Gregg Turkington
Untraveled Pathways
by Anil Prasad
Copyright © 2024 Anil Prasad.

Photo: Sundance Film Festival

Most artists would kill to be in Gregg Turkington’s position. His incredibly diverse music, comedy, and acting career reflects intense focus, uncompromising principles, and serendipity in equal measure.

Turkington is best known for his alter-ego, the fictitious, bedeviling, and anguished stand-up comic Neil Hamburger. He first created the confrontational, self-loathing persona in 1992 as part of a series of prank calls. To his surprise, the character caught on in a significant way across the world and is considered one of the highlights of modern alternative comedy circles.

Neil Hamburger comes across as beset by neuroses, alcoholism, and highly questionable sartorial instincts that are a cross between a funeral director and low-rent lounge singer. The character consistently upends comedy conventions, telling fragments of jokes, offering veiled insights in the form of seeming non sequiturs, relying on pop culture references from decades past, and infusing performances with awkward pauses that seem to go on forever.

There’s definite genius in Turkington’s approach and it’s not for the faint of heart or meek of mind. What on the surface may seem like reductive jokes, cries for help, or societal and celebrity attacks, are often reflections of deeper cultural fissures. Whether one considers Turkington’s work as Neil Hamburger biting satire, sardonic observations, or simply pure insanity, one thing’s for sure: the character cannot be ignored when in his presence.

Neil Hamburger has toured the world, released 14 albums, been the subject of endless television and YouTube content, and even starred in his own film, 2015’s Entertainment. The movie showcases the character performing to annoyed and unengaged audiences without a clue about the intentions behind his abstract humor. Neil Hamburger also gets a layered and surprising backstory, infused with deeply uncomfortable moments that skirt around significant ethical and moral questions.  

The latest Neil Hamburger project is Seasonal Depression Suite. It’s an ambitious concept album co-created with musician, producer, and vocalist Erik Paparozzi that takes place in a generic chain hotel during the December holiday season. Each track is assigned to a specific vocalist, including Hamburger, Paparozzi, Neil Finn, Puddles Pity Party, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Annabella Lwin, Alan Bishop, and Scarlet Rivera. Together, they explore real-or-imagined personal crises, delusional paranoia, and various life lowlights.

Turkington’s musical endeavors beyond Neil Hamburger are significant. He founded and ran Amarillo Records between 1991-1999. Based in San Francisco, the label was initially created to release his own projects, including albums by Neil Hamburger, his experimental death metal group Faxed Head, and the lo-fi avant-rock act The Three Doctors Band. Amarillo was also responsible for important records from the region’s punk, post-punk, and experimental scenes, including artists such as Secret Chiefs 3, Sun City Girls, Anton LaVey, Dieselhed, Totem Pole of Losers, and Major Entertainer.

Turkington’s profile as an actor continues to rise. He appears in the recent celebrated indie drama Fremont. The film explores the life of an Afghani immigrant who escaped the Taliban and tries to find focus and meaning in her new life in Fremont, California. Turkington portrays a psychiatrist offering counsel, wisdom, and solace to the protagonist, Donya, played by Anaita Wali Zada.

Turkington is also part of the Adult Swim series On Cinema, in which he plays an absurd movie reviewer. In the role, Turkington often offers deadpan perspectives that celebrate unimpressive films, and quietly ridiculous and inaccurate commentary. He’s also appeared in Ant-Man, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny. In addition, Turkington has voiced characters on Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Gravity Falls, and The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack.

Innerviews spoke to Turkington about the joy of voyaging across so many artistic universes without a map to guide him.

Gregg Turkington as Neil Hamburger | Photo: Tore Sætre

Describe the evolution of the Neil Hamburger character from its humble beginnings to emerging as a significant alternative comedy force.

When I started doing the Neil Hamburger stuff, I had no aspirations for it beyond what it was, initially. I think the mentality of doing Neil Hamburger reflected the mentality of San Francisco in the early ‘90s, where I used to live. It’s been said that most musicians have one band that does 300 shows. In San Francisco at the time, it was more like there were 300 bands that did one show each. It was kind of how everybody rolled at that time.

Neil Hamburger was a character in a prank call that was made late at night to amuse people I was hanging out with. It didn’t really seem like anything I would be pursuing. And then I got a call from Ron Lessard at RRRecords, which is a noise label on the East Coast. He liked the prank calls and wanted to know if I’d do something for a noise compilation he was doing. So, it hit me that I could do a prank call as Neil Hamburger for it, or I could do something else altogether.

I chose to record a fake standup routine instead that the character from the prank call would have done. I fleshed it out a bit. I recorded the audio separately and then took laugh tracks from different sources, as well as added my own laughs to it. I sort of pieced together this fake comedy routine. It was really fun. It felt like this new direction was more about soundscape than it was about creating the jokes. On that earliest effort, they really aren’t jokes at all. They’re fragments of jokes that cut off before a punchline. I got into the idea of creating fake soundscapes that capture the mood of comedy without actually being comedy.

I went on to do a couple of singles like that and I thought that was the end of it. I didn’t think there was any potential buyer for those records. At the time, record pressing was cheap. I pressed them with the idea that I’m going to just leave these in thrift stores for fun and imagine what happens when somebody finds these incoherent comedy records. That’s where a lot of them went. But then I found out from the distributors I dealt with that these records were getting around and had an audience. Eventually, they fell into the hands of Drag City, who then approached me to do a full-length Neil Hamburger album, which was called America’s Funnyman and came out in 1996. That was exciting, because I grew up listening to comedy albums. I thought, “Wow, I’m going to have a chance to make one myself.”

I put everything I had into the album, thinking it’ll be one shot for Neil Hamburger, and that there wasn't going to be anything more after it. I threw every idea I possibly had into it. And to my surprise, Drag City asked for a second album and then I started getting requests for live shows. For the first few years when I’d get those requests, I said “No, this isn’t a live project. This is a studio project. I’m controlling all the sounds in the background. I’m choreographing a fake show in order to create a certain mood. If I were to do a real show, it would be the cool kids laughing and being in on the joke. It would kind of undercut the whole point.”

So, I declined and declined, and kept recording these fake live show records. Eventually, I went to Malaysia in 1999 and chose to record some material in the hotel room shower, because it had nice acoustics. Then I spent the day wandering around trying to find bars to record the sounds of locals talking in the background that I could piece together with the audio of my non-existent show. I tried to make it as realistic as I could. If I’d done it at home and tried to fake being in Malaysia, it wouldn’t have been the same. I spent two weeks in Malaysia wondering what this record should be and recorded it near the end of the trip. It was released as Left for Dead in Malaysia. But I kept getting more and more requests for live shows.

My girlfriend at the time was Australian. We eventually got married in Australia and had a lot of reasons to visit it afterwards. We were living in California when an Australian punk rock band called Frenzal Rhomb approached me and said they wanted me to open a bunch of shows they were doing. These weren’t regular shows. They were giant Australian festival shows. They were very popular at the time, so it was a tour that included a show at Sydney Olympic Park, and other really big venues. The tour even included Darwin, which is the town I was born in. The whole idea seemed too interesting not to do. But I did decline a couple of times, before I finally said, “You know what? Yes, I’ll do this tour.”

My wife and I went out and bought a tuxedo and worked up what the Neil Hamburger act would be. The thought was, if it didn’t go how I wanted it to, no-one would ever know about it outside of Australia. It was kind of like a test market. I was really doing it because I wanted the free tickets to Australia they offered for doing the show. But the tour went pretty well. I mean, people were throwing things at me the whole time and booing, but that was an interesting angle. It was very different to the records. On the records, Neil was failing internally. The albums sound like somebody who’s buried alive doing a comedy routine in their coffin. But taking it out there and having hundreds, thousands, and even sometimes tens of thousands of people booing and being hostile brought out a whole other aspect of the character.

So, that tour was the beginning of realizing this character has legs to go in different directions, depending on what’s going on. I decided, “Okay, let’s just go with what’s happening at the moment.” I tried to do the best I could with that. It became a question of figuring out exactly what the live show is and changing it over the years.

And then the opportunity to do a movie came along from the director Rick Alverson. He suggested doing a Neil Hamburger film and that was another big jump. I had been so controlling over this character and had all these rules about what Neil would or wouldn’t do. In order to make the movie, it wasn’t going to be very realistic if we stuck to my backstory and all my rules. I had to let go of some of that.

The movie was called Entertainment, and it was a whole new chapter in the Neil Hamburger world. It came out in 2015 and you see Neil offstage and not in costume. The viewers get Neil’s backstory explicitly told to them. Before, I liked for people to fill in the blanks of what this guy’s life was like offstage. But we had to give them that within a movie. Providing that information opened up a whole other world. And so, again, it became a question of “Where can this lead me?” I decided as long as I honor the moment and where the character’s at during that moment, that’s more important than sticking to some backstory rule from a record I made 26 years ago.

The musical records I’ve done continue in that vein of harnessing an opportunity to do something different. I’ve always found celebrity vocal records from the ‘60s and ‘70s very interesting. Telly Savalas was one of the best examples, along with Richard Harris and Leonard Nimoy. None of these guys are necessarily singers. They’re actors and personalities. They’re almost giving you a souvenir of their personality in song. I think that approach works really well for the Neil Hamburger character.

I think it also coincides with the fact that I’m more into music, personally, than I am into comedy, film, or anything else. Making musical records is inspired by not just those celebrity personality vocalists, but also those vaudeville people who didn’t have perfect voices but made the best of what they had. Probably the best example is The Wizard of Oz. You’d never want to replace any of those performances. But you could make the case that those guys singing in it weren’t the greatest, but it works because their personalities come through. I think the same holds true for people like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. People are always claiming they have terrible voices, but for me, they have great voices because I’m always very emotionally invested in their songs when they sing. That, to me, is more important than anything.

Photo: Gregg Turkington Collection

Seasonal Depression Suite is the most ambitious Neil Hamburger project to date. Describe how it came together.

It was originally going to be a holiday record and we got started with that in mind. But I had this nagging feeling nobody wants to listen to a holiday record. I love The Temptations, The Supremes, and The Beach Boys, but I’d never want to listen to the Christmas records they made. It’s embarrassing to hear these great, great singers sing such trivial songs. That’s my problem, I guess. But that concern was in the back of my mind.

I didn’t want to put out a straight-up holiday record. So, we recorded a couple of songs and then I thought, “Well, what if it’s a holiday record? But it all takes place in a hotel, and it’s more of a record about holiday self-reflection, self-pity, insecurity, and doom—the depression that often hits people during the holiday season.” I’m talking about being out of work, the failure to follow-up on New Year’s resolutions, strife with the family, or even just gray skies and gloomy weather.

For entertainers, the holidays are also a time when you can be out of work for a few weeks because nobody’s going to see a comedy show during the Christmas period. You definitely slow down and get more time to reflect.

During the aftermath of the COVID-19 lockdown, when a lot of people spent a lot of time at home, they were also getting into some of these feelings. So, Seasonal Depression Suite is about a time of isolation and uncertainty. It’s also about a holiday lockdown for the different characters in this suite of songs, which all take place in hotel suites. We changed the focus from Christmas to December in general.

Erik Paparozzi, who I wrote and produced the record with—and who plays many of the instruments—suggested this was starting to feel more like a rock opera or a connected suite of songs. That’s where the idea of bringing in other vocalists to play other characters came from, rather than it all being from the point of view of Neil Hamburger in one room. Instead, we hear from different people in different rooms. That really opened everything up as far as the writing and the songs themselves. And when you’re suddenly planning a song for somebody who’s one of the great vocalists of our time, rather than yourself, it definitely makes you step things up.

One can listen to Seasonal Depression Suite as an album with lightweight lyrics or one can listen to it and be hit with serious existential and societal angst. Talk about how those dueling perspectives coexist in your work.

I think that's just how my stuff comes out sometimes, because I really listen to, admire, and respect a lot of these private pressing records from lunatics who are untrained. I guess calling their work folk art is a nice way of putting it.

There was a scam run by a company called World of Poetry once. They’d put ads in papers like The National Enquirer and pretend to be running a poetry contest. So, amateur poets would send in their poems, and they’d all get a letter back saying, “Congratulations! You’re such a great poet! We’d love to publish you in one of our books as one of the winners of our contest. You can buy as many copies of the book as you like to give to your family and friends for $50 each.” People thought they won and were excited to get this anthology showcasing the winners and would buy many copies.

Then when you got the anthology, which weighs as much as a bowling ball because it’s like 1,000 pages, you realize there are 20,000 poems in it all in tiny print. I started collecting these books, because for all the total garbage, there were some really, really interesting, deep, weird poems in there in which people really hit upon something.

So, I like stuff like that. But I also really love people like Leonard Cohen, Phil Ochs, and Tim Buckley. They’re all on the exact opposite end of that. I think having high-end and low-end influences really comes out in the stuff I do.

How did you choose and engage the guest vocalists on the record?

When we decided to open it up to other singers, names would just hit us. We’d say, “Who would be good on this? Is it this person? Let’s ask everyone.” Usually, the people we asked were the people we felt we could hear the song being sung by. So, it wasn't a question of casting or auditioning. All you can do is ask.

To my surprise, most of the people we reached out to said yes. When you get into having someone like Neil Finn on it, who is one of the preeminent rock songwriters, it blew our minds. He was really trying to sum up the Neil Hamburger vibe when he did his vocal. He’s very familiar with the character and is a fan. So, he wanted to do it right and respect the vibe. The idea that someone like Neil Finn was sitting there thinking about Neil Hamburger before singing our song was very exciting.

My sense is Neil Hamburger is very focused on negative space. The performances are full of intriguing pauses that seem designed to challenge the audience to fill in the blanks. Is that accurate?

It's something I've thought about. I do really notice the difference when I do a show in which I'm allowed to have that negative space and can play with the silences because of the good sound on stage, the good microphone sound, and the good room sound. The shows I enjoy the most are the ones that have those dead moments. Usually, those are the moments that make me break character and laugh. That stuff actually gets me feeling giddy inside.

The origin of the whole thing was based on the negative space on those early records I made. They had nothing to really do with the words. It was really about the soundscape. So, it makes sense that it’s still a big aspect of what I do.

Neil Hamburger at the Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny premiere, Hollywood, CA, 2006 | Photo: Gregg Turkington Collection

The Neil Hamburger of 2024 is quite different from the Neil Hamburger of 1992. Discuss your desire to keep evolving the character.

I’m always just trying to do what feels right for that moment. But there’s an intentional effort to make each of the albums different from the others, rather than figuring out what works and repeating it. I’m a big Tim Buckley fan. I grew up listening to people like him, in which the fifth record doesn’t sound anything like the fourth record. I love that. It’s very exciting. So, that’s what I’ve done with my records.

At some point, clinging to the backstory and making sure everything’s consistent became less important. Rather, it was about making sure each record or project exists in its own world and is as good as it can be.

If you listen to George Carlin records from the ‘60s and then listen to his work in the ‘80s, he sounds pretty damn different. Not just his voice, but the whole approach. And if you listen to a Pink Floyd record from 1968 and one from 1987, again, it’s as different as night and day. I think it’s just what happens if you do stuff for long enough. If I had kept making records that sounded like the early ones, they would have ceased to be interesting to me and everybody else long ago.

I’ve been doing it for so long that it’s become an intuitive process. There are certain tics, movements, or sounds that may occur during one show, and as it’s happening, I might think “This is good. I need to keep doing this.” And then, the next night it’s back. It could be everything from the three drinks I take on stage, with two under my arm and one in my hand. That was just something I did one night and decided to stick with it. Pretty much everything I do is like that.

When you hear the words “Neil Hamburger” come out of my mouth on that first prank phone call I did, I didn’t have that name in my head until I said it. And then I stuck with it. It's the same with a lot of stuff I do for On Cinema as well. The actual show is the workshop for what the thing will be in the future.

Your origins are in punk. And to me, Neil Hamburger is as much punk as it is comedy. What’s your view?

That’s completely true. The band Flipper was the biggest influence on me and Neil Hamburger. When you talk about repetitive riffs, that’s what they’re all about. They didn’t care about the audience reaction. They thrived on discomfort or hatred, and still had a philosophical core about what they did. Flipper wasn’t a party. It was something else. There was also a battle between optimism, extreme optimism, and extreme pessimism running through all the Flipper stuff.

I think the most formative show of my life was in Phoenix, before I moved to San Francisco, at a concert that had a bill with Flipper, Meat Puppets, Sun City Girls, and Animal Things. It was at this club called Madison Square Garden, which was a wrestling ring. So, the bands were performing in a wrestling ring with a fence around it.

All of these bands were so conceptual, confrontational, and annoying to the people there. I had never seen anything like this before. Prior to that, I had been into The Bee Gees, The Who, The Beatles, and things like that. If you went to see any of those musicians in concert, you’d be there with thousands of people, and it would be formatted in a certain way that’s fairly pleasing and fun. But the show at Madison Square Garden was so abrasive and obnoxious. The bands were also talented, musically. Meat Puppets were doing somersaults on stage while performing a drawn-out version of “Battle Hymn of The Republic.” I just loved it. I was more into those artsy types of acts more than I was into the hardcore ones.

When we moved to San Francisco as a teenager in 1982, I was like “Yes! That’s where Flipper is.” They really got me going. I started going to every single Flipper show. I ended up becoming friends with those guys and was obsessed with it all.

Photo: Robyn Von Swank

How do you look back at what you achieved with the film Entertainment?

I’m pretty thrilled with it. The fact that it even got made was kind of miraculous. There were so many steps along the way during which it seemed like it was over and wasn’t going to happen. People would say they were going to invest money and then change their mind. Once John C. Reilly agreed to be part of it, some people said they wanted to invest in it then, but they were insistent they be given a blooper reel so they could exploit that. We said, “There’s not going to be a blooper reel.”

The way the director Rick Alverson and I work is we have a lot of conversations. We get completely on the same page, and then when we’re working, there aren’t disputes and arguments. We both know exactly what we collectively want.

It seemed impossible to realize with all the money and time restrictions. It was very hard to shoot some things for little money and usually have a maximum of two takes per scene. And then we had certain locations for such short amounts of time that if we didn’t get what we needed right away, we’d have to leave before we had it. All of that was going on. And yet, the film feels exactly how we wanted it to be. I’ll never get over that.

Entertainment is incredibly uncomfortable to watch at times. You’re hinting at all kinds of taboos in it, which are never actually depicted on screen. Talk about that tension you were communicating.

Previously, people had talked to me about doing Neil Hamburger films with the idea that they would be comedies. When I talked to Rick, I said, “I don’t really think the Neil Hamburger story is a comedy film.” And of course, it isn’t. The stuff you’re describing is the world we live in, and we wanted to get that on the screen.

The more tense, unpleasant, and excruciating the scene was, the more we would have to immediately sneak off into the corner and start laughing hard. The tension and misery in the film definitely triggered this weird convulsive reaction. Nobody else would be laughing, but we thought that stuff was so funny. Maybe it was just us seeking relief. But the most intense moments involved me really drawing from every hell I could summon up from my life to make the scene work.

It was fascinating to watch audience reactions at the theater to the film. It was clear many had absolutely no idea how they were supposed to interpret what some of those scenes were about. It was almost like a sociological experiment.

One of the best things anybody ever said to me was at the Sundance Film Festival after it played. This person came up and said, “Do you have some sort of background in psychology or psychiatry?” I responded, “No, I don’t.” Then they said “That film was the most accurate depiction of clinical depression I’ve ever seen. It’s something we could show in college courses in my field. It’s that accurate.” They continued to describe all these specific things in the film and how they related to specific issues. I’d reply, “We didn’t study any of that. We just made the film. But I’m interested you would think that.”

Anaita Wali Zada and Gregg Turkington in Fremont, 2023 | Photo: Music Box Films

Your profile as an actor continues growing, and your work in Fremont underlines that. Talk about your interest in the film and the considerations involved in bringing your role to life.

Because I was never trying to be an actor in any way, when somebody asks me to do it, my first impulse is to say, “Oh, no, I can't do that. I don't know how to act. I'm a comedian.” I might also say “Why are you asking me?” I forget, well, actually, I have done a bunch of acting.

I can't get my head around it. I feel like I stumbled into acting or was weirdly pushed into it somehow. I'm not complaining. It's been really interesting, rewarding, and fun, but I definitely have a weird ambivalence about it.

When I got sent the script for Fremont, I was basically offered the role without any sort of audition process or anything. I said, I need to talk to the director Babak Jalali and find out why this is happening. I read the script and found it very moving, and it was very clear this was a very interesting project. So, I got on the phone with Babak, and it turned out he was a fan of Neil Hamburger and On Cinema. He just thought it would work. That was all I needed to hear—that he got what it was I could do and that it would work with what he wanted to do. I trusted he knew what he was doing, and I got excited. It was a challenge, because it wasn’t the type of acting I had done in the past. I wanted to do a good job.

On the first day we started shooting, I met the lead actress Anaita Wali Zada and she had only spoken English for six months. I realized my usual approach of playing with the dialog and improvising wasn’t going to work in our scenes. We’re going back and forth with each other and she’s relying on me to be the cue for what she’s supposed to say. So, I needed to stick to the script, which was a big challenge for me. Memorizing that stuff and then performing it convincingly is something I had to work on. I had to have mental focus on the lines as written.

Anaita’s performance was so impressive to me. It was very moving. It made me think “You cannot fail this project. You have to absolutely bring your A game to it. Look at how she’s just bringing it to every scene.”

We’d also get choked up while we were filming. It was four days of just staring at each other talking and it was super intense.

What are your thoughts on Fremont’s subject matter and how it relates to our macro societal challenges?

Telling stories like this is great because it gets people researching the whole situation after they've seen the movie because they’re so moved. They want to learn more about what happened in Afghanistan. But Babak wasn’t trying to make the movie overly political. He was more interested in how people can be from different backgrounds but still want the same things and have the same basic human needs. But of course, it is also political. In fact, there were scenes we shot that were more political, but aren’t in the movie, because Babak cut them during the edit. I like the balance in the final film.

Let’s discuss The Golding Institute releases, which go back to the ‘90s. Tell me about the inspiration behind them and how you put them together.

I had a job at a San Francisco chemical factory once. It wasn’t the most fun thing to be doing. I’d take a gallon jug of hydrochloric acid and pour it into smaller bottles. It was a little grim sometimes. I’d try to make the most of my weekends outside of the job. One of those things was me deciding “I’m going to make a record from scratch this weekend and press them up. It’s going to be weird, but it’s going to be fun.”

At the time, I had been listening to some strange field recordings. One was called The Sounds of the Junk Yard. It was part of a series of records Folkways did. They’re very hard to find. There was also another LP called Sin and Sex of Paris, France. It had a lurid package with lots of typography and nudity. It was a weird record that was probably sold via mail order through adult magazines. It was really promising a lot on the cover. You think you’re going to hear prostitutes, strip shows, sounds of brothels, and all this stuff as the cover depicts. And then you listen to it, and it’s just some guy who’s got a hidden tape recorder in his jacket that’s captured all these utterly boring conversations with doormen at strip clubs. [laughs] The sound quality’s terrible and nothing really exciting happens. You might hear some music in the background of the dialog sometimes.

That was a double album, and it was so frustrating and maddening. It was a total rip-off and was nothing more than an annoying little audio documentary. But I also found that very funny, so I decided to make my own version, but have it be an even less interesting location for documentation, and that was various fast food restaurants in the Bay Area.

I spent a Saturday driving around and going to fast food restaurants and just sitting there and recording sounds. It didn’t matter if they were interesting sounds or not. I’d just get three minutes of audio at a Burger King and move on to the next place. Then I brought all that back and wrote annoying narration to go with it. I edited it all together and sent if off to be pressed as Sounds of the American Fast Food Restaurants from 1994.

Once I did that one, it became addictive, and I did more. The goal was to see how much further we could remove the enthusiasm of the narrator. We went on to do Sounds of the International Airport Restrooms and Sounds of the San Francisco Adult Bookstores.

For the adult bookstore 7”, I wandered around the shops looking for any sort of sound. The question was “What are the sounds of a sex shop?” Well, it was people just flipping through the pages of magazines back then and then putting them back on a shelf. That’s really about it. It’s even more boring than Sin and Sex of Paris, France. I mean, there’s just nothing happening in any of those shops, so that’s what we documented. I think one of them had film loops playing in booths where you could watch films. I stood outside one of them and recorded the muffled sounds of an X-rated film. Sven-Erik Geddes, who runs Planet Pimp Records, also got some recordings for me. We pieced them together and that’s what you hear.

The way they’re packaged is part of the joy of these releases. They come with inserts. Sounds of the San Francisco Adult Bookstores comes with a tissue that’s folded up in it. Sounds of the International Airport Restrooms comes with a toilet seat cover folded up. They’re all about the inserts.

We were planning to do a fourth one called Sounds of the Science Fiction Conventions. We went to a Star Trek convention in Sacramento, California and planned it as a full-length album, but we never finished it.

In 2006, The Golding Institute returned with the Final Relaxation LP, which went in a very different direction. Describe what you were going for.

It’s a hypnosis record for your body to shut down completely to so you can die—if there’s ever a need for that. Apparently, we didn’t sell millions of copies, but that was the idea. It was recorded in Sydney, Australia one afternoon with a friend of mine named Brendan Walls. He’s a noise musician. He thought it would be interesting to do a New Age hypnosis-type record. He’d put down sounds and I would provide the narration.

Unfortunately, we didn’t really plan ahead. I was on tour doing Neil Hamburger shows in Australia and we agreed to meet on a Sunday afternoon to make this record. He had booked this studio in Sydney, and I was like, “I’m sorry, I don’t have anything ready.” So, we left and went to a bookstore in the neighborhood and bought 10-15 books on New Age philosophy, massage therapy, Buddhism, meditation, relaxation, and childbirth. We brought them all back to the studio and I was thumbing through them for inspiration.

All the while, I was thinking “Goddammit, I failed. I fucked up.” Brendan was like, “Well, let’s just roll tape and see what we get.” So, he turned the recorder on, and I spoke for 45 minutes, and he turned off the recorder and said “Great. I’ll take that and edit it.” He edited it down to 30 minutes. And that is the album you hear.

There was definitely this weird exhaustion I had. I’d done two shows the night before, stayed up too late, and had too much to drink. And then there was this album to record the next morning. I was kind of fried and burnt out, and I think that comes through on the record.

You’ve released a lot of hyper-limited 7” singles in recent years. Talk about the thought process behind them and the audience you intend them for.

I did a lot of them during lockdown. It was something to do—a way to work during a time I couldn’t go out and do shows. Also, people were locked up at home and enjoyed receiving this stuff in the mail. I think these small pressing quantities were a lot of fun for everyone.

When I ran Amarillo Records and was releasing stuff in the ‘90s, including The Golding Institute things, the idea was to make records I would personally like to have a copy of myself. That meant printing 300-500 copies. At the time, record pressing was a lot cheaper. You could get 7” singles pressed up for as little as 30 cents each.

So, I’d come up with these crackpot ideas that probably didn’t have much of an audience. And it was great to take a crackpot idea and turn it into a piece of plastic that existed and would baffle people for years to come. We really did leave a lot of them in thrift stores. I enjoyed the feeling of being confused by a strange record I’d find in a dollar bin. I’d buy one, put it on, and be completely perplexed. I’d think about it for days. I’d ask myself “What was their intention? Who is this person? How do they walk the same planet as me?” These people seemed so in their own world. But these high—or stupid—concepts required a minimum pressing of 300-500 copies, which was a lot. And I didn’t promote them at all.

When the lathe cut option for cutting 7” singles started happening, I realized that was a new opportunity. Now, I can have these crackpot ideas and actually print up numbers that are more appropriate for them, like 20-60 copies. It also becomes more special for the person who gets it. I’ll also put different items in the package and make it a kind of fun artifact. It was a perfect activity for lockdown. Since lockdown ended, I haven’t been doing them anymore.

There was a Neil Hamburger one I did called Live at The Beetle Festival. I had done a show at the festival in 2014 and it was a total horror. Nobody recorded it. During COVID, I thought, “I’m going to try and recreate my experience at Beetle Fest.” I still knew the jokes. So, it’s a fictionalized version of that show. I thought it was fun because it brought me right back to the earliest days of Neil Hamburger records when the shows on the records were faked.

I’m not a technical guy at all, so I had to figure out how to piece together this fake show so it sounds kind of realistic, and then print it up in small quantities for the few people that would be interested. The Beetle Festival 7” sold out in five minutes, so that was kind of wild.

Photo: Gregg Turkington Collection

Tell me about your dedication to record collecting.

I collect records big time and have thousands of them, but I only collect them if I like the record. If there’s an artist and they made 15 albums and I love 14 of them, I don’t have any reason to keep the 15th one. I don’t have the space and I’m not a hoarder. I just want the work that is truly a great record and experience to listen to.

I want to be immediately connected with that person in time when the needle drops. Records are like a cheap time machine. You can go to a dollar bin and get a ticket to a time machine into somebody’s mind and get into what they were trying to express at that moment. Unless the record is beat to shit, I really enjoy that.

I don’t get the same experience from an MP3 or the experience of being interested in an artist and then downloading their entire life’s work with one click. When you do that, you’re kind of skimming through it on your computer while you’re doing something else. And if something doesn’t grab you in 10 seconds, you delete it.

I grew up not having a lot of money but being really interested in books and records. I’d have to figure out how to get the money to go to a thrift store to buy two or three records, take them home, and then for the next week dig into them, listen deeply, really examine every square inch of the artwork, read the lyrics, and think about them.

There was no Internet or way to look this stuff up when I was growing up. So, other than if you found a book referencing the music, you’d have to use your imagination, daydream, and speculate about what you were listening to. Also, because I didn’t have an unlimited amount of money, if I bought a record, I was going to make the most of it and give it a chance. And if I didn’t like it, I’d still listen to it again and again and try to put myself in the mind of whoever made it. I think those experiences were good for me and you don’t get that from MP3s in a folder.

You ran Amarillo Records between 1991-1999. Was that the ultimate manifestation of your fascination with collecting?

Yeah. It was also because the stuff I was doing nobody cared about. I liked records and thought “Well, they’re not that much to put out.” I had worked at Subterranean Records in San Francisco as a teenager. I learned how to release a record, including how to get the covers printed and have the whole thing manufactured. So, I’d work at my job in the chemical factory, save up the money, and put out records.

As I said, nobody wanted to put out my stuff, so I did it. That was the whole point of the label. I was just putting out records I would personally like to have. And then they started selling decent amounts—enough to fund the next record. Then I’d start seeing acts around town I liked and said “Shit, I could actually have a record label that puts out stuff by other people I like. I could help these people out and spread the word on some of this great stuff that’s going on.” So, I started doing more of that and less of my own stuff.

The ultimate idea was “This is a record I would like in my collection. And it’s not going to exist unless I get it made. So, let’s get to work on that.”

How do you look back at your experience as part of Faxed Head?

That band was really fun because it was friends. It was almost a case of “What kind of band could we put together with us?” Grux was the real instigator of that band in the early years. He had such an interesting and positive work ethic. He’d call me up and say “Hey, let’s make a new record today. Come over at 6pm.” And I’d come over, he’d thrust a piece of paper in my hands and say, “Write some lyrics. Quick.” So, I’d just write something on demand for him. He’d say “This is great. Let’s record this.” He always had an enthusiasm for the whole thing. It really worked.

After Grux was no longer in the group, Trey Spruance, who’d been with it the whole time, was into a lot of black metal, and Norwegian and Swedish metal. So, we started making more hi-fi records. We weren’t recording them quite as poorly as the early Faxed Head stuff, which was done on cassette or four-track. We went in a more high-end direction, experimenting with some of these weird tones and sounds that Trey enjoyed from the world of metal. I’m not sure that any of the rest of us were really into that kind of metal. But it ended up infiltrating Faxed Head and combining with the rest of us. That’s why you’d hear this black metal band doing a Robin Gibb or Tupac cover.

A close friendship and working relationship with Trey Spruance developed via Faxed head. Describe how that evolved.

I was a huge fan of Faith No More. I used to see those guys when they first started. Bands I was in would do shows with them. They were a very interesting art rock band. Very weird, with seemingly no commercial potential, but of course, they did have some later.

I loved their sound. Bill Gould’s bass playing is something I can listen to day and night. Roddy Bottum wrote some very interesting things for the keyboard. Mike Bordin is one of the greatest drummers ever.

When they became popular, it was a bit of a shock, but it does make sense to me. Bill introduced me to their new singer, Mike Patton, and we hit it off.

Mike and I were interested in a lot of the same fucked up stuff. He also had this band called Mr. Bungle with Trey—who also worked with Faith No More—and told me I had to hear it. Eventually I saw them and heard their recordings and totally flipped out.

The guys in Faith No More eventually moved out to San Francisco from Eureka, California. Trey and I gravitated towards each other, inevitably. We started doing stuff together, which culminated in Faxed Head. But we did some other stuff, including the Three Doctors Band. We hung out,  talked music, listened to a lot of music, and went out to eat a lot. It was a lot of fun working with him.

I should mention some other guys from Faxed Head, too, who are very important. James Goode, the sound designer from the band, is also a really interesting character. He had a completely different approach to noise and musique concrete. It was very humor oriented. When you travel with James, he’s always got the tape recorder ready to capture odd sounds. Then they’d end up on a Faxed Head record. I remember us being in the middle of the Outback in Australia and finding an abandoned water tower. We’d all start banging on it with rocks in percussive ways that he’d record which ended up on a record we did years later.

Brandan Kearney from Faxed Head is one of my best friends and most favorite people in the world. He’s just an incredible genius musician and writer. He joined the band and replaced Grux. He wrote a lot of the songs when he came in. But like me, he’s also into very mainstream pop music more than people would think. So, we both navigate the world of avant-garde and pop. We don’t take any of it that seriously and even have a healthy disdain for a lot of it.

We’ve discussed the different interpretations people bring to your work. But looking at things from a bigger picture, we have a world that’s imploding around us in myriad ways. Do you feel your work serves as a coping mechanism, distraction, or filter during a period of such societal upheaval?

I’ve had a lot of people come up to me after shows and say the stuff I’ve done, whether it’s Neil Hamburger or On Cinema, really helped them get through hard times. It was really nice to hear that, and they would be emotional about it. I realized they had a deep relationship with this stuff while they were going through trauma. It meant a lot to them, and they really wanted to tell me. And that is just so rewarding.

Over the years, there have been various things in my life going on that weren’t always the best. Art has always been a refuge for me, and humor is definitely a big part of that. But I don’t mind if people don’t like what I do. In fact, I expect it. But when somebody does like it and they relate to it on that level and it actually means something to them, that’s as exciting as it gets to me. It makes me feel like everything is extra worthwhile, even if that wasn’t the intention when I made it.

I’m just trying to reach people that would like this work, knowing that they’re a small group, and not being adequately catered to. I know how much it means to me when I find something and it really speaks to me, even if it speaks to no-one else.

It’s really about the chemistry in your brain being activated by this stuff and the good feelings you suddenly have because somebody has created something that tickles you in the right way.