CHIODOS

Flint, Michigan’s favorite sons have tasted the crispy delights of tender success, and they’re ready for more.

By Gary Graff
Photo by Pamela Littky

It’s not exactly a rock-star scene at the Firkenfox tonight. The well-lit, noisy brewpub on the southeast side of Flint, Michigan, is filled with pre-holiday revelers watching sports and ordering from the bar’s extensive beer selection. They’re also seemingly unaware that their haunt contains members of the hottest rock band to make it out of the area since Grand Funk Railroad four decades prior.

Chiodos keyboardist Bradley Bell and bassist Matt Goddard—brothers-in-law since Bell married Goddard’s younger sister—are in full off-tour relaxation mode. Earlier they hit a nearby ski hill for some boarding. Now, they’re kicking back and savoring the thrill of their first, just-completed national headlining trek and wrapping a video shoot in Los Angeles for “Lexington (Joey Pea-Pot With a Monkey Face).” It’s what they need to prepare for a full 2008 that will include opening for Linkin Park.

“Everybody has dreams like that when they start out,” Bell, 24, says as his first beer arrives. Goddard, 23, nods in agreement. “We feel fortunate for everything that’s happening, especially seeing where we started and seeing where it’s come today.”
The sextet has been living what frenetic frontman Craig Owens calls “the whole suburban rock-star dream come true” since forming Chiodos in 2001 in Davison—a sleepy, middle-class suburb of Flint. The group’s debut, 2005’s All’s Well That Ends Well, sold what Owens calls “hardcore gold” (about 200,000 copies so far). Bone Palace Ballet (Equal Vision), which came out late last year, debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard charts, a success the band never expected.

Not surprisingly, major labels are hot on their heels, and Chiodos—which also includes guitarists Pat McManaman and Jason Hale and drummer Derrick Frost, who recently moved back to his native Texas—have met with execs eager to woo the group away from indie Equal Vision.

But the band’s greatest success is its appeal to fans of differing genres. In recent years, they’ve won over emo kids on the Vans Warped Tour, punks on the Take Action Tour, and headbangers with their Taste of Chaos cronies. With classically trained chops and an irreverent, hard-rocking spirit, Chiodos thrash about, deftly blending prog-rock precision with hardcore energy. These musical explosions simply propel Owens’ tortured lyrics about heartbreak and countless “insecurities.”

Their musical flexibility has attracted some famous names, as well. “Lindsay Lohan just bought our CD,” Bell reports. “The record-store clerk called our label and told them.” “Yeah,” adds Goddard, “right out of rehab.” “Hopefully it helps her,” Bell says. Then there was the visit from Cassie Steele, one of the hotties from TV’s Degrassi: The Next Generation, who apparently had a crush on Hale. “They met at a Taking Back Sunday concert the night before we played,” Bell recalls, “so she got his phone number and came out the next day and hung out with a couple of her friends.”

With Bone Palace Ballet, recorded in Kentucky with producer Casey Bates, Chiodos retains the fury of All’s Well but sound more sophisticated and polished. The album is more experimental and melodically advanced, including strings and even a ballad (“A Letter From Janelle”).

“We’ve definitely grown as musicians over the past few years,” says Bell. “We opened our minds a lot. We didn’t want to sit on one category of music. We weren’t trying to create radio singles or do what somebody told us to do. We had music we wanted to hear, and that’s what came out of it.”

Owens adds, “We’ve always had a sky’s-the-limit kind of attitude. We’re not trying to become the biggest band in the world. We just wanted to write an album that represents what we had become in the three years since we made our first record. I couldn’t be more thrilled to be where we’re at.”

THE CHIODOS BOND formed at Davison High School, where the members met. They each shared childhood exposure to music—including many classic-rock staples. Goddard laughs about being “forced” to study piano and, later, violin by parents who were accomplished musicians themselves. Bell, whose father has perfect pitch and whose mother was a choir director, took lessons from the same piano teacher and began singing formally when he was 3.

Owens and Goddard met in 10th grade geometry class. “I was wearing an MxPx T-shirt,” Owens recalls, “and [Goddard] was saying he was upset his mother wouldn’t let him go to the concert.” Owens and Bell, meanwhile, logged time together in the all-state honors choir and would hang out at Bell’s house learning favorite songs by Alkaline Trio, Saves the Day and Queen.

“That’s what we would do for fun, for hours,” Owens says. “He would play piano; I would sing. Or we would put a CD on in the car and we would harmonize to it. We always had that connection, musically.”

Also in that orbit was guitarist McManaman, who was in a band with Bell while Owens and Goddard started another group. “He was the local kid who could record bands, so I obviously met with him and hung out,” Owens says with a laugh. The McManaman house, in fact, was “the place to hang out in Davison,” according to Owens, and where the fledgling band first formed as the Chiodos Brothers, taking their name from B-movie horror masters Stephen, Edward, and Charles Chiodo, makers of bloody camp classics such as Killer Klowns From Outer Space.

The band honed its craft around its home base, mostly at Flint Local 432, a since-closed all-ages club (which Chiodos hopes to reopen) where suburban parents felt comfortable sending their kids, and which provided a stage for other local favorites such as the Swellers, Empty Orchestra, and Kid Brother Collective—whose bass player, Chris “Cowboy” Everson, is now Chiodos’ tour manager.

“We were promoting all the time, handing out flyers and stuff,” Bell remembers. “Eventually people would see us at shows and start coming to other shows. We figured, ‘OK, if we can attract this much attention, then why can’t we do that everywhere else we go?’ That’s what really started us touring; we felt like if it was successful around here, maybe it could be everywhere else, too.”

So Bell quit his music studies at Western Michigan University and Goddard and McManaman took leave from nearby community college. Packed into a converted police van, Chiodos spread their reach into the Detroit suburbs, then began working through the Midwest and South. They found bases of support in Milwaukee and Texas—and, somehow, Bakersfield, California. “But nowhere else in California,” Goddard notes.
The increased travel regimen proved to be too much for Chiodos’ original lead guitarist and drummer, who quit. Frost had seen Chiodos play in Texas, contacted the group through MySpace and took a Greyhound north for the audition. He subsequently recommended his friend Hale—who made the nonstop drive to Michigan in his pickup truck—for the vacant guitar spot.

“Everybody on the local scene was like, ‘Oh, I don’t like Chiodos anymore now that they have these two new guys, from outside,” Bell remembers. “But (Frost and Hale) were way better and definitely had a better vision. We became a better band with them, no question.”

CRAIG OWENS ISN’T KNOWN for being a happy guy, mind you. In fact he’s famous for building his lyrics from the angst of his parents’ divorce, his late-teens ecstasy and Vicodin addictions, and a near-fatal case of pneumonia that hospitalized him in 2004 (“a flyer for the next Chiodos gig at the end of my bed was what kept me going”). To listen to his lyrics, you might think Owens hasn’t seen a functional relationship his entire life and couldn’t find happiness in a large-type dictionary.

But while his bandmates generally live up to their images as laid-back, beer-quaffing rock-and-rollers, Owens seems the opposite when at home amid stacks of videogames and books about poet Charles Bukowski, who inspired Bone Palace Ballet’s title. The tall, slender Owens is chatty and animated, expressing wide-eyed joy at Chiodos’ good fortune.

“For some reason, we’ve always had the same vision with this band,” says Owens, dressed casually in a torn V-neck T-shirt and long Nike shorts. “It’s pretty great to have the chemistry we do. Understanding and respect is where it comes from. That’s something a lot of bands today don’t have for one another.”
So why all the angst?

“Just every day, man,” Owens explains. “I’m the farthest thing away from being a perfect human being, and I’m not afraid to admit that. It goes back to family problems, friend problems, relationship problems, to being a human being and stripped bare and really just being who it is that you are as opposed to what other people want you to be.
“I’ve always said music is my therapy and every tortured and creative thing that I say in my music is really just me saying something that I’ve wanted to say but that I’ve bottled up—sometimes for years.”

So does he cling to his anxieties in order to fuel his songwriting? “As much as I want to say no, probably yes,” Owens admits. “I mean, we all need muses. But if I do, I don’t mean to do it.” These days, Owens’ greatest issue is living up to his fan base’s expectations of him. “I’m not a perfect human being—and people think that I am.”

Bell, who’s been friends with Owens since high school, says the rest of the band knows to cut the frontman some slack—especially on the road. “You’ve just got to know when to give him space if he’s getting stressed out over something,” Bell explains. “He has the only instrument that can’t be fixed, you know? If Jason breaks a guitar, we go buy a new one. If Craig is sick, he can’t play. So you have to revolve a lot of the decisions around what the singer’s gonna do that day. But Craig handles it well. He gets a lot of attention and stuff. It’s really hard not to spread yourself too thin. He does a good job with it.”
Distancing himself from the rest of Chiodos is also part of Owens’ survival strategy. Friendly as he is, he admits to being “very reclusive” by nature and that he doesn’t quite fit into the gang mentality back in Davison.

“I kind of separate myself from that,” explains Owens, whose chest tattoo bears Shakespeare’s “All the World’s a Stage” and left bicep quotes the Saves the Day lyric “Try to stay afloat in shallow water.” “I’m not a bar guy. I don’t go out very often. I know Pat, Matt, Jason, and Brad—and Derrick when he was living here—always hung out, every single night. That wasn’t my cup of tea. I just need some time away.”

Instead Owens busies himself with other creative outlets. A novel. An online journal (iamcraigowens.com). A more straightforward side band, Cinematic Sunrise, that also includes Bell as well as Chiodos’ booking agent and merch salesman; they intend to release two EPs this year.

“I’m an overachiever,” Owens explains. “I’m not at a place in my life or in my head or in my heart where I believe I can stop yet. I can’t just sit down and enjoy time off and have a good time. I always have to be doing something.”

He says the upside of being physically separate from the rest of the band is that “distance really does make the heart grow fonder. You leave these guys for so long, the next time you see them you want to just run up and give them a hug because you haven’t seen your best friends in so long. It makes you appreciate the time you have with them.”

OWENS SAYS THAT from the first self-released Chiodos Brothers EP in 2001, the group’s musical path was clear. “I think it’s basically to strive for a change in music,” he explains. “To prove a point, to show that not everybody has to sound exactly the same and not everybody’s trying to get to the very top as quick as possible.

“When we write songs,” he adds, “we write exactly what we want to hear as if we were fans of the band. We all are fans of our band; that’s how we view it. So we don’t think about it too much. We let it come out naturally and don’t go out of our way to strive to do it this way or that way.”

Right now the band is looking forward to other kinds of challenges as it rolls into 2008—and opening for Linkin Park will certainly be one, though Owens says that Chiodos is more “stoked” than anything else to be part of the package.

“We’re excited to play in front of, to me, a different crowd,” says Goddard. “I’m always excited for those ‘I’m gonna fuckin’ prove it to you’ shows.” But recalling the Taste of Chaos bill, where “there were so many upset people waiting for Jared Leto to come out with 30 Seconds to Mars,” Bell is braced for a hostile reception. “There’s gonna be a bunch of people in the front row bummed out that you’re standing in front of them screaming in their face,” he says. “It’s gonna be hard. But if we can walk way with half of that crowd somewhat interested, that’s an extra 10,000 people who know who we are.”
And as far as Owens is concerned, all of them are welcome.

“I’m not afraid of being the biggest band in the world,” the singer maintains. “I’m never gonna be too cool for anything. I’m aiming for the sky. I want to live off this. I want to live as prosperously and happily as I can. I want to achieve dreams and goals and touch as many people as possible. So, no, I’m not worried about popularity. Bring it on, dude…”