I GET WET

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and many more …

Andrew W.K.’s

I Get Wet

Phillip Crandall

Bloomsbury Academic

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ISBN: 978-1-62356-550-3

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Norfolk NR21 8NN

I Get Wet

Andrew W.K.

“It’s Time to Party

” (1:30)

2. “

Party Hard”

(3:04)

3. “

Girls Own Love”

(3:13)

4. “Ready to Die” (2:54)
5. “Take It Off” (3:10)
6.

“I Love NYC”

(3:11)

7. “

She is Beautiful

” (3:33)

8. “

Party Til You Puke

” (2:34)

“Fun Night”

(3:22)

10.

“Got to Do It”

(3:54)

11.

“I Get Wet”

(3:23)

12. “

Don’t Stop Living in the Red

” (1:40)

•

vii

•

Contents

Puke (Preface) viii

Ink (Introduction)

1. Perilymph

2. Juice

3. Sweat

4. Smoke

5. Blood

109

ˈkəm 126

Ice (Interviews and Sources) 146
Stop Bath (Photographs) 152
Champagne (Acknowledgments) 156

9781623567149_txt_print.indd 7

26/11/2013 12:20

•

viii

•

Puke

Isn’t that fun?

—Wendy Wilkes

Andrew is standing on his Los Angeles kitchen floor,

but he could topple over in a projectile-heaving daze

any second now. Seeing his wobbly reaction playing out

exactly to script, Wendy Wilkes is ready with Step 2 of

her devious master plan.

As a girl growing up in northern California’s Bay Area,

Wendy spent 360-some days of her year ticking off boxes

until the next Walnut Festival. Commencing as summer

turns to autumn in Walnut Creek, the festival officially

celebrates the beloved crop whose groves replaced area

vineyards during Prohibition. Whatever the reasoning, it

was young Wendy’s opportunity to enjoy rides that only

got more twisty, twirly, and exciting with each passing

year. Wendy went on to study English during the Lew

Alcindor-era at UCLA, and, after graduation, train as a

paralegal during that profession’s infancy. There, she met

Jim Krier, a professor of law who would later co-write the

preeminent casebook, Property. In Jim, she would find love,

happiness, and a life confined to lame merry-go-rounds.

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

“I quickly found out that this guy was not going on

any ride with me ever unless it stayed on the ground,”

Wendy says. “I was doomed.”

So when Wendy gave birth to Andrew in May

1979—“I was delighted to have a son,” Jim says, “[and] I

went home and told the dog we had a boy in the family,

then three hours later went off to teach”—the mother

saw, among many adorable first-child traits, a partner

in rollercoaster-riding. Shortly after Andrew learned to

walk, Wendy put her plan into action.

Wendy led Andrew into the kitchen and picked him

up, placing her arms under his tush and his arms around

her neck. Holding his body tightly against hers, she

began twirling around, hoping some vertigo would shake

his equilibrium to the diaper-donning core. After three

or four intense spins, Wendy bent down to stand Andrew

up on the kitchen floor.

If body language is any indication, this kid has no clue

what’s happened or why his body is responding accord-

ingly. He looks to his mom, who, as the spinner, created

this internal mayhem and perhaps has an explanation

as to why the dishtowels are waving. In this instance,

the dosage of spin needed to carry out Step 1—getting

a toddler dizzy—would not impair the spinner’s ability

to carry out the second and most important step of this

plan.

Allowing for the dizzy effect to make just enough of

an impression on the young brain, Wendy looks Andrew

in the eyes and, in a gesture quite opposite to bringing

him to barf’s edge, lays some comforting mother-voice

on thick.

“Isn’t that fun?”

I G E T W E T

•

The child, reassured by his mother’s acknowledgment

and approval of the feeling, laughs.

“Don’t you love that?”

The child, not unlike one who falls but cries only

upon being coddled with sad reactionary faces, laughs

some more. “Do it again!” Andrew commands.

The plan has worked. Little Andrew yearns to push

the limits of dizzying intensity again and again in that

kitchen. As boxes keep ticking, they take the game to

their new kitchen in Ann Arbor, Michigan. From there,

they’ll take it outside, where Wendy will hold Andrew

by the outstretched hands and spin until the earth blurs

below.

“Isn’t that even more fun,” she asks. “That’s so much

more fun than twirling with Mom holding you! You can

twirl way out there really fast.”

The child, instinctively now, laughs some more. And

when the child gets a baby brother, Wendy will repeat

the process.

“Each boy, same thing,” Wendy says, proud

of her efforts and thankful for a life not spent on

merry-go-rounds.

“They are perfect. They go on everything.”

•

Ink

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points
out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of
deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to
the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred
by dust and sweat and blood … who at the best knows in
the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the
worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that
his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls
who neither know victory nor defeat.

—Theodore Roosevelt, “

Citizenship in a Republic

”

Hey you, let’s party!

—Andrew W.K.,

“It’s Time to Party”

Andrew Wilkes-Krier is sitting in his wheelchair, ready

to puke, sweat, bleed, or pulverize even more unsus-

pecting bones if this live TV performance calls for it.

The network exec, seeing the energetic musician he

booked in this lame position, puts the kibosh on the

entire thing.

The accident happened weeks earlier on the

600-square-foot stage of the House of Blues, Los Angeles,

I G E T W E T

•

where Andrew W.K. was taking advantage of every

square-inch, running around joyously and carelessly as

usual. The band—consisting of the mic-clutching and

occasional keyboard-pounding Andrew, three guitarists,

a bass player, and only one drummer for now because

they wouldn’t get around to adding a second until the

following spring—is in the midst of its third circling of

the United States in six months, but the first full tour

(and West Coast show) since the follow-up to

I Get Wet

was released. Hyperactive as ever, Andrew is growling

the chorus to “Your Rules,” a song on the latest release,

but from Andrew’s earliest demos, that, when performed

on Late Night with Conan O’Brien weeks earlier, was

introduced by Andrew as a song “for anybody who has

ever believed in music.”

“We will never listen to your rules,” shouts the leader,

uniting an L.A. crowd that, throughout the set, will climb

up onto the stage and prance about the ever-shrinking

hallowed ground in a frenzied scene, still a trademark of

AWK shows. Chorus completed, Andrew leaps around

some more, charging himself up for his second-verse cue.

In doing so, he accidentally wraps his microphone cable

around his leg. As he explained on his website days later:

“That happens all the time, and I usually just dance my

way out of it, but this time when I came down from the

last jump … I got more tangled in his bass cable and I got

my foot pulled out from under me. At the same time that

happened my foot got rolled and crushed and twisted

and I fell over.”

Feeling a sharp pain but thinking nothing of

it—“twisted my ankle,” he wrote, “happens to me every

now and then”—Andrew powers through the rest of the

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

concert on pure adrenaline; no one the wiser, no song the

sufferer. It’s only when the lights come up and the rush

wears off that the subtle pain becomes a siren. Partying

produces yet another battle scar, joining on-stage head

injuries for the sake of the show and on-demand hemor-

rhaging for the sake of the legend.

Loaded into the ambulance, the hobbled showman

keeps the driver idling so he can sign every last autograph

request, a common post-show gesture he would later

push to its extreme in a 24-hour marathon signing

session in Japan. Once at the hospital, X-rays show he

shattered his right foot. His options: cancel the tour’s

remaining shows and rest at home for two months, or

perform while confined to either a bench, crutches, or

a wheelchair. Gnarly stage-wheelies are envisioned, and

shows, including Anaheim’s, less than 24 hours later, only

get rowdier.

“I just lock the wheels, and then hold on for dear life

as I try to whip myself back and forth with all the power

I have,” he would explain on his site. Fans who didn’t see

him seated in concert got to witness this wild ride on

Andrew W.K.’s live concert DVD,

Who Knows?

Edited

in a process called sync-staking, where clips from many

different shows were spliced together to create what

sounds like one seamless performance, the interwoven

wheelchair antics feel like a compilation of greatest spins,

slams, and spasms. Viewers who tuned in for the 2003

Spike Video Game Awards show were set to see it, but

then that exec stepped in.

“When they saw I was in a wheelchair they just

wanted me to cancel,” he told the

Guardian

in the United

Kingdom in this unedited, clearly British-ized interview.

I G E T W E T

•

“They said: ‘No it doesn’t look good, there’s a reason

why you don’t see people in wheelchairs performing on

telly!’ I was just baffled by that and then I realized, holy

smoke, you really don’t see people in wheelchairs on

television! Why the fuck is that?”

The network relented, and the national audience did

get to see the band crank through a medley that gets its

largest response when Andrew declares, “When it’s time

to party, we will party hard”—the inviting intro line to

his debut’s breakout anthem, “

Party Hard

.” His charis-

matic vessel, compacted by his own reckless abandon,

develops an even stronger gravitational pull.

“Afterwards the guy apologized, he said he was wrong,

the show was amazing and thanks for doing it,” Andrew

told the

Guardian

. “I realized if you’re injured it’s not just

getting around that changes, it’s the whole way you’re

treated.”

No rock cliché—lesson learned the hard way,

collateral bodily damage, the show having to go on—has

ever resulted in such incredible footage. “I didn’t know

if people we’re going to like it,” he confessed on his

site, “but me and the band just slammed it as hard as we

possibly could. In honor of everyone who never gets the

chance. In honor of everyone who has to be in a wheel-

chair forever.”

“In honor of all those left out and discriminated

against and told no, we slammed.”

***

“

It’s Time to Party,

” the first track off

I Get Wet

, opens

with a rapid-fire guitar line—nothing fancy, just a couple

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

of crunchy power chords to acclimate the ears—repeated

twice before a booming bass drum joins in to provide a

quarter-note countdown. A faint, swirling effect inten-

sifies with each kick and, by the eighth one, the ears

have prepped themselves for the metal mayhem they

are about to receive. When it all drops, and the joyous

onslaught of a hundred guitars is finally realized, you’ll

have to forgive your ears for being duped into a false

sense of security, because it’s that second intensified drop

a few seconds later—the one where yet more guitars and

instruments manifest and Andrew W.K. slam-plants his

vocal flag by screaming the song’s titular line—that really

floods the brain with endorphins, serotonin, dopamine,

and whatever else formulates invincibility.

***

A pianist sits down to his instrument and plays an

original piece. When the song is over, a man approaches

the pianist and says, “Tell me about the song and what it

means to you.” Without saying a word, the pianist simply

begins playing the song again.

It’s one of a few parables Andrew has offered when

asked about his music’s meaning. Perhaps “playing the

song again” is his practical, albeit less punchy, spin on

that dancing-about-architecture chestnut. Or perhaps it’s

gentlemanly tact directed toward an enquirer who wants

to know what a song entitled

“Party Til You Puke”

truly

means.

The purpose of this book will be to provide context

for the

I Get Wet

experience as a whole, not to interpret

or over-intellectualize its individual songs. The album

I G E T W E T

•

was a polarizing sensation when it debuted, first in

Europe in 2001 and then in North America in 2002.

It didn’t capture the zeitgeist of rock at the turn of the

century; it captured the timeless zeitgeist of youthfulness,

energized, awesome, and as unapologetically stupid as

ever, and that created immediate deriders. Implying

some unspoken political message to each song’s lyrical

text wouldn’t reaffirm polarized positions; it would drive

both polarized camps to disgust.

***

Andrew tells me this album isn’t about him, a perfect

sentiment reaffirming both the feelings I brought in and

the ideal I wanted to uphold. As a fundamental principle,

I wanted to avoid telling my story in this book; to put it

another way, I wanted to avoid the word “I.” His mother’s

story about rollercoaster-prep and dizzying context made

me reconsider.

Depending on what you’re bringing to this author–

reader endeavor—and, in the truest spirit of this album,

all readers regardless of backgrounds are invited—the

stories within this book may offer twists and twirls you

feel uncomfortable with. That could be as innocent as

references made to unfamiliar people, bands, or genres,

or as disorienting as entire topics that have little to do

with your

I Get Wet

enjoyment. I’m not just spinning you

around the kitchen now; I’m actually pointing out things

to look at on the side. I’m curating someone else’s life

and work (Andrew’s) and contextualizing someone else’s

experience (yours). You should probably know two things

about your spinner:

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

1) I snatched my car keys the moment the “Party

Hard” video credits rolled so I could go buy the CD. And

the first time I saw Andrew W.K. play, I was so overtaken

and lost in euphoria that, afterwards, I couldn’t remember

a single between-song sentiment Andrew shared with us,

only the added bonus excitement that context instilled.

Those feelings are sacred and that context incredible,

and this book shall henceforth lean heavily toward the

latter.

2) I have no room in this book or reason in my heart

for showy prose or superfluous reference making. If a

passage seems daunting, I assure you it’s there for the

bigger picture or some pending payoff. As one who reads

these books hoping for the same courtesies, I’ve always

felt the only place a dredging of this magnitude can come

from is out of love in its purest form.

***

Pitchfork

gave

I Get Wet

an abysmal 0.6 rating when

it came out—“Maybe Y2K really was Armageddon,”

the reviewer wrote, “and maybe Andrew W.K. is just

the first of four pending horsemen”—then, at the end

of the decade, named it one of its Top 200 Albums of

the 2000s. (In a review packing the phrase mea culpa

in the first sentence,

Pitchfork

gave the 2012 reissue an

8.6.) Talking about Andrew W.K. bred polarization and,

interestingly, self-reflection. Three gentlemen debated

“the death of irony” for

Ink 19

shortly after

I Get Wet

’s

release. Christopher R. Weingarten, the topic’s broacher

and eventual 33 1/3 author, asked: “If he is indeed being

ironic, should he be reviled for being a gimmicky jape?

I G E T W E T

•

Or revered for being a brilliant appropriation artist? If

he is indeed as serious as he says, should he be lauded for

creating visceral body music? Or derided for cock-rock

arrogance?” The rebuttals painted Andrew’s music as

“icky bubblegum metal (with umlauts over the ‘u’)”

and unworthy of any conversations, period. Eventually,

the debate broke down over its impenetrable layers of

arguing about irony arguments—“I made no argument

whatsoever as to whether the work of AWK is or is not

ironic,” wrote rebutter M. David Hornbuckle. “My main

point is that he sucks”—but Weingarten’s questions

about post-modern enjoyment based on artist context

are still interesting, especially since Andrew’s celebrity

only got larger in the decade that followed

I Get Wet

Andrew W.K. sends out “Party Tips” to his social-media

followers. He helped a fan throw a birthday party on one of

the television series he hosted. He opened a nightclub called

Santos Party House in New York City. He gives slightly

re-phrased, often verbose mission statements to anyone

who will give him a platform (“My personal mission, my

goal, my life’s work is to not only discover myself, but to

discover what that self of my own is meant to do,” he told

a Pepperdine newspaper, “and so far, and I could be wrong,

but so far it is to party”) then resorts to ALL CAPS simplicity

for his online profiles (“ANDREW W.K. = PARTY”). If the

man didn’t have such a defined outer shell—unwashed

white jeans, unwashed white T-shirt, unwashed hair—you’d

envision him wandering the streets with nothing but a

megaphone and a sandwich board, “Party Party Party”

spray-painted in blood red on both sides.

What makes Andrew’s “play the song again” anecdote

such an odd, yet beautiful sentiment is that he does

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

have a crystal-clear message outside the confines of the

I Get Wet

vinyl groove, one he’s absolutely hell-bent on

sharing with the world. Man-at-the-piano Andrew is in

the camp that music should speak for itself, regardless of

context, but to even be aware of that opinion, you would

have had to read an interview with the artist, the mere

intake of which is proof that artist-contextualization

is unavoidable. The only music without any context

comes on some universal, unlabeled medium, left at your

doorstep by an anonymous stranger.

Andrew’s extracurricular activities have been consistent

and complementary to the

I Get Wet

spirit, with charisma

in lieu of melody driving the message home. Asking

whether that drive is serious or ironic says more about

listener expectations than artist intent.

***

“The true book of the meaning of life has one blank

page.”

Oh, there are paradoxes aplenty in the Andrew W.K

story. This book will shine light on a few of them, while

paradoxically providing one of its own.

At some point you will put this book down, be it

after the next damned brain-wrinkle or when the final

word on the final page is read. Regardless of when that

happens, rest assured that this book did not nor can

it tell the definitive history of Andrew W.K. and the

making of

I Get Wet

. As your trusted curator, I’ll admit

up-front that we—that is myself, Andrew, and all of his

family and friends quoted within—didn’t discuss every

aspect of Andrew’s art and life, to say nothing of the

I G E T W E T

•

choices I alone made about which discussed aspects

were highlighted and which were deemed expendable.

Throughout these highlights, I’ve taken particular care

to qualify statements and credit sources out of respect for

the subjects discussed, the person quoted, and collateral

parties who might be unable or unwilling to verify each

and every account.

There will surely be detail oversights and ideas under-

developed, and it’s a shock that any book would claim

success in telling a complete story. No one wants to be

easily summarized, and the above disclaimer is as close

as I can get to extending the luxury to an artist and an

album so befitting and deserving. If I may try to wrap

Andrew W.K.’s personality up in a nice little bow, it is

one resolute on destroying nice little bows from within.

(It’s also one of complete generosity; he volunteered his

time and energies for this project in humbling ways, and

was beyond candid way more than 93 percent of the

time.)

I couldn’t help but think about my historian hang-ups

when I first read that blank-page, meaning-of-life quote;

it was buried in an article about Scream 2 in Andrew’s

WOLF “Slicer” Magazine, a creation of genius we will get

to in due time.

***

The first two chapters will cover some of the art Andrew

created prior to

I Get Wet

, including his teenage efforts

in Ann Arbor and the EPs he made in New York City

that would hint at the bedlam to come, while the third

chapter takes an in-depth look at this album’s recording.

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

Andrew told

Rolling Stone

, “Thousands of hours were put

into making sure that the songs didn’t sound like they

had thousands of hours put into them.” What resulted

was a focused, singular sound that never decrescendos,

with effects and overdubs more ambitious and far

cleaner than the metal genre had ever heard. Ionian and

mixolydian scales have been used to pop-ify music for

years, but

I Get Wet

’s unrelenting use of bright keyboards

and piles of guitars to carry the blissful melodies is its

irresistible signature. Its layered sound confronts with

volume and texture, but not in gruff distortion, face-

contorting guitar solos, or false machismo. It gets labeled

as metal, but there’s clearly something distinct about

his particular brand that seems to eschew the defining

guidelines. The derider in the

Ink 19

debate called it

“icky bubblegum metal,” and if you ignore the subjective

four-letter adjective, one could rationalize the longer one.

The bubblegum descriptor carries with it damning

connotations of being easily consumed and disposed,

appealing to those with yet-to-develop tastes and

overflowing piggy banks. That’s not necessarily an

incorrect sentiment, but it disarms the word of any

redeeming qualities, of which

I Get Wet

boasts many.

“Unlike all the astral-planing acidwreck dreck you were

soon burning out to, bubblegum laid all its cards out, not

disguising itself as anything (i.e. ‘smart’) it wasn’t,” wrote

Chuck Eddy in the pages of an 1987 issue of Creem.

“You didn’t have to study these hooks paramecium-like

under a microscope or anything; they were so blatantly

cute on the surface you just wanted to tickle ‘em under

the chin. Which is fine, because rock’s not supposed to

require much thought.” Andrew’s chin may be soaked

I G E T W E T

•

with blood, but the urge to jump up on his shoulders and

take in—and take on—the world from his point of view

is just as alluring.

Interestingly, the album shares some of bubblegum

music’s more subterranean, shadowy characteristics

as well. The genre exploded in the late 1960s with

songs like “Sugar, Sugar,” created by faceless writers

and musicians who could remain hidden behind the

cartoonish characters—literally and figuratively—

that made up the bands (in this case, The Archies).

Abbreviations and amazing aliases abound throughout

I Get Wet

’s liner notes, effectively staging the first

dominos that, some say, cast shadows on Andrew the

Artist. Those who crack this spine asking only the banal

questions may not find the shade of some of the answers

as satisfying as I do.

The fifth chapter will look at the bonds created in I

Get Wet’s aftermath, and the sixth will put this album,

those bonds, and this shared experience in a perspective

that will hopefully prove both fulfilling and full of

potential, more than any blank page ever could.

***

Every time, without fail, the brain has to weather the

same flood of sound, chemicals, and emotions when

confronted with that first

“It’s Time to Party”

decla-

ration. As it takes a second to find its aural orientations

in the head, his chant becomes even more insistent. “Hey

you, let’s party!” With this invitation, you, the listener,

have hereby joined forces with Andrew W.K. on the

party front. And you are not alone.

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

Despite the first-person singular pronoun in the

album’s title, the

I Get Wet

experience is a shared one

between artist and audience. You’ve been invited right

off the bat and, in the first verse, told “we’re gonna have

a party tonight.” This isn’t an us-versus-them narrative

dynamic; it’s an inclusive, “we” for the sake of “we,”

potential-filled promise that finds its way into most

tracks literally and all tracks spiritually. And it’s the only

kind of party and fun we want.

“We” isn’t a revolutionary narrative device, but in the

hands of Andrew W.K. there is no exclusivity to who

can join. In a 2009

New York

magazine profile of Santos

Party House, Andrew W.K. revealed he’d much rather be

the party’s organizer than the reveler: part of the group

as opposed to the literal life of the party. And while

party may be an all-purpose, universal word applied to

whatever topic Andrew W.K. happens to be talking about

in and outside of the music, “we” is not. “We,” even in all

its inclusive openness, is specific.

“We” are those that find our place with the daring,

non-timid souls who only know victory.

•

Perilymph

The inner ear … consists of the bony (osseous) labyrinth, a
series of interlinked cavities in the petrous temporal bone, and
the membranous labyrinth of interconnected membranous
sacs and ducts that lie within the bony labyrinth. The gap
between the internal wall of the bony labyrinth and the
external surface of the membranous labyrinth is filled with
perilymph, a clear fluid with an ionic composition similar to
that of other extracellular fluids …

—Gray’s Anatomy, on the inner ear

Jesus’ return is supposed to be heralded with the sound
you’ve never heard that you can’t describe that is the
sound that changes everything. This sounded like the
end of the world.

—Andrew Wilkes-Krier, on a noise he made

When Andrew was four years old, Jim took piano lessons

from an acquaintance at the University of Michigan law

school. Andrew had already shown interest in the brown

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

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upright sitting in the family living room, pulling himself

up to a standing position before he was able to walk and

blindly poking any white key he could reach. Jim’s teacher

began staying an extra 15 minutes after each lesson,

playing along with Andrew to make musical impressions

upon him rather than bestow any technical instruction.

That same year, the University of Michigan’s music

school started a program to match community youths

with Master’s-seeking students who needed teacher

training. Andrew’s parents wanted to enroll him when

he was six, but first he’d have to try out in one of those

closed-room, no-moms, we’ll-call-and-let-you-know

auditions against older children, some of whom could

read both music and words.

“The director called me back and said, ‘What we

were so impressed with is that he made up music,’”

Wendy says. “He didn’t play ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’

or ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’—he’d just start making

music. We’d say ‘Where did you learn that?’ and he’d go,

‘I made it up. I have another one!’”

The director told Wendy that Andrew, with

his advanced ear, might find learning to read music

frustrating. Eventually, years of regular classes and

hourly flashcard practices and pressure-packed classical

recitals did catch up, all but burning Andrew out by the

time he was in junior high. The director decided to take

Andrew on personally rather than have him quit the

program. At the time, she was preparing to play piano for

a production of Jesus Christ Superstar, and the sounds of

Andrew Lloyd Webber found their way into her lessons.

“This huge music pounding him—it was like the light

bulbs went on,” Wendy says. “We also had this recording

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of Hooked on Classics. It’s just this up-tempo classical music,

and he would play it so loud, then run around the house to

these huge sounds. That took him over the hump.”

Hooked on Classics also took Andrew into a realm of

physical happiness beyond being happy and his brain

feeling good. “It’s where it sends to every version of

your senses,” he says, “and then even beyond into your

soul and then into the world around you. When you’re

in that state, everything looks cool, everything seems

more interesting, and you’re more enchanted by your

surroundings, like the world has improved.”

***

Andrew’s childhood home in Ann Arbor is a center

hall colonial built in the late 1920s, with wood floors

that creak with every tiptoe, never mind resonate with

every disco-pop interpretation of Bach concertos or the

reactionary freak-out. (The owners prior to Andrew’s

family actually brought in a local band called The Iguanas

to play their daughter’s sweet 16th birthday party—and

one can only imagine the raw power a full band had

on those floor panels.) The black Yamaha piano that

replaced the brown upright when Andrew was five sits

in the corner of the open, bookshelf-lined living room

on the first floor, where it projected rehearsed scales,

on-demand Christmas carols, and inspired improvisa-

tions for all to hear from basement to attic. Andrew’s

younger brother Patrick says 55 Cadillac, Andrew’s 2009

album of piano improvisations, “reminds me of home,

because it’s just Andrew on the piano doing whatever—

it’s exactly what the house used to sound like.”

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The basement ultimately became the noise-emitting

epicenter in Andrew’s musical world, but first it was a

playground for Patrick and his friends … and laboratory

for young Andrew’s creativity. “Andrew’s birthday parties

were pretty normal,” Wendy says, “but Patrick’s birthday

parties were not normal because Andrew ran them.”

Patrick remembers him and his friends embracing their

guinea-pig roles, crawling through winding, interlocking

cardboard-box tunnels, each box with a different gory

mask or frighteningly lit horror scene that was “very

realistic and scary and intense for a little kid,” Patrick

says, “but a lot of fun.”

***

Ann Arbor’s musical history doesn’t begin and end with

The Stooges’ debut album—after all, the MC5 released

their debut album first, and the Michigan student who

wrote that first Paul Is Dead article did so just after The

Stooges came out in 1969—but to many, Iggy Pop and

his band are the rock gods by which all others shall be

compared. Andrew W.K. doesn’t know a single song.

“I still don’t,” he says. “I’m not proud of that and

it’s not meant personally, but in Ann Arbor and in

Michigan in general, groups and acts from that region—

especially legendary ones—they took up a lot of space.”

So much space, in fact, that Andrew’s own living room

isn’t immune to the saga. Before Iggy was Iggy, he was

James Osterberg, playing sweet 16 house parties with the

band from which his nickname derives.

***

I G E T W E T

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“We’d say ‘Oh, the Stooges suck,’ just to be assholes,”

says Jim Magas, who, alongside Pete Larson, co-founded

the band Couch.

Examine any scene and you’re bound to find a backlash.

Wait for the ebb to flow and you’ll witness a revival that

counter-attacks that backlash. Zoom in closer and you’ll

notice crossed arms awaiting the revival, perhaps with some

of those original scenesters split between the camps. Get

distracted by some all-encompassing, planet-misaligning

sound from the side and that’s where you’d find Magas,

Larson, and—from all accounts—the tens of kids that kept

Ann Arbor neighborhoods noisy in the 1990s.

“We never thought the Stooges sucked by any stretch

of the imagination,” Magas clarifies. “It was really just a

sense of making fun of everything and totally lampooning

everybody, from the promising bands in Ann Arbor to

the sacred cows.”

Magas describes Couch as a “strange, kind of weirdo

rock band.” Bent on outbursts of abstract intensity

more than they were hooks, choruses, or any of the

other stereotypical song-trappings, Couch found both

friends and enemies in nearby Chicago’s no-wave

scene. Quintron, a musician who ran (and lived in)

a ramshackle Chicago theater, remembers the band’s

first show there being so polarizing that a couple broke

up over “whether Couch sucked or not.” Chicago,

Quintron says, was “more driven by people in art

school, and I liked the Michigan noise scene better

because it was freer and funnier. Couch was hands-

down the king of that whole spirit.”

***

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Back when he was a kitchen-spinning toddler in California,

Andrew’s family lived next to a couple and their two

college-aged sons. The two young men took a shine to

their little neighbor, and especially got a kick out of calling

him Andy. “It was like calling him ‘Sue,’” his mother says.

“He didn’t know that’s a nickname for his name. He would

just ignore them and they were dumbfounded.” And, like

that, a more subtle Wendy mission had succeeded: “I hate

that name,” she says of Andy, “and I figured if Andrew

introduced himself as Andrew, then he’s not even going to

respond if you don’t call him by his name.” Early on in his

elementary school career, he and a child named Andrew

Cohen were in the same class, and neither were blinking

in the settle-on-Andy stare-down. The teacher ultimately

dubbed them Andrew W-K and Andrew C. (Later in life,

when Andrew C. began his musical career, he would call

himself Mayer Hawthorne.)

In second grade, Andrew approached a child in his

class named Toby Summerfield. “I’m weird,” Andrew

declared. “Are you weird?”

“I can’t be sure, but I bet I brought my guitar

over to his house the first time I came over to play,”

Summerfield says of their friendship which grew around

musical discovery. “All 13-year-old boys in Ann Arbor

were issued the first Mr. Bungle record. We went to

Schoolkids’ Records, and asked for ‘more like this.’”

Andrew and Summerfield were shown John Zorn’s

production credit on Mr. Bungle and directed to his Naked

City work, from which Summerfield says Andrew’s path

veered toward Zorn’s harsher, more aggressive metal,

while his followed other Naked City members. Along his

way, Andrew was introduced to a Couch 7-inch.

I G E T W E T

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***

Each semester, Larson would apply for an emergency

loan from the university, pleading he couldn’t pay a bill

or whatever other outrageous claim they’d buy. In 1993,

he used a loan to co-create Bulb Records with Magas.

Their first release, Couch’s four-song 7-inch, shows both

members bespectacled and suited-up: Larson leaning

back with a cigarette and Magas with his chin buried

in his schoolboy knot. Magas says it was catalogued as

BLB-026 because the rookie label-heads didn’t “want it

to look like we didn’t know what we were doing,” and

because he was 26 at the time.

Aaron Dilloway, who would drum for Couch years

later, remembers seeing the band live with his friends

Nate Young and Twig Harper in the 11th grade. “Couch

was just another step further into chaos and strangeness

and we’d never seen anything like it,” he says. “I was

thinking it was free-form, then I got the 7-inch at

Schoolkids’ and was like, holy shit, this is the exact same

thing—this is actually structured chaos.”

***

Andrew saw Larson and Magas around town, but was too

starstruck to talk to them. Larson worked at an upscale

grocer—“it was like going to the store and having Frank

Sinatra at the cash register,” Andrew recalls—and one

day Andrew built up the courage to direct his dad’s cart

down Larson’s lane. “His dad wanted to get a case price

for wine,” Larson says. “They were the same brand, but

the wine varieties were different. I told him he couldn’t

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

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do it and he got completely enraged.” Andrew says there

were “swears toward the end” and he left absolutely

devastated.

Magas worked at Schoolkids’, lining up in-store

shows and indulging his own interest in Japanese noise

(and bulk-purchase prices) by recommending albums

to neighborhood kids who adored him. “There’s one

Masonna CD,” Magas says, “and I don’t know how they

did it, but it was ten times louder than any CD you’d ever

heard. It had this weird mastering thing, and I remember

that having an impact on Andrew.”

Once, Andrew handed Magas a tape of what he’d been

working on, and Magas said it didn’t have that “Earth-

destroying whoosh.” Andrew, again, was devastated.

However, Magas would introduce Andrew to Dilloway,

whom Magas considered a ringleader with a lot of

the kids getting into noise. Andrew knew of Dilloway

through his band Galen, and, even though Dilloway was

only a few years older, Andrew idolized him too. “He

was aware of some of my recordings I was bothering Jim

with,” Andrew says, “but Aaron had the warmth and the

courage—the boldness, the not-shyness—to invite me

to come over to his house that day. This was like getting

to go to an icon’s house. Like, wow, dreams could come

true.”

***

For a while Dilloway lived at the Huron House, one

of a few Ann Arbor residences that could colloquially

be called the punk-rock house. Fred Thomas lived in

a closet there. Steve Kenney lived in a closet across the

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room from Thomas’, and remembers a time when two

people—who were not a couple—shared that closet.

Across town, near the university’s Institute for

Social Research, was another punk-rock house called

the Jefferson House. Thirteen-year-old Andrew was

terrified of the place because of “the threat of something

disgusting or awful happening,” but says he was simul-

taneously drawn to it because of those very dangers.

Eventually, he was struck by the residents’ commitment

to that life and to music. He told the

Ann Arbor Observer

in 2003 that they “lived the way they wanted to live, and

it was so on their own terms and so free that anything

seemed possible.”

Allow one-time resident Twig Harper to give the

grand tour: “There were homeless people living on the

porch … we painted the kitchen completely head-to-toe

blue … we had a rotting deer carcass someone found in

the dumpster, like, hanging off the front tree. … It was

one of those situations where someone comes over and

they give you a lot of LSD and you’re convinced possibly

that they could be an agent and the whole house you live

in is some sort of social control experiment.”

***

Andrew and Fred Thomas saw each other at Huron

House shows and around town, but the elder Thomas

says he didn’t really get to know the high-schooler

until they worked together at a costume shop in nearby

Ypsilanti.

“I’m going to go down to the store,” Andrew said one

day. “Do you want anything?”

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Thomas, being a self-admitted young, broke punk kid

living in a closet, took out all his cash.

“I’m starving,” Thomas said. “Get me as much food as

you can with this dollar.”

Envisioning a candy bar or soft drink or some standard

convenience-store fare, Thomas was not expecting an

explanation, which was the first thing Andrew offered

upon his return.

“OK, I will take this back if you get mad,” Andrew

said, “I did exactly what you told me to do.”

And with that, Andrew presented a three-pound bag

of oyster crackers, “technically and literally the most

food he could have bought me for a dollar,” Thomas

says. He was taken by Andrew’s thought process that

was “equal parts sublime and ridiculous,” and that, more

impressively, he had food for the next week.

Andrew and Thomas became obsessed with extremity,

from the outrageous Japanese fashion magazines they’d

pore over to the breakneck black metal that they listened

to so loudly and so frequently that it seemed to slow

down. At some point, the two devised a plan where

Andrew would tell his parents that Thomas was a foreign

exchange student—“France or Norway or something,”

Thomas says—so he could live in the upstairs attic.

Instead, Andrew simply asked his parents if his friend

from work could move in. Thomas wouldn’t find out he

could drop the routine for a few uncomfortably silent days.

***

Thomas’ Westside Audio Laboratories label released

a cassette in 1996 entitled Plant the Flower Seeds,

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a compilation capturing local musicians when they

were 13 or younger and their prolific fires were

just sparking. A squeaky-voiced Andrew Wilkes-Krier

introduces his entry, “Mr. Surprise,” as the theme

song to the reappearing titular character, before what

sounds like a carnival calliope run on cotton candy

kicks in and the whimsical tale of an ever-mutating

creature is told.

The song had originally appeared on a tape Andrew

made called Mechanical Eyes, complete with color-pencil

drawings he had color-copied at Kinko’s. He made about

ten tapes, selling a few and passing the rest around to

friends.

Andrew has said this tape is his first released-

for-public-consumption effort. To trace every tape

(commercial or otherwise) and name-drop each of

Andrew’s bands since isn’t so much daunting as it is

impossible. Bands in Ann Arbor could be as short-lived

as they were incestuous, configured quickly for kicks or

conjured hypothetically, also for kicks. “Everybody was

doing things with their friends at all times,” Thomas

says. “Highly collaborative. There could be six people

and that could be, at any given time, 12 different bands.”

It’s a recipe for documentarian disaster, and an errand

this fool believes takes away from the spirit fueling the

effort. Rather than attempt a doomed-to-fail compre-

hensive listing, I present these early, mostly Michigan,

pre-

I Get Wet

efforts for what it is: not definitive, not

chronological, not entirely fleshed-out, and compiled

strictly for narrative’s-sake.

***

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In either late elementary school or early junior high,

Andrew and Summerfield were in a two-person band

called Slam. (Summerfield claims the proper name was

“Slam: A Two-Person Band.”) They drew up cassette

tape labels and had a song called “Ode to Bolga,”

where the two sang the lyrics, “Ode to Bolga / death

to Bolga.” That band evolved into Reverse Polarity,

which Summerfield says leaned grunge. Reverse Polarity

became Sam the Butcher, and at some point between

the two incarnations—where lineup changes and experi-

mentation had Andrew on bass, on drums, and at the

mic at various times—they played the local Unitarian

church, a venue where Andrew would see some of the

bands that influenced him most, from local favorite

Jaks to Dilloway’s band Galen to Twig Harper’s band

Scheme. The church was in a residential neighborhood

right around the corner from where little brother Patrick

had gone to nursery school, so Andrew’s mother had no

problem with Andrew going to shows there despite, as

Andrew says, “the whole right side of the venue (being)

sliding glass doors, and at almost every show, one of them

was broken if not someone flying all the way through it.”

***

Andrew would watch a grindcore band named Nema

rehearse in Huron House’s basement. “Andrew was a

really good drummer, and was one of the only people we

knew who could really play black metal with any kind of

authority,” says Nema vocalist Jeff Rice, who would join

Andrew’s band Kathode. “Once people in Nema heard

him play, everybody wanted to start a band with him.”

I G E T W E T

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Kathode was all about “playing as fast as possible and

growling as most inhumanly possible,” Rice says. When

time came to record a demo, they all of a sudden had to

come up with words, so he and Andrew split the task,

with Rice’s leaning left-wing radical and Andrew’s lyrics

being “your standard non-conformist theme,” according

to Rice.

Rice remembers Andrew and a friend executing what

he calls an “art annoyance project”; Andrew says he was

simply trying to make something intense happen that

normally didn’t.

Andrew and the friend propped a huge PA speaker

in the ground-level window of that friend’s downtown

apartment, plugged it into a keyboard, taped all the

keys down, cranked every available knob, laced up their

running shoes, and went for a jog. “This was so much

louder than we thought it would ever be,” Andrew says.

“Like, Jesus’ return is supposed to be heralded with the

sound you’ve never heard that you can’t describe, that is

the sound that changes everything. This sounded like the

end of the world.”

When Andrew and his jogging partner returned,

they found a mass of people banging on the front door.

“We were like, ‘Oh my god, what’s going on in there?’”

Andrew remembers. “‘Did you leave the blender on?

Maybe the radiator’s gone haywire?’”

***

Andrew’s super-progressive Community High School

offered a class where a local expert would come in and

voluntarily teach a course. One year, Andrew enrolled in

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an Asian cinema course being taught by Pete Larson. (“I

showed Drunken Master 2, but at that time not a whole

lot of people knew who Jackie Chan was,” Larson says.

“All of the 2s are amazing. Swordsman 2, God of Gamblers

2 … .”) Larson was also playing guitar in a Judas Priest-

channeling band called the Pterodactyls. Dilloway,

as Pterodactyl Man, dressed up as he envisioned a

Pterodactyl Man would and blabbed improvised lyrics at

live shows. Steve Kenney was the Pterodactyls’ original

drummer, but Larson eventually got Andrew to replace

him. Promoted on Bulb’s site as being from Germany,

the Pterodactyls’ 1996 release,

Reborn

, shows Andrew in

a studded leather jacket, credited as L.A. Ellington for

drums and “look.” The front-cover banner has the band’s

name as the Pterodactys, without the “L” — an ode to

when Kenney forgot to include the letter on a demo-tape

spelling. The band was set to go on a tour that spring

break, but Andrew was grounded for not waking up in

time for class; Kenney was invited back.

Larson, Dilloway, Kenney, and Andrew are all

credited—Andrew, by his full name—on a Mr. Velocity

Hopkins album released in 1999. “I don’t think I’m

actually on that, but I’m listed as being on it,” says Steve

Kenney, whose first and last name is spelled incorrectly

on the liner notes.

***

Andrew was creating T-shirts for his band Lobotomy,

but he misspelled it Labotomy. Lab Lobotomy was born.

On bass was Allan Hazlett, who remembers first

getting acquainted with Andrew because “there was

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an Arby’s really close to his house, and since he knew

that I went to Arby’s a lot, it became convenient for me

to give him a ride home.” Hazlett remembers sipping

on a vanilla milkshake the first time he heard Andrew

play piano. It was “Hey Jude.” Andrew was singing, and

Hazlett thought he sounded better than Paul.

Playing guitar was Jaime Morales (who Andrew

credits with introducing him to that Couch 7-inch) and

Alex Goldman. Hazlett says they’d plan out a few licks,

but the different influences each member brought to

the table resulted in constant direction-shifts. “Almost

ambient and slow, plodding along,” he says, “then frantic,

and then white noise, etc.” At one afternoon outdoor

show, Hazlett hoisted an aged vacuum cleaner up to the

mic and it “chocked and died and belched out all this old

dust.”

Sometimes, when Goldman wasn’t there, the others

would go hillbilly and become The Rusty Bucket Group,

a super-distorted bluegrass group. “It was high-pitched

screaming,” Goldman says of their tape he’s since lost,

“and they’d be grumbling and hacking in-between

songs.”

“Andrew, more than anybody, really reveled in that

kind of thing,” Goldman says.

***

The Portly Boys was Andrew and a group of overweight

inner-city youths who sang fun chants to demonstrate

their take-no-shit bond.

“Portly Boys Bounce / BOUNCE BOUNCE

BOUNCE BOUNCE

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•

Portly P- Portly / BOUNCE BOUNCE BOUNCE

The Port! Ly! Boys! / WHAT?!

The Port! Ly! Boys! / PICK IT UP!”

The Portly Boys were on an Ann Arbor label called

Rockside BK, alongside bands like Hot Milk, Bedazzler,

Hype Obesity, and Stormy Rodent and the Malt Lickers.

Only one Portly Boys tape was ever sold.

“My friend Jamie has the only copy,” Rice says. “He

had no idea it wasn’t a real band when he bought it.”

Rice says Kathode practices would usually devolve

into everyone inventing ideas for bands—“probably the

best thing about Kathode.” The thing that separates

teenage Andrew from the millions of other kids playing

this parlor game is, as Rice says, “where most people stop

it at the bullshitting phase, Andrew would actually do it.”

“Andrew came up with a fake tape label called Rockside

BK.” Rice says. “He made a catalog of all these bands that

didn’t exist, wrote descriptions of all of them, and made

them as outlandish as possible, and, if somebody actually

bought a tape, he would write and record the entire

album himself, posing as a band. It was a made-to-order

record label.”

Haunted Elegance, the only other Rockside BK tape

Andrew says he made, had a “vacuum-cleaner guitar

tone … these really thin drums, and then a sort of Louis

Armstrong vocal.”

***

When Andrew was 12, he successfully sold a forgery

of a collector’s item—an item that, in 2008, sold for

$2.8 million.

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•

Andrew’s childhood home showcases his art on

many surfaces, from a pencil-sketching of his father to

an abstract S&M painting above an upstairs toilet, to

framed school assignments on the walls, including one

of a road-raging, three-headed wolf meant to reference

the hot-rod style of artist Coop. (Andrew signed his

“Poop.”) Andrew created and sold X-rated cards to a

comic store in town that, according to his mother, wasn’t

allowed to sell the cards back to the underage Andrew.

Long before he met Andrew, Goldman bought a bizarre

comic from that store which he envisioned some weird

50-year-old guy in town creating. Later, when Goldman

brought up the odd find and shared that impression,

Andrew told him, “Thanks—that’s what I was going

for.” Patrick’s favorite items were the collector cards

showcasing graphic torture scenes, such as a man’s face

with a hook and chain pulling at his eyeballs. “They were

cartoony,” the brother says, “so it was kinda funny at the

same time as being disgusting.”

One day, Andrew began working on creating baseball

cards. Patrick vividly recalls the meticulous processes

of Andrew removing perforation nubs, applying dirt,

burning it to make it appear weathered, then the

scratching off of some of the surface. When Andrew

wanted to sell the lot—a collection that included the

1909 T206 Honus Wagner baseball card, considered

the holiest of holy cardboard grails—he had an older-

looking friend take them to an Ann Arbor antique store.

They got $250.

No one is entirely sure how the owner got wise—or

why he’d pay anything if he knew all along they were

fake, which he claimed—but Andrew says he did confess

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•

after the owner mentioned a friend in the FBI. As

punishment, Andrew says the owner demanded he give

his son art lessons.

Prompted by this and/or a separate incident where

Andrew created and distributed fake cease-and-desist

letters, he started seeing a child psychologist. “Why are

you here?” led to the immediate follow-up “And why

do you think your parents want you to come?” which

led to “And why did you get in trouble” and onto “And

why did you think it would be exciting?” and so on, for

months. Finally, the trained professional sat Andrew

and his parents down to discuss his ultimate conclusion:

“Andrew has a devilish side.”

“My Dad and I—but my Dad especially—thought it

was just hilarious and ridiculous,” Andrew says. “It was

such a strange, underwhelming conclusion. Almost like,

‘We knew that coming in—that why he’s here!’ But I

guess he was trying to say it more like, ‘You have to find

a better outlet for these impulses.’”

***

Ancient Art of Boar (aka AAB) began with Andrew

and his Lab Lobotomy-bandmate Jaime Morales, then

became Andrew’s solo project, which he soon invited

Dilloway to play in. Dilloway says years later when he

was focused on fashion, Andrew started an Ancient Art of

Boar clothing line, creating a dress that was “completely

black shreds, like super avant-garde.”

In the summer of 1996, Andrew wrote and recorded

an AAB album for Thomas’ Westside Audio Laboratories.

“You can see the seeds for what came afterwards,”

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•

Thomas says of Bright Dole. “It’s melodic, but there’s

just something under the surface that’s already undoing

everything that’s been done by the rest of the music. …

We always had this thing where we really didn’t know

what goth music was, but we imagined what it was. This

pale, wailing voice, which didn’t have anything to do with

anything.”

Westside also released, among other tapes featuring

AAB, a 7-inch specifically for a September 1997 show.

The idea was that each band playing would be repre-

sented with a song. Ancient Art of Boar—that is,

Andrew—backed out of the performance, but not before

the 7-inch was pressed. The song isn’t labeled on the

sleeve, but if you drop the needle, you’ll hear the Ancient

Art of Boar cover of Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise.”

Andrew and Thomas formed a gothic rap group called

Coffinz, featuring Andrew’s beats under Thomas’ rhymes

about John Coltrane and eating power bars. After I Get

Wet came out, Thomas was instructed to never play

Coffinz for anyone.

***

In 1996, Masonna—the legendary, prolific Japanese

musician who astounded both Magas and Andrew with

his louder-than-possible mastering a few years earlier—

recorded

Hyper Chaotic

, the first release for an upstart

label called V. Records. The label was initially going to be

called Voktagon, but Andrew, the label’s creator, thought

that was too much.

“I just wanted it to be a really anonymous and kind

of boring label name,” he says. “Of course, there was

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

another V that I found out about. I think I was in a

depression for several weeks when I found out about

that.”

At the same time Andrew was mailing Kathode demos

to potential Japanese labels, he was contacting Japanese

musicians for his own label, communicating through

an upstairs fax machine that, according to his mother,

would “start spitting things out at like 4 in the morning,

night after night.” After

Hyper Chaotic

, the label released

7-inches by the Japanese death metal band Hellchild

and by Aube, a Japanese musician much more restrained

and minimalist-leaning than Masonna. His Fast Tumbling

Blaze 7-inch was recorded with only a single voltage-

controlled oscillator and was going to be the first of two

Aube releases on V. Records. He recorded the music

for the follow-up as well as created all of the album’s

artwork, which he carefully sent to Ann Arbor.

“It wasn’t a disc or a file,” Andrew says. “It was actual

artwork and photographs laid out by hand. He sent it

full-size in this huge tube. Everything was hand-pasted,

every word was cut out by hand, but it didn’t look like a

collage; it was a masterpiece of graphic art. And this was

a moment where I intentionally chose to do the wrong

thing.”

The wrong thing was Andrew trashing Aube’s artwork.

The urge was no different from the same urges he had

in committing other crimes, and the intent, he says, was

entirely to be mean. “I was 16 at the time, so I don’t know

if he was aware of that or if he had any idea of who I was.”

In 2000, Aube released

Sensorial Inducement

on Alien8

Recordings. Tracks on the LP were, according to the

first line of the album’s notes, composed and recorded on

I G E T W E T

•

May 2, 1996. Aube could not be reached for comment, so

there’s no telling whether

Sensorial Inducement

was to be

the potential fourth and final release on V. Records.

Nothing, except that on the second line of the

album’s notes, it reads “Fuck & No Thanks to Andrew

Wilkes-Krier.”

***

As was standard operating procedure for so many tape

labels of the era, releases were often dubbed over officially

released or promotional cassettes from major labels.

When Dilloway began Hanson Records, he got much

of his stock from the record store where he worked.

“Usually they’d send us a box of 25 tapes of some new

artist,” he says, “but one time, for some reason, they sent

us 300 copies of these blue-shelled, ten-minute cassettes

by this band Skold, some mediocre industrial rock. We

ended up doing a cassette single series.”

Some of those blue Neverland / Chaos promo tapes

ended up being repurposed, Dilloway says, as the first

release credited solely to Andrew Wilkes-Krier: Room to

Breathe. “That was just one thing I made one afternoon

and gave to Aaron,” Andrew says. “It wasn’t put together

or planned out as some big release; I think he only made

five copies of it.” Another recording, entitled You Are

What You Eat, has a diner-style ice-cream sundae on the

cover and was limited to two copies.

Andrew has appeared on Hanson tracks by The Beast

People (with Dilloway, Harper, Nate Young, and, at

times, Kenney), Isis & Werewolves (with Dilloway and

Kenney), The Hercules (with Dilloway and Anthony

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

Miller aka Dirty Tony), Galen via Hercules (a band with

Dilloway, Dirty Tony, and Kenney that either descended

from or gave birth to The Hercules), as well as the

1998 Hanson vinyl compilation

Labyrinths & Jokes

that

features songs by, among others, Isis & Werewolves,

The Beast People, and Andrew Wilkes-Krier. Etched

onto Side 2 of

Labyrinths & Jokes

’ run-out groove is the

phrase “So I Met this Like Totally New Kind of Kid,”

which Dilloway acknowledges is a sentiment about the

kid Magas introduced him to years earlier. Andrew didn’t

know about the etching on the vinyl; he really didn’t like

the name on the sticker.

“I told Aaron that if anyone ever asks, I’m one of the

labyrinths, not one of the jokes,” Andrew says. “I hated

the idea of someone thinking, ‘Oh, Andrew’s tracks

on this compilation are a joke.’ I wanted mine to be a

labyrinth.”

The Beast People, to highlight one band, balanced

guttural animal growls, screams, and whimpers on top of

a building keyboard line. “They did this one show at a

gnarly bar in Detroit where Andrew was The Phantom,”

says Galen guitarist Justin Allen. “He had these leather

pants, big frilly shirt, the mask, and a really long wig. He’s

on stage playing The Phantom of the Opera soundtrack,

and then all of a sudden this pantomime horse comes

walking through the audience, bumping into people.

The horse then birthed The Beast People. I call it stupid

because that’s how you would probably classify it as far

as the realms of humor are concerned, but I think it’s

amazing.”

***

I G E T W E T

•

“This was a game I used to do as a kid,” says Dilloway,

describing a scene from a movie he and Andrew co-wrote

where the main character darts down a hill, prompting

a congregation of cows to give chase. “It was such a

magical thing that it happened while we were filming.

Did you notice the lone horse?!”

Poltergeist stars Andrew, the farm owned by Dilloway’s

grandparents, and—yes, for a brief moment—a horse

that thinks it’s a dashing cow. Andrew also created the

soundtrack, a portion of which is his entry on the Labyrinths

& Jokes compilation. One vignette has Andrew slo-mo

leaping around what looks like pink-and-black-striped

pipes and panels (which Dilloway calls the Jumble Gym).

Andrew spent weeks creating the piece, getting paint all

over his father’s garage floor and eventually erecting it

in his backyard for passers-by to see. (Pictures of it—and

Andrew posing in front of it, looking like a Ramone—

appear in issues of a magazine Andrew later created and in

the booklet for his 2010

Mother of Mankind

album.)

Andrew’s parents—convinced their music-playing,

movie-making, comic-drawing, fashion-designing,

sculpture-creating, project-oriented teen might become

an artist—gave him the ultimatum that he had to at least

apply to art school. Andrew took the ACT on two hours

of sleep, presented his portfolio on Immediate Decision

day at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and

got accepted. Andrew’s pencil-sketch of his father was

drawn just before Andrew told him he’d rather move to

New York City instead.

“Everyone tells me, ‘Oh, you’re so brave that you

could let your son not go to college,’” Jim says. “Look, I

teach in college—it’s no big deal, believe me.”

•

Juice

You know, I just can’t believe things have gotten so
bad in this city that there’s no way back. I mean,
sure, it’s dirty, it’s crowded, it’s polluted, it’s noisy,
and there’s people all around who’d just as soon step
on your face as look at you. But come on! There’ve
got to be a few sparks of sweet humanity left in this
burned-out burg. We just have to figure out a way to
mobilize it.

—Ray Stantz, in

Ghostbusters 2

, right before our heroes

discover the New York City icon known less commonly

as “Liberty Enlightening the World” as that symbol

that, along with an uplifting soundtrack, could appeal to

the best in all of us.

I love New York City / Oh yeah, New York City

—Andrew W.K.,

“I Love NYC”

“Look what I did,” said an excited Andrew in Mark

Morgan’s Brooklyn living room.

I G E T W E T

•

Morgan, missing the forest for the suddenly displaced

trees, sees only rearranged furniture, the relocation of the

TV, sprawled-out newspapers on the ground, massive new

paintings hanging on the walls, and his (detuned) guitar

not in its rightful place. And, of course, the unsightly cot

that Andrew has been calling a bed for the last few months.

“What the fuck, man?” Morgan says. That may be the

question he asks, but the overwhelming question in his

mind is actually one of semantics: is Andrew the worst

roommate or the worst houseguest in the entire city?

“He was more like an extended period guest than a

roommate,” Morgan says. “He would attain roommate

status in your mind, but then he’d do something to piss

you off and he’d be back to extended guest. He drove me

fucking crazy.”

A Michigan native himself, Morgan and his

female roommate in that $750/month, two-bedroom

Williamsburg apartment were doing Andrew a favor as

he got settled in the city. Before Morgan’s, Andrew had

stayed at his sister’s friend’s place while the friend was

away, but Andrew opened a window to combat the heat

and the friend’s cat jumped out and ran away. He only

planned on crashing at Morgan’s for a weekend, but that

turned into one week (Andrew rearranges CD and book

collections), which snowballed into one month (Andrew

mistakes savory gourmet cheeses for rotten food and

trashes it), which avalanched into three months (Andrew

insists on occupying the computer in Morgan’s room

after he has told Andrew to get the fuck out so he can

sleep) and into four months (neighbors complain about

Andrew’s noise). This was all before Morgan learned that

his apartment had burned to the ground.

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

“I was working and I got this phone call,” Morgan

remembers. “There were all these sirens and people

yelling in the background. They were like, ‘Hello, is

this Mr. Morgan? We’re sorry to inform you, but your

building caught on fire and I’m afraid you lost everything.

There might be a few things here for you to salvage—you

should come here and take a look.’ I was like, ‘Holy shit!

I’ll be there in 20 minutes.’ Then, all of a sudden, the

sirens stopped and Andrew’s like, ‘Hey man.’ He probably

spent hours making this ludicrous background tape for a

two-minute prank call. I was like, ‘You’re a fucking piece

of shit—fuck you,’ and hung up the phone.”

Morgan says the day he was about to kick Andrew

out once and for all, Andrew informed him he had found

another place to live.

“We got along a lot better when he moved out,”

Morgan says. “I was seriously ready to kill him. I was

like, ‘You can’t be doing shit in the living room without

fucking telling me.’ He was like, ‘Well, I can move it back

if you want,’ and I was like, ‘Don’t do anything, it’s fine.’”

“I had to admit—it actually did look better.”

***

Morgan got Andrew a job at Mondo Kim’s, the home

entertainment mecca on Manhattan’s St. Mark’s Place.

“I remember him listening to Billy Joel really loudly,”

Morgan says. “I fucking hate Billy Joel—I can’t stand that

shit. It’s got pianos, so I guess maybe that’s why. I just

remember it providing much mirth in the store.”

Also working in the second-floor vinyl section was

Matt Quigley, whose band—an art-pop duo named

I G E T W E T

•

Vaganza—was about to release its debut album on a Geffen

subsidiary. (Prior to Vaganza, the New Jersey native had

played with his teenage buddies in Skunk, which put out

two releases on Twin/Tone.) Quigley saw a quiet, funny,

slightly effeminate, artsy kid in Andrew. One day, Quigley

played a test pressing of Vaganza over Kim’s speakers.

The horn-heavy glam opener with its ELO melodies was

followed by the rich piano-centered orchestration and

delicate harmonies of what was to be the album’s single,

“Everyday.” He showed Andrew a picture of the duo in full

extravagant regalia, and Andrew asked if he’d ever heard of

Sparks. “That’s how I bonded with Quigley,” Andrew says.

“I feel like Vaganza predicted what Sparks ended up doing.”

“Every time I came home,” Morgan says, “[Andrew]

was listening to Sparks. When his first record came out,

people were like, ‘Oh, this fucking hair-metal shitbag.’ I

think people got caught up with the signifiers of people

with long hair rocking out with fucking guitars. It didn’t

really sound like ’80s cock-rock to me. It sounded like

Sparks. The hooks were similar.”

Fred Thomas remembers Andrew latching onto Sparks

when they lived together, with Andrew getting so worked up

by their flamboyance, theatrics, and lyrics that his unending

insistence that Thomas needs to really listen to it did

nothing more than try Thomas’ patience. When Andrew

moved to New York, he’d similarly inundate Thomas with

Napalm Death’s Harmony Corruption. “I’d say, ‘It’s good, but

it’s fucking crazy grind metal—what do you want me to say?

I love it, but I’m also over here listening to Yo La Tengo, so

maybe we can talk in the middle.’”

***

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

As he’d record, Andrew would bring songs to Morgan

and Quigley. More than 15 years later, Andrew still

remembers Quigley’s reaction the first time he played

something for the Kim’s collective: “This is the music

that an insane person makes.”

The lyric-less “Airplanes,” which eventually evolved

into

I Get Wet

’s “

Got to Do It”

(after, Andrew says,

dumping a distinct Cure, “Boys Don’t Cry” vibe), had

an upbeat, major-key melody with what Quigley says

were “cheesy, pre-set, digital synth sounds.” He knew it

wasn’t techno pop, it wasn’t retro, and it certainly had no

connection to any underground sound of the times.

“It was utterly inscrutable by being so completely

not,” Quigley says. “I knew Andrew well enough to know

that this wasn’t cynical. There was nothing contrived

about the degree to which he was trying to be icono-

clastic. I said, ‘This is music made in a vacuum—you

don’t know that this is fucking weird.’ He came upon

things in a very peculiar way; I don’t even think he knew

what rules there were to break.”

***

Some of the late night work Andrew did on Morgan’s

computer was for WOLF “Slicer” Magazine, a ’zine-like

publication Andrew created and was quick to correct

when someone—like Morgan—called it a ’zine. Issues

featured pictures of him and the Jumble Gym, fake

letters (one that inspired Morgan to name his band

Sightings), articles praising Scream 2 (“It is fun, scary,

funny, and cool/neat: just perfect for the summer heat,

and a treat”), and diatribes that show up mid-article—as

I G E T W E T

•

if by copy-and-paste malfunction—about standing up for

what you believe, making people laugh, and preaching

an ALL CAPS phrase (“NEVER LET DOWN”) and

philosophy he later turned into a song on

I Get Wet

’s

follow-up.

Shortly after being fired from Kim’s for stealing

cash, Andrew was introduced by a friend to a potential

employer. Andrew had just seen a news show devoted to

pyramid schemes and multi-level marketing, so when this

employer started describing that exact model, Andrew

interrupted him.

“Wait a minute,” Andrew said. “I just saw a

documentary on this.”

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” the man assured Andrew.

“That documentary is full of—”

“No,” Andrew interrupted again. “This is the greatest

thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe I’m now meeting

someone who actually does this. This is like destiny!”

Another New York job of Andrew’s was at Bergdorf

Goodman, a Fifth Avenue luxury department store with

elaborate window displays. One day, while marching

around the store at a high-energy pace and changing the

words to some song worming through his head, he found

himself repeating the phrase, “I get wet, I get wet, I get

wet, I get wet …” He continued singing it for the rest of

his shift so he would remember it by the time he got home.

He had started designing window sets at Bergdorf

Goodman shortly after being mugged; an incident he

said put an end to his on-the-job stealing ways. He had

begun questioning himself as to what would happen

should he continue following those impulses, and tried

to redirect those urges.

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

“I think it was always meant to ultimately go in a way

where you could be a magician,” he says. “That’s a good

use of that urge, but I don’t really like that. I’m not so

good at magic tricks in that way, so you kind of have to

make your own magic.”

***

“Anyone can sit down and play piano,” Andrew says of

his instrument’s playability. “Those are just buttons. It’s

the most immediate and satisfying in that way, just like

drums. [With] guitar, you have to strum and press—

[that’s] doing two different things.”

When Andrew was younger, his mother bought him

a 50-cent guitar at a garage sale, but he didn’t pick up

the instrument with any intent to learn until he moved

into Morgan’s place and realized that, for the music he

wanted to make, its tones would be essential. Andrew

learned that the quickest way for him to grasp guitar

would be to tune it to a power chord. In laymen’s terms,

he tuned the guitar so that while his right hand strums

the strings, his left hand needs only one finger holding

down those strings to create a major chord. For a G

chord, he could press his finger across the length of the

third fret as opposed to needing multiple fingers mutated

into an unfamiliar formation on separate strings and frets

to create, essentially, that same G chord. He gave the

guitar button-functionality, and he estimates the method

covers “93 percent” of what he ever wants out of the

instrument.

“All I really need are those first three,” he says,

referring to the three strings lowest in pitch, thickest

I G E T W E T

•

in gauge, and closest to the heavens (which he tunes to

E–B–E). “And when you’re playing like that—especially

with me who doesn’t have a lot of agility for that

positioning—I’m only hitting most of the time just the

first two. The fourth string has only really been used for

leads, like the beginning of ‘

She is Beautiful.’

Those top

two strings—I never really liked the way they sounded,

because they were too high or too thin. Those things I

would rather do on the keyboard.”

When warped wood and neck pressure wasn’t a

concern, Andrew removed those high strings—the ones

traditionally responsible for rock’s face-melting guitar

solos—completely. Andrew’s style meant a lot of movement

along the neck, however. Back to laymen’s terms: one

advantage to the mutated-hand formations is that the

hand can often go chord to chord without necessarily a

great deal of movement up and down the neck; a power

chord approach doesn’t have that luxury, and Andrew’s

particular approach surpasses most extremes. Jimmy Coup,

Andrew’s guitarist during the first few tours, says that if

he were playing parts of

“Party Hard”

the way Andrew

would, he’d be playing the octave-up E chord at the 12th

fret, creating treble and what he calls rubberiness that is

essential to

I Get Wet

’s “major keyness” and overall sound.

“He didn’t know how to play guitar, then he tunes it

to open E major and all these chords become available to

him,” Jimmy says. “That’s brilliance at work.”

***

Long before Jimmy or anyone in the eventual band

entered the picture, Andrew looked for potential

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

bandmates among his New York City friends, the

readers of NYC’s alt-weekly, Village Voice (only one

seasoned session musician answered the ad), and

even strangers walking down the street. “There was

one guy who looked amazing,” Andrew remembers.

“He came over and heard [my music] and said it was

terrible because of the keyboards. He said it sounded

corporate.”

The corporate labeling seemed to confound Andrew

the most. In this particular instance, the stranger pitted

his preference for what he called raw, stripped-down

garage rock against what Andrew saw simply as music

done in a high-production manner.

“Why does everything have to be stripped down,”

Andrew says. “Unless it’s achieving something that’s

better than the alternative, [it] seems empty and naked. I

think the Rolling Stones were trying to make everything

they were doing sound the best they possibly could, not

intentionally make it sound bad—not that their songs

sound bad. If a musician from the ’20s had what we had

to work with, he would use it. They didn’t make the

music sound in the ’20s as a choice.”

To not use a keyboard as an available tool to “get

to a feeling” made no sense. Andrew wanted a musical

place where you could have room for “sound effects and

explosion sounds and orchestra hits and synthesizers

and really distorted guitars and multi-track vocals.” And

part of that, he admits, was pushing against many of his

friends who were firmly entrenched in a “crust-punk

anarchist aesthetic.”

***

I G E T W E T

•

Andrew’s first public NYC performance was technically

a job-audition-gone-horribly-wrong at the legendary

Cafe Wha?; only time will tell if his “Rocket Man” places

him among the usually trotted-out Dylan, Hendrix, and

Springsteen names there. His first NYC show playing his

own music was at a storefront some guy was living in on

the Lower East Side. Grux, the man behind Caroliner,

was performing with his offshoot project Rubber O

Cement. Aaron Dilloway and Nate Young were playing

that night in some capacity, Andrew remembers, and “by

default, I had the opportunity to play if I wanted.”

Online footage shows Andrew hunched over an

extremely low-set keyboard and drum machine, wearing

headphones and a white tank-top. The visual effect is

one of a towering frame, with gangly limbs pounding out

arpeggios. The songs that would evolve into “Girls Own

Love” and “She is Beautiful” were filmed, and Andrew

says he may have played “The Star-Spangled Banner”

and “Airplanes” that night, but he remembers technical

problems more than anything else.

Kelly Kuvo, a friend of Dilloway’s from Chicago’s

no-wave scene, was one of the 20-some folks on hand. She

found Andrew to be this “autistic, Mormon missionary-

type guy” because he didn’t drink or smoke, and had

been told his apartment was stacked with books about

how to make it in the music business. She remembers

Andrew improvising songs, getting everyone to clap, and

calling out for requests, and thought he’d be perfect for

the variety show she was lining up at this Astor Place

venue in the East Village called Starbucks.

“People were saying all these Starbucks were taking

over and Broadway was turning into a mall,” Kuvo says

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

of this Starbucks location, at the time literally a pumpkin

scone’s throw from another Starbucks in the same plaza.

“But we thought it was the perfect ‘fuck you.’ Every

crazy freakwad from Williamsburg, I called.” Kuvo saw

Andrew filling the “cute, kind of pop boy-band” slot

alongside her puppeteer friend, her band, and a cast of

others. “I didn’t like Starbucks then,” Andrew says, “but

everyone involved in doing [the show] was so excited and

passionate about it, so I tried to follow their lead.”

Casey Spooner, Kuvo’s bandmate and the eventual

co-founder of performance-art duo Fischerspooner, also

performed at that February 12, 1999 show, billed as

Saskwatch, with black greasepaint and a long black wig.

He stripped down to microscopic red undies to win

over the 50-person crowd that night, but, according to

Kuvo, Andrew was transfixed by the full get-up Spooner

stripped out of.

“White denim jeans, white jacket, white T-shirt, white

Chelsea boots,” Spooner recalls of this, one of many

wardrobes he’s performed in throughout the years. “He

can have them—I left that one behind really fast.”

As awed as Andrew was by the man in all-white,

Spooner was equally blown away by Andrew’s perfor-

mance. “I feel like Kelly really set me up because I stood

there with my mouth hanging open,” Spooner says.

On May 19, Andrew performed in a Fischerspooner

show on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center.

Photographer Roe Ethridge was documenting the

night and says Andrew asked him if he could come

over to Ethridge’s studio and have his photo taken. “I

remember him saying he was going to bring an ax,”

Ethridge says.

I G E T W E T

•

Andrew arrived at Ethridge’s Williamsburg studio sans

ax, but did bring some pig’s blood he had procured from

a Greenpoint butcher. For this session, Ethridge would

shoot film on a 4-by-5 large format camera—think cape

over the head—against black velveteen that wouldn’t

reflect light. Andrew, decked in a sleeveless white tee

with a torn collar and a Team U.S.A. basketball jersey,

stood before the backdrop for at least one comparatively

lackluster portrait. Then, Andrew excused himself.

“As I remember, he bashed his nose with a cinder

block and it didn’t work,” Ethridge says. “So he had to

do something else, but I can’t remember what that was.”

“It was my own blood,” Andrew says. “I went into his

bathroom and bloodied my nose, which is not that hard

to do. Basically jam both fingers in after hitting it as hard

as you can with your fist or on the wall of something. It

bled pretty good, and then you blow your nose as hard

as you can. It will flow out.” Andrew says he added some

of the pig’s blood to increase the quantity.

Everyone “from a little kid to your grandmother” has

had a bloody nose, Andrew pointed out to the Chicago

Tribune, adding that no one had stepped up and owned it

as an image yet. To Ethridge, the photo that ended up as

I Get Wet

’s cover complements Andrew’s energy, “sarcas-

tically embracing the extreme, but also really embracing

the extreme at the same time.”

“What you see is the only frame where he wasn’t

making a face with an open-mouth scream,” Ethridge

says of the bloody shots. “It was the only one where he

was calmly looking back at the camera, and the juxtapo-

sition between the blood and his composed look made

the picture magical.”

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

***

Spencer Sweeney was DJing at a different unnamed

after-hours bar in the Lower East Side when a friend

told him about this keyboard-playing kid who was “Rick

Wakeman on steroids.” When Spencer finally saw him, he

said Andrew’s treatment of the keyboard like a pommel

horse was like nothing he’d ever seen. He helped Andrew

line up a few shows at an art gallery he was affiliated with

called Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and soon contacted his

cousin who “knew a lot of people in the music industry.”

“I remember intentionally refraining from any

description,” Spencer says. “I was not going to say a

goddamn thing about him except that, ‘You gotta come

see this guy.’”

Matt Sweeney had been in bands signed to Matador

and Twin/Tone before working at the Nasty Little Man

PR firm, and at the same time his cousin was issuing

mysterious must-see demands, a friend and former

bandmate of Matt’s was also telling him about some

crazy, obsessive, classically trained Michigan kid who

started playing shows in the days since they worked

together at Mondo Kim’s. Eventually, Matt Sweeney

worked out that the rough gems Spencer Sweeney and

Matt Quigley were telling him about were one in the

same. That first show at Gavin Brown’s “blew my mind,”

Matt Sweeney says, and after he saw him again—this

time with a pre-recorded CD and a microphone instead

of a keyboard and drum machine—he asked Andrew if he

could be his manager.

“I’ve never seen anybody jack their body around like

that,” Sweeney says. “It looked like he was going to hurt

I G E T W E T

•

himself, yet the songs were so spectacular and catchy.

I compare it to Ween. In their early shows, they were

playing along to a tape and there was something inher-

ently confrontational about that. There was something

shocking and uncomfortable and sort of dangerous about

what Andrew was doing.”

The editor of Vice was with Matt Sweeney the night

he offered his managerial services, and after the show, he

promised Andrew the cover. (Note: Volume 7, Number

3.) In casual conversation, Sweeney calls that second

show “karaoke,” a term Andrew hated. It’s how many

people described those shows where he sang over a CD

of his own music, but in Andrew’s mind, the term made

his efforts seem like a joke. “It allowed them to sum it up

and understand,” Andrew says, “like, ‘Oh, I get it—this is

a guy, this is a karaoke thing.’ No, I don’t have a band,

but I’m going to figure out a way to play.”

***

Andrew had finally settled into an apartment in

Greenpoint, a predominately Polish neighborhood next

to Williamsburg, and been recording in a makeshift

studio he built in the living room. He’d work on a song,

then play it over the phone for friends back in Michigan.

Fred Thomas thought the song title “Girl Is Beautiful”

sounded “caveman, in a bad way,” and suggested a change

(not, he insists, that he’s taking credit for that change).

“The first one he played me was ‘

It’s Time to Party’

and it totally flipped me out,” Dilloway says. “I hadn’t

heard him do anything that structured like a pop song.

It reminded me of Redd Kross. I’d say that a lot—‘that

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

sounds like this band,’ ‘that sounds like that’—and it used

to drive Andrew crazy.”

Dilloway had returned to Michigan following a stint

with Chicago’s Flying Luttenbachers, and joined what

had been Nate Young’s solo noise project called Wolf

Eyes. Andrew soon began making tapes under the Wolf

Eyes name and mailing them to Michigan. “They were

almost like John Carpenter soundtracks,” Dilloway says

of his contributions. “Electronic pop music … I don’t

want to say Krautrock-influenced, but I guess it was. It

was definitely melodic stuff, but it was pretty minimal.”

Wolf Eyes would eventually become prolific noise

renegades on Sub Pop, but in 1999, with only a couple

Hanson releases, the two Michigan members relocated to

Andrew’s apartment—the idea being they would become

a three-piece or simply back up Andrew’s project. Band

names Andrew was considering included Mini-Systems

(“but that was really Dirty Tony’s band name,” Andrew

says), Wolf Eyes (also, technically, taken), and Women.

“When he was writing a bunch of

I Get Wet

songs, that

was going to be for Women,” Dilloway says. “We did

professional promo photos … and I still have a bunch of

tapes marked Women.”

The three recorded, mocked up covers, and brain-

stormed ideas constantly. Their first show, at the MoMA

PS1 exhibition space in Queens, featured “She is

Beautiful,” “Don’t Stop Living in the Red,” and a couple

Wolf Eyes songs, according to Dilloway. He remembers

playing guitar and “damaged tape stuff,” Nate making

“weird noises,” and Andrew playing keyboard and singing

over a drum track. Andrew backed out of doing a second

gig.

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•

“We were both going in such different directions,”

Dilloway says. “He wanted to make this music that

everyone would love and be able to relate to, whereas

Nate and I were doing the complete opposite. Our music

was getting more anti-social and bizarre.”

When Dilloway and Young headed back home to

Michigan a few months later—their van breaking down

an hour outside of the city—it confirmed to Andrew that,

even if familiar friends and street strangers weren’t inter-

ested in being in his band, he was committed. He himself

would be “this guy.”

“It was a real revelation to just have it be an individual,”

Andrew says. “I like the way that contrasted so much with

the idea of a group and this ‘we’ collective spirit. … Even

when it was all these instruments and all these sounds, it was

just this feeling of one person. It was such a contradiction.”

Bulb Records released a Wolf Eyes 12-inch entitled

Fortune Dove that featured three songs the band recorded

in Andrew’s apartment. For the fourth song, the label

(Larson) asked Andrew to do a remix. (“We do not play

on that song at all,” Dilloway confirms. “That song is 100

percent Andrew.”)

That song, “Wolf Eyes Rules (What Kinda Band?),” is

the first featuring the Andrew W.K. name. The guitar riff

and rhyme delivery are closer to the random nu-metal

samples you’d extract from any Y2K time-capsule, but

the voice is clearly Andrew. In the song, he asks about the

kind of band that would play “noisy ass shit,” live at his

house, and allow him to “remix a track / and then gets all

pissed off when they get the track back.”

“We never heard it until we got our copies and were

like, ‘Holy shit,’” Dilloway says. “Pretty funny.”

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

***

The cover of

Mad

#387 (November 1999) shows more

than a dozen Alfred E. Neuman mugs representing the

styles and events that defined the 1900s. The coverline

payoff: “The 20th Century—Why it Sucked!”

The issue—photographed with other seemingly

random items alongside a reclining Andrew W.K. for

the back cover of his first EP,

Girls Own Juice

—provides,

if nothing else, a loose marker for where the story of

Andrew’s two releases (and third near-release) on Bulb

Records might begin. The cover for

Girls Own Juice

(aka AWKGOJ) features a picture of a long-haired skull

bleeding from every orifice and wearing a Detroit Tigers

cap. Andrew, who painted the image himself, named the

skull O.T.T.O. (short for Over The Top O.T.T.O.).

The first track, “Girls Own Juice,” shares some skeletal

similarities to

I Get Wet

’s “

Girls Own Love

,” but offers

slightly different lyrics, a brighter keyboard radiance,

and less gruff in the vocals. The other four songs would

all be re-recorded or re-released on official albums or as

B-sides, with “We Want Fun” and “Make Sex” appearing

on the Japanese version of

I Get Wet

. The vocals on “We

Want Fun” are night-and-day different from the version

that would also appear on the Jackass soundtrack years

later; a new melodic lead also masks a Sparks-esque intro.

The

Girls Own Juice booklet extends an invitation to

call Andrew at a 212 number which, as of this writing,

still functions. (“Most people would just hang up or say,

‘you suck,’” Andrew recalls.) On the back cover, Andrew

is lounging on a floral patterned couch. (“I remember

that fucking piece of shit couch,” Mark Morgan says.

I G E T W E T

•

“We found it on the side of the street five blocks from his

house and it was raining and he was like, ‘Oh, this will be

perfect!’”) Scattered next to Andrew on the upholstered

bane of Morgan’s existence is an obscured copy of

Mad

#387, a Galen 7-inch, and the beloved Couch 7-inch with

Larson smoking and Magas in his schoolboy knot.

“I was flattered,” Magas says, “Kind of a little nod,

you know. I thought

Girls Own Juice

was amazing. To

me, it sounded like everything that’s great and ridiculous

about music, like Judas Priest mixed with Sparks, with

this really happy feeling that’s kind of subversive and

presented in an epic scale.”

***

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night could

keep Andrew’s demos—mailed with a Matt Sweeney

handwritten letter attached—from arriving at their

(destined) destinations.

“That’s just what I did,” Sweeney says of his letter-

writing ways. “I remember describing Andrew as ‘jackpot

rock,’ where it’s like hitting the jackpot and everything

you like about rock music, you’re being showered with it.

‘Maximalism’ is a word that I used. I wrote a lot of letters,

but it’s all about those demos.”

Dave Grohl, an old friend of Sweeney’s who received

one of the first care packages, got right back to him.

“He’s like, ‘Dude, this is fucking awesome,’” Sweeney

remembers. “‘Does he want to open for me for this

show in San Francisco?’” Andrew would tell

Interview

magazine: “the first time Dave called me, I didn’t know

who he was. I had heard of the Foo Fighters but I didn’t

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

know his name. But I liked his drumming for Nirvana,

for sure.” (In that same article, Grohl called Andrew’s

bloody nose picture “the sexiest thing you’ve ever seen in

your life. My girlfriend immediately had a crush on this

kid. So I hated it, and then I put on the tape and thought

it was genius. … It’s refreshing to hear something that

you can actually hum along to and smile.”)

For that March 2000 concert, Andrew flew out with

Sweeney and a CD. “I think even then I maybe had the

CD player on stage with an output coming out of it,”

Andrew says. “During soundcheck, I would go to great

lengths and work with the engineers and crew to try to

find a place on the stage that wouldn’t bounce or shake

… and I think even then it was skipping. I figured, ‘Oh,

here is a reason to get a band.’”

***

Lewis Largent had just quit his job in the music

programming department at MTV, where he also hosted

120 Minutes. Largent’s wife, Julie Greenwald, was senior

vice president of marketing at Island Def Jam when

her boss, Island Def Jam president and CEO Lyor

Cohen, asked Largent if he’d want to work in the A&R

department there. When Cohen took over, he cut the

number of rock and pop artists at Island Def Jam from

274 down to 29. Still, Largent walked in the door with

Sum 41 already lined up, and shortly thereafter brought

Supergrass into the fold. He soon received a handwritten

letter from Matt Sweeney.

Largent—surprised that no one had heard of Andrew

W.K. because “somebody in the A&R world always

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•

knows”—liked the demos enough to accept Sweeney’s

invitation to Mercury Lounge, where Andrew won over

every last person in the audience. “I was one of four

people there,” Largent remembers, “and he sang to a

ghettoblaster, playing like he was playing for a stadium.”

There was something Largent couldn’t shake, however.

“Part of me was going, ‘Am I crazy, because nobody

else is here,’” Largent says. “He was also attached to the

Vice guys, and those guys have that snarky, ironic vibe,

which he didn’t seem to me at all. I was waiting for the

curtain line. For the Wizard to say ‘Yeah, this is just a big

joke.’ My cynicism was up. I kept asking him, ‘Is this for

real? You’re not fucking with me, are you? Seriously, this

is not a joke because I want to go with this.’”

Island Def Jam was the first to express interest in

Andrew, and, despite his manager’s advice that you

classically don’t go with the first offer, Andrew “wanted

to get down to work as quickly as possible and not fuck

around,” Sweeney says. After a few back-and-forth phone

conversations, they arranged a meeting where Andrew,

sitting stoic in sunglasses, finally opened up to Largent.

“Thank you for your interest,” Andrew said. “I’m

really excited about working with Island Def Jam, but it’s

important for me to tell you something. If you haven’t

seen photos of me, it’s because I have an issue with my

eyes.”

Andrew removed his shades and revealed to Largent

a jarring set of crossed eyes. Largent could not muster a

response in the four seconds before both Sweeney and

Andrew lost it; looking back, Largent says the wonkiness

was convincing enough to “give pause to the idea of

signing him.”

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

***

In early 2000, as stars were aligning for Fischerspooner,

the duo was offered a gig at a Belgian arts festival called

Over the Edges for $5,000, “the most anyone had ever

offered to pay us,” Spooner says. Though already booked

elsewhere, Spooner reached out to Andrew with an

opportunity. “He loved [Fischerspooner’s] ‘Tone Poem,’

so I said, ‘We’ll send you and you can lip-sync the song

for me.’” Spooner envisioned Andrew performing in

front of a blown-up print of Ethridge’s “erotic and

violent” photo, and deemed the event, “Fischerspooner

Presents Andrew W.K.: New Looks, New Feelings.”

Andrew went, but instead of “Tone Poem,” he played

“

Party Til You Puke

.”

At least some version of the song. Andrew’s second

EP, a 12-inch entitled

Party Til You Puke

, contained three

remixes. Unlike the version on

I Get Wet

, these remixes

find their driving intensity away from the guitar. The

focus on two of them is cutting electronic embellish-

ments and floor-shattering effects. The third, called

the Shout Out Remix, is simply 31 a capella seconds of

raw, layered vocals, each line ending in a retched strain.

Rounding out Side A is a cover of Couch’s “Old Man”

that any actual member would find Earth-destroying.

“The

Party Til You Puke

thing was based on the

intensity of Couch,” Andrew says. “There was a time

when I was thinking I was going to do either every-

thing keyboard and play solo for the rest of my life, or

make it more like a rock band where there’s people and

real-sounding drums and guitars and things that I don’t

have on the keyboard.

Party Til You Puke

was to see what

I G E T W E T

•

would happen if you just took what I was doing in these

solo shows … and say, OK, it’s going to be undeniably

electronic and digital and keyboard-sounding.”

Snapshots from the online archive Wayback Machine

show a September 2000 update to Bulb’s website

promoting

Girls Own Juice

as a current release and

Party Til You Puke

as an upcoming release; let’s ballpark

AWKGOJ as between November 1999 (thanks,

Mad

magazine) and September 2000, and PTYP as fourth

quarter of 2000. Further down that snapshotted list of

upcoming releases, a CD by Andrew W.K. entitled We

Want Fun is under a banner that says “Out January 2001.”

***

Before Island came into the picture, that was the plan.

Largent remembers getting Andrew out of his Bulb contract

as being a non-issue, and Sweeney says it was as easy as

paying a little kickback, “which was really cool on Andrew’s

part … recognizing that Pete had supported him.” Although

Bulb never released a full-length, the We Want Fun name

was used for another artifact circulating around that time.

“All the recordings I had, some of which went on I Get

Wet and some of which went on The Wolf, I was referring

to that as We Want Fun,” Andrew says of what he was

sending out as his demo. “This wasn’t being presented

as an album. This was more like, here’s some songs I’m

working on, do you want to work with me?”

The cover Andrew put on We Want Fun was another

gigantic painting of his; you can see a portion of that

painting behind Andrew’s filthy couch on the AWKGOJ

back cover, in its entirety in Larson’s garage, or in the

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

back of this book. Sweeney confirms it was the demo

with this cover—with, of course, his handwritten letter

and a print of the bloody-nose picture—that “everybody

fucking freaked out over.”

“I remember [Andrew] mailed me the CD and I

hadn’t gotten around to listening to it,” Quigley says,

“and he called over and over and over again. I put it on

and I get to ‘

It’s Time to Party’

and I was immediately,

like, holy shit! ‘

She is Beautiful’

was actually the one

that completely blew me away. I had heard some of the

stuff over the phone, but this was just a phenomenal leap

forward in terms of its presentation, its realization, (and)

actual songwriting involved.”

Around that time, Magas was out on tour and stopped

at his friend Mark Morgan’s apartment. Andrew came by,

and Magas asked him if he could hear the demo. “We sat

there and listened to the whole thing, beginning to end,

while he air-drummed through it,” Magas says. “Flurry of

arms and hair for the duration of that record. And I was

right there rocking along with it too, just loving it.”

“Oh man,” someone said, “if you produce it this way,

then …”

Magas recalls all of Andrew’s friends being super-

excited for him, throwing out crazier and crazier ideas

of what a soon-to-be major-label recording artist could

do. Magas chimed in with an idea of his own, phrased

slightly different from the others.

“I said, ‘You know what you got to do’—and I don’t

even remember what he had to do, but he very sternly,

very matter-of-fact said, ‘Don’t tell me what to do.’”

•

Sweat

We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the
man who embodies victorious effort.

—Theodore Roosevelt, “

The Strenuous Life

”

When you’re working you feel all right.

—Andrew W.K.,

“Party Hard”

Aaron Dilloway is down to his boxers, drenched in

diaphoresis, and has been screaming for hours. It’s a

sweltering, sticky summer evening all over Brooklyn,

and inside Andrew Wilkes-Krier’s un-air-conditioned

apartment, the place offering the least relief is the five-

foot-wide, three-foot-deep, unventilated coat closet in

which Dilloway stands, risking heat stroke. Comforters

and pillows are clogging valuable air space overhead, and

the climbing temperature is made all the more stuffy and

dreadful thanks to the layers of moving blankets, heavy-

duty rubber, and Auralex acoustic foam Andrew has

nailed to every visible surface.

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

It’s inside this unforgiving box—one that Largent

would later describe as a “stand-up coffin”—where many

never-die party vocals were born and first recorded.

“I did like 15 vocal tracks for The Beast People in there,”

Dilloway says. “We were so dehydrated and so full of lack

of sleep that after hours of screaming, we just kept hearing

things … (like) people trying to break in or something.”

***

The intended effect of so many dense, deadening, heat-

trapping materials, of course, is to contain the sounds

coming from within. To hear Andrew describe it though, the

soundproof closet wasn’t an evolved DIY attempt at sonic

perfection so much as it was a way to keep neighbors from

getting pissed off. “There was never a single complaint,”

Andrew says. “Once that door closed, you could scream as

loud as you possibly could,” Andrew says, “and [you] barely

hear it standing two feet away.” The closet only housed the

mic; sounds created outside the closet didn’t meet the same

standard. Even when Andrew played keyboards with his

headphones on, neighbors would come banging.

“‘Andy—what are you doing?’” Andrew says, imperson-

ating his next-door Polish neighbor. “‘Why the tap, tap, tap,

all day, all night?’” He’d try playing lighter or cushioning

the keyboard-bottom with a pillow, but the tap-tap-tapping

still crept through the glorified two-by-four posing as a

wall. “‘Andy—why? I come home: tap, tap, tap.’”

Along with his Roland keyboard, Andrew kept

his computer and stacks of modules and processing

equipment just outside the closet, even using pieces

of the dismantled Jumble Gym as propping parts or

I G E T W E T

•

makeshift shelving. It’s a tradition, he says, of “haphazard

assembly” that he still follows, although more out of the

subconscious necessity of finishing a project than out of

aesthetic design or sentimentality.

Connected to his keyboard was a Roland SC-880, a

module Andrew saw in a catalogue and went with because

the price was right. Andrew estimates “93 percent” of the

keyboards we hear in his music comes through this,

with its array of general MIDI sounds and settings that

replicate an entire orchestra worth of instruments. “The

keyboard was basically dictating everything,” Andrew

says. “It’s so pointed [and] percussive, so every time

the note hits, it starts loudest and gets quieter. There’s

a lot of energy in that attack … very immediate and

aggressive.”

Andrew had worked with other tabletop digital

recorders, but returned them when realizing that, for

the same amount of money, he could get a custom-built

PC loaded with an entry-level recording program called

Cakewalk. What stood out about Cakewalk was its ability

to record and overlap audio on the same track. Whereas

two- or four-track tapes require audio to be bounced

back and forth to create space (and other software might

get bogged down with the amount of audio Andrew

wished to record), Cakewalk allowed Andrew to record

keyboard directly on a previous keyboard track. It didn’t

matter that Cakewalk limited the amount of tracks one

could use at one time because Andrew could fill out his

sound on a single track.

“It just changed everything,” he says. “It was like a

dream come true. I remember the first few days as I was

figuring it out—it felt like a dream or winning a billion

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

dollars, just realizing everything’s opened up. There’s no

limits. I could finally make this music sound the way I

want it to sound.”

Andrew neglected sleep. He’d record keyboards until 2

a.m., wake up three hours later for work, then come home

to add more layers. For guitar tracks, Andrew recorded

line after personalized-tuning line with his Gibson Les

Paul, which was connected through a SansAmp guitar

amp modeler that simulated the distortion of a real amp.

For drums, Andrew used a Roland setting where one key

was the kick, one was the snare, one was the crash, and so

on. Playing two or three keys per hand at a time, Andrew

would—and still does—record entire drum parts. (Years

later, when Andrew re-recorded the song “We Want

Fun” for the Jackass soundtrack, producer Rick Rubin

and drummer Josh Freese were mesmerized by the

display. “He’s nailing all these drum parts on this little

synthesizer, with drum fills,” Freese remembers. “He’s

energetic and animated the whole time. I remember

looking over at Rick, and he’s pointing over to Andrew,

like ‘Don’t look at me! Watch what he’s doing. This is

insane!’”)

One bone-basic Cakewalk tool Andrew had no

interest in utilizing was the loop, which would have

hypothetically allowed him to tap out a single measure

of drumming, then copy it (or loop it) over the course

of an entire song. He initially chalked up his reluctance

to some sort of perfectionist-drive or inner-matter of

integrity to keep the music live, but soon put his finger

on the real reason.

“I realized, oh, I really like playing this part, and that’s

why I’m doing it a hundred times, because I’m getting so

I G E T W E T

•

much pleasure from playing the part and just executing

it,” he says. “It’s fun to play the song, so why wouldn’t

I want to play that part again? I definitely had temper

tantrums. I’ve gotten better at not blowing out a bunch

of energy in that way. There’s something very satisfying

about going, ‘Motherfuck—OK, one more time.’”

Andrew wasn’t getting to the center of the ultimate

song. He was perfecting a singular sound, one that wasn’t

just greater than the sum of its parts, but would hopefully

void those parts. Guitar solos and lead fills interested him

none—“It’s not really supposed to be expressive in that

way”—and, as he told one fan site, the place for person-

ality and individuality was not here. “Sometimes it just

gets in the way of the song itself,” he said. “I have a lot of

respect for the song and the recording and not as much

respect for the players or how they perform. … It’s about

the feeling of this recording, of this song, of this thing.”

***

Gary Helsinger, Andrew’s eventual publisher at Universal

and a former Stallone-impersonating member of Green

Jellÿ, called it a “Castle of Sound.”

“When you’re multi-tracking a guitar, if you add

another guitar, that’s enough,” Helsinger says. “It will

sound really big, and if you listen to Led Zeppelin

records, it’s two guitars. There’s almost never more than

two guitars on a recording. But then if you do three

or four guitars, what happens is the sound waves start

to cancel each other out, and then it becomes a hum.

Those cool little jaggedly sound waves start to smooth

out and there’s nothing there. It sounds smaller. What

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

Andrew figured out was that if you keep going and

going and going, what happens is those little nuances

that were canceled out by having three or four guitars

start to show up more often over 20 guitar parts. You

almost get a single guitar, but beefed up with those

weird little nuances popping back up. It’s like mathe-

matical electronic philosophy. He had a goal to make the

melodies so thick and gooey that it just became one big

hunk of melody lumbering down on you.”

To Andrew, the traditional Wall of Sound is a blurry

wash of sounds still discernible and dissectible. There

would be no room for that in this collection of songs.

“I just wanted it to sound like music was the instrument

instead of music made up of different instruments,”

Andrew says. “I want to create a feeling that’s inspiring

to people versus impress people.”

***

“Guys, we’re going to make rock ’n’ roll history. You

know that, right? Rock ’n’ roll history.”

Lewis Largent had just entered the nearly

5,000-square-foot Hollywood Hills mansion that Scott

Humphrey called home. Expansive loggia corridors, zen

gardens, and a waterfall welcomed visitors over the years,

most of whom came because of Humphrey’s in-house

recording studio he called the Chop Shop. The studio

itself was going for more of a distressed high-tech look:

monitors and consoles with their covers removed, rust-

finished everything, screensavers with the raining Matrix

codes. Working as a studio engineer in the early 1990s,

Humphrey would wheel his computer around town from

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•

studio to studio, editing digitally in a world still hung up

on analog tape. He used early versions of Pro Tools to

edit vocals, guitar, and drums on Metallica’s self-titled

1991 album (aka The Black Album), and even provided

software suggestions to Pro Tools for features considered

standard today. One of Humphrey’s first Chop Shop

projects was with an industrial band named Skold for

a 1996 Neverland / Chaos promotional tape that went

out to record stores on blue waiting-to-be-repurposed

cassette tapes.

Largent saw in Humphrey “some sort of bastard

child of Mutt Lange” and a producer who could harness

monstrous anthems in a poppy way. He sent him

Andrew’s demo in the fall of 2000. “Andrew loved the

Hellbilly Deluxe record I produced and wrote with Rob

Zombie,” Humphrey says. “He said, ‘I want my record

to sound like that, but more intense.’” Humphrey and

his engineer Frank Gryner were both excited to work

on a project they viewed as over-the-top … and this was

before Largent held his pep rally on the first night of

recording.

“It’s one thing if you bring in Jimmy Page and say

that,” Gryner says. “Andrew was a kid and you didn’t

know who he was. I thought it was funny, but refreshing

in a way. It’s the rock ’n’ roll thing that artists at that time

lacked: the balls to have that kind of attitude.”

Humphrey and Gryner invited their stable of session

musicians to begin filling out drum, bass, and guitar

parts. Eventual AWK drummer Donald Tardy flew in

from Florida to track a handful of songs one weekend.

“Hey, do what you want,” Tardy remembers Andrew

saying, “but play it exactly the way I want you to do it.”

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

Tardy played nervous and tight on a kit he wasn’t

comfortable with. (“It was Tommy Lee’s disco ball drum

set,” he says, “the one with all the little pieces of glass

mirror stuck to the whole bass drum.”) He had rehearsed

a “couple tasty fills” that ended up on the record,

including a fill right after the first chorus in “Party

Hard.” Andrew’s songs, Tardy says, are all about the bass

hits. “If you picture an AC/DC song,” Tardy says, “it’s a

bass drum then a snare, bass drum then a snare—1, 2,

3, 4. With

I Get Wet

, you’re kicking on the bass drum

every time. Andrew loved that. Even when I mixed it

up and tried to bring a little bit of my style into it, it

still sounded better if I took Andrew’s word and played

four-on-the-floor.”

***

Long before studio work began, manager Matt Sweeney

dialed up Quigley. Sweeney had written letters to a

score of other contacts early on, but he had one last

component in mind he felt would complete the package.

“Andrew needs his Randy Rhoads,” Sweeney told

Quigley. “His Mick Ronson. I’m thinking—maybe—

Jimmy Coup.”

“That’s a fucking great idea,” Quigley said.

Jimmy Coup had been the singer and guitar player for

the Coup de Grace, a Twin/Tone label- and tour-mate of

Skunk’s. Quigley and Jimmy had known each other since

they were kids growing up in New Jersey, and Quigley

saw Jimmy as the perfect complement to what Andrew

was trying to do, both as an energetic component to a

live show and as a megaphone for some of the concepts

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•

Andrew held dear. “The idea that this is meant to appeal

at the broadest possible level was very much Andrew’s

concept,” Quigley says, “but I’m certain Jimmy helped

facilitate.” Rather than have couriers deliver to Jimmy

the usual handwritten note and demo-package, Sweeney

called Jimmy.

And once he heard the songs, Jimmy immediately

drafted a letter for Andrew.

“I could probably rewrite it this very second,” Jimmy

says. “‘This is the most incredible shit I’ve ever heard.

Totally awesome. I would give my left arm to play

this music. Your friend, Jimmy.’ I do remember that

specificity, because I remember thinking to myself that

whoever made those demo tapes is my buddy.”

***

Gryner admits to having no idea how those demos were

made. They didn’t sound like home recordings, they

didn’t sound like professional recordings, and he couldn’t

tell what kind of equipment was used. He only knew

they were incredibly unique sounding—“with all the

DNA of what he wanted embedded in there”—and that

Andrew was enthusiastic about them, sitting shoulder-

to-shoulder with Scott. If Andrew was looking at the

Pro Tools screen and saw a waveform that jumped out

in a weird place, he’d insist on editing it. If Andrew was

hearing something in a song that didn’t sound exactly

like the demo version, he’d insist on re-doing it.

“He’d just listen to his demos over and over, non-stop”

Humphrey says. “We’d record something, and he’d be

like, ‘Wait, I need to hear the demo. Yep, there’s a cymbal

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•

crash there. Stop. Do it again.’ We recreated his demo for

pretty much every single beat. I’m like, ‘Dude, let’s just

go have fun with it,’ but he was adamant. He wouldn’t

take creative input.”

Humphrey admits the demo had a “certain charm to

it” and that the energy was there alongside completely

fleshed-out songs, but his biggest challenge was reeling

Andrew in from his relentless ambition to make it sound

huge his way. Where Andrew wanted more guitars, and

more pianos, and more drums, Humphrey says he wanted

contrasts of smaller things to make those big parts sound

bigger. Otherwise, ears would just get fatigued.

“It’s like a painting,” Humphrey says. “You can’t make

everything super-bright because then it’s just white and

there’s nothing on the canvas. It needed dynamics. Or

when you’re a kid, [and] you want to make the most

amazing sandwich ever. You stack a hundred things on it

and make this huge sandwich, but, when you bite into it,

it doesn’t taste like anything because there’s so much crap

on there. It loses all the flavor. Everything just starts to

work against each other.”

Even with paintings and sandwiches as examples,

Humphrey says Andrew still wanted more stacks of

guitar, more stacks of piano. If Humphrey’s stacking

didn’t sound right, Andrew would ask to play the demo

again.

“Frank and I were going bananas,” Humphrey says.

“Finally, I’m like, ‘Andrew, check this out: you hired me

because you liked Hellbilly Deluxe. In this song, when the

chorus ends, there’s just one little instrument playing for

two bars. Then, bang! Everything comes back in and it

sounds huge.’ He said, ‘OK, I get it.’ Then we’d try it

I G E T W E T

•

a couple times and he’d be like, ‘I don’t know, Scott—I

think I like the demo better. Let’s go back to the demo.’”

“He had the worst demo-itis of anyone I’ve ever met

in any of my 30-plus years of making records.”

***

“It’s called demo-itis because those recordings are some

of the most remarkable things I’ve ever heard and that’s

that.”

From the beginning, Matt Sweeney didn’t think

recording “in that gigantic mansion that looked like

something out of The Matrix” was right for Andrew. “It

was still the age of gigantic budgets and huge amounts

of money being put in the hands of producers,” Sweeney

says. “I was like, ‘Dude, Andrew, you’re a fucking genius.

Why are you spending all this goddamn money?’”

In Humphrey’s initial discussions with Andrew’s team,

he let it be known that he could do the record, but had

a six-week snowboarding trip already booked in Aspen,

Colorado. That early 2001 vacation would represent the

first days he’d taken off in seven years, and he couldn’t

cancel it.

“Look, I’m not afraid to work,” Humphrey said. “I’ll

pack up my studio, we can rent a bigger place, and we can

work out there. I just need to be on a snowboard from

eight to noon.”

“It wasn’t Andrew’s lifestyle,” Sweeney says, “and it

was money being spent on other people’s lifestyles, which

is typical.”

Humphrey wanted to get all the basic tracks done

at the Chop Shop so they could focus on overdubs in

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

Aspen. That meant getting vocals done, which is no small

task in Humphrey’s hands. Ever the Pro Tools wizard,

Humphrey would have singers record vocals on such a

tightly wound loop that a singer may only have a single

beat to recompose oneself before getting right back into

repeating the line. Sing. Beat. Sing again. Beat … in

rapid-fire succession, 50 times if that’s what it took. “You

have to be a robot to keep up,” Gryner says. “I think

Andrew definitely fared well though.”

Tuning the songs down allowed Andrew—who was

recording vocals he had first written and recorded in

his teens—to reach higher notes he couldn’t otherwise.

“Andrew’s singing was really crazy on the demos,” Jimmy

says. “It’s awesome and totally full of all this enthusiasm,

but it’s so high and such a chant. And he did it in this

closet—this sensory deprivation chamber where he’d

be in his own world. It’s tough to get in the zone when

there’s this producer sitting behind this huge control

board that looks like the fucking flight deck in Star Trek

and Tommy Lee’s dropping by and there’s a microphone

in front of you.”

Jimmy took a couple whacks at “

Fun Night,”

listening

to Andrew’s phrasing and contorting his own voice to

best mimic Andrew’s with “more presence or attack.”

Andrew then came in and sang over the top of Jimmy’s

track, essentially singing like Jimmy, who was singing like

Andrew. “When I listen to

I Get Wet

,” Jimmy says, “I can’t

hear myself. There’s only one place that I actually hear

my voice, and that’s in

[‘She is Beautiful

’] ‘nah nah nah,

nah nana nah nah.’”

Jimmy has no shortage of ways to describe his efforts

in the vocal booth … all of them in relation to Andrew’s

I G E T W E T

•

vocals shining prominently on top of his. Jimmy

“provided a net.” Jimmy added “width … that’s tucked

under there.”

“It’s like swinging a bat,” Jimmy says. “You can tell

when someone’s not swung the bat as much as you, so

you take the bat and go, ‘Here, check it out, brother—

swing it like this.’ Then you put the bat in his hands

and reach around his shoulders and show him. Andrew

learned how to do it very, very quickly. He sang the shit

out of shit.”

Andrew referred to Jimmy’s vocals as The Sweet Heat,

and, today, says Jimmy’s voice is all over the place, even

if Jimmy himself doesn’t recognize it. “Jimmy was trying

to blend in to this sound that we were making,” Andrew

says, “It wasn’t about an individual voice sticking out. …

At that time, it was supposed to be the most anonymous-

sounding voice possible.”

Ken Chastain, who would work as an (uncredited)

engineer later in the process, says Jimmy’s greatest

influence was outside anything the

I Get Wet

listener

would hear. “It was basically a philosophy session of

Jimmy showing Andrew W.K. what he thought Andrew

W.K. was,” he says. “Both of these guys were on a tear

about how huge this was going to be, how important

it was, and how they needed to understand what they

were saying. As a cynical old guy, I think it borders on

megalomania, but to watch Andrew and Coup talk, it was

a classic thing.”

Gary Helsinger, Andrew’s publisher at Universal,

hears the vocal evolution and differences between the

demos and the album, and thinks Jimmy had a major

impact. “I don’t think there’d be a lot of harmonies if

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

it wasn’t for Jimmy,” he says, “Jimmy sang a lot, and

Andrew doubled it, imitating Jimmy’s track before they

took Jimmy out. He really forced Andrew to sing.”

***

Jimmy became a daily presence at the Chop Shop,

taking on tasks A&R rep Largent admits were closer to

his job description. Largent might ask Jimmy to address

some label-based matter with Andrew, and Jimmy would

bring it up during a discussion about philosopher James

Allen over some apple-and-peanut-butter slices. If work

was being done that didn’t involve Andrew, Jimmy

might suggest they go sneaker-shopping to clear their

heads. Good, clean, honest, hard-working fun, as Jimmy

describes it. And when 2001 rolled along and it was

time to pack up shop and move about a thousand miles

to Aspen, Jimmy was there with his ’84 Dodge van.

Andrew dubbed her the Good Good Kid after the first

three letters on the license plate, even writing a Meat

Loaf-inspired theme regaling the van’s virtues (that both

Jimmy and Andrew can still recite).

“Are you kidding me,” Gryner remembers asking

Andrew. “That thing couldn’t look closer to the Scooby

Doo Mystery Machine; it’s such the obvious name to call

it the Mystery Machine!”

The caravan to Aspen included a U-Haul truck stuffed

with the innards of the Chop Shop: a console, multiple

monitors, amps, preamps, compressors, guitars, and a

tuner accidentally stolen from Lindsay Buckingham.

Driving through a winter storm that only energized

the snowboarders further, the crew pulled into Aspen

I G E T W E T

•

and tasked their assistant with reconfiguring the studio.

Their chalet—in the middle of nowhere, though just up

the road from where Jack Nicholson owned a home—

was immediately gutted of its furniture and rewired to

electrically accommodate the studio. Humphrey called it

a “bit of a hooptie,” but it was ready to roar come noon

every day.

Humphrey recalls getting Andrew up on skis the first

day. Gryner remembers it being toward the end of their

trip. Both agree it happened only once, though, and

the results weren’t great. “I have never seen someone

so awkward on the mountain as Andrew,” Gryner says.

“Definitely not in his domain at all.”

Andrew and Jimmy would start their days eating

oatmeal or exercising, then cutting gang-vocals, talking

Tony Robbins, and contemplating the power of the

universe. Jimmy saw himself as nothing more than a

facilitator for helping Andrew see his vision to whatever

end Andrew chose … “and they were paying me a wage,”

Jimmy says. “Fucking great job!”

“Andrew and Jimmy did whatever in the morning,”

Humphrey says, “and Frank and I basically tried to

kill ourselves snowboarding these insane double-black

diamond runs. We’d let her rip, grab some food, be back

at the house by noon, and work until midnight.” In the

winter wonderland, Humphrey also teased Andrew about

his subject matter and how little it reflected the Andrew

he saw.

“Andrew, you have all these songs about partying, but

you don’t party,” Humphrey would say.

“I party!”

“What’s the definition of party?” Humphrey asked.

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

“The definition of party is when you throw a pillow

on the floor, then you run around it until you get dizzy

and pass out and puke.”

“That’s not the definition of party! That’s the

definition of being retarded!”

To demonstrate, Andrew would spin around in an

office chair 20 times as fast as he could, then attempt to

run up a staircase.

“He was bound and determined to do it,” Gryner says,

“and he would crash into guitars and be almost as out of

control as he was on the ski slope. He’d get so fucked up

and dizzy and just run around as fast as he could. It was

so juvenile, but I thought it was hilarious.”

***

“I didn’t want him to mix the record,” Andrew says on

why Humphrey and Gryner didn’t get to finish what they

started. “It was more that Mike Shipley had expressed

interest in mixing it and I thought from my own limited

experience, sometimes it’s a good idea to have a totally

fresh perspective. … I felt real bad about telling Scott

that I wanted someone else to mix it. I didn’t have the

guts to even tell him—I had to have Jimmy tell him. I

wouldn’t have changed anything other than the fact that

I would have told him myself. [ John] Fields was the one

getting stuff ready for Mike Shipley.”

***

After Aspen, Jimmy says he was out eating dinner with

Largent, both of them lamenting about the last 10

I G E T W E T

•

percent of the album that was just not getting done.

Jimmy brought up a producer friend of his who he called

a finisher—a closer. He could guarantee

I Get Wet

’s

completion.

***

In the spring of 2001, John Fields was homesick and

living in a temporary New York City apartment provided

by the record label of some band he was producing that

wasn’t “drop D, super-pop metal.” Fields had been blown

away by Andrew’s demos when Jimmy first cranked them

over a set of crappy computer speakers, and was just

as wowed hearing the rough mixes in a studio setting.

Fields was interested, but had one stipulation: If they

were going to do this, they’d have to do it at Sub Jersey,

a home studio he’d recently built in his basement more

than a thousand miles away from New York, just on the

other side of Minneapolis.

“Eighty percent of the tracks had been recorded

already between my first recordings I did all by myself,

then the time with Scott Humphrey, which was off

and on over a year or six months with session players,”

Andrew estimates. “I mean, the whole album took two

years of pretty consistent work. I would say there were

over a thousand hours put into it, but by the time we

went to John Fields’, I went back and re-recorded. I went

back and played guitar over top everything else again

and used that as the main guitar and then everything else

went into it.”

Two workstations were set up in Fields’ basement:

one with Andrew’s Cakewalk PC, and the other with

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

Fields’ Pro Tools system. They would listen to Andrew’s

original demo version of

“She is Beautiful,”

Fields says,

and if Andrew liked a guitar part, Fields would open up

the digital audio file on Andrew’s computer, extract the

guitar part, then transfer it onto his computer where

he’d insert it into his Pro Tools program, creating a new

version of the song. They repeated this process song-by-

song, track-by-track, with all of Andrew’s demos as well

as the Chop Shop recordings. And at Sub Jersey, Fields

says Andrew felt comfortable bringing out all his toys,

from his Sherman Filterbank processor (“for strange,

Euro-dance music,” Fields says) to his vocoder (“the

computer voice you hear all over ‘

Party Hard

’; you hold

down a keyboard key and whatever note you play is what

you talk like”).

“I think he was stifled creatively because shit was

just taking too long,” Fields says. “In L.A., they were

spending a day getting the bass sound and teaching the

bass player how to play something. I’m like, ‘This is

crazy—you should’ve just played it yourself.’”

Fields can point to certain familiar things that remained

from Humphrey’s session—“On ‘

Party Hard,’

there’s an

awesome fill right before the second verse”—but he

says Andrew essentially recut all of the guitars, bass,

drums, and keyboards. With the keyboard-to-Pro Tools-

via-Cakewalk process perfected, Fields says Andrew

underscored each song with timpani, French horns, and

saxophones. Andrew says he still uses keyboard saxophone

on most recordings to double the guitar and bass parts,

believing that the mid-range timbre of the saxophone

“blurs the guitar in a nice way to turn it into the idea of

a guitar, but maybe not the sound of a guitar so much.”

I G E T W E T

•

Fields, thinking certain synthesized wind instruments

sounded too cheesy, brought in two local guys to double

up the keyboard trombone and saxophone parts. Andrew

says you can hear the live players in the inspirational title

track’s intro.

“I Get Wet”

has what Andrew calls a breakthrough

chord progression that “changed everything.” It revolved

around the “1 Chord Over 3 Bass,” which he told

Inventory was “simultaneously sadder than a chord like D

minor, and happier than a regular major chord. … I think

this chord, and its sound, are tapping into the elemental

aspect of what it is to be alive.”

Once Andrew discovered “this place existed,” he never

stopped using those chords and their inversions. “It’s just

notes rubbing off each other,” he says. “That’s where the

tension and power of that sound come from.” Not only

are they featured in virtually all of Andrew’s songs, but

he says he doesn’t want to make music where they’re not

there. “They’re not all power chords; some are single

strings,” he says, pointing out that most people who

cover his songs miss that subtlety. “It gets the point

across, it still works, but it doesn’t have that certain

feeling, that magical feeling.”

Instrumentally, Fields estimates that the

“Party Hard”

he and Andrew worked on had, among other things, a

dozen layered guitar tracks (with who knows how much

guitar per track); seven mono piano tracks; synthe-

sized horns; ten-plus percussion tracks that included

drums, multiple timpani, and “these weird anvil kinds

of sounds”; and three bass guitar tracks, where one bass

played the eighth notes, another synthesizer bass added

quarter-note reinforcement, and a third bass tuned up

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

an octave was tucked underneath. Added up, the number

of tracks far exceeded the limited number of tracks that

Fields’ version of Pro Tools could accommodate … and

that’s before counting a single layer of

“Party Hard”

chants, vocoder-tweaked and otherwise.

For the vocals on “

I Get Wet

,” where parts overlap

and cross over, each utterance required its own separate

track, Fields says, meaning the only way to play all of the

vocals together with all the instrumentation was to have

two versions of Pro Tools playing simultaneously into

one larger console.

“John opened up the crayon box and let Andrew play

with the crayons however he wanted,” Jimmy says. “It

was a false start with Humphrey. They did a lot of great

work, but then when he got to John’s, he let Andrew play

with the colors. He brought Andrew to a destination, and

the destination was wrapped in a bow with the name of

fucking Shipley!”

***

Mike Shipley first entered a recording studio when

one of his schoolteachers asked him to provide vocals

for a record. He fell in love with the back-room studio

environment, and, after a brief stint at an Australian art

school, flew to England in the mid-1970s to naively

knock on the doors of his favorite studios. The first place

that welcomed him was Wessex Sound Studios in North

London, where he would run tape machines, make the

occasional tea, and, if the artist required, clap his hands

and stomp his feet for percussive effect. On consecutive

days in October 1977, the first two recordings Shipley

I G E T W E T

•

worked on were released: Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the

Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols and Queen’s News of the

World, featuring the stomp-stomp-clap of “We Will Rock

You.”

***

“I called Shipley and said, ‘I’ve got this crazy project,’”

Fields remembers. “‘It’s this kid with a million tracks and

it’s the heaviest music you’ve ever heard, and it is super-

pop.’ And he’s like, ‘I’m in!’”

Shipley was working out of Ocean Way’s Record One

studios, an unassuming Los Angeles facility that had

the necessary second Pro Tools rig to play back Fields’

sessions. Cory Churko handled much of the mixing prep

work—“dressing the drums, treating the vocals”—before

handing over the mix to Shipley. The files Churko opened

up were not what he expected. “They came in very low

resolution,” Churko says, “and because he had played the

drum tracks live with his fingers on the keyboard, all of

the drum tracks were mixed together. He wouldn’t punch

in or anything. It was just so unorthodox.”

Unable to separate any individual percussion entity

from the single stereo drum mix, Churko couldn’t, say,

raise the volume on the kick without raising the volume

on the snare or high-hat as well. Churko could make

out where the attack of, say, the snare was, but because

of its reverb, he would not know where precisely to add

samples—embellishments that Shipley had cultivated

and accumulated over the years, which he used to make

specific sounds “pop better” on nearly every project he

worked on.

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

Churko estimates that, in the final version we hear,

the balance of Andrew’s drums to Shipley’s sampled

drum parts is 75/25. “We drastically changed the drum

sound into being much bigger,” Shipley said in a phone

interview just a few months before his untimely death

in July 2013. “He’s not trying to be natural; he’s almost

trying to be as unnatural as possible, so we would try to

get that kind of sound.” With the guitars, Churko says

the key to what we hear is all in Shipley’s compression

because the versions they received were too digital, too

amateur, and “quite bad, in my opinion.” Shipley called

the sound of those horns and brass piggybacking on the

guitar “mutated,” but, because they were layered larger-

than-life, he found them fun.

“We looked at each other because we couldn’t believe

that someone had a record deal who did production this

way,” Churko says. “This guy brought us Cakewalk files

and played the drums on his hands. Now looking back at

it, that’s where the magic of the whole thing was.”

***

“Andrew was, right up to the very last second, freaking

out over certain nuances,” Jimmy says, speaking of both

the last-minute vocals Andrew added at Record One and

font-size conversations he’d have with the label back

east. One song Andrew remembers changing at this

stage was “

It’s Time to Party.

” In earlier incarnations

(including what the tenth anniversary special edition of I

Get Wet calls the “1999 Version”), the song’s guitar intro

is twice as long, with the quarter-note drum countdown

still building excitement, but with added fills and flavor.

I G E T W E T

•

What

I Get Wet

listeners might call the second verse isn’t

here; once the first “party, party / there’s gonna be a party

tonight” bridge ends, the keyboard-led instrumental

breakdown kicks in instead.

“There were times when, at the last second, I would

feel a need to make huge sweeping changes,” Andrew

says, “and I think that was one of them. Like, ‘I need to

write a whole new section now that this song is basically

done.’ It just seemed like it wanted to go on longer.”

Andrew says he asked for an hour, isolated himself, and

wrote the necessary part.

“The way I was thinking of that song before was more

like an introduction, not a full song,” Andrew says of

the structural change that adds beef and, interestingly,

only six seconds of song time. “Before, it was supposed

to be more of a, ‘Welcome, ladies and gentleman. Here

we go—let’s have some fun’ and then a real song would

happen. But I wanted that to count more as a song.”

***

“The whole building was like, oh my god, this is going to

be the biggest thing in the world,” says Julie Greenwald,

who would be named Island’s president by the time I Get

Wet was released state-side in March 2002. “We thought

we were going to change the sound of alternative radio

and sell ten million albums. Plus, he was the warmest

person on the planet. The whole building loved this

guy. It was all 200 of us in the boat, heaving and hoeing

behind him.”

Across the pond at Mercury Records, Andrew’s label

in the United Kingdom, Team AWK was rolling out

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

a campaign leading up to a November 2001 release,

which included an October 23 showcase performance

at London’s The Garage, events with members of the

press at Andrew’s soon-to-be-adopted home near Tampa,

Florida, and a plastering of the cover art all over London’s

public spaces. Andrew was an absolute fixture at New

York’s Island Def Jam office, discussing small details with

art director Scott Sandler and larger matters with CEO

Lyor Cohen, including the four potential suggestions

Andrew had for censoring the bloody nose for retail, if

necessary.

“I don’t think I had ever worked with anyone who

knew exactly what they wanted,” Sandler says. “He

provided a manifesto, like a book. Like, ‘I like this font.

This big. Centered black background.’ I had never seen

anything like that. I feel like with any genius, there’s an

element of crazy. I remember when I first met him, they

were calling the project Steev Mike …

•

Smoke

A n O ra l H i s t o r y

All quotes—unless otherwise noted, just as they are in

the rest of the book—were collected through first-hand

interviews.

From a commercial created for Island Def Jam

executives

Ladies and gentleman! Would you please welcome Island

Def Jam recording artist … Steev Mike!

Dazed & Confused magazine, January 2001, page 34

Like the Phil Spector of Speed Metal, Steev Mike wants

you to hit the wall when you hear his music.

Commercial (cont.)

Steev Mike means party metal! Steev Mike means fun!

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

Dazed & Confused (cont.)

Love it or loathe it (and there’s no in-between), Steev

Mike, who was until recently known as Andrew WK,

makes head-banging booty music crafted to detonate on

impact and start killing sprees on dancefloors everywhere.

I Get Wet liner notes

Executive Producer: Steev Mike

Gary Helsinger, former music publisher at Universal

Music Publishing Group

I love Steev Mike. He’s awesome. He’s really talented.

You know, he really balances out what Andrew does. The

way they work together as a team—it’s incredible. They

combine their efforts, and where one is lacking, the other

one has that quality, so … everybody knows it’s made up!

It doesn’t blow any cover, does it?

Andrew W.K. (IGW notes: “All songs written by

Andrew W.K.,” “Produced by Andrew W.K.,” etc.)

Initially, I wanted a band name. I mean, even when I

had done things by myself, it was usually a band name

or name that wasn’t my name. I was going by Andrew

Wilkes-Krier, but that name was unwieldy and always

mispronounced for good reason. It’s even hard for me to

say. Andrew Wilkes-Krier. It doesn’t roll off the tongue

so well.

Frank Gryner (IGW notes: “Engineered by F. Gryner”)

Andrew W.K. was how we were introduced to him, but

I think he had it in his mind that that wasn’t necessarily

going to stick. He wanted to be called Steev Mike for a

I G E T W E T

•

little while. Scott and I kind of scratched our heads. Two

first names? Really?

Scott Humphrey (IGW notes: “Produced by … Scott

Humphrey for The Chop Shop, Inc.”)

He really wanted my opinion on it. “What do you think,

man? Steev Mike?” I go, “I don’t know how you’re

gaining anything. It just seems like a lateral move from

one unknown name to the next.” He seemed really

distraught over the decision.

Andrew

I said, I’m just going to commit to this being this guy …

but then trying to think of what that name should be was

tricky, because I really didn’t like the way [Andrew W.K.]

looked. Still don’t really like the name. I didn’t like the

way it wrote out, because you couldn’t square it. I didn’t

like the way it looked to put W.K. at the bottom, because

W.K.’s going to be really big. Then I was going to do

initials—AWK—but then it looks like awk, and it’s just

not that. I think this went on for months. Thrown into

potentially very deep depressions.

Lewis Largent, Andrew’s A&R representative at

Island Def Jam

I sensed it was coming from a place not of belief but fear.

Like he was afraid of his own name. It didn’t feel like it

was instinctively something he wanted to do; something

else was motivating it, and that’s why I was against it.

I was married to Andrew W.K. There have been some

pretty great bands that have had shitty names though.

Like, Cheap Trick—can you get worse than that? The

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

great band finds the name, and the name becomes cool.

It’s like your band is Pink Floyd and, all of a sudden,

they’re called Bubba Scooby. What happened to Pink

Floyd?! I stole [Bubba Scooby] from my wife, by the way.

Pete Larson, Bulb Records co-founder (IGW notes:

“Technical Assistance: … P. Larson”)

He was obsessing over it. “I can have Mike TV!” [I was]

like, “Dude, don’t do that.” He had a backstory written

for it—something about a car wreck. It was so convo-

luted, so stupid.

Matt Sweeney, former manager (IGW notes:

“Technical Assistance: … Matthew Sweeney”)

We couldn’t work together eventually because he wanted

to change his name to Steev Mike and I didn’t want to

have anything to do with that. I remember saying, “I

wanted to manage Andrew W.K., and I don’t know who

this Steev Mike guy is.” And then he’s like, “Well, you

obviously don’t understand what I’m doing.” I’m ten

years older than the guy—and he’s a really intense young

dude—and these arguments turned into big-brother,

little-brother, “I know better than you,” “you don’t know

shit.”

Scott Sandler, Island Def Jam art director (IGW

notes: “Design: S.S.”)

I was having an interview with Andrew in the creative

department and Lyor [Cohen] happened to drop by.

“Hey, Steev Mike! Still not feeling that name!”

I G E T W E T

•

Jimmy Coup (IGW notes: “Guitar: Jimmy Coup, E.

Pain, Sgt. Frank”)

Andrew created this commercial to sell the idea to the

label that he should be called Steev Mike. Lyor left that

meeting going, “OK, Andrew—you want to be Steev

Mike? You can be Steev Mike.” Andrew convinced the

president of the fucking label that he was going to be

called Steev Mike! It was just a challenge for Andrew,

[because] once he convinced him, he didn’t want to call

himself Steev Mike anymore. The thrill was gone.

Andrew

I had a meeting with him about it. There was a lot

more that certainly Lyor didn’t know about and Matt

didn’t even really know about that was going on that

was informing some of that. I’m not going to say I don’t

take credit for it, but I was having influence put upon

me that I took very seriously and probably gave more

weight to than was either healthy or was deserved. …

This was even getting close to

I Get Wet

coming out

where I had to decide what this was going to be called

once and for all, and I did something I don’t normally

do in creative processes: I asked my Dad. For life

experiences, I would talk to my parents all the time,

still do, but not so much for a creative thing. He said,

“Well, the name of the son that I have that went to New

York to do this is named Andrew, so you should call it

that.” It was just a relief that I don’t get to decide what

it’s called. That’s kind of how I found peace with it …

or some version of peace that allowed me to just move

forward.

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

Jimmy

The persona of Steev Mike did have life. It did have legs.

Believe me—he put a lot of effort into Steev Mike. He

wasn’t just going to let it fall off the map. … I do remember

one thing I said that had a little bit of a lift. We were sitting

on swings somewhere, and Andrew said, “Well, what about

when people say, ‘What does W.K. stand for?’” It just

dawned on me right then and there: “Tell them it stands

for ‘Who Knows.’” It was just a big relief.

Sandler

I did ask Andrew once, “So, what’s the W.K.?” He goes,

“Walter Cronkite.”

***

Andrew (in Midnight Mavericks)

The reaction I got [from

I Get Wet

] was so intense, that

it literally, fundamentally changed me as a person. I think

that is a rare thing. I don’t think that people are changed

by other people very often.

Post on January 2, 2010 on http://awilkeskrier.

homestead.com (a site which went down shortly

after work on this book began, only to come back up

just a few days after the manuscript was submitted.

Status of site when you read this: unknown. Excerpt

not edited for grammar)

ANDREW W.K. & STEEV MIKE INFORMATION

PAGE

Like many people, I had been sifting through a

grotesque and scattered mountain of information, trying

I G E T W E T

•

my best to organize all the different elements into a

logical frame. … I would come across some new fact

or idea, hoping it would provide the elusive key to

complete understanding. However, far too often I would

make a counter-discovery; an equally legitiment idea of

the opposite nature, which would immediately provide

paradox, and effectively eliminate my progress.

Knox Mitchell, fan and former AWK forum moderator

I wasn’t a huge fan until 2005. It was the music, but then

I learned about this whole Steev Mike thing and that

kind of sealed the fascination.

Post date unknown on http://what-happened-to-awk.

weebly.com (site live at time of publication; excerpt

not edited for grammar)

The following quote is from an anonymous high school

friend of Andrew’s … One day in the acting class the teacher

had us all stand up and talk about what are dreams for the

future were … Andrew went last and stood up and said,

very slowly, “I want to craft my own non-existence.” The

teacher asked him what he meant and said “Exactly what

I said.” … I thought what he said sounded cool though,

so after class, while we were walking to our cars, I asked

Andrew how he was going to craft his own non-existence. I

don’t remember what he said word for word, but essentially

he said, “First I’m going to make myself undeniably exist as

a recognizable and identifiable form, and then I’m going to

spend the rest of my life working to eliminate it and prove

that it’s existence was an impossible illusion all along, but

because people have already seen it they will experience the

sensation equal to maximum pleasure.”

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

Spencer Sweeney, artist and early supporter (credited

for “Technical Assistance” on the I Get Wet 10th

Anniversary Special Deluxe Edition)

This chatter started online that he really wasn’t the

Andrew W.K. and all these pictures were showing up of

him dressed like a middle-aged mailroom worker. It was

very strange. And then I was watching footage of him

speaking in London and someone called him out on this

conspiracy theory that he wasn’t himself. That he was a

character who was created by some record company.

Andrew (from that London speech)

I’m actually not Andrew W.K.; I’m not. I’m not the same

guy that you may have seen from the

I Get Wet

album …

and I don’t just mean that in a philosophical or conceptual

way. It’s not the same person at all. … What I mean is that

since that time, I have changed. And for any of you that

happened to be there during that time, perhaps you have

changed as well. And I would like to think that we’re not

the same people at all. And again, not just conceptually,

but very literally. … I’m a completely different entity.

Spencer Sweeney

The crowd seemed to be taking it very literally, but I

was taking it as more of like a philosophical query. Like,

is anyone themselves? The atmosphere became very

awkward; a very agitated energy was created.

Andrew (London speech, cont.)

Andrew W.K. was created—and this is a bit of a

confession—it was created by a large group of people.

Almost a conference of people. And they met and I was

I G E T W E T

•

there, and we talked about how we could come up with

something that would move people. And it was done

in the spirit of commerce. It was done in the spirit of

entertainment, which usually goes hand-in-hand with

commerce. And I was auditioned alongside many other

people to fill this role of a great front man. A great

performer.

Spencer Sweeney

As far as I can tell, it was kind of an organic progression

of his artistic statement. I’m not sure if it was something

he had been planning all along, but I think as it unfolded,

it turned into a philosophical challenge. I think with

anything that is a challenge, by nature it’s going to be

disruptive and by nature not easily digested. … But if he

didn’t want people to question his work, to be questioning

themselves, to be questioning life that we all lead, then he

wouldn’t propose a challenge. [That questioning] could

be seen as what makes life worth living.

Matt Sweeney

That’s all coming from Andrew—him taking on the idea

of ownership and authenticity and that kind of stuff. Just

the idea of people being behind it … or Dave Grohl was

Andrew W.K. or some kind of stuff. I think all of that’s

amazing. He is his own Svengali. It’s part of the joke. Not

the joke, but there’s a lot of humor in that whole thing.

Mitchell

What interested me most after I found out that it really

was just a simple case of him not sure what name he

wanted to use [was] the fact that he created all this

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

backstory to it. That he was that strange to want to create

all this confusion around his own persona.

http://awilkeskrier.homestead.com post (cont.)

In 2005, rock ’n’ roll and heavy metal musician “Andrew

WK”, abruptly stopped writing music, releasing records

and touring. … Why would Andrew suddenly give up a

successful career in music to do something as inexplicable

as hitting the road as a new-age, self-help magus? One

of the most probable reasons behind this drastic career

change is an elusive figure named “Steev Mike” who,

after a controversial Andrew WK concert in New Jersey

in December 2004, has been threatening AWK’s profes-

sional career by flooding the public with cryptic, hostile

blackmail-like information about Andrew’s past – threat-

ening to reveal top secret information about Andrew WK

being a hired actor, and simply a pawn in a larger scheme,

controlled by a group of behind-the-scenes managers,

including his own father, Professor James E. Krier.

Andrew (on his social media accounts shortly after

http://awilkeskrier.homestead.com went live again

in July 2013)

THIS IS NOT PARTY! I really do exist and I really am

Andrew WK! Please, please, please don’t believe these

liars …

Dan Rodriguez, former program director at WSOU

who organized that December 17, 2004 show in

Elizabeth, New Jersey

He was doing weird hand signs and saying cryptic things;

a lot of non sequiturs and illogical, irrelevant things.

I G E T W E T

•

All that conspiracy theory stuff that people were eating

up on the message boards, he was in fact doing. People

were disappointed because it wound up being a 20- or

25-minute set—we had a hard curfew and we told them

they had to get off stage—and they perceive that as being

part of the conspiracy.

http://awilkeskrier.homestead.com post (cont.; still

not edited for grammar or incorrect datelines)

At the December 18, 2004 concert in Elizabeth, New

Jersey, audience members and security staff claim that

the person singing on stage in AWK’s signature white

outfit wasn’t actually Andrew WK, but someone dressed

as him, and filling his place as a front man. Less than

half way through the set, this “Andrew WK” suddenly

left the stage, and the rest of the show was canceled,

causing quite an uproar. Radio sponsor, WSOU, was also

confused and angered, as they tried to figure out what

exactly happened.

Rodriguez

Someone [wrote], “I don’t think that was really

Andrew W.K.” And the first instinct, at least as I

perceived it, was not this whole conspiracy theory;

it was that [people would think] the radio station

had put on the audience and hired an Andrew W.K.

impostor. I had to be defensive. I definitely wanted

to keep the integrity, both for a legal and an image

perspective of the radio station. Our phones were

completely log-jammed, with conspiracy theory fans

actually obstructing money from coming into the

station and business opportunities and interviews. We

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

just couldn’t operate. And when you’re arguing with

someone with a tinfoil hat on, anything that’s not

admitting is just further digging into the ditch that

you’re in on the conspiracy. Andrew was addressing it

on the front page of his site and he was having weird

characters take over the site. Then he put up a cryptic

post about Steev Mike.

Pete Galli, manager

I think when he did the whole Steev Mike press

conference thing, he didn’t realize people actually cared

that much about that stuff. That came from the interest

online and these weird people making blogs and sites

about it and all these things. I thought that was one of

the most genius performance things.

Andrew (from that February 2010 press conference)

On my first album,

I Get Wet

, Steev Mike was the

executive producer. This is the name of the producer that

appeared on my third album, Close Calls With Brick Walls,

which will be released on March 23, 2010!

Rodriguez

The whole buildup was “Andrew finally answers all

your questions,” but I knew he wasn’t going to. And

he wound up talking about that Vince Vaughn movie,

Couples Retreat. If you were going to take it seriously and

try to understand, it was going to annoy you.

Galli

I was in L.A. watching it streamed, and dying. That’s why

he’s a great performer and why you just love the guy.

I G E T W E T

•

Andrew

All those creative processes—like what I was going to look

like, and how the music was going to sound—there was a

lot of discussion beyond myself. And this happened early,

before Island, before Matt (Sweeney) … it happened after

Nate and Aaron had moved back, but there was a lot of

discussion about big-picture stuff with a small group of

very supportive people that explained to me very simply,

like a manager might do, here’s the terms of what we’re

going to do. I made the choice to agree to it. I just never

thought when I made that decision it would ever matter.

It’s like, OK, so these people don’t want credit on the

record. … There was a group that didn’t want to be

credited and were going to make their own name.

Jeff Rice, Kathode vocalist

That Steev Mike thing just reminded me of everything

that we used to talk about at practice. People were saying

that Andrew W.K. had an impersonator or he was a

series of people. I was like, yup, that’s Andrew fucking

with people. What people are accusing him of being,

he’s actually capable of doing. Andrew is somebody who

would be fully capable of being the Svengali behind some

pop star. And for all I know, maybe he is.

Andrew

At this point, every other version of what it could

possibly be has come out, and I’ve gone with some

of them, I’ve gone with others. Again, I think those

are some of the mistakes I feel we’ve made giving

too much attention to it, trying to address it too

directly. The fact of the matter is that it doesn’t really

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

ultimately impact hopefully too much in the big

picture.

Helsinger

I don’t think anyone in the general world ever heard of

(Steev Mike). They’ve barely heard of Andrew. And the

people who obsess and know the details—they’re his fans

and they love him. It’s more juice for his fans to get all

worked up. Something that I told him in the beginning

is to create your own myth. I mean, everything around

Prince is made up. The Beatles did it with “Paul is Dead.”

Nick Sheehan, fan and friend (author of the essay in

the back of the Who Knows? booklet; credited as N.S.)

The beginning part of that booklet is even weirder for

me to read, because there’s that part that’s apparently

written by his dad. That is largely made up of corre-

spondence between Andrew and me. He just cut and

pasted chunks of emails that I was sending to him and

then his responses. It’s super-weird.

Jim Krier, father

He uses my picture a lot, and never asks permission.

Sheehan

Right around the time he got signed to Island, there was

all this controversy about how there had been an original

website that was far more hardcore. A thing called the

Andrew W.K. Reinstatement Army had a website and

were demanding that they put the old website back up.

And now, in hindsight, it seems pretty clear that was

probably all just Andrew.

I G E T W E T

•

Jimmy

Andrew used to create personas online and get on Andrew

W.K. sites and either slag Andrew or defend Andrew.

And he would have debates between himself, between

two different online personas who the rest of the world

thought were just these crazy Andrew W.K. fans.

Mitchell

With the moderator position, you can go in on the board

and find the IP addresses of names on the board. So there

was the official Andrew W.K. one, which was Andrew

posting updates. Me and another moderator traced the IP

of that and found that it was coming from New York, so we

held on to that number and cross-referenced it with a few

different names we saw posting that we thought could be

him. When they matched up, we were able to come across

the whole list. There were at least 80 different names.

Jimmy

Andrew is capable of so much crazy stuff that I honestly

didn’t even know for a fact if Andrew didn’t hire you

himself to create this book and get all this information

out of people. Just to find out what people are saying or

thinking. I’m not paranoid, but I know the extent and the

bizarre lengths Andrew’s gone. And honestly, I just didn’t

know. I was like, “I wonder if Andrew hired that fucking

young fellow.”

***

Twig Harper, former Jefferson House resident

and Ann Arbor bandmate (credited for “Effects

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

Processing” on the I Get Wet 10th Anniversary Special

Deluxe Edition)

I had a very intense time-travel experience. I super-

imposed my experience on all the information I was

getting in the outside world. I was able to go to the spot

where I was having this intense, psychedelic time-travel

thing, where the UFOs are landing and I’m seeing this

big swirl of information, the angels are there calling me

in … [and] as the whole Steev Mike thing was devel-

oping, it culminated with a fire in our building here (in

Baltimore). These are real forces happening here. As the

amount of Steev Mike activity continued to intensify

and mutate my reality … our building caught fire with

everything inside of it.

Doug Anson, musician who has worked with bands

on Andrew’s Steev Mike record label

Andrew’s an entertainer putting on a show, first and

foremost. He’s created a persona to entertain people

with. That’s like saying Gene Simmons is the God of

Thunder. Even though that’s his real name, he is putting

on a uniform.

Krier

He was very shy. He had to adopt this sort of aggressively

upbeat persona that had to be an act because it wasn’t the

real him. I mean, he’d walk around with a little note that

said, “Don’t be a fucking wimp.”

Anson

And that uniform, however simple it is, as soon as he

puts it on, he becomes somebody that’s larger than life.

I G E T W E T

•

100

•

Maintaining the illusion or suspending the disbelief—it

could go from people knowing something personal about

him to actually knowing or thinking that Mario Dane

doesn’t exist.

Helsinger

Steev Mike, I knew the whole time. But Mario Dane—

like, I remember seeing it, but now I can’t remember if

that’s an actual person or not. I don’t think they’re all

made-up people.

Andrew (over email)

[Mario Dane] probably doesn’t want to talk due to the

managers and Steev Mike stuff. … He’s more “close

to the fire,” and I’ve pissed him off with some stuff I

said and got involved with during the mid-2000s—but

as far as I’m aware, he’s not mad at me anymore. I just

think he’s laying low and probably doing his usual “no

comment” thing.

I Get Wet liner notes

Produced by Andrew W.K., Mario Dane for R.C.U.

Audio Intl. and Scott Humphrey for The Chop Shop, Inc.

Co-Produced by John Fields

Additional Production by T.S.D. and Frank Vierti

Matt Sweeney

One thing that Andrew was fastidious about was he was

really careful about having a lot of unknown characters

working on his record. Frank Vierti and the recurring

characters on his records who I’ve never met—I love all

that shit! I just always loved that name, that vibe. What

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

101

•

were some of the studios? Heaven Studios! I love that

one. I’ve never been to Heaven Studios either.

Andrew

[Sub Jersey] was the real name of John Fields’ studio, and

I changed it to New Jersey Studios, which I thought was

cool. Like, in Minneapolis, there’s a studio called New

Jersey. And he was pissed. “You know you got the name

wrong.” I’m like, “Oh shit, sorry! It might’ve just been a

typo at the label.” I was just ruthless; I didn’t care.

Matt Sweeney

And it’s amazing, because [he’s] like, “How can fucking

people think I’m making this up? That I’m lying!”

Because there is this other element of fiction to it. But

the thinking is that the fiction doesn’t make it any less

real. In fact, it might make it realer. … It is funny that

the guy who’s obsessed with forgeries decides then to do

something totally from the heart and then people accuse

him of being a forgery. I love that shit.

Andrew

It was [Mario Dane], that guy Frank Vierti, and T.S.D.—

the main people I met in New York that were supportive

and helpful. Not so much with the business side, but more

creative, sort of conceptual ideas and overall approach. I

don’t know if they still work together, but then again, I

haven’t seen them since, like, 2005.

Jimmy

I think he likes to have you think that maybe he was

conferring with people that shall not be named. It’s like

I G E T W E T

•

102

•

Illuminati shit. But there is no-fucking-body else but

Andrew. I would like to take it back for the fans. This is

the philosophical riff that Andrew and I had. He thought

it was cool to go down that type of road—create the

slightly contrarian mystery—where I said no. I said,

“Let’s bare all and be completely honest.” He’s honest,

but he likes there to be more mystery in the mix. Which

is fair enough.

Matt Sweeney

He was already really into the idea of questioning things

like authenticity and what’s real and what’s cool. Playing to

a live tape, which some people get real offended by still. The

bloody nose photo—what does that mean? Was that real?

Was that not real? Wait, an art guy did that? Constantly

doing lots of paradoxical things. There were all these things

back then, like I couldn’t tell anybody how old he was. He

didn’t want anybody to know that he played all of the instru-

ments. “I don’t want to be seen as some young prodigy guy.”

Andrew

I didn’t want them to be able to figure out what [this] was. I

just wanted it to be what it is and that was enough. I always

thought of it (like) if someone has this thing and instead

of wanting to be fascinated by it, you just want to put it

in a bag and stuff it in your back-pocket or something.

Like, OK, now I know what this it. File it away and feel

comfortable that you figured it out. I didn’t want anyone to

understand at all—I just wanted it to be that feeling.

Mark Morgan, former roommate (IGW notes:

“Additional Guitar: … Chuck Morgan”)

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

103

•

He gives me credit on that album, right? My middle name

is Charles, but I’ve never gone by Chuck in my life. I

didn’t do shit on that record. I didn’t play a fucking thing.

Tom Smith, member of To Live and Shave in L.A.—

with whom Andrew has performed—and owner of

the email address Andrew provided for the following

credit (IGW notes: “Assistant Engineering: … Tom

Durlayne”)

I think someone may have been pulling your leg. I’m

neither Durlayne nor Verlaine nor [the] engineer.

Phil Solem, member of The Rembrandts—best

known for the Friends theme song, “I’ll Be There For

You”—and nearby neighbor to John Fields’ studio

(IGW notes: “Technical Assistance: P. Solem”)

I think I was over there for a party or something and

we were just hanging out. I wasn’t involved with any

recording. Once they’d start recording, it would turn

into “OK, only the people making the music in here.”

Aaron Dilloway, fellow Ann Arbor musician (IGW

notes: “Programming: Nate Young, Anthony Miller,

Darron D.”)

My name’s on there—or my nickname [Darron]—as

doing programming. He plays everything on his records.

He’ll put other people’s names there, but it’s him.

Andrew

These are great friends. Most of the people are people I

would consider mentors. That was a big part of how that

list was put together.

I G E T W E T

•

104

•

Twig

I really feel like Andrew tips his hat to certain people and

gives them credit for recording that album, and that is

returned. If one engages in that type of mindset and activity,

they become an attractor of that force and energy. It’s fun

because that’s a collaborative weave that is encouraged. No

one has hierarchy of reality, at least on this plane.

Jimmy

It was all Andrew, all by his fucking self, up all night long.

Apparently, there’s some priest in the background—the

Temples of Syrinx, which is a Rush reference, by the

way—some board somewhere that apparently things go

by. But I say, let him have those legends. Jimmy Coup’s

never heard of them, but Jimmy Coup doesn’t doubt

their existence.

Twig

That’s the thing. I’m just going with it. I can’t speak for

the whole idea, but the whole concept is sort of like,

whatever. Steev Mike is a manifestation. An idea of being

something that’s infinite. But also very confined in that

same way. I mean, I don’t understand. As someone who’s

involved, possibly—I mean, I don’t even know. That’s the

beauty of it. I think the people involved in the system —

the concept of Steev Mike, within that, if there is that

cabal—don’t even know how detailed they are involved.

Like, what the resolution actually is.

Sheehan

He comes from this noise music and very prank-based

culture. There were a lot of questions, but I decided

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

105

•

pretty early on that I didn’t care; the music was so

good that it didn’t make any difference to me what the

intention was. If it is a giant prank, it’s an incredible labor

of love. And if that was the case, then that would be so

amazing that it wouldn’t even matter again. If Andrew

came out in 20 years and said, “Yup, I never meant any

of this—this was just all an enormous joke,” then hats off.

Thirty years, committed to a joke. It wouldn’t stop me

from loving those songs.

Spencer Sweeney

We were trying to come up with the definition of

magic one time. What I was able to come up with at

that point is, it’s possibility. So the gray area is the area

of unlimited possibility. And possibility is the true

magic. A part of Andrew’s philosophical standpoint of

maintaining this space—occupying this gray area—is

the area of questioning. Even though that may be

something that people may find frustrating, because

then you have to apply energy to look for answers or

truths or explanations, it also maintains the space of

absolute possibility. And that is where you can find the

magic.

Toby Summerfield, childhood friend

I think it’s great that [Andrew’s] doing something so

ostensibly positive with the influence afforded him by

his fame and notoriety. I can’t help but see it through an

Andy Kaufman lens though, like he has grown to love the

schmucks he started off mocking and now the sarcasm

has sweetened into genuine affection.

I G E T W E T

•

106

•

Galli

He will never say this and he doesn’t like the comparison,

but I don’t care: He’s got a sprinkle of Andy Kaufman

and a sprinkle of Andy Warhol. He takes pop culture and

turns it on its head. That’s what’s so great about him: You

don’t know if he’s fucking with you or if he’s genuine. I

mean, he’s always genuine, but he’s so likable that he can

get away with whatever.

Krier

I think part of him is genuinely a person who’s trying to

be ironic and doesn’t think there’s any irony about it. It’s

kind of metaphysical.

Matt Quigley, Mondo Kim’s co-worker (IGW notes:

“Technical Assistance: … Quigley”)

With Andrew, the truth is always a fluid, liquid concept. I

don’t know the truth … and it’s much more fun for me as

not only his friend, but as a fan, to not know. The thing I

know for certain is that I do not know the full story, and

it’s much more fun that way. In terms of music, I’m pretty

sure

I Get Wet

is top-to-bottom, 100-percent Andrew

W.K. I mean, look how fucking hermetically sealed that

record is. There’s not room for anything else.

***

Post on March 8, 2006 on http://doessteevmikeexist.

blogspot.com about a Steev Mike 7-inch (site live at

time of publication; excerpt not edited for grammar)

This large hole 45rpm record released on Bulb

records in 1992 is one of the most compelling items

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

•

107

•

in “does STEEV MIKE exist”. This blog was created

because recently a box 25 of these appeared on ebay,

supposedly found at a garage sale in Ann Arbor

Michigan.

Sheehan

There was a flurry of activity on the boards. Somebody

who was quite a super-fan spent a lot of money to

buy it, and it turned out to be what it was—basically a

repackaged Couch album.

Mitchell, not that particular super-fan, but one who

eventually heard the 7-inch

I recognized it pretty much immediately because I had

already heard the Couch 7-inch. It’s the same thing,

minus the last song—which was “Old Man”—so I knew

exactly what the deal was.

Larson, co-founder of Bulb and Couch

I didn’t know anything about it. It just kind of popped

up. There’s some contact and I wrote to them and I’m

like, “Dude, I’m cool with this, but you got to send

me a copy.” Then I mysteriously got a package in the

mail with 20 7-inches in it. I never really knew the

story.

Jim Magas, co-founder of Bulb and Couch

I didn’t know anything about it. I heard about it through

the grapevine, and I actually chalked it up as a rumor.

Like, “Whatever, that doesn’t exist.” Then somebody

showed me one. I related to it right away.

I G E T W E T

•

108

•

Dilloway

I had nothing to do with that. I do have a copy of it. All

I know is that it smells like smoke.

Twig

Were they, like, roasted over a fire? Maybe someone’s

hanging out, chain-smoking, blowing smoke on it. Just

tweaking reality here as my mind collapses.

Andrew

This is where the name came from to begin with. Now

we’re getting into more touchy stuff, because if the name

came from this, then it’s obvious who might’ve been—I

guess maybe not obvious, but …

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Blood

We dance, we know, we jump, we go.

—Andrew W.K.,

“Party Til You Puke”

We fuck, we fight, we fuck, we kill.

—Erik Payne, guitarist, with what he thought the “Party

Til You Puke” lyrics were

Andrew is fully decked out in his all-whites, standing

between a gigantic, blown-up poster of his hemorrhaging

nose and the video camera that would ultimately beam both

mugs across the MTV-watching landscape for the first time.

Ready to roll in 4 …

To Andrew’s left, Jimmy Coup is donning his soon-

to-be-trademark red Hawaiian shirt; behind them is

drummer Donald Tardy, who isn’t bothering with a shirt.

Stacks of Marshall amps are lined to the left and right of

the poster, each tethering a guitarist in Andrew W.K.’s

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band. In addition to Jimmy, there’s one bass player and

two additional guitar players, all of whom flew in from

Florida to shoot this

“Party Hard”

video. (A couple of

them met Andrew for the first time earlier in the day.)

Erik Payne, one of those new acquaintance guitarists,

looks out at the “cameras everywhere and fucking 62

people working on the crew” and knows each of them

is thinking exactly what his bandmates were when they

couldn’t contain their laughter a moment earlier.

… 3 …

During a previous “Ready to roll in …” countdown, Andrew

had stopped the proceedings at 2 to ask Payne if he had any

other shorts. The band had been given 500 bucks from

the video’s wardrobe budget shortly after their arrival, but

Payne saw no reason to shop or switch out of the ensemble

he’d been wearing since he was four: “Converse, some

Dickies shorts, and a fucking T-shirt.” Wanting only to be

a team player and not hold up the largest, most expensive

production he had ever seen, Payne sprinted to the trailer

to retrieve another pair of Dickies he packed. When he

returned, Andrew again asked if he had anything else.

Payne, wanting only to be a team player and not hold up …

… 2 …

“To make a long story short, this happened like three

fucking times,” Payne says. “Finally, I was like, ‘What’s

going on, dude? I have lots of different colors of shorts,

but it’s all the same kind.’” Andrew, not caring whether

he held up production, walked Payne back to the trailer

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and handed him the shorts he had in mind: “these

fucking bright red shorts from 1972 that came about

three inches below my balls,” according to Payne. He put

them on, endured the laughs, and is now feeling his heart

race as the cameraman is prepping his pointer-finger to

signify the countdown is at its final, unspoken number.

… (finger pointed) …

“Hold on! Stop!”

Having completed the hardest, most nerve-racking

first step, the nut-hugged man in red walks over to the

leader in all-whites and shares his thoughts.

“Listen man, I really want to be a part of this, but

there are three things I’ve never going to do: I’m never

going to high-five you, I’m not going to cut my hair, and

I’m definitely not wearing these fucking shorts.”

Andrew would end up allowing Payne to return to his

original pair, but not before haggling over how high the

on-set seamstress would raise the length. “If you watch

that video,” Payne says, “you will only see two seconds of

me in it, and I think that might have had something to

do with it.”

***

“[Andrew] wrote me a letter in pencil when he was 19 or

something,” Donald Tardy remembers. “He said, ‘I love

Obituary, you’re one of my favorite drummers, and I would

love to see if you would be interested in helping do my

album.’ He sent me the

Girls Own Juice

EP, and of course I

was blown away by it. And that’s as simple as it was.”

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Dilloway remembers every morning at Andrew’s

apartment starting with Obituary’s World Demise album.

“I’d wake up to ‘Don’t Care’ and him being like, ‘Just

listen to the ride cymbal—listen to how fucking heavy

the ride cymbal is on this.’” Whenever Andrew took

a meeting—whether it was with Largent or in larger

group settings—Matt Sweeney says he’d ask politely if he

could put on some music and always play Obituary. Part

of Andrew’s vision all along, Sweeney says, was to have

a “gang of outsider, long-haired party dudes” as a band,

sharing the stage with anybody who wanted to jump up

and be crazy right alongside them. “It’s easier to be a

manager when the other person has the vision,” he says.

When Tardy got Andrew’s letter, it had been a few

years since Obituary had done anything. Hearing

Andrew’s music—“the complete mirror image of what

my career was”—convinced him he’d be up for the “fun

challenge.” He agreed to be in Andrew’s band (which

was, at that point, just Andrew and Jimmy) and was given

the task of putting the rest of the band and crew together.

Andrew asked if a certain Obituary guitarist would be

interested—Tardy asked, but the guitarist thought the

music was “too happy” for him—but after that, Tardy

says it didn’t take him five minutes to envision and corral

the friends he wanted in this band.

***

Gregg Roberts and Erik Payne were in an Orlando

metal band called Intoxicated. When asked over email

to describe Intoxicated, bass guitarist Roberts says they

would “put 13 riffs into every song and would also

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include a heavy breakdown that would make you want

to sock someone in the face with a holey sock filled

with poop.” Payne—same question—says they “bought

a car with our merch money so we could leave it at the

bail bonds place so that when we went to fucking jail,

we’d just get out immediately.” At some point in 1999

or 2000, following a particularly bad Intoxicated show

that necessitated firing the drummer, Payne asked Tardy

to sit in. Roberts and Payne would drive the 90 miles

from Orlando to Tampa to rehearse Intoxicated songs

in Tardy’s 500-square-foot, two-car garage, where, it was

not lost on them, one of the greatest bands of all time

in their collective mind practiced. One day, Roberts and

Payne arrived to hear Tardy cranking

Girls Own Juice

Roberts, in his head: “I was baffled a bit at first at

Donald’s enthusiasm for the music.”

Payne, to Tardy: “What the fuck are you listening to?”

Andrew wasn’t brought up again for another few

months, but, when he was, Tardy was direct. “All I said

was, ‘Dude, do you want to be in a band?’ And they’re

like, ‘With you? Hell yeah!’” Roberts was fond of the

songs he heard that were “fresh, positive, energetic,

and moving,” and although Payne agreed to join, he

remembers it took a phone conversation with Andrew

to convince him. For Payne—who, witnesses swear,

screams phrases like “Louder! Louder! Slayer! Yeah!” in

his sleep—it wasn’t their mutual love for Obituary and

Napalm Death that drew him in, but Andrew’s fondness

for Barry Manilow and Neil Diamond.

“I come from a straight-metal background, but I will

not lie to you: I was intrigued,” Payne says. “He seemed

to have a natural insight on just a) how to talk to people,

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and b) about music. I was attracted to it right away. It was

a handshake deal over the phone.”

Roberts and Payne moved out to Tampa and, for what

Payne estimates was eight salary-paid months before

ever meeting Andrew, the three of them would “wake up

in the morning, make smoothies, take about four fucking

bong hits, and rehearse at the Obituary house,” jamming

Intoxicated songs after going through Andrew’s set a few

times. He says they learned the songs within the first four

days, making up lyrics when they couldn’t understand

Andrew’s.

Jimmy would fly down occasionally to Tampa, Roberts

says, and give instructions on how specific parts of the

music were played, demonstrating intricacies to Andrew’s

chords. “Most stuff was played on the top string and

gave the music a fuller sound,” the bassist says. “I found

it really easy to play. … I could dance, thrust, sway, and

prance around stage without worrying about playing

technical parts.”

Tardy’s crew included: drum tech Rich Russo, a

high school friend of Tardy’s who grew up listening to

metal but played drums mostly for jazz and blues bands;

guitar tech Ken Andrews, who played occasionally for

Intoxicated (“I was the dude they’d go to with, ‘Hey, I’m

going to jail this weekend and I need someone to fill in

for me’”); and stage manager Bryan Geisler, a bearded

racing enthusiast who answered to Big Daddy.

As Andrew’s band was coming together, Tardy played

the demos for Frank Werner, a guitarist friend of his since

they were teenagers. Werner was given the impression

the band was fully set up with Intoxicated and Obituary

guys, but he told Tardy to call him if anything ever came

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up. On a summer night in 2001, shortly before the band

was to head west for the video shoot, Tardy made that

call.

“Dude, do you want to be in a band and go on tour,”

Tardy asked.

“Hell yeah,” Werner replied.

“You got a passport?”

“No. I think I went to South Carolina once.”

“Wow. Get a passport, because you’re about to have a

blast.”

***

After the video shoot, Andrew told the guys he’d be

joining them in Florida once everything album-wise was

complete so they’d have at least a few weeks to rehearse

before their first show in London. After mixing, Andrew

returned to New York for the mastering, and, by the

beginning of September,

I Get Wet

was as good as done.

Jimmy and the Good Good Kid pulled all-nighters

as they headed east to scoop up Andrew en route to

Tampa. Jimmy stopped in Ann Arbor to play the album

for the first time for Andrew’s parents, and arrived in

Greenpoint on the 10th. He and Andrew drove into

Manhattan that night where they karaoke-sang the night

away with Matt Sweeney, Melissa auf der Maur (the

former bassist for Hole and Smashing Pumpkins as well

as the photo-adoring, now-ex-girlfriend of Dave Grohl),

and a bunch of other all-night partiers who would wake

up to a changed world.

***

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It would be irresponsible, immoral, and absolutely

pathetic to use the tragic events of September 11, 2001

as anything beyond a timestamp. The most destructive

act of terrorism the United States had ever experi-

enced happened that morning, with the loss of life and

innocence too significant for this author to bother with

any matters not directly on the pulse of the human spirit.

—Days after the Twin Towers collapsed, Andrew,

Jimmy, and the Good Good Kid answered an all-call

for vehicles willing and able to haul water and whatever

other goods and materials needed to be transferred from

various docks. They did the most they could do in an

otherwise helpless moment, and happened to lose a bag

of tapes and some equipment along the way.

—From Andrew’s childhood friend, Fred Thomas:

“Even if I didn’t know some of the nuances of the

person who made it, there’s a sense of triumph that

was necessary when that record came out. There was

definitely a breath of fresh air that everybody my age

needed. We’re all just kids, but we’re also adults now

and this is actual real shit that’s affecting us. Maybe

there’s something that can make us feel like we’re still

kids and we’re still going to be OK—and it’s Andrew’s

record. Something to put some blind faith in. Just super-

positive, super-good feeling. It just seemed like an ideal

record at the time.”

—On the evening of September 11, 2002, Andrew

sensed an anxiety in the Athens, Georgia crowd. In the

middle of his set, he asked the audience to join him not

in a moment of somber silence out of obligation, but

in “a moment of volume and noise” in a demonstrative

remembrance. Actions speak louder than words, and

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those living that day to its fullest had never made a more

rapturous promise.

***

On a Saturday night less than three weeks after the album

was released in the United States, Dwayne “The Rock”

Johnson told the Studio 8H audience that “we’ve got a

great show,” Andrew W.K. was there, and that everyone

should stick around because they’d be right back. In

the green room that evening was Lewis Largent, Gary

Helsinger, Lyor Cohen, and many other Island folk, all

wanting to be on hand when Andrew W.K. went from

MTV crush to bona fide household name. According

to Helsinger, Lorne Michaels personally requested that

Andrew do

“I Get Wet”

for his second song.

Andrew barely got the introductory line of “Party

Hard” out of his system before his microphone hand

started throwing punches, his head started banging,

his body started flailing, and his legs started dancing a

joyously spastic jig. At home, we see the camera pan out

to show the full band, complemented on piano by Jeff

Victor, a Minneapolis friend of Jimmy’s who temporarily

toured with the band and is responsible for some of our

planet’s soothing soundscape CDs.

“When

I Get Wet

came out, it was such a huge thing for

our circle of friends,” says Thomas. “It was like watching

your friend hit a home run in the World Series every

night—or whatever the fuck, I don’t follow sports. It’s like

watching someone you know really nail it for everybody.”

In the Studio 8H audience, Matt Quigley thought he was

seeing “a watershed transformative moment in pop history.”

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“I was convinced Andrew was going to be the biggest

star in the world,” Quigley says, “and the reaction was

exactly the opposite. I remember being shocked at the

message board responses, which were almost uniformly

negative. Like, ‘What the fuck was that? How did this

guy get a slot on

Saturday Night Live

?’”

Helsinger says Andrew’s dress rehearsal run-through

was much better, but that Andrew simply wasn’t ready for

a showcase like that. “Since he sang all those parts on the

record, I think he was confused which parts he should

sing live,” he says. “He just went with power instead of

trying to actually sing anything. Lyor and everybody was

really hopeful and excited, but after

Saturday Night Live

they got a little dejected.”

***

Big Daddy’s job as stage manager isn’t to get the stage

ready for a band to perform.

“We build racecars every night,” he says, “and we race

the shit out of them.”

Talk to Big Daddy after a night when Andrew acciden-

tally breaks his nose, and he’ll tell you, “Oh sure, we

dinged it up. Ran it and rubbed it up against the wall, but

we’re going to polish her up, put a couple quarter-panels

on her, get her back out on the track, and run the shit

out of her somewhere else.” Months before MTV and

Saturday Night Live

, Andrew came off a stage in Europe

and asked Big Daddy if he wouldn’t mind introducing

them every night (no doubt inspired by Obituary’s live

album, Dead, where Big Daddy does exactly that). Big

Daddy says the next night, he came out “cussing like a

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sailor” and was promptly asked to make it PG for any

young kids out there. His announcer role expanded into

spraying people down during

“I Get Wet”

and “looking

like a crazy psycho madman, acting like a weirdo freak,

and making funny faces.” Big Daddy became an unofficial

mascot as that first face greeting audiences from the stage

most every night. And when he’d make the introduction,

he’d welcome “your friend, Andrew W.K.”

Guitar tech Ken Andrews remembers telling Payne

before the band joined the Ozzfest tour that the crowd

was going to throw shit at them. “In metal, you’ve got

the negative, minor-chord, tough-guy thing,” he says,

“and here comes a dude who’s playing all major chords

and sounds happy and talking about partying. It was such

a contrast.” Payne would be the first to insist he wants

“fucking metal” at Ozzfest, and he felt the band was the

underdog that had to prove itself every single day on

those dates. “We fought for it,” he says. “Every day, we

did win. It wasn’t easy for us, but that’s what made me

love and appreciate this.”

***

The more the racecar circled the globe, the better

prepared Big Daddy had to be for spectators crowding

the track. Before the green flag waved each day, he’d

meet with the venue’s security guards to give them

a heads-up: “If a kid gets up on the stage, let him do

his thing. He’ll haul ass eventually. And listen: the last

song is a song called ‘

Party Hard,’

and Andrew’s going

to invite every one of these kids up on the stage. Don’t

worry about it; it’ll be cool.”

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Bum-rushers at one early show had knocked over

the entire stage-left back-line of cabinets, heads, and

other equipment. Big Daddy says everyone—security,

the sound guys, “the metal boys” in the band who viewed

fans on their stage as a no-no, club personnel, Big Daddy

himself—freaked.

Everyone, that is, except Andrew.

“I like it—what can we do?” Andrew asked.

The techs responded by strapping the Marshall

cabinets to their wheeled cases; that way, when kids

inevitably slammed into the gear, expensive equipment

would roll instead of fall. Stuff may bump and collide

along the way, sure, but rubbing is racing. And, besides,

these weren’t just fans crowding a stage.

“We don’t have fans,” Andrew said in a confessional-

style clip from

Who Knows?,

“we have friends.”

***

In Season 2 of the HBO sketch comedy,

Mr. Show

, a

dazed, long-haired cameraman interrupts an on-stage

argument about the generational differences that

divide hosts Bob Odenkirk (representing a mid-1970s

upbringing) and David Cross (reppin’ the late 1970s).

That’s more background than you probably need for the

following exchange:

Cameraman: “I’m still bummed out about the Dead

breaking up. It’s like I lost my best friends.”

Bob: “What are you talking about, you dumb hippie?”

David: “Well, Bob, I can relate. I know my best friends

used to charge me 35 bucks to listen to ’em dick around

on guitar.”

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That exchange—along with a punk band’s ode to the

dead Head Deadhead (“August 8th” by NOFX) and the

Onion pun I just stole to describe it—is about all I know

about the Grateful Dead. There’s no pride to be had in

ignorance, but my life’s disregard for that jam band can

only help make this point. The cameraman’s feelings—like

any matters bestilling the heart—are real. His bond is an

undeniable truth, forged through some mysterious mecha-

nization that generates interpersonal feelings through a

seemingly impersonal give–take arrangement. It’s a love

that’s just as strong as Jimmy Coup’s love and fellowship

with Andrew after only experiencing his music for the first

time: whoever made that thing that stirred this feeling has

to be a friend. Music fosters the environment where thrills

and emotions thrive, and to deny a kinship along the way

is defeating music’s purpose and ignoring its potential.

Taking references to the literary world, consider the

type of book that would knock out Holden Caulfield in

J. D. Salinger’s

The Catcher in the Rye

: one that “when

you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote

it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up

on the phone whenever you felt like it.” While that line

directly impacted an author perhaps not prepared for

the ramifications, Andrew quite literally gave his phone

number to those he wanted to feel the emotions of the

product he created, with hopes he could share their joy.

“These are the greatest days of my life,” Andrew said in

that same

Who Knows?

clip, “and all they are revolving

around is the intensity of so many friends.” You may

cross your arms and call that lip service—and you

would be forgiven for instant skepticism—but you’d be

mistaken.

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After shows, Andrew would hang out by the merch

table or head outside to be with the fans. Meeting

and greeting sounds easy and obvious, but his drive

to connect with fans, his mother Wendy says, comes

directly from bands he loved who wouldn’t do that. “You

want to go talk to these guys and they won’t talk to you

or stay for five minutes—and Andrew thought that was

horrible,” she says. “That was his job to give back to the

fans who were supporting his music.”

“But, oh my god,” she continues, “those early shows

when we would go see him? It would be two in the

morning and I’m still waiting, thinking, would you please

all go home? And he would sign and talk, and sign and

sign, and talk …”

… and restore …

Multiple fans have witnessed Andrew sign the data side

of someone’s

I Get Wet

CD, run onto the bus, and hand

over 17 bucks for a replacement.

… and relate …

“He would really try to connect with everybody in the

way they were trying to connect with him,” says fan Holly

Quinn. She put out two compilations of various bands’

AWK covers, organized the 2004 Wolf Kult convention

in Philadelphia, and ran one of the larger fan sites of that

era. “This was total coincidence, [but] the three biggest

fan sites at one time were run by black females,” says

Quinn, who is biracial (black and white). “The funny

thing was, the first AWK MTV special sent Andrew

to spend a weekend in a girl’s dormitory at a black

college, as if it would be the craziest combination ever,

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presumably without the knowledge that his fandom had

very active black females. They all got along beautifully.”

… and give …

Once, in Canada, a girl didn’t have a camera to capture

her moment with Andrew, so he took their picture on his

camera instead. When she asked him if he’d be able to

mail her the picture, he gave her the camera.

… and help …

A gentleman in Seattle once dug through his pocket

looking for anything Andrew might sign. He pulled out

an electric bill, which Andrew saw was actually a Final

Notice. Andrew asked if he needed help; the guy hadn’t

even noticed how dire that situation was. Andrew gave

him the cash to cover it, and then some.

… and encourage …

Agnes Barton-Sabo once mailed Andrew a ’zine in which

she mentioned her five-year-old brother’s love of his

music; Andrew responded with a letter to her and a letter

to the young kid, telling him to keep dancing. A year

later, Andrew called her on what happened to be her

birthday. “We talked about how awesome New York City

is and how awesome cake is,” she says.

Nobody in Agnes’ family remembered to call her that

day.

… and connect.

Andrew, in one fan-site interview, spoke of Nirvana’s

Kurt Cobain, who was crushed that fans of his music

weren’t people he wanted to hang out with. “I try to take

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the opposite approach,” he told the site. “I want to do

something that allows me to connect with people that

I would otherwise never think I would like. Then we

find that we have this common ground or this common

enthusiasm. That head-space allowed me to go out there

and meet the best people in the world.”

***

Band members would go around signing “I [heart sign]

Andrew W.K.” on ticket stubs and posing with those

waiting their turn for Andrew, but they’d ultimately

retire to the bus long before their leader. They’d fill the

time by breaking Andrew’s rules.

“He didn’t want too heavy of shit,” says Ken Andrews,

the guitar tech who would eventually join the band, “but

while he was out in the snow signing paragraphs, there’s

two girls crawling around in their underwear on the floor

of the bus like dogs, eating potato chips off the floor.”

Russo—the drum tech who would join Tardy on stage

when the show called for a second drummer and would

eventually replace him—says, “It always involved fun,

partying, music, girls, and alcohol, and maybe we could

say some borderline debauchery, but there was always

consent.”

“To this day,” Ken Andrews adds, “we remember

stories and [Andrew’s] like, ‘This was going on while I

was out there?!’”

The band’s stories, occasionally referenced in the

nebulous span of somewhere in the last decade and

somewhere on the globe, include the rock stereotypes

of personality clashes too multi-faceted (and trite) to

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pay any mind here. I wish future documentarians luck

in their pursuit of road tales, and give them the head-

start of the bandmate who drunk-punched a cop; the

bus driver too strung-out to drive; the run-ins with

guns; the run-ins with DEA and ATF agents; the run-ins

with Mafia members; the guitarist’s hernia that blew out

mid-song and would continue to every night (“I was

taking napkins from Aerosmith’s banquet—because they

had really nice napkins—and I would duct-tape them on

my body where the thing would break open”); Xanax

races on gravel parking lots; more silly faces, dumb

laughs, and friendships made than one could hope for

in a lifetime; and the brother-in-arms who was halfway

across that globe when his father died.

“Andrew was the dude I went to first,” Payne says of

when he got the news in Australia. “I didn’t fly home, and

some people might say that’s fucked up, but I didn’t. I had

already talked to him before. His organs had shut down

and everyone said ‘We don’t know how he’s not dead yet,’

and he goes, ‘I’m waiting for my son to come home.’ I

was really torn about what to do. But Andrew gave me a

big hug, you know, and then we did acid and went to the

zoo. It was so crazy. You couldn’t tell whether the animals

were on the inside of the fence or the outside.”

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ˈkəm

Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness,
hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little.
More than machinery, we need humanity. More than
cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. …
… Soldiers—in the name of democracy, let us all
unite!

—A Jewish Barber,

The Great Dictator

Life’s too short. Everyone’s invited to this party. It doesn’t
matter who you are, what you look like, what you taste
like, what you act like, what you like, what you don’t like.
If you like you … if you like things in general … if you’re
happy to be here, come inside.

—Andrew W.K.,

Who Knows?

Andrew dropped Jacques Derrida’s name the first time

we spoke. I jotted it down as “Darridah” and, in a

moment of attempted modesty, made it a mental note to

get his take—whoever he was—on the word “cum.”

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This chapter was to be called Champagne. No liquid,

I felt, better signified the celebration shared in these

pages than the bubbly. Talking to Andrew at the pub

that day (and fueled by hyper nerves and mid-day

pours), I was blabbering on about other chapter names

I’d contemplated, like one might bang on about paint

samples for a room that might never be visited. In a

moment of immodesty, I spoke my second choice for this

chapter’s name, based on a line in “

It’s Time to Party.

”

And that’s the story of how enthusiasm for whatever

was thrown my way led me down philosophy’s way …

***

Andrew told NPR that he imagines Bach striving toward

the same, equivalent feelings that a rock band would:

“pure joy, a total rush of energy, without ideas, concepts,

or even specific emotions to stand in the way of the total

sonic experience.”

The music Andrew makes on

I Get Wet

fits, I believe, 93

percent of that definition. There is an overarching concept,

and although it isn’t lyrically specific nor does it get in

the way of the experience, it is particular. “[It’s] trying to

achieve something that’s specific that, for better or worse,

a lot of other music isn’t trying to achieve,” Andrew tells

me. “That’s why it’s so personal, even though it’s not an

expression of my life so much. It’s just an expression of this.”

Delving into the specific lyrical depths of these

songs—or even Andrew W.K.’s motivations behind

each individual song—is thus a delicate bordering on

dangerous hovering above futile endeavor. Songs more

than albums are too susceptible to outside forces, and

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I wouldn’t want one person’s take on a song’s text to

color my experience. It’s one thing to point out, for

example, that no

I Get Wet

song specifically mentions beer

drinking, but quite another to explicitly deflate, slight,

denigrate, or presumptuously correct a listener who hears

in these songs that spirit. There are, after all, times I feel

that spirit! We have names for those who push their inter-

pretations, and they’re harsher than “party-pooper.”

On his website in 2004, Andrew wrote that the

lyrics “were not unintentionally left out of print,” the

hope being that “people’s own passion to sing along

would bridge any cloudy vocabulary chasms and result

in original formed words.” And although he says it’s “a

slope worth sliding down,” your slope deserves better

than being tainted by mine.

***

I did ask Andrew about the second verse in “It’s Time to

Party,” however …

This book’s introduction spelled out how, right off the

bat,

“It’s Time to Party”

invites you, the listener, into this

celebration. In Chapter 3, Andrew explained his rationale

for adding a second verse to his demo version: to make

I Get Wet

’s version feel less like an introduction and

more like a full song. Here, under this chapter name and

sliding that lyrical slope, I asked about the imagery in a

verse with the phrase “pleasure yourself,” among others.

“Yeah, I guess I pushed it into that,” says Andrew,

when I posited that the verse—studied paramecium-

style against my own predilections, through the layers

of anthemic shouts—seems to reference a particular

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self-pleasure. “I liked the idea that the song was about

something that you didn’t think it was about. … That

it was this idea of partying, but you were by yourself.

There’s always been those potentially dark elements to

the whole thing, so that’s just another example of those

things rubbing against each other, pun intended.”

***

Lyric-interpreting seems futile because Andrew, for the

most part, claims he didn’t approach the words like a tradi-

tional songwriter. “A lot of the songs were lyrics that came

out of nowhere,” he says, “almost like the lyrics were an

instrument.” He would strive for words that “at least don’t

stand in the way of that musical power getting through.”

Of course, we don’t have to take Andrew’s word for any

of this. If lyrics become public domain (figuratively, not

literally) the moment they’re sung, then Andrew’s feelings

about them carry no more validity than anyone else’s;

hence Andrew’s encouragement of slope-sliding. And if

that’s the case, I respectfully decline the opportunity to

deconstruct each song’s lyrics within my personal vacuum

any more than I already have. This isn’t an anti-intel-

lectual stance. A true complement to

I Get Wet

would—in

my opinion and intentions—serve to draw in rather than

spell out. To encourage openness rather than shut a case.

My validation comes, paradoxically, from a read of one

song’s sadder sentiments: Andrew, in “

Got to Do It,”

not

knowing that a slammed door would hurt so bad.

There are ways to celebrate songs without restricting

the text. Besides, there’s too much fascinating stuff

happening with the album as a whole.

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***

Andrew uses the word “party” in three

I Get Wet

songs,

both as a noun and a verb. (“Party Music,” from the

We Want Fun demos, could have brought the adjective-

action.) Over those songs, he tells us when we should

do it, to what level we should do it, who we could do it

with, and when we should do it until. What it is is never

defined.

The word was “the most obvious, direct, simple word

that everybody understood that meant fun,” Andrew

says. It wasn’t until people asked him what it meant

that he “had to reinterpret what I liked about it.” It was

analytical thought he enjoyed engaging in, and to hear

Andrew say it, “party” went from being a word he used

because there was nothing to think about … to an idea

packing unknown potential with each ensuing question.

Contemplation and natural articulation snowballed

into people reading further into his lyrics. “Everyone just

assumed I was into Buddhism,” he says. People would

quote books they assumed he had read, and, in doing so,

introduce him to new ideas. “I remember how baffling it

was [that] those sensibilities are just in the ether,” he says.

When asked, then, what philosophies and ideals did

influence or inform

I Get Wet

, Andrew keeps their very

idea close to his chest. “I never really felt like that’s the

place,” he says. “I have all sorts of interests just like

anybody else. I don’t really involve them in my work

because I don’t feel like that’s what it’s meant to do. It

almost seems disrespectful. This is not an expression of

me. It’s more like it’s just something I’m supposed to

do … and wanted to do a really good job at.”

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***

The writings of French philosopher Jacques Derrida

are completely impenetrable, and I keep wavering on

whether that’s the point. I find some comfort in the

words of Allan Megill: “To interpret the writings of

Jacques Derrida is already to engage in an act of

violence, for Derrida contends that his writings are

meaningless—that they are, in the literal sense of the

word, nonsensical.” Of course, Megill immediately

hedges his bet and says he could be wrong, referencing

both “Derridean ambiguity” and an interviewer who

once told Derrida out of frustration, “I asked you where

to begin, and you have led me into a labyrinth.”

My labyrinth diverts me to “

Living On

,” where

attention is finally being paid to the fabled word—come!

The word is spelled as I expected, but being in a section

called “The Triumph of Life,” it would not shock me if

Derrida began addressing the word’s slang usage for the

genetic solution. And maybe he did, but my lost mind

could only wander. And in wandering the labyrinth and

mentally attacking the word on my own, I discover a

much more innocent use my brain had yet thought to

think: come, as in to join. An invitation.

I mention my first Derrida conversation in an email

to Dr. Allan Hazlett, a lecturer in philosophy at the

University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, and the

Lab Lobotomy bass player who used to make Arby’s

runs and vacuum-cleaner sounds with Andrew. “That

sort of linguistic analysis is suitable for him,” he writes.

“Think of ‘party,’ from Old French ‘partie,’ meaning

a separation or a division (as in a political ‘party’); to

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party is to separate one’s group from the non-partying

group; every party necessitates and in that sense contains

a non-party. Andrew’s goal of a universal party is self-

contradictory; you can’t party without a partition, and

you can’t partition without leaving somebody out.”

Andrew The Inviter is the center of this universal

party; the center being the point from which “everything

comes and to which everything refers,” according to

author Mary Klages. Her example is a classroom where

the teacher—the center—dictates the overall behavior

when he or she is present. Language, a system itself in

which a word can have multiple meanings, thus has the

potential to come at a system. To be that wild child once

the teacher steps out for a moment. A structure holds its

own with only as much strength as the center has, and

literary language is possible because of the motion all

around that center.

Andrew, in an interview with Vice’s Soft Focus

program, discussed a version of the center—and that

motion—that he strives for in his work. “We’ve been

talking about contradiction,” he told the interviewer.

“The thoughtfulness that you commented on in me

personally up against this apparently thoughtless music

or lyrical content, is all to create that in-between space—

that paradox, that contradiction—that keeps the thought

in-between without it being able to rest on one certain

side or the other. Without being able to say, ‘I know what

this is. This is this.’”

He continues: “I would like, if anything I could

offer as an entertainer, performer, musician, or as an

individual … to allow myself to stay in that in-between

state of possibility, and allow the other people who are

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listening to stay in that. And that to me is a party. Where

everything’s possible.”

I had been looking for the wrong thing. It wasn’t

Derrida gift-wrapping a honed, deconstructed answer to

a specific word, and it wasn’t even learning how to get to

a system-center. Perhaps Andrew wanted me to see that

there is a motion there.

Derrida’s word for that motion at work? Play.

***

A month before he dropped Derrida on me, Andrew

W.K. posted the following (unedited) comment on his

social media accounts. “Woah! It just dawned on me that

I haven’t ready a book since high school. Magazines don’t

count I guess! JUST PARTY HARD.” As someone about

to have an invested interest in the literacy of Andrew

W.K. listeners, I found the dispatch’s spirit hilariously

worrisome.

“He reads like a demon,” his mother reassures. “And

he reads really crazy stuff. Mostly non-fiction, lots of

philosophy. He loves all the conspiracy stuff. Not to

worry—parties and reads. Probably doesn’t even party.

Whatever.”

You don’t have to abstain from partying or finish

a book to reference Derrida, after all. (Let the record

show I didn’t complete the book quoted here.) Klages

says Derrida’s center, amidst all that system play, “escapes

structurality” because although it’s part of the structure,

it is also the governing element. Giving a Puritan system

as an example, Klages highlights how God creates the

world, but isn’t part of it; “the center is thus, paradoxically,

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both within the structure and outside it. The center is the

center but not part of what Derrida calls ‘the totality,’ i.e.

the structure. So the center is not the center.”

Surely, the idea of a persona grants Andrew W.K. the

leeway to make any statement or projection he feels.

His current manager, Pete Galli, calls what Andrew has

“credibility immunity,” and his non-musical work during

the writing of this book alone proves Andrew’s party-

reach: speaker at an animated TV-series convention;

invited Cultural Ambassador to Bahrain; spokesperson

for Playtex Fresh + Sexy Wipes. Andrew W.K. can say or

do whatever he likes, effectively, and no matter how much

seemingly crazy “play” attacks the center, the system

remains. Because he knows what the work—musical

and otherwise—was meant to do. It’s not necessarily an

expression of him, and it’s surely not an expression for

him.

***

Andrew was a guest speaker at Canterlot Gardens, billed

as “Ohio’s premiere convention for fans of My Little Pony:

Friendship is Magic,” in September 2012. Bronies from

all around descended upon the Strongsville Holiday

Inn for general fellowship and meet-and-greets with the

voice stars; Andrew was invited because of proclivities he

shares with Pinkie Pie, a female Earth pony who, among

other defining traits, owns a party cannon. During the

Q&A portion of his panel, an audience member asked,

“From the mind of the party king, what would your

words be to the kid in the corner?” Andrew’s immediate

response—“That it’s totally fine to be in a corner”—was

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met with laughter, but Andrew continued giving the only

answer he knows.

“I actually have struggled with shyness a long time,

and one of the greatest things I learned was that it’s

okay. You don’t have to push yourself out if you don’t

feel like it. You can do and feel however you want to feel,

and when the moment’s right for you to go out of your

comfort zone, you can. But never pressure someone who

doesn’t want to do what you want them to do. It’s a really

bad vibe, and that’s not party.”

His wife, Cherie Lily—who joined Andrew on vocals

for the tenth anniversary tour of

I Get Wet

and was

sitting stage-side for the panel—thought the response

was amazing. “I’ve learned so much about his philosophy

from him being interviewed more than him telling

me directly,” she says, “and I love that he’s got this

philosophy and motto. He presents these major ideas

wrapped up in candy, basically. Positivity and positive-

partying—it can mean whatever you want, and I think

that’s one of the most beautiful things ever.”

Many of those closest to him see Andrew’s philoso-

phies as a way he combats his natural shyness. Jimmy

Coup says Andrew was an outsider who “created the party

that he couldn’t go to—a good place to be as an artist.”

His mother doesn’t consider him an instinctively outgoing

person, but his temperament is one of being intensely

curious, to put himself in uncomfortable situations, strive

to be better, and to say yes. “He’s told me, ‘Wow, that

makes me really uncomfortable—I’m going to do it,’” says

Galli. “And it’s all done with 100 percent sincerity.”

Carl Wilson—discussing love, taste, and Celine Dion

in this series’ most renowned book (#52: Let’s Talk About

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Love)—talks about democracy not as a “limp open-

mindedness, but actively grappling with people and things

not like me.” Through that “dangerous, paradoxical and

mostly unattempted ideal,” Wilson says, “which demands

we meet strangers as equals, we perhaps become less

strangers to ourselves.” Fred Thomas remembers discussing

philosophical ideas with Andrew; not what partying meant,

but “everything beneath that.” He says Andrew grew

frustrated with others’ complacency—those happy with

being average, or okay with being unhappy—and eventually

Andrew reacted not in spite, but in something “a little bit

brighter.” “He had this bizarre twisted altruism to him

where he just knew things could be better for everyone

around him and that, in turn, would make things better for

him and everybody else,” Thomas says.

***

Following the release of his piano-improv album, 55

Cadillac, Andrew toured with The Calder Quartet.

Performances included Bach, Philip Glass, improvisa-

tions, and even some of Andrew’s classics. “They did

‘

Party Hard

’ and

‘It’s Time to Party,

’” Galli remembers

of one show, “then Andrew goes into the mic, ‘Are you

guys ready for the ultimate party song ever?’”

The crowd, Galli confirms, goes wild.

“This is the greatest party song ever written,” Andrew

reiterated. “Are you ready for it?”

The crowd somehow goes wilder. Galli says 20 dudes

were surrounding Andrew, having just head-banged for

two songs straight and clearly ready for what they’re

being told is the greatest party song ever written.

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Andrew W.K. and the Calder Quartet began playing

4’33”.

(This bears explaining. 4’33” is a John Cage compo-

sition divided into three movements, each calling for the

musicians to play nothing. “The audience’s attention is

drawn to all the other sounds to be heard in a concert

hall,” explains author Paul Hegarty in

Noise/Music

“and the world, then, is revealed as infinitely musical:

musicality is about our attentiveness to the sounds of the

world.”)

The crowd—aware, stupefied, accepting, or any

number of internalized and externalized feelings—heard

themselves. Not silence. Themselves.

But especially Galli, crying in the back row, “laughing

so fucking hard.”

***

Jimmy Coup dropped the priests of “The Temple of

Syrinx” on me during our second phone conversation.

He informed me it was a Rush song before I had a chance

to ask, and the coincidence I’d discover was too eerie to

dismiss.

I had been exploring the pronoun “we,” a word

repeated throughout

I Get Wet

and one whose spirit

was slowly becoming as powerful as party. Layers of

heavy strings and shimmering keys grouped to sound

like one, driving a chorus of voices constantly saying

“we,” in unison and in excelsis. Jimmy’s mention of the

song—from 2112, with lyrics like “we’ve taken care of

everything, the words you read, the songs you sing”—was

in regards to whether Andrew’s work was informed by

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someone(s). The liner notes for 2112 pay tribute to Ayn

Rand, whose dystopian tale in

Anthem

features a protag-

onist using “we” because pronouns showing any more

individuality are strictly forbidden. Rand’s protagonist

calls it a “monster” and a “word of serfdom, of plunder,

of misery, falsehood, and shame” before ultimately seeing

the god that is the singular pronoun. (Both 2112 and

Anthem

have roots in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 dystopian

tale of totalitarianism, aptly titled We.) The word, clearly,

has the potential to be crushing, anti-progressive, and

anti-individual, used as a cold weapon rather than an

inviting campfire.

Personally, the last paragraph feels like some hedged

bet. Like I’m showing my work and flaunting some

(feigned) acumen by referencing cheerless Russian

novelists that benefit a literary cred more than serve this

book and this album. Yes, not every

I Get Wet

lyric is

explicitly fun, just as not every pronoun is plural. Some

ears may prescribe a dystopian scenery to certain violent

lyrics, and, again, it’s not my place to presumptuously

correct. To my mind, there is only one tale of a future

dystopian society meriting any mention here. It’s the

one hinted at in that Keanu Reeves film where a man in

shades and sharp duster jacket contacts Keanu via phone

and schools him on the circuitry that connects his late

twentieth-century reality to a bleak future only he and

some fellow disconnected individuals have the ability to

alter for the better.

In this film, the future’s energy source was the music

of Wyld Stallyns, which man-in-duster Rufus—played

by George Carlin—says, is “the foundation of our whole

society” and will end “war and poverty … align the

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planets and bring them into universal harmony, allowing

meaningful contact with all forms of life.” (He adds

that it’s “excellent for dancing,” too.) “Party on, dudes”

may have been the main takeaway of Bill and Ted’s (and

Honest Abe’s) uncomplicated message, but the portion

just before that—“Be excellent to each other”—speaks

to the inclusive spirit we need to get there.

***

When Freddie Mercury wrote “We Are the Champions,”

he claimed it to be “the most egotistical song” he’d

ever written. As detailed in

Is This the Real Life?,

Queen

guitarist Brian May was “on the floor laughing” the first

time he heard it, perhaps envisioning the lyrics being

belted at a patronized crowd by a self-assured man

wearing a crown. Instead, the anthem ended up with

the masses, uniting victorious fans at sporting events

and even the socially persecuted at the end of Revenge

of the Nerds. May says “We Will Rock You,” the B-side

to the single, was “an interesting experiment to write a

song with audience participation specifically in mind.”

Instead of drums keeping the pace of a group sing-along,

the song’s foundation comes from actual foot-stomping

and hand-clapping, overdubbed many times over for a

full-body communal feel. The song’s producers brought

in anyone they could find in Wessex Studios that day to

get up on the drum risers and contribute the distinctive

boom-boom-cha, including the eventual mixer for I Get

Wet, Mike Shipley.

“I like seeing Andrew live,” said the late Shipley. “I like

seeing the audience participation. It kind of breaks down

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world barriers. I just like the positive-ness of the party

music. It’s upbeat, it’s positive, it puts a smile on the face,

and it’s about having a good time in the right way.”

***

In an interview with Dusted shortly after

I Get Wet

was

released, Andrew is asked about the Portly Boys, the

tough-yet-jolly chanters he created for his Rockside BK

label. Reflecting back on the band—while, mind you, not

letting on about that band’s entire nature—he stated: “I

didn’t realize it before, but I really liked those big groups

cheering and chanting and call-and-response. … It was just

this group of overweight dudes who weren’t gonna take

any crap. And they were good-natured, that was the thing.

I think that’s probably the most misunderstood thing about

that—and about this now. It’s very good-natured. They’re

not angry, they’re just dedicated. They’re not fighting

against, they’re fighting for. And there will be more of

that. That’s just part of what we do. Music that’s written

for more than one person to sing is really exciting to me.”

Brian Eno, the musician and producer so connected

to experimental ambient music, spoke to NPR about

the physiological and psychological benefits he found in

singing (like the Portly Boys do) in groups. More telling

were what he called the civilizational benefits of singing

with a group and immersing one’s self into a community.

“That’s one of the great feelings,” he says, “to stop being

me for a little while and to become us. That way lies

empathy, the great social virtue.”

Like layered vocals and anthemic choruses, the word

“we” isn’t a revolutionary device, but in the context of

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I Get Wet

’s partying, the word implies automatic inclusion

in the event. When it’s time to party, not only is “we”

uniting and empowering partiers at no single partier’s

expense, but—thanks to Andrew’s consistent vagueness

in defining “party” in the face of incessant questioning—

no partier is dragged into a situation undesired. The

party is undefined and indiscriminate; we do what we like,

we just want fun, and we will always party hard.

Musicologist Christopher Small coined the catchall

phrase musicking for the idea that “composing, practicing

and rehearsing, performing, and listening are not separate

processes but are all aspects of … one great human

activity.” His 1998 book, Musicking: The Meaning of

Performing and Listening, examines more of the concert-

hall scene, although doesn’t discount the “drunken ol’

pals singing bawdy” or “the teenager in the street with

a Walkman.” For most, the musicking experience is

only enhanced by Andrew’s open-stage, all-involved,

after-show live experience, but his lyrical inclusiveness

enriches even further. “Who we are is how we relate,”

Small writes. “So it is that to affirm and celebrate our

relationships through musicking, especially in company

with like-feeling people, is to explore and celebrate our

sense of who we are, to make us feel more fully ourselves.

In a word, we feel good. We feel that this is how the

world really is when all the dross is stripped away, and

this is where we really belong in it.”

***

We may feel invincible partying in a crowd, but there’s also

a psychological sensation of vastness, that we are but one

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small piece in this larger thing, and that realization can be

awing and empowering. James W. Pennebaker wrote about

a “we-jump and I-drop phenomenon” that takes place in

group-galvanizing matters. Think the capricious nature of

sports-fandom (“we won” when your team wins, versus

“they lost” when your team loses) or even tragedies that

actually hurt others and feel like they’re threatening us

(“we will overcome”). In the case of the latter, “coinciding

with the elevation of we-words was the brief drop but then

long-term increase in positive emotion words,” he writes.

“A horrible trauma such as 9/11 has the unintended effect

of bringing people together, making them less self-focused,

and within a few days, making them more happy.”

To Matt Sweeney, Andrew’s inclusive vision was a

direct reaction to rock subcultures like black metal and

noise that had rules already set in place: “He wanted to

do something that had the intensity of that, but was all

about, like, everybody’s welcome.”

Andrew says using the word “we” was a “conscious

decision from the beginning,” but inclusion isn’t the only

feeling the word conveys. In recording so many layers of

vocals, Andrew wanted the voicing to sound anonymous;

the result isn’t stripping away character, but creating

space for any and all. “That you could hear your own

voice almost in it,” Andrew says, “and it’s not being sung

to you or at you, but it’s being sung with you, even the

first time you heard it. To come across at all times that

you were included, invited, wanted, and beyond that,

already even there. … Once that was established, you

could even do something like ‘I,’ and it’s going to be an

‘I’ that everybody’s the ‘I’ versus ‘here’s my story that I

went through and I’m telling you this experience.’”

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As the sole name on the spine and face on the cover,

Andrew’s use of the word does both demystify (i.e. all

at this party are musicking together) and add intrigue

(i.e. who are all these other crazy names on the guest

list?). He represents entities intended to be nameless,

faceless, indistinguishable, and numerous. A blank slate

in all-white to both reflect and project upon. Paradox

may thrive in the universe of Andrew W.K., and while

this book cannot provide a tidy explanation for every

one, there is a place where the prize is in clearer focus.

“In musicking,” Small writes, “we have a tool by

means of which our real concepts of ideal relationships

can be articulated, those contradictions can be recon-

ciled, and the integrity of the person affirmed, explored,

and celebrated.”

***

When Andrew’s mom wasn’t spinning him around the

kitchen as a child, she was dunking him in a pool and

flipping him around under water. “She called them

dizzy dives,” Andrew says, “which would produce this

wonderful chills-in-your-stomach feeling. The great

thing about dizzy dives is you can just do them over and

over and over again and you get one every time. It’s sort

of orgasmic in a nonsexual location—a full-body great

feeling.”

Andrew shares the kitchen-spin and dizzy-dive stories

with friends who claim not to like rollercoasters. He

imagines they’re experiencing the same sensations he

does, just interpreting the feeling differently. “What

might be uncomfortable, awkward, scary, embarrassing,

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or otherwise undesirable for someone could also be

completely thrilling for someone else and it’s the exact

same sensation. Confusion, I think, is a common one.

I like the feeling of not understanding something and

being thrown off—kind of like having your mind blown—

not being able to fully comprehend an experience and

enjoying it even more because of that.”

“In fact, maybe that is the best part of the experience,

and the experience is only there as a tool to get you to

that place of bewilderment.”

***

Barbara Ehrenreich’s fascinating

Dancing in the Streets

(2006) chronicles the united rejoicings of cultures. She

speculates that early hominids who stamped their feet

and waved sticks at predatory animals may have learned

to synchronize their actions, tricking that predator into

thinking it’s facing “a twenty-foot-long, noisy, multi-

legged beast” with one mind. This likely led to communal

huntings and eventually to rituals celebrating human

triumph. “When we speak of transcendent experience in

terms of ‘feeling part of something larger than ourselves,’”

she writes, “it may be this ancient many-headed pseudo-

creature that we unconsciously invoke.” Noting that

the word nomos is Greek for “law” as well as “melody,”

Ehrenreich says “to submit, bodily, to the music through

dance is to be incorporated into the community in a way

far deeper than shared myth or common custom can

achieve.”

Two concepts Enrenreich pays particular attention

to are French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s notion

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of collective effervescence, and anthropologist Victor

Turner’s idea of communitas.

Collective effervescence, “the ritually induced passion

or ecstasy that cements social bonds,” forms what the

sociologist said is the basis of religion. Turner, the book

notes, recognized collective ecstasy as something more

universal and an expression of what he called communitas,

“the spontaneous love and solidarity that can arise within

a community of equals.” Ehrenreich says both concepts

reach toward a group-uniting concept of love, but that

the “love that binds people to the collective has no name

at all to speak.”

We submit: PARTY!

“I’ve gotten in arguments with people about ‘What

is this bullshit fake-metal, party-party-party, dumb-bro

rock?’” says Fred Thomas. “I’m like, ‘No, look a little

closer—this is the most giving, inclusive music you could

hope for.’ Maybe it’s a semantics choice. Will people

listen if you talk about love instead of partying? I think

it’s kind of the same thing.”

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Ice

I n t e r v i ew s

All conducted between September 2012 and July 2013

(by phone, unless otherwise indicated):

Justin Allen (phone; email)

Ken Andrews

Doug Anson

Agnes Barton-Sabo (email)

Big Daddy

Ken Chastain

Cory Churko

Jimmy Coup (phone; email)

Aaron Dilloway (phone; email)

Roe Ethridge

John Fields (phone; email)

Josh Freese

Pete Galli

Alex Goldman

Julie Greenwald

Frank Gryner (phone; email)

Twig Harper

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Allan Hazlett (email)

Gary Helsinger

Scott Humphrey

Steve Kenney

Jim Krier (in-person; email)

Kelly Kuvo (phone; email)

Lewis Largent (phone; email)

Pete Larson (in-person; phone)

Cherie Lily

Jim Magas

Knox Mitchell (phone; email)

Mark Morgan

Erik Payne

Matt Quigley (phone; email)

Holly Quinn (phone; email)

Quintron (phone; email)

Dan Rodriguez

Jeff Rice

Gregg Roberts (email)

Rich Russo

Scott Sandler

Nick Sheehan (phone; email)

Mike Shipley

Tom Smith (email)

Phil Solem

Casey Spooner

Toby Summerfield (email)

Matt Sweeney

Spencer Sweeney

Donald Tardy

Fred Thomas (in-person; phone; email)

Frank Werner

I G E T W E T

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Wendy Wilkes (in-person; email)

Andrew Wilkes-Krier (in-person; phone; email)

Patrick Wilkes-Krier

B o o k s a n d Pe r i o d i c a l s

Blake, Mark. “All the Way Live: Steev Mike.” Dazed & Confused.

January 2001.

—

Is This the Real Life? The Untold Story of Queen

(Da Capo Press,

2011).

Derrida, J. “

Living On

.” Deconstruction and Criticism (Continuum,

2004).

Eddy, Chuck. “Bubblegum Never Died! It’s Just That Nobody

Ever Writes About It!” Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth.

Kim Cooper and David Smay (eds) (Feral House, 2001).

renreich, Barbara. Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective

Joy (Metropolitan Books, 2006).

Ehrlich, Dimitri. “The Open Act and the Main Act.”

Interview

April 2001.

Gregorits, Gene. Midnight Mavericks: Reports from the Underground

(FAB Press, 2007).

Heath, Chris. “Andrew W.K.”

Rolling Stone

. April 11, 2002.

Hegarty, Paul.

Noise/Music: A History

(Continuum, 2007).

Klages, Mary.

Mad

. November 1999.

—Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2006).

Megill, Allan. Prophets of Extremity (University of California Press,

1985).

rris, Kyle. “Party Hard: The Enigma of Andrew W.K.” Ann

Arbor Observer. April 2003.

Pennebaker, James W. The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words

Say About Us (Bloomsbury, 2011).

Rand, Ayn.

Anthem

(Penguin, 1995).

Salinger, J. D.

The Catcher in the Rye

(Bantam, 1964).

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

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•

Small, Christopher. Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and

Listening (Wesleyan University Press, 1998).

Standring, Susan. (ed.). Gray’s Anatomy (Elsevier, 2008).

Wilson, Carl. Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste

(Continuum, 2007).

W.K., Andrew. “My 5 Favorite Piano Chords.” Inventory. Josh

Modell, Keith Phipps, Tasha Robinson, and Kyle Ryan (eds)

(Scribner, 2009).

—“Scream 2: What’s Your Favorite Scary Movie?” WOLF “Slicer”

Magazine. No. 3, Vol. 1 (Hex Gang and the Gang PAINT

THE WHITE HOUSE BLACK!!!, 1979–1998).

O n l i n e

Amsden, David. “The Let’s-Just-Party-Boy.”

New York

. April 26,

2009. http://nymag.com/nightlife/features/56300/

Cohen, Ian.

I Get Wet

review.

Pitchfork

. August 31, 2012. http://

pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16836-i-get-wet/

dickalan. “We Partied With Andrew W.K.” http://andrewwk-

music.com/ (archived).

Eno, Brian. “Singing: The Key to a Long Life.” NPR.org.

November 23, 2008. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/

story.php?storyId=97320958

Galvez, Esteban. “Andrew W.K. is the ‘King of Partying.’”

Pepperdine University Graphic Online Daily. March 3, 2002.

http://www.pepperdine-graphic.com/featured/9927/

Hunt, Sam. “The Golden Rule: An Interview with Andrew WK.”

Dusted. http://www.dustedmagazine.com/features/38

Jonze, Tim. “Andrew WK: ‘Music is a healing powerball of electric

joy’.” Guardian. April 5, 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/

music/2012/apr/05/andrew-wk-interview?CMP=twt_gu

Schreiber, Ryan.

I Get Wet

review.

Pitchfork

. July 7, 2002. http://

pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/184-i-get-wet/

I G E T W E T

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Stewart, Allison. “Andrew W.K. Enjoying Return to Musical

Roots.” Chicago Tribune. March 23, 2012. http://articles.

chicagotribune.com/2012-03-21/entertainment/ct-ott-0323-

andrew-wk-20120321_1_andrew-wilkes-krier-andrew-wk-bloody-

nose

known. “The Master Plan?” http://what-happened-to-awk.

weebly.com/

—“

The Bulb 45.” http://doessteevmikeexist.blogspot.

com/2006/03/bulb-45.html

Ward. “Forming Fantasy of Fortune: The Imaginary Reality or

Here Goes Nothing …” http://awilkeskrier.homestead.com/

Weingarten, Christopher R., Hornbuckle, M. David, and Davis,

Ned. “Andrew W.K. and ‘The Death of Irony.’”

Ink 19

April 2002. http://www.ink19.com/issues/april2002/streaks/

andrewWKDeathOf.html

W.K., Andrew. “Ask Andrew.” http://www.AWKworld.com

(archived).

—“Headbanger Andrew W.K. Rocks Out—to Bach.” NPR.org.

July 13, 2009 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.

php?storyId=106537663

A l b u m L i n e r N o t e s

Aube.

Fast Tumbling Blaze

(V. Records, 1996).

—

Sensorial Inducement

(Alien8 Recordings, 2000).

Masonna.

Hyper Chaotic

(V. Records, 1996).

Mr. Velocity Hopkins. Mr. Velocity Hopkins (Insignificant Records,

1999).

Pterodactys!, The.

Reborn

(Bulb Records, 1996).

Rush. 2112 (Mercury Records, 1976).

Various.

Labyrinths & Jokes

(Hanson).

W.K., Andrew.

Girls Own Juice

(Bulb Records, 2000).

—

Party Til You Puke

(Bulb, 2000).

—

I Get Wet

(Island Def Jam, 2002).

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

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—I Get Wet 10th Anniversary Special Deluxe Edition (Century

Media Records, 2012).

—

Mother of Mankind

(Steev Mike, 2010).

M ov i e s , S h ow s , a n d S p e e ch e s

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Orion Pictures Corporation,

1988).

Ghostbusters 2

(Columbia Pictures Industries, 1989).

Great Dictator, The

(United Artists, 1940).

Mr. Show

. “The Biggest Failure in Broadway History.” November

29, 1996. DVD (Home Box Office, 2005).

Revenge of the Nerds

(Twentieth Century Fox, 1984).

Roosevelt, Theodore. “

The Strenuous Life

.” Chicago, IL (April

10, 1899).

—“

Citizenship in a Republic

.” Paris, France (April 23, 1910).

Saturday Night Live

. Season 27, Episode 17 (April 13, 2002).

Soft Focus. Online (Vice, March 12, 2007).

Who Knows?

(Music Video Distributors, 2006).

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Stop Bath

Bulb Records promotional photo. Photo courtesy of Kelly Kuvo

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

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We Want Fun demo insert, unfolded. Right side is the cover (a photo

of a larger piece Andrew painted); left side shows a portrait taken

at the Roe Ethridge shoot, pre-blood. Photo by author; taken on the
living room carpet of Andrew’s childhood home

Andrew, at Sub Jersey (aka New Jersey Studios). Photo courtesy of
Jimmy Coup

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Mike Shipley and Andrew, at Record One. Photo courtesy of Jimmy Coup

“Andrew is dorking out on the millimeters between the letters,”

says Jimmy (in background). “Andrew loves details.” Photo courtesy of
Jimmy Coup

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“This ‘LifeList’ is what I had posted up all over my house and on

tour and even on the desktop of all my computers for many, many

years,” Andrew says. “This I made in 2001 and probably looked at it

every day until around 2008.” Photo recreated to best of author’s abilities,
with permission to do so from Andrew W.K.

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Champagne

First, foremost, and forever, my thanks to Andrew,

without whom we couldn’t have this party. Your music

and spirit deserve more than I could give, and your help

throughout this project still awes me. Thank you.

My thanks to Andrew’s wonderful family and friends

who gave me pizza, lentils, MP3s, precious time, and

incredible insights. My apologies and thanks to Dave

“Big Shirt” Nichols, Blake Canaris, Matt Darling,

Caroline Duane, Don Fleming, Don Grossinger, Jennifer

Herrema, Jaime Herrero, Roger Lian, Louise Mayne,

Nardwuar the Human Serviette, Justin Payne, Dave

Pino, Rat Bastard, Tavis Stevenson, Vanessa Walters, and

Derek Wieland—I sincerely appreciate your help and

wish your names could’ve appeared in places beyond this

section to prove it. I also wish to express my heartfelt

sympathies to the family and friends of Mike Shipley,

who passed away as this book was nearing completion.

For Programming, Technical Assistance, and hugs along

the way, my eternal gratitude to David Barker, Kaitlin

Fontana, Ally Jane Grossan, Ian Buck, Kim Storry, Dawn

Booth, Maggie Malach, Beth Kellmurray, C.R., Jo Crandall,

Rick Jeans, Michael Braun, Kat McCullough, Christopher

P H I L L I P C R A N D A L L

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R. Weingarten, Neil Matharoo, Miku Akiyama, Dan Reilly,

Julio Aponte, Emma Trelles, Irene P., Linda Douthat,

Graham Beaton, Mark Yarm, Sommer Gray, Stacia, Dan

Kletter, Brandon Fleszar, Christina Simone, Ester and

Eric and their rad kid, Radio-Active Records, TGBGT,

Scott Prentice, John Neander, Zac McGowen, Sam Fiske,

Andrei Feldt, Mark Bauer, Steve Kay, Kevin McHale,

Ricardo Campos, Greg and Drew and Johnny and Jay

and Kenny and BMac and everyone out on Saturday, Don

Regan, Amy Fox, Lucille’s parents, Merrill’s parents, Tim

Kealey, Jason Friedman, Meisel, Meagan Gordon, Lia

LoBello, Sam Barclay, Rebecca Wallwork, Crazy Legs

Conti, Adam Winer, Laura Leu, Samantha Judge, Patrick

Bertoletti, Andrew Cassese, Tom Conlon, Scott Kritz,

Meghan Conaton, Tony Romando, Christopher Rudzik,

Randi Hecht, Brekke Fletcher, Ian Knowles, John Mihaly,

Christine Reilly, Antonella D’Agostino, Jon Hurwitz,

Jonathan Chase, Jake Bronstein, Rob Hill, Matty Warner,

Lenny Naar, Sean McCusker, Jimmy Jellinek, Michael

Dolan, Neil Janowitz, Molly Knight, Tim Stack, Jen

Adams, Kyle Anderson, Grace Carter, Ben Gruber, Tom

and Chris Gorman, Andrew John Ignatius Vontz, “Brass

Bonanza,” Scott Gramling, the boys, and the Mu’s.

I’m indebted to the Broward County Library,

Scrivener, Cheesy Gordita Crunches, and teachers like

Steve Harper.

I love you, Esther, Ken, Mary, Art, Bob, Dave, Terri,

Tom, Tami, Molly, Caius, Linda, Red, Tracey, Mike, Kevin,

Lauren, Capt. Chris, Alex, Tommy, Taylor, Darryl, Elizabeth,

Julian, Charlotte, Uncle JBJ, Mom, Dad, and Harper!

All I want is what we are, Christa. You’re simply the

most beautiful person ever, and now that fact is in a book!

I G E T W E T

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•

***

Hey you—let’s party! Call me! 55-WE-PAARTY!

(559.372.2789)

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•

Also available in the series

1. Dusty in Memphis by Warren

Zanes

2. Forever Changes by Andrew

Hultkrans

3. Harvest by Sam Inglis
4. The Kinks Are the Village Green

Preservation Society by Andy
Miller

5. Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice
6. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

by John Cavanagh

7. Abba Gold by Elisabeth

Vincentelli

8. Electric Ladyland by John Perry
9. Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott
10. Sign ‘O’ the Times by

Michaelangelo Matos

11. The Velvet Underground and Nico

by Joe Harvard

12. Let It Be by Steve Matteo
13. Live at the Apollo by Douglas

Wolk

14. Aqualung by Allan Moore
15. OK Computer by Dai Griffiths
16. Let It Be by Colin Meloy
17. Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis
18. Exile on Main Sreet by Bill

Janovitz

19. Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli
20. Ramones by Nicholas Rombes
21. Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno
22. Murmur by J. Niimi
23. Grace by Daphne Brooks
24. Endtroducing … by Eliot Wilder
25. Kick Out the Jams by Don

McLeese

26. Low by Hugo Wilcken
27. Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey

Himes

28. Music from Big Pink by John

Niven

29. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by

Kim Cooper

30. Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy
31. Doolittle by Ben Sisario
32. There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles

Marshall Lewis

33. The Stone Roses by Alex Green
34. In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar
35. Highway 61 Revisited by Mark

Polizzotti

36. Loveless by Mike McGonigal
37. The Who Sell Out by John

Dougan

38. Bee Thousand by Marc

Woodworth

I G E T W E T

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160

•

39. Daydream Nation by Matthew

Stearns

40. Court and Spark by Sean Nelson
41. Use Your Illusion Vols 1 and 2 by

Eric Weisbard

42. Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth

Lundy

43. The Notorious Byrd Brothers by

Ric Menck

44. Trout Mask Replica by Kevin

Courrier

45. Double Nickels on the Dime by

Michael T. Fournier

46. Aja by Don Breithaupt
47. People’s Instinctive Travels and the

Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor

48. Rid of Me by Kate Schatz
49. Achtung Baby by Stephen

Catanzarite

50. If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott

Plagenhoef

51. Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich
52. Let’s Talk About Love by Carl

Wilson

53. Swordfishtrombones by David

Smay

54. 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew

Daniel

55. Horses by Philip Shaw
56. Master of Reality by John

Darnielle

57. Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris
58. Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden

Childs

59. Gentlemen by Bob Gendron
60. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash by

Jeffery T. Roesgen

61. The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob

Proehl

62. Pink Flag by Wilson Neate

63. XO by Matthew LeMay
64. Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier
65. Radio City by Bruce Eaton
66. One Step Beyond … by Terry

Edwards

67. Another Green World by Geeta

Dayal

68. Zaireeka by Mark Richardson
69. 69 Love Songs by L. D. Beghtol
70. Facing Future by Dan Kois
71. It Takes a Nation of Millions to

Hold Us Back by Christopher R.
Weingarten

72. Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles
73. Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo
74. Song Cycle by Richard

Henderson

75. Kid A by Marvin Lin
76. Spiderland by Scott Tennent
77. Tusk by Rob Trucks
78. Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne

Carr

79. Chocolate and Cheese by Hank

Shteamer

80. American Recordings by Tony

Tost

81. Some Girls by Cyrus Patell
82. You’re Living All Over Me by

Nick Attfield

83. Marquee Moon by Bryan

Waterman

84. Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen
85. Dummy by R. J. Wheaton
86. Fear of Music by Jonathan

Lethem

87. Histoire de Melody Nelson by

Darran Anderson

88. Flood by S. Alexander Reed and

Philip Sandifer

Document Outline

FC
Praise for the series
Forthcoming in the series
Title
Copyright
I Get Wet
Contents
Puke (Preface)
Ink (Introduction)
1. Perilymph
2. Juice
3. Sweat
4. Smoke
5. Blood
6. 'kem
Ice (Interviews and Sources)
Stop Bath (Photographs)
Champagne (Acknowledgments)
Also available in the series

33 1 3 089 Andrew W K 's I Get Wet Phillip Crandall (retail) (pdf)

Document Outline