|
|
DOS & DON'TS
RELATED ARTICLES
ALSO BY RYAN DUFFY
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 CHARLES MAGGIO FROM RORSCHACHINTERVIEW BY RYAN DUFFY PHOTO BY SEAN CAPONE 
We thought it might be interesting to talk to Charles Maggio, head yeller of seminal hardcore punks Rorschach, since, you know, their brutal melding of hardcore and metal pretty much altered the trajectory of punk music in America and all that jazz. It turns out Charles is pretty much just your average Joe who just so happened to front the best band of my lifetime with a voice that could embarrass banshees. He also threw in some cancer surviving for shits and giggles, and he could still kick your ass while balancing his twin baby girls in his hands. What a letdown it can be to get to know your heroes. Vice: What were you up to when Rorschach started? Charles Maggio: It was the summer between high school and college. I was enrolled in a business-management program at a New Jersey school that had a metal radio station in the late 80s. I tried to get on the air there, but I really didn’t want to pay my dues first by pulling Dokken and Mötley Crüe records for dudes with long, highlighted hair. WSOU at Seton Hall? Yep. I actually ended up taking a radio class there. One of our assignments was to cut a one-minute-plus spoken word piece down to 30 seconds successfully. I chose “Family Man” and learned that if you cut out all the times Rollins says the words “family man” it is only like a 45 second rant. Speaking of angry guys, how did the lyrical topics come into focus for Rorschach? We were all coming out of a scene of bands like Youth of Today and BOLD, who were “pissed off” by people not being straight-edge and not being a true friend. We had already sung along to all those songs and maybe as a result we dug a few levels deeper. Then I got sick with cancer—Hodgkin’s disease—and it opened up a whole new slew of anger trigger points: cigarette smoking, socialized medicine, mortality, death, and so on. Things got a bit darker. Yeah I was going to ask you about that—I’m glad you opened the door instead of me. When was that in the trajectory of the band? That was early on, right around the time we were writing stuff for the Remain Sedate album. We had to play a show with Keith singing half of the set because the treatment I was undergoing was a bit too much on my system, but for the most part we rolled ahead at a decent pace, considering. Maybe it’s my very pedestrian understanding of the disease, but that’s kind of stunning. Well, I had eight months of chemotherapy. It was two treatments a month, and I scheduled them on Mondays so that I would be recovered to go to the shows on weekends. I’d go to the hospital and go under for 28 hours and wake up in my bed at home feeling like what I imagine a really bad hangover would feel like. I would start functioning normally within 72 hours. I’d imagine even if you could recover physically relatively quickly, being that young with a potentially terminal illness had to take a hefty toll mentally. I refer you to the lyrics on either Rorschach record. I got sick and I came out of it a changed man. I felt invincible, impervious to the petty things that effect mortal people. That went away quickly, and then I balanced it all out. So cancer was no biggie in the band’s progression, but still, Rorschach had a relatively short turn that we all wish lasted a bit longer. What happened? Popularity is a fickle bitch and you need to be careful what you wish for. We were lucky enough to have generated enough in-band ill will toward each other to break up while we were still doing something seemingly valid. A lot of bands don’t have that kind of luck. And now? Life is good. I’ve been married since 2003 and had twins this past January. I work a real job as an accountant, still do the Gern Blandsten record label, hang with the twins, sell records on eBay for extra money for the kids’ college fund, and I practice Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. So there you go.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
- VICE@VICELAND.COM
- PRIVACY STATEMENT
- TERMS OF USE
- © 2000-2009, VICE MAGAZINE
Development: Solid Sender
