SPAZZ
Wayne: I would like to start off by thanking you for taking the time out of your schedule to do this interview with us. Can you tell our readers a little bit about yourself and what projects you are involved with (past and/or present)? Chris Dodge: Thanks for the interest & taking the time to contact me. I grew up in San Jose, moved to San Francisco, and 11 years ago relocated to LA. I’m 43 and I’ve been playing in punk bands since I was about 13. I was a rabid fan of hardcore bands as a kid, so I did everything possible to get involved with “the scene”. It’s hard to get a serious band going when you’re that young, so I spent a lot of my time contributing whatever I could to zines, and drawing artwork & flyers for local bands. I wrote for Maximum RockNRoll & Flipside, and published my own zine called “Broccoli Makes Me Sad”. Later I started a record label called Slap A Ham, and eventually published another zine called “Short, Fast + Loud”. Over the years I’ve played in a lot of bands. In the 80s, I was in Legion Of Doom, Stikky, and No Use Chris: After Stikky stopped playing, which I think was around ’89 or ’90, I wanted to be in another fast band. Hardcore, thrash, anything extreme wasn’t “cool” at the time in the Bay Area, so I didn’t have any luck. The only harsh band I knew in the area was Capitalist Casualties, and nobody liked them either. I played off & on in No Use For A Name, which was fun, but it really wasn’t my thing. NUFAN started out as Black Flag worship but eventually morphed into melodic hardcore and more like Bad Religion worship, which was boring to me. So I lived vicariously through the bands on my label for a while, and spent those years being the “thrash guy” for MRR. I was pretty lucky, because 90% of all of the fast & extreme releases all went to me for review, which helped me meet a lot of like-minded people worldwide. At Slap A Ham Fiesta Grande #1 I got word that Max from Plutocracy and Dan from Sheep Squeeze were jamming some power violence style tunes, and they needed a bass player. This was seriously the only opportunity I had heard about in years in the Bay Area. I contacted them, and they had practiced for two months under the name Gash. They sent me a practice cassette, I learned the 10 songs, we practiced together once, and then went to House Of Faith to record. We weren’t sure who was doing vocals, so off the cuff in the studio
For A Name. In the 90s, I was mainly in Spazz, and did a couple side things, including a tour and an album with Hellnation. In the 2000s, I started out the decade in Jesus Philbin, Burn Your Bridges, and East West Blast Test, then in 2006 joined Despise You and Bacteria Cult, and in 2007 joined Lack Of Interest. In the 2010s so far, I joined Low Threat Profile and To The Point. So I’m basically a fat, bald middle-aged guy who still acts like a kid. Wayne: This interview will be pertaining mainly on the Spazz/Slap A Ham years of your life. We will start off with Spazz. How did the band start out and did you expect the project to get as big of a reaction as it has?