BACKSTAGE INTERVIEW WITH JEPHA HOWARD AT

THE PLAYSTATION THEATER, NYC

By Deb Draisin, photos by Justine Perez

Utah punks The Used are celebrating their 15th year as a band by embarking upon an almost complete sold-out tour, playing two nights per city, featuring their first two chart-busting albums, The Used and In Love And Death this spring. While signed to Reprise Records, The Used made a name for themselves on the Warped Tour circuit.

Currently residing with Hopeless Records/GAS Union, a partner of singer Bert McCracken’s own label, Anger Music, The Used has survived a couple of lineup changes (ex-Saosin guitarist Justin Shekowski replaced longtime guitarist Quinn Allman last year, and Dan Whitesides replaced current Rancid drummer, Branden Steineckert, back in 2006.)

The band recently released their second live album/dvd, Live And Acoustic At The Palace and show no signs of slowing down. Founding bassist Jepha Howard, was sweet enough (as he always is) to travel down Memory Lane with Jersey Beat along their New York City stop at the Playstation Theater.

Q: You guys parted ways with John Feldmann for Artwork, but he’s produced everything else. What is it about his production technique that has become so integral to The Used's sound?

JH: John and Bert work really well together. You know, John is a very interesting guy – I’ve known him for so long now. I was terrified of him for years

Q: Oh, he’s that kind of interesting?

JH: He’s a very good guy; I like John a lot. We’ve become better friends over the years. I think the best thing about him is how he is with Bert, really: he pushes him to do things.

Q: That he doesn’t want to do, necessarily?

JH: Well, the best thing about any producer is the outside opinion. We’re all focusing on the music, the writing, and knowing what we do. With a producer there, it’s harder to be like “Well, I play this way, and that’s it.” They’ll say “Okay, but if you did this, it would sound better.” John looks at music completely differently than we do.

Q: How so? What’s different about his way versus your way?

JH: Oh man: we’re very organic; we want it to sound real, like it just happened. Feldmann’s very neat; he wants everything to sound cleaned up and organized, and we want it to be a mess. We want feedback that’s not supposed to be there, and I think that’s why it works: because we’re both fighting for our side to win.

Q: So that could be why, in 2004, Billboard stated that "In Love And Death continues to straddle the line between street credibility and mainstream success."

JH: Could be, yeah. Feldman’s more mainstream, and we’re more underground - that fight to be heard is part of what makes our sound. I don’t want to say that’s where it came from, though, because, before him, we had a demo out.

Q: Isn’t that 801?

JH: Yeah; I don’t know if it really had a name, but I think it turned into that. On it, you can hear that we have a definite sound – it may have been a little too messy.

Q: Well, it just sounds like you’re in a basement punk club.

JH: Yep, totally, and that’s where Feldmann came in; made it a little prettier – which was kind of the turning point in our career, now that I think about it.

Q: You had two gold records after that.

JH: Worked out pretty well, right? Especially since nobody buys records anymore.

Q: They sure don’t. How are you handling that, as a band? Is that changing the landscape for you?

JH: It’s funny, because people are still buying our first record, but, fifteen years later, even though we’re doing these really big tours, still not enough people have bought it to make it go platinum. Yet people are still coming to the shows, which is awesome. I say “Steal our record from Wal-Mart – hell, steal everything you can from Wal-Mart.”

Q: Fuck Wal-Mart. It’s not even about stealing from the band, but the outlet.

JH: I mean, if it’s a Mom-and-Pop, then don’t steal it. If you’re taking it offline because you can’t afford it, then do that, whatever. I’d rather that kids steal our record then not come out to the shows.

Q: Do you think it’s ironic that the bigger artists are the ones who get the most offended about piracy, rather than the ones who are just trying to eat?

JH: It’s an ego thing: like, you sold fifty-eight million last time, but this time, you only sold twenty-eight million, so oh, it’s because everybody stole it. Still, though, you sold twenty-eight million records! We’re the opposite, because we push people to steal it - labels really don’t like that so much. We’re on Hopeless now, though, and the label gets so excited when you sell twelve thousand records in your first week.

Q: For them, that’s a big deal. A label like Reprise would be like “Uh, you’d better step that up.”

JH: Well, even at Reprise, it’s changed. In the beginning, they’d be like “Oh man, you guys sold two hundred thousand in the first week!” And the next year: “You sold one hundred and fifty thousand in the first week, but it was still one of the best records ever, it got on the top of the charts. Then, a couple of years later: “Oh, you guys sold fifty-eight thousand records in the first week, still way up on the charts.” You know what I mean? We don’t give a shit – we just want people to come to the shows and be excited about the music.

Q: And have they been? Has it been a good tour?

JH: Yeah! These shows have been out of control! I can’t tell you how awesome they’ve been. Well, I guess I can tell you: they’re awesome (all laugh.)

Q: Are you seeing all familiar faces out there, a mixture, or mostly new faces?

JH: You know, we have the same diehard fans that come to all of our shows, no matter what - I recognize most of them. But then we also have a lot of new fans that come out, and I’ll meet them occasionally. This tour has been a lot of older fans that just got busy in life, doing their own thing.

Q: And then they were like “Oh, yeah!”

JH: “Yeah, I remember, I want to see this record again.” So, it’s been a mix of all three – it’s really exciting.

Q: Badass. So, tonight’s show is In Love And Death: the album features a cover of Under Pressure. Since we lost Bowie this year. would you summarize his influence on your music?

JH: Oh man…I wish we were playing that tonight.

Q: Yeah, you have to have another singer. Maybe one of the opening bands would help out.

JH: I remember that the song wasn’t on the original release.

Q: I think you added it later on.

JH: Yeah; there was a fight about that, too – it almost didn’t get released.

Q: Oh, because it was supposed to be for charity, I think was the issue.

JH: Long story short, it wasn’t My Chem’s issue. I think it had something to do with their management. It was just one of those things: they wanted to do something and we wanted to do something. We wanted to release it on both of ours. We wanted it be a full thing for all of us, and…

Q: It didn’t quite work out?

JH: No, it didn’t. So, we were like “Well, fuck it: we’ll release it then, whatever.” We’re not going to get around to playing it now, unfortunately. As for Bowie: he was a huge influence on Bert. Actually, Bert had a dog named David Bowie - he got hit by a car during the In Love And Death recordings. All That I’ve Got actually started out to be about his dog, but then it turned into something more serious later on. He’ll probably talk about it on stage tonight.

Q: Bert went through some shit during the production of this particular album. Is it still an emotional experience for the band to play these songs?

JH: Oh, absolutely – that’s why we don’t play most of them. These first two records, actually… (reaches for my questions list,) oh, you have all the songs right here, great.

Q: I do! I helped you out.

JH: God, well for the first record, we had played every song before… (still reading the list) “Ooh, Just A little, that was an awesome song too.

Q: That was the deep cut, right?

JH: Yep. So, everything on the first record, we’d played before, but not after the second record came out. The first was mostly demo stuff, and then, when we recorded some of it, that made it a little harder for us to not play those songs live, but it was just too much to play live. Plus, we were touring so much, and Bert was screaming so much, sometimes it was hard for him to hit those high notes and scream, so we cut some of those out over time. Aside from this tour, we’ve played "Let It Bleed" only one time. "Cut Up Angels" we’ve never played before this tour. "Yesterday’s Feelings" we played not as a full band, only acoustically. "Light With A Sharpened Edge," maybe we’ve played it twice?

Q: So you probably forgot all of those songs – you had to relearn them.

JH: Yeah, you wouldn’t believe how easy it is to forget these songs (all laugh.) The cool thing about this is that Justin, our new guitar player, has never played these songs live. Quinn and Justin have a certain style of playing, same thing for Branden and Dan. We wanted Justin and Dan to play them the way that they would play, but also play the song as it is. So, they learned the parts and then added their own take on it.

Q: Well, yeah, that makes sense - you don’t want them to just do what Branden or Quinn would have done.

JH: Exactly; we wanted them to do what came more naturally to them; to add their flair (gestures) Did you just see the sparks flying? (all laugh)

JP: If this was on Snapchat, we could.

Q: We’ll add a graphic later on. I’m glad that you mentioned Justin. Did you steal him from a Salt Lake City band also?

JH: No, that was Dan. Although, we didn’t really steal Dan – his band wasn’t touring that much, I think. I don’t really know the full story behind that. I guess we did steal Justin as well.

JP: You just kidnapped them – threw him into a van?

JH: Kind of. We got Dan from a band called New Transit Direction. Dan’s actually playing a show with them this year.

Q: Oh, that’s gonna be fun! Are you going to go?

JH: I would love to see it. We actually toured with that band a couple of times – that’s why we wanted Dan so badly – he’s a tremendous drummer. Dan didn’t record on, but actually helped write Lies For The Liars. He was there in the studio the entire time.

Q: Kick-ass fucking record.

JH: Dan recorded the drums on all of the B-Sides. Unfortunately, none of them made the record, but most of them should have, I think. Shallow Believer is what it turned into - we play all of that stuff.

Q: You wound up with two albums’ worth of material just from one recording session, that’s killer.

JH: We were pretty lucky, with that one.

Q: You’ve just released your first live album since Berth, (Live and Acoustic At The Palace,) what made you choose The Palace to record it?

JH: We wanted to have a show that erased what everybody thought about The Used completely. We picked The Palace because it’s completely seated. No one goes to a Used show that’s seated. We need that front opening: people have to have fun, there has to be moshing.

Q: And Bert has to order a Wall of Death of some point.

JH: Oh, completely. We need people to get aggressive – let all of that anger out, but that’s exactly what we wanted to not have for The Palace show. We didn’t tell anybody what was going on – we went completely dark. The only thing that we said was that it was an acoustic show by The Used. So, kids show up, they walk inside, and it’s completely seated, so there’s no choice but to sit in a seat.

Q: And they’re fucking bummed.

JH: They’re like “What the fuck?” So, they walk down to their seats, and we have, like, pamphlets, draped over the chairs.

Q: Oh, like Playbills!

JH: Playbills, totally! I said “pamphlets,” which is so weird. The Playbills feature each member of the band, plus the extra people onstage, which we’ll get into, but they don’t even know if they’re going to be there.. It was light-hearted; we’ll write serious songs, but we’re not really serious people. We like to joke - everything is funny if you let it be. So, it wasn’t the most serious thing in the world, but it had that feel of something that was.

Q: The audience is like “What did I just walk into?”

JH: Right! So, they sit down, and the stage is all lit up nicely (we used our same lighting guy; he’s incredible.) There are these two big trees onstage, a dead flower in front of Bert, and chairs all over the place. We don’t play seated either – I actually sat on top of my amp, which is so comfortable, you should try it.

The first song starts, and just Justin and Bert come out. They play Light In The Tunnel. Then, me and Dan come out, and we play The Taste Of Ink. Then the string quartet comes out, then the rhythm section. We also had a harpist, the piano player from The Black Keys, and the saxophone player from Reel Big Fish.

Q: That sounds batshit. What was the audience’s reaction by this point?

JH: They didn’t know what to do, you could see. The video is good, but it missed the entire beginning; the audience filing into their seats, picking up the pamphlets. It’s good, it’s deep, but it missed the heart of what was going on. You just can’t capture something like that on video.

But the horn player from Reel Big Fish, (Matt Appleton,) he recorded on In Love And Death and engineered both that album and Lies For The Liars. He had actually recorded on the songs that he played live. It was an awesome, all-star cast. We had three gospel singers too. It was seriously one of the most amazing nights of our lives.

Q: I’m going to have to watch this thing. For shows like this, when you’re doing album sides, I like to do my own version of Storytellers. Do you want to just pick a song or two, and just tell an anecdote; something people may not know?

JH: Just A Little has Ray Capo singing on it, which is pretty cool.

Sound Effects And Overdramatics has the singer of Coalesce on it, which was one of our favorite bands growing up. They’re just this very cool metal band. Actually, the drummer from that band (James DeWees) is now the singer for Reggie And The Full Effect. So, if you listen to Sound Effects And Overdramatics, all of the lumberjack-y scream-y, awesome stuff is Sean from Coalesce.

Listening is the third oldest song that we have. It was written before we recorded the first record.

Q: Oh, so it was a leftover?

JH: It wasn’t even a leftover, it was lost. That one was on this shitty eight-track player that we recorded on together, had totally done, and completely forgot about. So, Listening is not even on our demo tape – it was just lost to history.

Q: A ghost song.

JH: Branden was looking around one day and somehow found it on there, and he was like “What?” Listening is still one of my favorite songs to play live; we play it almost every show.

For Take It Away, we recorded the whole video on a rooftop in Canada.

Q: That wasn’t cold at all.

JH: No, it was…well, actually, it was probably cold (all laugh.)

Let It Bleed is actually my favorite song to play.

Q: Why?

JH: I like really groovy stuff, and it kinda has that little bit of funk to it. It’s rock, but it could go funk at any moment, although it doesn’t. We’ve only played that song one other time, like I said, and it was a disaster.

Noise And Kisses we played one time on a Warped Tour and then never again.

Q: Is it really devastating when you fuck up a song?

JH: If it’s your first time playing it, yeah, but also no: we take pride in mistakes. If somebody makes a mistake, we’ll point it out (all laugh.) And we have clues: if somebody’s pretending to play a flute at any point onstage, that means somebody fucked up. Mistakes show that you’re actually playing the song live.

Q: No, I agree: you don’t want it to sound too canned.

JH: No, we’re not robots. Robots can play to a click perfectly, but humans can play in the front or back of it, and give a kind of groove to it. I’m sure you can build a robot that can groove, maybe, but soul and stuff, that’s hard to get. We left all of the mistakes in the live albums; we want them in there.

Q: You want it to sound raw.

JH: We want it to sound real; have some backbone. You listen to all of those old recordings; why are they still so good? Because they sound real. Nowadays, recordings sound like robots recorded them.

Q: Well, you know I think everything’s going backwards, because now people want vinyl: they want to hear the scritches and scratches.

JH: I hope so. I’d really rather people play off a little bit, and just have the fucking groove down. It might not be perfect, but that’s how it’s supposed to be, you know?

The first video that we ever made was A Box Full Of Sharp Objects; John Feldmann produced it for us. That huge line that we’re waiting on, in the video, is the security line to get into Los Angeles Airport, on Thanksgiving. I can’t remember why, but all of us had to fly somewhere. So, it was the whole band and Feldmann. The line was an hour and a half long – we almost missed our flight.

Maybe Memories, we had the music written before Bert was even in the band.

Q: Really? That was pre-Bert?

JH: Pre-Bert. My mom had a little apartment somewhere in Utah; I crashed at her house for like a week and a half, I think. I made a little vocal booth in her closet, and Bert started recording the vocals for Maybe Memories in that closet.

Q: What is it with the closet recordings these days? There aren’t even any acoustics in there.

JH: Well, you need it to be dead for vocals. We’d just put padding around the mic, so when you sang into it, it was just the sound of that, and you could add your own echoes on after.

Q: It’s better if you add them?

JH: I think so. But maybe not; maybe it’s better to do it the other way – maybe that was the problem.

Q: Well, you used to hear people say that you should sing in a bathroom.

JH: For the natural reverb, yeah.

On My Own will be fun tonight (Editor’s note: they did not play it.) We have a different version of it that we play – a full band version, which was on the live show, with the string players. We’re going to have to tour with that someday. We played the one show, and then we played, in Amoeba, a tinier version, with the gospel singers and the quartet – which was crazy, because that’s a small stage. Then we thought: “You know what? Maybe we could actually do a tour like this, but the problem is that it might be too expensive. We’d like to, though, if we could figure it out, money-wise.

Q: That would be fun. You’d have to have everyone do double duty: “You’re the merch girl and the backup singer!” “You’re the coffee guy and the string player!”

JH: We’d need seven more bunks just to get the string players in. The bus holds twelve, and we have nine people, usually, when we tour, so we’d have to get another bus, which is way too expensive.

Q: It’s also kind of a douche meter, isn’t it?

JH: I think so. Two buses, hm, I don’t know about that, Dude. So we’ll just have them drive themselves.

Q: “Listen, Man, shit’s tough out there, Dudes” (all laugh.)

JH: We’re doing a cool version of Lunacy Fringe tonight.

I’m still bummed that we can’t do Under Pressure tonight though.

Q: And I still think you should get the singer from one of the other bands – just make him come out and do it.

JH: My Chem, yeah, I don’t think they could do it tonight.

Q: Oh, you meant the original. I don’t know…could you get them here that fast? “Yo, I know we haven’t played this song in like eight years, but you know, Bowie, Man –just play it.”

JH: The My Chem dudes? Maybe if they would get back together, they’d want to do it.

Q: I don’t know if I’d hold my breath for that one. I guess when people run out of money is when they make those decisions.

JH: When they have to get back together.

Q: “I can’t pay my car tomorrow.”

JH: “I love touring now!” We just like touring – that’s why we’re still on tour.

Q: Forever and ever and ever.

JH: Yeah, we don’t stop touring.

Q: You have to love it, because it’s really miserable.

JH: It depends upon what band you’re in. I don’t mean that against any band that’s not touring, I just mean that I really love everybody in our band, and everyone in our crew. So, when we’re on tour, it’s like I finally get to see my friends, you know? When I’m at home, it’s just as awesome, because then I finally get to see my wife. So, she’s happy about that half and I’m happy about this half.

Q: We won’t tell her that you said you’d rather be on tour.

JH: No! I’m saying that she’s first. It’s fucking awesome that I get to have wife time – and she’s actually here this time, so woo-hoo.

Q: There you go; you get to have wife time and tour time all at once. I read an interview with a band who was asked what they’d save in a fire: they all said their wives or their pets or their kids, but this one guy said “My guitar.”

JH: Well, it’s still firewood.

Q: You could bash something with it, get yourself out of the fucking fire.

JH: That’s what I’d do: break the window with it and jump out – and then you’d save both. There you go.