Interview: HORSE the band w/ Erik Engstrom, 29 March 2008 @ home club

The legendary Earth tour, why American bands stink, etc

What is a band's worst nightmare while touring? Finding out their gear had gone missing probably ranks #1. HORSE the band keyboard wizard Erik Engstrom encountered a similar situation: his Korg MS2000 -HTB's most prominent instrument- was lost in transition en route from Beijing to Singapore.

"The airline called me [about the incident] and I was like 'AUUUUUGHH!' Everything else made it through but my keyboard. I don't know when I'll be able to get it back, if ever. Guess I'll have to use somebody else's keyboard now." Erik recalls another encounter while the promoter paces anxiously behind, on the phone with an airline crew. "When we first toured the UK, I plugged in my keyboard and it smoked and died. So I had to use a Casio, like a little toy keyboard. But it'll be okay," he shrugs. "I don't think that many people will even notice the difference..."

The incendiary LA experimental metalcore quintet certainly didn't anticipate this, but neither were they sweating buckets. As it appears, self-managing a 3-month tour in 2002 has given HORSE the band enough confidence to embark on what seems to be an overly-ambitious project to most: a 45-country 'Earth tour' - 100% self-booked, 100% self-financed. One bold leap for DIY, one big slap in the face of commercialism. Needless to say, this has been an interesting conversation.

How's the Earth tour kicking off so far?

Erik: It's been awesome. We were in China for five days and that was crazy. But China's weird though. [Maybe because] we were the first heavy band to play most of the cities there, nobody knew what to do. They just stood there, like this [crosses arms]. The shows were small and uncomfortable...[laughs] Hong Kong was insane, so was Bangkok. Two shows in Japan were sold out. It's been really, really good.

What was the motivation behind this tour?

It was part boredom, part wanting to do a fun tour again where it's not really 'professional'. We just have to show up, play shows, and meet people. It was also to show american bands that they are pussies. They are so scared to go out of the country, they hate it, and they complain all the time. It's dumb. We love travelling, [but] other american bands are like "oh nooo!" and they don't even like going to Canada, which is really almost the same [as the States].

How different is it playing in Asia and in the States?

Every country has its own character. All the kids here are really fashionable, it's almost like being in America! Then China was like really weird [laughs]. Japan is kind of like how America was 4 or 5 years ago. The scenes here [in Singapore] and in Thailand are really current and up-to-date. EVeryone looks the same as american kids except they are Thai. It's really fun to see how different everyone [in this region] is.

Did you know you'd be able to pull this off right from the beginning?

We knew we could do it. Back in the day, [touring] was way more fun when we didn't have our own booking agent. We did everything ourselves. We knew the flights were going to cost a lot, but if we played enough shows in Europe to get good guarantees, it's likely to earn enough to cover our costs. Most of these Asian tours, we're not really getting paid for. It's more like we pay for the flights ourselves, get the accommodation and food expenses covered...but there's no actual money from playing shows. So we're losing a lot of money right now, but once we get to Europe we'll start earning it back, hopefully. But we're doing better than we thought.

What were the main problems encountered while planning this tour?

We couldn't get a show in Dubai; that was disappointing. We tried really hard but it just didn't work. And getting visas too. We had all these shows booked, then a week before we left, two of the countries emailed us and said "Oh yeah you need a visa, by the way." Everything had to be done in a rush. It was $300 a visa and like $2,000 for each country, so we had to rush to Washington DC from LA and all that shit and we didn't know if we'd even get our passports back in time to leave. On the day we left at 6am, we only got our passports back at 3am. It was really, really crazy. The booking itself took a full three months; it wasn't necessarily hard, just a lot of work. And researching the cheapest flights to every place took FOREVER.

How much exactly did this tour cost you?

It cost like $50,000 for flights for 7 people, and around $10,000 for the visas that we needed. We're definitely losing money in Asia, because bands don't tour here. But I think within 3 more years, a lot of bands will be touring here all the time because the scene is going to grow, and someone will figure out how to do shows really good, really cheap, and be able to pay bands. Actually we wanted to be one of the bands to show that it's possible for a band of our size to come here, and to show other american bands not to be scared. We toured Mexico in our van once and that was awesome, but bands are too scared to go to Mexico. Well, I dunno...we just hope to break even at the end of this tour.

Why do you reckon american bands are afraid to venture outside of the States?

Only 10% of americans have ever left the States, which seems pretty stupid to me. I don't know what's with these american bands. You'd think they're cool, but we've toured with a lot of them, and they hate doing anything. In any city, there's always fun shit to do and they'll sit in the back room with their computer on the internet ALL DAY. Every day. And waste their lives away. They have an opportunity to lead an exciting life, and they purposely choose to lead a boring one. It's stupid. We played in Puerto Rico where we stayed in hotels by the beach, it was so fun. We talked to the other bands who were like, "Oh my god the hotel rooms were so dirty, and we didn't know what to eat, and everything was so gross". Fuck you dude! Go try some new food, talk to people, sleep in a room that's a little bit dirty - you're not going to fucking die. Go figure out what life is like for other people to get a better perspective. Don't be such a pussy and sit on your computer all day. But I guess it's kind of how americans are, because everything is handed to them, clean and pre-packaged. They have some level of standards or something. Any obstacle just makes them go crazy. It's dumb.

Sounds like they should man up.

Yeah. A lot of american bands don't like us because we call them on that. We'll tour with them, go partying, have fun seeing the city, show up late cuz we wanna do other stuff, and they think we're being "unprofessional". That's the reason why we're doing this tour - to have no one getting mad at us, no one telling us what to do. Just playing crazy shows like this. We were so sick of touring with american bands. Touring in the States has become so huge and corporate; it's like working in a day job. You have to be at the venue at 2pm, load in, sit there for 4 hours, do soundcheck, then sit in a room until you play. Then you load out. You're putting in 8-hour days doing practically nothing! You might as well be working in an office. We just want to get out of that scene because it's just fucked. It's so huge that the spirit of punk rock is completely lost in it. Even though we're a metal band, touring the US in a van is supposed to be "punk rock". Do whatever the fuck you want. You're a band. You break the rules - you don't follow them! It's like everyone else just forgot what it's about. They're just concerned about making money, looking good on stage, not offending people...it's so lame. It's so, SO good to be here.

How is your relationship with the label?

We were supposed to film a video for "Murder". We had a treatment for it and everything was set up. Then our label last minute decided not to pay for it when they already agreed to do so. We were like, "What the fuck is going on?" and got them to let go of us cuz we had two albums left. So now we're free and clear. We can get a new label, which is really good because we hated that label. They don't understand our scene at all. Hopefully, we'll sign to Equal Vision or Epitaph or something.

Is it tempting to put your music for free downloading or for a donation, now that you're free agents?

Well...if you're a huge band like Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails, it's really easy to do that because they go on tours and make millions, even on one tour alone. They're super rich and don't have to worry about selling albums. For us, we don't even make any money off of albums anyway. People can download our album for free no matter what, and I don't care if they do. If we put it up for a donation, it would be us thinking that we're bigger than we are. You can either buy it or download it like you're been doing for the last six years. Everybody downloads music for free. It works for bands like them, and it's a good publicity stunt to get attention. But if we did that, no one would even care. It won't even be in the news. It would be more like, [adopts mocking tone] "Oh, I already downloaded it for free anyway, so fuck them!"

I think what's REALLY going to happen is that labels are going to be irrelevant. It's getting easier to record your own music with all the software to make it sound good, and you won't need a big budget to make a record or advertise. Bands just blow up on myspace. It would be ideal if we didn't have to sign to a label, and we can just record something and sell it. For the people who decide to buy it, we'd get maybe $8 for every album, whereas now it's like 80 cents or something. On top of that, we have to pay back however much money the label spent to record our album, so we never see any money. Plus they have all these 'tricks'. Unless you sell 100,000 copies, you're not going to see any money from your album. It sucks, but we're not big enough yet, so we probably need to sign on to a label just so our album will be available and cheap. We have a lot of labels around the world now and that's really cool. In the US, though we have a good handle on what's going on and how to reach out to the kids, we're probably not ready for that yet.

Antarctica is not on your list. Any interest in playing there? (fills him in on Fall Out Boy's failed expedition. He's amused)

[laughs] I would love to! I've been thinking about playing Antarctica, on some science space or something - that would be hilarious! We need to play Africa too, and South America. We're planning to. So if we could beat [Fall Out Boy], that would be awesome, HAHA! I didn't hear about that though. That's crazy. NOFX has been pretty close too, they've played shows at a lot of places we're playing. And there's this thrash band called R.A.M.B.O., they did some really DIY touring. They would just show up in a city, hang out, meet the punks and say "hey could you set up a show for us tonight?" and they'd just play it! They didn't even bring their own instruments. They've definitely done some crazy shit, but they haven't played all seven continents for sure. I have no idea how we'd be able to play Antarctica, but yeah! Let's do it!!

So what happens after you're done with this tour?

We'll have to find a new drummer...then maybe play Antarctica.

Well, this tour definitely sets a record of its own.

I think Guns N Roses toured for two years straight once, also to many places.

But that wasn't DIY was it!

Oh yeah..[laughs]

We leave him to go back in and figure out the new keyboard, a last minute replacement from who-knows-where. Barely halfway through the set, some smartass decided it was 'metal' to smash into Engstrom's kit (thanks ever so much, that's another, what - $1,000?). It immediately fell dead, resulting in the band not being able to continue. However brief, HORSE the band nearly caused the tiny, musty club to collapse with their brutality and frenetic performance. All the raving reviews you heard? It's true. And a frickin' Earth tour? It doesn't get more punk rock than this.

Tearin' up a city near you.

HORSE the band's last album "A Natural Death" was released in 2007. [Myspace]

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