You may call this site a mishmash but to me there’s little difference between a record of my favourite punkrockwavers the LOST SOUNDS and ‘Twentynine Palms’, the third movie by one of my favourite French directors Bruno Dumont. Both deal with desperate earth-shattering violence in a unique way. Both express feelings of alienation, betrayal and hatred. Both are totally in your face. Love it or leave it. At the end of 2003, I got the chance to interview the Lost Sounds after an intense set at the Pit’s. I confronted leadsinger Jay Jay with one of my favourite quotes from Bruno Dumont which you can read at the top of this page. When I asked Jay Jay for a comment, I didn’t get much of a reply. Later on during the interview, he suddenly admitted that he agreed with Bruno Dumont’s view. The Lost Sounds on Freud's coach...

For years, we were anxious to see you guys live on stage so needless to say that the 45 minutes show tonight was way too short.

J

Rock 'n' Roll!!!

A

I didn’t care that you freaked out on the audience. All I care is that somebody puts money into a show and then you cost them even more money by kicking over their equipment. I don’t care what you do to the audience, I care to the people who put money into the show. You don’t fuck with those people.

A couple of years ago, you played with The Reatards in Belgium and you were really sick which made your music sound even more desperate & destructive.

J

The Belgian show was fun. That was a good one.

R

It was fun. It was a peaceful night. It was mellow because Jay ate a lot of spacecakes and the danger level had dropped down quite and I could relax for once.

J

That’s why the band had to stop because it became dangerous.

R

A lot of things were being thrown at us. PA monitors were crashing down, broken bottles and chairs were flewing around. We had a lot of group activity… (laughter)

Why exactly did you disband The Reatards?

J

I personnaly felt that it went as far as it could go. I mean, basically, I don’t think I could have made an angrier album than that second Reatards album (Grown Up, Fucked up) unless like, somehow or other, you could make a record that kills someone when he plays it. I mean, I don’t think there was any progression, there was nowhere else for it to go. It was to the point where if I would have kept playing with that band, I was like seriously thinking, fuck, why not just bringing a semi-automatic weapon to the show and fuckin’ waste everybody!

A

No, it was because Jay started smoking weed! (laughter)

Hatred is omnipresent in your music. Is anger just an energy or do you love to hate?

R

I don’t hate so I’m the wrong person to ask. Talk to these two, they write the lyrics behind the songs.

(complete silence)

Let me put it otherwise. What inspires you?

J

I don’t know. I think it’s pretty frustrating to be a human, to be just a redneck kid from the south.

A

It seems like the world is really beautiful and then, especially in America, people do ruin it. It seems like the people in charge are just regular everyday people who don’t show anything special about them to make them leaders. Somehow or other, most of my songs are political because I don’t like who’s in charge as they’re not smart people. I don’t know. I’m not as hateful as Jay though, because Jay is definitely full of hate.

J

(cynical laugh) I am just realistic, that’s all. If you wanna know why our music is so hateful, it’s because I’m convinced that America is gonna incinerate half the fuckin’ world and then everybody’s gonna kill everybody and we’re probably gonna start it. The human race is a cancer growing on a planet in a desperate mood of a radiation therapy. I agree with your French director.

A

The thing that really pisses me off about the US and people like George Bush is that they base themselves in Christian beliefs that top of the line says “Thou Shall Not Kill”. I’m not a Christian but I still believe that.

R

Our country is too far gone.

Do you get inspiration out of other musician’s work?

J

I don’t listen to records, really. I don’t hang out listening to music. When I first started making music, I would listen to other people’s music, trying to get inspired, to get ideas. But nowadays, it’s a lot easier to walk down the street where I live. It’ll get you pissed off and than you get home and start writing a song.

A

I always sit down with the intention to write something happy but it always comes out unhappy. Although I really love happy songs, I can’t write them.

J

Waking up in the morning and thinking everything’s OK? Shit, I can’t imagine because I know something’s going wrong around the corner. I mean I wake up and look out of the fuckin’ window at the grass and the birds and whatever and think, yeah, that stuff’s really easy. But than I think about the fact that I am a rock singer and than I get pissed off again, pissed off about being mortal, about having only two arms and not been able to pick up more than two things at once…

Your music is a great emotional outlet for an ordinary fan like me. As a musician, I suppose you have the same kind of feeling.

J

Without music, I would be in jail. I was on that path. Before I played music, I just basically beat people off. I was on my way to become a complete scumbag. I really stopped beating the shit out of people about the time I started listening to music because then, I could be in my bedroom and jump around and go fuckin’ crazy. Our music is fuckin’ primitive and I like that. A thing I hate is when somebody says “God, get realistic, it’s just music, it’s not everything.”

A

I went to art school because I liked drawing and I also played guitar. I was just messing around with it but I soon realised I had to get serious about it because I was going to become a real anti-social weirdo if I stayed on and only drew and painted on my own. I had to make a fuckin’ conscious decision to become social and to go out and talk to people.

J

The only thing that makes me feel good about the human race is when I’m playing some fuckin’ music and then having someone who can relate to it. And that’s the only way I can relate to other human beings. I feel like a fuckin’ animal.

A

I can’t understand being a human and not wanting to create something, whether it’s writing or just doing something visual. I can’t imagine being a human and working for a company and just working for somebody else and coming home everyday and feeling satisfied. I’m not saying it’s bad but I can’t imagine for myself.

J

I had a job that was like 8 to 5 that I did for about 6 months. I stopped playing music and I lived in an appartment with some other dudes. I didn’t record and I didn’t really go to shows because I was too young so I watched TV and I seriously was about to implode. Being a musician is a big sacrifice to stability, really nerve-wreckin’.

Next to the regular releases, you also release your demos & outtakes. Is there a special reason behind this?

J

All of us are really hyper-productive people. We practice, play a lot of shows, record a lot of songs, make a lot of songs together. Putting out various stuff like that keeps your music from being predictable and one-dimensional. I’m sure that she-bands like Aerosmith would still sound good today if they went back and made songs on a four track.

A

That’s how the music starts anyway, on a home-recording.

J

We have like 2 days a week to do shit as a band and if we only waited to do stuff with the whole band, a lot of ideas would be lost so it’s a chance for us to fuck around with a recorder.

When reading the Goner bulletin board, it seems like the Memphis scene is a family thing where everybody knows everybody...

Did the so-called garage explosion changed the scene in Memphis?

A

It’s kinda weird in Memphis because nobody ever came to Oblivians shows. Of course I didn’t care cuz I really liked it so I just thought it’s rockin’ and all the people who are in like the band and go crazy. So until that reunion no one really came but then they’re like such a popular band everywhere we go in Europe. Strangely enough in Memphis you can have a show with 20 people and you can have a show with 200 people. It’s a weird thing, you can never tell.

J

I think it had a negative effect on Memphis, it made people really bitter. I mean a lot of people that had been doing that kind of shit for really were already frustrated that their music wasn’t going the way that wanted it to go so it pissed ‘em off even more to see pretty boy taken what they were doing, dressing it up a bit, claiming them as influences and then going to the bank. I think for a lot of people it pissed them off. I think we’re one of the only few bands in town that got something positive out of it. I know the 3 of us probably would listen to that stuff until it was like in your fuckin’ face so we got fed up with it and decided to do something different. I don’t know if Jonas was heavily into that kind of stuff. So yeah, that’s about all that happened. It made everybody either bitter or it made everybody oh man I’m sick of this. Like for instance the Mooney Suzuki, me, Alicjia and Rich and about 3 other people happened to be at that bar that holds 800 people and saw them play to 6 or 7 people and heckled them and made fun of them and they came back to town 2 years later and played for 400 people.

A

The thing that’s weird about us playing is that I feel like in Memphis about over a hundred people are there but it’s still like the same 5 people that come to all our shows and are rocking out and everyone else looks really confused like ‘I think I’m supposed to like this but I don’t really get it’.

You didn’t played any of the older songs tonight like ‘Satan bought me’.

J

It’s like, I don’t know, it’s kinda cool when you see bands that have been a band for years and then they start playing their older stuff and it just doesn’t sound very good because they’re not that same band anymore. I wrote some songs on the first album about 6 years ago before the band even existed! I don’t know, like I once saw the fuckin’ Rolling Stones and they were like a bunch of old farts dressed up in women’s clothing trying to sing ‘Satisfaction’ – it’s stupid!

But we had to wait several years to see you guys on stage so we never got the chance to hear those songs live

J

Yeah, of course I could come back and play those songs but I don’t think the audience would be happy because I would be standing still because you’re bored as hell. It’s like finding a balance.

A

One reason I don’t like doing “Satan bought me” is that it fuckin’ scares me. Not the way it sounds, not becausse I’m just using Satan as a word like ‘Oh let me put ‘Satan’ in a song’. There was a time that I’d been like dismissed from the regular world of people and that I was only meant to be involved with evil things for the first time in my life. Of course I don’t think that anymore but it kinda scares me to remember the way I felt. I don’t know, sometimes it seems kinda like he’s fuckin with me though. He made my warehouse flood, a fuckin’ tree fell on my front lawn. Fuckin’ scary…