Coming up in the California hardcore scene of the early 80s, Whipping Boy made no concessions to expectations. By their second album, Muru Muru (originally released in 1984) the band were already tired of simple hardcore tropes and were branching off into all sorts of dark, strange, psychedelic, new-wave-adjacent musical directions.
Aside from the mixed reaction to their second album back in the day, the band were never satisfied with the way Muru Muru turned out—feeling that their own lack of experience (and that of recording engineer Klaus Flouride) led to the final mix of the album somehow not capturing the sonic dimensions that they believed were there in the songwriting, performances and textures.
From that point onward guitarist Steve Ballinger and vocalist Eugene S. Robinson had an itch to see the album represented in the way they’d always imagined it. Thanks to producer Joe Chiccarelli, that dream has now been realised in the newly-released Dysillusion: A Muru Muru Remix (out now on Blackhouse Inc.)
Ballinger and Robinson caught up with New Noise to discuss Whipping Boy and Muru Muru then and now.
What were your impressions of each other when you first met and how did you end up deciding you wanted to collaborate?
Steve Ballinger: So I was at Stanford, and had been playing football and had gotten hurt and had to have surgery and wasn’t able to play football, and to sort of pass the time I had purchased one of those “lawsuit guitars” for like, 100 bucks, and I had a little Ampeg amp, and I was playing along to records and just, you know, trying to find people to jam with.
Eugene was a freshman. It was still fall, but Eugene made enough of an impression at school by then. So I was walking along, going somewhere, and I see this guy on this busted looking red moped. This dude wearing a leather jacket on a moped, and I’m just like, “I wonder if that’s the guy they keep talking about, Eugene?” and he stops. I think you saw me and recognized me.
Eugene S. Robinson: Yeah somebody had told me that you were looking for somebody, and I was like, “I’ll talk to him later,” and then I go, “No, no, no, now, now.”
Steve Ballinger: Yeah, and you’d seen me before at a party, and the weight room too. There was a party where I got called a fascist. Remember that?
Eugene S. Robinson: Yeah, that was the first time I’d taken LSD, and Scott was like, “Look at that guy over there,” and you had on an army jacket and mohawk or shaved head. “Oh, that guy’s a fascist.” I said, “Well, why don’t you tell him that?” and so he goes “Fascist!” and you kind of looked around, and Scott kind of ducked down hahaha.
Steve Ballinger: So we talked a little bit and eventually, we sort of figured out a way to get some other people to play with us. Some of the first people didn’t work out very well—a matter of dedication more than anything else, I would say.
Eugene and I were both very, very interested in having this be a real thing. We weren’t just messing around wasting time. We wanted to be a real band and record and stuff. It took a while for us to get other people of like mind and Sam [Smoot] and Dave [Owens] were great musicians, but they didn’t want to be rock stars. They had their own thing, they were going to school, they were gonna, you know, become the professional whatever. During the time that I was in the band, I sort of forgot about whatever it was my academic pursuits were leading to. I was like, “Whatever, I gotta take some classes and get the hell out of here so I can become a rock star.”
Within, I’d say probably six or eight months, we played our first show, right? I mean, not one that we jumped up on stage and commandeered other people’s instruments.
Eugene S. Robinson: That happened with the Circle Jerks and Effigies hehe
Steve Ballinger: Right. Eugene just goes “We should be playing.” He went and talked to some people, and the next thing I know we were up on the stage playing. The Effigies let us use their instruments. Nowadays, I can’t even fathom that.
Eugene S. Robinson: It was amazing that they had done so and Keith and the Circle Jerks, I think what they did is they looked at us and they figured, “You know what? It’s just easier.” I mean, the balls I had to do this, right?
Steve Ballinger: And it was like a huge show. I bet you, there was 800 people there, and we got to play the slot right before the headliners.
Eugene S. Robinson: We said, “We’ll just play three songs.” So they say “Next up from LA The Circle Jerks,” because the guy got confused, and we went out and the audience flipped out, and we were like, “Ahhaha,” gave him the finger and it was great.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had 800 people hate you, but it was a delightful feeling. They were throwing shit. There was the only time I was proud of our bass player at the time. I look and he’s kicking some guy in the face, you know, and we did three songs, which at that time was about three minutes, and then we were off. At the end of that is when Klaus (Flouride) came up to us with Darren Peligro and was like, “Who the fuck are you guys?”
photo: Jim Smothers
So thinking about the record. I sort of get the impression that around 1983/84, a lot of creative people in punk or hardcore scenes were getting fed up with the music starting to have a formula. Muru Muru feels so completely different at this point. What do you put that down to?
Eugene S. Robinson: It’s like when they say with suicide, it’s never any one reason. There were a couple of things. One, Sam and Dave, the rhythm section, wanted to have greater creative output. They were definitely listening more broadly than I was at the time.
So I said, “Well, I got to keep these guys engaged. So let’s give them some musical say.” I mean, Dave is the one who introduced me to The Birthday Party. So the stuff that they liked wasn’t that out of line.
Then also, lyrically, I was writing lyrics that didn’t make any sense to do in a 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4 format. And musically, Steve was getting better on the guitar and actually evolving stuff. So it wasn’t a rejection of hardcore as much as it was, “Well, I guess we’re musicians now, what do we want to do as musicians? Let’s do something cool.”
We just thought people would evolve with us and half the scene did right? You have from us and Fugazi, you have all these guys who had been hardcore guys who evolved—Scratch Acid to Jesus Lizard—who evolved into interesting places. You have others who stay true to the cause and I love those guys too, like the CRO Mags and Agnostic Front and so on.
Steve Ballinger: Well, for me at the time, I was writing most of the music, and Eugene will remember when we started out, I had cassette tapes where I would just sit down with this crappy little $20 boom box, turn it on with a mic on, and just play stuff that I’ve been working on, and most of it was not hardcore.
Most of the stuff that I’d been working on for years was not hardcore music. It was more like kind of weird rock music I was really interested in, like making dissonant chord change stuff, sort of what they call angular lead playing—which is just really a way of saying, I don’t know how to play lead. I’m just going to slop it out and see how it turns out.
But one of the things that made me lose my taste for hardcore, writing those songs is pretty boring. One of the things I liked about Black Flag was Greg Ginn always threw in like little bits. There’d be like a little two measure vamp, or some little thing in the middle, or sometimes an intro. It wasn’t just 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, and then the same six chords over and over again.
So I was trying to move in that direction, and something that really kicked me that way was, you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but Tim Yohannan, may he rot in the ground, he did not like us. He never liked us, and he had such a loud voice with Maximum Rocknroll.
Every opportunity he would either ignore us and not even mention us. We’d be on a bill at a show, and he would say, “Then Whipping Boy played, and after they played, somebody else played”; panned our records; never said anything good about any of our output.
And I’d say “Well what is it that Tim Yohannan wants to listen to? Oh, like, a bunch of Finnish stuff where you couldn’t tell the voice from the guitar. It sounded like it was recorded with a single microphone in a garage.” I’m just like, “Oh, really? So you have no musical taste at all. Fuck off then, I’m done with you. I’m done trying to pander to you. I am now going to do whatever I want to do.” Eugene’s obviously along for the ride, and weirdly, Sam and Dave came along too. They seem to really enjoy it. We didn’t care.
Eugene S. Robinson: Keep in mind, to give some context, we used to go up routinely to the recording of the Maximum Rocknroll show at KPFA in Berkeley, hang out there, help out, do whatever we could. This wasn’t transactional. We just wanted to be where stuff was happening.
They invited us to be on this compilation—that was very exciting for us—and we’re hanging out there and I’m a writer, so I started pretty early on writing for both Maximum Rocknroll, Flipside and Ripper Magazine—another punk zine at the time.
But Steve is exactly right. Those guys, everything about us they found suspicious. We all obviously lifted weights, we were somewhat athletic, knew how to fight, but were smart guys because we went to Stanford. They figured, well, we’re probably rich, even though at that point, as Steve remembers, I was breaking into food lockers, stealing food—badly. I would break in at night and steal a bunch of stuff and get it home and find out that I had taken, like, an eight gallon can of relish.
Steve Ballinger: I saw one of those 60-ounce peanut butter jars in some dorm with a bunch of knives stuck in it and bread crumbs and stuff. I said, “Fuck this, this is just gonna go bad.” I pulled the knives out, I put the lid on, I get home, it was literally half ants. But it was dark. I didn’t know.
Eugene S. Robinson: Yeah, so those guys largely thought we were short timers that, you know, we were everything that they kind of despised, rich kids, and I remember Tim Yohannan, when he was about to die, I was doing a record swap. This is like 10 years now after college, which means I’m 31 doing a record swap from the stuff that had been in my record store.
He came and he sees me at the table, and he kind of came over. He was sick, and he knew he was dying, and he gave me a look and a nod that was kind of, “I’m sorry”, you know? And I remember thinking, “You know, this guy’s dying. I should let him off the hook by giving him a nod. I accept, I acknowledge” and I refused haha. Fuck you, you piece of shit you.
I liked the guy, but you know, he treated us better than any of those other people. Jeff Bale was not a great fan. In fact I had a run in with one of them at a Fight book deal. It was at an art gallery and the gallery owner says to me, “Hey, you want anything?” I go, “Yeah, I’ll have a glass of red wine if you have it.” And a guy turns to me and goes, “What! I thought you were straight edge?”
I go, “Yo bro, I’m 47 fucking years old hahahaha, I can enjoy a single glass.” “Well, [Jello] Biafra is still straight edge.” I go, “I don’t give a fuck what Biafra does with his life. I’m going to enjoy this glass of wine, because I know one glass of wine does not an alcoholic make. Besides which, I remember you dancing around high on an LSD, naked in the park here. So, no lectures from you, please.”
And that was [V “Valhalla”] Vale from RE/Search Books, actually, who used to do Search & Destroy magazine. So there was always this kind of caste system in early hardcore—in San Francisco, very specifically—and we were never in the in caste. We were the outcast of the outcast.
Thinking about the original recording of Mura Mura, at what point did you realise the album wasn’t going to sound the way you wanted?
Steve Ballinger: Tom Mallon in his studio—who we recorded our first record with—had some car speakers, like six-by-nine car speakers in little boxes up on the wall, and he said, “You know, a lot of people are gonna be listening to this record in the car. Do you wanna hear what it sounds like in the car?” And actually I said, “You know, I think it’s a good idea. Let’s tune it to these speakers.” So The Sound of No Hands Clapping, for my part of the mix-down, was kind of adjusted so it sounded best out of those six by nines, not the $800 a piece big JBL things that he had.
So this is not going to work with Muru Muru, and we all kind of knew that it wasn’t going to work. I remember getting the final mix before we did all the record processing, and driving home from Sausalito in my car at four in the morning, or whenever we got done doing it, and putting the cassette tape in and just going, “This doesn’t sound very good.” Then I go, “Maybe it’ll sound better on my system at home.”
I had a fairly decent stereo at home, and it didn’t sound very good there, and I thought, “You know, maybe the music isn’t any good, because when we play this in our rehearsal studio, this sounds amazing.”
Eugene S. Robinson: Or live. Some of them we played live.
Steve Ballinger: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it sounded great. There were some songs in particular that just sounded awful. I just thought, how could we go through all this time and effort and have the outcome sound worse than it sounds when we’re just rehearsing or playing live? How is that possible?
I think just a lack of chops in the studio is what the problem was. And because it wasn’t just hardcore, with me, with my guitar turned up to 10, playing it as loud and as fast as I could, and Eugene yelling. Good or bad, that sounds about the same, but we were doing something that required more than that. And I would say that within a very short time after we recorded the record, and it came out on vinyl, I was like, “Eeghh this has not turned out very well.” You and I started talking about it within months of the record being out, that we’re going to do something with this later. We’re going to go back, somehow fix it.
Eugene S. Robinson: That was a dream. Always. Tom Mallon, who did The Sound of No Hands Clapping was phenomenal. He used to drum for Negative Trend. He was in American Music Club for a period of time, recorded a lot of the Chris Isaac stuff. We really should have gone with him for the second record.
The guy Jerry Harrison, from the Talking Heads, he had bought Harbor Sound and we were very impressed with a real studio. Then, those markers that Steve was talking about, we got, “Yeah, it wasn’t that great, but you know what, it’ll be fixed in the mastering.”
And the mastering guy we got was like a Grammy winning guy, George Horn. He was a phenomenal masterer, but he mastered primarily jazz. We didn’t realize at the time that you need to audition mastering guys. With Oxbow for the Thin Black Duke we auditioned five.
We’d been in music at that point over 30 years, and we had never thought of doing that before. You got to pay five different people, and that was kind of a drag. But, you know, you give them 30 seconds of a song and say, “Show me what you can do.” It was phenomenal how different they were.
But we didn’t know. So they said, “Use George Horn.” We thought we’d be fine. He did the best he could, but, you know, starting with the stuff that Klaus recorded, I mean, [Joe] Chiccarelli when he heard it was listening like, “Why?” He was baffled at every single professional kind of recording choice that had been made. He was like, “Why would you? How could you? Why would you?” He was stunned. But, you know, in 1982/ 83 what do people know?
So tell me about that experience bringing Joe Chiccarelli in for the new version of the record.
Eugene S. Robinson: He’s recorded everybody under the sun from Miles Davis and Frank Zappa. All I did was say, “Hey, man, I want you to listen to something and let me know if you think you could do something with it.” I had a digital file, so I sent him it and he said “Yeah, I think I could fix it. I like what’s there.”
When I was packing up all this stuff to move to Spain I found the tape and I sent it to him. When you have a tape that old, you have to do all this shit to it. They have to bake it. They had to send it to this special woman up in Petaluma, this special oven for baking it.
Then they sent it to where we recorded a lot of stuff for Oxbow, 25th Street Studios. That’s where they digitized it, and then they emailed it to Chiccarelli. And that’s when he called me and was like, “What the fuck.” I was like, “Can you do something with it?” He goes, “I don’t know. Let me see.” Like, why would you record the drums in the same room with the guitar? How is that even possible?
He fucked around with it and fucked around with it, and he said, ”Look, I’m kind of getting there, take a listen.” And we listened to it. It was so good. It was just so clearly so great. This is not to shit on Klaus, right? We didn’t know anything back then either, right?
We knew that, yeah, maybe people weren’t going to like it after The Sound of No Hands Clapping, but we strongly felt that people didn’t hear it. They hated it in principle, but they didn’t understand it because they couldn’t hear it. You know, we spent more money paying Chiccarelli to fix it than we ever spent on the band and its entire existence hahaha.
Aside from the performances, I love how in the new mix so many of the textures and effects come out in the mix. Tell me about how some of those became a part of the record.
Steve Ballinger: There’s a part that was directly from a dream that I had, where every time I tried to fall asleep I would hear the needle drop on a phonograph record that was very scratched and dusty, and I go, “Fuck, it’s gonna be so loud.” And I’d wake up and go, “Oh, I’m having a hallucination.” I’d fall asleep, but it’d happened again. I wanted that on the record.
Eugene S. Robinson: And then the party sounds came from this great little Japanese offering for men who cheat on their wives, and it’s called haha The Alibi Tape. Ostensibly, when you’re at the hotel with your girlfriend, you put this on and play it and you can talk in the background. You can say, “Oh no, honey, I’m at the bar with the people. I’ll be home soon.” It had about eight different things on this tape, and the one that I liked the best was the one with the party.
Why did you decide to completely rename the release Dysillusion: a Mura Mura Remix and give it this completely different identity?
Steve Ballinger: It’s not like anybody knew the name before—except for the 270 people that bought the record, or maybe a couple more. I think that really for us, we just wanted to firmly establish that we were not giving them one of the records out of Eugene’s garage.
We were not just putting new cellophane on those and sending them out and going, “Hey, we got all this crap lying around that we want to get rid of. Take this and pay $20 for it now.” My original conception of this, I was thinking I was going to go back and re-record all my guitar parts.
I was very surprised at how much Joe did to make it sound better, because I did not like how it was at all. I didn’t like any part of it really on the first one. So it turned into something different. I had this idea that there might be all sorts of different stuff on it that was going to be redone, maybe even some of the drums and bass might be redone, but that didn’t happen. Apparently, everything that was there was all that needed to be there.
But for me, I think that Muru Muru is kind of a relic. It’s like something that got dug up in an archeological find and said, “Oh, we found this thing from an ancient time and here’s what it is.” This is a new thing. It’s the same thing, but it’s a new thing. Like, “Oh, we figured out what this is. It’s a calculator for, you know, the Antikythera Mechanism. It was at the bottom of the ocean, and here we have a pocket calculator that does kind of the same thing, but it’s electronic and works better,” you know?
Buy Dysillusion: A Muru Muru Remix from Blackhouse Inc. on vinyl.
Band photo by Matt Etheridge
