NO MOTIV
Interview with Max McDonald (guitar) and Roger Camero (drums)
By Leah Weinberg
“The Andrew W.K. tour was the moment where we were all just like, ‘I think we need to reassess our lives a little bit,’ and hence our long break,” recalls NO MOTIV drummer Roger Camero. The band jokes that Andrew W.K. is the reason the California quartet called it quits (at least temporarily). They are kidding, of course. Well, sort of.
1995 saw the birth of NO MOTIV in Oxnard, California, with founding members Jeremy Palaszewski (vocals, guitar), Max McDonald (guitar), Camero (then the band’s bassist) and Pat Pedraza (drums). By 1998, the band had signed to Vagrant Records and then dropped its third album (after two releases on Edge Records), And the Sadness Prevails… in 1999. NO MOTIV’s sophomore effort for Vagrant, Diagram for Healing, came out in 2001 during the pop-punk boom and garnered the band a healthy following with catchy tracks like “Celebrate” and “To the Roots.” After touring on Diagram for Healing, the guys took a little break before starting the writing process for 2004’s Daylight Breaking, during which time Pedraza left the band, Camero rotated over to drums and current bassist Jeff Hershey came on board.
The sound on Daylight Breaking was a departure from the more melodic punk NO MOTIV had been producing to date, and the darker rock vibe on the album began to separate NO MOTIV from its punk counterparts. As a result, Vagrant thought it would be a good idea to diversify the tours the band played on and put the guys on the road for a couple of outings with FINGER ELEVEN. While they got along swimmingly with the members of FINGER ELEVEN, the audiences at the hard rock shows were not as easy to contend with. NO MOTIV’s music was too different from the dirt rock tunes of Finger Eleven and the band failed to connect with audiences on the tour. After the FINGER ELEVEN tours and some less successful headlining gigs, the guys went on tour with Andrew W.K., who selected a mish mash of bands from various genres to open for him. Though Andrew W.K. was awesome, the crowds’ reactions to NO MOTIV was not, and the guys decided to hit the brakes for a while. “I feel like we’re one of those bands where we let our surroundings and our feelings get to us a little too easily,” explains Camero. “And that’s why you would see breaks in between tours and records. I think we crumbled to our own personal view of what we were doing so much.”
A formal announcement about the band’s fate was never made, though McDonald admits that he did phone Vagrant head Rich Egan to tell him that the band was calling it quits. Fast forward several years and today the members of NO MOTIV are all involved in their own musical endeavors and are maintaining various day jobs.
But they could not stay quiet forever. This past summer, the band started up a Facebook page and announced the release of a new EP, coupled with a solitary reunion show. Fans began hoping that a full-length and proper tour would follow. But even before the reunion show, McDonald was clear that fans shouldn’t get their hopes up. “There are definitely no plans for re-banding and trying to conquer the world again or anything like that,” he reiterates. “It’s really casual. It’s going to be really fun to get back together and see where it goes and just for one day not take it so seriously. That might actually work to our benefit. We’ll be able to play a show, have fun and just walk away.”
On August 19, NO MOTIV headlined a show next door to Oxnard in Ventura, California. It marked the first time in over a year that Palaszewski, McDonald, Hershey and Camero had shared a stage together (and the first time in several years they had been on stage as NO MOTIV), the last time being at one of McDonald’s shows where Hershey and Camero were playing back up and Palaszewski came out to perform one of McDonald’s songs. Comfortable with their ability to pick up the old songs pretty easily, the guys had a limited number of rehearsals beforehand. Even so, the show went off without a hitch.
The timing of the reunion show was intended to coincide with the August 30 release of the Winterlong E.P. on Siren Records, an album the guys recorded at the end of the cycle for Daylight Breaking. The songs on Winterlong emulate the style of Daylight Breaking but take the heavier rock sound a step further. For those who loved where NO MOTIV was heading towards the end of the band’s run, Winterlong serves as a perfect treat. Camero admits that laziness dictated the delay in releasing the album and he and the other members credit their friends at Siren for getting the album to the public. “If it wasn’t for Siren [Records] and our friends approaching us with the idea of putting it out, I really don’t know if it ever would have seen the light of day,” says Camero. “Those six songs we feel were some of the best songs we’ve written, at least the most happy songwriting-wise that we’ve ever been. So to think that it wasn’t going to make it to anybody else’s ears was actually pretty sad. We’re very, very happy that it all worked out.”
With one reunion show under their belts and a new EP in hand, the members of NO MOTIV are feeling the pressure from fans to do something a little more official. Since making the announcement about the reunion show and EP, the band has been hounded by people coming out of the woodwork wanting to help them make NO MOTIV a full-time operation again. But the guys are hesitant to make any commitments at this point.
“It’s kind of funny, NO MOTIV was never really that successful of a band,” admits McDonald. “We got a lot of great tours and opened for a lot of great bands that were doing really well at the time but we were never really able to stand on our own two feet as a headlining band. It’s interesting because it’s been as long as it has, a lot of people that were younger and liking us at the time have grown up and are integrated in the music industry now so we’re getting calls from booking agents and managers and stuff that are around our age that were fans of the band back them. But I think some of them have unrealistic ideas about how successful of a band we were to begin with. I think they’re unrealistic about what the legacy actually is.”
“When we did play the show, I think we all got a little excited about everything,” recalls Camero. “But we all told ourselves that we’re pretty deep into what we have going on now individually, musically. We kind of want to just take this opportunity to have the EP see the light of day and do what we can to promote it and not really feel like we’re starting all over again trying to do this band full time.”
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