Planet Loud recently caught up with Ryland from Reel Big Fish just before their London show and as he was celebrating his third anniversary in the band.
Planet Loud – If you could introduce yourself and tell us what you play?
Reel Big Fish – I am Ryland and I play drums in the Reel Big Fish.
Planet Loud – And how’s it going?
Reel Big Fish – It’s going great, yesterday marks my 3 year anniversary of playing in the band!
Planet Loud – Congratulations!
Reel Big Fish – Its fine, it’s great, I’ve know these guys for 8 years now so its been really good!
Planet Loud – How did you first meet the other guys?
Reel Big Fish – I’m originally from Nebraska which is the middle of the country – I played in a band called Square and we moved out to California together. We played in this Ernie Ball battle of the bands and RBF were one of the judges at the competition, and that’s how we met and became friends – I actually filled in for previous drummers in the past; the first time I played in the Astoria was September 2002 filling in for Carlos their old drummer so yeah, we stayed friends, kept in touch and eventually my schedule was open and they asked if I wanted to come and drum for them full time.
[Streetlight Manifesto walk in to the room]
Reel Big Fish – Sorry dude we’re using your dressing room!!
Planet Loud – Have you been enjoying the tour so far?
Reel Big Fish – Yeah it’s been great – for all of Europe and the UK combined I think we’ve played for over 50,000 people on this tour so it’s been amazing and thanks to bands such as Streetlight Manifesto [SM: Wooo!] that have been helping us out with ticket sales, cause as much as kids these days love to come and see us play it helps if you have a great tour package, so us with Streetlight together has always been a greet combination – its helped to bring a lot of people to this tour, especially in Europe, we’ve had some of the biggest crowds we’ve had so it’s been amazing.
Planet Loud – Yeah, the Astoria is a great place to play; we also saw you play your two shows at ULU last year…
Reel Big Fish – Right! Well its weird, it seems that we always end up playing different places – 2 nights at ULU and I know the band’s done Brixton before, we’ve done the Electric Ballroom, and the Forum, it’s cool we keep switching around – so who knows maybe next time… well actually next year we’re hopefully going to do this same tour with Less than Jake – that might be at Brixton! But you never know, we may be somewhere else.
Planet Loud – You recently toured with Less Than Jake in America didn’t you?
Reel Big Fish – Yes, and that went great, and we also did Australia together. It’s been so amazing cause when you have a co-headlining tour with two bands you never know if either band is going to have an ego or attitude but we get along so well and it’s a non stop party the whole time! Sometimes you get bands who say “We want to headline the whole time!” or “We want to headline tonight!” but with us its “So you guys headline tonight!” “no, no you guys headline!” “no, you!! So it’s almost a very humble atmosphere in the sense that each band feels that this must be the other band’s crowd out there that night, but you find that both bands compliment each other really well -LTJ definitely have the ska-punk thing, they’re more on the punk side, and we’re more on the Ska side so the two bands together work out. So we’re definately hoping to have that tour next year.
Planet Loud – Getting back to this tour, did you guys choose the support for this tour?
Reel Big Fish – Well, with this one I think we wanted to do it with Streetlight and I think we wanted to do this with LTJ too, but they’re currently recording a record right now, so weren’t able to do it, and I think we got lucky as it was just us and Streetlight for the European portion of the tour, but for the UK portion we got to have Sonic Boom Six open for us as well. They’re a great band, a lot of fun and the crowd seem to love them, so it’s been a great tour package. You find out with bands, that even though we’re the headlining band, and we want a specific band to open for us, it’s not as easy as that – it doesn’t always work that way. I think what happened was we put in a few names who we wanted to play with, and Sonic Boom Six came up, which was perfect.
Planet Loud – If someone hadn’t been to one of your concerts before, what would you tell them to expect?
Reel Big Fish – Honestly, I would tell them to expect to have a lot of fun. One thing I have been noticing a lot, I feel that RBF are one of those bands that you can come to a show only knowing one or two songs – Most of the time people will know “Beer”, or “Take on Me“ and they know “Sell Out”. Here in the UK people know “Monkey Man” ‘cause we did the cover version for the soundtrack to the movie [The Wild Thornberrys]. Other than that there are a lot of songs that people don’t know but because the atmosphere is so fun and the music is so danceable people can get into the show and have a good time throughout the entire show. You can go see a band and hear the one song you know and be like “Oh yeah! Woo!” and hit the dance floor for that one song, but for the rest of the set with the songs you don’t know you could be standing there getting bored. But with RBF even though you don’t know all the songs they’re fun to listen and dance to, I guess what I would say is expect a lot of dancing and a lot of sweating!
Planet Loud – Do you tend to save any songs until last, because you know people absolutely love them?
Reel Big Fish – Well, usually, there are the 3 big ones like I said earlier – “Beer“, “Take on Me” and “Sell Out” – Those are like the 3 hits so generally we save one for the end song. We’ve done tours where we start with “Take on Me” and end with “Sell Out” and then we’ve had tours where we open with “Sell Out“, or we’ll play “Beer” in the middle of the set – it depends on the tour. But usually you need to save one big one for the end. It’s funny though, we’ve done shows before where we haven’t played an encore – we’ve played all the hits, all the songs everyone wanted to hear, but STILL they wanted an encore! It is a good feeling as well though, just goes to show they’re not there to hear your “hit songs”, they’re there to have fun.
Planet Loud – Obviously you’ve been on tour for a long time now, but were there any big things happening beforehand?
Reel Big Fish – Uhhh…Well, we did Australia with LTJ in December… this band is always on tour! We have a studio in Orange County, so we’re always messing around with stuff, recording. Sometimes it’s stuff that never sees the light of day. Because we’re always on tour there’s never really any time when we say “let’s take 4 months off to sit down and make a record”, usually it’s more like “hey we’re got 2 weeks here” and Aaron will come and say he’s got some ideas and because it’s so easy for us to go in and out of the studio we can record whenever – sometimes it could just be bass and drums from an idea Aaron had. It’s cool in a way because in some bands they write their record and then they release it, and then they go on tour for 9 months to a year, and then they take another year off to write and record the next record, whereas this band are constantly working so its nice to have that equilibrium between touring and recording; we don’t get too bored or either. I have friends who do the studio – release – tour thing and they’ll have months off and get so bored. Plus the band have gotten accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and to do that you need to keep the money coming in so with that we’re always touring and I think because the band are used to it now, it’s how we work.
Planet Loud – Any new album plans?
Reel Big Fish – We’re still going to be touring off of “Monkeys for Nothin’ and the Chimps for Free”, we have a lot of touring coming up, we’re doing warped tour in the states this summer and there’s always a lot of projects of stuff that we’re recording, but we never really tell people about it until we’re sure. I’ll just say that we’re always in and out of the studio, you can expect new things and possibly some old things that have been redone to be new again since we are off our label – nowadays instead of trying to get the rights or master tapes back from a label it’s easier to re record everything and then re release it later. Though there’s nothing definite at this point except for the touring! We were thinking about doing a Poison tribute EP, ska-punk style. Apparently we have to wait to get permission from Poison to make sure we can do it… but we may do that! Could you picture “Every Rose has it’s Thorn” Ska punk style?
Planet Loud – Are you enjoying being off a label?
Reel Big Fish – There are good and bad things – At the moment there are more good things. But a label can be fantastic – if they’re behind you and they’re going to push you and they’ve got your back. When RBF were originally on Mojo records, it was amazing – they took them from a local scene and took them to a massive level – without a label they wouldn’t have been able to do that. But now we have the fans that we do we’re able to go off on our own. Luckily we’ve been working with Rockridge Music – technically they are a label though they’re more of a distribution company for us. We get the same benefits of having a label because they want to see sales so they’re going to advertise and they’re going to make sure it gets in the stores. Actually we’ve been getting more advertising and more worldwide distribution through Rockridge than we did being on the Jive records Machine that is supposedly great. Plus you don’t have to have your management phone up the executives and say when you want to do a record, and you don’t have a bunch of paperwork to get the money to record the demos which you need for them to listen to before they sign off a budget for you to write the record. Then there’s no guarantees that the record will be released once the record is recorded, whereas with our current situation we tell Rockridge what we’re doing and if they’re interested – luckily so far they’ve been into everything we’re doing. So we just record it the way we want to. The only drawback is that we have to come up with the money ourselves. At least at the moment we’re making monkey off our record sales – on a major label you have to sell hundreds of thousands of records to see any money back. Labels won’t pay up unless you sue them – labels know they owe bands money but you have to get your lawyer to draw up papers to say you’re going to sue them for royalties owed and usually what happens is the label settles out of court. With smaller bands who are owed money they cannot afford the representation and so don’t get their money. We don’t have to worry about this anymore.
Planet Loud – You mentioned Warped tour – are you looking forward to that?
Reel Big Fish – Definitely! I’ve never done Warped tour and the last time the band did was 2002. We’re going to be on the main stage. When you’re on your own tour you wake up, you can have your sound check, play around for a while, then you can go eat, then you come back and then you play your show for an hour and a half. Whereas on Warped tour , you don’t get a sound check, you just throw up your equipment and you get a half hour set. Usually from what I know the locations the festival is in, there’s usually nothing around. So you end up having to go eat the vending food every day. I’m not looking forward to that but I like to read a lot and I have a drum practice kit so I have a lot of time to practice.
Planet Loud – Do you know many bands playing on there with you?
Reel Big Fish – Yeah, Beat Union from Birmingham, they’re playing, we played on tour with them last year, great guys, I look forward to hanging out with them. Say Anything, I’m good friends with the drummer Coby. I’m sure there’s others I know too! It’s going to be a lot of fun in that aspect.
Planet Loud – Any UK festival plans?
Reel Big Fish – We haven’t gotten any offers yet, unfortunately because of the timing I don’t think we’re going to be able to do any, in the first part of the Summer, apart from maybe Reading or Leeds which we did in 2006. I love doing Reading and Leeds so maybe them again this year.
Planet Loud – How’s Matt Wong’s replacement, Derek (bassist) getting on?
Reel Big Fish – He’s getting along great, and he’s playing great. Its always hard because as great as Matt was playing in the band, the last few years he didn’t like being on tour since his baby was born, even when his wife was pregnant he didn’t want to be away, it was definitely a good split – he just wanted to be home and now Derek’s out, and the atmosphere can be a lot more relaxed.
Planet Loud – How did you find Derek?
Reel Big Fish – He actually played bass in Aarons side project, Forces of Evil which John Christiansen played trumpet in as well. He was just working a desk job. He had also filled in for Matt previously when Matt wasn’t able to play on the last European tour so it just seemed like a no-brainer!
Planet Loud – Are there any other bands we should be looking out for?
Reel Big Fish – There’s a band from LA called the Aggrolites – they’re a ska-reggae band. Westbound Train, they’re from Boston, they’re another great traditional ska band, all really great players. I’m really into bands like the Mars Volta and A Perfect Circle and also bands like the Vandals and I love Frank Zappa.
Planet Loud – Mentioning Ska bands, do you reckon ska is dying off? Or still going strong? Or do you really care!?
Reel Big Fish – Honestly, I think at this point I don’t really know the answer . For bands like us and Less Than Jake it seems to be going as strong as it ever was, but I hear of other bands that are trying to make it who find it so hard. In the end it may has nothing to do with whether or not ska is dying, if you’re a band who write really good songs, people are going to come and see you, and you just happen to be a ska band. So I don’t think ska is dying, I just think that there are no ska bands writing really good songs! Though I’m not going to say I know for sure, I can’t tell people their songs suck! I’m going to say I don’t know, but for the Reel Big Fish it doesn’t seem to be !
Planet Loud – Did you feel the earthquake on Wednesday morning?
Reel Big Fish – No! Man, everybody kept talking about it! But you know what? At home we live in Southern California where we have earthquakes all the time, I have yet to feel one earthquake! They tend to be at night or in the early morning, and at that time I am so deep in sleep – I am a pretty heavy sleeper- so I didn’t get to feel it. But I heard everyone talk about it – so I felt the effects of everyone talking about it!
Planet Loud – Thank you very much! And good luck for tonight!
Reel Big Fish – Thank you! Don’t get too sweaty in the pit.
Interview by Kim Allen
