Milwaukee's Get Rad celebrates 5 years of radness
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Five years is a milestone for any band, but it’s especially impressive for a hardcore outfit obsessed with waterslides and the 1986 BMX movie classic Rad. Apparently there’s just no stopping Milwaukee’s Get Rad, the blistering “supergroup” comprising members of Since By Man, Seven Days Of Samsara, and High On Crime that’s been tearing up basements, VFWs, and other underground venues since 2005. The group marks its half-decade anniversary by finally releasing its long-in-the-works album, the zombie-themed I Can Always Live, Friday at Bay View Brew Haus. Before the show, The A.V. Club spoke with bassist Dave Rudnik about the album, being an “older kids” band, and, of course, Rad.
The A.V. Club: What’s the best part of being together for five years?
Dave Rudnik: The friendship that’s formed between the four of us. I didn’t really know Brad or Ben at all before Get Rad, but we’ve formed an insanely tight bond. We’ve been a band for five years, and I still get excited to play the very first song that we wrote. The bands we looked up to, most of them weren’t around for five years, but we’re still doing it, and we’re having fun. Once we stop having fun, we’ll stop doing it. That should be the model for everything, but unfortunately, it can’t be. [Laughs.]
AVC: Explain the Get Rad/BMX correlation.
DR: Get Rad was named after the movie Rad, a BMX movie that stars an actor by the name of Bill Allen who played a character named Cru Jones. The first song we wrote was called “Thunder In Your Heart,” which was based off of that song in the movie, and our next song was about BMX biking, so we’ve had songs about it. Throughout our lives, all of us have biked or skated. If you broke it down, we’ve all skated more than we’ve biked. We all bring skateboards on tour.
AVC: What’s the audience like for Get Rad in terms of all-ages shows versus 21+ shows?
DR: I believe that there are younger kids that like Get Rad, but it seems that most of the people that come to see us are older. Milwaukee lacks a decent all-ages venue for the size of show we’re doing. You can get around a hundred people at the Borg Ward, and the next smallest all-ages venue is the Miramar, which is 300, so there’s nothing in-between. That’s a big gap. In other cities it does seem like we have a younger fanbase, but here, we’re older kids. [Laughs.]
AVC: Your new album took a while to make. What was the hold up?
DR: Most of the songs on I Can Always Live are almost three years old. With Kevin living in Minneapolis, it takes us longer to get the whole song together. We started recording in April of 2008 and finished about a year later; now it’s coming out. It’s been a very long and painful process, but in spite of them being that old, I still love these songs, and we’re excited to finally have them released so we can play them all live. We try to mix up our set with older songs, so people will know at least half, but once this is out, we’ll have the freedom to play all of our songs. Twenty-five of them were tied up in this record that hadn’t been released yet—that’s a lot of our catalogue that we didn’t feel comfortable playing. People like to hear songs they know; that’s why cover bands are popular.
