OK, original band members John Denny, my vocalist. Dix Denny, John's little brother, is my other guitarist. And me, I'm my other guitarist. Zander Schloss on bass.

He's a Weirdo, yep. We always say if you do a show with us you are a Weirdo. So he's a Weirdo. He's mainly known for being with the Circle Jerks. And he was an actor.

Yeah, he was in Repo Man, a classic movie. So we got Zander with us. He's just a phenomenal, incredible, musician and an excellent bass player too for us, he's really good. And on drums we're playing with Shawn Antium. He played with us over the weekend in Seattle and Portland, so now he's a Weirdo. Shawn's been playing drums in bands in the L.A. area for awhile now, and he's an incredible drummer.

Nicky was our first drummer and Nicky's been, he played with us for a year and a half, and left the band, then played in other bands. He from time to time plays shows with us but this time wasn't available for our tourettes (laughter). That's what we call them, tourettes. A tourette is a weekend jaunt to anywhere we can reach by a plane for a weekend and play for a weekend.

No, no...

It's been about 13 years! (laughter)

Ummmm... I don't know (laughs). I don't know man.

So volume three is coming out in, oh..., 2015. (laughter)

A couple years ago it was I think a year, or a few months, before our 25th anniversary. I thought "oh, let's do a compilation". It wasn't going to be a volume two, it was just gonna be, well it had been so long since anything had been out, I didn't even know if anyone even knew about volume one. Apparently it has been listed in the top 50 greatest punk rock albums and it is just a compilation.

Right, and it had most of the good stuff on there. So the plan was lets do a real cool Weirdos, put all of our best songs on there. It just evolved, we missed the deadline for our 25th anniversary so that's why it's our 26th. It came out in time for our 26th anniversary. So then we thought why don't we just make it part of a collection like Weird World Volume One.

A couple years ago we played on the closing night of a gallery show at Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica...

Yeah, the forming show. It's an art gallery and they did a show with set lists, photos, record sleeves, flyers, clothing, posters, guitars...

Yeah. And they put our stuff, we had so much stuff, they used the main wall for The Weirdos. They had our banners, photos, my guitar - the old Voxx guitar I used to play and it took up this whole big wall. It was up for a couple months and it was closing, in the summer of 2000 I think. So they organized a closing night show where the bands would play a few songs. They had us down there, they had Devo down there, X, Go Gos, all those guys. They kept saying, "stand by". All these bands go up ahead of us, and they saved us for last. We came on, we only played three songs, and we just brought the house down. So that was our one appearance in years. A few months after that, we played at the Viper Room in L.A. on the Sunset Strip for a benefit for Keith Morris of the Circle Jerks. He was very ill. It was X and The Weirdos. We only played like four songs, just a short set. We probably could have played longer but it just came together really quick. In all this time, now that we're playing in L.A., it's been, I think the last time we played in L.A. where you can go to a venue and see us do a full set, I'm sure it must have been 13 years ago. You know we don't even think about that. You're not the first guy to ask that. We are just like here right now and that's all we're concerned with.

I'm a plumber (laughter), no I'm just kidding. I'm a math teacher at a middle school.

Some of them do. You know that movie that's out, School of Rock, I'm the real thing (laughter).

They are musicians, and artists.

There is material that we have in the can like old demos and live stuff and rehearsal tapes. We have all that kind of archival stuff. There is still some tracks from our old records that have not come out on cd yet. A volume three? Yeah we'd like to do one.

Yeah, sure.

Sure, yeah, they treat us right.

The very first lineup was myself, John Denny, Dix Denny and Dave Trout. It was just four of us, no drummer. Dave Trout played bass, Dix and I played guitar and John sang. That was our original lineup.

It was the Bomp one. Destroy All Music came out in September of 1977. We started playing in April of 1977 so it took about 5 months.

That came out in January or February of 1978, so almost another 5 months.

Before I even started The Weirdos, I used to subscribe to Greg Shaw's magazine. I used to love that magazine cause it had articles on The Standells and The Seeds and all these cool bands. This was like early '70s and I'd go and look for their records, collecting old records back then. They weren't that old, just a few years old back then I guess. (laughter). Well greg shaw, I think somehow I got his number and called him up, or got someone to do it, so that's how we hooked up with him. We used to go down to his record store, he had a Bomp record store. When the punk scene in L.A. started happening he put out a bunch of records. He did a Stooges single, and an album. He did The Zeros, Devo, The Weirdos, a bunch of groups. Dangerhouse happened a little later on, it was just like guys in the scene that got together. Black Randy was one of the guys involved, there was a bunch of guys, there was a guy named Bob Dead. There was a guy in The Screamers, David Brown, Pat Garret who was the drummer in The Randoms and The Dils for awhile. It was great because we were on the label, The Deadbeats, Bags, X, Weirdos, Alleycats, Dils, Avengers, Eyes, The Weirdos, (laughter), and Black Randy. It was great. Those records are great. So that was why we jumped on, we just did single deals, that was what everyone did back then, they just put out singles. No one did albums. Everyone wanted to do albums. Not everyone had an album's worth of material but we did, we could have gone in and done an album easily but when we recorded Destroy All Music we were ready to go and record an album. People approached us, but everything always fell through. We didn't know, we didn't know what the hell we were doing. I was sitting there reading this book, "the business of music" it is this big tome. I would sit in my apartment and read it, I didn't know anything about the music business. I'd flip to the page with the contracts and go, "what the hell is this, I can't even read it." (laughter).

Yeah we always had agreements with people, we'd type something out. Those are collectors items now, I could probably sell our old contracts on ebay.

Um, no. But you know what? Not too long after we did the Dangerhouse single, maybe in the mid '80s, maybe eight years or so later. Our Dangerhouse single was selling for 200 dollars at swap meets back then.

Yeah, I'm sure, you know.

Who What When Where Why?

Well that was self-financed. So we had enough money to go in and do six songs. We did a 12" mini LP I guess you'd call it. We made up a new format you know. Destroy all music was a mini EP, a 7" with three songs on it, a mini EP. They used to put out 12" singles right. So we thought why don't we do a 12" EP, which a lot of bands did that back then.

Yeah and the thing was to do color vinyl, and odd sizes. The Dickies did a 10". I don't think we ever did that, ours were just black. Black is kind of a cool color (laughter).

I think I came up with it. It was because everyone we knew used to call us Weirdos. We'd be walking around with our long overcoats. Everyone had long hair, we had short hair. Everyone was listening to Journey and whatever, I don't know, all that stuff. We were listening to Eddie Cochran, and Iggy Pop and the Stooges, other stuff you know.

Yeah!

When we gave them their first show. We had already done a few shows before then, maybe we played two or three nights before then. We ran into this band who said "yeah we're The Germs". It was Bobby Pyn, it wasn't Darby Crash. I asked John if he would put them on the bill cause it was just us and The Zeros about to do a show a few days later. We didn't know them, didn't know what they sounded like, we just thought they looked cool. Bobby Pyn looked cool, but he was with these two chicks and a guy with a big afro. We thought the name was good. It was one of our names, the names we had on our original list for band names. We had The Zeros on that list too. When The Germs played that first show, they are standing on the stage, there are three people in the audience, two of them were their friends. They were like standing there and they didn't even have any songs. Pat Smear knew a Queen and a David Bowie song. Darby just starts smearing peanut butter on him and that was their show.

No, that was later. This was before that. I know that Bomp record says it is their first show. Maybe it was their first real show you know. They didn't last too long at the show they played with us at the Orpheum Theatre. The theatre owner was having a fit and said "I'm gonna stop the show you better pull the plug on this guy". So we ushered him off the stage. They weren't playing, back then it wasn't "Darby Crash" and they weren't doing "Lexicon Devil" and "Forming" and all that stuff, it wasn't even that. Yeah, we never got, you know, now it is like, L.A. punk rock, The Germs, whatever. Now, maybe because were doing these shows now and have the CD out... It's like, he's dead, Darby's dead, so The Germs are never going to play again, Tomata died, so The Screamers are not gonna play, so it is like, who is left?

Oh that's right, isn't that funny.(laughter)

There is a new book coming out that is takes the title of another one of our songs, Destroy All Music. It is on The Weirdos, The Screamers, The Germs and The Zeros. The first four bands.

David Jones. That is gonna be an incredible book, it is coming out soon.

Um, well the best part about it I think, my favorite part about the book is the title. (laughter). There is some good reading in it, you know.

Uh....I don't know. I think a lot of people, they drink, they waited too long to write the book and all these people have taken drugs and drank a lot and their brain cells that hold memory, have gotten a little fuzzy.I think I'd concur with Robbie Fields about most of it. (laughter) Some people like it, they think it is a good read you know.

Pretty soon, hopefully by next year, he has it pretty well wrapped up.

I had a hankering it was coming. I just knew. We saw The Ramones, and we had their album and we were reading about The Clash and the Sex Pistols, Generation X and The Damned but never heard them. Rodney would be talking about them, even before he played their records and stuff. I just, John and I, we've known each other since high school, and our main topic of conversation for years was staring a band. I knew John would be the singer. He was just naturally one of these guys, you just knew when he was on stage he'd be the singer, he was very charismatic. I wanted to play guitar. I wanted to bang on a guitar. Everyone I knew played guitar you know, and were virtuosos. I just played. My first guitar was a piece of wood with some strings on it and a pickup that I borrowed from a friend of John's with broken knobs. It was a home made guitar and it barely stayed it tune. I wanted to learn to play guitar so I went to this music store and this hippy guy, you know, he had a gold top Les Paul, and one day I asked if I could play it and he was like "No!" (laughter). He's teaching me all these chords like F sharp augmented minor 7th to A dimished seventh ninth.

I already had studied music formally. I knew how to write music, read music, how to play sax and piano and I'd studied harmony, I'd compose music for my high school stage band and was in the stage band. So I'm sitting there with this guy and I'm like "teach me gloria, teach me wild thing, teach me pinball wizard..." Any song that had "braaaangggg". This was years before I started The Weirdos, but that was what I wanted to play. When we'd get together with friends who had equipment,everyone would be sitting there, the virtuoso guitarist, and we'd all be kids and they were like, the girls liked those guys with long blonde hair who could play Buffalo Springfield and Crosby Stills and Nash songs. I'd be like "let me play that" and I'd turn up the volume and they'd be "no, turn it down!" (laughter) So that's where I was at. So then I bought a guitar and just started teaching myself, playing what I liked. I never played along with records and learned like Led Zeppelin or Hendrix or anything like that. I was always writing songs, right off the bat. I was just strumming, writing songs, and had tape recordings and John would come over and we weren't a garage band, we were like a living room band. Then I got serious and I started writing some songs. I wrote six or seven songs with lyrics and everything and John was like "wow". I got together with my friend Dave Trout, who I knew from when I was going to Cal Arts, who played bass, we went to his living room. John brought over his brohter, Dix, who could play flawless Jimmy Page riffs, and Hendrix and stuff like that, and were were like "he's pretty good, let's get him and add a little slickness to it". (laughter). We had a rule, no leads, no guitar solos, but then Dix came up with these great lines and we're like "that's in, forget that rule". The songs were short, they were fast, the lyrics were kind of minimal. I was anti-poetry. It's not poetry, they're lyrics. Like "Do the dance". We have a song, "Do the Dance", and that was the lyric "do the dance, do the dance, do the dance yeah", and that was the lyric, that was it. Now that is not poetry, it was just "do the dance" you know. To me, the lyrics were just, the words were almost like a visual thing, they could have been anything, it didn't really matter. The way I write songs is I come up with a title first, and flesh it out from there.

Yes, in fact one of our plans is when we do Weird World Volume 3 is to actually record do the dance and maybe a few other songs that were not properly recorded.

That was them just doing, for that the recording studio was like in the service porch of their house.

No, that was when we were still active. We have to wrap this up, we're running behind...

No, punk rock does not pay all the bills, maybe a couple small bills. (laughter)