Joey Burns, vocalist and guitarist of Calexico, and his friend Robert Voticka sit down for an interview at the Wakarusa Music Fesival. The two met each other while working for the SST record label in the 1990s.

JL: Did you hire any local musicians for this show?

Joey: No, we didn’t, but we’re still working on that. We’re putting our feelers out and we’re going to hit the campground. Basically, if we don’t find any, we’re going to take audience members and tie them to John’s drumsticks and just beat them to a nice little, green, fleshy pulp.

Robert: This is the Green Album

Joey: Yeah, it’s kinda the Green Album.

JL: Is the Green Album going to be politically charged?

Joey: Oh, yeah. It’s all about the green machine. green party, green drinks, green beaches.

Robert: It’s like Saint Patrick’s Day.

Joey: No it’s not [laughs]. It’s all about Spirulina, Chlorella, Chlorophyll and Bermuda grass.

Robert: That’s why you write lyrics about Guero Canelo because it’s green.

Joey: Yeah, green stuff, marijuana.

JL: Do you think your music helps people escape reality or become more aware of it?

Joey: That’s a good question. Maybe a little bit of both. We haven’t set up our [audience testing] laboratory yet [laughs]. Seriously, several times we had people come and tell us our music helped them recover from chemo and cancer. That was possibly the biggest compliment I could ever get. Did it help them escape reality, maybe? Did it help them find more reality, yeah. ...

Robert: You’ve done [US-Mexican] border stuff.

Joey: Yeah, we’ve played in some of the Borders Bookstores. No, sorry, just kidding. He (Robert Votika) is talking about playing benefits for some of the border issues especially in the southwest. It’s an issue that’s global. I went to Europe a couple of years ago and was talking to people and they knew about the [US-Mexico] issues. They were like, that’s "globalism,” don’t you know.

Robert: Globalization

Joey: Yeah, globalization.

JL: Do any filmmakers or writers inspire your work?

Joey: Sure, I was inspired by this film the other day. I finally saw one of Jean Luc Godard’s films, “Contempt,” "Le Mapris," with Bridget Bardot, Jack Palance, and Fritz Lang. I don’t get a chance to watch movies very often. I’ve refused to get a TV in my house, ever since I moved to Tucson, and that was about 12 years ago. Now that I have a laptop I can watch DVDs, which is really nice. We have a lot of people who send us their films with our music on it. So, it’s kinda nice to see that. Other films or books…

Robert: What about [Sam] Peckinpah?

Joey: Peckinpah is cool. He’s all right, definitely. “The Wild Bunch” is great. And then he got all this flack for being so brutal, and his personality probably had a big effect on his reputation in Hollywood. So he ended up making some other films that were not as meaty and gritty and controversial. One was called "Ballad of Cable Hogue," which we wrote a song about with the same title. Luis Alba Urrea is a great writer and I just got his book called Hummingbird’s Daughter, so I sung about hummingbird’s daughter tonight. I wrote a little story about it. The story was the girl was coming up from Latin America to the U.S. and is stopped at the US-Mexico border. She is stopped by the border patrol but a big monsoon comes and washes everything away and saves the life of one of the border patrol guys who was basically just going to incarcerate her and send her back to Mexico. It’s the beginning of a larger story.

JL: Tell me about your role in the movie, “Collateral”?

Joey: That was an interesting call. It happened on New Year’s Day. No one was in the office at the record company, so I didn’t know what to say except, “sounds like fun, Michael Mann.”

JL: Who called you?

Joey: The Music Supervisor. We went out there [LA] and began working on the soundtrack, and ended up in one of the shots — it was Michael Mann’s idea. We were all wearing some kind of bad Norten`o outfit, it was supposed to be Banda but it looked to La Tango to me… But you know it’s Hollywood. But we did get to this great location, the Rodeo Bar, which I have never seen. It’s in West Covina or something. Its East LA. It was fun. Jamie Foxx enters the bar to meet up with these sort of drug lords. And we were lip-syncing and listening to music and people are dancing.

JL: Did you talk to the director?

Joey: Yeah, I did. The director came up [Michael Mann] “I’m a big fan, I love you guys.”

His daughters have Victor’s [Gastelum’s] artwork.

Robert: Oh really, I didn’t realize that.

Joey: Oh, yeah. They have quite a few pieces I guess. Michael Mann’s daughters were helping out, some in production, some in wardrobe. That was kinda nice.

JL: Do you plan to work on more films in the future?

Joey: Sure, we’d love to. But, I think what’s happening is that films that are on a big scale, they have a hard time convincing the studios that this band from Tucson is going to score the film. They’re kinda like ‘Uh, we want a music composer.”

Robert: They want someone who writes in dots.

Joey: Not even that. They want someone who is doing film scoring. The first film “Committed,” Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo was all set to do the music. He canceled last minute, so we got it.

JL: Where do you think punk rock is today?

Joey: Its in K-Mart. It’s a tangible thing. You can buy it in a candy. You can go get it at Hot Topic. Or you see these guys and gals who are abandoning their middle class homes and just kinda living on the street and they are getting kinda tribal, kinda punk, they’re doing the hobo life, which is cool, admirable. I say that because punk has become immediately identifiable with a physical presence, a look or logo, but it’s more of an attitude than a philosophy, than anything. So, I’m not sure how potent it is anymore. There are Orange County punk bands, and I don’t know. There are still punk bands. Maybe punk and jam bands connected somehow. My favorite was the Minutemen. I grew up in Southern California and I listened to KXLU, which was a college station. Punk was in your face, raw, but after a while it got boring. I like notes and variety and dynamics, so if that had anything to do with punk rock I’d be into it, and the Minutemen that did that so I was really into that.

JL: You like mixing genres and styles, any new ones to test out?

Robert: Two chord drones

Joey: Two chord drones, yeah. I’m open to all kinds of music. I’ve been enjoying playing steel string acoustic. We got asked to do this John Fahey tribute. His music is influenced by blues folk. He even has some songs with funeral recordings.

Joey: They’re playing Steely Dan right now (in the background). Once in Chicago, someone told us we sound like Steely Dan.

Robert: How did you feel about that?

Joey: I was surprised.

Robert: You said, ‘”we can’t play that well,” right? [Laughs]

JL: Do you think drug culture affects these festivals and the listeners here?

Joey: Not as much as you would think it does. Everyone here seems very on top of things. It’s when you go to these big festivals in Europe. Things are a bit more lax, there is a lot more mud, and people face down in it on too much Ecstasy. I think here there is just ‘shrooms and pot, which is all very organic and I don’t think it’s a big deal. The government is cracking down on all the medicinal marijuana, and all that really good weed is being dispersed into the public. So I’m sure there is some really good weed out there right now. I don’t smoke, so I’m not really looking for it, but I do see it. For me it’s just disturbing when you see heroin or coke and stuff like that. I just don’t think they add anything, but I’m not an official on drugs or anything.

Robert: You mean you’re not trying to tell them to say, “just say no”?

Joey: Just say…"what." "Just say what."

JL: New record this season?

Joey: Yeah, we are working on one right now. Hopefully by August we will have cut away at the stone and have some kinda idea of what to do. It’s hard to make those decisions because when you start recording and you come up with an idea that is so different. For example we had this song called “Crumble,” which is paying homage to Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Gil Evens. The record label is like, let’s not put that one out, but we all negotiated. But there is this documentary movie being made right now about the music business and where things are at right now. They [the filmmakers] got into our music, and the reason is, there are so many different sounds - folk, mariachi, some Latin stuff, this jazz tune, and they want to use that as their opening song.

JL: Who is producing it?

Joey: It’s called “Before the Music Dies.” You can get all the info on it at www.Faronwest.com.

JL: Cool, thanks.

Joey: Thanks a lot.