Michael Hann 

The Gaslight Anthem: ‘Fans look up to us. That’s creepy’

The one-time New Jersey punks have hit the big time with their brand of nostalgia-tinged rock. But they are ill at ease with their fame
  
  

The Gaslight Anthem <em>(l to r)</em> Alex Rosamilia, Brian Fallon, Alex Levine and Benny Horowitz.
The Gaslight Anthem (l to r) Alex Rosamilia, Brian Fallon, Alex Levine and Benny Horowitz. Photograph: Danny Clinch Photograph: Danny Clinch

The girls in the front row at the Middle East in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are gazing up at Brian Fallon, singing every word back at him. They were queueing outside in the heat by lunchtime to get these spots, and nothing will budge them. They look to be in their mid-teens – they have the wristbands to signify to the bar staff that they should not be sold alcohol – and they are truly, madly, deeply in love. The pretty girl with the red vest and the brunette bob in the very centre is acting out the lyrics, using only her facial muscles. You can all but hear her thoughts: Oh, Brian! If you were mine your heart would be made whole!

The object of her affections stands and sweats, tattoos down his arms and up his neck. He is shortish and slightly stocky, a scrubby ginger beard covering his prominent chin. But the Gaslight Anthem's looks are not what have attracted the front-row girls. They are here for the bruised romanticism of Fallon's lyrics, for the wounded lover they imagine him to be.

And as the Gaslight Anthem, unusually for a straightahead rock band, get bigger and bigger and bigger – their fourth album, Handwritten, entered the UK charts at No 2 and the US charts at No 3 – so Fallon finds the expectations and demands of their fans more and more difficult to meet. As guitarist Alex Rosamilia explains in the cool of their tourbus earlier that day: "We come from that school where we don't believe we're different from you and it's insulting to me on some kind of weird level that musicians are put on a pedestal."

"You were born with that talent," Fallon expands. "The best thing you could ever say to your credit is you refined it a little. Fans look up to us and that's creepy. It's kind of this huge thing of idolising and hero worship and – people say – religious experience. But they crucified Jesus! They shot John Lennon! I'm not looking for that kind of thing, I'm not into this." He laughs, to show he is not comparing himself to Jesus, and blows cigarette smoke out of the bus window.

The we're-the-same-as-you attitude comes from Gaslight's roots in the New Jersey punk scene, among bands such as Hot Water Music and Bouncing Souls. All four members, bar bassist Alex Levine – Fallon's brother-in-law, who was signed up because he was reliable and was taught to play his instrument by Fallon – had bounced around groups, and forming Gaslight in 2006 was more or less their last shot.

From the start, though, Fallon had a goal. "I had a five-year plan," he says, "to get to 500-seat venues and tour by ourselves and fill a room everywhere we go. I figured we could make a living off that. As long as you buy nothing stupid, you'll be OK."

Talk to Fallon's bandmates, or to other musicians who know him, and almost the first thing that gets mentioned is how driven he is. "Brian always had pretty grand expectations of what we could do," says Benny Horowitz, Gaslight's drummer and commercial conscience. "I'm a realist and kind of a curmudgeon, and in retrospect I think it's been good in both ways: we didn't go too far, too fast, which I can give myself some credit for, and at the same time if I was running the band we wouldn't have gone as far as we have. I'm grateful Brian had that headspace. I would have let my punk rock and white-guilt scruples hold us back too much."

Horowitz's punk rock scruples come from his teenage years, from playing in bands and putting on shows while he was meant to be in high school. "I really fell in love with the local scene and when I became a promoter it was really cool. You'd get a great seven inch that you loved, and either someone from the band or someone from the label's phone number was on the insert. You'd call and be: 'I book this Elks' Lodge in New Jersey and I see you're touring. Can I offer you this much to come?' I was 15 years old. They were the days before contracts, when everything was: 'We'll come, just give us a fair percentage off the door.' If you made a lot of money, you gave the band as much as you could. If you didn't make any: 'Here's enough for gas, I made you guys food, I got you a place to stay, and that's the deal."

His key tools were a notebook with a thousand or so phone numbers, a pager and a payphone dialler. "They were old pocket organisers that you could fuck with and somehow they'd mock the sound of change dropping into a payphone. So you'd dial the number and hear: 'Please deposit $2.25.' Then you'd hold the speaker up to the earpiece and press the quarter button nine times and that was it. I sat at this Quick Chek by my house for hours and hours and hours booking shows."

By contrast, music took Rosamilia not out of the house, but down to the basement, where he'd sit and experiment on the four-track recorder he had bought with savings from his first job. "That was really all I did throughout high school. I just recorded music by myself. In the basement. Sad little kid. I remember being obsessed with the recording process: how did they get it to sound like that? And by how moving the microphone further away changed the way it sounded. None of it sounded any good. I remember reading the liner notes from Pretty Hate Machine [by Nine Inch Nails] and it said: 'All songs written, arranged and performed by Trent Reznor', and I'm like: If he can do that by himself, I can do it by myself. I can imagine my mom wondering what was going on, me screaming in the basement with headphones on."

For Rosamilia, music was an escape from a wretched experience at a private high school, which he began the summer after his father left home. "The guy who's supposed to teach you how to shave and tie your tie and all that – he left. And now I had to go to a school where I had to tie a tie every day and I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I didn't mesh well with the other kids. I had one little table that everyone else in the school made fun of, and those were my friends for high school."

"We were the depression-era kids," is how Fallon puts it. "Not depression like in the 30s – but when they discovered kids were depressed and they need to take Ritalin. We were the kids that were like: 'This sucks, man. Everything sucks. This isn't a party. I'm getting beat up in high school.' People see us as more jubilant, but if you really read what's on the page it's not very jubilant."

Fallon's drive was apparent when he was a teenager. "I did the coffee house thing – we have coffee houses where people play, or we used to – and when I was 14 I started there. Just played all the time. Every weekend I had a show, or every Thursday. Open-mic nights, the whole thing. I was playing and playing and playing because I knew I had something that I had to be refining. People always refer to us as nostalgic, but I'm not nostalgic for anything. I'm happy to be here. The writing is about youth because there was no youth – I didn't go out and get wasted and go to parties, because I was trying to learn songs and write them so I could go to the coffee house and play."

People see the nostalgia in Fallon's lyrics, with their array of heartland America reference points, their embrace of a cultural iconography that stretches from the 50s to the 70s (their breakthrough album, from 2007, was called The '59 Sound). They draw it, too, from the chug of a band content to let guitar, bass and drums do the work, a band endorsed by Bruce Springsteen, a band that covers Tom Petty. To supporters, it all makes Gaslight a great American rock'n'roll group; to detractors it makes them the Emo Street Band, with words thrown together from a Classic Rock Lyrics Fridge Magnet set. Fallon tries not to take either group too seriously. "I have this expression that I love: it's not your band. If I wrote a book it would be called one of two things: They're Not Your Friends or It's Not Your Band."

This time around, Fallon's got a little less specific, a little less rooted in writing about everyman experiences. It wouldn't be true any more, he says, and nothing matters to him more than honesty – despite the way he throws up his hands in horror and pulls a face when I suggest what he sells is sincerity. "I'm not really your everyman any more, and I started feeling like that was a bit of a sham," he says. "I did live that, but I'm not that guy [any more]. I have to write about different things."

The references to old records and singers and films, though, aren't just casual shout-outs. "I realised that everyone has to know where we come from," Fallon says. "They've got to know we're on this side, that our line is here, this is the line in the sand. We're not with you and we're not with you – we're with these people. I was really obsessed with defining where we came from and separating ourselves from everyone else. Rappers did that – A Tribe Called Quest did that, talking about Michael Jackson and a lot of other artists, and they were letting you know: This is where we stand. That was the only thing out of hip-hop music that I took and brought into our thing."

The thing took a little while to get going. Their first gig was up the road from their hometown of New Brunswick, New Jersey, early in 2006, in a town called Somerville. "It was at The Only Game in Town," Rosamilia remembers. "A place where people go to play Warhammer and magic stuff."

"They sell comic books in the front," Fallon says. "There were maybe 50 people there." And how many were friends? "Thirty," Rosamilia reckons. "A decent chunk."

"I remember somebody telling me that day: 'You guys are gonna be huge,'" Fallon says. "I was like: 'What are you talking about? Did you see that show?' It wasn't great, you know."

But Horowitz, using his old contacts as a teenage hardcore punk promoter to set up Gaslight shows, was soon starting to hear the same things. For the first time, getting gigs wasn't like pulling teeth, or the result of calling in favours. "This was: 'Dude, this is good.' They weren't just yanking me off this time and I saw an opportunity I had never seen before." For Horowitz, the moment when that opportunity finally and definitively knocked was in October 2007, at Fest, a punk and hardcore event in Gainesville, Florida. "Up to that point we were starting to gain traction, but nothing big. Then we went to that place and it was a lot of people in the same place for once. We played a show there that was just nuts. We packed this bar in the middle of the afternoon, probably 200 or 300 people, and people knew the words."

Tonight at the Middle East the crowd all know the words, from the teenage girls at the front, through the boys with tattoos bouncing on their feet in the middle, to the older guys at the back. Fallon is solicitous but firm, telling one crowdsurfer to stop, and that if he's unhappy he can have a refund. He points out to a beer-thrower that he is a non-drinker and is no happier about being drenched in alcohol than a vegetarian would be to have meat thrown over them. And he and the band do not let up for the duration of their set.

After 90 minutes onstage, condensation dripping from the low roof, the Gaslight Anthem retreat up the back stairs and out into the hot, close night. They walk to their tour bus and board it, open cold drinks and wind down for a minute. Then Fallon pulls his pack of smokes from his pocket and pulls the bus door open to reveal those teenage girls from the front row. "OK," he says to the rest of the band, who aren't leaving their seats. "Time for me to sign some autographs."

Handwritten is out now on Mercury. The Gaslight Anthem play the Leeds festival on 24 August and the Reading festival on 26 August. They tour the UK in October. Details: thegaslightanthem.com/tour. Michael Hann's trip to Massachusetts was paid for by Mercury Records.

 

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