Cast Iron Hike reunites
Globe Correspondent
June 06, 2013
Bassist Pete DeGraaf recalls singer Jake Brennan wearing a Billie Holiday T-shirt to his tryout for a spot in Cast Iron Hike, a band with aspirations to merge hardcore punk’s intensity and honesty with heavy metal’s groove and dynamics.
“It wasn’t weird because all the people in the band listened to a lot of different kinds of music and listened to music really closely,” DeGraaf says.
Brennan got the job, joining guitarists Chris Pupecki and Mike Gallagher, drummer Dave Green, and DeGraaf for a run that began in 1994 and was over by 1998, leaving in its wake two EPs, the full-length “Watch It Burn,” a bunch of tours, and a devoted fan base.
“People have been asking for a reunion since 1999, the year after we broke up,” says Pupecki.
Before Cast Iron Hike, Green and Pupecki played together in the hardcore band Backbone. Green says he and the guitarist had a good chemistry, and their musical tastes were expanding beyond their hardcore roots.
“I wasn’t listening to hardcore at all anymore, probably with the exception of staples like the Cro-Mags, Bad Brains, Minor Threat, and Black Flag that I still listen to regularly. I was listening to a lot of Swans, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits stuff then. I was always looking for heavy, Sabbathy, groove-oriented music, but the vocals of most metal were silly, and a lot of heavy hardcore was dumb, macho posturing with screaming vocals that did nothing for me anymore,” Green wrote in an e-mail.
The two were stumbling into what was then a fresh brand of heaviness courtesy of such bands as Kyuss, the Melvins, and Helmet, and wanted to put together a band along those lines. In separate interviews, each member of Cast Iron Hike in some fashion said that the band was neither hardcore nor metal, yet somehow drew from both camps to simply be “heavy.”
Once Gallagher, DeGraaf, and Brennan joined, the band bashed out its ideas in Clinton and played around Worcester, eventually branching into Boston. The fledgling Big Wheel Recreation record label released Cast Iron Hike’s debut, “The Salmon Drive E.P.,” in 1995, then the larger Trustkill Records put out the band’s self-titled four-song CD the following year. In 1997, Victory Records, at the time one of the bigger independent labels for heavy music, released “Watch It Burn.” The band relentlessly toured, doing mostly DIY club shows plus the occasional festival; Pupecki recalls how both Blink-182 and Limp Bizkit preceded Cast Iron Hike on two different festival bills.
“We went from playing in garages to touring with Sick of It All pretty quickly,” Pupecki says. “It was pretty awesome.”
Even though the traditional hardcore camp gave Cast Iron Hike what Pupecki calls the “skunk eye” because of Brennan’s clean, no-shriek vocals, others picked up on what the band was striving for with its blend of heaving riffs and tightly coiled melody lines.
“The people who told us, ‘We like your riffs but your singer sounds like Steven Tyler,’ were five years later listening to the exact same kind of stuff we were making,” Pupecki says.
The reunion is so long in the coming for a variety of reasons, mainly ones having to do with post-Cast Iron Hike commitments. Brennan left the band to pursue an interest in roots music awakened while the band toured through the South. Gallagher joined prog-metal band Isis. Pupecki, Converge’s Nate Newton, and others formed Doomriders, which has its third album coming out this summer. DeGraaf has played in various bands and is working on an album with power-pop band Clear the Way. Green went back to school after Cast Iron Hike dissolved and is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.
Gallagher (left) and Jake Brennan during a band gig at Sir Morgan’s Cove in Worcester in the mid-1990s.
“I was young in Cast Iron Hike, and like a lot of young adults, you start digging deeper into music. AC/DC and Led Zeppelin records bring you to the blues,” Brennan says of the move from Cast Iron Hike to his next band, the Americana-oriented Confidence Men. “I was listening to a lot of music by the Band, and thinking ‘They’re Canadian guys doing this. I can do this.’ ”
Brennan later moved to the indie-pop world of Bodega Girls and now focuses mainly on his music production company, BrenBurg Media.
“Being in Cast Iron Hike taught me how to be in a band and how to work with other people,” Brennan says. “Those were strong personalities in Cast Iron Hike, and I sought that out in my future projects.”
The reunion ball finally got rolling after Isis disbanded in 2010. Gallagher, who now lives in Los Angeles, called Pupecki to say he was open to a reunion if the other members were.
“I didn’t want to do it for the longest time,” Gallagher says. “It just didn’t feel right.”
But like the others, Gallagher credits his tenure in Cast Iron Hike as an important time of learning and is still proud of the music the band made.
“We had a good run,” he says. “We enjoyed it. We did it, and who knows what would have happened if we stayed together any longer?”
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| Chris Pupecki, left, and Mike Gallagher of Cast Iron Hike (Aram Boghosian photo) |
Bassist Pete DeGraaf recalls singer Jake Brennan wearing a Billie Holiday T-shirt to his tryout for a spot in Cast Iron Hike, a band with aspirations to merge hardcore punk’s intensity and honesty with heavy metal’s groove and dynamics.
“It wasn’t weird because all the people in the band listened to a lot of different kinds of music and listened to music really closely,” DeGraaf says.
Brennan got the job, joining guitarists Chris Pupecki and Mike Gallagher, drummer Dave Green, and DeGraaf for a run that began in 1994 and was over by 1998, leaving in its wake two EPs, the full-length “Watch It Burn,” a bunch of tours, and a devoted fan base.
“People have been asking for a reunion since 1999, the year after we broke up,” says Pupecki.
And they’ll finally get one, as Cast Iron Hike
reunites for four shows beginning June 13 at O’Brien’s in Allston,
followed by appearances at Ralph’s Diner in Worcester on June 14, Great
Scott in Allston on June 15, and wrapping up at St. Vitus Bar in
Brooklyn, N.Y., on June 16.
Before Cast Iron Hike, Green and Pupecki played together in the hardcore band Backbone. Green says he and the guitarist had a good chemistry, and their musical tastes were expanding beyond their hardcore roots.
“I wasn’t listening to hardcore at all anymore, probably with the exception of staples like the Cro-Mags, Bad Brains, Minor Threat, and Black Flag that I still listen to regularly. I was listening to a lot of Swans, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits stuff then. I was always looking for heavy, Sabbathy, groove-oriented music, but the vocals of most metal were silly, and a lot of heavy hardcore was dumb, macho posturing with screaming vocals that did nothing for me anymore,” Green wrote in an e-mail.
The two were stumbling into what was then a fresh brand of heaviness courtesy of such bands as Kyuss, the Melvins, and Helmet, and wanted to put together a band along those lines. In separate interviews, each member of Cast Iron Hike in some fashion said that the band was neither hardcore nor metal, yet somehow drew from both camps to simply be “heavy.”
Once Gallagher, DeGraaf, and Brennan joined, the band bashed out its ideas in Clinton and played around Worcester, eventually branching into Boston. The fledgling Big Wheel Recreation record label released Cast Iron Hike’s debut, “The Salmon Drive E.P.,” in 1995, then the larger Trustkill Records put out the band’s self-titled four-song CD the following year. In 1997, Victory Records, at the time one of the bigger independent labels for heavy music, released “Watch It Burn.” The band relentlessly toured, doing mostly DIY club shows plus the occasional festival; Pupecki recalls how both Blink-182 and Limp Bizkit preceded Cast Iron Hike on two different festival bills.
“We went from playing in garages to touring with Sick of It All pretty quickly,” Pupecki says. “It was pretty awesome.”
Even though the traditional hardcore camp gave Cast Iron Hike what Pupecki calls the “skunk eye” because of Brennan’s clean, no-shriek vocals, others picked up on what the band was striving for with its blend of heaving riffs and tightly coiled melody lines.
“The people who told us, ‘We like your riffs but your singer sounds like Steven Tyler,’ were five years later listening to the exact same kind of stuff we were making,” Pupecki says.
The reunion is so long in the coming for a variety of reasons, mainly ones having to do with post-Cast Iron Hike commitments. Brennan left the band to pursue an interest in roots music awakened while the band toured through the South. Gallagher joined prog-metal band Isis. Pupecki, Converge’s Nate Newton, and others formed Doomriders, which has its third album coming out this summer. DeGraaf has played in various bands and is working on an album with power-pop band Clear the Way. Green went back to school after Cast Iron Hike dissolved and is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.
“I was young in Cast Iron Hike, and like a lot of young adults, you start digging deeper into music. AC/DC and Led Zeppelin records bring you to the blues,” Brennan says of the move from Cast Iron Hike to his next band, the Americana-oriented Confidence Men. “I was listening to a lot of music by the Band, and thinking ‘They’re Canadian guys doing this. I can do this.’ ”
Brennan later moved to the indie-pop world of Bodega Girls and now focuses mainly on his music production company, BrenBurg Media.
“Being in Cast Iron Hike taught me how to be in a band and how to work with other people,” Brennan says. “Those were strong personalities in Cast Iron Hike, and I sought that out in my future projects.”
The reunion ball finally got rolling after Isis disbanded in 2010. Gallagher, who now lives in Los Angeles, called Pupecki to say he was open to a reunion if the other members were.
“I didn’t want to do it for the longest time,” Gallagher says. “It just didn’t feel right.”
But like the others, Gallagher credits his tenure in Cast Iron Hike as an important time of learning and is still proud of the music the band made.
“We had a good run,” he says. “We enjoyed it. We did it, and who knows what would have happened if we stayed together any longer?”
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