It’s pretty cool, but we had to come home a little early. The tour itself was awesome and we really enjoyed touring with Lewd Acts and Trash Talk. They’re all awesome guys. I think we’re going to be doing a tour again in March or April with Lewd Acts to support a split 7 inch we’re doing.

What happened was, when we were in St. Louis Trash Talk ran into a little trouble. They basically didn’t have a van to finish the tour with. We were going to try to figure out a way for them to finish the tour but every option we came up with didn’t work out. So they ended up being stranded in St. Louis. We decided that we were going to finish the rest of the tour. So we played two more dates and then Lewd Acts… something went haywire with their engine and their van wasn’t drivable at all. We were like, “well we’ll still finish the tour” but when I talked to the guy who booked the tour some of the promoters were saying that since both Trash Talk and Lewd Acts couldn’t make it that they weren’t going to do the show. At that point we had suffered through so many long drives the last few days and our money situation was really low. So when we were in Denver we had the decision to make… we know we have enough money to make it home to Prescott or we can take the chance knowing that a couple of these shows aren’t going to happen and try to make it up to the Northwest. When we started looking at it, it just didn’t work out at all.

So we decided it was in our best interest to come home and that way we’re not totally screwed in Seattle.

Umm the one story of triumph, that is unbelievable, I will share…. I don’t remember exactly where we were. It was towards the end of the tour. Dustin and Pat decided that they wanted to try to sleep in a Wal-Mart overnight because we didn’t have a replacement gig. Addison, Lance and I slept in the van… actually Lance and I just stood outside of Wal-Mart the whole time and watched this happen. Basically Dustin and pat found an aisle and hid themselves behind these comforters and slept for like an hour. But the way they re-packed the comforters to hide themselves wasn’t how Wal-Mart normally displays them. So this woman came over to fix them, and she pulled one out and saw Dustin’s head and was like, “What the fuck?!? You can’t sleep in here!” Dustin is dead asleep and just pulled the comforter back and said, “Yes I can”. Then he realized where he was and was like, “holy fuck I’m sleeping in Walmart right now”. The woman, after she saw him, immediately ran to go get security or something. Pat was asleep on the other side of the aisle and when he heard the woman run away he ran out of the store. Dustin did the same thing, but Dustin went to the back and Pat went to the front but they both managed to get out of there with nobody saying anything to them. You could see the aisle that they were sleeping in from the outside front door, so Lance and I watched the whole thing. Then like twenty security guards or Walmart employees were looking for them.

Yea, we had a good laugh about it. We just pulled into the next stores parking lot and slept there and went to Cici’s and had pizza all day. (laughs)

Uh, yea there’s a lot of truth to that. Not laser sights but… I had a friend of Addison’s named Freddy work on one of my guitars and he decided he wanted to put a scope on it. It was awesome but I ended up smashing it in Richmond, Virginia. We’ve been really into smashing our guitars lately and it’s probably not something that’s going to stop anytime soon. I just hope I don’t get carried away and smash my Les Paul or something.

Exactly.

Nothing. We all are absolutely out of our minds all the time. We just fuck with each other constantly… I guess that’s not really staying sane but none of us do actually stay sane when we go on tour for that long. Sleeping in Wal-Mart is obviously not a good idea but at the time it seemed like the perfect idea. So, there’s nothing that we do to stay sane we just embrace feeling completely out of it all the time and embrace being idiots.

Yea, I mean like the van… thankfully a lot of times we have places to stay but sometimes we don’t…the van is usually a mess and I’m kind of a neat freak so when I’m home where I live is very kept up and stuff, but when you’re in the van you’re with 4 or 5 other people and you can’t let that kind of stuff get to you. You just have to go with it and not worry. Every once in a while, every couple weeks, one of us will snap and that will be it... it will just be over after that and it’s not a big deal.

Never dude. This is what I hope I’m going to be able to do for the rest of my life. At this point it’s kind of hard. All of us have other jobs and we work full time when we’re not on tour. And when we’re on tour we barely make enough to keep the band going. But at the same time I can’t imagine doing anything else that would make me happier. Granted we’re all suffering quite a bit, but at the same time there’s nothing I would rather be doing than sitting in a van suffering with 5 of my best friends.

Yes and no. You can really tell, especially when you go on tour, the kids that have just started listening to aggressive music in the past year or something. They’ll have a Black Flag shirt because they saw it at Hot Topic or they saw somebody from Fall Out Boy wearing it on MTV. They don’t actually know who that band is… so there’s been a lot of shows where we’ll play a Misfits cover or a Black Flag cover and there’s all these kids with Misfits shirts and Black Flag shirts and they look at us and they don’t know these songs. And it’s like, “that’s a song by the band on your t-shirt.” (laughs)

It’s fine… I think it’s awesome that it’s a little more accepted these days and more kids are getting into it, but I also don’t like the idea that these kids are wearing those shirts because they think it’s cool. Everyone gets into a band at some point, and you can’t expect them to be totally hip with all these things…but at the same time if they’re going to wear a shirt of the Misfits, they should probably know who the Misfits are and listen to the Misfits.

So it’s definitely becomes really weird but at the same time I think there are that group of kids who are really sick of what hard music has become. I was just watching a show on MTV and after the show Silverstein was on this little clip… Life In Pictures played with Silverstein at Modified like 2 years ago. It’s just insane to me that that type of music is… I guess acceptable is the right word to use now. I never in a million years would have thought that.

Yea, exactly. It’s safe. There’s just a huge audience now, and a lot of the younger, newer kids wear this stuff even though they don’t know anything about it. It’ just hard for me to deal with that I guess. It’s weird and it’s not weird…

We’re pretty well accepted when it’s a lot of smaller shows but we just played with Evergreen Terrace and Casey Jones right before we left and those guys are awesome friends of ours and that’s why we played the show. But there were so many kids there who weren’t into us… and that’s because they like bands like Evergreen Terrace and Casey Jones. They don’t like bands like the Misfits and Black Flag.

I hope so badly that that is what we’re doing, and I hope that by seeing us… if they think we’re a cool band they would think, “well Hour of the Wolf likes these bands maybe these bands are cool because they sound this certain way”. I think that’s a huge thing that kids don’t do anymore is they don’t look back to how these bands got this sound. If you think about Poison The Well’s “Opposite of December”… that’s a metalcore record and that’s what those bands are trying to sound like. I like that record but I don’t like how these new bands are trying to duplicate what Poison The Well did so many years ago.

Touring. That’s the bottom line. People think that we work really hard or that we have hook ups or whatever. But in all honesty… by the end of this next tour we’ll have played over 150 shows in the year 2007. For a small independent band of our size, booking all of our own tours, and getting on a couple of really decent tours. That’s us working hard. It’s not because people are giving us hand outs or whatever. That’s the only way. Especially now, there are so many bands out there. A lot of them are really good. A lot are really bad. And the only way to set yourself apart is to go out there and tour and show people, “this is why we’re a good band”. October 14th we’re going on another 35 day tour and then we’ll be home for the rest of the year to work on the split 7 inch with Lewd Acts. Where Eagles Dare toured quite a bit and they got pretty moderately sized. Had they had the right support behind them they could have gotten even bigger. They’re one of the only other Arizona bands that I can think of that toured. Job For a Cowboy, whether you’re a fan of their music or not, they’re huge now because they tour all the time. I think it’s sick when any band believes in themselves enough that they’re going to take it out on the road. I think a lot of people maybe don’t believe in themselves or what their band is capable of, or they’re just not really trying. They just expect things to happen and that’s not how it works at all.

Yes. It’s definitely happening but the details are not as solidified as I would like them to be. Hopefully this weekend our whole band is going to be able to sit down with Dan and talk to him about what he wants to do. We’re really excited because it’s going to be the first vinyl that we’re going to have out. Which is awesome because we’ve all wanted to put out vinyl for this band since day 1 but we just haven’t had the ability to.

The deal with Think Fast is, they only wanted to do a CD because they weren’t sure how we were going to do. And to put out vinyl is a pretty big investment. So we finally convinced them to do vinyl but it’s going to be the split with Lewd Acts. Apart from them, nobody really wants to do vinyl anymore… very few people are willing to take the risk. Because unless you sell every copy of the record you put out you’re not even going to break even. Thankfully is totally willing to take the risk and he supports us 100% and that’s awesome. We really appreciate him and we’re definitely siked about it. We’ve done so well with Think Fast that they’re willing to put vinyl out for us too, which we’re also really excited about. So probably in like early 2008 we’ll have two or three vinyl releases.

That’s what Moshington and Rebuild are putting out is Power of The Wolf on vinyl. It’s going to be one sided and have silk screen art on the other side. We’re going to redo some of the artwork but not all of it, keep the same cover but redo the rest. Waste Makes Waste… Dan has talked about being interested in that too depending on how Power of the Wolf goes.

Basically, it’s just a design… I guess you could call it a design company that Lance (our singer) and I have. We do t-shirt designs, record designs, CD designs, poster designs. It just came about because Lance is such an insane artist and with Hour of the Wolf we always wanted to do our own artwork. Lance has the ability to put it to paper but we needed somebody who could bring it into the digital realm, and that’s what I’m going to school for. So it made sense for us to team up and do it together. So when we started touring with Hour of the Wolf people would ask us, “Who did your t-shirt designs?” So we didn’t think anything of it at first and people started emailing us pretty frequently about doing stuff for their bands and it just kind of snowballed.

Let’s see… well right now we’re finishing up a bunch of new stuff for Hour of the Wolf. We’re also doing a shirt for a band from Phoenix called the Fair and Debonair. And if everything goes according to plan we’re going to be doing a few shirt designs for As I Lay Dying.

Yea, it’s kind of in the air right now. They definitely want us to do it but it’s just a matter of can we get all this other stuff done before we leave on tour again. If we can’t, it will just go on the back burner until we get back home. But the new Hour Of The Wolf stuff is definitely priority right now.

Oh absolutely! We were in Durango, Colorado at Dustin’s parents house. They have a giant teepee outside. This was a Where Eagles Dare/ Life in Pictures tour years ago. So we got down to the creek and somebody had said, “Pat, can I pee on your leg?” just jokingly. Pat is pretty insane sometimes so he was like, “yea, that’s fine”. And then it turned into “can I pee on your leg too?” I don’t think that I personally peed on him but I was standing right there and it was the worst smell I’ve ever smelled. People were gagging. It was ridiculous. (laughs)

Everybody from both bands including roadies were just standing right there watching it and it was just the most terrible thing I’ve ever smelled. It’s one of those things that you’ll never forget, y’know what I mean?

Definitely not. It’s funny, we played what was going to be our last show in Phoenix, and then Where Eagles Dare asked us to play their last show and because we were like the Arizona team bands for years. We toured with them so of course we were going to do it. We never really planned on playing that second show, it just kind of happened. We never played a last show in Prescott. So if we ever do play another show it will only be one more time and it will only be in Prescott. But to be honest, Hour of the Wolf is so busy and it’s our priority. Caleb has a band in Tucson called The Swim and he’s been putting so much effort and time into that because they’re getting ready to tour and stuff. None of our schedules allow us to practice for a week and then play a show. So I would say most likely… no.

Last words… I will say that we are doing that full U.S. tour in October/November; we’re playing Gainesville Fest, so if anybody can come out to that. It’s a big trip but it’s going to be fun. The split record with Lewd Acts will be out in March on Think Fast records. That’s it man… thanks for doing this interview. I know that you’re doing it for the Arizona Hardcore board and I think it’s awesome that we finally have something that everyone in AZ can get on and discuss stuff.