A Blade In Your Wrist Tape: The Wonder Years' Dan Campbell, Punk Rock And Pro Wrestling
Thursday, 15 October 2015
Written by Huw Baines
Dan Campbell of the Wonder Years is a couple of thousand miles from home and among an excitable crowd of a few hundred at a California American Legion hall. There’s no back line in place and he’s not about to pick up a microphone. He’s gone coast to coast to watch wrestling.
At indy level - like the PWG show Campbell flew in from Philadelphia to see - pro wrestling runs parallel to touring in a punk band in more ways than you might think. Both are physically draining, involve hellish amounts of travel and often require those who participate to accept meagre returns in pursuit of something more permanent. Both jobs are about balancing highs and lows.
The Wonder Years, five albums in, are in a decent spot. They play good sized halls and recently landed a top 20 spot on the Billboard chart with ‘No Closer To Heaven’, but they are not alone in having many thousands of miles on the clock, along with memories of countless sleepless nights in the van, mud-soaked festivals and empty club shows. Joining the dots between their early existence and that of a grappler taking powerbombs night after night in search of a star-making break doesn’t require that much of a leap.
The band have become friends with a bunch of wrestlers, and crossed paths with many more, during their travels. Campbell speaks to one of them on a weekly basis, having watched him climb the rungs from indy worker to superstar anti-hero and, now, king of the pro wrestling castle. He even got an early advance copy of 'No Closer To Heaven' as a birthday gift. You'd know him best as WWE champ Seth Rollins.
“I’ve always loved wrestling as an art form,” Campbell says over the phone during a rare period of time off the road. “I had a couple of hobbies growing up, mostly wrestling and American football. I made the decision that I was going to try to play music as my job and I realised that if I wanted to do it, it needed to be all my time that I had available.
“I went to school and I went to work, but all the time to be thinking about something that wasn’t school or work was really about being in a band. It was a hobby because it wasn’t a job, but a dream and a goal. Once you get there it’s a full time thing and every job has its ups and its downs. When your job sucks at the kitchen you work in, you think about music. But when your job sucks and your job is music...I was like: ‘I don’t know what to think about. I don't have anything else. I’m upset about today and I have no reprieve.’ I started watching football again and I started watching wrestling.
“I love the way it mirrors punk rock. I love the effort that's involved in it. It’s really a very difficult job, very draining. It’s easy to commiserate with wrestlers and because of that we became friends with a lot of them. There’s people that you see every day and people from touring you talk to at least once a week and one of those for me is Seth, who we met when he was not at the top of the food chain. We’re friends with Summer Rae and Corey Graves and some of the indy guys, Mark Andrews and the Young Bucks. I watched their DVD the other night and was like: ‘This is like a punk band.’ I used to literally hit myself in the face with the microphone to get pops when we were playing basements.”
Campbell's got a scar on his forehead, just above his eyebrows. It’s not mic-related, rather a permanent reminder of a teenage viral infection and an unscripted collision with a sink at Shore Memorial hospital in New Jersey. When he catches sight of it in a mirror he thinks of the many veteran wrestlers who wear similar, if more numerous, abrasions thanks to years of gigging, or blading, to administer an edge of gory drama to their matches.
On ‘No Closer To Heaven’, the scar gets a mention. One of the album’s highlights, and there are plenty, is the furious I Don’t Like Who I Was Then, during which Campbell revisits moments from his past with the benefit of hindsight and no little admonishment for his younger self. When Shore Memorial enters the narrative, which was knitted together from words scattered in his notebook, he sings: “Turned away like I’m working babyface out of Mid South in the ‘80s. I kept a blade hidden in my wrist tape.”
“It’s when you and all your friends are sitting around and telling stories,” he says. “Someone says: ‘Remember when you did this thing? Remember when you did that thing?’ And they actually feel like a different person did them. I sometimes don't even have memories of the things they're saying, or barely do. And you think: ‘Man, what a dick I was. What a fuckingdickheaded thing to do. I can’t believe I did that, or said, that.’ It’s thinking back on being young and stupid and selfish and self-centred, all the things that go with that, and not liking those memories much.”
The song is a neat distillation of the album’s change in perspective. Having exercised his narrative muscles with the recent Aaron West record, Campbell’s back in autobiographical territory. But this time he is less concerned with the minutiae of a suburban life and instead focused on being the best he can be and moving forward.
His writing retains the emotional highs and lows, examinations of loss and faith and theatrical elements that have blossomed since the release of ‘Suburbia, I’ve Given You All And Now I’m Nothing’, but re-frames them in a philosophical, ultimately optimistic, light.
Musically, the record accompanies Campbell’s shift in focus not by reinventing the Wonder Years' wheel, but by blending the elements of their sound more seamlessly than before. It sounds like everything they’ve done before and, at the same time, nothing they’ve done before.
“You're never going to get it right,” he says. “Everything we've said in the past is flawed. Every person I've been before I was this person has had problems. When you’re 24 you look at the shit you did when you were 18 and go: ‘Damn, that was dumb.’ Now I’m 29 and looking at the shit that I said when I was 24 and thinking: ‘Man, some of that was dumb, too.’ I’m sure when I’m 35 I’m going to look back at the stuff I said when I was 29: ‘Some of that was dumb, too.’ And this record is the realisation that that is OK and we’re always going to get some of it wrong. The idea is to be better every time.
“There are going to be detours and dead ends. At that point it can be really easy to give up on progress. Just say: ‘Well, I tried. I didn't get there and fuck it, this is good enough. Who I am right now is good enough. I’m going to stop walking.’ The point of this record is to say that you’re going to hit the detour, hit the dead end or make a wrong turn. It’s going to be totally fucking your fault. You’re going to fuck up and go backwards for an hour. That doesn’t mean live where you end up. It means pull yourself up, turn around and keep walking.”
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