Feedback -- Pain -- October 1999

Dan Lord has wild eyes. Not the kind of wild eyes Henry Rollins has, eyes that say he might wrap a Ziploc bag over your head and a phone cord around your neck. Lord has the kind of wild eyes that say he might run down the street giving cotton candy and ice cream cones to total strangers, or jump on a merry-go-round and have to be begged to get off.

Right now Lord isn't doing any of those things, however. He's on the stage floor miming a middle school fistfight as his band, Pain, plays their song "Fight" at The Masquerade as part of the Atlantis Music Conference. The eight-piece band, including three horns, surrounds Lord's mime with an ever-shifting sea of pop-ska-punk grooves. Before Pain's night is over, however, the band will find themselves in a real fight with the Masquerade and the Atlantis Conference to save their equipment from confiscation! More on that later.

For those who have not heard them, Pain are an eight piece pop-ska-punk band from the pop-ska-punk capital of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Though the group's morbid moniker may raise visions of dark Nine Inch Nails-style angst, their songs are actually bouncy, upbeat anthems about "kooky kids, lovely girls, and people we hate."

It's a couple of weeks after the Atlantis show and the group's bassist, Pose (a.k.a. Mark Milewicz), is talking to me by telephone from "Pain Headquarters" in the college town of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Though the band has had some great career highlights -- videos shown on MTV-2, the Cartoon Network requesting their compositional abilities for an animated feature, and sharing a bill with the Mighty Mighty Bosstones -- their success doesn't seem to be the result of cold calculation as much as un-premeditated fun. Pose's replies to questions about the band's development are often prefaced with, "I don't know...that's kind of a weird thing to figure out..." Here's what we figured out.

Feedback: How did you meet Dan Lord?

(Pose:) Dan and I have been friends since we were probably 14 or 15 [They met at McGill-Toolen Catholic High School in Mobile, Alabama -- Art], so by the time we started the group we had known each other for the better part of 10 years. We knew we had a very similar feel for music, liked the same stuff, going to the same shows, so that part was pretty easy and provided fertile ground by which we could get started.

What made you say, "We must start a band?"

I think it's just kind of a natural progression by which you really enjoy something so much it's kind of natural that one day you'll get into physically doing it as well as enjoying it. A lot of people are avid readers and are really into literature. It's not unusual for those guys to write something themselves. I guess that holds true for music and other things, too.

What was going on at the time you put the band together?

Dan and I got the idea of doing the whole thing in `93 and we started performing in `94. We were living here in Tuscaloosa and had been trying for some time to get a band together. We had just never been able to get the right combination of people. Really it came down to interest. You have to go back and think about 1992 and `93 and Nirvana and all that, and here were Dan and I wanting to get together this large band. At the time it was a fairly odd thing to do. We could just never find anyone who wanted to do it. So he and I just started writing music and putting it down on a four-track between the two of us. It wasn't until 1994 that we were able to physically put together a group to perform.

You guys say that you were inspired by all-ages shows, and you like to play all-ages shows. Do you have any Fugazi-like policy where you only do all-ages shows or require the cover to be held to a certain price?

Given the choice we'll always go for the all-ages show as opposed to a bar show. If not given the choice we'll try to have a contractual agreement where the door won't be more than five or six bucks. Sometimes you don't have any control over it and the club will stick you with a $10 door, which we really don't like. I apologize to the kids a lot for having to pay that. That's just too much. I don't think the show should be that much.

We're not so much like the Fugazi thing because with Fugazi if it's not their terms, they won't do the show. Most bands you speak with will acknowledge that unless you have an amazing amount of clout you'll end up not playing any shows if you're too hard line with that.

Why would you prefer the all-ages show to the bar show, or why would you not want to charge $15? I would think that would give you a kind of prestige.

I haven't thought about that, that would be kind of prestigious to say we could command a $15 ticket! I just always got bummed out as a kid being turned out of so many shows because of my age. I was especially ticked off at high door prices because I didn't have a lot of money -- I still don't have a lot of money! It always upsets me when you can't go see a show for under $15 or $20. At this point, since we're on the other side of the fence, I would like to do everything I can to not keep someone from seeing the show just because they're not 21 or don't have $10. It's just something I've always felt strongly about.

What are Pain's goals over the next five to ten years? Do you want to play 20,000 seat venues?

I don't have any preconceived notions of playing bigger or smaller venues. They both have their merits. It would certainly be good to see the venues increase in size as the band grows and develops and continues to perform, but small venues are pretty cool, too. You can play 200 or 300 person venues and have a really good time. I would be willing to go with whatever the situation called for. There's a certain amount of distance you get in bigger venues that, for the performer and the audience, makes it a little more challenging and less personable.

How did you get the opportunity to write music for Jabberjaw on the Cartoon Network?

We were on tour out in Southern California about this time last year when we got a fax from our publicist. We were sleeping on our publicist's floor and we were getting ready to go to a show in Los Angeles and she said, "Hey, you got a fax from Ted Turner!" They said, "We heard you guys from somewhere in Atlanta and think you would be really good for this project we're doing. We're doing a cartoon short for Jabberjaw and need original music."

You just never know where these things are going to come from.

That was just one of those neat things that happen. You can't plan or prepare for those (later Pose says he thinks Steve Craig of 99X may have told the Turner people about the band -- Art).

Okay -- what happened with The Masquerade?

The way festivals are run, they must keep everything on a tight schedule. The stage manager, who's job it is to make sure everyone is on and off on time was doing her job properly. The P.A. people, who are supposed to give us our two-minute warning for set times, failed to do that. Whatever vocal cues they put through the monitors, it didn't come through at any volume that we could hear. We were completely unaware of our set time running low, but we had rehearsed a 45 minute set, and were on our last song at the time I'm told we were told to stop. We were still one minute-and-a-half from finishing the last song at that point.

Instead of letting us go for the extra minute-and-a-half, their response was to slowly cut off our power one-by-one, and that's why you saw Dan scurrying around the stage looking for a mic with power going to it (Indeed, at the end of the set Lord was floating from mic to mic, and ulitmately the drummer was forced to finish the song by himself as the stage crew started unplugging equipment -- Art).

What about the equipment confiscation?

During the show a couple of mics got knocked over and a mic stand was slightly bent, and the ball that covers the sound filament on a mic got dented. They thought that we were being vindicitive and "angry rockers" or something. So they said, "You owe us all this money to replace this gear or we're going to hold your equipment as ransom!" They sensed we weren't too hip on that idea, so they called the security from the first floor (an off-duty Atlanta police officer). Two stage hands were aggressively guarding the load-out area, and I said, "This is going to be a bad situation!" I didn't even know what was going on until all the bad feelings were being thrown around. So I said, "If we caused this damage, we'll pay for it! That's fine! It's only right." The police were sent away, and they said, "You owe us so much money for these repairs, and as soon as you pay us that you can go, but if you don't have the money we're going to keep enough of your stuff to make up for it." We went to the merchandise fund and found the cash we needed to pay them.

Then there was another conflict. We we said, "If we're going to pay for this stuff, why don't you give us the stand and the mic covers so we can use them in our practice place?" Then the Atlantis people got upset and said, "No, that's our gear!" We said, "Look, we're not going to give you this money and leave the broken gear. We're buying this from you. That's the deal." So then they brought in the head of the festival and worked that out, and finally we took our broken mic stand, broken mic covers, and our gear and left. I doubt we're going to be asked to perform there ever again.

What does the new CD, Full Speed Ahead, sound like?

There aren't any songs that have drastic stylistic differences, but there are some oddball things there I think you would get a kick out of. It's more guitar-oriented, more of a straight-up rock kind of album, but it's got it's changes in there. I'll leave the final verdict up to you. I'd like to get the listeners' opinion because we've been sitting on this thing for months now and listening to it a hundred million times. It's hard for me to give you the most objective opinion. It's on Vegas Records out of California.

Full Speed Ahead is out October 19th. Pain plays an all-ages show at the 513 Club on October 16th.

Visit Pain's web site at www.indieweb.com/pain/