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I’m Ruined

By Robert Welborn

Remember that scene in The Exorcist where Chris MacNiel goes into the attic to investigate “noises” and her candle goes bright and burns out?  That’s the feeling you get when you first hear the screams on My Ruin’s new album A Prayer Under Pressure of Violent Anguish.  You go cold for a moment.  You shudder.

The CD jacket credits Mick with guitars, Mehgan with the bass, Yael with the drums and Tairrie B with the throat.  Tairrie B brought her throat from the hip-hop to rock some years ago.  She came out of Ruthless/Comptown, an organization that my parents and the State of Florida ordered me not listen too.  I conversed with her throat on a sunny, Sunday afternoon, where I could ensure that I would not be scared.

NC: I picked up your album at Tower Records in the “Rock” aisle right between Mandy Moore and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult…

Tairrie:  Our record is between Mandy Moore and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult?  <high pitch laughter>  That’s a really crazy combination.

NC:  Yeah, I know.  If you had the power to add a section to the record store where your CD would be sold what would you call it, and what other bands would you put in there with yours?

Tairrie:  I’d call the section “Records that Don’t Suck” and I’d put Nick Hayes, Fu Manchu, Monster Magnet, PJ Harvey and, I don’t know, there’s a whole lot of other records that I’d put in there.  You know, records that most people are afraid of.

NC:  You’ve been working on your music for like 13 years or something…

Tairrie:  No.  I mean, I had a rap record out in, like, 1990, which was released by Comptown Records, which was produced by Eazy E.  Then I did a second rap album which never came out.

Then I decided to form  a band, which I started in my early days, called Manhole.  We eventually released a record on Noise Records called “All is Not Well”, and we toured the world a few times.  Then we went to release a second record and got sued for our name by some band in Texas.  Wrecked our life.  We changed the name of the band to Tura Satana, after the girl in the Russ Myer film, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!.  I decided to leave the band after I’d been there for a long time.  I felt it wasn’t going in a direction that I wanted to go in.  So, I started my solo project, eventually called My Ruin.  I did the record Speak & Destroy. 

I decided to actually put a band together and I hired Mick Murphy, who’d been touring with me and we kept Meghan Mattox from the tour.  We listned to Yael [pronounced Yah-El], and we brought her into the band, so now it’s a “full blown band”. It’s been that way for about year.

NC:  You came out of an organization like Ruthless/Comptown, which is very family-like, some have even called it mafia-like.  Do you miss the mafia at all?  Did you bring some those elements with you into this band?

Tairrie:  Listen, Eazy E gave me a record deal, but I wasn’t a part of that whole scene.  You know, I tried to work with those guys, Dr. Dre, NWA.  They wanted to write all my lyrics, cut all my music, do all the publishing.  I probably would have been the female Eminem if I would’ve let them.

I wanted to do my own thing and be my own person. I wanted to talk about issues that were more important to me, like a woman’s right to choose, domestic violence, and rape.  I wanted to talk about how the media looks at women.  I really wanted to put together my own band.  I didn’t have very good feelings about the whole rap thing then.  It was very violent, very racist, very sexist.  Music in general is very sexist and I was female and a rapper and I was involved in this whole NWA clique.  It was very weird. 

NC: My Ruin’s new album A Prayer Under Pressure of Violent Anguish, which readers can find at your record store right next to Mandy Moore…

Tairrie:  If you can find it at all! Thanks to the fucking Spitfire Records label… Let’s go off on this for just a moment, shall we?

NC:  But of course.

Tairrie:  I signed a deal with a UK label called Madfish Music and they released Speak & Destroy in Europe and we toured off that.  Then they [Madfish] licensed it to this shitty little label, Spitfire, for what reason I have no idea, because the owners were friends or something.  So, Spitfire Records, who we’ll refer to as Shit-fire Records, they basically put the record out in The States, a year later.  They waited A YEAR!  Then they included two new tracks for it, mastered at a completely different volume, which, of course, fucked up the whole record.  They killed the record.  We got in a huge fight with them.

Well, we recorded this album and didn’t even know that they [Spitfire] were going to release it.  We said “Fine” and tried to be cool about it.  They put the record out and they left out one of the most important things on it.  This CD was made in tribute to Lynn Strait of the band SNOT; there was picture of Lynn on it and tribute to him.  They completely left that out of the US release.  They did a horrible job of promoting the album, no advertising.  They didn’t want me to do any interviews, because they were afraid that I’d badmouth them, which, of course, I am <evil laughter>. They’ve restricted us.  I have fans write us and ask “When are you going to play in our town?”  and I hate saying “We can’t because of our political label”.  We would love to play everywhere in the US.

NC:  Your music is very personal and this is a very public place to talk about these things.   What has motivated you to keep pouring your heart out like this?

Tairrie:  It is kind of like slitting your wrists and bleeding on vinyl.  To me, the best music is honest music.  It’s music that isn’t contrived.  I don’t mind using play tools, but some bands play tool their records to death.  When you see the band live, they are not even the same musicians.  When I put my voice on a record, I don’t want my scream play tooled to death.  I want people to hear me live and say, “That girl can really scream”.  Because of that, some people have called us a metal band.  We’re not a metal band.  We are what we are.  We don’t have a category.  We have hard-core vocals, funky guitars.  I don’t rap any more, like I used when I was with Manhole. I’m not a singer and I’m not a rapper.  I’m a vocalist.

NC:  You album has a very “analog” sound.  Where did you cut the record?

Tairrie:  We did the album at Grandmaster, in Hollywood.  We had Nick Raskulinecz produce the album, who is very old school.  He has a very “analog” approach to music.  A lot of producers are like, “Fuck it, scream one line and I’ll sample it twenty times”.  I want to do everything real.  It kills me when I read in Guitar Player some musician saying “Yeah, I played one chord and they sampled it 120 times for the entire song”.  I’m like saying, “You’re awfully talented”.  I wanted to produce a record that had heart.

NC: You start and finish the album with two spoken word pieces, as you call them, “prayers”.  In the first one, called “Morning Prayer”, you say this line “we kissed and my mouth started to bleed and then all my teeth fell out. I hate it when that happens”.  That cracked me up.

Tairrie:  <high pitch laughter>  “Morning Prayer” is about a lot of my dreams I always have dreams of drowning and have dreams of my teeth falling out.  I have them constantly.  I’ve had them since I was younger.

NC:  You know that both of those are Freudian elements indicating a fear of losing control…

Tairrie:  It’s very funny that you would say that.  I get called a control freak all the time.  Those spoken word pieces are just very honest, and those things come out.

NC:  In the 4^th track, “Heart Sick”, you sing this lyric, “God are you listening?/ I hear you in my room/As hot as the moon on the 10^th day of June/There’s no sleeping for me, I’m loosing my faith/ Love is not safe in a world filled with hate” Are you struggling with God?

Tairrie:  No, not really.  Let me tell you what I mean by that. When I refer to God in my songs, I’m referring to a man. A lot of times it’s about a guy from my past or some guy from my present.  When I say that “Jesus was a rockstar”, I mean, he was a rockstar.  He had a following, he went on tours, the establishment crucified him.  He was loved by millions, hated by millions, you know, a rockstar.  When I’m asking “God are listening?”, I’m asking someone in my life, not God.  I’m definitely not on speaking terms with THE God.

NC:  Who does the lead guitar intro on “Stick it to Me”?  That axe kicks major ass.

Tairrie:  It’s Mick, he’s the guitar on everything.

NC:  That was the piece that made me stand up and take notice.  I realized that I was listening to something completely original with this album.

Tairrie:  I’ve been with a lot of other guitar players and I’ve never met a guy like this.  I’ve never been able to write with my guitar players.  Mick has really taught me a lot.  Mick plays really old school, so he’s not another one of these guitarists ripping off Korn’s riffs.  Mick has gotten some reviews calling him the “70’s rock god”, but that’s who he is.  He’s the guy in leather pants playing his guitar up on his head.

NC:  Well, he does it very well.  Mick comes up with some riffs that are Beavis & Butthead quality.  You could hear them going “This is cool, Da-nah-nah Da-nah-nah-nah”, trying to duplicate the sound off “Stick it To Me”.

Tairrie:  Well, let me tell you, I’ve recorded many songs, and I’m always saying, “Well, we could have done that better or we should have done this”.  The Prayer record, though, I’m really happy with it.  I’ve never complained about it once.  Nick is my partner in the band, and he’s my partner in life, you know, he’s my boyfriend.  We have a very different rapport.

NC:  What should someone expect who goes to one of your concerts?

Tairrie:  We’ve just written nine new songs.  We played last night, and we premiered like six of them.  They went over amazing.  They were acting like these were all songs that they’d heard before.

NC:  They were trying to sing along but they didn’t know the words…

Tairrie:  Yeah!  It was so cool.  My shows have a really strange vibe, it’s almost like a cult kind of thing. Yael is a fabulous drummer and Mehgan is solid as hell and kicks ass on bass.  We can look at each other and play next to each other, and vibe off each other, it’s very cool.  I bring people on the stage and they are screaming in the microphone with me, screaming to the point that they are crying.  It’s that intense.

My Ruin is playing September 24, 2001 at Canes in San Diego.  You should go; their music will kick your ass.