“I mean, dude, being in punk was an identity.” –John Reis

Cover by Eric Baskauskas
Cover photo by Mari Tamura

John Reis interview by Todd Taylor and Jim Ruland. Intro by Todd.

When thinking about putting together the 150^th issue of Razorcake, I wanted it to be special to me. Let me underscore that RZC remains a fanzine, and, because I’m a co-founder and have been co-editor the entire run, I wanted this to be a statement of both my fandom and a celebration of a creative life. To interview someone I’ve been influenced by/admired for our entire twenty-five year run. Longer, even. An artist who never stopped creating new works. A lifer. A fellow traveler down the long, often cruel, memory-challenged, winding road of punk. Someone who we hadn’t, technically, interviewed before in print. Razorcake had interviewed the Hot Snakes in 2004, but I didn’t conduct the interview and John “Speedo” Reis was one of four members talking. I knew there was far more to his story. Let’s back up before we go forward.

1993: Flagstaff, Ariz. A young punk buys a five-dollar used CD. It’s Rocket From The Crypt’s Circa: Now! He’s so moved that he writes the title of a song, “Killy Kill,” in Wite-Out on the side of his shoes, partially to show how punk he is. He writes to Speedo’s Army. Someone in the band makes sure he’s on the “buy ticket” list, so the five-hour roundtrip to see their show in Phoenix doesn’t end with the young punk in the parking lot, listening to the band, horns muted by the concrete brick walls. It’s a small gesture—the band writing him back, making sure he can get into the show—but one he never forgets. That young punk is me. Several years later, Jim Ruland becomes my roommate. We listen to the fuck out of RFTC.

1990-2025: John Reis records, by his estimation, around 1,000 songs. Twenty-five albums, give or take. Drive Like Jehu and RFTC release multiple records in tandem. The list of bands he’s been in sounds like my ultimate “Recommended If You Like” list: Pitchfork, Hot Snakes, Back Off Cupids, Night Marchers, Sultans, Plosives—all the way up to his current project, Swami And the Bed Of Nails. And you know what? I recommend it all. Sure, I have favorites, but we’ve all got different tastes. I don’t skip any of it. All of it is so far away from being shit; that’s an incredible feat on its own. I know this may be a stretch, but I regard John Reis as the Huell Howser of San Diego punk. (It’s worth looking up the reference if you don’t know Huell, especially his interview with The Clash.) John should be mayor-in-perpetuity of that city. He’s a cultural institution.2025: I pulled my wife’s and my John Reis records out of our collection—including CDs, vinyl EPs, LPs, and 7”s. The stack is over 12” high.  I listened to everything—some on repeat, once again—while I researched John’s musical life. Brevity is not my strong suit when I get excited and involved in a project. I researched for two months, collected a novella’s worth of information. 123 pages were distilled down to seven pages of questions, and I was faced with a dilemma. “How do I jam such a rich musical life into so few pages?” So I approached this one a bit differently and told myself, “Treat this interview like a mini-book history of a musician. Start at the beginning, end with what he’s doing today, and see how it goes.”

With that as the framing, here’s Part I of our first full-length interview with John Reis, conducted in San Diego in the Swami Grotto adjacent to John’s house and recording studio.

Tsubasa Muratani (Funhouse, Rough Kids, Psychoactive, The Sacred) interview by Martin Wong

At the Metro station in L.A.’s Little Tokyo, there’s a display dedicated to the Atomic Café, a first-wave punk hangout where friends and bands like the Screamers, Plugz, Go-Go’s, and X gathered after shows at the nearby Hong Kong Café and Vex. It’s cool to remember and celebrate scenes and spaces of the past, but what about today? There are more rad punk bands than ever, and now there’s a spiritual descendant of the Atomic Café right around the corner from the demolished spot. 

Funhouse feels more like a practice room than a J-Town eatery, with primo punk flyers (Dils, Germs, Black Flag), posters (Iggy, Joan Jett, Damned), and clippings (Alice Bag, New York Dolls) all over the walls. When I learned that my friend Tsubasa from Rough Kids—one of my favorite bands that’s somewhat on hiatus—was opening a punk Japanese izakaya restaurant, I had to pay a visit, as well as find out more about his two new groups, Psychoactive and The Sacred, which feature pals from Rough Kids, Stormhouse, Maniac, Crocodiles, and more.

Every age can be a Golden Age—we just have to realize it.

Lxs Cochinxs Interview by Iván Salinas

Cumbia Has Always Been Punk

From their very first show, Lxs Cochinxs (pronounced Les Cochines) have built a sound and identity rooted in rebellion that we can dance to. An invitation to awaken the revolution within us and dance hardcore cumbias over the graves of colonizers. The trans-lesbian duo, made up of Matías “Carla” and Elí “Mariquita,” has quickly become a force in Los Angeles’s underground scene, performing what they call cumbia cochina at mutual aid events, bars and even on the streets of Downtown L.A. during protests outside the Twin Towers detention center.

In a caldo de sonido rooted in community building and united against all things fascist, Lxs Cochinxs blend Latinoamerica’s rhythms of cumbia, chicha, merengue, punk and rave beats. Dance floors of Detroit with the classic requintos of boleros and psychedelic Peruvian chicha echo through Carla Cabrona’s cathartic performance as Maruiquita swings over the drum machines. Both of them bring unique flavors influenced by their ancestral roots and the music their friends and family have shown them over the years. Lxs Cochinxs are guided by what makes you dance your ass off and kill the colonizer in you through the power of groovy guitarrazos. 

When I spoke with Lxs Cochinxs over a video call in the summer of 2025, they were preparing for one of their biggest shows yet: a free concert at the Levitt Pavilion in MacArthur Park. The show almost didn’t happen due to a string of ICE raids in the neighborhood, but the organizers persisted. Many ska-heads await some of the best shows to see their favorite bands––The Paranoias, Pobreska––but even bands all the way from Mexico City like Inspector have created giant mosh pits in the smoggy neighborhood of Westlake. On Aug. 16, Lxs Cochinxs opened for La Resistencia in what became one of the most electrifying performances of the summer.

We talked about these early days of Lxs Cochinxs and their Bowie-inspired transmythical origins, Latin American influences of chicha and reggaeton, Brazilian guitar players, and the exciting mix of drum machines and loopers they use on stage.

As Matías and Elí note, their sound is raw, punk and unfiltered, but it doesn’t always fit comfortably into mainstream categories––not to mention that punk is very much a cis-male-dominated scene on stage and in the pit. Each new listener who fucks with Lxs Cochinxs’s sound is a win they carry into their next gig.

While the U.S. experiences a narcissistic “golpe de estado” reminiscent of the military coups they funded throughout Latin America, Lxs Cochinxs are here to lure you into their sapphic cult where tongues know no gender and no beats belong to filthy labels.

Twisted Teens Interview by Billups Allen

Steel Your Face Off: New Orleans’s Twisted Teens have a big year.

I was not present the first time the Twisted Teens came into Goner Records in Memphis, Tenn. where I work. They dropped off their debut self-titled record after playing The Lamplighter, a local bar where you can put on a good punk show that could be poorly attended. My co-worker mentioned the album as something I’d like. It only took two songs before I was hooked. The LP felt like a new angle in a transom of roots-inspired garage rock. The first song, “Twisted Teen,” opens with a bit of bravado. Vocals, drums, guitar, and bass erupt into a solid punk riff racing alongside the melodic warble of a steel guitar. The lyrics are framed by chaotic melody. It’s the type of symbiosis that feels like it could dissolve at any moment. The lyrics arrive more from the howl of punk than the barrage. “Now it’s time to be a bully, bully, bully/ before they grind you down.” The song ends on a raucous chant of “twisted teen” accompanied by hand clapping and topped off with an unexpected flash of an abruptly ended guitar solo. It’s a powerful sound that might have been recorded on a potter’s wheel. The second song, “Marionette,” could have been written for Exile on Main Street. Steel guitar slowly matches the melody of the vocals framed with simple rock riffs. It only took two songs to show the band moving in and out of speed variants gracefully. 

They played Memphis again as a five-piece at Gonerfest 22. The singer met up with me after their set. He’s an impressively tall man who can pull off wearing a hat slightly cocked to the side and looks like he might have at one time tended a gas station in a Robert Williams painting. He tells me he’s got to find R.J., and then we’ll talk. I tell him I’ll wait for him and point to a bench. He passes by me once. Then twice, going the other way. Then a third time, drinking with someone. I was beginning to think he forgot about me when he arrived with R.J. The three of us walk away from the bedlam of the fest to talk in an empty lot nearby. On the way, we talk a little.

Travis Millard Interview by John Miskelly

To sustain a career in any artistic endeavor in the world today takes a certain amount of adaptability, diversity of medium, a whole heap of prolificity, and, a fair chunk of right-place-right-time luck. Travis Millard’s dizzyingly varied portfolio of work is a testament to all of these attributes. He’s the artist behind the cover art for the breakout Get Up Kids album Something to Write Home About, Dinosaur Jr.’s 2012 I Bet on Sky, a Chocolate Skateboards deck series, a Lakai skate shoe, a lifetime’s worth of zines, a playbook and soundtrack art for an auteur director, a video game collaboration with rapper Aesop Rock, and “a shitload” of doggy portraits.

Travis’s drawings are often surrealist and playfully gory. They’re funny and weird but tinged with underlying sadness and a sense of overwhelming fatigue with a world gone off the rails. There’s no zine long enough to explore all of Travis’s many projects and collaborations over the years. What we did touch on, though, is his zine, his band-based roots in the Kansas City underground, how artists might (or might not) address the current political hellscape, his protracted battle with mental health issues, and how he accidentally became one of America’s leading pet portraitists.

What I hope most comes across from this conversation, apart from his warm and chatty openness, is Travis’s still-effervescent enthusiasm and commitment to his field, a guy who still “just draws all day,” just as he did as a teenager long before any sniff of professional accomplishment came his way.

The Politics of Metadata By Davida G. Breier

I’m going to preface this article with a few disclaimers. The first is that this article is meant to explain how a few invisible data structures work and how they can be used/misused. I recognize how fucking boring that sounds, but go with me for a couple thousand words. The second is that I’m not an expert. There are several interconnected areas of study (rabbit holes to follow) and as technology changes, it’s impossible to know and understand everything. What I have to offer is experience and observation. I hope to help reveal some largely hidden infrastructures and draw connections. The current political climate in the U.S. (translation: there are fascists in charge) has greatly altered my thinking over the last ten years and I’m deeply concerned that we’re entering a new era of censorship and suppression.

I’ve worked in and around publishing for about the last thirty years. I was selling books before Amazon was formed in 1994. Unfortunately, Amazon is relevant to this article because they’ve dominated changes to the book industry and that was intentional from the start. In 1997, Amazon’s evil billionaire founder Jeff Bezos explained why he chose to sell books: “There are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category, by far. Music is No. 2—there are about 200,000 active music CDs at any given time. But in the book space, there are over 3 million different books worldwide active in print at any given time across all languages, [and] more than 1.5 million in English alone.”^[i] Books are cheap to mail and relatively unbreakable. Bezos also wanted to harvest data about the kind of people who bought books. If colanders or light bulbs had met the same criteria, those industries and consumers would have been targeted.

What appealed to Bezos about books was their richness in descriptive metadata, or data about data, and how that could be used to build a searchable online store. Making books discoverable can be a noble idea, but it can also be weaponized.


“I would wager more people than ever are not okay.” –Donna Ramone (instagram)

“Our passion for punk rock is expressed through our values and ideals.” –Jim Ruland (instagram)

“I feel something which I can only describe as my soul sliding out of my ass.”–Lorde Destroyer

“When we dedicate ourselves, when we trust ourselves, and when we do it ourselves, we can make great things happen.” –Sean Carswell (instagram)

“My devotion to the Ramones back catalogue knows no bounds.”–Rev. Nørb (instagram)

“Quick reminder to anyone partaking in piñata activities: If the blindfolded person swinging the stick gets too close to you, simply get the fuck outta the way.” –Designated Dale

“Grossest National Product.” –Art Fuentes (instagram)

“There are still pleasures in this world which cannot be reduced to a complex matrix of ones and zeros.” –Rhythm Chicken (instagram)

“The little birds were going to do it—they were going to scare the big one off. ‘They’re going to win,’ I whispered to no one.”” –Bianca

And photos from the lovely and talented:

Chris Boarts Larson

Mari Tamura

Albert Licano

This issue is dedicated to the memories of  “Naked Rob” Gongora, Geoffrey Clayton Ferrall, and cats Wallace and Dr. Indiana Jones