Interview by Jason Schreurs
Over here at Rice and Bread we’ve made our love for San Diego’s Rocket from the Crypt quite clear. Whether it’s watching them steal the show last year at Calgary’s Sled Island festival or, more recently, chatting with vocalist/guitarist John Reis about his San Diego dive bar Bar Pink, this is a band that we pay real close attention to. So when we got a cheery announcement about Rocket’s new collaborative album with legendary New York punk rocker Sonny Vincent, seemingly out the blue, well, let’s just say it was a good day. Recorded in 2003, the album sat on the shelves for awhile before Reis was able to revisit it and put it out, but not before a very strange rejuvenation process, which Reis explains in our conversation below.
Tell us about this new album that Rocket from the Crypt did with Sonny Vincent?
Reis: We did it awhile ago, but I’m pretty stoked on it. I think it came out good. I wasn’t super amped on it to begin with and that’s why it sat dormant, because I didn’t really have the means to resuscitate it. But Sonny kept haggling and haggling me about it, like, “You gotta fuckin’ put it out!” So I revisited it and had to dump all the tapes down… here’s a food-related thing… I had to put all of the tapes in a food dehydrator, because they were so old and gummy that they wouldn’t play. So I used a food dehydrator to dry them out and take all of the moisture out of the reels. And it worked!
I thought the album was a good mix, and I’m a big Rocket fan, so hearing someone else sing is a bit weird, but Sonny’s voice mixes well with your sound.
Yeah, and we’re big fans of his. You can hear some parts where I had my hand in them, and I think it’s pretty obvious, but for the most part a lot of those ideas are his that he brought to the table. I don’t know if you ever heard this band that Sonny was in called Testors? Swami Records put out a double LP retrospective of all of their recordings and they are basically a New York punk band from 1974-1979 and they were really ahead of their time. They’re really cool. The guys in Rocket all loved that stuff. We thought it was just so cool; really cool proto-punk that was occupying that space around the Dead Boys and the Stooges and that kind of thing, but a little bit more melodic. And some of it is pretty brutal, too, with two guitars, drums and no bass on some of it. You should check it out. You might like it.
Cool, thanks. So what was it like working with Sonny after being such a big fan of his stuff? Was it weird to be in the studio with him?
Well, we’d gone on tour with him. He lives in Germany now, so he came out here for a Rocket tour and we backed him up as his band and we played a bunch of Testors stuff. And then after we did that we decided that he should come out and record. So we had a studio at that time called Drag Racist, where Rocket and Hot Snakes had recorded at, and we decided to block out some time for him. So he came out and he didn’t really have any songs and we’re like, “What’s going on dude?” [Laughs] I thought he’d have a bunch of songs already written, but he didn’t. He just started making up riffs on his guitar, and then he started singing, and it started coming out of us. Then he’s just like, “Roll the tape!” and I said, “Seriously? It’s the first time we played it. We don’t even know how it goes,” and he said, “No, it’s fine.” And, sure enough, he was right. It was really cool to work that way, because there’s nothing finesse about the songs. I mean, we’re all capable of playing and following someone, but it was really cool that we did it the way that he suggested doing it. I think that’s just the way that he always does it, to tell you the truth.
Sonny Vincent and Rocket from the Crypt‘s Vintage Piss is out now on Swami Records.
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