Hot Press meets Rocket From The Crypt

As they prepare to storm Dublin's Button Factory this Saturday December 7, Hot Press' Dave Hanratty caught up with frontman John 'Speedo' Reis to talk reunions, riots, radio, Dave Grohl and… Christmas jumpers?

Rocket From The Crypt are officially a 'reunion band' now...

Oh yeah, we broke up. We are a reunion band, for sure. 

You said that it doesn't feel any different, though, that it just feels the same.

Well, it is the same. You can't escape yourself, even when we're six people. We reconvene and continue to be ourselves. The sound is the same and so is the chemistry. We put so many hours into what we were and what we did. We attacked the rock and roll form with abandon and we felt that our best chance of being a great band was to work harder than everyone else, because we felt inferior to a lot of the music that we were inspired by.

We weren't James Brown. We weren't that good of players, I'm not that good of a singer, so the only way to kind of find artistic freedom is to break ourselves down so that the music comes naturally. It becomes second nature, the language you speak. When we got back together, it was nice that all those hours weren't wasted on the moment. There's so much memory and ways in which we trained ourselves in that absence. I'll be honest; there was a little bit of rust but it fell away rather fast. We found that work that we had done. There was a lot of muscle memory that came into play.

It really doesn't feel any different, at all. It does feel that people are a little bit more interested right now, which is a good thing. That's one of the reasons - not the reason - but one of the reasons we stopped playing is that it didn't seem like people really cared all that much [anymore], you know? We'd been a band all that time and it's only natural. We wanted to pursue other things, live life and see what else was out there beyond Rocket From The Crypt. And then people started calling again…

It is a reunion, because we broke up and we're back together so whatever negative comes from that, I guess we have to take that criticism, because I do look at that tag as being almost a negative thing. There are so many reunions going on and I tend to not want to be lumped in with anyone, especially if it's bad. The fact is that's what it is, though. 

In the case of Rocket From The Crypt, things are a little different. This isn't a cash-grab stadium 'one last run' thing. Still, the whole 'reunion' tag has negative connotations.

Yeah. Here it is, I'll try to make sense of it. All those years that we were playing, from 1990 to about 2005… all those years, we really wanted people to like us. We went and canvassed and petitioned, basically going door to door, shook hands, kissed babies and tried to make connections with people through our rock and roll attack. That's what it was - trying to find that connection. We weren't really able or willing to do or be anything different from what we were, therefore we didn't try to fight music that was popular. We realised that what we were doing was very niche. It was what we were about; representing our tastes and our instincts. We tried to find the tribe, to build the tribe out of nothing. 

Then we stopped playing and all of sudden people want to hear the band again. All that time, we wanted people to like us and hear us and want to come see us and now, years later, when they came asking, it kind of seemed ridiculous to say no. We all get along and this is what we wanted so why not just look at it as, 'Well, we took a break and now we're back'? For our band, we couldn't say, 'We're taking ten years off'. That's not who we were. We were all about the band. We were either gonna go full-on attack or completely recede and go the other way. But it needed to have a finality to it. We didn't want to just float in purgatory. We wanted to be on or be off. 

At the time, when it was 'over', did it feel like it?

It felt like it was over, for sure, to tell you the truth. We were all so committed to rock and roll so when we were played our last show, I really felt like, 'I won't be doing this again, I'll be doing something else'. So it did really feel over. Again, like I said, we all got along great. There wasn't any artistic or personal rift. It was just time. Nothing lasts forever. We had a really good run and we did everything we ever set out to do and 100 times more. We were very happy of what we achieved and the times and the moments we created. There was definitely no remorse in any of it. 

Let's go back in time. I've been listening to Circa: Now! quite a bit lately. You recorded it during the 1992 LA Riots…

We weren't quite in the epicentre of the action. Things were happening throughout the city. It was pretty fragmented. We were in a locked down area, not allowed to leave the studio. They weren't calling it 'martial law' but it was like that. There was a curfew in place and after a couple of days we were told, 'Don't leave. Do not leave the building'. We had a TV in there so we could see what was going on and we'd hear the helicopters flying over the studio and we'd occasionally see our building on TV and what was happening around us but we were really too dumb to feel in any danger. I don't think we felt threatened. We just thought, 'We're making a record!'. 

It was a big undertaking and it got to the point where we able to get in and work so we were completely focused on getting it done as fast as possible and within our budget. It's not that we were insensitive to what was going on around us. The walls could have been exploding and we would have reacted the same way. 

It must have been strange for a punk band in that situation, having to retain focus against a backdrop of social upheaval.

Well, it's what we were there to do and we'd been planning it for five months. Back then, time seemed to move much more slowly. We were so excited in that build-up and it felt like a rare opportunity. We had to claw our way to make our first record so when it came time to doing our follow-up, we had to pull so many favours and have so many things fall into place… I wouldn't necessarily say that it was focus, it was more… even in that early stage, it was our identity; this is what we do. This is what it's about.

Also, we weren't from LA. We went there because it was a good studio that recorded punk rock music and knew where we were coming from. We could speak the same language as them and they'd understand what we were going for. Even though it was just a couple of hours away from San Diego, we felt like we were in a foreign land. When you grow up in San Diego, LA seems like this dark force to the north. It's quite different, not just being a larger city but all-consuming in all the ways that San Diego is not. 

In terms of the future, you seem to have a heavily-rumoured on again/off again working relationship with Dave Grohl… 

It's just a rumour! He's a fan of the band and he expressed interest and it's been cooking up but nothing more. It's just one of those things. How it got out there, I don't really know. I like Dave, he's an awesome guy and he was a big supporter of the band and we valued his endorsement. More than that, we liked that he came from a similar background, specifically the underground hardcore punk rock scene, that network that we were all weaned on. And he went on to be a part of modern music history. We're really happy for him, it's a really cool thing to see. 

What are you listening to these days?

I love The Blind Sheik, they're awesome. There's a really good San Diego band called Octa#grape. I like Thee Oh Sees, too. King Khan & The Shrines was probably the best show I've seen this year. As far as new stuff… most of what I listen to tends to be a bit old… antique. 

Vintage. 

I don't know the definition of 'vintage', really. I used to think that it meant that it had to be 50 years old and antique was 100. Maybe it's something that is connected to a bygone era. It's probably not the same definition that's used for wine or for a specific year or to be used interchangeably like the term 'old-school'. 

Have you heard anything recently that pissed you off? 

Hmm. I'm trying to think… let's be real; I try to avoid that kind of thing but I do hear things every now and then that make me shirk. Why even turn on the radio? I don't know what it's like there but over here, why even fuckin' turn it on? I like to listen to baseball games on the radio, sometimes more than watching it on the TV. I think that radio is actually a really exciting medium. It really plays on people's imaginations and our ability to create pictures in our mind and sometimes that's better than actually seeing them in reality. Radio, with the right people behind the mic and the controls, has the potential to be such an amazing form of media and entertainment. It's really incredible. There's such a rich history in radio but it's so bad in its current state. Thankfully, there's Internet stuff and all that but radio, I gotta tell you, it just isn't the same.

No?

I worked in radio for a while and one of the recurring dreams that I had was that with radio, the bottom would fall out and people would just not care anymore and it would be completely devalued, Internet radio would take over and computers would be the new thing and radio would have no use. Hopefully, if that ever happens, a person with vision will be able to come in and afford a station, because in the United States they're very, very expensive, even a low wattage station in this area is worth millions and millions of dollars. Maybe somewhere down the line, that can happen and someone can create exciting radio that existed in the '50s and the '60s and do something community-based that was original and spoke to the people and represented the culture of that area. Radio now is definitely crass, to say the least. I hear stuff all the time that makes me wince and makes me mad…

Let's be more specific, then. Would you have a most hated song of all time?

I have no idea, there's so much crap out there. I can't think of one above all others… I used to really hate that song 'Baker Street' by Gerry Rafferty. I still do, actually. I hate that song. It's not my least favourite of all time, but it's up there in the top 100. It's the first that came to mind. It's an era of music and it has this adult pomposity that really pissed me off when I was younger. There's this pseudo-class to it that I thought was phoney and fake. I didn't like the way I sounded, either. It sounded like menthol cigarettes and cocaine. And I really like the saxophone but it has one of the worst saxophone sounds ever. 

People love it, though.

Well, it's irony for them. It's like people wearing a really loud Christmas sweater. 

You might see some of those at your Dublin gig.

I think it'd be a little premature, no? They'd be jumping the gun a little.

You'd be surprised.

Hey, I like Christmas as much as the next person who likes Christmas…

You won't throw them out if you see one, then?

Come on. People need attention, I get it. Whether you wear a Christmas sweater or you ride a unicycle or you have a beard or whatever you do to make up for that love that you didn't get as a child; I don't hold that against you at all. I get it. 

I'm happy to report that I don't have a Christmas jumper, beard or unicycle so I think you and I can be friends.

What about juggling? Do you juggle? 

I do not fucking juggle. You kidding? 

Ha! That's great. We can be friends.