Twenty One Pilots: Inside the Biggest New Band of the Past Year
By the time he was a teenager, Dun was rebelling hard. “I just had this aggression,” he says, noting that his parents nearly kicked him out when he was 14. “They almost sent me to a military school. They didn’t know what to do with me, and I was always in detention. I never got into drugs or alcohol, but I would yell at my parents and just treat them terribly. Everything was an argument. Looking back, they were trying their best.”
When his parents fell asleep, he’d break out his punk-pop CDs; eventually, they softened up on rock music, allowing him to assemble a drum kit in his basement piece by piece with his own money. He didn’t go to college, moving in with a bunch of buddies instead and playing in local bands while scraping by working in the drum department of Guitar Center. “I was going nowhere,” he says. “One day I said to my dad, ‘Are you disappointed that I’m working a minimum-wage job and I didn’t go to college?’ I’ll never forget his response. He said, ‘It’s not about how much money you make or what your job is, but it’s more about your character. For that, I’m proud of you.’ It gave me motivation.”
Josh, I have a question for you,” Joseph says. “Would you rather be attacked by 100 chicken-sized horses or one horse-sized chicken?” Dun gives the question (inspired by a popular Internet meme) some thought. “There’s pros and cons to both,” he says. “A horse-sized chicken will have short legs, so I don’t know how fast it would be.”
Joseph disagrees. “Take how fast a regular chicken is, and times it by however big a horse is. You want to take the 100 chicken-sized horses all day long. You just kick them right in the snout. Dude, just picture the beak on a horse-sized chicken. And he’s not just roaming around. He’s, like, honed in on you.”
It’s a freezing-cold afternoon in Ohio a couple of days before New Year’s, and Joseph and Dun are walking around a nearly deserted downtown Columbus, not far from where they first met in 2010. Joseph had taught himself piano by playing along to Beatles and Dion songs on the radio, impressing friends with how quickly he learned, and forming an early version of Twenty One Pilots with two friends. Dun first saw them at a club on the Ohio State campus. “I loved everything about the show except for one thing: I wasn’t onstage playing also,” he says. It would be another year before Joseph’s original drummer quit and Dun got the job, but they had become best friends in the meantime. By 2012, Joseph had grown into a ferocious performer, climbing the scaffolding and diving into audiences. The duo became the biggest band in central Ohio, putting every spare penny into the band and focusing intensely on their local fans. The most important Columbus promoter, Adam Vanchoff, took notice when they played the 1,700-seat Newport Music Hall. “I was like, ‘These local guys just sold out the Newport?'” says Vanchoff. “Nationally touring bands can’t do that!”