US Punk Metal Mainstays Strung Out On Tour Next Week…

US punk-metal mainstays Strung Out return to Australia next week to celebrate thirty years of their landmark album Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues with a national run of headline shows. Originally released in 1996, Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues crammed thirteen songs into thirty two breakneck minutes and became a defining record for a generation of punk fans. From the opening blast of Firecracker through to Wrong Side of the Tracks, the album’s mix of hook-heavy melodies and high-speed riffs still hits just as hard today.

Across ten albums and countless tours, Strung Out have built a reputation as one of the most explosive live bands in punk rock – loud, tight and direct, with no throwbacks for the sake of it and no wasted moments. Starting next week, Australian fans will hear Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues celebrated throughout the set, alongside favourites from across the band’s catalogue. Jason Cruz speaks to Rob Lyon about the tour.

Another Australian tour, it definitely must feel like a second home for you guys now?
We don’t. Yeah, it does. You guys have been good to us for a long time now, very long time.

What is it that keeps you coming back and what is it that you love about playing Australia?
Well, it’s my job. This is my job, and I go where the work is, you know? Australia’s a great place to play. People are amazing to each other, they treat each other like people should treat each other, and they’ve been good to us for a really long time, so you know, it’s what I do. I travel around and I bring music to people and I hope I can make them happy.

It’s hard to believe it’s thirty years of Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues. How does that milestone sit with you now when you reflect on it?
It’s coming to me a little bit more. The older I get, the more, farther away I get from it. I guess I can look at it from a different perspective now and it seems like just another lifetime that record was made. There’s so much distance that I think that’s what I trip out on is how far away that record seems to me. But it’s fun to play it, it’s challenging, it’s one of the hardest records I can think of to play live, and we’ve gotten pretty good at it, so I think the fans will be stoked. It’s a hard thing to comprehend, when you make something and it reaches somebody so far away.

Do you think it was that album that really turned the corner for the band and got you a whole host more attention?
I think that record let people know we were here, and then the next one, Twisted by Design, was the record that solidified it, those two records back to back were like a one‑two punch. It’s hard to live down that record because people expect us to be so fast all the time, and we are, we’re still a pretty fast band. That’ll always be a part of our sound, but I think that record was too fast at times and when we play it, we slow it down a little bit, and it just sounds better.

It must be humbling seeing the amount of young people who’ve gravitated to this album and worked their way through the rest of the discography?
Yeah, I just hope that people accept who we are and what we’re capable of. I think that record is just one element of what we are capable of.

Were there any particular moments from when that album came out that you still remember fondly and feel proud of?
Yeah, a funny story is, it was before computers, and I would just remember my ideas in my head. Then I would show up to the studio and step up to the microphone and sing, and nobody had any idea what I was going to do. I was kind of making it up along the way, actually. I did that in front of Fat Mike, and I happened to be really sick at the time. He wanted me to just run through the whole record and it was terrible. It was terrible! He just cringed and he like put his hand on his head. He said, Oh boy, we got a lot of work to do. I didn’t represent my ideas very well and like I said, I was really sick. So we spent two weeks working on melodies and writing stuff with Fat Mike, and then, when he left, went back to San Francisco, I was feeling better and more confident about my ideas, and I switched back to my original ideas. I was pretty proud of myself for actually stepping up and proving myself, and I think that was the one record I proved myself.

Is there any truth that the album title is an amalgamation of a Bob Dylan song and a phrase from a Who song?
Yeah! Yeah! You know, it’s kind of like a rock and roll cliché, the teenage wasteland thing, and I just thought put a little punk rock suburban in front of it, make it all one word, gave it a cool thing, a cool vibe.

What’s the plan, play it start to end on this tour, or mix it up?
Now we blast through that record. We’re pretty tight at it. We did a whole Canadian run with it. So we’ve got that album locked down, and we’ll blast through that and then play, come back and play some… we got a small set right after that that we’ll do. So we’ll give the fans a good amount of songs for their money.

Are there a couple of songs that took a bit of rehearsing to get right, or is it muscle memory and it comes back quick?
I think playing that fast is really hard. There’s some… it’s hard to sing that fast and I think that was a problem I was having with it was it’s one thing to record a record that fast, but to sing it live, it’s hard. It’s hard to get a melody, to be melodic, to be musical when it’s that fucking fast. So like I said, we slow it down just a tiny bit so it’s audible, so it sounds decent in a room full of people. But it’s still pretty gnarly and we got it locked down pretty well.

When you play that album, headphones on, in the car, wherever, what do you think now?
I don’t ever listen to it. I think once a song has been released into the world, I don’t listen to them anymore. I’ll go back and listen to them if I have to remember a part for playing the song live. But it’s very rare that I go back and listen to… it’s hard for me to listen to that record because there’s so much emotion attached to the making of it, and then I just hear what I could have done better, and it just seems hard for me to listen to Strung Out. It’s very difficult.

Is that kind of thing where once it’s out there in the world, it’s not really yours anymore?
Yeah, and everybody puts their own meaning and their own baggage and their own experience behind it, and it’s not mine anymore. And I’m always, by fault and by whatever, whatever, I always look forward. Like, I never look back. I have a hard time looking back at things. I always want to move on to the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. Once something’s done, it’s the process of making it that I get off on, not the actual end result.

What is next for Strung Out? Is there plans for another album or anything else in the works?
We are currently in the studio right now tracking another record with Kyle Black, this Australian tour is the last tour of the year and it’s the last tour of this whole record cycle, so we’re going to go through a lean period where we just hunker down and work and record, and then start it all again mid‑next year.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Strung Out on the following dates, tickets from SBM Presents…