Day 2 of Riot Fest 2022 took place on September 17th. The temperatures rose and because it was a Saturday, so did the crowd size. It was a day of both music and expressions of solidarity with one nation under attack. Red Scare Industries’ No Trigger was assigned to the smallest music stage in the […]
Day 2 of Riot Fest 2022 took place on September 17th. The temperatures rose and because it was a Saturday, so did the crowd size. It was a day of both music and expressions of solidarity with one nation under attack.
Red Scare Industries’ No Trigger was assigned to the smallest music stage in the park, the Rebels stage. However, that did not stop the boys from Boston from giving a powerful performance, including the tunes “Antifantasy,” “Holy Punks,” “No Tattoos,” and “Neon National Park.” There is little doubt in my mind, or at least lots of reason to hope, that No Trigger will be promoted to a larger stage at its next Riot Fest appearance. I’m not much of a gambler but I’ll take the bet that they will indeed be back at the festival, and sooner than later.
Fans of Bully were fortunate to not only see one of their favorites treat them to a fantastic set, but they did so from the Radicals Stage. That stage provided the most shade and the coolest setting on an otherwise boiler of a day. Rolling through “Trash,” ”Where to Start, ”Stuck in Your Head, ”Kills to Be Resistant, ”Milkman,” “Hate and Control,” “Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues” Bully gave the crowd what it was looking forward to and needed.
A formidable amount of joy was felt as The Joy Formidable took over the Roots stage. That line might be of questionable quality, however, the performance by the pride and the Formidable Joy of Mold, Flintshare, Wales (ok, I’ll stop now) was quite palpable. The band, presently based in London, and composed of Rhiannon “Ritzy” Bryan, Rhydian Dafydd Davies, and Matthew James Thomas performed solidly a set that included “The Greatest Light Is the Greatest Shade,” “Y Bluen Eira,” “Sevier,” “CSTS (Come See the Show),” and “Whirring.”
The Get Up Kids were one of the 2022 Riot Fest bands doing an “album play” set. The album in this case was its classic Four Minute Mile on its 25th Anniversary. Though not dedicated to running legend Roger Bannister, as the title might suggest to near-lifelong runners (such as myself), it does feature track runners on the cover. More importantly, the band’s debut studio album transformed the members of the group into stars of the emo punk sub-genre. For attendees who became fans at the album’s first release and those just discovering its music, it was great to hear the full track listing, including, “Stay Gold Ponyboy,” “Lowercase West Thomas,” “Washington Square Park,” “Michelle With One “L”,” and “I’m a Loner Dottie, a Rebel.”
7Secondsannounced their retirement in 2018, citing health issues as the primary reason. For that reason, the band appearing at Riot Fest this year was especially compelling. The band returned to touring earlier this year as support for Circle Jerks, alongside Negative Approach. Sammy Siegler sat in the drum chair in place of Troy Mowat, whose health issues continue to keep him sidelined. Kevin Second’s voice was strong and the setlist featured many entries from the band’s classic 1984 album The Crew. The album was remastered and reissued in deluxe style by Trust Records in 2021. Among them: “Here’s Your Warning,” “Definite Choice,“ Not Just Boys Fun,” “This Is the Angry,” “Here’s Your Warning,” “Definite Choice,” “Not Just Boys Fun. 7Seconds also played “We’re Gonna Fight,” plus covered “99 Red Balloons” by Nena.
For those who might not know, Alexisonfire is from St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada and named after an American porn actress. There was some controversy surrounding that latter fact but let’s move now to its Riot Fest appearance. It was a crowd pleaser, featuring in the setlist “Accidents,” Boiled Frogs,” “Sweet Dreams of Otherness,” “Pulmonary Archery,” and “Drunks, Lovers, Sinners.” For a hot late summer day, near that stage was a pretty cool place to hang.
Yungblud is an excitable boy (a nod to Warren Zevon there) and an exciting performer. Dressed in black dress pant style shorts held up by a single suspender over a long sleeve black and white striped shirt added up to him looking a bit like a post-modern day Pinocchio sans the pointy cap. Yungblud’s infectious charm was obvious, as he bounced across the stage almost nonstop through “The Funeral,” “superdeadfriends,” “parents,” “Tissues,” “I Love You, Will You Marry Me,” among others. His set ended with a show of support for the Ukrainian activists at the festival as the English rising star brought a group of them onstage. The Ukrainian flag being held high by said activists demonstrated again the solidarity for the war-torn nation on display at Riot Fest 2022.
Bad Religion is yet another of what I call FORFs — Friend of Riot Fest. As in, the band is a regular part of the festival’s lineups over the years. This should continue ad infinitum. They are a brilliant group every bit deserving of the word legend which has long been attached to them and the innumerable tattoo tributes across the globe. One crowd member expressed their love with the BR symbol shaved into and painted onto his skull. Meeting Greg Graffin for the first time, in the media tent, he exuded humility and kindness. Graffin: “Hi I’m Greg.” Me, in an attempt to be professional and not fan girl the PhD Punk icon from one my top 5 bands: “Thanks, I gotta go shoot 7Seconds now.” Yes, I’m a dork. But I’d hazard a guess Graffin was ok with that awkward bailing out. Back to their performance though. When the music kicked in Graffin, Jay Bentley, Brian Baker, Mike Dimkich, and Jamie Miller got straight to the point with “Recipe for Hate.” That was followed by “New Dark Ages” and “Fuck You.” With so many classics over the decades of its existence, the band couldn’t possibly hit all of them. However, it did a pretty good damn job of getting in a lot of them. Among those they drove through were “Dept. of False Hope, “We’re Only Gonna Die,” “Suffer,” and “21st Century (Digital Boy),” They concluded the set with “Fuck Armageddon… This Is Hell,” “Sorrow,” and my personal favorite, “American Jesus.” Whew and Wow. That about sums up Bad Religion in general and its Riot Fest performance in particular.
Gogol Bordello returned to Riot Fest as a replacement for Bauhaus which had to cancel its American tour due to lead singer Peter Murphy entering rehab. The Gypsy Punks released their latest album, Solidaritine, just one day before its set at Douglass Park. It appeared clear a priority for the band was to continue increasing and solidifying support for Ukraine and its efforts to fight back against Russian Vladimir Putin, his government, and the Russian military (Putin, of course, directed the military invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022). Earlier in the day, Eugene Hutz, the Boyarka native singer of Gogol Bordello, participated in a moving tribute to his homeland in a performance alongside a Ukrainian dance troupe. The full band known for its rousing performances did not disappoint as they ran through “Immigrant Punk,” “Wanderlust King,” ”My Companjera,” “Immigraniada (We Comin’ Rougher),” “Think Locally, Fuck Globally,” and “Mishto!”
Yellowcard was one of the three Saturday Night headliners. The band performed in full, its fourth album, also its major label debut, 2003’s Ocean Avenue. “Way Away,” released as the album’s first single, and credited as Yellowcard’s injection into the realm of mainstream popularity, started off the set. Title tune “Ocean Avenue,” was followed by ”Empty Apartment,” and “Life of a Salesman.” The rest of the album including “Miles Apart,” “Twentythree,” “View From Heaven,” “One Year, Six Months,” “Back Home” took diehard Yellowcard fans on a nostalgia trip. But what a trip!
The Riverboat Gamblers are celebrating the 20th Anniversary of its 2003 Something to Crow About. The band decided it was a good time to reflect on the significance of the record. I asked the below questions of two of The Riverboat Gamblers’ band members, singer Mike Wiebe (MW) and guitar player Ian MacDougall (IM). I also […]
The Riverboat Gamblers are celebrating the 20th Anniversary of its 2003 Something to Crow About.
The band decided it was a good time to reflect on the significance of the record. I asked the below questions of two of The Riverboat Gamblers’ band members, singer Mike Wiebe (MW) and guitar player Ian MacDougall (IM). I also spoke to the pair about how the Riverboat Gamblers came to be and where it is now. Along with Wiebe and MacDougall, the band also includes Fadi El-Assad on lead guitar, Rob Marchant on bass, and Sam Keir on drums.
On Something to Crow About:
(NOTE: The Q&A below has been edited and condensed for content/clarity’s sake.)
MG: How did the decision to re-release the record come about?
IM: “We’ve been wanting to have all of our releases available and we wanted to start with the one that’s been unavailable the longest.“
MG:Was it simply a matter of 20 years being a milestone amount of time?
IM: “This record is really special to all of us and to have it back is awesome. 20 years just happened to be how long it had been when we got it back. It sort of lined up perfectly.”
MG:How long have been planning/working on the re-issue?
IM: “I had met this great dude John Kastner over the years touring in other bands and he helped facilitate this so we that we could re-release this ourselves and have it distributed properly. Everything has been pretty in house here now which is at the time great.“
MG: What went into the decision-making as far as the artwork and presentation of the re-release?
IM: “As far as artwork etc. We brought in original bass player Pat Lillard that recorded on this album, to help update some things. We added a quote from producer Tim Kerr and changed some fonts around that had always bugged some of us.“
McDougall summed it up with:
“We got a great remaster from Jack over at Enormous Door here in Austin. He really woke this thing up and gave it a shower, shave and a hot pot of coffee.“
Mike Wiebe (vocals) “Long story short- after Gearhead went under it was tied up for a bit…“
MG: Reflecting on the album now, were you aware or did you have a sense of how special it was at the time and how important in might become in the future (and now history) of The Riverboat Gamblers?
MW: “I knew we worked really hard on it we were happy with it but no, I didn’t really know how special it was and that it would be such an important factor in our lives 20 years later. I knew people liked it at the time but it’s kind of hard to see or feel that stuff when you have nothing to compare it to. ”
MG: Was it simply a matter of 20 years being a milestone amount of time?
MW: “In editing the video for “Rattle Me Bones” a few weeks ago and looking at all the old footage of us playing I really started to feel the weight of all of it. I think for the most part I/we are always kind of moving forward and thinking about the next record or the next project and I don’t really take a lot of time to reflect on that stuff. So it was nice to look back and really appreciate how lucky it is to have the experience of a little magical pocket where everything kind of clicked at the same time.”
On the Past, Present, and Future of The Riverboat Gamblers
MG: How have things changed since you started the band?Have your goals been met and are there new goals?
MW: “I mean it’s you know it’s completely different. I mean we were little babies when we started. I know the band’s over like 25 years old I think. The band can rent a car. You know, the (band) living on its own, can vote and drink and everything.
Honestly my goal is just like I just want to see the band name on a screen-printed poster. I want to have a 7-inch out like that was that was the big goal or whatever.”
MG: What was scene like back when you started?
MW: “So, (back) then you know, we were in Denton, TX. It was really just like playing these house shows mostly, and the scene was really big and booming then. Right when Green Day was like blowing up and Rancid and all these bands.
My friend calls it the “Gilman Gold Rush.”It was something to sign all these punk bands. It was just this really exciting fun time to be a band in Denton Texas because Denton, this little suburb outside of Dallas where there was like one or two clubs.
So, there’s all these old houses that everybody lived in kind of, you know, just college kids and we were just throwing these house shows, and it became this really kind of like underground famous place to play a show at the time for touring bands. Touring bands, a lot of times, they would skip Dallas. They would skip a club show in Dallas to play Denton because – especially punk bands would do that – because that was such a popular place. It was just kind of like this known fact that like if you come, you do a show in Denton. A lot of times like this you’re like, you know, a smaller touring punk band. It’s going to be the best show of your whole tour and the word kind of got out.”
MW: “So, between all the houses we were living at, there was there was just plenty of opportunities to play and like kind of cut chops as it were. And so, we were just kind of like playing shows all the time and setting up shows and kind of making connections for when we were going to go out, ultimately later.
I would say, I mean, I would think this started up when I was like 20-ish, you know? Probably 20, like 19, 20… This is, this is before Something to Crow About. But yeah, this is maybe even before the Gamblers, like when the scene was just kind of getting started. But we were all in different bands and you know? Fadi and I were in a band together and then some of the other guys, we all, everybody kind of just started playing in multiple bands. And sometime, you know, over the course of a couple years, we all started Gamblers together.”
MG: I have always had an interest in the origin of band names. How did you come up with the name The Riverboat Gamblers?
MW: “I don’t remember exactly all except for kind of It was at the time, band names were really, and felt like, you know, our purview that, like a lot of bands were…there’s a lot of very…emo at the same time. The emo movement was like, really kind of up-and-coming. It was kind of like the pre, before emo kind of became what it is like now. Or what it would become.
But the emo movement was very like pretentious long-winded names, you know? I mean you know you name your band after some obscure French poets. Then there’s like a band called something like – and they might have been great, I don’t mean to disparage them – but their name was Fall into the Seer and the Yellow Leaf, and there was always very like very and on the flipside of that, the pop punk bands would kind of be like The Veronicas! or you know, the Choppy Boys or whatever. And so we were, The Riverboat Gamblers seemed like it stuck out in a weird way. At the time I think we liked it kind of sounded like a little bit more like oh this could be like a country band or like a classic rock band.
Yeah, it kind of fits there. Texas swagger to it which ultimately, it’s fine, but there was a period where it kind of bit us in the ass, because it was like everybody just assumed because we were from Texas and called The Riverboat Gamblers that we were like a stand-up bass rockabilly band. And everywhere we go it would be like ‘what rockabilly band in town are you going to play with?’ Rockabilly can be great and all, but at some point it was it was like…it was a little bit of effort in like no, that’s not, you know, that’s not what we want to do. We’re not in that world you know, and that was what it felt like and can’t accept it, that people the world kept trying to put us into that universe and was a little bit of effort to not stay in there.
But there was a lot of that in the Dallas area. There was at that time, especially.
IM: Yeah, Dallas had the Rockabilly thing. I feel like Dallas has like a huge skinhead thing too here as well but…Because there’s also less of a line between. But it was. It was. I remember being a kid and being freaked out going out to shows for sure for a while there. It was kind of a mix. I feel like there was. I feel like with any of that stuff, there’s always going to be some sort of, you know, people coming out of the woodwork. “
MG: Ian how did you get involved with the Gamblers?
IM: “I met the guys when I was probably like, the guys in Gamblers. I met them when I was probably about 15 and I caught the tail end of what Mike was talking about. Like the house shows, and the Gamblers were already a band. They were kind of playing around and yeah, I would go and see them. And then eventually, like, go up to them and I met all the guys. There was a record store across the street from my school [in Carrolton, TX, where MacDougall lived at the time] called CD Addict. And I’d go there after school and I bought a Buzzcocks record from, you know, it’s just like, oh, I’ve always wanted to check this out and I bought a Buzzcocks record and the guy behind the counter was like, oh man, well if you like this, you might really love my brother’s band. And that band was The Marked Men. And it was Jeff Burke’sbrother. [Jeff Burke plays bass player for The Marked Men. His brother, Mark Burke, opened CD Addict in Carrollton, and now owns Mad World Record Shop in Denton] And so, I came back, and I was like, I love this. He was like, well, they’re actually playing this weekend. He gave me a flyer and I got my buddy to give me a ride and we both went up to the show and saw The Marked Men. And I don’t remember who else was on the show. It might have been The Marked Men and The Dirty Sweets.
For me, when I was a kid going there like Mike, I had a little bit different of an experience with it because I didn’t live there and so I would come up. [Carrolton is just under 25 miles southeast of Denton] I mean, I spent like all of my time up here though and it was really cool to come up. And we had a really cool little group. I would come up whenever I got out of school, and everybody else is still working jobs or not working, and we would just all hang out at somebody’s house and then there would be a show there or something like that at night. And because it was a college town, every house would be having some party or something and so we would just like walk around and go in just like party hop and then eventually go to some show and then you end up back in somebody’s house staying the night or hanging out staying up listening to records and stuff.”
MG: Mike, what was Ian like, with him being much younger? Do you recall what you thought of the kid at time?
MB: “I was 10 years, yeah, about 10 years older. You could say who you know who you are. Again, kind of game meet game as far as like somebody that’s into the same type of music. It’s still, you know, even though that was defined as a cool Bohemian (place), Denton it wasn’t like this is the sort of specific style of punk music style of. Punk music and stuff that we were into was a little bit more obscure. So, you know, Ian kind of came in and like kind of had the same background of genres of rock and roll and punk music and stuff like that. So, it was really easy. Old soul too. And I’m very immature. So it was easy to kind of meet there and then when we recorded Something To CrowAbout and he didn’t play on that but right after, right after we recorded it, we started touring a whole bunch. He hopped in the van with us and our guitar player couldn’t do it because it was looking like an extensive amount of touring, and it was more than he could do for work and stuff. That’s when the band kind of went from being a weekend warrior band to kind of like a full-time deal. Ian was just graduating high school.“
MG: Ian, what was it like to tour so young, and being too young for some of the venues?
IM: “That was around was in the mid -90s. Around the first tour that I did with Gamblers, you know I was pretty young. I wasn’t 21. We toured with this band Burning Brides for the first tour that we did together and Burning Brides they had that advance money where they got money. We were still in the van and trailer but they had a bus on this tour. And so, there were a lot of shows where I couldn’t go in. I could go in and do sound checks, play the show, but I couldn’t hang out. And so they would let me come and hang out on the bus. I just watched TV in the back with Dimitri [Coats] the singer in Burning Brides. It was, you know, just hanging out.“
MG: So now you both are in the band. How long before you starting hitting the goals, like you had the 7 inch and next…
MW: “It felt pretty natural, but there was definitely some huge buzz surrounding Something To Crow About. We toured and toured on that record for a long time and shortly thereafter it was time for the next record. And so around then it’s when things really started changing because, you know, we wanted to do something bigger scope and to get out there. I don’t know, there were demos that were floating around that we had done and then there were, you know, we started working on songs and so we actually were talking about working with all these different producers and labels and you know, the people that really came out and really went above and beyond to show us that they cared were Volcom. Volcom Entertainment. They had a really great team of people, and you know we were kind of like gonna be their first dance. They were kind of basically treating us like it was going to be their first real big like “we’re going to go all in on this” (thing).
And that’s really where it started to feel like things were changing because all of a sudden we’re living in an apartment at the Oakwoods (Apartments in Los Angeles), which like actors and other bands and were there for like a month and we have an allowance and where So, all of a sudden we’re in LA for like, you know, for a month or more. I feel like it feels like so long that we were out there, but we all lived in an apartment together and we were out there, you know. It wasn’t uncommon. This was, like, a super common thing for bands to go out there and live at this giant apartment complex, that was for like entertainment industry folks. So, there was a lot of actors there. Here was I remember like being in a swimming pool with Pat, our old bass player and like all the kids from Malcolm (In The Middle) on the grounds. “
IM: “Like that, like sort of that thing where, yeah, like we go to the gym and there would be like Garrett Morris from Saturday Night Live. It’s crazy, but around then you know, and then afterwards, we were working on a record with this guy Andrew Murdock. Same things, as he went above and beyond to really prove that he wanted to do this record and because of that, we knew that we wanted to spend more time on Confusion. You know this is my first experience. I had recorded stuff in the past, (but this was) my first experience like, you know, working with the guys and Gamblers in the studio and it was a lot of fun. We had a lot of fun working on that record.“
MW: “During that was that was that during a time it was a cool experience. Not that I thought like oh it’s going to be like this every time. I think I knew it was kind of special but now in retrospect like wow what a unique experience.”
IM: “Cool, weird, lucky thing that we got to do that. A lot of bands maybe don’t get to do that. And you know, we didn’t really get to do it yet. But it was, yeah, it was what years were those? That’s when there was still money in the music industry. Remember that one, 2005 maybe? [Mike adds: “yeah something like that “].”
MG: When did you notice the crowds getting bigger. When the floors where you were earlier on the bill were filling up? Was out slow or all of a sudden?
IM: “It was at around the time that we started this touring constantly and there was headlining stuff, and also a lot of like support act stuff. But for big bands, where we were actually playing, we went from playing little clubs to getting to open up for bigger bands in really big rooms. And noticing the people were staying for the early acts and I think that was just like from touring.”
MW: “It took a really long time to get to get used to that. I think maybe it was everybody else acquiesced easier. But for me, it took a long time to get used to, like figuring out the animal of those big stages far away from the crowd. There’s like less people to try and figure out how to translate that. To do what we had been doing, what I had been doing in those little clubs, and to try and translate that to giant things. Well, it was slow. Like you notice here and there in some towns, I mean there’d be little pockets of like ohh wow we just kind of leveled upin this one area.
For us was really slow. We never really had an overnight kind of thing you know and never any like real…umm… navigating all of it was pretty confusing and weird and still is just the business side of music. The business part is something we’re still kind of, you know…I mean I think we’re more aware of it now but now of course it’s changed so much but back then it was, like, confusing. Really confusing.“
MG: How soon did you get out of Texas and start doing national tours, criss-crossing the country?
IM: “That was like immediately. I mean like the first tour that I did with Gamblers like we, it was a full U.S. tour and all of these things that we did when they were all like we would go out like everywhere. And that’s one thing. It’s like getting out of Texas. I remember that always being like, oh, we got to start this tour in New York. So, we would drive 24 hours from Austin or Denton and go straight to go and meet some tour out in like. New York or like Morongo, California…that’s where we started the X and Rollins tour. And these things would go all over the place We would go all over the place and then we’d hop over to Europe and play everywhere you possibly could over there too.“
MG: What was the first huge tour and was there any nervousness or sense of starstruckness?
IM: “I think you know like we the the one of the like one of the bigger ones that we went on early on like we toured with Flogging Molly and that was like that was a pretty big one…but there was no like starstruckness with that. I think when we had when we toured with X and the Rollins Band. That was when it was like, like, holy shit, there’s that dude from Black Flag. And then that’s X Oh my God.
And then it was cool to the eventually like befriend these people. Like, I remember an experience in DC and being at the 9:30 Club and sitting there and talking with Ian McKaye and Henry Rollins, like about about Eater. You know, this old 70s punk band. I was wearing an Eater T-shirt and they were like, “Can you believe that there’s kids wearing an Eater T-shirt?” We were talking about that. And I was like, Oh my God, this is so crazy. I got pictures from that still from that night and I look like I’m a child. And then we toured with Joan Jett and that was another very like, wow. “
MG: And were they all pretty cool with you?
IM: “Yeah, everybody, we got along with pretty much everybody we’ve toured with. Yeah, yeah, for the most part. That’s the cool thing with this bandandits experiences. Not only are you meeting all of these band people, but you’re meeting the crew as well that worked for these folks. And like the world is so, so small, you know. Because I mean, like eventually, I started working in in crew stuff, doing tour management stuff. And you know, lifer types, you’re going to run into these people like 10 years from now. And it’s been pretty neat because it’s all been from, you know, our time with Gamblers. And I’ve worked with some of these crew members that we met in the early days when I was a teenager and, you know, worked with them like, you know, 10 or 15 years later.“
MG: Looking back have your views on the scene changed? Are you still as eager?
MW: “Yeah, well, I mean like I think for me it’s, you know, getting older and still doing it and still feeling like there is no room and stuff to say. And the goals are a lot different, like all that hype and stuff is not…you know we’re not young anymore. So, the only reason to keep doing it, not that we were doing it for any other reason before, but the only reason to do it really when you’re older is because you still really love it, and it’s you like creating music and performing it and stuff like that.
I mean, you know, it’s less about like, well let’s get out there and conquer the world, touring and stuff. It’s more like let’s keep it real pure, like let’s just make some cool shit because there’s not any pressure of like being super, super full-time with it in that way. There’s not any you know…we’re kind of on our own right now. There’s just not that like vice-like pressure of like, well, we gotta tour six months out of the year and we have to, you know, fulfill this record, by this date, by this time for these people. It’s more just like, no, we wanna do it. So, no time limit. It’s just, it’s just for the for the love of the game.
IM: As we got older, people go off and do other things and start families, but we’ve always been writing music together. We had all this time, like our last record came out in 2012. And I mean, we have songs from back then that didn’t get released, that only for the sheer fact that they didn’t really fit kind of the vibe of the record. It wasn’t like they were kind of throwaway things.
So, we’re kind of revisiting a lot of stuff and we’re also. I mean Mike and I and Fadi and Rob, you know, like we constantly have these ideas that we’re in little song demos and stuff that we’re shooting each other. It’s a cool thing.
Everyone’s like, you know, the guys with kids, the kids are old enough now that that, you know, they can kind of get away for a little bit to hop in the studio and knock out some stuff or we can go and do these weekends. And so right now it’s sort of like, you know, picking up the pieces a lot. For things, you know, because all of our labels that we had releases on, they’ve all dissolved.
So going back and getting these records back available for everybody that want them and making sure that you know…like Something To Crow About was out of print for, you know, over 15, close to 20 years. And you know, it’s kind of like a shame that nobody could buy it at the merch table, because it’s still like 80% of our set are those songs.
And so we got that back together and we’re going to rerelease Confusion as well, or repress it. And we’re also just like we did a 7-inch last year. Over this last year for the songs, one of them is super old, but you know, nobody heard it, so it’s brand new. There’s that new generation and hopefully you know hopefully also reading Dying Scene will help our little tiny bit but just getting out there and yeah word of mouth.
MW: You know, like what is? I’m just excited to make new stuff. You know it’s always…this band has been around for so long and there’s like a core of what we are, what we keep. We’ve always kind of evolved and tried to do a little bit different stuff and you know now being so old and like it’s kind of like I said like I feel this real…there’s no… I don’t really feel a lot of pressure that I might have even like 10 years ago of what a record should or shouldn’t be. Like I have in my head some stuff that I want, some parameters that I think that we should kind of be, that the Riverboat Gamblers are in my opinion. But it’s still it’s still really open and it’s really like the thought not that we were ever like, you know, overthinking like well what what are people going to like? But now the thought doesn’t really necessarily cross my mind so much. It’s more just like, man, let’s just get in there and make some cool stuff and that feels pretty good.”
MG: Mike, I was incredibly impressed with your energy level at the show at Reggies [late 2022). Are you finding more aches after a show and are you more careful now about that type of thing?
MW: “I find aches and I’m 48 and I find aches without playing a show. Like, I’m definitely stretching. I’m stretching as we’re talking right now because I’m about to go into the studio and just knowing that I’m going to be on my feet for a long time, I’m making sure I get my stretches in.
I’m just a little bit more careful. I think, when the mood strikes me, I’ll do whatever I feel like. here’s a little bit more like, let me look and see where I’m going to fall. Well, there’s a little voice in my head that says, like, how we can’t recover like we used to. Yeah, you know, the Wolverine’s healing factor. And now? Not so much.“
The Riverboat Gamblers recently announced its Inaugural “AC Hell Festival” set for October 14, 2023. The band will be playing Something to Crow About in its entirety. The bill also features, amongst others, The Starving Wolves, The Get Lows and User Uauthorized. Further information on the event and tickets can be found here.
The third and final day of Riot Fest had a bit more rain and clouds but that seemed totally fitting for the main headliner of the day, The Cure, and Dying Scene has photos for you in case you missed it. We are also showcasing some other amazing bands, including AFI, Earth Crisis, The Bronx, […]
The third and final day of Riot Fest had a bit more rain and clouds but that seemed totally fitting for the main headliner of the day, The Cure, and Dying Scene has photos for you in case you missed it. We are also showcasing some other amazing bands, including AFI, Earth Crisis, The Bronx, Gorilla Biscuits and Fleshwater!
Fleshwater is an alternative post-hardcore band from Georgetown, Massachusetts. Anthony DiDio and Matt Wood are also members of hardcore group Vein.fm.
Straight-edge hardcore band Earth Crisis brought a blazing and intense performance.
The Bronx! If you are lucky enough to embark on Flogging Molly’s Salty Dog Cruise in November you’ll see them there!
Finishing off his three-peat performance weekend, Walter Schreifels and the Gorilla Biscuits had no shortage of energy!
I first saw AFI at Riot Fest 2013; ten years later they still put on one of the best shows. If you haven’t seen them live yet you are really missing out.
The Cure closed out the night with a mesmerizing concert to an emotional crowd of fans that waited for this moment all day.
Check out the full gallery below and revisit day one and day two!
The final day of Riot Fest 2022. What a journey it has been! Do you ever get that post-concert blues? Because I sure was feeling it after Riot Fest. Check out our photo gallery of Save Face, Mom Jeans. and long-time favorites Less Than Jake. Mom Jeans. is an indie rock/emo band from California. Time […]
The final day of Riot Fest 2022. What a journey it has been! Do you ever get that post-concert blues? Because I sure was feeling it after Riot Fest. Check out our photo gallery of Save Face, Mom Jeans. and long-time favorites Less Than Jake.
Mom Jeans. is an indie rock/emo band from California. Time to get your sad on!
Another first for me was seeing Save Face and I’m so glad I did. The red jumpsuit-wearing post-hardcore/emo band released their debut album Merci with Epitaph Records in July 2018.
If you’re a ska fan then you are well familiar with Less Than Jake. They formed in 1992 and been making waves ever since. Check them out in the full gallery below, along with some neat shots of their toilet paper shooter (yes, you read that correctly)!
Don’t forget to check out Riot Fest day one coverage and day two!
Is it already that time of year again!? Riot Fest is back and we have three days worth of photo galleries of some of your favorite bands and some up and coming bands you should put on your radar! Check out some of the bands from the first day of Riot Fest and give them […]
Is it already that time of year again!? Riot Fest is back and we have three days worth of photo galleries of some of your favorite bands and some up and coming bands you should put on your radar! Check out some of the bands from the first day of Riot Fest and give them some love.
FEA is a Chicana all-female band from San Antonio, TX. Produced by Laura Jane Grace, they debuted their self-titled LP in 2016. FEA set the bar early on for the first day of Riot Fest with their raw, fierce, and powerfully feminist punk rock energy.
New York-based garage punk band The Bobby Lees quickly become one of my favorite bands of the year after hearing “Guttermilk” for the first time. In true punk rock fashion their drummer, Macky Bowman, ran laps around the stage in nothing but his tighty whities (and that was just a warmup).
Code Orange is a sludgy, thrashy, metalcore punk rock band that obviously cannot be defined by only one single genre. Their intense set was one not to miss.
Yard Act is a fun post-punk British band. Their newest single “The Trench Coat Museum” was released in July and co-produced by Gorillaz member Remi Kabaka Jr.
Walter Schreifels had a particularly busy Riot Fest weekend not only performing with Quicksand on day one, but also Rival Schools and Gorilla Biscuits on the following days. For its 30th anniversary, Quicksand played their 1993 album Slipin its entirety.
Turnstile was of the headliners for the first day (along with the Foo Fighters). Check out the rest of the photos from the first day below, and look out for our coverage of day two and three of Riot Fest!
Festival season is in full swing, and one of the biggest European fests of the Summer is just around the corner. Punk Rock Holiday is an annual event held in Tolmin, Slovenia, a small but beautiful European country nestled between Italy and Croatia. PRH, contained on a site near The River Soča, attracts thousands each year […]
Festival season is in full swing, and one of the biggest European fests of the Summer is just around the corner. Punk Rock Holiday is an annual event held in Tolmin, Slovenia, a small but beautiful European country nestled between Italy and Croatia. PRH, contained on a site near The River Soča, attracts thousands each year for its unique blend of camping in natural beauty, a tight-knit community of regular attendees, and fantastic lineups that features some of the biggest names in punk rock, as well as a batch of some of the most exciting up-and-coming bands from around the world. This year’s edition is back, featuring another behemoth lineup from August 7-11 in what will surely be another PRH for the ages.
As a person who has been regularly attending punk and other music fests and shows for roughly a decade, PRH has always been on my radar. In 2023, I will finally be able to attend and take in the music, the sites, the community and hopefully provide the Dying Scene readers with coverage of some classic names, and bands you may have never heard of! Before packing up for Slovenia, here are some bands I’m most looking forward to seeing.
Rob’s Must-See Punk Rock Holiday Sets
Pennywise
Pennywise is a veteran of the festival scene, but seeing them at Punk Rock Holiday seems like a completely different beast. One of the trademarks of the festival is that the stage features no barrier, instead opting for a connected mini stage where fans can stage dive off of and interact with the band. This feature comes into the spotlight whenever Pennywise plays as the crowd devolves into absolute bedlam. Just check out their last performance at PRH 2019, featuring road flares, circle pits, and a full-on invasion of the stage.
Even for those who have seen Pennywise many a time, myself included, a performance at Punk Rock Holiday is must-see.
Maid of Ace
One of my most anticipated sets from a band that may be under the radar for some is the excellent band of Hastings, UK natives, Maid of Ace. The band, which consists of sisters Alison Cara Elliott (Lead vocals/Guitar), Anna Coral Elliott (Vocals/Guitar), Amy Catherine Elliott (Bass/Vocals), and Abby Charlotte Elliott (Drums), has been releasing ferocious music and putting on fantastic shows since 2014. Their most recent release, Live Fast or Die, was named the 6th best album of the year by Vive Le Rock in 2020. If you haven’t checked out this band, give them a try!
With the band releasing a few singles in recent years, hopefully we aren’t too far away from a full release. Either way, I’ll be checking them out on the beach stage at Punk Rock Holiday.
Cigar
Who doesn’t love a good skate-punk set? Cigar, one of the underappreciated acts of the 90s skate punk boom is hot off the release of their comeback album The Visitor in 2022 (read our review here) and has been hitting the road touring. Cigar is a band I’ve never had the chance to see live and I’m excited to see the band play a set of their trademark fast, fun and ferocious tunes. Let us know in the comments if you’re into Cigar, if you’re happy they’re back and if you’ve checked out the latest release from the pioneering group.
Scowl
One of the best parts of music festivals is checking out bands who have just recently released an exciting new project. The group that fills that niche for me at this year’s PRH is Scowl, who is fresh off their release of a new EP titled Psychic Dance Routine which saw the band generate a fair amount of buzz. This buzz has resulted in an odd but momentous past year for the band which has seen them play big live shows like Coachella and opening for Limp Bizkit, but also performing at a Sonic Drive-In in New Jersey. Check out one of their recent music videos to see if it’s up your alley.
It has been a wild ride for a band that released their first set of material in just 2019. If it continues they may be more regular performers of mainstream festivals like Coachella and Lollapalooza. It should be interesting checking them out at PRH to see if their hype will translate to a triumphant set in Slovenia.
The rest of the Punk Rock Holiday Lineup
While this is just a short list of some of the bands I’m most looking forward to, there are of course a number of other exciting acts, including but not limited to H20, Frank Turner and the Sleeping Souls, Pulley, Dropkick Murphys, etc. If you were attending PRH, who would be your can’t-miss sets? Let us know in the comments and stay tuned for coverage of the event from yours truly.
Continuing with our Riot Fest 2022 coverage with a few bands from day two! In case you missed it, click here to see my day one recap. We’re starting off with the hardcore punk band War on Women. This female-fronted band delves heavily into political and feminist issues. Shawna Potter is the very definition of […]
Continuing with our Riot Fest 2022 coverage with a few bands from day two! In case you missed it, click here to see my day one recap.
We’re starting off with the hardcore punk band War on Women. This female-fronted band delves heavily into political and feminist issues. Shawna Potter is the very definition of fierce; definitely see this band live if you get the chance…and, head’s up they will be touring with fellow hardcore punk band Cancer Bats this fall for an East Coast U.S. tour.
Next are The Front Bottoms, an emo/indie rock band from New Jersey. They released their third installment of their popular Grandma EP series titled Theresa on September 2, 2022.
Long-time emo band Sunny Day Real Estate made a stop at Riot Fest for their fourth reunion tour. Their 1994 debut studio album Diary has been considered one of the defining albums of the Midwest emo genre.
Check out the full gallery below and Part One of day two here!
In 2001, I moved to the Northern English city of Leeds, in part because of the live music venue, The Cockpit. This small venue put on all my favourite bands of the time, and had a long history of putting on great live music. I worked in another venue in the city on weekends, so […]
In 2001, I moved to the Northern English city of Leeds, in part because of the live music venue, The Cockpit. This small venue put on all my favourite bands of the time, and had a long history of putting on great live music. I worked in another venue in the city on weekends, so Tuesday night was my big night out, and Tuesday nights were Slam Dunk at The Cockpit. A solid mix of ska punk, pop punk, emo, rock, metal and whatever else alternative kids were listening to in the early 2000’s.
So here I am, 21 years later. The Cockpit has long since shut down and whilst the Slam Dunk Club Night plays on at its new home, the Key Club, it’s the festival that I am at today. Now held across two cities with more than 50 bands, across five stages, things have really grown from that two room sweaty Tuesday night under a railway arch.
The lineup covers a wide range of punk and alternative music, but because I’m old and stuck in my ways, I’m mostly staying at the Dickies stage, which is the main stage this year, hosting The Suicide Machines, The Bronx, Hot Water Music, The Vandals, Streetlight Manifesto, Pennywise, The Interrupters, The Dropkick Murphy’s and headliners Sum 41.
I’d originally bought tickets on the basis that Rancid were headlining, but they pulled out for undisclosed reasons. Then support from the Mighty Mighty Bosstones collapsed along with the band. Things were looking bleak, and I actually looked into selling my ticket, only to have two of my close friends and original Slam Dunk allies to buy tickets, so it was to be a big day out for us old guys.
The venue for the festival is Temple Newsam House. For further personal historic links, this was the site of the first music festival I ever went to (V98), and a big part of my musical taste was formed in these park lands. The benefit of this location for me is that it is close to home, the downside is that it still takes an hour and a half to get in, as traffic is not well managed and everything is already getting expensive (£10 to park in a field, £10 for a bus), I’d planned to ride my bike to the event, but for three of us, that didn’t make much sense.
Inside the arena, the stages are far enough apart that there is little noise mix from bands and practicalities like bars, toilets and food concessions are plentiful, the addition of a separate “real ale” bar was a pleasant surprise, and I managed to spend an impressive amount in this tent after and before every band. The tent also provides some welcome shade from the unexpected sun that I was totally unprepared for!
So, on to the music…
Hot Water Music, a band that I’ve discovered backwards through Chuck Ragan’s solo work, come out impassioned and full of energy, although the crowd are a little flat with it being an early set. Despite this we get a solid effort from the band, though possibly things are held back a little by a lack of catchy hooks and sing along choruses in the songs performed. Finishing with “Trusty Chords” gets the crowd interested from hearing a song they know. Whether they know the song from Epitaph‘s Punk-o-Rama compilation, or it’s just a favourite is hard to say, but in a pre-internet world, compilations from Independent punk labels are how a lot of us discovered new bands, especially those that didn’t tour the small northern venues like the Cockpit!
A quick trip to the bar revealed the sound of Punk Rock Factory carrying on the wind from the Rock Sound Stage. I was familiar with the band from their Youtube videos of punked up, harmonized pop covers, and as a father of small children, I found myself singing along to “Let It Go”, whilst appropriately stood at a urinal. If I have to play Disney songs on long journeys, then at least they can have crushing guitars as well, and hopefully, like some kind of gateway drug, this leads my kids down the path of home made tattoos and living in a van (or some other punk cliché).
The Vandals took to the stage with a not too reassuring “We’ll do our best”, and whilst I appreciate their honesty and openness, first song “Café 405”, is out of time and out of tune.
Three songs in, things are starting to tighten up, “People That Are Going To Hell” gets people moving a little, but on the whole, the crowd remain static. “And Now We Dance” raises the energy, “The New You” keeps it going, but there’s just not enough there to hold the attention of the majority of the crowd. My friends desert me to hit the real ale bar, I hate myself for giving up on the mighty Vandals, but cold beer and the Cancer Bats on the Jagermeister stage lure me away. I’m not massively familiar with the Cancer Bats, but the wall of noise, that I could feel through the ground and see vibrating through my pint has led me to listen to more of their back catalogue.
I had a dream the night before Slam Dunk that I took all my family to see Streetlight Manifesto, but instead of their usual set list, they played a really challenging, four hour Jazz set, stopping only to enjoy a sit down meal, where they served soup from tea pots. I was trying desperately to convince my family that really, they’re a great band, whilst simultaneously enjoying the weird spectacle.
Fortunately, there’s no Jazz today as Streetlight Manifesto, a later addition to the bill, take to the stage. There’s a clear sense of excitement in the crowd as the eight piece tear through classic hits “We Will Fall Together” and “The Three Of Us” along with lesser known tracks with a level of energy normally reserved for headline shows. The crowd sings along, dances, moshes; it’s a perfect blend of everything you want on a summers day. The only slight letdown is Tomas Kalnoky shouting “this is the big finish!” and then promptly not playing “Keasbey Nights.” I get the reasons, and I support them in letting go of a song that doesn’t really represent the band, but for many in the crowd it’s the song they came to hear and there’s visible confusion as the band leave the stage, though encores aren’t really a thing at 16:30 on a festival stage are they?
I last saw Pennywise in 1999. So its been a while. Late last year I read Jim Lindberg’s book “Punk Rock Dad,” which renewed my interest in the band, so I’m excited to see this set, and if the number of Pennywise T-shirts I’m seeing are anything to go by, so are the crowd.
From the get go, the band are on full attack. There’s no sign of age in the band and the crowd are loving it. Covers of AC/DC’s “TNT” and “Breed” by Nirvana continues the energy. Early songs “Pennywise” and “Society” lead to Lindberg lamenting to having been “doing this for thirty years,” but it’s not slowing them down.
The crowd holds middle fingers aloft for “Fuck Authority,” and whilst it feels cheesy, a load of middle aged men swearing at the sky, its kind of cathartic, and hey, it’s a great song! Who doesn’t enjoy feeling like an angry teenager (teenagers maybe?).
A cover of “Stand By Me,” which closed 1992 album Wild Card/ A Word From The ‘Wise surprised me, as I was certain it was Lagwagon, so I learned something important today if nothing else.
Set closer “Bro-Hymn” has exactly the effect you’d expect. Huge “wooahs” from the crowd, that epic bass riff and impassioned singing along. Obviously it’s a great song, but I think it hits harder now, after the last few years and I think everyone can take some strength from this song and apply it to someone they’ve lost.
The Interrupters carry a strange position in my mind. I love their songs, they’re great live, but there’s just something not quite right. Something doesn’t sit right with me, and I hate myself for being so negative, but its all a bit too clean cut for me. Like it’s the soundtrack to Disney film where some hopelessly good looking, talented young people form a ska punk band and take over the world with a weird crusty mentor behind them (Called Tim?).
Opener “Take Back the Power” feels stronger than normal. Maybe its that they’re more established, or maybe my cynicism is fading? Either way I enjoy it for what it is, well polished, perfectly-performed ska pop-punk.
Ignoring a weird segue about how they all used to bathe together… “She got arrested” gets a great crowd sing along, and is probably my favourite of their songs, not least as it was my introduction to the band back in 2017 and a great example of the quality story telling in the lyrics of some of their songs.
A cover medley of “Keep ‘Em Separated”/ “Linoleum”/ “Ruby Soho” gets the crowd going before surprise high point for me, a cover of Bad Religion‘s “Sorrow,” which goes down well with the crowd (For reference Bad Religion played Slam Dunk in 2019, as did the Interrupters).
The band finishes with “She’s Kerosene,” keeping the party going, the crowd moving and generally capturing the moment nicely. People are drunk, its sunny, the people want to dance and the Interrupters deliver.
The Dropkick Murphys take to a stage with a full length riser, done out to look like a stone wall, but there is a notable absence. Al Barr, it is announced, has stayed home to care for his sick mother. Ken Casey steps up for lead vocal duties and the evening begins with the sound of bagpipes on the cool evening breeze.
“State of Massachusetts” gets the kind of crowd reaction you’d expect from a classic pop hit or a song about Yorkshire, such passion for such a challenging subject is strange, but hey, it’s a great song and the drunk, bouncy, dancey crowd are loving it.
“Barroom Hero” is introduced as the first song the band ever wrote, which is a bit of trivia I didn’t know, but I remember it from way back in the 90s, so I guess that makes sense. The crowd offer weak “Oi! Oi! Oi!” effort which is a disappointment, maybe the crowd aren’t as au fait with shouting Oi! as I’d like? Though I accept my drive to shout “Oi!” is probably higher than most.
The slip up begins with the instruction to sing along to the 1937 hit “I’ve Still Got Ninety-Nine” by the Monroe Brothers, which although an undeniably good song, probably isn’t too familiar to the crowd today. On the upside, we’re promised an acoustic album in September, which is one to look out for. Whether it’s new material or reimagined classics has not been confirmed, but hopefully there will be an associated tour.
“Rose Tattoo” brings the sing along from the crowd, but lacks the momentum to get the crowd moving. This is exacerbated by the big screen showing bored, static faces in the crowd for the first time. Fortunately, “I’m Shipping Up To Boston” brings the party back before the end of the set. I’ve never seen such passion for a missing wooden leg, as the crowd goes nuts, with crowd surfers from all directions riding above the waves of the crowd. All parties appear to have legs intact, so that’s good.
Headliners Sum-41 were a bit of a quandary for me. The first album was an important soundtrack to my late teens/ early 20s and I saw them play in Leeds twice in 2002, but I haven’t listened to their music since Does This Look Infected from the same year.
A bit of pre-show research suggested they have had seven further releases, including 2019s Order In Decline, but in the spirit of openness, I’ve not felt inspired to check these out.
The band come out to a stage with blood-soaked Marshall speaker cabinets, a giant skull, jets of fire and “Motivation” from the first album, All Killer, No Filler. More people than I expected are really into it, though competition with Deaf Havana and the Nova Twins is limited and the other stages have closed.
The stage is set for a night of big rock and I’d like to say I invested more effort into rediscovering Sum 41, but too much sun, too much beer and a designated driver who wanted to beat the traffic meant we made an early exit.
Muddy Roots 2023 is officially in the books, and with this being my first trip out to Cookeville, TN for MRMF, man was it a hell of an introduction. If you aren’t familiar with what the Muddy Roots crew has brewing in the middle of rural Tennessee, think of a DIY version of Bonaroo, but […]
Muddy Roots 2023 is officially in the books, and with this being my first trip out to Cookeville, TN for MRMF, man was it a hell of an introduction.
If you aren’t familiar with what the Muddy Roots crew has brewing in the middle of rural Tennessee, think of a DIY version of Bonaroo, but way sicker and way more affordable. Free camping virtually anywhere on the premises and a wide-open BYOB policy have helped build a reputation valuing the music and community over large profits, something I appreciated just as much as the huge headliners they’ve attracted in recent years.
The huge headliners in question for this year’s installment were GWAR, Suicidal Tendencies, and Cro Mags, all of which were live firsts for myself. There wasn’t a drop-off in big names either after the top 3, with Amigo the Devil and DRI also playing. And, with the exception of Daikaiju and Night Talkers, almost all artists were, at least personally, live firsts.
The atmosphere was perfect, the music was perfect, everything was perfect. Whatever they’re doing out in Cookeville surely seems to be working. The shuttles to a nearby private waterfall help folks truly appreciate the gorgeous and unique scenery of Eastern Tennessee, while the music starts early and continues late into the night. From bluegrass to sludge-metal, punk rock to rockabilly, local act to international touring musician, Muddy Roots did as good a job as any in bringing people together from all over to celebrate the music we all love.
With the festival lineup growing larger and more diverse each year, I felt coverage of Muddy Roots would be most productive in highlighting some of the weekend favorites, rather than each individual performer. Below you’ll find the eight artists I most enjoyed seeing.
I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Night Talkers a handful of times, most recently opening for The Last Gang at Music City’s best punk bar, the Cobra. And when local ska-punk legends Stuck Lucky were a last minute Covid scratch, onlookers were graced with the Night Talkers signature style of shredding guitar solos and fast, in-your-face rock ‘n’ roll. Although it was a disappointment missing the always entertaining Stuck Lucky, Night Talkers very much filled their shoes, much to the pleasure of the packed-out Wood Stage crowd.
Unless I’m mistaken (which is always a possibility), this was Night Talkers’ Muddy Roots debut. They’ve recently, as of the last year and a half or so, emerged as a local favorite of mine and I’ve been glad to see some local dudes garner interest both around town and out of state.
Hans Gruber and the Die Hards was one of those pesky touring bands that has somehow alluded my radar for several years now. I’ve known who they were for a while, but it wasn’t until the Muddy Roots lineup was announced that I hopped on board with these guys. It sucks to think that I’ve missed out for this long on probably the most entertaining band of the weekend.
Between every song, it seemed someone was switching instruments, whether it was lead-singer Rosey Armstrong switching from saxophone to some sort of handheld percussion instrument, or her husband Kurt dropping the bass and grabbing the traffic cone trombone, these dudes were all over the place, both musically and literally. I couldn’t take my eyes off their set, not only for the fast, hard-hitting punk rock, but for the stage antics that I only managed to capture a fraction of in my shots.
I’ve found the band whose duty it is to fill the Masked Intruder void that was left with the hiatus of everyone’s favorite masked punkers. The Jasons have emerged, assless chaps and all, with their own unique blend of villanous attire and Ramones-core punk rock. Humorous, sexy, terrifying, they’ve got the look figured out, and the music is in no way lacking.
Their closing came in the form of a sort of response to the Menzingers‘ ‘I Don’t Wanna Be an Asshole Anymore’ titled ‘I Wanna Be an Asshole’. And it sent the crowd into nothing short of a frenzy.
Waxed was a band I decided to break my punk-rock-only policy for, and it was probably the best decision I could have made. The experience that’s been gained in their 10+ year history really presented itself with their mastery of stage performance. The crowd was as rowdy as any I’d seen all weekend, even keeping up with the obvious contenders in Suicidal Tendencies and GWAR (although I’ve gotta rank it behind Cro Mags saying as an actual ambulance had to rush to the pit during their set).
Trending more towards modern hardcore than the skatepunk I normally fancy, I did see shades of Turnstile in both sound and performance from these guys. It was obvious from the packed mob of onlookers that a group of fan-favorites was about to take the stage.
Not much else really needs to be said here other than Tim Barry did what Tim Barry does. He put on a hell of a fuckin’ show, split pretty evenly between being up on stage and down on ground level with the rest of the crowd. The sentiment and storytelling were there, giving meaning and insight to the ever-attentive crowd. All the favorites were heard, at least all my favorites, including ‘Fine Foods Market’ much of Rivanna Junction, all culminating with the obvious closer, ‘Avoiding Catatonic Surrender’.
If were going off of technicality here, I guess I had already previously seen Tim Barry’s Fest 20 set last October, but the view sucked and I was rushing off to another set before Barry was halfway through his. This was my first real Tim Barry show and it satisfied every live-show craving I had to see my favorite Americana writer.
I’ve covered multiple Daikaiju attacks, being that they aren’t merely live performances, but attacks. Prior to each show, I seem to forget why they are my favorite band to photograph, and maybe favorite live band overall. Fire always holds a prominent place in performances, almost as prominent as crowd interaction.
Every crowd interaction possibility that I can devise occurred at the Wood Stage, during the late hours of Muddy Roots night one. Lead guitarist Secret Man led the crowd onslaught, riding the shoulders of one crowd member, recruiting others to play instruments, and surfing the remaining spectators, all while playing seemingly neverending surf-punk riffs. The tattered remains of each member’s Hawaiian stage uniform makes a whole lot more sense post-attack. The only antic I had yet to witness (until this performance that is) was their ritualistic tour van arson, which was done almost ceremonially to close their performance.
Having lived in Tennessee for much of my adult life, Suicidal Tendencies and Cro Mags have been bands of legend, with my only hope of seeing live performances being out-of-state travel. So I was beyond stoked seeing the lineup announcement featuring two of the founders of Hardcore. What I was unaware of, however, was the amount of talent and musical experience that would grace the main stage late during the first night.
Beginning with Mike Muir and Dean Pleasants, Muir being the only original member and Pleasants’ now outlasting that of former guitarist Rocky George. The two veterans recruited their asses off, bringing in the next generation of great musicians in Ben Weinman, Tye Trujillo, and Greyson Nekrutman. Weinman, formerly of Dillinger Escape Plan, Trujillo, whose last name may be recognizable as son of RnR Hall of Fame Metallica member Robert Trujillo, and Nekrutman, a worthy replacement for current Offspring drummer Brandon Pertzborn.
During the show, Muir’s years did not show a bit, while Trujillo portrayed a musicianship that didn’t seem to align with the mere 18 years he’s lived. Trujillo boasted some of the fastest, yet cleanest bass playing I’ve witnessed, while Weinman and Nekrutman’s speed was equally impressive. The current Suicidal lineup was, in many ways, the epitome of punk: a group from different backgrounds, genres, and even generations, producing genre-mending music.
While Suicidal Tendencies had gone through an evolution, Cro Mags appeared to be the fast, wreckless, fuckin’ insane punk band that I had pictured from 40 years prior. As was the case with Mike Muir, Harley Flanagan’s age was not a factor in his ability to utilize the entirety of the stage within a matter of seconds.
What was immediately obvious was these guys were veterans, they knew exactly what they were doing up there. The crowd excitement gave this the feel of a small-club East coast show rather than an outdoor festival in rural Tennessee.
There you have it, a pretty good wrap-up of my Muddy Roots experience in a nutshell. However, only so much can be portrayed through word and photograph. The community atmosphere was just as enjoyable as the big headliners, but don’t get me wrong, the music was as rad as ever, making me proud to live so close to something so special.
I feel it to be a punishable offense that the Nashville Dying Scene branch has failed to cover Muddy Roots in the past. I hope to have the privilege to cover MRMF far more frequently in the future because it really is as special as I hope I’ve portrayed. Scroll on down for a bunch of shots from the weekend. As always, thanks for checking out the site. Cheers!
Fire Sale can serve as the very definition for the term ‘supergroup’. Matt Riddle has cemented himself as a household name among even novice punk fans thanks to being a founding member of Face to Face, as well as playing with No Use for a Name, Implants, Pulley and 22 Jacks. Chris Swinney most notably […]
Fire Sale can serve as the very definition for the term ‘supergroup’. Matt Riddle has cemented himself as a household name among even novice punk fans thanks to being a founding member of Face to Face, as well as playing with No Use for a Name, Implants, Pulley and 22 Jacks. Chris Swinney most notably played guitar in The Ataris for close to 3 years, but also formed a band I happened across years ago called Chronic Chaos. Lead singer Pedro Aida (who as of writing this is on tour in Europe with Nathan Gray and the Iron Roses) currently plays with Ann Beretta and formerly played with Fun Size. And drummer Matt Morris has become well-known in the Dallas-Fort Worth area for his time playing with Darlington and Weaver Street. Not to mention cover art was done by Mark DeSalvo (NOFX‘s Heavy Petting Zoo, NUFAN’s Making Friends, Lagwagon’s Let’s Talk About Feelings, etc.) and recording was done at The Blasting Room with Bill Stevenson and Jason Livermore. So basically, that extremely lengthy and unnecessarily long opening paragraph was all to emphasize the lengthy resumes these guys have built and just how much talent this band has.
And although, Swinney and Riddle are all for embracing the ‘supergroup’ title, as we later discuss, I think these guys have something that most groups, no matter members’ past resumes, struggle to find. These guys have a unique chemistry and one-of-a-kind sound that makes me ecstatic as to where these guys are headed.
In talking with Swinney and Riddle, it quickly emerged to me how complementary each member was to the other three during the songwriting process. Swinney and Riddle each brought they’re own brands of songwriting expertise, Swinney with a very technical grasp on songwriting and performing through going to school for music theory, while Riddle described having a more sloppy, punk rock-esque playing and writing style. Then add in the more pop-punk influenced Aida who writes perfectly melodic vocals, and Morris whose able to tie everything in with his hard-hitting yet perfectly executed percussion, and you have a band that should be given far more thought and consideration than the shallow term ‘supergroup’ often entails.
After talking with these guys, I can’t wait to hear what releases and show announcements come next (hint: we talk about that). It was an absolute pleasure talking to two guys who were members of bands that significantly shaped my childhood. Check out their newest EP A Fool’s Errand and keep up with these guys for soon-to-be-announced show dates and more new music.
(Editor’s note: The following has been edited and condensed for clarity’s sakebecause a good chunk of this interview was just three guys shooting the shit.)
Dying Scene (Nathan Kernell NastyNate): I really appreciate you guys sitting down with me. Where are you guys calling from?
Chris Swinney: I am in Muncie, Indiana, and if you ask enough questions you’ll realize that we started this during the pandemic. We all live in different states so we do things a little differently than everybody else.
Matt Riddle: Yeah has band-demic already been used?
Swinney: I think I’ve seen it tag on Instagram.
Riddle: I’m not original anymore. There’s too many people.
Swinney: Yeah Muncie, Indiana and Moore, Oklahoma.
DS:So I wanted to start off with like how you guys originated. I know you said it was during Covid and I was reading an interview, Matt, you did with Punknormal Activity where you talk about you hadn’t met any of the guys. So I wanted to see how Fire Sale kind of came about?
Swinney: I’ll let you take that one Matt, I wanna hear your take on it.
Riddle: Oh, it was actually because I haven’t been really doing much musically after Tony [Sly] passed. I kind of dropped out of the scene a little bit or a lot. I didn’t wanna do it anymore, I was just kind of over it. I got sick too you know, so like touring is really hard for me and all that but I really like recording at home. So Chris got ahold of me and asked if I wanna be a guest on [That One Time On Tour Podcast]. I’m like sure, so we talked for like an hour, it’s really a good time and we didn’t really talk about much what I’m doing now musically, which is, at the time, nothing. I just had some songs I recorded you know through my Mac and I’m super like, budget when it comes to recording stuff, I don’t really care about it. And this guy Mikey, you know Mikey and his Uke, he asked me to do a NOFX song with, uh, oh God it was Roger from Less Than Jake. Yeah it was really good and then Chris [Swinney] wrote me not long after and said ‘dude, I didn’t know you were still playing’ and I’m like ‘well I kind of don’t’. He’s like ‘would you mind playing bass on some stuff’.
Swinney: Well, what I said was, I said ‘I’m gonna send you a couple songs’. I’ve haven’t written any songs in like 10 years. ‘I’m gonna send you a couple of songs and if you like them let me know what you think’ and then you’re like ‘dude, I’m gonna play on these fuckin’ songs!’
Riddle: Oh yeah.
Swinney: …and it blew my mind because, even though we’ve become like friends, you’re [Matt] like my favorite bass player ever; so well it blew me away because they were just like little shit songs that I wrote in my bedroom and I sent them to you and then all of a sudden now I have to start a band because Matt Riddle played on my fuckin’ songs. Yeah that was the catalyst for me because I was bored in the pandemic, I hadn’t worked for like however many months, and Matt and I had become decent friends. We met back in the late 90s on the road but he doesn’t remember that; I remember because I love what you do on the bass, I was just the fifth guitarist for The Ataris. You probably had no idea who I was; so now like in my mind when I was trying to find people from the podcast I was like ‘well I don’t really know Matt but I have friends that know Matt I can get his information’. Yeah once he was on the podcast we just got to be really good friends and we were like texting, and then I sent him the songs, and he played on the songs, and then in my mind I’m like ‘I haven’t done anything for so long because of the pandemic, how cool would it be if we started like a real band … and not like just doing covers and shit, but like really do it.’ So when Fire Sale kicked off, you know, we got our singer Pedro, who I’d worked with in the past. Tim, from Protest The Hero, was initially a big part of it, but when Protest started kicking back up, it had to take a back seat and it kind of made more sense anyway because the rest of us were kind of gelling and writing songs, and Tim was a big part of that at the beginning. But then he just didn’t have the time. We had a hard time finding a drummer, but when we finally found Matt Morris it took off there.
DS:So then, where did your guys’ name come from, Fire Sale?
Swinney: So, *laughs* I don’t think Matt’s ever really liked it, and that’s cool, I mean I don’t think it’s like the best name ever.
Riddle: Wasn’t it originally Southern Gothic or something?
Swinney: Yeah Pedro and I had done a collaboration, the song that we have online right now called “Long Overdue”, that was a song that I wrote and I programmed the drums, and it was just like this goofy thing I was doing on the podcast and Pedro sang on that. That’s how Pedro and I came to be close and we needed a song for a compilation after we released our first two songs and we didn’t have time to like write something and get it going. So I was like, you know, let’s just use that and I’ll have Matt play bass on it, Pedro could redo the vocals because he wasn’t happy with the first take, and then we’ll have Tim play on it too and that song, the project was called Southern Gothic. But I didn’t wanna use that because I’d already kind of used it for a goofy side project, so we’ve actually got a song called Southern Gothic that’s still not done yet; it’s a little bit more poppier kind of, that should come out at some point. But yeah, the name Fire Sale. I got to be fairly close with Sam King from Get Dead, he’s been on the program a few times. The night I was trying to think of names, I had like nine, ten names written on a piece of paper; like the band was kind of gelling, we were figuring out what we were gonna do and they [Get Dead] had just dropped their new video for their song called ‘Fire Sale’. And I was watching, I saw something on some punk site about it and I was checking it out, the songs really cool and I was like ‘Fire Sale, that’s a cool name I wonder if there’s any bands named Fire Sale.’ And there was one band from like 2008 that played one show somewhere in Kansas, they were like teenagers and they hadn’t done anything in forever; so I’m like ‘fuck it, I’m picking that name’ and I told everybody and it’s not the best name but no band name is. You [Matt] were in a band called No Use for a Name.
Riddle: …and Pulley
Swinney: I mean Face to Face is a cool ass name man.
Riddle: That was actually from our guitar player at the time, Mark, he came up with it. He said like ‘vis a vis’ which I think is a rough translation.
Swinney: But that was the thing with the name, I mean on some of the like press when we first came out it talked about that and yeah I’m not gonna say it had much to do with Get Dead, it’s just the fact that I was watching their video and I’m kind of friends with Sam. And I was like ‘well that’s a cool name’, so that night I got all the socials for @firesaleisaband, because fire sale’s like a clothing company so you can’t just have @firesale.
Riddle: Isn’t a fire sale like everything must go kind of thing?
Swinney: Yeah it’s like if you’re going out of business and you need to get rid of everything, they call it a fire sale.
Riddle: I only know fire sale from Davis Cross from Arrested Development, *laughs*.
Swinney: So yeah, I just thought it was kind of cool because my favorite names, they mean a couple different things, like if nobody knows what fire sale actually is, it sounds kind of dark or ominous. But it’s not dark or ominous, and I remember Matt at one point, he had this picture of a burning ship. He wanted it to be like Fire Sail, and for a while we were thinking about that.
Riddle: Yeah for a while we were thinking about even changing the name but I kind of dig it and its grown on me. I don’t know, it’s hard to pick a name man, I mean in this day and age it’s just it’s really fuckin’ hard.
DS:It was funny actually this week I’m in this band, we actually have a group message and one of the guys has been sending you guys’ singles I hadn’t heard you guys. Then I saw he posted something where it’s like ‘super group’ and I’m like ‘oh damn, I gotta start listening these guys’.
Swinney: We’ve been leaning pretty hard into that, like I felt weird about it at first, but the label that we’re with now, which I’m sure we’ll talk about, he was kinda like, we had this meeting and he’s like ‘well listen you, guys have all been in bigger bands, you know you guys should lean into what’s gonna get people to check you out, your past resumes.’ That’s why we decided to go with Mark DeSalvo and the artwork.
DS:So, it sounds like you’re kind of embracing the term ‘super group’ because I’ve kind of seen that label thrown around quite a bit with you guys.
Swinney: We don’t claim to be a supergroup, but I don’t mind people saying it because it gets people in the door you know.
DS:Yeah so moving on kind of to songwriting, is there one main songwriter or with all of you guys coming in from different groups and different backgrounds, is everybody kind of contributing?
Swinney: We’ll kind of both take that one. I’ll give my thoughts and I’ll let Matt speak on it. The first couple songs, it was like I would just send complete songs to Matt and Pedro and it would go that way. Now it’s got to be a lot more collaborative, like I’ll still send full songs that I write, but Matt’s sending full songs that he writes and then I’ll redo the guitars and maybe have an idea here or there. Like that solo on “A Fool’s Errand’,”I kind of mimicked what you did with the horns on there. But it’s become a real collaborative thing, writing with Matt and kind of going through and really producing it you know, just talking over Zoom or FaceTime. There was one part on the second verse of “A Fool’s Errand” we just couldn’t figure out the sound that we wanted because the first verse just has big chords and then the second verse we wanted this like 70s drony kind of sound. There was a single note and then they flew on top and, I swear to God, it was like a month or two before we finally got it.
Riddle: It was one of those things where, so you know the bassline that is pretty gnarly, it’s like a banjo. Well I kept that through like both verses all the time and I wanted the second verse to be brought way back but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. And me and Chris went back and forth for like a month like what the fuck are we doing wrong?
Swinney: I recorded literally like 40 guitar parts over that verse.
Riddle: Yeah it ended up all we needed to do is let the bass just stay on one note the whole time, the guitars stay the same and that’s exactly what we needed. It’s so stupid, it’s so simple.
Swinney: But see the songwriting thing you were asking about, yeah I’ve always had a collaborator, no matter what. Like when I was in the Ataris some of the songs we did Roe and I would mess with stuff. In any band I’ve ever been in, I’ve never been the guy like ‘here’s all the stuff’. It’s always been like back and forth. At the beginning, I felt like it was like ‘hey Matt, here’s something I wrote, play whatever you want on it.’ And it’s still sometimes it’s like that because we all have ideas. But working with Matt and tearing these songs apart and figuring out everything, it’s been a really really good experience and I’ve felt like the songs are stronger because we’ve collaborated so much and then we send it to Pedro and then he tears it apart.
Riddle: That’s one thing that I like is if Chris comes up with something, I’ll get it and then he’s like do that ‘classic Matt Riddle’ that a lot of bands don’t know how to do. So I do that which I basically learned how to do, something like playing Steve Harris songs, Iron Maiden. But I learned that style, so he’s like put that stuff on it. So I do that and then it gets sent to Pedro and Pedro’s like ‘you know what, I think this should be a verse, this should be a chorus’ and he’ll change things up, send it back and it immediately sounds like pretty much done.
Swinney: And it’s great because like I don’t think we think a lot about vocals when we’re writing, we think about parts, like here’s a verse, here’s a chorus, and because we all live on opposite sides of the country, we played to a click track and as long as we do that we can kind of puzzle piece everything together. So when Pedro gets it and he writes the lyrics and the melodies and the harmonies, he’ll be like ‘hey your verse is a better chorus, maybe that chorus doesn’t need to be done two times, it needs to be done one time’ and he’ll cut it up and send it back and then I can manipulate my master session to what he wants. It always comes out better. He’s a vocalist and you know we just think about this is gonna be a cool guitar or bass part right and everybody’s got input. Like even the new guy, Matt Morris, when he was cutting the drums for these new songs, coming up with fill ideas. And like there’s that part on the second verse of “A Fools Errand” where he goes into the floor tom thing. Like we want it to be a band, we don’t want it to be one person.
Riddle: Right yeah, like him asking what to do on drums on the songs, I told him, I go ‘you know what dude, be you, just do you on all these songs’ and he came up with some really rad stuff. And then we would go over it, make sure it all fit right in the song. And so it’s rad, we’re all inputting now as far as the songs go.
Swinney: We’ve all been in situations too where we’ve kind of been a team player with a guy who’s like ‘the guy’. And I don’t want that to be the case because when this first started, a lot of people were like ‘are you writing all the songs’. I’m like well they’re not songs until everybody gets them because the songs that I do won’t be right if Matt doesn’t play the Matt thing on the song. It’s not a Fire Sale song if Pedro doesn’t put it together the way he wants for his vocals. Like I love the fact that everything is equal, even down to the royalties and everything is equal. Like I don’t want this to ever become anything other than fun. Like yeah everybody’s equal and I love the guys I’m making music with and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
DS:Right, so there’s been a lot of ‘super groups’ that I’ve listened to where you can obviously tell who’s writing the songs. It’s just a carryover from whatever other band, they sound the same. With you guys I kind of have trouble pinpointing, like you can’t tell who wrote what, probably because like you said it’s kind of a collaborative effort.
Swinney: Here put this in your article, that me and Matt are the Lennon and McCartney of punk rock, *laughs*.
DS:Damn right, *laughs*.
Swinney: Yeah somebody said that in a review when we released dark hearts I thought it was hilarious
Riddle: Really funny, Lennon McCartney, that’s funny. Chris wrote like most of everything on all the songs and we’ve put our stuff into it but I’ve had songs from back in the day that I brought over and actually “A Fool’s Errand” is one of those songs. I wrote that a long time ago when I was kind of relearning how to play bass after I got sick. I was having a hard time playing and that’s why the riff is so gnarly in that song, because it was more of just for practicing. But I got done, I’m like ‘oh that could be a song’ and I just wrote it and its been 10 years and I send it to Chris, he redid the guitar, reprogrammed some drums before matt joined and so then I redid the bass on it and it was an amazing melody. I’m like ‘dude this is a song, what the hell just happened.’
One thing funny is that Chris you know likes my playing style. So one night my wife is out of town, went out to some party thing, and Chris had wrote me and he’s like ‘hey dude I don’t know if you’re in a songwriting mood or what, but how about one of those those Matt bass intro. So I was like playing like playing Elden Ring or something, I was gaming. So I got my bass, I’m sitting there messing around and I came up with this riff and went to the computer put in the click track, play the riff and next thing I knew, I had a whole song written, remember that.
Swinney: Are you talking about “Albatross”?
Riddle: “Albatross,” yeah really really fast, but the riff is killer. I think I just came up with it and then I ended up writing the entire song around that riff, sent it to Chris and then he changed parts here and there, put the guitars on it.
Swinney: I stayed up till 6:00 in the morning redoing all guitar parts and everything.
Riddle: Yeah because I can’t play guitar so I just kind of ripped through it and said ‘here’s something like this’ and then he put the guitar line. I think that’s great.
Swinney: That’s gonna be one for the next couple that are coming out. We literally on our SoundCloud page and in our Google Drive, we have like 14, 15 more songs and they’re gonna like, I mean I know you haven’t asked yet, but I’ll go ahead and say like the plan now, we wanted to do a full length but it’s hard working the way that we work. Everybody’s got different things going on and our label, the idea from Negative Progression was like hey, let’s put out a series of two-song EP’s and then eventually we’ll release a full vinyl like 12 inch. So in the next few months we’ll probably have two more come out and then in the next couple months a couple more. We’re gonna keep leaking out singles.
DS:I know Matt you talked about “A Fool’s Errand,” the writing behind that. I wanted to talk to Chris, with “We Dance for Sorrow,” that’s your song, right?
Swinney: Yeah, the first verse, the thing I really really liked, it’s got that kind of clean, single note thing on the verse with Matt’s bass too. I always kind of thought that sounded like one of the darker Blink 182 songs, but not like cheesy. I had that forever, I think I might have even sent you [Matt] like a voice memo of it at some point and you’re like ‘yeah that’s cool’. I finally one day was able to kind of figure out how that song fit together and even like the intro part, a couple people said it reminds them of “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” which it’s similar it’s not the same thing.
Riddle: It used to sound more like it and you changed one thing.
Swinney: I changed it yeah, things like one or two notes from the last little piece and now it doesn’t sound like “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” That one of those songs where once I figured out the direction of what was gonna happen, it just came out. And people talk about inspiration, people talk about you know the hit songs they write or the best songs they write take 5 minutes. Once I figured out what that verse was that I’d written two years ago or whatever, that song did just kind of fly out. And I sent it to Pedro and the only thing he did I think he shortened one of the choruses or something like it was very much the way I sent it was the way it came back. And so I just felt really good about that and I don’t look at it as Matt wrote “A Fools Errand” and I wrote that because we all put our stuff on it. I kind of feel connected to that song. I don’t know, I love both songs, I love every song we’ve ever done, but that song, I feel real connected to it just because of how it came together.
DS:Right and it was those two in particular, I just I really couldn’t pinpoint who wrote them, and it took me reading some interview with you guys that said Matt you kind of wrote this, one Chris you wrote this one. But I was listening to them, I really couldn’t tell so that’s why I asked you earlier about if it’s kind of collaborative.
Riddle: Well you know what it is I think that makes it indistinguishable is Pedro’s vocals. Like he sings what he wants to sing and that’s what makes the songs sound like us immediately. Like he writes these really great melodies, I never would have came up with that melody for “A Fools Errand,” no way. Like I can write the music all day, but that’s how it was when I was in Face To Face and that’s why that song probably sounds kind of reminiscent of early Face To Face, because when I would write like with Trever, those are the kind of songs we wrote, real quick, fast, painless, done. And Pedro comes up with these melodies that makes it sound like a Fire Sale song instead which I think is super killer, you know.
Swinney: I’ll also say, working with Matt, the thing that’s really been beneficial for me is that, like I was in The Ataris, but I’ve also been in a bunch of like metal bands and like hardcore bands, so I’m not a good editor. I try to make things like hard, I try to like ‘oh I’m gonna throw 4 harmonies on this’ and ‘I’m gonna shred’ and ‘I’m gonna do 64th notes’ and ‘I’m gonna tap’ and I don’t need to do that because I feel like my whole life I’ve been trying to show off for other musicians instead of just write good songs. And so working with Matt, sometimes I’ll send him something and he’s like ‘just do something simple, it’s like you don’t have to do Propagandi shit on everything’.
Riddle: I’ll like crack up because you’ll do these things. I’m like ‘dude like just play sloppier on “Albatross”.’ There’s these chord changes he does and I’m like ‘dude that sounds like a robot’. That’s how Dave Nassie was.
Swinney: That’s the thing that I think Dave and I have in common. Because when I was in The Ataris, Chris Roe would always be like ‘dude you play like you’re a computer, you need to chill and just like slop it up a little bit’. Like man when I was growing up and I was learning guitar, I would sit in my bedroom after school for four or five hours and play scales to a metronome. So it’s hard for me to do that. But there are some parts and songs that haven’t come out yet where Matt kind of said that to me and I did loosen up and it was better like if it breathed more and it had more soul.
Riddle: I just like the songs to sound real.
Swinney: Yeah I mean I do too, I just didn’t know how to do that.
Riddle: It’s funny because it is real, like when you play, it is real, but it’s just that you play like I said, so meticulous and so tight and he still, to this day will sit down and just over and over like he’s so good. And that’s how you play, like real clean and right to the point and I like sloppy metal, I like sloppy punk, I like sloppy. I like real musicians doing real stuff
Swinney: The thing I love about Matt’s playing is that like when I’ll get the stuff back and I’ll try to like edit or quantize stuff, if I fix anything wrong with Matt’s playing, it doesn’t sound like Matt Riddle, you know what I mean. Like we talked to Jason at the Blasting Room, I’m like ‘you know, make sure it lines up, edit it the way you wanna edit it, but if you do too much it’s gonna take away the cool factor.’ I’m starting to kind of feel the same way with my playing, like yeah, maybe I didn’t hit it exactly on the grid, maybe I could be a little left or right of center. I think he’s right, I think it does make you sound a little bit more like humans are playing it you know.
DS:How’s the reception been so far for you guys’ releases?
Riddle: I don’t know, I don’t know how that works. Chris?
Swinney: It was really really good. We first came out with the first two singles last year, but I am astonished at the amount of feedback we’re getting on these two new songs. It’s crazy man like the amount of people that are emailing and commenting on the socials. I’ve had texts from people I haven’t talked to in 10 years that someone sent them the song, like it’s been crazy. And I don’t know what good streaming is and what bad streaming is but we’ve done, you know, a couple thousand in less than two days so for a small band like us it’s pretty good. I’m really really excited that people seem to be connecting with it as much as we did when we were writing it.
Riddle: I kind of drop out of conversations sometimes, like there’s a whole group text that went on, but I was driving, it was a 19-hour drive to get out here to Oklahoma. So I couldn’t really write anybody back, but they were sending the stream numbers and all that and I’m like ‘damn that seems pretty rad for something I recorded in my bedroom’.
Swinney: *laughs*, something we recorded in our bedroom, but then Jason [Livermore] and Bill [Stevenson] took it to the Blasting Room and made it sound really good.
Riddle: I was nervous, I didn’t know how that was gonna go over because you’re producing our stuff and I was like that sounds good and then when Jason got hold of it I couldn’t believe what we got back, I was like that’s really fuckin amazing.
Swinney: And I had a couple of conversations with Jason about like making sure that the original spirit of the demo I produced was still there, but it just sounded really really good so he kind of knew what we were going for.
DS:Yeah, next thing, let’s talk about like future. So you guys said you had a completed record, well basically a completed record worth of material, right?
Swinney: Yeah the thing is, it’s expensive, like we could mix and master and we could put it out and people would probably like it, but now that we’ve gotten that taste of working with Jason and Bill, man I don’t wanna go down in quality.
Riddle: Right yeah, they kind of next leveled it.
Swinney: Yeah and with the label we’re working with, Seth, the guy that owns Negative Progression, he’s been amazing ever since we signed and you know if we need funds for something, he makes them available. And I don’t know how financially good of a decision that is on his part, but he’s doing it, we’re gonna put these out, wait awhile, put some more out. And there are gonna be physicals for everything we release, there’s gonna be a 7-inch colored vinyl for these two songs [A Fool’s Errand] and then we’re also gonna have CD singles and cassette singles, which I think are kind of fun. And we’re just gonna keep going that way. As far as the future, uh, we’re in talks with a couple booking agents, and they know that we all have jobs and families and we’re not gonna be on the road all the time, but there’s been a lot of talk of festivals and there’s some overseas stuff that’s been spoken about. Nothing’s concrete yet but there’s definitely gonna be some shows in our future, just probably no crazy tours.
Riddle: For me, it’s a little bit hard to tour after I got sick, like trying to keep up with my medication and stuff on the road is really really hard to do, it’s hard for insulin and all my pills. Like I run out of stuff. I got really sick doing that, and then I got sick again because we had shows with NOFX just through California, right by my home. Still my sugar would drop, and I’m not good at the diabetes thing at all, it’s like type one, it’s really bad.
Swinney: I think the thing that we’re gonna do is we wanna do things that’re gonna be beneficial for the band. So you know Pedro lives on the East Coast, Matt lives on the West Coast, the other Matt lives in Texas, I live in the Midwest. So there’s been talks about you know doing five or six days on the West Coast and maybe five or six days on the East Coast, playing markets that make sense for the band. And then like maybe like Riot Fest or Punk Rock Bowling, like things that are not super taxing, like just the weekend away, play a gig, go home back to normal life, kids, wife, whatever. And then the overseas stuff, I mean it’s been talked about and there’s some good opportunities, but it’s gonna have to work for everyone in the band. I’ve got a 6-year-old and a 5-year-old and I can’t be gone for more than a week or two. I love playing live and I miss being on the road because we used to do it all like 24/7, but I would much rather sit and watch Peppa Pig with my daughter than be in Germany playing some shitty club that’s freezing.
Riddle: Yeah we end up in Germany at some shitty club, those kids are gonna know that you don’t wanna be there, *laughs*.
Swinney: So ok I’ll take that back, I’ll go play a shitty freezing club in Germany as long as a week or two later I can come see my kids.
Riddle: Yeah I love shitty clubs in Germany.
Swinney: Germans love us, look at our Spotify numbers. We’re gonna probably end up there at some point next year.
DS:Okay so how would you describe your music style? Kind of how would you describe it and where your influences lie? Like I know with Matt, if you write a song you’ve got your personal influences, but more as a whole do you guys have influences and just how you would describe your music as a whole?
Swinney: Well I will say, I’m gonna let Matt give his, there are a lot of differences between Matt and I, but there is kind of a Venn diagram of things we agree on. I am a little bit younger than Matt.
Riddle: Hey *laughs*…
Swinney: So like when I was growing up, it was all the 90s punk stuff that Matt was involved in. Like he’s 55, I just turned 44, so my thing is like when I first started hanging out talking to Matt, I thought ‘oh we’re gonna have all this stuff in common, we’re gonna talk about Pennywise and blah blah blah’ and it wasn’t like that. But then I realized that I’m also a metal head, so I didn’t realize how deep into some of the metal stuff Matt went. So I think we’ve bonded a little bit more over Maiden and some of the weird kind of Scandinavian stuff than we have over punk rock. But when I’m writing, the influences that I’m drawing from are 90s skate punk and 80s thrash metal. That’s me and then Matt’s a little bit different I think.
Riddle: It’s actually kind of weird. I’m not really influenced musically by bands as much as I am influenced by what they did. How do I explain this, like it doesn’t make me write a certain way, I write how I write. I can’t help that, that happened with Trever in Face to Face, it’s just what it was. But what I listened to, yeah my picking style is reminiscent of a lot of like Steve Harris and that kind of stuff. I’m very metal that way as well, but I don’t write like that. I write my own stuff. Like when I first got into punk rock, it wasn’t any of that stuff, it wasn’t 90’s stuff. I got into like Rudimentary Peni, Antisect, all this like real dark, weird shit that wasn’t really even hard. It was hard to find, but I just loved how dark and weird it was. I grew up on Maiden, that was my thing, but like when I got into punk rock, I started to drift into the darker side of music altogether. There’s of course like the Cure and Joy Division and stuff like that, but then my metal taste got into like Mayhem. And I like the Viking side of it, I like the black metal stuff. I like a lot of that kind of like weird stuff.
Swinney: He likes the bands that burn down churches, *laughs*… and that has been a thing that Matt and I thought, because I’m a music theory geek, like I went to college for theory and performance guitar. And we’ll start talking about a song and I’ll be like ‘yeah that augmented 4th blah blah blah’, and he’s like ‘it’s an A I don’t know.’
Riddle: Yeah I don’t know what I played.
Swinney: But I love that because sometimes having the theory knowledge hinders me. I won’t try something that might be outside of the box because theoretically it shouldn’t work and it could be this really cool dissonant thing. So I like the push and pull between Matt and I with our influences and with how we both play and how I’m a little bit more robotic or whatever, by the book, and he’s a little not so. When that pushes and like rubs together I think it’s better musically for what we’re putting out.
Riddle: Yeah it took me a little bit of time to subscribe to that like when it comes to actually writing. I kind of had to fall into that place because, again, I’m more loose and whatever and I’m not really used to like major minor and all that kind of stuff because what I listen to is so different than that. But I also do know that when something sounds cool, it sounds cool. Like if it’s sonically correct, that’s killer. And if it’s not, well it sounds good to my ears.
Swinney: That’s why it’s called a theory because it’s not a proof.
Riddle: *laughs* but yeah I think you can be influenced by anything, doesn’t have to be like music. Like I never thought to myself ‘oh I wanna play a song that sounds like that,’ like that was never my thing. It was what just came out.
Swinney: No that makes total sense because like I guess I don’t like base a reference point when I’m writing this song. Like the way that the stuff comes out that I send you [Matt] that I’m writing, it’s just off the top of my head. And then I put it together the way that I think it should go together. But for me growing up and being like obsessed with two bands you [Matt] were in, those bands kind of inspired me. And I’ll start playing a song and I’ll be like ‘Oh, well what if on this part, I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do, what if I did this thing that Tony did or what if I did this thing that Trever did.’ That’s a theory kind of thing, maybe they didn’t know it was a theory thing. The Maiden influence, I’ve always been a Maiden guy. But then NOFX and No Use, Good Riddance and Strung Out and Propagandhi and 88 Fingers Louie and like these bands from when I was in junior high and high school that if I didn’t have them, I don’t think I would be doing this right now. And Matt was a big part of that. Yeah, even though we’re buddies and we’re in the same band together, but thank you for helping mold my shit you know.
Riddle: But I mean like I know how to get from point a to point b, but I’m again not a theory guy. I learned how to play bass, learning how to tune my bass by listening to records. I didn’t have tuner. I put a record on and I just hit a note and go ‘that doesn’t sound right’ and turn my tuning peg until my string makes sense. That’s how I learned how to tune. Yeah it’s ridiculous, I practiced everything you know like Maiden, Fleetwood Mac, like I’m all over the place. And nowadays I just practice the bands like Mayhem and stuff like that because I like to be really really fast. But I mean I’m not that loose when it comes to writing, but I guess I’m a lot less structured.
Swinney: And I would like to be less structured than I am because it hinders me sometimes.
Riddle: Yeah many times I’ve sent something to Chris and you’ll change something and go ‘how about this’ and I’ll go ‘Oh my God dude, I never would have thought of that’ and then Pedro comes up with this vocal line where I’m like ‘well fuck that, finish that song.’ It’s weird, it’s kind of a weird thing.
Swinney: I’m just really really happy. I mean I’ll tie this up by just saying that we all have different people, like influences. Pedro’s get a lot more pop punk type stuff. Like I was more skate punky whatever, metal whatever. And Pedro, he does listen to a lot I think more pop type stuff that informs what he does. I mean I’m not saying like he has a reference like I said earlier, but I think it informs his style and you know it’s very melodic. The one thing that a lot of people have said to me since we’ve released this is just how are there these like mid tempo or fast punk songs. They’re so melodic and there’s actually like pretty parts. And I think a lot of that comes from his influences and what informs that is the pop stuff he listens to, the pop punk stuff. I don’t know, I look at this band and everything we’re doing. We’re all in our 40s or 50s and we’re putting out new music that people really seem to connect to and like and I think that is a rare thing to be able to do. I’m just so grateful that people are giving us a chance man.
Riddle: Yeah that’s really cool, kind of dusted off the cobwebs for me.
Swinney: I hadn’t done anything in 10 years man. And I mean like Matt was kind of in that same boat almost. And I wrote a couple songs, sent them to Matt and shit started kicking off. And now it’s a real thing. Yeah, ideally we want people to like it, but also it’s just been such a good, fun experience to write songs with these guys that I really respect and admire like it’s a bonus.
DS:It seems like everybody’s kind of complimenting each other. Where you [Chris] said you’re very mechanical whereas Matt, a little looser. It seems like that kind of complements each other, and then with Pedro tying everything in at the end.
Swinney: Matt Morris, I don’t wanna leave out Matt Morris. The band has been doing stuff and been writing and been an entity since the pandemic started almost, when we locked in Matt Morris, this band turned a corner. Now it’s me, Matt and Matt and Pedro and it’s a band and it feels better than it’s felt ever.
Riddle: It’s cool because I know he was a fan of mine and yours Chris and so for him to do this, he’s totally digging it. It was cool because he sent that text like ‘well what about this, what about this, and that’s when I told him ‘no dude, just be you and do what you want’ and he did. Yeah he’s really solid, a really really good drummer.
Swinney: I feel really really good about the lineup of guys we have. I mean we’re all busy, Pedro’s in a bunch of bands, he’s getting ready to go to Europe with Nathan Gray and Iron Roses. So I mean that’s the thing, like of course when we do tour, when we do play shows, it’s a logistical thing figuring out how to get everybody somewhere. But I mean a lot of festivals are fly-in dates and stuff like that, I mean it’s gonna happen and everybody’s on board 100%. It just feels really really good now that we have this core unit of guys that everybody cares about the band, everybody wants it to happen. The band’s been this kind of slithering weird like project up until Morris got in and now it’s like ‘ok the four of us are Fire Sale and we’re gonna kick everyone’s ass.’ *laughs* that’s how I feel.
DS:That’s awesome man. Yeah I really appreciate you guys talking. When I saw you guys were interested in an interview, I jumped on it immediately because both of you guys were in bands that were very influential to me as a kid with The Ataris and then yeah Face to Face and No Use for a Name. Yeah all three of those were hugely influential for me growing up. It’s really cool getting to talk to you guys now so I really appreciate you taking the time.
Swinney: Yeah we appreciate you too man because, like I said you know, I was the 5th guitarist in The Ataris, like that moniker works and helps get some people in the door, but it’s the fact of like Matt Riddle is one of my favorite bass players in the entire world, but he’s I think maybe felt like I felt in my past bands where I was always a supporting cast member for somebody else. And in this band I don’t want there to be any supporting cast members, we’re all equal in the same and we all do interviews. Fire Sale is the most inclusive band you can find.
Riddle: Don’t let me be your favorite bass player, that title should go to Scott Shiflett because that should be everybody’s favorite bass player.
Swinney: Well my favorite bass player is Cliff Burton then you and Scott Shiflett right in there too.
DS:Yeah I’ll try not to take anymore your guys time, I appreciate talking to you. It was really cool meeting you guys.
