Mar 12, 2007 A Conversation with The Visitors, Part II
In Part I of Jed Davis' interview with The Visitors, the guys discussed their formative musical years. Now, in Part II, they talk about getting the band together and making a name in the tough New York scene.
Jed: Brad, you grew up on the West Coast; Brian, you grew up in the Midwest. But you both have a love of New York punk rock. How did you come upon it, and what about it appealed to you?
Bradley: First of all, for me, everything spawned from The Ramones. I mean, I don't want it to be what we're identified with - which is already starting to happen in reviews and whatnot - but if I do get compared to The Ramones, I don't take it as an insult at all because everything did start with The Ramones for me. I found The Ramones, and after you find out about The Ramones, you can only go so long before you then find out about The Dead Boys, or... you know, that was it.
Brian: I got lucky because I had an older brother and sister, and they were already punks in their early twenties and stuff. They took me to my first Ramones concert when I was thirteen. And after that, it was kinda, like, set in stone that that's what I wanted to do - you know, follow punk rock and maybe become a musician, and then go to shows and do the whole thing. And yeah, New York, the New York original punk scene and everything like that was, like... huge.
Jed: I ask that question because some kids hear the Ramones' music and it just doesn't speak to them for whatever reason.
Brian: I don't understand that.
Bradley: For me, I did not have any sort of a luxury of having an older... I had an older sister who did not influence my music listening at all.
Jed: She try to get you to listen to Milli Vanilli? [Laughter]
Bradley: I think it was The New Kids On The Block. [Laughter] For somebody like me, The Ramones... Everybody who likes The Ramones knows what is special about them. And those who don't get it - I feel really sorry for them. They're fucked, I dunno. [Laughter]
Jed: So you guys meet, you drink the sangria, you go and rehearse one time... then what happens? You weren't a band yet, obviously.
Bradley: Oh, I know what happened next! Brian started selling Christmas trees and I didn't see him for a month, and I figured that was that. [Laughter]
Brian: I had just gotten to New York, and I was desperate for money. I didn't have anything. So I took this job, and it was crazy. I worked every day, twelve hours, from the day after Thanksgiving, until, like, the day before New Year's. So that whole time, I was just busting my ass and dreaming of starting a band, you know? And as soon as it was done, me and Brad got back together, and it was really... we had humble beginnings. We both ended up living in the same neighborhood -
Bradley: Oh yeah... there's a lot of weird coincidences like that. Like, where do you live? Oh, Christ, you live four blocks from me. That's convenient.[Laughter] And also... when I played the Bowery Electric Festival - after we played, despite the problems, everybody saw how young we were, everybody was really nice afterwards. But one person came up to me, and she was like, wow, you know what? I really, really liked you. That was a lot of fun. It was awesome - I talked to her for a good part of the rest of the night. And then - I was only in town for a few days, so the next day I was walking around the east village, and what the fuck - I run into her on the street. How fuckin bizarre is that? She was like, wait, didn't you play at the Bowery Electric - and I was like, yeah![Laughter]
So then I go home, I come back, I meet Brian... we had been rehearsing for a few months, and he was like, oh, my sister's gonna be in town - she wants to come to the rehearsal. We didn't have a drummer yet, so...
Jed: Oh yeah, [Brian's sister] plays drums!
Bradley: Yeah, he's like, oh, she'll sit behind the drum kit... And she comes in, and that's who it is - it's Bridget, who was the girl I had met at Bowery Electric, then ran into on the street the next day, then I met Brian - no fuckin knowledge of this, whatsoever, it was, what, two years later. It was fuckin weird. That was a coincidence; we lived in the same neighborhood - that was a coincidence; I dunno.
Brian: So we lived in the same neighborhood, and Brad used to come over and we would write songs in my apartment. Just the two of us. We had, like, a ten-inch practice amp that we would both plug into, and come up with chords and lyrics and shit.
Bradley: And I think - didn't we buy, like, a 24-pack or something?
Brian: These rehearsals were always fueled by tons of booze. [Laughter] Jim Beam and cheap American beer.
Bradley: And then the neighbors would be, like, pounding on the wall.
Brian: That's how our first songs were written.
Jed: What songs did you write in that period?
Brian: Oh, gosh, that was like the earliest stuff that we had. We had, like, a handful of originals.
Bradley: We had some songs that each of us had already been working on.
Brian: Riffs and stuff, stuff that you probably haven't even heard. This was really early, primitive stuff, you know - just like riffs that we were coming up with and stuff. So that went on for a while, and then we had a handful of originals. But no drummer. And it was like pulling teeth trying to find a drummer.
Bradley: Yeah, we tried some out...
Jed: Yeah, welcome to New York.
Brian: Yeah! We tried some and they just didn't get it. Just couldn't do it, ya know?
Bradley: Like, one guy says his favorite bands are Motörhead, AC/DC, what not - so, okay for this guy if they were, but he comes in and does nothing but, like, try to put jazz beats to all our songs. It was bizarre. This is how fuckin hard it was.
Brian: There was some kid from Brazil who claimed he was into punk...
Bradley: He was!
Brian: He was, and he was really cool, too, but he wasn't... I dunno... he didn't have the skills to do it.
Jed: What, he couldn't play fast enough?
Bradley: He couldn't play for a whole song - I think he even said he had been playing drums for three months. Me and Brian had at least been playing for several years.
Brian: He wasn't ready.
Bradley: Maybe he's in a band now, I dunno. But at the time...
Brian: So nobody was working out, and we were getting really frustrated. And I remembered Danny from that one audition - and I really didn't know how to get back in touch with him, because I had only met him that one time. That had happened...
Danny: Over a year before. Brad, weren't you saying that you were thinking about playing the drums and getting someone else to play guitar?
Bradley: Yeah. I have, like, stagefright and this and that, and I was like, I don't really want to be standing up in front anyway, so I'll play the drums and we'll find another guitar player.
Brian: But I refused. I was like, no way. Even though Brad is, surprisingly, pretty damn good on the drums.
Bradley: Not really surprisingly - I've played drums longer than I've played guitar. [Laughter]
Brian: You hear this guy play guitar and you're like, he's a fuckin guitar player.
Bradley: I can fool people pretty good.
Brian: I had to track down Cecilia, who was a friend of my sister's, to find out where is this guy Danny? How do I get in touch with him? I just remembered that we had that one audition together and that we both really, like, dug each other a lot. So I tracked him down. And I was like, you gotta come out, me and this guy, we're writing these songs - and Danny's like, oh, I'm playing in this goth band right now but I'll come check it out.[Laughter]
Bradley: You wanted to get out of that anyway.
Brian: He totally wanted out! [Laughter]
Danny: Yeah, fuck yeah... When Brian called me to try out for the band, the first thing I said to him, I think, was why the fuck didn't you call me a year ago?[Laughter]
Bradley: Brian, yeah, what's up? [Laughter]
Brian: I dunno! There really wasn't [a band yet], and there really wasn't much to... I mean, at that point, it was really about me and Brad trying to get a sound and some tunes, you know?
Danny: After the Jones Crusher thing, I pretty much was like, I ain't gonna find anyone to play with. I thought it was all over. I'm not gonna find any band that I really want to be in anymore, and I kinda sorta gave up. And then especially when I went into that gothic thing, I'm like, it's over. This is the last nail in my coffin - I ain't getting out.[Laughter]
Jed:That's pretty goth. [Laughter]
Danny: No pun intended! And then I came across this, and I was just like, this is unbelievable. Everything I wanted in a band: these guys wanna go out, they want to play, write songs - into the music I was into...
Brian: So of course, Danny comes out, and we had the rehearsal, the audition, and he was perfect, you know? Well, exactly what we wanted. He could play the songs right.
Bradley: He could play right... but that ain't even enough for me, because... a lot of people can play, but a lot of people are fuckin dicks. So we practiced and it sounded really good, and then we went to the Irish Rover in Queens, which is a... at the time, Shane MacGowan from The Pogues, that was his bar when he came to New York, and I'm a huge fuckin Shane MacGowan fan. So we all went there -
Brian: Me and Bradley pretty much lived there in these days.
Bradley: We had already been kicked out of there a few times -
Brian: We had fights... wrestled on the floor... [Laughter] We had a love-hate relationship with the bartenders.
Bradley: I mean, they got a kick out of us, I think.
Brian: We were young punks, and we were playing cool shit on the jukebox. [Laughter]
Bradley: Anyway, we go there after practice, and I'm talking to Danny - Brian already knew him, I was meeting him for the first time - and me and Danny, our instant bond came over The Who. The Who was my first favorite band, and me and Danny loved The fucking Who, and we bonded over that. And we were talking about - shit that... when I meet people who are into New York punk and whatnot, they aren't into some of the other stuff I'm into, like Neil Young and Crazy Horse, and I think Danny mentioned - we were talking about that, even.
Danny: And The Kinks...
Bradley: And it wasn't... musically it worked, but like, there was camaraderie as well. Which is very, very important for me because I don't really put up with too many people. I don't even really like very many people. [Laughter] Everything worked - and that's how The Visitors started. After that first practice, that was it. I don't think we played a show for another six months, but...
Jed: What was goin on in that six months?
Brian: Just rehearsing, writing songs together.
Bradley: I thought it took way too long to get a show. [Laughter] We finally got our first show at Niagara - more or less, again, through Arturo, who was involved with [art collective The Antagonist Movement], who put on their shows there. Every other club, you know, you've got to already have a draw, or you've gotta have a demo, but we had none of this. We had no draw, we had no demo - nothing recorded. These guys gave us a show just because they knew us. They knew me - I had been going in there since I moved to New York, every Thursday. They gave me a chance. And we played there once a month, every month, for a while.
And then there came a point when we were playing too many fuckin shows. And then I couldn't take that. We were playing, like, twice a week sometimes, to two people in a fuckin room. In Williamsburg. It sucked, I hated it.
Jed: But that's what makes you a better band, though, you know? Those tough gigs - and a lot of gigs.
Bradley: Oh, definitely - and that's what we said: take every show we could get in the first year. Just to get our name out there.
Brian: Me and Brad were new in town, and we didn't know a lot of people. And we were just basically trying to, you know, get our name out there and try to get noticed, to meet some other cool bands to play with. So it took some time, and we played a lot of shows.
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