Utter Trash--PB Army

Turning Over a New Leaf

An interview with Keith Bergman of PB Army

By Bob Ignizio

l to r: Mahlon Orrin, Keith Bergman, and Micah Shamborske)

There are a lot of obstacles in the way for an up and coming rock band. But Toledo based hard rock band PB Army (drummer/vocalist Keith Bergman, guitarist Micah Shamborske and bass player Mahlon Orrin) couldn’t possibly have expected vocalist/drummer Keith Bergman almost dying from an aortic dissection to be one of them. After recovering, Keith returned to his band with a new outlook on life. The result was PB Army’s new album on Sin Klub records, ‘Spine for the Snapback’. It’s a collection of seventies style power riffs and catchy hooks that more than proves there’s still some life left in both Keith and the stoner rock genre. As the old saying, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Utter Trash: You recently had some serious medical problems that you recovered from. How did that affect your outlook on life?
Keith Bergman: I had an aortic dissection. Basically I had sort of a bubble in my aorta which, had it burst, I wouldn’t be here. It was pretty much a crapshoot if I was going to make it or not. But I had open heart surgery a little over a year ago. It’s a cliché to say, but it definitely makes you appreciate everything. Every show I’ve played since that surgery has felt great. Even just practicing and writing songs feels like an amazing privilege now as opposed to something that I’m just doing to kill time or as a hobby. When I got out of the hospital I could barely even walk up a flight of steps without being too tired to go on. At that time the thought of playing drums, loading in equipment and going on road trips, just seemed like it was never going to happen again. In the past, I definitely took a lot of things for granted, and I don’t think that’s going to happen anymore.

UT: So did you get any songs out of the experience?
KB: Yeah, although it’s probably not the one you would think. “A Temporary Absence” is the one that’s all about the ordeal. But looking back, a few of the songs have references to it. Like “A Hole in the New Leaf” starts out with the line “I do not recognize this heart”, and I wrote that about a year before this happened. Looking back now it seems kind of foreboding. I don’t know if subconsciously I knew something was wrong, because as far as they can tell my condition was a birth defect that could have blown up at any time. And I don’t know if my body knew that, but if you think too much about stuff like that you just end up sitting in a corner all day. And there’s a couple other songs coming up that touch on my changed outlook. I don’t want it to be an “up with people” kind of thing where I’m singing about how everyone should change their life, like some James Hettfield therapy session. But everything I write is always autobiographical.

UT: How did the band get together?
KB: I was in a band with Micah, our guitar player, back in the nineties. It was kind of a joke band called Chicken Dog. We put a CD out in 1997, got to do a bunch of fun stuff. But it was a pretty terrible band, but we had a lot of fun. We opened for Kid Rock a few times before he got big. That eventually fell apart and we took a few years off from playing in bands. I started a record store, he got a job at a community college and started learning recording and stuff like that. We still went to a lot of shows, and one of these shows there were a lot of bands that frankly weren’t that exciting. On the way back we got to talking about what we’d do if we were still in bands, and kind of gradually talked ourselves back into it. We started playing shows in late spring or early summer of 2001, and got Mahlon, our current bass player, in December of 2001. We recorded the first album after he joined, and everything has been rolling ever since.

UT: You obviously have a seventies rock influence in your sound. What is it about that era that appeals to you, and that’s maybe missing from some of the modern rock bands today?
KB: I think just the fact that the bands then were more real. You didn’t have as much opportunity to fake it in the studio. And I think eccentricity was a little more tolerated. You know, now Black Sabbath sounds pretty familiar to us. But when those first Black Sabbath albums came out that had to blow people’s doors off. Even stuff that isn’t heavy. Like you look at something like Mungo Jerry that’s really off the wall shit, and they’re on a major label and touring. It just seemed like there was more room for different things. Everything wasn’t so homogenized. And I know it wasn’t all like that. There’s definitely a filter of nostalgia. But I think a lot of the stuff that came out during that time has stood the test of time.

UT: Any bands in particular that influenced you?
KB: One of the bands that personally influenced me as a songwriter was Devo, which may not come across. But just the way that they put their lyrics together and the way Mark Mothersbaugh phrases when he sings, I can think that way. It makes sense to me when I listen to it. And that’s how I approach it as well. Lyrically Bad Religion was a big influence. They were one of the first bands I heard that were angry and aggressive, and yet they were still melodic and they were literate. It wasn’t just rhyming “please” and “knees”, they could actually get a point across. And of course a lot of the usual suspects. Sabbath and different bands like that. I would definitely say Bill Ward is a favorite drummer of mine. As far as writing goes, another one of my favorite bands is Faith No More, a band that basically could do and did whatever they wanted.

UT: What do you like about touring?
KB: Basically the adventure of it. Getting to play every night is awesome, and getting to drive around and see places I probably wouldn’t have seen. Meeting weird people. I’m all about road trips and checking out strange places and small towns. You can focus on just being a musician for that little span of time.

UT: How would you describe the progression of the band from your first album to this new now, ‘Spine for the Snapback’?
KB: I think we’ve gotten better at playing and better at playing together. We’ve gotten a little more intuitive as far as writing. When we write, we know where to leave each other room for things. I think the songs overall are a lot better and more memorable than on the first album.

UT: What’s your favorite track on the album?
KB: “A Hole in the New Leaf”. I like it lyrically, musically, and arrangement wise. It sort of encapsulates what we’re about in a three minute song. We’re actually going to do a video for it.

UT: Now you also do a website called Infernal Combustion, which is sort of like ‘The Onion’ for the heavy metal and hard rock scene. Has anything you’ve written on there ever come back to hurt PB Army?
KB: It’s actually been the opposite. We’ve made a lot of friends and contacts through Infernal Combustion. It’s definitely increased my profile, and I’m shameless about using that to help the band. I started Infernal Combustion with a friend of mine back in 1999. The guy who runs Blabbermouth, which is hosted by Roadrunner Records, put me in touch with them because he was a fan and wanted to see if I could get a similar deal to his, where Roadrunner would host the site and design the web pages, and I’d just upload the stories. And so we did that a couple years ago, which confused a lot of the long time readers who thought we’d sell out and stop making fun of Roadrunner bands.

UT: What are your plans for releasing the new CD, ‘Spine for the Snap Back’?
KB: It’s coming out through Sin Klub records. I’d like to see the next album come out on a bigger label, though.

UT: How would you describe the Toledo scene right now?
KB: There’s a lot of good bands, but it seems like only recently. I’ve been here in bands since around 1995, and it’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve really see a “scene” developing. A little bit of camaraderie, bands that are actually good and working together for the good of everybody. It used to be kind of competitive and sniping. Dealing with the other bands in the area was just an unpleasant reality as opposed to something you’d want to do. What you have now are people who are in it for the right reasons, and they really love what they do. There’s some really good bands, and I think the makings of a good regional scene.

UT: Tell me a bit about the song “Ashtabula”.
KB: It’s about growing up in a small nowhere town in Ohio. You’ve got the people who get out as soon as they can, and then you’ve got the people who graduate from high school and go into a 40 year holding pattern. They marry someone from school, have kids, and live three blocks from their parents and never really see anything different. There’s no desire for a lot of those people to expand their horizons beyond that. And it seems like you go back, and the towns have a sort of sucking effect. I felt really relieved when I got out of where I was when I was a kid. It was such an isolated town, and during the time being into heavy metal and stuff like that you were definitely an outcast. And I know when I go back I always feel this kind of dread like they’re going to try to make me stay.