EDSEL DOPE Says TRIPP EISEN 'Will Pay The Price For The Decisions That He's Made'

Jesse Capps of RockConfidential.com recently conducted an interview with DOPE frontman Edsel Dope. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

RockConfidential.com: "American Apathy" seems to be the most politically motivated record you've ever made. The entire record isn't reflective of that but it's still pretty dominant. Are those songs reflections of where you think America is at or where you're at personally?

Edsel Dope: "I think it's both. I think that the first record had a political edge to it. I think it's a natural progression. This is our fourth record. On the last record my goal was to really branch out and prove to myself and prove to everybody out there that the band had a more broad ability to have our sound be more diverse and have more depth. We really felt like we accomplished that. With this record we really wanted to make a record that when people saw the band live and were into the energy and the dirty, nasty grooves — we wanted to make a record that felt like that. We want people to go to the shows and go, 'Wow! That's awesome!' have a great time, leave the show and pop the CD into the CD player and go, 'Oh fuck! That's definitely the same band!' Without making a live record, we wanted to capture the live energy of DOPE and bring it back to the gutter where we think DOPE belongs."

RockConfidential.com: Are you the riff-master? Do you come up with a lot of the hooks in the songs?

Edsel Dope: "It's always kinda been what I do. I have a killer working relationship with my guitar player, Virus. He's not as much of a riff guy but he's a killer player. I can sit there with a guitar, come up with a real simple monkey riff and then look at him and go, 'OK, make that smart.' He'll add four more notes to the riff and instead of me hammering on two different notes, he'll pull it into a different world where it's got more stuff going on around it. Then I think, 'Oh great, I hope this isn't something I'll have to play live!' I can't fucking play that shit! I'm just into the groove and the hooks. That's one thing that seperates DOPE from a lot of the bands out there. We have a lot of pop influence in what we do. The songs are all two and a half or three minutes long. The choruses are extremely obvious. A lot of them have the big sing-along type things and you really feel the presence of that live. That's always been a big part of our sound. That's been what I think has made people think we're not heavy enough. They think we're not brutal enough and that we don't scream enough. You know what? If that's what you think, go listen to somebody else. We like the big hooks and the anthem aspects of songwriting."

RockConfidential.com: One thing I've not heard you discuss is what went down with Tripp Eisen. What do you think about that?

Edsel Dope: "This is a tough one. You haven't seen my opinion because I've been very reserved. Oddly enough, this is a person that the world knows I haven't gotten along with too well since I replaced him in DOPE several years ago. We've had a lot of words. For anybody out there that's thought I've been a dick, this is an opportunity where if I wanted to be an asshole and bury this guy and completely rake him through the coals, now is a time I could do it. That's just not my style. It's none of my business. In this world we all have to be resonsible for the decisions that we make. For every action there's a reaction and I guess he just made some poor decisions. He's gotta pay the price for the decisions that he's made. I don't wish that on anybody. Prison is one place that nobody wants to go. Hopefully he'll come through it all right and he'll get it together and figure out what to do when he gets this all behind him. It ain't gonna be easy and it ain't gonna be pretty."

Read the entire interview at RockConfidential.com.