Fat Mike, the frontman and bassist for the legendary punk rock outfit NOFX, will be premiering his latest endeavor, a Broadway-style musical, tomorrow night in San Francisco. The punk icon, whose real name is Mike Burkett, recently sat down with Mother Jones’ Gabrielle Canon to dish on the intricacies of the new musical and the complexities of the writing process.
The musical, Home Street Home, hinges around the tale of a runaway teen who, per the show’s website, becomes assimilated into a “saucy tribe of slutty, castaway street punks that welcome her into their wild yet surprisingly functional street family.” According to Fat Mike, much of the show’s material came from his own experiences during his youth.
“When you wanna write something authentic, you write about what you know,” says Mike. “Drug use, living on the street, self abuse, shoplifting, stumbling, prostitution, bondage, flogging, running from cops, playing guitar, and passing out is what we know.”
Home Street Home was written over the past five years in collaboration with Soma Snakeoil (aka “Goddess Soma”)—a professional dominatrix, AVN award winner, fetish film star, and Fat Mike’s fiancée—and Jeff Marx, co-writer of Avenue Q. The musical’s soundtrack, which was released last week on Mike’s now-seminal punk label, Fat Wreck Chords, features a who’s who of punk rock’s most elite artists, including Matt Skiba (Alkaline Trio), Frank Turner, the late Tony Sly, and members of Lagwagon, the Descendents, and Me First and the Gimme Gimmes.
Fat Mike’s punk musical is certainly not the first of its kind, but it promises to be markedly different from Green Day’s American Idiot in that Home Street Home is more narrative-driven than it is a collection of songs with only some semblance of a plot cobbled together around it.
Fans of NOFX may remember the last time Fat Mike made headlines, the circumstances of which were somewhat less auspicious. The rocker, now just two years shy of 50, went onstage at South by Southwest in 2010 as “Cokie the Clown” and apparently proceeded to trick an entire audience into drinking his urine in the form of doctored tequila shots.
Home Street Home will initially run for 11 performances at Z Space in San Francisco’s Mission District. Tickets are available here.