I sat down with Lionize keyboard player Chris Brooks before the band’s big, 12/23 show at the House of Blues with Reel Big Fish and Streetlight Manifesto to talk about how their reggae/rock jams are received by ska fans, their upcoming stint with Lucero, and what it was like playing Warped Tour and Bonnaroo in the same year.
This Vegas date is the last show of your tour with Reel Big Fish and Streetlight Manifesto. How was the tour?
It was good. I think half of the shows sold out which is pretty awesome for any tour. The shows were great. The people were great. The Streetlight guys are always really awesome to play with.
Yeah you guys played with them here in Vegas back in February at the Hard Rock Café on the Strip.
That was an awesome show. Vegas has been really good to us. The Warped Tour in Vegas was pretty good too.
What do you guys like to do when you come here?
Normally we don’t have enough money to gamble properly so I usually just wander through the casinos, put $5 or $10 bucks in a slot machine. Mostly lose. Sometimes win. I won $350 one time!
Anything you guys really want to do out here that you haven’t had the chance to yet?
We want to headline House of Blues. That’s kind of a far-reaching goal. We’d like to headline a club somewhere here in Vegas. Actually, today, we’ve had a bunch of people out here specifically to see us, which is good. I don’t think we’d seen that in Vegas before.
I was wondering about that. Touring with ska bands, how does the crowd react to you guys?
It’s funny. I think Reel Big Fish is the only real ska band on the tour. Streetlight Manifesto is just fast. It’s fine. I think the crowd kind of wants to listen to faster stuff so they can jump around and go crazy. And I think physically, they don’t really know what to do while we’re playing, which is fine. The kids are digesting it. It’s a young audience which is cool too. We don’t get to see that very often.
You guys seem to be on the road constantly.
We’ve gotta work to make money and pay the bills. We like to play, we like to tour. It costs money to make records. Or you’ve gotta get money to pay back. Unless we become exorbitantly famous, which I don’t think is going to happen in the near future, we have to play shows to keep our business going, which is fine with me. It helps us grow as players and grow as people.
It’s either that, or sell a song for an iPod commercial.
Yeah, if you know the guy that buys the songs for the iPod commercials, I’d like to have a conversation with him.
Talking about making some money for records, you guys were really busy in 2011. You put out Destruction Manual in February and Superczar and the Vulture in early December.
Well Destruction Manual was recorded in 2010 and it took a few months to get it out. We had a bunch of time off before the Warped Tour where we were just writing. And we always practice. We don’t really do much else. So we had a bunch of material ready to go. If we have it, we might as well record it. Releasing Superczar and the Vulture in December was an added bonus because we didn’t think we’d get it out that quick, but it happened.
What was it like being on the Warped Tour? You talked about there being a lot of young kids on the Reel Big Fish tour, but Warped Tour is a really young audience.
Yeah, Warped Tour is a really young audience too. It’s a little bit different because they’re not forced to stand in a room and watch you before the band that they want to see comes on. They can stroll around and do whatever they want, so it’s a lot of hit-or-miss shows. But the beauty of it is all the kids that are walking by. We played the amphitheater stages, so when you see the kids just sitting in the back, you don’t really think of them as being involved in your show, but when I think about it myself, I’d probably be one of those guys just sitting in the back and listening. I think we probably reached a lot more people than we thought.
It seemed like a tough tour at first, but I don’t think it really was. I think it was pretty solid. It’s hard to sell merch and stuff at Warped Tour because it’s all out there in the field. We did our best to have our merch guy come by the stage and sell some stuff but it’s a tough racket.
As a music fan, who did you enjoy seeing on Warped Tour this year? Were there any new bands you discovered?
Well, we’d kind of discovered Larry and his Flask beforehand but we definitely got to know them on the Warped Tour. I didn’t really know Lucero too well before the Warped Tour. Foxy Shazam was another great one, and The Aggrolites, who we shared a bus with. There was a lot of good stuff out there. MC Lars, we watched them every day.
You guys played Bonnaroo this year too, right?
Yeah, it was awesome. It was way better than we expected. We were in the True Music tent, which was this little stage kind of right in the middle of the thing, where I guess they sell Budweiser, that’s the perk. It’s a smaller show. We kind of expected maybe 100 people to stay and watch the set, but it was a lot more than that. There were probably like 500 or 600 people standing there as a captive audience, and of course, however many people were walking around in the back. It was a pretty awesome and bizarre experience.
We got to see a lot of really cool bands. We saw Dr. John with The Meters and Allen Toussaint. I think it was like 2 in the morning when they played. And then Gogol Bordello after that. We watched Lil Wayne. We tried to watch Eminem, but the crowd was too intense. Like all 80,000 people were there and I could only see a corner of the jumbo screen.
Didn’t NOFX play this year?
Yeah, we watched them too! It was comedic. It was definitely funny. It was a huge crowd.
There were huge crowds for all kinds of stuff this year. There was a huge crowd for the metal bands, we watched Kylesa’s set. There were a ton of people out there for it. We watched some really good rockabilly sets with tons of people watching. It’s still a diverse audience. Despite what they say about it being corporatized.
What do you have planned for 2012?
We’re starting with a tour at the end of January. I think we start on the 26th in New Orleans or Texas with Maylene and the Sons of Disaster. I’m not sure if it comes back to Vegas, but it definitely swings out west on the first leg, so we’ll be around again. And that’ll run just about a month and we’ll take a little time off and see what this summer cooks up. I’m sure we’ll have something good.
Interview by Emily Matview
Transcribed by Ashleigh Thompson
Photo by Emily Matview (edited by Tyler Newton)
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