Craig (00:00.534)
Hey everybody, this is Craig Garber. Welcome to Everyone Loves Guitar. We got Mike Dimkic with us from Bad Religion. Awesome guy, interesting guy. He’s got a lot of outside hobbies that are cool and he’s been through a lot in the business. So before we get started, I just wanna thank our mutual friend, Keith Nelson, the living legend, founder of Buck Cherry, awesome producer. So Keith, thank you so much for hooking us up. All right, Mike’s Cliff Notes. Since 2013, Mike’s been the rhythm guitarist with one of the biggest, if not the biggest selling punk rock band ever, Bad Religion.

Michael Dimkic (00:19.638)
Yes. Hello Keith.

Craig (00:30.254)
Mike started his career playing in California punk bands after connecting with Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols. He opened with Steve for the cult, who then asked Mike to join them as rhythm guitarist in 93 and he was with them for 20 years. He also played on a really cool album by a band called Sucker Punch out on the West Coast, their self-titled album. And he is a competitive cyclist and a former competitive long distance runner. This guy is in like incredible shape. And I forgot to write this down. You’re like a male model.

for some, I saw you, aren’t you like male modeling for some cyclist clothing?

Michael Dimkic (01:06.43)
I’m definitely not female modeling. Oh, okay, you know, it was, it was, it was my, I mean, hey, man, if it pays, I’ll do anything. It was my, it was, I have to, I have to correct a couple of things real quick. I definitely was a rhythm guitar player in the cult, but in bad religion, I would say it’s, it’s 50-50. It’s kind of, yeah, I can, I can play leads, folks. Granted, when I, when I joined the band, Brian,

Craig (01:10.194)
I don’t judge.

Craig (01:20.387)
Yes, please.

Craig (01:26.439)
Oh is it? Okay cool.

Michael Dimkic (01:35.15)
quickly gave me all the leads he didn’t want to play, which is funny because there are certain nights where I’m just like, god, we’re both sort of like, god, I wish there were nights that I could just fucking play the chords and not have to play a lead. So be careful what you wish for. So I was like, shit, I gotta do this lead. It’s kind of tricky. Why can’t I just play the chords? And I’m a hobbyist, cyclist and runner. My buddies, I have a bunch of friends who are Euro pros and the male modeling thing, there were a pair of twins from

Craig (01:48.503)
Yes.

Michael Dimkic (02:05.398)
Slovakia called the velets and they were really good like high-end domestiques and they started a clothing company near the end of their career and Their shit is so much more high-end now But when they first started it was like me and a couple other people they knew model for them And they you know gave me a hundred bucks or something now their shit looks really like You know everyone’s tattooed and has a beard looks cool But yeah, that was that was my modeling career. It was yeah

Craig (02:30.874)
That was your modeling career, man. All right, you’ll take it though. It’s all right. Hey, I hope I get this right from your bio. So you’re originally from LA, and then when your parents split, you moved to Memphis and then to Houston where your mom remarried, and your stepdad was a cool guy who turned you on to punk rock, and he and your mom took you to loads of concerts. Is that correct, first of all, the backdrop of that?

Michael Dimkic (02:34.635)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:56.478)
It’s kind of sort of my, my father worked for Oscar Meyer, the hot dog company. And, um, they, we lived in Memphis and we lived in Houston and then my folks split up, so my mom and I went back to California. I was born in California. So my dad stayed in Houston. And then just by, just by like happenstance, my mom, uh, it was her boyfriend for years and years, but he was like my stepdad, he was from Houston. So it was just kind of an odd, but, but they, but they met in LA and.

Craig (03:11.545)
Mm-mm.

Okay.

Craig (03:23.293)
Oh, that’s random.

Michael Dimkic (03:26.174)
He was like a blues guy. Like he was, he wasn’t a punk guy. Like my mom was into hip stuff. My mom, you know, was in, was in all the sixties, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and all that. But she also was into like Iggy Pop and Bowie. Um, so I kind of, some of that trickled down and he, he would, he, he was such a, a cool guy. I’d be like, Hey, I want to, you know, I started borrowing his guitars. And, you know, maybe when I was about 12 or 13, cause I realized I wanted to play guitar and uh,

he would help me figure out a sex pistol song for me, but he would also talk about, like, oh, this Steve Jones guy, obviously, he’s doing Chuck Berry stuff. And I kind of knew who Chuck Berry was, but he pointed me in the direction where the stuff started, which is what you should do. He lives in Austin, right? So whenever we go through, he comes down. And I think it’s really

Craig (04:16.998)
That’s really cool.

Michael Dimkic (04:26.714)
he gets to see, you know, that his efforts, you know, I’ve made a life out of it.

Craig (04:34.196)
Yeah, you changed your life really when it comes down to it. That’s fantastic, nice story. That’s a very nice story, man. Okay, so what was it about punk rock that resonated so well with you?

Michael Dimkic (04:36.202)
Yeah, totally. No, he was a super cool guy. Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (04:47.57)
Um, you know, I started out liking what I saw on TV. Like there would be reruns of the Monkeys and they were great. I’m those songs are great. And of course I liked the Beatles and all that. So I liked all that stuff, but it was, you know, that had been around. I was born in 68, you know, so I’m listening to that. And I loved all the AM radio stuff, man. I mean, I am such a, like, like ABBA and oh God, and my mom, we drive, she had this horrible, uh,

Craig (05:09.548)
Mmm.

Michael Dimkic (05:17.506)
God, it was a Capri. I don’t even know who made it. Um, it had an AM radio and I remember, you know, you would just listen to seasons in the sun and like Fernando by Ava and I, I listened to that again. And it’s pretty horrible actually. Like, but I loved it at the time. I, I was such a sucker. Fernando is still, it’s about the Spanish civil war. That’s a fucking deep song. And I remember I loved, yeah, it is. It’s about Spanish civil war.

Craig (05:28.454)
Terry Jax, yeah.

Craig (05:36.653)
It was great at the time.

Craig (05:42.86)
Is it?

I never knew that.

Michael Dimkic (05:46.834)
No, it’s, but my mom was kind of like, you know, how can you stand this, you know, kind of sappy pop? Like I, I was a sucker for it, man. I loved, loved all that. And I think she was, she didn’t dislike it, but I know the Terry Jacks one, I think she thought was, was pretty, pretty brutal. I mean, it’s, you know, but I’m a, I’m a sucker for a fucking sappy pop song. It does not matter.

Craig (06:05.35)
crossing the line a little bit on that one.

Craig (06:13.926)
How cool is that your mom thought that wasn’t a legit enough song? I mean, your mom was pretty cool.

Michael Dimkic (06:20.714)
She worked, before she met my dad, or maybe she was a school teacher, but I think before she met my dad, she worked for Teen Magazine. And she interviewed, like she told me about that she, her coworker went to interview the animals when they first came to America. And she came back in tears because they were so mean to her. Like they were drunk and like…

Craig (06:41.07)
Wow.

Michael Dimkic (06:45.098)
totally berated her and were just assholes. And she came back in tears and told my mom, like, they’re horrible, they’re horrible animals. And like, so everyone thinks the sex pistols were out of control. My mom was like, the animals were complete bastards to her. And Rodney Bingenheimer used to hang out and she was like, oh, he was creepy even then. But he’s a great DJ. But she went, they sent her down to Sunset Studios where we actually recorded the last Bad Religion record.

Craig (06:51.494)
Wow.

Craig (07:00.558)
Wow!

Michael Dimkic (07:14.998)
sense that sound. And they were like, Hey, there’s this new LA band, go down and do a thing on them. And she goes, yeah, I walked in and it was like, pitch dark and the singer was doing a vocal and it was the fucking doors. So she heard like, she heard like Jim Morrison’s voice coming out of the blackness. And I, you know, that was pretty, pretty outrageous. Teen magazine, you know, cause they, cause they’re, you know, they’re like Rolling Stone maybe had just started. So they’re, you know, Teen was as much of a

Craig (07:26.238)
Oh my god.

Craig (07:31.906)
That’s pretty fucking cool. Wow. Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (07:43.818)
You know, there were no serious rock magazines. So you would have, you know, the animals and the doors and Jim Hendrix would be in teen magazine, you know, cause that was.

Craig (07:51.078)
That’s I did not know that that’s really interesting.

Michael Dimkic (07:54.11)
And she actually finished out her career, like, when she died, she was the advice columnist for Teen Magazine. Ha ha ha!

Craig (08:02.126)
That is wild, man. So like, not to take too much of a time on this, but what was the, like, did she get any like bizarre letters?

Michael Dimkic (08:04.019)
It was pretty funny.

Michael Dimkic (08:11.806)
Oh, dude, um, she did, she, because this is, this was, uh, the early 90s, like 90, 91. So there was no, no one was emailing anyone. They were letters and she would come home with a box of letters and she got her masters in a, like, uh, family therapy. And I think focused on, on like, I think like the focus was pretty grim. It was like, you know, sexual abuse and all that kind of stuff. Um, but some of the letters would be like, they, she,

Craig (08:13.282)
I can only imagine.

Craig (08:22.275)
Yeah.

Craig (08:29.803)
Okay.

Michael Dimkic (08:41.714)
A lot of them would just be like, hey, I really like cows and my friends make fun of me. And my mom would have to come back with something like, you just tell your friends to like, take a leap over the moon, you know, and do some little cow riff. But some of them would be like, I forget what it was, dear Annie or whatever it was, would be like, hey, my dad comes in my room at night and like, no, dude, there would be serious shit. And I don’t.

Craig (08:52.991)
Sure.

Craig (09:02.887)
Oh my god.

Craig (09:08.083)
Oh.

Michael Dimkic (09:09.77)
God, I don’t remember what the protocol was back then, because this is 35 years ago or whatever. Like, I don’t know. I don’t.

Craig (09:14.302)
Yeah, is there an immediate call place to that version of DCF or something like that?

Michael Dimkic (09:20.958)
I don’t know, but I remember seeing some of those. I was like, you know, mom, she’s like, yeah, there’s once in a while you would get, you know, this total cry for help. And I think you would pass it up a chain somewhere. But yeah, that was it wasn’t all, you know, coming games.

Craig (09:36.17)
Wow. Yeah. So it just goes to show you people were as fucked up before the internet as they are now. Just, it’s not as, not as easy to get out there. Wow. That’s really sad, man. Holy shit.

Michael Dimkic (09:43.686)
Oh god yeah, I mean…

Michael Dimkic (09:48.786)
Yeah, I remember that one. It was just like, oh jeez mom, like, you know.

Craig (09:51.378)
Oh, God, yeah, that’s wow. OK, so what was your childhood like in general growing up?

Michael Dimkic (09:54.049)
I know.

Michael Dimkic (10:00.218)
Um, I mean, my folks split up 71 or something. I was like two, two or three. Um, I mean, I’ll be honest, like I, that was the first, my mother and her generation, you know, people born in, you know, the, the early 1940s, mid 1940s. That was the first generation of women who I think like left husbands. You know, they were like, I can get divorced. I don’t, I don’t have to be, you know, the wife of a

Craig (10:24.483)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (10:28.606)
of a regional manager, you know, and I don’t know what, my dad’s a great guy. Um, I mean, we’re not super close, but like, I can see why they got married, but at the same time I was like, he seemed very straight, you know, my mom was, was very like arty and, and rote. And so I didn’t see the, how they squared up. And I think that she probably like, probably what women were sort of expected to do is marry.

Craig (10:49.839)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (10:56.626)
a guy that maybe will settle you down. Yeah. And I think, I think more that she probably wanted something out of life that women couldn’t get in the early sixties, you know, like, like a real job, you know, like she got paid shit. I mean, women, you know, women still get paid shit, but they got really got paid like shit then. It couldn’t, you know, she could, she could write for teen magazine, you know, or, or be a typist. Do you know what I mean? Like there, there weren’t

Craig (10:57.702)
Stand by your man kind of thing. Yeah.

Craig (11:08.09)
Sure.

Craig (11:21.651)
Right. Meanwhile, with her degree, she’s way capable of much more intellectually and performance wise.

Michael Dimkic (11:25.502)
Yeah, exactly. And I definitely don’t think she was cut out to be a housewife who didn’t do anything. Like, I, and I think she probably suffered from depression and didn’t know it at the time. So then, she’s in, she’s in Houston and dad’s working all the time and taking business trips and she’s just kind of stuck at the house. And so, when they divorced, it was weird to be the child of a single mother, I felt. Like, when I was at school, everyone had two parents at home. And there would be a lot of, like,

Craig (11:31.704)
Yeah.

Craig (11:54.05)
Yeah, back in that day, yeah.

Michael Dimkic (11:55.382)
Like where, where’s your dad? That’s what you know. And you felt like, kind of like a dickhead. Cause you’re like, I don’t have a dad. You know, you go to little league or something and your dad’s not, you know, it’s your mom and mom and mom’s young. Like she, you know, she’s a single woman and wants to like, you know, have her life. So there was, there was a lot of like 1970s, you know, the parent, you know, even married parents, they’d, they’d split for a cocktail party and you kids are home alone and they might come home the next day, you know, like there was a, there was a lot more just like.

Craig (12:05.386)
Yeah, yeah, sure.

Craig (12:12.206)
Sure.

Craig (12:21.932)
Right.

Michael Dimkic (12:24.906)
Go sit in the car with it running while mom goes shopping. You know, like, that’s just what happened, you know? So, so it was, you know, it was, it was kind of weird in that regard. I mean, now, you know, my kid.

Craig (12:30.337)
Yeah, it was very different.

Craig (12:38.298)
That’s an interesting dichotomy because she had like this independent woman as a role model, which was awesome and encouraging and very different for that time. But at the same time, you’re like, when she wasn’t there, I could see that being, and you’re like on your own alone. That’s how to be. Yeah, that’s tough for a little kid to process.

Michael Dimkic (12:55.938)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (13:00.518)
It’s a weird one. Like we lived on the West side of LA. Like I always say this too, we lived in Brentwood, which Brentwood is super fucking she-she, but there are sections that are not super. It’s sort of like, if you saw the movie, The Slums of Beverly Hills, there’s like Beverly Hills adjacent places that are, they’re not shitty, but they were, so long story short, we lived in this massive, there was a whole block street called Sam Barrington by a rec center.

Craig (13:01.838)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (13:30.258)
and it had just dozens of apartment buildings on them. And back in those days, apartment buildings could refuse to rent to people with children. There were adults-only apartment buildings. So basically, the shittier, cheaper places was where all the single moms with kids got stuck. So I used to refer to them as the single mom ghettos, because you really, there might’ve been one family that I know of in this massive, you know,

Craig (13:39.408)
Wow.

Michael Dimkic (13:59.07)
a hundred something unit building, whatever it was, where there was a dad. But he was a contract he, and he was a tragic alcoholic who would get drunk and beat his kids with the Hot Wheels tracks. So that was the married family there was, was he, and I, and I used to think, do you think when

Craig (14:03.448)
Wow!

Craig (14:14.01)
to. So all those women walking around like, that’s why we’re not married.

Michael Dimkic (14:20.042)
the kids got the new orange hot wheel track for Christmas that they would start crying because they’re like, Oh no, dad’s gonna. I mean, it was brutal. So totally. So it was, it was lots of and the moms are all working. So it was, you want to talk feral cats. It was kids running a mock with no adult supervision. Kids were doing coke, everyone smoking weed. I didn’t do any of it. Kids were having sex, kids were making out.

Craig (14:27.798)
That’s a new weapon. That’s fucking horrible, man.

Craig (14:33.946)
Sure.

Craig (14:38.103)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (14:48.942)
stealing their parents booze. It was like complete… I don’t know. I had a weird moral compass. I was scared by most of it. I was scared by the drugs and the booze. I was scared by the girls. I also knew my mom, that it was a tough gig for her. And if I fucked up, it was going to make her life… You know what I mean? Like, I just didn’t want to add to her, you know, put more stuff on her plate.

Craig (14:51.29)
How did you stay away from all that?

left to your own devices. Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (15:16.85)
I definitely, I made out with girls. I definitely remember that. Um, you know, so there was, God, there was one girl, Julie. I still remember her. She was, her mom was like a, like a bartender somewhere and always had a fully stocked bar and it was, but I, but the kid, the kids got up, the kids really got up to a lot of no good. And, um, I just was, was kind of freaked out by it. So I, uh, I steered clear of it. It was, thank God.

Craig (15:31.386)
things we remember.

Craig (15:42.682)
Wow. To your credit, I mean, you could you could bypass the shit ton of problems by doing that as an adult.

Michael Dimkic (15:46.613)
I know.

Michael Dimkic (15:52.21)
I would think so. I mean, if, you know, I mean, you’re in third, I mean, I was in third or fourth grade. I was a little, you know, had I been a teenager, I don’t know if things would have been different. I still think I would have, because I was, I was really straight in high school. So around this time, my mom met Jack, the, the guy from Houston, and she’d, she kind of had a string of just like, she always dated musicians. You know, I mean, if I go back in time, I’d be like, Mom, you know, that’s the, you’re,

Craig (16:18.698)
Mom, sit down.

Michael Dimkic (16:22.232)
You’re blowing it, like, you know. So…

Craig (16:26.374)
I want to get you on the right path, mom.

Michael Dimkic (16:28.722)
I know. But she met a musician who was super nice, and he worked for Sperry Univac Computers. And he’d worked on some of the NASA moon launches, some of the later ones, because he was in Houston. So, LBJ Space Center. Yeah, he was super cool, like, super math geek. Like, he was a complete nerd, but happened to be, like, a really good blues rock guitar player, and was a nice guy, and was younger than my mom, was quite a bit, maybe nine years younger.

Craig (16:36.538)
Oh yeah, sure.

Craig (16:42.416)
Wow.

Michael Dimkic (16:57.43)
So I really liked him. Like, you know, he, we went to Disneyland for my birthday and he was just a fun, he was just a really nice, fun guy who was nice to my mom. So he, you know what I mean? So like that, so once he showed up, they had the dual income so we could move, we eventually rented a house and that’s when we moved to the Valley. So, and that moving to the Valley was huge because I was a West side guy and being a, you were a Val and like that was considered uncool. Like Valley people were considered.

Craig (17:14.447)
Right.

Michael Dimkic (17:26.518)
you know, gauche and not cool, and you weren’t near the beach. And I don’t know what, I didn’t give a shit, but I didn’t want to be called a that, I didn’t want to be called a Val by my West side friends. And then when the area, this was a huge moment. It was like when the Berlin wall got built, because for about a year, everything was two and three area code, right? Two and three went from like Santa Barbara to San Diego. We were all just one big happy area code. And for about a year, they’re like, okay, the Valley is going to get this eight one eight area code, cause in the past you would just dial

Craig (17:32.099)
Right.

Michael Dimkic (17:55.502)

4767139. There were no area codes to deal with, unless you knew someone in San Diego. And I remember my grandparents, you still had rotary phones that would have the prefix GR, because they figured people couldn’t remember seven numbers. So, your phone number would be Granite 26955, which was GR. Totally. Dakota, whatever. So, one day, I’m at a party.

Craig (17:58.374)
Sure.

Craig (18:13.79)
Yeah, they hit that in New York too, right? Yeah. Yep.

Michael Dimkic (18:21.902)
in eighth grade, but I would always call my mom. She gave me a super long leash, but was like, just let me know what you’re doing. And there was no cell phone, so any time I went to a party, I’d have to scope out the phone, and I’ll never forget the night I’m at a party in eighth grade, and I go to dial my home, and I get the recording, you must dial the 818 area code before, and I was like, that’s it. Like, 213 is over. I’m now 818, and when I give someone my phone number, I’m a val. I was, no.

Craig (18:44.754)
you’re a vow. You can’t hide it.

Michael Dimkic (18:49.602)
But I’m a proud, I’m a proud, I’m a proud vow now, but at the time I was, I was so bummed.

Craig (18:56.134)
That’s a good story, man. That’s a good story. That guy really changed everybody’s life in that house, it sounds like, it’s nice. It sounds like you all deserve a break.

Michael Dimkic (19:04.222)
Yeah, no, it was a good… And then eventually, my mom was able to buy a house. Yeah, the dual income thing, it’s still huge. I mean, having a husband and wife both working, or, you know, two partners or whatever, yeah.

Craig (19:13.047)
Yeah.

Craig (19:16.794)
You have to. I mean, it’s, I don’t know how people, it’s really tough. My son is a single dad and he’s really struggling and he’s got his daughter full time. And I, we’re just like, it’s tough. Yeah, it’s really tough. Wow.

Michael Dimkic (19:26.476)
Oh yeah.

Michael Dimkic (19:29.794)
No, that’s, yeah. I mean, I’m grateful there because my ex-wife and I get along fine. And like, as I said, they live a kilometer down the road and I take them, I just, I took them to school a little early, so I would be here on time. But yeah, I drive to school every day and do our thing. So it’s not, you know, there’s no, you know, people have, exactly. Cause it, yeah, no, I get, I mean, without getting to that whole thing, but definitely when, if there’s acrimony, the kid ends up like a, like a fucking, like Poland between Soviet…

Craig (19:40.922)
That’s cool.

Craig (19:45.83)
There’s no punishment. That’s what happened. Yeah.

Craig (19:52.931)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (19:59.859)
Union and Nazi Germany, you know, it’s just not no one wins

Craig (20:00.199)
Oh, it’s…

Yeah, it was terrible. My ex was like that and it was really, it was really, it was tough on us, but it was really tough on the kids. That’s what I was, you know, but we, I wound up getting full custody of them. So everything worked out in the end, but yeah, it’s, you’re fortunate. Hang on, Hazel, you got to come here. Now I wanted to ask him, you did mention about your dad that he was a UCLA football star. So I was curious and if it’s irrelevant, you don’t have to talk about it, but how did that, I’m only asking cause you hadn’t specifically mentioned it.

Michael Dimkic (20:17.856)
Ha ha!

Michael Dimkic (20:26.508)
He was.

Craig (20:32.73)
How did that impact or influence you, if at all?

Michael Dimkic (20:36.65)
Um, it was interesting because he, he was definitely like, it’s a hackneyed term now, you know, you’re a rock star, but to, to be on the Bruins in like the late fifties, early sixties, he was a rock star. Like they went to the Rose Bowl, they lost, but he’s still, when he talks about the couple of weeks leading up to the Rose Bowl, I can tell that’s, you know, that was life changing for him. Cause he, they, they got just wined and dined and were gods, you know, and, and he was

Craig (20:47.694)
Oh.

Michael Dimkic (21:04.47)
He was like, I think he got a high school all-American thing. Like he was, he was like a big deal in that era of late 50s, early, early 60s, uh, football. And times changed. He wasn’t, he wasn’t big. Like, I mean, long story short, it was right around that time that they finally like integrated football teams, you know, like, and it was just all white guys and all of a sudden you had this whole pool of suit.

Craig (21:28.758)
Isn’t that amazing to think of that? This was in our lifetime.

Michael Dimkic (21:32.394)
Totally. And you now have a whole pool of guys that weren’t there before. And maybe dad, you know, good, but there’s a lot of other guys now coming that had been held out, held back and they’re good. You know? So I think, you know, I, he could, my mom said he could have gone and played in Canada and he was, he was kind of like, it’s gotta be NFL or nothing. And my mom was like, I was totally willing to go to Canada because I thought it’d be neat that he could do his thing. I, I wished he had.

Craig (21:43.663)
Yeah.

Craig (22:02.231)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (22:02.678)
But it’s funny, I was at another sidebar. I was at my son’s swimming some years back and there was a mother there and she came up to me and was like, oh, I was talking to your wife and my dad played football with your dad at UCLA. And I was like, wow. And my dad, I mentioned his name, my dad goes, oh, you’re a hell of a player. I knew that guy. So that guy went pro and played for the Dolphins actually and some other teams. And she said, your dad probably got lucky. My dad’s a fucking wreck because they shot him up with.

Craig (22:16.419)
holy crap

Michael Dimkic (22:32.21)
every kind of steroid, and God knows what, and they just played him injured, and he’s, you know, he’s really beaten up and concussed. Like, they all got concussions. So, he’s, like, got dementia. So, I think my dad, who’s still alive, and I think, I think, for that era, like, he played with Billy Kilmer, who played for the Saints. The skins do, yes. Are they the commanders? What are they now? Dude, Billy, Billy…

Craig (22:37.855)
Yeah.

Yes.

Holy shit, so your dad dodged a bullet.

Craig (22:50.926)
from the Washington Redskins. Yeah, holy shit. He was like, yeah, the commanders, I’m sorry. Ha ha ha.

Michael Dimkic (23:00.99)
Even as a kid, I was like, that name really rankles. It’s not, but I, I ran into Billy Kilmer at Santa Anita racetrack. And my uncle, my uncle was like, Hey Billy, this is Mitch. This is Mitch Dimkidges dad. He’s go, Hey, yeah. And I go, I met you when you played the Oilers at the Astrodome and said, he goes, Oh shit, I remember that game son. They had a hell of a whatever. Uh, knock me on my, knock me on my ass. That was a great, you know, and, oh, I, I.

Craig (23:05.005)
Eh eh

Craig (23:09.498)
This is hilarious.

Craig (23:26.598)
That’s so funny.

Michael Dimkic (23:29.254)
I worshiped Billy Kilmer. And like, yeah, my dad, yeah, no, my dad knew him and they were pals. And those guys made so little money that he, they in the off season would go to car dealerships as salesmen and they would basically just be the famous guy who’d sit around and probably drink scotch and people would show up to see Billy Kilmer and buy a Chrysler. Like that was, so they got the shit kicked at them.

Craig (23:31.982)
Well, he was a big deal, man. He was like the guy, you know.

Craig (23:52.29)
Right. Yeah, but nowadays it’s the opposite. They’re making so much money and they can’t catch a fucking, you know, you’re a wide receiver. You got one job, catch a fucking ball, right? Just one job.

Michael Dimkic (24:03.626)
And I, I mean, I haven’t, I haven’t watched football since probably that era, but I loved, I loved watching games in Buffalo where they fucking play in the snow and like, and you, and you’d see like the dolphins would just be falling apart because they’re not used to the snow and like, or the Jets, you know, with Joe Namath, I loved that seventies football and baseball. I loved it. Fucking JR Richards for the Astros. I was, the Astros broke my heart so many times getting knocked out of the playoffs.

Craig (24:10.842)
Sure.

Craig (24:15.14)
Oh, that’s brutal, dude.

Craig (24:24.678)
It was a great era. It was exciting. Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (24:34.183)
And then.

Craig (24:34.202)
Did you see that documentary? There’s a great Dolan Ryan documentary. Have you seen it? It’s really good. Yeah, it’s really, yeah, it’s a really good doc.

Michael Dimkic (24:38.298)
No, I gotta watch that, because I, he pitched for the Astros. He was great. Yeah. I, I loved that era, and they were, and then, of course, when Astros win, it was the whole fucking science ceiling thing, and I’m like, God damn you guys, you, you finally won. I was able to watch it, and then you kind of get humiliated, so you broke my heart 30 years later. So, so you, yeah.

Craig (24:52.998)
Right.

Yeah, that’s so funny. That’s cool. That’s stories, man. Good story. So your dad’s around. He’s doing okay now.

Michael Dimkic (25:03.626)
Yeah, yeah. He, uh, I was renting, you know, this big roll-off bins. I was cleaning my garage out, like, shit, 20, 20 odd years ago. And I just went into the Yellow Pages, because that’s how long it was. And I just randomly picked some, you know, rubbish, haul-off company. And I called up and some guy answers, you know, and he’s taken my name down and he asked my name and I tell him Dimkic and he paused and he goes, Dimkic, why do I want to call you Mitch? I go, that’s my dad. He goes, did your dad play ball?

Craig (25:31.482)
Oh

Michael Dimkic (25:32.766)
I go, yeah, he goes, hell of a ball player. I’m gonna give you an 18 foot bin for the price of a 10 footer. Because, and I called my dad, like you’re never gonna guess what your football career just got me, and he would, hell of a, my in-laws knew who he was. They all went to Cal and they were like, oh, hell of a ball player. That’s what those people, so yeah, there is an age group that, when they hear my name,

Craig (25:39.546)
There you go, the gift that keeps on giving.

Craig (25:55.93)
That’s wild.

Michael Dimkic (26:02.122)
No one else has my name. It’s not, it’s, it’s the, there’s, there’s no, if you had that last name, you’re related to me. End of story. Um, so, uh, people hear Denkitch and they’ll just be like, right? So yeah, I totally, I totally still get that. It’s, it’s nice.

Craig (26:04.458)
Right, it’s very unique.

Craig (26:08.901)
Sure.

Craig (26:17.17)
Hey, UCLA Bruins. That’s funny, man. That is nice. That’s really cool, man. That’s a nice little legacy there. That’s awesome. Thanks for sharing. Those are really cool stories, man. Okay, so you start playing in bands in your teens. In your early 20s, you wind up meeting Steve Jones and then you played with him for a while. How the hell did you wind up like just connecting with him even because, you know, I’ve never met him, but you read all these things and it’s like,

Michael Dimkic (26:20.938)
Yeah, yeah, it’s cool.

Craig (26:45.782)
You would think it would be like, I’m sure it’s not, but you know, from what you read and on the outside, it would be like super intimidating. Here you are, this young kid going over to Steve Jones. How did that all come out or come go down? How did you guys connect?

Michael Dimkic (26:55.306)
Um, the whole, it kind of goes back, my ex-wife always would say that, that my upbringing was like almost famous, like the movie, you know, like the kind of wacky mom and you’re just kind of cut loose, you know, but moms like make sure to behave yourself. So I love the Sex Pistols and then they’d broken up, like I didn’t really even get into like new music until probably 1980. And it was like the B-52s and the Cramps and you know, Devo.

Craig (27:23.238)
cramps.

Michael Dimkic (27:24.562)
And then, then I kind of was like, well, what’s the Sex Pistols band? Because they started this whole thing, right? So I went back and as soon as I heard that record, I, it was, it was like, probably when someone first heard The Beatles or Little Richard or Elvis. Like it was, and that’s what I always say is it’s not punk rock so much to me. What I consider is that was just the great new music of that time in the same way that, because my mom’s boyfriend, Jack, he saw Little Richard, he saw The Beatles.

Craig (27:30.619)
Sure.

Craig (27:38.455)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (27:52.15)
We saw Paul Revere and the Raiders, Otis Redding, all these fucking guys. And I was like, what was it like? He goes, it just was, it was just the great new thing. You didn’t think anything. So that’s what I think the Sex Pistols were. And by the time I was getting the music, they were gone. And so it was kind of, as far as I was concerned, punk rock was kind of over. You know, I liked that style of music, but he had a band afterwards with Paul Cook called the Professionals, who I really loved. They were a little, they were like a little more poppy and a little more mainstream and I loved it. And.

Craig (27:55.107)
Wow.

Craig (28:15.109)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (28:21.81)
I missed their LA show. I had tickets to the first one. They had a car crash and the tour got postponed a year. When they came back, it coincided. That was the school talent show where my band was gonna play that night. And that was my first ever gig. And I was like, in retrospect, I could have done the gig and hustled to Hollywood to see them, but I didn’t. But…

Craig (28:42.202)
That’s a big overwhelming thing when you’re probably keyed up as hell to your first performance. Yeah. You have to.

Michael Dimkic (28:46.438)
You gotta do your first gig, like, as much as I want to see them.” So, that band broke up, and then, a year or so later, my mom found a clipping, because she, by this point, worked for an advertising guy in the film industry. So, she would read Variety and Billboard and all this stuff, and she cut out a clipping for me that said, hey, Steve Jones has some new band in New York with two of the guys from Blondie and two or three of the guys from Blondie, and this guy, Michael DeBar, who was in Silverhead and Detector. I think my mom knew who he was.

So they were coming to town. Like she’s like, they’re doing a tour. And I was like, oh my God, I’m gonna finally see Steve Jones in the flesh. So we were doing two shows at the Roxy, like Friday and Saturday night, two shows a night, like an eight and a 10 PM show. Those were the days. So God bless my mom. She took me Friday night. I think I went to both shows. Like I’m sure I did the eight o’clock show.

Craig (29:21.048)
Yeah.

Craig (29:38.498)
Your mom sounds like the coolest mom ever. Honestly, man, I’m sure she had her faults and her weaknesses, but she sounded like a super like caring human being, you know,

Michael Dimkic (29:50.975)
I think what it was is she probably saw in me this passion for music and probably…

Craig (29:57.719)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (30:02.438)
her, probably her passion for, you know, she, she wrote poetry and like song lyrics and short stories. And I think that was just, you know, never, uh, encouraged by her parents or, or society. Do you know what I mean? Like, and she had a kid, so she couldn’t like just run off and be a hippie in San Francisco and smoke pot and write poems. I mean, she stayed at home and smoke pot and wrote poems, but so I think

Craig (30:27.246)
Well, she could have. That’s the thing. You know, I mean that like the fact that, you know, she had that, you know, sort of like, uh, yearning she could have, but she, she didn’t. That’s what I’m saying. She was a good mom. She said, you know, I got, yeah, let me take, she didn’t, wasn’t like, you know, these narcissistic parents that you probably see, you know, in your kid’s school. Like it’s all about me. Like the kids are like, you know,

Michael Dimkic (30:39.942)
Yeah, yeah, she had a kid.

Michael Dimkic (30:49.95)
No, she definitely ate shit on my behalf. So maybe in her, she thought that if she kind of nurtured that in me, that she could at least, you know, not… Not, not… Because my dad was not a fan of the music thing. Like, he was very straight. You know, he’s a company guy and was just… Thought I was, you know, barking up the wrong tree. And she was the opposite.

Craig (30:52.842)
Yeah, yeah, which is wonderful.

Michael Dimkic (31:18.658)
So she took me to that show, and they played the second night, and I remember I had to go to the Bar Mitzvah of her boss’s son, and God bless her. We, she didn’t want to go to the Bar Mitzvah either, believe me, but it was her boss, you had to go. So we go to the Bar Mitzvah in Beverly Hills, but the 10 o’clock show we can make at the Roxy, because that’s where they’re playing, in West Hollywood. And she fucking drove me down to the show. I don’t know if she’d go to like the sushi bar across the street, or maybe hang out with her friends. I don’t.

Craig (31:27.301)
OK.

Craig (31:38.202)
This is hysterical.

Michael Dimkic (31:47.138)
She liked music, though, too, and she would go watch the band. But I remember seeing Steve Jones at whatever the first show probably was, and he looked great. Like, he’d been, you know, I knew all this later, but he’d been living in New York, just being, you know, a raging junkie, and, you know, didn’t have two nickels to rub together, so did this band, and they were making cash. But I just remember he walked out on stage and was, like, super skinny, and his hair was, like,

Huge. It looked like Phil Lynette from Thin Lizzy. It was massive. And he even had a little bit of a mustache. He honestly looked like a white Phil Lynette. And he just played great. I distinctly remember he had a Mesa Boogie SOB and a Fender Deluxe daisy chain together, like you would do. You go into number one, input and out to number two, and into the number one. And it was just fucking deafening loud. And…

Craig (32:18.406)
Hahaha!

Craig (32:25.19)
That’s so funny.

Michael Dimkic (32:46.162)
I remember just looking up at him, you know, and I remember he would say this about when he would see like David Bowie or, or Mata Hoople, that you, these people were like, they came from outer space. Like I couldn’t believe that they existed because he, I’d only seen pictures and they lived in England and you know, were very hard to see. And him just playing guitar. I remember I probably was just losing my mind. Like, I mean, I don’t think I was crying like Beatlemania, but I was like a gog.

Craig (32:57.402)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (33:12.99)
And I remember he looked at me and I get the feeling that he saw a little kid, I was 14 maybe, and understood what he was seeing. You know, that it was a kid like him who probably one day wanted to do that. And I remember he like tossed his crazy amounts of hair back and winked at me and smiled like, I see you. And it’s…

Craig (33:38.926)
That’s so cool.

Michael Dimkic (33:41.366)
Like, I get choked up thinking about it, because it changed my life. I was like, I think I can do this. Like, that was, and I mean, we’re friends now, I told him that, and of course, our recollection is just like, oh, you know, I’m glad I could help you out, mate. But it was, so they started playing around town, and I just would bug him. Like, I would show up any time they played and get his autograph every time. So, you know, he probably, at a certain point, was like, this kid again, you know, but I was just a little kid, you know, and he was…

Craig (33:44.387)
Yeah.

Craig (33:55.574)
Ha ha

Craig (34:09.358)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael Dimkic (34:11.382)
So he got to know who I was, and knew who the little fan kid was. And fast forward, the band lasted a year or so. He got strung out again. The band dissolved. He ripped a bunch of people off and was kind of like persona non grata in a lot of circles. Yeah. Yeah, he was just selling shit and selling shit that wasn’t his. And somehow I bumped in. He had a band.

Craig (34:28.91)
He’s an addict, man. That’s, you know.

Craig (34:35.225)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (34:40.246)
that was with a guy called Rick Dano, and it was called the Dano Jones Band. And by this point, he was sober a few months. So it was like a sober guy’s band. There was a bunch of sober guys. And I went to that, and it was at the Central, which became the Viper Room. And I mean, there might’ve been 10 people. It was really like, and to his credit, had I gone from being in the Sex Pistols and Checker Pass and all these bands, to playing to 10 people, I don’t know how I would have not, I would have been chasing the nearest

a bunch of heroin or God knows what I could have found to just erase how depressing this is. And he soldiered through. So he saw me and Steve, a savvy guy, he was like, hey, what’s up, mate? Long story short, he was playing, I don’t know what kind of guitar he was playing. It wasn’t even, he had like a fucking little tiny Music Man amp, like practice amp, and like some awful borrowed Gibson copy or something. He said, dude, I got a Fender Twin and a Les Paul.

Craig (35:12.504)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael Dimkic (35:37.874)
if you’d like to borrow it, I’ll, you know, I’ll roadie for you.” Like, I was thrilled. And he was like, you got it, mate. So I became kind of his little, you know, uh, you know, kind of trying to think. In the English military, I’d be his Batman. You know, I would be like the young, the young, you know, underling, you know, cabin boy, you know? And, um, I just drove him. I could drive now. So I was 16 or 17. I was in, so I was in 11th grade, probably 16, 17.

Craig (35:58.758)
How old were you at the time?

Craig (36:05.962)
Hey, man, I give you some credit because that’s kind of a ballsy move.

Michael Dimkic (36:12.49)
I don’t know. He knew me enough by then that it was, it was, uh, you know, like, he didn’t have, I don’t think he had a lot of friends at that time. You know, he, he’d really burned a lot of people and was just getting, getting his feet again. You know what I mean? Like, and I, I think he was happy to, uh, have someone who, you know, liked him. Yeah. And, you know, it had a guitar and a car. Yeah. And I wasn’t, I wasn’t a, yeah, I wasn’t a bad, well, he, he muddied the slate.

Craig (36:31.674)
cared probably and you had a clean slate with you. It was, yeah.

Michael Dimkic (36:41.918)
not long thereafter, but, uh, so, so I was, so I was, like, roating for this band to his, and, fuck, this, this has a good intersection of, and Steve knows the story, so I’m not, I’m not outing him. He’d forgotten about it, and there’s a, there’s a really nice, remind me, there’s a really nice, uh, sorry, I’m cracking my neck. There’s a really nice resolution to the story that happened just a few months ago, but, so, I’m not playing in his band yet, I don’t think, but I’m kind of trying to,

Craig (37:06.178)
Oh, that’s awesome, go ahead.

Michael Dimkic (37:12.938)
Maybe I was. Maybe at this point, I got in there, because the other guys in the band were older guys. And my buddy from school was a great drummer. So he’s like 16, 17. And we got in his band. And we weren’t even old enough to be in these clubs, because you got to be 18. So that was… So we started playing with Steve, and I played guitar. And then Jack actually came in on bass for a while. But then he had some other gigs, because he was in kind of a big band called the Bone Daddies. It was like a kind of a big LA kind of world music kind of band. So I switched over to bass, which was fine.

And so, I’m getting to play with Steve now, in rehearsal. But he calls me, he’s like, Hey, mate, I’m doing a session with some, she’s like an Australian playmate or something, but she’s gonna record a Sex Pistols song called Black Leather. And Kim Thauley is producing. So, you know, I’ll pay you, can you bring the amp and guitar down? And I think he was gonna pay me, you know, cause he was gonna get paid, maybe he was gonna give me a hundred bucks or something. I was doing all this for nothing, so I didn’t care, but.

So I drive down, we’re at this studio, I’ll never forget, it was just east of Highland and Hollywood, maybe, called, it was on Macadam Street. And we roll in there, and there is Kim Fowley just looking like, you know, Frankenstein’s monster with that big square head, and he’s just odd. And I’d never met the guy, but I knew of the runaways, I knew of him. And Steve’s there, and there’s a woman, she’s Australian, she’s got, she looks like Michael Monroe, but she’s a woman. And her boyfriend is this kind of,

Her boyfriend’s this kind of, Michael Monroe probably is better looking. I’m sure he is now. I guarantee you Michael Monroe is, he looks amazing and I think it’s fucking, seeing the guy, it’s crazy. And her boyfriend was this like Johnny Thunder’s looking, maybe English guy, but tattooed, kind of Izzy Stradlin looking. And I, you know, I love Johnny Thunder’s. I knew the whole thing. And he looked, you know, he looked a little shady to me.

Craig (38:39.566)
It was great.

Craig (38:48.912)
Uhhh…

Craig (39:01.303)
Okay.

Michael Dimkic (39:08.878)
I don’t know if it’s before or after, but Izzy Stradlin shows up. And that was, that was bad news then, because there was no Guns N’ Roses. He was just, he was a heroin dealer at that point. But I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t quite get what was going on. And then the kind of, I knew things were looking a little dicey, like this was not looking wholesome. And the, the kind of, like, English Izzy Stradlin guy goes…

Craig (39:13.062)
Okay.

Craig (39:19.804)
Oh shit.

Craig (39:24.174)
But you knew it wasn’t good, it sounded like.

Yeah.

Craig (39:31.953)
This was not looking wholesome.

Michael Dimkic (39:37.758)
Hey, mate, are you guys gonna go get that gear? And I go, the gear’s right here. I brought it.

Craig (39:42.702)
wrong gear.

Michael Dimkic (39:44.346)
And I knew, I knew, I knew that expression from Steve. Like I had, he had told me war stories about like, oh, you know, I went and scored some gear and whatever, but he was talking about the past. But once I heard gear, I was like, oh no, this is not. So Steve’s like, hey mate, we gotta go do something. I’m like, oh boy, here we go. So I’m driving my car around and I’m 17 and we drove all.

Craig (39:50.194)
Ah, it’s great.

Craig (40:06.611)
Oh god.

Michael Dimkic (40:11.462)
over the fucking place. We honestly went to a Chinese laundry. Like, that’s how cliched it was. Like, we went to a… No, no, no

Craig (40:16.68)
No tiki, no shirty, man.

Craig (40:21.966)
Yeah

Craig (40:28.561)
Ah, this is…

Michael Dimkic (40:38.63)
And anytime we get to a light that’s turning red, he’s like, “‘Just go, mate! It’s still yellow!’ And I’m like… I’m, you know, I’m thinking, I know why he’s in a rush, but I’m not getting pulled over on a school night with heroin. Like, this is… this is not good. Like, we would have gone to jail. I was… I was now… my guitar hero was starting to really upset me, because I was like, my mom’s gonna fucking kill me if I have to call her from jail for a Class A narcotics arrest. Like, this isn’t good.

Craig (40:50.414)
with heroin. Yeah.

Craig (40:58.992)
Yeah.

Craig (41:06.404)
Yes.

Michael Dimkic (41:07.614)
And it’s a school night. I got, so we get back to the studio. Steve runs off to the bathroom and I’m like, Oh God. So I’m, you know, Kim Fowley is like, Oh, I’m glad you guys got that figured out or whatever. And now I feel like they think I’m just kind of in the, in the little kind of.

Craig (41:21.995)
Yeah, in cahoots with it. Another junkie here, yeah. Baby junkie in training, yeah.

Michael Dimkic (41:25.418)
Yeah, and I’m just, I’m just, yeah, and I’m just, just horrified. So, Steve, Steve comes out, Steve comes out high as a kite, and I kind of look down, and I remember he’s wearing, like, John Travolta in Grease, Gray Sweatpants. And I can see that he’s got a syringe, like, stuck in his socks, and the plunger’s sticking out. And I’m just like, oh, like, as if I didn’t need the confirmation. There it was. So, they begin the recording sessions, getting later and later.

Craig (41:31.435)
Holy shit.

Craig (41:46.569)
Oh.

Craig (41:51.898)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (41:54.902)
The drummer cannot play. The drummer’s terrible. So Steve, Steve’s, Steve’s high as a kite. He sits down and plays the drum track. Then he overdubs the bass and then plays all the guitar and sings the backing vocals and he’s just out of his gore and high, but still is that musical. Like he really is a superb musician. Like he, he

Craig (42:14.47)
What was that artist doing there? She must’ve been like, wait a minute, I’m paying for all this, like, this is chaos.

Michael Dimkic (42:21.286)
Um, well, it really wasn’t chaos because Steve was high, but unless we were worried about cigarette ashes falling on the floor, because, you know, it was that long, because he was, you know, like nodding off. He played great. And Kim, you know, it’s Kim Fowley. Um, I mean, he played better than any of the guys she brought to play, you know? Like, he was just, he was just like, you know, hang on, sweetheart, let me, let me do this, we’re wasting time. So he, he knocked it all out of the park, but it’s getting later and later. I’m like, I got to get out of here.

So I split, and I go home, and I’m, you know, it’s three in the fucking morning, and I go to school the next day, and I’m just exhausted, and I’m really bummed, because I know that, like, Steve’s not sober anymore, he’s run amok. I don’t hear from him for, like, a week, and that’s not good, because my 3CBS Fender Twin and Custom Shop, it was the first year, it was the first year of the Custom Shop 30th Anniversary Gold Top, so it had, like, the nice Arch Top, Tim Shaw pickups. That, I’ve not heard from him, and I’m like, well, this is not good. So…

Craig (43:14.17)
God.

Craig (43:21.106)
Oh my God. And that guitar was probably like nothing that you’re gonna be able to replace really easily.

Michael Dimkic (43:22.559)
He calls me.

Michael Dimkic (43:28.222)
You know, here’s the crazy thing is I had another one by this point. I own two Les Pauls. That was my favorite one. But I was more bummed that like my friend was going down the tubes. Like I was like, you know, it’s a guitar and an amp. I’m bummed, but he is my hero. And I’m more sad that he’s probably going to OD, you know? I was just more sad about the whole situation, you know, than like, that I was young enough that it wasn’t like you fucking rip off motherfucker, you know, where years later you would be like, you wouldn’t have the

Craig (43:38.5)
Yeah, sure.

Craig (43:45.433)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (43:57.538)
the patience for this, but I was, you know, I was much more understanding. So, he called me, and he’s like, I got your amp. He goes, I pawned your guitar, but it was like a 60 or 90 day. Like, it wasn’t gone. The guitar was not going away. It was 30 or 50 bucks to get it out of Hawk. And the pawn shop’s on Santa Monica. I know that pawn shop. I still pass that pawn shop. Still there. So, he’s like, I got 30 bucks or 50. He goes, I just

Craig (43:58.842)
Sure.

Craig (44:15.682)
Oh my God, that’s so.

Michael Dimkic (44:27.054)
Plasma I got 50 bucks. So that’s where the blood supply was coming as the AIDS epidemic was no, dude It was I mean these were these were rough times So he gave

Craig (44:33.323)
I’m not.

Dude, they still have that going on now. I read an article recently that there are tons of people that get by and make their rent by donating, doing this plasma. They give bonuses and it’s like, they’re kiting one bonus guy from another. It’s fucking scary times, dude.

Michael Dimkic (44:51.518)
Especially when you, if, if you’re going to get people who are living in, you know, kind of on the fringes of shit, particularly, you know, people using IV drugs, it’s like, you know, this was, you know, they weren’t, you know, they didn’t realize yet that the blood supply was getting tainted. Um, so, uh, I mean, that was not an issue for Steve, but I mean, God knows, you know, how many, you know, hepatitis, hepatitis C definitely was like, a lot of people got that from blood transfusions. Um, so.

Craig (45:14.67)
How many people at what? Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (45:21.214)
He’s like, guitar’s been pawned. I gave blood. I got 50 bucks. So I’m like, okay, just, just show up at the pawn ticket. All right. So by the time he shows up, he’s got like 30 bucks. He’s like, well, I had to give some money to my, to my roommate. I had to buy some lunch. I’m like, I don’t care. Just give me the goddamn pawn ticket. Yeah. So I go to the pawn shop. Somehow, my mom got involved. Somehow, I had to come clean with my mom because she had to drive. I don’t know why I had to come clean with her. Maybe I had to borrow the money, but I had to confess.

Steve Pond the guitar, there was heroin shenanigans going on, and she’s not happy now. This is almost famous, where she’s like, you know, you can’t be running around. So, we go to the pawn shop. I have the pawn ticket, but I’m not Steve Jones, so the guy won’t give me the guitar. We get in the car, and my mom lost her fucking mind. Like, this is partly why I didn’t fuck around, because my mom’s dad had a temper that was terrifying. And her temper was as terrifying. And she…

Craig (46:05.071)
Oh my god.

Michael Dimkic (46:19.478)
flipped her lid, rightfully so, but she, we were driving down the fast lane. It was one of those like, she was like road raging and screaming and like, I can’t fucking believe it. You know, what, you know, why are we associated with junkies and stolen guitars? And like, this is all, you know, I couldn’t really argue like, but mom, so she was just, she was furious. And she’s like, I knew this was a bad idea. Like, so I got the guitar back, but she was mad. And Steve, somehow,

Craig (46:36.802)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (46:48.482)
Cause Steve’s a charming guy and my mom was nice enough, she like forgave him for like ripping off her kid and like involving me. Maybe I didn’t tell the like, I drove and scored heroin with him. I might’ve left that part out. Yeah, cause that was, so yeah, we were like, I could have, you know, cause I don’t know how that would have gone down if the cops had fucking.

Craig (47:05.811)
wisely so. Hey mom, one more thing.

Michael Dimkic (47:17.538)
sheriff’s and pulled us over. So, no, it would have been bad. So, a few months ago, Steve and I were hiking up on Dirt Mall Holland, and we were talking about something, and he asked about my ex-wife. Some of my mother came up, something, and we were talking about stuff, and he goes, well, you know, did your mom have a bad temper? And I go, yeah. I said my mom really could fly off the handle.

Craig (47:19.862)
not in your best interest, I can tell you that much.

Michael Dimkic (47:47.146)
at the wrong time sometimes. You know, sometimes she, that was one of the bad things about her. She could transfer anger about certain things onto people that didn’t deserve it. But in this instance, she had every right to lose her marbles. So I said, well, actually, Steve, the angriest I ever saw my mother was that time you pawned my gold top. And he goes, when did I pawn your gold top? I said, don’t you remember the Kim? He goes, oh my God. He goes, did I? He goes, I…

blanked that whole thing out. I go, yeah. He goes, did you get your guitar back? I go, yeah, I did. And I said, but it was really funny. By the time you showed up, you had no money. So, I had to pay the 60 bucks to get it out. And he goes, well, you know, mate, I’m not excusing myself. He goes, but I must have actually cared about you, because anyone else, I would have just never spoken to you again, and that guitar would have been gone. And he goes, what do you think, in 1985, or 84, he goes, what do you think 60 bucks?

was worth it. I said, I don’t know. He goes, do you think $300? I go, yeah, I guess, you know, and he opens his wallet and just gives me $300 and goes, and I go, dude, I’m not going to take the money. He goes, no, I have to do it.

Craig (48:52.825)
and inflation adjusted repayment.

Michael Dimkic (48:55.974)
And he said, no, he said, I have to do this, mate. I ripped you off. And it was just, I couldn’t believe that there would be, I wasn’t carrying around a grudge about that. It was a funny story. And I got Miles, I told him, I said, dude, I’ve gotten Miles out of that story, because I’m sure he has, but he made amends and gave me 300 bucks. And it was a nice, no, he’s a good dude.

Craig (49:02.534)
That’s cool.

Craig (49:07.322)
Right.

Craig (49:14.106)
That’s very cool. That’s, he’s sober now, I’m assuming.

Michael Dimkic (49:19.154)
Yo, he’s been sober 30-something years. So he got, yeah, he got-

Craig (49:22.922)
Okay, great. Yeah, that’s making amends man. Step 12. Yeah, I think it’s that well.

Michael Dimkic (49:26.89)
Yeah, that was good. That was just too funny. I was like, dude, I didn’t, I didn’t tell you this to kind of, I just thought he, I was surprised he didn’t remember because it was, you know, it was a pivotal moment in my teenage years.

Craig (49:38.982)
That’s pretty wild, man. That was really, that’s a nice way to close. So let me ask you this. So you’ve had a couple of events, right? Your stepdad coming in, this event with Steve Jones. And so you’ve had a couple of like specific life-changing events. When you go back and look at these things, how do you personally account for them? Do you look at it as like a God or a higher power thing? Do you look at it as serendipity or just like random shit? How do you?

place those sort of events in your life.

Michael Dimkic (50:10.218)
I don’t know, man. I think you… I have a good friend who, as I’ve gone along in music, I’ve had that weird kind of, like, a lot of people probably have an imposter syndrome. You’re like, oh, I just got lucky. And I’ve had a couple wise people say, well, you make your luck. And so I think just sort of inserting myself…

Craig (50:28.613)
Yes.

Michael Dimkic (50:34.598)
Steve Jones band, because, and when I ended up in his solo band for his second record, I just showed up uninvited to the audition. Like, my buddy actually got the audition through a friend, but he was moving to Germany, and he goes, just come with me. Crash the audition. I was like, I did, and I got the fucking gig. And through that gig, I got the cult gig. So, man, a lot of it is just being at the right place at the right time. Having the skill.

Craig (50:52.848)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (51:03.85)
you know, that you’re trying to sell to people is important. But getting yourself in there and the funny thing is, I’m not a hustler at all. And the fact that I’ve manned up enough to crash that rehearsal is the most uncharacteristic maneuver I can probably think of in my life. Like it’s, it would be like me, you know.

Craig (51:07.653)
Yes.

Michael Dimkic (51:31.246)
fight with Mike Tyson. Like, it’s just how I pulled that off. I still don’t know. So, I think, and I do think, life events shape you. Like, I think, if I’d grown up in a, like, total normal, leave-it-to-beaver household, I don’t think music would have spoken to me like it did. I think that’s definitely the case. I do think,

Craig (51:34.838)
Not characteristic, yeah.

Michael Dimkic (52:00.677)
all your like.

and sadness and excitement in, just like some people. My dad probably did it with sports. You have a passion that absolutely consumes you. There was no room for anything else. I played Little League a bit, but once I got into music, I was like, I have no interest in sports. That’s for jocks. That’s not… Obviously, I changed my mind on that, but at the time, you’re like, that’s not cool. Everything was about music. That’s all I cared about.

Craig (52:28.443)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (52:35.77)
I mean, I don’t know if that… I don’t think there’s, like, a universal plan, you know? I don’t… But I don’t see I could have done anything else. You know what I mean? Like, I think that was my destiny, you know? I think, you know, that… And I would say that’s probably the same for, you know, for anyone who… You can’t… That’s what I would say to anybody. Like, when we play shows, invariably, every couple tours, there’ll be a…

Craig (52:40.354)
Yeah, okay.

Michael Dimkic (53:02.806)
someone on the staff, like a caterer or somebody, and they’ll have their child with them, like a young, a teenage son, who’s like working the show with them and wanted to come see the cult or bad religion. And I’ll be in the catering room, they’re cleaning up or something, and I’m hanging out drinking a beer or something. And I remember distinctly once, the mother was the caterer, and she said, hey, my son really wants to be in a band. Like, is there anything you can tell him? And I said, I said, yeah, actually, I will. I said, how are you doing in school?

He’s not doing that well. I said, well, first of all, dude, get your shit together and do well in school. I said, I got A’s, because I knew if I fucked around in school, the guitar will go away. Or just, I would just, you know, and I also wanted to get A’s. I liked school, but I just knew if you keep your nose clean there, you got a lot more leeway. Your mom will let me go stay out late to go see a band because I’m not missing school and I’m getting A’s. And

Craig (53:39.071)
All right, awesome.

Michael Dimkic (54:00.538)
you’re allowed to, you’re given much more, you know, you have leverage. And I’d said, don’t fuck up in school. I said, you know, you’re in high school. You should graduate high school. Like if you want to play music, and the parents are always like, oh my God, like I hope maybe this will get it through his head. And I know plenty of people who didn’t finish school and they’re very bright guys because they’re well read, but my advice would be like, try to keep the home front cool. You know, like don’t.

Craig (54:15.334)
I know, such great advice.

Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (54:28.322)
Don’t bum your parents out, you know? Like, and if you get straight A’s, your parents will have to brag to the other parents, like, you know, so-and-so got, you know, he got straight A’s. And then, maybe, when you ask for that guitar for Christmas, they’re gonna, you know, you get some leverage, you know? Like, if you’re flunking out of school, you have no leverage, and your parents are not gonna think rock and roll is gonna save you. They think it’s gonna lead you down the tubes.

Craig (54:42.937)
Yeah, yeah.

Craig (54:49.926)
Dude, what great advice that is. She must have, did she like give you a hug afterwards or something? That was really.

Michael Dimkic (54:56.442)
She was just, I think she was flabbergasted. You know, that was, I mean, that was my point to him. It was like, dude, I really, you know, cause if you’re, if you want to do it, you can’t do it half-assed. Like you’ve got, you’ve got to, like that’s where I kind of got annoyed with my buddies by the time we got into high school, is they really got into like partying, like playing parties in the band and you got to meet chicks and party. And I was like,

Craig (54:59.254)
Yeah, not what she was expecting.

Michael Dimkic (55:25.438)
You can meet chicks and party, but you need to get your craft sorted out. I wanna make it music. I don’t wanna play a backyard party for keg beer. I was like, I had bigger ambitions. And it wasn’t like, I wanna be a rock star, but I was like, if you can, I just wanted to be good and be in a band and figured if you’re good enough and the stars align, this can be your career. And then there will be.

Craig (55:29.84)
Yeah.

Craig (55:38.115)
Yeah, that’s awesome.

Michael Dimkic (55:54.806)
girls, hopefully. I mean, that’s all that is in the back of a teenage boy’s mind. But it’s not, it wasn’t like, I’m going to play guitar to meet women. It was just like, I want to, I want to do this and, you know, maybe you’ll meet women that way. But you know, that was, you know, so like all the parting and stuff, I was sort of, I was like, I was real like a prude. I was like, guys, like, we got to be good. Like, don’t, don’t get drunk and play, play shitty.

Craig (56:19.602)
just focus you had you had a goal and that the other stuff was fine but that goal was your that was your pursuit yeah

Michael Dimkic (56:27.53)
Yeah, the other stuff was, you know, not even icing on the cake. To me, it was like a distraction. To me, it was, at this point, we’re young and, you know, learning our craft. I don’t have time. I just don’t have time. And guys were like, oh, I can’t rehearse. You know, I got in a fight with my sister and I hit her and my parents grounded me like, you can’t hit your sister. I’m like, who the fuck hits their sister? And also your parents are going to ground you. Now we, and now you’re the drummer. We can’t rehearse. Like I was so down.

Craig (56:35.877)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (56:57.834)
on guys who would fuck up like, dude, I got an, like this great drummer, he was great. He failed something and his parents are like, you’re not going to rehearsal. So back to the catering mom and the kid, like you get in the ass, you can’t go to rehearsal and you’re fucking the band up. And I was so, he was a great drummer. He ended up a junkie. I remember that. Like he went down the tubes, but I didn’t, I really was a real task master. Like I was probably.

Craig (57:13.018)
That’s great.

Michael Dimkic (57:27.314)
I don’t think I was a dick, but I was not having… I had no time for it. I was like, you know, we gotta focus on this. Like there’s, you know, there is no…

Craig (57:36.718)
Someone’s gotta be the leader, number one. You know, someone’s gotta fucking run the show in any group or at least provide the direction. So that was you.

Michael Dimkic (57:39.454)
Yeah, and I think anyone…

Michael Dimkic (57:48.634)
And, you know, and believe it, I’m friends with guys who were in my first band. And one of them is a hugely successful financial advisor, but it’s funny because we’re, we’re still very friendly and I’m still doing the same thing I was doing when we met when I was 13 in my bedroom. Like it’s a little, and granted he, he has a much

Craig (57:57.722)
That’s so funny.

Craig (58:05.274)
That’s funny. And he’s coming over to talk about his 401k. Ha ha ha.

Michael Dimkic (58:09.674)
His, believe me, his, you know, he’s living like a rock star, believe me. But you know, you followed your passion, you know, and.

Craig (58:19.089)
Oh my God.

Craig (58:23.658)
That’s what it’s about. That’s cool, man.

Michael Dimkic (58:25.354)
And he actually, he followed his passion because he was, he ended up being a mechanic for a racing team. That was what he loved. He was a car guy. And he was good friends with my mom’s boyfriend because my mom’s boyfriend was also a car guy. And he could build amplifiers. Like we used to take old fender heads and he would build a combo amp and I would Tolex them. And we basically would build like boogies. Like we’d put a blackface basement into a one by 12 combo thing. And that’s what I would, I wish I had that one still, man.

Craig (58:37.921)
Uh, okay.

Craig (58:55.03)
Yeah, that sounds like a you’re so your stepdad did this or your buddy did this your stepdad did this. Wow, that’s really cool

Michael Dimkic (58:55.083)
That was he.

Michael Dimkic (58:58.922)
No, my stepdad. He was a super handy guy. And he built cars in the garage. He was a motorhead guy. He would build up. I had a V8 Vega. That was a cool… The Vega was the worst car in the world. But you put a… I had a 327 with a B&M shifter, and God knows what else, and it just fucking went really fast. And I’d get to a red light, and there’d always be some, like, kind of dirt-head, hessier guy who would go, like, dude, what’s under the hood? And I’m just like, I don’t know, you know.

Craig (59:11.002)
Chevy Vegas, those were badass cars back in the day, man. They were.

Craig (59:18.31)
Those are great cars.

Michael Dimkic (59:27.79)
motor. Like, I, you know, I was like, you know, I was like this, this wimpy rock and roll guy. I was not white trash, muscle car guy at all. I was, I just drove it because he gave it to me, so.

Craig (59:28.046)
Yeah.

Craig (59:34.994)
Yeah. Sure. That’s so cool, man. Okay. 92. That was a stressful year for you. Your mom, you lost your mom to cancer and then the cult at the same year asked you to go out with them. How did you wind up connecting with them? And were you, after the European tour, they asked you to join the band. Was that a surprise to you?

Michael Dimkic (59:47.212)
I did.

Michael Dimkic (01:00:02.67)
What happened is, I’d done the Steve Jones firing gasoline, kind of hard rock record that the Colt guys had co-produced with him. That was 90, 91, I think. We did some shows with the Colt opening, so they knew me. And by this point, when the Steve Jones band ended, I was going back to college. Like, I was like, I’m gonna get my degree. I’m almost done. And around that time, I moved back home, and my mom got sick.

And that spiraled pretty quickly and she died. So I was going to college and not, you know, just pretty shell shocked, but just kinda, like I remember I went to class the day after she died because you don’t know what else to do. You really are like in zombie mode. So I went to school and I had a buddy, Tim Moser and Dave Rossoff, they’d been in some bands that were much hipper than.

Craig (01:00:36.986)
Sorry man.

Craig (01:00:43.685)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:00:58.898)
into bands I’d been in the 80s, when everyone got signed, like 88, 89. I was never in a signed band. The Steve Jones thing was the closest I got, but I was, like, a hired guy. But everyone had record deals, like Brian Baker from Bad Religion was in Junkyard, Tim Moser had a brand called Broken Glass, my friend David was in Kill for Thrill with Gilby from Guns N’ Roses later, and I always really liked those guys, and they got in touch with me, and they were like, hey, we’re forming the bands. Brian Baker on bass, Rossi on drums, Tim Moser

do you want to play guitar? And I was thrilled because these guys were like, you know, kind of like the top tier of dudes who weren’t Guns N’ Roses, you know what I mean? Like they were guys who I really respected as musicians and Junkyard was over by this point and Brian was gonna play bass. So I was thrilled to get to play with these guys because I always thought they were, I was really flattered that they asked me to play with them. And I remember the first gig, Brian Baker took mushrooms. He’s sober now, but I remember you.

Craig (01:01:39.258)
Sure.

Craig (01:01:57.647)
Here you go again.

Michael Dimkic (01:01:59.158)
He was on Mushrooms. It was a lot of fun. So that band was called High City Miles. We did some demos. It was very professional. It was Clash. It was a really fun band. And it kind of looked like we might get signed. You know, there was kind of like bands. It was 92, 93. And it was kind of the post-metal thing. And, you know, bands like the Goo Dolls were kind of coming up. And we were like a rock and roll Clash pop band.

Long story short, we rehearsed at this place called Coal Rehearsals, where I think Brian Baker might have worked at the time. And I showed up early, which was unlike me, because I had to drive from the valley all the way to, like, fucking East Hollywood. And I showed up early, and Billy Duffy was there. And I go, hey, what’s up, mate? And he goes, oh, we’re rehearsing. What are you up to? I said, oh, I’m playing with my band. We’re, you know, we’re playing, you know, at this bar this weekend. He goes, oh, well, we’re doing a summer tour with Metallica. And I think we might need to beef up the sound. You know, do you have plans this summer? I’m like, no, I’m not doing anything. He goes,

Well, here’s my phone number. You know, why don’t you give me a bell and maybe, you know, we set up an audition. So we went about our way, went on our ways. And I remember thinking at the time, like, well, I can’t call him and like bail on my friends. Like, I’m in, you know, I’m in a band, you know, with my buddies. You know, I don’t, you know, I mean, I really didn’t have the mercenary hustle. I honestly was like, oh, that’s nice, but I’m not gonna go try to play with the cult. Like, I really was like, I’m gonna stick it out with.

with my band playing in the bar. And then I got home, and I’d say a week later, I was just getting these stacks of medical bills for my mom, which I didn’t have to pay eventually, but I all of a sudden was in charge of a house and had to pay the property taxes and pay the fucking cable bill. I didn’t know what was going on. I was 23 or 24. So, no, exactly. I was going to college. I don’t, you know, too…

Craig (01:03:33.85)
No, I don’t think so.

Craig (01:03:45.958)
Well, where the hell are you supposed to get the money from?

Craig (01:03:51.45)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:03:52.418)
She probably had a little bit of money left in the checking account. And I think, I think what I did is, I would just forge checks from her checking account and deposit it in my bank account, because I don’t think I knew her PIN number. You know what I mean? It was like, really, like, what the fuck? So, I called Billy Duffy. I’m like, I gotta make some money. So, I rang him up, and he was, oh, we’re recording at Sound City. I want you to come down. So, I went down and auditioned. It was him, and the bass player was Craig Adams.

Craig (01:04:04.462)
Right, right, yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:04:20.158)
It was the album that had the Goat on it. That’s the record they were recording. It was a really short-lived lineup, and it had Scott Garrett on drums. And it was after Ceremony, which was the one after Sonny Temple. So, I went, and Ian wasn’t there that I saw.

Craig (01:04:34.035)
The ceremony was a good record.

Michael Dimkic (01:04:36.322)
But it didn’t do well. Like instead of it being Sonic Temple, part two, it tanked. So, and already they were kind of having rifts where Ian didn’t want to go more commercial, like kind of hard rock metal. I think Billy did. Ian wanted that goat record with the goat or sheep on it was very alt and kind of wacky, but that’s what Ian wanted to do. Ian’s like Velvet Underground, Patty Smith guy. And Billy is, you know, he’s Mott the Hoople.

Craig (01:04:39.882)
Yeah, right.

Michael Dimkic (01:05:06.434)
But at that time, I think he was maybe even thinking a little Bon Jovi. Like, let’s just, let’s go all out and just fucking sell millions of records and be able to retire. Fair enough. I get it. But Ian’s an artist, and was always that guy. So, I auditioned, but I guess Ian was listening outside. And, I don’t know, a week later, Billy calls and goes, Ian loved it. You’re in, mate. And I was just like, you know, he’s like, do you have a passport? I’m like, I got to get it renewed. So, I got my passport renewed and…

was in college, and the tour was gonna start, I would have to leave college, like, two weeks early, like, before finals. So, I went to all my professors and said, look, here’s the deal. I’m gonna do this, whether or not. But, because I was getting As in every class, the teachers were like, Mike, of course you can take the finals early. You’re gonna get an A anyway. You know, you’re not a deadbeat who’s trying to get out of finals. The only teacher who gave me an incomplete, and I had to come back and take the final, was the Spanish teacher.

Craig (01:05:40.829)
Ah.

Craig (01:05:50.97)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:06:04.074)
which I thought was funny, because when we toured Spain, I was speaking Spanish fluently, you know.

Craig (01:06:08.238)
That’s so funny, awesome for you, man.

Michael Dimkic (01:06:10.73)
So, yeah, within a couple weeks of that audition, my first show with them was, I think it was Hanover, Germany, opening for Metallica, and it was a soccer stadium. Like it was 60,000 people. That was my first show. So I’m sorry.

Craig (01:06:26.094)
Oh my God, so your first show with him, that’s like baptism by fire, man.

Michael Dimkic (01:06:30.386)
It was so weird how not scary it was. It was the weirdest thing. It was just like, okay. The only thing that I learned was like, monitor mixes are a whole nother thing on a stage like that because I realized in one song, I had played like a verse when it was a chorus and just didn’t even know until like the singing happened. And I was like, oh God, like that was bad. So yeah, that was, and we just fucking opened for.

Craig (01:06:32.931)
Really?

Craig (01:06:50.115)
He had no clue.

Michael Dimkic (01:06:58.674)
Metallica and Guns N’ Roses. It was really bizarre. I mean, I needed it, man. After the thing with my mom and everything, I kind of felt like, you know, I kind of earned this. Like, karmically, the universe, you know, gave me this.

Craig (01:07:01.018)
That’s crazy.

Craig (01:07:08.247)
Yeah.

Craig (01:07:15.918)
Yeah, brought some joy into your life, man. Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:07:18.374)
Oh, man. And I’d never really been to Europe, other than England, with my mom. So, I really got a taste for travel and for Europe and the culture. And when the tour ended, I went to… I just met some girls at a phone booth in London, like, and just ended up staying with them in their flat in Camden Town, when Camden Town was not cool. Like, it was cool, but it was…

Craig (01:07:39.938)
I’ve been to Camden. Yeah, now it’s all like, it’s kind of like West Village-y New York City a little bit. Yeah, yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:07:44.382)
Yes, yes. I stayed at their flat and I went and visited it a couple years ago. And it’s so funny because it’s so gentrified compared to when I was there. It was scary. And I remember I listened to a podcast with Boy George, and he lives on the street where I was. So that tells you how posh it is now, that fucking Boy George is living there. And when I lived there, it was just like drug dealers and criminals. Like, there was scary-looking

Craig (01:07:53.302)
Yeah, I’m sure.

Craig (01:08:02.337)
Oh, that’s wild. Yeah, that’s

Michael Dimkic (01:08:11.458)
kids there who I thought were just gonna stab me with a screwdriver. Like, it was… and I s- I s- That’s when I was there, dude. Piss everywhere, it was-

Craig (01:08:15.972)
I was there in 93 and it was, yeah, kind of a little dodgy. It was like, like I said, it was like the Greenwich, the East Village maybe even back in the day. Yeah, that’s so funny.

Michael Dimkic (01:08:25.994)
Yeah, it was, and there was no, it was a payphone in the flat. And you put money into like the, you put money in for the heater. You know, it was too, it was just total, just it was a, it was a council flat. And the guy just leased it out to these young girls who I met. And I stayed with them. And then I flew to Milan and went to like Lake Como with a girl I’d met and had this like, you know, romance with, you know, with, with a model, you know, typical, you know, just thinking.

Craig (01:08:36.131)
So… Yeah, yeah.

Craig (01:08:52.558)
Dude, so you were like getting a little bit of lovin’ from the universe there, from coming from this low point.

Michael Dimkic (01:08:59.654)
I did things like, and then I got home and was like, this is awesome. Like, cause Ian’s like, you’re on the firm, mate, you’re back. Fast forward a year later, like they’re rehearsing and I’m not in the band. Like they just got someone else. And I, and I was working at a liquor store by this point. So I’m like, you know, delivery guy, I’m cleaning the toilet, stocking the walk-in and they’re going on the road. And I was, I was devastated. I was still, I was in high city miles, which was great, but I, you know,

I had tasted, you know, playing velodromes and soccer stadiums. I was like, and getting paid. Like I’m, I want to do this.

Craig (01:09:30.752)
Yeah!

Craig (01:09:35.71)
So they just like bolted and didn’t even say anything like, hey, like when you were in the band, you were a sideman, I’m assuming. Yeah. So you’re a sideman in there and they didn’t even have the courtesy to say, Hey, Mike, uh, we’ve made some changes or like, just, that is so fucking yeah. That’s like, so I have such a problem with that ghosting shit, me personally, because it’s like,

Michael Dimkic (01:09:40.21)
I got, yeah, I don’t, yeah, there was no, but I was, I was.

Michael Dimkic (01:09:52.882)
No, they, they ghosted me. Like, to use, I got, I got ghosted.

Craig (01:10:04.266)
I want to tell somebody like, Hey man, I just want to be open and honest with you. This didn’t work out or, you know, we’re moving forward. I mean, I just, I couldn’t see. Like I feel incomplete if just like, fuck that guy, you know,

Why burn a bridge?

Michael Dimkic (01:10:21.207)
I was confused why I didn’t get the thing, because I knew that I was the right guy for the gig, musically, without question. And I know Ian, and I got really close. When I left that thing, Ian was like, you’re the guy. So I think what happened is, they got an English guy, which Ian said to me it was Billy’s decision, and I think it probably was, and Ian tends to not really…

if there’s confrontation, he doesn’t really want to get involved. So, I think. And Billy had gotten sober, kind of like, in between when we played and them going out again, he got sober. And I think they didn’t get a sober guy. I would have understood that a little more, you know? But they got an English guy, and I was bummed, but I wasn’t I had to move on. So, and in the end,

Craig (01:11:12.108)
You got over it. Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:11:14.786)
the band I was in morphed into a band called Sucker Punch, and we got a record deal. And that was right around the time that the cult was going. So I felt like, okay, you know what, I’m making money because you get in advance. We had a legitimate record deal. I’m doing my own thing. So I felt like that probably, that temporary inconvenience worked out for the better because then I ended up making a record with songs I helped write.

Craig (01:11:38.021)
Sure.

Michael Dimkic (01:11:41.634)
You know, and I had my own thing. I was on a record. I wasn’t playing someone else’s songs. And then the band broke up mid-tour. Those guys, the Colt. So, it was… It all kind of worked out, in the end. And then…

Sucker Punch, that just, you know, we went nowhere. It was one of those, you’re signed to an imprint label on MCA, a new boss comes in, he doesn’t want to deal with his imprint label, we’re gone. So I was pretty crushed at that point with music. And I was like, I’m kind of done with this shit. You know, I was like, this is why I went, I went to Europe and stayed in Europe for like a month or so and just kind of cruised around. And when I got back, I had a buddy who we formed a power trio that was just fun.

Craig (01:12:08.302)
Right, yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:12:25.69)
It was just me and him and a drummer. And he got a publishing deal, and we went and played CMJ. We did some fun kind of showcase shows. And I thought we’d actually get a deal. And it was such a fun band that I thought that would be a really fun band to get a deal with. Like, there was no hassle. Everyone got along. It was a trio, which is a lot of fun. There’s never that kind of, like, two guys versus two guys or something. That didn’t get a record deal, so I was done with music. I just kind of put the guitar away. And by this point, I was really getting into running marathons.

I put all that energy for playing guitar into running marathons and trying to get… So I was an age grouper, not competitive. I mean, I got third place in a couple races in my age group, but that, the guy would win, you know, these are like the Palos Verdes marathon, the guy who wins probably ran, you know, 255, whereas people that go to the Olympics run, you know, guys who win them run 201, you know, in big, yeah. I mean, yeah. So I was running three, three…

Craig (01:13:18.594)
Oh my god.

Michael Dimkic (01:13:24.942)
315, 320. So I was okay for, you know, but I was super into it and just watching, you know, getting as light as I could.

Craig (01:13:32.57)
But you started, is that when you first started running? Like that?

Michael Dimkic (01:13:35.654)
No, I started, before my mom died, I started running in about 1990, just jogging, just to kind of, you know, I realized I couldn’t, like, drink a ton of beers and go to Okie Dogs, you know, and have the metabolism I had when I was, like, 20. So, I just, when I was, like, 22, I just started running and, you know, was a, you know, my leather pants fit like I wanted them to. And I just kept, I kept that up, but never really…

Craig (01:13:40.798)
Okay.

Craig (01:13:48.991)
Ha ha.

Craig (01:13:54.083)
Right.

Craig (01:13:57.42)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:14:02.862)
I probably did a marathon in 95, but I would do 10Ks and things. And by about 97, 98, I got more and more into them, and really made an effort to run them as fast as I could, for me. I wanted to qualify for Boston. That’s kind of every amateur person’s goal, because there’s a graduated time for each age group. And I think, for that age group, I had to run Sub 3… I think I had to run Sub 3.15 or Sub 3.10.

But I was really into marathons, and Mike’s car was under the bed. And I got a call from this guy, Julian Raymond, who had featured throughout my sort of musical career as a producer guy. And he always had these cockamamie. He loved High City Miles and Sucker Punch. He always had these cockamamie schemes, like, I’m going to get you signed to Hollywood Records. He was like the head of A&R at Hollywood. He was, I’ll get you signed to wherever. And he would call me out. So, he called me out of the blue and was like, what are you doing Monday? And I was like, I don’t know. It was Friday.

Craig (01:14:37.286)
Wow.

Michael Dimkic (01:15:02.814)
And he goes, well, can you be at A&M Studios? Do you remember, do you remember the MTV VJ, Jesse Camp?

Craig (01:15:10.134)
No, I don’t remember that name. Unfortunately, sorry.

Michael Dimkic (01:15:10.986)
Oh my god, oh my god, this, oh my god. He was like this really, he was obsessed with Hannaway Rocks. He was super skinny. He had like this big haystack hairdo, and he was always like, he kind of had like a Polly Shore thing, where he’d kind of be like, hey man, like yo, like, like this, Google, Google Jesse Camp. But he got a record deal, of course, with Reprise, I think, like Warner’s. And Julian is like, look, the Green Day producer is doing it

Craig (01:15:26.254)
I’m probably sure.

Michael Dimkic (01:15:40.022)
but he’s exec producing, he thinks this thing is a joke. Can you come in and play on it? The money’s really good. They’re throwing money at this guy. So, and his band is terrible, so we’re re-recording everything. I hadn’t played guitar in like two years. So, I ran down to the corner music store and bought a set of nine gauge strings. I always play 10s, but I’m like, I need some help here. So I bought some nines, put them on, and basically spent the whole weekend playing along to the Doll’s first album and Nevermind the Bollocks, the records that I started playing guitar with.

Craig (01:15:53.634)
Yeah, just gonna ask you that.

Michael Dimkic (01:16:10.39)
when I was 12. And I just kind of relearned how to play guitar. I mean, it was still there, but I was rusty, and I showed up Monday, and, you know, the fucking money was on triple scale. Here, you know, what do you guys want for lunch? Blah, blah, blah. So, Julian knows people, and Julian has, like, Paul Stanley come in one day. He’s got fucking Rick Nielsen coming in. I think you got Stevie Nicks. Like, he called it so… I forget the name.

Craig (01:16:11.526)
That’s so funny.

Michael Dimkic (01:16:38.918)
of the Green Day producer. Is it, is it, is it Guerno? He’s got a, no, Cavallo. I think it was Bob Cavallo, Rob Cavallo. And then his brother is a manager, like Don Cavallo or something. I don’t know. I think, actually, I think that’s, I’m thinking of Don, Don Novello, the guy who’s father of Guido Sarducci. So yeah. What are you, what are you late? What are these dogs? What are you late for a nap? So, so Cavallo.

Craig (01:16:42.746)
I don’t know the producer of Green Day.

Oh, Rob, Rob Cavallo. Yeah. Okay.

Craig (01:16:58.136)
from Father Guido Sarducci.

name in a while.

Michael Dimkic (01:17:07.89)
starts seeing that all these celebrities, not me, but these real deal rock icons are coming down, and he gets it in his head that this Jesse Camp thing is not a joke and it’s gonna be huge. So he shows up, and when he shows up, I’m like, uh-oh, Julian Raymond is no longer in charge. And the first day that Cavallo’s there, there’s another guy playing guitar. Another rig is set up, and mine is just a half stack and a cable going into it and a Les Paul.

This guy’s got a pedalboard, like a Soldano amp, 10 different amps, and he’s kind of this, like, pudgy, bespectacled nerd. I mean, I don’t, I’m not gonna hammer the guy, but, you know, I looked like a proper rock and roll guy, and played like, and played like one. So, this guy, I don’t, I don’t know, and bass player was from Huey Lewis & News. It was, it was not the old guy, but lovely guy, who taught me how to do Nashville charts. That was a game, game changer. Thanks, buddy.

Craig (01:17:51.862)
Right. Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:18:06.358)
So he’s on it, and this new guitar rig is up. So we both got our guitars on, we’re getting ready to do a track, and I’ll never forget, Cavallo goes to whatever the guy’s name was. And it turned out it was the guy who plays on all the Goo Dolls records and probably played some Green Day records. Like he was his Jimmy Page ringer who would show up and play stuff. And he goes, yeah, yeah. And he goes like, hey, you know, hey, you know, Pete, give me a Sex Pistols tone. And I’m thinking…

Craig (01:18:26.492)
studio got for sessions. Yeah. Okay.

Craig (01:18:34.211)
Yeah, hello.

Michael Dimkic (01:18:36.382)
The guy steps on about four different pedals and switches things, goes like this, and it’s just this, like, generic, stupid… Just… the guy didn’t understand that you don’t just get the Sex Pistols or Johnny Thunder’s tone pressing shit. Like, there’s… it’s a whole… it’s like guys that think they can play like Keith Richards because they can do a drop G and they have a telly. It’s like, you know, I’m gonna pride myself that I…

Craig (01:18:59.458)
Right, right.

Michael Dimkic (01:19:02.514)
like a blues obsessive learning every Peter Green or, you know, Muddy Waters or Lighten Hopkins rip, I fucking studied Thunders and Jones and Ront, like, Ront’s and all that shit, to the point where I would argue no one knows it better than I. So, when this guy did that, I was like, my days are numbered, and I didn’t get a call. Like, that was, it was one of those, like,

Craig (01:19:27.431)
Like they were so far off from you where you were coming from musically. Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:19:30.89)
Yeah, it was one of those, like, hey, should I leave my gear here? No, maybe I should take it home. You know? Like, oh, boy. Like, at those auditions, should I leave my stuff here? Why don’t you take it? So, and I, yeah, exactly. So, I was bounced off of that one, but that record came out, and I have a copy of it somewhere, and it, it went nowhere. And I want to say that Jesse Campkid was on a promotional tour, not even playing yet, and…

Craig (01:19:41.307)
Yeah, just in case.

Michael Dimkic (01:19:58.966)
got busted giving alcohol to underage girls. Like he got me tooed before, like the MTV people were like, oh my God, we got to pull the plug on this shit before it brings the entire empire down. So, and I ran into him at Irving.

Craig (01:20:03.302)
Cheers.

Craig (01:20:12.198)
Yeah. I don’t know how that gets in guys’ heads actually, even to, maybe I’m just a weirdo. I’ve never like, when I see younger women like Eve, I’m like daughters. I have a 23 year old daughter. Like I don’t, I, it’s, how does that, what are you going to do after you, you know, after you fuck, what are you, what are you going to talk about? You know,

Michael Dimkic (01:20:25.632)
It’s

Michael Dimkic (01:20:36.402)
Like how you broke a law. I mean, he was pro, I was probably 27 at the time. He was probably mid twenties, maybe this guy, but like, dude, you’re an MTV VJ. Why? I mean, obviously if someone has that predilection, that’s what they’re gonna go for. Like, dude, there’s plenty of 25 year old women who are happy to have drinks with you and go to your hotel room. Like, leave the children alone, like the teeny boppers. And I mean, I’m sure Durand, but even Durand, Durand and stuff.

Craig (01:20:56.222)
Yes, right. Yeah, right.

Michael Dimkic (01:21:04.462)
sure that their road manager and stuff, you’re like, this is the age of consent in this state. You do not want to be in the South and be some limey whose, whose parents are coming after you with statutory rape charges. Like even if you, even if you have no conscience or soul, just for your, you know, the empire built on you, don’t be stupid, you know? And I think that, so, so that, yeah, so that, so, and I ran into him at Irving Plaza at a StoneTibble Pilots gig.

Craig (01:21:08.503)
Yeah.

Craig (01:21:14.891)
Oh my god, yeah.

Craig (01:21:24.597)
Yeah, of course.

Michael Dimkic (01:21:31.986)
in probably 1999 when I was there with the cult and there was Jesse Camp and he had some new manager and the manager was like Well, I Went up to Jesse Camp. So do you remember me? He’s like, oh, hey, man I think you played it and I go and then his manager came flying over and was like, oh, yeah You know that whole deal with warners was ridiculous. We got a new thing. You know, it was like yeah He’s gonna he’s gonna be huge now and I think I googled the guy

Craig (01:21:37.542)
Oh my god, did you must’ve got a laugh at yourself? A laugh to yourself when you.

Craig (01:22:00.192)
That’s funny, man.

Michael Dimkic (01:22:01.614)
And he, I think he ended up with, like, problems in mental health issues, and went missing, and, like, I just was curious. I wonder where that guy is now. So, I wish…

Craig (01:22:09.702)
Wow. Holy shit. You know, sometimes you’re reflecting like, you know, I like my nice, boring life, you know, it’s, you know, it’s like, it’s really, you know, no drama is good, you know, no crazy up and downs is good, you know, all that shit.

Michael Dimkic (01:22:17.974)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:22:27.202)
But I mean, the thing is, though, is I put this in, I have a whole bunch of notes that I came up with when I was writing my CV for you, but musicians are so, it’s such a fucking feast or famine, or not even feast, but a sort of like cup of noodles or famine, that I remember getting a phone call, it never failed, I’d be mopping my floor, doing something, just thinking about like, I wonder what I’m gonna do with my life.

And the phone rings, and it’s this guy, and he’s like, hey, man, Julian Raymond, gave me your phone number. Julian Raymond featuring again, he goes, he says, man, I hear you’re the guy. Like, I’ve got this female artist, kind of Avril Lavigne, but, you know, but she’s not a poser like Avril Lavigne. She’s the real, I’m like, whatever. So, he’s like, I heard you’re like the Thunders, Jonesy, Pistols, just the rock and roll, hot shot guitar player in town. And I’m thinking like, man, this shit, like, so, so that’s what we’re looking for this project, man, just, just someone like you. And then he pauses and goes,

So do you know anyone who plays like you who’s young?

Craig (01:23:27.014)
Oh my god. Augh!

Michael Dimkic (01:23:30.206)
I was maybe 30. Dude, I looked at the phone and thought, I can’t believe I’ve actually just heard something that I’m shocked by after all this time. And to my…

Craig (01:23:41.786)
Oh, yeah, like, what the fuck is it with these people? Why can’t they just get on the phone and say, I’m wondering if you could help me. I have an artist that’s, you know, looking for you, but unfortunately they want a younger artist and I’m so, I’m terribly sorry to.

Michael Dimkic (01:23:56.595)
especially the whole buildup. Like, dude, I was like, I was like,

Craig (01:23:59.408)
You’re the guy blah blah. Yeah. So do you got someone like your brother? What kind of shit is that?

Michael Dimkic (01:24:03.974)
Yeah, yeah. It… And to my eternal shame and discredit, I recovered and said, No, but if I hear of anyone, I’ll let you know. And if you hear of any gigs for someone my age, keep me in mind. Like I… How I didn’t go, like… Could… Can you please give me your address so I can come to your house and burn it the fuck down? Like I… I ate… I ate shit, because musicians, we’re just… So…

Craig (01:24:27.)
Yeah, like.

Michael Dimkic (01:24:33.198)
for a fucking gig and that is shameful. Like I, you know, people wanna unfollow me on Instagram. It’s. Ha ha ha.

Craig (01:24:37.306)
It’s not shameful, man. It’s just like there’s dude, especially like post 1990, 2000 even. I mean, it’s the music business went from this to this. So I mean, like, there’s no fucking shame in asking for a gig because there’s not a lot of them out there. It’s not like you got, you know, you’re like, you’re above all these other gigs and you’ve turned them down. You know?

Michael Dimkic (01:25:04.067)
It was just one, it definitely, it kind of was one of those like reminders, like you’re getting older, even though I might have been 32. You know, it was one of those like, Jesus, I’m already being put out to pasture. I know. And that was…

Craig (01:25:12.602)
Sure. Someone younger. Yeah, 32, that’s amazing. That’s like fucking sad.

Michael Dimkic (01:25:21.926)
That was probably 2002 or 2003, when the cult did one of their hiatuses, hiatii. I took Latin, I should know, with the hi-ee-tee. The plural of the masculine form, because of hiatus, I think it might be hi-ee-tee. Let’s see. If there’s any Latin scholars out there, let me know. It could be. The plural of prius should be pre-ee, not priuses.

Craig (01:25:30.958)
Ha ha ha.

Craig (01:25:42.041)
No hiatal, like the hernia.

Michael Dimkic (01:25:52.034)
So if you, if that’s a Latin word. So yeah, I was in the wilderness for a while and in 2004 or five, I had two roommates. We were all newly single, like divorced, or I had broken up with a girlfriend, she broke up with me, and the other two guys were divorced. And I’d been in bands with all these guys, but never at the same time. The one guy was from Sucker Punch, the main songwriter, other guitar player.

The drummer had been in that power trio with me. So, they all were, they were all living at my house. I had, you know, I had money in the bank. I wasn’t working. They were paying rent. It was great. And we went down to this local new bar that opened up and the bar manager was this beautiful woman, like beautiful. And we were all just like, oh my God. And she comes up and goes, are you guys in a band? You look like you’re in a band. We’re like, yeah, we’re in a band. She’s like, we knew, we, we all been in bands. And she said, well, we need a band.

Craig (01:26:23.127)
Okay.

Michael Dimkic (01:26:50.646)
we won’t have live music. Can you play here next week?” And we’re like, sure. And she’s like, what do you play? We’re like, what do you want us to play? And she’s like, oh, you know, just cover songs or whatever, like, okay. And we ran home and set up our shit in the living room and came up with like, you know, kind of some cool cover songs, like Nancy Sinatra, These Boots Are Made For Walkin’, you know, Dirty Water by the Standells, like kind of like proto-punk. It’s true, some Tom Petty in there, just, you know, for the civilians.

Craig (01:26:50.864)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:27:19.53)
and we fucking played the next week. And that began a whole little, like, super fun, and I had kind of given up guitar again. This was another of, Mike hasn’t played guitar for a year. So I kind of got my chops back, and it was a power trio, and we played at the local pub. That was really fun, because it was all just drunken Englishmen, and we learned All the Young Dudes by Mata Hoople, the David Bowie song. And when we played, that’s a hard song. And when we learned that, those motherfuckers would, Tim’s like,

Craig (01:27:41.702)
It’s such a ronson. It’s a great song.

Michael Dimkic (01:27:49.09)
Dude, I can never sing the chorus. I said, mark my words. These Englishmen are gonna hear that opening riff, and you’re not gonna have to sing a lick of that song, because they’re gonna be crying in their pints, because it was older guys. And they were all just like, ah, you know, like, singing the chorus. And we just had a blast. It was, like, the most fun band I’d been in, for ages. And…

Craig (01:27:56.13)
Yeah, absolutely.

Michael Dimkic (01:28:12.646)
met a woman who ended up dating our drummer, and she, she managed a Steve Madden shoe store in the mall. And she jokingly said, well, I’m hiring. Do you want to apply? And I go, I said, yeah, I’ll come down and apply. I’ve never, you know, so I worked at a fucking shoe store, just because I was like, I need to get out of the house. And I was just selling footwear. Like, I was at the mall. I worked at the mall and I was like 30, this is like 2005. So I’m like,

Craig (01:28:27.674)
So funny.

Craig (01:28:36.058)
That’s wild, man.

Michael Dimkic (01:28:42.038)
37 and I’m kind of at the mall and Frankie from Blondie came in to buy shoes. And he was like, I, and he was like, I remember you. You’re from Steve Jones has been like, I need some black shoes. And like, he was, yeah, he was, and he, he didn’t embarrass me that I was working at the shoe store

Craig (01:28:49.926)
That’s crazy.

Michael Dimkic (01:30:08.65)
Frank, yeah. Well, Frank, Frankie, Frankie was, Frankie was cool. I was once recognized once by a cult fan who was like, oh my God, you played in a cult. And those were those times when I was like, I don’t know if this shoe sales lark is good, but I did. I was.

Craig (01:30:24.354)
But you liked it. It said you love you said you loved it in your bio or I heard you or an interview or something you said you love doing it.

Michael Dimkic (01:30:28.206)
Oh, my manager, Sheila, who I’m still friends with, she lives in Manhattan now. Whenever we go, she comes. She, um, my employee number was 10101. So she called me 01 and her, her last two digits were 59, which I was taught of 59 Les Paul sunburst. So I called her 59 and she called me 01. And she, she came up to me one day and just goes, goes 01. Your fucking numbers are terrible. You got to at least try to sell some shoes because like,

Craig (01:30:49.254)
That’s cute.

Craig (01:30:56.822)
HAHAHAHA

Michael Dimkic (01:30:58.33)
The higher ups are like, this guy is wallowing together. And I said, okay, you know what? I said, I’m gonna fucking sell some shoes like you’ve never seen. And I went totally ape shit and put all my energy into being the best salesperson, right? And I ended up being like the regional top salesperson just and got some kind of bonus. And then I immediately went back to my old ways because I was like, I’ve proven I can sell shoes. Now I’m gonna be a deadbeat again. So it was.

Craig (01:31:12.442)
Good for you.

Craig (01:31:27.707)
This is a one-time opportunity. That’s it. Yeah, man. That’s funny. Wow.

Michael Dimkic (01:31:30.166)
But I, so yeah, and around, so I’m sorry, you can, you can ask some questions. I’m just caffeinated.

Craig (01:31:36.074)
No, no, it was, um, how did you get the gig with bad religion?

Michael Dimkic (01:31:43.07)
Okay, that’s what’s crazy about that. So, the cult reformed in 2006 or 2007, and was going steadily, was touring a ton, and the looters were still going. Like, in between cult tours, we would play at a place that’s slinged in Phantom, from the Stray Cats, who was a co-owner, it was called the Cat Club, right next to Whiskey. And I think our friend booked, our friend Blaine, who worked for the cult’s old management, he booked it, or knew people, so we would go play shows there.

Craig (01:31:44.183)
How did that come about?

Michael Dimkic (01:32:11.702)
just for fun, and we got free drinks. So, I was in the cult, and things were getting… It was kind of getting… After a number of years in the cult, I would sort of reach a bit of an Eddie, where I was like, it’s kind of the same thing. I’ve probably reached my maximum salary, a salary cap. I never… It’s their band. I’m never going to expand beyond playing those chords. And I’m… Yeah, and I’m not going to get to kind of… But at the same time, I’m like…

Craig (01:32:37.318)
Cult tunes, yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:32:41.918)
I got a wife and a kid. It’s, you know, it’s my job, but it had become a job. So Bad Religion was doing like seven nights or something at the House of Blues on Sunset when it was still there. And Tim from The Looters, that was what this cover band was called, he was friends with Brian Baker. I knew Brian from the eighties and he’s like, oh, we’re on the list. Let’s go see Bad Religion down before we go play at the cat club. Cause we played like at midnight or something.

So, we go down there and see Bad Religion. We go in the dressing room. We’re having drinks, and Brian’s like, “‘Oh, I’ll come down.'” I’m like, “‘Yeah, great.'” So, we get down to the show, and I’m pretty sure, oh, God, I mean, I swear that day started at a pool party and a barbecue. Then we went to someone’s birthday dinner. Then we went to Bad Religion.

Michael Dimkic (01:37:43.73)
And I do remember, I was told this story years later. Brian came down and I know Greg Hetson, I’d forgotten this, Greg Hetson got up and played Blitzkrieg Bop with us. And that’s the guy who I ended up replacing in Bad Religion. So he got up and played with us and Brian saw the band and he told me later, he was like, I’d forgotten how well you played. Like he said, I was really impressed by your muted eighth notes, which is…

Craig (01:37:57.14)
Okay.

You’re. Yeah, right.

Michael Dimkic (01:38:12.974)
you know, that was my stock in trade in the cult and bad religion. But he just, he was like, I, he’d known me forever because I hadn’t seen you play in so long. I’d kind of forgotten because he’d, he’d seen me in the cult, but I, you know, you probably couldn’t even hear me in the cult. So he just was like, I kind of made a mental note of it. And then when a few years later, you know, push came to shove and they, they needed another guitar player that night was, was in his head, which was, which struck me as so

Craig (01:38:42.822)
So that was your audition. That was your audition that night, effectively.

Michael Dimkic (01:38:44.986)
And the hysterical thing is, is I know for a fact, I think I fell backwards into the drums and Tim fell forwards off the stage. Like it was, it was, oh, it was just a complete, maybe that was a different gig where I fell backwards, but I’d like to make it that all these things happened in one night that like bad religion was there, I fell backwards, Tim fell forwards. We’d, you know, the day had started at a pool party and it was, you know, just, just epic, ridiculous, you know, evening. But yeah, so.

Craig (01:38:52.966)
because you guys are so lit.

Craig (01:38:57.495)
I don’t know.

Michael Dimkic (01:39:15.362)
So I don’t know where.

Craig (01:39:16.506)
So after he came that night and then a year later, he gave you a call.

Michael Dimkic (01:39:20.706)
I’m guessing it was probably a year or so later, because I was on a bike ride. I would do a Sunday bike ride and meet my wife and son, he was tiny at the time, in Malibu at Cross Creek, and he’d play at this little park. And I would finish my ride there and then stick the bike in the car, we’d hang out and go home. I got to the playground, kind of Cross Creek, Malibu area. It’s a good place for star watching too. If tourists want to see really cool stars in their element, go to Cross Creek.

Like I saw Robert Duvall there. That’s, I mean, Robert Duvall. No, that’s like good stars. Yeah, that’s cool. So I had a voicemail from Brian Baker and Brian Baker and I do not, we never talked on the phone. We would see each other every two or three years on the road somewhere. And I’m like, to my wife at the time, I said, that’s really weird, Brian Baker does not call me. And then I was on Twitter and I looked and all of a sudden Jay Bentley from Bad Religion was following me on Twitter.

Craig (01:39:50.074)
that’s the place. Oh wow. That’s that’s legend. Yeah, he’s a legend. Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:40:18.31)
I said, something’s in the air, Hillary. Something’s happening. So Brian was like, hey, give me a buzz. I’m flying to Belgium for a festival. Give me a call. You know, this will interest you. So I eventually got in touch with him. And I actually thought what he was gonna say to me was, hey, I’m gonna go to rehab. Can you sit in for me for a few gigs? Instead, he’s like, oh no, I went to rehab. I’ve been sober for a year. We’re…

Craig (01:40:21.352)
on things afoot. Yeah, man.

Michael Dimkic (01:40:47.75)
we need someone to replace Hedson for these immediate shows. And I’m like, oh shit, like, okay. And he said, we’ve got Drosa Rock or some festival next weekend, we’re not gonna lay that on you. But in two weeks, we’re doing two radio shows in the States, can you be ready? And we’re playing for 50 minutes. I go, okay. So this was how long ago it was, I rode my bike around to bookstores and record stores to get CDs of their songs.

Craig (01:41:17.432)
Wow.

Michael Dimkic (01:41:18.258)
I don’t think I had iTunes at the time. I had no reason to. And I think, I mean, their shit was so opposite from the cult, because the cult was pretty much three chords, D, C, and G in some permutation, and the songs were mid-tempo. And I don’t mean that as an insult, but Love, Remove, Machine, Rain, Fire Woman, Coming Down, those are all D, C, and G.

Craig (01:41:21.858)
Yeah, right.

Craig (01:41:40.846)
No, I get it though.

Michael Dimkic (01:41:47.134)
and you had a one to three chance of hitting the right chord. And if you hit the wrong chord, a G and a D don’t sound that off. Do you know what I mean? Like you could re-

Craig (01:41:54.122)
Hey, so if they need somebody, how do I throw my name in the hat? Cause I can handle those three chords. That’s so funny.

Michael Dimkic (01:41:57.994)
You got Billy’s email, don’t you?

Michael Dimkic (01:42:02.322)
And as I said, they were mid tempo. So like if you got off track, you were okay. And also I knew all the songs from hearing them at nightclubs on the radio. Bad Religion was not in my wheelhouse. I knew 21st Century Digital Boy. I knew Infected. I knew the K-Rock hits. I didn’t know Suffer. I really didn’t, you know, I was more of a rock and roll guy. And I went to learn this stuff and I was like, oh man, like the songs are really complicated. Like,

Craig (01:42:20.74)
Right.

Michael Dimkic (01:42:32.402)
they’re songwriter songs, like they’re very, they modulate and do weird shit, and they won’t modulate like a half or whole step, they’ll modulate from like B to F, rough sharp, let’s say. Like, it’s like fucking Beach Boys stuff. And I was like, oh shit. And I was really freaked out. And Brian’s like, dude, no, it’s not. No, there was a lot more going on. And I said to Brian, like, dude, this stuff doesn’t make sense to me. And he said,

Craig (01:42:44.102)
Okay, yeah.

Craig (01:42:49.958)
That’s not your conventional punk vibe musically at all.

Michael Dimkic (01:43:01.854)
you’re gonna figure it out. He said, you’re gonna realize there is a pattern to the songs and there are boxes and things. And as I learned more and more, I could differentiate a Brett song from a Greg song usually. And I would know where they were gonna probably go. Like I could start anticipating, but they were still really complicated. And they were, a lot of them were fast. And if you got behind, like if you missed a change, better luck tomorrow night, because you’re not gonna catch up. Like I would just at times,

have to like stop playing guitar. It was fucking humiliating. Like I rehearsed for two hours with Brooks the drummer and Jay the bass player and that was it. And then I showed up and played a show in front of people, met the singer for the first time an hour before we played. Had never played with Brian since High City Miles. It was the only time I’ve gone on stage feeling like the nightmare where you go to school and you haven’t been going all year and you’re at the final and maybe you don’t have.

Craig (01:43:57.838)
You’re at the final, yeah, yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:43:58.526)
and maybe you don’t have your pants on, I was like, oh man, this is gonna be brutal. And I would come off stage just so humiliated because I just, you know, in the cult, I nailed my job every night. And here I was like, I was hacking. I was really not doing, and they were all really cool. Like, you’re gonna get it. It’s already, you know, you’re all.

Craig (01:44:21.902)
Yeah, but that is so cool that like their expectations are realistic. You know, they, you know, they, they know their music and like, they weren’t expecting you to like get it day one. That’s like very reasonable human beings.

Michael Dimkic (01:44:35.082)
I mean, in retrospect, and this was so out of the blue for me. Like we played punk rock bowling or something. And I didn’t, this was not my circle. Like everyone knew everybody. And I’ve been running around doing rock festivals. And like, so I bumped into Buck Cherry, but I didn’t bump into bad religion. So I didn’t know no FX. I didn’t know any of these people. And I was an outsider. And I was like, and people online, there was definitely a bit of like, who the fuck is this guy from the cult?

Craig (01:44:50.38)
Yeah.

Craig (01:44:54.566)
Sure.

Michael Dimkic (01:45:04.598)
wearing white Levi’s, because I showed up with like Mc Jones white Levi’s. And somehow those got turned into white leather pants. And I assure you, I never had white leather pants like Axl in Paradise City. And I wasn’t doing that good of a job. And they could have probably found some dude who knew all the songs and could play them. And Brian’s point was, because this was Brian’s doing for the most part, was like, look, he knows how to tour.

Craig (01:45:15.13)
Ha ha!

Craig (01:45:26.019)
Right.

Michael Dimkic (01:45:33.482)
You know, like he can figure this out, but he’s toured for the last 20 years.

you couldn’t get like a he’s our age, you know, you probably couldn’t get this is the time where you don’t want a guy like me who’s young, because he hasn’t been on the road for a million years and knows how not exciting it is, you know, and isn’t going to like, chase underage girls, or you know what I mean? Like, like, like be so excited, like, you know, new guy shows up and goes ape shit. So I think it made sense in the end that they

Craig (01:45:48.355)
Right.

Craig (01:45:59.65)
Right, right. Yeah, yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:46:10.582)
we go with a grizzled veteran.

Craig (01:46:15.674)
How long did it take musically till you felt you were where you should be? Excuse me one second. I got him. I’m going to move her. She’s she’s pass her. Welcome. Hang on a second. Sorry.

Michael Dimkic (01:46:24.638)
Oh.

Craig (01:46:30.948)
No.

Craig (01:46:36.475)
Sorry, man.

Michael Dimkic (01:46:36.63)
No problem.

Craig (01:46:39.674)
How long did it take you until you were at where the point where you thought you should have been?

Michael Dimkic (01:46:44.166)
Um, I did, what’s so funny is, is the cult, the cult was on another one of their, another hiatus, um, cause they’d been, the two guys really, it’s very like Mick and Keith kind of thing, like they, they really butt heads, but also, you know, they need each other, you know, it’s, it’s that it’s like, I would say they’re like Ray and Dave Davies from the kinks. You know what I mean? Like it’s, or,

Craig (01:47:06.858)
Interesting. Yeah, I saw them in concert. They were doing this on a stage, the two of them. Funny enough.

Michael Dimkic (01:47:11.346)
or like the Black Crows. And I’m not saying that like as a slag. That’s just the dynamic. You know, it’s like they’re the fucking yin and yang, you know, fire and water. I was like Derek Smalls. I was Luke Warmwater in between them. And to go back to the cult, I would say I played a Ronnie Wood role in that band because I was the guy in a good mood and they both liked me and I

Craig (01:47:18.946)
No, that’s the relationship. Yeah.

Craig (01:47:34.648)
Okay.

Michael Dimkic (01:47:40.478)
I would say I play better than Ronnie Wood played in the Stones. And I love Ronnie Wood, but in the faces. I haven’t seen him in a long time, so it’s hard to say. But I love Ronnie Wood. I don’t want Ronnie Wood to hear this and fucking hate me, because I would love to meet him. I did meet him, actually, at the Guns N’ Roses show. So I was like the Ronnie Wood. But they were having another one of their kind of cyclical, kind of like we’re not dealing with each other, or we’re not touring.

Craig (01:47:46.935)
Yeah, man, I’m with you on that one.

Michael Dimkic (01:48:10.002)
And we not worked for like a year, or six or eight months. And I was like, I gotta work. So when Bad Religion came calling, there was no conflict at all. So I did two European tours with them that were like six weeks long each. And I did not tender my resignation from the cult until the end of that second tour. So I had played with that band for like three months basically. And I still don’t think

Craig (01:48:35.55)
Three months, yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:48:40.058)
I really had it down for another few years. I’m now comfortable in the band where they won’t throw something at me that’s not in my thing. It’s fucking been 11 years. And what is so great about it is I was forced at age 40, whatever I was, to actually put my nose to the grindstone or my shoulder to the wheel, whichever it is.

and fucking have to like become a better guitar player. Like I played no solos in the cult. And the only time I played leads or I played all the guitar was the covers band cause it was three piece. So that kept my chops going. That’s such a cheesy word, but that kept me to where I could do more than just kind of chunk, chunk three chords. Like I could have gotten really lazy and just, you know, been on autopilot. And when I got in bad religion, Brian was like,

Okay, dude, here’s like 50% of the solos that you’re gonna take, because I’m tired of playing. And I’m like, be careful what you wish for. I’m like, oh shit. Like, unfortunately, I kind of, you know, had been playing solos and all these things that I, you know, but I had to really focus on playing guitar again. And my right hand was always good for like, the chunking and the mid tempo, but I was always a shitty acoustic player.

Craig (01:49:47.447)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:50:07.358)
anything that required that kind of like, doon, doodly, doodly kind of thing, I couldn’t do it. My right hand was shit on acoustic guitar. And after a couple of years in bad religion, I would say I’m a pretty reasonable acoustic player in terms of my right hand is good. I mean, I’m not, you know, there’s guys who really can play acoustic, but I can fake it now. So it was really funny that I left the like arena rock band to join a punk band.

And in my 50s or late 40s became a better guitar player than I’d been. It was nice. Like I can’t believe that I would ever, it was like a second childhood in that like, wow, I thought if anything you kind of start, cause I definitely run a lot slower, but my guitar playing is better than it’s ever been. I mean, if you don’t like the way it plays and it’s not gonna mean anything to you, but I…

Craig (01:50:38.855)
Yeah, dude, I think that’s awesome

Craig (01:50:56.78)
Ha ha.

That’s awesome, man.

Michael Dimkic (01:51:04.514)
Personally speaking, I’m at the top of my game and we finished these, we get halfway through our tours and I’m just like, oh my God, I can’t believe it comes back to you and it’s really fun to have fun this far along in, you know what I mean? Like we got done rehearsing last week and I got home and was like, you know, cause you show up, you haven’t played, we haven’t played since South America in December.

You know, you show up and you’re kind of like dusting off the cobwebs and it, you know, within a couple of days, you’re just like, God, it’s so nice that it comes back, you know, that it’s, because I always worry sometimes one day it won’t, you know, like just.

Craig (01:51:42.127)
That’s great.

Craig (01:51:48.086)
I’m sure. Well, you know what’s nice? When I was watching some interviews of you guys, I watched some older ones, which is where when, it must have been an older interview because you were saying how you are playing rhythm now and you don’t get to do a lot of solos. That’s which is where I got that data from. Yeah, that was, it must have been an older interview, you know, and.

Michael Dimkic (01:51:48.406)
I’m gonna let you-

Michael Dimkic (01:52:04.512)
I said that in bad religion?

Michael Dimkic (01:52:09.09)
I think I was joking because I got those, I got shit. It depended on the set list. I mean, there’s set lists where I don’t have to play a couple solos and then there are the others where Brian’s like, I’m taking a night off. Like, it’s not that we trade solos, but he’ll write a set or they’ll write a set list. It’s a flip of the coin. It just depends sometimes. And there are some nights where I’m like, oh man, like why can’t I just play the two solos tonight and not have to.

Craig (01:52:12.674)
You got, he handed you 50% of the souls right away? Yeah.

Craig (01:52:30.522)
Sure.

Michael Dimkic (01:52:36.738)
you know, be on form the entire fucking set, you know, like.

Craig (01:52:41.811)
But my point is that you guys all just seem very content, if that’s right. It was just like the three or four of you, three of you sitting there and it was like, it was just a nice conversation. You could tell you guys are extremely comfortable. Nobody’s like, hey, I need to talk more or, no, it was just like three normal people.

Michael Dimkic (01:53:02.486)
No, no.

Michael Dimkic (01:53:06.314)
No, believe me, they definitely, and I’ll use the word pawn off, they try to pawn off things on me and Jamie the drummer when they can, because they don’t want to have to do all the interviews. And I’m always like, you know what, they’re going to ask me questions I don’t know the answers for, so sorry guys. Like you’ve been in the band 42 years, you got to do the interview. But I did one for a Spanish thing, and it’s funny, I think I spent more time, they asked me more about the cult and they did Bad Religion. It was pretty much like,

Craig (01:53:19.876)
Sure.

Craig (01:53:28.15)
Yeah, I need some help.

Michael Dimkic (01:53:36.904)
So you’re playing tsunami rock. So the time’s in the cult. And then they just, it was all about the cult. I was like.

Craig (01:53:37.114)
That’s weird.

Craig (01:53:43.133)
Did you talk in Spanish or did you talk in English?

Michael Dimkic (01:53:45.086)
I mean, I can get by in Spanish, but I wouldn’t do an interview in Spanish because God knows what kind of… It would be a pretty basic… I’m not going to discuss… I’ve discussed politics in Spanish. I was in Argentina and I stayed there for a couple of weeks and I was hanging out with this couple and they spoke no English, just enough that if there was an impasse, but it was immersion all the way. And we were talking about the election that had just happened. We were talking about the police down there.

Craig (01:53:48.869)
Okay.

Craig (01:54:01.778)
Wow.

Michael Dimkic (01:54:13.61)
So it was neat that like…

Craig (01:54:14.232)
Oh wow.

You could talk that in depth. That’s not like even cut. That’s not normal conversational span either. Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:54:20.874)
No, no, I was sort of, you know, I mean, I mean, I don’t know, maybe I hope it didn’t, you know, I don’t think I would have come off so poorly that they’re like, oh, Mike’s a fascist. You know? They were, he’s, yeah. He supported, you know, the Perone dictatorship, apparently. I did not. And I didn’t see the Evita musical either.

Craig (01:54:34.594)
No invite tar next time.

Craig (01:54:40.998)
Ha ha ha.

Michael Dimkic (01:54:49.533)
So what?

Craig (01:54:50.318)
Hey, let me, I wanna ask you a question about your gear. Fuck gear for a few minutes. What’s your go-to guitar now? What other two might round out your top?

Michael Dimkic (01:54:56.225)
Okay.

Michael Dimkic (01:55:03.526)
None of them are with me here. When I joined Bad Religion, I had a custom shop, like their 58 TV model, and I started playing that in a cult, because they had a manager that was like, you can’t play Les Paul while Billy plays Les Paul. And I always owned, the manager had all sorts of interesting musical ideas. So I was like, I’ll play an SG, I don’t care, but I’m not gonna go buy one. So I had a kind of a cool white SG.

Craig (01:55:20.987)
What?

Michael Dimkic (01:55:33.454)
custom maybe that I was playing for a long time that I liked, but I didn’t own that. And at some point they came out with like the custom shop TV model reissues. And I’d always wanted one, like a Johnny Thunders, you know, the yellow double cutaway. And I’d owned a double cutaway red one back in high school that I sold, of course. But I, so I started playing that junior. And when I joined Bad Religion, I had that one. And I didn’t, I was so used to the P90 and the one pickup that I couldn’t go back to a Les Paul.

I didn’t like the sound of humbuckers.

Craig (01:56:05.574)
Okay, talk to me about that. What is the difference between a one pickup and a two pickup? Let’s talk about specials then, because you got like a one pickup junior versus two pickup special with P90s.

Michael Dimkic (01:56:14.378)
Okay, well, the humbuckers in the P90s are a whole different beast. Like, a P90, I believe the volume control works well, whereas I think with a humbucker, they sound good on 10, and other than that, they sound thin and crappy. I just, I find them too linear. I like the P90. But…

Craig (01:56:20.013)
Yes.

Craig (01:56:32.683)
I love P90s man. Love them.

Michael Dimkic (01:56:36.65)
Has Charlie Starr been on your show?

He has the theory that the two pickups don’t sound as good because there’s some magnetic interference between the two pickups and you just don’t get the same ballsy sound. I…

Craig (01:56:40.628)
Yes.

Craig (01:56:53.654)
as you do when you just get the one P90.

Michael Dimkic (01:56:55.542)
Yes. And there’s an argument, in P90s, these soap bars, I believe, sit farther down into the body. But I have a late 1959 Junior that has the dog ear cover, but apparently, actually it’s a 58. At some point they ran out of the dog ear pickup that has the little, you know, like a…

Craig (01:56:58.572)
Interesting.

Craig (01:57:26.23)
Yeah, that little flap kind of, yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:57:26.486)
The dog ears, yeah, and that attaches to the top of the body and you screw it in. The four digit 58s, if you take the cover off, they just have a soap bar in there without the little, why am I forgetting, the brackets. And they basically have like a wooden shim and then just one screw, and then the P90 dog ear cover on top. So that guitar sounds amazing and it’s not a dog ear P90, it’s a soap bar.

So, but it’s one pickup. So once I got into bad religion, Brian and Jay are gear nerds and I was not a gear nerd. I was kind of like, I got my one or two juniors. That’s all I need and a cable. And at some point we were on the, Brian collects old guitars and I think he started.

Craig (01:58:15.125)
Right.

Michael Dimkic (01:58:21.834)
He switched over to juniors. He started playing single cuts. We agreed, I get the double cut, he gets the single cut. And he was kind of like, I think a bit shocked that I showed up with no effects pedals and just this one pickup guitar on a bicycle. I think he was like, this sure looks simple. And I think he wanted to begin simplifying his life. And I want to say within a year or so his pedal board was gone and he started playing a junior. And…

Craig (01:58:27.629)
Okay.

Michael Dimkic (01:58:51.906)
Brian doesn’t do things in half measures. He was buying custom shop specials and stuff, but then he started buying vintage ones because they were a lot more affordable eight years ago, nine years ago, they were cheaper. And you could buy a junior for 5,000, 3500 bucks, you know? And he started showing up with some, and I’m like, I need to get into the vintage wars and get myself a vintage guitar. And I’d taken out a home equity loan to improve some stuff on my house, and I earmarked a little chunk of money.

Craig (01:59:03.618)
Yes.

Michael Dimkic (01:59:21.846)
to get myself a junior. And I had a buddy who works for Sheryl Crow and has worked for.

Craig (01:59:24.335)
Absolutely.

Michael Dimkic (01:59:30.838)
Doyle Bramhall with Clapton and he works with Billy Gibbons right now, lovely guy. He knew a place in St. Paul because they’ve got a double cut junior to killer price. It’s a player guitar, it’s got Grovers, you know, it’s not been repaired but it’s beat up, it’s great. And I got that for a screaming deal and it was so nice. I mean it played great, had a big fat neck and then I kind of got…

Craig (01:59:48.806)
That’s great.

Craig (01:59:53.55)
Yeah, it’s funny how you love those big fat, you must have long slim fingers, I would imagine. Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (01:59:57.034)
Yeah, and I just like, they just feel better. They’re just, I mean, I’ll play a skinny necked one, but I know that the one I had in high school had to have been a 60 or a 61, and the neck was really thin. And if you played like an open G and walked the neck, it was like an SG, go, wrong, you know, it would, if you moved around, it shifted, you know, and you could go like this and bend the fuck out of it. So, and I hadn’t, I was 17, I hadn’t figured out P90s yet.

Craig (02:00:21.592)
Yes.

Michael Dimkic (02:00:27.014)
So when we would go on the road, I started looking at Craigslist and shit in local, in local parts of town. And Brian always loves going to music stores. And we were in Edmonton somewhere and their Craigslist or their, I think it’s a, it’s called like NGG or it’s got some really wacky, like Ninja something.

Craig (02:00:46.626)
Yeah, whatever it’s called it.

Yeah, something like that. Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:00:53.61)
I won’t say in-ginji, but that’s a kind of running sock, but it’s a weird name. So I was looking up and there was a store that had a repainted 58 Junior that was repainted like off white, which is the perfect color because that’s the Steve Jones Sex Pistols guitar, but it’s a Johnny Thunders Jr. And you could tell it had been painted years ago because the paint was chewed up. And I called them and said, hey, we’re in town in Calgary. Can we come look at it? And I threw like the bad religion thing.

just to kind of see if maybe they’d bring it down or something, but they were like, come on down. So we went down to the shop and they had a couple juniors actually, and they had this one. And we looked at it and Brian took the cover off and he kind of pulled me aside. He said, this, because it’d been repainted and the serial number was different. And it had probably been red at one point and TV yellow, but it was probably originally, it was originally red. But he pulled me aside and said, this is definitely a real Gibson, even though it’s had a new decal put on. He said, because

it has a soap bar in it. And there was a thread on the Les Paul forum where guys talked about they had 58s, that they were worried were fake. And then about half a dozen guys were like, no, my four digit serial number has a P90 in it. It’s soap bar, they must have run out and they just went and grabbed those and put a fucking popsicle stick in there and shimmed it. So he goes, this is real. But he wanted to see if it had neck repairs. So…

there was like a porn shop next door, like one of those like dirty magazine places, and they had a blue light, they had the blue light because it was like a strip club or something. It was like a porno strip club. So we took the guitar over there and put it under the blue light, and you could see it had a headstock repair, which was fine, and it had Grovers on it, and God knows what. But was original.

Craig (02:02:25.146)
Sure. Ha ha ha!

Craig (02:02:41.114)
But you get those much cheaper when they’ve had a headstock repair, man, don’t you?

Michael Dimkic (02:02:43.594)
Well, dude, I mean, I’ll say this out loud. I paid $3,500 Canadian for it, which was like three grand.

Craig (02:02:51.162)
For a 58?

Michael Dimkic (02:02:52.798)
Yeah, but that was also eight, nine years ago. You know, it was, they went crazy. I know that I was in Mike’s music, I think it is, in Cincinnati with the Colt in 2008. I know this for a fact. And I had money to burn. We didn’t have a kid yet, and we didn’t, 2009. So I had money to burn. I’m like, I’m gonna go buy a junior. I’m gonna buy a new guitar today. I’m gonna go buy a used junior, maybe a TV model.

Craig (02:02:54.822)
That’s it.

still that’s pretty like extremely recent.

Michael Dimkic (02:03:22.334)
and I figured they’d be three, four grand. This was 2008, a fucking red junior that had a Bigsby pulled off of it and had faded to a weird color was like 11 grand. That was the crazy spike. And then they went down and there definitely was a dip in the market right about when Brian and I started getting in there. And I bought the red 59, it’s original, for not much more than I paid for the white one.

Um, so those, those are the white one became my go-to. Um, and I think, I don’t remember why it has a different neck. It’s a little skinnier of a neck, but I liked the color of it. Um, even though it’s not original, it, it was painted so long ago that it’s like really yellow. And then, and it looked enough like a TV model to me. Most people thought it was, but it didn’t have that translucent, you know, TV finish, but it’s so yellow at this point that it, it looks yellow.

Craig (02:03:53.787)
That’s cool.

Michael Dimkic (02:04:22.634)
And then when I finally got a TV model just a few months ago, if you put them next to each other and take an Instagram photo, they look like the same. You know, it’s like.

Craig (02:04:31.122)
You did that. I saw that and it did look like a very similar guitar. Yeah, look really close. So wait a minute. Okay. So all right. Two questions. So the biggest difference I’m good, because I don’t have a special or excuse me, a junior. The juniors with the one have the one pickup specials have the two, correct? Okay. So I have a special, I have it’s an Eastman, but it’s effectively a Les Paul special. What is the biggest sonic difference I’m going to see with the one ver- I’m always so used to having two pickups. It’s more like I’m

Michael Dimkic (02:04:32.342)
These look pretty close.

Michael Dimkic (02:04:47.178)
Yes.

Craig (02:05:00.814)
I’m not close to the idea of having one eye. It’s just out of my, it’s something I have never had before.

Michael Dimkic (02:05:06.454)
I mean, obviously, you don’t have the neck pickup, so you don’t have, you can want that warm, that like American woman intro solo thing or sweet child of mine or whatever. But you also can just turn the tone knob down on the one pickup. I just think, I mean, I do have, this is my home guitar, get over here. That I bought this and got it repainted. Before I got the other one, I got it repainted like Polaris white. It was a TV yellow, but it was a whole,

Craig (02:05:17.462)
Yeah.

Craig (02:05:33.471)
Right, that’s a cool looking guitar.

Michael Dimkic (02:05:36.75)
Gibson Custom Shop only now has gotten the TV yellow right. When I bought it, it was like almost like a natural wheat color, which is the color of like a 54 single cut before the TV color existed, really. I’ve now seen that they finally got them with a tortoise shell pick guard, the proper yellow, but I think they’re eight or 10 grand.

Craig (02:05:48.183)
Okay.

Craig (02:05:56.982)
Oh, the TV yellows are beautiful guitars, man. I mean, just the colors, like.

Michael Dimkic (02:05:59.362)
But yeah, and it’s hard to get done, but I think the custom shop things cost almost what a real one cost a few years ago. Like I think they’re eight grand now. Like.

Craig (02:06:10.71)
No, it’s not. I’d have to. I wouldn’t. I’m not a professional guitar player, so I couldn’t. I couldn’t spend that money. Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:06:14.262)
But yeah, so, but that guitar I have used on tour, like I took it out for a couple of years probably. And it just, it didn’t sound as ballsy as the single cut. It just, I know that’s not, it just, it lacked, it just doesn’t have like that groan that the junior has. I mean, these aren’t.

Craig (02:06:31.726)
Really?

Michael Dimkic (02:06:42.788)
very scientific terms but

Craig (02:06:45.17)
No, that’s okay. I mean, music is not like you can’t explain this stuff like, well, the frequency that hurts are, you know, 40 microns lower. So that’s, of course, you’re gonna hear the difference. Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:06:52.726)
Yeah, they just, they don’t, they don’t have, and also I, it’s been so long now that I’m so used to just really having the one volume knob to deal with, that the pickup selector is a pain in the ass. I, you know, I do, I do find I have kind of like, you know, devolved. If my guitar playing has gotten better, I will say that my skill navigating around a two pickup guitar with the knobs and the toggle switch has suffered.

Craig (02:07:06.927)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:07:20.598)
Like I definitely am like, oh, this is too much, too much to deal with. You know, like, if I played a show with someone, I’d probably bang the thing off by accident, or, you know, flip it to the neck pickup and all of a sudden it would be like, vroom.

Craig (02:07:36.577)
And so the other question is what’s the difference between the double cut away and the single cut? Is there any difference there or is that just an aesthetic preference you like the doubles?

Michael Dimkic (02:07:44.646)
I like it because that’s what Johnny Thunders had, and I do think they look cooler. I would love to own a single cut TV model because they really do look beautiful. But we made the choice. Brian was like, I’m not gonna go into the double cut world, and I’m not gonna, like when that TV model showed up in Cleveland, if I didn’t buy it, he was gonna buy it. And if he bought it, he was gonna probably be hard pressed to not wanna play it on stage.

Craig (02:07:50.476)
Okay.

Craig (02:07:55.477)
Oh, pose.

Michael Dimkic (02:08:13.086)
and I would be looking over at that guitar like you stole my girlfriend.

You know, like the girl I’ve been dreaming about for my entire life and you met her now, you’re with her. You know, and I had the chance. So I had to buy the guitar because I would have probably just been looking over to resentful every day. And then maybe I could have guilted him enough that he was sold it to me. But that was, what the hell was my point on that one? Yeah, I just like the aesthetic look.

Craig (02:08:20.289)
Yeah, yeah.

Craig (02:08:26.586)
Yeah, what a great analogy.

Craig (02:08:43.15)
Double cut verse single. You just prefer the double.

Michael Dimkic (02:08:47.646)
And that was, you know, I mean, and they prob, the neck joints aren’t as good, you know? I mean, in turn, I mean, the neck joints are really good, but you’re probably more likely, the specials, the old specials have a horrible neck joint and you’re almost never gonna find one that doesn’t have a heel break, which is bad. Like those, you break that and that’s a lot of repair, like knowledge has to be taken to get that done right.

Craig (02:08:48.666)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:09:16.67)
My custom shop, actually, I broke the headstock off that one, actually. I think I put that on Instagram. My not my one of my old ones, thank God, but it was I had moved the guitar and that was my guitar. I played at home the one I played through the Colton early PR. And there had been kind of some like there’d been some drama where like there was like a family member in the hospital and I had to spend time in the hospital. So I ran and just grabbed some socks and moved the guitar from where it normally lives. And then fast forward a week or so.

everything is good. And I’m picking my son up at school and it’s like, hey, dad, can we go get barbecue? So I’m gonna take him to the barbecue joint he likes. I keep, and his mom was out of town, so I was gonna go stay at the house with him. So I had to get a backpack and just throw some clothes in it. But I’d kind of forgotten in the total craze of driving to the hospital that I had moved that guitar. So it was in a place I wasn’t used to it. And I’m in a bit of a rush because the kids waiting in the car. So I run and I’m just gonna yank my knapsack out from where I store it.

Craig (02:10:09.966)
Ugh.

Michael Dimkic (02:10:15.842)
kind of behind like a dresser. And as I pull it out, my elbow goes back and I feel it bump something. And the minute it bumped something, I knew what it was. And I turned around and I just, I could, I saw the junior just hit the deck and the headstock just went, like it shot off, like those little like nerf guns that kids shoot. But of course the strings didn’t let it just fly like under the coffee table. It just went, and I saw it and I was like, fuck. Like.

Craig (02:10:25.402)
BONG! Ugh.

Craig (02:10:40.579)
Ugh.

Michael Dimkic (02:10:44.286)
It had been a hell of a week. Our son was in the hospital for like five nights. It was, talk about gratitude and the whole thing. Everything’s fine, but it was like a weird, you can get myocarditis, which you get a virus that sits on your heart and then your heart gets inflamed. I knew athletes that got it. It’s kind of a thing that endurance athletes get, but 15 year old kids don’t get. So it was a weird, but.

Craig (02:10:52.376)
Oh wow.

Craig (02:11:10.853)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:11:12.278)
He’s good and everything’s good, but there were, it was definitely some scary nights, like not anything you wanna deal with. So I was so fucking frazzled that when the headstock came off the guitar, I wasn’t surprised, I bumped into it. And I just thought, like, put your money where your mouth is, it’s a fucking guitar. It didn’t look like a bad break. I’ve broken one before years ago, they fixed them. It’s not your kid, you know, like I’d made so many deals with the universe in the hospital that like,

Craig (02:11:14.022)
He’s okay now, right?

Yeah, of course.

Craig (02:11:40.384)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:11:42.078)
if the broken guitar is like, you know, the payback. No, I was totally, I would have like biblically chopped the guitars into kindling wood, you know, and throwing them into the fire if that was, if Job, you know, if the Lord had asked me to. So I was annoyed for about two minutes and I walked back out to the car and then we went to the rib place. And as soon as we sat down, we had an earthquake. We had like a, I think it was 6.8. And I was just like.

Craig (02:11:45.67)
If that’s your price, no problem. Yeah.

Craig (02:11:52.142)
Yeah.

Craig (02:12:07.648)
What a week!

Michael Dimkic (02:12:08.202)
And I was like, God damn, and you know what? The guitar probably would have fucking fallen out of the stands anyway during the earthquake. So that’s getting repaired now. Keith Nelson turned me on to LA Guitar Repair. So it’s down there, so.

Craig (02:12:14.455)
Holy crap.

Craig (02:12:21.739)
Okay cool.

Alright, so one more question about all these. I bought a special, a TV yellow special, I don’t know, two years ago and.

Craig (02:12:36.406)
it had the old school bridge in it, right? And the fucking thing wouldn’t stay, and this is a brand new guitar, I mean it literally wouldn’t stay in tune to the point where like I gave it back to the shop and they had tried to fix it two or three times and finally I go and the guy goes, look, I’m just gonna give you your money back, this thing is not staying in, I mean I didn’t even ask for it, you know? He goes, this thing is not staying in tune. He goes, yeah, so now I’m always wary about it if I don’t have some sort of a.

Michael Dimkic (02:12:58.136)
Really?

Craig (02:13:05.302)
you know, a proper like a stop tail bridge or something that I got to worry about that. How do I, you know, if I’m buying it sight unseen, what do I do?

Michael Dimkic (02:13:09.718)
Was it? I mean… I would…

Michael Dimkic (02:13:15.27)
Um, I would say, because Brian and I have talked about this because I’m, I’m very, I’m old school in terms of like, I don’t think the Les Paul has been improved upon since 1958 and I don’t say 58 because that’s when the double cut started. Like honestly, the stop tail piece wrap around with a P 90 that happened in 54. I don’t, nothing after that, that’s happened to Gibson’s. I care about, like, I know that sounds really stupid, but the tune-o-matic I have no interest in.

The humbucker now I have no interest in. I mean, I’ll play those guitars now and again, but I would say when a guitar doesn’t stay in tune, a lot of people blame the tuning pegs. Tuning pegs just allow a more

Michael Dimkic (02:14:07.249)
Oh, my phone rang and I told him to turn that off and I didn’t. So he did the countdown. Okay, good. So like the old, like little, you know, the Clueson pegs or the little white ones, the ratio isn’t as good. So it’s a little harder to dial it in, but they don’t slip. I would say if a guitar’s an insane tune, sometimes it’s a nut issue, I think. Like I think…

Craig (02:14:11.562)
Oh, no worries, man. Yeah, it didn’t. It’s we’re fine. But yeah, thank you.

Michael Dimkic (02:14:35.701)
And Brian could speak more to this or Craig Nelson, I’m sure, but from what I’ve heard, I think sometimes they don’t cut the nuts as well, you know, like the actual just quality control is not that good. So, the strings kind of, you know, they’ll ping, you know, they’ll jump. You could put graphite or I think there’s stuff called nut lube, haha, but I think it’s called nut lube. You can put that in there. I don’t believe tuning pegs are an issue. And…

Craig (02:14:53.998)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:15:02.821)
A tailpiece should not cause a guitar to slip out of tune. I know guys like to argue that the wraparound does not, because it’s compensating. You dial in the high and low E and then you just hope for the best on the rest. I have never had a problem with any of that. I pride myself on that I can play guitar in tune anywhere on the neck. And I’m not playing bar chords at the 12th fret. Actually I do sometimes, but I’m not playing in high A like this.

And if you’re playing single notes and things, you’re intonating it with your fingers and your ear. You know what I mean? Like, so I don’t, and I also, because they do make all sorts of amazing wraparound replacements, you know, like, I think that is there like a mojo ax one or a pigtail, these different things.

Craig (02:15:47.907)
Yes.

Craig (02:15:52.89)
There was these guys switch his people they put on three separate ones and none of them would stay in tune So I’m thinking so I’m just thinking listen, man. This is a shitty fucking quality guitar

Michael Dimkic (02:16:01.513)
But it was, was it that it, would it just not stay in tune or would it just not intonate well?

Craig (02:16:08.282)
Um, it did not stay in tune or intonate well. And that’s why the guy was like, look, I’m just going to give you your money back. I can’t expect you. Cause he had the guitar for the first two months. I didn’t even play it.

Michael Dimkic (02:16:19.633)
I mean, I mean, I mean, there are just dog guitars. I mean, maybe it’s, I mean, I mean, I’ve, I’m trying to think if I’ve ever had like a, I’ve had a guitar that was a lemon and it didn’t sound that good and it weighed, fucking must’ve weighed like 16 pounds. It was a gold top from 79 or something. And it had P90s. It was really heavy and just didn’t have much, didn’t have a good tone to it. And that I traded that I got rid of that one.

Craig (02:16:23.402)
Yeah, could it just been a could it could be on lemon?

Michael Dimkic (02:16:49.213)
But I’ve never, man, I don’t think I’ve ever had a guitar that, I had a Les Paul White, Les Paul Custom, like the Sex Pistols one, and it actually wasn’t that good. It was probably 74. And I wish I had it just cause it was kind of cool, but it, I don’t know, I recall maybe it didn’t stay in tune all that well. It didn’t sound that good. It was just sort of, a lot of those,

Craig (02:17:08.634)
So it sounded like it just could have been a lemon more than like a, you know, a problem that I need to be wary of moving forward.

Michael Dimkic (02:17:17.193)
I’ve never had, I mean, I own a couple of the Billy Joe Armstrong guitars. I got a couple off Gibson in the day. And that’s their, that is the truest version of a junior now because they were like 900 bucks. You know, like they actually were kind of honoring what a junior was in the day, which was an affordable guitar because a junior, a custom shop junior is not affordable and a vintage is definitely not affordable. And the Billy Joe’s are like 2000 bucks now, but that was a good guitar. I mean, I own a couple and have used them.

Craig (02:17:38.094)
Don’t, yeah.

Craig (02:17:43.503)
Okay.

Michael Dimkic (02:17:47.077)
uh, just doing little like gigs on the side and stuff or playing them at home. And they’re solid guitars. And that, that is there, you know, they’re made in USA, but it’s, you know, it was a list price, $1,100 guitar, which for Gibson was pretty cheap at the time. Um, yeah. And they, and they were really good. And I think people got hip that they were pretty good. And because I think they’re at least 2000, 3000 bucks now, which a custom shop junior in a day was a couple of grand, you know, I don’t know what they are now.

Craig (02:18:01.748)
As a new guitar, hell yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:18:17.985)
But they’re not that cheap. So I think you might have just have gotten a dog, because the Billy Joes were good. I don’t think they sound as good as my old ones. And I mean, obviously I would be inclined to want that to be the case because they cost 10 times what a Billy Joe costs. And you’re hoping, if you can’t tell the difference, like, oh, maybe the emperor’s new clothes.

Craig (02:18:22.242)
Yeah, that’s what it sounds like.

Craig (02:18:37.867)
Hell yeah.

Craig (02:18:42.877)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:18:45.385)
But those are good guitars. I mean, you might have just gotten a dog.

Craig (02:18:50.074)
Could it just been a dud that happens? I mean, for the guy to him to take it, for the owner to proactively say, hey, listen, I’m just gonna give you your money. I didn’t even, you know, I was getting close to being there, but he’s like, let me just give you a refund because I can’t have you like, I’ve had the guitar longer than you. So, and I was like, okay, cool. He’s doing the right thing. Awesome. Yeah. That was a Gibson Les Paul.

Michael Dimkic (02:19:07.781)
Oh wow, well good, well that was good of him. And that was, was that a Gibson or was that a different?

Craig (02:19:11.862)
special it would have with the two pickups, you know, the two black pickups P 90. I and that the good thing about that is that turned me on to P 90s. I’d never played them before. And I was like, Oh my god, I’m in love. I wish this thing would stay in tune. And then I got that. It was a single cut. It was a single cut.

Michael Dimkic (02:19:25.745)
Was it a double cut or a single?

Michael Dimkic (02:19:30.117)
I, they loaned me one that I kind of had around the house for a while that I was hoping they would just forget about, but they didn’t. And it, it was good. But you know, you get kind of spoiled that where it’s like, if it looks new, like I don’t want an aged one, but if it looks new, then I’m like, oh, it’s new, you know, like, you know.

Craig (02:19:34.138)
Ha ha.

Craig (02:19:45.006)
Who doesn’t like, who doesn’t feel good? It’s like the Christmas morning, man. You get a guitar and the, you know, it’s like awesome. Who doesn’t, you know, it’s, yeah, it’s awesome. You know, how many experiences you get when you’re like, you know, I just turned 60. So it’s like, yeah, I’m up for that.

Michael Dimkic (02:19:53.873)
No, it’s always fun to have, yeah, like a…

Michael Dimkic (02:20:02.937)
Oh, I mean, when I found that TV model in Cleveland, I was, I mean, we strung that fucking thing up and cleaned it. And there was no way I wasn’t playing the whole show with it. Like, you know, like intonate it the best you can and let’s go. And I was, I was actually really itching to go down to where all the stuff stored and maybe bring it to my place. Because, you know, I only I only played it for the last week or two of the tour and then it went away. And I was like, oh, man, I, you know, I’ll tell you what.

Craig (02:20:08.654)
That’s awesome.

Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:20:28.621)
I think if I had it here, it would have been on that stand. And I probably, that would have been the guitar I bumped. If that had broken, I would have been crushed because it’s a little beaten up, but it’s not how to headstock repair. And I would, if possible, I don’t want to break the headstock off that guitar. That would turn a really, that would knock a few bucks off what your guitar is worth. Not that I ever want to sell it, but I don’t want to break.

Craig (02:20:30.542)
That would have been the one I broke, oh my God.

Craig (02:20:35.599)
Yeah.

Craig (02:20:43.18)
Yeah.

Craig (02:20:51.158)
Oh my God. No, but yeah, you don’t want to damage your asset either.

Michael Dimkic (02:20:58.301)
No, I bet that would have made that week been like, oh God, please. Yeah, just a guitar.

Craig (02:20:59.958)
Yeah, it was a tough week for you as it was it sounded like man.

Craig (02:21:05.514)
Mike top three desert island discs no particular order and just for right now because obviously this changes all

Michael Dimkic (02:21:12.721)
All right, I’m going to go, of course, nevermind the bollocks, here’s the sex pistols. I wish I could put Johnny Sanders Heartbreakers, LAMF on there, but I’m not going to because I need diversity. I want Otis Redding’s Greatest Hits and ABBA Gold.

Craig (02:21:27.27)
Craydon.

Interesting I’ve had several players mention that

Michael Dimkic (02:21:36.245)
Because what if someone else ends up on the island, you can at least have like a dance party with Abba.

Craig (02:21:40.596)
That’s funny. You know, I have to tell you, you know, I know the Sex Pistols only played 12 shows. Ironically, they played in my wife grew up in this little tiny town in England called, yeah, called Dunstable. One of their shows was in either the Dunstable Cali or the Dunstable Civic Center. I couldn’t believe it. It was so funny. I don’t think she was into them.

Michael Dimkic (02:21:54.274)
I’ve heard this.

Michael Dimkic (02:22:04.925)
Wasn’t it like the Sex Pistols on tour secretly? Like it was when they did, like I think a secret, they were doing a tour when they had Sid, but they would have been banned everywhere. So they’d play under a, they’d play under, I think if that’s the one they played like really, really under really funny names, but they would kind of like let people know that it was, you know, I think one was called Acne Rabble, which I thought is really funny.

Craig (02:22:11.434)
Was that what it was? Is this, I don’t know the backstory to it.

Craig (02:22:23.918)
Hey, we’re coming to town, it’s us.

Craig (02:22:29.135)
That’s funny.

Michael Dimkic (02:22:33.261)
And then one was called like a band of international renown. And yeah, it was the Pistols. Yeah. Playing like, you know, whales or somewhere.

Craig (02:22:37.102)
That’s funny. But it’s just tiny little, and you know, I’ve talked to like three or four, or like, uh, Ian pace from deep preplac. So yeah, we, uh, Richie and we opened up our career there. Uh, Andy Powell from wishbone ash. Uh, they played there at this time, actually hit Andy Powell’s wife is from that little town too, which is really bizarre, but it’s just crazy how this little town had all these, or back in the day, all these great acts come in there. Not, it’s just very random.

Michael Dimkic (02:23:09.048)
I mean, I think in England, I mean, I’ve only played like the obvious stuff. You know what I mean? Like, I’ve never been in a pub band where you would play Dunstable or, I’m trying to think of some.

Craig (02:23:14.922)
Did you never got a Dunstable almost like you don’t get there willingly it’s not like hey guys We got a gig in Dunstable. No, it’s like oh, we’re gonna get in Dunstable

Michael Dimkic (02:23:19.95)
Like, oddly.

Michael Dimkic (02:23:27.197)
I mean, I’ve been to the Moors, I’ve been to Ilkley and Otley, and I’m sure bands, and bands play there. But yeah, I just, you know, I’ll play like, if we go to Bristol, that’s always kind of, I really like Bristol actually, but like, it’s always gonna be like Leeds. I’ve never played Liverpool. I have never fucking been to Liverpool. It makes no, it just makes no sense to me. I mean, I’ve been to Leeds and Birmingham and all the other things, but.

Craig (02:23:27.956)
The Moors. Yes.

Craig (02:23:44.674)
Oh, interesting.

Craig (02:23:55.314)
I was talking about my wife at the sex pistols, because every time I, I mean, it’s just like, I, you haven’t been to her town, and it’s like stepping, let me just say this, growing up in New York City, when I went to a town like that, it was like stepping back in time, right? Because, you know, I remember when we were dating, and when I first went over there in the 90s, she goes, oh my God, the new Tesco is open. And I’m like, okay.

Michael Dimkic (02:23:56.169)
How do we get on the topic of England? They’re not metric either. They’re a mix.

Michael Dimkic (02:24:15.476)
Yeah, for sure.

Craig (02:24:24.706)
Yeah, right. But they got one. It was like, like this big like the fucking Statue of Liberty’s open or something. You know, it’s just like really funny. It’s kind of cute. You know, just perspective is different, you know.

Michael Dimkic (02:24:25.001)
They had, I mean, they have a Tesco at least, I mean.

Michael Dimkic (02:24:39.893)
Well, I mean, I love that. I’m a huge like spanophile. I don’t think that’s the right word. I don’t know what it’d be, but where, you know, you’re in Spain and it’s like, hey, guess what? It’s the weekend, shops are closed because people are with their families. Like you don’t get to buy everything you want seven days a week. Like you need to plan ahead. And I love that. Like just the family aspect, and Mexico too. Dude.

Craig (02:24:50.712)
Yes.

Craig (02:24:56.686)
Man, how much calmer is that culture that it’s not all focused on commerce 24 sub.

Craig (02:25:07.61)
Family Time.

Michael Dimkic (02:25:08.753)
No, it’s siesta time. It’s, you know, yeah. And that was, it’s sort of like, it’s Sunday. You should be hanging out with your family. I mean, I get, obviously, not everyone has family to hang out with or have things to do, but you know, you are on the road and it’s kind of, it’s, I always find it the fun challenge where you’re kind of like, hey, while we’re here and they’ve got the supplies you want, get it now, because you might be in Saarbrücken, Germany on a Sunday and it’s not impossible that.

Craig (02:25:11.95)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:25:37.861)
You know, the Aldis and stuff, they’re always open. But you know, you do, you plan ahead. It’s not like America where it’s 24 hours, 24 seven truck stop. And I, you know, and I can buy, you know, I can, I can buy like hunting supplies and clothing and, you know, and food. It’s just like, you know,

Craig (02:25:43.075)
Yes.

Craig (02:25:54.082)
And you order them in the morning and they’re in your house at 4pm.

That shit is like bizarre. Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:26:01.545)
That, I’m not an Amazon guy. I know I probably, like, how the fuck does that, like, I’m gonna be that guy. When I would order models or army men, it was fucking six to 12 weeks. And it would take 12 weeks sometimes. You would look in the mailbox every day and you finally would have just been like, it’s not coming. You know, did they cancel the check? You’d have to go, mom, could you go look and see if the money order went through? And now it’s just like, yeah.

Craig (02:26:12.943)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Craig (02:26:19.258)
Yeah.

Craig (02:26:24.01)
It’s too much a little bit. Yeah, I’m with you on that, man. I have a, yeah, I have a granddaughter. She’s 10 and it’s really sad because I see her ex her expectations of how life should move. You know, it’s, to me, it’s like, you’re, you’re breezing through life, man. You got to like, you know, you can’t tell a 10 year old to slow down. It’s like telling a,

Michael Dimkic (02:26:31.131)
I mean, I just…

Craig (02:26:50.346)
A 13 year old, hey man, you know, there’s this thing called an IRA and if you save money in it, blah, you know, they’re just going to be like, what, you know, it’s like, you know, but it is different. Most important lessons that you’ve learned from getting older, Mike.

Michael Dimkic (02:26:59.386)
Right.

Michael Dimkic (02:27:10.45)
Um.

Honestly, probably not future tripping too much. I mean, I spent a lot of time worrying about crap and we might’ve talked about this maybe when we chatted, when we were working this out, where I had a couple of friends who I ran into, whose lives like, I would have always considered them more successful than I. Like they had bigger gigs, the other guy.

had a, ran a whole kind of, hotel, restaurant, spa, whole thing was, a very successful restaurant manager, GM guy, had a condo and a nice car and made good money and had expendable income and could take off to Nice if you wanted. And the other guy was in bands that he had gigs that I was like, those are bigger gigs than I have. And in a space of a week, I had one of them show up at my doorstep, just like homeless and broke. And then

Craig (02:28:06.274)
Oh my god.

Michael Dimkic (02:28:12.901)
And you know, he stayed with me for about a week, but I was like, I can’t, you know, I can’t help you out like you got to go and a few days later my other buddy He sent me a text like hey Do you want to hang out and I knew he was kind of like things were not going well for him And I was like I said to myself I don’t think I can hang out with him because I just had my other friend who’s in just a shit storm And I can’t help this guy and I’m really

Craig (02:28:13.658)
Yeah.

Craig (02:28:24.058)
Something’s up.

Michael Dimkic (02:28:41.685)
close to this one guy and I just done like a four hour bike ride. It was like, it was like August or something or September was fucking 120 out. I was, I was just shattered after this ride. And I sent him a screenshot of the, of the temperature and just said, like, dude, I’m fucked. Like let’s take a rain check. And he’s like, no worries. And that was a Monday or Tuesday and he died on Thursday. Like he just fucking OD’d on fentanyl. Like I guess people are want to do these days. So that to answer your question, like not like boohoo for me, it was, it was like,

Craig (02:29:01.311)
Oh, fuck.

Michael Dimkic (02:29:11.749)
You know what, dude? I’m not gonna worry about really anything at this point. It’s like, if you’re a little stressed about money, well, everybody is. And I got a tour’s coming around the corner. If that fucking driver wants to cut me off in their car and I’m in my car and not on my bike, so I still fucking get pissed about that. But I just took the thing of like, nothing’s gonna fucking ruffle my feathers. So that would be, but sadly it took.

Craig (02:29:32.166)
Good.

Michael Dimkic (02:29:41.001)
two friends, you know, kind of coming to grief for me to realize like, dude, like, you know, yeah, and I, and it sounds very, I’m not going to have one of those fucking plaques on the wall that says gratitude and like, live love, you know, with that, that fucking, that cursive, that fucking cursive writing, like, ah, but I, you know, I saw them like, God damn it. You know, I’m, I’m going to be happy for the roof over my head.

Craig (02:29:42.254)
Perspective.

Craig (02:29:52.466)
Hashtag blessed.

Craig (02:30:04.483)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:30:10.865)
your kid’s health, and then when the little kid health scare happened, you’re like, oh, do I really need the universe to fucking test this one too? Like, I’m grateful enough, could you stop with these tests? But that’s not how things work, obviously. So I would, but I couldn’t tell you.

Craig (02:30:17.743)
Yeah.

Craig (02:30:24.169)
So being more in the present.

Michael Dimkic (02:30:31.877)
Yeah, just like the guitar headstock broke off, so what? You’re having barbecue with your kid and you’re having a laugh about the modern country songs that they play in the barbecue place that are so bad that we just laughed at all the songs are about, I just need a truck, a gun and a good woman and my whiskey. Like they really are like my kids 15 is like, it’s always about drinking a cold one and my good woman in my pickup truck. I’m like, yeah, that seems to be.

Craig (02:30:35.866)
Right.

Michael Dimkic (02:34:50.441)
I don’t know. I mean, probably crashing that Steve Jones audition in terms of a career move would be that. It’s probably kind of trite to say like having a child, but that definitely was not something that was on my docket. I was like, you know, I just was like, why would I ever have a child? Do you know, like that did just seemed that would be complicating my life and all that. And it, you do, it does change your life and make you

a different person and you get a sense of something larger than yourself. I think it took me a long time. For me personally, once my kid got older and they’re becoming like, because when they’re little babies, they’re kind of like a dog or a cat. A dog or a cat is only going to get so smart and then they’re kind of done. But then they get to the age if your dog all of a sudden was like, hey, I want to get barbecue. You’d be like, holy shit, my dog’s talking to me. This is interesting.

Craig (02:35:31.933)
Yeah.

Craig (02:35:41.872)
Hahaha

Craig (02:35:50.262)
Yeah, that’s so funny.

Michael Dimkic (02:35:52.057)
And then they get smarter. And eventually your dog is like, you’re talking to your dog like up here. So that to me was what was so cool about a kid. Like I changed diapers and did all that. That was my job. I was a night nurse. But they were really, they’re cute and fun and do cute things, but it’s when they start turning in, I had a friend say, dude, your son’s gonna become your buddy. And he’s like, it’s so fun. And I kinda just was like, oh, it’s just this cute little thing running around. And then they do get to a point where,

They’ll have, they’ll comment on something that you maybe didn’t, you know, they’ll have an insight to something and you realize, oh wow, this is a fully forming, you know, intelligent being that can actually add stuff. You know, and it’s, because before they’re, and I don’t mean it to be crass, but they’re kind of like a pet prior to that. They’re just a cute.

Craig (02:36:26.276)
Yeah.

Right.

Craig (02:36:34.454)
No, well, it’s just one way care goes one way relationship goes one way conversation goes one way. Yeah, for sure, man. It’s a it’s a lot of work. It’s yeah, your kid doesn’t. Your dog at least appreciate that you feed him your kids like, you know, doesn’t for a while and until they’re much older and out of the house. Once they’re out of the house, you see even a bigger change because that’s when they start saying, you know, you’re pretty smart, dad. And all of a sudden, you’re like, what? Wow, that’s

Michael Dimkic (02:36:48.593)
Yeah, I mean your dog makes you feel good.

Michael Dimkic (02:37:07.385)
Oh, I know everything my dad said to me, I was always he wasn’t like super into the musical career and he kind of give me these these, you know, sort of hoary expressions like you know, you know, once you hit 40 or once you have a kid or your time and I, and I’m like, Oh my god, he’s fucking right. Like, you know, you’re just like, God damn it. Like,

Craig (02:37:16.346)
Hahaha!

It’s a lot of work having a kid, man. It’s a ton of work. That’s to me, it is anyway. All right, tough question. What do you like most about yourself?

Michael Dimkic (02:37:29.883)
You know.

Michael Dimkic (02:37:36.529)
Um, I think I’m, I would like to think I’m empathetic that I, that I can try to, you know, put myself in someone else’s shoes and not, uh,

Michael Dimkic (02:37:51.138)
I don’t know. Or I could come up with something a little more.

Michael Dimkic (02:37:56.309)
what’s the word I’m looking for? Less heavy duty. I think, I’m a good traveler. I don’t know if that’s a good, if that’s not like a super deep down thing. But I do think that I’ve managed to take all the years of travel and really appreciate other cultures. There’s cultures I appreciate more than others. There’s some places where like you go touring and you’re like, oh, this will be whatever, but there are, you know.

Craig (02:38:10.274)
Yeah, that’s cool.

Craig (02:38:21.454)
What’s your favorite place you’ve traveled?

Michael Dimkic (02:38:27.379)
I love that adventure. I think I’m not… I would like to…

Craig (02:38:30.121)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:38:34.069)
I put it like this, anywhere they speak Spanish or Portuguese, I tend to love. I love it. I love Portugal. I love Brazil. I love Argentina, Chile. I love Spain and Mexico. I really, I mean, I really, I had the fantasy of like decamping to Spain or maybe Portugal, cause it seems that’s where everyone’s going, but I don’t speak Portuguese. I want to go.

Craig (02:38:47.19)
I went to Portugal once years ago, Porto, man, it was fucking gorge, just everything about it. The architecture, the food, I’m not even a foodie, but the food there was just off the fresh fish, the bread, it was off the charts. Phenomenal.

Michael Dimkic (02:38:59.077)
Yeah, yeah, I stayed in Porto for a couple weeks.

Michael Dimkic (02:39:21.294)
Okay, yay, there we go. So dude, Porto, I was there probably about 10 years ago with the cult and I spent a night or two and I was like, this is amazing, I gotta come back, right? And then I was there summer before last and we had a second tour that was gonna happen in Europe so I just stayed, right? And I did like three weeks with my son. We traveled all around Spain and everything. So then I went to Croatia, because I had a friend there

Craig (02:39:42.842)
Beautiful, isn’t it?

Michael Dimkic (02:39:50.906)
cool my jets and I had to get out of the Schengen countries. Like if I stayed in the EU proper, I would overstay my visa. And then when we did the second tour, I would be fucking illegal. So I went to Croatia and all my bike racer friends go, oh, go to Croatia, it’s not part of the Schengen agreement. So I stayed there for a couple of weeks. Then our tour got canceled because there was like someone else had a family emergency. And I went to Porto and stayed there for like 10 days. It is so much more crowded and busy

Craig (02:39:58.018)
Oh, that’s great.

Michael Dimkic (02:40:20.75)
thought it was 10 years ago. It was, it was, and it was high season, dude. It was like, but any, anywhere where they speak those languages, particularly Spain, I just see the old dudes wearing their hats. They have those big like basque berets. They’re playing like Patong or bocce ball. Uh, they’re drinking always some kind of clear, probably some kind of pastis type of thing and smoking. And I, I will

Craig (02:40:34.755)
I’m not surprised, man.

Michael Dimkic (02:40:48.918)
If I make it that far, I’m going to go there. My Spanish is good enough. I’m going to learn whatever that sport is. I think it’s Patonk. That’s the French one. I’m going to smoke. I’m going to start smoking and I’m going to drink that pasties and like play dominoes and stuff with the old guys. I’m going to try to get in. They may not let me in. They’ll be like, who’s the Yankee that

Craig (02:40:49.284)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:41:11.254)
Oh, they’re fucking, no, they’re great there. They’re so excited you speak Spanish. They’re like, why would you speak Spanish? I’m like, well, cause I live in what was Mexico. Like, you know, I should speak Spanish and it’s fun. So yeah, I love Spain. I’m trying to plan a trip there after our European tour. Cause we finish in the Basque country, which is a whole, its own whole separate thing. I won’t call them Spain. So.

Craig (02:41:14.95)
Good for you.

quit. Now I mean everybody people are generally pretty welcoming man if you’re not a dick.

Craig (02:41:45.658)
That’s cool.

Couple more questions, man, and thank you so much for your time. Biggest change in your personality over the last 10 years, Mike. And has that change been intentional or has it been a natural part of aging?

Michael Dimkic (02:41:48.91)
Um, probably both. It all probably goes back to the same, the same thing where I, I have mellowed, but definitely it kind of took those couple of my friends where I really was like, okay, there’s no, there’s no need to worry about, you know, my grandma was always like, don’t cross that bridge till you come to it. And I tend to catastrophize things and think about, oh, what’s going to happen if this happens and it, as you get older, it’s just like, man, don’t.

That’s a road to just driving yourself completely nuts. You know, just sorta.

Craig (02:42:20.281)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:42:28.082)
No, and it’s just, you know, if you’re worried about money, like you’re going to work and make some, you know, there’s, it’s not the last dollar bill that’s ever printed. You know, it’s, things tend to work out. You just kind of, and you get older and you just let, you’re just, you, you definitely less concerned with others’ opinions for sure. Not that you just run around being a raving asshole. It’s more just like, you know what? I, I think I’ve got this one right. I’m going to.

Craig (02:42:35.219)
And none of it ever happens the way it’s in your head anyway.

Craig (02:42:48.183)
Yes.

Craig (02:42:59.076)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:43:02.358)
Yeah, and yeah, just the, I mean, cause I’ve listened to a bunch of shows and that’s, you just, you get older and you’re, and you just, you kind of give less of a fuck, you know? Like, yeah, it just, and you really, you realize like, you obviously want to like leave something for your children, but if you amass all this shit to make yourself happy, it fucking, it doesn’t go, you can’t take it with you. I mean, even the pharaohs, you know, I could take all my

Craig (02:43:07.17)
That’s the number one answer that I asked that question. That’s the number one answer. Less concern of what other people think about me.

Craig (02:43:16.89)
Thanks.

Craig (02:43:21.45)
Yeah, 100%. You should.

Michael Dimkic (02:43:31.126)
nice vintage guitars with me, but they’re just gonna be in the sarcophagus, you know, like let the kids sell them and go buy a fucking house or whatever. Like you really realize it’s just, it’s such a like.

Craig (02:43:39.095)
Yes.

Craig (02:43:45.887)
Right.

Michael Dimkic (02:43:46.498)
a rat on a wheel. Like it’s nice to have like a nice life and things, but man, it just really is, you know, I drive around, I have a 2001 Nissan Xterra, it’s fucking still going. The AC is starting to go, I gotta get that worked on, but it’s winter. But when I see people driving around in like a G-Wagon, or you know, I have friends that are car heads, and they love their car, and that’s kind of their vintage guitar, and I have no problem with that. But I don’t know why

Craig (02:43:49.172)
Yep.

Michael Dimkic (02:44:16.322)
you would need a G-Wagon or I mean, if I had, I don’t know what those costs. I mean, if I had $150,000 to spend on a car, I would go buy a Subaru Outback and then go buy a bunch of fucking vintage guitars that we’ll appreciate or just not spend the money. Like I don’t, I’m not, all that’s.

Craig (02:44:39.5)
Yeah.

Craig (02:44:42.778)
Sure.

Michael Dimkic (02:44:45.774)
It’s yeah, it’s I mean I live in LA we get we get a bad rap But I mean we have great nature and we have an ocean you can ski we got everything was in an hour But I do have to look at just I drive my kid to school and the cars the kids are parking in the lot I’m like Wow, like I just don’t know why a parent would give a kid a Tesla you know, I’m

Craig (02:44:46.914)
I know I, it’s, it’s a lot of, I know I’m the same way. If I have that much money in a car, I’m going to buy a rental property and a car, you know.

Craig (02:45:17.602)
I gotta tell you this story, God’s honest truth. My wife knew this family when my daughter, Sam, was in middle school. They bought their kid a brand new BMW when he was 15. And they didn’t want, 16’s driving license here. They didn’t want him to have to wait when he turned 16. God forbid the little spoiled brat would have to wait until he, you know, oh now I’m 16, I gotta wait for the car. So they had it waiting for his 15.

Michael Dimkic (02:45:40.967)
Ugh.

Michael Dimkic (02:45:44.118)
Oh man, I mean…

Craig (02:45:47.75)
Two months after he’s 16, he crashed this shit. What do they do? Buy him another one. I’m like, what the fuck are you teaching your kid? What coping skills are you giving him? I don’t get that. My kids all, I didn’t buy him any of them a car. I told them when they were young kids, I said, hey, we’ll match you dollar for dollar, start saving now.

Michael Dimkic (02:45:49.39)
That’s it.

Michael Dimkic (02:45:54.174)
It’s yeah, I don’t it’s a weird. It’s a bad.

Michael Dimkic (02:46:06.446)
Sure, sure.

Craig (02:46:16.234)
And then when they were like 16, 17, whatever they wanted to buy a car, they had whatever money was in there because we had matched it. And then I gave him a, we, and I gave him a thousand bucks each towards their car. And that better cover your taxes tag. You got to get an inspection, you know, and by the way, you’re not getting this until you get a job, because I’m not paying your insurance, you know?

Michael Dimkic (02:46:27.899)
Yeah, and gas is so, yeah, it’s a, I mean, we.

Craig (02:46:39.926)
and they all bitch but later on in life like that I’m glad you did that I understood why I’m like yeah because you both totaled all your cars anyway like I’m not participating in that you know I want to teach you how to function

Michael Dimkic (02:46:43.154)
I mean, I came from a long history of all my buddies. We would get, we got like a beater, like the parents might be like, hey, the neighbor’s selling the Plymouth Duster or the Pinto and you’re totally kind of humiliated because it’s a super lame car, but it’s also a car and you can drive to Hollywood. But I went to a school where it was very upper middle class and there weren’t a lot of BMWs, but there were kids with like.

Craig (02:47:02.7)
Yeah!

Michael Dimkic (02:47:08.866)
you know, Mustangs and Volvos, like kids had nicer cars. And me and my buddy, we were with the band guys. I had the Vega, which a couple of the like, the Hesher guys thought was cool because it had the V8 in it. But he had it, he had it, but it was, it was like brown. It was ugly. It was ugly as shit. And everyone thought it was a Pinto. So, and I rear-ended somebody on the freeway in bumper traffic and fucked up the car. And my mom was like,

Craig (02:47:28.834)
Yeah, that Chevy Vegas, a cool car actually really.

Craig (02:47:38.153)
Pinto.

Michael Dimkic (02:47:38.454)
Well, that was your car. You know, you don’t have a car now.

Michael Dimkic (02:47:45.192)
No, I…

Michael Dimkic (02:47:48.838)
I took, I met my dad, still worked for General Foods and he would get company cars. So, but for at least a semester or two, I took the bus down to Cal State Northridge, which is about probably about 10 miles from me. I never got such good grades because I’m sitting on the bus reading everything because I don’t want to make eye contact with anyone because everyone on the bus was insane. Like it really, not to be unkind, but there were definitely, I can look back, there was definitely some severe OCD people on there.

Craig (02:47:49.618)
Right. Yeah. She didn’t go out and replace it. I mean, nobody ever heard of these things. That’s insane, isn’t it?

Craig (02:48:18.145)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:48:18.49)
There were people who definitely needed to be medicated. And then no one was dangerous, but there were people you just didn’t, you didn’t wanna have to like talk with these people. Yes, you just looked forward and I’d be reading my history book and I got straight A’s. And then I think at some point, my dad had this Buick Century company car that he gave me. And it was the, this was when the Japanese were destroying America with cars, it was like 84, 85. This fucking thing.

Craig (02:48:34.154)
Yeah, it’s like going on a subway in the 70s in Manhattan. Right.

Michael Dimkic (02:48:46.658)
with such a piece of shit. The only good thing was, is it looked like a cop car. So when we drove around with open containers, doing stupid shit, as was our wants when we were 18, no one ever, you never got pulled over, because it was the total like, you know, dad car. But at 70,000 miles, it went from running fine, to you would pour transmission fluid in it, and it just poured out onto the ground. So the transmission died overnight. It went through two head gaskets. I mean, two.

It was a fucking lemon. You wanna talk lemons? It was a piece of shit Buick. And we still laugh about it in bad religion. It was called the stealth because it was so, we would take it downtown and it never got fucked with. And it was a piece of shit. It was horrible. So I was given one car, but I spent so much money fixing that fucking thing. I mean, two head gaskets of transmission is like 4,000 bucks.

Craig (02:49:21.542)
Two.

Michael Dimkic (02:49:42.358)
Yeah, that was a lot of money, four grand, like 1200 bucks for that. That, yeah, that was okay. So that was whatever my answer was there.

Craig (02:49:44.23)
That’s so funny.

It’s the price of a used car back then, yeah.

Craig (02:49:56.218)
Wow. Yeah, yeah. That was the biggest change in personally. And last question, what’s making you the happiest right now or giving you the most joy?

Michael Dimkic (02:49:59.394)
on.

I mean, obviously, you know, one’s child does. But I would say, but he’s always, you know, the kid is always cool. I’ve kind of found, kind of fallen in love with playing again, with like doing it. I mean, I’ve always, I’ve never regretted joining Bad Religion for a nanosecond ever. And it’s, you know.

When I left the cult, Billy was like, wow, you went from one big band to another big band. That’s pretty impressive. And I was like, wow, you’re right. It’s not like being a baseball player where you can kind of go from the Astros, the fucking Angels or whatever, and you do a whole, if you’ve been a one band that you can make a career of is shocking. So I had this moment of as dumb as it’s, here we go with the gratitude. We were playing just this last tour in South America, we were playing

Craig (02:50:46.796)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:51:01.39)
fuck. Is it Nova Rock? I’m spacing now it’s not Nova Rock. Shit, I should remember. But it’s a big, we did the big, it’s a big Spanish and Portuguese language festival. It’s like their Coachella, basically. And we did one in…

fuck, Buenos Aires. And we didn’t know we didn’t we did one in a I’m sorry, I’m spacing out we did one. I’m confused my countries now. We did the one in Barcelona. And they liked it so much. They’re like, Can you do our others in South America? And they’re super diverse, like, I think, it’s like two different stages, and we played and then the closer the night was to cure. So it’s it ranges that far from, you know,

Yeah, the first night was the killers and somebody else like, you know, I mean, it’s very diverse. It’s like you could have Madonna or somebody. It’s not a rock festival. It’s not kind of going to Germany and playing rock and ring. And we were doing this one in Sao Paulo and the band was just on fire. Like the band was just so good, if I could be immodest. And we’re on this, you know, huge stage at their like,

Craig (02:51:56.986)
They’re touring a lot, I noticed, to cure. They’re everywhere now.

Michael Dimkic (02:52:22.106)
I think it’s like an F1 track down there. It’s just huge. And it had to be 75 or 80,000 people. And everyone stayed, came over for us after who Rolto was playing. So it wasn’t one of those like captive audiences because the Cure was gonna play next and everyone could have just split and gone to the Cure stage. And they didn’t and were playing. And it’s one of those crazy moments where I’m playing a solo and you can hear it coming from the PA towers that are, you know, you know.

200 meters away metric, and you get this crazy echo that there’s no better guitar sound in the world than playing in some monster place and you hear it coming back through the PA at you. Cause it’s like the ultimate echo plex. But it’s not so weird that it fucks up your timing. It just sounds like you’re fucking, I’ll name him cause he gets named on your show. You feel like you’re fucking Leslie West. You’re just playing and you’re just.

holding this note and I was able to, while this was happening, go, holy shit dude, you’re 55. And if that 13 year old kid would be able to see what you’re doing now and for a moment thought you were ever going to bitch about it or think it was a pain in the ass sometimes, he wouldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t believe that you have done this for your entire adult life. And

Craig (02:53:24.591)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:53:47.942)
Even in that moment, I was, I think I laughed to myself. I was like, I can’t fucking believe this. Like eighth grade me playing the talent show is now here. Like how did that happen? And I was utterly like, this is too fucking ridiculous. This is crazy. Like how am I here? I know why I’m here, but I was like, you’re fucking here playing. You never, you would have just been happy to go play in clubs and like, you know, you’re playing, you know, it’s not like I’m in

You too. I mean, it was a festival, but we were…

Michael Dimkic (02:54:23.766)
Yeah. No, and it was, you know, yeah. And it really was that moment of like, holy shit, the cure’s on next and then the thing’s over. Like it’s done. And I was like, how, you know, I couldn’t not be just giddy about it. Like I really was. Like I just was like, this was so amazing. Like I never thought I would be there. And so your question was,

Craig (02:54:26.266)
but you’re on the stage with 70,000 people, man. How many people are doing that in their lifetime? And you’re happy.

Michael Dimkic (02:54:53.026)
What makes me, I mean, I mean, yeah, I would say that because then I get home and I’m not like, being on tour is tiring, of course. I mean, we’ve all seen the Bon Jovi videos. It’s hard being on the road, you know, riding a steel horse and rocking a million faces. I think those were the lyrics. But you get home and you’re like, I’ve just had.

Craig (02:54:58.522)
What’s bringing you the most joy right now? You said playing, falling in love with playing.

Michael Dimkic (02:55:19.638)
You know, a fucking 20 hour flight going through Houston, which is the fucking worst airport in the world. I’m sorry. But you get home and you’re like, I just had the greatest time playing music. So you get home and a day or two later, you’re waking up driving your kid to school and you’re and you’re not like, oh, man, I got put through the ring or it was a six week difficult tour. You’re like, I was fucking having a blast every night and playing music and now I’m home and all I have to do is drive my kid to school and go ride bikes in the sunshine.

That’s what I’m doing today. And I’m just like, so it makes all aspects of your life better. You know, someone cuts you off in traffic, you’re like, I just got back from a tour and I’m doing what I dreamt of doing when I was 13. And you’re just driving like an asshole because you hate your fucking life. And that’s not my problem. And I’m just gonna let you cut me off, that’s okay. And you realize…

you realize that these people driving around like lunatics with their kids in the car, they can’t be happy. If they’re that angry at fucking 8.05 a.m., I don’t want to see how the rest of their day goes. So I really take that. And I pointed out to the kid too, I’m like, do you see that douchey maneuver there? Don’t drive that way. That’s not cool. You know, like I’m trying to train him how to not be a bad driver and crash whatever shitty car he gets from us.

Craig (02:56:13.039)
Yeah, man.

Craig (02:56:28.742)
It’s a problem. Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:56:41.174)
But yeah, I’m enjoying getting to do what it was I dreamt of. And you forget, you know, you do it for so many years that you’re just used to it. You’re like, oh, I’m playing guitar. Like, you know, and you get people, wow, that must be really neat. And you kind of can become a bit complacent. And like, yeah, what’s what I do? I’m not, you know, and then you realize like, you know, you don’t need to feel like, oh, I just got so lucky. You know, like you, you know, you made the luck. You, you.

You know, you didn’t have a bunch of, you know, I was a fucking geek in high school, other than that we kind of looked cool because we dressed like Johnny Thunder’s heartbreakers, but I was such a nerd, I didn’t have time for girls and scared of them because I wanted to play music. So it’s like, I did, you know, you make sacrifices, obviously. I think anyone on your show probably spent a lot of time in their bedroom not going out with their buddies and- And-

Craig (02:57:40.486)
No, every one of them, not every one of them, literally.

Michael Dimkic (02:57:40.674)
And your parents even are sort of like, don’t you think you should go out? That girl sounds like she wanted you to come hang out. And you’re like, no can do, mom. You know, like, I gotta figure out. Yeah, and that, so it makes you get up there and you’re just like, oh, I’m so happy that I’m fucking doing this. You know, like it really is, you know, that it’s not just a job. I mean, it’s great, I mean, you know, I wouldn’t be doing it for free at this age. I don’t, you know what I mean? I don’t think I’d want to be a…

Craig (02:57:53.574)
Gotta practice.

Michael Dimkic (02:58:09.818)
because I because I

Craig (02:58:13.03)
Sure. No, but you don’t have to. It’s a gig.

Michael Dimkic (02:58:13.046)
Yeah, I think I would have become jaded. Like I was very close to being jaded. If the cult hadn’t gotten back together again and bad religion had come calling, I think I might’ve gotten into a like, you know, feeling undervalued or underappreciated. Because I know guys in my position who can really get resentful. Like this is fucked. I’m, you know, I’m, you know, I’m not paid enough or I’m not shown, I’m not enough of a…

I’m more than a hired guy or whatever. You know what I mean? And that’s, I think that can really be a dangerous road. You know what I mean? Like being happy where you are is hugely important, I would say, you know? And if you’re happy where you are, it does, you seem to end up in better places. You know what I mean? Like you do, I wouldn’t have, 12 years ago, I wouldn’t have thought I’d be in bad religion.

Craig (02:59:08.558)
Yeah.

Michael Dimkic (02:59:09.978)
applying my trade and playing guitar better than I’ve played in my entire life. I wouldn’t have ever, you know, as I said, I thought I was like, okay, I’ve reached, I’ve reached the level of my incompetence or competence, you know, and that’s cool. I’ll do that. And then all of a sudden to have a whole new like, you know, a whole new responsibility heaped on you where it’s like, no, these guys are like counting on you to fucking do your job the best you can. Cause if you don’t, they’re going to notice

And it was like, wow, I actually like the responsibility. It’s not just sort of like, you’re just kind of filling in the sonic whatever. This is like, no, if your guitar goes off, all of a sudden, that’s a problem. It’s like, all of a sudden I kind of got to go be Mick Taylor in the Stones. It was just like, holy shit. Like this is, I mean, I’m not trying to compare myself to Mick Taylor, so I don’t want anyone to get mad.

Craig (02:59:47.654)
Yeah.

Craig (03:00:12.994)
No, I totally get it, man. No, I mean, I’m happy. Listen, man, this is like a really nice way to sort of end this because it’s a great answer that you have. And, you know, I’m so happy that you are feeling so good about your life right now and what you’re doing, because that is like everything, you know, when you wake up every day and you’re happy about it, I think life’s a lot better than when you wake up every day and you’re fucking miserable, you know,

Michael Dimkic (03:00:32.774)
It is and you don’t and it’s easy for me to forget because we’ll have these long kind of, you know, we haven’t played since December and that’s a couple months off, you know, and I’m doing the dad thing and driving around and riding bikes and going on hikes, but I’m playing guitar, but I’m not, it’s like I kind of, I can forget what the fuck it is I do. Like I know what I’m doing. There’s, you know, here’s, there’s guitars there and my Johnny Thunder’s poster and original, original God Save the Queen.

That’s worth a fortune, I’m sure now. It was three pounds that the fucking Camden swapped me in like 1982. But then we get, I got a Holley’s and the Sun one too. I think they were five pounds for the pair. And they’re real, wow. But I kind of forget what I do. And then I’m driving to rehearsal and the fucking traffic in LA, dude. It takes me an hour to go eight miles. I’ve ridden my bike and I mean, I’ve commute on my.

Craig (03:01:05.582)
Very cool. Yeah.

Craig (03:01:09.87)
That’s so funny. Camden swap meet I saw I went there. That was so funny. Yeah. I remember that whole place.

Craig (03:01:29.09)
Yeah, that’s pretty nuts.

Michael Dimkic (03:01:30.042)
commuted on my bicycle to rehearsals before, because I know it’ll take an hour. Barring, you know, a disaster. But then once I get to rehearsals and we’re playing for four nights in a row, I got home and I was like, oh, I remember that feeling of accomplishment, of like, it was rusty at first, you’re good again, the band sounds tight, you’re learning songs and preparing for the new tour. This is what you do, you know? Because, you know, playing around learning songs in your house is part of what you do.

and playing guitar and I play along to commercials and do whatever, but it really is that playing loud with other musicians and being like, oh my God, everyone’s doing their thing and it’s great. That makes me, then I would wake up taking a look at the school and I’m like, this is great. I’m gonna do this and go on a jog and then go play music on my guitars that I think are really pretty. And it snaps me out of that. And I do have to kind of

not get into the doldrums in between stuff, you know, where I’m, you know, you’re, you haven’t played in a while and you don’t forget, but you just kind of get back into the like, going to the Trader Joe’s sitting in traffic, you know, doing, you know, I do, I do miss that. There’s a focus for the evening, like, okay, at nine o’clock, you’ve got to have all your

Michael Dimkic (03:03:00.846)
good money to come see you and you want you to have them leave happy that they got to hear a nice selection of songs and you acquitted yourselves well. And yeah, I do need that sense of self. Obviously, you’re a father and you do all that, but there is that other thing where it’s like…

Craig (03:03:21.634)
Yeah, you got to be your you. Yeah, your identity is not in someone else. It’s in you for sure. I think so

Michael Dimkic (03:03:25.21)
No, you can’t throw everything on your child because then you don’t want to be the crazy parent who’s like, don’t you have something else to do? Leave your kid alone.

Craig (03:03:30.799)
No.

Craig (03:03:34.114)
No. Yeah, totally. Mike, thank you very much for everything. I really appreciate it. Let me tell you, let me tell people where to find you. So Bad Religion and Social Distortion are touring, co-headline tour this coming the next over the next few months. Check the bands out. You can follow Mike on Instagram at Mike the Serb as in Serbian, which is last name is Dimkic. Anything else that I should tell people about that you got going on?

Michael Dimkic (03:04:00.366)
Uh, not really. I really don’t. I’ll be, I’ll make a shameless thing. Like when I have time, when I’ve, when I’m home off the road, I’m always happy to play guitar. So if there’s anyone, I don’t know, some, some bands that, yeah.

Craig (03:04:06.468)
Yeah.

Craig (03:04:12.854)
Yeah, if someone’s looking for a session, if you’re looking to hire Mike for sessions, DM him on his Instagram, tell them what you’re looking for, send them some of your music so he could at least make a, you know, some sort of a cognizant awareness of yeah, this is a fit for me or no, it’s not, or you know, what you’re specifically looking for him to bring to the table so he could respond back to you intelligently. But is that the best way to get you on DM you on Instagram? Okay.

Michael Dimkic (03:04:34.166)
Yeah, totally. I mean, I always laugh because whenever I’d be touring with a band like The Cult or Bad Religion, I mean, I’d always in time off, I always thought like, oh, it’d be fun to go play bass in that band or something. Like, just go get in a van and go tour, just don’t make me drive. But I think I’ve talked to people over the years where I was like, oh, dude, I would have done that tour with you. You’re like, we couldn’t have afforded you or what? You’re like, believe me, I have a sliding skin, whatever. You know, like playing music. Yeah, that’s always my…

Craig (03:05:00.718)
Yeah, reach out to them. Yeah, reach out to them. If it’s a good vibe. You know, let me tell you, you know, how many people I’ve heard had on the show that have come back to me said, Oh, man, I got hired for some gigs. And people have called me for sessions. Yeah, so it happens. It happens, you know, hopefully a lot more than I’m aware of. But yeah, reach out to Mike on Instagram. Again, it’s Mike the Serb. And you can find them there, dude, I really appreciate your time and your conversation, man. It was really nice talking to you. And I hope

Michael Dimkic (03:05:09.376)
Oh, how neat.

Craig (03:05:26.294)
We’ll wrap up in a minute afterwards, but I hope to get to see when you come down here That’d be nice, you know grab a cup of coffee or drink or whatever you want to do be cool if you got the time Tampa so I think you guys are playing either Ruth Eckerd or Clear I think it’s a Ruth Eckerd you’re playing Ruth Eckerd Hall, which is a great a great theater to play in It’s sonically. It’s good. It’s aesthetically. It’s beautiful. So it’s gonna be a good show

Michael Dimkic (03:05:29.11)
Yeah, I forget where you are in Florida.

Michael Dimkic (03:05:45.838)
Oh nice, because it’s always Janus Landing. We’re always St. Pete Janus Landing. So now that it’s…

Craig (03:05:50.71)
Oh my god Janice I stopped going there. They oversell and you’re there and all these fucking guys drinking and spilling beer all over you and I’m like I’m too old for that shit man you know. But and it’s a great venue.

Michael Dimkic (03:05:54.975)
It looks pretty.

Michael Dimkic (03:06:03.241)
Is the place we’re playing, is it a little bit out of town-like?

Craig (03:06:07.794)
No, it’s a theater. It’s in it’s in St. Pete. It’s in right over the actually in Clearwater, just right over where Clearwater starts. Yeah, it’s great. It’s a it’s an amazing theater. I mean, it’s, you know, probably, I don’t know, maybe a little over 2000 seats. And yeah, it’s a I mean, acoustically, it’s a great I would imagine it’s a great place to play. It’s a great place to see shows. So I’ve been there many times. I like St. Pete better, but Clearwater and listen, man, you’re down here in the Gulf. It’s not like you’re going to go any place that’s like

Michael Dimkic (03:06:11.767)
Okay.

Michael Dimkic (03:06:19.787)
Oh, fun.

Michael Dimkic (03:06:26.466)
I’ve never been clear waters nice, I’m told.

Craig (03:06:35.586)
Oh, this is miserable. I mean, of course it’s good in bad areas, but I mean, overall it’s the West coast of Florida is pretty nice. Hope down the coast.

Michael Dimkic (03:06:41.462)
I thought, I like the vibe in St. Pete, I always thought it was pretty fun. Like they had good places to kind of hang out and it’s kind of got like, it seems pretty, I mean, it seems pretty like, I don’t know, is it a university town? It seems kind of progressive and sort of like.

Craig (03:06:46.398)
It’s so much fun.

Michael Dimkic (03:07:14.807)
Yeah, yeah, it’s got a good…

Craig (03:07:17.1)
Um, it’s

Michael Dimkic (03:07:22.872)
Okay.

No, I do like it.

Craig (03:07:27.978)
Mike, hang on one second. I’m going to wrap this up and then we’ll get to wrap this up. Thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it. Best of luck with everything you’ve got going on and thank you so much for being yourself, man. I really appreciate your conversation. My pleasure.

Michael Dimkic (03:07:33.998)
Thanks for it.

Thanks for having me. I feel like I’m in an illustrious company with all the guests you’ve had.

Craig (03:07:42.51)
I’m in illustrious company, man. So thank you. I appreciate it. Everybody, thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this, share it on your social media platforms with your friends. We appreciate your support. Thanks very much to Mike Dimkic for his time and please support the band and come check out Social Distortion and Bad Religion on their co-headlining tour. And most important, remember that happiness is a choice, so choose wisely. Be nice, go play your guitar and have fun. Until next time, peace and love, everybody. I am out.

Michael Dimkic (03:07:43.803)
Oh, oh, you flatter me.

Craig (03:08:11.682)
Mike, thank you so much, brother.

Michael Dimkic (03:08:13.082)
course.