EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH 36 CRAZYFISTS VOCALIST BROCK LINDOW

And so it is with great sadness that we come to the last of our Rockstar Mayhem Festival interviews. Sigh.

At the tour’s stop at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, we got the chance to sit down with the improbably named Brock Lindow, front man for metalcore stalwarts 36 Crazyfists. Lindow is an incredibly nice dude who had some really interesting things to say about doing a big travelling festival tour, how band members that live so far away from one another maintain a long-distance working relationship, and, of course, his beloved home state of Alaska. Check out out the full transcript after the jump.

[Referring to Vince’s humongous beard] I don’t do well in the heat anyway, and it’s been hot as shit on this tour, so I’m glad I don’t have the big beard now.

So other than the heat, how’s the tour going?

The tour is amazing, man. It’s been incredible.

How do you feel, as the front man, trying to get a big crowd like psyched up, performing for thousands of people as opposed to hundreds of people?

I feel challenged every second of it.

There’s a challenge?

You know, to be honest, [this tour has] been really surprisingly killer. We come out and almost every day there’s a “36” chant. We’re like, “What?” We’ve played here before, and I didn’t hear a chant then. So it shows that things are growing, and it’s really cool. I’m not very good at banter between songs. I just wish we’d keep going because my banter isn’t that good. “Oh, we got to check something out. Oh, how are you doing?” But I’m getting better at it. It’s not easy when you got five to ten thousand people in the crowd and the majority of them don’t know who you are, as opposed to three-hundred kids in a room that are singing all the words – that’s easy. It’s like “Do what I tell you and you will.” It’s good for me because it takes a lot of practice to get good at it, and if you’re not doing this type of stuff then you don’t really know. I think that just being confident is a big part of it, and I’m getting more confident.

Cool man. And it sounds like all the bands are getting along.

Yeah!

We heard about these crazy barbecues every night.

Every night. We started that, by the way.

You did?

We also started the margarita mixers in the parking lot.

We haven’t heard about those.

Yeah, there haven’t been a lot of them because it’s more expensive to do that, but we did have a couple of good margarita mixers.

What did you make for your barbecue?

Well, our bass player [Mick Whitney] is like a huge chef. He marinates his steaks for six days. He makes a Guinness marinade.

The guys from Airbourne were telling us about that.

Yeah, we used their bus for the preparation because they’re our buddies. It’s mostly beef for sure. We had some chicken shish kabob stuff, some shrimps, and typical barbecue stuff.

Do you get tired of every single press story that’s about you guys mentioning the fact that you’re from Alaska, or are you just like “Yeah Alaska!”?

Yeah, I’m the flag flyer man. I’m very prideful. It seems almost ridiculous sometimes. I’m like, “Why do I have like ninety Alaska t-shirts?” But I really love the place, and I dread every second that I’m not there. It’s a very weird thing for me. I’m connected to that place. I can’t even explain it. When I get home, I breathe it in and I’m like “Thank you for letting me be back home.” I really love it, so I don’t get tired of it.

But you don’t even live there anymore.

I do. I moved home three years ago.

Oh, okay, but the rest of the guys live in Portland?

Two of the guys are in Portland and two of us are in Anchorage.

It must be fucking hell to practice.

Yeah, we don’t practice as much as we used to. We’re touring so much, we do a couple of weeks before we go on a run or whatever, but mostly it’s just getting together for like writing and recording or a little tune-up practice here and there. We don’t do it like we used to do it. Everybody has their own thing going on in life and don’t have time for the daily practice. We’re slacking.

Does the writing get done by e-mail? Are you sending riffs back and forth?

Yeah, this last record [The Tide and Its Takers] was the first time I ever did that because basically I told the guys that. I’ve been in the process of writing with these guys every record. At least being in the room and listening to the drummer and guitar player hammer out stuff for eight hours a day. It’s the most boring thing you can ever imagine, because these guys can just look at each other and be like “What do you think of this? Oh, you didn’t like that? Whatever.” So this time I was like “You know guys, I gotta stay home.” We were off for a year and a half from the last record. I got married two years ago. I was barely with my wife. I just got a boxer, and I wanted to be with my dogs. I was like, “You guys do your thing, send me the music and I’ll write to it.” At first I didn’t think that they were even going to buy into it, but they did and it was so great. They would send me stuff e-mail and then I would run over to my buddy’s studio and I’d throw down demo vocals and send it right back. I was like “Dude, technology rules!” The only bad part about it I think was that I would really be feeling something, and they would be like “I’m not really feeling that.” Whereas before we would write the songs, and we’d practice them all day long and they would get it more. They were actually just hearing things first time, and you know you gotta hear things a few time before you really get it, especially with our band. So I had to deal with that a lot. I’m like, “Just listen to it a little more and then tell me if you don’t really like it.” I think that was really the biggest challenge.

But it obviously worked out in the end.

Yeah, absolutely. In the end I did go down for like two weeks and re-did all the demos with them because there were questions and [it seemed like] maybe we should be together. So I did kind of bend and go down two weeks before Christmas and do all the demos again and listened to their input. It was better to do it that way, but initially I stayed home for six months and wrote.

Cool. So what’s next for you guys? You have a few more weeks on this.

Yeah, I think we have nine days left or something and then we do two weeks with Walls of Jericho and It Dies Today. Then we go directly into Trivium, All That Remains, and The Human Abstract. Then we go directly from that to In Flames and Gojira.

Wow.

I’m stoked. And it’s full Canadian and full U.S. tour. We haven’t done a full Canadian tour before and we’re pretty much Canadians. We’re on tour all the way until after next summer. We have like three weeks off for Christmas, then we go to Australia and Japan, Asia, do Europe with Bullet for My Valentine and Unearth and the ball’s rolling.

-AR & VN