Magazine: Flogging Molly’s - Part 3 - Bob Schmidt
Flogging Molly - Bob Schmidt
Probably best known for his fast playing banjo intro to Flogging Molly’s classic Tobacco Island, Bob Schmidt grew up in LA and now lives in Boulder, Colorado when he’s not bouncing around Europe on a tour bus.
Tony: We’ve talked about Flogging Molly’s music being rooted or heavily influenced by traditional Irish music but where do Bob Schmidt’s musical influences come from?
Bob: A lot came from my parents, a lot came from growin’ up in L.A. in the late seventies and early eighties, there was just an enormous amount of music that came through then. I grew up on The Who and The Beatles and that stuff and a lot of classic rock & pop.
Then as a teenager I started to get into more like.. X and The Blasters and there was a lot of country and country folk and country rock coming around LA at the time and I got really involved in that scene through some friends.
The Kennedys came through and the Circle Jerks and Black Flag – I ended seeing a lot of those bands. But I listened to everything – I played music so I wanted to listen to music. I’d listen to the Circle Jerks on one night and The Thompson Twins on the next night – the whole gamut of it, if there was a band playing good music I was into it. It was all over kind of the map and that to me was a rebellious as joining anyone of the cliques.
A great thing about going to see someone like the Circle Jerks, Keith Morris was the great voice of don’t be a sheep, oh you’re wearing Mohican, oh you’re shaving your heads, oh you’re all wearing white beards.
Every time he saw people doing whatever made this clique work he would rip it apart and that was really inspiring for me as a kid because I felt the same way – you get your ass beat by the jocks, you get your ass beat by five guys with a mokawk, what’s the difference – it’s just some group of people oppressing another group of people. And at that point you are exactly like the people you claim to hate so much so why do it?
Tony: If I were to ask you to put your hand in your wallet and pull out your own hard earned dollars, who would you pay to see perform live?
Bob: Tom Waits. Yeah, I’d pay a hundred bucks to see him play any night of the week - absolutely. He’s a great story teller, he’s a brilliant, ingenious and creative musician and it just wells up out of him, he’s always been a huge influence on me. I’ve always loved Elvis Costello, The Who – if The Beatles were still around I’d go see them. ACDC – I’d go see them, there are still great bands out there old and new.
Tony: Do you miss the intimacy of Molly Malone’s, where the band started and which could never be described as a large venue?
Bob: You know… no! 
Not because I don’t like playing small shows but when we played Molly Malone’s the stage was about… this area we are in is about four or five times the size of the stage at Molly Malone’s. We were all crammed up there with the gear and everything else. I think the pub was legally rated for like 70 or 80 people and there would regularly be 150 people there on a Monday night.
It was great fun but I would never want to go back to do it. It was cramped, it was hot as balls, you were sweating your ass off, it was loud and the sound system sucked and I’m glad we came from that because it really puts your irons to the fire - but going back to it, I don’t know, would you want to go back to being thirteen again? It was a great time and you learned a lot but would you really want to do it again?
Tony: The Greek Theatre was a slight change then?
Bob: Yeah, that was great. There are a lot of things that we’ve done as you go through, that you can’t believe that you are actually doing. Because I went to the Greek Theatre and saw Earth, Wind and Fire and Stevie Ray Vaughan and Stevie Wonder - I’ve seen countless acts there over the years, I’ve seen X there and never in a million years as a kid watching a show at the Greek did I ever imagine in my wildest dreams that I’d be playing a show there.
We did a show in France with the Pretenders – I’ve seen the Pretenders probably six or seven times and never in a million years would have imagined that I’d be on the stage watching them as a peer. Even though I always wanted to be a musician growing up I, it never occurred to me that even if I became a musician that I’d be at the level that I perceived them to be at.
Having played with The Pogues now and all of these great bands over the years… Bad Religion, having played with Keith Morris and done shows with the bands that I grew up listening to, it’s been a phenomenal ride. And the Greek is one of those places, there’s a handful of places around, even the Wiltern, when we played the Wiltern for the first time, a place where I’d seen Tom Waits and The Waterboys and PJ Hardy and all these acts - it was mind blowing.
Tony: If you weren’t in Flogging Molly, would you still be a musician in a band somewhere?
Bob: I don’t know. I don’t know if I’d be in a band or if I’d just be working like… helping build a studio.. I’d be doing something in music most definitely, whether or not that would be in the live venue… theres a lot of things in music that interest me. I’m also kind of an engineer so that whole aspect of it appeals.
Tony: Do you get involved in the recording aspects of the band?
Bob: As much as I can, and still be in the band, it’s difficult. I’m always sitting next to our engineers and producers, watching what they do, talkin’ tech with them, more in the pre-production stages of things. It fascinates me; I love all the gear and studios.
Tony: Don’t you have a collection of scooters?
Bob: Yeah, I have a few. It’s a love of that kind of design and the art of that, I think they are one of
the most beautiful things you can look at. You get a VBB scooter and it’s just like.. all those curves – it’s a beautiful thing and the sound and the smell, and the whole thing…
Tony: I always thought that Vespas were a purely European thing rather than American.
Bob: Yeah, they were an import but in the scene that I was on and the people I was friends with they were always big in the States, but then I’ve never been a mass group culture kind of guy – I’m always been in the kinda smaller sub sets of society.
Tony: Once you’ve done the tour do you all go off and do your own thing?
Bob: Well, we live all over the place, we talk to each other, we email and stuff, we are in contact, we don’t go into media blackout! But much less than when we are living together for months on end.
Tony: What’s your idea of a really good Sunday when you are not playing music?
Bob: When we’re not on tour, I’m at home with my family, we’ll have lunch somewhere – on a perfect day I’ll take my daughter kite flying, and then we’ll nap – something you don’t get a lot of chance to do on the road or anywhere In life really – yeah a day with my family hanging out, getting a chance to play a little music.
My daughters very interested in drums and violin, we have a piano at home so we’ll go into – I have a little studio area, we bought her a little drum set, and she’ll want me to play piano while she plays drums – she’s three.
Tony: Family appear to be very important to all of the band members.
Bob: Oh yes, they are always on our minds because they are not with us. As bands go we started kinda late. We are definitely not the angry young men yelling about stuff, more the angry middle aged men yelling about stuff. Of course Dave will be fifty this year - when this thing started taking off I was I think 29 or 30.
If you start at 22 you are still figuring out who you are, you have all this development you go through and I think, if you don’t have a family at that point and you don’t have any of that maybe a lot of that falls away and doesn’t become important to you but if you are already in that realm when you start doing this then it becomes more and more important to you.
We’ve never been a drugs, sex and rock and roll band, maybe ‘a little too much to drink’ and music band. We are not like a sexy, swinging rock band. If you are not a fan of the music I don’t think you get into this band for looks or anything – it’s not deliberate it’s just not what we are about but what we’ve always been about is each other and our families, so it is naturally important to us.
Tony: Is there anyone you’d like to play alongside, or do a duet with perhaps?
Bob: Tom Waits for sure, but there’s tons of guys, Willie Nelson, Ronnie Drew – before he died I would have loved to sit in with him, I’d still like to meet and hang out with Barney (McKenna), Peter Gabriel – I think he’s just a fascinating guy, like thirty five years on and he’s still pushing the edges.
I think I’d love to do something with Pete Townsend or Daltry, Roger Daltry. I was reading an article where Roger Daltry was saying: “yeah I’ve been trying to do a rock album forever but I’ve got Pete Townsend writing for me, who’s going to jump in and write for me now?” So I think like: Fuck! I’ve gotta start thinking about how to go about writing an album for Roger Daltry, I mean if I could do that I could retire! I just love listening to that guy sing.
But you know: who Roger Daltry is and The Who are different things but what he was talking about was that I’m not that guy, I’m a sixty year old guy who has a whole set of interests outside of The Who and it’s.. like who’s going to write THAT album for me?
But this list could be very long – let’s not go there!
Tony: The whole thing about digital rights management and the fact that anyone can rip your music off these days must really tee you off, yes?
Bob: Not necessarily, to me there is always a balance between selling records and promoting the band. So maybe a kid steals a record, but he turns sixty kids onto the band because of this one stolen record and those kids will buy T-shirts, they’ll come to the shows. If you look at it as purely an income stream thing then you are being very short sighted. Frankly we’ve never sold that many albums compared to like you know… Lady Gaga or whoever. There are bands out there, the Foo Fighters, who are still selling millions of albums; we’ve never been one of those bands. People are attracted to us because of the live show.
It’s frustrating but whatever your line of work, someone is ripping you off somewhere whether its digital rights management or the cost of health care or any of those things. I don’t get particularly upset about it, they said the same thing about cassettes and they moved to CDs and it happened somewhere else. As soon as tape players came out people were taping stuff off the radio – that’s what I used to do when I was a kid and they were saying oh that’s piracy but we weren’t pirates, nobody was going to buy this off of me!
The music industry is just changing and the next sea change of what happens next… who knows – I read somewhere recently that a lot of the big manufacturers are going to stop producing CDs by the end of 2012 and it will all be on their website or whatever.
We as musicians just have to continue to not suck, just write good songs and play good songs live – that’s our job, that’s all we have to worry about. But when you put your business hat on there has to be a re-imagining of what music is, a physical one or in an intangible form and what that is worth and what it means and is it purely a promotional device as it really was always meant to be - people weren’t making millions of dollars form a million records sold, even in the early days. They sold them for 50 cents each. We just have to rethink, and it’s going to be a very visionary guy who comes up with the next wave of whatever it is and we are just going to have to adapt.
Tony: You live now in Bolder, Colorado why did you move rom LA?
Bob: When I met my wife she was going to school there so I went while she was finishing off – I was on the road a lot so it didn’t really matter where I was and then I just fell in love with the place. When you do this for a living and we are in all these big cities and there is all this energy and we are running around all over the place – when I would come home to LA, LA still had that same energy in it so you’d get off the road and you were still being torn eight different ways.
That buzz of a big city was always there and you never got to tune your nervous system down a bit so the first winter I spent in Boulder, Colorado I’d never heard silence like that in my life, it just wasn’t in my experience, the way that the snow sucks up all the sound and its maybe 28 square miles, its small, there’s not a lot of cars, there’s not a lot of trains, there’s no planes, it’s just really relaxing and quiet and allows you when you come off a year like this to just completely tune out all of that hustle and bustle and just be in that moment.
It’s very difficult with this kind of lifestyle to experience life in real time and to pay attention from moment to moment – I’ve got to work out when I’ll get a shower, a toilet that’s not going to bite me in the ass, getting laundry done, you are constantly working on your plan for the day just to keep a step ahead of where you are. To me it’s very important from a philosophical / spiritual point of view to be aware of what is going on now and to appreciate the moment, it’s difficult to do in this lifestyle. I could never do that in LA, now I find when I go home to Boulder that there is a lot of space to enjoy each moment.
Tony: Do you get much time to see the places you visit on tour?
Bob: Yeah we get to see… today it’s different in Norwich because we are four miles from anything in the university. You’ve got lovely walkways and trees! Some days are better than others, when we were in Vienne we were like a train stop away from the centre of one of the most amazing cities in the world so nothing stops us from getting out and touring around.
Tony: Do you get recognised in the street?
Bob: Naw! (laughs) Once in a great, great while. Dave probably much more than the rest of us because he’s such a focal point on stage for everyone. And everyone thinks I’m taller because I’m like four feet above them so when I’m just walking around.. you know I’ve been in our crowd not wearing a waistcoat and tie and nobody has any idea.
I’ll go and watch the opening bands at our shows and I have no problem with somebody wanting to shake hands, take a picture but it would be troublesome if like Jennifer Aniston or Brad Pitt trying to eat dinner in a Chinese restaurant four thousand miles from you home and people are going click, click, click.
Tony: I could sit here all evening talking to you Bob; it has been a genuine pleasure. Thank you very much for taking time out to talk to Grapevine Magazine.
Tony Bell is a professional photographer and enjoys working with Grapevine (he says!).