by Tim Stegall
Ask
Lee Ving why he,
his wife, and his family moved to Austin six years ago, and he’ll tell you: “We
had friends here, so we were gonna move here, anyway.” Ask any of the usual
civic-pride-type questions a mag like the Chronicle asks a noted rock
musician who moves here — what do you like about our fair city, etc., etc.? —
he’ll tersely state in a jokey Texas accent that he won’t divulge information
that’ll attract “foreigners.” (An odd choice of words from one who moved here
from Los Angeles by way of Philadelphia.) Make any sort of attempt to get a
bearing on Lee Ving’s pre-punk history, he’ll “plead the Fifth.”
In short, if you were hoping for the skinny on the man’s rumored operatic
training, singing waiter past, or long-whispered relation to Dead End Kid Leo
Gorcey (which would explain much of Ving’s appearance and thuggish stage
persona), you won’t get it here. Mostly because you won’t get it from Lee Ving
— at least, not in print.
The longtime leader of Fear, the seminal L.A. band whose
dirty-words-and-slamdancing appearance on Saturday Night Live 14 years
ago probably did more than anything else to establish the American stereotype
of punk rock, Lee Ving’s a man with a very carefully constructed public image,
one that’s the design of a sharp and cunning mind. And Ving happens to be
highly protective of both that image and of his private life. He loves to talk,
loves to give interviews, but will only tell you what he wants you to know.
Nothing more, nothing less. One begins to suspect he was granted such a tightly
set mouth to ensure the only words he’d utter would be the ones he
chooses to utter.
Too bad. Whenever someone’s crafted a body of work as compelling as Fear’s,
you wanna know the inner workings of the minds responsible. And few hardcore
bands cultivated a noise and stance as volatile and adventurous as Fear’s.
Constantly teetering on the edge separating Tex Avery slapstick from impending
violence, Fear threatened as much as they entertained. Their pitch-black wit
managed to make sexism, misanthropy, and homophobia deeply hilarious, and the
band’s immortal take-no-prisoners appearance in Penelope Spheeris’ classic L.A.
punkumentary The Decline of Western Civilization is all the evidence you
need of how Ving managed to elevate crowd-baiting to an art form. (“Next
time, don’t bite so hard when I come, okay? You only spit as good as you suck,
shithead!“)
“Well, that’s your responsibility as a person that does this kinda thing,”
remarks Ving. “It’s to outrage, challenge authority. That’s your
responsibility. People wouldn’t come and see you otherwise. I mean, what the
hell? You can listen to the news at night. It doesn’t challenge authority just
to tell us about stuff. That’s pretty placid. It doesn’t get anybody going. You
dig up sore spots and that kinda shit, that’s what you wake up and listen
to.”
And for a punk rock band, Fear hardly fit either the
two-barchords-and-a-leather-jacket, sub-Ramones idea of punk, or the inept Bad
Brains impersonations of the hardcore bands that followed in their wake.
Ludicrous time-signatures were set to breakneck tempos. Lead guitarist Philo
Cramer made vomitory noises over Ving’s viciously jacked rhythm guitar,
suggesting a familiarity with Captain Beefheart made plausible by Cramer’s
off-the-record tales of hanging out with the Magic Band as a pre-adolescent in
the Trout Mask Replica days. (Ving recalls Fear rehearsing down the hall
from the Magic Band, but doubts that had any bearing on their musical ideas.)
And Ving himself managed to evoke Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and a drunken,
belligerent Confessionserent pipe fitter bellowing for the ump’s head at a Red
Sox game, all at once. Fear’s two LPs should be all the proof needed that this
band was not as moronic as their pose.
“They called us `musos,'” Ving grinned in recollection three years back, when
he, Cramer, and drummer Spit Stix reunited and drafted L.A. session bassist
Will MacGreggor to revive Fear’s bad name. “‘Cuz we knew how to play our
instruments. But we weren’t ashamed of that fact. Y’know, we wanted to
bring as much strength to the thing as we could in knowing how to play the
fucking instrument. Which,” he laughed hard, “is a pre-requisite!”
Spit Stix figured the jazz-and-blues-bred sophistication of Fear music had
little to do with the shape of their record collections. “I think that’s our
sense of humor more than anything else.”
“Yeah,” Ving agreed, “something to make ourselves laugh. We were entertaining
ourselves, putting things in the songs that…
“…didn’t belong!” smirked Stix.
“That didn’t belong,” Ving began clarifying, “or weren’t really required, or
were just there for our own amusement.”
“Put things where it hurts,” Stix asserted. “It’s like, `Oh, there’s a bar
that’s 33/16! Oh! Ouch!‘” he laughed.
Philo Cramer: “There’s an entire rule book that we could write, if we wished
to waste our time, about how to do this kinda music. I ain’t shittin’ you:
There’s bands whose songs you can’t tell one from the next, but they’d tell us,
`Oh, you can’t do that!’
“I can break somebody’s fingers in triple time,” he continues.
They were John Belushi’s favorite punk band. They also must have been
Hollywood’s favorite punk band, not only in the civic sense, but in the
industrial sense. Ever watch the “punk rock” episodes of Eighties TV series
like Quincy and notice how much the “punk bands” featured resemble
scandalous versions of Fear?
Ving was hardly surprised. “Hollywood, TV, and movies tend to do that to
anybody. They make people be bigger or worse than they normally are. But I
think that in that case, they really missed the boat entirely. They would take
something that you should really be careful of if you run into it on the
street, and made it look like clown amusement for children. Just an unrealistic
medium.”
Ving should know, having done plenty of work in that medium, usually playing
“a bad guy that was able to stop in the midst of doing this mischief and sing a
couple of song[s].” There was also a healthy chunk of movie credits, including
films like Flashdance and Clue. Then, there’s musical activity
you would never suspect.
“I did some sessions and some touring and an album with Tom Scott, the jazz
horn player. I wrote and sang a song with Ry Cooder that was a soundtrack tune
for a Louis Malle film that was about the Baytown, Texas, shrimping industry
and the immigrant problem after the Vietnam war and that sort of thing. There
was a bunch of different stuff that was happening around that time.” Including
— following Fear’s ’87 breakup — a country band, Range War, that gigged in
L.A. and Texas.
“We played in San Antone with the Gatlin Brothers, Ray Stevens, and Asleep at
the Wheel. We opened up for Johnny Lee on a tour of the West Coast for awhile.
We played in Nashville for some RCA people. That was awhile back.”
It sure was. Since then, five years past Fear’s disappearance, they
reappeared. Why? “It was just obvious to me that Fear had really not run its
race. The course hadn’t really been run. There was a lot more to do with it,
and it became more and more tempting to get back involved with it.”
So, what happened, after a pair of tours, to Philo and Spit?
“They became fundamental Islamics and moved to Iraq.”
Now, waitaminute! I happen to know that Spit is living in New York, and Philo
is living in New England!
“Uh, that’s probably our covert misinformation service. It works very well.”
Well, I was told during our pre-interview conversation that Philo is raising a
couple of kids in New England!
“No, no, that’s an experiment. They’re two test tube kids that he’s been
trying to generate from some cloned prehistoric fetal tissue that he was able
to come by from an archeological dig in Southern Iraq, which was part of what
drew him and them to try to relocate there, and also establish some punk rock
in Baghdad.”
So, why did this new Fear lineup (ex-Frank Zappa bassist Scott Thunes, drummer
Andrew Jaimez, guitarist Sean Cruse) tour for awhile under the name Lee Ving’s
Army?
“That’s true, we did a few performances under that moniker. But we were always
Fear. It was just another kernel of our misinformation dissemination
program.”
Well, what have the new guys brought to the band?
“More skill. And that, of course, was the idea. I wanted people that could
play complex things, but also enjoyed playing simple stuff. Actually, I was
just looking for great players. That was the long and short of it.” Later, Ving
will remark that he likes to hear “players with lots of skill, where it’s
coming out all over the place.
“I’ve always been a big fan of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins,
Roland Kirk, Charlie Parker, Django Reinhardt, McCoy Tyner on the piano, Archie
Shepp, Beaver Harris,” he says. “As far as popular music is concerned, I’m not
seeing anything that I think is hallmark stuff: no historical, innovative
things are happening at the moment, only at the regular rate of change. I don’t
see anybody breaking those barriers.
“But the business is never really geared towards anyone that does anything
really different. Though you can’t really say that, because every once in
awhile, someone comes along who does something very differently, and they’re
able to attract attention and to make it stick — make a commodity out of it.
So we still think the gray matter in the American population isn’t deep enough
to absorb what we’re doing. Not only that, but to take it to heart and to
really like it so as to enable them to get the steam out on Friday night, or to
put it on their record player or CD machine and get steam out whenever they put
it on. And hopefully, it will get put on more for that reason than that the
message is honest and positive and all that kind of shit. You know what I
mean?”
Well, whether the 1995 model Fear will achieve that lost maverick soul Lee
Ving misses remains to be seen. The players certainly have the skill,
imagination, and credits to try, however, what with Scott Thunes’ Zappa
pedigree and all.
“Yes, indeed,” says Ving, before practically poking a hole in his cheek as he
adds, “He also played with Eugene Ormandy and Henry Mancini. And I think he
directed the Norman Luboff Choir and did some consulting work for Mitch
Miller.”
Uh, yeah. The evidence available from the new Fear record, Have Another
Beer With Fear, is that the new blood has indeed made the band potent
again, resulting in their strongest work since the first Fear LP (even though
the best Fear on record would doubtlessly be their cuts on the Decline soundtrack). And unlike that Slash LP, the rich quality of the production
actually enhances the material, this time around. And as a lyricist,
Ving is still as hilariously politically incorrect as ever. Of course, four
songs alone are about beer. Three years ago, Ving declared Budweiser to be The
Official Beer of Fear, “because it’s red, white, and blue.” Now, he says that
still holds true, “unless there’s a Shiner Bock handy.”
I remember hearing you liked to shop at Whole Foods because they allowed you
to drink beer while you shopped.
“I don’t know where you hear these stories! You know, our
misinformation service is a 24-hour operation, and we’ve gotta figure that they
get a bunch of details out there that people have to weed their way through.” n
This article appears in November 17 • 1995 and November 17 • 1995 (Cover).