Bizarrely, Dan is the only Canadian interviewed in this guide. That can't possibly be the case, wait... oh yeah, Carl Newman! Still, he's the only Canadian in these pages that reacted to seeing Royal Trux and Doo Rag on the second stage at
Photo by Rebecca SmeyneBizarrely, Dan is the only Canadian interviewed in this guide. That can’t possibly be the case, wait…oh yeah, Carl Newman! Still, he’s the only Canadian in these pages that reacted to seeing Royal Trux and Doo Rag on the second stage at Lollapalooza 14 years ago by “coming in his pants.”Vice: If an American festival booking rolls around and you find yourself less than jazzed about performing, what’s the one saving grace? Seeing friends in other bands?
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Dan:Exactly. That’s one difference between European and North American music festivals; I pay more attention to the music at a festival in Europe, but when we play a festival in the States, I just hang out with people I haven’t seen in a while. You have to pay the rent.You do, you do. And I hear that playing a festival is a good way to do that. Some pay well, and some pay……a ludicrous amount of money—an astronomical amount of money. I think the unifying factor of festivals like Bonnaroo and the Download Festival is not “a showcase of music and two or three days of fun.” There’s a reason a lot of those festivals take place in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the summer. The unifying factor that allows bands to get paid an astronomical sum of money is that there’s a captive audience, not for the music, but for Volkswagen or Guitar Hero and all of the companies underwriting those things, and so Aquafina can charge $5 per bottle of water because it’s a 20-minute bus ride back to your hotel room.Do you play harder or do anything different to make up for the 15-foot security pit separating you from the audience?I play differently because of the disconnect between audience and band that comes with the festival environment. There are people that pay a lot of money to see a small number of bands, especially people that don’t live near large cities, and they’re out there in crazy heat, so I feel like I have to give something extra back. And when you play one of these huge festivals, you can pretty much guarantee that the sound isn’t going to be the best, so I sort of throw myself into it because otherwise I’m not going to have a good time during our set. I think it’s the really big corporate festivals that tend to be a drag.Now that the economy is actually fucking things up, I think that 2009 will be the litmus test that dictates how the next five or six years play out. Now it’s a question of how many people are going to be scared shitless by the uncertainty eating up the rest of the year. Lollapalooza for one….I had an amazing time at one of the 90s Lollapaloozas, when I was a teenager. I think it was ’96 or ’97, and the second stage was insane. The main stage was good, too, Sonic Youth headlined, I walked over, saw the Jesus Lizard, then came back to the second stage and Royal Trux was about to start. The rest of the band didn’t make it over the Canadian-American border, so it was just Jennifer and Neil up there, high as balls, making this brain-melting racket. For me to be 17 and watching Lee Renaldo and Thurston Moore watching Royal Trux, it was mind-blowing. I almost came in my fucking pants. I don’t know if festivals still have this impact on kids, but I lived in a really small town on a fucking island, and nobody ever came to the next big town, seeing all of that was really important.I think that still happens in some cases, in others, no.A lot of the festivals have second stages, and it doesn’t seem like they’re taking chances. If Coachella could get someone like Jay Reatard or Fuck Buttons on the smaller stage, I think that could be really good for people, but they get a lot of second-string emo bands on a subsidiary of Capitol Records and based out of LA.
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