The Woodrows Interview 2023

As you may have heard, 2023 marks the 30th anniversary of the Reglar Wiglar. With that in mind, I thought it only fitting that I reach out to the first band ever featured within these pages. Yes, the Wiglar gave the Woodrows a lot of ink throughout the ‘90s and early ‘00s, but I hadn’t checked in with them since 2003. So read on to find out what the band has been up to for the past 20 years.

NOTE: This interview originally appeared in Reglar Wiglar #29. Oh, and check out an annotated Woodrows’ discography over on Chris Auman’s webpage (whoever that is).

RW: Wow. It has been a long time since we talked… 20 years, I think.

Toby: I’m sorry, who are you?

RW: Joey Germ.

Toby: From?

RW: Reglar Wiglar. I’ve interviewed you guys, like, five or six times. You were featured in the very first issue back in 1993. You don’t remember? 

Toby: Don’t remember, don’t care… it’s a tossup.

Ricky: What Toby means is, of course, we remember, and we’re honored that you’ve decided to include us on your podcast.

RW: Magazine.

Ricky: This is for print? Oh, OK. Our press intern did not inform us of that. Well, we’re already here so I guess that’s fine.

RW: I appreciate it. A lot has happened since we last spoke in 2003. Let’s talk about some of the highlights of the last 20 years starting with the At Home with The Woodrows reality TV show in 2004.

Marvy: Yeah, well, The Osbournes was a big hit for MTV at the time, so they were looking to do more stuff like that and some genius thought the Woodrows would be entertaining in a drooling, brain-dead sort of way. No disrespect to the OzMan.

Erin: The thing we learned about reality TV is that it’s actually not real.

RW: Right, like for example, you guys didn’t all live together in the same house, right? I mean, that’s not very believable.

Erin: No, we totally did. All four of us were going through divorces. To save money we all moved into the recording studio and then we gradually started welding our individual homes onto the studio building. 

Ricky: We were early adopters of shipping container homes.

RW: You were living in shipping containers?

Erin: Oh god, no. We didn’t have that kind of money. Our recording studio was a shipping container. We were living in “tiny” houses, although they weren’t called that yet, they were still called Dumpsters. We welded our individual Dumpsters onto the studio to build our house. Don’t get me started on early 21st-century architecture or I’ll never shut up, but long story short, At Home with the Woodrows got canceled after one episode. 

RW: I can see why. You guys were either passed out or you were semi-comatose on the couch watching other reality shows the entire time.

Marvy: That’s pretty meta though, right?

Erin: Anyway, the producers were really bumming on us for not recording any music or doing anything at all really. They were like, come on guys, do something, eat some cereal, or take the dog out. I was like, dude, first off, we don’t have a dog. Secondly, I’m watching fucking SpongeBob SquarePants, what more do you want? I can only do so many bong hits in an hour. I’m sorry if that slows the pacing. Turns out we did have a dog, by the way.

Marvy: Trump saw that episode and wanted us on the first season of The Apprentice but we didn’t know who he was. 

Ricky: We thought he was just another suit with great hair. 

RW: Is it true that you guys collaborated with Ye on a project?

Toby: Yeah, Ye gets us. He’s a genius with incredible instincts. That man is going to be president someday.

RW: Did you do an album together?

Ricky: No, we designed a shoe with him.

RW: Really? 

Ricky: Yeah, it’s based on our album Sneakers, which is not about shoes, by the way. It’s allegedly about a group of our fans who took things too far.

RW: Were they stalking you?

Ricky: You could say that. They were stalking our record label office looking for a refund for the blank CD we were selling with the Woodrows logo on it.

RW: They bought it thinking there was Woodrows’ music on it, I’m guessing. 

Ricky: Allegedly, but that’s pretty stupid because if you look at the tiny print on the back of the packaging it says “blank CDR”. They retailed for $14 a pop and I guess some people thought it was misleading. 

Erin: Terrific profit margins initially, but unfortunately it did trigger a class action lawsuit.

RW: You sold a blank CD to fans for $15 called Sneakers and Kanye West based a shoe on it?

Ricky: That’s what happens when great minds meet, I guess.

RW: Did that shoe ever get made? I’ve never heard of it.

Toby: They only made one pair and Ye kept them. Isn’t that brilliant?

RW: Yes. Moving on, given the stories of sexual depravity that have followed you guys over the years, I never would have thought you’d survive the #metoo movement.

Erin: You wouldn’t think so, for sure, but rock stars got off pretty easy on that one overall. I must say though, we are and always have been absolute gentlemen in regards to our seductive practices and sexual dealings.

Ricky: We also had a really great, but also very crooked lawyer, Jim Willy, Jr. He’s in jail now but he was way ahead of his time with NDAs and consent forms and getting everything in writing. The groupie line outside our motel door went directly through him. 

Erin: You signed in triplicate before you had a spontaneous fling with one of the Woodrows. 

Marvy: We were also fortunate with that hashtag thing in that 99 percent of those stories about our erotic escapades were manufactured in-house. 

RW: You made them up? 

Marvy: That’s right, we put a lot of those stories out there for the press to run wild with. We had a full-time Gossip Writer working for us at one point. 

My many battles with STDs are very real, unfortunately. I’m very unlucky in love, but the rest is total fiction.

RW: Switching topics here, as prolific as you guys are in the recording studio—but not the bedroom, I’m learning-—you also change your politics as often as you change musical styles.

Toby: What can I say, we’re very impressionable. For example, I could listen to some big city wind farmer talk about how wind power is better for the planet and reduces our dependence on fossil fuel and that’s great, but then I listen to the opposing argument that wind is a carcinogen and birds hate wind, and I’m like, yeah what about cancer and birds, Libtards? I mean, both sides make equal sense. 

RW: But you don’t lean one way or the other politically? 

Toby: I try not to lean in any direction because once you start leaning you fall over.

RW:  Wow, that’s surprisingly insightful.

Toby: I’m being quite literal because, at least for me, if I start leaning I’m on the floor in about five seconds. The meds don’t help much in that regard.

RW: Besides the shoe that never got made, what are some of the other collaborations you guys were a part of the past few years?

Erin: We’re proud of the fact that we taught Miley Cyrus how to twerk. She got a lot of heat for cultural misappropriation, but in her defense, she thought she was appropriating it from us.

Ricky: We also tried to hang with the SoundCloud rap thing for a minute. I’m a natural mumbler, but I just couldn’t find the right dose of cough syrup to get that teenager-just-waking-up-from-a-coma flow that is so important to the art form. 

Erin: That’s because you were drinking DayQuil instead of NyQuil.

Ricky: Oh, right.

RW: Then there was that well-publicized fling with Taylor Swift…

Toby: Yeah, evidently I made a public declaration on Twitter that we hooked up, but then later I thought, wait, did I dream that or did it really happen?

RW: You dreamt it.

Toby: I must have because we’ve never met in person. I don’t think I ever did apologize for that. Sorry, Taylor.

RW: You’ve gotten in a few scrapes with your social media posts. You often tweet in excess of 2,000 times in a single day.

Toby: Yeah, but sometimes I just pass out on my phone and end up tweeting a bunch of stuff, like when I called Machine Gun Kelly a whore. That was totally me just moving around trying to sleep on a plane.

RW:  You typed “Machine Gun Kelly is a whore” on your phone while you slept? 

Toby: My butt did, yeah.

Erin: Toby’s butt tweets a lot of controversial stuff.

Toby: Nothing racist though. Sexist, ageist, ableist, sure, some Ultra MAGA stuff on occasion, but nothing racist so far. Knock on wood.

RW: Well, that sounds like a good place to end it. Thanks again, guys.

Ricky: Sure.

Erin: Ok.

Marvy: Whatever.

Toby: Huh?

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