You’re on stage. The last band just finished, and you’re up. As you prepare to play, the crowd below you begins to grow and swell – flood. People are oozing in from every cardinal direction. You’re surrounded, suffocated by people. It’s a horizon of heads: giggling, screaming, yelping heads. All of them there for you.
Some might toss their instrument and rush to the nearest garbage pail, but John Barrett was seeping with cool when he, as Bass Drum of Death, was presented with the situation.
“It’s kind of like riding in an airplane for me. You feel a little nervous but then I buckle in and take off.”
Earlier this August, Oxford resident and Ole Miss grad John Barrett played La Route du Rock, a festival in France, that provided thousands of thrilled, locked-in fans.
“It’s crazy, going super far away from home and people knowing words to (your) song and asking about really random, obscure things. It’s fun,” Barrett said.
They were there for him and his blazing sound, his adrenaline-pumping stage performances. The only time I’ve seen someone successfully crowd surf in Oxford was at a Bass Drum of Death show. Now imagine an Oxford show of that magnitude and blow it up thirty or forty times. I imagine it was pretty killer.
Luckily for us poor bastards who couldn’t make it to France, Bass Drum of Death just released its second album through Oxford-based Fat Possum Records. The self-titled “Bass Drum of Death” was recorded entirely by Barrett – a drum kit, guitars, a computer and an ability to write hooks that force you to be invested. It’s the kind of music that makes you drum with your feet as you sit at your desk, chipping away at your problems. There’s a good amount of head bobbing involved, too, and, for me, some daydreaming about me tearing it up in a swordfight. Thankfully, Barrett has no choice but to provide me my daydreams and your tapping feet. He can’t live without it.
“It’s stress release for me, anxiety release,” he said. “Something to work on. It’s like how some people feel after they exercise. You know how you feel better after you exercise? That’s how I feel like after I record songs. It’s one of those things I have to do for my own well-being.”
He’s thankful for how things have worked out for him. Becoming an international rock star is a dream many children have, then those kids grow up to become statutory cost auditors, but not Barrett. He stuck with the dream.
“I’d be doing music whether I got paid for it or not. The fact that I can support myself on it is pretty rad.”
Don’t let his success make you think he’s going to lend his guitar to the dust bunnies, though. The man doesn’t have time for feather dusters – he’s got big plans.
“The end goal is to be the biggest band in the world,” he told me, chuckling.
So pop by End of All Music, ask a clerk to blast you with Bass Drum of Death’s “Bass Drum of Death,” and support the dreams, daydreams and tapping feet.
