MIKE MUIR of SUICIDAL TENDENCIES: Learning To Say No
An interview by Sarah Kidd.
Suicidal Tendencies is a band synonymous with tenure in the music world. While members have come and gone over the years, the music and their individuality which they staked out from the beginning has remained solid; thanks to the one and only Mike Muir.
While everyone else was trying to fit it into a scene, Muir wanted nothing more than to make music that satisfied his own creative desires. Growing up as the younger brother of Jim Muir – infamous for being a member of the Dogtown skateboarding team – Muir was soon introduced to a heady mix of both metal music, punk and skateboarding, a combination which many would say lead to the conception of Suicidal Tendencies. They were a ‘crossover’ band, taking the elements of genre’s such as hardcore punk, thrash metal and skate punk and mixing it altogether to create a potent mix of sound that they alone owned.
Nearly thirty-eight years down the track and Muir is still fighting fit, heading the band as the only original member but one whose vision remains the same as it always was. When I call Muir he is in “beautiful southern California”, which prompts a quick discussion about the crazy weather patterns over this side of the world; something that concerns him as he has family in Australia [Muir lived in Queensland for a short period of time] who have been “goin’ through it”.
Suicidal Tendencies has been going since 1980; how do you look back on that length of career because really in a day and age when bands come and go you guys have stayed true and are still here and that’s pretty damn impressive!
“There’s a lot of ways to look at it, I think one of those first things is we really weren’t starting out to be quote unquote a band! I think one of the problems is when people want to do something they make all these things that they’re going to do and they get caught up on trying to be successful on definitions that don’t really apply and they forget about the bases and what life’s about. It’s like doin the right things for the right reasons you know? And for us, we didn’t want to follow the parameters that other people had for success and probably people would have laughed if we said that we were. So consequently we avoided a lot of pitfalls that other people had.
The other thing is my Dad told me ‘Hey’ – you know when I was twelve years old – ‘You never get anywhere in life unless you learn how to say no and mean it and if you can’t back up no you’re in trouble’ and I didn’t [laughs] really understand what he was saying at the time but I definitely learned that really quick and I think that applies for everybody.”
Dad sounds like a wise man…
“People when they’re young they’re scared of being accepted, they wanna fit in so they do things short term that they think will be accepted and then they end up regretting it and hating themselves! It’s not worth hating yourself to get someone else to like you, so that’s the same thing with music why would we play music that at a certain particular time more people would like? You know what I’m saying? My best friend came over before we were doing the first record and said ’Mike I just gotta be honest, what you’re doing is not music and no one’s gonna like it’ and I said ‘Well I really don’t care’ and he said ‘Well listen to the radio, you can do that’ and I said ‘Well I don’t listen to the radio, I don’t like it, so why would I do something I don’t like?’
[mutual laughter]
I’m not doing it to be liked, I wanna do what I like and if other people like it great, and if they don’t that’s fine. I’ve always had the approach; with music it’s kinda like food, if somebody doesn’t like something that’s my favourite food and they say ‘That’s terrible’ I don’t go ‘Oh is it?’ and spit it out [laughs] and there’s stuff that I don’t like that people say ‘It’s so good’, I’m sorry I just don’t like it, I hate it, it’s like I take a bite and it’s like I can’t eat it. I wished I like it, but I don’t.
So to me that is what music is about, it’s not about fitting in or something, it’s something that’s deeper, it’s intestinal, just like food in a sense. It’s doing what you believe and what you wanna do and not just for the moment and so that’s why we’re still around. Also you don’t have funny pictures that people look back on – that I call blackmail photos. You have to like what you’re doing, you have to believe in it or people will be able to see through it. It’s a façade, and it’s a job and you’re an actor; and that’s the one thing – in my first ever interview – that I said, ‘I’ll never let it become a job’ I think that’s the smartest thing – in hindsight – that I was smart enough to know.”
That was one of the main things that appealed about Suicidal Tendencies; as a band you spoke to those of us who never really fit into a particular scene where everyone was trying to be part of a larger cell. You just were who you were.
“Yeah well that was the big contradiction with punk rock you know, one of the big bands at the time – which they were pretty big back then – [the lead singer] he was like ‘You know what people aren’t going to like you looking like that’ and I’m looking at him with his eyeliner and his leather jacket and his hair’s all like this and I’m like ‘What does it matter how I look? I never like listen to music and then say ‘Hey can I see a picture of these guys?’ [mutual laughter] before I like it you know?
A lot of punk rockers were like ‘You gotta look this way, dress this way, act this way, rulebook and then you become an individual’ and I was like ‘Isn’t that a contradiction?’ and it’s like who makes the rulebook anyhow? And I think the other side of it, is the ones you know like a lot of the punk rockers that have a problem with this they just do the opposite, and doing the opposite isn’t the thing. You gotta be honest, and you have to learn to play with yourself and you’ve got to follow your heart and that’s a dirty path because you might find in the beginning that you really don’t like yourself and that’s where a lot of people will stop because that’s a painful journey and they just go ‘Wow’. But then that path of not liking yourself is honestly where you get to the point where you end up having victory because you deal with the things that you don’t like and you stop doing the things that you don’t like about yourself and when people usually stop halfway through and then they just deny the fact that they don’t like, they say it’s good.”
Well it’s certainly what made Suicidal Tendencies stand out from all the rest.
“I think for us basically the point is – I’m not going to tell people what to think, I don’t care what you think as long as you do think, as long as you have a reason for your opinions, and they’re based on a little bit of effort and you think that they can stand up to talk and abuse. If you aren’t willing to talk to someone who has a different opinion, and you can’t be in a conversation with someone I question the validity of your opinion.
I think now we live too much in a society where people don’t hear what they don’t wanna hear. They either honour you or they call you whatever is the bad word in their terminology, you’re a commie you’re a fascist, you know like ‘Duuuude, c’mon I lived in an age where I knew what a commie and a fascist was so it’s ridiculous. If you’re having to call people a commie or a fascist it means basically you fuckin don’t have a very good argument. I never got offended when people had different opinions, sometimes I’d laugh, ‘Ok you can have your opinion, it’s your life, go ahead!’ It’s when you try to force it on me that’s when I have a problem. I think too many people are trying to force opinions on people and I think that’s really wrong!”
Interestingly enough you have also had other musical projects along the way; Los Cycos, Infectious Grooves and your own solo work under Cyco Miko. What was behind the need to have these other projects as well?
“For me there’s a lot of music that I like and there’s waaay more I don’t like. My two favourite bands when I was young were Parliament and The Sex Pistols and people say they’re completely different but to me there are similarities in the sense that they were doing what they wanted to do and it wasn’t – maybe later – but it wasn’t done for a commercial aspect, it was just like ‘Hey you know what we’re gonna go up there and do it and nobody’s gonna stop us, kinda mentality.
With Infectious Grooves – basically when Robert [Trujillo] got in the band he was playing bass and I go ‘You know there’s a lot of stuff that it would be cool to do, writing songs based around the bass line’, whereas Suicidal is more written around the guitar and so it was a really fun thing to do and I really enjoyed it.
With Cyco Miko it’s like a chance to go back into more of the punk rock where I started off and do a situation like when I was sixteen if I heard this what would I think? You know if I saw this what would I think and that kid [Muir referring to himself when he was sixteen] was pretty strong willed you know and so Cyco Miko was a kinda record that that sixteen year old would go ‘Yeah this is fuckin bad ass’ and also in the same sense I had Steve Jones from The Sex Pistols play on guitar on it and for me that was a huge thing because when I was twelve and somebody had said ‘Hey you’re going to do a record with Steve Jones playing guitar!’ it would be like ‘Ahh fuck you man!’ [mutual laughter]
The same thing with Infectious Grooves you know, when Ozzy sang on ‘Therapy’ one of the Infectious Groove songs. When I was twelve years old people listened to Black Sabbath and they’d say ‘Hey, one day Mike you’ll be singing a song with Ozzy!’ and I’d be like ‘Yeah, yeah right, yeah, sure thing’ [laughs] So you have to be able to appreciate things you never thought would happen, so there’s a lot of great things that I appreciate!
I feel like I’ve never been like the angry music guy, I’m a fighter to a certain degree and I’ve redefined what fighting is but you know I’m not angry in the sense that people just wanna be upset to be upset.”
It cannot be denied that for Suicidal Tendencies one of their most iconic songs is ‘Institutionalized’, it’s synonymous with the band. To you, what is it about this track that has made it stand the test of time?
“I think because you could take any generation and they’ll say that’s their song, that’s how they feel you know? It’s a very honest song, it was done in such an honest way that some people hear it and go ‘Yeah, I can relate’ and that’s what music should be you know?
To me music should always be something that you can relate to and that motivates, rather than just sing along to because it’s gotta hook and is catchy. So there’s no hook [laughs] it’s not catchy, but you listen and you go ‘What’s he sayin?’ and it kinda forces you to listen and I think – even now, like I said before – people don’t listen and that’s an important thing to learn how to do!”
Suicidal Tendencies are one of the acts performing at tomorrow’s ‘Storm The Gates’ Music Festival, alongside bands such as Limp Bizkit, Hed PE and Sublime with Rome. Tickets are still available, but get in quick as it’s tracking towards selling out!
