Black Rebel Motorcycle Club bassist and sometime vocalist Robert Turner has recurring nightmares about the end of the world. “Yeah, and it’s all my fault,” Robert explains. “I haven’t had it in a long time, but it used to always reoccur, and it’s a combination of like voices and sounds. And it’s like chaos and then I wake up completely panicked, and I start running around, just trying to get away, and then I’m still in it, but I’m awake, and I know I’m awake. I can’t really get out of the thought that it’s actually happening, and it’s like it comes down after five or six minutes. And then I keep repeating that I’m awake.” Wow, pretty intense. “Yeah, it’s a whole guilt thing of like past things probably. Just too much pressure on myself. Family guilt.” Main vocalist and guitarist Peter Hayes also has some fucked-up recurring dreams. “There is one I guess that comes up a lot. All my teeth are falling out,” Peter says. “They all fall out of my head, blood and the whole thing.” “But they are [falling out],” Robert retorts. “Yeah, ha, ha, that’s the thing, they are coming out,” Peter admits.

That’s not the only strange dream Peter has had recently. “I had one where I was standing on a pier and I dove into the water and I kept going down, down. And it was really deep and then I hit the bottom, and I pushed off and, the next thing I knew, I was up in the air going the highest height you could ever get. I mean, just up, up, up in the air, and then falling. I fell, and then that feeling of falling out of control, stomach’s in your throat. And then I went back down to the ocean. It was like I could feel that sensation. It was bizarre; it was really bizarre. I went from the deepest ocean to the sky, you know, reached both levels.”

What this tells you about Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, we’re not sure. It would be easy to make some bullshit parallel between their dreams and their music, about how both sometimes have an air of paranoia, but BRMC aren’t about bullshit, they’re about raw rock ‘n’ roll. More than any other band in recent memory, they ooze the stuff of rock ‘n’ roll, both in their feedback heavy sonics and their ‘couldn’t give a fuck’ attitude. But, while the boys seem too-cool-for-school on stage and in videos, when you meet them in person they just come off as regular guys. When I ask them what they’d do if they weren’t in a band, Peter humbly responds, “I do cook. I wouldn’t mind cooking. I could be a chef.” To which Robert jokingly adds, “I’m pretty hungry right now.” Peter’s had plenty of day jobs on the road to up and coming rock stardom anyway, “I was washing dishes and basically just helping the cook and stuff like that. Mechanic, fast food, uh, carpentry, gas station stuff.”

We first sat down with Peter and Robert in the lounge of Hollywood’s Club Vinyl when they opened for The Charlatans there last July. The Charlatans were sound checking at the time, and the organ sounds of “Weirdo” could be heard drifting down the hall. The other third of BRMC, British ex-pat drummer Nick Jago, was stuck in traffic. We then had a chance to catch up with Peter some eight months later when we had a phone conversation with him as they were on tour with Spiritualized in April. Peter sometimes seems like he’s out of it all the time, as if he’s taken one too many somethings, but he’s also one of the nicest guys in the world. Robert is a little more focused and together than Peter, but equally down to earth. They have a reputation for being difficult in interviews, but that’s more to do with shyness than anything else. Sometimes, they have to struggle to get their answers out; this is especially true for Peter, but they are still willing interview subjects. Of course, we also ask some challenging, out of left field questions, mixed in with the standard influences and band name fare. “If you could be one fictional character, who would you be and why?” we ask them, to which Robert replies, “finally someone throws out a difficult question and it stumps us.” After much silence and vaguely uncomfortable laughter, Peter says, “no idea, just tryin’ to get through sound check man.” Eventually Robert half-heartedly answers, “One of the fictional characters that plays great shows and does a good sound check.” Peter’s eventual response is more amusing: “To be the guy who can answer that.”

Fine, down to the nitty gritty of the band. The BRMC story begins in San Francisco, which is where Peter and Robert went to high school together. Robert’s dad, Michael Been, was a musician, the frontman for ‘80s New Wavers The Call, but that didn’t exactly inspire Robert to be a musician at first. Robert’s idea of rebelling was to turn away from music, instead of embracing it, at first. “I didn’t want to be a musician,” Robert admits, “just from knowing what it was like (for my dad). It was kind of not a really glamorous side of it, it’s more the struggling side. So, I didn’t know how to play a thing; so, I wasn’t thinking about it. Then, later on, I just picked up a guitar and it came natural. So, at that point, I started getting into it, but I was pretty deterred actually in the beginning.”

Peter admits that Robert’s dad was actually a huge influence on him. “In a way, yeah.” Peter says. “See, he’s the first person that actually made it okay to be into music. My folks wouldn’t have, you know. The first person I met, the first guy who actually said, ‘you know, you can actually do this, and it’s alright.’ And that was about the main influence on me.” Robert’s dad is still very supportive of the band, acting almost like a mentor. When the band members are fighting with each other, Robert says his dad “patches things up, lets us remember what’s important again.”

After hooking up with Nick, the trio moved down to L.A. and cut a demo. The band was originally named The Elements, but eventually renamed themselves after a motorcycle gang in the Marlon Brando movie The Wild One. The gang in the movie all had BRMC patches on their jackets. It was only later that the band discovered a nice bit of trivia about their name in relation to that film. “The Beetles were the rivaling gang, and that’s where the Beatles got their name,” Robert tells me.

Of course, the name has lead to some confusion when they tour. “Once in awhile we get the Hells Angels showin’ up. They show up mad, and, actually, this one guy in Arizona showed up and thought we were some motorcycle gang that was movin’ in on their turf,” Peter explains. The guy ended up enjoying the show and even wanting a t-shirt at the end; so, they just gave him one. What else do you do when a Hells Angel asks for something? This leads to a whole tangent in the interview about the Hells Angels. We point out that we always think about how they fucked up the free San Francisco Rolling Stones concert, where they were supposed to be security, but ended up beating up all the hippies, as seen in the great documentary, Gimmie Shelter. “It’s hard though, that’s one picture,” Robert says. Then we remember that in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure they were really nice to Pee Wee, when they gave him a motorcycle, even after he knocked down all their bikes. Robert laughs and says, “blend the two ideas and then you got something.” “Makes it all better, doesn’t it,” Peter also laughs.

After all the usual struggling artist stuff, the band eventually got signed to Virgin and have spent the last year in the eye of a storm of hype, hype that’s for once deserved. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club might just be our new favorite band, and they’re American. This is a surprise, for even though we’ve liked many an American indie band in the last decade, the majority of Under the Radar’s staff members are often more drawn to bands of the Anglo variety. Robert admits that it’s a surprise to him too, and still continues to surprise him that American bands might be leading the way right now. “It feels like some American bands are just getting better; you know, it’s kind of a shock, it’s been fifty years. That’s the most striking thing to me most recently, like a lot of good stuff is either here or coming out in the next few months,” Robert says. He admits that he hasn’t been too happy with American bands in the past. “Not in the way of leading the way musically, I don’t think American bands have done that, you know, in quite awhile,” he says.

There are other young L.A. and San Francisco-based bands that BRMC particularly align themselves with and take on tour with them when they can, like The Warlocks, Vue and Stratford 4. “They’re friends, we like the music, we like them as people,” Peter says. “The more the better in this whole thing, along with The White Stripes and uh, The Strokes. Strength in numbers. You get all these band’s names out there, and playing, and albums, and the next thing you know, hopefully we start to edge our way into people’s heads.”

Of course, with all this talk of how great current American bands are, we mustn’t forget that BRMC’s main influences are British -- chiefly The Jesus and Mary Chain. If BRMC weren’t so fuckin’ good, it would be easy to write them off as The Jesus and Mary Chain Mark 2. Everything from the attitude to the hair to the sound hearkens back to the JAMC. Of course, there are other influences too: early Ride and Verve, and My Bloody Valentine, but it’s The Mary Chain that does immediately come to mind. “It’s there, yeah it’s in there, I guess,” Robert admits about the Mary Chain influence, “I don’t think about it much, and we don’t really call on it in any way, like ‘hey, let’s try,’ you know. I think we’ve got our own sound and that’s in there. It’s pretty cool to feel like we’re maybe bringing back some memory of that sound for people, but it’s definitely taking it further, you know, ‘cause in our own minds we don’t want to do anything that’s been done and just leave it at that. The idea is to take on an idea and go forward with it and make something even better than it was, you know. Everybody tries to do that.”

And don’t get us wrong, BRMC have done that, the influences are there, but the sound is their own. Some of their influences agree. The Charlatans’ Tim Burgess, The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, Oasis’ Gallagher Brothers, and The Mary Chain’s Jim Reid have all praised the band. “It’s a nice thing, you know, that’s about it. It’s nice, it’s nice of them to say and back at ‘em,” Peter says.

Noel Gallagher even tried to sign the band to his new record label after somehow hearing their demo, but the band was too close to signing a deal with Virgin to restart negotiations with another label. Gallagher wasn’t bitter though, and recently had BRMC open for Oasis at London’s Royal Albert Hall. All Peter has to say about it is, “It was an experience,” and he’s hard pressed to praise Oasis. When asked if he’s a fan, Peter replies, “A bit yeah, yeah a bit. I’ve seen their albums floating around everybody’s collections.” That performance, and their whole first tour of England was somewhat bittersweet, in more ways than one. Because of Nick’s visa, he wasn’t able to return home to England to tour with the band, for fear of not getting let back in the country. Still, the band found just about the best replacement they could’ve hoped for, former Verve drummer Pete Salisbury. “He heard about the situation through managers and stuff like that, and he offered. Then he flew out to America and worked with Nick. He tried to learn kind of the feel and all the parts,” Peter explains. Peter admits that it was pretty much an honor having Salisbury tour with them. “This guy’s been pretty used to playing pretty huge places the last couple of years of his career, or whatever he wants to call it,” Peter laughs. “Pretty big places, and the next thing he knows, he’s stuck in these two-hundred-seat clubs and I think he had a good time getting right back down into the muck of it, you know.”

Of course, it wasn’t easy for Nick to stay in California, while his band stormed his home land. “He was saying to his friends back there that he was going to come back as a band, but he is and, the next time we’re there, we’re gonna be with him,” Peter says. Nick still has the same visa problem, but the band is taking him with them anyway. “We’re just going to stay there if we have to,” Peter says. “We’ll just do the rest of the world and forget about America for awhile.” Peter doesn’t necessarily think that would be such a bad thing. As with The Strokes and The White Stripes, BRMC has made more of an impact on mainstream culture in the U.K. than in the States. Perhaps going away for awhile and being successful in other countries might make America realize what they’re missing, Peter reckons. “Right now we’re the hometown band and you tend to kind of overlook the hometown bands. So maybe America will catch on a bit.”

America will hopefully have plenty of time to get its act together and fully embrace the band, for BRMC seem to be in it for a long run. The band are genuine rock ‘n’ rollers in the best sense of the word, and, despite being on a major label, they remain fiercely independent. The band self-produced last year’s self-titled debut album and did an astonishing job, better than anyone else could’ve. They also have complete creative control, and their contract with Virgin has allowed the band to release four, two-disc 7 inches. Nick’s paintings adorn the covers of each. The band also shot their latest video, for “Spread Your Love,” at an illegal house party in Hollywood. “It’s one of those things where it was put to us, you can’t do that, it’s not legal to even do that, blah, blah, blah, and we just went and did it and made a video out of it.” I’m sorry, but you can’t imagine The Strokes doing that sort of thing, it seems like stylists would have to be involved. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club have asked the question with their calling card song, “Whatever Happened to My Rock ‘N’ Roll (Punk Song),” and seem to also have the answer.

Despite all the hype, and potential backlash, and regardless of the fact that Peter isn’t always lucid in conversation; he and the rest of the band seem to have a good attitude to it all when asked if he’s worried about the backlash that often follows hype. “We half expect it, you know. Can’t really worry about it when it’s expected. The only thing we can do is keep our heads screwed on and not fall into either one of them. Not believe the hype and don’t believe the, uh, tongue lashings. Any and all of it can be true, you know.”

And, in spite of all the hype and relentless touring, the band has found time to focus on their second album. “We have it done. We have all the songs there, we just need to go record them,” Peter reveals. “We started it already because we figured this was gonna happen. And we started it when we doing the first album. We’re on our way with that.” The band plans to stop touring in September and want to have the album finished by November, in time for release next year. Peter says the sound of the next album will be pretty much the same, “Similar yeah, I mean, we’re not going to do anything drastic.” You’re not going to suddenly do Polka music or anything, we joke. To which Peter replies, “No, it sparks an idea though (laughs), I don’t think so.” Damn, we were looking forward to that. “That’s the Christmas Polka album,” Peter says. That’s about ten years down the line, we tell him. “Yeah, I’d hope so. Something to look forward to,” Peter jokes from the other end of the phone at the conclusion of our follow up interview with him in April.

Back in July, the interview ends on a more serious note, when Robert admits that he’s a little worried about getting jaded by the whole music business thing and by aging. “Hopefully there’ll still be a fire and a need to go on and a need to keep things moving, to makin’ music, you know. The older you get, with everyday it gets a little less, a little less than it was the day before. It’s kinda everyone I speak to is musicians and what not, it’s like, constantly, it’s never gonna be as great as the first show you ever saw. You know, it’s like that’s the top and it gets more jaded and what not. Then again, there’s always resurrections here and there, and you get really into something again and it’s a whole new day. I think it’s just about keeping that, keeping a love for it as you can. That’s all you need, because that’s where everything else comes from, your drive and everything.”


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