Another thing you talked about with Jack Rabid—as far preparing for records—you spoke about going out and observing people. ….

… Most of the songs I came up with in the ’80s were just natural events on the streets of Portland. … I always naturally picked up things from people, and that’s where I got all my ideas—stories, basically—it was that way.
It wouldn’t even be from people I know; in fact most of the songs I’ve written weren’t from any situation or any person I personally knew, except for a few. And then starting ’89, 1990, like a dieing vortex or something, it slowly started closeing up.

It was getting harder and harder to get images from people, so I would spend more and more time looking. … I would use images I get from other people, as a barometer of the future.
It was like a third sense I was born with, but I used it musically, because that’s where you get the most intriguing emotions. … It’s hard to explain. It’s kind of the way I would come up with colors—that’s how I looked at it. I would pick up colors for songs, and colors I would translate to the tones.

Back to the History of Portland Punk, and the original “scene,” it seemed like it was created out of people who needed to be there, who had to find it because we didn’t fit in anywhere else. Do you have positive or negative memories of that time?

Definitely positive. The ’80s were a really important, powerful time in the Northwest. People were pioneering. … People were more open—that means they were more outward, now they’re kind of inward—and people were going forward, instead of backwards. There was a place to go, a direction to go … a force behind that, you know, an invisible force behind it. But it was the audience, too, because everyone was looking for … something creative.

Even if they weren’t expressing it musically, people were a lot more artistic in the ’80s, is my theory of it. And except for some of the people that are still at it from that period of time who understood it and got something from it and kept that alive inside themselves, there’s very little inspiration [now].  It used to be … there was an abundance of it, and that sea has dried up. But we’re basically in the opposite vortex of twenty years ago. … It’s just a power flux that comes and goes; it has positive and negative peaks.