We Drive For Free
Leadfoot travels the country on three vans a week.
By Keith Bergman

If you haven’t heard of good-time North Carolina rockers Leadfoot, you’ve got a lot in common with the rest of the world. Originally fast-tracked for success after its formation by ex-Corrosion of Conformity members Karl Agell (vocals) and Phil Swisher (bass), the band had high-powered management and a deal with Roadrunner Records lined up in the mid-'90s. On the eve of the release of debut album Bring It On, though, Roadrunner abruptly decided that “rock is out” and shelved the album, effectively stopping the band in its tracks – those high-powered managers dropped them like a hot potato, and the band retreated back home to regroup.

New York-based indie The Music Cartel stepped in and released the album in 1998, following it up with the group’s sophomore effort Take a Look in 1999. And then, once again, silence descended, this time for three years, until Swedish label Lunasound showed up to the party – sorta – to finance We Drink For Free, the band’s third platter. Determined to finally get some momentum going again, Agell and Swisher rallied the troops – guitarists John Dzubak and Scott Little, and drummer Tim Haisman – for a four-week, cross-country tour. With the album released domestically through Abstract Sounds (though a manufacturing glitch kept it off the shelves for another frustrating month or two), things seemed to finally be looking up.

But the best laid plans, as they say… Karl Agell picks up the story. “We were on our way from Iowa City to Chicago, and we blew a head gasket in the ol’ tour-mobile,” he remembers, a trace of road-weariness creeping into his voice even a month later. “Finding some fortune amid the misfortune, we ran into a really cool mechanic, who wound up letting us take his brand-new, 35-foot RV into Chicago so we could make that show. We did that, got back, and rented a box truck – we rode in the back like illegal immigrants, all the way to Kansas City, where a great friend of Johnny’s and mine named James Brown bought us a $1000, 1984 conversion van. We set out for Denver, and three hours west of KC we broke down again.

“We cancelled a few shows, did a bunch of repairs, and somehow made it out to LA. We did Anaheim, L.A., San Diego, and somehow made it to Vegas, with the van dying – some friends of ours ended up getting a van from Mexicali and delivering it to us, and we managed to make it home… man, I dunno how we possibly crammed that much turmoil into three weeks.”

A brutal tale of the downside of being in an underground touring band – but also an encouraging sign that, in the darkness of public indifference, there are still people out there who love the rock enough to throw down and show support when it’s needed. “Oh yeah, man, absolutely,” Agell agrees. “We appreciated it so much, we had to get to Los Angeles, no matter what. We were supposed to play in front of some new people – managers, promoters, labels. I mean, the record business is full of vapors and bullshit, but some of them actually did follow through and show up. They seemed interested, so we can hopefully get someone behind us, and keep the rest of the guys’ eyes on the prize.”

Leadfoot’s rock and roll is tailor-made for partying and carrying on, the logical descendent of Thin Lizzy and Sweet (whose “Someone Else Will” gets a raucous reading on We Drink For Free). It’s quite a contrast from the earnest, political, uber-serious post-punk that COC was blaring around the Blind era, when Agell and Swisher were members. Yet some fans have had a hard time differentiating between the two, or letting go of the past. “We were in the second week of a nine-week tour back in 2000,” Agell recalls, “at this famous junkie shithole bar in northern Holland. We’re all fucked up, we’ve been smoking way too much pot, drinking too much good Dutch beer. We were doing Leadfoot’s one and only unplugged show ever, and they’d given us these shitty acoustic guitars. Up comes this dude in the old-school COC shirt with the skull on it, and he keeps yelling ‘I haff to hear [Blind song] “White Noise”! I haff to hear it!’ I couldn’t get it through this guy’s thick head that we didn’t play that song. It was like he needed COC to exist, in that lineup. I have a tape of the show around here somewhere – it was actually pretty horrible – but I finally just snap and yell ‘how about I just knock your Dutch fucking teeth down your Dutch fucking throat, and you shut the fuck up???’ You know, if you need to hear those songs that much, go buy a copy of Blind and some good speakers, and turn it up loud.”

With the tour-from-hell behind it, Lunasound a distant memory, and a whole raft of new material itching to be recorded, Leadfoot is home waiting to see what happens next. “The problem has never been the material. We can always write, man. I can always sing, and come up with good melodies. We just need the people behind us to make it happen – it sucks from a fan perspective when people say shit like this, but music just doesn’t appear. There’s a process – it’s called the music business… it’s a sorry state right now, and I blame the labels. They’re run by a bunch of pussies – these people don’t have any balls. They have no frame of reference, they don’t know where rock and roll came from… it’s just a short-term, let’s focus on the lowest-common-denominator kind of thing.

“We get shit all the time because we’re ‘damaged goods,’ we’re not 21, we don’t have an eyebrow piercing and nice abs and… I dunno… great nipples, or whatever [laughs]. But you know what? Why does that fucking matter? Can those guys sing better than me? Can they play better than my guys? Can they write a better song? Will you walk out of their show thoroughly entertained? Fuck no. Look at… fuck, look at Keith Richards. Look at Lemmy Kilmister. Does that shit matter to those guys? Don’t they rock?”