INTERVIEW: VICE COOLER

AMERICAN UNDERGROUND LORE APLENTY!

XBXRX were one of those bands that people told stories about. Long before I saw them play, I heard a string of secondhand tales that left a serious impression on me. I’m talking about matching outfits. I’m talking about crowd participation hijinks. I’m talking about really short sets. XBXRX freaked out in a uniquely Alabamian way, part of a larger tradition that connects Man or Astro-man? with Sun Ra. The band, which was started in Mobile when core members Vice Cooler and his brother Steve Touchton were still teenagers, cut a mirth-filled path through the 2000s underground. It was playful no wave, at once positive and unhinged. They moved from Alabama to California and they went on tour with Sonic Youth.

Cooler also had a solo act called Hawnay Troof, which could read like a hardcore punk take on Miami bass and often featured him playing in nothing but a Speedo. Between that and XBXRX, he was constantly on the road, his performances helping to shape the language of DIY in the aughts. In the time since, Cooler has worked on way too many projects to mention, spread across music, photo, and video. Collaborators include Peaches and Kim Gordon. He’s been a touring drummer in The Raincoats. The CV is thick, people. This is not to mention everything he’s done to help in the wake of the recent wildfires that hit his home of Los Angeles. 

In an attempt to capture some lost details of a special era of American music, I linked up with Vice virtually. We talked about the early days of XBXRX, the South in the ‘90s, getting branding advice from Ian MacKaye, and a whole lot more.

People are interested in 2000s music right now. They know about The Strokes and screamo and electroclash, but they don't necessarily know about the cuttier things that happened at the same time that are just as interesting.

There was a good decade where nobody ever brought up XBXRX at all with me. I'm okay with that, but it's also like, if you live making that art, you sacrifice mental health, physical health, having stability when some of your peers might have had stability. The give and take of that is you become fortunate enough to experience life in a different way. You get to tour with bands and see how they work behind the scenes. You get to go around the world and see places you would never get to see if you're from a middle-class or lower-class background. 

I was a bit conflicted about nothing being brought up. Part of it is I started to physically feel the deterioration set in. I have extremely bad lower back problems that are chronic now and I'm starting to feel knee pain more and things that I know are related to that period. My teeth are all chipped and really messed up. So I was kind of like, Oh, I destroyed my body for what, why did I do that, I should have probably just gotten a stable job or whatever. 

Yeah, I can relate.

But then, post-pandemic, I'll just be at a random show at The Smell or somewhere, and a lot of younger people are now coming up and asking me questions. With every generation, there's kids that weren't alive in aughts, and so I think once kids hit 18 or whatever, all these things are new information. You saw it a few years ago where you would hear all this stuff that just sounds like Liz Phair, these records on Matador that are huge. It’s like, Oh, well, Matador did Liz Phair in the ‘90s. But you got to remember these kids weren't alive when Exile In Guyville came out.

It's cool that young people have been talking to you. Seemingly one thing that has been less present in the 2000s revival is the kind of noise rock end of it, but that's subject to change. Maybe you've seen that changing? 

I'm aware that living in Southern California, we're connected to the whole lineage of like, Three One G and GSL and The Locust. I know I'm in a bit of a particular bubble, just due to my location. I'm skeptical of anything that's criticism or praise. I don't want to name names, but a lot of the bands that are reuniting and selling out these massive shows, I'm like, I don't really know if that needs to be remembered. And I would put some of our stuff in the same hand. For me, it's a seesaw, because a lot of the music was just absurd, and you just had to see it and be there. In the context of older bands playing now, it's not what it was, just due to aging, and people not being on drugs. 

A lot of that stuff was about the energy in the room. I mean, with XBXRX, I feel like I heard stories about your band’s live sets long before I saw you play live, which is a testament to something.

Every band from that period, like Lightning Bolt or Black Dice or The Locust, we didn't know it at the time, but we were experiencing the final breath of a particular lifestyle of making art and presenting it to people. Because within five years of all these bands starting to tour a lot, you started to have cell phones, MapQuest, being able to book tours very solidly via email. Social media after that, MySpace and Friendster and Flickr, things started to change. I think XBXRX had half a million listens on one of our songs on MySpace. That didn't seem like a big number because I'm sure Hella or somebody had a million or whatever. We were not realizing the power of it at the time because it was just this new thing. 

I remember an earlier encounter I had with XBXRX, I think it was a photo of you on the Tapes Records website. There was something striking about the image to me—you all had your hands in the air, like you were clapping, but I don't think any of you were holding a musical instrument. So there was some kind of intrigue there. Is this a rock band? Is this something else? You all had matching outfits.

XBXRX was a band where everybody had slightly different variations of what the purpose was, because we didn't discuss the psychology of anything. We were from the South and there was so much resistance and so much pushback on everything we liked and everything we were doing and bands we'd bring through. Also, all of us grew up watching wrestling, so there were wrestling aspects that I think were subconsciously probably there. I think we were really into countering whatever seemed normal. We didn't discuss it, I don't even know whose idea it was—it might have been mine, it might have been Steve's—but we were like, Yeah, let's have no song titles. Let's have no identity. Let's have no credits. 

At a certain point the minimalism got so extreme that we did the Clear record on Ian Vanek from Japanther’s label Tapes. There was a sticker on the front that identifies it, but once you open it, there's no information whatsoever. 15 years later, Kanye did that with Yeezus, whether or not that was an influence, I don't know, but it's the same mindset of minimalism. I remember one time I went into Dischord after that came out because Ian MacKaye recorded it. And Ian was like, Dude, you got to think about the people that buy your stuff, at least put the name somewhere on the CD, even if it's small, because somebody might buy it and forget about it, open it and lose it, and then a year later they don't know what it is.

He’s giving you a lesson on branding! He is kind of a branding genius. I'm sure he would hate that.

You see the porch with no one on it and you know what that is. 

It’s funny, you had that minimalism, but watching some of these old YouTube videos of XBXRX playing live, there was also this true sense of chaos. It seems like you were banned from a lot of Alabama venues early on. 

We got banned from the University of South Alabama twice. The first time they booked us in a lobby at noon, and I remember this guy named Carlos Moore, who became a lawyer in Mississippi, I think, he was so offended that we were playing music that he wrote this total legal letter to somebody high up on campus. We ended up getting a copy of it and used as inserts on some of videos at some point. We got booked again, because Quintron requested that we open for him there, maybe a year later. They weren't allowed to advertise on campus that we were playing, but off campus, we were on the flyers.

That's the time when we started bringing in interpretive dancers, there was maybe eight of us, officially, in the group. Me and my friend Joey would go behind Goodwill at night and take all the donations and then have whatever's in those bags be what's at the shows. But at the same time, we were really into like, let's get baseball bats, and if there's anything electronic, it just gets ripped out of the bag and we destroy it. But we would also bring brooms and clean it up immediately after. We were really into this idea of having it just be complete destruction, which I think that's sort of where a little bit of the wrestling stuff comes in. We were chasing the feeling of when people are out of the ring and someone gets thrown into a table and the table breaks. It's an illusion of safety being gone, but no one's going to get hurt, even though people did get hurt, but that's a different thing. 

We accidentally caught a stage on fire in Mobile and that was a legitimate ban. That was an early, early show where we were bringing in shredded paper we got from Kinko's and then catching it on fire on stage. There was a lot of stuff that we were exploring that might have been related to us finding out about Dada and stuff like that. 

It’s interesting to do that in the South, especially in the late ‘90s. Were you playing hardcore shows at all?

Well, what's weird is we got immediately shelved into that. We always did good in Central and Southern Florida for some reason. A lot of those shows were two-dozen band hardcore shows that started at like 1 p.m. and it'd be us and Pg. 99 and Jeromes Dream and that kind of stuff. It was always weird because in the car, when we were on tour, we'd listen to Weezer or Spice Girls or Beck or Smashing Pumpkins or Nirvana or Sonic Youth. We weren't listening to Black Flag or anything on Ebullition. When we recorded with Ian MacKaye, I’m pretty sure none of us had ever heard anything on Discord. 

How did that happen?

Ian saw one of the videos, I made these VHS videos that I would dub and edit on VCRs. My thing was like, well, this show, there were 20 good seconds. So I just put 20 good seconds from this show, five seconds from that show, ten seconds from that show, a band we like—five seconds from their show. I didn't know I was making collage art or anything. I was just like, Oh, well, I'm putting the best stuff on a video. But that became something that a lot of people saw. Now that I work in film, looking back on it, that’s how I started editing and directing in a way. 

Totally. 

But I did not realize that for 20 years. So people would bootleg those and send them around. I'm pretty sure this guy, Karl, who books shows in Gulfport, Mississippi, copied it and sent it to Ian, because me and Steve of XBXRX ot home from school one day, and he had called and left a voicemail, which I still have the tape of somewhere. I don't remember what he said, but it was just a really nice message. I remember it being supportive. Our dream was like, if we could play in Tennessee, you know, we had these weird goals that were vague, we want to play out of town because that's what bands do or whatever. 

Either me or Steve called Ian back and he was really nice and I just remember we felt supported and understood by an adult. And I think he or maybe Karl or somebody mentioned that he records. We loved playing out of town and we loved recording out of town, it was really exotic to us. It was kind of both of those things that motivated us to write material. I wouldn't say that, at that time, any of us understood songwriting or necessarily enjoyed it. I do remember, this is a long time ago, but when we had recording sessions booked, that's kind of when we would be like, great, let's write 20 songs or whatever. 

Prior to that, with recording at the end, we did one of our first East Coast shows. Quix*o*tic set us up a show in D.C. and not that many people were there, but Ian came and he brought Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth. So we met them at the show and I remember they brought Eddie Vedder. 

That’s wild. You were all still in high school, right? 

Yeah, I'm pretty sure we were all teenagers. Devin Instre might have been 20. But yeah, we were super, super young. And then I remember I was standing at the door and at that point, I did know who Guy [Picciotto] was, so I was like, Oh, I think that's that dude, Guy. And then Ted Leo came in who we had met in Texas. I remember a lot of The Make-Up came in and I'd seen The Make-Up at that point. As a teenager, seeing The Make-Up in the ‘90s, the way I remember it in my mind, which is obviously not how it happened, but it felt like the ceiling opened up in Tallahassee and then a spaceship came down. They were just so otherworldly at that time to me, with their energy, their presentation. 

So essentially you played to nobody but a bunch of serious heads. 

We had self-released a seven-inch that we were selling for two dollars. I think the bad part of being schooled by DIY punk is like, I still love and try to live by anti-capitalist values and things like that, but at the time no one explained to us that if you're not a trust fund kid, you have to survive if you want to keep doing it. So I wish in hindsight we would have sold records for four dollars or whatever, three dollars. We had the video tapes I made that I would dub on my own that were five dollars. We definitely had shirts. 

No one really bought anything and then Thurston and Eddie came up at the same time and they gave us a hundred dollars each. And then we were like, Oh, we got to go make change at the door or something. And they were both like, No, man, keep it, you need this. That was my first impression of both of them, they're fucking so nice and generous, and this is going to be so helpful. Because to us, two hundred dollars, that pays for all of our gas at the time for the tour. 

Back then, two hundred dollars went far. 

Yeah, it's like a thousand bucks in gas, you know, gas prices were under a dollar. I ended up seeing Sonic Youth with Pearl Jam, maybe eight or ten years later in San Francisco. Pearl Jam did “Yellow Ledbetter” and I forget which of the guitarists, but one of them was trying to smash this Les Paul and it wouldn't smash. It just kept going on and on and on, and I thought it was awesome because with XB stuff, if stuff wouldn't break, we thought it was funny if you kept trying. It’s kind of a gag, if you do it a hundred times and nothing happens and it's supposed to be climatic and you never get it, that's even better.

Me and Thurston went back to the Sonic Youth room and Eddie was in there just sitting in a chair. Thurston asked what I thought of the ending, and I was like, That was fucking sick. I wish every Pearl Jam show ended with guitars not breaking. I remember we walked back and then Eddie was like, I don't know about that ending. He’s kind of bummed and then Thurston said, Vice fucking loved it. Eddie perked up and was like, You know, if you liked it, I'm kind of stoked, because your whole band's basis is only doing the climax—what a band does in their last ten minutes, that’s what your whole set is. 

That’s sort of the perfect way to describe XBXRX. 

Yeah, skip the first hour and just do the last ten minutes. 

How did Hawnay Troof start?

That started when I was a kid. At the time, I got into Operation Re-Information, it was Man or Astro-man? related, it was hard to find out who was in it because it was very coded and had a whole lore behind it. I remember the first laptop I saw on stage was with Rob from Man or Astro-man?, who was also in ORI, who offered their sampler program for free. Me and Steve downloaded that, and we kept trying to figure out ways to use it, but the computers that we had were so bulky and slow that we couldn't really figure it out. Shortly after that, somebody showed me a crack of early, early, FruityLoops. I started making remixes of songs. You would cut a sample in Cool Edit and you would loop it for five or ten minutes to a click and kind of try to guess. I figured out you could put Weezer’s Blue Album in Cool Edit and then take a kick from the beginning of “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here” and be like, I have a unique kick sound.

That was really exciting. Again, I wasn't listening to Black Flag or anything like that. It was everything from Juvenile to Smashing Pumpkins or Quintron as a teenager. I saw Peaches, that blew my mind. I feel like tastes then were not meshed together. People just liked specific things. 

What you were doing with both acts was maybe closer to the way people process music now.

At the time, I didn't have any awareness of where chords were. I couldn't look at a keyboard and know that's a C and that's an A. I didn't understand any of that stuff. I had to figure that out in my 30s, unfortunately. I was just running out of a computer mono into a four track cassette and then doing everything that way for years. Whenever we were in rooms with Steve Albini and Don Zientara and Ian MacKaye and all these people, I wish I would have paid more attention and asked more questions, but I was really shy, as I was a kid and also the South is pretty intense mentally. It took me like a long time to feel comfortable talking to people and asking things without being embarrassed about it. 

I started learning that stuff a little bit before I worked with Peaches on Rub. I produced and co-wrote and did a tremendous amount of work on that record. She was the first person to kind of throw all those responsibilities into my hands and just be like, Yeah, I'm not worried about it. I know you can do it. I remember one time we were in the room with The Cataracts, during peak Cataracts, like “Bass Down Low,” “Like a G6,” we were working at a big studio in Santa Monica, and it got to a point where they didn’t know how to work Pro Tools. I was like, Okay, I'm going to figure out how to get a mic to properly go through Pro Tools, work the ins and outs in a professional studio. And then I figured it out. I started getting forced to learn things. 

Am I wrong or was the first or second XBXRX show with Unwound? 

The first New York show I'm pretty sure was with Unwound at Brownies with Turing Machine, and that show really affected me because I met Tara Jane O'Neil, saw Tara Jane play, saw Unwound play twice. And then Justin from Turing Machine was like, there's a show down the street, Black Dice and Erase Errata underneath this pizza place, Two Boots. I loved Erase Errata and this was when the Black Dice ten-inch hardcore record came out, which is still one of my favorites—I think that's the best hardcore record ever made. Arguably might be a noise record, not a hardcore record, but whatever. So Justin dragged me in and then I climbed on top of the table and I was able to just see Black Dice's heads when they were doing stuff. I remember it was that energy of kind of improvised hardcore. There was so much feedback. That was one of the first things where I was like, Oh, XBXRX is not hardcore, but we're like this, this is what's in my brain. 

You and Lightning Bolt and Black Dice, I found out about all of that through hardcore. Then there was a point where it became its own scene.

Yeah, because I think Black Dice is similar, where they were listening to like Aislers Set and stuff. 

The story I've been told is that they were almost twee pop kids who were pretending to be a tough guy hardcore band. And that was kind of the magic of it.

Yeah. That ten-inch is maybe one of my top five, top ten records of all time. I still love putting on that record. 

It’s funny, at the beginning of this interview, we sort of talked about how a lot of this stuff was about the performance and the moment. But there was very good recorded music, too—experimental hardcore that I think has been missing from the conversation. 

At Amoeba, any time I see the Semen Of The Sun seven-inch by Black Dice, it’s there all the time for like $2, sometimes there'll be three copies, and I'll just buy all of them. I have probably ten copies of it. I meet people all the time that are just getting into hardcore and they're listening to maybe more meathead aspects of it. I’ll meet a kid and they're like, I just got into Turnstile or whatever; if I know I'm going to see them again at a show, I try to bring a copy of that seven-inch and I give it to them.

You're like the noise rock messenger to a new generation.

That's putting too much importance on it, but yeah, it's more like I am so enthusiastic about music that if there's something that someone might like, I try to tell them about it. I love when people do the same for me, like Blair from Snõõper is always sending me these completely obscure Bandcamps that like five people know about. I still love the exchange of information. When I was a kid, when I was like 14 or 15 and we'd play out of town, I would bring blank cassette tapes and VHS tapes and if we stayed somewhere where I could dub people's record collections or VHS collections I would dub stuff. That's how I got into early Miranda July stuff. I just think information is important, especially if it's attached to wanting to know more about it rather than being a surface playlist aspect. I'm more engaged with wanting to know the lore of it.

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