Eddie Spaghetti chats with Ken Sharp for Rock Cellar magazine:

Rock Cellar: What’s the first rock and roll record you bought?

Eddie Spaghetti: The first record that I bought with my own money was Crimes Of Passion by Pat Benatar. I still have it. I think Neil Geraldo is a great guitar player and I think that record still holds up.

Rock Cellar: If we took a peek into Eddie Spaghetti’s bedroom while growing up, what would we see? What were the albums that got the most time on your turntable, posters on your wall?

Eddie Spaghetti: When I was a kid, the first music that I got turned on to was kinda more new wave-y. The record that made me want to play music and want to be a rock-n-roller was Get The Knack. When I heard “My Sharona” on the radio I literally lost my fuckin’ mind!

They were amazing. I still think I’m trying to write a song as good as “My Sharona” to this day. That record still sounds so good. It just sounds like a band. You can hear a live band. There’s very little overdubbing that needed to be done. I imagine there’s a lot of vocals they did after the fact, but the music sounds so live and vibrant… and just the sound of those drums, oh my God!

So you would find The Knack and Blondie and The Cars and also sprinkled in was some Commodores. I was pretty into the disco thing when I was a kid. That never really left me either, I still love that music and think it holds up really well. I had a Sir Nose d’Voidoffunk poster on my wall; he was a Parliament character. I also had a Commodores poster up on my wall and I had a Blondie poster, too. I was really into Blondie a lot and I had a massive crush on Debbie Harry as a young man. So that kind of stuff was my first love, but then when I got into high school I got turned onto Van Halen and then my walls were completely covered with pictures of Van Halen.

Rock Cellar: If someone did not know the Supersuckers but wanted to check out the band, what’s the first Supersuckers album you’d pick to turn them on?

Eddie Spaghetti: Oh boy, I guess it kind of depends on their angle. If they’re alt-country people or if they’re more like rock-n-roll people, that would go a long way into determining which album of ours I’d recommend someone starts off with first. I would say our newest albums sound the best. Suck It and Play That Rock ‘N’ Roll are our best sounding records that we’ve ever made.

Rock Cellar: How about the alt-country folks?

Eddie Spaghetti: I’d say Must’ve Been High is the one. I think it’s probably our most popular record, even though at the time when we put it out it was met with a large amount of confusion and disdain from our hardcore fans. They just didn’t get it. It was so out of left field for us, for this scrappy, shitty punk rock band to put out something so big and mature in scope.

It still had goofy Supersuckers lyrics on it, but it was such a departure and came so out of left field that I think people didn’t understand it at first. That record came out before here was any such thing as “alt-country,” there was no No Depression magazine about grassroots music. There were none of those cornerstones of the movement now which has become an accepted genre in country music.

We were one of the first to put wheels on that wagon, and I’m pretty proud of that.

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