With so many bands — particularly pop-punk bands — celebrating major anniversaries for their albums from 20-25 years ago, it’s no surprise that a lot of them are jumping back on the nostalgia bandwagon.
But while the Ataris could go from town to town selling out shows and drawing crowds at festivals by playing So Long, Astoria over and over again, they’re not content with just living in the past. Instead, Kris Roe and his collection of friends are finally releasing their long-awaited sixth album in March, pushing the band’s discography forward for the first time since 2007’s Welcome the Night.
Hit Parader spoke with bassist Mike Davenport about the band’s return to the spotlight, maturity, and much more.
Hit Parader: Looking back on the last 30 years, what does the “story arc” for the Ataris look like?
Mike Davenport: It’s funny because it’s not just an arc, but an up-and-down kind of situation. When you’ve been a band 30 years, you see yourself start really small — our early shows were played to 19 people in a bagel shop or something — and then you get to this point where you’re playing these festivals like Reading and Leeds in Europe with 50,000 people or whatever. But you also hit lulls in your career along the way in this very Spinal Tap way, where you’re like, “What happened and why are we here?” Then things start to come back up again. It’s just like everything with music, it has its ebb and flow. When we started our first tour, we called every basement, backyard and VFW hall we could. We got in the van and just booked anywhere we could play. So from those days to 30 years later playing shows like Riot Fest and Aftershock, we couldn’t be more grateful.
HP: How different is it to be in a band as a father, compared to when you started basically as a kid?
MD: Well, one big difference is that when we would go out on tour in our early days, we’d go out for three, four, five months at a time. We’d barely come home. It was like a “We don’t know what home is” kind of thing. Now in our older, wiser days, we try to mostly do weekends and get home for a couple days in between. It’s still a crazy grind, but you get home and make sure the kids are in school and that your wife still loves you. That’s the most important thing, but it takes a lot of time to learn that.
HP: How does it feel to see the nostalgia and love for not just The Ataris’ So Long, Astoria, but also some of the other massive albums from the first half of the 2000s?
MD: There’s a lot of nostalgia for that era going on right now. I grew up listening to a lot of metal bands as a kid — and Hit Parader was a magazine I read for a lot of those metal bands — and hair metal really never saw the resurgence that pop punk has. It’s so weird to me that our genre has kids latching on to it again, almost like a second coming. We all blew up in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, but then there was a downswing where even bands like Blink-182 went from playing stadiums down to venues like the House of Blues. But now, for the last 10 years or so, all of us have taken this big step back up because the next generation has come in loving pop punk. I’m just wondering if hair metal is finally coming next.
HP: What goes into striking the balance of not being a full-time band anymore but still making the most out of the weekend festival gigs and such?
MD: I just think it’s maturity. We’re all pushing 50 now, and as we get older, I think we realized that the balance is just as important to our success in playing music. We all laugh at each other, because we have this disease where it’s like we’re sick because we love that time on stage so much. That hour or however long it is that we get on stage drives us inside, and we have to have that, but finding the balance between that and our real lives at home is very tricky. We all have families and kids and those kinds of things, and now we’re able to manage it better because we’re older and wiser than we were as kids.
HP: How have you seen the music industry as a whole change over the decades?
MD: Well, we used to sell records. We don’t sell records anymore. It’s all about the live show now. We get paid better these days to play shows than we did back then, but we don’t sell records, so we don’t get paid on that end of it. The good news is that the kids are 100% into what we’re doing right now, so it’s good to know that it didn’t just fade away. There was that time in the middle where maybe we thought we were going to go the way of the dinosaur.
HP: After so many years together, what do you want to see the Ataris do in the next 5 years?
MD: I used to think “5 years? Talk to me in 5 days!” But now that we’re a little bit older and wiser, I can think a little further ahead. We love getting to play in other parts of the world, so the next couple of years will definitely have us in South America, Australia, and places like that. The goal for the next couple of years is to play in as many cool places around the world to as many of our fans as possible. We just got up to Alaska for the first time ever in our career, so we’re trying to hit all of these places where our fans can see us live.
HP: What was it like to record a new album for the first time in nearly 20 years?
MD: It feels good. We all finally got focused on what was important, what our job was in the band, and put behind us a lot of things that had been tearing us apart in the middle years.
