Alt Rock Live recently caught up with Tony, Ben, and Adrian from Tab. The band is currently on the tour with Slash. Getting to talk with the band was a great opportunity and we found they had a lot to say; we hope you find it as interesting as we did!

AltRockLive: Growing up, what did your father (Joe Perry) teach you about music?

Tony: Nothing.

Adrian: Nothing, he taught me nothing.

AltRockLive: So it was the sort of the thing that just explored on your own and picked up yourselves?

Tony: yea.

Adrian: Well my grandfather was a musician, and a music teacher, so he was a pretty big influence. But otherwise - rock and roll - I just came to it on my own.

Tony: Yea I learned on my own, I didn't start playing guitar until I was like 14. I actually started with drums and it just sort of evolved into it. It was all natural, and he [Joe Perry] didn't really help us at all.

AltRockLive: Even after he found out that you were starting to learn instruments, he didn't give you any pointers or anything?

Tony: Not really, he just let us do our thing.

AltRockLive: Was it difficult learning your instruments?

Tony: It seemed easy, I don't know. I mean I practiced a lot.

AltRockLive: So it came down to mostly practice?

Tony: Yea, I don't consider myself one of those people where I can just naturally display anything.

Adrian: I am one of those people, it was incredibly easy. (laughs) I was instantaneously good.

AltRockLive: Are there hinderances associated with the connection to your father?

Adrian: Absolutely. I think that, if anything, it's more of a detriment than a benefit. But it's something that we were aware of going into it, it's not like we can deny it or anything. We just kind of play it straight, you know. We don't run around trying to hide it, we don't run around promoting it. It's there, we deal with it. We run into people sometimes whether it's journalists, or radio people, or whoever that aren't into the band just on it's face just because they assume that we don't work hard, or we're not genuine, or we're not doing it for the right reasons. I can't worry about that; we know why we're doing it. We have enough respect in the music community, and other journalists and radio folks who do get into the band, and see who we really are. But we definitely run into problems, sometimes, with the perception. It is what it is, we deal with it. Every band has problems and challenges, we just have a different set, you know.

AltRockLive: Where do you think you would you be if you did not have the connection to your father?

Adrian: I have no fucking idea. I mean there's no way to tell, there's just no way to answer that question.

AltRockLive: How would you describe your style of music?

Tony: It's kind of a lot of different stuff. Mostly just classic rock is what we all take from. I mean everything from The Beatles to The Who and Cheap Trick to new stuff like The White Stripes and all these bands...we all listen to everything. And we like listen to Biggie Smalls and Run DMC, everything influences me. It's not like I only listen to AC/DC all day long. We're all like that. We all listen to Jazz, Classical

Adrian: Old R&B, I mean I love...

Ben: Motown

Adrian: Yea Motown, and Sly and the Family Stone, and Stevie Wonder. I'm a bass player so I love all that stuff. Yea we all have ecclectic tastes and it all kind of comes into play, but at the core we're a straight ahead rock band in the 1968 sense, or 76 sense, or however you want to characterize it.

Tony: When I listen to it, it's not like we're ripping off old bands. I think we take what we are influenced by and create something newish. You wouldn't listen to us like other rock bands that are out now and be like "oh they sound just like AC/DC, or they sound like Black Sabbath," you know but you'll listen to it and you'll be like "oh that sounds like Cheap Trick, The Rolling Stones, The Who." You know what I mean, like that's what we all have in there is like Beatle harmonies with AC/DC rhythm and Cheap Trick style and all that stuff.

Adrian: We're not like a gimmick band, it's not like we wanna "recreate the 70s," you know. We get up and play what we play, and try to update rock and roll for our generation. That's it.

Tony: We just write music we like listening to.

Ben: We're updating it for ourselves.

Tony: If we worried about what people thought about our music style-wise, we'd create some dance hipster douchebag band and instantly become famous, because that's all it takes. We wanna write music that we like listening to because I don't hear anything now that I'm wicked stoked about

AltRockLive: So you do it for yourselves, and hope that along the way you pick up as many fans as you can.

Tony: Yea it's like you're either going to join us or your not.

AltRockLive: And that's even if you're not as popular as the "douchebag" bands?

Adrian: They burn out fast.

Tony: I'd rather sustain a solid career than just flash in the pants like we're cool we're on the cover of Spin for one issue and no one cares after that. And I think we're all the same kind of idea.

AltRockLive: Who has influenced your life or your music aside from bands, as in personal influences?

Ben: My father is a music teacher, he's definitely influence everything I've done. Even in life, like my life decisions. He's a music teacher so it helps having that, I guess that's still a musical influence but whatever.

Tony: Um I don't know I'm trying to think that's a tough one.

Lou: My mom's been singer forever. She's been in a lot of acapella groups and she's in this thing called the Belltones, three girls singing fourties music, she has tought choirs in the south shore and stuff like that. So growing up around that has obviously influenced me.

AltRockLive: So you guys have all grown up in musical families, I guess you could say.

Tony: Yea we all did.

AltRockLive: Which of the songs that you've written is your favorite and why?

Ben: That's like choosing between children. (laughs)

Tony: I don't know I mean I like obviously all of it. I'm trying to think of songs I like more than others. I go through phases.

Lou: The newer ones are more exciting because they're new.

Tony: I'll go back after not listening to our first record for six months and listen to it again and be like "I forgot how cool this was" or whatever and it's always evolving and changing. You know we'll write a new song and that's my favorite, and then two months go by and back into an old song or a new song we wrote. There's nothing that sticks out this was our pinnacle, like this is the one - kind of thing.

Ben: Because then we'd have to kill ourselves. (laughs)

Tony: Yea because then we'd finish. We're always progressing, and every song we do we wanna make it better than the last one.

AltRockLive: So are you guys coming up with any new material?

Ben: All the time.

Tony: We all kind of live in different spots but we all are always like recording and emailing or like going around with ideas. We just recorded two new singles a couple weeks ago and got them mixed and mastered and they'll come out in the next few months. And then we go into the studio in November hopefully with Mark Niel the Black Keys producer, to do an EP with them. But I can't even count the amount of songs we have...

Adrian: There's a back log of songs. I've got about 35 tunes sitting in the playlist. Lou's got God knows how many, and everyone's got ideas. We're always writing and progressing, and we're playing a new song in the set tonight. The singles Tony mentioned that are gonaa come out in October, a song called Little Water and then there's another single that will come out later. You just gotta keep on keepin' on, you know.

Tony: The attention span for people now-a-days is very short, so we like the idea of constantly producing music and kind of going back to the 60s like "two albums a year" like The Beatles used to do. Especially now-a-days everyone's attention span is this big (here he gestured how big the attention span was, which was not very big). I'll listen to a song ten times and then be like "I'm done with that."

AltRockLive: Do you come up with a lot of ideas when you're touring or playing a lot of shows?

Tony: Usually when I get home is when I'll do it because I'll have time to think about everything. And that's usually when we're all playing the best too.

Ben: We don't try to force the song out. We'll be like "alright we have some down time now, let's write a song."

Tony: Yea usually when we're not playing on stage we're either driving or sleeping.

Adrian: Or eating.

Tony: Or eating.

Adrian: We got on a hot streak recently. We had some down time, and I didn't do anything for a couple of weeks and then all of a sudden songs just start pouring out. I was writing like one or two a day. It just kind of comes and goes and when you're on you just have to keep going and when the well dries up you gotta let it dry and work on the ideas you have and it's just a cylce you know. You have to just let it happen.

AltRockLive: What was you're favorite live show, or have you had any memorable moments on stage?

Tony: I mean last night was pretty fun. We played at Terminal 5 with Slash, and the crowd was just really on point and seemed pretty into it. They higher the energy the crowd has the more I get into it and the better we all play. It was definitely one of the top, I mean it was sold out, we were like main support. Everyone was there when we were playing so it was definitely really cool. That was a fun one. But any time we get on stage with like Slash, STP, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, or Modest Mouse it's always fun you know it's always a good show. And being able to play with bands of that stature, it's influential.

AltRockLive: How did playing with Slash come about?

Tony: We were over in England playing with STP, we were playing a festival, and he was playing there. And later we saw him and...

Adrian: Yea we just talked to him about trying to do some shows together, and he was like "Yup, let's do it." He was able to get us on a couple of shows in our "home cities" which are New York and Boston.

AltRockLive: Two of your members went to Boston University; how do you feel coming back and plaing shows in Boston?

Tony: I mean for me it's awesome, in the last month I've probably been here like five times. It's definitely a cool experience to play venues I mean like we played the Bank of America Pavilioin with STP and I've seen a shitload of shows there. I almost like doing that more, playing locally these bigger shows because I'm playing with bands where I've seen bands.

Adrian: Even when we've been to Paradise it was really cool.

Tony: I like historical, I mean Boston is a crazy music city, and I mean New York is too obviously, but the Orpheum for me is the one I would love to play. Paradise was like, AC/DC played there, it's just such a sweet venue. For me it's awesome.

Slash's Drummer: (randomly coming by) Do a job! Do a job!

AltRockLive: So what is the influence behing your latest album Zoo Noises?

Lou: There's not really a story behind it I mean it was kind of like "let's write some songs."

Tony: The last couple of records we kind of like were more focused on that garagey rock with pop kind of thing, and this one we're like fuck it, let's do whatever we want. And that's what we did.

Adrian: It sort of broke down all the bariers we had set for ourselves for the first two records because we found ourselves on the first two records excluding a lot of ideas and influences that we really liked. So on this record we just figured we can make this work. We can make it all work because our style is not going to be defined by, I mentioned earlier, (sarcasticly) we're just this "gimmicky, garage 70s band" or you know we're a powerpop band or this or that. We wanna be a good songwriting band. We want the essence of the band to come through on everything that we write, and the production style is just the icing on the cake. So that's why I feel like whether you hear a song like "Girl Like You" which was an acoustic track or you hear "Bought and Sold," you're gonna know it's us because of maybe the style of the arrangement, the sound of the band, the tenor of the lyrics, the vocal sound, all that stuff. It will be the unifying factor. So with Zoo Noises we were just like well let's just put together a record of all the songs we like, and all the songs we think are good enough to be released. And that's what we did, and you know some people are like "Well there's too much of this or that" and we're just like "You know, who fucking cares?" Tony brought up a good point a bunch of times in other interviews you know now-a-days people, they buy song to song. The don't even buy full records anymore. To me the record is a cool record as a whole. Not to compare it to albums like "The White Album" or "Exile" but it has that expansive quality where you're hearing the band doing a lot of different stuff and I like that. But other people they might only like some of the harder stuff or they might like the folkier stuff, so let them buy those tunes. That's fine, I don't care.

Tony: As long as people are listening.

Adrian: Yea I mean we're here for your entertainment, so you can use us how you want. So that was the idea with Zoo Noises and I think it's a really fun record you hear a lot of cool stuff going on. It's a record that sticks to you because it has depth and it doesn't get boring. I don't know that every record from here on in is gonna be like that, but it has certainly set the spectrum very wide for what we can do.

Tony: I mean we could do a folk record now, or actoustic stuff, and people would be like oh that's obviously them taking from this part or do a whole record or Cheap Trick songs or...

Adrian: Or a fuckin' heavy one, you know what I mean, the sky's the limit.

Lou: We like playing what we like so if we want to do a record of folk songs than that's what we'll do.

Tony: Beck does that constantly. He'll do like a dance record and then an acoustic album you know and people like him for him.

Adrian: And it always sounds like him.

Tony: Yea and it's always Beck. You listen to him sitting down with an acoustic guitar or with a huge band, electronic, and you always know it's him. I mean we didn't take it from Beck but that's our idea.

Adrian: Yea that's our idea if you're looking for a comparison then that idea is what you can think of.

AltRockLive: Are there any questions you wish you had been asked on an interview?

Tony: I don't think so. That was pretty involved. (laughs)

AltRockLive: Well that's all we had for you tonight, Thanks!

Adrian: Sweet.

Ben: Cool man.