Jeffrey Lewis is an old-school punk and a pivotal voice in comics, zines, and the whole music scene. This interview takes place on the terrace outside of the Mohawk’s Green Room. In it, Jeffrey Lewis and I discuss the importance of this current election. Election day is today, November 5th, so if you are reading this, and you are registered to vote, I urge you to exercise your rights and vote. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Perfect. Okay, to really quickly introduce myself, I'm Ben Catterton, or DJ IV Drip. I use they/them pronouns, and I'm with KVRX 91.7 FM in Austin, Texas. So, if you wouldn’t mind introducing yourself, your pronouns, and plug whatever you want to plug.
Hi, Jeffrey Lewis here. He/him. I'm playing in Austin, Texas tonight, but I don't know when people are going to be interacting with this interview. Maybe it's in the future sometime. Today is October 24, Thursday night. I'm on tour with my band, currently called Jeffrey Lewis and the Voltage, and we are about two weeks through our three-week USA tour. So we're making our way back home to New York City at the moment, coming from the West Coast back towards the east.
Q: Great. All right, first things first, I really want to pick your brain about those new campaign songs you released. I thought those were super fun, “Harris & Walz” and “Republican Rednecks.” I wanted to ask: which musicians and songs did you draw from the most when writing those two campaign songs, aside from, of course, your really fun play on Karma Chameleon in “Harris & Walz”?
Well, I guess in some ways, I feel very rooted in a lot of ‘60s albums that are the majority of my own record collection. So, I have tons of stuff by, you know, a lot of the ‘60s folkies, like Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, of course, all those sorts of people who, you know, were topical songwriters at times. Not so much Baez and not so much even Dylan, exactly, but the idea of responding, kind of, in real time to an inspiration from what's going on or in the world around you, right? Writing songs that might very well be obsolete a couple weeks later, because that—which is kind of a problem, because I have tons of songs that are just obsolete. They refer to situations that are no longer relevant.
And that was especially true during the pandemic, when I was writing songs based on whatever the situation happened to be, which was often changing from week to week. But I think, in retrospect, songs like that, I get a lot out of listening to Phil Ochs records. I mean, I own every Phil Ochs album, and there's a lot of references to things that, you know, might have seemed obsolete two weeks after he wrote them in, you know, October of 1964 or something. They were old news. But nowadays, looking back, it's a valuable historical document, and they're also just so witty, and they're just such great songs.
And of course, the thugs who, in some ways, would maybe be more of a direct link for an inspiration. I feel like some of the songs, especially those two songs that I just released on Spotify, maybe have more in common with a kind of thug style, a slightly politically outrageous being aware that some people are maybe gonna be triggered by some of these things that I'm saying, but.
Yeah, just that—that just kind of throwing yourself into the fray in that way that mostly comes from a ‘60s inspiration. I don't see that many modern acts doing that sort of thing. Like, I don't know if people are just scared to alienate segments of their audience, but—or if these people just have different songwriting influences from me—but I'm not aware of these kinds of topical songs being written by, I don't know, almost anybody that I could name, whether it's in in rap or in indie rock. People may support different causes, but they're not writing songs in that way, as far as I'm aware.
Q: Oh, not really. On that note of the thugs and kind of triggering: in “Republican Rednecks,” you've got this really refreshingly indignant tone. It was a real breath of fresh air for me. And I was wondering, do you think this fear of “Republican Rednecks,” right, is a result of a left-wing or a right-wing invention? Is it because of, like, the overly masculine posturing of the QAnon cult, or is it because of that op-ed culture we've really taken on on the left?
Well, I do see some of the demonizing of the left when you take a look into the right-wing-o-sphere, whether it's Fox or even the more fringy right-wing outlets for—I was going to say information, but I should say disinformation or misleading information. Or even just the—some of the things that you hear people say—this demonization, the taking the most, you know, anxiety-ridden, stressed-out stance about those who you consider to be your political opposites. And I would like to think that my own anxiety about my perception of Trump and Trumpers and the, you know, the—what I perceive as a kind of violent element in American society, these gun, you know, the gun people, the people who stormed the Capitol, the people who think the election was stolen. I mean, they seem like a bunch of violent lunatics to me. And, you know, there's these apocalyptic fantasies of this kind of, you know, fascist, brutal, brown-shirt element, Proud Boys marching in the streets and, you know.
But at the same time, I'm aware that there is a similar right-wing, paranoid, anxiety-ridden fantasy about all of us, blue state, liberal city, left-wing people burning down their cities and rioting and, you know, turning the country into some kind of communist Black Lives Matter, queer, whatever their worst nightmare—you know, they have these worst nightmares about us the same way we do about them. So maybe, if their fantasies about us are not entirely accurate, maybe our terrors of them are not entirely accurate either. That would be a comforting thought. But at the same time, we didn't storm the damn capital, they did. So, you know, I think maybe I would like, you know, there's so—I don't know, but I just don't know. We live in such echo chambers that my own echo chamber, it's hard for me to really perceive outside my echo chamber. I believe the reality of my echo chamber. I believe the liberal reality, to me, that is reality. And those other people are lunatics. So, yeah, the fact that they think I'm the lunatic, that's just weird.
Q: You and the Voltage have clearly proven to be, like, evergreen, despite your firm commitment to this garage punk—know you love this word—anti-folk, ‘90s sound, which, as you outline in your song, “The History of the Development of Punk on the Lower East Side, 1950–1975,” was pulling from an even older sound. And you've clearly got that older taste in music. So what about punk do you think makes it so immortal in our cultural sphere?
Well, I think you could say that there's something immortal about anything that is pretty hands-on for anybody to take up as a, you know, the way that maybe in certain parts of the—not that I know anything about country music—but maybe, like, back-porch bluegrass in Kentucky is something that somebody could just pick up a fiddle and start joining the family band or something. I don't know, I'm just making—I don't—I'm not—I don't know what I'm talking about. I shouldn't talk about that sort of thing. I should talk about the things that I know, which are more like folk punk, indie rock, and comic books and zines and homemade comic books.
All of this stuff is—I usually think of it as, like, culturally diametrically opposite from things like opera, ballet, classical music, even jazz, which some could say is more of an underground culture, but requires such a technical sophistication that there's such a barrier to entry for the average person to just express themselves in that form. [It] requires years of training. Whereas folk music, punk music, and kind of homemade comic books or zines, this all represents—or if you want to call it anti-folk, or if you want to call it garage rock—all of that represents a layer of cultural participation that doesn't have the same barrier to entry. It doesn't have a requirement of years of, you know, technical expertise. So there's something… But that doesn't mean that the people making it are stupid. There's something, like, wonderful about the fact that the people making it can actually be smarter, you know, more clever, more perceptive or have more interesting philosophies or provocative things to say, regardless of the fact that their techniques might be really rough. Yeah, that's… I think society always needs that kind of counterbalance. You know?
I don't know, yeah, I just don't know enough about the more sophisticated realms of culture. I just—I'm so ignorant about classical music and things like that. So maybe someday I'll learn more about opera and I'll realize that that really is the best form of music and I’ve been so stupid listening to all this dumb garage rock.
Q: In an interview of yours I read, you expressed some small frustration with the songs of yours that are doing the best statistically, now that we have all this streaming and graphs really readily available to us. I mean, your most streamed song on Spotify, “Cult Boyfriend,” even has the lyric, “this song probably ain't gonna go very far beyond an open mic,” right? How do you think, if at all, streaming has changed the singles you released, right? Back to kind of that point we were talking about with your more topical songs.
Well, yeah, that's a couple different topics to unpack, because then on one hand, there is this weird new era that we're in, in which you can really see exactly which songs are being listened to the most, which was never the case back when it was records or tapes or CDs. If somebody got your album, you didn't know which song they liked more than the other songs, they just got the whole album. And maybe there was a little bit of like mixtape culture, in which certain songs might end up on mixes, and somebody might come up and be like, “Oh, I put this song on a mix for my boyfriend,” or something. And maybe it would tend to be a certain handful of songs that people would say they were putting on mixes for people.
But the streaming thing is really weird, because you can really see how the first songs on every album always get more listeners than the last songs, like people just drop off. The attrition rate of people's attention spans usually don't make it all the way through a record, so it's a bit depressing to think, like, “Whoa, if I put any songs that I worked really hard on towards the end of the record, they're just not going to get as listened to,” which maybe wouldn't be the case if somebody was buying a physical record and had to listen to the whole thing just because they owned the whole thing, [than] if they were just jumping around and streaming.
Maybe there's a lot of songs that I think might be my best material that aren't really getting listened to and may never get listened to because people are even judging it by the stream count. People are like, “Who is this Jeffrey Lewis guy? Let me see what his stuff is.” And they look at Spotify, and they see, “Oh, here's this ‘Cult Boyfriend’ song with 3 million streams. And here's, you know, all these other songs he has that have only 10,000 streams. So I want to listen to his best stuff if I'm gonna check him out for the first time.” So that just means now that has 3,000,001 streams, 3,000,002 streams and three, you know, it just it snowballs in both directions. The stuff that's listened to the least gets listened to the least, and the stuff that's listened to the most gets listened to the most. So it just has this self, you know, this self-echoing snowball effect, which, yeah, is weird. I don't know what that—but it has caused me to pay more attention to certain songs in my repertoire, songs that maybe I hadn't played live in 10 years or something. And I'm like, “Oh, wow. People are really listening to that song. Like, all right, I'll play that one, you know? I'll throw that one into a tour once in a while, if people know that song” and things like that, so that—that is interesting.
But then the idea about using it for the sake of topical songs is super interesting to me, because it really goes back to this kind of pre-album era of music, like the sort of ‘50s rock and roll era in which you did have a lot of novelty songs, and an early ‘60s folky era in which you had a lot of topical songs. Because I think things were more kind of single oriented and more rapid in the turnaround times between recording and release. If you look at, you know when, whoever it was, whether it was the Beatles or Dylan or any of these other artists, Elvis, anybody that you could name, the time between when something was written, recorded and released, was just very quick compared to nowadays. It's like, I mean, I don't know, I haven't put out an official record in like, five years now, but meanwhile, I can just write stuff and immediately record it and put it on Bandcamp, put it on Spotify, put it on whatever, you know, and it just goes worldwide immediately. So there is, it sort of goes back to this, almost, like, the Kim Fowley era of like, just throw out an idea quickly, and like, some of them might catch on and some of them might not.
It's, yeah, it's interesting. I—in the start of the pandemic when I released that song, “Keep It Chill! (in the Eastville),” it was written and recorded as a very quick emotional reaction to the pandemic shutdown situation that was happening that week in New York City, and it just blew up because I was one of the first people to write, and—I don't know, maybe one of the only people, because, like I say, I don't, you know, the Mountain Goats, I don't think, are doing songs like that. Yo La Tengo is not doing songs like that. Whoever, you know, Sabrina Carpenter’s not doing songs like that. I don't know who's doing songs like that, other than losers like me who play at open mic nights. It's like a very—it's a very—it's like a thing that you don't really do once you become successful, writing topical reaction songs. You know, I don't know. Metallica doesn't do it.
Once in a while, you might see a rapper do something like that, I feel, because there's so much of an emphasis on content, you know. They might not write a whole song about it, but topical things will form, you know, find their way into rap lyrics, I think, more likely than they will into rock or pop. Yeah, somebody needs to write some kind of anthropology term paper about that, or somebody needs to analyze that.
Q: A lot of large artists, some of whom we even named, have complained about audience conduct recently.
What’s the complaint?
Q: Attention span—the crowd moving in and out of attention at the song that they came to the show for, right? So I wanted to ask, considering that you've been, I mean, playing live music for something like thirty years now.
Well, not that. Twenty years.
Q: Twenty years?
Well, twenty-two. Twenty-five. What is it? Yeah, twenty-five years, I could say.
Q: Something like twenty-five years.
Yeah, like, what are you, crazy? Thirty years? Are you out of your mind? It’s only been twenty-five years!
Q: I wanted to ask if you've noticed a similar thing, right? People checking in and checking out of your sets.
I will be boastful and say that nobody checks out of a Jeffrey Lewis set. These artists who people are checking out of their sets, they just need to write more interesting material. Because I check out of people's sets all the time. Every time I go see a band, I'm like, after two or three songs, like, alright, this is what they do. I get it. I don't need to stand here for another hour. I think that's—a lot of artists just don't have an engaging amount of content, at least for my mind, you know. And I'm not one of the—I'm not one of, like, the young generation of attention span problems, you know, I didn't grow up with smartphones sort of thing, but I certainly need my attention to be engaged if I'm gonna actually stand there for an hour and watch a whole set. And I just feel like a lot of artists just aren't bringing it there. They just don't—they don't have the—they don't have the content. They just—they don't have enough going on. They sort of have a style. They have a sound, an atmosphere, a style. But once you sort of get that for the first few songs, it's like, all right, I got it. What else do you have? Nothing? You don't have anything else.
Q: Yeah. Well, you mentioned open mics. Gotta ask, since you lived in Austin for some time, what's your favorite open mic spot in town? Well, or what was?
It wasn't actually—it was actually very brief. But I went to Hole in the Wall—not Hole in the Wall. Cactus Café had a Monday night thing that I would go to. There was a place called Ruta Maya that had a Tuesday night open mic. And, I mean, we're talking back in 2000, 2001 era. So a lot of these played—that's, this is a long time ago, and this was, like before I was even touring or anything. So it's like a whole other world. I don't know which of these places still exist. I'm sure there's open mics still in Austin, and some of the old venues are still there. I mean, I know Hole in the Wall is still there, and… I don't know, it's weird that Emo’s is gone, but other—I don't know, that's like the same as any city, like, you walk around, you're like, “Oh, this used to be this, this used to be that, this used to be that.” It's like, that's the same in, you know, New York, Seattle, San Francisco, so…
But those were two open mics I definitely remember being regulars at when I was in Austin, was the Monday nights at Cactus Café and the Tuesdays at Ruta Maya. And once in a while, I will bump into somebody that I knew from those days that was like, you know, that still sort of follows my stuff. But there's a lot of other people that I wonder what happened to them. There were artists that, you know, I was really a fan of that were just open mic people that didn't even necessarily ever play gigs or certainly didn't tour. They were just… maybe I had their cassette. You know, some of these people, I still have their own CD-R or their cassette that I got from them back then.
There was actually a guy named Kevin Gant who was an open mic regular, and I think I had his CD or CD-R, as it would have been. And many, many years later, I found a documentary about him. It was like, “Whatever happened to Kevin?” Like, apparently, he disappeared or something. There was, like, some documentary about this local Austin musician who disappeared. I was like, “No way. Like, what? That's crazy.” So I watched the documentary, and it was about that guy that I knew, but he didn't—he, like, apparently, when he disappeared, he had just moved to California or something, and nobody knew where he went, and then he, like, came back or something. I don't know it was—it was interesting, and I don't think it was a movie that most people would have found particularly dramatic. But I was just like, “Woah, that's crazy. Somebody made a documentary about that guy I used to see at the open mic.”
Q: All right. Well, I absolutely love your comics—Fuff for life—and your thoughts on comics. So before the end of the interview, I wanted to ask if you have any recommendations for any current comics or zines or anything you want to plug.
Well, I am still a devoted fan of Snakepit Comics. And that was—Ben Snakepit was a guy who was living in Austin at the time when I was here, and he was doing this little diary comic, three panels every day of just his punk rock life. And he has kept it up every single day for, you know, over 20 years. And I'm just so addicted to reading Snakepit. I think he lives in San Francisco currently, and every three years he puts out a big collection of all of the stuff. You know, a lot of people do these sort of autobiographical comics, and it doesn't always interest me, but for some reason, I find Snakepit just so addictive and hilarious. And I'm always, you know, I always recommend Snakepit Comics to people, and it's great that Ben is still doing it from his early Austin roots.
And Gabrielle Bell is a comic artist in New York City that I'm a big fan of. I always look forward to seeing any of her stuff. She's a fantastic, very devoted illustrator, and I like the stuff that she does. And… oh, there's a comic artist I met in Berlin when I was there a couple of years ago, and her stuff has really been blowing me away. I feel like I would be—her name is Karla Paloma. Karla with a K, Paloma, P-a-l-o-m-a. And she basically just self-publishes these kind of comic zines. And I just thought they were so funny and so great. And I got in touch with her, and I got some more of her stuff. And, yeah, if there was a new Karla Paloma comic, I would be—I would just run to the comic store to get it. That would be something I would be really excited about.
Of course, Daniel Clowes, all the old ‘90s people that I love. I mean, Joe Matt just died, so there won't be any more Peepshow stuff by Joe Matt, but a big fan of his stuff, always. Chester Brown, if there's any New Chester Brown stuff. Julie Doucet. Like, a lot of these people just don't do that much stuff, so… But, yeah, there's a lot of modern comic stuff that I'm just not really that aware of. I'm not as plugged into the current crop.
While Jeffrey Lewis’s tour has since come to an end, and he made sure to only plug other’s works at the end of our interview, I want to take a brief moment to recommend his book: “Revelations in the Wink of an Eye (My Insane Musings on Watchmen, from Conspiracies to Stupidities).” I can assure you, it’s worth your time.
Check it (and his other works) out here: https://thejeffreylewissite.com/art-landing-page/
And find your closest polling place here: https://www.vote.org/polling-place-locator/