Drag The River

Jon Snodgrass is a busy man. After finishing the recent Tony Sly tribute tour with The Scorpios, Snograss went back home to practice up with Drag The River a little bit – wipe of the dust and get ready to bring the country-tinged band back across North America.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen anything from Drag The River but that doesn’t mean they haven’t been busy – working on two seven inches and a new album (which he hopes will be released in October sometime), Snodgrass is ready and raring to go again with Drag The River and his slew of other projects. The week before the tour started, Pete Bataillon called him up to catch up on everything in the world of Drag The River – from the new album, to their plans for Fest and the Elmer Fishing Series. 

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Even though the main focus of this is about the new Drag The River projects and tour, I did want to talk to you a little bit about the recent Scorpios tour and the Tony Sly tribute.  At what point did you decide to do the tour?

Well, that’s a hard thing to answer.  I’m not quite sure.  I mean the thing is, to be honest, the idea of the Scorpios thing is that -and no one ever got to find this out because unfortunately Tony passed so soon in to the first wave of it – but we have a list of all these Scorpios friends you know that play music and its pretty impressive and it was just a thing that me and Joey were going to do and it was going to be a revolving cast of characters all the time.  So, now this thing unfortunately happened and we would never want to do anything to perceive us as replacing him you know so we always wanted to keep playing.  We never thought that we would not do Scorpios stuff.  I’m not sure if Joey has ever really explained that in an interview.  But that’s the truth with that.  But then obviously when we lost him we got our wits about ourselves and we were like “let’s go out and play some of his songs.  Let’s do our stuff and then he won’t be there but let’s play his songs”. I can’t say really when the idea came about.

It was amazing tribute.  I got the chance to see you at the Vancouver show.

That was a fun show.  I don’t know what day of the week that was, I mean but that was good.  Canada, in general, was the best.  It was amazing.  I loved it up there.

The smallest show and the largest show were actually my two favorite shows.  There were 30 people in Regina and there was 700 or something in Montreal and they were almost back to back, and they were really close to each other.  I had very similar feelings at both shows.  Just with the playing, and the energy on stage, and the folks.  I don’t really know what that means.  I mean I know that I had a lot of fun, it doesn’t matter how many people are there, it’s just the energy that is coming off the thing.  There was good energy in Regina too is what I’m saying. 

But in Montreal I almost fucking went deaf after we did a couple songs.

From?

The crowd.  It was like the biggest reaction I’ve ever been a part of.  It was at the end of one of Tony’s songs.  It was pretty gnarly.  Like it was so loud I’m like “wow this is the loudest crowd, this is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard”; and then right as I was thinking that, I think it’s almost like everyone else was thinking the same thing and it got everyone in kind of a frenzy and I swear it went about 30% louder.  It was like a jet engine.  It was crazy. (laughs)  It was awesome.  But what I’m saying is, I liked the show in Regina too.  They put us in this room that was way too big, but these 30 people were stoked and it was one of those exempt clubs you know, where the bar closes after the show is done.  It’s just a tax thing.  It’s like a thing for Canada up there. So once we finished the bar would be closed so it was a small show and uh we wanted to make sure the bar did the best they possibly could so us and the whole crowd kept the show going and finished it at the bar.  You know, in front of the bar.  Us drinking and playing in front of the bar and everyone has to get a drink.  It was good.

That’s two polar ends of two awesome shows up in Canada.

I’m curious, will we ever see a release of “Half A Dude” from the Vancouver show?

(Laughs)  Oh man, you must be referring to something I made up on stage.  If anyone has YouTube footage of it and how it went and I think its worthy for some comedy things I could do it.  I’m not going to try and re-write “Half A Dude” though.  I remember it being kinda funny.  But I’m gonna need to hear it again.

I’ve been looking for it online but I can’t find it.

Have you?  I almost feel like, like normally when that kind of thing is happening I normally like ask someone “please film this and put it up, so I can remember this song I’m making up later”.  I feel like I might have done that.

You did.

Shit.  No one gave a shit about “Half A Dude”.  Well maybe it wasn’t that good.  (chuckles) Maybe “Half A Dude” wasn’t that great.

I think we all enjoyed it.

Awesome.  Awesome.

With upcoming tribute album for Tony, you had your hand in with a couple different songs didn’t you?

Yeah I did actually, I was lucky with that.  Tim McIllrath from Rise Against would be the first thing.   They record and practice and make their records out here in Fort Collins down the street from me at The Blasting Room. And he just asked if I was in town and luckily I was and he said he wanted me to sing on “For Fiona” and it was interesting because I always liked that song but never sang with Tony on it when we played.  I mean, I’ve heard him do it a million times.  There was one little harmony that I used to think could be in there but not really in the key that Tony did it in.  But there was a thing I used to kind of hear but I didn’t really have anything for it.  But yeah just went up there and it worked.  It worked out.

Any of the other songs that you did?

Well, we did “International You Day”.  Scorpios did it. It’s listed on the album as Joey Cape and The Scorpios. Then Fat mike asked me to do “On The Outside” with a country band was his actual question to me and I had asked him before I left if I needed to do something but then I had already done those two other things and I’m like OK that’s plenty like I just wanted to be involved you know somehow.  So it was fine.  But then when he asked me to do that I was 3 days into a European tour with Scorpios and I was like you gotta be shittin’ me.  I mean yes I have a country band, they’re in Colorado and I was with them 4 days ago.  Like I could have maybe done this.  So I kind of did a hail mary pass; I asked my friend Chris Shiflett, he has this band called The Dead Peasants too that’s a country band.  So I was trying to think of a friend of mine that had A: a good country band and B: a studio or somewhere where he could pull it off.  And then I’m also realizing, well Chris played on the original “On The Outside” in No Use For A Name cause he was in that band too and that seems perfect and I didn’t know how busy he would be but I lucked out and he did it and sent me the music and I sang the vocals in Berlin and a girl that Tony and I had actually met together that we played shows together with named Nessy sang the female part because she lives in Berlin.  So all the music was done in LA at 606 studios and all the vocals were done in Berlin with me and Nessy. 

That’s a great full circle to have Chris in on that.

There’s a lot of reasons why it’s good yeah.  The fact that Chris for sure and you know and obviously all our connections together I mean there were tours there was an Armchair Martian tour where us and No Use had gone out and I had lost my voice and Tony and Matt Riddle would sing the Armchair Martian songs and Chris, you know he’s our bud and he wanted to be involved and that was the only time Armchair Martian was a four piece.  He played electric guitar too. I gotta tell you it was kind of a good time.  I was sick as a dog but I was having a good time not having to actually having to sing and just play rock and roll….with Chris Shiflett you know he’s a guy I knew that could play guitar real good and then Tony and Matt singing.   It was pretty awesome. It was a good time. There was like three towns that got to see that.  I think Cleveland, I don’t know and wherever we were at the night before Cleveland.  I know I lost my voice in Chicago and that was the last night I was able to actually sing so it was the next couple days and then I got it back.

It’s nice that they backed you up on that.  That’s great.

They’re good dudes.  Yeah that was when the “Making Friends” record came out so this is the full circle to that story.

So with the new Drag The River stuff that’s going on, you’ve got the two 7 inches coming out, the full length, and the tour; and the band hasn’t been super busy as of late.  Are you excited to get back into things with Drag The River?

Yes! Very much.  It’s time.  I mean used to make record or a release at least once a year you know and then I kinda started doing other stuff and so did Chad.  We kind of needed a break from it to be honest with you, I mean we were going hard.  You know, there’re bands that do more and less, but 200 shows a year is a lot to do for a really long time.  For a decade or whatever.  So anyways, but we’re stoked because Chad just got a Les Paul.  Our new record, it’s crazy, it’s like I was listening to it because we were about to sequence it and there’s 10 songs on it; 5 of them are rock songs, I think have maybe 2 or 3 songs that would really be considered country type songs, and then there’s just a couple sad slow ones.  It sounds like Drag The River, but you’ll see.

Where did you end up recording it, was it at the Blasting Room?

Well we did two songs at the Blasting Room.  They’re really busy and its actually hard to get in there to be honest, I mean they’ll make space for us but, you know, we live here so we just try to slip through in cracks whenever we can.  But we did the majority of it with Chris Fogal, he has a studio in Denver called Black in Bluhm; he’s in that band called The Gamits.  He’s good.  He did me and Chad’s solo records too.  Well I recorded my solo record other places as well but he mixed it and I did some stuff there.  Chad did the acoustic guitar and did all his stuff there at Chris’.  But we’ve been doing stuff with Chris for a long time.  He’s been mastering our records for a long time.  He does all Joey’s stuff to.  All that Lagwagon stuff.  He did that whole Lagwagon box set. So he’s legit.  He’s good.  Yeah, we’re really proud of it.  We’re happy.  And like I said, Chad Price just got a Les Paul dude.  (chuckles) We’re gonna play rock and roll.  He hasn’t played electric guitar in a band since he was 20.

It’s been a little while.

It’s been a long time. I’m excited.  Its good.  So yeah that was my whole bit.  It’s been three years since we really put something out so I decided we needed to put three things out in 3 months.

When you got everyone back together did things fall back in place like they were or did you have to work out any kinks or shake off any rust or did things just kind of feel natural when you came back to it?

Yeah I tell ya, I gotta be honest, playing with Drag The River is pretty easy.  You know, it’s pretty comfortable, we all know what we do.  It’s what I do.  That’s my main thing that I do and yeah, it was easy.  But we are about to get this new electric guitar thing going for Chad, and we’re about to start.  We practice on Wednesday and Thursday while we do the last recalls for our record and then we master it at the same time, so we’ll just kind of take our time and play some music then we get in the van and drive to Salt Lake City.  So we don’t think it’s going to be hard.  We think it’s going to work out.

So you obviously do so many projects; you do your solo stuff, Drag The River, and collaborations with other people.  When you’re writing, do you write with specific projects in mind or do you just write what comes to you, do a demo of it, and then apply it to whatever project is coming up next?

Yeah, and sometime the other way around I mean you write something and then you’re like this is that, OK I guess it’s time to do more of that.  Like I have songs for, well I don’t want to give too much away, but there’s another thing that I think will happen and I got those songs and they’re sitting on a shelf.  You know I got four songs for a specific project that I think will be great.

Hopefully we get to hear it soon.

You’ll get to hear it, I don’t think it will be soon.  Not to give too much away but it’s something that I’m hoping will come out next October.  But I’m not going to pilfer those songs, unless we end up not doing this thing that I think that we will do, then I got four badass songs for something else.  But to be honest these songs need to kind of live with a certain project.  But Drag The River, I mean I write a song and it’s obvious if it needs to be a Drag The River song or not to me.

You play both solo shows and Drag the River shows but if you often play Drag The River songs while you’re playing solo – how does the feeling differ between those two?

Well, I mean there are certain songs that people ask for, and I’ll play them…I would prefer to play them with the band you know, but there are some you just give them a different treatment you know.  I try to do better nowadays with Drag The River for sure and be a little more consistent you know.  Like we’d never have set lists, and someone would yell out a song in the crowd we were like “OK” and I’ll play what I know to be the first chord of that song but I don’t really put too much mind into what the tempo  or the feeling of the song is just to keep people on their toes and enjoy it.  And sometimes it works really good and sometimes it’s a train wreck, so in case it’s ever to be a train wreck I try not to do that so much anymore.  When I play by myself, I can play those songs however the fuck I feel like it and I really enjoy it and sometimes it works better than others.  Like the fast Drag The River Songs, sometimes I just try to see how fucking D.R.I. fast I can get those things going.   

When you’re doing the songwriting for Drag The River how much collaboration is there between you and Chad, do you both come up with ideas on your own and bring them to each other, or do you sit down and write together?

We show up to the table with our songs pretty close to being done.  In a lot of ways they could all be done.  At other times someone needs help or someone has suggestions.  We released this thing  that was just demos called “2010 Demons”, which was 10 of 20 songs  that we demo’ed in my garage and about 3 or 4 of those songs are on our next record or on one of these other 7-inches.  When we were working on those we kind of made a rule with each other that we gotta touch each other’s songs in some way.  It didn’t always really happen but you know we had to make some pretty hard decisions on each other’s songs you know without trying to not hurt each others’ feelings but not feel like we were hurting each other’s feelings.  Because otherwise we’ve been doing stuff by ourselves and we wanted to make sure we wanted to make sure that this sounded like Drag The River.  And I think the end result is good because we even went into another direction that we’ve never been before on some of the songs.

I’m looking forward to hear the differing sounds.

You’re gonna hear stuff and you’re like “right on” and if you like Drag The River you’re like “That’s a Drag The River song” and there’s other stuff that’s like “That’s Drag The River doing something I’ve never heard before” hopefully.  It’s not too far out there, but it’s the obvious place where things could possibly go without it being jazz.

(laughs) Someday.

Someday.  10 more years.

Can you talk a little bit about the Elmer Fishing series and where that came from?

That thing actually is…..That’s funny because you were talking about how much we actually work together.  Those are actually were two separate songs that me and Chad did separately within a week of each other because a friend of ours was starting a fishing show, or was trying to start a fishing show, and wanted music for it.  So we both wrote songs for him.  That might have been four years ago, I don’t know.  But Elmer heard those songs and he liked them a lot and he wanted to do his fishing thing so we let him have those.  It’s a cool thing.  There’s only 500 of them and that’s all there will ever be.  But that’s not a representation of what our new record sounds like by any means.

I put a disclaimer on the back of it that says basically what I just told you, “These are songs we wrote on the spot, for our friends who were making a fishing show.  They still fish, they’re still our friends, there was never a show, the songs are OK”.

Something like that.  I’ll take a picture of the quote and send it to you. 

Thank you.

I don’t want to mis-quote myself.

(laughs) I’ll make sure to get it in there correctly.

(laughs) Well you can put the improper quote in there first, and then the clarification comes in later.

You do a lot of different releases with a lot of different people, you make some things available on your own website and the first 7-inch is coming out on Hometown Caravan records August 9th (today).

Yeah they’ve been doing the pre-sale for a bit.  Yeah it’s out there.  We have our copies, I’ve been selling them (laughs) Like, they’re out there.  Whoops. Whatever.

Our stash is pretty much almost gone.  I have two boxes set aside so I can have a little bit on this next tour and then they’ll be gone and I need to save.  Because I have to put a little disclaimer in there saying I won’t mail to Canada.  I’ve mailed to Canada many times and the reason why I don’t do that is because it costs a lot and I feel like a fucking asshole asking for that amount of postage.  So I feel like a dick.  But there are 5 different people, 3 of them are actually in Vancouver, so if they read this, they’ll be stoked.  They already paid for them and then they read my little thing later and I just told them I would hand deliver them at the show so they’ll get them.  I’m not going to make them pay 7 dollars for a 7-inch, just in postage you know what I mean, that’s ridiculous. And the other thing is that they actually get held up in customs a lot and let this be known, that’s the reason, I’m not lazy, I mean I’m going to the post office, like it’s not that big of a deal.  But yeah I don’t want to ask for the money sometimes and sometimes they get held up in customs.  Because I go to the liquor store and I just cut out the cardboard from their old cardboard so they look kinds sketchy, and sometimes when I run out of boxes, they get a Fruit Loops box turned inside out.  My shit doesn’t look very professional when it comes in the mail.  Hopefully it sounds better than it looks.

That’s what really counts right?

Yeah.

With Hometown Caravan being a German label, how does that affect the other sales in the states and Canada?  Do they have distribution here?

No, that’s just a 7-inch, that’s just a thing.  When it’s gone its gone.  There’s 500 of those things.  So there’s no distribution.  I think they might have done something with Last Chance Records because I actually saw someone tweeted that they just got something from Last Chance and this guy was in London, which seems kind of crazy to me because those records came from Germany, they went to Arkansas, and then they went from Arkansas to London. So that’s why I try to say, going back to the Canadian thing, if you live in another country talk to the dudes in Dresden.  It seems like I care a lot, but this whole postage thing really upsets me.  I feel bad when the postage costs more than a record.  I’d rather just hand them to people.  But we don’t make very many of them and they would never last because we pressed 500 and those things don’t last long.  I actually take the little boxes, I kind of hide them, I don’t hide them but I put them in different spots I never keep them all together so I come across them months or a year later and I’m like “oh look at these” and I take those out and people are happy because its something that hasn’t been able to be found for a long time.

With the second 7-inch coming out on Last Chance records, is there a date set for that one yet?

I know they’ve been doing the pre-orders forever and I know that last week maybe he got the test pressing and he OK’d it and those things are in the mail.  So I’m going to be getting our copies for this tour within the week.  So that means that he’ll start sending them out once he gets them.  There was never any hard date on it.  Whoever did the pre-sale on it is gonna start getting that stuff within 2 weeks I bet.

What else can you tell us about the upcoming full length?

Basically that I want that thing to come out in October and in October we go to California and in December we’re going to go to the Northeast which includes basically New Jersey, Quebec City, Montreal, and Toronto.  Like that kind of Northeast.  That’s the plan.  When you say October, especially with a couple things that we’re waiting on, sometimes that turns into November or December, but my plan is that it has to come out in 2013.  It just has to do it because the last thing that we put out was in 2010  and I’m kind of ashamed that there isn’t anything that came out in ’11 or ’12, so if something doesn’t come out in ’13 I’m going to be really bummed out.   Like a slacker.

What are you looking forward to about the upcoming tour?

I am so fucking excited to play right now I can’t even tell you, to play rock and roll.  That’s the only thing about playing acoustic with your bros, that’s second nature to me and I love doing that.  It’s also nice to go back and forth.  The only draw back on the band is the fucking drums dude, there’s so many of them and it’s a lot of stuff to move (chuckles), that’s all.  I always say the thing about playing acoustic is that you don’t have to move a drum set or a guitar amp you know.  You just get on a plane and go.  That being said, I’m really excited to play rock and roll and Chad, he’s a got an electric guitar dude; I’m ready to rock.

Are you looking forward the playing The Fest 12?

Yeah, you should maybe make a comment on this just so people know.  The Fest, the only reason why we’re really playing The Fest is because we haven’t done it for a long time and Tony [Weinbender] asked me to come seeing that ALL is playing if Chad’s already gonna be there that I should just come down too .  So that’s the main reason because it’s just easy to do, and we don’t have to move a drum set.  So that’s just a me and Chad show.  That’s the only show this year that will be a Drag The River show that isn’t the full band.  But, I gotta be honest, we like doing it that way too.

Anything else you want to add?

I really hope we have our new record then, I have a feeling that is the soonest that we could possibly have it though.  I really hope we have it then.

But yeah, that’s it.  I really appreciate you talking to me.

No problem.

If you quote me, just try not to make me sound like an idiot.  You can put that in the story too.