Are you at all surprised that after 20 years punk rock continues to be a fruitful outlet for you in your life and career?
Yeah, I never thought this would last more than us playing at a couple bars in Florida to our friends. Personally, for us, it’s crazy to think that we’re still doing this at the level we’re at. But at the same time it doesn’t’ surprise me that punk and ska and that kind of music has lasted all these years. Punk music is timeless music for the most part, and at the end of the day people like a good, honest song. Punk rock will be around for as long as people want something that’s different from the norm and what’s out there. I think it will be way more respected than a lot of the pop garbage that’s been out there forever. I mean a lot of the poppy shit from the ’80s and’90s that people laugh about now never had the longevity because it was just that – a novelty. Albeit, there was a novelty thing to the ska-punk thing in the late ’90s or whatever, but for the most part people like it for what it is. It’s honest and it’s fun.
Let’s talk about the pop thing for a second. In the past, you guys have toured with bands like Fall Out Boy and Good Charlotte – bands that opened up for you guys before anyone really knew who they were. Is it weird to watch bands like that go from relative obscurity to mainstream success after you guys were the ones that brought them on the road in the first place? Are you generally happy for them or is it like “That should have been us”?
No, it’s not weird. No disrespect to any of the bands you just mentioned, and I could be completely wrong, but I don’t think Good Charlotte is going to be playing shows in twenty years. I just don’t think they are. And I knew that back then – that they were a sign of the times. And it’s not just them. It’s a lot of bands. That’s just one of those things that you’re either blessed with or cursed with. If Less Than Jake would have had a huge hit in 1997 or 1998, would we still be around now?
A lot of times you go up, but it’s a long way down. You just can’t keep up that momentum. With Good Charlotte, it was like there they were, 21 or 22 year old kids – or however old they were – playing arenas! That’s like lightning striking in a bottle. That happened, and at the time I was like “Ok, this is cool. This is like a 2003 thing. It’s not going to be here next year.” And it wasn’t there next year. It takes a lot to sustain a long career and be a Metallica, be an Aerosmith, be a Bruce Springsteen, you know? It takes a lot just to be a punk rock band at Less Than Jake’s level. We were never a flash in the pan. We always had this pretty steady career. So to answer your question, no, I was never put off or jaded by [the success of those bands] because none of those bands ever had the career that we did. There are only so many bands that did last – Rancid, Blink 182, The Offspring, Green Day, Bad Religion, NOFX, Pennywise. Those bands have had long careers and have been together for a really long time. But the bands that just had a couple songs on the radio, they didn’t last long.
Looking back at the band’s trajectory, if you had to pick a moment or an event that you can pinpoint as having launched your band into the echelon of success it has achieved over the years, what would it be?
Before any labels or touring got involved – in fact, just a few years after we formed, in August ’94 – we got to play our biggest show to date at that point. We played to about a thousand people in St. Petersburg, Florida. We opened up for The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. We didn’t even have a CD or anything. We had been selling a cassette in Florida at our shows for about a year and a half or so, and of course this was pre-internet, so it was all word of mouth. These were honest fans that knew who we were and we were just starting to build a name for ourselves in Florida. At the time, we were playing to a hundred kids here and there, maybe fifty kids in Daytona Beach, two hundred kids in Gainseville, but it wasn’t anything bigger than that. But when we played that Bosstones show in Tampa, or excuse me it was St. Petersurg, I walked off the stage that night and was like “Ah man! I think we can do this for real cause we just had a thousand people fucking dancing and going crazy.” I thought “This could happen.” That was the pivotal point.
It’s fair to characterize most of your music as catchy and up-tempo, but I notice more and more an almost existential and depressing – if you want to call it that – tone in some of your lyrics. I can think of several songs, but the ones that come to mind right now are “Rest of My Life” and “The Life of the Party Has Left The Building”. I know that Vinnie writes most of the lyrics, but can you speak to what’s going on in your guys’ lives that inspires the content in those songs?
Even if you look at some of the early records, there was always a dark undertone to some of the lyrics. That was kind of the idea. It was part of selling ourselves to fans at first too, because a lot of people thought “Oh, they’re just a wacky band and they write songs about girls and about riding their fucking Vespas” or whatever. That was never what we were about. Yeah, we had some joke songs, but the lyrics always had a serious undertone, even though the music took on a sort of party element. That was kind of the dichotomy we were going for. It was like “Ok, if you scratch below the surface here, we’re actually saying something but we’re not trying to say it in a grunge rock way or in a way that’s depressing.” We wanted it to be upbeat, so when the song was over people could be like “Ok, cool. I just listened to something kind of crappy but at the same time it made me feel good” if that makes sense.
Not to make this a music industry interview, but I read an article not too long ago about the misconception people have that successful bands like yours have tons of money and are rolling in the dough. Can you shed some light on this? What’s it like day to day and how hard is it for musicians at your level to support yourselves financially when you’re not touring, especially considering that no one buys music anymore?
Well first and foremost let’s make one thing clear. You know how much you make in one year and however much that is, so imagine what it would be like to have somebody cut your income by almost a third, or at least a quarter –let’s just say a good quarter. That would be from CD sales, from people not buying CDs anymore. What happened several years ago was that the money from CD sales stopped rolling in, and for a band like ours, we were a band with tons of releases on tons of different labels, so royalty checks were coming in quite frequently and they were kind of nice. That has completely dried up. The last royalty check I got was for like $168, and that’s for over a three month period. So from that aspect of making money, the last twenty years of hard work that our band put in cultivating these songs, I mean, there’s no money to be made on those songs anymore. So yeah, that’s difficult.
