James: I'll never forget the first time I came home and turned on my TV set to see Monkey Butt Sex. My initial response was "What an Asshole." Yet, from that point on I found myself racing home from whatever bar I was at to catch it week after week. I loved your brutally honest reviews of the music and the kind of laid back interviews you were doing on the show. How did the idea for the show come about and what was it that drew you into Hardcore music in general?

Iann:My interest in hardcore was a bizarre one. I was raised in upper Manhattan so my first exposure to music was really hip-hop. I used to hang with the uptown kids and every so often we’d venture downtown. I ended up seeing Murphy’s Law at a show and I became kind of enchanted by the power and rebellion in what they did. A friend of mine gave me Black Flag and it was like something had touched deep into my soul. Somebody had figured out what I was feeling and was singing it back to me.

From there I just immersed myself into it and stayed mainly with the bands that spoke to me. Minor Threat, Black Flag, The Minutemen, Cro-Mags, AF, Negative Approach, VOID, anything I could relate to or felt rebellious. As I got older I got into more of the MC5, Stooges world and the eclectic No Wave scene and so forth. Before hardcore became about basketball jerseys and tough guys it was a universal acceptance of the counter culture. Through hardcore and the people I met I found the counter culture and who I wanted to be.

As for Monkey Butt Sex, I actually owe the kid from Squirt TV a debt of gratitude.

He had a  access show and I hated it, hated him and knew I could do better. I marched down to Manhattan Neighborhood Network; signed some papers and they gave me a time when the show would air. The name came about because I wanted something when people saw it on the preview guide they would have to at least check it out. At first the show was going to be all skits but that didn’t really work out and suddenly I was alone with a name, an airtime and no show.

I decided to just review albums on tape the way I had always written and talked about them. I set up a VHS camera on my desk, sat in front of it and went to town. At first nobody cared but then suddenly people were stopping me in the street telling me how funny the show was. The “break” came when Pete from Sick Of It All came up to me at a show and said he loved Monkey Butt Sex. I asked him if SOIA would do an interview and he agreed.

From there bands and labels suddenly were interested in working with the show. I interviewed tons of bands, reviewed records; it was a really cool time. I think doing all of that is what made me so comfortable with the camera, which helped get me the MTV job. I did the show for several years before deciding to go out on top and calling it a day.

Monkey Butt Sex provided everything for me. I got into directing music videos from it for bands like Sick Of It All, Agnostic Front, Hedpe, Napalm Death, H20, Warzone and a few others. I used that to start my own business, which is still around today though without my involvement. I also got the MTV job from Monkey Butt Sex. It was a major turning point in my life.

James: I know from personal experience that giving a bad review in the Hardcore scene can get you into trouble with certain people. Some of your bad reviews went way over the top. Were there many instances where you were kind of looking over your shoulder or peeking inside your mailbox to see if there was a letter bomb about to explode in your face?

Iann: To be honest it never occurred to me because my feeling was always if you put a record out then you had to expect opinions good or bad. I learned quickly that isn’t the truth at all. When you review music made by people with limited mental facilities and the review is negative, violence becomes their only recourse and you’re pretty much screwed. I sat in the backstage area of a few shows knowing some muscle bound roid rage victim was going to thrash me because I said his band sucked. I remember ripping apart 25 Ta Life and people telling me I was going to die. I didn’t die but there were some tense times

I decided when I started writing professionally that if what I wrote was to mean anything I would have to take what came with it. I’ve been fired, punched, screamed at, all sorts of things based on what I’ve written but I incited those reactions so I have to deal with them. When people ask me why I put up with it or why I don’t just write in a less brazen way I say to them “seven years”.

Lets be honest here, I have the opportunities I have because of my time on MTV but seven years after leaving that station people still, for whatever reason, want to hear my opinion on things. It might be to cheer it might be to plan my murder but they all come to check it out. If I had backed down or changed things nobody would have given me a second look and I would be nowhere now.

I have to face myself, my fiancée Sara and the few friends I truly respect. Outside of that I could give a flying fuck what anybody thinks of me or how I live my life or what I say. As long as I can look those people in the eye then I’ll deal with whatever comes.

James: Predating the show I also noticed we were going to Kingsborough Community College at the same time. Pretty sweet for a community college if ask me. Were you majoring in journalism?

Iann: No I was majoring in fucking up. I had been kicked out of Hunter College because like an idiot I got married at 20 to a girl who was kind of insane and I couldn’t hold down everything and go to school. After my divorce I entered Kingsborough to try and get my act together and did really well. I also discovered the girls there who were hot and not hard to talk into bed. It was a pretty glorious time until my dad’s sickness kicked in.

He had AIDS and started going downhill quickly and then passed away. I left before my second year was over to deal with that and get my head together. From there things started happening for me and I never went back to school. I’m going back to school now to study either Social Work or Human Resources. Shockingly enough I spent the last few years counseling troubled youth and found I really want to focus on helping people in my life.

I also have always felt that journalism is a dead thing. Not because the skills aren’t viable but because so much of the media is corporatized that being able to dig the truth out in a story doesn’t matter anyway. Add that to the bloggers who are now trusted “journalists” and we see how far we’ve fallen. People call me a music journalist and I correct them I tell them I’m a music fan who happens to know how to write.

James: At one point or another most of us have have to go through the pain of seeing their parents pass. But being so much younger and having someone go through such a painful and even misunderstood disease had to be very painful. How did that effect and even shape you and your general outlook?

When somebody that wonderful is struck down by such a horrific disease and is forced to suffer more than any one person should it destroys pretty much any ideas you have on justice or fairness in the world. You spend a lot of time hating God or whatever benevolent deity is up there handing out death sentences. I watched as people who were just the absolute scum of the earth, fathers who were bastards, lived and prospered while I buried mine. I was an angry person to begin with but that pushed me into a dark arena I almost never got out of.

I’m not a big fan of talking about how my dad’s death affected me because he was the one who suffered unbearably. I watched him take his last breath on Earth and I can honestly say some of the good in me died with him. I know he’d hate to hear that but it’s true. My cynicism, bitterness and general disdain of everything sharpened that day.

I carried on that way, with that kind of rage inside me and that desperate need to feel like somebody cared, for years and it destroyed many friendships, relationships and had no small part in what cost me my MTV job. Over the last few years I’ve sunk myself into therapy, tried to recognize my issues and deal with them. I’m better now, not cured because I don’t think you can be but I am better. I still slip into old patterns but I identify them quicker and try to overcome them without destroying everything in my path. I’m still a hard person to be around at times but I am trying, I can promise you that.

James: Were you always this Piss & Vinegar kinda guy?

Iann: I don’t know, how do you answer that? I mean yeah my childhood sucked but not as bad as others, up until about 5 years ago I was fat so I was picked on a lot but I also never had a problem getting laid. I’ve always had a girlfriend but up until Sara I never found one that worked. There’s a lot of my life I wouldn’t wish on anybody and the unfairness of a lot of it has made me volatile and ill tempered but who isn’t?

I think the biggest misconception about me is that I hate everything or I’m always negative. That just isn’t true, I have a great deal of love for many things but I also call bullshit when I see it. If I had to analyze it I think people don’t know what to do with me because I don’t have an agenda. So many people factor their agenda into what they write and when you don’t folks have no mechanism to deal with that so you’re labeled a hater.

For instance I don’t have to be friends with a band but I’m not opposed to it. I like free stuff just like anybody but I don’t need it. I’d love for DC comics and Marvel to fly me around to movie sets and so on but I don’t write in hopes of that. I don’t hate or love anything so much that I won’t look at it justly. I review things based on what the thing I’m reviewing actually is and for some reason that’s an oddity. The game is played based on favors and who washes who’s back. I don’t play that way so I spend a lot of time alone.

I remember reviewing the last Mastodon album and saying I didn’t like it. People kept saying “But dude it’s Mastodon” and my response was “So what?” Factoring in who a band is or what they’ve done before into what their recently offering makes no sense. If it’s all reputation then we end up with an industry of design instead of artistic merit. I gave a bad review to the new Slayer album because I honestly didn’t like it and their publicist banned me from talking to any of her bands ever again. Really? That’s where we’ve fallen to? If you don’t love what I say love then we’ll take our ball and go home. That sucks.

People get on me because I don’t care for Phil Anselmo. They always site who he is and how important Pantera was and my response is still who cares. Phil has said and done some ridiculous things (Dimebag for instance)  and to me it puts him in a negative light. I don’t care if he can heal cancer with one touch; if he acts like a douche I’m going to point it out.

Same with the recent Avenged Sevenfold album I reviewed. I have always hated that band but I gave their new album a decent listen and found it to be terrible. I also found their constant updates on how the death of their drummer pushed them into making this album to be in poor taste. These tween kids all thought I went in hating the album and so I was labeled a biased asshole.

First of all that isn’t true but secondly if I had been wearing an Avenged Sevenfold t-shirt and saying they were so good I wish they made cookies to eat these same tweens would’ve been amped on how cool I am. I doubt any of them would have said, “Well it’s a good review but Iann is a big fan so that’s biased”. Again, that’s their agenda; I have no agenda so people get mad.

When you do things as honestly as you can it hurts people’s feelings, it gives the business itself nothing to figure you by and usually it will put you at odds with everyone. Do that long enough and suddenly you’re super negative and an asshole and so forth and so on. It’s fine with me, I’m not here to make friends or get backstage passes. I won’t turn them down but I certainly won’t jump through hoops for them.

Some ask who the fuck I think I am to believe my opinion is so great. Well, I don’t think my opinion is so great but I’m not going to change it to become buds with people or bands or anybody else. If you think I’m a talentless hack then don’t read my work. Nobody can please everybody so all you can do is create work that pleases you. People who love it, I’m honored that you read it, people who don’t that’s totally your right. However don’t expect me to follow those politics when I’m writing something. I don’t owe anybody anything at all, period.

James: Did you always want to be a writer?

Iann: Yep, as far back as I can remember. When I was seven or eight I would trace comic book pages and leave the balloons blank to write my own stories. That all comes from my father, he was the most incredible writer and person I have ever known. Having him pushing me to always write got me to never quit no matter what was going on. I write as much as I can all the time, just to write. I’m a huge fan of Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, Kerouac, the beats  and HP Lovecraft. All of those people loved to write and would write just to do it.

My style came from that and my need to get across how I really felt about things in a visual way using words. As I got older I got better and discovered my own voice. I feel like I’m better now than I ever was because of Craveonline. They let me write what I want; they’re very open minded, supportive and have allowed me to grow as a writer. Everybody needs a niche; a place to write and feel safe and craveonline has been that for me.

I write because I have to, that’s the best way to describe it. I have short stories that nobody has seen, a couple of scripts, even a stupid blog just to blurt out opinions all because if I don’t write I’ll snap my cork and then it’s green hair, white face paint, red lips nutty Iann time. For those like me writing is as much a compulsion as music, collecting records or comics or even drugs. You have to do it you have no choice.

James: As a kid I was really into comic books. I was and still am a big Marvel fan (always thought DC heroes were lame and suggestively homosexual, Hey, I was a kid) What were some of your favorites?

Iann: That’s funny because I’m much more of a DC person than a Marvel guy, I just find the stories to be better. Marvel is so steeped in keeping their heroes “real” that they forget these are heroes, bigger than life people we need to believe in and they don’t always have to have incredibly depressing private lives. I still read some Marvel stuff but not like DC.

I started with Peanuts and Archie books. My grandfather worked in a distribution house so he’d load me up with those paperback Peanuts books and Archie digests. One day I ducked into a store to avoid kids who were picking on me and I looked in the spinning rack of comics. I was about seven or so and I found a book about the death of Batman, with all the villains standing over his grave saying “I killed him”. It shocked me because at that age I only knew of Batman through the Superfriends and the 60s TV show reruns. This seemed so serious for Batman. I bought the book and was instantly hooked; he became my number one hero.

So thirty two years later I still read Batman along with tons of other stuff. My main reads right now are all the Batman books (of which there are six or seven), the Green Lantern titles, Walking Dead, Wolverine, Spider-Man, The Flash, JSA, Superman, Daredevil, and the occasional indie comic that my friend and Book Report cohost Joey Esposito tells me about. I’m also a huge fan of old mystery, western and war comics plus any of the Creepy stuff.

Though I love modern comics my main love is the old school stuff, before it all got so cross over heavy and serious. Anything Jack Kirby was a part of or Ditko or any of the true pioneers. I could do a whole separate interview on this topic it consumes me like music does.

Iann: I met Brian Smith through one my best friends David Monogahan. My first introduction to Brian was Dave telling me about the performance art band he had called 4 Way Anal Touchfight which consisted of Brian and another friend Guy dressing up in choir robes colored like the Denmark Flag with masks of the same design and pretending to be two guys from Denmark singing about Touchfighting, though they never explained exactly what that was. It’s hard to describe the genius of it, I’d have to play it for you or you’d have to see it live.

When I first met Brian it turned out he was the same type of comic freak I was. I don’t mean we both liked comics I mean we both connected to them in the same way. We would have three or four hour phone conversations about why Jimmy Olsen was referred to as Superman’s “pal” or how awesome it was the way Galactus spoke. Brian is also the funniest motherfucker alive and very few people can make me laugh at all.

When I moved to Boston we just got closer, I’d spend most of my weekends with him and his amazing family just talking comics and driving around drinking iced coffee. Brian became and remains one of if not my best friend in the world. He’s also much like me, angry, belligerent, volatile, so it works. We had talked about doing a comic book together with me writing it and him drawing. Come to find out doing a press run can be like $2000 and you have a minimum of five hundred copies, which is bullshit.

So we decided to pool our money and buy a copier, write the books and literally build them in Brian’s basement. We named the company by combining two Joy Division songs being that we both worship that band. The first thing we collaborated one was A Fist Fight With God about a man who loses his wife to a drunk driver and that rage leads him to a physical confrontation with God. It’s clear something I wrote about my anger towards my father’s death.

Then Brian started doing his continuing series called Recur, which is amazing but hard to explain. I worked on a science fiction western titled The Drifter with another artist as well as book called Some Agoraphobic Girl. Brian and I collaborated again on a book called Imagine If Bon Scott Was The Herald Of Galaxus. It was basically making Bon Scott the Silver Surfer to Galactus only he wanted to be a rock singer not a herald.

We’ve done some conventions, our stuff is in local stores but we’re not really looking to become the next big thing. We’re working on new stuff but it comes out whenever it comes out, that’s how we work. People can check the stuff out on our Facebook page and at http://www.isolationdisorderpress.com

James: Fast forward a couple of years after Monkey Butt Sex and "oh shit, that dude from MBS is on MTV. I couldn't help but wonder "What the fuck was he thinking?" "What the fuck was MTV thinking?" How did the job come about?

Iann: This guy Ocean Macadams used to watch Monkey Butt Sex with his friends and when he became a big wig at MTV he remembered me. Originally they were casting for some countdown show and wanted a metal guy, pop girl, hip hop guy and techno fan to report the news for various scenes. He found me and asked if I would come in and read. I did a camera test and then didn’t hear back from them.

A few months later Ocean called and asked if I could do a fake set up in a bar pretending it was a news segment. I did that and then a few months past until I was called again. I went to a Powerman 5000 show and did am entire news segment as if it was live. Suddenly there was silence, I mean almost six months of it. My old band Puny Human was playing a show so I emailed the MTV people I’d met and invited them to come down. I got an email back from a producer telling me I couldn’t play a show that weekend because I was going to cover the Metallica/System Of A Down show for them. It was a shock to me, nobody had told me anything about it.

I did that and then was told that I wasn’t being hired because MTV decided to go for a girl due to the original show not happening and MTV only having a need one news reporter. I said fine and went back to MBS Productions. About four months later I was called and told they wanted to offer me a job on air. Apparently my test tape went out and had the highest rating of anything ever tested for MTV.

James: Did they try to change your abrasive style or perhaps polish it up a bit?

Iann: Oh yeah, they had to. I was way too rugged for TV just in the normal sense of I cursed too much and gave too many offensive statements. I didn’t mind that but when they started trying to change me into this “metal guy” character and tone down who I was it got ugly. See I’m one of those assholes who needs things explained to him or at least for it to make sense or I fight it. MTV never explained anything they just said, “do it” and right there I was armed for a battle.

I also have no truck with hypocrisy and MTV is as hypocritical as you can get. They would pull news stories because labels asked them to, run segments on performers because they wanted the label to be happy, etc and so on. Then they’d tell me I couldn’t have an opinion because it would hurt the credibility of MTV news. Let’s keep it real here folks; MTV News has no credibility because it’s entertainment. That kind of hypocrisy sets me off so we were fighting all the time.

You can see the reality coming to light now as MTV News has, much like music, disappeared almost completely from the channel. Looking back I didn’t realize what I was fighting or how to fight it. I just swung my arms and kicked and screamed, which was the wrong move. In 2000 when I started MTV was just beginning to change from a music channel to the reality TV, pyramid of cowards channel it is now. If I had realized that I would’ve held on for the ride and laughed as it crumbled. Instead I made so many people angry they opted to get rid of me.

James: You kind of gave the channel a short lived sense of street cred. Here was this guy from the Hardcore scene perhaps trying to show that there are alternatives to the garbage that was out there.

It goes back to the hypocrisy thing. MTV is forever trying to pull the wool over their viewer’s eyes whether trying to sell some hugely backed major label artist as an “underground” artist or shilling their news reporters as people they just happened upon when in reality it was a long exhausting search. I cut through all that so people trusted me plus I had actually been in the music scene for a long time.

Lastly I delivered the news differently than anybody else ever had. I talked to people not at them, I was weird and random and made stupid jokes. I wanted people to always know I knew how dumb this all was and how ridiculous it was I was getting paid to do it. It was like when George Reeves would make a joke about Superman and wink to the crowd, it’s a unsaid thing we all respond to. People liked that about me so they responded to it. MTV still tries to get their news people to mimic it with varied results.

James: Were there a lot of instances where you were interviewing or covering a band that you absolutely hated or thought were complete garbage?

Moments where you had to kind of bite your tongue and just kind of suck it up?

Iann: Of course, it was a job and just like any job you have to do things you don’t want to do. I interviewed bands all the time I had no interest in and just sucked it up. The funny thing was it wasn’t who you’d think I’d hate interviewing. I enjoyed sitting down with Britney Spears a whole lot more than Korn or talking to Eminem was way cooler than dealing with Godsmack.

I never bit my tongue when a band would ask me what I thought of them but I didn’t march into an interview ready to start bitching. The worst of the lot was Limp Bizkit because I completely hated them. Not only was their music garbage but Fred Durst was a cunt, a bully and an all around piece of shit. I couldn’t hide how much I hated him and at that point he was MTV’s darling. We had a few run ins, the worst was when we nearly came to blows at Metallica Icon.

Fred boasted a lot of threats and gestured a lot and blew off steam but nothing happened. I think Fred thought that when he “stepped” to me I was going to cower and cry for mercy. When I just stood there looking at him like the joke he was he had no plan B. So after ten minutes or so of him priming like thirteen-year-old girl he just walked away. Later Fred called a truce and I nearly pissed myself laughing. What are we in the third grade?

James: Any experiences that really stick out or left a mark? (Good or Bad)

Iann: Oh lots of good ones, it’s easy to make MTV seem all bad but it wasn’t. I got to go to Lucas Ranch and meet George Lucas, of course that was before I realized how badly he’d raped my childhood. I got to meet Black Sabbath, Lemmy, Megadeth, Dave Grohl, etc. The main thing was I got to bring exposure to bands I felt needed it and get press to shine on those I felt deserved it. I also got to travel and do things few ever get to do.

There’s no one experience that really jumps out, it’s all an amalgam of things that happened to me there. It’s also been seven years since I was on MTV so it all tends to blur. Touring with Slipknot was fun, hanging with all the big rap dudes at the NBA thing in Atlanta was cool to. As for bad experiences that came more with the day-to-day of working there.

MTV isn’t set up as a community or a place that creates an atmosphere of compromise or creativity. You are told what to do and either you play the game or go home. MTV big wigs are really into acting like parents and scolding their workers like children. They also like to mess with people’s livelihoods by hiring everybody as “permalance”, which means you’re always there but still considered freelance. Then they can fire you with impunity, which they do often. Letting people stress their jobs is how they maintain control and that makes the place hard to work.

James: I'm not a science fiction fan in the least but I'm a complete and total Star Wars nerd. (I've got an unopened Sand People action figure on the shelf next to my desk.) But you hit the nail right on the head when you mention "having your childhood raped." (Eluding to the prequels) If you had met him after their release and had an opportunity to engage him honestly. What would you say?

Iann: At this point I’d just ask him why. Why did he let his ego destroy something so precious to all of us? Why did he make Anakin’s turn so anti-climactic, why include Sam Jackson, why do any of it. I guess the biggest question is why make Jar Jar Binks an annoying loser who sounded like a Jamaican talking underwater? Why make the bad guys in the first one Asian?  The biggest question was why not let people who can write and direct do these stories? Write the treatments, tell the tale and then let people who are actually good at this take it from there.

Lucas has no sense of dialog, pacing, structure, timing or character development. One second Anakin is saying “Oh God what have I done” when he kills Mace Windu and then five minutes later he’s killing children? What the fuck Lucas? The movies should have started when he was a teen and shown his gradual turn, plus it should have involved the Clone Wars more. Amedalla or whatever her name was dying of a broken heart? Are you fucking kidding me?

I would want to point out every problem with all three movies and have George explain it to me. Not with excuses but with actual reasons why he made these three movies so ungodly bad. I’m just as big a Star Wars geek as anybody, I have an entire forearm of tattoos dedicated to those movies and I just can’t watch them anymore. Even the ones I grew up with are tainted for me. It’s like this giant part of my childhood has been ripped away thanks to Lucas making what amounts to a reverse Roger Rabbit movie with humans in a cartoon world.

James: One of my favorite memories of your time on MTV was the episode of MTV Cribs that featured you. Here was a really badly scripted show that was a bad copy of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" The people seemed fake, the comments always sounded scripted and the cars always seemed strategically placed. The episode that featured you was the only one that actually made me laugh. How did that come about and were you completely taking a piss out of the show?

Iann: They actually came to me about it because of my massive toy collection. Part of my self-medicating when I was miserable besides eating was buying toys and collectables of all kinds. It was out of control and I literally had a huge two bedroom apartment overflowing with toys and pop culture items. I wasn’t trying to take the piss out of the show itself but I was taking some swipes at the rich folks and their whole “player” thing.

The funniest part of all of it was I made some innocuous joke about Lars Ulrich and he lost his shit. He called MTV, tried to get me thrown off the Metallica Icon show, was a prick to me, anything you could do he did it. I just laughed that he was such a little bitch over a joke but he pitched his tantrum and then it went away. Since then I’ve sold everything I ever owned in that show, all of it. I got into some rough times and needed the money plus slowly I was getting out of the whole impulse buying thing. Now I just kick myself because if I had all that money I could buy a fucking home.

James: One of the funniest things about watching the early "Real World" episodes is there was always a musician or a guy in a band who made a point of pimping his music on the show. It always turned out to be a really shitty band or dime a dozen soul act. None of these bands ever went anywhere. Maybe they put out a record or two but they always went right into the cut out bin or better yet the good old circular file. At the time you were working for MTV you were also playing drums for Puny Human. (A very good, heavy fucking band) There you were working for the biggest Music network on the planet yet you never talked about. In retrospect that seems like a very wise choice.

Iann: I never thought about bringing Puny Human into MTV because it was my one chance to live away from the channel. In the circles we toured in my being on MTV had no bearing at all people didn’t care. I could just be me and hang, play shows and exist. The other thing was in that circle it was about the merit of your band, if we’d rang bells and sung songs announcing my thing on MTV we’d have been sunk, people would have seen us as a joke band or not respected us.

You also have to remember I was the drummer, as far from the front man lead guy as you could be. I always hated when photographers tried to put me in front of a picture or started asking me all the questions at interviews, I felt like it would be incredibly super douche to take on the front man roll just because of my job, Fearing that I made a conscious effort to stay in the background so we didn’t become stonerrock’s answer to No Doubt.

James: I got to see the band a few times and still listen to "It's not the heat..." and "revenge is easy" Can you tell me a little bit about the band?

A few years later we were thinking of enlisting our friend Brian who sang in Crawlpappy to be our frontman but he lived too far away. He suggested this guy Jim Starace who we instantly clicked with and loved his voice. From there we banged out songs and recorded our first album Revenge Is Easy, which is still my favorite. We toured some, played shows, did normal band things and it was great. My two best friends and I with this new awesome dude making music we loved, I couldn’t have asked for more.

Things started getting hinky during the writing for our second album. Josh and Jason were amazing players but they had one Achilles heel, this weird fear of not being seen as consummate musicians. Our songs became more complicated, we veered away from the straight groovy stuff we were doing and it ran some tensions high. We also called in J. Yuenger from White Zombie to produce our second album It’s Not The Heat It’s The Humanity and while he is a kick ass producer and an amazing human being we didn’t need that many bells and whistles.

Somehow I was labeled the bad guy in all of this, which I don’t think is one hundred percent fair. Right when the fallout happened I had moved to a new city, I was broke, getting divorced for a second time, dealing with the MTV loss and all these other things. I was a terrible mess but not without reason. My reactions to things were way off and incredibly harsh and I regret that but it was during a dark, dark time for me.

It was sad that people were quick to believe the worst about me and a great deal of people I had helped turned their backs on me and that hurt, still does. I tried to patch things up but it became out of sight, out of mind. I wasn’t invited to the party anymore and since I wasn’t there nobody thought about me.

It’s been five years since all of that and we’re all different people now. Everybody who was in the band has a kid except me and while Puny Human did release an album without me on drums I think it’s pretty much defunct now. It’s too bad it all went down how it did and I hold a bit of hope that one day we’ll all be in the same room and maybe work it out but if not it’s so far removed from my life now that I can’t really be too upset about it.  

Links to Iann’s work:

http://www.craveonline.com/

Related interviews:

Gus Pena of Chord Magazine

Norman Brannon

Kevin Egan