All Time Low: All Downhill From Here

Posted by Rachel Lux on 11-Jan-08 @ 06:51 PM

ALL TIME LOW came out of nowhere (okay, Maryland) as contenders in the next pop-punk sweepstakes. Big-name producers? Bigtime pressure? World domination? This is growing up in public.

Story: Tristan Staddon
Photos: Roberto Chamorro

The Maryland State Department of Education system requires that all high school students complete 75 volunteer hours before they can graduate. They're called service learning hours. Some students use them to better their communities; some seek credit for exhausting school projects; and some take more absentee avenues.

"I didn't really do anything," admits All Time Low frontman Alex Gaskarth, blushing. "There were kids who built wheelchair ramps or cleaned up parks, but I never did anything like that and somehow I still managed to complete the hours. My guidance counselor was cool."

Gaskarth, 19 and loaded with confidence, isn't being entirely honest: The truth is that he and his bandmates-guitarist Jack Barakat, bassist Zack Merrick and drummer Rian Dawson-made their quota by playing weekly fundraising shows at St. John's Church in Westminster, Maryland, from freshman through senior year. (Those shows, by the way, totalled something like 500 hours.) Eventually the band even convinced guidance counselors to let them enroll in a work-study program that permitted them to leave school at 11:15 every morning-so long as they spent the afternoon practicing their airtight pop-punk compositions. On second thought, maybe Gaskarth really did forget his altruism His "volunteering" probably never felt like work.

Today, All Time Low are continuing their education by obsessively studying their musical idols (primarily pop-punk world-beaters like Blink-182 and New Found Glory), and if the early results are any indication, they're uncannily fast learners. After feeding on sloppy Blink and Green Day covers in middle school, ATL toured the eastern seaboard throughout their high-school tenure. By the time their classmates were waiting on college admissions letters, the band had aligned with Hopeless Records and readied a seven-song mini-album, Put Up Or Shut Up. When the EP had sold more than 60,000 copies it was official: All Time Low couldn't be ignored.

"A year ago, when we went out with Amber Pacific, we had never done a national tour," says Barakat. "We were playing all of these new places, basically introducing ourselves to the world. When we came back, people looked at us differently. Local bands wanted to play with us and we started to turn heads around Maryland. Ever since that tour, things have changed."

What didn't change was the band's resolve to write unabashed world-class pop-punk, regardless of criticisms that aimed to sell short their musical abilities and undercut their enthusiasm for the genre. When it came time to craft their first full-length this past spring, the band had no doubts about the direction. "It's really hard to prove yourself in this industry," says Merrick, "and even when you do, you still take shots from people. Everybody's got an opinion, and I don't have a problem with anybody saying anything negative. We just want to play the music we love. We always make a point: We're pop-punk. Nothing more and nothing less."

"One of my band's biggest pet peeves is when a band puts out a CD that's really good and then puts out another one that's totally different," says Dawson. "It's like, 'What the hell happened to this band?' We all hate that. But we also hate it when they put out the same exact CD. We didn't want to sway too much from our EP, but we wanted to improve upon it a lot."

After a failed attempt to jump-start their creativity at former Yellowcard guitarist Ben Harper's studio this spring (only "Let It Roll" survived the session), All Time Low entered pre-production with mega-producer Matt Squire (Boys Like Girls, Panic! At The Disco) and their longtime friend/Squire protégé Paul Leavitt. But before they could begin realizing their ambitions, the band first had to overcome feeling intimidated by the success of their debut, the task of topping it and working with the well-regarded producer.

"Honestly, for a few months before we recorded, we were so scared of Matt," says Barakat. "Him and Paul Leavitt sat in the room with us the whole time and heard what we played and commented on it. [Squire] would go, 'I don't like that verse. Change it. I'm going to go eat lunch and when I come back, I want a new verse and a new chorus.' I was scared shitless until our CD was finished. It's our first full-length; we needed to make it count."

Incredibly, none of those anxieties come within a mile of the resulting So Wrong, It's Right, an immensely infectious album born from a band with the exuberance of hungry upstarts and the songwriting skills of pop-punk lifers. "Shameless" sets speed thrills to muscular guitars; "The Beach" is a sunny sing-along, and "Six Feet Under The Stars" reprises the people and places from Put Up Or Shut Up's star-making "Coffee Shop Soundtrack" while spiking the story with Jäger bombs and the sound with monstrous harmonies. The disc manages to be more of the same while simultaneously stepping their musicianship and songcraft up several notches.

"I didn't go off in any crazy new directions or find Jesus or anything," says Gaskarth, laughing. "So there's nothing wholly unique and different. But I think with maturity, there's a little bit more to the lyrics. 'Dear Maria' is a song about a friend of mine that became a stripper-which is rad-but it spiraled off into this other idea and concept. A lot of my writing before had been first person. It was fun to tell stories a little more."

Merrick also steps up his game, flashing inspired bass lines and backing vocals that resulted from the lessons he took during what little downtime the band found over the past year. "There aren't too many four-note bass lines," he says, smiling. "I remember talking to Matt Squire and going, 'You're not going to turn down my bass parts...' and he was like, "Well, we'll see." But he kept pretty much all of them in. He was like, 'You've got a mad bass part in this song. Do something simple.' I just wanted to make sure that I played bass as well as I could on this record."

The more converts come around, the more respectable is All Time Low's decision to stand behind the music they love. Though each member of the band is quick to point out that they relate completely with the same crowd they're singing to, it seems the only thing growing faster than ATL's supporters are the band's aspirations.

"It's funny to think that we wrote some of the songs on the EP when we were 15 and 16," says Merrick, laughing. "Now we're 18 and 19 and we want to take over the world like Blink did. For how generic pop-punk can be, I think we make it different for people. When Blink were onstage, they would always talk about foul things and funny stuff about growing up. There's no fun band out there anymore. But that's what we're all about: Things that kids understand."

"It's really weird when a kid my age comes up and shakes my hand and says, 'I just started a band and you guys are the reason,'" relates Gaskarth. "I'm like, 'What? Really?' It still hasn't quite clicked yet. I stress about it. I freak out about it. I sweat it out of my body. I bleed it and I'm really proud of it. I couldn't be happier that it turned out the way it did."

"I hope kids look at our record three years from now and go, 'That's a classic pop-punk record,'" intimates Barakat. "I think about Say It Like You Mean It by the Starting Line; I look at [Blink-182's] Enema Of The State and Take Off Your Pants And Jacket. Those are CDs I will always listen to. I hope that kids look at our record that way."

He pauses and thinks for a moment.

"It's weird," he continues. "The stories behind these songs are the stories of my high school years, but I feel like this is the record that I've always wanted to have." ALT

THE SECRET LIVES OF BASSISTS
While it might come as a surprise to some that Zack Merrick made fast friends with members of hardcore heavyweights Throwdown on this year's Warped Tour, it turns out there's a lot about the All Time Low bassist people don't know. In addition to his proficiency on the four-string, Merrick can also breathe fire, weld underwater and ride a unicycle. "I pretty much could join the circus if I wanted to!"

Merrick worked at a rodeo camp while he was in high school and came away an expert in both steer wrestling and bull riding. "Being 16, you can imagine I didn't hold on for very long," he says. "Actually, we used to have to get behind bulls to shoo them into a cage. They tell you, 'When it's time to put them in, we'll tell you which one' and they hand you a stick. So it's you and a two-foot stick against a 3,000-pound animal. It's the scariest thing ever." This from a guy whose job was to kill poisonous snakes before they could harm farm animals.

Today though, Merrick's more ladykiller than anything else. Fans of MTV's Exposed saw that this summer when the bassist charmed a young Los Angeles beauty, winning her affections and a $500 cash prize. "I didn't realize it was Exposed," says Merrick. "[The show's producers] tricked me into it and right at the end, after you've answered all of these questions, they're like, 'You've been Exposed.'"

Now, because he had to meet up with ATL to begin Warped the day after his episode taped, there's no new romance to report on yet. But Merrick says that he and his belle keep in touch and plan to get better acquainted the next time ATL play L.A. So exactly how honest was he? "I had pretty much lied about everything," he says, laughing. "You've got to protect yourself somehow. For $500, I'd lie about just about anything." [TS]