In Conversation: Tim Kinsella of Joan of Arc and Cap'n Jazz
His first band copied D.R.I., but his next act upended every hardcore norm we had and changed the culture forever. Thirty years later, Tim Kinsella is still your favorite outsider's favorite outsider.
Not many hardcore kids will get to see one of their bands anthologized for a box set. Even fewer will be able to say that set features only the first five albums of a band discography that runs more than 20 records deep. And even then, those 20 records are still only a fraction of the work that Tim Kinsella has put out into the world. His Discogs page lists over 200 credits alone: Cap’n Jazz, Joan Of Arc, Owls, Make Believe, Kinsella & Pulse—that’s only a handful of them. This is a person who has been compelled to create for a long time.
But Tim Kinsella is also someone who has committed himself to an unbound process, inspired by the outsider framework that he discovered in the punk and hardcore communities of his native Chicago and imbued with a willingness to go further. And while this approach continues to reap some unorthodox results, Tim has certainly never given us any reason to expect orthodoxy. If anything, he tells me, “It feels almost built into my sense of purpose as a creative person that I need to reject scenes or something.”
These days I think we’re all hyper-aware of the fact that punk and hardcore are basically legacy genres at this point. We’re not babies anymore. But talking to you today, one of the things that made me pause is that we’re here largely because of the release of a Joan of Arc box set that defines one very short era of your creative life. I’m wondering how you process that, because you’ve never stopped working and you still seem far from retired, but we’re already formally archiving your music.
TIM: I remember there was a moment when I saw that there was some sort of anniversary for [Nirvana’s] Nevermind coming up, and I just quickly did the math and realized that the time between Woodstock and Nevermind was shorter than the time between Nevermind and this box set. I was never a Nirvana fan—from the moment I saw the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video. I remember seeing it on MTV at my mom’s house and being like, “Who is this Jawbox ripoff?” [laughs]. I was a real purist. But it was obviously a cultural moment. So to wrap my head around how close it was to Woodstock… It felt like dinosaurs were more recent.
I think smartphones have collapsed our shared sense of how time passes. Like, we have a shared sense of fashion trends or stylistic trends when we talk about the ‘60s, the ‘70s, the ‘80s. We have clear images in our minds of what those fashions mean and what that meant stylistically for music and film. And then smartphones happened and now there’s just this stew. Maybe this is the definition of postmodernism, but it’s like all those eras are happening at the same time now. It’s whatever you want to click into.
The records in this box set actually all exist at that particular cusp—the end of one millennium, the beginning of the next—which means they also exist in a recent past that feels more distant than you think it should for any number of reasons.
TIM: I hadn’t listened to the records since they came out. There was just such a vitriolic response to them at the time. First on the message boards, from the Jade Tree purists or whoever, and then through Pitchfork reviews. As much as I think I did a pretty good job of getting that out of my head and continuing to do my best, I think it did shake me a bit. I just assumed these records must be really bad. So I never listened to them because I thought it would screw me up moving forward.
Karl [Hofstetter], the owner of Joyful Noise, brought this idea to me. And at first I was like, “Nah, I don’t wanna do it” [laughs]. But he said, “OK, well, I licensed the records and we’re doing it.” So it was a little bit like, if you can’t beat them, join them. He came to town, rented an AirBNB, and then he sat me down and made me listen to them from beginning to end. And it was a really powerful moment. I mean, obviously, there were moments where I was like, “Oh, that’s a little clunky” or “Oh, that’s embarrassing,” but overall, I was like, this sounds pretty good to me. It doesn’t sound that far off from my biases and sensibilities now.
OK, before we go too far into this era, I wanted to go back a little bit to your first band.
TIM: OK!
I read something recently where you described that band, Toe Jam, as being into D.R.I., Nuclear Assault, Crumbsuckers, and Cro-Mags. And then you said, “The idea of crossover was a very, very serious international issue, which we felt an urgency to address on whatever local scale we could”—which makes me believe that somewhere in your subconscious, you remember having a very specific position about crossover.
TIM: I totally did! I mean, it was a very local issue, too, in the same way that giant political issues have local manifestations. That was very real for me as a junior high kid: Why couldn’t my punk and metalhead friends get along? [laughs] The music was all fast. If the distinction was made according to technical skills—which I think is what the metalheads thought, that Nuclear Assault or D.R.I. didn’t have the same skills as like…
… Overkill.
TIM: Yeah! Right, but those guys had chops in a different way. If you listen to the first Bad Brains tape, that shit is crazy in terms of chops. But as a kid, it registered to me as punk and not metal, even if they got a little more metal later. So yeah, I was definitely a thirteen-year-old. Maybe I was a little bit of a people-pleaser or something, but I was very much the lynchpin between my punk friends and my metal friends who were dismissive of each other.
I think it’s also worth talking about the fact that Chicago itself has always had a very distinct regional identity from a hardcore perspective—and that could be from the Effigies to Naked Raygun to Gauge. That was a part of your upbringing.
TIM: Right.
And at the same time, the last time I interviewed you, you were wearing a Shelter shirt [laughs]. So it was clear to me that you were invested in some form of hardcore in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, but somehow, we’ve never actually talked about that. How would you describe that relationship?
TIM: I’m just going to state the facts because I don’t want it to come across as shit-talking. But there’s the defining examples of what a thing can be like, especially on a local level: Like, Los Crudos or 8 Bark. I was never super tight with any of those people, but I knew them and I was at their shows and stuff. But there were also the negative examples, where I was like, “Oh, this is not what I’m about.” Victory Records was a big thing in Chicago, and that was not something that drew me in, you know? So I think pretty early on, you know, I saw Shelter and loved it. I saw a Slapshot show that erupted into a barroom brawl that looked straight out of a cartoon Western. There were all-ages shows at this place called McGregor’s, and I went to every show there for a few years.
I remember meeting this one kid—I can’t even remember his name, but I can see his face now. He was really nice, and we made plans to go to this show once. I didn’t know anything about him. But I borrowed my mom’s car and I picked him up. He was in full skinhead style. As we’re driving, he tells me this story about how the rival skinhead gang broke into his house and tied up his mom. This is, like, 1989 in Chicago. I was like, “Jesus Christ, what have I gotten myself into?” [laughs] So we get to the show, and I remember him walking into the men’s room at some point and seeing some rival skinheads follow him in, and I was like, “Oh my God. I’m here with this guy. But I don’t really know him.”
Did you ghost him?
TIM: I did not ghost him, but I stood there for what was probably too long of a time wondering if I was supposed to go into the men’s room now and stand up for him or something. He had literally just told me that they tied his mom up. Eventually, I walked into the men’s room and these guys were intimidating him a little bit, but they weren’t beating him up or anything. So he said, “Let’s get out of here,” and we left. I don’t know if I ever saw him again.
OK, I wanted to try to settle the dueling etymology stories of the name Cap’n Jazz here. Sam [Zurick]’s story is that you were all sitting around eating Cap’n Crunch and he just screamed, “Cap’n Jazz!” and everyone was like, “Cool” [laughs]. Your story, which I think is more interesting, is about a superhero comic that Sam supposedly drew.
TIM: Yeah, yeah. I think a large part of who I’ve become and what I do was defined by these things that you discover that shock you when you’re a little too young to really understand what they are. So for whatever reason, Sam and I ended up seeing Elvin Jones play at the Chicago Jazz Fest when we were sixteen. So when we were starting this new band, we called it the Elvin Jones Jazz Machine. And then somehow by the time we got off the train back home, it was more like Jazzmatic Spazz Machine. But Sam was really into making comics at the time and he had this idea of a superhero…
…who would take “square” things and make them jazz.
TIM: Right! I don’t think he ever made a full comic book, but he would always talk about this comic book he was going to make.
I mean, this is a weird question, but as kids, is that what you wanted to do? Like, did you think you were taking “square punk” and making it jazz?
TIM: For sure! You remember that movie Pump Up the Volume with Christian Slater, where he has this pirate radio station or whatever? That era and that angst was real. I mean, I’m full Gen X. You’re Gen X. You get it [laughs]. It was that complacent suburb mentality, where even when I was a kid, I was like, “Why is everyone sleepwalking?” So we definitely were aware that was what we wanted to do as a band. We always had a sense that there was a mission. And then later, Nation of Ulysses was a big part of that, too.
When I think about hardcore between 1990 and 1995, it can feel like most bands did either one of three things: They wanted to Minor Threat, they wanted to be Fugazi, or they wanted to be metal [laughs]. There were outliers, of course, but I always slid Cap’n Jazz into the Fugazi column.
TIM: We were definitely in the Fugazi camp. I skipped the last five days of high school to follow Fugazi on tour. They toured so much and we saw them so many times. They set the bar—that, along with everything Dischord was putting out. I think the first time Lungfish played Chicago was during my junior year of high school. All the Dischord stuff was huge for us.
Honestly, even the way you held the microphone—your performance aesthetic—reminded me of Guy [Picciotto]. Is that something you were conscious of?
TIM: We weren’t really aware of that. But also, really, I can’t emphasize enough how much of an impact Gauge had on us. Like, they really showed us how to be a band. I saw Gauge 82 times. And I know that because I saw a list of every show they ever played and I counted. The first time I ever went on tour was with them. Every hit was just as hard as it could be, and when it wasn’t, it was almost a reverse dynamic; it would be impactful when they would hold back for a second.
I think there’s a narrative about Joan of Arc’s arrival that you were specifically trying to alienate Cap’n Jazz fans or punk and hardcore kids. And I understand where the temptation to say that comes from, but then if you look at what actually happened, Joan of Arc played its first show at an anarchist space in Chicago with Racetraitor. That doesn’t sound like you’re trying to alienate anyone. That sounds like you’re saying, “This is my community, so let’s fucking play.”
TIM: It’s much easier to see that in hindsight—especially because there were however many Joan of Arc records and there’s really just the one Cap’n Jazz [album]—but there were a lot of different strains holding Cap’n Jazz in the tension of how it existed. And a lot of that was kind of silly and meant to provoke people a little bit. I think when Joan of Arc started, the very first thing to consider is that Sam was playing drums and he’d never played drums before. I was playing guitar and I had only ever played guitar in The Sky Corvair for a minute. [My brother] Mike was playing guitar and Jeremy [Boyle] was playing homemade instruments. We didn’t start the band with being skillful at our instruments. We started the band with an impulse: Let’s make weird puzzles. We were always attuned to rebellion, but rebellion doesn’t need to be the common dynamics of forcefulness. Especially when you put that in the context of Nirvana and nü-metal, where the codes of rebellion had become so popularized that it was like, what were we supposed to do? Be faster than Antioch Arrow or Heroin? [laughs] We needed to find a new way because we’d built up a tolerance to the old forms of rebellion. We needed to find a new way to create this tension.
When I think about my own music, I feel like I don’t know if the songs I’ve written that were reactionary really hold up as well as the songs that brought out something I felt like I needed to express. Just reacting doesn’t feel as authentic to me. Actually, this is funny because I feel like this is something I’ve talked about in therapy [laughs]. That thing where you do something reactionary to spite someone who will never even know you did it.
TIM: I mean, there is a way in which I appreciate the more localized forces that I was reactionary against because they goaded me into different directions. I may have needed to learn whatever formal lessons I could learn from [writing] a reactionary song, which then hopefully got absorbed and used for something with purer intentions later. But I’ve always bristled at the scenes. I’ve always loved the communities, but I’ve bristled at the scenes. It’s a very different thing. The Chicago music communities—underground, experimental, whatever the forms, whether it’s techno or free jazz—that spirit of rebellion, those communities still enable me in a million ways. But the scenes around them… It feels almost built into my sense of purpose as a creative person that I need to reject scenes or something. It just felt too easy to do anything that we knew people would like, you know? And I understand why people say I’m pretentious when I say something like that [laughs].
A little earlier, when you mentioned the fact that you were all complete novices at your instruments, I had this realization that this decision may have also been kind of reactionary—in the sense that, if we go back to that specific moment in Chicago, that was the era of “the Chicago virtuoso.”
TIM: Exactly. Yes. Thank you!
You had Tortoise and post-rock and it seemed like everybody in the city was like, “Oh, I’m a fucking trained jazz player,” and you guys were like, “Hey, Jeremy, can you make some cute beeps?” [laughs] So there’s this continuity there, to me, which is that the original hardcore bands took limited knowledge and limited resources and just did their best, right? Like, I’ve started thinking about punk as two things: “punk process” and “punk product.” But you can take an un-punk process and create what feels like a punk outcome, or you can take a punk process and create what is definitely an un-punk outcome. I would argue that “punk process” is the more important thing.
TIM: 100 percent. Yeah, I don’t even have any comment. You nailed it perfectly. And that’s what I was saying, too, about how this spirit of punk is still alive and well—in terms of process and in terms of community—in things like the techno and free jazz scenes, even if it doesn’t sound like a punk product. Because how many times have you seen a punk product like the Warped Tour or whatever and thought, “I’m not really feeling the rebellion here?” Not that rebellion is always the end goal, but in my mind, there does need to be some kind of friction. There does need to be something that unnerves the listener a little bit, even when it’s a beautiful sentiment. Even feelings of beautiful wonder can be unsettling.
I talk about community a lot in this space, but this is what it means to me: It means that when you are a part of a community, you develop a lens with which you view the world, with which you view art, with which you view life. So if I have that lens, and I’m looking at you playing what sounds like a John Fahey song, I can still see where the hardcore part lives. That’s why I have such an expansive vision of hardcore.
TIM: We were visiting my in-laws in Wisconsin last week, and we were sitting at this pizza parlor. It’s very traditional, and there are these guys sitting around in their Thin Blue Line t-shirts or whatever, and then these three punk high schoolers came in and sat down. I said to my wife, “Do you think these would be my friends if I lived here?” It’s like, I’m three times older than them [laughs]. But I was like, “I’m pretty sure those seventeen-year-old punks would be the people that we became friends with.” That’s just real. That was the harshest part of the couple of years post-Nirvana, that all the jocks and the pea-brains were suddenly wearing the codes of rebellion that my friends and I really depended on to recognize each other up until that point. So you’d go to a new place and you’re like, “I don’t know who to trust anymore.” I probably shouldn’t have to be thinking about that as a 50-year-old, but you can’t take that lens off once it’s there.
I get that. And I feel like I’ve had to retrain my brain a little bit. Because I have a lot of friends in their twenties that are hardcore kids, right? Someone can ask, “Is that normal?” And maybe it’s not for most 50-year-olds, but in my brain, I see intergenerational exchange as crucial to the development of a community.
TIM: 100 percent. When I was in my early thirties, I started collaborating with this performance art couple who were a little older than me. They’re my neighbors. They’re amazing. And they’ve really become mentors. We’re talking about really heady, esoteric performance art people. They don’t come from the punk world at all. But I learned from their example how important intergenerational relationships are. Whatever self-awareness I have in terms of my past [work], I feel like the only way I can think to make it really valuable would be to befriend young weirdos who feel alone. Not to make myself sound too noble or something, but as a lonely confused kid, older weirdos meant everything to me, you know? I needed to just feel like, “These people actually get it.”
I think a lot about my relationship with Keith [Burkhardt] from Cause For Alarm in this way. Cause For Alarm was one of my favorite bands ever. I only ever got to see them play a reunion show at the Ritz in 1988 or 1989, but a few years later, I met Keith and we somehow wound up becoming really good friends. We lived together for some time. We’ve worked together. It was hard for a long time not to hang out with him and be like, “This guy was literally at the birth of hardcore” [laughs]. But I very much see him like my big brother. He’s 60 and I’m 50. I cherish his friendship so much.
TIM: When I was a sophomore in high school, I had to do a career speech. You had to interview someone who did something that you wanted to do when you grew up. And Chris Connelly, the singer of Ministry and Revolting Cocks, worked at the Wax Trax store. So I called the Wax Trax store as a fifteen-year-old kid and was like, “Hey, can I interview you for my career speech?” And he was like, in his rich Scottish baritone, “Yes, please do” [laughs]. I wouldn’t say we became friends, but the patience and generosity he showed me as a precocious fifteen-year-old kid was incredible. The fact that this guy, who was the singer of Ministry at the height of their fame, took that kind of attention and care to me, that was so formative.
As you know, I lived in Chicago from 1998 to 2000, which is in the center of the period the box set covers, and—correct me if I’m wrong, but—it seems like when you write about this era in the liner notes, you really focus in on the community in Chicago in a way that you didn’t before. From the way that I experienced it, I think one of the most interesting things at that time was that it felt the community didn’t have that many splinters. Like, hardcore kids hung out with post-rock kids or electronic kids or whoever. If you hung out at Jinx or Rainbo, I met you. As a Chicagoan, how did you perceive that time?
TIM: I love that you were there to see that because you have that perspective of coming in as an outsider. But I took it as ultimate, beautiful permissiveness. And I do think that really informs those records because there was such a permissiveness. What you were saying about Joan of Arc leaning into our amateurness—at the beginning, we were definitely responding more to the punk and hardcore communities, nationally. But then there was this real Chicago moment. To realize that there was this same energy, across creative disciplines, was a real eye-opener for me.
This was also around the point in Joan of Arc’s life where you’ve said that Jade Tree had sort of given up trying to understand you. Maybe this is the way I saw it, but it felt like your relationship with Jade Tree was always a little contentious.
TIM: I always connected with one of them better than the other, and this was a time where there were some internal changes that kind of shifted the dynamics to where, suddenly, I had to start interacting with the one I got along with less. I understand that I have maybe a little bit of a reputation for being prickly or being a provocateur or something, but I don’t think I’m actually a difficult person to get along with, you know? Like, I have a lot of friends. I get along with strangers well enough. I’m not actually a prickly guy, I don’t think—although maybe a prickly guy would say that, too. There are just some people that you can’t communicate with for whatever reason. That’s kind of how it became at the end of our relationship with Jade Tree. Everything I tried to express to them, I felt misunderstood or warped. In their defense, I was probably misunderstanding and warping a lot of what they said, too.
Did you ever feel like agreeing to release the Cap’n Jazz anthology with them was like paying a tax to keep doing weird shit with Joan of Arc?
TIM: Oh, I never thought of it that way [laughs]. Yeah, I mean, I guess I did. I remember when I was a kid, I first became aware of Jade Tree because of the Swiz compilation they put out. And I was such a fan of that Swiz compilation that I went to Kinko’s and I took the CD and I made my own homemade poster out of artwork from the CD. I turned the CD panels into a big poster, and then I hand wrote the lyrics to the entire discography on the bottom third of it. That’s how much that Swiz anthology meant to me. So when I first met those guys and they talked about working together, I was like, “This is the big time!”
The thing I remember most about the Cap’n Jazz reissue was the moment when they told me however many copies it sold on its release—and it was more than the Swiz discography had sold. That was my first moment of trying to understand scale. Like, I’m sure you’ve played rooms where you saw a lot of formative bands as a kid. When you literally see behind the curtain, and you just realize, Oh, this is just like every other show. But when I was a kid and saw this, [Swiz and Jade Tree] seemed so big. There’s also a kind of interesting retreat from that, too, as I get older and I keep doing this. There are diminishing returns on a professional level. There are smaller audiences. It’s kind of interesting to see that the meaning of a song can still be present even if the audience isn’t present [laughs].
The box set also covers your first real period of diminishing returns on some level, because I think you’ll agree that The Gap is probably the most uncomfortable record from that period to listen to. It was a tough sell for people.
TIM: Oh yeah.
Even in the liner notes, you say that you were not prepared for how deeply people would hate it.
TIM: I think I was pretty shocked that a lot of the criticism was directed at me personally. Maybe I took it more personally than I should have, but it felt like I was being personally attacked quite a bit. At the time of The Gap, there was Storm & Stress and U.S. Maple, both doing very fragmented rock music; there was Autechre and Oval—the glitch stuff. We were stewing in all that. It’s not like it came out of nowhere. That said, in terms of me continuing to make things, all these bad reviews when I was a kid turned out to be the greatest gift in the world, because it gave me a sort of fearlessness. You can only take so many punches. At this point, I couldn’t care less what people think, you know? But there was an in-between period.
OK, you mentioned your reputation for “being pretentious” a little while ago, and while I will take that with a grain of salt, I am a little curious if there’s anything on the Joan Of Arc box set—across your first five albums—that you can look back and now say, 30 years later, “Oh, absolutely, 100 percent, that part is pretentious.”
TIM: There are moments I regret. There were moments that I know could have been better, truer to what I intended them to be if I would have stuck with it. But I don’t want to cop out on the question. Pretentious? I mean, that “Zelda” song on The Gap is asking a lot of people [laughs]. But I don’t feel bad about it. I’m not embarrassed to be ambitious and fail a little bit, because even when you’re being ambitious and you wipe out, it’s still expressive in a singular way. And that means more to me than just falling back on something that would be easy to do.
I wanted to end with something you once said, about how you often look at bands and wonder about their business models. Because as somebody who has also been doing this for a long time, I always do that. And I think we all want to answer the same question that you brought up when you said that, which was: “How can you actually get away with doing this?” Thirty years after Cap’n Jazz, and through to Joan of Arc and Kinsella & Pulse, are you actually getting away with it?
TIM: Yes. And I’m glad you asked this because I do think that not enough people talk about how so much of what people make is determined by their resources. A teacher of mine taught me forever ago that when you have an idea, you have to think: What would this be if I had unlimited resources? If I had all the money and time and resources in the world? How would I express the same idea if I had ten minutes and nothing else right now? And then you have to calibrate it accordingly. When Joan Of Arc broke up, I owned one amp the whole time. I had a couple of different guitars, but never more than one at a time. I had an overdrive pedal and a tuner. And I bought one $400 synth in the last five years of the band. I had no gear making all that stuff. I like those limitations.
I think I’m getting away with it now, but I’m only getting away with it because my band is just me and my wife—which is the ultimate life hack, to be a couple-band. There’s not enough money to go around, but if you can be two people who share the money, you can do it. It also works in terms of time, because no one is getting jealous of the time you spend at band practice, and travel is simplified, too. So yeah, I’m getting away with it, but I am part of a collaborative couple that have designed our lives to get away with it. We recalibrated what it means to be in a band according to realistically assessing what we can do. It’s a little bit sad, actually [laughs].
Obviously, we’re both at the age of thinking about aging in a different and more serious way. How do you account for that in your calibration?
TIM: Not with great confidence! I mean, I taught Creative Writing at a college for a decade and it actually made more sense to go back to bartending and photo-assisting. Jobs that didn’t take much skill ended up being not only more lucrative, but more conducive to where my priorities could fit in more easily around them. But I don’t know. I’m just sort of the same as when I was a kid. I’m counting on civilization to collapse before I need to worry about it.
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"Because how many times have you seen a punk product like the Warped Tour or whatever and thought, 'I’m not really feeling the rebellion here?'"
Warped Tour really seems like the epitome of a "punk" outcome from a non-punk process. On the other hand, a band like Sensefield or Farside or Quicksand, even if they don't *sound* hardcore, they are, because they are products of hardcore and of a hardcore process. If the process is one that prizes independence, self-reliance, and a disregard for expectations, the results are going to be punk/hardcore even if they aren't labeled as such. "Rebellion," especially defined as reactive opposition to the current zeitgeist, seems so facile to me by comparison.
I have never cared for any of his bands but man, this guy rules. Must re-listen