Long Island Entertainment: September 1997

Most bands have an enormous hit and they have all kinds of trouble writing a song for their follow-up album. 311 has twenty-one, count ’em, TWENTY-ONE on their second Capricorn Records release, Transistor, and there were others they couldn’t fit on a CD. What?! Them worry about what to do next??!! 311, the rage of hard alternative world here in ’97 have probably left their most difficult moments in the rear view mirror: They made it out of Omaha, Nebraska to the stages of the world.

With a recent Jones Beach show, 311 made another imposing statement about how important it is to be young, passionate, and explosive and let the faithful know why they’ll be around for days to come. Jusst prior to their stop, 311’s Chad Sexton calls in from the road to talk about the boys’ status and to clear up some crazy talk that’s been going around about the band. Life’s too good to let any nonsense get in the way.
Drummer Chad Sexton is friendly and soft-spoken over the phone, barely easing into the day as he calls from the West Coast, the morning after a show. So far, the tour’s been going well and he’s got no complaints. When their self-titled debut with Capricorn took off and put them on a whole new level, there had to be some pitfalls that came with it. We launch the talk on the subject of pressure of following up a monster.

“There was no pressure at all,” begins Sexton, matter-of-factly, “we maintained the same philosophy we’ve always had… write riffs and grooves to play. We weren’t trying to make another album just like the last one, the last one wasn’t planned in any way. Some people are saying that this album is a little calmer, a little mellower. If it is… then that’s what it is. We’re still pretty young, but integrity matters to us. We’re not trying to be philosphers, we’re just writing about what we know. Our preparation is writing original material, we’re not a rock band that borrows or steals what they’ve heard… we just want to be ORIGINAL. If it sounds like something else, it’s coincidence. Nothing is done consciously or sub-conciously. It comes out how it comes out.”

What came out in the case of Transistor was a whopping total of songs. The buzz about it being a mellower 311 this time around (whatever that means) probably comes from my studio work on the songs. “We recorded 30 songs,” explains Sexton, “And we got rid of 9. We didn’t have any set number in our head, we just wrote until we thought we had enough good material so we didn’t have to use everything. Our first Capricorn album has a lot of abstract noises and in some ways, it was more creative throughout. This time, we wanted to get back to the grass roots of recording, get back the overdubs, delays, throwing in some space noises to the mix. When we write songs, we start a song and we finish a song. We don’t keep a lot of loose ideas or bits and pieces of a song laying around and then use them later. When we had everything finished, everybody in the band got a ballot and we voted on what to keep. What the vote set is what you get.”

The album’s song titles reflect the band’s nature to follow whatever the muse is that strikes them. Songs like “Inner Light Spectrum,” “The Continuous Life,” “Beautiful Disaster,” “Creature Feature” and “Stealing Happy Hours” ably point out 311’s nature to follow music wherever it takes them while they were letting their minds stretch out. And when it comes to mentally stretching out, 311 has plenty of harmony in the ranks.

“We get along really well,” offers Sexton, “we have no problem partying together, playing together or just hangin’. We have really different musical influences and depending on who writes a song to bring to the band, we may not add much to the original idea or we may all add a lot. I think it’s that mesh of musical ideas that keeps this band fresh. We believe in Unity, that’s why we have a song called “Unity.” If you haven’t got it, why have a band?”

The band has recently had to deal with bizarre rumor that was spreading like wildfire at one point. The rumor that the band was pro-KKK and Sexton marvels at how these kind of stupid things get fueled. “The letter “K” is the eleventh letter of the alphabet,” he explains, “and when you multiply it by “3”, you get “KKK.” We’re not racist man, we are NOT down with that! You know where our name comes from? We used to have an old guitarist in the band that loved to go skinny-dipping… that was his thing. A police call for someone naked is a 311, indecent exposure. The first time that happened, we didn’t have a name for the band, so it was… VOILA! Now we’re three-eleven. We’re carbon-based life forms here on earth, that’s from our sun. We may be different sexes, have different sexual preferences, different color, whatever… but we’re all in the same place and we’re all the same thing, basically. We play music, man, we don’t pass judgement.”

Where they are different, getting back to the music, is, as Sexton sees it, because of growing up in Omaha, Nebraska. He definately feels it was a great climate to grow up with an open mind in. “If we were growing up in L.A. in the 80’s we would’ve liked Motley Crue and we probably would’ve wound up sounding like Poison. Motley Crue is a normal sound for them. We were all growing up listening to everything from Ice Cube to De La Soul. Nick (Hexum, vocalist for 311) and I were putting bands together back in ’88 and though I’m sure what we fif through the years might’ve seemed weird to someone visiting from Omaha, I don’t think our audiences thought anything of it. Back in ’91, we were mixing rap into rock and the rest of the scene were cover bands and alternative bands that sounded like R.E.M. But, our audience was watching us evolve, so nothing seemed odd. They were just digging it and so were we.”

And now; with things really taking off and the band established, I ask, as we wind down, if Sexton always knew 311 would make it to this point. “You always hope for the best,” he concludes after a moment of thought, “but you never know. I always knew I would do something with music, I couldn’t handle anything else. I think I’d probably wind up teaching High School drum limes, it pays pretty good and it’s working with music. Maybe I’ll still wind up doing that… who knows how far this will go?”

With a job in the drummer’s seat in one of the bands with one of the biggest buzzes in the business, I don’t think Sexton’s going to need any short term planning. When asked if he has anything else to add, he merely states that he’d like people to “give us a chance.” For a guy and a band that’s made it, it’s almost strange in its humble appearance in the conversation. Then again, it’s what a real person would say and 311 got to the game by being real.