TODAY IS THE DAY - Rise Above
Words and graphics by: Tom Wilson @thetomwilsonexperiment - Sense Music Media | Sunday 19th December 2022
Press shots by: Pat Kennedy + Nathaniel Shannon
“The Man Who Loved to Hurt Himself” on Conquering Pain
“ALRIGHT MOTHERFUCKERS! LET’S FUCKING GET IT ON! WE’RE ALL ON ACID, AND WE’VE GOT MORE!”
This, the opening salvo of TODAY IS THE DAY’s 2002 set at Beast Fest in Japan, does a great job of summing up the intensity and attitude of frontman Steve Austin, who has spent the last few decades kicking against hardships, chronic pain, and music itself. At home in Maine, he spoke to SENSE about getting the wind knocked out of his sails by COVID, and turning that crisis into the rebirth of Supernova Records.
My first exposure to you was the video for Mother’s Ruin. I was struck by your intensity. Has music been a form of therapy for you over the years?
I think it definitely started that way, and still is. With aggressive music, I think we all get really bent out of shape sometimes, and flipped out about stuff. Just even recently, about a week ago, the timing chain busted on our car, and I had worked on this thing relentlessly to make it as awesome as it could be, and then all of a sudden, within a heartbeat, it was just killed, it was dead. I told my wife, “You know, I feel like taking a baseball bat right now and going out in the woods out here behind our house and just beating the hell out of a tree or something like that,” because of how ferociously pissed it made me. The music thing, I think, took the place of the tree, early on. You’ve got a lot of stuff going on inside you, and I think, in a lot of ways, there’s nothing that can make you feel better sometimes than a good old-fashioned primal scream. [Laughs]
One of my favourite tracks of 2020 was Burn in Hell. I related a bit to the lyrics … I can sympathise with constantly being away from your loved ones and missing birthdays, anniversaries … how you have to learn that these are just dates, and you can celebrate them when you can. I struck me that that song was about missing all those things, but you released it right before a period of spending such a long time at home with COVID. What was that like?
You know, I’ve gotta admit, in all of the trials in my life of things that were really disappointing and pissed me off, it was conjoined … You may have read in some things, because there was talk about it from when I released No Good to Anyone, not cos I really wanted to, but I think a lot of people wanted to know … I was having this terrible physical time, because I had a van accident, and had flipped the van upside down, and when it did, it shattered my right hip socket, and it dislocated my left hip, and to make matters worse, because I live in Maine where Lyme disease is rampant, I ended up getting Lyme disease as well. It’s hard to really explain what it’s like living with those two conditions, because either one of them is enough to drive a person crazy. The hip thing basically equalled chronic, non-stop, dull, aching, burning kind of pain that eventually got to where I almost couldn’t walk anymore, and I was using a cane for probably about six or eight months, and it’s because it couldn’t get diagnosed correctly about what was wrong with me. And then, Lyme disease is a whole other animal. Lyme disease is like having intense pains that are pinpoint in various parts of your body, and when you get an attack with it, sometimes it won’t stop for 48 hours or something, so you’ll wind up staying awake all night and all day. It’s very funny, because no matter how brutal or tough or big of a man or whoever is, Lyme disease, in itself, will bring you to your knees … the threshold of how intense and unending that pain is.
So what was hard for me with that COVID thing was that I had finally found the correct doctor that could diagnose what was wrong with me, and he immediately was like, “I can fix this,” about the hips. I went under surgery two different times, and I had both my hips replaced, and the minute that I got that done, one half of my problem was gone. I could walk perfectly. I could do brutal things. I could tear a car apart and put it back together again … It took a little bit longer and I found the right doctor about the Lyme disease, and I also beat that … So I found myself, in 2020, all healed up, everything back to good again, no pain of any kind, physically on fire and strong and feeling great, and we took off on that tour for No Good to Anyone, and an indicator of how happy I was, I remember walking through different clubs … It’s in the afternoon, there’s no one there, it’s during setup for soundcheck and stuff, and I’m walking through the bar and kind of dancing my way from the back of the place to the front, light on my feet, happy as I could be, and I was happy because I had beat those two things, and now I was back out on the road again, fully armed and ready to go as far as delivering the goods, and feeling happy … All that stuff was fixed, it was like a miracle, I was like, “Oh my god, I’m so in love with life right now! It’s so great! I can’t believe I’m on tour right now. I’ve got the new album out, everything’s great!” We played seventeen shows, and then, I had to, the next morning, tell everyone that the tour was postponed, and we were in Austin, Texas.
When I got home, another pivotal thing that sticks in my mind is when I was standing in the living room, and I was looking out the window, and that time of year, in Maine, in March, is a shitty time of year where it’s really muddy, and all the remnants of wintertime is uncovered, when the snow goes away, so it kind of looks like that movie The Road after winter has gone away. There’s broken trees and all kinds of shit on the ground, and there’s mud everywhere. It’s a really ugly time of year. I remember looking out that window, and just standing there, with the realisation that three days ago, I was on tour with our new album out, and happier than I’ve ever been in my life, and now I’m standing here, looking out this window and realising, I have no idea what the fuck is going on, if this is going to end soon, maybe in a month, in a week, in two months, I don’t know. There was a real urgency with me about that, because the record had just come out on February 26th, and this was the 16th of March, so it was only out for three weeks, and I had signed this deal with BMG. In the music world, BMG is pretty much the top of the top when it comes to major labels … I find in life that, if you don’t freak out, and you realise when tragedy hits than a lot of amazing things are born out of tragedy and terribleness … I can’t believe I’m saying this, because I fucking hate COVID worse than anything, but in a way, I’m thankful about COVID, because during that time … the corporation of BMG was basically shut down. They sent all their people home, nobody went to their offices, it was a really hard spot for them to be in, and they were really … they were the most un-major label people I’ve ever met in my life. They were the nicest, coolest people that you could ask for to work with, and the only bummer was, when I talked to them about it, they were like, “With everything that’s going on, we don’t know what our next move will be.” They were talking about, “Well, maybe we can do a new album in 2023.” At the time, it was only 2020, so I was like, “Holy crap, I just spent all this time being in pain and having a terrible life there in a while, and now I’ve got everything back,” but now I’m like a rat trapped in a cage at home. It’s almost like everything just stopped.
Then I thought about it, and I was like, “You know, it would be really cool if I could get my catalogue back, and then I could just, up against the grain of COVID, do my own label that I started a long time ago that I hadn’t really used, that’s distributed through Sony and The Orchard. I didn’t think [BMG] would do that … but I asked them, and surprisingly, they came back to me and they said, “You know, Steve, we like you as much or more than any artist that we’ve worked with at BMG, and we feel that it would only be the right thing to do, that if that’s what you want to do, and you don’t want to wait until 2023, we’ll do that.” So out of the tragedy of COVID, on the upside of things, was that I got my catalogue back, I restarted Supernova Records, we put out Willpower, we put out this other band called WOORMS. I spent a lot of that COVID time in the recording studio. I basically remastered my entire catalogue, except for one or two albums. That took me, like, six months of time. So the legacy of all my work up to this point, I was able to take all of that stuff, remaster it all, get it all out there, and then get this label going, and now, for the future, the new TODAY IS THE DAY album that’s almost done … I made this traditional country music type of album. Those two records will be put out by Supernova, and it’s just a better feeling. It’s like being in control of your own destiny, and being able to control your own shots about what you want to do. It’s a really good thing. And again, I don’t say that in relation to the BMG folks. They were as extreme as anybody I knew. They weren’t ever scared of any kind of really extreme ideas. They always backed me up on anything I wanted to do.
Live in Japan is out now. Check it out here.