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[Gippy] ITA: Qualche settimana fa
sono finito praticamente per caso a fare questa intervista via mail
con Chris della BCT di San Diego in California. Fin dai primissimi
anni 80' Chris ha prodotto e distribuito molto materiale, prima in
cassetta e successivamente in Vinile, tra cui numerose complilation
con gruppi europei ed anche Italiani, come Raw Power, CCM, Peggio
Punx, Nabat ecc... e le versioni americane di "Osservati dall'
Inganno" degli Indigesti. Questa sua passione per l' hardcore
italiano lo ha spinto a farci un paio di domande sulle nostre
attività con Lanterna Pirata, il che ha portato alla conversazione
che segue. Spero presto di riuscire a tradurla anche in italiano.
Intanto qua c'è la versione in Inglese.
ENG: A few weeks ago I ended up
being interviewed by Chris from BCT in San Diego, California. Since
the early 80s Chris has been releasing, trading and selling lots of
material, first on tape and later on vynil, including many
compilations of European and even italian bands like Raw Power, CCM,
Peggio Punx, Nabat etc... and the american versions of "Osservati
Dall' Inganno" by Indigesti. His interest in italian hardcore
has lead him do ask us a few questions reguarding our activities with
Lanterna Pirata, which resulted in the following conversation. I hope
to be able to do an italian translation of it soon. Here's the
English version.
1)C: What sells more, CDs, 7",
LPs or something else? do tapes sell? I've always been partial to
Italian HC so when I meet any Italian who is into that I'm
automatically interested. Thanks for responding. Makes me happy.
G:
First of all thank you for the interview and the attention.
I think what sells best
these days really depends on the focus a d.i.y. Distro wants to
have. Our distro mostly carries CDs, mainly because when we started
doing our the label we were just kids and CDs were the easiest thing
you could get your hands on and/or produce moneywise(I'm 23 now and
started Lanterna Pirata in my last years of high school, when I was
17/18 years old).
C: I'm dealin' with a
kid here! I'm 60. Ha. 37 years difference between us yet so much is
common between us.
G:
Lately we are trying to focus more on Vynil. Many people who
still care about buying records today are kind of the collector
types, so I guess they prefer vynil, due to it's longevity when it
comes to conservation and sound quality. My favourite format is the
7" vynil, as I believe it's the perfect format to release
hardcore punk stuff on. It's got just the right length for it.
C: I'll take CDs for
ease of use. Mostly cuz i can't really listen to HC at home due to
the wife (and before her, my lst wife and our daughter, neither of
whom were into it but they allowed it when punx came over!). I love
the format of LP and 7". They look and feel the best, but,
fairly impractical for use and I dislike cracks and pops! per se.
Tape, it's so funny. It is a sturdy format but when it gets stuck in
the machine!!! Yer right, 14 minutes of a 7" is perfect for
punk. I never fully thought of it that way.
G: Tapes seem to have made
a quite unexplicable comeback lately if you consider that it's quite
an outdated format(younger generations hardly even know what they
are) and many bands are pressing limited runs(usally like 50 copies)
of their albums on tape. Many kids who get into punk today sadly
seem to be interested in buying t-shirts rather than the records of
the bands.
C: I can only hope they know the music first and
get the t second! Though some T's are very cool. Art really.
2)C: I notice a distinct lack of
devil stuff on your records. do you make a conscious effort to
simply avoid releasing such material or is it just a coincidence?
G:What do you mean by devil stuff? If
you mean heavy metal, it's because I never listened to it much and
neither does Marco, my friend I run the label with. Me and my
brother, Roberto,(who is a twin of mine and plays guitar in
L.e.i.s.f.a.) got into punk through our parents, who are about your
age, so we were introduced to a mix between the 80s stuff and the
90s melodic hardcore music, which was starting to become more
popular when we were born(I guess this also explains why our band
has a more melodic touch ;) ). But for a kid our age it was far more
common to get into metal bands like Iron Maiden or even Slayer and
mostly avoid hardcore punk completely. In most cases punk and metal
audiences today are seen as two really different scenes who rarely
mix, exept for few exeptions. There is no conscious effort in
keeping heavy metal stuff out of our distro, as I would actually
welcome it, in terms of musical diversity, which is never a bad
thing. It's just that many metal bands these days don't seem to like
or particularly care about the whole d.i.y. Approach to things.
C: You cover a lot in this answer. By devil stuff I mean art
and references to demons, evil, death, suicide, indulging in satanic
images and lyrics (like Slayer and Venom do). I assume many of those
bands and kids assume that God and the devil and heaven and hell are
not real so they don't care if they upset people by using such
images since, for many of them, I'm guessing, they don't believe
it's true anyway. If some do believe in it and still indulge in such
images and lyrics, i feel bad for them cuz there's no party place in
hell. I dislike metal and crossover (later Discharge, later Cockney
Rejects, later DRI, I guess later COC). I love Led Zeppelin and Jimi
Hendrix. But, to me, that's before metal got screwed into a parody
of itself, so to speak. I'm glad due to yer parents you didn't get
into metal! If you guys are 23 then if yer folks had you at 25 then
your parents are about 50, maybe 10 years younger than me!! Ha(note:
mom's 52 and dad's 59). I love that they got you guys into 80's and
90's hc. Nothing wrong with more melodic hc. If metal and punk stay
separated, that's ok with me. I'm not surprised that metal often
disdains DIY. What that translates to is that their goal is to make
a living at it, while with punx DIY means they'll keep their day job
or live with their parents and so forth, to do DIY punk activities
for the love of it. Yes, punk is better than metal, in virtually all
ways!! Ha. I like musical diversity as well. Check out my 12 posts
from yesterday on my fb page. Maybe it'll educate you to some great
music out there. Lemme know. I like Metallica for 2 reasons: they
took the speed of punk and applied it to metal which was getting
horribly slow. and they took the independence aspect and ran with
it! also, notice they seem to totally avoid
demon/devil/evil/hell/suicide type lyrics and images! i think that's
pretty cool. Especially since i do believe in God, the devil and
heaven and hell so I don't wanna end up in hell just because of
music that i like. There's TONS of great music out there that has
nothing to do with evil images and lyrics so I enjoy them!3)C: Who are your customers? can you tell the age? teens? 20's? 30's? 40's? 50' year olds?
G: Nice questions, but honestly for me it's really hard to tell. Taking a guess I would say it's mostly people between their late 20's early 30's all the way to their 40's, who are still used to buying records, when it was the ony way to get into new music. There are also some younger kids who are interested in it, but not many. Being that we do a lot of sending via mail order it's also hard to tell
- C: I guessed you would have difficulty knowing. I never knew
the ages of punx who bought bct tapes and records. still don't. but
you end up meeting some and a few say their age so i knew there was
some indication for me back then and you today.
4)C: do customers (i hate to use
that word with punk!, usually i say 'kids') want music available via
mp3 or other downloads?
G: Most of the music whch is released
today is usually avaliable for free streaming and download right
from the get-go(not only on d.i.y. labels), in many cases even weeks
or months BEFORE the actual physical copies are even released, so I
would say it is something inevitable that happens automatically. It
has it's usual set of pros and cons. On one hand it makes a lot of
stuff avaliable to people who maybe don't have a lot of money for
free, so it integrates the whole d.i.y. And low-cost ethos very well
and you have the opportunity to spread it far easier than you used
to(just look at this interview ;-) ). On the other hand it forced
the whole record releasing community to tone down pressing numbers
significantly. For a common d.i.y. Band in the 90s it was no big
deal to press a 1000 copy run, as it was the only way to make the
music avaliable. Now you are lucky if you can press and give away
300-500 copies of a release
C: Fascinating. "give away"!! Yer right, the
'low-cost ethos' is met well with free access to music. who doesn't
love that.
5) C: Do you bundle things like you
did the CDs and zine? such as download for free along with a CD or
LP?
G: We rarely bundle things when we
sell them, the fanzine being ,I think, the only example, but we try
to keep the price of CDs as affordable and low as possible while
still beng able to grow a bit. We are not making a living out of any
of the actvties, be it the distro or the shows we put up.
C: I have always assumed that very few punx in the world can
make a living at it. The only ones who can are Epitaph, Anti,
Offspring, and so forth, cuz, of course, they get bought by the
masses. Though not all on Epitaph does. And Hellcat label/Rancid
also appear to just happen to make music that sells big so they
surely do live off their music efforts but, to me, i assume they
still stay pretty darn punk ethos wise.
6) C: How are records and CDs
selling these days compared to 2 or 5 years ago?
G: This is another question hard for me
to answer to. During the past two years or even the past five I
honestly didn't notice much of a difference saleswise. Maybe we got a
little bit more used to it and it gets easier to give away records,
simply because through time you get to know more people and you start
to get the hang of how all of this works, but otherwise we feel like
we got a kind of a steady stream of small improvements through time
that keep us going and motivated. It's more than enough and I would
definetly say that we are into all of this far more because of the
people and friends we get to meet, than because of the records we
sell.
C:I like that, 'a steady stream of
small improvements through time that keep us going and motivated.'
excellent. It's exactly the same with bct, first, the true find, the
real value, was meeting and interacting with a wide variety of punx
in San Diego then L.A. then the world! I met several punx whom i have
never met face to face but became friends with, without ever seeing
them. but by snail mail letters! The tapes and records are like
little are works, tiny children, sorta, that we give birth to and
then watch if they can navigate time and still be of interest to punx
in future years. though, in the 80's when we did bct we didn't think
much of the future.
7) C: How much of your stuff do you
end up trading vs. selling?
It appears to me that there are
much stronger punk indie distros in existence today than in the 80's
when often we had to deal with so called indie distributors who were
not punx and often they dragged their feet about giving us punk
labels our money. it was the only bad thing about punk in the 80's
(aside from the rare violence).
G: We like the trading part more than
the actual selling one, for a bunch of reasons and most of the stuff
we get in the distro is by trading our own releases.
C: Cool. I love hearing that. I used
bct tapes to get a bunch of zines, other tapes and some records, all
in trade. I didn't quite realize till you answered this just how much
a factor that was in bct for me back then. still is. ha.
G: First and foremost it gives a nice
personal touch to the whole thing, while making it all less about the
money.
C: Amen. Less about the money (only
about money cuz it does have some costs and so forth) but way more
about getting stuff in trade.
G:
Trading is often also a quite wonderful excuse to stay in
touch with a lot of friends and a great way to stay informed about
many things that are going on in the d.i.y. Scene.
C: That's exactly how it worked in the 80's too.G: Since the 80s a lot of stuff has surely changed in the world of music, and it is by far easier to run a label nowadays, given many of the comforts of modern technology. You get into much more stuff much quicker.
C: I didn't stop to think of
that.I'm still shocked when someone simply sends me a link and
suddenly I'm listening to something i never even heard of 1 minute
ago! In the 80's we needed snail mail and tapes or vinyl and zines to
share infos.
G:
Con side is that often a lot of the relationships that are formed
through social media and the internet are becoming more and more
impersonal.
C: Again, fascinating. I saw that
just a few days ago. I've had several punx worldwide ask to friend me
and i've asked to friend some who are clearly into punk. I friend
this guy in Australia and he clearly sent me a 'stock answer' of info
in my fb message. I was kinda stunned. But, I know there's no reason
to retype something if i've already typed it up! But, i think social
media is way more opportunity to hook up easily and quickly (like our
interview here! I never knew you existed 2 weeks ago!) and, with it,
i see a lot of personal interactions. even if we never meet. one of
my favorite people on earth is a punk in italy who traded me a lot of
Jimi when i traded punk to him. in the 80's. still we have never met!
G: This is actually one of the reasons
why i decided to write a paper fanzine in 2012/2013. I write it in
Italian and translate a lot of intervews from foreign bands, so
italian people, who are not the best at speaking english, can read it
in their own language.
C: I love that. I have been meaning
to say your English is excellent. When we had Raw Power (5 Italians)
and then Indigesti (6 Italians with Stiv of T.V.O.R.) most spoke
great English but about 3 of 11 spoke virtually no English. And maybe
2 spoke broken English. I know and knew about 100 words in Spanish
and they ALWAYS understood, without translation, every word I used in
Spanish. And they knew all the punk words: gig, guitar, band etc! I
LOVE that you translate to Italian for a paper zine!
G: It is nice to expose a lot of the
interesting people you meet, going to shows or touring and getting
away from a PC screen every now and then.
C: that's hilarious! ha. come away from the computer. come
outside. meet a human being.
8)C: I see you have a focus on
Genoa, naturally, as it is where you apparently reside. It appears
to me that punk has remained very DIY and so it makes sense that you
would know what bands exist in your area/region and would then work
with them, cooperatively, voluntarily, to release their records thru
yer distro. Are there other small punk labels in your area/region
and they look to you to help distro their CDs and vinyl?F or me,
it's questions i have of the current punk generation! since i don't
know hardly anything about punk from after 1986!!).
G: We started the distro and puting up
shows in Genoa, mainly in the local squats, because we were noticing
a certain lack in all of those things when we started our first
bands, which was at the age of 15 in 2007. As we were getting started
we were living through the leftovers of our previous generations and
scenes, with many people who used to be involved in it either having
kids, or relocating, or simply not knowing them yet. So we really
felt the need to start something of our own. Genoa and Liguria in
general throughout the years have had a small but quite active scene,
with people forming bands, running distros, but has always had some
continuity issues. Many labels closed down after few releases, but
continued being operative in some way shape or form under different
names/collectives. Punk and hardcore shows here in italy have always
had very strong ties to squatting, so it was a good thing that we at
least had some previous "breeding ground" so we had not to
start not totally from scratch. A good example are the people at
C.S.O.A. Terra Di nessuno, who taught us more than a thing or two
about organizing ourselves. Other regions and cities are not always
so lucky. A few good bands from the Liguria area throghout the years
you should definetly check out are: Distemper, Evolution So Far,
Slaughter In The Vatican, 5MDR, Majak, CGB(Crime Gang Bang), Gli
Altri, L.e.i.s.f.a., Esalazione, Losers Parade, Kafka, Downright and
Never Was.
C: Fascinating. squats basically do not exist in the U.S. I
will look on youtube for each of these bands. I can't wait.
9)Do you work with other punx on
your distro? I assume you do. Do you guys all have day jobs and do
this on the side after work? You don't make a living doing it do
you? i'd be surprised if you did. just cuz there's so few punx in
the world and so many releases and punx are famous for not being
rich! so many DIY releases make for many small pressing releases.
cool man. i hope you don't mind me doing this interview with you!!
Chris BCT in San Diego.
We also love to do interviwes, don't
worry ;-)
We don't do Lanterna Pirata for a
living, we just love doing it in our free time. I started the project
in 2009 with Marco, who lives in Varazze and who is about 10 years
older than me. When i started thinking of it I was just a kid, and
really was just trying to figure out a smart enough way to give away
our records. I just did it out of necessity. Marco is now unemployed
for the first time in years and I study languages at Genoa
university(I'm also half German, btw).
C: I'm half Mexican, half Sicilian.
