After All These Years

In the 10 years since Lagwagon’s first album, Duh, catapulted the band from Santa Barbara angry youths to underground new school punk demi-gods, frontman and songwriter Joey Cape has obviously had his fill of shitty interviews.
“I’m trying to do an e-mail interview right now,” relates Cape via a sketchy cell phone connection, “but the guy I’m doin’ it with is just a fucking asshole. I’m just not into it. I was actually right in the middle of telling this guy he’s an asshole.”
Not exactly perfect timing. A sketchy cell phone connection and a long bus ride certainly don’t help set a mood conducive to easy going conversation. “We’re driving, driving to Jersey right now, but we’re not there yet, and I don’t know why; we left like 50 hours ago and it’s supposed to be like a six hour drive,” grumbles the frontman. However, after an aborted connection and a brief interlude of phone tag, both band and bus arrive safely in New Jersey and Cape’s mood noticeably improves.
“We’re having a great time, it’s really going well,” says Cape in regard to the band’s current tour, which began last month in California, swings the band up through Canada and east to Massachusetts before circling back west to California in June. The past decade has seen the band circle not just the United States, but the world: Japan, Europe, South America. The band still finds the often grueling act of touring somehow enjoyable. “We’re not burnt out on it, it’s fun, ya’ know. We’re still having a good a time. As long as it’s fun, you keep doing it. I mean, sometimes it gets to be a drag, it just depends. But overall, it’s fine,” says Cape.
Lagwagon’s current tour is in support of Blaze, their recently released sixth full-length for long time label Fat Wreck Chords. Cape is, of course, modestly approving of his band’s latest effort.
“I’m happy with it,” he says, adding after a moment, “It took us long time to get any record going.” Indeed. It’s been four years since 1998’s Let’s Talk About Feelings, the band’s last release of new material. But according to Cape, it wasn’t for a lack of trying. “It was just really a matter of us taking a long time to get the chemistry together; we recorded it three times and weren’t really happy with the music we were making. We just didn’t really feel like the stuff we were recording was all that good. We didn’t feel like the quality was all that great.” Eventually, however, the band clicked and the finished product, Blaze, is definitely a testament to the band’s drive to keep pushing the boundaries of a genre they helped create.
Unlike many of the bands that followed in Lagwagon’s footsteps, achieving fame and fortune, Cape assures me that fame and fortune are definitely not something he strives for.
“I’m not really interested in that at all,” says Cape about the otherworldly success enjoyed by many of the bands Lagwagon has shared the stage with, such as Blink 182 and fellow State Street-ers The Ataris. “I’ll tell you why: the sorts of things that come with that never really appealed to me. We’re fortunate in that we’ve been able to sustain ourselves and play music for a lot of years now, put out a lot of records, and that’s good enough. That’s the real answer.”
For Cape and his bandmates, success is best judged by standards other than money and mass appeal. “I think success, as far creating any kind of art, is about doing what you want to do, when you want to do it, and being able to allocate the time to do it, by having a certain amount of monetary success, so that you can actually do it. But those sorts of great riches that bands go for, they include things like fame at a level where your life changes and things are compromised and that sort of thing just never appealed to me at all.” In other words, don’t expect the next Lagwagon video to be tearing up the charts on TRL any time soon. “I would really hate to be a famous person. I think it would be an extraordinarily miserable experience. That’s why I was never really interested in MTV or that sort of mainstream success,” sums up Cape.
Truth be told, Lagwagon seems content with the relatively comfortable, yet still rather subdued, amount of acclaim that they have garnered up till now. “I’m just happy with where we’re at right now,” he concedes. “It’s sort of like, if it’s not broken then don’t fix it. We’re able to make records, we’re able to tour, we’re able to do what we’ve been doing for a long time and we enjoy it.”
But Lagwagon isn’t the only outlet for Cape’s musical output. He also moonlights in Fat Wreck all-star cover band Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, as well as the somewhat weirder Bad Astronaut. According to Cape, though, these are all parts of the same whole.
“Everybody calls things side-projects, and I know I’ve been known to say that to about those other bands. But when I’m working on a Gimme Gimmes record or a Bad Astronaut record, I give it 100 percent. I look at it all as part of the same thing; something that I’m doing within the same spectrum.” He continues, “I love making music, and I’m really fortunate; I’m able to make it with different people and do different things. They all serve slightly different purposes. The Gimme Gimmes are just straight up fun, silly good times, hanging out with good friends and Bad Astronaut is definitely more of a nerd-oriented thing. Most of the guys in the band are engineers, and it’s more of a studio project. Lagwagon is Lagwagon. It’s what it’s been for years.”
Other projects aside, for now Cape is all about Lagwagon. “For me, whatever I’m working on becomes the prority. Right now, I’m really just in Lagwagonville. A little while ago, we finished a new Gimme Gimmes album. I haven’t worked with Bad Astronaut in a long time, but we may try to do some stuff this summer; it just depends on if there’s going to be time, because Lagwagon’s kind of what I’m doing right now.”
This time around, there won’t be nearly as long of a wait between albums for Lagwagon aficionados, if all goes as planned. “We’re going to go home in the middle of June for about seven weeks or so, and we’ve been trying to figure out what we’re going to do. I’m writing right now, so we’re going to record some stuff with either Lagwagon or Bad Astronaut, we haven’t decided yet. Might be the Lagwagon guys are kind of into getting back into the studio and maybe putting out an EP or something. We just want to keep working.”
For Cape, it’s all about seizing the day. “Definitely going to try to do some recording in July, I just don’t know which band. Basically, I don’t want to waste any time. You don’t get any younger.”

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