Tim version.

THERE'S A TERRIBLE WEIGHT hanging over all our heads. News is not good these days. It's not just because we've got a supreme dick in the White House who's galloping the entire nation towards the Apocalypse. Shit's bad all over, from jobs to housing to a revolving door of idiots attempting to buy all the water falling freely from the sky to sell it to you. What are some of the last refuges for the fucked and poor? Skating and music are two of 'em. There's also a point to being misfits. That's where the Tim Version comes in. Desperate. Acutely literate. A beer and friendship band. Their songs funnel all the sidesplitting jokes into stories of backbreaking sorrow until they become indistinguishable. Then they marinate those words in a smoky sauce of Leatherface by way of Merle Haggard, then grill them over the intense, seemingly unworkable mix of early Van Halen and The Thumbs. The antidote? The will to continue fighting that terrible weight by twisting self-destruction creatively outward. Well, fuck, I hope it is, because that's about all we've got.

So you're a scientist, is that correct?

Russ: I am, yes, what could be called a scientist. I deal with a lot of electronic stuff, basically control and guidance systems and stuff like that. The whole deal with that is that based on the application that they're going to be used on, like let's say you're going to send a satellite into space, there's a radiation environment that you have to be concerned about. I deal with making sure that the electronics will survive in the radiation environment that they're going to be subjected to.

Does being in a punk rock band cause you any problems at work? Are there any overlaps between the two, or do you keep them separated as much as possible?

I try to keep them separated as much as possible. People that work where I work at don't even come close to understanding what it is that I do. I've even had my boss say that he's concerned about the fact that I play in a band, in terms of my career longevity. It's like, what are you talking about? I don't make any money. I'd be eating dirt if I just played in a band all the time. Nobody really understands what it is that we do or what our main objective is, which is basically to just have fun and make music that probably a very small cross-section of the population will be interested in.

What conflicts do you have internally from being a scientist and being in the Tim Version? Is it a pretty nice synergy or are there things that you wish were better?

For fear of getting in trouble where I work I sometimes wish that I had a little more choice about the sorts of things I work on. Just to put it as general as possible, the things that people tend to focus on aren't the things that I necessarily think are that which benefit mankind. The tie-in with the band is, obviously, that being somewhat politically and socially aware and having a tendency to focus on things like that, there's a clear conflict of interest between my ideological self--which I would like to think is the songs that we write--and what I do for a living, which is my realistic self. There's just a clear head-on collision there. I try and walk that line as best I can, but it's tough sometimes. Things just really get to me and that ends up turning into a song.

Can you explain the rock and roll bathroom?

That was awesome. When I moved into an apartment with the roommate that I have now, back when I was getting ready to start grad school, we had this idea to make a rock and roll bathroom. It was the bathroom that was downstairs in this apartment, and it had one of those light switches that was hooked up to an electrical outlet, so whatever appliance you had hooked up to it would work. Like, if the switch was off, the hair dryer wouldn't work, but if you turned the switch on, the hair dryer would work. We had the obvious idea to take a tape player and put Accept or Cheap Trick in the player and have a bunch of lights plugged into the power strip. At one point we had a strobe light but it distracted me so much. A fog machine would have been awesome, but that probably would have been too much. We had posters of Ted Nugent and Van Halen. I made a Van Halen shower curtain. That lasted for a long time. I was pretty proud of that. We just had all these tapes in there, and if you had to take a dump or whatever, you could pop in whatever metal or rock and roll tape you wanted to listen to. Take a poop while you're listening to Kiss; it was awesome. It's something that I'd really like to carry into my current house right now but I haven't quite gotten around to implementing it yet. It was really a glorious thing.