Interview with Unwritten Law

Interview by Jonathan Morrill | jmorrill@staff.TRUEPUNK.com| with Rob.

Unwritten Law’s 1998 eponymous effort is one of the best pop punk of the late
ninties; hardly any fan of punk from that era will disagree with you.
With an album set to knock you on your ass in 2005, guitarist Rob
Brewer of UL took time out to talk to truepunk.com about their new
album, former UL members, getting back on the road, fatherhood, and
oddly enough — college football.

First off, let me just say that it’s a huge honor and insanely cool that I’m
talking to you right now. I’ve been a fan for a really long time.
How were your holidays?
Thanks, man. Very, very well.

I know that you and your wife recently had a baby. How’s fatherhood going?
Awesome (laughs).

Was it a bit of a relief not having to go on tour with your wife having a 4 or 5 month old kid?
Um, we only went on a little bit of a tour, just for about a week
or so-for like 10 days here and there. It takes some adjusting…

I know that you guys have an album coming out in a few weeks called "Here’s
To The Mourning." I’ve heard a few tracks and I gotta say I’m
really impressed and psyched for the new record. I’ve noticed that
it seems a lot more rock-riff driven than previous UL works-I’m specifically
thinking of "Get Up" and "Lost Control" and stuff
like that. Was that a conscious effort or was that just kind of the
musical progression of the band?
It’s just stuff that we were just writing-everyone had songs and they
were all diverse, different styles and stuff and it came together
the way it did and we definitely wanted to make more of a straight
forward rock record, I think, this time. People mistook our last acoustic
thing that we put out as a record but it wasn’t supposed to be a new
record, it was just a thing that we did outdoors and I think everyone
kinda wanted to come back with a studio record that had little more
balls and just play the way we like to play: Heavy progressions, heavy
rock riffs with melodies, you know?

Yeah, man.
And like I said, I’m definitely excited for it. Do you have a favorite
song off the album yet, or do you just kind of like them all? Or is
it sort of like picking between your children?
There’s a few different songs I’ve been really happy with. Have you
heard the secret track?

I’ve actually
heard a demo of it, I didn’t hear it with vocals.
Do you have a copy of the record?

No, someone
on your message board actually sent me a demo of, I think its called
"Machine Must Go", I hear that’s what the secret track is.

Oh ok, well yeah, its just called "Machine" but I don’t
know which version you have but the album version came out really
cool and different, you know? …it’s one of my favorite musical tracks.

Like I said,
I’ve been an Unwritten Law fan for a really long time. The first time
I heard Teenage Suicide, dude, I was definitely all about you guys.
I’m also a big fan of your record "Oz Factor" and I’ve always
been curious-what happened to your former bassist John Bell? Do you
guys keep in touch with him? Could you give me a clue as to what happened
with the split between you guys and him? Is that something you wanna
talk about?
Well, yeah! We’re still friends with John, I just saw him actually.
We just played a private show for UCSD-we were actually touring when
we stopped by there to play-and we had a tour bus and he actually
goes to school at UCSD and he’s about to graduate, so he just came
over and jumped on the bus and said hello and I had a chance to catch
up with him and stuff. But it was just weird timing but back in the
day, it was like 1996 or something, and we were getting ready to go
to Seattle for three months to record with this producer and work
up there to do the black album and John just wasn’t into going. He
wasn’t into going to Seattle to do a record-he had a girlfriend here…

Speaking of
former members, obviously its been kind of a big deal that you guys
have split with Wade Youman, your long time drummer. I don’t need
to get in too much detail about it but how does not having Wade in
the band change the dynamic of Unwritten Law?
Um, it’s just made things a hell of a lot… easier. (Laughs).

Like I said,
I don’t need you to talk trash or anything, I’m just curious…
Oh, no. Wade has obviously been in the band a long time but, you know,
we needed to make a change for ourselves and we’ve brought in Tony
Palermo.

Yeah. How did
you guys come to pick up Tony Palermo, was my next question actually…
He was actually referred to us by Brooks Walkerman (spelling?) but
we’ve known Tony for so long from when we used to play with Ten Foot
Pole back a long time ago. We’ve known him over the years, we just
never would have thought of him when, you know, when we were trying
out drummers. He was like referred to us and just like the first time
we played with him, we were just like "alright, cool", you
know?

So you guys
are all gelling pretty well?
Yeah, I mean it’s been really cool having him around-he’s a really
good guy and he’s a great drummer so it’s been really cool for us.

I had heard
some discussion about Adrian Young from No Doubt playing drums or
at least recording with you guys-I don’t know if it was about him
becoming a full fledged member of the band or not. I also remember
that on your last album, "Elva," that Tony Canal, the bassist
from No Doubt played on the title track. What’s with the Unwritten
Law/No Doubt connection?
Just that we had met ‘em around 1996 and we got a chance to tour Australia
and some of the States with them and our manager had known them from
Orange County since high school. We were looking for someone to do
a bass line for us and Pat wasn’t available for the song "Rest
of My Life"-which is the "Elva" track-so Tony came
in and did a bass track for one song on there. And then, No Doubt
pretty much stopped touring last summer about the same time we were
going through the split with Wade. Adrian was available to do some
drumming and we were looking for someone to do some studio work-there
was never any implication that he would join the band or anything
like that. He told Les (Wes?) our manager that he’d be interested
in recording a couple of tracks and see how it went. So that’s what
we did, and he ended up recording about 6 or 7 tracks for us so he’s
on half of the record and Tony played on the other half.

Oh, really?
See, I thought it was just for one song or two…
No, it’s actually for about six or seven of them that he played.

Off the top
of your head, could give me your top two or three releases from 2004?
Oh man… You know what, man, I haven’t been listening to too much music
right now cause of the kid and everything. I’ve been listening to
a lot of old stuff when I’ve been listening to music.

Well, what’s
in your CD player right now?
I think its Lou Donaldson? (laughs)

Haha, who’s
Lou Donaldson?
This alto-sax player from the 60′s who used to jam with George Benson

Oh wow… that
was definitely an unexpected answer…
(we both laugh)

The first time
I ever saw you guys was on the Warped Tour. A buddy of mine and I
drove down from here in Wilmington, Delaware the five or six hour
drive to Bristow, Virginia to catch you guys on the Warped Tour, cause
in 2000 I guess you guys didn’t play the Philadelphia date. I was
just wondering, do you guys have any future plans to play on the Warped
Tour?
Well, we’ve done three of them. We did the first one in ’96, and then
’98, and then 2000. We were slated to play in August-they had a 10
year reunion show in Boston and we were supposed to be on that, that’s
when my wife went into labor with my son so… I cancelled the show
for everyone.

Haha, I bet
that was a real hard decision… Warped Tour? Baby? Warped Tour? Baby?
(laughs) Exactly… So that was the last time we were set to play. But
we still keep in touch with most of those bands and we still see Kevin
Lyman once in a while but I don’t think its…Its something we’re kind
of over with, you know?

Well, I mean you’ve done it three times…
And it’s represented a point in our lives already. Not to say that
we wouldn’t go out and do some more Warped shows again if the timing
was right but we just haven’t had a record that was out in the summer.

I hear ya.
There are some bands like Rancid and Pennywise that do it every other
year and after a while I definitely could see it getting old.
Yeah, you basically sit around all day to play for a half hour in
110 degree weather. You could go out at night and do your own club
shows and it just makes the setting better, I think, than you know
playing during with no life and stuff.

So, I’ve also
heard some rumors going around that you guys are planning to remix
and re-release your first album, "Blue Room". If you wouldn’t
mind, could you elaborate a bit on how you came across doing that?
(Critial information deleted) put it out… and hadn’t paid us for in
so long that we basically said, "look, dude, we’re taking it
back." We got it back from him and now, I guess, we can do what
we want, so we were talking about mixing it and getting it to sound
to sound better than it did before.

Are you gonna
try to re-record it or…?
No, we’re not gonna re-record it, we just took all the masters and
mess around with it. We might release it on something, there’s a lot
of people who want it who couldn’t get their hands on it for a while.
It wasn’t really readily available, you know? It had really limited
distribution. We might release it at some point, we don’t have any
definite plans as of yet.

Alright, right
off the top of your head, give your favorite Unwritten Law song.
I think "Before I Go" maybe…It’s one of those that just
encompassed a lot of different things about the band and there’s just
a lot of good feeling about it.

Ok, now again
off the top of your head, your least favorite UL song?
(leaving me no time to finish my sentence) Holiday (laughs).

Now, this question
is completely random, but with you being from Southern California
I wanted to ask you… You’ve got two pretty exciting football teams
going on around there right now with the USC football team decimating
Oklahoma the other night in the National Championship and the surprisingly
playoff bound San Diego Chargers. Are you excited for either of these
teams?
I’m excited about the Chargers. I’m from Arizona originally, so I’m
a Sun Devils fan, haha. Arizona State. But I can respect SC. Anyone
that goes out and wins a National Championship in that fashion… That
was just a beat down.

–After a bit
of standard male college football banter, I eventually get back to
my next scheduled question–

When I first
getting into you guys, there was a lot being made of the fact that
you and Blink 182 were tight. I was just curious are you guys still
as close? Or have you kind of broken it off?
Well, it’s funny. It’s not like we’re not friends, but I mean with
their raging success we just haven’t really seen the guys. I think
the last time I really saw them was a couple of years ago at a radio
show we ran into them in Hartford, Connecticut. I hung out a little
bit with Tom and stuff but… We’re friends, we just have different
paths, you know? We don’t keep in touch when we’re home and stuff.

I’m sure you
get that question a lot, so I apologize.
No, it’s cool. We don’t really get it as much as we used to. When
we first were getting popular people would ask us that all the time.
Like, "you both are from Poway, what do you think of Blink’s
success?"

I don’t know,
just being a fan like… Blink’s "Dude Ranch" and your self-titled
albums were all I listened to when I was like 16, 17 years old. I
worshipped those two albums like the Bible.
Yeah, we did a lot of touring with them back in the mid-90′s…

On the Good
Times tour, right?
Yeah! Did you go to that?

Nah, that was
actually a couple of years before I got into music, when I was like
13. But I’ve heard and read a lot about it.
That was with 7 Seconds on that tour. I think we made it as far as
like Ocean City, Maryland. They went up to somewhere in New York with
Sprung Monkey and 7 Seconds and we went to upstate New York to record
Oz Factor after that.

Alright, well
are there any final words you’d like to say to your fans out in truepunk.com
land?
Oh, just thank you very much for the continued support. We’re getting
ready to hit the road.

I know your
tour got halted, any plans for rescheduling just yet?
Well, we just wanted to give Pat a chance to be with his dad, you
know?

Oh yeah, I
think the general consensus among UL fans is that we were pretty disappointed
that the tour was cancelled but at the same time we totally understand
what’s going on.
We have every intention of going back out to the cities that had the
10 dollar shows, and at least making good on the ten dollar tickets
still.

Alright well
I’ll definitely be there when you come back to Philadelphia. Thanks
again for taking the time out to talk to me.
Come on up and say hello dude.