At 15 Steve Hanford became the hard hitting drummer for legendary punk band Poison Idea. He’s been in the business for years not only as one of hard core’s best drummers but as a producer as well until the years of addiction and rock and roll excess called it’s debt. After seven and a half years in the Oregon state penal system we catch up with him to see what’s next.

Wow, here we are, it's been seven and a half years my friend. Welcome home and thank you for agreeing to this interview. Let me just say right now that you look amazing, a completely different person from when I last saw you.

Thank you my dear, it's great to see you too.

So let’s start at the beginning. You've been playing drums since you were a kid. How old were you when you started playing and who influenced you?

I started playing drums around 8 years old. I was listening to Black Sabbath, Rush, Led Zeppelin, you know Van Halen, all that kind of stuff and then I got introduced slowly to Punk and Post Punk. I have to say the biggest influences on my playing were Keith Moon, Mitch Mitchell, John Bonham, Neil Purt, Bill Ward and later Klive Burr, Rat Scabies and Budgie. And then I just went on my own till I developed a style that I you know, liked. Elizabeth: Why was it drums as opposed to Guitar?

The reason I started on drums was because I was hanging out with three guys in my neighborhood and one of them got a guitar for his birthday, the other guy got a bass for Christmas and so I was forced to get a drum set because we were going to start a band and that's how it went down. I wanted to play guitar but was forced to play drums.

And play drums you did. That first band you were in with the neighborhood guys, was that with Figgy on bass?

Yes! Craig “Fig” Pallay, We played Fernwood middle school at a talent contest and we played the street theater a couple of times you know that was cool.


Ok, so then you join Mayhem at what, around 12?

Yes, in the neighborhood where I was living there was a lot of music. There was a Funk band and some metal bands. One of the metal guys lived two blocks away from me, he still does actually. His name was Eric "Vegetable" Olson, I went over to his house one day when I was 12 years old because I heard a band playing and I said hey, I want to play drums. Can I play with you guys? And they said you're a kid, we're trying to rock and I said I can rock and went in and played with them. He and I developed some songs together and we got Craig "Mondo" Lower, a guy I later went to high school with to put a band together. The long and short of the Mayhem story is one night when I was taking pictures at Slayer's first concert in Portland I started talking to Kerry king and said “I'm in a band and here's all these pictures I took for you guys.” Some of them got into that Decade of Aggression album but I didn't get credited. Anyway, he got us on Metal Massacre Six, Hirax was on that and some other bands and that kind of got us into the Heavy Metal ether so to speak. That kind of fizzled because I was starting to hang out with Tom Roberts from Poison Idea. I met Tom through Matt McCourt. He was the singer for a metal band called the Wild Dogs and later was the singer for Mayhem. Tom was kind of taken by me because I was just a metal head kid and I liked punk. I wanted to play and I didn't really care what anybody looked like I just liked how it sounded. I also liked the attitude and when I got introduced to Tom we developed a rapport and then I started working for Poison Idea being their roadie.

Tom heard some of the Mayhem stuff and said this stuff sounds pretty good, one day when they had just got done recording Kings Of Punk, I was at Tom's house with Jerry and we were listening to it. Some of the stuff was fucked up and I said “you know you should do this” and Jerry said yea, we're going to do this with you and so I went back into the studio with Tom and we redid all the guitar parts and remixed it and that’s what’s out there now. I'm not sure if I'm actually credited as the guitar producer and mixer of that album but anyway that's how that happened. When they got sick of playing with Dean and Tense who were both great players, they said hey let’s do it and that’s how I joined Poison Idea. Dean Johnson was a huge influence on how I played hard-core punk.

Let's talk about the late great Tom "Pig Champion" Roberts for a minute and what a brilliant man he was. Tom's guitar talent was legendary but he was also so damn smart, funny and fun to talk to.

Ah yes, He was all that. He was a philosopher, humorist and above all an alcoholic. He was a beautiful person and all crap aside I loved Tom and he taught me so much about music. It was insane; the guy had the biggest record collection I've ever seen in my life. He promoted shows, he put out records and had a radio show, he was constantly immersed in music, all kinds of music, mostly punk but you know punk is a pretty diverse thing? I mean it expands into so many different what would now be genres but then it was just punk. You know, hard-core punk, post punk, no wave, whatever, he had all those records and so much more. I would go through his records and just tape stuff.

I loved how at his house there was just a pathway from room to room between his records. Just records and beer bottles…..

Oh for sure, he had an extensive record collection. He had everything including a huge Elvis Collection, we were big on Tom Jones too, everything. Tom was a beautiful person and we cultivated a lot of music together and I learned so much. In that time we also cultivated a severe drug habit and all that comes with it. You know all kinds of shit can come up with that and it gets devious and it gets silly and childish and unfortunately it took his life. And you could say that maybe the healthcare system in this country took his life but that's a whole other story. At any rate Tom was a great, great man and is lionized and deified for good reason.


Amen my friend, absolutely. So most people know you as Thee Slayer Hippy, how and when did that moniker start?

Well I got that name before I joined Poison Idea and I was working for Tom doing the door at shows I think it was The Dicks or maybe Battalion of Saints. Anyway I was working the door and Del Murry from Lock Jaw came in expecting to get in for free and I said no dude, its five bucks. He said “do you know who I am?” And I said no I don't know who you are and I don't care its five bucks. So the next day I go over to Tom’s house and he says “LOOK, its Thee Slayer Hippy.” Apparently, Dell called Tom the next day wanting to know “who was that Slayer fucking prick long-haired asshole” running the door last night who wouldn't let him in. So from that day forward every time I walked into Tom's house that's what he would say, "Look, it's Thee Slayer Hippy." At first I hated it, I mean I had long hair and a Slayer patch on my jacket but I definitely wasn’t a hippie man. Anyway, that's how that name came about and Del and I are friends now.

Alright, so let’s talk now about the end of Poison Idea, at least the end of that amazing line up of Tom, Jerry, you, Tickner, and Mondo.

Yes, OK, Well you know Tom being who he was and how he lived his life, didn't apologize for how he imbibed alcohol or drugs and neither did the rest of us however, some of us could get along better than he could after all he was a 500 lb. man with an alcohol and opiate addiction and you know we were all getting there at the same rate. Charlie was the only one that really didn’t dabble in drugs he just drank. He drank like a fish but he didn't do drugs and he was sick and tired of being around a bunch of what seemed to be a bunch of children. We started acting like privileged little brats who made a couple of bucks and now had drug habits. Finally on our last tour in Europe, it was three months long and so brutal on Tom he was just "Well that's it, I'll record and stuff but I don't want to play anymore on the road" and who could blame him.

There was a time after that tour I went and talked to Wurzel from Motorhead about joining the band and he wanted to but in the end I thought, well you know it's not going to be Poison Idea without Tom so let's just stop. There's no reason to go on without that lineup. The lineup had changed over time but without Tom and Jerry, it wouldn't be Poison Idea anymore. Oh sure we could call it that and they call it that today, at least Vegetable is in the band with Jerry and they're doing good so I mean good on em. I'm not saying that the band shouldn't go forward but at that time we were all very sick individuals, it just had to stop so it did and then Jerry and I did that Gift record.

With Jerry's wife Mary! I loved it, brilliant!

Thank you, I'm glad someone liked it.

That show at La Luna was really good.

Yea, we played with Everclear and Swoon, I think it was Swoon. Anyway it was fun playing those shows but by that time Jerry and I were so dysfunctional it was just pointless to play with one another.





OK, moving on. What did you do after PI?

I got into a band called Nero’s Rome because I wanted to do a complete 180 from what I was playing. I wanted something different. I wanted to do something I didn't know how to do you know? I could play hard-core in my sleep. I wanted to do something different and they were more along the lines of a more refined style. A slick pop sound and I wanted to explore harmony and melody more. We were kind of getting there in PI but it didn't really fit. That's what we tried to do in Gift and it didn't really fit. So, I did a record with them called Togetherly and my name on that record is "Stinking goga dentures" I also go under “Thee Slayer Heaviest production”. After we recorded that album, like most bands I've been in dysfunction ensued and I bowed out and then I joined Grunt Truck and moved to Seattle. Grunt Truck had Alex and Tom from the Accused in it with Ben from Skin Yard and it was kind of grungy. It was good and it was fun but after seven or eight shows more dysfunction and addiction and that dissolves also. Unfortunately Ben's dead now but I got to play with Alex and Blaine from the accused in their band Toe Tag at Dante’s the other night and it was great. Mostly after that I produced records.

Tell me about the production work you have done. Who have you worked with?

Well I produced your band Candy 500 on the Sympathy label and that was fun. During my time in PI I produced and mixed a lot of Portland punk bands as well as Seattle bands. I went to LA and produced a band called Jug Heads Revenge and that was fun. I also got flown down to Australia and produced the Hard-Ons for their album Too Far Gone. Then I got to work with The Gits, and Joan Jett, she's fucking awesome. Then I moved back to Portland and I helped with the first two Heat Miser albums with Elliot Smith in the band. A bunch more stuff that can't come to mind at the moment. At any rate, that's what I'm doing now, cultivating my production career and getting back to work again.


October 9th 2008. Can we talk about that day?

Yeah, that was the day I turned myself in after I had a warrant issued for my arrest due to my sole involvement in robberies of pharmacies here in Portland. Now at that point, I had just been in my 13th drug rehab as well as six mental facilities. I had tried suicide by that time about 5 times and nothing worked. The last rehab I got in, I was put in there by "Music Cares" and it was the third time they put me in rehab and they said this is the last time we can afford to do this for you Steve so make it work. We are going to send you to a nice place and they did. They sent me to this really posh rehab outside of Nashville and I mean it was Posh. Every Friday night there were four guys carving four different kinds of prime rib. There were people there who kind of toyed with addiction you know, the guy who drinks a whole bottle of chardonnay and Ambien every Saturday night ooooooooo, and a guy who worked for Blackwater, who you know, killed a couple hundred people and drugs are the way he dealt with being a mercenary, he got fucked up.

So at any rate at my last rehab stay we did some kind of little therapy session where you pair off with a person and that person tells you what they did from the ages of 5 to 10. The guy I was paired off with tells me it was so nice and all about how he went to his grandma’s house, went on picnics and it was all beautiful you know, river activity and noodle salad. When it was my turn I came to the realization that I repressed a lot of sexual and physical abuse as a child. When I told this to this person in kind of a flat way they were shocked engrossed and oh my god, you know. After that exercise I went and saw this psychotherapist next to the station where they medicated the people at this facility and I asked him “is this only doctor patient privilege? I'm only telling this to you right?” He said yes so I proceeded to tell him everything and he says OK wait right here and he left the room, walked over to my counselor and a bunch of other people and proceeded to tell the whole story. I got furious because I was already really jarred from having to have this kind of gestalt realization about my life and so I went out and confronted him in a very ugly way and rather than beating him up I walked out into the woods and I picked up a log and I beat another log. Little did I know I was screaming so loud and being violent because I thought I was in the woods but there was a big shale wall and all my screams were bouncing off it directly to the neighbor’s house and who is the next door neighbor? Tim McGraw and Faith Hill as it turns out, I woke up Queen Faith so when I come out of the woods I'm surrounded by her Gestapo security force and I say hey listen stay away from me, I'm at this rehab here and this is their business not yours. Leave me alone and don't come near me. When I went in to deal with the rehab people they said you have a choice, you can either go to the Nashville General mental ward or you can go home. SO, I came home and I burned every bridge I could, destroyed my life and got rid of all my gear.

Finally one day I was walking in Walgreens and thought you know, this has got to stop so I looked around and there was this sale on steak knives so I grabbed a steak knife off the shelf and walked to the pharmacy counter and said put all the Dilaudid, OxyContin and all the other opiates you can in a bag and surprisingly they did and I walked out and got high for a while and finally thought ok it's time to go and I made an absolutely massive shot of the Dilaudid and I slept for a day and a half and woke up the sickest I've ever been in my life and thought that's it, I can't even kill myself.

By that time people had seen the video of the pharmacy robbery and the police were coming by my parents’ house and so I told my parents tell them I will be there this date and they can pick me up and I turned myself in.

I kicked drugs in jail and it was the absolute worst kick I had ever done but it was exactly what had to happen. I had to be locked up. I couldn't have been placated to. If I had had anybody say how are you? Can we do this for you? It wouldn't have worked. I was that sick and I had to go through it and it was not pretty.

I stayed in county jail for over a year and I pleaded insanity because I was. I finally got sentenced to 7 and a half years and during that time I was put back on all Psychotropic drugs I was prescribed on the outside and it came to about 11 different drugs. So I just ballooned to 360 lbs. and turned into a zombie and got so I couldn't walk straight or speak. I then got sent to OSP which was the worst prison in Oregon. That place should be condemned. There I got put into the mental health wing to get off all the pills that I was on and it took me about 8 weeks to get off 11 different pills. Finally I was sent to EOCI in Pendleton.

PUNK GLOBE:

So you get to EOCI and you find out there is a music room. How long were you there before you ventured into that music room? Tell me how all that transpired.

Steve Hanford:

Well, I found out that there was a room with drums and guitars and you know stuff that you could go and play. At that time I was still really messed up. I couldn’t really walk straight or talk in complete sentences. My equilibrium was all fucked up and you had to have 18 months clear conduct just to get into the room. So, what I did was made it my goal to get into that room. I passed my time by going to the religious library and read through the entire Buddhist section, then I started in the Hindu section, then the Hermetic magic section and during the whole time I would walk the track listening to music trying to just psych myself into being a human being again. I went on a strict diet and finally I got in there and started talking to the guy who ran the place. That guy’s name was Sam Redding, he started the place. He helped procure the funding for it and set the whole thing up. We started talking one day and he said “you know I know you from somewhere” I was still pretty sick at the time, and he said “Yea, I used to buy heroin from you up in northwest.” I thought oh fuck, I was by that time, so out of that mindset and he said “oh don’t worry about it, that’s all over now, let’s concentrate on this.” He and I developed a rapport and I told him that I produced music and he knew that I played drums and what I had done before and said “why don’t you come in here and we’ll see about getting you a job.” So I got a job in the EOCI music room and after a while I started teaching drums which meant I had to re-teach myself which was very valuable because I started doing things that I didn’t have the discipline to do before. It was hard at first, really hard but I just persevered. I started taking guitar lessons, just working the fret board a lot and I started producing Sam’s songs which turned out to be the Orchid Reverb album that we finished in there.

PUNK GLOBE:

It’s brilliant, maybe my favorite work from the entire project.

Steve Hanford:

Thank you, yea, those are all his songs, he was a really good song writer, all he needed was a little push and that’s what the producer does. After that I thought fuck, you know, If we can do this in here with this Chord D 3,200 track digital recorder, Hell I’ve got close to five years left, why don’t we start making records? We did his record “Orchid Reverb” and then we started in on some of the other bands that I was playing with in there and we made a compilation record called “Seems like up to me” and from then on it just cascaded into more projects of all kinds. Then all kinds of different guys were coming to the music room, they had certain skill sets. They were all trying to better themselves, trying to become whole again. When you came in through the doors of the music room you were in sanctuary. This man Don Osborne, he was an older gentleman in his 60’s, late 60’s. He played the country circuit down in Texas and we made the “Honky-Tonk Villains” album which is a bunch of covers and mostly sung by him. Sam did a couple of songs and I did a song. After that there were more projects. There was a band called “Nizari” which was a death metal band. The members changed over time but we did three albums and all are really good. The last one came out really great. By the end of the whole thing we had done an alternative band, a psyche-punk band a hard-core band, metal, funk, hip hop and country band. As many things as I could possibly think of to do we did. And with that we finished 13 albums and we’re about to master it all and trying to get it out. It’s a big body of work and it’s awesome. I play drums on every one of them and mixed and produced most of it. Some with Sam and some with other guys and it’s great.

PUNK GLOBE:

So now you’re out seven and a half years have passed and Portland, the city you grew up in is a completely different city from when you left. Are your plans to stay here?

Steve Hanford:

Yea I plan on staying here right now because I have 3 years of post-prison supervision to deal with. I have to be watched by the state a little bit to be sure I don’t re-offend or abscond. I’m happy to do whatever I have to do to stay out of the system it’s terrible. I have a bunch of production gigs in the works and a project with Eric the “vegetable” Olsen and his two sons. We’re going to do a kind of old school thrash metal thing. I have opportunities to play with some other bands; I’m not at liberty to say who they are yet because it’s still in the works. Mostly I’m going to concentrate on putting out these 13 albums I did in prison. Sam Redding, the guy I was talking about earlier gets out in July and we’re going to continue one of the albums that we did in EOCI that’s called “Cosmo demonic telegraph company” as well as putting out more “Orchid Reverb” albums. I just want to play.

PUNK GLOBE:

Are there any plans to work with Poison Idea again?

Steve Hanford:

I don’t know, I’ve heard pre tell talk about it but I haven’t heard personally or spoken to Jerry yet, I’ve talked to Eric but there’s just a lot of crap for Jerry and I to work through. There’s a lot of water under the bridge so to speak. I love him but we just need to have a conversation that’s all. It’s up to him and me and how ever we want to go forward.

PUNK GLOBE:

So, wrapping this up, what do you see for the future?

Steve Hanford:

I just want to cultivate and play great music and I want to do it with some positive people that want the same. If you want to get a hold of me you can find me on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/steve.hanford.18?pnref=friends.search that’s all new to me, it’s just crazy, technology… And my new smart phone is super smart.

Punk Globe would like to thank Elizabeth Deal and Steve Hanford for the informative interview..