ROCKWiRED iNTERViEWS ROOM FULL OF STRANGERS

BEHiND THE MASK
MICK DAGGER OF ROOMFUL OF STRANGERS
TALKS TO ROCKWiRED
ABOUT THEiR EP WE'RE ALL LiViNG THE AMERiCAN DREAM
SPORTiNG BLACK MASKS ON STAGE
AND LiBERATiNG AUDiENCES

http://www.rockwired.com/roomfullofstrangers.jpg

FEBRUARY 25, 2010

iNTERViEWED BY BRiAN LUSH
In listening to ‘WE’RE ALL LIVING THE AMERICAN DREAM’ – the debut EP from the Orlando-based five-piece band ROOM FULL OF STRANGERS – I get the sense that I’m only getting half of the story. This propulsive little EP boasts a brand of darker edged punk rock that has become synonymous with acts such as THE MISFITS. The rhythm section provided by bassist ZED and drummer B.E. STRANGER is indeed thunderous and the power chord duel between STRANGER # 2 and THE REVEREND K. MANG certainly gets heads banging and singer MICK DAGGER’s authoritative delivery (an oil and water mixture of GLEN DANZIG and JOEY RAMONE) certainly makes an impression. The missing piece of the puzzle for me is the band’s primal, raucous live shows that are marked by the band sporting menacing black masks. In an age where rock music is about prescribed angst and pretty posturing, it is great to see a band willing to get a good laugh out of shocking folks. "We get mixed reactions." says DAGGER with regard to those little black masks "It just depends on the person. At the end of the day we really play on cognitive dissonance. The mask is obviously a very threatening, iconic image and is associated with a lot of very bad things but all of our body language and things that we say in between songs are kind of sardonic and comical in nature."

ROCKWIRED spoke with MIKE DAGGER of ROOM FULL OF STRANGERS over the phone. Here is how it went.

Now that ‘WE’RE ALL LIVING THE AMERICAN DREAM’ is out there for people to hear, how do you feel about the finished work?
I feel really good about it actually. We had a fantastic producer work with us – MARK KRAMER – who is widely known as KRAMER. He has one hell of a pedigree from being in BUTHOLE SURFERS to BONGWATER, which was his own project and playing with bands like SONIC YOUTH while producing talent like DANIEL JOHNSTON and many others so we felt honored to kick off our first album with KRAMER. People seem to like it.

The masks you guys wear in performance are really quite menacing. Whose idea was that?
It wasn’t one of those hatched ideas where we all sat around the campfire and said ‘This is what we’re gonna do. We’ve got to look a certain way.’ It just kind of came to me at a random moment. When I was very young, we had a break in. Long story short – a noise downstairs woke me up. I went downstairs and looked on the couch. I was like three or four years old. My mother and my babysitter were tied up with lamp and telephone chord. Apparently my mother had gone out bowling and my father was at work. These men broke in and tied up my babysitter and my mother and blindfolded them. There were a bunch of dudes in the kitchen waiting for my dad to come home and they were all wearing stockings over their heads – not black ski masks but stockings and they all had guns. The lead guy who was wearing a blue flower print dress that he apparently had lifted from our neighbors house that they also broke into. He was even carrying a purse, a big husky dude with grey hair. He leans forward and goes, ‘What’s the kid’s name?’ and my mother was like ‘His name is Michael!’ She was obviously nervous. And then he says ‘It’s only a game Mikey!’ this isn’t some kind of made up, mythos bullshit! That was my first childhood experience that I can remember and that stuck with me in some way shape or form. So,what is art? It’s a form of expression and if you’re harboring certain emotions eventually, they are going to come out, and here it is.

Did this happen in Florida (Where ROOM FULL OF SRANGERS is based)?
No. I grew up in the rust belt – a very famous town for mafia killings and steel mills called Youngstown, Ohio. The bowling alley that I used to go to when I was a kid was right across the street from the steel mills. The bowling alley scene in the movie the Deer Hunter was shot there, a real seedy joint. Most of the famous people in Youngstown are reportedly mobsters, JOEY NAPLES who was assassinated in 1991 was one of them. I used to hang out with his nephews. Anyway that was where I came up. Violence and stuff like that was just part of growing up there. There was also an intensely great music scene as well. There was this one particular place that opened up in 1982 called CEDARS LOUNGE. It’s still open today. It had everyone there from DEVO to THE RAMONES and all of these great bands. I don’t know if THE PRETENDERS ever played there, but CHRISSIE HYNDE is from the area as well as DEVO. The DEAD BOYS were from up the road in Cleveland. Cedars was kind of a great artery in this really down and dirty artist music scene. It was one of the gateway places for a lot of underground musicians to travel through. IN fact, PATTI SMITH had gone to this venue as well and a friend of mine has some of her personal affects. He was friends with her mother and her mother had a bunch of stuff and gave it to this friend of mine. It was stationary from HOLIDAY INN on 422 in Youngstown, she was writing ideas on it for HORSES. I get a kick out of that. Anyway, that’s where I’m from.

At what point did you go from being a participant in this music scene to deciding on being in a band?
THE GREAT ROCK N ROLL SWINDLE was the album that changed my life when I heard it. As a kid I was listening to a lot of old time rock n roll and punk. I was nine years old and listening to that kind of stuff. Most people don’t get into that kind of stuff until they are in their teens. Music had a very great effect on me. I dealt with some adversity when I was a kid. I was a little bit of an outsider so that kind of music really spoke to me. I’m not much into subgenres and stuff like that. A lot of people use the word "punk" very loosely. A lot of punks in the early days didn’t like that term. The ethos behind it was all about calling bullshit on certain things that just weren’t right. A lot of those guys haven’t changed since then. They didn’t grow up and grow out of it. It wasn’t a phase. They really had something to rail against and that really inspired me as a very young boy. I never really decided to be in a band it just kind of happened because of the people that I hung out with.

Talk about the genesis of this band. How did it begin?

How have people responded to the masks that you guys sport on stage? Has it given you guys trouble at all or no?

It actually evolved from another project. I had this desire to put together this original rock band where we would play an eclectic array of music. Unfortunately, our album WE’RE ALL LIVING THE AMERICAN DREAM doesn’t quite capture our eclectic nature, we recorded it in transition. We’ve written a variety of new songs since then that showcase the band as a much more versitile band musically. It’s kind of a hard question to answer on how the band formed. It was basically myself and STRANGER #2 – the lead guitarist – who had teamed up and we have been back to back ever since. We’ve been through a lot of band members and there has been a lot of distractions and what not with people that kind of came and went. STRANGER #2 and I remained back to back and then we got the old guitarist that I used to gig with from another project, The Reverend K Mang and then a drummer from another band, B.E. Stranger. Now we’ve got another fellow on bass, ZED, that we used to play with from the same band as the drummer, so now it’s like two bands formed into one. It’s not the most interesting answer but that is kind of what happened. It all fell into place when I made a decision to start Room Full of Strangers and we did everything organically. What is probably more interesting is how we started off gigging. We used to go to this place called the BULL AND BUSH and it wasn’t really meant for shows even though a few bands in the Orlando area had gigged there successfully. We got the bartender really drunk one night after a practice and she is actually this full on Irish girl and we convinced her to let us play. She said "I like you lads, but you remind me of the I.R.A." We got on stage in ski masks and all and brought some of our friends out and I’ll just say that the shit hit the revolving oscillator. A lot of beer got drunk that night and we got invited back. After that we played a party there and because of that, they decided to give us our own night. We kept on going from there. There were a few venues that we had a hard time getting into at first and now we’ve got very good relationships with them. We’ve come a long way in a very short period of time.We get mixed reactions. We went to a courthouse wedding recently, the wedding was steeped in controversy because the couple getting married were perfect strangers. They did this in protest to laws that prevent gay marriage. We went there in ski masks,cops were everywhere, I thought for sure that we would get arrested. Instead we made the news, nationally. So, I guess it just depends on the person. At the end of the day we really play on cognitive dissonance. The mask is obviously a very threatening, iconic image and is associated with a lot of very bad things but all of our body language and things that we say in between songs are kind of sardonic and comical in nature. Some people really get that and they have a really good time with it but at the same time, we’ve had people who have refused to put on a mask. I had this girl one time who told her boyfriend ‘If you put that mask on we’re fucking done! It’s over between us!’ People really get freaked out over a piece of cloth. Some people will embrace this little bit of madness – this little bit of energy that we bring and jump about, have a good time and get into it and blow off some steam. That is what we really like to see. I would be lying though if I told you that we didn’t get off on seeing people get freaked out as well. I mean GG Allin used to crap on stage, it's funny how nuts people can et about what they fear or don't understand.

The image of you guys on stage with masks is very powerful.
It’s a universal image. In theater, the actors are involved in the process control what the audience is feeling by conveying emotion. The first emotion we want people to have is shock and morbid curiosity and maybe even a little bit of fear then we can take that energy and reel it in and take them on a bit of a cerebral trip as well. It’s not all just about a costume. It’s almost like a crazy tone poem that we’re acting out like a symphonic play in a visceral, brutal kind of way. One thing you can’t beat is the truth and when we throw out that primal energy it is pretty much unavoidable to feel something.

How do you guys come together to make the music that people are going to hear eventually?
It happens in all different kinds of ways. At the end of the day, we do not have a specific process. Probably the most common circumstance that leads to a song is when STRANGER #2 throws out a riff and we build the song around that. We’ll kind of work it out together but as of late, we’ve had other members of the band kick the process off for us. For instance the drummer recently laid down a beat and we all jumped on it together and literally had a song in about three minutes. We performed it for an audience a week later and I made the lyrics up as we went along, it's a drone. It went over very well. Sometimes inspiration is something you’ve got to hunt down and we’re not afraid to do that.

Talk about the DVD you guys have released?
This past Friday we had a DVD release party. It’s a forty-nine minute DVD with interviews, fan interviews and an appearance with "the anonymous fan" who is a real fan and more or less became a stalker. He was shot in a seperate location asking us interview questions. We worked with BROKEN MACHINE FILMS and it’s funny how it fell together. I felt the need to have an electronic press kit for a variety of different reasons – to shop different venues and so on and so forth. We started to have this camera man follow us around at some of our shows. And during the process we met that anonymous fan that always shows up at our shows in a ski mask. We met him and we captured probably about a half a dozen shows and we interviewed people who had never seen us before after the show to capture their reactions. It was about the same time that we were sending the masters off to get replicated for our album and it occurred to us to build our EPK into this production and have our EP on the DVD. ‘WE’RE ALL LIVING THE AMERICAN DREAM’ became the EP/DVD/EPK. The opening of the DVD start off with a 41 second commercial for promoters to see and the rest of it is for everybody else. That is how we ended up creating that.

What songs from the EP resonate for you the most and why?
All of the songs have different meanings to me especially when you are actually sharing lyrics with other people. It’s another form of communication and spoken word or singing word rather. One really doesn’t stand out more than the other and I know that that is a bummer answer.

It’s an honest one.
Honesty is the best policy.

What would you like someone to come away with after they’ve seen you guys live or heard the CD?
Well that really depends on the individual. The first person that comes to mind – and not to be stereotypical because I don’t like to be stereotyped myself – is the person who is going through life just being or exsisting. They have their regular nine to five job and this routine that society dictates. I would like for people like that to feel somehow liberated –that they are excited try something new or they want to go back revisit a part of their life that they skipped over. Maybe they’ll get out of a shitty relationship and find their passion in life if they’re working in some soulless kind of a job they will quit. I’d like for them to feel liberated and motivated to make a change in their life and wake up to things like consumerism and the like. We want you to think, be an individual. That is what being a stranger is all about, because "Everybody is a Stranger" when you're evolving.