Mean Jeans
The most punk rock thing you can do in 2018 is sell out. At least that’s what Portland punk band Mean Jeans thinks. Since forming over a decade ago, Mean Jeans has cemented a jocular sound in a similar vein as bands like Riverdales, The Queers, and other pop-punk stalwarts. On JINGLES COLLECTION, their brand new album on Fat Wreck Chords, Mean Jeans puts the comical jingle treatment on 23 brands ranging from Wendy’s to Hot Pockets. I talked to guitarist, Billy Jeans about the new record, his favorite Ramones songs, and the band he’d most like to see cover his own tunes.
There are 23 brands covered on this album. I’ve seen the public responses from Coors and Mountain Dew, but how many of the other companies know what you’re doing? What has been their response?
The project began fairly organically. The idea was to create a Mountain Dew jingle for fun. We decided to post it on the internet and encourage our followers to hit up Mountain Dew as a joke, but also as a fun experiment to see if we could get Mountain Dew to respond. Our followers’ responses were great. We were loving that and we wound up three days later being contacted by a marketing director who sent us forty cases of Mountain Dew and some t-shirts. To be completely honest, as soon as you have forty cases of Mountain Dew it becomes a burden because what the hell are you going to do with forty cases of Mountain Dew? We still have them. Even just deciding who has to hold onto the forty cases caused a rift between us. But regardless, the experiment was kind of successful. We were all totally satisfied with the results so I polled our followers and asked them what other brands they’d be interested in hearing a jingle about and we landed on Coors Light. So anyway, we kept going with this cycle. To be honest, we were just having so much fun writing jingles so we decided to make a bunch of them. The songs that we’ve “released” so far were sort of the beginning of the project. The rest of what’s on the album I guess you could call the “unreleased” songs.
How did Rain-X Wiper Blades and Kinkos end up as song subjects?
Well, it’s been brought to our attention since posting our tracklist that Kinkos no longer exists, and that Camel Light doesn’t exist either. We grew up making punk flyers at Kinkos. Rain-X Wiper Blades…well, we’ve got terrible wiper blades on our van and apparently, those are top-of-the-line so we had to show some love.
You recently posted a photo of a fan with a Kraft Mac and Cheese tattoo inspired by your jingle. Is that for real? How does that make you feel?
Well, I would have had to be at the tattoo shop to verify if it was a Mean Jeans fan getting that tattoo, so I can’t confirm it. But I would say that the more fun parts of being in a band are when people send you really stupid tattoos of your band. Surely there are thousands of bands whose fans have gotten more tattoos than those of Mean Jeans. We’re not that big. But the people who really do like Mean Jeans are…
Devoted?
No, I was going to say out of their minds (laughs). I’ve seen some silly ass tattoos over the years and I love that shit! Keep ‘em coming.
A lot of time passes between when an album is recorded and when it gets released. Do you get sick of hearing the songs by the time the album sees the light of day?
Always. The Jingles record came together remarkably fast. I’ll give Fat Wreck Chords credit for that. What I’ll say is this: Until five years ago or so, vinyl production all but died outside the punk community. There are so few vinyl facilities left that once someone like Taylor Swift releases her album on vinyl, she puts her order in, and if I own a record pressing plant, of course I’m going to say yes to that order. The plant truly has to make the records one by one. It’s this ridiculous, archaic process – which I’m a fan of as a record collector – but it pushes back the release schedule. As an artist, you’ve been waiting for your record to come out to see how people react, which can influence what you do next. Under the current timeline, you’ll be putting out a record once every three years. I remember reading something – maybe it was Michael Jackson’s Thriller or Bad – where the recording dates and the release dates were like two weeks apart. It was insane. That was such a more natural cycle on the artist side. Write a song, cut it, put it out. Now it’s write an album, record it, then write another album before anyone hears the first one.
You’re often compared to the Ramones. What is the best Ramones cover song you have ever heard?
I’ve done a bunch of interviews about the Jingles collection and I would say the primary question asked to me is why the fuck did you make a Jingles album? That’s a valid question. I can answer it in a number of ways. One element is – for someone like myself who has had a lifelong obsession with the Ramones – you go through phases of what the best Ramones record is, or what era you’re into. Casual Ramones fans like the first three or four records and those are all great. But then everything changes. The production changes. I’ll find myself convinced that some pretty bad albums like Brain Drain, Animal Boy, Acid Eaters – some late Ramones stuff that I originally thought was questionable – I’ll start to think those are the best albums they did. But then, if you really dig deep, you’ll find their 1995 Steel Reserve malt liquor jingles. They did three of them, which makes even less sense. My journey of Ramones appreciation has landed me on believing wholeheartedly that their 1995 Steel Reserve jingles are the peak of their catalog. That has been an inspiration for where Mean Jeans is at right now with the Jingles collection.
If a band were to cover a Mean Jeans song, what band would you most like to see do it?
That’s a tough question. You just mentioned Rancid. All of us grew up on Rancid, particularly Let’s Go and …And Out Come the Wolves. We listen to Wolves on the road all the time. There are so many songs on that album and they’re pretty much all the same chord progression so it’s kind of inexplicable how they’re all so good. If I could see Rancid from the Wolves era cover any Mean Jeans song, my life would be complete.
This doesn’t get talked about a lot but I see you guys have covered two Nirvana songs for tribute albums in the past?
All of us are definitely Nirvana fans. I assume pretty much everyone who likes rock music is. In both of those cases, it was a friend of ours who runs Robotic Empire Records who was putting together Nirvana tribute albums for Bleach and Nevermind. A lot of the contributing bands were actually people that we grew up with in northern Virginia. As background, all of us are actually from Arlington, Virginia. Our drummer and I started the band there and played one show and were kind of like “We need to get out of here if we’re going to do this band thing.” We’ve been in Portland the last ten years, so technically the band is from Portland, even though I now live in LA. I just moved here.
Why the move from Portland to LA?
Well, I was kind of bored of Portland. The winters are very dark and rainy and cold. I had an opportunity to sublet a place in [the Silver Lake neighborhood of LA] last year for a few months. I took that opportunity and it was totally awesome. It turns out that bouncing back and forth between Portland and LA is pretty easy. It doesn’t cost that much. I live in a house in LA that doesn’t cost that much and I was living in a house in Portland with some people that cost too much. I was just looking for some adventure.
In many ways, I feel that there is an exodus of people going from LA to Portland given how crazy expensive it’s become to live in LA. People are flocking…
Definitely. I still have a lot of love for Portland but when we moved there eleven years ago there were no real goals. It was like “Let’s do this rock and roll band.” We didn’t know anybody. It was kind of the perfect place for our needs at the time. It was a good community, a lot of low brow punk bands, and everything was cheap as fuck. We sort of lived in what would now be considered the “desirable neighborhoods.” It didn’t even occur to me that we were getting a great deal. As all things change, it’s really grown a lot and become developed. I’m not grumpy that it’s not the way it was, but it’s more that ten years ago it was perfect for me.
Do you guys surf now that you’re in California?
No, but I’m new to LA so someone give me a surfboard. I’m ready to go! My buddy was surfing yesterday and said he saw a six-foot shark jump out of the water. So, the shark’s out…just saying.
For tour dates, visit here.
