So the first heavy band that I got into...the first REAL ACTUALLY HEAVY band that I got into...the first band that actually made me feel like it was raining icepicks and that someone had jammed a meat-hook in my chest and was dragging me through a sea of iron sludge with a bulldozer? SOUNDGARDEN dude.

I think the first time I actually legitimately "pirated" music was with a SOUNDGARDEN song. I'm not talking about Napster or Soulseek or any of that other P2P garbage. I'm talking middle schooler, blitzed on caffeine and acne medicine and hormones, sitting by his radio, finger delicately poised over the play/record button in hopes of etching their newest single "Burden in my Hand" onto some magnetic tape for maximum headbanging on my sony walkman on the way to school. I still have the tape...I got to the button a little bit late and shaved off the first 3/10 of a second of Chris Cornell's bleating right there at the beginning...and I listened to that tape until the reels were melting and it squeaked.

Yeah...Down on the Upside was pretty wack, but there were still some ragers on there. "Blow up the Outside World?" Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn.

So yeah, sometime before that, when I was still in the single digits I was exposed to "Badmotorfinger" and "Superunknown" and after seeing the video for "Rusty Cage" I knew that I wanted to have a moustache just like Chris Cornell.

Still, my all time favorite song by the band is "Ugly Truth," the opener on 1990's Louder than Love. The album was so heavy..."Hands All Over" (some kind of environmentalist message? Some line about killing your mother?), "Loud Love" (Air Guitar), "Big Dumb Sex" (don't you don't you wanna touch it anyway?) and "Full on Kevin's Mom." Louder... is my favorite album by the band.

I could wax on and on and on about 'em, but I'll save that for issue #3 of Drug Dogs. The point is that when I was at This is Hardcore Fest, COLD WORLD had some shirts that struck my fancy. Check 'em out:

Direct LOUDER THAN LOVE rip-offs! Raddest shirts I saw all fest, minus the kid wearing the Ric Flair one moshing during THE KILLER.

P.S. Check out this pic, scanned from my TURNING POINT discography CD of an OG SOUNDGARDEN Louder... shirt!


Check out COLD WORLD on Myspace if you're still into them.

Morgado

THE WRONG SIDE is one of my favorite hardcore bands, so I was even more stoked to find out that the singer, Chris Morgado was into drawing so I hunted him down. He's the artist behind a number of cool hardcore shirts, many of them I had before I even knew that Morgado had done them. I've done a sweet interview with him that'll definitely appear in a future issue of DRUG DOGS. Anyway, the following is a discussion on the NEW LOWS shirt above in Morgado's own words.

"I kind of hate to do shirt designs. It's sort of awkward, like layout wise I find it awkward. I never know just how big I can go or anything, and so I end up feeling like I'm doing the same big image with band name over/under it thing over and over. I vastly prefer doing fliers and record art…fliers especially, fliers are my absolute favorite to do…it's just less stressful knowing "ok, this is the space I've got, this is what I can work with, now fill it". And most of the time people don't really know exactly what they want, like I get told "we want something like what you did for MENTAL so just come up with something like what you did for them", which isn't the worst thing to get told by any stretch of the imagination, but it's kind of more stressful because even though I can do that kind of thing standing on my head, I have to worry about copying what I already did without actually repeating what I already did."

"A skinhead with a chain by me is going to look like a skinhead with a chain by me…well, more like it'll look like a poor copy of a skin by Sean Taggart (laughs)… no matter how I draw it; it's pretty much just asking me to swap out the band name. If that's really want someone wants, great, I'll do it, but it's cooler if someone has an idea that I can work with, or if it's a band with a name or a vibe that I can latch on to."



"Like WAR HUNGRY, yeah those shirts look like they could just as easily be MENTAL shirts, but they're actually very specific to that band, I came up with those by just doodling around with the name “WAR HUNGRY” and the images that put in my head. I never would have come up with those designs for MENTAL, those designs just wouldn't exist."

"With NEW LOWS, I've done four shirts, and it's been 50/50 as to P-boy knowing what he wants and me just coming up with something on my own. The Shining shirt was his idea, and the MINOR THREAT rip off. He left the details pretty much up to me so far as how to execute them, but those were both his idea. The Albert Packer shirt and the octopus sex shirt were mine. It was kind of a last minute deal, they needed some shirts for Sound and Fury and P wanted something new but didn't have any ideas on tap. So I kind of just brainstormed, just like... inserting random California and ocean related words into Google, and eventually I ended up googling octopus and just started thinking, "hardcore design concepts have gotten pretty tame, hardcore in general is pretty tame now, I wonder if an octopus porn shirt would get any reaction". So I started googling Japanese octopus porn and printing out pics that I thought would make good reference. This was all done at work, naturally. So I had all these print outs and I just started sketching shit out and seeing what I could combine with what, and one of the pics was by this artist Toshio Saeki, in fact if you look at my actual drawing, it says "with a nod to Saeki" under my signature, that's how much of his idea I felt like I actually took. It was a guy fucking a girl who was an octopus below the waist. I thought it would make a good shirt if you stripped it down to just the guy and the girl, maybe not as nuts as doing one of the ones where the octopus is tentacle fucking a girl but probably easier to make work on the front of a shirt. But I didn't want to just have it be a tracing or an exact copy. I had just done a drawing of Death smoking a bong for this band that never paid me or used the design, so I had that on my desk. So I redrew it with Death in the place of the guy, and a few drafts later I was satisfied enough to do a nice little bit of old school cut and paste…I do pretty much everything old school cut and paste…I only use Photoshop for minor touch ups like removing a line here or there to get the band name on there."


"What I was thinking of with the layout was this FUGAZI bootleg shirt a kid I knew in high school had that just had the band name over a black and white photo, though when I was doing the shirt I was remembering it as being underneath."


Check out Morgado's art and NEW LOWS.

Spoiler

I first saw this WAR HUNGRY shirt design at United Blood 2007 in Richmond and instantly recognized the artwork. It was by the hand of Spoiler, also responsible for the VICTIM LP, tons of JUSTICE artwork and those really cool IRON BOOTS designs with the skinheads holding the globe. I vowed that I'd get in touch with him to talk about the graphic because it's totally sick, and so here I am, two years later, posting a blog about T-shirts. I managed to catch up with Spoiler to talk a little bit about the shirt. Keep your eyes peeled for DRUG DOGS ZINE #2 which will feature an exclusive interview with Spoiler.






So first things first, with the front design...I want to know, to the best of your knowledge how the exchange went in drafting the shirt.

Any War Hungry shirt I did was because of Hoodrack and me brainstorming over AIM. We'd come up with the best shit together. He always had great ideas but couldn't draw them. I don't remember who came up with what, but we decided they were going to have a mascot like Eddie for Iron Maiden, so that's the dude on top, cursing the world.

Hoodrack wanted a really metal looking shirt, but I made it borderline fantasy metal. I got a few of the ideas out of an art book. I wanted it to represent a bunch of different species being at war with each other, you know, “war hungry”, and their mascot standing over it all. Kind of a nerdy fantasy-land version of the real world.

It definitely reminds me of like...Jason and the Argonauts. Have you ever seen that? It has that theme...
I've never really heard of that before. Probably never aired in Europe where I grew up. Argonauts sounds pretty fantasy metal though.

Well War Hungry definitely has that kind of lyrical biz going on in their songs...like "Labors of Hercules" and stuff so maybe that helped…
I didn't go over any lyrics for this shirt, but maybe Hoodrack got some ideas from it. I'm sure it's all connected in his mind.

On the back design, it's kind of a remake of an old psychedelic flier that I've seen...with the skeleton holding the peace sign. I've seen it used on an old flier....I remember you telling me that your Mom was kind of a hippie and your Dad was a metal head...is that where you got the design from?

Yea that's from a Grateful Dead flyer, on the original it's a lady holding the sign. Hoodrack sent it to me. It's not actually related to my parents though it could very well have been. I don't think they were into the Dead though, my mom is more into shit like Blue Cheer, the Who, and Black Sabbath. Way cooler than most hippies. But yea, there was plenty of weird psychedelic art and record covers in my house growing up, so that's why I like to incorporate it every now and then.

What is "EU" on the back? Is it Latin for "United States?" I know in Spanish U.S. is "Estados Unidos.." was it for an American tour?
It's commonly used as short for Europe, thought I believe it actually stands for European Union. But yea, the art is from the back of their first EP and the EU was added into the art for their European tour shirts.

Check out more of Spoiler's art and War Hungry.

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