Drowning Pool Interview - Netwavz Artist of the Month for May 2008

This is for the Soldiers: Mike Luce and Stevie Benton of Drowning Pool Discuss Intentions and Misconceptions of “Bodies” and “Soldiers” in the Wake of 9/11

About a decade ago, the active rock scene was thriving in Dallas, Tx. Bands like Slow Roosevelt, Big Iron and Ugly Mustard were hitting the clubs of Deep Ellum in a weekly rotation. Bar hopping from Trees, to DaDa, and other hot nightspots, one could see 20 bands in a night for a mere five bucks. At least that’s how drummer Mike Luce and bassist Stevie Benton of Dallas’s Drowning Pool remember those days. Now, seven years after signing with Wind-up who would release their first album Sinner, the band has been met with adversity. They lost their first singer Dave Williams while on the Ozzfest tour, replaced him with another who left due to irreconcilable differences, and finally found their match in former Soil frontman Ryan McCombs. They’ve had equipment stolen twice (in a span of just a couple of months), Stevie’s had an encounter with Bell’s Palsey, and they’ve switched from Wind-Up to Eleven Seven Records. The scene in which the band started has all but dissolved in Dallas, yet somehow the band is still rocking like it’s, well, 2001.

After years of touring and an album for each singer, Drowning Pool is still best known for their first single “Bodies” off 2001’s Sinner. But in the wake of 9/11, the band was dealt a blow when media outlets, namely radio stations, put a sort of embargo on the track due to its content and the alleged appropriateness after the tragedy. The notion that the lyrics “let the bodies hit the floor” were meant in any way to relate to the terrorist attacks seemed ludicrous. Ironically, it was the servicemen and women who kept the track alive; adopting it as a battle-cry while they fought insurgents in Iraq.

Now, seven years after its release, Drowning Pool has released their third album Full Circle, whose noise-making track “Soldiers” has come under some of the same kind of scrutiny. The song was written in homage to the soldiers the band met abroad in the tours of Kuwait in 2005 and 2006; yet many perceived it as a war song.

We caught up with Drowning Pool in their home-state while on tour with Saliva, and Mike and Stevie from the rhythm section set the record straight. Here is an abbreviated version of the interview.

Chelsea Schmid: You guys have been on tour with Saliva for a while now, right—since the beginning of the year?

Stevie Benton: Our first show was on Jan. 29, so it’s been about eight weeks, and we still have about two more weeks of shows left. With those guys. Every night. For 10 weeks.

CS: Every night.

SB: Man, like six shows a week. It’s been pretty brutal, but a good time.

CS: So you started in Florida—where did that part of the tour take you?

SB: Well we started out in the South and did a lot of shows. And then we went up to the northeast where it was cold as f*ck the whole time.

CS: So where are you guys going from here then?
Mike Luce: Pacific Northwest, I think we start heading to in a couple of days.

SB: Yeah we play I think one more Texas date after this and then we start heading through Colorado and go to Portland, Montana…

ML: Back up to the cold. We’re Texas boys; we’re not too—

CS: Not adapting well?

ML: No, we don’t do well. Most of us—a few of us were sick for the first three weeks of the first month of the tour. Just from bouncing around to different climates, picking up the bug that’s going around up there in the Northeast…I guess you get used to it, get born into and that’s how you live, that’s all you know. I guess if you were to come down here, you would think you were just sweating bullets the whole time. But yeah, it’s a completely different atmosphere for us; we’re all southern-fried.

CS: What did you guys think of Iraq; was it just barren desert lands?

SB: That was too hot.

ML: Too damn hot and for all you people out there who have not—Baghdad smells of burning metal; it’s just crazy. Anyone who has worked in a machine shop or has cut Unistrut or done diamond-plating or anything like that—that’s what it smells like, it’s crazy. That’s one thing that you never get out of your head. A city burning—you never know what that smells like, and that’s basically what it smells like. It was just burning metal, you know like an engine over heating in a car and just blowing up and on fire and something and it’s just crazy.

CS: So while you guys were over there, what was it like interacting with the soldiers? Were you on a base the whole time, or did you skip around to different ones?

SB: Well in Kuwait, we stayed in a hotel and we ventured out every day to a base. But in Iraq you’ve got to stay on base at all times. I guess that was a little more convenient, you know. Just wake up and we’re already there. We did the whole mess-hall thing every morning and got lunch with the troops and just got to hang out all day. It wasn’t we just show up and play a show and that was it, we got to hang out all day and talk to them and then do the big rock show and hang out and sign stuff, you know.

CS: Right.

SB: It was exhausting but we were only there a week and I can’t imagine what the guys stationed there 12 months…I can’t imagine. Poor guys. Got nothing to do. Got no alcohol.

CS: They’re not allowed to drink out there?

ML: It’s crazy though, you know what sucks? There’s members stationed from every country—of course we’ve got the most—but they’ve got the British soldiers there, and as part of their meal, they would get a beer. Because that’s part of their culture; that’s what they do in Europe and England, Great Britain, that’s what you do. At lunch time you have a pint and your fish and chips I guess. So they were actually able to get beer, so all your American soldiers, you know were all bitter.

CS: (Laughing) I imagine!

ML: Pun intended because the English got to drink their pint of bitter with their fish and chips or whatever it was—the Salisbury steak.

SB: While we were out there the sound company that we used said they could get us a fifth of Jack on the black market there for $175.

CS: Wow, that’s a lot. Did you guys get it?
Mike and Stevie in unison “Hell no.”

ML: We ain’t that bad off.

CS: So you’ve been there twice right?

ML: Two times to Kuwait.

SB: Yeah we’re trying to get back and do Iraq and Afghanistan, maybe by the end of this year. It keeps getting pushed back. We’ve been working on it for quite a while.

CS: Tell me about the petition you guys had up on thisisforthesoldiers.org.

SB: It was originally for the Lane Evans bill, which was a bill that was set up to provide more funding for the mental health aspect of troops when they return. There’s nothing really set up to gage them when they return—you can [see]a physical wound, but not really the emotional scar that it can leave. Being over there for 15 months and then when your time is done you’re supposed to just come back and rejoin society like you haven’t been on edge every day of your life for 15 months. I can just imagine what that’s got to do to your psyche. So this bill was just set up like a mandatory screening when they get home. Just to set up a little counseling and make sure that they don’t go home and have trouble like they’ve been having. Returning troops—their alcoholism rate, their depression rate, their suicide rates are just through the roof. So this is just kind of to give them a hand with that kind of stuff.

CS: So to push for that particular one, was that just something you guys found out about, or was it inspired by—were you hearing stories from people that were over there or people that had come back?

ML: Stevie’s got a close-knit tie to it because his dad was a three-time returning vet to Vietnam, so he grew up with that…Once we went and played, it was kind of hard for us to just go back and go ‘okay, we’re four jackasses that get to play rock and roll music and pay our bills.’ These guys are over there, locked in the sand for 15 months at a time, two and three tours deep and they don’t get to go anywhere, there’s no R&R. There’s no leave-for-the-weekends. They’re locked in and [there’s] just desert everywhere you go. There’s nothing that way and there’s nothing that way except more desert and insurgents.

It left us with a deep respect and a deep, close-knit tie to these guys, wanting to go ‘okay, how else can we get just a little bit more involved?’ Stevie kind of pioneered the whole thing between he and management with the IAVA and the Lane Evans Bill. Obviously, that’s something Senator Obama’s big into, and it led us to meeting him, up on Capitol Hill. We got to pass the petition—at the time, it was something close to 30,000 signatures on it. And you can see the results, like Stevie was talking about on the news. It was just a couple of days ago. There was a kid that took out a family and there’s a poor mom on TV crying because she’s hurt. She’s on TV saying it ‘my son just hasn’t been alright since he came back from Iraq. I’m sorry, I’m sorry to the family’s loss. I don’t know what to say. I’m hurt and I hope the boy gets some help.’

It’s just stuff like that. There’s a certain motismo, there always has been. A bravado between service men and women. You suck it up and you tough it out, you know. You deal with it. Which is a killer motto, and it’s the way people ought to be, but at the same time your brain isn’t engineered to understand things like your buddy’s leg being blown off in front of your face. So when you come back home and you’re expected to just go back to work and acclimate to eight to five and take the lunch and come home and be cool and watchTV and not be reminded or not be interjected back into that—

It’s ludicrous to think that you can ever go somewhere and be shot at 24/7 and return fire, and then just come back home like you just put in a day’s work and everything’s cool, turn theTV off, let’s go to bed. F*ck that; you can’t do that. There’s no way anyone could be expected to do that.

So the Lane Evans Bill was a way to go ‘hey, we see what you’re going through. We understand. We’re not going to ask that you stand up in a group of people and single yourself out for maybe having some bad dreams or something.’ It’s a mandatory thing which makes it just cool. It’s not questionable whether it’s cool or not to go in and say ‘hey I don’t feel so good after returning. I think I need to talk to somebody.’ No, it’s more or less—it’s established, it’s done, it makes it protocol, it makes it etiquette. That way it’s done and you don’t have to explain yourself.

CS: It has been passed, right?

ML: In essence, yes, it has. But it didn’t get passed as Lane Evans, it got passed in bits in pieces of something else.

CS: Okay, I got it. So have you guys had the chance to play “Soldiers” abroad? Or have you been back since that came out?

SB: That’s when we were first working on the song. We started it over there.

ML: We were playing it that second tour we did, but it wasn’t on the record yet, so nobody knew it as what it is now. If we were to go back, I’m sure everybody would go kind of crazy. Because that was a huge campaign for us; that was—we wanted to lead-off with a song that was pretty close to us. And here’s the irony: “Bodies” was taken from the radio as a result of 9/11, which understandably so. But the soldiers kept the song alive, and kept the song in the minds of people, and then it came back to radio big and strong just before Davey passed. The irony is five years later on the fifth anniversary, we’re in Baghdad and we’re playing “Bodies” for the guys and girls on the anniversary of the event that took the song off the radio. Then we write—in respect to that—we write the song “Soldiers” because “Bodies” was misinterpreted. Anybody that doesn’t understand the song—I can understand them wanting to take it off. Who wants to be on CNN’s soundtrack for people flinging themselves out of a window or something as a result of 9/11, you know, I get that, we understand that.

CS: Well that song was completely unrelated though.

ML: It was unrelated. It was our view from the stage, looking down into the moshpit and seeing the kids just—I mean it’s 2008, you don’t sing “Let’s go to the hop, oh baby” (starts to snap fingers.) I mean, you don’t sing stuff like that. “Let the bodies hit the floor,” it’s the same thing though. It’s like ‘Let’s go out to the club, let’s have fun, let’s do our thing,’ but it’s generational. You’re talking like the ‘50s or ‘60s to 2008 you know, “Take me for a spin around the dance floor, you big boy…” we don’t sing stuff like that. “Let the bodies hit the floor.”
So the irony is, we write “Soldiers” thinking that nobody will misconstrue this song. This song is about our going and playing for the soldiers; it’s our tip of the hat, it’s our thank-you to them. They adopted “Bodies” as their battle cry, this one is all of them, no question about it, nobody should get this wrong. And then people come at us thinking we wrote a war song.

CS: Are you serious?

ML: Yeah. Not everybody, but there’s a few people that just wouldn’t get on board with the song because the thought we were like pro-war, and we were like ‘Man. You guys just don’t get it’ and we thought we wrote the simplest, easiest tune that was just geared straight toward the troops. It was kind of mind-boggling that we couldn’t get everybody on board with it right away, and jut the irony of it all was unfathomable for us.

CS: I imagine. Especially for them to embargo “Bodies” on the radio and for that to be adopted as their battle-cry.

ML: The biggest balls of all is when somebody doesn’t agree with something, but they know they signed up for it, so they go over there and they fight for it anyway. Even though they’re not gung-ho about why or who put them there in the first place. That’s the biggest balls and the biggest fcking guts of all.
Our song was written toward that kind of respect, toward that kind of fortitude, and people are just sitting back in their easy-chairs talking about ‘we wrote a war song.’ It’s like ‘get out of here man, you have no freaking clue what these dudes are doing, and you’re going to sit here and—whatever.’
I woke up a little angry today.

SB: You did man. Kind of scaring me.

CS: Laughs) You didn’t look too happy when the interview started. You’ve kind of perked-up some.

ML: This is the way I always look. I feel refreshed.

CS: Well good, I’m glad. I’m glad I got to see the transformation…In closing, you guys have played Dos Amigos many, many times before, what was your favorite show here, and why?

SB: There was one show we played here and the Mavericks were in the playoffs, and they had it on the big screen downstairs. And so we all dressed up in whatever inconspicuous stuff we could find and the game went into overtime, so we had to delay the show close to an hour. People were up on the stage chanting, ‘come on, start the f*cking show!’ and we’re all just gathered under the TV, right under their noses, watching the game. Then as soon as it was over we all just ran out.

ML: And unfortunately, they didn’t win.

SB: So we went to stage all aaarrrghh f*ck.

ML: Just mad; 35-45 minutes late.

CS: People got wild that night? That’s hilarious.

SB: Yeah, that was a good time.

CS: All right, well thanks again for doing this.

SB: Thank you for having us.