Hey! Don't worry About it.
Interview With Tracy Lee Skull From Thee Undertakers
Los Angeles
From Issue 2.2, November/December 2005
If someone wants to step inside the home of Tracy Lee Skull and tell him “Wow, you have a nice house,” chances are he’ll respond with a quick “thanks” and then proceed to say, “Yeah, a lot of people think we’re rich. I call it getting a job.”
It’s wry wittiness-not to be confused with rudeness-that makes Tracy unbelievably cool and by far one of the most down-to-earth people to talk to when it comes to all of the music that emerged from Los Angeles in the late 70s.
This is because he started East Los Angeles band Thee Undertakers in the middle of 1977, and the band eventually played at places like the Vex, Starwood, Hong Kong Cafe and the Whiskey with other bands like D.O.A., Plugz, Gears, X, 45 Grave and Mad Society.
While someone might be quick to assume that this is the story of someone who used to play in a band, that person would be sadly mistaken.
This is very much so the story of Thee Undertakers-not as they were in the past, but what Thee Undertakers are doing today.
“I have 25 years of punk in my blood,” Tracy said. “What? Am I going to wear polyester and sit around rotting here.”
In fact, as he said, it’s all about, “what are you doing now? What I’m trying to do is to show that hey, some of us [from the earlier days] are still alive, some of us are still around,” Tracy said.
Although the period from 1979-1982 brought in a lot of gigs, Thee Undertakers eventually stopped playing in 1982 after what Tracy described as “personality problems.”
In 1981, the band began recording their LP and Tracy said, “that’s when things started to disintegrate. What happens is all these big labels start buzzing about you. People start paying attention to you and there are personality problems. You try to continue and it’s not the same anymore. Everyone kind of went their own way.”
The LP they recorded went nowhere for 20 years after they disbanded.
“You can’t change the past,” he said in retrospect. “I wish the record came out back then. I wish there was not so much bullshit with the band. It was just this big build-up and then the hearse hit the wall.”
None of this however, should overshadow what Thee Undertakers, past and what will be the present, seek to do with the music.
Years after the disbanding, Grand Theft Audio released an EP in 2001 containing some of the band’s music from their L.P. and demos. In 2005, Artifix Records released a record with previously unreleased material.
Everyone continued on their own way, until Tracy began putting the band together in 2000, but was confident in saying that it will not be the original line-up.
“The problem is that people get older and they lose that feeling,” he said of the kind of havoc time sometimes does to a band.
So far, it is Tracy on bass and “Creepy” Tony on guitar, and he expects the 4-song, concept CD to be out soon.
Formerly a resident of East Los Angeles, Tracy moved to Pomona in the early 80s. He currently lives in Covina and frequents the shop Feedback Records for what he calls “research”-though he probably remembers and has seen more than what any DVD or CD will show someone.
That research translates back into a large collection of CDs and DVD’s that he kept walking back and forth from towards the end of the interview pulling off everything from the documentary “Punk Attitude” to a CD from a German band called Seeed to DVDs of the Masque and The Gears live.
His library collection of music for the most part recounts a part of punk’s past.
Tracy, who does not really care for thrash and what the mainstream says is punk today, said he used to look at the younger generation as a bunch of poseurs, which he said a lot of older people do.
However, he came to the realization that many young punks are still listening to old bands and said, “Now I kind of admire the younger generation. They’re experiencing it all now, but it’s interesting that they’re going back [to the past for their music].”
He said while many kids get caught up in the fad and go to shows to socialize, he answered back, “Yeah, but what else are you going to do. You get out of the house. Maybe you don’t care about the band, but you’ve got to have an outlet.”
That outlet, which also translates into how people dress he said, should be backed up with a response when someone asks “Why are you dressed that way?”
“Have an answer,” he said. “When [kids] say, ‘Oh, it’s because it’s cool,’ then that’s when it becomes trendy.”
When it comes down to it, he said that no matter how a band dresses, it all comes down to rock ‘n’ roll and being able to appreciate the music enough to be able to keep a beat and actually know how to play.
Though Tracy would agree that things are not the same as how they used to be.
“It was pretty crazy times,” he said. “Back then, it was a little different.”
Back then, The Brat, The Illegals and the Stains were all playing and he and his bandmates used to dress in black suits, sang about the recession and poverty and used to go down to a bar down the street from their former drummer’s home.
“It was like being in a pulp fiction movie,” Tracy said of walking into that particular bar. “It was like being exposed to your culture. There were people sniffing paint and totally drunk.”
Started as just three high school kids into the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, Thee Undertakers went from having trash thrown at them, to earning the respect of their audiences.
Tracy recalled how at their first show, the crowd was not into them and threw stuff at them-including a screwdriver that Tracy remembered stuck straight out from the stage floor.
“All I could do was laugh,” he said. “They didn’t get what we were trying to do. We had no reason to sound like anyone else and they were all just standing there looking at us like ‘what the hell’s this? What the hell’s this guy doing.’”
There was also another incident when the band played at the Vex and written on the wall was the message, “Undertakers: Go Back to Mexico.”
At the time, the Chicano movement was in full swing, but Thee Undertakers never subscribed to only that one platform. Their music was more universal.
“We all sang about our neighborhoods,” Tracy said of him and other bands at the time. “At the time, it was the whole Chicano movement. To me that’s kind of one-sided. Color doesn’t matter, but if you’ve got a screwed up brain, then that’s your problem.”
It is also someone’s problem if they don’t get what Thee Undertakers were trying to do.
“It wasn’t good,” Tracy said of the bad shows, “but it was fun. Our only goal was to play and just terrorize people. We didn’t want to be punk; we wanted to be scary punk.”
Based on how they dressed and their photo shoot in a cemetery, the four original members had a fascination with the morbid, but their music was pure punk. It had the nerve to hit the vein when it came to pinpointing social ills and they had the nerve to keep playing even when people said to stop.
Some people may not understand what Tracy is trying to do with the band and then others have just moved on from music.
“People say I’m tunnel visioned,” he said now standing near a window in his living room smoking a cigarette, “and that I’ll never grow up. I’m sorry that’s just what I like. People say, ‘oh, you need to grow up.... The last five years [of putting the band back together] have been interesting. That’s why you’ve gotta believe in yourself, or just don’t even worry about it.”
While he does speak with excitement about the up-coming recording, he is not bending over backwards to persuade people to listen. After all, Thee Undertakers already proved themselves legitimate more than 20 years ago. Now, as Tracy would put it, it is just a matter of focusing on the present because the past is done.
Twenty years ago Art wearing his suspenders backward, the black suits and death-like look prompted blank stares, the screwdrivers, audience heckling and the questions of what in the world Thee Undertakers were trying to do from people not listening hard enough to the music.
“It was always that question, ‘What are you guys doing?,’” Tracy said.
As if to finalize his response to that eternal question, he said with a wave of his hand, “Don’t worry about it.”