Squad Five-O - March 1998
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On the afternoon of March 26, 1998, HM assistant editor Brian McGovern caught up with the always-on-tour punk-ska band Squad Five-O, and chatted with singer/guitarist/singwriter Jeff Fortson about the about everything from the new record (Fight the System) to the glam metal they love. It was, by all counts, pretty cool. Here, submitted for your approval, is the uncut/unedited transcript of the conversation.
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I've got the tape recorder rolling. Actually, I looked at the tape, and it's the exact tape I used last time I interviewed you.
"Awesome."
Yeah... Well, tell me about the past year. What's gone on in your lives, and in the band since I last talked to you?
"Well, we've pretty much been on tour, like, the whole year, basically. We're on a spring tour right now with a couple of bands from our label, Dear Ephesus and Johnny Respect. We started touring last June, and we were pretty much on the road all the way to Thanksgiving. And then we had all of December off, up until New Year's Eve. We had a show New Year's Eve in Colorado, and then we were out on the West Coast for about a month. And then in February we recorded our new album. And now we're back out on the road. We've been out since the beginning of March, and we'll be out till May 15th. And May 30th I get married."
Cool. I don't think I knew about that. What's her name?
"Her name's Kelly. We've been dating for like five years."
That's my girlfriend's name... we've only been dating for a year though.
"Yeah, we've been dating since we were in high school."
Are there any kind of cool road stories, or just cool things that have happened on the road?
"Well, we're in Detroit right now, and we went downtown last night. I had never been to downtown Detroit. The first night we got her, we went to Canada, and we were hangin' out. We went back to go find our car, and it had been towed. We went into this donut shop, because there was this police car there, and they wouldn't even give us a ride. So we had to walk two or three miles to the tow place. It took us like 30 minutes, and it was freezing. It was like 20 degrees. And when we got there, they made us pay a hundred bucks to get the car back. And then we came back to America, and we crossed the border at, like, 4:00 in the morning, and they made us pull over and searched the car. That was a pretty exciting story. There's a lot of stories. We've been a lot of places and met a lot of people. That's one of the more exciting ones. There was a time last summer when we had a run-in with some guys who were real tipsy, and wanted to beat us up because we were skateboarding. And we barely got away with our boards. It was pretty funny. You meet a lot of strange people on tour, but you also meet a lot of good people, like all our friends in California."
David at the label was telling me a little about, like in California, when you visited with some other bands, like, that whole experience...
"Yeah, we became real good friends with The Dingees. We hung out with them a lot. They were real nice to us and really good to us. The guys from The Supertones, we saw them a little bit and they were really good to us. And we also became good friends with the Halo Friendlies, and we played a few shows with them here and there. We became really good friends with those bands and we've really gotten to know them personal level. And we really consider them all like friends now, more than anything. We're really stoked on all the people we've met. We need to give, like, a shout out to the Jones Family in California, who put us up."
David had mentioned some problems, where you were thinking about getting off the label for a while...
"Well, when we were out in California, we were supposed to be out there playing shows, and then working our way up to Seattle where we were gonna record. And we got out there, and all the shows that the label had booked for us kinda fell through. And so we're sitting out there with no shows, trying to book ourselves some weekend shows, just to try to survive for that month. And we felt really abandoned by the label, and we felt like they left us out there high and dry, and like it was all on our shoulders. And by the end of January, we had little to money. We were living off, like, five dollars for three or four days at a time. Luckily, we had good people putting us up in their houses, and they's feed us when they could. But we just felt real abandoned, and we felt like we were gonna break up. We thought we'd rather just go home, because we didn't even have money to even get up to Seattle. And we called the label and told 'em we wanted off, because we felt like they were dragging us down. It felt like everything was going down. We got out there and had no shows, which they were supposed to book for us, and that they had told us they had for us. And we were stuck out there, throwing together weekend shows, living off merchandise money. And we got a little upset, and we said that either we were gonna break up or walk. We told 'em what it would take for us to get to Seattle to record, and our van was acting up, we couldn't get it worked on. There was no way it was gonna make it to Seattle. And so they made up for all that. They paid us for all the shows we should've had, they flew us up to Seattle, and they gave us the amount of time that we wanted in the studio. So they made up for that, and it worked out. We're still talking to them, and still trying to work things out, because there's still a little tension, I think, because a lot of feelings were hurt while we were out there. And there's things to work out, but at least we're on, like, a talking basis now."
That's cool. What do you think that you learned as a band from that experience?
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