“My God, the Heat” is a rock band based out of some of the tougher parts of Rockford, Illinois. They are are very energetic and fun group of guys who play one hell of a show. They were recently in Fort Wayne to play a show at The Brass Rail and they were kind enough to let me interview them.
If you like Rock ‘n Roll, of any type, I would highly recommend checking them out. You can find the link to their website at the bottom of this post.
JS: Okay first question. What are your names?
Jake: Jake [drums]
Stu: Stu [guitar, lead vocals]
Ben: Ben [guitar, vocals]
JS: On the website you guys have awesome nicknames. Are you still sticking with those?
Stu: Did we give Ben a nickname?
Ben: I’m just Ben Worthless.
Stu: Benjamin the Worthless.
Ben: Oh it’s THE worthless.
JS: And you? (at Jake)
Jake: What was it, Buttermilk?
Stu: Buttermilk Dickson. And I’m pancake but I will change that to blahblahblah.
JS: You guys are called My God, The Heat. Where does that come from?
Ben: Like growing up in the church you know? Worshiping god. (Ben is wearing an upside down cross around his neck)
Stu: Yeah, sometimes it gets really hot and you’re like ‘oh my god the heat is just-’. I didn’t wanna have a ‘the’ name like, you know, The Pantyliners. I could be in the Pantyliners. I do have a lot of people like ‘What’s the name of your band? My god it’s hot? Oh lord its hot?’
Ben: Mom the other day was like ‘oh my god’.
Stu: Yeah, ‘are you oh my god?’ Yeah, nobody ever remembers it.
JS: How you describe your music to somebody who’s never heard it?
Ben: Boring!
Stu: (laughs) Honestly it’s rock ‘n roll. It really is. I would say if you took Buddy Holly gave them a bunch of methamphetamines and crossed them with Buzz Cockson. Tom Waits made a bunch of stupid, clashy, fun rock ‘n roll. I don’t know. It is what it is. It’s just rock ‘n roll. It’s two bisexual white guys and two straight white guys playing rock ‘n roll.
JS: What are some of your favorite bands? What are your influences?
Stu: If you were to have rode with us the five and a half hours here, fuck, where would you start?
Ben: Jay Reatard, Sabbath, clearly.
Stu: Hives, Tom Waits, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, what else? Mary lambert, Ray Charles anything from Muscle Shoals, Chuck Berry, Buzzcocks.
Ben: Dead Kennedys
Stu: Old country, Tennessee Earl Ford.
Jake: We wrote some classical on the way down.
Stu: Yeah, a ton of classical. Beethoven. I always wanted to be in a band called either Gaythoven or Blowzart. Like if you took Mozart and mixed it with cocaine I thought it’d be a really funny thing. Like I’ll wear powdered wigs and get powdered all over the nose and be like ‘Blowzart and the Powdered Wigs.’
At this point, the band’s bassist joined us. His name is Tony.
JS: You wanna tell us something about your writing process?
Ben: I get real high then I sit in my basement and then I chug all this shit out and then I have to convince these guys to play them. I’m like “hey come on let’s do this one”.
Tony: We’re so unprepared without all the lyrics and stuff. We don’t know the songs we’re writing these days.
JS: So [Ben is] the primary lyricist?
Stu: It’s me and Ben. Here’s the weird thing. Ben’s my son. But I didn’t know that until he was eighteen. I guess about fifteen but I didn’t really meet him until he was about eighteen. So he was eighteen and I was, I dunno, very old.
Tony: He was an Absentee father he just told everyone that he was waiting for him to be cool enough
(laughs)
Stu: You got to pay your dues son!
Ben: Aaaand I’ll be your dad… now!
Stu: Okay his songs are pretty good, NOW I’m your dad. That’s what we were gonna call our first EP: Out of the Way Dad.
JS: Alright so the music I was listening to was from a few years ago but it seemed like a very fun, danceable kind of punk rock. You’re not a band that’s taking yourselves super seriously up there.
Stu: No we’re super serious. Like SUPER serious. Everything is about, you know, crime.
Ben: We make The Smiths and Nick Cave seem like fuckin Justin Bieber.
JS: You guys mentioned a new direction that you’re taking the band.
Ben: One Direction
Stu: It’s a bisexual band; both directions.
JS: So tell us something about what kind of direction you’re turning to.
Stu: If you took the kinks and kind of mixed it with, I dunno, it’s just rock ‘n roll. It’s not terribly thought out.
Tony: If you could coax the next record into a van with some candy. It’s sort of like that.
Stu: Your best bet is to sit here for the whole fucking set and honestly just judge for yourself.
JS: Do you guys have song that’s the most fun to play for people? A song that the crowd really seems to enjoy?
Stu: They hate everything. Honestly it’s hard to say that because the whole set is so new that nobody really cares. There’s some things that get better responses than others and there’s some things that don’t and to be honest we really don’t care, because the songs are really for us. It’s a fucking blast!
JS: That’s the important thing. Your music is for you first.
Stu: Of course! If you’re in music for any other thing that the moment of creation, if you have some ulterior motive, then you’re missing the point.
Ben: I’m just trying to get laid.
Tony: He’s always trying to get laid. Listen if we leave you hanging for the interview it’s not because we’re fuckin sick of you.
JS: That is totally understandable.
Stu: We go to the double door in Chicago and it’s like our third time playing there, first time with Ben. And what’s he do? He’s like ‘hey I met this waitress I’m staying here’. He fuckin goes home and fuckin puts it in her ass and I gotta drive to fucking goddamn Harvard and pick him up the next goddam day.
Jake: Yeah so really, whose ass did he put it in?
(laughs)
Stu: I did have it coming right? After fifteen years of not paying child support.
Tony: Hey, he’s cool now.
JS: How much touring have you guys done so far?
Stu: No a whole lot. We do a couple of two-or-three days. And a couple of outs. Next weekend we do like a three-day. Nobody wants to do a tour until we have a record. The whole thing is just to get the band to play together and just to do a bunch of shows and then make a record and then wherever the record takes you, then you worry about it.
JS: You mentioned a place in Rockford that you guys really like to play, your favorite venue.
Stu: Mary’s place!
JS: Why is that your favorite place to play?
Stu: Where to start?
Jake: The people that are there are always phenomenal. There’s a neat little music scene in Rockford.
Stu: It’s the oldest bar in Rockford.
Jake: Also true.
Stu: There’s only three reasons to go to Mary’s place. Either to go see live music, to get totally fucking drunk for ten dollars, or to go see live music and get totally drunk both at the same time.
Tony: A little bonus for us: five block away from our house. What’s also great about that place? You play one show there and for the history of the rest of fucking music you never pay for another drink. You’re like royalty.
Ben: You can’t even go in there on a weekday and pay for a drink. It’s almost impossible to buy a drink there.
Stu: Becky and Jay, the owners of the club, just a great group of people. There’s no bouncers. There are two door guys that collect covers when bands are playing. But even then even then they only charge five to seven dollars no more. Mostly its five dollars. There are no fights except for a sound guys who got five of his teeth knocked out by a fellow musician who is now OSTRACIZED FROM SAID COMMUNITY!
Tony: But you know, in the words of Doyle in Sling Blade, that’s how friends do one another.
(laughs)
JS: Do you have a least favorite place?
Stu: No
Ben: Kryptonite bar
Stu: I mean, yeah.
Ben: Put that in there, print that. Kryptonite Bar.
Stu: I mean obviously by process of elimination we have a favorite and a non-favorite.
Jake: Super bowl Sunday or January first, at noon at a sports bar.
Stu: At buffalo wild wings!
Jake: Yeah that’d be a shit gig wouldn’t it?
Stu: Honestly though anybody that lets you play at all you gotta honor the club that you play. The only reason we did this show in Fort Wayne, and we were going to cancel, is that it’s a great club.
Tony: Tell them about Doppler Effect.
Jake: Doppler Effect would be the greatest band because they play on the back of a semi. So you can only hear them as they drive by.
Tony: If the band ever got any traction you know some of their original fans would be like ‘they just got away from their roots they were so much cooler when they drove slower but then they got that new driver’.
Stu: Their fans would be like ‘I remember the first time they drove by but now they take the interstate. They sold out’.
JS: Any last comments? Shout outs?
Stu: Oh you guys still do shout outs?
Jake: Shout outs to the people who are shouting out. Tell them to keep it down.
Stu: You mean the shout outs to the people who are keeping it real on the streets? In Rockford, this is one of my favorite things. I pulled up next to these straight Gs. It’s Rockford. It’s a black guy and a white guy and the white guy’s got a straight little hat and he’s got all the chains on him and I was at the light right there. They were both kind of mean-muggin you because everybody in Rockford does the prison stare you know? And they’re looking at me just on the corner and I go ‘you fellas keeping it real on the streets?’ And the black guy just fucking died laughing and the white guy goes ‘the hell that supposed to mean?’ The light turned green and I was out of there.
Tony: Okay, here’s my whitest guy in America story. I had a car that had the stock stereo but it would just randomly change the stations. And it would totally suck, like I would be driving and it would all of a sudden go from the AM to FM or whatever. I’m sitting there listening to sports radio with both windows down. Talk radio isn’t nearly as loud as fuckin music, so it’s cranked. And I pull up. We live basically in the ghetto of Rockford. I pull right up to the stop sign. There’s this whole fuckin corner of Gs just sittin there hanging out. I go to give them the look like, ‘what’s up you guys?’ and at the same time as I give them the look, the sports radio just switches over to Toto’s ‘I Test the Rain in Africa’. By the way the worst thing about it was you couldn’t change it right away there was a five second delay before it would react. So as much as I frantically went to change it, as soon as it was two seconds in they were looking at me. Instead of looking frantic I just kind of went ‘yeah that’s right. I’m down brother, you know’.
JS: You can pretend but they know what you were listening to!
Tony: Yeah!
Stu: The neighborhood we live in we make like sixty calls a month non-emergency. Like we call the cops all the time. There’s shootings, drug deals and shit.
Tony: We call the cops just to let them know we know the number.
Stu: I had this guy sitting on my stoop one day. I open the door and I’m like ‘hey man, you just gonna sit there and sell fucking crack on my stoop all day?’ And the guy gets up and looks at me and he goes ‘the fuck you gonna do about it no-lips?’ I literally went like this: ‘no lips isn’t bad but I’m going in to call the cops’. Like if he had been my friend I would have been like ‘oh high five that’s a really good one’. So I got that going for me. I got no lips.
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You can find everything related to My God, the Heat at their website: here
For details about The Brass Rail, check out their website: here
Sleep in Strange Places 