Interview with Jamie Jasta

Is that what separates Hardcore from Metal.? A lot of people listen to you and consider you a Metal band.

Jamie- The only thing that separates Hardcore from Metal is that whole, "You could the guy in the band", thing. Where as Metal you have leather pants, the lights, the smoke, and the hair and the braided beards and stuff like that. Hardcore is stripped down. It's more about the music rather than the imagery of the people.

What was it like touring with Slayer?

Jamie- It was great. Best tour we've ever done. It was cool because so many of our fans came out to represent for us and we had gained a lot of Slayer fans from the Tattoo the Earth Tour. We had the best of both worlds. We were gaining new fans every night and we had our fans coming our to support us. We were going out there and just destroying it. We were having huge pits and sing alongs. It was surprising for us.

Now I've heard a lot of rumors about your tour with Motorhead and Dropkick about two years ago. You were supposed to come here (DC) but you guys and Dropkick dropped off of the tour. There were rumors about someone getting into a fight with Lemmy…

Jamie- Oh, no, there was an argument over some bullshit like, Dropkick had an argument over the time we were going to play at or where we were going to be able to set up on the stage, just different things. Both of us, at the time, we don't really need to open for Motorhead. They're a great band, they're huge, but both us and Dropkicks have our own fans. I think that's pretty much why we canceled that show. It was like we weren't going to get paid, there was this long, out of the way drive to deal with all this hassle. I can't really remember what the exact reasons were. Nobody had a fight with Lemmy. Lemmy was totally cool, the whole band was the whole tour. It was more along the lines of their road people demanding certain things of us that weren't that cool.

What happened with the Victory split? Why did you guys leave?

Jamie- Basically because we weren't getting any support on the road. We didn't have anything to show after years of selling records and touring. It was one of those things where all of our nightmares had started to come true. All the bad stories we heard from some of the other bands started happening to us. We just told them, "You're not getting another record." Luckily, Universal bought out our contract and it's all behind us. It actually worked out for the best. I've never had so much positive feedback come from a bad situation. We were real worried that a lot of kids were going to go ,"Oh, they're off Victory, they're on a major," but we've had more positive feedback then I ever could have imagined. That's why it took so long for this record to come out because it was one of those things where we wanted to keep selling records, we wanted to keep touring, we wanted to have our records in stores but it was never going to happen with Victory. Now you can't throw a dime and not hit a Hatebreed CD, it's everywhere. It's in Target, it's in Best Buy. If you go to like, Montana, that's where kids buy their records. It's important for us to have distribution rather than a label that's not really worried about their bands

As you guys get older and grow, are we going to see any Rap or Emo style vocals on your records?

Jamie- Oh, no. That's what's cool about our deal with Universal. They don't want to change anything. They want us to do what we do and they just want to put the CD in stores. That's what we want to do. We want to pave our own way and do our own thing. I check our fan mail everyday, our email everyday, and Hatebreed.com and you got so many kids who don't have our CD yet saying they think it's going to be this or it's going to be that. You'd have to be completely ignorant, if you've seen this band, or know what we're about to think that we're going to fix something that isn't broken. Then there are people who've heard the record who say, "Oh, it's the same Hatebreed, there's no progression." Well that's what our fans want. Just like when I hear a Slayer record, I don't want to hear Slipknot, I want to hear Slayer. We're just trying to do what we want to do and stay true to ourselves and at the same time stay true to the people who have gotten us to this point.

In defense of some of your critics, Earth Crisis scared a lot of people…

Jamie- I know, everybody always says Earth Crisis, and VOD, and you know, Sick of it All is Punk Rock now and all this stuff. I don't know, I can't speak for any of those bands. They're my friends, they're all great people but we've always said that we don't want to compared to any other bands. We always just wanted to forge our own path. I want people to have faith in us.

Going back to your first record, you have a song called, "Kill an Addict." Is it safe to say that you're violently opposed to drug use?

Jamie- No, no, it's nothing like that. It's about a family member who basically deteriorated to the point where our blood, our relationship had nothing. There was nothing there. They made a choice, it was drugs or family and they chose drugs. It's just an extreme title for an extreme song. There were points in time where I wanted to kill this person so I wrote this song. We got a lot of flack for it in Europe. Everybody takes everything so literally over there. Every interviewer asked me about it. It's not like we're some militant straight-edged band that's saying go out and kill addicts. It's sad when it [drug use] gets to the point where drugs become the only reason people live. Sometimes I feel like a cold heartless person and say if you don't want to be alive and just do drugs then why don't you just kill yourself. It's sad but sometimes everyone else would be better off if they didn't have such a terrible thing to deal with. I've seen people who've just wasted their talent, just total wastes of life.

What do you think of all these bands, like the Dead Kennedys going on tour without Jello, or the Misfits or even Samhain, when you did that tour or the Sex Pistols re-uniting and going out on the road?

Jamie- I don't know. It's weird, I mean, you don't know the inner workings of these bands. Who does what or who feels what. I can see with Danzig why he wanted to do that. People loved it. The Dead Kennedys, I don't really see how they could do it without the singer. I think the singer is pretty important. I saw Suicidal without all the original members and it was weird but it was still Suicidal because Mike Muir was there. I've seen the Misfits without Danzig, and I've seen them with just Jerry Only which was really weird but I can't knock it because who knows, I could be one of these people fifteen years from now playing with a bunch of 17 year old kids as a backing band.

What do you want people to look back and say about Hatebreed when you're done?

Jamie- That we defied the standards of what a Hardcore band should be. That we stayed true to ourselves and our sound and our message.