By Welcome to Hard Time Blues: The World of Pro Wrestling from Merry-Go-Round Magazine! It’s a great time to get into professional wrestling. With the Hard Time Blues feature, Luke Phillips explores the wild, weird, and wooly world of the squared circle, and all of the angles, feuds, gossip, and evil wizards therein.
It’s been almost 30 years since Rivers Cuomo first sang, “watching grunge leg drop New Jack through a press table.” Kate Meizner of the hard-hitting power pop act Jobber, who recently released their stunning debut album, JOBBER TO THE STARS, on Exploding in Sound, has stepped into the ring here with Hard Time Blues.
Kate, can you name more than five Weezer songs that sound like Pavement, including “El Scorcho”?
Kate Meizner: I think “El Scorcho” and “The Sweater Song” and … Yeah, really it’s a trick question, because there aren’t any others.
It’s great to have you back here, and to talk about the new Jobber album, your debut, JOBBER TO THE STARS.
KM: Lots of ground to cover for that album—and lots of ground to cover in terms of the wrestling world at large, and so, yeah, let’s get into it. The album, I mean, you know, obviously we talked to you when the EP first came out. And I guess it should be known that we are actually, like, friends (since then).
Make everything copacetic on a journalistic front—friends, like, socially, and, like, constantly talking about wrestling.
KM: Yeah, we’ve done karaoke several times—Lenny Kravitz karaoke.
That’s been very fun. I’m excited for when you come out to LA next.
KM: We’ve even gone to wrestling shows in LA before.
Beyond all of that, I really think that the album is just an incredible triumph—one of my favorite debut albums of this year. And one of my favorite albums of the year, just full-stop. I texted you when it came out and gave it the highest praise I can give something in my estimation, which is that it sounds like the PINKERTON B-sides. It sounds like “I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams,” or the Rentals, or Ozma.
KM: You got it. I feel like the Rentals were my main inspiration for at least one of the songs on the album … The Rentals were a big inspiration. Sugar was a big inspiration for me. Really just one particular song where I totally ripped off a Sugar, but you know there’s a lot of influence.
It definitely sounds like Sugar—even the BEASTER EP.
KM: Sugar has a lot of heavy shit that’s kind of crazy.
COPPER BLUE is so hooky and it’s got all the singles on it, but then they were putting out EPs that were some of the most heavy and gnarly and screamy stuff—the polar opposite end of the Bob Mould sound.
KJ: It’s that energy Bob Mould brought to it, yeah. I was really late to learning that Bob Mold wrote for WCW.
Oh yeah, what the Hell—incredible wrestling connection. I’m glad you brought that up.
KM: Yeah, very funny.
Have you ever read his autobiography, SEE A LITTLE LIGHT? He talks about that a little bit.
KM: No, wait, I’m gonna order it right now.
Yeah, it’s pretty good. He talks about how he wanted to have that dichotomy between heavy music and really poppy, hooky music, and how that was always kind of the thing that he was trying to do with Hüsker Dü. But, he’s very hip with it, like, he understands and recognizes his own influence. He saw firsthand how the Pixies and shoegaze bands were name-checking him in interviews. So that was kind of like his rebuttal, I guess, the BEASTER EP. He wanted to still be part of the whole heavy alternative discussion, but he had moved on from Hüsker Dü and the shoegaze people had heard Hüsker Dü and heard the weird production on their albums, and were like, “Oh! It’s loud, but it’s really muddy!”
KM: I was just gonna say! The bad Hüsker Dü production is so awful. Mike, our drummer, and I joked that you could tell which songs were the Bob Mould songs, when Bob Mould was singing it sounded like Kenny from South Park, he sounds so muffled.
Holy fuck, that’s so funny. He does sound like Kenny! Like an angry Kenny!
KM: I love Hüsker Dü, though, I gotta say, when I was in LA … Not, like, the best driving music. Sorry, Bob.
The Sugar albums are way more, like, better produced, his solo albums are better produced. Hüsker Dü was always the hardest band for me to get other people into, especially, like, when I was getting into them in high school, because their albums sound like shit. Like, the albums on SST, all the Spot-produced ones, sound like shit—like, Spot never produced an album that sounded good besides … I guess the Minutemen stuff he worked on. And then all of the Warner Brothers stuff, once they self-produce themselves, has the awful ‘80s production on them that’s super dated and has all of those horrible gated drums and shit.
KM: You know what, though? I do think that for some reason Bob Mould songs just sounded worse and worse with the bad production. Grant Hart songs sound cool as Hell with the shitty production.
Yeah, they don’t sound as bad on the Hart songs.
KM: It’s funny, I think it was kind of on Bob. Bob had more songs than Grant on the early stuff.
By the end it’s pretty much half-and-half between them on the Warner Brothers albums. It was kind of almost like a 2/3 split at first.
KM: I love Hüsker Dü. Pretty much one of my favorite bands, but yeah, their albums sound like shit.
You can totally hear the influence on the Jobber stuff—but it doesn’t sound like shit. One thing I also heard too is that “GoInG InTo bUsinEsS FoR MySeLf” sounds a lot like Elastica. It was Oasis weekend in LA last month—I stole Oasis Valor, I bought a $50 bucket hat at the merch pop-up a block away from my apartment, but I didn’t go see them.
KM: I’m sorry, you didn’t see Oasis, but guess what, I stole Oasis Valor too.
Yeah? That’s so sick.
KM: I didn’t go ’cause my mom was in town, and the night of the show I was like, I’m just gonna wear my full, like, Adidas get-up and, like, go, and then everyone at the bar was, like, taking shots, like, “This is to not being at Oasis”
Look, I had better shit to do than see Oasis, no matter how fun that sounds. But I think the Elastica record is probably the best Britpop record.
KM: Oh my gosh, I love that you just said that.
It’s one of those things where it’s, like … I’m not trying to be performative or anything. When I got into Britpop I always thought Elastica was the best. I know at the time it wasn’t as well received as Blur was or whatever, but I think that that’s such an incredible debut record, and I think every song is so good—and it’s a long album, too. There’s, like, 14 tracks on it.
KM: Justine Frischmann is her name. There was a Blur/Elastica connection. She dated Damon and she was a founding member of Suede but left them early on.
And Damon was dating her when Blur put out all those albums that sound like Elastica.
KM: Damon plays keyboards on the Elastica album, and then they broke up.
There was some tension maybe, I think, because Elastica had broken through in America in a way Blur hadn’t yet. “Connection” was in a lot of commercials and ads and trailers. “Song 2” and Gorillaz hadn’t happened yet.
KM: It’s funny you bring up that song, because that is a very, very old song. So the aforementioned Mike Falcone, our drummer, he has an unbelievable backlog of songs that he’s written, or half-written. Some of them are just totally off the rails—like he was going full experimental. But this one, I heard it, and he was kind of singing something unintelligible, but I heard something in it. So I finished the song—he had the foundation of the song and then I added a lot of things. I wrote the lyrics. I basically arranged it and structured it and finished it. Wrote an entire part for it, like a guitar solo. So I would say he wrote the foundation, but, like, we heavily co-wrote that song and his intention was to make it sound like Elastica. I was like, “This is too much Elastica.”
You can hear that kind of quirky jerk Elastica thing going on, too. Elastica is ripping off Wire and the Stranglers, right? So you’re ripping off Elastica just as much as Elastica were ripping off Wire, right?
KM: Oh yeah, no, no, no, we were ripping off Wire.
You’re ripping off Wire as much as Pavement was ripping off the Fall, right?
KM: Less than Weezer was ripping off Pavement, mmhmm.
Yeah, that’s funny. Keeping to the Weezer connection to another thread, you know, it also reminds me a lot of that Juliana Hatfield record, from like 1999 or 2000-ish. It was called JULIANA’S PONY.
KM: That is not by design. There’s just, like, bands that you’ve never listened to for no reason and Juliana Hatfield is one of those. Yeah, she was in the Blake Babies, right?
Yeah, she was also briefly in Lemonheads.
KM: I know she and Dando are tight.
She’s awesome, and I think especially the JULIANA’S PONY record is very proto-Jobber. The Weezer connection is that Mikey Welsh, the bass player from GREEN ALBUM, who’s sadly passed away, he plays bass and he co-wrote several of the songs on that album.
KM: So we’re connecting all the dots.
It’s a cool, scuzzy, almost stoner rock Juliana Hatfield album. With all of the bass parts that you don’t hear on GREEN ALBUM because they’re mixed down.
KM: I’m glad I can hear the bass parts because that was something … Some of the bass parts that were recorded and written for this album are crazy. So if you ever decide to close-listen, I would write the bass parts and then someone else would perform them in the recording session so I didn’t lose my mind—I could shut my brain off for, like, you know, five minutes here and there. Miles did an amazing job recording. Mike Falcone did a great job recording a bass on a few. They’re really great bassists.
… But if you want to …AND JUSTICE FOR ALL it, that’s a perfectly and totally valid means of production, right? SPINAL TAP II just came out …
KM: Oh, because Lars is in it from Metallica.
I thought that was so funny.
KM: I love a sighting.
I’ve been wanting to watch SOME KIND OF MONSTER, and I’ve been … I keep recommending it to all of my colleagues, especially the ones under 30 who haven’t seen it … I’m like, “You’ve got to see SOME KIND OF MONSTER … ”
KM: You have to. I mean the sheer principle of a “Band Therapist” in so much sense, but, like, seeing it in action … It’s wild. It’s like watching that show COUPLES THERAPY, but with James Hetfield and Lars just going at each other. It’s insane. Lars is just such a petty little bitch and, like, yeah … I mean, it’s beautiful.
He’s such an asshole, and it’s so funny because he’s so insufferable, but he gets comeuppance, you know, he gets comeuppances from his dad, his tennis pro dad Torbin—“Delete that!” Incredible!
KM: I love that scene.
I mean every scene is full of quotables, right?
KM: It really is the real-life SPINAL TAP. Like, what amazes me about Lars is that he’s been playing drums professionally now, like, for how long? Like, 45 years?
Yeah, and he hasn’t gotten any better.
KM: He sucks at it. Metallica obviously sounds amazing live, but, like, more ramshackle than I think other huge arena bands now. Because Lars just can’t play on time, he has, like, the worst clock.
Oh my God, it’s so funny.
KM: Like, you’ve been doing this for longer than I’ve been alive.
Oh yeah, like, I mean, have you seen the Instagram where it’s just the guy who does impressions of Lars’ drumming? He’s, like, a professional drummer—like, a session drummer someplace, a gigging drummer, like the guy who just joined Primus or whatever.
KM: What the Hell? Why does he stand up so much? Like, what? It’s all performance, man. That’s how you gotta do it.
Be a drummer! Good music chat for sure. You can bring it back into, like, tying into the themes of the album or whatever, whenever you want to now. I kinda also want to kind of go into a general kind of state of wrestling talk, get a little snarky with it, you know. There’s been a lot of developments with wrestling. AJ Lee is now back in, in wrestling, back with WWE after nearly a decade, post-retirement, and after, you know, Vince treated her so badly.
KM: Holy crap, and also hot on the heels of, you know, WWE bringing Brock Lesnar back into the fold controversially.
Certainly convenient timing.
KM: So when I got into wrestling, or rather back sort of back into wrestling in 2015, she had already just left. And re-entering wrestling fandom in August of 2015—around the time of SummerSlam—one of the things that really stood out to me, and catching up and as I was getting deeper into wrestling, was thinking, “Wow, the women’s division is really different and is much stronger than it was when I was watching wrestling more casually just through osmosis when I was growing up.” And I remember seeing Paige and being, like—all the wrestlers look cool, like, they’re all really, really good. I even remember being impressed with the Bella Twins because, by comparison to how things were in, like, 2002, they’re amazing. But then I didn’t really know about AJ Lee. I started going back and watching the videos of CM Punk as I got deeper into it, and there was this whole wild storyline with Dolph Ziggler and AJ Lee, and I just remember thinking that she was a really good wrestler. Really good on the mic. Her gimmick obviously does not hold up so well now.
To her credit, I think it’s crazy how she’s still just doing the gimmick.
KM: The way she threaded the needle, like, well, so she comes back after CM Punk had left, and then they were really horrible to her in the locker room and just terrible to her in general. So she retired and she cited when she came back, she said felt like she had accomplished all that she had to accomplish—which, I mean, there was a vital piece of that promo missing of the rationale for her leaving, but she talked about how she left and she went to therapy, and she was taking care of her mental health … But the way she threaded it in, I was catching up and I saw Becky Lynch, and I just knew I had to come back, and she, like, segued immediately from talking about taking care of herself and going into this unhinged, like, “I came back to get revenge on Becky Lynch because I couldn’t bear to see her with the title.” Oh my God, the ridiculousness of that is just, like, part of why I love wrestling so much. Then Becky comes out—total heel mode. Cuts a better promo on AJ Lee, in my opinion. I think it’s cool that she’s maintained the gimmick, but then there were certain things that were just such deep millennial cringe, even about her promo the other night. She was like, “I hung up my Chuck Taylors,” and I was like, “No, don’t say that.” And then she had everyone in the crowd chanting therapy, and I was like, yeah, we all like that. We all like therapy, sure, but you don’t want to chant it.
Oh, absolutely. It’s very funny. I don’t want to compare them too much because I think AJ can stand on her own. She’s always going to be like a mirror of Punk in her return, because of both the circumstances of how she retired and returned, but also how she’s the spouse of the guy who did the exact same thing and has been feuding with Seth Rollins and Becky.
KM: They pretty much did the ultimate Superstar Spouse vs. Superstar Spouse program. They’ve been trying to do the spouse versus spouse matches for, you know, almost half a decade—a little over half a decade now.
And it kind of came and went, and they’re on to the next already! Bringing this into the whole State of Wrestling, in general, it’s been very hard for me to follow and care about WWE this year. There have been some storylines I’ve liked or am still interested in seeing play out, but for the most part I think they have completely whiffed in major moments where it counted. The shows feel like they’re running on fumes, and it just seems like everyone in the company loves the smell of their own shit. And they’re just coasting. They’re charging people premiums for coasting and this awful, protracted, modern Triple H-style booking. It’s weird because my brother is really into it—he follows the product weekly—and my dad is getting into it. It’s hard for me to try to balance caring enough to talk about it with him sometimes and follow it as much as I do, because really, most of what I’ve seen this year, I have not liked. Compared to how decent it’s been in the last several years.
KM: That makes sense. From what I understand, and I haven’t followed NXT in quite some time, but apparently their, like, NXT division—the developmental division, for anyone who isn’t familiar—it’s just like a hot fire right now. It is just so good and they’re, like, basically sitting on a gold mine, a whole arsenal of amazing talent, and that is the one thing that I feel like they have on AEW in the sense that they can sign the best talent and afford to do it. And train them, and develop them, and they have some of the best trainers at that gym in Orlando. So that’s, like, the only silver lining I see. I mean, I did love the Becky / AJ / Seth / CM Punk feud. I’ve been hoping this would happen since before Punk even came back and Seth was cutting promos on CM Punk before he even came back, calling him a cancer. That made it feel real.
Because Jericho or Mox had already said that in dirt sheets!
KM: It felt almost like Monday Night Wars-era shit, and also there have been some recent things about WWE scheduling the pay-per-view the same night as AEW—the counterprogramming is really reminding me of that era. I feel, like, in particular the Punk/Seth feud and then getting the wives involved and having AJ come back. Not to quote Vince, but I’m like, “Oh, this is, like, the good stuff. This is good shit.”
It’s hard to be a WWE fan right now, and I would not readily say I am one. The counter/counterprogramming makes them look scared and bitchmade—it hurt them and made them look bad the weekend of ALL IN, it made them fuck up the Goldberg retirement Saturday Night Main Event, it fucked up the build and scheduling for EVOLUTION, which ended up being one of their best pay-per-views that year. That was all on the backs of the women just pulling that out of essentially thin air, because their talent are so good and their pool is so deep.
KM: It’s a credit to the strength of the women’s division.
Seeing that event is, you know, part and parcel for why AJ is even back now, right?
KM: And what’s interesting is that the AEW Women’s division was suffering only a year or two ago. That was always sort of my gripe with AEW, not really doing anything with their women’s division, but now it’s so strong.
Yeah, they have some of the wrestlers I’m most excited about, definitely.
KM: You know, I think AEW has that thing where it’s, like, yeah, they don’t have the PC, they don’t have the same kind of development.
It’s very almost on-the-job training, right?
KM: It’s sink or swim.
That’s kind of almost the appeal of the promotion, right? It’s how sink or swim it can be. I think Cody and Punk and some other people learned that the hard way, especially people who were former WWE, right? When you have that kind of approach, you can’t rely on the safer storylines.
KM: AEW has done a tremendous job. I mean, look at Toni, she’s just, like … Gosh.
Toni and Mercedes Moné have really proved that you can come out of WWE and become the best version of yourself at AEW. For Mercedes and Toni, in particular, that’s kind of crazy.
KM: It’s, like, they’re giving us the versions of them that we weren’t really afforded in WWE.
Mercedes, I think, still gets a lot of really awful hate directed at her from the IWC and all these stupid mouth-breathers who remain wrestling fans.
KM: Is she the best promo? No. But, like, whatever. I think she’s really making it work with what she’s doing in AEW and she’s only gotten better in the 18 months she’s been there, or two years she’s been there. And she’s an incredible belt collector now.
She’s doing the Super Saiyan version of the Sasha Banks gimmick. Timeless Toni Storm is the greatest women’s gimmick in the last five years.
KM: She’s one of the best wrestlers and one of the best promos, male or female.
It’s an incredible gimmick. I think honestly Timeless Toni Storm is a better single gimmick than just about any gimmick in WWE, but then again, I really think it’s operating on a level that’s just completely beyond something that WWE would be able to provide as a promotion. It’s a reason to watch AEW, right?
KM: Let’s just not talk about only the two of them, right?
It’s Saturday Night! Stat is champ, which is so great. They’ve built the division around incredible women like Athena at Ring of Honor, the Forever Champ, Jamie Hader, I mean, of course, Statlander, you know, Willow. All these people, and there’s more recouping.
KM: Marina Shafir became more of a presence, pulling weight and bringing in intergender stuff to AEW.
Bringing in Mina Shirakawa, bringing in Beth Phoenix. Harley Cameron is really entertaining. They’ve really developed the division in a powerful way.
KM: More power to them. Bringing it back to WWE, I like what Bayley has been doing with her gimmick recently.
I am a massive Bayley mark—a big Pam stan—and I’m very tickled with how she’s doing a conflicted lurching between the emotional extremes of her previous gimmicks. I want Joker Pam.
KM: I’m glad we’ve only talked about the women too, to be honest.
I think I should only watch the women in WWE and turn off the rest of the show. They don’t deserve to be watched any more than that because they fucked up Cena’s retirement year so badly.
KM: Absolutely. Between WWE, and AEW, and Joshi, and indies: Watch more women’s wrestling, I think is the ultimate point.
It’s not a performative or woke thing to say.
KM: It’s just the truth.
You can snag a copy of JOBBER TO THE STARS over on Bandcamp!
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