Web Exclusive: A conversation with AFI/The Force's Hunter Burgan

AFI's Hunter Burgan will join his former band, THE FORCE, for a series of reunion shows in California this August. The shows will be the hardcore punk band's first performances in 10 years, and will support a forthcoming discography of all their material–which will be sold digitally as well as a via limited vinyl pressing at the shows. Burgan recently spoke with Brian Shultz regarding the circumstances and celebration surrounding the reunion.

When did the idea start being thrown around to do these reunion shows?
It was back in maybe February or March. Matt [Wedgley, vocals] and I were having lunch with another friend from Grass Valley [California]. Somebody was talking about bands playing reunions, [then] I realized it'd been 10 years since the Force played our last show. It was a joke at first, but then we kinda just got into [the idea].

And then from there the idea to do a discography started?
That'd always been our plan. And it seems that the universe is trying to not have us put out a discography. [Laughs.] It took a while to track down all the songs and obtain the rights to all of them. And then even after that, we had problems with trying to find masters of each of them. For a while we couldn't find the DAT or the first 7-inch.

You said you had difficulty obtaining the rights to your material. Are most of the record labels you worked with even still active?
Most of them aren't. I believe Johann's Face still does stuff…

Oh, Johann's Face, yeah, they're still active.
[Wedgley’s label] Wedge Records is no longer active. So that was easy. Spiderclub Music is no longer active. So I bought the masters off of them. All the comps and everything that our tracks have been on, we already own the masters.

When did splitting time between the Force and AFI start to become a conflict?
I joined AFI officially in November of 1997, and I'd been playing with them since April of that year just as a temporary. So during that time, it was pretty easy to balance the two. Balancing the time between the Force and AFI was already a problem with Matt, because he was AFI's merch guy. So with the Force, we would always have to wait for Matt to get home from his AFI tours for us to do things. So it was a constant theme in the band, always. But then I think around May of 1998 is when it became a problem because the Force had a lot of stuff and then AFI suddenly had a tour in Europe that I had to go on. At that point, it started getting really hard. Also, a lot of it was definitely my taking on a lot of stuff with two bands; but two of the other band members, Mark [Roustabout, vocals] and Chad [Cox, drums] both got married and had kids around that time. So, there was a lot of responsibility outside of the Force going on at that time.

So it wasn't just you contributing to the demise of the band.
It just sort of… It was one of those things that was a lot of fun, and it was definitely something we were all really into. We wanted to see how far we could take it, but it was not necessarily our main priority at a point. It was always most important for us to have fun, so when we ended the band, it was not on a bad note. We just decided we had too much going on outside of the band and we should probably just end it now while it was still good.

Before the reunion or discography ideas started to swirl around, when was the last time you had listened to the songs?
Actually, it was probably within a week or two before that. I always love to play these songs for people who have no idea I had a band like that at all. Sometimes I'll go a year or two without listening to them. Something about the songs–we had such great energy. We recorded it before Pro Tools was really available, so a lot of them are just single takes and we really captured the energy of that moment.

So how well do you think the songs hold up today?
I think they still–they definitely are not like a lot of bands who will just layer on a lot of different sounds and different instruments. It's definitely very simple and very raw. But we always tried to play with a lot of energy, and I think that definitely holds up today. The music style is different than what you might hear on the radio, or if you go to see a show. But the energy is there.

Do you think there's a noticeable difference between your live performances with AFI and the Force?
Yeah. Well, let me go through a quick evolution of stage performance. The Force was really my first band, the first band I really focused on playing bass. So my initial concept of stage performance was [molded] by playing bass with the Force, which was always as crazy as I could be and it fit the music because the music is very energetic. And that transitioned well into AFI when I joined because the music was mostly very fast music. And then over the years as AFI has progressed, I've actually gotten more comfortable playing my instrument on stage. At the same time, the music has sort of slowed down and we've sort of experimented with different styles and so, if I think back to Force shows, it was always just, go as crazy as you can at all times. I don't think that would be appropriate at a current AFI show. But I think that the underlying concept of matching [energy and presence is there].

If the Force were to write new material today, how do you think it would sound?
[Laughs.] We joked about that. You know how many bands get back together, and then write new stuff and it's just kinda like…old men writing slow songs? I don't know, maybe that doesn't happen.

That's a really good question. [Laughs.] I think that…gosh…I don't even know. I don't even know what we would write.

Would it still be in that sort of East Bay punk/hardcore territory?
You know, I don't know. We were always trying to push things a little bit but stay with what we were doing. I mean, this is in the mid-’90s and we were experimenting with a lot of samples on our songs, which is, whatever, maybe commonplace, but we would have women and babies screaming on a song. So some of that. I don't know that we would write stuff as fast as some of that is, but once again, we would definitely try to capture that same kind of energy. I'll tell you that.

What have been some of the more successful reunions as of late, in your eyes?
Let's see… The Police reunion; huge. I've always been a Police fan. I feel like they really pulled that one off. The Pixies were a really big one for me. When I first saw them, I saw them when they got back together, and I was blown away at how perfect they sound. A couple years ago, I saw the Zombies get back together–well, it was two members of the Zombies playing in San Francisco, and I thought that was really great.

Are you expecting there to be a certain part of the crowd at the shows that has no familiarity whatsoever with the Force and be in attendance solely because of your association with AFI?
Well, I honestly hope that people [who] are planning on attending the shows because they're a fan of AFI take the time to familiarize themselves with the Force material a bit. Because any show you're playing in a band, you hope that the people there know your songs, or just a couple of your songs. It's been 10 years since we've played our last show, so I would imagine there are gonna be a lot of new people who are interested in checking out, who had never even heard of the Force.

What do you hope people will take away from these shows?
I just hope people have fun. I feel like maybe there's more Force fans out there now then when we actually played. During touring with AFI, I ran into a lot of people who tell me, “Yeah, I love the Force. I wish I could've seen you guys play.” And so, I hope this is an opportunity for some of those people to actually see us play and hopefully we don't disappoint them. But it's just kinda fun for us, and hopefully it'll be fun for everyone.

On the AFI front, how are things progressing as far as a new record goes?
Really well. We're still in the sort of writing, pre-production phase–not in the studio yet. But [we] should be in that pretty soon. I'm really excited with the new material; it's…I hesitate to say it's different than before because it's not something we've ever been incapable of doing, but I feel like we have some really solid songs that I'm really excited about. alt

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