Big Ups is a post-hardcore band originally based in Brooklyn. The 10th anniversary reissue of their record Eighteen Hours of Static is out now.
Amar Lal, Brendan Finn, and Carlos Salguero are the guitarist, drummer, and bassist, respectively, of Big Ups; Greg Rutkin and Mike Caridi are the drummer and guitarist of LVL UP. Big Ups broke up in 2019, while LVL UP broke up in 2018, but this year, both bands have gotten back together for reunion shows in NYC (including Big Ups’ show at Market Hotel tomorrow, October 26). Big Ups also just reissued their record Eighteen Hours of Static for its 10 year anniversary. To celebrate, the longtime friends got together over Zoom to catch up about it all.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Amar Lal: We both just did 10 year anniversaries, right?
Greg Rutkin: Yeah, now we’re all haggard and old as fuck. [Laughs.] I wake up in the morning and you can smell the stench of death coming out of my body through my mouth.
Amar: [Laughs.] I practice the songs and my entire body aches.
Brendan Finn: I can’t even make it through a full set without standing up and walking around and going like, [groans].
Amar: What was it like for you guys, getting back together and starting to practice the songs?
Mike Caridi: It was kind of difficult to pin down times. I think we only ended up practicing four or five times, maybe, over a six month period. We just couldn’t figure out times to get together. Obviously Dave [Benton] is in New Jersey and I’m in Connecticut, and everybody’s got full time jobs, so it was kind of hard.
Greg: Yeah. But in terms of feeling, I feel like when we first got together, I was like, Oh, yeah, it’s totally normal. And then I think we all got a little scared the second or third time, like we actually hate each other or it’s not going to work out… And then it just felt totally normal and we were working. It was really nice. There were definitely moments, I think, where we were all just like, “Oh, maybe it’s not going to happen.” [Laughs.]
Mike: Yeah. There were a lot of ideas being thrown around in the early days that would have made it feel really extravagant. We were like, “We’re gonna have all these guests come up on stage and do guest solos, and there’s going to be different singers every night coming up on stage with us!” And I’m glad that we scrapped that, because I feel like we barely were able to make it through the sets as it is.
Greg: Like, who did we think we were?
Mike: I couldn’t remember how to play any of the songs. How are y’all feeling about your memory for the songs? Can you remember everything, or are you having to relearn from scratch? I had to look up some tabs…
Brendan: [Laughs.] Oh, damn.
Mike: And they weren’t right. But they got me closer, and then it ultimately kicked in from there.
Brendan: I just sent Amar tabs that somebody had made for one of our songs. Do you remember that?
Amar: Yeah, I think it was one of the first times that I’ve ever seen that. And it was for a song on the last record [2018’s Two Parts Together] that I never thought someone would want to tab out.
Mike: Did they do a good job?
Amar: They got as close as I think you could get without knowing that there’s a capo on the sixth fret.
Greg: That’s pretty good. I feel like your songs are probably really hard to tab out because — I mean, our songs, people played notes, but yours, not very often. I feel like there’s a lot of noise.
Amar: Yeah, there’s noise. There’s feedback. I had to relearn how to use my pedals, which I didn’t think would be a thing, where you’re like, OK, I have to step on this thing in this order, and then that happens… I had a funny thing where I couldn’t play a lot of the parts. I was finding it really, really hard to physically play some of them, especially the early stuff like “Grin” that’s so fast. Then I got this guitar set up for the first time since I’ve owned it, and they were like, “Your action is, like, three times higher than it should be.” And we always had this thing where we would play certain songs and it would be kind of out of tune, like on “Proximity” or “Dog Walker,” and they were like, “Yeah, so every time you go to fret a note, you’re going to push the string out of tune because it’s so high.” So they fixed that and it was like, Oh, I could have just been doing this the whole time we were a band. [Laughs.]
Greg: Like, who would have thought, setting up your instrument…? [Laughs.]
Amar: [Laughs.] What a novelty.
Greg: Mike, you were experiencing some technical difficulties at some point.
Mike: Yeah, classic. I got all new pedals for the shows, and they worked all up until the first show, and then one of them just stopped. Just the worst nightmare. But I feel the vibes still felt good. It wasn’t embarrassing. We weren’t a new band or something, and I think people didn’t mind giving us five minutes to figure it out.
Greg: And let’s be real, I feel like we were half the time OK at playing shows, and the other half really bad at it. So it’s kind of like a really authentic experience.
Brendan: [Laughs.] That’s how I feel. We had good shows, and then we had those shows where we stopped in the middle of the set so we can change a bass string and Joe [Galarraga] played the drums for a few minutes. It happened, I think, more than once.
Mike: Somebody brought up a really early LVL UP show to me the other day. It was at this place called Lily’s Pad, in New Haven. It was one of our first shows, and we were opening for Hop Along, who nobody knew about yet, and then Bomb the Music Industry!. It was a really dope show. And I remember [Nick] Corbo was rocking so hard that he pulled his entire head off of the cab and everything came to a crashing halt. It was so embarrassing because we kind of sucked back then, and nobody knew who we were anyway.
Amar: Dude, I feel like there were so many Big Ups shows like that, where it would be our biggest show yet and one of my pedals would stop working or the head would blow up. We played NYU’s Strawberry Fest with Lightning Bolt and something just stopped working in my rig. One of the pedals stopped working the first time we played Bowery Ballroom.
Brendan: I dropped a stick at a crucial point the first time we played Bowery Ballroom. And I remember after the show, this French guy coming up to me and being like, “Wow, you must be so embarrassed. I watched you drop that stick.” I was like, “Thanks, dude.”
Greg: The fucking gall that some people have. Every German show, there were, like, six people at each of them, and we’d finish and — at the Berlin show, we got off stage and some girl was just like, “Hi, nice to meet you.” I was like, “Oh, yeah, nice to meet you. How are you doing?” She was like, “That was really bad.” [Laughs.] I was like, “Yeah, I know. I know that one in particular was really bad.” And she was like, “Yeah, it was really bad.” I was like, “You don’t need to keep saying it.”
Brendan: They’re a little bit more direct over there… I will say, all the Big Ups tours that we did, no matter where it was, I think for the most part we had fun. I think our goal was pretty much always to have fun, even for the more difficult, strenuous and physically demanding shows. The four of us definitely had fun hanging out together. That was never the issue. I think the issue was just feeling homesick and not physically well, you know?
Amar: And we got better at it, too. I think early on, you’re 22 and touring and you’re like, “I don’t know how to talk to another human about my problems right now,” and everyone gets mad. But then by the end of it, it was like, “Cool, we got a day off, let’s go do this thing.” Or like, “Are you guys OK with being late to soundcheck so we can go to this spa in Budapest and feel better?”
Brendan: Yeah, we got better about communicating our individual and collective needs, I would say.
Mike: That sounds really healthy.
Amar: It took some time!
Greg: We got worse and worse. We were just so fucking miserable, when we were in Europe specifically. And honestly, all of our last tours, we were just miserable and sitting in silence and stressed.
Mike: Yeah, we had bad attitudes.
Greg: Such bad attitudes.
Mike: We took the opposite approach to you guys.
Greg: At first it was really easy. No Problems, so fun. And then it just got more and more horrible for us interpersonally — for honestly no good reason.
Mike: Our attitudes in Europe were, looking back, comically bad. We had no reason to be so upset the whole time.
Greg: We had this poor tour manager that was just dragging our asses around as we were on the verge of tears at all times.
Mike: We were like little babies.
Greg: Just such little babies. But I will say that when we started playing these shows, I was remembering all these little moments of, like, being in Germany and eating döner kebab at four in the morning on the street, and I was like, Oh, you know what? That feels like such a special experience that I got to have with these people, and I’m glad to be celebrating it. But at the time I was just like, Fuck this horrible hell.
Mike: Yeah, there were some really fun moments that I think were just so overshadowed by how sad we all were.
Greg: Yeah, it wasn’t that hard. We were just making it hard.
Mike: Well, we were on tour for nine straight weeks, so…
Amar: That’s a long time. And you’re broke and just trying to figure it out, you know?
Greg: So broke. We signed all of our publishing away in, I’m assuming, some sort of ill-advised deal, and we were just waiting, hoping that we each got, like, $3,000 in our bank account at some point while we were in Europe. I don’t think it even happened. It was just so broke. [Laughs.] And it was really fun.
Amar: It was like Type 2 fun.
Mike: What is that?
Amar: It’s something that comes up a lot out here [in California], because people are really into extreme stuff, like big backpacking trips or whatever else where you’re grinding away — Type 2 fun is where you might not be having fun in the moment, but then you look back on it and you’re like, “That was really fun.”
Brendan: The older I get, the less Type 2 fun I imagine I’ll be having. I’m not trying to put myself through anything too demanding at this point. When I was younger, sure.
Amar: That’s real. I mean, obviously life’s super different than being 20 and living at David Blaine’s The Steak House, but are there things that you’ve come back to for the anniversary where you’re like, “Why did I ever stop doing that?”
Greg: No. What do you think, Mike?
Mike: Yeah, I would say me neither. Because I feel like for me, I look back on that time, and my teens and 20s were a really good time, and there was some real highs and lows and I can romanticize it. But also, I like the things I’m doing now. I wouldn’t wanna do those things again.
Greg: Yeah. I feel like playing was really fun and satisfying. But I was like, “I don’t wanna tour.” I finally, for the first time in my life, have stability and comfort, and — wow, what a gift that is.
Mike: What about you guys? How’s it feeling?
Brendan: I would say I feel the same way. I like where I’m at. The thing that has been the hardest — and I think Amar can relate a little bit — is I just miss hanging with Carl, Amar, and Joe. I miss hanging with those guys. The fact that we all live kind of far apart now sucks. And I do think we, with all of our schedules, make an effort to hang out as much as we can. But everybody’s doing other stuff now. But I will say, having the stability of a new job and a new life, so to speak, has been kind of nice.
Amar: I do actually really miss playing live, honestly. And especially, like Brandon’s saying, playing with the three of you guys, because the chemistry that you form over that 10 years, it’s hard to make that up again.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. I’ve had that same experience, playing music with other people, and it just doesn’t feel the same.
Greg: Totally. It was really easy to get back together and play music. It felt really nice to be able to hang out with everybody. It felt pretty casual and kind of healing.
Brendan: It’s a long history. And I like that both of our bands, our histories intersect quite a bit, too. Going into this, I was thinking about when we were on the West Coast together and trying to find a hotel, and Phish was touring the same cities we were touring. Do you remember that? Every hotel and every motel was booked up by Phish fans, because they were in every city we were at.
Greg: I forgot about that. I do remember Phish from that tour, because I feel like we traded cars at some point, and I was in the front seat with you, Brendan, and I was like, “Who even listens to Phish?” And you were just like, “I listen to Phish.” And I just sat there and listened to, like, 10 Phish songs with you as I was driving. I was just like, I didn’t expect this punk drummer to love Phish. I was so surprised.
Brendan: That’s what nobody expects. Go back and look at the history of Big Ups interviews, and I’ll find a way to drop Phish in just about every single one.
Amar: Greg, you’re still in the live music world in New York. Is it still thriving? Are there places to hang? Are there still clubhouses like we had with Shea [Stadium] and Death by Audio?
Greg: I’m sure there’s millions of places and I would just not be clued in to that type of thing. You know what I mean? I’m 33, and I think that people our age are always like, “Oh, back then it was so lively and cool.” I’m just like, “I’m sure it’s still the same way. We just don’t know because we’re not cool anymore, so nobody’s going to invite us.” I’m assuming it’s there. I have no idea.
Amar: [Laughs.] Carlos—
Mike: He’s trying to jump in now?
Brendan: Last four minutes, let’s do it!
[Carlos Salguero is added to the Zoom room.]
Carlos Salguero: “This meeting is being recorded.”
Brendan: Yeah, dude, for the interview that we’ve been doing.
Greg: I was just talking about how we’re not cool and we’re all old and stuff, and you just entered the Zoom like [squints at the screen].
Carlos: [Laughs.] My hearing is legitimately terrible. It’s become sometimes an issue — like, “What? I can’t hear you, the fan is on.”
Amar: Have you guys seen that video going around that’s like, “My tinnitus is crazy.” “Yeah, girl, tonight is crazy.” [Laughs.]
Brendan: I did just find my earplugs, so I’m getting ready for the show by locating my ear protection.
Greg: That’s a huge step.
Mike: Do you guys have special surprises for your show?
Brendan: Not anything big, I don’t think. We’re just gonna play the songs. [Laughs.] Amar, is this going to boot us off in less than a minute?
Amar: Yeah, I think so.
Mike: Well, before we get booted off: love you guys!
Brendan: [Blows a kiss.]
Amar: Love you, too!
You can catch Big Ups at Market Hotel tomorrow, October 26.
