Interviews: Sputnik's Down

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By Tiffany Razzano

While punk rock and emo are all the rage on Long Island, Sputnik's Down, with its roots in rock, jazz and funk - and even opera - are appealing to all different types of fans across Long Island.

In fact, Sputnik's Down, which garners comparisons to bands such as the Counting Crows, the Wallflowers and Maroon 5, even managed to not only crash punk rock's Warped Tour at Nassau Coliseum in August, but score some new fans in the process.

The band's bassist, Brian Starke, called their very short-lived Warped Tour stint an adventure. "Things, of course, didn't go exactly as planned," he said, "but they never do. We had fun and it was definitely a good experience for us as a band. It was weird being at Warped Tour, being that we play a very different type of music."

How they got to Warped Tour is a story the band will tell for years to come. Through a friend, they met a guy who told the group that he had a tent at the festival, inviting them to play at his tent for four gigs, from Camden, NJ, through Elizabethtown, NJ, including the Nassau Coliseum date. As it turned out, the guy was scamming the group. Not only did he not have a tent at Warped Tour, but he was nowhere to be found at 7 a.m. the morning of the Camden show. When he eventually turned up, he didn't have any good explanation for the group, and instead taught them how to sneak into the concert.

So Sputnik's Down tried to befriend and play at any tent they could. They eventually made friends with funk/punk/ska band Fishbone, who let them play at their Doc Mad Vibe tent. Fishbone invited them to play at the Nassau Coliseum gig as well. After that, they decided to go skip the rest of Warped and try to book some legitimate gigs in Philadelphia.

"Yeah, we crashed Warped Tour," Starke said, laughing. "We crashed Camden and Nassau Coliseum. We didn't know we were crashing Camden. We were just sitting around with no badges, passes, credentials or stage, and we figured we'd been scammed, so we made the best of it."

He added, "We didn't really know what we had gotten ourselves into. We played our asses off and felt good about that. We didn't have hundreds of people running around with CDs afterwards, but there were a few people who enjoyed it and showed up." He said the group received nothing but positive emails in the weeks after the shows.

The Warped adventure might have been exactly what the band needed. Now they're interested in writing and recording the follow-up album to their 2004 record, Going Down. They have a handful of songs written and plan on writing another 10-20 more so they can choose the best of the bunch.

They all help writing the songs, which is a method that works well for them, especially since they all have incredibly varied interests in music. The group also has a long history of playing together, in various forms since high school, whether as a ska band, a punk band, or even, once, a swing band. "One of the things we pride ourselves on is that we're never listening to the same song at the same time when we're apart," Starke said. He added that the group is proud of their new songs because their sound is taking shape and becoming more cohesive.

The group is excited to get back to writing. After their last album, much of their time was spent trying to get a label for it and touring. "Now we want to go back to writing," Starke said. "We learned so much in touring and writing our first album that we really want to write new stuff. I figure if our fans aren't tired of the first album, we sure as hell are."

He added, "We absolutely want to take this as far as it will go. Right now we want to write, want to get back to making music and cutting out the other bullshit that we spend way too much time on. We just want to be five guys playing rock. We got kind of bogged down by ... administrative stuff. We were going overboard with it. We all work full time and only have a certain amount of hours a week for the band. We don't want to waste 10 of them [talking about] fliers ... We're having a blast again, and we're so psyched about it."

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