Rag Men

CN: I still have my fantasy of singing on stage in front of people. I’m okay in a band or a choir; as long as there’s other people with me, I’m cool. But doing that solo thing – I did it a talent show –So I get up there and I’m starting to play this song, and it’s all out of whack. It was just a choke moment, in front of the whole school. So I think that has stuck with me for quite a few years. I ended up promoting my friends instead of doing it myself. But I can dig that focus. I always have to have music on. The only reason why there’s no music on now is because we’re recording this. Even when I sleep, I have new age or something on. Lack of music in the world makes colors look less vibrant. It makes everything look more drab.

M: Yeah. I gotta be listening to music at all times – if I’m in my car, or if I’m on a train or a plane; if I’m not in a conversation, I’ve got my headset on. Always.

CN: What was the most influential record for you when you first started playing, which you obsessed on?

M: When I first started playing an instrument, or in bands?

CN: Either one.

M: I grew up on heavy metal: Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Ozzy, and Black Sabbath. That was the first stuff that I really went out and started buying the records. When I first started playing the bass, those were the records that taught me how to play. I never took a lesson or anything. My mother was a music teacher, so she showed me how to tune the thing. Once it was in tune, it was just a matter of listening to the records and trying to play along. So those were the bands that taught me how to play. I can’t pick any one specific record that early on, but Iron Maiden was just my band.

CN: Steve Harris… that was the guy.

M: One thing that I wonder what the effect is going to be like in twenty years, or not even twenty years, ten years from now… When I grew up, the bands that I learned how to play from – Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden – were bands that played basically straight-structured, power chord riffs. They were very easy to develop your ear to. Nowadays, all the heavy music kids listen to, like Korn, The Deftones…

CN: All that drop tuning…

M: Everything is tuned so low. I’ve been playing for almost twenty years now, and I have a hard time figuring this stuff out.

CN: It also gets kind of muddy when you drop it that far.

M: That’s what I’m saying. I wonder what it’s going to be like, how people’s playing is going to be. [The music I grew up on] is brilliant, but at the same time it’s very simple.

CN: What you learned is cleaner and a little more structured. Once I began to learn how to read the music and play, and get the tone in my head of what it is, if I heard something that was in a similar key it would just send me off racing mentally on a whole different tangent of sound and thoughts. That’s where I was coming from with the question. Sometimes there’s just one pivotal album that you’ll listen to and go, “Wow, this just spring-boarded me to another place.” Steve Harris is definitely one of those people. He played the bass more like you would play a guitar.

M: He kind of invented his own style, though. He really pioneered a whole generation of bass sounds. The fact that he still played with his fingers – he was still like a leftover from the 70’s.

CN: I love that tone, though.

M: But at the same time he made it into a voice, the low-end of the guitar.

CN: That’s what I’m saying. It was almost like a bass melody line. It gave much more depth to a lot of that music. That’s why I like people like Me’Shell Ndege’Ocello--great funk, slap stuff. Like the first time I heard Jaco Pastorius, that kind of stuff. I like the low end. I like melody. I like it all. I just like to see what people do with it. I listen to a lot of country just to balance out all this, because it gets to be a bit much after a while. As much as I love it, I need something that will make my ear know the difference. Sometimes I put on the TV. One of the bluegrass bands that I like – they’re kind of pop bluegrass – is Nickel Creek. There’s a chick playing violin, the brother’s playing guitar, and this other kid’s playing mandolin. He just rocks on the mandolin. I saw a video one day, and it’s set in a music store. And who is in the music store playing the stand-up bass parts for their whole little thing going on? Rob Trujillo! I’m like, “Get the fuck out of here!” That intrigued me, because he started way hardcore with the Suicidal Tendencies. Seeing him in a bluegrass video just spun my head around.

M: I’m still trying to get used to seeing him in Metallica.

CN: Yeah, well, it took me a while to get used to seeing Jason Newsted in Metallica too. I remember Jason from when he was in Flotsam & Jetsam. During the 80’s, I did the whole metal shebang. I had to do the Wingers and stuff like that too. But my heart was really in the hard stuff. As much as I loved hardcore, I could get barely any of it in the pages of the magazine because I wasn’t the editor. I could slide stuff through, like the early Prong stuff, the stuff they had on Spigot before they got signed.

M: I remember hardcore kind of breaking through around ’88. It wasn’t even so much that one band did it, the whole scene started to [break]. I remember a couple of magazines doing exposes on the Sunday Matinees and the whole New York hardcore scene. The Cro-Mags, Murphy’s Law…

CN: I could squeeze some of it in. I kept pushing the thrash bands, since Metallica was doing so well. The girls that were the editors listened to so much Winger and Poison, and all that crap. They didn’t know the heavy stuff. To them, Biohazard, Cro-Mags, and Murphy’s Law were the same as Testament and Slayer. It was all just heavy to them. So I was able to get some hardcore in there, just slide it on in. I was interviewing Howard Benson, the producer, yesterday. We both agreed that this was probably going to be the year of hardcore.

M: I hope.

CN: There’s a lot going on with the scene. The scene has existed for years and years with no help from major labels. It’s always been pretty solid.

M: You’ve got to think that someday there’s going to be a backlash from the whole emo thing that’s going on.

CN: That stuff just makes me want to scream sometimes.

M: To be honest, I never put down one style of music in any way. The emo thing to me is… the music is the one thing I don’t have a beef about.

CN: No, the music’s not the problem.

M: I think the music is brilliant. Even the lyrics, as whiny as they are, don’t bother me so much. The thing that bothers me is the whole image of the tormented, poor, suffering singer with his little sweater on. I’ve been telling this story for a year. Madball played this festival down in Florida, where we were a last minute fill-in. I think one of the major headliners canceled, so they asked us to play. A great majority of the bands were these emo bands. At one point, one of these bands, with the exception of the drummer, had its back to the crowd. And they’re thrashing around, rolling around on the stage and not looking at the audience. That just doesn’t sit with me.

CN: It’s offensive.

M: It’s not even so much that it’s offensive. It’s just so far out of touch with where I come from. I got no problem with the music, I got no problem with the lyrics. But when you get on a stage, I want to see you be a man about it. You don’t have to be all testosterone and tough guy. But stand up there and sing your songs to the audience. These people paid to see you and you’re acting like you don’t want anybody to look at you.

CN: That was my main beef at Lollapalloza. I had never seen Rage Against The Machine live, so when I went to see Audioslave I figured, ‘this is gonna be great.’ Did you know that the guy in Audioslave played the drums with his back to the audience with a big mirror in front of him? I said, “What the fuck is that about?” And the girl next to me said, “Oh, he’s got really bad stage fright.” I said, “Is it really bad stage fright, or is total narcissism?” He’s got a mirror in front of him! Tell me which!

M: Get over it.

CN: To me it’s offensive to turn your back to the audience. I understand if you have stage fright. But if that’s your shtick, then it’s arrogant.

M: That’s exactly what I’m talking about. This wasn’t an issue of stage fright, this was an image. That image doesn’t sit with me. As I said, I don’t mind the haircuts, the sweaters, the funny shoes, or the music. There are some amazing emo bands. The music blows my mind, how it’s so heavy, but at the same time it’s got good melodies to it. I just can’t stand the whole shit like Eddie Vedder, who came out ten years ago like, “I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want anybody to look at me. I just want to be left alone.” If you want to be left alone, don’t get on a stage. Don’t put your music in front of people.

CN: Be Alan Parsons. Just make fucking records and never play live.

M: Don’t even put them out. Make your music and stick it in your pocket. If you’re going to put it out there for people you should face the people you’re playing to.

CN: Even though emo came out of hardcore, it’s such a different thing.

M: I don’t even think it came out of hardcore.

CN: Ages and ages go, there were a few [hardcore] songs that they called ‘emo’ because they were emotional hardcore. It’s a totally different animal from what it started as.

M: Somebody described it to me saying that emo is to today’s music what new wave was in the 80’s. Like The Cure, Depeche Mode, and all that.

CN: Kind of, yeah. It’s the same kind of slightly nerdy, slightly geeky…

M: That kind of evolved out of punk. So the relationship of 80’s new wave punk is almost the same as what emo is to hardcore.

CN: Yeah. The thing that gets me about the emo is the atonal nasal whining of the vocals that gets to me. It’s not good dissonance, it’s annoying.

M: For me as a musician, I can’t put anybody else’s art down. I can never sit there and say, “Oh, this guy sucks.”

CN: I’m not going to say it’s bad, it’s just annoying to me.

M: I wouldn’t even go so far as to say that. If I don’t like it, it’s just not for me.

CN: You’re doing the Madball tour over there, are you going to come back and tour with Rag Men here?

M: Definitely. Once the record comes out, we’re gonna do a lot more touring. Basically the three bands that we have that are directly associated with each other – there’s Madball, and between me, Rig, and Hoya and Freddy, that’s everybody’s number one priority. But with Freddy and Hoya doing Hazen Street, and then me and Rig splitting off with Rag Men, it kind of works out because we know when they’re going to be doing stuff, which gives us the opportunity to go out and stay busy with our thing. We know when Madball’s going to be playing, because all four of us are in other projects now. So when Hazen Street is out on the road, that’s when you’re going to see Rag Men on the road. And when neither of the bands are on the road, it will be because Madball is on the road.

CN: Kind of like Slipknot, Stone Sour, Murderdolls...same gig, just different genre. It works good. You’re keeping busy. You’re generating new and different ideas to keep the scene evolving. Although, Freddy tells me that Hazen Street’s definitely not hardcore, it’s a lot different. So how would you describe Rag Men? Is it metalcore, is it hardcore?

M: Rag Men is, to me, hardcore but a little more to the metal side of hardcore. At the same time, it’s not metalcore. The reaction I got when we recorded our first bunch of songs was that people were really surprised that it was so melodic. We’ve really tried to stay away from sounding like any of the bands that we’re all coming from. Earth Crisis and Marauder were two of the pioneering metalcore bands of all time. They perfected that sound. I think a lot of people expected us to be metalcore, just straight-up stomp beats and screaming and whatever. It’s really not like that. There’s a little bit of that in some of the songs. A lot of the songs have a rock influence and a little melody to them. There are some songs that are just straight hardcore. The way I’ve always thought as a musician is that a band has got a unique sound. If you put a group of guys together, they’re going to have a sound that no matter what they play, style-wise, it’s still going to sound like that band. The way I look at it is that, when I have Jorge singing I can write almost anything on the guitar end of things, and it’s going to be heavy at the end of the day. Because the way we sound as a band is heavy, and then when you have his pipes screaming over it it’s going to be deep, and it’s going to be hard. What we’re trying to write is taking a little bit of the artistic license with that, and the freedom we have, and write a little melody in to give the songs some texture and give the songs some real catchiness to them that you wouldn’t have necessarily if you were just flat-out killing it with all the metal riffing. That’s what we’re going for. Whatever originality we might have – and originality is up to each person’s judgment; people can call us generic or people say we’re original (I’d like to think that we’re somewhere inbetween) – comes from the fact that we’re writing songs just what sounds good. We’re not going for one specific sound. We’re just trying to see what comes out of it.

CN: You just kind of go where it takes you. That’s the good thing about playing with people outside of your core project, having different collaborators. You get that different flavor from them. I was telling Freddy that hardcore is very much the equivalent of gangster rap, basically. I told him it would be an awesome fucking idea to have Madball and DMX do a fucking song together. You know that song he did, “Who We Be”? That would be a perfect hardcore song.

M: Sure. Well, there’s been hardcore mixes with rap. You had Biohazard with Onyx.

CN: That was a more commercial style of rap than what DMX does. DMX is like a hardcore guy. It’s more like Ice T and Bodycount than Onyx and Biohazard.

M: That’s the thing. So many of the guys that I’ve been in bands with from Ezec with Skarhead and now Freddie and Hoya, almost none of us listen to hardcore anymore. We’ve all got our founding bands that got us into it, the Bad Brains, Agnostic Front, the Cro-Mags, Murphy’s Law, Leeway, and Sick of it All.

CN: I remember when it all started.

M: Those are all bands that you don’t even have to listen to anymore because the songs are just tattooed on your brain.

CN: You just hear the name of the song and you hear it in your head, yeah.

M: The only hardcore I listen to [now] is if something catches my attention; if we tour with a band or if somebody gives me a CD that catches my ear. I’m really not actively going to record stores and checking out new bands. You move on. Most of these guys that I know and have been in bands with, listen to rap. That’s the main music they listen to, hip hop and rap.

CN: I listen to that because of the neighborhood I’m in [Spanish Harlem, NY]. I like that guy Sean Paul because he is the dancehall equivalent of hip hop. He does some interesting inflections, and even that song he did with Beyonce has all that Indian influence. It’s getting really interesting again. I listen to a lot of that because of where I live, and of course it comes through the window. I drive them crazy with the hardcore. Yesterday I was playing Dropkick Murphys. I’m really into a lot of the oi and classic punk stuff right now. I get a lot of the metal. I listen to it once or twice, but I always find myself gravitating to other stuff which is not what I’m writing about because it keeps my ear fresh. I think that’s basically the same thing you’re talking about. If you listen to the same thing all the time, it’s going to come out sounding the same.

M: It’s inbreeding. That’s what that is. When you listen to nothing but the music you’re doing, it’s inbreeding. You have to listen to something new. The only way you’re going to come up with something original is by mixing two things that people haven’t thought to mix before. Or two things that have been mixed but taking different angles from it.

CN: A lot of the hardcore and punk guys are doing the whole psychobilly stuff too, which is lots of fun. It’s just so funny to go to a psychobilly show and see these people doing retro shit. There’s a lot of things going on underground in the city. The hardcore thing is really big right now. The psychobilly / garage punk scene is getting really hot. The Little Killers are really hot right now, and Crypt just signed them. They haven’t signed anyone in three years. It’s like their first signing. There’s a lot stuff going on right under the radar of the labels. There’s going to be a whole explosion in 2004. It’ll be so much fun. Right now, it’s the pop-punk and the emo. But I think people are wearing thin on that now.

M: I think the pop-punk stuff, and even emo, is looking like its starting to not be the new, next best thing anymore.

CN: When I see on [MTV2 show] Subterranean, interviews with emo bands who say “Oh, we’re not emo,”…

M: That will always be a standard that no band will ever want to be called what they are. And that’s kind of where hardcore differentiates. Madball has been a hardcore band since day one and it has never tried to be anything else other than a hardcore band. We never tried to say, “Oh we’re this, or we’re that.” That’s true. When you had the grunge thing, and the Seattle thing, every band was like, “We’re not grunge, we’re not alternative.” Nobody ever wanted to be called alternative. Even metal, back in the 80’s, it was terrible how many bands denied their metalness by saying “We’re a rock and roll band.”

CN: You know who I always respected for being a fucking metal band, and saying they’re metal? Manowar. It became goofy, but at least they admitted it. There’s a few that are stalwarts: “Yeah, this is what I am. Deal with it.” I like that direct approach. Don’t try to be subterfugal. I think that’s why I like Courtney Love. She’s like, “Yeah, I’m a fucking mess and I’m going to show you.” I like people with heart, even if they don’t play 100%. That’s why I liked Bodycount a lot. The musicians could barely fucking play, but they had heart. They made you believe that shit. That’s part of why hardcore has always been great for me. People have such heart with it. They’re just so serious about it. Sometimes too serious.

M: Yeah, sometimes too serious. The thing with hardcore is that you’re always going to get sincerity out of a kind of music where you’re not making any money. There’s no one in hardcore doing it for the money, not one person. Because there ain’t no money. If you’re doing it for the money and you’re in hardcore, you’re an idiot. You’re gonna go hungry. So anybody who’s doing this kind of music, they got their heart in it. There’s no such thing as a hardcore sellout, because there’s nobody sending kids to college off of hardcore records.

CN: You’re right, no one does hardcore for the money.’ You hit that one right on the head. No one does music writing for the money either, Mitts. Let me tell ya. I love it when I go to shows and people think, “Oh you’re a journalist, you must be paid really well.” I’m always like, “Dude. Even when I got paid, if I wrote the story, turned it in, it got published three months later. They’d get the returns maybe three months after that, and I might get paid.”

M: Everybody in the entire music industry gets paid. And at the end of the day, if there’s any money left over, the person who made the music might get a percentage of it. When you do a show, the guy working the door is getting paid a set amount. The guy doing the sound is getting paid a set amount. The guy at the bar is getting paid an hourly rate. The guy who owns the club is getting a flat fee to rent his club out. The guy who’s there sweeping the floor, he’s getting paid a regular rate. At the end of the day, when all those people are paid off, whatever is left goes to the band. Maybe.

CN: And then the band has to pay their driver, their merch guy, and all that. Then you might have enough for your per diems.

M: And the reason it exists is because there’s always going to be bands that want to get on that stage. If you don’t want to do it for free, they’ll do it for free. Someone out there will play a show… I remember hearing stories back when I was growing up, trying to get shows around Long Island and New York. And we were complaining about how you have to sell tickets. You have to go and hand these little tickets out to your friends. I remember complaining about that, and somebody going, “Hey, you think this is bad? In LA, they make you pay $400.” You want the show, you pay the money to buy $400 worth tickets. If you sell those tickets, you make your money back.

CN: And that’s the real truth.

		RAG MEN interview by Christine Natanael
		LINKS: eulogyrecordings.com
RAG MEN claims members in such legendary bands as MERAUDER (Jorge Rosado-vocals), SKARHEAD (Mitts-guitar), EARTH CRISIS (Ian "Bulldog" Edwards who did the recording, but Jonathan Buske from THE PROMISE has since joined), and ex-Hatebreed ( Rigg Ross-drums). Though a hardcore band at heart, this crew feasts upon the carcasses of a wide range of styles, such as hardcore-old school and new, metal, rock, and punk. An "all-star " lineup in the truest sense of the term, this band is an awesome arsenal of sonic firepower. The recipe is staggering: the streetwise grit of SKARHEAD, the staunch conviction of EARTH CRISIS, the metal wizardry of MERAUDER, and the unequivocal ferocity of HATEBREED. Their collective years of experience have forged these men into a machine of consummate sonic havoc. Mitts came by the Crusher office back in November of 2003 for a little sit-down. So if as far behind the curve on your music as I am on getting these things transcribed and up on the site, well, read on and learn, my friend….
CHRISTINE NATANAEL: Madball had been broken up for a little while. Is that when all these side projects got started? MITTS: Kind of, yeah. I think that they had been talking about the Hazen Street thing even before Madball had broken up. It was that guy Chad from New Found Glory; he was the one, he and I think Toby from H20. I could be wrong, but I believe that they were the ones who originally wanted to do that idea. And Hoya was telling me about it even when Madball was still together. CN: The first question I asked Freddy [from Madball] was, “How many people do you think are going to know that Hazen Street is that street down the middle of Riker’s Island?” And he goes, “How did you know that?!?!” And I said, “Dude, my address was 15-15 for like a year! “ He started laughing. Because it sounds like Hazen Street could be next to Elm Street or Oak Street. But if you know, if you’ve been there, you know exactly what it is. So I thought that was kind of funny. Now, how did you guys put together Rag Men? Because I know Jorge was doing the Harley’s War thing for a while.
M: Yeah. Jorge keeps busy with a lot of bands. He was in another band for a little while called God Is I. Marauder always exists, whether or not they play out, they’re always around in one way or another. Basically, the way I tell it is that I was playing for Skarhead, from 1998 until we broke up last summer. Right around the time we were breaking up… It wasn’t over yet, I did start Rag Men before Skarhead broke up, but it was about the same time. What it was, I basically had a lot of material that didn’t fit in with what we were doing in Skarhead anymore. It might have at one point, but Skarhead was trying to go mainstream a little bit, and look for a little more radio-sounding stuff. The stuff that I had didn’t really fit. So I had a lot of riffs and stuff. I had talked with Jorge a bunch of times about doing a band, because I always admired his voice. He’s got, to me, the best voice for that style in the world. I don’t think there’s a singer out there that can hold a candle to him in terms of that deep, metal growl. I always wanted to do something with him. And I started kind of taking it seriously, all this material I had. I kind of asked Jorge a little bit on the side, “Hey, would you ever be interested?” And he was interested. At the time, we had my boy Rig playing drums for Skarhead. He just did our tour with us. But me and him were jamming together, doing Skarhead stuff and I played him a lot of this material I had and he sounded really interested. At that point, I was like, “Wow, maybe I’ll make this into a band.” So I got Jorge, and then I got Rig. They knew each other, so that clicked. And then when I finally decided to go through with it, I tried to think of a bass player. I already had one guy from one pretty big band, Marauder. And I got Rig who was just playing for Hatebreed – they’re certainly a huge band. And myself, I had played for Skarhead and I had played for Madball in the past. It would be good if I could get a fourth person who had the same experience as the three of us, and that’s when I thought of Bulldog from Earth Crisis. So I called him up, asked him to play. We’ve been good friends with those guys for years; Skarhead and Earth Crisis toured together. Madball toured with Earth Crisis before I was ever in the band. They’re really good guys and they’re really professional. I knew that if would be down to do it, he’d be a perfect fit. So I called him up and he sounded into it. That’s how I got my lineup. That’s it. CN: It’s amazing how a lot of the hardcore people have these side projects. They’re all doing, like, nintety different things at the same time. Which is good, though, because it keeps things fresh. M: Definitely. CN: …especially if you do too much of the same thing… M: You’ve got to stay creative, too. The more music you put out, the better it makes you as a musician--the more you actually channel into something finished. It was fun for me because it was something that I could start from scratch and let it be the way I wanted. I was in Skarhead, but Skarhead had existed before me. Before Skarhead, I played a little bit for Crown of Thornz, an old New York hardcore band. Everything I had done, I basically had inherited. All the bands I’d ever played for, I basically had inherited songs that were already written. So this was cool for me to start something off from scratch. And it was my vision, and I got these guys in on it. They took it to the next level. CN: So, who starts the writing process first, then? M: Most of the songs on the record we did now were my ideas, and then I got together with the rest of the band and we worked them out into songs. Generally, I would get together with Rig – just me and him – and we would knock out riffs and just jam and play stuff and see what felt right. Then we’d bring in Bulldog on it. He lives up in Syracuse, so a lot of his stuff was done by mail. I would just mail him a cassette with a whole bunch of ideas on it, and he would learn the bass parts. We did the original three songs, and then we did the record. Basically, the drill was we got together once to rehearse the stuff and work it through. Then once the songs were written we gave them to Jorge and he took it from there in terms of writing the lyrics and the vocal patterns over the music. It’s a dream working with these guys. Some bands have one or two guys who are experienced and the other guys are new or whatever. But with this band, all four of us have all done this numerous times. We’ve all made records, we’ve all toured. We’ve all played in bands forever. We all are on the same wavelength. There’s a big difference a great musician who’s on his own trip, and musicians that work well with a band. That’s what I’ve got right here. CN: Well you’re already all seasoned and experienced, but this is a new project so you get the best of both in that case. So, as far as song concepts, what are these songs about? M: Jorge wrote most of the lyrics except for a couple of songs. There’s one song I wrote, and then another song that me and him co-wrote. Most of the stuff so far has been pretty introspective, if that’s the right word. Rig’s a little younger than us, but me and Jorge and Bulldog are all around that same age now where we’re not in our early twenties anymore. I think a lot of the lyrics are just kind of looking inside and figuring out where we’re going with ourselves; whether we’re keeping on track. It’s a rough life playing music because there’s really not that much money to be made in it and it takes up all your time. It’s a full-time job with less than part-time pay.
	CN: Exactly like music publishing. Same thing. M: I wrote this song called “Insomnia.” I wrote it when Skarhead was breaking up and I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself. And this was before Madball got back together and asked me to join. I was at a crossroads in my life where I was like, “How much longer am I going to go on with this music?” I was wondering whether or not it was just time to surrender and go and get a real job and start living a more structured life. I ended up playing for Madball and then signed myself up for another tour of duty. CN: There you go. You guys are going out next week to do Eastpak Resistance. (remember this interview was done in 2003.—ed.)
M: We are. We leave Wednesday for that. CN: It sounds like so much fun, all those bands. M: Package tours are always fun. CN: I just miss the road. I’m a road dog, I fucking love it. I think that comes from when I was kid and my dad used to drive us here and there. I used to spend hours in the backseat of a car. M: There you go. CN: It’s normal for me. Having a kid and having to keep him in school, though, shuts that down real quick. M: It’s funny you mention that. That’s kind of what that song was that I was writing. Right now, when I’m a single guy, not married, no career other than my music, all I’m living for is myself. There comes a day when your number one priority is no longer yourself, but a wife, kids, a job, and things like that. I wrote this song about, you know, ‘when am I going to get around to putting myself second?” Obviously not yet. CN: You’ll get there. I didn’t have my son until I was thirty. It was hard to try and stay in music because, at the level I was doing it, I was like you guys. A different show every night, a different city, somewhere, being on the road with a band for a week… I love living out of a suitcase and having to be somewhere all the time. So, it felt very schizophrenic. I mean, I freaked. I ended up riding a desk for a while, doing endorsements for Gibson just to stay in touch with music. It’s so alien not to have it in my life. And when I actually stopped doing the Gibson thing, shit went way downhill. I was like, “No, no.” That’s what kept me on track. That’s what kept me from fucking up. Music. And I think that you guys provide such a great service for people and for kids in general as musicians. That’s the anchor in theses people’s lives, is that music, that outlet. What you’re going through, maybe if a kid hears that it will help him focus. Hardcore does that a lot more than metal or pop punk. M: I definitely remember what bands meant to me when I was a kid, so I always take that kind of stuff into account when I’m writing. Most of the lyrics aren’t done by me, but what you said about what it means to people… CN: Yeah, you can hear emotion in an instrumental, and know exactly what that person was feeling just by the key it was written in and the tone. So, when did you start playing? How old were you when you started? M: I was originally a bass player. I started playing the bass, I think, when I was thirteen, or fourteen. I didn’t pick up the guitar for two or three years after that. My father had an acoustic guitar lying around the house and I started to fiddle on that. The guitar, to me, was a little more appealing because when you the play bass, it’s fun, but it’s not something you can sit around and make songs with. But you can sit down with a guitar and start playing riffs and they kind of sound like a song. So I started playing a lot of guitar at the same time. I played in a bunch of high school garage bands and stuff like that, and a couple of city bands here. But nothing that ever broke the barrier of playing shows where you didn’t have to ask your friends to come down and be an audience. So I’ve been playing since then. There was a couple of years of my life where I really didn’t play in any bands at all. I was working at a recording studio, and trying to get a career going like that. But then in ’97 I ended up playing guitar, as I said, for Crown Of Thornz – which eventually turned into Skarhead. So that was the first time I had ever played guitar in a band. As a functioning guitarist, I’ve been playing since ’96, ’97. I’ve been playing the guitar and bass since I was an early teenager. CN: What made you pick it up?
M: Shit. Music has been every bit of my life since as long as I can remember. When I was a little kid, I remember Saturday mornings when I had no school; waking up at 8 in the morning and pulling all my mother’s Beatles records and Rolling Stones records out. And all I wanted to do was be that guy. I wanted to play. I used to have dreams of playing in front of people. It got into me at such a young age. There’s a lot of musicians in my family. My mother was a music teacher. So music has always been a big part of my whole family, and I just always wanted to play. I played a couple of instruments through grade school. I played the trombone, and I played the string bass when I became a bass player. I learned how to play in the orchestra. I was playing concerts with those things as early as the third grade. You get used to playing in front of people.
CN: I still have my fantasy of singing on stage in front of people. I’m okay in a band or a choir; as long as there’s other people with me, I’m cool. But doing that solo thing – I did it a talent show –So I get up there and I’m starting to play this song, and it’s all out of whack. It was just a choke moment, in front of the whole school. So I think that has stuck with me for quite a few years. I ended up promoting my friends instead of doing it myself. But I can dig that focus. I always have to have music on. The only reason why there’s no music on now is because we’re recording this. Even when I sleep, I have new age or something on. Lack of music in the world makes colors look less vibrant. It makes everything look more drab. M: Yeah. I gotta be listening to music at all times – if I’m in my car, or if I’m on a train or a plane; if I’m not in a conversation, I’ve got my headset on. Always. CN: What was the most influential record for you when you first started playing, which you obsessed on? M: When I first started playing an instrument, or in bands? CN: Either one. M: I grew up on heavy metal: Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Ozzy, and Black Sabbath. That was the first stuff that I really went out and started buying the records. When I first started playing the bass, those were the records that taught me how to play. I never took a lesson or anything. My mother was a music teacher, so she showed me how to tune the thing. Once it was in tune, it was just a matter of listening to the records and trying to play along. So those were the bands that taught me how to play. I can’t pick any one specific record that early on, but Iron Maiden was just my band. CN: Steve Harris… that was the guy. M: One thing that I wonder what the effect is going to be like in twenty years, or not even twenty years, ten years from now… When I grew up, the bands that I learned how to play from – Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden – were bands that played basically straight-structured, power chord riffs. They were very easy to develop your ear to. Nowadays, all the heavy music kids listen to, like Korn, The Deftones… CN: All that drop tuning… M: Everything is tuned so low. I’ve been playing for almost twenty years now, and I have a hard time figuring this stuff out. CN: It also gets kind of muddy when you drop it that far. M: That’s what I’m saying. I wonder what it’s going to be like, how people’s playing is going to be. [The music I grew up on] is brilliant, but at the same time it’s very simple. CN: What you learned is cleaner and a little more structured. Once I began to learn how to read the music and play, and get the tone in my head of what it is, if I heard something that was in a similar key it would just send me off racing mentally on a whole different tangent of sound and thoughts. That’s where I was coming from with the question. Sometimes there’s just one pivotal album that you’ll listen to and go, “Wow, this just spring-boarded me to another place.” Steve Harris is definitely one of those people. He played the bass more like you would play a guitar. M: He kind of invented his own style, though. He really pioneered a whole generation of bass sounds. The fact that he still played with his fingers – he was still like a leftover from the 70’s. CN: I love that tone, though. M: But at the same time he made it into a voice, the low-end of the guitar. CN: That’s what I’m saying. It was almost like a bass melody line. It gave much more depth to a lot of that music. That’s why I like people like Me’Shell Ndege’Ocello--great funk, slap stuff. Like the first time I heard Jaco Pastorius, that kind of stuff. I like the low end. I like melody. I like it all. I just like to see what people do with it. I listen to a lot of country just to balance out all this, because it gets to be a bit much after a while. As much as I love it, I need something that will make my ear know the difference. Sometimes I put on the TV. One of the bluegrass bands that I like – they’re kind of pop bluegrass – is Nickel Creek. There’s a chick playing violin, the brother’s playing guitar, and this other kid’s playing mandolin. He just rocks on the mandolin. I saw a video one day, and it’s set in a music store. And who is in the music store playing the stand-up bass parts for their whole little thing going on? Rob Trujillo! I’m like, “Get the fuck out of here!” That intrigued me, because he started way hardcore with the Suicidal Tendencies. Seeing him in a bluegrass video just spun my head around. M: I’m still trying to get used to seeing him in Metallica. CN: Yeah, well, it took me a while to get used to seeing Jason Newsted in Metallica too. I remember Jason from when he was in Flotsam & Jetsam. During the 80’s, I did the whole metal shebang. I had to do the Wingers and stuff like that too. But my heart was really in the hard stuff. As much as I loved hardcore, I could get barely any of it in the pages of the magazine because I wasn’t the editor. I could slide stuff through, like the early Prong stuff, the stuff they had on Spigot before they got signed. M: I remember hardcore kind of breaking through around ’88. It wasn’t even so much that one band did it, the whole scene started to [break]. I remember a couple of magazines doing exposes on the Sunday Matinees and the whole New York hardcore scene. The Cro-Mags, Murphy’s Law… CN: I could squeeze some of it in. I kept pushing the thrash bands, since Metallica was doing so well. The girls that were the editors listened to so much Winger and Poison, and all that crap. They didn’t know the heavy stuff. To them, Biohazard, Cro-Mags, and Murphy’s Law were the same as Testament and Slayer. It was all just heavy to them. So I was able to get some hardcore in there, just slide it on in. I was interviewing Howard Benson, the producer, yesterday. We both agreed that this was probably going to be the year of hardcore. M: I hope. CN: There’s a lot going on with the scene. The scene has existed for years and years with no help from major labels. It’s always been pretty solid. M: You’ve got to think that someday there’s going to be a backlash from the whole emo thing that’s going on. CN: That stuff just makes me want to scream sometimes. M: To be honest, I never put down one style of music in any way. The emo thing to me is… the music is the one thing I don’t have a beef about. CN: No, the music’s not the problem. M: I think the music is brilliant. Even the lyrics, as whiny as they are, don’t bother me so much. The thing that bothers me is the whole image of the tormented, poor, suffering singer with his little sweater on. I’ve been telling this story for a year. Madball played this festival down in Florida, where we were a last minute fill-in. I think one of the major headliners canceled, so they asked us to play. A great majority of the bands were these emo bands. At one point, one of these bands, with the exception of the drummer, had its back to the crowd. And they’re thrashing around, rolling around on the stage and not looking at the audience. That just doesn’t sit with me. CN: It’s offensive. M: It’s not even so much that it’s offensive. It’s just so far out of touch with where I come from. I got no problem with the music, I got no problem with the lyrics. But when you get on a stage, I want to see you be a man about it. You don’t have to be all testosterone and tough guy. But stand up there and sing your songs to the audience. These people paid to see you and you’re acting like you don’t want anybody to look at you. CN: That was my main beef at Lollapalloza. I had never seen Rage Against The Machine live, so when I went to see Audioslave I figured, ‘this is gonna be great.’ Did you know that the guy in Audioslave played the drums with his back to the audience with a big mirror in front of him? I said, “What the fuck is that about?” And the girl next to me said, “Oh, he’s got really bad stage fright.” I said, “Is it really bad stage fright, or is total narcissism?” He’s got a mirror in front of him! Tell me which! M: Get over it. CN: To me it’s offensive to turn your back to the audience. I understand if you have stage fright. But if that’s your shtick, then it’s arrogant. M: That’s exactly what I’m talking about. This wasn’t an issue of stage fright, this was an image. That image doesn’t sit with me. As I said, I don’t mind the haircuts, the sweaters, the funny shoes, or the music. There are some amazing emo bands. The music blows my mind, how it’s so heavy, but at the same time it’s got good melodies to it. I just can’t stand the whole shit like Eddie Vedder, who came out ten years ago like, “I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want anybody to look at me. I just want to be left alone.” If you want to be left alone, don’t get on a stage. Don’t put your music in front of people. CN: Be Alan Parsons. Just make fucking records and never play live. M: Don’t even put them out. Make your music and stick it in your pocket. If you’re going to put it out there for people you should face the people you’re playing to. CN: Even though emo came out of hardcore, it’s such a different thing. M: I don’t even think it came out of hardcore. CN: Ages and ages go, there were a few [hardcore] songs that they called ‘emo’ because they were emotional hardcore. It’s a totally different animal from what it started as. M: Somebody described it to me saying that emo is to today’s music what new wave was in the 80’s. Like The Cure, Depeche Mode, and all that. CN: Kind of, yeah. It’s the same kind of slightly nerdy, slightly geeky… M: That kind of evolved out of punk. So the relationship of 80’s new wave punk is almost the same as what emo is to hardcore. CN: Yeah. The thing that gets me about the emo is the atonal nasal whining of the vocals that gets to me. It’s not good dissonance, it’s annoying. M: For me as a musician, I can’t put anybody else’s art down. I can never sit there and say, “Oh, this guy sucks.” CN: I’m not going to say it’s bad, it’s just annoying to me. M: I wouldn’t even go so far as to say that. If I don’t like it, it’s just not for me. CN: You’re doing the Madball tour over there, are you going to come back and tour with Rag Men here? M: Definitely. Once the record comes out, we’re gonna do a lot more touring. Basically the three bands that we have that are directly associated with each other – there’s Madball, and between me, Rig, and Hoya and Freddy, that’s everybody’s number one priority. But with Freddy and Hoya doing Hazen Street, and then me and Rig splitting off with Rag Men, it kind of works out because we know when they’re going to be doing stuff, which gives us the opportunity to go out and stay busy with our thing. We know when Madball’s going to be playing, because all four of us are in other projects now. So when Hazen Street is out on the road, that’s when you’re going to see Rag Men on the road. And when neither of the bands are on the road, it will be because Madball is on the road. CN: Kind of like Slipknot, Stone Sour, Murderdolls...same gig, just different genre. It works good. You’re keeping busy. You’re generating new and different ideas to keep the scene evolving. Although, Freddy tells me that Hazen Street’s definitely not hardcore, it’s a lot different. So how would you describe Rag Men? Is it metalcore, is it hardcore? M: Rag Men is, to me, hardcore but a little more to the metal side of hardcore. At the same time, it’s not metalcore. The reaction I got when we recorded our first bunch of songs was that people were really surprised that it was so melodic. We’ve really tried to stay away from sounding like any of the bands that we’re all coming from. Earth Crisis and Marauder were two of the pioneering metalcore bands of all time. They perfected that sound. I think a lot of people expected us to be metalcore, just straight-up stomp beats and screaming and whatever. It’s really not like that. There’s a little bit of that in some of the songs. A lot of the songs have a rock influence and a little melody to them. There are some songs that are just straight hardcore. The way I’ve always thought as a musician is that a band has got a unique sound. If you put a group of guys together, they’re going to have a sound that no matter what they play, style-wise, it’s still going to sound like that band. The way I look at it is that, when I have Jorge singing I can write almost anything on the guitar end of things, and it’s going to be heavy at the end of the day. Because the way we sound as a band is heavy, and then when you have his pipes screaming over it it’s going to be deep, and it’s going to be hard. What we’re trying to write is taking a little bit of the artistic license with that, and the freedom we have, and write a little melody in to give the songs some texture and give the songs some real catchiness to them that you wouldn’t have necessarily if you were just flat-out killing it with all the metal riffing. That’s what we’re going for. Whatever originality we might have – and originality is up to each person’s judgment; people can call us generic or people say we’re original (I’d like to think that we’re somewhere inbetween) – comes from the fact that we’re writing songs just what sounds good. We’re not going for one specific sound. We’re just trying to see what comes out of it. CN: You just kind of go where it takes you. That’s the good thing about playing with people outside of your core project, having different collaborators. You get that different flavor from them. I was telling Freddy that hardcore is very much the equivalent of gangster rap, basically. I told him it would be an awesome fucking idea to have Madball and DMX do a fucking song together. You know that song he did, “Who We Be”? That would be a perfect hardcore song. M: Sure. Well, there’s been hardcore mixes with rap. You had Biohazard with Onyx. CN: That was a more commercial style of rap than what DMX does. DMX is like a hardcore guy. It’s more like Ice T and Bodycount than Onyx and Biohazard. M: That’s the thing. So many of the guys that I’ve been in bands with from Ezec with Skarhead and now Freddie and Hoya, almost none of us listen to hardcore anymore. We’ve all got our founding bands that got us into it, the Bad Brains, Agnostic Front, the Cro-Mags, Murphy’s Law, Leeway, and Sick of it All. CN: I remember when it all started. M: Those are all bands that you don’t even have to listen to anymore because the songs are just tattooed on your brain. CN: You just hear the name of the song and you hear it in your head, yeah. M: The only hardcore I listen to [now] is if something catches my attention; if we tour with a band or if somebody gives me a CD that catches my ear. I’m really not actively going to record stores and checking out new bands. You move on. Most of these guys that I know and have been in bands with, listen to rap. That’s the main music they listen to, hip hop and rap. CN: I listen to that because of the neighborhood I’m in [Spanish Harlem, NY]. I like that guy Sean Paul because he is the dancehall equivalent of hip hop. He does some interesting inflections, and even that song he did with Beyonce has all that Indian influence. It’s getting really interesting again. I listen to a lot of that because of where I live, and of course it comes through the window. I drive them crazy with the hardcore. Yesterday I was playing Dropkick Murphys. I’m really into a lot of the oi and classic punk stuff right now. I get a lot of the metal. I listen to it once or twice, but I always find myself gravitating to other stuff which is not what I’m writing about because it keeps my ear fresh. I think that’s basically the same thing you’re talking about. If you listen to the same thing all the time, it’s going to come out sounding the same. M: It’s inbreeding. That’s what that is. When you listen to nothing but the music you’re doing, it’s inbreeding. You have to listen to something new. The only way you’re going to come up with something original is by mixing two things that people haven’t thought to mix before. Or two things that have been mixed but taking different angles from it. CN: A lot of the hardcore and punk guys are doing the whole psychobilly stuff too, which is lots of fun. It’s just so funny to go to a psychobilly show and see these people doing retro shit. There’s a lot of things going on underground in the city. The hardcore thing is really big right now. The psychobilly / garage punk scene is getting really hot. The Little Killers are really hot right now, and Crypt just signed them. They haven’t signed anyone in three years. It’s like their first signing. There’s a lot stuff going on right under the radar of the labels. There’s going to be a whole explosion in 2004. It’ll be so much fun. Right now, it’s the pop-punk and the emo. But I think people are wearing thin on that now. M: I think the pop-punk stuff, and even emo, is looking like its starting to not be the new, next best thing anymore. CN: When I see on [MTV2 show] Subterranean, interviews with emo bands who say “Oh, we’re not emo,”… M: That will always be a standard that no band will ever want to be called what they are. And that’s kind of where hardcore differentiates. Madball has been a hardcore band since day one and it has never tried to be anything else other than a hardcore band. We never tried to say, “Oh we’re this, or we’re that.” That’s true. When you had the grunge thing, and the Seattle thing, every band was like, “We’re not grunge, we’re not alternative.” Nobody ever wanted to be called alternative. Even metal, back in the 80’s, it was terrible how many bands denied their metalness by saying “We’re a rock and roll band.” CN: You know who I always respected for being a fucking metal band, and saying they’re metal? Manowar. It became goofy, but at least they admitted it. There’s a few that are stalwarts: “Yeah, this is what I am. Deal with it.” I like that direct approach. Don’t try to be subterfugal. I think that’s why I like Courtney Love. She’s like, “Yeah, I’m a fucking mess and I’m going to show you.” I like people with heart, even if they don’t play 100%. That’s why I liked Bodycount a lot. The musicians could barely fucking play, but they had heart. They made you believe that shit. That’s part of why hardcore has always been great for me. People have such heart with it. They’re just so serious about it. Sometimes too serious. M: Yeah, sometimes too serious. The thing with hardcore is that you’re always going to get sincerity out of a kind of music where you’re not making any money. There’s no one in hardcore doing it for the money, not one person. Because there ain’t no money. If you’re doing it for the money and you’re in hardcore, you’re an idiot. You’re gonna go hungry. So anybody who’s doing this kind of music, they got their heart in it. There’s no such thing as a hardcore sellout, because there’s nobody sending kids to college off of hardcore records. CN: You’re right, no one does hardcore for the money.’ You hit that one right on the head. No one does music writing for the money either, Mitts. Let me tell ya. I love it when I go to shows and people think, “Oh you’re a journalist, you must be paid really well.” I’m always like, “Dude. Even when I got paid, if I wrote the story, turned it in, it got published three months later. They’d get the returns maybe three months after that, and I might get paid.” M: Everybody in the entire music industry gets paid. And at the end of the day, if there’s any money left over, the person who made the music might get a percentage of it. When you do a show, the guy working the door is getting paid a set amount. The guy doing the sound is getting paid a set amount. The guy at the bar is getting paid an hourly rate. The guy who owns the club is getting a flat fee to rent his club out. The guy who’s there sweeping the floor, he’s getting paid a regular rate. At the end of the day, when all those people are paid off, whatever is left goes to the band. Maybe. CN: And then the band has to pay their driver, their merch guy, and all that. Then you might have enough for your per diems. M: And the reason it exists is because there’s always going to be bands that want to get on that stage. If you don’t want to do it for free, they’ll do it for free. Someone out there will play a show… I remember hearing stories back when I was growing up, trying to get shows around Long Island and New York. And we were complaining about how you have to sell tickets. You have to go and hand these little tickets out to your friends. I remember complaining about that, and somebody going, “Hey, you think this is bad? In LA, they make you pay $400.” You want the show, you pay the money to buy $400 worth tickets. If you sell those tickets, you make your money back. CN: And that’s the real truth.