INTERVIEW: Too Much Joy's Tim Quirk
- Tim Hulsizer
I got the call at 10 am. A very tired-sounding Tim Quirk, telling me to call him back at his hotel, room 216. This I did, discovering he hadn't been to bed yet. Hey, no big surprise there - after all, this is rock and roll. Anyway, knowing he was about to fall asleep I got right into it. Portions of fanboy adulation have been edited so as not to annoy you, the reader...
Consumable: Have you been playing since the last album Mutiny or did you guys have to get back into it?
Tim: Actually the latest tour is the first time we've gone out more than a night or two in a row in three years. The last actual tour we did was spring in '93 and we spent the time after that just basically writing songs and recording and doing the occasional one-off just to put some money in our pockets. Mostly we were hustling to get another deal.
C: This album seems harder than the last couple.
T: Yeah, there's a couple reasons for that. Part of it is the mood we were in, part is the fact that it's three years since the last record. We recorded 30 songs, we could've put this album together any number of different ways...there's other more loping numbers we could've thrown on but in the end these just seemed like the 13 songs that made the strongest, most coherent statement. Another thing is that it's the first time the guy who produced the band, apart from being IN the band, has SEEN the band live before he made the record. Even though Bill {Wittman} did the last record, he'd never seen us perform live until after he was done with the whole thing, which is the same thing with Paul Fox and Cereal Killers and Michael James with Son of Sam I Am. No one ever saw what the band was like live until it was too late (laughs). They go back and say, "Oh THAT's what you're about." Which is not to say one is better than the other, but it does account for the difference.
C: There's a song on the new album called "You Will". Are you skeptical of this whole "computer movement"?
T: Well, skeptical's not really the right word, because you know, I'm hooked up, I got it, I dig it. It's just those AT&T commercials...I just don't understand WHY anyone would wanna get a fax at the beach. You go to the beach, you're away from all that bullshit! You know? What's the point? I don't understand why that's a goal to work toward!
C: So what's up with the artwork for the new album, did you ask for that stuff specifically from him or did he turn that in himself?
T: No, he was our 5th or 6th try actually, as an artist. We'd come up with this idea, sort of along the style of R. Crumb and we actually went after Crumb and asked him, but he hates rock bands so he said no, but someone had told us Doug Allen was one of his favorite artists so we tracked him down and we looked at some of his stuff first. The first guy that did a drawing, we described it like, "It's a guy and a girl in bed...they're very realistic and sexy-looking but you know in a very sleezy, sort of twisted way. They've obviously just finished having sex and they've each got a thought balloon coming out of their head and it merges into one and says, 'Finally', because that's what they're both thinking." We told that to every artist we had, and the first guy gave us a picture of two CLOWNS in bed! Why in the world would we want a picture of clowns? We said "sexy" not "scary"! (laughs). But Doug Allen, we told him what we wanted and he was the first person who got exactly what we were thinking. It's as though he dug his hand into our brains and scooped the picture out of 'em. It was totally cool, and then he threw in all this extra neat stuff that we hadn't even thought of...a lot of the details are all his, and the strip on the inside of the lyrics to "Jersey Sky".
I'd sorta had this idea that it might be cool and I asked him to do it. I didn't really have any idea whether it would turn out good or not, because you know I can be kinda precious about my words basically, and it came back way better than I thought it coulda turned out. I was so happy and proud of that.
C: Do you guys have any plans for a video off the new album?
T: We still have plans for videos off the old records, honestly! (laughs)Ah yes, it's just a question of what song we decide to plunk down the money on. We'll see how it goes with radio.
C: The video you did for "Donna Everywhere" was directed by Penn & Teller?
T: It was actually directed by Teller. It was Penn's idea and Teller directed it. It was great fun, but the thing is, Teller doesn't say a word onstage but boy is he a loudmouth when he's directing! (laughs) It was really fun, the only thing was, he saw us drinking beers and he asked us to stop. And you know, because we're sort of WASPy, non-confrontational type people (in real life, not onstage in the band) rather than just go "no, this is what we do," it was like we were back in junior high school, hiding our beers in cups and soda cans and stuff so he wouldn't know. But it was fun..we just took over a mall in Topeka, Kansas.
C: How did you get to work with [rapper] KRS-One on "Goodkill"?
T: Let's see...Our publicist at the time, who ended up marrying Sandy, the former bass player, also worked with KRS-One at that time and we were big fans of his, always had been. And Sandy had been talking to KRS one day and he said, "you know, you should do something on our album!" We're whores basically; whenever we meet anyone famous or semi-famous or semi-talented we're like, "Oh, we should work together one day!" And you know, no one had ever said yes before but all of a sudden he was like "okay" and it was really cool. We went through the album and he had to go back to New York but he still wanted to do it. So we sent him a DAT with the music in the right channel and he tried several different raps over it and recorded them in the left channel and we picked one and it turned out great.
C: A few years back Too Much Joy were touring with the Wonder Stuff and there was some sort of problem. What happened?
T: To this day we don't have a satisfactory answer. The tour was going great, we were selling out every room we were in and it was a perfect opening headliner slot basically, we were bringing in fans of our own which pretty much helped fill up the club. We were introducing them to the Wonder Stuff and at the same time winning over the Wonder Stuff's fans for ourselves. We thought everything was going great; it might have been going a little too great, I'm not sure. It's just that the Wonder Stuff were...well, drunken English bastards, as far as that goes! (laughs) We made a couple of attempts to get to know them, not in an ass-kissing way, not to be buddies or anything, but just to be friendly. They were all rebuffed, and I don't know, they were just really miserable and at odds with each other and with everybody on that tour. We did a show in Asbury Park..we had two nights off and then we were going to D.C. and at the end of the night we just said, "See you guys in a couple days in D.C." and they're all like, *effects British accent* "Royt, royt, see you there." We pull up in front of the club two days later and the club says, "oh you can't unload your van, you guys aren't playing, didn't they tell you?" We'd been kicked off the tour and no one had bothered telling us. It was a really messed up situation because you know, both bands had the same booking agent at the time and our own agent had to tell us we couldn't do these shows they'd booked for us and they swore up and down they weren't going to stand for it, they were going to talk the Wonder Stuff out of it, that they couldn't do that, that it wasn't up to them, they were just being jerks. Then all of a sudden [the agent] just turned around and said, "you know what, sorry about this guys, just go on home and we'll make it up to you." And we ditched that agency shortly thereafter. It was not a happy scene.
C: Was that before or after you guys wrote the song, "Long-haired Guys From England"?
T: Oh that was after. We were doing that song every night on tour, in fact the first night of the tour we asked them (not that we were going to stop if they minded), "Oh, you don't take offense at that, do you?" And they were like, "No no...we're the long-haired guys from England! We think it's funny..ha ha!" And they seemed to mean it at the time.
C: What kinds of beer do you guys like the best?
T: I'm a Molson Golden man, myself. I also like Red Stripe and I'll drink a Sam Adams now and again. I guess Sam Adams and Red Stripe come in brown bottles, but I'm mostly a green-bottle boy, as long as it's not Rolling Rock.
C: I got your first album, Green Eggs and Crack [long out of print] and I think it's good. Do you think that's ever going to be available again?
T: Yeah, the thing is we kept telling everybody we were going to put it out in 1993 but then the problem is, we put out Mutiny and then we had problems finding a new record company and the time between Mutiny and the new album just started getting so long we didn't want anyone to think Green Eggs and Crack was our next album. We're just so young and learning on it! And now if anything it'll probably be even longer because if we put out anything that's not a new record, it's going to be all the songs we have a backlog of from these sessions. I want it to happen so people will stop stealing it from college radio stations, that bums me out! I hate it when people come up to me and go, "yeah man! Sign this!" and when I ask where they got it, they go "I stole it from my college radio station!" like that makes them cool or something. It's like not returning books to the library!
C: I was really disappointed last year when I tried to go out and replace all of the old TMJ albums on CD and they're all out of print.
T: Yeah, that just happened last year. Someone was over at my apartment one day and they knew I was in a band but they had never heard it and they asked to me to play something. So I thought I'd put on "Crush Story" since this wasn't really a rock-type person. I thought this is pretty, this will win them over, and I put on the CD and it started skipping! I thought, Oh no! My only copy of my own record is messed up! I went to the store to buy another one and I couldn't find them anywhere so I had to go to the flea market. It was very depressing!
C: You guys have the best liner notes of any band i know...is the whole band responsible for writing that or what?
T: Basically it's a lot like the lyrics. I'll sit down and write 'em, then submit 'em for the band's approval. And they'll nitpick, throw in a stray line here or there. It's a group process but it begins me.
C: Other than the Who, what are your favorite bands?
T: Actually the thing about the Who, especially with this record is, alot of that's Bill. I guess on the cover of ...Finally there's a Kiss album, a Clash album, and a Who album. Basically Doug Allen had given us blank spaces for three different records but there's four guys in the band so Jay and I both chose London Calling so that sort of solved that problem. But I was a huge Who fan when I was a teenager, still a pretty big Who-ophile, but apart from them I would probably say The Clash are probably #1 of all-time for me. Currently I like...well, the Flaming Lips are pretty happening and the Mekons now and forever will be good. I like the Wedding Present too; that's off the top of my head.
And thus, after a couple more minutes of chatting about other stuff like Star Wars, the conversation ended. Having been illuminated about a number of points, I slouched back to my hole, to wait for the next record. We can only hope it doesn't take too long.
