Interview: Hot Water Music’s Jason Black on the origins and legacy of No Division and Caution

Hard as it may be for many bearded punks to fathom, Gainesville, Florida’s Hot Water Music have been a band for 25 years now. To celebrate the occasion, the band (guitarists/vocalists Chuck Ragan and Chris Wollard, bassist Jason Black and drummer George Rebelo) have been performing their albums No Division and Caution in full over two nights in various cities around the globe, with Canada’s own Chris Cresswell of The Flatliners filling in for Chris Wollard on the road. That tour hits Montreal’s Corona Theatre on January 29 (No Division) and January 30 (Caution) with Cancer Bats and The Fullblast. The band then make their way to Toronto’s Phoenix Concert Theatre on January 31 (No Division) and February 1 (Caution). Tickets for the Montreal shows are available here, and Toronto tickets are here.

We caught up with affable Hot Water Music bassist Jason Black to discuss the origins and the enduring impact of the two records, how the full album tour came about, and what’s up next for the greatest FLA export since oranges and the Flordia Man memes. For all upcoming tour dates head over to the official Hot Water Music site.

Bad Feeling Mag: How did you settle on performing these two albums in full for the anniversary shows?
Jason Black: I feel like it was sort of a whim really. [Laughs] Not necessarily the shows in general, but to do the records we literally just threw up a total off-the-cuff Twitter poll, like, “What records would you want to see us play?” And those were the two that won. So it was like, OK, now we have that information. We didn’t plan on doing anything with it! [Laughs]

How do you feel about these full album shows in general? Is there a particular record you’d really like to see performed live?
I mean Failure is doing some really good ones right now, but I also would just go see Failure and they would play a bunch of songs I loved anyway and I wouldn’t be mad.

Actually, yeah; I have missed all of them so far, but if The Cure do Disintegration in the States, or kind of anything in the States, I will fly to go to that. And when they play they play like three and a half hours, and all their albums are awesome. They’re my favourite band too, so that also helps. But they’re a very album-centric band. Where there are a lot of bands that I love where I don’t care if they play their record from front to back or not, ’cause I feel like most people’s records have like three songs I don’t like on ’em, including ours. You can never get ’em all to be as good as each other. There’s the dreaded track seven or whatever.

No Division was the first Hot Water Music record I heard, and seemed to make a big impact at the time; did it seem like a big jump forward for the band?
It was on a lot of levels for us. It was the first time that we went away to record in a studio. We recorded the album all at once instead of in fits and starts and stops. We went to Richmond, so we left town. Walter Schreifels (Quicksand, Gorilla Biscuits) produced it, we had signed to Some [Records], and they had given us enough money to make a record with, which was very different than especially No Idea. I mean, Doghouse gave us enough money to make a record for Forever and Counting, we just didn’t know what the hell we were doing. So this time around it was nice, we went to a studio and spent maybe two, two and a half weeks and really recorded an album, front to back.

And then I think that Some was the first label that really…right when that record came out those dudes were really going for it, and they helped push to get us on Warped Tour and they got us on the Sick of It All / AFI tour, and those were two things — Warped Tour then, I think was very helpful for us. And the Sick of It All / AFI tour is still one of my favourite tours we’ve ever done, and that was a really cool show to be a part of.

That introduced the band to a lot of people on the East Coast as well.
Definitely. It did because that was such…there were a couple of rough shows, but still — I feel like this is kind of coming back around — but we would play tons of shows with hardcore bands. And more pop-punk bands. And more quote-unquote “emo” bands or whatever. The only bands we never really played much with were indie bands because we were a little bit too heavy-ish for that or ham-handed. So you could mix up bills like that and it was cool. It wasn’t like a bill of seven of the same kind of bands.

And I think that kind of held true for Warped Tour back then too, because the first year we did it was like, Avail, Snapcase, Good Riddance, Lagwagon. I think Weezer was on it for a little bit. And maybe Green Day was on it for a little bit, those were the big bands. And that’s when Green Day was failing, so it wasn’t even that big of a deal. That was a cool tour, it was a lot of fun. And then a few years later I did it with Senses Fail like in the late 2000s, and it was like…I don’t know how a band could make it happen on that now. It’s literally just people showing up to watch the band they already want to see anyway, not that it’s still a tour anymore. There also was only four stages then, instead of like, eight. So it was pretty easy to catch a lot of stuff I felt like.

“Constructive criticism was frowned upon in our camp at the time.”

Caution is your second record for Epitaph, and this is when the band really starts getting on some huge tours; what was that period leading up to the record like?
It was cool, when Brett [Gurewitz, Epitaph Records owner] originally approached us on Warped Tour, this is ’99 or 2000, it was hard for us to think about signing to Epitaph because mentally the image we had, which was still pretty accurate then, was like, Pennywise. No offence to any of those bands or any of those people that dig that stuff, but it was like, that’s not really what we’re going for.

But right about then Brett had just bought a lot of the Burning Heart Records, and put out the Refused album [The Shape of Punk to Come], and had just started Anti- and put out the Tom Waits record. And we were like, “Hmm, I don’t know, maybe this place is cooler than we thought it was.”[Laughs] And I’m super happy we did it, because they’re all such awesome people, and have continued to be a really cool label the whole time. So yeah, that was the introduction to being able to tour overseas on a regular basis and have people working for the label over there. That was a big part in us signing to Epitaph as well, is that they had, and still do, an entire European label and office. We had started going to Germany once or twice a year, and it felt like it was cool and maybe people like us here, to having an actual kind of infrastructure over there was super important to us as well.

You worked with producer Brian McTernan again for Caution; how did he influence those records you did with him? What was that relationship like?
It depends on who you ask. I’m still really good friends with Brian. There’s no hard feelings or bad vibes or anything, but those were challenging records. That was the first time that anyone showed up and said, “You’re doing it wrong.” Which none of us really took very well. [Laughs] Constructive criticism was frowned upon in our camp at the time. It was a little rough, like, “How about this drum fill, or this note, you’re out of time on the guitar.” Just performance things that…we were young kids that didn’t want to hear that. But the man was not wrong about any of it, I don’t think. And actually, his new band [Be Well] is playing with us in Boston for a few shows.

“We wouldn’t go play album shows for ourselves, I’ll put it to you that way!”

That was the first, like…you hear the stories of, “We made this record and it was a real challenge.” And yeah, those ones were hard. Caution, not so much as [A Flight and a Crash], because we had already gone through the super painful process of, OK, now we’re all friends and we know what’s going on and how to do this. But yeah, Flight was a tough start for sure.

Is there anything that stands out from all the shows you’ve played in Montreal over the years?
I feel like we’ve always had a tortured relationship with Canada. Not like in a bad way. Canada likes us just fine. We’re not huge up there but the shows are totally good, so we’re never there as much as other people are. Montreal specifically, we just used to play at the Rasta place [NDG’s long-defunct Rainbow] all the time. I loved that place! That place was so cool. That was Montreal to me. That alley, and that place, that was the entire city to me for like ten years at least. That was the first time we played a show with Buried Alive, which is how we met Scott Vogel, who we’re still friends with to this day. So there’s some history to the Rasta house in Montreal. We just did a show with Terror in Brazil.

What are the band’s plans after these anniversary shows? Anything you can let us in on?
These all sort of wrap up in March. We started doing them a year ago, so we still technically have a little bit of time on the clock if you want to count like, first show anniversary stuff. As it is now, those are the last album shows that we have planned. And I feel like we’ll probably move on, at least from these albums, for a minute. I mean maybe we could be convinced to do some other ones, but I think we’d rather write a new one first. It’s a lot of work to learn some of these songs. You take a record like the new one, I bet we’ve played like three of those songs live. I could see maybe Flight or Exister shows happening because those two records also seem pretty favourable to people. [Laughs] We wouldn’t go play album shows for ourselves, I’ll put it to you that way!

Hot Water Music brings their 25th-anniversary tour to Montreal’s Corona Theatre on January 29 (No Division) and January 30 (Caution) with Cancer Bats and The Fullblast. The band then make their way to Toronto’s Phoenix Concert Theatre on January 31 (No Division) and February 1 (Caution). Tickets for the Montreal shows are available here, and Toronto tickets are here.