NHEdge.com shared with us their interview with Seacoast native Joe Queer, a.k.a. Joe King, of The Queers, who’ll headline The New Hampshire Teen Institute Rockfest at The Music Hall on Saturday, Oct. 28. The band will be playing songs from their new CD, “Love Songs for the Retarded,” due out in January. Also on the bill for the all-ages show will be Famous, Pondering Judd, Jupiter 2, Starch, The Andwutz and Heavens to Murgatroid, to benefit the N.H. Teen Institute. The show starts at 2 p.m and tickets are $25.

For nearly 25 years, New Hampshire’s favorite punks sons The Queers have been cranking out rock ’n’ roll that’s loud, fast and crass. Refusing to bow to commercial forces that prefer watered-down punk for the public airwaves, the Queers have stayed true to their roots, and in doing so they’ve played every two-bit dive from here to Hong Kong and rocked hundreds of thousands all over the world. The Queers are known for their high-energy shows, logging thousands of miles every year on the road. They’ve recorded some 16 albums and numerous EPs. Tom Ferry recently caught up with Joe Queer by phone outside a Chinese restaurant in an undisclosed location, in between recording sessions at a super secret studio.

Tom Ferry: On The Queers’ MySpace page, you write about the potential of a future project with Wimpy and Tulu (who will join you at The Music Hall), and maybe even B-Face.

Joe Queer: We had a side project, Wimpy and I, called the Drunken Cholos, and we did one eight-song EP for Hopeless. I was hoping B-Face would play on bass but Wimpy and I are definitely going to do something. As far as Tulu and B-Face, Tulu’s in L.A. and B-Face is MIA half the time, so I don’t have much contact with them. Wimpy and I will always work together. He’s on our last live album, he’s gone to Italy with us and a bunch of other places. He’ll come in for a week and then go home. Jack and I, we still do stuff. He’s not going to be on this album because he’s in New Hampshire and I have to rush this thing out. But yeah, we’ll definitely be working together. We’ve already got song titles and stuff. We’re ready to go.

TF: It seems every band plays certain gigs that remind them that they do this for the love the music.  Are The Queers an exception?

JQ: About a year and a half ago, we were going back to Atlanta, where I live, and the guys were going to fly home from there, and so we got offered one more gig in Heflin, Alabama. A kid offered us a thousand bucks. So I talked to a booking agent, and she said he was trying to start this club, what do you think? I said, well, what’s the worst that can happen? So we get in there and it’s like some renovated house that’s half destroyed, but we thought, “Oh God we’re here,” they were nice and there were kids drinking, so we said, “Let’s go for it.”

Well, no sooner do we start playing than the cops burst in the door. My girlfriend’s selling merchandise and we had all the boxes of T-shirts in there, and the cops busted the show and confiscated all our merchandise and held onto that for months. I had to go down and get a business license in Heflin and sweet talk the cops and go back and forth. I finally got the stuff back. There’s many crazy stories like that.

We kind of put the money first in that instance. But sometimes kids are like, “The Queers are a big band, I can’t believe you guys e-mail me back or do a small show.” We do shows when we know we’re going to get paid, I’ll be honest. But it’s not about being a big rock star. The value I place in it now is getting to travel, the friendships I’ve made. There’s some great people I’ve met through music.

Kids come up and say, “Your album got me through high school.” And that shit actually means something to me. That’s great, ’cause that’s how I was with The Ramones. They said all the stuff that I felt. “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue,” “I Don’t Care,” “I Wanna Be Sedated,” really, that was me. That was The Ramones. I talked to Joey about it, and that song, “Do You Remember Rock ’n’ Roll Radio?,” (sings)  “Do you remember lying in bed, with the covers pulled above your head?” And I said to Joey, I couldn’t believe you wrote that line.” And he just laughed and asked why, and I said I thought I was the only one who ever did that. I was lucky enough to meet him and get to know him on a fairly friendly level; I wasn’t his best friend or anything. He was still really into music toward the very end, it wasn’t about how famous he was. Here’s a guy who didn’t just change music, he changed the world. The Ramones changed the fucking world. And he was so nice. We’d talk about Mott the Hoople and T Rex and David Bowie and he’d tell me about how David Bowie called. It wasn’t about him going out on the road and him lording it over the roadies.

You see a lot of bands from out West and they’re just so arrogant, and you think, well Joey Ramone can be cool, why the fuck can’t you, your music sucks, the Ramones were great. I’ll be honest with you, to me, you’re going to get to do this incredible thing—I talked to Joey about this and he agreed, even at our level—you get to play music, travel, meet kids, there’s half-naked 17-year-old girls running around, it’s fun as hell. If you’re going to be a bigger asshole after doing that job than before, why don’t you just go fuckin’ manage a Taco Bell and leave the rest of us alone. You’re not learning anything from experience, that’s my attitude. I just feel blessed to be able to do this. I know it sounds stupid but, ya know.

TF: With all this worldwide touring and recording at a breakneck pace, will Joe Queer ever slow down and work banker’s hours?

JQ: No, no. I worked on my brother’s fishing boat for six years when I wasn’t touring, but the boat sank. I moved to Atlanta. I owned a restaurant before I did this shit, I might go back to it. I don’t know, I’m not going to play for the rest of my life. I’ll always do music and right now it’s the way I make a living and I’m really, really busy but I want to write books and stuff. As far as a 9-5 job goes, no, it’s not me. It’s great for some people but I just don’t see myself going down that road. It’s great for some people, it’s just not my thing.

TF: The music business paid attention to Portsmouth’s music scene from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. People still talk about the good old days. The Queers were a big part of that scene.

JQ: Well you know, some of that stuff is great. I’ve seen some people that have grown up a little bit and moved on to marriage and kids. People are like, “Oh man, I miss the good old days.” Kind of like saying that was the best time of your life. Yeah, it was fun, but I think of every day as new, and I don’t think back like that. Yeah, it was great, but it wasn’t the best time of my life. It was a good time. But I’m lucky that I have something to get me out of bed in the morning. It’s the music, all sorts of projects to do and crazy people I’ve met. It’s great, man, I love that energy. It has nothing to do with drinking and drugs. I love it, it’s great.

TF: Of all the rooms to play in Portsmouth, the Elvis Room was legendary.

JQ: I loved the Elvis room. I met Mo Tucker from the Velvet Underground there. We’d played in Boston at the Middle East downstairs and Ween was playing a late show. About three weeks later I was walking past the Elvis Room, and I saw that Ween was playing there. I didn’t really meet them the night we saw them, so I went in and the guy said, “Hey you look familiar,” and I said, “I’m Joe from The Queers,” and he started shouting, “Mo Mo, come here, Mo,” and Mo Tucker from The Velvet Underground was doing a small tour with his band. She was nice as pie, sweet as hell.

But, yeah, the Elvis Room, we used to start every tour off there. The crowd was great, a lot of my friends. I just saw Dawn Marie down in Florida. She was one of the owners. She came and saw us on tour, up in Pittsburgh and Cleveland. She helps us sell merch down there. It was great. I’ve met a lot of friends there that I’m still friends with today. It was a great, great place and a lot of good bands played there, too.

TF: Can you name some other bands that you’ve played with that have attained commercial success but still remain true to their vision?

JQ: Oh, I would say, hands down, Green Day. People give ’em shit and all that but they haven’t changed one fucking iota. The production was better (on Reprise), but they had all the songs for “Dookie” and would have recorded it on Lookout, the label we were all on together. Now there’s Blink 182 and Good Charlotte and all these other bands, but nobody has the originality and spirit of Green Day. Green Day’s a band that will knock your socks off. God dammit, that’s a good band. The (Mighty Mighty) Bosstones were like that, too. I remember playing with them in 1989. They were going to play that great ska rock whether they made it big like they did or whether they ended up playing at the Ratt on a Saturday night. They were doing it ’cause they loved music, not ’cause it was a career move. I respect bands like that. You play music because there’s something inside of you that says you have to play music. Now you get bands like Fall Out Boy that are basically created in the studio. The Warped Tour changed it. I just don’t like that shit. All the guys in the bands remind me of the jocks I hated in high school. Fuck it, I’m not going. To me a punk gig is a small sweaty club with the audience right in your face knocking over the mic stand and boogying off the energy. You feeding off their energy, that’s what punk was to me. The Ratt in Boston or CBGB’s or Chet’s in the North End in Boston.

TF: What’s it meant to you to be a punk rocker from New Hampshire?

JQ: I do remember getting up in front of 15,000 or 16,000 people in Brazil, at this festival, and it felt really good saying “We’re the Queers from Portsmouth, N.H., in the USA,” and the crowd cheered and I thought, fuck, that one’s for the gang back in Portsmouth. I’m really proud of the fact that that’s where we started and to me, we’re a New Hampshire band. I don’t live there now but I’m back all the time. You know what I mean? The little Portsmouth punk scene is where we came from, and that’s who we are and that’s who we’ll always be. I was really proud to do that, and nobody back home knows that unless I tell them.

The full interview with Joe Queer is available in the archives at www.nhedge.com.