Interviews

Some Girls

Interview with Wes Eisold on Feb 25, 2006 by Archive Bot

Some Girls is a nihilist super group, a gang of hardcore heroes who have been around, seen it all, helped put it out, and are now here to tell you what’s wrong with it.  On their recent stop in San Francisco, Some Girls were :JP, he of clear bass and unmistakable reverberations, who runs 31G and plays with The Locust; Sal, mighty master of the see-thru baby blue drum set; Cody, filling in on guitar, on loan from The Blood Brothers in lieu of Chuck, who had a family emergency; Rob, dressed like a killer cowboy on guitar; Jose, professor and drummer of Swing Kids fame stepped in on second drum set for the closer; and Wes, the guy who writes the words. 
 
It was Wes who sat down and answered questions. Wes Eisold, whose lyrics ignited the flame of hardcore in many, whose relentless and impassioned delivery inspired countless imitators, whose very presence would have left an interviewer speechless - if he weren’t such a funny, shy, quietly articulate guy. When asked about previous accomplishments like fronting the genre-defining American Nightmare/Give Up The Ghost, Wes give a typical answer:
 
By: Greg Weissel
 
“We were just idiots. Complete morons. AN was just friends playing music in a band together.  That’s how it came out, and that’s all I can think of it as.  But people relating to it, that’s great. That’s how I feel about music. I feel really passionate about bands I listen to and like, so I can relate to it on that level, but I can’t see it from an outside perspective.  But that’s probably how most bands feel.”
 
Much has changed for Wes since the very first Some Girls album, a one sided seven inch entitled The Rains, first surfaced on Boston label Deathwish Inc. The sound present on the early records was the sound of Wes and a revolving cast of compatriots.  It was the sound of shedding, the outgrowing of a skin.
 
Wes remarks, “I feel older now - not in a jaded, bad way - but I don’t want to act like this is the best, most glorious time of our lives, freak out, jump around, throw our arms in the air.  It is what it is.  If it’s a bad vibe, it’s a bad vibe. Who fucking cares?  It doesn’t matter. The whole idea of a band like that playing live is sort of beat to hell anyway.  There’s a job for the band to do, there’s a job for the crowd to do.  It’s stupid.  It should be very honest and natural.  If the honesty and naturalty of it is that it’s boring and it sucks, then so be it.  It’s not that big of a deal.”
 
The choice of Religion II, originally by post-punk reactionary group Public Image Limited, tells a bit more about how Some Girls see their current environment. “There is a parallel between the way members of PiL felt at the time about the whole ‘punk’ genre, and the way we feel about hardcore and punk now.  It’s so redundant now.  It’s monotonous.  Personally, we’re really bored with it. I think it’s a good pick for us, especially with the ideology behind it.  Also with ‘Religion II,’ it fit thematically.”
 
Of the current tour, winding down with this last west coast jaunt, the reaction to Some Girls’ live set has been “Fifty/fifty.  The shows in the bigger cities have been great, but in some of the smaller towns we’ve just gotten a lot of staring.  We’ve played some weird shows too, where no one came out so we would just play Deathface, the last song on our album, for twenty minutes.  We’re not trying to bum anyone out or rip anyone off.  If there’s a few kids who come to the show but the show sucks, we’re going to play our songs for them because they came out to see us.  That’s important.  We’re not saying, “Fuck you! This show sucks!”  It’s not that.  We’ll play our music for you, but we’re not going to be freaking out, jumping off of things.  We’re not U2.”
 
“I don’t think we’re trying to win anyone over.  If people like it that’s super cool, but if not, that’s okay too.  Just looking at magazines and seeing bands with their promo photos and the things they say in interviews, it’s like, fuck man, this is such bullshit.  It’s so silly, just so trite, it doesn’t mean anything.”
 
As if on cue, Cody from Blood Brothers  sticks his head in and asks Wes, “Hey, what’s that band that’s really shitty?  Eyeliner rock, but they’re actually Republicans?”
 
Wes answers, “Avenged Sevenfold.”  He laughs, and says, as if by way of explanation, “We read magazines on tour.”
 
When asked what question he would like to asked in an interview so as to accurately portray himself and his art, Wes admits there can be no one question he can come up with off the top of his head.  He does take issue, however, with the way the new record’s lyrics are interpreted. “When people review the record and they talk about the lyrical content as super abstract, like it doesn’t mean anything, I think it’s quite the contrary.  It’s very specific.  If anything, it’s more specific than anything I’ve been a part of.”
 
The last track, Deathface, is one of the hardest to review, interpret, and understand.  It builds up to a staccato droning chant of the word ‘Ape!’ over and over.  Is it an accusation?  A pleading call to be left out of what you see happening around you?
 
Yes with a but, according to Wes.  “Yeah, I think the whole record is like that.  But you’re not left out, you’re in the middle of it all.  The last song was pretty much improvised in the studio.  I didn’t have words written down, I just knew how long sections were.  I didn’t want to include the lyrics to that track, but JP really like them so they’re in there.
 
It’s not about ‘kids at the show.’  It’s about everything.  It’s an interpretation of people and their roles in the world.  It’s repetitive because the part called for it, not to be obnoxious or anything.  I think it’s a good wrap-up to the record, but it was a total pain in the ass to record. We knew that our producer could have had us say it four times and copy and pasted it, but he made us do it all the way through like four times.  It was pretty brutal.”
 
As amazing as it is that those lyrics were improvised, it’s just as shocking that Wes hadn’t already had lyrics at the ready.  With a long awaited book Death Beds, a short story for sale on tour, and past zine work, Wes is always writing. 
 
His first zine’s title, Go Get Left On An Alter, later resurfaced in Some Girls lyrics. “About fifty percent” of SG lyrics come from previously written stories and poems.  Wes added, “Not that they all get used, but the way we structure the songs is that the music will already be recorded and I’ll get the music to put words to.  If there is something that I’ve previously written that I want to use, which is often the case, I’ll use it.”
 
About the book on sale on tour, Wes had bad news for interested parties. “Yeah, they’re all gone.  There were only 200 of them, I just printed them up for tour.  The tour zine was one story and a poem of sorts.  The story was a tour diary from the Daughters/ Breather Resist/ Some Girls east coast tour.  It’s kind of a recap of those five shows but less concentrated on the shows and more on interactions, things we did.”
 
“But my friends and I are starting a website called www.theheartworm.com.  We’re going to start putting out a bunch of zines done by friends and selling them through there.  It’s not really legit yet, but it will be.”
 
And finally, Death Beds will be released eventually, Wes assures. “Yeah, it’s just a drag because it’s taken so long.  A lot of the stuff in it I’m removed from because it’s so old.  I would take it back, take stuff out, and add new stuff. But it’s finally done. I’m still waiting for the layout to be completed. Jake and Nick Pritchard who did the layout for Heaven’s Pregnant Teens and The DNA - I guess they’re doing it together. “
 
With all his writing, it’s surprising there is time left for bands.  But in addition to Some Girls, another project called XO Skeletons will surface soon on Art Fag records. “Nothing’s really done with that band or idea because I wrote all these songs, and they’re pretty crappy.  I don’t play any instruments, so if I’d done any more, it would have just sounded exactly the same.  But now Chuckie’s doing it with me, so we wrote some songs, and maybe they’ll be recorded soon.  The twelve inch is just for fun, out on a friend’s label in San Diego.”
 
Some very early XO Skeletons demos are floating around the internet, but Wes doesn’t care. “Oh, I don’t care about the XO Skeletons songs.  I didn’t release them, friends of mine did, but I wouldn’t have much of an opinion on it either way.  They’re just some crappy songs; if someone wants to listen to them, that’s cool.”
 
“I have mixed opinions about file-sharing as a whole though. If there’s some band I want to hear, of course I’ll download a song.  I do feel weird, because as a person who is a part of music that gets downloaded it sucks.  The artists are never going to get anything from that.  But you don’t technically get anything when you sell a record usual.  I feel bad when I think about it from the standpoint of JP and Alyssia who run Three One G.  They fucking bust their asses, they put all their heart into it - and people just take it from them.”
 
“Music as an art form is very disrespected.  A painting or a photograph can be sold for a huge amount of money, but you can put the same effort into a song and it’s just not treated the same as an art form.  It’s just a screwed up perception anyway.”
 
Even within a disrespected art form, there can be contentious legal battles - as any follower of  the American Nightmare/American Nothing/Give Up The Ghost renaming fiasco knows.  So was Wes experiencing deja vu when he learned of the Juliana Hatfield alt-rock group named Some Girls? “Yeah, I freaked out for sure.  I learned a thing or two from that whole experience and I knew that no matter what if you have the name first and you’ve played a show or sold a record in a state, you legally have that boundary.  If you play a show in another state, you have that boundary.  We’d already done all that stuff.  I knew we had the name first.  I followed the whole thing, I figured it’d be legit.  I still worry about it a bit, but I don’t think Epitaph would have put out the record if there was anything sketchy.”
 
“There have been a couple times on this tour when people have come to see that band.  In Baton Rouge, people kept coming up, coming up, and no one was there to see our band.  All these early-thirties, cubicle-rocker, yuppie dudes were coming up and they heard our songs and were like, “Well I guess that’s why no one’s here!” talking said shit to us, and we were like, “Good, man. Who cares?”
 
Newer SG lyrics are very different from AN or GUTG lyrics, whereas The Rains and The Blues played like AN lyrics caught in a grind band. The lyrics are “very time and place oriented.  It’s not a conscious step away at all.  Not all, but there’s some old lyrics from AN/GUTG that I feel really silly about now. I didn’t feel that way at all at the time. It made sense at the time and place.  I don’t feel like that now, so I can’t write like that.  The new lyrics are how I feel about things now at this time and place they were written and recorded.”
 
The newer Some Girls lyrics have a lot of sex and drugs in them. San Diego is fun, huh?  Wes is caught off guard, and pauses a moment before laughing and answering. “No, no. It’s not about San Diego at all. That’s funny. It’s just surrounding everywhere, what you see people doing.  What friends of yours do, the different clutches people fall into - that’s how religion ties into the theme of the record as well. It’s not about things I do, it’s about things I’m around, or things I see people do.  I think it’s sad: i have friends who are fucked up or dead because of drugs, and I think it’s relevant so I talk about it.  It’s not glorifying it.”
 
“It’s a drag how people think I do drugs cuz I really don’t. I don’t even smoke pot anymore. I just don’t do anything like that.  When people write stuff about you on message boards and your friends see, it’s just stupid.  I don’t know any of those people passing judgment on me.  People just forget that people are people.  It’s a drag too, when your relatives see it, and they ask you, “What’s this?”  I don’t know! I always think about that when I read fucked up rumors.  That’s the power of the internet I guess.”
 
Wes Eisold and everyone else in the band is on the internet at Somegirlshaveallthefuck.com, and their new record info can be found at www.epitaph.com and www.threeoneg.com. Says Wes, “If people direct something specific towards one of us, then yeah, we respond.”  But, he insists, “I don’t think much of us spend too much time on message boards.  If it’s brought to our attention by our friends, like: “Yo, you’ve got to see this.  It’s ridiculous.”  We see stuff like that, but I don’t think we’re necessarily on the prowl.”  Drop them a line on their forum and find out.