The World/Inferno Friendship Society’s Jack Terricloth Ranks the Band’s LPs

In Rank Your Records, we talk to artists who have amassed substantial discographies over the years and ask them to rate their releases in order of personal preference.

The man known as Jack Terricloth, leader of the World/Inferno Friendship Society, doesn’t view his band’s output in terms of albums but instead as a series of seven-inches. He also doesn’t consider World/Inferno a band so much as a collective. He also has a hard time playing favorites with the collective’s releases. He also doesn’t much like talking about himself. He also promises I’ll be sick of him before this interview is done.

Donning boots and a three-piece suit on a surprisingly hot October night, the pale Terricloth sits on his laptop at a dimly lit Brooklyn bar where he is a regular, sips a glass of Johnnie Walker Black, and prepares for Hallowmas, the longrunning annual blowout the band plays every October 31. “It really is like being a circus leader,” he says of wrangling the World/Inferno Friendship Society, whose performances are punk rock cabaret shows that often employ as many as a dozen performers—pianists, accordion players, and horn sections are all common in the lineup. Terricloth is not sure exactly how many musicians have played with the World/Inferno in their 22-year history, but it’s somewhere between 40 and a thousand.

But even as Terricloth grows older and the collective continues to morph and evolve, the cult of the World/Inferno Friendship Society remains fueled by the passion of youth. “The crowd just gets younger and younger,” says Terricloth. “It’s almost painful. I’m pushing 50 and these kids are literally half my age. More than half—a third of my age, sometimes.”

Even though World/Inferno has amassed a dedicated following for the unforgettable, communal experience of their live shows, it’s the strength of their songs that has armed these performances with their ammunition. The band has released an album every few years and is due for a new one to follow up 2014’s This Packed Funeral. Terricloth says an album is in the works for a (tentative) 2019 release via Alternative Tentacles. He’s also working on reissuing the band’s catalog.

“I will die eventually. I’d prefer the albums to last,” he says. “To be fair, people do seem to enjoy the live show more. But in the end, the albums should stand out more, and I guess time will tell.”

When asked how he would rank World/Inferno’s albums in order of personal preference—if he had to—Terricloth responds by saying, “I don’t have to do anything.” Fair enough. So here is a very loose ranking of World/Inferno’s releases in what seems like Terricloth’s order of fondness for them. Don’t hold him to it.

Noisey: You mentioned earlier that you were asleep through this album. What’d you mean by that?
Jack Terricloth: We have a studio upstate in… I can’t remember where the fuck it is. I won’t reveal the location of our secret lair. Someplace in the middle of the woods. Nothing to do—no bars, no liquor stores, no restaurants. Anything you need, you have to take with you. So we all cook breakfast together every day and it’s very nice, but it’s not enough stimulation for me. I’m a city kid. If there’s not a subway or a 24-hour deli, I get a little edgy. The idea was that we’d all work together and bang out the songs. And I wasn’t bored, I was… nervous might be the word. It was also a concept record and I don’t think that got through.

What were you going for on it?
It was supposed to be about another band called the Paranoid Style with a singer named Grace Talicious, who is a real person. It was the story of another band. One side was supposed to be the Paranoid Style’s songs, and they’re all very punky, and the other side was songs about that band and those were more mellow. Not sure we really got there with that.

What contributed to you not reaching that vision?
I’m not sure if everyone was on board or actually got it. I even handed out playbills about the songs and stories. [Scott] Hollingsworth, my main collaborator, totally got it. But everyone else was like, “Eh, I’m here to play bass” or whatever. But there’s some great songs on it. “American Mercurial,” we can’t leave the stage without playing it.

By the time this album came out, the band had been around for almost 20 years. Is it hard to stay engaged with the same project for so long?
Well, we change so often that it’s not hard to keep concentration on what’s going on. And live, it’s never a problem, and we play an awful lot. For being around for 20 years, we’ve got seven records or something. We put out a record every four years or so, and that’s the exact amount of time it takes.

This was the early days of the band. What do you remember about the band at that time?
We were getting new people almost every day. There was a bar called Sweetwater over in Williamsburg on North 6th. Our saxophonist at the time, Steve Polier, owned it, so we’d be there all the time because we could drink for free. So anyone who came in, it was like, “Oh you play an instrument?” “Yeah, I used to play trumpet in high school.” “Well, come down to the studio.” We had a studio on Keap Street. So in the middle of the night, after the bars closed, we’d go over to the studio, press record, and it was a party.

What was the vision for this album?
It was a true story of the Bridgewater Astral League, which was a bunch of kids in Bridgewater, New Jersey, where I’m from. They were a carjacking gang and they would steal cars and sell them to Russian mobsters who would put them in ships and take them to Russia because they didn’t have big, American cars there. They were very good at it and they never got caught, and they claimed it was because they astrally projected to plan their crimes out. They’d go to sleep and listen to these tapes. They claimed when they went to sleep, they met in the astral plane, they’d plan these crimes, and they’d go out and do them. They were great at it. They made a lot of money. All the bands in Central Jersey pretty much paid for their equipment from stealing cars. That record in particular—we’ve tried to do other theme records—but I think that one really got the storyline.

Do you feel like you did their story justice?
I do. So much so that some of them threatened me afterwards.

Is it true that you played this album on a rooftop in Brooklyn and someone jumped off the roof?
She did. She had a harness, but none of us were sure that the harness was gonna hold, and I don’t think she cared at all.

Why was that?
I guess she was upset at the time. But she jumped off.

How high?
Six stories. You know that club North Six? It’s called Music Hall of Williamsburg now. We used to rehearse on the top floor, like every day.

By great coincidence, Danny Shatzky produced this one. [Vibromonk Studios producer Dan Shatzky enters the bar and gets Terricloth a fresh drink]

This album features a grand piano quite heavily.
Our guitar player quit in pre-production—Lucky Strano, he was an absolutely fantastic guitar player, and even wrote some of the songs. So we didn’t have a guitar player. I kind of play guitar, like a punk rocker does. But our piano player, Raja Najib Azar, really owned the record.

There was a song called “Lean Times for Heroes” on this record, about the pains of being an artist.
Well, the pains of being known. The band was at a certain point and people expected things from us. And suddenly, our guitar player quit and we were like, “What do we do now?” We didn’t play for a year at that time. We played one Halloween show and took the rest off. It was us feeling sorry for ourselves.

So more about the perils of being a person in the spotlight, then.
Yes. A person who is looked up to. I thought a lot about Joe Strummer at the time, and how he was very uncomfortable being a public figure and being a hero.

How have you learned to cope with that position?
I have a fake name and I don’t answer direct questions.

You also have a song called “Canonize Philip K. Dick, Ok” on this record. Whenever you write about these authors or artists or people from history, are you trying to raise awareness among your fans?
Yeah, it’s to have the kids discover new things. Almost everything I’ve learned, I learned from records. I realized at one point, I was listening to a Leftöver Crack record, and I’m friends with Sturgeon, and I thought: People actually pay attention to this stuff, so you need to say something important. So yeah, I do want people to read Philip K. Dick, I want people to listen to Jeffrey Lee Pierce, and pay attention to the 30s and the time Peter Lorre came out of.

How far into your career did you understand that weight of responsibility?
I was in a band called Sticks and Stones and all those songs are just like, “Oh, I’m so sad. Everything sucks. I’m so angry.” The band broke up, and before I started World/Inferno, I thought: Nobody cares how you feel and it actually doesn’t get you anywhere. It doesn’t move the conversation forward. It either makes you a demagogue or it makes people not care. So start singing about subjects that matter.

The strength of this album, especially with its narrative of being based on Peter Lorre, really helped raise the band’s profile.
That was definitely when we were most popular. We recorded it with Don Fury, who also did Red-Eyed Soul. We did these two back to back. But yeah, we toured it for like four years, and toured it as an actual theater piece, which is hard as shit!

I remember I saw it performed at the Spiegeltent. Do you remember that?
Yes, the Spiegeltent was beautiful. It was run by the producer Tommy Kriegsmann, who produced the entire run. We toured it for four years, which is why the next record didn’t come out for such a long time. People were like, “Did you guys break up?” And I’d be like, “No, I just played fucking Spain yesterday!” That was a whole lot of work, and we got involved with theater people. I always made fun of actors because I thought it was kind of fey, but it’s really fucking hard. I’m used to improvising on stage. In theater, you can’t do that because there’s lighting and video. It’s a huge amount of work. So it was a huge amount of fun, a huge amount of work. It might have actually hurt our music career because we didn’t put a record out for four years, but we were working the whole time.

I imagine after that, a normal tour must seem—
Easy as shit! In fact, in the European run of Addicted, on the weekends, we’d do the productions of the theater bit, and during the week we would do regular van tours, just to keep the money coming in because it’s expensive. So that was exhausting. We did get some shit for re-recording some of the songs, because we’d been working on the Lorre thing for a while. Some had appeared on Just the Best Party, I think. In fact, our mutual friend Laura Jane Grace was like, “Why did you re-record those songs?” Well, because it’s part of the storyline.

How did you meet Laura?
Oh, we met in the middle of a brawl.

What?
Yeah, I have no problem telling this story. This was right when [Against Me!’s] big record hadn’t come out yet.

New Wave?
No, no, no, though we were on that tour too. The Axl Rose one. Which, by the way, Axl Rose—I don’t know why they put that on the cover, bleh. But anyway, we were playing a big festival in Asbury Park, New Jersey—like, 20 bands. Inferno’s on stage and the sound crew had no idea how to deal with horns. So the linecheck took forever. The next band was supposed to go on and they apparently had someplace to be. And their name is Snapcase, from Buffalo, New York. They came up and wanted to play, and unplugged our guitar player’s amplifier, at which point, our guitar player, Lucky Strano, punched the guy in the face, which is completely reasonable. So bam! And then all of Snapcase start jumping on Lucky, at which point, the rest of our band starts beating up Snapcase. So now we’re in front of 4,000 people, not playing music, getting in a gang fight. So Against Me! all get on stage and start fighting Snapcase. So there was a fight on stage that lasted longer than our set. And Laura and I have been friends ever since.

If I’m not mistaken, around the time this album came out, you had that famous Coney Island debacle, where you were said to have destroyed a venue. Can you give me your side of that story?
There’s a whole comic book about that.

One of the Turnstile Comix?
Yeah, yeah. It’s happened to us so many times—we’re supposed to be playing someplace and sometimes we’re booked as a jazz band and the club is not prepared for punk rockers dancing, which is all they’re doing. And the dumbass owner, who I found out later was a mobster and was on The Sopranos—how funny is that? His name in Sopranos was Cha Cha, and we were playing Cha Cha’s. It was just a normal show—kids were slamdancing. And the guy was like, “You’re wreckin’ my club! What the fuck? You gotta tell the kids to stop!” And I was like, “That’s the exact opposite of my job, to get the kids to stop dancing.” And he said, “Well, if you don’t do it, I’m gonna fuckin’ turn off the PA.” And I said, “If you turn off the PA, you’re gonna have a fucking riot.” And then we did the next song, which unfortunately—it wasn’t planned like this—was “Zen and the Art of Breaking Everything in This Room.” We started it and the kids didn’t do anything that unusual, they were just dancing. And Mr. Cha Cha turned off the PA.

Dan Shatzky: I’ll intervene here and say that the daughter of the owner—and this was the first time I’d ever seen this in my entire career—literally pulled the plug.

Terricloth: And it was a packed house. And the kids literally did rip up the place. So to save the fucking club—because they really were wrecking it—I said, “OK, acoustic instruments out.” And we did a marching band thing out to the boardwalk, because Cha Cha’s was in Coney Island. So I led the riot out onto the boardwalk. But I go back in and the guy is screaming at me. And I’m like, “I just fucking saved your club!” And then he threatened to keep our equipment for the damages. And I said, “Absolutely fucking not. I told you this would happen!” And he said, “You don’t know who I am. I’m a made man!” Which, later, that turned out to be true. But at the time, I was like, “You’re not a fucking made man. You’re an actor!” So we did get all our equipment.

Oh! And the best part of this story. The guy hired a publicist to call every club we were playing for the next month and a half on tour and said, “These guys are monsters. They’re gonna wreck your club. You have to cancel the shows.” So every night, we’d get to the club and someone would be like, “We have to talk to you, we hear you’re very violent.” And we’re guys in suits and pretty girls. We’d send the ladies in to talk to them, and they’re very charming. Not one show was cancelled. But this guy did more work than any publicist I’ve ever hired! We got so much press out of it that after the tour, I called the guy and said, “You were fucking great! Can we hire you?”

This was your first official full-length as a band, but you’d been around enough that you’d built up something of a following.
We’ve always been very, very lucky that kids come to see us.

So did you feel any expectations when you were making this record?
Everyone was disappointed with the cover. We’re reissuing it and have a different cover. We did have a working band that was a democracy, and that’s why that cover sucks so much. No one could agree on anything so it was like, “OK, blue. We’ll just go with blue.”

You tend to go really big with album concepts. Do you worry that that would make it difficult to find an entry point into your catalog?
The opposite, in fact. Addicted is our most popular record, and it’s really just a concept record.

How did you ever-changing lineup affect Just the Best Party?
It was originally recorded as two EPs that we put on one record. We changed keyboard players midstream. Having an actual bass player, finally, tightened us up a lot.

This one seems to be the fan-favorite.
Everybody’s favorite record.

Why is that?
We worked so goddamn hard on it. We had a solid touring lineup, everyone was involved in the song-writing. We demoed it at our rehearsal studio. And we got Don Fury to produce it. New York hardcore legend, Don Fury, who I knew from my bartending days but he was so drunk back then he didn’t remember me. I’d love to work with him again.

What do you think it is about this record that connects with people?
It’s not a concept record, it’s more personal, it’s more punk rock-y. Don Fury was the only person with enough authority to tell people what to do. My favorite story about this is, Lucky Strano, who is the best guitar player I’ve ever played with, was doing his parts and Don Fury was like, “No, no, you’ve got to do it this way.” And Lucky was like, “What the fuck are you telling me about playing guitar? What the fuck do you know?” And Don was like, “I’m Don Fury! I invented New York hardcore, you don’t tell me how to make a guitar sound.” And Don Fury got up and tackled him in the studio. It was fucking brilliant! Then we all went home, Don calls him the next day and said, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that.” And everything was fine. It still makes me laugh.

Do you think with the Don Fury mark on it, it bears any resemblance to a hardcore record?
Oh, I think it definitely gave us some credence. Is that the right word? It made people take us more seriously. Before, we were just a bunch of poofs and ladies playing light ska, but you get Don Fury on the record, it changes. Sick of It All, World/Inferno—in the same category, really.

As far as artwork goes, this one seems the cleanest. Where does it rank as far as covers go?
I like the ones I did, of course. But let me give credit to the one you like. This one was done by Rain Polsky. [grabs recorder and holds it up to his mouth] The cover for Red-Eyed Soul was done by Rain Polsky, who is a very talented lady who lives in, I think, New Hope. [grabs recorder again] Do you still live in New Hope? Anyway, it was great and she pulled it off last-minute. After the disaster of Just the Best Party, we went through many, many iterations and Rain really pulled it off. But the ones I did, I did all the seven-inches.

This collection includes your first seven-inch, with the first song you wrote, “Tattoos Fade,” on it, and you play that—
Every. Goddamn. Night.

You’ve said this is your favorite song and you open every show with it. Can you tell me why it’s so special to you?
Oh, it changed my life. I was in Sticks and Stones, which was a straight-up punk band, and I wrote that song for them and they didn’t want to do it. I kept saying “How about this?” And they just didn’t want to do it. So I broke up that band because they didn’t want to do it. So that was the first song for World/Inferno, and we do it every night and never get bored of it. My life would be totally different if the boys in Sticks and Stones had not turned it down.

Was there anything or anyone in particular that sparked this line of thinking—tattoos being superfluous?
I guess the basic answer is: No one’s ever addressed it, and I have many friends with tattoos. I’ve got a very regrettable tattoo myself. My Neurotic Impulse tattoo, and I’m not gonna show it to you. But no, “nothing is permanent” is a given in anyone’s life, unless you’re 12.

Has anyone ever taken it the wrong way?
Nope, but people don’t usually confront me because, well, I punch people. So no, and people have even gotten that tattooed on them. So maybe the answer is that no one gets it. But the idea is of the song is nothing lasts forever.

Do you think you’ve changed much since these days? You seem like a man fairly committed to his ideals.
Well, yes, I am. I’ve not changed in that way at all. Being a public figure, though, which I wasn’t in the early days because it was just a studio project, it has made me a monster at times because I’m really good at being on stage and getting the adulation of people, and I’ve had to turn that down in my personal life. “Do you know who I am? Out of my way!” It hasn’t changed the work. But my personal life, I try to remain anonymous, hang out in empty bars, I don’t go to shows as much because if I go to shows I have to be on.

Is it hard to evolve in the public eye?
I really ignore it. I try to operate in a vacuum. I do not move in the scene at all. I would like to be anonymous.

But at the same time, you’ve got a very distinct way of dressing.
I’ve got, like, five black suits.

I’m guessing that doesn’t help the anonymity.
That’s true, but that’s just part of being a punk rocker. You walk down the street with a mohawk and people point at you. Hm, I really hate examining myself. You’re doing a very good job. But I grew up being a punk rocker, getting screamed at and getting in fights on the street. So I’m used to it, but it does make me uncomfortable when people show me their tattoo of the band. It makes it difficult to be normal.