Touring with no cell phones, skating EMB alongside Gonz, and playing sold out shows in Brazil
a conversation with:
Gabriel Wiley
There’s a bit of context to this interview that I feel is important: I bartend at a little spot in Pflugerville - My dad opened up the place a year ago, offered me a gig, and now we’re here. My dad, who is also a drummer - comes up to me and says “hey you ever listen to a band called Mineral?”. What the fuck, yeah of course! He then tells me his “old friend Gabe” is here, and asks if I want to meet him. I promptly walked out and introduced myself, told him I was a fan. He came back a week later, and we chatted a little more. Not only that, but he brought me a drumstick from one of their shows in Rio. After I finished the first issue of SPEAK, I started to think about the next interview I might do. Mineral has been in my lineup for years, and led me to so many other great bands. I wound up getting Gabe’s phone number, and sat on it for about a month as I felt I needed to prepare a bit. Everything worked out, and I feel more than honored to have this opportunity. Thank you Gabe!
Dylan: When I was trying to do research for this interview, I couldn’t really find any interviews with you, mostly just Chris (Simpson). There was a short one from 2014 when Mineral went on the reunion tour, but that’s about it. I figured we could just kinda start from the beginning, where you’re from and how you got your start in music?
Gabe: Yeah - so… I don’t really know how to say where I’m from. My dad’s a jazz musician & record producer, so we moved wherever the money was. I got my first drum kit when I was 3, and I would go on tour with my dad sometimes when I was younger, playing the drums after they did sound check. Sometimes when they would go and record, I’d go with and just play on whatever house kit they had. I got my first real drum kit when I was 13, when I lived in Tacoma - and I would just try to play along to records. I think the first record I ever played to was Bryan Adams, and then I moved on to Iron Maiden.
Then, we moved to the San Francisco area when I was 15, and I was in my first band. We were called “Disabled Skater” which changed pretty quickly to “No Reason”. We played at house shows for a little while, and our first club show was at the Gilman Warehouse, and we were opening for Operation Ivy. It was crazy, because it was their homecoming show after their very first tour. I don’t know how we got on that show, it was sold out - there was a line wrapping around the building, and they sold out again. It was nuts, there’s no way we should’ve played that show, that was our first real club.
So yeah, we started off with a bang for sure. We befriended Operation Ivy, and played some more shows with them, and then I left & moved to Texas when I was 17. I didn’t really play much for a long time - I didn’t really know anybody. Obviously Texas doesn’t really have public transportation, so you can’t just go wherever you want. You have to have a car.
*** These next few words occurred later in our conversation, but I wanted to move it here because of the time period & context.
G: So you said this zine is about skating and music right?
D: Yup
G: Well I skated, especially during the time when I was in “disabled skater”
D: Oh word, in SF?
G: Yeah, yeah my friend Wade Speyer, he actually got signed to Powell Peralta in the late 80’s and it was cool ‘cause I had another friend who got signed to Vision - and we got to go to all these parties after the demos and skate comps, and meet all of those guys. The one guy we actually skated with the most was Tommy Guerrero, but it was really cool meeting all the Powell guys. It was a really fun place to skate, lots of iconic spots.
D: Embarcadero?
G: We’d be there weekly, and I actually saw the Gonz ollie. My friend Wade pulled it off too. Kevin Thatcher - the old editor for Thrasher, would be around all the time on a long board. He’d just always have 2 or 3 cameras on him, and one day he saw Wade skating. He was doing 360 flips off of this stage spot at EMB, and remember this is kind of before that was a usual sight. This was around the beginning of street skating. But anyways, he shot some photos of Wade and that’s kind of what led to him getting hooked up later on.
But yeah man, it was a really cool thing to experience. You don’t realize it when you’re 15, 16 - playing in a punk band & opening for Operation Ivy, skating with pros. And then you move away and it’s like “oh that’s not normal?, where is everybody?”. It took me a while to realize how lucky I was, and I missed it. I mean I did not wanna move to Texas, I was pissed. My parents told me we were moving, and I actually didn’t leave immediately. I stayed for about 2 months after that, with my friend and his family but eventually realized it just wasn’t sustainable. I was still in high school.
******
Jumping forward a bit, I started college - I wanted to be an audio engineer, or at least I thought I did. I quickly found out that I don’t really like recording other bands, I just like working on what I’m doing haha. But that’s when I met the guys from Mineral.
Jeremy, the bass player was dating my sister. And Chris, the singer was dating her best friend. They had started a band in Austin called - I don’t remember what it was called. But that kind of fizzled out and they started Mineral. It was with a different drummer named Matt, who actually named the band. It was named after a song by Buffalo Tom, a great song actually. But he ducked out after like a month or two of practice, and then they asked me.
And so I joined in, I think it was ’94. I dropped out of school & we started touring. We played a show with Christie Front Drive while we were in Houston, and they kind of took us under their wing. Took us on our first tour - It was maybe 5 or 6 days. We went up as far as Denver playing with them. They showed us how to use “Book your own fucking life” to book tours nationally. There were a lot of house shows, backs of record stores, VFW halls. We didn’t have cell phones, so you got really good at reading a map. Just hoping that you’d get good directions, because it was difficult to get in touch with anyone after the initial approval of a show. You weren’t really in contact with anybody until you showed up, and just hoped it worked out.
D: So it was mostly just word of mouth, flyers, etc. that people would find out about the shows?
G: Yup, there were a lot of zines that would have any upcoming shows in the area listed. When we started, we didn’t even really have websites. Even if you did, nobody had really thought of using the internet to advertise shows at the time. If you got to a certain point or if you had a good promoter, they would be able to get those shows listed where you planned on going. Whether it be zines or newspapers, but that was pretty rare in the beginning. Usually it was just a flyer in some local punk record store to let people know you were coming, and that’s if anyone actually knew who you were.
A lot of times, it was just a matter of going to a pre-established scene, and whoever the typical promoter was, they would let people know. We would make a tape and send it to them, and they would make copies. Mixtapes and duplicates would get passed around, and sometimes we would show up & people would know a couple of our songs.
But yeah it was really strange. And looking back on it now, it’s kind of insane to do that - just to show up and hope people would be there, hope that we could make enough gas money to get to the next show.
D: That’s what’s up. I was looking through some setlist archives, I saw this one show that y’all played - it was in Fayetteville, NC. with The Get up Kids, Jejune, Mineral & Speedwell at some skate shop in ’97. What I would give to have been there man!
G: Yup, that was our farewell tour. The last tour we did was with the Get Up Kids & Jejune opening, that was fun.. The Get Up Kids had just released that first EP, Four Minute Mile just weeks before. It was crazy, every show had a growing crowd of people who knew who they were, almost as if people were sending word down the line. It really seemed like it was growing with every show, and we really got to seem them blow up in front of our faces, so that was really cool.
D: Definitely a different era, it’s cool to hear about how things came together organically in a time before social media, the interconnection between scenes all over the country. I still feel like we have that, but in a different way. The internet is heavily involved nowadays.
G: What’s crazy to me is sending people music digitally. Being able to just send somebody a band that you love. Back then, you had to physically own it, and to share it with friends you’d have to use snail mail. It feels like another lifetime ago, it’s just crazy that that was a thing and I lived it.
D: It’s interesting to think about the future, and how it’ll be different. I’m curious what changes we’ll look back on, what we’ll miss from right now.
G: I’m sure that every age has that thought, like: how can it be any different from now?How can there be an even more advanced technology than what we have now, but there always seems to be.
D: Going back to the farewell tour - I know Mineral was somewhat short lived, did you know that it was coming to an end after that tour?
G: Yeah, we knew before the tour - we had gone to record the second album, and Chris realized that he wanted to re-write a lot of the lyrics. So he went home, and started spending time working on that. It was sometime around then that Chris and Jeremy decided that they didn’t want to tour as much as Mineral was. The thought was that, well if we’re going to be signed onto a major label we’re probably going to be expected to tour a lot. So they made the decision , we were gonna finish the record and do one last tour, and that’d be it.
D: Yeah, I had found this video of what I believe is the last show y’all played before the reunion tour. It was with The Promise Ring at Emo’s.
G: Yup, that was the last show. The last one of our tour was actually at the Electric Lounge, and I don’t think we ever really thought we would have a “last show”, just assumed that the last one of the tour would finish it off. But during that tour, or right after we got back - The Promise Ring said they were coming through town, and that they wanted to play with us as our last show, so we did! We hadn’t ever played to a crowd that big in Austin at the time, so that was a crazy show.
D: So the energy was pretty high that night, huh?
G: Definitely!
D: After that, Chris and Jeremy went on to start the Gloria Record, and you went on to Pop Unknown - was there anything else in-between that?
G: So when we were recording the second Mineral record, we had just signed to Interscope, and I had some money burning a hole in my pocket. When we left San Diego, which is where we were recording- so that Chris could rewrite the lyrics, I was getting bored. ‘Cause it ended up being months. I had a friend Tim, who told me he had been writing some songs, and I had another friend that owned Sweatbox - which is a studio, and he would rent it to me for like 20 bucks an hour. So we didn’t really practice, we would just go into the studio, and we ended up recording 4 songs. We picked out a few guys to play on it, and played some shows. We then went back and re-recorded those songs, & put out an EP. So when Mineral broke up, I was sort of like “okay well this is my thing now”. It wasn’t really supposed to be a band, just a side project for fun. I got the name from - there was a Dukes of Hazard reunion show. In in the opening credits there was a sign that said “Welcome to Hazard County, Pop. Unknown”. But it was spelled “P-O-P, period - Unknown”. I thought it’d be funny to name it after that. Maybe if I thought it was gonna be a real band I would have done a bit better, haha.
D: I did some research into your other projects, my memory is failing me now - but what happened after Pop Unknown?
G: Scott McCarver and I put together a band called Imbroco. One of the guitar players from Pop Unknown ended up being the bass player. And the singer was Rory Phillips, he was in the Impossibles. He named it Imbroco - he had a friend from Italy that told him it meant “skirt chaser” haha. It was also pretty short lived - finding guys that you kind of gel with musically, even more importantly being able to work together personality wise. It’s hard to see that beforehand, you just have to try things: sometimes they work out & sometimes they fall flat really fast. That one fell flat, but it was fun- it was a good band, just didn’t work out.
D: Whenever you started to get the Mineral reunion tour going, what were the rehearsals like? Did it come pretty naturally to everyone?
G: No- So, the guys from Jimmy Eat World Had contacted us. It was gonna be their 20th anniversary of them getting together as a band, and they wanted to put together a show, maybe 2 shows with a lot of the bands they used to tour with. So it was us, Get Up Kids, Promise Ring, and a bunch of other bands. We said yeah, that’d be really cool - so we started practicing. As that was going on, the management company for Jimmy Eat World was dealing with pulling all these bands together, that really weren’t really together anymore. They realized it was like herding cats and it just wasn’t gonna work out. By the time we found out, we had already been practicing for 2 or 3 weeks, and were just like okay we’ll just play a show then.
So this guy Jeff - who I guess became kind of our manager, was working with some booking agencies, like how are we gonna put this show together, where are we gonna do it - there were talks of going to the East Coast. As soon as they started talking to these booking agents, they got - I don’t really know how it happened, I guess they were asking other bands who might wanna play on it, and then we started getting offers to do 2 nights in New York, then 3 nights, and we just organically started traversing the country. Different promoters in various cities would ask us to come and play, so we figured maybe we’ll do a tour. It was a lot of fun, and we just kind of kept going. Europe happened - Japan, we went to Australia. It became this whole world tour, we started off in Austin.
D: It must have been a trip touring worldwide, any spots you enjoyed the most from that tour?
G: Well, I had been through the US numerous times, and I had been through Europe a few times - twice with Pop Unknown and once with a band called America is Waiting. But I had never been to Japan or Australia- I would say probably Japan. It was amazing, it was so cool. It’s hard to pinpoint a specific show or time, I feel I kept expecting it to kind of “fizzle”, or not be as cool as the last one. Each show was amazing in and of itself. Even when we were at our height, when we were an actual band (Mineral) we never played in front of crowds like that, and this time around it was every single night.
D: Japan is on my list for sure. It’s out there though.
G: Yup! But once you get over there, you can get around pretty quick. The cities aren’t that far from each other, and they have the super trains - so you can hit 4 or 5 major cities while you’re there no problem.
D: So after the reunion shows, what have you been up to after that? Any musical projects going down at the moment?
G: So I’m working on - we’re just calling it a project. Chris Crisci, the singer of Appleseed Cast - he and I have been doing a long distance project. He’ll record a song, and then send me the file. I’ve got an electronic drum set that I can set up, so I’ll write and record, send the song back and we’ll edit it from there. Kind of just going back and forth changing songs - I think we have like 8 songs now. We played South By, and we’re gonna go play a festival called the Post Fest in Indianapolis in July . So we’ll probably do a few shows on the way there & the way back, but it’s just the two of us. He calls it “synth pop”, and it’s just what it sounds like. It’s just me playing drums to multiple synth tracks, and then he plays one of the synths live - but we haven’t really done “live” yet, besides playing together that one time. It’s a little different because I have to play along to a click, & listen to the music on top of that - so it’s tough.
D: I bet it’s a bit of a different too, going from sending files to playing live is quite the feat, even for trained musicians.
G: It’s strange. And he also wants to get to a point where he can control lights via MIDI, and just run everything through a laptop. We really don’t know how it’s gonna work live, because we really had to strip it down for the South By show. But I think it’s gonna be fun and interesting, just hoping it’s not annoying haha. We’ve just been in the discussion of how often do we wanna play, and that’s called “The Black Sea” so we have a name now. I think we’re going to record & release an EP sometime this summer.