Interview Date: Jan 21, 1996 after a show at RSC in Miami

I used to think Less Than Jake was an awesome band. It wasn't, however, till I saw them live, that I realized their true greatness. Not only is the band great, but the members are the nicest, most down to earth chaps you'll find. They are totally appreciative of their fans and exemplify humility - not something you'd normally find in a band on the verge of becoming huge. With a six album deal on Capitol Record in the sack, the sky's the limit. As a child one of the Jake - sters had a dog named... you guessed it Jake. The dog would always be the best fed in the family, putting down T- bones every meal. The kids, however, got 'less than Jake'. It doesn't seem that they'll be getting the short end of this bone for much longer. With roughly thirty releases to their credit, you might want to listen to them now. Almost everything is sure to become a collectors item and you can say you heard em before Rolling Stone shoved them down your throat. Mark my words ska-punk is the next "big thing" for the alternative media to exploit. Enjoy. Fuck you.

RI: Not that you guys really need an introduction but why don t you start there and mention the other members that are not present here?

Chris: I'm Chris. I play guitar and I try to sing. Vinny's next to me.

Vinny: I play drums.

Chris: We got Roger on the bass, buddy on the trombone, Jessica on the alto sax and Derron on the baritone saxophone. That's at the present moment.

RI: How did you guys actually form? How long have you been around?

Chris: I knew Vinny since high school. We had a band back home together. We used to live 100 miles outside of Tampa in this small little shit town. Then we went to college in the summer of '91 and we kept in touch. We'd go home and we'd do demo tapes on a four track. We'd keep in touch all the time. We got together with another bass player in the summer of 92 that we'd get together with and start jamming. That's basically when we went out and played live as Less Than Jake. That was in Gainesville.

Vinny: We were Less Than Jake before that...

Chris: But only as a name itself. We only had a few free demos but we had never played out live. The band really came together in January of l993 when we got Roger and Jessica.

RI: Did the band start out initially as a ska/punk band or was it one or the other?

Vinny: Not really. We started out as a three piece power pop band but on our demo tape we did one ska punk song. We never thought of doing ska at all. We thought of doing pop punk with horns like Snuff. When we first heard Snuff with the trombone we realized that's what we wanted to do.

Chris: The last songs on the CD are actually on a four track with me and Vinny. I played the bass and did all the guitars. That's how it was initially.

The first incantation of the band never had horns. It was just me and Vinny. There's that one track on our new CD and a 7 to be released by our friend David [Hayes] from Too Many Records out of Spokane Washington with some of that stuff. It sounds pretty true to where we're at now with our stuff without the horns.

Vinny: If you listen to Too Many Records releases you'll realize that there are two things that he likes. There's the East Bay style of pop punk and the crazy Scholong grindcore-to-folk music type of stuff. That's basically what it sounds like, basically. It sounds like the whole Easy Bay pop punk from the era of Crimpshrine, its really fuzzy because we recorded it on a four track. If he likes it enough to put it out...he'll probably do only like a thousand 7"s [Look for those ads collectors, and get ready to order:ed]

RI: You guys have done like a million releases. Is there an exact figure as to how much stuff you actually have put out?

Chris: There's thirty releases as of...[the number has increased as of the printing] Including comps and everything there have been 13 labels not to mention that is Gainesville we found that someone had taken a song off a record and put it onto a CD. That's probably not the only bootleg out there. I don't really give a shit. All it does is create an awareness somewhere that you're not know. Not only that, but this person actually did this because he likes you.

Vinny: There's thirty releases as of our Losers. Kings CD which is the Comp on No Idea with all our 7" and stuff. That was our thirtieth release including comps of all the stuff we had put out. Over the next two months we have Crash Course in being an Asshole, which is a covers 7" coming out on Rhetoric Records. He's also doing a Pezcore picture disc as well as the regular vinyl version. Then we're going to have a free 7" that we'll be giving out at our shows. There's 2000 of those. It's a split 7" with a band called Pung from Gainesville. It'll also go out to people on our mailing list. Then there's Rock n Roll Pizzeria, which is a one sided 7", etchings on the other side, and comes in a pizza box. After that we're going to do the Grease soundtrack on an LP. We won't do the whole album, but we're going to do the hits. We'll take out the Shanana stuff.

RI: You're making it really hard on collectors! Is there a reason why you've dealt with so many labels?

Vinny: It's the best thing to do. You don't understand...When you go on tour...An example: Whirled Record from Richmond, Virginia...we never played in Virginia before. But this summer we played there for the first time and there's over a hundred people there and they know are stuff, and they were singing our songs. It's weird that this one guy had been promoting us in the area. Now when we go back, more people will will be there. We've gotten to sell our stuff. A lot of songs were duplicates. When we were first starting out, we didn't have that many songs under our belts. I think Liquor Store is on about four or five different comps. If they're paying for it and they like you enough to be on their comp...statistically, if you figure that a thousand or so records get sold, you have to realize that countless other people are listening to this. How many comp tapes did this person make? How many friends did this person play this record to?

Chris:As far as I'm concerned, the more labels the better.

RI: Do you guys have a favorite release?

Chris: The 7"ers are my favorites. A lot of it is the cover. I like the artwork on some of that stuff. The Pez Kings 7" is one of my favorites.

Vinny: I'd have to say that my favorite is the Songs About Drinking on Too Many Records. Its a double LP. Each package was different and that was really cool.

[Side note by cariaso: I've only seen one of these, but it had a puzzle of Erkle (everyone's favorite tv nerd) as the cover. SO DAMN COOL!]

RI: By everything you tell me, I would imagine that you guys are record collectors...

Chris: I buy most of my stuff on CD. Roger is.

Vinny: The most collectible thing we have is the ray gun that we gave you. We only gave some out on our tour and at shows, but most of them are going to college radio.

RI: In other words, my sealed copy in a couple of hundred years should net a couple of hundred. [laughter] Having several members more than your average rock band, how do you guys go about writing music?

Vinny:I write all of the lyrics...

RI: Yet you don't sing them. Is there a reason for that?

Chris: He's tone deaf, basically (laughter)

Vinny: I've always written the lyrics since we started the band. It just never changed.

Chris: I'll come up with a line and then it'll get a perverse and twisted. So basically I just can't write lyrics.

RI: So basically, what you're saying is that it's the ignorance of the other band members that has led you to take up the writing task.

Chris & Vinny (laughter): Basically!

Vinny: I like writing the lyrics, and thankfully, they come out with the intention and emotion that I wrote them with. Chris: We talk about them ahead of time, also. I never go into a practice not knowing a thing of what we're going to sing about. We throw around ideas and discuss the ideas and then work something out.

RI: Has there ever been the case where you've said "No, I won't sing that song!"

Chris: No. Though he writes 99.9% of the songs, I have the freedom to fuck up that .1%. We change things around sometimes to make things fit.

RI: The grapevine has it that you'll be releasing a full length on the Beatles record label, Capitol. Could you elaborate?

Vinny: We are going to. Rumors have been flying all over the intenet and punk/underground scene, but most of it is hearsay. On our recent tour, pretty much atevery show we were ask about it. I'm kind of tired of it.

Chris: Some zines have already printed it. Rumors fly. We haven't really had that many negative reactions. Anybody who has wanted to come up to me and talk about it, I've been more than happy to talk about it. I don't even pay attention to the rumors, because there are too many people who are going to do that. Basically, we got a lawyer and worked everything out. We never went out looking for them. We don't have a bio or anything like that. It's not in us. Its always been pretty much a hobby, and it always will be to us. Its something we love to do. To make a long story short, this guy from Capitol named Lorne, who's an understudy to our A&R guy who signed us, is a scout who goes out...He knows every zine out there. He knows zines done by kids with a run of 30. He's a hard worker, and he's amazing. Anyway, he kept seeing reviews of us in zines. He called around and in Atlanta got our 10 song sampler from Dill records. When he listened to it, he gave it to Craig, our A&R guy, and told him he should hear this. Though he didn't like ska. he ended up listening to it, and liking us. So in June of '95 he flew out and saw our show in Gainesville. Thats's pretty much how it started, and he pretty much started talking to us then.

Vinny: to clear thing up and to make things easier for the people reading this, we have no problem taling about what's in the contract. We have no problem with it. We don't want people to have misconceptions of what goes on. The contract basically boils down to the fact that Capitol touches NOTHING. That means that they don't touch tours, they don't touch our merchandise, they don't tell us what to do, when to do, or how to do it. Basically, they say that at this point you [LTJ] need an album. We're going to promote and distribute that album. We're allowed to do independent releases. Basically, we're an independent band that's on a major label that gives us good distribution.

Chris: There are limits, also. There's also the fact that if they don't make money, "Bye, see you guys the fuck later. We know that. They're are a corporation...

RI: Are you guys on a one album deal or...

Chris: No. This is going to sound crazy, but...we're not going to make it to six albums. It's a six album deal. That's the way they sign contracts - six album, ten year deal. But after two albums, if we're not selling, they're going to say good bye to us fast.

Vinny: We have a running count. We'll be off of Capitol in two years. We can release an album as quickly as we can write it.

Chris: We're going to record as early as April, but more along the lines of May.

RI: Will they help you in touring?

Chris: If we want them to. It all has to do with advances. All these bands, like the early eighties metal bands that did al the hotels and hooker thing and getting two hundred thousand dollar advances owe the label all this money. They didn't know what they were getting into. They have to pay for all of that. We asked the label every question imaginable, and we went over this for seven months before signing the contract, and we got what I think was a fair deal.

Vinny: We got a deal that no one else that I know got. We're allowed to do independent releases. We can take the Capitol album and put it on vinyl on an independent label. That's unheard of. I don't know why they gave it to us, but they agreed to it. People are saying that Less Than Jake soldout. We just did a tour that had 5 and 6 dollar door charges. We sell our stuff and will continue to sell our stuff l really cheap.

Chris: Bands out there on "the circuit" have a mentality that since they are now playing to 800-1000 kids a night, they can sell their shirts for whatever, regardless. We know how much the shirts cost. Our short sleeve shirts cost about $5 with shipping and the long sleeve cost around $6.80 and we sell them for $7 and $9. We make around $2 a shirt.

RI: Let's say that theoretically you do sell 1 or 2 million record like Green Day...In Punk Planet, this woman who was doing this punk video show tried to interview Green Day, and they said, "No, we've been told by our label to 'lay low'." They can't do interviews with zines. I can see how that would piss punks off because these are the people that actually "made" them and put them in the position to be where they're at, and they're turning their backs on them. Now they have no control to talk to who they want to and when they want to. Consider you sell a million records, how can you guarantee your fans that something like this won't happen. Can your fans be sure that they won't be shit upon?

Vinny: We have 100% creative control. We can do whatever we want.

Chris: At the same time, you really have to