The Misfits
The Misfits proclaim they are the band of the century and they are heading back to Australia. The band has stood the test of time returning to play their classic 1977 debut album Static Age in full which is regarded as one of the greatest punk records of all time showcasing the band at their primal, raw and evil best! To top that off they are also playing Earth AD orchestrated by the one and mighty Jerry Only who talks to Across The Ocean ahead of the tour.
Are you looking forward to raising a racket down under for your tour?
We’re looking forward to it, we’re on tour now. We’re touring here right up until we hit you guys and we’re excited about that. What happens now is that we’re hitting stride, we’re literally playing every night pretty much and we’re playing great. Normally, when we come down below we are usually coming in cold without having done anything before that except rehearsing. You can’t rehearse what we do. It’s a bit like swimming practice on dry land!
Does it make touring easier knowing that you’re playing two of your classic albums in their entirety?
Well you know, the thing is when we’re on tour we work out to keep on top of our game and not lose muscle mass. That’s one thing that happens a lot where you might be working out all summer long then the fall comes and you go from working out three to four times a week down to two. Things start going then other way but this time we’ve been keeping up with that with a few more shows here then back home before getting back to New Zealand then Australia. For me, I’m happy about that, it’s a load off my mind and there’s a whole bunch of preparation I don’t need to worry about or get on top of, we’re already there.
Do you get sick of touring after thirty years?
Oh yeah, it is incredibly hard! People think it is a picnic but it is a grind. My son is in the band and has been for two years now and my nephew does my drum tech. It’s a solid outfit and touring isn’t bad, the thing that bothers me is if you don’t have the right PA or don’t get enough sleep then you start losing your voice. That’s the only thing that winds up being a problem, all the mechanical stuff is doable every day but singing and sweating it’s the body that can’t take the gig. We can handle it, we’re doing forty, fifty songs a night. We go hard and you can’t rehearse that or prepare. You can stay in shape and you can play your guitar but when you get out there and play you have to step it up two notches.
It’s like trying to practice throwing a hundred mile an hour fast ball, you either throw with everything that you got or you don’t. There’s no practicing it! It’s not easy but I think we do it well. We’re not junkies or anything back in the day, partying people or drinkers but I think we’re athletes or jocks. We were cool people listening to music and shit and we did athletics – there were no video games, no one had video games. There wasn’t such a thing, you would go and sink a basketball for half a day. That weighed a lot on The Misfits being the physical entity that it is. The entity takes energy and energy is based on how you produce it. I think that is the key to longevity is to keep everything well machined and well run.
So that means you suss out all the good gyms on tour?
That would be great! It is hard to find the energy to do it but we carry weights with us. We have two fifty pound dumb bell sets, a bench and a sit up bench. I try and sit my butt up on the bench and do one hundred every day and keep it going. Normally I wake up in the morning and I’ll try and do that hundred sit ups, if I have the energy when I come home from work or whatever I’m doing all day I’ll try and do a hundred more, then I’m ok.
My goal is fifty years and I have thirteen to go and to keep playing. To keep the integrity of the project and how do we become the biggest band in the world but yet still be cool and not get flushed down the toilet twenty years later – who gives a shit! We don’t to be like bands in the sixties when people one hundred years from now won’t even know who they are we the name is brought up. If we make it to fifty years there will be people who will talk about us forever. To me that is the key to success is being like Beethoven or Brahms and they’re still playing their music a hundred fucking years later. You want to be someone like that and have a lasting impression!
Is that the key to survival?
I think that is the key to enlightenment and happiness in saying that I achieved my goal. I have done something that I’m proud of and noticed. When people look at it they say fucking great job! We want our next album to be the best, it’s me and my son, I want it to be something when people hear it I want it to be the album that breaks the band after thirty years. That’s what I’m for, I’m looking for the perfect skeleton key, the fun of it is the challenge. It is like going on a roller coaster, I love touring because we play and whatever I have to put up with because we’re playing is well worth it because when we play it’s like nothing else.
Where do you see The Misfits going with the next album?
The songs write themselves, people think they write songs – they don’t! An idea comes then it finds itself and it’s funny because mechanically it is like a biological thing where you throw a seed on the lawn. When you throw a seed on the front lawn of your house it breaks out, the root grows in to the ground and starts to grown, next thing you’ve got a plant. A song is the same way, an idea pops on to the lawn of the ground and it takes root. All of a sudden you find it’s me, you find a hook, you find its pattern that you can be creative on top of so for us it’s punk music.
I can’t talk about other music because I don’t write other music. With us, you come up with something that is really hard and catchy on the guitar that’s going to bring your blood to a boil then you have to wrap the vocals around like a ribbon to come up with a hook. It’s built on a structure and next thing you’re done, you’ve got it. It’s got leave, a trunk, roots in the ground, it has everything – it has the music, it has the vocals, the lyrics which are really important because you want to say something cool and not something stupid and that’s how we write. I write things I reverse where I would write the words then the music like I did for the She Demons. That’s a new band that we put together, all girls, they’re opening for us, and they’re killing it.
That was something I wanted to create as well, a mate for the monster, like the bride of Frankenstein, the ultimate second movie, the next thing is to have a male and a female arch villain. That’s what we’ve done which is going well. A young new line up! We’re coming the hardest we’ve ever come and this is the band of the century! I’m excited! This is not a band of the seventies or eighties, this is the band of the century. That’s what I’m looking to do, we’re going to do something no band has done before, that is The Misfits.
Whether it is rummaging through vinyl at record stores such as Clarity and Title finding hidden gems to scouring the internet to find that album by the next big thing or chasing bands to get that elusive autograph and photo his passion is music all the way.
- Aversions Crown - January 27, 2017
- Sick Of It All - January 19, 2017
- Refused - January 11, 2017
