“It’s like a dream, it really is,” says Jerry A, former vocalist with American hardcore legends Poison Idea, of finally recording with the Hard-Ons.
The long-awaited collaboration between them – titled simply Hard-Ons/Jerry A, was finally released in August.
LOUD: You’ve known the Hard Ons for a very long time of course
JERRY A: “I’ve been a fan of them since the Waterfront days. You sit around listening to music… Motorhead or whatever, and you think, ‘Fuck, wouldn’t it be cool to sing with Motorhead, or just band a tambourine, or whatever’… Then you hear the Hard Ons, and they’re a three piece and I know they have a singer, but wouldn’t it be cool if I could sing with the Hard Ons? Then, Wow!, here it is.”
L: I know you recorded with them back in the 90s before they split up the first time, but this is the first time you’ve done a whole album with them. Was that something you’d planned for ages or did it just coalesce after you toured together last year?
JA: “We played, and Blackie gave me one song, and we did it. Then he presented me with a dozen songs, and I got those and I listened to them for the first time and I was like ‘Wow!’ You know, if you get a song and you can hum along or sing along to it the first time you hear it, you know it’s a good song.”
L: Blackie has a strange gift of being able to write songs off the cuff like nobody else. He’s just an incredible songwriter. You know that he wrote 366 songs in a year once?
JA: “That’s amazing!”
L: I don’t know where that guy’s gift comes from, but I’m glad he has it.
JA: “Yeah. It’s like rock, it has an Australian rock flavour with pop sensibilities. It sounds radio, but it sounds underground at the same time. He’s a genius. He really is.”
L: What was the process of doing the album, because being the Hard Ons, it probably didn’t take that long.
JA: “Honest to God, I got these songs and I listened to them, and I listened to them all at one time. We still had three or four songs in the can. And I was like, “These are great songs”, and they said, “Well, you need to put vocals on them”. So I said “Sure”, then I waited for, like, two months, and then they said “Listen, we have to mix next week!” So I was like “Shit! I haven’t even started”. But let me take a song every day. So I took about a week and a half… I listened to one song a day, wrote the lyrics, went in the studio that night, came home, and did that for about a week… a week and a half, because we had two songs already. So I did eight songs in eight days. It was pretty easy. I was overwhelmed at first but when I took them song by song, they were pretty easy.”
L: What’s it like being on stage with them?
JA: “They’re like a machine. I don’t have to worry. It’s like a dream. It’s amazing. These guys are an absolute machine.”
L: It seems like fate that you got together with them because there are quite a lot of similarities between the Hard Ons and Poison Idea – very underground, very do-it-yourself, and the attitudes are pretty similar also.
JA: “Well that’s what we grooved on. We’re brothers from another mother.”
HM: Do you have a particular highlight from the album?
JA: “Every song is its own thing. I never thought I would be doing these songs that I could hear on a movie soundtrack. There’s a song that makes fun of corporate rock, selling out like The Sonics doing a song for Mustang… I can see that song being on a commercial for Virgin phones or something. It’s great. It’s riding a Harley Davidson at 120 miles an hour. It just feels great! It’s actually hard to describe.”
HM: I actually wish you had done something like this sooner.
JA: “I had the opportunity to work with these guys years ago. They had their stuff going on, I was out burning bridges, trying to destroy everything around me. It’s rare when you get to do a do-over. In life, they say you fucked it up, you ruined everything, that’s the way it goes. DOn’t let the door hit your ass on the way out. But, you know what? Twenty years later, you wanna give it another shot… thirty years later! What? You’re kidding me! I promise I won’t fuck up too bad this time.”
HM: I’m not sure we can give you another thirty years, Jerry, but I’m sure we’d still forgive you at some point.
JA: “We’re gonna keep doing it. I keep telling Blackie all the time, write me another good song! I don’t want to step on Tim’s toes. They’re a band, and they’re great the way they are. I’m just creeping in the backdoor like Howlin’ Wolf and I’ll take what I can get for now. I’m very happy and very grateful, and I’ll make the most of it.”
HM: Well I think Tim would be pretty happy too. He’s got his own other band and he’s a Poison Idea fan too, I’m pretty sure.
JA: “Well I asked him and he’s like, “You gotta be kidding me! I couldn’t give a shit”.”
Brian Giffin
