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This is an interview with The Grandmaster Swamp Ratte from Cult of The Dead Cow. It was taken from an interview originally published in HOE E'zine on 5/1/95. I love hyperlinks!@ Mogel: How did you get your handle? SR: I used to spend my days when I was little running around through the woods in Ohio around my parents' house. These woods contained a huge swamp which I'd fall into a lot and get covered with sewage. Cool. Rats are cool, too. Really though, it's just another "dumb animal" handle and I spell it differently to not be confused with however many other people call themselves the same thing. If i'd been thinking ahead, I would have come up with something more unique. BTW, "Ratte'" is just pronounced "rat." It ain't pseudo-French. Mogel: How old were you when you first got into telecom? SR: In 1980, the UPS Man brought a gnarly Apple II+ w/48k RAM and one 140k disk drive to the house. I was ten years old and it was about the coolest thing anyone had ever seen. Friends would come over and we'd play lots of Wizardry, Apple Panic, Space Eggs, Bill Budge's Space Album...early stuff like that. Write lame little things in Applesoft. Read Softalk, Creative Computing, and Hardcore Computist magazines. In '82 at school I was introduced by some other kids to the concept of WAREZ. Woah. As everybody knows, when you're 12 that means all the video games you could ever want, free. With those way-cool "CRACKED BY MR. KRAC-MAN!!" sector edits and the names of the first two pirate groups splattered all over 'em... The Apple Mafia and The Untouchables. It was intriguing. I started calling boards in '84. There were maybe a half-dozen or so of us local younger teens who were all running boards by this time on Apple II's, TI 99/4A's, and Atari 800's. The BBS software was all original or so modded-out that you couldn't tell what it was originally. It was a tightly-knit group and we had a lot of fun doing messed-up board mods that freaked out the old tech-oriented users who only called Fidos. This is what cDc originally grew out of. The Egyptian Lover of the Phoneline Phantoms was our local elite guy (he had an AppleCat modem while nobody else did) and he ran a board called The Missing Link which was a big deal at the time. He helped Franken Gibe and I get going with the low-level telecom stuff of the day... easy local codes, extenders, WATS Metros, boxing, bridges, Alliance conferences, etc. Wargames-era things, as we were all part of that early '80s big wave of h/p kids. The best thing about The Missing Link though was that it had something brand-new... text-files! This was a HUGE conceptual shift right there. You had goofy things like "How to Hijack a School Bus" and then tech info like thermite recipes and "The Book of BIOC" which started unravelling the mysteries of the phone system. The whole concept was mind-blowing. Any kid just like us, who could get to a computer could boot up AppleWriter or whatever and just write something... how to solve Zork, revenge fantasies involving parents, ANYTHING. Use a 5-digit MCI code (so easy to get you could hack one by hand in a few minutes) to call The Metal AE or Ripco and upload it. Within a day, this self-published t-file would have spread across the USA and was being read by hundreds, thousands of kids. Who would write their own stuff and do the same thing. There's never been anything else like it. It was totally BY these kids, FOR these kids. That's something a lot of people don't seem to understand, like the way our file "Sex With Satan" was featured on Geraldo and cDc was referred to as "a bunch of sickos" by the host. Sure, the file's pretty dumb, but the point is that it was written by a 14-year old. Not some middle-aged pervert trolling for little kids, but a bored jr. high student writing for other kids in the same age range with the same sense of humor. Nobody cares if you don't get it, Mr. Rivera, you're not supposed to. The first group of people to really grasp the concept and start doing organized electronic publishing was Anarchy, Inc. in 1984. They were followed by the Neon Knights, cDc (under the name "Pan-Galactic Entropy"), and then Phrack Magazine in '85. Presently, some of the former members of Anarchy, Inc. are responsible for the Waffle BBS software. The Neon Knights are long gone, while cDc continues and Phrack has changed editors several times but persists. Mogel: Why do you continue doing this? SR: That's a scary question. Sarcasm, sarcasm. Well, see, it's like this. I don't like computers. I don't dig messing with them for hours for the sake of messing. Or struggling to get a hard drive running or taking care of some obscure little software problem. The "computer as LEGO set" analogy has never really worked for me. I've got plenty of patience to deal with computers when there's some definite point to it. I think of computers as... tools to do something that's hopefully cool with. I've always felt this need to make things, to produce. I happen to use computers for some of the stuff I make. And telecom gives me a really good way to distribute some of the stuff, too. It's a piece of equipment. Not a "friend," not a "life"...yeesh... get away from me with that new-school "cybersurfing info-junkie" zombie talk. Buncha middle-aged Star Trek freaks wearing polyster pants and arguing about IRQ conflicts is where THAT road leads to. If you're headed that way, GET OFF THAT BUS NOW, man. That's my advice. I'm not into escapism... not much TV, fantasy/sci-fi books, drugs, role-playing games, or sitting on my ass trying desperately to forget the world with my modem. It's all the same. cDc was unique when we started in that we were/are about using technology as a means to an end, never was the technology an end to itself. The medium is NOT the message. The message is the message, and the medium is insignificant when it can be taken for granted. That's what we want. Mogel: Do you have a life? If so, what are some real world interests of yours? SR: Damn, I hope I have a life. That'd be cool. Anyhow, I keep busy enough. Physical stuff: I like bike riding (BMX, mountain, street), working out, playing Ultimate Frisbee, skating (boarding, in-line), mind-in-a-mess walks at 3am, Breaking & Entering, Trespassing, going to most all of the punk shows that hit town, dancing at raves, and dinking around at playgrounds like an idiot. One of my goals is to someday have an indoor full-sized trampoline. That would rock. Music is a big deal to me. I listen to and dig everything from death metal to disco. I was playing bass in a hardcore metal/punk band Tragic Machine up until a month ago, and I play guitar and keyboards. I rap & produce music for my punk/hip-hop band Weasel-MX, produce for a dub/funk project, rap and produce for another dancehall reggae/hip-hop crew called Primordial Dub, and have a solo thing called Squint Thrust. I've got a little recording studio place downtown where I do demos for other (mostly rock) bands and record my own projects. It's fun and makes a little money (too little). I make t-shirts and hats and stickers and put out tapes myself, and that's all cDc stuff. I legally own the name "cDc communications" and "Cult of the Dead Cow" is the trademark, so it's for real and that's the name I use for the stuff I make. Doing graphic designs for those things is pretty fun, wish I had a rad Mac setup for it. Other than that, I'm a senior telecommunications major and I DJ at the college radio station. I need to hurry up and finish and try to get a real job, eh. So that's literally all I ever do... school and music and make stuff and exercise and I'm never bored. I don't know if that's really good for me or not though. I just work, that's it. Mogel: Who are the /<-RaDDeZT eleet guy(s)? SR: All the cDc cats are like some of the most creative and hypest people around I could ever hope to be associated with. The Gonif (Natl. Enlightener), The Daredevil (Anarchy, Inc.), Evel Knievel, all the editors Phrack's had, Lord Digital, Jesus, Muhammed Ali, Steve Wozniak, The Knights Of Shadow, Rick Rubin, Abbie Hoffman (YIPL, know your roots), Ian MacKaye, Malcolm X, Video Vindicator (Mr. Fraud), and Mr. T (The A-Team). Mogel: Who do you find extremely annoying? SR: Hmm. I like most everybody, it's just certain traits I don't care for. Lying, backstabbing, the usual Bad Person things like that are... bad. Uh. People's point of not returning phone calls. The need some h/p kids feel to call me and "show off" all their info while I'm on the line by dialing all these bridges and stuff. I'm usually happy to talk about anything, it's just the showing off part that's not so good. Kinda pretentious. Overall, this is the big one: how huge numbers of people go out of their way to act/look/seem "weird" or "different" in a feeble attempt to be interesting. IT DOESN'T WORK. NOTHING IS IMPRESSIVE, GET IT? EVERYTHING'S BEEN DONE, SO RELAX AND BE YOURSELF. If you're a freak, you're a freak and that's fine (so am I)... but LET'S NOT FAKE IT, SHALL WE? Please. Please?! You can cover your entire surface area with tattoo ink; you can pierce every square inch of your body; you can make your hair shine with colors previously unseen in the known universe; you can adopt any number of mix-and-match gender roles; you can swear endlessly with every possible combination of "mother" and "fucker"; you can put every chemical you can beg, borrow, and steal into your system; you can talk about your fascination with vampires and death and black clothes and how English accents are just too cool; you can mull over coffee-derived drinks and discuss anything, so long as it's obscure... French philosophers, music... and make plans to motivate the proletariat into doing your bidding... and you know what? NONE OF IT MAKES A DAMN BIT OF DIFFERENCE. SHOCK VALUE IS NULL AND VOID AND IT WAS ONLY FOR SQUARES ANYWAYS. Thanx! Mogel: What direction do you see cDc heading in? SR: More more more. Bigger media presence. Graphics. Music distribution is gonna be looking really interesting through telecom pretty soon and we wanna be involved with that. We intended to be like a D.I.Y. Time/Warner, looking for new valid means of distributing cool stuff, cheap. Mogel: If you were to die tomorrow and wanted to leave one quote that everyone would remember you by, what would that be? SR: "Get real. Sit down. Shut up." Nah. My real thoughts sound too much like a shoe commercial. Mogel: What would be the first thing that came to your mind when I say "zine"? SR: Ball-PEEN hammer? Disco-dancin' boogie MACHINE? I like to read CRANK and agree with most of its sentiments. BABY SUE is funny. COMETBUS is always interesting. SCAM, BIG BROTHER (skate), and THORAZINE are cool. Those are my favorites. I read MAXIMUMROCKNROLL and FLIPSIDE too but don't really know why. |