I mean, honestly, what can I say about Joey “Shithead”Keithley that would properly serve his legacy? Besides being the father of hardcore, D.O.A and Joey have been a institution for nearly 30 years. Think about that… 3-0 YEARS people! While most of his peers from the time have either moved on to desk jobs or jail, Joey continues to hammer out songs and run Sudden Death Records. Pioneer, rebel, icon; Joey Shithead is all these things and will continue to be so until the day he dies. I recently had the pleasure of talking to Joey over the phone, while he was taking a break from his daily routine at Sudden Death.

So we’ll start off with Smash The State, you guys just put that DVD out recently. How did you guys decide on putting together the DVD, like compiling the early footage of DOA?

Joey: There’s a couple DVDs out there. There’s one of us called “Live At The Assassins Club” in England in 1985 or 1984 which is ok, it’s not bad. The sound quality is pretty good. There’s another one called “DOA: Greatest Shits” and that’s a collection of videos. I wanted to get something down to the raw, nitty gritty of what DOA was like live in those days and with the original lineup. I thought about doing a few of them, I had a lot of footage and I thought that it could all go on one package. It was just a matter of digging through all the tapes and a friend of mine dubbed them over from VHS. Just started going through them and seeing the stuff I thought might be interesting to people. I worked with what I had.

Were there any outside sources coming to you with video footage at all?

Joey: Not really, I didn’t really solicit it because I knew I had enough stuff to do this. There is a movie that will come out early next year about the Vancouver scene and that will have a lot of stuff from all sorts of sources and views but that’s a totally different project. I thought the title “Smash The State” was good for the times. When you really think about punk rock in the early days, there’s a real sense of not quite a revolution, but people in the scene were wanting one. That title, is a DOA song as well, but it’s like “yeah, take on the fuckers.”

So speaking of the political climate, obviously Bush gets a lot of comparisons to Reagan, how do you feel about bands out there, punk bands and the music scenes in general reaction towards activism? There were all those concerts for John Kerry a few years ago. How do you feel about the amount of activism in music today?

Joey: I think it’s a lot less certainly than it could be. It’s funny because almost all the Hollywood people are almost more activist than the musicians sometimes. I mean, not quite, because I know they have a lot of money and they get approached by groups that need money. But with the music scene now, there are people that are involved and got their heart into it. The whole DIY punk thing is still alive. That underground scene that is really political and active. And, for a bigger band, you have a band like Anti-Flag, they are activists. And it’s cool for the 2004 elections in the USA, the whole Punkvoter.com and Fat Mike and everybody involved. [Jello] Biafra got involved with stuff like that. The whole thing is that you can’t wait for elections to go be an activist because you’ll make no dent at all. You have to be full-time, I’m not saying you have to spend your whole life at it, but you got to keep working on stuff as it goes along. It’s hard to change politicians because you can see they steal votes, they can manipulate people, they own the press. At the same time, in the US, the two parties are very similar in their outlook and their policies. Which is a really frustrating thing for people down there I’m sure. Bands, big-small-medium, gotta be involved. The guys when I was a teenager that were kind of my heroes and gave me my own peculiar activist point of view were guys like Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie. They were musicians that actually took a stand on things. They did different concerts that served people’s imaginations and got them thinking, acting and changing things.

Do you see any Hendrix or Dylan-esque people that are inspiring people today?

Joey: It’s almost [that] they are so corporate and so mainstream that their activism is almost negated by their wallowing in the mainstream. A band like U2, which could be probably the prime band of activists but at the same time, it’s good the causes they get involved in, but I have a hard time taking them seriously. They are multi-multi millionaires and have corporate sponsors with iTunes. I think the king of activism right now is Willie Nelson. For a big act, he’s done the Farm Aid thing and that’s a great, down to earth type thing for farmers getting killed by the agriculture business. He’s also promoting stuff like biodiesel. What a brilliant idea. Do truckers live Willie Nelson? Of course, they love Willie Nelson. You’ve got your audience and let’s go after these truckers here, they burn up a lot of fuel. Producing green house gases and stuff like that.

There’s been bands that have been active like Rage Against The Machine. They reunite for a six-figure income at Coachella instead of reuniting for a particular cause. Like, as activists, why then?

Joey: They had the power to really get people thinking and it just kind of washed away a bit. Then when come back and it’s hard to make it credible again if you pick the wrong way to come back. That’s a hard thing so you got to be careful with what you do and how you do things. Another guy who is a top-notch activist who is big in the music industry is Neil Young. There’s an inherit sense of rebellion in punk rock. A lot is “mall punk” and that really doesn’t really doesn’t mean too much at all. Just like mohawks with loud guitars singing about girls. Same old stuff pop bands have been singing about for years. To me, they really don’t make a difference. A lot of the music and entertainment business is all about fashion and bling and fifteen minutes to half hour of fame. We’re living in a really funny time now. If you think of American Idol to Jackass I and II. People don’t care about their fifteen minutes of fame, they are going for their three or four minutes. It’s really changed how people look at entertainment. It’s also changed music a lot too in a sense. You have your little five minute burst and that’s your creative thing. Big record companies, not like the small guys, are looking for a band that can make a single and they don’t really care about an album. Back in the 60s-70s and a little bit in the 80s, people wrote albums were you could go ‘wow, there are eight or nine great songs on this album and two other ones that are pretty decent too.’ Now we’ve kind of gone back to the 50s with just the short little type thing. Totally disposable pop is what were back at to. It’s comes full circle. That’s why record sales have gone down and nobody gives a fuck. Bands don’t care, they just want their five minutes of fame and I’ll buy a house and a nice car.

You’ve been doing Sudden Death Records for years and years. What does it mean to you with all the bigger labels have troubles to be a record label owner now as compared to when you started off? How do you stay alive?

Joey: It’s pretty hard. We’ve tried experimenting with a couple new bands over the last few years. We’ve put some money into advertising and different ways of promoting the band and getting them in front of people and getting their records to people who might be able to help them. Whatever the type of stuff you do to help a new band. It’s really hard now to get your record into a record store except there’s the one die hard shop in every town and I’m sure in New York there’s like six or seven, San Francisco [there is ] four. A couple record stores that actually know what’s going on with stuff that’s not just mainstream. The majority of record stores is just fighting to get space for your artist. ‘Ok this chain will take one of this new title’ if your lucky for each store or they won’t even look at it at all. Cause a big record store use to carry 5-6,000 titles, now what are they down to 2,000? Every fall that number is actually smaller and smaller because there are more DVDs, anthologies and best ofs of older artists or established artists. Or half of it is that top pop or rock type stuff. Or top ten hip hop. To me, the bands have to get out there, make and build up fans. They have to play and they have to be great. People said good demos all the time and I’m like ‘ok, this is good. I don’t find it that original. It might some of punk style that we’ve heard before because we’ve get a lot that. If these guys or girls really want to develop, they would get out and travel around and make fans. A great example of that is Green Day. When Dookie became big in ’94 or whatever it was, it just wasn’t because Geffen had a lot of money, it was because they had gone out and played hundreds and hundreds of shows all over the United States and built up fans in every single corner of the country. They actually build a core following and now they have a great career and they’ve got some power to do things and influence the youth of America.

It seems like bands today because of Myspace today are spoiled. They can achieve instant fame instead of working.

Joey: The Myspace thing is a very cool thing. You can get yourself out there and find fans all over the place. And this is good because you can’t get yourself into the record stores but the Internet is providing a way through Myspace or downloading that you can get your stuff heard in Iceland, Russia, or South Africa. Where you’d never get your CD there in a million years. At the same time, a band can go into a studio, practice a song ten times, they reel off a brand new CD and go we’ve got a brand new CD. Not saying that people shouldn’t do that but I’m saying for example when DOA started before we went and recorded our first album, we had probably played 2-300 shows and rehearsed about 5-600 times on those same songs. We had probably played those songs about 800 times before we ran it through the studio. We played them in a real natural fashion. I think that helped make great records and we played in every single fucking town that would take us. We’d look through magazines and write down address and mail letters and mail singles. ‘Hey, we’re DOA. Will you book us here?’ It was totally DIY. You got to work your ass off. Unless you think you’re going to get on American Idol and become big and famous, even if you got so lucky one out of a million, your career is probably going to fall apart in short order anyway because you never had any substance to say to start with. You don’t know how to write a song.

Being in DOA and doing the solo stuff, how does it feel playing in front of an audience where half of the people in attendance might not have been born when you first started?

Joey: We’ve been getting younger and younger audiences in the last couple years. Some of the fuckers my age won’t show up, can’t get out the house or they are dead or in jail. We’ve always said to get a really well attended DOA show you need to have a decent sized jail break. To me, it’s kind of cool that people have picked up on it on what we do and what we stand for. Kids will say ‘hey, I heard this band is good. My brother told me about them.’ Now, we’re getting ‘my dad told me about them.’ When you get up and play you should say ‘hey, this could be the last show or the last time I’m ever going to play in this town.’ I don’t mean that in a malicious way, just like, ‘I’m going to do my best and do a great show to show people that I care and that I mean what I say and I mean what I stand for.’ If you can influence people in the right direction that’s a great gift. I think it’s a great gift that people still want to see us after all these years. We’re pretty fucking lucky. I appreciate every minute of it. Well, maybe not when I get hit in the head with something but almost every moment.

Does it ever frustrate you to see bands that broke up and reunite to do successful reunion tours?

Joey: Not personally at them. I continue doing what I do because I believe in. My central philosophy is ‘be your own boss. Think for yourself.’ Try and enact some positive change in this world. I’ll be playing music until I am dead. For a band to reunite, there’s nothing wrong with that. But I think it’s good if it can move in a creative direction or at least come up with something new. Not this complete regurgitation of what was good before. The classic punk rock example is the Sex Pistols reunion tour. They made one of the greatest records ever and were influential. I love them myself but they were upfront ‘we’re just doing this for the money.’ Then they tried to do the follow up and that just kind of fell flat. Kids were like ‘ok I’ve seen them once. It was ok.’ They hadn’t taken any creative steps to do anything new. They could play a show anywhere and get a ton of people out. I’m not saying that they couldn’t. They couldn’t keep up the momentum they had on that one tour. It would be impossible. All of the main bands have tried to reunite at one point or another. If people want to see them and that’s good but they better play fucking hard. I think that most people can tell when you are just going through the emotions. It’s a pretty sad thing. I don’t go to many shows. I just think I have a beat on it after playing thirty years of traveling around.

I think Mission of Burma was an example of a good, natural reunion.

Joey: Yeah, that’s a good example. Another one is the Buzzcocks reunion stuff has been pretty well received. The band has been playing hard and playing well.

How do you try, in terms of writing music, to keep it fresh in your own way?

Joey: The music is never really a problem specifically. When I play guitar I just play a riff. Just a new one and then I’ll tape it and just be like ‘ok, that’s worth exploring or that’s not worth exploring.’ I’ve got boxes and boxes of riffs and song ideas. Lyrically is more of a challenge for sure. Obviously I’ve got a bunch of themes I kind of stick to, that’s no secret. We talk about riots, insurrection, hockey and beer. We use politics and we use satire. Just to get an idea, you can get while watching TV or in a newspaper. Sometimes somebody will make that extraordinary statement, and you’re like ‘wow, that fucking makes sense. There’s an idea for a song.’ And then you gotta put in a context that people will understand and that I’ll understand. I can’t co-op my songwriting and pretend I’m 20 years old again. That would just end up sounding really stupid. It’s kind of this people, power, populism thing that I go for. That’s my thing. That if people are smart they can control their own destiny. They need a helping hand to get them going and in the right direction if they haven’t started already.

Thanks to Joey and Sudden Death Records for the interview. Check out Joey’s new solo record Band of Rebels and more at  Sudden Death Records 

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