#99: The Audit with Ean Sicko

Talking Sicko, Tales from the Birdbath, Date Night With Brian, the Subjunctives, and...Michael Moore?

Ean pushing the product.

As a music fan and person who’s been interviewing bands for, oy, 30+ years, I always appreciate a lifer. Specifically, I love the folks who have been playing music forever because they love it, even when it’s not paying their bills or making them famous. Coming up in the punk scene, particularly the doctrinaire ’90s one that went overboard in its suspicion of success, I couldn’t help but prefer the bands who played cheap shows and hung out by their merch table afterward.

That’s how I met Ean Hernandez, a.k.a. Ean Sicko, way back in 1996. I’d started a zine in college and wanted to interview his band, Sicko. They were one of the best pop-punk bands of the era—which is saying something, because there were about 5 million of them. They released several stone-cold classics, particularly 1994’s You Can Feel the Love in This Room and their two 1995 albums, Laugh While You Can Monkey Boy and Chef Boy R U Dum, before disbanding toward the end of the decade.

But because Ean’s a lifer, more bands followed. That made him the perfect person to chat with for my new BNB interview format, the Audit. The idea is to hear the stories behind the names in a person’s bandography.¹ The timing was right, because the fest Ean books, the Seattle Pop Punk Festival, is coming up March 20-22, and Sicko and his newer band, the Subjunctives, are playing.

This has been edited for clarity and length blah blah blah.

Various, 1985-1991

Ean Sicko: I was in a hippie-ish folk-rock band that had sort of Dinosaur Jr. aspirations, which made sense at the time. We stole a lyric from one of Dinosaur Jr.’s songs where he says, “hard to think what’s over me.” We took What’s Over Me and made that the band name. Then the first band I played in with Denny [Bartlett, Sicko guitarist/bassist/vocalist] was at WSU.² We decided to make a funny joke cover band, and so we called ourselves the Pullman All Stars, which is probably 80% sarcasm—it’s not really an all-star kind of place. Then when I moved to Seattle, I started a band with one of my other college buddies and a fella named Johnny Ray, who was in Old Man and then was in Sicko when Josh [Rubin, drummer] took a break. He was a good friend of mine, and we named that band, so regrettably, Pop Smear. [Laughs.] I think thematically, it was a smear of sort of loud, noisy pop music, slower than the stuff that Sicko did—more kind of that Dinosaur Jr.-type of artsy rock.

Sicko, 1991-1998, 2018-present

ES: We had a gig at a party up the street from where we were practicing, and we had to figure out the name for the band. I’d been in so many bands at this point, all of which never recorded anything that got made into a record anyway, and none of ’em had even lasted a year. We were just like, “We need a name.” “I don’t know.” “Well, we have to tell ’em something.”

We had this friend Kathy, who was just a very funny, intelligent person, very sarcastic. She’s one of the Pullman arty, music-type people. Kathy, for one summer, had just gone around calling everybody a sicko. She'd say, “Hey, how's it going, Ean?” I’d go, “Hey, Kathy, how are you?” She’d go, “Sicko!” Just like super inappropriately. Nobody's being a sicko at all. We were all very nice, clean kids. But that was her joke for the summer, and I don't think she did it much longer than that. We thought that was funny because we were so preppy. It was kind of dirtbag Seattle [at that time]—things were becoming big with the grunge bands and lots of heroin. So we thought it was funny and antithetical. We called ourselves Sicko, and I think I regretted it almost immediately. [Laughs.] I suggested it, Denny was like, “Fine,” Josh didn’t care.

I’m fucking Ean Sicko 35 years later. I don't really like being Ean Sicko. I’d rather be Ean Lawnmower or Ean Doorbell or something, but not Sicko. I’m not a sicko. My grandmother was like, “I don’t know why you would do this.” [Laughs.]

Picking a good band name is very difficult. I’m sure you have observed that one-word band names were common in the ’90s. If we get into some of the other bands I've been in, they get longer, more abstract. Well, particularly in the age of social media and where things have to be singular—you don't want to be one of 20 bands named Overkill. That's not going to work because which Overkill? Especially when someone's trying to add you to something and you're a little tiny logo, or people are trying to find you.

We're very lucky in the sense that Josh had the prescience in 1995 or something when no one was on the web—it was a silly toy for kids at universities in computer-science departments—so we got sicko.com. You’d pay a lot of money for that today. People have tried to get it from us, including Michael Moore.

That's a whole story. They contacted us when that movie was coming out. I was at Oxford getting my MBA, and I was doing a negotiation class. I wrote my negotiation class term paper on that negotiation. I actually fucked up that negotiation. [Laughs.] But that paper's been found by professors and people on the internet, and they’ve said, “Oh, can I use this in my class?” So it’s actually made it into some, I don’t know, loose academic settings just from having that stupid domain.

Tales From the Birdbath, 1998-present

ES: I've always loved twee, and I wanted to do a twee band, but I also had this idea to combine it with shoegaze, which is probably a mistake. I was dating this girl named Rebecca, now my wife. We had walked past this pet shop on Capitol Hill, which is where we were living in Seattle, and she said, “Oh, look at all the budgies.” I said, “That is not a word. You just made that up.” Her grandmother and dad are English, so those are actually words—“budgerigar” is a term for a parakeet, and they call ’em “budgie” for short.

The next time I saw her, she says, “Well, hello, Ean budgie budgie.” [Laughs.] And I was like, “Oh boy, here we go.” It became this thing we were calling each other. We call each other “budge.”

She used to live in this apartment where she had a clawfoot tub, and she would get up to take a shower. Then she'd say, “Oh, it's time for you to come take your shower now because I’m done.” So she would yell, “Budgie, it's time for your birdbath.”

I was trying to come up with an arty name. I wanted it to not be like Sicko. I wanted it to be more artsy and sort of fey and twee and long kind of abstract. And so Tales From the Birdbath was born.

We've made a bunch of records and CDs, and we still play a couple of times a year. That band is really just about me and my wife. There have been various people in and out of the band over the years, but at the current time, it's just her and me. The songs are mostly about each other and jokes that we have and stuff.

Date Night With Brian, 2015-2018

Band Name Bureau: You wanted a twee band, but Rebecca eventually rebelled against what she called “that pussy meow-meow birdbath cardigan-sweater shit.”

ES: Yeah. Well, she plays in a band, probably less well-known in our circles, called the Cripples, which is like an electro-punk band. I call it “scary robot rock.” So yeah, she thinks that my music is a little bit too cutesy. I think she calls it “meow meow pussy rock” or something like that. I mean, she's not really such a hard shell of a person as that sounds. She's actually a very sweet and sentimental person, but she does take a relatively dim view of pop punk.

So the next band was called Date Night with Brian. I'm sure you can see where this is going. So Reba³ and I were starting a band, and she said, “We're not doing any more of this meow meow pussy shit.” We recruited our friend Brian from a band called the Primate Five, which actually had been the Tales From the Birdbath backup band at one point.

This time, I had the idea of a cross between Sonic Youth and Guided by Voices with maybe a little bit of REM in there. There's this really neat thing called the Sonic Youth Online Guitar Archive, which is like every guitar with every tuning they ever played. Boy, if you want to have a song that sounds just like Sonic Youth, do those tunings, and you sound like Sonic Youth now. It’s pretty cool. Anyway, I had a lot of fun with that—bought some Jazzmasters and started this band. Again, I wanted to be arty, so there was no bass. It was just two guitars and drums, and I think that met Reba's criteria for not being too basic.

We were coming up to a gig and there was this question of, “What are we going to name it?” We didn't have the answer. She and I were driving back from band practice one night, and at this point we had two young kids, so getting out was not trivial. We were driving back, and we were chatting about whatever. I go, “This is great. This is our date night.” And she goes, “But it's with Brian.” And I thought, “That's a great name for this band! Date Night with Brian. That's hilarious!” That is how that landed. Brian thought it was funny.

And then ironically, it wasn't really working, and I finally said, “Brian, that's it. I've had it.” I kicked him out. Then we were sort of in the position of, “Well, now we have a band named after one of the members of the band. What do you do, set up an ad saying ‘Your name must be Brian?’” So that band went on ice.

The Subjunctives, 2018-present

ES: It was around the time that I realized there was this whole nth wave of pop punk going on in Seattle, focusing around at a place called the Kraken.

I was really taken with this idea that I wanted to do a pop-punk band, and Reba was like, “No way.”

So I just put out some ads, and I started finding people to play with. Johnny Ray came and played with for a while, who had been the drummer for a while in Sicko and also had been in Pop Smear. We were coming up to a gig and we needed to have a name again, that old story.

I had seen this funny bit online where some drummer was making fun of different drumming styles. One was heavy thud, doom monster, another one was bluesy or whatever, then one genre was “sunshine and rainbows.” I thought, “That is the funniest name. I am naming my band Sunshine and Rainbows.”

It was two things. One, John was like, “Well, that is a very Ean name for something.” And then on the other hand, I did feel that this generation of punk, the more Gen Y people, they’re a lot more PC, a lot more inclusive, a lot more LGBTQIA, a lot more female-inclusive. This is a different world—and just for the record, and I've said this many times, it's a much better world than what we had in the ’90s. But I was like, “You guys are all a little sensitive, though.” A dirty joke on stage would bomb and all that—and this is from clean-cut Sicko! [Laughs.] So I thought, “Oh, sunshine and rainbows. Don't worry. It'll be okay. It'll be a safe space for you.”

But we had this fella, Matt Coleman, great friend of mine and a great drummer that was on the Sunshine and Rainbows record, plus the dogs one⁴ before that. He's from upstate New York from some tiny town, and his vibe is maybe not so twee, not so coastal lefty. He was like, “No fucking way.” [Laughs.]

I was like, “Come on, Matt, it’s going to be great.” He's like, “Bro, no.” So [sunshine and rainbows] ended up being the album title, because I was like, “I’m not letting go of that name!”

I was looking into how I could find a name that would work. At the time I was working for this company, it was international. I was managing it for four countries in Latin America. One of [my] benefits was I could speak Spanish, and I could go down there and talk to people.

One of the things that you learn about Spanish is there's an official verb—they don't call it a tense, but it's a conjugation just like the future, the past, the preterite, all these things. They have one called the subjunctive, which working in Latin America is very funny, because it's a hard place to get things done. This whole concept of mañana looms in your daily work life. It's particularly challenging for North Americans and Northern Europeans to work in that work context because we have really different priorities and business styles. Anyway, I found it hilarious that there was a whole verb conjugation dedicated to things that might happen. [Laughs.]

The Subjunctives [as a name] came across as slightly intellectual, slightly unclear, not taken by anybody else, short enough to be “the something”—that was the new thing. We weren't doing one-word things, we weren't doing long strings of names, now we're doing “the somethings.”

So it just was right for me at that moment. And Matt was sort of like, “I don't know what that means. That sounds fine.” So I got it past the band. I don't necessarily know if that's the best name. It's less implicative in a direct way than Sicko.

One thing I really like is occasionally you'll get these people who are clearly literature people or language people. [English doesn’t] really have a formal way of conjugating for the subjunctive—we talk to the subjunctive: “if only” all that kind of stuff. It's not as formally chopped up like it is in the romance languages. So I do get people saying, “You shouldn't have named [the Subjunctives album] Let’s Try This Again. You should have named it If We Were to Try This Again. [Laughs.] There's a fair number of linguistic jokes, and I love those guys. It makes my day when some smart person sees our thing and gets a chuckle out of it.

BNB: Let me ask you what I always ask people in these interviews, and you’re a great person for this: Do you think it's better to have a bad name that's memorable or a name that doesn't make waves and just is there?

ES: I really think that the latter is better. The example I always give is Van Halen. When they first came out, people said, “Is this a shirt?” Because there’s a shirt company called Van Heusen. They make Oxford shirts and polos and stuff, and people were like, “What in the hell is your problem? What is this about?” But Van Halen, because of the art, took over the name.

You can let the art tell people what it is instead of sort of wrestling with the implication of the words that you put for the name. I don't think people think of Sicko as a gross name. Now they think of it as the fun pop-punk band. So I think that happens in either case.

Although I would say this: When you're first starting, if you have a name that is implicative of the tone in an obvious way, then that will connect with people more quickly. So Tiger Trap, that's just like, “Oh, isn't that cute? I bet I’ll like that.” And I did. I mean, how cute is that? You're not surprised that that band sounds like this music, I guess. But then that becomes a trap, so I think, in a way, they're both true.

But having had my experience with Sicko, I would rather have a name that can be a little bit more generic, and then we can build the character out of the music, instead of always explaining why we're not sickos. [Laughs.]

POST-SCRIPTS

• Publishing this on 2/28 still counts as February! Sorry, this issue is unconscionably late. It’s so late, in fact, that I’d planned this interview as a bonus issue for March, but realized I’d need to get it out sooner in time for the Seattle Pop Punk Festival. My apologies. Work has been devouring my BNB time the past few weeks.

My to-do list. Nailed it!

• You can read the Sicko interview from my zine here. I was pleasantly surprised how little I cringed revisiting it. FUN FACT: I was profoundly hungover when I interviewed them. Young Mr. Ryan went a little too hard for his 20th birthday.

• I didn’t include the solid 10 minutes Ean and I spent talking about our mutual hero, Lance Hahn of J Church. Anyone who knows me knows how much I love J Church—searching Google for “j church site:avclub.com” brings back a lot of results, all of them by me, with a couple exceptions. In case I weren’t already predisposed to liking the Subjunctives, the song “It’s a Shame We Didn’t Get More Time, Lance” (video above) would’ve sealed the deal. Ean may have my superfandom beat, though: He has a tattoo for Cringer, Lance’s band before J Church. Respect.

1. This isn’t a word, but let’s make it one.

2. Washington State University in Pullman, Washington.

3. That’s Rebecca’s nickname.

4. The Subjunctives’ self-titled EP with dogs on the cover: