Ten years since the demise of Dripping Goss and Brian is back with his first solo record, a harrowing and yet fully realized, and in the end, hopeful record called The Firing Line. Recorded at Applehead Studios in Woodstock, New York with the help of Mike Birnbaum and Chris Bittner (Codeseven, Coheed and Cambria, John Mayer) The Firing Line sees Goss’s singer/songwriter side truly flourish into waters hinted at in the subtler moments of Dripping Goss’s bombast. In the wake of a painful divorce Brian buckled down with friends and family (including Simone Felice of The Duke And The King, ex-Felice Brothers) to make what is one of the finest records in recent memory. The Firing Line is a flowing, living, breathing storyboard illustrating the human process of dealing with loss and embracing every moment of life. Characters and lyrics jump from the album and paint vivid pictures that evoke everything from Nick Drake to the Rolling Stones, gluing you to the record with an emotional investment in how it all will turn out.

Brian has re-emerged with confidence, showing off his mellow side, and the results are a cinematic and yet very lively poignant series of songs ranging from breathy, resigned piano balladry to country-tinged forays into marijuana country. The Firing Line allows for everything to coexist, which in the end, is the lesson worth striving for.

MORGAN Y. EVANS: You listen to someone like Leonard Cohen or Elliot Smith and there is a sad comfort to their music. Not that your entire new record is sad, but there are some truly mournful songs. There’s a wide variety but it flows really well. All of your albums in different bands have been personal in that you’re really good at storytelling. A song like Dripping Goss’s “Gift Of Demise” was more world issues, but you’re very good at poetic imagery where the song unfolds and is colorful but doesn’t browbeat. This solo record has some newer directions. Some of it reminds me of a direction you were hinting at with “Save Your Prayers” by Dripping Goss, from that band’s finale, the Blue Collar Black Future release.

BRIAN GOSS: We were getting there. At that period of time, ten years ago already, at that point we would do anything if we felt it was really good. Even if it wasn’t hardcore or punk rock, if it really moved us, we didn’t care. Unfortunately we didn’t tour much after that and maybe played “Save Your Prayers” once or twice live.

MYE: That song in particular, I was thinking about it when I heard this record and it is such a snapshot of New York City and daily life, that “looking out a window” type feeling. Then on The Firing Line you have stuff like “Hey Marianne” with an almost ‘60s pop/Rolling Stones wistful vibe.

BG: That’s funny you caught that. We were playing this café getting this material together once a week in the West Village and that song came about. It really is that kind of picture of sixties West Village energy, kind of walking around and the characters on the street. It has that vibe for me as well.

MYE: There was a lot of variety on all of your records, like Dripping Goss’s Blowtorch Consequence. It’s one of the things that attracted me to your music years ago. Dripping Goss had a very psychedelic side but it could also be dark and was very expressive, like an intellectual heavy band. That band’s debut Flake had crazy guitar solos but was really trippy. Then getting on to The Firing Line, nowadays with your solo career, it’s easy for me to see the threads to what you are doing now. Someone might say, “Oh, he used to play noise rock,” but if you see the whole arc of your career, you grew up between Palenville, New York and NYC. Up in the mountains, a lot of that ‘60’s and ‘70s energy survives. There’s also some mountain madness and you took the best of folk and rock and mixed it with the Lower East Side parts of your life.

BG: I always thought of Dripping Goss as an acid rock band, always. That was the idea. Later they called it “stoner rock” but we were more acid.

MYE: You had some weed songs, like “Here”.

BG: [laughing] A little bit, but mixing psychedelic rock with anger. I’m not angry anymore.

MYE: It’s all time and place. And your new solo record sounds honest and not forced.

BG: To be fair to it, a lot of the stuff on The Firing Line is old. After we broke up Dripping Goss in 1999, we never made it into the next century, which I don’t mind…but, after that I got a place in New York and got married. I got a job and could actually buy guitars I wanted. We had a little apartment, me and my wife, at the time. We had a second bedroom and I didn’t have a band so I didn’t have to be at rehearsal or call anybody. A few songs on The Firing Line are from that period in 2001-2002 where I just had an acoustic guitar. I’ll throw down one verse and a chorus and move on. I write a lot and throw a lot of stuff away. Over time, “Time To Fold”, “Gig”…those were songs that stuck in my head for the next seven years. I’d be walking down the street and they’d hit me. I’d think, “Damn! If they can do that then they’ll be good songs.”

MYE: I know you’ve said it’s a divorce record, not every song, but, did you have the music before the lyrics?

BG: Yeah. The music always comes first. Right after my divorce, I was still going through it and I ran into producer Mike Birnbaum at a show in New York. I told him what was going on. It was my daughter’s show and he was there with his daughter. I told him I had some songs that I wanted to get done and he said to drop into his studio, Applehead, anytime.

MYE: Of course, you knew Mike from the Woodstock, New York area and music scene, which is close to Palenville.

BG: Yeah. We’d done Fuzz Deluxe stuff there, my project after Dripping Goss with Simone Felice. That was a fun time. I had made records with other bands like that after Dripping Goss but never with as much effort as the principal songwriter. I had “Time To Fold” and one or two verses and the chorus of “Tina”. I came upstate and my brother Robb was there at my mom’s house. I was going through a really rough time. I’d never really collaborated with him since we were really young in The Warmjets. That was in ’86. The Warmjets started in Palenville and then moved to New York. We did that first 45. So yeah, I hadn’t done anything with him in years and he wrote the middle verse of “Tina” and the last verse of “Time To Fold” with me. We sat at my mother’s piano and I told him what I was trying to say. I gave my first two verses to him and he helped me finish those two songs. After I finally had some new material, I thought it was great and I was determined. It hit me that of course, I needed to make a record again. The first sessions at Applehead were “Time To Fold”, “Tina” and “The Firing Line”. “The Firing Line” was a song that I wrote with Simone Felice when we were doing Fuzz Deluxe in the early ‘00s. Simone had all the lyrics and was beginning to figure out some chords. I wrote the music and his lyrics to that are brilliant.

MYE: yeah.

BG: Just that line, “Everything falls in place on the firing line”, the images it paints are brilliant and wide. There was a time in point in the past where I had to be very constrictive and do everything, but this time I wanted everyone with it and taking the best things that were out there. We did those first three in the summer of 2008 and then I went back into court for seven months with the whole divorce thing draining me financially and mentally. When it was over in April and started to ease up, I had full freedom and everything was done. We diligently went in the studio every weekend for the summer of 2009.

MYE: And Applehead is a nice property with a barn and a calm retreat just outside of Woodstock.

BG. Yeah, the lamas and horses… The rest unfolded there and I pulled some more songs out. My drummer Tom (drums) is back in the mix…

MYE: Also from The Warmjets and the early days of Dripping Goss.

BG: Yeah…and we pulled it off.

MYE: Having people involved that you’ve worked with before like Paul Schiavo, who at one time played with Dripping Goss, or your brother Tommy, it must have felt good to have certain aspects of familiarity there and a rapport with people. Also, what was it like working with Mike Birnbaum and Chris Bittner up there?

BG: Over the years I’ve been tinkering with piano and I reconnected with an old friend of mine, Jason Darling. We were in rival metal bands in high school doing Metallica songs at parties and stuff like that. We reconnected in New York twenty years later. I was living on my own again, being divorced. He was going through a brutal thing where he was about to be married…

MYE: That’s always brutal. [laughing]

BG: [chuckling] I don’t recommend it. But, I won’t get into detail about what his dilemma was but that wedding was cancelled before it could happen. He moved in with me for a while and is a brilliant guitar player. I had him come in the studio to play all the guitar parts while I played piano. It was freeing for me. Always being a guitar player, I’d always think in guitar parts, and all the time I was in the studio I was able to just focus on piano and my singing and step away. I gave people complete freedom with their solos and whatever they were feeling. He did a lot of slide work on there. I was happy with the more constrictive results when I was younger, but this was great. Adam Whidoff, he can play anything and I love him and I told him I was in town and he could drop in anytime, so he came in and laid down the B3 organ stuff. Jane Scarpantoni, I really wanted her on this and she came in and stacked the string stuff on there. We were all looking around and in the beginning there was no management and no label. The studio was free. It was just being done like that and created this atmosphere that was euphoric. In the end, I used to be a part of mixing down all the Dripping Goss stuff, but I let Mike Birnbaum mix THE FIRING LINE down any way he wanted. I swear. There’s a lot of things I would have done differently. No doubt. Stuff might have been on the left or the right or the center or louder in a part than I would’ve done, but it was all about giving everyone that freedom. When you do that, it’s a monster!

MYE: If you have the right people around you, that ego clash disappears and you get better results.

BG: It’s like going to get a tattoo. You like your friend’s sketch so you bring it to the tattoo artist and say you want it. But if you go to the tattoo artist and say, “Gimme the best fuckin’ thing you can do,” it’s gonna be brilliant! If you go to Picasso and say to make a Monet, y’know what I mean? [laughing] I really believe that and that really worked. I am thrilled with how everything turned out.

MYE: Not that this sounds like them so much, but I was thinking about how Alex Chilton’s band Big Star had power pop and then also dark stuff like “Big Black Car” or string arrangements that were tastefully done and complimented the songs rather than making them too melodramatic. Your record also has an effective use of drama. Warmjets and even Dripping Goss came up at a time where “alternative” was growing. Jane’s Addiction, who The Warmjets toured with, were so expansive. There are a lot of bands out today that are bringing some elements of that back, more in indie rock than punk and some other scenes, unfortunately. But you’ve always been yourself and that allows new musical ground to be broken. You must have faced a daunting task with The Firing Line wanting it to come off as powerful as the meaning behind the songs and you had a good team of people. Could you talk about some of your goals ahead of time or what influences you wanted to let out.

BG: I always thought of a double album where one side was a mellow side recorded up here and one was a really loud, industrial noise rock side, very New York. Everything is a mix of those for me, to some degree. I always kept a studio at home and even during The Warmjets, I always had mellow material. People say they write a lot but I always had hundreds of songs, literally. In my head it was a vision of what I wanted Dripping Goss to be and it had to be that. There were a lot of dynamics but I didn’t want to stray from my vision. Only on the last record Blue Collar Black Future did I start to stray from that and it was good. Stuff like “Darkhorse Connection” and “Save Your Prayers”. And guitarist Dan Souza had a big influence on a song like “Mercenary Woman”, a lot of those riffs. He had a lot of influence on that record as opposed to the early days where I wrote everything. But, it was more about wanting to do an acoustic record, more of a piano record. I really learned how to play live piano in the last five years and it feels good. I’m still not as confident at it as I am as a guitar player, but I wanted to be very current and in the mood of where I am at, but at the same time make a record that I possibly…well, the heavy nature of the content I couldn’t have done like this before the divorce, but in the last twenty years, I never made an acoustic record. There was an abundance of material. Not that I regret things, but there’s a lot of material I had that I listen back and look back to from early ‘90s demos, and it sticks out. If I’d dropped it then, it would have gotten the point across then as well. Simone jokes around and says this was the record that took me ten years to make.

MYE: The pathos.

BG: Yeah. I used to hide lyrics in analogies and metaphors, but in “Trainwreck In Your Eyes” it was , “Tell my son I said hello”. The older I got it was easy to be straight up.

MYE: It’s a good balance, ‘cause some stuff is still poetic, but it’s not as obtuse as something from your past like “Cloud Stained Mattress”.

BG: [laughing] Right. Neil Young or some artists could just say it straight up back then, but also, too…growing up, I’m a bit older than you…But, growing up, playing that heavy shit, they wouldn’t let us play Woodstock’s best venues like The Joyous Lake and Tinker Street.

MYE: Yeah, all our bands had to gatecrash. [laughing]

BG: They were into The Band and Rick Danko and everyone was sucking his dick. I didn’t like Bob Dylan. I hated that shit!

MYE: It wasn’t so much about the artists as that there was a stigma in our punk and stoner rock scenes up here that it was like why I couldn’t stand the Grateful Dead. I hated all the fans around town who had double standards when it came to letting a new generation express themselves. Now I can appreciate the music apart from that!

BG: Right. I hated all that shit! Bob Dylan and The Band influenced Dripping Goss because…I didn’t like it! [laughing] As you get older you realize these guys were monsters. MONSTERS!

MYE: [laughing]

BG: Even when they were young. Now I can listen to the Dead.

MYE: I got into it when I heard stories about The Band back in the day being as badly behaved around Woodstock as all of us used to be. [laughing] They were bad asses.

BG: Right. On The Firing Line it’s really drawing on influences I despised as a kid, knowing now how good it was and having absorbed it, but back in the day it fueled the hardcore and acid rock in other ways as well, just to…not be it.

MYE: There’s that well documented pre-Altamont shit and then there’s post-Charlie Manson, but Goss and The Warmjets and your stuff explores psychedelic culture but there’s also some darkness to it. Not every acid trip is gonna leave you in sunshine land. But you make it through the dark tunnel and there’s still a light at the end. That journey is like punk rock, in many ways, and it is a better lesson than denial or the hippies who were less activists and more about being fucking lost in drugs all the time.

BG: Yeah. I wasn’t sure of the title and after waiting a whole nine months before we came back in from the first sessions, “Holiday” was a new song.

MYE: Which is very upbeat.

BG: I’ve never written a song like that in my life. It has poppy aspects and some Clash, but then in the middle it blows up with a psychedelic onslaught into a higher caliber than I think I ever captured with Dripping Goss.

MYE: But it’s not all happy, there’s still the speed of life…

BG: Yeah, the chic is leaving.

MYE: Jet setting. [laughing]

BG: Yeah. Jet setting and, “…The street lights flashing don’t go and the stop sings begging to stay.” A lot of this record, I was married fourteen years. I met her when I was twenty three. I was in New York and when it was all over, I had my wits and still have some youth in me. It’s an abundance of meeting new girls and running through them. They come and go, but it’s okay. They’re all over that record.

MYE: Yeah, The Firing Line as a record has a sense of mourning things that were very sacred to you but also the sense of life in motion and processing.

BG: That it moves on. That’s why in the end when I decided to put “The Firing Line” last, it has that lyric “…And I love all my ghosts.”

MYE: I LOVE that line. That killed me.

BG: It’s referring to “the devil on the telephone” and “the mystery man” and “the girl that came and went”. All of these characters. It all falls in place on the firing line. As hard as all of it was to go through, it’s okay. It is what it is. Everything is all right now. At the time, when I was going through it, I had no vision life would be good again.

MYE: You hit the nail on the head. Hearing this record makes you think about survival. Those moments in life where you have to accept it, because it is out of your control. Also, something like divorces or friendship fights with people you really care about that you can’t seem to heal, break ups. “Time To Fold” struck me initially, as “when is it time to fold”? People always say I am really stubborn, but it is out of love. How do you fold without feeling like you are giving up or selling out what you cared about? I feel like The Firing Line is very graceful about that process.

BG: Thanks. Yeah, that line in general, “Sail on, but never sail away. You’ve dealt your cards. It’s time to fold now.” That really out of all the lines on this, it’s that moment where you know it’s best and has to be done for the good of all, but the repercussions to everyone, and the children and the couple itself and all those years…the destruction of it all, it really is that final moment where you can’t do it anymore.

MYE: It’s hard to let go but can be a stronger way of loving the person than letting it all sink. Letting go is one of the hardest things to do.

BG: Sure. It’s the last thing. I’m not comparing it to death…

MYE: A lot of people compare marriage to death.

BG: [chuckling] It’s not something you tend to dwell on or prepare yourself for when you are married and living and the whole picture. It’s the last thing you expect. As you said, we all go through hard times, but divorce makes your bones hurt. You are giving up. It’s hard but it all falls in place. It had to happen and now everything is fine. We’re all good with each other and are all good friends. I have the children half the time and it’s okay. It’s all okay. I didn’t know it was gonna be like that, but it is, thankfully.

MYE: I had a lyric when I was in the band Pontius Pilate Sales Pitch with our mutual friend Nate Kelley, well…things are generally better now, but there were still lots of unresolved tensions with him and the Coheed And Cambria guys from when he was their first drummer years ago. We wrote a song called “Moving Days” about trying to reconcile that which said “Can we shine like even bottled ships are still sailing fine”.

BG: That’s a great line.

MYE: Y’know, just thinking about how communication is so vital to having a better outcome with people who had been important in your life, when things get estranged. Despite any drama there was, it’s that attempt for a better outcome. I always hope for that.

BG: I agree. And it’s like fat ’77 Elvis. No one wants to remember that, but you focus on the better stuff.

MYE: I love fat Elvis! I voted for the fat stamp when they had the vote years ago!

BG: [laughing]

MYE: “Mary’s Leather Clown” has an almost carnival, Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s vibe.

BG: That song, as far as scattered imagery, I’m in New York going through this thing, but I wasn’t Upstate much. After the divorce, I started to come up more, back to the woods. “Bambu Or Ez Wider”, y’know , it has lyrics like ,” me and Mike flying kites in the moonlight, again.” Me and (fellow Warmjet and subsequent singer of a great band Spin Cycle Lava) Mike Billera running around in the woods when we were kids and having a kite 1,000 feet up in the sky. All the string went out at four in the morning. It was awesome. “Mary’s Leather Clown” has the darkness of childhood, or dipping back into how you get through it.

MYE: “Gig” is a great centerpiece because you go from all these stories about people to a story about your grandmother.

BG: Another woman in my life. And in “Mary’s Leather Clown” it says, “You liked the coffee but you didn’t like the cocaine, at the kitchen table, three days with some friends” and then the last line says ,”You liked the colors but you didn’t like the explosions in the summer I said we were through”. I had written that line years ago and then a lot of shit had gone down on the 4th of July when we were away with the kids. It’s funny how these things you write all of a sudden make sense but are pertinent to the word for what goes on currently.

MYE: Grant Morrison had a character King Mob in The Invisibles comic that he wrote having an injury and then Grant got a very similar thing!

BG: It happened numerous times between all of these things from the past you’re trying to make sense of. That song was a blast. Tommy Goss played timpani and xylophone, he borrowed from the local high school. Each verse we tried to make it more schizoid, like if the Beach Boys really did let Manson in. [laughing]

MYE: Are you working with Simone Felice’s post Felice Brothers band The Duke And The King any more?

BG: No. I did the first leg. Jason Darling and myself were in the first phase and went through Europe and then Spain. We had a seven piece band but after that Simone stripped it down to a much more palatable and easy to travel with thing. Simone’s one of my best friends and we’re playing solo acoustic in Brooklyn together soon.

MYE: It’s great to see you both getting more recognition. I loved his book GOODBYE, AMELIA, even more than his music.

BG: He has a new book coming out that’s gonna really floor people.

MYE: Can we talk about your development as a musician more for some people? Any stories you wanna share from The Warmjets to being in Warzone for a number of years.
Even Dripping Goss played shows with Murphy’s Law and Chuck Valle was a member of both. You were able to fit into that scene but also had elements that could open minds, something that Bad Brains first pioneered, the odd band out.

BG: Sure. Todd Youth was a close friend of mine around ’87 and I’d met him early on. He had departed with Chuck and did some other material and Todd and I were the same age. We used to love hanging out playing guitar. He loved playing in those type of bands but was more of a player as well.

MYE: I love his shit with Danzig and now he’s working with Michael Monroe.

BG: Sure. He liked psychedelic rock. It was about that scene at the time, though. How I knew Jimmy G. and Raybeez and the Warzone guys, I knew them years before I was in Warzone. There was a small scene that was always at shows and at the bar all the time. Dripping Goss was on the same label, Profile, for a while, as some of them. Harley and John and all those guys, they were street kids. I grew up in the woods! It’s very different, but I always loved hardcore for the unity. Kids would come to those shows and stay for every band.

MYE: Kids are so privileged now that they don’t think of the larger connotations.

BG: People come and go. It goes back to The Sex Pistols hated Pink Floyd. I liked both!

MYE: Floyd’s Sexy Pink Pistol!

BG: [laughing] I loved Sonic Youth more than hardcore, for sure. Dripping Goss, I was trying to combine those two. I loved the brutality of hardcore but couldn’t stand the lyrics of some of it. I liked more abstract lyrics. I always liked the noise, too. Dripping Goss was trying to combine straight up acid rock with brutal hardcore and tangible noise. My belief was once you know how to play an instrument, you are no longer hardcore. Once you’re good at it, the hardcore is gone. Hardcore is about that simplicity and innocence. Once it mixed with anything else, like the metal came in in ’88 and breakdowns, it was over for me. It was fast and sloppy and that was great for me. I don’t want to come off wrong with that…

MYE: I’m sure a lot of people will understand the context you mean. The Warmjets threw you into New York City first.

BG: I was a metalhead in my teens. Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Judas Priest. That was it.

MYE: You hear that in the killer solos on Flake, the Dripping Goss debut.

BG: Yeah, and then it was abandoned even quickly by the time we did The Shifter. But with The Warmjets, my brothers Robb and Tom moved down to the L.E.S. in ’83 and this whole wealth of music like Pussy Galore, Live Skull and stuff was shown to me later on. My brothers’re ten years older then me, and I was going down there in 9th and 10th grade and playing The Pyramid Club and CBGB’s! And Raybeez, he’s the doorman at The Pyramid Club. There are transvestites but hardcore security…and drugs! It threw me for a loop. The Warmjets, we loved that early noise mix tape stuff. Once I heard The Butthole Surfers, my whole record collection was gone. Warmjets were improv at first and there was no cohesion. We’d start the set with one song and were then trying to sound like machines for a half hour and then we’d play the second single. Robb wasn’t a skilled player. We were in New York and had that first single on Bob Mould’s SOL records, and we were playing a lot.

MYE: How’d that come about?

BG: Steve Fallon owned Maxwells in Hoboken. My brother Tom worked at The Ritz on 11th street in the mid ‘80s and was a roady for The Ramones. He was also a roady for The Bongos, with Richard Barone and Jim Maestro, who still owns a guitar store in Hoboken. They were the first to tell Steve he should have bands at Maxwells. Now everyone knows Maxwells. Richard and Steve loved my brother Tom and when he came to them with his own band saying we had recorded five songs, Fallon said he was starting a label with Bob Mould and they wanted to put us out as a statement of what the label was gonna do. CD’s were available in ’87 but not a big format. Everyone didn’t have a record. It was very different from today where anyone could have a record. To be a band and have a 45 felt amazing. It always made me believe art was attainable and the proliferation of art was important regardless of success. To document the times of your life. It’s never left me, since that first release. The Warmjets went on as a noise band for awhile and we were living with this guy Phil Schuster who worked for Radioactive records. He signed that band Live. We were still young. What happened was I started really writing more at that point and my brother Robb was more avant garde. He wrote a lot of the lyrics but we needed a bass player. Phil would kind of jump in and play some of the new stuff we were writing. It eventually got to the point where we had to bring in Phil full time and Robb kind of drifted off then.

MYE: He was drifting Goss.(note: Just kidding, Robb!)

BG: Actually, that was gonna be the original name of that band! But then it went on and Phil got us shows with Jane’s Addiction. We did a shitload of shows with them as they were blowing up. The first leg of Nothing’s Shocking. They were still playing 500-1,000 seaters the first leg of that tour and the house was packed every night. We knew it was gonna explode and they did. To see that, in retrospect we were all very young. Our singer Mike Billera, my best friend who I went to kindergarten with and starting doing demos with at age ten…he was getting disillusioned and wanted to come back Upstate more. He would improvise lyrics in Warmjets sometimes for forty five minutes and still can.

MYE: And was on the cover of the Dripping Goss record Blowtorch Consequence breathing fire.

BG: We didn’t realize what we had with The Warmjets. Tom got an offer to play with Jack Bruce and it was great for him and his career. It established him as a professional drummer and we were excited. We disbanded. “Bliss” off the first Dripping Goss record Flake was the last Warmjets song.

MYE: Jesus. That song ,like…got me through six or seven years of my life!

BG: That was where we were at by the end! Dripping Goss came a few years later and “Bliss” was the starting point, but if we knew what we knew when we were starting Dripping Goss when we were running around with Jane’s Addiction, it would’ve been ridiculous. It was before…

MYE: Nirvana.

BG: All that shit.

MYE: And by Dripping Goss you were singing.

BG: Yeah, and we did Flake and The Shifter. ’92 we were getting courted by labels and worked on half of The Shifter with Chris Shaw who worked with Butthole Surfers and Bob Dylan after that. The other half of The Shifter was done by Doug McKean, who did that huge Green Day record. After Blowtorch Consequence Tommy soon left the band and then for a brief time we had Frank Ferrer for six months. Now he’s in Guns‘N’Roses. Frank’s great. We still keep in touch. He has this band The Compulsions I’ve been trying to check out.

MYE: The Compulsions totally kill. I love that band, and Frank rules.

BG: As we were doing Gift Of Demise Frank went off to do other stuff and we got Tobias Ralph on drums, who did Gift Of Demise and the last record, Blue Collar Black Future with us. We did that last album with Genya Ravan for CBGB’s Records. The first Warmjets show was on Genya’s lawn! When I was a kid, if I can say this, I was doing blow in her living room when I was about seventeen. All her friends were up and we were gonna go do this noise set for them and I said, “What if they don’t like it?” and, I’ll never forget, she was this hardcore chic from Rivington Street and she looked at me and said, ”Fuck ‘em, Brian. Fuck ‘em.” I always loved her for that. Years later when we got the deal with CBGB’s, she was back in touch with (CBGB’s owner) Hilly Kristal at the time and did the record with us. I knew Blue Collar was gonna be the last Goss record. It was Genya Ravan, Hilly Kristal… Mick Rock shot the cover. I wanted it to be as uber all that NYC as I could. I have a great Hilly story. I went into CBGB’s after a show one day and I come in and Hilly is sitting there with a walkman and a DAT Machine with headphones. I’d talked to him a few times about bluegrass fingerpickin’ and guitar and had played there since I was sixteen, or whatever. But he said to sit down and I did and he put the headphones on me and it was a show from Dripping Goss from when we FIRST started! The tapes were tapes he’d taken of us from the board, and he looked at me and asked how I’d like to do a record with his label.

MYE: Wow! That’s awesome. But yeah, you’ve always had a great sense of melody, even when you were very angry there were melodic sides. Now, as time has gone on, you’ve become even more confident. Did Mike and Chris at Applehead push you for this new record? They helped me a lot when I recorded with them in my old band Divest.

BG: What happened at that time after Dripping Goss and up until this record, I realized I couldn’t sing “Happy Birthday” in fucking key. It infuriated me. I thought I could sing. I’d made a bunch of records and sung on stage, but I wasn’t living it. As you get older, you realize you have to work on it more. There’s always more to learn, like the piano. I really focused on that. Regrettably, the lyrics and vocals were often dipped down and widened with reverb a lot in Dripping Goss, except for Blue Collar Black Future. Dripping Goss weren’t a harmony band, but then I got into harmonies working with Simone Felice in our band Fuzz Deluxe, before he was in The Felice Brothers. Trying new things, you can hear it on THE FIRING LINE, that I really worked on it. But yeah, Chris Bittner was there every day and I always will look at him and say, ”What do you think.” Aside from loving Chris as a bass player and knowing his history from when he played with 3, he really listened. And Birnbaum during the mixdown phase gave it everything at the board, all the time. Doing all the levels. I can’t thank him enough for putting that much in. Bittner was joking, ”This is easy when you have a good song.”

MYE: Could you talk about the transition with how you became involved as a member of Warzone?

BG: Todd Youth and I were good friends and I knew Raybeez. I’d known Jay and Paul, the early guitar players from Don't Forget The Struggle, Don't Forget The Streets. We were all friends even back during The Warmjets stuff, hanging out with the same girls and shit. Todd jumped in. Ray had stopped after 1990. The third Warzone record when metal came in wasn’t well received. When he came back in ’93 or ’94 he was adamant, and later on he went really straight and picked up the pieces and really went for it. Todd brought me in and couldn’t do a couple shows one time. Ray was a security guard and I had worked with Ray at The Ritz. I’d worked the stage and Todd said I should do the shows. Ray had never thought of that and said, ”Goss! Shit yeah!” He’d never thought of that because I listened to other styles. We had so much fun. Todd jumped back in for a while. Warzone had never been to Europe on the early records. After, he signed that deal with Victory out of Chicago and did five full-length records throughout the ‘90s. I played on a bunch of those. We finally got to go to Germany and did thirty shows in twenty-eight days. We got to go to Osaka and Tokyo. Berlin was on fire. Bringing it to them and giving it to them the real way, the real fuckin’ shit. If you were playing blues, that ’s Muddy Waters. Then there was Another Planet Records.

MYE: Dripping Goss was happening at the same time period whenever you had the window.

BG: Right. I was in Germany with Warzone and they were faxing me layouts of Blowtorch Consequence to approve. I never thought of Dripping Goss as a hardcore band.

MYE: You were almost post-hardcore in the truest sense.

BG: It was early. That transition as Walter moved into Quicksand and the influence of Fugazi shows you could put more into it. I always thought Walter’s lyrics were brilliant. He came from all that hardcore stuff but didn’t mind putting more poetry into Quicksand.

MYE: And Dripping Goss was a band like that and like Jane’s Addiction who could appeal to metalheads and also be truly cerebral. Chipping away at the iceberg and expanding consciousness.

BG: In the late ‘90s the floodgates opened and you saw you could do this and combine things. I feel we were a part of that. But yeah, with Dripping Goss, we used to read that magazine Metal Mania and they’d write nice pieces about us. [Editor’s note: Gee, guess who wrote for them…hahaha] We’d go out of town with Dripping Goss and while it was easy to get a crowd in New York, we’d go out of town and people would bring the magazine to the show. This was pre-internet and they’d read the article about us and think we sounded cool and would come to the show to check us out! We thought that was amazing and were so grateful for all of that. But the noise and hardcore and reggae scenes, everyone hung together. If they played hardcore, they’d still be at the ska show. It was like the classic New York where Blondie didn’t sound like The Ramones who didn’t sound like Television who didn’t sound like The Stilettos. Punk was to sound like yourself and New York always embraced that! Nowadays, the worst is when people take one style and say they can only play one thing, where the reality was you could play one style, but it didn’t mean the hardcore band or noise band only went to Sonic Youth shows. And then everyone was at the bar and it was all cool. Warhol did that great, as the Beats were dipping down, the Beats loved the punks and Warhol brought in The Velvet Underground and mixed stuff up. But yeah, after Dripping Goss was over, I did a band with a young kid named Simone Felice. He was a young poet from Palenville, New York at the time and had started hanging around New York City more. I wanted to build a band around his poetry and his great writing. We ended up working with Dante Ross. I was at the point after a few stages where I was trying to get the band to go a heavier direction, some Iggy Pop type stuff. Let’s get freaky! Simone was really into James Taylor and Gordon Lightfoot. His brother was starting to write some songs, so then he wrote with him and The Big Empty became The Felice Brothers. Simone put that band on the map and then left to do The Duke And The King, bringing me back into the fold.

MYE: Which then led to now and your solo debut, with the help of friends, of course.

BG: Todd Rawson, who did the artwork for The Firing Line, he is Christmas’ brother, of The Felice Brothers. I saw that he was designing the cover for The Duke And The King. You could tell he listened to the lyrics of every song, and as I was putting The Firing Line together, I was so proud of these lyrics and I sat with him and he had sketches. I could tell he truly had sat with it and loved it. That’s what it’s about.

MYE: There’s the tea cup and other elements from the songs.

BG: He elevated it as a complete piece.

MYE: What about the music video you have coming up?

BG: Tobias Stretch, who did the “Weird Fishes” video for Radiohead, I met him in a bar at one of my shows. He grew up in the woods of Pennsylvania, not unlike growing up in Palenville. He used to go to the bar with his grandmother too and we started talking about my song “Gig”, which is about that. He said we could work together, and he’s building a model, outdoor animation with puppets. He’s making a model of my grandmother. He altered the story of the song a bit to be a lot cooler than I’d thought. I let him run, once again, with whatever he wanted to do. The whole process of this album has been letting it all fall in place.