|
 “You Need It…You Bleed It”
Dinner & Conversation with
The Bangkok Five
Interview By Tracey L, Photos By Ed Banas
It may be an old cliché… “we sold our souls for rock in roll” but in the case of L.A. based The Bangkok Five, that’s pretty much the deal they signed when they set out to pursue the dream back in 2005. From their self-released EP to booking their own tour via the Internet and playing everywhere and anywhere that would have them, the B-5 have a boatload of life experiences that include days without food, and being literally afraid for their lives as the hardships of life on the road put their physical health in jeopardy. However, as the quote goes, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and The B-5 are ready to take on the world with their signature brand of sonic-electronic booty-shaking, glam-punk creations.
After supporting The Cult on a stint through Canada, the guys are currently tantalizing concert-goers along the East Coast opening for Buckcherry throughout the remainder of the summer.
I joined the boys, (Frost-vocals, Holcolm Ks.-guitar, Coatez -bass, Sweeney-guitar and Blanco-drums) now relaxed and winding down after their killer set, as they dined on Sushi at a swanky Japanese restaurant located next to the Trocadero Theatre in the fine city of Philadelphia, PA where we discussed quite a few topics including the new record, “Who’s Gonna Take Us Alive?,” where to get the best cheese steak sandwiches and also some captivating stories that makes one ask the question, “Why do it?” For the pure love of Rock’n Roll baby, that’s why!
Note: (On behalf of myself, and the band, a big “Thank you to Mary, our sweet waitress, for putting up with our shenanigans and to Buckcherry for providing the post-dinner entertainment!)
The conversation begins with me stating that Glam Metal.com TM is based in Buffalo, NY and drummer, Blanco confesses his love of (the Buffalo exclusive) Mexican fast food joint, “Mighty Taco” and how he once worked for local band Snapcase.
 |
Tracey L: So have you guys been to Buffalo?
Frost: Yeah, a couple months ago, we were just off the Cult tour.
Blanco: But it was during the Sabres play-offs, so no one really cared. Ha ha.
Tracey L: Oh I see, attention was diverted elsewhere. Sorry! It’s funny you love “Mighty Taco”, being from California, and my friend here is from Philly and he claims the best Cheese Steaks are at “Jim’s Steak Out” in Buffalo.
Frost: We’re in Philadelphia right now, right?
Tracey L: Yeah. 
Frost: The home of the Cheese Steak? Oh… I HAVE to get me a cheese steak before I leave!
Blanco: Have you guys ever been to California?
Tracey L: Yeah, last year.
Blanco: There’s an amaaazing cheese stake place in North Hollyood on Magnolia.
Frost: I’ve been there. If you wanna stay trim… go there.
Tracey L: Well, how is that possible?
Frost: Cause it’s soooo fattening you generally throw up after you eat the whole thing. They are gigantic!
(Laughter from all)
Tracey L: Who came up with the name of the band and what’s the meaning?
Holcolm: It’s kind of a multi-tiered story, it has a lot of facets to it really. There’s the one thought that really makes sense, when you consider the subject matter of our songs. The observational quality of what we talk about. “Bangkok” being this really unbridled, wild and free and open society especially with regards to sex, added to what we’ve seen on the road and what’s going on the internet, and like the undercurrent and the backlash of conservatism in this country.
Frost: It’s a really good way of expressing this wide-open, wild, free-wheeling vibe. It’s funny when I told my Mom what we were calling it, she was like, “Child prostitution, giant fried bugs and people getting eaten alive by wild rabid packs of dogs in the streets. What the hell are you thinking?” I was like “Exactly!” Like our dog logo we just came up with, because it had this sort of aggressive nature like our music did.
Holcolm: When we were coming up with the logo all that was going on in Bangkok, I found out about it on-line and told these guys and we all started laughing about it.
Frost: And if you say aggressive, I think would be not necessarily agro in the sense of black metal, obviously there’s much more aggressive music out there, but like, scrappy and skinny, frothing at the mouth, hungry, tired, lean and mean. That was the idea.
Tracey L: So that’s more inspiring to you than say a “Rainbow Field Party?”
Frost: “Texas Rainbow Field Party” that’s actually a cool story too. Cause we played a lot o f field parties on our tour. I guess that’s another example of conservatism, actually Holcolm came to the band one day laughing with this story…I’ll let him tell it….
Holcolm: Have you ever seen those shows where they fix your house and stuff? Well, I knew this producer in L.A. who worked for FOX and they were gonna do this show where they came and fixed your “town.” It was a little Christian town in Texas. The town ironically enough, like all towns in Texas, had a former Pro Football player who was like the Mayor of the Town. It was a real small town, about 6,000 people and it was a dry town, so you couldn’t drink. It was super repressed, very right-winged Christian. As the producer looked around and met with the people to find out what it would cost FOX financially to rebuild this town, he heard about this thing that the kids were doing there. On the nights that the kids weren’t going to see high school football, they would all drive their cars to a field and park them in a circle, with the headlights all pointing toward the center and basically the girls would wear different colored lipsticks, and as we all know if you tell people something terrible and they are gonna go to hell for doing it… chances are…they’re looking for some way out, because they see that repressed nature, obviously their parents don’t seem too happy, so they are looking for somethin , they can’t get any booze, and they probably get bored of sniffing Sharpees or glue. Needless to say, it’s a great lineage, basically the game works like this…the gentleman that ends up with the most color lipsticks (on his member) at the end of the night is the winner of the rainbow field party.
Frost: So if you think about that, there’s no moral compass at all, it’s just complete and total chaos. That’s like the whole “My Space” thing, you’ve got this whole backlash thing of parents that can’t control their children because they don’t understand technology, and then you got a band like us that’s literally booking tours on My Space. You’ve got people offering us deals to play these rainbow parties and stuff. Let’s make what were doing on the road into a party. Lets pull it away from playing all the normal stupid “places” and let’s play like exciting things and wind up in exciting places and have crazy stories, and that’s what happened. “Who’s Gonna Take Us Alive” is about that whole thing. It’s about that crazy thing that we were on, and now it’s like really weird cause it fueled the fire that became the record, and the fire that was fueled got us on this major label now. I mean were basically doing it the same way Black Flag did the ‘Damaged’ tour, it was that scrappy and punk rock. We were playing houses, barns, anywhere we could play, screaming my fucking face off. We didn’t sell merchandise (t-shirts).
Sweeney: At one point on that tour we literally went three days without eating.
Tracey L: Is that the definition of your “Death or Glory” Philosophy?
Frost: D.I.Y. Punk Rock. I don’t care if people go “You don’t really sound like a punk rock band.” Well, (A.) What is punk rock? and (B.) Fuck punk rock! It’s D.I.Y., it’s about doing it ourselves. The irony is this whole thing got us on a major label. Truly not giving a fuck.
Holcolm: Speaking of punk rock, one of the greatest punk rock bands of all time is The Dead Boys. That’s our lineage, The Stooges and The Dead Boys. Those are our forefathers, and those guys had to really go out, I mean can you imagine what it was like being in The Stooges touring Amercia in the late 60’s early 70’s, and they had money, but they were coming up against prejudice left and right.
Tracey L: So Cheetah Chrome is a hero?
Holcolm: How could he not be?
Frost: Now we are doing bigger rooms. We’ve been lucky enough to have an amazing band like Buckcherry, who by the way, when I was a drum ‘n bass kid, when that record came out, and I swear to God it influenced what I’m doing today. When “Lit Up” was on the radio I was like “Jesus Christ! Can I get another line of that and another hit of “e” and fuckin’ turn that up!” At the same time DJ Hive came out. He was doing drum ‘n bass tracks with heavy guitars and stuff. But I swear, that record influenced what I was doing and influenced these guys in some sort of weird way, cause it happened right in the midst of all that stuff. You were into electronic music back then too.
Holcomb: Yeah, I had totally givin’ up. I love rock soooo much, and I had gotten to the point where I felt that everything had become pretty stale. Other than Queens of the Stone Age, Refused, and at the Drive-In. Electronic music was where all the cute girls were, and where all the parties were. You go where the energy is, and that’s where it was. So let’s see what these chill out rooms are all about and after a few hits I was well into it. So needless to say… but the most important thing is what we’re doing right now. We got this amazing record that’s out. We’re well balanced. Everybody in this band could be fronting their own band. We all have a love of the hardcore thing. We are five guys that are committed to being a rock band. We’re not trying to be a metal band, not a punk band, not an indie band, we are just trying to write great songs and play with a lot of energy.
People ask us what our music is like. I say it’s for strippers and chicks goin’ down runways.
Frost: I was finding that DJ’s in dance clubs in L.A. were playing more and more rock and garage stuff like The Who, The Stooges, The Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs. Dance was fading away. To me relevance is… being relevant, being vital and being visceral, and being now, you need to listen to what’s happening. That’s why this band has that sexy energy. That’s why we always go back to soul. Always go back to R&B. Old Detroit R&B. Where did the Stooges and the MC5 come from? They came from that. We’re not doing it as a matter of course, that’s where the sex is, that’s where the hip-shaking groove is, that’s where the ladies are.
Tracey L: In checking out your MySpace page, it’s seems you’re getting a heap of positive feedback. Especially from the recent Cleveland show. How do feel about that?
Frost: Chicks get it in the first two seconds! They just have these shit-eating grins! They’re like, “I love this band!” Then the classic rock guys and the metal dudes, they get won over cause they realize we’re nuts! They realize we really have sold our lives and given everything away to be in this band. No apartments, no cars, no money.
Tracey L.: Given that, is there any one thing that you wouldn’t want to re-live?
Holcomb & Coatez: Our transmission breaking down for the second time somewhere in the Sierra Nevadas, we’re walking with cars speeding past at 90 miles an hour, temperatures in the high 90’s …no money, no food, it’s not good.
Frost: When your life is in danger. When you really realize we could all die.
Sweeney: I was on the road with a painfully infected tooth that I couldn’t bite down on for like almost 4 months. When I got home, my family was scared for my life cause I was so thin and sickly looking. It was bad.
Coatez: Once we had resorted to fishing, with poles, just to catch some fish for dinner.
Frost: Yeah, these guys were catching like 12 fish and I could barely get ONE! That sucked.
Tracey L. What’s next for you guys?
Frost: We have a full-length limited-edition (only 3000 copies) of our next record being soft launched now. The real record will have different art-work on the cover and additional bonus material coming out on October 31st. In September we are looking forward to working with Steve Albini on a project.
Holcolm: Ya know, the real fact is…I want to be the soundtrack to people having a good time. It’s like, I didn’t get to appreciate the real Van Halen, with David Lee Roth, that wasn’t my generation, but you hear his interviews and you think, “This guy was the greatest rockstar of all time!” That’s the energy I WANT. People always wanna talk about what’s goin on in North Korea and yeah, it’s dark and it’s been going on for 40 years, and yeah it’s terrible, so with that said, I think it’s time we had a really GOOD time.
Coatez: Everybody wants some!
Holcolm: Yeah, exactly! I know it sounds like we are diminishing that or we’re ignorant of it, but you’ve got to be present and have to realize that life is short and life is precious, and we want to be THAT band. If we can be the band that says we’re gonna ditch the rule book, we’re gonna ditch the clichés, we’re gonna ditch worrying about what the cool kids think, we’re gonna do what we want. If we do that, I think we can be the soundtrack for a lot of peoples parties. If we do that…we’re good.
Tracey L: Your self-assured you have what it takes to reach that goal?
Holcolm: I think two of the top singers of the last 10 years are Josh Todd and Lane Staley, and I feel we have one of the best singers of our generation. We are honored to be out with Buckcherry, Keith Nelson is one of most stand-up human beings on the planet, I feel like if it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t be out here, but, I feel like this guy (referring to Frost) is like Josh with a deep helping of David Bowie and Iggy, ya know? We’re from the same family tree, but they’re like AC/DC, Aerosmith and we’re like The Stooges, Bowie. We’re that other side. We’re like the kids that grew up reading Warhol books and being like, “We got RIPPED-OFF! There was no Velvet Underground for us, there was no factory scene, we got ripped off man!”
(All agree)
So that’s what we want. We wanna have a GOOOOOD TIME! We wanna have like a REALLY good time!
Coatez: With that said, we intend on staying on the road for a long time. Finishing these Buckcherry dates, then we’re going out with Circus Diablo then The Cult in the US. We’ll be doing a lot more stuff.
Tracey L: Well guys thanks for all your input, it’s been a pleasure. Good luck with everything!
T-B-5: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us. We appreciate it, really!
Everyone paid their respective tabs to Mary (Mary, Mary why ya buggin?) and off we went, The Bangkok Five with bellies full (at least for tonight).
www.thebangkokfive.com
|
