SHANNON SAINT RYAN (The T4 Project Mastermind): I have no idea. I think it’s something where you see it and see where you want to go and what it looks like. Barriers are gonna come up. They come up every day no matter what you’re doing in life, so long as you’re still seeing what’s in front of you you'll just bash through them or see a way around them. It’s basically like planting a seed and it just grows from there. There is a lot of hassle with obviously, the tour schedules and even how to get in touch with musicians that you sometimes have never met. I just think of the Kevin Bacon method.

SSR: Yeah. Everyone knows someone that knows someone.

MYE: Once it starts steamrolling people are like,”Hey! Yeah, this…!”

SSR: Yeah, you can build momentum with it but even down to the very end we were looking for one more guitar player. Even with all these names involved it’s not easy peasy. You think with the bigger names on there that they’ll start doing footwork for you but everyone’s busy doing their own albums and I was the unlucky one left to sort shit out. It feels very rewarding in the sense that you can just make a record. You don’t need any label funding. Just go out and do it. People come at you and tell you it can’t be done and that just fuels the fire.

MYE: Also, with so many collaborators, I am impressed with how cohesive it is. With so many people, there’s twists and turns to the music but it sounds like a big family band or something. How did you keep it coherent?

SSR: I didn’t want it to sound like a compilation. That’d be too jarring from one song to the next. The way I built it was I started with the rhythm section and I said to the drummers, “We’ve got ten songs. Between the two of you fill out your five favorite songs that you’re drawn towards.” Once the drummers had picked those five songs then I could approach the bass players and say take half of these guys and half of the others, so everybody ended up playing with everybody. Half of that and half of that. Everyone basically ends up working together.

MYE: Right! ‘Cuz you can hear the mix of the modern and older styles in little places in each song so it’s cool how they mesh.

SSR: So fucking cool to hear those stamps that each artist puts on it! They’re all unique in a different way. That’s why I wanted to encourage it to being that out. I wrote the demo but sometimes when you’re producing artists will ask you, “Ok, so what do you want me to do?” Here I said to put their stamp on it. I always want to take it further than you want it to go because then you can pull back. If you’re always afraid of that you’ll go nowhere. Looking at it, you’ve got a great rhythm section. For me, growing up in the punk scene I’d go, “Oh man, Bad Religion/Subhumans, that’d be really cool.” The Subhumans drummer is a lot different from Spike who is with Morrissey and The Damned and Conflict, it’s amazing like the technical shit that he’ll do. Trotsky from Subhumans is really the straightforward, driving beat, you know, tear your heart out your chest. Those styles of drumming along with the bass players of Bad Religion and Buzzcocks, Buzzcocks’ Tony (Barber) using that awesome Rickenbacker…

MYE: Yeah, man. They’re the best.

SSR: …That is so cool! Then Hetson from Circle Jerks comes in and he’s bending the strings and even recording it, I was engineering that session and he’s recording it behind me and I thought “Oh my God!” One of my guitar heroes was behind me playing these notes!

MYE: You must’ve been tripping out, bro.

SSR: Yeah! I feel so blessed to have gotten to do this. Yeah, it’s a shitload of work, but fuckin’ A!

MYE: Talk about achieving something you want to in your life, though! What it most reminds me of is a version of Crass’ Christ: The Album for 2008, with the deep, social satire and the themes of protest and radio satire. Instead of the Falklands War you are talking about fucked up things today.

SSR: Yeah. Crass was definitely an influence growing up and even those commercial blips in between and I felt like we never heard some of this propaganda stuff as bad on the radio even five years ago, there might be the odd pharmaceutical commercial, but now it’s like you don’t even notice it anymore. It’s disgusting!

MYE: Your fake commercial for the army says “Have you ever dreamed of killing someone?” It’s like the military video games right next to the recruitment ads in prime time.

SSR: That’s not cool. It really isn’t, so the fake commercials was my way of …I don’t ever want to be too serious about stuff because then you end up wanting to cut your own wrists. You want to laugh at stuff and be grateful for the stuff you do enjoy in life and have fun with it. That’s why I think NOFX and Propaghandi are cool ‘cuz they know how to enjoy themselves and don’t take themselves too seriously.

MYE: Yeah, then at the same time you’re not bludgeoning people but there’s an important message there. You have the aesthetic of a punk larger family. I love when you said in the press release that it was “like meeting old friends for the first time”. That’s how I’d feel if I got to meet Black Flag, even if I had nothing in common to talk about other than music and we were really different, which I doubt. We relate to the songs in our lives. You also said it is about the scene “becoming stronger instead of endlessly quarrelling” which I so agree with. With some of the political stuff too, I think in the last five years or so, like the band Boysetsfire really put their necks out on the line after 9/11 and said that it was fishy. They caught a lot of shit for that but a lot of people played it safe. People were too quiet I think.

SSR: Yeah. It has been sort of all these thoughts and ideas boiling for a long time for me and to be able to take all these things and put it in a bowl of plasticine and create a concept album, I mean, even singles now…music doesn’t have a face anymore. It’s all digital singles and this record was a reaction to that too. Everything was singles until you had Pet Sounds and now it’s back to singles so I wanted to create something where you’d sit down with a pair of headphones and enjoy listening to a record from start to finish and the artwork goes along with it. It’s just unbelievable.

MYE: How did you know Keith Rosson was the artist? It’s very stark art in the booklet comic that comes with the CD but it is also very human.

SSR: A couple artists wanted to do it and Keith had done the art for Mike Clark’s Glass and Ashes band, and he said, “That’s Keith Rosson from Oregon.” I didn’t want to take their artist from them, but he said he’d done art for lots of bands like Submission Hold. Obviously, you are always looking for something new to put into it, and Glass and Ashes said to go for it and put me in touch with him. I told him about what I was doing and he was all for it. I started creating these stick figure sketches and he made them look beautiful. He just blows it up! Even the lyrics in the booklet are handwritten. People don’t know it because I know you’ve got, like, the text generators now off the computers. If I could change one thing, it would be I wouldn’t have wasted writing out the whole booklet in a cold warehouse. [laughing]

MYE: [laughing]

SSR: That’s what I loved about records growing up, when you’d see handwritten stuff. I wanted to recreate that look and feel.

MYE: Like some of the old hardcore records like Blast!

SSR: Yeah, or you could even go back to Subhumans or Citizen Fish. Little things like that, instead of just putting some songs together. If I pick up an album and there’s no lyrics, you feel like you’ve been cheated. It was another area to expand and create more art.

MYE: Jason Cruz from Strung Out knocked it out of the park on vocals. How did you know he was the guy?

SSR: He wasn’t even the main vocalist first! I was working with Cinder Block from Tilt/Fabulous Disaster. Fantastic voice but there was a conflict of schedule, she was taking off with touring and was doing fantastic so we had to part ways. Around that time, funny as it goes, I was in Europe and that was where Jason said he’d heard some of the stuff and said ,” Man, I’d love to sing on this.” I thought that’d be great but said ,” I’ve already got Cinder and I could talk to her.” I thought maybe we could do some modern day X kind of feel with male/female vocals and it didn’t work out, she said she had to move on and Jason just got right in there. I’d worked with Jason before doing pre-production on one of the Strung Out records, so we were used to each other and how we worked and stuff like that. When you’re working together you’re all family and get to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

MYE: Right, right. It comes back to two points. First your record touches on generations between the punk scenes. I just saw this show with this guy John The Baker’s band Instant Asshole and they were touring for a split 7” they did with the band Mouths Sewn Shut. He’s from the whole Gillman scene on the West Coast and works with Jello Biafra and it was great. There was this young band UTD on the bill and lotsa kids and John was telling stories about Gillman and other stuff. You pass the energy and I think your record really does that too. Even the fans and the scene, like Sex Pistols were out for themselves, but it was still a fuck you to the establishment, but now we need to band together in some ways more than before with the modern state of music.

SSR: Yeah. Mouths Sewn Shut, that’s guys from Rodent Popsicle Records.

MYE: Yeah, they’re also in this other band, I forget the name of… [note: Toxic Narcotic]

SSR: I played with them on the East Coast. Bill (Damon) was the singer. [laughing] Yeah, that band’s pretty brutal for the East Coast!

MYE: Yeah, they are actually really very heavy. Good times.

SSR: Yeah, bringing people together though…growing up you see a gap in the scene. Some people like old school, some people like new school, whatever. I was able to record different bands for about five years. Through that experience I realized there’s a common thread there. I thought “Shit! We’re all going against the grain in some way”. Music is the way to deliver the message, and it’s a different vehicle. So I thought of bringing everyone together as a celebration. And I do feel that we’ve captured a moment in time. Ten years from now this will be an even more important record. Another thing, too, as you know in the music industry, there is a lot of bureaucracy and all this crap even running through the punk scene, which is ridiculous. I feel really pleased with the fact that we were able to produce a record straight from the street with all these people involved that was absolutely pure. No matter what happens, whether it’s forgotten or put on MTV or the radio, who gives a shit. It’s what’s inside the record and the people.

MYE: Absolutely. A great thing, too, is the story of the characters Phil and Jackie, the young lovers, it is to the point and not incomprehensible, but has depth. Punk used to rebel against concept albums and nowadays there are some that aren’t cohesive or seem made up on the fly and make no sense or lack important social themes such as Pink Floyd’s The Wall or the T4 Project. You have parallels with reality like media complicity and government control. I had a band called DIVEST who worked with Doc from Bad Brains a minute and we had a song called “Dressed To Kill The Eyewitness” which was about how people would see something and then wouldn’t even believe their own eyes anymore because the media barrages you and tells you not to believe what you saw yourself! That ties into your song “15 minutes”, my favorite on the record. It’s so on point to just show a movie star or make people forget they believe in something.

SSR: Yeah. Obviously this is a story but it’s based on experiences of friends we’ve had and is kind of a magnified world of the pressures we live under, so it’s fiction and you have these characters walking around with zombie eyes and stuff like that.

MYE: It’s archetypes.

SSR: There’s a parallel. Interesting thing with the vocals, too, it’s such a laugh. We have these tour schedules to figure out with Jason, and we have to book him in a studio between where I live and he lives and find an engineer, too. And it was getting a bit difficult like “Fuck!” And I was looking at the budget and the amount of time we were gonna spend doing it and I thought, “Shit! I’m just gonna go down to the hardware store and build a vocal booth and put it in my bedroom”. You spend a quarter of the money and you’re good to go.

MYE: You can do it yourself.

SSR: A Protools rig setup and we just did some vocals. Inside a box that we built! Those little things to me are kind of the cool icing on the cake that you have such a good time doing and it is different.

MYE: Right on. Some of these bands now are bigger or revered like Buzzcocks and it brings it back to when they started or that purity.

SSR: Yeah, and also some of these artists, when we got together, some of them haven’t played on the same stage…even Trotsky (Subhumans) and Jay Bentley (Bad Religion) Hadn’t played together since like ’83 or ’84, and you think , “Wow”! I mean, I’m moved. I’m touched just being there. You have the chance to hear their stories and hear that they’re excited, too. I hope, if the record does anything, it’ll inspire kids to think, shit, they can do this too. “If some crazy nutter can run around and do it then why the fuck can’t we do it?” With all the new technology and kids kind of switched on to it, where we’re old farts catching up, they can do some amazing stuff! Make fantastic art!

MYE: Empowering. Don’t take your scene for granted. I hate it when bands get selfish and forget where they came from or people who helped them along the way or worse forget about fans and the scene. It’s important to have your career, but you can do so much more. There’s an old Dropkick Murphy’s song “Get Up” where they sing “We all fall down, so get up now.” We can help each other make it stronger, you know?

SSR: Yeah.

MYE: I wanted to ask you a couple political questions if that’s alright.

SSR: Ok.

MYE: Well this one’s actually more an emotional question. There’s that song “The Plot To Avenge” where after the punk character Phil’s girlfriend Jackie is assaulted and he’s beaten up by bigots and rednecks for being an anti-war supporter and a scapegoat in the media, you have this concept of him catching a “virus” of wanting revenge. It ties into real life, the anger people felt after 9/11 like “get the towelheads” or solving problems with violence. Sometimes it’s hard in life, like the death penalty issue. If someone you love is hurt or raped you want revenge. I knew someone who was hurt bad by a guy and I found out. I worked at a factory with him and could’ve really hurt the jerk, but it would’ve perpetuated the violence cycle. It was really hard to hold back knowing what he’d done. In the end I was glad though.

SSR: Where it goes with this story, these are emotions we feel. Phil’s lost his girl, he’s lost his job, and he’s lost everything. The freakiest people on Earth have nothing to lose and they are scary motherfuckers. He’s got nothing to lose and is gonna go after the main bastard that attacked him and Jackie, and if he gets hurt in the process, who gives a shit. He’s got nothing to lose. So that is the basic emotions but when it moves to the song “Break In” where he actually breaks in, this is what the album is all about. Everyday we have a choice and he recognizes that moment when he has the bigot cornered and has a gun on him at the dude’s head and a kid pops out around the corner and Phil realizes what a monster he’s turned into and he’s not gonna ruin the kid’s life. There was more power in that moment for him sparing that guy’s life than taking it away.

SSR: But the other dude didn’t recognize that and so gets the gun and ends up killing Phil and that was what I was trying to say, that the moment…one guy caught that moment and one guy didn’t. The witness was the child and he recognized it and decided he wanted no part of that violence and leaves home to find people like him who can relate to him and want harmony in life.

SSR: Yeah, can you justify murder? I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know the answers. This is one person’s…not even one’s…Everyone’s experiences put together. Everyone’s got unique experiences in life. What’s right, wrong? Who the fuck knows. This is my idea and if people can relate to it, that’s great.

MYE: You’re adding to the discussion, the lexicon. It’s like the death penalty. Do we really trust the government to have that power?

SSR: No. Am I against the death penalty? No, not really. If some piece of shit bastard is gonna remove someone from the Earth that you love and they’re caught red handed, should they be removed from the Earth? I dunno. Maybe. When it gets scary is yeah, when the government is involved and you don’t know who is really who. I’m just like everyone else. Concerned about it. You just get through life.

MYE: I love that lyric “The anger that we find becomes who we are”. It really summarizes it well, that you can be angry about something but you don’t want to become what you hate.

SSR: Yeah. Jason comes up with some beautiful metaphors. It’s awesome.

MYE: Some of the things, like the Bush administration that prompted the record…Kucinich just had an impeachment proposal for Bush after the Iraq Senate Select Committee found that he and his cronies manipulated intelligence to sell the Iraq war, and Bill O’Reilly is saying it’ll never get passed. And maybe not nowadays, but Kucinich’s point was that we investigated the shit out’ve Clinton’s scandal, which was an affair and he lied but it was still a consensual sex act and Bush’s lie had far worse repercussions and loss of life than the sperm that died because of Monica Lewinski. I mean, the African Uranium Saddam was supposed to have tried to get was years and years earlier and it was touted as brand new and current! What is it gonna take?!

SSR: I think it’s gonna take waiting for all these old farts to die out. Bring in the youth and teach them some compassionate ways, teach them to be themselves! If we can focus on that , you can’t teach an old dog new tricks like all these old dogs lining their pockets. You’ve got to be patient.

MYE: The youth are getting restless! On another hand I am a waiter and I met a former World War 2 pilot the other day and he fought the Nazi’s to preserve our rights and has been called unpatriotic by people for saying he doesn’t like Bush or things like lack of health care.

SSR: Being American is having the opportunity to speak up. I feel very lucky coming from another country seeing the things that I enjoy. I do love living here, and I choose to live here, and I’m glad I’m allowed to, but does it mean everything is hunkey dorey? No. There’s problems everywhere. You just hope you can have a positive impact on your community.

MYE: One or two more things about some of the breaks between songs, the sarcastic commercials. The “Homophobia” track, now that gay marriage is allowed in California people who’ve been together for fifty years can be legitimate. It’s disgusting we’re supposed to be modern but we don’t allow people to be recognized for their choice of partners on a full respectful level. I was thinking about your commercial you did advertising sarcastically fixing homosexuality like a, “Wouldn’t you like to be normal?” type of thing. It makes me sad when I see some of the people who “Used to be gay” or they get scared of the Bible and say “Oh, we’re reformed” and the Christian Right jumps on it and exploits it. It’s so pathetic.

SSR: It’s terrible! We came up with that commercial. I had seen a documentary where they’ll send kids away and “Straighten them out”. And I thought, “Are you serious”? They’ll play them videos of these really gross sexual acts so whenever they think of people of the same sex they’ll think of these horrible images like A Clockwork Orange.

MYE: Meanwhile the funniest part is a lot of these gay couples are rich doctors who have their shit so down and are so liberated and actualized and smart and are the coolest motherfuckers.

SSR: It’s something you think the government would want to have something to do with ‘cuz it could be lucrative for them because gay couples usually have more money to play around with.

MYE: [laughing]

SSR: A piece of the pie! Give it a few years until religion decides to change its face once again like it does throughout the years. A friend of mine, has since obviously passed away, Heath Ledger, and the shit he went through for doing Brokeback Mountain was unreal.

MYE: You were friends with him?

SSR: Yeah. I’ve known him probably about ten years, just in and out ,but seeing what he was dealing with from doing that and the religious right…it’s fucking stupid.

MYE: Absolutely, man. Bullshit. Also very sad he died. Such a loss. Why can’t we lose Rush Limbaugh? It’s always talented people.

SSR: We got pretty close with his pill addiction, but his was on purpose. The thing with Heath and Jim Cherry, the original bass player of Strung Out, one of the founding members, he passed away. It’s called polypharmacy. You’re on pills for one thing, and the doctor gives you pills for another, and they don’t work in synergy. When I heard the news of Heath I thought a drug overdose didn’t make sense, and from what the test has shown that’s the deal. And if I’m correct, polypharmacy kills more people a year than smoking.

MYE: Not to get too sad…Back to the record, I really admire what you’ve done. It’s so admirable for many different reasons. Very inspiring.

SSR: You’ll be psyched about what I’m doing next. I’m kicking the movie industry in the ass! I wrote a dark comedy about mad cow disease coming to the U.S. The rights were sold and they are looking about turning it into a movie, and it’s the same as T4. You’re up against all these people and the industry says they don’t want to see this, and I’m saying it’s a film about consumer rights.

MYE: If you could make it that would be such a coup because vegan groups couldn’t buy airtime for ads on some major stations because Clear Channel or whoever didn’t like it. It wasn’t in their privatized interest to run it.

SSR: Yeah! Even in the punk scene hidden shit goes on and you’re like “No way! Come on.” It blows the mind, you know? The deal with the film though is it isn’t a veggie film. It isn’t vegan. It’s consumer based how big business plays Russian Roulette with us. We are doing the same fucking things here that Britain did to cause mad cow. Why the hell are we doing it here?!

MYE: We deserve it more! I wish it would break out here because that’s the only way people learn. Like the environment, you hope it’s not too late. Harsh to say, but…

SSR: Sometimes it takes a natural disaster or industry disaster to make people wake up, but in a way, with everything going green now and it being hip it makes you not want to go green. [laughing]

MYE: [laughing] Give me a cheeseburger!

SSR: People call you a fucking hippie and now you don’t want to wave the flag. I saw a great video, you’ve got to see it on You tube. Someone showed me and it’s called Fuck The Earth Day. This guy is hosting it and he’s saying “Fuck the Earth Day. Smack it around. Make it your bitch”.

MYE: [cracking up]

SSR: He throws one of the six ring soda loops into the Ocean.

MYE: [laughing] Play horseshoes with the baby dolphins.

SSR: Yeah. I think stuff like that is hilarious, a critique while appearing to be the other way. It’s always worth a laugh, but mine is called Mad Cow Ninja Movie. Same thing as T4, where we are pulling together a cast and crew who believe in the project and studios have said it is absolutely original now and no one’s done a movie in this arena before. But they can’t fund it because of advertisers and people aren’t interested in knowing what they eat, and that to me is borderline criminal when you have the opportunity, but same again, we’ll bring it through the street.

MYE: Well, they got Super Size Me out.

SSR: Yeah, and Fast Food Nation. Now, we’ve got the guy who did Green Mile, all these people who have credits from here to there and it’s awesome. Apt Pupil, Crash crew. We’re building it and we’re gonna bring this thing out. It’s gonna be awesome. There’s barriers and roadblocks but [laughing] “Whah, whah, whah”.

MYE: That’s a good attitude because you can’t give up.

SSR: I’m as scared as anyone else. You look at your paychecks and think, Jesus Christ! Why have I bothered!? But you remember the things in life you appreciate and time you spend with people and be grateful day by day and not let all that negative shit hang on you. It’s not easy to do because money rules the world.

MYE: Dude, good luck.

SSR: I appreciate it. Cheers, man!