If you’re familiar with metal or hardcore music, then you’ve without a doubt come across the work of Jacob Bannon in some capacity. You may know him best as the charismatic voice behind Massachusetts’ own Converge. Maybe you’ve heard of one of the numerous bands that are, or have been, on his record label Deathwish Inc. Even with the band and the label, Bannon still has time to create visual art for an extensive list of heavy music’s most popular bands. It’s a wonder that he had time to put together this year’s Deathwish Fest, let alone give me the time of day for an interview.
How did Deathwish Fest become a reality?
We did the last one around 2002. We’ve been trying to resurrect it for a long time. Not so much for any particular reason other than wanting to have a diverse and interesting line up of bands that we work with. We want to share that with people. So pretty much the easiest way of doing that is to make a fun and interesting live show. We’ve talked about making this a tour in the past and that was the original intention with this one. Getting the bands schedules all lined up and trying to turn it into some sort of larger tour, whether it be in the States or in Europe, or international in some capacity, but it’s just tough to get everybody’s schedule together. Even if you’re talking about 4 or 5 bands, every band has 4 or 5 people that all have different responsibilities pulling them in different directions. So I’ve brought the idea down to a couple day event and structured some tours, for example Cult Leader and Oathbreaker, who are both in town at the same time, so it worked out for bands like that. But there are some other bands that we’re flying in specifically for those dates.
The show has been sold out for awhile now. Had you ever considered moving to a bigger venue?
I really wanted to do the show in Boston proper, or at least Cambridge proper. To be in the metro area is pretty important to me. Mainly because that’s where I like to go see bands. Getting to Worcester has always been a bit of a hastle if you’re not from central Massachusetts …We’re going to showcase our label on our own terms rather than throw it in the venue that always has always has tours come through. So partnering with Bowery and trying to do it in affiliated venues was the way to go … The Middle East has always been awesome to us so we’re excited to be there.
Why is Deathwish Fest happening in the middle of the week versus a weekend?
Our friend Joe [Hardcore] has a festival called This Is Hardcore in Philadelphia and that festival starts on Thursday. It’s a pretty substantial festival. It always has some interesting bands playing and it’s always a big event, so we wanted to do something that would lead up to that. That could put some bands that were looking for a show in this area that were affiliated with us, yah know, in line to get there. The timing worked out. It was easier for us, instead of going against that or having it the following weekend and then instead of having bands meandering around, play the Tuesday or Wednesday and then head down to his festival.
Converge are scheduled to play both nights of Deathwish, without giving too much away, what can fans who will be attending both days expect from a set list?
There’s always a little overlap because that’s just the nature of doing thing. There’s a whole lot of songs and a whole lot of songs we could play, but there’s only so many. I’d say about 20 or 30 that we like playing as a band and it’s only because they’re relevant to us musically. They’re a little more challenging to us to perform and we like that sort of challenge, but we’ll definitely mix it up for both nights. We have some cool things and special things lined up for sure. We’ve talked about it a little bit, but not in great detail. We’ll talk about it the week prior and actually start writing the sets.
What was the inspiration behind the Converge and Andrew W.K. shirt featuring half of the iconic Jane Doe face and half of his face from the I Get Wet album cover?
We played a festival together recently in Seattle. We headlined one day and he headlined the other. A local guy there had a really interesting idea. We do a lot of mash up shirts and we do a lot of fundraising for various organizations. He had the idea of doing a shirt like that. So we talked to him and talked to Andrew, made it work, sold a good chunk of shirts, and just an hour into the event we raised about twelve hundred and fifty bucks, something like that, for a local animal rescue organization. We had a lot of people online that were chattering and wanted to have it available to some capacity, so we worked it out with Andrew again to release it online. We took pre-orders for a few days and printed them out for people. This time 100% of the profits are going to MSPCA, locally, if you’re familiar with Angell Hospital for animals or Nevin’s Farm up in Salem, NH. Those are both facilities that the MSPCA run locally and we have experience with them both as dog and cat owners and wanted to help them out so that’s what we’re doing.
Speaking of fundraising, on a heavier note, last year Converge played a fundraiser for the One Fund for victims of the Boston Marathon bombings and reportedly the money didn’t go where it was suppose to. Have you heard about any updates from this situation? Do you know if we’re any closer to getting the problem solved?
Myself along with Craig Silverman, Keith Bennett, and a bunch of other people involved in the music world here have been pretty proactive about trying to get stuff worked out. We figured out that there was some wrong doing going on by the promoter. The venue managed to write a check for their portion pretty early, which has been stated already online. So we got a good chunk of the money directly to the One Fund, but there’s still a missing four thousand estimated dollars more, we’re not really sure exactly because we never really got straight accounting. We’ve been asking for it for well over a year now. That promoter has no interest in paying. We actually went and talked to him pretty recently. We found out where he worked and we popped in and said hello and he has declined to show up to work ever since. So he went back into hiding. We just want to make sure that the money that was raised goes to the right people. That’s all we want to do. He sat there and lied to us and told us he would either some how come up with the money or receipts of the money going to One Fund and he never did any of that stuff. He just went into hiding again. Typical stuff that’s to be expected from somebody who has already done this. There’s not much else to report. We hope he does the right thing. That’s all we want to see done.
You guys come out with a record roughly every three years. Seeing as it’s been about two years since the release of ‘All We Love We Leave Behind,’ can we expect to hear new material from you guys in the near future?
Possibly, we’re always writing and we’re always working on stuff, but we just naturally let it happen. We don’t work in a schedule or anything. There’s a lot of interviews out there with bands who do stuff on cycles or when labels tell them to do stuff. That terminology isn’t really in our vocabulary. We do what we do when we want. That’s why we’ve been a band for so long. Our schedule now is essentially dictated by how much work myself and Kurt [Ballou] have going on independently outside of the band. It’s all music related in some capacity, whether it’s with Deathwish or me doing artwork for bands and Kurt recording and engineering bands. There’s some material in the pipeline. We have some ideas, some demos and stuff floating around, but we’ve also been really busy in that time as well. Kurt has been recording a ton of bands. I’ve been doing a lot of Deathwish related projects and artwork related projects. Nate [Newton] released an Old Man Gloom album and a Doomriders album since then and toured with both bands. Ben [Koller] released his latest Mutoid Man project as well as a new All Pigs Must Die record. We’ve all been going full throttle since then and playing. So to us it doesn’t feel like we’ve had any down time. We’ve all been creative to some capacity making music and we’ve all been around each other a lot. It doesn’t feel like two years has passed. The six months I spent making art for that record is just as fresh [now] as it was back then. Where as other things just get kind of easy after awhile. It’s crazy. It really feels like a current event to me.
DEATHWISH INC. W/ CONVERGE + TRAP THEM + MORE. MIDDLE EAST DOWNSTAIRS, 472 – 480 MASSACHUSETTS AVE., CAMBRIDGE. TUE 7.22 + WED 7.23. 6:00PM/ALL AGES/SOLD OUT. BOWERYBOSTON.COM