I watched this video interview with Joey Keithley before I talked to him for today’s English lesson on Ebaby!, so I knew the guy could talk. Which is great. I always edit the interviews for the lessons, and the more someone has to say, the more there is to work with.

So what I’m getting at here is that there’s a lot of material that didn’t make into the lesson from our 15-minute conversation. In addition to explaining how his band name can be used in a conversation, Keithley talks about playing Poland in the ’80s, how D.O.A. got booked for a tour of China that starts this week, his philosphy on political music and a longer-term view of the singing-in-English phenomenon I discussed with Hutch Harris. Full text below, but first, D.O.A.’s tour dates, which are also available on their MySpace.

Jan. 9th Beijing, China at Mao Live House
Jan. 10th Wuhan, China at Vox Bar
Jan. 11th Shanghai, China at Yuyintang
Jan. 12th Nanjing, China at Castle Bar
Jan. 13th Beijing, China at D-22
Jan. 29th Oak Harbor, USA at Oak Harbor Tavern
Jan. 30th Seattle, USA at El Corazon
Jan. 31st Portland, USA at Satyricon
April 1st Valence, France at Mistral Place
April 2nd Barcelona Spain at Estraperio Club
April 3rd Zaragoza, Spain
April 4th Arrasate, Spain at 360 Arretoa
April 5th Limoges, France at CCM John Lennon
April 7th Torino, Italy at United Club
April 8th Milano, Italy at All Blacks Pub
April 9th La Spezia, Italy at La Spezia, Italy
April 10th Roma, Italy at Forte Prenestino
April 11th Firenze, Italy at CSA Ex Emerson
April 12th Cremona, Italy at CSA Dordoni
April 13th Gorizia, Italy at Pieffe Factory
April 15th Vienna, Austria at Arena
April 17th Kerkade, Netherlands at The Rock Temple
April 18th Diksmuide, Belgium at Muziekclub 4AD
April 19th Cologne, Germany at Sonic Ballroom

Jason: Have you guys ever been to China before?

Joey: No we have not. This will be a first.

Jason: And what do you expect the punk climate in China to be like?

Joey: I guess I’m going there to find out. I’m also going there to find out what China’s like in general. It’s fun to go play shows and entertain people and get them to sing and stuff like that, which is what D.O.A. always does. It will be an eyeopener culturally, politically and musically. You know what? I’m hoping to stumble across some great Chinese band and sign them up to my record label. Who knows, there might be something there that’s really great. Now, sure, there will be a million bands we won’t see, but who knows, there could be something that’s really unique, right? Something with a different twist. There’s got to be Chinese punk rock that people have heard but maybe there’s something over there that nobody has yet. So that’s one thing, and we’re pretty fascinated by it. D.O.A. has been about trying to go to places that we’ve never been before. New vistas, I suppose.

Jason: How did you end up getting booked in China?

Joey: It always involves somebody saying, “Hey, I think I can put on a couple of shows, or a mini tour or a whole tour.” We had to go find people in Europe when we started going there in ‘82 and ‘84, and we went some unusual places like Poland and Yugoslavia that, you know, punk bands hadn’t been to before. So it’s a similar kind of thing. You just have to find somebody to say, “OK, I can get it together, you’ll play here, here, here and here.” Because it’s too hard to do it from here. So finally a promoter approached us last September, and said, “How about D.O.A. coming over? There seems to be some interest.”

Jason: You guys have been touring internationally for a really long time and i wondered if you guys have seen the number of bands that sing in English increase over the years.

Joey: I would say so. Take an early German band like Die Toten Hosen all their early records were all in German. A lot of punk bands we played with there sang in German, but I find a lot of bands now will sing in English. But I think it’s kind of cool if they mix it up and appeal to different people that way because I guess English is the language of music around the world, that’s how it turned out. There’s this great record from when we played Japan in 2001. It’s called, We Still Keep on Running with D.O.A. and it’s all Japanese bands covering D.O.A. It’s pretty hard to find. You can find it on my label. It’s not exactly a well-known record. But they did some really great, incredible versions of a bunch of D.O.A. classic songs. And they sang in English too, and the inflection makes it pretty interesting, right?

Jason: I wanted to ask you about the band’s slogan, “Talk – Action = 0.” I wondered if singing a protest song is talk or action.

Joey: I guess in a sense you’re trying to inspire people to action. It’s both, I suppose. You can change the world to a far greater degree by convincing people that you have a good idea and getting that idea to spread around as opposed to taking a violent method, which I’m not backing. At the same time, sometimes people really get backed into a corner, right? It does take sometimes protest to really change things. You just have to look at Eastern Europe for example with the fall of the Warsaw Pact. Or Suharto in Indonesia or Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia is another example. It’s kind of the people power sort of thing, right? That’s why I think it’s interesting that D.O.A. is going [to China] because we have something of a reputation, but we’ll see what happens, right? I’m pretty excited about it.

Jason: You’ve been involved with a lot of different causes doing benefits and things. What are some that are on your mind right now?

Joey: The usual things we’ve done the last few years are ecological or environmental-type causes. We’ve been involved in a bunch of concerts and rallies opposed to the Iraq war. There’s a big one we did a couple of years ago, we were the warm-up act for Noam Chomsky. That was pretty interesting, about 20,000 people on the beach in Vancouver. And “free trade” versus what I like to call “fair trade”.

Jason: You guys have been around for so long that there are a lot of bands that have been influenced by you. Have you also been influenced by some newer bands? Or are you still drawing on some of the same influences from 30 years ago.

Joey: No, you know, I really write songs and get my view of the world from talking to people, watching TV, reading newspapers or websites. I don’t think D.O.A. is really influenced by any younger bands, some of them certainly we admire. They’re doing good work, like Anti-Flag. Musically and politically, I was influenced by people years and years ago. I’m talking like Woody Guthrie and Jimi Hendrix and stuff I heard in my formative youth. That kind of spirit stuck with me even though the stuff we do doesn’t sound anything like that.

Jason: We always have people define a slang term so our members can learn a new term and I figured an obvious choice is the name of your band.

Joe: We took the idea from an old movie starring Edmund O’Brien. It was Dead on Arrival. It’s like a toe-tag. So when an ambulance picks up a body and they’re not quite dead when they arrive at the hospital, they stick a tag, I think on their right toe and it says, “D.O.A.” on it, because they arrived dead. So the most famous D.O.A. is John F Kennedy. Dead on Arrival. You could make up all sorts of things for that. There was a pretty funny thing with this English band called Dead or Alive for a while. We’ve kind of outlasted them, I would say. This older lady was booking us into a hotel one time and she’s really straight and she goes, “What’s D.O.A. stand for?” And our base player in a rare moment of brilliance goes, “Disciples of the Apostles.” She went, “Oh, you sound like really nice young fellows.” She thought we were a religious group or something like that.

Jason: What are some ways that “D.O.A.” might come up in conversation outside of a morgue?

Joe: It’s a common thing in the band practice. “If you don’t get this part right, you’re going to be D.O.A.” We don’t threaten each other quite that much. But it’s something like that, like, “You’re D.O.A.” It’s gonna be curtains in some way or another.

Photo by Bev Davies.

Below is the full text from the interview I did with Hutch Harris from the Thermals for Monday’s English lesson. It was the second time I’ve interviewed a band for an English lesson, and this time, there wasn’t a specific topic for vocab (like drinking last time). So I did my best to reach the perspective on American culture and vocab terms that Hutch could offer and I think it went pretty well.

But first, the Thermals’ tour dates.

12.04.08 Chop Suey Seattle, WA
12.05.08 Doug Fir Portland, OR 21
12.06.08 Doug Fir Portland, OR All Ages, early show
12.12.08 Primavera Club, Barcelona, ES
12.13.08 Primavera Club, Madrid, ES
12.14.08 KCLSU, London, UK
12.17.08 Ekko, Utrecht, NL
12.18.08 Vera, Gronigen, NL

Jason: Since your last album [The Body, the Blood, the Machine] was, in some ways, a comment on American politics and society, I just wanted to ask you about how you feel about Obama’s victory and if it’s affected your world view.

Hutch: Dude, I’m stoked. I’m so stoked. I was scared until the last minute, really. I didn’t even have a drink. I wasn’t going to get drunk at some Obama party and have it turned around and have McCain steal it or something. As soon as he took Ohio though, it really seemed like was gonna happen.

So yeah, it totally changes my world view because choosing Obama wasn’t choosing the lesser of two evils. It wasn’t like if we would have gotten John Kerry. And it would be quite different if we had McCain and Palin going in there right now. Everyone knows that. Not just did we get a great president, we also dodged a bullet with those other two. And the whole world was rooting for Obama. So obviously the world is going to be very different and it looks to be positive.

Jason: How do you think it affects the Christian/fascist state that you were imagining on your last album?

Hutch: The most disgusting thing right now are people who think that Obama is the antichrist. I mean this is serious. I hate even talking about it because it’s almost like we shouldn’t give these people any credibility at all. I don’t know. What’s wrong with people? Obama is a good Christian. People, I think are confused as to what the president actually does and what he has the power to do. Yeah, I don’t know what to say about the nuts. I try to think about that less. I turned myself off on thinking about religion and being wrapped up in it after that last record. But obviously you can’t. I just try not to obsess about it and let it get me down like it used to.

Jason: Totally. For a lot of our members, I’m guessing that “punk” and “garage rock” are going to be relatively new terms. So your first couple of albums were described as low-fi and more recently there’s been a lot of talk of the Thermals pop sensibilities and I wondered how your sound has evolved and what we can expect on the next record.

Hutch: It’s just what you said. It’s pop sensibilities for sure. I think as pop songs, these songs are written the best of all our songs. I think the structures are really solid. They’re really catchy. I’m really proud of the lyrics because again I feel like the lyrics have some gravity to them, but at the same time, they work really well on the surface, if you’re just thinking about it as a pop song or something you can sing along too. There is another layer without being too pretentious about it.

Jason: Do you think “lo-fi” was a term that applied to you at a point in time?

Hutch: We called it “no-fi” for the first record because the first record, you know, was just on cassette. “Lo-fi” would have been an over statement for that record. But we’ve been going through a natural progression since then where we don’t take huge leaps in fidelity, but we try to make each record sound better than the last one. For us to just put out records on a four-track cassette would just be ridiculous.

Jason: So you do a lot of touring internationally, and I wonder, what’s your favorite country to play in?

Hutch: I kind of think it’s got to be Germany. Even before we were getting successful here and in the UK and other countries, Germany and the Netherlands jumped on it right away and we had some of the most exciting shows in Germany. If we’re talking about all countries, it has to be the US. The best shows of our lives have been mostly in the US, either in Portland or Seattle or New York. But we have fun shows everywhere. It’s hard to pick one. We love touring Europe. Touring Europe is a lot more fun than touring the US. You’re treated much better. Hospitality…no matter what your level, you’re just cared for a lot more. And a lot of times it’s easier because the countries are so much smaller, the drives are a lot shorter. I mean in the west [of the US], driving like 9 hours a day with a show every day? That’s crazy.  We just did only UK shows for two weeks. It was beautiful, it was like two hour drives every day. But touring the UK is much more like touring the US. I’m talking about mainland Europe when I’m talking about them feeding you and putting you up, etc.

Jason: Have you picked up any German from your shows there?

Hutch: I know a little bit. I know some short words. It’s a really intense language. I was actually to a German band one time…Because most German bands we play with, they’re all singing in English. And of course they speak English. Their English is better than ours. It’s more grammatically correct. They say “months” instead of “munts.” They say “second” instead of “sekind.” But anyway, I was talking a German man and he was saying that the English language, the thing is you have so many more words to choose from than in German that you can be way more expressive.

Jason: And then the last thing I wanted to ask you, since I think it will be a new word for a lot of our members, is what are thermals and how did you pick that as your band name?

Hutch: The real definition of a thermal is hot air. Like if you’re hang gliding…or birds, will ride a thermal. That’s not why we picked it. But it’s associated with heat, so you say thermal underwear or long Johns. Which to me, that style, people wearing their thermals to rock shows, that’s a really Northwest thing. And we were totally into flannel when Nirvana was big. You’d have black cut off shorts and wear your thermals underneath with boots or whatever. That wasn’t me. I’m thinking more of girls, actually, but it was something I always thought was really cute. So we’re named after underwear. But it works to say that it’s just a lot of hot air.