Interview by Rich Gold
Dan Rivas is an Alt Citizen. The mastermind behind the stoner metal band Dutchguts, acting manager of the Meatlocker music venue, a DIY recording engineer, and an all around notorious bad-ass with a massive dreadlock that makes him easy to pick out in a crowd.
The Meatlocker is an underground punk venue in Montclair, NJ. If you want to know the address, ask a punk. It is located in the basement below a very pleasant French restaurant and was at one point an actual meat locker (hence the name). I love hanging out at this place and watching adventurous normies walk in and out in a matter of 5 minutes. The hallway leading to the steps is floored with peeling black and white linoleum. The walls are basically white (except for the crudely scrawled inside jokes all over them), but when you turn the corner, the aesthetic changes from relatively dirty to punk rock paradise. The cement floors are almost always damp from spilled beer and/or bodily fluids, cans and bottles are strewn about, old restaurant booth couches line the wall leading to the show room with practice spaces off the main room. The walls down here are completely covered in terrible graffiti dating back to the 80’s.
I went to the locker at around 9:30 PM on 10/8 (half an hour before shows usually starts, because the restaurant upstairs will call the cops on us if we start any earlier) to meet with Dan. I brought a flask of whiskey to sip while I conducted the interview, but I gave a good amount of it to Dan before we started so that he could “loosen up for the interview.”
RR: When did you first come to the Meatlocker?
Dan: I guess it was at least 10 years ago. I was 15 and in a band called Septic Shock. We got thrown on a show. I mean, we came here, we set all of our shit up, we waited way late to play, and then as soon as we started playing, all the toilets overflowed and the whole place flooded.
RR: Fitting band name considering the circumstances.
Dan: Yeah that’s what we said, because then we played again down the street at that place Bloomfield Ave Cafe with that band Cheap Sex. I don’t know if you remember them they were a punk band or whatever… but someone went in there and smashed the toilet and we got blamed for them smashing it, so every time we played a show there was a fuckin you know… a toilet incident.
RR: Toilet incident… nice. So that was the first time you came here, but when did you-
[interrupted by Ana “hey we gotta go have a debriefing with Roy”]Dan: yeah gimme a few minutes we’re doin’ something here
Ana: Alright lol.
RR: So what was the deal back then? Were there still practice spaces?
Dan: See I didn’t really know what the deal was, the guy, his name was Johnny, he played in a band called the Pinheads, and I don’t know exactly how they got in touch, but that back showroom wasn’t even there. I think that was a practice room or somethin’ else, so we played on the floor next to the bathroom, and everything was set up — I mean it was the same shithole, but it was set up differently and there was no stage. You know, it seemed much smaller, but yeah I guess, I don’t even know when that back room opened up, but we played here pretty consistently with Septic Shock. Well there was Septic Shock, then the Chuck Norris Roundhouse Kick of Deth Experience, we just did our whatever year reunion that was—
RR: Oh yeah I saw that bill, didn’t know it was one of your projects.
Dan: Yeah it wasn’t ten so it must have been like an eight year reunion… yeah so I was consistently comin’ here and then I guess it was the end of when I was in High school. I put together this band with Brian Marsman, he’s a tattoo artist now, he works in Morristown, he’s been all over. But me, him and the original drummer from Dutchguts, Fleszar, it was us three and we just started crashing shows here… and it was goin’ pretty well, you know people were way into it and Roy said to me, “oh I got this room opening up if you’re interested”, and I was like “yeah, im interested, how much?” and he said “come back some time and check it out.” I was like, “I’ll check it out now,” and he said “no come back some time.” So I came back, and I came back, and I came back and I was like “DUDE, how much? I WANT to RENT the room.” And then finally he let me start renting it, so I went out and bought a computer off of craigslist. I just, well cause I had a bunch of amps and shit, but I didn’t know anything about recording, but I figured “I got the space, might as well do it.” So then, you know, after just experimenting and shit, I figured out how to record, but I didn’t want anything to do with booking or anything here, you know what I mean? [Dan, Ana, Mike and a few others book almost every show at the meatlocker nowadays].
I was like, I just wanna have this space as my practice room, my studio, they can do whatever the fuck they want outside, I just don’t want to be bothered by it. And then the dude that was booking the shows, he was sick and he was getting progressively sicker, and he just wasn’t able to be here at the shows because he was sick. So I was in the middle of a recording session one day and Roy’s calling me up, he was like, “the restaurant is freaking out upstairs, there’s like a hundred kids outside and there’s no one there at the show, I’m working, can you PLEASE help me?” and I said ”dude I told you, that’s not my problem.” And then… it was my problem, and now it is my problem.
I then told Dan that this situation reminded me of the beginning of the movie Gladiator (Russel Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix), when the dying emperor tells Maximus that he will succeed him on the throne and Maximus says that he has no desire to lead the people of Rome, but the emperor says that’s exactly why he must do it. Dan then agrees that he is “gladiator-like”. Dan occasionally gets into amateur [basement] wrestling matches and it almost always ends with him being thrown through a table or directly on the floor. Yeah he’s a tough guy.
RR: What is Dutchguts?
Dan: What is Dutchguts? I was originally in a band called Diallelus, but it was a band that started off with 5 dudes, and then we had a show to play around Halloween time, but it started up in the summer. We were doin’ really well, it was pretty awesome, we were playing out a bit. I think we made it down to Philly for a show. We were on the path to having this EP out, it was all recorded and everything and then school started up and the two dudes sorta like… well one guy had a family trip to go on and just kinda lost touch, and the other one went to school and we lost touch, and it was just the three of us left. We were missing the lead guitar player and the singer and we had a show around halloween, but there was this dude filming a documentary for the guy Mike Hideous (one of the unsung singers of the Misfits) and we were on the lineup for this gig but we weren’t actually a band. So we were fuckin’ around with different names, but Dutchguts actually made sense because we were the leftovers, you know cause we would smoke weed at practice, roll blunts whatever and we were the leftovers of that band and made it happen…
We talked about how theres’s always a bunch of dutchguts in the parking lot because that’s where people go to roll up before an L ride.
RR: That’s all well and good, but do you have any sort of message or feeling that you’re trying to convey? (what IS Dutchguts to you?)
Dan: Not really a good one… it’s more of a personal outlet for me. I feel like we could have done more, you know, gone further, because we’ve been a band for a long time now and I feel like most people wouldn’t have bothered… but it’s a very personal thing for me and I don’t really want to compromise it.
RR: So can you tell me about these two songs you just put out, Insatiable and Life Sentenced?
Dan: Uh yeah, those are another two very personal songs, I’ve been working on ‘em for like a WHILE… Insatiable actually got released on a compilation — I think it was like last year or the year before, but we never posted it up or did anything with it. I think this one sounds better.
RR: And what about Life Sentenced?
Dan: We’ve been messing with it for a while — [suddenly Mad Mike comes in and says goodnight, asks if he’s disturbed the interview, is pleased when we tell him he has, then Dan tells him about this poster he’s gonna gift him.]
RR: Yeah so Life Sentenced… you’d been messing with it for a long time.
Dan: Yeah I mean both of those songs have been written for a while. I mean both of the songs had the lyrics written almost three years ago, but I never had the finishing pieces with it. So we got Rob (Furnace Head, Sunrot) recently on guitar, and we’re doing this tour this weekend with Fistula, they’re really cool, and I wanted to put out — you know we kinda rushed it too — but I wanted to get the two songs out to be like “we’re still a band.” Cause we’ve got a full length comin’ out in the spring. I did the vocals the other day in 15 minutes and Pete August got here to mix it and I was still recording it and I was like “sorry man you gotta give me like a few minutes” but, yeah, we got it mixed in half an hour and it was done. I ordered some CDs from Best Buy, we’re gonna go to the copy shop and print out the cover art, get like 50 of ‘em ready for the weekend.
RR: DIY CDs?
Dan: Yeah I’m not tryin’ to put these on vinyl, it’s more like a couple of demo tracks.
RR: Word, so you think you’re gonna re record these for the full length?
Dan: Definitely. These two are part of a collection of like six or seven songs we did as demos that we never put out or finished because we were in between guitar players. So I took these two and got Rob to play guitar for ‘em. I think they came out pretty decent, considering the situation.
RR: Nice… so who’s your biggest creative influence?
Dan: GG Allin, 100 % for the music… or (and a band has started playing outside the room now, its very loud) more his influences I think. I mean I like Eyehategod, but I don’t want to sound like Eyehategod.
RR: I think you do sound similar tonally…
Dan: I think my influences are Sleep and Discharge, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Black Sabbath, Black Flag. That whole, you know, that southern rock, but we got that northern aggression. Can I have some of that whiskey?
RR: Do you think that the world is ready for you and Dutchguts? Do you have a message?
Dan: I think we’re too punk for metalheads, too metal for punks and then there’s all this riffy stuff in the middle. I mean I have people come up to me and say “I love the music but your death metal vocals suck.” I don’t think I have death metal vocals but they’re like “why don’t you just sing like Ozzy?” A lot of people think if I just did clean vocals it would be so much better. But… I don’t WANT to do that. We’ve gotten a lot of good reactions and there’s a lot of people that really do like us. I mean we’ve toured a lot, made it out to California, done the whole US before, but we have a lot of good friends goin’ down the east coast. And they all really like us a lot and we’re all on board, trying to work harder.
The last question I asked him was really wishy washy. His response was that sometimes people read into things way too much and that he thinks that his whole aesthetic/creative output is pretty straight forward. There’s no politics behind it. He’s never published the lyrics and people always want to know what they are, but you can expect to read them when the next Dutchguts album comes out next spring.
Listen to the songs below.
