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Mosh: With the last two releases, including
IX with the original three members, I'm just
glad that COC is still around after 32 years.
What makes the three of you stick this band
out?
Mike Dean: We're musicians, that's what we
do. The communication is good in this unit,
natural chemistry and also the familiarity of
working with each other for awhile. In a
way, it's almost more fun to do it as a continuing history, we enjoy being in the process of
a continuing saga. It's just something we're
compelled to do and we're going to stick to
it.
Mosh: Hailing from North Carolina, you
were pretty far away from the initial punk
scene on the east coast and also the west
coast American punk scene. Where did you
fit in, where were your influences based?
Mike Dean: Pretty much everywhere. But the
biggest thing would be Bad Brains out of
Washington, DC and NYC. Black Flag out of
Los Angeles. And D.O.A. out of Vancouver,
British Columbia would be our big three I
would say. Also a lot of other DC bands. We
would go up to DC and see some shows and
they kind of changed our lives and made us
say, "Hey, we can do that." I appreciated
what Minor Threat brought musically. Some
of the DC bands, there's one called Void in
particular. They were kind of like us in that
they sort of picked up on having fun with
the hardcore genre by inserting heavy metal
and hard rock influences into it. We thought
it was fun and creative and it also angered
people who were there just for the style of it.
People who were rigid about it. That's how
people came to talk about us and eventually
they started calling us crossover. We definitely had a side of the west coast stuff too
because that's really the origins or hardcore
in the United States. It's also where that combination with the metal kind of happened.
We went out there and we felt like we were a
big part of what was happening. At the time
I didn't really appreciate the term crossover,
people tried to put us in a box. We used to
complain about mass media, but the only
thing worse than that is micro-targeted
media that makes people never experience
anything outside of what they expect to
experience.
Mosh: What was the experience like working
on the 2004 Probot album with Dave Grohl
on the song "Access Babylon"?
Mike Dean: This kind of goes full-circle back
to what I was saying about Void from DC
because Dave was from DC and he played in
the band Scream. So we knew him from
then. I haven't talked to him a whole lot since
then, but low and behold he ends up in
Nirvana and the Foo Fighters and he became
successful. So he wanted to do a record with
some of his favorite vocalists of metal and
hardcore. On a track he had lined up for
COC, he got Jon Dupree to play guitar on it,
who was in Void. For the song, Dave sent me
a short little tape. I wrote some lyrics and
about 10 minutes later we had a vocal track.
I just wanted to do something that was Bad
Brains-inspired on the track and it kind of
captured it. As far as the stuff on the record I
ended up liking the Eric Wagner track a lot.
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38 illinoisentertainer.com july 2014