Interview by Elena Whidden
Oxnard CA-based hardcore punk/crossover thrash veterans Dr. Know recently played a high-energy show at Hollywood’s Key Club on October 12th, with Ghoul, Mentors, Witchaven and others. Our writers Avinash and Elena were both at that show, and were highly impressed with the band’s performance. So we decided to fix up a chat with founder, vocalist & guitarist Kyle Toucher to explore Dr. Know’s past, present and future in detail, and present their story to our readers. Enjoy Elena’s great in-depth conversation with Kyle below. We have also embedded HD videos of a couple of re-recordings put out by the band this year. Check those out as well, and visit the band on their facebook page for more info.
So you got the new lineup together on the same day that Brandon Cruz announced the break-up of his version of Dr. Know and your lineup is from the This Island Earth and Wreckage in the Flesh era. So were you planning on putting the band back together for a while? It happened so quickly. And what were the logistics of that?
You know it’s weird, it was kind of bizarre providence that it kind of fell on the same day. Oddly enough, it was actually on my birthday. It’s true it was on my birthday, August 18th. In 2009 we tried to get it airborne, and it was just weird dumb luck that it happened that way. Tim Harkins, the other guitar player in Dr. Know, had been kicking around the idea for a few years because the Brandon thing was really bothering us. A) it wasn’t Dr. Know and B) they were running around singing my songs- it was the whole thing you know. The analogy I make is, it’s like watching somebody fuck your girlfriend. It was that bad, and that does weird things to you. It was just a weird collision of timing. We made this announcement on Facebook that we’d had this meeting with the four of us who were on Wreckage: Tim Harkins, myself, Mike Purdy, and Larry White. We announced that we were gonna do it and that same day, by some weird miracle, Brandon trumpets to the world that his version of Dr. Know is broken up. Guess what: They weren’t together anyway! We went ahead and started doing some rehearsals, and Larry couldn’t make the commitment that we needed him to make. And at the same time, my divorce really started snowballing, and everything started getting so out of control and so hectic that there was really no way I could do it. So we had to push it back another 6 or 8 months, there was so much I had to deal with. My whole life got disordered, that changed everything. And once that window opened up again, Mike Vega stepped in on drums, who is the brother of a friend of mine. I was also in a band with that friend in the 90s, and so I asked him, Steve, if he wanted to be in the band and he said “No, get my brother, he’s a badass,” and so, Mike shows up and he was still playing with a band called Lightning Swords of Death at the time. So he hops in, we start playing together, and so it’s all still Ventura County natives shit, personal lives, and playing together, and so we just kept drilling and drilling, so we could do our first show, which was about a year ago, late November in Ventura. The reason why we made the commitment then in 2011 to go ahead and go full steam is of course the air was clear of the whole divorce nightmare, and Tony Cortez from Ill Repute had asked us to do this show at the Ventura Theater for a bowling tournament that he’s run for a year, and so he goes, “If you guys come back and headline this thing, it’ll be huge,” and so we said okay. The place was packed, and the response was really good, and I don’t know if you’ve seen the video for “God Told Me To” that we put out, but a lot of footage from that night is in there. So it just all really clicked and started working, and while we were rehearsing we said, “Well there’s no reason to come back and play the songs, if we’re gonna play, it’s gotta sound better, it’s gotta be presented better, it’s even gotta look better than it did 25 years ago,” because if I’m 50 years old out there playing Dr. Know’s stuff, I can’t go out there being a mess. You know what I mean, we can’t have the band be a half-assed thing. You gotta just pump the whole thing up. You gotta take that go-kart and turn it into a muscle car. So that’s means going under the hood of the song and making sure to at least tweak the arrangements a little bit, tighten everything up, just give it a nice, big, bold, heavier face-lift.
Would you say that’s been one of the hardest parts of coming back for you guys? Changing the go-kart into what you’d like it to be?
Actually, it’s just natural to do it that way, because of the maturity level, and how many years it’s been. I was twenty-two, we ran until early 1990. Now we’re a lot older and more experienced. We have careers now, and we just see things differently. If I hear one of the old Dr. Know albums now, I hear it totally differently than I did when I made it. And it’s like reading a story or a paper you’ve written six months later, you go, “Oh, I should have changed that.” We’re taking the songs, tightening them up, tuning them up; you’ll certainly recognize them for what they are, it’s just they’re presented more professionally and more coherently. We’ve done everything from arranging songs in a certain running order so they blend, to some vocal changes, and some guitar things. Even down to guitar gear and stuff like that. It’s just gotta sound better, and be a much better presentation than it was 30 years ago. It’s a different time, and we’re different people now.
Gotcha. So I saw that Dr. Know has re-recordings out- what are your plans for those? Are you going to trying to reach more people?
Oh yes, definitely trying to reach more people is on the list. No one has been more shocked than us at the demand for them that proved to be out there. So once we started playing, we played Ventura Theater. That was home, that was gonna be good. I think our second show was Baldwin Park, and it just exploded into this huge fiasco. It was just the most crazy thing I’ve ever seen. Seriously, my mic stand just went down constantly, as if it were made of rubber—you’ve never seen so many feet flying in the air! Really fast songs, they shut it down, there was a helicopter, the whole bit. We still have to go back there and finish those guys off! What we’ve been doing for the past year is doing shows around the area to get our sea legs back, get our performance together, get our presentation together, get experience on the set, songs coming in and out, blending things together. But the response is getting better and better each time we do it. The Key Club was really our first proper Hollywood/Los Angeles show, so we wanted to wait to do something like that just until we had a few shows under our belt. Working out the bugs, stuff like that. Power of the Riff was really good for that, in August. So we really haven’t travelled much except in the general area. We did go to Vegas to do Punk Rock Bowling, which was a great gig too. We’ve played with Toxic Holocaust and Ghoul and Midnight, Adolescents. I don’t care who it is, as long as the show is cool and the situation is straight.
Do you guys have any plans for more extensive touring in the near future, maybe outside of Southern California?
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s the goal for 2013, now that 2012 is coming to a close. We’ve got one thing we’re gonna be doing at the end of December in Orange County. But after that, it’s all about getting the record together. We could go on the road right now just on the old catalogue and still do some good shows, but we also want to make a record, get the new material cooking, we’re in the writing process right now. We wanna be real selective and put out a collection of top-shelf songs that are really heavy, really groovy, that knock you over the head, and then take that out on the road. We need to get up to the bay area, we haven’t even been there yet. We still need to go back to the Northwest, back East—we haven’t been on the East Coast in 20 years. So you’re right, all of this needs to be done, and that’s what our 2013 blast radius will encompass. We’ll be taking little trips as we’re getting the record together, just so we can go out and do shows and be seen, and after we get the record done then we’ll go out. And we’ll probably go out like in Alien, in short controlled bursts! We look at shows totally differently now. It used to be a great thing to go play, have fun, it was party, party, party, stay out to 4 AM. Now it’s let’s go out there and do the job and just slay. We have kind of a different attitude about it.
So you guys are making a new record though?
Definitely, that’s what we’re doing now is getting the writing together. We’re taking a different approach to songwriting than we used to. We’re seeing things through different eyes now, and none of us had made an album together in so long. We’d love to unroll, but quality over quantity you know. I’d rather go in there and do a decimating hour, than be onstage for 90 minutes and have some of the lag. You didn’t really think the last Transformers needed to be 2 hours and 47 minutes did you? It’s a movie about fighting bulldozers. We don’t wanna overstay our welcome. We wanna come in, and hit ‘em hard. And I want people to tell their friends the next day, when they see them, “Man, you missed it, you should have gone!” If we’re gonna come out and do it now, it’s gotta sound better and look better. We gotta go erase that harm that the band’s name has taken over the last ten years or so. I wanna block that memory out as much as I can.
Is that why you guys are not “Dr. Know” on Facebook? You’re “Return of Dr. Know” I think?
Well the first gig was billed as “The Return of Dr. Know.” It had a nice ring to it. As for the actual Dr. Know Facebook page, I don’t even know who the admin is. So that might reduce visibility a little bit, but we always have the Dr. Know domain name, we need to get that off the ground as well. If we put out an album, it wouldn’t be under the name of “Return of Dr. Know.” That’s also why we changed the logo a little bit and worked the arachnid illustration into the Dr. Know lettering. I guess you could say it’s rebranding in a way. “Here’s what Dr. Know 2012” is all about. With full respect and admiration for the entire legacy we’re moving ahead, and this is what we sound like. That’s why we did a couple of remakes of existing songs. Dr. Know still plays that kind of music that you recognize, this is what it sounds like. So that’s why we did “God Told Me To,” we did “Mastermind,” we put three out. We’re gonna make them available for download for free, you can just do whatever you want with them. They sound really good because, Tim also recorded and engineered them and mastered them. That’s what he does, he’s an engineer—that’s convenient! He and I have been friends a long time, and we get along really well together, and he knows exactly what it should sound like. That last thing we recorded was the most fun I’ve ever had in a studio. Playing these days, and playing the songs and playing the shows now, especially to a new generation of kids who are just as bat-shit crazy as the ones before—it’s great! It’s the most fun I’ve ever had in this band. The mission is totally different.
How so?
You have to have had the experience, and lived through it, and had all that time in between then and now. It’s a hindsight thing. I’m 50 now. So I see those days as a fun learning experience, a great time, it really was. But now the focus has changed. It’s time to be the best, most entertaining band that we can be. Not that we weren’t conscious of it in those days, it just seems more focused these days, and I get a lot more out of it. I’m putting more into it, and getting a lot more out of it. Plus not being hung over and drunk and smoking cigarettes and doing blow. I’m too old for that. If I were still doing that, I’d be a gray-haired mess. That stuff destroys you. There’s no way we could go out and deliver the way we do if we were still doing that stuff. I’m not gonna fault people for doing it, as long as it doesn’t get away from you, have at it. Nowadays I don’t have time to get loaded! It’s a lot more rewarding cause I get so much more out of it. And I love seeing the audience go batshit—you see so many young faces, I see the old school kids, I see people I haven’t seen at shows in 20 years, it’s cool! So in the end the whole thing is really awesome. My ass is dragging after a show or after a four hour rehearsal, but it’s worth it. And both Mike Vega—he just turned 31 actually—he really helps. You gotta have a young guy back there on the battery, and he’s doing a great job. Tim is a stunning guitar player and he’s having a great time, and then Mike on bass, he’s just enjoying himself, and when we go out there that energy and enjoyment translates too. You’re not going to get the energy back unless you put it out. You get what you give in anything you do. If you haven’t learned that by the time you get to this point in life, you’ve had your eyes closed.
You guys really do put the energy out onstage. That’s for sure.
You got to. When you turn your shit on, and it’s that loud, and it sounds that gnarly, it sounds like it’s speaking in tongues and shit. It’s like that in rehearsal too. You just go off and just do it.
That’s how you guys rehearse? You all get together and just go?
Sometimes we’ll stop, or we’ll say let’s do this or let’s do that, I’ll do something absurd and wrong. I’ll play the song in F instead of E—nobody’s perfect. If we haven’t played for a while, we’ve taken a few weeks off, it’s a little rough for the first 40 minutes. We can tell, but by the third hour, it’s right back to being a bulldozer. We’re really enjoying it though. And the response has been really good though. We can’t wait to get out and start pummeling people. Competition is fierce out there! There’s all sorts of good bands out there these days.
Are there any new bands that you really like?
In addition to doing shows with the newer heavy bands, I hear a lot of stuff on Sirius and stuff like that. I mean, heavy music, especially in times of war with the way things are now- with the world on the brink of big war and economic collapse and all the terrible things that are about to happen in the next few years. Horror films and heavy music can get a real uptake, and heavy music will get an uptake because it is a mirror of what’s going on out there. You don’t get a big bump in Taylor Swift’s popularity when things go bad, but people start going to Slayer shows, they start going to hardcore/metal hybrid shows, the kind that we have going and stuff. The pump is primed, heavy music is huge, it’s worldwide, the pendulum has swung back the other way, people are putting groove and scary riffs back into things. It’s cool, it’s a great time to be playing the stuff. The receivers are wide open, and the world is completely connected together now, so it’s great.
Very cool. I know you did work on Battlestar Galactica—do you still work in film and television? And if you do, how do you manage to fit Dr. Know around your job in film and TV?
We all have responsibilities going on. I work down in Los Angeles, that’s where we rehearse too. I don’t live in Los Angeles, but I work, and we pilot Dr. Know’s ship mostly from down there, so that makes it a little easier. I’ll just jet from the television studio down to the rehearsal studio. I spent a lot of time on Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, those are the shows people know about, and those shows were very good to me, very rewarding, got to do great work, high profile stuff, it’s a great way to make a living. And when you’re in that area of work, you also run into a certain amount of lenience, people can be tolerant of a band, stuff like that. And the people I’m with now, I’ve been with for years. If your stuff looks bitchin’ who cares? You have to make concessions, if we have an episode to deliver in three days, I can’t play a gig… that kind of stuff does happen. Others have other scheduling conflicts. We’ll jump through the hoops as necessary in order to do shows that are important to us. We had to make a couple concessions to make Power of the Riff work, but we pulled it off. Energy in, energy out. If you don’t put the energy in to solve the problem, you’ll never pull it off. If it’s worth it to you to find a way to hustle and make that show happen, whether it’s a day job or something else, if you wanna do it you’ll do it. No matter what it is, whether it’s blowing up space ships on TV or delivering pizza. I’d rather blow up space ships than sling pizzas! But there’s days when that becomes a grind too. It’s a great way to make a living. And Dr. Know is a great outlet for a whole other side of my creativity. I got them working together now.
Well, I’m happy you guys pulled the strings to make these shows work, even though you’ve all got other stuff to do.
Not bad for such old geezers! We just gotta school those kids. Everyone has been very nice and very accommodating to us and very welcoming when we show up, it’s just been great. We definitely wanna continue to do it. As long as people wanna see it, we’ll bring it- as long as we don’t break anything vital! We have to stay in shape, it gets harder as we get older. That’s a reality that has to be dealt with. That’s a big reason why my behavior has changed over the past few years. It makes everything groove better. We’re really excited, we’re excited to be writing again, and we’re not gonna make the same record we made when we were 22. Not gonna make the same record I made when I was 26 and 29 either. It’s still gonna be a Dr. Know album. Once things start getting a little juicy, we’ll start throwing some tidbits out. Maybe we’ll end up in your town! What would you think of that?!
I don’t know what my town would do if you guys showed up, I’m from Connecticut.
Where in Connecticut are you from?
I’m from Greenwich, it’s on the gold coast, I don’t know what they’d do with you guys, you’d turn it upside down.
You’re from a very quaint Connecticut town, you’re saying? We played in Stamford and Hartford, I can’t remember where else. Stamford we used to play religiously, at an old place called the Anthrax Club, which was a basement club that was in Stamford for years. This was before your time, but this place was awesome. I think someone did a documentary film about the place. Everybody played there, it was awesome! You should look into the history of the club, it was a great club. You’d play Hartford the night before, then you’d play Stamford, it was a nice one-two punch, it was fun. All those places are on the list, the Midwest, down south through Texas and Florida. Of course what’s really on the agenda is to finally get this band to Europe, we’ve never done it. That’s got to be done. That’s a whole different thing. Part of the thing that hurt us the first time around is that we had no professional infrastructure. We didn’t have the management, we sort of came and went with lower level booking agents, that kind of stuff, so they never really got a whole pro apparatus behind us. It was kind of hard to flourish in that environment when everything was going through that system. Now all those problems have been alleviated, so that makes things easier too these days.
Are you guys gonna do the big festivals in Europe?
I mean, sure I’d love to, without a record though you can’t do it. I can’t go, “Yeah! Years ago I had underground albums you guys liked,” they’ll be like, “Who the fuck are you?!” I got scars on my knees that are probably older than people at the shows. You have to have something that’s relevant.
I think metal is super relevant over there though. It’s like you were saying, when things take a downturn, people turn to heavy metal, and in Europe there’s such an economic depression right now in so many countries. I think it’ll go over well.
Oh yeah. The only reason that isn’t happening here is that they can print trillions of dollars. There actually is a depression on, you just don’t see it, in the breadlines or anything. You ever see films from the ‘30s and people standing in line for soup and bread? Well the reason you don’t see that now is because of the EBT card. You don’t see that because of digital food stamps. Otherwise you would see that. You’ve got 50 million Americans that are having the government buy them dinner every night. 20% unemployment and zero job growth—that in my opinion is a depression, and we’re in it. There is a depression going on, you just don’t feel it yet. And it’s severe. It ain’t over yet.
Are the conditions you’re talking about, is that something you’d want to talk about on your next album?
I like to stay informed about things. A lot of those subjects, you can call them geopolitical or social, or whatever- not whining, “Oh the world is unfair.” If you look at the lyrics on Wreckage, you can see that kind of stuff on there. The songs “War Theatre” and “Mastermind” are examples of those lyrics. The truth is out there! Here’s the caveat to it. It’s not on TV. You’re not gonna find out what’s really going on as long as you’re still watching TV. As long as you’re head is stuck in some video game, or any of these dumbed-down pop-culture distractions. As long as you’re keeping your head in that, you’re in The Matrix. You’re the guy in the pod with a pipe down his mouth, living in a dream world. All your opinions are being fed to you. You understand what I mean?
I think so… there’s a lot out there interfering with the signal…
TV is designed to lull you into a state of suggestibility. You just turn into a zombie as you watch the TV, then it’s like “Wow, where’d all the time go?” And video games glorify violence and war, and make light of killing people, while dazzling you with pretty pictures. It’s important to realize the kind of manipulation that goes on through large, mainstream monster media channels. In my opinion, the truth is out there, but it’s certainly not on television. I work in TV, but I don’t even own one.
Really?
Yeah. Be a pusher, not a user. Remember what happened to Tony Montana in Scarface? I’m not buying what they’re selling, I’ll put it that way. As long as we have the free internet, as long as the internet is open and not being crushed with terrible regulations, it behooves anybody, especially anybody who is obviously intelligent, to seek out alternative explanations to anything you hear on the news. Only 5, 6, 7 corporations at the very top, control all media in the world. That’s a lot of power in the hands of a very few.
It’s scary when you put it like that.
Well, you’ll find out down the road, life’s good. Life’s great. It can be. I love life, I love being a human being. I believe we all have souls, and we are all fundamentally good. There is a ruling class, there is a control apparatus out there, a bunch of sinister motherfuckers. Real honest-to-god control freaks. They revel in people being distracted, being stupid, and that’s how they take advantage of us. People wander off in a daze, how do they ever get anywhere? That kind of manipulation that does exist.
Do you think music is a part of that?
I mean yeah, look at gangster culture has propagated and force-fed on mainstream society. MTV suddenly just flipped the switch and just force-feeding everybody the coolness of gangster culture, and celebrating failure. How incoherent can you be? How much run-around-like-a-slob every day can you be? How disconnected can you be and still be able to chew gum and walk at the same time?
Do you think it could be a way to get out of that and engage yourself though?
Yeah! If you want out of the trance, it takes something to nudge you out of it. Getting woken up with 9/11 was a big part of it for me. It scared the bejeezus out of me, I thought World War III was gonna start and in a way, it sort of had. I think music can do that, it’s a nice communication tool for that. People are writing about worldwide tyranny, if you wanna call it that, pressure from a world governing body. People trying to tell you that polar bears are dying cause you’re driving an SUV, absurd shit like that. And people are believing it. There’s a coal power plant, you’re driving an SUV, that’s what’s making the weather warm and that’s why there’s a hurricane. Should we give Al Gore money? Where’s the logic in that? The weather is controlled by a giant fusion reactor in the sky, known as the sun. Sorry! And there is weather manipulation going on, but not by everyday citizens running around doing their jobs. You can see it! You live in Los Angeles, you can see the geoengineering going on over Los Angeles. When you look up and see giant chem. trails that don’t evaporate, you know something’s going on. But people don’t wanna look up. “I got my Obama sticker! I got my Romney sticker! I like the reality show!” They don’t wanna be shaken out of the trance, because that’s scary. Like Neil Sedaka said, waking up is hard to do. It can be scary out there. Reality isn’t all kittens and rainbows. But it doesn’t mean that you have to live in terror. Being awake is being empowered. Being awake is actually being emboldened, because you’re no longer afraid. Look at the way people act when they get pulled over by a cop. They start groveling, shaking, calling him “Sir,” changing their behavior. They don’t just go, “You work for me!” There’s examples, a lot of stuff is force fed people by en masse, to keep up the distractions, to keep them from what’s really going on. The banks are fucking over everybody. “Oh, I got a 53-inch TV in my house, I must be wealthy even though I owe 3 grand on it.” There are a lot of people in that somnambulist state. There are a lot of people who know something weird is going on though; people are waking up. The world is much wider than it appears. I don’t claim to have all the answers or know it all- there’s some shit out there! We are much more than we realize. There’s much more to being and consciousness than we realize we are. Remember, we only function in this special invisible light, and there’s a lot more out there than that. It’s a big universe.
Very cool. Thank you again for taking the time, I look forward to the new Dr. Know record, and to next year!
Give us a shout any time you wanna see what’s going on! If you wanna see what we’re doing right now, it’s “Return of Dr. Know” on Facebook for the time being. And while we have the free internet, we’ll be in touch and we’ll have our site up in the next few days, our songs will be available for download there. Watch for heavy stuff coming down the way in the future!
Related: LA gig review