The Tenacity of the Cockroach: Conversations with Entertainment's Most Enduring Outsiders

Presents an eye-opening selection of interviews with some of the entertainment world's most important directors, creators, writers, actors, and musicians who discuss their unique careers, featuring conversations with Robert Altman, Merle Haggard, Chuck Jones, Berkeley Breathed, Pam Grier, William H. Macy, Mr. T, Gene Simmons, and many others. Original. 50,000 first printing.

Mr. Show, Part II
By Stephen Thompson
Originally Printed September 1997

During the HBO sketch-comedy series Mr. Show's four-year, 30-episode run, The Onion A.V. Club took every opportunity to speak to the show's masterminds, David Cross and Bob Odenkirk. In the fall of 1997, at the beginning of their second season, both struggled with the brutal workload that accompanies creative control and the pursuit of excellence.

The Onion: What's going on in your lives?
Bob Odenkirk: Well, all that's happening in our lives is we're writing and working on Mr. Show. It's a fucking hellish bitch that won't get off our backs.
David Cross: A tempestuous shrew.
BO: And we will do anything, anything at this point, to finish it up, get a laugh as we're leaving, and run. Run, run from the studio.
DC: Not look back.
BO: We're working our asses off to do justice to the last few episodes we're working on, as much as we did the first few. That's the hard thing.
DC: It's really caught up with us, our lack of proper preparation time.
BO: As of now, we've done seven shows out of the 10 we have to do, and they're good. Every one of them is great, and I don't feel like we've dropped the ball yet. Now, we have three left to go, and I know the next two are really strong. With the last one, we're still struggling at this late date. We have to do it in the next week and a half. We have some good ideas to fix it up, but it's more last-minute than we would want.
O: Exhaustion is setting in at this point?
BO: We're very tired.
DC: It is in, my friend. It's set up camp, and it's not going anywhere.
O: So you're out of ideas.
DC: No, no. But to be totally honest, there is a marked difference in our energy level. It's different when you're in your seventh month as opposed to your third month.
BO: Not to be egotistical, but it asks a lot of you to be brilliant day in and day out, and to be as groundbreaking as we are. Have you ever tried to break the ground in a brilliant way? That is hard to do. We want to keep things up to the same level that we always have. You know, I worked at another big-name sketch show for a long time–I'm not going to say the name–but there was a real attitude of, "Yeah, we got our laughs. We got our three laughs. it's done. We filled an hour and a half." And really, that was the attitude from the word "go," and we never, ever want to feel that way.
DC: The Edge was an hour and a half long?
BO: [Laughs.] We want to look at each show as if it were the only show we were doing.
DC: It's tough. It was a fear we had when we started: We knew the schedule was going to be very, very tight for us. Those fears were substantiated. You just have to make the last one as good as the first nine, and it's hard, because we're still dealing with rehearsing, and we still have stuff to shoot. We have one week to do…Oh, it's fucking nuts. It's crazy. I can't fucking wait until it's over. I'm just going to cry a deep, weird cry–the kind of cry that's not happy or sad.
O: What made the process different this time around?
DC: Well, HBO expected more shows this time around, in the same amount of time, so you're not gaining any time.
BO: But we still wrote these 10 shows the way we wrote the first batch of four and the second batch of six. We sat down and wrote a bunch of scenes that made us laugh–all different kinds of scenes. Then we started putting them in order and finding connections between them. So as far as the actual process of writing the show goes, we did the exact same thing we've done every time. I just think we've found a limit of how many shows we can do in this length of time. Fans of the show should look forward to a great season, and ideas that are going to come just as fast and be just as cool and interesting as any other.
O: How long are you guys going to do this?
DC: Honestly, Bob and I have talked about this with numerous people involved with the show. It just depends on the time we get to do the next 10, if we do 10. This is not enough time to do it properly.
BO: It doesn't help that they make us sleep upright. We eat G.I. rations. Worms are eating away at the skin of David's feet. It's called Wormfoot. Chunks fall off.

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Jello Biafra
By John Krewson
Originally Printed April 1997

Seminal California punk band Dead Kennedys left some listeners wondering whether its music or its politics came first, a question former frontman Jello Biafra was happy to leave unanswered. A San Francisco mayoral candidate even before the release of the group's first album, Biafra has long prided himself on never backing away from a challenge. In 1981, he formed the Alternative Tentacles label to counter the homogeneity of the music industry, and four years later, he faced an obscenity trial (and frequent police harassment) over the band's Frankenchrist album, which included a phallus-intensive poster by H.R. Giger. Following Dead Kennedy's 1987 breakup, Biafra, began dividing his time among the lecture circuit, recordings (both musical and spoken-word), Alternative Tentacles, and politics. In the 1990s, he survived both a near-fatal attack by skinheads and a lawsuit by his former bandmates while becoming one of the most outspoken members of the Green Party. Biafra would always rather talk about issues than himself, however, as illustrated in this 1997 interview with The Onion A.V. Club.

The Onion: How's it going?
Jello Biafra: Next question. I just did another long interview, so let's just draw a blank on a question like, "How's it going?"
O: Okay, I'll jump to the really tough stuff, then. Everybody wants to know the story about your legs getting broken by punks.
JB: No, I'm not gonna answer that. That's boring, tabloid, O.J. Simpson shit. I'm not interested. Not gonna do it. Ask an intelligent question.
O: Then tell me the story of how you hosted that Make-A-Wish foundation kid.
JB: God! Umm…How'd you hear about that?
O: I'm not telling.
JB: Well, basically, he came to visit, and we took him some places, and he enjoyed it and went home, and I hope he's okay. I was never quite clear from his condition whether he was somebody who was destined to live a short life or destined to be very ill a lot of the time. He went off and bought a guitar, he went to record stores. We mainly hung out at the label and went out to dinner, and I sort of gave him some tips on other places to visit around San Francisco: Avoid Fisherman's Wharf, go to the redwoods, and so on. A lot of people who visit from Europe or Japan or Australia go only to big cities and then wonder why they're not finding stuff that's as interesting as they'd hoped for.
O: Well, what's cool out in San Francisco these days? What's your take on the scene there?
JB: I can't think of a good answer to that. There are 500 scenes in this town, just like any other town now, and they don't communicate enough with each other. There are lots and lots and lots of bands that want to sound like Green Day or get on Fat Wreck Chords or something, and there's lots and lots of bands that want to sound like Nirvana, and lots and lots of bands that want to sound like Pearl Jam, and lots and lots of bands that want to sound like R.E.M. And every once in a while, someone cuts through who sounds completely unique, and often they wind up on Alternative Tentacles because nobody else will touch them. The reward of AT is being able to put out some really cool music that wouldn't...