by Kyle Ryan July 22, 2009

Behind every famous, successful band are at least a couple groups whose influence far outweighs their notoriety or income. So, as frontman for seminal Chicago pop-punk outfit Screeching Weasel, Ben Foster (a.k.a. Ben Weasel) is essentially the Guy Behind The Guy. During its heyday of the early and mid-’90s, his band heavily influenced a generation of followers, among them Green Day (bassist Mike Dirnt played on the band’s 1994 album) and The All-American Rejects. Where some people in the same position might resent the success of those who followed, Foster is perfectly content living the quiet life in his adopted hometown of Madison these days. Well, it’s not that quiet: He has a new album, Invasion USA, out with his post-Weasel band, The Riverdales, and he resuscitated Screeching Weasel earlier this year after an eight-year layoff. As The Riverdales prepared for their release show this Saturday at the Majestic, Foster talked to Decider about life in Madison, his priorities, and the unintended consequences of the digital revolution.
Decider: You moved to Madison from Chicago three years ago. What prompted the change?
Ben Foster: Well, we wanted to have a family, and this is really in all the magazines—it ranks up there as one of the best places to live and raise a family and whatnot. I’ve got family in Wisconsin, not real close to here, but close enough that they can help out with the kids. It’s a nice place to live. It’s a pace I’m much more comfortable with than when I was in Chicago. It’s quiet, not a lot of noise and not a lot of pollution. People are polite, more or less. Not a lot of traffic. It’s a good situation. I was tired of city life. I can do what I do for a living as long as there’s an airport. And it’s cheaper. I couldn’t afford to buy property to raise a family down in the Chicago area. So it was really a no-brainer.
D: Do you miss anything about the city?
BF: No, not really. When I first moved up, I was torn about not having a pro baseball team up here. But I started going over to Miller Park, and I realized, to drive from here to Miller Park in Milwaukee doesn’t really take much longer than it took for me to drive from Oak Park up to Wrigley Field and park and walk. You’re not really adding that much time, plus you have the bonus of not having to sit in traffic. Yeah, I really can’t think of anything off the top of my head. Well, I guess the only thing I miss is being by a huge airport where I can get direct flights everywhere. I don’t like having to make stops when I fly somewhere.
D: You have a new Riverdales album coming out, and you’ve reformed Screeching Weasel. How have your goals for the bands changed?
BF: I think in the wake, actually not in the wake because it’s still going on, of this digital revolution, I’ve had to change my focus and focus more on live performance and less on recording. To the extent that we’re able to record, we’ve got the new Riverdales album coming out, and we’ve got another album written already to follow that up that we would like to record this winter. But it’s entirely dependent on how this one does. If this one doesn’t justify at least a similar budget, which was pretty low, then we’re not going to be able to do it. That’s what me and [bassist/guitarist Dan] Vapid, from a creative standpoint, are really into right now. And there’s been a few people here and there who have piped up asking if we’re going to do a Screeching Weasel album. Who knows? Certainly not real soon unless something comes along to make me change my mind, which I don’t see happening.
Recorded music has been devalued so much, and that’s the main thing that I want to do. My main interest and creative work is creating work: writing the songs and of course rehearsing and arranging them and getting them down on a recording. That’s always been the thing I’m most passionate about. But I literally can’t afford to indulge that passion anymore, so it’s really gotta be live music. Which is fine.
D: You’ve said you made money self-releasing your solo record a couple years ago. Even though it wasn’t as much as Screeching Weasel made in their heyday, it isn’t enough to pay for another album?
BF: There are three different issues here: One, probably under the best of circumstances, or under most likely circumstances, I’m not going to do as well as I did at Screeching Weasel’s peak because that was also the peak of their genre, and it was really the peak of independent punk-rock record labels and distribution. A lot of things converged at one time to enable us to enjoy the kind of success that we did. So that’s issue one. Issue two is that I’m guessing with the Riverdales album, we’ll earn a profit. It probably won’t be very large, but then we get to issue three, which is, when you factor in all the work that you put into something from its inception to its completion—writing, rewriting, demoing, re-demoing, arranging, arranging again, changing the arrangements again, throwing with the lyrics, rehearsing, recording, the mixing, all that—and then going out and promoting the record, at some point you have to ask yourself, "When is just doing it for the sake of the music enough?" In my case, I would say that’s becoming much less the case.
It’s not a popular sentiment, I realize, and it’s probably the last thing a fan wants to hear from a musician—we’re all supposed to pretend we don’t care about money—but I think like anybody else in the world, even if you really love something, if you’re doing it and you’re not making money, that’s one thing. But if you’re doing it and you’re not making money because people want it but choose to steal it instead, then that’s really demoralizing…
I think we’re just beginning to see the effects of this, and the funny thing is it’s hard to comment on it as it’s happening, because it’s still radically changing, but my guess is, and has been ever since I figured out what illegal downloading is and file sharing and all that, that it’s going to be bad for music, and specifically going to be bad for the people on the fringes and who are a little bit quirky. Right now in punk rock, in my little subgenre of pop-punk, the most popular bands by far are essentially the ones who just copy each other. They’re not really bringing anything new to the table. Some would argue, and I would agree, that it’s always been that way. But I don’t think the gulf has always been as wide as it is right now, and I think it’s just going to get worse. If there is less money to be made, then record labels are going to take fewer chances because the risks are much higher. The end result of that is it’s bad for music; it makes it far less likely that interesting music will be heard. I would like to think that with the advent of Internet technology and cheap home recording that a great band will more often than not put their stuff out online and get an audience if they’re good and deserving, but I just don’t think that’s going to happen.

Related Links

music eventS - The Riverdales, Shot Baker, and Jetty Boys

performerS - Green Day, Screeching Weasel, The All-American Rejects, The Riverdales