Himsa just finished up a tour with Amon Amarth and Sonic Syndicate in support of their new CD, Summon In Thunder Blistering talked with frontman John Pettibone en route to the last date of the tour to talk about switching up drummers, all-female cover bands and having quotes “taken out of context” by Revolver. Pettibone’s take on all things Himsa (and some things not) ensues…
Blistering.com: I think I saw on the website that this is the last day of the tour with Amon Amarth and Sonic Syndicate. How’s the tour been going so far?
John Pettibone: It’s been really good! The majority of fans have been Amon Amarth fans – they have a wide and loyal fan base. We have a handful of kids that come out to the shows, but the ticket prices are a little higher than what we’re used to, so we’ve been winning over the crowd every night. It’s been pretty rad. We kind of like that challenge and we’ve been getting a great response, so you can’t ask for more than that, I guess.
Blistering.com: You kind of answered this already, but how are the three groups meshing in terms of the crowd? You said it’s mostly Amon Amarth fans?
John Pettibone: Yeah, for sure. Right when we come out it looks like the entire crowd’s wearing Amon Amarth shirts. You know, the fans come already wearing their shirts and then they buy two more from them, but by the time our set’s over, our merch kind of jumps up. Sonic Syndicate’s been having a little rougher time because they have a lot of singing parts in their music – they’re a little bit more poppy, I might say. So they’re having a little more trouble trying to win over the crowd. I guess the crowd is just a little bit too extreme for them. They still go out and play their hearts out and have a good time. They’re good kids and they’re good at what they do. And they know it, too. They knew it was a gamble coming out on this tour, so…
Blistering.com: It can’t be as bad as – I went to the Sounds of the Underground tour this year – do you know who Necro is? Are? Whatever?
John Pettibone: Oh, yeah.
Blistering.com: They opened up the main part of the show and it was ugly. There was back-and-forth shit-talking with the crowd – it was terrible. They were pretty much booed off the stage.
John Pettibone: Oh wow. That sucks, you know. It sucks that this scene can be elitist like that. That they’re trying to make a festival tour of a genre that consists of a lot of underground acts and you still get these die-hard elitist kids that only want to hear one thing and it fuckin’ sucks.
Blistering.com: It’s like “heavier than thou,” pretty much.
John Pettibone: For sure. And I’m a fan of Necro, and he’s a huge metal fan, so it’s upsetting to learn that that’s what happened to him. That’s part of the challenge, though, is going out there and even just getting a few fans or still playing whether the crowd likes you or not. Just still going up there and doing it is half the battle.
Blistering.com: Judging from their Sounds of the Underground appearance, Amon Amarth have this stoic Scandinavian thing going. Are they as serious as they seem to be while they’re playing when they get off stage?
John Pettibone: Yeah, for sure. It’s their heritage. The funny part about it is seeing the crowd being so fanatic about Viking war, when it’s like “OK, dude, you’re American – we’re all made up of different kinds,” and everyone is wearing their Thor hammers and whatever. It’s kind of like, sure, be a fan. But you need to respect people’s heritage in a way that doesn’t exploit it. But the Amon Amarth guys are true to the fact, and they’re very, very deep into their culture.
We’re traveling in a van, and we travel every night to the next show, so there hasn’t been a real big “hang time” with those guys. They’re really nice and really humble and good dudes. We couldn’t ask for a better tour, and we’d love to do something with them in the future, but like I said, we haven’t gotten really, really close because a lot of the drives are so long.
Blistering.com: On the other side of the coin, the guys in your band are a little more off-the-wall. I’ve seen videos with preppy tennis outfits and that “Big Timber” sasquatch video. Has there been a lot of weirdness backstage or are you more serious on tour?
John Pettibone: No “weirdness,” but we’re all a bunch of fuckin’ nerds, so we don’t take ourselves so seriously as many bands do. There’s always a humorous side to us. We’re always making fun of each other, fuckin’ off and whatnot, making fun of the other guys and that’s just our personalities. If you take yourself too seriously you won’t have any fun at this. That’s what’s most important to us is to keep it fun and keep us sane, and that’s part of it, being corny.
Blistering.com: You had a show on Dec. 15th in your hometown of Seattle. Did you do anything special for that show?
John Pettibone: No, not really. We played kind of a post-release show a couple of months ago and we all dressed up back in the tennis outfits. It was near Halloween, so we made it the Halloween/post-release show. That was kind of the special thing for that. We knew on the Amon Amarth tour we’d get a lot of our fan-base from home, but the majority would be Amon Amarth fans. That night there were a ton of people there that had never even heard of us and we got a lot of “Wow, when are you guys coming back?” And I’m like “What do you mean ‘coming back?’ We live here!” These kids live 20 minutes outside the city and they are surprised that they’ve never heard of us. Well, it’s because they have their blinders on and they don’t really read into that much underground music. They just see what’s on television or what’s on Ozzfest. Even playing at home was definitely huge for us because of those kinds of people that never really researched and found out about their local scene.
Blistering.com: I saw on one of the two HimsaTV internet shorts that you played a bunch of covers at a show. Was it a whole set of covers or what?
John Pettibone: That was the same night as the post-release/Halloween show. We did a two-set thing because in Seattle, there’s this semi-pro wrestling franchise thing that all these punk kids do. It’s kind of like the ECW or WWF kind of stuff. They had the same night booked at the club that we play at and I work at. So we decided we’d do two different shows – one before and one after the wrestling thing, and the second show would be an all-cover set. That show was also Chad, our old drummer’s last show, and our new drummer, Joe’s first show. So Joe did the cover set and Chad played the regular set with us. With that going on, we got a really great response and even got asked to play the cover sets at other shows. The Himsa cover band is called Sexytime.
Blistering.com: That’s a good name!
John Pettibone: Thanks. That came from Kirby’s Borat shirt.
Blistering.com: The covers sounded really great on the video I saw. Specifically, Sammi’s version of the solo from “Whiplash” was amazing. I’m just going to throw it out there: Better than Hammett?
John Pettibone: Ummmmmm… sure, I’ll go out on a limb and say yeah. Especially now [laughs].
