Less Than Jake’s newest release: Greetings and Salutations.
As we all know, gas prices are through the fucking roof too, as they have been for seven or eight years now. When it’s $1.20 for a gallon of gas, it’s a lot easier to take your bus or your van around the country and play shows. Now that gas prices have quadrupled, touring is harder, but at the same time you can’t all of a sudden make your t-shirts fucking $30 because no one is going to buy them. So as a band, you’re caught between a rock and a hard place. You’re like “Shit, we’ve still got to sell our t-shirts for $15 or $20” but we’re taking the brunt of the gas, and I mean…everything has gone up! Recording costs are high, hotels costs more than they ever have, but our ticket prices haven’t gone up much in the last ten years because our band just can’t afford it. If we start charging $30 or $40 for tickets, people aren’t going to come see Less Than Jake. And we’re on the fortunate side of a lot of bands that are our size or around our size. Bands that are smaller than us or bands that are just regional acts that play to a hundred people here and there – you want to talk about a nightmare?! It’s really hard to tour like that and make enough money just to fill the gas tank and fill everybody’s stomachs that are in the fucking band. It’s tough.
Thanks a lot for clearing that up. I think that’s important for people to know.
It is. And I’m not trying to bitch or be sour about the downloading thing, but the bottom line is that musicians aren’t making money from their music anymore and it sucks.
Let’s talk about your live shows. Walk me through the process of putting together a set list for a show. Who picks the songs? Do band members ever have strong differences of opinion over what to play?
Yeah, sometimes. But look, most of the time it’s pretty cut and dry. We know the 12 or 15 songs that we’ve got to play that people are there to see. Then there are 8,9, 10 songs that float in and out, and other nights it’s like “Let’s not play this song, let’s play that one instead.” It’s pretty democratic. We never really argue too much about it. Sometimes someone will come to a rehearsal and will be like “Hey, we should play this song off of this record” and it’s pretty much like “Ok, cool. Let’s rehearse it.” Sometimes we go to the fans too; we’ll post on our website or on Facebook to get an idea of what people want to hear and if a song pops up 20 or 30 times it’s like “Ok, maybe we should play this one.”
So is that really the only time you guys bust out the old, obscure jams that people might be surprised to hear?
Well a lot of those were songs that were b-sides from like 15, 16, 17 years ago or that were on our first couple records, and we know where our popularity was. Our biggest popularity was Hello Rockview through Anthem, at least in terms of commercial popularity in the United States. So people really want to hear songs off of those records. If you start getting into Pezcore, our first record – or shit, even some of the songs on Losing Streak which for years that’s all people wanted to hear –we’ll rock those songs out and have one or two people going crazy but the rest of the room is like “What the fuck song is this?” So you gotta be picky and choosy.
To reach 20 years as a band is an awesome accomplishment. I can’t think of a successful person in any field that hasn’t had to make sacrifices along the way to get to where they are. Looking back on your career, what have you given up to get to where you are today?
Mostly interpersonal relationships with friends, family, girlfriends, wives. There’ve been divorced too. And that’s just our band. I’ve seen it all. I’m speaking for a lot of bands. You deal with divorces, you miss birthdays, you miss funerals, you miss weddings, you miss parties, you miss graduations, ceremonies, memorials – and it’s because you’re gone so much. Those are the sacrifices, but this is also what we chose to do. So be careful what you wish for – you might end up lying in it (laughs).
Less Than Jake is definitely best known for songs like “Johnny Quest”, “Liquor Store” and “…Doug Hastings?” I’m 28, and those songs are nostalgic gems for a lot of today’s older punk rock listeners. Do you ever get frustrated with the focus people place on the Losing Streak and Hello Rockview albums over your newer material? How do you keep today’s audience interested?
Well, we write songs to keep ourselves interested, and that’s about it. Ultimately, if we were looking for a major label and trying to make a bunch of money and be on the radio – which is not going to happen – maybe we’d put more thought into it. We’re just trying to write good songs and we try to write them for ourselves. We know with every record we put out, it takes four, five, six years for people to catch up to want to hear songs off that record. As for the initial part of your question – whether it bums us out or not – no, it doesn’t. You’re almost thirty, so you’re at that age that I was talking about. I call you an “older fan” at this point. When you were first listening to those songs, those are moments in your life that those songs shape. You know, you hear a song off Losing Streak and it reminds you of when you went on your first fucking date in high school with your wife. It reminds you of when someone passed away that was close to you. It got you through that time. Every night people will come up to us and be like “Oh man, will you play ‘Johhny Quest’ tonight?! It makes me think of this.’ It never gets old and it’s never like “Oh, we gotta play this shit again? Why don’t they wanna hear the new shit?” Well, they don’t want to hear the new shit because they haven’t heard the new shit a thousand times.
And at this point in my life, I don’t care what kind of record Metallica could come out with, it’s never going to be as good as when I was 15 years old listening to Metallica for the first time. I’m never going to be 15 and I’m never going to be able to be shaped by music like that again. Who knows, maybe Metallica could surprise me, but knowing what I know about myself and stuff, I doubt it. Music hits you at a certain point in your life and you take those songs with you. I see it all the time, so [to answer your question] no, it doesn’t bother me at all.
