P: The Sleepers connection was based on Tim and Ricky and Craig, and Michael Belfer, because they were all kinda like buddies. Negative Trend and the Sleepers were both playing Mabuhay Garden and around San Francisco at the time. That was while I was in Seattle playing with the Meyce and the Enemy.

M: That’s how you pronounce that (Meyce), like mice?

P: Yeah. Go to the EMP (Experience Music Project) website — both of the Seattle bands I was in are featured. We were the ones who ‘started it all’ — according to them, we played the first ‘punk rock’ show in Seattle. The TMT Show: it was the Telepaths (later the Blackouts), Meyce, and Tupperwares, who later became the Screamers.

M: Were there were a lot of people in drag there?

P: Well, I wouldn’t say drag. The Tupperwares’ friends were drag queens and stuff like that. And then the Telepaths bass player . . . he was Japanese and dressed up in a Nazi uniform. The lead singer molded himself on Iggy Pop, so you can take it from there. It was a bizarre scene that’s for sure. Penelope (Houston) was the doorman — she went out with Damon from the Enemy, which is another weird thing. Shortly after the TMT Show she moved to S.F. and formed the Avengers. That’s how we were able to stay with Negative Trend later on when the Enemy went down to San Francisco. It’s a small little world.

P: By the time I got to San Francisco the Sleepers had broken up. But one of the first singles I ever bought was that Sleepers EP that had five songs on it [nerd collectors note: Seventh World EP, Win Records, 1978], and this guy I was staying with knew of them and went to all the gigs. So he was basically filling me in on music scene. The Sleepers’ drummer really reminded me of the Telepaths drummer, and they told me there was a left-handed Les Paul guitar player in the band, just like Erich Werner from the Telepaths. And Ricky was kinda like the singer for the Telepaths. So I felt an affinity for them right away.

Later, when I ran into Craig, I said, ‘yeah man I gotta find this Tim Mooney guy, he’s really great.’ And he goes, ‘ oh, well he’s in my band.’ I thought that was kinda weird. Then when Craig asked me to join the band on guitar without hearing anything I’d been doing (I’d stopped playing bass by then), the whole thing just kind of got weirder and weirder. I just kind of looked at it like an act of God or something. I always liked the Sleepers, and Craig always liked the Sleepers. They broke up and got back together a couple times. But the sound similarities . . . I mean we never tried to sound like them, we just tried to sound like ourselves. But we did gigs with them from time to time, when they got back together. Sometimes Ricky would do one show with them, and the next week did a show with us.

P: He was such a huge influence on both me and Craig, with his sound and the way he would arrange music. The Bowie stuff especially, but I thought the SLAUGHTER ON TENTH AVE. LP was the epitome of all those things, the culmination of the ZIGGY STARDUST/ALADDIN SANE thing. Ronson . . . I mean he had the rock songs, but he also brought in the sort of Broadway thing. Even live he had a horn section on stage, and these back-up singers. He just played what’s important, and let everyone else play what they’re gonna play, and it’s all in the mix so you can hear it. And I think that was what Craig and I really liked, and we were hoping to bring (that) to our own music. And also (producer Tom) Mallon helped us out, in terms of keeping it simple, allowing us to freak out in the studio.

M: So you guys were essentially instrumental for the first, what . . .

P: We were together for 3 years before we broke up for the first time. The first year was instrumental, the second year was with Ricky, and the third year was instrumental again. That’s more or less how it went.

P: He was into psychic phenomena, you know, talking to the dead, and ancestors. And also Charlie Manson and Jim Morrison: these guys who could control crowds. Aleister Crowley. Maybe in part because of the Indian burial grounds — he lived up sort by a nature preserve or something like that. He wanted to be menacing, and he wanted to be kind of like ‘evil’ and stuff, but you couldn’t really take him seriously. If you were kinda close to him, you didn’t take him so seriously.

Ricky grew up near Palo Alto or Mountainview or someplace like that. And that’s about when the computer chip explosion started to happen. And you’d see all these big satellite dishes, which to us in '80-'81-'82, were very strange. I, for one, totally love the space shuttle IMAX film, and orbital photographs of the earth, space pictures, and so forth. And that sort of all lent in with this whole computer explosion . . . we kinda got this feeling we were living in a ‘Microage’, like microcomputer, microchip, etc. And also we’d really been into science-fiction. We really related to Blade Runner, and those sorts of alienated, 1984-like movies . . .

M: THX-1149?

P: Right. We did some photos down there in the same area where Lucas filmed some of that, in the BART tunnels.

P: Ricky, in terms of his lyrics and stuff, was pretty much what we were . . . well, we couldn’t find too many singers we really liked, and he was one of them. So when he showed up one day at my house — I was on my way to the recording studio — I was like, ‘hey man, come on over!’ He came and actually he recorded the tracks for "Destiny" in one take, and he’d never heard the song before. He basically just came up with the lyrics on the spot. And he had to write them down later, so he knew what they were.

P: Ricky was totally unpredictable. When we had finished recording and mastering the record (SEA OF UNREST), and I got this phone call: "RICKY’S AT THE STUDIO OVERDUBBING VOCALS AND DESTROYING TRACKS!" So we went over there, and tried to get him to stop. He was fucked up, he spilled a beer on Tom’s mixing board. And Tom was about to kill Ricky, literally. And so I sort of intervened, and started tickling Ricky. He ended up flailing around like a whale on the ground, laughing hysterically. By this time everyone was cracking up — which ultimately probably saved Ricky from getting pummeled by Tom, who by this time thought it was funny.

P: Ricky started showing up at our later shows with Eiztel, and he (Ricky) would say, ‘come on man, lemme sing, lemme sing a song.’ And eventually we did let him up on stage to sing a song. Then we were about to go on tour, Eiztel left the band. So we went on tour without Eitzel, and when we came back we called up Ricky to see if he was healthy.

At the time, he was wearing this electronic device on his ankle because he had been arrested for attacking some biker with a butter knife. He was straight and sober for the first time in his life, and he was freaking out. But we started rehearsing with him, and we recorded a bunch of tracks, and it seemed like things were gonna happen again. And we did a show, and right after the show he died.

M: So he was actually in the band when he died?

P: Yeah. He was ill to begin with; I guess he didn’t realize it but he had a collapsed lung and he had pneumonia. He was so used to being on some drug or another, or alcohol, when he performed, that to be straight and perform was too weird for him. And he drank a bunch and took some pills and stuff before the show — downers of some kind. I couldn’t tell if it affected him or not. He seemed totally energetic and sang pretty well. There were some things that were off about it, but I figured that was because he was straight. And afterwards some of his fans said to him, ‘hey man, come party with us.’ But Ricky was kinda flipped out . . . I talked to him in front of the club afterwards and he was like, ‘what was the show like?’ and he seemed kinda paranoid that it wasn’t any good or something. And I just said, ‘hey don’t worry about it, it was fine. Who cares if it was good or not — it’ll get better in no time.’

The next day, Craig and I got this phone call from Tom that Ricky had died of a heroin overdose that night. I mean it was a combination of all those things: the pills, the alcohol, the collapsed lung, the pneumonia, and the heroin. That was 1992. It was Nov. 22^nd, I remember, because the Kennedy assassination was the 22^nd.

P: Eiztel was a huge Ricky fan to begin with — I think that was one reason he wanted to sing with us. But then after a while Eitzel showed up, and after that we started recording a record. And after a while Matador got interested, because Gerard (Cosloy, Matador head honcho) was . . . the Midgets were his favorite band in high school. And Eiztel was also one of his favorites, he liked American Music Club — so he thought that we were just the perfect band.

M: So Mark was actually a member, he wasn’t just a guest singer?

P:Yeah, he was a member for about a year. AMC had officially broken up, or they didn’t do anything the year we were playing.

In terms of what Mark’s input was . . . he basically came into rehearsals and tried out a bunch of lyrics. When it came down to recording, he recorded a bunch of stuff, but he wasn’t around when we were editing. We edited the crap out of his lyrics, because he just wouldn’t shut up — he went on and on and on and on and on. There were several takes of each song.

I thought Eitzel was very successful, in terms of what we put on the record. I don’t know, because he never told us, but I thought he didn’t like what we did with it. And that was one reason he left the band.

He had some other problems. I don’t know what the deal was, but he was drinking a lot, and didn’t want to hang out very often, didn’t want to talk about what he was doing except in the context of rehearsals. And then he’d be drunk at shows, and not easy to talk to. So when he said he wasn’t going to do it anymore I don’t think anyone was surprised. I thought it was too bad. But later on when he started badmouthing us in the press . . .

M: I didn’t know about that. In his little biography — which I didn’t read, by the way — I did flip through it looking for something about the Toiling Midgets. And there’s like one little line about you guys in there.

P: Right. He doesn’t want to talk about it, I don’t even know why. Personally I thought he had a crush on Craig, and Craig rebuffed him or something.

M: Tell me what your gigs were like — they were generally instrumental?

P: Yeah. Tim would be late — you could count on that. But he had the car, so . . . we’d be waiting at China Blue (which was our rehearsal studio) for him. Unfortunately it would kind of alienate some of the club owners, and after a while we just said, ‘man, you gotta get it together.’ And that wouldn’t even always work. But basically that’s how it would start.

Once we were there and everything, we would kind of huddle up during the set before we went on and just sort of hang out together. And usually if we did that, the shows were pretty good. If we didn’t hang out together right before it was pretty scattered, and it didn’t turn out very well. But Tim would bring a bunch of toys, you know like monkeys, and pictures of flaming skulls, and weird, macabre things to hang off his drum set, off of mic stands, and all around the stage. Later on Kim Seltzer would have some of her paintings, like a slide show, behind us.

We’d usually start off just by jamming, and a lot of the set would be just jamming. We would improvise and do a lot of noise things . . . I mean Tim & Craig were so strong rhythmically, we’d would just fall into some kind of groove and just do some whacked out, sonic things. And we’d have a lot of skateboarders at the shows.

M: I can’t imagine that. So these kids would find your music, like, skateable or whatever?

P: Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Jack’s Team, but that was Jonathan the bass player and couple of his friends. They tried to teach me how to skateboard . . . it was kinda dangerous around S.F., but I started out learning when I was 21, and that’s a little old, they were all young when they started . . .

But you’d have all these skateboard kids, and at some of the shows they’d be skating around the club, doing donuts on their boards while we were playing. They’d call it "Absolute Music" for some reason.

When Ricky was in the band, he’d always show up late too. Usually he came with a girlfriend, a nurse — like a rock ‘n’ roll nurse, you know like in that song by the Dolls. And usually we’d have to a have a contract with the woman, to make sure that he was there on time.

Once we played with the Cramps at the Old Waldorf, and he wasn’t there, we had to start, so we just started by jamming. And they recorded it, and it was actually live on the radio, which was really hilarious. But he arrives, and he’s got an armful of magazines. And he just ran up to the stage, dumped the magazines on the stage, and he started improvising lyrics about all the articles he’d been reading in the magazines.

With this live thing of Tim and Craig and I facing each other . . . it’s all true, but it was more like circling the wagons, you know.

M: To get into the groove, the heavy rhythm thing?

P: It was. We were just focused on Tim basically, so that we could lock-in. Tim and Craig especially, because they were just so tight. He was the rhythm guitarist, and I did all the whacked stuff. What we used to tell people was that Craig played time, and I played space.