Greg Puciato - The Dillinger Escape Plan (23/07/2015)
It’s no secret that heaps of pop-culturally recognizable fellows and lasses keep a bunch of their own paraphernalia on the walls in their various dwellings. Most probably because it reminds them of the staggering successes, glories, and joy that artistic recognition has brought them. Arnold Schwarzenegger had Conan’s sword in his office while governor, every musician ever on MTV Cribs has gold records slapped around every surface, and even your humble 59th Sound interviewer has the two times I made the local paper on the wall for hosting a sex education show and doing a rap about Melbourne’s western suburbs respectively.
Contrary to this, The Dillinger Escape Plan’s Greg Puciato is not one of these people, hence the audible humility in his voice when I iterate thanks for making time to do a phone interview with us, even after fifteen years as – almost inarguably – the world’s greatest metal vocalist.
“I don’t really keep anything around me, like, I don’t have anything in my place that has Dillinger Escape Plan on it. I don’t have any posters or anything on the wall, so I just forget, y’know? So every now and then I’m just like ‘Oh wow! People know who we are? I forgot!’ I really feel like a lot of people get old and really jaded, and get used to being in a band and getting to travel and have people show up. I really enjoy kind of preserving the shock of anyone giving a fuck.”
Down the line from balmy South Los Angeles to the characteristically inclement winter of South-Eastern Australia, it’s immediately both evident and very unsurprising that TDEP’s powerhouse front man is a perspicacious sort. Something as arbitrary as discussing our antithetical climates quickly becomes a muse on people’s predilection for staying their place in the world based on weather.
“It’s what ends up keeping people here, man! LA is the place that people complain about the most, but then they never leave (laughs). Everyone who lives here always bitches about something, but then you can’t leave! When you think about how shitty winter’s gonna be somewhere, you’re just like ‘Yeah…’. Especially when you tour! Y’know, you just end up in fuckin’ Poland or something, in December, and it’s the worst. It’s seriously the worst icy hell imaginable. Then you come home and it’s warm… but Melbourne’s cool, man. Australia’s probably my favourite place on earth! If I had to live anywhere besides LA, I would move to Australia for sure.”
A love for our country could easily attribute some reason to why TDEP have decided on a tour here after only a year-and-a-half absence from our expensively distant shores since their cataclysmically spectacular shows for Soundwave 2014.
“Well we did Soundwave, but we haven’t done any headline shows over there in a bit. I think it’s been a few years, but time goes by so fast. I think it’s been a while since we’ve actually come down and done headline shows. We’re fuckin’ excited, man. I’ve kind of known about this for a few months now. Seriously, it’s been really hard to sit on it and not say something.”
With a headline tour on their minds and a legion of intransigently dedicated fans to welcome them, there’s still another recent mater that will no doubt be apparent at every TDEP show from here on out; The Gayest Band T-Shirt Of All Time.
“Dude it’s so weird, I was sitting in bed and just had this idea that we should make something SO gay, because nothing irritates me more than seeing people, or just the connotation that metal and hardcore has. For people that don’t know anything about metal and hardcore, they look in and think that everyone is just a fucking luddite, or a fuckin’ criminal or something like that, and it’s just nothing like that at all. I would really prefer to go too far, I mean, nothing’s more fun that just blatantly offending people who need to be offended, yeah?”
“So I sent an email to the guy who deigns our merch, and was just like ‘Hey man! Can you draw a unicorn with a dick for a horn with a rainbow coming out of it?’ I thought for sure that I was gonna get at least one person in the band say ‘I don’t know about that, dude’, or whatever. But uh, he was just ‘YES’, and that’s the best part of doing any merch; you can just come up with any idea that sounds absurd and then the next day there’s a T-shirt for sale that has a unicorn with a rainbow coming out of it’s dick-horn. It was such a proud moment in my life, man.”
“We ended up donating half the proceeds to charity, and it ended up being our biggest selling T-shirt we’ve ever made! Which is fucking crazy. It was a really cool feeling to know… and y’know it was one of the first times I’ve ever really given like a ton to charity besides a bit of money here-and-there. To do something where you’re actually making money for a selfless reason felt pretty good, man.”
Shortly following the release of TDEP’s blistering 2013 album One Of Us Is The Killer, I chatted to lead guitarist Ben Weinman about the unspoken hard line of compartmentalized aesthetics based on music when the band was first starting out.
“When we first started we were all college kids, and back in the 90’s typically metal bands and heavy bands looked like metal bands. They had long hair, wore black, etc. Punk bands looked like punk bands, indie rock looked like indie rock, y’know? You never saw a cross over, there wasn’t a Black Flag shirt at a Slayer concert. Here we were, these college kids. I think one of us was a manager at J. Crew… I’d just wear a V-neck sweater and khakis at school, and then go play a show. People were blown away that we had this energy playing this crazy, progressive, violent kind of music, but we didn’t look the part.” - Ben Weinmen
Without explicitly decreeing so, It’s obvious Ben and TDEP broke down some barriers about what bands should look like based on their musical output back in the late 90’s. With ‘the gayest band shirt ever made’ now out and about in the world, it seems TDEP have, again, taking what’s ‘appropriate’ to wear at certain gigs to another level of it-doesn’t-actually-fucking-matter-ness. It obvious such a feat excites the persistently humble Greg Puciato
“That’s the next step! I can’t wait to see them! That’s the final part of the process, when you go to a show and see someone wearing this thing you just, like, came up with in your head. It’s almost I can’t believe I made this. That’s the best part; pointing at a kid in the crowd and being like ‘Holy shit! You have that thing I came up with in bed! It’s like when you hear lyrics back, singing lyrics you wrote. There’s this weird gratification of things coming full circle. It’s like, I have no business in Australia even know who I am! That’s a very strange thing to begin with. For you to be able to be like ‘Fuck yeah, dude!’, it’s great. The whole point of everything is to try and connect everyone somehow, and if you have to use a unicorn with a dick for a horn to do it, then so be it!”
The inception of the shirt itself was bore partly from a surprising – albeit very small – homophobic reaction for TDEP celebrating The USA’s recent legalization of gay marriage. With such a positive reaction to the shirt, it’s obvious the band’s fans are a largely accepting lot, with only a minute smattering of gay-fearing detritus muddling the pack. For TDEP, that’s obviously still far from okay.
“It’s crazy! I feel like our fan base in general are really progressive, and would assume so. But the bigger you get the less in touch you get. You can’t tell where people are coming from. When we used to be smaller I knew a lot of our fans came from the ground up; they came from the hardcore scene or a punk scene, or an underground scene where the politics are more progressive. Then when you get so maybe people are coming from the top down, y’know maybe they’re coming from a bigger world, they may still have some archaic beliefs. I mean, they… should not have them (laughs). Nor should we! I just want people (like that) polluting our fan base with their bullshit shit. They should either change their beliefs or go.”
Not having released anything for a couple of years, the question of new material is always on every fan’s minds, especially when a band will soon hit their shores and quite possibly show it off, or even if the material itself was enough to prompt the band kicking off a preview-inclusive tour of their next LP.
“Part of it is we started playing a lot of songs off Miss Machine we hadn’t played in years. For the first time in maybe eight or nine years, shit… yeah, like eight or nine years. Be basically every song off Miss Machine we started revisiting. For a while we were really burnt out on that record. For a while it was big deal for us, then it started becoming ‘Fuuuck, everybody always talks about Miss Machine and we just wanna do all this other stuff and other records!’ Finally we warmed up to it and started playing the songs again, and we fuckin’ had a blast! So we feel like that, mixed with the combination of (being) four or five songs deep in to a new record as far as having them written. So we’ve got all this stuff, like new songs we’re working on, and old songs that are new to us again. It kinda feels like we hot reboot a little bit as a band lately. If there was like a chapter two, or something? I dunno, it just feels like we’re in a different phase, or something. Everything just feels new right now.”
With new material in the bank, it’s worth inquiring as to just how TDEP get their markedly complicated and staggeringly intricate trademark sound twisted through songs.
“The beginning of a song is just pure ferocity, y’know. When we start writing it’s usually just really off the stuff. By the time we write it’s been so long since we’ve written, we just have a lot of pent up, just ‘AHHH!!!’. Just ‘Fuck dude!’, just noise coming out of you. So you get al the raw aggression and speed overall, and it’s really sloppy. Just get it all out in a big pile. Then you start sorting through the pieces like ‘How can we trick this piece out?’ By the time it gets put on the record, it’s so far gone because you get numb to it. You think ‘Oh, that could be a little bit more clever, little hiccup here, little thing there’, to throw people off. Then that becomes normal to you, so then it’s like ‘Let’s just do another weird thing!’ By the time you record it, you don’t even realize how fucked up it sounds to a person that didn’t hear it from the beginning. So whenever someone says our stuff is really complicated, by that point I’m like ‘Really?’. I always feel like we don’t go far enough, but then people around me go ‘No dude, this is fine. You’re good’ (laughs).”
“I think (drummer) Billy is like ‘Dude, I can’t do anymore. I think my arms are gonna fall off, man’. I don’t know if he’s gonna be old and just have some fuckin’ wicked tendonitis, or somethin’. He’s not slowing down, man! He’s a fuckin’ machine! I think he’s just a ball of anxiety (laughs). Honestly, he’s the one at the beginning of the writing process is more like “Everything’s got to be more!’ We’re like ‘Are you sure? Because if you say that, we can make that happen! It’s easy when you’re playing one song to think it’s got to be crazier and crazier, but, dude, you gotta remember you’ve got to play 15 of those in a row at some point! Just remember when we play a show that you’re the one that wanted to do this! You brought it on yourself, bud!’ (laughs).”
It’s no secret that the majority of musicians consider touring the fun part, and recording the dry-but-rewarding part of professional musicianship. Greg himself agrees as the interview comes to a close, but as a man with an impeccable physique that very visibly flies in the face of a booze-soaked touring lifestyle, it’s interesting to find out just how the guy stays in shape on months-long tours around the world.
“You know what man, I actually don’t work out on tour because it’s just too much. I can’t work out and play a show, it’d just take too much out of me. So off tour I just try to think of it the way an athlete would think about getting ready for a full season of some really intense sport. I just try to make sure that by the time we go on tour, I feel good, or that I haven’t spent the entire off time just being a slob. Or dumping constant toxins in to my body, because that’s really what happens once you go on tour; you’re just beating the shit out of yourself every day, you’re drinking more alcohol than you’d normally drink. So if you don’t go in to it like a tank, it’s gonna beat you up pretty quickly, especially in our band. For me it’s more thinking about when we start tour, I’m at 100%, because then it just starts to chip away, y’know?”
Catch the uncompromising behemoth that is THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN on their Australian tour throughout August 2015.
Todd Gingell
FRIDAY 28 AUGUST – PRINCE BANDROOM, MELBOURNE – 18+
www.oztix.com.au
SATURDAY 29 AUGUST - MAX WATTS, SYDNEY – 18+
www.oztix.com.au
SUNDAY 30 AUGUST - MAX WATTS, BRISBANE – 18+
www.oztix.com.au
Contrary to this, The Dillinger Escape Plan’s Greg Puciato is not one of these people, hence the audible humility in his voice when I iterate thanks for making time to do a phone interview with us, even after fifteen years as – almost inarguably – the world’s greatest metal vocalist.
“I don’t really keep anything around me, like, I don’t have anything in my place that has Dillinger Escape Plan on it. I don’t have any posters or anything on the wall, so I just forget, y’know? So every now and then I’m just like ‘Oh wow! People know who we are? I forgot!’ I really feel like a lot of people get old and really jaded, and get used to being in a band and getting to travel and have people show up. I really enjoy kind of preserving the shock of anyone giving a fuck.”
Down the line from balmy South Los Angeles to the characteristically inclement winter of South-Eastern Australia, it’s immediately both evident and very unsurprising that TDEP’s powerhouse front man is a perspicacious sort. Something as arbitrary as discussing our antithetical climates quickly becomes a muse on people’s predilection for staying their place in the world based on weather.
“It’s what ends up keeping people here, man! LA is the place that people complain about the most, but then they never leave (laughs). Everyone who lives here always bitches about something, but then you can’t leave! When you think about how shitty winter’s gonna be somewhere, you’re just like ‘Yeah…’. Especially when you tour! Y’know, you just end up in fuckin’ Poland or something, in December, and it’s the worst. It’s seriously the worst icy hell imaginable. Then you come home and it’s warm… but Melbourne’s cool, man. Australia’s probably my favourite place on earth! If I had to live anywhere besides LA, I would move to Australia for sure.”
A love for our country could easily attribute some reason to why TDEP have decided on a tour here after only a year-and-a-half absence from our expensively distant shores since their cataclysmically spectacular shows for Soundwave 2014.
“Well we did Soundwave, but we haven’t done any headline shows over there in a bit. I think it’s been a few years, but time goes by so fast. I think it’s been a while since we’ve actually come down and done headline shows. We’re fuckin’ excited, man. I’ve kind of known about this for a few months now. Seriously, it’s been really hard to sit on it and not say something.”
With a headline tour on their minds and a legion of intransigently dedicated fans to welcome them, there’s still another recent mater that will no doubt be apparent at every TDEP show from here on out; The Gayest Band T-Shirt Of All Time.
“Dude it’s so weird, I was sitting in bed and just had this idea that we should make something SO gay, because nothing irritates me more than seeing people, or just the connotation that metal and hardcore has. For people that don’t know anything about metal and hardcore, they look in and think that everyone is just a fucking luddite, or a fuckin’ criminal or something like that, and it’s just nothing like that at all. I would really prefer to go too far, I mean, nothing’s more fun that just blatantly offending people who need to be offended, yeah?”
“So I sent an email to the guy who deigns our merch, and was just like ‘Hey man! Can you draw a unicorn with a dick for a horn with a rainbow coming out of it?’ I thought for sure that I was gonna get at least one person in the band say ‘I don’t know about that, dude’, or whatever. But uh, he was just ‘YES’, and that’s the best part of doing any merch; you can just come up with any idea that sounds absurd and then the next day there’s a T-shirt for sale that has a unicorn with a rainbow coming out of it’s dick-horn. It was such a proud moment in my life, man.”
“We ended up donating half the proceeds to charity, and it ended up being our biggest selling T-shirt we’ve ever made! Which is fucking crazy. It was a really cool feeling to know… and y’know it was one of the first times I’ve ever really given like a ton to charity besides a bit of money here-and-there. To do something where you’re actually making money for a selfless reason felt pretty good, man.”
Shortly following the release of TDEP’s blistering 2013 album One Of Us Is The Killer, I chatted to lead guitarist Ben Weinman about the unspoken hard line of compartmentalized aesthetics based on music when the band was first starting out.
“When we first started we were all college kids, and back in the 90’s typically metal bands and heavy bands looked like metal bands. They had long hair, wore black, etc. Punk bands looked like punk bands, indie rock looked like indie rock, y’know? You never saw a cross over, there wasn’t a Black Flag shirt at a Slayer concert. Here we were, these college kids. I think one of us was a manager at J. Crew… I’d just wear a V-neck sweater and khakis at school, and then go play a show. People were blown away that we had this energy playing this crazy, progressive, violent kind of music, but we didn’t look the part.” - Ben Weinmen
Without explicitly decreeing so, It’s obvious Ben and TDEP broke down some barriers about what bands should look like based on their musical output back in the late 90’s. With ‘the gayest band shirt ever made’ now out and about in the world, it seems TDEP have, again, taking what’s ‘appropriate’ to wear at certain gigs to another level of it-doesn’t-actually-fucking-matter-ness. It obvious such a feat excites the persistently humble Greg Puciato
“That’s the next step! I can’t wait to see them! That’s the final part of the process, when you go to a show and see someone wearing this thing you just, like, came up with in your head. It’s almost I can’t believe I made this. That’s the best part; pointing at a kid in the crowd and being like ‘Holy shit! You have that thing I came up with in bed! It’s like when you hear lyrics back, singing lyrics you wrote. There’s this weird gratification of things coming full circle. It’s like, I have no business in Australia even know who I am! That’s a very strange thing to begin with. For you to be able to be like ‘Fuck yeah, dude!’, it’s great. The whole point of everything is to try and connect everyone somehow, and if you have to use a unicorn with a dick for a horn to do it, then so be it!”
The inception of the shirt itself was bore partly from a surprising – albeit very small – homophobic reaction for TDEP celebrating The USA’s recent legalization of gay marriage. With such a positive reaction to the shirt, it’s obvious the band’s fans are a largely accepting lot, with only a minute smattering of gay-fearing detritus muddling the pack. For TDEP, that’s obviously still far from okay.
“It’s crazy! I feel like our fan base in general are really progressive, and would assume so. But the bigger you get the less in touch you get. You can’t tell where people are coming from. When we used to be smaller I knew a lot of our fans came from the ground up; they came from the hardcore scene or a punk scene, or an underground scene where the politics are more progressive. Then when you get so maybe people are coming from the top down, y’know maybe they’re coming from a bigger world, they may still have some archaic beliefs. I mean, they… should not have them (laughs). Nor should we! I just want people (like that) polluting our fan base with their bullshit shit. They should either change their beliefs or go.”
Not having released anything for a couple of years, the question of new material is always on every fan’s minds, especially when a band will soon hit their shores and quite possibly show it off, or even if the material itself was enough to prompt the band kicking off a preview-inclusive tour of their next LP.
“Part of it is we started playing a lot of songs off Miss Machine we hadn’t played in years. For the first time in maybe eight or nine years, shit… yeah, like eight or nine years. Be basically every song off Miss Machine we started revisiting. For a while we were really burnt out on that record. For a while it was big deal for us, then it started becoming ‘Fuuuck, everybody always talks about Miss Machine and we just wanna do all this other stuff and other records!’ Finally we warmed up to it and started playing the songs again, and we fuckin’ had a blast! So we feel like that, mixed with the combination of (being) four or five songs deep in to a new record as far as having them written. So we’ve got all this stuff, like new songs we’re working on, and old songs that are new to us again. It kinda feels like we hot reboot a little bit as a band lately. If there was like a chapter two, or something? I dunno, it just feels like we’re in a different phase, or something. Everything just feels new right now.”
With new material in the bank, it’s worth inquiring as to just how TDEP get their markedly complicated and staggeringly intricate trademark sound twisted through songs.
“The beginning of a song is just pure ferocity, y’know. When we start writing it’s usually just really off the stuff. By the time we write it’s been so long since we’ve written, we just have a lot of pent up, just ‘AHHH!!!’. Just ‘Fuck dude!’, just noise coming out of you. So you get al the raw aggression and speed overall, and it’s really sloppy. Just get it all out in a big pile. Then you start sorting through the pieces like ‘How can we trick this piece out?’ By the time it gets put on the record, it’s so far gone because you get numb to it. You think ‘Oh, that could be a little bit more clever, little hiccup here, little thing there’, to throw people off. Then that becomes normal to you, so then it’s like ‘Let’s just do another weird thing!’ By the time you record it, you don’t even realize how fucked up it sounds to a person that didn’t hear it from the beginning. So whenever someone says our stuff is really complicated, by that point I’m like ‘Really?’. I always feel like we don’t go far enough, but then people around me go ‘No dude, this is fine. You’re good’ (laughs).”
“I think (drummer) Billy is like ‘Dude, I can’t do anymore. I think my arms are gonna fall off, man’. I don’t know if he’s gonna be old and just have some fuckin’ wicked tendonitis, or somethin’. He’s not slowing down, man! He’s a fuckin’ machine! I think he’s just a ball of anxiety (laughs). Honestly, he’s the one at the beginning of the writing process is more like “Everything’s got to be more!’ We’re like ‘Are you sure? Because if you say that, we can make that happen! It’s easy when you’re playing one song to think it’s got to be crazier and crazier, but, dude, you gotta remember you’ve got to play 15 of those in a row at some point! Just remember when we play a show that you’re the one that wanted to do this! You brought it on yourself, bud!’ (laughs).”
It’s no secret that the majority of musicians consider touring the fun part, and recording the dry-but-rewarding part of professional musicianship. Greg himself agrees as the interview comes to a close, but as a man with an impeccable physique that very visibly flies in the face of a booze-soaked touring lifestyle, it’s interesting to find out just how the guy stays in shape on months-long tours around the world.
“You know what man, I actually don’t work out on tour because it’s just too much. I can’t work out and play a show, it’d just take too much out of me. So off tour I just try to think of it the way an athlete would think about getting ready for a full season of some really intense sport. I just try to make sure that by the time we go on tour, I feel good, or that I haven’t spent the entire off time just being a slob. Or dumping constant toxins in to my body, because that’s really what happens once you go on tour; you’re just beating the shit out of yourself every day, you’re drinking more alcohol than you’d normally drink. So if you don’t go in to it like a tank, it’s gonna beat you up pretty quickly, especially in our band. For me it’s more thinking about when we start tour, I’m at 100%, because then it just starts to chip away, y’know?”
Catch the uncompromising behemoth that is THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN on their Australian tour throughout August 2015.
Todd Gingell
FRIDAY 28 AUGUST – PRINCE BANDROOM, MELBOURNE – 18+
www.oztix.com.au
SATURDAY 29 AUGUST - MAX WATTS, SYDNEY – 18+
www.oztix.com.au
SUNDAY 30 AUGUST - MAX WATTS, BRISBANE – 18+
www.oztix.com.au