He has good reason for being so enthusiastic at the moment. Lagwagon, like any band that has lasted over 20 years on an independent label like Fat Wreck Chords, have had their fair share of ups and downs. Right now though, Lagwagon and the label they helped create are in a strong position. “We’re just having a rad year. There’s good and bad years with a band and sometimes you almost feel like you’re just struggling to have this unified kind of drive. That’s not happening at all right now. Right now we’re all getting along and we’re playing better than we’ve played in I don’t know how long. We’re kinda on fire right now. I don’t know why but it’s really quite amazing.
“I think Fat Wreck Chords has really balanced out too. They kinda know where they are now. They’ve gone through all the trials and tribulations and they just have a really solid thing going now and it’s very cool. I think it’s pretty relaxed now. I don’t think anybody has any high expectations anymore. Everybody’s doing it because of love, which is what it was always about.”
One thing that really has Joey excited is his latest Lagwagon project, which he and Chad Williams (Fat Wreck Chords) have been working on over the last couple of years. It is the remastering, and re-releasing of the first five Lagwagon albums as a complete package. Joey explains, “The idea was we’d do it in lieu of doing a ‘best of’ or an anthology, greatest hits kind of thing. We agreed that we just don’t like the idea of those things because it gives people a one-off way to discover a band. If someone’s going to look for a Lagwagon record and we have a greatest hits, that’s what they’re going to do. Those songs that have been deemed ‘good enough’ are going to be the songs they get to hear. By doing that you sort of bury the history, the era, the evolution of the band, the deep cuts on those records. I’m not into that. From the point of view of a fan, by listening to a band that I love that has a more involved history, I like to celebrate different parts of the history of the band at different times you know? I like to listen to the entire record to see what they were doing at that time.”
As well as the benefit of the records being re-mastered (he admits they didn’t really know what they were doing when the original records were created) another benefit for fans and newcomers to Lagwagon alike is the fact that during the arduous project, Joey and co. discovered a whole wealth of undiscovered and often completely forgotten tracks.
“Totally!” agrees Joey. “It was amazing. There was so much that happened where you’d find something then you realise, ‘Oh’ and you start to talk to guys in the band about it and you remember an old engineer you worked with and you call that guy and somehow and I found guys that were living on farms back east that I hadn’t talked to in 15 years and said, ‘We recorded this thing with you, I totally forgot’ and he’d be like, ‘Yeah I got the whole thing’ you know? It was really cool. It was great. We just forgot. Plain, simply forgot about a lot of the music that we had done.”
The whole process also offered Joey a bittersweet chance at reflection when it comes to his career in one of American punk’s best loved yet often overlooked bands. “What it did for me is it really put everything into perspective in terms of the whole evolution, which is a good and bad thing. Obviously nobody likes to look at their lives closely for that long a period of time, but on the other hand it kind of renewed my passion for my band in a lot of ways because I was like, ‘Wow, you know I’ve really put a lot of work into this. This matters’.”
Australian fans will get the chance to revisit those first five seminal Lagwagon records when the band hits these shores to tour this month. Despite the fact that the band – and by all accounts their diehard fans that have been with them since day one – are much older and wiser these days, you can still expect a killer show. “The shows are pretty crazy still. When play I look out in the crowd and I see a bunch of people that I’ve been looking at for 20 years. I dunno what it is about our band but there’s a lot of people who like [Lagwagon] that don’t move on from our band. I’m not bragging, and I honestly don’t understand it but we have some pretty loyal people. And they’re older now. Like a LOT older. But we’ll play a show and people are still slam dancing. We are lucky. We always have a nice audience and we’re just one of those bands that are really fortunate.
BY ADAM ROBERTSHAW
