‘We said yes to everything!' John Reis on his blistering punk career, from Hot Snakes to Rocket from the Crypt

The Guardian

19-03-2025

John Reis has lived as if there's no tomorrow. Over the last 35 years, the hardest-working man in punk rock has recorded more than 25 albums and an avalanche of singles with groups including Rocket from the Crypt, Drive Like Jehu, Hot Snakes, the Night Marchers, Sultans and more; as Swami John Reis, he's about to put out a blistering new LP, Time to Let You Down. But lately, the 55-year-old has been particularly haunted by the finite nature of existence.
It began when the pandemic forced Hot Snakes off the road mid-tour early in 2020. 'It came at a time in our lives where, even though it was just a couple of years we couldn't tour, we could feel how precious those years were. We're getting older, and we're already thinking, 'How much longer will I be able to do this?'' Reis pauses. 'And then my friend Rick went into the other realm.'
Reis first met Rick Froberg – who died in 2023 aged 55 of an undiagnosed heart condition – in 1986, at a picnic for San Diego punks held by the publisher of an anarchist newsletter. Both helped establish the DIY, all-ages scene at San Diego's Ché Cafe, as a refuge from the city's 'super-violent' punk clubs. And when Reis's instrumental trio Pitchfork decided they needed a vocalist, Rick volunteered. 'He'd never sung before, and he was a shy dude, too,' Reis remembers. 'But he sounded amazing, and wrote such good lyrics, viewing the world through a lens far beyond his years. We went from three guys making noise in a garage, to four guys making a much better noise in a garage.'
Reis's next group with Froberg, Drive Like Jehu, were 'more complex, more dissonant', influenced by Sonic Youth, the MC5's free-jazz excursions and Neu!'s avant garde experiments. Froberg hollered like a demented preacher over angular, mathematical riffs, while on the epic Luau, on Jehu's second album Yank Crime, Reis's guitar howled like a broken siren. He came across this thrilling din after incorrectly reassembling his amplifier post-repair. 'The transformer was igniting the tubes and burning through them,' he grins. 'Whenever I got close to that thing, it screamed. And it sounded awesome.'
It was the early 90s, when major labels signed every gnarly punk group, hoping to find the next Nirvana. Interscope nabbed Jehu, though their noise remained resolutely radio-unfriendly. However, the label also optioned Reis's other group, the Froberg-less Rocket from the Crypt, who were a much more saleable proposition. Comprised of buddies from the Ché Cafe scene, Rocket had 'no motives other than 'let's just have fun',' says Reis. Rocket aped the primal favourites of Reis's teenhood – the Ramones, the Dictators, the Saints and Didjits – but their punk-rock party truly hit top gear after the group acquired a horn section. The inspiration for this development is, perhaps, surprising. 'As a kid, I thought Live and Let Die was the biggest song ever,' Reis says. 'So huge sounding. I approached Rocket with the mindset that more is more – the more people onstage, the bigger the sound will be. And I love how the horns sit with the guitars – it all sounds like one massive instrument. It just has this undeniable girth.'
Arriving as grunge mouldered, Rocket dressed in matching uniforms and greaser quiffs, took pseudonyms – Reis was 'Speedo' – and engaged in life-affirming rock'n'roll showmanship, including onstage fire-breathing and swinging guitars around their bodies like hula-hoops. 'Our music was honest and sincere,' Reis says, 'but we also had this James Brown sensibility of: this is a show. Having fun is regarded as less artistically important than stuff that's darker in tone, and I always thought that was stupid. Rocket was the most fun band, ever. Wherever we were playing, that was the place on planet Earth you had to be that night.'
Their magnum opus, 1995's Scream, Dracula, Scream!, was the result of the 'fucking massive budget' Interscope had given the group. 'Instead of dividing it up between us, like anyone with a brain would've, we spent it on a punk-rock record.' The album featured string sections and glockenspiels, and Reis recorded 'orchestral transitions between songs' that were removed pre-release after the label balked and Reis realised they sounded 'a bit pompous' (the deleted interstitials were lost in the Universal Studio fire, he ruefully adds). Rocket scored an unlikely UK Top 20 hit with On a Rope, after appearing on pretty much any TV show that would have them, including Top of the Pops, TFI Friday and The White Room. 'We said yes to everything in the UK that we'd have said no to in the US, as an experiment,' Reis says. 'You want us to appear on breakfast TV? Yes. Use our music to sell shampoo? Yes. We had fun with it, because we knew it would go away. But for that brief moment, it seemed like people knew who we were, and they liked the music. And that felt good.'
Rocket toured hard, until parenthood changed their priorities. 'To be a decent parent, you can't be gone for three years straight,' Reis says (his son was born in 2006, and the 18-year-old now attends shows at the Ché Cafe himself). The group went on ice, and now play the occasional reunion show, while Reis invested his time in his Swami Records label, producing other groups, and forming Hot Snakes, his final band with Froberg. 'Rick always made songs out of my noise, elevated it into music,' he says. The group cut four albums of rapturously acclaimed, sublime punk-rock over 18 years, and were working on a fifth when Froberg died suddenly. That unfinished Hot Snakes material will someday see the light. 'But it's hard, man,' Reis admits. 'Just hearing my friend's voice … I know grief is a process. I feel very connected and close to Rick – we still have a dialogue in my head and in my dreams. But sometimes it's just too real and heavy when I hear his voice singing. I just get really sad whenever we work on it.'
Reis ploughed his grief into 2024's Swami John Reis album All of This Awaits You, which 'wore everything on its sleeve. I made it with a bunch of friends, and it was dark, but there was a lot of joy to it.' He believes, however, that distribution issues scuppered its release. 'I was crushed that record didn't get its chance,' he adds, 'and I wanted to put out another record so I wouldn't feel the effects of that, and could move on. Time is precious, I don't want to waste it wallowing in defeat.' Time to Let You Down's lean, super-melodic punk – rock fuses Rocket's anthemic brutishness with Hot Snakes' dissonant attack. There's catharsis within its grooves, but precious little self-pity: the title track closes with Reis hollering: 'Dry your eyes and get out of your grave!'
'I was fucking angry,' he says. 'But I realised at an early age, I'm not a bluesman. Tragedy doesn't inspire my best art.'
Wallowing still has no place on Reis's agenda, and his eyes are trained firmly on the future. 'I already have the next record pretty much done in my brain, and the record after that as well,' he says. 'There's nothing to savour in defeat, only an opportunity to move on and do something new. I know I'm getting older. I just want to see where rock'n'roll takes me next.'
Time to Let You Down is released 21 March on Swami