Waiting to meet The Real McKenzies at the Rock for People Festival at Cesky Brod in the Czech Republic, we remained in the back of the tent area until we spied an overcrowded van of anxious irritables. Yet we were the ones that became irritable while waiting in the hot shade with no beer or bettons (Becherovka and Mattoni) to cool us -- so a walk around the grounds was in order.

Sun, fair skin, black clothes, booze- the alchemy of goth/punk festival goers, a lethal combination, which I did not rise above. On the third pass around the perimeter glanced someone as inappropriately dressed as I, only more authentically Western. Upon closer inspection and discovering the Real McKenzie logo on jacket and proudly displayed upper arm tattoo, I realized I had run into a ‘McKenzie’. Head spinning and skin glowing a bright red that promised to hurt later, I asked if we could speak later on tape. It was either, my at times way too congenial manner or the sun and lack of block that spoke up before I did saying, “I’ll get the body condoms,” winking and swaying,  “I give good interview…” What an idiot. I wouldn’t have talked to me.

But Paul looked me and my condition up and down, with a comprehension that belied his understanding of the perilous line between appropriate and inappropriate, of the humble and the brash, of the sane and insane. Undeniably, it takes an untold amount of endurance and flexibility to see the day-in and day-out with the same people for eight months, but eight people? For eight months? For eight years (not the same people albeit the same amount)? I can barely stand to see my own reflection every day let alone the faces of my flatmates which I see inadvertently (and they’re nice and smell good).

And these guys, I would come to find, were professionals at the craft of partying to the point of blurry or blackout. Then in the morning, shower, calmly pack their things, methodically redouble their steps in search of things forgotten (“boots, belts, kilts, Vaseline…all accounted for?”) and apologize politely (if the need arose) on their way out to the van.  Our conversation began with Mental Health and it’s inherent issues in today’s society. We touched on serial killers, the open door policy of asylums after Reganomics, socialized medicine and the Brain Drain from Canada to the States that caused Kurt to have to get treated by a veterinarian instead of a doctor [who apparently was not available]. To break the ice Nina introduced a pop psychology game [admittedly a bit sophomoric] that required you to write down your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd favorite animals and three adjectives to describe each. The last question was to provide three adjectives to describe coffee.
[Key to your burning curiosity at the end of the interview.]

While Kurt was scribbling away and Paul was racking his noggin, I ventutred into more investigative territory.

M-I hear that your own bed and a permanent home are foreign things to you. How does touring [almost] eight months out of the year affect you?

Kurt- You have your good days and then you have bad days, and then you just drink a few beers and turn your bad day into a good day.  

Paul- Yeah but even that can become very difficult, it’s a very precarious balance.  I think that all the boys, we take it for granted that it’s just a natural thing, but all of these boys are fucking superstars, to be able to do what they do.  And forsake home and family for something higher.  Much like a Crowley card, I think that it would be…Paul- a bunch of fucking hedonists is what they are…

M- Speaking of Crowley we have the alchemy issue coming up too.  

Kurt- My roommate is becoming an alchemist; he’s saying that it can be done.  

M- It can be done; there is an alchemist’s society as well.  

Paul- I’ve been into that since the seventies…oh sorry wait…that was anarchy.

N- So how many times have you toured through, how far east have you been?

Kurt - Well we’ve been…we’ve done some stuff in Croatia.  

N- But you seem to put an effort into going that far East, there’s not that much money in it.  

Paul- There will be three houses in the middle of a field; you will be playing in one of them.        

M-So right, wait, it’s the higher gift of what your receiving [from touring] and what you’re putting out musically?  Because when I saw some of the conditions that some of the bands that I toured with went through, it was pretty hard on them.  They got crusty, you know? And not in a political way or way of being.

Kurt -In America we were sleeping on people’s floors.  A guy got a cockroach crushed to his head.  You get guys coming out with their underwear hiked up over their  belly buttons screaming at you, “Get out of my house you cunts!”

Paul - No, no, “You skanky Yankees!” and we’re not even Yankees!

Kurt - Yeah they called us “skanky Yankees” and fuck I don’t know.  “You guys stink!”  I go, ‘Look, I know these guys stink, they’ve been on the road for awhile.’

Paul -  I stayed in the back.N- So how many people do you have on tour with you at any given time?

Kurt - About 8.

Paul - Seven, eight.

M- That makes for close quarters.

Kurt - Yep.

M- So everybody’s got to get along then?

Kurt- Yep. Yeah we just go to the other side of the van

Paul- Bite your tongue and look out the window.

Kurt- Hopefully you can discuss it tomorrow because we always start every day with a new clean slate.

Paul- The only saving throw in a situation like that, and believe me I’ve been there many times, is the fact that we have to get along, or just stop right now.

N- So do you think the alcohol might like…

M- exacerbate or help?

Kurt - It’s a machine on which we’re driven, so it has its ups and its downs, fortunately we’re all functioning alcoholics.

M- Hey you’re talking to one.

Paul - Oh I love beer and I love wine.  And I love whiskey and I like Vodka.  I like good booze, I don’t like shit booze. The thing is I have a problem with myself because you’d think an alcoholic would drink any booze at any time, but I won’t drink bad booze.

Kurt - At four in the morning I’ll drink anything.  I’ll drink SLIVOVICE.

N- No really?

Paul - I just dry out.N- SLIVOVICE’s pretty good.  It’s drinkable.

Paul - Let’s put it this way, I’ve been drinking heavily since I was nine.  I’m 43.

M- When you see good alcohol do you have to drink it?

Paul - Yes.

M- Well allright, there you go. Yes, you’re alcoholic.

Paul - It’s because I really, really want to. It’s not that I have to.

M-  But you won’t drink bad alcohol if it’s there?

Paul - No.

Kurt - What are you talking about?  We drank gallons of shit vodka.  We were poor in the States so we’d buy these big, big fucking gallon jugs of it.N- Were they plastic?

Kurt - Plastic, yeah yeah.N- Vodka in plastic bottles is not okay.

M- Who cares man.Kurt - We drank ______MARRON.  We drank what ever they gave us.  We like to drink good booze but we will drink what’s given us.

M- I made friends with my alcoholic side. And that’s what I think you have to do to survive and still drink.
N- So do you all have Scottish ancestry?

Kurt - Yeah, except the Bone is Irish.

Paul- But an Irishman is a Scotsman who couldn’t swim back.(laughter)

Paul - The drummer is Swedish and the Vikings came over and fucked everybody so he’s allowed in the band.

Kurt - Yeah, it’s hard to get an all Scottish lineup, but we have had it that way at times.N- There was this funny thing that someone saw on this poster in Argyle in Scotland.  It says, “Drink is your enemy.” And then the next poster over said, “Love your enemy.”  Is that a Scottish thing?

Paul - Yeah, well when you live your life with Scotch whiskey it’s definitely a double-edged sword.  Too much is too much and too little is not good.

N- Do you have to get drunk enough that you could enjoy the day?Paul- Of course, it’s a precarious life. You know the thing is you don’t really get drunk on Scotch.  If you OD on Scotch you get drunk on it, but there’s a way to drink it that just enhances your environment, not so much to the tune of being drunk. So this is always what we try to extrapolate through much experimentation.  Sometimes we do it, and sometimes we OD.

Kurt - You need to learn after awhile how much booze you can drink before you can get up and do your job, but Scotch whiskey is the one booze where there’s been many times we’ve all drunken like 26 ounces of  scotch each and gone ON TOP and played a flawless set.  You go, ‘How the fuck did we do that?’ I don’t know. I haven’t had that experience on many other kinds of alcohol where I can drink that much and have that much clarity.  

Paul- And then there’s black rum. If I wanted to destroy everything in my life, I’d drink black rum.

M- You talking about dark rum or…

Paul - Black rum.

M- Well maybe it’s the sugar that you can’t handle.

Paul - Perhaps.

M- Because then there’s the argument that if you’re raised with a certain chemical tolerance, like if your ancestry has a certain kind of liquor behind it, then there’s a synergy between you and that liquor right?

Kurt - When a Chinese friend drank whiskey with us he turned bright red.  My friend Jack Lee was allergic to whiskey.

M- The first time my friend Big Rock saw you (in L.A. eight years ago) he mentioned that you were screening shirts in your van?

Kurt - The first time he saw you, what?

M- The first time he saw you play, there were like three people, four people at the show, he said.  He asked for a shirt, and he thought you guys were screening the shirts in the van.

Paul - Yeah that’s true.

N - Tell us about screen printing in the van, how does that work?

Paul - Well I’ll have to pass you over to Mr. Robinson.  He’s the screen master here.

Kurt - Well sometimes you know your merchandise doesn’t show up. I think when we first invented it was likean early like touring the East Coast of America like 13 year ago. We got our contracts for the rest of the tour when we got into Boston actually and our stomachs sank down to our toes.  We’re like, “Holy fuck, we’re getting like $50 a night. That’s not even going to pay for the gas. We aint getting home. What are we gonna do?”  I think we started, just cut a stencil out of cardboard and bought shirts in K-Mart.  Spray painted them. Then we upgraded down to getting a silkscreen.

Paul - We still see people with those shirts periodically.

M- He doesn’t have his shirt like that anymore, but he described it as, “kind of offset.”

Kurt - Every shirt’s different.

M- What about the politics of 'Get the Bitch off the Money'?

Paul - It’s the edgy monarchy song.

M- Edgy monarchy song.  It’s only about things, like the British monarchy…Mutti - I’m sorry guys.  I’m supposed to say “hi” from ?????.

Paul - Oh _______.Mutti - He actually wanted you to meet ________ it’s like a big Mexican band.  They play somewhere else. _______ the guy who was working on Brazil and Argentina and another guy from Hanover.

Kurt - Okay, well we’re doing, what we’re doing. When we’re done.

Mutti - Cool.Kurt - All my Canadian money fell out of my pocket.(Back to the discussion at hand.)

Paul - It’s just an interesting thing, having been raised by my father and my grandfather and they’re very anti-English, not anti English people but anti English politics because of what’s been going on for the last thousand years since Richard I. They walked in and they just took it. It’s unacceptable. For me, in this day and age, a lot of people don’t understand me not having spent anytime with me, I do have an opinion and I am politically motivated in some respects, but most of the time I’ve got my tongue in my cheek, so it’s not as harsh as it must seem. Yes, but definitely Get the Bitch Off the Money is about the effigy of the Queen on the Canadian bill.  Did you know Canada is one of the last commonwealths in the British Empire.

Kurt - We’re supposed to get work visas to go there.

Paul - So yeah, we want to get the effigy of the Queen off the money. Canada has a rich enough history with enough thinkers that we could put Louie Riel on the bill.  

M- Who would you put on the bill?

Paul - I would put Louie Riel on the bill.

M- Who?

Paul - Louie Riel.  He was the leader of a Canadian uprising during the Victorian Era.  He was hung and quartered.

Kurt -  I was talking about Carters.

Paul - Yeah, Papa John Carters is another one. Or Marty Hall from Let’s Make a Deal. Or Jackie Gleason. JackieGleason was Canadian.M- Bryan Adams.

Paul - As a matter of fact you would be amazed how many people who made it in America are Canadian.

M- There was an underground inquisitive essay on that, about how many people in the celebrity scene are actually Canadian and don’t admit it.

Paul - Yeah, getting back to the original question.  The British monarchy is a pestilent parasite and I would sooner see monies taken from the Canadian taxes going to something better like education and health care, rather than have that fucking ugly bitch put on our money and put on our fucking wall. The kids have to sing God Save the Queen in the morning at school. Shit like that. It’s pathetic.

G- In Canada?

Paul- Yeah. So this is why we wrote the song, 'Get the Bitch off the Money'. And the thing that really got it going was that I believe that the British government, slash monarchy, assassinated Diana. And I just wrote a song around that line.  

M- You did.

Paul- A lyrical thing around that line.

Kurt- I only just did the song to impress our parents. In elementary school when you have to stand up and sing God Save the Queen. I had a note from my dad that I wasn’t allowed to. So of course three o’clock top field I had to fucking fight everyday because I didn’t have to stand up and sing the song.

Paul- It was all part of the training process. We didn’t know it at the time but we do now.

M- I didn’t know there was so much behind that, but that was good.  Tell me about Honest Don’s. You guys are the premier band on that label.

Both - We didn’t know that.

M- Well this is straight from Big Rock. How do you feel about being the captain of the Honest Don’s team?Paul- Well our humility won’t let us extrapolate anything from that.

Kurt- We’re the shittiest band on that label, we just work the hardest.

Paul- We just work hard and we’re really happy about Honest Don’s because they do the record thing for us and we take care of everything else. They take care of promotion, publicity and the distribution and those are some of the things that we were lacking in ‘cause we’re just a bunch of fucking drunk artists, right? We can write the songs, produce the songs, well most of the songs, and get to the gigs.

M- You don’t need a babysitter in that respect.

Kurt- Oh no.  We’ve got two of them right now. If it’s an important trip we got three babysitters. Don’t fool yourself.

Paul- When the babysitters aren’t around or we can’t afford them, Kurt and I can tighten up our bootstraps no problem.Kurt- Like I did a lot of driving in America.

M- About the institutions, let’s get back to mental health for a second.  How do you feel about institutions?  What defines crazy?Kurt- Well, we’d be locked up right now probably.
Paul- I think it’s relative to the environment. For example, a lot of people think it might be crazy to jump off a bamboo tower with a bit of twine around your foot and smack your forehead on the jungle dirt, but that’s a right in a lot of villages and a lot of places in Africa. All those guys do that. People would think they’re crazy but to them it’s not crazy so it’s relative. I constantly like to entertain myself with thinking about someone from say 1000 [A.D.], just the beginning of the Dark Ages.  Bring them here and see how they fare. I mean it’s all relative. But then again there are people who will hurt innocent people or hurt themselves and they are right out there. And a lot of this is a chemical imbalance.

Paul- But one thing I’d like to say about mental health, in terms of treatment, we’re making leaps and bounds in that respect. Were as people would just have a cage put on their head and thrown into a room, nowadays there’s a treatment for that. If that be medication or whatever that needs to be.  Sometimes I ask myself, I look out the window in the van and think, ‘Fuck, am I losing it?’ and the answer is yes. And then I take another drink and shut the fuck up, slice my fingers across my wrists.

N- Seriously?

Paul- I’ve never slashed my wrists.

N- So does being on tour the amount that you’re on tour make you feel a little more mentally unstable?Paul- It’s definitely mentally unstable.

Kurt- At points, but at points we become used to it and it’s unsettling to be in one place. And you go home and you go, “Oh, we’ve had hero to a zero,” and at the plane it’s just like, “Oh man, oh man!” Then you become depressed.

Paul- On the other hand if you don’t get the right sleep and you don’t get the right nutrition and you get a high stress environment…naturally you’re going to react to it in different ways, different people are different. It’s definitely not the healthiest environment and it takes a very strong person to, and I use the term loosely, keep it together.N- One of Don’s mottos: Keep it together.

M- Actually, everyone I’ve spoken to, that’s ultimately their motto if they’ve been on the road for longer than 3 years.  

M- Have you ever read the Master of Margarita?Paul- One of my favorite books. Where are you?

M- I’m at where everybody’s just getting into the institution because Professor Woland just did his magic act.Paul- Behemoth? The cat?

M- Yes, Behemoth, the cat. I’m really relating with the cat. I just had to ask that because somebody [Brendan of  The Lawrence Arms] who was coming through whom I interviewed, turned me on to that.

Paul- Do you know the story behind that? Behind Mikhail Bulgakov writing that?M- Wasn’t he in an institution himself?

Paul- Yeah. That was actually three stories woven in a masterful way, woven together to keep them uniform so that he wouldn’t forget it. Not to mention at this time the revolution just happened. The reality of it is that if you dissed government your were incarcerated. And he was lampooning them. So that was the  basis of his incarceration. He wasn’t a criminal [or crazy] he was a writer. It’s what makes it a masterpiece. I can honestly say, and I have read many, many books, I may have a problem picking a favorite animal, or a color or a song, but I could easily write that down as my favorite book, ever.

In conclusion: Are The Real McKenzies mentally fit? It depends on how your definition of ‘fit’. After spending a little more time with The McKenzies, it became clear that each individual in the group has their own method to keep the madness in check. Matt MacNasty [bagpipes] draws with the focus of an autistic child when given a choice between incessant rambling and time on his hands. Kurt and Jamie [bass] socialize opposite ends of the party spectrum, (and hope for the best). Ike [drums] gets lost and shows up with out recollecting. Paul, upon having enough libations to make a small village spin, donned a Hilter-esque moustache and terrorized various tables of unsuspecting Austrians [all in good fun]. And Bone…? Well, I’m not sure what Bone does exactly but I am sure that it’s probably not what a doctor would advise. Even though a seemingly excruciatingly long tour was coming to an end, there could be heard faint rumblings of “what will I do when I get home?”
Perhaps for some madness only sets in when you’re sitting still.

Key to Pop Psychology Quiz:
1. How you view yourself
2. How other people see you
3. How you really are
4. Coffee- How you view sex

Interviews Nina Bressler and Marika Ley 2003 

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