Perpetual Motion

When what passes for punk these days first caught on with MTV and mainstream radio, there was a resurgence of the "old school" that followed - Bad Religion's Greg Graffin dropped out of a doctorate program, his band resumed a regular release schedule and went out on the road with Blink 182; the Circle Jerks, in a move to recapture their former glory, did a duet of "I Wanna Destroy You" with Debbie Gibson; and The Clash's frontman Joe Strummer returned as the frontman of The Mescaleros.
And while all this has been happening over the last decade or so, D.R.I. has diligently and quietly - though that's not quite the right word - continuing to do what the seminal thrash punk quartet has always done: tour small clubs and play hard for true fans. Though the band has cycled through a number of rhythm sections (currently utilizing the talents of bassist Harald Oimoen and drummer Rob Rampy) D.R.I.'s core members, guitarist Spike Cassidy and frontman Kurt Brecht, have been constant since the band formed in Houston Texas in 1982. D.R.I. has been based in San Francisco for the better part of the band's existence.
Currently on their 20 Dirty Rotten Years tour, guitarist and founding member Spike took some time to answer some questions from a hotel room in Costa Mesa.

What originally prompted the band to move from Houston to San Francisco?
We got tired of playing the same two clubs in Houston every weekend, opening up for Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat or Black Flag - whoever was coming through. They'd call us up and we'd wind up as support on their shows. We just got tired of doing that, and we thought, 'We wanna be on tour like these bands.' After talking to them and learning about what goes on in other places around the world, we decided to sell everything we owned. We had a big garage sale, saved our money and moved out to San Francisco.

Why San Francisco instead of, say Los Angeles or New York?
We already knew three bands that left Texas for San Francisco - Verbal Abuse, MDC and The Dicks - and they all had good things to say about it. So we knew people there and it wasn't like we were going to a city where we didn't know anybody, even though we were living in our van in a parking lot, we knew people who told us to go to the soup kitchen where you could get free food, and told us that there was a place, an old brewery, where they started letting bands practice…so we had these little tips and help from friends.

Do you still live in the Bay Area?
I live in Oakland.

Any plans to leave the Bay?
Yes. As soon as possible. Kurt moved away a few years ago. Our drummer lives in Florida, me and our new bass player Harald live in Oakland. It's just really expensive to live here and I'm looking to move away to some place more affordable. This [D.R.I.] could come to an end, whatever, and I need to start preparing for the future. But we've been doing this for years like this; Kurt moved away a long time ago. Just because we're in different places doesn't mean that there's an end in sight. We've still been touring a couple of times a year. Living apart doesn't stop us from playing, it stops us from practicing and it stops us from writing new material, but it doesn't stop us from touring.

You haven't released anything new for a long time. Do you find that your fans are the same people who were coming out back then, or do you get new fans as well?
It's even a more diverse mixture than before. The traditional hardcore punks are coming out, and so are more of the metal kids. We get the new school hardcore and metal kids, people who are 80 years old and kids who are like 10. It's really diverse.

This is D.R.I.'s 20th anniversary tour. When you look back over the years, what stands out the most?
I guess that would be that we've actually stuck together for the full 20 years, didn't break up, just kept touring, all that. It's business as usual, and we've managed to stick it out together for that long. It's something that doesn't happen too often.

To what do you attributed this easy cohesion to?
Probably the fact that none of us really wants to work a real job, and that we can do this, that we're able to keep touring and make enough money to keep going. We all kinda have little day jobs, but the thought of having nothing but that is some incentive to keep going.

How many people have been in D.R.I. over the last 20 years?
Wow…um, there's me and Kurt, and we had eight bass players and four drummers. So that's, what? Sixteen people. I wrote most of the lyrics and Kurt wrote most of the music, and everybody contributed along the way, but since we haven't put anything out since 1995, our newest bass player hasn't really able to contribute on a record.

The band has always been one of the biggest names in the genre, but the punk mainstream - MTV and college radio - has pretty much avoided you. Is that kind of success something that you were ever after?
We're not commercially viable. We never really got a lot of airplay, though we were on MTV back in the heyday of Headbanger's Ball, but besides that we never really got a lot of that kind of stuff. To me that was always a good thing because we were never trying to be a commercial band, we always tried to be a cult band, and if we had started getting all that airplay and exposure, then we would have become what we never wanted to be. We never wanted to be a big rock star concert band, we're into the small clubs , with a couple of hundred people back in and just having fun. We're happy with the way the band's evolved over the years, with the paths that we've taken.

After 20 years, if things came to a close and you had to quit today, what would be the most important thing you could take away from your time with D.R.I.?
The experience of traveling around the world for the last 20 years. I've learned a lot, seen a lot of different cultures and different people all kinds of crazy stuff, and I appreciate it very much.

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