(Listen to the podcast by launching the stand-alone player or stream within the page by clicking the play button below)

Launch Radio Player

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

If you ask just about any Arkansan, they’ll tell you they believe there’s a national prejudice against our state.

Hillary Clinton pointed it out in 1998 shortly after she identified the “right-wing conspiracy” trying to ruin her husband’s presidency. “I think a lot of this is prejudice against our state,” she told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “They wouldn’t do this if we were from some other state.”

More recently, the national sports media attacked us when the talking heads on ESPN and every other sports outlet launched their full-blown assault on new University of Arkansas football coach Bobby Petrino and blared through their loudspeakers like a methed-out Karl Rove that Petrino is a self-serving, soulless Lucifer and the school’s administration and its team’s fans are a musty bunch of Tyson chicken-fed rubes.

So forgive us when we pounded our chests a little when Jason White appeared stage right with Green Day at the Grammys in 2005, and again when the band was performing in front of what seemed like 8 billion people at the Milton Keynes National Bowl in the UK on the Bullet in a Bible live DVD when Billie Joe pointed over to him and shrieked “from Little Rock, Arkansas… Jason White!”

Because for us, especially those who know him from way back when, to see Jason at that level was particularly affirming, while at the same time a great big middle finger salute to our imagined detractors.

And while it’s paranoid to believe such a conspiracy exists, if you read the reviews of Richard Matson’s documentary Towncraft: Notes From a Local Scene, which chronicles Little Rock’s nascent punk rock scene, they very much lend to the theory.

From Harp Magazine’s Jonah Bayer:

“Towncraft tells the story of Little Rock, Arkansas’ late-’80s punk scene—and while that sounds innocent enough, the film is so self-congratulatory and solipsistic that it’s hard to follow the actual story through all this hyperbolic bragging…”

He goes on:

“…Towncraft feels like an elitist endeavor, which is pretty ridiculous when you consider the fact that scenes like Omaha have been able to produce far more impressive results from a similarly landlocked landscape.”

Though I could argue with the last statement, I won’t. And after I put Bayer’s criticism into some context, it fails to sting as much. Because when White, Burt Taggart, Joshua Bentley and Colin Brooks – the Big Cats – play their annual Christmastime show, it almost feels exclusive – though it’s the furthest thing from it – because every far-flung Little Rock expatriate turns up for these shows, and each year, they have the air of party where you know every single soul.

This podcast/interview with Jason and Burt, who have been friends and bandmates since their days in the hardcore band Chino Horde, took place a few days after their 2007 show and begins with a Big Cats song from their record, On Tomorrow, which was released on Taggart’s label Max Recordings. As it moves along, the whiskey and wine flow and a couple of the song choices get comical (Dolly Parton’s “Me and Little Andy”?), and it tells the story of the Big Cats’ first tour, Jason’s experience with Green Day and Pinhead Gunpowder, and gives some history of the Max Recordings label and growing up playing music in Little Rock.