Here's the interview with Franklin, Kyle, and Peter of Nothing Painted Blue, from the "Nipple Hardness Factor" magazine packaged with MISHA-02. The Dennis Callaci interview is here.

To read it straight from the scans:

A text transcript is below, as accurate as possible to what's printed. Please enjoy, this one's great:

Kris and Chuck went over to Eagle's coffee pub to talk to Nothing Painted Blue.
Drummer, Kyle, bassist, Peter and guitar pal, Franklin all huddled around a tape
player. The following is pretty much a direct take of what we gabbed about that
night. Forgive the grammar. Our conversation just kinda started to roll as we
spoke about what everyone does during the day.

Kyle: (I work with) The attorney general, a state agency. I do criminal appeals
so when people appeal their convictions, they come up to us and I try and keep 'em
in jail.

Kris Arnold: Wow! How do you find time to do the band stuff?

K: It's not always really easy but it doesn't take that much time though. I'll be
tired tomorrow, but I can knap at work.

KA: You can knap at work? (everyone giggles)

K: I have a couple fo times before, just like quick five minute ones.

C: (to Peter) Do you get to knap at work?

K: He can't, he's a substitute teacher.

Peter: I could knap during my prep period and I could knap during lunch. The
rest of the time I have to at least have my eyes open.

K: You have to remain semi-conscious.

P: I can have a pretty restful day usually.

KA: Do the kids take you for granted?

Franklin: I think Peter is a much better sub than I ever was and he also has a
better attitude than I ever did.

P: Well, from school to school it's different. There's one school I really like
subbin' at, but the high school that I actually went to, is fucking awful. It used to
the the best one in the district, and then this new one came in with more money,
and since then my old school is terrible.

F: I used to sub at Montclair, where Dennis and Allen (Refrigerator) went and
it's easy to see how they turned out the way they did.

C: How did you get competing high schools in the same small town.

F: It's just a zoning thing, they area expands.

P: Chino's a pretty big area, it's growing fast. There's Chino high school which
has been there since 1910, and then there's Don Lugo high school which was
built in the 70's to accomadate the influx of people. Chino Hills was just
incorporated a few years ago.

KA: They always put hills on it to make it sound classy.

K: Well they don't want to be with the frickin' farmers!

P: I totally resent it, cause where I grew up, now it's Chino Hills!

K: That happened to us as well. Where I grew up in Michigan, the city was called
Auburn Heights and when it became bigger and more industrialized it became
Auburn Hills. I mean who cares?!?

C: Where I was living it was "Holly wood nights and then it was Hollywood Hills". (KA laughs, the F,K,P moan)

C: A little Franklin history. How did Suggestion Box come together?

F: Well, I think that about two-thirds of S.B. is stuff that I recorded before I was
ever in a band or thought about playing in public and it's just recorded at home
for my own enjoyment.

C: The actual recordings were KUCR and KSPC weren't they?

F: I think I recorded a couple of things at KSPC while I was in college, but not on
the air. I just recorded stuff down at the station. There's stuff on other tape that
was broadcast on KUCI live, but I think everything on S.B. was recorded before
we ever released a record. There's a couple songs that I recorded once I knew
that Dennis wanted to put something together.

C: Was any of that related to the development of Nothing Painted Blue and for
you guys to come together?

F: Kyle's always been in the band. As a songwriter, I haven't always had the
same line of development as me and Kyle playing together because the first
bands we played in were...

K: Bad... F: Bad. But they were with other people who also contributed songs and we did a
lot of covers, both normal covers you'd expect and strange things. It really
didn't start being a singer/songwriter based band until college. All the people
we played with in high school had other kinds of input. Like one person we
played with really wanted to do a noise band type of thing so it almost grew into
something like that. I would write songs that were too complicated for us to
learn at the time and those would be the songs that I would tape at home.

K: You'd also write songs that we didn't think were too complicated but were, in
retrospect.

P: They were just beyond their capabilities at the time.

KA: You still do that though. I try to teach myself guitar and I put on your
records and it's like....

K: Oh, but very little is beyond our capabilities now.

C: Have you risen to the occasion or have you fallen down into submission?

K: We've beaten Franklin into submission!

F: Ok, it's like this-This one's in E,D,A...

K: Then back to B.

P: The days of when our reach exceeded our grasp are long behind us.
(everyone laughs)

F: I don't think so, my reach as a guitar player still exceeds my grasp.

KA: Do you all write the songs?

F: I basically write them because Peter writes songs for Diskothiq and Kyle
doesn't play an instrument that makes notes.

K: So sad.

F: I've wanted him to try his hand at lyrics many times. I want them to
collaborate on a song.

C: (to Peter) Do you have songs taht you'd like to bring into NPB instead of
Diskothiq.

P: I basically do in Diskothiq what Franklin does in NPB...

F: A fascist dictatorship.

K: (Replaying a rehearsal scene) Look it's perfectly simple. It's just this part for
four times, then this part twice and then we go back to the first part for six,
then we do half of the first part again, then we go back to the second part twice.
It's perfectly straight-forward.

C: What's wrong with you!

KA: Do you all pull together on the arrangements?

F: All the time. Half the time I come in with stuff I don't know how it's going to
go or end.

K: Oh, and our solutions are so great!

F: I have confidence that they're going to complete the picture. So I don't
necessary feel that I have to do every detail. There's a new song called "Niacin"
that almost came outta jamming, I'd pretty much written it, but I don't know how
all the words were going to turn out. There our songs that I have a really clear
picture of everything about them, what the point is, why it's this long, I could
talk about the particular idea for a long time and those are ones that I get really
picky about we're going to end up doing them. But then there's other songs, and
I'm happy to move more in this direction, that are a little looser.

K: You have moved more in that direction too. All the new songs that were
learning are...

F: Simpler you think?

K: Well, I don't know if they're simpler...

P: They're more open ended.

K: Well put Peter!

F: Well don't worry, there's a couple of uptight annoying ones coming up.

KA: Do you have a new record coming out soon?

F: We're re-issuing a Scat single from 1991.

C: That one with the green cover.

K: It's Scat 18.

F: We're pressing another 500 of them. They're were only 400 originally.

C: And that was the three of you?

F: That was with our original bass player.

C: What's the timeline on that? When did you and Kyle get together?

K: We've been playing together for more than ten years.

F: Just say ten years, it's too depressing. And then Mike started playing with us
in 1986. And we put out our first record in 1990. After that summer, he went
away, and we found Joey and he played with us from 91 to sometime in 93. He left
before our summer 93 tour. And then Peter's been with us ever since.

C: And then the guy that played with you in Pomona once when I saw you last
year.

F: That was Mike our very first bass player.

KA & C: OH! (revelation!)

KA: He's the one that played on the "Foundation Slips" 7".

F: Right. He actually wrote that one.

C: I loved what he added to the band.

F: oh.

C: And now you're totally inadequate!

F: He might actually come out here for grad school. I'd really like to have him
out here for recording.

KA: You can take over guitar parts easier when you have somebody else playing.

F: And I can sing better. And he can just cheese it up, by the end of the tour we
were just so rock. People actually liked us.

C: I guess it was kinda a guilty pleasure hearing the songs be fuller.

K: We were so solid. The violin parts were great.

C: Could you explain if there was an Inland Empire before you guys became
Kings of the Inland Empire?

F: Well, there's been an Inland Empire for years.

K: Millions of years. By the way I looked up in the government code of California
and do you know what the official state fossil is?

(silence)

K: Sabre tooth tiger!
(everyone laughs)

KA: Really?

K: We also have an official marine mammal. The California gray whale.

F: Oh. Fascinating.

K: I couldn't believe it!

C: How do become a state fossil? Is there a lot of lobbying for it?

F: It's the sabre tooth tiger advisory board.

K: It's bizarre. I thought, What! There's a law about this?

F: We're not the Kings of the Inland Empire, we're the grand old men of the
Inland Empire.

KA: Oh come on, I think that Chuck and I are probably older than you guys.

F: I guess of the scene, man.

K: We didn't make up that name just so you know.

KA: See, Sammy's taken that over you know.

F: I don't know what the deal with that is.

KA: Why did they say that?

C: I think it was specifically to get a rise out of you guys.

F: Nah. Oh well.

C: Why haven't you guys ever toured Europe?

F: The reason that we haven't actually is because I'm too lame to call the guy in
Holland in time and I suck.

C: Is that Paperclip?

F: No, it's Fast Forward Festival.

K: I won't go to Europe. I hate Europe.

F: Bullshit.

P: It's dirty, disgusting, they don't know how to speak English very well.

K: Look at the fricking money, it's all different!

C: They don't have national fossils.

F: Hell, they are national fossils! You know what the national fossil of France is?
Frenchmen! Well I think the real reason we haven't gone is that no one's ever
asked us, we don't have the money and we don't have any records out there.

K: Well you're saying that we have no fans, no promotion, and no money. Is that
what you're saying.

C: It sounds exactly like a NPB US tour!

K: Exactly!

F: It's not unlike our situation in the states but we don't have to leave the land
mass.

K: We can go out in a Suburban or something and we speak the language.

F: It's also occurred to me that I don't quite see what possible pleasure that people
who don't understand English could take in NPB.

KA: That's a really good point. A big part of your music is what you say.

C: I disagree. There's this German band, Blumfeld that's incredible and I can't
understand a word.

F: Actually I know some German and I've heard that and it's all about White
power stuff.

(everyone laughs)

C: When you're writing do you have a problem with coming up with lyrics?

F: I will occasionally resort to a rhyming dictionary, but only when I'm trying to
avoid a forced rhyme. Like if there's something that's coming to my head too
easily and I feel that it's the path of least resistance then I'll spend more time
looking for something that fits. The places where people think I use a rhyming
dictionary in my songs is exactly where I don't use one. The clever rhymes are
the ones that come to me out of the blue. I write more words than I can use.

C: Do you look to other musicians for inspiration? For example do you hear Eitzel
differently than you did a few years ago having seen what you've seen?

F: Does it sound to you that I write like Eitzel?

C: No, I'm not inferring that.

K: You wish!

C: I'm just saying that as I know you're probably a fan.

KLA: (she quotes "In A Sourceless Light") "Sitting in the dark, listening to Mark"

F: See, most people don't get that.

(the snide remarks fly)
P: Oh, I thought that was Mark Givens.

C: I thought it was Mark Burgess.

K: I thought that is was Mark E. Smith.

F: It's Mark Anthony Thompson. It's Marky Mark. I didn't like San Francisco that
much. I guess that's the only thing that I can say.

KA: Where do you guys see the band going?

K: We just had this discussion this weekend.

P: By next year at this time, we will either be Weezer or Trotsky Icepick.

KA: Do you see goals of a major label?

F: All of us have a life outside of the band. So I don't know where we'll be in a
year or whenever.

P: Should we just start announcing at all of our interviews starting with this one?

F: That we're going to break up in May 1996.

KA: That would be bad.

K: That may or may not be true.

C: It sounds kinda cool to say.

P: It does sound real cool.

K: Oh, but I hate when I read that. I think that's bullshit.
(band is cued to get on stage in a minute)

F: As for major labels, well I'd feel bad signing to someone with them expecting
us to tour a lot more than we have any intention of doing. We're just not poised
for success in any way shape or form.

K: It's a sad story.

F: I could see myself far in the future doing something in another musical
context that might suit itself to being on a major. At some point I could see
myself making a record with Van Dyke Parks producing with like 2000
instruments on it and it would drain all the resources of the record company and
would be an utter failure when it came out but maybe 20 years after that, people
would point to it occasionally as a cult classic. That would be my ambition for
what I would do on a major label.

K: You and Roky Erickson.

C: And Alex Chilton.

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