PipemanRadio Interviews Dan Lilker & Dave Hofer About Perpetual Conversion

0:04 Hey, you have one too, Yes, censure, I'm for see Wow, crazy. Young ro. Why become America? It's time for the Adventures of White Man. I'll tell you for c why dot com West pompys is number one Internet radio station. Here's your host, the white Man.

1:19 This is the pipe Man here on the Adventures pipe Man W four c Y Radio. And I'm really excited about our next guests because they have a book that is really like to me, it's like a history book. It's it's it's a it's very very cool Incidance second edition. We're going to talk about it. So let's let's welcome to the show. Dan and Dave. How are you? Hey, how's it going? Hello? So this, uh, this book was off the shelf. Basically I have print for like five years and now we're having another edition of it. Tell us how that came about that this keeps evolving over all the years.

2:04 Well, the main reason for a second edition was really due to a lack of availability of the first edition. There was a specific amount made up. They sold out by about twenty nineteen because it was originally released in twenty fourteen, and then it was just a few years of Hey, dude, where can I get your book? Now you can, Hey, dude, where can I get your book? And then Dave and I and of course my wife Heather has been very helpful with all this. You know, just the original publisher wasn't There was an original publisher who was going to do it, which was handshake, and then Brazilian Points took over for reasons left unexplained and put it out, but they were not going to be doing interested in pressing anymore. So we ended up, after talking to a few publishers, just saying fuck it and doing it ourselves. And we just decided to have it coincide with my sixtieth birthday, which was last week, because the original edition came out on my fiftieth birthday. That's cool, so the second As far as like what makes the second edition different, there would be the forward by Thomas Lindberg from at the Gates, and then there's a new color photo picture area in the back with some pretty recent stuff, stuff that I've even done this year. But I probably answered like four questions like that, so sorry.

3:30 Oh that's perfect, and yeah, so are some of the pictures in there from this year at say Sonic Temple or Welcome to Rockville. No, they're The only picture from the Anthrax stuff was when I played with them in Santiago, Chile the month before that, but that is in there. And what was it like after like forty years to get back together and play like that. It was pretty cool. It was unexpected when I was first contacted by Scott, but Frank couldn't do some shows, and the majority of it was in Latin America, you know, from Mexico on down, and then those two shows that you mentioned, And yeah, it was just a lot of fun playing some stuff I'd heard a million times but never actually played. And obviously, you know, I played with Scott and Charlie before in another bands. But getting to know Joe and John Johnson Ad the guitar player, the guy from Shadows Falls, but with them for ten years was great, you know, made some new friends like that, and yeah, it was a good time. Got to go to some cool places like Ecuador and Costa Rica I've never been to before.

4:39 Yeah. See that's his shirt right here is it has a picture of a sloth and it says just do it later, and it's it's I go to Costa Rica all the time. So oh oh, same same with the hat. See it says Costa Rica, So that's pretty funny. Yeah, it was great. I saw you guys played in sany you played in San Jose, so that was pretty cool because it's not often that metal plays in Costa Rica. Yeah, those people like nuts. That was a club show and it was hot as balls, but really fun. It would be there, right yeah.

5:20 I mean that's tropical, dude. There's you know, walk out of the hotel in the evening to go burn one and it's at dusk and all the birds. It was so loud. I was just like, what the fuck's going on? Recorded it on my phone. It's just like squawking at like ninety decibels. And you know, how about the Howler monkeys. Did you hear the Howler monkeys? I don't think I did, but I was told about them. Yeah, they're a trip. So Dave, tell us a little bit about your experiences writing the book, and you know how it felt to put this kind of history out there.

6:03 Oh, I mean the experience was great. I mean Dan is somebody that I admired from a distance, you know, for many years, and randomly would kind of see him here and there. The one fun story is how my wife is from the Pittsburgh area and one time I was out there visiting her and we were went to a show a Nate Palm Death, Cannibal Corpse, Macabre somebody else maybe probably, and Dan and his wife were just there randomly. I didn't approach him at the time, but I just remember thinking like, oh fuck, like what is he doing here?

6:47 That's cool? And you know, I loved SOD and Brutal Truth, and then eventually had the opportunity to go on tour with Brutal Truth when they got back together in seven and then again an eight, which is when the idea for the book first came about. So it was very surreal getting to meet him and just kind of hang out and spend time with him and have a laugh and have a beer and just kind of hang out. In terms of putting his story out there, I mean, I feel honored to be the one to do that, because again I'm a great admirer of his work and now him as a person that I know him actually, and so I took it very seriously despite having a laugh a lot of the time with him, because you know, I want to take it too seriously because he's very funny.

7:43 But yeah, I mean, you know, that's not every day you get to do a project like this, And I didn't want to half asset nor did I want to make a joke of it, because his career is incredible and very important. So yeah, news, I guess not to like overstate it, but I consider it to be an honor. To have been the one to be able to do that. And it's pretty cool because unlike nowadays, there was really no record of things and stories from back in the day either, you know, like now, everybody records everything that happens.

8:26 Lucky for us, in the eighties, most of his stuff was not recorded, right. Well, yeah, I mean everybody's I mean, shit, you play a show in the first three rows, everybody's recording a show with their phone and barely watching the bed. I know, right, Yeah, it's a little overdocumentation. But I know what you mean, because if a band started now, they'd be able to have, like, be very easy to capture their whole career, whereas back in the day, you know, what did you have? I mean, if you wanted to see a video now of Nuclear Sault playing a little more in nineteen eighty five, it would be some grainy VHS you know, hundredth generation you know, VCR type tape and everything. No, no, yeah, but that's what also made it classic. Yeah, I mean like having a classic car or something. You know.

9:21 I don't know, but well it was classic like that because back then, even with music, you went to a show because you didn't even know if it was going to be something you liked. You just saw something that was like, oh, this is cool, I'm going to go to the show. You didn't have a way to preview it. You just went, well, yeah, that's like how you bought records too. When I got into hardcore, I just tried to buy records with like if the bands had at least twenty songs on the record, I'm like, oh, hey, this is probably good. And that only failed once they were called TMA and the record was called What's for Dinner and they had twenty pop punk songs on it, and I said, verily, I have aired.

10:06 I just want to go back to the thing you talked about it being kind of like a history book. One thing that like I don't think anybody but me cares about is that I don't know. I have always loved I work in a research center. Now, I've always loved that kind of like when I was in school writing a research paper as like a project that was my safe, comfortable place I could I love doing research, and so I pretty much well didn't have to insist to anybody else. But I was determined to have an index in the book because I really like the idea of somebody and god knows how many years writing a book on death metal and they can look in the back of this book and go to the d's and see, oh, death metal is mentioned on this, that and the other page, and they can use it as like a source material for whatever paper or book that they're working on. I hope that someday, before I die, I can see this book cited in another paper or book.

11:12 That would just like warm my heart to no extent. That would be cool. And I did notice the index. I was like, Wow, that is pretty cool, and especially for the reason that you're saying, and you could kind of use it to go through and look for different things that you want to look for. And then it's funny that you mentioned about citing it because I had a history class in high school back in the eighties and the only thing I had to do was an oral presentation for the whole semester, and I chose to write about Ozzy Osbourne. Cool And I got an A in my history class for talking about Ozzie.

11:57 You know. Yeah, well, I mean if that's you're right about things that you're passionate about, and that would have made sense. So no doubt, no doubt. And so, Dave, what would be one of your favorite stories of either from the book or from all this time of putting the book together. Well, there was like one thing that happened that is not in the book, but just kind of like between Danny and I when we were doing interviews that stuck out to me as a drummer at the time. Gosh, I guess it was probably like Danny's black metal band, Nocturnal Hellstorm. We took a break and he played me a CD of some recordings. We just like went into his car and listened to them, and.

12:51 There was like a. Slower part and the drummer in the band did like a little like ride symbol, kind of like flourish and I heard that and said, oh, that's a tasty little ride cymbal lick there, And Danny looked at me, and he was like, I was wondering if you would notice that. And I was kind of like, ah, I passed the test on this ride symbol. I don't know whatever. I know it wasn't a test, but I was just like, Oh, that's fun that we are both kind of like tuned into the same things there. And I also love the story in the book that Keith Bennett from Wrecking Crew tells about Dan. You could obviously tell it better, but it was like, You're wearing some shirt straight edge band that says.

13:36 Like I don't need your drugs. Oh. That always tracked me up. You mean, yeah, Uniform Choice that was the band, Yeah, yeah, oh yeah. It said on the sleeve it said like I don't need your drugs. And our joke was that that's because your drugs suck. It's like, I don't need your drugs, I need his. Yeah. And then the other thing was the sleeve. I cut the sleeves off my shirt, so then I just had this little sleeve that said I don't be your drugs. Like this tube of cloth, I'm like, I wonder if I could stretch this over my cat so he could be a command Joe. You walked, he just walked by and glare to you while you're smoking a joint, and that would be on his back.

14:25 You know. Ah, that's great, I love it. You know that would be like contortion. I wouldn't do it to him. Yeah, yeah, so you know it's I find it interesting too. I was thinking about this back in the summer because uh, I was that grass pop and I heard perform live one of the SOD songs but altered a little for twenty twenty four. I'm like, man, would SOD even be able to be a band in twenty twenty four? Have you thought about that? Oh? I thought about it, But SOD wouldn't be able to be a band since two thousand and one because we haven't done any shows since then. And nice, that is something that's out of my hands. One member of the band isn't interested in participating, and so that's kind of shot that. But okay, I'm curious who was doing an s OD song?

15:25 Oh, that was that grass pop and of course it was mister bungleh And so it's funny because here when they play the festivals here and played the song, they say speak Spanish or die. Well, I did the show. I did that with them in Columbus, nice saying on stage with them. So that was great because I got to play with Dave Lombardo for a song. I know rights is that? Now? Is that of anybody that's going to play drums? If it's not going to be the original for that song, it should be Dave? Right? No? He now did he actually played some of it too fast. I'm like, yeah, so down buddy. So it.

16:14 Was funny. I grasp popped. They changed it to speak Flemish or. Die that makes sense, you know, stay local. Yeah, so it's pretty cool that you had this come out on your birthday both times. And so what have people been saying now that there's another copy? Like people have been waiting for this for a while, right. Yeah, I think there's people that are psyched because there's a lot of people. It's funny. You'll talk to people all over the world will go, I'm so glad it's another copy because you know, I lent it to my friend three years ago and fell out of touch with him, or he moved and got in touch with me again.

17:01 And now I don't have to fucking book as the guy has it. So there's a couple's a few people like that, and then kind of things that are kind of touching, like where I was working at a record store here for a while and this girl would come in once a year in early June. Once she was like fourteen, next year she was fifteen, and she would go, is your book out yet again? And I go no. She goes, shit, my dad's birthday is June fifteenth, and I want to get him one for his birthday. And I go sorry, And then she'd come back. I'd see her three hundred and sixty four days later or something like that, and she's gone, sorry, still not available. So I'm glad that it's available now. I hope she knows.

17:45 But uh, stuff like that just where people have been coming up, you know, puppy dog eyes and now you can say, okay, now it's available. So that's a good feeling. Absolutely. And So what's your possibly favorite story from either the book or creating the book? Uh? I think just you know, creating the book with Dave, because it was just really cool. I mean all the stories in the book. I don't really have a particular favorite. There's a lot of cool stories in there, but just putting the whole thing together and how we just went about it just as staying motivated but still being lazy in some aspects, like and still being who we are.

18:35 And because you know, Dave had never taken on something of that magnitude, and I've never been the subject of a biography. So I think we managed to pretty much along the lines of the music I've played in my career. Just keep it where it's exactly how it should be, without you know, outside influences and stuff like that. I agree, you know, Yeah, wants to be part of the interview. Yeah, it's feeding time around here now, so. So everybody can get perpetual conversion at perpetualconversion dot com.

19:19 Is there anything else that you want to let people know how to reach out to you, connect you on socials, anything about anything of going on? There is a Facebook for the book itself, but I am not on any social media, just being a lazy and unresponsive that's me. So, Dave, is there anything you want to throw out there? I mean, the Facebook page is just damn litlker book. And then you already said perpetualconversion dot com. This is like Danny was saying, you know, just like the kind of spirit of the book to me to make like a whole Instagram page or a website like for the book.

20:04 I don't know. It's kind of like an underground thing. We're not trying to like make it to the best seller list or anything, so there. Is no like, you know, they should tag this, you know, blah blah, have him write a po have them write a po box or something like like book trading instead of tape trading. Dude, it was enough work, like just getting all. Of like the shipping straight and all of that, and like setting up the big cartel page to like manage, you know, and like whatever. I have friends and bands that are like quite successful and have talked to them about like self managing their Instagram pages and whatever, and it just sounds like a complete fucking nightmare. And for something like this that is just kind of like a dee it well not kind of. It is like a DIY project. It started as just like a labor of love.

21:07 It's like just we don't want to try too hard. I think it should not be that way anyway. Like you said, it's like an underground type of thing, so it should kind of stay that way. I think it's kind of cool. Well, it's also that whole thing with Instagram and all that. That's more for something that would just have current relevant updates. Now, sure we could really push the envelope with that and be like, all right, now, there's only you know, three hundred and seventy one books left as you go today, there's not enough that would constantly feed that where somebody there there would be nothing different, you know. Yeah, book or book goes out and gets an ice cream cone.

21:48 You know, it's like Facebook shit. And there's limited copies, so people just have to go to Purple Perpetualconversion dot com and just get their copy before they're gone. Yeah, five, I heard of them. If we had an Instagram page, it would end up having two posts on it, which would be the book is out and then X amount of time later the book is sold out, and that would be the entire page. Probably there it. Is, all right, Well, guys, it's incredible that you put this book out there though, because there's so many great stories and so many and great things that have happened through the years, and uh, you guys rock thanks for putting it out there, and thanks for being on the Adventures of Pipe Man.

22:33 You're very welcome man. Thank you Thank you for listening to the adventures of Pipemin on w for Cui Radio.