Skeletonwitch - Scott Hendrick and Nate Garnett
Posted on May 07, 2008 at 9:50 pm by admin
I interviewed Skeletonwitch on a previous e-mail which really laid some of the groundwork for what the band hoped to achieve. Since being on the road for a good time now, I asked them what life was like being band warriors.
Way Too Loud: Most interviews get directed towards you (Scott). Are you sort of the band leader, or the guy who likes doing interviews the most, or the guy who gets picked to do them the most?
Scott Hendrick: I’m not the band leader, but I usually end up doing most of the interviews. I set a fair amount of them up. For some reason I just field all of them.
Hate Ganett: He’s like our in-house PR guy! He handle a lot of that kind of stuff. He does a lot of stuff on the phone, so he does a lot of on-the-phone interviews, or if there’s time, we get a couple people sitting here like we usually do.
Scott: I get a huge phone bill sometimes, because if someone calls from a magazine in Japan, it goes on my phone bill! To say like a band leader though, everyone plays a different role to make it all work. In some ways, Nate could be the band leader. He drives everywhere, and he’s the principle songwriter, so he’s the main bitch! (Laughs)
WTL: So you don’t get a tax deduction for your phone bills? Wouldn’t that count as a business expense?
Scott: I guess it could, but I make so little money that I don’t have to pay taxes!
Nate: We’d have to make enough to count as a business first!
Scott: We don’t even need to file taxes because we’re considered horribly poor!
WTL: What bands got you guys up and playing?
Nate: When I started out, I got a guitar for Christmas, and then I got Metallica tab books, like “Kill ‘Em All”, and that actually got me into playing metal. A list of my influences includes Metallica, Overkill, Amon Amarth, a lot of 80’s thrash, death metal, all the good shit!
Scott: My personal biggest influences include Mercyful Fate, Death, Judas Priest. I’m a bit of a younger guy. When I first started playing it was when “Cowboys From Hell” by Pantera came out, and that was pretty fucked up when I heard that. I loved that, and it was definitely a big influence on me, hearing Dimebags guitar playing. Since then it’s grown to all sorts of stuff from black metal to thrash and death. Too much to list I guess!
WTL: What have you guys been listening too lately?
Scott: Sirius radio! We’ve been listening to this “Metal Attack” radio show that someone gave us a copy of the other day.
Nate: We have listened to Dolly Parton!
Scott: Looking through our CDs right now. Here’s Vio-Lence.
Nate: We’ve been listening to the new album from The Sword. A little bit more diverse than the first one.
WTL: Did you see that they landed on a tour with Down and Metallica?
Scott: yes, we did! We talked to them a few days ago when we were in Austin and wished them well on that, because that’s insane! Being an opener for Metallica, that’s pretty crazy!
Nate: We were wondering if you open for Metallica if you get a $100 guarantee, or if you get paid a ton, or if Metallica says “We’re going to take this, and here’s your normal amount”.
Scott: I’ll bet they get 50 bucks and a sandwich, but they know you’re going to do it anyway because you’re playing for Metallica!
Nate: But you get to meet Lars, and that’s all that matters!
Scott: Here, I’ve dug out a stack of stuff that we’ve been listening too, or at least checked out. We’ve got Saviours, Primordial, Insect Warfare, Obscura , Decrepit Birth can be a little too tech, Pagan Altar, Waylon Jennings, Hate Eternal, who we’re on tour with, Kampfar, Thryfing, so that’s some of the stuff we’ve been listening too.
Nate: We’ll listen to Sirius Radio, hen we’ll listen to Howard Stern, and then we have a lot of mixed CDs, We have a Led Zeppelin CD, a country CD, a black metal CD to listen to some different bands instead of blasting our skulls out with say, the entire Emperor catalogue for 3 days straight.
Scott: Hey, are we allowed to swear?
WTL: Sure!
Scott: I realize we’ve done that several times already. We’ve done some interviews where they had to do some heavy editing because no one told us that, and I just didn’t want to do that to you!
Nate: We’ve ended up with interviews being shortened too: Do you guys like heavy Metal? Yes we do. (Laughs)
Scott: And nothing else was usable!
WTL: You’ve seemed to move up since you’ve released “Beyond The Permafrost”, so can you tell me what you’ve accomplished since then?
Nate: We’ve been on the road since the album came out, and we’ve only had a few small breaks so we can tour the summer, or do some weekend shows. We’ve been able to get on tours that are bigger. Even before we had a record deal, we played with High On Fire, then somehow Scotty would get Matt Pikes phone number and call him. Just a lot of new connections, a lot of new friends, and getting the word out a lot more. We make about the same amount of money, which hovers right around zero. (Laighs)
Scott: Zero and negative zero! (Laughs) Whatever that means! A big accomplishment is meeting a bunch of bad-ass people. It’s when the record seems to be doing ok and we go on bigger tours. We’re out here playing, and we pretty much devote all of our time to it. It’s good when it works out and you can continue moving up, but at the same time, no one cares if you were in a magazine 2 years ago. We don’t care that much. It’s cool and neat, because we never thought we’d be in Revolver, but in 3 years, someone will ay “Revolver”? I don’t give shit about that. What we will have is friends in all these places we went to and cool people to hang out with, and go to shows with and shit like that. That’s also a rad thing. Like when we go to Austin, we always have friends we can stay with.
Nate: Another big surprise for us was landing on a couple of top off 2007 lists. In Decibel Magazine, we tied with Type O Negative for 41!
WTL: Now that you’ve become full-time road warriors, what’s the standard routine now?
Scott: Well, we wake up in these van seats that you’re sitting on right now, so right now you’re sitting in our sleep stink, then we poke Nate, and go get some coffee, and everyone else just stays asleep, and we just take off and drive all day, we get to the venue immediately, then start drinking beer, load in, then get too drunk to drive after the show, but we drive a little bit anyway.
Nate: We have our priorities straight! We drink enough to be able to play good, but after that…
Scott: We like to have fun. When you tour so much, you’ve got to have fun, and there’s a lot of different ways to do that. We’re pretty fucking goofy I guess! We like to laugh and joke and shit. We were on tour with our good buddies Cephalic Carnage, Nate and their drummer, every time they’d pass each other they’d say something weird.
Nate: We have just watched “Deliverance”, so we just kept on making pig noises at each other and quoting that part of the movie -
Scott: What part?
Nate: The butt-fuck scene! (Laughs) and the guy from Cephalic Carnage were just like “Do you guys have to say something every time you walk past each other?” And we’re kind of like “Uh… yeah…” (Laughs)
WTL: What else do you do to keep yourselves entertained?
Scott: We listen to lots of different music. We burn lots of CDs off of our computers. We make a lot of mix CDs. We don’t do anything terribly crazy.
Nate: We don’t have that much time. A lot of bands will drive all night and spend the day in the city. We don’t fuck around too much, we’ll just start driving early. A lot of times we’re driving 6 or 8 hours a day. If we have days off, like we might go camping tomorrow on our day off, we might try and get Soilent Green to come camping with us. As far as seeing the sights and shit, like “Lets go to Washington DC!”, I’m like let’s don’t! We’re going to have to park there, and you can’t take a trailer past the White House or else you’ll get surrounded by cops. It’s just a pain in the ass.
Scott: And it should be known that Nate drives every mile, of all of our tours.
Nate: I don’t trust anybody else. I sleep there. I have taken, maybe one shit there. (Laughs) but I don’t think I have in this van. I think I’ve been pretty clean. My left arm gets sunburned a lot, so that’s about all the pain of driving!
WTL: I’ve heard stories of bands eating beef jerky and peanut butter to survive on the road… (Just then, Scott pulls out a jar of Jiff peanut butter, and everyone bursts out laughing) I see a banana that looks like it’s in good shape.
Scott: It’s not bad, I ate the other one yesterday.
WTL: But you’ve got to ration it though.
Scott: Definitely! That’s 8 meals right there! But to let everyone know the secret, it’s our amazing budget. We give everyone in the van $5 a day.
Nate: I usually spend mine on a Coke and a king-size Snickers bar. Or if I don’t get that, I usually get a beer.
Scott: I’ll buy a pack of cigarettes and a banana.
Nate: We usually bring a lot of food from home. My mom will bake. The last time she bought Wal-Mart brand pop-tarts and some canned chicken, so I’ll eat one of those a day. You can buy a loaf of broad for a buck.
Scott: I can usually buy tuna.
Nate: It’s way cheaper than buying fucking Burger King. Burger King’s way better, but…
Scott: Burger King does a number on our stomachs.
Nate: Eating from home keeps your butthole a little better! (Laughs)
Scott: And that’s a huge concern when you’re on tour!
WTL: Is it pretty safe to assume that you’re fueled by alcohol and some other stuff?
Nate: We can mention everything. We don’t do anything hard, just drink beer and smoke weed.
Scott: Actually, Nate and I don’t really smoke weed, we’re more drinkers.
Nate: And I don’t drink any hard liquor or anything, just strictly cheap, crappy beer.
Scott: I’ll smoke one time or another.
Nate: Tomorrow while we’re camping, it’s safe to say that we’ll all probably smoke something. I don’t like to do it during the day because it just nukes me out, then I’ll be too tired and be a piece of shit for the show.
Scott: I used to get stoned every day, years ago, but when I do, it puts me on my ass like I’ve never smoked before.
Nate: Except we roll with chronic! (Laughs)
Scott: We all try to avoid cocaine!
WTL: I did notice the difference in beer, from Pabst (I point to Nate) and Heineken (I point to Scott).
Scott: Well these were left over from last night. These are actually Hate Eternal’s beer. Usually we get High Life or Pabst, or if we get really extravagant, Budweiser.
Nate: A couple of buddies came from Indiana, the band Demiricous. The came to the show and brought a 30-pack of beer, and we hung out in the car-bar for awhile and drank, and they left the rest of the beer. Pabst Blue Ribbon, nice guys!
WTL: Would I be guessing correctly that since you’ve been touring so much that you’ve been forced to quit your day jobs?
Scott: Everyone individually has it set up one way or another to tour and still kind of work. When I’m home, I work at a record store and a book store. They let me come and go when I’m home, they let me sign up for hours. Derek, our drummer does artwork for other bands.
Nate: He’s done t-shirts for Cephalic Carnage and Job For A Cowboy. <To Scott> Plug his art! Plug his art!
Scott: Go to www.myspace.com/apocalypsenau . It’s got his last name, Nau, hence the brilliant name, Apocalypse Nau. He’s done some of our shirts too. Chance our singer works at a tattoo shop, and Nate…
Nate: I don’t do anything.
Scott: Neither does our bass player!
Nate: I maintain the van, and I still live with my mom. My dad’s out half the time, so I just make sure she keeps shit, and make sure that shit ain’t falling apart. One of my buddies has a rental house, and I’ll do some shit on that.
Scott: What would you say that Eric, our bass player does?
Nate: Uh… He does sound at bars every now and again.
Scott: We all scrape by with whatever we can do.
WTL: I love talking about this stuff - a lot of promotional pictures suggest that you sport spiked gauntlets and bullet belts during your live show.
Nate: A long time ago Scotty did the bullet belts.
Scott: I wore them here and there, but I don’t even know what happened to it… I started out without it, then eventually I wore it, and then I just said “fuck this thing”…
Nate: I just became too much. I wear a gauntlet, and I’ve had the same one since 2001.
Scott: It smells!
Nate: If I call it loud enough, it’ll probably crawl in here! (Laughs) And Chance wears one. We don’t wear costumes while we play. I just wear a band t-shirt and a gauntlet, so I’m not going to put on a leather vest, or bondage stuff, an upside down cross, or hang myself from meat hooks! (Laughs).
Scott: Actually our bass player started off with that bullet belt and gave it to me, then I wore it for awhile, but obviously we’re not too concerned about how we look onstage or off stage, because it’s pretty much the same. We look the same all day no matter what we’re doing.
WTL: Who would you like to tour with who’s feasible, but not obvious?
Scott: I would love to tour with Death Breath! With Nicke Andersson from Entombed! That’s the top of my list! That would be awesome, and it’s possible!
Nate: I would love to tour with Amon Amarth. I love their music like none other.
Scott: <Invites Skeletonwitch drummer Derrick Nau over. Who’d you like to tour with?
Derrick: King Diamond.
Nate: Behemoth would be sweet.
Derrick: The Black Dahlia Murder, I’d like to tour with them. I talked to them to earlier, and they’re coming out. Trevor told me he was going to make me do a bunch of car bombs with him. (Laughs)
Nate: Did he tell you not to throw up on the bar and get your dick out again?
Derrick: Welcome to Cleveland…
Scott: That’s where that happened!
Nate: Any band that we list around our influences. Immortal would be amazing! Then there’s that At The Gates tour that we’re NOT on…
Derrick: I want on the Sepultura reunion tour! Whenever that is…
WTL: Have you ever lied about your band name, since people ask about band names too often?
Nate: I’m being put on the spot for comedy here… We lived in Cleveland for a year, and this bum came up to us and says “What ch’all band name? Which one? Skeleton? Witch? Some kind of Skeletonwicth?” and we were like “Yeah, Skeletonwitch!” and we kept it, so we owe much money to cryin’ James Parker at the boarding house on Chester Avenue!
Scott: And it’s funny because it’s mostly true!
Skeletonwitch at MySpace
Prosthetic Records at MySpace
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