Exclusive Interview: Jimmy Urine on the return of Mindless Self Indulgence

(Photo by: Craig Burton)

FRANKENSTEIN GIRLS KICKING ZOMBIES AND VAMPIRES IN THE CROTCH REPEATEDLY: The return of MINDLESS SELF INDULGENCE

In today’s rapid-fire information age, two years seems like an incubation period for fossils. But it seems like the right time for smarmy, electro-punk wiseguys MINDLESS SELF INDULGENCE to launch themselves back into our faces like a scene from a porno where…uh, never mind. For years, MSI—frontman/programmer Jimmy Urine, guitarist/instigator Steve, Righ?, bassist Lyn Z Way and drummer Kitty Dunn—have enraptured thousands with their hard-driving, twitching energy bursts and sarcastic takes on everything from classic rock (“I Hate Jimmy Page”) to hip-hop posing (“Bitches”) to how to stem the tide of emo bands (“Mark David Chapman”).

After a decade of service, the band members took some time off from the rock treadmill in 2009 to spawn, travel and write music. But in the two years that MSI have been gone, it seems the world has caught up with them: You can draw a line between the jittery, twitching programming styles of such records as 1999’s Tight (reissued by The End earlier this year as Tighter, with more bells, whistles, bonus tracks, baby pacifiers and glow sticks than ever before) and 2000’s Frankenstein Girls Will Seem Strangely Sexy to the burgeoning dubstep movement (even though the members of MSI dress better and tell funnier jokes than your typical Electric Daisy Carnival attendee).

Jason Pettigrew chatted with Urine about what he did on his extended vacation, how the rest of the world has finally caught up with MSI’s patented twitchy, ADD-addled electro-epilepsy, Righ’s transformation for My Chemical Romance and what kind of uniform he wants his fans to wear at these upcoming gigs.

How long has this reconvening been in the works?
JIMMY URINE: It’s been in the works about since my birthday, I’d say, since September-ish. It was around then that we were like, “Let’s check shit out and drop a bomb on everybody.” We always planned to go out, but the actual “Alright, let’s do this” decision was around September. We feel like we want to go back and have some fun. We had planned to take a break and then go back out. It’s not like we hit a brick wall or somebody had died. We’re people; we wanted to take a break, start some families, check out some other ventures and have some fun.

How have you been entertaining yourself for the past two years?
I actually do a lot of stuff. My wife Chantal [Claret] did a piece for a website that was pictures of us in the last year. I was looking at them and I was like, “Holy shit, we do a lot of stuff.” That’s part of it, and [I’ve also been] doing some music stuff here and there; I’ve got some stuff that’s coming in the future that I will probably talk about in a couple months or next year, which is only like a month away. Some small side things that came up that were fun. Some DJs on Dim Mak called Mustard Pimps were big fans of Mindless, so they called me up to do a track. I got to get drunk in my basement and scream about a bunch of shit and they cut it up and it turned out really great. It’s called “Money Shot.” The video’s amazing: It’s all this chopped-up animation of George Washington off of a dollar bill getting all hedonistic and having fun. Little things like that pop up for me, and it’s fun, just traveling around, having a good time.

The other thing that’s strange about being in a band like Mindless Self Indulgence: When people who are in big successful bands make their side projects, their side projects are super-fucking weird. Being in a super-fucking weird band already, anytime someone’s like “Want to come write a song for some pop girl?” I’m like, “Okay, fuck it. I think I can do that, I’ll just replace all my ‘fucks’ with ‘love’ and see how it flies.” The funny thing is, right before we went on our break, everything was still in a Daughtry world—very boring stuff. But in the last three years, a lot of music sounds very Mindless: very ADD [and] computer-y, and a lot of the rap stuff sounds a lot more like the Left Rights [Urine’s side-project with MSI guitarist/instigator Steve, Righ?] If you just replace the fucking “Dougie” with “Doogy,” you pretty much have a Left Rights song. People are being ill again, which I like. There’s definitely a sense of “Let’s get stupid” in a cool sort of “Humpty Dance”-type of way.

Then there’s the d-word—dubstep—where a lot of the programming style is very jittery, similar to what MSI have done in the past.
That’s very fidgety and has a lot of cut-ups, which reminds me of a lot of Mindless stuff. Right before I die, [MSI detractors] are going to be like, “Wait, he was a genius! We thought he was a fool!” [Laughs.] Now there are a lot of people coming out of the woodwork, like anytime I meet someone, they’re like, “Oh my God, I grew up listening to your music, and now I’m a millionaire.” Great, lend me five bucks and take me out to dinner. Really, the cool thing is these are people who went to shows, like, “I was a 13-year-old kid, and now I work at this crazy thing and think you’re the bomb.” It’s really cool.

I don’t know if you trolled the Mindless boards or anyplace else online in the last two years. Did you get the vibe that there was still a demand for MSI?
Yeah, there was very much a desire for us to tour. We have a very good show, and we created a band that has lasting power. I think no matter how much anybody thinks it’s in excess, when you’re into crazy cult movies, crazy cult bands, crazy cult books and crazy cult artists, you’re probably going to have a crazy fucking cult band, no matter how you slice it. You can try and make it Duran Duran as much as you want—it’s going to end up Mindless Self Indulgence. I think that really helped us have a band people want to see again and again. Pick a random band like GWAR or the Cramps: When you go to a GWAR show you want to see GWAR, and you really can’t get that anywhere else. Now you don’t even need to troll random boards, you can just turn on Facebook and Twitter and every other [tweet] besides being “You guys are really cool” is “When are you touring again?” [This tour] wasn’t like, “Oh, this is overwhelming pressure.” It was like, “Oh, they still want to see it. Alright, cool, we’ll do it again. I don’t give a shit.”

Was that the deciding factor? Let’s go further back to the last week of the touring behind your last album, If. Had the band members gotten to the point of, “I’m just so tired and if I have to be on a bus another week with you…”
No, we never got like that; we love each other and we do enjoy doing the shows a lot. It’s just a coincidence that it’s incredibly entertaining for you people, because we try to make it entertaining for ourselves. If I was in a Daughtry band, I could completely understand those guys [wanting to consider using] heroin or taking pills or becoming an alcoholic, because that shit’s boring. With our live show, I’m trying to entertain Steve, entertain myself, entertain Kitty—and vice versa. So we got to the end of that record cycle, and everyone was literally starting, like, boom! We’re going to have babies as soon as the road stops. In fact, Lyn Z got off the road, like, I think a month or two before those last couple shows.

When are you and Chantal starting a family?
Soon, but the part that’s great is trying, ’cause I get to stick it in, then take it out again, then stick it in again. So that’s the best part, I’m practicing right now, I want to get in shape. But soon; [I’m going to] see how this next year or two goes.

So this tour is nothing more but a war chest for you to buy diapers.
It’s a diaper war chest. No, I definitely want to do another Mindless record. I’ve got some other stuff in the works I can’t talk about right now. I think everyone in unison will just be like, “Oh, snap.” Then I also want to do another Mindless record of some caliber. I need to figure out how I want it to sound and what I want to do with it. But believe me, it’s not like I’ve been sitting here for three years. Whenever I write something, it either goes in one pile to someone else, or I’m like, “Oh, that’s a Mindless song,” and put in another pile. There are a lot of piles around my house.

Do you think the world has caught up with Mindless Self Indulgence?
I think they’ve definitely caught up. The one thing that [today’s bands] did do, was they took elements [and] applied those elements in a much more pop or focused manner. I’m too out of focus; I like too many things to commit. I think when you do commit to one thing—even if you tweak it slightly—it becomes a lot bigger. Like, “We are a rap act, and this is a rap thing, and I’m a rap act, and I’m going to do it a little skewed slightly.” Oh, you’re Odd Future. Or, “I’m a dance guy and I’m going to do some dance stuff, but I’m going to do some fidgety, fucked-up shit in there.” Okay, you’re Skrillex. But those guys are not 16 things all combined at once going, “Hey, we’re 16 things all combined at once, good luck figuring us the fuck out because we’re going to fucking do it like this.” Which I think is the one thing that makes us completely different than everybody else.

The funny thing is when we were first got signed back in ’99, the main thing people—whether they were an A&R guy or whether they were an act we were opening for—they were like, “You guys are 10 years ahead of your time.” Whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. “Sorry I couldn’t make or break this record, you guys are 10 years ahead of your time.” Now it’s 10 years later, I think we’re pretty much on schedule. Now that we’ve had that break, the world has caught up a little in certain aspects. [There are fans] being like, “Hey, you guys were really cool, I was just a crazy motherfucker who listened to crazy music and I listened to your crazy record a lot and now I’m more successful than you.” [Laughs.]

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You and Lyn Z are in Los Angeles while Steve and Kitty are in New York. How does this band being in two different area codes work?
First off, it’s a modern era. You could do a rehearsal—they have a couple sort of Skype programs with less lag time so you could rehearse—but I like [playing] in person. We will fly and do a couple weeks, because we still have family and friends on the east coast. I’ll go spend two weeks there and rehearse with Kitty and Steve, then Lyn Z shows up and we rehearse as a foursome, or make some of them come here.

Other than the rehearsal though, we’ve been doing shit online since pre-If. I was mixing that record online, I was editing shit on laptops on airplanes, not even in airports, on airplanes, like, “I’m on my way to a studio in Vancouver, let me line up these vocals I just cut in my closet,” because you can do it. You can write a song, email it to somebody, they can add a session, send it back to your session, mix it, send it to a mastering guy and he’ll master it while you listen to him through some crazy program. The only good thing I can say is that we’re not in an international area where you might get problems with the internet because there is no good internet in Europe, so we’re still locally in America. This is the kind of job where you can be anywhere, so you need to take advantage of it. If I were in another job waiting for a position to open up in the corporate section of blah blah blah, I’d have to be in Los Angeles. With this, I could be in a ditch, I could be on the moon or pretty much anywhere. As long as I show up with a record and I’m crazy jumping around at a show, I’m golden.

But ultimately, the thing with bands is that there’s chemistry. Modern technology is great, but there’s something about a band’s personal interaction.
Well, we’re not fucking Pearl Jam. I fucking hated jamming, and I really don’t like musicians. When we “got together” to figure stuff it was always brainstorming. It was never, ”I’m going to jam on these riffs.” When we created the music, I would get an idea, get it pretty damn ship-shape, then send it off to everyone else, it was all about making mistakes and correcting mistakes. A lot of stuff is happy mistakes I just let happen, ‘cause I’m using fucking archaic machines, old Atari computers. So we would all clean up the mistakes and make more mistakes and stuff, but Mindless are a future art-school band, not a fucking Pearl Jam band. That’s fine for the rock guys. If five guys want to hang out in a garage and fucking smoke weed on a couch, like, “Hey man, let me pull out my acoustic guitar” and make me barf, hey, go all the way to the bank with that shit. I’d rather throw a bunch of fucking machines on, have them glitch out on each other and turn a bunch of fucking knobs and stuff and see what you get.

Kitty, Lyn Z and Steve have kids. Does that mean they’re soft and boring now?
We were always sort of soft and boring; I mean, we’ve always been nerdy people. We have a definite thing where when we say “Do whatever the fuck you want,” we do whatever the fuck we want. I think people hear that and they think you must be hanging from chandeliers, ripping your clothes off and cutting yourself with a knife 24 hours a day. But it’s like, no, if you want to do that one day and then the next day you want to do a fucking crossword puzzle and pet a long-haired dachshund, you should be allowed to do whatever you want. If you want to have a gay marriage, then have a gay marriage. If you want to sit around at a fucking McDonald’s, then sit at McDonald’s. If you want to go to the beach and have a good time, go to the beach and have a good time. If you want to fucking break walls and have a revolution and occupy whatever—go occupy a nutsack—go for it. That’s what we like. I don’t think there should be any judgments either way, like “Oh, they’re not going hard 24 hours a day.” No, motherfucker, neither are you. The only people who are actually probably hard fucking 24 hours a day are the people in Afghanistan, and they probably want a crossword puzzle and a long-haired dachshund one day out of a year, so enjoy it when you can. We’re the same freaky people, and we enjoy being odd.

Steve in the character of Dr. Death Defying on the last My Chemical Romance album was pretty amazing. He’s not like any house-husband I’ve ever seen.
That’s actually an interesting story. He did the role of Dr. Death Defying on Danger Days, and [My Chem] had a plan of how he was going to work. They wanted him to look very much like Dennis Hopper from Apocalypse Now. They had a costume for him, but they didn’t know he already looked like that, he was already dressing like that. For some reason, he and Gerard [Way] had the same idea. Gerard didn’t know that he was just sitting at home playing Mr. Mom thinking, “I’m going to grow my hair out, grow my beard out, start dressing like a freaky Dennis Hopper, Easy Rider biker guy, just have a fun time.” So he shows up for the test run and they’re like, “Oh my God, you look just like Dr. Death Defying!” They showed him all the pictures and sketches that he already looked like, which I think is genius.

You seem legitimately stoked for this tour.
Yeah. I wish I had a Sublime story, like right before the hit came out, he did too much heroin. But we’ve always been like that, we just call it like we see it.

I think it’s perfect that Mindless decided to crank things back up for the end of the world according to the Mayan calendar.
Exactly, the Mayans really forced us back on the road. That’s where I want to be on the last day of the world, a fucking Mindless show, not with my loved ones or anything. I want to be working.

What type of gifts will you be expecting from fans?
I completely expect everyone to come, and you better be fucking dressed up. I went and saw some cool-ass shows, like System Of A Down’s reunion and a lot of other shows where people used to dress up and no ones dressing up anymore—everybody’s just coming in t-shirts and jeans, and with really normal hair cuts. I don’t even see anybody looking Hot Topic-y at all. So that’s what I want: Dress to the nines! I definitely want to see some fucking mascot outfits. I want to see whatever the hell you need to have during the show, you bring it. You want me to wear some fairy wings? Throw some fucking fairy wings on stage. I love that shit. It’s like I have a Carrot Top show on stage out of nowhere.

The thing that’s crazy is when you go to the big places, like New York or L.A., they’re fun but they’re a little too hip to get crazy. So when you go to the fucked-up places, they don’t care. You go to Detroit and just say, “Hey, give me shit” and all of a sudden, the shit that gets thrown on stage is amazing. Like, here’s a World War II helmet or here’s some shotgun shells or a pretzel covered in mustard someone stole from a vendor outside. Detroit, Scotland, places in Ohio… Whenever it’s really far removed and people piss on the place, those motherfuckers are so into shit, it’s insane. Big ups, because those are some of my favorite places to play. The U.K. always beats the shit out of Scotland, then you go to Scotland and they’re the best audience in the fucking world.

So what shouldn’t people bring?
Check that attitude at the door, hon. They should bring everything. Bring a friend. It’s very much like Rocky Horror, bring a virgin and we’ll pop their fucking cherry. If you’re lucky, I might give you a haircut onstage. alt