From the years 2000 to 2002 I ran an online zine, Actionattackhelicopter, along with my friends, Brian and Josh. I was fortunate to interview many musicians whose work I enjoyed. I’m posting some of those interviews here for anyone who may have missed them the first time. They have been edited for length, relevance, and to correct for my poor editing skills at the time of original publication. Keep in mind that these were done over a dozen years ago, thus individuals’ opinions, thoughts, and ideas may no longer be relevant, but they are still interesting as a snapshot of a particular time and place.
This interview was done in the summer of 2000.
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Avail are fucking rednecks; beer drinking, chain smoking, tattooed freaks. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. They create some of the best sing along punk rock songs and have been doing so for what seems like forever. Their live show never lets down as it contains the raw, fresh energy of punk with the fierceness of hardcore and melds it all together with a sincere vulnerability. Always a good time, I recently sat out back of the Emerson Theater in Indianapolis to talk with Tim Barry, the lead singer, and other members of the entourage who proceeded to float in and out as time went by.
Tim: I’m gonna interview you.
All right.
Tim: How was it working with Vanessa, the publicist, at Fat Wreck?
Well, I didn’t work with her, but a friend who set up the interview did and she said she was very easy going and helpful.
Tim: Good. I ask that just because I work directly with her and from her track record she seems to rock. All those people at Fat just kick ass. It’s unbelievable. They’re so fucking nice.
Is that why you guys switched labels?
Tim: We switched because of distribution, but the icing on the cake is how cool all of them are. We switched to Fat because they have great international distribution and we’ve been touring internationally forever. Lookout! is a fucking great record label. I absolutely love them. But they weren’t getting the records to a lot of the places where we were going. It became exceedingly frustrating.
They’re just weird nowadays. They put out weird shit. They’re turning into K Records or something.
Tim: That’s their thing. Larry Livermore started it and obviously you can tell his taste in music with Operation Ivy, Green Day, Screeching Weasel, the Queers, Avail records and all that stuff. He sold the record label to some of the people who ran it. He was just over music. He still loves music, but you know what I mean? He wanted to write a book and focus on that kind of stuff. That’s when a lot of the change in their style of music came about. But to credit them, if you don’t like a lot of the garage rock or whatever you want to call it, they have put out a couple of great records recently like American Steel. They’re a great mix between Leatherface and Hot Water Music. They also put out Ann Beretta from Richmond. They’re keeping that variety of music but straying at the same time.
How did you cut up your leg?
Tim: A lot of this is from Warped Tour and on Warped Tour…
Going nuts for the kids.
Tim: Warped Tour equals barricades. And I don’t like barricades between the crowd and the band. That’s sort of the antithesis of the Avail thing so I spent a lot of time jumping off the stage and over the barricades and into the crowd and singing with people out there. I guess I was fighting the barricades and got my legs cut up.
So how long were you on Warped Tour? Did you do the whole thing or was it just a special slot?
Tim: We did about two and a half weeks or around there. It’s one of the most difficult tours you can go on for a band like us. We are not wealthy rock stars so we can’t afford a bus. Warped Tour load-in is at eight in the morning. I’ll give you a quick example. I’ll be descriptive of our van first.
I like your van, by the way.
Tim: We have a $150 van that Joe (guitarist) did all the work on. We swapped the engine out of the old one.
It has a name, doesn’t it?
Tim: Kelly. We swapped a lot of pieces out of Jenny, our old van, and into the new van. There were eight of us on the tour: five of us in the van and our friend David driving and Paige and Jay who are our roadies. So basically we would play, drink some beer, leave at ten o’clock at night and let me give you an example of a drive…I’m so fucking jaded right now…we would play Jacksonville, Florida, drink some beer, get in the van at ten o’clock at night and drive all night to Knoxville, Tennessee. We’d drive over night. All of us would be sleeping in this van while David drove. You’d wake up at eight o’clock in the morning and you’d get out of your fucking van covered in sweat and you’d go find a bathroom and wash your face. Then you’d walk around. It’s kind of like purgatory. You walk in circles and then production tells you what time you’re playing and what stage. Then you walk around in circles some more and maybe drink some beer and it’s a lot of fun, you meet a lot of really cool people and it’s really cool for the bands because there’s a lot of new people to hear you but if you don’t have a bus it’s very difficult. Night after night after night with nowhere to shower and I didn’t shower for two and a half weeks which isn’t a big deal to me but it’s still kind of nasty. There’s nowhere to hide from the sun and it’s chaos but everybody does it. Everyone else has a home base but we don’t so we just hang out in our merch tent and try to stay out of the sun.
Kelly doesn’t have air conditioning, then?
Tim: Nope. Neither did Jenny. Kelly has heat though. Jenny didn’t heat. I remember driving through Pennsylvania one time in the winter and there were icicles on the inside of the van. You’d think that after a long time of driving that it would start warming up but it didn’t.
Beau Beau (cheerleader) had icicles growing in his hair and stuff.
Tim: He could look like one of those grizzly men in National Geographic.
You found the Sasquatch and he’s in Jenny.
Tim: I’m like the Sasquatch. I’m the big guy. He’d have to be like the troll or something.
[laughs] Was it worth it?
Tim: Man, it’s always a good time. The only negative aspect of it is that it’s difficult and it’s very tiresome. Other than that it’s a wonderful time. Seriously, the camaraderie between all the bands and the crew is such a good time. It’s amazing. It’s such a big production. There are so many people involved. The bands are a minimal part of it. There’s monitor people, sound people, drivers, and there’s so much work to be done. There are so many rad people on it. Outside of maybe two or three people, I got along with everyone. It’s always a good time. We did it a little bit last year, just a week to see if we could endure. I think that if we did anymore than two weeks it just wouldn’t be possible. Hot Water Music had an RV and a lot of bands do that: have a RV and pull a trailer in back. A driver is absolutely essential. It’s so dangerous, too.
Isn’t it like an hour of sleep in a van is only equal to about half an hour of real sleep?
Tim: Yeah. We call it van sleep. It’s not real sleep. Until you get in the rhythm. I slept in the van. I fucking woke up in the morning and got eight hours of sleep. I got totally used to it. But you wake up every time it slows down or stops. You get used to it until it’s normal.
Does Warped Tour conflict with the politics of Avail?
Tim: No. That was something when we first got offered we turned it down a couple of times. If we do it, it’s a decision that we’ve made as a group. Generally there is discussion about it. We did discuss the Warped Tour at length and decided that we could do the same thing every night, which is play clubs or halls to the same people, or we could try and bring in new people. It was a conscious decision. Music was made to be shared.
No more preaching to the converted.
Tim: Yeah. You’re supposed to learn from it, learn about yourself and have fun with it. That’s why we make music. Playing Warped Tour is great because there are so many people who say that they’ve never heard us before. If Hot Water Music and Avail and Snapcase and Good Riddance and a handful of other bands that were on the Warped Tour can give people an alternative to what they think is alternative it’s great. Shit. What if you were thirteen years old and hung out at the mall and bought records about whatever you heard on the radio like Korn, Green Day, and maybe NOFX is about as obscure as you get? Then you go to Warped Tour and you see those bands like Hot Water Music and they blow your fucking mind. You pick up the records and check the message boards and wonder what people are talking about when they mention Ann Beretta, American Steel, and Avail. Then maybe you’ll get into some of that shit.
That’s how I got into it.
Tim: That’s how I got into it, too. When I was in my early twenties I was a fucking PC turd who thought that that music should be exclusive and no band should play outside of a basement and all that kind of stuff. People naturally evolve. The reality is that I’m twenty-nine years old and I bought all my records at the mall. I went to see Iron Maiden, Ozzy Osborne and Metallica. That’s what I was into. I accidentally went to a metal show where a punk band opened. I was blown away. “What’s this slam dancing shit?” I got hooked from that. It’s just an accident. A lot of that stuff happens. I’ve never been able to walk into a show and see a kid wearing a Korn shirt or a mainstream band t-shirt and think they’re not cool. It goes right back to the idea that music is supposed to be shared.
It’s definitely a younger thing, too, don’t you think?
Tim: I know a lot of older people who have a pole stuck up their asses, still. But yeah, it goes with that. I was that way when I was in my early twenties so I guess it’s true.
How has Avail changed since then besides in personnel matters?
Tim: What’s awesome about Avail is that it’s an eclectic group of people. The whole time I was PC I was like, “You shouldn’t say that word!” I was one of those annoying people who dwelled on the words instead of the actual issues. Beau would always come back at me with saying the words just to piss me off. He was the total opposite. Finally I had to break down and realize how stupid I was. I could take this thought process and make myself open. The whole time Beau is saying, “See, I told you so.” And Beau could say, “Maybe I should stop being so anti-PC because it’s not that cool. Maybe I should expand.” So it’s cool. We’ve always kept ourselves in check. I don’t think we’ve changed; it’s just that our real people have come out after all these years. We communicate better. We’re like a family. We’ve always been tight, though. I’ve known Beau since kindergarten.
Has Beau’s role in the band changed at all or is he still a crazy guy?
Tim: The only thing that’s changed is that he lost his front tooth. Now he looks even more like a fucking lunatic. He’s got more tattoos and less teeth.
How’d he lose his tooth?
Tim: We were getting ready to go into band practice and Joe and Beau had been out back working on the van all morning and Joe made Beau one of those fucking microwave pizzas in the oven. We were upstairs getting ready to rock. Oh shit. I can’t believe I just said, “rock.” We were upstairs getting ready to play and Beau knocks on the door and says, “I can’t come to practice today. I’ve got to go to the dentist.” He smiled and he had no front tooth. The shit was rotting and it was all nasty and black and shit. So I grabbed the Polaroid to take a picture of him with no front tooth. Beau’s sitting there, he lost his tooth and he says he swallowed it.
Oh my gosh!
Tim: Gwomper, our bass player, is sitting there eating his scraps. He gets to the last bite of his pizza bones and the motherfucker had his tooth. He had been chewing on his rotting, black tooth. It was so nasty.
That’s horrible!
Tim: Gwomper has a really weak stomach and was gonna throw up so he went to the bathroom.
Did he throw up then?
Tim: Yeah, I think so. I ran out of Polaroid film so I was desperately looking for film the whole time.
Oh my gosh. That’s a good story.
Tim: That’s the Avail world. We have a million of those stories.
You guys are based out of Richmond, right?
Tim: And always will be. A few years ago my friend Neil from Tribal War Records said to me, “Every night you say the same thing. You always say, ‘What’s up y’all? We’re Avail from Richmond, Virginia.’” We were joking in the van because I realized that I still say it every night even though we change the set list. I think we’re going to name the next record Avail from Richmond, Virginia because it’s just like our name now. Our friends travel and people say, “Oh you’re from Richmond, Virginia? Do you know Avail?”
Because Richmond has three people in it. Even though I’m from Indiana, I love Virginia. I’m a history person, too, so it’s awesome. What are some of the things you like about living in Virginia?
Tim: Some of the things I like about where we live in Virginia is that it’s a slowed down pace from our neighbors up north in Washington DC and places further north. I like those places but we have cheap rent and the community I live in is cool because when I get home from tour the old guy at the corner store asks me how tour went and asks for pictures. I’ll go and get my hair cut and Bill, who cuts my hair, will say, “You’re home! God damn your hair is long!” I’ll go to the bar and get a beer and I’ll know all the punk rockers. Then I’ll ride my bike down to Café 21, which is the working class bar. Lots of construction workers. They’ll be like, “How was tour?! Everybody get Tim a beer!” I love that and that’s what I dig about Richmond. That’s why I’ve lived there for so long. Richmond is the reason I haven’t worked since 1993. Rent is fucking cheap. Sure it’s going up, but it’s going up all over the country. We’ve been lucky enough to have the same six-bedroom house for the past seven years that costs $500 a month.
Oh my gosh. I’m moving down there with you guys.
Tim: Rent is going up but there are still neighborhoods in Richmond where you can get cheap houses. It doesn’t mean I live in the nicest area, but I know every fucking kid in the neighborhood and they’re the only ones who break into cars and if you know them, they’re not going to fuck with you.
So what kind of shit do you guys do down there besides rocking?
Tim: I’ll tell you what I do. When I get home from tour, I love to write music, mountain bike, hang out at the James River with my dog and I ride freight trains.
Are you serious?!
Tim: Yeah. I jump on freight trains and ride down to North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia or Florida. I drink whiskey and jump on another freight train and go somewhere else. If you live in New York City or some other big city like Los Angeles you do something called working to live. That’s all you do. You work sixty or seventy hours a week to pay your bills, eat, feed your dog or whatever. Where we live you can get by on very little. I’ll give you an example. Ed, our drummer, has worked at this restaurant called Millie’s for ten years. Just out of the sheer fact that he has a loyalty to them he keeps two shifts: Wednesdays and Sundays. He makes about $150 or $200 in tips in one day. Tons of people go to eat there. If he’s banking about $300 a week working two days a week and your rent is only $200 a month, you only need to work about eight to ten days a month to get by comfortably. Do you see what I’m saying?
And the rest of the month you can ride trains. I’d rather live that way.
Tim: Some friends of mine from San Francisco just moved up to Portland and they said the things that they totally forgot existed is that you can ride your bike around in Portland and stop by people’s porches and hang out and eat some food and then you can get on your bikes and go to somebody else’s porch and get some beer. In San Francisco that doesn’t happen anymore because everyone works. Richmond is just like that at this time of year. It’s front porch 40s. I sit out on my porch at night and random people will stop by and have a beer. We’ll smoke some cigarettes and some punkers will come by. It’s nice because you don’t have to work to live. I wouldn’t be able to live off the band if I didn’t live there because we far from live large. Right Gwomp?
Gwomper: Yeah, but you can’t drink alcohol working two days a week. You’ve got to work three days a week in order to drink.
Just to afford the alcohol?
Gwomper: Yeah.
Tim: Not if you drink like me.
Not if you drink Milwaukee’s Best.
Gwomper: Yeah, if you sit all by yourself, sitting on the porch cheap style. I like to go be social.
Tim: That’s my social. My social is not being surrounded by tons of people. My social is grabbing a couple of 40s that cost a dollar fifty and sitting on the porch and actually talking to people instead of trying to scream over some band.
I feel like I’m in the South. You guys represent the South so well.
Tim: It’s not even a Southern thing, though. We’re talking about a city that, in comparison to East Coast cities, is pretty small. It has a lot to do with population and where people are coming from.
Is there a lot of shit to do as a visitor in Richmond?
Tim: You would go to all the historic sites. You’d go see Tredegar Iron Works, Chimborazo Hill, which is the largest Confederate hospital that existed.
They just live off of that don’t they?
Tim: No. The tourist economy in Richmond is laughable. They’ve been trying forever to capitalize on Civil War era stuff. It’s Virginia for Christ’s sake. It’s like South Carolina started the war and we dealt with it. That’s how it went.
That’s so true, though.
Tim: Poor Richmond. It got burned down and it never really revived itself. Ever. If you’re into the Civil War, go to Petersburg and go to the Crater. Do you know about that?
Yeah.
Tim: It’s one of the biggest military fuck ups ever. It was a unique and creative concept. For those of you who don’t know, during the siege of Richmond there were the big Confederate and Union lines. In Petersburg, which is thirty miles from Richmond, that’s where the siege went on for a really long time. Pennsylvania troops who were miners came up with this concept. They were tired of staring at the fucking Confederates. These Pennsylvania troops came up with the idea that they could dig a tunnel under Confederate lines and put tons of dynamite under there and blow the Confederate line up. The Confederate line got a surprise one morning when the Union soldiers put the dynamite in the tunnel and the fuse actually went out and they had to draw straws to see who would go back in and re-light it. The Confederate line got blown up, but it was a little too much in front of it and so the Union soldiers being non-racist and everything (because the Union was fighting against slavery and everything) they sent all the black troops and Irish troops—you know I’m being sarcastic here, right?
[laughs] Yeah.
Tim: They sent these troops straight into the Crater—(to Gwomper) is that your ass? Somebody’s ass was on fire a minute ago. Anyway, the line doesn’t really get blown up.
Gwomper: GOD DAMN!
[pulling shirt over his nose] Oh man.
Tim: That’s just the Subway. It’s a fucking sandwich. Is that the onions?
Ron: Yeah.
Gwomper: No, it’s his ass.
Tim: Union soldiers go into the Crater to rush the line and they’re going into the hole and the Confederate soldiers just stand there and shoot them like they’re a pack of dogs or something. That was the tragic end of digging a hole under the Confederate lines. I could have told that story better if we hadn’t been on tour for six-and-a-half weeks.
So are you a big history person, then?
Tim: Yeah. I started researching the Civil War in about 1990. I went through it so many times I had to take a break and now I’m not really knowledgeable about it like I used to be. I’ve moved into the Depression era of history and that’s how I got into the freight train thing. I was reading about migrant workers. Ronnie here was the person that made me realize that people still rode trains. Because to us it wasn’t a punk thing. Ronnie took me on my first freight train trip.
Where did you guys go?
Tim: We just went down to Rocky Mountain, North Carolina, and then hitchhiked over to Raleigh. It was a good time.
Are people pretty friendly when you hitch hike?
Tim: Ronnie just hitch hiked from Asheville, North Carolina, to Chicago in a day to meet us at the Fireside Bowl. He missed the show by four hours. I got a call on my voice mail the next morning and he was like, “Where are you guys at?” and it turns out he was in East Chicago and we were in Lafayette, Indiana, and heading down to play in Louisville. He said, “I’m gonna meet you in Louisville,” and I said, “There’s no fucking way you’re going to make it.” He shows up at the Louisville show with no problems.
Do you have a degree?
Tim: I have one of those fake degrees. It’s a two-year degree from a community college.
From Sally Struthers?
Tim: No, from the local community college. It’s community and social services. I write phone messages on my little fucking plaque. I don’t even care about that shit. It’s not like I’m going to try and open a social service facility and like I’m ever going to work under anybody else again in my life. I’ll tell you a good travel book, though. It’s actually real and it’s written by a man who was homeless. It’s called Travels with Lizabeth. It’s a heavy, gay man and Lizabeth is his dog and they hitchhiked back and forth between Texas and LA and then all in the middle of the country. He’s just this homeless guy. He saved enough money to put out this book and it’s totally from the perspective of this gay, homeless man traveling with a dog. It’s about as honest as you can get. It’s fucking great. It’s one of the best travel books I’ve ever read. Fucking Jack Kerouac was a joke.
Gwomper: That was the most uninteresting thing I’ve ever tried to read.
On the Road? I was just going to start reading that.
Tim: Read it. Everybody should read it.
Ron: I think it was good for what it was.
Gwomper: I couldn’t make it past four chapters.
Ron: I think Tim’s reaction is to the little, suburban kids who were like, On the Road, let’s do that for a way of life. Instead of the reality.
Tim: Which is that it’s not fun for a lot of people. It’s how they have to actually get around because they don’t have money.
Ron: The Beat Generation turned into another fad, another way of being cool. Where’s a good place to take a shit around here?
Trash cans?
Tim: I would go to the McDonalds across the street.
Can you tell me about the new album?
Tim: It’s called One Wrench, it has fourteen songs and we’re the only band that gets heavier as we get older. It’s heavier than the other records.
Is it still catchy like the old stuff?
Tim: Yeah, but you have to give it a few listens. Most of our friends fell right into it and understood it. A lot of our friends said the first few tries they didn’t get it and then they totally got it. The hooks aren’t as quick as Over the James. It has the Avail hooks, though.
Is there an eventual destination that you’d like to reach with Avail?
Gwomper: Moscow!
Tim: We were talking today about how cool it’d be to play Moscow. But the destination is this: we start writing new music, if we love it we put it out and tour and if we don’t, we stop. It’s that simple. We’re selling more records, the shows are getting more fun and more people are coming to the shows. At this point there’s no reason to stop.
Have you guys ever been on the verge of breaking up?
Tim: No. We just roll.
You don’t all live together in that house, do you?
Tim: Everybody has lived there, but right now the only members who live there are me and Joe. But everybody’s always there because that’s where we practice.
Anything you want to say before I wrap this up?
Tim: Gwomper wants pot.
Gwomper: Bring me your goodies.
Tim: If you come to an Avail show, bring Gwomper pot.
All right. We’ll close with that.
