www.russstedman.com : The home of legendary home-tape recording artist Russ Stedman. Making weird noises since 1982.

Audio :

AUTO-REVERSE Magazine 2003
Interview by Michael J. Bowman

MJB: Is there anything you're feeling particularly mouthy about at the moment?

RS: I would like to ask George Bush 2 questions. 1) Where are the weapons of mass destruction? 2) Why is my gas still $1.50/gallon ? What else ? Oh...Tool is a very boring band. Drugs are dumb. It is the springtime of my loving, the second season I am to know.

MJB: Word. Musical influences?

RS: Kiss, Devo, Frank Zappa, Guided By Voices, The Beatles, Pink Floyd (Roger Waters albums only), Led Zeppelin, Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, Husker Du, The Didjits, David Bowie, Butthole Surfers, Buzzcocks, Grandaddy, The Knack, Lee Harvey Oswald Band, Supersuckers, Lou Reed, Prince, The Residents, Vibrators, Ween, ZZ Top, Weird Al Yankovic.

MJB: Wow, Kiss! Ian's gonna love this interview. What's your home recording setup?

RS: I have currently given up home recording, or any recording for that matter, so I don't really have one at the moment.

MJB: OK, so what was the classic Russ Stedman rig when you were making what I consider to be some of the better homemade rock music out there?

RS: I started with two tape recorders. After that it was a Tascam 4-Track followed by an 8-Track. Then I got a digital 8-track. After that I also did some stuff in Cakewalk Home Studio 2002. Didn't like that much. My favorite was the digital 8-Track I had, a Boss BR-8, which has sadly been discontinued. It was a great little machine.

MJB: How do you write songs?

RS: Many different ways. A lot of times I just sit down and make them up out of thin air with no pre-planning.

MJB: Like while the tape is rolling? Do you do drums first? Just lay down riffs and see what develops? Lay it on me.

RS: Not with the tape rolling...but I don't do a lot of demoing and refining...I just sit down and make up a song and record it. Usually I would do the drum machine first, just depends I guess.

MJB: Why do you write songs?

RS: Probably because I got tired of jumping around my room playing a cardboard guitar and miming to 'Kiss Alive!'. It also had something to do with the Beatles, I'm pretty sure.

MJB: Oh shit, Ian is going to LOVE this interview! You either work or have worked in record stores, right? I mean, the record store and everything in it has to be some kinda motivator, it was for me. I was like "Hey, I wanna make records and CDs too." Although I never worked in a record shop.

RS: I have worked in a record store for the past few years and plan on staying as long as I can. I'm not sure if it motivated me to write songs. I think a lot of my motivation was taken away by having a job I like so much. The best of songs come from the worst of times.

MJB: Are you active in your local music scene?

RS: Not anymore. I was quite active in the mid-90's. Since then, our best live music club has closed and it's just not the same any more.

MJB: Were you in a performing band, or did you only ever make recordings?

RS: I had a band in 95-96 called Ten Center that did my songs and covers. Nobody really cared for us, of course. After that I played guitar in a couple of Pop/Punk bands called The Sneakies & Stickler. It was fun, but then the live music scene died and there was no reason to be in a band anymore. Since then, it's come back, but not in any form I can relate to.

MJB: What music are you excited about right now?

RS: The new Grandaddy album (Sumday) totally kicks my ass. I love those guys.

MJB: They had the only good cover on that stupid movie soundtrack that was all Beatles covers. It was "Revolution". My sister said, "oh I love the Beatles covers, but why did that one band have to ruin Revolution?" I told her "Duh, it's a fucking musical Revolution, get it?" I guess she didn't.

RS: I haven't heard that, but Grandaddy's 1st album "Under The Western Freeway" is one of my all-time favs. Check it out !

MJB: Do you like being associated with the 'hometaping' movement, whatever that is?

RS: I like being associated with it. I feel very disconnected from it these days, however. Back in 1997 when I bought my first computer, I had this idea that the Internet would bring home-tapers together into a huge family. That never really happened. All the Internet did for me was make me lazierabout sending things in the mail, so in effect, it kind of ruined the home-taper excitement for me.

MJB: Well, it musta happened to everybody, because the amount of mail action totally died down.

RS: Exactly...everybody went into e-mail mode around '97 or so. Too bad you can't teleport a cassette. Downloading MP3's and sending e-mails just isn't the same.

MJB: Everybody got an mp3 page or something. I also thought burning CDs was gonna set the world on fire like. Get it, burning, fire? Uh, yeah. Whatever. I like having a computer to do stuff like slicing and dicing tracks, stuff I woulda had to do with physical tape edits or lame pause and play bounce techniques in the past. Did you get into using the computer as
part of your recording rig?

RS: I mostly got into the computer because of the internet in general. I also did Tech Support for Gateway for about 3 years, which taught me enough about computers to be able to pretty much build and fix them, and also earned me a nervous breakdown before I was done. The 90's were so great for the technology sector...and then it all came crashing down.

MJB: Yeah, computers suck. Hey, what would you say someone who is just buying their first multitracker, dreaming of the hundreds of homemade albums they are going to crank out?

RS: Try your best to be as self-indulgent as possible. Fuck what other people think.

MJB: Who were some of your favorite hometapers? Are you "Love, Calvin"? If not, who or what is "Love, Calvin"?

RS: Good lord no ! Love Calvin is my dear old friend Scott Johnson who currently resides in a tiny little town about 50 miles north of me called Madison, SD. He is a great guy who's had some tough times over the past 10 years, but is on an up-swing at the moment and getting ready to do his first recordings since about 1993. He is one of the greatest songwriters ever, and in fact, I am currently in the process of remastering all his old stuff for him...which will take forever, but it will be worth it. As far as favorite home tapers go I'd say the short list would be : Dino Dimuro, The Rudy Schwartz Project, Sockeye, M.O.T.O., Dan Fioretti, and a bunch more I can't think of right now.

MJB: On your website discography, some recordings are described as "art rock dogshit". Explain.

RS: That description comes from a project Evan Peta and I would work on occassionally called "The Michael Kenyon Seizure" (named after the real-life "Illinois Enema Bandit"). It was really just improvised noise and sonic clutter.

MJB: Do you still feel the need to make your older recordings available, or do you see them as "of the moment" stuff, like people were either in the scene and scooped them up, or interested parties now can just "fuhgeddabowdid"?

RS: I don't see any reason to make them 'available', unless someone specificly requests one.

GAJOOB Magazine - 1997
Interview by Bryan Baker

Here's a guitar, play me something/anything right now. (What are you playing?).

Probably some KISS song. I love KISS, the first rock record I ever bought (age 7) was "Rock N Roll Over". I’ve seen the new reunion tour twice now. I was a complete metal-head as a kid until I heard the SEX PISTOLS album when I was 16. It’s the ultimate cliché , but that album changed my life. I will give Heavy Metal credit for the fact that it inspired me to sit around playing guitar scales all day for a couple years as a teenager. It’s much easier to be interesting musically if you have a good command of the instrument. Then again, there are millions of ‘Fabulous Musicians’ that have about as much creativity as a bucket of cauliflower, so whatcha gonna do ? Gimme a ‘C’, a bouncy ‘C’ ! Dee Dee, Daa Daa, and whatever the hell else you wanna put in there !

Did you ever spit fire from your mouth?

Wow ! What a question ! I never have. Never even considered it. Put on the make-up plenty of times though. But…I was in a band called THE SNEAKIES. The most enjoyable band I’ve ever been in. Anyway, one of the high-points of our show visually was our bass player (Sideshow). Not only did he breathe fire on stage, but he also did this weird trick where he would suck a condom up his nose…grab the other end through his mouth…and squeegee it back and forth between orifices like some kind of twisted dental floss. Sadly, THE SNEAKIES have broken up, and no video of ‘the trick’ exists.

I used to do the fire with lighter fluid…why did the Sneakies break up?

The band broke up because the other guitar player decided to move back to his hometown, which is about 2 hours away. It’s really too bad. I had just joined the band about 8 months prior to the breakup. The band had actually been around for almost three years, originally as a three-piece. We had just won "best local recording of ‘96" in a local music paper, and Tim at Mutant Pop records was pretty interested in releasing a 7". Too bad things had to fall apart when they did.

Have you ever broken a guitar string while performing? If so, did you keep playing, or did you stop?

Well, these days I keep a back-up guitar on stage with me, so it’s not a problem. I do, however, continue to play until the current song is over. I do recall one time at an outdoor festival with one of my old bands (TEN CENTER), I only had one guitar with me. I broke a string early on in the set and decided that since no one in the audience was paying us any attention, that I would just play 5-string guitar for the rest of it. It was the high ‘E’, so it wasn’t too hard to adapt to.

What's your favorite Frank Zappa song?

There’s no way I could possibly narrow it down to one. My favorite era has always been the Flo & Eddie years. I’ve always wanted to be in a band like that, one that could lyrically improvise on the moment. Flo & Eddie were GENIUS !That kind of situation will never be equaled in music again. If you’ve never heard "Illegal, Immoral, and Fattening"…go get it! No offense to Frank (of course !), but those boys don’t do too badly on their own. On the other hand, half of the band on that album are Zappa alumni, so that could have a lot to do with it. I guess those songs just wouldn’t be the same without the occasional, unusual vocal quality of Jim Pons sprinkled here and there as well. The credit ultimately goes back to Frank for assembling such an ‘on’ group of people.

What in the hell is "Shop Vac" (a song from one of Russ’ tapes) all about?

An interesting story, and a pretty long one too. A couple summers ago, some friends (including Evan Peta of Mother Inferior ‘fame’) and I traveled to Minneapolis to see King Crimson. We had decided that after the show, we would be driving straight back home (a four-hour trip). So, early in the morning hours after driving up, walking around Minneapolis and almost getting heat stroke, seeing King Crimson, and driving back…our brains were pretty fried. Evan and I somehow started discussing ‘Cosmos’, which is a tourist attraction in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It’s this place where they claim all this wacky, physics-defying stuff takes place…like they supposedly have a stream there that flows up-hill. Anyway, the joke was…‘Yeah, that stream flowing up-hill is just some redneck up at the top with a REALLY BIG Shop-Vac, sucking the water up-hill.’ Hence the lyric ‘Okay Cleetus, turn on the shop vac, and start the national anthem…’ Quite a lot of my songs over the years have evolved from convoluted jokes between Evan and I . He’s kind of like my own personal Flo & Eddie.

Whatever happened to Mother Inferior?

Well, the first Mother Inferior tape was just basically done as a joke. Then we ended up getting ‘the letter’ from Tom Sarig, A&R for TVT. After that we got all serious for a few days and tried to make a demo to send to this guy. Which we did, and he rejected of course. At that point we recruited a drummer and tried to start a live band version, which never got off the ground. I still remember,we were going to cover "John Wayne Was A Nazi" by MDC. That would have gone over REAL well around here !

Tell us about your recording set-up.

Currently it’s the Tascam 488 8-track cassette recorder, ART Proverb effects, a stereo compressor, Roland TR-626 drum machine, a SansAmp 2, and lots of other miscellaneous stuff. At one time, I had an Ensoniq ASR-10…but it left me feeling rather stale at times, so I dumped it for the 8-track and got back to analog land where I belong.

Are you happy with the 488?

I like it a lot, but I’m kind of pissed that right after I bought it, they came out with the 488 ‘Mark II’, which has some nice features that I wouldn’t have minded having…like the ability to plug low impedance mics straight in without the stupid adapters, and a counter that counts real time. It’s kind of like buying computer stuff. Buy it today, they’ll make a better one tomorrow.

So what's the satisfaction for you, beyond the necessity to create?
Do you still get into the networking aspect of hometaping?

My satisfaction comes from a number of things. Recording something that I just know is really ’on’…like I spent a bunch of time on it and it came out great. Seeing reviews (good or bad) in Gajoob or Factsheet Five.When people ask to have a copy of a tape. I just want to be loved ! I used to do A LOT more sending of tapes when I lived in Mitchell, probably due to the boredom of living in a town so small that you could be anywhere in the city limits within 5 minutes. These days, I struggle to keep in touch with my favorite home-tapers, and seem to find little time to look for new friends. Which sucks on my part.

You're not interested in doing any sort of mass marketing for yourself?

Well, a good example is The Sneakies, who put out a disc early on in their existence, and now are broken up, and there are still hundreds of copies collecting dust. That’s a big fear. I think I’d be a lot more willing to make a CD if I could get 200 pressed for a proportional amount of money. The most copies I’ve ever distributed of one tape are probably under 100, so what in the hell would I do with 1000 CD’s ?

If you put together a tape of cover songs by other hometapers, what would they be?

(…off the top of my head…)

"Jimmy Swaggart" – The Rudy Schwartz Project
"Ice Cream Soup" – Ken Clinger
"Boring Al Wankovic" - Dino DiMuro
"Fuck Me, Fuck You" – Joe Shmoe
"Head" - Love,Calvin
"Young And In Love" - M.O.T.O.
"Waiting For Martha" – The Koel Family
"Graveyard" – The D-Cups