Joe Garden

Joe Garden walks us through his Onion inception and keeps on going... right into the world of office-run bodegas and simian cinema.  Ha!  Simian cinema...




















Chief Magazine: How did you get started with The Onion, what was that process like?

Joe Garden: I started just over fourteen years ago in 1993. In New York it’s weird, because there’s a lot more of a public face with The Onion, but back then it was a very tight-knit cloistered environment. At one point I thought I wanted to write music reviews for the student paper The Daily Cardinal, I did a few and I was a terrible music reviewer. If you could go back and read some of my reviews in the Onion, they’re just horrible. My favorite thing to cite is a review I did of Pavement’s album Crooked Rain. In it, I referred to their previous album, Slanted and Enchanted as The White Album and Revolver rolled into one. It was just full of hyperbole. So I went there wanting to be involved, but it was a really close knit thing and I was feeling really out of sorts. I had gone through a bad break-up and I had really low self-esteem.

One of the people at the meeting was Dan Vebber, he was the graphics editor, and I took him some drawings I had done. I don’t know why, I’m a terrible artist. So he was pretty dismissive of my stuff, rightfully so, but I noticed he was wearing a Residents T-shirt, and I was really big into the Residents at the time, so we started talking. We were both members of the fan club, so we were just kind of geeking out about that. I also worked in a liquor store on State Street where people from the Onion would stop in and I’d meet them that way.

There was this band called Pachinko, which was a Madison punk band, and I worked with this guy Matt who was in the band. I don’t know if I had any history of nudity at the time, but one day he told me that they wanted to have two naked dancers, one male and one female and he asked me if I wanted to do it. So I said “Yeah, but I think I need some sort of disguise.” So a friend of mine had these yellow tights with the legs all knotted up, and had added of those little plastic canisters that you get from those gumball machines and put it on either side of the nylon with a marble in each so it looked like this weird alien thing. So there I was, butt naked, and the band was opening for Shorty whose members went on to be in US Maple and the band Killdozer. So a bunch of people were there, including people from the Onion, and Dan Vebber was like, “Hey I know you!”

[Laughs] Not so anonymous.

No not very. So I ended up doing that for a while, I was their naked dancer.

---

---

So it wasn’t just a one time thing?

No I did it a few times. The highlight was one time when the guitar player broke a string and he had to change it, so he took the broken string and threw it down and I picked it up. The thing is that I have this… I would never pierce my genitals, but it was an accident during circumcision where there was a hole in my foreskin. So I took the guitar string and threaded it through there and basically played dick puppet theatre. I’ve never seen people move back so fast, except for this one guy who I found out later was on mushrooms who was sitting there slack-jawed with his eyes bugging out.

So anyway, back to The Onion. I was working at the liquor store and we had to make signs for the inside for products. I had started doing a little bit of writing, just for my own sake, I didn’t have an outlet at the time, but when I started making signs for the liquor store I had an outlet. So I started making signs that were more joke-based. Then the owner was like “we’re going to start putting some of these signs in the front window instead.”

Do you remember what any of them were?

The one that I always cite is something I’m happy with, but alternately a little bit ashamed with because it’s so goofy but it’s the one I remember the most. It was for Michelob beer, and it was a really crude drawing of the brain and I had an arrow labeling the “frontal lobe” and another one that said “backal lobe” and a third that said “Michelob.” The last one said “squiggly parts that modern science has yet to determine.” There was another one for some kind of French wine we bought on clearance and I drew it as the Godzilla monster crashing out of the liquor store with people running away in terror. I did a series called Are You Hip? It was all this essay-based stuff about various and assorted aspects of hipster culture. This is back when the whole rave thing was really big. I don’t remember any of them. I don’t know if the owner has since saved them. I went back, actually, years later to look. It was like, “Oh boy, that’s not good.” One I actually still have at home, which is for Old-Style beer which was basically a long paragraph, maybe 150 to 250 words. I don’t know if you know of Old-Style beer, it was local, brewed in Wisconsin. When I was growing up, we’d always pass by the brewery on the way back from my house, and they’d always have the statue of King Gambrinus, the King of Beers! The other thing is that they had the world’s largest six-pack which was just six gigantic beer tanks about five or six stories tall painted like Old-Style cans. So I wrote about that, I’m pretty happy with that one actually.

I had another one that was kind of trash-talking one of the writers for the student paper Matt Kaufmann, who’s actually a pretty good guy, we became friends later on. He wrote about this experience of meeting Nick Cave, and being backstage. So the thing I wrote, I don’t remember the content but there was definitely a snotty, snide thing about it. So then the Daily Cardinal called and asked, “Hey we want you to write for us.” Then Dan Vebber came into the liquor store one day, who was the assistant editor at The Onion and said, “We love your signs, do you want to come to a meeting?” The first week I didn’t go, because I was too freaked out. The second week I showed with my ideas. I only remember one thing from that. This is back when they had the Camel Bucks. My idea was “Hormel introduces the Hormel Bucks.” It wasn’t that great. So that was how I got involved. It was basically fortune, good luck, being at the right place at the right time. Also it was just taking it into my own hands, because when I started writing I didn’t have any grand scheme. I didn’t think I was going to be hired at The Onion. I thought people might take notice as sort of a casual thing and that nothing would really come of it. But it turned out that something did, and now it’s become my full time job.

I don’t know how other people got involved, I think most of them were writing for The Daily Cardinal, which was one of the few student papers at the University of Wisconsin. Graeme Zielinski, John Krewson, Todd Hanson, Maria Schneider, and Dan Vebber were all Daily Cardinal people. One guy was not a Cardinal person, I think he just sent stuff to The Onion and it was actually really good. His name was Kelly Ambrose. He was fucking amazing. His stuff was really, really funny and had this kind of anti-authority slant that was so all consuming. He couldn’t take any sort of authority, even at The Onion, and ultimately what happened is that he sort of crashed and burned. I’m not sure what he’s doing now. He could seriously be like another Bukowski because he lives this lifestyle of total abandon where he doesn’t give a shit at all. He might give a shit by now, who knows? But at the time he did not give a shit. He did what he did and if you couldn’t deal with it, then “fuck you.” So basically there weren’t a whole lot of people involved with The Onion that weren’t involved with The Daily Cardinal.

---

So when did The Onion become full-time for you?

It didn’t actually become full-time until after they moved. I was with The Onion for three years and then I moved to Chicago because this girl I was dating at the time wrote for The Onion very briefly, then moved to Chicago to go to the School of the Arts to study art history. She was there for a year then I finally followed her down there, which was not the worst idea. Then about a year later is when they started hiring writers full-time. Meanwhile I’m living in Chicago working at a punk rock record distribution place. I worked at nearly every college or university in Chicago as a temp at some time. I worked at the hospital at the University of Chicago, I worked in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University. I was just writing Jim and Jackey Harvey which was about once a month, and I was writing CD reviews as well. So I was still involved with The Onion at that point, but I didn’t want to be the guy who moved back to his college town because for me, there was nothing more indicative of personal failure. I know it’s not the case for everybody. I have friends that live in Madison still and they’re happy, and I’m happy for them because they wanted to do it and it worked out well for them. I think I had such a reaction to it because I had one goal growing up which was to go to the UW Madison and when I got in I was like, “I’m a shitty student. This is the high point of my existence? What the fuck have I done?” Also, in a lot of cases, there is something really sad about people who go back to their college town trying to recapture their college experience and postpone their actual trajectory into adulthood. They’ve just forged their new existence and they’re afraid to go through that transformation again to do whatever else. You don’t have to be the most responsible person in the world, but at the same time you don’t have to go to keg parties with 21 year olds and bullshit about Milan Kundera, which you haven’t read, in an attempt to get laid.

At the time at The Onion, the pay scale was really bad. I had created these two popular characters for The Onion and I was being paid what amounted to about ten cents a word. That’s like, Dickensian basically. So I emailed them like, “this kind of sucks.” So they offered me half-time salary if I would write more stories and contribute ideas again. So I did that and it worked out. Then when they moved to New York I let them know that I wanted to move there and become full-time, and they conceded. There were some people who were kind of against it, but there were people who were fighting for me, and Todd Hanson was very vocal on the fact, which I am eternally grateful for. Also, the webmaster at the time, Jack Szwergold was very vocal about it. Otherwise, who knows what the fuck I’d be doing. I might be a secretary, who knows, because I never went to journalism school so I wasn’t suited to write for any other type of publication. I had some connections at the Chicago reader but I never felt like I was a good enough writer to really pursue anything there. I didn’t think my style would fit in. When I went to New York they paid for my move they gave me a desk and I was on Easy Street. They took a chance and I’m glad. I mean, they knew that I was writing something.

Well you seemed to have been locked in for a while.

Yes, they just never unlocked me.

How does The Onion when it initially moved to New York compare to what it’s like now?

It was a lot more laid back then. Here’s the way it would go: Monday and Tuesday we’d have to be in the office. Wednesday we could stay at home for our “writing days” which invariably meant fucking around. For a year I would just go see movies and end up writing my story last minute on a Thursday morning. Thursday we’d read the drafts of the stories and then Friday we’d have another writing day to finish our stories which invariably meant more fucking around. I’m speaking for me, but I’m sure other people experienced the same thing. Then as time went on things became a lot more structured. We’re there five days a week now.

The vibe isn’t a whole lot different, people are a little more resigned to the fact that it’s something they have to be concerned with and that it’s actually a job that they have. It’s not fun time party job, it’s a job and while there’s no clock to punch there are certain responsibilities that you have to adhere to. That’s changed, but it’s not the worst thing. I don’t have to punch a clock but I have to be there. How I spend my time hasn’t changed. Actually, for my birthday, the people at The Onion bought me a pair of Heelies, the shoes with the wheels in the heels. Apparently they come in adult sizes. I piss a lot of people off with them, but no one’s said anything yet. I do my work, but that’s how I burn off my energy.

I’m always looking for excuses to go up front now. When we first moved to New York there was another vibe as well, prior to the new ownership, which I think is pretty indicative of the way things were. We hired these guys to renovate the office and put up these partitions. I think they were there for a year. People would go in and there’d be just one guy grinding down the metal support beams and everybody else would be on the other side of the office watching TV. But we kept giving them money for not doing a fucking thing. They moved slower than anyone I know and still managed to get paid. It was shocking. But now when we hire somebody we actually get things done, not as fast as a lot of companies probably would, but I’m sure we’d get things done a lot faster if we paid a lot more. We also just don’t hire people because they seem cool like we used to. The business side is a lot tighter than it was before. We’ve definitely had to work more, but no one’s ever said “boo” to me about running a deli out of the office. No one says anything about Heely-ing back and forth.

---

---

Tell me about this Deli.

I run a bodega out of my office, it’s called Joe’s Cold Beverages. It started when I got a BJ’s membership which is now a Costco membership. I was just selling Cokes and Diet Cokes like, “Hi! Welcome to Joe’s Cold Beverage’s!” It’s the kind of thing that started as a joke and then went too far. Now I have like, ten different kinds of candy bars, chips, I bought chip racks off of Ebay and installed them in my office.

I think as long as you’re not doing cold-cuts you’ll be fine.

I do lunch specials. Grilled cheese lunch specials. I bought a Foreman grill and I buy cheese in Wisconsin from a cheese factory in between my mom and my dad’s house. The ends are kind of fucked up so they can’t sell them to Wal-Mart, but they can sell them for two bucks a pound. So I buy those and make grilled cheese lunch specials.

How often do you go to Wisconsin to do this?

You’ve got to understand that when you’re buying cheese like that, you buy it in five to six pound blocks and I’ll come back with twenty pounds of cheese. I also go to thrift stores and dig through their book and record bins and come back with twenty or thirty records. You never realize how much it weighs until you go to the airport and you have to pay twenty five dollars extra so you’re taking cheese and shoving it in your backpack.

---

How big is your office if you have to refrigerate cheese?

I keep most of it at home, but I have a mini fridge in my office which holds eight cokes, eight diet cokes, eight sprites. Right now I have Budweiser and V8. I also have some cheese and Vitamin Water.

They approve of you selling beer, or is that your private stash?

What I do is I call it “Joe’s Cold After Dark” which is kind of like The Peach Pit After Dark from Beverly Hills 90210. It all comes together. So Friday nights after five thirty I have the shot-and-a-beer special for five bucks. You get a shot of Maker’s Mark and a Budweiser. We’re moving right now, my wife and I, and she found all of these shot glasses that she doesn’t use anymore, so I brought them in for Joe’s Cold After Dark. So now instead of using those Pom tea glasses, now I have actual shot glasses.

Part of the reason I started it in the first place, when we were in Chelsea I’d always be going to the Chelsea market to buy fruit and nuts and whatever. So I’d have nuts out and people would always be grabbing my stuff. So I decided, “Fuck this, I’m not going to feed everyone for free. Buy stuff from me!” That’s where it ultimately came from and eventually went overboard.

Do you at least make a little bit of a profit?

I definitely make a little bit of a profit. I’m covering expenses. I’m always looking for an excuse to go to Costco, it’s like a magical wonderland.

What’s the new thing with The Onion going video?

It’s been about a year in the making. I think it’s been a really weird learning process, but we’ve got it down now. I’ve been to a few of the meetings, but the usual duties take the writers away from it, plus the writers are more generally accustomed to text. So they have other writers who’ve been brought in to work on that. What astonishes me is how much press that it’s received. Everyone’s worked really, really hard on it and they deserve some praise for it. Carol Kolb was the assistant editor, then she became the editor-in-chief, then she left for a while. But they brought her back and now she’s the head writer for the video network. She’s in charge of assigning things and cleaning everything up. It’s one of those things where part of it’s a big deal because it’s a form of media we haven’t done before. I think it’s good too because we get to take advantage of the web’s functionality. We were always considered a print publication with an internet sideline. When we moved to New York, we had just opened our offices and we had just gotten set up there and that’s when the internet bubble burst, but no one wanted anything to do with it. But then after a year it built up again and became more powerful than ever. Now we have this other feature on there. What I think will happen is that the online Onion will eclipse the print version and I’ll be one of those bitter old guys. I guess that’s where diversification comes in handy.

Do you find yourself interested in dabbling in it, or is it just not for you?

A lot of what they’re doing is still in The Onion news format. It’s more news than the personality. The real personality-based stuff is done by really good improvisers, because they have the “in the know” segment, which is their Sunday morning talk-show style program. That’s just improvisers riffing on a topic. I can’t really write jokes for that because it’s really just a lot of improvisation. I’m really not that good as far as writing stuff for that. I’ve been doing fake news stuff for fourteen years now in some form of another and I’d like to expand beyond that.

There are other projects I'm dabbling in. Writing fake news all the time starts to make you go crazy, even if it’s character-based stuff because you want to write something maybe a little more complicated or maybe explore visual aspects, which is something you can’t do in print. A side project adds to your workload and might make you a little bit crazy but at the same time gives you another outlet so you can explore your other ideas. That’s really important because otherwise I’d be a bitter husk.

You think you have a shot with the whole “Vote for Joe” thing?

Without a doubt I have no chance whatsoever. There are people at Conan O’Brien who know about Vote for Joe. Whether Conan O’Brien knows about it himself is another story all together. Whether he has any say about it, I have no idea.

Is it just to point out how bad of an idea Jimmy Fallon is?

Vote Joe came first. I have no doubt that Jimmy Fallon is probably is a nice guy, but I’ve never been able to stand his mugging or his giggly nature. The thing about the weekend update is that when it started, Chevy Chase played it really straight, and you’d have Dan Akroyd very serious saying, “Jane, you ignorant slut.” But when people are giggling and laughing about it, it undercuts the premise. Maybe he’s charming enough to pull it off, but I can’t see it. He definitely has the advantage over me because he has TV experience and he’s used to working with cameras and lights and a guest host everyday and a rotating cast. I’m just used to working with the same neurotic fucks all of the time. On the other hand is that I’m 37 years old, I’m balding, I have bad teeth and my speech pattern is a little bit halting. As much as I would disparage the Jay Leno style of comedy, I certainly can’t do the Jay Leno delivery. It takes a certain personality to say any joke, whether or not you believe in it, with conviction. I’m also one of those performers who need constant reassurance.

Conan did that at first. It’s like his thing.

Yeah and he’s actually done a great job. He came into the Letterman spot and made it his own. When Jimmy Kimmel came in he did his whole, “I’m a normal guy like you.” But then after a while he went with the whole coat and tie and his ratings went up, because that’s what people are comfortable with. Zach Galfanakis did a talk show on VH1 for a while, not very long. I never saw it, but I remember seeing the bus ads. I think the only way I could succeed is with a cable channel who’s like, “what do we have to lose?”

When I was growing up, my favorite show on late night was of course Letterman, but the show I look back at was this show Night Flight on the USA network. It was on the weekends and it was when MTV had launched and they had Friday night videos on NBC. They had themed episodes, but they never really had a host for it. It was on for like three of four hours on a Saturday night. That was the first place I saw the movie Urgh! A Music War!, which was a 1981 concert film of all punk and new wave bands. Thirty-four bands. It was like the Dead Kennedys, Oingo Boingo, Pere Ubu, XTC, The Cramps, just these phenomenal performances. Growing up in Wisconsin, this blew my mind. It was energetic, vibrant, these people were out there and they just didn’t give a shit. They’d have things like their salute to animation where they’d show Bambi vs. Godzilla or Jack Mack and Rad Boy Go. It was a precursor to Beavis and Butthead. The guy was an animator from Texas. It was a one-time short about these two guys, and you can really see a lot of this style in the early Mike Judge animations. These guys are complete misanthropic, hedonistic ne’er-do-wells who drink and drive and run over people’s pets. They showed music videos too. They’d have standard videos and then their salute to industrial music, which would last for about thirty minutes. There’s no market for that! That’s the sort of thing I’d like to do. It would be a little more structured of course, with maybe rotating guests and stuff like that. You could overlap some of the regular late night stuff. It would be something where you’d be at home, hanging out with your friends and you’re high, kind of like what Adult Swim does. You could be like, “Hey we could watch The Big Lebowski again, or we could check out what’s on Night Flight or whatever the modern day equivalent would be. That’s where I could see myself actually doing something, having the freedom to interview people…

Interviewing people you’re actually interested in rather than the random Hollywood shit.

Right. You don’t have to interview Tara Reid, you don’t have to trot out… whoever. Nicky Hilton. “Oh I have a fragrance!” I don’t give a shit about your fragrance! Stuff like that makes me a little sad.

You have people who are genuinely funny and talented like Conan O’Brien and Letterman, but because of the machinery at work, they will have to interview people like Nicky Hilton. It’s a weird democratization of television. When you do it, you appeal to the broadest swath of cultural relevance that you can, but as they’ve proven with Adult Swim, you don’t need to do that. You can sit there and dictate “this is something that we think is funny and interesting that might actually challenge you, whether you like it or don’t like it.”

That always blew my mind, how the cable networks that you were dedicated to as a kid are constantly saying “we’re cable, we don’t matter” while the network channels are just a fucking empire.

Well, as time goes on, more and more people are going to get cable because of things like the Dish network and Direct TV, people are going to be hooked up to a broader spectrum of programming.

I always wonder; just because I like something, and I think it’s brilliant, how does that play across the board? Is it universally popular or is it just an encapsulated New York thing?

Well, Night Fight was not made with me in mind. It was not made for the sixteen year old high school student in a small town in the middle of Wisconsin in the mid-eighties. Nobody thought that was a market. It was probably marketed more to the cool New York set, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t have a profound influence on me. Somebody in Wyoming is going to watch Twelve Ounce Mouse and be like, “Holy Shit! This is funny and I could probably do something similar to this.” For a number of reasons network TV will continue to be the 800 pound gorilla not only because they don’t have to rely on cable providers, but also because most of them are owned by other concerned. Like ABC is owned by Disney, NBC is owned by General Electric, CBS is owned by Viacom so they’ll have a lot more marketing money to put behind it. Where I would fall on this is that I would love the chance to be part host and part curator where I’d be able to choose things we could do, maybe on a weekly basis.

Do you think that the Onion Video Network would be an avenue for this kind of thinking at all?

It would be hard for The Onion itself to diversify. The Onion has branded itself as a news source. If The Daily Show would for some reason present the “Funny Farts Show.” People would be like “why The Daily Show?” The Onion couldn’t do anything like that either. What remains to be seen is as The Onion grows if it will branch out into other websites. Take for example Gawker and Nerve. Ultimately I’d like to see another website get off of the ground. Until the streaming is a lot faster and the resolution is full screen I think it’s going to be a lot harder to do. YouTube is fun, but you get tired of looking at little tiny screens.

---

---

We interviewed Eugene Mirman last month, and Super Deluxe is pretty good.

In the comedy community there aren’t a lot of cars. I have one of the few cars in the comedy community so my friend Joe who shoots some video stuff, he works at The Onion, his sketch group needed a car so they borrowed my car for a couple days. Kurt Braunohler from Hot Tub was shooting something for Super Deluxe and they borrowed my car for that, too. So my car will be on Super Deluxe in a matter of weeks.

I subscribe to The Wall Street Journal morning tech briefing podcast. Sometimes you hear something relevant, sometimes you hear something interesting, but it’s funny because I find business news to be morbidly fascinating. For a story I had to research the Disney/ABC merger, so I bought a book. I read the parts that I needed to and then went back and read it from the beginning, it’s all about Michael Eisner’s reign over the Disney Corporation. I love that stuff. Business news always has a greater resonance and more of an effect on you than other news will. There’s also a lot more rise and fall stories, and a lot more morality tales than other news. Reading about these people, it’s like, “When is growth enough? When is profit enough?” That’s the thing with cable. There are more diminished expectations than there are for a network show. But a cable show will be more successful because there’s a cult reach as long as you’re able to bring it in under budget.

What’s your favorite Monkey Movie?

That would be The Barefoot Executive. The Barefoot Executive stars Kurt Russel and Heather North. I don’t have it on DVD, but I should. They released it but it’s a mediocre transfer. It’s still full screen, they didn’t strike a new print to do it. It seems like more of an obligation than anything. It’s actually a funny movie. It’s a kid’s movie. The whole premise is that Kurt Russel’s character works in the mailroom of a TV network, but he thinks he can be the tastemaker. So he keeps on bothering the executive, played by Harry Morgan who is Colonel Potter from M.A.S.H. He keeps telling him, “Everyone loves President Lincoln and everyone loves Doctors, and everyone loves dogs, so I have this great show: Lincoln’s doctor’s dog.” That’s brilliant, amazing comedy. So his girlfriend from the north is somehow babysitting a chimpanzee. Where these chimps that need to be babysat are, I’d like to know, because I have cats that need terrorizing, I think a chimp would be perfect for the job. But it turns out the chimp can watch shows and accurately pick the shows that will be a success, because he loves the dumbest ones, and invariably, those are the ones that the public loves.

There’s a message there.

It’s sort of a weird indictment of the TV networks in general. But it’s funny and the chimp action is cute. I’m also a fan of Monkey Trouble as well because it has Harvey Keitel and a monkey, and Thora Birch before she filled-out. I actually have a Monkey Trouble poster that, right when American Beauty came out my friend Josh was working at the Onion and was like, “I’m going to interview Thora Birch.” So I asked if he could get her signature on my poster. So now I have a Monkey Trouble poster with her autograph. We had an Onion film series until December when we sort of shuttered it. It was half business decision and half exhaustion. It’s hard to pick good movies and track them down to make sure they still exist. The hard thing about that is you realize how many movies don’t have prints anymore. Cemetery Man for example. I was convinced we could get a print of it, and we scheduled it and had to cancel. I even talked to the people from Anchor Bay and asked what print they were using, but they were like, “We can’t find one.” These are the people who fucking reissued it. This movie is only twelve years old. Urgh! A Music War!, the movie I was talking about earlier, there was one print I found and it was in New Zealand and it was water damaged. We screened it the first time and they took me up into the projectionist booth and they showed me the gate like, “You see this? This is the stuff that’s rubbing off on the print. We can not show this again.” So we showed the DVD, which doesn’t exist by the way, it was a bootleg. Because of rights issues it can’t be released. In the case of this movie you have 34 acts. Every act signed a contract. The contract dictates that they sign over film rights and rights to existing media, which at the time was analog, laserdisc, and videotape. Now they lost the contracts and they can’t amend them. They’d have to track all of these bands down again and re-do the contracts.

Good Luck. None of those bands lasted. They were time bombs, every one of them.

There are bands that nobody knows anything about. There’s a band called Invisible Sex. Who were they? No one knows. I’m on a mailing list for Urgh! A Music War! These are people who are super nerds. Nobody has any idea who they are. It’s sad because this is history that is being lost.

At a certain point can’t they accept that a band doesn’t exist enough to find them, is it worth risking it to get sued by that band?

There’s precedent for that, but I don’t know if there’s precedent in the film world. I know the Nuggets Box Set had a band on it where no one had any information, but they just released it anyway like, “If you have any information on this band or you were in this band, please let us know.” I don’t know if they ever heard anything. Lenny Kaye who did the first Nuggets compilation and I think he worked on the Nuggets Box Set as well, he’s DJing with my friend Phast Phreddie in a couple of weeks. Anyway, back to the monkey thing.

For the past two years I did a thing called Monkeypiece Theatre where I collected monkey films and would screen them. I actually had a Hogan’s Heroes episode where there was a chimp on screen for maybe five minutes and the rest was just a Hogan’s Heroes episode. I learned a valuable lesson, that you can’t screen Hogan's Heroes publicly, it has no effect whatsoever. Then there was Castle Films, who would do all these eight and sixteen millimeter home films for people like really truncated versions of Hollywood movies. If you ever got Famous Monsters of Filmland or Fangoria in the early seventies, they’d sell versions that were edited down to almost nothing. They have this online now, like, Pokemon in fourteen seconds. They also did a series of chimp movies like Zippy the Chimp or Chimp Goes to the Circus so I collected those. I found what I believe is the first and one of the only chimp westerns. The problem is that when I got it, it smelled. Film stock, when it decays, it has a vinegar smell to it. I talked to the people at Anthology Film Archives and they couldn’t run it because it would contaminate the player, but I did find a company who could actually clean it and transfer it to DVD. It cost four hundred dollars but it was totally worth it to me. I spent all this money and I have a DVD transfer of a chimp western, but I don’t know what to do with it. I guess I could burn copies and sell it on the internet, but that seems kind of lame.

Why do you think we stopped making monkey movies?

Well, there hasn’t been one in about ten years.

There was Ed.

Yeah, but that was more of a monkey suit. There’s Dunston Checks In. I could tell you the main reason. While it’s fun to eat bratwurst, it’s not fun to watch bratwurst get made. It’s fun to watch monkey movies, but in my heart of hearts I know those monkeys probably had the shit beaten out of them to get them to do what they did. I think that monkey movies are hilarious, but I’m not that sad that they aren’t making them anymore. Although, I do like the careerbuilders.com commercials with the chimps of the office.

Did you know that they have retirement homes for monkeys? There’s one somewhere near the city.

I’d love to go to one of those. I’m a moderator of an e-mail service called Monkeywire where people post monkey news. My moderation is basically filtering all of the shit. It’s me and this woman Carrie McLaren who writes Stay Free magazine. I love Stay Free. They still do make monkey movies. There were three MVP’s : Most Valuable Primate, Most Vertical Primate, and Most Extreme Primate. I saw the Most Valuable Primate in the theater. It was me and four of my friends and maybe two families and that was it on opening night. The same company did a film called Spymate, which is a chimp spy film that was released last year. ThinkFilm released it in Canada, but no one released it here. I would love to find out what the availability is. I would love to screen that. I’m sure they no longer beat the chimps. I hope not.

You were in Aqua Teen Hunger Force, how was that?

It was great. We did it from here. We went to a recording studio in Midtown. I didn’t even know what my lines were when I went in. You do the line; they laugh and say, “Okay, now try it this way. Over and over again. I was amazed when it came out, like, “Holy shit, that’s me!” I’ve watched it from the very first episode. I’m such a fan, I was so honored to do a voice for that. Working with Dave and Matt, they’re visionaries. They took a wad of meat, a milkshake and a giant thing of French fries and turned it into a franchise. God bless ‘em. We didn’t work in the same building at the same time. That was the same episode with Janeane Garofalo, Fred Armisen, Bob Odenkirk, and Tim and Eric were also in it.

Their new show [Tim and Eric] is fucking amazing.

They know what they want to do. Since doing Tom Goes to the Mayor, they were like, “Well, we did this typical show, let’s try something different.” That’s the thing about the Cartoon Network, Keith Crawford and Mike Lazzo are just like, “Okay, go nuts.” They’re really open to that shit. I wish there were more of those in the world of entertainment.

Are there any bat-shit crazy story in your life where you thought, “This is the end, I might die here?”

The first and only time I did LSD, I had friends who were into billboard modification. I was at home with my friend and I took a quarter tab and it wasn’t working, so I took another quarter tab and it wasn’t working, then finally it started to kick in. I got a call from my friends like, “Hey we’re going on this thing, do you want to come?” So I ended up going out. I don’t even remember what the billboard was, it just involved waiting until the coast was clear, taking the thing and really quickly wheat-pasting it up there and getting the hell out of there. It was doubly weird because it was a weird experience and the only time I took LSD.

My wife’s father has a lot of stories. He’s nuts. He’s a Buffalo Polack, drinks all the time, he had a massive stroke. He basically ran into an eighteen wheeler, drunk out of his mind, and walked away. A couple days later, massive, massive stroke. In the hospital, you couldn’t even tell. He walked, had no slurred speech, just normal. He has all these stories about time he spent in Antarctica. My wife and I are going to go up to Buffalo after the move, go up with a recorder and do more interviews with her dad. You can’t believe that one person could’ve done all of this shit and not gone to prison, or lived to tell the story.

---

Website

www.votejoegarden.com

Photos

Xavier Veal

---