(Wavves)
Thinking about younger acts for this project, along with FIDLAR, Nathan Williams and Wavves was the first thing on my mind. In addition to a blackout Primavera set, Williams offers sobering advice to any young band, warning that mental and physical health is more important than a massive tour schedule.
Drunken, druggy, and rowdy is par for the course when it comes to Wavves shows. The most highly-publicized one was the first time we played the Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona. Wavves started as a recording project in my parents’ garage. I was twenty-one and making these records myself, without really thinking about a future, a band, or a career. I had no expectations. I was playing everything myself—guitar, bass, drums, and synths. I was producing everything myself, and the songs “No Hope Kids” and “So Bored,” started making their rounds on the internet during the Myspace days in 2008. It caught on pretty quick, and I was suddenly signed and making money for the first time.
They flew me to New York, and I met a booking agent. They said, “Do you want to travel the world?” They had all these shows lined up. I said yes, even though I didn’t have a band yet. I asked an old friend if he wanted to play drums, and we just went—nonstop. Nine months later, we’re still on this first tour. I was completely running myself into the ground, partying every single night. There was a US run, then Europe, and I was getting drugs everywhere that I went. We finally got to Barcelona, and I found more drugs. I had a friend there that had a pill connect, and backstage they had Jäger on tap. At the beginning of the UK tour, I had gone to buy coke with a guy I knew in London. He went in with my money and came back out with a giant bag of Special K. I was like, “I don’t want K! Why did you buy all this?” He said, “He didn’t have coke, so this is what you get.” There’s no receipt or return policy when it comes to drugs, so now I had all this K.
Primavera was my biggest show at the time, and I don’t remember playing it. I was on ecstasy, K, a shitload of alcohol, and whatever pills I was given. The last thing I sort of remember was being in a hot tub at a hotel called the Princess. The dealer for the festival was sitting next to me. He was the guy who would service all of the bands and their drug needs. He had pills, and that’s the last moment I remember. There were probably 15,000 people watching me, which was probably their first look into what Wavves was, and I couldn’t even talk. I couldn’t sing and forgot everything. My drummer was pissed because I was fucking up and poured a beer on my head. I broke the mic and the mic stand. I think they just ended up cutting the set, shutting it off because it was such a mess. The audience threw shoes at me.
The next day, I cancelled the rest of the tour. I still had about four or five weeks left. That flight back home was insane. They thought about turning the plane around because I was sweating bullets and puking. I was coming down so hard. I went home and slept for about a month. When I woke up, Pitchfork and all of these publications that had been hyping me up, saying that I was a genius and a prodigy, were writing “Primavera Meltdown. Career over.” It had only been a day, but they had turned a 180, gone polar opposite on me. A month later I released a song, and everybody was back on the train again.
There was another time in Germany. Our drummer at that time was antagonizing the crowd. It was a really small room, and we were all packed in. I think we had drunk too much during the day, and our drummer had gotten really pissed about a group of kids who were heckling us. He got completely naked, stood up from behind his kit, and started calling them Nazis. We had to get out of there pretty quickly after that. A couple nights later, I fell off the stage. The show was a complete mess. We went downstairs in the club and continued to party. In Europe, a lot of the backstage areas are downstairs in these cellars. I was playing monkey bars with the pipes and ripped one from the ceiling.
This awful sludge started pouring out, and we realized it was the sewer pipe. We filled the entire backstage with raw sewage. We might have been in Austria. None of us really knew where we were. The promoter ran in and started screaming at us in some foreign language. He was staring at this massive puddle of human feces, which was getting bigger. We grabbed our stuff and just peeled out of there. Needless to say, that guy never invited us back.
What really did me in was the touring. Nobody told me, “Hey, they’re going to completely run you into the ground.” I didn’t know about setting boundaries with booking agents and labels. To them, all you are is a dollar sign.