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You would never know it from the skull-stomping, crunched-out ferocity of Against Me!'s current music, but the rising Gainesville, Florida, punk quartet began as a solo acoustic act. "It was pretty much by necessity -- when I first started out, I didn't have an electric guitar," says frontman Tom Gabel, 24, whose shredded-larynx howl evokes Social Distortion's Mike Ness and Fugazi's Ian MacKaye.
Eventually, Gabel found some bandmates and went electric, creating a passionate, punk-without-the-pop sound that demands mass singalongs. But his time as a solo strummer helped awaken him to pre-1977 music. "It was like, who else has done this thing before?" he says. "And you start getting into Bob Dylan and stuff like that. Now we're fans of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Creedence. And [bassist Andrew Seward] has two Bruce Springsteen tattoos."
On his first tour, in 1999, Gabel had so little money that he was forced to survive by dumpster-diving and begging at a fast-food chain. "We just went into KFCs and were like, 'Look, we have no money, can you help us out?'" Gabel says. "Colonel Sanders supposedly had some kind of relative who died of starvation, so at the time KFC had this policy where if you went in and you were hungry they gave a full plate of food." (A KFC representative denies that the policy existed.)
Gabel started off writing angry songs about life in his ultraconservative hometown of Naples, Florida -- where punk-hating high school jocks gave him and future Against Me! guitarist James Bowman such frequent ass-kickings that they both dropped out. On the band's third and latest album, Searching for a Former Clarity, Gabel turns his fury on the Bush administration: The galvanizing "From Her Lips to God's Ears (The Energizer)" climaxes with his cry of "Oh, Condoleeza, do you get the fucking joke?"
On other tracks, such as the country-tinged cocaine lament "How Low," Gabel directs the same energy toward self-flagellation. And on the album-closing title song, he imagines himself dying onstage -- which isn't completely implausible, given the band's insane touring schedule. "We don't have a day off for the next thirty days," Gabel says. "But we're fucking young and have got all this energy, so why not? What else am I going to be doing?"