Even If It Kills Me is presented by Manhead Merch.
Once
the tour bus door closed in the summer of 06,
those hazy end of summer days only added.
to our near instant nostalgia for events that were not even a week old.
The first day I was home,
away from the
24-hour cacophony of a touring music festival,
I honestly couldn't wait to get to the quiet of my bedroom.
For the past two and a half months,
if we weren't somewhere with an earshot of a three-story tower of speakers the size of go-karts,
we were wandering the canyons of idling tour buses and tractor trailers.
Even once on the bus,
the generator was always running.
Our lost addiction would not have been possible without it.
It couldn't have been very long before I noticed something odd amongst the silence.
of my bedroom.
It still sounded like I was on the bus,
on the tour.
It felt like my body was vibrating.
And this ringing was more than just my dumb ass never wearing earplugs.
It was this constant reminder of being there,
surfing the screaming edge of the event horizon of fame,
just long enough for it to leave its mark forever.
It's been almost 20 years since the peak of Summer Tour 2006,
but still to this day,
the shimmer of that summer still warbles and rings true for us.
What we had been seeing on a scale imperceivable to anyone around it was happening on a scale
10,000-fold.
The scene was ending.
The generation was shifting into its second half.
Generation X was having kids,
and the millennials were dealing with the world falling apart at the plinths.
Individualism was burning across the globe like a wildfire jumping a highway.
It was disconnecting and splintering the pop scene into a million little pieces,
Humpty Dumpty'd forever.
You have to make a lot of decisions.
as a band,
and those decisions have a lot of consequences one way or the other.
How do you write?
Who is recording it?
And are you going to make like a stylistic change slash growth from album to album?
Because those three things can all be confused for being the same thing.
In the end product.
This album was written bigger.
Alright,
a band's progression grows.
It doesn't shrink.
Progression is not shrinkage.
The new album,
there was some slide guitar in there.
There was some keyboards.
There was harmonies.
Some new octaves.
We were trying to kind of do something different with that album.
And have a little bit more depth.
And because we're who we are,
right?
I mean,
we were the original four and then ultimately the five people that made up that band.
All of it felt very organic and natural to us.
But when you take those three different aspects of the process,
what came out,
I feel like the label was just like,
the fuck is this?
It's like they're like,
this isn't you guys.
This isn't any like,
you know,
this isn't what we what we were paying for,
quote unquote.
So have this be the end outcome.
When we turned in the record,
the head of the label hit me up and was like,
are you down to write with people?
And back then it was not acceptable really to write with other people.
And then they started talking about wanting to work with other people to write singles and blah,
blah,
blah.
And I was just like,
oh,
fuck,
here we go.
All right,
here's a little known fact.
Back in the
2000s, collaborating was not cool.
Cool people,
they wrote their own damn songs.
What the label did was they're like,
can we just send you to L.A.,
have you write with someone we think you'll really click with and just see what happens.
To push the sound of the band in a direction that would make sense to everyone,
John stepped out of his comfort zone,
broke his own bullshit self-imposed rule of not collaborating with anyone outside of the band,
and he headed to LA to completely relearn the process of writing songs from someone who was living at Shirley Temple's house?
What?
He was squatting in Shirley Temple's mansion for his friend who was like a celebrity realtor.
And every day I'd go to Shirley Temple's house and Kevin slowly but surely taught me a completely different way to think about songs.
And this was like a game changer for me because I was a guy who would just kill myself to try and get results in a way that was not helpful.
Whereas like this is exactly what I needed.
You know what else John and the rest of the band needed?
They needed some fresh meat,
some untainted young blood to inject into their old vampire veins in order to keep their creative juices flowing and growing.
They needed a man,
and that man's name was Dan.
I watched
The Office from front to back easily four times.
Dan was the final addition to the band,
and it was such an organic thing for him to join.
that it felt as if his spot on stage had already been carved out and reserved years before it actually happened.
You know how some people,
if the marriage isn't working well,
they maybe,
well,
let's try to have another baby.
The album that we had written and recorded was different,
and we needed to change our live sound to kind of match that.
We wanted to make a go of it because it was like our last chance,
you know?
I watched them.
demonstrate the blueprint of you know um being a little different in in in particularly in forms of um in the in like being in a band um it wasn't something a lot of people did and it was kind of like a whoa what if people did that so i watched them do that when
i was impressionable you know and young and that i i obviously was like i want to do it too and then you know you go a few years later and i'm up
graduated from high school and college basically aged and it's like they're looking for someone and they're like what are we gonna go audition strangers let's just see if dan can do it dan and pete and myself all
grew up on the same road we were all kind of out in the country here dan and i went to the same high school you know he was a music guy and writing songs playing in bands
But like,
I've known Dan since I was a little kid.
I mean,
he was like a natural fit.
He grew up in our neighborhood.
He was,
he's an awesome guitarist.
He's an awesome singer.
He can play keys.
So then I ended up calling him and asking him,
Hey,
you know,
would you ever want to like come on tour with us?
I'm in college.
It sucks.
And I'm like ready to bounce.
And they're like,
yo,
you could just come on the road with us if you want,
whatever.
Come help us finish the record and come on the road with us.
And he basically was just like.
Well,
I guess.
I mean,
I guess I'll try it.
And I was like,
all right,
so I basically got to go for it or not.
I went for that.
He walked away from school to come do it.
So it's like he gave up just as much as any of us did.
We went back to record like two or three more songs.
And that's sort of where I jumped in and was playing a few parts in the studio.
I wasn't there for that whole album.
He was already,
you know.
super tight with us as it was and it just was seemed like a natural thing to have him in and i was stoked you know i just thought it would be great if it couldn't have been dan i don't know that we would have done it that we would have tried to get somebody else it had to be a homie it had to be somebody who was like a brother mac
and i were probably the last to know dan and it's funny because once he joined the band and i got to know him i couldn't imagine life without him but yeah we were just like
immediate friends and it worked out so well we were just happy that he wanted to come along for the ride dan was locked in folded in and ready to rock in the usa yeah i sort of got rushed in so
that we could go tour and i could support them with like some of the added instruments and stuff like that that they were putting on it you know they were wanting a little more keys and
those additional guitar parts.
After a certain number of years,
like the camps had formed,
Dan made us all forget about that.
And he was the unifier between the two camps.
And everything was a lot lighter and easier with him around because of that.
I was very okay with Dan joining because Dan took all of the singing.
So now
I could just play.
Without the burden of a mic stand in front of him,
Mac had the freedom of just playing.
I imagine it's close to what Johnny Greenwood feels when he's plinking away on a harmonium hooked up to a wah-wah pedal while the rest of Radiohead is picking up the slack.
Bringing in somebody you've known for,
you know,
a decade plus just makes it easier.
And they're like excited again,
you know,
where the rest of us were all kind of like,
here it is.
It's tour.
All right.
He was very much more into it,
which was inspiring for us.
Is Dan in the band?
Dan's in the band.
Yeah,
we're good.
Everybody's good.
All right.
Back to work,
everybody.
Time to hit the road again.
Where we were at in 2006 with the spring tour.
And then being in the studio doing the record and then being on the summer tour,
it just was so good.
A lot of what I had heard about was like
Glory Days stories.
However,
you'd still have great shows,
just not shows where there's kids to the back wall,
you know,
and screaming at the top of their lungs.
Not big crowds,
smaller venues,
just kind of.
going along and doing the thing.
We were back to our previous life of in the van,
you know,
playing small shows.
You know,
we had some good one-off shows here and there.
We would still have,
like,
amazing times.
I've never had any college,
like,
fraternity thing,
but it was,
like,
fraternal for sure.
Every day when we see someone driving,
they're going to work,
and we're just,
like,
fucking around.
and trying to get to the next spot on time.
I love that part of it.
We hit the U.S.
at least twice.
It just wasn't going well.
The writing was kind of on the wall,
like the record was getting held up.
Our bills were adding up.
We were just working to pay off,
like to pay for our van and to pay for the trailer and to pay for our studio rent.
We were basically working and practicing and just to save up enough money to go on tour.
And it was just the same thing over and over again.
At that point,
it kind of sets in that ever since we came off that summer tour,
we haven't had very much go in our favor.
It went flat.
Where the music industry was at that point was like this weird tipping point between the end of CDs,
the end of all that stuff,
and the beginning of the whole social media revolution.
We were stuck.
Morale was not very high during those tours.
We weren't making any headway.
We were just like...
treading water just hoping to like make it long enough for the record to come out for the rest of 2006 the band pinballed around the u.s on old familiar tours with loose crowds and crowded merch totes they
were powerlessly waiting for the record label to set a release date so fall turned to winter winter into spring spring turned up a release date
And a promising U.S.
tour with a headliner that could sell out shows.
Okay.
All right,
all right.
Okay,
now we're talking.
The track is back and we are on it.
Let's get this shit.
We were going out that summer with a bigger band.
A significantly bigger band.
So we're excited for this.
We're locked in and we're ready to go out.
And.
Next thing we know,
that band says,
actually,
never mind.
They decide to cancel their tour.
And then they hitch on with an even bigger band.
And they go out as support for this bigger band.
And then we have nothing.
Sorry,
guys.
Good luck.
We're going out with a bigger band.
So we are now like...
okay that's great as a consolation prize our booking agent and our manager worked to book this other tour for us it was a headlining tour for us and there was another band gonna go with us and
it was a small tour that went down the east coast we're not a headlining band we're not even an opening band like we're having hard enough time being support headliners you
What?
What the hell is going on?
Wait a minute.
They weren't ready to headline.
Actually,
I mean,
they have been doing this band thing for like six years at this point.
You know,
everybody knows you got to put in your dues or in your lumps,
whatever.
But by year six,
with thousands of miles of touring the US and Canada behind them,
you would think that the band would have at least built up a small fan base and a little bit of confidence to go out on their own as headliners.
But it didn't seem like it.
Sure as hell didn't feel like it.
Nobody really wanted to talk about it,
but nobody really wanted to do it either.
I think everybody had kind of been thinking,
you know,
we're getting older.
What if we didn't keep playing?
What are we going to do?
It was hard to get any sort of,
you know,
of the juice back that makes you be like,
yes,
this is great.
I'm going to put on a great show tonight.
I'm going to write a great song when I get home from this tour.
It was very hard maintaining any sort of hope.
by the end that things were going to change.
I think it was a matter of time where one of us was going to break and one of us was going to be like,
guys,
and then the rest of us were going to fucking fold.
And that's exactly what happened.
At that point,
we were all hurting from what we were experiencing touring.
Basically,
I made this decision that I was like,
I got to tell them I wanted to go back to school and get that out of the way and get things going for me.
in another way first in first out like salindari it was logical that dan was the one to say the quiet part loud he was the closest to quote normal life having just joined he knew he had to start the conversation so he just reached out to john john's just like yo just uh
come pick me up let's go for a drive and we'll talk about it okay he was getting my feeling for it and then he said something like let's get all the guys together because honestly i think
Everybody might have this feeling to a degree.
We were facing the decision whether or not to continue.
And,
you know,
we're old.
We don't have any money.
We live with our parents and we're not having a lot of luck.
It got thrown out quick what my intentions were.
And then the whole,
you know,
kind of group debate started of whether or not everyone else wanted.
to quit do we keep doing this or do we try to keep doing this or is that is that it or do we even want to try to keep doing this i was like dan's leaving the the new delight that i find in this band is leaving i don't know if i can do this like
where's the joy gonna be coming from i think it was probably somewhat of a mixed bag of of relief in some ways we knew
what we were up against at that point and you know we tried to rally the only person who was like fully still on board was pete and i was like are you kidding me i was finally starting to be like i think i want to do this and
uh we decided that maybe we were gonna go do something else we were gonna stop it's time let's go do our thing that's it like the band's over there was no arguing
No one was pissed at anyone.
I was very nervous about that.
I'm like,
here we go.
Someone's going to be like,
I knew we shouldn't have fucking called you.
Okay,
it's booked.
The tour is booked.
We can't just bail on the whole tour.
We have to at least put in a good faith effort to see it through.
We had a conversation.
We called our manager.
We're like,
this is it.
We'll do this tour,
but we're not doing the whole thing.
Cancel the last second half of the tour.
Whether or not we're going to be a band anymore,
I'm not trying to burn bridges on the way out.
You know what I mean?
Like,
I want to be an adult about the whole thing and have everyone feel like we fulfilled all of our obligations.
So if these guys come to us with a tour,
we say we're going to do it,
we're going to fucking do it.
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Wow.
Holy shit.
I can't believe I'm going to say this.
One final tour.
One final route.
One last trip down the east coast right back to that hot sweaty tainty growth named Florida.
Especially if we got some good weed or something and you got something to give them they gonna they gonna they gonna eat it up like fucking grits grits you know what grits are yeah you ever eaten any grit I have never had grits but oh
man let's go to the Waffle House
That's exactly where I'm at.
Let's go to the Wobble House.
Spin the wheel.
Pick a tape.
Pick a show from Florida and they will all sound the same.
He is so ugly he just makes his face and don't make gorilla cookies.
Gorilla cookies.
We got five thousand gorilla cookies.
They're ugly,
man.
They're all game thrill.
Game thrill,
yeah.
Gainesville that's where my brother went
University of Florida go Gators well that sounds exciting wow that's that sounds like a fun time how'd the show go that night it's one of the largest labels oh
yeah that's right nobody was there
Empty crowds,
crowded bars,
all locals,
zero fucks given about what was on stage.
The holes we stopped in,
they were just filler between bad teeth cigarettes.
There were some shows that had people at them,
but there were some shows that didn't have any people at them at all.
There were some shows that got canceled.
We'd show up at venues,
we wouldn't be on their calendar.
There'd be no poster in the window.
Like,
you know,
they'd let us in and we'd set up and play.
But it was for like,
you know,
us,
the other band,
their sound guy,
the bartender.
And some nights that was it.
And some nights they just would say,
no,
let's just not even do it.
And we,
you know,
we'd cancel.
It was a mix.
They weren't all complete flops,
but there was a lot of not a lot.
Tensions were high because we were nearing the end,
you know,
and it was just like.
Everybody was either ready for it to be over and or not wanting it to be over.
From the very beginning,
Ryan was all in.
As the years and the miles dragged on,
the world outside the bubble of touring life had started to turn menacing.
And Ryan felt its unforgiving lack of giving a shit about him more than anyone.
He could not wait any longer.
He wanted his second chance at riding that mechanical bull of the universe,
but this time...
This time there was no getting bucked off too soon.
Nah,
fuck that.
Ryan was acting...
Kind of strange,
like not having fun,
didn't want to do basically anything.
We weren't making money on bigger tours.
So like on smaller tours like this,
like there is no money in my mind.
I'm thinking,
man,
I need to be at home working,
saving up some money to get myself to where I was going for school,
which was Florida.
And I was getting kind of impatient.
There is nothing wrong with knowing when to call it quits.
When you're in over your head,
feel like you're drowning,
it's cool to panic and wave and scream for help and want somebody to lifeguard you on out of there.
If you're in a band with your best buds for years and shit just ain't paying the bills...
It's okay to take an agonizing reappraisal of the whole scene.
You wanna know what isn't okay?
You wanna know what isn't fucking cool?
You wanna know what fucking sucks?
When you quit while quitting.
When you're-
inches from the finish line or when you've stopped running at yard 99 or when you only have a few days left on your final tour as a band and you just fucking
quit shit sticks with ryan had already kind of confided in me that he was like
Yo,
I don't know if I can finish this tour.
I might bail.
Would that be fucked up?
And,
you know,
Ryan's like,
I'm already hurting and I'm already over this.
Who are we doing this for?
It's obviously not for us because like it's costing us.
And then we get to Florida.
We are staying at Dan's now wife's family's house in Orlando.
One of Ryan's good friends lives in Orlando.
One of my best friends lived in Orlando at the time,
and there was a couple friends of ours from home there that weekend and hanging out,
visiting.
And
I saw that as an opportunity to either try to put some leverage on it or just peace out.
We had gone out to eat and we had come back and Ryan sort of came in and was like,
yo,
I want to talk to you guys out front of the house.
And so we all went out to the front.
I pulled everybody out.
I told him,
I'm like,
all right,
I'm out of here.
Two buddies are up,
you know,
up the street and they're,
they're heading home tomorrow.
They're driving back to New York and
I'm, I'm hitching a ride.
I'm heading back.
He said he was leaving.
Like,
well,
Ryan,
we've only got like a couple more days left.
I thought maybe they would just be like,
yeah,
it's time.
And that is not how it went at all.
He's like,
no,
I can't do it anymore.
The other guys took it a little harder.
I don't really remember Pete getting to like.
heated about it but i know like the other guys definitely were like dude abandoned ship we'd probably walk it back but the initial was fuck you forever oh you don't want to be in this anymore and this is how you want to do it be my fucking guest he's succumbing to the noise and
it pissed me off this whole time that dude was the one guy who was always in and always wanted to do the thing and now he was like leaving us at the end
When we had maybe five or six shows left total.
This is not a good idea.
It did not go well.
They did not agree that it was time to stop and they were mad.
And
I had already just given my,
I'm heading back and I wasn't backing down.
They were like,
what the fuck?
And I was like,
well,
why the fuck are we here?
And you know,
like we're just back and forth and I'm not backing down and they're not backing down.
I thought other members were going to be relieved,
you know,
and maybe we could just all go.
But it just it didn't go that way.
It didn't go that way at all.
That was the sort of general attitude of like,
I can't believe,
you know,
he's not going to he's not going to finish this out with us all that we've done all this.
And now he's going to be like,
oh,
I'm going to I'm going to go and and like go home early.
My friend is picking me up by.
They said,
all right,
peace out.
They said,
see you later.
And I said,
all right,
see ya.
And they went in the house.
Then I went and got in the van and I sat in the van and I called my friend.
I thought,
you know,
I'm just going to call him up and be like,
yo,
okay,
come get me.
Nope,
asleep.
So
I sat awake in the front seat of the van all night long calling and calling and calling until the sun rises.
I didn't sleep that night and I'm kind of dozing off and I'm not.
And all of a sudden he calls,
Hey,
what's up?
What's going on?
I'm like,
you got to come get me.
I'm at the house where we're staying.
You got to come get me.
He's like,
all right,
dude,
I'll be right there.
So he comes down and he grabbed his bag and his friend came and picked him up.
And that was it.
He was gone.
So we were like,
okay,
well,
Ryan's gone.
Alrighty.
I guess that's that mattress man.
Ryan left.
Oh,
and it was in Florida?
Fuck that.
Nothing good ever happens in Florida.
Nothing good ever happens in Florida on tour either.
Just the fact that Ryan left on tour in Florida just proves that point.
We immediately addressed how I would fill in that hole.
Which was essentially I'd be stepping in a second guitar,
not like sort of alternative instruments.
So all of a sudden we're back down to two guitars or maybe just one guitar and a bunch of keys happening.
Regardless,
it opened us up a lot to where it kind of changed the perspective of the music.
And I was like,
in another life,
I could get down with this and just keep doing this,
you know.
But we were too far down at that point.
It was just interesting,
right,
to hear.
those songs with a new restructuring,
right?
You know,
Dan started playing some different parts.
Um,
he had to play more guitar than keys to cover for it.
Um,
and so it,
it,
you know,
even though it was essentially a death rattle,
like at the time when we were,
when we were playing those last few shows,
I think we were all kind of coming away being like,
this is kind of interesting,
like hearing it,
uh,
in this new way.
Less than a week later.
John,
Dan,
Mac,
and Pete were back home.
Mac sent me a text message and he said,
your amp's at the coffee shop.
Come get it.
And I just said,
okay.
I heard through the grapevine that there was going to be a farewell show at the coffee shop where we had had so much of the band had happened at that place.
I remember it was just like,
are we going to call Ryan?
Are we just going to play it like it's another show?
that we just finished i was so offended you couldn't have convinced me to have him play they had the show um i wasn't there i was bartending we played a local show without him that's how that's how we do you dirty but i hadn't talked to anybody uh
they didn't say hey come play the show but i also didn't say hey can i come play the show we were a four piece instead of a five piece and i remember that was sort of like
Oh,
you know,
in the hometown.
I mean,
I don't blame them.
It was such a huge part of our lives.
We had done this for so long and,
you know,
I just fucking chucked it aside.
These are my brothers.
And we had been through so much over these years.
Like every single day
I saw these guys for years and we had built this thing and gone through with it as far as we had.
And I didn't see it out.
Like the fucking very end of it.
And I just shit it out.
And I just,
I just walked away from it.
With how it all went down.
I wouldn't expect
Ryan to expect to be asked to come to it.
You know,
two weeks after it was like a fresh wound still.
Ryan will always talk about it whenever we catch up.
And he's like,
oh,
it's one of my biggest regrets.
You know,
this says it that flat out.
Knowing what I know now,
leaving the band would be like one of the biggest mistakes
I have for my own self.
And one of the biggest mistakes I ever made,
probably second only to starting smoking cigarettes as a young person,
which was fucking bad.
But like this just
I can't think of anything else that I regret as much as I do leaving.
At the moment,
I felt like I'm doing this.
This is the right thing to do.
But man,
I regret it.
And I regretted it right away.
I left the band.
And it's like,
fuck,
if I could have just fucking stuck it out,
I would have finished with my brothers.
For him,
it's more like
I could see it.
It's like there's this really big,
beautiful picture of this experience.
And at the end,
there's this little like,
yeah,
maybe I would have wanted to do that different.
But he didn't burn any bridges.
He didn't,
you know,
it's not anything seriously fucked up.
If you go right back to the beginning of the story,
he.
And Pete,
we were the ones riding our bikes on the road together.
So,
you know,
we're,
we go way back.
But luckily for me,
they are my brothers.
And little by little,
we were all friends again.
And then even more lucky for me,
two years later,
we had a reunion show.
And it was at the coffee shop.
And it was all of us.
Well,
we're waiting,
said the audience.
Did they make it,
or what?
Well,
no,
I mean,
they didn't achieve those massive album sales and those sold-out shows that they were dreaming of,
but,
I mean,
it's all relative,
you know,
just like space-time,
just like an event horizon.
So the band made it through the event horizon,
through that fame gap.
You know,
they never got stuck on tour.
And it didn't really matter.
You know,
they all made it through and they all made it across all of that shit straight back to reality with all their parts intact.
Alright,
let's wrap this shit up.
The dramatic end of the band's time riding the fame gap of touring in a van was...
It was dramatic.
And it was unexpected.
And when it first happened,
I honestly didn't see it forming the way it did.
But the universe is like that,
ain't it?
It just sneaks up on you and just whacks you right in the sack.
Milk or testicle.
The universe has also been known to sneak up on you and just kiss you right on the damn lips.
Years after the end of the band story,
everyone involved have written their own pretty kick-ass stories of their own.
Pete is a farmer.
Like a real farmer.
Complete with livestock and a sheep dog.
It's not even his family dog.
He needs a car.
Like a van that can seat five.
A house that can handle three girls.
Good luck with all that.
Mac designed a bench.
I mean,
holy shit.
He went to the Rhode Island School of Design and everything.
Fucking dude's building the skyscraper in Times Square now.
He's gone from benches to buildings.
He's got Turkish in-laws.
I mean,
come on.
Dan never stopped learning.
He's like Neo,
downloading new shit into his brain on a yearly cycle.
As of the
2020s, he's coding software somewhere,
which he actually taught himself how to do.
Ryan?
He never stopped playing music.
Honestly,
none of the guys did.
But Ryan managed to find a way back on the road.
This time,
it was with a race team.
It was one of their mechanics,
which honestly is kind of badass.
Oh,
and he quit smoking.
John shifted from being in a band to managing them.
And
I have no clue on which one is less stressful,
to be honest.
And as for me,
your humble narrator,
what have I been doing?
Well,
you're listening to it.
I never stopped attempting to capture that ever-passing moment by filming it or photographing it or writing about it or whatever.
Somewhere in the depths of my mind,
I always knew that I was going to tell this story.
And I'm really glad that I didn't quit on me.
There is a perfectly flawed
27-ish year cycle of the human collective consciousness.
Trends begin to blur,
old as new as old again.
Stories repeat,
reboot,
restart over and over.
The cadence of our creative pulse,
the vibration of life if you will,
7 beats per second by the way,
it never goes away.
We simply shift away from the pulse the more cycles we collect.
We move away from our starting point in all directions at once,
attempting to wrap our arms around the ever-passing moments.
You might as well just try to scoop up a herd of cats.
Even If It Kills Me is a Fang Workshop production.
Written and narrated by me,
Aaron Joy.
Produced by John Lulow and Brendan Walter.
Featuring original music by Alex Dozen.
And original theme song by Matt Gifford.
Please,