Josh Freese has played drums for artists from Nine Inch Nails and A Perfect Circle to Sting and Kelly Clarkson, so yeah, he’s the kind of drummer people call when they want things to sound perfect.
But his heart belongs to the Vandals, the long-running Orange County punk band he joined as a teenager. It’s a group of great musicality, except when they decide to leave things a little rough around the edges, as Freese remembers in 1995 sessions for the album called — prepare yourselves here — “Live Fast, Diarrhea.”
“It was an experiment,” he says of the album now coming out in a special 25th-anniversary vinyl edition. “I kept on asking (guitarist) Warren Fitzgerald, who I think acted as producer on that record, I’d pull him aside and go, ‘This is OK that we’re doing this, right?’
“I was kind of in the mindset of like, ‘I’m gonna go and do as good a job as I can do recording this song, but I don’t want to go back and fix every mistake,’” he says. “Let’s not sit there and tweak this thing to death where it loses any spontaneity it may have had in the beginning.
“Would Keith Moon go back and fix that one part where he kind of missed the cymbal? Like, who cares?”
Bassist and original member Joe Escalante, who joined up when he was 18, says “Live Fast” still feels more purely punk than any other Vandals album.
Before it, they made EPs and albums for indie labels such as Epitaph and Enigma, the latter of which recorded 1990’s “Fear Of a Punk Planet” with producer Bob Casale of Devo, another band Freese later joined, too.
After “Live Fast,” the band signed “a blockbuster billion-dollar deal with Kung Fu Records,” Escalante jokes, as Kung Fu, of course, is the band’s own indie label.
“This time we made a record without any input from an outside record company and our outside producer,” he says. “So the only record that is like a pure punk rock DIY record is ‘Live Fast, Diarrhea.”
A few days before the release of the Craft Recordings reissue, Escalante and Freese hopped into the Pop Culture Time Machine to talk about the record.
Raw ‘n’ real
Freese says the decision to aim for something less than perfect leaves him happy to this day, though it wasn’t easy to stay the course.
“I would listen back and go, ‘Oh my god, the drums are kind of rusty and kind of (messed) up in that section,’ but I’d look at Warren and go, ‘Let’s just keep it, right?’” he says. “I was kind of scared to commit. It was kind of like asking someone to take their finger slowly and put it into a flame. You’re like, ‘I shouldn’t be doing this but I’m gonna keep going.’”
But perfection, he decided, wasn’t what the Vandals were about.
“Let’s not do the song 200 times in a row ’til it’s perfect, because after the first five or 10 times it’s going to be sterile and boring,” he says of the band’s philosophy.
“You know, like, we’d almost get it right, but not.”
Friendly fire
The album opens with “Let the Bad Times Roll,” a song Freese wrote, and also includes such songs as “I Got a Date,” a cover of a Simpletones’ tune.
“N.I.M.B.Y.” and “Johnny Twobags” are typically irreverent Vandals songs, snarky takedowns of “Saturday Night Live” guitarist G.E. Smith (who played and recorded with Hall & Oates, David Bowie, Bob Dylan and others) and Social Distortion guitarist Jonny “Two Bags” Wickersham.
“I feel bad for being so cruel,” Escalante says of tweaking Smith and his then-haircut in the “N.I.M.B.Y.” lyrics. “But that’s not a haircut for a grown man. When you grow up, you gotta think about that; otherwise, people write songs about you.”
The Vandals were friends with Wickersham, and Escalante worried about delivering the G.E. Smith treatment to a friend.
“I had a certain reverence for Jonny Two Bags and I didn’t know we were allowed to do a little send-up,” he says. “They knew him a little better than me, and they knew he had a sense of humor and would think that was funny.”
As for the title of the album, Freese, a father of four boys, explains why it’s so funny.
“Oh, man, because it’s gross. And everybody does it,” he says and laughs. “It’s disgusting and horrible and part of life.”
Ticket to Deride
Three songs on the album reference Disney or Disneyland, no surprise given the Vandals’ Orange County origins. They burn through “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” while “Get In Line” gripes about Disneyland’s wait times and “Power Moustache” takes aim at Walt Disney’s upper lip.
Freese says he and Escalante are actually huge Disneyland fans — the drummer’s father Stan Freese has been musical director for Disneyland and other Disney parks for four decades.
Escalante says “Power Moustache,” for which Fitzgerald wrote the lyrics, is an example of the kind of “oppression” Orange County punks have to sing about.
“We don’t have real gripes with society — but look at the harsh regulations going on at Disneyland,” he says, referencing the theme park’s longtime ban on employee facial hair. “It’s an exploration of oppression. These people are oppressed, but it’s also comical because, big deal, they’re working at Disneyland; they asked for it.”
The Vandals never wanted to copy the political punk of the United Kingdom in the ’70s or even the grittier Southern California punk of bands such as TSOL or the Adolescents.
“Other people do tap into that who grew up in Orange County,” Escalante says. “You can either be ‘Power Moustache’ and ‘N.I.M.B.Y’ or you can be Rage Against the Machine and actually convince yourself that you’re oppressed, which you’re not.
“But there’s two ways to make great music.”
This might Sting
As one of the most in-demand drummers for sessions and tours, Freese has worked with plenty of rock guys who get what the Vandals do. And then there’s Sting.
“I don’t think Sting knows much of anything about the Vandals,” says Freese of his employer in the studio and on the road at times over the past two decades. “But you know who Sting does like? Sting really likes Devo.”
The former Police frontman also loved A Perfect Circle, another of Freese’s bands, so there’s hope.
“Maybe I’ll work on him,” Freese says. “Maybe he’s gonna be a big Vandals fan after all.”
Friends and family
Most rock bands don’t last 40 years, but Escalante and Freese say the Vandals have long kept the band in perspective.
“Usually, it all starts with the singer, and the singer of this band often reminds us that we’re a punk band,” Escalante says. “And so, as a punk band, you can’t have these grand ambitions of getting to some higher level of success, because that’s not what we set out to do.”
If Freese gets an offer to tour or record with an artist with deeper pockets, he goes. If Escalante, who worked as a lawyer, CBS network executive, radio host, and now TV writer, needs to leave — this year he sold a paranormal series to Fox Nation — the Vandals are cool with that, too.
“You don’t get mad, and you let everybody do what they’ve got to do,” he says.
Freese calls the Vandals a labor of love, whicht keeps it enjoyable for him and his bandmates.
“My dad had a funny line that I’ve said a million times before,” Freese says. “One day he goes, ‘You know what, Josh? ‘Some guys play poker and some guys go fishing. And you play in the Vandals.’
“He’s right.”
