Tom DeLaney
of  Tragic Plastic

photo by Andy King, 2004

August 29th, 2003- In the Madcap Studio

Tom: I was in Little 5 today, with my CD’s out talking to a couple of people, and I know these people, and I don’t know who I had to sell my soul to to be able to talk to these people because they’re fucking crazy. Somehow I am. Is this the Doors first album you’re playing? Or is this a greatest hits?

LK: It’s from a boxed set.

Tom: Is this a collection?

LK: Yeah, this CD is called “Band Favorites.” Live footage, outtakes, b-sides…

Tom: Do you have any films of them? Live in Europe?

LK: Some clips.

Tom: Clips? It’s probably what I’ve seen on Classic VH1. Where they show a compilation of clips, and it shows Jim being arrested. I’ve been doing a lot of listening to them lately. I just got “Waiting For the Sun” and I have that and a Very Best of the Doors remastered. I’d like to get some more, but I’ve been broke. I think I can get some at the library, you know? But I’ve been going through a deep Doors phase. Oh, I got “The Illustrated History of The Doors,” that book, and it’s got all of their press compiled, and it is good. Have you seen it? Do you have it? You can borrow it if you want.

LK: It’s fantastic. That’s a cool idea. To compile press like that.

Tom: It is. For me it’s just interesting to read about The Doors as they were viewed in their own time. Because now when you read about them, it’s just “They were pre-punk” and “He’s a corny Rimbaud” and I just don’t understand. They just see it as a stepping stone to the greater things that came later. But I think that’s a bunch of crap, you know? They are their own thing. I’m just not into all music before Punk being like, “It was Pre-Punk, It was almost good!” I hate that. “It’s where Metal came from!” Well, that Live in Europe video is pretty ridiculous. They play “Spanish Caravan” and all this shit live, and Robbie just plays the whole Flamenco thing on the SG and it sounds flawless, and Jim is really the one freaking out the whole time. They are just solid you know, it works well.

LK: Talk about some of the music you heard very early on that inspired you to want to play.

Tom: When I think about the earliest music that I remember…first I remember practicing Cello. Bach and Suzuki, and learning little tunes, the kind of things that little kids would learn. I remember in elementary school, doing a talent thing with the song “Wipeout” and in the guitar solo I would drop to my knees and do air guitar, and we perform this for all the kids in fourth grade, the different classrooms, and that was a moment of glory for my elementary school years.

The next memory I have, I was still in elementary school, and my older brother Tim gives me some money to go buy this record with Mom at the local K-Mart, and he was like, “Okay man. Here’s some money. Get it…The cover is all black. It’s just all black.” So, I went and got it, and it was “Shout at the Devil” by Motley Crue. I remember getting that, and being real freaked out at the whole intro, you know, as a kid. But Tim was getting into The Crue you know. I also remember me and my friend hated U2. Tim was really into U2, and all of his friends, and we were the younger kids so we were like, “No. We hate U2.” We’re just going to listen to roller skate music. And then one day in fifth grade we listened to “Bullet The Blue Sky” and we were like, “Whoa. Bono.” All of a sudden we became huge U2 fans. I know that I watched “Rattle and Hum” a lot of times. It’s funny because now, I talk to people my brothers age, and they are like, “Rattle and Hum is like, the low point for U2. I really hated that that came out, because I really liked U2. But all I remember as a kid is like freaking out at Rattle and Hum and watching it all the time. Me and my friends would draw a lot, and I won second place in the North Florida fair because I drew this guy, and it was called “The Rattle and Hum Effect” because it was this guy who was kind of a silhouette with lighting on the edges of his body. It was real film noir, and I had got that idea from the film. I guess I liked the lighting in it. I saw some of it the other day, and I though the live footage was pretty amazing in it.

I saw this Who concert from the eighties that I rented from the library, and it looked terrible. Musically it didn’t do much for me, but the filming of it…I didn’t know that rock concerts could be filmed the wrong way. That was.

LK: Talk about your experience drawing and painting.

Tom: The drawing all started when I was a kid. I would look at comic books, and I was just kind of a hyper kid, and I wanted to play football, and when I looked at comics I didn’t want to read words, I wasn’t patient enough. So I would just look at the pictures. Eventually we would just start drawing comics, and I started drawing a lot. My childhood was spent watching MTV and drawing in front of the T.V. Freaking out over different comic book artists. When Elektra Assasin came out in sixth grade, just freaking out over Bill Sienkiewicz. I’d try to draw noses the exact same way that he would, I had no idea to just try to draw a nose from real life. No way. You just draw it exactly the way Bill Sienkiewicz draws it from different angles. That really got me into art. Reading comic books. There’s a weird thing about The Watchmen. That was huge for me. But the fucked up thing was, I’d go over to my friends house, and we’d both me reading comics, and he had recently gotten George Michael’s “Faith” album, the one with “I Want Your Sex”, and that was huge when that came on because I was living MTV, and that song was great because I never knew what monogamy was, and I never figured it out, but it sounded heavy.

So when I think of The Watchmen, I think of George Michael’s “Faith” album, because we listened to it over and over while we read The Watchmen. And that’s a pretty fucked up combination.

V for Vendetta is a favorite of mine. That was a high point for Alan Moore. In some ways the art in V for Vendetta is more stylish in a neat way. I’m not sure if there is a character in The Watchmen that is as cool as V for Vendetta. V was really potent.

In tenth grade, I read “The Fountainhead” and “It Happened in Boston” by Russell H. Greenan, which is about a painter that goes insane. I decided I was going to start painting. I drew comics, and when I read The Fountainhead I decided I was like, one of the all time greatest painters in the world, and I was going to be, and I was going to oil paint like Michelangelo, or Leonardo Da Vinci, like an idiot, so I decided to start oil painting. One of my first paintings was a painting of the cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Stages 69 album, the compilation Stages and the ‘69 concert there is a picture of him on the cover, and I painted that over a long period of time. I embellished on it. That painting took me a long time. I wanted to make to so perfect in some sort of Ayn Rand way that it had to take months. I also did this other one, called “Holy Afro” which was this black guy with an Afro and a halo around it. And it was because I was listening to a lot of James Brown, and Sly.

LK: So talk about Tragic Plastic.

Tom: Off the cuff I asked this girl Kim Hoeckele, if she had any ideas for a band name, and she was like, I read this essay today that had this word that I thought would be a good band name, and it was “Tragic Plastic.” And I was like, I don’t know that word has four syllables and what we need it three syllables, like “The Beatles,” and “Led Zeppelin,” “Van Halen”… you’ve got to have three syllables. It was from an essay by Piet Mondrian. So I found the essay in a book store, and it’s kind of hard to understand what Piet Mondrian was saying. The whole language of his essays is steeped in some kind of philosophical code, if not some kind of theosophical language. I haven’t studied Theosophy, which he was all about, but I got that the main gist that the Tragic Plastic is about the human condition. It’s about the tragedy that’s a part of human existence given plastic expression. The tragedy is the violence and the abuse that is hand in hand with the human condition. I really liked that. It’s a study of the human condition which is what I’m the most interested in.

LK: Talk about these words. Slow Fear.

Tom: Like a crawling king snake and some very dark Doors music. Which we are listening to right now. Like Riders on the Storm. And L.A. Woman. That would be a slow fear. A fast fear would be like Break on Through and The End. Even though it starts out slow, it’s a little more high energy than the last album, which was the Slow Fear.

LK: Black Feather Limbo.

Tom: Black Feather Limbo, I’m thinking of Black Velvet paintings, I saw one at the 40 Watt last night and it was a portrait of Prince. I had an assignment in college in an art class to do a black velvet drawing. I can’t remember what I drew on it. Elvis and black velvet for some reason go real good together for some reason.

LK: Mermaid and Pharaoh.

Tom: I’m thinking of “Lucifer Rising” by Kenneth Anger. That doesn’t have any Mermaids in it. Mermaid makes me think of this girl that I work with. But Pharaoh’s makes me think vividly of Lucifer Rising and that narrative that was going on in it. I’m not really sure what it was about yet. I haven’t studied the works of Aliester Crowley yet,

But somehow he took the concepts of Egyptian alien spirituality which is real flakey to me, but it was in the heyday of psychedelia, but that was a fucking great film. He made it work. That’s an amazing achievement to me. That is wasn’t just some corny shit that we would just laugh at now.