As much as I remember little league, teenage heartbreak, adolescent holiday festivities and graduating high school, I remember AFI. The effect the band had on my youth cannot be understated. From helping me discover music which I now hold dearly to giving me inspiration to try and create things of my own, AFI has had the same effect on countless individuals around the world. At the center of this adoration is usually AFI frontman Davey Havok. To preview AFI’s return to the Electric Factory this week, I spoke with Havok about the industry, fine art, and cheesesteak. Check out part one below.
Phrequency: What’s the most fun part of being in AFI in 2009?
Davey Havok: Performing. Performing the new songs really in particular, we’ve been working on this record for so long and I’m really so in love with the songs. I’ve been waiting to get out here and perform them and now I’m finally doing it and that’s the most fun.
P: So after almost 20 years and so many records, how do you guys decide what to put in the set every night, especially with putting some old songs in?
DH: Um, I mean really I get the most enjoyment out of playing the newest songs, as well as a few of the songs off of Decemberunderground and Sing the Sorrow but we only play for about an hour and fifteen minutes so it’s hard to fit a lot of songs off of every album into that batch of music. We just decide every night what we feel like playing from the old catalog and we do throw some old songs in there for the fans that have been with us for fifteen or sixteen or seventeen or eighteen years, just to give them that little moment of nostalgia if they’re out there waiting for it.
P: Besides about a month ago, these are your first East Coast shows in three years.
DH: Yeah.
P: When you come to the East Coast, especially in Philly, is there anywhere you need to go and what’s it like coming back?
DH: I love playing the East Coast, it’s such a pleasure to me to play. We played New Jersey and it was fantastic and we’re coming to New York and I always look forward to playing Philly. Our shows have been really fantastic there for years, truthfully. I have many great memories of playing the Troc and where we’re playing now at the Electric Factory.
Philly has some of the best vegan cheesesteaks there are.
P: Govindas?
DH: Yeah, Govindas, which is great and I always look forward to that, and there’s the pretzels. Beyond the shows, Philly really does have a lot to offer. And our friends the Loved Ones are there so we look forward to seeing them if they’re around.
P: Speaking of the Jersey show last month, I was actually there and when Lou Koller (singer, Sick of it All) came out, most of the crowd was dead. What’s it like to have those two separate worlds where you tour with Sick of it All and now when you bring him onstage or cover David Bowie, is it a point to expose your fans to different music that they might not know?
DH: Well, that’s a nice side product to us just enjoying playing those songs and those bands being very much a part of who we are and it coming out through us wanting to cover them as much for homage as for our own enjoyment. At the same time, bringing a band like Sick of It All with us or brining a band like Gallows with us is a means of exposing our fans to a type of music that they might not be familiar with because we don’t play hardcore anymore, though that’s a very much a part of where we came from. We really like to show our fans there is a type of music out there that is very aggressive and very straightforward and very from the heart, that is very important and very important to us. Whether it be something like Sick of It All or David Bowie or the Cure, we do like to some extent, as you said, expose people to types of music that they may have never heard if it wasn’t for us, and is a very important part of music and of culture.
P: So speaking of Gallows, how’d you guys get hooked up with them for this tour?
DH: Actually they submitted for the tour and we had heard of them a bit and then we played with them at Reading and Leeds and we met them and played with them and they were very, very impressive both on stage and off. They’re very genuine people who seem to have come from the same place that we did as artists and musicians and have a lot of the same perspectives and outlooks and they just destroyed the crowd at Reading and Leeds and it was very inspirational to watch them do so, so it’s been great having them with us.
P: So this is kind of an industry question. How has the activity surrounding the release of an album changed since 2003?
DH: I mean, the music industry has been very quickly falling apart since the early aughts and that has accelerated between 2003 and now. Record labels are desperately trying to figure out how to sell records and people don’t buy records anymore so that is the most marked difference. That being said, and the record industry being driven by commerce just totally effects everything. They don’t know how to sell their product, they’re looking for other products to sell and it effects how you record. What type of budgets you get for recording, what type of budgets you get for making videos and thereafter how the record is marketed and not marketed. All of that goes into, it trickles down to the artist and it’s crazy. It’s nuts. It’s really nuts what’s happened culturally with music as well as the business aspect of it.
P: Speaking of what’s happened culturally, in all of the interviews and press materials for Crash Love you’ve talked about the “culture crash” in all of the lyrics, and they’re problems that those of us who live outside of the mainstream are very aware of. I always put this back to the advent of social networking, what do you think has caused this culture crash and why do you think culture is accelerating so quickly?
DH: I think most certainly you can point to the ease of which we share information and that ease has led to a demand for constant stimulus and constant bits of information rather than substance. The desire for quick, meaningless blurbs of something that would have once been perceived as art, whether it’s the decimation of literature or fine art or fashion or music or film, really has overshadowed the desire for something greater, something more powerful, something more important. I really think that the media, the modern media has facilitated that desire and thus changed culture as the generations have moved on. Simply the want for something more than a bit of surface information has gone away because there’s never been anything to instill a desire for anything more in modern culture, and it’s heartbreaking. It’s really heartbreaking coming from a place of finding art so important and it having made such an impact on my life and the lives of people of my generation and even generations younger but at a certain point it’s disintegrated. Really what it comes down to is a lack of desire that has been created.
P: (pause) Wow.
DH: (Laughs)
P: Well speaking of the constant stream of information, AFI always has been mysterious and has tried to keep a sense of danger in music. Is that much harder to do now that there’s this demand?
DH: Yeah, absolutely. There’s certainly a demand for more of that from people who want to market us, which we understand. We want people to hear our music and people with focus on the way culture is, push us in that direction in hopes of getting people to hear our music because it’s backwards now. People hear music because they’re more interested in a blog or a twitter (laughs). Or a photograph.
P: It’s completely disheartening…
DH: It’s really hard to balance that because that’s something we’re not interested in, we’re interested in playing music. We’re not interested in being personas, we’re interested in making music.
Check out Part II of our interview with AFI's Davey Havok tomorrow. Want some incentive to read on? How about this quote: "Tt would be like doing a reunion show for a band that still has the same name. And right now, I just have no interest in that."
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