by Daniel Sinker | excerpted from PP74
It wasn’t supposed to happen, not like this. There was a time when the future felt within reach—a future built by you, by me, together. It was a future where the rules were changed—where “success” was defined by actions performed, not money made, and where expectations were exceeded or broken, not reinforced. In this future, a band like the Promise Ring—four friends from Wisconsin, of all places, interested in making songs instead of being popular, with a lead singer who could craft catchy melodies but couldn’t sing them—could become famous without compromising what had made them great.
But that future disappeared, replaced by the present—when the underground is staggering under a weighty infrastructure of press releases, street teams, promotional budgets, ad buys, and NewsCorp-owned MySpace pages.
But it’s also a present that brings us bands like Maritime—made up of the remnants of the Promise Ring and (until recently), Washington DC’s Dismemberment Plan. The band’s new album, We, The Vehicles, is a postcard from that future we thought was ours, inscribed, Having a great time: wish you were here. That the 11 songs on it wallowed in limbo for nearly a year while the band struggled to find a label interested in putting it out in the US is a reminder that we’re living in a time that shouldn’t have been.
I spent last night reading old reviews of Promise Ring stuff. Some of your reviews—especially of the later albums—were fucking insane in terms of the level of personal attack and vitriol they contained.
Dan Didier: Were you just reading the Pitchfork reviews? [Laughs.]
Those were certainly some of the most vindictive, but overall there was something about that band that polarized the audience—you either loved it or hated it. And if you loved it, you loved it a lot; if you hated it, you hated it a lot. With some distance, have you been able to suss out why reactions were so strong?
Davey VonBolen: It’s totally still true. Today a Pitchfork review came out of We, The Vehicles and it seemed to me like they went through three pencils writing the review because they couldn’t believe they liked the record. It was like it was paining them to say these nice things. So that relationship is still very much there. Even today, most people lead off articles about us by saying, “Promise Ring: loved ‘em or hated ‘em!”
But it seems like your peers got more of a pass than you did.
Didier: That’s true. I don’t really know why that was.
Looking at the musical landscape now—at the bands that are clearly derived from the sound that you and your peers fleshed out—and looking at how hugely successful they have become—bands like Hawthorne Heights—what is that perspective like? Back when you were at your peak, it felt like either you or one of three or four other bands were going to hit it big. But now, 10 years down the line, what we all defined as “hitting it big” was so much smaller than what’s happening now.
Didier: I could really care less about the success of these bands now because it’s so removed from how I feel good music should work. I find it intriguing, sure—Hawthorne Heights creating their own MySpace site, and setting it up so that if you sign up 20 people you unlock videos and shit—it’s like, “Wait, what?” That is so far removed from what I think music is and how it should be put out there. It’s mindblowing, actually, the difference between 10 years ago and today.
VonBolen: People often will come up to me and ask how I feel about this awful stuff on the radio—this safe version of a watered-down Get Up Kids. They’re always asking if they can blame me for this, or if I’m pissed that these lame guys in purple shirts and white ties are doing bad versions of whatever that style I was a part of. It’s not like I want to be linked in this chain at all, but I always imagine the 40-year-old 1985 Revolution Summer DC person thinking “Who is that guy? The Promise Ring is just this mixed with this mixed with these other bands that Amy Pickering was in.” I was 10 when they were 20 and people were being born when I was 10. I really can’t tell you if we were a link in the chain of a watered-down version of a watered-down version who people are ripping off and watering down now. But you know what? There are bands playing in basements right now who are kicking people’s butts with the unsafe version of this stuff, the same way that bands in our time did.
Didier: Are the popular bands of today going to matter in five years or in 10 years?
VonBolen: Or is there a Rapid City band that we don’t know about and will only sell 2000 records, but is going to become the basis of what comes after? For us as 20 year olds, Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary was the record that you had to go see the band because of. But when I went to go see them there were maybe 12 people there.
Didier: The point is that whatever band influences you is the only one that really matters, regardless if there are 12 people at the show or 1200.
VonBolen: Yeah, but to think about it at that point, nobody really liked it. The whole point of this is to say that I don’t think we can speak about what current bands are going to become influential.
