A lot of people are stunned that you personally answer all your mail and e-mail. This is an interview for a bigger-name magazine, yet we waited in line with all the fanzines. Is there any practical advantage to doing it this way?

There's no advantage. We just answer our mail. People write and we respond. It's a drag sometimes, mostly when I realize somebody's written to me about a report that was due three months ago -- I hate when that happens.

I do get overwhelmed. But when it's time for me to go see my mom and play cards, people are just going to have to wait. For me, an opportunity to sit down and talk to someone is always going to take precedence. That's what I'm doing this for. So if somebody comes in and they need to talk, then everybody else is going to have to wait. But on the other hand, we do answer all our mail. It was no formula; it just seemed to me in the very beginning that if somebody wrote to us, it would be nice to write them back. We're a little bit like the Luddite people -- we just do what we do. We're not thinking about how other people do stuff, and we don't really care how other people do stuff. This is just how we set things up and it seems to have done OK.

Do you get a lot of students contacting you for reports?

Occasionally. I'm usually happy to do it, especially for high school kids, because when I was in high school, I was notoriously bad about doing homework. I didn't do it, and any books that were assigned I never read. I had to do a book report for an English class on "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." I just didn't really get around to thinking about it. I couldn't sum up my feelings about the book. I did read the book, or parts of it. I ended up calling Ken Kesey because I was in a pickle and needed to get this report done. So I just called up Oregon information and asked for Ken Kesey and they gave me a number, which I couldn't believe. I called and he was not home, but his wife was, and she was so nice to me. She talked to me about some of the ideas he had, and I wrote it up and I got an A. I was pretty psyched about it, but mostly I was touched by the fact that this person would take time out to speak to me. So I just feel like I'm returning the favor.

Is the Napster phenomenon any more troubling to you as a musician and co-owner of a record label than home taping of music was in the '80s?

Not to me. We never had any problem with home taping. Again, this is not our commerce. I don't know much about Napster -- my computer doesn't go fast enough to fool with all that stuff. Certainly I love the idea of the application. I understand the issues a band would have if somebody were to take an unfinished tape from the studio and put it up on the Internet. That's a drag, because it's not something they're ready to have released. But I don't believe that it undermines the industry. Most people I know who use Napster listen to stuff they've never heard before. And then they get psyched and go out and buy the damn records. It's more like a sampler.

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