Parked outside The Slide Bar in Fullerton, California, The Riverboat Gamblers front man Mike Wiebe sits slouched on a cushion at the back of the band’s tour bus. He’s got a bloody gauze bandage wrapped around his leg, and he looks exhausted – which makes sense considering he’s just completed a 43 show stint during the band’s 51 days on Warped Tour. Tonight’s the final night of their tour, and the atmosphere on the bus is celebratory but wistful, so I take a seat next to Wiebe at the back of the bus to get the rundown on Warped Tour, why his left shin’s so bloody, and how he came to do voiceovers for Dragon Ball Z. That’s right: Dragon Ball Z.
Plus, streaming music:
[audio:http://www.theinertia.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/02_dontburyme.mp3, http://www.theinertia.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/AChoppyYetSincereApology_clean.mp3, http://www.theinertia.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/07-Robots-May-Break-Your-Heart.mp3|titles=Don’t Bury Me…I’m Not Dead, A Choppy Yet Sincere Apology, Robots May Break Your Heart|artists=The Riverboat Gamblers, The Riverboat Gamblers, The Riverboat Gamblers]
I can’t help but notice you’re a bit injured at the moment. (I signal to a blood-stained gauze bandage wrapped around his left shin.)
Yeah, I got like a third degree sunburn that’s just gnarly.
Just from being in sunny California?
Well, we had the day off in Vegas, and I slept by the pool for a little bit and I’m real pale and Irishy and not used to that kind of thing so it fucked me up.
It looks like you somehow managed to extend just your shin beyond the shadow of the umbrella.
Actually, I’m pretty messed up right here. (Mike signals to his stomach, which looks pretty charred)…Fuck, I’m getting fat…but this one on my leg is the worst because I’ve had to do a bunch of shows with it and the mic cord got wrapped around my leg one night, and it’s just fucked up.
Sounds like it’s been rough.
It’s been gnarly. Just super gnarly.
Tonight marks the official end of your stint on Warped Tour. What toll does Warped Tour take on you as a human being?
We’ve been on Warped Tour for two months and we’re half dead. I’m just out of it. I feel like ten years older. It’s just brutal. It’s the toughest tour ever. It’s all day long, and it’s just really hard to keep that pace up for two months. At least it is for me…and my voice. My voice isn’t always as hearty as some people that I know. I have to do a lot of tricks to keep it going and keep it good. It’s been tough. This tour has been really tough.
So do you do vocal lessons or exercises to stay sharp?
Yeah. I’ve done a few, and I have this warm up CD and warm up iPod mix that I’m doing. It’s exercises like: brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. I’m a little nervous hoping that my voice is going to show up tonight. Club shows are a little better because usually there are people who will sing along…
I saw you’ve got the nickname Rookie Sensation. Is there a story behind that?
I don’t even think it’s much of a story; it just came from my general lack of knowledge about sports of any kind whatsoever. I don’t know anything from football to squashball. It’s kind of making fun of me for that, and I just kept it.
Have you been working on any new music since Underneath the Owl?
We were going to finish out Warped Tour and start writing, and all these tours popped up. We’re going out on tour with Pennywise then we’re going on tour with this band The Flatliners that we like…
We’re actually interviewing them next week.
Oh sweet. They’re fucking awesome. I love them. They’re so good. We hung out with them a bunch on Warped Tour, and we both realized that we had a date in Chicago so we decided to do some shows together. Then we’re going to Europe for a month with Sum 41, so the rest of the year is kind of booked up.
Hopefully, we’ll get to writing and working on new stuff at the end of the year or next year and maybe we’ll be recording in March or something like that. Maybe. We’ll see. It depends. We try not to rush it, you know? At some point it’s good to put a deadline on it, but I don’t like rushing things too much. We’re going to do some new ones tonight. There’s some new stuff for sure.
You put a lot of energy into your live shows. Whether you’re crowd surfing or jumping off scaffolding, you make sure your audience gets into it. If you had to pick your favorite stage moves, what would they be?
I kind of make them up as I go along and see what happens. I remember being a little kid and seeing somebody crowd surf, and I was like, “Wow, that’s so fun.” So whenever that gets to happen, that’s pretty cool.
And I love watching James Brown and old soul singers. I can’t even do them – all the crazy splits and stuff, but sometimes if I’m really amped up, I’ll try, and it’s comical to say the least, but I like the James Brown splits and jumping around and stuff like that.
He’s a pretty good showman to emulate.
I like all the showmen.
Well, there’s the musicality aspect of a show, but there’s also an energy there, too. You can listen to the CD at home.
Exactly. I don’t think the live experience should be exactly like listening to the record.
In the song, “Don’t Bury…I’m Still Not Dead,” you say magazines will “fuck your head up good.” Now that you’re in the magazines, are you messing with people’s heads?
I’m thinking more like when you’re in the grocery store, and there are all the pictures of – I’m trying to think…who’s popular right now? I was going to say Britney Spears, but she’s almost two years ago, but like the Kardashians or fucking Charlie Sheen or Jennifer Anniston or Angelina Jolie….Anyway, the line’s like “magazines on the end caps” which are an industry term for people who work shitty jobs in super markets, but that’s the end row where they put the impulse buys…specifically those magazines that are like, “Stars! They’re Really Like Us!” and I think those magazines are just designed to make you feel shitty about yourself or to make you feel superior because there’s a bad photo of Renee Zellweger without makeup, and she looks kind of shitty and it’s supposed to make you feel superior…ugghhh I hate that.
It’s just a bad part of our culture, the way that fame is treated in that kind of way and those stupid fuckin’ Brad – and I like Brad Pitt – but I just fuckin’ hate that every time I go and buy bananas I read something that I don’t even want to read about his supposed love life that probably isn’t true. But you can’t help it. You’re standing there in line and you just have this information and these photos that are thrown at you that are made to make you feel a certain way and I hate it.
It’s interesting that stuff has such universal appeal.
It affects everybody whether you buy it or not. That information and those photos are shoved in your face whether you want to see it or not, unless you’re blind, I guess.
What were you doing before you were with the Gamblers full-time?
Well, we did this band part-time for a really long time. I did acting and stuff before I got into music. I was an actor.
In Texas?
Yeah, mostly. I went to school in Santa Fe, New Mexico for a couple years and did acting and film stuff, but now the band is full time and the acting stuff is kind of part time.
So are you still occasionally doing acting jobs?
Ehhh….occasionally. Yeah. If something pops up, I’ll jump on it.
What could we find you in?
I did some voices for Dragon Ball Z and some bad B-Movies.
It’s so funny where people get placed in the acting world.
Yeah, it’s pretty random. I would like to have a better resume for acting. If anyone wants to hire me, that’d be awesome. That’d be good.
I feel like that’s a hard career.
Well, that’s kind of what launched me into music. I didn’t have to audition, you know? I don’t mind auditioning, but with music you don’t lose out on anything because you’re too tall or you’re too short or you’re too ugly or you’re too good looking… “Oh, we’re looking for somebody with blond hair and you’ve got brown hair, or whatever…” There’s none of that stuff to deal with, and I came back home from school we kind of threw a different band together, and we were immediately playing shows. I like performing a lot, and that was the main goal: to be performing, and I didn’t have to jump through all these silly little hoops–not that they’re necessarily silly. I understand why a director or an agent or whoever has a vision for a role in a movie, but it’s nice to have something that you don’t have to jump through those hoops.
So if you couldn’t release all that energy you let out live onstage, what would you do?
I don’t know. I get really bored at home, for sure. When we have a long stretch of no shows it definitely gets to me. I’m like, “I need to do something. I need to make an ass out of myself in front of some people soon! Stat! Get me in front of a crowd so I can fall down.”
If you had one last show, where would it be and with whom would you play?
Man, I don’t know. I kind of like a – not a small show, but a club show, where it’s real sweaty or just real, real chaotic. So somewhere like Emo’s or The Triple Rock in Minneapolis or Alex’s Bar in LBC. I don’t know. There are so many bands that I love that would just be awesome to play with again. Rocket from the Crypt…there’s a million. I could go on and on. That’s a hard one.
Would you mind humoring us with some free association? I’ll say two random words; you say the next thing that comes to mind.
Yeah, I love stuff like this.
Non Sequitur, Tangelo: Delicious
Agamemnon, Pimiento Peppers: Spear
Elbow Room, Cockroach: Quarter Horse!
THE END
"With music, you don’t lose out on anything because you’re too tall or you’re too short or you’re too ugly or you’re too good looking," says The Riverboat Gamblers' Mike Wiebe.
