Tea and Talk with San Jose’s Hard Girls

I recently sat down with San Jose punk band Hard Girls for an article I was writing for Metro Newspaper. After the interview was over, drummer Max Feshbach told me, “This is the first time we ever gave a serious interview.”

I was surprised at how well the interview ended up going. We met up at a pseudo ultra-lounge themed diner near San Jose State called “Flames.” Since I was friends with the band members, I was nervous that I wouldn’t be able to conduct a serious interview and that we’d spend the entire time making jokes about our testicles. As it turned out we got pretty deep into their history, musical influences, and so forth. I got so much usable information that it became near impossible to distill our conversation down to 750 words.

Of the interesting tidbits I couldn’t squeeze in the article, my favorite was finding out how guitarist Mike Huguenor was voted best local guitarist in Metro’s best of series in 2002. The beauty of the story is that he wasn’t playing guitar in a band that year. He was lead singer for “Rage against the Robots.”  How could this happen, you ask? Huguenor wasn’t sure either, but he suspected that one of his friends infiltrated the system and stuffed the ballot box. I won’t name names, but you know who you are.