Welcome to The Grand Tour, a regular feature where
PHXmusic.com takes you inside practice spaces, tour vans and seedy
apartments occupied by Phoenix-area bands. This week we give you a
look inside the industrial cozy space of Tempe-based punk band Rumspringer.
If you would like your band featured, tweet @PHXmusicdotcom. If you've got musician friends, encourage them to get off their asses and invite us over to where they park those asses.
Rumspringer (drummer Mikey, bassist Matt, guitarist Wes) play pop-punk. Don' tune out yet. This is the good stuff. Like, the kind of jams Green Day used to write before they decided to be an arena rock act. Stuff that would fit in perfectly on the vintage Recess Records roster.
The guys will be rocking the newly re-opened Nile Basement on March 24th with Off With Their Heads and Dead To Me.
Smells Like: Last week I whined that all the practice spaces I've visited have been just a bit too squeaky clean for my taste. Rumspringer's abode was a real rock n' roll hideaway: pizza boxes tosses about, littered with beer cans, hazy with cigarette smoke. When I visited on Tuesday night, the boys were holed up inside "Fuck City Studios" working on their new album, but they also practice there, and as Mikey showed me, take great pride in their toilet.
Most cherished piece of gear: Situated in an industrial park in West Tempe, the boys actually built an entire room inside a room, which serves as a recording booth and practice space, while the main room houses a giant television for Tony Hawk tournaments. The room-inside-a-room also offers some refuge from the hazy smell of car paint: "Yeah, the guy next door runs a body shop, so sometimes this place is just flooded with that smell, and you just start gagging," says Mikey.
Odds
n' ends: The band shares its space with other acts, so every corner is crammed with amps, drums and assorted nick-knacks, giant Darth Vader heads, vintage tattoo-style art, and most nostalgia inducing for me, a Parkway Wretch shirt, an ancestor band of Rumspringer, from Coolidge, AZ where I (and some members of Rumspringer) had the unique fortune of growing up.
