On...
The Gay Blades

The artist: The Gay Blades
The sound: Duo (singer/guitartist Clark Westfield and drummer Puppy Mills) rocking their brand of “trash pop” like they were a 20-piece rock opera
The album: Ghosts, released on September 23 through Triple Crown Records/4Never Records
Where you can hear them next: By downloading two free songs at rcrdlbl.com or catching their tour running toward the end of 2008
  
I was reading your tour schedule and it looks like you might’ve been right in the middle of Tropical Storm Fay. What have the past few days been like on the road?
[Puppy Mills] Pretty crazy. We’ve been driving through periods of the heaviest rain we’ve ever seen, and then it would just stop and be sunny. So we’d get out of the van and throw rocks at the storm and tell that storm we’re the boss. Then it told us that Bruce Springsteen was the boss and we’d have to think of a new nickname.
 
How does just being a duo differ from being more of an entire gang or band of brothers out on the road? What are some of the perks and some of the downers?
Well, the intra-band fighting is fairer when it’s one-on-one. But that turns into a downside when we get in fights with 20-piece ska bands. There’s no stupid bass player to explain all your jokes to, but on the negative side, you don’t have his strong ox-like body to strap all your gear to.
 
For just two guys, you seem to make a hell of a lot of noise. Ghosts has everything from strings, synths, keys and even some choir action in there. How does this work live?
We replace all the extra instrumentation with pre-recorded tracks of babies crying and cool parts from zombie movies. Other than that, we sometimes invite the people who contributed their genius to our record to come on stage and play their parts along with us, except we make them play it all mouth-trumpet style. You wouldn’t think so, but it actually sounds pretty cool all put together.
 
If I were to believe your story word for word I’d have to believe that you all met while volunteering at a traveling sideshow, you once boxed a kangaroo and won and a sex tape featuring you is floating around out there just waiting to be discovered. Slapstick and sarcasm seem to be an important part of being in The Gay Blades. Please explain.
The Gay Blades will have fun and make everyone else have fun (or feel weird) whether they want to or not. Usually it’s not too hard to do, since most people coming to shows these days are so bored that they have to get fake tans and do Jager bombs in order to have fun. We are slowly working to eradicate that notion. It’s OK to be what we are for originality’s sake.
 
While most bands only post the positive reviews from journalists and pretend the bad ones never happened, you list them all—from “a pair of double ds short of The White Stripes” to “The Gay Blades have a shitty band name, and play something we assume they don’t like to call emo, even though their singer does that stupid, annoying thing where he allows his voice to crack to feign real emotion.” Is this a way of poking fun at the professional haters?
We have nothing to hide. It would be unfair of us not to post them all. After all, we dish it out way harder than they can. We have them come to a show and talk some mishmash during a set and see what happens. Just tonight, someone asked where our bass player was during our set and was then made to stand on stage and act as a mic stand for our last three songs.
 
Ghosts will be on your own imprint, 4Never Records, through Triple Crown. How important was it for you to have creative control?
Very. A band like The Gay Blades can’t survive without complete control of all aspects of the band’s image, music and creatively formed information. In fact, Triple Crown is letting us sequence and create album art for all future albums released on their label. Their only stipulation is that we have to pay the electric bill and take out the garbage on Tuesdays and Fridays. It’s totally worth it.
 
Your influences are everything from T. Rex to Bill Murray. How important is the comedy angle in The Gay Blades?
There is no comedy angle. The Gay Blades are cold and calculating musical criminals. We are also real criminals. The reason we cite T. Rex and Bill Murray as influences is that they have both crushed many, many people to get to where they are. Eventually, we hope to be considered the sociopaths of our time, but in a good way—like T. Rex and Bill Murray.
 
When on the road, is it separate hotel rooms for the two of you?
We wish. Triple Crown pays us in fish heads, which we recently discovered are not considered acceptable forms of payment for hotel rooms.
 
There seems to be some confusion to where you originated from: New Jersey or N.Y.C.?
Is Mexico in New Jersey? If so, then New Jersey.