Your songs can be very different live—more jammy, and sometimes a little heavier. Yeah, we’ve always made a concerted effort to extend certain sections and give songs another element live that we don’t necessarily have on the records.

Is that why you recorded the most recent record (June’s All Your Favorite Bands) almost entirely live? Yeah, it has always been a struggle for us to put on the record what we do live, and we’ve always felt that we are at our best as a band in the live setting. The mentality was, let’s go make it sound as live as we can and capture that energy in the studio. That’s how [producer] Dave [Rawlings] records all of his music. We were all facing each other, and we tried creating that vibe that you get onstage. And it seemed to work out.

You also road-tested the songs, right? How did getting to see audience reactions affect the final outcome? There were certain sections that just weren’t hitting live, so we would structure them differently, like the bridge would come after the second chorus as opposed to after the solo, something like that. That kind of experience is invaluable. Even with countless hours of rehearsal, you can’t get what you get playing the song in front of an audience in one show.

Is there a particular song you think really benefitted from that? “Right on Time” definitely came together in that particular way. It became more driving. All of them really benefitted, though.

A lyric from the title track stood out for me: “May all your favorite bands stay together.” Where did that idea come from? [Frontman] Taylor [Goldsmith] had that line for a long time—he was actually singing the chorus for a long time and didn’t know what to do with it. The song was written for a friend, a younger person who was kind of finding their way, this was like a good-tidings-to-you sentiment. Despite what you may experience, how traumatic certain things can be, try to hold onto that element that makes you youthful. If you really unpack it, it’s somebody who’s graduated from adolescence.

Dawes’ lyrics remind me of signature LA artists like Jackson Browne, The Eagles and Tom Petty. Is that the music you and Taylor were raised on growing up in Southern California? We were more raised on soul and Steely Dan, and Bob Dylan to a certain extent. We didn’t really start getting into that stuff until people started making the comparisons. It makes sense, I guess, but when we released our first record that was a common criticism or a common comparison, but I didn’t listen to a Jackson Browne record until I was like 19. I had heard some of his songs, but I didn’t dig deeper into his catalog until we were given the opportunity to meet him and hang out with him. I didn’t develop an affinity for Joni Mitchell or The Eagles until later as well, and I know the same goes for Taylor.

Maybe it has something to do with being raised in LA and the commonality that we all experience as Angelenos. For any artist, where you come from influences your tastes and forms your decisions and aesthetic values. LA is a giant city, yet there’s a certain closeness, and it definitely cultivates a certain type of lifestyle.

Your musical style brushes up against a lot of genres. I’ve seen you on bills that were bluegrass, alt-country, rock, folk. How would you describe it to someone who hasn’t heard you? I usually just go with rock ’n’ roll, but I can see why somebody might want to call it Americana or folk or indie rock. It’s tough for me to say objectively it’s this or that—it’s whatever the listener makes it. But I’m happy we do brush up against all these different genres, because it’s given me opportunity to play with a lot of artists that are very different from one another.

Web link: http://lasvegasweekly.com/ae/music/2015/aug/06/weekly-interview-dawes-drummer-griffin-goldsmith/

In the wake of the Bunkhouse’s sudden closing on Monday, Sunday’s show has been moved to Backstage Bar & Billiards.

What’s life like for a metal band at your level in 2015? It’s an interesting place to be. You have to put in a lot of hard work, and you definitely have to put in the miles—you have to go on tour and bust your ass writing stuff. … Some bands get lucky, I’m not gonna lie, but I feel if you put in the work, put in the time, you can make a living. We have for some time now.

What sort of goals do you guys have now, having recently released your fourth full-length? To stay on our upward trajectory. The records get better, and as musicians we get better. There’s a certain routine aspect to being in a band, and if we’re off for a very long time we miss it, like certain breeds of dogs—you need to take them out, they need to be walked. I think at a very basic level we’ve been conditioned, like, “Man, I want to get on a stage, I want to play, I want to turn my amp up, I wanna see my friends in other states and visit places.” They’re kind of like work vacations.

New album Restarter sounds like a return to an earlier musical style for Torche. Do you agree? I think it sounds taken back to [2007’s] In Return stuff, heavier and more direct, but I feel like it’s also very current to where we want to be as far as the energy. It’s very true to our live sound.

Did [previous album] Harmonicraft ruffle your fans’ feathers? We tend to do new things and keep ourselves entertained. We have our sound and our identity, but it allows us to revisit or explore an aspect of our sound as opposed to doing the same thing over and over. It’s very liberating and freeing and keeps it very exciting to us to not have limitations on our sound. I feel like Harmonicraft was more sonically tight and energetic in vibe and tone. It was upbeat rock and roll.

It’s been a decade since you released your first album. How has the writing process evolved over those 10 years? We’ve kept the same setup, as far as writing rather quickly, because we’re usually in a time crunch. We have members who live across Florida, and we really have to take advantage of the time we have together. So it’s always really long days, and we usually demo stuff and hear it the next day in order to really let it digest. I feel that over time we’ve really developed a way of working quickly and efficiently both in writing and recording live in the studio. You’re going to have those instances where you hit a wall, so to speak, but I feel that we always work around it together.

One thing I think spans all your records is the band’s pop sensibility, which is notable for a metal band. We all grew up with pop music or even rock and metal stuff that was catchy, that was about the songs. It was all sorts of custom melodies and hooks but that doesn’t mean you can’t get heavy. There’s so much you can do while still keeping it memorable, and that’s something that attracts us.

And except for a few outliers, your songs are usually pretty short, too. Is that intentional? Honestly, we try to let the music come together on its own. It’s very basic songwriting at first, and we very much let it roll. Its not in us to sit there and say, “Okay, for this song we want a super heavy Ramones-type part that goes into this shoegazey wash part that goes back around and does this Sabbath thing.” For us it’s like, “Hey man, here’s a riff.” And if people like it then we’ll jam with it. A lot of the stuff is done on the spot, and some of the stuff gets down to the wire.

Web link: http://lasvegasweekly.com/ae/music/2015/jul/22/weekly-interview-torche-bassist-jonathan-nunez/

Over 20 years, a handful of records and countless shows, no act has come to embody the Vegas punk scene quite like The Vermin. But nothing good can last forever, and the band’s hilarious, offensive and always-entertaining run ends July 3 with a final performance that shares its name with the release of a new retrospective album, The Vermin Must Die. Singer/guitarist Dirk Vermin, bassist Rob Ruckus and drummer Gerry “Turbo” Proctor look back on two memorably drunken decades in the desert.

THE SHOWS

Turbo: “You grow up listening to Ill Repute, and next thing you know you’re playing with them or Doctor Know or Youth Brigade, or any number of great punk bands from back in the day. … We even got to play with Sylvain Sylvain from The New York Dolls.”

Ruckus: “The first Las Vegas Shakedown at the Orleans—we played with everyone from The Dictators to Guitar Wolf and Wayne Kramer from MC5, an absolutely amazing lineup of bands. All the New York shows, the last LA show we did with Adolescents and 7 Seconds and Channel 3. All the shows with TSOL and Agent Orange.”

Vermin: “Opening for TSOL, as drunk as I’ve ever been onstage. Turbo had to tune my guitar, and it didn’t help. We got to open for Fear twice. One show I remember we were great; the other show I do not.”

THE MOMENTS

Ruckus: “Getting to play for Timothy Leary, who came to see us at the Double Down right before he died. We sat and talked for a few minutes, and then I went on. He lasted about four songs, came up, hugged me and said, “You guys are very entertaining, but you are very loud and I must now leave.”

Turbo: “One show where Ruckus threw his bass at me from the back of the bar at the Double Down. It was spiraling toward my head, and then it did this weird Bruce Lee thing and went sideways and landed perfectly on his amp and my drum head. It was, like, bionically weird, and everyone at the bar was like, “Whoooaaaa!”

Vermin: “At one time we did a weekly gig at the Wet Stop—that’s where we honed our chops and got our stage shtick down. For a weekly show you have to stay on your toes, and the three of us have big mouths, never at a loss for words. But it was tough; it was Wednesday night. I don’t miss it at all.”

Ruckus: There were times at Calamity Jayne’s where I used to do this thing called the beer fountain, where I’d put a full can of beer in my mouth and blow, and it would make 12-foot fountains on each side. I did this one night, and there happened to be a local motorcycle gang up front, and I doused them. One of them jumps onstage and puts a knife to my throat. I finished the song and handed him a shot of whiskey as an apology, and then the guy took the knife from my throat.”

HOME BASE

Vermin: “Double Down. I mean, that’s home. I never feel more comfortable onstage than when we’re at the Double Down.”

Ruckus: “There were so many drunken nights there where just anything would happen. Usually, I would end up naked by the end of the night. Until we got the TV show [Bad Ink], every single show I would end up naked by the end. Then we went on TV, and I was told I couldn’t do it. Now that I’m not on that channel, I can do it again for the last show (laughs).”

THE LEGACY

Turbo: “When there wasn’t a scene in Vegas, The Vermin was the scene. Bands would come, and bands would go. And who’s still standing? The Vermin. But we’ve got all these great bands and a scene that’s thriving now.”

Vermin: “Obnoxious. Your mother hated us, and your sister wanted to f*ck us (laughs). Something like that. We were just that punk band. When other bands would play with us, if we didn’t pick on them they felt like they hadn’t arrived.”

Turbo: “We were the band where punk rock meets pro wrestling. We were the punk-rock Rat Pack, and we had that title for a really long time.”

Web link: http://lasvegasweekly.com/ae/music/2015/jul/01/final-gig-vermin-looks-back-two-decades-vegas-punk/

Tell me how your new Archive box came together. As our silver anniversary was approaching, we realized there was an opportunity to commemorate it with something special. We’ve always had a lot of odds and ends—B-sides and demos and alternate versions—in the vault, so we got it together and put out a box set. Chad [Sexton], our drummer, is really the band archivist—he’s got a big closet full of tapes and hard drives, down to reel to reel format where it’s hard to even find something to play them on. We got it all together and remastered everything to make it as even as possible. I hadn’t heard a lot of those songs in a long time, so it was really cool to spark those recessed neurons. I think it’s gonna be a real trip for our fans.

Was the rest of the band involved in picking the songs? We really let Chad lead, because he had always taken the time to keep track of everything. One interesting story about him is that there was a wildfire out by his house, and this wall of flame was coming toward his property. The first thing he did was load up his truck with boxes of hard drives and tapes and everything. The fire was extinguished before it got to him, but that was the first thing he saved, because it’s irreplaceable.

Is there a certain track you’re really excited for people to hear? There’s a song called “Strong All Along” off our Soundsystem album. An early version of that was called “Pass the Grass,” and it had different lyrics and a really far-out creativity. It was a demo that I made when I guess I was in a really weird mood, and a lot of it got changed for the final version. But for people that have lived with this song for about 17 years now as “Strong All Along,” I think the skeleton of it with different words will be a trip.

There’s a lot of examples like that, where songs really transform from the demo version to the album version. It’s like looking at a family photo album and thinking, “Wow, did I ever look like that?” My favorite band of all time was The Clash, and I loved finding their early demos and bootlegs and stuff like that, but it was a lot work. We’re making it easy on our fans, so they don’t have to dig.

As you celebrate 25 years as a band, what do you remember most about the early years as a band? There was one year where we put all our meager possessions into a storage unit and just lived on the road. We were doing hundreds of shows a year and also still somehow managed to make the [self-titled] “Blue Album” that year. Plus a lot of wild parties to celebrate the momentum we were gaining.

Now that you’re independent again, do you feel more or less pressure? I think the turning point came back in 2000, where we realized we’re a touring band, more like jam bands, because playing live music is something that you can’t fake and it’s something that we enjoy so much. We work the albums around touring. At that point it took the pressure off making albums because we realized we’ve got such a bedrock of a fanbase, it’s not make or break that we have a hit or anything like that.

Anything special planned for your July 3 and 4 shows at Mandalay Bay Beach?It’s the 20-year anniversary of our “Blue Album,” so we’re playing that album in its entirety. And we have a bunch of other surprises planned over two nights. That’s just a fun place to see a show. The first time we played there, it took us a few minutes to get used to such an unusual setting, to have a stage surrounded by water and people on the beach and in and out of the water, but the show we had there last year was fantastic, so we thought, let’s make this a tradition but also make it a special night with the 20th anniversary of our self-titled album.

Are those the only shows where you’re playing the full “Blue Album” on this tour? Yeah. I think we did that back in 2003, but this will be the first time since then. It’s a way to give people something special. When we were on the [Carribean] cruise, we did Soundsystem in its entirety, which was a very Jamaican-influenced record, so that was appropriate. This is more of a party album so it might as well be in Vegas.

I was 10 when that record came out, and I remember the picture of you guys with the alien eyes, the ridiculous conspiracies about your band name and hearing the combination of rap and rock for the first time. What was it like developing that sound back then? I guess we came up in the time of grunge, where everything on the radio was just rock. I mean, it was cool rock, but we needed more twists and turns. Growing up in Omaha, we were geographically in the middle of a lot of things between reggae from Jamaica and punk rock from LA and New York, hearing Bad Brains from D.C. and the Chili Peppers from LA. And of course, alternative was still alternative at the time.

We were just all over the place, and we insisted that we were going to break the mold of being in one certain lane. We had this eclectic, anything-goes attitude, and we needed our rock to be funkier than what was on the radio at the time. So we decided we were gonna do what we do, just playing shows and waiting for the culture to come around to us. And that’s what happened, through “All Mixed Up” and “Down” and songs on the “Blue Album” that blew up to a wider audience. It wasn’t that some radio station or MTV really championed us; it was because there was such a groundswell of excitement from the shows we were doing that they demanded it. It was cool to kick the door open and not be invited in.

Web link: http://lasvegasweekly.com/ae/music/2015/jul/01/weekly-interview-311-frontman-nick-hexum/