1996 Eat Interview

The Eat's brand of "old time punk rock" is as all-American as a thick slice of apple pie. And just as tasty. Hailing from Miami, Florida, their two self released 45s from the late 1970s frequently crop up on nerdy collectors' want lists. Don't fret, you'll never see a copy of the first, "Communist Radio". You may lay eyes on the second, God Punishes The Eat, but don't count on it.

This interview was conducted via GTE telephone lines over a period of two weeks last July, 1996. All four band members proved to be personable, gregarious, and talkative. Uhh, extremely talkative.

Michael O'Brien: vocals, guitar, main songwriter
Eddie O'Brien: guitar, vocals, family man
Chris Cottie: handsome drummer
Kenny Lindahl: nit-picky bass player #2
Roger: guy with the big phone bill

Roger: Eddie, you and Mike are originally from New York?

Eddie: Yes, we grew up in West Islip on Long Island. Our parents moved to Florida in 1969. I was seventeen when we moved and spent the last six months of high school here in Miami. I was in a couple of garage bands in high school We'd practice all summer leading up to a gig at somebody's party (laughs). Three hundred rehearsals in preparation for one little party.

Roger: Were you old enough to see any bands in Long Island?

Eddie: Oh sure, there was the Vagrants with Leslie West, they were at the top of the heap. Billy Joel's band the Hassles, they were big at that time. The Wilkinson Tricycle (laughs), I don't know if you've ever heard of them, they were pretty obscure. They had one album out, I still have it around here somewhere. It used to get played on what were then called the "underground stations" in New York. They were sort of a Hendrix inspired three piece power trio is what you'd call it.

Roger: What about Miami? Any bands going on?

Eddie: Most of the bands were cover groups...there was the Echo...and a group called Hemlock (laughs). As far as original music, Charlie Pickett's cousin Mark Markham had a group. They were partially based here and in Ohio... Mark Markham and the Jesters. They had sort of a garage band sound, like Question Mark and the Mysterians.

Roger: Were you in any bands prior to the Eat?

Eddie: Chris Cottie and I were about eighteen when we started playing together. We were in a few different bands..."wannabe" type bar bands. But we were never straight enough to be even that good (laughs). We were doing covers, but it was the type of music people didn't want to hear. Jefferson Airplane, stuff like that, whereas Miami has always been more of a pop/Top 40 oriented place. There wasn't anyone playing original music in Miami in the 70's, everyone was doing covers. Eventually it got ingrained that that's what you were supposed to do if you were in a local band, you played covers.

Chris: Both Eddie and I had responded to an ad from a guy named John Levitt who was putting together a country rock band called Helios. Leavitt had roadied for the Jefferson Airplane in the late 60s. Eddie was playing lead guitar. This was in 1972. We were into bands like Poco and the Byrds circa Sweethearts of the Rodeo. We went through about three or four different girl singers. We were the house band for a bar in Hialeah. That lasted about a year and then I took off to move to Canada.

Michael: They were playing Jefferson Airplane, Poco, the Band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, a lot of Byrds covers, Their first show was at the cripple ward of Jackson Memorial Hospital (laughs). The band set up and then they wheeled all the patients in, sitting in beds and wheelchairs. The band went through their repertoire - "You Ain't Going Nowhere", all these Byrds songs. They did the bass solo from "You And Me And Pooneil", that long psychedelic Jefferson Airplane thing. It was just grotesque. Thing is, the cripples seemed to enjoy it...

Roger: Maybe they were mentally impaired as well. In any case, they were pretty much a captive audience.

Michael: I suppose they could've asked to be wheeled out if they didn't like it. I was fifteen or sixteen at the time. I was their little roadie. I could play guitar but I didn't play with them. Helios eventually split up and Eddie and Chris separated into various sleazy cover bands, doing James Gang-type stuff. They weren't concentrating on writing their own material, although Eddie had a couple of songs he was working on.

Roger: Michael, were you in any bands prior to the Eat?

Michael: I was in a band called Total Darkness (laughs) which was a stupid Black Sabbath cover band. We were doing Grand Funk too. This was when I was fifteen. Not too much good music was coming to Miami. I did get to see the Spiders From Mars tour when it passed through, which I'll never forget. Chris and Eddie were still into country, but I was into all the glitter stuff: Roxy Music, Sparks, etc. My brother would say to me, "What's this crap you're listening to?!", and he'd keep playing country.

Roger: How did the Eat get started?

Michael: Glenn Newland worked with Eddie. Glenn had never played an instrument before, but suddenly decided he wanted to learn bass. Eddie agreed to teach him in his basement. Eddie's house is one of the few in Florida with a basement because if you dig into the ground you'll often hit water. The initial impulse was go down to the basement - Eddie teaches Glenn bass, I'd play drums, Eddie would be on guitar and we’d just jam. I knew guitar, but I wanted to learn to drum. We got a fourth guy, Elio Garcia, also on guitar, and started playing covers.

Roger: Like what?

Michael: Well by then Eddie had changed his mind. “Oh you were right, glitter is pretty cool after all". This was in ’78. We were into Cheap Trick and Sparks because I've always been a big Sparks freak. And the Ramones were around, Elvis Costello, the Sex Pistols, the Clash. We were still listening to the Who. Plus we had that psychedelic background from growing up in the 70s. We were doing all these covers..."Peace, Love and Understanding", "Uncontrollable Urge", and we sucked, we were horrible.

Eddie: We liked punk bands but we didn’t have it in us to be able to play that "thrash" style of music. So we ended up sounding kind of … I’m not sure what you would call it. I was listening to country and western, rock-a-billy, Carl Perkins, that type of crap. Michael was listening to the New York Dolls, Bowie, and all the stuff from that era. Before that we had all been fans of the Beatles and other 60s British pop.

Roger: How did the band name come up?

Michael: Initially we were called the Fire Ants. But we were really, really bad and we'd sit around complaining all day long. "This practice totally eats", "We can't fucking play, we eat", "Everything eats", "Ah shit, it all eats so much", and somehow the name Fire Ants mutated into the Eat. That was the very first incarnation of the Eat...me on drums, Eddie and Elio on guitars, Glenn on bass. This was still in '78. Anyway, Chris Cottie had just returned to Miami after having been kicked off the David Allan Coe tour.

Roger: What happened Chris?

Chris: I returned from Canada about 1977 and almost immediately left to tour with David Allan Coe...

Roger: The guy who sang "Willie, Waylon and Me"?

Chris: Right. Well in the back of the old Rolling Stone magazines there were ad listings called "Musician's National Referral". For twenty bucks you were given ten names or "leads" of people in your area to play with. At that time David Allan Coe was based in Big Pine Key in the Florida Keys, and his name came up as one of my leads! As soon as I saw his name I went, "Holy Shit!" (laughs). I called him up, auditioned, and got the job. I don't know if you know anything about him?

Roger: He's some sort of wild man isn't he?

Chris: Ohh, just fucking crazy! With a capital 'C' (laughs). He had been appointed head of the National Outlaw Motorcycle Gang, so this was basically a biker sponsored tour. I don't know if they were smuggling guns, drugs, or shit like that in the bus, but there were always a lot of bikers coming and going, doing business backstage. There would also be a couple hundred bikers up front at each show, which was real intimidating for the rest of us. David Allen Coe treated us like shit. He never paid us, we were kept like prisoners. The steel guitar player was the band leader - David Allan Coe never even came to rehearsals. He was separate from the rest of us. We were like hired guns. We were expected to know all his songs at all times. Whenever he decided to start singing a song onstage, well, you'd better fucking know it (laughs). As soon as we'd get comfortable with a certain set list he liked to announce, "Aww, that shit's too easy". Then he'd whip up a new list for us to memorize and rehearse.

Roger: So how did you get kicked off the tour?

Chris: We were playing in Georgia at an outdoor rodeo. After the soundcheck, I was walking back to the bus to change clothes. I stepped in a gopher hole and broke my right ankle. The paramedics came and took me to the hospital, where they wrapped it in an ace bandage and sent me back to the rodeo. I played that gig with the broken ankle and three or four more gigs after that. David Allan Coe was such an asshole he wouldn't let the roadies help me set up or break down my drum set. He said I was too much of a "whiner" because I was complaining my ankle hurt. So I was playing with my right foot propped up on a milk crate, playing bass drum with my left foot instead. My last show was in Athens, Georgia. We were supposed to move on to play Nashville, and I told him, "I think that'll be all for me, my ankle hurts too much. Maybe you can pick up a new drummer in Nashville". Next morning when I woke up, I walk out the motel to find all my gear thrown off the bus onto the sidewalk. The rest of the band were eating breakfast so I asked, "What's going on?". David Allan Coe gets right up in my face and says, "I ain't no fucking taxi service for gimps." I asked, "Are you going to pay me the money you owe me?" Right in the middle of the Holiday Inn restaurant he pulls out a .45, cocks it and sticks it under my chin. "No. You got any more questions? You're fired!". I came back to Florida with the attitude, "If that's Nashville, then kiss my ass, thank you very much" (laughs). I laid low for a couple of months, rehabilitated my ankle, got a regular job and thought about returning to college. I got back in touch with Eddie, who said he and his brother Michael were playing in his basement... did I want to come down and jam with them? And that was the start of the Eat.

Michael: Chris happened to be back in town when we kicked Elio out of the band. Chris called up, asking "What's happening?" We told him we've got this punk band, why don't you come on down. I was playing drums and wasn't much of a drummer. Kind of pathetic actually. Once Chris came in I switched to guitar and that was it, the whole thing just gelled. Once we had that decent line up we said screw the covers, let's start writing our own stuff. Also right about that time we made the conscious decision, "We are now going to be a punk band". No more country shit, let's start working on new material. When Eddie wrote "Jimmy B Goode" we said, "Oh wow, that's really a great song". We could sense we had something going.

Roger: Were any other punk bands playing around Miami at that time?

Chris: The way Miami was in the mid-70s, if you wanted to play in clubs, the club owners had a list of songs you'd have to cover and clothes you were allowed to wear. If you didn't wear those clothes and play those songs then get the fuck out. It wasn't a good environment for bands wanting to play original music.

Michael: When we showed up to play, the Miami scene had existed for maybe two months. The Cichlids were playing original material, the Z-Cars had some originals, another band called the Screaming Sneakers did new wave covers, and we were doing 75 percent originals. That was the whole scene at the time. The Z-Cars, or Zed Cars, had an English lead singer. It was the closest thing there was to a punk band in Miami at the time. The guitar player would do windmills like Pete Townshend. They wore a lot of weird clothes and such, and strange people showed up at their shows, dressed in sort of a glitter style. They were playing songs from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which back in 1978/79 was pretty wild, for Miami at least (laughs).

Roger: So it was a pretty close-knit scene? All the Miami punks dressing up like transvestites and doing the “Time Warp” …

Eddie: Not really. The main band was the Cichlids, a group with two guys and two girls, a kind of poppy punk group. Their manager was Robert Mascaro. We got to be good friends with him, but I knew that we had ABSOLUTELY NO COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL!! Our motivation was just to annoy people, which we probably succeeded at (laughs).

Michael: The Cichlids were playing Tight Squeeze, a club in Hollywood owned by Mickey Rooney's son. On stage they had two guitars, bass and drums, but they sequenced their songs with a lot of segues and were very loud and distorted and fast. Their drummer was killer.

Roger: What were your early shows like?

Michael: When we played our first show we still looked pretty hippyish. I had long shoulder length hair. Eddie had dreadlocks (!). We were too chickenshit to cut our hair, yet we still wanted to do something kinds weird. So Eddie got his all done up in dreadlocks. This white guy with dreadlocks (laughs). We were playing songs that would make up most of the first two 7"s. "Catholic Love", "Jimmy B. Goode", a couple of other songs we later ended up throwing away. We still had a few covers: "Cretin Rock" (sic) by the Ramones, a perfectly awful version of "English Civil War" by the Clash. We were even doing "Anarchy In The U.K.". We got dissed pretty bad at the beginning because of our hippy looks and the fact that we sounded only okay, we weren't great. But as far as original stuff, I think we had some strong material in our set. It wasn't a friendly scene, certainly not like today where everyone just loves one another. We played two shows with the long hair and dreadlocks. The second show was outdoors at Florida Atlantic University. This local punk zine, The Mouth Of The Rat, had discovered us by then. The editor, David Parsons, told me, "You look like John Kay of Steppenwolf, you'd better cut your hair". That was it. We decided to revamp our image, cut our hair and dress up as ridiculously as possible.

Eddie figured he'd do Rick Nielsen one better and dress like a priest. He bought a Gibson Explorer. For our third gig we had the priest suit and the haircuts. I was dressed up in a clown suit. Our bassist Glenn would dress up as femininely as possible. Our drummer Chris is huge, so he'd wear a wrestling outfit.

Kenny: Eddie used to wear that priest collar about every other show. One Halloween they all dressed up as Fidel Castro, the beards and cigars and fatigues and everything.

Roger: Where were you getting gigs?

Chris: The first club that featured original music was Tight Squeeze. The next place was Premier AOR club, which was a huge building. All kinds of bands came out of the woodwork to play there. That was a place you could do whatever your little heart desired because nobody would give a shit. Read poetry, choke a chicken (laughs) ... whatever the fuck you wanted to do, it was okay. That's where the Miami music scene really started to grow, in my opinion. Our manager early on was my friend Eric Moss. He had been doing a radio show on WRN, the local public station, called Radio Free Living Room. He helped us get gigs and built a bit of an organization around us. Eric and I would go into empty clubs and tell owners, "We can bring 100-150 people here on the weekends if you let us book the shows". The Premier AOR, the Balkan Club, Finders Lounge, we found a bunch of bars that didn't have any business. All these clubs would let us play, but after a while they realized the punk rock contingent didn't have the money to drink that much! (laughs). So after a couple of shows we would go find some other suckers. We did quite a few strange gigs and had writers from the local papers cover it. The local Porsche dealership opened up a showroom, so we played there. Miami's entertainment scene was just starting to crack open. A lot of weird things were happening. Magazines would want to interview us. The magazine would only have three issues before it folded, but Hey!, we were in there.

Roger: What was the initial public reaction to the band?

Michael: Real hostile. A lot of people spitting on us. After shows we would have to run a gauntlet to get to our cars because there would be a gang of rednecks waiting outside to kick our asses, slash tires, whatever. That kind of shit. And here we were, wearing spandex leopard skin pants because we were still influenced by glitter. One of our early shows was organized by a disco magazine called Images. They had discovered punk and wanted to do a "Disco Meets Punk" issue. Our manager, Eric Moss, got us the gig in a ritzy part of Miami, Coral Gables, I think. The crowd was all disco freaks, about 200, mostly Cubans There was a disco band playing called Babe (laughs), B-A-B-E, and we show up with our little entourage of about five punks. The Images staff decided the disco band would play, then the punk band would play. So Babe struts their stuff and then we get up to play. Right during the first verse of our first song, "Jimmy left the room with the bottle in his hand," the club owners pull the plug on us. I mean we're playing and playing; and all of a sudden, "Uh oh, there's no power!". David Parsons, editor of Mouth Of The Rat, turns and screams at this crowd of disco people, who are standing there with their mouths open because they didn't know what was going on no one had announced a punk band was going to play or anything. The promoters just told us to get up and start playing. And the Images writers were trying to write their thing or whatever. So David screams at the crowd, "You people are assholes", and pulls a large framed picture off the wall and smashes it on the front of the stage. Shards of glass go flying into the audience and into the band. I said, "Let's get out of here!", and we all grabbed our gear and split. The Miami police showed up and put David in the back of a squad car. I don't know how our manager got him out. And then we had to deal with this big bunch of club bouncer gorillas at the front, who were threatening to fuck us up. Somehow, I don't know how, we got out of there unscathed.

Roger: Any other incidents?

Michael: The same year we were playing the Agora club in Hallandale. Eddie had his priest suit on and I was wearing one of my mother's old pants suits. We were looking real stupid and silly. At the time, Ted Kennedy was running for President and we had a big campaign poster with his picture on it. This was also during the time of the hostage crisis, so we drew a speech balloon coming out of his mouth saying, "Drown the hostages”. People were offended but we were just trying to be humorous. The other weird thing about that show was we had a debutante-type girl from West Palm Beach introduce us on stage. She said, "Here they are, the only punk band in Miami with no Jews and no queers".

Eddie and I looked at each other, because normally during the intro you don't hear what's said, you just slam into the first song. We started into "Communist Radio" and I was thinking, "What did she just say?" The club owner came up between sets and fired us for her comments. When that got written up in the newspaper, people were calling us "anti-Semitic bastards” which of course we never were. Half our fan base was Jewish, my sister-in-law is Jewish … it's just the music press wanted us to be obnoxious, so they portrayed us that way.

Roger: Oy veyl So you're saying you were unfairly typecast…

Michael: Well no, that's not true either because we were purposefully obnoxious on many occasions. One time we played a show and said we were going to have a wet t-shirt contest. My brother got a bucket of water and a bunch of t-shirts. He dipped the shirts into the water, pulled them out and got the audience to decide which was the best wet t-shirt (chuckles). Shit like that, people found obnoxious.

Roger: When did you first decide to record?

Chris: We had wanted to record almost from the start, but there were no bands at the time, let alone any bands putting records out. Then the Cichlids landed this contract with an actual record company, and we were very jealous. We thought, "Fuck those guys, let’s put out our own record before they do", and we hurried up “Communist Radio" as a single.

Roger: The first single was recorded live at a show?

Michael: No, we had a video shoot in September of '79 at Down South Studios. We got on the sound stage and played six or seven songs live. We arranged for a sixteen track mobile recording unit to tape the whole thing. That's where we got "Communist"/”Catholic Love”, off that session. We thought we'd do the record and be able to shoot a video at the same time. The video turned out green. Somehow the lighting or coloring was wrong, and the video got tucked up and was worthless. We never saw the video again, no one knows where it is. Most probably it was recorded over, who knows. Even the master tape from that session is gone, because there were more songs that were recorded. Stuff that would later end up on God Punishes The Eat. We released the "Communist Radio" 45 on New Year's Eve, 1979.

Chris: The sound quality on that first single really sucks and it's my fault. It was originally a very clear recording, super clear, everything sounded great. I took it in to get it mastered and the sound in the mastering lab was AMAZING. This guy had a whole fucking wall full of speakers. Most clear sound I've ever heard, so I told the guy, "Make it brighter, add more treble, brighter, brighter, BRIGHTER!" The sound engineer was saying, "Gee, I don't know...' But I was telling him, 'Trust me, it's punk rock. Go ahead, it sounds fucking GREAT!". Because it did sound great in there. But when we got the record home it was total static all the way through and well. Oops

Roger: I like that though, especially the distortion on the vocals.

Chris: I know, but it was totally unintentional.

Roger: I really like the lyrics.

Michael: "I got caught getting caught in the motion". The lyrics don't really mean anything, it's sort of stream of consciousness lines strung together. I was playing around with the guitar and wrote it in about five minutes. Usually when I write, I'll throw words in temporarily and come back later, hopefully, to turn it into something more meaningful. But when I wrote "Communist Radio", I dropped the ball on finishing it. All of a sudden we were recording and all I had were filter lyrics. That's what went on the record. "Catholic Love" is a song Eddie had written a couple of years before the Eat even got going. Eddie thought it would be a neat idea to write a "papist pop song".

Roger: Was the single ever distributed nationally?

Michael: Initially, we just took them to the local stores here in Miami. Those stores may have unloaded some on a national distributor, I'm not sure. Most of it was here in Miami. Next thing, just about a year later, some of them got into Europe, although I don't know how. We started getting letters from there.

Roger: What's the significance behind "Giggling Hitler"?

Chris: That was Eddie. He had a real cool picture of Hitler surrounded by all these young, gay looking, staff members. They're looking down at him and he's giggling, "Hee hee hee". We used it as an insert for the single with the lyrics on the other side.

Michael: When we put out "Communist Radio", Eddie had made a cover which we didn't end up using because David Parsons went and made this neat-o punk cover for us, with a lot of words and letters cut out of a newspaper and pasted together. But Eddie had this great picture in a book of Adolf Hitler laughing, and we put that inside the single as an insert. We thought, "'Giggling Hitler'... hmmm, that has a nice ring to it". Of course, people were. saying, "See they're racists, I told you so', when actually it was a spur of the moment thing we threw together. Eddie put a picture of John Denver in them too.

Roger: Did "Giggling Hitler" release any music by any other bands?

Michael: Nope. Giggling Hitler 001 and Giggling Hitler 002, that was it.

Roger: You guys were booking your own shows?

Michael: After we put the record out, this guy Eric David wanted to manage us. He was really rich and would come to our shows flashing rolls of hundred dollar bills. He'd tell us, "I've got a contract I want you to sign. In return I'll get you this and that". Eric David rented out the Sunrise Musical Theater, a small auditorium in Fort Lauderdale. The Beach Boys were just there not long ago. He organized a show for us called "New Wave New Year's". He got James Chance And The Contortions, us, the Cichlids, Nervus Rex, and one other band I can't remember. Pat Benatar was there, hanging around. This was his way of showing how much money he had, how much he'd be able to do for us. We played the show and announced, "Here's our first single, folks", and started throwing copies off the stage. We only pressed up 500 and here I am flinging them into the audience. They're getting all smashed up, people are defacing them or throwing them back at us. At that point, I don't think we had the jackets, just the single. We probably threw out at least fifty of them, and the majority of those got trashed. After we played, we went backstage and drank all of the Contortions' booze. My brother and Chris went to their dressing room and ripped it off while they were playing. We didn't end up signing because Eddie and I didn't like the looks of the whole thing. He had the contract all laid out. Chris signed it and Glenn signed, but Eddie and I, being the little commie jerks we are, said, "No, this guy's a creep. Fuck him". What we were doing was unwittingly sowing the seeds to become a cult band, that's what we were doing (laughs).

Roger: That's a great attitude though.

Michael: Yeah, he had his contract with its, "You will do this and you will do that" terminology, and "Publishing rights will be blah blah blah". We asked ourselves, "Do we really want to have to deal with this guy?" And we decided no, we'll do things on our own. We had put our own record out, we didn't need this guys help. I like the position I'm in now, although I wouldn't have minded all the money he was promising (laughs).

Chris: When Eric David was hanging around, I was pushing to sign. My feeling was, "Fuck, let's go for it, see how far we can take this". I would get hot and Eddie would get cold. Then I would say "Fuck it" and Eddie would say, "Oh, okay". We were always opposite, we could never agree on anything back then. That was the only time we got close to doing this as a full time thing. It just never seemed to work out,

Roger: What were the circumstances under which the EP (God Punishes The Eat) was recorded?

Michael: After "Communist Radio" we thought, "Wow this is fun, now we’ll do an album". We bought a four track reel to reel and started working on what turned out to be God Punishes The Eat at Eddie's house, down in his basement. We called it JMJ studios, after Jesus, Mary and Joseph (laughs), We ended up recording six songs, one of which we didn't use. We put the instruments down on four tracks and transferred that over to eight track and added vocals. The whole thing is a six track recording. While we were recording, with the four track going, the whole damn reel unraveled. ¼ inch tape all over the floor like a big pile of spaghetti. We had the recording equipment sitting on a wet bar in the basement. The tape was piling up on the floor, but we couldn't see it as the machine was facing away from us. Eddie saw what was happening but didn't want to tell us. He re-spooled the whole thing. That's probably why the sound quality on the EP is the way it is. It sounds like mud. We packaged the EP the same way as the single, only this time we pressed up one thousand.

Roger: What's the story behind "Doctor TV"?

Michael: That was the first song I wrote with the Eat. I used to be a telephone directory assistance operator. One day I get a call, "I'd like the number for Doctor TV". I said, "Who? Doctor TV? What the hell?!". I looked and couldn't find it. "I'm sorry, it's not listed". The guy goes, "Are you sure? It's right on the comer of so and so". I checked and it turns out “TV Doctor”'s the name of the place, the guy had gotten it backwards. But the phrase stuck with me and I thought, "Hmmmm ... Doctor TV, that would make a great title". The music, I don't know where the hell it came from, I think I was trying to sound like the Doors or something.

Roger: Oh no. What Doors song?

Michael: Gee, I don't even know (pauses). "Break on Through"? It's all in a sort of groove on A. I wasn't much of a guitarist at the time, but at least I had written something. Chris arranged it, he was the one who put all the stops and starts into it. When I went in with it, the song was pretty wimpy. Chris said, "Let's do this with it", and once he beefed it up it sounded pretty cool.

Roger: Did you ever tour the U.S.?

Michael: We were still working day jobs the entire time. Three of us worked with the telephone company. I don't think Eddie ever contemplated quitting his job, but Chris and I might have. Finally we decided we'll give it a shot and do a tour, take time off work, go to New York, talk to whoever...

Chris: Our one and only tour had its ups and downs. We had real good gigs where a lot of people came and were very enthusiastic. Then we had gigs where three people would show up. We booked the tour on our own. We had gotten the names of a few clubs in the Carolinas and Georgia. We had a gig in New York City and I got a chance to fly up early. David Parsons from Mouth Of The Rat had moved to New York. I stayed with him and managed to book us into a few more clubs. I took a bunch of the records up there and I walked around all day, knocking on record companies' doors, trying to get in and get people to listen to the records. All that kinda shit. Most of the places said, "Drop it off, we'll get in touch with you". Sire were the only people that would talk to me. The guy actually invited me in, sat down and played the record. A couple of the guys from the band Madness were in the office at the same time. I had a little Miami coke on me, so we all partied up. After we finished it they said, "That was really nice, thanks for coming by, we'll call you" (laughs). Hey, at least they listened to it, I couldn't argue too much.

Michael: In New York we wanted to go see John Lennon. We were going to go to the Dakota and hang out. This was right before he got shot, like October of 1980. We had played two clubs in NYC, a place called TR3 and a place called the 80s, which was in the eightieth block of Manhattan, near the Dakota. We got the idea, "Hey, let's see if John Lennon steps out", which we didn't end up doing. Instead, we went and saw David Bowie in the Elephant Man (laughs).

Roger: Any shows stand out?

Michael: We played in Raleigh, North Carolina, in this little university district called the Raleigh Underground. A lot of Floridians in the audience were going to college up there. We did great. That was the best show of the whole trip. They went nuts. Then we went to Atlanta, but the show hadn't been publicized. The club owners offered to let us play anyway, even though no one was there. They were still going to pay us. We had stopped at South Of The Border on the way and gotten some fireworks. Chris said, "Okay, I'm going to shoot this roman candle. If it goes North we'll play, if it goes South we're going straight back to Florida”. The candle went north so we played. That's the way we made decisions (laughs). That gig we played with the Contractions, an all girl band from San Francisco. We were thinking, "Yeah, we’re going to get some action tonight", and of course they turned out to be lesbians. We got back and played the last show of the tour at the New Wave Lounge on Fort Lauderdale Beach. At that time we were in the midst of working on Scattered Wahoo Action. We had been in Sync studios before we left for the tour and recorded half an album, seven tracks or something. After we got back to Miami, our bassist Glenn said, "See you guys, I'm quitting".

Roger: Kenny, was that when you got involved with the Eat?

Kenny: I was playing with Charlie Pickett and we would share bills with the Eat pretty much every other weekend at a club in Hollywood called the Premier. The Eat and a band called the Reactions would open on a rotating basis every other week. I got to know Michael and Eddie because they were from New York and were big Mets fans, as was I. We're a fairly baseball oriented band, that's why we put the cards in the records. Glenn decided he didn't want to play with the Eat anymore and I wasn't playing with Charlie during that period, mid '82, so we hooked up. I appeared on the first Eggs' 45, "White Light White Heat", which was on the Open label. Charlie remixed the record and left off the bass track, but I still got credit for playing on the record.

Roger: You played bass on half of the Scattered Wahoo Action sessions?

Kenny: There were songs the Eat recorded with Glenn and also with me, later. There's two versions of a lot of those songs. The takes that Charlie produced, which were the ones I played on, sound much better. Most of those were used for the Jeterboy tape.

Roger: What's the deal with Sync Studios?

Kenny: Both Scattered Wahoo Action and Hialeah were recorded at Sync. Sync has occupied many locations over the years. Sync Studios is run by Frank Falestra, stage name Rat Bastard. Frank's main claim to fame is his band Scraping Teeth, who were voted "Most Detestable Band" or "Most Awful Band" or something like that, in Spin. The band's called the Laundry Room Squelchers now.

Michael: God Punishes The Eat had ended up sounding so awful that we fled Eddie's basement for a real studio. We were worried we might get a disappointing slick sound, which unfortunately is what happened.

Roger: "I Led Two Lives" appeared on both the cassette and the Open compilation. Were those different recordings?

Michael: Yes, those are two different versions. You might notice the back-up vocals are different.

Roger: What's the inspiration for "Ballbusters On Parade"?

Michael: That came from the movie Carnal Knowledge. I thought it was a neat title If you look at the lyrics, they have nothing to do with the title. That's the way I end up writing a lot of my songs.

Roger: How many copies of the tape were made?

Michael: I think Joe (Harris, a.k.a. Jeterboy) made 250 - 300. The vinyl reissue is missing a semi-acoustic version of "Catholic Love", which appeared on the cassette. That was recorded at our first ever session, a cheesy sounding kind of thing. Joe has the master, we don't even have it. It was recorded before we had even played out live. It sounds acoustic because I plugged my guitar directly into the board so there's no amplification and it sounds like a freakin' banjo. A pretty lame sounding tape. The Dutch reissue has a live version of "Communist Radio" from 1983 recorded onto two track reel to reel that replaces "Catholic Love'. The sound is questionable, but it's a good version, better than the single. Oh yeah, the reissue also omits "Sub-human" because Wicked Witch will be putting it on a compilation. Scattered Wahoo Action was intended to be an album, but by the time we got through recording we didn't have the finances to press it, and it sat around. We kept playing shows, but by 1983 the band had split up. Joe Harris expressed interest in putting it out, and since we had split no one gave a shit what happened. Joe even mixed it, but we hated the mix, we hated the songs, we hated everything to do with that recording. It was awful, a terrible mix, the worst. On the reissue it's been beefed up somehow. I don't know if they re-EQ’d it or what, but it sounds much better.

Roger: What lead to the band first splitting up in '83?

Michael: Eddie and his wife were both involved in the punk scene, they did everything together. She had her own band Smegma who later changed their name to Teddy and the Frat Girls, after Ted Bundy (laughs), Smegma were a bunch of girls that would hang with the Eat. When we would finish playing they would get up and just destroy whatever was left of the audience. They used our equipment and would come to JMJ studios to get their set together. They couldn't play, but they were cool, they were fun. Eddie's wife got pregnant and Eddie decided, "Well, I'm either going to be a punk rocker or I'm going to be a family guy". And he decided, "That's it, I'm not going to do this shit anymore, I'm going to stick with the wife and the kids".

Eddie: By the mid 1980's the interest in the group was at an all time low. There were a lot of hardcore and thrash groups coming out. The guys with no shirts on and stuff like that (laughs), and it seems that people lost interest in the Eat. Our last show was in '83. At that time we were trying to get this funk thing going. We'd done punk, we'd done new wave we thought we'd give funk a try too. We ended up with stuff like "Nixon's Binoculars". For our last show we took all our stuff, "Living Like A Pig" and everything else, and made funk/groove versions out of them. We have a tape of that somewhere, too. After that we split. The next week Chris Cottie called up, "I know we've broken up, but I have a video project going...". So a week after we split up we had to get back together and do this video project for Chris. A video for "Open Man". We got on an old stage and performed a live version of it. Then we did some cutaway shots of different things. We edited it and put some football stuff in there, some Dallas Cowboys footage. We still have that video, although we never did anything with it. But that was the final thing the band did, was to take acid and make this video. Then we didn't do anything together musically for the next five years...

Michael: I went and joined Morbid Opera

Roger: Was anyone else in the band playing music between 1983-1988?

Michael: The rest of the Eat weren't doing anything, I was the only one playing out. We still hung out and went to sporting events. We'd go see the Dolphins or whatever.

Roger: So then the Eat got back together between 1988-1992?

Michael: Yes. We were all still real friendly with Charlie Pickett. If you go back to '79, Charlie was the next thing that started up in Miami, after us. Charlie continued playing throughout the 80s. We were all in a club in 1988 to see Charlie, and someone said to us, "Hey, why don't you guys play?". We thought, "Yeah, why not?". We put together a reunion show in 1988 which was pretty slow and sloppy because we hadn't gotten enough rehearsal time in. From between '88 and '92 we did about two shows a year and tried to pull in our old fans. For the first show we really packed the place. And it was great, everybody loved it. After that, people said, "Okay, you can break up now". A critic for the Fort Lauderdale News wrote that. We're all a bunch of sensitive guys, real touchy about that kind of shit. Not me, so much as my brother..."Oh fine, you want us to break up, well FUCK YOU!" We ended up playing about four or five shows total. One of them was a benefit a guy held for himself! That was Pete Moss, who was the drummer for the band the Essentials. That was the last time we played, the Pete Moss Benefit in '92. We were horrible. We were doing half punk, half swamp-a-billy. It was pretty thick. I'd look out and see people yawning, so I thought, "Okay, that's the end of the road for this shit".

Eddie: We were getting together once a year to play maybe one gig at the local punk club, Churchill's. I got disgusted with it. During the early 80s, when we were playing every weekend, we would rehearse two to three times a week. We got to be tight. It's hard to recapture that without putting the practice time into it. We would have only three or four rehearsals for our yearly gigs which would always be lousy. It disgusted me and we haven't played now for a couple of years. I said I didn't want to do it anymore. It sucks, we're embarrassing ourselves, everybody hates it … I'm not enjoying it. Why the fuck are we even doing it? (laughs).

Roger: You recorded the Hialeah EP during this time?

Michael: Hal Spector, who calls himself Boise Bob on stage, is an engineer who worked with us on a bunch of different stuff. In 1992, he offered us studio time if we wanted to record a new album. I had a few songs we began to rehearse, but the other guys were out of it as they hadn't been playing for quite a long time. They told me, "You've got the songs and you've got the chops still, so you run the whole thing". We began learning the new songs I had, and brought back some of the old tracks we had never recorded. We ended up recording fifteen tracks, all in 1992. Those sat around longer than Scattered Wahoo Action. Because in '92, the whole local punk scene had fallen apart, it was just depressing. We got out and played our brand of good old time punk rock, but there was no audience to hear it.

Roger: Then how did the Hialeah end up getting released in 1996?

Michael: Kenny is the archivist of the Eat, an anal-retentive kind of guy. He's a draftsman. He loves making little labels and putting things together. We decided to do something with the songs we had recorded. We couldn't afford a whole album, but we could do an EP. That pink cover with Jackie Kennedy was intended to be the cover of the album, we just downsized it for the 7 inch.

Roger: The title track "Hialeah" was an old or new song?

Michael: In the interim, 1983-1988, when we weren't playing, Kenny and Eddie became horse racing fanatics I had a song worked out which was initially called "Plastic TV Android" (laughs), a stupid song with stupid lyrics that we hadn't recorded because obviously it was too stupid. But we'd play it live... we had hundreds of songs we'd written but never recorded. We'd play songs once to see if the crowd liked it before throwing anything away. And that was one we had hanging around for about a year before we decided, 'This is stupid, let's toss it". I brought the music back because we all liked the progression. If you listen closely it sounds real new wave since it was written in 1980/1981. I asked Eddie to write new lyrics and "Hialeah" is the one new song he's written since the band split. The lyrics deal with horse racing because that's all he cared about. Him and Kenny were obsessed. On the cover of the EP we're at the track Chris and I are there just to have our picture taken, but those two fiends are busy laying down bets, getting drunk. My brother has the binoculars on and everything. When we recorded, I had Eddie sing since he wrote the words. It doesn't make any sense if I sing all the songs. On playback, we thought, "Wow! A hit single". That's when we decided the record would be called Hialeah and have a horse racing motif throughout. Kenny and Eddie organized the layout If you look on the back of the record, our names have little track references tacked on. They had originally wanted to title the record after some obscure horse racing term. Some kind of bet you make, some really obscure thing that nobody would know what the fuck it was. 'Tri-Part-Wheel' or something equally fucked up. Finally I said, this shit is getting out of hand, just name the record after the fucking track (Ed. note: Hialeah is a horse track in Miami). Joe Harris put up money originally for the recording. But when we actually pressed the records, Kenny and I financed it. Hal Spector mixed it.

Roger: "I Dream Of Yogi" has sort of a psych feel to it...

Kenny: Yeah, it's creepy and different. When I wrote it and when we originally rehearsed it, the song was much faster. When we got around to recording, it had mutated into something slower and more sinister. The impetus for the song came from the two lines Eddie wrote, "I used to take L.S.D., now I take L.S.U.". Eddie came up with that phrase at a Chinese restaurant after we had played a gig. It's a song detailing the relationship between drugs and gambling. Eddie didn't get co-songwriting credit because it was only two lines. The rule in the Eat is: you have to contribute at least four lines.

Roger: Fourth rule is: Eat kosher salami. Chris, you and Mike co-wrote "M80 Ant Death"?

Chris: I wrote the music, but the words I had weren't great because I'm not a great lyricist. Michael's lyrics are stream of consciousness shit and a lot of times they don't make sense, they're just cool sounding phrases. He'll have a germ of an idea, then he'll throw something in from out of left field, but it sounds cool. They create an image although they may not have a meaning. That's a talent that's difficult to duplicate. Either it sounds cool or it sounds like you're an idiot. Michael happens to have the ability to make it sound cool.

Roger: When was the first time you became aware that your original records were becoming big time collectibles?

Chris: We kept getting fan mail because I've lived at the same address the entire time. Letters were always trickling in from Japan, Australia, all over the world. People would write asking for the records. We still had copies of the second so we'd send them out. Then people started asking more specifically for the first. I remember talking to people from Texas and they offered $100 and I said, "What, are you nuts?!". That's when we started realizing Even now, it hasn't hit Eddie. He's married with tons of kids, he doesn't play anymore. He isn't aware of the level of interest out there.

Michael: Well at first it was just "Communist Radio", nobody wanted God Punishes The Eat (laughs). "Communist Radio" was selling for $100, but then that Killed By Death boot made it shoot up into the $500 to $600 range. As recently as a few years ago we had three hundred of God Punishes The Eat lying around, maybe more. Then, when we were in the middle of recording Hialeah, somebody called asking if we still had copies of God Punishes The Eat. "Yeah, we've got tons of them!". We sold a large quantity to somebody in New York, damned if I can remember who, at 25 bucks a pop (laughs). We thought that was great... my brother kept repeating, "We're rich, Norton, we're rich!" (laughs). I think we got 600 dollars from that. What ended up happening with those records, I don't know.

Eddie: There was a distributor from Boston that contacted us, this must have been 1987 or 1988. He was willing to pay $25 each for copies of God Punishes The Eat. We were thinking, "Man, this guy's nuts. Let's get his money now!". Because we are all out of touch, none of us read the punk press or anything. People would tell me they had seen our records advertised for outrageous amounts, but I never paid much attention to it. After we had stopped playing as the Eat, I was playing on and off with Charlie Pickett when he was between bass players and needed help. I played one gig with him quite a few years ago where we opened up for Sonic Youth and fIREHOSE. I didn't know who these guys were, although Charlie knew Sonic Youth from New York. I came walking into the club with my old bass guitar that has a big sticker on it that says, "the Eat". The guys in Sonic Youth and fIREHOSE were like, "Oh Wow! You were in the Eat?!?!" (laughs). One of them kept pestering me for copies of our records, but I can't remember who...

Roger: Might have been Thurston Moore.

Eddie: Thurston, yeah. I talked to him for quite a while. His aunt lives somewhere in Miami Beach. He was going to go visit her after the show. Just the idea that he had heard of our obscure little band blew me away.

Roger: What do you think about people paying that kind of money for your records?

Michael: It's a shocker, especially when I think of throwing a bunch of them off the stage (laughs) when it first came out. It is nice, especially with all the shit we went through. At first we were thinking, "Oh God, it's just a collector's item. I'm sure no one listens to the music" We thought the music was to be laughed at, that people were more interested in it as a limited commodity than as an actual enjoyable musical listen. Another aspect that makes it collectable: it was the first punk record out of Miami and one of the first independent releases out of Miami.

Kenny: The reason lies in the fact that Michael and Eddie are great songwriters. Personally, it's an honor to play with those guys and I think they are fucking geniuses, I really do. Speaking as a fan of the Eat, which I was when I first saw them, and as a member of the Eat, which I've been for quite a while, I can unequivocally say those guys are just brilliant. That's the reason people want those old records.

Chris: We very rarely got any positive feedback during our existence, it was a struggle to keep going. And now, it turns out everybody liked us (laughs). Better late than never. It's cool to have people be appreciative. It makes me think, "Jeez, it was worth all the effort". We busted our balls. But then, everybody did. Everybody's got a story. We always thought the Eat was good stuff, but what the fuck did we know?

Roger: What are your thoughts concerning the Killed By Death bootlegs?

Eddie: You mean the ones that have Walter's cover?! (laughs). Walter Cz from the Essentials drew that cover for God Punishes The Eat. I've never seen the actual bootleg, I've seen a picture of the cover. Is there more than one in that series? I don't have a big problem with it. I doubt the guy's making a fortune with them. Gets the music out there.

Chris: If someone's that interested to go to that much trouble, and if people like it and it gets the name out there so more can enjoy it, then what the fuck. It wasn't like we were figuring on making millions of dollars on the radio with a top ten hit (laughs). It's funny, we always thought it was accessible. We were writing songs that we liked, that we thought sounded cool.

Roger: During your career was there ever any interest from any of the bigger independent labels?

Michael: As far as I know, just the cassette label ROIR. This was before Scattered Wahoo Action, while we were still in our prime (laughs). We didn't follow up on it. That's the whole reason the band is the way it is, we never gave a fuck. We were having fun and we didn't want to have to listen to anyone telling us what to do.

Eddie: There were labels that expressed interest, I can't remember which ones. We must have fucked it up by not calling people back (laughs), shit like that. We never gave enough of a shit to even call anyone back.

Roger: What do your kids think about the Eat?

Eddie: I was poking through my records trying to find a Sex Pistols album for my thirteen year old. He's learning how to play guitar. He's heard our music and so far he doesn't seem too impressed (chuckles). If it's not on MTV you know, it must not be any good (laughs). The groups he likes are all kind of derivative. I tell him Green Day sounds like the Buzzcocks or that Rancid sounds like the Clash and he tries to shut me up. He doesn't want to hear it. No kid wants to hear their father say their music sounds like bands from the old days. It's funny, my son's going to go see this band Cracker next weekend I didn’t even know who they were, but Joe Harris called and told me Bob Rupe (ex-Silos) was playing bass for them. So I told my son, "When you're at the show, tell the bass player that your Dad says hello" (laughs).

Roger: The band has begun rehearsing again?

Michael: A year and a half ago I walked into the local punk club and noticed a new scene had sprung up. I was knocked out and felt great it had returned. People were coming up to me saying, "Hey, you used to be in the Eatl". I was thinking, "How could you possibly know?!", because these kids were so young. People started hassling us. All these little punkers asking us to play. A complete reversal from four years ago, when we didn't have any reason to play anymore. I had to go back and convince Eddie and Kenny and Chris this phenomenon was really going on. Those three wouldn't believe me. Finally I dragged Chris down to the club. I dragged his ass away from his couch and big screen TV and managed to convince him. Because all these kids got right up in his face, "Oh my God, it's Chris Cottie from the Eat!!". Although Chris was in, we still couldn't convince the other two. Eddie and Kenny protested, "Oh no, we're too old". Chris and I just recently convinced them and we had our first practice last weekend. I actually had to put the records on to hear what the songs sounded like (laughs). I'd start playing and think, 'That's not how it goes", and then I'd figure out it was in a different key or something.

Eddie: Our rehearsal? We spent ninety minutes playing and about two and a half hours bull-shitting (laughs). Which is par for the course and no different from the old days.

Kenny: Even before we started playing, we were sitting drinking beer which comprises most of our practice time. I couldn't remember the songs, Michael had to write out the chord changes for me...

EAT DISCOGRAPHY AND POST SCRIPT

"Communist Radio" b/w "Catholic Love", Giggling Hitler 7",12/31/79 (pressing of 500)
God Punishes The Eat, Giggling Hitler 7",'80 (pressing of 1000)
Scattered Wahoo Action, Jeterboy cassette, '82 (300 copies?)
"I Led Two Lives" (alternate) on The Land That Time Forgot, Open LP compilation,'82
Hialeah, Jeterboy 7",'95 (pressing of 800)
"Communist Radio" on Killed By Death #2, Redrum boot LP
"Doctor TV" and "Kneecappin"' on Killed By Death #3, Redrum boot LP
"Catholic Love" on Back To Front Volume 4, Incognito LP,'94
Scattered Wahoo Action, Wicked Witch reissue 10','96 (pressing of 1000)
"Sub-Human" on Kangaroo Vs. Wicked Witch, Wicked Witch 7" compilation, '96
God Punishes The Eat, Whappow double-ep vinyl boot, 2002
Scattered Wahoo Action, Moss Music cd-r 2003
God Punishes The Eat, Moss Music cd-r 2003
Rock'n'Rollski-Live At The Polish American Club 9/26/81, Moss Music cd-r 2003
Live At The Polish American Club 9/26/81, unlabelled vinyl boot 2006? (500 copies?)
Live In Lemon City-Giggling Hitler/Lurch cd-r 2006
It's Not The Eat, It's The Humidity, Alternative Tentacles double-cd and double-vinyl, 2007
Scattered Wahoo Action, Jeterboy/Lurch cd-r, 2008

2009 update--Chris Cottie passed away in 2004. He was a powerful and inventive drummer, his work will never be duplicated, we miss him. The Eat are currently on hiatus, perhaps permanently. They played 4 1/2 gigs in 2008 (with new drummer Mike Vullo) to commemorate the release of their super-deluxo retrospective "It's Not The Eat, It's The Humidity" on (longtime fan and ex-Dead Kennedy) Jello Biafra's Alternative Tentacles records. Then Kenny moved to New Mexico, and Eddie says, "The less often we play, the more special it is when we do..."

Eddie O'Brien plays bass with Charlie Pickett. Mike and Kenny and Chris had a band called the Drug Czars with ex-Roach Motel guitarist Jeff Hodapp, they are also on hiatus. Glenn Newland recently played with a couple ex-Cichlids in a band called Mad As Birds, but it couldn't last. And Mike Vullo plays with lots of different people, as well as writing and recording his own stuff.