When You’re Not Excited, You’re Not a Fan: An Interview with Nardwuar the Human Serviette

Popshifter: How did you get involved with them?

Nardwuar: We played a gig with The Evaporators in 1994 in Chicago backing up Cub. And Jake, the editor of Roctober, was tipped that Cub were a hot, up-and-coming band. And they were: they were from Vancouver and they were so versatile. They were a three-piece girl band but they were able to open for Rancid or They Might Be Giants! And TMBG ended up covering their song “New York City!” So it was totally cool.

Nardwuar and Joan Jett, 2006
Image from Nardwuar’s Gallery

And we opened for them and when we play, sometimes we get our mysterious masked friends Thee Goblins to open for us and by sheer coincidence, Jake was in a band from Chicago called The Goblins, while we were THEE Goblins. He was so freaked out by that! And when he found out I did interviews he asked me to start contributing to Rocktober.

It’s how I got into contributing to Razorcake fanzine. Todd, who had done some stuff for Flipside fanzine, started Razorcake. And how I contributed to Flipside was I just mailed them stuff I did for Discorder, which was the CITR radio program guide, which is still going strong. That was another influence and that was where the Redd Kross interview was published.

That’s what’s so great about magazines in independent media! They don’t necessarily edit; they just let you have the entire interview, rambling on and on and on. That’s just great! I love that!

Popshifter: Me too, yeah!

Nardwuar: Where other magazines, you only have 100 words. Sometimes it’s an interesting interview like if it’s Alice Cooper and he hangs up on me. [In the interview Alice Cooper hung up not long after Nardwuar mentioned his golf hobby.—Ed.]

Popshifter: Oh! That was so funny! My mom saw him when we lived in California, and she went to the Beverly Center Mall, and she waited in line behind Alice Cooper at a coffee place. And she was all freaked out. It was on Friday the 13th. And I was like, “Mom, why didn’t you get his autograph on Friday the 13th?” And she was like, “He was scary looking! I didn’t want to talk to him.” So when I read your interview I was like, “Well, I guess it’s good that my mom didn’t try to talk to him about golf!”

Nardwuar: He hung up because I mentioned golf and I found out later that he’ll hang up on you if you mention golf. And I still would have mentioned it, but I would have made it my last question! Later on, I found out that he talks about golf now. So people change; they lighten up a bit.

Popshifter: Well, those are all the questions I have. Thank you so much for this interview.

Nardwuar: Thank you so much for the interest! I really appreciate it. And doot doola doot doo. . .

Popshifter: Doot doo!

Additional Resources:

For more on Nardwuar, including versions of his interviews in transcribed, MP3, RealAudio, and video form, please check out the following links:

Nardwuar the Human Serviette website
Archived interviews
Radio interviews
YouTube
MuchMusic
Nardwuar on Going Coastal
Podcasts
Facebook group for “Make Nardwuar the Human Serviette the host of the 2009 Juno Awards”

Click to read more from Nardwuar on. . .

Inspirations and approaches to interviews
Music journalists and the early days
Can Rock and Chris Murphy of Sloan
Beck (Hansen) and Bach (Sebastian)
Digging into history and school dances
Redd Kross and Bill Bartell
Nardwuar’s fave fanzines, part one
Nardwuar’s fave fanzines, part two

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