“Well… shit, fuck dude,” he replies as if no one has ever asked him this question. “We were a band for a long time. We kinda did everything we wanted to do; we’d made a fuckload of records, recorded thousands of songs, we’d played pretty much everywhere we though we’d ever play, and more. Really, we had kind of achieved everything we’d wanted to achieve from when we’d started out.
“We’d hit a point where there was this sameness and for a band that had really prided itself on having a serious commitment, I mean we really threw ourselves into rock’n’roll completely and there wasn’t time for anything else, so it was one of those things were we all felt that it was time to do other things.
“I owe everything to rock’n’roll, I owe my life to rock’n’roll, but sometimes you just have to stretch out a little bit. It was more than just me too, but there were no people hating each other, there were no creative differences, there was no drama. We realized we’d done it, it was a job well done, so we high-fived each other and walked off into the sunset.”
Rocket From The Crypt, famously, played one more show after that, on the set of children’s TV show, Yo Gabba Gabba, but even that didn’t satisfy the band’s desire.
“I’ve continued to keep playing,” Reis explains, “and part of being in a band – even if you do it on your own terms and not for the satisfaction of others – there is still part of you that wants to be liked and have people relate to what you are doing; it sort of makes you feel not so alone in this big world, you know?
“When people start really asking you, the invitations start piling up and after a while you realize that all these people really wanna see you play, and you realize you still really like playing and you still really like each other, so it seemed kind of ridiculous to say no to something that was always so much fun to do.”
Rocket From The Crypt have played many times in Australia – the last time was in 2002 where they climaxed every show with a medley of classic Australian rock songs such as The Saints’ (I’m) Stranded, Aloha Steve and Danno and When The Birdmen Fly by the Fun Things. They are coming back in 2014 to play at Soundwave Festival, though playing festivals seems to bring out the more competitive side to Reis. “For a band like us…if we were going to do these festivals, we were going to have to get over ourselves and realize that it wasn’t all about us. There’s hundreds of bands there and the audience isn’t just there to see you, so you just have fun with it.
“There is part of what we do, underneath it all there is a desire to decapitate people with rock’n’roll and to be the best. I know it’s not a sport and I know that people aren’t holding up scorecards after each song and I know that at the end of the festival they are not handing out some big silver cup to the band with the highest score. But you feel these things in yourself, there are some times that it is undeniable. Sometimes you come offstage and agree that the audience may not have liked you but you just say, ‘man that was killer, we killed it’, and those are the things that keep you going – those are the things that keep you horny for playing rock’n’roll.”
BY JEREMY SHEAFFE
