Tunes Over Trends – Dramarama Are Still Doing Things Their Way

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, during a time when so many in music were following whatever was popular, Dramarama just wanted to be a rock n roll band.

“We weren’t trying to be like anything else,” says the band’s frontman, John Easdale (photo: red shoes), “we had no plans on being on the radio.”

Dramarama, however, ended up on the radio, and after generating quite a bit of buzz, signed to a label.

A string of singles and albums were released, and while the band gained a following, major fame eluded them, and they eventually parted ways in the mid ‘90s.

Their songs, however, had an enduring quality to them, and stayed in enough people’s minds to warrant VH1 tracking down the members of the band in 2004 for the short-lived show Bands Reunited.

The reunion went so well Dramarama has been back together, recording and touring, ever since.

With their songs now receiving airplay on MTV Classic, exposing a whole new generation to their music, I caught up with Easdale to find out more about the band that was, in many ways, ahead of their time.

You know from having been on the VH1 show Bands Reunited that TV appearances can spark renewed interest, so with that in mind, knowing that you have videos now receiving airplay on MTV Classic, what would you like to say to all the people who are just now discovering, or perhaps rediscovering Dramarama? 

I don’t know, man. There’s so many bands, and there’s so many songs, I think it’s a miracle, really, that we’re still around and doing it and playing shows. We’re extremely fortunate to do anything.

I often say it’s easier to win the lottery than it is to be successful in music, and I guess there’s different levels of success. I haven’t made millions of dollars, but it’s gratifying. It really is.

I know so many guys who’ve been in bands, and I know so many guys who are in bands, and who play music, and I’m just the luckiest guy in the world.

While you relocated to L.A. very early on in your career, you’re passionate about your New Jersey roots. You even have a snippet of a Crazy Eddie ad on Vinyl, and it doesn’t get more tri-state area than that. Why are your Jersey roots so important to you? 

Well, I lived in Jersey until I was 25, and that’s where I’m from, that’s who I am.

I’ve lived in California now longer than I lived there. I’ve put down roots here. I have a wife, and we had four daughters who are all grown up now, but Jersey’s in my blood.

Did anyone from Crazy Eddie ever contact you, or discover that you use that snippet? 

I believe by that time Crazy Eddie was out of business.

I worked for a company that actually was owned by the Crazy Eddie family, the corporation. It was a record store called Disc-o-mat.

So, yeah, I remember when that all went belly up, and they were gone.

Those Christmas ads still come back to me every single year. 

Yeah, that guy who did the commercials, he was great.

You had another famous name on that album, Mick Taylor, who played on two of the songs (“Classic Rot,” and “(I’d Like to) Volunteer, Please”). What was it like working with a member of the Rolling Stones? 

We had to pinch ourselves a little bit. It was shocking. We were surprised that he was willing to come in and do it.

And yeah, it was fantastic. He was he was great. He was amazing.

Did you get him to tell some stories? 

No, it was just more about playing. He just came in, and played guitar, and he was really nice.

Dramarama didn’t necessarily fit into any of the musical boxes of the ‘80s, or ‘90s. While that obviously can cause some problems when it comes to finding big time fame, what are some of the perks of not fitting into a specific category? 

You know, I never really gave it much thought. I mean, we were only just trying to play the kind of music that we liked. Growing up in the tri-state area, that kind of music wasn’t on the radio, really.

The New York FM dial was filled with a classic rock kind of vibe, or urban/R&B, and sports and news, but the stuff that was going on in New York, like the Ramones, wasn’t really on the radio. That wasn’t what radio was playing, and neither was MTV.

We liked old style rock n roll, like The Beatles, and the Stones, and The Who, and newer bands like Sex Pistols, and Psychedelic Furs, so we were trying to just do our own thing.

In retrospect, your albums sound like they were all three to five years ahead of the curve of what rock music was doing. For example, Vinyl sounds like it would have come out post Nirvana, like after Nirvana’s run was done, but it came out the same year as Nevermind. Do you feel like you were musically ahead of your time? 

I think we were before, and after, our time.

You know, it’s rock n roll. It’s guitars, and bass, and drums.

Even from the beginning, when we started getting played on the radio out here in Los Angeles, the modern rock music they were playing was very synth based. It was the mid to late ‘80s, and it was a lot of Depeche Mode, and that sort of stuff. It wasn’t rock bands, it wasn’t electric guitars, and drums. So in that sense, we were ahead of the curve before bands like Nirvana came out, but it wasn't like we were trying to be futurists, or retro, you know, we were just playing the kind of music that we really liked.

Now you’re on some nostalgia tours, including this year’s Lost ‘80s Live tour. 

Yeah, we’ve been doing all these shows for a while, because people like going back, and reliving their past.

We’ve been lucky enough to do those, and it’s weird, because there’s a lot of places where no one ever heard of Dramarama.

We still have three out of the four original members, and we play rock music. There’s no tapes, there’s no tracks, it’s just live rock n roll, and if you consider it a battle of bands, we go out there to win.

Is that is that how those shows are internally viewed? Does every band go out every night being like, “Alright, we’re the ones who are going to rock this crowd the most”? 

I’m not going to say anything about any of the other bands, but definitely us. We do.

Like I said, a lot of (the audience has) never heard of us, so we go out and we try to win them over.

Are there any artists that you’ve reconnected with through these tours, or maybe become friends with for the first time? 

I’ve made friends with a lot of them.

We work with with all sorts, and when I listen to like first wave, or ‘80s music, it’s amazing I can say, “Oh, yeah, we play with them!”

Speaking of friends, you had Traci Lords in your video for “Wonderama Land.” How many of your friends decided they really wanted to volunteer to work on the set that day? 

You know, I honestly don’t remember that being a problem. I don’t think anybody knew until after the fact. I honestly don’t even remember how that decision was made.

I think other people made that decision. I was just writing songs, and singing. I was never really a good marketing person. That wasn’t my purview. I was just about the music, and the band.

All sorts of decisions were made by record companies, and managers, that in retrospect, to use that word once more, I don’t know if they were the best decisions.

I know that I personally made lots of horrible, terrible, very bad decisions, and signed lots of horrible, very bad contracts, but I was having fun at the time.

You managed to make it out of it alive, and with a career afterwards, too. There’s something to be said for that. 

Yeah, well at some point in like ’94, it was like, OK, we got to stop doing this, it’s not healthy, and it’s also not fun.

At that point, when Nirvana, and Pearl Jam came around, a lot of the bands from before then were no longer considered cool, and the radio stations that we were on weren’t playing ‘80s bands (anymore), they were playing all the new rock bands, even though we could fit in kind of because we played guitars and stuff.

The interest was fading. There were many reasons, and we were sick of each other, too, I think, so we stopped for almost 10 years before VH1 came along (with Bands Reunited), and that is why we survived. I think if we’d stayed with it … if not dead, I’d be in a lot worse shape.

Dramarama has existed through the days of vinyl, cassettes, CDs, MP3s, and now streaming. What’s been your favorite format as an artist, and as a listener? 

I always like records, vinyl records. That’s what I grew up listening to.

When I was five years old I had The Monkees first album, and I was was listening to albums – The Monkees, and The Beatles, and then everything that came after that. So yeah, vinyl was the way it went.

When we found out that they weren’t going to put out the Vinyl album on vinyl, that’s when we decided to call it Vinyl, and if you listen to our records that came out that were never on vinyl, there’s still a side one, and a side two, at least in my mind. That’s the way the records run, that’s the way I hear them, and that’s the way I put them together, that’s the way I sequence them.

You need a record store day release of Vinyl on vinyl so it can finally be in its proper form. 

I wish.

We own the rights, and the masters, and we control everything on our first two records, and on our last two records, but the ones in the middle are controlled by Warner Music, so Warner Music would have to make that decision, or someone would have to license it, and manufacture it.

That's trickier. 

A little bit.

Speaking of formats, “Haven’t Got a Clue” was on one of the initial CDs for the Sega CD video game system. Did you get anything cool from Sega out of this? Did they hook you up? 

No. In fact, that’s first I’ve heard of that.

Really? 

Yeah. I didn’t know that.

I was a pinball guy, and I remember Pong, and the early video games like Space Invaders.

What you really need is a drummer on a pinball machine.

I haven’t played pinball in a long time, but I did waste a lot of quarters on it back in the day.

I hear there’s a deaf, dumb, and blind kid who’s pretty good at it. 

At least that one boy.

Color TV was the most recent album you released. It’s been six years since then. Has Dramarama been working on anything new? 

Yeah, we’ve been in the studio. It moves kind of slowly. A friend of mine owns one of the best studios in Los Angeles, and he sneaks us in when Elton, and Miss Streisand, and those people aren’t spending thousands of dollars a day to get in there. So we sneak in on weekends, and holidays, and so it goes slowly, but there’ll be another record someday. Fingers crossed.

So “someday” is the timeline right now? 

Yeah, there’s no agenda. There’s no urgency. It’s just when it’s done, it’s done.

Last time we got the record done it took a while to find someone to help us put it out. You can do it yourself, but it’s nice to have someone else.

I’m a terrible salesman. I’m a terrible promoter. I’m not good at that. So I could put it out there, but I don’t know how people would find out about it.

This next question might be impossible to answer, but on “What Are We Gonna Do?” you sing “I’m not a protest singer, I can’t write a song to send a message / But it seems to me that this message needed to be sent.” How is it that 35 years later the environmental message of the song still needs to be sent? Why can’t humans sort things out? 

Some things are unsolvable.

There’s another song I did called “Work for Food” (which is on Hi-Fi Sci-Fi) in which I pictured myself as a homeless person, in the future, who used to be in a band, and is now pushing a shopping cart.

On the last album (Color TV) there’s a line (in the song “Up To Here”), “Everything we try to do just fails / Chill the planet, feed the hungry, save the whales.”

I don’t know. I can’t speak for for humanity, but I know that profit takes precedence most of the time, so even though there are alternative energy sources that could be developed, there are very powerful forces that don’t want that.

It’s all about business. It’s all about money.

And that is a bummer, but we’re not going to end on a bummer. So finally, do you still stay up watching ‘70s TV? 

I wake up watching ‘70s TV now.

I’m an early to bed, early to rise kind of guy these days.

Is there anything else you'd like to add about yourself, the band, or your music? 

Just that we got some shows coming up later this year, and if we come around, come on out, and enjoy.

For more Dramarama, check out dramarama.us.