TEAM LAST CALL

Davey Havok is a dark and enigmatic rock star, waif-thin with androgynous good looks, a straightedge vegan who has become one of the voices of a brokenhearted and disenfranchised emo generation.
He’s also naked as a jaybird, as the hapless maid in his hotel is about to discover.
“I’m on the phone!” he hollers to the startled maid. “Thanks!”
When fully clothed, the 33-year-old singer spends his time shocking people in an entirely different way as the frontman of goth-glam punk band AFI. On the band’s newest album, Crash Love – the eighth record of the band’s 18-year career – Havok and company continue in their chameleonic ways, this time steering away from the electronica-tinged sound of 2006’s number one smash Decemberunderground and embracing a driving, melodic, bare-bones rock sound.
In anticipation of AFI’s November 12 show at the Electric Factory, Team Last Call tracked down the au naturale crooner to talk about why you won’t find him crying in a corner anytime soon.

Team Last Call: You’ve said that you’ve never been more proud of a record than you are of Crash Love. What prompted you to say that?
Davey Havok: It’s hard to step back from something you created and explain why it means so much to you. It moves me in a way that our music’s never moved me before. For the first time, when I listened to it through, I felt a sense that it could transcend any sort of era. That’s not to say it will, but I was struck with that feeling. I thought about it more – and I don’t think I’ve ever articulated this – but this is the first album really ever that I feel I can play for my friends and say, “OK, check out our new album,” without having to skip any songs.

TLC: Especially starting off in punk and hardcore like you did, you’re taking a huge risk by constantly expanding your sound, and it’s something you’ve gotten a lot of flack for. Have you reconciled yourselves to that?
DH: Absolutely. It’s something that we accepted very early on. It really comes from the ethos of being a punk and hardcore band. It was really because we just didn’t give a fuck. In the same way that we were playing punk and hardcore and didn’t give a fuck that anybody liked it, we continued to write and play what we liked and didn’t give a fuck if anybody liked it. Our hope is that people do like it, but if they have an issue with it, it doesn’t matter because we’re doing what makes us happy.

TLC: I can’t believe you keep getting away with it.
DH: Neither can I. Well, I can believe it in some respect, because the longer we’ve done it, the more our fans have come to expect that progression from us. Not to fear it, but actually in a way demand it. To release a record that sounds like our last record would be more of a detriment to us.

TLC: AFI attracts a lot of fans who feel like outcasts. Why do you think people react that way to your music?
DH: I think it really comes naturally from me. I really feel that likely it’s pervasive in the sentiment of the records because my feelings tend to be contrary to those of your general, average person. So if people connect to that and recognize that, it’s just something that’s part of the way I write.

TLC: Did you have music as you were growing up that served the same purpose for you?
DH: Pretty much everything I love was music from people who disassociated themselves from the masses in some way. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they weren’t a massive band, if you look at The Cure, for instance. But their perspective was not the average.

TLC: You seem relatively upbeat and sociable. It’s funny, because I’ve always had this idea of you, like, always crying in the dark.
DH: Most people do.

TLC: Do you care about that?
DH: Oh, no. It doesn’t bother me. Whatever people think of me is fine, however they want to envision me. I find it curious. I’m always intrigued by who people think I am and the persona they have created for me, what they think I’m into, what they think I’m not into. But I certainly understand that consideration, that I would be a bleak and miserable person, because a lot of my lyrics are very despondent. Luckily, I have the music to use as catharsis. If I didn’t, I might spend more time sitting and crying in a corner than I need to. Also, I think manners are very important. To be a sullen rain cloud when conversing with someone, be they your friends or a journalist, I think is inappropriate.

TLC: You are famous for your lifestyle choices, being vegan and straightedge. Why is that stuff the most important to project?
DH: I really think for the good of this world that, if I could have it my way, the whole world would be vegan and straightedge. So that’s why I feel it’s important to create an awareness of this lifestyle, create an awareness of the choices people make. To bring awareness about those lifestyles can bring a positive change, if only on the level of an individual.

TLC: It’s wildly entertaining, the amount of wrong guesses and suppositions you can find online about what AFI stands for. Do you have any personal favorites?
DH: I’ve heard we’re Christian, and that always tickles me. I’ve heard that I’m a junkie. I’ve heard that I’m a vampire. I’m a junkie vampire. That can be your pull-quote.

TLC: That quote just got boxed out in 24-point type.
DH: Thanks. I don’t spend a lot of time reading about myself or researching myself, so it’s hard to come by this stuff. It’s always pretty funny, and it’s rarely true.

TLC: Even the acronym itself. “A Flame Internal!”
DH: We’ve had people say it stands for something that doesn’t even have the right letters beginning the words. “Oh, that stands for Ah, Fuck You.” It’s like, what are you talking about?

TLC: You started this band 18 years ago at the age of 15, practicing in garages. Do you ever think about what you might say to that kid?
DH: Just do what you love, I’d say. Don’t try to write something that you think someone else will like. Write something that you like, and if they don’t like it, fuck ’em. That’s what it’s about.

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine

As you already know, Dethklok is the biggest band on Earth. Ever. The Norwegian death metal band boasts a fan base of millions who willingly risk life and limb (and often end up losing both) just to see Dethklok play. The band is so big that it ranks as the world’s seventh largest economy. So  powerful that it’s been called “the world’s greatest cultural force.” So unreal that it’s a … cartoon.
Dethklok’s wildly popular animated series, Metalocalypse, returns this month for its third season on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. The series’ creator, writer, songwriter and resident guitar god, Brendon Small, is currently touring America with a live-band version of Dethklok, performing such timeless classics as “Bloodrocuted” and “Briefcase Full of Guts” under an animated screen.  The band’s second album, Dethalbum II, debuted in September at #15 on Billboard, making it the highest-charting death metal album in history. 

Team Last Call: I’m trying to imagine the initial pitch you made to the network for a cartoon about a death metal band that murders its own fans.
Brendon Small: I work for a network that is contrarian, so they got it immediately. It wasn’t too hard of a sell. I know they’ve gotten tons of pitches for, like, “It’s a band, but they’re zombies.” This isn’t a new thing. It started with The Archies. They made millions of dollars off of this band that didn’t exist.

TLC: So, you basically get to make cartoons, tell jokes and play guitar for a living.
BS: I definitely have the ultimate job. I can’t think of any other job I’d rather be doing. The only bad part is that I talked people into financing it, and now I have to deliver it. Even though it’s fun work and it’s satisfying work, it’s still work. I don’t take vacations and I don’t sleep that often. Right now I’m at that point where I’m like, “Oh, wow. I’m missing deadlines on the writing side because I’m on the road. I wonder how that’s going to work out?”
 
TLC: You’re out-selling and out-charting the “real” bands, some of which, like Mastodon, you’re even touring with. Does that get uncomfortable?
BS: I don’t believe that people would buy my record in place of buying a Mastodon record. I think there’s room for everything. I think the only person I would be in direct competition with is if there were another cartoon metal band out there. And hey, any other dildo that wants to go create a TV show and do what I did – why didn’t you do it first?

TLC: Dethklok is kind of like the gateway drug of metal bands.
BS: That has been the coolest part about this. The thing that I get is, “Hey, this is my first metal show ever,” or “I never purchased a metal record before,” or “I don’t even like metal, but I like Dethklok. What else is out there?”

TLC: Goodbye Hannah Montana, hello Cannibal Corpse.
BS: If I can do just a little of that, then I’m happy.

TLC: For the uninitiated, can you explain the purpose of a pain waiver?
BS: A pain waiver legally disallows any liability for anything that could possibly happen to you within the realm of Dethklok. So you trip, you fall, you die … You basically fill it out and you enter your credit card number, your pin number, your social security number, your date of birth and all that stuff, and then we have rights to film your dead body, we have rights to all kinds of fucked up stuff.

TLC: It even says that if the sight of you getting murdered disturbs the band members …
BS: They have the right to sue you. It’s pretty harsh, but you gotta think about the band. You gotta make them happy. If you bum them out by dying in front of them, then they can sue you.


TLC: What do you think is the grossest thing that’s happened to audience members at a Dethklok show?
BS: I’d probably say falling in love with each other. I think that’s pretty disgusting.

TLC: What was your personal favorite crowd massacre scene to write?
BS: It’s hard to go beyond what we did in the first show, which was, they do a coffee jingle and they pour scalding hot coffee on people in these gigantic vats, and then they put cream and sugar on top of them too, just to humiliate them even more. We could launch convicted felons into the sky and destroy them with a laser beam if we wanted to, but that fucking coffee thing, it’s hard to beat that. I think tarring and feathering would be kind of fun. Like, smearing their collective faces into dog shit would be a funny thing to me.

TLC: What powers does Dethklok’s music have?
BS: There are things that happen once they get together and start playing. There are even possible supernatural things that happen. Sometimes they get together and play and the weather starts changing.

TLC: What’s next for Dethklok?
BS: They’re in a very precarious place since we left them in the last episode. They’re basically without a manager, and they’re driving their own business right into the shitter. This third season deals with a little bit more of that “OK, we’re up here. Who the fuck are we now? Now what do we do?”

TLC: And what’s next for you?
BS: In the near future, I see a vacation happening. I won’t fucking do anything. I’ll sleep and put on 40 or 50 pounds. Eat some really good food. Kill a couple of trannies. You know, the American dream.

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine

The Boston boys (and girl) of All That Remains became the toast of metal-town following the release of their most recent album, Overcome, which catapulted the band from Ozzfest second-stage anonymity to hard-rock radio celebrity. With the Top 10 Mainstream Rock success of “Two Weeks,” ATR showed that even metalcore bands can play Fall Out Boy for a day.
Incidentally, “metalcore” isn’t a label the band takes kindly. They’re an opinionated bunch, as Team Last Call found out first-hand during a recent interview with guitarist Mike Martin.

Team Last Call: Prior to “Two Weeks,” was radio success even on your radar?
Mike Martin: Not even close. We were actually thinking about not putting the song on the record, because when we heard it was all singing, we were like, “That’s weird.” I initially was just like, “Wow, kids are going to hate this so much.”

TLC: You’ve taken some flack for making your sound more melodic. Do you care?
MM: Nope. When a record comes out and sells five times faster than your previous record – which sold fairly well – you really don’t have time to care, because everything’s too busy going awesome.
 
TLC: It probably takes the edge off of little Billy’s mean blog post when you can finally have a good per diem.
MM: Or you get on stage and there’s a thousand people at your headlining show. It’s like, “Well, OK, the little jerkoff who’s masturbating to Internet porn all night in his mom’s basement doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.”

TLC: At this point, how do you measure success for the band?
MM: I guess you could already consider it a complete success, making a living off of it, making enough money. None of us have jobs when we go home anymore because we don’t really have time. We’re literally living off music. We’re playing every night of the week. That’s considered “making it” to a lot of people.

TLC: To be a touring musician and not going home to live in your parents’ basement is a success to a lot of people.
MM: Which all of us still do, basically, but whatever.

TLC: I’ve always heard All That Remains referred to as a metalcore band, but I just don’t hear it in the music.
MM: That just makes you smarter than everybody else, because we’re not.

TLC: Well, go on ...
MM: That’s the stupidest word for music ever invented, basically. It’s just dumb. If a metal band has dynamics in their music and it isn’t just this straight double-bass crap the whole time, it’s called metalcore. It’s just annoying and awful. We’re just a metal band, and that’s really all there is to it. It’s simple.

TLC: Which is worse, when people call you metalcore or when people call you a Christian band?
MM: I saw this one post like, “These guys are a bunch of Christian assholes.” Which is hilarious, because we’re the furthest thing from it. Just another example of people being completely ignorant and having no idea what they talk about.

TLC: When you get to those nasty sites like Lambgoat, sometimes it’s just best to turn off the monitor ...
MM: Lambgoat’s just straight-up vicious. I went on that website one time, and I was like, “OK, I’m never coming back.” I saw one comment that was like, “I hope this band flips off a cliff on their bus and dies.” Like that’s really necessary. Jesus Christ.

TLC: Is it true that [frontman] Phil [Labonte] is a conservative Republican?
MM: I don’t know what he is. I just know that he talks about politics a lot, and every time he does I leave the room. He sits in the front lounge on Twitter and watches MSNBC for 15 hours a day. He Tweets about everything that happens every 15 seconds. If you start talking politics with him, be prepared to be busy for hours and hours, and be prepared for me to not be in the room.

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine

It’s October, which means it’s time for Team Last Call’s annual Halloween column. Most of TLC’s previous October columns were devoted to scary subjects like Mark Wahlberg’s superfluous nipple and John McCain’s old man smell. But this year, we were really looking to raise the bar, to find a story subject that, like the realization that Larry King might still be sexually active, would haunt readers long after the column was over.

That’s when we came across the KFC Double Down sandwich, without a doubt the single most terrifying thing we’ve encountered in 2009. This bad boy is like the Steve Buscemi’s teeth of handheld food. At its core, the Double Down is a bacon sandwich, which is already bad news, only this bacon sandwich comes slathered in swiss and pepper jack cheese and the mayonnaise-based Colonel’s sauce. Oh, and instead of bread, the Double Down is held together by two deep-fried chicken filets. In summation, that’s a bacon sandwich in a bun made of fried chicken. I don’t know what kind of magnificent pervert thought it up, but he deserves a medal, and then deserves to be shot.

When we first heard about the Double Down, we thought it was a joke. So we decided to consult the leading authority on the subject, a website everyone should visit at least once a day: This Is Why You’re Fat (Tag line: “Where dreams become heart attacks”). Sure enough, we dialed up the site (www.thisiswhyyourefat.com) and there the sandwich sat, glistening and greasy like a breaded Rush Limbaugh. Our curiosity piqued, we decided to track down the folks behind the scenes at This Is Why You’re Fat, Jessica Amason and Richard Blakeley, to ask a few questions about the Double Down.

Team Last Call: Why was the Double Down a good fit for the site?

Jess: Needless to say, any meat-on-cheese-on-bacon-on-cheese-on-more-meat is a given for This is Why You’re Fat.

Richard: Cause that’s why you’re fat, duh!

TLC: What were your first thoughts upon hearing about the sandwich?

Jess: I thought it was what SNL’s Taco Town Taco was to Taco Bell, except this was KFC actually owning its own absurdity!

TLC: Did you, like most people, think it was a joke?

Richard: Yes, and a very good one at that, because there was a commercial to go along with it on Food Geekery.

Jess: The commercial sold it for me. I thought, “Well, they’ve gone and done it now, haven’t they? They’ve taken fast food to the next level.”

TLC: Have you had a chance to try one?

Jess: No, and honestly, I never had anything against the traditional sandwich structure. If it ain’t broke, don’t throw more meat on it!

Richard: I don’t eat chicken or bacon, so I’m not planning on doing it any time soon.

TLC: Is there another sandwich you’ve discovered this year as heart attack-tastic as this?

Jess: In the same spirit of “sandwiches 2.0,” I’m partial to the Pizza Burger. [A giant burger between two large meat pizzas, topped with eggs, bacon and colby and pepper jack cheese]

Richard: The Pattie LaBurger. [A triple bacon cheeseburger with deep-fried patties as buns]

It didn’t take long after its debut for word about the Double Down to circulate. “How can I get one?” everyone wanted to know. “And how bad is it for you? Would eating it kill you right away, or would it take a few hours? And why is Rush Limbaugh such a massive turd?”

Speculation about the sandwich’s caloric content was running wild. Men’s Health food and nutrition editor Matt Goulding wrote in an article, “Independent labs are estimating that [the Double Down] has around 1,200 calories and over 50 fat grams, based on what’s in the other KFC sandwiches.” But were those numbers to be trusted?

Not according to KFC public relations guy Rick Maynard, whom Team Last Call contacted in early September.

“There have been numerous incorrect reports in the media regarding the calories in a Double Down,” he says. “While we wouldn’t run final numbers on a product unless it is rolled out nationally, we estimate the Double Down at about 590 calories.”

Stop laughing. He’s serious.

While Maynard wasn’t able to come clean about the Double Down’s stats (he also claimed the sandwich has precisely zero grams of trans fat), he was able to take the time to crush our dreams of trying one for ourselves.

“[The Double Down] is a test market item that is available for only a brief time and in only two markets: Providence, RI, and Omaha, NE,” he says. “At this time, there are no plans to introduce it in Pennsylvania.”

At least we still have Pattie LaBurger.

It’s two in the afternoon, and Kimberly Schlapman is in a hotel room somewhere near Portland, OR, trying in vain to pacify her 2-year-old with ice chips.

As one of four members in Nashville band Little Big Town, Schlapman is wrestling to reconcile her two new identities: mom and country music star. Her life as it stands now is a blitzkrieg of diaper changes and meet-and-greets, with nightly stadium concerts peppered in for good measure. Despite the hectic schedule, however, she and her bandmates are enjoying one of the first truly peaceful moments of their career, which up to this point had been pockmarked with record label strife, divorces, and family deaths (Schlapman’s first husband died of a heart attack in 2005).

After more than a decade of trials and tribulations, the dust seems to have finally settled in Little Big Town. The release of the group’s latest album, A Place To Land, signaled the beginning of a healthy relationship with new label Capitol Records. All four members are happily married (two of them to each other), and the babies are coming in rapid fire. Team Last Call caught up with Schlapman (and daughter) to talk about tragedy, triumph and other aspects of life during Little Big Town’s pregnant pause.

Team Last Call: Until recently, your life as a band was just one tragedy after another. Do you feel like survivors to a certain extent?

Kimberly Schlapman: Oh, definitely. We have persevered through all kinds of stuff. We are definitely survivors, and we are survivors because we love the music and we love each other. When one of us is down, the other three pick up the load and carry that one along. We have a really special bond.

TLC: To be a band for this amount of time and to still have your original four members is amazing in and of itself, but then to go through that kind of adversity ...

KS: I’m proud of it. Karen and I had this idea about 13 years ago, I think, to do this band. We knew that we would have to put together the best vocal collaboration we could, but also, it had to be the right personalities that could live together, because we knew we’d be stuck together more than we would our families. Thankfully, I guess we made the right choices. Karen and Jimi ended up getting married, so that was the perfect choice for her.

TLC: I read that before you were successful, you were at a point where you would have qualified for food stamps.

KS: We made such very little money. My late husband was my provider. He had a good job, so it was OK that I wasn’t making anything on the road. But some of the members of the band didn’t have someone to provide for them. The four of us would drive ourselves in the van anywhere in the country that would have us play, just for gas money and to cover the van rental. There were many, many very lean years for our band.

TLC: Now you’re on the other side of the spectrum with these huge tours. You can hardly sneeze without being nominated for some kind of award.

KS: We’re just thankful for our journey. As we look back, we know that every part of our journey was meaningful and for a certain purpose. We wouldn’t want the easy road, looking back. Our journey is the reason we write the songs we write today and the reason we make the music that we make. I’m sure of it.

TLC: You guys are like a commune on wheels with your spouses and children in tow. What’s that like?

KS: We love it. We thankfully have gone from a minivan to two buses and trailers, so we’ve got a little room to spread out. We have the crew on one bus, and then we have the four of us and spouses and two babies on our bus. It’s fun. It’s a challenge. As a mother, it’s a challenge with a two-year-old to keep her quiet at times. But when we get down and get kind of drudged in the business part of it, it’s nice to have the perspective of a little infant child. We just love it.

TLC: It must be tiring, because you have downtime as a musician, but you don’t really get to punch a clock on being a mom.

KS: I’ve waited a very long time to be a mom. It’s the best job in the whole world. I wouldn’t trade anything for it. And it is challenging at times, and it’s tiring, definitely, but I’m used to it now. I think I’m just tired all the time and I don’t even notice it. I’m just used to sleep deprivation and just being run ragged. But my husband also comes out. He’s just my rock. He is my helpmate and is Mr. Mom out here on the road.

TLC: There really isn’t even a hint of controversy in your background. I think there’s something about being in the country market where having a clean image also seems to be expected.

KS: It is expected. I think it has a lot to do with how we were raised. Not that any other artists were raised poorly or anything. But we were raised to appreciate what we have and to give back. It probably is expected in our format, and I’m glad. We’re just normal, average people. We’re not perfect. We certainly know how to have fun.

TLC: What would you put on Little Big Town’s tombstone one day?

KS: I think this is a band that never quit and always persevered through the struggle, and it paid off. Why have we made it? Because we never gave up. The times when nobody wanted to hear our music, we believed that we were making music worth hearing. We pumped our arms. My late husband used to say, “Pump your arms!” And I think of that so often, because that’s what we’ve done as a band. We just pumped our arms through it and made it.

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine

At this point in his career, Gabe Witcher has a fairly sophisticated palate. He’s sampled the finest vintages of the finest strains of music, sniffed, swirled and spit.

Since the age of 5, the prodigious fiddler has performed with the most titanic of bluegrass legends, recorded on more than 300 records by artists from Willie Nelson to Beck, and contributed to film scores ranging from Brokeback Mountain to Toy Story. In short, the dude’s been around the block a time or two. But that didn’t stop Witcher from freezing up the first time he heard the composition his Punch Brothers bandmate Chris Thile had developed for the band’s debut – a 42-minute, four-part suite titled “The Blind Leaving The Blind.”

“I pressed play for the first time and it sounded like Super Mario Brothers on crack,” Witcher laughs during an interview from his southern California home. “It took me three or four days. I had to slow it down, get inside of it and read the score. Once I started to be able to hear it past the video game-iness of it, it started to make sense.”

That particular opus – the centerpiece of Punch Brothers’ debut album, Punch – was the launching point for the band’s sonic voyage into what the New York Times dubbed “American country-classical chamber music.” As unlyrical as that title may be, it’s as good a tag as any, although still barely vague enough to contain Punch Brothers’ expansive sound. Armed with banjo, fiddle, mandolin, guitar and upright bass, the five virtuosos deftly transcend the limitations of acoustic music and yield something literally and figuratively unheard of, something that breaches the worlds of both Bill Monroe and Bjork and inhabits every inch of the land between, from the complex grandiosity of classical music to the precise immediacy of pop.

Witcher puts it in simpler terms: “Music that we like, put through the filter of a bluegrass ensemble.”

“We’ll play a Radiohead song, and we’ll do Bach, then we’ll play Flatt & Scruggs, then The Strokes,” he explains. “Music is just music. It’s all made up of the same stuff. A good piece of music will translate through any medium, any instrument.”

Witcher and Thile, the latter most famous as one third of million-selling newgrass trio Nickel Creek, hit upon the concept for Punch Brothers (named after the Mark Twain short story Punch, Brothers, Punch) in 2006 while commiserating over recently failed relationships with the help of plenty of whiskey and several jam sessions. The idea to start a band came immediately, but didn’t come to fruition until Thile introduced the first tastes of “The Blind Leaving The Blind,” a meandering, yet intricately plotted piece pregnant with leitmotifs and counterpoints. The two dropped their other projects, rounded out the band with friends and likeminded musicians, young prodigies all, and set off like Magellan into the black waters of sound.

“It’s been the best, most positive musical experience that I’ve had,” Witcher enthuses. “One of the things that I think interests all of us as musicians is to come up with something that people haven’t heard before, that we haven’t heard before. We’re always searching for a new texture, a combination of instruments, a new form of song, a new way for a collection of notes to be ordered. Especially coming from the bluegrass world, there’s a lot still to be explored.”

Meet JBOT, a musician who, tired of dealing with egomaniacal bandmates, decided to start a rock band with robots as backing musicians. He built the robots himself with tender, loving care, giving one a guitar, another drums, until the band was completed. On the seventh day, he rested.

Then tragedy struck. JBOT’s beloved robots turned evil, captured their creator and yanked out his intestines and eyes. Now JBOT lives a tortured existence under the cold, watchful eyes of the robots, who delight in nothing more than humiliating their creator during their nightly concerts.

Team Last Call interviewed poor JBOT in anticipation of Captured! By Robots’ October 26 concert at the Chameleon to see how long we have before the robots take over the entire world.

Team Last Call: Why did you build the robots in the first place?

JBOT: Just all the stuff you have to deal with when you’re in a band, everything from drunk band members to girlfriends to “Oh, I can’t tour because I have a baby now.” So I decided to build some robots to take the place of human band members and see if they would do what I wanted – and they didn’t.

TLC: When did you first know that things went terribly wrong?

JBOT: It was pretty early. I had a horrible coffee-spilling accident with the CPUs when I was making the first two, Drum Bot and Guitar Bot. I don’t know if that’s what made them go against me and be evil, but it was something. As soon as I plugged them in, they captured me. They put a chip in my head and activated this chip as sort of a method of control. It’s called a Biocerebral Chip. It’s almost like being hit with a cattle prod. Not that I’ve been hit with a cattle prod, but that’s what I would imagine it’s like.

TLC: You’ve been captured for almost 13 years now. Are things better or worse overall?

JBOT: In the beginning, it was all torture and bullshit, just constant abuse. The first couple of tours we did, it was just me and the Drum Bot and Guitar Bot. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the situation where you’re lonely and tired and working really hard, and all you get is people yelling at you all the time, but it gets old fucking fast. But their hatred of me has gotten less over time. I think we sort of have a functionally dysfunctional relationship these days. We’re like an old married couple because we’ve been together for so long.

TLC: Why do you think Guitar Bot in particular is so damn mean?

JBOT: I think part of it just goes down to the instrument. I don’t know if you’ve met many guitar players, but generally – no offense – guitar players are pretty much dicks.

TLC: Do the bots tell you what kind of music to play?

JBOT: They don’t really care what we play. Basically, they rock hard and they’ll rock with whatever we play. And if the music I choose is bad, they just use it as another excuse to rip on me.

TLC: As far as you can tell, is there any way to avoid the imminent robot apocalypse?

JBOT: I think it’s only a matter of time. I think the human race is on borrowed time as it is. It’s not going to be global warming that kills us. I think it’s a tossup between two: either asteroids or robots taking over. The most likely is going to be robots taking over.

TLC: I would think so.

JBOT: Yeah, I’m pretty good with trying to analyze situations with percentages and statistics. I’ve run the numbers.

TLC: If people come out to the show, aren’t we in a way financially supporting this plan for them to take over?

JBOT: I don’t think so. I’m a bad robot builder. That new Japanese humanoid robot – my god, that’s what we need to worry about. That’s the scary part. I think we’re safe for the next five, 10 years. But if you know you’re going go die tomorrow, are you going to cry today or are you going to go out and party?

TLC: I’m going to party with robots.

JBOT: Totally!

*Reprinted from Fly Magazine