Question::
I dont know if you even remember making this album at all, but what
was it like working with the Boredoms for the Z-Rock Hawaii album?  I
saw Boredoms in 2008, front row, and I can honestly say that Yamataka
Eye was probably the most intense person I’ve ever seen in person.  I
know the album seems to have been done quickly but I love it anyway.
Do they speak English?  Did you guys jam a lot?  Do you like their
records?  Anyway just wondering as I can’t think of any musicians who
would try to seek out the freakin’ Boredoms.

A- I get asked this so often that I figured it’s time to answer it. Way, way, back (like in 1993) Andrew Weiss took me to see Boredoms first in Philadelphia, and then again in Hoboken a day or two later. They were the heaviest band I had ever seen since the Butthole Surfers, but on a similar level of psychedelic transcendence with a Japanese point of reference that was unlike anything before or since. Last time I saw them a few years ago they were just as heavy and still evolving. At the time not a lot of people knew their music stateside, but the singer of the the band Yamatsuka Eye had released a solo album full of samples of “The Pod” so we knew he was a fan. After meeting at these 2 shows we arranged for him to come to our studio (we were working on “Chocolate and Cheese” in Pennington, NJ) and he stayed with me and my family for about a week. His English was minimal at best and he spent the whole time at my house roughhousing with my border collie Jimmy, which I loved. He couldn’t get enough of Jimmy, throwing the ball, chasing the stick, it was incredible to see and Jimmy loved it, being a Border Collie and all. Not being able to really communicate in the studio was an advantage, we tried anything and everything. He spent time inventing contraptions to sing through, like an Evian bottle as a megaphone taped to a snare head with the other side mic’ed up with vibrating snares, shit like that. He was an animal on the microphone. One night he and I were driving home at 3am and a deer jumped in front of my little Nissan. I totalled the car and the deer lay dead, steaming in the road. Eye was going batshit, I dunno if he’d ever seen a deer in person and I was laughing my ass off, it’s pretty typical around here to run into deer and I hated the car. Anyway, after he left he went back to Japan and the Boredoms wrote the second half of the album and mailed it over to us. We overdubbed our tracks and that was that. Eye named the band “Z-Rock Hawaii” which was the most perfect name in the world for the record. In the studio it was just me, Aaron, and Andrew Weiss and Eye. I think Claude may have played some drums on there too actually. We did some 4-tracking at my house which I’ve never been able to find for some reason.