The clown princes of class war take up arms again this December 28th at Reggies. Flanked by consummate comrades Sass Dragons, Canadian Rifle, and Night Cap, they’re mobilizing to paint the town red and ring in the New Year. Even though their local(ish) status (bassist Paddy Costello hails from Minneapolis, while guitarist and vocalist Issac Thotz will be flying in from the west coast to play) The Arrivals are rarely if ever spotted in the urban wilds of the second city’s club scene, so it’s a bit of a miracle that we’ll have the chance to see them play before 2019 snuffs it. We must have been extra special good this year because contributor Mick Reed was actually able to snag an interview with the illusive guitarist and vocalist Dave Merriman in the lead up to the big event. They talked about the bands long and storied career, the secrets nestled in the furrows of their album art, and the perverse pressures of living under late stage capitalism. Join us as Mick asks Dave the big questions: about life, labor theory of value, and what he wants the big red guy to bring him for Christmas.  

The conversation was recorded live, transcribed, and edited lightly for brevity and clarity. 

MR: Mick Reed
DM: Dave Merriman

MR: Are you excited for your show on the 28th with Sass Dragons and Canadian Rifle? 

DM: Oh absolutely, we’re spread out across the country so we don’t get to play much anymore. We’re really excited to all be in the same room together again. We might be just as excited for the practices that proceed it. Ron and I are the only ones who are still in Chicago. 

MR: You guys aren’t known for playing many shows and the band has acquired a reputation as a bit of an enigma as a result. People can get very excited when you announce that you’re playing, almost as if a unicorn has appeared before them out of thin air… 

DM:  Yeah, that’s always been a little weird. People have always liked us more than we thought they should and it happened almost immediately too. I mean, we like us too, but we were not prepared for how much people dug us and still seem to. 

MR: Were you in bands before The Arrivals that had a similar kind of cult following? 

DM: No. We started the Arrivals in ’96. Issac and I were 18, and Ronnie our drummer was 14. 

MR: Oh wow, you guys were still in highschool. 

DM: Yeah and within that first year we had a pretty good following on the Southside. We didn’t know anyone on the Northside punk scene which was quite a bit more established at the time. Fireside had just started doing shows when we started and we thought to ourselves “Oh yeah, we have got to get into there. If we’ve played Fireside we’ve made it.” We were really outside of the whole scene and I think that’s one of the things people liked about us because we could already play pretty well by the time were playing clubs on the Northside. But how positive the reaction was is still surprising to me. I’m thankful for it. We all are. But it’s still surprising. 

MR: Well I’ve followed you guys for a long time and I’m going to take this opportunity to gush a bit. You’re a long running band with some really great songs, but you seem like just a bunch of nice laid back guys playing music. And the songs you write are fun and have a lot of good energy, but they’re extremely thoughtful as well. Your album art tends not to be the typical kind of route pop-punk variety. They’re not just stills of you hanging out in an alley or a skate park. I’m thinking specifically of Marvels of Industry and the framed painting you have on the cover. It’s really gorgeous… 

DM: Thank you. I do all the layouts for our albums so I like talking about that aspect quite a bit. The painting was done by a Chicago based artist by the name of Jarod Joslin. Issac’s cousin was really into his work and that’s how we got turned on to him as well. At the time we were putting together Marvels of Industry we didn’t know what to call it but there was a clear through-line in the material of Marxist sentiment and we saw one of Joslin’s paintings that had a woman laying down and behind her you can see smoke stacks filling the sky with black smoke in the background and it seemed like what we were getting at on the album was an attempt to find beauty in a world that is breaking down, and that image just spoke to the general mood of the songs so we had to use it. We contracted Joslin to see if we could use the painting and he said yes, and then I did the layout and framed it in the center of the cover. When I framed the painting I used these corner icons that I had made. There was a snake, and a skull, and a rooster. I was trying to zone in on oppressive, patriarchal, secret society iconography, gilded with a black outer edge. With smoke stakes upon smoke stakes hanging over the image of that woman. 

MR: Reminds me of the factories that are still operating across the border in Indiana. 

DM: Oh yeah, those are oil refineries, if you are talking about the smoke stakes that you can see over off of 94. The smoke stakes in that image remind me a lot of the ones we had down in Blue Island were we started. Reminds me of where I grew up. 

MR: You mentioned before that you’re a Southside band, do you think that the working class ethos of that area of town permeates down through your songwriting? Or are songs about your day job what your most comfortable writing about? 

DM: Both sort of. We’ve never had a conversation about what we want to write about thematically. It’s comfortable for us to write in that zone because it’s what we know and we come from people who work hard. And when we write, sometimes we see a world that is progressively dissolving. Working people who we saw as honorable would get laid off from companies they had put their whole lives into, meanwhile the factories that the company owned would were spewing pollution into the air that was in excess of what was reasonable. Well above what was permissible. And instead of fixing their infrastructure and clean up what they were doing they would just pay the fines because they had the money. I remember protesting one of these factories because one of their smoke stakes had dumped a bunch of chemicals onto the roof of my highschool. It got into our vents and a bunch of people had to go to the hospital. It was some kind of a solution that was meant to clean the smoke stack that ended up getting dumped on us. There are stages of filtration in these stack and some of them use chemicals, and something went wrong and the chemicals they were using ended up being released and raining down on our school. So we grew up in that situation. 
But the music that inspired us when were younger was also stuff like The Clash, Bob Dylan, and Billy Bragg.  People who had something to say and who spoke truth to power. We liked a lot of folk stuff back then. Some of our first covers where actually folk covers, like “When I’m Gone” by Phil Ochs. The music we make is a reflection of the music we love. We’ve never thought that we had to write a political song or a song about a particular aspect of the human experience, we just draw inspiration from where we come from and music that swam in the same stream as what we were experiencing. 

MR: It’s interesting to hear you say that you’re inspired by Dylan and Bragg. While I was brushing up on your back catalog today it occurred to me a lot of your songs have a folky quality to them. I had also heard that you write a lot of your music acoustically. You’re saying that you are inspired by folk singers and you write on an acoustic guitar, for a working class guy, there is a real lineage there that you are tapping into… 

DM: Well sometimes it’s just that the acoustic guitar is what’s sitting next to the chair you’re in when inspiration hits. Also, when you are living in close quarters with other people it’s a lot easier to play acoustic than something with more amplification. But when Issac and I first learned to play we did it on acoustic guitars. We were always looking for songs we could play together back then and he had this Beatles songbook and we would sit there with that and learn the chords. We came together because we both loved the Pixies and Frank Black, so we were already into punk, but we also had this Beatles book that had all these crazy weird chords in it, like old timey transitional chords, and when we started writing our own songs our musical vocabulary was informed by the songs we learned from that book. Another big inspiration for us was Oi. We were listening to a lot of British Oi back then as well. Cock Sparrer, Combat 84, “Action man” by the Strike, and that song “Clockwork Skinhead.” Issac had this compilation that we used to spin constantly. I loved all these Oi bands, how their songs sounded like a well written pop-punk chord progression with one chord wrong.

MR: Between British Oi, American folk revival, and interpretation of American folk by the Beatles you’re kind of describing the musical pedigree of a Southside working-class hero. It sounds vaguely revolutionary to me. 

DM: We wouldn’t call us heroes. If anything, we ascribe to the no gods thing. We’re just products of our environment. 

MR: It’s cool that you can translate your experience into something that other people can relate to, though. 

DM: More importantly its music we can relate to. The perceived audience when we write something is ourselves. I don’t think anyone can create art without a fleeting thought about who will be consuming it, but we are writing songs that we want to hear. That’s our inspiration. We are inspire by ourselves.

MR: Well don’t take this the wrong way, but since you’re writing for yourselves, I’m a little surprised that you’re not more prolific, that you haven’t produced more material. Why is there such a long gap between albums? 

DM: I don’t know. I straight up don’t know. That’s a huge answer and a question I haven’t even asked myself. I think it comes down to the fact that for a long time the concept of doing our band as a job, as a full time job was zero. We have jobs. Why do you want to be a slave to work? 
You know the title to our third album Marvels of Industry comes from one of the volumes of Das Kapital and it fit so well with the image we chose for the cover and the sentiments of the songs. We have a full quote from that the book in the liner notes as well that gets at the value of spending money on things that make you happy and not just the things you need. There is freedom in taking care of yourself, and doing something nice to yourself. There is value in going out dancing, or in buying yourself something nice. Capitalists try to convince us the only use for money is in investments and using our capital to gain more. 

MR: Yeah people don’t really think of Marx and political economy when it comes to their leisure time, but that’s definitely something he was interested in. He was very concerned with general emancipation and that’s rarely something that comes up in discussions of his work. 

DM: He was a philosopher. People know him mainly as an economist, but he was a philosopher too. 

MR: So that quote sounds like it advocates for a kind of self-care. Is that a message that people still need to hear in 2019, or has self-care been totally co-opted to just sell us stuff? 

DM: It’s still extremely important to do things for yourself, but yeah, they will try to sell you anything now. It’s hard to find anything good that hasn’t been co-opted and put into an advertisement now.  

MR: And I think it’s important to note that our passions and the things that we do to make life worthwhile for ourselves, like art making, seem to have been completely swallowed up by the gig economy now. Like that thing that you used to do only for you is not a second or third job you have to do in order to make ends meet. 

DM: Yeah, the concept of the band as a job was never appealing. It’s not something that people from where we came from did, and as we started playing more and bigger shows and getting more into the music industry we just got really turned off. It seemed really gross. Success was based on popularity, and we didn’t know what to do to be popular, but we realized that we didn’t want to try to do the same things we saw other people doing to get popular. With our first little whiffs we realized we had had enough. That’s why it didn’t seem odd to realize music the way we have, to not be on a yearly schedule, to not try to keep any kind of a tempo for releases. We would just work on songs as they came. We didn’t make a choice to not put out albums. We weren’t thinking about it as producing widgets. 

MR: Right, you weren’t thinking of your music as commodities that you need to push out, and sell. You were making albums when it felt right. 

DM: That’s right. We were just happy that people wanted our records, and wanted to put them out. We do like recording though and the act of making a record is fun. We enjoy making the records. Sequencing. Sequencing is something we really get into. But we have lives and jobs and other things in our lives. It never made sense to think of the record as a product. When you turn a piece of art into a commodity, the goals of the artist change. It’s the money bags. The money bags want something different than the artist.
I remember when we were coming up we would meet bands who would stress out about their next record. Like “oh sh*t, now we have to write all these songs, and do a sh*t,” and we said no to all that. It just looked like another job and we had jobs man. Music was just fun. It was our joy in life. We couldn’t stomach it, and the allure of popularity didn’t have the draw for us. 

MR: That’s not the impression that most people have of rock bands. I think most people believe that musicians are all about gaining attention, it’s the reason they start a band. 

DM: Ah man, yeah, that is not our band at all. A lot of the formative aspects of this band happened during our early twenties while we were trying to figure ourselves out. Playing songs in a band was not an exhibition, it was a party, and the band was just one aspect of the party. That’s still the way we approach our music today. There is a little bit of a different vibe now that we can only get together when we can. There is more pressure when we do shows now to make sure they go well, but more to the point we weren’t interested in being bossed around more when we weren’t at work. We’ve talked about how great it would be if the band was our full time thing, and making music is our favorite thing to do, but without the appeal of fame and fortune, we were never going to be commercially viable. The industry tries to push you in that direction because that’s how other people can make the most off of you, but we just weren’t buying it.

MR: So having a golden toilet seat was not a motivator for you? 

DM: No. Having a comfortable toilet seat is all we need. Hopefully a clean one too. 

MR: Simple pleasures in America, right? 

DM: Absolutely.  

MR: People love that song (“Simple Pleasures in America”). It’s a great song.  

DM: If I could ever call a song our “hit,” that would be it. On our last album so many of the songs were about civilization eating itself that we needed a song like that one. Even now, the songs that I’m writing currently are really dark and I’m just about crying when I am done with them. Things have gotten so much worse since 2009. But we wrote “Simple Pleasures in America” to go at the end of the last record because it was such a downer and we wanted to end on a positive note so that everyone left happy. It required the least amount of thought, planning and everything of any song on the record, and it resonates with everyone. It’s awesome how much people love that song. 

MR: You mentioned that you’re writing some new material for an album right now. Do you have any plans for a release in 2020? 

DM: Only as much as we ever have. We’ve been writing songs and Issac and I always have a few in our back pockets. We’ve started exchange a few tracks via Garage Band and demoing songs as their written that way. 

MR: So we can expect another record in 2030? 

DM: Yeah, that sounds about right. I don’t want to say when we are going to release another record, but it’s going to be soon. We have eight that are about done, but we’ll wait to release them until we have enough for a full album. We have one song that didn’t make it onto Volatile Molotov that is a ten minute hardcore song, it’s a real banger. I’m not sure what to do with it because if we released it on a 10” single it would be an entire side. It was one of the last songs we recorded in our old practice space and it may make an appearance on the next release.

MR: One last question, what do you want for Christmas?   

DM: I’m bad at that. I just think of what I need. I’d really like a new set of drill bits, because I lost all mine. I could also use a new guitar. One of those St.Vincent models would be nice. She has a signature line by Music Man, angular hour-glass frame. Reminds me of a black widow’s mark, like that mixed with an explorer shape. It’s very cool. 

 -Mick Reed