Under the influence of no influence
Hip-hop/rockers Gym Class Heroes spring from the nothingness of Geneva to the somethingness of success
Geneva’s Gym Class Heroes are going big time. The band just
finished headlining a tour, spent the whole summer playing one of the Warped
Tour main stages, and has a new album getting the big push from Atlantic. And Gym Class Heroes — McCoy, guitarist Disashi Lumumba-Kasongo, bassist
Eric Roberts, and drummer Matt McGinley — have a lot of friends. A lot.
The band’s MySpace page boasts 197,478 friends.
“Yeah, it’s kinda disgusting,” says frontman
Travis McCoy, through cell phone static in New York City. “It’s funny because I’ll leave
the country for like a week or there’s times we’ll be on the road and internet
access is few and far between, and I’ll have like 2,500 friend requests. And
kids actually get pissed off when you don’t add ’em.
I don’t have time to sift through all of them. It’s funny how personal people
take it.”
McCoy tackles the
phenomenon on the band’s new record As
Cruel As School Children with the song “New Friend
Request.”
“It’s pretty much an
observation that MySpace is such a big part of
everyday life as far as keeping in touch with fans,” he says. “It’s an awesome
platform for music. There’s definitely other websites that have been crucial in
building our fan base, but MySpace has done a lot for
us.”
The GCH fan base is
definitely growing but McCoy is somewhat skeptical if all requests are from
true fans. Motorhead’sLemmy
once wondered aloud if all that fans that had the T-shirt had actually bought
the record. McCoy suggests they put their money where their mouth is.
“That’ll be my new
thing,” he says. You wanna be my friend? Then buy a fuckin’ record.”
McCoy, now 25,
and his band have been together since they were 15 growing up in Geneva. He credits the
band’s foray into music on the nothingness surrounding them. No influence
proved to be their influence.
“What helped us
nurture and mold the sound we have now is the fact that, coming from upstate New York, there’s not
much of a music scene,” says McCoy. “And there definitely wasn’t anything in Geneva. When there is a
huge thriving music scene a lot of the bands that come out of that area sound
the same ’cause they’re influenced by each other. And it was the opposite for
us because there wasn’t much for us to draw from. So we pulled influences from
the music we were listening to.”
In the beginning
these influences clashed slightly; there was no real cohesiveness or specific
sound. It was more of a gym class free-for-all.
“Earlier on it was
like ‘This is gonna be our
hip-hop song, this is gonna be our rock song, this is
gonna be our jazzy funkier song,'” McCoy says. “But
then as we progressed it all became an amalgamation and everything kinda blended together and we started making songs that
dynamically had elements of all that shit.”
Those various
elements became evident in the band’s growing fan base. It awes McCoy.
“The beauty of it all
is you can’t really put a face on a GCH fan,” he says. “They come from all
walks of life. It’s funny; we just finished a headline tour and there were
times during the set where I would just have to stop and in my head [think],
‘We’re breaking ground.’ I’m looking at the faces and there’s
hip-hop kids, indie kids, emo
kids, there’s moms. It’s crazy. Not
to toot my own horn but there’s not a lot of bands that can do that. We have
something really special.”
Sure, there’s the band’s catchy hip-hop/rock hybrid and lyrical humor. But that something special
has got to be the band’s use of melody. You remember melody, don’t you?
“Everybody thinks
they’re a rapper nowadays so I have to up the ante a little bit,” McCoy says.
“I feel like a lot of times rappers are afraid of melodies. Guys like 50 Cent,
they’re trying but it’s like, dude, just let loose. I
used to hate my singing voice. Hall
& Oates is one of my all time favorite groups; I listen to them all the
time and I think that kinda helped me get a little
more comfortable with my voice. I think melodies can make a song legendary.”
But that ain’t all.
“Melodies definitely
get you the girls,” McCoy says.
Gym Class Heroes play
with All-American Rejects, The Format, and The Starting Line Monday, November 6, at The Auditorium Theatre
(note venue change), 875 East Main
Street, 232-1900, 7:30 p.m., $26.50. 232-1900. General admission show; first-come, first-served.www.gymclassheroes.com or www.myspace.com/gymclassheroes.
This article appears in Nov 1-7, 2006.
