Show & Tell - S&T chats with Justin Beck of Glassjaw

JUSTIN BECK of GLASSJAW
The World, NYC, NY
11.26.02

In an interview conducted months earlier with Glassjaw front man Daryl Palumbo, we made a point of discussing how opionated he was. Here’s how that article opened:

"Daryl Palumbo has opinions and he’s not afraid to share them.

Honest, raw, hardcore... These words could just as easily be describing Daryl as the seminal band Glassjaw that he fronts."

What follows is our interview with Glassjaw guitarist Justin Beck.

There must be something in the tour bus water. Justin was refreshingly honest the day we spoke. About life, about the band, about touring... Backstage is usually a haven for misrepresentation and fabrication. Not this night. This night what we got was brutal honesty.

So rather then coming up with a clever new intro for this piece, please just use the aforementioned intro replacing "Daryl" with "Justin" and "that he fronts" with "he plays guitar for."

Show & Tell: How are you?

Justin: Tired.

S&T: Tired from traveling and bopping around?

J: Yeah. It’s a grind and being unproductive drives me crazy.

S&T: You mean on your downtime?

J: Yeah. I like working. I like waking up at 8 o’clock and working all day in the studio. But on the road it’s just…

S&T: A lot of waiting in between?

J: You wait 23 hours a day to play for 45 minutes. And no city’s a quarter as good as New York City. You think, "Why would you want to leave New York," right? I get bummed. I haven’t been home for a good, long time... since last year. We left to do the recording last November, and after we recorded, the next day we were on tour.

S&T: You haven’t been off the road since the album?

J: We’ve had, like, a week between a tour here and there, and then we had two-and-a-half weeks between Warped Tour and Ozzfest, which was like, whatever. And then Daryl got sick going to Europe so we got some downtime, but it’s just like…. I think touring is for someone who just loves going out and sitting all day. You might enjoy it, but it’s not my thing.

S&T: What about the rest of the guys?

J: Everyone enjoys it, but it’s just like, whether you’re friends or not, being in a band when you’re together with someone every day, all day, we’re smart enough to just realize, "Man, we’re getting on each other’s nerves." It’s been a year since any of us had any personal time, so it’s understandable.

S&T: It’s like a marriage, multiplied by however many people you have in your band.

J: Yeah, but when you’re married you don’t see your wife, ‘cause you’re at work from…

S&T: Unless you’re us.

J: Oh. You guys are married?

S&T: Yeah. And we have our own business together and we do this together, 24/7 – so I totally understand your point about having to get away! [laughter] But I don’t care if you’re a road dog or not, I mean, a year on the road – that’s exhausting.

J: And it’s one thing if you know it’s a certain duration and you can break it down, but it’s like, we know we’ll probably be doing another Warped Tour, which I fucking despise like no other…

S&T: Why?

J: First of all, playing in daylight sucks. Like, when it’s daylight outside but you’re playing in a club, it still sucks. But when you’re playing outside in the daylight and it’s 120 degrees, it sucks. It’s not conducive for rock and roll, I’d say. Playing outside is not fun. You sweat just from sitting there. And playing inside, I don’t know whether it’s the lighting or the walls that contain the sound, but energy’s lost [playing outside]. And it’s just like a factory – there’s too many bands, there’s a mall going on, there’s no intimacy. And you live in a fucking parking lot for fucking two months.

S&T: Was Ozzfest any better because it’s not as many bands?

J: Ozzfest was much more organized and much more beneficial if you’re going out, you go, "OK, I want my band to play for these people." It’s more bang for your buck.

S&T: Right, because you’re going to get a cross-section of people who might not have been exposed to your music.

J: Yeah. And like on the Warped Tour, there’s ten bands going on at any one time, and a fucking mall on top of everything… There’s that, and then there’s the discomfort. I mean, I want to be in a band, but like, when I was 17 or whatever, I didn’t mind going out and eating shit and living like an idiot. I think the misconception is that if you’re in a band, you’re supposed to eat shit or you have to go out [on the road] for two years, like, to prove something. I don’t have to prove shit, I like playing my music. If it were up to me, I’d like to have a balance, like where you know you’re going to tour for this many months.

S&T: Yeah, so right now you guys are on the road kind of open-ended? Like, this is going to wrap whenever, and you know you’ll be picking something up right after that?

J: Yeah. When this is over, we go to Europe for two weeks, we come back and I know – like I’ll fucking shoot myself in the face – that we have January off. And then in February, I think we’re going to do [the Airwalk] Sno-Core [Tour], and after that maybe we’ll go back to Europe, and then come back and by that time spring tours are going to be coming around again, and it’s just like…. And then the Warped Tour and everything, it’s just like, oh man. And it’s easy for everyone like managers and labels to get you pumped to book tours. I mean, I understand that’s how you make your living if you’re in a band, but it’s so easy for people to point fingers, like, "Oh, you didn’t do this tour." But to do that, you’ve got to leave your house, leave your girlfriend, your favorite restaurants – all the stuff that makes you sane.

S&T: What are your favorite restaurants?

J: Mine is Wonton Garden on Mott Street, a block south of Canal [in NYC’s Chinatown]. Or New Indonesian/Malaysian, off of Pell. Or Penang. Those are my favorite restaurants. It’s little shit like that I miss on tour. I know I’m being a pussy, I’m bitching, but…

S&T: No, you’re not. It’s actually good to just hear somebody talk straight about it, because I traveled for four-and-a-half years, I know how ugly it is on the road, to just be away from it all. One of the reasons that we started doing this is that we wanted to do interviews that weren’t the same as everybody else’s. We didn’t want to come in here and say, "What are your influences?’ and that kind of shit. So, to hear you talk about it like a real human being is a thrill for me. We interviewed somebody who’s a vegetarian, and he was like, "Do you have any idea…?"

J: Yeah, we’re pescatarians, most of us.

S&T: So that makes it that much more difficult?

J: Well, it is and it’s not. I’m picky with food. I just like Mexican or salads, basically. Rice and curry. And you don’t get it when you leave New York. There’s a pocket here and there, maybe San Fran. But if you’re not in a big city, the food sucks.

S&T: Yeah, well I always think that if you’re from this area, you’re spoiled.

J: Absolutely spoiled.

S&T: So spoiled, with food and accommodation and everything. I do it even when we leave New Jersey. We went to Pennsylvania to cover a show and I was like, "Are we on another planet? I don’t even know what’s going on out here." My wife’s like "Where’s the Starbucks?"

J: I need sidewalks, people. I like things going on. Even if it’s 2 o’clock in the morning on a Monday and I have to get my laundry done while eating sushi, there’s something that can accommodate me.

S&T: Right, right, you go to a sushi laundry. [laughs]

J: Everything closes at like, 8 or 9 o’clock everywhere else.

S&T: You have to have care packages sent from home. The first time I went out on the road, the mozzarella cheese was terrible, so my wife sent me mozzarella cheese, packed with dry ice in a box! You can Fed Ex it overnight priority with dry ice – it works fine! I was trying to make a pizza or something in Ohio, but the cheese was turning yellow. I needed Jersey cheese.

J: I know what you mean. That’s exactly why I’m being a pompous dick, as my manager would say. I just need a break. I’m spent. Not like this is worse than other things that go on in people’s lives, but just trying to pay bills, have a relationship with a girlfriend who’s in Santa Monica, and when you’re on the road you can’t call her because your phone doesn’t work on the highways, and when you’re home you leave work at 1 o’clock and you’re exhausted, but it’s only like 9 o’clock for her and she doesn’t realize you just worked a 15-hour day. So it’s a lot of shit.

S&T: Is the rest of the band kind of the same way?

J: They are fucking lazy pricks. Waking up at 2 in the afternoon and sleeping. They love it.

S&T: How’s Daryl feeling?

J: He’s doing alright, I think he was slightly brooding the other day. I don’t even know how he’s going to do tonight.

S&T: So, to change the topic a bit, we’ve been asking a lot of bands how they feel about the Internet, about how important you think it is to have an online presence.

J: I think the Internet’s everything, you know? Shit, from the record companies to bands doing their own self-promotion.

S&T: Yeah, with MTV not playing rock music, or having two rock videos and then twelve rap videos, we’ve seen a lot of bands turn to the Internet for promotion. Some post updates on their sites every day.

J: Yeah, it’s just scary how much time some bands spend on their sites.

S&T: Do you guys get on there, on chat groups or message boards?

J: I don’t, because I get irritated because the kids, as much as they can be dedicated, can also be stupid sometimes. They talk shit and I don’t think they realize that bands have people behind them and they come to their own conclusions and throw up stupid shit. And it’s irritating how they’ll over-analyze. Like, "This guy farted, so now he has ass cancer." Just the most ridiculous shit, whatever it is. They’ll compare bands to other bands, and it’s all about competition.

S&T: Are you guys involved with your website?

J: Yeah. I do it all.

S&T: You do the entire site?

J: Yeah. I actually have to fix it – it’s all fucked up.

S&T: Well, visually it looks great. I appreciate the design, I like the images, it’s really nice. What about videos? What do you think about videos now that they really don’t get played anywhere?

J: Well, they do and they don’t. I mean, MTV for a band, I don’t think it’s as effective as it once was. When I was young, if your band was on MTV, that meant you made it. But getting on MTV doesn’t mean shit now. And from a business standpoint, you can spend so much money on a video, and they may not play it.

S&T: Well, that was my point. Is money better spent on the Internet, on a more interactive website? Not all bands have grasped that you can really use it as a tool, but with the ones who have, you can really see the difference. A lot of bands are also beginning to do DVDs at the end of a tour, so they’ll put some live footage for that and a video on their website, because if a fan misses the video during the two weeks that MTV showed it, they can’t see it anywhere else.

J: MTV’s there, it’s a portal. If they take something you’ve done, cool. But if not, move on, you know.

S&T: What about file-sharing, that kind of thing?

J: Um, it’s good, it’s productive but it does come to a line where, like, how can I put it? When you’re putting your life on hold to be in a band and go out on tour, there’s a balance between record sales – I mean, for the most part, bands don’t make money from record sales – but it’s a bullshit gauge that that the industry uses to measure your band and its popularity and what it’s worth to spend more marketing dollars, so I don’t give a shit, but sometimes we need the numbers. Record labels are trying to come up with a different gauge, they are trying to adapt…

S&T: It’s almost too late. It’s almost like they dropped the ball and now they’re trying to play catch-up.

J: Exactly. So, I mean, I don’t know where it’s going to go, but it’s definitely changing.

S&T: But no matter what kind of encryption they come up with, there’s always going to be some 15-year-old kid down in mom’s basement who’s figured out how to get around it.

J: Yeah, so who knows? It’s sort of like, if you’re an artist, everyone can see your art, but if they want the actual painting, should they fucking buy it? It’s weird, I don’t know.

S&T: When we were growing up, you’d pass cassettes around all the time.

J: It’s always been around, but it’s the next level if everyone’s buying blanks and nobody’s buying CDs anymore.

S&T: Do you keep an eye on record sales?

J: I try not to give a shit. I think it’s annoying, I think again it’s a stupid gauge on bands and as much as it’s a catalyst for good things with a label, it’s also a catalyst for bad things at a label. There’s a bunch of fucking punk rock kids out there now, and they’re all following Soundscan to try to get bigger contracts. It makes people forget the reason why they ever picked up an instrument.

S&T: A musician I spoke to recently said the thing he hates the most is that the media focus so hard on the first week’s sales, and there’s no time for development, so if you don’t make that mark…. And that band’s attitude is, "We’re doing this for us. We’re glad we signed, but we’re doing this for us."

J: Well I was kind of upset after our first week, because it did good. And I was sure it was going to do good, because we have x amount of fans, and I’m sure that x amount of fans will go buy that record whether it’s the first week or first month. But then after that’s absorbed, it’s like, people are going to get bummed. I personally just think following record sales is annoying.

S&T: Thanks for the great interview, Justin. Have a good show.

J: Thanks.

interview by scott sisti