On a warm winter day at Bonnerhaus, the Ryan’s Rock Show headquarters in North Hollywood, O’Brother guitarist Johnny Dang speaks of touring with Circa Survive. “[We] were going to play a prank on them the first day of tour [in 2010], but they were too nice…” he laughs. Brother and bassist Anton Dang chimes in and says the pair had planned to speak only in Vietnamese — “We were going to pretend we didn’t speak any English.”
Outside a coffee shop on Wilshire Blvd, Veil of Maya guitarist Marc Okubo remembers stories from the band’s first-ever tour with After The Burial. “[We played a show for] some kids in their parents’ garage that didn’t do any promotion at all…They tried to pay us with some cheeseburgers from McDonalds.”
Hours before the group’s sold out show at House of Blues Sunset, August Burns Red drummer Matt Greiner speaks of growing up on Solid State Records bands.
“My parents didn’t let me listen to anything else,” Greiner laughs in the dim green room of the venue. “They were very particular about me listening to music that had good lyrics and a good message. And since Solid State is a Christian affiliated label, they were very comfortable with that.”
On an early November morning en route to Salt Lake City, Stray From The Path had a run with disaster – a patch of black ice sent the band’s van and trailer swerving off a frozen U.S. highway before the break of dawn. “We flipped and then a semi-truck flipped behind us the other way,” guitarist Tom Williams recalls of the catastrophe. “Our bassist Anthony [Altamura] was sleeping…we thought he was dead for a few seconds.”
Awaiting an order of gourmet sandwiches at a restaurant on the Sunset Strip, Dead Letter Circus guitarist Rob Maric and frontman Kim Benzie speak of mainstream media and its influence on society. “It’s not natural to have violence broadcasted to you from all angles of the world,” Maric says. “[Taking action begins] with your personal relations to people around you and changing yourself.”