BOMB
Bomb flyer by Richard Carse credit: Michael Dean
Tales of San Fran punk underground
Jay Crawford interview by Clinton Orman, Part 2
(December 2023)
PSF: So tell me about the gay thing. A lot of people thought of you as a gay band. But you only had one gay guy in the band.
Jay: Toward the end. Doug didn't even tell me he was gay for like two years. I found out on stage.
PSF: Really!
Jay: Yeah, we did a Halloween show at the End Up [gay bar in San Francisco] and he threw up his arms and went "I'm gay!" and I just thought "Here goes Bomb again, playing the gay card." It took me... I don't know how long- to kind of go, "I think Doug's gay!"
PSF: "I think he meant it that time!"
Jay: He meant it! I mean it was Michael Bi, Jay Gay and Tony Fag. That was the joke. But none of us were gay.
PSF: So it was like the Ramones, but your last names were all sexual preferences?
Jay: I guess, yeah. But then this guy Don Baird started writing articles about us.
PSF: Was that The San Francisco Bay Guardian?
Jay: Yeah. He's still a DJ at the Hole In The Wall, Doug Hilsinger's bar in San Francisco. He was a big Bomb fan. Great writer. He really expanded our audience, we owe him a lot. Thanks to him, we became a gay-friendly band. People would chant "Be a fag!" after our shows.
PSF: So the thing with Doug comes after you're touring the world and yelling that you're gay on stage every night, and you don't don't know that it's true in his case.
Jay: Right.
PSF: That's hilarious. I never would have thought. But it was just like, being provocative? Did you feel there was homophobia in the music scene? You're punking the punks? These were 1980's punks, not the P.C. kind of today.
Jay: Yeah, button-pushing. We saw it as being allies. "Oh you want to gay-bash? We're gay, come bash us, asshole." But you know, I was homophobic myself when I moved to San Francisco. I didn't know anything. I accepted David Bowie but in my head somewhere it was like "-but he's gay!" I had to get a job at Hamburger Mary's [gay-friendly diner in S.F. 's SOMA neighborhood] and then that all just went away. But yeah, there's a lot of homophobia in the world, everywhere. Still.
PSF: Yeah I remember when I first read about Bomb it was in the Guardian and the article was calling the band "homocore." Did you flinch at that label?
Jay: I was into it. It seemed right somehow. I mean, San Francisco was like a different planet from the rest of America. You leave and it's Reagan, Bush, totally straight. And I was born in San Francisco. So we were like "Hello, America! We're from San Francisco, and we're proud of it, in fact we're gay."
We didn't overthink it. We weren't politically minded. Obviously it's a different world out there now. But in terms of the band's image and "homocore" and whatever else, I just kinda rode the horse. I couldn't steer it. I could drive the band but I couldn't steer... the lore, you know? Michael was just so impossible to deal with sometimes. You know, that thing where you can't tell if you're hurting someone's feelings or not, you just say everything that comes into your head? That's Michael. He was always stirring up some new shit.
PSF: Borderline personality?
Jay: Maybe.
PSF: Well these days they would say "on the spectrum."
Jay: He couldn't tell if people liked him or not. He couldn't steer emotions right. He was too truthful for people to deal with. So he was always a joker in the mix. Then Tony was either just super quiet, mean looking, not talking, or over-the-top crazy, yelling weird shit. I lost hair working with him. At one point on tour I lost all this hair here, [Indicates part of hairline] because of Tony. Stress from dealing with him.
PSF: I never thought too much about him. I love his drumming. But then I heard Michael talk about him and I guess the two of them have serious beef. What was his deal? Did he have issues?
Jay: What do they call it... tortured artist. Total tortured artist. Always gloom and doom about his art, whatever. Really hard to understand him. Big strong dude, and he hits as hard as he does because he's kinda pissed off. We'd do a sound check and the whole place would flinch every time he hit the snare, it was so loud.
On tour he would sit in the front seat, always, no matter what. He was bigger than us so we couldn't fight him over the front seat. So he would sit up there with a jacket and a hood pulled up and just brood and smoke cigarettes. Eventually, he would be drunk enough that he would be kinda happy. Anyway, those were sort of the bad parts of being on tour with Bomb, without Doug. Once Doug got in the band he kind of normalized everything a little bit. We became more like four dudes who were happy with each other. Touring with just the three of us was definitely hard for me.
PSF: Did you have moments where you were like, "fuck this."?
Jay: Oh yeah, we broke up all the time. [laughs] At least once a year. We'd break up on tour, then someone would need to get back home so we'd somehow get back together. Play the rest of the shows. And then by the time we got back home, we'd be happy with each other, stop playing for a while, take a break. That was one of our tricks, to keep breaking up in order to stay together. It's like we had made some pact, without saying it, to always play music together. So we would break up, grow a little bit, and then get back together.
PSF: It's funny, from the outside... because if the music makes you happy you think the people making it are happy. But I guess the old cliché is true, it's just like a family, including the worst aspects. Nobody can make you angry like a family member. When you've dealt with the same shit so many times, it's like, "get out of my life!" But yet...
Jay: But you're stuck with them.
PSF: There had to have been moments of joy too.
Jay: Oh sure. It was like heaven and hell, a constant cycle. Heaven and hell. I'm sure it was like being on a pirate ship. A little heaven, a LOT of hell. Modern pirates. We went to the darkest, gloomiest side of town of wherever we happened to be, playing, hopefully getting laid, and moving on the next day.
PSF: What was Michael like on the road?
Jay: He would charm everyone. Everyone. He would show up early at the club with an acoustic guitar and be like, "gather round, children!" He knew all these old folk songs- "I Love My Mother," whatever. And he would sing songs and tell stories. The girls loved him. The guys, I don't know. He wasn't good looking...
PSF: But he looked them right in the eye, everything they like.
Jay: He just didn't lie. That was it. He didn't lie. He was 100% real. I would be off finding a spot for the van, making sure everything was squared away, and he didn't give a shit about any of that stuff. I would get back and he would have twenty people gathered around him, playing guitar, the Michael Dean show. Then they would get Bomb, which was totally different from that.
PSF: It's cool, you got to be one of those bands in the mid-eighties that got in a van and took the show on the road and did it all yourself. Everybody that was doing that, the big groups, the small ones, Fugazi, Dinosaur Jr, The Replacements...
Jay: Yeah, it was great. Our friends were back home working jobs and we were on the road. So that part was good. We never made any money, especially in America since everything is so spread out. You'd get the door, and it would be, you know, $64.73...
PSF: ...And that goes in the gas tank.
Jay: Yeah, then drive for two days. But we would call information- 555-1212, and say "Hey, where are the punk rock clubs in your town?" -and they would tell us! [laughs] Europe was easier. An hour's drive and you're in another country.
PSF: Let's talk about how you left the band and then came back?
Jay: Sure. Well, Bomb broke up, as far as we knew. My wife and I wanted to have a baby so we said "Let's do it now!" and moved to France and had our kid. Then Bomb made this record [Happy All The Time, as a three-piece with Michael, Tony, and Doug] and sent it to us. Listening to it made us cry, and we said "Let's go back home and get back in Bomb!"
PSF: Did you and Doug hit it off right away?
Jay: Yeah. Doug was perfect for us at that point. We were just getting talked to by the bigwigs, and Doug was a flashy guitar player, well-mannered, and he fit right in.
PSF: Was that weird, re-joining the band and meeting your "replacement?"
Jay: We were really into it. It was fun. We rehearsed for a couple months. I had written a lot of the songs so I didn't feel pushed out or whatever. We knew we wanted to record so we had to figure out our parts, with a four track, work it all out slowly, playing and then listening back. It was just a flow. Doug and I knew we played well together.
We'd met Doug when Bomb played in Philadelphia. His band opened up for us. Daddy's Protein, I think. We stayed at his house and Doug and I went to the basement and played. Him on drums, me on guitar. And after that we were just like glue, we stuck together. We knew. We had whatever the Yiddish word is... schmutz!
PSF: Kismet. Schmutz is crap.
Jay: [Laughs] Right. Kismet.
PSF: So when you got Bomb Mark 2 going, were you thinking about getting signed to a major? Underground music is getting more traction, Jane's Addiction is popular...
Jay: Yeah and we got Jane's Addiction's manager interested. I don't know how that came about, but it did.
PSF: Was getting signed to a major or a bigger indie label in the back of your mind, or just trying to enjoy life as it comes, or a little of both?
Jay: I'd say a little of both. I definitely wanted to be a rock musician, get signed, all of that. It was a lot of hard work. The band was progressing, breaking new ground all the time.
PSF: And you wanted to make records with more time and resources.
Jay: Yeah.
PSF: So how about some guitar bullshit? It seems like with guitar you keep it pretty simple- get a lot of crazy sounds with basic equipment. You have that Legend amp, I remember. Did that just kinda work for you so you kept it, or do you love it?
Jay: I love it. I bought it when I was... twenty I think. Ended up buying another one. So I had one on each side of the stage. Stereo! Nowadays they're a little too crunchy. I didn't feel that way back then. I like a cleaner sound now.
PSF: Rock N' Roll 100?
Jay: Legend 50 watt. Hung in oak. All glued together. Hardly any screws. So all the low-end feedback was really great. You can get that "GRRRRRR...." Not always squealing, like Marshalls do.
Jay's Legend amp. Credit: Michael W. Dean
PSF: Interesting. What are you using now?
Jay: I've just been playing a lot of bass right now. All the guitar stuff is gathering dust in the basement. I ended up playing with Jeremy for seven years now, just guitar and drums. Turned into a loop dude. I would have a stack of speakers in the middle, for my guitar sound, then I would make a loop and it would go out to two other amps so I had surround sound. Then a wall of PA speakers and then one drummer. Improvised rock.
You can find all that music, it's called Battery Powered Grandpa, on Bandcamp. 150 songs, all recorded at a 16-track studio through Ableton Live. It started out as a drummer appreciation project. So there's twenty different drummers on there. I would bring them to the studio and we'd play for a few hours, make up stuff and see what came out, then I'd mix it, keep the best and put it online. You should check it out, there's 20 San Francisco drummers on there.
PSF: I did actually. I listened to the ones with Tony and Doug [of Bomb].
Jay: Oh cool. Freeway, the San Francisco drummer, I played with him for years too. The first songs are at the bottom. Jeremy shows up about halfway through and then he kinda became the drummer. Turned into a Jeremy/Jay project.
PSF: It's so easy to do music without the "four players and a van" part any more... although that seems to be the only way to make money these days. That or get your music on TV or in a video game. Bands still do it though. Deerhoof got in the van for twenty years.
Jay: Flaming Lips are still playing all over.
PSF: Yeah. And guitars- you play that Gibson L6-S. How did you come upon that unusual guitar?
Jay: I literally had four hundred dollars and I went down to the pawn shop. That was before Bomb, I was in Airtight Garage. It was supposedly what Santana played, but he actually played an L-5. It was a lie!
PSF: Bob Casale in Devo and Paul Stanley used them.
Jay: That's right.
PSF: I read that it was Gibson trying to make their version of a Stratocaster. It was light, made of maple, and lots of options on the knob. You can switch from single to double coil.
Jay: It's got six positions. Only two would work for Bomb. Probably the deepest ones.
PSF: Were you writing lyrics with Bomb?
Jay: I wrote "Be A Fag" and "Happy All The Time" [both songs that only repeat the title over and over, and both classics].
PSF: But you sang on some.
Jay: Yeah, sure. I'm so into the music, I couldn't tell you what the lyrics were on any of the songs. If I sang I had to learn them, but I couldn't tell you what they mean.
PSF: Damn it! So how about labels. Did you dig being on Boner?
Jay: Yeah I was living in Europe when the band signed to Boner, so I don't have much to say there. Really small label but it was cool. The Melvins were on there. Steel Pole Bathtub were friends of ours. And "Boner" was a perfect name for our band's label.
PSF: Can you tell me about how the whole Warner/Reprise thing went down? Hate Fed Love? Was that mind blowing?
Jay: It was a trippy thing. We went to L.A., did a showcase for all these labels, we played for them. Michael did some crazy shit, showed his dick... and one of the guys was interested. He was an agent for Reprise. Huge contract to sign, inches thick.
PSF: In your mind, were you preparing yourself to go on tour with Alice In Chains or whatever?
Jay: Yeah, see what happens. But nothing happened. Warner Brothers didn't support us on tour. We got a bunch of money. Got Bill Laswell, who admitted he didn't even listen to us. He said he did the record for the money. Doug doesn't like the record, I do. After two or three times listening, I like recordings of my bands. Even if there are mistakes.
PSF: There are good songs on there.
Jay: We had to make Laswell leave the room because he was trying to over-produce it. We had been making four-tracks and we knew we wanted the guitars to come in this way and that way, and he was back there on the faders, automation style. We were like (shakes head) "uh-uh." so he said "I'll leave the room and you guys mix it how you want." The only one that he ended up mixing was "Hey, Richard."
PSF: Was that about your friend Richard, the artist?
Jay: Yeah, Richard Carse, he was the one who did all our artwork. Got killed by a cop. Richard was drunk, had a knife, and the cop shot him. He wasn't in San Francisco at the time, it was hard to find out very much about the incident.
PSF: The song was before that?
Jay: I think the record was done after that. I'm not sure. I don't think he ever heard the song. I think we wrote it because we were sad about his death.
PSF: Because the song sounds like it's talking to a depressed person. "Get out of your bed." But it was addressing a dead person? Wait, you already said you couldn't answer lyrics questions [Michael Dean said Tony wrote the lyrics of this song as speaking to Richard when he was depressed and suicidal].
Jay: Yeah. Not much to say there. But the whole Reprise thing was great. We stayed in New York for like a month, we got a per diem. It was like a job. All of our records before that were done fast and cheap, in small places. This was Bill Laswell's studio. It wasn't even that great of a studio. He didn't even have windows. He would just turn the volume down when we recorded. It was pretty pro but it was kinda disappointing. We recorded all these live tracks and then he cut everything out but the drums and we had to go back in and record everything over again, which wasn't really the kind of vibe we wanted.
1990 Bomb promo photo.
Left to right: Michael Dean, Tony Fag, Doug Hilsinger, Jay Crawford. Credit: Ann Stauder
PSF: Did you enjoy recording To Elvis... In Hell?
Jay: Yeah! We were super high on speed the whole time. Yeah.
PSF: I could never do speed. I had friends who got into it. The few times I tried it, It would give me such a bad hangover it would scare me away. Hell on Earth.
Jay: That's how we got the engineer on To Elvis...in Hell. We paid him in drugs. But I never had a hangover from speed.
PSF: You have tiger blood.
Jay: Something like that. Worked for me for many years. But yeah, on Elvis, we were so young, and they, well, Tony couldn't speak about music in a correct way. He would be like, "and then I want you to sound like an angel being crushed by three semi-trucks!" and he would kind of hum these non-musical parts and we would try to figure it out, decipher the sounds he was making somehow.
PSF: That's great. Maybe that's where the primitive thing comes from... Non-Western-traditional parts, not cliche melodies or hooks.
Jay: We would just jam and when something sounded good we would go, "Let's do that again, but make it go rrr-rrr-rrr..." There's no "leads." Are there?
PSF: No, it's like each part is its own weird little hook, just all parts of the song.
Jay: Then when Doug came in he could hear melodies that we didn't. He pulled melodies out of the noise.
PSF: So when Tony quit the last time, did you kind of know that time it was for real?
Jay: Well, we did a whole tour without Tony.
PSF: Oh right!
Jay: Tony was already too much to deal with. Not to belittle his presence but we were able to go on without him.
PSF: So when it was over, you were still in a couple of other bands so you just kept on playing music?
Jay: Yeah, I've always played music. Just, at some point I realized I didn't want to try to make money doing it. That freed me up in a lot of ways, opened me up to new things.
PSF: Yeah, I know what you mean. I can relate, in different ways. You kind of stop worrying.
Jay: Right.
PSF: Well I guess I'll let you go... I wanted to tell you though, I used to have this walkman that the auto-reverse was broken so instead of flipping the tape it would play what you just heard backwards. So I had "Happy All The Time" on tape and one day I heard the backward masking part at the end of "Health Food and Heroin" and a little light bulb in my head went off and I pressed the auto-reverse button and I heard Michael speaking that part forwards at perfect speed.
[placid self-help guru voice] "Hi, this is Michael Dean of the rock group Bomb. I'm here to tell you the three secrets to eternal happiness. Number one: smile all the time, even if it hurts." I guess everything sounds satanic backwards. I wonder how many people have actually played that backwards? Might I be the only one?
Jay: You never know. On the record Hits of Acid, we put an inner sleeve in one record that was actually a whole sheet of acid, so a lot of people were tasting their inner sleeve.
PSF: [Laughs] So it was like a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory thing? "Did I get the golden ticket? Let's taste it. Nope... just paper." I have that record. Maybe I should taste mine!
Jay Crawford Today; Credit: Jay Crawford