Lagwagon gear up for Froth and Fury while looking back on 30 years of Hoss

Bred from a long lineage of punk bands from Southern California, Lagwagon have become one of the most influential and pioneering punk bands of their era, with a sound characterised by speedy drums, guitar virtuosity, and distinct melodies. Now, more than ten years since their last visit to WA, the band are set to bring their 30th Anniversary of Hoss Tour to Perth this summer, playing Froth & Fury Festival at Perth HPC on Saturday, January 24, with tickets on sale now. KAREN LOWE spoke with Lagwagon frontman Joey Cape to find out more about the band’s upcoming tour down under, the 30th anniversary of Lagwagon’s album Hoss, NOFX’s final shows, discovering new music and Geraldton band RATSALAD. 

You guys will be touring Australia in January, starting with the Froth and Fury Festival in Perth and Adelaide. Are you looking forward to the shows? And what are some of your favourite memories of Australia?

That’s a question I always get asked, and then I say, ‘Memories? What are those?’ But yeah, it all kind of blurs together. I’m looking forward to the festivals. I don’t think we’ve ever played that festival before, and it’s cool that it’s in two spots. I have no idea what to expect, but it’s always kind of fun to do something different. I think it would be super cool, especially in Perth, because in WA, we always just play venues. I don’t know if I’ve ever played a festival out there—maybe, but I don’t know.

Maybe the Big Day Out or Soundwave? 

Oh yeah, probably. I have a ton of great memories. It’s funny. When you’ve been doing it long enough, you kind of realise that the memories that stick with you aren’t the shows or the venues or the bars or any of that kind of obvious stuff because you’ve done so much of it. The funny part of it is the stuff that kind of stays with you that becomes special is things like bowling, like lawn bowling—doing that with a bunch of friends on a day off. That’s my favourite thing to do down there, or just going to the beach. Those are the things I enjoy doing when I’m in Australia, if the weather permits. With late January, it’s going to be kind of hot. Lots of shorts!

It’s the 30th anniversary of Hoss. What are your favourite songs to play off that album, and are there any songs in general that you wish you played more? 

With Hoss, we’ve always played a lot of songs off that record. That was our third record, and it was the first record of ours that came out when we were starting to get well known, and it was far more eclectic than the first two records we made. The first one is just one sound. We did it in three days. It’s live. I can’t even listen to that record. I mean, sometimes you go back and relearn songs. The second one is similar. We started to get a little braver and branch out a little bit, but Hoss is the first record we made where I put every influence of everything I was into at the time. I felt like there were no rules here.

That’s how you should always be when you make music, of course, or any art. But, because of that, it is exceptional because there are at least ten songs on that record that we play on a regular basis, so there aren’t too many that we don’t play. And the ones that we don’t play, I think there’s a reason that we don’t play them. There’s a song called Ride the Snake on that record. I believe it was the last song on the record, and it’s super slow and kind of sounds like doom metal but also maybe a little bit like early Nirvana too. It’s a slow one for the band, and it’s just a weird song. I kind of like playing it. It feels like I’m taking a break when we play that song. It feels like it’s like having a smoke.

It’s like the breather for the mosh pit.

Exactly! And there’s a bunch of people in the audience looking at us like, ‘What are they doing? What’s happening here?’

That’s actually the best reaction you can get, though.

Oh yeah, I love it. It’s perfect.

Lagwagon have been around since 1990…

Well, we started a little bit earlier, and when I joined, they were called Section Eight, and I joined the band in 1988 and started writing for them. Every member except for two was different, and then I joined, so I was new too. I always say we got together in 1989. That’s when we had our first record written, and then we recorded it in 1990. Of course, somehow, it didn’t come out until 1992, which I will probably never forgive certain people for. It really pisses me off, like, ‘Goddammit, NO! Weeks?’

What are some of the biggest changes that you have seen in the industry? And what challenges, or improvements, have those changes brought?

That’s a big question. I mean, the geography and time have a big effect on what changes. It changes differently throughout the world. From pretty early on, I think in the early nineties, we started travelling internationally with the band. What I might say about climate change in Germany would be totally different from, say, anywhere in Australia. So it’s hard to be specific about something like that. But things come and go. The way people feel things get, for example, was really politically correct for a while. Fortunately, we haven’t really been all that offensive in our careers. For the most part, we’re good people, so it hasn’t really had a huge effect on us.

Then the music changes. I think what you do as a band, there’s always a critical mass. It gets to a point where it’s doing really well almost everywhere, and then all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Eh, we’re getting bored with this,’ so everything starts to change. The good news is we’ve always been kind of flying under the radar. We’ve never really become a big band, so we just get to endure by doing what we do.

Lagwagon’s early records had that chaotic skate-punk energy, but the newer work leans towards a more melodic and reflective sound. What drove that shift as writers? 

I mean, probably mostly age. The older you get, the more you source your emotional material from experience. It’s hard for me to be too calculated about the things I write. I kind of have to just have to react to whatever’s happening in my life, at least lyrically speaking. The music’s different because the music is eclectic. It’s a collaborative thing. The best we can do is when everybody’s happy. So if we make a record and everybody’s like, ‘Yeah! We did it!’ then I feel great about it, and everybody else does too. So that changes. There are five people who influence the train and where it goes.

But lyrics, I mean, when you’re younger, there are a lot of things that you write about. Maybe you’re a bit naive, and you think, ‘We’re going to change stuff. I’m going to write this song, and people are going to hear it,’ and they’re going to go, ‘You know what? I’m not voting for that guy next time!’ And then you get older, and, well, I’ve become more introverted, and I think the songs are maybe more of an emotional response to life.

On that, your music style changes between your various projects. Do you find yourself writing songs for your solo act that end up being more appropriate for Lagwagon? 

I have actually been writing songs for many years. I write a lot of songs when we have downtime or when I’m home. I used to write on tour, but I stopped doing that back in the nineties because it only worked the first few years. So, I write at home, and I write all the time. Right now, I think I have about seventy songs, and none of them have been recorded, and probably at least half of them aren’t great.

But whatever’s in front of me, if it’s time for Lagwagon to make a new album or make new music, then I just look through. I’ll bring material to them and go, ‘Well, I’ve got this tune. I got this tune.’ And yeah, very tough, really. It’s a tough audience. But the solo is sometimes just obvious to me. I’ll listen to a song, and it just needs to stay the way I wrote it, which is almost always on an acoustic guitar and kind of mellow. It won’t be stronger if I take it to the band and we turn it into something aggressive.

You guys played at the final shows for NOFX. How do you think their absence will change the scene? And how many guitars did you lose to Fletcher at the very end? 

I didn’t lose any guitars to Fletcher. I was there, but at the point that happened, I was backstage with these friends of mine called The Flatliners. I had gone to their room, and they had a bottle of whisky, and it was funny. I actually got in a fight with my partner because afterwards she was like, ‘Where the fuck were you? You totally missed the whole big giant ending of this whole thing,’ and I was like, ‘Sorry, I was having fun!’ so I missed that, and the shows were really cool.

Then the joke answer to the question is ‘Well, now NOFX is gone, it’s all open, it’s all ours!’ No, I’m just kidding. It’s a bit of a trip, because in some ways it feels like there’s going to be a void, as they’ve been such a significant part of our lives, constantly crossing paths in so many different ways. On the other hand, when bands split up, first of all, they almost always come back. How many bands do eight farewell tours? But we’ll see. This seems pretty permanent to me. But the records still exist. There’s social media now. I still see tons of stuff about NOFX all the time in my feed, so there’s a part of me that’s like, ‘Did you guys break up or not? Come on.’ It’s bittersweet.

I remember seeing Lagwagon and NOFX in Bristol.

Oh really? In Bristol, was it O2?

Yeah, it was!

Oh yeah! That used to be one of my favourite places to play because they always had such good shows, no matter what shows they were.

Over your career, what are some of the biggest moments that you still can’t quite believe actually happened?  

God, I really should be prepared for this. I get asked these questions all the time. If I were writing a memoir, I’d have a great answer, but the answer I always give is that I don’t know. There are too many memories. It is all remarkable and all not remarkable, and there’ve been a million things that happened in my life as a musician that either I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, or I can’t believe happened because it was amazing. We’ve had every kind of experience more than once. It’s funny how the ones that stick with you are usually the traumatic experiences, so that’s kind of a bummer.

What bands are currently on rotation in your CD player? Are there any bands that you didn’t fully appreciate until you saw them live?

There’s the band Cock Sparrer. They still tour a lot. I’ve been listening to punk since the seventies. So I knew all these earlier punk bands, and that’s the best era of bands, where the live show is what got you. I had a few Cock Sparrer records. I still do, and there’s a certain number of songs that I really like. But the first time I saw the band live was honestly only 15 years ago or so. I was like, ‘Oh shit! These guys are great! This is great!’ So that does happen for sure. Not very often, though. If anything, sometimes it’s the other way around. If you really love a band and you see them live and you’re kind of like, ‘Oh, that could have been better.’

With the current bands on rotation, I have a 21-year-old daughter who’s really into music. She has very eclectic taste, and she’s always playing me new stuff. I mean, these bands that she plays for me, and their names are just… you can’t even remember them. Anyway, she listens to a lot of stuff that I really dig. Then, recently, I turned her onto a band from Sweden that I was very into, called Logh. They broke up a long time ago because everything I find on YouTube is like nineteen years old. But I ran into them by accident and went, ‘Oh shit, this fucking band!’

So I sent this band’s song to this really good friend of mine. The song is called Death to My Hometown. I have a song called Before My Heart Attack, and my friend said, ‘It kind of reminds me of that.’ And I went, ‘Oh fuck!’ because this is a song I published five years ago. But that song came out nineteen years ago. Somehow, there’s something in your subconscious, and it’s not a direct steal. It is a steal, but it’s not intentional. This is just like ‘Oh my god, it’s almost the same!’ and that almost never happens to me. I don’t know what to do. I can’t erase the song. It’s out there! I just tell people about it.

Then you go to call your friends, and if your friends are my friends, they’re kind of old, and they’re going to be like, ‘I don’t know, man, I don’t listen to new music.’ But when people turn me on to stuff, I check it out, and if I like it, I like it.

I have a punk band for you from Geraldton called RATSALAD. Female-fronted, and they are absolute legends. They are a really, really great band.

This is interesting. I think I just listened to them the other day. One thing that’s really fucking cool about touring Australia is that before the tour comes up, they give me links to music by at least a few bands from every city we’re playing. Then I get the pleasure of going through and listening to it all. I am pretty sure RATSALAD was one of the bands.

What I can tell you is that I always have a knee-jerk reaction to it. I listen to the band, I listen to the song, and I will go, ‘Ok, cool, I’ll give that a seven’ or whatever. It takes hours, but it’s fun. By the time I’m done, I’ve picked one or two bands from every town that I think would be a good band to play with us. Not because they sound like us. If anything, it’s because they don’t sound like us, and they just seem like a really solid band. What I really dig out there is how many female-fronted bands there are.

And with RATSALAD, Jaz does handstands and cartwheels on stage, and they are always so happy. 

Here’s hoping! I swear it just really rings a bell. Hopefully, I chose RATSALAD, but if I didn’t, it’s because sometimes, if there are five bands, I’m like, ‘These are all good,’ and I don’t know what to do. So, I will just say something like, ‘I like all these bands.’

Lagwagon bring their 30th Anniversary of Hoss Tour to Froth & Fury Festival on Saturday, January 24, 2026. Tickets are on sale now from www.ticketmaster.com.au