In Conversation: Mike Judge
Twenty-nine years after our first interview, I decided to pick up on our original conversation to find out what’s changed—and what hasn’t—and maybe cringe at our younger selves along the way.
Finding Mike Judge in 1994 was not easy. I asked every “youth crew” member I knew—including his Judge bandmate, Porcell—and everyone gave some version of the same answer: “I think he’s a biker now?” But when it came to specifics, no one knew. Finally, I asked Mark Ryan from Supertouch. I knew Mark and Mike grew up together in New Jersey, that they wandered into the New York City hardcore scene as friends and teenagers in the early ‘80s. I knew their history was deeper than most. And when Mark gave me the smile of a well-kept secret, I knew he knew.
As I recall it, Mike declined my request at first. But Mark assured him that I was a good guy—and a good friend—and he even offered to come along, which he did. So with that endorsement, and under that arrangement, Mike agreed. But as we sat down to talk at a since-shuttered vegan ice cream shop in the West Village, he began having second thoughts.
“I remember that night,” he tells me now, laughing. “I remember thinking this can’t be a fanzine. This doesn’t sound like fanzine questions. I was like, ‘Fucking Mark. What did you do?’”
Our published conversation is still one of my favorites to appear in the original zine—not only because of the absolute production that it took to make it happen, but because our interview started a chain of events that eventually brought Mike back out of hiding, and back out in front of a hardcore scene that has always loved him. There’s no way you could have told either of us in 1994 that both Anti-Matter and Judge would exist in 2023, and that seemed like reason enough to reconnect and revisit that conversation with new eyes.
The first thing I wanted to talk about is something I felt was pretty key to my re-reading of our interview. At one point I ask you how old you are, and you say, “27.” I say, “Wow, that’s a pretty long time to be doing this thing.” And you respond, “Yeah, eleven years, man.” And my memory of you saying that was like: Oh. Mike Judge sort of sounds like a retired coal miner. [Laughs] It felt like we were both already feeling like we were at the end of the line—and this was 29 years ago. So take me back to that place. What brought out the retired coal miner? What were you thinking?
MIKE: I think it was because of the way I left Judge. They dropped me off on that tour and I told them, “Yeah, I’ll call you when I’m ready,” and then I just never called. As far as I was concerned, at that moment, I was done. I just didn’t think there was any future for me playing that type of music because still, to this day, Judge is the best thing I’ve ever done. When people were like, “You should start another band”—why would I? It will never be as good. I’ll never love it as much as I love Judge. I just figured it was over.
Also, there were a lot of things being said by different people in the scene about how I let them down by doing this or doing that. And I was like, you guys have no clue. I’m not saying I had the weight of the world on my shoulders, but in my fucking world, it felt like I had the weight of the world on my fucking shoulders. So when everything started falling apart, I just fell in with a bunch of people not related to music—people who were kicked-around guys like I felt I was—and they became my family.
Would you say that you really felt as old as you sounded when you said that? Like, did you really feel like 27 was ancient?
MIKE: Yeah. I mean, I felt like the tank was empty. I felt like I gave everything and there wasn’t anything recharging me. I felt like I wasn’t getting anything. It was just an awful time right there. I had a lot of pressure at home, too, outside of music. So it was a constant struggle to do these things. And then to go out and have anyone say I didn’t give it enough… It was like, I don’t know what you want. I can’t give you any more.
Sitting in that ice cream shop with you 29 years ago, there’s no way that I would have ever thought, “Oh, I’m going to talk to Mike again in 29 years and we’re going to revisit this interview.” [Laughs] That was not a thing. The idea of a hardcore future wasn’t really possible because we didn’t have a model for it. And if I’m being perfectly honest with you, there was an element of “live fast, die young” in hardcore for me. I literally thought I’d be dead by 30. Do you think you were also living in that no-future mindset?
MIKE: Truthfully, I was in the no-future mindset since before I found punk rock. I’ve been in a no-future mindset since I was like, fuck, 12 or 13. I would have never thought I would have been doing it at 27. Not only that, but I thought that by the time I’m 27, no one was even going to care about anything I did. It just didn’t register with me. It’s crazy now that dudes can make a career out of it and keep going and Judge can play and all these bands can play and people show up. I wasn’t expecting to get past 27.
What was so pressing on your mind at that specific moment? Because it did feel like you had a heavy heart.
MIKE: Well, there were a lot of things that I probably should have let out somewhere else. You know, like, maybe someone professional should have heard some of these stories? [Laughs] I just never wanted to do that. I thought I could express it in these lyrics that I wrote. I was always like, “I don’t want to come out and say what’s going on, but maybe I’ll glance over it, and maybe that will be enough to keep my head together.” But after a while, it just wasn’t. I don’t know. Maybe there was just too much damage done, and I couldn’t fix it.
I can say this now, but when you were talking about your life at that time specifically, I was also keeping a lot of things inside that I was struggling with. Like, obviously, I was in the closet at that time, and that was really difficult for me. But there were also things you talked about, concerning your family and situations you had growing up, that had me thinking about issues that I probably should have been seeing a professional to talk about as well—issues that I’ve processed since, specifically about childhood abuse. It’s weird because I do think I sort of used Anti-Matter as a way to find other people who were willing to say the things that were on my mind.
MIKE: Right.
Or to help broach these subjects so we could sort of open the window a little bit.
MIKE: That’s what I’m trying to say, brother. That’s what I’m trying to say! I would write these things and then be like, “Hey, do you get it?” Like, “Read between the lines, man. I’m a wreck.”
That’s actually really funny you say that because, in the original interview, I asked you how you were doing mentally and you replied, “Mentally I’m a fucking wreck” [laughs]. And then you said, “I’ve sunk so deep inside myself ever since those old days.”
MIKE: Growing up I never heard, “Hey, you did great at this!” or “Hey, you did great at that!” I was just a fucking hillbilly kid from Jersey. There were no accolades anywhere. And then I had that first taste of, you know, “Maybe I can fit in with people!” when I joined Youth of Today. And then that led to Judge—and that came just out of me! It was something I thought of, something I created. This was me. Like, anything after this, I’m fine with. I’m content. Because at least I did this. Some people don’t even get that. And when Judge fell apart, I thought, holy shit. I really don’t have anything anymore. Nothing will ever be that good. Nothing will ever feel that good. Nothing that fun is going to happen anymore. And it was depressing. I was back in Jersey, back to being the dirty hillbilly kid. It all just rained down pretty quick.
How would you update that answer today?
MIKE: Just living up here [in Albany] with [Equal Vision and MerchNow owner] Steve [Reddy] and stuff… Like, I knew I had good friends. I knew I made some good friends. I just didn’t know they were this good. And it’s humbling. It’s amazing how good these people are. And I am so lucky to have these people in my life. It wasn’t only about Judge. It was about the friendships I made from the very beginning.
I remember when Judge first got back together, and it was time to have the first rehearsal where we were going to see each other face to face. And my wife was like, “Oh my God, you’re going to be so nervous. You’re so nervous.” And for some reason, I was just not nervous. I don’t know why. It had been 30 fucking years. But me and my wife walked into the rehearsal room, and everybody’s there, and we all just started talking like I’d seen them yesterday. It was the weirdest thing.
You’ve said at one point—and this wasn’t in my interview, it was someplace else—that you didn’t grow up with any tenderness. But even back in the day, even before I knew you, mutual friends always described you with a sense of tenderness. I mean, sure, Mike Judge had a “reputation.” But the reality seemed to be, especially among the people who knew you, that you were actually very kindhearted. So if you felt like you didn’t grow up with it, where did it come from?
MIKE: My whole fucking life—like, everything from not wanting to drink to not wanting to do drugs—I just didn’t want to be like my family. My mom died when I was nine or ten, and it was just an odd fucking way for a kid to grow up. It was mainly my father and my older brother, who was like ten years older than me, and we never got along. And shit would just get so bad that I’d be like, “If you didn’t want a kid, you should have just fucking got rid of me.”
[My dad] was always like, “What are we gonna do with him?” because he wanted to go out at night, go to bars and shit. And then he bought a bar, so he’d be gone all weekend. He would just hand me to people, which is part of the fucking problem. One side of the family they handed me to were fucking, you know, kid-touchers. The other side, junkies. From ten years old on, I’m in this world of shit. And there was never any sympathy or anything. I’d never heard the words “I love you” until my first girlfriend. Never. It just wasn’t in the vocabulary. My father, when we were going to my mother’s funeral, told me not to cry. And then at his funeral, I fucking cried. I was like, “Joke’s on you, old man. Fuck you!” [Laughs] I just didn’t want to treat people like that. I needed to break the fucking cycle somehow. I don’t got it in me to be that. It’s like, just be good. Just be a good person. Be the way I wish somebody was with me.
I know that when we did that interview your dad was still alive, but it wasn’t clear if there was a sense that he was going to pass soon. It felt like there was some sense of reconciliation going on between the two of you, and you seemed very eager to talk about how you just loved him and you didn’t know what you’d do without him.
MIKE: When he did get sick, I wasn’t living there. It was only him and my brother, and my brother’s just… he’s just a fucking hard dick [laughs]. But when he got sick, he just wanted to be at home. And he probably shouldn’t have been at home, but he wanted to be at home and someone had to take care of him. So I started staying there like five nights a week to take care of him. It was fucking hard! I was just so fucking frustrated because he was depending on me and I’m just trying to sort out all these things in my head. Every night I’d think: Why did everything have to be so hard until now? Like, if you had an ounce of this [relationship with me back then], everything could have been so much better.
When I pulled you out of New Jersey at that time, no one knew where you were. You just sort of disappeared and everyone had these crazy theories. But what I didn’t realize was that this wasn’t the first time you’d done that. I recently heard about how you just completely picked up and disappeared after leaving Death Before Dishonor, too. The story goes that you played a final show at CBGB, opening for Agnostic Front, and at that show, you played a cover of Iron Maiden’s “Run To The Hills.” But you felt so bad about playing that song that you literally walked out of the club and left the scene for a couple of years. You actually felt that playing that song was only going to help the metal crossover sound and hurt hardcore. So in both scenarios—in leaving DBD and leaving Judge—there seemed to be this burden of responsibility that you were carrying where you felt crushed by it enough to be like, “Peace out, fuck this.” [Laughs] What is it that makes you feel so responsible? Where does this burden come from?
MIKE: I guess I just put it on myself. In the old DBD days, it was just the way everything was going. All the bands were starting to play [more metal]. And we were like, “Yeah, we’re gonna do it too.” But that afternoon at CBs, I just remember being on the drum set, and we’re playing this song, and I was looking out and thinking, “Wow. I hope I didn’t just help kill this beautiful fucking thing I found years ago. Because what’s someone else like me gonna do if [hardcore] isn’t here anymore?”
The thing is, when I first went to CBs and I met Roger [Miret] and those guys, it just felt like, Oh my God, this is like a little family! And then with Keith [Burkhardt of Cause for Alarm] and all the Nutley guys… I remember it being like, “Hey, Bad Brains are playing in some squat in Brooklyn. We’re all gonna go there, but we’ve got to stick together because, you know, it’s a bad neighborhood and we can all watch out for each other.” Like, I never even got that kind of guidance and support at home. But now, here I am in New York City, and I’m getting it now, and it was everything I ever needed as 14- or 15-year-old fucked up little kid.
So being in Death Before Dishonor, and looking out that day, I just didn’t want to help destroy this thing that we had. Because some other little kid, he might need it, and it might not be here for him anymore. That’s how I felt. And so… I guess I felt ashamed. I felt like I couldn’t show my face anymore.
It’s just that in order for the weight of that burden—the responsibility that you felt—to make sense, you also had to have had some sense of importance that you actually had that much influence. That playing that song or moving in that direction really could have literally just fucked it up for everybody.
MIKE: I mean, it would be nice if I thought that! But it was probably more like, “You dumb fuck! You fucked things up again!” [Laughs] That was always my mindset. Like, how am I going to ruin things this time?
At one point in our interview you told me, “I try not to let myself get too happy or I might not be able to write.” At the time, again, I related to that. I’ve suffered from depression my entire life, and to some extent, when I started writing music, I did start to think, “Oh, I write the best songs when I’m feeling fucked up!” But over the years, that changed. I started to feel like, “Wait. This is actually a really dangerous thing to believe!” [Laughs] Do you still believe it?
MIKE: Well, yeah. I mean, I would like not to believe it, but the only time that my mind turns to my notepad is when my head’s in some type of fucking turmoil. It’s never like, “Hey, I’m having a great time! Where’s my notepad? I’m gonna write something!” When there’s tragedy, that’s when shit comes out of me.
But is it the tragedy itself, or is it the way that tragedy tends to lean one towards introspection?
MIKE: I mean, maybe. Nowadays, with everything that’s going on in this world, there’s so much to write about because there’s just so much that makes me so sad when I look out. I don’t know if that’s introspection.
You feel these things when you see other people being affected. But what about the things that affect you? How good are you at allowing yourself to feel that and process that and accept some kindness for yourself?
MIKE: I don’t think I do. There are people who are, like, being really good to me right now. And I’m not saying I’m not grateful, but it’s more like: I don’t know if I deserve this. I question that every day I wake up. I have a lot of people who I’ve grown up with, who I’ve been in bands with, who feel they deserve the accolades they get, but I never once looked around me and said, “Man, I deserve this.”
I mean, maybe “deserved” isn’t the best word, but certainly you’ve earned kindness. Certainly you’ve earned the love of your friends. That stuff isn’t just given away, right?
MIKE: Yeah. I mean, I try to be true to the people I care about.
And everyone I know from the last 30 years of hardcore, well… I’ve never heard a bad word about you. Let’s just say that.
MIKE: Well, that’s nice [laughs shyly]. I’m not used to stuff like that, for sure. I still picture myself like a little knocked-around dirty kid from Jersey. I don’t think that’ll ever go away. But I made it past 27, so I’m winning.
I wanted to talk about names for a second. Obviously, some people know you as Mike Judge, and some people, Mike Ferraro. But do you ever feel like Mike Judge is embodying a different person in some way? Do you feel like there’s some sort of split in that name?
MIKE: I used to say Mike Judge is the better version of me.
OK, explain that. What makes Mike Judge better?
MIKE: Because I always think of myself as this kid alone, you know, just hanging out in the woods or by a river and just dreaming of all these things. And then “Mike Judge” is the guy who actually fucking went out and did some shit. I mean, I’m hoping he’s the one I actually grew up to be. The one that was fucking wondering why all this was happening to me when I was 10 years old. Or the one stuck in Florida when I was 14 or 15 years old, staring at a shotgun on the wall, wondering if I had the balls to do it. I’m hoping that kid became Mike Judge—who can fucking just be content with life, and where he’s been, and what he’s doing. Because that kid didn’t want to go on much longer, that’s for sure.
I also ask because when I called you in 1994, your answering machine still said, “Mike Judge.” And by that point, it had been years since Judge had played. So it was interesting to me that there was something about this name that you identified with enough, even after the fact, to be like, "Hey, it’s Mike Judge, leave a message."
MIKE: There was an angry time where my older brother, who, like I said, I never got along with, would always hammer it into me that I wasn’t really family. Like, he was just that type of dude. So I was happy not to use that name. Even at work—and maybe this is crazy, I don’t know, whatever—but we have these tags that we scan to do stuff. So the tech guy, he writes out my tag, and then he writes my name: Mike Ferraro. The first thing I did was fucking scratch that fucker out [laughs]. No. No. There is no Mike Ferraro anymore. That poor little kid is like sitting by a river in the woods of Towaco, New Jersey, and it’s best to leave him alone with his ghosts. He’s just not here anymore.
I understand that. Like, no bullshit, my first memory of my mother is her telling me, “The only reason I had you is because I wanted a girl.” She was basically telling me that I fucked up from the second I was born—and she treated me that way. Like I wasn’t “really” family. It’s funny because I still think a huge part of the reason that playing music became a thing for me is because doing it was literally the first time that anyone had ever clapped for me [laughs]. You know what I mean? It was the first time anyone had ever said, “Oh my god, you’re awesome.” And I was like, yes! Validation! More of that, please.
MIKE: I hear that. But I also had to deal with just being totally fucking afraid of being in front of people, too. It’s such a weird thing why I wanted to do this. I could never be satisfied because, you know, I want [the audience] to be there, but then it’s also like, “Oh no! I gotta stand up in front of them and do this!” [Laughs] I’m my own worst enemy, man. It could be the greatest thing and I’ll figure out some way to torture myself about it.
Is there anything that you feel like you might be doing to help work on that?
MIKE: No. No. I just put it out of my head, and everybody knows. Don’t bring up anything to me. Just tell me where I gotta be and I’ll be there, but I don’t wanna know about it. I don’t wanna dwell on it. Because if they tell me anything, I’ll be thinking about it every night. I’ll just grin and bear it, and then I’ll put myself in that situation, and I’ll get through it. But it’s never gonna change for me. I’m always gonna be like, “These people, they hate me. I know they’re gonna hate me” [laughs]. I can’t help it, brother.
All right, I’ll ask one more thing. One of the things I asked you in 1994 was, “Does getting older scare you?” And at 27 years old, your answer was, “Getting older doesn’t scare me. Not making a difference scares me. Not being heard scares me. People not caring scares me.” How do you think those metrics have held up in the last 30 years?
MIKE: Truthfully, the only thing I fear… I just want to make sure that my wife feels comfortable and safe wherever we are because we went through hell and she never questioned it. She was always just like, “Whatever we’ve got to do, we’ll do.” It was a horrible fucking time. There was always this constant fear that something could happen. Like, now, we’re more stable. But constantly in my head, I just feel like I can’t let anything like that ever happen to her again.
Because, honestly, for me? I don’t care. I could do whatever. I don’t care about me so much. My fear is that I will let her down. She’s been my number one for so long. And I just never want to look in her face and feel like she’s sad or let down by something I did, done, or I’ve fucked up. I don’t fear dying; I kind of don’t care. Mainly my fear is that I never want my wife to be disappointed in me.
Honestly, that’s a very consistent answer. Your care for other people shows. It’s like that’s your M.O.
MIKE: I just don’t want to see people sad; I don’t want to see people hurt. There’s too many people who get off on hurting people. Good people deserve to be treated well, and bad people deserve to be treated badly, and I wish I could do that.
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I just want to give both of y’all a big ol’ hug. I feel what Mike was saying so much! I’ve known such turmoil and grief throughout my life that the last thing I want to do is inflict that upon others.
That interview with mike judge really touched me especially about his experience taking care of father. From my own experience have to parent you own parents is especially a tough transition. I never thought my father who seemed like Superman to me when I was young would grow old and deteriorate mentally. For example he went to the movies to see power of dog a critically acclaimed film and instead of seeing power of dog he saw the movie dog and he saw the movie the dog and didn’t recognize there were two different movies. But mike also touched on another subject that also intrigued me the concept of the narrative arc and does life have a narrative arc? When he said that judge was the best thing he even done it reminded of interview that Ian mackaye said in a interview with British magazine “huck” where he mentioned being in bands which people who thought this is the best thing they have done he never understood that. And said they no such thing as a narrative arc when it comes life. But I asked my aunt who is a playwright about can life have a narrative arc and she said absolutely. But as Ian said while he was in embrace “what is wrong or right I can’t say.”