By Andrew Bansal
Los Angeles modern metal stalwarts DevilDriver are in the final week of their late spring/early summer North American touring run with co-headliners Whitechapel and support acts Revocation, Carnifex, Rivers Of Nihil and Fit For An Autopsy in an altogether crushing lineup that put on a killer show at the House Of Blues Sunset Strip on May 20th. The prolifically touring DevilDriver are out promoting their latest album ‘Winter Kills’ and based on that performance in front of their hometown crowd, the quintet appear to be at the peak of their powers as live musicians. A few hours before the House Of Blues gig, I sat down with gutiarist Jeff Kendrick to discuss the tour and to get his thoughts on a variety of topics such as DevilDriver’s AWOLNATION cover, the band’s major markets, festival shows in America, cannabis, All Axess, and more. Enjoy the conversation below.
Jeff, how are you doing today?
Great! Hometown show, excited. It’s going to be amazing.
Is it good to hit the hometown show at the beginning of a tour? It can give you the energy to carry on for the rest of the tour.
Sometimes. It just all depends. I think it’s not good if it’s the first show of the tour. In our first week we’re just getting into the groove. The LA show is usually always in the beginning or the end. It’s always nice ending a tour here but we have a ways more to go on this one and we’re psyched to be here today!
This is a pretty heavy lineup of bands. How’s it been so far, three shows into the tour?
It’s been great. It’s just a lot of really talented musicians. I think I’ve said this often, but as time goes on, a lot of the younger guys just get more and more talented. The new generation of players and the new breed is just amazing. I’m pretty impressed with some of the guys with how talented they are individually, and their bands are great too. It’s definitely a strong lineup. And to be honest, I didn’t know a lot about all of the bands aside from their names before the tour. But now that I’ve seen all of them play, they’re fucking great.
I guess one thing fans don’t think about is, people in bands themselves are getting to see newer bands on tour that they might not have had a chance to see before.
Yeah, it’s like with anything, if you’re a veteran of being around something, there’s new up-and-comers you want to kind of keep tabs on what those people are doing. And I plan to learn everyone’s name before the end of the tour too, which will be actually quite an accomplishment (laughs).
DevilDriver has been around for so long now. You see that most of these bands have come up after you started. To be still able to headline a tour like this must be a satisfactory feeling because some of the bands that have been existed for as long as you have faded away and are not really headlining these kinds of tours anymore.
Yeah, it’s often the top of our conversation and you’re totally correct. We’re very grateful for everything that’s happened. We’ve worked really hard and luck and timing also plays a part in all of that. There’s a lot of people who work hard and don’t get the same results. So we’re grateful for what we have and we’ll continue to work hard to take it as far as we can!
So, most metal bands are touring regularly these days, mostly out of necessity, but even by today’s standards all six bands on this particular tour are really active touring-wise. For bands like yours, the biggest challenge must be to keep it interesting for people coming to see you every time because you’re returning so often, right?
Yeah, you’ve just got to mix it up. It’s a constant process. You don’t want to give kids the same show every time.
The album you put out last year is great but the AWOLNATION cover is kind of a little out of left field. How did that get into the mix?
Dez heard it, and sent it to us. We were actually working on music together, we heard the song and right off the bat all of us thought that it’s great. It’s in a minor key and it has a certain element to it that we thought we would do well with, and I thought we did a good job. But it was a random pick.
You’ve put it into your live set list as a regular item though, right?
Yeah, because it did really well for the album and pushed it a lot. A lot of fans actually found the band because of that. You do what you can these days while still keeping your integrity, which we’ve never even remotely given away.
Also, it’s up to bands like you to introduce your fans to older bands with covers like these, like Metallica did back in the day.
Yeah, but for us it was more about the song itself in this case. I don’t think any of us are super big AWOLNATION fans. Not that I don’t like them but I don’t really know all their stuff. I’ve heard stuff that’s cool. But it was more about working with that song and what we could do with it versus us being fans of AWOLNATION wanting to cover their song. It was one of those random instances where it worked.
Before this tour, you did a UK and Europe run. I think you guys always do well there, specially in the UK. How was that?
It’s great! That and Australia I’d say are the best markets for us. UK in particular is always fantastic. I mean, we have pockets everywhere with more fans than other places, as a lot of bands do. We’re lucky for everything we have. We’ve worked hard for it but we’re grateful to still have fans and continue to do this. But yeah, it’s great over there!
You mentioned Australia, and I’ve noticed that a lot of the American modern metal bands have a big following, like yourself and even bands like Fear Factory.
Yeah, it’s just amazing what that market is like. It’s a totally different place, very die-hard fans and I think it’s kind of a testament to the Aussie spirit. They love their metal.
That’s a good way of putting it. So, you play festivals all over the world and there are a few in America as well but for the most part it’s not really part of the culture here. I saw the Scion Fest a couple of days ago and what I noticed more than anything was that people were not really interested in checking out 26 bands across four stages, and most of them stuck to 2 or 3 bands which they would see at the regular shows anyway. Do you think that’s one of the main reasons it doesn’t really work here, people not being open to diverse genres and multiple stages?
Yeah, definitely the diverse genres thing. For whatever reason, overseas there’s more fans of music in general versus here people are very particular about the genres they like. The whole festival thing here is still kind of a mystery, I think. Mayhem Fest works but you’re talking bands that are all pretty much in the same vein, whereas in Europe you have Bowling For Soup play and then Slayer. I don’t think Bowling For Soup will do well on Mayhem or on Scion Fest. Even on our tour for instance, we have six bands but any more than that is pushing it. I think it’s a good number. It really just depends on the lineup. I guess people are really just concerned about a couple of bands but it depends on how many of the bands are new, old or a combination of both in the actual lineup.
It’s very genre-specific over here. People don’t really go out of that too much.
Yeah, they don’t. It’s just our culture. I think there’s a lot of things in the US where people are just very ensconced in their own world and are not really willing to step outside of it.
Even Mayhem Fest, it’s pretty tightly packed in with modern metal, metalcore and genres like that.
Yeah, I think it’s good to have a Mayhem Fest, though. It’s great that the United States has something like that. I hope it keeps going. We’ve done a bunch of festivals here and they usually have a shelf life of a couple of years. We’ll see how long Mayhem lasts and whether they beat Ozzfest, which set the threshold previously.
One thing with DevilDriver shows is, Dez always talks about the smell of the weed, specially in LA. Does anybody in the band actually indulge in that?
I think everyone has their own respective things that they’re into, and they kind of just remain their own business. His speaking his mind about it is fine but everyone else is a bit more tight-lipped.
Fair enough! Last time I ran into you was at this year’s Golden Gods where you were trying to get some work done for your All Axess endeavor. For people that don’t know, could you tell me what you’re currently doing for that and what it’s all about?
We have a website that focusses on teaching lessons for music instrumentation, mostly guitar as of now but it’s going to expand. And then we also have a whole social media aspect where we build sites for musicians. We have Munky from Korn, Paulo from Trivium, Willie Adler from Lamb Of God, and Chris Kael from Five Finger Death Punch. There’s some official .coms we are going to entering in advertising, modeled with a big company in the UK that I can’t say yet but should be signed soon. We’re going to help these guys earn money through social media by being their brand ambassadors and doing digital marketing for them. It’s a new, completely different kind of business model that we’ve been working on for the past three-and-a-half years.
So it’s expanded a lot since it started out just for guitar lessons.
Yeah, it’s just like any business. You’ve got to keep rolling and figure it out as it goes and not be discouraged or dissuaded by your lack of success, or be too excited and overzealous about your success. You’ve just got to keep a level head. So we have that and we also have a merchandising company called Black Harmonics which does various signature series shirts with guys like Willie from Lamb Of God, Munky from Korn and Chris from In This Moment. It’s been really cool. It’s not a band shirt but is actually their personal shirt that we’re putting out.
Good luck with that, and great talking to you as always, Jeff.
Thanks man, great to see you!
Related: Review + Photos – DevilDriver & Whitechapel Co-headline Heavy Lineup At House Of Blues Sunset Strip
DevilDriver links:
DevilDriver.com
facebook.com/DevilDriverOfficial1
Remaining Tour Dates:
6/17: Orlando, FL @ Firestone Live
6/18: Ft. Lauderdale, FL @ Revolution
6/20: Houston, TX @ Scout Bar
6/21: Corpus Christi, TX @ House of Rock
6/22: Dallas, TX @ Gas Monkey Bar ‘N Grill (Outside)
6/23: Austin, TX @ Mohawk