July 2, 2008

As the lead singer in the 1990’s band “The Promise Ring”, as well as his earlier and equally influential band “Cap’n Jazz”. Von Bohlen and his band mates were at the forefront of a movement. The band, along with many of their contemporaries on the Jade Tree label helped lay the groundwork for what would come to be recognized as the punk sub-genre ’emo’. Ah! The “e” word. Although that genre today is essentially a pop-punk gone glam-rock explosion of eyeliner, bad hair, and tight pants, “The Promise Ring” were the real thing: Kids from the punk and indie scene making introspective and thought provoking music.

Today Davey Von Bohlen lives with his family in Minnesota and continues to record with the band “Maritime”. Icons of Punk caught up with Davey to see what’s been going on with Maritime and to talk about the history and impact of “The Promise Ring”. When I called Davey at the time we were scheduled for the interview I caught him in the middle of some kind of fire drill at the building he was in. As you’ll read this made for a rather eventful interview… – By Mike C. – 7/08

Can you hear me ok?

Yea, there’s a fire drill at the place I’m at and now we’re stuck in a room.

Are you trapped in a basement or something?

No. Trapped in a racquetball court in a rec center!

Is…is that fireproof? In case of a fire?

I…Maybe it’s a tornado drill? Yea, because in fire you don’t want to go into a “trapped” place.

No, it’s fine. I can hear you just fine. So, what’s been going on lately?

I’m back in school, that is a huge part of my world. Other than that we’re trying to play some shows, make some songs, and take care of our families and hang out with them as best we can. That’s taking a huge portion of our time, you know.

What brought you back to school? What have you been studying?

Yea, I’m an accounting major.

Really?

Yea, I kind of think having a family put me back into school since I was actually going to be home more.

Is there anything new going on with your music?

Yea, well you know, we’re working on the 4th record, which is a big deal. We’re kind of in a downtime right now. After we did the last tour, we were in Japan, and after that we pretty much took a little time to be with our families and write songs.

Any big goals for the next record? Anything you’re looking to address?

Uh, well, you know we are always trying to keep ourselves interesting and progress forward. We’re not so far in the process that we know what it’s going to sound like. We don’t typically have an endpoint. We kind of live with the process and whatever it ends up being, it ends up being.

One thing that I was reminded of when I set out to talk to you was that I hadn’t really followed Maritime recently, and so I had to catch up with bit with you and your music. How do you feel the reception to Maritime has been over the last few years? It seems like a more low-key effort than your previous bands?

Yea, it is low key, it’s just different. We do a lot less, we just hope that when we do less it’s a “less is more” kind of thing. We hope everything we do is quality. That’s really the long and short of it.

Well, I was really taken by the music. The song “With Holes” was on your MySpace page and I was immediately drawn in and thought it was fantastic and pushed me to catch up with “Maritime”. How has touring been though, since you now have a family?

There’s a stronger focus on my family for me, so we just balance. In the past we made as much music and toured as much as we can for to strengthen the career of the band, but you know we’re way more focused on making sure we satisfy our individual family needs. It kind of works itself out because we can’t tour more than we do so we don’t. We’re just a little bit more mature about the whole thing, I guess.

And I think you can hear that in the music too. Do you consider what you do a natural progression from your previous bands work?

I mean I hope at the very least we’re better at what we do. So you know as far as that I hope it’s more mature. If we’re moving backwards then I’d need to find something else to do, you know, if it’s not moving forward!

What is that though? What does it mean to you to move forward?

For me it’s all individual songs and individual albums, so make the experience better and just get craftier. I guess we’re closer to our song writing process, you start to feel it better. It’s like if you were to jog everyday you’d get better in your technique and your actual end result.

NOTE: At this point the line went dead. This being my first interview for Icons of Punk (I’m an old regular at our sister page, the horror site “Icons of Fright”) and the first time I’d ever interviewed a musician I was concerned that…maybe…did I offend? I tried calling Davey back but I didn’t get anything, just a voice mail. My little heart sank. I knew it–my first interview for this site and I’d probably already managed to piss someone off.

But…not exactly, and I got a call from Davey a few hours later explaining exactly what happened, and I caught back up with him over the weekend.

Ok, so what exactly happened on Thursday? Was there a tornado drill?

Yea.

That’s so unusual to me, but then again I’m from New York, we have few tornadoes.

It was definitely a combustion of lots of different events that were unforeseen. It would have been a lot more humorous had you actually witnessed the entire deal of it.

And…you ended up breaking your phone, in the racquetball court, where they herded you to avoid the tornado.

Yea, it was kind of worlds colliding too…what can you do?

I guess what we can do is just continue along and take about your previous band, “The Promise Ring”. I’ve been trying to do the some research on the band, but I can’t seem to find the story that brought you guys together.

The original band was two members, Dan Didier and Scott Schoenbeck had a, um, “post-hardcore band” I guess is what it’d be called which was coming to an end and Jason G had a very similar type of band in Madison that had just finished and they were looking to start a band and the 4th member never really seemed to work out. For years and years me and Jason had known each other just from going to shows and stuff and had always said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we were in a band together”. I sort of got the job when they asked me to join (I was playing a band called Cap’n Jazz at the time) so for me it was kind of “Yea…because this is the only chance, I’d better do it.”. It definitely was not in my favor to do and it made my life a bit difficult for a long time.

So we basically got together and said, “Let’s write some songs, we’ll put out a 7”, go on tour”, and if that’s all that came of it, then awesome. SO that’s what coaxed me into it: 6 months and I’m good. We didn’t really get along all that well, in the beginning. Mostly I guess due to Scott Schoenbeck and Dan Didier had been in bands for years, years, and years and were growing apart at that stage.

So it was kind of a problem and it wasn’t going that great but the music was fun so we kept doing it. And we went on a tour that summer and put out a 7” that summer. We’d gotten together in February and started playing shows in March, recorded 3 songs, put out the 7” in May and went on tour in June. We really started to click in that summer, and found, “Oh we actually do get along if we find that weird middle point.”

Then I had a tour right behind that with Cap’n Jazz in July and that band broke up on tour with suddenly we were all the same spot and just gelled after that—soon followed by the departure of Scott, but that was the point when I was like, “Oh we’re totally on same page and a band.”

What were some of the things you noticed going musically in the band that made you see it gelling? Who was pulling what in what and do bands ever maybe sit down and discuss these kind of things, or is it more of an organic thing that happens?

I think at the very, very, very start of a band you have to have some idea, or else, you know, if you didn’t have any discussion somebody’s going to come in and think, “We’re going to sound like Pantera”, and somebody else is going to be like, “Uh…We’re going to sound like Paul Simon”. So there is some sort of general assessment of what general direction you’re going to guide yourself. But at that point we were only, what, 18, 19, and at that point you are, of course, still emulating things, you don’t have your own idea of how music should be played. So really, at that point, I could have played in a band that sounded like Pantera, or a band that sounded like Paul Simon and it wouldn’t have been that strange. And that’s as much as we talked about, but after the second or third song we wrote together…I think you start to have this, I mean that’s the whole point of writing music, it gets beyond being able to discuss it and map it out verbally. That’s where art becomes a creative process and you can’t necessarily explain it, and you can’t write down, or it just it would “math”. And that was 12 or 13 years ago and I don’t think I’ve had a discussion about what the sound was going to be since then and I don’t think I probably ever will again.

How hard was it getting Promise Ring off the ground, because I guess you’d had some indie label support with Cap’n Jazz, right? Were you able to immediately get some support for Promise Ring?

Not really. The thing with Cap’n Jazz was that it was popular posthumously, really. That last tour was mostly basement shows and that was when we thought, “Wow, we put out a record and there are people purchasing it.” We thought that was crazy. We would play shows with between 30 and 70 people and that to us was popular, that was really doing it. And the indie support Cap’n Jazz has was, basically, our friend had put out our record. Jade Tree’s picking up Cap’n Jazz had come later after Promise Ring had forged that path.

We all had directions, we all had friends so we could book a tour but it was still on a very grassroots punk rock, basement shows type level. And a few happy accidents, you know, we’d opened for Texas Is The Reason as our second or third show in the first two months of our band, and we happened to give a demo tape to Norm Arenas who happened to be living in New York with Tim Owen who was running Jade Tree at the time who happened to really like it. He called us on the phone and asked if we’d like to put out a record and we said yes. So by ten months into the band we had a 7” out on Jade Tree, but still we weren’t popular by any stretch. At some point we played a show in Milwaukee and there was 100-200 people there and I remember thinking, “There are so many people here I don’t even know”, which seems totally illogical but at the time it was, “People are coming to our shows that I’ve never seen before and they already like it and this is the most crazy thing that has ever happened to me”.

What was it that was helping get the word out about the band, because this is pre-internet…Where there any shows you’d played that you knew had been important for the band?

I mean now you can play in Wyoming and Pitchfork will have pictures of it. So, the internet has shocked the world and leveled a lot of the playing field, which is cool in a way but also kind of strange. I think there were some shows, especially after the 7”. You know we didn’t have contracts even though Jade Tree was a fairly pivotal record label later on, at this point it was still like two guys in their apartment. We did an East coast tour, the first full tour, I think New York and Boston felt really important, there was a lot of people. I don’t know necessarily, we always had great shows when there was 14 people in Alabama, but when we had to do it at CBGB’s it was kind of messy and everything went wrong. I don’t know if we’d gotten it into our heads, or if you start thinking about that kind of thing the magic starts slipping away–

So you were maybe psyching yourselves out?

Maybe…we played a lot of bad shows and there was this random quality to it. Sometimes you just don’t have it, but there’s a little “luck of the Irish” there too. Everything goes wrong at the wrong time. I don’t know if we psyched ourselves out. We were always the last people to know about “us”, you know? It did happen fairly quickly for the band and when people would be like, “Oh my god, you’re in that band”, I’d be like, “yea…what does that mean?” We had no idea who we were and I think there’s still probably some of that, you know. We think, hey, some good things happened and we played in a band for a long time, made some great songs, met some great people and it was fun. To think of it as monumental to some people still seems really strange.

You were part of a unique movement in music, so you never thought to yourselves, “Oh we’re a part of something now”. It wasn’t exactly punk rock, it wasn’t popular rock at the time, did you ever start to feel that you were developing as part of something different?

The “part of something” comes out of the age of the internet, I think, where people can talk extensively about things. That’s when people start to dissect things into a million, million pieces. I think we felt a part of something right in the beginning of the band. We’d played shows with Christie Front Drive from Denver, Jimmy Eat World from Phoenix, pretty soon after that was Mineral, from Austin. We always felt like we were part of the bands we all know that are not from New York or LA. So we felt sort of part of something because these were our people.

And you definitely started to develop relationships with these bands, especially with Jimmy Eat World.

I mean, yea, I would have no idea how to count how many shows we’d played together in one way or another. We’d certainly forged, and that band’s been together 12-15 years now, certainly that one stands out. I don’t think when the word “emo” came into play it was a way for everyone to pass it off as “not good enough”.

Ok, good, you brought it up so let’s talk about “emo”. When do you remember first hearing that term, because I understand it’s not a label you would use to describe “The Promise Ring”, I don’t see the relationship between your band and what’s considered “emo” now.

I feel like when I was 13 years old in the 80’s “Maximum Rock’n’Roll” used the term to describe bands from the East Coast like Soulside or Rites of Spring or MIA, which was a way to describe underground music that they couldn’t really put a finger on. So when it became a really finite point to me it was the opposite of what I knew the term to mean because it used to mean “everything else”. I mean it’s not like “college radio music”, but it’s not “hard core”, but it’s not “punk rock” but it’s not the accepted in between so when it became a finite thing, the sound of it, it was totally funny because it’s the exact polar opposite of what it used to mean. But that happened at about the same time our band became what you’d call a “popular band” so I thought if this is concurrent with what’s happening to us everything’s good. The fact that we’re still us and people are still coming to our shows then everything that’s happening is positive. The whole idea of bad press/good press, I mean certainly we polarized people, but ultimately that worked.

I mean, good press/bad press aside, you did start to get good press from “mainstream” publications and such. Did that start with “Nothing Feels Good”?

Yea, pretty much.

What were you expecting from the band after that point?

That is when I think, I mean, it was so early on. Today you’d look at bands and say, “Wow, you’re not on a major, I can’t believe you’re not on a major” but to us we thought, “Well, we’re not Nirvana so we’re not going to be on a major”. I think maybe Jawbreaker had just signed, and people were saying the next logical step would be for us to be on a major…

Then again it wasn’t really working out for the bands that had jumped to a major. You mentioned Jawbreaker and they didn’t have a great success.

Well, this was around the time too when Jawbreaker was a band that we felt maybe “akin” to and they had a big disaster on a major label. I don’t know if it was necessarily, I mean, we weren’t naive. If you’d offered us a couple of candy bars and a new pair of Vans, no we’re not going to bite at that, we’re not idiots, but at the same time, yea, if somebody were to offer me a ton of money to do it, maybe. But for us that never crossed our minds. People kept asking about it and we probably said a million different things about it because it got boring. I mean, it’s like if people keep asking you, “What would your life be like if you were a girl”. Well, it’d be completely different, I don’t know. I’ve lived my life as a boy, what can do you do? I had no insight into that question. I guess that parallels into how we never saw ourselves as a popular band.

But you did get a really strong following… and now the band does have this legacy. Do you maybe hear your influence in music today?

I don’t hear myself…people I know say, “Dude, have you heard this band, they sound like your old band” and I think that doesn’t sound like me. I guess the fact that we’re talking today. To me it’s flattering, that band ended six years ago and we have conversations now and again about it. I don’t know, legacy might be strong language, but it certainly feels like what we did was somehow remembered by somebody. And that in itself is something.

You always hear bands that come out today and they do tend to name check bands from that era, and that must be interesting especially if they are completely different and you can’t imagine they could possibly been influenced by you.

Yea, totally, you know it’s got a life of it’s own, I guess. I feel like kind of a bystander when I do hear it. It seems like a different life now…

So what was it that really brought the band to a close?

Um…Awareness. I think it was our ability to stand inside and outside of the band and see this is completely not working anymore and to bring it to a close is really the only mature thing to do. And that is really exactly what it was. We’d done a tour with Bad Religion, we’d done a tour with lots of other bands that were obviously unhappy and not great anymore. There were certain bands that had been together for 10 or 15 years and you’d say, “This band was great 3 to 5 years into their band, but the last ten have been really mediocre.”, whether they see it or not. We consciously didn’t want to be that band that just wasn’t good at it anymore. You think you’re doing better than what you did, and it’s not. You have to be blowing yourself away every time or you’re not moving forward, and if you’re not moving forward then…what are you doing?

Were you guys hinting at that with Wood/Water? I’d read how excited you were to start recording on it but when I listen to some of the songs it almost sounds like a band that is saying it’s “good-bye” to each other. Now, not in a bad way, just almost as if it was the end of a “third act”.

Looking back, it definitely does have a sort of “swan song” vibe to it, but also looking back at some of the decisions we made with the band, oh my God, the writing was so on the wall. But that’s hindsight so you can read anything you want into anything if you look at it in the opposite direction. We certainly didn’t know it, maybe subconsciously. It would even be a stretch or a guess to even say subconsciously, but it more was, I think the writing of the music saved the band. We had talked about not continuing with it, staying together but starting a new band, really challenging ourselves to do something different. So we were aware of it, but I think when we started making the record it was really great and we felt we’d started moving forward again. The writing of the music really united us again, but then we took a lot of time. Before Wood/Water we’d been writing music but we weren’t doing anything because I’d had like three surgeries in 18 months and everything was…We were together but we didn’t have that same togetherness.

How did your health problems affect that?

Just in the way that we weren’t practicing as much, we weren’t touring as much. We saw each other and hung out and did rehearse, but I think we had moved on in our personal lives a bit. So when we did get together and say, “Ok, great, 100% forward” we were all not at the same place we left in. That’s what made it seem like we should do something different because we’re all looking at this different. When we went out on tour it was really noticeable that we felt like individuals, that we didn’t feel like a group anymore. Every idea you’d present to the band everyone thought just opposite of everybody.

What do you mean by ideas you’d presented to the band?

I mean like when we started using a lot of keyboards and extras. You might want to fly all that stuff and use it on the show, but someone else might say, “I was thinking the complete opposite. If we did that on the record I think we might do everything completely stripped down.” So we just couldn’t agree on everything. We couldn’t agree on a set list, which songs to play, we were a band with 4 albums and we had about 10 songs we could play at a show. It became such a struggle that at some point we realized we’re just not four people who should be in a band.

And this was a really interesting time for you to come to a close, because with that album you’d done a major tour, you were on Conan O’Brien, big success was maybe just around the corner, but I guess it just wasn’t what you guys were feeling right as a group…

Yea, things were happening but it felt so hollow playing in that band which had been such a part of our lives that could not be as great as we could be. It was such a knife in the heart kind of thing. This is something you love so much and it’s not as great as it could be and that’s 10 times as disappointing as it might appear to be. That’s why we walked away, it was time to do something else whether it be music or something else. Part of it was, “Are we doing this because we like doing it?” It was just really difficult, we couldn’t attach ourselves to something that was super exciting. Looking back to me it’s sad because we did start writing music for the next record and I felt like we really started to emerge from whatever we were scratching the surface of.

I guess ultimately music really changed a lot too. Where would the band had been at this point, it’s hard to imagine.

Maybe it would sound something like the Maritime sound. It’s hard to say what kind of door you’d open.

Well, with Maritime it certainly feels like you’ve gone through a natural progression for yourself.

Yea, I feel pretty good about it.

Is there anything in music right now that’s really blowing you away?

Well, being that I am sort of removed from my life in general it’s sort of difficult to know things at the first moment of greatness, you know. I get the second or third wave, it has to be fairly well know before I get to it these days. I really, really love Super Furry Animals, I mean I’ve loved them forever, but they continually still redefine pop music in, it’s like the dark side of pop music between their structure and how they approach it. They have a really nice feel to the way they make music, I appreciate that.

You had a very strong pop sensibility too, though. That’s another interesting thing about the bands you’ve been in, they’re not at all inaccessible. It’s pop but it never became cloying or insipid.

Yea I mean that’s kind of what I love about Super Furry Animals, they kind of perfect it. They are so good at not being, not seriously trying to get to that moment. Also, the band The Headlights, I don’t know if you know. They’ve been a really good band, but this new record they put out is great. So knowing them and seeing them coming into their own is really exciting. Pretty thrilling. They’re record is really good.

Have there every been any bands that are active today that have reached out to you for anything? To get you on an album, or a guest spot, there’s so much of that going on.

Yea, last year I did a ton of them. I’m always telling people, “Let me play!” mostly because I’ve spent a lot of time being at the very start of the songwriting process that I always wanted to just come in and be told what to do and enjoy it. Last year I did mostly singing, which is interesting because that’s not what I’d consider my forte…

But you voice is so unique, it’s one of the most defining aspects of The Promise Ring!

Yea, it’s unique but it’s also what makes it unique is how weak it is, how unable I am to control it, it has a weird timber. It is definitely something that I love, but its super frustrating every single time I make a sound.

That’s really interesting to hear from you.

Yea, I have a total love/hate relationship with it.

So what did you sing on?

I sang on the new Bound Stems record, I sang on a Canadian girl rock band called Bad Flirt. There’s more, I swear there is more. I’ve been really happy to do stuff like that, it’s tons of fun. I’ve done lot of guest vocals. I’m probably missing something.

Wow, well, thanks for talking to us. It’s been great to talk to someone who… you’ve been at the top of the list of people we’ve wanted to talk to.

Well, sorry it got so complicated. That’s my life, just a bunch of chaotic mishaps that have come together to form really good situations. It all works out in the end.