Deep down in their pink bellies, however, the Spiders are just regular, hormonal twenty-something boys whose debut album, Teenage Graffiti, just happens to have been produced by erstwhile Cars frontman Ric Ocasek. Since signing with Suretone (Jordan Schur's new Geffen imprint, also home to Drop Dead, Gorgeous), the outfit has gone from being a baby band that started touring just three weeks after forming to co-headlining a tour of its own. We recently spoke with bassist Jon Decious, who spun some harrowing true-life tales about the life of a Pink Spider.
Westword: I've read a few things about you guys that sound like urban legends. Did you really sleep in New York City subways?
Jon Decious: Yeah, it sucked! It was one of those things that was very kind of delusional at a certain point. You stay up all day and walk around, and with the wind chill, it was the coldest winter in fifty years. It was -30 degrees outside. So we'd walk around all day and go to our show and then just go back to the subways after we played the show. It was two or three days that we spent in New York. I can't even remember, really. It was, like, two and a half years ago.
Okay, so how about the trailer-catching-fire story?
That's a funny one, actually. I guess the wheel popped off. I didn't even realize it, because I was asleep when all this was going on. And then the axle got so hot, it caught the bottom part of the trailer on fire. It was just one of those things. Shit happens, you know? It sucks, but we were actually on tour with another band at the time, and so there were like nine or ten dudes in a van. And after that happened, we took it to some parking lot and left it. It was a weird thing. We took the plates off and everything. It was pretty fucked. There was no fixing it. I think I peed in it, too. That was just the icing on the cake.
You guys must be out on tour a lot for these things to happen all the time.
We started touring three weeks after we started the band.
Don't people say that you should wait before getting out on the road?
That's just what people say when the band sucks. When your band sucks, you should probably wait a year and get good. But we just happened to be pretty good when we started; that's why we got the band together. We were just tired of sitting around at home and not doing anything. What are you waiting for, really?
