The Damned Things: In-depth Interview With Joe Trohman
By Aniruddh "Andrew" Bansal, August 11th 2011, Los Angeles CA: I spoke to The Damned Things guitarist Joe Trohman about the band's first ever headline tour, the support bands, music videos, future plans, and GWAR. Read the interview below!
Andrew: You guys are starting your headline tour on Saturday in San Diego. It's your first ever headline tour. How are you feeling?
Joe: I'm not sure how I feel yet because we haven't started it, but it's going to be fun. man. We are really excited and I think all of the other bands are excited, so it should be a really good time. I guess we'll find out how it goes when we get there (laughs).
Andrew: Recently, you toured with Volbeat and before that you did the Jagermeister tour. The transition from being an opening band to a headline band came rather quickly. Did you expect it to be so quick?
Joe: It wasn't really the plan, you know. With everyone's schedules, we wanted to do more support stuff to kind of build things longer. But Inked was so excited about doing this tour with us, so I think the opportunity was good and it worked out really well for everyone's schedules. It is a little bit before our time to headline, but we're mostly dealing with smaller rooms in most of these places like House Of Blues. So I think it will be really cool and with the help of the other bands we should get some nice turnouts, and it will be a blast.
Andrew: On those previous tours, you were the band nobody knew about. But on this tour, people will be coming to see you. So is there any added pressure or anything like that?
Joe: Absolutely, there's always more pressure when you get to headline. It's less pressure when you rely on the headlining band to bring everybody. Now it's kind of our turn to bring it. It adds even more pressure because we're still a new band. It's definitely a little bit scary but I think it's going to work out for the better. On a lot of these tours whenever we got a day off, we did off shows here and there. For the most part, those shows would go really well. We got 200-300 people to come out at all these shows and considering how new we are, that's awesome. And since we're doing similarly sized club rooms on this tour, it should be cool. Because we have such a relaxed, 'in the groove' sort of thing going on when we play, it is liked by everybody and hopefully that'll be the case on this tour as well.
Andrew: In terms of the set list what are you guys doing on this tour. Are you going to play the whole album?
Joe: We'll play the whole album because that's mostly what we have. We're going to try to put together a new song that we had for the record but it never got finished, and may be we'll work on some covers. We'll see what we can do but I prefer a set to be short and sweet personally. My attention span has gotten worse as I've grown older, but the general people's attention span is also short. So in "show business", we give people what they want to hear rather than over-saturating them with stuff. We don't have too much stuff, so hopefully people will look at that in a good way rather than a bad way.
Andrew: You're taking out three support bands on this tour. How was the line-up decided. Were they hand-picked by the band?
Joe: Well, Maylene is a band we had kind of talked about for a bit, because Every Time I Die had toured with them before and musically it seems to fit well with The Damned Things. Fair To Midland was pitched to us, and it sounded like a really cool idea. They are an eclectic band and said they want to do it, so it happened just like that, and it's great. And Hourcast were with us on that Volbeat tour, so it was a pretty easy choice.
Andrew: The music video you did for the "We've Got A Situation Here" single is a fun video. Do you guys plan to do any more videos?
Joe: We want to, but there's no money anymore from record labels for videos. Specially for us, because our record came out on Island and if you look at some of the other artists on Island Def Jam, there are a lot of pop artists and that's what major labels are thinking of as easy and safe. So they are just repeating that formula instead of necessarily putting a lot into newer bands like us. We're not getting a lot of money for video, but we're trying to put together something for may be "Friday Night". We're still going to try to get it panned out and make another video. I think the Situation video came out awesome. It was a lot of fun to make, which I think translates really well for other people to hear or see. So hopefully we'll get to do that. It'll be really nice. We have a bunch of ideas. We talked to Brian Posehn and he seemed really cool about it. It's all about getting some money together. Like I said, because there's been a slow decline and people don't even like showing music videos on TV, and it's hard for people to find that one place where they can go and see music videos. There's been a lot of prioritizing in terms of the videos that are shown, which is sad because a video is like a second expression for a song. The song itself is an expression and the video is like a whole another way to express the meaning or the vibe, or whatever it is. So it will be nice to do another one. People definitely ask us a lot about it. We'd love to give people what they want, but it's tough nowadays.
Andrew: Yeah, exactly man. So after this tour, what plans does the band have for the rest of the year and the near future?
Joe: We're supposed to go to Australia but the Soundwave Revolution festival thing might be cancelled, which has put a lot of bands in a crummy spot. We're talking about still trying to go over to Australia and doing a small tour over there with a coupe of other bands. So that may be still on the cards and we'll go there in September, and then it's kind of closed for the rest of the year. We're going to Japan for the Loudpark Festival which is what we are talking about playing. It has been shortened to one day because of the tragedy over there, just to change it up this time around. So basically it'll be like a little hiatus after this Australia tour but I'm sure we'll be doing one-off shows next year, try to get together here and there, and in the future we'd definitely like to make another record. We'll probably make it even if people don't want it (laughs).
Andrew: I think the timing for this tour is perfect because after this tour Anthrax will be busy with their new album and Every Time I Die are going to tour with GWAR.
Joe: Oh yeah, and Every Time I Die are putting the finishing touches to their new record as well, so they'll be touring on that. New Anthrax is coming out, so there'll be some good things. I've got some other stuff I'm working on that I'll probably put out there, and we'll get back together when the timing is right. We're certainly not going away permanently, and it's going to happen in between other things.
Andrew: I follow Jordan from ETID on twitter, and before the GWAR tour was announced, he had said, "We're going on tour with the best live band on the planet." So I wanted to ask you about your opinion on GWAR. Have you seen them live?
Joe: Yeah, I've seen them a bunch of times. They're one of those bands where even if you don't like the music, their live show is one of the best you'll ever see. They give you the show and it's a spectacle. It's awesome, and I love how hyper-political they are. It's some really goofy kind of humor mixed with smart humor. The props and the costumes, and everything is just mind-blowing. They've been keeping it up full-on. It's great that they exist and they're a really important band. I saw them with The Red Chord a couple of years ago. It was really fun. George Bush was still in office and they made some pretty brutal George Bush jokes, and it was amazing. There's a lot of jerking off jokes and great stuff like that. It's really hilarious and they're really good with their live stuff. So I'm with Jordan on that, they are one of the best live bands out there.
Andrew: Joe it was great talking to you man, I'm looking forward to the show on Sunday and I'll see you then.
Joe: Cool man, see you there and thanks for the interview!
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