In an attempt to match the epic scope of Neurosis’ music and cover their 20+ year history, I ended up asking Scott Kelly and Steve Von Till way more questions than I actually needed for the May 2007 cover story. I transcribed all their answers, so here are a few that didn’t make it into the finished article.

What were early Neurosis tours like?

Scott Kelly: When we first started booking the Pain of Mind tour, when it was even suggested that we should tour, it wasn’t even something that we honestly even realized was possible. You have to remember that when we started the band, I was 18, and I was the oldest member. Jason was 15. We were way inside of our own little trip, and we were living in this warehouse environment that was very self-sufficient. We had basically everything we needed there. When it was put to us that we should travel around the country and tour, we were like “Well, OK.” The first two tours that we did for Pain of Mind and The Word as Law, we booked them ourselves. We had a friend at home who sat on the phone and we would call her every few days to make sure all the shows were happening. But we would each take a region and book shows. There was somewhat of a route that had already been scratched out a little bit, but as far as the music we were playing, we played with basically anybody. Largely we’d be playing with whoever the local punk band is, but every once in a while you’d have some local reggae band opening for you or some shit. There were a lot of house parties, a lot of pizza parlors, hotel conference rooms…very few clubs. The first club that I actually remember playing was in Minneapolis, and that was the first gig that I remember when we got to Minneapolis there were 300 people there, they knew the album, and we were kinda blown away by the whole deal.

Neurosis has always been described as tribal, and there’s a side project called Tribes of Neurot. What does a tribe, or tribalism mean to you?

Kelly: It’s just primal. It’s just kind of a label or a catchphrase now. It probably means different things to different people. For us, we’re a tribe, we’re a family, however you want to say it. We take care of each other; we’ve always been there for each other. We have an undying loyalty to each other, to our children and our families. That’s the basis of the whole thing. It was like that at the beginning. We agreed to do this band and never quit, never let it stop, no matter what. That’s what it means to me. I don’t really think about that word so much. Tribes of Neurot, we’ve been doing that for 15 years…at some point, words just don’t have a lot of meaning anymore. It’s basically an identifying mark for something that we do.

Steve Von Till: I get mixed emotions on that, because there’s a part of that word that’s been so tainted by this image bullshit. To me the idea of a tribe is your people. Who are your people? Who are the people who have your back? Who are the people who you would go to the ends of the earth for and who are the people you would do that for? Basically family. Extended family. For us, Neurosis is tribal because we’re brothers, we’re family, and we’ve overcome a lot of adversity together. We’ve come across a very select few but dedicated people all around the world we can call our friends, who we can relate to, who understand where we’re coming from. And I’m not just talking about the music, I’m talking about as people. People who we consider our extended brotherhood and who know where we’re coming from. Starting with the family, and reaching out to the brothers, reaching out beyond that to our extended community. That’s what tribal is for us, an extended family and dedication to what we’re doing. To each other.

Both of you have released solo acoustic albums. What makes an idea something for you to do solo instead of something you do in Neurosis?

Kelly: I did one solo record just by myself. It was a record I needed to do. It was kinda marking a period in my life…kind of a tombstone, in a way, it was the end of a time for me and I felt like I needed to get it out of me. Then as I continued to write more acoustic stuff, that’s when that turned into Blood and Time. That’s what I’m doing now, and that’s with Noah [Landis] and Josh [Graham], so it’s still in the family. It’s just a different vibe, yet the same. It’s just quieter, and more reserved in some ways. It’s very open and naked, there’s nowhere to hide when you’re doing music like that. You can’t turn the amps up and have everything blur into one mass of sound, which is what Neurosis does. With Blood and Time, you can hear every word, every note. It’s kind of the opposite side of the same coin, dealing with a lot of the same ideas in terms of the way the sounds work together. It really kind happened in the van when we were touring, when Steve and I both started enjoying singing more, and realized that we could do it and that we wanted to do it. You basically can’t sing quietly over Neurosis. There’s moments, and we definitely use those moments, but Neurosis is like a driven force. It just kinda runs itself and we’re attached to it.

Von Till: You just know what headspace you’re in when you’re making music. When I sit down to make music, I usually know if I’m songwriting like I would for solo stuff – which took a long time to develop. Initially, when I first came across the idea, I had a little home studio set up and I was recording a lot of things. Most of it ended up on Tribes of Neurot records, some of it ended up as riff ideas for Neurosis jams, and a bunch of it didn’t fit and solidified as its own thing, which became my first solo record. Looking back on it, it’s not my favorite record but it was a starting point, and then by the second one I was like ‘OK, I’ve carved this niche where I have the freedom to sit here and work on actual songwriting as opposed to epic composition of destructive sound with these other guys. It’s more of a personal, understated, private-space music, an expression of self. Of course, you can tell where we come from no matter what we do. [Laughs.] It’s all related by the spirit and the dedication to giving our whole self to the flow of the sound. I can usually tell, by this point, when I sit down I’m either in my improvisational Tribes of Neurot mode or I’m working on ideas that I plan on sending back out to the group for everyone to put their input in. It’s never somebody’s individual ideas that become what Neurosis is, it’s the filtering of the group through everybody’s ideas. Then other times I’m just rolling tape and doing Harvestman, psychedelic guitar stuff. It depends on the mood. And that’s the one benefit of that responsibility that I spoke of earlier, to the inspiration. As big an inspiration as Neurosis is in our lives, it fills you with this inspiration, the blessing and the curse, that once you ask for it you don’t get to get rid of it. It’s solid and it’s all the time and you’ve got to deal with it. When you get that flow of creativity, you have to find your outlets for it.

Why did you cut down so much on playing live?

Kelly: It came down to a couple of things. One was that we’re fathers, we have children. Being on the road all the time itself does not lend itself to doing what you need to do for your family. We also came to this realization…like I said before, we kinda take what’s in front of us, and we had done that for a long time. Doing tours, rolling forward, and it just hit us one day: Why are we doing this? Why are we here? There’s only one reason, and that’s to make music. We’re not here to tour, it’s all about the music, and when you get into that extended touring mode and you’re surrounded by people you don’t know all the time, it starts to take down your ability to really focus on your music. We just said fuck this, this is not why we’re a band. Touring is great, playing live is great, but it’s absolutely not the most important thing to us. It was a hard decision financially. We’ve never made money as a band, we still all work 40 a week, and it was just about getting re-centered. We made a commitment to do this thing forever, and if we were gonna do this thing forever then we had to make some decisions to get through that. I think if we had continued touring…self-destruct is always in full effect, there’s just no way to avoid it, at least for me. It was a wise decision. It enabled us to focus on when we do play, really making it something significant and special.

Neurosis uses a lot of epic language: blood, the sun, storms, grace. What in your life gives you that sense of epic scope?

Von Till: I guess it’s the ability to relate the small things to the big things. The ability to relate your own experiences with the trials and tribulations of the whole race. The microcosm and the macrocosm. You’ve got your own life, your own struggles, you’ve got the stuff in your immediate history. You’ve got the stuff that transcends the entire evolution of our species. Trying to reconcile that with being a thinking, feeling, kind of open, sensitive human being. Trying to be what you can, trying to self-realize, trying to grow, trying to evolve. Trying to deal with all this and move beyond it in a world so full of distraction and falsehood. Measuring all those thing automatically connects you artistically. Personally you feel connected with your ancestry and your responsibilities. Histories. Trying to put that in some sort of perspective when it would be really easy to write everything off as complete bullshit and go after what’s true with all your heart. For us, what’s true is our families and our music.

Kelly: It’s just the way we see things. We’re pretty much out in space. The words just kinda come. I rarely sit down and say I’m gonna write a song about whatever. The words just come through the music, so whatever the words turn out to be, that’s what we use. It’s not that we sit down and say we want to write epic things. It’s just the gravity of the music brings that to us. When we’re writing, we definitely have thought that we want this to be a mountain, or this is water. Those thoughts definitely come to us when we’re writing, but I don’t really have an explanation as to how we get to that point.

As promised, here’s Part 2 of an excerpt of a rather lengthy interview with former Melvins bassist — and current Sunn O)) member/ solo artist – Mark Deutrom. Fun fact: Decibel writer Zach Smith transcribed this when he was an intern (the magazine’s first, in fact) way back in ‘04!

The Melvins are famous for pissing audiences off. Do you have any memories to share?
Anybody who has seen the Melvins will tell you there’s a point where they’re going to test your attention span, even to die hard fans. Prick would be a prime example of that — things you can’t really listen to. There’s a certain amount of arrogance and pride in that, and of course I took part happily in that type of attitude when I was in the band. Some of the more notorious examples of that are when we played in Dallas with Nine Inch Nails and we opened the set with a 9+ minute long instrumental. Nine Inch Nails fans don’t want to hear that stuff, so the audience melted down and ripped up the seats in this minor league hockey arena and threw ‘em at us. The old Melvins standby is to just let the feedback rip for 15 minutes. It’s as much of a trademark for the Melvins as Gene Simmons blowing fire is for KISS. It’s just part of the band, and if you love the band, then you kind of look forward to moments like that just to see how people who haven’t been exposed to the band will react.

You joined the band for a bunch of releases that everybody seems to be able to agree upon like Stoner Witch and Stag, as well as all the material that came out on Amphetamine Reptile, which is stuff that no one seems to be able to universally agree on. How were you approached to join the band?
Buzz and Lori both had this situation where they were still involved with each other, they both went into rehab, they came out, and they started getting interest from major labels. I’m not even sure if Lori recorded her parts for Houdini. If she did, it was all wiped. It became evident that Buzz was going to split up with Lori and kick her out of the band, and he was looking for somebody new. They had finished recording Houdini in ‘93, and I wasn’t doing anything, so when they asked me to join the band, I said, “Okay.” It was basically Buzz and Dale on that record, and I think maybe Kurt Cobain played some guitar, I’m not really sure; the whole idea of him producing anything is interesting. He just really didn’t do anything on that record except for kind of show up and pass out, but people…Cobain was addicted to heroin. He couldn’t have produced a crap after a cup of coffee at that point. You know, with all due respect to him, he had no experience producing records. It was kind of one of those sort of mismatches that I think Atlantic came up with or Kurt told the Melvins that he wanted to be there, and all the sudden he’s producing the record.

Can you give me an account of what happened wherein you severed ties with the Melvins?
You mean when they kicked me out of the band?

Yes.
Because make no mistake, they kick people out of their band. Our contract with Atlantic was up, and there were a couple of labels that were interested in us doing demos, but Buzz was like, “I’m not going to do anything for those motherfuckers, there’s no way I’m going to audition for them.” He looked at it purely as an insult, you know, and felt that he would kind of be selling out or being untrue to his own direction. We never sat down and had career move meetings between the three of us. The main thing I felt was “take advantage of everybody as much as you can for as long as you can and then get out.” And that was kind of the attitude we developed, there was certainly a type of mercenary sort of ruthlessness that we had.

My attitude was like, “Sure, we’ll make some demos for you; give us five grand or whatever.” They give you five grand, you go and record an entire record, you give them a couple of songs, and then if they don’t like it, you just put the album out that you’ve recorded on AmRep or Man’s Ruin or whatever, and then basically then you’ve got an album out of the situation for free. So you’re ahead. But I think he interpreted that as me wanting to become some band like Metallica or something, which would be completely ridiculous. Having known the Melvins for like 12 years at that point, I understood exactly what the commercial potential of the band was.

What would bring closure to the situation, what would need to happen for that to happen?
I don’t know, probably apologies or whatever. I’m not sure; I can only speak for myself. For me, it’s just kind of, I’ve been in plenty of towns where they’re playing and I always mull it over: should I go down there and talk to them? I’ll give full credit to Buzz in creating something that’s utterly unique and he created that whole thing by himself. There’s nothing like it and it’s respectable, it’s good, and you know, I was glad to be part of it, seriously. I had my own problems at the time, I had a great deal of depression in my life that started when I was a child, and so they had to put up with that. And I didn’t manage to seriously address it until a few years ago. I’m glad I got a chance to be in the Melvins. That’s it, really.

There’s a huge oral history of the Melvins that appeared in issue #3 of Decibel that isn’t online, probably for the same reason that the Hall of Fame features aren’t online. We want you to buy back issues of our magazine, ok? Putting these things together is always a bear, especially in the case of the Melvins piece. We ended up with something like 15-20 hours of tape when the dust settled, including about 2 hours worth of conversations with former Melvins bassist/producer and longtime associate Mark Deutrom. Mark hadn’t spoken to anyone about the Melvins for years before that, and probably hasn’t since, but he had a lot to get off of his chest during that interview. Since we’re in a Melvins kinda mood, here’s part 1 of an excerpt of the conversation; part 2 follows tomorrow!

Very early on, you put out Gluey Porch Treatments on your own Alchemy label and you also produced Ozma. Is that how you came to know the Melvins?
My business partner Victor Hayden went up to Seattle, saw the Melvins, and came back and said, “They were crawling up the wall!”And he played me a tape of them, or played me there first ten song thing on C/V, and I thought it was good, so we decided to do a record with them. They came down from Aberdeen and we started working on Gluey Porch Treatments. Before that, my band with Lori Black, Clown Alley, played a gig in Olympia with the Melvins and Greg Anderson’s first band — he was only 16 at the time!

Years later, Buzz told me they had wanted to prove to themselves that they make this record without drinking any beer, which they actually did, much to their credit. At the time, I didn’t realize it was, you know, that much of a mountain for them to climb, but they did it and credit to them. We recorded in the record in Sausalito, where we got some really cheap time at a studio that Huey Lewis and the News and Whitney Houston were doing tracks at. And there was this incredibly huge room and it had moveable panels on the walls and that’s how that monster reverb was captured on “Eye Flies.” Another little piece of trivia is that I took the picture on the back of Gluey Porch Treatments; that’s the living room of the house that Lori Black and I were living in at the time.

Do you have any sense of what the general impression of the Melvins was when they were still based in Aberdeen/Seattle/the Olympia area, and was there a general awareness in that scene of community of the group moving to the Bay Area?
In 1984, you had Van Halen, punk rock was dead, and the only thing that was really cool and kind of cutting edge was crossover metal bands or bands like Black Flag or Bad Brains, you know, stuff like that. But it was still totally difficult if you had a band and you weren’t doing hair metal. But locally it was just like it’s always been, you know, people despised your bands, you went out and played a gig and there were always some pissed off people there who would just go to the gigs to yell “fuck you!” Bands were very isolated from each other. When the Melvins left, they left before everything got really huge in the Northwest, so it’s funny that they’re still considered the godfathers of grunge or whatever, because they were out so far ahead, they were out of Aberdeen, so far ahead of that whole kind of major label feeding frenzy in the Northwest that they weren’t even really part of it. I think of them as more of a San Francisco band, really. When you’re in an isolated community like Aberdeen, which is the end of the Earth you know really, there’s nothing to do there but drink and smoke weed and just pray to God that there’s some way out before you kill yourself. Who knows what would’ve happened to the Melvins if they had stayed there

They’d be dead.
They’d still be sitting around their front porch like drinking OE and smoking bud, you know. And I can relate to that, because I grew up in El Paso as a teenager, and that was like the end of the world, too. They were literally, like, if they could have burned that town to the ground, they would have. If they could have gotten away with it, they would have burned that town to the ground and left, laughing as the flames shot up in their review mirrors, you know.

You were living in England when the Melvins played at the Reading Festival, right?
Yes. I think it might have been ‘91; it’s the only date Nirvana played at Reading Festival. The Melvins were the opening band, and of course there were 20 bands and then there was Nirvana at the other end, so the irony was not lost on me at that. That was a really brutal gig. All these British people were completely hung over and they staggered out, it was pouring with rain and there was a sea of mud and the wind was blowing about 50 miles an hour, and here’s the Melvins playing, It was kind of apocalyptic and interesting

I read that for the show, the organizers dubbed the Melvins “the worst band ever.”
Yeah, that’s true. With Reading, it’s a tradition to have…I mean, its run by the British, they’ve got all the stupid flavor of the month bands up there. Before I did that tour with them, I knew that Buzz and Lori were using, and I was like, “I’m not interested in doing this if you guys are on drugs.” Sure enough, when we got to Amsterdam, Buzz and Lori disappeared off into some housing project or squat and came back to the hotel and started shooting up right in front of me with some homeless guy they picked up. And, of course, I’ve done my share of drugs, too. And I said, “You know what, I think I’m going to stay and just do dope with everybody else, because at least then I won’t be pissed off.”

But I wasn’t strung out yet at the time, so I could get away with it. This homeless guy they invited to stay in the van with us stank like a pirate’s graveyard and I told Buzz, “You gotta get this guy out of here, it’s like carrying a corpse around.” After that, the tour sort of fell apart. Lori got sick and I don’t know where Buzz went, he went back to San Francisco or something, I’m not sure, but Dale ended up staying at my place in London for about a week and I just kind of took him aside and said, “Look, you have people in your band who have a problem here with drugs. You can do whatever you want with that information but you can’t say where it came from.” And he was appalled and flabbergasted, he couldn’t believe it.

The July issue of Decibel (out June 5th) will have a full feature on Pig Destroyer and their new LP Phantom Limb. In the meantime, a few questions from the interview with J.R. Hayes that didn’t figure into the finished article.

Do drugs still play a role in your writing?
Yes and no. I don’t rely on them for my writing, but I do use them. Indirectly, taking weed for example, I’m a very stressed, neurotic, kind of twitchy person; so in order for me to be able to concentrate and get into my mind and get something down on a piece of paper, I gotta relax somehow, whether it’s a couple of sips of whiskey or whatever. There are certain drugs that nobody can write on, or at least I can’t. They just kind of allow you to step outside and get a different perspective on your emotions and what you’re feeling, and maybe come up with a good idea to tie a lyric together that you’ve got laying around or something.

Is the rest of the band in the loop about what kind of lyrics and concepts you’re working on?
Not really. We’ve been a band together for so long now that they trust me not to come up with something that sucks outright. I usually take as much time as I can, like in this case I pretty much waited until the week we were going into the studio to finalize everything; up to that point I’m always switching words around and changing things. That’s just the type of writer that I am, I’m always picking at it like a scab. I pretty much waited until I had everything written and then I showed it to them, and they approved so it was cool. I think Scott didn’t like the title “Girl in the Slayer Jacket” at first but now he’s warmed up to it.

Phantom Limb is the second album in a row with tits on the cover.
Yeah, it looks that way. There’s gonna be a sticker for the stores that can’t handle boobies, places where kids are gonna be I guess. We did it for Terrifyer with a slipcase. My compromise with the label was that as long as all the original artwork was included in it, they can do whatever they want, but I don’t want to change what we did. That was a compromise that I made, and I wish I didn’t have to, but I can’t be a complete dick. Sometimes you gotta work with the label instead of against it.