Full Speed Ahead – An Interview With Ramming Speed


Ramming Speed 1Ramming Speed has paid their dues in the very competitive Boston metal scene, going back to their humble beginnings as Despotic Robot. Perhaps cutting their teeth in shows in basements, VFW halls, and crack house hovels helps a band prepare for touring the world. Ghost Cult chatted with drummer Jonah Livingston, and he is one of the most real and down to earth guys you will ever meet. Ramming Speed’s new album is out on Prosthetic Records, and if you don’t already own Doomed To Destroy, Destined To Die; something is seriously wrong with you and your taste in metal is questionable.

When starting Ramming Speed, did you ever expect it to get as big as it has?

Not at all. It sounds cliché to say, like “No, man we were just hangin’ out, drinking beer and playing metal.” We never realized how hard we wanted to work on it until we started touring and you realize you love it you’re like “we can do this”, and when everyone’s on the same page, we book one tour, and if it goes well we book another one. If that tour goes well, we book another one, and so on, just keep doing it. But yeah, we never expected a record label with offices and full time employees, and I think we realized this is what we would be doing with our lives fairly early on.

What were some of your biggest influences, metal and/or non-metal?

As a whole band; the whole D.I.Y. movement like Black Flag and Minor Threat is a big influence on how to run the band in terms of booking tours ourselves instead of waiting for things to happen. If you want something cool to happen, make it happen. Now, obviously, we have a team of people helping us, but that’s brand new; for the last 7 years it’s been us been driving around the country in the shittiest van possible doing laps around America. There’s a book called “Our Band Could Be Your Life” that talks about the early D.I.Y. punk/hardcore/indie bands. They weren’t waiting around for anyone to help them, they forced shit to happen by brute force. It’s a huge influence on how we ended up getting a European tour. People didn’t offer us things; we email a million people, one will write back and then we have a show in Berlin! Musically we’re obviously into all the classic thrash metal bands, some Swedish d-beat, Thin Lizzy, Iron Maiden, all that stuff. It all kinda finds its way into the mix.

It’s great that you mentioned DIY since your band has shown a lot of that ethic, and still plays house shows in Allston (MA) to this day. It may seem odd to ask, but over time do you think it becomes harder to hold “true” to that ideal with a record deal?

A lot of bands get signed, they get booking agents, and they just stop playing DIY shows. I don’t know if they’re told not to do that anymore or they think they’re not supposed to do that anymore, but there’s no reason to stop. Bands get touring packages and offers that come through booking agents oftentimes. Our booking agent’s huge as shit; any handful of big metal bands you can think of, he’s probably got them on his roster. The first time I talked to him he said “Man, you guys came up in the punk scene, and I don’t wanna fuck with that. You’re booking your own tour? Be my guest. You wanna go on one of my tours? That’s fine too.” Obviously lately it’s been more tough to find the right houses in Boston, what with the cops, but DIY house shows have been some of my favourite to this day and I don’t see any reason to put that behind us. Paying six bucks for a beer and having some bouncer yell at you isn’t my idea of a good time, so I can see why you’d pick a house show over a club show.

What’s the hardest thing about touring?

There’s like… every reason why it’s dumb, haha. You’re hungry, you get sick all the time and can’t get better because you’re traveling, you can’t eat good, your girlfriend at home might leave you because you’re away all the time; nobody wants a dude in a band. There are so many reasons why touring is just stupid. If you enjoy it, you tell yourself, “I’ll get better, my life at home’s falling apart, but I’m with my friends all the time playing metal, what more can I really ask for?”, but there are so many reasons it’s a pain in the dick. When you tour all the time you’re poor all the time, and learn to just be uncomfortable all the time; If you’re hot, you’re hot. If you’re cold, you’re cold, you can’t go home and sit in air conditioning. You kinda just have to roll with things, and if you’re not good at that, then you won’t do it anymore, but if you are, then you’ll be really happy.

Since Ramming Speed is a band known for its tongue-in-cheek sense of humour, how hard is it to balance the goofier elements with buckling down and getting things done as a somewhat serious band?

I think that part comes most naturally for us. A lot of bands get too caught up in being serious, especially in the metal world, but I have no time for joke bands. No one likes bands that takes themselves too seriously. You gotta learn how to smile, know when to have fun, and recognize how awesome a guitar solo is. You can’t get caught up in the bullshit, and that’s one of my favourite parts of this band; (insert name) writes have a lot of serious, politically minded, intelligent and thoughtful lyrics that are wondering about what’s going in the world, but when we get up on stage we’re not there to lecture a history class. We’re here to headbang, drink beer, and high five, and for our band that’s the perfect dichotomy for us.

How would you say that it compares to the earlier material such as Brainwreck and Full Speed Ahead when looking at them chronologically?

You can definitely hear where we have our training wheels on, and where we started getting more confident. I think this is the first record where —you may or may not agree— we’re finally doing our own thing. It didn’t happen suddenly; on the 7” (with A.N.S. In 2011) we released after Brainwreck, you could sorta hear where we began to get better and it went from seeing our influences and being like “Oh, Anthrax part, Slayer part, Tragedy part”. It’s now more like, “Oh, Ramming Speed part.”, haha. I think we’re finally starting to sound like a real band on this record. It’s not so easy to just pick apart our influences. I don’t think that we could have made this record without doing the others first, and it stands head and shoulders above the rest. I’m glad that we did all of those others but this is definitely my favourite so far.

Your vocalist Pete mentioned once onstage —on floor rather— at a show that the song you were going to play was about getting your “face blown off by a nuclear warfare” [sic]. Is that how you think we’re gonna go out, what with the Thrash Metal fixation with radioactive fallout and related topics?

Hahahaha, I think I know what song you’re talking about. It’s about a tense political situation during the Cold War; there was a general in the Soviet Army and all the alarms went off and they thought there were American missiles on the way, so everyone was like “Holy shit, we must respond!” and this one guy said “Eh, let’s wait for a little while, this seems weird”, and they were yelling “We have to return fire!” and this guy just says “This seems fishy to me, let’s wait”, and it all turned out to be a radar malfunction or a weather balloon sending off the signal. It’s amazing to think that one guy’s patience saved the whole world. So we just wrote a song saying “Ahh we’re gonna get hit in the face with nukes, ooh!”, but yeah I have no faith that humanity can have weapons of mass destruction and still live on this planet without killing each other.

Sean Pierre-Antoine

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