Avail’s throaty singer and damn nice guy Tim Barry is almost beside him with excitement. It’s just been announced that his long-standing Virginia quintet have been hand-picked by punk vets Bad Brains as supports at CBGBs as part of the legendary New York venue’s final round of shows before closing its doors.

Interview by Steve Tauschke with singer Tim Barry of Avail.

“Bad Brains, as far as punk goes are as influential on me as the Clash is and to be able to play with them, phew, I’m kind of speechless over the whole thing,” gasps Barry over the phone. “My intent is just to play our hearts out, get off that stage, crack open a cold beer and go up front and sing my f*&kin’ heart out to every Bad Brains song. And I think these are the last three shows at CBGBs and there are rumours that it’s going to be burned down after the last one.”

Speaking of memorable shows, last time I saw you guys was with Lagwagon in 1998?
“Yeah, for us it’s all about the money and never havin’ any. When I say money I don’t mean profit potential because I don’t really give a f*&k about that.”

So the pure joy of playing has helped keep you guys going all these years?
“I think we’ve never wanted anything to do with the MTV game and it’s not because of punk politics, it’s just where we come from and the type of people we are. We just work jobs, I’m a stage hand, Ed’s a painter and Joe’s a carpenter and Gwomper’s a truck driver and Beau’s a bartender. So the music is just based on the realities of our daily lives. It’s our expression.”

You’ve moved over to the Jade Tree label .. what happened with Lookout?
“It’s such a long story and maybe not too exciting because it revolves mainly around business. But in a nutshell we were with Lookout for the entire time but we left
‘because we weren’t being paid royalties. It’s unfortunate to say but we had to abandoned it after five years of saying ‘where the f*&k’s our money?’. We received quarterly royalty cheques from them and that money is put into a band pool, a bank account that provides health insurance for each band member, their children and their spouses. And every quarter our royalties weren’t coming in and we would say ‘hey, we need this money because it’s for our health insurance’ and they’d be like ‘oh, it’ll be in in a couple of months’ and eventually we had to start putting our health insurance on credit cards to the point where we got $18,000 in debt. It got the point where we thought ‘this aint workin’ no more! So we pulled all the records because of non-payment and I called up Jade Tree Records and they were glad to put them out and did a wonderful job.”

So did Lookout pay you in the end?
“No.”

Avail and Lookout seemed so like-minded.
“Yeah, it’s unfortunate but that shit just happens. Lookout are still great friends and I don’t mean to say any of what I just said as a slander because they are good folks and they took care of us for a number of years.”

I believe the band is trying to piece together a new album while on the road?
‘”Well, we had all the songs done and we had time booked in Fort Collins Colorado with Bill Stevenson (Descendents, ALL) early last year and about two months before that we had a meeting. I held up the list of songs and asked the guys if they liked these songs and there were only two songs that everybody backed. So we cancelled the recording session and dropped the entire set of songs except two and started from scratch. We decided not put this record out until everybody likes the songs.”

Will you go back in with Bill Stevenson when they’re ready?
“If we have it our way, yeah. But he’s a busy motherfucker, he’s doing a lot of bands over there. But as far as producers and engineers in this country I think he’s the absolute best so when we do another record I don’t want to have it any other way. I want to go with him.”

What about your own record .. I hear you have a solo album out?
“I have a demo that I made that turned into an accident. It’s the same three chords as any punk band basically but it’s folk-style music and I made this demo. My sister plays fiddle and my buddy Josh plays dobro and we all just get together and play music. But I put out this demo and it just kind of took off. I didn’t expect to make it for anyone more than friends and family but it kind of jumped without me anticipating it.

“It just got picked up by a record label out in Colorado and just recoded my first album with them and that will come out in late November. It’s a lot of fun, I get to play like house shows and basements and dive bars with my sister and friends and make folk music really rebellious again. I love playing these shows in shitty little bars where people are breaking bottles and fist fighting and singing along. It’s almost like a punk show.”",”http://www.truepunk.com/interviews/AVAIL_2″,2008-01-20 00:00:00,”TEXT”,”Avail is a punk rock/hardcore punk band from Richmond, Virginia. Originally from Northern Virginia, the band formed 1987, comprised of Joe Banks, Doug Crosby, Brian Stewart and Mikey Warstler. The only original remaining member, guita

Displaying the light and shade of a folk-punk marriage, American quartet Against Me can expect to be on the road for the next eight months promoting last year’s album Searching For A Former Clarity. Truepunk caught up with frontman Tom Gabel.

Interview by Steve Tauschke | steve@staff.truepunk.com | with Tom Gabel from Against Me!.

“Power doesn’t necessarily mean loud volume,” declares Tom Gabel, nucleus of long-running Floridian hardcore outfit Against Me, as he waxes lyrical on the lasting contribution of the acoustic guitar to popular music.

“I’ve heard it been said before that you can tell a song is a good song if it can be played just on an acoustic guitar,” he adds. “If it stands alone it’s still a good song.”

Singer-songwriter Gabel started out as an unplugged 17-year-old busker on the streets of Gainesville in 1997 and with the aid of musician friends performed rough-edged anti-establishment protest songs mirroring the sentiments espoused by the UK’s 80s peace- punk movement.

“We were really into Crass and the Apostles, bands that were almost like borderline hippie punk,” says Gabel, still an active anarchist. “We’d be wearing sandals and we’d have dreadlocks and people were like ‘what is going on here?’.”

The band’s genesis was “unorthodox” to say the least; essentially Gabel on acoustic guitar and 8-track recorder - a Christmas gift from his mother - with original drummer Kevin “banging on some buckets and makeshift drum pieces” - hardly a crowd-pulling act in hardcore-drenched late 90s Florida.

“We didn’t really have anyone around us to take our cues from so it was really just up to us what we wanted to be doing,” says Gabel. “There’s a certain amount of freedom in that, when no-one likes what you’re doing and no-one has any expectations.

There really was no intent or purpose when I started out. I was playing in another couple of bands at time and I was not really into what we were doing. So I pulled out an 8-track recorder and I started messing around with it and made a little demo tape of a couple of songs and gave copies to some friends and it just kept snowballing from there.

We definitely had the attitude when we first started out of ‘fuck it, let’s just see what happens and we’ll do this by any means necessary and we’ll make do with whatever instruments we can find and we’ll play where ever people will let us play’. And it just gradually got stranger and stranger and more and more people took interest and here we are today.”

After several line up changes and countless tours, Gabel did the Dylan-esque unthinkable - he turned electric, and just in time for the band’s 2001 debut album Reinventing Axl Rose.

“We pretty much did everything we could do as a two piece,” he says, “so we thought we should add a bass player and eventually people did start coming around to what we were doing. Acoustic instruments are quite temperamental and once you start playing larger venues and using amps you start having weird feedback issues so gradually we started to switch over the playing more electric while still doing some acoustic stuff.”

Against Me’s most recent album Searching For Former Clarity, produced by former ex-Government Issue/Jawbox member Jay Robbins, is a measured pairing of hardcore gusto and neo-folk acoustics that retains Gabel’s anarcho-punk-roots.

“I was raised in an army family and spent the majority of my childhood on military bases,” he confides. “I had a very unfortunate experience when I was very young. I got beat up by the cops and arrested which definitely made me think ‘wait a second, what’s going on here, maybe we aren’t all that free’.

“What anarchy means to me is that mankind has the ability to govern itself and all power and control of governments is an illusion and you recognise that based on fear of force and fear of violence. Unfortunately you have to pick and choose your battles - we live in dark ages.”

So does the album title allude to those sentiments?

“The meaning for me is feeling like maybe in one period of time you had things figured out and now you don’t necessarily have them figured - and so you’re trying to get back to that place. I was talking about the new Propagandhi record with a friend of mine recently and it’s a great record but we were talking about the differences between their newer stuff and their older stuff and I think they sound a lot more unsure than they used to.

We thought that just comes with growing older, how when you get older all those things that seemed so definite and concrete when you were like 17, 18, 19 years old they become less and less concrete and you become unsure. I don’t think that necessarily has to be a bad thing, like being jaded. I think you can grow older and realise that maybe you just don’t have it all figured out, that things in the world aren’t that black and white and aren’t that easy to categorize