Matthew Grimm is a man with strong convictions who is not at all afraid to convey them to any and all in the most strident way possible. Lucky for us, he has a knack for couching those convictions in blazingly rocking, insistently catchy songs.

I first got to know Grimm, an Eastern Iowa native, when I was working for a daily paper up the road from Iowa City and he was fronting the Hangdogs. The band, a spunky little roots rock combo based in New York City, was touring, and he was looking for some coverage from the local press. I obliged, and we became acquainted. The band toured again, we talked more, and when Grimm moved back to Iowa to be closer to his family, we kept in touch.

Along the way he shed the ’Dogs, took some tentative steps toward establishing a solo career, and finally found his footing fronting a new group, the Red Smear. While his work with the Hangdogs always had a left-leaning political undercurrent – the group’s last disc was the Henry Wallace homage Wallace ’48 – he jumped fully into the deep end of the pool with this new combo, writing his most pointed and direct songs yet.

The results were issued last year on the self-released Dawn’s Early Apocalypse. I’ve always contended that those who complain about the man not recognizing the quality of their music simply fail to realize that their music isn’t very good. Grimm turns that idea on its head. He has a long list of labels who passed on this disc, and that’s a head-scratcher, as this Pete Anderson-produced gem is full of solid, slightly twangy rock ’n’ roll songs that are instantly engaging while still having something to say. Perhaps it is that last descriptor that tells the tale.

Grimm is never short of words, and it only takes one question to get him revved up. With that, I offer the longest-ever Monday Interview.

TIRBD: It seems there's a large segment of the populace that would rather their favorite musicians simply "shut up and play." You clearly disagree. Why?

MG: Well, people were talking about that a few years ago when we were all s’posed to line up behind the president because God had blessed him and his righteous Crusade against the infidel, and not coincidentally all domestic differences of opinion, but I'd do some research to see if you find how "large" that segment is anymore. Or I'd just look at Green Day's American Idiot sales and then ask oneself how much that particular opinion really matters. I don't think it's a coincidence that that record went through the roof at the same time that mindless fealty had become the policy of all major media and institutional mouthpieces and every sports event and every gas station LED readout was basically telling us to get in line or get out. And I think it's a rare example of why I guess it's a beshitted opinion, because Green Day was probably the most prominent, loudest voice talking common sense in this country when all institutional voices had abrogated their responsibilities.

It's rare, in this culture that "art" does that anymore, but at some point, when all other media are, in fact, closed to dissent, that's where it's going to happen. And it becomes almost an obligation, I think, of those who can see the forest for the trees to try to paint the picture in whatever way they can. And, I can't say this enough, who saw the forest for the trees in 2003 and 2004, who warned of the epic cataclysm that was obvious to anyone with two eyes open and a remote sense of cross-cultural history? Who turned out to be dead-nuts on when the radio industry was blacklisting the Dixie Chicks? And where were those people who say "shut up and play" on the war and the gutting of the infrastructure and the domestic lockdown on thought and reason? How did that whole blind fealty and silent ascent thing work out for them, and for the country?

When you're putting songs together, what comes first, the message, the lyrics, the melody or something else?

Used to be lyrics/message now it kind of varies with each song. I used to write a lot more story-songs, obviously because I was doing more countryish stuff, so the story, the tenor of the narrative, kind of dictated how the musical attack would shape up. But more recently, I can get germs of songs, like a central theme, and I'll sort of feel the vibe of how to convey that, then I write around that vibe. For example, I loved the idea of "Hey, Hitler!" as a smartass message that some of his ideas of primacy and innate lordship have survived well into our own culture; that idea bespoke a cutesy, disarmingly poppy song – it almost has to to mitigate the subject matter – so the idea bred the music, which eventually bred the lyrics. At the same time, I have this new song "Cry" whose melody I had in pocket for about a year until I had the kind of theme and subject that fit and really realized the music, and the lyrics flowed from there.

You've taken a left turn (literally and figuratively) with the Red Smear when compared to your Hangdogs days. What led to the decision to be more stridently political and to shed a bit of the alt-country twang of your old band?

Well, short answer is, I get angrier by the year, and the last six years, this cultural and political nadir the country has hit really have left me little to not be angrier and angrier about. Past that, to be kind giggly honest – and no offense to my old boys – I can do shit as the primary engine in the band without worrying about being second-guessed. The ’Dogs, while I was the primary voice and songwriter, was always a kind of democracy, guys had really strong wills and personalities, and while we all met spiritually in some big concentric circles, sentiment “X” in song “Y” might face of voice of temperance or moderation here or there. It's the same as any collective effort, more cooks are going to, if not spoil the soup, at least moderate the flavors that go into it. And for better or worse – and I know many people think for worse – I don't have those voices in my ear anymore.

These are my recipes, soup-through-nuts. My ideas go from gut to head to paper to guitar and the collective effort doesn't really start with the Smear until we get together as a band and arrange the songs, and even then, I'm writing more textures of songs in my head before that than I ever did with the ’Dogs. I hear parts as I write. I just wasn't that sophisticated a musician back then, at least not until the last Hangdogs record. So there's an aggregate there, I'm feeling more intemperate, writing more intemperate shit, untempered, and I'm also orchestrating the music more roundly to render those kinds of sentiments, and, as rendering such sentiments go, well, they just sound more like blazing guitars and fat bass and a snare like a spike through your head than they do sweet, heartfelt songs. There's a sweetness and a credulity to twang, to some of those old Hangdogs songs, that just isn't in me anymore.

You obviously enjoy a good war of words, encouraging people to respond to your web site missives. What kind of response do you get, and have you won any naysayers over to your side?

I don't get nearly enough responses as I'd like. I had a guy from Texas corresponding with my booking/promotion guy and he was one of these people who just couldn't understand how I'd gotten here from "Monopoly on the Blues" or whatever, and my guy writes back to him, all nice and customer-service-y, about how, yes, I was an intransigent crazy artist, go fig, and how we'd be happy to refund his money for Dawn's Early Apocalypse. Well, turned out the guy hadn't bought it. Heard some MP3s off the web site, read some of my ranting, and just decided, to try to recall it, that my "talent had crawled into a bottle with a copy of Lenin and died." Or something. His opinion, we posted it, I teed off, which I must admit is a guilty pleasure. And some other people wrote in, two of them conservatives no less, and rebutted that, agree or disagree with the politics, it was my best work to date. One of them like it because of the politics, because, wherever we do disagree about the world in general, okay, here's a story, a bit of poetry, that if done right can boil shit down to a kind of common denominator of human spirit and simple reason that even political opposites can agree on – see, I just did my job there. I created a little place where we can meet, for all my bad words and my rage (which by the way are just leverage points to get us there).

I had a nice conversation with this kid who was a Republican and in the service, a "compassionate conservative" he called himself, and he asked me about my obsession with class warfare. I explained to him my take, that for all the talk of compassion, conservatism had been hijacked by people who make little attempts to disguise very cold hearts, if even under the guise of Christian sentiments, and I stacked up some stats and even sentiments of prominent conservatives as to how, in fact, the basic lot of both middle and lower classes has been eroded for decades in the interest of the unrestrained license of business and unchallenged privilege of the wealthy, and we had a thoughtful dialogue and we're friendly now – he's back in Missouri and plays bass for a band we've played with.

See, once we're there, they don't have to come to my side -- they never have to come to my side, I'm not some doctrinaire ideologue – we've found the sweet spot of concentric circles to talk about shit.

Are there any other artists out there sticking up for what they believe in a way that you admire?

Green Day, as aforementioned. Anti-Flag, who were always a politicized band, have really found their voice in the last couple years, as have NOFX, who were always just sort of funny and iconoclastic. Springsteen, while I think his stuff has been a little spotty in recent years, has only been more politicized by recent events, and he's used his mainstream platform to be a kind of galvanizing voice, and to hell with all the flagwavers who never once in their lives understood what "Born in the USA" was about, and I respect the hell out of him for that. You want to know what "Born in the USA" is all about, assholes, read up on your Walter Reed scandal and that's it in a nutshell. And, y'know, I've liked the Drive-By Truckers for a while, but until recent years, I never really heard the kind of passionate blue-collar empathy that's characterized their work of late, and it's honestly made me pay much more attention and really made me a fan.

Humor is a big part of your music. How do you know when you got it right?

Christ, I don't think I ever know, dying's easy, comedy's hard. I think there are implicit juxtapositions in working in a medium that is routinely so overwrought and sort of having a post-structural mind, which is to say, I kind of tend to deconstruct everything and question implicit meaning. Which sometimes makes the humor the angel in the stone, y'know? I mean, it's like a priest schtupping a stripper; there's something inherently funny in the image, and that's going to be obvious when I write songs about politics or social circumstances in a country whose leaders and leading voices have so profoundly betrayed its promise.

"Hey, Hitler!" = disarmingly melodic Sixties jangle-pop, I might be being presumptuous on this, but that's just comedy that writes itself. "Nothing to Say" is a love song from the perspective of a guy who doesn't really believe in profound, timeless love anymore, to the point of self-destruction and preoccupation with shit he can't affect, which is obviously a very personal and subjective viewpoint, so it's pretty easy to enumerate all the ways I'm wrong. "Fuck Fuck Fuck" is a simplistic, visceral response to a world spinning into the abyss, "Kill the Poor" is a face-value call to certain ardent followers of a supposedly compassionate, tolerant, loving religion to just go ahead and do what they really want to do in contravention of that religion because they're not fucking fooling anyone – all these variances of thought/perception and action, of how just plainly stupid people (and me) can be, this stuff is pretty much there to be juxtaposed, I just figure out words to do it with and those become songs. Don't know if I got any of it "right" or not.

How is it different being based in Iowa as opposed to New York?

It's a much tighter community, obviously, in terms of knowing a lot of people in music, in terms of having good relationships with venues, but I think a lot more scattershot. We really have yet to build a regular draw here, and I'm not sure what to do anymore to do it, whereas, in NY, the market's big enough, scenes-via-specific-bars are so much better established, you can establish a sound and a place to some degree and, if you don't suck, people will find you. And I don't necessarily mean "scene" in a hipster way, just sort of, to use the term again, a nexus point of concentric circles. We've got, what, three regular music venues in town, and all have great merits to them, but there's no one punk rock bar, no one bar for rockabilly and Americana – there can't be, just wouldn't make sense to get in everything you need to get on a schedule – where sort of like-genred, if you will, people just congregate to look for shit they like, whomever might be playing that night. Corporate radio has screwed the culture to a great degree in terms of deconditioning kids from being active, seeking participants in programming their own music, so that has something to do with live-music venue erosion everywhere, but "scenes" like this, in bigger markets, can at least mitigate some of the damage, sort of being terrestrial grass-roots radio, as it were.

It's also much tougher to book yourself on national tours, I've discovered, when you say you're based in Iowa versus New York.

Labels: Monday Interview, music