#dave decker

Forgive me for not knowing, but you're born in Miami and then ended up in Gainesville and Tampa Bay? How does that journey happen? Like, how do you get from Miami? Is there a town in between there? Did you live in Orlando for a little bit?

No, yeah. I was born in Miami, and lived there till I was like around eight or nine. That's when we came to Tampa. I'm, like, fourth generation. In 1910 my granddad was on this river, it was called Palm River down by Tampa Bypass Canal, so we had land and stuff here. My mother was a working single mom and she came up here to be on in this area because my grandparents were here too. They helped out, you know, it's hard to raise a kid on your own. So they were around and stuff growing up in Tampa.

So I grew up in Tampa until I was 17 or 18. I grew up skating, listening to music, going to shows, hanging out and stuff and then I moved to Gainesville in, like, '89 or '90. I was there until, I want to say, like, '94. Then we basically came back to Tampa; I'm giving you like the short version.

We lived in Gainesville for four years. We were always into the music since we were like 13 or 14; you know, punk rock music, rap music and shit. Gainesville was just exploding. At that time, that band Radon was getting big. The Hardback was where people would go for shows, and all these bands were happening. Thee Gainesville bands like Smoke and Radon. Hot Water Music and Less Than Jake weren't even bands yet. They weren't even bands until like around maybe '91 or '92. Then those guys moved up and we were all neighbors;  I played with Less than Jake for one practice.  I love those guys, they're totally good friends, they're nice guys, but I was I was playing Fugazi, Jawbreaker, all that Dischord shit, New York hardcore shit, L.A. punk shit, Berkley stuff. We shared a band room, and those guys, of course, became who they were. So we did bands, and No Idea was the label that put band stuff out around that time, '94; No Idea kept going until a couple years ago. I think they folded or had some stuff happen.

So we moved back to Tampa, like, in '94: Richie, Don and myself. We kept our bands going and still toured. So it's funny that we're actually talking about this because last night I went over to Richie's to work on new Big Sad song. I've played, pretty much, in every band with him. So from 1990, we were in bands together. When I was a kid, he was like one of the older kids that would run around and you know, be in crazy bands and stuff. Anyway, we were watching these old videos of Clairmel tours on old VHS tapes from, God, that's gotta be damn near 30 years ago now.  Videos of shit; just us with other bands touring with no money, drinking, smoking... being in bars. You realize how immature you are.

So we got back to Tampa around '94 or 95 and then pretty much lived in Tampa until now. I owned a business; we all just kind of came here to live. Those guys got married, but we all lived that 9-to-five, but always played in bands. We were always drinking and stuff.

I always noticed that when I would drink, it was weird, because those guys would all drink and just have fun. I would drink to numb the shit. I was like, "I like drinking because I get numb." They were like, "Well, we like drinking because we have fun." Like, "What's wrong with you, dude?"

I was in Tampa pretty much the whole time. I went out to San Diego for like a month eight years ago, but I didn't stay there. I never lived in Orlando; I just robbed a bank in Orlando. I figured it was a better place to rob a bank versus Tampa. I was so stupid. I was like, "If I rob a bank in Orlando, then nobody will find me," and then four days later. I mean, for five days I was on the run. I mean, I remember being in the car and driving away with fucking cop cars right behind me and being like, "Aw fuck, I guess I'm gonna get out of town." I had a bunch of money full of fucking red dye because the dye pack blew up. Money was going everywhere; the shit burns you. It's crazy.

In a rental car, I drove back to Tampa. I hid out out and four or five days later, I'm looking at a cell phone, and I'm like, "Oh, shit." I saw my picture. I Googled my name, and I saw my picture, "Wanted," in circulation on, like, 25 or 30 national newspapers. Chicago Sun-Times, I remember looking at that website, and I'm on the run for fucking four days, but there's my picture. I'm like, "Oh, shit." So I look at another one. The L.A. Times, whatever, there's my picture. It's everywhere. I guess Reuters or some news agency probably got it. That was fucking nuts.

Wow. And I was going to ask you this later. But my assumption is that you're addicted to photography now. But what were you addicted to? That led you to steal cars and rob that bank?

I guess I would say like my drug of choice was probably alcohol; it was my go-to thing you know? Ultimately, whatever drug you're doing; you're just trying to mask a symptom, right? You're just trying, you're just trying to feed this other thing.

They say, "You don't have a drinking problem. You have a thinking problem." The core problem is, "What are you thinking about and why are you thinking about it?" Because all your thoughts are going to translate into beliefs, and your beliefs are going to drive your actions, and your actions are going to drive whatever consequences are the result of those actions.

And they can be positive consequences, you know. It all starts with your thought process; now I understand that. I was always trying to bury my feelings with, you know, booze and stuff. I went through like two years where I got into heavier drugs. I used to experiment with, like, cocaine and stuff. At that point, I was trying to sell cocaine and hustle to stay high. I think I was doing meth. That shit's crazy; you see how people can get so addicted to it.

What's weird about it is that we used to eat a lot of Adderall and drink, but you think about it... they give that shit to kids, but Adderall is an amphetamine. I mean, it's fucking meth, and that's what we're feeding these kids with ADD. Kind of how you feel on Adderall is how you feel on meth, to be honest. It's energy. I was always addicted, honestly, dude, I was always looking for energy.

It seems weird because you have it now in spades.

Here's the fucked up thing. I remember being a kid, 13 to 17, and all you did was skateboard and go to shows. We'd stay out all night skating. I'll go to Ybor for an hour now since I am so into photography right now, learning how to find a narrative or frame a shot with a photo. What I was gonna say is that I'll be walking through Ybor, and I see La Tropicana, and we used to skate those fucking curbs in '87 and '88; we were doing slappys, and feeble grinds, shit like that. I remember being like, 15 years old and skating those Tropicana curbs while Nirvana was playing at the old Masquerade across the street. I had that record, it was called 'Bleach,' I had it and I couldn't even get in because I was a little kid. I remember standing outside listening to him play, I think it was "Floyd, the Barber," one of those songs. Then Jane's Addiction the next week, that Nothing's Shocking record had just come out.

You'd sneak into shows if you could; I remember seeing Jawbreaker at the Volley Club. I was maybe, like 15 or 16; we all snuck into kitchen and watched Jawbreaker. That shit was like a high, it was like being high. We were almost like straight edge kids, I remember being around people that were drinking. They were kind of our friends; there were so many different types of people in the scene.  You did an interview with Edwin; he was always around. He was a guy that I totally looked up to. He had this band called Awake. There were these other guys in this band called Slap Of Reality. The people O idolized were people like Edwin. And like, you know, this guy, Trevor Slimser, who actually does Noisey now. Richie, my bandmate, I looked up to him. It was so cool, because there was always shit happening, so I never really felt like drinking. I never understood drinking cause I was always fucking running around being crazy and creative.

So it's funny. I remember my lowest of lows, getting arrested and being like, "Fuck, this is the best thing that can happen to me because I'm gonna die out here." My game plan was rob the bank, fucking out of fucking money and then kill myself. I had a little .380 sitting there; I'm looking at a gun and I'm like, "Fuck, man. I don't really want to kill myself, but now I'm probably going prison for 10 years. And I'm like, "Shit. I don't know what to do. I don't want to pull that trigger. It doesn't seem like a good idea."  I was like, "Fuck, they're just gonna have to catch me, I guess. So until they catch me I'm just going to fucking ride out."

They eventually caught me; I remember being in the lowest of lows and thinking "This is the day that it's all gonna change." I was like, "I don't know what's going to happen, I don't know how long I'm going to be locked up for, but I'm going to take full responsibility for everything from here on out. I don't give a fuck. I'm alive right now, and I don't know why."

I don't believe in predestiny. I don't believe in God and all that shit, but I just think shit happened.  So I was like, "I am a control what happens to me for the rest of my life. I'm gonna own up to everything I fucked up." I never touched a drink or anything since. It's  been a wild ride from there to here. But now it's it's cool, man.

I think you were arrested like, the middle of January 2014. Did you rob that bank before the New Year, like, before Christmas and stuff?

No, I had robbed the bank. I think I think on January 6.

To take a step back, you were talking about Edwin and stuff, but I think that Richie was also somebody that you looked up to a lot, and that was wondering, like, what were some of the cultural movements, that he was involved in, the music he was involved with that spoke to you?

We were all kind of involved in like the same things. He was like an older dude, if I could nail down scenes, he was into the Berkeley scene with all like, the Lookout bands. There was the D.C. scene with all the Dischord bands. There. The L.A. scene with all the SxE bands and stuff. I'm probably missing a lot here. There was the old English scene, bands like The Oppressed, The Business, The Jam. He turned me on to stuff like that. Then there were bands like, like Dinosaur Jr., the Flaming Lips, all the New York hardcore stuff. He was a dude that was into all that shit. And I could go like, hang out with them, smoke weed and listen to records. I remember listening to old Flaming Lips records, and thinking, "Holy shit," some people called that stuff post-punk. That stuff is so rad.

Cultural movement-wise, there was "punk music," if you want to call it that. It's really just about resistance. I remember being a kid skateboarding; there was no X-Games. You'd be skating and people would try to beat your ass in the street for it. They'd call you names and stuff. I remember in the punk scene there'd be people trying to fight you. There was so much violence back then. There's not violence now like there was then. Richie was the kind of guy who would stand up for himself and stand up for you. I remember skating downtown with one of my best friends who was this African-American guy named Alfred. We were skating downtown one night, skating curbs outside of what used to be called 911. 

On Franklin.

Yeah, yeah, on Franklin. I was a kid, 16 or 17, but I was friends with all the older dudes because of skating and punk rock. This dude, a crazy racist, a gnarly dude comes out and he starts calling my friend the N-word. I was like, "Fuck this dude," but he was big. And Rich comes out, and he's like, "Yo, is there a fucking problem?" He totally pulls a Patrick Swayze, man. He took care of that dude, without getting into details. He stood up for us. We were young.

He knew how to defend himself. He was always doing things for the right reasons. So in that sense, I always admired him. "This is a fucking cool dude, a good guy with good morals." There were a lot of good people around the scene back, and I hate that word "skinhead," but there was a lot of that back then, too. There was a lot of violence.

I know that there's been evolutions of the Big Sad sound, especially with Frank getting synthesizers, but I think of a song like "Hazard," which just grabs you on first listen and subsequent listens, but what bands influence the Big Sad sound?

I'm inspired by a lot of stuff. The top of my triangle of guitar, the people I admire, I guess, would be J. Mascis, Ian MacKaye and my buddy, actually, my buddy Dave who was in a band called Radon. He's a phenomenal guitar player and songwriter. I'm always trying to channel the energy of old Dinosaur. The first three dinosaur records come to my mind. All of the Fugazi stuff. The D.C. stuff always moved me so much. Honestly, there's a band that always really inspired me, a San Francisco band called Fuel, but not that Fuel you always hear about. They were pushing LGBT issues back in the early '90s; their singer was trans. They were badass; they had a record out on Lookout, I think.

How many hours do you think you put in with Frank at Atomic for the six songs on the EP?

Maybe 12 recording. And then he mixed for another seven or eight and played synth on it.

I will say this when you ask about what's influencing the sound. It's kind of influenced by so much right. Every time I go out and every time I go out and I see a local band, I'm excited. I get influenced by just the shift that happens around here. Like I went to that Clang! show, and it's crazy because there's like there was another show happening at the same time that I wanted to be it. It's been happening a lot lately. It makes me happy that there is so much cool shit out there. But I'm influenced a lot by what I see locally, but a band that I really dig is that band Idles. That band is so good.

Yeah, that record’s like a cup of coffee for me.

Yeah, right? It'll get you going, man. Especially if you're dealing with bullshit.

How do you know when a song is starting to grow legs and needs to walk somewhere? What does that feel like for you?

That's a great question. Songwriters all have their process, but for some there is more than one process, right?

There's so there's the process of when I hear something interesting, I write it down and make a note. If I hear opposing ideas in one phrase, or a metaphor, something that moves me or makes me think in a different way, I write it down. We're always searching for the perfect metaphor, but then it's how do we put these metaphors together in prose, in rhythm, and make it work in time? Where do we create melody for that rhythm.

Hopefully, all that's going to happen on accident. In a perfect world that just kind of like, falls out of the sky, and then rains down and fertilizes the roots of what we're trying to create and call a song. When it grows, legs, I feel like it's when we're moving through a part... a lot of times, it's like me just playing and finding notes I like. Turn that into a footpath or something I can tap my foot to. Then I can bring those notes into a timing or a frame. Now I have that melody. Sometimes I hear the music first. And then I'm driving and I've got these lyrics. And I'm kind of humming words, and it kind of falls in. And I'm like, "Oh, cool." Other times, it's like, I'm driving down the road. And maybe something’s rolling through my head; it can be just random thing. So you grab your phone, and then you know, you sing a little melody, and then you know where you're at. Then you put chords to it, and it happens like that.

Whether you do it with vocals-first-music-second or music-first-vocals-second, I feel like it grows legs whenever I wake up the next day and that idea is pulsing through my mind. That's when I sit down, grab the guitar, start singing it and playing it. usually I'll demo it; now it's kind of grown legs, and I'm like, "Let me talk to Richie," or "Let me talk to Shawn."

Like last night, I'm with Richie. We're watching old videos and working on songs, then this morning he's got these ideas. I think it grows legs when I'm not trying to hear it. When I'm in another state of mind, or another state of consciousness, and that song follows me. And that melody follows me. It's in my head. That's when I know that something that I'm going to want to, you know, turn it into something more substantive. It's now following me. It grew legs and stayed in my mind.

You could easily use the same chords 100 times and write a record, but is it compelling? So for us, we're taking longer to write song only because we want these ideas to marinate and cultivate. That's what's so cool about working with Shawn Watkins and working with Richie; they're both songwriters. Sean's a classically trained musician, and he played xylophone. He's a classically-trained vibraphone player, and it's so rad because I'll be working on something or I'll be singing something, and he'll go, "Hey, can you pull the fifth of that?" I'll be like, "Yeah, let me try it." I never heard the drummer fucking tell me to pull the interval of a major scale and sing it. That's pretty cool. Then Rich,  if I got this chord progression, he'll be like, "No, I don't want to play it like that. I'm going to do this." He'll just play some total counter rhythm melody to it. It's cool. If you leave it to me, I'll write some one-dimensional song.

You mentioned that it does feel like four equal parts. I think you just answered it, but Sean obviously is very instrumental in helping form the Big Sad songs, even before Richie got there. And I think you just explained what Richie does when he gets to the songs, but as far as the Big Sad songs that are going to be on this EP, how different are they from the songs that you demoed and wrote, the ones that grew legs and followed you?

You mean, like these songs from like, from the point that I demo them to the point where they're at now?

Yeah.

Oh, wow. That's a that's a great question, too, because the three of the songs are songs that I pretty much had written. They're very different because when I write it's kind of a simple thing. They're kind of like one dimensional, in the sense that I'm not really writing a lot of bass parts. When demo them I just kind of write a base on the traces it. Sometimes they'll have a bass idea, but for the most part, I'll just start playing with Shawn and then Richie will take the idea.

I might write a weird arrangement, and Richie may be like, "I'm not feeling that," or Shawn will  actually stop and work on a pre-chorus. There'll be all these layers and textures to it, rhythmically, so yeah they come out super different. In the old days, I used to get upset about shit like that; 15, 20 years ago I'd be like, "No, I want the song to be written my way." But then you realize, "You know what, I don't have to always be right. And I don't always have to have the answers to everything." That's kind of how I learned to live life. I don't need to always be right, and I don't need to always pretend to have the answers."

The irony of that, or the paradox, I don't know how to say it,  is that in in understanding that I don't know everything about how I want the song to be, it ends up being a better song. When I approach a challenge in life on a daily level, I can look at it and go, "OK, this is what I know about the situation. This is what I don't know, and this is when I ask for help." And that really is cool.

Yeah, they come out really different. And that's what was rad about Frank coming in. I'm excited to keep writing and doing all this new stuff. There are spaces. I'm just one guitar player even though I am playing two amps, but there's space in there now. The idea was, "We could get another guitar player," but we've done that.  What we've never done was filled in that space with like sensing something as you know, melodic and harmonic like a keyboard can produce. He does it on three songs on that EP, and I was like, "Dude, you should do it to all of 'em," but he's like, "Nah, it's fine." It creates this whole new level, a whole new thing. I'm super stoked. I hear these final mixes, and I can't believe that I'm playing in a band that has all these different sounds.

I get that your daughter drew up a logo for you, but what was that conversation Richie had with his 19-year-old daughter to lead to the name “Big Sad”?

We were going to call the band Send Help because Sean has this painter friend up north. He calls his art "Send Help," and he paints this really cool stuff. In fact, I think we're going to call the EP Send Help, and we're going to use this painting of his; it's a crazy fucking flamingo, a fucked up looked flamingo. Then we go on Spotify and Google and there are all these "Send Help"s , so we're like, "I guess we can't do that." So we're trying to figure it out. And I had this idea that I can call it Rekced Division because I did that record called Rekced, but I didn't want to make it all about me. And so we were struggling on a name and Richie's talking to his daughter, and she's really creative, they were having this conversation about Pete Shelly dying at 63 years old, and she said, "Oh that's Big Sad." He called me up and he goes, "I got a name for this band." I was like, "What do you want to call it?" He goes, "We're calling it Big Sad." I was like, "That's fine. Let's call it 'Big Sad.'"

Should we talk about your Gibson guitar that’s been glued back together and reborn at least a dozen times? It’s the one thing you didn’t lose or give away, it plays like a dream, but it’s been through a lot…

It sure has. Actually, it's funny, dude, that video we're watching last night was us playing in Washington, D.C., playing with a band called Gus. Their drummer Sammy actually plays in Interpol now, it's weird, I remember being in New York City with him and sitting in Soho; Cindy Crawford was walking across the street, and he was like, "I'm gonna live up here one day," and I was like, "Yeah, whatever Sammy." That video was from '95 or '96 — some shit like that, and I'm actually playing that guitar. I'm like, "Fuck, man. That guitae has been through so much."

You know, that guitar? It's interesting. It's hard to put it into words how much it means to me because it is just an object. To me, it's a symbol of my survival; I'll keep it for the rest of my life.

It's on a wall now; I don't play it as much because it's been so beat up. I play a different guitar. It's an SG. For Big Sad, I play a tremolo. I don't play it for Big Sad. It's just so fucking beat up, man. Yeah. I always take it's like when I play shows as a backup. I I learned how to bend notes and play tremolo; I just want to try and create these new sonic abstract sounds. But, yeah, that guitar means so much to me. I look at it every day. It's like, like an old friend. It's pretty awesome.

How much does, or have, the Thursday sessions with Sulynn affected the music for Big Sad?

I never really wanted to change my style; I have kind of a box I play in, but I wanted to build on my technique, andreally focus more on ear training and improvisation training so that when someone is working with something I know where to go within the melodic box. Through working with things like triads, intervals, arpeggios, modal shapes, I've learned that basically, a lot of what I do solo-wise... for example, if you ask J. Mascis what he's doing guitar, he'll say, "I don't know anything about music theory." If you talk to people about music theory that love J. Mascis, they'll  tell you he's playing major scales, the majority of what he does is in major scale. So then I realized, that, "Fuck, man, everything I do soloing, and when I'm playing guitar, is in the major scale because it's more melodic. So I like playing in the fifth degree of the C major scale a lot. I play in the fifth shape of that scale.

Practicing with Sulynn has helped me nail down notes that I used to miss. So on the song "Sworn To Protect" I now know that when I go into that solo, I'm playing E Ionion, which is the first degree of the E major scale. I'm doing a two octave run all the way down the fucking neck to get to that last lick and at last note. Then I bring it back and create, I guess a melody form within the space that the rhythm allows. It's helped me understand what I'm doing and where I want to go. It has made it more interesting. In Big Sad I'm the guitar player, so I can't really hide behind mistakes. I have to kind of have my chops up.

She puts me on these assignments; she keeps me plugged into a lot of things. Like, "try an arpeggio in the major scale in shape one. Next week, it might a directional picking workout. Or I might be working with descending string pairs. It's pretty cool, because a lot of that stuff, I don't take to my songwriting, but my hands are so, into different shapes and different phrasing of things that a lot of it starts to bleed into me being interested in other areas of music. I've always appreciated other forms of music, but she's taught me  appreciation and understanding of different forms of guitar playing that I never really understood. It's such a journey.

I love Sulynn, man, she's so fucking cool, man. She's super talented. She's just a really genuine, amazing human being. She's pretty much into any style of guitar. And she doesn't know how to do it, then he's trying to learn how to do it. She understands rhythm and timing in a way that I can't even really grasp. She works hard at it. She's probably one of the hardest working musicians I've ever met. She's definitely helped me out. I mean, she's just a good friend and kind of like a good mentor. It's cool when you know people that are that talented that will work with you.

I want to ask you, you take your glasses off before you play, which I assume has a lot to do with how much you move around, but how much can you still see at that point?

For me a song isn't ever really complete until I can play it and never look at the guitar. It's not complete until I can play it blind.

So are you blind when you take your glasses off?

Yeah.

Can you see  the shapes and the crowd?

Yeah, I usually can. But when we start playing, I pretty much just, kind of black out. I don't really know what's happening with people and stuff. That's why it's hard for me to talk. I don't really consider myself an entertainer. I don't know how to really connect with the crowd, so to speak. It's hard to describe. I like to be able to play the next line because then on, and then I have to focus on singing. But to me, this singing has to be connected to the notes on the guitar. And then it feels more authentic. If I if I'm trying to say and stare my neck, then I'm not really feeling that message I'm trying to deliver.

And as far as that message goes, you talked about "Sworn To Protect" and some of the musical parts, but the first verse of that song reads like instructions. That song has a message. Is there anything that people should read into in terms of listening to the Big Sad EP?

Yeah, so that's Richie; he's my collaborator. Basically that's a song I pretty much wrote. But then Richie started singing, and he had these vocal ideas, right. I had a vocal for it, but he stepped in with something that was that he was really sure of. He wrote all the lyrics for that song. And so he stepped in with something that he felt really good about. I could have tried to step forward and put resistance there, but, honestly, my idea wasn't as solid as his idea. And that was where I was like, "Dude, go for it."

He had these decides this just general idea, and these lyrics. Basically, the message there is that these cops gotta lay off people, man. Fucking beat people up. Quit killing people; quit killing people because they're black. Yeah, you know what I mean? He wrote those lyrics, and I was like, "Whoa, that's pretty rad, man." What I do is I come in and do backups; we talked about where the backup should be, trying to build harmonies — stuff like that. It's both of us singing.

"Empty Falls" is just a nod homeless people. I'm not gonna lie: a lot of my life, I've always had empathy for people, but I just kind of never understood homelessness, but being locked up and seeing homelessness.. while it seems like a choice, you know, when people say, "Oh, you know, that person should get a job," but it's not that simple, man. First off, we don't really know what kind of mental illnesses people have; people are hurting out there, man. A lot of is undiagnosed mental illness, untreated addiction and stuff like that. So, there was this homeless lady I would see every day driving from home from work. Six, seven years ago. I mean, I was on the streets; I remember sleeping, sleeping outside under a bridge. So I see this lady. I imagined having a conversation with her, and I was wondering about her life. Basically that song was me having a conversation with that never happened. I'm just speaking generally about, you know, it's really a song about compassion.

I know, it's a different band, but I wanted to ask you, when did you stop being Evil Eye from some of your other songs? Is Evil Eye dead? Is that person gone?

I mean, Evil Eye is still kind of still there. He's kind of like the alter ego, but then there's the Waffle Face Girl. I mean "Horizon 2 Charlie," those songs that I wrote for Sandspur City, that song would have been a Big Sad song. Sandspur City is still a band, we're just not moving as fast. We're not doing as much. But you know, we've been practicing a little bit lately, but I'm just gonna write songs for you know, for this band.

Evil Eye is dead in the sense that he's never coming back, but I guess the story of Evil Eye and the Waffle Face Girl is still there. More to be revealed, right? He's definitely not coming back; I'm definitely not Evil Eye anymore.

What about a Waffle Face Girl? What's her role in your life now? She seems like a superhero.

She's 12 years old now, man. She's everything to me. She's everything. Waffle Face Girl came to me in my dreams when I was locked up every night and comforted me. Basically, I am Evil Eye. She helped put Evil Eye, I guess, on a shelf. Watching her develop and become a smart young woman in this crazy life... her mother is just a really amazing person. They're my family; they're my girls. We're partners. We're a family again; it's so amazing. I never thought that would happen. But well, I did. I knew in my heart. I mean, that's what our name like when I was I was locked up. She came in my, my sleep. And knowing she was out there comforted me.

When did you get out, Dave?

I didn't do a big bid because I took such a lengthy probation.  They wanted to put me down for three-and-a-half years.

The thing that saved me from like, a four or five year bid was that I had no points, no prior felonies. So I caught four felonies within two months; two F3s and one F2. Basically, it was warrants in three counties. So every time I saw a judge, I would say, "I'm guilty." I didn't try to defend myself. I was guilty. So I only did 13 months, but I took a 10 year probation sentence. For six months, I took this really rigid Department of Corrections regulated... it was called like a therapeutic community. Kind of like this drug treatment thing, and it was intense, man. That's a whole 'nother story. I got through that, and they released me on 10 years paper.

Every time you do a prison bid you get a letter — there are guys with K and J letters, they've been a prison 10, 12, times. When I got out, I was on paper, and I was on the street, but I had to have a place to live. I couldn't be on the street, and be on probation, so there was family that took good care of me, the Pitinos. I owe those people a lot. For like three months, I lived in their garage, and I worked. While I was locked up, I got a job sweeping the floors for the granite company that I now manage. I actually run the whole campus now; I basically run production. My boss is the vice president of the company; he and I work together, and I've got eight guys that I'm responsible for. They had just built a new facility in Tampa, and the owner of the company liked me. So the vice president looked out for me. I was actually in Zephyrhills with the Pitino family. I basically just started grassroots, stayed sober, went to work every day, ended up buying a car. After four months living with them, I got a little apartment.

I think during that time I kind of would reach out to you and talk to you a little bit about stuff; slowly my relationships started mending relationships. With Melissa and my daughter, Waffle Face Girl. With Richie and everybody and then everything's been all uphill from there. It hasn't been easy, but it's got me to where I am now, things are good.

Does that answer your question? I'm sorry.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I didn't mean to cut you off when you're talking about what your wife and Waffle Face Girl mean to you.

It's all good. It's weird, because I haven't really talked about a lot of this stuff lately. So it's cool. It's cool to talk about it because it kind of kind of brings me back to these places. And there's a lot of real emotion there.

And if I ever asked you, if I ask you something you don't want to answer, then feel free to you say you don't feel like talking about it.

I don't mind sharing my story because my story was so public anyway, so for me to just like say, "Fuck it and be private" is definitely an option for me, but I feel compelled to share my story if people want it to to hear it because I want to let people know that if you're struggling, and you're out there, and you're on the street, and you think that you can't turn it around — that I've been there, man, and it's possible. You just got to really want it. You gotta want it more than you want the air in your lungs. You got to hang on to hope and put some work in, man.

And you're still putting the work in today. And you talked about in the past, you were drinking to be numb, when your friends were drinking to have fun. Is it ever painful to not be numb? I know you have a lot of other hobbies and stuff, and you're eating clean now, but is it ever painful day-to-day, sometimes, to not be numb?

You know, that's a great question. I'd been trying to get sober for 20 years. I mean, hell, I owned a business from 2005 to 2010, me and my partners were doing like $1.2 million a year at one point. I was making money, man, I had a house all kinds of stuff. I was still a still drunk; just a functional drunk. And I was doing bands, I played SXSW and owned a million dollar company.

Behind the scenes, I was just a sad, sad, entitled drunk consumed with self pity and selfishness. But I always worked hard. I was selfish and full of self-pity in my mind, but I did care about people — and I love my friends. I would try to get sober. I'd go to these periods where I'd been sober for a little bit, and not be sober; I tried different ways of doing it. I was always wondering where that silver bullet was. It did used to be hard. I used to resent not being able to have a drink because I felt like, "Oh, why can't I do that?" 

In these last six years, it's never hard to stay sober. I don't ever feel that need to be numb because you realize that... for me, with alcohol or drugs, I look at it like now a diabetic or someone who is allergic to peanuts — you can't eat fucking peanut butter because they'll die. I look at it like that. If I'm around people that are drinking I don't even think about having that beer because I know that basically that beer is going to kill me. It's like drinking a glass of gasoline. It never get hard because my best day drunk was a was never as good as my worst day sober. I just know where that shit takes me, man. After, like, five, six years, it's pretty easy. It's not a big deal. I don't really get I don't get too into like groups and dogmatic type stuff. I kind of did that for a little while. You kind of realize — and this is a controversial thing I might say — but I don't believe addiction is a disease, man. I think that it's a choice we make. And if I think that I really need to be sober, then I'm going to make the choice to be sober you know? I ain't giving credit to God or nobody. I'm giving myself the credit, and that's OK, you know?

I do feel that whatever it takes to somebody get to a place where they're happy. And they have you know, peace they can get rid of their irritability, their restlessness and their discontent — whatever it takes and get you there, do it. If it's going to church, do it. If it's worshipping a doorknob, do it?

What did Jeff Brawer’s letter/letters to you say specifically, and how instrumental were they for you as far as turning around? 

I think I actually have that postcard right here. So when he sent me that postcard, I think I'd been locked up for maybe six months. I hadn't talked to anybody, nobody would talk to me. I was kind of an asshole. I stood everybody up on the Fest.

The only person who would talk to me was my friend from San Diego, Jessica. She would send me letters and she was in recovery, that she loved punk rock music and shit, so we would always hang out with her. She's just this really cool, creative girl that I have. I think she had dealt with her own addiction; she had been 10 years clean and sober. I think she saw that I was struggling with it. So she would write me in the jail, and just write me with postcards and letters. 

She was really helpful to me, but then Jeff sent me that postcard. I felt like everybody in Tampa hated me and that I would never talk to any of my friends again. So when he sent me that it just gave me so much hope. I'd never planned on coming back to Tampa, man, I was so embarrassed.

My buddy, Tony sent me a Raw Power postcard; he was trying to set up a visit, and he came to visit me from Tampa, and that was super cool. At that point, I was still eight months from getting released because I had to go o all these different counties and face judges. So that was pretty cool. Jeff's was was cool. in a different way because it was someone I used to play music with. It felt good to know that like that crew of people actually cared. He didn't have to reach out to me. To me, it's a testament to who Jeff Brawer is. He's just a loving, caring guy, man, which is what's cool about all those guys and that whole scene. They have all their bands, Navin. Ave., Old Vices — I just love all those people, man. They're just, they're super talented, and they're always doing cool shit.