Sister Hazel frontman Ken Block and Brett Newski discuss best tour pranks, maintaining lifelong relationships, The Rock Boat, overcoming trauma, and ditching ego.
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EXCERPT:
Brett: Do you have any advice on how to keep a band together for 25, 30 years? Because you guys are an anomaly in how tight you’ve stayed, and how you’re so close. I would love to be able to do that.
Ken: Like all the bands we know, we spent the first three and a half or four years in a van trailer, doing 150 to 250 shows a year. If you sold a T-shirt, you’d get a room, otherwise you sleep in the van. We actually even did 300 shows for two years in a row, which was...I would never, ever recommend anyone do that.
We went from that, to getting on “the ride” and having a couple of big songs, and a big record. Yeah, there were some growing pains there, like, “who stands where in the picture,” all that stupid stuff. Or the set list, and “I don’t like that song there, or there.” Andrew (Copeland) and I, especially, were the most opinionated. There were a couple of years where...well the only person who ever got punched was our bass player, he got between us one time, he caught a couple of blows.
Brett: What a great system, having him take one for the team.
Ken: *laughs* Well I will say, when I got sober, everyone in the band knew...you know you have a problem when you get intervened by a rock band and others. So chemicals and alcohol had to leave my life, and no one was innocent in that. We didn’t miss many parties. I was at a different level with things, but we were a colorful bunch of guys.
I think everyone kind of regrouped then, and things started to get better all the way around. You didn’t have those confusing conversations where you’re not making sense, and then you’er holding a grudge the next day.
So what we learned was this, let’s get to the “how do you do it.” First and foremost, you have to check your ego at the door. Don’t take it personal, we’re going to serve the song, serve the set. If someone brings in a song, this was hard for me at first because I wrote pretty much all of the first few records, and I’d come in with a song, holding it really tight saying, “you need to play THIS groove, and this has to sound like that” until finally the guys were like, look, we didn’t get in a band to be told exactly what parts to play.
Brett: Yeah.
Ken: As I gained trust, and realized that they had some good ideas, I’d start bringing in songs that were more of a skeleton, and when everyone got their fingerprints on a song, and felt ownership of it, it had everybody promoting it, going, “hey that part there, that was my idea.”
Brett: That’s great, that’s great advice.
Ken: And money, we started splitting everything equally. That was a big thing. Checking your ego. Letting everyone get your say in a song. And if a song comes in by any of us, at the end of the day, defer to the song writer. They brought it in, so we do our best to serve that vision.
So we don’t fight about any of that stuff anymore. We literally rotate setlists every single night, so everybody gets their setlist in. That’s really helped a lot. And I think our sense of humor. We like to laugh a lot. We rag each other endlessly, like guys do. There are belly laughs every day on Sister Hazel tours.
Brett: Oh man, that’s the best feeling, when you totally lose control, adn tears are pouring out of your eyes. You must be high as balls every day you’re on tour, I an only get that a handful of times a month if I’m really lucky.
Ken: If we could bottle that, man, we’d have it all.
