We recently sat down with Jack Terricloth and Sandra Malak from our favorite gang of east coast burlesque-punk bad-idea-addicts The World/Inferno Friendship Society to talk about sex magic, World War II, and balding fluff-heads.

After rocking the shit out of all twenty Sac State students with the decency to show up for the best rock show of their short pathetic lives, we forged the first chapter in a clusterfuck of an adventure all over Northern California.

Over the course of a week we learn about burlesque dancing, why Jesus still rocks, naked pulling of horse carts, twenty-one armed starfish, and why there’s still an imprint of a 16 tooth cog on my left ass cheek. You can read all about it in my memoir, as published in the future by Silver Sprocket. In the meantime, I’d like to thank Jack, Sandra, and the rest of Inferno for showing us a right sinful time in four counties, five venues, an established university, and the plate bottoms of God knows how many muffinators. Enjoy!

Sandra: Do you all go to school here?
Vince: Yeah, I’m gonna be a rocket scientist.
Jack: I just read a fascinating book about rocket scientists…
S: Well, you know, do you worship Aleister Crowley? Apparently there’s quite a connection.
J: Do you know who Jack Parsons is?
E: No -
J: He’s a guy who star-, one of the founders of the jet propulsion laboratory, worshipped Satan, Satan, SATAN!
S: They said they don’t go to school here.
J: I know, but he did say rocket scientist, you never know about these rocket scientists, because they might be doing sex magic in their dorm rooms.
S: Might?
A: I must have picked the wrong major. Well, we are the Silver Sprocket Bicycle Club, an international drunk-punk bike club.
J: Mm, should (have) played up Thumb Cinema more today then.
A: You mentioned that you don’t ride a bike because you have knobby knees?
J: They’re very unattractive.
A: Did you used to be (able to ride bikes)?
J: Oh, no, it’s just a congenital condition, just unattractive legs.
A: (To Sandra) Do you ride a bike?
S: I do, I ride a nice carbon-fiber, fixed gear, single-speed track bike.
A: (To Jack) If you rode a bike, what do you think you’d be into?
J: Oh gosh, you know, I’m a city kid, subways.
S: I see him on a nice old Schwinn, that style-
J: Maybe a unicycle.
S: Basket, with a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine in the front.
J: That’s very Italian, I can see that, Estrada-
S: That’s my secret fantasy.
E: You’re on the wagon this tour? (Ed note: Jack mentioned he wasn’t drinking)
J: I am on the wagon.
E: Is this the first time you’ve been on-
J: No, I’ve been doing it every year for, gosh, four or five years, just taking a fasting period. It started off to uh- my friends tried to have an intervention one year, and I said the standard (drunken slur) “I can stop anytime I want”. And I did, and every year I just kind of dry out. Seems like a good idea.
A: Lent?
J: You got it. ‘Cause clearly, me and the pope (snaps fingers) like this. I’ll tell you what I told Alec from Leftover Crack, you know he lives in your town, did you know that? I was like, you know, the pope called me up and said “Jack, you know, this Catholicism thing, if you don’t support it, it might not make it. Can you please?” I said, “Ok Pope.”
A: I’ve heard it said that the World/Inferno Friendship Society is a gang rather than a band-
J: It’s true.
A: So what are the qualifications for acceptance, or how does one join?
J: Don’t ask anything and do as you’re told — clearly that’s not the case or the rest of the band would have been here tonight. It usually happens when you meet somebody, they usually end up touring with us in one capacity or another and then they- whoever shows up… you just gotta show up, pretty much. It’s like Woody Allen said, “95% of success is showing up.”
V: I noticed you guys kinda pulled an Oingo Boingo here and dropped all the horns.
J: Well you know, we didn’t mean to, its just because we’re more of a gang than a band, no one ever tells me when they’re gonna show up, they just kind of show up. Sometimes we’re far into the double digits. Sometimes, like tonight, only five people show up. But as we were saying, for the rest of the tour, Franz is showing up in a day, Corri’s showing up four days later, and then Hess is showing up in Arizona. And then in fact, our other piano player’s showing up in Texas, and we’ll be up to ten, and then they start to all go away again, and then we get back to New York.
A: Do you have room in the van?
J: We have two vans. Short answer: No.
A: Do you ever get surprised by how many or how few people you have onstage, is it ever unexpected?
J: Yes, because the gang members tend to not tell me what they’re doing, because they know I’ll get angry. I didn’t find out we’d only have five people until about a week or two ago.
A: I can see your stage plots being pretty obnoxious for promoters, “Here are fifteen different versions of how you might want to set up our equipment.”
J: Yeah, but we’re obnoxious to our sound guys no matter what. “What do you mean you have an accordion?” // “Actually we don’t” // “But you sent us a plot that says you have two horns?” // “Yeah, we did that.”
V: Kind of like the army, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
J: Yes, exactly.
A: Alright. Vince, you had a question? I have a question from Vince-
V: Oh! Do you have any advice for, balding young men?
(Vince nonchalantly removes hat to reveal stunning, although thinning, locks of hair)
J: Just go for it. I think the ladies will back me up, girls don’t give a damn what your hair looks like. Unless you have one of those floppy things in the front.
S: Oh yeah, those two guys at the airport, did you see those two guys? I was, I called them… balding… fluff… heads. Because they were both sitting there, and they were bald, and they had like fluff, right here, and they both had the same-
J: Maybe they were brothers.
S: -tuft is a better word for it.
J: She’s taking it and running with it. You know, as long as you don’t look like you have something to hide, that makes you look like you’re ashamed of yourself. Go with what you got. Gotta work with your strengths. Besides, hair is a (vestigial) trait. We’re evolved, we don’t need fuzzy, fuzzy- I’m almost completely hairless, it’s fine.
A: You give a lot of advice on your website. Some of it is pretty thoughtful or entertaining.
J: A lot of it’s just off the top of my head.
A: Do you think people should actually follow your advice?
J: Yeah, ’cause actually I don’t… well sometimes I’m very funny. Very, very funny. I don’t actually give any advice (that) I think would hurt anybody.
S: That’s not true, I ask you for advice. Listen to his advice. His advice is good advice.
J: That’s what I said. I wouldn’t give advice that I actually thought was harmful.
S: Oh, I wasn’t listening.
E: (to Vince) What was the answer that you got?
V: One I time I wrote in and asked for advice on a lady friend, described how horrible she was. You replied ‘She sounds great, hold on with both hands.’
J: That’s uh (laughs) I’m very excited. What’s worse than being bored? Nothing is worse than being bored. Sometimes if the people really seem sad I don’t post the advice, I just write them directly.
A: There are a lot of Peter Lorre references throughout your work-
J: True. Including the whole last record. (laughs)
E: I was wondering what the fascination was?
J: Well, let’s see. He was an eternal outsider, from every point of view, while at the same time being an accepted, beloved childhood character. I think I first learned about Peter Lorre from Bugs Bunny cartoons. You know, (fantastic Lorre impersonation) “Don’t heet me weeth the beeg stick Rover, it makes me very, very angry…”, I guess you didn’t see it. But you know, it kind of snuck in under the radar, hanging out with Bugs Bunny, and then you learn more about him, that he was, you know, ran from the Nazi’s, then he was a communist, then he was kicked out of the United States for hanging out with communists, even though he wasn’t communist himself, and just had this laconic idealism where he didn’t really care about anything that much, but didn’t like being told what to do, so he just kind of pissed people off; I just really identified with that.
A: There are lots of literary and historical references throughout what you do. Did you go to college as a history major or just read a lot?
J: I didn’t even graduate high school, actually. No, what else am I going to write about? I mean there’s millions of bands out there who tell- who want you to know how upset they are, or how they feel about their last girlfriend, or that they’re really, really angry about something, and I’ve been in those bands as well. When I started Inferno I decided I wasn’t going to be that guy anymore. Because it’s… dull.
A: Well, what happened in your life to get you (to this point) – you know a lot of things?
J: Well, I’m old; I’ve been around. You look for other people in the same kind of position you are, and you look for antecedents in the past, people that you respect or have something in common with and try and see what they did, and how this reflects on your situation, and try to learn from other people’s mistakes.
V: Back to Peter Lorre. All of your historical references, like Peter Lorre, Leni Riefenstahl, they all seem to be centered around Germany and Holocaust era sort of-
J: Well, twentieth century. That was the big event of the twentieth century, and it was right in the middle. It’s the point where all the rules changed. It went from nineteenth century, being more of an age of innocence, to a very wide open period where our art was exploding and anything could happen. It could have gone in any direction. I mean, Hitler was elected and a communist was almost elected Chancellor of Germany. Anything could happen and the worst possible thing did happen, but it was still something that no one expected. I mean, they just wiped out people they didn’t like. And people were like “Yeah, that could happen”, so it was a turning point, where I think the world lost it’s innocence. Once again, that might happen again, so we should study the past to see what we can do to change the future.
A: Might? (laughs)
(Interruption as Adam Admission has to go home)
A: Bye Adam!
E: I love you!
A: (Talking about Adam) We inducted him into Silver Sprocket by duct-taping a watermelon to one hand and a pineapple to the other hand-
J: What?
A: – Made him ride around the block. I mean, it’s much harder than you’d think, because your center of balance is hanging over the bike-
J: Right.
A: He ended up with a duct-tape bag of mashed up fruit. it was amazing. Switching gears a bit, you guys are a pretty sharp dressed band. Does that ever help you get respect from authorities, when you’re doing things you’re not supposed to?
J: Oh yeah, totally. It is camouflage. I walk in and out of trouble quite well. (puts hands on Sandra’s dread locks), you’ve got a giveaway!
J: Oh yeah. Even at shows where like, we played NYU a couple of years ago and the ceiling got ripped down and the security guard says “I think the band should pay for the damages!” and I said “I’m here to pick up my kid!” and just walked out. “Later guys.”
E: I’ve seen a lot of videos where the concert spills out into the streets and instead of people moshing or anything, everyone’s just waltzing and the cops are just “What’s going on?”.I think it’s great.
J: It is great. I touched on that with the What Would Jack Do? column, it really confuses authority figures, they have no idea, like, people run out say and “These kids are rioting, you gotta stop them!” and they show up like “What the-?”
E: I wanted to make something like that happen (tonight), and I brought some fireworks, but I’m like “Nahhh…alarms might go off and water will get everywhere.”
J: Yeah, colleges do not have a sense of humor about that.
E: You guys are very different from other punk bands and you usually play with just plain punk bands. What kind of reactions do you get from people who are expecting just a pure punk bill?
S: Gaping mouths.
J: Yeah. It’s usually — what (are) the seven stages of acceptance? First anger, then disbelief, look them up on the internet and just pretend I remembered them. Denial, and finally acceptance. Obviously when we started ten years ago the reactions were a lot stronger. Now you’d really have to go in the middle of nowhere to find someone who didn’t know what they were in for. But the first time people see us is always the strongest, always the most fun. That’s why we like playing festivals or free shows in the park and whatnot, because you get people just wandering by and they have no idea-
S: Nobody leaves, but they’re very confused. And that’s a lot of fun. I love seeing people confused, because you know it’s their first time seeing the band and they don’t want to leave because they don’t know what’s going to happen next.
E: Do you guys play a lot of guerilla shows, where you don’t really announce it?
J: Um, we used to a lot more, now we don’t so much. We did a couple last summer. After that Coney Island debacle, some promoter said “You’ll never work in this town again!” — In our town. So the next week we did two shows, one in Manhattan (and) one in Brooklyn, just because no one stops me from working in my town. We played Washington Star Park with False Prophets actually, who did a reunion show.
E: Was the Coney Island incident where the club got destroyed?
J: Eh, it didn’t really even get destroyed, it was ridiculous. It was like we were the Sex Pistols or something, these people never saw slam-dancing before. “My god, these are punching each other! What’re they doing? Oh, why, why?”
A: Do you think it’s because of your sound, that you get booked in places that aren’t traditional punk venues?
J: That would be a good explanation, but that’s not what happened at this place. These guys just never saw kids dancing like that-
E: (Your music) invokes a different kind of emotion in people than a regular punk band does, because it’s so different and-
J: Greg, our manager, pointed out that same club, Sick Of It All played the week before and those guys just beat each other up. They don’t kind of go into a souffee dance, if that’s the right word? It’s not the right word.
A: Are you guys familiar with Jason Webley or The Phenomenauts?
J: Phenomenauts, yes. Yeah, they’re from here. San Francisco?
A: Oakland, yeah. Earth’s capital.
J: (laughs) Unlike Manhattan, which is the universe’s capital –
Ashley: Whoa, might wanna take that up with them.
(really fucking awkward pause… The Phenomenauts and Jason Webley are members of the S.S.B.C. in case it wasn’t obvious)
J: I think we’ve been in contact with them, but I don’t know them personally. We have mutual friends.
V: I read about Inferno’s early days, as just a gang, where you’d go around and do, sort of questionable-good-Samaritan-like acts-
J: That’s true. Before we started playing music we did do things like that.
V: Would you care to elaborate on any of those stories?
J: Some of them were very funny. My favorite one is the very first thing we did. It was a spur-of-the-moment type thing; I was still living in New Jersey, New Brunswick, and it was Superbowl Sunday, and we were just trying to find someplace to drink, and we couldn’t find a bar without goons yelling “Hey, kill, urgh!”. And so Scott Hollingsworth, who was our original piano player — how to describe Scott, imagine a giant, fluffy rabbit. And he said “Guys, just sit down here, I’m gonna go do something I think you’re really gonna enjoy.” And we said “Scott, we don’t wanna stay here, just a bunch of goons watching television,” they’re all yelling “Kill, kill kill kill-”, “No guys, I’m just gonna bounce outside, you guys just sit here and have a beer.” And so we sat there, and Scott went outside and cut the cable wire, while we all watched- and all the goons were going “What the hell?”, and once again, the seven stages. “It must work, it’s not working, why isn’t it working, I’ll kill it if it doesn’t work”, and they’re smashing- Me and Scott just watched the whole thing happen. And that’s really when we realized, punk rock could be fun, and not all grief all the time. We could do this all the time!
A: I heard you guys packed up an abortion clinic protest once.
J: We did. There was an, ‘anti-choice’, we’ll say, “rally,” and they had a P.A., and we pulled up in, one of the bands we were running, Sticks and Stones, had a van, and we said “Ok, we’re here to pick up the P.A.!”, and they went “Yeah, ok. Thanks. Thanks for renting it to us!” and we just picked up the whole P.A. and put it in the van and drove away. And then we had a P.A. for shows and rehearsals after that.
A: That’s so amazing. That’s so, great!
J: That’s really how we started, we could get away with stuff. It was also fun, too. Look sharp, but it does actually get you out of trouble.
A: Awesome. Thank you guys so much for taking the time to talk to us and rock for us.
J: Cool. Well, I’ll see you guys at, any of the rest of the shows around here? San Francisco is only a hundred miles away.

Photos from Konstantin Sergeyev.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 12:08 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.