Reel Big Mess

Everybody knows Reel Big Fish, they just might not know it. Ask your friends and neighbors what they know about Reel Big Fish, and chances are, with some exceptions, that you’ll get blank stares in return. But sing the chorus from "Sell Out," Reel Big Fish’s 1997 smash, and I guarantee that anyone who was listening to the radio or watching MTV four years ago will know exactly what you’re singing. Propelled by that song, and the surrounding explosion of ska-core music, Reel Big Fish are making it in the music industry.

Huntington Beach spawned this seven-piece — Aaron Barret (vocals / guitar), Matt Wong (bass), Andrew Gonzales (drums), Dan Reagan (trombone), Tavis Werts (trumpet), Grant Barry (trombone), and Scott Klopfenstein (trumpet/vocals) — from out of the underground, and into the limelight of temporary stardom. Their album, Turn The Radio Off, charted in the Top 100, and on the strength of "Sell Out," sold over a half million copies. They subsequently got the opportunity to open up for bands like Kiss, The Cure, and even Coolio. Reel Big Fish were veritable stars; they had the alt-rock hit of the summer, were moving lots of units, playing huge shows, and just having a good time being their, wacky, energetic selves.

Unfortunately, the sad world of popular music is ever-shifting, and just as fast as the world had gotten hooked by Reel Big Fish’s ska-punk stylings, they were moving on to the "next big thing." But fortunately, this did not deter Reel Big Fish. They just kept doing what they had been doing, touring incessantly and putting out quality albums. In 1998, they put out Why Do They Rock So Hard, and they have a new album that’s ready to drop.

Here’s where the plot thickens. Label darlings at the height of their popularity, they now are in the last place any band wants to be: major label purgatory. Needless to say, this is not a pleasant place to be. On a recent sunny afternoon, The Synthesis took the opportunity to discuss these and other issues with vocalist/guitarist Aaron Barret, who was definitely not his usual, goofy self.

I’ve heard that you guys like to say kooky shit and do kind of silly interviews.
You never know. Sometimes we do really lame and boring ones.

How do you feel today?
I feel okay today. I feel like giving some good mutual information and some facts about stuff. Unless you want me to bullshit you and say lots of crazy, stupid stuff?

Sorry, but I have too much journalistic integrity. Besides, you wouldn’t want to be misrepresented in print, would you?
You get used to it. It happens all the time.

How’s the tour going?
The tour? It hasn’t started yet, but I’m sure it’ll be great once it does. Tuesday’s our first show, in St. George, Utah, then we go to Las Vegas, and after that I don’t know, but I’m sure someone knows.

All I know is that you’ll be in Chico on the 26^th.
That’s our last show before we go back home.

Where’s home?
We live in Orange County. It’s a nice place to live.

So when’s the album gonna be out?
[assumes contemptuous tone] Well let me tell ya’: we spent the whole year 2000 writing songs and recording, just going crazy in the studio. And we turned in 16 songs to the record company and they didn’t like them; they told us the producer that we used, they never wanted us to work with him in the first place, even after they gave us $150,000 dollars to record with him. You would think that if they didn’t want us to work with him that they wouldn’t have given it to us. But record companies are silly that way.

Did you tell them to suck on a lemon?
Actually we don’t know what’s going on with them right now. I think they’re trying to, I don’t know…

Are they trying to give you guys the boot?
I don’t know, we kind of wish they would kick us off.

Really? I’ll put that in bold print for you. Maybe they’ll take the hint.
Whatever you want to do. I didn’t say anything bad about them.

You just told the truth, that’s all.
It’s business, you know. You gotta do the business. But anyway, that’s what happened with that, so now we’re just going to go on tour, and just play until either they just put it out, or someone puts it out, or we record more songs or whatever. It’s in limbo right now.

But the band’s not gonna break up or anything? The world just wouldn’t be the same without Reel Big Fish.
We’re still gonna keep it together and keep doing it. We’ll see what happens. We’re not giving up just yet, we’ve been doing this for about ten years.

That’s kind of a bummer. You got anything happier to talk about?
We just went to Europe for five weeks. We played every night for five weeks.

I heard that ska is still really big over there.
Yeah it’s getting really big over there. It wasn’t really big a few years ago, but it’s starting to hit now. It’s kind of like it was in 1997 over here. They really like it over there; all the kids have Less Than Jake shirts, and they go crazy at the shows; they love it. So we’re going over there again in May. But you can’t get our records at a normal record store over there, you have to order them and get them imported.

What’s the deal with that?
Because our record company never released our stuff over there. I guess they feel that Europe isn’t important, even though millions and millions of people live in Europe. I mean Germany is one of the biggest markets for music in the world. It’s just another one of those business things. But even they can only get the imports. They all had our records, and they knew all the words. They weren’t just like "Oh, an American band, let’s go see them!" They were real fans, they knew who we were and they knew all the words. So that was cool.

I don’t understand why your record company is so mean to you? What’d you guys ever do to them?
We just sold a half of a million records and toured the world. That’s what we did.

It just doesn’t seem right.
Well, that’s what record companies do. They ruin bands. But that’s about all that’s going on right now. We’re in the middle, just kind of waiting for something to happen, I guess sometimes it’s easier to make things happen. Like with Europe, we waited for so long for them to put the record out over there, so we could go over there, but, you know, they never put it out, so we never went over there. And it went on like that for years and years, but now we just decided that we’re just going to go over there because lots of people know who we are and hopefully someone will release our records properly.

Why don’t you just do it yourself?
It’s very complicated. There’s contracts and things. We’re trying to work it out. We’ve got lawyers on it right now.

Trying to liberate you guys?
Yeah. I’m sure it’ll be all right, though. I’m not trying to tell you my sad story and have you cry for me.

But it’s just not right that you guys are getting the shaft. The music public needs to know these things.
I think everybody knows that the record companies screw bands all the time.

I just don’t think they know how bad. But you and I will expose the record companies.
[mockingly] We’ll show them! I don’t know, I think it’s worth it. We did reach a lot of people with our music, and we sold a lot of records and that was cool.

Plus, you’re still playing around the world.
We haven’t had a record out in two years, and we can still play around the world and draw 1,000 or 1,500 people. It’s just of those low points where you got to try real hard and make things happen, because other people aren’t making them happen for me.

Well don’t despair, things will get better.
I despaired long enough.

You should write a song about it. A really sad ska song.
Well I did write a bunch of sad songs, because the whole year of 2000 my record company was like "We don’t like that song, we don’t like that song, you suck." So there’s a bunch of weird crazy songs on the album, cause we didn’t know; we were trying to write every kind of song. We were like (to the record company) "Do you like this song, how about this song, no, you don’t like anything."

I hope I get to hear it someday.
It’s gonna be a good album. We’ll get it out eventually, somehow. Hopefully by summertime we’ll have everything worked out with the record company and the album. It’s a good album, we used a lot of different stuff on it: piano, and…I don’t remember. It was too long ago.

Such bitterness.
Who’s bitter?

You are.
I know. I’ve always been bitter.

That’s not what I heard. I thought you guys were all happy and zany and ska-y. I hope you guys still jump around on stage.
Oh yeah, we love to play. That’s why we keep doing it, is so we can play shows. As long as we can keep doing that we’ll be happy. I mean the business side of everything is really depressing and awful, but going on tour is what we love to do. We still have a great time. So we’re not gonna be on stage all frowning and stuff, we’re gonna be jumping around and have a good time. We’re still out looking for a good time.

Well I’ll see you at the show?
Awesome.

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