Cinder Block has warned her audience. "You there in the front," she explains only half-apologetically into her microphone. "You will get spit on."
There's no intent of malice, but this is a woman who can hock one hell of a mean loogie. Spewing out melodic, polysyllabic lyrics throughout Tilt's set, it seems, has got Cinder's mouth churning out plenty o' drool. She's simply gotta spit it out, and spit she does. I can't help but feel relieved that her phlegm-arc doesn't seem to be aimed in the direction of the photographer's pit. After Tilt's short but explosive set as a part of a recent Warped Tour stop in Seattle, WA, Cinder's heightened, hair-raising stage persona is replaced by a quieter, somewhat gentler presence. Still decked out in her Plasmatics t-shirt and a short skull-logo camouflage skirt, Cinder decides to don a straw hat of unlikely proportions to protect her skin from the relentless UV rays of this unusually sunny Seattle day. Nearly a half an hour is spent talking and meeting with an assortment of fans of both genders, and then the group splits up - husband and guitarist Jeffery Bischoff and new bassist Jimi Cheetah staff the popular Cinder Block T-Shirt table, while Tilt drummer Vincent Camacho goes off to check out the performances of other touring bands. Singer, lyricist and loogie-meister Cinder kindly consents to a lengthy interview.
CB: That's a good question. I don't think anyone's ever asked that. It's taken a few years to set boundaries and divide duties evenly. But right now, we have the most equitable arrangement ever. I do all the bookkeeping, Jimmy the bass player answers all the mail, when we're on tour, Vince takes on a lot of the tour managing duties like booking shows on the phone, and Jeffrey's the driving force. He's the guitar player and also my husband. He can't help but be the spearhead. He's just that way in life. He's a doer. He works real closely with the booking agent to try to get on some good shows, and organizes recordings and stuff like that. He's almost like our manager in that way. It's something that he doesn't really want to do, but we can't afford a manager. 10 percent of nothing is nothing. It's not a real money making proposition. All the money we make goes right back into the band. Jeffrey and I also have a business together called Cinder Block T-Shirts, for about 9-10 years now.
ST: Where is that based?
CB: That's in Oakland, CA. We started in a punk-hippie warehouse in West Oakland, and we had about 25 roommates and 7 dogs, and we started Tilt there and the t-shirt business there, starting the t-shirt business to support our music habit. In that part of our lives, neither one of us were very employable. Jeffrey more than me. We just worked hard and kept putting the money back in, making sacrifices and living where we worked, and putting up with adversity. It's paying off now, we're growing and growing all the time. In 1996, we grew about 600% and then in '97 we grew that much again to the point where we have 14 full-time employees. and we print for a whole lot of bands, including those in the Warped Tour. We print and sell all the Warped Tour events merchandise. This is the second year in a row that we've done it, and we try to do as good a job as we can. The Warped family is a very tight-knit family, and we're proud to be a part of it. It's tough. We're on the tour with the band, and we have the t-shirt business with us, so we're always switching back and forth between being the businessman and being the artist - left-brain, right-brain; it's hard to make the transition sometimes.
ST: So you're speaking in pretty positive terms about the whole Warped Tour experience. It sounds like you've been involved with the scene for awhile, but how do you reconcile yourself to the more commercial aspects of the tour - specifically the way it's been billed--by the New York Times, for instance - as a "punk rock summer camp"? Does that bother you at all?
CB: I'm having a blast. Punk rock summer camp, were they being derogatory?
ST: Actually, they were talking about it more like if your children want to be punks for a weekend, this is where they can come.
CB: I thought you meant for the people traveling! That's what it feels like for the people traveling. For Tilt, we're reaching an audience that we wouldn't reach normally. The audience here are definitely festival-goers as opposed to punks. They're concert-goers. But that was me when I was 14 years old. All we had, and this is going to date me, but I was that age in the 70s, and we didn't have punk rock. We had arena rock. That was all there was to do. Thank God there's good bands for kids to come to now. It's a bit of a meat market, but when your hormones are raging, what else are you going to do? I feel much more comfortable, of course, in a shitty little dive with condensation dripping from the walls, no ventilation; I love playing in places like that because I can really make contact with the audience. Performance depends a lot upon making a connection with the audience. I was a little bit incredulous at first, thinking it was going to be this huge barrier between the kids and the stage, but it's not that way. I'm having a ball, a great time. There are sponsors here, but it's not these big corporations just taking over and running it. Instead, there are these punks who have grown up. More often than not, you see the promoters skating by, asking if you have enough beer. It's a good vibe, it's people that came out of the scene working hard to make it happen, rather than people hired by some soulless corporation that don't have anything to do with music, trying to squeeze every little drop out of the counterculture.
ST: Can you tell me a little bit about your background - where you were born and raised and what drew you toward the punk scene?
CB: I'm 37, I'm like a grandma in this scene. If I was singing blues, I'd be the young one. I was raised in Nebraska, and during the 70s and early 80s, we had an OK scene there. We had a place called the Drumstick and the ZooBar where I got to see some cool bands and a lot of seminal LA punk rock bands like X and the Meat Puppets came through. A lot of these bands really influenced me, and I realized that's what I wanted to do pretty early on and started a band in '83. I've been in about 10 different bands. This one, by far, is such a four-way marriage, it's such an intimate relationship that it takes a long time to find the right combination of people. Right now, we have the best so far of any of the bands that I've been in.
We just added Jimmy from Screw 32 on bass, and he just fit right in. He came out of the same East Bay scene. I moved to the Bay Area about 12 years ago. I still consider myself out of that scene more than any other. Jimmy came out of the same Gilman scene, and they broke up, and we gave him a week to mourn the loss of that before we called him to be in our band.
ST: What was it in particular that spoke to you about the punk scene?
CB: The rebellion and also it seemed like... I was really interested in art. I majored in theater, I got a B.F.A. in Theater Arts, acting and directing. I wrote a couple of small plays. I realized that I wanted to write and perform my own material, and I've written poetry ever since my early teens, and I realized that would be a great way to do it. To write and perform your own material in theater, it takes a lot more people, a lot more money, getting a place, insurance, and it's hard. At that point in my life, I thought it would be a lot easier to get four people together and play music. I love music. It's an immediate vehicle - it hits you over the head with emotion. Then, you throw the words in that to shape that emotion into something that has meaning. I love the raw energy, and I guess I had a lot of hurt inside. I got a lot of my frustrations out. Over the years, I've quit bands for awhile, and I couldn't do it. They say if you can not do it, don't do it. It's really hard to make the sacrifices that are necessary to keep wanting to do your art, especially in a white male-dominated genre. I tried to quit, and it ate me up inside. I needed to sing. It didn't matter if I was singing to ten people or 2,000, I love singing. Even if I never performed except for parties, I think I'm going to sing all my life. It's about the most spiritual thing I do, besides yoga.
ST: Tell me about being the only female artist on Fat Mike's label? The label actually bills you as bringing a "balance of the sexes" to the otherwise all-male line-up.
CB: I must be really heavy! Actually, the Muffs are on the label now, so I'm not the only one. I don't think it's all their fault that they don't have more female artists. I think there's very few - I don't know why there's so few female performers in this genre.
ST: I'm sure you must have some idea.
CB: Well, I know why, because it's hard. Someone came up to me on the stage today and said "Man, you rock, you are so awesome, but if it was a guy up there singing that, there would be way more people here and the whole place would be moshing." I'm just really grateful for what I get, and for me to sit and swell on the fact that men have a hard time thinking that a female performer is cool, it's just going to do a disservice to me, it's just going to hold me back. I try not to perceive it as an obstacle. I try not to get all involved in proving myself, because I'm OK the way I am. I don't have to prove it to anyone. When I first started, it was a lot harder to convince people - hey, I can rock. Let's make a band together. But as I got more experience and got older and I got real tired with banging my head up against the wall, I realized it felt better when I stopped and just had confidence in myself and was true to my own material and if they don't like me, fuck 'em! I guess it takes a real man to like Tilt.
It's odd to have women come up to me afterwards and say that I've inspired them in some way. That makes it all worthwhile, right there. Changing the world is a slow process. We all have to get involved. Attitudes run deep. Even I'm guilty of sexism.
ST: How so?
CB: I remember when I was in between bands, I caught myself saying, this woman had left a message on my machine, I had gone, "Aw, shit, a female bass player, I bet she can't rock." It was an instant that I thought that. Then I realized, "Hey, wait a fucking minute," that's bullshit. I'm just buying into societal norms. We auditioned her, and she did suck, but a least we gave her a chance. There's so many women that rock their pants off, but for some reason, even I'm subject to thinking that they can't. I think the brainwashing of our culture is very, very strong.
ST: What brings you the greatest happiness in your life?
CB: Writing. Creating. Playing music with my friends. Sounds trite, but it's true. Yoga.
ST: Have you been doing that for a long time?
CB: About a year and a half. I've had some health problems lately, and the doctors are about 90% sure that I have MS. Yoga is helping that a lot.
ST: Is this something you're willing to disclose?
CB: Might help someone else that has it. I don't want to get too far into it, because I get depressed if I start thinking about it. I'm also in recovery; I'm a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. I've been clean for a couple of years now. I work really hard on my recovery. That's the best thing I ever did. Some people think when artists sober up that they have nothing more to say. It's just made my writing more intense and my music more angry, I think. It's made performance much much more enjoyable, because I can put so much more energy into it. I've been on tour before where I've been so run down from just a little bit of drinking. I've been struggling so hard just to get through the set that I haven't been able to concentrate on the ideas that I'm trying to get across, or making a connection with the people on stage or with the audience. And now I can. It's a fucking miracle; it's a gift. It's one of the gifts of recovery that I'm so glad that I finally surrendered to. But it's hard, it's hard to be on the road with partying all around you. I try to hide in my bunk with my little book and wait till the storm is over.