Bridge Nine boys Soul Control are ready and willing for their first appearance in Ithaca, NY at this winter's Big Day In on Dec. 4th, 2010 with Young Widows, Bridge & Tunnel, and 9 other bands from around NYS. You may recognize some familiar faces from bands like Achillies, Verse, and What Feeds the Fire but the band has been setting themselves apart from their former/sibling projects over the last few years with their slew of EP's and last year's kicker, "Cycles".  Bubba Crumrine chats with them regarding the past, present, and future of the band...sort of, but not really.

IU: To start things off, lets get a little history on the band. You guys each spent (spend) time in quality bands like Verse, What Feeds the Fire, etc - how did you meet and what brought you to birth a band like Soul Control?

SC: We met at the top of the empire state building after Eric's son called into a talk radio show and said he wanted his dad to find a new band.

IU: How did Rory come to be in the band later on?

SC: Well, we'd just parted ways with our singer and begun the process of auditioning new ones. Meanwhile, Rory had been working a shitty day job and at night singing in a Soul Control cover band called "Dance of Shadows." I guess some SC fans heard we needed a singer and they sent us a tape of Rory performing with his band. We were impressed and got in touch. He came down and belted out "On Survival" in the booth and blew us away.  That was that.

IU:  How did you get hooked up with the folks at Bridge Nine?
SC: Well, we knew that the Sons of Thunder had just gotten signed based purely on the fact that they had gotten played on the radio. So without much planning we broke into a radio station to try and get our demo played on the air. Well, you know how THAT goes. Suddenly there's uzi's and chaos and things get out of hand quick. Somehow Chris Wrenn from B9 got into the building and pretty much laid it out to us that without him and B9's lawyers, we were screwed. We had some real dick...cheese...burger from the station help us with the legal jargon and signed our lives away to B9.

IU: More recently, you guys put some pretty heavy road hours in over the summer with Like Wolves, Menzingers, Another Breath - how was the trek? Any best/worst stories?

SC: We had a day off in Vegas, but a few of us had some prior obligations, namely one of us was getting married the next day. We decided to party anyway and it got REALLY crazy. We somehow left Ted from AB on the roof of some fancy hotel and Adam from Like Wolves got insanely drunk, pulled his own tooth out and married a stripper! It was kind of a hectic day, but we got to meet Mike Tyson, which was fucking awesome!

IU: What has been your favorite tour so far?

SC: Oh man, there's so many to choose from, but this one US tour was particularly awesome. We went out with this band called Stillwater, total classic rock kind of vibe, so it was a weird mix of styles, but that's always awesome. It was kind of a new experience for us, there was this young reporter trying to follow us around the whole tour and all these babes who called themselves "band-aids" trying to just hang and party. Good times.

IU: How were the New England Metal & Hardcore fest and The Fest for you guys?

SC: Both were pretty sweet. We started out driving to the fest, but there was CRAZY traffic, so we hopped off some random exit to try and find a better route. Somehow we ended up in the wrong part of town and witnessed some really sketchy dudes potentially murder someone. We peace out, but they followed us and it became a game of cat and mouse as we tried to find a way to get help. Jim was driving and he put on this sick Helmet and House of Pain mash-up and it got us all pumped to get away.

IU: I heard rumor there may be some new SC material in the works - any truth to this?

SC: It's complicated. Short version: We started working on some new stuff but Rory ran into some trouble with the East German High Command. He's been trying to find this girl's father to stop him from building some crazy awful super weapon before it's too late. Other than those details, news about any new material is top secret, but we're thinking of calling the record 'The Polaris Mine'.

IU: Each of your releases have been unique from its predecessor - what sort of direction are the new tracks heading in?

SC: I guess we're moving away from the elevator bomb type approach, ya know? These new tracks have the kind of energy that you'd expect from a person who was cruising through LA on a city bus and realized there was a bomb attached to the bus. We're trying to keep these songs moving faster than 50mph to avoid any sort of second LP "explosion". We're all really stoked on how the new stuff is sounding.

IU:  How do you feel the band has progressed since your first string of 7"s and EPs to Cycles to where you guys are now a year later?

SC: I guess back when the 7"s came out we were like a group of quirky screw-ups trying to do something useful with our lives, but would always end up causing more problems or getting our wires crossed. Now, a year after 'Cycles', it's like we've got Commandant Mauser running the show, and Lassard's kind of taken a back seat, if that makes any sense?

IU:  How are you guys managing the future of touring & recording with members spread out so far?

SC: It gets tricky. Rory's in Rochester, NY and the rest of us are in RI and MA. Ryan's parents want to send him away to military school if he doesn't start "doing something" with this band. If Ryan gets sent to military school, the band is done, which sucks. We know this dude named Rufus though, who's been helping us travel through time to all our shows and it's been a pretty excellent adventure so far. We'll see if we can keep it up.

IU:  Any words of advise for bands looking to make a serious go at DIY touring in this day and age?

SC: It's kind of a brutal thing. It's almost like being in prison for a crime you didn't commit. You do the time, you make some friends on the inside who change your life, you help the prison build a library, do all their accounting and basically create a sense of unity amongst all the prisoners and guards. You spend all your free time slowly digging through the walls to create an escape route and in the end you escape and find freedom, but it's always kind of tainted by the fact that you don't know how to have a normal life outside of that cell.

IU: What can fans look forward to in '11?

SC: 2011 will be life as usual for us. Some of us are still living at home, but the one cool thing is that Rory and I are getting our own public access TV show. We'll probably try to film it from Rory's basement, but I think it will be a lot of fun. For now, it's just for fun, but we're hoping that the show will catch the attention of some big-time TV executives so that we can go national with it and use it to promote the band. We're a little nervous about the idea of working with the big-time guys, but this babe that we met who plays in a totally awesome metal band seems to think it's a great idea. Not to mention, I think Rory is totally in love with her!!

IU:  Any of you been to Ithaca, NY before?

SC: I've never actually been, can you believe that? I picture it being totally awesome and having the ability to turn a 13 year old kid into a middle-aged man. Ithaca makes you come to grips with all these harsh new realities like having to have a job, but you stick with what you're good at: playing with toys. You end up getting to play chopsticks on a giant floor piano which kicks ass! When it's time to leave Ithaca, you've experienced all sorts of weird foods, had your first encounter with a woman, but you are left with the insight that being a kid is really fucking awesome and you miss your family.

IU: Any final words to those coming out to see you guys at Big Day In?

SC: Well, I hope everyone will try to remember that we're regular people just like everyone else. Being in a hardcore band isn't all glitz and glamor. Sure, sometimes it seems like our lives are straight out of a Hollywood movie, but for the most part, we're no different from any guy you'd see walking down the street in a freaky spider costume shooting webs out of his hands and saving lives, ya know?