“I WAS IN Los Angeles, in a tattoo parlor, and I was getting a tattoo onmy leg,” Terry Hall explains, his quiet voice peppered with more than a little nostalgia. “The lad who was doing it had no idea who I was, until I said I used to be in a band called The Specials. I just felt the needle go up my leg. He was really shocked, because that first album got him out of a situation. And he was younger than my oldest boy. But it still had great relevance to him.” Despite being a touch groggy from having just slept through band rehearsal, The Specials’ front man is seemingly in a fairly whimsical mood.

It’s the perfect moment for reflection, of course. It’s been two years since the band reunited to commemorate its 30th anniversary, an event born as a celebratory one-off festival appearance that soon blossomed into something much larger. “We did a surprise slot at Bestival, a festival in the U.K., two or three years ago,” Hall tells me. “We just wanted to test our stuff, really, see if we could manage to do a set together, and we did.The response was great.That’s why we then decided to do it for our 30th anniversary.”

The reunited Specials, Hall is quick to point out, has been now been together for longer than the band’s original incarnation. “We made two albums in a very short period, and it really imploded because of the nature of our material, or band and our social climate. It was destined to fold pretty quickly.The way bands like The Pistols did and The Clash, even—it was very much a flashpoint.You capture something and then it just disappears, all of a sudden.”

The driving force of the late-1970s and early-’80s ska scene, the band put out two of the era’s greatest records—Specials and More Specials—in two years and then promptly dissolved. Mastermind and keyboardist Jerry Dammers kept the name alive for a third album, 1984’s decidedly mediocre In the Studio, while fellow expats Hall, Neville Staple and Lynval Golding formed the New Wave trio, The Fun Boy Three.

The band had a short-lived reunion of sorts in 1996, riding the popularity of the mid-’90s ska revival with an album full of covers and a headlining spot on that year’s Vans Warped Tour. Hall didn’t participate that time around, so vocal duties were split amongst those who did. “I couldn’t think of a good enough reason to do it,” he tells me, simply. Fourteen years later, Hall’s got reasons aplenty. “Two or three of us have very personal reasons for why we wanted to get back together again,” he explains. “It wasn’t necessarily to play music—it was because we had lost this friendship that was very near and dear to us.That was my number one priority. It could have ended at a meeting, knowing that we were all OK, and I would have been OK with that.”

As with the ’96 reunion, Dammers opted ultimately to sit this round out. But Hall is hopeful that we haven’t heard the last of him as a member of The Specials. “I’d like to see if Jerry’s interested in doing something,” Hall tells me, hinting at the possibility of an LP full of new material. “But I know he’s not interested in playing the amount of dates we’re playing. That’s been our problem with Jerry. He’s out touring with his orchestra, and they’re doing 10 dates. For him, that’s a lot of work. It would be quite interesting to see what would happen if we sat around, later this year.”

> The Specials

April 20 & 21, Terminal 5, 610 W. 56th St. (at 11th Ave.), 212-260-4700; 7, $30.

I lob a couple of softballs to start and he bats them off, as if the whole thing is a waste of precious time. “I don’t like to be interrupted,” he adds, deadpan. A couple more questions in and he apologizes. It’s been a rough morning. These things happen. And when the subject of songwriting comes up, the 50-year-old rock star happily rips into the issue as though no one had ever broached it in his presence before.

“It’s quite different,” begins. “In the old days I’d write melody lines and the lyrics around them. I get the sense of melody in my head—usually in the shower. I sing phrases. I’m not normally one who sings for the sake of it, but I do sing comedy songs in the shower. Generally now my melody lines come a capella, rather than with an instrument. I think it’s a reversal of how most people, where it feels like an actual way or writing. You nail a tune and then work out the actual instrumentation. I’ve always got the songs pretty well mapped out, because once I have the melody lines, I’ll write the chords to go with it. There’s usually maybe a bit that is missing like a middle eight or an alto, which can come just by singing the rest over and over again. But generally I write the songs, start to finish. I’ll get the melodies then I’ll work out the lyrics.”

Thirty years in, it’s clear that McCulloch still has a passion for songwriting, a spark of creativity not dulled by his band’s touring revisiting of its 1984 classic, Ocean Rain, full backing orchestra in tow. It’s an album, McCulloch insists, that is as fresh 25 years later as it was when it was first recorded.  

“I think our songs sound like they’re from the future. That’s how I’ve always felt about our stuff. We’ve always aimed it to be timeless. We certainly never wanted it to sound dated. Because we never used synths, really. Our music had more to do with Television or the Velvets—it was more like the New Yorky stuff, Patti Smith and all of that. And Bowie. Will loved Television and I loved the Ramones.”

Being from the future, after all, means never having to succumb to the trappings of modern music. “I don’t think about what it’s going to sound like on the radio, because I don’t listen to the radio. I don’t listen to much music at all, to be honest. I play crosswords and watch BBC News.”

Or for that matter, Coldplay, in spite of an appearance by that band’s lead singer on one of The Fountain’s tracks. “It seems like just a gimmick to put into reviews. What’s that got to do with anything? I’ve been in Echo and the Bunnymen for 30 years, what am I going to learn from Coldplay? It’s ridiculous.”

Earlier in the month, Merge released a new record by Bejar’s Destroyer—an EP called Bay of Pigs. An odd record in many respects, pressed onto 12-inch vinyl, the record contains two tracks, one on each side. The self-titled A-side stretches for 13 minutes plus, a downright opus for songwriter whose sensibilities seem far more inclined toward pop and folk songs—a fact certainly not lost on anyone more familiar with the artist’s part-time gig as a member of Carl Newman’s New Pornographers.

Bejar calls the title track “ambient disco.” The former part of that compound genre note is immediately clear. The singer, who’s struggled so valiantly in the past to squeeze every last note of lyrical acrobatics into a three-minute rock song, has finally given himself plenty of room to stretch his words. The first sentence of the song occurs somewhere just before the two minute mark, and Bejar seems to relish the opportunity to drag out that first word “so” for as long as he sees fit. By its end, the singer has finished a first-person account of the ‘61 invasion of Cuba—or maybe not. “I was 20 years old in 1992,” the narrator announces matter of factly. No clearer is the music, with crests in electronic beats and crashes into atmospheric fuzz.

The song’s counterpart, “Ravers,” a comparably brisk sub-seven minute number will perhaps prove more familiar to Destroyer fans, but only slightly so. “The B-side is kind of a stripped down analog synth based version of an older Destroyer song that I tried to play with ambience and atmospherics,” explains Bejar. There were traces of it in the past, for those who picked up the vinyl version of 2006’s Destroyer’s Rubies, which devoted an entire side to more primitive electronic noodlings. For Bejar, the computer noise of Bay of Pigs points the way forward toward the next step in his evolution as a songwriter.

“If I play a Destroyer song on an acoustic song and sing along, it sounds like a folk song or a pop song, and that’s not what this is about,” Bejar explains. “The solo shows that I’ve been playing this year have just been me with an acoustic guitar playing a variety of songs from the eight Destroyer albums, and maybe a couple of other songs on top of that. The show in New York won’t have anything to do with that, really. I won’t be playing guitar.”

Bay of Pigs, it seems, offers the strongest hint at what Bejar will be doing. “In way that might have some overlap with what [long-time Destroyer collaborator Scott Morgan] and I will try and do at the New York show, though it’s quite different to it demands a certain vocal approach.” It also demands that Bejar, relatively new to this world of computerized music perform the show sans instrument.

As far as the performance is concerned, Bejar seems far more confident in what he won’t do than what he will.

“So what exactly will we be hearing?” I ask, simply.
“I’m not going to say,” Bejar laughs. “We’ve tried a few different things—some old, some new, and we’ll see what ends up on stage.”

Over the years, the Super Furry Animals has built much of its reputation on such self-proclaimed recklessness. Fortunately, however, the band’s critical and financial successes over the past decade and a half has hinged on more than just, say, shoving 50 instances of the word “fuck” into a less-than-five minute song. When it’s not featuring Paul McCartney on carrot and celery sticks, the band is releasing some consistently amazing music—OK, 2005’s Love Kraft was just sort of alright, but the band has more than made up for a mediocre misfire with subsequent mind-blowing platters.

The release of Dark Days/Light Years in April marks, among other things a shift away from the manner of shenanigans that have put the band on the radar of those who care less about such trivialities as amazingly awesome music. At least according to Rhys, the Super Furry frontman. “We used to put on quite an elaborate multimedia show. In the past few years we’ve just been focusing on playing. When we’re making an album, we’ve got lots of different kinds of songs and moods. We haven’t been as focused on creating the visual aspect. We’ve just been quite content to play the music.”

The change, Rhys explains, stems out of a sense of musical immediacy—the sort of immediacy, apparently, that can’t by appeased by cruising down the block in repurposed war machines. “We were making albums that had videos for every songs. They were great to make, but they were huge undertakings. It would be at least a year of work to get everything together. These days we’d rather just take two or three weeks and just make a whole album in a continuous way and just go out and play it. At the moment we’re in that kind of a restless mood.”

The Super Furry Animals is, it seems, making records for and of the moment. Like Dark Days/Light Years, an album with the sort of title that just begs to be unpacked. There’s the simple definition: “We recorded it in January, when the days were especially short. They’re dark. I think that’s definitely where our heads were, at the time.” And the more abstract one: “there was lots of doom lingering in the media. Obviously there’s always that shit going up, but the ‘light years’ is sort of looking back. Maybe we’ll look back on it as some kind of a golden era. Maybe it will be seen as light years when we look back at it.”

And then there’s the third dark horse contender, stripped from the third track, “Mope Eyes,” which lend the album its name. “Dark days,” Rhys sings on the track, “are light years away.” It’s the unique brand of glee that the band has long delivered with all the subtlety of a big blue tank. “I think generally we like to put people in a collective high,” Rhys tells me, “offer these people a sense of euphoria, rather than dread.” No Yeti suit required.

>Super Furry Animals
Sept. 11, Highline Ballroom, 431 W. 16th St. (betw. 9th & 10th Aves.), 212-414-5994; 7, $25. Also, Sept. 13 at All Tomorrow’s Parties.

And now, nearly half a decade later, while those details seem forever disappeared, one thing is clear: Will Hart sounds different. For the first few moments, I’m not completely certain that I’ve got the right Will on the phone. I’d phoned a number left over from that 2005 interview and asked for him by first name, no doubt a popular one in the Athens, Georgia area code. In fact, for the first few moments, I have some difficultly making out what the man on the other end of the line is trying to tell me.

A lot has changed in Hart’s life, over the past four years—far more than the standard tours and records and band in fighting customary in the life of any active rock and roll musician. Three years ago Will Cullen Hart was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

“I take some pills that make me stutter like I’m drunk as fuck,” Hart explains, with a laugh. “I think those pills have helped me. And they do affect the brain and the motor skills, because I’m excitable, anyway.”

One morning three years ago, Hart woke up, blind in one eye. “I went to the doctor with what little money I had,” he recounts the story with a surprising sense of easiness. “I had to get to the hospital, so he could save my eye. Steroids, that’s how he did it. He saved one eye, visually, that’s how he did it.”

I was worried at first, afraid to broach the subject. It’s public knowledge now, I suppose, revealed by Hart’s bandmate, Jon Fernandes in an interview with a website late last year. I’m resolved to let the subject arise organically, and it does, without missing a beat. Hart broaches the topic himself, as a way of answering a question about what the artist has been up to in the eight years since his band The Circulatory System—playing New York this week and also playing the upcoming All Tomorrow’s Parties festival—released its first and most recent record.

“Not really that much,” he answers with a laugh. “I’ve got multiple sclerosis. It sounds like a joke…That’s what happened, I guess. You don’t know what the fuck is going on with yourself. You’re like, ‘why am I different now?’ You know something is definitely going on. I thought something was going on with my brain. I was like, God, why am I different?”

“How are you different?” I ask.

“Mentally somewhat,” he answers, quickly. “It’s changing, though. I’ve started taking these shots. You have to take shots every other day, and it was like, ‘I don’t like taking shots.’ But now it’s different, because I don’t mind given them to myself now.’ It changed my brain chemistry. I swear to God. I know it sounds crazy. It helped me change back into something that was like 1996.”

From the moment he says it, it’s clear that “1996” means a lot more to Hart than just a bygone date. It was a banner year—arguably the banner year—for Olivia Tremor Control as both a band and as one of the pillars of Athens’ absurdly fruitful and influential Elephant 6 collective. That year saw the release of the band’s astoundingly beautiful and complex Music from the Unrealized Film Script, Dusk at Cubist Castle and its ambient counterpart, Explanation II: Instrumental Themes and Dream Sequences.

That year would also see the release of On Avery Island, the first LP from Neutral Milk Hotel, the brainchild of one-time Olivia drummer Jeff Mangum. Childhood friend Robert Schneider was in-between the Apples in Stereo pop masterpieces Fun Trick Noisemaker and Tone Soul Evolution, and fellow collective members Elf Power and Of Montreal were kick starting their own fruitful recording careers.

Two years later, 1998 saw the release of Olivia’s next LP, the equally wonderful if somewhat more haunting Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume One. In the interim, there was a seemingly endless parade of off-shots and side projects—such was the nature of Elephant 6’s place in the Athens community, a free flowing collective of multi-instrumentalists far more concerned with the creation of art than the area’s escalating rent prices. Hart painted, too, beautiful psychedelic canvases that often graced the covers and inserts of his music output. It was a good time.

And then something happened. Something in his brain. “I think I called the band off, but I’m not sure,” Hart explains, attempting to piece together the last strains of that golden era. “I think I was getting crazy and I’m not sure what was going on. I was making music, but I wasn’t sure what was going on. Plus, you’re in a band, I was turning 30. A lot of shit happened real quick, and it just confused my brain.”

In 2000, The Olivia Tremor Control broke up. Fellow songwriter Bill Doss dusted off the moniker The Sunshine Fix for a new solo career, drummer Eric Harris joined up with Elf Power, and Hart and the rest of the band rebranded themselves The Circulatory System, releasing their self-titled debut a year later, a work on-par with anything released by the band’s previous incarnation. Asked why they parted ways, Hart won’t go into detail, but he seems more than willing to except his share of the blame.

“His doctor was saying that around the late ’90s, his MS started kicking in,” Doss tells me in a separate interview, a week or so later. “That’s when it really started affecting him. And he really did start acting weird at that time, but he’s a weird cat, so it didn’t seem abnormal at the time. Plus there were pressures on the band at the time. We were getting more well-known, which was cool, but the pressure and the MS hitting him caused him to go into another place in his brain.”

“We were the main songwriters,” he explains, “and so, you know…Things got crazy for a while. That’s a decent enough way to put it.”

“When the band split up, I think I was a little lost,” Doss tells me later. “I didn’t know what to do and he was acting a little strange. That, of course, changed out dynamic. To be honest, there were several years where we didn’t hang out. He was a little mad at me, I was a little mad at him, and neither of us really knew why. I think it was that was kicking in. he was changing and it was weird, and neither of us really knew what was going on.”

In 2005, the band staged a brief reunion. At the behest of Vincent Gallo, The Olivia Tremor Control got back together to play that summer’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in the U.K., Doss included. The band also played a small handful of gigs in the States, including two shows at the Bowery Ballroom.

In fact, Hart credits Doss with much of his own mental rehabilitation. “He helped me actually start taking the shots,” Hart explains. “Once he did, after months, we were friends again. I don’t want to go into the whole thing, but my brain chemistry changed. Literally. It was crazy, actually. That’s why I keep saying ’96.”

“He started dealing with it,” Doss recall. “He reached out to me, and it was like, ‘this is ridiculous. ’We’ve been mad at each other for several years now, over nothing.’ We started hanging out and talking about stuff and becoming friends again. I tried to help him deal with the MS the best way I could, bringing in Montel Williams books to read and looking up stuff on the Internet. We all were.”

Now, in 2009, it’s all 1996 again for Will Cullen Hart, so much so that the artist tasked a group of friends with the responsibility of combing through the old Olivia demos, in search of material for Signal Morning, the second Circulatory System record finally released a full eight years after its predecessor.

“I’ll always have that to pull from, if necessary,” says Hart. “And it felt necessary. Actually, someone else chose that and it made me more excited. ‘Really? You chose that? I love that! I love “Woodpecker.” ’ My two friends picked these songs. I was happier with that, because we weren’t getting anywhere with the band format, but you know. We’ve always really used different production qualities from Olivia to know. Everything carries on, it really does. Visually and otherwise.”

Of course a lot has happened in the Elephant 6 camp in the intervening decade or so. The Apples in Stereo (with whom Doss now plays) and Of Montreal have become indie rock stars and Olivia’s one-time drummer Jeff Mangum has come to possess the sort of enigmatic status traditionally reserved for the Syd Barretts and Skip Spences of the world.

And rent prices rise and people get day jobs, too. “The whole thing besides that has changed a good bit,” says Hart. “Everybody’s moved on with their life, for one. We were barely making rent, at that point. We were always traveling around. And now it’s, ‘I’m working,’ at this point. It’s like see you the next day. I wish everyone could live off of music. I wish I could use it to pay rent.”

But when the tube amps fire back up, there’s no discerning ’96 from 2009. “Bill came over yesterday and we made up something awesome,” And then we went over to his place with my 4-track cassette and bounced what we did off of his computer.” The duo even pieced together the first Olivia tracks in more than a decade. “We only have two,” Hart laughs, “but they’re great!”

“One day I was over at his house and he had a 4-track out and we started to record,” Doss adds later. “’I remember this feeling. I remember doing this for the last 20 years!’”

But for the moment, Hart’s focused on The Circulatory System, with a new album and an upcoming tour—the band getting something of a dry run for the latter in the form of last year’s Holiday Surprise Tour. “And it was fucking great, man. There were so many kids into it.” Kids who Hart insists, laughing, “weren’t even born in ’96.”

>The Circulatory System, Sept. 9, (le) poisson rouge, 158 Bleecker St. (betw. Thompson & Sullivan Sts.), 212-228-4854; 8, $15

If the problems are, in fact, systemic, do you think these tiny steps can make a difference?
It’s because the problems are systemic that our tiny steps make such a difference. The only solution is for the human beings in that system to begin behaving like human beings, instead of the iron filings flying back and forth between two magnets. Restoring some tiny amount of human agency and human intention totally fucks up the whole system.

What will it take for those on top to come around to this proposed shift?
On a personal level, it will happen because they will come to realize that it takes more of their resources to insulate themselves from the real world than it would to actually improve the real world enough for it to become something they would want to take part in. The equation stops making sense. That’s sort of what you see happening in a lot of neighborhoods. That’s the Bloomberg New York question. Can he erect a kind of billionaire bubble around Manhattan that can protect the rich folk that are all moving into the fine neighborhoods from the poor folk who are being pushed into the outer boroughs?

In the book you map the current economic situation as having essentially begun in the Renaissance period. Do you feel like the shift back in the other direction will necessarily take that much time, or is it something that can occur relatively rapidly?
I look at it as hundreds of years in the making. It’s certainly happened before. There was a central currency in Egypt, which the Egyptian empire instituted. A centralized currency is a great way of paying for expansion during a time of war. That’s really what they talked about in the Bible, with Joseph and indebtedness and seven years of feast and seven years of famine and all that. That’s all about shifting the Egyptian empire from an abundance-based economy to a debt-based economy. So that happened, and eventually it failed them. And then the Romans did it, and it worked for a while; but eventually they got so decentralized that it failed them. And then they tried it again with establishment of the nation-state in late middle ages Europe, which gave us the Renaissance; and the Renaissance gave us the Industrial Age. We’re at the end of the Industrial Age cycle now.

It’s the second week of an annual drive aimed at keeping WFMU in the black, and once again the weekly comedy call-in show has positioned itself as one of the top moneymakers for the nonprofit freeform radio station.

Scharpling’s getup, of course, is a less-thansubtle allusion to what he has long happily asserted with his three-hour weekly mix of mirth, music and mayhem: “This is a tent pole show. The tent don’t stay up with out the tent pole.”

Fellow WFMU personality, DJ Terre T— hostess of Saturday’s Cherry Blossom Clinic— passes out multi-colored sailor hats to the staff of phone volunteers, who, by the show’s end, will reinforce Scharpling’s boast, collecting nearly $61,000 from pledgers on this week’s show alone.The sum is no doubt bolstered by the cavalcade of celebrity Best Show fans—Ted Leo, Aimee Mann, Paul F.Tompkins and John Hodgman—who have come out to Jersey City to help raise money for the station and the show. They proudly don the brightly colored “Friends of Tom” sailor caps.

Scharpling, for his part, spends the lead up to tonight’s show running around the studio he affectionately refers to as “the submarine,” prepping guests, thanking pledge takers and searching frantically for a recent misplaced cell phone—a whirlwind of activity only made more immediate by the cameraman constantly trailing the host, capturing footage for an upcoming documentary on the station. “He’s in a whole different mode,” explains the show’s associate producer, AP Mike. “This is ‘Don’t get in his way mode.’ He’s in the zone.”

After 13 years with the station, Scharpling is unquestionably a pro, but tonight is different, in a room swarming with volunteers, station staff, celebrity guests and a small handful of media types. It’s something that the host, traditionally calm and levelheaded, dreads. “Nobody wants to do those shows,” says Scharpling. “If you could press a button and not do them, you’d do it in a second. But there is something that comes out of those shows that’s so exciting. It’s really alive then, everyone comes out to get onboard and be heard with regards to how important the station is to them.When it goes the way it went the last two weeks, it takes my breath away.”

The two week pledge total for the show will ultimately hover around the $120,000 mark, a far cry from The Best Show’s humble beginnings more than a decade ago, when Scharpling’s friend, Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster, first called into the then musicdriven show in character. “I always have that in the back of my mind, and that’s not that long ago, when the general consensus was, ‘you’re just not good at this,’” begins Scharpling. “But we just did what we wanted to do, and we were right, I guess. [Because,] thankfully, people found us.”

It’s those bits with Wurster, long and seemingly meandering, with no discernable end, that are the backbone of the show, a sense of free-form comedy that keeps listeners tuning in one week to the next. “From both the comedic and the radio point of view, it’s so rare to be so immersed in something for three hours,” says Hodgman. “It’s something you do while driving or walking down the street or doing your taxes, or, as I do, cleaning the azaleas, and it sort of weaves itself into your life.The stuff that Tom does with Wurster is so wonderful. It’s a slow build, and it sort of worms itself into your brain.”

Tompkins adds, “Thanks to Internet, we now know there’s over 100 shows to listen to, and the thing that makes Tom’s show number one is Tom. I can just listen to him talk forever. I’m always sad when the show ends, because I really could listen to him for another few hours.”

By the end of tonight’s show, Scharpling will lead his four guests in a fairly impromptu cover of Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.” Leo plays the song under the shade of his sailor cap and explains Scharpling’s magic succinctly: “He’s an amazing conductor of energy. He’s just got one of those personalities where he can get people together in the right space to deliver.”

>The Best Show

airs every Tuesday from 8-111 on 91.1 and online at WFMU.org

Finally locating it below Sam Seder, he yells at his co-host for refusing to pick it up, berates cameraman Matthew Weiss for not taking his side in the argument and, half-jokingly, hurls a chair across the Air America break room where the duo host a mid-afternoon Web video show (available every day at breakroomlive.com). After a moment, Maron picks the chair back up and smiles.

It takes more than a pre-show freak out to faze Seder. The comedian, who moments ago was discussing his three-year-old’s potty training, barely lifts his head. The camera has yet to start rolling, but it’s still nearly impossible to discern where the men’s bi-polar relationship begins. “Despite whatever cockfighting goes on and whatever battles we have,” Maron explains, “we have two sort of specific, different ways of approaching things, but we’ve known each other for a long time.We’re both fairly aggressive Jews, and funny sort of happens from that.” The duo has known each other for 20 years and both are veterans of the comedy circuit. Maron’s rants have landed him specials on HBO and Comedy Central and made him one of Conan O’Brien’s most frequent guests.

Seder, the more politically obsessed of the two, compares himself—tongue tentatively in cheek—to film pioneer John Cassavetes, having used the money earned through a string of failed network sitcom pilots to finance his own self-directed films. A pile of DVDs of the latest, Bad Situationist, sits in the office he shares with Maron and Break Room Live’s producer, Brendan McDonald.

Along with Maron and Seder, the film’s cast reads like a who’s who of alternative comedy, including Sarah Silverman, Janeane Garofalo and Jon Benjamin. Like most of Seder’s forays into the entertainment industry, however, the movie’s destiny was ill-fated.The words, “This film was entirely written and shot by June of 2001” grace the back—a sad but necessary disclaimer. Three months later, few would be jumping at the chance to distribute a comedy that opened on its protagonist aiming a rocket launcher at a New York skyscraper.

Both men also did time in Air America’s radio studio during the station’s heyday. Maron co-hosted Morning Sedition with radio vet Mark Riley. Seder, meanwhile, did The Majority Report with Garofalo. After a fair deal of shifting, Seder and Maron ultimately left the station. And now, five years after first helping the station get off the ground, both men have returned to Air America—or Air America’s kitchen.

There are five of us crammed in the room waiting for 3 o’clock to roll around. Maron and Seder are on the other side of a kitchen table. A subway map is taped to the window behind Maron’s head, perhaps covering up one of the room’s cosmetic blemishes. A fire extinguisher arrow hangs on the wall behind Seder, pointing down at the host’s head. On either side of the break room’s entrance hang signs reading, “Break Room Live is on the air…but you are more than welcome to enter.”

The show began life as a video show shot in a radio studio, bearing the title Maron v. Seder—a less than subtle nod to the duo’s combative relationship. “When it was Maron v. Seder,” begins the latter, “people asked what the ‘V’ stood for, and I said, ‘it’s a battle every day of cynicism versus pessimism.’” After a few months, the show moved to its current setting, adopting its new name to reflect its less ostentatious surroundings “When you were in the studio, it felt like we wished were in a better studio,” Seder says. “It’s just more confident to do it from the break room, because we don’t care about the trappings. And I think that’s the interesting thing about the Internet, too, on some level it’s counter-establishment.”

Today’s show isn’t off to a rip-roaring start. By the time the first pre-recorded sketch opens the episode up, things are about 25 minutes late, the show suffering more than its usual share of technical difficulties, thanks in no small part to a production switcher that has been shipped off to Washington D.C. for the inauguration.

After introductory statements, which find Maron declaring his hate—and then love—for Seder (“let’s not rebound too far to the other side,” retorts Seder), things take a turn for the serious.The interplay between the somber and the comedic is another balancing act in the hour-long show. For a new program, however, Break Room Live has done a good job maintaining stasis. “A lot of people are active and a lot of people are progressive, but a lot of people don’t know what the fuck is going on,” Maron explains to me after the show. “And I think our dynamic speaks to that.”

Mayhew recounts the story with a certain sense of whimsy—one of those splitsecond decisions that would shape the remainder of his life. It’s in the manner of fate-based tales on which Star Wars fans tend to thrive. After all, besides his physical adherence to that old adage of everything being big in home stage, the actor, now 64, is a rather alien character: a 7-foot-3-inch British sci-fi actor living deep in the heart of the Lone Star state. Of course, thanks to his stint as a galaxy far, far away’s most celebrated Wookie, Mayhew hasn’t spent much of his post-trilogy existence at home. Three decades after first donning the big furry suit, the continued pop-cultural love affair with the movies that made him a nerdy household name still keeps him on the road, attending some 20 conventions a year, by his estimation. He and his wife Angie just arrived back from Phoenix late last night, and are prepping themselves for a return to New York for the fourth annual New York Comic Con, taking place this weekend. “I’ve always enjoyed wherever we go,” Mayhew says happily, in a soft spoken British accent, from his home outside of Fort Worth, “and New York fans are usually pretty nice and respectful.”

Mayhew, for his part, seems blissfully aware of the absurdity of his situation, that despite the fact that his best-known role fated his face to be obscured by a thick hairy mask 20 times a year in cavernous expo halls, he became a god, and despite all of the column space that’s been devoted to celebrating the merger between geek culture and pop culture, there
are certain laws of the universe that are only fully realized between
convention center walls, where the man who played Chewbacca can command
the level of feverish fandom largely reserved these days for reality
television stars. “You get the young ladies who want their T-shirts
signed [while] they’re still wearing them,” he laughs. “It’s a little
bit awkward. I don’t mind signing shirts, but they’ve got to be laid
flat on the table.”

“It’s like working in a traveling circus,”
Mayhew continues. “At certain shows you’re going to see certain
people.When you get, say, R2D2, Chewie and Bobba Fett together, these
are guys that have known each other for a long time. It’s like family.
It really is.” For the most part, however, Mayhew’s brand of cult
stardom is a dying phenomenon. Each new year brings another crop of
CGIed out action flicks; most of them largely wiped away from the
collective nerd memory by the time the next convention roles around.

Very
few souls have managed to Mayhew’s level of celebrity in the insular
world of geekery without having added subsequent high-profile roles to
their resumes. By that standard, Lou Ferrigno is something of a brother
in arms.The bodybuilder’s moment in the sun came in 1977—the same year
as the first Star Wars film—when he played the green id to Bill Bixby’s Dr. David Banner in the television adaptation of Marvel Comics’ Incredible Hulk series.

Ferrigno’s return to New York
Comic Con’s autograph stage, he points out, is something of a
homecoming for the Brooklyn-born weightlifter turned actor. Still,
speaking with Ferrigno over the phone, it’s easy to forget this fact.
His deep monotone seems somehow foreign. He tosses the word “powah”
around a lot, when describing the lasting appeal of his most famous
role, as in “it’s all about powah.”

Telephone communication
isn’t necessarily Ferrigno’s strong suit. Chalk it up to the
significant hearing loss he suffered at an early age, or just an over-
eagerness to promote his many continued pursuits, but, well, interviews
or otherwise, no one can accuse Lou Ferrigno of doing anything by the
book. Early on, he deflects a question to promote a new film, I Love You, Man, in
which he plays himself. He plugs his website and his ongoing career as
a personal trainer. Like Mayhew, Ferrigno is quick to express affection
for those who have continued to demand his attention for the past 30
years. “I talk to the fans and they tell me it was a positive message
they received from me when I did the series and also my involvement
with fitness and bodybuilding, and how it motivates them.” And then, he
quickly reveals yet another aspect of the many faces of Lou Ferrigno.
“The tell me how much they love the series and also the other things I
do with my life—because I’m also a deputy sheriff for the sheriff’s
department.”

But ultimately, Ferrigno knows exactly what it is
that keeps getting him invited to the shows, year after year: powah.
“They like the pictures and they like to meet someone like myself,
because I’m in great shape. It’s like seeing a real-life hero.When they
see my body, when they see my persona, they can really connect with the
character and the persona of Lou Ferrigno. Every one of us has a little Hulk inside.”

Everyone
including Lou Ferrigno. “I’ve been the Hulk my whole life, and I
wouldn’t mind continuing with the legacy of the Hulk. They’re doing a
movie called The Avengers and I will be involved with the
project again. It’ll be a part of me for the rest of my life.” It’s a
bit of sentimental affection happily echoed by Mayhew. “You’ve got the Clone Wars animated
series out now. Maybe in two years’ time, they’re gonna do live-action
TV. And hopefully, if  don’t get too old, I can do some of that.
Luckily.The people who matter know this and are quite willing to do
whatever is necessary. If the fans want Chewie back, I’m quite willing
to do it as long as possible.”

–
New York Comic Con
Feb. 6-8, Jacob K. Javits Center, 655 W. 34th St. (betw. 11th & 12th Aves.), 888-605-6059; times vary, $30-$50

“Do you mind my paraphrasing one of your song lyrics to you?” I ask
Billy Bragg, who answers cheerfully, “Go right ahead.” It’s from
“Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards,” off Bragg’s 1988 LP, Worker’s
Playtime, and in two short lines it perfectly captures Bragg’s mission statement,
tongue-in-cheek sense of humor and a sense of humbleness that carries
over into these one-on-one interactions. “Mixing Pop and Politics he
asks me what the use is,” sings Bragg. “I offer him embarrassment and
my usual excuses.”

“It was really me just reflecting the difficultly of trying to create a
discourse in a medium as fluffy and trivial and pop music.” Bragg is
happy to re-examine the 20-year-old song lyric. “I’ve always [felt]
that I’m not really a pop musician. I’m a folk musician. I just
happened to choose an electric guitar. Folk music is sturdy enough to
write about anything.”

All of these decades later, as most of his contemporaries have long
since redefined or otherwise abandoned the ethos that drove punk rock
in its earliest incarnations, Bragg is at home packing, readying
himself for a tour of the States he’s deemed “grassroots,” due to the
inclusion of a number of stops in smaller towns, and timed to spread
his gospel in the lead up to the presidential election.

“There’s an opportunity, as a foreigner to bring a perspective, if
only, ‘think when you go vote that you’re voting for a leader for all
of us, not just yourself,’” he explains. “There are some people who
don’t like that message, who don’t care what I think. The urge for
those of us in other countries to comment on the U.S. election is
[great] because the United States is the most powerful democracy in the
world. There’s an election in Canada, but I don’t need to be going over
to the Canadians saying, ‘Watch out who you elect,’ because the
parliament of Canada is not going to have a huge effect on our world.”

One wonders, of course, whether or not those who tend to lobby such
criticism against the singer are really the type to go out of their way
to attend a Billy Bragg show.

“You can’t stand at the door and throw out the people who are
sympathetic to your politics, because you’d end up playing to a lot of
rather soppy men who just want you to play ‘Greetings to the New
Brunette’ all night,” he says, laughing. “Which is quite fine, I can do
that, but it wouldn’t be fair to those who want to hear a bit of
politics. My experience as a fan of The Clash, back in the ’80s, when I
went to “Rock Against Racism,” was being with a bunch of people who
shared my beliefs. It made me realize that I wasn’t the only person in
the world who was opposed to racism. Where I worked, that’s how I felt.
I was working in an office with a bunch of guys older than me, who were
casual racists, sexists, homophobes. I never said anything about it,
because I thought I was in the minority. When I went to see The Clash,
I realized that not only was I not in the minority, but this issue of
discrimination was where my generation was going to make its stand in
the way that the previous generation made its stand against Vietnam.
What I’m hoping to do is draw in those people who do share my politics
… and then send them out to carry on with the struggle, rejuvenated.”

After 30 years spent playing music, Bragg himself has surely required
the same manner of rejuvenation, and fortunately he’s able to harness
it from similar means. “I’ve had my moments of cynicism, I helped get
Tony Blair elected, for fuck’s sake. But I’ve managed to overcome it by
standing out on a dark stage, playing songs.” And of course, the
occasional signs of social progress matters a touch as well.

“A black man stands a very good chance of becoming the President of the
United States of America. You’ve got to be proud of that, because if
you’re not proud of that, we’re proud of that for you. It’s the
embodiment of the idea that your country was built on.”

That old lyric, it seems, still stands; and while he admits to having
altered it slightly, it’s still undeniably Billy Bragg. “I have changed
the lyrics a bit—I now say, “mixing pop and politics/ they ask me what
the use is/ I offer them my acupuncturist and my masseuses.”