was during our Civil War education. This bloated tick repeatedly referred to slaves as 'MONKEYS'.

So I acted like one and threw my desk at him.

Our school had a fund raiser known as 'Slave Day', where students became 'slaves' for another student who made a donation to the class treasury. Someone thought it would be funny to sign me up one year. It was even funnier when the Vice Principal called out my name as a participant over the monitors.

My perseverance through all of this crap ingratiated me with the other dregs - the metal heads, druggies and losers with skin problems. These guys had some real issues and, despairing and high on acid, one kid jumped off the Memorial Bridge, ending it all over a girl. This wasn't a new phenomenon, so many people had dove off this bridge there had been an X spray painted on the rocks below with the legend "Marks The Spot" emblazoned underneath it. But he was the first KID.

The fake outrage and media frenzy over a kid that no one cared about was truly disgusting. We had a huge assembly at school where the clueless teachers asked "WHY? WHY DO YOU DO THESE THINGS???". So, I got up and said, "Because there's NOTHING ELSE TO DO!"

Oh, well what are you going to do about it? This was the adults immediate challenge. So I suggested we start an organization of kids that would work toward putting things together (shows, movies, repairing the rec center) for kids to do. So a group was put together (with an overseeing group of - UGH - parents) with myself voted in as President. We cleaned up the old recreation center, I called in some favors and set up a huge thrash metal show.

The show was HUGE. My first band, Pesky Leper played along with four other bands from all over the state. There were two hundred kids there.

And someone crucified and eviscerated a cat...

Suddenly, there's a 'SATANIC CULT IN RUMFORD?'. At the next 'Youth Force' meeting (NOT my idea, BTW), the parents were freaking out - "What does all of this have to do with Youth Force? We've got to stop these Satanists!". So, I had to point out that it was more likely a gruesome prank. Like an idiot, I offered to ask a friend who was studying the occult if there was any sort of ritual of that sort.

Of course, there wasn't, so I said as much at the next meeting. The parents were even more freaked out now, forgetting all about St. Garfield and were highly concerned with my friend: "We've got to stop this girl from worshiping Satan!"

I couldn't believe what I was hearing, so I made a huge mistake: I evoked the Constitution. I pointed out that, although my friend was NOT a Satanist, she had the Constitutional right to worship the deity of her choice.

Within a week, I became the leader of the 'Satanic Cult'. Police went to classmates homes and told their parents to keep their kids away from me. The parents guild of fascists suggested that if I REALLY cared about the aims of 'Youth Force' I'd step down and remove the stigma of ME from the group.

As an adult, I now see very clearly that this was an incredible effort by the parents of the dim bulbs who made up the rest of the Youth Force (mostly kids with overbearing mothers and no vision). They were sick of this teenage black bastard calling all the shots and making them feel stupid. So they fucked my world up good.

Alright, that's why I hate Rumford so much that i named a band after it so people would ask and the truth would get out.

You compared Rumford to Mudhoney-- doncha think that's selling yourself short?

Not at all. We never got a bad review but Mudhoney and Jesus Lizard got referenced a lot. I really don't think we sounded at all like either of those bands, but apparently I'm alone on that. We were a great live band that put out so so records. See next question.

Larry Hardy of In the Red was supposedly "embarrassed" at the prospect of signing Rumford to his label-- shouldn't he be more embarrassed of being a Pussy Galore fan?

See now, I love Pussy Galore and, at the beginning, Rumford was an unashamed PG clone. Now, I realize there are a vast abundance of reasons to hate them and the majority of their catalog has aged like meat, but what worked for me then, works for me now.

We sent Larry a bunch of live tapes in 1994 and he loved it.

Then we went into a 24 track studio.

The producer was just completely against all of our ideas and, I shit you not, re-recorded some of our other guitar players (Edward J Gibbs) parts when we weren't around. He didn't want his name associated with a 'bad' sounding record, apparently. The result was a polished turd. We were all pretty unhappy with it, but Gibbs sent it to Hardy ANYWAY. I have no clue why. So, Larry gets back to us and says he hates the record and that he couldn't put it out because, if I recall correctly "My friends will make fun of me" and that we should "sign with Am Rep and make a lot of money". The very next year he started putting out those Jon Spencer singles every month. So if it's guaranteed paydirt, shame takes a holiday. Not that I blame him - it was a horrible record. It should be noted that the album that did get released on Dubious Honor in '97 is an entirely different session with a sympathetic producer.

Last person you punched in the face?

The last person I full on punched in the face was a kid named Dana when I lived in the Rumford Group Home in 1984. I woke him up being loud and he freaked and called me a 'nigger'. This was a trigger word for me back then and I smashed him square in the face. He went down like a sack of potatoes. I had actually knocked him out. His eyes rolled back and he started twitching. I felt like "that'll be the last time he says that!" like, "oooh I'm so tough!" My thumb felt wet though and I didn't see any blood on Dana's face. So I hold my hand up , fingers spread and notice that my thumb was completely busted up. I mean, completely twisted out of it's socket. I lost it. The tears, the dreams of being a comic book artist all burning away... At the hospital, a doctor just walking by took a look at it and just yanked it back into place. Yeah, it was just that simple. My thumb is still all fucked up to this day.

I found this video on Youtube featuring your luxurious 'fro-- what the hell were you guys thinking?!!

That's with Dino Felipe and Vanessa Payes and Walueska Palais. FKTRN had been around for a long time, starting in Miami as part of the Monotract, Harry Pussy, To Live & Shave scene. We lived together in Atlanta through a VERY DARK period of bad drugs, bad decisions, bad people, and bad sex (no, I didn't fuck any of these people). The time I was involved was actually the end of the 'band' and the beginning of the transition into Dino going all electronic / glitch whatever.

Okay, what were we thinking. Dino and Walueska (pronounced 'Va Les Ka' the bald girl - the niece of Nicaraguan dictator Somoza) and her husband Rob Deth, were very proactive about constant creation, so if they weren't making music, they were making art, or movies or who the fuck knows. Vanessa (the 'drummer') and I just went along with it sometimes. The video is actually pretty vanilla compared to some of what got recorded.

Why the move to Hot'lanta of all places?

Well, a woman, duh.

The other reason was, at the time, the Portland, Maine music scene was just shriveling. Rumford had sprung up in early '94, inspired a bunch of other goons to pick up their guitars and pound out noisy garage rock and when we broke up in early '97 the scene died with us. I was fairly fed up with the verse/chorus/verse routine, and the band had no interest in going beyond that. I had been playing with a band called Secular Lambs To Lions with some really far out kids from San Francisco who had been in Caroliner and Deerhoof. They were all about improv noise and, at the time, I just didn't have the skills to do that correctly so I just got more and more depressed. Eventually, due to being the face of the 'cool' record store I worked at and a huge dick besides, I had worn out my welcome as a local celebrity - old ladies recognized me on the street but the scenesters were really hating on me.

A girl I knew had moved to Atlanta and really wanted me to come live with her. I liked her and I figured "It's GOT to be better than this".

Ironically, the Maine scene has really blossomed into a hotbed of experimental music.

How does S.A. Emmons fit into the Atlanta "scene?" Do you play out or is it strictly a recording project?

I don't really, at least not yet. When I came here in '99, Atlanta was in that moment between generations not unlike Portland. All of the established bands of the 90's (Tweezer, Melts, Pineal Ventana etc.) were breaking up, their members getting married and pumping out families. The bands that replaced them were very career minded, by the book rock bands - the most popular, 'The Tom Collins', prided themselves on sounding exactly like Led Zeppelin.

This was basically the mindset of the scene at that time. In reality, while these bands were huge in town they just bombed on the road. At the time, The FKTRN crew fled back to Miami and to the scene at large I was looked at as a joke. A black guy playing weird rock was just not the way to super-stardom. I was actually asked to open up for a band like this: "You know what would be hilarious..."

Listening to the S.A. Emmons stuff, I'm instantly reminded of Keiji Haino and The Dead C. In the ballpark?

I love Keiji Haino and Fushitsusha but they are not an influence really, more a validation. In fact, my S.A. Emmons work made me go search out Haino's stuff as I remembered it as being similar. The Dead C, I like okay but not an influence at all.

You claim on your Myspace page that S.A. Emmons is "the blues as I experience them," you haven't been art-damaged by one of those creeps from Southern Lord, have ya?

Not really. I love Earth, but I loved them when "Extra-Capsular Extraction" came out. I like a few things Stephen O'Malley's done, but beyond that I really don't know much of it. The S.A. Emmons stuff is created in a state of "AAHHH FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK OH GOD I HATE THIS WHY ME I SUCK" etc. A very low black hole emotionally. Usually after a woman has denied me (again). It keeps the noose away. I've got a lot of demons and I do a pretty good job keeping them quiet, but sometimes it takes an exorcism.

OK, you've been offered a long-term contract with a major label and a large indie (Epitaph, Sub Pop) simultaneously-- whaddaya do?

Ignore both. I have no interest in that game. You want an S.A. Emmons album? Let me know and I'll record one. Share it with your friends. If I actually get it together and come through your town on tour, come see me and if you're really cool, put me up for the night.

Is there any hope for R&R, or has it become a moribund art-form like jazz?

To look around at the musical landscape today, the cynic in me says no. But that's what people have been saying since the first generation of rockers went gray. Is there hope for R&R as far as an adult is concerned? No. Modern R&R is not designed to speak to us. It can't. What R&R is is redefined by each succeeding generation and MUST SOUND LIKE SHIT to ears over thirty.

My problem is that nothing is new. Rock music has fallen into a reflective period. That 'Punk Rock' still exists as some kind of youth rebellion movement is just tragic to me. When I see kids in the uniform of 'a punk', I don't see a statement of raw individualism, I see members of the flock. It's been bought in a box. But it don't mean shit if your parents understand it!

Of course, the kind of hideous stuff that led to the shockingly new thing that was Punk- Vietnam, Nixon, Thatcherism, the death of 60's idealism, The Eagles - that shit was unavoidable. There were only a few television stations, burned out hippies and their golden god coke rock strangled radio, an evil half-dictator in power...

In today's cultural climate, if you don't like something, it's very easy to pretend it's not there. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Bush Crime Family, Darfur, Reality Television, American Idol - it's all a click away from being a fuzzy memory. The astute kid can feasibly turn their TV to a news free (not that news is even news anymore) environment and the internet is whatever you want it to be.

There's no need for that new line in the sand when you can comfortably stick your head in it.

What was the question? (Close enough.- JTP)

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Well, I hope some of you made it through the monolithic morass of words above-- you've heard from the man, now check out his music. Sir Anthony has put together a buncha exclusive tracks for y'all to check out. They are:

1. S.A. Emmons: A Desert Of Glass
2. The Technicoloreds: Chambermaid Mary
3. The Technicoloreds: Demon Action
4. SQUIRM: Half Machine Lip Moves (Chrome)
5. SQUIRM: Maggrah Meets The Metal Messiah II
6. SQUIRM: REBUL
7. SQUIRM: Stitch Bitch
8. S.A. Emmons: Surgical Strike On Competence

Get 'em here.

Get Squirm's "Freedom Coven" (16 more tracks) here.

Visit the S.A. Emmons Myspace page here.