Skowronek, 29, is energetic and quick to answer questions. He obviously likes to talk about music and the band. McMurray, 29, on the other hand is quiet, but eloquent when he speaks. Throughout the entire interview McMurray would sit and lightly strum his guitar creating ampless twangs as he'd carefully and quietly answer questions. He calls it warming up.

Maxeen kept things together despite the vegetable war and chairs that allow your ass to sink to the floor when you sit in them in the Metro's dressing rooms.

Popular Underground Magazine: If someone came up to you guys and gave you $50 in cash, turned around and walked away, what would you do with it? And you can't give it back.
Jay Skowronek: You can't give it back?

PUM: No, you can't give it back.
Jay: I would go right to the record store. I'd find the nearest record store and blow it all within five minutes.
Shannon McMurray: I'd probably put it in the bank. I've got a wife.

PUM: As a kid, what sort of posters were on your walls?
Jay: My first band poster actually came (my mom bought me the Purple Rain album by Price) free with Prince and the Revolution. So that was my first poster. Adam and the Ants. I had a few cool Adam and the Ants posters that I wish I still had. I love that band, I grew up on that band, like that's one of the reasons I started playing drums because of that band. And then I had a lot of Samantha Fox [posters]. That's music related in a way.
Shannon: I had a U2 Stories for Boys and I had a Guns and Roses Appetite for Destruction.

PUM: What was the first concert you ever went to?
Jay: It's actually weird because the first band I ever saw was Cheap Trick and they're [from] Chicago, which is pretty cool. Cheap Trick was my first real show, my first rock band. My first show ever was Buddy Rich, the jazz guy. I don't remember anything about the show, my father took me and I was probably like four years old. So, Buddy Rich was my first real show, but I count Cheap Trick as my first real show. It was awesome and they opened for REO Speedwagon. That's really important. REO Speedwagon is horrible. Awful.
Shannon: Mine was the G & R, Use Your Illusion '91.
Jay: You saw that tour?!
Shannon: Yeah.

PUM: What ultimately got you into music, to want to be in a band and go on tour?
Shannon: For me it was watching... and it's becoming a common theme in the interview, but I had two video tapes and one was Rattle & Hum by U2. When I was in eighth grade, every weekend everybody would come over and we would watch that all year long. The other [tape] was G & R Live at the Ritz. It was just such a bad ass fucking, wild rock and roll show.

PUM: What do you think of the state of Axel Rose now?
Shannon: I think people with eccentricities that are given free will, to [have] all the money in the world, at first it can be a good thing. It allows you to write song or whatever, it can be kind of weird. Then you get to that point where you can have whatever you want, but what you want is not necessarily what you need.
Jay: It's a shame because bands like the Rolling Stones got real good in their 30's. They put out great records in their 30's, but Guns and Roses now are in their 40's. They missed a decade of fucking, possibly great music they could have been together writing. It sucks.
Shannon: You get the power to, and this is the thing we try to avoid; is what we're thinking, what you do too much, sometimes given too much time or too much money becomes a bad thing because a manager says it is what it is.

PUM: You guys are from Connecticut and you somehow ended up in California. Did you just go over there, like up-an-leave?
Jay: You know how I did it? I grew up in Connecticut, but then I moved to Boston and had a band in Boston and we were trying to do it and trying to be real serious and we're touring and everything and the band kind of just fell apart at the time and we all just went our separate ways. At the time, I was dating this girl who had just moved to L.A. to become a camera operator in film. She's like "If you want to come out and crash with me, you can do it. You know, try to see what happens." I was like, "You know, I really want to try living on the West Coast." So I packed everything in my car, whatever I could fit, and drove out there. I sold all my old Metallica records on Ebay for gas money and literally when I got over the hill into L.A., I had thirty dollars in my wallet. So I just made it.

During the course of Jay talking about his drive to L.A. from Boston, Aaron from Matchbook Romance entered Maxeen's dressing room, looking like a little kid and offering up some fresh vegetables. Jay and Shannon, both took a couple from Aaron's tray, but the funny thing was, Maxeen had their own sitting on a table next to me. This event would foreshadow a coming war.

PUM: Yeah, see I was curious, based on what I had found online about you guys, like how you go from one extreme to the other and have a place to live.
Jay: Everyone always worries about that kind of stuff and I don't think it's really... I think people naturally gravitate toward security and money, but you're always going to have food and stuff. Stuff always works out I think.
Shannon: We got plenty of homeless shelters.
Jay: Yeah, plenty of great homeless shelters.

PUM: Again according to the bio on you on the Internet, it said once you all played together for the first time you knew it was the right match. How did you know? What was it that tipped it off?
Jay: When you get in a room with musicians you can kind of see if they can play or not, but so many other factors go into it. They might be able to play their own instrument really well, but [can] they play with other people? Are the dickheads? Are they idiots? I remember, we all got in a room and we didn't talk much. The first time I ever met Tom, just the three of us had this feeling, this energy, it was just there. I think we realized the jam was going really well after like 15 minutes and Shannon ran out and rented a tape deck recorder and a rehearsal space and we taped the whole thing. "White Flag" was one of the songs that came out of that.
Shannon: "White Flag..." there was just a lot of ideas that we were like, "Yeah, we're going to take this and do something with this. It's not going to be hard to. It was a matter of, the melodies were there, we just needed to arrange the songs. There was like 10 good ideas the first night
Jay: Like I'll just follow Tom, like Tom will come up with the bass line and I'll just follow him and Shannon will come in with some kind of textural melody line. Tom has the ability to scat lyrics. He just knows how to sing anything.

PUM: How well do you guys get along while you're on tour, cooped up in a van or whatever?
Shannon: It doesn't really matter who you're cooped up in a van with, you're going to get sick of them.
Jay: It was weird, our first tour was the Warped Tour last summer (Warped Tour 2003), by the end of that tour I was so pissed at everybody in the world. We had never toured together before, you take three guys that had never been together before...
Shannon: Warped Tour is the toughest van tour to do. It's the summer time, it's a van tour and all the drives are overnight and you have to set up at 8:00 in the morning. So you're like 8:00a.m. to 8:00p.m., setup, show starts at 11:00, done by 8:00p.m. and then you drive through the night. So basically someone is up 24 hours a day. And then you throw in that it's hot, you don't get to stay in a hotel or anything.
Jay: You sleep like three or four hours a night.

PUM: It's always seemed like one of the most grueling tours to do.
Shannon: If your in a bus it's okay, if your in a van it's just really difficult.

PUM: What sort of things did you learn, being that Warped Tour is like the biggest punk tour?
Jay: I think that one thing we picked up is really just to work hard and get people interested in your music and try to really, always improve your live show. If I think about the first show we played on that tour, God, it was like, it must have been so pitiful!
Shannon: I think what I learned is that you spend 23 hours and 15 minutes of the day doing things that are irrelevant and the 30 or 45 minutes that you're on stage is the only reason you're there and you have to keep that in mind. No matter what happens or what the situation is, that when you walk up on stage, you're there to give 110 percent.

PUM: What are some of your musical influences that are shown in your album?
Jay: The biggest one I hear is like U2. Looks at Shannon and asks "Early U2?"
Shannon: I don't know. It's like three, U2, the Clash and the Pixies. That's me anyway.

At this point Jon from the Matches, who's in the dressing room next to Maxeen's begins making some really strange noises with his lips. "Hey, shut up!" shouts Jay. "Fuck you," says Jon.

At this point Jay declares battle on Jon with vegetables from the band's vegetable tray. Tomatoes, broccoli and cauliflower are being launched over the short walls that don't fully extend to the ceiling. The two run back and forth between dressing rooms while Shannon sits and keeps on calmly strumming his guitar, saying "Maturity's a big issue. We're mature and we throw vegetables."

As soon as this war subsides, Jay is right back on track with the answer to my question.
Jay: Tom and I have these tour bands, like U2, the Police, the Pixies, the Replacements, Elvis Costello, those are like all the bands that equally influence us. We all have eclectic tastes. I love Chicago Blues.

PUM: What's in your CD player right now?
Jay: Looks at Shannon and says, "What did we listen to on the way here?"
Shannon: I think we listened to the Rushmore soundtrack.

PUM: What was the feeling in the band when your guys got signed? Did you guys have a party?
Shannon: We had a party at my house. A pool party.
Jay: Shannon had a tiger stripped thong on, he had water wings and he ended up getting really [intoxicated] and he fell into a bar-b-que.
Shannon: I think we were really happily surprised that things that happened that fast. We started in June and we were signed the contract in February. So that was eight months from when we started and we recorded two months later. So the band had been together for 10 months and we recorded a record.

PUM: How did you get to that point? Were you sending out demos to various labels?
Shannon: No we played a warehouse in Long Beach [California] and our manager found us there. James A. Corky knew the guys at SideOneDummy and he basically asked us, "What do you guys want to do?" "Do you want to get a major label or do you want to try and do an indie deal?" And we were like, "We want to do an indie deal first." So SideOne came out and saw us at a place called Mr. T's Bowl, which is a trashed -out bowling alley. It's not even a bowling alley anymore because the lanes are so screwed up. They make it into a venue with a bar. So there was about 10 people there, including the guys from SideOne. I think five of them were from SideOne. They saw us play and were like, "What the heck, we want to sign you guys."

PUM: Speaking of terms or indie vs. major, would you guys ever want to go major?
Shannon: Yeah, we're working toward that. That's something that we definitely want to do. I think the standard thing to say to that is, "is that a sell out thing?" And my response to that is always, "well, if the Clash is a sell-out band then so are we." They went to a major. It can be a vehicle for reaching a larger audience.
Jay: I think one thing that we really want to do and major labels still fuck up on is abilities. Like who's the next Bob Dylan? John Mayer? Major labels haven't developed talent in so long, that it's kind of scary. I don't think that any band should [go to a major] unless they know the label is intent on developing them and making smart decisions?

PUM: What's next for your guys? Are you working on another album or a DVD?
Shannon: We're always working on another album.
Jay: We have a mini-disc recorder that we always take with us during sound checks or we just jam and I always have it on and we're always working on new ideas. Like tonight, we're probably going to try a new song just to play it and see how it goes.

PUM: Do you guys ever get tired of what you're playing now?
Shannon: I don't really get tired of it. I think that for the position that we're in it's always a constant challenge to win over new fans. We haven't been around forever so we take this with an attitude that we're here to rip your balls off and hang from the chandeliers.

By: Adam K. Zakroczymski III - Senior Editor / Founder