Be Your Own Pet (who are playing 930 club this Friday) are violent scary extremists, whipping their hordes of blood-crazy fans into a Dionysian orgy of unruly madness.

Just ask the executives at Universal Records who cut three of their songs off the US version of the new record, “Get Awkward.”

If I could talk to those shadowy heroes of the boardroom I would thank them from the bottom of my boundless bosom for protecting the children of America’s heartland from the dangers of a song like “Becky,” which is sung from the point of view of a jilted teenage girl getting revenge on her former best friend (”Me and [my new friend] gonna kick your ass, we’ll wait with knives after class!”). You might ask why a giant company which has no problems distributing Marilyn Manson and 50 Cent and Eminem would care about a small band from Nashville whose members are all on the cusp of completing their second decade. Well perhaps you are not aware of the fact that when a pretty girl like Jemina Pearl sings that she’s going to start killing people because she’s bored (like she says in Black Hole), it’s 98% more likely to induce a 12 year old kid to plant a nailbomb in the varsity locker-room, while when someone with a penis sings the same lyric, it’s Dramatic Narrative.
Statistics have shown that when the music is of a particularly high quality—like say: fast pounding thrashy guitars, gutter bass lines and pure sarcastic screamy chick vocals like riot grrl without the whining or the faster 90s grungepunks like the Gits or Butt Trumpet—it increases the likelihood of being driven into nihilistic literal-mindedness (Actually “Blowing Yr Mind” out with a shotgun perhaps) to 10 times more than bland commercial Hip Hop. Science Fact.

So all I can say is Thank You Universal Recording Company.
Thank you for protecting our youth from their own dark inspiration and demonic creativity.
If only there was a special reeducation camp you could send bands to when you signed them so that they wouldn’t end up like these fallen punks who have ungratefully abused the munificence shown by the conglomerates in plucking them out of myspace obscurity and making them overnight sensations.
In spite of all this generous hype and helpful prodding to be the next poster children for family friendly rock and roll funtimes these brats insist on focusing on the desperate rage-filled nerve-wracking elements of high school and young adulthood, and on putting on a live show so chaotic and ball-out crazy that they might at any moment induce a full scale riot, or spontaneous combustion.
I only wish the morally bereft ingrates at Nylon Magazine could have been pressured into leaving them off of their current showcase tour with She Wants Revenge, The Virgins and Switches.
Shame on you, Urban Outfitters!
You’re usually so supportive of uniform mediocrity, frankly I’m disappointed.

I spoke to drummer John Eatherly on the phone from a noisy venue in Atlanta GA, and lectured him sternly about responsibility, civic duty, and how they should be more like those nice children in Paramore.

BYT: So you’re on this fancy Nylon tour right now…
John Eatherly: About two weeks into it now, a little over a week and a half.

BYT: How’s that going?
JE: Really great. It’s really really fun, everybody’s getting along. There haven’t been any fights or anything. Nobody’s an asshole.

BYT: I hear you all have a bus…
JE: Pretty insane being on a bus. Pretty surreal. We’re sharing it with the second band on the line up, the Virgins. Them and this guy from Live Nation and these two girls that work for, like, Havaianas Flip Flops or something…so it’s really really really full but, it’s fun. There’s 18 bunks and 18 people as well.

BYT: I was imagining some kind of super RV like in that movie Almost Famous, sounds more like a dorm.
JE: Yeah it’s pretty crowded.

BYT: What are the crowds like, any clashes between your fans and She Wants Revenge fans?
JE: Just walking around the audience it’s clear that most of the people are there for She Wants Revenge. And I wasn’t really too familiar with SWR at all before this tour, their music or anything. So it’s pretty much them, they’re filling up the show. But it seems like up to this point on the tour everybody is having a good time. It isn’t too mismatched.

BYT: So the tour isn’t playing to your hometown?
JE: No I wish we were…I don’t know why we’re not.

BYT: DC sometimes inexplicably gets left off package tours like this too. I think there’s a lot in common between DC and Nashville…big tourist culture and then a small parcel of locals who have to fight for any kind of sense of community. Is there a strong punk rock scene in Nashville?
JE: There is and there isn’t. There’s this band Dawn that used to be called the Cripplebeaters. They’re pretty sweet, they’re friends of mine from high school. They’re doing really good, apparently they’ve been doing some radio stuff with that station 91.1. And they’re like real intense like Warsaw by Joy Division or something, real brutal. There’s a couple other bands, but it’s not really there so much.

BYT: Is there anything good that’s come out of the interest in the pop-punk scene there, like that band Paramore?
JE: Oh yeah yeah. There’s bands like that but, I don’t know. [pause]. I hate that band.

BYT: [Laughs]
JE: They’re from Franklin, Tennessee anyway, I think.

BYT: As long as they’re not from Knoxville. Well, I saw you all in DC last year for the first time at the Halloween party thing at the Rock and Roll Hotel…
JE: That was hosted by the Bravery right? That was a fun show.

BYT: I really thought was an awesome show, and you guys went all out, you brought it. How do you recover from something like that, and just hop out on stage the next night? Is it going to be harder as part of a big package deal like this tour?
JE: On this tour…well the first few shows of a tour are a little bit rough. You’re still totally going at it, but it’s like you haven’t found the groove yet you know? The pocket of it, really. After a few shows, maybe about a week into it, it gets solid. But we try to keep up the energy as much as we possibly can. It just depends on how tired we are I guess, or sometimes it’ll be hard to hear the bass and guitars so that’ll throw us off. These venues we’re playing at, they have big monitors and stuff, so you can usually hear everything pretty well. But for the past couple of show I lost my earplugs, and I’m losing a little hearing in my left ear, so I got kind of freaked out about it. So it almost seemed like I couldn’t hear anything in monitors for a couple shows, like I couldn’t really hear anything.

BYT: Do you think bigger clubs like the ones you all are going through now do a worse job of making loud music sound
JE: Yeah it’s 100 times more complicated and sometimes it sounds pretty bad too. The way they mic things through those big speakers it sounds real machine-like, the toms on the drums sound like DOInnng.

BYT: I’m not sure how to spell that (DOOING! DdOoWwwng?) but I know just what you mean. So do you all feel out of place on a big stage or is it just a different kind of thing?
JE: It’s more just a different kind of thing. We’re not ones to complain about it or anything, since there’s nothing really to complain about anyway, it’s just different.

BYT: Most people writing about you like to focus on how young you are. Does that bother you guys, like your getting pigeonholed by elements that have nothing to do with music?
JE: Not really. So many bands are like that now, bands are pretty young. They act like it’s unusual, but it’s not really unusual. We’re kinda young, but that’s not really that exciting.

BYT: Maybe it seems unusual because most of the people who listen to the kind of late 70s, or 80s, DIY punk that you all sound like are pretty much old weird record collector dudes. Speaking of which, have you heard the Killed By Death records?
JE: Yeah yeah. Those are cool because it’s fun to pick out the songs you really like.

BYT: Do you feel that kind of obscure 80s hardcore is an influence?
JE: We don’t really think of ourselves as a punk band. I think of it as just pop music, sped up.

BYT: Is it strange to have fans that are ten, twenty years older than you? It’s like the opposite of the way most bands’ fanbases work.
JE: I guess yeah. But it’s cool to meet some of those old dudes after shows. I guess because we kind of relate to music they heard in the late 70s, those dudes are there anyway, still trying to go to shows. We’re just one of the bands they’re down to go see.

BYT: You must see a wide variety of ages when you look out at a crowd.
JE: If the show is all ages there’s a lot of young kids. There’s definitely a weird age mix. It’s all over the place. A lot of old dudes and teenagers.

BYT: It’s like you skip the twentysomething demographic all together. Well, I wanted to ask you about the album. You had it all ready to go and Universal cut three songs without asking you…what happened?
JE: Yeah, that totally sucks. We had fifteen songs, and now on the US version we only have twelve. It was maybe a month before the album was released, which is really cutting it close when it come to what’s going on the album since things have been mixed and finished for so long. All of a sudden, top suits at Universal, who we weren’t allowed to talk to at all, were like, “No, too violent.” I mean, Def Jam records goes through Universal. Wu Tang Clan is on Universal, technically. They think that fifteen year old girls buying our record are going to want to go kill their friends or something, I don’t know. It’s just totally stupid. Or it has to do with Jemina being a girl.

BYT: For real? You think that had something to do with it?
JE: It could definitely be mixed in there, since it was pretty unfair to begin with.

BYT: Could it have been an attempt to guide your careers, make you more palatable for the Wal Mart mid-western middle school chick?
JE: No, I don’t know. What’s sweet now is that XL is going to release the songs, hopefully, on an EP in America, as a little bit of a Fuck You to Universal, since we’re going to put them out and they can’t have anything to do with it. Last thing I heard is that they’re trying to make some kind of a problem with that, but I think that XL is going to be releasing those songs in America anyway now, in May.

BYT: It’s called Get Damaged, right? Did you have to fight for that to come out and are you ready to burn bridges to make it happen?
JE: I mean, yeah. I don’t really care if we make a third record on Universal. After this I’d be down to go somewhere else. Try another label. It just totally sucks. Ecstatic Peace is really cool, but there’s nothing they could do about it. It was just the top suits of the company.

BYT: That sounds insane to me, like a scene from 30 Rock. I keep picturing an evil Alec Baldwin appearing on your doorstep saying “Don’t get violent Lemon!” to Jemina. Anyway, from the beginning you all have had a lot of support from a record company, since you were plucked off of Myspace by Ecstatic Peace…how would you say that affected you guys, being the beneficiaries of the Artic Monkey syndrome?
JE: I think it’s great when you have the funding to make records and stuff. If you get lazy it could totally suck because you wouldn’t have the material keep on going. But you just have to keep on writing, even though you don’t need to, just because it’s fun. Which is why this is so sweet anyway, since we like writing songs. Being a productive is possible is the best way.

BYT: Have you all matured since the beginning…is the hype machine easier to deal with?
JE: It gets easier. It just becomes a reaction rather than getting really nervous about it.

BYT: Finally, this record, what with the Valley of the Dolls reference and some of the other lyrics, seems more like a party record than the last one. Do you all go as hard as your songs, or are you the kind of band that’s more likely to sit around surfing the internet and drinking tea after a show?
JE: Ummm [laughs] I don’t want to say too much but, we definitely party. A lot. We’re not carried away in an unhealthy way but, we definitely have our moments. It’s all about the peak of the party building.

BYT: Hell yeah.

I meant Hell NO SINNER! No matter what, do NOT let your children go out to the Nylon Tour this Friday at the 9:30 Club. You have been warned.

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