SUICIDAL - NO MERCY FOOL!

SUICIDAL TENDENCIES
Interview with Mike Muir
by Jason Walsh

They’re back! The Suicidal Maniacs! Venice’s ST crew have revisited some old classics from their early, formative years with new style and flavor, sure to be appreciated by not only diehard fans but the next generation of Cycos as well. SUICIDAL TENDENCIES founding father Mike Muir along with partner-in-crime, guitarist Mike Clark, took some time in the studio to re-record songs from Suicidal’s second LP, “Join the Army,” as well as tracks from their 80’s Venice side project, NO MERCY. According to Muir, this was a chance for them to get the songs down tighter and cleaner than the classic releases from the old days. “No Mercy Fool!/The Suicidal Family” is not a nostalgic walk to the past, but moreover an upgrade of the original material.

Muir, like on stage, is constantly in motion. Aside from his duties with SUICIDAL TENDENCIES, he runs his own label, SUICIDAL RECORDS, which started in 1996, as well as his side projects, INFECTIOUS GROOVES and CYCO MIKO. Muir is also a father, with one on the way in the new year, and somehow finds time to balance all of these things.

I had a chance to talk with Muir before the band hit the road on the “JOIN THE ARMY / DÉJÀ VU 2010 US TOUR” about coming back to these classic hardcore anthems as well as the future for hardcore’s most insane ambassador.

JW: Hey Mike. How things going for you right now?

MIKE MUIR: Good, good. A little hectic. A little more hectic than usual but that’s life sometimes.

JW: You got this new record coming out and you’re getting ready to hit the road for a couple months. Tell me about that.

MIKE MUIR: First, there’s a festival in L.A. that we’re doing. It’s called EPICENTER, two days, bunch of bands, and just a really, really efficient machine, that you get twenty emails a day just requesting all kinds of stuff. It’s crazy. So, we’re getting all that sorted out and then we do the show. Then, we’re sorting out our visas for Brazil. INFECTIOUS GROOVES is going to South America for the first time and then S.T. is playing two days later at a festival in Chile, so we do that, fly that, get picked up at the airport, head on tour with Suicidal in the States. Got a lot of stuff we’re trying to take care of before we leave.

JW: That’s cool though. I just saw you announced that you had those two festivals down there in South America. Are those good times for you guys down there because I mean they get some big crowds down there?

MIKE MUIR: Yeah, they’re real big festivals…I think they’re both three days and all the press we’re doing down there, it’s like a lot of really big TV shows, things like that, that normally we wouldn’t do and like I said, Infectious has never been down there. People are real excited about that. Suicidal has been down there a couple times recently, so I think people are excited about Infectious. Then, going to Chile and doing the Suicidal festival is good and I know a lot of people from South America are going to both of those or traveling to see it. You know you get the emails, “before I buy my tickets are you going? Are you sure?” Yeah, we’re excited about that.

JW: Very cool. So tell me about this new record. You took some songs from “Join the Army” and some of the NO MERCY songs and re-recorded them. What made you decide that’s what you guys wanted to do?

MIKE MUIR: Well. You got to go back I guess to ‘87 and in early ‘87 that’s when the NO MERCY album came out and that was Mike Clark, who’s in Suicidal now, before he was in Suicidal on guitar and I sing on it. Later on the “Join the Army” record came out and, jumping ahead real quick, a lot of the songs that are on “How Will I Laugh…” were songs that me and Mike were writing for the second NO MERCY record. I think what happened is when the NO MERCY came out, I realized that there’s a lot of things with the Suicidal record that was missing, as far as playing, and that was Mike Clark and stuff, and didn’t want NO MERCY to become competition with Suicidal. You know originally, “How Will I Laugh..” and “Trip at the Brain” and some of these songs, should be Suicidal. So, I talked to the guys, you know, and was like, “hey, we should really get Mike Clark in Suicidal,” you know, add that element and make the band, I think, a lot better and there was some resistance, there was some persistence on my part, and so then Mike got into Suicidal, and the “How Will I Laugh…” record came out and all that, so the NO MERCY kind of disbanded. And then ‘89, we got offered an ANTHRAX tour in Europe, a lot of big places, and “Lights, Camera, Revolution” wasn’t ready yet, so we went in and did an E.P. for Europe, “Feel Like Shit…Déjà Vu ,” and we recorded a bunch of the old NO MERCY songs. We recorded them and played them, and that was when Robert (Trujillio, now in METALLICA) first got in the band in ‘89. So, we went there and got a lot excitement because of having Robert in the band, having Mike. Mike was excited playing the NO MERCY, and you know, it’s one of those ones, you always go back and I always listen to “Join the Army” and go it would have been way better if Mike was on it, and when Robert was in, would have been way better if Robert was on it and stuff. Then when “Lights, Camera, Revolution” came out, that cut that tour short. Going back now to where it was, we kind of basically going back, we re-recorded some of the NO MERCY songs because we always told Mike, “hey, we’ll do another tour one day playing the NO MERCY songs” and that’s when we kind of put it all together. We did some of the “Join the Army” songs and called it the “Feel Like Shit…Déjà Vu ” E.P. It kind of goes back, but without being kind of sounding dated or something like that, so for the recording with this, what we wanted to do was basically not try to just go massive distortion or something like that. We wanted to really make sure that it was played, it was played tight, and really heavy, and without having the distortion being played and you know, we think it sounds killer.

JW: And that’s the thing I was going to say is it sounds definitely a lot cleaner, a lot tighter, and I mean, like the bass and the guitar stand out in all the mixes that I heard.

MIKE MUIR: Well I think what we wanted to do is, previously a lot of quote-unquote metal is just guitars straight ahead, drums straight ahead, bass straight ahead, and when we got Robert in the band, that kind of changed things and tripped people out a bit. I thought it was great. For us, what we did was we got Clark sitting there going, “You know, we’re not going to have it distorted so you can cheat. You can get a little kid and put the amp on and massively distort it and have him hit a power chord and goes “WHOOAAA,” you know…didn’t want to do that…“You know what, maybe I have to play it. Not do the little cheating thing. Not a pedal. This and that. Go in there and make your arm sore and actually play it, so there’s no shortcuts and then keep that real tight so that it made room that the drums don’t have to be straight ahead, the bass doesn’t have to be straight ahead.” So it’s more of a musical and a powerful thing, and that’s where we can even play it faster and I think more aggressively.

JW: It sounded great. The speed on the guitars, from beginning to end, it’s a really great record. What was it like for you and Mike going back and revisiting these songs in the studio. Was it kind of nostalgic or what?

MIKE MUIR: Well, we have our own studio so we’ve recorded a lot of stuff over the years and originally we didn’t know we’d be putting the two together. What we did, the “Join the Army” stuff, first time Mike started playing it, I was like, “Dude, it’s not good enough.” And I think that he went…and when you do something for a long time, you go in and you just do what you do. Doing what you do is not what it should be. You got to go in there and really, really work. So that’s what I was saying, we take the distortion off, none of those things. I know a lot of times, people like to have the screaming and the distortion and have everything mastered real loud and all that. It’s like I go, “you know what, I want this to be for someone that is young and wants to play an instrument to listen to this and go ‘oh wow, I got to sit down and do my homework,’” rather than, you know, those ones that you can just get out there and start playing around because it’s real simple. I think on “Join the Army” original, someone that was young back then, they could get there and play it and go ahead and play it right away and stuff. So, we wanted to make it, like you know what, if it inspires someone to do music, they’re going to sit there and try not to be the total generic. And I think also when you re-record things, you realize there’s going to be x-amount of people that don’t like you, that are going to say they hate it, before they even hear it, you know, to begin with and that’s good, you know what I mean, because it just eliminates people that you don’t want anyhow and stuff. But when you go in there, you realize it can’t be five times better, it’s got to be ten times better and stuff. So for us, that’s what it is, it’s ten times better, and it gives us a chance to play a lot of songs that we haven’t played in a long time, that we wouldn’t play in a long time, and we definitely probably won’t be playing when we get our new record out, because then we’ll be playing a lot of that stuff, so it’s even harder to fit in any of the old songs.

JW: When you heard it finished, all put together and done, and you listened to it back, were you pretty happy with the results?

MIKE MUIR: Yeah, like I said because they recorded it two different times and when you put it together, I think it’s a great record, and like I said, the common denominator is, you know, the 1987 NO MERCY and “Join the Army,” and you know like I said, we try not to be the nostalgic thing but, as we’ve toured recently, the last couple years, you get a lot of people that happens with the little kid that you know, you see the parent push their kid up and they go, “thank you” (laughs) and you’re like, “for what?” and he goes, “cuz I wouldn’t be born if it wasn’t for you” and then you got the parents there and they said, “ahhh, we met at a Suicidal show 12 years ago.” But, I think that when you go backwards, you worry about the nostalgia stuff, but I think what it is is a chance for a lot of people that maybe mention the tour, have kids now, they can bring their kids, you know, check it out. Show them what’s up and stuff and also to rediscover music and be able to hear it for probably one last time.

JW: On this tour, are you going to play a lot of this stuff that you re-recorded on this album.

MIKE MUIR: Yeah, so it’s basically going to be the stuff on there and the “Feel Like Shit” E.P.. A few other ones.

JW: You were talking about another record. Come into next year, are you working on a new record of new material?

MIKE MUIR: Well, we basically have two other records done, but originally we were going to put that out in Fall, but one of the things that we really wanted to do before we put out a new record was to tour around and we’ve been doing that the last few years. But, I’ve also just had a son that just turned one and I’m having another baby in January, so it’s like, we don’t want to put out a record and not be able to do a full-on tour. Even with this tour, they start booking it and we get requests from all over the world and we’re not a band that wants to go out there and tour ten months out of the year and be away from our families and all that. I think we’ve done that before and then it gets to the point, you’re just trying to survive the tour, You know (laughs) and I think what we try to do now is like, everything that we do, there’s a reason for it and we want to make sure that we’re in a position that we can do every show to the best of our ability and make sure that the people that are there are going to remember it for the rest of their life, like the shows before we were in a band that really made an impression on us and stuff. You know we’ve always said, going back to the first interview, we don’t want it to be a job and that’s what we try to keep it from. On the same side, you know, when you have new stuff that you think it’s like, “wow this is great,” and I think for us because some of the stuff on the new record we did here several years ago and you sit there and you go, “no one’s doing what we did” and it’s going to come out sounding very new, and where I think sometimes if people did a record and held it, some of the songs, for three or five or seven years, it would end up sounding very dated. We’ve never done a record kind of for the time, that’ll fit into the time, and I think that’s what we try to do with a record, that ten years from now, people when they hear it for the first time, that are 5-years old now, when they’re twenty and they hear it or whatever, they’ll go, “wow, that was bad ass.”

“No Mercy Fool!/The Suicidal Family” was released on September 7 on Suicidal Tendencies. Muir has also released a SUICIDAL TENDENCIES “Live at the Olympic Auditorium” DVD as well as a live-split from Cyco Miko/Infectious Grooves dubbed, “Funk It Up & Punk It Up: Live in France ’95.” On top of this, the ST “Possessed to Skate” deck, originally dropped in the 80’s on brother Jim Muir’s skate company, DOGTOWN, will be hitting stores once again.