Show & Tell - Powerman 5000, an interview with Spider

POWERMAN 5000
an interview with Spider, 06.11.03

The move defied industry standards and defined gutsy.

"Tonight The Stars Revolt!" had sold a million plus units and Powerman 5000 was on the tip of the music consciousness's collective tongue. Now, not only was the followup album "Anyone For Doomsday?" ready for shipping, but the tour had been booked and the band had been doing interviews. Onward and upward...

And then something unheard of happened.

Scant weeks before it's official release, Powerman 5000 pulled "Anyone For Doomsday?"

The result? A lineup shift [the departure of drummer Al3 and bassist Dorian 27, replaced, respectively by Adrian Ost and Siggy Sirusen] and a four year period between releases.

Four long years.

Now, finally, the real followup to "Tonight" has been released. Aptly titled "Transform," the record features a pared down PM5K, a happier PM5K and a "ready to pick up where we left off" PM5K.

We talked to front man Spider about the decision to pull "Doomsday" and the album that resulted from that decision.

Show & Tell: How you doing, Spider?

Spider: Good.

S&T: Where are you?

Spider: I have a day off in Pittsburgh. I haven't seen anything yet but that's okay. Kinda rolled off the bus and started doing interviews.

S&T: I guess the [publicity] machine is in full swing, you've been doing these non-stop?

Spider: Yeh, we started getting back on the road in April. First break, we'll get a week off in July. Yeh, we're just back into it. But it's great, it's so nice to be back in the game, y'know?

S&T: I would imagine, with that much time off from the road...

Spider: Yeh, two years off from the road and four years between records which is just ridiculous. Like a lifetime in pop music.

S&T: Let's get [the discussion about "Doomsday] out of the way, though I'm sure you're probably tired of talking about it...

Spider: Oh, the whole, "why did you pull the record?"

S&T: Yeh. I give you a lot of respect for having the balls to pull it.

Spider: Oh, thank you.

S&T: Especially because this whole madness [publicity on the album] had already started; interviews, reviews and everything else.

Spider: Yeh, I'd been doing interviews, the record was all pressed up and the tour was booked. The whole thing was just going and, at that point, to say, alright, let's stop, is just borderline insanity. Not to mention the amount of money labels spend. We'd just come off a record that'd sold a million and a half copies. The smart thing would've been, I shouldn't say the smart thing...

S&T: The typical thing?

Spider: Yeh... would be let's go with it, let's just see what we can get out of this one, milk it... But y'know that's not why I did this.

It's funny. I don't think people understand that I started doing this because I discovered The Clash, Minor Threat and Black Flag. [I was] going to punk rock shows when I was thirteen years old and, for better or worse, I believed in the whole fucking thing. I believed in the music and what it was really supposed to be about. I guess I've never let go of that side of me so I really did say, creatively, ["Doomsday" is] not a record I want to go out and spend two years supporting because I don't even think it's that great.

S&T: That's a statement about your integrity. I wish Metallica had said the same thing.

Spider: [laughs] It's crazy, man, I haven't heard anybody say anything good about that record.

S&T: It's worth a listen, a single listen. So this decision, is this you in a room toiling every night for a week? "Man, I don't want to do this, how do I pull it?"

Spider: Not really. When it went down it went down fast. We made ["Doomsday"] and the band was not getting along that well and it was a real struggle to make and we didn't really click with the producer. The whole process was not fun. We've always been the kind of band that loves being in the studio and making records and this one was just not cool. We worked through it and worked through it and when we finally finished it I think we were all just very relieved and happy that it came out as good as it did. I mean, I don't think it's a bad record, I just don't think it was the kind of record I wanted to make. I think it took a while for it to sink it.

For myself there was that sense of relief that we were done but then I started realizing, "okay, I'm not listening to this record, I don't even want to hear it. I wonder why that is?"

We remixed it, like two or three times and it just... There were some signs being raised that I didn't pay attention to because you figure, "that's it, we gave it our best, there's no turning back." And then you get in a discussion with the label, "okay, what's the single? Okay, 'Bombshell.' Okay, what's the second single going to be?" And I kinda looked and said, "I don't know," where with the new record I could list you six songs that I think could be hits. Things like that started happening.

And then all of a sudden it was like, "you know what? What if we don't put this fucking thing out? Then it was me in a room with my manager, the top guys at Dreamworks and we just sat down... It was kind of bizarre in a way because they're like, "you know what? If you really feel like, creatively you can do better then we trust you, go do it."

S&T: That's amazing to me in today's industry.

Spider: Yeh, those guys are from the old school, back when it was done right. It gets harder and harder to behave that way but they showed who they are and let us know they trusted us. And of course the original plan was just to go back and maybe tweak it, maybe write a couple more songs, which turned into making a whole new record after two guys left the band.

S&T: That is old school, nurturing a band creatively...

Spider: Yeh, I think they saw the same thing we saw which was we put out our first record, "Mega Kung-Fu Radio," and then we put out "Tonight The Stars Revolt!" which essentially was a whole new different thing. We took it and we experimented and made a whole new sound and then when we did "Doomsday" we didn't do that. We just kind of repeated the formula a little. With maybe a little more aggression.

I saw that and they saw that and [there wasn't that same] sense of experimentation that we'd done before. With "Transform" I think that we did that, we tried new things. In some ways it became experimental by simplifying a little bit. Instead of adding more and more and more sounds and more blips and more bleeps and more loops, we sort of went the other way and took all that crap away and just said, alright, here's the band.

S&T: That's what it sounds like, a stripped down version...

Spider: Yeh, and for us that was a big step because I think that we all sort of suffered from hiding, not hiding... There's the old saying "less is more." We'd always had "more is more" and this time we didn't do that.

S&T: Was there a shift in the band that prompted the straight-forwardedness of the new stuff? Even lyrically you're not hiding behind any subtext...

Spider: I think for me it was just sort of waking up. We had some dark days there for awhile rebuilding this band and I said to myself, "well, why did I fucking do this in the first place?" And I went back to those days, being thirteen or fourteen and jumping on the train and going into Boston and seeing the great fucking punk rock bands that inspired me to start making music. I kinda got back into that spirit, being honest. You didn't think about anything, you just sorta did what you did and didn't make apologies for it and I just got back into the spirit of just why I started making music in the first place and I think a lot of that comes through on this record.

S&T: Making music for the sake of making music, imagine that.

Spider: Yeh, that doesn't happen much anymore.

S&T: No, not really. Did you pull anything from "Doomsday?" I saw some lyrics that are almost word for word.

Spider: Yeh, I just made some lyrical references. I kinda did that mostly for the kids who already had "Doomsday" because a lot of them have it from the internet and I thought it'd be funny to use some of the lyrics. But musically it's a 100% new record.

Growing up one of my favorite bands was the Police and Sting used to do that a lot, he'd take lyrics from other songs and put it in, I always thought that was kinda cool.

S&T: Right, he'd reference himself.

Spider: Yeh.

S&T: Do you think "Doomsday" is something that would be released down the road?

Spider: I think that's a possibility, I don't know. It's funny, a lot of kids, and I think it's just a psychological thing, but a lot of kids come up to me, "that's my favorite record." I think it's just because it is the hard-to-get record. It seems a cooler record because we didn't put it out. So maybe some day, you never know. If we ever get to the point where we have a career that warrants some kind of special edition CD or a boxed set or something...

S&T: Let's jump to the new stuff... How's the reaction been to it live?

Spider: It's been fucking great which is really surprising because we were out for a good six weeks before the record even came out, playing live. Generally you expect to play new songs and everyone to just kinda stand there and scratch their heads but there was a real enthusiasm for the new stuff. And now that the record's come out it's really cool.

When you write songs you sort of have this ideal reaction that you want to get from people, physically or otherwise, and I'm starting to see that now that the record's been out for two weeks or three weeks, I'm starting to see that live which is really great. "Action," we play that, it just turns into a mad house. And "Free" you get this feeling of like, an anthem-vibe, like kids singing it back to me and I can tell that they just get it, it's cool. A lot of fun.

S&T: How about the new stuff integrating with old stuff, especially sans space suits and stuff?

Spider: You know it seems to all work. To me, when you take away all that stuff, I think you start to realize that there isn't that big of a difference between everything. I think the image was the big wall, that made it seem more different than anything else. Musically it all seems to flow pretty smoothly.

S&T: Mudvayne said something to the affect of wanting to have their music taken more seriously, that the makeup was more of a hindrance to that. Do you see anything along those lines?

Spider: Yeh, I think absolutely and I think it's unfortunate. I think Mudvayne is a much different scenario than us, when you are doing makeup, they almost started to seem like GWAR to me, like it was supposed to be silly. What I was trying to do, although in the same lines it does get misunderstood... People looked at us like, "oh, they're a cartoon band," the Spacemen or something. Unfortunately I think there was a time when that kind of stuff was looked at as kind of cool and creative. The Beatles are Sgt. Pepper and Queen puts a record out and there's a giant robot and they're dead in the hand of the robot and things like that, not to mention classic stuff like Ziggy Stardust... I think there was a time when things like that were looked at as being, or welcomed, as a testament to a band being adventurous instead of just being silly, y'know?

I think there was an element that completely was lost, not that we were like the world's most serious band, there was definitely an element of fun to what we do, but I didn't realize to what extent people are blinded by an image.

So yeh, I knew that having new members in the band and having this break was just sort of the perfect opportunity for me to sorta rebuild this thing. Look, I'm not the kind of person who's looking for credibility. I don't need that. I will never be thought of as Radiohead. At least not for Powerman 5000. Maybe in five years if I do something different that may be part of the equation but this is a loud rock band. The credibility factor isn't a huge part of it, it's just the misunderstood aspect of it is probably more important to me.

S&T: You had a rough time making "Doomsday" and maybe some people weren't happy in the band. Was that once you got in the studio or was that left over from the last tour?

Spider: I think it had been sort of building. Al and Dorian had been in the band for over ten years. Sometimes you become so familiar with somebody that it builds just odd resentment because you sort of automatically assume what that person's thinking and what they're gonna do and how they're gonna react. And I think, unfortunately, we built up images of each other that maybe weren't necessarily true. And it just really started to affect how we got along. They created a scenario where it was the band and me, and I was a separate part of it, which I think was unnecessary.

I think it had been building for awhile. But that's okay because I wouldn't want anybody to stay, to stick around if they didn't want to and it was something that I knew had to happen for the survival of the band so they sort of made my life a little easier by quitting so I didn't actually have to ask them to leave.

S&T: How about the dynamic now?

Spider: It's way cooler, for the first time in a long time I feel like I'm in a band. Like with everybody just sorta hanging out, goofin' around and having fun, and just talking about it and getting off stage and talking about the show and being excited. Before it was a very separate feeling. So far so good, it's a lot more exciting than it was before.

S&T: Your web site is really fan-friendly, that's a big focal point of it. How much involvement do you have with that?

Spider: Actually, a lot. And it became something on this particular records that I wanted to make more important than every before. I noticed that our hard core fans are an interesting breed. They tend to be pretty smart kids. I spend a lot of time sort of spying on them on the message board and stuff, and I'll post occasionally and I noticed there's a lot of clever, smart kids and I like that, I like that we're attracting that kind of a fan. So I wanted to create a place that was interesting for them to hang out. We tried to offer all the information first there, although it's hard sometimes to beat people to the punch. It's an important thing for me now.

S&T: The internet has made things so small. When we were growing up, your favorite band would come around maybe once a year and that was your only interaction with them, maybe a picture in a magazine. Now, kids go on, they expect you to be online, they expect you to be accessible. How do you handle that sort of demand?

Spider: I think that there's a really great aspect to that and a really bad one. I think the great part is that it does [create] an opportunity that was never available even just a few years ago, to have that kind of connection with the bands. But on the other hand, I think that that sort of takes away some of the fun of a rock band. Maybe it shouldn't be something that's so accessible, maybe it should be something that has a little more mystique to it.

I have mixed feeling about it. I think that if you're bombarded by images of your band and you can see the video anytime you want 'cause they've got it online and you can see a hundred different pictures, and you can do this and that, I wonder if in the long run that's not hurting the excitement of coming out to the show or buying the record. If that is your only chance to see the band, it's gonna make it that much more special. But if you're always having so much information, I wonder if that takes away some of the fun? I don't know, but I think we're past that point, you might as well embrace it and get into it and use it.

But I think it sort of takes the fun away from it a little bit.

S&T: I think that it's certainly contributed to the demise of the "ROCK STAR." That bigger than life, untouchable aspect.

Spider, thanks for your time.

Spider: Alright, good talking to you.

interview by scott sisti