Live music and touring have been on lockdown and fans as well as artists are going through withdrawals. We wanted to come up with something fun to help bridge that distance between fans and artists right now. What we came up with is something called The Lockdown Lowdown and it’s a Q&A session with fun questions for artists to answer. They’re not your typical interview questions, so it gives you a peek inside of the artists themselves. We’re big music nerds here at I’m Music Magazine and we love learning things like this about the artists that we love. We’re pretty sure that you’ll get a kick out of these, so we hope you’ll take the time to read them. In this installment, we sat down for a fun Q&A session with Bob James of Silent Theory.
How have you been doing during the pandemic and how are you spending your time? Have you been working on new music?
I’ve been doing as good as can be expected. Where we live there are two college towns 8 miles apart, so it’s been a bit of a ghost town since spring break and we have luckily had comparatively low confirmed cases. As for passing the time, my girlfriend and I have been spending a fortune as Home Depot and trying to knock out some remodel projects. The band has been working on new music. We have studio time locked down and are hoping to have an album ready by the end of 2020 or early 2021.
5 albums that changed your life
Hard Days Night, The Beatles
Led Zeppelin IV, Led Zeppelin
Cheshire Cat, Blink 182
3 Dolla Billz Y’all, Limp Bizkit
Delusion, Silent Theory
5 artists that influenced you as a musician.
John Entwistle, The Who
Paul McCartney, The Beatles
Jim Root, Slipknot
Mark Tremonti, Alter Bridge
Nikki Sixx, Motley Crue
Your 5 favorite live albums
R30, Rush
Time Machine 2011, Rush
Kiss Alive, Kiss
Live at Budokan, Cheap Trick
Live at Slane Castle, Red Hot Chili Peppers
Life on the road; 5 of your craziest/funniest/scariest tour stories
For a long time, we traveled in a 40 foot motorhome named Millie. It had a vinyl wrap and the logo was probably 8 feet by 16 feet on both sides. Our last trip was kind of a rough one; we had a few break downs, and we even missed one show in Nashville. We were headed to Grand Junction, CO for our last show before we headed home for a few local shows to wrap up the tour and we broke down like 3 mile outside of Denver. It was 10 pm the night before the show and we were only about 4 hours by car from Grand Junction. Over the course of the next 14 we dealt with like 3 tow company’s before we got one that could tow us, we tried all the diesel repair shops in Denver before the Cummins dealer agreed to look at it and literally split up and went to every U-haul dealer in Denver before we found the only U-haul truck that could tow our trailer. Our hope was to leave the bus and have the dealership get her running again, but when the prognosis was much worse than we were expecting, we somehow managed to sweet talk the dad of a friend of one of the mechanics into buying the bus as is for enough money to cover the U-haul and a rental car to get to Grand Junction and then home. Thankfully the radio station promoting the show and the other bands were sympathetic to our situation and pushed the start of the show back an hour. It ended up being the best show of the tour.
Same tour, we were playing a show in Indianapolis, like right downtown. Not being race fans, we didn’t realize that the Indy 500 was that weekend, but there was definitely a weird vibe downtown. There were a few bars hosting various parties on the same block as the venue, so there was a lot of foot traffic and most people were having a good time. Over the course of the next few hours, we load in sound check and hang out for a bit, all the while noticing more and more people out and about and the attitude on the street is a lot more confrontational than before. As we’re getting off stage, we overhear some people talking about how its starting to get out of hand outside. As per usual we head outside to load the gear back in the trailer, and it is borderline mayhem in the streets. All walks of life, all sorts of intoxicated everywhere and I’m not really sure why but tensions were getting high. As we were finishing up loading the gear, fights started breaking out and more and more cops started to show up. There were so many people in the street arguing and scuffling that they started re-routing traffic. After a brief talk with one of the boys in blue, we make the decision to grab the merch and get out of downtown. In the time it took us to go inside and pack up the merch table, the entire IPD riot squat rolled up and started gearing up. The crowd was starting to turn their attention collectively on the police and somehow our bus was in the middle of the action. Thankfully before anything got too crazy, we got the rest of our stuff loaded and a few cops blocked traffic and pedestrians for us and we got on the road.
On our first national tour, we were in the Midwest, I think near Des Moines, Iowa. We had hit a little rain on our way in, but nothing crazy. While stopped at an Old Country Buffett, we kept hearing people talking about a storm rolling through and we didn’t think anything of it. As time went on the sky went from partially cloudy to damn near black and the storm had certainly arrived. It was about that time the tornado sirens started going off and the restaurant put the weather alert on the radio in the dining room. After enjoying the thunder, lightning and some of the heaviest rain I’ve ever experienced, we started asking some of the locals what they though the best course of action was. It was a resounding “shelter in place and wait it out”. Taking that into account and deciding amongst ourselves that if we had to pick a hill to die on, it certainly was not going to be Old Country Buffett. So, we ran through the torrential downpour, fired up Millie and headed out of town. Conveniently we were headed the opposite direction of the storm, so we thought. We got out of the storm safely and felt good about our decision, then we looked at the storm tracker. It turns out that when we had left OCB we got out in front of the tornado and we were on the same trajectory for a while before it veered off and petered out.
One time while on tour, we had a travel day and were passing through Laramie, WY and like many of our stories, we were stopping for something to eat. We parked at a Shari’s kind of on the edge of town, and as we were disembarking the bus we were greeted by a couple of high school aged guys. They preceded to tells us how much they loved the music and how excited they were to see us. It turns out they were on their way to the second half of a pre-season two-a-day football practice when they saw us, and then turned around and followed us across town hoping we would stop. We signed some autographs (on their football gloves because that’s all they had on them at the time), gave them some swag and headed inside. We got sat down and when our waitress came over to take our drink order, she informed us that her manager was a huge fan and was super nervous to meet us. We were all skeptical, as this was pretty early in our career and we didn’t think there was anyway this guy knew who we were. Turns out he had visited a friend or family and had by chance come to a show we played and was hooked. We were still skeptical, but when he finally came over to talk to us he had a lot of very specific details about the show and we found that to be pretty convincing. He asked for a signature, and we were happy to oblige, but we were a little surprised when he handed us a menu to sign. But not being the weirdest thing that we had autographed that day to signed it for him and hooked him up with some swag. I can’t remember if there were any comped meals or anything, but it was strange stop for sure.
One time, we had a couple of travel days and we were headed west across Minnesota headed to South Dakota. We are all pretty touristy guys and love a good attraction, the sillier the better. For example, we stop by Wall Drug anytime we are near Wall S.D. While driving a long kind or early in the morning, I kept seeing billboards for The Spam Museum in Austin, MN. A short while later Mitch got up and I told him about the billboards, and we had a good laugh about how ridiculous we thought the concept of a Spam Museum was. So naturally we stopped. You can image Scott and George’s surprise when they woke up in a strange town and Mitch and I were gone, then to walk around the bus and see the Spam Museum in all of its glory. It ended up being a surprisingly informative experience. After we got back on the road, we started seeing signs for “The World’s Largest Jolly Green Giant Statue”. Before you know it, we are standing in Blue Earth, MN starring up at a 55-foot-tall Jolly Green Giant. It is both completely amazing and wildly underwhelming, but you can see it from I-90. After paying homage to our second processed food of the morning, we headed to Deadwood, SD and had more fun than I think anyone else in Deadwood was having at the time. We spent the night in Deadwood and enjoyed every touristy thing that tiny little town had to offer. It was probably the single greatest tour day that we didn’t have a show.
5 favorite movies
Top Gun
Along Came Polly
You, Me, and Dupree
Vacation
Caddy Shack
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