Gimme Something Better (39 page)

Then I met our drummer Erik Sandin outside the Cathay de Grande, which was a punk club in Hollywood where I grew up. I had a Black Flag skateboard, and he was just, “Cool skateboard.” We started talking.

We were all 16 and had no idea how to play musical instruments. Lucky for us we wanted to play punk, therefore we didn’t need to know how to do anything. So Melvin, Smelly and I started writing songs and playing shows.

Mike LaVella:
A lot of their success is just the fact that they never did a comeback tour. From ’85 ’til now, they never stopped. Not too many bands can say that. There’s something to be said about the consistency. There’s some kind of chemistry between those guys where they’re like, “This is our job.”

Fat Mike:
No one ever liked us in L.A. It was a shitty town. So we just toured every summer and every vacation. We played places like CBGB’s, Mabuhay Gardens, and the Anthrax. No one liked us, but that was okay ’cause we were having a hell of a good time.

Mike LaVella:
I met him in ’85, they played in Pittsburgh in my neighbor’s basement. We just called our friends, “Some fuckin’ band from L.A. is playing in Nick’s basement.” Maybe 20 people came, but it was packed. I had all these fat-chick magazines in my room.
Gent
, all that shit. Mike was like, “Oh, you like fat chicks, too?” He was probably the first guy who was open and excited about someone else having fat-chick magazines.

Fat Mike:
The reason I moved to San Francisco—it sounds kind of corny or like I’m a loser. But I didn’t want to give up punk rock, and L.A. was really dangerous. In the summer of ’85, I went to a Dickies show in Santa Monica, and my friend got stabbed in the lung. For nothin’. He almost died. In San Francisco, skinheads were beating the shit out of everyone, too. But right when I moved here, they all left. So it was totally cool.

Noah Landis:
I went to S.F. State with him and we had a lot of talks. He was another person who spoke truth to power. To this day, he does not have any qualms about saying exactly what he thinks.

Fat Mike:
I studied social science. Minor in human sexuality. I was gonna be some kind of sex therapist.

Bucky Sinister:
When we graduated I was like, “What are you gonna do now?” And he said, “I’m gonna be a professional punk rocker!” I was like, “Ha ha!” Joke’s on us.

Fat Mike:
I used to graffiti NOFX everywhere we went. I’d wipe off the back of the toilet and write my band’s name there, ’cause everyone sees it, you know. I did that behind the toilet and in the urinal at the Farm. Of course, they got pissed at me. Most of our early shows were at the New Method Warehouse, but we’d played the Farm a couple times and we were trying to get a show. They said, “If you want to clean your graffiti off, then we’ll let you play here again.” And I fucking did. I went there, scrubbed the toilets, and got the NOFX name off of there. And then the Farm closed down. So we never got to play there again anyway.

In ’86 we toured with a band called Subculture. That was my first year of college and I had a food card. I gained 30 pounds in a year. So a lot of cities we went to, people were like, “Oh, you put on some weight, huh? Got a little fat there, didn’t ya?” They started calling me Fat Mike. Well, Mike—what kind of a name is Mike? There’s gotta be something. Mike Suicidal, Mike Fuck-Up. So Fat Mike works.

Mike LaVella:
People were really into Bad Religion, but I always liked NOFX more. They were more funny, more clever. Fat Mike is pretty charismatic.

Fat Mike:
We had to have a sense of humor because, this is totally serious, we were the worst band of the ’80s. The only thing we had going for us is maybe we were a little funny onstage. And we drank more than every other band. It was more of a fabulous disaster. That kept us going for awhile.

We kept on touring. In 1989 we wrote our first good song, “S&M Airlines.” Brett Gurewitz from Bad Religion heard it and signed us to Epitaph Records. Then we made the
S&M Airlines
LP. It was weird, people actually started to like us. From there on, things got better.

I didn’t really start the Fat Wreck label until ’91. Even though I put out early NOFX records in the ’80s, that wasn’t a label. I just printed records and sold it to a few distributors and sold them on the road.

Mike LaVella:
I was working at CD Presents. The world’s worst record distributor. Mike needed a job, and I hired him. He did the mail order, I was the salesman.

Fat Mike:
CD Presents, David Ferguson. He put out the Avengers record, and DOA record. The Institute for Unpopular Culture. That guy is the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever met. He burned Fat Wreck Chords for ten grand. Which, back then, was a lot of money.

Mike LaVella:
CD Presents became Buried Treasure. Nobody worked there but me and Mike. And then we hired Spike Slawson. Spike was my friend, and I introduced those two. Then Mike left. He was like, “I’m starting a label.” For his birthday, his wife made him business cards and stationery.

They reissued the
P.M.R.C.
7-inch, that was their first, and I was the distributor for it. I remember thinking, Jesus Christ, it’s easy to sell these NOFX records. People wanted them. In Germany, and wherever.

Jesse Luscious:
Until really recently, if you put out a record on Fat you were guaranteed 50,000 sales.

Fat Mike:
I don’t know, we’re fairly smart people. I mean, it’s not that hard. The goal isn’t how much you can get, it’s how much fun you’re having.

Spike Slawson:
He wanted to do good shit for his friends. I think that was the main drive behind doing that label. And he is a pretty good businessman.

Fat Mike:
We put out Tilt, Dance Hall Crashers, No Use for a Name from San Jose, Dieselboy from North Bay.

Mike LaVella:
Most of the bands sounded vaguely like NOFX. He was like, “Well, if we can sell X amount, then I’ll sign the bands.” He was in a unique situation. He could do NOFX EPs or a live album on Fat, but he kept NOFX on Epitaph for a long time. Because by that time Epitaph had the Offspring, that sold 7 million. And they had Pennywise, and all that crap. And he knew they were solid. Like, this check is always gonna come in.

Davey Havok:
The one independent label that no one has anything but good things to say about is Fat Wreck. Fat Mike does it from a place of pure love of music.

Dave Chavez:
NOFX ruined punk rock, as far as I’m concerned. Mike LaVella: They were not respected very much by the rock ’n’ roll people here. Mike would go to Europe, and bring me back these posters for festivals they played. Hole and New Order had opened for them. I’m like, “New Order opened for you?!” And then they’d play the Bottom of the Hill for 75 people.

Fat Mike:
Tim Yohannan always spoke highly of us. When people would bitch about us being jokes, he always said, “Yeah, but they’re kind of a cool band. I don’t really see what they’re doing wrong.” He was one of the reasons NOFX got credibility, and kept credibility.

Fat Mike:
Despite what people think, we have always been political in our records. Our very first 7-inch had a political song, but live, we didn’t preach. We were funny live.

A. C. Thompson:
There was actually a debate at Epicenter about a NOFX record called
Heavy Petting Zoo
, which had a cover of a person petting a sheep in a suggestive way. There was a sense that this was offensive to both women and sheep, and the vegans on staff were not going to stand for this.

My point was, there are no women in the picture, so how could this be offensive to women? If you can’t make fun of sheep, then you really can’t make fun of anything.

Fat Mike:
We were actually banned from Gilman. For what?! The thing is we used to play Gilman and we’ve always taken a stand against major labels. There were four and a half months where we didn’t know what the fuck to do. Green Day got really big and Offspring got big, and major labels wanted to sign us. We met with one major label and just felt so disgusted. So that was it.

Heavy Petting Zoo: NOFX’s sixth full-length album

Fraggle:
NOFX always played sold-out shows at Gilman. Always. People would come from all over. There was a whole San Francisco crowd that would only come out for big shows.

Mike LaVella:
They played well to kids.

Fat Mike:
First time we headlined there, 80 people came. I got hit in the face with a basketball. Just when I came onstage. I was like, “Hi, we’re NOFX, we’re from L.A.”
Bam!
Welcome to Gilman.

Mike LaVella:
We once had this big fight because Mike liked Manhattan Transfer. I was like, “Dude, they’re shit. You should listen to Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.” I went out and bought the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross album, gave it to him. But he preferred Manhattan Transfer. Think about that. Gloss it up, take the soul out of it, take the jazz out of it. That’s what he did with punk rock. I really thought those records were overproduced. There was no raw edge.

Blag Jesus:
Most people don’t look at music in a complete way, and that helps you market it better. A guy like Fat Mike loves punk rock, period. And he sold a couple million records doing just that. Try to be real expansive, you lose people ’cause they don’t give a fuck.

Mike LaVella:
When Me First and the Gimme Gimmes first started, Fat Mike came to my house and went through my record collection. He was like, “This would make a cover, this would make a cover.” All those early Me First singles and the first album, they’re just records from my collection. They would just put “Me First and the Gimme Gimmes” over the top of “Allan Sherman,” or whatever.

Spike Slawson:
I was the shipping manager at Fat Wreck. I wasn’t very good at it.

Fat Mike:
He was drunk a lot. I wrote the song “Go to Work Wasted,” so what do I expect? My employees show up drunk!

Spike Slawson:
I must have smelled like a distillery.

Fat Mike:
My wife said, “We really have to get rid of this guy.” It’s because I wanted to fire him from Fat Wreck Chords, I put together this band and said, “Take it on the road.”

Spike Slawson:
I was doing karaoke at the time at the Mint, which is a gay bar in the Castro. I would sing in the warehouse while I was shipping. Mike said, a lot of the best songs on any record by a new punk band is the cover, so let’s just do a whole record of them, a whole set of them.

Fat Mike:
We started playing San Francisco. The whole idea was to put out 7-inches, no CDs. We were just going to play San Francisco. Just bars. It lasted for a couple years like that.

Spike Slawson:
Cover bands are for bars.

Audra Angeli-Slawson:
They did their first show at the Chameleon in early ’97, which was tiny. Now it’s just crazy. We recently came from Japan and the Gimmes played in front of 40,000 people. It was a festival, but still. It’s a phenomenon. Spike always says, “I don’t know why people like our cover band.” It’s because they are fucking hilarious and fun.

The first time I met Fat Mike, I was doing stage security. He said, “You’re a badass!” We’ve had a mutual admiration society since then. I work with them, doing a lot of stuff. I do production and wardrobe. I tour-mom. If I don’t feed them, they won’t eat. They’re my children. And all their wives are happier because they know the boys are taken care of.

And fuck if Fat Mike doesn’t bail me out of trouble a lot. I’ve had Incredibly Strange Wrestling shows at the Fillmore where my headliner has canceled, and Fat Mike got NOFX to play, didn’t even think twice about it. Sold out the room for me.

Noah Landis:
Hats off to him. He’s lucky enough to have had success with his music and his label, to have had the time and means to do things.

Jesse Michaels:
Fat Mike took his power and put it to real, tangible use with Rock Against Bush. This tour went on for months, and planted seeds in the minds of an enormous mall-culture generation that wouldn’t go anywhere near a protest march.