KERRANG Magazine has called Komodo Wagon’s Troy Perlic “one of the most charismatic frontmen around”. HARDROCK HAVEN says this band has “vocals reminiscent of the best of Iggy Pop, Josh Todd, and Ian Astbury… This is a band that deserves to be heard and has huge cross-over potential.” They’ve played all over North America and Europe with bands like Drowning Pool, Clutch, The Sex Pistols, The Answer, and Tool. Lance Skullz from CIVL Unrest Radio caught up with vocalist Troy Perlic to find out where this band comes from and where they’re headed…

Well I guess I should ask the first question. Who are you, and why should I care?

Who are we? Well, I'm Troy from Komodo Wagon. Komodo Wagon is a hard rock band, a punk'n'roll band, whatever you wanna call us. We're a high energy, heavy riffs, catchy chorus type of band that puts on as I say a high energy show. We're out of Vancouver, the band was originally out of Europe, but it's an all-Canadian lineup now out of Vancouver. Why should you care? You should care if you like to have a good time when you go to gigs. There's not enough of that goin' around at the moment.

It's true, it's true. I'll agree with you on that, and you do put on a good show. So you say you got started in Europe, was it you originally from Europe, or...?

Yeah, well, I mean, I'm Canadian but I did spend about thirteen or fourteen years over there. The last few I spent in Portugal and I started this band, after I had been in London with my previous band for years and years. We did a bunch of recording, et cetera... The band was pretty cool, but the economy crashed as everybody knows, really badly, and I had to get the hell out of there. Thought I'd come back to Canada. Had a little hiatus, and one of my age old friends Shane Love, our bass player, said: “What the hell are you doing? Let's put this band together, you've got some smokin' tunes and we want to play it, that's what we wanna do”.. So we started up fifteen, sixteen months ago here and we're gettin' it rolling here in Canada.

Very cool, very cool. So, like you said, you've been doing this for a while. Just out of curiosity, what was your band in England?

Ah, that started in Vancouver, and we took it to England. It was called Five Hundred and Crave and that is many, many moons ago. I think that we were active from '94 to about 2000-and...three? Something like that?

Wow. That's crazy. Alright, so like you said you've been in Europe and you came back... You've probably had a lot of members in that time and because of that a lot of influence. What would you say are the influences behind the band then, and now, and are they different?

You know what? The influences haven't really changed, mostly I guess because I've been the principle songwriter and kinda started the project. For a lot of our recorded material, I did work with one of the ex-members very closely. It was Johnny, he was a guitar player, so maybe that's where some of the more heavy punk influences come from... because I like a lot of it but I didn't really grow up that way. We've got some really fast tunes on our records and stuff, and that probably came from him, but otherwise, it's kind of par for the course. We wanna write hard rock tunes without being a gimmick band, without being a throwback to the L.A. 80's, but just an honest high-energy rock band with some attitude in the live show. That goes to a lot of older bands that I guess we grew up on, like Guns 'n Roses, definitely their early stuff, early Metallica-- Kill 'Em All, the thrash scene, bands like the Ramones always, Motorhead of course. You know, Motorhead I think from my point of view has a hell of a lot of punk in themselves, for that matter, so did Appetite for Destruction. Then from being over in Europe there's some other influences, that people maybe don't know about so much over here, bands like The Helicopters and The Backyard Babies, some amazing hard rock bands that were doing it the whole time through the late 90s and early 2000s when a lot of people thought the genre was just totally dead. So, what else... Monster Magnet, Jane's Addiction, The Cure, pretty wide influences. I've been through a lot of the musical genres, as far as a listener goes I'm pretty open, but I keep it pretty much to guitar music... so I've been through 'em all and I like some bands out of all genres. But that's the mainstay, the heavy riffs, catchy tunes, or smokin' fast and catchy tunes.

You were saying Motorhead. Motorhead, by far is one of my favorites of all time. And listening to you guys I can hear a lot of the influence, and I guess just a lot of that pre-New Wave of British Heavy Metal stuff like Saxon and all that kind of stuff. Now, you were saying you were in Europe so there's a lot of that influence coming in and coming through.

That's pretty cool, actually. Most people don't come up with Motorhead just cause my voice sounds nothing like Lemmy's, but yeah, musically there's definitely some similarities in how they wrote their songs and the energy they have.

I think you're all trying to get that high energy of the rock show, I mean, he just took the Chuck Berry riffs and put 'em on their ass and made them that much bigger and that much stronger, it's like what you're saying for you guys with your big riffs and all that stuff. Big riffs, that's what your motto is.

It is, it is. And Motorhead and bands like I mentioned, The Helicopters maybe are talking the exact same thing we are, except basing it really off that Chuck Berry kind of 50's blues, and where we're maybe basing it off that plus maybe some 70s and 80s influences.

Yeah, like you were saying Monster Magnet, so you've got that psychedelic kind of metal aspect as well.

Yeah, even Motley Crue. If there's a wicked band that isn't totally cheeseball lyrics and it's got heavy riffs, we probably like it. If it makes you want to throw your hands up and wanna bang your head, that's naturally what it's been all about since I was a teenager, and it still is.

You hear something and if it makes you wanna start kicking stuff, that's a good song.

Yeah, exactly!

Alright, so the question is this. You have your slogans of “big riffs”, as well as “punk and roll”, what does it all mean?

Well, punk and roll isn't something we came up with, we didn't invent the term or anything, but we like it. Yeah, it causes a little bit of confusion, cause people are like “you're not a punk band!”-- and we're not saying we are a punk band at all, but why we like to use it is because we think that for a rock and roll band, there's as much punk energy and idealism behind it in our rock and roll band as some of those early punk bands. And like I was mentioning before, I think there's just as much punk in Appetite for Destruction and Kill 'Em All, as there is in any modern-day punk album almost. It's that idea of the punk, it's that energy and that attitude that this is what we do, and we hope you like it, but if you don't it really doesn't bother us. We're gonna get up on stage and we're gonna have a riot. You can come on-board or not. It's not the punk like “Oh, we're gonna kick everybody's ass”.. it's the energy and it's the attitude.

It's the DIY aspect. It's going out and throwing everything you have into it whether people like it or not.

Exactly. So yeah, I hope that clarifies.

Clarifies it for me. So, you've got some touring coming up. When you say “bring the boys together”, I think you need to explain to everybody just how difficult it is for all you guys to come together.

Heh, yeah yeah yeah. You know, it is getting better, but I'll start with answering the question. Definitely not a normal band in the sense that we don't all live in the same city. And the only reason we can pull that off is that we have been friends for... ever. I mean, our bass player Shane and I have known each other since we were three years old. He's the one who kinda kickstarted this and said “I'm coming to the coast to do some stuff, let's play some Komodo shows and get it going”, and we did. So everyone kinda had to go home and talk amongst themselves and say “can I do this?” Cause we live a thousand kilometres apart, we've been doing that for a year, so that's kind of why whenever we play, we try to have a minimum of three shows in an area. It gives us a chance to maybe get a rehearsal in before, which is always nice but we don't get that many, but the boys are all pros so they know what they're doing. But hopefully we do that and we then play three to five six shows or on tour or whatever it is. Luckily, Shane is moving out here in about a month's time, so that is gonna be something else because we'll actually be able to get some more rehearsing in, and it'll make the writing process obviously easier than sending stuff back and forth on computers. But yeah, it's been an interesting ride, and it's just a different way of doing a band. I've done bands for a lot of years, and the funny thing is, as crazy as it sounds, if you take the money equation out of it for traveling, it's probably the easiest band situation I've ever been in. Simply because the nature of our business, you get two or three rehearsals done every week, and what generally happens is that you get a few songs in and you get a lot of beer drinking done.

Guilty!

So the way we've been running things kind of eliminates that, and whenever we get together, we know that everyone had to do their homework and is rip-rarin' ready to go, right? So it's been very interesting.

True, but do you find that because you guys are all from different locations and you have to come together, that that first show is... maybe not difficult, but it's maybe not a cohesive unit right away, or do you notice that?

To be honest, not really, just because over the past fifteen months we've done so many shows that if we haven't had a chance to be together for a few months... like over the winter we had a little break, then we won't be introducing anything new to the show, so everybody knows the songs and we can get a bit of a rehearsal in, and we maybe change bits and pieces in the order but there's no major work to be done. So the guys all know the songs and we've played them live and rehearsed enough times, that it hasn't been-- if anything it's almost been a bit of a bonus because we're not in the same room together two or three times a week, so that first time you hit the stage you kinda have that energy of the first gig of a band every time. When we get together, that first one usually goes off with a bang.

True. You get that energy of being all together. Yeah, I can see that actually. That makes a lot of sense.

And it's weird.

Yeah, but at the same time I can see what you're saying. Alright, so I have one last question for you. Like you said, you've been doing this for a long time. Try to find one tour story that you want to tell the people.

Oh boy. This one goes back to a manager I had, and where were we... We were in Europe doing an Ozzfest date. And that was pretty exciting, this was probably 2003, somewhere around there. Slayer was on the bill, and Tool was on the bill, and all these bands, and at that time it was the biggest stage I'd been on for sure. We were pretty excited to get one of the three or four opening slots. Anyone who's been in a band knows what the routine is, you get there sometime very early, and you pretty much hurry up and then wait for the rest of the day until someone says “Alright you're up, you gotta sound check” or load your gear or whatever it is. So we're there, and it's pissin' rain all day, and it didn't really bother us too much cause there was beer and all, and then we got the call to go and put our gear up, and we did. Tool at that time, I don't know if you remember or saw it, but Maynard was singing behind a screen for the whole show. So it was like a silhouette you saw of him, it was an illuminated screen and you'd see the silhouette with whatever colour they were putting up on the screen that moment, and you didn't see him the whole show, it was gigantic. So the thing was, we're there loading up our gear, checking our guitars, and all of a sudden I hear this “WHAT IN THE [expletive] DAMN ARE YOU DOING?!” just bellowed, right? It stops everybody in their tracks for like 200 metres all around. I look up, and there's our manager, she's standing in the middle of the stage, but what she doesn't realize is that she's standing on the middle of the projector screen that's just a light film that they laid out across the stage. So yeah, everyone had a pretty good howl at that, after the really big guy calmed down. That was a good one. And I will say that Tool did give us the beer from their rider after the show, so that was nice of them.

To be that big of a rock star, that you can just give the other bands your stuff.

Oh I know, hey?

One day, hopefully for the both of us right?

Yup. Exactly. You hope you can return the favor one day.

Exactly. We can all be jukebox heroes. Alright, well that was awesome! Thank you very much!

Thank you! To listen to or buy Komodo Wagon go to: www.komodowagon.bandcamp.com www.itunes.com/komodowagon For contact and inquiries: komodowagon@gmail.com