Smokebox: Interview With Camden Joy

"I want to remind people that what is good about music is its unspeakable mystery, how it plugs directly into our consciousness, establishing a whole world inside the listener’s head. If there are any sensible polemics in my pieces, I try to balance them out with enough insensible hysteria and humor so as to insure they won’t be taken too seriously, or at least too simply; music (like fiction) has its own kind of justice, into which the polemics of the political world don’t translate particularly well...."

smokebox interview: camden joy
on liz phair and lost joy

"Camden Joy entered notoriety in 1995 as a renegade-rock-critic-meets-pop-culture seer and, since then, has smitten his fans with a rich spread of prose and manifesto". Or so says his press packet. A lot of clever descriptors to say the guy’s words kick ass if you ask me…

Mr. Joy’s latest collection deserves a bit more than the customary chin-nods and martini tosses from the oh-so-casually detached hip literary circles. He’s a dangerous thinker this Camden Joy. An independent writer of considerable determination. And there’s something weapon-like about an independently published tome – it feels different the way it weighs in your hands when you bring it from your rucksack into the light. You can swing it around like the gun it is, and no one will drop you on the street for your transgressions. You can read it’s precise and malevolent passages while waiting for a court appearance or haircut, and who will really know what you’re up to? Who will be affected by the dark secrets you are privy to? A book like Joy’s Last Rock Star Book flies so far under the radar, that when it comes bellowing in all it’s visceral fury into our field of vision it can’t help but evolve into a conflicting set of twisted epiphanies. "I think he’s onto something real here," or "the man’s a full blown sociopath," or "I don’t think I’ve read in my days a more resplendent passage describing the inconceivable beauty of a women’s voice in my life…"

...or ...

"...what the fuck???"

Either way, do not make the mistake I did and confuse Camden Joy the writer with Camden Joy the character. For they are clearly not one and the same.

From one of the coolest of the small publishing companies (TNI Books in Seattle www.tnibooks.com) comes a beautifully packaged collection of prose and polemic from this smart street warrior. Lost Joy is a fascinating collection of essays and art from the writer whose Last Rock Star Book did nothing if not pin your ears back with it audacious premise and mostly flawless execution. Camden Joy is often compared to writers like Lester Bangs, Hunter Thompson and Richard Meltzer but in fact reminds me more of a hydra combining the twisted narrative nuance of David Lynch, the unrepentant street malice of Hubert Selby and the enduring belief in our own flawed humanity articulated by Jim Harrison.

Rock critic? Perhaps. But I don’t think so. Pick up a copy of Lost Joy and decide for yourself.

Smokebox: I must confess that I’ve become very cynical about the enduring relevance of rock music as it functions as an ideologically independent force over the past ten years. More to the point, I’ve always been keenly in tune with all forms of manipulation, and my sense is that things have gotten much more contrived when it comes to "rock and roll" and its absorption into mainstream culture these days. It seems that there are no sacred cows anymore, the defiant backbone that underpins rock music has become a powerful marketing angle. Respected icons like Springsteen release a new album while strumming live notes on the Today Show. The voices of once respected mainstream music "critics," people whom you’d expect to know better, are filled with laudatory prose pertaining to the dubious significance of manufactured ex-mouseketeer musical corporations. Former hard-rock hellions Aerosmith™ have moved without so much as a whimper into Truckville; T.Rex, Who, Iggy and Kink tunes are backdrops in advertisements for injection-molded Urban Assault Vehicles and Luxury Cruises. (Meet the new boss, my ass…) Once proudly defiant alternative music disciples flock obediently to the feet of this week’s tersely labeled garage-pop messiahs. It really has gotten quite discouraging. The commercial assault on our musical sensibilities seems unending and I can’t seem to connect the dots anymore when linking what I’ve come to understand and expect from rock and roll to many of its current manifestations. Yet in chewing through your new collection Lost Joy, I am quite frankly astounded by the scope of your comprehension as it pertains to rock and roll’s cultural evolution, complexities, and lineage. And I’m struck more strongly by the notion that in spite of it all -- in spite of the sense of betrayal that those who are sensitive to such things can’t help but feel when the art they rely on for sustenance in their lives is commodified and squirted back to them on a platter in some universally digestible form -- You still believe.

Camden Joy: Whew. That was extremely well said. And thank you. I feel I’m sorta out of my depth when it comes to meditations on "relevance" and "ideology." I mean, I hear what you’re saying, that it gets discouraging to see musicians sell out, but I don’t completely agree. Or I agree with that for maybe an hour or two a day, and then I believe something completely opposite. I just rarely have very fixed beliefs. This is why I know myself to be a terrible "music critic." I change my mind a lot. (Maybe we all do? I don’t know.) I tend not to put a lot of weight in terms like "integrity" and "credibility." Usually, these are just by-products when an unlucky artist has bad distribution, poor tour support, an unhelpful publicist. I like most music, and I don’t often care about the words that go along with it, or the images, or marketing. Of course I do react to the images, I am just lucky enough to live in a state of near-total blackout when it comes to press and magazines and television so I don’t receive much extraneous info about musicians and bands, like who’s popular, what they look like, etc. You sound younger than me; I think I maybe had bleak thoughts like yours in the early- to mid-eighties, when all the punk bands I liked were breaking up for lack of an audience, and MTV was beginning. Ultimately, new bands always come along to remind you how great and fun this stuff is, and that it’s not about anything ideological, it’s about the passion behind a passionately-held belief, not the belief itself. It’s about the face I imagine to be singing, and the interesting sounds it makes, not so much what the face is saying.

But another thing I must point out is that I made music for fourteen years, and never much respected or paid attention to people who wrote or philosophized about music (except Peter Guralnick). They seemed grown-up and beside the point. As a songwriter, and a band leader, and a musician, all I ever wanted were good, well-paying gigs, and some money to pay rent and live, and the right to be heard by everybody in the world, and the chance to work on my music endlessly. I didn’t put any thought into an image or a stance. My bands would’ve sold out in a heartbeat if we could’ve, but we couldn’t even figure out how. We didn’t care how we dressed, we didn’t have an angle, we didn’t have friends, we didn’t know anybody involved in the business, we didn’t have a single sound or look; we never had a chance.

Smokebox: You partially anchor your response around the notion of "the passion behind a passionately held belief"—yet this statement seems to me somewhat contradictory. The two components are inseparable aren’t they? Can you have one without the other? How does one necessarily react to the passion behind the passionately held belief, without being somewhat affected by the source of that passion?

Camden Joy: All I mean is that to me passion has become one of music’s most attractive qualities, an alluring language unto itself, and that it’s never necessary for me to know what the musicmaker is being passionate about, or even to agree with them. I say this thinking of several examples: international singer-songwriters who stir me deeply (such as Baaba Maal, Djam Leeli) even though I can’t understand a single word they’re saying; hip-hop people I come across (like Outkast) whose songs elude me lyrically while making sense on a primitive level; favorite bands from the nineties who sang intensely (Helium, Red Red Meat, Pavement, Spoon), their words mostly broken images and obscure observations. There is nothing ideological or political in my affection for these artists, I just trust their instincts. Does this answer your question?

Smokebox: Yes, I think it does. It’s a visceral as opposed to a deconstructionist approach, but it does make sense. I’m not sure I’m always able to separate the components like that. Anyhow, I hope you can forgive me my bleak philosophical inquisitiveness. I sort of intentionally float in and then out of that "state of blackout" you refer to when it comes to modern media awareness myself, so I know its usefulness. But I have this admittedly unhealthy obsession with that line where artistic expression and commerce collide. I watch that line a lot. It’s a fascinating and fluid boundary. There are angels and demons there both.

Camden Joy: I suppose I do too, though perhaps I’m less cognizant of experiencing it as such. For example, I love reading tabloids while in line at the supermarket. I rarely know who they’re talking about, but I love getting an instant snapshot of cultural propriety at any given moment, and admiring the simplicity of tabloid language, the capitalizations and exclamation points, the unnamed "close friends," the fuzzy photographs, the supreme possessiveness we have with celebrities. This is all justifiably fascinating stuff, I think, plus most of it involves pretty people and sex, which certainly adds to the pleasure while passing the time and waiting a turn at the cash register. But maybe you’re talking about something more wholesome.

Smokebox: In retrospect, I doubt it….ummm …you refer to a music writer who you do respect. Who is this man you paid homage to above…this Peter Guralnick? How was he able to grab your attention?

Camden Joy: Guralnick is the author of the three-part Elvis Presley biography that’s been leaking out for the last eight years; two of the books are out, the final third is due eventually. He’s older, and seems wonderfully oblivious of any sense of "hip" or "cool." He only cares about talent. He doesn’t write about contemporary people, I don’t think. I suppose he doesn’t have anything much to say about music made in the last twenty or thirty years. My favorite book of his was "Lost Highway," a moving collection of pieces about country music. He takes all his subjects very seriously as people, and writes of them with a sort of Steinbeck-esque appreciation for character, he never judges them, he just writes about how hard the job is, to be a musician, to be on the road all the time, and examines why certain people can do it while others quit.

But actually, when I was growing up I used to love this hilarious, big-minded guy who wrote for Rolling Stone named Charles M. Young. I think he writes for Musician now…? I never read Lester Bangs when he was alive because I was reading Charles M. Young at the time, and it was sorta the same thing.

So I would say Charles M. Young is another music writer I liked, but curiously he was the exact opposite of Guralnick.

Smokebox: The word "critic" – oh never mind…

Camden Joy: Yeah, I’m a lousy critic. I stink. My preferences change every hour.

Smokebox: Well, I mention that because I’ve done some "rock criticism" over the years, and I always resented the label. I don’t write about music because I want to criticize it. I write about it because I am moved by it and it’s important to my sense of balance in life. But you seem to have at least temporarily been thusly labeled…people drop the names of a lot of "critics" when referring to your work – deservedly complimentary comparisons to Bangs, Thompson, Meltzer – but I can’t really see much of a structural correlation. You’re a lot less suspicious. You seem to be tackling things from a pretty unique vantage-point most of the time. And I hardly see that any of your work qualifies as conventional "criticism."

Camden Joy: True enough, but on the other hand I really don’t envy the people who have to describe what I do. I make it pretty hard on them. I hope you’re right that labeling me a "rock critic" will be short-lived. But my narrators, my characters, and I all have lots of musical opinions, so that’s a handy thing to focus on, it’s like interviewing all of us at once. Personally, my favorite tag is "pop fabulist," because I feel like this stuff is headed toward mythology, and soon I’ll be weaving National Enquirer stories into epic myths and fables, a South Park "History of the World" or something.…

Smokebox: In many of these essays you are able to weave music into a personal tale without rendering any sort of overt personal opinions as to its overall value. Music is merely a fragment of a larger tale. As such, it seems to me that the most polemical pieces in Lost Joy are the poster collections. I’m sure this is a conscious decision on your part, but I’m curious as to your motivations for approaching your subjects in this fashion.

Camden Joy: I’m trying to accomplish several things in my writing. Polemics don’t interest me, except as a character flaw. I think of myself as a storyteller. I want to evoke a place, a scene, a plot, or an identity which is suggested to me by a certain piece of favorite music. I want to testify to the slipperiness of self, the uncertainties of being. I want to point out how little opinions matter; which means that if the narrator gives an opinion in a piece, I will usually go out of my way to include something which also undermines the narrator’s opinion (i.e., the narrator is a maniac, or a junkie, or a thief, or a rapist, or a racist, or a blatant hypocrite, that kind of thing). I want to remind people that what is good about music is its unspeakable mystery, how it plugs directly into our consciousness, establishing a whole world inside the listener’s head. If there are any sensible polemics in my pieces, I try to balance them out with enough insensible hysteria and humor so as to insure they won’t be taken too seriously, or at least too simply; music (like fiction) has its own kind of justice, into which the polemics of the political world don’t translate particularly well.

Smokebox: On the other hand, I thought your enthusiastic defense of Frank Black’s dark secret (you know, ummmm, the flying saucer issue) was very benevolent, but it got me thinking… If given the choice, which alien-obsessed rock personality do you think would be abducted first: Frank Black, that guy with the Tsunami hairdo from Flock of Seagulls, or Dave Davies? Do you think they would give any of them back?

Camden Joy: Well, I deserve to be abducted before any of them. They’ve already had their time atop the headlines. Now it’s my turn.

Smokebox: I am curious to learn more about the intriguing "poster collectives" represented in Lost Joy. It seems like such a marvelous device – a bona fide guerilla tactic unleashed in times of duress: The plastering of a city with ideas as opposed to advertisements. A throwback, as it were, to the days of the offset printing press and resulting rhetorical handbill, or even to some degree a clever (though unintentional) perversion of the more recent dropping of propaganda pamphlets and nourishing Phillip Morris products from planes on a bewildered populace under attack. Do you have any sense of what sort of impact your various poster campaigns had on their assorted victims?

Camden Joy: They had no impact whatsoever, though on the street Freedy Johnston did see the one about himself and got scared. Oops. My influences--whether in writing songs, stories, or posters--were always the same: various books and artwork by surrealists and magic realists, the War of the Worlds broadcast, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the Firesign Theatre, plays by the Wooster Group, radiodramas by Joe Frank, the film David Holtzman’s Diary by Jim McBride and L.M. Kit Carson. I am instinctively drawn to enigmas, paradoxes, pranks, impossible coincidences, particularly when attached to theories of alternative history or bad science. Plus I like to laugh. The street postering projects evolved out of me putting up flyers to advertise my bands’ gigs. It happened very organically and it was not wholly original; there was another guy in New York who wrote much better posters than me to advertise his band "The 20% Tippers;" they were long, funny essays; you’d read them, you’d shake your head, you’d read them again, you’d ponder their levels of meaning, you’d question how much was true, you’d admire the language, you’d read them again, you’d walk away; and when you turned back to take another look, just to make sure, they’d be gone, covered up by somebody else’s flyer. The insubstantiality, the unreliability, the instant nostalgia for a piece of trash, a joke, a song--these drew me to gluing up posters that formed a sort of narrative arc, detailing somebody’s "pop culture" derangement. The "Lost Manifestoes" came first, then MacFest and CMJ, then Souled American; then I stopped, because I couldn’t figure out what else to do or say, and I moved to Boston. But before the posters came the pamphlets--the Frank Black piece and the Al Green piece were each self-published as a small, faux-religious tract. This was when my fondness for design and antique printing briefly flared, because my girlfriend at the time was a designer, and my best friend had an old-fashioned letterpress printer, and so I tried to make these pamphlets look old, to have them jut out a little, to seem impossible. Which next definitely led me to look at street postering as historical, as a perennial preoccupation for the disenfranchised and aggrieved. So sure, that was on my mind as I glued things up, but more I was thinking about how it’d make somebody laugh, or how bad the urine on the sidewalk smelled, or how completely sticky with wheatpaste I was getting, or whether the cops were coming. The posters were always gone in a matter of days; more often, a matter of hours. A lot of people glue up a lot of things in New York, and they run out of room pretty quickly.

Smokebox: I had strong reactions to the sentiments revealed in many of the posters in Lost Joy, and like all effective art, they seem to work at a lot of different mental levels. But I found one in particular very compelling. I stared at it for a long, long time. It disturbs me. It’s the one that reads:

ADVERTOCRACY
ROCK TEACHES
YOUTH TOBACCO
AND TATTOOES
THIS AIN’T
ROCK AND ROLL
THIS IS GENOCIDE

Powerful medicine -- much darker, more subliminally violent than the other posters represented in both its sentiment and execution. The line borrowed from "Diamond Dogs" is a harrowing and prophetic electric proclamation just standing on its own. Its application here lifts it intact, complete with all its implied malice and sonic bombast, from Bowie’s futuristic backdrop of social decay and drops it into a very familiar arena: the present. This is just flat horrific. Where did this one come from? It seems like a forceful reaction to something very specific.

Camden Joy: It’s always great when anything I write produces any reaction, but you’ve definitely made me happy there, with your particular response. I really like David Bowie, and New York just then (1995-96) felt very "Diamond Dogs"--there was this thing called "the web" taking off, it sounded like something out of a comic-book conspiracy, and there was all this suffering on the streets, crime, sadness, and unfulfillment. I was definitely experimenting with pop paranoia ("popanoia") when I created this notion of an "advertocracy," a body of advertisers which secretly runs our lives; there’s some truth to it, but the exaggeration tries to obscure that. "Advertocracy Rock" was meant to be like "Schoolhouse Rock," this thing that indoctrinated some of us during Saturday morning cartoons. "Tobacco and Tattoos" are just harmful things we all do because they’re cool (according to the advertisers that run our lives). But to be honest, I worked less on the meaning and more on the rhythm of the wording, to get it to roll off the tongue just right: "advertocracy rock teaches youth tobacco and tattoos, this ain’t rock and roll this is genocide." It has a swell staccato. And I always was pleased by the jumbled fuzziness of the photo.

Smokebox: Exaggeration notwithstanding, don’t you think that the truth implied by that term "advertocracy" is a big part of the poster’s ultimate power?

Camden Joy: I’m gonna have to take your word for it. I see that poster as ultimately no more powerful than the others. Mostly they seem a little old and stale to me, at least now, today, when the sun is out, and autumn appears to be approaching. Although, come to think of it, the one poster that always seems powerful to me is, "A lotta people won’t get no supper tonight." It’s true, it’s simple, it’s sad. It always gets me.

Smokebox: Again, a poster question:

JOE
STRUMMER
WHERE
ARE
YOU

I’m not sure if this was your intended point, but Strummer did just seem to drop off the map when the Clash imploded. Do you think it was just a simple matter of his 15 minutes being up, or did he just get fed up with it all? (Maybe he was afraid of getting implicated in the crimes against humanity unleashed by the second B.A.D. album). What do you miss the most about what the Clash brought to rock and roll?

Camden Joy: Yeah, that was my point. I was listening to "Armagideon Time" (a song covered by the Clash on Black Market Clash) and I just missed Joe Strummer. He had this voice that came from an unusual part of the head, and he seemed to be on fire, and sort of obsessed with his own futility, the unlikeliness of existence. Listening to early Clash (as with middle-era Kinks), everything they’re doing and saying has this gorgeous sheen of paradox, because it’s all about the pointlessness of fighting the system and the fleeting nature of friendship, but it also sounds like a call to arms, like they believe in something but they’re wary of giving it a name, like they want to reach mobs of people with the message that mobs are bad. I suspect that Joe Strummer left because, like John Lennon, he got sick and tired of being a hero. But my poster is sorely out of date, because Joe Strummer is back now with great music. I think Global A Go-Go by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros is better than most early Clash.

Smokebox: That dichotomy reminds me of what I think I understand of Syd Barrett, Kurt Cobain, or Jeff Buckley’s own personal paradoxes - to be simultaneously attracted to and thoroughly repulsed by stardom and success…some people never can get that balance right. But you mention the Kinks, and I sense a great affinity for them from reading your work. I love the Kinks, and see Ray Davies as having figured that balance out and having evolved into one of rock’s most brooding and iconoclastic figures. He’s angry, and my sense is that he is fully entitled to his anger. But in spite of that he’s managed to provide those that paid attention with a healthy dose of hopefulness with his work. "20th Century Man" and "Apeman" are pretty strong indictments when you take them at surface value. But then you listen to the genuine affection that flows like blood through biographies of human imperfection such as Muswell Hillbillies, "Waterloo Sunset" and even something as muddied as Lola, well, there’s a real sense of cheerfulness and hope that trickles through all of that focused bitterness. No offense to Lost Joy’s anti-hero "Guy" or his beloved CCR, but I think the Kinks may be the most criminally under-appreciated act of all time. Talk about them for a minute…

Camden Joy: Oh, no doubt about it, the Kinks are absolutely great. They had this amazing run from 1966 to 1972 when they didn’t record a single bad song. Seven years! That boggles my mind, it’s like a wonder of science. Science! The Rolling Stones had a pretty good run of almost five years during which they stayed on track. The Beatles, of course, had the best run ever, lasting eight years. But these’re the exceptions. Think how hard it must be, staying good when you’re popular; you’ve got a lot of people around who already like you. They don’t want you to change. You must feel them tugging at you constantly, an undertow. Plus you’re exhausted from touring, a lot of things are out of balance and uncertain, there’s people trying to take advantage of you, there’s a lot of untrustworthy friends who have arrived, flocking to your success, wanting you to experiment with them. The distractions and temptations of the lifestyle are immense. People as great as Bob Dylan and Van Morrison have succumbed, they have hardly ever strung together two great albums in a row, and these are pretty strong-willed individuals. That shows how hard it must be, being famous, keeping the artist inside you healthy and motivated. Joni Mitchell actually had a really good run, and David Bowie, and the Pixies, and Prince; but it’s usually difficult, for some reason, for popular acts to remain consistently inspired or focused. And yet, from Face to Face until Everybody’s in Show Biz, when Ray Davies got a little hysterical with his rock-operas (most of which, in truth, were still pretty good), the Kinks were solid, through and through. Each album held to a theme but otherwise each album was completely different from the other, involved different studios, different musicians, different plots and characters. And in addition, they put out a lot of 45s at the time, too, all of them perfect. The story of the Kinks is especially happy to me because they got so famous for "Come Dancing," which is a surprisingly great song that seems to summarize Ray’s every songwriting aspiration. That’s always fun, when some artist’s best song becomes a huge hit and then you get to share it with your mailman and everybody.

But I don’t see Ray Davies as particularly angry; that’s not an emotion I associate with him. I hear him most often as melancholic, as one of those misery-loving Brits, a very conservative fellow in chaotic times, delicate and morose. Nostalgia is really Ray’s thing, he’s made it this magnificent art form. It’s a tremendous accomplishment, plus he’s survived it pretty well.

Smokebox: Don’t you think that John Lennon was tired of more than being a hero? He was tired of the whole bloody process. Your comments are interesting to me in that I really wonder how an idealist like Lennon would fare these days – he had what could be construed as a black outlook towards a lot of modern conventions. He seemed to place a great deal of importance on issues of justice, personal powerlessness, artistic integrity and individuality. And those themes became a big part of what drove his solo work. Today, the very notion of the strident voice seems to make a lot of modern artists rather squeamish. And whether this squeamishness stems from weariness, ingrained callousness, hipster indifference, boredom, a reflexive defense mechanism, cynicism I cannot quite determine.

Camden Joy: I disagree. You still hear plenty of strident voices singing simplistic songs about obvious evils. This is a frequent problem I have with Ani DiFranco, Melissa Ferrick, etc., though on occasion they can be sublime. Certainly no one seems to be writing listenable, un-shrill protest songs anymore, except Dylan and Randy Newman, as usual, and this Canadian I really like named Bob Wiseman.

The thing to remember about John Lennon is that the songs he wrote in his final years were awful. This doesn’t get addressed much, because the assassination made Lennon look like an activist, a social force, but the truth is he didn’t make much good music after 1973. If he’d lived, he might’ve gone on to be like Stevie Wonder or Elton John, reshaping his public image into something innocuous. He might’ve continued to make sappy bad records like he’d been making when he was killed. Or he might’ve gotten inspired by all the young punks, I don’t know.

Smokebox: Would you shell out $300 to see McCartney? $150 to see U2?

Camden Joy: There’s a lot of reasons I never go to rock concerts. One is, I’m pretty much a total hermit. Another is, I hate crowds (except at sporting events). But mostly, I’m a cheapskate. Would I pay $150 to see U2? I wouldn’t pay $1.50, I can’t stand looking at U2, they’re so big and proud. Would I pay $300 to see Paul McCartney? Maybe, but only if: 1) I got to write the set list, 2) he played in my living room, and 3) as he played, his youngest daughter performed fellatio on me (and on my wife as well). Otherwise, forget it.

Smokebox: Have all the "breakneck bands with onion breath and words like sour lemons" been corralled in the exclusive realm of obscure smoky clubs and the underground radio stations? Are all of our "gritty and desperate but spiritually nourishing" artists operating under the surface of mainstream perceptions? I ask you in all sincerity: is it possible to be both OBSCENELY WEALTHY and INDIE COOL?

Camden Joy: Probably a lot of our best bands are hiding in plain sight, just as the Beatles did at the beginning of their career. They were just a bunch of silly idiots in matching jackets with moptop haircuts, they weren’t supposed to be any big deal, but with every album they incrementally raised the bar. They were immensely popular all the while they were inventive. That’s the goal, to my mind. You need both: an audience and a vision. Wealth helps most artists stretch out and paint their masterpiece; I can’t see money in itself as an evil; people can certainly want too much of it, and become shallow, greedy, and dull, but others accomplish their most remarkable works once they have the confidence of knowing that they are successful and the challenge of having an audience.

I can say, after years and years of being in bands and recording in studios and working up arrangements in rehearsal shacks, there are certain sounds in songs which intrigue me, and others that don’t. This is how I unconsciously choose the radio stations I listen to and the musicians I write about; it’s never that they’re underground or anything but that they’re doing things in songs that I’d tried to do, and they make sense to me.

I got so happy during the nineties when a few of the bands and musicians I adored got popular, like Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Pavement, Liz Phair. Great music got on the radio and reached the kids. It was sure a surprise, too, after the ugly back-biting and name-calling which was the underground scene of the eighties.

Smokebox: The eighties…the camps were well defined, and opinions seemed perpetually polarized. Maybe all that backbiting was unhealthy. Then again, maybe that fierce level of competition made all of them all work harder. Who’s to say? There is certainly is something to be said for positive energy. But, there were a lot of influential bands working the circuit in the eighties in spite of the fact that few of them ever made it to the same level as Nirvana did in the nineties. And I don’t think a lot of the serious alternative bands appreciated what was going on in the music industry much – particularly the exponential influence exerted by MTV. So there did seem to be an increased amount of tension in the eighties, not only amongst individual bands, but between artist and management as well.

Camden Joy: God, don’t even make me remember the eighties. It was a decade of me and my friends feeling like dorks, and having to apologize to every girl we knew for liking the kind of music we liked, with our parents and families wondering what was wrong with us. I mean, yes, there were a lot of good bands playing in intimate settings, that was neat. But let’s not glamorize the eighties. It was the nineties that made everything worthwhile, when popular films and records and even TV got really weird, and we weren’t dorks anymore, we were "brave visionaries."

Smokebox: I’m pretty certain Paul Westerberg died for my sins…

Camden Joy: I’m just glad he’s dead.

Smokebox: Who gives you hope that there’s still a chance for rock music to continue to matter in a broad and substantive sense? That there remains something inherent in modern rock music that can still legitimately separate it from the calculated and mind-numbing banality that marks contemporary television and cinema? I’m staring at the latest Rolling Stone magazine that boldly proclaims ROCK IS BACK. (This because of the emergence of media darlings the Strokes, the Hives, the Vines, and the White Stripes). I am confused. I didn’t realize ROCK HAD LEFT in the first place. And I’m not sure about you, but I’m not willing to bank on any long term contribution to rock and roll coming from a band who hasn’t produced more than 60 minutes of recorded material before they’re declared the second coming of the Stooges or the Ramones. While having the Hives or the Vines on the covers of Spin and Rolling Stone seems like a good thing on the surface, I wonder about the sudden media frenzy to collectively anoint our new indie heroes. Is there some sort of media prize being offered for locating the next great indie power that I haven’t been made aware of? Something seems slightly askew here.

Camden Joy: I welcome the period of "anointing" whenever it comes around. It never lasts very long and always leaves me wanting. I have a brother who never hears much of the music I like unless it becomes really popular, gets played all over the radio, sells a million copies. I like it when our cultures happen to collide, because I like to talk with him, it makes me feel connected. So now we get to talk about the Strokes, just as before we got to talk about Pearl Jam. That’s a good thing, I figure.

Smokebox: You don’t seem to agree with the labeling bands as alternative, emo, nü-metal, whatever. Do you think it tends to compartmentalize the different factions too much, or is it just because labeling is inherently unfair?

Camden Joy: Neither, it’s just because I never understand the labels. And even the people making the labels usually have to apologize while they’re doing it and say that these labels are artificial because these bands really have little in common. I think the truth is that there are very few really local scenes anymore, where bands influence one another directly, where they stay up late together, talking, and thinking of themselves as a movement, and wanting to be labeled as such. Those are the only labels worth noticing, the ones put out by the artists themselves.

Smokebox: Have you ever actually met Liz Phair? Has she intimate knowledge of The Last Rock Star Book?

Camden Joy: I’ve never met her. In 1998 someone asked her if she’d read the book, and she said at that time that she hadn’t. That’s all I know. My publishers sent her an advance galley with a very sweet letter. We count ourselves lucky that we didn’t get sued.

Smokebox: Let’s finish up with one of those mental games stoned rockers play as they lay in rumpled heaps on dorm room floors while listening to old Pretty Things records. If you assumed the mantel of the great benevolent force for one day, and you were instructed to send the one deceased rock musician back to earth with the most unrealized potential, who would you send back?

Camden Joy: Rather than bring back a dead person, I might prefer to reactivate certain lazy but talented songwriters, like Neil Young, or Lou Reed. These guys catch fire now only about once a decade, and that just aggravates me. I wish they’d hold themselves to a higher standard more often.

Smokebox: I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us.

Camden Joy: Thanks a lot.

People can find Camden Joy's sharp collection of essays and guerilla art contained in Lost Joy at TNI's website (www.tnibooks.com ) or via mail order ( TNI Books, 2442 NW Market #357 Seattle WA 98107). You can also find it in independent bookstores like Quimby's in Chicago, Powell's in Portland, Left Bank Books in Seattle, etc...

John Richen is an on again, off again writer and graphic artist living in Portland, Oregon. He produces Smokebox with his abundant free time. Mail him at mr.grant here at the box.

smokebox interview: camden joy on liz phair and lost joy

smokebox interview: camden joy
on liz phair and lost joy