Mark Robinson, Phil Krauth and Bridget Cross were eating dinner when I sat down to talk to them about Unrest’s short but sweet reunion tour. Between mouthfuls of falafel and blueberry crumble there was much reminiscing, crosstalk and most of all, laughter (in the way people laugh when they’re with their oldest and closest buds). Join us as we talk about the Unrest catalog, unintentional icons and the music scene in Juneau, Alaska.
You guys are old friends, right? High school friends.
MR: Phil and I are high school friends.
And then Bridget, you came in…?
BC: Sometime after high school. College.
So in the blush of youth, was it fun and happy and was that what youth was like for you guys?
PK: It was fun, hanging out in high school together. Back then we started playing music, we listened to a lot of bands, shared a lot of common interests. It was all pretty much music in high school.
MR: Initially we played with a couple guys and we played mostly Van Halen.
PK: Not by our choice
MR: No, not by our choice. I was just having fun playing music. We recorded everything on a boombox, we didn’t have any recording equipment or anything, we used whatever microphone was on the tape recorder.
Why are you back as Unrest now, how did this come up?
MR: We were gonna have the 25th anniversary for a Teenbeat show, so I asked these guys and Bridget said, “Why don’t we do more than one show?” so we just decided to plan it in July and here we are. So now it’s the 26th anniversary. (laughs)
Are you playing cross country or just the East Coast?
MR: Just East Coast. We love driving.
Do you find it easier since you knew each other when you were so young?
PK: We’re all friends, so it’s like friends doing professional stuff. It’s not like any big contract or negotiations, it’s just, “Hey, let’s get together.”
MR: We’ve been rehearsing, we have this one song that’s pretty much improvised within a structure, it’s called “Hydroplane” and I feel like we’re meshing with that pretty well. And if we’d just gotten together as a band last week and we didn’t know each other then I don’t know if that would happen.
I think I’m on day three of having “Make Out Club” on repeat in my car. I looked up the video on YouTube and there it was with the “120 Minutes” logo and all, and the first comment was “Phil Krauth is my English teacher!”
(all laugh)
Have you seen that?
PK: No, I haven’t seen that!
So you’re still teaching English?
PK: Yeah.
Do your kids know – well obviously one of them knows?
PK: Well, yeah, with the internet, yeah they see all of that stuff. I don’t invite it. We don’t really play shows, at least not since 2005, so… Some of them are into it. It enhances their educational experience to some degree (laughs). I teach high school. Kids’ll bring it up but I never talk about it. I let them imagine the mystery a little. There was a parent that came to me that said, “Oh yeah, we’re big Unrest fans.”
So Phil, you’re teaching, and then Mark, you’re doing [the record label] Teenbeat still obviously but also professionally you do book design?
MR: Yeah, it’s good. I design about 30 covers a year. I do fiction and non-fiction, novels, short story collections, a lot of books now like The End of Oil, The End of Food. (laughs) Science-y books. I don’t do any self-help books, there’s not any super-cheesy stuff that I have to do.
And Bridget, what is your alter ego up to these days?
BC: I’m a yoga instructor, and me and my man run a fish and chips stand up in Alaska. Oh, and my other band [Maybe It's Reno], that’s me and my fish and chips guy.
I remember I discovered Unrest in a way that complements your “lending library” aesthetic, someone dubbed a copy of Perfect Teeth on side A of a cassette and it was just serendipity. With the way technology has exploded, have we lost a little bit of that magic?
MR: There’s no search anymore. You can just go to eBay and just find it. I used to go to used record stores and look through every single record in the entire store. I couldn’t leave before I’d looked at every one.
Are we released now from that OCD-ness? Does that enable our energies to go elsewhere?
MR: It’s good and bad. It’s good that you can find things that you like. But maybe you’re not discovering as many new things. I used to buy records because I thought the covers were cool. So maybe it’s good in that now I’m looking for stuff that sounds good. It does seem like somehow in 1985 or 1990 even, everyone knew everything. But it was just fanzines and people wrote letters, and now with the internet…
BC: And there’s just so much.
MR: Yeah, there’s so much. Because back then it was such a big deal to put a record out that nobody really did it. And now everybody does it. Good and bad.
So is there more good music out then now than ever, or is it a quantity vs. quality thing?
MR: I think when you’re younger, the things that you hear when you’re 15 stick with you more than the things that you hear now. I’m sure as far as good music goes, it’s the same as it ever was.
Have your preferences changed over time?
MR: I still like about 95% of my record collection. Except for That Petrol Emotion, that was a mistake.
BC: Really?
PK: What??!?! (laughs)
So you guys have done “experiments” through your career. Like, not playing the same song twice, not playing the same song the same way twice…
MR: I think in the really early incarnation of the band, I think half the stuff we played we just made up on the spot. And I guess when we were playing songs that we had played previously, there were never any structures, we just “felt” when we should change. I think we definitely tried to do a lot of different genres, we didn’t want to repeat ourselves too much that way. We’d have what we would call a country song, then we’d do a rock song, and so on.
And then with [Robinson's band] Flin Flon the idea there was to not have chords and to only have a high hat, right?
MR: Right, no cymbals and no chords. Mostly single notes. I think I just wrote a bunch of songs and that’s the way they sounded. I wanted make it sound a little different than other bands. Or maybe I did set those rules down hoping something cool would come out of it.
So when you introduce yourselves to strangers, do you say “Hi, I’m Phil, I teach high school” or “Hi, I’m Phil, I’m in a band”? What’s the first thing you say?
PK: No, I don’t talk about it very much.
MR: I think I do exactly what you do with your school. I never talk about it. Because if you ever bring it up, people are like, “Oh! Are you guys gonna get big? Are you gonna try for a big hit song?” It’s all about this commercialization. “When are you guys gonna make it big?”
BC: For me it’s like, “Do you wanna jam with me? I got my mandolin and Jenny’s got her banjo…” I mean, that’s cool, but… I don’t.
What are you guys listening to these days? What are you obsessively listening to on replay?
MR: I’ve been listening to the first Roxy Music album. I’m kind of rediscovering that. That’s good stuff, Peter Sinfield produced that. “Virginia Plain” is not on the original album, did you know that?
BC: I like Miike Snow. He’s Swedish. I don’t put it on repeat though, I would repeat it too much.
As I pulled out your CDs, there’s [musician/music journalist] Cath Carroll, there’s [American realist painter] Isabel Bishop and at first when I saw the credit for Naomi Wolff I thought, “Oh! The feminist author I love so much!” but it’s not. It’s a different Naomi Wolf altogether! Which is fine, she’s beautiful on that cover [of Kustom Karnal Blaxsploitation].
MR: It’s funny because they both lived in Manhattan. The Naomi Wolff that I knew, she had all of these credit problems, she didn’t pay her bills, she had bad credit cards, and then the other Naomi Wolf – the author – she would have all of these credit companies calling and coming after her.
BC: You’d think they could get that straight!
Actually my question about all of that is that it seems like you always have sort of a feminist muse, you always have a woman front and center somehow. Is that intentional?
MR: It’s retrospectively embarrassing.
(all laugh)
MR: I like the Isabel thing, I love that song a lot, so I stand by that one.
Is it just where you were, what you were doing at the time? Isabel Bishop was not a pop culture reference.
MR: Well, neither was Cath Carroll.
Until you made her one…
MR: I think that’s kind of why I thought it would be cool. I thought, nobody knows about her, so it would be kind of funny to write this ode to her.
She later recorded on Teenbeat, right? Did you know her that well first?
MR: No, I didn’t know her at all.
So what did Cath Carroll think of “Cath Carroll”? Did you ever talk to her about it?
MR: She might have thought it was terrible, I don’t know.
BC: She was mysterious. She was an intense woman!
PK: The thing I read about it is that she was a little worried about someone writing a record and putting her picture on the cover. But then I guess she toured with you guys? And she said, “Mark’s a regular, cool guy.” (laughs)
And then on Imperial f.f.r.r., it’s the idea of noise and not-noise. In your liner notes under instruments you have bookshelves and water and wine glasses and sirens. Did the sounds find you or did you find the sounds?
MR: A lot of the stuff, like the bells on “Cherry Cherry,” that was just like in the studio there were tons of bells and I was like “Hey, let’s play these bells.” Kind of spontaneous. We just looked around at everything he had in the studio and thought we’d use most of it.
PK: Hey, there’s a Mellotron! Let’s put it on Bridget’s record…
BC: So great, made me so happy…
MR: Maybe we should talk about that…
BC: The “secret record”?
MR: Bridget’s band, Maybe It’s Reno, we all play on it. I play guitar, she plays bass, Phil plays drums. Phil also plays mellotron. It was put out two years ago. It’s kind of like an Unrest reunion but Bridget wrote all the songs.
BC: And there’s other people that play on it. My man.
Does he have a name?
BC: (laughs) He Who Cannot Be Named but his name is George [Kuhar]. And a drummer [Jordan Strudel] that he was playing with at the time in Juneau.
PK: So that’s the record to get.
by Stacey Pavlick
