In Conversation: Daryl Taberski of Snapcase
In his work with Snapcase, Daryl Taberski eschewed hardcore factions and fashions for a vision of a more inclusive and empathetic scene. Personally and creatively, he's never stopped working on it.
My original interview with Snapcase, which appeared in the Summer 1995 issue of Anti-Matter, kind of felt like a breakthrough: Having been dogged with a bizarre (and unearned) “tough guy” reputation for the first two years of their career, these interviews—with all five members of the band at the time—allowed for an opportunity to show us who they were in fact. What they revealed was a complex, but thoughtful portrait of five hardcore kids in separate, but similar stages of self-discovery. In many ways, it foreshadowed the mission statement that anchored their breakthrough album, Progression Through Unlearning: Snapcase were interested in growth, development, and empathy. And in the 29 years since that first interview, they have continued to pursue these ends.
Of everyone I’ve met from doing Anti-Matter, my relationship with Snapcase has been the most fruitful and enduring: They were part of the zine, they contributed a song to the compilation, they reunited to play the Anti-Matter book release shows in 2007, and they continue to extend their friendship in my personal life. When it came time to think about doing another “reunion interview” last month, I texted singer Daryl Taberski to see if he would reprise his role in the hot seat. “Oh wow, that would be super awesome,” he said, using the same modest inflection I’ve come to expect from him ever since that very first weekend we spent together.
We’d met before, but the weekend we did those first interviews for Anti-Matter, on January 25, 1995, that’s when I believe we really got to know each other. You were playing Burlington [Vermont] and Philadelphia that weekend, and I was basically tagging along.
DARYL: Right. At that point of the game, as far as Snapcase goes—as a band and as a band member and probably, at that point, as a band leader—I was probably the most focused and driven. I had an idea of what I wanted to do with the band. The rest of my life, I was really confused and clueless.
Re-reading that interview this morning, I actually created these little descriptions of where I thought everyone was at, and I thought we could start there: First, there was Bob [Whiteside, then-bassist], who was making $4.25 an hour washing dishes. He had no idea who he was or what he wanted to do beyond Snapcase. Scott [Dressler, then-guitarist] was, quote, “scared to death about putting all of his ambition into this band,” and so he was working on a bachelor’s degree. Jon [Salemi, guitarist] was still living with his parents, but he was also working on race cars with his brother. He was technically the most stable-seeming, but he was still sort of hesitant about where he was going to put his focus. And Tim [Redmond, drums] was focused on college, but he was feeling extremely socially isolated and divorced from the world outside the band. How would you describe your level of confusion and insecurity at that point?
DARYL: I was probably struggling through college. I’d always been a good student, focused on academics, and I always pictured myself racing through four years of school and then going on to do graduate work and all that. My mind was in a million places, but the main place was in music and hardcore and doing this band. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing or where it would go. I was at odds with my parents about it because the goal was [supposed to be] school. That was the focus. But in a way, even though you feel like you’re doing a good job and you’re dedicated to something, it felt like being in a band meant accepting that I’m [going to be] a fuck-up everywhere else. And that was really hard for me because I’d always just followed the conservative path of the nuclear family and school and everything as it’s “supposed to be.”
It’s funny you say that because one of the things I wrote about you in the interview was that your house “looked like it could have been anyone’s parents’ house” [laughs]. I basically pegged you as “the Dad” of Snapcase. Did you feel that way?
DARYL: Oh my God, yeah. There were moments on tour where someone would do something stupid and they’d be like, “Just don’t tell Daryl! He’ll kill me! He’ll be so mad!” [laughs].
But I have to say this really quickly. When you went through the band members then, it’s interesting because the band has Frank [Vicario] and Dustin [Perry] now, and I don’t know if all bands are like this when you think about the progression of a band, but I feel like Frank and Dustin were just building on the family, rather than replacing people in the family. It’s strange. I don’t ever think of the band and think, Oh, there were those guys, and then there are these guys. To me, it was seamless. We could all hang out together and it’s not a weird thing at all. I was just with Bob and Dustin and Tim the other day at Jon’s 50th birthday, and it was really fun.
I think I loved hanging out with you that weekend because you didn’t come off as a very dramatic band. There was a chemistry that was palpable, even back then.
DARYL: Something I remember about that weekend was the feeling of stopping at that frozen pond on the way to Vermont. We called it Lake Snapcase, and we just goofed around seeing who could slide the farthest on the ice, just crashing into each other. That feeling, it wasn’t like any feeling that I had when I was at home. Just being on the road with this group of people, letting loose, giggling, having fun, and doing something so stupid… I guess that’s it. It was so stupid and fun, and I wasn’t allowed to be stupid and fun for most of my life. My life was always getting straight A’s. Or are you practicing baseball? Are you serious and focused? Go, go, go. And here it was just fucking around with your friends, but you’re on your way to do something meaningful. That’s a feeling that only shows up when I’m with the band.
In my mind, there are three major versions of Snapcase: There’s the Comatose era, with Chris Galas singing. There’s the version that appeared in Anti-Matter, with Scott and Bob. And then there’s the version with Frank and Dustin. Obviously, that’s reductive and there have been other people and other lineup mixes, but those three versions feel very distinct to me. So what’s interesting is that you are the only person who has been in all three versions. I feel like I remember hearing that it was your idea to actually start the band.
DARYL: Yeah, I would think that’s true. I started the band with our original singer, who was a guy named Tiger [Balduf]. That was who I got into punk rock with. He was my neighborhood friend. We were going to shows and listening to the punk radio station that would review the shows, and I remember when we realized that some of these bands were from Buffalo, we thought it would be so cool to try and do something like that.
Do you remember any conversations that you might have had about what that band would sound like? I’m thinking about a part in our first interview where you said, “I guess the sound of the music doesn’t really match the personalities in the band.” I’m wondering if that tougher, harder sound meshed more with your personality at the start.
DARYL: It’s funny. A lot of people get into hardcore because of dysfunction—maybe dysfunction in their upbringing, dysfunction in their community, dysfunction in their family. In some ways, even though my family was very together and loving, it was also very conservative and restricting. If I think of a lot of the classic New York hardcore bands, many of them didn’t have stable households. They were staying at friends’ houses or maybe even staying in shelters or in group homes. They got into hardcore to develop a sense of family; that was something they were looking for. But that wasn’t my story, you know? I was more like, I don’t feel comfortable being this conservative nerdy suburban guy. I know there’s more out there. What else is out there? So I was sort of rebelling against all that and looking for something else. I think we all come to hardcore for similar reasons, but we come from different places. The beauty of it is that once you get there, everyone is tied together.
To answer your question though, and this is probably typical, but I had a lot more anger in the beginning. I was angry. I was angry at being this conservative kid. I was angry that I felt so confined. And I wanted to scream. I wanted to be like, I’m so much different than this, and I could be so much more. Thinking about it now that I’m an actual dad—I have a kid, and he’s wise beyond his years for nine years old—I think about hardcore and I think about this band and I think: Is this something that I would want to share with him? Is this something good? And when I think about it, I’m like, this is so cool. And this is important. And this is good. I do want to share this with him. I do want him to know about this. I do want him to meet all the guys in the band and everyone that I know through music. And I do want to bring him to shows. I don’t want him to feel like he has to become a hardcore kid, but I want him to know that this is good stuff. It’s important. The feeling and the meaning behind all this stuff, it holds up.
Whenever you talk about the early days, you tend to bring up this review of the Comatose 7-inch in Maximum Rock’n’Roll where they seem to think you played flute on the record.
DARYL: Dustin made stickers. Do you know this? He made these stickers with a Revolutionary War minuteman playing the flute on it and it says “Snapcase” [laughs].
Well, I had to find the original review, and I did [laughs]. This is from December 1992. It says:
High energy chugga-chugga hardcore, thrash and metal (the good kind). Interesting use of flutes (??), but somehow the whole package is a bit too artsy for me. At least it’s high quality artsy. I left it on 33 for half the record before I realized it was a 45, works either way.
Is that how you remembered it? Because I think that’s actually kind of a good review!
DARYL: I don’t think I cared. I was more like, “Wow, we’re in MRR!” [laughs]. It was like, holy shit, we made it. I never would have expected a writer in MRR to like us, you know?
This was the only Snapcase record where you played bass. Galas was still singing, and Galas was your best friend. But he got kicked out of the band. He didn’t quit.
DARYL: Correct.
What did that turmoil look like in terms of your friendship?
DARYL: It wasn’t good. We almost didn’t speak for two years solid. I didn’t have it in me to call him and say we were moving on. Dressler did it. He’s my first cousin, as you know. And so I’m hanging out at my aunt and uncle’s house and Scott’s like, “I’ve had it. That’s it. I’m calling him. We’re moving on.” But I think because Chris and I were so tight, he took it out on me the most—even though Scott called him, even though Scott told him the band decided.
But it wasn’t only that he was being kicked out of the band. It was also that you were technically replacing him.
DARYL: At that moment, we weren’t sure what we were going to do. And it was scary because we were already on Victory and we were already scheduled to record [Lookinglasself] with Don Fury.
There’s a lot of baggage that comes along with becoming a singer. You were going to become the center of attention, for one. But you’re also sort of grafted with this responsibility to actually say something. This was something that we touched on 30 years ago. You said, “I’d only feel like I was cheating myself and everyone else by getting up there really super-confident and saying, ‘This is the way things are and I’m telling you because I know these things.’ It’s not like that, and that’s one thing about becoming the frontman of the band after playing bass for so long. I’m still looking for a stage identity.” If I wanted to be critical about that now, I could say that if everyone waited until we knew everything 100 percent, then no one would ever stand for anything ever. That sometimes you have to trust your gut and just say how you feel. Thinking about that statement now, do you think that’s a cop-out at all?
DARYL: I don’t think that’s a cop-out. I think that’s real. I prepare myself to cringe when I’m going to hear something that I said [in the past] that might sound fake or not authentic. But that doesn’t come across to me as fake or inauthentic. I really was pretty much unsure.
I buy and sell vintage art now, in my adult life, and sometimes people think it’s important that a painting has intent—that it’s “good” if it has intent and it’s “not good” when there’s no intent in this piece of art. But I don’t know if I really agree with that. I don’t think good art has to always have intent. It just has to express how you’re feeling at that moment. And if you’re confused and unsure, then you’re confused and unsure and that’s part of the art. I think that’s a big part of what this was for me.
I kind of envied Earth Crisis when we were touring with them because it was so concrete. They knew what they were about. They had a mission. They had a statement. And mine was like, well, “I’m kind of figuring myself out. My lyrics are about figuring myself out” [laughs]. But that’s OK. You don’t have to join forces with something that’s concrete and established, or join forces with something bigger than yourself. Just be yourself. Use this to build yourself. Back in the days of getting handwritten letters, we used to get so many letters that were like, “I felt alienated by straight-edge bands, and somehow I needed to get my act in gear, and you guys are part of why I did that—because I need to focus on me, not on me trying to become something else.” That’s when I started to realize the value of my lyrics, the value of what we were doing or what we were stumbling into. But there was no intent to get there.
There’s something else you said later in our interview, about something else, that feels connected. You said, “I don’t know what to say. And I’m always watching my words. I worry about what I will say all the time.” That’s a level of self-consciousness that’s precarious for a singer. Where was that coming from? What were you afraid might happen if you slipped up?
DARYL: That’s probably a lot of being your own toughest critic, being hard on yourself. I think a lot of that still comes from a strict upbringing; that’s probably ingrained into who I am. But that was also what Progression Through Unlearning was all about. The unlearning was about unlearning all the dumb or restrictive things that I’d learned in my lifetime—and I wasn’t able to grow or go any further until I unlearned them or allowed myself to forget about those things to go farther. Being worried about saying the wrong thing kind of comes along with that. You’re a bit tentative. You’re leaving something you’ve always been to become something that you don’t know what it’s going to be.
Did you ever feel like you guys had some sort of Buffalo underdog complex?
DARYL: Maybe an underdog, yeah. Because as an underdog, you feel like you have to work harder to get where everyone else is getting. We felt like we had to work. When we got into Progression Through Unlearning, that was like a machine. We practiced five days a week, doing three- and four-hour practices. Enough was never enough. We were in lockstep working on that album. That’s the feeling I always have whenever I think about that time.
As far as being an underdog, it’s weird because Buffalo had a really great scene. The shows were great. And like any smaller scene, it was sort of competitive. There was some jealousy versus support from each other. But then I think about the shows. I think about the River Rock Cafe. I look at old photos and Garrett [Klahn from Texas is the Reason] was there. [Terror’s Scott] Vogel was there. Mike Ski [from Brother’s Keeper] was there. Robby [Takac] from Goo Goo Dolls was there. Dennis [Merrick] from Earth Crisis. Sometimes the guy from 10,000 Maniacs was there. And definitely the guys from Cannibal Corpse were there. All in the same room at the same freaking show, from little Buffalo. It’s amazing to me. It’s unbelievable when I think of stuff like that. There were probably 300 people there and all those people came out of it.
Something unique about Progression was its commitment to empathy, and I think that was sort of uncommon for this style of hardcore at the time. From my perspective, this was something I was thinking about a lot back then, because—coming from a history of abuse and also being in the closet—I knew that I could either become the bitter fucked-up person who wants to do fucked-up things to other people, or I could try to be the person who says, “I don’t want other people to go through this. I want to help.” I think we all eventually have to make that choice. And for as long as I’ve known you, I feel like you’ve always tried to be a helper. You have always very much played that role. Where do you think that stems from?
DARYL: I don’t know. I think it comes along with just feeling that you’re not alone. Kind of extending your hand and letting someone know, “I might not think exactly like you do, but that’s OK. I’m here to listen.” I became a social worker, and people always ask me what kinds of philosophies I follow in social work and counseling. I kind of hate that. I take bits and pieces here and there because every person has a unique journey. It’s not exactly the same, so you don’t just plug someone into some kind of treatment method. It’s about recognizing what is individuality. What does that mean? Some people go, “Oh, I’m not the norm. I’m a hippie and that’s an individual thing.” Well, not really—not if you’re like all the other hippies, right? And it’s the same thing for punk rock or hardcore or whatever it might be. Your community in some kind of a way should give you support, but it shouldn’t define you. That was kind of what I learned through doing [Snapcase]. I was constantly learning from trying to write lyrics and trying to put this together. I never knew what I wanted to say, but I learned what I was saying as I was writing it—and that, to me, made it more fun. It was more explorative.
You spent twelve years working at an inpatient psychiatric hospital. That seems really intense.
DARYL: Yeah. In the scope of social work and mental health, there’s really no more acute level of care than inpatient hospitalization. An inpatient setting is where the shit really goes down. Someone only ends up in the hospital because they’re either really ready to hurt themselves or someone else or because they just did. And that’s the minute that you’re meeting them—when they come in right after that. There’s definitely no other experience like it, for sure.
What prepares you for that kind of crisis work?
DARYL: My personality conflicted with a lot of styles in the hospital. Like, nurses are very regimented. Or at least the nurses I worked with, especially when I started, were very medication-focused. They don’t like gray areas; everything has to be defined. But social workers, we love gray areas. And so you clash, right? Because nurses hate that.
I’m not a big guy. I’m not a tough guy. But for some reason, especially when I worked my way up into leadership at the hospital, I became the person they would always page [when a new patient was being admitted]. And every single time it was a learning experience. What’s it going to be? Some super angry person that’s ready to smash me through the floor? Or someone that’s so psychotic that I might as well be a space alien approaching them? I have to think of that.
I always think about this one guy that came in overnight. I came into work that morning and the story was that this guy came in and he hurt three staff [members] the night before. They said he’s really psychotic, and that everyone was scared for him to wake up—because we’re not equipped to handle big, psychotic men like that. It was like, “Should we just pump him full of meds?” And I’m thinking, no. You don’t just pump him full of meds. That’s not OK to do. We don’t even know anything about this person right now. They weren’t a good reporter of themselves when they came in because they’re sick.
So I remember, of course, getting the call: “This guy is freaking out. He’s punching walls and storming up and down saying, ‘Let me out, let me out now!’ Get down here.” So I come down there and of course he says, “Who the fuck are you?” But I just walk along with him and I ask him what’s going on. He says, “I can’t take this. You guys have me locked up. I feel so constrained. I can’t even breathe in this fucking place. Everyone is staring at me.” So I start telling people to just get away, to leave this guy be. I ask him what it is that he wants about being let out. He was just like, “I can’t breathe. I’m suffocating in here.” It was in the middle of January in Buffalo, and it’s freezing outside, but I said, “Listen, if I could put you in a room with all the windows open, would that work?” So I told the nurses to open the windows. They were like, “Daryl, we’re not allowed to do that.” But I said, “Well, blame me then.” We put him in there and it was freezing; you could see your breath. But the guy laid down, no shirt, on the bare floor, and he just chilled out. And he did that for like two hours. Then he got up and went back to his room and he was like, “I’m OK right now.” His family eventually came in, and we got him some meds. The guy was actually a professor at a really nice college. It was amazing.
OK, let’s switch gears. I wanted to ask you something about Snapcase in 2018. I don’t know if you read my interview with Civ, but there’s a part where I ask him about “the lost” Gorilla Biscuits 7-inch from 2006: It came out, they played it live for a minute, and then it just disappeared and got buried in the YouTube cemetery of music. It’s not on streaming. They never play it. They don’t talk about it. It’s just a thing that happened. And Civ said, “There’s nothing that sucks the air out of a room more than saying, ‘Here’s a new one!’” [laughs]. So in 2018, Snapcase is playing a new song live called “Spike Up Your Tone.” And then, as best as I can tell, it just disappears, never to be spoken of again. I know that at one point, you have said that if you were going to continue playing in the band, you felt like the band needed to create new music. But seeing what happened to that song, I guess I wanted to know if your position has evolved.
DARYL: I feel like we need to write some new music. What that should sound like is another conflict. Do we want it to sound like Progression, because that’s where Snapcase left off the strongest, and that’s what people like, and we like that, too? Or do we write something that sounds like what we like now? I don’t really know what the answer is to that. I only know that if you write something, it’s got to be good—whatever good is. I would like to do something new. I know what Civ is talking about though. You don’t want to deflate the momentum out of a show by throwing a new one in there. Maybe the answer is to not call it a new song [laughs]. Just play it. Play it and treat it like it’s your best song.
The thing about “Spike Up Your Tone” is that I liked the song, but I didn’t love the song. I think the whole group kind of felt that way. I think we just did it because we felt like we needed a new song more than we were doing it because we thought we had a good song. There’s a difference there. I think [we were affected by] some of the criticism you’d see from the scene. People who were like, “Oh, these guys are just playing shows to do something they did 30 years ago. They’re not a real band”… I guess I listen to criticism too much.
I get that, and yet at the same time, Gorilla Biscuits is going on 35 years with one album and a 7-inch, and they’re happy, and the kids are happy at shows, and that’s what matters. Even with Texas is the Reason, I’m always like, “You guys say you want new songs, but you don’t want new songs. You want us to come out and play the 16 songs you know, and we’re done, and everyone will go home happy.” I just feel like you shouldn’t feel compelled to make new music because of criticism. You should feel compelled to make new music because you have something you need to make. And if not, just keep it real.
DARYL: Yeah, I think you’re right. I mean, on some level, I think it depends on the band and how they do it. The main thing is it’s got to be good. Do I want to go see some of these classic bands and hear new music? Even as a fan, I don’t know if I do. I don’t know.
OK. I kind of saved this question for last because I know you can be diplomatic and this can be a thorny topic for some people, but I just want to get real for a second.
DARYL: All right… [laughs]
When was the last time you talked to Tony Victory?
DARYL: That’s been a very long time. During the full-on isolation COVID era, his wife contacted me and said, “Tony’s turning 50. We can’t have a big party. So I’m asking people that he always respected, and that he was friends with, to say some kind words on a video to him.” At first I thought, I don’t really know where we left off! You know, are we good? [laughs] But whatever. Who cares? He gave us a shot. Snapcase got the opportunities that we got because he was there. Going back to Maximum Rock’n’Roll, I found Victory Records in MRR. I sent demo tapes and photocopied photos of the band to eight or nine labels that had ads in MRR. And he was the only one that said, “Come here and I’ll check you out.” He actually said, “I don’t get it, but all my bandmates love this” [laughs]. So anyway, I made a video for his 50th birthday and I never heard anything back about it. I was kind of disappointed by that, you know. I put some time and thought into the video I sent.
I did see [his wife] again at Riot Fest last year, and it was great seeing her. She was cool and she kind of explained Tony now to me. She was like, “He would never come to this. He just doesn’t know what to expect from people. He just couldn’t relax here. He couldn’t enjoy himself.” It would just be at the front of his brain: What is everyone saying? Does everyone hate me? So he just doesn’t come out.
I think I bring him up because sometimes I feel like I’m one of the rare people, as you are, who remember Tony in the ‘90s—before everything went haywire—and my early memories of him are good. He was really nice to me and always down to help. Texas would play in Chicago and we would stay at his house. We were actually friends. That started to crack when I put together the Anti-Matter comp. He turned so ugly about money and having the Victory logo somewhere on the art next to yours and Strife’s names, and all this shit where I was like, What the fuck? This was supposed to be the easiest one. But it was the hardest one. And yet, because I still have this knowledge of who he used to be, it’s difficult for me to depersonalize him in the way that I think he’s been depersonalized in a lot of the hardcore lore. Whenever I hear you talk about him, I get the feeling it’s the same for you.
DARYL: Mm hmm. I think that’s fair. You know, a lot of [my memories of Tony] were good. Like, Snapcase got stuck in a blizzard in Indiana once and we were stranded in a hotel room for five days. Tony showed up in this beat-up little pickup truck and paid to get our van fixed and bought us food and took care of everything. He drove like five or six hours just to get there—by himself. Another time I remember walking around Chicago with him at night, and he just walked up to these skinheads and ripped their Nazi patches off their jackets. And then he looked back at us like we were going to back him up, and I was like, “I’m fucking scared right now” [laughs]. But I don’t know. Being ambitious can be a good thing. Tony was just getting so ambitious to dominate, to take over the world. I just always think of that Radiohead line: “Ambition makes you look pretty ugly.”
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"I think it comes along with just feeling that you’re not alone. Kind of extending your hand and letting someone know, 'I might not think exactly like you do, but that’s OK. I’m here to listen.'"
That is so important. It's really difficult, but it's really important.
This interview has got me going back through Snapcase's discography and as I'm listening to Bright Flashes, it hit me - what Snapcase was was ahead of their time. What might have seemed odd then makes perfect sense today.
"...we just goofed around... Just being on the road with this group of people, letting loose, giggling, having fun... It was so stupid and fun, and I wasn’t allowed to be stupid and fun for most of my life."
The Daryl I had small interactions with in the 90s East Coast scene left me feeling that he was very serious. Around him, I felt like a sloppy, unread, wandering "art school type" (wait... I was exactly that!).
I love reading interviews—honest ones like Anti-Matter ones—where us readers are given a key to a previously locked door, with a new perspective on someone we admired and misunderstood.