Warped Tour 2007

The Vincent Black Shadow
Robbie Kirkham, guitars

How would you describe your sound?
I like to describe it as gonzo music because my writing idol, who is Hunter S. Thompson, the late great Hunter S. Thompson, called his journalism "gonzo journalism," and it was basically based on the fact that when he would write a book or a collection of something, it would be autobiographical, it would be fictional, it would be letter writing, it would be poems, all mixed into one thing, all into one medium. Essentially what we do is we take from rock, pop, jazz, metal, anything we love and we sort of mush it into “our” sound. So rather than saying, "we're kinda like rock-rap-punk-funk-jazz-soul-metal," you know, we just say it's gonzo music, which means we take from styles and make them our own.

Where do you draw your inspiration?
It comes from wanting to be different. I’ve always – when I was young all the way to now – I was always a weird kid. Whenever my brothers would show me music, it was like, “here, listen to this. You’re weird, you’ll like this.” Primus, Oingo Boingo, Devo, B-52s, stuff that was like, “everybody is listening to this, I’m going to go over here.” I have the same approach to the way I dress, the way I act and the way that my music comes out, because who wants to be the same as everyone else? I mean, everybody wants to be different but they want to be different in a conformist sort of way, you know what I mean? Like, “I’m gonna be different by getting the same haircut that everybody has.” All my musical influences have come from people like Mike Patton, Glen Dazing, Les Claypool, Fiona Apple, people who were the badass in their own way. It’s just like, I’m going to do what I want to do and if it means the end of my career, whatever. If it was the way I wanted to do it, cool.


Killswitch Engage
Joel Stroetzel, guitars

How would you describe your sound?
It's kinda heavy but kinda goofy; kinda melodic, I guess. A bit of everything.

What do you think is more important: a killer live show or a great album?
It's hard to say. Thing is, if you don’t really have a good record, people aren't going to come to your live show, and if you don’t have a good live show, they're not going to buy your album. They kinda work together I guess. But, I mean, as far as building up a kinda grassroots following, doing it yourself, I guess having a live show and just playing as much as you can is probably more important. Thing is, it's really hard to make money selling records, to make a living like that today, because nobody buys records any more. It's all download and iTunes. If you have a good live show and you can sell some t-shirts, you make a living that way.


Street Drum Corps
Adam Alt, Bobby Alt, Frank Zummo

How would you describe your sound?
Bobby: Beautiful noise! It’s high energy drums. We’ve got everything now though. Our sound is heavily drums, but now we have vocals, we have other instruments – a theremin, I think our friends played some guitar on this new record we have coming out, bass, keyboards, lots of programming. It’s all there.

Where did the concept for SDC originate?
Bobby: Mainly from street drumming, All of us were playing theme parks and private parties for years, playing hand drums, buckets, garbage cans, drum sets.
Adam: Bobby and I had a show called Experiment, Frank had show called Re-Percussion.
Bobby: We kinda joined forces 3 or 4 years ago and started doing work and ended up on the Warped Tour, Taste of Chaos, on the road with The Used, 30 Seconds to Mars, Matisyahu, little bit of everything now.

What do you use to make music?
Bobby: Everything from regular household appliances to things you might find in the garage – grinders, pieces of motorcycles and cars, real drum sets, electronic instruments, buckets ...
Adam: Trash cans
Frank: Marching drums
Bobby: Everything from a junkyard to a drum shop.

Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
Ronnie Winters, vocals

How would you describe your sound?
Basically, as stupid as it might sound, we kinda consider our CD to be like an iPod Shuffle. We tried to cover a lot of different things from piano rock to screaming metal to punk rock to power ballads, so that’s how we kinda consider it, if that makes any sense.

What would you say is your biggest accomplishment as a band to date?
Well, we did a tour called the Take Action tour in February/March. It’s a tour to raise awareness about youth suicide. They give out free samplers and if you put it in your computer, you have the option to become a youth counselor. On the tour that we headlined, there was a 500% increase in people that not only put the CD in but signed up and took the course than all of the existing years of the tour put together. I think that was pretty rad. That’s probably the best thing that we’ve done so far.


Still Remains
Jordan Whelan, guitar

How would you describe your sound?
Anything diverse. If you like bands like HIM, In Flames, Stone Temple Pilots, I think you'd like Still Remains.

How has Warped been so far?
It’s a great opportunity for us to tour with bands and meet bands that we would never tour with otherwise. There’s a band on tour called the Rocket Summer, an incredible band but Still Remains would never tour with the Rocket Summer on a regular tour! So it’s cool for us, it’s cool for the fans.

Do you prefer the creative process of writing the music and seeing it all come together or playing it live and watching the crowd’s response?
I love playing live and I love being on tour, but for me, the most accomplishing feeling is being in the studio and making something out of nothing. It’s obviously not the same as birthing a child, but it’s the same sort of thing. It’s like taking your thoughts and ideas and composing them and compressing them and making this beautiful piece of work. So definitely the creative process is my favorite part about it.


Chiodos
Jason Hale, guitar and Matt Goddard, bass

How would you describe your sound? Jason: Diarrhea
Matt: It’s a mixture of a bunch of stuff. I don’t really know.

How has Warped Tour been so far?
Matt: It’s been great, just really hot. I cant wait to get back to my own toilet. [To Jason] Why are you looking at your…[Jason holds up his finger after picking his nose] Oooooh, gross! Um, I’m looking forward to not being in a bus on Warped…that’s gross. I’m seriously distracted by that, I cant stop looking at it.

Is there anything else you’d like to say?
Jason: Halo rocks!
Matt: I can’t even think straight right now we’ve been playing Halo so much today. One day we were driving and we played for 4 hours straight. I had to pee so bad but I couldn’t get up.


The Matches
Shawn Harris, guitar/vocals

How would you describe your sound?
I have no idea what the description comes up as.

So tell me a bit about co-directing your new music video for "Salty Eyes."
I co-directed it with my art partner and our manager and this guy who was the Director of Photography for the video. It basically came about because we shot our video for this album, Papercut Skin, which came out about the same time as the album. Being on an indie label, you pretty much get a bunch of promo videos. We had this concept for "Salty Eyes." It was an appropriation of the Bob Dylan "Subterranean Homesick Blues" video, and we had this really good spin on it that went with the song perfectly. We ended up making it for less than $1,000. We wound up finding all the TVs in junkyards ourselves. We collected between 50 and 100 televisions that all worked and practiced for a week using cardboard boxes. We finally shot it all in one take. There are no cuts; it's one take straight through. We had one chance to get it right.


Hawthorne Heights
Eron Bucciarelli, Drums

How would you describe your sound?
I would describe it as rock with emo inflences, pop-rock influences, hardcore influences, metal influences, classic rock, pop, the whole spectrum. I think at it's core, it's rock music, but if you listen hard enough, you’ll be able to pick out where were drawing inspiration from.

What’s life on the Warped Tour like?
Its like camping. It's long, hot days. You've gotta figure out when you’re gonna eat, when you’re gonna shower, and sometimes the facilities are just as good as camp facilities. But it's really fun. There’s a lot of really great bands here that we’re friends with and that we’ve become friends with and the crowds are amazing. You cant beat the crowds. Warped tour is the best summer festival out there, hands down.


Published in the Oregon Voice