Audio By Carbonatix
When Rob Crow and Armistead Burwell Smith IV’s named
their project Pinback, a reference to an obscure science fiction movie of the 1970s,
only the nerdiest of film nerds got the joke.
The San Diego indie rock stalwarts were paying tribute to a key character in John
Carpenter’s low budget debut Dark Star. In
1974, the future director of Halloween
and Escape From New York put
together a direct descendant of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey but with a wacky sense of humor. Informed by the Cold War hysteria of the time, the film followed a small group of interstellar adventurers from Earth on a mission to destroy unstable planets… Until one of their spaceship’s talking bombs gains self-awareness. Co-writer Dan O’Bannon played Sgt. Pinback.
New Timesspoke with Crow
last month about the band, a mutual appreciation for sci-fi, particularly an
appreciation for the genre’s game changer Star
Wars, could not be avoided.
See also
–Pinback’s Rob Crow on the Band’s Sound: “It’s Never Polished Enough for Us”
New Times: I love the
origin of your band name. Have you seen Dark Star on Blu-Ray, yet? Does it
still hold up?
Rob Crow: I mean, I watch it all the time (laughs). It’s
just a good movie that I like to watch. There was a period in my life when I
watched it every day. It was either that or Duck
Soup [the Marx Brothers classic] or all sorts of things.
Sci-fi seems part of
the influence in your songwriting. What do you like about the film genre?
It’s the genre with the least amount of good films attached
to it. There’s tons and tons of science fiction films and maybe 20 really good
ones, and that’s counting the ones that are good by mistake. The ones that I
like most are the ones that have like dirty technology. Like Silent Running or [Star Wars: Episode IV] A New
Hope or Dark Star. Things that
are futuristic but run down.
Like Looper?
Yeah, I liked it.
Can you even count how
many times you have seen the original Star Wars?
Oh, that would be impossible, and then I saw it nine times
when it came out originally.
What do you think of
news of the sequels?
Well, I have high hopes. I mean, J.J. Abrams did real good with that first Star Trek. Yeah, I liked it a lot, and [screenwriter]
Michael Arndt worked on Toy Story 3,
which I loved a lot. Let’s just hope things don’t get really convoluted.
All I
can do is cross my fingers and hope for a hero, like some real characters that
my kids can look up to like I looked up to Luke Skywalker and Han Solo and
Princess Leia and Chewbacca and R2 and C-3PO and Obi-Wan. That would be great,
somebody like that for them, for their own generation.
You’re talking about
what a mish-mash those prequels were…
Oh, those prequels were terrible. And here’s the thing, so
I’m like a completest with a lot of things. Like, I can’t start reading a good
comic book story arc unless all of them are done. It’ll just drive me nuts. So,
they announce, I don’t know how many years ago, maybe 15 years ago, that they
were going to start putting out Star Wars
movies — the classic Star Wars films– in 3-D. They had shown the entire first
reel of A New Hope in 3-D, like when
they first started talking about digital technology and 3-D coming back the way
it is now. It was one of those things
that kick-started the whole deal.
So I’ve been waiting this whole time for them
to finally release it. So they started trickling it out with the first prequel,
so I ended up going back to the theater, watching the goddamn Phantom Menace again to see what it’s
going to be like in 3-D, and then they’re going to put out the next two, I guess, this year, and then they were going to put out the classic trilogy, and then
all of a sudden they’re like, “Nah, we’re not going to do that. We’re not going
to release any more.” So they halted the plan, so now they tricked me into
going to see Phantom Menace again and
not giving me the classic trilogy in 3-D like they’ve been promising forever (sighs).
Oh, no. That’s
terrible.
Well, at least I heard good things about the possibility of
Star Wars Land, which is happening in Disneyland, and I’m close to that, not
super close but just an hour, an hour and a half away. But you know, there’s a
possibility of quitting everything and just going up there and getting a job
being a custodian at Star Wars Land. I think I can see myself doing that.
And all those music
projects you have?
I’ll do them at night. I’ll clean up droids all day (laughs).
It will never be the
same as when you were a kid in the ’70s. It is really one of my first vivid
memories in a theater. I was in kindergarten. My brother was all worried about
the Jawas being burned, and I told them it was OK.
(Cracks up). Why is it OK?
I told them it brings them back to life, which happens off screen, of course.
(laughs) You were a Star
Wars revisionist before the film had even gotten anywhere.
I was six!
You were like, “You’re right. It’s horrible. That Empire
sucks, and they should do everything in their power to defeat them.”
How about you, any
early memories of Star Wars as a kid – how old were you when you saw it?
Oh, man, I don’t know. I was real young. I know it was
before kindergarten because I think the second time I saw it was kind of a
treat after going to my first kindergarten class, or maybe it was first grade,
I’m not sure. I remember seeing it many times in the theater. Whatever excuse I
had to see it I did.
“Oh, the folks want to go shopping at the mall? Is Star Wars playing? Can I go see Star Wars while you guys shop?” It was
usually a good way to placate everyone. Last time I saw it in a theater, like
that, before the re-releases, it was when my parents went bowling, and the
bowling alley happened to be next to a drive-in, and as soon as we pull in, it
started playing at the drive-in, so I just hung out, outside the bowling alley,
and you could hear it just fine from all the outside speakers. It was before
radios at the drive-in. So that was a fun time seeing it too.
But then came the
special editions with the digital effects added. It takes you out of the
movie, didn’t it?
Yeah, it did. It ruined it. Especially, like the dance scene
at Jabba’s palace in [Return of the] Jedi. That was just horrible, horrible
revisionism.
Pinback, with JP Incorporated. 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 13, at Culture Room, 3045 N. Federal Highway, Fort Lauderdale. Tickets cost $15 plus fees. Call 954-564-1074, or visit cultureroom.net.
Follow Hans Morgenstern on Twitter at indieethos.
