Sick of it All

An Extremely Physical Approach to the Game
“There’s that saying, Support your local scene, and I look at that as not only your local scene, but timelines. Support what’s happening now, don’t support the past.”

Interview by: Justin Morgan and Twig
Photos by: Juston Morgan

Palookaville, Santa Cruz, CA, 4/26/01
Friday,4/26/01, Twig Wusso of the infamous Nor-Cal Hardcore band, The Diseptikons, accompanied me, the most worthy of partners, on an adventure. We started this trek around noon, and departed Sacramento destined for my old stomping grounds of Santa Cruz, CA. We were amped by two things 1.) The chance to interview East coast legends Sick Of It All and 2.) Their new CD “ Yours Truly.” During the drive the CD inspired us to change questions and or re-arrange what we at first thought were well thought out questions. Three hours later we arrive in Santa Cruz, three hours early for our interview. Oh well, let’s hang out. In and out of the venue during sound checks, and a couple of bars later we run into Armand. Friendly guys we are, we spark up a conversation about past shows, other bands and why the hell the guys got to Santa Cruz at 6:00 am only to hang out on Pacific Ave. Nonetheless, everyone’s satisfied to be there. The next thing we know Twig and I are on the tour bus and ready to begin trying not to sound like every other magazine in the world. Well, you be the judge…I thought everyone met my expectations and beyond. These guys are serious, motivated and extremely knowledgeable about music. Some words of wisdom, when these guys speak, listen and take notes. P.S. Lou, I hope you get this issue as you get on the subway…Thanks guys

Going from a major record label to Fat Wreck Chords has people saying they respect you more for it, what are your thoughts on that?
Lou: Well, I don’t think it was a step down to Fat, I think it was the right step to go to Fat from a major.
Craig: It was a little lateral movement, ya know?

You’ve been on tour for a while now, huh?
Lou: Yeah, we don’t like to tour the states, especially, I don’t know, it seems like the east coast is very…
Craig: Jaded!
Lou: We’ll pack ‘em in on the east coast, but they’ll just stand there and wait for like uh…
Craig: Hardcore Punk used to be the most dangerous exciting shows to go to. Everybody else that went to rock concerts sat down and applauded, and we went fucking crazy, because we were letting shit out, and now it’s the MTV bands who make the kids go crazy and kids at hardcore shows are so cool that they just stand there and watch you. I don’t want to down everybody because I’m sure that there are a lot of kids that have heart out there, but I don’t know what these kids are being taught out there, because hardcore’s about being a fuckin’ wild man. It’s about letting that shit out, not about being cool. There’s nothing cool about hardcore. Hardcore’s about people who aren’t cool.
Lou: I’ll tell you though; when we hit the mid-west it was totally insane. Lincoln, Nebraska, Marx, Kansas…

As far as the kids going off, I mean in the 80’s and early nineties, the circle pits were good fun pits, but now it’s wind milling and kicking and punching. Do you guys not care, or are you open to whatever?
Craig: People can dance how they want, I’m not gonna tell people how to dance, ya know?
Pete: As long as you don’t go home and practice your moves in the mirror, like all those kids who dance in Long Island and in Connecticut, and in Jersey. They all do the hardcore soul train…
Armand: Yeah, they don’t watch the band, they watch the guy dancing, then they wait and take turns. It’s like breakdancin…
Craig: People mistake dancing as a fashionable expression but it’s not. It’s an expression of pure angst and emotion. It’s a thoughtless thing, an animal instinct.

Well that’s a common thing nowadays. At the nightclubs, one person goes into the middle and shows their highly practiced and perfectly executed dance routine, then the next person goes in and so on…
Craig: There’s been a lot of changes over the years, you know? If you ask us we’ll tell you…
Armand: One of those changes is that sometimes you deal with a spiritless crowd, as opposed to a spirited crowd that is into music, enjoys music and vents through the music, as opposed to people that stand around and wait to be entertained. One of the worst things that we’ve experienced is the fact that there are a whole bunch of kids that come down to our shows that are sixteen or seventeen years old, that only cry out for the old shit; shit that is eleven years old.
Craig: Shit they weren’t even around for.
Armand: They were five or six years old when we put that shit out, there’s no way they knew it back then. They do it just so they can look old school, like they’re into the early shit.
Craig: Yeah, there’s that saying, support your local scene, and I look at that as not only your local scene, but timelines. Support what’s happening now, don’t support the past, ya know what I mean? I am one to talk, ya know, I love the older hardcore and stuff but you gotta work with what’s happening now, cause if you glorify the past too much what are you gonna have? You have nothing, nothing but a washed up shell of memories which you think were your glory days.
Armand: That song, Souvenir is all about that whole hardcore nostalgia thing, it’s just depressing.

Take your latest album, Yours Truly, and where you started out in the first album. How do you think you’ve progressed as a band and in gaining a fan base?
Armand: I think we’ve become better song writers, I think the songs run their course a lot better now. They’re not too short; they’re not too long. Because around the Built to Last era we tended to write songs and they were, we should of shortened this part down, ya know, after the fact, so uh…even with Scratch the Surface same thing. There were some songs that could’ve been shortened, or edited, but I think that we’ve also become a little better musicians to where we can throw a little bit more in musically than we did on the first couple of Sick Of It All albums. It’s because we were just learning how to play, so now it’s just a different feeling.
Lou: We’re not embarrassed by it. Some bands won’t play their earlier shit because it’s too embarrassing. I think listening to it is embarrassing, but playing it, I still fuckin get a fire out of it, ya know. Those songs are raw emotion, I think they are great.

So right now you have your pop punk bands, and punk bands are now getting radio play and MTV play, and then you’ve got your hardcore bands which are now sounding metal, and people are calling it brutal hardcore. What kind of tour packages and shows do you prefer to play?
Lou: We like to play with a whole mix of everything. You know there are some heavier bands like Indecision from Brooklyn that we took out on the tour with us in ’99 and they were a fucking amazing band. Heavy as hell, but still their whole attitude and whole, uh, persona on stage was still total punk, and I love that.

What’s your take on the “New Age Hardcore” and the kids starting these bands with these claims?
Lou: I think if you ask the kids who call themselves hardcore now, who their influences are, they’ll cite Sepultura and Pantera. Nothing wrong with those bands, but they’re not hardcore bands. I think what they’re missing is the history. They don’t know Negative Approach, they don’t know Discharge, stuff like that. All they know is Blink 182, or Green Day.
Craig: That’s not punk, we’re talking Discharge, we’re talking Minor Threat, ya know. If someone were to ask me if I like punk or metal, I’ll take punk if you’re talking about Minor Threat type hardcore, because to me that’s hardcore punk. All that other stuff is metal that doesn’t get big, so they call it hardcore just to be grass roots. I have nothing against it, ‘cause you do your own style.

Who’s fault do you think that is? The older or younger generations?
Lou: I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault. On the east coast, it started when you hit the dance part, everybody exploded. When we play fast some kids are moving, but when you go to the slow heavy part everybody’s dancing, and it started there. Kids were like “well I like that part why don’t I just write a whole fuckin song like that,” and that’s where it went.

When we were growing up music was put on the table for us like Minor Threat, 7 seconds, etc. Now that we are the generation that is supposed to bring this music to the younger generation it seems like no one is doing that! The kids are mainly influenced by whatever is on the radio. OK, now I want to bring up the Slayer tour. When you guys were first booked on the Slayer tour everyone was like, whoa, Sick Of It All and Slayer, no one knew exactly what to expect (crowd wise). How were you reacting to their crowd and vise versa?
Pete: Some nights were really good, some were O.K., and some were fucking terrible.
Lou: The weird thing was, in places like New York, and San Francisco we thought, this is going to be an easy show for us, but it was the total opposite. It was like a limited amount of our fans bought tickets to the shows, and the Slayer fans would just stare at us. It was fuckin insane, you didn’t know what the reaction was gonna be. We’d be in the mid-west or even Reno, Nevada where we’ve never played, and fuckin five huge pits open up as soon as we came out…

We were at the Reno show and you won over that crowd which was awesome, but at Slayer shows it tends to be a large amount of White Supremacists.
Lou: Yeah, well to be honest with you, we even asked Tom of Slayer “why do all these Nazis like your band?” And he said, “ I don’t fuckin know,” maybe it was Angel of Death, I don’t know. But everywhere we went they had a big White Supremacist following at the shows, so maybe it’s good that not that many people on the Slayer tour picked up on Sick Of It All.
Craig: Yeah, it’s kinda like a blessing in disguise, you go back to that mid 80’s dirt, the whole Nazi, skinhead thing, it’s fucked up man.

Last but not least. There’s been a lot of new people coming to the Sick Of It All sound, and that’s a good thing, but how do you embrace that at shows? You have a lot of loyal fans but also those who have never seen you live before and might just stand there and stare.
Lou: Well, if I see a lot of people standing around I’ll try to get all the people who are dancing to lock arms and charge towards the back of the audience like a big wave. It works sometimes; it didn’t work too well last night in San Francisco though.
Pete: It’s like there are those who are say, “Wow, you guys are on Fat, let’s go check ‘em out.” They knew the new record and we were throwing garbage cans at their heads and they were like wowww, but still didn’t move much.
Lou: Bands like Boy Sets Fire will come out with a heavy, heavy song, and then they’ll bust into this fuckin total alternative rock, melodic vocal singing, and girls will be up front crying, “Oh my God, it’s so beautiful.” Then we come out and it’s like Bam Bam Bam. No niceties or pleasantries.
Craig: We have an extremely physical approach to the game.