A.Cave #3 - FUCK YOU, THIS IS ROP

Talking with Rop Vasquez [Rice-Peechees-Semiautomatic-Necking-Xray Eyeballs]

Rop Vasquez is a punk lifer. Over the course of four decades of activity in the underground, Rop’s adventures span several countries and a plethora of bands. Whether participating in San Diego’s revolutionary hardcore scene, working/playing in the mid-’90s punk epicenter of the Bay Area, getting in at ground zero for NYC’s turn-of-the-millennium indie explosion or being a key player in Brooklyn’s late 2000s DIY renaissance, Vasquez has kept himself close to the action. Recently, AC made its way to the Death Church, the Brooklyn apartment where Rop has lived for 26 years, and asked him to lay it out for us.

Death By Audio, 2008

The origins of the man known as Rop—Go:

I was born in the Philippines in Manila. My dad ended up moving my mom and me, my brothers and sisters to America in 1987. I was 16 years old and had just graduated high school in the Philippines. 

I was already a weird kid. I was an alternative kid. I played in a band. Because the Philippines are so Americanized that when punk rock got big in America, military people brought it back here and we ate it up. British punk was so big in the Philippines that I thought the Ramones was a British band. I would order Maximum Rocknroll. It would be like 3-4 months before it showed up, but you always had a friend that had an uncle or knew a stewardess that would always bring stuff over. So that's where you got all the records.

My dad was Spanish-Filipino. Because of the dictatorship of Marcos, Spanish families benefited a lot. When Marcus got ousted in 1986 and the new regime was gonna come, they knew it was not gonna be beneficial. So my dad thought it's time to move to America because my grandma already lived here. My grandma lived in Navy housing with her third husband who was a black man and sergeant in the military. So that’s why we ended up living in San Diego. When I came here, my name was Jack in the Philippines, which is my middle name. My first name is Robert. But because I can't say “Rob,” all my friends thought I was saying “Rop.”  So it stuck. 

How did you adjust to life here in the good ol’ US of A?

The first thing I started to do was make fanzines. I put interviews with fake bands in it along with stuff about the Cure and Sisters of Mercy and I sent it to Elektra. They're getting probably 100 letters a day, so they’d be like, “Some guy put in the fucking effort to get a press pass.”  It was called The Casket.

Then my mom and dad divorced so my mom decided—Fuck it, I’m using your dad's money moved to Las Vegas. She's like either you stay with your grandma here or you come to Vegas with your sister. My sister had become born-again, so I was like—Fuck that.

So there was this dude named Cory Linstrum. He made a skate fanzine and I wrote him a letter. I go—Hey bro, we have the same zip code. I just moved here from the Philippines. I didn’t know they were straight edge kids. They would make fun of me, like—We got your letter, it smelled like cigarettes. Cory became my best friend. He was in a band called End Of The Line with the kids from Heroin. Later he became the singer for John Henry West. So I started hanging out with them and that's how I met everyone. 

Cory knew Sub Society, so I started hanging out with them. John Reis too. I sent him a fanzine and he sent me a demo and said—Hey, you should come to the show. Pitchfork was playing with Fishwife, which was Gar Wood’s band. Later those guys formed Hot Snakes. John was like—Let’s do an interview, so I got a pen and paper and just scribbled shit he said. Then people were like—Oh, that guy has a fanzine. That was the best thing about that fanzine—I became friends with kids that I'm still friends with today, the whole punk scene in San Diego. At that time, the San Diego punk scene was so fucking violent because of all the skinheads. We lived 15 minutes away from Fallbrook, which is where Tom Metzger and the W.A.R. (White Aryan Resistance) skins bought out blocks and blocks of the town. That's what we would hear from MRR, that Tom Metzger and his community of skins were raising their kids to be WAR skins. 

You made San Diego your home though, fuck those idiots.

I moved into a shed with Cory for 50 bucks a month. Then I ended up in another punk house with the guitar player for Heroin and Matt Anderson, the singer, who started Gravity Records.

Rice at Gilman Street

Tell us how Rice came to a boil.

The concept of Rice started in 1990. We set up our own shows and we were basically running the Che Cafe because all the hippies had graduated. When my mom moved to Las Vegas, she left me her station wagon, so I ended up driving all of these bands around on tour. Up the coast to Gilman Street or across the Arizona desert to Phoenix. Santa Barbara to LA, wherever. I drove Heroin and Justin Pearson’s first band Struggle. So the first tour I drove Struggle around is actually how Rice came about. When we were going on tour, I would take a rice cooker with me. Being Filipino, I make my own rice. We left a show in the Bay Area and an hour and a half later, I realized I forgot the rice cooker. So we drove back and there was nothing they could do, because it was my car. I was joking about that whole Mike Ness thing from Another State Of Mind, when the whole band quit on him. And he said—I don't care. When I get home, I'm gonna start a band. I will sing the same songs. I will name the band the same name. So that was the joke—When I get home, I’m gonna start a band called Rice.  You're gonna play in it and you're gonna play in it. Every song is gonna be about rice.

We played two shows at this practice space with Heroin and some touring bands. And then after the second show, I was like—Let's make it a real band. Let's really sing everything about rice. My thought process was like—Every fucking [hardcore] song is the same. Every song is about friendship. Even racism can be a joke thing with rice—white rice, brown rice, it all cooks the same. People thought we were a ska band because we had a horn section and like nine people on stage. Most of my bandmates were people that lived with me in the punk house. Jason, who became the trumpet guy in Rocket From The Crypt. Dustin from Beehive & The Barracudas. Carlos [Canedo] didn’t really live there, but kind of did. His mom was like—Hey, since you're an adult, can you take care of my kid? Because I was 21 and Carlos was 14.

Put me in that San Diego hardcore scene. I was gazing at it from afar, what was it like up close?

There was a point in the early ‘90s where we had the right bands and they were attracting all the cool bands, like Heroin met all the coolest bands from DC and New York. Because of that, we got to bring those bands to San Diego [Born Against-UOA].

Who did you like hanging out with?

The Unwound kids. It’s funny cuz Rice was on tour and we were playing a practice space and Unwound pulled up in a Suburban and asked if they can play. I hung out with Vern the most (RIP).  He was the alcoholic, cigarette-smoking guy. He liked to play pool and gamble. 

Rice in the house

You were in some other bands besides Rice.

I was driving drunk everywhere I went. This band the Creeps was actually formed because I was a drunk driver. One time I was pulling into the parking lot of the Che Cafe for a Rice show with, I think Monsula. As I was pulling into the parking lot, I sideswiped this Mercedes Benz. I was wasted and Carlos was in the passenger seat. We were laughing. My first instinct was to back away and park somewhere so we can play the show. So I parked somewhere else, played the show, came out and there's cops everywhere and they were wondering what happened. They were gonna cuff Dallas, the singer of Crossed Out, because he parked next to the Benz and they thought he was lying about hitting it. So I said to the guy who’s car it was—Can we talk about this? So they dismissed the whole thing. I worked at a shady rental car place, so I got the car fixed for cheap. So this guy whose car I hit, he wanted to start a weird garage band and he asked me to play bass. And that became the Creeps, which is funny because after Rice broke up the following year, Bumblescrump wanted to tour again. But since Rice already broke up, the Creeps ended going on the tour; two weeks with Bumblescrump. A garage band driving a Mercedes is not a good look, especially when you play Olympia with Rancid. 

That's what you get for driving a Mercedes to the punk show. So you guys toured in the Mercedes that you hit. 

Because of that accident, the dude’s mom made me sign a statement that I am not allowed to drive the car during the whole tour. I stuck to it. I just got wasted, even more fucked up.

Well at least you made it back to San Diego in one piece.

There's a certain point where San Diego people, when they turn 21, they become bar bands. But in the all ages scene, everybody respected each other. You'd have a show where it's like a bunch of different kinds of bands. Like Rice played a ton of shows with Three Mile Pilot. We played straight edge shows even though they knew that I was an alcoholic. But that was just normal, because the respect was there.

When Gravity put out Antioch Arrow’s In Love With Jetts, it was a fucking bitch because Matt had silkscreened jackets all over the porch, so I couldn’t go out there to smoke weed without stepping on them.

Back then, bands handed out lyric sheets before they played. We put We’re Not Hungry Anymore on the stickers. [Ebullition Records/HearttaCk guy] Kent McClard always thought Rice was a joke. We tried to book shows there [Goleta], but he wasn’t having it. Everybody was preaching to the same crowd. So I made it all about rice. To me it was an analogy, that's all it is. How can you get away with a joke, but make it serious and go—Dude, this is fucking for real, fuck you. This is about rice. We went on one big tour with Bumblescrump, which is how I met Chris Applegren.

What was touring like back then?

You meet a band like Econochrist that will give you 10 calling card numbers and you can start booking your tour. But half the time no one wants to put a phone bill in their name to book a whole tour, because of the long distance charges. So you head out and it’s like—We haven't heard back from this guy but tour is happening. What the fuck do we do? It's like—We'll go to his town, go to a record store. If we see a flyer, we have a show. If not, we'll ask around, go to the next town. You know what I'm saying? I wrote this guy a letter two weeks ago, we're trading shows. He sent me a flyer. Now we have a show. We left on tour for three weeks, I think we only have like six shows for sure. But we ended up playing more because that’s the way it worked out. Our merchandise was Faygo soda. The guitar player for Rice’s dad had a membership at Costco, so he bought a ton of Faygo. It came out to 15 cents a piece, so he sold it for 50 cents at the merch table. I brought my screens and made shirts on the road.

How did the Peechees get together?

On that tour, we ended up going to Olympia. Chris was dating Molly [Neuman] from Bratmobile. Rice didn’t know nothing about Olympia, except that it was a bunch of white people who really liked Taco Bell. So when Bratmobile was breaking up, Molly was gonna move to the Bay Area and she wanted to know if me and Carlos wanted to start a band with her and Chris. I was still in San Diego and lived in this huge  punk house with people from Clikitat Ikatowi, Antioch Arrow and Matt from Gravity but I was sick of it. San Diego was becoming heroin central and a lot of my friends were getting swept up in it. 

Cory was living up there and he was like—Dude, why don’t you move up here? He was like—You know Joel Wing? Joel wrote for Maximum Rocknroll and played in Corrupted Morals. He told me Joel had moved across the street from him and he had an open room and I should move in. I was like—Fuck San Diego, and moved to Oakland. On the other side of my wall was this guy named Bret Blue, who had played bass in Born Against. He got me my first job, which was at a screen-printing place run by the guys from Neurosis. He took me to there and I watched Neurosis practice The Word As Law songs. I was like—Dude, I can’t believe I will be working with Neurosis. They just screen, smoke weed and practice. And play ping pong. I was like—I love the Bay Area. I was smack dab in the middle of the punk scene. John Henry West was blowing up and the Peechees was going. Our first show was actually before I moved up, with Rancid and Total Chaos at a skatepark.

Did you have the name? 

We were coming up with names. I remember there was a peechee folder sitting on the table. I said—That's what we're called: The Peechees All Season Sensations. I was like that would be a great seven inch cover. We didn't know we were gonna be a full time band. 

So you worked at Lookout?

And Kill Rock Stars. They needed help. Like, I needed to fold as many Bikini Kill records as possible. “Slim needs help folding 3000 sleeves.” This was 1994, right before Green Day was about to fucking destroy everyone's asshole. Before everyone's jock roommate became your best friend because they listen to NOFX. We worked at Larry’s [Livermore] house and we would do the mail order in the bathroom. That was Lookout East. Molly worked there doing publicity before she became the general manager. Lookout West was in the Mordam office. I loved that because it opened my life to every goddamn Sympathy For The Record Industry band. It opened me to the garage and I left pop-punk for good. Everybody I lived with was the Gilman scene, the whole pop-punk scene. And I hated that music already. So at 23-24 years old, you hear garage and I like the rawness of this shit. Before I moved, I saw Teengenerate at the Casbah and I loved it.

Lookout moved to a big building with a record store in the bottom where I started doing all the mail order stuff. I had a staff of my own that ran the record store. So that's when you knew it was a big money. We had a record store called Old Lookout Shop(pe). 

Peechees

When our seven inch on Lookout came out, 3/4 of the Peechees worked there. But it was kind of weird, because we didn't know that we could fit in. I mean, the best thing for me was because Chris loved Rice so much that when he ran the label, he ended up putting everything Rice put out on one record. After that record came out, it sold so much because it's in the era of Green Day.

Was it weird being in a band with the two people who ran Lookout Records [Livermore sold them the label in 1997]?

That was the sucky part. Being on a successful label that you don't have nothing to do with. And the second sucky part, and Chris I hope that you hear this shit because I never told you—I loved being in the Peechees with you. I loved going on tour. But everywhere we got interviewed, everywhere we went, we could not escape Lookout Records, because you owned the goddamn fucking thing. And I got sick of that. I didn't want to play rock music and started getting more into hip-hop. 

I'd rather be on Kill Rock Stars, because working at Lookout, there was a certain stigma that comes from that. It was always a pop-punk crowd. There were certain exceptions, like the Smugglers from Canada. I loved to play with them cuz they were a fun band.

I was telling Chris—Imagine how ridiculous Lookout would be if that one time that I showed you the Korn demo they sent in and the Limp Bizkit demo. Blink-182 when it was still called Blink, they sent their demo. What if we had put that shit out. In ‘95, when Green Day was so fucking big, it was inescapable. The amount of demo tapes that we would get of people that sound exactly like Green Day. 

But I will never talk bad about Green Day. Because when I got sick in 1996, I would have been dead because my liver and kidney both stopped from abusing uppers and downers. I got so sick and I would have been dead. But because Green Day furnished Lookout Records with so much moolah. On a handshake, from whatever residuals they were getting from being on a major label was milking down to Lookout. So because of that, I got to have insurance and that paid for me getting better in the hospital because I would have been dead. It was like $180,000 for 14 days. I made like $4.25 stuffing records there. But I had insurance.

Thank you, Green Day. Now please stop making music. Speaking of which, how did the Peechees end?

The Peechees toured regularly. In fact, by the time I left, we still had a tour set up with Brainiac. You know, that never happened. We went on tour to Europe and my first day in Germany—because I have dual citizenship, I wasn't told I needed to get a different kind of entry visa because I still have a foreign passport to Germans. I don't have an American passport and Germany is one of the countries back in the day that didn't recognize your green card. But they wouldn't let me go back to England, they said—You gotta go back to America. My medications ended up in my bass case which ended up with the band. So I had at least three weeks of no medication, coming down from steroids. Cuz when I got sick, they put me on steroids to gain back all of my muscles because I gained about 200 pounds of water. Then when they drained the water, it was like no muscles. 

The band was in Germany telling me—Dude, fix everything with our booking agent and pay for it in advance and then come and join us on tour because we got at least four more weeks.

So I went back [to America]. I was so bummed, I came home, defeated. My girlfriend had just moved to New York because she started working for Martha Stewart. She said—Why don't you just come here and live here? You can be Mr. Mom, don't need to do anything. So my point was like—Should I go on tour with this band that's gonna blow up, because London Records wanted to sign us. I wanted to go eat on their dime, do stuff in London, and then not sign. My girlfriend talked me into moving to Brooklyn a week later. So, with the band waiting for me to finish the tour, I put everything in storage; all my records, my gear. They got the bass player from Comet Gain to finish the tour. We had choreographed moves in every song, so it killed that. Carlos tried his best, but I’ve known him for nine years at that point and suddenly I’m saying—Dude, I gotta go. It took me and him about 20 years to actually talk about it.

I never said sorry, I just made rash decisions. I didn't tell anybody in the band. I wrote them an eight page  letter on the way to New York. As soon as I got to New York, I was gonna mail it, but I felt so betrayed that they didn't support me, that I had to figure it out to come with them on tour. I got to Brooklyn and threw out the letter I was gonna send to the band. That end of the Peechees—when I made the rash decision, and I was like—What would have happened if I had stayed? But then what would have happened to my life? I wouldn't have moved to New York. 

So you and your girlfriend [Akiko Carver] start Semiautomatic.

I was really trying to get deep into hip-hop. When I was still in the Bay Area, I bought a mixer from this company in Bay Ridge called Upstairs Records. So I went there and asked if I could get a job and they hired me. I got into installing DJ lights to then becoming a salesperson selling DJ gear right before it exploded. It's funny, I would talk to people's parents, like now I'm selling them turntables and a mixer where during Green Day, people wanted the same kind of guitar as Billy Joe. I was getting into jungle and drum and bass, trying to mix that with the indie stuff. One of our first shows that we played was in DUMBO during a blizzard. It was Le Tigre’s first show. 

Semiautomatic

This is at the beginning of what we currently know as “Brooklyn culture.”

Todd P came along and fucking made it easier for me, because he's like—Hey, do you want to DJ or do sound or do the door? And I was like—Oh shit, why not? I knew him from Portland. So me and Akiko were doing Semiautomatic and Slim Moon was like—I’m starting another label called 5 Rue Christine and I want it to be weird stuff that doesn’t fit on Kill Rock Stars. 

Tell me about Semiautomatic’s brush with Hollywood.

Akiko went to high school with this guy that went to film school at UCLA. His first movie was called Better Luck Tomorrow. A bunch of Asian kids rob people, cheat on tests, break into houses. So we got to do 12 songs on it. The day that we met him to watch the movie, he showed us a scene where this guy’s getting beat up and they had Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up” playing. He's like—I want you to come up with a song like this. So we came up with “Marion Berry.” That night we played the biggest punk show in LA. That was the scariest show of my whole life. Natalie from Kill Rock Stars traded a show with this chick from LA. She said—I'll trade you, I'll book you a show here in Olympia if you book Semiautomatic in LA. So we agreed, not knowing who it was with, except it was going to be a “big band”. Then we’re in LA, and I hear this shit on the radio—”Circle Jerks first show since 1995, at Spaceland.” Us and 400 Blows opened. 

Damn, nice one.

We were on tour because Akiko worked for Martha Stewart’s magazine when it started. Early on, she let her employees buy stock. So we bought a shitload of it, sold half of it, bought a van, paid rent for four or five months and went on tour with our dog for three months around the USA. We were trying to be called “breakbeat punk” because we didn't want to be trip-hop, but we’ve got drum machines and samplers. 

Somehow, the movie got bought by MTV. And the Asian community got real grassroots with it, promoting it. It was John Cho’s first movie. So MTV calls us and is like, we’ll give you $36,000 for the music rights. We’re like—”OK!” And we still get residuals from it.

Japanther was a casualty that happened because of Semiautomatic. 

What does that mean? 

Soon after we started, Ian Vanek moved to New York. He saw Rice in the ‘90s when he was a little kid at a record store in Yakima, Washington. He was like—”Dude, I love your band so much. I want to be in a band with you blahblahblah.” Especially when he found out I scratched. I was getting good at scratching and juggling beats. He was going to Pratt, which is down the street. So he ends up joining the band. He was 19 years old. Akiko was a riot grrrl from Olympia, went to college with Kathleen Hanna, knows everybody. So this kid from Yakima, with his misogynistic ways, didn’t go over with her. So he gets kicked out of the band and starts Japanther. I heard that there were songs written about someone’s ex and I go—Whose ex would it be? I know he’s not gonna talk shit about me.

Brutal. How did you guys jive with the NYC scene at the time?

There was a thing where every fucking band in New York in 2003-4-5 was under the umbrella of “post-punk” and I hated it. Skyscraper interviewed us and the picture was us with thought-bubbles on our foreheads. The one on mine says FUCK and the one on Akiki’s says POST-PUNK. We existed before this, we’ll exist after this.

After Semiautomatic calls it quits in the mid-2000s, what happens next?

I started circuit-bending in the early 2000s. On tour, I was buying every [Casio] SK-1 I could find. Then I would circuit-bend it and sell it for like 150 bucks. I don't know how I ended up at a Cock ESP show, but I liked it so much that this band played like 30 seconds long. Set up in five minutes and sometimes only played like three seconds long. If you miss it, you miss it. Fuck you. I started getting into that kind of thing. I also got into black metal and powerviolence again. I ended up hanging out at Dead Herring and meeting Nick [Lesley], who was originally from San Diego and a fan of Rice back in the day. I started playing with Necking and also BIG A little a. 

Necking was percussion-heavy blown-out improv noise.

We played all the time. There was a certain point—during the Four Loko era in 2008-9-10—where it was like—How many can I drink? Luckily there were people filming it, so I know I wasn’t throwing up.

Necking @ Dead Herring; pic by Nicki Ishmael

Did you record practices? 

Technology was changing. I bought the first Fostex digital eight-track. That one came with like 250 gig(abyte)s of memory. I’ve got hours of me and Nick just jamming out. I named each song after the type of strain of weed I bought that day. So I know which is better when the dealer comes. I go—I want that, because that makes me write this kind of song. 

Xray Eyeballs! Collect ‘em all.

OJ [San Felipe] was working at Monster Island for Kayrock Screen Printing when Golden Triangle was happening. I was doing doors for Todd P and we ended up doing shows in the basement of Monster Island. OJ was like—We just recorded, do you wanna do shows with us, playing keyboards and noise? We practiced in the screen printing place—

Where the fuck is Neurosis??? Lazy bastards…

The guy from Kanine Records wanted to put something out. Golden Triangle was getting big, but they broke up, so we took their remaining shows. But then the other people in Golden Triangle started K-Holes. And as much as I love Carly [Rabalais] and everyone in Xray, the K-Holes were a much better band.

Not gonna argue with that. Tell me about the sticker world that you’ve plunged into. 

I’ve always been into graffiti. But instead of doing it with spray paint, I started doing it with stickers. I’ve been doing it for a couple of years. Putting little things out that are stupid or political stuff like No One Was Born A Racist. I just flipped that into making characters and then somehow I fell into the sticker scene. I just started drawing stickers and getting on sticker festivals, doing projects with famous graffiti guys.. I’ve got stuff in the Sticker Movie that just premiered.

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