The
Motards didn’t even start as
a band,” laughs bassist Toby Marsh. “It was more like a party, really.” To hear
Marsh talk, the ascent of Austin’s fave crash `n’ burn punkaholics to the top
of the local slamheap has been a shopping list of one serendipitous event after
another.
“Everything has just happened by accident,” Marsh recalls over afternoon
coffee at Star Seeds Cafe, “and it’s just dumb luck. It seems like a string of
dumb luck that just hasn’t ended, y’know? I was in this other band [Team USA,
one of the earliest Blue Flamingo bands, who also featured current Cov’rs/Lower
Class Brats bassist Rick Landmann], and we took ourselves so seriously, and no
one wanted to hear it. And here’s this band that’s a joke! And everyone
loves it! “
Marsh is laughing, but no one else is. And if they are, they’re laughing
with the Motards, named for a “stupid, derogatory kids’ name” guitarist
Dave Head picked up while growing up in San Antonio. (It’s a collision of
“moron” and “retard,” although the band recently discovered it also means
“biker” in Japan. Like any of these guys could ever give Sonny Barger
pause….) Since forming out of a chance meeting between Head and vocalist John
Wilson — redubbed “Johnny Motard” early in the band’s lifetime — the band has
issued several singles plus a recent album for Seattle’s eMpTy records
showcasing their rampaging din that sounds like 1964 Kinks 45s played at 78rpm.
They’ve also gained a live reputation for sheer mayhem that precedes them
wherever they play, mostly due to Johnny Motard’s penchant for inebriated auto-
and exo-destruction. Either they’re the worst goddamned spectacle you’ve
witnessed or audited, or they’re the best. It really depends on how you were
wired at the factory.
The accidents began in 1993. Not a one of the embryonic Motards had been in a
band of any degree of seriousness: Head tooled around in a speed-metal band in
his teens in Utah, scrubbing a Fender Jaguar his country blues-picking father
had begifted him with, discovering punk rock through tapes his older sister
began sending from Austin. Wilson, meanwhile, “tried to mess around in high
school, do some Black Flag songs and shit,” but not with much success.
“I met John at this really boring party on the East Side,” recalls the quiet,
bespectacled Head, who looks less like a punk guitar player than a serious
engineering student. “Before we walked into the party, I looked in this
apartment and saw John standing there, and I figured I’d rather be hanging out
with them than at this lame party. Ended up drunk, started screwing around,
talking about trying to start this band. I knew Suzanne [Bishop, the Motards’
drummer and Marsh’s longtime girlfriend] had just got some drums. I worked with
Suzanne at Ruby’s, and I’d been twisting her arm a while, trying to get her to
start a band. I met John and I knew immediately John was the singer.
“I’d been playing guitar for ten years. Paul [Johnson, Motards Guitarist
Number Two] had been playing a while, too. Toby had been a guitarist in a
couple of bands. We all used to go see the Inhalants play all the time.”
“The Inhalants were what did it for me,” affirms Wilson. “I loved the
Inhalants. Once I saw those guys, I thought, `Any schmuck can be in a band!
It’s only rock & roll!’ They were great! They were obviously fans of punk
music, doing their best to play pop music. So, that was great.”
“Dave turned me on to Supercharger and the Mummies and stuff like that,” says
Marsh, “and earlier we had a much garage-ier sound. It was nothing intentional.
I think we learned to play better or something and got louder. I guess that’s
what Dave had in mind when he started the band.”
Meantime, it was a case of on-the-job training for Suzanne Bishop. She’d
bought a drumkit with her tax return in July of 1993 and was a Motard a week
later. They’d been rehearsing with a friend of Wilson’s named Al, who ended up
getting a girlfriend pregnant and moving to Longview to do the honorable thing
with her. Since Marsh had been hanging around rehearsals to drink beer, he
picked up an old Hofner knockoff bass for $75 at Cash America, and practiced
that night with the band (although he suspects the Inhalants’ Lisa Rickenberg,
who was also hanging around, was planning to volunteer her services, too).
The band’s impact, after debuting Marsh-less at a Halloween backyard party,
was fairly immediate. The usual growing pains inherent from starting a punk
band from scratch were apparent, but it was evident they were on to something.
For all the cheap amp clang and Johnny Motard’s throat-shredding vocal
gymnastics, underneath it all lurked a collective songwriting genius best
summed up by Marsh, who prefers writing “songs that are as catchy as any
Ramones or Rezillos songs, and try to make `em short and sweet and something
that people wanna listen to.” There was also a rather off-center lyrical slant:
how many punks do you know who’d pen paeans to Johnny Tremaine? (Although, to
be fair, “Johnny Tremaine” actually honors not the classic children’s literary
hero, but Steve McDonald’s sleazebag manager character in the trash cinema gem
Desperate Teenage Lovedolls.) Then there’s the, uh, human explosion
known as Johnny Motard.
“At first, I was jumping on people and shit just to get over the stage
fright,” says Wilson. “Instead of fuckin’ standing onstage and hoping people
like me, I throw shit at ’em and spit on ’em and jump around. It makes no
difference on the way I sing, anyway. I don’t like singing if I’m not drunk. I
hate being onstage sober. It sucks. It doesn’t feel right.”
“I think he was kinda waiting for a while for somebody to kick his ass,” muses
Head. “Then, once he realized nobody was gonna kick his ass, he got more
obnoxious. I think somebody eventually will on tour sometime. When you go out
there, and people don’t know John, don’t know he’s a nice guy or whatever,
people are actually a lot more scared of us. There’s this weird mystique about
being from Texas. People think you’re packing a concealed handgun or
something.”
“It’s the audience that trashes places!” Marsh insists. “Things
get nuts. We played a party once at (somebody’s) house where the walls kinda
caved in on both sides. But Dave’s roommate came over an plastered them up the
very next day, y’know.
“Sometimes, it gets kinda crazy,” he continues. “I like the shows to be
spontaneous and feel like anything can happen. My favorite thing in the world
is when somebody gets up and starts singing with the band, just grabs the mike
and goes for it. That’s my favorite, when you blur the distinction between the
audience and the band as much as possible.”
“I hear stories all the time about shit I did that I know I didn’t do!”
says Wilson. “(Someone) claims I came to their house and kicked their door down
or some fuckin’ crap. I know I didn’t do that! People love to just talk shit. I
just get drunk, go in people’s bathrooms, take all their toilet paper. That’s
about as bad as it gets, really. [Though] on tour, we do a lotta stupid
shit.”
“When we go on tour, we lead a pretty wild life,” says Head. “It’s kinda
weird. People that hear us get this idea of what we’re like, and then weird
stories go around that burst everyone’s ideas about us. Like when we were in
San Francisco, Suzanne and (Reclusives drummer) Mike Leggett got in a little
argument at a party. Suzanne slapped Mike, and Mike slapped her back or
something. By the time we got to the next town, somebody told us they’d heard
Suzanne had pulled a knife on somebody! When we’re being nice, people make up
these stories. I think they just wanna have some weirdos, they wanna believe
this whole crazy myth. I wonder about bands like the Dwarves. I wonder how much
of the stories you hear about them are true. I think people just wanna believe
crazy stories, whether they’re true or not.”
Across the Motards’ growing discography, change has been evident. They’ve gone
from a debut EP Head sees as “sound(ing) more like the Cramps” to playing
“fast, slightly longer, balls-out punk songs.” He also notes Paul Johnson’s
fondness for country music, which has manifested itself not only in the
deathless thrashing the band gives Willie Nelson’s “I Gotta Get Drunk” on their
debut Rock Kids LP, but in Johnson “playing these country guitar things
along with this weirdness.” The band has also developed into a first-class
touring machine of late. Head sees that development as the best part. “We’re
going out again in [a] month. People are saying, `Oh, you’re gonna get sick of
it, you’re gonna get burned out.’ No, we’re sick of being here! That’s
the best thing.”
“The last tour was a cakewalk compared to before,” says Marsh of their third
road trek. “Having the album out helps. I guess having Maximum Rock `N’
Roll on your side helps a lot.”
And the happy accidents keep happening: The day the band played an in-store at
some mom-and-pop in Arizona, Rolling Stone called that very store to
report for the next issue’s Alternative Sales Chart. Due to the fiscal boost of
the Motards’ mini-gig, Rock Kids found itself in that week’s
Stone, nuzzling up to the likes of Oasis. When it was relayed to Marsh,
he figured his pals were indulging in some chain-yanking.
“We outsold NOFX in Tucson!” Johnny Motard boasts, smirking. “My mom liked
that.” n
This article appears in June 14 • 1996 and June 14 • 1996 (Cover).