Greg Mental Interview Pt. 4 (The fav LOC records)

Winding down at this point. Please note that this was all taking place in a pre Free Spirit world, and Raw Life was just about to be released. 

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

What's the deciding factor in whether or not you'll work with a band?

(Laughs) seriously, I'd like to keep working with bands that have a similar sound, but at the end of the day it's not about them sounding like established LOC bands, it's about releasing hardcore records that I'd wanna put on my iPod or turntable.

Do you have a favorite Lockin Out release? I know these questions are tough but there's got to be some you're especially happy with.

One is definitely Stop and Think's Both Demos. They were an inspirational band for me at the time, doing something I thought was really cool when everything else was getting boring. Through that, AJ and Joey C became two of my best friends, and I think back on that shit like nothing else. Also, I legitimately love those demos. People either get it or they don't. 

Another one is Righteous Jams Rage of Discipline. One of the best hardcore records ever made, no doubt. 

Number 3 is Mental's Planet Mental. It's kinda cheesy to pick my own band's record, but whatever. It's my favorite shit that Mental ever put out. I'm glad I got to do it myself and that band and time period was just a great period in my life. 

Runner up would be Rampage Limit of Destruction. I love their sound. A lot of people sleep on them, but I think they are one of the greatest LOC bands I've ever worked with.

I'm definitely stoked they've come together to bless us with a full length. The cover artwork is great too.

Yeah, I think it was either the drummer Ben or the singer Josh who did it. Both are ill at drawing.

Any Lockin Out releases you'd rather forget?

The Terror LP was kind of a dumb move on my part just because of the hoops I had to jump through for Trustkill. I'd love to do something with Terror again but it would have to be 100% me. It had nothing to do with the band, I love those dudes. It had everything to do with their label. I wouldn't say I regret it, I just wish I would've stodd up for myself more in the situation. A similar kind of deal happened with the second Righteous Jams LP. Again, I don't regret them because I learned how that type of situation will pan out and now I'll be sure never to agree unless it's a little more in my favor. As records, I'm perfectly happy with them. It was just the label bullshit I had to deal with that I'd rather forget...label royalties and such. It just wasn't a wise move on my part.

Does it ever bug you when people reference a LOC "sound" or "style" or anything like that?

I think it's cool that my label has become a verb. It means that I did something that wasn't a trend or a fad. A LOT of people called it that when it was just getting off the ground (laughs). They can now line up to suck me off. 

I'm tempted to say that Lockin Out would lose its identity if it started releasing material from lots of different "styles" or bands, but then again...I dunno. Look at Rev. I mean, they hardly do "youth crew" stuff anymore, but they're pretty much synonymous with that just because of their early catalog.

Yeah, I think it would dilute it though. I'd not something I'm trying to do right now. I like the niche I've made for my label and will continue to release bands that I like and really that's just it. If they are a little bit different, I won't be too concerned. I think most of my releases are consistent. At least that's what I'm aiming form. I think the next 3 Lockin Out releases will prove that.

Can you drop any hints? Let's just say I'm out of the internet pipeline...

The New Lows EP is one of my favorite hardcore records I've heard in a long time. This band The Rival Mob has a great demo out and will be doing an EP this summer. Think think both those bands, and RZL DZL have an "older" sound to them, more consistent with like..."older" LOC releases. 

Gratitude Fanzine #1 + Ride the Fury #3 (Weekly Seizure - 11.24.13)

I got to live out a middle school obsession and see Monster Magnet this week. If you happen to be a fan of the Magnet, get in touch. I'm thinking about starting a usenet forum. This week I got a few zines, namely Edgegazer and Gratitude, and the ever growing stack on my desk of things to review just keeps getting less and less tamed.

1) Ride the Fury - Pro Wrestling Zine #3

I caught this one on the last go-around and liked it enough to order again. Many of you already know I'm a wrasslin' fan across the board, and I'm glad that there's some ink being dedicated to the similarities between the cultures. I'm also prone to buy things which have "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan on them.

USA! USA!

The zine also came with a homemade Ring of Honor DVD which I haven't watched yet, but is from a good era of that promotion. I'm stoked on this zine but have a few gripes. There's some really great purely wrestling zines right now (Atomic Elbow here in the states, and Calling Spots in the UK). The layout is a little too "indesign" ish, to the point where the interview with Jam of Code Orange Kids is almost unreadable due to weird spacing errors. However, it saves itself with a few gems. One being an interview with Tom Sheehan in which he tells a story about Indecision touring with Milhouse and Silent Majority and how they gave a shirt to Perry Saturn at a rest stop. I'm also a big fan of the question "If your parents said you could bring back one wrestler who passed away to come back to life to eat Thankgiving with you, who would it be?" Bummed no one said "Ravishing" Rick Rude though. That's my answer, no question.

Nope, that ain't NYC Mayhem-era Tommy Carrol. RIP Brother

Overall, it's sick, the DVD is a nice flourish and I loved issue 2. The fuzzy layouts may seem like a persnickety gripe, but my eyes suck and it was kind of a stumbling block here. Much respect to the back cover image though, a full on HBK tribute mural.

Barbershop Window

DVD's, zines, demos and anything else related to Ride the Fury records (including the above reviewed zine) at their bigcartel. 

2. Gratitude #1

I don't feel even remotely hyperbolic by calling this the best zine of 2013. As a means of disclosure, I actually contributed the Rampage centerfold, but my bias isn't any issue. Gratitude takes after the zenith-era of brilliantly written core culture zines Lockin Out #1 Fanzine and Trumbull Escapades. These zines were insular, obsessive and academic in ways few other zines were, and at times even genius. I won't sell this one that hard. You're either into the aforementioned zines and therefore 'get it' or you don't. I am going to leave this, my favorite quote in the entire zine because it absolutely articulates my position on Metallica better than anything I've ever managed to pen...and i wrote an entire 60-page senior capstone project on them in college. (Not a joke:

What's cool about Metallica is: everything. I revel in seeing them bum people out by doing things they sincerely think are great. Sometimes I don't even know if what they're doing IS great, there's just too much history there for me to make heads or tails of it. The world's finest authors couldn't make up a character like Lars Ulrich if it was their life opus - the closest we have is Pete Campbell from Mad Men. God bless them both. --Leah Geragosian (@diahleah)

Top notch content and contributors, excellent art, footnotes (!) and the best Free Spirit interview I've ever read. There's a few of them here at the Mosher's Delight bigcartel. Get on the right wagon, bunko. 

Me and the dog will show you who's hard

R is for Rampage

I don't behave. I be-slave.

I still think Rampage is one of the lesser praised bands in the Lockin Out canon, which is weird. They're pretty much the only band from the early era (within the first 10 releases) who still plays the occasional show. 

I probably got this picture from a Tee Till Death post or something,  mostly because I don't remember seeing their gear floating around too much. A friend of mine had the shirt with the gorilla holding up the letters, Donkey Kong style, but it was a color way that I wasn't crazy about. This is just the artwork from Heads in a Vice, a record that's got more than enough play for me at the gym (cliche, I know). This is a cool shirt, but I can't help but gawk at those heinous pit stains. Seriously, it looks like someone rubbed a grey oil pastel under them rosies.

I'm a sweaty guy, so I feel this pain. I've gone through the shameful experience of sweating through a coating of deodorant in a matter of hours. "Oh, you're getting pit stains? Try using a deodorant that doesn't have an anti-persirant in it. There's metal in there that reacts with your sweat." Sounds like a load of hippie-speak, but it's probably true. Problem is, I need an anti-persperant. I'll sweat through anything else. I'm also not a big fan of the whole "tee shirt under a tee shirt" thing either. So yeah...I've got some really serious problems in my life. Not as serious as the time I bought some "medical grade" sweat stopper from a local Kroger and ended up setting fire to the first 4 layers of skin under my arms...ugh. Can anyone vouch for Botox?

Oh, Rampage rules. The LP was one of the best of the decade, and the art ruled. Know your history.

VEST-iges of Life on the Wrong Side (Inky Fanzine Nugget #2)

Wake up before dawn, it's already pounding me...

Looking back on the "2000s" era of hardcore, my genesis era, I'm sometimes entirely overtaken by douche-chilling memories of boys in girl pants, man breasts filling out youth medium tees and the ubiquitous "YOU'RE SCUM" Outbreak shirt that at least one kid sported at every show between 2004-2006. Still, like a retarded moth to a raging flame, I perused the B9 board today to find that old sleeping beast, the "trends from 2000's hardcore" thread had been brought out of e-core retirement. The comment? "The bubble vest/hoodie combo."

How could I have forgotten? An excellent vestige of hardcore fashion, that might still be kicking (or may have died out, along with studded belts and Guns Up) but was certainly seared into my immediate sphere of influence via "cooler" bands from the Northeast playing my town and covering Life of Agony. Anyway, I got to thinkin', and poring through the ol' zine collection and stumbled across this gem from the "can't quite keep 'em down" Wrong Side. Since my Drug Dogs interview with Chris Morgado is stuck somewhere in development hell (i.e. a storage locker on the West side of Salt Lake City), I'll throw this 'un up for your reading pleasure...because looka that! Dude rocks a bubble vest/hoodie combo!

Swinginnnn' YOU

Credit for the nugget goes to the excellent, and largely undercelebrated, Final Word fanzine. Active in the mid-later 2000's Final Word was a partnership between Pauly Edge and another guy named King Adross who gets ragged on a lot. I'd done some business with Pauly, designing a few Meltdown shirts (one I'm really proud of, and one I'm not) and found the guy to be super likeable and enthusiastic on the 'core...and his zine shows it. At one point, we spitballed some awesome Meltdown shirts, one of which involved two muscle-bound jarheads raiding a supermarket, copping armfulls of raw eggs and "ANYTHING FOR LEAN GAINS" on the back, and another with a Satanic creature dismembering an Atreyu shirt-clad pantywaist and "HIPSTER HOLOCAUST" emblazoned in some weird script around it. Alas, neither panned out, and it's a crying shame, but in a "business" with no contracts and only "good dude backed hard" recommendations to go on, many great ideas get tossed to the dogs. Anyway, peep this excellent exchange between Pauly and Chris Morgado on the subjects of moshing, Earth Crisis, The Bloodhound Gang and Hatebreed. The zine's gotta be long out of print, but if you're interested in some good readin' seek it out.

From Final Word Fanzine #3:

Pauly: You're known for going completely nuts at shows and doing some crazy shit. What are some of the craziest things you've ever done?
Morgado: (Laughs) Let me think. Down But Not Out shows always brought the craziest shit out of me I think. Their set at that last Proclamation show in particular...punching myself with brass knuckles, throwing chairs, one man wall-of-deathing kids, that was a good show. Q from the A-Team had a video of it. I sang "Life of my Own" and this kid Cappy we're friends with was in the pile on and you just heard THUD THUD THUD instead of the words, 'cuz I was hitting him with the mic. I know that sounds like some asshole shit, but whatever I do to people I have usually done to myself twice as hard in the same time frame. One time during Death Threat, I headbutted the stage so hard I blacked out. Moshing used to make me completely insane and unconscious of everything...now it's singing in the band that does it. I'm a much mellower mosher now, most of the time. Certain songs will still bring it out of me though, as will certain bands. "Why Must They?" and "Life of my Own" are guaranteed mind erasers for me, and Outbreak sets just make me the biggest asshole on the planet. If you were on stage during their set at Posi Numbers, I probably hit you. That goes for the guys in the band too. I fucking whaled on poor Ryan O and Chris a ton (laughs). They fucking love it though. For some reason it gets them really psyched and I think everyone knows it's not a malicious action; they just make me go nuts. I got what was coming to me anyways. I stage dove and bounced ribs first off the PA's at the end of the set, fucked myself up good for like, three months.

Pauly: A lot of people don't really give Earth Crisis the respect they're due. I know you said in another interview that Ten Yard Fight and Earth Crisis was your first 'real' hardcore show. What do you feel ExC did and how are bands influenced by 'em now?
Morgado: I know you're full of Syracuse pride Pauly, so this will bum you out and I'm sorry, but I think Earth Crisis ended up doing more harm than good. They were so over the top, politically, that to an extend it made straight edge a joke. You have to look at it from the mainstream sense, because ExC were the band that took the edge to the mainstream. That's something you can't separate when you talk about the band because that's one of the reasons they're still an important band from a historical perspective, despite how it turned out. I mean, the result was completely unintentional obviously, but for years anytime anyone found out I was straight edge it was like 'oh yeah, I saw that Earth Crisis band on CNN. How come you think you're better than me because of my leather shoes?' It was like you were automatically a little vegan soldier because you were straight edge. Fuck, occasionally it still happens to me. 'Oh yeah, I remember seeingthat on MTV in 1998. I thought that fad was over.' I respect that they were trying to spread a message and promote something good, but I think it bit them in the ass, in part because the media is bullshit, and in part because it was so over the top and deadpan. You know those dudes weren't shooting drug dealers and vivisectionists dead, but they were on TV all solemn and straight-faced...and I LIKE Earth Crisis! I hunted down the '93 demo and I think it's probably some of my favorite material, and the title track from Gommorah's Season Ends is one of those songs that makes me lose it. But as a political movement or whatever, I think they ended up making things worse for straight edge instead of better. For a while there, they made it huge, definitely, but all the kids I personally met who swore by ExC back then? I don't see all that many of them still edge or vegan today. Was it awesome to have a shitload of kids screaming 'A Firestorm to Purify!?', absolutely. Did the message have any lasting impact to the majority of the mass populace? Straight edge is considered a gang to cops all over the place now because of the Earth Crisis disciples in Salt Lake, does that count? Should that count?

Pauly: Who do you hope for the Wrong Side to tour with, since you guys have a lot more exposure on Stillborn records? I remember Stand Accused dropping off a Hatebreed show because they didn't want to play to the type of fans that Hatebreed brings out. How would you feel about touring with Hatebreed if you were given the chance?
Morgado: I don't think was why Stand Accused didn't play those shows, or if it was it wasn't wasn't the deciding factor. Obviously I would tour with Hatebreed in a second. I respect the hell out of Jamey and I'm told he's really into our record, the Blacklisted record too. That is a dude that just loves hardcore and has done so much for it. I went to so many shows in Connecticut when I was coming up, that were shows he booked at the Hanover House and so on. I saw him reaching out to hook up bands like Down But Not Out. Down But Not Out, the band who everyone knew would never reach their potential but wanted to, he was gonna do a record on Stillborn. They dawdled on it like they did everything else, and it never happened, but I've always remembered that he wanted to do that for them. It wasn't because they were huge scenesters like a lot of the bands who started at the same time as them, but because he just thought they were a great band. That has always stuck out for me. I met my wife at a show he booked, ya know? And Hatebreed is still the same band they always were musically. You can't tell me otherwise, they're just better at it now, like a whole 'nother level. That song "Doomsayer?" That's right up there with any Slayer song to me man. They're at that level of mainstream hard music, yet it's totally a hardcore song.

Pauly: What are your favorite Lockin Out bands?
Morgado: Righteous Jams without a doubt. The lineup they have right now has really come together so that their live show is completely tight. Everyone in that band is a great dude and the music they're making is just so awesome. It's so stripped down but it's still a current sound, ya know? It's hard to say Mental because everyone in my band is also in Mental, but they've really picked up their game from the 7" on Bridge 9 and rekindled all those feelings I had when they started with the 7" they just put out. That the best material they've done by far. It amazes me with the song-writing skills they possess to do that and still come up with what they come up with for the Wrong Side. I mean, to me, just on a personal level of being there when it started, that is Lockin Out to me: Mental, Dump Truck and RJ's. That's not trying to slight Rampage or Jaguarz or whoever, it's just that those three are who it started with. Those three and Crunch Time, that was like AJ and Greg's big thing when it started I think, that Crunch Time record. They really took that band under their wing.

Pauly: What bands do you like that no one would guess you'd like?
Morgado: As far as within the core, I like a bunch of what people would call tough-guy style hardcore bands, "thugcore" I guess they call it, like Death Before Dishonor from Boston. They have lots of songs to move to. Fury of Five, and Shattered Realm have stuff I really can get into as well. Nobody thinks I'm genuinely into that stuff but I am a little bit, I think it's cuz that style was so prevalent when I started going to shows at like 121 in Brockton, so it's like I have a soft spot for stuff that's hard as nails and causes spin kicks. I'm not talking like screamo metalcore with artsy lyrics and acoustic parts, I'm talking hard chugga-chugga hardcore about revenge and drugs and whatever. Outside of that, the strangest thing I really dig is this weird band called The Bloodhound Gang. I think they're hilarious, they're like slacker rap/punk stuff. They have this record called Hooray for Boobies and the leadoff track is just a great skank riff. It's called "I Hope You Die" and it's HIGH-larious to me.

LOL, We're gonna headline TIHC 2016

Lockin Out - Let's keep our fingers crossed

50% ain't bad. Let's see another Rampage LP.