This is the second installment of Sloan's chat with the super-humorous Exhumed. To read the first part, click here.
The massive interview with Exhumed’s Matt Harvey and Wes Caley continues. The band jokes around more, talks about their next album, DVD and rubber shirts. Also, you might be surprised who their dream tour would be with…
Blistering.com: How much in-fighting is within the band? I mean, you two obviously seem to clash heads quite a bit [laughs] and seem to want total control of the music.
Matt Harvey: [laughs] Oh there’s a lot of egos in this band.
Blistering.com: Pink Floyd had their legendary ego squabbles with the music and creativity. What about Exhumed? How many violent fights are there because you want your ideas more than the others?
Wes Caley: [laughing] Oh, there’s none of that. Seriously.
Harvey: We used to back in the day when we were stupid kids. But these days, if somebody doesn’t like a certain part or song, we just scrap it. We’ve written so many songs both individually and collectively that we don’t have that emotional attachment to it. We don’t give a fuck that way. We work really hard on our music, but if someone doesn’t like it or it doesn’t work for the other guys, you just have to trust the people you jam with. The bottom line is that I wouldn’t jam with anyone whose opinion I didn’t respect enough. If Wes said a riff that I wrote sucks, even if I thought it was great, if he thought it sucks, it probably sucks. When that happens, I’ll come back to it later and, sure enough, it was a shitty idea. That’s all part of the maturation process. You gotta trust each other.
(A security guard approaches us)
Security Guard: Hey guys - we can’t have you drinking out here in the parking lot. If Metro [Las Vegas police] comes by and sees you, they’ll shut down this van and give you guys big tickets
Harvey: Ok, cool. No problem.
Caley: Sure, we’ll get rid of it.
Security guard: Thanks guys.
Blistering.com: You’re supposed to tell him, “Hey, we’re in the band!”
Caley: Yeah, that stuff doesn’t work with us. It never does. [Wes and Matt collectively groan and mumble under their breaths as they put the contraband back into the van].
Blistering.com: You guys said you have a bunch of other songs you didn’t use or couldn’t fit onto All Guts… Does this mean that you have enough to write another album and get one out relatively soon?
Caley: Well, no, I wouldn’t say that. There’s enough for some 7” stuff in the future but as far as a whole new album, no --
Harvey: [interrupting] Basically, before we split up. I’m sorry, not to totally interrupt you.
Blistering.com: How rude. Seriously.
Caley: I know. See? Rock star.
Harvey [laughs] I thought I could do it more concisely. Before we split up, we were working on a DVD. We are going to try and finish that and it’ll have an audio component from some songs that didn’t make it onto that last album as well as some re-recorded older stuff and some new cover songs. That’s the next thing that we are going to work on. And then we’ll work on an entirely new record. I doubt we’ll use any of the songs from this last one on the new one because I think they are all sort of in the same temper as All Guts, No Glory so when we start the new record, we want it to have sort of its own character. Each record should be its own thing.
Caley: Conceptually and sonically, it’s going to be its own thing.
Blistering.com: When you guys do create something that works, do you visualize it working better in the live setting or on record? What is more important for you when rehearsing new songs?
Caley: For me, it’s all visceral and there’s really no thought process. Whatever works. If it sounds good, cool. I don’t know what your style is.
Harvey: Honestly I don’t think about that. For this tour, we only did three new songs off the new record and how we determined that was which three songs Relapse released first on the internet for the album (laughs). That’s how we did it. That was really how our decision making process went.
Caley: Yep. We did a lot of tours before the record even came out. We were kind of putting them in there one at a time because we didn’t want to bum out the fans. We wanted to play as much of the classic shit that everybody’s used to. We didn’t want to be dickheads and play just all new stuff because that’s not fair to the fans.
Harvey: I figured that if I hadn’t seen a band live for six or seven years, I wouldn’t want to hear the whole new record. I’d want to hear a lot of the old stuff so we try to respect that. After a couple more tours, I’m sure the set will shift in favor of more new stuff.
Caley: It’s going to change all the time depending on the crowd response, what we feel like doing. It’s an amalgamation of those things. Whatever works, you know? You get up there, you play, and you see what works and what doesn’t work. That’s how it goes.
Harvey: We really try to be as under-analytical as possible.
Blistering.com: My personal favorite song from Exhumed is “Open the Abscess” and every time I’ve seen that song played live, it seems like that’s the general fan favorite. That and “Decrepit Crescendo.” Is there anything that even though the crowd loves it, you’re just sick and tired of playing?
Caley: Well, not for me personally because I haven’t been playing these songs since ’92 [laughs loudly, along with Matt].
Blistering.com: [laughs] The question was aimed more at Matt.
Harvey: [laughs] I don’t know. For me, I love “The Matter of Splatter” and it’s usually like one of the crowd favorites. It’s either the first or second favorite for the crowd. I like it, but there’s this one riff that’s in there that I just don’t like. Our old guitar player Mike [Beams] wrote it. It’s a great song and it’s fun to play, but that riff that he wrote just annoys me. Had I written it, I would have written it differently so it’s easier. So I don’t know if I don’t like playing it, but that one little part is physically annoying to play. As long as the kids like what we’re playing, that’s all that matters because we’re doing it for them. I’m not trying to be up there and only satisfying myself. As long as what we’re doing gets the kids moving and going crazy, we’re doing our job.
Caley: The record we did was more for us, what we wanted to do. It’s what we like doing and we do that part mainly for us. So when it’s done, we then incorporate what we think the kids would like and if they like, then cool, that’s what we go with. It’s always about them when we play live. If we play songs and they don’t give a shit about our music. Well… I hope they give a shit [laughs loudly again].
Blistering.com: Well, the whole point is to hopefully write something good so they go and buy the CDs [laughs].
Harvey: [laughs loudly] Yeah that’s kind of the idea, to you know, have them buy our music.
Caley: Yeah, I hope they care. It would be like Slayer going out with a new record and then playing three songs off the new record, and then playing like 20 old songs. That’d be ridiculous. We don’t have as long a career as Slayer or whatever.
Harvey: We basically have to disengage our egos from it all. The setlist that I would want to play is not the same setlist that we’re playing. The setlist that the kids want on the internet is the best gauge of fan response so that’s the setlist we play. We are here for the people who are paying money to see the show, so it’s sort of a no-brainer. It just seems like the most obvious thing ever. If someone gives you money to go and do something, you try to make them happy? I don’t know, it just seems kind of obvious.
Caley: And it’s not just a business thing, either. These people are to see us and if this is what they want to see, they’ll see it. It’s respect and appreciation. We aren’t going to be assholes.
Harvey: If we’ve been around for 20 years, we’re not going to come out with a subpar album full of Marilyn Manson outtakes. Like, you know, other bands in the genre who will remain nameless.
