Gasoline Heart is not a studio band. Checking out their touring calendar reveals long stretches away from their Orlando home base – a feat for any unsigned indie band. But see one of their shows and it’s no wonder they can sustain themselves: coming from a raucous punk rock background, the rockabilly-twinged Gasoline Heart charms the crowds before thrashing everyone into a frenzy.
Metromix talked with lead singer Louis DiFabrizio during a break at a show in Missouri about touring without a label, not making money and doing hot dog shots.
You guys have spent the last two months touring away from home. Is this normal?
Yeah, well, yes and no. We’re a touring band, you know. This is the first time we’ve been out on the road in four or five months, and it’s totally fantastic. Our first record that came out was on a record label and it had national distribution so we were doing a lot of touring. Our label went out of business like every record label does nowadays, because no one buys records, everyone steals them. So the record label went out of business and then we had a booking agent who was like “We can’t really do anything with you without the label support.” We thought we were going to be confined to home until we could find a new record label, but somehow we ended up on two really fantastic tours. We’ve been a touring punk rock band since we were 18 and I’m 30 years old now, so we’re used to the road, it’s not a new thing.
How did you manage to get two tours back to back?
Well there’s this band called Murder By Death and they were supposed to have this band called the Gaslight Anthem on their tour, and they’re booked by our old booking agency. And some weeks before the tour started Gaslight Anthem bailed and they had no one to open for the tour. And we played with them, I guess, a year and a half ago like right when our record came out. They were like “Let’s have other ‘gas’ bands.” And they’re like “Gasoline Heart!” and they called us up and I’m like “Yeah, we’re ready to go!” I used to be in a band called The Kick, and we toured with mewithoutYou like four years ago, and same shit happened with them. They were on tour and the opening band bailed out last second and the old bass player from The Kick was hanging out in Philadelphia with them and he said “You should call up Gasoline Heart” and they were like “Yeah, why didn’t we think about that?” You know, the stars were aligned for us to come travel.
I read that John Fortson (bass) has a baby back home, right?
Yeah, that was crazy, man. John had a baby two weeks before the first gig on the Murder By Death tour and it kind of threw the band into chaos. His baby was in breach, do you know what that is? It means it’s like upside down. He was really worried about the breach because it means you have to do a caesarian and any type of surgery is scary. But it worked out perfect because the baby came out three weeks early, so if the baby wasn’t in breach the baby would have been born with John on tour and our bass player would have missed the birth of his first child. In God’s master plan of things, like everything always works out.
You said a couple years ago that you wanted to make music that your influences (The Who, Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam) would want to listen to. Do you think you’ve accomplished that?
I don’t know because they’ve never listened to us. Pete Townshend would probably hate us, but that’s just because he’s like an insane musical genius. But I think maybe The Boss would like us, and I think maybe a couple of the Pearl Jam dudes would be into it.
You’ve also said that you’ve never made a dollar from playing music. How true is that?
It’s completely true. We all work shit jobs. The thing with our band is that we’ve played with a lot bigger bands that I’d rather not name. And they’re making a lot of money, but the music they make doesn’t sound anything like the music that they listen to. Nothing sounds more miserable than being fake or being phony and playing something you don’t like to make a buck. I maybe made, I don’t know, like $5-$10,000 total in my ten years.
Have you had any luck finding a new label?
Yeah, we’re actually getting ready to sign to a new record label called P is for Panda and it’s a subsidiary of the punk rock label Hopeless Records. So we’re gonna go make a new record in September, which I’m really stoked about. It’ll be cool.
What is this I hear about doing shots out of a hot dog?
I wasn’t a part of it because I was too busy selling T-shirts. There were a couple of the guys in the band that went to a bar down the street that really likes us. And they do a bunch of different shots. They did a hot dog shot where they poked a metal rod through the hot dog and you put your fingers on one end and fill it up with whiskey, then you drink the whiskey from the hot dog and then you eat the hot dog. I wasn’t a part of it but I’ll tell you that it’s really fucked up.
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