Originally from New Brunswick, New Jersey, Sticks and Stones disbanded in 1995 and played their first full set in a decade on October 30, 2005 at the Hook in Brooklyn. While they were one of the best yet unappreciated punk acts in New Jersey, they are undoubtedly here to stay. This interview was originally aired on BSR - 88.1FM Providence and can be heard in its entirety here.

I’m here with Sticks and Stones, can you guys introduce yourselves?
Pete: I’m Jack Terricloth ni Peter Ventantonio
Chris: I’m Chris
Sam: Osamu Kawahara
Pete: and we’re missing Mr. X ni Mr. Caballero

I’m just wondering first off what made you guys want to re-form?
Pete: Nothing to do between yesterday and tomorrow. The only time I get to see these guys is if we’re playing in a band so I decided to put it together.

Is this the only show you’re going to be doing or do you have any other plans?
Pete: We’ve gotten an outrageous amount of offers in the month we’ve been rehearsing but I don’t know.
Chris: We’ll see if the offers continue after we play tonight. The offers may all drop off very quickly after the performance.

You guys didn’t seem to have an incredibly easy time as a band. Do you think you still accomplished what you wanted to with it?
Pete: Short answer, yes.
Chris: On a personal level, yeah. I got to be in a band! I got to go see stuff and go hang out with people so yeah. We thought we were going to conquer the world and that hasn’t been accomplished yet. So I guess on that level no.
Pete: We made an impact at least in our local scene, and that’s the first thing you want to do anyway.
Johnny X: You get something out of it. And it may take you ten years to understand what you got. And it’s neither better nor worse than what you intended. But, you know, life isn’t what you intend. The experience was great and irreplaceable.

And how did the Strife and Times come to be released so long after you had broken up.
Pete: That was all Callello’s idea.
Chris: It wasn’t really my idea. But all our friends wouldn’t let it die. Basically, they kept covering our various songs. Bouncing Souls covered Less than Free, The Ratchets covered Saved, Ted Leo covered Linus. But you know they wouldn’t let it die. I dunno, it meant a lot to me.

In part of reforming, are you guys looking to play more shows?
X: Part of reforming isn’t to get those last couple things on the checklist that we didn’t get.
Chris: We never got to go to Czeckoslovakia
X: Yeah, it’s fun. It’s fun to play and it’s fun to play the songs and I think I still believe what I believed then. The songs have the meaning for me now that they had for me then. So all that is still there. But I don’t know if we’re trying to accomplish anything at this point.

That brings up a good point. I was really fascinated with the song “Grasping at Straws”. And I think that probably a lot of your fans identify with that song. I was wondering if that song or any of your songs hit home differently with you now. I feel like they could be pretty dated for you.
X: Some of them are so specific about people that we knew that it really takes you back.
Pete: I love that when we say “Andrew” we just look at each other and say “haha”
Chris: Someone we haven’t talked to in ten years but we all know exactly what he means.
X: Songs like Saved to me are like I’m fifteen when I hear that song. They’re not specific persons or people but…

Speaking of what you guys have been doing since then, I read in the booklet about the last song you guys played was “Saved” and the whole “I won’t shut up I won’t go away” thing
X: We weren’t lying!
Pete: I’m pretty well documented [frontman for the band World/Inferno Friendship Society] but Michael is an accomplished comic book artist
X: I draw comics

There’s a pretty wide range of influences in your music that it’s really hard to categorize you guys at all in one word. How do you think that affected you as a band? Was it a good thing? A bad thing?
Pete: Really? I thought it was easy. [laughs]
X: I think we had a lot of different styles coming through.
Chris: It made us different and it also reflected the fact that we didn’t always agree on everything but that’s what made us somewhat unique. That ten years later you can still hear us and think “ah, they still don’t sound like anything else.”
Pete: Although now we sound almost contemporary.
Chris: Everyone else sped up to us.

I would love to hear you guys talk about where your band formed.
Chris: The original Sticks and Stones Pete formed, mostly out of spite, but he can tell you about that.
Pete: It was the four of us. I went to Junior High with Mike, I went to High School with Sam and Chris was this guy I met while he was going to college. I’m actually being very sincere. I just want to make the scene.
X: Someone would leave, someone else would come in. I actually auditioned two or three years before I was actually allowed in the band. I auditioned and Larry hated me so I had to wait for Larry to quit to join the band.

Someone actually asked me when I said “oh yeah I’m going to see Sticks and Stones tonight” they asked why you’re playing a show in Brooklyn. Wouldn’t it make more sense to play a show in New Jersey?
Pete: I live here now and I have a relationship with the club owners and they do all ages shows. We definitely wanted to do an all ages show and the only other place in town is the Knitting Factory, which was booked. It would make more sense but no one lives in Jersey anymore.
X: I think it would be fun to do a Jersey show. Jersey deserves a show. We don’t necessarily have any plans. Or maybe we do.
Pete: I grew up in New Brunswick but I was living in Bridgewater, with my family, we formed out of the New Brunswick scene that had bands like PED and Pleased Youth and AOD and those bands and we were always the younger kids. We’d go see those bands. And we started the band with Scott Hollingsworth who’s gone on to be in World/Inferno as well and Brian Johns who has disappeared off the face of the earth and John Gilch who is sadly no longer with us. And it was the suburban kids driving to New Brunswick to make the scene there and playing college shows. At the time college students seemed a lot older than a lot older than us which is weird now that you think about it.
Chris: I grew up really close to there and at the time New Brunswick was like the Mecca. You wanted to go get a show at the Court Tavern. You were a grownup. You were playing with grownups if you got a show in New Brunswick. You were playing to college kids and older people. I was living maybe five miles away from where Pete was and it was the same kind of thing.
Pete: Yeah, he’s was in Basking Ridge so he should know. From there once the first lineup of Sticks and Stones broke up…after Brian Johns either quit or got kicked out, and I was left singing by myself…
Chris: Well no, Brian was friends with the Bouncing Souls. Brian was the one who through the Bouncing Souls got me to audition when Nigel quit. We existed for a little while for a couple months with Brian, we played a couple shows, but then Brian exited and then we traded him for a keyboardist. Scott joined, we had the tortured synthesizer period of “Storm Coming”
Pete: dun DUN DUUUUUUUUN. I remember Eric begged us not to do that. That one note in Rogue, he was like “oh no NO you don’t, no you CAN’T” Nah man, we have to, it’s a thing. And he just shook his head and said “well man, you’re paying the bills”
Chris: Once Scott and Larry left Sam joined and Mike joined. Sam joined first on a permanent basis and Mike joined on kinda like, he was being real coy about it. He played on a couple songs and then he drove to Minneapolis with us and and that point he was still like “I don’t know”
X: Actually, what happened was, I learned songs because Pete wanted me to overdub about four songs, twelve string guitar in the studio on the Theme Song for Nothing record. So I was strictly a studio musician. I put down my tracks and after the tracks were recorded the band had booked a short tour to Minneapolis and just for the tour, the keyboard player Scott quit, which left this sort of vacuum in the band. He was filling out a lot of sound in the band. So, I already knew four songs. It was a matter of “well, if you can learn five songs really fast you can come on the road for us and fill in what’s missing.” So that was it, I was in. Which is pretty much how everyone got in the band. Necessity. Need of the moment. “Can you do this now? Okay, you’re in.”

Wasn’t there quite a bit of learning the instruments in the process.
X: You were in the band first, and then you learned to play. You were already in, in sort of a social sense, you were a friend or something like that. There was no placing an ad for someone with rock chops or something like that. It was like, I want my friend in the band and then you learned to play. I knew maybe four or five notes…now I know six.
Pete: Never got anyone from placing an add in anything
X: One thing to know about Sticks and Stones is Pete formed a band. The band dissolved then and one would say continued to dissolve and reform over a period of ten years. Pete being the consistent member. Especially in the beginning to middle stage is the band doing Pete’s music and that’s what kept it consistent. You would join a band to learn those songs and play those songs and that was it. My point is I’ve always thought about how, having the proximity to other bands, one of the things that made us different behaviorally was that at any time Pete was surrounded by better musicians. Pete, pretty much, it was his band. And I think at any point he could’ve gotten a better drummer, a better guitar player, a better bass player, a better anybody he wanted because New Brunswick was filled with musicians. And that was never really priority with the band. I think that was really a striking difference. A lot of bands formed on the idea that “this guy, across town. This guy is the best guitarist around. We’ve got to get him in our band.” And it was never ever really a criteria. Really, I’m not exaggerating. My whole style of doing anything that I do on a guitar is specifically because of learning to play in Sticks and Stones and learning off Pete and off Sam. It really functions only in this band to an extent.

You would all agree to be in the band just to be “in the band” and not necessarily to be the greatest guitarist or greatest drummer or greatest anything…
X: We wanted to be good, what I’m saying is we weren’t necessarily good to begin with. There’s always somebody better. The town was filled with really good musicians. It was just simply not the point of the band to stock it with mercenaries and hired guns and go out there and play this super refined perfect thing. The music was almost a symptom of the actual sickness.
Chris: The band was more important than the individual. Whether it was the song or the music or the people in the band. The band was the thing, it’s what we were. It was us. It still is. Even ten years later after not doing it, I’m still defined by being “oh the guy who used to be the drummer in Sticks and Stones” to most people I know.

I think that really shows just how important it was. It wasn’t just something that passed by or just something you did.
Chris: At the time it was everything to us. People do a lot of things doing their formative adult years and they usually look back on that with a lot of fondness. This is what we did. This is what we do.
Pete: Except instead of going to high school or college reunions, we go to band reunions.
Chris: We didn’t join a fraternity. We didn’t play major league baseball or tour with the swim team. This is what we did.

That answers my question then of when a van catching on fire or various tour incidents, what kept you all going as a band?
Pete: Out of spite. Definitely out of spite. Not letting the bastards get us down.
Chris: Lack of better options. The options weren’t very good, were they? For me, go back to college, get a real job. It wasn’t like there were that many other options that seemed that great at the time.
X: My brain just went back to the fire.

Sorry, I shouldn’t have mentioned that.
X: No, I was hoping to be able to put it into words. I don’t know if I can. The truth is, after the fire, after our equipment burned. We got back in the van and drove to the next show. There was maybe a moment or two where we were like “what do we do?” And then the answer, I don’t know who it came from or how it was agreed upon, but the answer very quickly was we’re gonna go to the show and we’re gonna play. The problem was, shortly after, maybe within another hour, we got into another accident which left us outside of the van on the side of the road.
Chris: With glass in the side of my neck!
X: There was a minor explosion. I remember sitting on the side of the road and really believing the words “I see now that someone has to die and I’m not getting in the van.” That was real to me at the moment and that is when the tour stopped. At that point it was a full on retreat.
Chris: It only took another two days but between there on the way home the one town in Ohio, the first town after the fire that we decided to stay over in, the chemical factory in the town blew up and they evacuated. They had the National Guard in the streets, emergency notices on the TV that we were watching in the hotel. The one town that we decided to stay in. The one night after the second accident, that’s what happened.
X: Full scale evacuation. Highway jammed with cars exiting the town. Hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of national guardsmen.

You come to town, they evacuate.
Chris: The fact that we kept playing at all after that really is something else.
X: We just got back to work.
Chris: This kind of thing is kind of the reason people remember the band fondly. I don’t think the band would have the same character. If it wasn’t for all the misery, it’s kind of what we’re famous for. It adds to the character. It’s not much more interesting if we were like “oh, we played a lot of shows, we went to my friends house, no one would sign us.” you know, it makes for a better story.

Some Sticks and Stones and related band links:
Sticks and Stones
Johnny X and the Conspiracy
World/Inferno Friendship Society

Tags: Interview, Sticks and Stones //