Without a childhood musical mentor, TOM GABEL was left to make his own early listening choices untarnished by parental or peer pressure. “I didn’t really get into music with a group of friends or under the influence of an older brother so I had no one really guiding me,” says the 28-year-old leader of American punk outfit AGAINST ME!. “All I could ever really go off was whether I really liked the song so I didn’t have the prejudices of what was cool and what wasn’t cool.”
Consequently, Gabel was a kid with diverse musical tastes that ran the gamut from New Kids On The Block to Guns & Roses. He later discovered The Doors and Led Zeppelin and in his mid-teens he awoke to the endless possibilities of punk rock. “I got really into the protest singers from the ‘60s through punk music,” he says, “and it was through that I wanted to strip it down and play more acoustic music. Which I guess was a really backwards way to get into it.”
It’s a journey Gabel’s fans can appreciate on his first solo outing, last year’s striking mini-album Heart Burns, recorded in LA last August in between Against Me! tours. It finds the versatile singer/songwriter trading amplified punk fury for largely acoustic-based personal and political manifestos, an approach that similarly gave birth to Against Me! back in 1997. “Yeah, that’s where Against Me! started,” he nods. “Just me and an acoustic ...
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Without a childhood musical mentor, TOM GABEL was left to make his own early listening choices untarnished by parental or peer pressure. “I didn’t really get into music with a group of friends or under the influence of an older brother so I had no one really guiding me,” says the 28-year-old leader of American punk outfit AGAINST ME!. “All I could ever really go off was whether I really liked the song so I didn’t have the prejudices of what was cool and what wasn’t cool.”
Consequently, Gabel was a kid with diverse musical tastes that ran the gamut from New Kids On The Block to Guns & Roses. He later discovered The Doors and Led Zeppelin and in his mid-teens he awoke to the endless possibilities of punk rock. “I got really into the protest singers from the ‘60s through punk music,” he says, “and it was through that I wanted to strip it down and play more acoustic music. Which I guess was a really backwards way to get into it.”
It’s a journey Gabel’s fans can appreciate on his first solo outing, last year’s striking mini-album Heart Burns, recorded in LA last August in between Against Me! tours. It finds the versatile singer/songwriter trading amplified punk fury for largely acoustic-based personal and political manifestos, an approach that similarly gave birth to Against Me! back in 1997. “Yeah, that’s where Against Me! started,” he nods. “Just me and an acoustic guitar and it grew in a very organic way from there. So it’s not so much a stretch of the imagination for people to accept that presentation of just me and the guitar up there. I’m just a really strong believer that if a song is a good song then it can be played with just a guy and a guitar and then you can add in an orchestra, a full band, whatever. But it has to able to exist as just that bare bones structure first.”
On his first solo tour to Australia this week to promote Heart Burns, Gabel will be sharing the spotlight with friend and fellow Floridian punk veteran Chuck Ragan (Hot Water Music), just two guys with hollow-bodied guitars and plenty of mutual respect. They plan on performing plaintive versions of HWM and Against Me! songs as well as collaborating on each other’s compositions with a few choice covers thrown in for good measure.
“What you hear on the solo record is a little bit different to what I usually do live,” says Gabel, who toured with Ragan last October in the US. “All I can really bring is just me and a guitar so the songs will sound a little different when I play them. I’m definitely not playing along to a drum machine or anything. It’s also different to Against Me! in that it’s probably a little bit looser when I’m playing just by myself. I have a certain amount of flexibility where if someone yells out in the middle of the show that they want to hear such and such a song then I can launch right into it as opposed to having to make sure four other people know the song.”
Tom Gabel and Chuck Ragan play the Tuggeranong Youth Centre (All Ages) on Sunday May 10. Tickets from Moshtix outlets, moshtix.com.au.
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