3
Jeff Nelson + most of Gray Matter = A perversion of executive branch powers and a blatant violation of the Boland Amendment. From GREED Vol. 1 Issue #3.
by Kurt Sayenga
GRAY MATTER was one of the DC area’s more spirited bands, playing speedy, heartfelt rock and roll featuring raging, emotional songs with a few hooks tossed in. As is usually the case with bands affiliated with Dischord Records, after Gray Matter broke up,1 its members immediately went back to their basement practice spaces and started again. Now all four members have resurfaced: drummer Dante Ferrando is with Ignition, and the three other original members (lead guitarist Mark Haggerty, singer/guitarist Jeff Turner, and bass player Steve Niles) have joined forces with Jeff Nelson, whose whirlwind drumming with Minor Threat left listeners around the world gasping for breath. The new band is called 3.
You’ve said that covert actions require secrecy and deception. Our democratic process places a high value on the very opposite characteristics of openness and truth. So the real question, and the much more difficult question, is how to conduct covert operations in an open, democratic society in a lawful manner in which public officials are accountable for their acts. And so my first question is, do you believe that the president has unrestricted power to conduct covert action?2
Turner: Gray Matter broke up in June of 1986.
Nelson: A year ago, Ian MacKaye and I were playing together in England, recording the Egghunt single. When we returned, we got together with Steve and Jeff and tried to do a band, but it just didn’t seem to work. Ian and I decided that it’s hard for us to work together. Ian left and Mark joined in August.
On March 6, 1985, an arms depot in Managua, Nicaragua, was destroyed by an explosion. What was your role in arranging for the explosion?
Haggerty: We didn’t have a name.
Turner: The songs were just not finished.
Haggerty: I think we felt that we had a good thing and we wanted to wait before we presented it until we felt confident about it.
You’ve admitted before this committee that you lied to representatives of the Iranians in order to try and release the hostages. Is that correct?
Nelson: Well, I was counting the members and I forgot to count myself.
And you’ve admitted that you lied to General Secord with respect to conversations that you supposedly had with the president? Is that correct?
Haggerty: We’re in the studio now.
Nelson: We laid down some tracks.
Haggerty: We’re staying in a hotel in Switzerland, like Deep Purple used to do.
Nelson: We’re finishing up and I’m pretty sure it will be some form of record – a 7" or an ep or maybe an album.
Haggerty: We recorded about 13 songs.
Nelson: At $35 an hour, I might add. And it takes a long time – you have to lay 16 tracks for each song. Multiply 13 songs by 16 tracks and that’s a lot of tracks you have to lay down. At $35 an hour. I’d also like to add that we have no plans to go on tour. And we want to play only adult shows.
Haggerty: A lot of our material is adult-oriented, for mature audiences.
Nelson: Life is an adult swim.3
And you’ve admitted that you lied to Congress. Is that correct?
Turner: It’s hard to sing songs with any power if they don’t have any meaning to you. Most of them are personal viewpoints. I try to make it very clear what I’m talking about, to make sense of what I feel, but also to give it universal appeal.
And you admitted that you lied in creating false chronologies of these events. Is that correct?
Haggerty: Songwriting is a real group thing compared to Gray Matter.
Turner: Everybody’s contributing.
Haggerty: Someone might bring in a piece and we’ll jam on it for a while and experiment. Our process takes a while, but it works. Somebody comes up with a riff and we just play it for a Jong time, jamming in between practice and our set, and we begin to like it and people come up with other things to play along with it.
Turner: The advantage of having been together for so long is that we’ve got a lot of momentum behind us. A lot of our songs have come up during practice. I’ve been playing with Mark and Steve for so long that I’ve got an understanding of how they approach a song.
And you’ve admitted that you created false documents that were intended to mislead investigators with respect to a gift that was made to you. ls that correct?
Niles: Great.
Haggerty: He plays a great role in organizing songs, which for a drummer who can’t sit there and play what he’s thinking of on guitar, a chord change or…
Nelson: Is basically musically illiterate...
Haggerty: He expresses himself well.
Niles: And we get great flyers.
Nelson: I’m having a lot of fun. This is the first band I’ve sung in – after seven or eight years in bands. I do backup vocals while I’m drumming, which is, uhmm, quite a feat.
You certainly have admitted that the documents themselves were completely false...were intended to create a record of an event that never occurred. Is that correct?
Nelson: In all the bands I’ve been in before, Minor Threat particularly, the band came first and I was at a point in my life when I could just quit my job and go on tour. I’m no longer at that point in my life. It would have to be a pretty darn sure thing for me to do what it takes to go out on a long US tour. Everybody in the band has rent to pay, jobs, or school. We’re definitely hampered by lots of things.
Turner: At this point if we went on tour we’d set ourselves up for a fall.
Haggerty: I still feel that we’re a very young band. We’ve been playing for a year, which is a long time for a DC band, but compared to others it’s no time at all. I still feel that we have a long way to go.
Can you assure this committee that you are not here now lying to protect your commander in chief?
Turner: It feels good to be in a band now. There are a lot of good bands to play with – bands like Soulside, King Face, Fireparty, Ignition, and the Vile Cherubs.
Niles: Everybody’s doing different stuff. It’s real nice.4
Nelson: The DC scene seems to be good all around once again, and yet I don’t like all the expectations some people place on this. It ruins the spontaneity and the fun of it. It’s great to be playing when there’s a resurgence and a revival, but I hate it when it’s being touted as such.
Seth Lorinczi wrote a nice piece about haunted photographer Naomi Petersen that you can find here.
Gray Matter later reformed. They play reunion shows once in a great while at Dante’s nightclub, The Black Cat.
Having quickly tired of the “rock interview” format, I substituted my questions with quotes from the Tower Commission’s interrogation of Lt. Col. Oliver North, the Marine who ran point for the Reagan administration’s secret and illegal sale of arms to Iran in the 1980s. The money from the sales was used to fund the Contras, fascist murderers fighting the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
Jeff, the co-owner of Dischord Records, started an offshoot label called Adult Swim that put out records by DC bands that didn’t quite align with Dischord – for instance, ironic pop band The Snakes (the creation of SOA guitarists Michael Hampton and Simon Jacobson) and unclassifiable music terrorists 9353.
Steve “Man of Few Words” Niles is now a successful writer.
Thanks for sharing
Before I ever heard the band, I was obsessed with their graphics. So Iconic