“I guess the biggest fear for me is when people stop showing up,” he states on the band’s current, well-revered standing. “To this day, we could do a street somewhere we all grew up in a fuckin’ hundred capacity club and have all of our friends and the entire world say that they’ll be there, there’ll still be a point where I think, ‘What if nobody shows up?’ Now we’ve figured out how to exist as musicians, I’ll be cranking out tunes till the day I die regardless.
“But there’s always that thing, it’s not necessarily relevance, but music is such a great community, a source of humanity, I would be pretty bummed to miss that. It’s a tough one. I’ve never been concerned about our band’s popularity on a trivial level. I get as much out of it as people get out of it, shows mean a lot to me, I love meeting people and sharing music with people. I don’t want that to ever stop. I could sit here and make music in the studio and put it out and be happy, but I wouldn’t really be happy. I don’t want to be just a studio musician.”
Since The Bronx’s inception, the band have managed to do things on their own terms. “I remember when we were doing our second record, it was our first-time brush with major label publishing and all that shit, and we get this call from Burger King asking us to write a song for these chicken fingers, saying they’ll have us in masks so nobody will know that it’s us, playing amongst skateboarders and mosh pits and all that,” Matt recalls.
“We were in the process of doing the second Bronx record, and it was a fucking lot of money for some broke dudes, like $80,000 or something like that. Which is a fuckin’ good chunk of change for some scrappy dudes like us, it would have helped out a lot. We had this B-side that wasn’t gonna make the record so we entertained it for a bit, laughing our asses off writing these lyrics about chicken. We recorded a demo of this Bronx song with these fuckin’ chicken lyrics.
“Then we just said, ‘Fuck it, this is wrong, there’s no way’. Our manager was like, ‘Hey if you do this, it’ll be aired a few times, you’ll get paid, nobody will ever know it was you guys’. It was funny, they got another band to do it, it aired for two weeks, then Slipknot sued because the masks were a character likeness, and they pulled the commercial off the air. That was our first experience with stuff like that. But from day one, if it feels like a scam or compromise in what we wanna be or what we wanna do, we don’t do it.
Everything we do in this band is because we wanna do it. If we do a corporate gig as El Bronx for a tequila company, or Bronx doing rum shows, everything we do feels right for us. We go by our own meter, we’ve said yes to some things, we’ve said no to some things.”
Over the course of a decade, The Bronx have become regular visitors to Australian shores on a variety of stages – both as The Bronx and as Mariachi El Bronx – hitting festivals boutique and massive, and everything in between.
It’s become a lot like how the band has grown. Australia has seen us from the beginning and seen us through all stages of the band. I think that kind of reflects where we’re at with each other. It’s like a second home for us. Again, it’s that thing where I was scared no one would turn up the first time we went over. Australia is in my wheelhouse as a human being. I’m from California, I love the beach, I love the surf, it’s everything I love about life. It’s got such a great musical history, especially with punk and rock‘n’roll. From the moment we landed it’s always felt like a natural fit. Now it’s at the point where we’re there almost once a year. It’s definitely my favourite place to play, by far.
With Mariachi El Bronx establishing itself as a formidable touring force in its own right, Matt explains that entering the dichotomous headspace of the two acts has become easier over time.
“It was really hard for a while. I was struggling with it for a good two years, where it was hard for me to get comfortable because the balance between the two was so jagged. It was hard to get grounded creatively. After this third El Bronx record that we’ve just finished up, I feel a lot better.
“I’m in a really good spot between the two bands in terms of mentality, writing between the two, I’m in a good spot. The trick is, as with a lot of creative stuff, you don’t try to fight it. The fact is we’re two bands, and if El Bronx need to do something and I want to do something Bronx, I’ve just learned to accept it. Once you become both of those things, it became a lot easier for me.”
After revealing Mariachi El Bronx III will be out this September, Matt assures there will be more in the way of Bronx material on the horizon. “We’re moving at a pretty quick pace these days; we’re looking at some cool ideas floating around for Bronx right now, something cool and a little bit different for our next release. So we shall see. As far as music in general – whether it’s gonna be an EP, album, double-album, a fuckin’ quadruple live LaserDisc – whatever it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be something. We’re flowing right now. We’re in a spot where making music doesn’t feel like a job. We’re cracking out tunes for the hell of it, and it feels good.”
BY LACHLAN KANONIUK
