The music industry can be an ugly place, full of shattered dreams and fragile egos. Most bands playing for nothing right now dream of days when the venues will sell out and the albums fly off the shelves. They want to sign autographs and read glowing reviews in articles about themselves, finally achieving success for all of their hard work. They want to “make it.”
New Orleans act Die Rötzz doesn’t care about any of that. For a decade now, Paul Artigues (drums) Andy Goceljak (guitar) and Marvin Hirsch ( bass) have played raw, uncompromising punk rock completely on their own terms. They’ve released numerous 7” records on their own dime and toured countries and continents all without any real management or label interference: they just don’t want to do it any other way. Live, they deliver frenetic, intense shows that define the spirit of punk as it should be: one middle finger extended and pointing in all directions.
Just in time for their ten year anniversary, the band is set to release their first 12″, You’re Black & Blue (Volume 1), with the second installment to be released soon after. Expect brash, snotty tunes full of swagger and attitude from a band that has mastered the art of not giving a fuck.
After ten years of playing live as a band, your first full length album is coming out—what took so long ?
Paul Artigues: We did a bunch of 7” records and drugs and alcohol, pretty much.
Andy Goceljak: We’ve recorded with so many people, we’ve got a back-catalog of demos and stuff we intended to be on a full length; but we didn’t like the way they sounded. We’re kinda picky about what we put out, even though we’ve put out some stuff that could have been better. I mean, we recorded for free. Marvin Hirsch: This was the first record that we actually spent money on.
PA: That could be it too. We never decided to drop however much money it would cost to take a three day weekend, get somebody to master it and mix it, all that shit.
Has there been any label interest? I know that you guys have a good relationship with Goner Records.
AG: Fuck no! I mean, we could have if we had capitalized on the stuff earlier but everyone’s got their hands in a million pots. There’s a lot of things going on in people’s personal lives. I play in other bands, Paul and Marvin play in [Guitar] Lightnin’—
PA: I think, you know, I think… actually I don’t know what the fuck I think. [laughs]
So it sounds like it was just a matter of timing then?
PA: No one was going to spend $3,000 to put out a Die Rötzz record when we’re not touring all the time, when we’re not the most dedicated band. I mean, we play music for us, and people that will put out a record want you to go out and make all their money back. And we’re definitely not a guarantee on making your money back. That’s probably the reason why. Business- wise, Die Rötzz isn’t a solid investment. We’re putting them out; we know we’re gonna sell ‘em all. We don’t have a problem with it, but for somebody else it’s not worth it.
AG: They want people to raise the roof but we wanna raise the middle finger, you know?
PA: We’ve toured a lot: Canada, Europe, all over the United States; but at the same time we’re not just a touring band—
AG: It’s like a vacation for everyone. PA: Yeah, when we hit the road it’s like once we’re a little bit out of the city the car starts to float because we feel so much lighter.
MH: It’s probably because the car usually starts to fill up with weed smoke by that point.
It’s more than just making gas money to get to the next gig.
PA: Fuck gas money.
AG: Yeah, we think about all of the places we can go eat, stuff like that. We’d probably just be disappointed. We don’t worry about making new fans… People think we’re assholes. We’re not nice or sorry. We’re a mirror reflection of you. Hey, I get a lot of dirty looks around town, pal! [laughs]
There’s been a superstition over the years of something called the “New Orleans curse” where bands get a certain amount of success here and never really do anything with it. Do any of you believe in it? If yes, does it apply to Die Rötzz?
PA: I don’t believe in that. What the fuck does that mean, anyway?
AG: We curse people out! No man, I don’t believe in that. Look at a band like Eyehategod: they’ve been together for 25 years, been all over the place, put out a bunch of albums—
MH: Usually it takes a band ten or so years to get anywhere, anyway.
PA: And when you look at bands from the ‘50s or ‘60s from here, it was all New Orleans music. A bunch of bands that nobody knew who they were that didn’t go anywhere. But everyone was listening to their music. As far as Die Rötzz goes, we tour; we go out and play other places; but we always come back here. We do it to have fun, to feel good, which is why we’re still doing it and probably why we haven’t put out a record in ten years, because we are having fun.
MH: We have a lot of 7”s out there, too, like a record a year. So it averages out. AG: That’s like two songs a year! Really though, we’ve been together ten years, still have the original members and still get along. Think about it: most bands, they hate each other.
That European tour you guys did a while back was like a New Orleans family vacation, I’ve heard. In addition to Die Rötzz, you had King Louie Bankston, photographer Gary LoVerde—
PA: LoVerde had to wheel Marvin through a European airport or two. He more than did his duty.
MH: Yeah, LoVerde saved me.
PA: He was basically our photographer for the “Arctic Shattered Tour.”
MH: We properly named it—
PA: Before we even went; how did we know?
AG: Hey man, at least I ate my vitamins and we survived, like the Hulksters!
PA: I started drinking beer, so that’s what fortified me. I had quit drinking for years until we went to Europe.
AG: Yeah, they were playing that movie Wimbeldon and he fell off the wagon.
PA: It’s true! We got stuck in front of this Clockwork Orange-sized movie screen on the plane, like, “you’re not going anywhere.” So it was that movie Wimbeldon—and I wasn’t going to watch that shit—so I asked the stewardess if she could turn it off or change the movie because no one in our row wanted to watch that, you know? And she said no, so I told her I was a recovering alcoholic and that if she wasn’t going to change the movie to bring me a drink. And she just said, “What would you like to drink, sir?”
MH: They wound up cutting off King Louie and Paul. And they kept getting aggravated with me because I was all valium-ed out and kept wandering to the back of the plane.
There’s been a lot of press lately about a local “War on music.” Music clubs are being fined, restricted, or even shut down. Has Die Rötzz had any direct experience with this?
AG: You gotta grease the wheels in this town; it’s all about making money. That’s how it works. For a while I thought there was some kinda conspiracy…
PA: It’s money. Whether it’s one avenue or another, they’re gonna find another sheep to fleece. They started to go after sidewalk permits for restaurants and at the same time they went after music clubs. Somebody was thinking about how the city can make more money and permits and that sort of thing will do it.
AG: My beef is with the people that are moving here and complaining about live music. I remember even in 2006 me and Lefty Parker were jamming a Flipper song early in the evening and some guy who had just moved here came and started complaining.
PA: What did you tell him, to call the military police? [laughs]
AG: Okay, maybe it was 2007. But Die Rötzz has had a practice shut down. The cop came in, cursing us out because he had been beating on the door with his nightstick for like ten minutes.
Give me a little history on the collaboration between Die Rötzz and Dee [Dave] Slut (the singer for early local punk rock band the Sluts). The performances I’ve seen were intense.
AG: We were working at Surrey’s on Magazine Street and Dee’s brother used to come in. This was about 13 years ago. We started talking about New Orleans punk rock. I had just found a copy of the Manic Depressives record and I showed it to him, and he told me his brother used to be the singer for the Sluts.
PA: Turns out our boss [Greg Surrey] played drums in Dee’s band at the time, called O.L.D. So we went to the shows, hung out and met Dee. We started talking about our bands and he found out we played punk rock. It was kinda like we went to him but we were all friends before that.
AG: And this was before Die Rötzz even started. I was in the Pallbearers at the time.
So Die Rötzz started around the same time as jamming with Dee?
PA: When we first started the band in 2002, we would jam with Dee and another guitar player, Seth. So it was this same lineup of Die Rötzz (with another guitar) and Dee Slut singing, doing Sluts songs just for fun. Dee, he’s the same at practice as he is on stage, throwing himself around, going nuts. He told us that back when they were recording the Sluts album, someone told him he didn’t sound right in the booth because he wasn’t being crazy like when they performed live. So he does that whenever he sings those songs. Our first practice with him, we are halfway through the song “Headhunter” and Dee just keels over and face-plants. And we weren’t doing drugs or drinking or doing anything stupid. We finally get him conscious, but he doesn’t want to go to the hospital. So we figured we’d take him to Surrey’s, because his drummer [Greg] lived upstairs.
AG: We had to put him in a cart at the practice space to get him to the car.
PA: And the whole time, Seth is fucking with Dee, making fun of him, asking him is he all fucked up, or did he fall down? I’m trying to get him to shut up, yelling at everyone that the first ten minutes after a heart attack is the most important and we’re wheeling him out into the parking lot. It was fucked up! I can imagine what someone who saw us would think, probably that we were taking some old punk invalid out for his evening stroll. I mean, it’s funny now because he was okay; but yeah, that was our first experience with Dee. [laughs]
Have you guys recorded anything with Dee or has it just been a live- only sort of deal?
PA: We recorded a bunch of stuff with him, before we did the Ponderosa Stomp Festival here in town a few years back.
AG: People are still talking about that. PA: We just got up there and destroyed everything. They didn’t put us on until like four in the morning.
AG: It was kinda tragic. I got up there and kicked down a Marshall stack. MH: That was awesome. Andy got up there and just channeled [Sluts guitar player] Jimmy Slut.
AG: Afterwards, this journalist from Texas came up to me and was like, “That was great.” And I just went, “Really?”
PA: Around that time we recorded a bunch of songs. We did put out a 7” with “One Chord City” and “Nuke The Whales” for Psycho Wolf records. But there’s only 200 copies of it so good luck finding one.
It’s getting pretty close to Christmas, and for some reason I always think of that movie with Eddie Murphy and Dan Akroyd, Trading Places.
AG: I’ve seen that movie. We have a dollar bet on [Antigravity Editor] Dan Fox!
PA: Yep, we’ve got a dollar bet on Dan. Actually, Antigravity wanted us to do some kind of holiday thing for this, with costumes and shit. They told me I was gonna be Santa Claus and Marvin was going to be an elf. I told ‘em Marvin wasn’t going to be an elf; that’s not even funny. But then I was talking to Andy and he said he had talked to Marvin about it. So I asked Marvin, “Are you gonna be an elf ?” And Marvin just said “Word.”
MH: I gotta say, I was relieved when I found out Jordan Barlow was drawing the cover, though. [laughs]
Die Rötzz play the Saturn Bar on December 22nd with Roman Gabriel Todd’s The Beast Rising Out of the Sea, Patient Zero and Imagine “the” Band
