Interview with Brendan Kelly (The Lawrence Arms) pt 2

The Rambling Boys of Pleasure

After four painful, UK tour-less years, Chicago three piece The Lawrence Arms finally returned to Ol’ Blighty, playing small intimate venues in every town that would have them. Moving North caught up with bass player and singer Brendan Kelly with some brief interjections from drummer Neil before their Birmingham show to discuss record labels, the Warped Tour fiasco, being stranded in the middle of nowhere and their biggest influence – alcohol.

PART TWO!

....Despite turning down major labels himself, Brendan doesn’t seem too bothered about other bands signing to them, and doesn’t think it’s hypocritical of punk bands to sign to them. “People have this real weird misconception that labels interfere with band’s careers and that these guys in suits come in and sit down in the recording studio and say ‘Ok, you need to write songs like this’. What happens is, bands sign to major labels because they want to take their music to the next level. All of a sudden, their motivations as song writers change and they change independently of everything. Signing to a major label is definitely not a determining factor in taking away control of the actual music you write and that you demo and record. Whether or not the label wants to put it out is another thing, but they’re not in there in the recording studio with you. A certain group of people who we happen to be associated with have this totally fucking crazy illusion about music. When you create any form of art or any form of work for mass consumption whether it’s a painting or a song there’s always gonna be a motivation for it, and it’s often ‘I wanna really disturb people’, or ‘I wanna really gross people out’ or ‘I really wanna make people horny’, like in the case of pornography for example, or ‘I wanna make people dance’ or whatever it is, and people think that’s fine, but if the motivation is ‘I want a million people to enjoy this’, that’s somehow a forbidden one, you can’t do that. But for me that’s a great and realistic and absolutely acceptable challenge to put forward to yourself.”

Despite dismissing some elements of the punk rock ethic in that respect, the band, perhaps unwittingly, act like how an ideal punk rock band should act in many other ways. They play small venues with cheap tickets, play a set low on gimmicks but high on passion, and mingle with fans after gigs And whilst they have never made an album accessible enough for the mainstream, they haven’t stagnated either, progressing from ‘A Guided Tour Of Chicago’, with it’s tinny production and it’s rather simplistic yet nonetheless great songs, through the more mature ‘Apathy and Exhaustion’, and the slightly darker ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ to the most recent LP, ‘Oh! Calcutta!’ arguably their best work. “The one thing I can say about the Lawrence Arms with assurance is that we’ve just got better and better and better. We were just talking about how Rage Against The Machine came out with their first album, and it was such an awesome, bombastic album that there was no place for them to go but down. We came out with our first album and it sucked, so the only way to go was up! And I think we’ve maintained a really steady stream of progression and despite whether people would say they like ‘Apathy and Exhaustion’ better than ‘Oh! Calcutta!’ or ‘Buttsweat and Tears’ better than ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’, there’s no doubt that we did different things in each one, the only reason they’re in competition is because we did them all”.

A discussion about punk rock ethics and the bands feeling towards them wouldn’t be complete without mentioning what happened when they played the Warped Tour in 2004, for many people the epitome of commercialized punk rock. After playing only a handful of dates, the band were thrown off the tour. Brendan isn’t keen to discuss this in detail, but it’s clear there’s an underlying feeling of tension towards the Warped tour, dealt with in the hidden track on Oh! Calcutta, Warped Summer Extravaganza (Major Excellent) and the lyrics “I took ocean down to the fairground to see everyone/
So beautiful that I drown in the waves of the haircuts
spin kicks and jumps/
Well I got my bottled water and my nachos,
it came in under twenty bucks/
I got this bad taste in the back of my mouth
from my time on the back of a bus”

“I don’t really wanna talk about that, it’s boring” is Brendan’s first response to the question. But he talks nonetheless. “Essentially it was really hot and it was oversold and people were passing out, and I said something about how it was too hot, the water was expensive and there was no shade, and people were passing out and the next time we played in Chicago the show would be five bucks and the water would be free. And it pissed a lot of people off. That’s it, there was nothing too weird about it”. But as he goes on, it seems there was something more to it. “One of our friend has no sweat glands, and he had to leave, and I’ve never been in a situation like that where a friend of ours had to remove himself from some place because of the extreme conditions, so it had a personal face to it. But I would have said that shit again, it was fucking disgusting there. Neil, was it fucking disgusting in there?” Neill agrees. “It was terrible. Warped in general was terrible.”

“Well yeah that’s another thing. And y’know there’s a lot of rumours out there about why we got kicked off Warped tour, and I think they all would have come true had I not said that that day, and we’d ended up signing to those labels that had come to see us that day and going back on the Warped tour, the ones about us telling people to go fuck themselves”.

This episode doesn’t seem to have had too great an impact on the band, and doesn’t come up in the question of what was the worst moment in their lifespan.

“The time when our van’s transmission dropped in Pennsylvania in the middle of the night, I’d say that maybe was the worst moment and also the best moment in the history of The Lawrence Arms. At the time we were super poor, super fucked, it was like hillbilly middle of nowhere style shit and it was the second day of the tour so we didn’t have any money in our bankbag. In that van I had two beers stashed in my backpack and I pulled them out and we passed them around. We were so terribly fucked and we were sharing two beers and we were sleeping in a parking lot and there was like wolves howling and it was behind this weird shack next to a river and it was fucking creepy. But at the same time, there’s nothing like knowing you’re in it with decent people. Your dicks are all on the chopping block, and you sit there and nobody freaks out and nobody goes crazy and everybody’s like ‘All right, there’s nothing else to do but drink these fucking beers’ and we passed them around and made the best of it and sleeping sitting up in our van and then living for three days in the shittiest town in all of North America while they fixed our transmission.”

In the past few years, each band member has been involved in other projects besides the Lawrence Arms. So, where does the future of the band fit in to all this? Is a new album on the way? “We’re all doing different things. Chris has a new Sundowner record that he’s recording and which Neill is engineering and that’s coming out this year on Asian Man, Neill has his band Council Trail where he sings and plays guitar and is the main song writer and I’m putting together songs for some record, but it’s not a Falcon (Brendan and Neill’s other band, with Dan Adriano from Alkaline Trio) record, it doesn’t sound quite right to be a Falcon record, so that’s gonna be something else entirely. I just put out an acoustic record although that’s not something I’m too interested in pursuing, playing acoustic, although it’s fun. But we’re all really busy so as far as a new Lawrence Arms record goes, we haven’t talked about it at all. It’s almost impossible to over emphasise how much shit is going on in our collective lives. For the entirety of our youths, this has been the only thing we’ve done, and then we stopped for a while when I had a kid and we started doing other things and we realized ‘Wow, there’s a lot of other things out there rather than just this one thing’ so everyone’s busy. So, is there gonna be another Lawrence Arms record? Oh yeah. For sure. Is it gonna be out anytime soon? No.”

It’s clear from the band’s lyrics that they are inspired by a number of things, not just punk rock, but other types of music as well as books and films, with album ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ littered with cultural references. So, to finish the interview, Brendan is asked to tell us his favourite book, film and album of all time. “Well I don’t believe in ‘Absolute Best’ for one thing, so this is not my favourite ever, this is my favourite right now, because I could say that ‘Less Talk, More Rock’ by Propagandhi is my favourite album, but there are definitely times that I don’t wanna hear that album, but there’s other times when some bullshit like ‘Party in the USA’ by Miley Cyrus comes on, and I’m like ‘That’s exactly what I wanna hear right now’. On films, ‘After Hours’ by Martin Scorsese is an amazing movie, one of his most underrated movies. It’s simultaneously very artistic, comedic and very dark, and with our band, that’s a combination I really love. As for a book, there’s a couple that come to mind like Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie and The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass, but really, when the shit goes down, Catch 22 by Josef Heller is the best book I’ve ever read. It’s such a masterpiece on so many levels. I’ve read all of those books I’ve mentioned five or six times, but that’s the one that still, every time I read it, I don’t understand how he did it. It blows my mind. It’s like the pyramids. I used to always say my two favourite albums were ‘Appetite for Destruction’ and ‘Straight Outta Compton’ because both those albums occupy the coolest position in rock ’n roll: history. But I can’t listen to either one of them now as I’ve listened to both so many times. That being said, I can’t think of a single record I could put above either of those two records.”

For someone in a punk rock band, those choices might seem a little strange. “I’m super influenced by punk rock as I play in a punk rock band, and Bad Religion was the first band that blew my mind, the band that changed my life. Punk rock is hugely influential to me, but so is a ton of other shit and as far as inspiration and influence goes, books and movies do as much for me as music. I listen to all different sorts of shit, I was a kid from the 80s so I listened to hip hop, heavy metal and punk rock and not knowing there was a difference, it all just pissed off my mom, so I liked it all”

Interview by Richard Martin