jackassworld

Part of this week’s half-ass theme is spotlighting a few of the more noteworthy band interviews from the musty, old pages of Big Brother skateboard magazine. Chris Nieratko was one of our foremost contributors in this category back then, so I’d like to take this moment to more formally introduce him and his relation to jackass.

When jackass was still very much in the conceptual stage, the subject of music was slated to play a much more prevalent role than just mere soundtrack fodder. Plus, it seemed like a natural selling point to MTV—them being a music television network and all—that we wanted to involve musicians on some odd level. Jeff Tremaine had always enjoyed the untoward band interviews conducted by Nieratko, a writer with an absurdly foul disposition (after two years of freelancing for Big Brother, Chris moved out to Los Angeles in 2000 to take a salaried position as Managing Editor following my resignation), and wondered if his particular brand of buffoonery could somehow be translated into a workable visual format. So around the time the original jackass pilot was being created in early 2000, a crew was sent along to document Chris and see what, if anything, could be made from these interrogative affairs.

On the first attempt, Chris pitted himself against legendary pipsqueak Ronnie James Dio to try his pompous mettle. Unsurprisingly, the two of them got off on the wrong foot altogether from the moment they were introduced, when Chris uttered, “Wow, you’re shorter than I thought.” Dio retorted by declaring the word “short” offensive and that “small” would have been a far more polite thing to say. (I fail to see the difference in nicety here, but he’s the rock star, not me, and thereby afforded certain liberties in the scope of reasoning.) To drive the point home with a wee bit of spite, he added that it would be the equivalent to his calling Nieratko “fat”—and all this before the cameras were even rolling.

When the formal interview taping finally started, Chris kicked it off by calling him “Rodney” and asked what it felt like being in the same band with Ozzy—all much to Dio’s displeasure. From there everything went downhill in a delightfully good way, but alas, one too many questions related to his height (or lack thereof) sent Dio’s ego over the edge and his henchmen began demanding the DV tapes be handed over. A veteran of these awkward situations, Nieratko had wisely managed to substitute one of the tapes already, but Rick Kosick was taken unawares and accosted by several metal thugs. Rick’s a trooper to be sure, but no match for a solid chokehold, and the crucial “two shot” angle on the interview was confiscated from his camera and lost to rock history.

Not long after the Dio escapade Chris sat down with yet another old salt dog of the metal scene, Bruce Dickenson of Iron Maiden, but the only seriously funny thing to occur was a moment in the waiting room when he accidentally broke a coffee table while rocking out to the promo CD. No one with any ounce of ingenuity on the crew could figure out how to repair the table, so they simply took all of the pieces and hid them behind a couch. Following a few feeble attempts at editing the Dickenson interview into something halfway entertaining, Tremaine threw in the towel on incorporating the music fantasy and decided to use Nieratko for the other thing he does best: puke.