Paul Collins is a Rock N’ Roll warrior. He has been playing
his brand of honest, infectious power pop, new wave, Rock N’ Roll, whatever you
want to call it for almost 40 years. This man along with his band, are out
there fighting for your soul. Traveling the world many times over and making
new music using there own blood sweat and tears. Paul isn’t some fat cat making
a couple of festival appearances a year waving at his fans like some kind of
pathetic mascot, living off his royalties. This man is out fighting a war, dug
deep in the jungles of battle, waging combat against all these posturing rock
stars. These are the kinds of people that sour so many against guitar rock and
driving them to dull, soulless electronic pop music. If in fact Rock N’ Roll
was at proper war, and we were all it’s soldiers, then Paul Collins would be
our commanding General!
Interview by Jay Castro
I read that as a kid
your stepfather was a civilian in the military and you moved all around the world,
Europe, Vietnam, Greece. At what age were you first stirred by music? What band
or musician made you think, that’s what I want to do for a living?
I remember I was in Vietnam and I must have been about 6 ½
years old and I was in a taxicab, they looked like Volkswagen Bugs but they
were smaller and it was pouring rain, which it does there a lot. “Big Girls
Don’t Cry” came on by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons and all those vocals
really knocked me out. Another song from that time period that really turned me
on was “Lightnin’ Strikes” by Lou Christie. Those are my earliest remembrances
of listening to music and being really turned on to it.
Later on my dad had Hank Williams and Ray Charles in his
collection, which were strong early influences. I especially loved Ray Charles Country and Western Hits Vol. 1 which had like “Take These Chains
From My Heart” on it and my mom had “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash which I also
really loved.
When we moved back to the states I lived in Long Island and
listened to AM radio every night and I would fall asleep with the little
transistor radio glued to my head. It was a cocktail of British Invasion, the
West Coast sound, the Detroit sound, the East Coast sound with The Rascals and
stuff like that. That music really influenced me a lot. I would listen to all
of those songs thinking it was so great and how do these guys do this. If I
could do something like this it would be really awesome.
So your family finally
settled down in New York, what made you want to get up and move across the
country and start a band?
Later on when I was 17, I went to Julliard School of music
as a composition major/piano minor but that was for you know, more serious
honor music. I decided that after a year of that, I wanted to go someplace and
be in a rock band. So my drum teacher said, you need to go to the West Coast,
this is where the music scene is happening for young people, and so I did. That
was the best decision I made. I made it out to San Francisco just before
turning 18. On my 3rd day there I saw a notice in a music store that
said “Wanted: Drummer for an all original band ala The Beatles.” At that time
there wasn’t a lot of bands doing original music in Rock N’ Roll. There were
jazz-fusion bands or funk bands but it was really hard to find a band in Rock
N’ Roll playing pop songs like the kind I listened to that I wanted to do. So I
tore the sign down so no one else could call and it was Jack Lee and he said “Come
on over” so I went right over there. In the first 15 minutes I was over there
he played the demo that he had of “Hangin’ on the Telephone” and it blew my mind. So I auditioned
for him, I had my drumsticks and I started playing drums on a phone book. He
started playing all these songs for me on his beautiful cherry finish Rickenbacker. And that’s really where my career in
Rock N’ Roll started.
So did The Nerves form
before The Ramones and the whole CBGB scene?
Well, I don’t know if we actually started before them, I
definitely remember never hearing about all of them when we started. I still
remember hearing about this band from New York called The Ramones we hadn’t
heard their music at all, and they were playing in San Francisco. So we called
up the club they were playing at and we said “So is this band The Ramones
playing there tonight?” and they said “Yeah, but they’re playing their last
song right now.” And we said “Can you just hold the phone up so we can hear
them?” And they did. So the three
of us crowded around the receiver and I remember Jack and Peter saying “They
aren’t changing, they’re staying on the D, I can’t believe it!” We had never
heard anyone attack music in that way which was similar to what we were doing.
So in 1979, The Nerves
called it a day. You actually had
another band that a lot of people don’t really know about in between The Nerves
and The Beat correct?
Yeah it was a short-lived band. When the Nerves disbanded it
was pretty catastrophic, I thought we were going to go all the way. I was the
youngest in the band and it hit me pretty hard when we disbanded. Peter Case
and I did try to carry on with The Breakaways. We did a hand full of shows, at
the time in Los Angeles, it was impossible to play anywhere live. There was
just no support. No one was interested in booking this kind of stuff and there
was no real fan base for it.
Especially if you weren’t living in that area or you didn’t grow up in
that area and you could have all your school friends support your musical
projects and stuff. So it was very difficult. A lot of stuff died on the vine
just because there was no way to really do anything. Just no acceptance, we had
no money and we were starving.
So after the Breakaways
came The Beat. You guys did some
television appearances including American Bandstand. Those performances are all
on Youtube including the interview you guys did with Dick Clark. Was Dick
really as personable as everyone says he was?
Dick Clark was such a professional and he was all-inclusive.
If you watch interviews that he does, he talks to everybody. He doesn’t just
talk to the lead singer or the cute guy in the band. He was such a pro; I mean
you were in and out of there before you even knew what happened. He had the
best technicians and cameramen. So you just roll in there and boom, it was over
and done with before you even knew what happened. But yeah, he was a pro. We
met Benny Goodman too and all the old top pros were all so gracious. They
treated us so nice and they didn’t seem to be threatened by what we were doing and
they were secure about what they were doing. I was lucky to meet people like
that. It made me see that you could be this big star, this big important
entertainer and still be very gracious and accepting of other things.
So in the late 70’s and
early 80’s the whole punk thing was blowing up. Do you feel that in some way
you owed it to that movement, which finally shook everybody, awake and showed
everybody what Rock N’ Roll was supposed to be about.
Well, I never really thought of it what way but that’s quite
possibly true. The punk movement
really historically pin points the “music revolution” that took place. The big
difference with the punk stuff and what we were doing is we were aggressive,
but not in the same way. They were really confronting to the status quo. We
were trying to do this music with our own interpretation on it. We were heavily
based in melody and classic song structures. Our staple was much more musical
than sociological. The really interesting thing about the Nerves, which I
didn’t figure out until much later, is that we were three strong men that went
against the establishment, which was normal. But we also went against our
peers. We went up against both sides. Our peers were the punkers, which were
looking and dressing a completely different way. So we unwillingly became total
outcasts. We were three guys in three-piece suits, everyone thought we were
from the moon!
Didn’t you guys have
your own club out in California for a while?
It was kind of like a roving club. There was no place for us
to play, we couldn’t get any gigs at any legitimate clubs so we said, let’s
make our own club and we called it The Hollywood Punk Palace. We presented the
first shows in Hollywood, at least to my knowledge of The Germs, The Weirdos,
The Dils, the Zippers. We knew them all from the rehearsal halls. So even
though we were putting own these shows, we would come on and people were still
saying “What the hell do these guys have to do with this stuff?” We had to do
something; we had to make something happen, so we did it.
I want to ask you about
a project you started a few years ago called The Beat Army, what is it all
about?
I travel around, and I know a lot of people that say, “Oh I
love Rock N’ Roll, I love new wave and power pop” and I said to myself, there
has got to be a way to polarize these people to show some kind of numbers. We
live in a world where everything is numbers, how many bids, how many likes, how
many downloads. So that’s what the Beat Army is all about. It is my attempt to
show the numbers so that people can say hey all these people like power pop,
that’s encouraging. And to also
promote people going to shows and buying a ticket so that these bands can go
out and play for more than 10 people at a show. On that end, things have gotten
a lot better. It’s past the point
it was 10 years ago where people said, “Well it’s over and done with and we’ll
never hear of it again.” Then with the advent of Myspace I started seeing all
these young bands listing power pop as a reference. I said, “Wait its alive
still!” These days power pop is an elastic term; I’m not a purist about it.
There are power pop bands, there are punk pop bands, there’s garage. The power pop genre needs
awareness. I think if you are a purist and it becomes exclusive and you wind up
playing for five people every night, you really haven’t done much. The better
thing is getting the scope to be wider: play with garage bands and play with
punk bands. Get the fans in the door and expose them to the music and get the
bigger base. To me, power pop embodies the best in Rock N’ Roll, great songs,
great hooks, great guitar parts and great melodies. That’s what every piece of
Rock N’ Roll that I love has.
We were talking earlier
about power pop now having the ability to reach a lot more people. Green Day feature the song “Walking Out
On Love” in their Broadway production of American Idiot and Def Leopard covered
“Hangin’ on the Telephone.” What’s the strangest cover you’ve heard of one of
your songs or one of your former band’s songs?
Def Leopard was very, very cool about it. They put out an
album of all covers, all their favorite songs, and they say a little bit about
each song that they cut. About Hangin’ On The Telephone, they say, “We know
that you think this is a Blondie song, but it isn’t. It’s by this little known
band called The Nerves from L.A.” So I thought was very cool. A lot of people
do think, in fact it’s a regular occurrence, where people are like “Hey great
Blondie cover” and I’m like “What the hell are you talking about?” There’s this
band from Oakland called Grass Widow and they cover “Walking Out On Love” and
it’s such a bizarre version. There was this tribute album put out by this
Australian guy that continues to put out tributes. I think he’s doing Dwight
Twilley now. There were all these bands and all these versions and some of the
bands were surprising. You
hear a rock band and they kind of did it the way we did it only they add a few
things and that’s cool. But some of these bands did it radically different. One
of the bands did an electronic version of “That’s What Life Is All About” or something and it was very,
very different. It’s always flattering as a songwriter if someone covers your
songs; I’m always like wow that’s cool.
In closing, what
projects do you have lined up for the near or not so near future?
I’m going
to make another record and I’m going to keep on doing what I’m doing, the Johnny
Appleseed of power pop. Bringing the music to the people at ground level, in
the trenches, at Rock N’ Roll clubs, down and dirty style. That’s where Rock N’
Roll lives and breathes. We’re trying to get people to get up off their asses,
come to the shows and realize that you can pay just 7 or 8 bucks and have a
good time. It’s completely unpretentious and it’s good.
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