It’s happy hour at the Permanent Records Roadhouse, a dive bar and record store in a potholed stretch of east Los Angeles, and Fred Armisen is advising the audience to talk through his set. “Feel free to text, interrupt, go, and come back,” he says. “Whatever you want to do.”
Armisen is a substantial name in comedy from his time on Saturday Night Live, but he’s never been known to hog the spotlight—so it’s not exactly a surprise to find that he’s indifferent to the way people treat him onstage. (Or, in this case, not even a stage, but rather just a checkerboard floor area at the far end of the bar.) He’s less a brand than a comedic support beam—someone prone to appearing in scenes where other people, usually more famous than him, perform parts that bounce off of or lean on him from the place in the back where he’s been shoved, waiting patiently to deliver a deadpan joke or two. Sometimes he doesn’t deliver a joke at all; sometimes the joke is that he’s just … standing there.
At the Roadhouse, another offer that Armisen extends to his audience is for them to feel free to let him know if he has any of the chords wrong. This is because he’s not doing stand-up or sketch comedy. He’s not even doing segments from his music-oriented Netflix special, Standup for Drummers. Instead, he’s performing Fred Armisen’s Playlist Live, a set of punk-rock covers—just him and a guitar, often aided by a drum machine, playing his favorites by bands like Buzzcocks, the Clash, and Misfits.
The night I’m there, in January, he walks onstage wearing a jacket emblazoned with various patches related to the sketch show he starred in with Carrie Brownstein, Portlandia (there was, indeed, a bird on it)—a wrap present, as he’d explain to us later, given to cast and crew. Wearing his trademark thick-rimmed glasses, he still looks much the same (albeit with less hair) as when he first made a name for himself in the comedy scene over 25 years ago, with a VHS-era viral tape of pranks and bits done at South by Southwest.
There’s some occasional stage banter at the Roadhouse, sure, but for the most part, the show isn’t designed to draw laughs. Armisen clicks on a drum machine, finds a good tempo, and then starts looping together guitar parts, building a ramshackle—but still impressive—version of XTC’s “Making Plans for Nigel.” When the song ends, there’s no punch line.
I first heard about Armisen’s punk show in an Instagram post by the Roadhouse, which, by the time it entered my feed, was promoting an event long since sold out. (The capacity for a show in the bar is around 100.) I figured I’d missed my chance, but then I kept seeing the same show advertised again and again. It turns out that Armisen, 57, just does this about once a month, whenever he can, bringing gear over from a practice space down the street. The sets have a $5 cover—“It’s kind of what fuels my whole empire,” Armisen tells me later, over a video call—and there will be two a night, one at 6 p.m. and one at 9 p.m. The performances are prompt and concise because, Armisen says, “I do believe everyone wants to go home.”
If you just stumbled into the Roadhouse one night and found the guy from Wednesday playing “Blitzkrieg Bop,” it might be a little jarring. But Armisen’s relationship with music actually goes back much further than his relationship with comedy.
“Even before I met him,” Late Night host Seth Meyers tells me, “there was this sort of bubbling Legend of Fred: this drummer who’d done Blue Man Group, who just decided one day to become a comedian, and then could immediately do it better than people like me, who’ve been trying to do comedy our whole lives.”
This Blue Man Group detail is true: Armisen really was part of the larger Blue Man ensemble in the late ’90s, which he’s described as “life-changing.” Previous to that, Armisen was working in cafés and playing drums in Trenchmouth, a Chicago-based industrial post-punk group of some note that could best be described—for better or worse at points in their eight-year run—as “angular.” Trenchmouth frontman Damon Locks had been inspired by the D.C. hardcore scene that he grew up in but met Armisen at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Armisen first approached Locks to discuss his jacket, which had a hand-painted depiction of the Damned album Machine Gun Etiquette, and they’ve been friends ever since.
“Fred was super interested in Bow Wow Wow and the Clash and Blondie,” Locks tells me, “and had this kind of angle that wasn’t coming from hardcore.” As a pairing for Locks’s intense vocals—at points resembling H.R. from Bad Brains, D. Boon from Minutemen, and others—Armisen opted for a less overtly aggressive style on drums. “Sometimes he would stand up,” Locks remembers, “because I think that he had seen, like, Tito Puente concerts.” (Later, Armisen would take that tendency and turn it into the character Fericito.)
Armisen was born to a Venezuelan mother and German father, and he briefly lived in Brazil as a child. As to how, exactly, he became a punk fan out of that combo, Armisen notes that salsa and merengue music is “kind of repetitive” in the same way that, say, the Ramones rhythm section is. “Even the aesthetics are pretty gothy,” he says of Brazil. “There’s definitely a scary element to that. And I remember soap operas that were on TV—there’s a morbid quality to them. They’re really into funerals and stuff.”
Eventually coming of age in Long Island, Armisen found himself uninterested in the “long hair, people in vans, and long guitar solos” that defined the mainstream rock scene of the late ’70s. Bands like Devo and Talking Heads, who “looked like students,” were a rebellion to the rebellion—one step beyond the Zeppelin-ish musical world that people like his parents had long since accepted. “[Punk] just gave me identity,” he says.
The general image of punk—particularly the first generation of lip curlers, such as Johnny Thunders and Sid Vicious—is caustic and snarling. But Armisen has never really embodied that image himself. Soft-spoken and approachable, he’s cheerful in a casual way. “He’s definitely more of an optimist than I am,” says Carrie Brownstein, taking a call a few hours before performing a show with her group Sleater-Kinney. “I think he wants to see the good in people.” In candid photographs of Armisen in the real world, he’ll usually be smiling meekly with one hand raised, greeting you with a pleasant “hello.”
To Armisen, his demeanor and love of punk aren’t mutually exclusive. “If you think of what the classic punk bands look like, there is something wispy and kind of gentle,” he says. “Even though they’re going like this”—here he snarls—“I’m like, ‘Ah, you’re sweet.’” He says it’s not like he doesn’t have a darker side in his head, like the rest of us. “But then when I actually talk,” he says, “it just comes out quieter. Maybe I just don’t have a very loud voice.”
When people used to ask Armisen whether he secretly wanted to be a comedian while he was grinding it out on the indie-rock circuit, he would tell them he had no idea. But in recent years he’s started to realize that it was percolating the whole time—the jokes in the van, the banter in between songs onstage. There was also the fact that his interest in music wasn’t entirely about the music.
“The answer is really that I think I always had my eye on comedy,” he says, “in that a lot of bands that I liked have a sort of theatrical, visual thing going that did seem kind of comedic.” Outré punk creations such as Devo’s Booji Boy and the Damned’s Captain Sensible—presented almost like characters in theater productions—interested him more than just the raw intensity of hardcore. “It wasn’t quite comedy, but there was something sort of not that serious about them.” (In 2018, Armisen played drums for Devo at a festival show.)
Armisen was the first one in Trenchmouth to decide he was done, which led the group to break up after the release of their 1996 album, The Broadcasting System. In 2000, at the age of 33, Armisen moved to L.A. and charmed his way into performing stand-up at the melting-pot venue Largo, having barely done professional comedy before. Within a few months, he made it onto Late Night With Conan O’Brien, doing a set as a hapless self-defense expert. (“You can clap your hands to deafen the assailant,” he suggests.) By 2002, he was cast on SNL. “The only thing that was surprising about his entry into comedy,” Locks says, “was how fast it escalated.”
I ask Armisen whether his time in Trenchmouth helped him become a comedian—if the timing element of being a drummer helped him with the delivery of jokes, for example. He says it was actually more useful in terms of knowing how to work within a group. “The role of a drummer in a band is, like, you’re just back there making all this noise,” he says, “and how do you lay out for some of it? How do you complement the bass player? How do you become not a show-off, but then how do you have flourishes so it’s entertaining? So that’s kind of where I see more of the link.”
Seth Meyers met Armisen when they were both newbies on SNL. These days, Meyers features him as his on-again, off-again band leader on Late Night. Thinking back on his SNL run, Meyers says one of his proudest creations is the 2013 sketch “History of Punk,” a mockumentary short in which Armisen plays Ian Rubbish, a Johnny Rotten–style icon who despises the monarchy but adores Margaret Thatcher for some reason. (“She works every day of the week,” he chides his audience, “including Saturday.”) I had always assumed that sketch came straight from Armisen, but it actually came from Meyers, who was utilizing the love of punk rock that Armisen had instilled in him.
Meyers wrote it—complete with a Bill Grundy interview—and then tasked Armisen with writing the various songs featured within it, like “Cunt in a Crown” and “Sweet Iron Lady.” After it aired, IFC approached Meyers, Armisen, and Bill Hader about making an entire show about Rubbish; the trio used that offer to make Documentary Now!, in which Armisen would write other songs for fake bands, like the soft-rock Eagles parody the Blue Jean Committee. The venerable indie label Drag City would eventually put out Catalina Breeze, an EP of Blue Jean Committee songs written by Armisen. Decades after quitting the indie-rock life, Armisen was labelmates with Royal Trux and Silver Jews.
“I do think that the reason he’s a good songwriter,” Meyers says, “is because he does it the same way he does comedy, which is, it’s never needy. And you have a real comfort watching him because I’ve never seen Fred panic with silence. He so embodies the characters he’s playing and he’s just sort of like, Look, this is the way I’m gonna do it, you’re not going to affect it. You can enjoy it or not. He does know his comedy instrument as well as he knows the other ones.”
For the bit, Armisen has written songs—such as the Bjelland Brothers’ “Sparkling Apple Juice” (a Top 200 hit in Minnesota) and Crisis of Conformity’s “Fist Fight!”—that have actually been stuck in my head. (Studio versions of both fine songs are also available for purchase from Drag City.) But when I ask whether he ever tries to sit down and write songs in earnest, Armisen says he doesn’t feel the drive to create music outside the purview of specific characters. “It’s only if I’m making fun of a genre that chords can come out,” he says. “If it’s me, it’s not there.”
The idea with the Roadhouse shows, Armisen tells me, was that they would be a modern update of the lounge singer act. “It’s just pure nostalgia,” he says. “And it’s kind of the equivalent of what someone playing standards at a piano bar would be. In the ’70s, someone was playing all the standards from the ’40s. That’s what this should feel like.”
There’s something a little more subversive about Armisen’s song selection than he’s giving himself credit for, to be sure; the contemporary equivalent of a yesteryear lounge singer playing “Summer Wind” would not be someone thrashing through Hüsker Dü’s “Never Talking to You Again.” But the way that classic punk music now pacifies instead of provokes does raise the question of what the genre even stands for anymore.
“I feel a little let down by punk,” Locks tells me. “I’m just not as interested in the long game of what it turned out to be.” To Locks, the punk ethos was supposed to be more than just a sound—it was supposed to be “doing something.” He still sees the original essence being tapped into in other ways, but as a strict genre, “I feel like it’s someone from high school that I haven’t talked to in a really long time,” he says.
Armisen says he never had any concern about sacrificing punk ideals to join a machine as big as SNL, partially because he doesn’t think abstaining from corporations was ever a moralistic requirement in the first place. Bands like the Clash and Talking Heads, he points out, were on major labels, and he was introduced to plenty of great indie bands on shows like MTV’s 120 Minutes. “My belief is it’s just art being brought to you by whatever organization it is,” Armisen says.
Confused about how I felt about this myself, I began asking people around Armisen whether they thought it was fair to call him “punk.” Whether this celebrity, who dates popular actresses and goes to Steve Martin’s house for dinner parties, is worthy of the title—whatever it might mean in 2024. Brownstein, anyway, isn’t so sure. “Is Fred a punk?” she repeats, laughing. “Probably not.”
Still, Brownstein concedes, Armisen’s ongoing relationship with the music he loves is “intriguing in that he sort of questions, ‘What did punk ever mean?’” she says. “He just has this way of defanging punk.” She added, “That’s the reason why a lot of punks don’t age very well, is because they sort of were putting on the plastic vampire fangs for five or 10 years and then popping them out. [They] stopped dyeing their hair and got normal jobs. And I think Fred has a way of seeing the humanity in all of that and exploring it.”
Case in point: a recent sketch Armisen put together for John Mulaney’s talk show, Everybody’s in L.A., that gathered punk luminaries such as Exene Cervenka of X and Lee Ving of Fear for an “Old Punks Focus Group.” “Look at all those fucking turds,” Mike Watt groans, after Armisen shows the group a picture of a cruise ship.
Others, however, were less hesitant to give Armisen credit for keeping the punk flame alive. “There’s something really punk about being Fred’s age,” Meyers says, “and still being one step ahead of what anybody guesses you’re going to do next.” When Locks thinks about it, he suggests that Armisen—being a prominent figure in TV and movies—making himself available to a small group of people in a low-stakes environment is a radical gesture in and of itself. “That’s really cool,” he says. “And that’s very punk.”
In 2015, Armisen went on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, and he spoke candidly about some aspects of his life that were bubbling up into public discourse. In the wake of a messy divorce from the actress Elisabeth Moss, who said in 2012 that “the greatest impersonation [Armisen] does is that of a normal person”, Armisen said he was working on how to be better to romantic partners.
“I have a problem with intimacy where all of a sudden there’s a real person there,” he told Maron. “I say these things because I’m not finished being a person.” At that time, he seemed to be figuring out what the second half of his life would look like, asking himself that difficult question that looms over punks as they get older: Am I going to pop out the plastic vampire fangs and grow up or not?
On a 2019 episode of Sam Jones’s Off Camera, Armisen told a story that stuck with me, about what inspired his realization that he wanted to quit being an indie-level musician. It was back in the ’90s in Chicago, and he surreptitiously caught a glimpse of an older indie-rock drummer he recognized lugging his gear around. “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to end up like him,’” Armisen said. The story is somewhat brutal, and candid in a way you don’t often get from an artist discussing the optics of middle age. But it’s revealing, nonetheless. Music is a tough way to make a living. It’s even tougher to maintain your dignity while doing it as someone over the age of 40.
After I bring up the story to him again, Armisen says he already looks at that moment differently than when he told it to Jones five years ago. “If we really want to analyze it,” he figures, “I was also saying that that’s not where my passion is.” Armisen says he never had his heart in it when Trenchmouth was in the studio, for instance, as the rest of the group was obsessing over the granular process of recording and mixing. “It wasn’t a judgment on that [drummer on the street],” he says. “I’m sure he was having a perfectly pleasant day. I’m sure he’s doing great. It was more about myself.”
Now that Armisen has, in some sense, turned into that older guy lugging his gear into a venue anyway, I ask him whether he would still like to be doing these kinds of shows even when he’s 80. “Actually, doing stuff like the Roadhouse is probably best for someone who’s 80,” he says. “If I lived down the street and lumbered over. Maybe not as much equipment, but just sort of like”—here he adopts a grumpy old man voice—“‘Hi, everybody.’”
While wrapping up his recent Roadhouse show, Armisen does what most people in the crowd probably want to hear him do instead: crack jokes. He talks about being aghast after meeting a baby who doesn’t know who Michael Stipe is, then apologizes if the music is too loud, noting that he has earplugs in. “Ah, I shouldn’t have admitted that to you,” he says. “That’s so not punk.” Then he catches himself. “But now it is punk.”
Nate Rogers is a writer in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Stereogum, and elsewhere.
