To paraphrase a Chinese proverb, change is growth, growth is life and those that refuse to accept change run the very real risk of being trampled by the new things coming down the line behind them. Ironically, few genres in the pop canon view change with more distaste than punk rock; once a band appears and makes an impact with a particular sound, the conventional wisdom among fans of the genre is that the band in question has no reason or license to expand or explore other avenues beyond that point and to do so is met with revulsion on a massive scale. Some bands simply play along to that mindset; the Sex Pistols continue touring behind just one album – and playing the same set list – thirty years after Nevermind The Bollocks was released to ecstatic crowds on a nightly basis.
That might work for some bands, but it does not work for Roger Miret.
Miret is upfront about the fact that, yes, he was once an angry young man – and in some ways, maybe he still is – but he is not the same man he was when he first formed Agnostic Front twenty-eight years ago – not exactly. Having interviewed Miret before, I was stunned by how warm, relaxed and talkative he is now and, presumably, it has everything to do with all of the changes that have happened in his life. Since the recording sessions that yielded Roger Miret and The Disasters‘ third album, My Riot, in March of 2006 (when last I spoke with him, the singer was on his way “into the city” to continue tracking for the album), the singer has moved away of his beloved New York City to Arizona, gotten married and had a baby with another one due soon. Miret has, in his own words, grown up yet unlike so many other vintage punk bands, he hasn’t become a pale and mawkish caricature of himself – in fact he’s gotten better with age in a lot of ways. While he still holds down the aggro-hardcore-punk traditions he grew up with in Agnostic Front, his work with The Disasters has become more autobiographical with each successive release. It’s a compelling metamorphosis to hear and, as the band works on a follow-up to My Riot, one can’t help but wonder what creative epiphanies will surface in the studio this time.
Bill Adams vs. Roger Miret of Agnostic Front
RM: Hello?
BA: Hi, Roger?
RM: Hi, how are you?
BA: Very well thank you – I’ve got to be honest, you threw me for a loop because I wasn’t expecting your call yet; I was surprised when you were an hour early.
RM: Yeah man, I’m in a different time zone and I still haven’t gotten used to it – I was going to call you an hour earlier even. I take a walk with my wife and my baby every morning – we do three miles – and we were out doing that. I was getting ready to call you at that point and she said, “Wait a minute, that can’t be right.” So I waited an hour and I still called you wrong.
BA: It’s no trouble at all man, so what are you doing on the West coast anyway? Last we spoke, you were still living in New York.
RM: I moved out here almost two years ago now; oh, it has been two years. I came out here, relocated, met a wonderful woman and we relocated here so she could finish her studies at ASU – her studies are in the family research program – and while we were here she got pregnant and we had a baby – Abby is seventeen months old – and now we’re having another baby.
BA: Jesus – congratulations man.
RM: Thanks. The second one’s due a week before Abby’s second birthday so I guess I cam out here to start a family.
BA: Apparently!
RM: [laughing]
BA: Congratulations again. So last time we spoke, you were talking about the hotrods in New York and a bunch of other stuff that was going on. I’m assuming that’s all kind of all fallen away and you’re concentrating more now on Agnostic Front and The Disasters. I’m assuming that the Disasters are still going too….
RM: The Disasters are still going, in fact everything I had going before I moved is still going believe it or not. The Disasters are going really good – we just finished fifteen dates mostly on the West coast, we’re going to do some stuff out on the East coast soon, I’m still doing a lot of stuff with the car club – I’ve got a small crew here, but I stick closer to the house than I used to.
BA: Well, that’s cool, and you’re taking Agnostic Front out on the road again – that’s supposed to be starting up very soon isn’t it?
RM: Next week.
BA: How’d all this come about then? Correct me if I’m wrong, but the most recent Agnostic Front album is about a year old.
RM: Yeah, that’s about right. We never did anything in America behind it; we wanted to let it get out, let it circulate as well as it would be able to, let people hear it on myspace, and then we released a video for it – which was our first video release for the record – and then we went ahead and funded another video ourselves for a song called “For My Family.” We let it cure here in the States, but in the meantime, we’ve been to Europe three times behind it, we only recently got back from a full South American tour which was very successful – all of the major cities sold out – and now it’s time to hit the States; we’re going to do it in three different parts, but we’re going to do them.
BA: That’s cool, and if you were selling out South America and Europe, that tells me that the record’s been received very well so far. That said though, the last time we spoke I got the impression that you never actually stop writing or touring. Can people expect to hear some new, unreleased tunes this time out?
RM: To be perfectly honest, I think at this point we’ve come to a really nice blend of almost all of our album material in the set lists. Of course, we’re going to focus more on the Warriors album – and when I say ‘focus more,’ I mean you’ll probably hear at least five of those songs because we are out there to support it and we do love playing it – but you’ll also get some from Another Voice and the majority of the set lists have always relied heavily on the old school, Victim In Pain, Cause For Alarm stuff, and of course the Riot Riot Upstart stuff and a little bit of everything else. I’m pretty excited about it – it’s gonna be fun.
BA: That’s cool, and you said you’re doing this tour in three parts?
RM: Yeah. The first leg starts next week and it’s about two weeks long – well a touch under that. They’re all about two weeks long actually; we’re doing the Northeast, then right around Thanksgiving we have to fly to Costa Rica for a show, then beginning December ninth we’re doing the West coast leg that will cover California, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. We’re going to do all that in two weeks, and then we also have a Mexico date in there too in Tijuana. That ends on the 22nd – right before Christmas – and we’ll come home to spend the holidays with our families and on January 23rd we’ll begin the South part which will consist of Virginia through Florida and into Texas. The only thing we’ll have left at that point will be the Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland and that area. We’ll have to wait for the weather to clear up before we do that though.
BA: Wow – you’ve already got a lot of this stuff laid out in front of you, are there any other plans set up for next year? New releases and so on?
RM: I’m actually working on a new Disasters record right now. The challenge with The Disasters though is that I relocated and at the same time a couple of the guys came with me but we have a new drummer and a new bass player here in Arizona where I live now. I’ve always had Rhys – my other guitar player and he now lives in Texas. We just did this recent tour and we’ve got a bunch of new songs and we’re going to start pre-production soon as well as put out a single, and my goal is to have a new Disasters record written by February. It’s really already in the bag, it’s just a matter of getting together as a band and collecting all the pieces. Rhys just had a baby boy last week too – these are the reasons why I went from touring nine months out of the year straight to doing two weeks on and time off and then two weeks on then time off thing. I want to spend time with my family; I think that’s important for me.
BA: Well sure – given I’m in a similar situation, are you finding that it’s a little different when punks grow up?
RM: [laughing] That’s exactly it! We grow up! The truth is that this is how I live my life. My motto was always, ‘Live fast and die young’ and those Disasters songs are very genuine in that regard; any Agnostic Front fans out there should check out The Disasters because that band really opens me up. If you want a clear view of who Roger Miret is, The Disasters is a journey of me prior to Agnostic Front, me in Agnostic Front and, because I don’t feel like the radar’s on me, I open up a little more in that material. In those songs I talk about a lot of stuff that happened – like throwing garbage cans through a McDonalds window because I was anti-corporation in broad daylight – and then fast-forward to today where a lot of things are the same, but I won’t do those sorts of things anymore; I might throw a garbage can through a McDonalds window at four or five in the morning now, or I have enough friends that I’ll make a call and they’ll do it for me [laughing] and I’ll get the same satisfaction. That’s how things used to be back when; we used to strike and then deal with it but now I think a little more about it first and then I strike.
BA: That makes sense but I know you’re standing there saying it and laughing to make light because your wife’s standing right there saying, “No you won’t.”
RM: Yeah, she’s looking and laughing at me.
BA: I do see what you’re saying about the Disasters records though – it seemed like on the last one you were getting back to that street punk sound that you had back when.
RM: Yeah, I think the last Disasters record was my favorite one of all. The first one was really raw and we were touching on unfamiliar zones because we didn’t think we were going to be a band. It was songs that I had written and given to my friends, I told them to meet me in the studio and we ended up loving the outcome so we decided to be a band; that’s how it all started. It was just songs that I had and I thought were really great songs and Agnostic Front was heading in a different direction so they weren’t feeling them but as a creative need, I felt that I needed to get those songs across. Agnostic Front actually used to play all those songs in sound check and the majority of them were written for Agnostic Front but they wanted to something different and that was fine. Then for the sophomore album we approached it more in the “Oi” vein; just no-frills straight-up rock n’ roll and we left out a lot of the stuff that was really cool about the first record like the piano licks and the female backing vocals. There are a lot of really good songs on that second record – don’t get me wrong – but I missed that piano and organs and then there was that acoustic song–
BA: I was gonna say, I really liked that acoustic song.
RM: –And then we had the reggae ending of "Janie & Johnny." It was the same band, but we really felt comfortable.
BA: Of course – now with Agnostic Front, that’s not the same beast but does any of what you’re doing carry over one way or the other?
RM: Well, let’s face it – there are people that like both. There are people that don’t like The Disasters at all – how do you expect me to do another Agnostic Front? Why would I? Agnostic Front is the band that is everything I think of when I think about hardcore. It’s a genuine band and it is very real – but why would I start another hardcore band? Why should I? I mean, it’s a little different, but it’s all street punk rock n’ roll to me. By the same token, there are people that like The Disasters and can’t stand Agnostic Front and they’re very vocal about it; I’ve had people walk up to me and say as much. It would be great if everybody liked both, but that doesn’t work all the time and it is true that Agnostic Front is a much bigger, more popular band, but it also has a lot more history. I hope that The Disasters get more of a chance and, as I say, it’s a great opportunity to get to know me really well. It’s a journey through my life before Agnostic Front and in the early years of Agnostic Front; if you want to know what it was like in the late Seventies and early Eighties in that New York hardcore scene, the lyric sheets for that band are like reading a book – it’s incredible.
BA: That’s absolutely true and, in fact, that acoustic song on the third record is my favorite song that you’ve ever written – I’m not going to lie to you.
RM: Really?!
BA: Yeah – I love that tune man.
RM: Well, you know what? There have only ever been three acoustic songs ever written for The Disasters – “New York City” on the second record started out as an acoustic song and it was absolutely beautiful acoustically. It was outside the comfort zone for the other guys in the band so we recorded it as a full group but, I’ll tell you something, someday I will record it solo acoustic because is way more genuine than what wound up on the record originally. It’s just a song about my life as a child growing up in New York City and it comes across better acoustically I think. Then there’s the one on the current album just let me open a little more than I think anyone would have expected on a Disasters album. The more I think about it, “Gal Friend” was the name of the acoustic song on the first record that ended up getting done with a full band. I finally convinced the boys to let me do one on the most recent album and I think it went alright.
BA: I like it because you can pick everything out; you can pick out the lyrics without reading the liner notes….
RM: The new one has an acoustic song that I already have recorded. We did it because my guitar player’s mother just passed away and we wrote it for her and played it at the funeral. It was just the guitar part in that case because he wrote the song and he asked me to sing on it. I had some lyrics that worked really well and it came out really beautifully.
BA: That’s cool. Now, obviously people expect something very different from Agnostic Front, is there any crossover as far as not being able to let a lyric go, but feeling like it should be an Agnostic Front song?
RM: Lyrically, a lot of shit crosses back and forth. The Disasters is basically a collage of the sounds of all my favorite bands as a kid and every time I write a song in the vein of one of my favorite bands, I always throw a lyrical reference into it. Like, if I think it sounds a little like The Business or there was something like them in there, I’ll reference it to The Business. There are songs in there that I’ve done that to Agnostic Front on a Disasters record and vice versa; on Warriors I did the same thing. It’s kind of cool if you like both bands to see that some stories do run across them but with a slightly different take on them. Musically, at this point in my career, I try to keep them very different and it’s fun to go out with the Disasters and do the street punk stuff and then go out with Agnostic Front and do something very aggressive; they’re so different that it feels good. It’s not redundant to me, it’s a breath of fresh air both ways.
BA: Well sure – and the way you speak about it, it’s not like one is a side project to the other, they’re running tandem; they’re separate projects that both just happen to have you in them.
RM: Exactly – and they’re both very genuine. The difference is kind of like Picasso and Michelangelo; who’s a better artist? Well, that’s more a matter of personal preference; they’re both great artists, they just have different styles. That’s how I look at these two bands; they don’t compete with each other, and one isn’t a side project of the other. I have a side project – it’s called The Alligators. With that band, we’ve only released a couple of singles so far and we just released our first CD that consists of those singles and three other songs. The Alligators is me, and three guys from a band called Instead that were a straight-edge band in the Eighties. If you like early Agnostic Front, you’d probably like that; it is very old school sounding.
BA: Cool – now then, is there anything else that I’m forgetting to ask about that you’d like to see in this article?
RM: I always like to thank people for the support and picking up the albums throughout the years. We’re passionate about what we do. This is our life – it’s not just something we talk about or read about – this is all stuff that we experienced. Granted, as you travel through life, things change; I no longer live in New York, I no longer live in squats or abandoned buildings – I’ve moved up from that and always wanted to – I don’t think it’s cool to live in poverty, I think it’s a struggle – and situations change. You said yourself that you’re a family man now – we old punkers, we grew up or whatever – but our minds are now our goldmine; those thoughts we have and we cherish cannot be replaced. I could sit in a mansion writing songs under the best circumstances you can imagine but part of my mind still lives in the gutter and part of me still walks among those people that are oppressed. I think about that all the time and I always think about something back, and that’s what I do with my music. I remember where I came from, who I am and I don’t forget it. Other people come on the scene and use hardcore because it’s an easy, instant audience, but they don’t understand that’s how some people came up. I’d like to ask people to consider those things and when they make a commitment, they make it for life. That’s what we’ve done.
Artist:
Roger Miret and The Disasters homepage
Roger Miret and The Disasters myspace
Agnostic Front homepage
Agnostic Front myspace
The Alligators myspace
