Valient Thorr.

"YEAH, I'LL GO, but I'm not gonna stay long," I replied reluctantly when asked to meet at a Valient Thorr show. I mean, a show is a show, right? WRONG! My plans of sneaking out early melted away (along with my face) when the first chords were strummed. My socks were knocked off after half a song! The performance was so captivating, I was compelled by some greater force to go up to Valient himself and thank him just for being alive.--LB

When did you realize that you're from Venus?

That would be the origin story, correct? I'm sure everyone knows the gist of this by now, but I'll summarize for the newbies. There are different time streams. These are different decisions that everyone makes--should I go this way or that way? The planet that you call Venus is dying. The outside of it is rotten. We left to find a better place. Earth was really close and convenient and is like a baby Venus. So we were popping in and out of time streams and zones, and crash-landed in this time stream in 1957. We hung with Eisenhower and others. Things didn't work out. So we repaired our ship and left. Then, searching along on our travels, we happened to come back to this time stream in 1977. But we didn't crash. And since we usually don't come back to the same streams, we hid a spare time machine in Virginia so that if we came back we could escape. Then, damned if we didn't actually show back up here once again in the year 2000. Totally crash-landed our spaceship in Dr Professor Strangee's backyard. Then, we went to look for our time machine, found out that Walt Disney had stolen it, and basically we thought we were fucked 'til we came up with this big idea. That idea being that we already know how things are suppose to work. The setback was that we could no longer rewind time to our advantage. In the end, it ended up working out, because life just happens to be a lot more rewarding when you learn from your mistakes. So now we're rock and rollers.

I don't know how to respond to that. Do I go for the throat and ask if you think it's necessary to have a gimmick, or do I just politely leave it alone?

Well, go for the throat. For budding young rockers, yeah, it's probably good to have a gimmick. For us, though, it doesn't matter if anyone believes us or not. Our approach is to lay it out on the line our way, with a little comedy and a lot of serious commentary. If we were pretending to be fire and brimstone preachers telling everyone they were going to hell, no one would give a luck about what we said. Instead, smart politicians and smart comedians have influenced our show as any of the great Earth rockers that we studied from afar. I always say it doesn't matter where you are from, what matters is where you are going. Forget the Venus part if you want. We can't get back there. We live as earthmen now. We don't have the technology to go back in time anymore. The future is what matters. If we continue to let the dudes who are in charge rule, the bad actors that comprise the White House, someone is going to push the red button and there'll be no future.

Where does your magic come from?

My best magic comes straight from my loins, despite everyone saying that it's my charming wit and marvelous personality. I'd say that Valient Thorr's true magic comes from the sweat that the five of us produce when we are sealing the deal. When we rock, when Eidan Thorr manipulates those stiff chrome strings, when Lucian pounds the dog shit out of the thunder crushers, and when Strangees hammers that bass to the ears of the uninitiated, magic is made, magic is stirred--the lining of the clouds starts ripping us under and magic just happens.

How long have you been rocking out together?

Eons and eons of Earth time, but just here in this time stream, I guess this is our sixth year. But time is just a helper concept. We come from the Ultimate Time, which is complicated if you've only ever been to one time stream. There is what's known as the Ultimate Timeline, which comes at the end of the universe. It describes your place in what eventually went down. But due to distance and gravitational pulls, and the ebb and flow of the cosmos, and the invention of Tivo, and the multiverse and doppelgangers, and time travel--well--shit gets complicated.

I noticed that you went on tour with the Volcom skate team; did you get a chance to hang out with Apples, Rowley, or Dustin? We had fun with those dudes. We hung with Mark and Geoff the other day at the Volcom birthday party. We had a lot of fun with Caswell Berry and all those dudes at Skatopia when the tour went there. It was pretty out of control--lots of bands and a lot of dudes causing trouble. Shit, that's a whole separate article. I do remember Appleyard asking me if I'd learn the lyrics to this Bob Dylan song and jam it with him at one of the shows. Then I learned the lyrics, and then we never did it.