Interview by Ben Lybarger
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RRP: You grew up in Boston, right? Al: Yes, Hyde Park. It is where the mayor Menino is from and also where the Brinks job was planned. That was the first time anybody had taken a whole Brinks truck and they never found it to this day. “The Brinks Job” is the name of the movie that came out in the 70’s about that big heist. It was world news when it happened. Hyde Park used to be a real shit hole, but now it’s pretty nice. White flight saved Hyde Park - all the old townies were animals. They moved further out into the suburbs because they were afraid of an economic downturn and the whole racial thing... basically of all the black people moving into the neighborhood. That’s pretty much what they were worried about. RRP: Yeah, I read something about that, about riots over forced busing in the 70’s when they tried to integrate the schools. Al: Oh yeah man, Hyde Park was ground zero for that shit. Hyde Park High, the school I went to, for two years was completely encircled with paddy wagons and cop cars. It was on the news all the time. My brother was in high school when all the riots were happening on a daily basis. Yeah, Hyde Park was definitely ground zero for all that shit, along with some other places – all over the city really. It was the first city in the country where they tried forced busing and to integrate the schools. Boston was such a racist place at the time. Black people lived with black people, white people lived with white people. Italian people lived here, Irish people over here, Jews lived over here... Still even into the 70’s it was pretty damn segregated. North side was a lot of Italians, South side a lot of the Irish, and the black people were stuck in the middle. RRP: Do you ever head back there? Al: Oh yeah, I still visit my dad there. He still lives in the same house I grew up in. It was a different place back then, you know, but that all started to change when I was a kid. A lot of those families that had been around for a while started leaving in the 80’s. Then it started to mellow out a little bit – all the white kids started to turn into wiggers, you know, which wouldn’t have happened back then. If someone my age started acting like a wigger or something, there would have been trouble. You know, the kids who are a generation younger than us, they’re all wiggers, man. It’s terrible. RRP: So how’d you end up in Tucson from Boston? Al: I hitchhiked with Pigpen, and had a really horrible time about it, man. Pigpen was the washtub bass player of the original three Shakes. When we first started it was Texas Trash on the drums, and Pigpen on the wash tub bass. You know, at the time we were hitchhiking, Pigpen hadn’t bathed in... I think it was like his 8th or 9th month without bathing, so that was a big hindrance right there. Finally I got him to bathe a little bit in New York and we were all right. When he had showed up before we left, he had been on the road for a while with these other guys traveling around, and hadn’t bathed the entire time. I said “dude, we’re gonna hitchhike, maybe you should do this” and he’s like “aww man, don’t worry, don’t worry.” Finally he did bathe and that helped a little bit. So yea, it took us forever because we looked like a couple hooligans. It was hard to get a ride, and we took the wrong routes and shit. We were stuck in New Jersey for shit, like 3 or 4 days, stuck in Ohio for 3 or 4 days. It was terrible, but we made it to Minneapolis, and from there a girl I used to date at the time came out. We hitchhiked together and got to Tucson in a few days. RRP: What made you want to go there? Al: I wanted to go to San Francisco, but the other guys were saying it’s gonna be cold in San Francisco, and we were gonna be on the street. So it’s like, well all right, let’s try Tucson. He had been here like a year before and he said it was cool, so we came here. I met people the first day I was in Tucson, and was at a house party the next day, then a house party the day after that. It wasn’t bad, you know. We got an apartment north of the downtown maybe a month down the road. It was good. But then I started to hate it, so I left and traveled around, then decided “what the fuck was I thinking,” and came back. That’s pretty much how it went. It was just a fluke. I never dreamed I was gonna be in Tucson – never even thought of it. I thought it was a quiet little town, a cowboy and Indian town or something. Turns out it’s a pretty hip place. RRP: So you never been there before you set it as a destination? Al: Never even met anybody from Tucson. I just didn’t want to be cold, and I knew I was gonna be homeless for a while. When I came here it was cold at night, but beautiful during the day. RRP: When you were living in Boston, you mentioned that you would go see and sometimes run into GG Allin occasionally. Any stories? Al: I was never friends with GG. I was introduced to him a couple times and only saw one of his shows. I had a friend who turned me on to GG - he was a GG fanatic. He slept out side GG's P.O. Box just to meet him. He would pay GG to shit and jerk off into plastic baggies and kept them in his fridge. He also would buy test pressings of his records for the price of a bottle of Jim Beam. He had one hell of a collection of GG's records, personal belongings, and DNA. GG was hated in Boston, and once in a while I'd see him getting chased by various groups of skinheads when he happened to be in town. I have to say I never saw him get caught. Even in cowboy boots and daisy dukes he could out run your average skinhead. RRP: I know you used to have a punk rock band yourself; what was it called? Al: The Foul-Mouthed Elves. It was Drunk Rock, that’s what we used to call it. I left that when I was 18. RRP: So that’s where you got the Al Foul name, it just stuck? Al: Yeah, bands always did that, like The Murderers had Bob Murderer, you know. Everybody does that kind of shit. RRP: So are you gonna put out some of the old Foul-Mouthed Elves stuff again? Al: Yeah, I’m just putting it out my way, you know what I mean? I’m making a couple hundred of them to sell on the road. The album is called “Boston Drunk Rock ‘86-’89,” and the cover has all the old flyers and stuff, and it folds out into this four page thing with old photos and lyrics, and this other shit. It looks great. Should be done in a day or two, along with some of my other old albums. Same guy who’s doing the artwork for that also is designing the T-shirts and re-did the cover of “Come Back With My Drink” and I’m really impressed with it. It looks great. Good merchandise to travel with, know what I mean? Plus I’m trying to buy out the rest of the album we did on Slimstyle Records, because they aren’t doing anything with ’em now since the label is done. Most of their other bands probably don't care because they're all broken up anyway. RRP: Were there other bands you were in? Al: Yeah, there was a couple smaller bands I did that never got records out or anything, maybe we recorded but never released anything. I did this band for a year or so called Rodeo Jesus, which was a reincarnation of another Rodeo Jesus that was around up in Maine and New Hampshire. That was more of a straight-up psychobilly type of freakshow band. Everybody in the band was a recovering drug addict except me, and they were all in the program. It was really funny. We had this song "Eat Bugs, Not Drugs” and we’d eat all these big tubs of live crickets and stuff on stage, I’d be tossing them into my mouth... later pounding Listerine just to get the taste out. It was really funny, man: we’d wear like those little g-strings with a big rubber trench coat, piles of hair so fuckin’ tall, tuxedo shirt and leather jacket, all that stuff… It was hilarious. We did shows, we even recorded, but we never released anything. Also, I did a side project with a friend of mine for a short time. I wanted to call it Kentucky Fried Watermelon, but he didn’t like that. We played some talent show and they called us The Winners. We recorded some stuff but never put anything out. I also used to play with Danny Walker down here in town – it was a rockabilly type of thing called Johnny Balls and Fabulous(?) Thunderballs. I played washtub for him. Just stuff like that. The only really serious things I’ve done were the Foul-Mouthed Elves and The Shakes... and I guess Rodeo Jesus I was pretty serious about, but it just obviously was not gonna work, you know what I mean? The whole band went into relapse. That’s terrible. So yeah, we just didn’t know what we were doing when we were teenagers. We couldn’t even hardly book our shows. We were young, drunk all the time, and not a penny to our names. Usually, I was the only one who had a job, then I’d quit the job, and then the whole band would be like “why don’t you go back to work?” At least if they caught me on a Friday night we’d be drunk for a few days on my money. I just didn’t know what to do about getting people to book us, even getting everybody to show up for practice. And then to have them actually practice, not just get wasted. RRP: Is that a benefit of the one-man thing, you don’t have to coordinate things with anyone else? Al: The way I have it now with the Shakes, I haven’t had a regular band practice since Piggy and Craig, and that was like ’98 or so. Now it’s just a few people who know my songs really well, and I’ll just call ‘em up and ask ‘em. But yeah, the one-man band thing is great because you don’t have to schedule with anyone else. And I love it, I just love it. I love doing the one-man act. At first I was really nervous about it. I was used to having a band, and when you have to get up there and you gotta play the fuckin’ drums with your feet, play guitar and sing, first off you don’t want to look like a clown or some sideshow act. Then you don’t want to seem to be doing some Hasil Adkins impression or some kind of shit like that. I don’t want to come off the wrong way - I want to come off looking sincere. People have told me, people in the audience, they said that they don’t really notice the drums too much, that it’s more like a simple concept, you know - just me and a guitar. But it has a beat. I think the one-man thing is more accessible to a wider audience too. I was playing for these people down in the little town called Patagonia the other night, right. There’s people of all ages there, from little kids to really ancient motherfuckers. Even these cowboy dudes, middle-aged to these old rancher guys were there. Everybody loved it. I mean, I had these old women hollerin’ and was I was like “wow.” I’ve done a few shows like that, where every single person in the crowd was totally into it, and that was great. But sometimes I’ve played these noisy places where you’re stuck in the corner and they don’t have a stage or anything, and in that situation you’re really easy to ignore. With the one-man act, I prefer to have a stage because nobody can see you - I gotta sit down to do it. If there’s no stage I run out back and try to find some palettes or something. That’s one limitation, but it’s the only one I can think of. RRP: How did the one-man band idea come about, and what sort of sound are you going for on the record you’re recording right now? Al: I still play with the Shakes on a regular basis, but I have thought about the one-man band thing for a long time, so over the last year, through trial and error, I got it together. With the Shakes, when people ask about our sound, I just tell them it’s kind of an off-beat rockabilly type of stuff. And then they go: “Rockabilly, what’s that?” A lot of people do that, you know, especially younger people - a college chick, or someone like that. You could go on for hours with these people and say, “well, it’s kind of like really early Elvis,” and they still look at you kind of weird even when you say that. So you just gotta say “like the Stray Cats” and then they’re like “Ohhhhhhhh, okay.” RRP: You know, that’s the way everyone ends up explaining it to people. I’ve done it a million times. Al: Yeah, exactly. And you know, we never really considered ourselves just a straight-up rockabilly band. It’s just rock’n’roll with a punk edge to it. I wouldn’t consider it straight-up rockabilly, and neither do the rockabilly purists either. They make sure they tell me too. RRP: Really? People really come up to you and give you flack for that? Al: No, no, I don’t get flack from them. I actually have a lot of friends who do that traditional stuff. But sometimes when you’re playing a place with a bunch of traditional rockabilly bands, and you get up there and do something a little bit different, you can tell what they’re thinking. They’re kind of like who-the-fuck-are-you? They won’t dance to ya, I’ll tell you that! That place Rudolpho’s, I remember we played there a couple times with Lloyd Tripp, who’s a really good friend of mine, and the crowd just talked amongst themselves. I don’t think anybody even looked at us the whole time. RRP: I hear that about some of the scenes out on the West Coast. Al: It depends on what shows you got. I mean, San Francisco is a lot different than L.A. Everybody judges the West Coast by what L.A. is like. L.A. is like L.A. The rest of the West Coast is not like L.A. San Francisco and San Diego are different cities than what Los Angeles is. Los Angeles is a fuckin’ shit hole, but California ain’t a bad place. Also, it’s just this mindset, you can feel it in the air if you’re out in Hollywood or somethin’. You can feel this desperation. There’s just this ridiculous desperation in people. So many people hitchhike there from all over the country because they can’t think of any place better to go. That’s why you can go down there, go walking around at night in Hollywood and you’ll see more prostitutes in one hour than you’ve seen in your fuckin’ life if you’ve never been there before. You can get your dick sucked every ten paces if you wanted to. RRP: They’re all aspiring actresses. Al: I bet. Well... actors who are acting like women. That’s what it mainly is. The majority of them are cross-dressers. It’s pathetic. Whatever, I don’t know, I just don’t like L.A. I’ve never liked it. I’ve had a couple good shows there, but mostly I don’t like it. I love San Francisco, and there’s a lot of good small towns in California. So yeah, anyway, the question was about our sound. I guess I would call it rockabilly, but to me, I’ll just call it rock’n’roll, I don’t know. Really that’s just a hard question to answer. Of course I’d really like to think I was the first one to come up and play music the way I do, but that’s why I don’t listen to much newer music. RRP: Is there anyone who has directly influenced the approach you’re taking with the new CD? Al: Some of the song-writing, in a way, was influenced by Roger Miller, who I was listening to a lot of at the time. I was really into it, buying every record I could find at thrift stores and stuff, listening to them all the time. I have to say, that was definitely the influence. When I was coming up with the idea I was in that phase. Then, of course, Hasil Adkins, you gotta give him props right there. I remember since years ago when I first heard of Hasil Adkins, I found out about what he did and saw the kind of set-up he had, and I was just like “that’s cool,” you know what I mean? I really liked his music too. I saw him a couple years back down here in Phoenix, and he was fantastic. He wasn’t too drunk or nothin’. They wouldn’t serve him anymore because the guy who booked the show told the bar not to serve him alcohol until he started playing. They were trying to keep him from drinking too much so he could play good, then he could get drunk as he wanted afterwards I guess. Hasil was really on it, that night, really impressive. So, yeah, he’s probably the first person I got such an idea for the one-man thing from, Hasil Adkins, but then some of the songs were influenced by Roger Miller. Other ones, I don’t know. I’ve been going a little more towards the country than the Shakes does, but then I got some other songs that are kinda straight rockers too. I can’t say the direction I’m going in, since it’s still a work in progress, but those are a couple of the influences I’ve had. Also, when recording on this new one I have to do it in one take, live, I can’t overdub or fix tracks, so that makes it harder to get it just the way I want it. Not just in case I screw it up playing, but also I want to have the right mood to it, whether it is a desperate love song or a tough cowboy song, I have to get into that character, that zone. That’s a hard thing to do sometimes. RRP: You mentioned that Naim Amor is going to co-produce it. Who is he? Al: Naim is a good friend of mine, and a great musician who has a good ear. He has a small studio in his basement. You can learn more about him at amormusic.com. The record is coming along great! RRP: You recently did a 10-year anniversary show for the Shakes in Tucson. How did that go? Al: The show was great. We filmed it and recorded it. Someday I plan to make a documentary film on my music and life. The only Shake that came a long distance was Jimmy King (guitar player) from the Aqua Lads in Charlotte, NC. He played with me for a couple years in the beginning. Then other people would grab something, so we had people playing the drums, two guitar players sometimes, a washtub player and bass player. It was a lot of fun. A bunch of people started jumping up on stage and playing whenever they wanted, different people who’ve played with me in the past. There was a snare drum here and a snare drum there, so you’d have like two drummers, somebody playing a washtub, somebody playing a bass, two people playing guitars... then afterwards we had a couple kegs of beer and drank until the wee hours of the morning. A bunch of alcoholic men bonding at their best, you know. But the crowd that night was packed with people who had come to see us over the years, and who really got into it. I was really worried at first because it started off a little bit slow. Right across the street at the exact same time that we were playing: fucking Duran Duran! Didn’t affect our crowd one bit. You should have seen it. There was people all day waiting to get in to see Duran Duran at the Rialto Theatre. You could see all these old chicks who were probably really hot in the 80’s, did a lot of cocaine, and have been there since... but now they’re not really hot anymore. Still dressed in the same way, and still coked up. It’s hilarious. Anyway, the crowd was really good and they did all the dance moves. They did the Breathalizer, the Roach, Spank That Ass... we got it all on film too. RRP: What is the Breathalizer? Al: It’s an instrumental that’s kind of got a surfy beat going, and the only words it has are during the breaks. It’s like “do the search,” and you act like you’re being searched. “Do the line” and you act like you’re walking the line, you know. “Do the nose” and you touch your nose back and forth. “Do the eyes” and you wave your finger in front of your eyes... it’s like the whole dance is doing the drunk test. People dig it too, especially around here in town where everyone knows it, but it’s really easy to learn... most people know it actually anyhow. RRP: So what is the Roach, then? Al: The Roach is a kinda like a conga line thing. I think where we originally got the idea was from our drummer Craig, who took it from that movie Hairspray. He had a record or something with the soundtrack, and he wrote down a few lyrics and we improvised the rest. For the dance, you get out there and you’re like squishin’ and squashin’ – once with your right, once with your left. Almost like a Twist kind of thing. You get it going, one at a time, then you form like a conga line and go around - jump on the bar, then get everyone else to jump on the bar and follow you around and shit. You know, when it was just me, Craig, and Piggy – the original line-up – we were a lot more aggressive with shit like that. It was a while back, but then we were really known for doing all these dances like the Clap and the Chicken Walk. For the Chicken Walk we would just flapping our wings and going into the audience and start jumpin’ on the tables. Then we jumped form table to table, flapping our arms like a chicken. That was one of the favorites there, because everybody knew when someone yelled out “Chicken Walk” there was gonna be trouble. Shit was gonna get broken. We used to break tables all the time. Break glasses, ashtrays, you know, we used to break a lot of shit and we were known for it. Places knew, but we could still play like the Newport Lounge all the time until finally we busted the place up really bad one night. It was Craig’s going away party, and he fucked that place up, dude. He got up on the bar, did a handstand, and kicked out the fuckin’ ceiling of the place. All the drop ceiling collapsed and knocked this whole shelf of glasses off the wall. I got it on film, you gotta see it. Then we broke like two tables and countless ashtrays and glasses and shit. RRP: What did the bar owner say about that? Al: He was fuckin’ pissed, this Polish guy from back east. At first we got along really good. This place was like a little tiny lounge that was in the basement of this other bar. The bar was probably built in the 60’s or 70’s with red crushed velvet walls and big giant tucked leather booths upstairs. The downstairs was a private party room that they turned into a tiny lounge with like 10 tables and a little bar. Everybody would cram into this little space, and the smoke was so thick you could barely breathe and your eyes watered and everything. It was fun as hell. It was the best venue this town has had the whole time I’ve been here. I loved the fucking Newport, it was great. Plus they would let us break shit because they made so much money off of drinks. We got the crowd really drinking. The biggest selling night for alcohol they ever had was one of our shows, and it was never beaten. Since we did that like our second or third show there, they never fucked with us about breaking things here and there. But that night we were being malicious. Before it was just in good fun. I was still trying to keep it all in good fun, but I was still a little excited. But Craig, because he was leaving, wanted to make his mark, and he fucked it up so we could never play there again, then the fucker left. But you know, he was an old punk rocker too, and he was lettin’ it out. RRP: I know on Spank That Ass you trade spankings with audience members. Somebody told me to ask you about an especially rough night doing that, which involved eating lots of chili earlier... Al: If you are trying to say that I shit my pants on stage you are out of your mind. I wiped my ass with my left sock at the Emerald Lounge once, but that took place in a secure bathroom. It also had nothing to do with any chili. I make fantastic chili. RRP: Why did you wipe your ass with a sock? Al: That was an emergency, man, no toilet paper... there wasn’t even anything in the garbage can you could get. That thing was empty. Barren. My ass wouldn’t fit in the sink, you know what I mean? When that stuff hits you, there’s no turning back. RRP: Speaking of socks and soiled garments, word is that you are against wearing socks and underwear. How come? Al: Underwear is a pain in the ass when it is 100 degrees outside. As for socks I always wear black socks. Sure if it is 105, and I have not done laundry, I will go to the store without socks - but never on stage. RRP: I heard that you had a close call with a gun once when you were young. What happened? Al: My father collects guns and always had several laying around. He taught us to be safe around them, although one time my sister accidentally fired a .38 and missed my head by inches. I was like 13, so she was probably 14, and she was just fucking around and thought it was empty. Just being a kid, you know. I think if you have kids you ought to keep your guns locked up or something, but then, like my father would say, what good does it do you when someone breaks in if it’s locked away? RRP: What can you tell me about the Tequila Taxi? Al: I’m going to tour the country in the taxi. It’s a ’54 Belair 4-door. People had told me it was a cab forever. I met a guy who had it like 15 years ago, and sold the meter out of it - one of those big old ribbon meters - for 5 or 6 hundred bucks. So I knew it was a working taxi. Other people had tried to tell me it was mock-up for a movie in the 70’s, and that’s bullshit. Then this old Mexican guy came up just like last month when I dropped the car off at the shop, and he said “wow, that must be like the only one left.” We asked him what he was talking about and he told us that he grew up in Hermosillo, and back in the old days this was part of a fleet of taxis there in down there in the capital of Sonora, Mexico. He was saying that sometime in the early 60’s he remembered it being around, so it definitely is an old taxi cab. It’s got a hell of a lot of miles on it, and I’m just about rebuilding the whole thing at this point. RRP: Didn’t you once receive a lap dance from a drag queen? Al: Yes I did, I received it from Faith Michaels and it was great! I have also spanked many a drag queens ass during shows. I’m not gay; I’m just not homophobic. Hell, if some homo wants to get up on stage for spank that ass, that’s his problem. He just better not have his balls up there because I’m going to spank him like a man. RRP: Is there anything else you want to mention?
Al: Yeah if you can book me some shows in Ohio I will come out anytime. Can I use your car? |