Fury Of Forward Motion: Our Interview With Joe "Shithead" Keithley

CREDIT: Sudden Death Records

Over the course of thirty some years, Joe "Shithead" Keithley has presided over the shelled out Dodge City of Punk Rock with all the pioneer spirit and rogue cowboy appeal that we love in our anti-establishment icons. Whether it be as the well-known frontman of D.O.A., a band that rode the top of the DIY wave of the early eighties and beyond; or as a potential politician and activist, he's managed to keep his finger on the pulse of humanity long enough to know what makes it surge.

I recently finished reading his new book, Talk–Action=0: An Illustrated History Of D.O.A., and was stunned by the amount of fun I had pouring over the pages packed with over three decades of life with D.O.A and Joe.

Hi Joe, how are you?
I'm great. How is it going with you?

Good thanks. What do you say we start out talking a little bit about the new book, Talk–Action=0: An Illustrated History Of D.O.A.? It's an amazing visual and written history and it spans thirty years down to the smallest detail. Personally I love this kind of book but I was exhausted for you when I saw the amount of stuff that went into it. It's meticulous. Playlists, lyrics, photos, fan art, posters. How hard was it laying out all of this and making sense of it?
It was pretty funny. I had 14 maybe 15 boxes of fairly reasonable size of all this stuff I'd collected over the years and when we first kind of conceived the book I went down and talked to Arsenal Pulp Press because they had done my last book, I, Shithead about eight years ago, and I thought, "How about a poster book?" They said, "Yeah, that's a good idea."

So we decided to do it in the summertime. So we got back from the tour last November and started going through the boxes and I said, "Man, there is an awful lot of shit in here." I've got duplicates of the same thing and I finally sorted through it and finally got it down to two boxes maybe three and went down to Arsenal and met with their entire staff and they had this big boardroom table and I kind of turned the two boxes upside down and dumped them out and just went, "Hey, there's your book." Not in a mean way but they were kind of just like, "Well, what the fuck to we do with this?"

So then it was the art editor who said, "Let's just put these things together correctly by year." So we started doing that and then she got on the computer and then I joined in and then we found some websites that were like a date finder because Saturday the 15th, 1983 could also be Saturday the 15th, 1990 right.

Eventually we pared it down and once I had them into years in order, I began to write the stories from there. So when we had enough posters from the first ten or fifteen years, it really started rolling and we could add more stuff in later as it went along.