D Generation: We Put Howie On The Cover Of "Teenage Kicks" #1 And I Interviewed Jesse & Richard About "No Lunch"!

Originally published in Teenage Kicks #1 (Summer 1997)

By Devorah Ostrov

D Generation (Columbia Records publicity photo by John Falls)

L-R: Howie Pyro, Danny Sage, Jessie Malin, Richard Bacchus, and Michael Wildwood.

A deluge of complimentary press (which variously compared them to the Stooges, the Dolls, Hanoi Rocks, and the Dead Boys) greeted the release of D Generation's eponymous debut album. But before they could prove themselves sales-wise, the band was dropped from EMI. Columbia won the ensuing bidding war, and last year issued D Gen's second effort, No Lunch. Produced by former Cars frontman Ric Ocasek, the LP combines several tracks from the debut with new fast 'n' furious numbers like "She Stands There," "Capital Offender," and "1981."

Teenage Kicks spoke to lead singer Jesse Malin and guitarist Richard Bacchus during one of the group's cross-country treks in promotion of No Lunch.

Howie Pyro caught mid-chew at an
in-store appearance in Berkeley (1997)
Photo: Devorah Ostrov

Q: You guys recently opened several shows for KISS, including Madison Square Garden. That must have been awesome!

Jesse: Oh, yeah! It was cool.

Richard: Yeah, it was fun! But it was kind of weird. The crowd was there to see KISS with their make-up. So, it wasn't a very musical crowd. There were people there to see stuff get blown up.

Jesse: A circus...

Q: You didn't get booed off, did you?

Jesse: Only once. Not off... we just got laughed at. But we actually did pretty good, considering they didn't know who we were. They didn't know there was an opening act. And like he said, they were there to see the fucking fire and tricks. But KISS were nice to us. They were funny. Funny guys!

Q: Were you prepared for playing arenas?

Richard: Yeah, our crew fell right into it. We used basically the same gear.

Promo poster for No Lunch

Jesse: Some of our jokes didn't go over as good. Y'know, it's a different dynamic when you go out to arenas. You gotta work more and send it out further.

Q: You gotta think Bon Jovi!

Jesse: We always think Bon Jovi!

Q: Since the last time we talked, you were dropped by EMI and picked up by Columbia. What happened there?

Jesse: It's kind of like a sour grape's thing.

Richard: The EMI thing was kind of like a black cloud. We're happy to get out from under it.

Jesse: If you find that record [D Generation], you find it. Otherwise, they stopped making it and we bought it back. It was actually like a blessing, one of those things that's meant to happen. At the time, it seemed weird but looking back it was a good thing.

Q: How did you wind up on Columbia?

Jesse: There was a bidding war with five labels, and we picked Sony/Columbia. We dined and swined and flew all over the place to play for different people and check everything out. We wanted to get going. It was actually harder picking a producer than picking a label.

D Generation headline Connections in Clifton, NJ - February 1, 1997

Q: How did you come to choose Ric Ocasek?

Jesse: We met with so many people, y'know, for a long time. And with him, it really clicked. He's a musician, and he'd worked with some bands that we really like a lot — Suicide, Weezer, Bad Brains... He's just a really cool guy, and he understands music and could be creative. He wanted to do a raw record. And we wanted to do a real live kind of raw record. We met him in a coffee shop!

Jesse Malin 

Photo: Devorah Ostrov

Q: You carried over four songs from the first album onto No Lunch. Was that your idea or Ric's idea?

Richard: We pooled everything we had, and we included some of the stuff from the first record because... Only about 6,000 copies of that record were sold, and we thought some of those songs deserved a better shake. So, we pooled all this stuff together and let Ric pick what he wanted us to do. We were actually shocked that he picked more of the newer stuff!

Jesse: We had like 30 songs for this record! We wrote a ton of songs. We still have 'em, and we'll do 'em... whenever.

Q: "No Way Out" was chosen for the video...

Jesse: Yeah... We did "She Stands There" as a single for radio to kind of get things going, then "No Way Out." We did the video with Nigel Dick. He's a real character; he did Oasis and Green Day. It was a lot of fun!

Richard: It was a really big production. There were like 200 extras.

Q: Where was it filmed?

Jesse: At the Port Authority, up at the top of Washington Heights by the George Washington Bridge. You can see the bridge if you really look. It was like four in the morning, a very weird day.

"No Way Out" promo CD single

Q: And some it looks like it was filmed in a cheap hotel room.

Richard: That was a set we built. Nigel's great! He had these storyboards. He had every single shot mapped out. He knew exactly what he was going to do.

Jesse: We're not really big fans of video. We'd done some videos before and were never that happy with them. We usually don't like looking at ourselves. But this one we actually liked!

Richard: Before MTV, the bands that made videos had a cinematic outlook — people like Bowie. And now, you have to make a video whether you're that way or not. So, everything gets very cliché looking. You can't tell whether it's a video or a jeans commercial or a coke commercial. Really, the lines are all blurred. That's why I'm excited about the Nigel Dick video, 'cause I really think it stands out a bit more.

Q: You were paired with L7 for several shows on this tour. That seems like a great combination!

CMJ heralds the return of New York rock

with this August 1996 cover pic of D Gen

Richard: It was a really good combination 'cause they have exactly the same sense of humor as us. We get along with them really well. The crowds were pretty cool too. It seemed like a younger crowd than we've played to in the past. The shows were all ages, that was pretty neat. We played some pretty weird places, though.

Jesse: A farmhouse in San Luis Obispo!

Richard: Yeah, we walked into a field with like a little shack in the middle. Like something out of a Clint Eastwood movie.

Q: And what about the shows you're doing with Social Distortion?

Richard: Well, we just started this tour. It's bigger than the last one we did with them, which was really amazing. So, we're really excited. It's a great combination too. It's a good show!

Q: I want to mention the various formats and sleeve designs for No Lunch. There's the double-10" vinyl version with a gatefold cover, and the CD has a gatefold cover... Columbia seem to be really behind you, letting you do stuff like that.

Richard: That's one of the reasons we went with them. When we were meeting with the record companies, we wanted to know: Are we gonna be able to do vinyl? Are we gonna be able to do these kinds of artistic things that you don't see anymore? Columbia was the only label that said, "Yeah, okay."

D Generation at Irving Plaza

July 26, 1996

Jesse: It's fun to have 10" vinyl with a gatefold, and it fits with the concept of the thing. Actually, the CD booklet, what they call the digipak, doesn't come with the vinyl. But the vinyl sounds different. It gets a different warmth. A lot of people that come see us still have record players — Victrolas!

Q: You got some criticism for what was thought to be a "toned-down" sound on the first album. You must be happier this time around!

Jesse: Completely!

Danny Sage shows off his record store finds
while Howie Pyro looks over his shoulder.
Photo: Devorah Ostrov

Richard: The first one, we were trying to get every single idea we'd ever had... The producer [David Bianco] was a really great guy, but we found out that wasn't the way to go. You need to have confrontation. You need to have that passion going on in the studio. You can't have someone always saying, "Okay, yeah, we can do that." You need to hit walls and be told, "No, that's not going to work."

Q: And you got that with Ric?

Richard: Yeah! He definitely put limitations on us. He said, "You can do this, but you're gonna have to throw all this other business out." The first record, we were calling up string sections at two in the morning!

Q: What kind of reaction are you getting in New York these days? You're not "local boys" anymore...

Jesse: We're not there enough to get a reaction!

Richard: We're playing Roseland. That will be interesting because when we played the Garden, we weren't really playing to our own people.

D Generation at Coney Island High

June 27, 1997

Jesse: Our audience has changed a lot in New York over the years. There's a lot of people from out of the local side, as well as the core people we grew with. We just wanna reach people and get in people's faces. You can only play to your friends so much; be the big fish in the small pond. It gets kind of tired. We've gotta put ourselves in more challenging situations and see if we survive it. Like doing the KISS thing. Or this tour. This is our biggest tour; we're going around the country like twice!

Q: I know Jesse was a major KISS fan as a kid. How about you, Richard?

Richard: I wasn't at all. I grew up in England. I was into all the glitter bands — Gary Glitter, Sweet...

Q: Mud?

Richard: I was a big Mud fan! But I was never really into KISS.

Q: Jesse, what was it like for you, seeing KISS again with all the effects and the make-up?

Jesse: It was like looking at an old girlfriend, y'know, and you can't figure out what you saw in them. Now I understand why I got beat up by the other kids for liking them. What was I thinking? But the show was the show! It was what I saw when I was a kid; it's blatantly a circus.

Columbia Records publicity photo

L-R: Howie Pyro, Michael Wildwood, Jesse Malin,

Richard Bacchus, and Danny Sage

Photo: John Falls

Q: When the first album came out, we went over the inspiration behind each of the songs, which proved interesting. Since you two are the main songwriters on No Lunch, can we do that again with the new songs?

Jesse: Sure!

Promo poster for No Lunch

Q: Richard, you wrote "Scorch"...

Richard: "Scorch" was written from a place where I was very angry, and very upset, and very disturbed by a lot of different things. But there's also an inside joke in there that no one except me and a really good friend of mine will ever get. I started writing that song on the phone talking about movies, and I finished up the whole thing in about five minutes.

Q: "Scorch" was also included on the Flipside compilation CD...

Jesse: Yeah, that was the first time we ever played it!

Q: Jesse, what's the story behind "She Stands There"?

Jesse: It's about being really scared and isolated. You're looking at a person and you want to communicate, but there's this wall... People have these walls around them. You want to meet somebody, but you might not have the energy or bravery to talk to them. And you only have like a minute to change your whole life; to break that wall, make contact, have the courage to say "Hello." But the mental anxiety that goes on, just thinking about doing that... And they could just be an asshole! So, you're looking at them, trying to figure out...
     I was in a restaurant in New York, looking at some girl who had a record in her hand; it was a real cool record — one of my favorite albums! I wanted to talk to her 'cause she was good-looking and had this great record. But I thought maybe she'd be an asshole. Or maybe it wasn't her record. You talk yourself out of things that could maybe change your life.

Looks like the Exotica LP is going
home with Michael Wildwood.
Photo: Devorah Ostrov

Q: You still stress out about meeting girls!

Jesse: Sometimes...

Richard: Aw, he's a real sweetie.

Q: What about "Capital Offender"?

Richard: It's about how, if you think about it, getting a record contract is pretty much a death sentence. It's usually people from a low-income background. They get jacked-up, and all this attention is placed on them overnight... And it goes all the way back to the '60s — people like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. And look at it now — like Tupac Shakur. You take a kid out of the gutter, focus all this attention on him... And I don't think the industry really does anything to prevent it. They almost do the opposite and encourage this like gangster lifestyle.

Q: And "Major"?

Jesse: It's pretty much a parallel between people getting burnt out on love and desensitizing themselves... You've been hurt, so you kind of put up these walls. I think, in some ways, when you want to end a connection with somebody who you love a lot, you kind of disconnect. And paralleling that to someone who's been able to kill people, murder people — and detach themselves. I've always been fascinated with how someone can live with killing other people.

Q: How about "Disclaimer"?

My autographed copy of No Lunch

Jesse: People are always trying to figure us out. What are you guys? What is your hairdo? Your clothes? What does this mean? And they hang these different labels... the kind of music that you play... You're put in a slot from day one. Everything is put in its little box, in its little pigeonhole. And I don't think you can do that to people. Y'know, I'm Jesse and that's Rick. And that's a real important message about us: You've got to be your own thing. Whether it's doing your own band, or your own painting, or driving your own car. What you think I am; I'm not. And I might be something else tomorrow. There's so much uniformity. You have to disassociate yourself from your family, your neighborhood, your school, sometimes even from a type of musical genre.

Publicity poster for No Lunch

Q: Like the "glam-punk" tag?

Jesse: That works!

Q: How about "Not Dreaming"?

Jesse: That's just like, trying to create your own life; making the reality you want come true. It's kind of about us growing up, having dreams to do something that's not accepted. And being able to live out your dreams. Going for something, instead of just doing what you think you should do.

Q: What about "Too Loose"?

Jesse: "Too Loose" is inspired a little bit by a movie. In this business, you meet a lot of girls — and guys, but more girls — that work in the adult entertainment business. Most of them are titty dancers, or strippers, or prostitutes — and all kinds of drug addicts. And I think when you deal with sex and money, you lose a certain bit of your passion; you pay a price in some way. And I think anytime... whenever you prostitute yourself, do something that's really against your spirit... I don't think you get away that easy.
     There's a movie called Paris, Texas with Nastassja Kinski and Harry Dean Stanton. He's looking for his wife and he finds her in this peepshow, talking through the glass. He can see her, but she can't see him. This is the person that raised his kid; they had this whole thing together and their lives changed so much.
     It's really scary when you see someone lose a piece of themselves through surviving or going for a lot of money. Everybody thinks sex is a lot of fun and a crazy thing. But there's a coldness to it. And when I meet these people, I get scared.

D Generation & Murphy's Law

at Coney Island High - Halloween 1997

Q: And lastly, "1981"...

Jesse: We grew up in the early '80s. The first band I had was a hardcore band — Heart Attack. We grew up playing with Bad Brains, Reagan Youth, the Beastie Boys...
     And it's kind of a nod to the early years of the East Coast, or just the hardcore scene in general before it got cliché. And it's kind of a tribute to our friend Jimmy from Murphy's Law, who kind of carries on that flag to this day. It's a bit of a story about him and just a nod to that time.

Q: Do you miss that era?

Jesse: Sometimes. I think about great nights and stuff, but I'm really into being in the present. I like what I'm doing now. It was fun then, but you've gotta look back and laugh at yourself too. I was serious. I was gonna change everything!
     But, y'know, there was a certain dedication. Things were brand-new then. Everything was happening. And that music, that movement, affected grunge; it affected hard rock and punk rock, and the last 15 years so heavily. All the rules were put down in those days. It was a brand-new thing — like how I imagine it was in the '50s when rock 'n' roll was new. It was hugely exciting! There were only 75 kids hanging out, and every night you were making history. And it only lasted for such a short time.

Q: And it was a lot more real than the punk/hardcore scene these days.

Howie Pyro on the cover of Teenage Kicks #1

Jesse: Yeah, the anger and frustration were really there, and really legit. It was harder, more dangerous, and more of a real release of expression than it is now. It's very easy and safe to be a radical punk now. We used to get beat up a lot worse. Shave your head, get your ass kicked!
     When we were growing up in the suburbs, to come into the City, or get away from that neighborhood, was to find a place where we were accepted. Or to create a place where you could be okay. And we still try to do that, because kids need somewhere to go where they don't feel like assholes or outcasts, and it's okay.

* To read my first interview with D Generation, go to:  devorahostrov.blogspot.com/2018/06/d-generation