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MAIRE MASCO (Pravda Productions partner; Desperate Times zine cofounder) It’s kind of hard to imagine now, but a lot of people in the scene didn’t even have telephones. In order to get a phone you had to put down a deposit of like $75 to $125. That was a lot of money! So the way you communicated with people was flyers, not only to promote bands and events, but sometimes to express political beliefs or public commentary.

This band started putting up posters that were just hilarious. One was MR. EPP AND THE CALCULATIONS: GREATER, BIGGER, LOUDER THAN THE GRATEFUL DEAD. Some of their other great taglines were LOUSIER THAN BOB DYLAN and LESS CREATIVE THAN JOHN CAGE.

Dennis White and I were watching these flyers go up and we’re like, “We gotta figure out who these guys are.” But there was no phone number on the flyers, no dates. And one day we were walking down First Avenue, and we saw some kids putting up a flyer, and we ran up to the flyer and realized it was for Mr. Epp and the Calculations. And we’re like, “Oh, my God, we found them!” They were a block or so ahead of us, so we ran down the street chasing them. They, of course, thought we were gonna beat them up or arrest them or something.

Finally we caught up to them and we said, “So are you guys Mr. Epp and the Calculations?” And it was Mark Arm and Jeff Smitty, and they kinda looked at their feet and shuffled around and said, “Yeah, I guess,” like they were guilty of something. I said, “Well, I’m Maire Masco, this is Dennis White. We’re with Pravda Productions and we’d really like to book you.”

They just started laughing, and I think it was Mark Arm who said, “Oh, my God, that means we have to get instruments!”

MARK ARM Mr. Epp was a fake band for a number of years, as retarded as that sounds. It was named after a math teacher in our little private Christian high school. One of our friends, Darren Morey, was actually a good drummer, but the rest of us didn’t know how to play anything. I was forced to play piano as a kid, but I quit in seventh grade and did my best to forget about it. We made these weird tapes with shit that was at hand in the house, appliances and whatnot. We didn’t think we were being avant-garde; we were just a bunch of kids dicking around.

After high school, we decided to make the band a little more real, and my friend Smitty and I went in on a guitar and an amp. At that time, Darren was still in high school. And Todd was like 16. He was Darren’s brother and the baby of the band.

How’d I get the name Mark Arm? My friends and I were into non sequitur humor. One day, Smitty and I had this fake argument using non-offensive body parts in place of normal swear words, like “nose face” or “ear elbow.” It culminated in Smitty calling me “arm arm,” which made us all just double over in laughter.

DENNIS R. WHITE They were snotty, self-important 16-year-olds. I may have been as old as 24 or 25 at the time, and they saw us as completely old and useless. There’s no doubt there was a certain sense of fun and novelty, but there was something else that we heard—they took it one step beyond the typical DIY ethic. There was such a sense of mission in what they were doing. And they would’ve just sneered at that: “What do you mean, ‘mission’?”

STEVE TURNER I met Mark in October of ’82, right when my senior year started. He’d come back from one year at college in McMinnville, Oregon, when I met him—we could never really decide if it was the Public Image Ltd. show or the TSOL show where I met him in line. We had a lot in common: Snarky sense of humor, some amount of disdain for the punk rockers. One of Mr. Epp’s jobs was definitely to piss off the punks, ’cause they were so easy to rile up.

JEFF SMITH (a.k.a. Jo Smitty; Mr. Epp and the Calculations singer/guitarist) The DJ Rodney Bingenheimer started playing our song “Mohawk Man” on the radio in L.A. and people liked it. We were always amazed that anyone liked what we did at all. A lot of people hated us, just because we didn’t have the right signifiers,