Face to Face

Live (Vagrant)
An interview with Trever Keith
by Austin Nash

Roll the lights back and hold your ear to the wall. Think about the bass players you’ve slept with and the children you’ve choked. It’s complicated, I know. Gagging on alcohol and smashing windows in the snow. But that’s show biz, and there ain’t no business…

Performances will be cheap in 1998 if they follow suit with 1997. One performance that you may have seen, and can only have enjoyed, was that put on by Face to Face. If you missed the show, you’re in luck: there’s a live album out on Vagrant Records. Here’re a few words from singer/rhythm man Trever Keith, and a couple words from my idiot face –

I looked at the Face to Face website today.
What’d you see?

Not much. It has all of these nice pictures and tantalizing links that go nowhere.
It’s under construction (gee). Which address did you use?

I’m not really sure. I did a wide search and found it through a link from somewhere else.
That site technically should not even be accessible right now. Let me give you the address of the currently functioning site. It’s www.unm… I can’t remember the whole thing. John? Do you know the full address? Hell… let me get that to you later. Wait… www.unm.edu.junelson.com. I know that’s kind of a pain in the butt. It’s a really good site. And our new address, incidentally is www.facetoface1.com. I’m hoping that will be done next month. It’s going to have lots of really cool shit on it, but the guy doing it for us is really slow.

Maybe that comment will stub your toe on his ass.
That’s right.

I have the new live album, it’s cool, I like it a lot.
That’s cool. I’m glad.

What do you think Face to Face adds to the music by playing live? What does that bring to the plate?
One of our strong points is our live show, it always has been, so it makes sense to me to do a live album. If you compare record sales to live attendance, it totally tips the scale in the live direction. You take bands that are selling tons and tons of records now like Sugar Ray and such. They’re doing less than a thousand people across the country where we’ve got about a hundred thousand of each of our records sold and we deal with a thousand to fifteen hundred on a headlining tour. So obviously our strong point is our live show, and we really wanted to capture the energy of a live show. Having been around for a while, we felt we had enough material to pull it off. It’s the Foghat rule: The fourth album must be live.

I saw you guys play a live show here in Boston about a year ago, that was sponsored by a radio station, WBCN, I believe. The place was crowded, and all the kids new the words to the songs, but when it was over there was no applause or appreciation of any sort. They booed the radio guy off the stage and threw shit at him. When the show was over everybody just walked away.
I remember that! That was really weird. We’re not much of a radio band right now. We’ve never had much success with it in the past. We had a hit called “Disconnected” that did OK but never really lit the world on fire. Typically, the kids who buy our records don’t listen to the radio. Radio grows ever-crappier. People begin to get disgusted with it, as I have. I can’t believe the garbage they play now. I think they were thinking, “Fuck you, get off the stage, we came to see the band. Not to listen to your stupid DJ talk about a radio station.” The reason we did that show is that we wanted to play in Boston, and we wanted to put it somewhere other than the Middle East. We were concerned with how many people would actually show up, and we were even more concerned that most of the venues were 21 and over. So we asked our label to set up a show in conjunction with a radio station, I believe it was a free show, and get as many people in there as possible to have a good show in Boston.

Have you ever heard of the On Line Guitar Archive at www.harmonycentral.com?
No, what is that?

It’s an immense database where anybody can sit down and pick out the chords of any song, document it using a method called “tablature,” and submit it to the OLGA for other people to have fun with. There’s quite a few Face to Face tabs in there.
No kidding? That’s really cool.

Yeah, you should check it out. There’re a lot of people out there playing Face to Face songs. Covering your tunes and you don’t know about it.
How rad would that be if in 20 or 30 years you have these old guys covering Face to Face songs in bars.

You guys seem to be fond of doing covers as well.
Yeah, it breaks up the monotony. A six or eight week tour and you’re playing the same damn songs every night, even to play 10 seconds of somebody else’s song is great. We don’t know many cover songs all the way through.

I’ve come across a few compilations with Face to Face on them. Before You Were Punk had you doing a Cure song…
We’ve covered a million songs. There was a Blondie song, Elvis, Police, Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black,” a couple of The Smiths songs. The Smiths are one of my favorite bands of all time (chuckle), “Please Please Let Me Get What I Want”, and “Reel Around The Fountain.”

I can’t believe it, that’s fantastic!
Something you’d probably never expect to hear.

Maybe you can play one if you come around again. Are you coming around again? I know you just toured for two years straight.
We haven’t toured the US in six or seven months, but it looks like we might go back out on a packaged deal with the Reverend Horton Heat, and we’re hoping for a band like the Royal Crown Review or something. That would make a very diverse bill with a big swing band, a ’90s punk band, and Reverend Horton Heat. It’ll be great. Look for that in March or April this year. Do you mind holding a second?

No, not at all.

(Here I went and got a beer across town, saw Green Booger and The Tree Huggers, finished my thesis on the voyeuristic tendencies of Portagee house painters, and lit up a smoke. I’ll not transcribe what I heard Katy say in the background during this time. Car horn outside, scribbling on paper, chair creaking, groan, traffic sounds, fart, me singing about cheese…)

Hold on one sec…

All right.

(Katy working chopsticks, sipping of coffee, somebody dropped a dog, I wish I had a HamDog from 7-Eleven…)

Austin. Sorry about that.

What’s the story with the master tapes from the Econo Live album being burned up in a semi-trailer?
The Econo Live album is something we did on the onset of the recording of the last album. Before the self-titled album was recorded, we booked a short tour of small clubs, like 50 to 100 seaters, and we only told the people on our mailing list about the shows. We used the shows to demo up the new songs. We recorded all the shows, and put them on a limited-edition 10-inch and again made them available to those on our mailing list. It was a fan-based mailing thing for those people. That came and went, there were 3000 copies of it, and it was over. After that, once the new album was released, when we did our first couple of shows in support of it here in Los Angeles, a company called Westwood One was at the Roxy recording those shows to broadcast them live on the radio. We listened to the tapes and thought they sounded really cool, which is what gave us the idea for a live album. When we went to track down the tapes a couple of months later, we found out that the original recordings of the shows at the Roxy had burned down in the truck somewhere in Texas. So we thought, shit, that kind of ruins the idea of our live record, and so we decided to book another show and record it as a live record. We had Westwood One come back out, booked two more shows at the Roxy, recorded them both, took the best recordings from both shows and made one live record.

Tell me about the new Lady Luck label you started.
Lady Luck records is my label, with the help of some guys at Vagrant. Vagrant is the label that put out the Econo Live album and the vinyl version of the Face to Face self-titled album. We went ahead and threw a Lady Luck logo on it to bring up the awareness of the label. I’m doing the live record with Vagrant and Lady Luck and it’s technically our first release. It’s set up with the intention of finding new bands and putting out records to give people a chance. I don’t have any bands yet. I’m looking for bands right now.

Where are you looking?
I get a lot of demos from people when we’re out on tour. It’s an excellent way to scout things out.

Have you ever heard of a band called Blink 182?
Sure. They’re great. We’ve played with them a number of times. They played some shows with us on the second Warped tour, and we’ve had them on a bunch of our own shows here and there.

Did you notice that they sound very similar to Face to Face?
Sure, but I can hear the differences too.

So you were also out with Down By Law then too?
Yeah, they were there too. Now that I think of it, the track that Blink 182 recorded for the Before You Were Punk comp that Vagrant put out, I was there in the studio giving them pointers and stuff, and ended up singing the backup vocals for it.

So it all comes full circle.
We all know each other. We help each other out.

Now the whole world knows.
Of course! Actually, I’m not incredibly close with those guys, but I was there for the sessions and I consider them friends. They’re really cool.

So what’s in store for Face to Face, what’s the foremost thing on your mind?
The foremost thing is new material, we’ve got about half of a record put together right now. We’re just sort of woodshedding, getting introspective, and looking at what we want to do with our next album. We’re not concentrating on much else past that, as a band. We’ve got a tour coming up and we’re hoping to use it sort of like we did with the Econo Live tour, to test out new stuff. But hopefully we’ll get right back in the studio after that.

Hey, don’t you cover a Descendents song on the Big Choice album?
Yes we do. “Bikage.” Big influence on the band. I’ve loved them for a long time. That brings up another full circle story I’ll let you in on. When they were out on the last Warped tour last summer, we played about a week of shows with them. That was exciting for me because I didn’t even discover them ’til they were broken up. I found out they were really great guys, we hit it off great, and they asked me to get up on stage and sing “Bikage” with them in Vancouver. Then a few days later, we had Milo up on stage with us and he sang “Bikage” while we backed him up. It was great fun.

I saw Descendants downstairs at the Middle East. One of the most insanely sweaty shows I’ve ever been to down there. That and Helmet. Bill Stevenson and Stephen Egerton do a lot of recordings now. Is there anything that you would like to tell the world, the part that’s listening anyway, while you have the mic?
I guess I could snub any of the rumors that Face to Face was ever breaking up or taking off any undetermined amount of time or going on hiatus. The band is going more full steam than ever before. You can expect to see more touring and this live recording is a good indication of where we’ve come from and where we’re going. We’re hopeful about the future, and I think we’re getting to be better performers, songwriters, and record makers all the time.

There you have it folks. Some cool words from a cool guy in a Rock ‘n’ Roll band. That’s why I do this. Also I want to win a game of “Six Degrees of Bill Stevenson” if anyone wants to play.