Interviewing Reel Big Fish is more like a babysitting gig. One room, one table of snack food and drinks, and six playful musicians who show no discrepancies whatsoever between their raucous stage interactions and their individual personalities.
The location is Worcester State College's Sullivan Auditorium, where the band is hanging out backstage on standard-issue dorm room couches, eating Doritos and tuning their instruments. Ever the college favorite, Reel Big Fish, just back from their first European tour, is playing a few college dates this spring. Many upperclassmen Jumbos will recall last year's Spring Fling performance, where the band's delectable blend of ska and pop-rock ignited the President's Lawn cloud to a beach ball-throwing frenzy.
"Is that the one that was early in the morning?" asks lead singer and guitarist Aaron Barrett, wearing a non-characteristic plain black shirt, with his short hair slicked back, while re-stringing his Gibson SG.
"Oh yeah, we played with Better Than Ezra," chimes in Scott Klopfenstein, one of the band's two trumpeters. Together with Barrett, who's usually much more flashily dressed, Klopfenstein is responsible for much of the band's stage presence.
Drummer Carlos De La Garza is absent - he went to the grocery store. Bassist Matt Wong is restringing his monstrous five-string bass, and the string section, rounded out by trombonist Dan Regan and trumpeter Tavis Werts, is simply relaxing and enjoying snack foods and sandwiches.
A few months after his band's last performance in the Boston area, Barrett is finally back on the six-string after a broken hand relegated him to contributing his witty-yet-simple vocals and stage humor to the band's high-energy shows. I ask him how he broke his hand in the first place.
"How did that happen," he says in a high-pitched voiced, mimicking me. "'Cause of f--kin' punks like you asking me stupid questions, I had to beat the f--kin' crap outta them," he shouts, without looking up from the guitar he's working on
"Notice how no one's laughing, " cautions Wong. After Barrett finishes tightening the new string he just put on his guitar, he looks up and begins to speak.
"I don't like to play guitar."
"Not at all?" I ask.
"Not really."
"Then why bother?"
"'Cause I'm so good at it, it would be a shame. The world would lose so much..."
"JELLY!" shouts Klopfenstein.
"The world would lose so much jelly," says Barrett, tying it all together.
Despite the band's apparent silliness, Reel Big Fish does apparently focus on its music once in a while. And, despite record label turmoil, it is committed to getting an album out soon.
"We're not allowed to talk about it right now," says Barrett, mystifyingly. "It's a good thing that they get these interviews for us, because we're not allowed to talk about anything."
I feel obliged to ask: "Says who?"
"Them"
"Who are they?"
"Management."
"Funny."
"Keep your mouth shut," he says with mock seriousness, then laughs. "We're making it... we recorded a bunch of stuff, then we're gonna record some more stuff." Silence washes over the room, until the unbelievably loquacious Barrett feels the need to talk again. As is usual with the members of Reel Big Fish, the topic is, well, off-topic.
"Did you guys get the pornos at the hotel? They got penetration!"
"All right!" shouts Klopfenstein.
"It's always a nice thing when you go to a hotel and the pornos there have penetration," continues Barrett, alternating glances between his guitar and me. "You feel like a winner."
Reel Big Fish will have plenty of time to study cinematography at hotels across the nation this summer, when they will embark on what Barrett calls a "super tour" of large concert halls.
"It's called the 'They Won't Let Us On The Warped Tour Tour,'" he says. The entire band - minus the elusive De La Garza, who's now at a local drum store - cracks up. "There's gonna be Reel Big Fish, Goldfinger, Zebrahead, and some other awesome band." Klopfenstein suggests that the fourth band might be Homegrown.
Touring has been a large part of Reel Big Fish's continued success. Though the band - and its hit, "Sell Out" - are often associated with the ska explosion of the mid-'90s, Reel Big Fish, started by Wong and Barrett, has been around for a decade. Thanks to continuous touring, the group has remained popular to this day, unlike the ska bands it rose to fame with.
Barrett notes that his band is "back and better than ever. We're getting big in Europe, too. It [the European tour] was incredible; we'd never been there before." Still, it's almost impossible to buy a Reel Big Fish album on that continent, and European radio stations usually don't offer the band any airtime. "It's totally underground," he says. "Internet stuff, word of mouth. We sold out almost every show."
Obviously, then, Barrett is a Napster fan. "I love Napster. If it wasn't for Napster... we wouldn't have as many people at our shows."
Before the horn section begins to warm up, the band's collective Attention Deficit Disorder takes control of the room. Barrett and Klopfenstein flawlessly act out an entire scene from Pee Wee's Big Adventure. (Klopfenstein: "You can't beat a movie directed by Tim Burton, soundtracked by Danny Elfman, and co-written by Paul Reubens and Phil Hartman.")
Egan, with headphones on, asks if anyone has ever heard of Papas Fritas, whose CD he is listening to. I point out that Papas Fritas met at and graduated from Tufts. Barrett grabs my tape recorder and begins to interview Klopfenstein like the kid in Almost Famous: "Do you have to be happy to write a happy song? Do you have to be depressed to write a sad song?"
And so on.
Before the group leaves to soundcheck, Barrett gets serious. Despite record company "bullcrap," he wants to point out that he's serious about getting a new album out soon. "We are definitely gonna put out a new record, just not anytime soon. That doesn't mean in the next five years, that means probably this year."
That's inspiring, but it leaves only one question to be answered, which is also the name of their last album: Why Do They Rock So Hard?
According to Klopfenstein, the answer is simple: "Because we were born to."
