Sauce

The glamour of life on the road can be in stark contrast to the reality – waking up in a new city, setting up, going off, and tearing it down again: repeat as above. Dave Williams spoke with punk band The Unseen about life on the road and the schism between the ideals of the genre and the commercial realities.

I’d like to ask you first of all how you’re feeling. Instead of just telling me “good, thanks,” and then we’ll rock into the interview, I’d really like an honest response about how you are feeling today; in terms of this interview, in terms of the world. How are you feeling?
Well, I like to be an honest person. We’re in Indianapolis, Indiana, on the Vans Warped Tour, and it’s not the greatest market for many live bands to play in. It’s just a weird, small farming area. So it was a really, really hot day, and the show wasn’t that great. I mean, the people that were here were super-excited, and we did have some dedicated fans. But it was kind of a drag because it was so fucking hot outside. So right now I’m a little tired; I got up super-early… So as far as the current state of the world, I haven’t been watching or paying attention to too much, because being on the Warped tour, you’re kind of trapped in your own world, away from TV and civilisation. It’s kind of like a traveling carnival – you wake up and you’re in a field somewhere, and then you set up your stuff and you play, and then you wake up the next morning and do it all over again.

It immediately reminds me of that crazy TV show – Carnivàle, I think it was called. Did you see that?
Yeah, that was a great show. It’s actually very, very similar to that! [Laughs] I own both seasons of that show on DVD!

So I guess there are people sleeping with each other’s wives and killing each other?
Sure, there’s definitely some weird stuff that goes on in this tour! [Laughs] I mean … I want to say there’s probably fifty-five bands on this tour, you know? So aside from fifty bands, you have probably another fifty or sixty sponsors. This tour’s a really good thing for bands, but it’s also like one big traveling mall. Everyone’s trying to sell something – whether you’re a band, or a vendor, you’re trying to promote your product, you know what I mean? There’s deodorant companies here giving out free deodorant. There’s people selling pizza. Bands are selling all their CDs. Then you have record labels, like Victory Records and Epitaph Records and BYO Records – you have all these labels giving you free samplers… It’s just one big promotion vehicle, and there’s so many people involved in this tour that there’s definitely some crazy stuff that goes on at night… behind closed doors in tour buses!

To me, that just sounds like the antithesis of punk. That just sounds like punk in reverse…
Yeah… I mean, there are definitely aspects of the tour that are punk rock – there’s a lot of really great bands that are punk bands, and have a strong work ethic, that do this tour. But at the same time, this tour really is about promoting yourself; whether you’re a small punk band just trying to get new fans in a small market where you don’t do well, or you’re a fucking multi-million dollar record company trying to push the next big thing. It is a lot of promotion – that’s what this whole tour is about; everyone trying to give you some free sampler or sell you something.

Thank you so much for your honesty on that. That’s fantastic.
No problem at all… [Laughs] I mean, this is my fourth time doing the Warped tour, and I do enjoy it, but I mean, if you go to Warped and you don’t realise that, then you’re an idiot! Every time you turn around, someone’s trying to give you something or sell you something.

I’ve read a quote from you guys in reference to Internal Salvation that “lyrically, the album is mainly about not knowing what’s going on, and feeling like you’re at a point when you don’t know what to do to get ahead.” Do you still feel this frustration?
Um… a little bit. Things are definitely getting better. When we were writing some of the lyrics for the record, we were just… a lot of us were at a weird point. We’ve been touring non-stop for the past four or five years, and when we tour… we’re at a point now where we’re really lucky to be on Hellcat/Epitaph Records – they help us financially, by loaning us money sometimes when we need it, which kind of enables us to keep being a band by flying us to Europe and stuff like that. But at the same time… when we’re not on tour, we don’t make any money… We do make some money, but, because we travel so much, when we are home, it’s really hard to find a job. Like, who wants to hire somebody that’s leaving in a month, you know what I mean? So the older you get, the more responsibilities you get; the tougher it is to continue to do this for a living. Around, I’d say, November/December of last year, when we were getting ready to record, everybody was just completely broke. We had no money. Three of the guys just broke up with girlfriends that they had been with for years… some of them had lost their places to live. It was just a dark time for the band, and I think it kind of shows on the record.

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