Tone Glow 150: Honeywell
An interview with Bobby Sell & Ryan Hildebrand of the pioneering screamo band Honeywell about skateboarding videos, their varied musical influences, and the recording of their monumental LP 'Industry'
Honeywell
Honeywell was a legendary punk band from Corona, California that existed from 1991 to 1996. The members included Josh Lewis (vocals), Ryan Elliott (drums), Bobby Sell (bass), and Ryan Hildebrand (guitar). Honeywell formed through connections made at the band members’ high school and local skateboarding community. Alongside acts like Merel and Heroin, Honeywell would pioneer a style of hardcore punk that is today known as “screamo.” Inspired by various acts—from Crass to Born Against, Sonic Youth to Minutemen, Throbbing Gristle to Negativland—these teenagers would release uncompromising 7-inches and a monumental LP titled Industry (1993). Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Sell and Hildebrand on October 22nd, 2023 via Zoom to discuss the shows they went to as kids, trying to emulate Glenn Branca, reflecting on the music they made as kids, and the possibility of reissuing their work.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: How are you guys doing today?
Bobby Sell: Pretty good. Just had a long week. We finally have a day off.
Ryan Hildebrand: Yeah it’s just endless. I’m glad it’s getting wintry up in Oregon.
Bobby Sell: It’s raining down here.
Where are you, Bobby?
Bobby Sell: In Oakland, California. How about you Joshua?
I’m in Chicago.
Bobby Sell: Oh, cool.
Ryan Hildebrand: I thought you were on the West Coast for some reason.
I wanted to start off by saying that I feel like the amount of information about you guys online is close to zero.
Bobby Sell: Yeah, pretty much.
Which is kind of great. And I love that if I type “Honeywell” into Google, it’s just going to come up with the company, and it doesn’t make things any easier if I type in “Honeywell Industry” either (laughter). To begin, I wanted to ask about both of your respective childhoods. When were you born? When did you first meet?
Ryan Hildebrand: I’m interested to see if we have the same recollection. I was born in ’76 in Southern California. I think, technically, I was born in Riverside, but I grew up in Corona, where Bobby grew up. I think we met at the end of my fifth grade year through a mutual friend who I knew from karate classes. I think the catalyst was that I had a Red Hot Chili Peppers tape and we were all like, “Oh shit, you like that stuff too?” And then it spiraled very quickly into us being good friends and playing music together immediately.
Bobby Sell: Yeah, that’s correct. I was thinking it was around 1988, maybe ’87. I was born in Corona in 1975 and grew up in the central part of the city, and then I moved out to a place called El Cerrito, which was this unincorporated area. That’s where I met our mutual friend, this guy Zachary Harris, who knew Ryan. I went over to his place one day. We were friends because we were into skateboarding and he started getting into drumming. So I went over there and Ryan was there just ripping on the guitar. He was playing Red Hot Chili Peppers songs and all sorts of things. I was like, “Wow, this guy’s like 11.” And I was 12 at the time. I was really impressed by this and it made me want to play music. I was like, “Whoa, if he can do this—he’s 11 years old—then maybe I can do it too.” Zach had a drum kit and Ryan was a guitar player so they were like, “Hey, you should get a bass guitar.” That’s kind of the origin of us playing together. From then on, we just started getting into music nonstop.
Ryan Hildebrand: I don’t know if you know the album this well, but at the beginning of the LP, there’s this recording that says something like “Ryan and Bobby, drums and guitar, fuck off!” That’s exactly from that period.
That’s so funny to me. That’s on the 7-inch, right?
Bobby Sell: It’s on the beginning of the LP.
Oh, yeah. The 7-inch has the thing from CHiPS.
Bobby Sell: CHiPS—yeah. Moloch (laughter).
When I heard the LP for the first time, I remember wondering if this was a recording from when you guys were kids.
Ryan Hildebrand: That recording predates the LP by several years. It’s kind of scary how many years ago that was, but we were 11 or 12 when that cassette recording was made and then like 16 or 17 when the LP was recorded. That sounds about right?
Bobby Sell: Yeah. ’92 is when we recorded the Industry record. Most of the other 45s—the $ellout and Anomaly ones—were recorded in ’91 or ’92. So we would have been 16 and 17, respectively.
Were you also a skater, Ryan? Or was it just Bobby?
Ryan Hildebrand: No, I just liked being around skating. I really liked the videos. I honestly think the draw for me was like all the SST soundtracks that were on most of those videos.
Bobby Sell: Yeah. One thing I want to go back to real quick is that intro to the record is us emulating the Dead Kennedys. You remember that, Ryan? At the beginning, Jello Biafra says “Fuck off!”
Ryan Hildebrand: I forgot about that. I do know that the song we were about to play was “Paradise City.” I can hear the rest of the tape in my mind.
Bobby Sell: Wow. I had forgotten about that tidbit.
So you two initially met through this mutual friend Zach. How did the other members of the band get introduced?
Ryan Hildebrand: Kind of independently, actually. I met these people, and then I think Bobby met them some other way. Josh Lewis, the singer, went to my junior high. We talked. He was into Sepultura and stuff like that, and I was not, but we were definitely into punk rock. Nothing musical happened at that time though. I just met him and we were sort of friends—I remember being in detention together. I actually remember being in an art class, and him opening the window and dropping all of these tempera paints out just to be a dick (laughter).
Bobby Sell: Sounds like Josh.
Ryan Hildebrand: I think I probably met Ryan through Bobby. Even though I had an awareness of him through some different friends. Small town, different schools.
Bobby Sell: I met Ryan Elliot, the drummer, by skateboarding. We were skateboard friends, then we started to fall into the music crowd. There was another guy in our band called Jimmy Lewis. He was the guitar player before Josh joined. Jimmy was also in a band called Subterfuge?
Ryan Hildebrand: I don’t know. There were so many bands.
Bobby Sell: Ryan [Elliott] played drums in that band with another guy, Troy Martinez, Terry Holmes, and Jimmy. I think Josh eventually was in that band. We all were just friends from skateboarding, and music led us all together.
So you guys were in California, and obviously skateboarding culture is huge there, and skateboarding is very tied to music and video. Could you talk more about your relationship with skateboarding?
Bobby Sell: Absolutely. There were videos like Santa Cruz’s Streets on Fire (1989), Bones Brigade’s Future Primitive (1985), The Search for Animal Chin (1987), and all those. Savannah Slamma (1988) was one of them. We heard music from the Minutemen, Dinosaur Jr., Dead Kennedys. Like Ryan said, all the SST stuff—fIREHOSE, Black Flag. That stuff started resonating with us, and being into skateboarding, it really motivates you to get out there and just do shit. I grew up in a pretty rural area but I was pretty wild—I was always going out. It’s the ’80s, so you’re kind of latchkey kids, and you’re running around—your parents have no idea where you are for the day. I’d be going to skateboard ramps. We didn’t really have parks so we would just go to schools or anywhere that we could find—banks or picnic benches or curbs. We’d wax them up and skate them. And that music really drove me. Once I started getting into playing music, I think it pushed me because I liked the punk rock ethos and the DIY nature of it. Like I said, when I met Ryan I was like, “Holy shit. He’s 11 and he’s a very adept guitar player.”
Ryan Hildebrand: For me, I remember mostly watching my friends skate. I would ride a board, but I wasn’t into tricks—it was more, like, transportation. I remember going down to the VHS rental store and being so stoked to get Future Primitive. I don’t even remember which ones had the good soundtracks. But I do remember hearing “I Felt Like a Gringo” by the Minutemen.
Bobby Sell: That was on Streets of Fire.
Ryan Hildebrand: It felt like something shifted after hearing that. And then hearing Descendents too. It’s so funny, you could encounter that now and be like, “I want to find out more about that” and just go on the internet. But I remember calling each other and playing tapes over the phone, like, “Is this the one?” (laughter).
A lot of the music you guys made had obvious political messaging. It was really exciting for me to go through the lyrics when I bought the records. Where were you drawing this stuff from? Was it bands like the Minutemen?
Bobby Sell: We were exposed to political music while growing up in California. Part of it was Minutemen and Black Flag and things like that. And Dead Kennedys, especially because they had “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.” So I think that resonated with me. But also, there were straight edge bands and hardcore bands like Downcast and those from the Ebullition label. We were not too far away from Santa Barbara or San Diego, so we were going to those cities to perform once we started to get our name around. And just hearing some of the political rhetoric that they were talking about live struck a chord with me because we grew up in a very… I would say there were a lot of racist people in our area. There’s a lot of diversity too—Corona is a very Latino populated area, so we had diverse groups of friends—but there was also a lot of homophobia going around at our school, and sexism in general.
I started to gravitate towards this music because it gave me some sort of ad-hoc education. We all were on the same page, I think, when it came to our politics. We were not into capitalism, we were not into homophobia or sexism or racism. We all wrote lyrics in the band. That’s how it came to fruition for me—it was through the music. And then just seeing the news. In the early ’90s you had the Bush administration and all of that stuff going on in the East. I remember protesting at the flagpole in high school because of the Gulf War. We just loved music and people and wanted to put that message into our songs.
Ryan Hildebrand: Yeah, I think we came at it with certain sensitivities. A factor here is that we were a couple years younger than Downcast and all these other people, so there was this prime opportunity for education. We came out of it with a sensitivity and willingness to receive that, just based on how we were already oriented and with the bigotry that happens in Southern California. I didn’t even realize how diverse Corona was until I moved away. I feel like as a small child, I would look at stacks of National Geographic around the house, as well as my mom’s PETA magazines, and just think, “What the fuck is wrong with people? This is not good. I don’t feel right, I feel sad.” There was already an opposition and an opportunity for this kind of anger and awareness. One thing Bobby didn’t mention yet, but this stems from right around the time when we first met, was that this guy Zach had an older brother, Roger, who had a Crass record that I won. It was because I washed the dishes one night (laughter).
Bobby Sell: I forgot about that.
Ryan Hildebrand: Hearing Crass was profound and, in an ongoing way, very influential to the music [we made]. But it was also influential for the ethics behind it and the personal political stance, rather than just bigger-picture global stuff.
Do you remember which Crass record it was
Ryan Hildebrand: Well, it’s confusing because it was Christ the Album (1982), the black box, but inside it was Stations of the Crass (1979). I still have it. But it was very confusing to me for many, many years, hearing Christ the Album and thinking, “That’s not the one!” And it’s because I didn’t catch the other until later. But yeah, it was Stations.
You mentioned the magazines your mother had, Ryan. What was the environment like in your respective homes with regards to your parents? Were they super big on music, too? Did they support your music and political endeavors?
Ryan Hildebrand: For my mom, there was an epiphany at some point for her. She was a vegetarian and actually had some contact—not that she did anything—but she did an interview with some people from ALF [Animal Liberation Front]. So I had this very radicalized view available to me, even though it wasn’t being modeled. I picked up on it really quickly and I still feel resonance with that. I think her making that space then created other types of spaces, like, “If you don’t have to think about it in the way that everyone else does, then why not this, and this, and this?” As far as being supportive, we wouldn’t have had the band if we weren’t able to practice in my mom’s living room. I don’t think we could have made music without practicing every day and just trying shit out. Not at all hours.
Bobby Sell: We pushed our limits.
Ryan Hildebrand: Yeah, totally. I mean, the police would show up from time to time and whatever, but it was pretty cool. It wasn’t necessarily an overtly political environment, but my mom was extremely supportive. Before we could drive, she was driving us to shows and I was like, “Don’t come in!” So she would wait outside. And Bobby’s dad drove us to record. Our first trips to San Dimas.
Bobby Sell: My parents were very supportive of music. They were super into music. Growing up, we always had records around the house and they would hire bands to play backyard parties. Some of their friends were musicians. My dad tried to play music. He actually bought a bass in the ’60s and said he was too uncoordinated for it so he gave it up. But when I got my first bass, I asked my parents if I could get one and they were like, “Well, find one that’s not too expensive. If you stick with it, then we’ll get you one that you desire more.” So I got this Hondo Flying V bass for Christmas when I was like 12 or 13. And then we just started going for it and they saw that and were like, “Okay, the next bass you want to get, pick out something that’s a little fancier.” So I got a new one a couple years later. They bought me my first drum kit. Like Ryan said, they would take us to shows or recording sessions. Our parents paid for the records that we recorded. All those records, we were like, “Hey mom, dad, can we have 50 bucks apiece to go into the studio at Black Diamond Studios and do those recordings?”
But I will say that Ryan’s mom was probably the impetus for us to really get into music because she started taking us to places like Spanky’s Cafe and Monopoly’s in Riverside. We were there at 14 or 15 years old. Sometimes she would come in and we’d have a booth or something. I remember a couple of times it would be like midnight and she’s passing out in the corner, but we’re just there rocking out to music. Most of that crowd was early to mid 20s, late 20s, early 40s. Those were real eye-opening places for us—going to shows and seeing all these bands. We had local heroes, like this group Spiderworks. We saw No Doubt before they were a big band in these small clubs.
There was a lot of fostering with our parents. Ryan’s place was kind of the meeting hub for a lot of us too because we’d have the instruments set up there and we kind of took over the living room. We would have jam sessions and music sessions where we would just listen to music. We’d watch crazy movies and stuff. It really gave us a sense of a headquarters—a place where we could create. I think without that, we would have had a harder time trying to make the music that we were creating.
Ryan Hildebrand: I’m just thinking about what Bobby was saying about my mom taking us to shows. We were 13 or 14 for those first ones at Monopoly’s. Just imagine your mom taking you when you’re 13 to see D.R.I.—that was one of the shows. You would think that’s scary or something, but it wasn’t. It was pretty chill.
Bobby Sell: We saw so many cool bands: D.I., Dramarama, Voivod, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. We were into a lot of music. I think that was a huge eye-opening time. Because eventually, when we got Honeywell started, we did the battle of the bands at Spanky’s Cafe. We were able to play where all these influential bands were performing.
Was there a lot of support from classmates and other people at your school? Or was this mostly outside of that?
Bobby Sell: Oh yeah, like tons. Josh had a whole group of friends, I had a whole group of friends from skateboarding, and Ryan had a group of friends and we were all like the Freaks and Geeks of our high school. We were outsiders. I just remember hanging out with a lot of metalheads and people that were outsiders in society in some way or another, but also having a really supportive group. There were a lot of drugs and things like that. We did have to bypass and dodge that sort of thing.
Were there any concerts you saw when you were younger that made you recognize the path you wanted to go down? How did you decide on what Honeywell would sound like?
Bobby Sell: That’s a good question.
Ryan Hildebrand: I don’t think we ever decided, it just kind of happened. I can remember very distinctly listening to college radio all the time. But this specific moment of hearing the last unnamed track on Heroin’s second 7-inch and just being like, “Fuck, this is a new sound and new feeling and new energy.” And it was really beautiful, too. There’s this harmonious element to what they were doing. That clicked something for me. But it’s not that reductive. I know that Pete [Swanson] or one of the people that we’ve been talking with sort of asked us and I was like, “Oh, yeah, Heroin, Born Against.” But upon reflection, we also had a friend named Sergio who would hook us up with stuff like Throbbing Gristle and the first Negativland LP. That specifically is something I can think of that absolutely influenced the way that Honeywell LP came out.
Bobby Sell: Totally. Nurse with Wound.
Ryan Hildebrand: Yeah, I had A Sucked Orange (1989). I remember getting that in ninth grade or something. All of this sort of collage stuff, not to mention the thrift store records that we would somehow stumble onto. I don’t know what was going on in Corona, but several very cool people must have died (laughter). All of their Moog records were showing up and the Nonesuch Explorer series stuff. We were just like, “What’s this? This looks cool.” We’d take it home and just be like, “Oh fuck, that’s another thing to add to the mix.” There are obvious touchstones like Heroin and Born Against and Crass but to get to your question, it really just sort of happened. The interesting thing, I think, is hearing it now, I don’t understand it. Seeing some of the comments that people leave on the YouTube videos like, “Oh fuck, I am scared of these people” (laughter). That’s so weird, because it just felt like… it wasn’t silly, but it was very focused, and very pissed off, but also very fun and cathartic. It felt like going somewhere else for a period of time.
Bobby Sell: We were teenagers, so a lot of it was cathartic for us. We had all this angst within us and, growing up where we did, you had a lot of tension. We put it into our music. Like Ryan said, bands like Heroin or Born Against were high on our register. We were a part of KSPC radio in Claremont. We would do live shows there. I remember Chris Jensen and a guy named Drew, who was later in The Fisticuffs Bluff. They started inviting us to the radio and I think that opened us up to a lot more music because they had weekly hardcore and punk programs. But also, we wouldn’t have been the way we were without bands like Throbbing Gristle or Nurse with Wound and the collage stuff that those bands informed us about. And we would break into Ryan’s uncle’s room and check out his records. I remember listening to The United States of America and Love and some other ’60s bands. I think he had a trumpet and that found its way into some of our recordings. The other thing, going back to our friend Zach, is his brother was maybe 10 years older than us and we would break into his room and pillage his records. We’d find stuff like Sex Pistols and The Smiths. It informed us on New Wave music, it informed us on punk.
We were into so many different things. I think, for me, it opened my ears. I’ve always, ever since then, been interested in exploring music. People ask me, like, “What’s your forte? What do you collect? What kind of records do you buy?” And I’m all over the place. So Honeywell was that way. First and foremost, it was an outlet for our catharsis. But it was also a place where we could just experiment.
Ryan Hildebrand: There’s another distinct moment that I remember. In an earlier, hardcore—I don’t know if you want to say straight edge—version of the band, Bobby used to sing. Bobby didn’t want to sing anymore, and I don’t even know what the circumstances were, but Josh was over at my house and we tried him out. It wasn’t this whole tryout thing, it just sort of happened. I remember when he started screaming we were like, “What the fuck? Holy shit.” Next level shit. Something gelled there, too. There’s some stories that I have heard someone else tell us about that day. They said that we were saying, “Josh, scream like a girl! Keep doing it!” I don’t even know. But it was definitely unexpected. We couldn’t have planned for it, or even set out, like, “Let’s go for this vibe.” Josh was extremely pissed off. I don’t think he had a great childhood.
I’m interested to hear about this initial demo tape that you guys had, and that even starts with that cartoon sample. Do you have any recollections of the recording for that?
Ryan Hildebrand: You mean the proper one, with Josh singing? There is another Honeywell demo that’s not even really the same band.
You could talk about any of these pre 7-inch recordings. What sort of stuff were you trying out? Did you have any specific goals?
Ryan Hildebrand: I remember being interested in the idea of dissonance through what I had read about Glenn Branca. I had never heard the first symphony, but I understood how it operated and I had an idea of how microtonalism worked. But for me, it was mostly just playing adjacent notes all at the same time. For example, I’d play one note off from what Bobby was playing. It was this ball-of-noise thing. We were definitely into Sonic Youth preceding all of this and that definitely carried through too. It was very distinct: how messy can we make this? And not even without it falling apart—that wasn’t the idea—but just exploring the idea of dissonance in this way. It was a very immature idea of what it could be, but still, I think we had the right pieces.
Bobby Sell: For me, I was really influenced by bass players like Mike Watt and Geezer Butler. My approach was less about a proper way of playing bass. It was more like playing a guitar because I played a lot of chords. I was trying to just make this meaty, heavy sound to complement Ryan’s dissonant guitar stuff. He was using a lot of angular, almost no-wave guitar. But we were also playing so fast that it was just drowning in fuzz. We were into a real heavy sound. On that first demo that we recorded, I’m pretty sure we had a piano bench, a cassette deck, and one or two microphones just in front of us, and probably Josh singing out of a little Gorilla amp. We were playing in Ryan’s living room. We just recorded everything live and did what we could with the tools that we had. That also influenced the sound of it because there’s only so much sound you could get at that close of a range with, like, RadioShack microphones. We didn’t even have SM57s or anything like that. It was just these tiny, little mics and a cassette deck. Most of it was probably overloaded, so that kind of distortion and fuzz saturated the tape and gave us a sound.
When we went to the studio, we wanted to use distortion on the bass and layers of guitars and stuff. I think that’s how the sound came to fruition is by the limitations that we had, when we recorded stuff like the demo. I think one important document is when we played on KSPC for the first or second time, in Claremont. Those recordings had a real interesting sound to them because there’s compression and all of the tools they use to get the music evenly broadcasted. I think those were what informed us on the sound we wanted. And being into collage music and industrial music and noise stuff, we wanted sounds in between. We took this all the way through our other projects with Los Cincos and One Eyed Richard. It was something we couldn’t let go of because it was just us exploring.
Ryan Hildebrand: For the demo, what Bobby recalls is what I recall. The piano bench and this shitty console tape recorder that actually had an 8-track in it (laughter). And two mics. I remember thinking, “What would happen if we played it back in another cassette deck, put it through the console, and then EQ’d it?” We probably thought, “This sounds professional.” But we were definitely fooling around and figuring stuff out, which we then applied through our 4-tracks and 8-tracks. But I remember what Bobby said about the noise in between songs. We recorded with this guy, Shawn [Bossick], who did the 7-inch and the 12-inch, he’d be like, “You guys gotta shut up. You can’t make noise in between.” And once we let him know that we kind of like it, we want all this stuff to stay in, he chilled out and was super into it. I remember he said to us, “You don’t even have to pay me if you let me mix this track.” And we didn’t like what he was doing (laughter). So we were like, “No.” Just thinking about getting the sound right, I also recall that his mixes were really drum heavy. We had to fight with him to turn the guitars up.
Bobby Sell: And he had a real issue with having distortion on the bass because it blends more with the guitar distortion, so he was like, “Your bass is going to drown.” And I was like, “I want it to sound muddy and dirty.” We did have an opposition there. But I think it taught us a lot about recording and what we would have to do to maintain the vision that we saw with the music.
Do you remember the initial feelings you guys and other people had with these initial demo tapes?
Ryan Hildebrand: I don’t remember. Phil must have heard it. I mean Phil who, with Bobby, put out the first LP. I don’t know how he was convinced that he should do that. At that point, like Bobby said, we were borrowing money from our parents and whatnot. But for the LP that was a different story. So someone had to think, “This is worth my while.” I feel like in the early days, when we were talking about punk rock shows in people’s backyards and being younger in high school, there was this support, but once we got into Honeywell proper, I mostly thought people did not give a fuck. Except we would run into Mohinder and they’d be like, “Fuck, dude, you guys are rad.” And we were like, “You’re rad.” There was this symbiotic thing going on. But beyond these sort of weird, one-off, very motivating encounters, I don’t feel like people really were down for it. But then I can think of this one video when we played at Pitzer, right on the cusp of things getting really good, but it was still pretty good. You could see people being into it. I just didn’t have a sense of that because we would play a show and then go home, and go to school.
How do you feel like being a part of this band as a teenager affected your life outside of the band? What was it like to then go back to school?
Bobby Sell: Most of our friends that we hung out with in high school were into music. Some of them would come to our shows, and some of them wouldn’t, but for the most part, it kind of gave me a path. Like, “I want to explore art, and I want to explore photography.” It influenced my schoolwork, getting into photography classes and stuff like that. But I always wanted to do that more than school because it takes its toll—driving to San Diego or Santa Barbara and coming back and having a high from being out and then going back to school. But we maintained it. I think it was good for us, because it taught us how to work for what we needed, because we had to do it from the ground up. I feel like it was a lot easier back then to put records out. The way it is now, a lot of the major labels are getting back into records and it’s delaying things for independent artists and labels. But back then you could put a record out for under a grand, maybe even $500 or $600, and you could get it back in a month. It blew my mind. After we got our first record back, I was like, “I want to keep doing this, this is all I want to do is put out music and put records out.” That definitely changed for the better.
Ryan Hildebrand: As for the influence and navigating between going to shows and coming back to school, I don’t know that I ever really thought about it. It’d be more interesting for me to think, “What if I didn’t have that [experience playing music]?” and then I think of how empty life would have felt. It was such a full, awesome, good time. So completely fulfilling. Growing up in a middle-class home and having security and whatnot is definitely a part of it. But it’s pretty ideal. I would not have wanted anything to be different. It felt natural.
Earlier you guys mentioned the battle of the bands. What year was that?
Ryan Hildebrand: Pretty sure it was 1991 or 1992.
Did you guys win?
Bobby Sell: No.
Ryan Hildebrand: We didn’t, but I have this memory of watching the tape, and it went off pretty hard. People were on stage. They would not tolerate stage diving there, but it was pretty wild. I don’t know how that happened. We must have brought every single one of our friends there (laughter).
Bobby Sell: All I can remember is there were a lot of bands, so it was very intimidating. It was the classic punk rock club, so everything is gonna be real loose and do-it-yourself, and be delayed. You’re gonna be waiting around. I remember feeling pretty anxious about it, but when we did get on stage it felt good. Like Ryan said, it went off.
Ryan Hildebrand: That would have been a more… straight edge has such a bad taste for me. Nothing wrong with the ideals but that scene fucking sucked.
Bobby Sell: It was pre-Josh, right before Josh joined the band. So it might have been more like ’92. Because we recorded the first two 45s in ’92.
Ryan Hildebrand: You’re totally right.
Bobby Sell: So it was probably ’92ish. ’93 was probably where we really were established. I think that was one of our first opportunities to play in a venue, like a proper club. It was an interesting turn.
The recordings of the KSPC show are online, and you guys were talking about how college radio was a big thing. What was it like to play for KSPC?
Bobby Sell: That was amazing because we started meeting bands like Man is the Bastard and all these bands playing around Pomona. We were always the younger kids. We were probably five to ten years younger than a lot of these guys in those bands. We came in and they started to notice us and ask us to play, so it opened up a whole new path. We were out in Corona, so we were moving out to play in Pomona, Pitzer College, and then we started playing in San Diego. One thing leads to another. You meet people from Struggle that later on went to be in the Locust and Three One G Records, and then we start playing in LA. I think that really brought us out of our cave and on to meeting other bands at the time.
Ryan Hildebrand: Yeah, and also being on the radio. Being in the studio and then checking out all the records that they had, getting recommendations and trading information. Our first show was with Bug Lamp, which had Keith Morris from Black Flag. And we were covering the Black Flag song at the time. But I remember him walking up to us and noticing we had X’s on our hands. He was like, “Check out these guys with X’s on their hands!” (laughter). We were like, “Fucking Keith Morris. That’s awesome.”
Bobby Sell: Circle Jerks!
That’s pretty crazy for a first show. Let’s talk about the first two 45s. The CHiPS sample is cute—that seems like a very teenager move. But then, in the same song you say that the right wing is dictating our morals, you reference Blazing Saddles (1974), and have a track called “In the Hands of Amerika.” You mentioned that you all wrote lyrics. Could you speak to what you were thinking about at that time? How were you thinking about communicating these political messages?
Ryan Hildebrand: I don’t know about our CHiPS obsession.
Bobby Sell: I just want to say that I watched CHiPS a lot. I think it’s a byproduct of growing up in Southern California. You watch TV in the ’80s. We’re ’80s kids. A lot of the influences we had are from that generation, horror movies. There’s a lot of that in my psyche from growing up. But with CHiPS, I was just watching an episode, where there’s the Moloch character. We’d also been really into Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park (1978). It was like, “Oh, shit, this is similar.” I just thought it was hilarious because he’s like, “Bingo, it’s 666, the devil’s number.” That was just something from our childhood, or at least mine, growing up in Southern California, and watching that show.
Ryan Hildebrand: A total aside here, but Bobby and I had a side band called Ponch and John, who are the two main cops in CHiPS.
Was that at the same time as Honeywell?
Ryan Hildebrand: Same time. We always had a million side projects. But as for the content, I don’t think I wrote any of the lyrics on that one.
Bobby Sell: Josh wrote “Paradox / Septic,” “Nameless Victim,” and “Blazing Saddles,” and I wrote “In the Hands of Amerika.” Obviously, “Nameless Victim” is an anti-war song. We’re talking about the Gulf War and that period of time. “Blazing Saddles” is absolutely a reference to the movie. I can’t speak for Josh, but he was pretty affected by the treatment of the Black character and all of the Asian racism going on in that movie. “In the Hands of Amerika” was kind of just feeling hopeless with all these global struggles. There’s a lot of apathy that people create to deal with problems. We sort of turn off when times are tough, and we feel hopeless. That’s kind of what I was expressing with those lyrics. That song is definitely heavily influenced by the tone and the heaviness of Black Sabbath. It starts off kind of slow with the bass, and then Ryan joins in, and then the drums join in, and then once you get this heavy dirge going, the lyrics come in. It’s like an adventure that’s forming and raising an energy as you get through the song.
These themes make sense. I’m now realizing the CHiPS sample is kind of perfect, because it’s so dumb what they’re saying, but it’s the same logic that certain leaders are using to impose specific ideals to everyone.
Bobby Sell: Plus it has that part where it’s, “Now all albums are played at 33.3 RPM.” And I was like, “Woah, we’re making a record and 33.3 RPM!” I don’t know, it seemed like an iconic moment to just throw in there. Like we said earlier, we were into all these segues and tidbits and collages, so it seemed natural.
Do you recall anything from the making of the cover art, with the police officers on there? What was the thinking behind that? There’s also the American flag insert in the second 7-inch. What sort of things did you want to communicate through the art?
Ryan Hildebrand: That’s all Bobby. Bobby did all that. But I can say that that picture of the cops captures something that’s not present anymore, because cops are all militarized now. That’s the old-style cop, which is also very scary. But it’s just interesting, when I see that. I probably look at that record once every three years. But it’s so evocative of something completely different from the present. But that doesn’t answer your question at all (laughter).
Well, what sort of things do you think about when you look at that picture nowadays?
Ryan Hildebrand: Part of it is just how people are brought up to think the police are your friends, and that they’re there to help. There’s a lingering sense of how that’s what a cop looked like when I believed that. But the way that Bobby pasted it up, all kind of splattery, and reduced to high-contrast black and white—it’s a little bit more jarring. For me, I was just really learning about brutality. Rodney King had happened. But up until that point, cops were your friends. Keep in mind, we were still very young. That epiphany is a very crucial thing.
Bobby Sell: For the designs, I had limited means. I didn’t have a computer or anything like that. It was all just done by hand and was just done using pens and markers and photos. A lot of it is just of its time. That picture in particular is kind of two worlds. You have these clown characters and then you have these cops. I’ve always felt that, like Ryan said, you grew up believing that the police were your friends, but then you see what they do and the brutalities that occur. I was just like, they’re kind of the clowns and they don’t even notice it—they’re oblivious because of the power. They’re above the law. It still bugs me that police will tell us that we have to do certain things and follow and abide by certain laws, but you see them on the street speeding and parking in front of fire hydrants and blocking access.
That is part of the catharsis in our band: the frustration with government and police and authority telling us that you’ve got to live this way, but at the same time, we’re not even given examples of how to live that way. We’re given hypocrisy. And the drawings were just me coming of age, in a way. I was really into Da Vinci and Egon Schiele and stuff like that. It’s just this kind of crude scribbly form of art in a lot of ways. The stuff from Da Vinci that really resonated with me are the sketches. I think either that drawing or another one is influenced by very specific pieces from the Renaissance.
I don’t remember where the picture with the American flag came from. Josh might have contributed that. The songs on that record are “If…” and “Five Minutes Only.” That song is Josh responding to his Catholic upbringing and being forced into Catholicism. The moment that he turned 18, he left the church and he finally felt free, but he had a lot of pent-up aggression in response to the way his parents pushed him into religion. That song in particular, it has a breakneck speed, too, it’s probably one of our fastest songs.
Ryan Hildebrand: I wish Josh were here to offer some anecdotes. But thinking about the cops, I think there was just a problem for us with authority in general. We didn’t really respect the messages we were being given so we didn’t respect the people who were giving them. Cops, flags, whatever. I remember being in Spanish class with Josh. I don’t know if this happens anymore, it probably doesn’t, but you would start the day by standing up for the Pledge of Allegiance. And Josh and I would never stand. We would sit down. I remember the teacher getting mad at Josh in particular, and Josh’s response was to lay on the floor (laughter).
Bobby Sell: I remember hearing about that.
Ryan Hildebrand: And of course, nothing happened. Because what can you do? We were within our rights to not stand up. But there was definitely this anti-authority thing going on, which I feel was completely nuanced and justified.
We don’t do the Pledge anymore. I find my students are much more privy to everything happening in the world compared to how I was at that age.
Bobby Sell: Totally. How can you impose the Pledge of Allegiance on Native American folks, and people of African descent, and think that we should all be indoctrinated by that sort of thing? One of the things that really pissed us off, growing up, and especially being around 17 or 18 years old, is the hypocrisy of it all.
What is the cover art for the Reach Out split supposed to be? Is it a chiropractor?
Ryan Hildebrand: Is it a dentist?
Bobby Sell: I don’t know. I think it’s a dentist. [Anomaly co-founder] Andy Ward did the artwork for that.
How did that split come to be? Did you guys know Reach Out beforehand? Or was it just something that the label put together?
Ryan Hildebrand: So Phil de la Cruz, who was with Bobby doing Mollycoddle, somehow got in touch with that band Merel and Reach Out. There was some access happening here. Phil would write letters to them and some of us would write letters to them and trade tapes. I remember hearing some boombox tape that they sent. It wasn’t the material that Reach Out recorded that came on the 7-inch, but it was fucking nuts. So it made sense that there would be this split. But I think that had to do with Phil trying to do a distro for some amount of time and getting in touch with other people like that. But Bobby may have information that I don’t know, because it’s all kind of hazy.
Bobby Sell: It is an Anomaly 45, and that was Steve Shimada’s label with Andy Ward from Evergreen. He was kind of the creative side of that, and Steve Shimada was the executive side of it. All I remember is we recorded the $ellout record which is the one with the cops on it, and we recorded the songs for the split with Reach Out at the same time. I think it was what Ryan referenced—it was with our connections with Steve Shimada and Andy Ward and Evergreen, and the Orange County groups that we were playing along with back then. It was one of my first exposures to bands in Northern California—they were from Oakland, where I’m at now.
I actually ran into Mikel [Garmendia] from Reach Out maybe about a month or so ago. We have a mutual friend named Paul Costuros who used to put on shows at the Huntington Beach Library in Orange County, and he ended up coming up here for school. He invited Richard Medina—from a band called Seesaw, another band that was around Orange County, Downey, and all that area—and this guy, Aaron Calvert, from Evergreen. I went out to hang out with them. I ended up going to another show that Aaron was playing and ran into Mikel. So it kind of goes all the way back, full circle. The people that we started interacting with… it was this happenstance thing where you meet one person, then you meet another person, and they know another person, so you’re all kind of filtering music together. That record just came about because of the people we were hanging out with and started to meet through music.
Ryan Hildebrand: I think I got the Phil part wrong. Maybe the Merel piece and the Reach Out piece were completely different. I don’t know.
Bobby Sell: Well, Phil was in contact with Merel, and I think that’s how we ended up playing with them. He was friends with Dave Lido, who was the bass player at the time. I remember they came on tour with Rorschach, and we played with Rorschach and Merel in Santa Barbara. That’s what those pictures are, in the $ellout record. Those are pictures that Justine Dimetric took at that show. She was on tour with Merel from the East Coast, and Rorschach. I don’t think Dave made it. He couldn’t make the tour. But Charles, from Rorschach, filled in on bass. That was kind of our connection through Phil, who was the guy who started Mollycoddle records, who put out the Industry record.
Ryan Hildebrand: I’m putting pieces together that don’t exactly fit.
Bobby Sell: No, but it’s good because you have pieces that I don’t remember specifically and I might have pieces that you don’t remember. This is the whole thing. It’s been 30 years since we last recorded and 29 years since we actually played a gig as Honeywell. That’s more than half of our lives ago (laughter).
Ryan Hildebrand: We definitely weren’t taking notes at the time.
I wanted to talk about the Industry record. You had recorded these first 45s, now you’re making your first 12-inch LP. Were there specific things that you wanted to accomplish, after having had these first 7-inches come out? What was the mindset going into writing and recording for Industry?
Ryan Hildebrand: I feel like writing was a very continuous thing, so I can’t say I recall anything in particular. But going into the studio, we knew what to expect. It was the same dude who had recorded the other stuff. We knew how to control the situation and how to get what we wanted out of the experience. Shawn had mastered his technique a bit more in that short amount of time. It just felt more focused, we had better instruments, and I think we had a better idea of what we wanted it to sound like. It was ever so slightly more mature. And I have to say, I fucking love that record. Of all the records that I’ve been involved with, most of which Bobby has also been involved with, that’s my favorite one. No contest. I don’t even understand, really, how it happened. We were too young to have pulled that off. It doesn’t really make sense.
Bobby Sell: It really marks a time for us, too, because some of the lyrical content that I wrote was pertaining to my experiences in high school with people that I had encountered, who frustrated me or inspired me. But I do remember going into the studio and even the idea of us collaging pieces and making noise pieces at the end of the record or in between songs, Shawn was on board with. He was just like, “Oh hey, why don’t you try this?” Didn’t he introduce us to some of those samples that we were using? I think he had some CDs or records laying around of French-language instructional tapes.
Ryan Hildebrand: I thought those came from you.
Bobby Sell: Well, there was one. I could be wrong. But I’m pretty sure that there was something there that we utilized from his archive of things in the studio. For me, I think that was probably the first time that I was like, “Hey, let’s use this, let’s try this.” And he was even getting innovative with things like, “Your cymbal is cracked, that’s gonna sound like shit on the recording. I have this thing called a drum trigger.” I remember taking a drum trigger and putting it on a fucking textbook that Ryan had brought from high school. We put it on a textbook, and that was our cymbal for those sessions. And there was like a drum trigger on the kick drum, and he was like, “We’ll get any kind of kick drum you want.” We weren’t purists, but we wanted the raw sound of our instruments. However, when he played us things, we were like, “Holy shit. Okay, let’s use it.” That opened our minds up to sampling and experimenting with new sounds. There’s a lot of feedback on that record. There’s just a lot of noise on that record. I remember reading about Frank Zappa recording the Alice Cooper Band. Before the later periods of Alice Cooper, they were like a garage band from Arizona. And he said, “I want to record this album like you’re driving past a garage, and there’s a band playing in there.” I feel like our record kind of sounds like that. You’re flying by the seat of your pants, and that record is just coming at you full on. There’s this chaos, this catharsis that’s entangling your speakers.
Ryan Hildebrand: It’s interesting that you mention Zappa, because there’s that Monkees sample on there from Head (1968). He was in that movie. I totally loved the Monkees.
I love all the samples. Even this French-instructional language thing ties in to your ideas about racism and colonialism. And you mentioned the Nonesuch Explorer records, and there’s also the African percussion at one point. Hearing all these things is kind of incredible to me. Just the fact that you were 16 or 17 and aware of all these different things is so sick.
Ryan Hildebrand: Yeah, I mean, it was just how it was. I can appreciate how other people didn’t have that experience. But in hindsight, that feels completely normal. Like, “Oh, hey, I know what these instruments are, awesome.”
How’d you guys write songs for Industry?
Ryan Hildebrand: I’d have a part, then Bobby would have a part. I think that’s how a lot of this came about.
Bobby Sell: It was a very democratic way of writing music. Like Ryan said, he would come up with parts, I would come up with parts, we would say, “This sounds good with that, but what if we tried this?” It was more of a group mentality.
I’m very interested in “Mesh-Control” because that’s the one that explicitly mentions homophobia. I’m curious about the things you were seeing that led you to write about that topic.
Ryan Hildebrand: That’s for Josh to say, but I think our high school just felt very conservative and bigoted. “Faggot” was such a common word, “fag” this, “fag” that. No one even really thought about what they were saying. We reacted to it for whatever reasons. I don’t even know how to describe what was happening back then. It’s not really different from what people do now, with language and the thoughtlessness of not understanding the historical meaning behind any sort of word, or how it can affect someone who isn’t part of the status quo. I think I’ve always had an appreciation for the power of language and words. But I’m just rambling, it’s really for Josh to say.
Bobby Sell: I do think that it has a lot to do with religion, and having Christianity forced down your throat, and the restrictions that religion has created to dominate and control people. I think he and I collaborated on the lyrics for that song. When I was a kid, my mother was a single child, so she really didn’t understand sibling rivalry. I had five brothers growing up, and we would fight all the time. We were real active and hyper. They tried giving us Ritalin and taking us to therapists and stuff. At some point, she met a Jehovah’s Witness, and I remember the Jehovah’s Witness coming to our house and trying to get us to do Bible study and stuff. I couldn’t get into it. I felt like, there’s so many hypocrisies about this. I don’t understand why you’re telling me that you can’t be this way and get into heaven. There’s all this emphasis on, “If you are a good little Christian, and you obey, you’re going to be saved and go to heaven.” Part of that is what the Bible or Christianity says about being queer. I think stuff like that appeared in “Mesh-Control” and “Thirty Eight”—that’s another song about homophobia.
“Screaming Numb Ears” is about sexism. I had a classmate who just constantly talked about how he was going to fuck this girl all the time, and, you know, “I’m gonna really give it to her.” I just thought, man, do you not even respect this person? You’re just so aggro about this. I think having the outlet of the music really helped us because it gave us a place to talk about these things. I think we all felt similarly about the injustice in all of these things.
Ryan Hildebrand: Yeah, I don’t think you can really understate how much of an outlet that was because I’m not gonna go out and like, fight people. I’m not gonna break things. It was very convenient. For creative people, I think that was the thing to do.
I love this record because it’s also such an evolution, musically. There’s a lot more sampling. In the title track, it’s so high-pitched, it’s almost like microtonal noise happening. Were there specific things you were trying to capture in the studio that were more extreme than what was on the 45s?
Ryan Hildebrand: Nothing in the studio, because we would have worked it all out before we set foot in there. With the exception of the long guitar drones at the end, which just sort of happened. I do think what we were pushing for was sort of what I said we were always pushing for, which was, how can we make it more extreme and more atonal, without just adding more distortion? Adding distortion subtracts from something else, and you just have this frequency, and we didn’t want that. We would just stumble onto things accidentally or intuitively because we played together almost every day. We would always be back at my house.
Bobby Sell: Oh, yeah, we were obsessed. That’s all we wanted to do—make music. Even if it was goofing around just one or two of us. Ryan and I would spend a lot of time with him on drums. We would switch instruments and stuff, so we got to experiment a lot and see how it felt to play along with somebody else, and play outside of the instrument that you’re used to playing. There’s that aspect of it. But there’s also, like Ryan said earlier, the dissonance. There’s a song like “Industry.” To me, that song has a lot of space in it with the rhythm section. The drums and the bass are kind of doing this more electronic “dsh, dsh, dsh, dsh-dsh, dsh.” And Ryan’s got those dissonant high-pitched guitar chords, and it sounds like bees attacking.
Ryan Hildebrand: I don’t know if it’s part of another song, but is that the same song? The one that starts with picking behind the bridge, and there’s this other one where Josh is screaming, “I despise this confusion / My past has created.” Is that the same song?
Bobby Sell: That’s “Undesirable.”
Ryan Hildebrand: I have all these distinct parts, but I don’t know what goes where.
Bobby Sell: Yeah—“It’s not your lack of creation / It’s my lack of interest.” That was “Undesirable.” But the beginning of “Industry” has the behind-the-bridge picking, and then I think it has the dissonant chords. Maybe I’m thinking of that. I could be thinking of that “Deeneener deeneener deeneener.”
Ryan Hildebrand: They’re both the same principles. You’re playing what would be an octave, but you dropped a note.
Bobby Sell: Yeah, it’s a half note in there, something that’s creating a dissonance.
Ryan Hildebrand: But the second one [“Undesirable”], I remember being so pumped when we first did that. Like, “oh my god, that’s something new.” That’s what we were feeding on. Those things are so few and far between when you get them right, it’s really exciting.
You mentioned you were listening to Ebullition Records. Do you remember what it was like reading the negative review of Industry in the HeartattaCk zine?
Bobby Sell: I don’t remember specifically what it said. I couldn’t tell you because now that you mention it, I hadn’t thought about that since then. I totally forgot about it. So I can’t really say. Ryan?
Ryan Hildebrand: I just remember there was like a little mini feud between us and Kent [McClard]. He was trying to be encouraging, and he was like, “You guys are dumb for not pressing more of these records. People want to hear it.” But I don’t remember. I think that was the gist of it. But I don’t remember what the review said. It’s such a small period of time… what Kent was doing was something very distinct to me from that time. It’s not like he had a monopoly or whatever, but he was like this thing. And I think our natural inclination was to not be associated with things. It starts to get homogenized in a way.
Because your lyrics were so political, was there a dialogue between you guys and the audience about these subjects, or was it mostly just catharsis on your end?
Ryan Hildebrand: I feel like it was the latter, and no one at a show would have much of an idea what we were on about. Our friends already knew what it was about, and we would have conversations just as part of friendships. But really, no one gave a shit about that band at the time (laughter). We would play and get a good response, but there wasn’t interest there. I felt like some people just tolerated us except for these rare instances of encountering Mohinder and them being really into it.
Bobby Sell: And you have to also realize that we were playing on some really shitty sound systems most of the time, so the lyrics were unintelligible, and Josh is screaming so loud. His voice is not like a lot of people’s voices. He has a higher register, and it’s grating. There’s something about it, and it’s unique because of that. Definitely, I think people that heard the first two 45s, and we were on a compilation with some Arizona bands and “Mesh Control” was on there, I think they started to see the lyrics and hear the music. There’s probably some camaraderie about the way we felt, but it never really was talked about. There was more talk about the music. Like, “Holy shit, you guys are abrasive and nuts and fearsome.”
It’s funny that you mentioned Mohinder, because I feel like that’s a perfect band to represent the way things have changed over the years. I think about how Duster has blown up to a ridiculous level, where my 15 year old students are like, “Oh yeah, my favorite band is Duster.”
Ryan Hildebrand: What?!
It’s crazy, they have millions of monthly Spotify listeners.
Bobby Sell: But it’s interesting, because we used to play with Nuzzle a lot back in the day and Sam Fabela plays with Duster now. He’s on bass for the live shows. It’s come full circle. That was what was so cool about running into Aaron Calvert and Richard Medina—just catching up on all of that stuff, and realizing how much we have all evolved, but also that we still gravitate towards each other with the music that we’re interested in. Mohinder is a good example because that music was a huge response to what was happening in Southern California with Gravity—Heroin, Antioch Arrow, and all that. But they had their own twist on it, too. It’s interesting to see that.
I was just aware of Duster’s recent exposure maybe six or eight months ago. It was kind of a similar situation, where someone was like, “Have you heard Duster?” I was like, “Duster? From ’93 or ’94? Yeah, what about them?” “Oh, they’re huge.” I looked into it and I had no idea.
What was happening in between the release of Industry and Electric Kool Aid? I know on the Electric Kool Aid insert it says you guys were already broken up.
Ryan Hildebrand: I have a vague recollection of the last show we played at Cell 63. That was sort of disastrous feedback, weird, interpersonal aggression, not between me and Bobby. But I think other people had things going on. I remember feeling like this was the end, and it was for a time. The crucial thing is when I went away to Santa Cruz for college. I remember Bobby and I were talking like, “Hey, let’s record the seven inch.” I was like, “Okay, I’m down for anything.” And that’s about 100% of what I remember. I know Bobby’s gonna flesh this out (laughter).
Bobby Sell: Okay, so that record. As Ryan mentioned, the final show we had in ’94 was at Cell 63. But we also had our very first show with One Eyed Richard and The Goddamn Liars, which was the band we were in after that evolved into Los Cincos soon after that. We played the same day. We had an early matinee show at Cell 63 that was Honeywell’s final performance, and then we went over and we started this other band with some of our other skater friends, Dave Seward Lewis, Jeremy Szuder, and Dennis Bunton. After getting more into that band, we kind of left Honeywell and Ryan went off to Santa Cruz to go to college. I think I reached out to him and was like, “Hey, we should record that record.”
Dennis from Los Cincos had a studio in his bedroom called Galaxy, and that’s where we recorded a lot of the Los Cincos stuff that wasn’t recorded in other studios. We would rehearse there sometimes and he was a multi-instrumentalist. He’s one of the first people I met with an 8-track reel-to-reel and a proper mixer and microphones. He was super into engineering. I asked him if he would record it and sure enough he said, “Yeah, let’s do it.” But we had already parted ways with the drummer, and things were kind of rocky for the last few months of Honeywell because he was running with some folks that got him into a lot of unsavory activities. But we didn’t have a drummer, so I just hopped in and played the drums.
It’s a terrible record, in my opinion. The production sounds like shit, it’s muddy. The songs are not really fleshed out. It has none of the magnetism and grit and fidelity that the other records have, which I think is partially because Ryan [Elliot] was such a sick drummer. He was sloppy a lot of times but it gave it this sound that was almost like glue, that made the sound swim around. It meshed really well. We just wanted to document the songs that we had written in the last few months of Honeywell. There is that aspect to it—that it exists and without it, those songs would’ve been lost to time—but I kind of wish that we had the opportunity to do proper recordings of those songs.
There’s another track on a record, In Memory of Jason (1996), one of our friends that was killed in a car accident. We did the song “Posthemosmis.” It’s just named that because the band is already dusted, it’s about death and losing somebody. It kind of marks the tail end of Honeywell in a way.
Ryan Hildebrand: I think I like the 7-inch, that last one, better than you do. I don’t know if it was summer or if it was just some random holiday that I was down from Santa Cruz, but we had to squeeze the recording into this insanely tight timeframe. I don’t know why the guitar sounds like it does (laughter). But I was thinking about it the other day, just anticipating this conversation. Our timelines are so… we just barely missed the chance. What if we would have recorded that with Tom Grimley? It would have been fucking phenomenal.
Bobby Sell: There you go.
Ryan Hildebrand: Yeah. So it’s unfortunate. I’m glad that it’s there. I think “Keratinize” is one of my favorite songs of ours to play so I’m really glad it exists. I think the songs were fully formed, it’s just the recording was so tight, done in a matter of hours. I barely remember it.
Bobby Sell: Same. We just squeezed it in where we could, and later only tried re-recording the drums, to try to do another version of it, but life catches up with you. You’re trying to live in the present. Revisiting something from the past—it’s always hard to squeeze something like that in. To me, it is what it is. Like Ryan said, there’s some good songs on there, but I’ve always been a little bummed about the production of it.
Ryan Hildebrand: We did get the chance, at least—I don’t know the song titles—but with Volume 11, we played one of those songs [“Genius”] and we recorded it more properly. That was really nice for me, to have that.
Is there anything that you would like to say about Honeywell that we didn’t talk about?
Ryan Hildebrand: For me, it just feels like it was one slice of that time. I was so deeply, and I still am, into K Records and Beat Happening and all of that stuff. That’s what I was really doing at the time. Trying to reconcile those two things is odd. I think my lingering sense, when I come back to that record and as more time passes, is just this astonishment that [Industry] exists at all. I remember coming to school and Bobby handing me the record. I would have been in 11th grade, carrying it around and putting it under my desk in class. That feels so incredibly innocent. I was so pumped and excited. And then you hear the record, and what that person who existed back then produced… it’s really strange. Having my own kids who are almost that age is also extremely interesting, and it gives me a different perspective on what we did.
Bobby Sell: I just feel really grateful that we had those opportunities to play live and go into clubs, or house parties or wherever we’d have the opportunity to express ourselves, but also to put a record out, and that people wanted to support that and give us an opportunity to document our music because without that, we wouldn’t have these things. We wouldn’t be talking about this. We have that because of people like Steve Shimada and Derek from $ellout records and Phil de la Cruz and Andreas Johansson, who put out the Mollycoddle LP. Phil and I did all of the legwork to put that out. That was an exciting thing, too, because I was a high school kid, but I was going to a pressing plant to pick up records and drop off tapes. I got to go to K Disc and watch the record get mastered. I remember being with Bill Lightner, the technician that was mastering the record, and him going, “Oh wow, okay.” He was really blown away by the music. He was like, “How old are you?” I told him I was 17 and he’s just like, “You guys made this music, it’s rough but it’s got a lot of balls to it.” (laughter).
Having those experiences really blew me away because Corona is a very small town. You didn’t have record stores, you didn’t have studios. It was just these experiences that shaped who I am, and gave me the idea that, “Hey, I can get out of this.” I think one of the best things I ever did was move away from there. I was able to explore and evolve as a person. Those things paved the way for me to have new opportunities in my life going forward.
I was talking with Pete Swanson, who was telling me you guys have been talking for a long time about trying to get this music reissued.
Bobby Sell: Yeah. So right now I’m sitting on about 200 original-pressing LPs from the first press. There were some extras that got pressed up that we didn’t have enough covers for. I’ve been carrying those around for 30 years. Over time, I’ve been wanting to put it into a package, and put those out and get them out onto the market. Because if you try to find the vinyl now, it’s been selling for up to $100. There were a lot of reissues, and from what I remember, I was only asked about one of them. But there’s been two or three, maybe four different issues of that record that you can find online. I think there was some guy in Florida that did one, and then maybe they started doing more represses of it, but they never really did anything with the cover. They just had their own limited resources. I think the opportunity for us to do something with Pete and those guys would be cool because it’ll put it into a good package, and they do quality work. It’ll be nice to see that instead of some of the DIY covers that came out over time. I’m happy that people are into the music and passionately felt that they wanted to reissue this, but we never got copies of it. We never really knew about these things, except for maybe the first one. It would have been cool to be a little bit more consolidated about those efforts.
So there’s been talk about us putting together like a double LP of the two seven inches and the LP, and doing an anthology of the works. However, what’s holding it back is finding the master tapes. We were young and inexperienced, so when the engineer at Black Diamond told us, “Hey, do you want to buy our reel for this amount of money?” we were like, “Oh we can’t afford that.” So he was like, “Okay, well, then you can rent a reel for $20 and then I keep the reel and I record over it.” And we were like “...okay, sure.” That’s why we don’t have multitrack masters of the recordings, but somewhere there are DAT recordings, digital recordings of that stuff. I have a few leads in my family home, but I don’t know if it’s there or not. If we have to, we’re just going to have to work from the vinyl.
Ryan Hildebrand: The interesting thing for me was that my friend Ben was telling me, “Hey, there’s people talking about you guys on Twitter.” I was like, “What?” I read into it and was just surprised to see that. And Pete coming into the mix… back in the early or mid-2000s, I was really into the stuff he was doing. To have those worlds meet, and to find a bridge from this hardcore stuff we were doing to the more experimental noisy stuff was really interesting.
Bobby Sell: That’s true. I knew Pete because him and Gabriel and Yellow Swans used to live here in Oakland. I used to play in a band called Caroliner, and we toured with Wolf Eyes and played shows with Yellow Swans and were part of the whole noise circuit. When he got in touch with us, I was like, “Oh yeah, I remember you from those days.” So, like Ryan said, it was cool how those scenes merged.
I didn’t know you were in Caroliner!
Bobby Sell: Yeah, I moved up to the Bay Area to join Caroliner in 2002, and I played with them until about 2009. So it’s the reason I live in the Bay Area.
Caroliner is such a Bay Area band to me.
Bobby Sell: Oh, yeah. It’s kind of a trip because there was a lot of music that I was digging on right before I moved up here, and then that I learned much more about by living here because of people who were still around. There was Subterranean Records, and they released Nervous Gender and Tuxedomoon and all of those groups. I was really into The Residents and Snakefinger, as far back as like ’94. Coming up here and joining that band just opened up a whole other can of worms.
Ryan, I wanted to ask you, since you brought it up via email, do you remember how you first found out about Tone Glow?
Ryan Hildebrand: Oh, god. So the trajectory is going back to ’96 or something, hearing Richard Youngs. That just spawned everything. Getting into AMM. Shadow Ring, I remember hearing them in ’94 on KSPC. There’s Graham Lambkin and Michael Pisaro. I’ve been obsessed with Morton Feldman for as long as I can remember. All of these things. When I first encountered Tone Glow, you couldn’t find these records easily. Or you would have to pay a lot of money to just hear them. I was just voraciously reading reviews. So that’s how I would have found that, and like Brian Olewnick, his site. I put those two together at the same time, being obsessed. Steve Roden, who you must know, just died. All the Erstwhile stuff.
Erstwhile was the reason I started writing reviews for Tone Glow. I was uploading the albums to a private torrent website and the record label owner, Jon Abbey, was like, “Can you stop doing this?” (laughter). I was around 20 years old. I was like, “No, I’m gonna keep doing this. You’re on this website, too, so obviously you’re downloading records. Why does this matter to you?” And then we just ended up having a conversation about UGK. I remember thinking it was awesome that I was talking to a guy who runs an experimental music record label I respected about Southern hip hop. Anyways, thank you for sharing that. It’s cool that you knew about Tone Glow.
Ryan Hildebrand: When you talk about downloading, my method used to be: search for an album cover, go to image search, it would probably be associated with a blog, and maybe there would be a download link. I don’t know if it was Tone Glow or Brian’s blog, but I would be frustrated, like, “It’s only reviews!” (laughter). But a lot of those albums—and you guys will probably agree—reading the review can be far more interesting than listening to the music. Which is always how I felt about Forced Exposure as well. I used to have this idea that I wanted to be in a band where I read a review and make the record I read about, rather than buy it and listen to it, since I was going to be disappointed.
You did that with the Glenn Branca record you mentioned earlier.
Ryan Hildebrand: Wow, that’s true.
Thank you for reading the 150th issue of Tone Glow. Shout out to moms taking kids to shows.
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