I erased half of this interview with Paint it Black when I interviewed Strike Anywhere. Luckily, this interview was an hour long and I didn't erase all that much of importance. They were suprised to find out that the drummer of the Bouncing Souls has a first name (its Mike, but they always call him McDirment-his last name), and they talked about their other jobs and I'm sure some other stuff was mentioned. This is a great band made up of totally awesome people. This interiew will adhere to that.

PL: PL: Dan, since you've been in Lifetime and Kid Dynamite, two bands that a lot of people have a lot of respect for, what impact do you think that you've had on the underground punk scene?

DY: (cough)Thursday(cough)...(some laughing)...Ahh, thats a question that ahhh...

AN: I'll answer it for him and I'll even do it in his voice. "I invented emo. Where's my goddamn check?"

DY: I don't want to place false modesty and say "Well, I only hope I had..." My first response would be, "well, that would be a great fantasy to think that I had some kind of impact on music," but I think that it would be pretty arrogant to think so. I'm told that thats the case, and when I listen to stuff, I hear a lot of punk influence in current music. So, I guess some of it I'm really proud of and some of it...

AN: It's definitely cool to know that hundreds of bands or more are directly influenced by...I mean, it happens all the time. The other night, we were loading out and this guy comes over and says "You guys were one of my favorite bands; I loved you guys." It happens all the time.

PL: To you?

AN: Do I?

PL: No, no, do people say that to you?

AN: Oh, no, I haven't been mistaken for a member of Lifetime recently. Although, when I used to shave my head, in my heavier days, I was ocasionally mistaken for Ari Katz. But seriously, I was never that fat.

DY: You know whats good is that I have a career that I make a good living off of so I don't have to feel bitter, because I think that if I didn't, if I were penniless than I would feel bitter about bands getting rich off of a style that we had a lot to do with. I think that even though people recognize me, the influence of Lifetime is more a reflection of people downloading it and not buying it. Its not like Saves the Day mentions it in Alternative Press and Spin and suddenly we sell 20,000 more copies of Lifetime records. It doesn't work that way. I think that if you did research on the internet, you'd see a lot more hits and downloads after stuff like that, but it doesn't really reflect in record sales, but thats cool. I'm happy that bands like Thursday, Saves the Day and New Found Glory are really vocal in the press and to my face about appreciating the influence. We were in a bar a few months ago and a guy from New Found Glory came up to us in New York; it just happened to be three of the members of Lifetime hanging out and this guy comes up to us and says: "Hey, I don't know if you know about us, but I play in this band New Found Glory, and I just wanted to say that people lump us in with all this new bullshit, but we wouldn't exist if it weren't for you guys." It was kind of cool. And I heard from somebody else that the next night, they played in Jersey in front of 5,000 people and they stopped in between two songs and said: "Everybody should go out and buy this record from a band called Lifetime."

AN: I think that you should set up a merch table at all the Thursday and New Found Glory and Saves the Day shows and just sell your records in the back. I think that you'd do really well. I'll do it.

DY: But then I'd have to go to the show.

AN: I'll do it. I have earplugs.

PL: What's your opinion on punk and punk influenced music of today?

DY: Most of it sucks. Some of its really cool though, but a lot of it is really half assed.

AN: It's a great question, but its a hard thing to answer without sounding like a total dick. And it's impossible to be aware of everything. Like you can't just answer the question, "How do you feel about every punk band out there today?" because I haven't heard most of them.

DY: Well, I wouldn't even call a lot of them punk.

AN: A lot of people are like, "There are a lot of punk bands and they all fucking suck," but a lot of punk bands in the 70's sucked too, but we just weren't around then.

DY: And the 80s. And the first half of the 90's was horrible for punk and hardcore. In terms of visible bands, I'd like to say that Dillenger Four is the best punk band in existance right now, by the terms of lyrical relevance and kick ass songwriting and an amazing live show.

AN: I agree with that.

DY: But there's a lot of great music. The punk dialect isn't as narrowly defined as it was 10 years ago with that sound. Like the stuff on Dischord right now, like Q and Not U and Black Eyes and El Guapo; I just saw that tour come through Philly. Amazing, inventive, rythmic, intense, still politcally relevent but not obvious. I think that Dillenger Four is amazing, I think that From Ashes Rise is amazing and I think that there's a lot of indie underground bands or semi underground bands that are amazing. I'm talking about Hot Hot Heat (NOTE:This led to a brief discussion about Hot Hot Heat and their signing to Warner Brothers before their Sub Pop album came out).

AN: Being on this tour has especially been kind of weird because I am totally not aware of these kinds of kids and this kind of scene, but there's millions of them. And I think its awesome. It's so cool...I've been telling Dan at every show: "Look at all these punks here." I'm so stoked about it.

DY: There's a bunch of big ass green mohawks on kids that are 13 years old that you know are getting their asses beat by jocks every day.

AN: And I fucking love it because I used to be like that. But the tendency is, at least in the group of people that we hang out with in Philly, is you dress kind of normal and you're still into the politics. But there's kids that are into being punks and there's kids that are into looking like its the 70s and they have leather jackets and spikes and shit like that and they circle pit every night and it's great.

DY: And as much as its a fashion accessory and as much as its more accessable now than it was in the 70s, you know these kids get shit from their parents and teachers and jocks. These kids are probably getting spit on, getting pushed around, getting called all sorts of names. And their clueless in a lot of ways, but its beautiful.

AN: We were all like that.

DY: We were all clueless.

AN: And its really awesome to see that this is not over and its awesome to see thousands of kids that are ready to take this someplace else.

DY: And there's a lot of relevant politics. These kids are very outspoken.

AN: And the kids respond. It's hard to say what the kids will do with it once they leave the club. I'm sure that, at this point, every kid who raises his fist at a club is maybe not 100% on board with all their politics, but at least they're bringing it out there and at least they're bring ideas so that they can make their own choice.

DY: And they also give conduits to find out more. They give a lot of websites and contacts and things to find out more. More detail or more in depth information than what they're singing about.

AN: There's a lot of people that are like (ew) Anti Flag, and you can say what you want, but they're having a big impact-

DY: And they've got heart. And they're honest.

AN: And that dude #2 can quote every movie I love, perfectly. He's a funny dude, I gotta say.

PL: You guys mentioned some bands that you like. Do you want to mention any other ones?

DY: From Ashes Rise.

AN: I really really like, if we're gonna talk about American bands; there's this band called The Suicide File that just broke up. I was at their last show.

DY: We were supposed to play that show, but my dumb brother got married that day. Prick (said in a haha way).

AN: Celebrity Murders, um...

DY: Street Trash.

AN: Street Trash, holy shit, I forgot about that. Street Trash is this band from California, fucking amazing.

DY: They sound like they're from 1982.

AN: Yeah, they do, but not in a contrived way. These guys are incredible. Why am I drawing a blank? From Ashes Rise, we like Deathreat.

DY: Not the Death Threat from Connecticut.

AN: World Burns to Death is really good. There's this band from Philly called The Sound of Failure who are amazing. Um...Tragedy.

DY: Yup, Tragedy is great.

DY: I listen to underground hip hop a lot more than I do hardcore. Right now I've been listening to a lot of; don't get me wrong, I love hardcore, but lately, I've been listening to the Def Jep releases and (names other underground hip hop artists that I personally don't care about and couldn't make out their names).

AN: Backpack hip hop.

Unimportant chatter.

AN: I like Justin Timberlake a lot.

DY: Yeah, Justin Timberlake is good. You know, as much as I like the underground stuff, I like the Missy Elliot record.

AN: The Missy Elliot record is seriously my favorite hip hop record of last year.

DY: I disagree. I'm willing to say that, I'll go out and buy ten records and listen to them and the one I like best just stays in my CD player for a month or two while the other ones stay under the seat of my car collecting dust. But those two records this month have been the new Aesop Rock record and the new Victor Vaughn record.

AN: Thats pretty much it; I'm just trying to...I listen to a lot of Swedish pop. I've been having such a hard time thinking about this, I just like the Cardigans.

PL: Alright; this one's kind of answered too. How do you feel about punk becoming the new trend?

DY: Its always been the new trend, just on and off. It just goes in cycles. And I believe I've lived through a lot of it; I started going to shows in 1984 and it feels like I've lived through that cycle a thousand times. Its been mainstream and then it disappears and then there's no shows anywhere, then someone starts doing them at a VFW Hall. It gets huge and then it disappears. It gets popular and on the radio and then it disappears.

PL: Is this the biggest you've seen it?

DY: I think during Nirvana's peak it was bigger.

AN: It's hard to say because I think that a lot of this stuff is being called "punk."

An indistinguishable discussion occurs in which Andy admits his disdain for Chris Carraba of Dashboard Confessional.

AN: I was gonna say that that is the one guy that bugs the fucking shit out of me.

DY: Suffice to say; that the stuff that you might be referring to as being big now, I don't consider punk. And I don't say this to be elitist, but ? I don't consider to be punk or hardcore. In the 80s, I had an argument with a friend of mine once about the influences of punk. He said that the stuff like the Dead and Hendrix and the 60s had a far more influence on culture than punk ever will be, and at the time I said no; you don't realize how much of an influence it is, but I would say now, I would say that punk has been as much influence, diluded or not, on our culture.

AN: I don't know if I'd agree with that, just in terms of sheer numbers. In terms of how if effects me.

PL: Well its not all about numbers, you just don't have enough years of wisdom.

AN: I'm just talking about: think about how many attend jam bands events and how many people attend those shows.

DY: What a great place to drop a smart bomb.

AN: I have called NASA repeatedly and asked them to drop a space station on one of those fuckers. I offered them a lot of money, but they won't take it.

DY: There's a game for Atari called Defender (?) where the guy on the screen had three smart bombs and you saved them up, and when you dropped one, everything on the screen would just disappear, so you'd save it up until there were a lot of bad guys around you. I'd say save one of those for a Phish concert.

AN: Yeah, because you can transfer video game stuff to real life. (brief pause) I'm sorry, he's not a physics guy.

DY: Don't understand physics.

AN: You can see the punk rock influence on mainstream culture when you turn on tv and N Sync are wearing Misfits shirts. It isn't a fashion thing, but certainly there is a fashion aspect to punk rock.

DY: When I'm talking about culture, though, I'm not just talking about the good aspects of culture. I'm talking about aesthetics, style, fashion, dress, art, music.

AN: I think that the world would be a much better place if there was a mohawk for every pair of birkenstocks.

DY: I would say that, in terms of what I consider punk, I'd say it was a bigger explosion when Green Day and Nirvana were huge than now.

AN: That would certainly be more cut and dry. Nirvana had politics.

DY: Very subtle politics, but still politics.

AN: Artistically, they were subtle, but I think that most of these bands' publicists wouldn't let them talk about that shit. Like anti homophobia and all that stuff.

DY: And that stuff is just so prevelant to Warped Tour culture.

This leads to a discussion about fighting and the lead singer of the Hope Conspiracy being a good looking guy.

PL: I'll ask you guys this one separately. Suppose you were Webster's Dictionary, how would you define music?

DY: Life, the life force.

AN: Ah...ahh...Jesus Christ. This is hard. Life, that was your answer?

DY: The life force. As important as sex in every way.

AN: Yeah, I'm with that. I think I would have a picture of a Pixies record.

PL: Do you guys have anything else you want to say?

AN: I wish there was a Spike's in my town.

PL: Spike's is great.

DY: We're gonna make our guitarist eat 20 tonight. He could do it; you should see him. He ate all of Go! For the Throat which is why they broke up.

AN: It was a dare; we were like: "You can't do it." He was like: "Oh...I'll do it in a second.

DY: "I'll eat my whole band. And he ate all of them, including the drum set. We tried to talk him out of it. We were like "Dude, you can sell that equiment," but he was like (eating face). "Maybe I'd like to have a little bit more guitar. Ohh, thats good. Maybe after that, I'll have some drumset." And then, before we knew if, everything was gone and it was just an empty practice space.

PL: Are you guys scared that he's gonna eat you?

BOTH: No.

AN: He wouldn't eat vegetarians. He might eat me.

DY: I got your back.

PL: And if not you could always ask Kevin from Hope Con. for help.

AN: Yeah, I love Kevin. Honestly, is there a more attractive man in hardcore? I really don't think there is. He's got the tattoos, the hair, the eyes, the muscles.

DY: The first time I saw him, I was like: "I'm just not gonna play music anymore.

AN: And thats coming from the hottest, most eligible man in Philadelphia. I know he gets weird when I talk about this, but this is a hot dude right here. And he's ashamed in the presence of Kevin. That's crazy.

Interviewed by RF

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