“We teepeed Thrice while they were playing,” says Pelican bassist Bryan Herweg. “We went out and actually wrapped them up in toilet paper.”
Chatting at a park bench on a calm street in Pomona, Herweg and guitarist Trevor de Brauw reminisce of tour pranks during Pelican’s 2008 run with Thrice and Circa Survive. De Brauw remembers testing Circa Survive bassist Nick Beard’s unicycling skills.
In the early 2000s when MonstrO drummer Bevan Davies moved to LA with his band Comes With The Fall, one of the group’s first-ever fans was Alice in Chains mastermind Jerry Cantrell.
“When we had a show…[Cantrell] would come out and do encores with us on our tunes,” says Davies. “Then we would end up going back to our rehearsal space and jamming Alice in Chains songs all night.”
When John Baizley and Peter Adams of Baroness were preteens, they played together in a band called Jab.
“We would build stages from two-by-fours and plywood,” guitarist/vocalist Baizley says. “At that point, we hadn’t even seen shows except for on television.”
When Æges frontman Kemble Walters played in Juliette and the Licks, he did a few studio sessions with Dave Grohl. “[Grohl] draws this picture and gives it to the runner there. ‘I want you to buy all these parts,'” he says imitating Grohl’s voice. “‘Here are the instructions. Make it.'”
Colorfully describing the enormous beer bong Grohl had the runner assemble, Walters says the energy during those recording sessions was crazy. “We destroyed [the studio] because we could. Dave Grohl was there.”
On the loading dock of a security-intense venue during the Anaheim stop of the band’s headlining tour, For Today frontman Mattie Montgomery reminisces of signing with Facedown Records in 2008. “Our drummer David [Morrison] was on the Facedown street team for years,” he commented. Montgomery says the band repeatedly sent Facedown demos of their music, but the label had no interest in signing the group. Then one day the label said “record the album and we’ll give it a listen.”