Hell Night: An Outlet For Anger And Healing
For a project created as an outlet for an enormous amount of anger, Hell Night has been bringing a lot of people a lot of happiness in Saint Louis for over a decade. “I wanted to call the band Circle of Shit,” says guitarist and founder Andy White, referencing the opinions about punk rock from cult movie Heavy Metal Parking Lot. A well-liked and well-traveled musician, White’s been rocking stages and making friends across the world since the last millennium. After the painful dissolution of his marriage and the slow demise of his previous band, the late, great Tilts (RIP Ken McCray) White found himself working at music venue Firebird watching other bands come and do their thing while trying to process it all.
“I was having fun but probably as broken or angry as I have ever been as a sober person,” says White, well known for both his clean living and good humor, “and I think the genesis of Hell Night came from some of that time.” He’d been in a bunch of more traditional rock bands “some of which were very rocking and very fun but at the end of it…having never really having been in a punk band.” An old school skate rat at heart “having grown up in Jefferson County skateboarding listening to punk rock and hating everything, I felt like there was something inside of me in that regard that needed to be expressed…and I really needed an outlet for anger at the time.”
“Andy and I had been saying ‘when we do our punk band…’ etc for years,” offers Eric Eyster, Hell Night bassist and the only other consistent member of the lineup “and it was finally time to actually do the punk band.” White had been jamming out his new angst and ideas with skateboarding buddy Tim Pinkerton, a very active drummer who made time for it between three different bands. After a frantic burst of creativity where the original blueprint of the band’s sound would emerge from White’s aggressively off kilter guitar and Pinkerton’s fast surf style beats, it was obvious to both that there was something to this project and it needed something to pull it together. As one of Saint Louis’s most talented and consistent rock bassists, Eyster has been pulling bands together for a long time.
“They were ready for low end to start happening and I was eager to play again,” says Eyster, who had been in the band Shame Club with White in the 2000’s but was on a musical sabbatical due to a health scare when the call came. “I got a handful of songs, I just learned parts to play, and it fit really well. I remember loving the riffs and knew it wouldn’t be like any other thing in town. Didn’t take long at all.”
Once the key was turned, the engine driving the band to what they would become started firing on all cylinders, fueled by each member’s excitement and need to get moving, and many things happened in quick succession. Singers were shopped for, first landing on Brandon Hoffman, who was there for the brainstorming of the band name and one gig before bowing out due to time constraints, then on Mike Craft, who became the band’s original full time vocalist. A drummer by trade, sober, and also a wellspring of anger, Craft fit right in with the rest of the group.
“He didn’t really listen to punk, but loved rap and jazz so he was perfect,” White explains. “He is an angry dude…and it’s not fabricated, like a Halloween angry. Mike was writing lyrics about his life, about actual pain. It was much more ‘therapeutic’ than ‘performance’ but he had incredible presence and nobody expected it. A lot of the metal and punk people didn’t know us so it helped our band. The music on the first two EPs is just very direct, there’s a song where Mike is yelling the dates his best friend died and musically I tried to bring something that felt like you were in a blender that was on a roller coaster. The place that some of that came from was the most real thing I could offer. I was so fucking upset and I just wanted to hit people over the head with that feeling.”
Time always moves forward and whatever burns hottest burns fastest, so some wear and tear started showing on the band but the changes it brought also brought growth. First to go was Pinkerton, who left town for a relationship, leaving the drum throne to be taken by current drummer Adam Arseneau, who the band didn’t know personally, but was a fan and fit right in. His technical wizardry, including double kick and a variety of different playing styles, brought new life to the band and a flurry of writing followed the drummer joining. As exciting as the new rhythmic possibilities were, three years of constant writing and recording took it’s toll on Mike Craft and he soon exited the band. Now without a vocalist, it was skateboarding that would once again come to the rescue.
“We had some mutual friends, we’re skating together talking about music and he was literally doing nothing at the time musically,” White says, referring to Brian Fair, Grammy nominated singer for bands like Shadows Fall and Overcast. “He liked our band a lot. He’d seen us a few times and was super stoked to join. He’s a very seasoned hardcore vocalist, literature degree from BU, smart dude who does the work and has tons of lyrical/musical ideas but has fun with it. Super nice guy who just throws the fuck down when he’s performing. He’s a radical dude and we love performing with him. It’s certainly shaped what the band sounds like and changed it from 2016 and on.”
2016 was a turning point for the band both in personnel and personally. A new band lineup coincided with new additions in family lives and it could be heard in the tunes. “Things have changed over time as far as themes with writing but I think it’s pretty angry music and it lives in that place,” White muses “I don’t want an AC/DC ballad and I don’t want a Hell Night happy song, but there’s definitely some things now that are maybe catchier or friendlier here and there. I believe the limits of the band become the rules and the challenge becomes…forcing yourself to do something interesting with the elements that you started with and not repeating yourself.”
Adding a well known and multi-talented singer to the mix gave the band a new set of tools to play with and a little extra notoriety, but it didn’t change to course of the band overnight. “We definitely got more followers on social media, we might have sent out a handful of extra copies of physical media (released by local label Planet Score Records) and shirts to people in different states via the internet…(however)it absolutely didn’t rocket us to stardom,” says Eyster. “I think the music leveled up and the live performances definitely did. Those were my main priorities.”
“There are people who view it as ‘Brian Fair’s side project’ and that’s fine,” White adds. “We’ve had some attention we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise with him, but also I think if you’re a die-hard Shadows Fall fan this is not what you are wanting to hear him do. It’s very different and much simpler. True Shadows fans are politely tolerating their champion in our Midwestern diseased grunge band. It’s cool to work with Brian because of the things he brings as a person and the talent he has.”
All the pieces came together and soon Hell Night went from being a band to being the band. Their live shows became a legendary spectacle of energy that sounds like, as Eyster describes it “an increasingly dangerous locomotive about to topple off a mountain” and they want you to come along for the ride. It became obvious to everyone watching the band that they have the talent to tour as far across the world as they want, but that’s just it, they don’t want to. Sticking close to home is built into the fabric of the whole project because to them being there for real life is the most important use of time.
“I think having kids makes you less tolerant of time used inefficiently. This band has never wanted to tour,” states White, “we sort of like keeping it very limited and hopefully that way it maintains the excitement for folks who love it. That keeps it fun and precious and free from being work for us, which is awesome!”
Having a band be arena ready while sticking close to STL for a decade has brought a regular community to the shows and fun opportunities to do some very creative projects with them. The band has become masters of the merchandising game, sticking their logo on everything they can, including a ‘Heck Night’ line of products for kids. Sharing a name with a horror movie was no accident, as the Hell Night crew are avid fans who regularly attend and sometimes cross promote events with the Late Night Grindhouse horror film revival series put on by destroythebrain.com. They’ve even gone so far as to have their own video shorts and interstitials produced by local filmmaker Eliot Ulet, whom the band refers to as their ‘Minister of Propaganda’.
When asked about the band’s love of the macabre and the crowd that brings with it, Eyster, the band member in charge of manning the merchandise booth at shows, responds like the a practiced shirt hawker. “People can come talk to me about horror movies, but if they’re chatting in line I ask that they move it along so the next guy can buy one of our $10 t-shirts. After all, 10 year anniversary brings all our t-shirts to $10!” Smiling, he adds, “I appreciate anyone who has ever supported us!”
Ten years is an important milestone in any facet of life and should be honored. Not many relationships make it that far, much less musical partnerships. Hell Night has made it this far, and they’re celebrating with a show on Saturday, November 23rd at Off Broadway along with Path of Might (who are also on their 10 year anniversary) and special guest The Gorge. It’s Hell Night’s only show of the year, and of the foreseeable future, but that’s alright. “We’ll continue to write and play shows at the pace that we want to,” says White. “We don’t have the pressure of having to do anything we don’t want to. We have busy, wild lives that only seem to get busier, but we do love it. We love each other and we love making this music.”
Come feel the love.
Check out hellnightstl.bandcamp.com to purchase music and merchandise online, and offbroadwaystl.com for show ticketing and venue info.
