Nina Malkin from RAYGUN invited me to write for them after profiling Too Much Joy for an early issue. The interview somehow concluded with the band watching the Oscars with her, which would have involved a lot of drunken sarcastic yelling any year, but THIS was the year Rob Lowe danced with Snow White, so the screaming and snark were particularly intense. I guess I qualified myself as a pop culture critic that evening. This was the first (and, in retrospect, possibly the worst) of a number of pieces they published in the ’90s and only sometimes sent checks for. Half the fun of RAYGUN was that you couldn’t always actually read the text, so I’m scanning sample pages from the magazine but relying on my old WordPerfect drafts for the copy, so the two might not always match.
I went to the Kiddie City on Union Square in Manhattan to buy a squirt gun. Two songs on Too Much Joy’s new album, Mutiny, are about murder, and I can always use a stage prop. Besides, the chance I might electrocute one of the assholes with guitars makes our live show that much more exciting.
The good news is that great strides have been made in water pistol engineering since I was in grade school. These things can now shoot a continuous stream of water up to thirty feet. The bad news is that they don’t look remotely like guns. Charlton Heston tells me the government makes it too tough to buy firearms. At least the ones he can buy aren’t painted fluorescent green and orange.