JONAH BAYER

NEW FRIEND REQUEST: GYM CLASS HEROES

Hip-hop? Punk? R&B? It seems like no one can successfully categorize this gold-selling group of outcasts from upstate New York—and that’s just the way they like it.

When you’re only one inch shorter than Michael Jordan with nearly every visible inch of flesh covered with a tattoo or piercing it’s difficult not to be an intimidating figure, but right now Gym Class Heroes’ frontman Travis McCoy looks even more imposing than usual.  It certainly isn’t due to a flamboyant wardrobe; McCoy is currently dressed as a fashion-conscious high-school student sporting a windbreaker, crooked cap and, yes, Air Jordans. However once we get closer to McCoy at the photo studio in Philadelphia where Inked is shooting him and his band, I notice that he’s rocking a white contact lens in his left eye that throws off his facial symmetry and makes him appear slightly unhinged, like he could lose his cool at any moment. While the rest of us munch on pizza (McCoy barely touches his vegan pie) he peruses a selection of magazines on a coffee table and nonchalantly settles on a copy of a popular men’s title, which wouldn’t be worth mentioning if it weren’t for the fact that his girlfriend Katy Perry is gracing the cover.

In other words, it’s just another day in the life of Gym Class Heroes, an unlikely group of misfits from Geneva, New York, who somehow became one of the most beloved bands in both the pop-punk and hip-hop scenes without actively trying to achieve success in any either of them.  “I’m not a pussy, man,” McCoy responds when I ask about the fresh outline of a heart of on his Adam’s apple that the band’s on-tour tattoo artist Craig Beasley started after last night’s show in Albany, New York. “I had to stop because my face got all hot and I was like, ‘All right, enough,’” he adds. “Sometimes you gotta just know when to stop; you’ll put your body into overdrive and pass out and it’s all bad.” Of all the band’s members—drummer Matt McGinley, bassist Eric Roberts and guitarist Disashi Lumumba-Kasongo—McCoy is by far the most inked, which makes sense when you consider the fact that as at the tender age of fifteen he apprenticed as a self-described “shop bitch” a tattoo shop in upstate New York.

“At first was like, ‘I’m not going to spend my time in a tattoo shop not getting paid when I could be out chasing girls,’ but I learned a lot from the time I spent there,” McCoy explains as he chain smokes Parliaments on the steps of the studio. Although McCoy eventually abandoned the shop to pursue the academic route, after dropping out of art school he returned there at the age of twenty and started working on skin a month later. “I was shadowing really good artists and it just sunk in,” he explains about his rapid ascent to flesh. “I did my first tattoo on the guy I was apprenticing under and during the first couple lines I was shaking,” he recalls with a laugh.  “He was like ‘Suck it up, quit being a pussy!’ and I was like ‘All right!’ He had quit smoking cigarettes so it was a cigarette smashing itself out that I drew and it came out dope as fuck—and ever since then I’ve been at it.” In fact, McCoy has tattooed the inside of both of McGinley’s arms, which the drummer shows off with a grin when we get back inside the warmth of the warehouse adding that McCoy has a “gentle touch.”

“When you’re a 19-year-old-kid that’s getting a tattoo from your friend who’s maybe only done it three or four times before you need that reassurance,” continues McGinley—who’s sporting a V-neck T-shirt with his an enormous chest piece of a lighthouse peeking out of the top of it—when asked what it was like to be inked by his band mate. “Travis was definitely a cool dude to have tattoo me.” However, we’re not talking to McCoy because he’s a famous tattoo artist. We’re talking to him because back in September Gym Class Heroes released their fourth full-length The Quilt, which debuted at #14 on the Billboard Charts and features producer and guest credits ranging from Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump to hip-hop and R&B royalty like Busta Rhymes, Cool & Dre and Estelle.

Oh, and then there’s the R&B track “Live Forever (Fly With Me),” which has special significance because it features a contribution from Daryl Hall, whose portrait is tattooed on the top of McCoy’s right hand. (Don’t worry, John Oates, the other half of Hall & Oates is on his left). McCoy was originally going to get the members’ faces tattooed on his shins before inspiration took hold of him. “One day I was looking at the Private Eyes cover and I was like, ‘that’s really fucking awesome’ and I looked at my hands and was like, ‘Let’s do it—and so that day Craig just did it.”

That said, McCoy knows firsthand how surreal it can be to see a tribute to yourself carved into a stranger’s flesh. “We get fans all the time that come up to us with tattoos of our lyrics and there have even been a couple portraits,” McCoy says. “At first it was super flattering, but then sometimes it’s just a little outrageous. For example, there’s a girl who got my girlfriend’s entire CD cover on her whole back; there’s a line, I guess.” With his frontman status and unique look, McCoy is clearly the most visible member of Gym Class Heroes—and probably the most likely to have his face immortalized in ink—however that could all change with The Quilt, which is the band’s most collaborative effort to date and shows what a tight unit the act have become since McCoy and McGinley decided to start the band together back in the late-nineties.

Things were different back then and while the band experienced some local success early on in their career, they didn’t receive their big break until Fall Out Boy’s frontman Patrick Stump discovered the band and they signed to bassist Pete Wentz’s Fueled By Ramen imprint Decaydance who released the band’s second album The Papercut Chronicles in 2004.  Merging elements of soul, R&B, hip-hop, rock and just about everything else the group listened to collectively, they played the requisite smaller stages on the Vans Warped Tour before breaking into the mainstream with 2006’s gold-selling disc As Cruel As School Children, which memorably featured the ubiquitous crossover radio hit “Cupid’s Chokehold.” After a seemingly endless span of time spent on the road, the band finished their touring cycle to begin work on The Quilt last year, but despite their recent success they decided to experiment with the writing and recording process this time around to allow all of their individual influences to shine through.

“I would definitely say that this is the most collaborative album I’ve played on with the band,” Lumumba-Kasongo says. “I remember the very first day we started start jamming out and working on the songs, I thought, “Man, I haven’t felt like this since I was high school jamming out in a garage; so it’s kind of cool, cause its that same feeling except we were recording for a major album.” However, ironically that the album that sees Gym Class Heroes coming closer together as a unit was written when McCoy was on an opposite coast from the rest of his band.

“I flew out to California [to write with the band] and I kind of went a little crazy so I took off,” McCoy explains, “the guys were doing amazing so the last thing I wanted to do was bring them down.” While the rest of his band were in Los Angeles, McCoy headed down to Miami to work with the hip-hop production guru Dre who “big-brothered” McCoy through his self-induced breakdown and inspired him to finish the record on the East Coast before trekking back to California to record the album. “It was the first time in a long time that we recorded all together as a band, so it was beautiful, man,” McCoy muses about the process. “It was a really cool experience.”

That’s not say that the circumstances surrounding The Quilt were all rosy for Gym Class Heroes. Last October McCoy witnessed a stabbing in his home base of Murray Hill, New York—and a few weeks later his cousin committed suicide shortly after spending time with the band on the Young Wild Things Tour alongside Fall Out Boy and Plain White T’s. These events prompted McCoy, who says he’s been addicting to pharmaceuticals since his was fifteen, to embrace drugs and forced him into the detox for the second time (the first being right before the band were signed). Then there are McCoy’s left knee problems, which were famously aggravated when the frontman got into an altercation with an African-American fan who allegedly called McCoy an “fucking ignorant nigger” and hit him in the knee during their Warped Tour set in St. Louis, prompting McCoy to strike the concert-goer in the head with his microphone.

“That whole situation showed people that we’re just as human as everybody in the crowd and we react to certain emotions,” McCoy acknowledges. “We’re just like anybody else, we don’t always make the best decisions; I apologized to the crowd right after for the fact that they waited all day and had to see that. But at the same time I feel that had I not done what I’d done and had security not pulled him out, the fans would have ate that kid alive,” McCoy continues. “I had people coming up to me after the like ‘Yo, we were ready to kill him.’ What I take away from that is that we have love from our fans to the point where they’re willing to stick up for us and have our back the way I would have Disashi, Eric or Matt’s back.”

Later on in the day, Lumumba-Kasongo elaborates on McCoy’s sentiment. “We definitely have each other’s backs, which is a good feeling because I’ve heard that in certain bands—and I’m not going to call them out by name—a member will be going through a very serious problem and come to the band and they’ll just be like ‘screw that’ and leave them high and dry,” he continues. “That’s messed up, especially when you’re in a band because when you become part of this industry and this world you’re very isolated. You don’t have as much support as people think and there are very few people who are actually close to you. So if the people who are in your actual band aren’t there for you, you’re in a very dangerous place.”

After speaking with them all individually, it isn’t until all four members of the band line-up for their turns to jump on a miniature trampoline that I realize just how physically diverse the members of Gym Class Heroes are. Sporting a shaggy mop of black hair, a leather jacket and a recent sleeve on his left arm Roberts looks uncannily reminiscent of a young Nikki Sixx, a comparison which is perpetuated by the fact that he says he plans spend the band’s upcoming time-off accompanying porn star Shyla Stylez to the AVN Awards in Las Vegas. The band will be enjoying their first month off in as long as they can remember in February because Lumumba-Kasongo’s—the band’s only unlinked member (although he’s considered getting a map of his parents’ birth continent of Africa on his back)—and his girlfriend are expecting their first child. Then there’s McGinley, who seems to display a perpetual grin and is currently sporting a plaid hat with earflaps that would make Elmer Fudd proud and, maybe more impressively, he also manages to make it look cool.

However despite the band members’ stark contrast in appearance, lifestyle and ideology, it’s clear that Gym Class Heroes are one cohesive unit these days, cheering each other on and laughing as each member takes a turn on the trampoline in an attempt to see who can catch the most air. (In case you were wondering Lumumba-Kasongo wins the contest by a long shot.) In other words, instead of letting the band’s surface differences get in the way the band have managed to recontextualize them into something that makes the band so unique that they’re not even sure what scene they belong in. “When people try and categorize us or to figure out where they think we should fit in, I don’t even have an answer,” McCoy explains.

“People will ask me ‘Do you feel more comfortable on hip-hop tours or rock tours?’ I’m like, ‘I just feel comfortable around friends,” he continues. “It doesn’t matter if they’re hip-hop bands or rock bands or pop punk bands; as long as they’re cool people and kind-hearted and realizing that we’re going to be in this together for the next month-and-a-half, I don’t give a fuck who we’re on tour with.” However, now more than ever it’s easy to see why Gym Class Heroes are an anomaly in today’s highly homogenized musical culture; it’s not like there are a handful of who can cover Lamb God on this summer’s Warped Tour and then head out on tour with Lil Wayne and T-Pain, which the band will do in March. The fact of the matter is that Gym Class Heroes are so off the grid that there’s no template to follow when it comes to what they should or shouldn’t do, something the band consider to be a blessing.

“I personally like straddling the lines because I think that it’s pretty representative of the band and of me personally, you know?” Lumumba-Kasongo concurs. “But at the same time it’s a natural thing for us. I think it’d be a whole different thing if we were trying not to fit into anything, but the simple fact is that when our iPod has Mastodon and Kanye West on it then that’s going to come across in the music,” he adds. “I think that if we were to just say “All right, well let’s just be ‘this,’ whatever ‘this’ might be, it would limit our freedom and l it wouldn’t represent us as people, which is something I think your music should represent. It should be an expression of you.”

“We’ve been the proverbial sore thumb our entire career,” McCoy explains after the trampoline his knee seemingly unscathed from his aerial acrobatics. “Even before we got signed to Fueled By Ramen, we were playing shows with death metal and hardcore bands and whoever would let us play with them,” he continues. “I wouldn’t even consider us a hip-hop band, musically it’s just all over the place. In a sense I think what’s made us successful and attracted people to us is the fact that we are this thing that stands out. We don’t look like every other band on Warped Tour and we definitely don’t sound like every other band on Warped Tour and it’s fun to be outcasts in that sense.

“Art imitates life,” he summarizes, when asked why he thinks him and his band will never fit in, adding that it’s something he’s dealt with for his entire life. “As corny and clichéd as it sounds, it’s the truth