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By: Jaan Uhelszki (Wall of Sound)
Such was the case on Sept. 12, when Metallica wound up its summer tour in sunny San Diego, Calif. Reliable sources insisted that Meeks got his hackles up when his band was pelted with Gold Medal flour and chocolate syrup, and drummer Matt Taul was airlifted out of his seat by a burly battalion of Metallica roadies, stage-managed by Metallica bassist Jason Newstead. Meeks then got his share when the hell-bent road crew savaged his mic stand. Reportedly in retaliation, he violently dashed his guitar to the floor and proceeded to tear it apart. Not an unusual action for a hard-rocker, of course, but Metallica had banned any ill-treatment of musical instruments from the get-go. Meeks confided that it wasn't because of a regard for the aesthetic, but it was a simple matter of housekeeping: "They didn't want us busting the guitars, because they didn't want to be cleaning the s--t up during the set changes.
"I busted my guitar because I wanted to bust my guitar," proclaims the outspoken Meeks. "They'd already thrown a bunch of s--t on stage, and I thought, 'Hey, it's the last show; they can't kick us off the tour,' so I busted my guitar. Why? Because that's what I used to do. I thought it was funny. I had a good time. It was the last show and getting through it was an experience."
There seems to be no ill will on Metallica's part, either, because according to the group's manager, Cliff Bernstein, they not only gifted all the members of Jerry Cantrell's band with digital cameras—Days of the New got their own high-tech gizmos, too. "Yeah, getting the camera was pretty cool. But, hey, if they hadn't done it, that would have meant they didn't like us." And did you like them? "Yeah, of course we did, but we didn't get them nothing."
But then Days of the New hardly had the time. Throughout the tour, Meeks was penning songs for the next record. A mere two days after the band exited the tour, he was in his Louisville, Ky., studio laying down tracks for a new album, tentatively, if unimaginatively titled Days of the New II, and again reheating the rumors that he once again fired his band.
"Let me tell you, two of the band members are no longer with the Days of the New," he revealed. "The only guy that has a musical talent besides me is Matt the drummer. The other two—I'm on one level and want to be positive and s--t, and they're thinking Pantera, and f--k the world for all it's worth. The bass player [Jesse Vest] is more that way. But he really just wants to go to college. Music is too spontaneous. He wants something stable."
And though it's been rumored to have happened in the past, this time Meeks claims he's given his mates their pink slips. "Yeah. I'm doing the whole album on my own. I'm going to do it just like Prince and Lenny Kravitz, and Stevie Wonder. They did all the work, and when they needed other people they brought them in. That's what I want to do."
"These kids and the media, and all these motherf--kers see Days of the New as a band," Meeks goes on. "And they want a band—four guys that are good-looking— and I think that's bulls--t. I think that's f--king gay, and it causes me to be angry." Only two months before, Meeks apologized on a fan Web site, explaining that it was his fault, "for giving people the impression that Days of the New was a band—and leading you on and setting you up to get attached to prior members."
So, is the rest of the band gone for good? You make the call—but be aware that guitarist Todd Whitener was overheard talking with Meeks during this interview. A spokesperson for Outpost Records dismisses Travis' outburst, insisting, "Travis is always firing the band, but when it's time for a tour, they miraculously show up, and he doesn't say a thing." On top of that, Days of the New are currently booking a headlining tour that's due to kick off at the end of October.
If all goes well, the band's second album will be in stores by April, and Meeks warns that there will be no more Eddie Vedder comparisons on the new record. "People will know that we're not into grunge by the next record. There's all kinds of things on it. We have some techno, some Celtic stuff, some Middle Eastern things, and some Oriental stuff. We even brought in some female singers." —Jaan Uhelszki
By: Mike Ross (Edmonton Sun)
Recording an MTV Unplugged album would be redundant for Days of the New - they're already unplugged.
By: Lisa Wiltson (Calgary Sun)
Don't tell Todd Whitener about paying dues and slowly building a fan base.
EVERY SCHOOL HAD ONE: THE kid who threw the chairs. Six years
ago, at
W.C. Stripling Middle School in Fort Worth, Texas, that kid was Travis
Meeks, the brooding singer for Days of the New. By fifth grade, Meeks
had already done time in a treatment center for troubled kids and a year
in special ed. "I was 'emotionally handicapped,' " he says, shaking his
head. "Nobody wanted to listen. Everybody kept pushing me around." By
sixth grade, Meeks was fighting back. "I'm like, ' You ain't gonna fuck
with me, I don't care how small I am,' " he says. "I was throwing chairs
and going nuts. It was fear. I was afraid. "
As you can tell, Travis Meeks is not your ordinary bored
suburban kid
writing songs about how he can't get laid. Just 18, Meeks writes what he
knows, and the songs on his band's debut album are bleak, black, devoid
of hope. This darkness is also reflected in the music, which hearkens
back to the rumbling era when Soundgarden and Alice in Chains roamed the
earth. Call them grunge throwbacks, but Days of the New's sounds is
connecting: "Touch, Peel and Stand," the album's first single, is in the
Billboard Modern Rock chart's Top 10 and is in heavy rotation on MTV.
ONE OF THE CITIES WHERE THE BOYS first caught on was Boston,
where they
are awaiting show time in a downtown Howard Johnson. It ain't the Ritz,
but it has all the basics: a tolerant staff, cable TV and a nearby
McDonald's. This afternoon, the band - drummer Matt Taul, 19; guitarist
Todd Whitener, 18; the excellently named bassist, Jesse Vest, 20; and
Meeks - are holed up smoking cigarettes, channel-surfing and fidgeting.
Introductions are made. "Hi," chorus the guys - except for Meeks, who is
playing guitar. His head is down. Minutes crawl by. An eternity passes.
Finally he sits his leather-pants-covered ass down, fires up a smoke and
begins to tell his story.
Meeks grew up in the working-class town of Charlestown, Ind.,
alongside
Vest and Taul, who shared his love of Guns n' Roses. Meeks lived with
his grandmother, Norma Jean, who worked at a cigarette company. "The
first day of school," he recalls, "I didn't want to go. I threw a fit. I
didn't want to be judged." Meeks was frequently picked on. He was small
for his age, and had severe emotional problems and a chemical imbalance.
He bounced back and forth between his grandmother in Indiana and his dad
in Texas, between schools and rehab. "I started sleeping around young,"
he says. "Did a lot of drugs. I fucked up a lot. Twelve years old,
walking the streets at night, drunk. Passed out. Graveyards. Behind
stores."
Music was Meeks' only solace. "No matter where he went, no
matter who
was around, Travis was always playing his guitar," recalls his old
friend Mike Lewellen. "He would walk and play."
And drink. "In ninth grade," Meeks reports, "I drank a fifth of
Wild
Turkey, blacked out and attacked a police officer. They sent me to a
place called Interventions. In an ambulance." While he was there, Meeks
received a letter from his girlfriend, Amy, saying that she was
pregnant. He was 14. Meeks' daughter will be 4 in April. (Meeks is not
the only teen father in the group - Taul, who is in the process of
getting a divorce, has a 2 year-old daughter.)
Meeks failed ninth grade, then dropped out of school. He moved
into an
apartment with his new family. "We're 15," he says. "Amy's on welfare,
I'm a stoner. She slept around with my friends, I slept around with
hers. I got into a lot of fights over her." During one brawl at a
"trailer-park fuckin' bash," he was beaten by a mob of older kids, one
of whom ripped his ponytail out of his head. "They beat the fuck out of
me," he says, staring. "At first it hurt. Then I started liking it. I
can't explain it."
At 16, Meeks bottomed out: "I was running from the police; I was
on
acid, coke, crank." His lowest point was "one week where I drank more
than I ever had in my life," he says. "It was like my life was getting
ready to end. I was just …waiting." During that time, he got in an
argument with Amy and cracked her car windshield with his fist. She
called the cops. "It was the last straw," he says. "They were going to
put me in jail."
Meeks hotfooted it to Louisville, Ky., and he never went back.
He moved
in with his sister, a kindergarten teacher. "I basically started writing
the album," he says. "Then I started singing in coffee shops, and
everybody was liking it. I thought, ' I'm going to go somewhere, man.' "
He had already been playing for years with Taul and Vest, and then he
met Whitener at a music store.
"I was buying an amp at the time for a new band I was in, Death
by
Diarrhea, " says Whitener, who grew up in Louisville. After Days of the
New's fourth gig, they were discovered by a management team, which
hooked them up with producer Scott Litt (Nirvana, R.E.M).
"Travis never gave up," says Lewellen. "He just took all his
experiences and learned from them."
These days, the band is opening for Aerosmith; ESPN has contacted Meeks
to compose a jingle; and he has made enough dough to get himself a nice
place in Louisville. "I'm going to set up a room and my daughter can
come and stay with me," he says. (His daughter lives with her mother,
who's now married.)
Meeks leans in: "All my life I've wanted to be heard, and now
I'm
heard. I've got my head on straight - Days of the New." He pauses. "My
family's proud of me; I'm at peace. People say, 'You're 18. How can you
have peace?' And I'm like, 'Dude, if you was me, you'd know.' "
"Damn, who crapped?" asks the band's manager. The fellas are all on the
tour bus, waiting to play a Christmas show alongside Veruca Salt and
Tonic. It seems that Taul has a gas problem this evening. The bus door
opens and some guys file in. They are Tonic, come to look at the bus.
"This is awesome," says one. Then they file out, presumably in search of
a decent tune.
Meeks is readying himself for the show. " I don't talk in
between
songs," he says. "We play one and go right into the next." No hello?
"Nope." How about "Thank you?" "Nope." Nothing? Meeks shakes his head,
smiles a little. A few beers later, the band heads for the stage. Meeks'
vocal style has been compared to Layne Staley's of Alice in Chains.
Meeks is aware of this. "The comparisons will stop with the next
record," he declares. "And onstage, I sound completely different. You'll
see." Indeed. Meeks' voice is deeper, richer. He is shirtless and sings
with his eyes closed. A few girls in the crowd smile at each other
knowingly. "Hotness," whispers one of them.
True to form, the band rolls from one dark, dense song right
into the
next. The audience is transfixed. Surprisingly, Meeks and Whitener's
acoustic guitars sound just as noisy as electric ones.
Days of the New's set is winding down. Meeks finishes up the
final
song. Then he stands in front of the mike. "Thank you," he says. "We are
Days of the New." He pauses. "Have …have a merry Christmas."
Eschewing distortion on guitars is more than just a gimmick for this Kentucky quartet, which burst out of the gate last year with a catchy (acoustic) blast of brooding (acoustic) rock called Touch, Peel and Stand. The self-titled album was practically an overnight success - nearly a million sold and counting mere months after its release. The band plays a sold-out show at the Rev tonight.
Guitarist Todd Whitener, 19, says the band wasn't trying to attract attention when it unplugged its guitars in the singer's basement about three years ago. These high school-age musicians - who immersed themselves in music to the exclusion of a social life - just wanted to give their ears a break.
"All of us had been in our share of the Metallica-Pantera-type, heavy kind of rock 'n' roll screaming, lash-out kind of band," he says. "And it really did just get old to us, man. So we formed for our own personal satisfaction, to give our ears something new. We thought we were just giving ourselves a treat. We had no idea that anybody else would actually get it."
In one of these rare rock 'n' roll Cinderella stories, one of the first people who "got it" was Nashville producer Scott Litt. Through "a friend of a friend of a friend," he got hold of a demo tape, liked what he heard and came to Louisville, Kentucky, to hear the band live. It was in the basement again, since Days of the New had yet to play a real gig. Litt soon gave the thumbs up to sign the band to his new label, Outpost Recordings. A couple of months later, Days of the New was opening for Kenny Wayne Shepherd in front of 2,000 people at the House of Blues in New Orleans. It was the band's second live show.
"We thought this might be a weird match-up, but we got out there and the crowd was totally into it," Whitener recalls. "It was really reassuring to us that we were in the right place and we hadn't made the wrong decision to try to pursue this."
Fans are particularly taken by singer Travis Meeks' poetic, angst-ridden lyrics, showing a maturity well beyond his 18 years (it helps that you can actually hear them, too - did we mention that the band plays acoustic guitars?).
"He definitely went through his fair share of s---," Whitener says. "He had a kid at age 14 or something like that. And that was definitely something that your average teenager doesn't have to go through.
"But the thing that's funny is that a lot of people get the impression that the lyrics have this negative vibe about them, which they totally don't at all. I think there's a fine line between deepness and negativity. The lyrics are really very, very deep and well thought through, but they're just lyrics that anybody on this earth can relate to, because they're all about life experiences. The songs are about emotions and everybody has emotions."
Acoustic guitars? Deep songs about emotions? Lest you think you're in for a sensitive singer-songwriter snorefest tonight, Whitener reveals that "actually, live on stage, we play with some distortion. We've got a pretty aggressive show."
During a recent concert, Meeks even pulled a Pete Townshend and smashed his guitar to splinters. So much for the "gimmick."
Young band in fast lane to success
The 19-year-old guitarist is having the time of his life as part of the fast-rising rock quartet, Days of the New.
"It was definitely perfect timing," says Whitener, in a slight Kentucky drawl during a phone interview from San Francisco, just one of the stops on the young band's latest North American tour.
"The good thing about the group is that we weren't naive going into this. We were familiar with the way the industry worked and we prepared ourselves. Most problems we run into have been expected, so we're making the best out of it."
It was 2* years ago when Whitener first met singer Travis Meeks, then 16, in a Louisville music store where Meeks had been working. The two became instant friends and began jamming soon after with bassist Jesse Vest and drummer Matt Taul, childhood buddies of Meeks.
After playing only a handful gigs, Days of the New were signed by Outpost Records, who were impressed with the band's grungy acoustic rock and Meek's mature, bleak lyrics, a result of his early teenage battle with drugs, alcohol and violence.
After having already abused drugs and alcohol for at least three years, Meeks became a father at the age of 14. Two years later, he entered rehab after attacking a police officer.
"Travis moved to Louisville because things became so bad in Charlestown, (Ind.), where he's from.... He's kept himself together for the past few years now."
Although the band -- which plays the Republik tonight -- doesn't consider itself a grunge band, Whitener admits he doesn't mind comparisons between the band's self-titled debut album and grunge idols Alice in Chains and Soundgarden.
"These are some the great bands of the '90s and I'm not ashamed of being compared to them."
Whitener is also excited at being able to play with some of his early heroes, such as Aerosmith.
"I've always liked Aerosmith and we just found out a few days ago that we're going on a Metallica tour later this year.... I love it!"
From: Melissa
Rolling Stone
Fell on Black Days