Interview with Joey "SHITHEAD" Keithley
By Bob Cooper
IHidden away in Vancouver, BC is one of the forefathers of the punk movement that began in the seventies. Joey “Shithead” Keithley headed the band DOA, who wreaked havoc around the globe along with the likes of The Clash and The Sex Pistols, making punk an institute of it’s own in the midst of an otherwise rock-controlled era. Keithley spent much time as an activist to certain causes that he felt strongly about and did many benefit records to help these causes, both within the DOA band and on his own. He began Sudden Death Records as an outlet for his music, which still continues to this day, where he has appeared in Portland on two counts: To play another DOA show, and to promote his new book, I, SHITHEAD, at a local bookstore.
This book is a collection of stories he has lived throughout his colorful life, from his experiences on the road with DOA to his friendship with Ronald Reagan's family, and beyond. When offered the chance to talk with this icon of punk, I was, of course, quite happy to do it, so his people worked things out with my people, and I found myself sitting with the band just as they were about to play their show.
As we retire to the warm confines of the bread truck that is the DOA tour bus...
BOB: Well it is good to see you guys back here in Portland once again for the umpteenth time. This is just a small tour if I am not mistaken. How is it going out there?
JOEY: Yes, it's about twelve days down the coast. We have one show here and about nine down in California. Then we have two more shows in the northwest in April. The 23rd we are in Eugene at the WOW Hall and April 24th we are at Hells Kitchen in Tacoma. Then May 12 to 23 we are on the East coast of the United States like New York and Philadelphia and Boston and that kind of thing. And that is about the extent of our touring this time around until the fall. We haven't really made any plans beyond that.
BOB: Well I see that a bit of genius is involved, as you are doing this tour in conjunction with your book tour.
JOEY: Yeah, it made sense. We had ten DOA shows and six speaking things with the book. It made sense when we put out the cd- the War and Peace thing which I sort of planned to coincide with the book. So that's there and the book is there and hence the tour. You know it's always fun traveling around together with my friends here, right. And the drummer and bass player too as well. (laughs) So it makes it a lot easier too. I have done a few little short tours where I just play by myself along with the speaking things, and it is just horribly boring hanging out by yourself driving around in a rental car and stuff like out in Ontario, and I didn't like it at all. Well, when you are used to being with a gang of guys and going out and causing trouble so I guess I am just a one-man gang, and it just isn't as fun, right.
CHUCK: Yeah, you are a crowd of one.
JOEY: Yes, a crowd of one.
BOB: Referring back to the CD, WAR AND PEACE, you have gathered up some rare gems from way back, like some EP material and stuff through the ages that, if purchased separately, would cost a fortune. These are mostly one-offs and special releases, but do you still have an archive of unreleased material that you will someday release?
JOEY: Well, we kind of did that a couple of years ago with the stuff that is really hard to find and some weird off-beat tapes that we called The Lost Tapes, and that came in 1998. I wouldn't say that there is a lot of stuff left still kicking around- skeletons in the closet, song- wise anyway that we have not put out. The only thing I have got aside from the old stuff that I do think would be interesting to people is what I actually was just talking about at the book thing is a DOA live show when we opened for The Clash, and there is another one from about a year later and hopefully I can put those two together as a sort of old- time live album. There are some songs that we never recorded or never play live, so it would be interesting.
BOB: Are you pretty frugal with your ideas generally, whereas you use pretty much everything unless you are at a standstill with it?
JOEY: Yes, sometimes I will start on something and it changes on me to the point that it is no longer relative to the original thought, or that thought had waned. Our ideas sometimes don't last for a while, and some just disappear. The sixties were evidence of lyrics like that, where some of the lyrics just fell to the ground, and others were just so completely dated, right? Punk rock too has got that aspect. Musically I think every musician does that, where they save lyrics or ideas for later and then they regurgitate them later. I think it was…fuck…George Thorogood that said that all of the good songs have already been written by Chuck Berry, and the only thing left to do is re-write them. And in a sense you do go around and copy what you did before that worked for you, but in a different form because that is what you do and that is your style.
BOB: Oh, most definitely. A good example of that is when you listen to John Lennon’s work tapes and hear these songs he was dinking around with that eventually became several different Beatle songs later. He would have these songs down on tape, halfway done, and years later he would meld parts of them together to create a completely new song.
JOEY: Yeah, I think that was because of the way him and McCartney worked on the songs together, and when they got together they had to agree which parts of each of their songs would be used when writing all of these songs together.
CHUCK: Yeah, one is pitching and one is catching.
JOEY: Yeah, but it is weird that you can always tell which were Lennon’s parts and which were McCartney’s parts, okay, because McCartney is singing lead on it and you can tell that the bridge is obviously Lennon’s, and vice versa or whatever, like one little part of the chorus. That is a different way of doing that, but you are talking about the most serious and most fruitful songwriting partnerships of all time obviously. It was pretty interesting stuff they were doing there.
Yeah, you come back to riffs. I saved all I have done over the years…
(drummer dude): Yeah- Lennon-McCartney-Shithead biscuits.
JOEY: (laughs) Yeah, Chuck was a good writer. Drummers can be good writers, but they kind of have a different way of approaching it with their sense of rhythm and all that.
BOB: Yeah, I find that to be true.
JOEY: Yeah, they can be pretty rockin', right. You know what Chuck did? It was one of the best things he did as far as that thing goes, is that he learned how to play drums, and then soon after he asked me, like, how do you play the guitar. So then I showed him a few barre chords, and he has a very creative mind so he went from there and learned, "hey, I can do this too", and started to put together songs.
BOB: And I suppose he delighted to the fact that those three barre chords comprise about 90% of the blues and rock songs out there.
JOEY: That is how it began in the 40’s and 50’s, but now there are not many true three chord songs, because they usually sneak in a fourth, fifth, and sixth chord somewhere, right.
BOB: Yep, in the bridge it can be found. So about twenty years ago you decided to start your own record company, and one would imagine that it was born from you being fed up with the ones that existed at the time. Is there a story there?
JOEY: Well, there was not really anything I hated about them. Like I was saying back at the book store, it was more that everyone hated us, and we hated them so we thought there was no way in hell that any label would sign us. So actually Sudden Death got going about 26 or 27 years ago, and we only really did singles on it and got them signed to a couple labels. Not really signed in the “big record deal” sense, but that made the label sort of go by the wayside, right? So then we only used the label for, like, benefit singles in the late seventies and eighties, and then seriously got going again as a serious label in about 1998. I even took on some other artists for a while, but that hasn’t been happening too much lately. The main reason I got started up again is because I wanted to be able to put out what I was doing and what DOA was doing. I did get sidetracked with some other bands, and some of them were…well, almost all of them were pretty good records, but not all of them should have been put out as records because, well, it is tough getting them out there. And encouraging people to get out there and buy the CD’s these days is not an easy feat.
BOB: Yeah, there are a lot of elements at play in that area. The internet now allows people to download and burn off almost anything that exists, and that can take a gouge out of sales.
JOEY: Not so much for the smaller bands, because face it- any way that they can get there music out there and get listened to is in their favor. But for the larger bands that makes a big dent in sales for sure. But in a sense for the smaller up and coming bands it really helps. It’s like a library, really, and if you find something there you like, you will likely go find out where you can buy more. For example, one of the guys in the band found Short Stories by Hemmingway, and I haven’t read a Hemmingway book since I was in University. I found this book in the van and since it is like a library I borrowed it, and I liked it so much I went out and bought some Hemmingway books. I was in a TV show with Billy Bragg, and he was debating with this guy who was the head of the Canadian Record Association who is vehemently against downloading stuff like that. He is saying “look, there is this one collection of Motown songs that I have loved since I was a youth, and I have bought them again about five times because I keep wearing the fucking thing out, right”. So yeah, some people will never go out and buy a new record, and it sucks for the bands and it sucks for the labels because they put their time and efforts into developing it. What’s interesting here in Canada as an example, and even here in the states in different forms, is that there is a show called Brigney Wiggs on CBC which is a national thing, that in the small towns you go to a record store and you will only find the most mainstream stuff, and these days that might mean the most mainstream of punk rock bands or rock bands, which is what MTV might be playing. But these late night radio shows in Canada used to be a source for people in these small towns that only had one small record store, could find this great music that they might never have heard if they had depended on the local record store or local radio station. So with that angle in mind I am all for getting on the internet and searching out new music.
BOB: Oh yeah, I did the same thing one night by punching up “melodic metal” on MP3.com, and lo and behold what appeared before me was a treasure trove of new bitchin’ music, and I have since sought out and purchased much of it.
JOEY: Right, because you never would have had the time to go to every record store or every show, or money to go out and blindly purchase these things. Metallica complained about it, and who gives a fuck. I mean those guys have more money than they could ever spend in their lifetime, and they wipe their asses with fifty dollar bills, but their record company put them up to it I think.
BOB: I think so too. I want to blame the band for being so horrifically greedy, but I think the fault lies in the management.
JOEY: Yeah, because I did like the band and they have done some monumental music. They have been a good band and continue to do so somewhat, but there is definitely an attitude about them that sort of takes all of the fun out of the whole thing.
BOB: There is a snottiness throughout the whole beast, especially within their publicity department. As a journalist and photographer I have contacted their people on several occasions to request photopasses and interviews and the like, and while a publicists job is to maintain that the artist gets written about and the image does not fade away, they are not very accommodating in that area. In fact when they play with other acts they control the other acts in terms of allowing photographers and press to review their shows. That is ridiculous if they think that Metallica can rest or their laurels or that they do not need publicity because they are already Metallica. What are they hiding? Do they think we are there to expose that they are rapidly slipping or that we will turn their words against them? Who knows. I try to put myself in their shoes, and with their schedule I can see them not being anxious to do interviews, but what harm is it for reviewers and photographers to document this stuff? Unless they have gotten really ugly…
Anyway, you told us about your book, I, Shithead, back at the bookstore, but when did the idea first come to you to do this great task?
JOEY: Probably about five years ago. It came from riding around in this van and telling all of those stories, and my sound man came to me and said “hey, you should go out and do a spoken word thing’’. So I started doing that, then I realized that I could put the stories into a book. Like I said, I think the last rock and roll stories book that I have read before Henry Rollins book was the Jimi Hendrix book about 20 years ago. I don’t read rock and roll books because I am too busy living it and too involved in it. Sometimes they are great, but usually I don’t bother with it. But anyway, there are always these old stories within the band, and Jan says give Randy (our old bass player who was back in the band for a while) or Joe one beer and it’s like hanging out with the Punk Rock Legion. Like the old war veterans who nurse their beer all night long and if there is someone there to listen, they will go on with this “We were back there, and we were at the big one. We were at Anza, right, and the Germans were all around us. It seemed like there was no way out” kind of thing, and then this “but you know what? I’m here today, punk”. So there you are telling those stories. You aren’t really embellishing the facts, but you remember the funny parts about it. What I was trying to do with the book is to give the positive aspects of it, even though everything was really fucked up. We were getting stiffed by labels, and getting ripped off, and getting in riots and getting hassled by the cops and we were getting arrested. I wanted to show that with perseverance you can overcome all of that shit in life and that is a very important thing. You have got to believe in yourself, and you have got to have a philosophy. If you don’t you will become lost as a person or you will find some sort of crutch like religion or something. I don’t blame people for getting into religion. I don’t do it myself, but whatever gets you through, fine as long as you don’t push it on others. But you do have to believe you are a good person to start with…..Oh, there is Christeen!
(Christeen is an old friend of Joeys and a whole exuberant personality in herself, and at this point old war stories begin to fly, so we close this interview with the agreement to continue at a later date. I found this new visitor to be quite an interesting person, and stayed for about an hour while she and Joey exchanged old yarns, I am not at liberty to share those with my audience. So stay tuned for Part 2 of my interview with Joey Shithead in a future installment)
