Rodney Anonymous Interview

INTERVIEW WITH RODNEY ANONYMOUS FROM TheCelebrityCafe.com ARCHIVES

DM) Rodney, it's a pleasure to speak with...

RA) (interrupting) Oh, I enjoyed your interview with Wink Martindale. The minute I saw Wink Martindale's name, I had to read that one first because I'm a big fan of his music.

DM) Most people know him for the game shows; you actually heard the CD that he did?

RA) I used to hear it when I was younger. My parents would travel with it and we'd pick up these country stages. His songs were some of my favorites! If I was him, I would be so proud of it that I'd start every interview with, "I was the guy who recorded your favorite trucker hits." The cool thing about him was that he made GREAT trucker music. If I could make great trucker music, I'd be the happiest person alive. I really am a big fan. I think trucker music is absolutely beautiful. Once the CD craze came, everybody made trucker music, but Wink's early stuff was really cool.

DM) This really changes the stereotypical question of "Who were your musical influences?" (laughs)

RA) Well, not really, because I used to listen to everything. I was always trying to make trucker music when I was younger.

DM) Are you trying to tell me that The Dead Milkmen came out of the influence of Wink Martindale?

RA) About the time the whole CD craze hit, truckers were saying that they didn't like people on the CD because they share the trucker philosophy, so Joe and I had a hit called "18 Wheels for Kierkegard". Now that wasn't SO Wink Martindale, but we liked the B-side, which was a song called "Toilet Bowl". It was the ultimate child abuse song, and that was our big trucker melody when we were teenagers. We covered every genre. I thought it was amazing that we'd be in some greasy spoon and we'd hear a trucker song come on, and these big guys would start to get tears in their eyes... I just thought that was absolutely amazing. Wink is definitely underrated for that.

DM) That's a funny co-incidence that you saw that.

RA) I was amazed when I was looking at your site. I saw the top ten interviews and thought if you could have fudged an eleventh one in there, it would have been Wink. I thought it was so great seeing it on your site, Wink Martindale right next to Margaret Cho. I thought it would be a great idea to have a cocktail party with such diverse people.

DM) Well, I appreciate that.

RA) Well, I read the John Paul Jones one, which was really good, but you set it up wrong when you talked about the mandolin not fitting a rock star image. Now, I have a mandolin player in my band, and he's a mighty good rock star.

DM) Oh, I'm sorry...

RA) Apparently, there's this association with the mandolin being a wimpy instrument, and I never had heard about that before.

DM) No, not that way at all, but when you hear Led Zeppelin, you don't think, "They must play a rockin' mandolin...first you think guitars, bass and drums, which made the additional instruments very interesting."

RA) Actually, all the stuff on Led Zeppelin 3 was mandolin, and Heart used to use the mandolin, also, quoting Led Zeppelin as one of their influences. The mandolin is one of those hidden instruments... oh yeah, and even R.E.M. snuck it into the top ten with "Losing My Religion".

DM) So back to the official question, why did you choose the name Anonymous?

RA) When I was growing up, every musician had a fake name. There were Johnny Rotten and the others... I just thought that's how it was done, plus Anonymous is the name of my favorite poet. He seems tohave written a lot for a really long time, and he still seems to be working! I think I got some letters from him when we were doing Dead Milkmen, and some of those letters were really angry too. But then again, I had the same problems as Paul America. Paul used to work with Andy Warhol and would have all of these difficulties, because whenever he would get high, he would see these signs everywhere, such as, "America accused of killing children in Cambodia" and they would think it meant him and he would go nuts! So I've learned that if your name is Anonymous, you can't drink or do any substances. You hear stuff like, "An anonymous tipster causes a bomb threat."

DM) So you have Anonymous on all of your credit cards and stuff?

RA) No, I go by my given name of Liederman. I never legally changed my name like Joey Shithead. I think he has a son whose name is Shithead too. I've love to see his mailbox with the beautiful type face saying, "The Shitheads."

DM) Oh, well, that's a bit extreme. I'd have to think that there's a limit that can be crossed, and that pretty much crosses it.

RA) You know, I don't think so. I think that once you take that step over the line, it's almost an art in itself. I've never had the balls to do something like that. There's a guy whose name was Sissyfag, and somebody started yelling at him about how he wasn't really being true to the gay community, and he just said, "Listen pal, I sign my checks as Mr. Sissyfag, so you just shut up." And I thought, "Wow, another ballsy move. What a great thing to do!"

DM) You seem pretty impassioned about it.

RA) Well, I guess I'm on my second wind, as I'm exhausted from today.

DM) What did you do today?

RA) Well, I worked, and then I worked some more.

DM) Where did you work?

RA) Oh, I'm an install developer for a pharmaceutical company. I create scripts to install programs.

DM) Well, aren't you worried, having a normal life now after having thousands of fans who get a little fanatical about your music?....

RA) No, probably not thousands, it might be down to dozens. If I ever say anything, it's always nice and real polite. Again, it's like trucker music... I've always made music "For Losers, About Losers and By Losers". If you're out there and you're big burly and you're screaming, "We must survive in the name of the Dark Lord." And If you're out there getting your butt kicked every day, then your audience is going to be like that. It's going to be a group of nice people who are just a bit disgruntled with the state of the world.

DM) I guess it's a little traumatizing to know that the guy from the band that made the MTV hit, "Punk Rock Girl" in the '80's is now working as a computer programmer.

RA) I had very, very little to do with that. I didn't write the song. I don't think I was even in the studio when they recorded it. I hung around for the first day of video shooting and then just wandered off. That was the song that I was least responsible for and was our biggest hit.