You know, I noticed a passing mention in one of your essays you’ve got posted on your Web site of the great pirate-radio ships who were offshore in Britain in the ‘60s. Is that kind of your underlying philosophy? “Here we are out here, broadcasting from beyond the legal zone, and nobody can touch us?”
Yeah, symbolically. And at the same time, it’s complementary to what mainstream radio’s playing in the middle of the week. It’s not totally unrelated; I’m not playing a jazz show here. About 20 percent of it is brand new stuff, and 20 percent may be unfamiliar. But half of it should be familiar, because it was the hits at one time. Or it’s the roots of what they’re playing the rest of the week on that station. So it’s directly related. I think it works in that sense, too.

What’s your selection process for the show?
It’s complicated. Um, I have my songs separated into about 15 different categories. I try to do something that has a good combination of the old and the new, of harder and not so hard, familiar and unfamiliar, British and American. There are a lot of ways to balance out the show, and I work real hard to get those 25 songs per week to capture a bit of everything that I want to say that week.

There seems to be a bit of the tent-revival preacher in your voice when you’re back announcing your sets. Do you labor over these things, plan out what you’re going to say a lot?
No, because I just love it, and it I get a little enthusiastic, it’s because I am! That’s no act. I love this stuff. I’m trying to do one of those shows from the past where you weren’t being watched so closely and you were kind of able to express yourself in anyway you wanted. At the same time, I’m not pretending to be completely objective here. This is my taste, in the end. It’s what I feel is the coolest stuff ever done. Hopefully, people will agree.

Any favorite songs you always know will work on a show? The “get the party started” classics like, say, the MC5’s “Shakin' Street”?
Gee, I dunno. I went about four months before I repeated a song. There are a lot I’d like to repeat, but there are so many I want to get in, too. I do what I call “The Coolest Song In The World” each week, and that’s something I try to repeat in a couple of weeks because that’s a brand-new song by a brand-new band usually.

Out on tour, are you hitting record stores and looking for stuff?
If I’m in a town, I’ll do that. You’ll find regional things. But mostly, by this point these small record companies will send me stuff, or friends of friends who know what I’m looking for. Bands themselves will have friends in bands, too.

You do a great job of drawing the lines of history together—playing oldies alongside newer bands like ...
The Shazam, Greenhornes, Cotton Mather, Creatures Of The Golden Dawn, Anderson Council ... I love the Boss Martians, Sugar Shack, Model Rockets. Mooney Suzuki are terrific, Mr. Brown out of Australia—there’s a bunch of bands in Australia. I can’t wait to get down there! And of course the bands like Vines, Hives, Strokes that we don’t even have to mention. There’s at least 25 newer bands I’m playing to keep an eye on, because now we have two solid generations of guitar bands out there, the generation that started out in the ‘80s and the one now. The Chesterfield Kings are coming back with a new record, Vipers, Cynics, you can’t beat them. The Swingin’ Neckbreakers—they were on The Sopranos this season, did you see them? They were in the second show this year. As we walk into Adriana’s bar, they’re playing in there!

That was your doing, no doubt.
Yeah! [laughs] They asked me for a music group, and of course it was gonna be one of our garage bands.

What would Silvio do if he found out a daughter or niece was getting hot and heavy with a hairy pill-poppin’ member of a garage band?
[long, evil laugh] He would NOT be too thrilled about it! Silvio is REAL old-fashioned, heh-heh-heh!

Unless there was an Italian-American garage band, of course. Are there any?
[cracking up] Per se, I dunno! I’m going over to Italy now with Bruce, so maybe I’ll find out.

Ask around some of the wise guys in Jersey. “Hey, we got a kid’s party and we need a band. Can’t have no Jews, no Hispanics, no blacks in there. Just Italians.”
Yeah! [laughs] Anyway, it is wonderful to see, finally, this new generation of young people, who’ve been looking for something to call their own, now they’re starting to find it. It’s gonna be garage rock, this kinda stuff we’re talking about. Because it’s just exciting, it’s fun, it’s cool. Again, a lot of the rap and hard rock stuff can be so heavy, so serious. And it all gets a bit homogenized after a while. That’s the great thing about garage music. Every single band is different. They really are. And I think as people discover more of these sorts of bands, they’re gonna be really, really pleasantly surprised. It’s the closest thing to the ‘60s we’re ever gonna have. These groups are learning from the ‘60s and skipping all those boring decades since.

Do you think there’ll be a backlash once it all gets a lot of media coverage? “Ah, White Stripes suck ...”
It doesn’t matter. I don’t live my life according to fashion or what the media’s doing. I know what’s great and what’s cool and that’s gonna survive regardless of what the media does with it. I mean, are you gonna get more hype than the Beatles when they came out? I don’t think that’s possible. The Beatles were everywhere, all of the time. They had five of the top 10 singles (simultaneously). The whole world was nothing but Beatles for a full year. So what? They continued to make great records and people continued to love ‘em to the end. But the people concerned about being super-hip about things? Yeah, they can be concerned about it, you know?

Of course, if we get Britney Spears produced by Jack White on our next album instead of somebody like the Neptunes, we might have a small problem.
Hah-haahhh! You know what? We’ll even survive that!

And she did cover “Satisfaction.” Stranger things have happened, I guess. Hey, I read the story on you that Guitar Player ran in their November issue. You mentioned in that interview you’d like to do a label as well as get a TV show going and setting up a touring network.
When I say things like infrastructure, that’s what I’m talking about. We’ve got the makings of an infrastructure here if I just get a little bit lucky and have the time to dedicate to it. If a few people come on to help me here we can get a record company going, we can get a TV show going. We have the Hard Rocks all over the country, 40 of them, ready to do tours. So you get radio, TV, touring, record company, and you got a little business. I’m not gonna try and reform the record business. I ain’t gonna be dumb enough to try and go in there and fix it. It ain’t fixable. So whattaya do? You create another business. An alternative music business. That’s what I’ve been working on it over the past three years, slowly. Lost a lot of it on 9/11, a year ago. I had a lot in place, and that put the revolution back a year or two. But I am fully engaged in this, and that’s what it is, an absolute revolution and I’m gonna continue to do whatever I can do to bring rock ‘n’ roll back ... it’s never gonna be as big as it was, and it’s never gonna be the mainstream music of choice. But that’s OK. I just wanna bring it back to where bands can make a living doing it.

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