The Bad Things are an institution. For eleven years, they have been burning midnight and all other oils in the music-circus-marching band-junkyard cabaret-burlesque-gypsy punk communities, facilitating and contributing to our city’s bang-up (and this case, sometimes banged-up) performance culture.

On Thursday June 27th , the Bad Things will play what promises to be an epic eleventh anniversary show at the Crocodile. Sharing the ticket are Bakelite 78, Miss Mamie Lavona and her White Boy Band, Sinner Saint Burlesque, Melissa Cerise-Bullock of Bat Country and the Blackmoor Travelling Picture Show, Kali of New Orleans’s Freaksheaux to Geaux, Seth “Danny Dead” Witz, Orkestar Zirkonium, Miss J9 Fierce, the Can Can Castaways, and many more.

WAR spoke with Jimmy “The Pickpocket” Berg, lead accordion and general frontman for the Bad Things. In speaking with him, the thing that stuck out the most to us was his unquestioning and unquestionably tireless support of and involvement in his community. The Bad Things do not exist in a vacuum. We spoke of bands sharing members, nationally circulated fundraising efforts, countless cross-genre collaborations, and the sea change in the arts scene after the Cafe Racer shootings last year. We also spoke a great deal about how priorities have changed in the last decade for the Bad Things and its individual constituents. Again, what was clear to us was that, even after all these years, the band remains at the forefront of its members’ intentions, automatically so, like eating and breathing.

We met at Fremont Coffee Company, another Seattle institution.

Wonder and Risk : So you work in Fremont?

Jimmy Berg : Yeah, I work for Brown Paper Tickets doing marketing and sales for them. It’s cool, the office is like half a block away.

WAR : Do the other Bad Things have day jobs, too?

JB : Beau, our guitarist, owns Lottie’s Lounge in Columbia City. He’s owned it for about…two, almost three years.

WAR : That’s the place with that beautiful wrought iron piece behind the bar, isn’t it?

JB : Yeah, actually, our drummer built the back bar.

WAR : Wow. He’s a twofer.

JB : Yeah. He’s a contractor, jack of all trades. And then our banjo player is the manager of Lottie’s, so, we’re all tied in there. And our bass player just kind of does random…he actually is leaving to go – he helps build Burning Man every year. So he’s part of the construction crew.

WAR : And that’s like a livelihood sort of thing?

JB : It’s what he does once a year. And the rest of the year he kind of does odds…kind of contract work, you know. And then…who else? Brendan, who’s our keyboard and trumpet player, he’s a sound designer for ACT theater. So, yeah, we’re all busy. It’s why we never tour.

WAR : You have toured a few times, though, right?

JB : We’ve done three West Coast tours, but it’s been a while. I have a two and a half year old son, too, so that’s made it pretty much impossible for me to tour. But maybe I’ll take him with me on tour one of these days. We’ve done San Francisco a few times, we have a pretty good following there. LA, we have a big following there, but it’s so spread out, so it’s hard to…it’s hard to rally people in LA. We have fans out in the valley, and they’re not necessarily going to come into Hollywood to see us, and there’s not really like a central area. So it’s a really hard town to play. People just don’t go out.

WAR : Do you go to Portland ever?

JB : Yeah, we do, we’re actually going back there in September. The last time we went was when my wife was pregnant and we haven’t been back since, but yeah, we have a lot of fans in Portland. People have been bugging us forever to go back, so we’re playing a burlesque show there in September. We had a cabaret show¹ that we did there with the Can Can Castaways. We did a two month run here at the Can Can and that was super successful and then we took it to Portland for a couple nights. We did two shows at Dante’s that were sold out. That was an epic weekend. Getting all of us there and our crew, our sound guy, and the dancers and photographers, and we all stayed in the same hotel and it was just like…it was an epic weekend. We still talk about it. It was fun. It was really really fun. But…very debaucherous. Microwave almost got thrown into the pool. Everybody almost got kicked out of the hotel. You know. Craziness. I was a younger man then.

WAR : Has it been the same six people the whole time?

JB : Me and the bass player started it, and then Beau who owns Lottie’s was the next member to add on and it was us three for that first year, 2002, and then we added a female singer who didn’t last very long.

WAR: Is she the woman singing on your recordings?

JB : We did do a demo kind of EP with her, but it never really got officially released. We made some homemade, probably about a hundred copies. Very few people have it, I don’t even think I have a copy. And then Funi [Daniels] was our female singer who was on two records. I pretty much have one girl coming in and doing her parts. Um, Melissa Cerise-Bulllock who’s in Bat Country and Glenn or Glenda, she is a big fan. She started Bat Country through our inspiration is what she always said, we inspired her to start Bat Country. So she’s been very…y’know. Has always put a bug in our ear like “If you ever need a singer” and we love her of course and her voice actually works really well with mine, and she’s gonna be on our record on one of the songs, a duet, on the new record. So we just asked her to do it, and gave her – was gonna start with two songs, like, ‘The Breaking’ and maybe another one, but now it’s turned into five or six songs.

WAR : Have you guys been rehearsing a lot?

JB : We haven’t rehearsed with her yet. We’re going to rehearse on Wednesday with her. She’s had the recordings, and she’s pro, and she knows us, we play with Bat Country a lot, so.

WAR : Does the band rehearse pretty regularly?

JB : Yeah, once a week.

[The Bad Things currently rehearse in Miles’s (the banjo player’s) basement. Fans know that the Bad Thing’s Georgetown clubhouse/practice space/backup apartment burned down last year in an electrical fire that wiped out much of their equipment. Since then, they endured an uneasy and brief tenure at a new arts space on Dearborn.]

JB : They were gonna build us a space, and we had a temporary space there…they were gonna build us a permanent space, but then it got to be kind of expensive and we were having trouble finding other bands to share it with, and then when it got time to sign the lease, they were like, “We decided we don’t want to work with you guys anymore.” So we were like, “Okay. Great.” So we lost that space. They caught our drummer sleeping there one night, after a gig. That pretty much put a sour taste in their mouth. And then another band that our bass player was in was using the space to rehearse…the Blackmoor Traveling Picture Show, kind of a big band.

WAR : Melissa’s involved with that, too, right?

JB : Yeah, she was in that, too, it’s all very…incestuous…but they were rehearsing there for their final show and apparently some of the tenants didn’t know who they were and thought they were weird and there was a big giant misunderstanding and we were kind of like, “Well, if this is how it’s gonna be anyway, it’s probably not a good fit, so.” It was kind of a mutual, “All right. We’ll move on.” And now in retrospect I’m like, we wouldn’t have been able to afford that space. It was very very nice, but it would’ve been stressful to come up with the money every month. So yeah, we’re at where we are now, and it actually works out pretty good for this show because we have so many performers, we’re actually practicing at BPT. We have a conference room in my office so we’re going to use that for our rehearsals.

WAR : Sinner Saint Burlesque is performing with you guys, right?

JB : Uh huh.

WAR : Are they going to do stuff through the whole show?

JB : They’re going to perform with the opening bands, too. It’s hard, because we can’t really rehearse [at the Crocodile]. Well, we can, but it’ll cost us money, because they have to pay somebody to be in the room. But, we’re all seasoned professionals, we’ve worked with this kind of scenario before.

WAR : Do you all live in the same area?

JB : We used to all kind of live in Columbia City. Austin, Brendan, Beau, and Miles all still do live there. I bought a house in South Park three or four years ago.

WAR : Do you guys spend a lot of time together outside of band-time?

JB : Yeah we’re all very close, we’re a big family for sure. Beau and me were friends before he joined the band. Austin and I were in a band before the Bad Things together for a couple years. Miles joined…Our old banjo player was kind of a crazy drug addict? Quit onstage while we were playing in Bellingham. Through our set he was walking up to each of us being like, “Fuck you!” and we’re just playing like, “Ho-kay,” and, y’know, we have a reputation for crazy drunken shows anyway, so I don’t think anyone thought anything of it, but he literally like broke his gear down in the middle of the set, looked at me and was like, “I quit!” and I was like, “…Okay!”

WAR : Do you know what in that particular set made him think, “This is the last straw, fuck these guys”

JB : Well…our old singer was making out with his girlfriend in the ladies room and he crashed into the ladies room and caught them together and was jealous or whatever, I don’t know what it was…

WAR : Before the show?

JB : Before the show. And then during the course of the show he went around pointing at everyone and being like, “You gonna make out with him? You gonna make out with him?” fighting with her from the stage. She was in the audience…at that point I just wanted him off the stage, I didn’t really give a shit what happened. He loaded off his gear, walked out of the club, flipped us off, and then left, and we’re in Bellingham. We had a show at the Crocodile, the old Crocodile, the next weekend, so we’re like, “Fuck. What are we gonna do?” And a lot of our songs revolve around banjo. Amazingly, Steve, our drummer, knew Miles, just from playing music in other projects, and he was like, “I know this guy,” he’d kinda been in my ear for months like “I know this great banjo player, we gotta get him in the band” this and that, but I really liked our old banjo player, he had a really distinctive, unique style, but he was just so fucked up that it was just really a coin toss whether he’d be sober enough to play, and sometimes his chaotic personality added to the show, but musically it was getting to where he was more off than on. So funny thing was, that same week we practice on Wednesday, so he calls me on Tuesday and is like, “So, uh, what time we practicing,” and I’m like, “You quit the band,” and he’s like, “Oh.” He’s like, “Well, I was kind of fucked up.” And I was like, “Sorry, you quit the band.” And our practice space, he worked at the factory where the space was in Georgetown, it was like a room off of a factory and he lived there but they kind of didn’t like him very much.

So I called the lady who owned the factory and was like, “Look we kicked McBee out of the band but we want to continue practicing there. I’ll sign a lease with you, I’ll pay rent,” because he was very on and off with his rent, he stole the company truck, y’know? They were amazingly cool people who just giving him second chances. So it was dramatic, but literally within a week Miles was ready to go, we played the gig the next weekend, and he was great. And he’s been with the band ever since. Has ended up being Miles, literally Miles better than our old guy. But I was kind of hoping to track him down and get the whole band to play for the show because we’ve since made up and we’re all cool and I think he’s kind of cleaned his act up a little bit.

WAR : When was that?

JB: That would’ve been 2004 I think.

WAR : So is Miles on all of your records, then?

JB : He’s on all of them but the first one. That’s our original banjo player. So he quit — the drummer on our first record we fired after the recording session because he was drunk through the whole recording session. It’s been a common theme in this band, alcoholism and drug addiction, so yeah…the first record was really a different singer, different banjo player, different drummer.

WAR : And y’all are at work on your fifth record, now?

JB : Yeah, well, we did a record in 2010 with Danbert Nobacon from Chumbawumba and then have been working on this record for a while, but it’s just been like money and time and, y’know? I pretty much took off the year my son was born, we barely gigged at all, just as I adjusted to my new schedule. And then with last year and the Café Racer shootings, every gig we played was a benefit. So we really made no money last year. So we really just haven’t had the money to do it. Or the time. But it’s all done, we actually recorded enough tracks to probably do two records but we’re putting out one now. It’s gonna be a vinyl. So it’s a little shorter than our other records.

WAR : When will it be released, do you think?

JB : We’re hoping winter 2011–2011? 2013-14. We’re talking to some labels right now so we’re going to see if someone will put it out if no one will put it out then we’ll put it out. I’d like someone to put it out. It’s a lot of work and I don’t have a lot of time. So, we’ll see. Yeah, it’s gonna be, I think, our best.

WAR : Have you felt that way about all the records you’ve worked on?

JB : No. We hated our last record. We really hated it. We liked the songs, but the engineer was kind of a freak, the whole process was…we recorded it at Columbia City at the theater, which was when we were all living there, which was great, but it ended up being like…this guy we knew down in the neighborhood had a studio in there, he was a real freak and ended up just not listening to anything we said at all and just did his own thing, and then, because it was in the neighborhood, people were going in, in the middle of the night, and adding parts, or remixing or bringing their levels up. You’d go in and it would sound different and you’d be like, “What is happening”…and then we all got mad at each other and there were all these battles of egos and battles with the engineer…it’s the one we’re the most disappointed with, which is a bummer because I think it’s some of the best songs that we’ve done up to that point.

This time we’re not gonna set a release date. We’re just gonna do it. For the mixing, I was like, “I want no Bad Things in the mixing” so it’s just the engineer, our sound guy, and Brendan, who’s a sound designer, who’s technically a member of the band but not one of the ego-driven members of the band. They’re gonna mix it, no Bad Things can be in the mixing room.

WAR : I was curious about how you guys write your songs.

JB : It depends who it is. If it’s me, I’ll bring in a song that’s pretty much fleshed out and we’ll just arrange and kind of bring out the dynamics. With Beau–Beau will usually have a song pretty fleshed out, but I’ll usually add the vocal melodies and things like that. Everyone writes a little different. It’s very collaborative. If it’s Austin, he usually writes it on bass so it’s just the basic bassline, doesn’t usually have much of a vocal melody in mind so I’ll come up with that. Actually probably my favorite song on the new record is one that he wrote that we all came together on. It’s so cool and so different that anything I would write.

WAR : What’s it called?

JB : ‘Can’t Get Enough of Love’. But it’s very jazzy and kind of loungy.

WAR : Sounds like the title of a torch song.

JB : Yeah, it’s a total torch song. I don’t play accordion on it, I just sing. It’s got electric guitar, it’s just very different for us and I love it. Lots of trumpet. Very sixties lounge jazz vibe which I’d never thought we’d be able to pull off.

WAR : Less “junkyard cabaret”.

JB : Yeah…I think the new record we’re moving away from that a little bit.

WAR : Do you ever have to be like, “No. Not this song.”

JB : Yeah, I mean, that’s something you go in…we’re very passive aggressive. No one will say anything when you play a song. We’ve had a lot of songs that we’ve worked on just to make the writer feel good, and then they just get fallen by the wayside. We call it…what do we call it…we’ve got songs in the clinic, songs in rehab, and some songs just go to the morgue. It’s hard to say that there’s a process, but I guess there is.

You just know. The ones that work, they just pop, everybody gets excited. The ones that we don’t get excited about usually don’t…but sometimes those come back.

WAR : You guys are pretty long-format.

JB : Yeah. We have so many songs. Our sets are insane. We can do two hour sets no problem. The anniversary set is close to two hours. It’s actually hard to do an hour set for us now. Theres a lot of songs that people love. Every show, they’re like, “You didn’t play this!” It’s really hard. Everyone loves our first record, and we, like, I mean…other than ‘Ashes’ and ‘Death of the Inferno’, both of which we’ve rerecorded because we hated the versions on the first record. Most of the other ones, we’re just so beyond that musically that we’re just “Ugh. Really?” Like ‘End Of The World Polka’ that’s one of our big hits and we never play it live. Never. And every time we do, people freak out and it’s like this big hit and we’re like, “Why don’t we play this? Oh yeah, cause we can’t stand that song.”

You’ve been in a band this long, we’re not those people anymore. I think that’s what’s happening with our music. We’re a very different band than we were when we started. I mean, we still have that junkyard cabaret thing, but I don’t think we’re just that anymore.

WAR : Do the other Bad Things have kids?

JB : Nope. I’m the only one. I think I probably will be the only one, too.

WAR : Do the other bad things look on your kid as like a nephew-surrogate-kid?

JB : Yeah. He loves Austin. Austin’s a big guy and he’s done some work on our house and Desi loves WORK and GUYS WORK which is weird cause I’m not like that at all. He always says “AUSTIN WORK”. It’s been hard because he actually hates it when I play accordion at home. He has certain songs that he likes and he likes me to play those song and I have a couple cover songs I play that he likes. Anything that’s not what he requests, he goes, “Okay, papa. Okay, papa.”

“Alright, no accordion. No accordion papa.” So it’s hard, because I can’t practice at night, and I can’t practice during the day when I’m with Desi, which is always, so it’s been like…writing has become a real challenge. I’m trying to figure it out with my wife, we’ve got to carve out a couple hours a week where I can go downstairs and write. But then when you do that, you’re not inspired, and it just doesn’t happen. I recently quit drinking, too, so…a lot of stuff was inspired by drunken nights. It’s like navigating a new life, essentially, and how I can continue being Jimmy the Pickpocket as a sober father. I will say, I play better now, as a result. Live shows are better.

WAR : How does the rest of the band feel about it?

JB : Good. Brendan also recently quit drinking. I think Austin has been taking a break. It’s hard. As you get older…you care about your friends, and you want the best for them, it’s hard to watch them struggle. It’s funny, going through pictures and stuff, this band was really built around partying and alcohol and drugs. It was a big part of the identity of the band. So it’s ironic, we’re a drinking band that’s half sober. As you get older, priorities change. I still like drunk people. Still like hanging out with drunk people.

WAR : They’re funny!

JB : Yeah! And a tradition at our shows was audience members buying rounds of shots for the band or us doing a shot with the audience, that’s all been strange to navigate.

WAR : Do you have to tell them not to at the beginning?

JB : No, I don’t say anything…my thought is, I wanna start having a whisky bottle with apple juice in it, so I give off the appearance of doing that.

WAR : Would you pretend to be drunk?

JB : No. But no one could tell when I was drunk before. I’m a professional. I could tell, but…

WAR : I bet your wife could tell.

JB : Yeah. And listening to some of our live recordings, I’m like, Yeah. Definitely didn’t sing as clearly when I’d had a few drinks. A lot of muttering between songs that no one could understand. We’ve ended sets with multiple rounds onstage and just spent the rest of the night after the show, just drinking all of our gifts as fast as we can, until 2am depending on the bar. Some bars would let us stay.

I get so much more out of playing live, now, as a sober person. I realized actually that I drank through a lot of my nerves. I get more nervous now. It hits me a little more. I never used to think I had stage fright or anything but now going up there sober is a lot different. You get a couple drinks and you get that swagger, doing it sober is a lot harder.

WAR : Do you like the nerves?

JB : I do like them now, because I feel like it pushes me more. I care more. I don’t think I cared before. Whereas now, I appreciate every second I’m onstage. I love it. I remember it, I play better. I feel like physical benefits of it, accordion’s a really physical instrument , just pumping for two hours and singing really hard and playing really hard. It’s like a workout. Before, if I was drunk, I’d be like, “Ughghhg,” dragging, now I’m like, “LET’S GO”, I get energized by it. It’s cool. I can sing so much better. I can really really use my voice, which I don’t think I even thought about when I was drinking.

WAR : Is it better for the band?

JB : I think so. I think we needed to get to that point. I think it was weird for everybody at first, but I think everyone now has seen it as a good thing. Alcohol is kind of a negative influence on the band at this point. Plus, y’know, you get older, you get drunker…faster. Get sloppier. Black out easier. You get to forty and you’re still drinking like you’re twenty. It’s not a pretty picture.

WAR : Do you think there’s ever been a show where all the Bad Things were playing blacked out at the same time?

JB : Yes.

WAR : Just no hesitation, just yes.

JB : Yes.

WAR : More than one show?

JB : Yes. Most of our shows at the Funhouse, I would say, we were completely fucked up.²

No clubs really knew what to think of bands with accordions and whatnot. At the time, everyone loved ROCK. I think at the time, seattle was really going through a shoegazy-rock period…Brian Foss [now of KEXP] was an old old friend of ours. Me and Greg [Adair, of Midnite Choir] played the first gig he ever booked, which was a punk rock show, and me and Greg played banjo and accordion in between punk rock bands at the Offramp.

Right away, it was proof that Brian had a bigger vision of punk rock than most people did. It totally made sense for him. But at the time I don’t think people really made the connection. He played the Bad Things on his punk rock show on KEXP and made a disclaimer, “I don’t think punk rock’s a style of music, I think it’s an outlook on life, this band is punk rock.”

Anyway. Whenever we played the Funhouse we always had horrible sound because the punk rock sound guys never knew how to deal with all our acoustic instruments, we were always feeding back, and we’d always be like, “We’re never playing the Funhouse again, fuck the Funhouse!” But by the end, it was by far our favorite place to play. Our shows there were always the best. I remember the last show we did with Drew and Joe [of God’s Favorite Beefcake], I remember an audience member just screaming, “I LOVE THE BAD THINGS AT THE FUNHOUSE.”

[It’s been just over a year since that last show was played. Three days after the performance, a man shot six people and five of them died. Two of the departed are Drew and Joe, lead singer/guitar/sideshow whiz and bassist for God’s Favorite Beefcake, another pillar of Seattle’s folk-punk sound. Jimmy’s esteem and grief for the duo and their band was evident in how often and how well he spoke of them.]

JB: To me, I always thought God’s Favorite Beefcake were so underrated. It was ironic. We played the last show they played, it was with us at the Funhouse three days before the shooting and that night, weirdly, all of us…I keep going back to it, but Bill and Melissa from Bat Country were there, that whole community, we were all there, watching Beefcake, and it was kind of not that great a turnout.

I book this Punk as Folk weekend every year as part of Folklife, so it was part of that, but it was one of those deals where we had tons of out of town bands playing on the other nights so everyone came to see those bands because they’ve seen us and Beefcake a million times, so I think it was just…no one KNEW it was gonna be the last Beefcake show, but it was an awesome show. That whole night, all we could talk about was, “God, why aren’t there more people here? Why do people not see how great beefcake is?” and, “They’re the best they’ve ever been”, it was just all these talks about them and how great they were. Very strange, because we didn’t know, but in retrospect, we were kind of getting that we had something really special, somehow it just dawned on us…I can’t stop thinking about that night.

The Bad Things all went out to a 24 hour diner in Georgetown that night and just talked about how much we loved Beefcake and our musical community and how this band was so great and why didn’t more people appreciate them, and then two weeks later after the shooting we’re playing to a sold-out Neptune theater of people singing Drew’s songs, and it’s just kind of like, honestly, I was like, “Where the fuck were all you people when they were around?” You know what I mean? Like…KEXP playing their music, it’s like, they had to get killed to play their music? There was a little sense of like…backstage we were all saying Drew and Joe would be cracking up right now to think that all they had to do was get murdered and now they’re rock stars.

So there was a little bit of that. But the good thing was that it did shine a light on a lot of great bands, and maybe people were like, there’s this whole musical scene we didn’t know about. Who knows. It was a strange year. And now it seems like, we’re kind of recovering and dusting ourselves off and looking to the future.

Beyond their 11th band-anniversary show on Thursday, the Bad Things will present the 10th anniversary edition of Cabaret Macabre this October. They are releasing their fifth album in the winter, and are (very) tentatively exploring a New Orleans or Austin tour, two communities to which the band has strong ties. Until then, you can count on gigs at the Comet, Columbia City Theater, and other fine purveyors of beautiful noise. Waste no more time, ladies and gentlemen. Stand up and dance.

1. The cabaret show to which Jimmy’s referring is The Breaking, a musical inspired by the music of the Bad Things that they created and performed with the Can Can Castaways in 2009. He referred to it as “the greatest musical thing he has ever been a part of”. The more we hear about it, the more we are chagrined to have missed it. ?
2. The Bad Things loved playing at the Funhouse, even since before it was the Funhouse. They played their first real gig as a three piece at Zak’s, the previous inhabitant of the now-defunct Funhouse. The Bad Things were an odd sight at the punk venue. ?