First of all, no one can prove that I skipped a day of work just so I could see The Watchmen on opening day. And there’s no concrete evidence that I’ve seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy dozens upon dozens of times and/or can speak entire sentences in Elvish. Or that I know my Elven name is Fëanáro Pallanén.
It’s no secret, however, that I have certain tendencies, tendencies that make me go absolutely bat-poop crazy for things like wizards and spaceships and costumed crimefighters.
All of which explains why my head almost exploded when I heard about Shadow Hare, a real-life Watchman who made national news on CNN and TMZ in April after he broke up an attempted assault in Cincinnati. Dressed head-to-toe in a black and gray spandex suit, the 21-year-old Shadow Hare, with one brazen hop, put the word “superhero” right back into our daily lexicon.
I had no choice but to investigate. I started with what might be my new favorite website in the world, the World Superhero Registry (www.worldsuperheroregistry.com), which is run by a part-time hero from Phoenix named Kevlex. As its name suggests, the site serves as a catalog of the world’s active crimefighters, or at least those who satisfy the three superhero prerequisites: 1) they’ve got a costume, 2) they’ve performed documented heroic deeds and 3) they’re motivated by something other than money or fame.
“Partly due to the efforts of the World Superhero Registry,” Kevlex tells me, “the Real-Life Superhero community has grown from a few isolated idealists scattered across the globe in 2005 to today’s diverse and rapidly growing international community with hundreds of members.”
Hundreds of people running around in spandex suits and thwarting evildoers? I’d trade all of the mithril in the Mines of Moria to see that!
With Kevlex’s help, I was able to contact the two most visible Real-Life Superheroes – Master Legend (a 42-year-old crimefighter from Winter Park, Florida, who was featured in Rolling Stone last year) and Shadow Hare himself – to learn what makes a caped crusader tick.
Team Last Call: How did you start your crimefighting career?
Master Legend: I got tired of being a victim and fought back.
Shadow Hare: I started in a small town going against a small gang who called themselves the Warriors. I just got sick of knowing that rapists and drug dealers were running the streets. People shouldn’t be scared to walk past other people on the sidewalks.
TLC: Why wear a mask?
ML: I like to give fair warning of what I am.
SH: I don’t want credit as an individual for these actions. I don’t do what I do for publicity. I see myself more as an idea than a person.
TLC: It’s got to be a relatively thankless job. What’s your motivation?
ML: My brotherhood with all my superhero friends is the best reward I can ask for.
SH: My motivation is that in time I may be an example that we can all make a difference. To some, what I appear to do may be stupid. But if we all did our part, things would be so much better in this world.
TLC: Don’t you worry about getting hurt?
ML: My dad used to play Russian Roulette with my head. I have no fear, as I wanted that bullet to finally end my hell.
SH: If me getting hurt means that I take the pain from another, then I am not scared to face anything. I consider the pain I go through an occupational hazard. I have lost a job due to physical injury. It actually made me homeless for a while, but I persevered.
TLC: What’s been your worst injury?
ML: It’s a tossup between fractured skull or the internal bleeding.
SH: When I was attacked with a pipe. I had bruised ribs. Dislocated shoulder.
TLC: What do you feel has been your biggest accomplishment?
ML: Saving lives and helping the homeless. Also, putting away a few murderers and a child molester in prison. And yes, I kicked their rotten asses.
SH: That I have inspired hope.
TLC: How do you respond to criticism that you’re some sort of vigilante, or that this is a joke?
ML: I feel sorry for those who have inferiority complexes. Plus, I am not a vigilante with a targeted person in mind. I am ready to jump into action when needed with my ever-vigilant eyes.
SH: I don’t do this for publicity and can care less about personal criticism. I do this for the people as a whole.
TLC: Ultimately, what do you hope to accomplish?
ML: I already have accomplished it. That’s the forming of a worldwide team known as the Real-Life Superheroes. I cannot say I did it all. It was immense teamwork. It has been my vision since I can remember deciding to be a superhero.
SH: To show the world that no matter who you are, or what people see you as, we can change the world so much if we do our part.
Whether you’re sitting there snickering or sketching out the design for a costume of your own, you have to feel at least a twinge of appreciation for what these guys are doing. I mean, wearing spandex is an act of bravery in and of itself. Wearing it while engaging in hand-to-hand combat with criminals is nothing short of heroic. The fact is, these crimefighters serve an important function in society. Namely, they catch the bad guys so that the cops have more time to run around and not find out who hit my car. Who knows? Maybe someday a Real-Life Superhero will save your life. And maybe he’ll be dressed like an elf. And maybe his name will be Fëanáro Pallanén. We’ll see who’s snickering then.
For some bands, the worst thing that could happen is for things to go right.
Richmond, VA melodic hardcore band Strike Anywhere experienced that first-hand after November’s presidential election. After a decade spent railing against the administration as one of America’s most outspoken political punk bands, singer Thomas Barnett and company were left standing with a funny little feeling burning in their tummies: satisfaction.
It didn’t last long. Less than six months into post-George Bush America, Strike Anywhere is returning to the studio to record its next set of booksmart bombast, tackling everything from child soldiering in Africa to, as Barnett puts it, “the cost of the colonial legacy all over the world.” Fun! We talked to the dreadlocked vegan and activist in anticipation of the band’s June 13 set at the Champion Ship.
Team Last Call: When we talked last time, we had all kinds of juicy stuff to discuss in the middle of the Bush administration. Now in this different climate, with a bit of hope circulating, what subjects are in your crosshairs?
Thomas Barnett: There’s, of course, songs about the current economic meltdown and the bank bailout and all of that stuff. There’s even a song about the role of punk even when the environment changes into something less negative. I wouldn’t say positive.
We were in our town on election night in the heart of black Richmond, and it was the most stunning, breathtaking, wonderful thing. Spontaneous marches and people hugging each other in the streets by the hundreds – some crazy shit. It’s only going to happen once in our lives, and it happened when we were home at the capitol of the confederacy.
TLC: You almost sound optimistic about where society’s headed.
TB: I think there are slight windows opening up in the consciousness of everyday folks, people that don’t have a bunch of anarchist textbooks laying next to their bed, people who haven’t been 20 years deep in a punk scene or a radical scene or having had the privilege or luck to be in a university progressive community of ideas and debate. Those other millions of Americans who haven’t had any of those opportunities, there is a sense of, “Wow, we are supposed to be the government. We’re supposed to be helping ourselves and defending each other. There are things at stake beyond our particular survival.”
I think even the little bit of deliveries that have happened – Guantanamo being closed, discussions of torture – it’s going to be neat. I think it’s going to start something rising that no one’s going to be able to control, and that’s a very good thing.
TLC: When you’re up on the stage watching kids pummel each other in the pit, do you worry about the message getting across?
TB: Me and my bandmates are punk and hardcore kids, so we know that feeling. We can read people’s faces and understand that people are having their own moment. They’ve taken our songs and they’ve applied it to their lives in a way that surpasses anything that we were ambitiously or not writing about. The show is a fulfillment of that promise that starts with listening to the record in your car or at home or riding your bike somewhere when you really feel comfortable and open to the ideas. You figure out what you need from the song and then you bring that to the show.
TLC: On the other hand, since you guys are so message-oriented, do you think it’s possible for the music to get lost in the shuffle?
TB: It is so idea-based. We’re part of a counterculture that’s about ideas that are not your regular rock and roll song topics. But I think what my bandmates write is visionary and I’m honored to be with them. The whole thing is for us to keep growing and keep pushing it and staying true to what we love – not just playing music that is esoterically, artistically experimental that we’re not even sure we like, but to do things that move us. There’s a thing where hardcore is a dance form of music,too. There’s got to be something that’s not just cerebral and built on a self-reflection of a political righteousness. It’s got to be more about the humility of being a part of that moment. It’s definitely important for it not to become some weird academic, theoretical thing.
TLC: It can be a little intimidating.
TB: That’s the problem with a lot of super-political punk bands. There’s just that sense that they get kind of lost in a very exclusive world. Punk was also invented to stand against typical rock star bullshit and to be very critical and to look at the spectacular nature of commercial entertainment, and to make sure that it wasn’t just fooling us. This is about friendship and an extended global family of artists, radicals, dreamers, maniacs, teachers. There’s a dentist in Edmonton who works on our teeth and then gets in the mosh pit afterwards. It’s like that.
TLC: If you found another way of establishing that connectivity, another platform that lets you communicate better to the people you want to communicate with the most, would you quit the music?
TB: I can’t imagine that. I’m a real shy person. Having the music in this band is the reason why this whole part of my personality exists, I think. I think that it would be difficult for me to just speak like Henry Rollins or something. It’s also just wanting to be a part of something that everyone shares in.
It’s the collective catharsis about this that is bigger than just the ideas, and the song is the platform for debate and opinions and building a world within a world and giving people hope. All of that is intensely important to us. But I think it’s also just the emotional clarity, the communication, the dropping of pretense, the sense of intelligence and ferocity and the optimism that’s a part of a punk show – even with all of the contradictions in punk, all of the stupid violence and sociopathic personalities that are also drawn to it. That’s a huge part of why I’ve ever had the courage to write about the things that the songs are about and to express the ideas.
For me, it’s all about the music. It’s all one experience, and the effects it has on personality and on mentality are fairly transcendent. There’s no way to get to that state just planting a garden in your backyard. That’s not to say that we don’t carry the revolution with us in every mundane moment of our lives, waiting in line at the bank, all that shit. There’s a certain amount of fearlessness and hope that has to do with it being beyond the individual. The annihilation of the ego is what happens. That allows you to get past your fears or insecurities or arrogance. All of that stuff falls away, and that’s why the songs feel the way they do.
*Reprinted from Fly Magazine
This month, Helsingborg, Sweden’s The Sounds return with Crossing the Rubicon, their third album of synth-accented glam-pop.
Awash in piss and vinegar, the record picks up right where 2006’s Dying To Say This To You left off, with the band plowing its way through athletic, menacing rock anthems with sweaty dexterity under the guidance of sassy siren Maja Ivarsson’s raspy yelps.
Team Last Call chatted up drummer Fredrik Nilsson about the new album and the Swedish cockiness curve.
Team Last Call: What were your goals musically with this album?
Fredrik Nilsson: We just wanted to make an album that was totally the band’s [idea] of what our music is, and not someone else’s. We did all the demos ourselves in our own studio in Sweden, and then we decided to not have any labels whatsoever involved in the process of making the album. The five members of the band, we financed everything, all the album costs. We got rid of pretty much all of our old labels in various territories. Right now we’re licensing the album here in the States to a record label, but The Sounds own the album.
TLC: Going into your third album, do you feel satisfied with where you are as a band?
FN: The only thing I really want now is for the album to be out. It’s much more fun to play the new songs when people actually know them. I’m sure by the end of the tour cycle I’ll be really sick of the songs and just want to write a new album, but that’s the way it goes.
TLC: You’ve always been plagued with comparisons to Blondie. I always thought it was unfair, until I heard “Beatbox” from the new album, which sounds exactly like “Rapture” …
FN: Blondie is a great band, but I don’t think any of us is a Blondie fan or has any Blondie records or anything like that. To me, that’s just a lazy thing that journalists do, is to compare a band to something else that already exists. I think that’s a really easy and cheap way. To me, that’s really boring. It has more to do with the look of the band than the sound of our band.
TLC: You also get grouped in with the whole ’80s revival scene.
FN: We all grew up in the ’80s, so it factors in somewhere, but we never set out to have an ’80s sound. It surprises me sometimes. As soon as there are keyboards on the tracks, they all refer to the ’80s, like that was the only decade that had keyboards.
TLC: You’ve got a reputation for being a really cocky band.
FN: I don’t think we ever considered ourselves to be a cocky band. We’re a self-confident band.
TLC: I meant cocky for Swedish people.
FN: They don’t like it in Sweden when you’re too self-confident. They have this saying – Jantelagen, it’s called in Swedish – that basically says you’re not better than anyone else. Everybody’s the same. Don’t think you’re better than anyone else, because you’re not. We don’t think we’re better than anyone else. We just think we’re really good.
TLC: People have accused you of not being Swedish enough. Is there such a thing as being too Swedish?
FN: Yeah, there is. I think you can only explain it to other Swedish people. But yeah, you can definitely be too Swedish. There’s a lot of people like that in Sweden. They’re very, I don’t want to say self-centered, but everything that happens in Sweden is really important and everything that happens outside of Sweden is not so important.
TLC: A lot of Americans know your music best from the GEICO caveman commercial. Is that good or bad?
FN: All ways of coming across our band to us is a good way. But if you see one song in a TV commercial and then you go and see the band, you might be in for a real surprise.
TLC: Maja is always making the Hottest Women in Rock lists. What’s it like for the rest of you to see stuff like that?
FN: All publicity like that is going to rub off on the band. It kind of makes me wonder where all the Hottest Drummers lists are, and why I’m not on them.
*Reprinted from Fly Magazine
IKEA. ABBA. Fish. Meatballs. Sweden, you just give and give.
From The Cardigans to The Sounds to Refused to Peter Bjorn And John, Swedish musical exports have almost always been worth taking a chk-a-chance on (Ace of Base notwithstanding). That list expands in 2009 with the release of the self-titled EP from Love In October, a Chicago band led by brothers and Swedish expatriates Erik and Kent Widman.
Stuck somewhere in the quirk-rock spectrum between Dinosaur Jr. and Modest Mouse, the band flip-flops between blissfully fuzzed-out rockers and mellow dance tunes, anxious yelps and hushed croons, biting off Built to Spill’s manic guitar heroics one minute and the Get-Up Kids’ keys-accented power pop the next. (GUK drummer Rob Pope co-produced the band’s 2008 full-length.) Depending on the song, Love In October’s music comes across as either playfully dramatic or dramatically playful; either way, it’s Swedish through and through.
“I would say 75 percent of our sound comes from Swedish influences,” says Erik, the band’s singer, guitarist and pianist, who emigrated from Sweden to Michigan in 2000 for college. “I also had the privilege to have a really good music teacher who taught me a lot of Swedish folk music theory. Now I’m trying to take what I learned a long time ago and recall that, but then put it into a rock and roll context.”
The Love In October EP (released May 26) is the band’s third release since the brothers Widman reunited in Minneapolis in 2006. It’s the first, however, since the band stumbled upon its current sound. Previous records were more pedestrian in their approach, with a more obvious, swing-for-the-fences appeal that earned LiO dubious comparisons to Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance and bands of that ilk.
“I don’t even know why we were doing it,” Erik shrugs. “We didn’t enjoy listening to our own music, so it was kind of like, ‘What the fuck are we doing? Let’s actually write something that A) we want to play, and B) we want to listen to.’ I think we kind of found our own path to go down.”
The move towards a more natural and raw sound has benefited Love In October in more ways than one. Aside from churning out a praiseworthy EP that nestles nicely on your iPod between Lou Reed and Lovedrug, the band has made major strides into the mainstream market with the placement of its song “Like Nothing Ever Happened” in national TV and radio advertisements for Shoe Carnival. With one catchy, quirky pop song, Love In October has more or less eliminated the necessity for the record deal it was chasing so earnestly in its first few years. The irony is almost too big to swallow.
“Now we write music to please ourselves,” Erik says, “and if anybody likes it, that’s good.”
Try less, get more. Sweden, I don’t know how you do it.
*Reprinted from Fly Magazine
Morrissey was once quoted as saying – presumably in between sobbing fits – that “we all need rain and good old depression.”
If that’s the case, then bring on the Cowboy Junkies, whose “gothic Americana” hymns have been ushering college students through breakups and breakdowns for over two decades.
Not that the Junkies are all doom and gloom. Oftentimes, what is mistaken for darkness is just the music’s sloth-like pacing; on their breakthrough album, 1988’s The Trinity Session, the Junkies managed to take both “Blue Moon” and the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane” and turn them into drowsy, gorgeous mopers that creep along with all the ferocity of a sedated snail. It can come across as a real rainy-day downer; but, like Schindler’s List, it can also be edifying and ultimately just the slightest bit uplifting.
“It’s certainly dark, what we write about, but I think there are also glimmers of hope in all our stuff,” says chief songwriter Michael Timmins. “When people say that music’s depressing, I find that very inaccurate. I think that’s a misuse of the term ‘depressed.’ ‘Depressed’ to me is something that’s lacking any emotion at all. To me, a mindless pop song is more depressing than anything we ever did.”
For the band’s newest album, At The End of Paths Taken, Timmins spent some time pondering family life and the inevitable changeover that takes place as children are born and grandparents pass away. Family is a natural subject for Timmins, considering that two of his three bandmates – Margo and Peter – are his siblings.
“Everybody in this band’s got young kids and aging parents,” Michael says. “I just wanted to write about those relationships – up to your father and down to your kids – and how those affect one another.”
The album – the 11th in the band’s 20-plus-year history – has enough molasses-y ballads and folky meanderings to satisfy longtime fans, but is also characterized by some newfound tension. Songs like the swinging “Cutting Board Blues” represent the Junkies at their most rocking, while the spooky “Mountain” features the unsettling juxtaposition of Margo’s soft vocals and the spoken-word droning of the Timmins’ father reading an excerpt from his autobiography. “My Little Basquiat” seems to be the album’s centerpiece; the song creeps ominously along, with Margo singing achingly about her children, until Michael breaks down the door with bursts of buzzsaw guitar that voice the morbid fear that comes with loving someone that deeply.
As bands like Oasis so ably demonstrate, siblings don’t always make for the best work partners. But Michael maintains that the Timmins’ relationship is not only workable, but might be the very reason why the Junkies have persevered for so long.
“I think it’s helped us,” he says matter-of-factly. “A lot of brothers and sisters don’t, but we know how to communicate. We know each other’s personalities and we know each other’s moods, and we know generally when to back off.
“There are very few bands who last this long, especially with the original lineup. You can probably count five. There’s U2 and there’s … mmm …,” Timmins laughs. “But we still enjoy working with each other and performing and recording. As long as it’s fun, we’ll continue to do it.”
*Reprinted from Fly Magazine
