LUCIDMEDIA

Elias Reidy of Red Jumpsuit Apparatus

Written by Adam A. Donaldson Tuesday, 15 May 2007 05:23

Elias Reidy: Basically, where we’re from there’s a bunch of counties that make up the city of Jacksonville and even though there’s a lot of land there’s only so many people. Eventually you meet everyone (or it at least seems that way) and there were only so many kids involved in the music scene that were trying to start music and start bands.

Joey and I had known each other since we were kids, we played previously together. Joe worked in a record store and Ronnie and Duke had already started Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and they were actually looking for a guitar player. Ronnie approached Joey, asked him if he knew anybody that played guitar and that’s the funny thing, Joey hooked me up with Ronnie and Duke before he had even thought about joining the band.

How long ago did all this fall into place?

That was about two years ago now.

And that was sometime before MySpace exploded and that whole social networking thing came into place, which I imagine has made it easier for musicians to find each other. . .

Yeah and we’re fortunate enough that we really knew when we had everything right with this band and that’s when we really started to get the business.

You guys started in Florida playing the smaller venues and such, so what’s it been like going from being that local to performing in something like the Warped Tour this past summer?

Honestly, it’s really unreal to all of us still and it’ll always be unreal to us in some sense. There was a very long time before Warped Tour where we toured with bands like Thirty Seconds to Mars and other great bands that were doing us a favour and just taking us out there with them. Being in these large venues we thought “will our band ever be able to pack these kinds of people in?” It just seems impossible now going back to those venues and seeing them packed in and we’re really appreciative of it.

Generally, how are you guys finding your success? Because I was reading about how Ronnie and Duke were writing music for a year-and-a-half before bringing it out locally.

It’s like we’re just a bunch of kids that have been blessed, but we’ve worked really hard at it and a lot of people didn’t have any faith in us, but a few did. It’s really just a dream come true is the easiest way to put it. 

There seems to be a lot of hard rocking bands that come out Florida, I mean even Marilyn Manson was a Floridian, so why do you think that is?

I just think that the music is very segregated throughout the United States; it just varies from state-to-state. There’s a huge, young, modern rock music scene in Florida now from Tampa to Miami and Jacksonville of course. But the feeling I get is that it’s just a bunch of kids who have nothing better to do than cause trouble and make music.

I read on the band’s MySpace page that your objective is “pure rock”, so I’m wondering if this is a difficult objective to achieve considering that everyone seems to have a gimmick?

Well the way we’re going about it is that we don’t really have a gimmick, our gimmick is just being normal kids and everybody knows that. Our gimmick is our normality I guess and we just want people to know that this is who we are. I think people will get it, they’ll feel it. This is what we’ve been doing for so long I think that people will be more receptive to it. Right now, we’re more concerned with being a tight unit relationship-wise with each other in the band as well as being a tight unit on stage.

You guys describe your music as autobiographical; is that a conscious decision or is it just a matter of writing what you know?

That’s the thing, we put a lot of work into all this but it’s all been natural, it feels like we were born yesterday. It’s not like something we were trying to do its just that we are who we are and with our next record you can expect the exact same thing. These are the songs we grew up writing basically and we put them together.

Is your success going to change the way that next record’s going to sound because this record comes from a pre-success point-of-view, while this next will be written from post-success?

Exactly, and that’s the thing. It’s funny because we put all that time and effort into putting all those songs together into our album and once that was done we didn’t know what to do. We finally did it. So we’re definitely going to keep that in mind when putting together songs for the next album.

Do you think that there was an element of timing in how you guys got signed; just a matter of being there at the right time and in the right place?

Sure. But that’s a horrible question to ask me because I think timing is everything and I believe that everything happens for a reason.

So you’re a fate guy?

Well, if you look at fate as a basically predetermined plan for the rest of your life, then yeah. I feel that my life is already a book that’s written, I just have to live it out.