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from RIP magazine, July 1995
[After this interview, Pepper Keenan and New Orleans were bound so tightly together in my mind that more than 10 years later, when Hurricane Katrina devastated the city, the first thing I did was scan the C.O.C. message boards to find out if Pepper made it out okay. He did, with his girlfriend, his dog, a guitar and not much else. While I enjoyed hanging out with all the C.O.C. guys that winter of 1994-5, it was Pepper who really made this feature stand out. I had a lot fun trying to translate his colorful way of talking into print. I think I did it pretty successfully.]
"It's insane, man. There's no way in high hell I can explain it: the moment where you've got a grass skirt on and a bottle of wine, and it's five in the morning and you're in some stupid alley in the French Quarter, and you're so drunk and your friends are all drunk — you're beyond the laughing stage, where you can't even stand up drunk. And you look around the brick streets, and it's foggy, and you just sit there and you think you're in the center of it all, man."
Pepper Keenan, Corrosion of Conformity singer/ guitarist, is enthusiastically regaling Columbia Records publicist Jocelyn Loebl and me about New Orleans' most famous holiday — Mardi Gras, of course. Pepper, being an untamed child of Louisiana's party town, is a Fat Tuesday expert. Our happy trio is having drinks and dinner on the second-floor patio of a French Quarter restaurant. The street lamps lining Decatur Street glitter flirtatiously, even though Mardi Gras is weeks away. No matter the time of year, though, this small but wanton stretch of New Orleans real estate beckons with the promise of high spirits and wild times.
Pepper is certainly in his element, and he's feeling fine. C.O.C.'s playing in his hometown of N'Awlins the next night, and they're about to embark on a tour opening for Megadeth. With the success and rave reviews that the group's latest record, Deliverance, has received, it's a sure bet that most Megadeth attendees will be showing up early for C.O.C.
Suddenly, I have a brain flash and am forced to interrupt Pepper's dreamy Mardi Gras reverie.
"Um, Pepper? You're gonna be out of town for this year's Mardi Gras, aren't you? Aren't you going to be on the road with Megadeth?"
An anxious look crosses Pepper's face. "Is it early this year? Somuvabitch, I wasn't even thinking about that."
"Megadeth's tour goes until the end of February," Jocelyn tells us.
Pepper's face falls and an aura of gloom settles over the table.
"I've never missed a Mardi Gras in my life," he groans with a shake of his head. "Even when I lived in France, I saw it. They had it in Paris. Damn! That sucks."
Finally, he shrugs off the melancholy moment and continues playing tour guide.
"That's where we'll probably end up tonight, down here on Decatur Street. It's like the seedy side of the French Quarter. It's fucking amazing. You walk down these streets, and you just have this weird air that 150 years ago there was some sailor from England who was hooked on heroin, or 250 years ago pirates were drinking booze in the streets. You know, basically degenerates, and they were just doing the same shit people are doing right now. Now it's all punkers in leather jackets and Misfits freaks. Everybody I grew up with, we still hang out in the French Quarter. It's still the fuckin' funnest, most uninhibited place, and you ain't gotta worry about anything. There's 10 gazillion bars, they stay open until nine in the morning, some of them don't even close.... We used to go out bringing sunglasses with us, knowing we'd be out when the sun came out — fuckin' vampires, man."
He's right. There is a rapture that overtakes you once you step into these ancient streets. And there's a dark side to the 24-hour vivacity that creeps into your bones, a bewitching force that compels you to step over the edge into a world where anything goes.
There's a taste of that New Orleans black magic in C.O.C. these days. They blend the heaviest of blues rock and the fiercest of hardcore aggression with a wicked swagger. There's a wayward release listening to Deliverance or seeing the band play live. Those big chunks of riffs on "Albatross," the badass rhythm of "Clean My Wounds," Pepper's ungodly scream on the blistering "My Grain" — it's a rollicking explosion of energy. In addition, C.O.C.'s sound has reached a new level of maturity. If a small minority want to moan that the quartet hasn't kept strictly to its hardcore roots, so what?
"I've heard a few people say shit about it," Pepper shrugs. "But I don't care, it doesn't bother me. It's just, I don't like people who slam things based upon past shit a band's done, especially a band like C.O.C., man. I mean, the band has done so much, you know? And to repeat yourself in those situations is just, in our opinion, suicide. It doesn't make any sense. We want to push things every time."
The truth is, C.O.C.'s music is just as brutal as ever, and the band could easily dive back into that 'core 'tude if they so desired.
"We have a whole shitload of songs that are fully capable of doing that," Pepper affirms. "But we'll do it on our terms, and I don't want to do it right now — especially right now, because everybody's doing it. We don't have to prove ourselves, 'cause C.O.C. did it when nobody else was doing it. What's the point of trying to hang onto something, you know? But it's not like we're trying to get away from it all. It's just that at this time and moment, we don't feel like doing it."
The next day, when I have lunch with drummer Reed Mullin and guitarist Woody Weatherman, both North Carolina natives, they concur with their bandmember's statements.
"Now that Mike Dean's back, a lot of people were thinking that it would be way more hardcore," Reed nods.
"Mike, the group's bassist — who returned after a six-year absence — is back at the hotel nursing a small cold so that he'll be up for the show. Reed, Woody and I are nursing small hangovers. Well, mine's small; I don't know about the other two. Still, it's pretty amazing that we're all capable of having an animated chat. Naturally, we can't help touching on the resurgence of punk rock. The phenomenon's on everybody's mind these days, and for a band like C.O.C., who were doing it 13 years ago, it's no surprise they have something to say.
"The thing that pisses me off is this redefinition of what punk rock is," Reed asserts. "Like, they're calling all these happy punk bands 'punk rock.' That isn't fucking punk rock! None of these bands would have lasted three minutes at a Black Flag show. They would have been pummeled. Punk rock was fucking Black Flag and Bad Brains and Minor Threat. It was angry."
Back when C.O.C. started, punk rock wasn't the property of every mall rat. It was outlaw music with a small, grassroots following.
"Our first album, we put that thing out ourselves," Woody recalls. "We totally distributed it ourselves. I remember sitting over in Reed's office shoving the things in these plastic bags. It was total do-it-yourself."
"Then we booked our own tour," Reed adds.
"Yeah, it was great," Woody smiles. "I don't think any of us had aspirations to be this huge band; we just were digging on what we were doing. We didn't expect to be huge, because that kind of music didn't get huge. It's weird to still be doing exactly what we want to do, but now the time has caught up and C.O.C. can be on the radio."
While C.O.C. was working its way up the ladder of success, so were some of their fans, most notably their A&R guy at Columbia, Jim Welch.
"When he was going to Tufts in Boston," Reed recalls with a grin, "he'd call me up and try to get us to play up there for his school. Halloween shows were the things he always booked."
Then Jim got a job at Relativity Records, and guess who he signed to the label? The result of C.O.C.'s association with Jim and Relativity was Blind. Although the record was well-received and C.O.C. toured endlessly behind it, no one lived happily ever after.
"Jim got fired the day Blind came out," Reed tells me. "There was this wholesale firing at Relativity. Everybody we knew, all the reasons that we went to Relativity in the first place, were gone in like one week."
It didn't take Jim long to hook up with Columbia, first with Earache Records and then with the corporation itself. Naturally he wanted to work with C.O.C. again, and the feeling was mutual. Coincidentally, a number of people working C.O.C.'s record at Columbia are Relativity alumni.
With a dozen years of history, putting together a set list for the shows isn't easy.
"We've got too many songs," Reed explains. "There's a killer song that we don't play that's from the new record — 'Pearls Before Swine.'"
It turns out that that song was inspired by a small item Reed read in a history book. In the 1930s, a Jewish journalist named Stefan Lux committed suicide in front of a League of Nations meeting. At the time, no one understood the danger Hitler was posing, and Lux was trying to make them aware of it. Instead, his act has been buried for decades.
"Oh man, it's the saddest story on Earth," Reed says. "The guy totally went for it. He was making the biggest sacrifice he could make. But he went down there and made this amazing speech and offed himself, and no one gave a shit."
Reed is always aligning himself with one worthy cause or another. His latest project is putting a compilation album together to benefit the Leonard Peltier defense fund.
"We've got Sick of It All, Bad Religion, Rage Against the Machine," he tells me. "We did a Minutemen song with Zack from Rage singing. That turned out badass."
But then, just about anything C.O.C. does is badass. That's proved by the evening's show: The club is loaded with crazed New Orleans maniacs hungry for some ear-blasting lunacy — and C.O.C. ferociously gives it to them. The walls shake with older tunes, like "Vote With a Bullet," and newer ones, like "Heaven's Not Overflowing," "Deliverance" and my favorite, "My Grain." I look around at the audience; these are definitely a bunch of hard-drinking, professional partyers. No wonder Mardi Gras is an institution. Too bad Pepper's gonna miss it this time around....
Well, there must have been some Vieux Carre voodoo floating favorably around Pepper. Later, back in Los Angeles, I find out that C.O.C.'s last show with Megadeth is on February 25 — in L.A. — three days before the climax of Mardi Gras. Naturally, I have to go backstage after that blistering final gig. In a week and a half, the guys will be off to Europe for two months. But for now, Pepper's got other things on his mind — like packing his belongings as quickly as possible.
"I'm taking the plane out tonight," he beams.
It turns out Woody's going too. Their plane lands in New Orleans at 6:30 a.m., and I'm sure by seven they'll be cruising the French Quarter, drinks in hand, surrounded by freaks and bare-breasted women. I hope they get some sleep on the flight, because it'll be the last rest they get for a while.
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