by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
The further back you go into music history, one truth becomes evident: every artist credited with inventing or innovating was always influenced by something earlier. The classic example is Elvis. Credited with the birth of rock music, Elvis and his contemporaries weren’t much more than plagiarists stealing from the Black tradition of rhythm and blues. Yet, go back far enough and you’ll eventually arrive at a crossroads where the Devil makes deals and history slides into myth.
Moss Icon has long lurched about in a similarly murky quagmire. Alongside Embrace and Rites of Spring, this late ‘80s Maryland band is credited as one of the founders of the emotional hardcore genre – AKA emo. Their lone album, 1993’s Lyburnum Wits End Liberation Fly was just reissued via Temporary Residence Ltd. in time for its 30th anniversary. While Lyburnum sounds every bit as bizarre and vibrant as it did when it was conceived 35 years ago – a slapdash concoction of proto-punk, metal riffs, and some of the most compelling lyrical content of any punk record, ever – if you strip away the birth of emo narrative, you get something much closer to the truth. Lyburnum is the sound of four kids fresh out of high school jamming in their parents’ garages, with little or no ambition other than to do something that felt right.
Tonie Joy, Moss Icon guitarist and the unofficial caretaker of the band’s story, has a grounded perspective on Moss Icon and the singular music they made. No, the band wasn’t trying to sound like anything, or invent anything. Rather, Moss Icon was an escape for Joy and his bandmates, a way to cope with a world that felt volatile and chaotic. In a way, Moss Icon’s story is both more ordinary and more remarkable than the story of a band saddled with such a legacy. Everyone has their first band. It just so happens Tonie Joy’s first band was way better than yours.
Joy’s trajectory caroms off chance meetings (he reconnected with Temporary Residence owner Jeremy deVine after meeting him years earlier in a Baltimore post office) and years spent playing music to the unlikely place it is today: an artist whose music remains relevant and demands attention. (Interested listeners are encouraged to also check out Joy’s post-Moss Icon work, Universal Order of Armageddon and The Convocation of…)
Over two conversations with Joy, Post-Trash delves into his trajectory, from Joy’s misfit beginnings listening to hand-me-down Zeppelin tapes in the Maryland suburbs to meeting Moss Icon’s enigmatic frontman Jonathan Vance to the unassuming recording of what would become an iconic album. Along the way, we examine a life spent dedicated to music. Even if Joy would never again summit the lasting heights Moss Icon has achieved, he remains, as he puts it “a lifer.”
(Note: this interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
photo credit: Robert Andrews
PT: Hey Tonie, where are you these days?
Tonie Joy: I live in Baltimore, which is sort of where I've always been. I lived in rural Maryland for like five years starting in 2015. And then I was in Philly for part of the year during the pandemic, and then I came back to Maryland. I didn't really plan to stay in Baltimore, but I kind of thought I had a reason to stay here and, you know, got an apartment. But I don't think I'm staying. I actually call it “the curse,” not being able to leave Baltimore.
PT: As I was researching for this, I was listening to the interview you did with Washed Up Emo, and you mentioned that you had this – I wouldn't say obsession – but you were definitely interested in an off-the-grid sort of lifestyle.
TJ: Yeah, totally. I have been since I was in middle school. I've just never been able to financially pursue that. Although, of course, you can do it really cheaply. I was actually looking for some property around rural Pennsylvania or West Virginia a couple years ago, a very specific thing, and I just kind of never found it. I did put an offer in on this church that was ever 100 years old. But someone else grabbed it who had more money.
PT: You’ve also mentioned that you were politically mindful and anti-authoritarian from a young age. Where do you think that comes from?
TJ: I honestly don't know why, but even in the 70s at a young age, I gravitated toward counterculture. I was aware of the anti-war movement and the anti-nuclear movement and, like, the Black Panthers and Weather Underground. I was into rock music, these long-haired fucking weirdos who played loud rock and roll, and were just like, fuck the government, fuck the man. And I gravitated towards that.
I was lucky I didn’t grow up with conservative parents. I actually lived with my grandmother from the age of five and she had this Depression-era mindset, so I definitely didn’t get (my counterculture views) from her (laughs). I guess I always gravitated towards things that were just extremely alternative or progressive, but more in a nuts-and-bolts sort of way, not in a preachy ideology way. I've worked mostly with my hands as an adult, as a mechanic. I was always wondering how things worked, or just thought of things in a real technical, basic way.
For example, I remember learning about solar panels as a kid, so to me, it was a no brainer, why would you not use solar panels? Right out of high school, I had to find a job. I looked in the phonebook and found a solar company. This was like, 1988, or ‘87. At the time, solar was definitely at a low point. And the guy I ended up working for was mostly just working on people's hot water systems that had been installed in the late 70s, when that was a thing. I don't know if you remember, the joke was Jimmy Carter had a solar hot water system put on top of the White House. And then when Reagan became president, he tore them all off.
PT: Was it a foregone conclusion to you that you were going to be in a band? Did you see that as part of saying, fuck the man, that being in a band was what you did if you had those feelings?
TJ: Definitely. But it was also about not really knowing what else to do. I wasn’t going to go to college. There wasn't even really money for me to go. I just wanted to do my own thing. And music had always spoke to me, especially being a young kid who was kind of like a loner.
I joke with people that when I was five years old, I didn’t get Sesame Street records. I got Deep Purple and Zeppelin and Neil Young records. I gravitated toward them because they made me feel good in a way that I rarely felt otherwise. I usually felt fucked up, honestly. But listening to music was like a portal into another dimension where I felt right. And I guess at a certain point, I just felt like I wanted to make the music and always feel the same way. Does that make sense?
PT: Absolutely. I've long felt that music is the only thing that can help tame the demons. It’s almost biblical. Like David playing harp for the Mad King or whatever. Was Moss Icon your first band?
TJ: Yes, it was.
PT: Is it weird for you all these years later to be talking about your first band? I remember my first band and it was fucking embarrassing.
TJ: Um, I mean, it's not weird to me. I think it was kind of a fluke that it was actually good enough or interesting enough to people that to this day, people still are interested in it. In a way, Moss Icon is transcending time. And to me, that's success, that's cool. If something can be listened to decades later, and it resonates with someone. I feel like a lot of it really is just lucky. And it was just total random chance to cross paths with a singer and lyricist like Jonathan (Vance).
PT: You met him in high school, yeah?
TJ: Yes, I did. I always say this to people: if he had not been him, I don't think the band would have been nearly as interesting. Not to say that Monica (DiGialleonardo, bass player) didn't write totally kick ass bass lines. I wasn’t skilled as a guitarist – I was basically teaching myself as the band progressed. Still, for some reason, I had the knack for just coming up with interesting stuff, even if it was still kind of basic or rudimentary or whatever. And so somehow, the music just kind of resonates.
PT: Yeah, maybe weird wasn't the right choice of words. Maybe “unlikely” was the word I was looking for. It's unlikely that most people’s first band resonates like Moss Icon does. Is it true Lyburnum Wits End Liberation Fly was recorded four or five years before it ever got released? After the band broke up?
TJ: Yeah, the album itself was recorded in three different recording sessions in 1988. A couple of those songs from one session became the Mahpiua Luta 7” I released (on Vermin Scum, Joy’s label) just by myself. And then another session was actually from the first real recording session we did for the first seven inch, but there were a couple of songs that were extra. By the end of 1988 we had this new batch of songs. We went in and recorded them, and then abandoned it. Jonathan wasn't happy with it or something.
You know, we were all like 17, 18, 19, 20 years old. There was a lot of chaos in our brains at times. For instance – I don't think I've told many people this – but when we went in to record the later 1988 tracks for Lyburnum’s second side, Jonathan wasn't feeling it. We generally recorded everything live, but Jonathan was in a separate vocal booth while the rest of us were in this little basement studio. Finally, at the end of a long day, he was just like, nothing’s working, fuck this.
So, when we came back, a few weeks or months later, Jonathan said, I need to be in the room with you, like it's a show. And the poor engineer was like, “Oh, my God, you know how much bleed there’s gonna be?” But we just needed to make this work somehow. We ended up re-recording a lot of the songs on the album that way, with us all in the same room. And that’s why the vocals are buried compared to some of the other earlier songs. If you listen closely, you can kind of tell the later session songs because the vocals are more crowded by everything else. And I think Les (Lentz, who engineered all Moss Icon studio recordings) did the best he could when we mixed it. But when Jeremy had Alan Douches remaster it 10 years ago, Alan did an amazing job bringing the vocals out.
PT: So, how did these songs become an album?
TJ: The songs were just sitting there. A couple came out on seven inches. But then the band broke up in 1991 and nothing had been released. A few years later, I joined Born Against, and Sam (McPheeters, Born Against vocalist and owner of Vermiform Records) was like, I’ll release your weird Moss Icon record. I think he just liked that it was this weird little proto-punk record. Back then, no one was thinking of it as like emo or whatever. Anyway, Sam, for whatever reason, he was psyched to put it out.
PT: Is there is anything that you want to say about why the band broke up or what the story is? Or was it like, as kids, you get to a certain point where bands just dissolve.
TJ: Yeah, I mean, that’s basically it.
The thing is, part of what I was saying about Jonathan – even though he would he have recorded a few times before in a vocal booth, for some reason that day, he wasn't feeling it. And there were just a lot of times when he would do things like that and then we’d break up and then get back together. It happened like four, five or six times. I can't remember for sure.
I think it was just us being young, teenage angst.
PT: If Jonathan hadn't been in Moss Icon, would he have been in another band? Or was it just meeting you and your desire to create a band that inspired Jonathan to want to do his art with you?
TJ: I don't think he was ever like, I'm going to be a rock singer like Robert Plant or something. I don't think that was his thing. We were into the music. We were into punk rock, we were into hardcore and metal or old rock or whatever. And I was just like, yeah, let's start a band. And it's funny, at first he was going to play bass. I don't think it was any specific thing I said, but one day he decided he wanted to sing.
I’d learned from being his friend that he wrote a lot, like really cool stuff, especially for someone that age. And I think maybe once we started doing it, it kind of opened up the faucet for him to write more and to get even more far out with it. I always think of Jonathan more as a poet or writer who just happened to sing in this weird rock band.
It’s funny. I feel like everything I've tried to do since Moss Icon, I've been kind of chasing, trying to do something as good. Even though I got way better as a guitarist later. The people I'm working with always dictate so much as to what's going on with the band because it all forms organically. Back in 2009, ‘10, ‘11, for the first time I was working on this thing with some people around here in Baltimore. And I was trying to have a lot of musicians, like six or seven, besides myself. And the idea was I was going to dictate way more to everyone what it would sound like or what it was going to be, because I've never really done that before.
PT: This was Slow Bull?
TJ: Right. Slow Bull came out of solo song ideas I had. But I was getting pretty jaded about things and just other shit was going on in life. So, I ended up not really telling everyone what to do as much as I originally thought I would.
PT: What about The Convocation of… is that still active?
TJ: No. Basically in 2001, or beginning of 2002, Guy (Blakeslee), the original bass player, quit. From 2002, basically until, like 2013-ish, George (Frances) and I kept thinking we wanted to try to keep doing it. But we could never really do it full-time. We had four different bass players off and on from 2005 to 2013. And we would play like a couple shows a year around Baltimore, and we recorded once. I was trying to do this label thing. But then basically, like a decade ago, my life was kind of in the shambles – first world problems, obviously – but I lost interest.
I've gone through different ways of feeling the past decade. Of just being like, I don't know, fuck music, I'm not going to do the shit anymore. But then it's like, that's not really what I'm thinking. I'm thinking more like I just don't want to do anything unless it's really substantial and sustainable, you know what I mean?
It's difficult when you're having to rely on other people, because basically every band I was ever in for the most part ended because of the people in it. When I was younger, I was definitely difficult to get along with; I was kind of a tyrant. I was kind of crazy. But you know, I had a vision. I had a passion, so it's all like a package deal.
PT: Now that the reissue is out, is there anything left for Moss Icon to accomplish?
TJ: In the time the band existed, where one thing that would happen and we would stop playing and break off and get back together again, we actually have songs we wrote that we played live a few times but never recorded in a studio. But there are a few decent soundboard recordings. So, I’ve been going through that stuff recently and it would be cool to do something where they’re released as a digital thing for people to check out. But beyond that, just having had Temporary Residence release the discography, and now doing the Lyburnum thing, I feel like that's a good way to wrap stuff up.
Lyburnum Wits End Liberation Fly is out March 31st via Temporary Residence Ltd.