Dr. Frank: vocals, guitar
Joel: bass, backup vocals
Jym: drums

The Mr. T Experience are one of my favorite bands. They play really really catchy pop punk with clever lyrics about girls. They're from Berkeley, California and have been around since the 80s, since then the band has gone through lots of lineup changes leaving Dr. Frank (guitar, vocals) as the only original member of the band. They have numerous releases on Lookout Records and they just recently came out with their newest record, Revenge is Sweet and So Are You. This interview was done in like the band room with Dr. Frank and Joel at Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

SS: HOW DID YOUR JAPAN TOUR AND THE CMJ CONVENTION GO?

DR.FRANK: Yes they went well. Japan is very fun. CMJ was alright, it was like another show but it was kind of weird because most of the audience there are people who have those badges and everything and they're not the same kind of crowd that usually goes to see us so it was a little weird. It was a little strange but it was fun. It was nice to go to New York without having all our equipment to worry about, so we got to wander around and do some stuff. Now we're playing New York the day after tomorrow and I would never park the van there overnight. So we have to stay somewhere out of town and then drive in there and then drive back so we didn't really get a chance to see anything from ordinary circumstances. We had a good time.

SS: WHO WAS THE GIRL ON THAT JAPAN TOUR SHIRT YOU GUYS HAD?

DR.FRANK: She's the same girl on the back of the "Alternative is Here to Stay" EP single and you know we got that from a 60s magazine, I think it actually might have been The Monkees Fan Magazine and it was just some picture of some mod chick. I don't know anything more about it then that.

SS: WHOSE PROM PICTURE IS THAT ON THE INSERT OF "...And The Women Who Love Them?"

DR.FRANK: We found that picture in the garbage.

SS: WHY DID YOU ADD STARSHIP TO THE MTX NAME?

DR.FRANK: It's a joke...it's because I'm the only original member and it kind of reminds me of the Jefferson Starship. I don't know if you're aware of this but Jefferson Airplane turned into the Jefferson Starship in the 70s and then just Starship and that was when only like two of them were still ticking and they got a bunch of flunkies. I think they're still going actually, they're calling themselves something else now like Shuttlecraft, so maybe that will be our next step.

SS: WHAT DO YOU GUYS THINK OF YOUR GROWING POPULARITY?

DR.FRANK: That's a nice way to put it. It's gradually growing. I mean the more growth the better, in this quarter we've shown substantial growth, but in the next fiscal year we'll have to downsize. You can't count on that kind of growth in all four quarters. That's something I learned.

SS: EVERYONE KNOWS HOW YOU MET UP WITH JOEL BUT HOW DID YOU MEET UP WITH JYM?

DR.FRANK: We were looking for a drummer, and in a record store we saw a little flyer that said, "Drummer Available" and so we ripped off the little tab and went ahead and called him. True story, you can print that.

SS: YOUR NEWER SONGS SOUND POPPIER THAN YOUR OLDER ONES...IS THAT A NEW DIRECTION OR THE DIFFERENT LINEUP?

DR.FRANK: You know people say that and I just don't see it that way. It doesn't seem like that to me at all. They must be right to agree since so many people have said it but no, I just think that what they're probably reacting to is that they're a little better and they're played quite a bit better. A lot of the older songs would've been more effective pop songs if they were played right and if I had done a little better job writing them. I'm not trying to do anything different than I ever was even from the beginning.

SS: DID YOU MAKE ANY OTHER VIDEOS BESIDES "BA BA BA BA BA?"

DR.FRANK: We've made three, what you'd call videos where we actually made them. We made the one for "Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba," there's one for "I Fell For You," and there's now one for "And I Will Be With You."

SS: WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU'RE NOT DOING MTX?

DR.FRANK: Um, you know, we're pretty much always doing it. And certainly, I'm always worried about it. It's hard, I mean you have to do a lot of background work. It's not just showing up for the show. And the songwriting part of it takes a lot of time and energy. But when I do have spare free time, I watch television, and I play chess against the computer, and I read books, and that pretty much covers it.

SS: I'VE HEARD YOU GUYS PLAY "SHE'S FROM SALINAS" BEFORE, HAVE YOU PLAY ANY OTHER SWEET BABY SONGS?

DR.FRANK: We've done that one and we've done "Pathetic" and I think those are the only two that we've learned how to do.

SS: HAVE YOU GUYS DONE ANY BOMB BASSETS SONGS?

DR.FRANK: Um, I know we do. I know we've played them once. Whether we can remember them now is another story. We've never played them live.

SS: HOW LONG WERE YOU A MEMBER OF SWEET BABY?

DR.FRANK: Actually the duration of it was probably a year. But we weren't terribly active at the time. It was a very casual thing, we played at like parties and everything and sometimes on the street and stuff like that. It wasn't very professional.

SS: I READ OFF OF SOME WEBSITE THAT YOU GUYS DID A SEGMENT ON RIKKI LAKE, IS THAT TRUE?

DR.FRANK: (laughs) That's not true! At least not that I remember, you must be thinking of some other, more famous, Mr. T Experience.
JOEL: Rev Norb was on Jenny Jones. You know how those things go, Rev Norb was on Jenny Jones, The Mr. T Experience was on Entertainment Tonight
DR.FRANK: (laughs) We were guests on ER. We were the band playing in the emergency room after we got beat up after the show.

SS: DO YOU HAVE GOOD RELATIONS WITH THE EX-MEMBERS OF MTX?

DR.FRANK: Um pretty much. Jon Von, I still see and still get along with. I don't really see any of the other guys. I never really got along with the drummer [Alex] even when we were together and there's certainly no love lost between the two of us. I probably will never speak to him again. The bass player, I see him every now and again, Aaron, but you know he's in Samiam now...they're big in Sweden.

SS: WAS "HISTORY OF THE CONCEPT OF THE SOUL" YOUR GRADUATE THESIS IN COLLEGE?

DR.FRANK: No, it was a paper that I wrote. I was a history major and I had to do a senior thesis in my last year. During your junior year, you do like a sort of dry run, like a junior version of it. That was the paper I wrote for the junior version of it and I kind of made it into a song to celebrate the fact that I finished it. The song is sort of like an abstract of the paper. It's not the exact...I didn't just turn my song in.

SS: WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT BEN WEASEL SAYING THAT "MILK MILK LEMONADE" WAS THE WORST ALBUM OF THE DECADE?

DR.FRANK: I never heard him say that until much later. But it didn't suprise me. Apparently he talked to Larry, and tried to talk him into not putting it out. I don't know. Ben...well not just Ben. A lot of peple didn't quite understand...that record is not without it's flaws and I know what he's talking about and there are things about it that suck but we were attempting something far more ambitious than we had the talent for and we could afford. And so it would have been easier to make a Screeching Weasel album -- "My Brain Hurts" was recorded for $100 or something like that and it's a great record and everything and he's good at what he does and he does it really well. We were trying much more difficult things and he didn't approve of that and that's fine...I mean I agree. I was remorseful of the way it turned out. All those mid-grade albums I was really disappointed with but now I look back on them and it's sort of interesting. You can trace the thread from there to here and see where the mistakes were made and it's just kind of cool. I find it kind of charming and the idea that I thought I could make that kind of a record -- potentially $50 a song -- was so funny to me now because no one is stupid enough to try to do that. It's an artifact.

SS: ARE YOU AFFECTED AT ALL BY THE WHOLE LOOKOUT CONTROVERSY GOING ON NOW?

DR.FRANK: No it's not controversial to us at all. I don't think it's anything more than just when people do business together and have conflicts and get mad at each other. The weird thing is people thinking because it's punk rock, and it's Ben Weasel, and has something do with those things. It's fine with us, I don't have any complaints and I know what they were talking about and I know why they were complaining and it has to do with things that I would have complained about too. But everything's ok now. I don't think of it as insanely, apocalyptic terms like those people do. It's a record label and their job is to sell records and they do something wrong and they screw up somehow, the result is the cause of selling records is damaged. But it's not like the cause of living in a free world is damaged if Screeching Weasel only sold 60,000 records instead of 100,000 records. And we're all responsible for the way things go...I mean we put out a record and no one buys it, part of it might be because it doesn't get enough into stores and whosever fault that is I don't know. But part of it might be that it's not that great, so you take responsibility for all around aspects of it. A lot of people just expect the record label to do everything in terms with what we're dealing with and that's not going to happen.

SS: WHAT DO YOU THINK OF SPINAL TAP?

DR.FRANK: The movie?! It's a great movie! Are you saying that as a way of drawing a parallel to the Mr. T Experience?

SS: NO...NOT AT ALL, I WAS JUST WONDERING WHAT YOU'RE REACTION WAS TO THE MOVIE AND TO THE BAND.

DR.FRANK: Everyone who has ever been in a band I'm sure has had their parallels to Spinal Tap because being in a rock band is just not all it's cracked up to be and so...sure...I mean, the in-store appearance that nobody shows up to, that's happened to us. The show that's cracked up to be this really great show and supposed to really cool and turns out to be like some kid's birthday party or something like that. All that stuff happens.
JOEL: Everyone who has been in a band has seen that movie, except for John Denery of The Hi-Fives.
DR.FRANK: Ok. Well there's the statistics on that.
JOEL: I think he's the only person that's ever been in a band that's never seen that movie.

SS: WELL THAT'S IT...I HAVE QUESTIONS FOR JOEL NOW.

DR.FRANK: Well I appreciate your interest and thank you.

SS: OK, SO THE STORY GOES THAT YOU WERE A BIG MTX FAN BEFORE YOU JOINED THE BAND...

JOEL: That's outrageous! I deny all...(laughs). Actually, you know, that's absolutely true.

SS: DID YOU HAVE ANY EXPECTATIONS YOU FELT YOU HAD TO LIVE UP TO? WAS IT AN AWKWARD SITUATION?

JOEL: It wasn't an awkward situation at all. How it was, was when I first met Dr. Frank at Gilman Street on Halloween 1994. It was the first time I was in a the same room with an idol of mine and I was pretty nervous. And I really had to gather up all my courage to approach him. But I'm really glad I did because he turned out to be very personable and I got the nerve to ask him one question and that question was, is the band still together because I heard the bass player quit? And it turned out that that was the right question because he said, no we're not together right now because we can't find a bass player, I don't suppose you play. And he asked it very sarcastically because I was only 17 and I don't think he seriously cared whether or not I did. But maybe he was hoping that I'd say that my older brother did. But it so happened that I did and the fact that I was such a big fan, because I used to sit alone in my room for hours playing along with the Mr. T Experience records and learning the songs and I never realized that it would pay off. But it turned out that my foreknowledge of Mr. T Experience material made it very easy for me to go into the first audition and I was pretty nervous about that. But I'd have to say the most nervous I've been was when I pestered Dr. Frank into giving me his phone number to set up an audition; dialing the number, dialing the digits to Dr. Frank's house was the most nerveracking experience in my whole life. My hands were all shaking, I had to hang up a couple of times and start over. It was ten times worse than calling a girl that you really like...which kind of sounds bad! But no, all my expectations about being in this band have been met. It's not a letdown in the slightest.

SS: YOU DID A LOT OF SONGWRITING ON THAT NEW BOMB BASSETS CD...WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?

JOEL: (laughs) Where did that come from! Well, thank you for noticing.

SS: I WAS ACTUALLY HOPING THAT YOU GUYS WOULD PLAY "DUH."

JOEL: Oh I'd love to do that. I'd love nothing more than to hog the spotlight and do a song I wrote. But there's really not room with all of Frank's playing and songwriting. I always feel kind of weird about it to tell you the truth: playing a song that I wrote in a middle of a bunch of songs he wrote because it would inevitably draw a comparison. But, you know, I may not be writing songs for the Mr. T Experience but I was glad to have the opportunity to write for The Bomb Bassets and maybe one-day, I'll get a chance to show the world my stuff. But in the meantime, I'll be the only person who knows what my songs sound like and that way I can be as great in my own mind as I want to be.

SS: IS MTX YOUR FIRST BAND?

JOEL: My first band ever? Yes.

SS: MY LAST AND MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION...WHAT DO YOU USE TO SPIKE YOUR HAIR?

JOEL: Jym refers to my styling product as an ancient punk rock secret because for the first several months I wouldn't tell anybody what it was and he would go through my stuff when we went on tour. He would look through my bag and he would go, it's shaving cream isn't it! And it wasn't so I'd laugh. And he'd get really mad. (laughs) But now I'm not as bashful about it. I use Petroleum Jelly, Vaseline because I read in a book while I was in high school that that was what Sid Vicious used. It works and it remains malleable, but at the same time managable and soft and luxurious. It adds body and shine and it's $1.50 for two quarts, I've had the same bottle for two years now and I'm only 2/3 done. It kind of grosses people out when people hear it and it's kind of weird to be walking around a club with a big jar of Vaseline, you know, it makes people think. But it works. That's the beauty tip of the week: if you want your hair to be punk rock and spiky, use Vaseline.