the promise ring. the interview. take one
We join the interview a few minutes in, talking about baseball players from Milwaukee, the Promise Ring’s hometown. Talk about baseball, playing pickup basketball games and a few other questions were lost, as the beginning of the tape was mysteriously erased. By the way, this interview was done in July of ’99 right before “Very Emergency” came out, so it’s kind of dated (we’ve survived Y2K)…and conversational. Sorry. Interview by Brendan and Wade, outside the Grant St. Mighty Taco in Buffalo.
NIMBY: Being from
Milwaukee, how do you feel about Robin Yount’s election… er, induction
into the baseball hall of fame today? I think it’s awesome he spent his
entire career with the Brewers.
Davey: Yeah, that’s like old-time baseball, man. When players play like
30 years for the same team, that’s awesome! Now you can’t get a player
to play for more than like three.
Dan: The whole thing about Robin Yount is… one time I was at the game,
and it was one of Rollie Fingers’ no-hitters. It was the bottom of the
ninth and…
Davey: Rollie never started!
Dan: What’s that? Really? No! I thought…
Davey: The only brewer to ever throw a no-hitter was Teddy Higuera. Or Juan
Nieves, I can’t remember.
Dan: Anyway, there was some important thing…
Davey: Oh, the game where Robin made that diving catch?!? It WAS Nieves.
Dan: Yeah, yeah, Juan Nieves, same shit. Anyway after the game they were interviewing
Robin and 
asked him
how he felt about the catch. And he was like “Oh, you know, I just did
it for my teammate.” He’s a real team player. He didn’t say,
you know “I’m so fucking awesome, that guy was nothing to me.”
He tried extra hard to catch it so Nieves could have a no-hitter.
Davey: Yeah, I remember that! It was amazing. Two outs in the top of the ninth…and
someone hit a total liner into the gap. And it was the first year Robin was
in center field after he’d gotten too ‘old’ to play shortstop.
There was no way he should have gotten to that ball; he totally laid himself
out and made the catch. The team was pretty stoked.
NIMBY: Yeah, he was one of my favorites. Longevity and heart. So, which city
is more happening on a Saturday night? Milwaukee, Madison or Urbana, Illinois?
Davey: On a Saturday night? I would say Madison during the summer.
Dan: WHAT?
Jason: In the summer, all the kids aren’t in school!
Davey: I think U of I has more parties than Madison does. But in the summer
Madison doesn’t lose as much. But that’s just my opinion.
NIMBY: But they all beat Milwaukee, huh?
Davey: Milwaukee’s not really a party college town at all. But I’d
rather be in Milwaukee on a Saturday night than either of those other two towns,
but that’s just me…
(Tape gets garbled for like 2 minutes. Fuck.)
NIMBY: So you guys have been approached by some major labels before, I’m
guessing. Is that something you’d ever consider? Jumping to one, I mean.
Davey: Nope. We’ve never been approached. It’s more a thing for the
rumor-mill.
NIMBY: Honestly? Wow.
Jason: We considered it. Well, there was that one time that we managed to sign
to like 9 major labels all at once. For millions and millions of dollars! So
we were able to sign with them and then get out of it. And now we’re independently
wealthy!
NIMBY: So they never offered you like a vice presidency like that guy from Limp
Bizkit?!
Davey & Jason: WHAT?!?!
NIMBY: You didn’t hear about that? The singer from Limp Bizkit is supposedly
like the vice president of Interscope records.
Davey: Where’d you hear that? C’mon.
NIMBY: My friends in Massachusetts and I were talking about it. We were complaining
about the sorry-ass state of modern music…
Dan: Yeah, like a major corporation like that would let some knucklehead…
do that…
Davey: “I can run a business, I’m 22!” I can see them explaining
the contract to him now: “AND you get to be the Vice President!”
NIMBY: Well that’s a good lead in for our ‘why does modern pop music
suck’ question.
Jason: It doesn’t! I don’t think it sucks!
NIMBY: Well, the bands that get on the radio, I mean…
Davey: Yeah, but they don’t all suck. I think to say that the state of
modern pop music sucks is to imply that at some stage pop music was amazing.
Scott: There have always been shit bands…
Davey: It’s just like, because it wasn’t your era you don’t know
about all the shitty bands that were there.
Jason: All the bands, all the ‘Creeds’ of back then have been forgotten
about over time. Like twenty years before you were born you would never know.
Scott: It’s hard to say. All the ‘oldies’ that are hip to like
now – in like 40 years these hip tunes are probably going to be like Matchbox
20, and people… well, I’m going to be like “This sucks!!!”
Jason: Yeah, lots of people are gonna be into old ballads, I think. Like Poison
ballads will be good fare for people in the future!
Dan: I’d have to disagree, because you can’t say that a Who record
or something like that would be looked upon as just as good as the Matchbox
20 record twenty years down the line. The Who was first – the Who paved
the way for Matchbox 20, you know? It’d be a sad state of affairs nonetheless.
I’d say ‘Oh my god, how awesome is that?’
Jason: But I don’t think the Who is really pop music though.
Dan: Yes they are; they were. They weren’t as pop THEN as Matchbox 20 is
now. Even more so, they’ve probably sold more records.
NIMBY: But I mean if you compare Matchbox 20 to something like Foreigner. Pick
like two loser bands. I dunno. Okay, that question fell apart. Sorry.
Dan: No, no. I just don’t see the purpose of… you can’t knock
the classics. I mean they’re classic for a reason.
NIMBY: Yeah, Because they’re the first to do something, something new,
something cool. And so they… sort of can be like a point of comparison,
even if bands hate to be compared.
Davey: Yeah, well it just amounts to saying what will be and what won’t.
Only point I really want to bring up is that it’s kind of really easy to
rebel against what’s popular now, and not even think about whether it’s
good. I personally don’t listen to the radio. But I don’t know if
it’s because it’s good or bad; it’s just, I don’t.
Jason: I think in the era of the Who there were a whole bunch of popular bands
that … that the genre sort of changed… the Who THEN probably wasn’t
probably considered pop music. Yeah they sold lots of records, but pop music
NOW is like a whole series of different bands.
Dan: Well we’re not just talking about music that makes it on the radio;
it’s music that people LISTEN to. The Who made it on the radio. Matchbox
20 makes it on the radio. Whatever. I don’t know what you want to call
it but…
NIMBY: So would you guys be psyched to hear something of yours picked up by
mainstream radio?
Dan: Sure. If it happens it happens.
NIMBY: But it’s obviously not what you’re ultimately shooting for,
right? I mean at least I don’t think if that’s the way things should
be.
Davey: I think we look at it more as if we make it, great. But as long as we
can keep making songs we like—that’s the ultimate goal. That is THE
intention. To stay together, keep having fun, and keep making good songs. But
it certainly makes it a lot easier when more people are reached with your songs.
It doesn’t change what we’re doing if some radio station decides to
play the song. But if they do, good for us. Because that means we’re dissin’
Matchbox 20 by taking up some of their air time, you know?!
NIMBY: More power!
Davey: Well, we think so; I don’t know if that’s true or not! Okay,
what’s left?
NIMBY: Well, I guess this would be the ‘lyrics’ question.
Collective: Uh-oh!!!
NIMBY: I don’t know if this is anything you want to get into… but…
where do you look for inspiration... and how do you approach writing lyrics?
I’m guessing Davey writes them all…?
Davey: Yeah, I write all the lyrics. I don’t know. This new record was
written a lot more on the fly than our other records. I used to have a huge
book of lyrics – which I still do have – but now I like writing the
lyrics as I/we write the songs. I start writing the melody as soon as I start
writing the song, you know? And as soon as I start writing the melody, I try
and think of words. So I start making stuff up. That’s pretty much how
it works. Sometimes I’ll get to something and be like “that sucks”
or “this just doesn’t work” then I’ll replace those. But
if I can get a catch-phrase and work around that, then it’s good. I try
to do it as much in the… well, as part of the ‘wheel’ of the
song, more than I used to I guess. As the song is being written I like to write
the lyrics. But of course this method is not foolproof, by any means. Oh, inspiration.
Um, I don’t know where inspiration comes from. Your head. Which is constantly
bombarded with messages. Blips. I mean everybody’s it, you know?
NIMBY: Cool. So, this is your first show in Buffalo, right?
Davey: Yeah. We’ve never played Upstate New York at all. Nowhere north
of New York.
Dan: My first band played Syracuse once. It’s a nice town.
Davey: We’ve never played there because Jason always says we couldn’t.
But seriously, I don’t know why we haven’t yet. It’s kind of
a weird routing to come out this way.
NIMBY: Oh no it’s not!
Davey: Okay, that’s a bad excuse. I think upstate New York has fallen prey
to Canada. That’s the way we usually have our tours planned out. Usually
after Cleveland we do Toronto and Ottawa and Montreal. But I don’t know
how much longer that’s gonna happen, I see there are people here that appreciate
us coming!
NIMBY: Yeah well, neither of us will probably be here next year, but oh well…
we might…
Davey: Well, if Doug Flutie shows up, that’ll help! He’s on the list,
so somebody call him! His band could open up since the sixth band cancelled!
Jason: Cancelled! Who?
Davey: Angels in the Architecture, I think?
NIMBY: I don’t know. I think they may’ve broken up. Oh, another question:
What are you guys doing for the Millennium? I heard that Pink Floyd is doing
this thing in the desert in Egypt; there just going to set stuff up and play
near the pyramids! Every band is doing something, you know?
Davey: Really?! We’re gonna open for Prince. Nah, I’m gonna be hiding
out.
Jason: It’s definitely freaky. I think people are really underestimating
it. I do.
Scott: Eh, I think people are overestimating things.
Davey: Those two opinions are why I think it will be really intense. I think
if you’re out driving down the highway that night… you just can’t
trust a single driver! It’s kind of crazy because you don’t know how
other people are gonna react.
Jason: I’m going to be somewhere where there’s not a lot of people
to bother me.
NIMBY: That works.
Davey: That I totally understand. But I think it’s going to be either pretty
wild or pretty ‘nothing at all’. One of you will be right! I don’t
know which.
Jason: Well, I don’t think things will be like the Apocalypse. But maybe
things will be fucked up to a certain extent where it’s gonna be a major
inconvenience. Some people will be hit a lot harder than others. There’s
a lot of things to take into consideration. Like the whole bank scare, a lot
of banks are saying that they’ve taken care of it – and if they have
then that’s good, and if they haven’t then it’s bad – but
you don’t really KNOW. But regardless, I think a whole shitload of people
are gonna be terrified of it happening, so lots of people might pull their money
out even if it’s safe to leave it there. And that is something that could
cause total chaos! And there’s lots of cities that are more prepared for
it than others. Like, I’m sure Minnesota is really prepared. There’s
a lot of states that get their electricity and power from other states. I think
Pennsylvania supplies a lot of electricity/power for a lot of states, and they
are totally not prepared! So some states are gonna be fucked even if they are
ready because they get power elsewhere. There are like so many things that can
be affected by this scare, it’s unbelievable. Like small towns, if they
can’t get food or if the power goes out somewhere there’s no way to
converse. There’re just so many possibilities, it’s unbelievable.
Davey: Uh, yeah.
Jason: I’ve been reading up on it a lot. A lot of it’s scary, because
it’s stuff we don’t know about firsthand. It’s all second hand.
That’s why it’s scary to me.
Davey: The only thing I know first had is of a guy that works at an electric
company, Wisconsin Electric. Wisconsin Electric runs Illinois because they don’t
have their own, they borrow from us. So this guy I know says he’s 99 percent
sure that nothing will happen, but if something DOES happen, we’ll be like
3 days without electricity!
Jason: And it’s something small like that could cause total chaos! I mean
imagine a city the size of Chicago going without power for like 3 days. Like
total looting, et cetera. I mean, remember when New York City had the ‘brownout’?
It wasn’t even a blackout and people were going totally fucking crazy.
Davey: I’m sure they’d get Chicago’s [power] back up as soon
as possible if something did happen, but then you know Southern Illinois could
be out for like a week or something. Because they’re thought of as less
important.
Jason: Also nuclear power plants: they were doing tests on them to simulate
Y2K, and one of them DID totally fuck up! And the thing is, they knew what has
to be fixed, and they fixed it, but the problem is, they can only test it every
6 months! So they can’t test it again before the end of the year. That’s
fucking scary.
Dan: I have a cousin whose ex-wife who works for the Dept. of Agriculture and
she’s on a task force of forty some people who are trying to get the Dept.
up, and they said that at 100 percent efficiency with those people and their
full-time plus overtime jobs doing everything they can do in their manpower,
they can finish only 43 percent of what they need to do by the end of the year!
And the task force has been going on since like ’97! So, I don’t know
if that 67 percent’s going to mess up or not, but that is scary…
Jason: And there’s also the fact that all these other countries, like third-world
countries who’ll get hit really hard. And everyone’s economy directly
effects all the other economies. So even if the U.S. was totally prepared, if
Japan goes totally under then that affects us in ways I don’t even know…
Dan: I still think that 99 percent of this stuff isn’t gonna happen, but
that one percent chance, that’s what’s really fucking frightening.
Jason: Yeah, overreacting is going to be the big thing, I think. I agree. Nothing
will probably happen. I listen to too much Art Bell, sorry…
NIMBY: Okay, that was… an involved answer…
Davey: Yeah, that went a little bit overboard… but Y2K is freaky. I was
thinking I might just spend three days working, sleeping and writing songs in
the studio for Y2K… that was one of my ideas. Write as many songs as possible
and record them. Otherwise I’ll probably be hanging out in my house. If
I have electricity…
NIMBY: One last thing I thought of is… well, you know Braid is breaking
up in like a month…
Davey: Yeah, you gotta love their ‘plan’ to break up! At their high
school break up… they were like “Yeah, I’m going to college,
so let’s break up.” Now they’re playing like 4 more shows…
Tape ends, but you didn’t miss much. More talk of Braid and basketball,
and we walk back to Showplace from the Grant Street Mighty Taco. They turn down
a request to play Saturday, opting to do a lot more new ‘pop’ stuff.
Good show.