In Conversation: Civ of Gorilla Biscuits
After 38 years of wielding a microphone for one of hardcore's most legendary bands, and thanks to a new memoir, Civ is sharing his voice in a new way—as a witness and a storyteller.
It feels like you could use Gorilla Biscuits as a punk-rock rule of thumb: You’re not actually “first wave” unless you remember a hardcore scene before them. At this stage of the culture, GB have seen almost four decades worth of global scenes and audiences and stages. And somehow, as someone who has seen them play in both 1988 and 2023, I can attest: They’re as great as they’ve ever been. That is no small feat.
Civ’s most recent endeavor, however, came unexpected. Back in September, he published his first book, A Roadie’s Tale, which uses original journals and other primary documents to piece together the story of Youth of Today’s summer tour in 1987. Having read it, I realized that this was the springboard I needed to finally sit down with Civ for our first-ever longform conversation in Anti-Matter. It turns out he knows how to weave a good story in person, too.
We’re at a stage in hardcore history now where we’re 40-plus years in. We’ve already had all of these punk documentaries—the movies and the books and all that—so I imagine there will be more hardcore-specific stuff in the coming years. But what really struck me about A Roadie’s Tale was this: I know you’ve watched all those movies with the old punk guys who are like, “All right. I’m going to sit down and tell you how cool I am” [laughs].
CIV: “Let me tell you how I invented this!”
Exactly. Your book was the opposite of that to me. It almost lacks nostalgia, in the sense that I don’t feel like it's a rosy-colored version of events at all.
CIV: I really tried to make it so that I included very little before [that tour] happened and nothing after. Just those three months. I wanted to keep it in that tiny little microcosm of my life at that time. I had to give a little bit of a pre-story for people who don’t know about this stuff because I wanted to try to get a different audience than just the people who know, or like, hardcore people. One of my friends, Roger Gastman—who actually put eyes on it for me after it was written—he was kind enough to read it and just rip it apart for me. And he said, “This isn’t a book about tour or hardcore. It’s an adventure story.” That’s a great way to look at the book.
I would agree. There were points in the book that felt like Stand By Me or Goonies if they were hardcore kids [laughs].
CIV: Yeah, it’s like our Outsiders! But you know how it is when you’re on tour and you’re young and you’re just doing stuff. You don’t think about what you’re doing. You just go. I was just happy to be not driving a truck at eighteen and being on the road.
But the reason I finally got to do the book was kind of what you just said: It wasn’t about me. I’m a really bad salesperson for myself. I can hype somebody else up, but it’s embarrassing to [hype myself up]. Coming out of hardcore, I didn’t want to be an embarrassing “look at me, look at me” kind of person. Especially with the internet and Instagram and Facebook—there’s so much “look at me” already. So I just thought, this was about those guys and I just happened to be there.
You also talk about your dad in the book, and I love that there’s this almost mythical quality to him. Over the years, I’ve been able to put together some things I think I know about your dad, but let me know if any of this is made up.
CIV: OK!
I believe he was a truck driver. He was a hunter. And he also somehow went to music school for saxophone, where he studied classical and jazz.
CIV: Yes. That’s all true [laughs]. I actually didn’t learn that [he went to music school] until I was in my twenties. I was already doing CIV, and we were on Atlantic, and I went to my cousin’s house on Long Island. We were talking and I pulled out a Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich drum battle record that I had—which I bought for Sammy [Siegler] because I’m a sweet friend—and my dad looks at it and he says, “I was always a Gene Krupa man. Everybody loved Buddy Rich.” And I said, “What the fuck are you talking about?” We didn’t even have a record player in our house. We didn’t have records. We didn’t have music at all. We maybe had one Roy Rogers Christmas record, literally. He was like, “What do you mean? You know I went to school for music!” I was the youngest. I wasn’t told anything.
He was also scouted in high school to play professional baseball. This guy was like, “After you graduate, here’s my card. Call me. We’ll talk.” My dad never called him. A couple years later, after he was already working, my dad was playing a pickup game and the guy rolled up on him again and was like, “Didn’t I give you my card?” He was from the Oakland A’s or something. My dad was like, “I thought you were fucking around!” The guy was like, “No, stupid. I’m a scout.” [laughs] My dad was pretty classic never-used-his-talents. He just suffered. He was more into suffering than using his abilities.
We had one of those round, four-foot above-ground pools in our backyard in Jackson Heights. It was a very Rodney Dangerfield backyard. There was a 1970s heatwave, like 103 degrees for a week straight. One day my dad walked in the house, threw his wallet and watch on the table, didn’t even take his boots off, climbed up the ladder, and just fell face first into the pool. I came out like, “What the hell are you doing?” And he said, “I don’t care what you do, just don’t do what I do. Use your abilities. Sit in air conditioning. Do something cool. Don’t be a truck driver. Don’t break your back.” That’s one really good piece of advice my dad told me. I guess it sunk in a little bit.
In the book, there’s this intimation of trouble at home. You call your dad “handsy.”
CIV: Yeah [laughs].
But there’s this one character trait you give yourself in the book, which is that you said you were sort of a bully at that time. The irony of that is you seemed like the most bullied person on that tour as well.
CIV: That’s a role I was comfortable with because of home. My friend Jimmy, who’s still my best friend, he would always say things like, “Oh, you were such a redheaded bully dick when we were kids.” And it’s like, yeah. You’re totally acting out, trying to get some sort of power, some sort of revenge for what you’re going through with someone who you can’t beat up or you can’t control. So for me, I would be mean to people who I could be mean to. It was grammar school stuff. You don’t know why you’re doing that until years later. But by the time I got into hardcore, by sixteen or seventeen, I felt like I found my place. I found my niche. I was like, “I’m just gonna be comfortable here.” That’s when I went the opposite way: I went vegetarian. I wanted to be more of a pacifist. I was gonna try to be more of a feminist. Everything I didn’t have at home or in my neighborhood, I tried to embrace all of that.
I also really appreciated the way that you specifically created the shape of Ray [Cappo] as a character. I went on my first tour with Ray maybe five years after the tour you write about, and even in 1992, Ray and Porcell—who were full-blown Hare Krishnas by that point—their personalities hadn’t really changed that much from the way you describe them in 1987. They sort of bullied me on that tour too [laughs].
CIV: Oh yeah. They’re Hare Krishnas, but they’re just leopards with spots, man. It’s hard to change those things. Even Krishna leopards are tough to change [laughs].
Which is why that scene in the book where Ray has a meltdown with a Slurpee was so resonant with me. Playing in Shelter, for me, was so stressful—that feeling that people are just waiting for you to fuck up. Ray, for some reason, seemingly thrives on that. But occasionally, he feels the weight.
CIV: Ray is complex. That’s the thing people don’t understand about him. He’s fucking crazy in a great way. I don’t know if he can figure it out. He’s intense, and especially then, he had it on his shoulders that he was gonna move mountains. He was gonna change an entire scene, an entire subculture, and bend it to his will. Whether it was straight-edge or Krishnas or the “Wake Up and Live” kind of song, it was like, “This is where we’re at. This is what punk should be.” In 1987 we were playing to punks and skinheads. There were no youth crew dudes. And he was up there in shorts and a t-shirt claiming vegetarianism and positive outlooks and PMA—it [took] huge balls [laughs]. I think Porcell backing him gave him a little wind beneath his wings. Porcell was always behind him, supporting him. I don’t know if those two could exist without each other, really. Still, to this day.
I will say though, with the bullying, it taught you how to get through stuff. Sick of it All and Agnostic Front were also bands that really trained people by breaking you down. It’s like military, Navy Seal training. They would break you down to the point where you’re crying and then they’d lift you back up and say, “All right, let’s start you over.”
That also sounds like a cult.
CIV: It is. That’s why they’re perfect for the Krishnas and they’re perfect for hardcore [laughs].
This is kind of related to another aspect of the book that I feel like a lot of people, even if they've been into hardcore for 10 or 20 years, might feel a bit foreign with, but you were really successful with how you illustrated the sort of hardcore hierarchy that existed back then.
CIV: The pecking order.
Right. When I first started coming around, I was able to understand very quickly that you had to respect the people that came before you. It was an unwritten rule. But there was also a reasoning behind that respect for the “elders.” It was a sense of tradition being passed, which is maybe something we had to outgrow because hardcore got too big in scale. But at that time, it felt possible that something could be handed down.
CIV: I always give [Raw Deal/Killing Time vocalist] Anthony Comunale credit. I was literally sitting at his knee to get “the rules,” you know? And then I got rules from Raybeez and Jimmy G and those guys—just listening to them talk. In hardcore, what you brought to the table, what you brought to the scene to move it forward, that’s where you got your respect from. You also got respect if you could beat the shit out of three people at once, because there were those guys who didn’t really do a lot but they could do that [laughs]. But hardcore was a place where nerds could come and thrive if they were musical or if they were good artists or if they could put on a show, you know?
There were so many misfits in charge of shit. I remember being at a show, and Donny the Punk was there, and Donny got punched in the face. [The guy who hit him] was like, “That dude is this” or “That dude is that,” and it was like, OK. I don't know what Donny’s history is. But I know he was here way before us and he’s the Donny the Punk. CBs is his place. You can’t just walk up to Donny and punch him in the face.
I kind of thought about all this in 2016 when you were in the middle of that whole This is Hardcore controversy. I remember thinking, like, this is weird. Here’s this guy who has been in the scene for so long, who has been a vocal antiracist for decades, who I have literally seen being a vocal antiracist at a time when 300-pound white-power skinheads were a foot away from his face…
CIV: …and he’s still talking shit [laughs].
Exactly. And we can’t give this person the benefit of the doubt, even for a second?
CIV: Yeah, that was crazy. It was like, you guys think that after 30 years of talking the talk and walking the walk, that I’ve decided that I’m gonna go on stage at This is Hardcore, and I’m gonna plant a flag for Proud Boys or something? I was like, what? It was misquoted. I mean, look. I get that what I said was close to something else that could have been bad. But I was talking about my friend wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt, and how I’m embarrassed of us as a people that we still have to wear shirts or wave flags to remind people that [racism] is something that’s real. But it got twisted.
The crazy thing is that the guy who wrote that article for Vice was in Australia. He wasn’t at the show. He saw something someone put on Facebook and he wrote an article about it. So I called my friend who worked at Vice and I said, “What are you guys doing to me? You’re fucking killing me right now. Take this shit down.” And he was like, “Oh, we can’t. He’s a reporter and they’re allowed to write whatever they want.” So you can just lie about something that was said and misquote me and just fucking ruin my life and it’s OK because he’s a reporter? They offered to have a guy write an op-ed piece, and I was like, I don’t even want to do that. My heart is in the right place. But this guy wanted to talk, and he just kept trying to trip me up. He’d say [leading] things and be like, “Right? Right?” And I’d be like, “No, no. That ain’t right. I don’t know if you think it’s my first interview, but it’s not. You’re not getting this guy” [laughs]. And then he called Sick of it All and Madball and us “dinosaur knuckle-draggers”… so I was not a fan. The guy calls me [after it comes out], and he’s like, “Did you read the piece?” And I said, “Yeah, I did.” He was like, “What did you think?” And I said, “I think you were shaking my hand and pissing on my leg.” He goes, “I don’t understand what that means,” and I said, “Ah, it’s an old knuckle-dragger Neanderthal phrase. You’ll understand one day.”
That said, this is probably gonna sound weird, but I actually felt like the dialogue that happened because of that—between the “old guard” and the younger people—was a good thing. It got people talking. So if I gotta be thrown into the fire to maybe cause something good to come out of this whole time, fuck it. I’ll do it.
The way you just framed that is a useful way to think about it. Because I do think that, as a community, we’re just coming to grips with the fact that one of the realities of hardcore being 40 years old is that you can now have people that are fifteen and people that are 55 at one show—and that can be very jarring because we may all be “hardcore kids,” but we sometimes speak different languages. So there has to be those intergenerational conversations to bridge the gaps, where we can learn from each other.
CIV: Yes. And I don’t think that had really come up too much [in 2016]. It was always like, those guys are talking amongst themselves, and the kids are talking amongst themselves, and the music is still the bridge—but everyone was afraid to talk with each other. I’ll even get it now. Sometimes we’ll go on tour with younger bands and we’ll go into the dressing room to say what’s up or be like, “We’re psyched to play with you guys,” and we’ll get a deer in the headlights. It’s like no one knows how to talk face-to-face. It’s not on our phones. It’s not Messages. I’m in the room. Let’s talk! I want to do it.
There’s something else you said in the book that I can throw in here because it’s relevant to getting older in the scene. You were talking about West Coast guys, and you said, “They really turn to liquid and flow with the times. Whereas New York guys are just like stones chained to another stone chained to a building where we don’t change and we don’t flow well” [laughs]. So of course, reading that, I have to ask how you think you’ve changed the most significantly as a person since then.
CIV: Oh God. I think my friends will probably disagree—especially my band—but I feel like, with age, a couple of things. I used to really feel problems. Any little thing would really throw me into a fucking tailspin—almost panic. And now because of the things I forced myself to do, nothing bothers me. You could be like, “Oh, the kids just fell off the swings and they’re getting stitches,” and I’d be like, “All right, are they OK? Let’s go bring them to the hospital.” Or it could be, “Hey, we just got this from the IRS. You’re getting audited.” And I’ll be like, “OK, call somebody, we’ll figure it out.”
I don’t know. I really haven’t changed too much. I think it’s more that I value my time a lot more. I’m not about money or setting up. I feel like I did as much of that as I can do. I still have hustles and wants and things, but those things are not as important as time. Time with my wife, my kids, my friends. That’s a happy place. Especially with music and art, you try for so long to try to make yourself better or more important or needed in those scenes, to strike out on your own and to have your own voice, and then you eventually realize it was a journey and you did it and you made some mark, but you were so busy trying that you didn’t really enjoy it or notice it happening.
How much do you think [Gorilla Biscuits guitarist] Alex [Brown]’s passing had to do with that?
CIV: Without even thinking about it, a lot. It was so hard because when Alex died, it was such a shock. I never experienced grief before, if that makes sense. When people died in my family, it was always, like, age-appropriate or one degree of separation away from me personally, so I never had that loss. I was fucked up for months. I’m still fucked up. I still have issues with people over it. I didn’t get the closure I needed from it. And then over the last couple of years I lost my friend Mike Madrid and I lost Rob Vitale from Black Train Jack. And in a weird way, those three guys were like my phone-call-drive-home-from-work guys.
Alex made me want to enjoy what I was doing when he was still alive because he had a real fear of aging. He had a fear of not being prepared money-wise. He had a fear of what if something went wrong. He had a fear of what if the bottom fell out of his art career. All real things, but not anything I would think of myself. So we spent a lot of time talking about that kind of stuff, and he was always so gracious and supportive of what I was doing, and I was lucky that we got to do an art show together before he died. I just thought he was so genius and so amazing, but he was the kind of guy that didn’t know how wonderful he was. So when he passed, it just made me go, fuck it. Time is more important than success.
I wanted to talk about success a little bit, and specifically about your experience with CIV. You mentioned that you tried to keep the book very much inside the capsule of that tour, but every now and then you’d throw something in from the past or the future. At one point, in a story about Mike Gitter [the future Atlantic Records A&R rep who signed CIV] roadying for Uniform Choice, you mention CIV and call it your “own total poser bullshit.” What did you mean by that?
CIV: Walter [Schreifels] came to me and was like, “No one’s playing hardcore anymore. It’s all metal and hip-hop. I just wanna bring it back, you know? We’re just gonna do these two songs!” And I was like, “Listen, man. I got a tattoo shop. I’m working. I’m done playing music. I’m obsessed with tattooing. That’s all I want to do.” But he was like, “Just sing these two songs. It’ll be great.” So we went back to Don Fury’s and I couldn’t even remember how to sing, honestly. I was trying to find my voice again, and I didn’t even know that was a thing. Don and Walter were just looking at each other like, “Uhh, this guy kind of sang OK on that Start Today record, but I don’t know what’s happening now” [laughs]. So it took me a couple of tries to find my voice and figure out the songs, and I did.
My own poser bullshit was just like, OK. Somehow I wasn’t really paying attention and now I’m filming a video. And now I’m gonna be on MTV and on Atlantic Records, and the band is called CIV—which is the most annoying, narcissistic bullshit ever. It wasn’t even my fucking idea, but no matter what I say, it seems like it’s me.
When [the video for “Can’t Wait One Minute More”] got picked up [by MTV], I was just like, Fuck. It was everything you talk shit about. I remember going to dinner with [manager] Doc McGhee with Charlie [Garriga] and Sammy—and they knew I was on the fence. The hardcore kid in me was like, “Don’t do it. You’re so full of shit, dude. You’re such a poser right now.” So we had dinner and Doc was like, “Listen, guys. Money isn’t the most important thing.” And I was like, all right. That’s a good start. Then he goes, “It’s the only fucking thing.” I remember going outside with one of those first-gen cell phones, those giant silver Motorola ones, and I sat on the curb and called my girlfriend at the time and I was crying. I was like, “What the fuck am I doing here? Why am I at dinner with this fucking guy? He manages Mötley Crüe.” Even that wasn’t cool to me at the time. But it was one of those things. Like, OK. I’m gonna dance with the devil, because this opportunity isn’t going to come along again. Tattooing will always be there. I didn’t think I’d be able to do music this long, so I figured I would just take a shot. It was kind of like winning the lottery to be signed to a major at the time. I didn’t know the way the record business worked. I didn’t know the way labels worked. I didn’t realize it was all bullshit. It was a boy’s club and they were in charge of your existence. You are not in charge of your existence at all.
So tell me this. Both in the Gorilla Biscuits origin story in the book and in the CIV origin story you’re talking about now, it feels like you were sort of dragged in a little bit.
CIV: Yeah. I’ve never had musical aspirations [laughs].
But from the things I remember reading around the time of Thirteen Day Getaway, it felt like you were actually taking some real pride in your work. You were saying how much you applied yourself and how you really worked hard to get it right. Somewhere, something changed.
CIV: We were on tour eight or nine months out of the year [supporting Set Your Goals], opening for No Doubt or the Toadies, playing festivals and playing our own tours, and that took a toll on me in different ways. When it came time to do the next record, Walter—who got the production and writing cred from the first record—was still doing Quicksand. Or maybe they had already broken up. So we were writing. Charlie was writing. And I was like, “Listen. I want to write the lyrics to this. You write the music and we’re just going to do it ourselves.” I wanted to apply myself rather than just being the singer in the band. Whoever wrote the lyrics, I always felt like I’ve made the songs my own and treated them like they were mine because that was my job as a singer. But with Thirteen Day Getaway, I really just wanted to write to the music that was given to me by Charlie and Sammy.
I didn’t realize until later, when it was done, that this should have been our third or fourth record—not our second record. AFI is a good example of a band that really changed in small increments; it’s very thoughtful. I am not thoughtful with music. I don’t think that far ahead about music. I never thought people were gonna be like, “This record doesn’t sound like the fucking last record.” No shit. I don’t want it to sound like the last record. This is what we’re doing now. That’s how I felt about it. I look back on it now and I’m like, “Holy shit, can we listen to more Blur and Oasis, Charlie?” [laughs]. At the same time, when we got to record, we went to Bearsville [in Upstate New York] and we were there for three weeks. I was the only one that didn’t come home from that recording session. I just stayed. I finally embraced the idea of music as something I could do or writing as something I could do, rather than just being the singer. So when people are like, “Oh, that fucking record sucks,” I’m like, You can suck it. I’m proud of that record. And the funny thing is that now, 20 years later, I get people messaging me saying, “I love that record.”
OK. I need to ask you about the Gorilla Biscuits 7-inch from 2006 that disappeared [laughs]. What happened?
CIV: That one… Too soon. I loved “At the Matinee,” but it was written acoustically and we had to hardcore it up, and we didn’t get to play it live [before recording it], so we didn’t really get to live it. I love the sentiment of it and the song is great. We probably should have lived with it. The second song on it was actually a song that didn’t make our actual demo tape. That was a demo song that was gonna be on the 7-inch, but we had to pick. We had eight songs and we did six or something. So that was from the mid-’80s. We just re-recorded it.
I had this conversation with Dan O’Mahony one time in California. He was mad at me as a human being or whatever because he doesn’t like reunions and he doesn’t like “no new music.” So one day I saw him and he was like, “We need to talk. I’m not into this reunion shit.” And I said, “Well, we broke up and we started playing together. We’ve been playing again for fifteen years so I don’t know if it’s really a reunion [anymore]. It’s just a second coming or something.” And he’s like, “Well, why no new music?” I told him, “Well, for me, as a player and a guy in a band, the way to ruin a show and suck the fucking oxygen out of a room is to say, ‘Here’s a new one.’ There goes the show. Now you’re gonna spend ten minutes trying to get them back” [laughs]. I’m not out there to suffer. I’m there to have a good time. I’m there to make you feel like you’re sixteen or seventeen again, to bring you back to the time when you first heard this record and make you feel those feelings. That’s what I want to do. I’m not here to be like, “Look at me, look at me, here’s some new shit I just did! I’m a genius!” That’s not my job. My job is to make you have the best time ever at that fucking show and leave saying, “That was awesome and I would go see them again.” That’s my job. When we would play “At the Matinee” on tour, it would go from being fucking insane to being crickets for three minutes. Why do we do that to ourselves? We have enough bangers that people like and that keep the show rolling so let’s just do that.
Recently I was listening to you on Toby [Morse]’s podcast. He mentioned something about Keith Morris and you made this comment like, “Oh, he’s going too long” [both laughing]. But it’s interesting because if you had told me in the early or mid-’90s that I would still be playing music right now, I would have never fucking believed you in a second.
CIV: No way.
But here we are. So when you talked about Keith, you sort of made it seem like there’s a point where you should retire.
CIV: Yes. Nothing against Keith. I mean, when we were like 21 we would say, “How long are we going to do this? This is a young man’s sport.” So the rule was: When [Vinnie] Stigma retires, it’s time to retire. That’s the age. But this motherfucker won’t stop! [laughs] So now I know I’m going to retire before Stigma. He’s gonna die on stage because that’s who he is. Keith Morris, probably the same thing.
You don’t want to be the band that’s putting on the costume, like, “Oh, I wore this on the back of this record. Let me bring back this style.” Or like, the guitar player needs a chair. There’s gotta be a time to know it’s enough. But if people are still showing up, the shows are still sick, and you can still pull it off, then I guess you’re OK. I try to keep myself to a standard where if I’m not giving as close to a performance as I can to when we first started or when we were heydaying it, then I should call it.
If there’s one thing that’s consistent about you—from the book and from this conversation—it’s that you really do have this sense of gratitude. You can argue that you got roped into these bands or whatever, but it doesn’t seem like you have any misgivings over that.
CIV: No. My life has been a series of happy accidents—because of the way I grew up, and because of the hardcore scene and how I was embraced by it and embraced it—that, in my mind, I was able to have all these cool experiences that I really wasn’t supposed to have. And then as I got older, I just learned the power of saying yes to things. Just being grateful to have an opportunity and say yes to things. That has also backfired over the years, but that’s a life lesson too. To be this age, and to look back on life, and to think that we got to do such cool shit… I’ve been able to live my life as an artist and a singer.
I remember having this conversation with my oldest, who is 21, about school and picking a career in college. This was 100 percent real. I was like, “You’re a great painter. You’re a great singer. But you can’t make a living as an artist.” And they were like, “Really?” [laughs]. I just said, “Don’t go by me. My life is an accident. I’m telling you. It’s stressful, you can’t do it.” But as accidental or as weird as my life is, it’s mine. I’m great at it. I’m great at doing me and living my life. It’s not for everybody.
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To be fair, Pig Champion needed a chair sometimes so I don't think that is a disqualifier from continuing to play in a hardcore band. Then again, we all can't be in Poison Idea...
Another really interesting interview! I actually gave both my kids the opposite advice...do what you love. Don't settle until you have at least tried to make a living at what you love. Too many if us took that "easy" way and I constantly regret it.