Catching Up With Red Fang Drummer John Sherman

By Andrew Bansal

Portland, Oregon riffmongers Red Fang are currently on a North American tour with two bands that sound nothing like them, Opeth and In Flames, and are on a mission to expand their fan base by performing a concise, high-impact 30-minute set in front of the biggest audiences they’ve ever seen, on some of the biggest stages they’ve ever stepped on in this country. The tour came through Los Angeles and delivered a memorable gig at the Hollywood Palladium on December 9th 2014, and a few hours before the show, I sat down with Red Fang drummer John Sherman for an interview. Check out the pleasantly candid conversation below, and catch Red Fang at show near you.

John, you’ve done a few shows on this tour with Opeth and In Flames and you’re playing in LA tonight. How’s everything been so far?

It’s been great! I think we’ve done five shows so far and LA is the sixth tonight. It’s pretty insane for us playing these big rooms with Opeth and In Flames. We have to play really early, and I was nervous about that at first, but so far, the crowds have been showing up early and we’ve had a good crowd every night. So I hope that trend continues. But yeah, the shows have been packed. I’m not sure whether all of them have sold out but definitely some of them. Good times!

Most or all of these shows are general admission standing room only, I’m assuming, and I think for bands like Opeth and In Flames, people want to come out early and get a good spot, as close to the front as possible. That works in your favor.

Yeah, yeah. If they want a good spot for In Flames, they have to sit through our set, right up front (laughs). But no one has been throwing rotten tomatoes at us yet, so I think we’re doing alright.

It’s an interesting lineup with In Flames and Opeth. I’m sure it’s definitely a challenge to try to win those people over and make them your fans. Is it good though to kind of step out of your comfort zone? You’ve been doing a lot of headline runs lately.

Right, but we’re not really doing anything different to try to win over those fans. We’re just doing what we do and hopefully they like it. I have faith that a lot of people that enjoy and love music don’t just want to hear one specific thing over and over again. I mean, I know there’s a lot of people out there that only listen to one kind of music, but to me that’s crazy. It’s like only eating cheese pizza every day. It’s fucking delicious, but every now and then you want some sushi or something, you know. But yeah, we just do what we do and it seems like people have been responding well. We’re not really altering our sound to try to fit the mould. Opeth and In Flames are super-different from each other too, so it’s just a nice well-rounded bill, I guess.

Exactly. And I just saw you guys sound-checking at the Palladium here in Hollywood. It must be the biggest room that you’d have ever played in LA, at least.

Yeah definitely the biggest room in LA, I think. I don’t know how big the Wiltern is, and we played there with Mastodon. It’s probably not as big as this.

The Wiltern comes close but the Palladium feels bigger because 80 per cent of the standing room is in one giant hall.

Yeah, it’s one big open room and it sounds crazy in there right now. Can’t wait till a bunch of warm bodies fill that place and make it sound better. Meat baffles, we call them. A human in a meat baffle. A baffle made of human meat. It’s disgusting. But humans do make the room sound better (laughs).

Interesting. But in terms of the set you’re just getting a half hour and you have to put your best foot forward in that sense.

It was tough to whittle our set down to half an hour, and we’re changing it tonight a little bit, but I think it’s a good set and it represents all three records. It’s pretty concise. We try not to talk too much so we can fit as much music in 30 minutes as possible. We do seven songs. I think Opeth does seven songs in an hour and 15. They have much more epic, longer songs than us. But yeah, 30-minute set! It’s different.

Have you ever toured with prog metal bands like Opeth before?

I guess Mastodon would be the closest. And that was great. We did two tours with them.

Right, but even they don’t really have 10 or 15-minute long songs. They’re more of a stoner/sludge metal band but they do have progressive elements, for sure.

Oh yeah, Mastodon definitely has some prog in there. But I guess this is the proggiest tour we’ve ever been on. I’m stoked! It’s fun to watch bands like them, specially from the side stage, just destroy. They’re pretty amazing musicians, and good songwriters too. It’s not just a musician’s band. The songs make sense. It’s not just about showing off how awesome they are. I actually enjoy their tunes. It’s good.

So, you guys are obviously from Portland, Oregon, and I just went there for the first time last month. It was an interesting experience. I say this in the nicest way possible, but I don’t think I’ll ever survive there. How do you do it, with that kind of weather, specially?

Well, you get used to it. Portland is amazing. I want to say that it sucks so that people stop moving there, because it’s getting way too crowded. But I like it a lot. The weather is terrible most of the year but you get used to it, and I think that’s why that part of the country produces so much good darker, heavy music. There’s a ton of really good bands there. It’s just raining all the time, so there’s nothing to do other than just hang out inside and write tunes, you know. It’s grey and kind of depressing, and I think it seeps a lot into the music. There’s so many fucking good bands in Portland now. I mean, there always have been, but it seems like right now it’s just a shit ton.

That’s why I brought it up. I wanted to mainly ask you if the music you play is a product of that environment and would it still have been the same if you were from somewhere else.

I don’t think it would be the same. I mean, I’m sure it would be similar, but your environment has got to seep in. It has to have some influence on what you do, whether it’s consciously or not. Not just our band but so many bands that come from Portland and the North-West in general, you can kind of hear the mold growing, the dampness, and the wet, grey, murky environment. You can hear Portland in Red Fang. Even with bands like Yob too. They’re pretty much my favorite band ever.

I was going to ask you what bands in Portland have really stuck out to you over the years. So I guess Yob would be up there.

Oh yeah, Yob is at the top. As far as that kind of doom metal stuff goes, Yob is by far my favorite. But there’s Lord Dying and they’re a great band and friends of ours. Rabbits is another one. There’s a label called Eolian Empire that’s putting out a ton of really cool, dirty, gnarly stuff. Drunk Dad is great. There’s so many bands. As soon as I try to list bands my brain starts to fail.

It just shows you how great the scene is over there.

Yeah, and we spend a lot of time on the road, so new bands pop up and I won’t even know about them until they’ve been around for may be a year or so. And I’d go and see a show and it’s like, ‘Holy fuck, who the fuck is this?’ So, it’s fun to get out there and be surprised by good bands.

Right, you mentioned Yob and doom metal. These days, doom is spreading all over the place and it’s pretty big. Red Fang is obviously not exactly a doom band, but do you see yourselves going in that direction because of the current climate in the genre?

We don’t really have much of a direction. We’re not a very well thought-out band (laughs). Our only rule is, if everyone is into it, it can be a Red Fang song. It doesn’t matter whether it’s fast or slow. We’re kind of all over the place. We’re on this road with no map. We don’t know where the fuck we’re going, and that’s fun to me. We’ve never been a band that has a clear direction. It’s not like, ‘Ok, we want to write 12 three-and-a-half minute songs at X beats per minute.’ If someone has a riff or even just a little lick that sounds cool, we just jam on it and expand on it, whether it turns into a song or not. But more often than not, it does. We have hundreds and hundreds of embryos of songs that we just can’t finish for one reason or another. And sometimes we’ll just end up finishing them. Like on this last record we had a couple of songs with riffs that we’ve been kicking around for years, and then we also had totally spontaneous songs that came out of nowhere. So yeah, Red Fang is a harvester of riffs, but with no direction (laughs).

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