HaM
NR: You've been in a lot of bands. Is it hard to work with you?
Ham: Yeah! I'm very demanding. Even if it's me joining a band or making a band I expect everything from the people that join. With anything that you put your heart into you want people involved that have their heart into it as well. It's not like your planting a garden. You put some fertilizer on it and there's a system. With music in general there is no set system. If you want to play football. You play football in high school, you play football in college, you work your way up. You go through the system. If your good enough you get the skills, a couple of lucky breaks, and you can make a living off of it. With music there is no farm leagues, minor leagues, scouts that go to each of your games and write down your ERA or whatever. It's all a game of chance. You have to expect the best. Yes, I expect the best. Yes, I'm hard to work with. Yes, I definitely believe that I have some complex surrounding me that makes me hard to work with.
NR: So basically music is more than a hobby to you.
Ham: Yeah, It's not collecting baseball cards. I write songs to express myself. A long time ago when the butt-rock, rap-rock and all that shit was getting big again I saw an interview where some guy was saying the only reason why people play music is to get laid. And if they say otherwise they are lying. Well that's not the case with me. I started playing music to make people feel the same way I do about performance songs, Pearl Jam songs and stuff like that. And that's what I try to recreate. If I'm going to put my heart out like that in front of everyone than I expect to sound good.
NR: You look down on bands fucking their groupies?
Ham: No. You want to get laid than get laid. If your going to approach music as a sport or a contest or to get out your sexual frustration then in a lot of cases you could be in it for all the wrong reasons. To me that's what music means to me. But that's the thing with music. It's like politics, it means whatever you want it to be. So if you want to surround yourself with a bunch of chicks that are willing to screw you at any time you can get that. That's the beauty of music. That's definitely not what I've ever done.
NR: You've been in the Vegas local music scene. Do you think it's kicking ass or do you think it's starting to suck ass?
Ham: With every music scene.. With music in general 98% of people are going to say it's stupid. With music like life in general you will get out of it what you want. If you say it sucks than that's all you will find. If you go out there and find the things that makes music special, then your going to find those things. One year I had a real bad birthday, one of the worst days of my life. My birthdays on New Year's Eve so that always makes it harder. I ended up going to a local show on a whim. As soon as I hit the door everyone was saying happy birthday, buying me shots, giving me hugs. The bands were like happy birthday to Ham, it's his birthday. It makes me feel so good because I knew that's where my home was. You don't piss in your own pool. You don't go around and bad mouth everybody and then expect to hang with them. They are genuine people that work hard at their day jobs to be able to play music all the time. So no, I don't think the Vegas music scene sucks. I think it's very special. I think its very nice nice close knit scene. Everybody knows each other. I've been to places with the scene that's 20 times the size of this scene and towns with no scenes at all. I think Vegas has the best of both worlds. And the worst of those. It's hard to make a venue or a band because we are run by casino's.
NR: With the venue status here, venues closing within 6 months of opening do you think Vegas will have another venue like The Huntridge?
Ham: Do I think there is another set venue in town? Absolutely! As time goes on and Vegas gets bigger there will be a bigger demand for that. It's a natural progression in any town. Vegas use to be a cowboy town and now it's a major metropolitan area. The demand is already there. People want it. Getting people that will do it the right way and be able to make money off of it is the hard part. Vegas will bounce back.
NR: What do you think of downloading music?
Ham: If the band is not giving it away for free then yes, it is stealing. Bands these days sign away their merch rights, they sign shitty deals that can get them some sort of radio play, then they don't get paid for the radio play, so a lot of the way these bands get money is from their CD sales and touring. I think it's a shame. If I burn a CD for somebody that's fine, that's sharing with a friend. But their are whole online communities that revolve around getting new stuff first before anyone else. Bands do suffer from that. At the same time labels have gone out of the way saying everybody is stealing music now were so broke we can pay the bands. So bands are bending over backwards for the shittiest of deals. If 30 years ago if Linkin Parks deals was offered to Steely Dan they would have smacked the person. It's a lot less organic, more corporate and a lot of these bands are now walking billboards for the industry itself. It also brings up the point that music in general is over romanticized in a lot of ways. You hear people saying that "They're sell-outs," "I'll never sell-out!" I think that sort of myth was created my record labels to convince people that if they want to make honest music they have to be poor. Which is not true. It's ok to make a living from music. I make a living by walking into an office 5 days a week for 9 hours a day busting my hump for\ $12.00 an hour. Nobody's calling me a sell-out now. Just because I decide to do something with my music that maybe profitable to me so I can pay my bills for my 1 room apartment on the west-side. But when a band like Dashboard Confessional posing next to a Honda Civic with their signature on it for a commercial, I think that is over the top lame. But then again Dashboard was always a little lame.
NR: You said you think it's stealing. So if someone was to download a whole Pearl Jam album or put it online, do you think they should be prosecuted?
Ham: That's a good question. No, I think the music industry needs to except a lot of what is going to go on with music and find out how to make a profit off of it. Look at iTunes. I have an iPod and I'm a big iTunes user and I think Apple and iPod have it right. You can download a song for $0.99 or pay $10.00 for a full album and put it on your iPod. I think it's the perfect situation. There is a war going on. I think we should prosecute the people that started the war. 6 G.I.'s were killed today. Prosecute them.
NR: What made you decide to pick up a mic or a guitar, or just do music because you loved it? Who are your idols?
Ham: I started playing music because it's the one place I felt accepted. I'm a fat guy. I'm very comfortable with it now but when your growing up, and your trying all these different things to find your niche, I tried playing sports, I tried being cool, wearing cool clothes, tried hanging out with chick, buying all the cool video games and none of it seemed to work. As soon as I got into music people started celebrating my differences instead of looking down on them. That was a very positive thing for me. I felt very accepted. I was 12 years old when I joined my first band. It was just a little before that someone gave me a copy of Nevermind (Nirvana). I couldn't put it down. It was the best thing I ever heard. Right after that I got into Pearl Jam. And I heard these two different bands do their things and it all sounded so authentic to me. I just thought these people are working hard and going out of their way to show their emotions. And that was a real inspiration to me. In a lot of places in life showing your emotions is not accepted. You can't walk into your job and sit down at your cubical and say, "Man, I saw the way the sun set last night. It made me feel so good inside." Person to person that sounds cheesy. But you can pick up a guitar and put that in context and people will get it. And people make it their own thing. That's what ultimately inspired me to get into music. Helping people forget about their problems for 5 minutes.
NR: We've been having big shows coming to Vegas like Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nine Inch Nails, Slipknot and the shows sell out incredibly fast due to scalpers. Do you think it's fair what they are doing to these bands fans?
Ham: Yes and No. One the reason they even exists is because there is a demand for it. Joe Schmoe high-roller, his parents were born with 40 acres and a mule, he's got so much money he doesn't know what to do with it. He has no problem calling up two days before the show and he's willing to pay 4 times face value. Ultimately that's the driving factor in a lot of this. Secondly I do think it's wrong because it shuts out a lot of people. If you don't know how to use that system to your own liking, or if you don't sit online all day checking prices and availability for every single show you want to go to then you get screwed. I think it's bad. I've missed some shows I really wanted to go to because it was sold out. Then again I've been lucky and was able to get tickets last minute for 3 times face value. I've seen some good shows and I've missed some good shows. I think it happens because the demand is there. But it's become such a competitive thing. With the internet I could go and start my own ticket scalping company. I could go out tomorrow and buy 4 Tom Petty tickets and sell them on Ebay for 8 times face value and some people would buy them. And that happens to be the driving factor.
NR: You did Not From Here and you had a good buzz with local music fans. Is there another Ham project coming up?
Ham: Absolutely. After I got out of Hemlock I did a re-incarnation of Not From Here with a wonderful person, Ryan Johnson. He was in Drive-Thru Pharmacy. He actually replaced me. I use to drum for Drive-Thru Pharmacy before I joined the H-word. We've been talking back and forth about doing it. We are getting back together this weekend to start a new band. It's not going to be Not From Here 2 or anything like that. We are thinking about playing a couple of the songs we wrote right before we broke up. Hopefully everything works out. He's a great person and I'm very confident being a front man now. I think I've proven everything I need to prove with being in a band. I've done everything I've wanted to do with music. I've toured, I've played big shows, small shows, been in the papers, been on the radio. I've accomplished everything I ever wanted to do with music. So this time I'm playing music because I want to not because I have to. With that in mind hopefully it will be better musically this time around.
NR: There are a lot of rumors around town about why you left Hemlock. One of them being you were fired because they thought you weren't good enough and the other one was you left because you weren't comfortable doing it. What's the real truth behind it?
Ham: Well I was in Hemlock for about 8 or 9 months. When I first joined the band it was like a honeymoon. I was never really a heavy metal drummer. I think I'm a fantastic drummer but I'm not a metal drummer. I thought coming into Hemlock that would be fine. That wasn't the case. As time went on they started putting a lot of pressure on me to metal it up. They wanted me to be like a Paul Bostaph from Slayer. I never really got into that style of drumming. As time went on they put more pressure on me. It became an awkward situation. It was kind of like they were hoping I would leave before I quit. That's not necessarily the case but that's how it felt. It got to the point I hated being on the road, I hated being in Hemlock, and I hated music. I wanted nothing to do with music, Hemlock or heavy metal. This was all happening to me so fast. It's one thing to hate your life when your at home. You can come home play xbox, watch t.v. and get on your computer and things like that. When your in butt-fuck-Idaho for four days straight you start to lose your mind. You start losing your mind in that sort of situation. It can be the best experience of your life or the worst. Eventually it got to the point I couldn't take it. At one point on our way home, we were in New Mexico or Arizona I don't remember, coming home. We've been driving for 15 hours straight. A couple of the guys and I had to take a piss so we pulled over. It was a beautiful night. There was a beautiful meteor showers going on. I was pissing on a ant farm or the person next to me I can't remember. But I just remember saying to myself, "I'm not feeling right. I don't want to feel like this anymore." I felt bad for being the musician I was. Not that they did that intentionally. Just the after affect of the situation. When we got home I told them I was leaving the band. You can take the time to find the person you need. I told them this in November. They didn't find a new drummer until February. So they knew for 4-5 months. They knew I didn't want to be in the band anymore. One day they called me and told me they got a new drummer and they were going out on the road with him the next week. The week after that everyone started asking me why I got fired from Hemlock. I don't remember being fired from Hemlock. I remember telling them I was leaving Hemlock. But if them firing me was the case that's fine but I don't remember being fired. PLEASE DON'T ASK ME THAT QUESTION AGAIN! I'm sick of being out at Del Taco and getting asked why did I leave Hemlock. It's Done. READ THIS! It's OVER!