Interview with various members of Caroliner, including Timber Amplifier, The Felt Pelt, Chance Century, Sore Pony Lore, Chapel Rimmer, Old Ben Spayed. From fanzine WINGNUT, Volume 3, approx 1990.

Wingnut: Where do you see music going in the next 10 years?

Timber Amplifier: At this rate, music seems to just bring an exact year-to-year duplicate of itself with the same limitations as when it started. With country music you can have a duplicate sound, but with some of the best instruments available: banjo, jews harp, slide guitar, etc. The absolute of the repeating motif of music is ultimately realized with the nostalgia act of Caroliner. Ten years from now, Caroliner will have the music down so perfect, hopefully, that we will have ways to actually nostalgically re-create the 1800's by intensifying the duplicate sound and move to the head of the music pack.

Wingnut: Do you listen to the radio? If so, what kind of station?

Timber Amplifier: There is no station locally that will respond to our requests for entire Dock Boggs lp's, demonstration of early American electronics/instruments, Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain lp's, and sounds of train routes across the U.S. Unfortunately, no radio station will respond to our specific simple requests so we don't use them.

Wingnut: Do any band members own ID cards or credit cards?

Timber Amplifier: Our passports give us the means, everything else is barter/trade.

Wingnut: What kinds of mental or emotional damage have been done to you?

Chance Century: Discorporation of the sight and sound world ensued when I was continuously beaten with chairs. The sight and sound world had been depriving me of the complete appreciation of food where my entire being is involved with the eating process - not just my mouth. The process irons my hungry veins and pounds up against my skin like 20 full wagons running off a cliff. The one drawback is my steps have to be very slight so as not to end up on my face or swipe one of the other members. I shake my hips and swish my beard. The movements supposedly thrill the people in front when I'm performing. I can only imagine.

Sore Pony Lore: Having been the butt of every joke in school and whenever a social gathering started with family or friends, I studied psychiatry using environmental intake as a distinction of myself against the materials outside of me so when someone says, "Pony, you are an imbecile with your imbecilic ideas and notions," Pony might be affected, but the rocks, dirt and sticks who share my consciousness/body by sticking in my navel, butt and mouth, are also assuring me of how much of a wonderful person I am to be housing them in my body. At one point, I was damaged, but no longer.

Chapel Rimmer: No comment.

Old Ben Spayed: When I was first spayed, I thought the end of my life was going to happen, but instead not only can I smell things better, I can maintain sexual congress on furniture for up to 20 minutes without being bored. With a strict diet free of fruit and using ashes as a catalyst to my system, I am able to keep a goin'.

Wingnut: (original question lost and forgotten)

The Felt Pelt: I've never felt that this land I live on is actually anything relative to what I should be living with. A perfect world for me would be a solid metal sphere warmed from the inside by human flesh rubbing together and heating the entire globe. As I hobble from place to place, I feel that I am wasting so much time in the travel. My family are on this horrible alien environment rolling marbles to each other in jealous envy.

Wingnut: Do you have any neighbors? If so, how do you relate to them?

Timber Amplifier: We are jam packed for space living in a city so we crowd into houses near and far from each other stepping on each other's feet and accidentally using toothbrushes of each others. A few members escape the city by running ranches and horseshoeing far from the streets not only making money to pay local rent prices but getting enough oxygen to sustain them for the months our of exile.

Wingnut: How often do you perform in public?

Timber Amplifier: As often as exiles and practice and clubs permit us.

Wingnut: Do you have anything to say about spirituality? Have you had any teachers or gurus?

The Felt Pelt: We have a song about spirituality called ÒRed Tail Above the Mourner's WailÓ which is about a man whose apologies of leaving his earth shell behind is so well put that he makes a great amount of people cry. The second day of crying is so amazing for people who didn't know him that food and chairs are brought in. The third day more people join at the hall in the wailing bringing bedrolls for themselves and the original mourners. That evening some construction workers who had been solely responsible for working on the town's houses start building an annex to the hall that has a grinning devil poking at your head with his tail tied to the ceiling. This devil begins to make people happier as it stabs at their heads that all the mourning is set aside.

Chance Century: We don't have any teachers necessarily but are filled with the spirit of the full century of the 1800's wind bitten noses of the frozen nights of pissing in a bug filled outhouse 1/4 mile from the house downwind and sun-scorched days heating up everything iron pounding iron blood turning the brain into a desert where camels of the mind walk on heart strings and spit ergot into the eye.

Timber Amplifier: We are passing by the rock/pop bullshit that is a turd creek millions of people are paddling up, some outfitted with state of the art egg beaters and others dipping in their hands pushing upstream to spawn in the corporate mouth of the rock commune where sighs Blue Oyster Bill and the next Helmet contract both yawning and jacking off each other's guitar shaped dicks. Exciting stuff.

[Interview shortened for webpage. -ed.]