The Vandals

In an age where most bands struggle to string more than a couple of releases together, The Vandals are still going strong… almost 30 years after their formation!

Radio personality, label owner and The Vandals founder (and hands down one of the funniest people I’ve spoken to) Joe Escalante had the following to say…

Interview w/ Joe Escalante (Bass)

of The Vandals (USA)

By Cameron Chambers

Joe, we really appreciate your

time today.

Hey, not a problem man.

Where are you calling us from?

I’m in a part of LOA called

Culver City, and it’s known for being the place where movies like Citizen Cane and The Wizard of Oz and… Gone With The

Wind were made. There’s heaps of cool stuff like that and all

those old studios where they made those films are located around here.

If you walk down the street you

may even see some Wizard Of Oz munchkins or maybe a member of

The Three Stooges, ha ha.

How have things been on the

touring front for The Vandals lately?

Well, in 2007 Warren was

playing guitar for Gwen Stefani on the giant whirlwind that was

her tour, so we basically just waited until that was over, but it just

kept going on and on, which was fine for us because we got to watch Warren stock away some money in the bank and have a good time, ha

ha.

We all had other things on though

but now we’re in 2008 and we’ve got shows booked all over the place!

I saw that you’re doing a

a warm up for the Australian tour?

Yeah, every weekend throughout

March we’re doing something and then into April, so it’s just, you

know, we decided to play some shows because most of the time we’re

waiting for Josh to free up some time. We worked out that we

go through this every few years where we’d wait to see if Josh

is free to book shows, but now we just do it! If he can play them…

great! If not, we get Brooks from Bad Religion or Derek

from the Alkaline Trio to fill in.

We’re going to be having Brooks with us on the Australian tour and then we’ll be doing

the Warped Tour throughout August and we also have plenty of

shows throughout July… so there’s a lot going on!

Speaking of, you guys must

tour?

For me, it’s just like, not

only are they great bands and it’s such a fun and perfect Australian

tour to be on, but these are our friends… some of our closest friends

in California! Now a couple of the guys from Sum41 live in Southern

California too. We’ve always been tight with those guys on the road

but now… especially Warren and Stevo just hang out constantly. Derek… well, I just him on TV every

day so I feel like I’m hanging out, ha ha.

With the Pennywise guys,

we were just down there in Mexico for Byron’s wedding so we’re always hanging out. This is going to be such a fun

tour! We share crew and people with the other bands so we couldn’t

be happier!

I’m assuming we’re going

lists?

Yeah, everyone should always send

their requests through. Our singer is actually in charge of our MySpace

and he happens to be in charge of our set list as well, so go directly

to Dave on MySpace!

I don’t know how many records

we’ve released since we were last in Australia, but I know Hollywood

Potato Chip is definitely one of them, so we’ll play a few tunes

off that and then it’s a greatest hits.

A lot of bands use a tour to

recording front for 2008?

Yes! We’ll be releasing a CD

called BBC Sessions And Other Polished Turds and it will be out

no later than June. It’s a collection of songs that we recorded at BBC radio over the years, some stuff off our 7 inches, some tracks

of some compilations and a couple of new songs!

Some songs are covers that we’ve

done over the years… like Alice Cooper’s worst ever song Poison! We figured if someone ever comes to us and says would you

like to be a part of an Alice Cooper tribute record, well, people

will fight over the good songs so we chose the worst one!? Ha ha

There’s a couple of Ramones

covers on there and all we could think of was the worst Ramones

songs, but with this upcoming Ramones tribute album that we’re

a part of they assigned us two really good songs! We all love The

Ramones but at the time we weren’t really serious about anything

so we didn’t care about disrespecting them or not and that makes for

better Vandals material.

We’ll also include a Jimmy

Osmond song. He had a hit in the seventies in England called “Long

Haired Lover From Liverpool”. You’ll want to kick his teeth in when

you hear him sing it, it’s horrendous! But when Warren sings it’s

pretty good!

Is it hard to get everyone

together to write and rehearse, let alone record these days?

Yeah, we don’t have any urgency

to put out a new record so we wanted to put more space between our last

album and the next one. When you release something every couple f years

you end up with twelve records and it becomes this glut of material.

We wanted to take some time and just…yeah, put some space between

things.

These days it’s more of a men’s

club than a band. We just get together and hit the road and hang out,

so we’ll get it happening sometime, ha ha.

You touched on this with the

if and when it feels right”?

Yeah, exactly. Everyone’s on

the same page when it’s time to do something. The record business

is bad anyway, so you’ve got to be careful about what you do and what

you spend and whose money you spend. We don’t release anything new

or develop any new bands on Kung Fu anymore… we’ve scaled

that back since I started on the radio. So it’s more about servicing

the catalogue we have.

I wake up every day and do radio

and I don’t want to develop the next Fall Out Boy. I don’t

have any interest in it and with the current state of business I’d

rather wake up and live off other people’s music.

Winding back the clock to 2004,

to do something like that?

I think that’s what made us

the perfect band to go over there and do it. We weren’t some punk

band that was all “we’re anti the US government and our soldiers”,

because they don’t want or need to hear that… that’s not the right

atmosphere for them. We sing about sandwiches, haircuts and diarrhea

so it’s a good release for them.

Hopefully we were able to provide

them with some music without making a comment on the war either way.

Everyone in the US understands that and the troops weren’t saying

“we’re glad you support the war”, their stance was that while

you’re here your opinion is none of our business and thanks for coming

and making these sacrifices to play for us. So we had plenty of people

in the US saying thanks for supporting the troops.

When we went to Europe it was

completely different though. None of them would think anything other

than “you support murderous US troops”. We got so much of that in

Europe that we’ll never tour on a large scale through Europe again,

which is a shame because they were our biggest market. So thanks guys!

Your decision was met with

punk rock community who claim to be liberal and open minded?

We didn’t get a lot of criticism

internally. Everyone knows in their heart it’s the right thing to

do, but when it came time for certain people to stick up for us… there

was very little of that. We had some trouble… we got pulled out of Fat Mike’s magazine when we were supposed to have a two page spread,

but Mike got some pressure from his European distributors to

remove it, so he did.

That’s his business and that

kind of stuff happens and he felt that he couldn’t release a record

in Europe with us in it, and that was really upsetting. Luckily there

was very little of that.

Most people in the US said what

we did was awesome and wanted to know if they could do it too, or they’d

say things like “I couldn’t do it but you guys are braver than me”.

We got a lot of positive feedback but when everything gets tied back

to Europe it just gets so messy, so our response to that was just to

go right back out there to Afghanistan and say to heck with it.

To further reiterate your point,

country’s soldiers doesn’t mean you are pro-war?

The difference between Iraq and

Afghanistan is that there are more foreign troops over there. It’s

a different kind of war… a war to get the Taliban out of there.

In Iraq they have violated something like 14 UN resolutions but 90%

of the world against the US presence there, however it seems like only

40% of people are against what we’re doing in Afghanistan. No one

gave us any crap for being in Afghanistan because everyone knew that

there’s not much left anyway.

We’ve already lost our European

audience, they’ve just forgotten about us but in the US a lot of people

just thought we were lucky this time around.

The Vandals have been toured

and why?

Ah, let’s see. We usually played

those Warped Tour shows, they were always fun. I think the time

where Warren ended up in the Manly Daily with a big black dot

over his private parts, with the headline “Concert Outrage”.

It’s still framed in my office

at the radio station! It was just beautiful to see that headline the

next day.

I’m sure you get asked this

at the moment?

Ah, well, the new young kids…

that used to be my big thing. That would be all I would listen to and

pay attention to. Now I’m not developing new bands for Kung Fu

so I’m getting exposed to a different kind of punk rock, like some

of the bands that I play on my show. Be Your Own Pet are great,

and some other stuff like Vampire Weekend. They’re not too

punk rock but that’s the kind of stuff I’m playing on the show and

it’s a mainstream indie thing, so it’s not a specialty show. There’s

already a punk show on my station so I leave that stuff to them.

I’m more of a dinosaur in the

punk rock world but very hip in the indie world now, ha ha. It happened

to be by virtue so it’s kind of the opposite of the old times. Actually… The Skybombers from Australia are another band we play! We’ve

been playing them for a couple of weeks and they would have to be one

of the only Australian indie rock bands that have made it onto our playlist.

Something I was curious about,

how did the remix record with Japanese musician DJ Shingo come about?

He was a guy that kept remixing

our material so we wanted a way for him to do it for free. That was

we could reward him with a piece of plastic and make some CD’s and

do something special for a friend.

As a band and as an individual

most rewarding for you personally?

You know, just to be able to still

be in the game and to be offered tours like this Australian tour. We

have a really good agent, Stormy Sheppard who takes really good care of us. We’re still relevant and it’s

amazing that someone would stick us on a plane to Australia!

I think just getting from that

gap of being an old school, almost forgotten band to somehow getting

onto the Warped main stage and staying there and we’re there

again this year. I’m most proud of that! Being able to outlast all

the things that came along with the music… and without even making

a serious go of making it into a career, but still being there with

people that are.

Pennywise and Sum41

devoted their careers to punk so we’re just happy to hang out and

share a stage with them.

That’s all we’ve got time

for Joe, is there anything else you’d like to say?

Stand up paddle boarding! That’s

what I do here all the time! I’m bringing my board and hitting some

waves.

Also, listen to my show! It’s

6am – 10am Pacific Standard Time and it can be found at www.indie1031.com. Believe it or not, David Lynch

is my weatherman.

Are you serious? That’s incredible.

Yeah man… we have a lot of surprises.

I’ll spread the word mate.

Awesome, focus on that!

Thanks for your time mate!

Make sure you check out: www.vandals.com orwww.myspace.com/thevandals