Alabama Sharp Interviews Adam Harmless
Alabama punk rock pioneer/legend Alabama Sharp (The Knockabouts, Monster God, The Go-Go Killers) interviewed Tiger Helicide and GAD! Zine founder Adam Harmless for GAD! issue 25. Both continue to do their part in keeping underground music alive in the state.
ALABAMA SHARP: Good sir Mr. Harmless, tell me about yourself....
ADAM HARMLESS: I'm an artist from the Gadsden, AL area. I've got a couple of punk rock bands going, Tiger Helicide and Hot For Creature. I've had some other bands and solo noise projects over the years as well. I've also been known to put together zines with my friends.
SHARP: Gadsden, Alabama. Tell me a little about that place. Did you grow up there?
HARMLESS: I was born in Gadsden, but moved away when I was about five. I mostly grew up in Pell City. A weird place. Gadsden is weird, but Pell City just seemed.... Anyway, I grew up there and moved to Jacksonville to go to college. Spent about 7 years in college (almost made it to junior!). Met my wife and we started a family and somehow ended up back in Gadsden. Which, surprisingly, turned out to be what I needed to finally make some of my bigger creative ideas happen. I was never understood in Pell City.SHARP: Tell me about college. What were you studying? What was your motivation, and why didn't you finish?
HARMLESS: I majored in art. I was always good at drawing, sculpting, painting. That's what I was known for all my life. I'm never the most skilled, but I'm pretty good a making my art be what it needs to be. In general, I did pretty well. I did get kinda full of myself there. I had teachers who thought I was "real". Minored in a billion different things. Kinda put it on hold for family.
SHARP: Tell me about your family. You met your wife in college, right?
HARMLESS: Yep. Darlene Vile. We actually met working at the same McDonald's. I worked maintenance and she was the cool girl that worked the counter. She saw through my self-righteous self-absorbed bullshit. It's impossible to illustrate how much I love her. And we have two teenage daughters who are amazing.
SHARP: How long have you two been married?
HARMLESS: As of May, it's been 20 years.
SHARP: Congratulations!
HARMLESS: Thank ya!
SHARP: So tell me about art, and it's meaning to you.
HARMLESS: Outside of family, it's everything to me. Art is this thing that makes humans soooo interesting, but remarkably, few of us really place much value on it. Art is the closest thing to religion to me. It's the closest thing to magic that we make.
SHARP: Do you remember when you got the muse? What inspired you?
HARMLESS: I've always drawn. In another life, I might've been a cartoonist or an abstract painter. I was always just kinda weird though. I had this dog character named Ruffles, who always looked super dumbly happy while something bad was about to happen. Drawing was the only thing I did that got me positive attention. Later on, writing kinda would be the big thing that folks noticed about me. Cyndi Lauper was my first crush. When I was a teenager, I discovered early Faith No More. Chuck Mosley and Mike Patton were both super neat-o to me. They paved the way to punk rock. That made me wanna be a musician. which literally no one asked for hahaha. Oh and it sounds lame, but I loooooved Nirvana. And Kurt's paintings were pretty cool. I still get butterflies when I see an old Cyndi Lauper video. They're like these fantasy worlds where the weirdos are accepted. Kinda the same with Rock'N'Roll High School.
SHARP: How old are you?
HARMLESS: Turned 42 in late April.
SHARP: So as far as music, how old were you when you discovered what moved you? Was it Faith No More? And what others?
HARMLESS: Yeah, Faith No More was the biggie. I'd heard The Real Thing and really liked it. Mike Patton at the time dressed like my friends and I (complete with Nintendo watches!). When we went to the record store at Century Plaza in Birmingham, I knew I just had to buy an FNM cassette. I didn't know which one I wanted. I liked what I'd heard on the The Real Thing (Epic, etc), but I wanted to understand the band. I didn't know how to buy music! So I looked on the backs and just bought the tape with the earliest date. That was their first album, We Care A Lot. My first real music purchase and it was from an indie label (Mordam). I was horrified when a friend on the drive home said, "Oh, this is when Chuck Mosley was the singer." I was in shock. Bands can change singers?? Luckily, I loved Chuck and the music on that tape. On the rerelease, there's demos where Chuck sings waaaay better. He gets a bad rap. Do you think the Bad Brains would've had him as a singer for 2 years if he sucked?? When I finally got to meet Chuck, I got him to autograph the cassette. It's white and all the print had worn away from carrying it in my pocket for years. I loved Nirvana. Didn't care much for most of the other "grunge" bands. They were cleaner sounding. But I can't stress to youngin's what a massive leap radio took when Nirvana hit. I fell in love with the Sex Pistols from the movie Sid & Nancy. Which, now that I know so much about the band, I find impossible to watch. I love the Cure. Robert Smith's lyrics did a lot for me. The Ramones were a massive influence, even their later stuff. As they tried and tried to sell out, they still held on to their basic style, which proved how you can really say any damn thing with simple music. The Misfits, too. Punk Rock made me wanna do music. The first art form I "failed" at.
SHARP: I never got over Chuck Mosley not being the singer of FNM. But we're talking about you. So as far as music and art.... how and why did you make the leap from a listener to a writer and performer?
HARMLESS: I think it was the lyrical side of it. All of the aforementioned bands had unusual idiosyncratic lyrics. Punk Rock says that anyone can do it. So I went for it. There weren't many punk rockers (or any other kinda rockers) in Pell City then. I was shy and quiet, still can be, so it was hard to convince folks to form a band around me singing. So I got an electric guitar. I played it badly and applied my lyrics to the noise. Eventually, I got a band going in 1995 called The Mostly Harmless?. I'm named after that band.
SHARP: Cool name.
HARMLESS: Thank ya!
SHARP: In your earlier years, before you were in a band, but drawing, writing, experimenting etc, what was your circle like? Anyone encouraging you?
HARMLESS: My mother had been a grammar teacher years before I was born, so I guess that's where I got my writing skills. She encouraged me to write and to draw. My dad kinda did too, but didn't place much value in it. He had a lotta problems. I think he was sorta a damaged artist type, but refused to be that. Saw no value in it. But he could create so much neat stuff. My mom's dad was like that too, without the damage hahaha. I really appreciated poetry. Because it can literally be anything. Later, in college, I kept taking sculpting classes because I had a similar freedom. A lot of my writing is like word sculpting. My younger brother Drew has always been there with me to back me up on stuff. He's more of a movie guy than a music guy. My friends were mostly outcast types. They were always game for my ideas. We'd make zines and I'd hand-paint shirts with dumb stuff and we'd all wear them to school on the same day. There was usually a mischievous streak in stuff I worked on. My writing was usually comedy. Simple to read stories with just odd stuff happening.
SHARP: And as far as your ventures into music.... can you share a timeline of what you were creating? And any co-conspirators?
HARMLESS: Sure. I formed The Mostly Harmless? in 1995 with my friend Kevin, who became Ash Nagasaki, and my friend Ansel, who became Ansel Oister (later Super-Donut). We made a ton of demos and played a few house shows. We were terrible. I wanted to play super fast, Kevin wanted to play super slow, and Ansel was just a mess on drums. Not to say he was worse than us, but if the beat's good, you can put up with the rest. In hindsight, I should've slowed down more. We had some stuff that was sorta in a Flipper vein. I tried too hard to write "punk" on a lotta tunes. But we did play and record "So In Love" which is still a song I do today. Later Kevin left and Rapid Randy of the Nic-o-teens stepped in to play bass for a demo. We were kind influential in the "well I can do better than that"kinda way. But we were the coolest looking band! Randy was a skilled musician. I used to make sound collage things and later experimental noise. Later, Randy and I tried to form a zombie pop punk band called The Brain Drainers (we finally recorded a tune from that project as Hot For Creature last year. We're gonna do more hopefully soon). That fell apart. Randy went on to briefly play in the Parasites and then went on to join Model Citizen and The Backseat Virgins. I kept the name and formed a new band. That version of the Brain Drainers featured Matt Harlot on bass and Skid Mark on drums. We were like an artier worse version of Tiger Helicide, but waaaay better than most of The Mostly Harmless? hahaha. That went away and I recorded a horror-techno thing as The Gravelees with help from Darlene. I kept making my solo noise through the early 2000's. Then, in 2009, Tiger Helicide happened....
SHARP: Tell me about Tiger Helicide... there is a 10+ year history now.
HARMLESS: TH formed in 2009. We played mostly my old songs because I wasn't talented enough to play the songs written by the other more skilled members. The original line-up never played out, but rehearsed in front of friends for about a year. That line-up was me on guitar, Casey (aka The K.C. Dilla) on bass, Johnny Ta-Tas on drums, and Kolbey (aka Koltrane) on vocals. Ta-Tas jumped shipped and Casey switched to drums. He's a much better drummer, so that's fine. We figured it'd be easier to replace a bassist. Kolbey eventually skipped. He wasn't really a singer and I think he felt uncomfortable. So I ended up being the singer again. So Casey and I persevered and eventually home-recorded our first EP, TIGER HELICIDE OR DIE. We followed that with the Romero & Juliet EP and then the Fight For Your Riot full-length. Casey played drums, bass, additional rhythm guitar, and a bunch of cool lead parts. We decided to focus more just recording a cool album (especially since we figured it'd probably be our only one), than worrying about how we'd play it all live. We still kinda work like that. For us the live performance is different from recording. For TH, a recording isn't a documentation or recreation of a live performance. So the live thing is different from the studio thing for us. I think that mostly comes back to me being an artist more than a musician. Whatever it takes to create the final piece is reasonable to me. Besides, as a music fan, I've always loved hearing the very different live takes of my favorite songs. Once we finished recording that first album, we did decide to play out at shows, so we needed more members. First, we added our friend Kenneth on guitar. He's a pro and kills on it. We played a show without a bass player and recorded a video for "Chinese Heart". We played a show with another Casey on bass. Then we replaced him with Jacob (aka Bartholomew Sebastian) from Russian Love Machine. That's basically our classic line-up. We played a ton of shows (mostly in Huntsville). We recorded "My Fists Bleed Death/I.E.D.". After a while, Kenneth was out, and we were a 3-piece. Then we added Jared (aka Just Pam aka Ferdinand Sebastian), the other half of Russian Love Machine. I went to just vocals. I sorta ended up in a bad musical mental place and ran off the rest of the band, ending that uh... "era". I thought they didn't care (I was wrong and I hurt a lot of folks, myself included) and I was frustrated that we weren't recording much. I grabbed up Kolbey, and we recorded the next TH EP with Michael Kilpatrick (you two may have met....). I played very little guitar and sang. Michael did everything thing else. Drums, bass, guitars, most of the back-up vocals. Kolbey did a little back vocals. I had a deal with Ed Brussa of Rabiez 4 Babiez to record the 2nd TH album, so I began recording with him and no band. We recorded "In Your Veins" with local record store owner Carl Lackey on additional guitar and Ed playing everything else.. Sounded very different from everything up to that point. I soon teamed up with Dick Hickey (of the Andies and Dammit Bobby) and on drums. We did a show where Bradley Ace sat in on bass. Then we went to record the rest of the album. I talked Jacob into coming back on bass. The album is a mess, but kinda works. We swapped folks around right after. At that point, it was me on rhythm guitar, Dick on lead guitar, Jacob on drums, and we added Frank from The Robert Muldoon Effect on bass. We recorded "Death Rays & Razor Blades" with him and played a couple of shows. He left, and we brought in Matthew Harris of Ugly Pompous Grin and Glass House. His addition meant that he and Jacob could swap-up playing bass and drums when desired or necessary. We recorded our split with the Boneyard Mafia with this line-up and released our "side" online as "The Zodiac Killer E.P.". Soon after that release, we added Jay Dubya Hyde (Screaming Cocks, RUSHPUNK, Dammit Bobby) on rhythm guitar, essentially taking my place in that department. He can effortlessly play what I struggle to mess up. He joined just in time to be a part of our single, "Punk Rock Fanzine". Later, while recording our contribution to a Chuck Mosley tribute comp I was putting together, things kinda got messy and Dick was out. Jesse Norris of The Old World Underground joined immediately after seeing me handling guitar duties on my own at a show. We played some shows with him. That's when we recorded the live E.P.. Shortly after that, Casey returned to the band. At the moment, he's mostly handling the drums live, but plays whatever when we record. So the current line-up is:
Adam Harmless
Casey Ponder (The K.C. Dilla)
Jacob Ragan (Bart Sebastian)
Matthew Harris
Jay Dubya Hyde
Jesse Norris (Jesse Forever)
We currently work as more of a collective. We have our dominant instruments, but really, no one is locked down to playing any particular thing. We literally have some of the best Gadsden area musicians in the band.... and me.
SHARP: So are you the primary driving force behind Tiger Helicide? By that I mean lyrics, structure, planning etc., or do y’all do things collectively?
HARMLESS: Almost all the lyrics are mine. A lot of the music is an outgrowth of something I'd bang out on guitar. Then everyone will expand on it and make it real. We've been jamming more lately though and I just put my poetry on top of their stuff. That really expands what we are capable of.
SHARP: Ok. That’s what I thought. As far as “music” what do you consider TH to be? What do you hope people think or respond to it?
HARMLESS: We usually simplify it to just "punk rock". That definitely covers our live sound. I've always gone in expecting to be misunderstood. A lot of the songs are very personal. Even the dumb ones. I feel like when we get a fan, it's an achievement.
SHARP: Now let’s get to your self-published written work also called Tiger Helicide. Is this your first publication?
HARMLESS: Indeed it is. I had a couple of immediate books in mind and I decided to focus on this one first.
SHARP: So tell me about Tiger Helicide. How would you describe it to someone coming in cold?
HARMLESS: I call it philosophical sci-fi/hyper-non-fiction. It's an adventure book that is most digestible in small doses.
SHARP: What future plans do you have Mr. Harmless?
HARMLESS: Future plans: Tiger Helicide is recording our last album. After that, it'll be mostly smaller releases. We've always been more of a singles band anyway. But that album will be the best thing anyone has ever heard from us. The Tiger Helicide book will be receiving an audio book treatment read by our friend, Jerrod Beavers. He was actually one of the few witnesses to that first rehearsal-only TH. Has a great mouth for voice-overs. Hot For Creature has more singles on the way as well. All of this would've already been finished were it not for current events. I've already started on my next book, which will be a very different read, about punk rock in Alabama. That'll probably eventually be a sort of series. There's too much to cover for one book, and I'm just not the guy to write our version of England's Dreaming. Mine will be more quick and fun. I like quick and fun these days.
SHARP: Who would win in a fight.... The Flash or the Clash?
HARMLESS: Ooh. The Flash, but the Clash would look cool losing.
SHARP: Most uplifting song: Imagine by John Lennon, or I Kill Children by the Dead Kennedys
HARMLESS: IKC for sure!
SHARP: DOA or AOD?
HARMLESS: DOA at the moment.
SHARP: Big Boys Fat Elvis or Skinny Elvis?
HARMLESS: Fat.
SHARP: Black Flag or Pink Flag?
HARMLESS: Black Flag
SHARP: Glenn Danzig or Glenn Campbell?
HARMLESS: Danzig!
SHARP: More punk: The Police or Blondie?
HARMLESS: Blondie. But Every Breath You Take is fantastic.
SHARP: Best hardcore frontman?
HARMLESS: Keith Morris.
SHARP: Best punk guitarist?
HARMLESS: Gotta go with Johnny Ramone
SHARP: Best punk drummer?
HARMLESS: Hmmmm. Bill Stevenson?
SHARP: Pick 3 bands that you could magically go back in time to see in their prime.
HARMLESS: Sex Pistols, Joy Division, Misfits.
SHARP: Who is not a punk: Judy, Sheena, or Mucky?
HARMLESS: Mucky. Mucky is a pup.
SHARP: Haha. Yep.
[For the record, Adam thinks that the best punk bassist is Mike Roche...]
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