Joshua Mohr came of age playing music in the East Bay Punk scene and has subsequently been an author and screenwriter for a number of years, publishing both fiction and his own memoir, Model Citizen. Now, he’s embarking on an ambitious project where a trilogy of books will be released over the course of a year, totaling about 1,000 pages, and accompanying Punk music will also be released. The first book, titled Saint the Terrifying, is arriving from Unnamed Press on October 22nd, and its accompanying EP will arrive on vinyl at the same time, titled The Wrong Side.
The book series turns on a central Punk protagonist with Viking roots called Saint, and the EP is music produced in the voice of his fictional band, Slummy. Mohr worked with Venice Beach-based instrumental Rock duo Movie Club for the creation of The Wrong Side EP. For Mohr, who didn’t get to complete his Punk journey as a young person due to addiction, this project is a new approach to completing and expressing elements of his own story through fiction and music. I spoke with Mohr about the book series, the character Saint, and some of his goals for the EP’s narrative and emotional arc.
I’ve spoken with the instrumental Rock band Movie Club before, who I understand you worked with for the Slummy EP that kicks things off for your trilogy of books. How did you come to work with them?
Joshua Mohr: When I knew that I wanted to put the band together, I had met Jessamyn first, just as a writer. We had become friends. When I listened to their music, I thought, “These guys are fucking rad!” I’m a big advocate of finding the most talented people that you can and putting them in a room together. Then letting some magic happen. We had such a blast putting this record together.
I know you’ve written a number of books, but how did you start thinking towards this Punk character Saint with his Viking connections?
I went with my daughter, who I’m sneakily giving a nerd education to, to the Nordic museum up in Seattle to teach her about the Viking side of her family. As we were walking around this museum, I started to get ideas. I knew that I wanted to write something that was crime fiction because I’d never played in that genre before. I thought, “What if I structure a 21st-century Noir story as though it’s an Icelandic Viking saga?” So I read like 20 or 30 of those things and thought, “I’m going to go for it!” So there are elements of fantasy, horror, and surrealism, but it’s still a hard-boiled detective story at the same time.
Some of those sagas are credited with coming up with the first real horror literature in the West.
They influenced Shakespeare, too, right? All of the really moral and ethical dilemmas that we now assign to Shakespeare’s jurisdiction, you can see in the characters in sagas. They are really yanked from this glorious material. It lent itself to what I had been thinking about, which was “demented whimsy”. That’s where you’re telling these very human stories that are grounded emotionally since I want to hit you in the feels, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t do some wild shit along the way. There are opportunities in the sagas, like the reckless collisions of surrealism and realism, and everything else you find along the way.
Reading about your character, Saint, made me start wondering, “What is a Punk hero?” I can understand that Rock heroes are sort of based on excess, but I don’t think Punk heroes are, and if you do use the word “hero”, it’s with a small “h”. It’s usually more about personal emotion, suffering, and experience that somehow serves a beloved community that a Punk band speaks to. Then there’s the role that Punk has played in human rights activism and speaking out. That’s a different kind of “hero”.
One thousand percent. I moved to San Francisco when I was 17. I was living in a Punk house, which didn’t start out as a Punk house. [Laughs] They always just start out as houses, and more degenerates keep showing up! It was me and Brian, who was the guitar player in American Steel. What you’re describing is exactly right, delineating between the upper case and lower case “h”. Punks are fighting in the lowercase “h” fights. Our definition of success would not be other peoples’ versions of success. The true left-wing nature of being in a Punk house is that everybody is welcome because we were all coming to this place because we weren’t welcome where we came up. Whether it’s SF on the West Coast or Brooklyn in the North East, it becomes this collection of misfit toys where we get to build this found family. Then you say, “My fucking people! I’ve been looking for you my whole life!” I really wanted to recreate that vibe in the Saint trilogy, for sure.
The character finds himself in a hero-like vein regarding the fighting crime aspect, but then again, our detective heroes are often very flawed and messed-up people. Is that another thing that “works” for you regarding the setup?
A character-driven story has this in common that causes characters to stick with you long after the fact: The storyteller is willing to render them with the dignity of complexity. Saint is fucking messy, because he’s alive, and confused, just like the rest of us. If he’s going to resonate with people, you have to be honest. Protagonists need weaknesses and strengths. I do want him to have a Hero’s Journey, with a capital “H”, in the sense that all he wants to do is to get some band’s gear back. It’s a very pure thing. He thinks, “Someone’s taking advantage of local musicians? I ain’t down with that!” Suddenly, it escalates from there. [Laughs] But I love books with simple drivers. He just wants to get this gear. That simple element then empowers all the other fantasy elements.
Did the Punk ethos also impact your writing style on this trilogy?
I love the intentional marriage of high and low art, which Punk rockers have been doing since it started. I somewhat pretentiously call it the “broken baroque.” Again, to really lean into the aesthetics and worldview of the community that you’re trying to honor, you’re not telling the story as a tourist, but from the inside. These are my people. You can always tell if there’s an MFA asshole who’s googled Punk houses. You just immediately feel like, “Come on, dude! Stop!”
That often makes its way into film and TV, too.
It does! It’s so demoralizing. But I think it was for my second book that a reviewer wrote, “Mohr writes like John Milton living in a garbage dump.” I remember reading that line and smiling ear-to-ear because I couldn’t tell if it was a compliment or not! That’s exactly where I want to sit, artistically. It’s a perfect collision of the high and low. That’s why I wear a tattoo that says, “The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.”
The bad reviews are often the ones that you want to put on the back of your book jacket. They often manage to hit on something that no one else is noticing.
Here, here! I love a review that tells me I’m a hack. The worst thing is ambivalence.
Did you have any trepidation about being a vocalist and singing in this guy, Saint’s, voice?
There were two things that were intimidating about it. The first thing was that the Producer’s session right before me was with Eddie Vedder. Well, he’s pretty good! In a weird way, that was a liberating presence. It was so intimidating that you have to say, “It doesn’t matter.” It gave me this permission slip to wing it and throw it all at the wall. Maybe Josh might be intimidated by that, but Saint would not be intimidated by that. He would think that Pearl Jam’s music was the worst thing he could listen to.
In fact, if you read the first book of the trilogy, he’s talking shit about Green Day the entire time! [Laughs] There are these interstitials in book one are called “Whole Foods Hallucinations” and it’s just him, and the checker behind the counter is Billie Joe [Armstrong], and they are having these wild, made-up conversations. I wanted to tap into Saint’s laughter and his persona. I tried to let him be my north star in those moments of self-doubt. Also, a lot of the bands I love, the singers aren’t great! Butthole Surfers are probably my favorite band. Is Gibby [Haynes] a good singer or not? I don’t know, but I know that what he does, he does with the utmost confidence.
How does the EP relate to the trilogy as a whole? Does its emotional arc apply to the first book only, or to the whole series?
I would love to do two EPs as isolated things, and when the big hardcover of the three books together comes out, put a couple more songs on there, and release it as an LP. I don’t want there to be filler. I wrote probably 22 songs from Saint’s perspective for the first EP, then I picked the five best, and disregarded the others. Now, I’m doing the same thing with the second EP. I’ll write 15-20 songs and then winnow it down to five. I want the records to be very lean.
The song “Size Queens” is going to come out soon. It’s the second song in terms of the order of the EP. The opener of the EP, “Let the Diamonds In,” feels like an introduction to the character. What do you think of the sequencing?
The song “Let the Diamonds In” tries to do what we often do on the page for literature, which is to immediately help you inhabit a consciousness as fast as I can. Saint is a very riff-oriented songwriter, so we’re always starting with a riff. I wanted the audience to meet that idea in the lyrics, too, of “my brain is broken from the inside.” You can almost shrink and walk into his ear, orienting yourself to your tour guide as we move further into the EP.
“Size Queens” opens with the line, “Oh, yeah, we’re size queens,/ We want our big dreams.” It’s a big call to action, not just for Saint, but in terms of how Punk rockers look at the world. You feed on that young joy, that’s furious. That’s one of the things that I miss about being in my late teens and early twenties is that I was so mad! [Laughs] I’m glad I’m not mad anymore, since it’s a better way to live, but that sort of animosity creates really interesting art. As an older man now, I wanted to thrust myself back into the heat of what Saint would be experiencing, out of prison, finally able to do the things that he wasn’t able to do before prison, because he was a junkie.
As an ex-junkie myself, that’s a nice analog for my feeling about this record. There’s a lot of people who can be junkies and have music careers, but there are a lot of people like me who weren’t able to do both. They were too fucked up on drugs that they didn’t get their shot, or squandered their shot. It was an opportunity for me to have this existential do-over. I wanted to really start with that full-throated Punk statement, “We want our big dreams!” It was really important to me that “Size Queens” should be the single.
