MTV did things in their typical cowardly way. The whole time this thing was going on they kept assuring me I was coming back but I might have to do this or that to smooth it over. Then, they fired me, boom, just like that. David Sirulnick didn’t even call me himself to tell me, he had one of his minions call my manager. Then Viacom told me they wouldn’t hamper my career but then they gave orders that I was not to be hired by any Viacom subsidiaries. Whatever, it’s typical MTV bullshit. They hire people as freelance but work them like they’re permanent so they don’t have to pay out benefits or medical coverage or anything like that. Then, when profits are down a bit, they fire everybody. That kind of work stress made everybody at MTV miserable, save for the management ticks who had burrowed themselves deep under the skin of Viacom. They also fire anybody who’s outspoken. Tom Freston, the President of MTV and a super huge higher up in Viacom kept trying to make MTV a little less stupid, he spoke out about it and—coincidentally—was pushed out.
I see MTV News now and it’s both sad and laughable at the same time. They have some swanky-looking British guy as a news reporter and he’s awful on camera and really condescending when he talks to people. They don’t use their amazing resources like John Norris and Kurt Loder and even though MTV “News” was always been an oxymoron, it’s an even bigger joke now. MTV News is mainly an online thing, the presence that it once had has dwindled down to almost nothing. There wasn’t much hope of it going any other way really. MTV has spent too long being the prison bitch for record labels and MTV News has towed the line with that. You and I both know there are at least four or five stories that were serious news items that MTV News was told not to report by the record labels. Then I’d say Linkin Park sucks and they’d look at me and say “Doing that can hurt the integrity of MTV News.” Are they kidding? I was bummed by the way MTV handled what happened with me but I wasn’t surprised. I once heard MTV described as a Pyramid Of Cowards and that’s pretty much what it is.
FCF: Despite having a high-profile TV reporting job where you regularly met celebrities, you never became saddled with a lot of "stars" in your life. The most genuine and solid relationships with "famous" types you did forge were with Corey Taylor, Serj Tankian, and Elijah Wood. What set them apart from the rest of the "A-List" pack you often encountered?
IANN: I don’t know man, I guess we just had more in common than the other folks I met during that time. I’m also still friendly with Rollins and Scott Ian. I think if you look at all of those guys you will see a specific trend in them, the fact that they aren’t really part of the MTV world, they didn’t need MTV to survive. Metal bands get no help from MTV, Rollins doesn’t play that game and Elijah will be a movie star with or without MTV. There was no ass-kissing going on, there was no feeling that they were friendly to me because they needed MTV support, it just grew organically. I respect all of them without fail. Rollins is…well…..Rollins, Scott Ian has been in one of the most forward-thinking metal bands of the last 30 years. Corey is an amazing frontman, singer, lyricist and writer and Serj is as close to brilliant as I’ve seen in a long time. I’m not as close to Elijah as I once was. I expect a lot from my friends because I give a lot to any friendship that I have. I think I expected too much from Elijah and it strained the relationship, which is too bad. I know for certain I wanted nothing from Elijah but to be his friend, I’m very doubtful of that with some of the people I know he hangs around. Don’t get me wrong, I love the kid but I’m not a hanger-on, I don’t hang with people because of who they are so I also don’t cow-tow to them.
Most of the celebs I met on MTV just weren’t very interesting as people, at least not to me. I guess the best way to describe it is when I hang out with Serj, Corey, or any of them we don’t talk about business, ever, and we never did. We talk music, comics, film, TV, fucking recipes, whatever, but their lives are not wrapped up in who they know or how in the public eye they are.
FCF: How in the heck did you lose the weight? And how are you keeping it off?
IANN: I have to give all that credit to my ex-girlfriend Heidi. We didn’t part on the greatest of terms but I will always owe her because she helped me lose all the weight and keep it off by teaching me a better way to eat. Diets are bullshit, quick fixes are bullshit, you have to re-train yourself to a different way of viewing food. I used to drink a 3 liter of coke or diet coke a day, gave that up and now I just drink water or coffee. I gave up 90% of all processed sugars, fried foods, etc. I eat a lot of vegetarian dishes, salads, chicken and good whole foods. I watch my bread intake and my starches. I also try to be more active, walking a lot, riding my bike, etc. It’s a constant battle but it’s worth it, I feel a thousand times better than I ever have.
FCF: Has the change in your health and appearance changed your outlook in general? If so, how?
IANN: Well, it made getting laid a lot easier..haha. I think the main thing it’s done for me is just to make me feel better about myself. The weight thing had haunted me my entire life and I had never really been able to beat it. Having finally won out it just gives you an insane feeling of accomplishment. I’ll never be pretty boy thin like you (I joke, I kid) but now I can look at myself in the mirror without feeling awful. It was also kind of a way to shed the past and move on with my life. Between 2003 and 2006 everything went wrong, my whole life was in a tailspin. I lost the MTV job, moved, got divorced, had the falling out with Josh and Jason, couldn’t find a job, and moved into a tiny apartment that flooded and was infested with rats. When I did finally get work I was working on a loading dock for Whole Foods. I just became incredibly depressed and started actually packing weight on.
I finally started rebuilding my life and cutting loose all the things that were causing me pain, I think losing the weight helped shed that whole past aspect of what had happened to me. That sounds wicked new age but I still think that it’s true.
FCF: Why did you relocate from New York City to Boston?
IANN: I had grown tired of New York City, it just wasn’t the place I had to grow up in. My then-wife Shelley and I had taken a cruise to Alaska to try and jump start our marriage and when we returned we both just wanted out of the city. It was too crowded, we were tired of living in a giant filing cabinet for humans, the list was endless. We figured Boston was a good idea because we had a lot of friends here and I had been up enough that I had a basic lay of the land, it just seemed perfect. When I got up here Boston just felt right, the whole creepy New England vibe felt like home to me. Nobody up here is really too interested in my past or in trying to milk my MTV days for anything.
When my marriage ended I almost jumped ship entirely and headed to LA, just to make a clean break from the East Coast but I just couldn’t. It’s hot and sunny there all year round, and since I’m not a lizard and I like hot coffee I decided against it. I just kind of fell in love with Boston, the history, the architecture, the Red Sox, all of it. So I stayed and now I’m really glad that I did.
FCF: I remember you were overseas filming a pilot for the Discovery Channel. Whatever came of that?
IANN:That was one of the greatest and worst experiences of my life. I had done a test tape for the producers months earlier in LA and they decided they liked me enough to shell out some bucks for myself and another guy to fly to Ethiopia to film a pilot. The whole concept of the show was taking two city guys and placing us in the smallest parts of the world. Our first stop was going to be Ethiopia, the mountains of Surma to live with the Surma tribe. I have been all around the world but I was not ready for the culture shock when I got off the plane in Ethiopia. It’s hard to explain the difference when you’re in front of a 3rd World Country when you’ve arrived from the USA. I had left my wife and friends behind for a month and I was terrified, absolutely paralyzed with fear. I missed them, I wanted to go home, I had an absolute mental collapse.
After a few days, things began to clear up and I really got excited when we left Ethiopia for Surma. I don’t care how much you think you know about abject poverty and the harsh conditions that some people have to live in, you don’t know shit until you’ve set down in Ethiopia. The area is so poor, so strife with disease and poverty that you feel like the asshole American for even complaining when you’re there. Ethiopia has a beautiful University and some amazing museums and cultural events but you can’t imagine the situation most of the people are living in. It makes you want to fly home and start stealing from fat, rich Americans and just wire-transferring all the money over there. It was really bizarre, the best Italian food I ever had was in a restaurant in Ethiopia but when I left the restaurant I felt like a big asshole for even having gotten to eat that night. Fifteen or twenty kids, all in various stages of sickness, come up and start begging for money. You can’t give them any because the kids are usually run by an adult who just takes the money from them.
After a few days of experiencing that it was a real trip to drive out to the mountains of Surma and hang out with the people there. I was adopted by a Surma family, brought into their homes and I got to experience life within their culture. I learned how to Donga Stick fight, which is how they settle disputes there. I drank Cow’s blood, ate these odd plants, even drank this weird mead beer until I threw up (which was a binding ritual). A few nights we slept in the actual huts the Surma live in, which was insane. They are small, hot, and filled with livestock. The other interesting thing is that every adult male has an AK-47, I believe because they are so close to the Sudan border. I had never seen an AK-47 much less fired one, so that was really cool. The whole trip was a brilliant experience that was grueling and long but I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world.
It was odd when I got back that the bullshit storm started. In a nutshell, Discovery told me that the show was a go-ahead and to wait for contracts and so on. So I sat around and waited. For 5 months they kept reassuring me and I just kept handing over my TV money for rent and bills, waiting to start my new TV job. Then, suddenly, they decided not to pick up the show. It had something to do with cost but they just ended it. So there I was, jobless nearly broke, and having wasted 5 months. I was so pissed but what could I do. I asked if I could have a copy of the tape of the final pilot and Discovery said they would get it to me, I never got it.
Fast forward a year or so later and I suddenly start getting phone calls and emails from friends about this amazing show they saw with me on it. I asked what they were talking about and they said, the one where you go live with a tribe in Africa. I was dumbfounded; they actually aired it and didn’t tell me? I called Williams Morris (my agency) but I wasn’t a hot property anymore and so they were not very interested in calling me back. I finally called Discovery and they said they would send me a tape, which they never did. I still to this day have never seen that show. That part of it sucked really badly.
FCF: Tell me about your new gig on the radio.
IANN: Right now it’s just fill-in work on WBCN, the biggest radio station in New England. I work a couple days a week, mostly learning radio and honing my craft. It’s very different than television so I have to get used to it. On TV you have to be over animated, bigger than life or it doesn’t read well on screen. Radio is exactly the opposite; you have to be laid back but not boring, conversational but still performing. It’s a totally different vibe. I’m hoping that it will lead to something bigger but I’ve been in the biz too long to rely on it. I’m just enjoying what I’m doing and having fun being in the media again. The best part is that friends all over the country can hear me on WBCN.com, they can also see when I’m on and so forth. (Check out Iann's bio on the radio website
HERE - FCF).
FCF: You are also performing as a DJ from time to time. How did that start?
IANN: To be honest I was never a “DJ”, not in the way I think of them. I didn’t scratch, mix, combine beats or do anything like that, I just played CDs. It all started because a friend of mine knew a guy who needed somebody to take a Friday night and try to get people into the bar. He hired me to play records and book a band every week. At first, it was really exciting but it soon became a pain in the neck. Management kept arguing with me about the choice of bands, how loud they were, I even was told you can’t have any more than 3 people play in the band and that included the singer. I enjoyed booking the bands and being involved in that aspect of the scene again but it just became a constant headache and I grew tired of it. I do it now but usually only playing records at a show for some friends or a party.
FCF: Tell me about the small-run comic book press you've started with a friend,
Isolation Disorder Press. (And when are you sending me some comics?!)
IANN: Sorry bro, I will get right on that!! I’m an old comic book geek from way back. I first started reading comics when I was 6 and I was a huge Peanuts fan, Charlie Brown & Linus were everything to me. Then at 7, my parents bought me this Spider-Man book with a play-along record for Christmas. That was it; I was hooked!! I played that record until it was un-listenable and I read the comic over and over until it fell apart. My dad brought me home a stack of comics he thought I’d like and I just jumped right in. From 7 to 11 my comic reading was pretty casual, mostly Archie, but that all changed thanks to some school bullies.
I was being picked on one day as I was walking home from school. I was probably 11 or 12 when this went down. There was a small bodega I passed every day and the owner liked my father and me so I ducked in there and he called my dad to come to get me. While I was there I started reading a Batman comic and freaked out, I mean I nearly had an aneurism. Here was a guy with no superpowers who just kicked ass, what a dream come true for a kid always picked on. I started buying Batman books feverishly, from there my interest just grew and grew. Over the years I’ve lost whole boxes, been forced to sell stuff, but I never lost the love for it. As my friends grew older they lost the desire to collect or read comics and I did it for a long time by myself. Enter Brian Smith, comic book fan and artist. Brian is a genius, pure and simple. He can draw, play drums, he is one half of 4 Way Anal Touchfight, the guy is a nonstop creative flow. We were basically the only one the other had to really talk comics with because we were both do dedicated to it.
Brian was showing me some of his early artwork for a comic he wanted to start titled Recur and we started talking about doing it ourselves. Brian checked out print shops and it turned out that to do a press run of 1000 copies was $2000 bucks. Brian also found out that buying a used professional copier was about $1500. So either we spent $2000 on 1000 copies of a book we might only sell 10 of or we spend $1500 on a professional copier and $500 on supplies we need to build our own books. We decided on the latter and thus the comic company was born. We arrived at the name by combining two Joy Division song titles together. We both worship Joy Division and the name is appropriate to the two of us…haha.
The first book we put out together was A Fistfight With God, which I wrote and Brian did the artwork for. It was a pretty good book, especially for the first one I had ever written. It tells the story of a man who loses his wife to a drunk driver and can’t seem to get past the rage he feels over it. God presents himself to the man and tries to tell him that his wife is in a better place and so forth. The man essentially tells God to fuck off, that he doesn’t buy into his bullshit. God, seeing how angry the man is offers a chance to fight him. By the end of the battle, the man has learned a lesson about rage, how it eats you alive and how you must let it go and move on.
Brian puts out Recur on his own. Recur is the story of a boy who kills himself and returns to his town. Only his best friend can see him as a ghost, whenever he touches or talks to anybody else they see him as though he never died. It’s a really intricate tale. It’s odd because both Recur and Fistfight are about coming to grips with our fathers. Mine is about the rage I felt when my father died and Brian’s is about coming to terms with how badly he was treated by his father.
Fistfight and Recur sold well enough that we don’t have to put too much money into the company for materials. The best part is building the books. The whole process from re-sizing the original artwork to the finished book itself is lengthy but Brian and I just put on music, drink coffee and bullshit the whole time. Since it doesn’t take too much money and we sell pretty well, at least in Boston and NYC, I have been able to work with artist Will B. (the drummer for Ogre) on a Sci-fi-western-mythology book titled The Drifter. I also write and draw (really badly) my own comic called The Daily Grind Of Thinguy And Fin. Brian and I collaborated on a comedy book titled “What If Bon Scott Was The Herald of Galactus” and we just put out Some Agoraphobic Girl, which I worked on with an artist named JB Sapienza. We’ve been in a few newspaper articles and there’s a film student who wants to do a documentary on us so I’d say it’s going pretty well. We’ll never get rich off it but that’s not really the point is it?
(A page from
The Drifter - FCF).
FCF: There's no need to dredge up your split with Puny Human, as you have addressed it elsewhere, but my related question is this: will we ever see Iann Robinson behind the drum kit again, in any band?
IANN: I doubt I will but who’s to really say. I still love metal and doom rock and 70s rock and all of it but I have no desire to play in those bands anymore. Part of it was that I’m still stinging from the betrayal of Josh and Jason but more of it is just a lack of interest. If somebody came to me with a band that combined Killing Joke/Devo/Joy Divison/Stax Records Funk and the Minutemen I’d be down. It would also have to be with guys who were just and only into it to have fun, maybe do some weekend warrior shows and put so stuff out here and there. Puny Human started that way but quickly became this thing that wasn’t fun anymore, it was a lot of fighting about keeping things from getting too prog-rock, about the amount of touring we could do, and so on. I don’t want to invest a lot of time in something that won’t be 100% fun with no pressure. I’ve done that, I’m ALL set with it.
FCF: Top 5 Favorite Movies, and Least Favorites (yes, I stole this question from you).
IANN: To me, there is no way to answer that question. I always throw it into my interviews because I’m fascinated by people who can come up with a top-five list for this kind of thing. The best I can do is my top 25:
1. Jaws
2. Halloween
3. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
4. Batman Begins
5. Miller’s Crossing
6. The Big Lebowski
7. Ordinary People
8. Crumb
9. The IceStorm
10. American Splendor
11. Taxi Driver
12. A Decade Under The Influence
13. Let There Be Rock
14. Dogtown & Z-Boys
15. Dragonslayer
16. Excalibur
17. Clash Of The Titans
18. Monster Squad
19. The Shining
20. Chinatown
21. Stop Making Sense
22. True Stories
23. The Legend Of Boggy Creek
24. Motorama
25. Style Wars
There are a lot more but that’s 25 I couldn’t live without. As for least favorites, well, that’s more having to do with genres I’m tired of and things in movies today that are killing the art form as we know it. I’m tired of hip hack directors who are revered because they’re “cool” or “geek chic” not because they can tell a fucking story. Robert Rodriguez can’t pace a film worth a damn, Tarantino is so in love with his own dialogue that his characters never shut the fuck up. Eli Roth is a talent less hack who seriously needs to be forced out of movie-making, Zombie can’t direct a movie, he can’t write dialogue, all he can do is string violent images together. I’m tired of “indie” films that are purposely off-beat like Zach Braff movies or Napoleon Dynamite. I guess of all the sins the greatest one is the growing remake insanity. Hollywood so creatively bankrupt that all they can do now is churning out remakes. Remakes are to the new millennium what sequels were to the eighties and gun-girl-snappy-dialogue-in-cool-car movies were to the nineties. It’s just a trend, something that made a little bit of money somewhere so now everybody is jumping on the bandwagon.
The best part is that I have NEVER, EVER seen a remake that was better than the original, and usually they’re worse. The Halloween remake was blasphemous, The Texas Chainsaw remake sucked all of the originality out of the original film, The Fog—Jesus Christ was that awful. Not only are remakes pretty much always worse but there is no need for them. Why remake a movie? Why? Why? Why? What purposes does it serve other than to squeeze some bucks out of an already used up franchise? The movie-making industry right now is almost as bad as the world of music, there are some who make quality films but for the most part, I just stay home.
FCF: Top 10 desert island records.
IANN:1. Marty Robbins: Gunfighter Ballads & Trail Songs
2. The Best There Ever Was Comp
3. Eccentric Soul: Deep City Label
4. Ken Burns Jazz Box Set
5. Black Flag: The First Four Years
6. Slayer: Reign In Blood
7. Black Sabbath: We Sold Our Soul For Rock N Roll
8. Joy Divison Box Set
9. Stop Making Sense
10. Nuggets Box Set Vol 1
FCF: You have so many tattoos and you were one of the first heavily inked people to be seen by millions of viewers on a regular basis. Now that the tattoos-on-TV thing is in full swing with all of the reality shows, and now that kids are getting their throats and hands inked before they even have one full sleeve, how do you feel about the presence and perception of tattoo culture in pop culture?
IANN: I pretty much think it’s laughable. When I was on TV there were few if any tattooed people on air, and so it was never a thing, it was just part of me. Now every dumb fuck that can pick up a tattoo needle can have their own TV show. The problem with Miami Ink and LA Ink is that it isn’t about the artwork, it’s about the drama. It’s about the cool kids that come to get tattoos, it’s about who gets along with who, and so forth and so on. It’s more like tattoos are the backdrop to yet another Real World clone. Tattoo artists should be famous because they do amazing work, not because they’re attractive or are on TV. That’s not what it’s about and it turns tattoos from THE thing into A thing. As for kids who start out with neck and head tattoos, hey, more power to them. If you’re ignorant enough to do that then you deserve any and all bad things that come your way. It just seems like kids are in a rush to fill up all the visible spots because they think it’ll make them part of this exclusive cool club. It just doesn’t seem like they think it out.
Tattoo Culture? Seriously, what does that even mean? The Maori tribe in New Zealand—tattoos are part of their culture. Yakuza suits, that’s tattoos in a culture. A bunch of guys or girls dressing cool, standing around at shows, or comparing tattoos isn’t culture, it’s a club. However, saying Tattoo Club is not nearly as cool sounding as Tattoo Culture so now we have to hear that kind of pretentious bullshit. Tattoos are expensive and the most precise description I’ve heard of them is Skin Art. It’s art, you’re paying for art and just like you wouldn’t get some expensive piece of art for your home without thinking it through, same goes here. It doesn’t matter what you get or how big or if it’s by some name tattoo artist, it doesn’t even really matter if it’s any good. It just has to make you happy and be something you don’t mind living with forever. If you’re getting any stupid tattoo you pull out of a book just because you want one right now, you will most likely regret it.
To me pretending that we’re all in some kind of cool clique because we have tattoos is tantamount to everybody with hardwood floors acting like they’re in a special group. Hey, are you in the plastic hangers crew? Man, I’m gonna check out the latest episode of Miami Red Brick. You’re not any better or cooler because you have tattoos, you’re not any more punk rock because you have tattoos, you are NOT a rebel because of tattoos, you are not a special and unique snowflake because you have tattoos. You are a guy who bought a nice piece of art or had an original piece of art created just for you. It’s a cool art form, it’s fun, it’s a good time but it is NOT a culture.
FCF: You have been blogging about how "I Am Legend" just felt like an unfilmable kind of book. What other books and comics have been turned into films that you feel would have been better left alone? I'm not talking about "Fantastic Four" or something that *could* make a great movie but was put into the wrong hands. I'm talking about something that just should not have been attempted by even the most capable of filmmakers.
IANN: Sure, there’s a lot of those. I haven’t seen it yet but The Watchmen is not a comic that can be made well into a movie. There is far too much going on and writer Alan Moore has woven it all together in such an intricate fashion that cutting any of it out will destroy it. They did the same thing with another Moore creation V For Vendetta. The movie is not the comic book, by any stretch of the imagination because all the stuff they re-arranged and chopped out destroyed what the book was. It’s not the fault of the filmmakers; it just shouldn’t be made into a movie.
In Cold Blood, while a great movie, doesn’t communicate what the book did, it just can’t and so the identity of the book suffers. Books that feature a running inner dialogue usually don’t translate well to movies or books that have giant interconnected plots usually don’t make good movies. The Stand movie didn’t work because it couldn’t work, there was too much going on in the book and too much operating they had to do to patch up the holes for the movie version.
FCF: I've noticed that people who recognize you find you approachable and accessible and think of you as someone they can talk to, which I think is awesome. You have probably had some really funny and random things said to you on the street by random people that want to talk to you for whatever reason. Tell me about three of those situations that ruled, and three of them that royally sucked.
IANN: Wow, that’s a tough one because I’ve met some great people out there and some real fucking idiots as well. I don’t know man, it sounds like a cop-out but most of the stories all end with somebody talking some music, saying the dig this or that, and then shaking my hand and leaving. There’s not any one person who is more memorable than the last, it’s more like so many of the people who have come up to me have kicked so much ass that I still like when it happens. I like jawing with some high school kid about Black Flag or some 47-year-old jazz cat about Gene Krupa because he saw me wearing a Benny Goodman t-shirt on air.
Most of the kids who get pissed off are metal kids, who aren’t always the most intelligent or reasonable music fans out there. They just can’t wrap their head around the idea that you’re not into everything metal and so he considers you a poseur. This usually manifests itself in the always catchy phrase:
“You’re not fucking real metal man!!”
Um, moron, your plane just left. My inability to think everything metal is good has led to some stupid back and forths with ignorant people but even those were at a minimum. I was lucky, people used to throw things at Carson Daly, yell mean shit to Gideon and some of the other on-air folks but I never really got that. People were always cool to me and that made almost all of the MTV shit worth it.
FCF: While you are sometimes guarded, when you do let people in, you go all out. After having been bitten and burned more than a few times, how do you manage to keep opening your arms?
IANN: To me, it basically comes down to the fact that if you do let the parasites close your heart off then they win. Then you miss out on the next great friendship because you’re holding others accountable for what some creeps did to you. I’m not that way, my anger doesn’t consume me as much as it did. I used to be Ahab and now I’m Ishmael if that makes any sense. As far as Puny Human goes, well, they can say how 2008 will be the best year ever for them and how bright the future looks but the truth of the matter is that there is a dark cloud over that band. It will always be associated with the fact that a 15-year friendship ended out of deceit and untruth just so that band could continue on in the tiny capacity it will.
FCF: When you leave this Earth, what would you most like to be remembered for by your friends and family?
IANN: If on the day I die my friends and family feel like they laughed more and just had a better time on this planet knowing me, then I win.
