[/caption]Check out our Exclusive Interview with Peratus!
This is the 58th post in our Musician of the Day series.
Peratus is a band in Washington that is really making waves with a style all their own. They have dubbed their music as Punk n Roll which features a seamless combination of punk rock and rock and roll. They have a wide variety of dedicated fans that is continually growing both in size and diversity.
Click here to listen to Wrought by Peratus
[audio http://fansiter.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/wrought.mp3]
Stephanie: Why don't you guys start by introducing yourselves?
Scott: I’ll start with me. I’m Scott.
Oliver: Hi I’m Oliver, I play bass and I also hump the bass onstage.
Sev: I’m Sev, I play guitar and sing. We’re missing Bud, Buddy Bones is not here. He is the one that had the car breakdown. But we do have our new drummer.
Andrew: I’m Andrew I’m the new drummer for Peratus. Yeah I’ve got my plate full but it’s kickass and I love it.
Sev: That’s all of us that are here right now.
Scott: And Sasquatch, he’s really tall. He’s our roadie.
Sasquatch: I kinda help.
Stephanie: You kinda help? I’d hope you’d do a little bit more.
Sasquatch: I help.
Scott: He carries stuff.
Sev: He’s big.
Scott: He keeps the ladies from attacking us. He’s not very busy lately though.
Oliver: I gave him the official title of panty catcher.
Stephanie:Okay the first is the basic question, the one I ask every band and it’s how did you guys get started?
Sev: This band really started in California. It was me and just a few buddies down there that were jamming and writing some songs and we knew that everybody was moving at the end of summer. We just did a couple shows, called ourselves Peratus and then I moved back up to Washington. It was right away after that that me and Buddy Bones, the other guitar player, started playing music a lot. Originally it was a couple other members it took us a couple years of sorting people out but me and Bud about three and a half, four years ago we met up with Scott and Olie and it was Adam at the time on drums and we’ve just been playing steady ever since. Adam recently left the band and Andrew stepped in and he’s got about two weeks practice and four shows on his plate already. So pretty much that’s where it came from. It’s just been slowly evolving into whatever we are now.
Stephanie: It’s a great way to refine your music before you get out there and then you are sorta stuck.
Sev: Exactly. We were out there a few times and every time the band kinda changed, as far as personnel or whatever that’s where it really evolved. The acquisition of new members or people who weren’t happy with it leaving and wanting to do something else. It was made the band take each new step forward. It’s brought us some limited success which is really nice and we’re getting some cool internet reviews from YouTube and stuff. We’ve got a video that our buddy made for us with WoW characters animated to it. So we’re really liking that one.
Stephanie: Yeah, I actually love that video. I won’t admit to how many times I’ve seen it.
Sev: Yeah
Scott: Yeah most people like it, I like to think that they like it.
Andrew: Probably not as many times as I’ve seen it. Hey I played DnD too man.
Sev: Shut up. That was Andrew, I want to make that very clear.
Andrew: Yeah with the exception of Ollie I think we all played Dungeons and Dragons.
Sev: Yeah I did. I was bad I played Star Wars, I played BattleTech, ShadowRunner, DnD…
Andrew: Did you ever play the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles roleplaying game?
Sev: No
Andrew: I did!
Sev: I’ve got the comic book though.
Scott: Sorry Stephanie, I figured out what girls were before they did.
Andrew: Girls were the things you rescue in my DnD game right?
Sev: Moving along…
Stephanie:Yeah you guys were what I called Quixotes in high school. All the roleplaying people were like Don Quixote because they saw things that weren’t there.
Sev: Let’s make this very clear, in my high school I didn’t play role playing games. I was into football at that point. It took me getting past my fear of being a nerd, cause I’m a super nerd now, ask all of them. I’ve got all this crap tattooed all over me. I had to become secure in my nerdality because I could come out of the closet and let everyone know. But in high school it was off by then I was like no way.
Andrew: This is the real revenge of the nerds right here.
Sev: Yeah I’m in charge now. I’m a big tattooed nerd in charge.
Oliver: What he forgot to mention is that he is dressing up as Princess Leia again.
Sev: Oh you shut the hell up.
Andrew: We call Sev the HNIC the Head Nerd in Charge.
Sev: I will accept that.
Stephanie: So you’re big nerds, but there isn’t anything very nerdy about your name. So tell me a bit about where that came from.
Sev: Actually I was in the Coast Guard and everybody has heard the Marines call out “Semper Fie/Semper Fidelis” means always faithful. For the Coast Guard it is Semper Paratus which means always prepared. I changed the spelling a bit but I thought the name was cool for a rock/punk band. Prepared, ready to go, so that’s where it came from.
Scott: And now we have to spell it and pronounce it for every single person we talk to.
Sev: Cause nobody understands until they’ve heard it, how it’s said.
[caption id="attachment_1920" align="alignnone" width="510" caption="Sev"]
[/caption]Stephanie: So you call your music Punk n’ Roll. Why don’t you explain to me a bit about where that came from and what it means to you.
Scott: Our music is not a current genre that I would say is mainstream or know. We’re kind of a combination of Punk rock and rock and roll. It’s somewhere in the middle and I guess Punk n’ Roll just sounds cool.
Sev: It was actually our manager, Jerry who thought it up. We’ve been classified as just extremely alternative because there is a lot of different influences you can probably pick out. There’s not too many of the sounds that sound a lot alike.
Stephanie: Your first two albums were great. I personally love them. Do you have anything new on the way?
Sev: We’ve got a new album’s worth of music but we’re going to try to do a little EP with a few songs by the beginning of next year, summer time at the latest and if we end up having extra time or extra cash flow then maybe we’ll get another album out but at least we’re shooting for another EP. We might have a single before that but that’s our goal right now.
Oliver: The economy is not our friend so hopefully we can put out somewhere between 3 to 5 songs, very strong.
Stephanie: Unfortunately that’s been the problem for a lot of bands.
Sev: Yeah but that’s the way it goes you either deal with or go home and play in your garage and cry to your Mommy.
Stephanie: So why don’t you tell me a little bit about how you write your songs and how you come up with them.
Sev: I’m trying to get somebody else to talk but I have a big mouth. The main way I personally do it with this group of guys is we jam out rifts or I get a couple chords or something in my head that I start writing to. We’ll either sit there together and start creating different parts and put the songs together and then start writing lyrics to it. I kinda do it backwards from a lot of lyricists, I write the lyrics last. We write the music first and then we decide what we’re trying to talk about. So I’ll either write a song and bring it to the guys and they will all write their own parts to it or we’ll write a bunch of parts and slam them all together at the end. Then I’ll take it off on a tape recorder or something and I’ll write some lyrics to it.
Andrew: We kick it 1988 tape recorder style.
Stephanie: Alright not that we need to but I like to have a few fun questions. So something that works great with punk rock bands and rock bands is Who’s got the Coolest Tattoo?
Sev: I feel out of place in this band some days of the week because I am covered in tattoos. I got them on my face, on my hands…I got like 23 tattoos on my hands, my sleeves, my back, my legs so I’m covered in tattoos. I’m sure if everybody else in the band had a bunch of tattoos then there would be a little bit of argument. But I work at a tattoo shop and I tattooed Bud like a couple months ago but I haven’t tattooed anybody else. Oh Andrew.
Andrew: You put a kanji on the front and you got my koi on my back. He does incredible work.
Sev: Oh shush. The point is I have the most.
Andrew: He’s too humble. He’s definitely got the coolest but the tattoos he put on me were pretty cool. I can’t hold a candle.
Sev: Yours just aren’t done yet.
Andrew: He’s got the wings on the back. One is like a skin dragon the other one is like a metal dragon. You know how most people get the wings on their back of the demon or the angel wing and he’s got like two different kinds of dragons on his. It’s pretty bad ass.
Sev: That’s just one of them it would take hours of talking to go through all of them. I’ll take some close-ups for the MySpace.
Scott: Actually it’s funny because when friends of mine or people I work with first see a picture of the band and they see Sev’s tattoos. They’re always like oh you Metal band and then it’s Wow you guys don’t sound anything like your pictures look.
Sev: I’ve been stereotyped since the moment I got a tattoo.
Scott: You’re pretty sensitive for a hardcore tattoo guy.
Sev: Peratus was like my first dreamchild and I wanted it to just rock. I didn’t want it to be fun I didn’t want it to be angry. Peratus has been mostly a high energy fun thing to watch, to go enjoy to dance around and sing along and our hardcore fans are always out there, always singing, like playing games with Scott while we’re playing music. So Peratus has always been about that I guess I do get stereotyped as metal a lot and I do have a metal band also with Bud and Andrew actually. But this was the first and this was the one that got my juices flowing.
Scott: Ollie and I are untattooed…do you have a tattoo Ollie?
Oliver: I have zero tattoos.
Sev: I’ve been begging them for years now to come get tattooed.
Scott: I’m gonna get a tattoo of a lot of hair on my back.
Sev: We’ll give you big silverback gorilla hair.
Oliver: I’m trying to keep my individuality by not watching too much UFC and not having a tattoo.
Sev: He just wants to be a loner in the band. I’m trying to conform them all to my regime and get tattooed but they resist. I use the force, I use it daily but…
Scott: Stephanie, the question is do you have any tattoos?
Stephanie:I have two, I actually just got one on my wrist. I’ve been told I’ll never get a job with it now.
Scott: Well it is a bold move to get one on your wrist.
Andrew: Yeah, what’s it of?
Stephanie:It’s a quill with a rose with the words “I must”
Sev: Come to Seattle and I’ll give you a tattoo.
Stephanie:See, I’ve got two and I’m already in trouble.
Scott: You never did tell us where the other one was it.
Stephanie: It’s on my lower back, it’s a tramp tat.
Andrew: I love those and I will go on a mission to change the name of those tattoos. They are beautiful.
Stephanie: Now I really like Wrought where did the idea for that come from?
Sev: Wrought was a mixture of a bunch of things. I just had gotten dumped by a girl again or something so that was part of it. The only thing I was reacting very emotionally and angry to it so that was… it had a lot of negative feelings in it, where my lyrics and stuff came from. By the end, it kind of evolves throughout the song and by the last verse of the song, it was more about the music actually making me happy about all those angry things I was feeling. The last verse actually goes “I see a monster on my wing” that was all about being on stage and looking over and seeing Bud you know on my wing there, rocking out with me and us having a blast, even though my life was Hell at the time.
[caption id="attachment_1919" align="alignnone" width="480" caption="Bud"]
[/caption]Stephanie: What are some of your favorite crazy moments together as a group?
Sev: Remember the Wildcat. You really want to hear this story?
Andrew: It’s about the old drummer so I’m excluded.
Oliver: Don’t worry Andrew there will be more.
Andrew: No I’m proud to be excluded from this one.
Sev: For Remember the Wildcat, we were on tour down in California a couple years ago. We just went on a California tour and we were on a day off in Santa Barbara just crashing at my Mom’s house. We decided to go out to the club because we had been partying and working and just killing time on the beach until our next show. And so we decided to the club and it was a Sunday night and it was like 80s night.
Oliver: Not to correct you but when we walked in the door the bouncer stopped us and he goes “You know it’s alternative night right?” and we thought he meant music but apparently he meant something different.
Sev: No, he meant something else. But Adam our old drummer was in Hog’s heaven apparently because about an hour after we’d been there, we’d all been drinking a bit and Bud comes up to me from the back and I’d been talking to some girl or something and he goes “yeah, they’re about to kick Adam out.” So we go to see and Adam had been dancing on the floor with some guys and some girls all in a big group and he had in the fever of the moment ripped his shirt off. He like Hulk Hoganed his shirt right off his chest and he was a skinny guy and he was just really wasted.
Oliver: He also had no shoes on.
Sev: Yeah he took his shoes off so they tried to kick him out, but he pulled his shirt back on and put his does back on and for like twenty more minutes they let him stay because he had a big ripped shirt but it was on and he was just dancing.
Oliver: No he was rubbing up against this guy.
Sev: No he was freak dancing with this dude.
Oliver: It was like Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey man.
Scott: Except for two Patrick Swayze.
Oliver: No one of them might have been Patrick Swayze the other one was more like Gilbert Gottfried.
Sev: So anyway he lasts about another 20 minutes and then Bud comes and finds me in the back and goes “dude they kicked out Adam.” I’m like ughhh so we go out to the front of the club because we’re out in California and we can just leave him out on the streets because he doesn’t know where he’s at and my mom’s house is like ten blocks away or something like that. You gotta understand the level of wasted that Adam is at this point. He’s trying to kiss us, like he tried to kiss me on the mouth when I tried to put him in a cab, and I almost punched him. So anyway I sent him home to my mom’s house and gave the cab like twenty extra bucks to make sure he got there, and think this is the end of the story but it’s not.
We all go back to the bar because we’re not going to leave because he got kicked out. So we close out the night there at the Wildcat in Santa Barbara and we end up going back to the house. So now, we’re all in our 30s we’re sneaking back into my mom’s house and we get back and I guess Adam in his drunken stupor did the right thing technically and locked the door, the back door that we were supposed to come in, when he got there earlier. So we couldn’t get in, so like 32 years old banging on my mom’s window going “Mom, please let me in the door is locked.” So she gets up and she does it and we go into the living room and there’s Adam naked, splayed out, wang hanging stuck to his leg, and he’s just like laying on the floor… my poor mother I don’t know how much of that she saw. But we covered him up, stuck some cookies in his mouth and took some pictures and that was kinda the story of Remember the Wildcat. That was a traumatic night for some.
Stephanie: Well I think I’m always done with you guys, I just want to know. You’ve got a very diverse range of fans, what do you think about that? Is it more fun?
Sev: I’m going to let everybody answer that question, because it’s a good opinion one. I personally think that it’s more fun because no matter where we go somebody likes us. It doesn’t matter if they’re 15 or if they’re 50 you know what I mean. They don’t like everything, most people don’t like it all, which I can admit because some stuff is heavier, some stuff is not their genre, but most age groups like most of it. That’s a pretty good average, if I can appeal to most of the people I’m happy with that. I don’t expect the whole world to like everything anybody writes, and that’s just realistic, so I personally think it’s great that we have a wide range of people that are interested, and if we’re doing this is 20 years maybe people will still be coming to hear Peratus.
Oliver: Music is a pretty wide open thing so I’d rather see a wide array of people, ages and colors at a show, as compared to us just getting 28 year old white guys who like hard rock music. So it would be great to see all ages, all colors because that’s what music is too, it’s not just one way or one emotion, might as well have a group of people that are diverse at the show.
Andrew:Yeah I think the more people we reach with it increases our chances of world domination so...
Sev: What are we doing today Pinky?
Andrew: I’m Downtown Julie Brown type of thing, you know what I mean? It’s good to be able to communicate that to every type of person out there. That wide array of people that are going to enjoy it, it’s going to spread
Scott:Not to sound crazy but I love them all old, young, middle aged, male or female. Especially if they’re young… I have a serious point. As you get older you kinda realize what kind of music you like and why you like it but when you are younger it’s just more gut more instinctual. You like music but you don’t know why. You see young fans and they like it, they just don’t really know why, it’s kinda cool I just means you’re doing something right.
Stephanie: Well thanks guys, it was fun.
To learn more about official website.
Click here to listen to Wrought by Peratus
[audio http://fansiter.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/wrought.mp3]
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