Steve Reynolds Program - Destroy
A defense and/or celebration of Wampus's choices of top 100 songs in the form of prose around 500 words
Seasoned Greetings!
Another weird year draws to a close. If you’re reading this, you’ve either survived or are a spooky readin’ ghost. Either way, it’s good to have this connection, buddy.
I don’t even remember my last year’s resolutions, but I’m sure I didn’t keep them. One I’m definitely going to make for next year is finish this top 100 songs series. Won’t that be a pip?
Now this installment is a very special one, because it’s NOT a write-up by me, but an interview with a cowriter of the song I picked! Chevy Heston’s Matt Martin was gracious enough to talk to me about the title track for the 1995 album Destroy.
I obsessed on this album for a quite a while, with its transgressive, almost stream-of-consciousness lyrics sung over simple, catchy yet abrasive guitar pop. Martin’s answers here confirmed some suspicions I had about influences, but I was surprised by others.
OK, before I write any more about this and sabotage the reason why I interviewed Matt Martin in the first place, here’s my talk with him.
Song #15
Destroy
by Chevy Heston
(Wampus questions in bold; Matt Martin’s responses in plaintext)
The difficulty in talking about just one song on Destroy, is because they’re all of one piece. Would you call this album “a rock opera”? Was that term discussed when making it?
No, it wasn’t. There was definitely a theme, right? Because almost all of the lyrics for the songs were written one stage. Most of the songs were written when I was taking a creative writing class at San Francisco Art Institute-- Zeph added some things in there too, but most of those -- I was graded for that stuff. That’s kind of why I would take creative writing classes, I’ve taken them 3 or 4 times in my life, so I could have an excuse to generate. I need deadlines. That’s what made the lyrics. That’s what made the album. The label said, “ok, we’re going to put you in the studio.” [to record demos] So they sent us to Maine for three days in March of 1995. The label really didn’t know what to do with us. They hated our demos.
Actually, our manager at the time, named Deb Klein in Boston [now manager for Melissa Etheridge and Cypress Hill], back in the day was managing Morphine, great band, so I had a really reputable manager. So she made the Destroy album happen. The label was not going to do anything, and Deb Klein said “you guys are crazy. This is good stuff! You need to put this stuff out.” So they took her word and put us in the studio for another five days where we made up the other songs on the album.
So you wrote these lyrics for creative writing. Were you inspired by certain literature or authors?
Yes, it’s purely William S. Burroughs by idiotic twenty-five or twenty-six year-olds. Zeph and I were both obsessed with Burroughs and we had been writing in that style for many years, getting high and just writing. That’s how we operated, stream-of-consciousness. We were a couple of beatnik wannabes in Plymouth, Mass. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing.
I can really pick up the Burroughs in the names and characters of people who pop up in Destroy. Like Little Candy Striper Laurie – that’s a real Burroughsian name.
Dr. Caster…
Dr. Caster for sure!
…Doctors, lawyers and teachers. All these pseudo-authority figures...
…who all really are abusing their authority…
Exactly. Corrupt to the core.
The title track “Destroy” itself. Is there anything unique about the song compared to the others on the album?
Yeah, all the lyrics were written by me when I was visiting my mom and just bored and watching MTV and getting annoyed with the shit that was on, the exploitation and the really misogynistic crap they were shelling out and pushing on people. And the advertisements too and…
The other night I went to Brooklyn Academy of Music to listen to Angela Davis give a talk about her autobiography, there’s a new edition. She was saying she wrote that when she was 28 and she just cringes at almost all of it. And I feel the same way about Chevy Heston. Half of it I think I would really love to do it again or change this word or lyric.
But, one thing is true still. I developed that idea of destroying things, right, in order to fix stuff. Maybe it’s a Futurist streak in me because they wanted to destroy all the institutions of art and culture though I’m not a very good fascist. In the work I do now, which is teaching at a graduate school, I talk a lot about “should this thing exist?” And I’m still into this idea of “let’s edit the world” or “let’s edit culture.” So I still like the theme of this song, but I mostly cringe at it.
It is what I thought was a pop song, I recognize that. I had the lyrics and we were in the studio and I came up with the riff . And I said “OK. I’ve got the lyrics for this riff.” There’s not many choruses in all of Chevy Heston, but this song in particular had a chorus and it even warns you that the chorus is going to happen. I pointed out it’s all a cliche. It ended up kind of the single of the album even though we had no singles. It became the name of the album. As an artist I’ve used “Destroy” as a title in two other projects, a film and video. I was kind of obsessed with destruction.
The opening line of “Destroy,” “Let’s panic / fascism is here,” is one I sing to myself a lot, especially, you know, in the last five or six years. Has it stuck in your head ever as well? Or do you think of it as a talisman?
Yeah. That would be a mantra, I think. It’s been consistent throughout our lives. The funny thing is I can remember what inspired that line. It was a commercial about some, like, skin lotion or something and it’s a woman walking on a beach and the voiceover says, “Don’t panic. Summer is here.” That commercial was running a lot when I was writing that. So I ended up using that.
There might even be some other references to commercials. I know that the stuff about the “all those fucking bodies going down the strip” was maybe about something on MTV, like a bikini contest or something that was really extremely awful and exploitative and just typical of what we get even still today. I don’t even know, does MTV even still exist?
Not as it did then, but it exists as something. We were talking about how you acknowledged the pop chorus in “Destroy,” you also sing “formula is a fucking tradition / so is this” which feels like the 90’s thing of stepping back and saying I’m guilty of what I’m yelling about.
Yeah, “while I do it, I’m going to criticize it.” It’s a self-referential point of view, you know. I do have to say if we’re talking about that song, and maybe a couple of others on this album, a lot of the way I would sing things, I would try to imitate someone else. On this song, with the basic music laid down by Zeph and me, I had the lyrics and I just channeled Elvis Costello on it. In my mind, that’s who I was trying to sing like. In my teenage years, I really liked Elvis Costello a lot.
In the song you say “go fuck up some TV studio / fucking Gillette.” Are you referencing Gillette, the company?
Yes. It’s because Gillette was and is still based in Boston. That was a reference to animal testing in particular. Sean, who was the guitar player at that time, we were roommates at the time in Boston and he had a poster up in the bathroom that was originally from PETA showing some animal torture and Gillette did a lot of testing. That was me giving it up to Sean and his influence on me and Zeph.
Did the label say anything about you mentioning the company name?
No.
That’s awesome.
I think they were maybe hoping as well I was hoping that there might be some sort of lawsuit. I think an assist would’ve been nice. I mean, come on! […] I tried a few gimmicks. And maybe the whole thing was a gimmick. Maybe all of the teenage stuff and “oh, lots of swear words, that’s not for me!” --the reason why we heard about NWA records was because it was so extreme in the time. I love it so much, the unapologetic positioning of speaking like we speak, with swear words. And it didn’t belong in the music of 1995 because a lot of it was garbage and so super tame and safe. Not challenging to anybody, and I wanted to do that—challenge.
other things
This week’s Song I’m Mad I Forgot To Put On The List is “He War” by Cat Power. “I never meant to be the needle that broke your back” is one of the all-time great opening lines.
If you’re in my neighborhood, come get some goodies at Suzy and me’s shop. As our imaginary tv ad says, “we got the deliciousness.”