In Conversation: Andrew Kline of Berthold City and Strife
Having scaled the heights of hardcore in the '90s, Andrew Kline saw how a "career mindset" can ruin a good thing. Now, he sees only two modes: Do it yourself. And do it for yourself.
Since the age of fourteen, Andrew Kline has tried his hand at almost every major hardcore pursuit—fanzines, shows, bands, a record label. But even with decades of experience, Andrew is not the kind of person to get stuck: When his first major band, Strife, needed a label for a new EP, he started WAR Records. When his desire to make music outpaced one band’s schedule, he taught himself how to sing and started another one, Berthold City. For someone like Andrew, “doing it yourself” is more of a joy than a slogan.
Of course, there was a learning curve to get here. As one-third of a stunningly successful late ‘90s Victory Records trifecta—which also included Snapcase and Earth Crisis—there was a sense that Strife, who were selling hundreds of thousands of records at the time, had meaningfully crossed some sort of rubicon into the life of a “career band.” Instead, the demands of that success unraveled them, leading to Strife’s initial breakup in 1998. “We just put everything else on hold to do this band full-time. And ultimately, that was kind of the downfall of the band,” he tells me. “Because then, all of the sudden, there was pressure to succeed. There was a pressure to say ‘yes’ and not ‘no.’”
With the release of Berthold City’s second album, Where Did We Go Wrong?, coming next month, I sat down with Andrew to see how these experiences have influenced the way he approaches hardcore today—and how he’s navigating the sheer power of saying “no” and not “yes.”
You’re one of two people that I’ve interviewed so far—the other being Dan Yemin—who I very clearly remember meeting on the first tour I ever went on, with Ressurection in 1992. That was literally the first time I’d ever really left New York City. And the thing I remember most about meeting Strife was thinking, “Wow, these guys are really young.” What’s funny about that now is that I’m pretty sure I’m only one year older than you [laughs].
ANDREW: My birthday is in November, so in the summer of ‘92 I was sixteen years old.
Right. Mine is in July, so I had just turned eighteen.
ANDREW: I actually graduated high school when I was seventeen. I started going to shows when I was fourteen. I was always the little kid.
I also remember you being the most enthusiastic kid I met that summer. You just seemed so excited to be playing shows. I feel like I chalked it up to some kind of suburban optimism.
ANDREW: Well, a lot of hardcore in California came from the suburbs. Not just Strife, not just the Orange County bands, but think of Black Flag and Descendents. That was Redondo Beach, not L.A., you know what I mean? There was definitely an urban, more “city” experience happening, but I think punk rock and hardcore in California came from the suburbs. Because maybe you had a little more well-to-do family that could buy you a guitar for Christmas. Or maybe you had a garage where you could practice. It’s a different experience. I’m sure it’s the same thing in New York. Like, a lot of New York hardcore came from Queens. What’s the difference between Queens and Manhattan? It’s the housing. You actually have houses there and more access to rehearsal spaces.
I think your first instrument was the horn?
ANDREW: Yeah. It’s funny because Dan Yemin had a very similar musical journey where he started on piano, moved to trumpet, then started playing guitar, and now he’s singing in Paint It Black. I started as a very young kid, taking piano lessons. No one played an instrument in my family, but we were still a very musical household. There was always a record playing, whether it was jazz or rock or blues. My dad had a vast knowledge of music. We could be listening to jazz on a Sunday morning and he would know every player by ear—whether it was the horn player or the drummer or whoever. He would just know. So I think I was encouraged early on to pick up an instrument. We had a piano in the house, so I took piano lessons. I had a drumset for a very short-lived amount of time. And then going into elementary school, I don’t know why I picked the trumpet. I was briefly in marching band, but then I decided the trumpet wasn’t cool anymore so I moved over to drumline. I played timpani for maybe half a year. Then my group of friends had this idea to start a band. They originally assigned me to play bass, but I bought a guitar. It was black with green lightning bolts and a whammy bar [laughs].
So this is something your parents must have actively encouraged.
ANDREW: Absolutely. Even when Strife went to Europe the first time, I was nineteen years old or something. Looking back on it now, it’s pretty incredible that a parent would let their kid travel halfway across the world with no means of communication. No email. No cell phones. We did a month-long tour with Sick of it All and I don’t even know if I checked in with them once.
My parents divorced when I was in seventh grade, so I was living between my mom’s house and my dad’s house. My dad was more of a hippie-type character. He worked in electronic engineering. He was very smart, but he always just kind of did whatever he wanted. He didn’t really fit the norms of society. He left New York at a young age and drove his motorcycle cross-country to San Francisco, so he had all these experiences—and I think he wanted me to experience life as well. He came to a bunch of our early shows. He saw us play with Chain of Strength. He saw us play with Lifetime and Up Front at Toe Jam in Long Beach. He was just a fan of music. Had I started doing anything else—like, if I was a painter or whatever—I think he would have encouraged that, too. There was never any pressure for me to have “a career” or even to go to college.
When I first heard that your brother was a marine biologist, I sort of just assumed that you were the black sheep [laughs].
ANDREW: Yeah, my brother has a Ph.D. in Marine Biology. He was valedictorian at our high school. He graduated and went straight to college. He was in college for twelve years or something. That’s definitely a path I could have chosen, but I didn’t. And it’s nice that my parents encouraged both of us. They weren’t let down by the fact that I didn’t choose to go to college or choose a “normal” career.
Do you remember a moment when you started to think of Strife as a “career?”
ANDREW: I remember being on that tour with Sick of it All, and Sick of it All at the time—that was my favorite band. They were heroes to me. The fact that we were this small band from a suburb outside of L.A. and somehow got on their radar, that we were able to tour the U.S. with them multiple times and go to Europe with them, that blew my mind. They were the only hardcore band from the ‘80s that was really still active in the ‘90s. You could argue for Agnostic Front, but they broke up for a long period of time. Sick of it All was kind of the outlier. Bands just really didn’t exist for that long at the time. So early on, I don’t think we ever really thought it could be a “career.” At the end of the day, we were playing hardcore music and the biggest you could get was Sick of it All. They were the pinnacle of hardcore.
Later, once we did the second record, In This Defiance, we started touring more and we started getting more support from Victory [Records]. We started getting on bigger tours—like, we toured with Sepultura on the Roots tour, playing arenas. It got a little insane. That was when we started to think of it more as a career because we were touring so much. We couldn’t really have other jobs. We just put everything else on hold to do this band full-time. And ultimately, that was kind of the downfall of the band. Because then, all of the sudden, there was pressure to succeed. There was a pressure to say “yes” and not “no.”
That’s really interesting in contrast to a band like Incendiary, who have basically made a pact with themselves that they will never be a full-time band. In the interview I did with Brendan [Garrone], he seemed almost gleeful about how the band says no to everything [laughs]. Which is such a bold position for them to take because I’m sure the brass ring must be very shiny for them right now. They're a very popular band.
ANDREW: Definitely. But they’re also able to exist in a world where they can fly to Europe for a few shows. They can fly to California for two shows. And every show they play is magical. That’s kind of the dream, where you can get to this level where it’s like, you’re only doing the cool stuff or the fun stuff. You’re not grinding it out in a van for 30 days in a row with no days off. Because that’s hard. We used to do 45 shows in a row with no days off in a van. You didn’t have an iPod to listen to music. You didn’t have an iPhone to text your buddies or your girlfriend at home. Have you seen this trend on social media about how some men are “rawdogging” their flights? Where they go on an airplane and just sit there with no music and no entertainment? Let’s see you do that for 45 days in a van. Let’s see if you come out alive [laughs].
OK, but at the same time, you made this move from New Age Records to Victory at a time when Tony [Brummel, Victory owner] was really sort of instigating this notion that his bands really could be as big as he wanted them to be. He was the most ambitious kid around. When you made that move, was that part of the calculation? Was there an idea of, like, “This is a bigger label. We can go further here.”
ANDREW: Yes. I mean, we met Tony Victory in ‘91 or ‘92 when he was on tour with [his band] Even Score. We ended up playing a show together at Spanky’s Café in Riverside. In 1993, he’s putting together the Only The Strong compilation and he gives us a call and asks us to be on it. And then that comp comes out and we see such a bigger impact from one song on a compilation than we did from our 7-inch on New Age Records. It was in more stores. There was more advertising. There were posters. He just had a different mentality, and you saw that through to the end. I think he started Victory Records and he had a vision. He didn’t want to just put out 7-inches for his friends’ bands to see how they do. He wanted to take it to the next level—and I could see that from one song on a compilation.
I think we also kind of wanted to separate ourselves from our peers locally. I mean, we were friends with Unbroken, we were friends with Mean Season, we were friends with Outspoken. We could play with those bands. They were all on the same label. They were all on New Age. And I think we just saw this opportunity that was kind of different. It was something these other bands weren’t doing. And to be honest, the only other label—which is very, very funny—that was interested in us was Metal Blade. I remember getting a letter in the mail from Metal Blade, probably on the strength of the Victory comp. And I never replied [laughs]. That was something that would never have crossed our minds to do at that time.
Was there a period at all between signing with Victory and your first breakup in 1998 where you noticed some kind of perceptible shift in the way that Tony was running Victory or how you were being promoted or things you were being asked to do? Was there ever a point where you thought, “Oh. Being on this label comes with strings.”
ANDREW: I would say we had a different relationship with Tony than a lot of bands did. We were friends. We would go to Chicago and hang out with him. He was actually a fan of our band. For the longest time, I’d say I don’t think there were any strings that we thought we couldn’t control. Obviously, the biggest strings were that you probably weren’t going to make much money. You were going to get charged back for every ad and every end-cap at a record store. But all of this, in the end, was hopefully going to make your band bigger.
I think everything he did was trying to grow the label and grow the bands—and yes, he did some things I don’t agree with, and yes, we were young kids when we signed the deal and definitely got taken advantage of to some degree. But again, when we started the band, we weren’t looking at it as a career. We were hardcore fans that wanted to play hardcore music and we wanted to spread our message to as many people as we could. So we saw that as a means to an end. We didn’t see ourselves selling hundreds of thousands of records. That didn’t cross our minds. We didn’t have the forethought to think that maybe all of our music would be available on the internet one day because the internet didn’t exist. We just got a contract from Victory, we signed it, and you know, I guess we’re probably still paying for that decision in some ways. But we also wouldn’t have had the experiences that we had without that. So I look at it very much as a double-edged sword.
I think I’ve just been thinking about Victory a lot lately because, obviously, I play with Thursday now. We’re currently on tour with Hawthorne Heights. Both bands literally had to sue Tony to get off the label. And then I also had that really distasteful dealing with him in 1996 when I was putting together the Anti-Matter comp, and I was trying to work out having you and Snapcase on it, and it felt like he was trying to extort me for more money than any other band on the record was getting. It’s like, I was friends with him, too. I thought working with him would be the easiest thing. It was not.
ANDREW: Do you think if it had been more of a DIY thing—like it was actually just you, and it wasn’t on Another Planet—that it would have been different?
I think it would have gone down exactly the same way [laughs].
ANDREW: I could see in his mind, him thinking, “Oh, this is on Another Planet. They’re backed by [Profile], they’re going to try to take my bands. They’re my competition.” Like, are they going to go after Snapcase? Are they going to go after Strife? They did the Warzone release. They did Leeway. What’s going to be their next move? You know how every time there’s a peak in hardcore—there are always ebbs and flows—but every time that happens, you get all these people coming out that had no interest in hardcore, and they’re like, “Oh, how can I get my grubby little hands on this and squeeze it and get some coins?” Right? You’re seeing it now. You saw it then.
Sure, but here’s the thing: People sometimes get too overly concerned with the non-hardcore people who are trying to get their grubby little hands on every cent and not concerned enough with hardcore people who resort to doing unethical things to get their hands on every little cent.
ANDREW: Right. And unfortunately, that’s what Tony turned into. And so the experience that Hawthorne Heights had was not the same experience that we had because he hadn’t seen that kind of success yet when he signed us. We had a four-page contract.
Actually, at that time, he also started Another Victory publishing. And I think that was a direct reaction to Strife being the first band on his label to get a publishing deal. We signed a publishing deal with Windswept Pacific, which was a huge company; we had a friend who worked there. They did the Spice Girls’ publishing. So we signed that and guess what Tony had to do? He had to pay royalties to Windswept Pacific! [laughs]. And he saw how much money he had to pay and he thought, “Oh. I never want to do this again. How can I make sure this doesn’t happen? I’m going to force every band to sign a publishing deal with Another Victory Publishing. And I’m going to not only get bands on my label to sign this. I’m going to get other bands and I’m going to collect their publishing as well.” I think that was a direct response to him having to cut a check to our publishing company.
That makes sense.
ANDREW: So every year, as the success of Victory grows, he changes his contracts. He’s figuring out: How can I not pay this money? How can I get these chargebacks for advertising?—or whatever. And he’s adding it to the contract. So by the time you get to Hawthorne Heights or Thursday, it’s an entirely different label and an entirely different contract. I don’t think that was his intention when he put out the Inner Strength 7-inch, which was Victory Number 1. I don’t think that was his intention when he signed Earth Crisis. But in the ‘90s, hardcore was having a peak, and bands like Strife were selling hundreds of thousands of records. Earth Crisis was selling hundreds of thousands of records. Snapcase was selling hundreds of thousands of records. He had to change his mindset.
How much did success change your mindset? I know you talked about going on tour nonstop, and I have to assume that played a part in your initial demise.
ANDREW: 100 percent. Once we viewed this as a business, it really lost the fun. Like now, we play hardcore and we still continue to play shows because we love it and it’s fun to us. But at the time in 1998, it lost the magic. We were doing it because we had rent to pay when we got home. We had bills to pay. We also had this deal with Victory where if we played fifteen shows in a month, he would pay us X amount of dollars. So, it was tour support in a way…
It sounds like half-tour support, half-bribery [laughs].
ANDREW: Basically! But it kept us on the road and it kept us from having to get a job when we got back. But also, I think a few people in our band were just not cut out for touring. It’s tough. And however hard it is now, I would say it was ten times harder then. At a certain point, people just didn’t want to tour anymore. People wanted more stability.
I also think we were getting a lot of pushback. We were getting the same pushback for being on Victory that the bands that came before us were getting for being on a major label. We would go to shows and we’d be arguing with people because they thought we weren’t DIY enough for them. Kids were protesting us because we asked for a thousand-dollar guarantee—at a show that had 700 people, you know what I mean? It was an interesting time. People wanted something to be mad about. People would get mad that we were shooting a tour video. Why? I don’t know. We played a show in Maryland where some kids made a protest shirt with Strife on it, where the S was a dollar sign. So I think that took a toll on some of the members of the band as well. We were leaving our families and our homes to get in a van to do this, and then we had to deal with a bunch of hateful people.
I wanted to talk about Berthold City, and for me, that begins with the name. It’s like, OK. We know that it’s a famous typeface, and we know that this typeface has a really interesting history in terms of hardcore band logos. But I think choosing to name your band after a typeface suggests that you see some sort of real creative value in the visual language of hardcore.
ANDREW: Absolutely.
When do you think you first had a conscious understanding of hardcore’s design language?
ANDREW: To be honest, I would go back to seventh grade as a young kid, taking a paint pen and drawing on the grip tape of my skateboard. And what do you do? You draw the D.R.I. mosh guy. That’s iconic. Maybe you draw Milo from Descendents. That’s iconic. The 7 Seconds stencil logo. That’s iconic. The Corrosion of Conformity skull. I could probably still draw that right now. So I think it goes that far back, to seeing those images and wanting to recreate them. I would say the design of punk and hardcore is almost as important as the music because that’s the first thing you see. When you see a record in the store, you don’t hear it; you see the cover. Pre-streaming, that’s how I would pick what record I bought. I’d look at the cover, or maybe I’d look at the back cover and see the record label logo. That was enough to say, “OK, I’m going to shell out my eight dollars and I’m going to give this a shot.” Sometimes it would be a winner and sometimes it would be a loser, but you didn’t know until you got home.
When you look at the bands who used the City font, it just added a sense of gravity to what they were doing. Like, even Gorilla Biscuits, who are arguably not as “stern” as, let’s say, SS Decontrol, it still added the same gravity. Had they continued to use that more ornery hand-drawn GB logo that was on the demo, I think we would be looking at them in a completely different way. But because the 7-inch came out with this typeface, it immediately reads as “hardcore,” even though most people probably didn’t even identify it as the same font that SSD used.
ANDREW: The Berthold City font is so much in the DNA of hardcore, and specifically straight-edge hardcore—like you said, SSD, Gorilla Biscuits, Chain of Strength, and so many other bands. When I started this band, obviously, coming up with a name is one of the hardest things you can do. So my first idea was that I was going to come up with the name of a band, and then I was going to create this fictitious place called Berthold City—so it was going to be whatever the name of the band was, and then “Berthold City Hardcore,” as if we were from that place [laughs]. But then I just thought I’d name the band Berthold City. It’s a bit of a strange name, but. I think it’s different enough to make people curious, and I think that’s cool.
From the first demo, I knew I wanted the band to have a strong visual identity. I wanted every release to have artwork by the same artist. So I approached Jeremy Dean before the demo was recorded, and I basically told him, “I want you to do our logo. I want you to do everything for this band. I want you to be our Raymond Pettibon.” So he came up with the original logo on the demo, and he’s done everything since—from all our 7-inches to all the album artwork. I pretty much give him full creative control.
One of the things I love about Jeremy’s work is how referential he can be, so it made me happy to see the artwork for “The Cost” and to see that Lifetime reference there because it harkened back to when we first met. It was a nod to history, but it also reads differently in a new context. Which is also kind of what Berthold City sounds like musically to me.
ANDREW: It’s funny because I have that Lifetime “Money is Cool” t-shirt, and I pulled it out of a storage bin. I thought it was such a cool image to mix in with the lyrics of the song. Because yeah, “money is cool,” but at what point is money not cool? When there’s blood on your hands for taking that money? When you have to compromise your personal beliefs to take that paycheck? That’s really what that song is about. Like, we’re seeing another peak in hardcore, and we’re seeing people offering money to these bands to do stuff with beer companies or energy drinks or Taco Bell. But there’s a whole DIY scene that would never take money from these corporations and would never use their music to sell a bean burrito. So at what point is that money not cool? It’s like, you’re getting this paycheck now, but at the end of the day, is this going to help hardcore or is this going to hurt hardcore? Or what happens when kids can’t sustain going to 25 and 30 dollar shows anymore? The coolest thing about hardcore when I was a kid was that it was such a low barrier of entry. Anyone could go, anyone could be a part of it, anyone could start a band, anyone could go to Kinko’s and start a zine. I think we’re really losing sight of that.
When you decided to use that Raybeez sample at the beginning of “The Cost,” how attuned were you to the irony of that speech coming out on Caroline Records, who were owned by EMI?
ANDREW: Everything about the presentation of that song is irony. The artwork is a t-shirt. If you look at the artwork on iTunes, it’s a t-shirt. It’s like the product has become more important than the music or the message. So it’s funny because I literally added that Raybeez sample three days before I uploaded the song to streaming. It doesn’t appear on the album version of the record. I really just wanted something to hammer that message in a little bit more. Obviously, that speech is super iconic, but again, like you said, there’s irony there because it appears on a record that came out on Caroline. So everything about that song, there are different levels to it. Even stealing that art from Lifetime, that was intentional. It wasn’t just intentional because we were like, “Hey, this is cool art.” It was intentional because the whole song is about stealing the heart of this music that means so much to so many people. Even down to the fonts we used: If you look closely, every letter comes from a different corporation that’s trying to squeeze something out of the hardcore scene right now. I don’t know if anyone’s caught that or not; nobody’s mentioned it to me. But that was also very intentional.
I think another interesting aspect of Berthold City is how amorphous the band can be in terms of a lineup.
ANDREW: That wasn’t initially the plan, but we wrote our first album during the pandemic, and it was just too hard to get everybody in the room. It was hard to get everyone to commit to getting into a band, and I knew that if I sat around and tried to wait and make it more of a democratic process, that it probably wouldn’t happen. So I wrote that record with Nick Jett from Terror, who produced the record. I wrote 20 or 30 songs and I gave them all to Nick and let him pick from that. Then [he and I] got in a room and hashed out the songs, and from there, we went in and recorded with our drummer. And that was such a great process that when it came time to write the new record, we did it the exact same way. I had 30 ideas, we worked on the songs and recorded demos, our drummer flew out from Portland and recorded the songs, and then I played all the bass and all the guitar and sang. At that point, the band could be anyone.
Which I think is why I ask. Because I feel like, in recent years, we’ve been toying around more with this question of: What is a band? Maybe it’s because of the fact that technology makes it possible for us to easily send demos to each other now, back and forth. Or because we can record entire albums over the internet at this point. Or maybe we’ve just grown a little bit and changed our ideas. Like, sometimes I tell people that “there are no ex-members of Thursday.” It just feels like everyone exists in this collective and whoever is there when you see them is there.
ANDREW: A lot of times that’s the only way a band can exist as you grow older. Otherwise, you’re just going to say “no” all the time. Like with Strife: Right now, this is always going to be the Strife lineup. Maybe if our drummer couldn’t do something, we’d bring in an older Strife drummer, but I don’t think we’re doing Strife without me, Chad [Peterson], Todd [Turnham], and Rick [Rodney], right? That’s why Strife says no to a lot of stuff, because someone can’t do it. The sole reason I started singing for a band is because I realized that the singer of a band is the only one who has the power. If a singer can’t do it, you’re not going to do it no matter what. And so, with Strife, we were turning down a lot of opportunities because Rick couldn’t do it or he didn’t want to do it. And then I started World Be Free with Sammy [Siegler] and Scott Vogel, but Scott hurt his back and we had to cancel all these shows. So I just realized that if I wanted to do a band, if I sang in the band, I could fill in the band with friends from all over the world.
I started Berthold City not even knowing if I could actually do it as a singer, or as a frontman. It was a real challenge for me. It took a lot of work for me to feel comfortable singing in the studio, singing live, and writing lyrics, and I’ve grown to really like it. But again, it was kind of out of necessity knowing that the band behind me could be anybody. That was kind of the agreement we had from the beginning. If there’s an opportunity that makes sense for the band, I can get other people to play and nobody’s feelings are going to get hurt, which is nice because it’s for the good of the band.
OK, before we end, I kind of wanted to patch back into the “money is cool” conversation for a second in this way: So first, while I appreciate everything you were saying about corporate sponsorships and rising ticket prices and all those things, I also acknowledge that you’re coming from a position in your life right now that’s not the same as when Strife was a touring band—meaning that you have a career in real estate that I assume pays you enough to live and do whatever you need to do.
ANDREW: Right.
So you’re not dependent on it financially anymore, which means you are able to approach it in a way that you weren’t able to in the ‘90s. How would you describe your current approach?
ANDREW: I think it’s more pure. There are no outside pressures to succeed. The only things you do are the things you want to do. Strife didn’t break up because we didn’t love hardcore. Strife broke up because it became a business. And I think if you’re going to be in business, there are much easier and much more lucrative businesses to be in than playing hardcore music [laughs]. I think now, Berthold City plays music because we love it. There’s no pressure to sell tickets; there is no pressure to sell records. The music that we play isn’t what’s popular in hardcore right now, and that doesn’t matter, you know? This is not our career. If Berthold City broke up tomorrow, I have accomplished way more than I’ve ever sought to do with this band. The fact that we’re about to release our second LP—a lot of hardcore bands don’t get there, you know? We are so fortunate.
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Yeah, always a great interview. Thanks Norm.
I remember hearing that when Strife toured they "DEMANDED" separate beds and hot/vegetarian meals, and thinking they were sellouts! God, we were dumb.