Brian Garrity
If fame were measured by influence, Dillinger Four would be one of the biggest bands on the planet. The Minneapolis, Minn. quartet practically invented the subgenre of Midwestern punk and has played shows all over the globe, including a tour with Green Day at the height of that band’s fame.
Now 21 years into the game, D4 have become the unlikely elder statesmen of a scene populated by countless bands that they inspired. Isthmus recently caught up with vocalist and guitarist Erik Funk in advance of the band’s Oct. 4 show at the High Noon Saloon.
Are you surprised that Dillinger Four has lasted as long as it has, let alone the impact your music has had over the last two decades?
When you start a band when you’re 20, you don’t picture being 40 and still doing it. You just can’t even imagine it. Most bands don’t last as long as we have, and the odds are against it. When we realized it was 20 years, we were like, “Wait, what? What happened? This is our 20-year anniversary, and we didn’t even do anything!”
But I’m happy about it. We’ve kept the band in a place where we never made it too intense a part of our lives, while other bands, I think, just get too intense, and it fizzles out. We’ve always just kept it in a space where it makes us happy.
Do you think it’s helped that you haven’t really rushed into anything? You’ve spaced out your work and really taken your time on things.
Yeah, that absolutely helps it. I think that’s probably the key — we never tried to make it our career. We’ve always had other lives. If it wasn’t working out for someone, or we didn’t have time to do something, we all gave each other that space, and that’s what keeps it alive. It never becomes a real bother for anyone.
As of a couple years ago, you guys were working on a new album. Is that still happening?
Kids happened in these last few years for several of us, and that obviously takes a lot more time. If we were slowly making records when we didn’t have kids, that’s definitely a big part of it now.
All of us want to do a record, but none want to just spit out a record because we feel obligated, because we’re not obligated to anyone. We don’t have a record deal that means we have to make a record or anything like that, you know? It might be helpful if we had some more pressure. It’s easy to kind of let time roll by, but we do want to do it, and it’ll happen when time finally cooperates for us.
You mentioned starting a band when you’re 20, and now you’re 40. You more or less created the template for gravelly, Midwestern “drunk punk.” Has it become harder to keep up appearances pertaining to that image as you’ve gotten older and more of you are having kids?
When we’re in band mode, it’s like no time has passed. The different lifestyle only really affects the day-to-day stuff. Once we’ve got our D4 hats on, it’s like the first year we were a band. Nothing’s really changed there.
Has that dichotomy of being a father at home and then going out on stage and being D4 made it more fun for you?
Yeah, it has. I think we look forward to it more since we don’t do that much. When we get invited to do something like a festival and it’s six months away, you start thinking, “Oh, that sounds like a lot of fun compared to what I’m doing today!”
I read in an interview a while ago that your son has a really strong opinion about D4.
He’s softened on that. He’s almost 5 now, and he still doesn’t like just listening to the music. But we [recently] had our first show where all of our kids got to come, and it was a fun thing for him because it was a big, outside, summer block party type of thing. There was a bouncy house and face painting, so he had a blast. But on the downside, now that’s what he thinks shows are like. So now when I say I have a show, he says, “I want to come! I want to come to all of the shows!” And I’m like, “They don’t normally have bouncy houses.”
