In Conversation: Scott Vogel of Terror
Terror's two-decade-plus history has secured their legendary status, but it's also saddled the band with some outdated baggage. Scott Vogel is finally ready to unpack that weight.
Over the course of 23 years and nine full-length albums—not to mention numerous EPs, live records, and other releases—few bands can claim to have covered more ground or garnered more influence over 21st century hardcore than Terror. At the heart of it all is Scott Vogel, who has become one of hardcore’s most charismatic and, in my view, misunderstood elder statesmen. On some level, Scott knows that he has previously played the part of the aggressive and even deliberately reckless frontman—the fact that his band is called Terror has never been lost on him—but over the last several years, we’ve also seen a more thoughtful shift.
Perhaps it’s one of the liabilities of longevity: Public perception is often reluctant to move, and personal evolution is slow to register. But in talking to Scott, and in creating a conversation that serves as much as a personal overview as it does a band interview, the patterns of change emerge and his own commitment to growth comes clearly into focus—even through his trademark self-deprecation. As Terror continues to thrive into its third decade as a band, Scott is sober, wiser, and doing the work.
I wanted to talk about the last time we saw each other, because I remember feeling this sense that you were almost perplexed by the sort of dedication to hardcore that I express in Anti-Matter—as if, for whatever reason, I couldn’t possibly still be into hardcore the way that I am [laughs]. What was that about?
SCOTT: The fact is, you’re in an older age bracket, and I don’t see that many people who are older saying, “I love hardcore,” as often as I hear you say it. I think there are probably a lot of people who have been around—people who learned a lot from hardcore, and have gained a lot from hardcore—but they don’t really outspokenly say it or just put it out there as a blanket statement: “I love hardcore. Hardcore means a lot to me.” I just don’t hear a lot of older people saying that. So to hear that, it warms my heart.
And also, you’re playing in Thursday now. There was also Texas is the Reason, who to someone like me, I may consider it a hardcore band, but there are other people that may consider it post-hardcore or emo or whatever… So to have someone that is known for other things outside of hardcore, to say they love hardcore so much, that’s just a rarity to me. I wanted to put it on your radar that I think that’s really cool.
I appreciate that. Because to me, Texas or Thursday, it’s all hardcore. If it comes from the community, and it continues to exist in the community or it gives to the community in some way, then I’m really not concerned with whether or not it sounds like the Cro-Mags.
SCOTT: I’ve always had this definition of hardcore that can be ripped apart, because it’s not bulletproof, but I’ve just always said that if hardcore kids make music, then it’s hardcore. It’s not a sound. It’s the way you live your life. Obviously, if you make a jazz record, it can be stretched too far, but…
OK, but can it? I feel like we need to dissect that a little bit because one of the earliest and most indisputably hardcore bands in the world played reggae.
SCOTT: True, but not from A to Z, it wasn’t reggae.
I’ve seen more than one Bad Brains show where at least 20 solid minutes of their set was pure reggae. And nobody was like, “Boo!” [laughs]. Everybody was in. Honestly, I think that’s where a lot of my definitions of hardcore come from—from experiences like those. Because it forced me to ask: If this isn’t musically “hardcore,” then what is it that’s holding this room together? And to me, the answer always comes back to community. That’s the glue.
SCOTT: So you’re saying there’s validity to what I’m saying, that when a hardcore kid makes music, it’s hardcore.
Yes. I think that’s valid. The band I always take out of the garage for this question is Split Lip.
SCOTT: Ah, beautiful.
I know hardcore kids now would listen to them and be like, “What the fuck is this?” But in the ‘90s, they were one of the biggest bands because they were just doing what was authentic to them. Being real is the qualifying ingredient here.
SCOTT: I listen to Split Lip more than I listen to Madball and Stigmata combined [laughs]. Not to take anything away from those bands, but just to listen to music with a melody and some beauty to it instead of someone hitting me in the head with a hammer—that’s usually where I go. That’s one thing about me that maybe people don’t know.
Honestly, I’ve always been fascinated by your public perception because it reminds me of the way Snapcase was first perceived 30 years ago. There was this idea back then that Snapcase were a bunch of meathead jocks [laughs]. So when I did my interview with them [in 1995], I decided to take a Greyhound bus to Buffalo so I could spend a weekend with them and just figure out who they were. And I was like, “Oh my God. Here are these amazingly sweet and thoughtful people. How did they get this reputation?” The biggest difference, obviously, is that in your case, you have actually referred to yourself as a jock in the past.
SCOTT: [Laughs] Yes.
So can we start by agreeing that there’s maybe a difference between being a “sports enthusiast” and being “a jock?”
SCOTT: Well, when you make me think about it, I guess the definition of a jock that would come to your head is one of someone who pushes people around and is a macho asshole. When I refer to myself as a jock, it isn’t that at all. It’s just that I love sports. So am I a sports enthusiast? Sure. Am I a bully? I don’t think so, no. If that’s where we’re going, we can agree on that.
I think there’s also the reality that when you play aggressive music, you’re bound to attract aggressive people, and that sort of reflects on the perception people might have of you.
SCOTT: Right. I’m not a violent person, but in the past I’ve surrounded myself with some people that aren’t the greatest people; they were violent people. Terror had a stint of years where our shows were too violent, and after we realized the damage it was doing, and saw some things that we couldn’t live with, we made a big conscious effort to change that. One of the first things we did is that we actually went to people that we knew who were maybe more responsible for some of those things, and we directly asked them to stop. It was affecting us mentally. Bands didn’t want to take us on tour. Venues didn’t want to have us. And we just didn’t like what we were seeing. That wasn’t the vibe we wanted to create. So we personally asked people: “Don’t do that anymore.” The last thing you want at your shows is a fight, or 20 fights, or fights that go on to end the show. We were just seeing all sorts of things, and it was very disheartening. It had to end.
I was reading a story with you where the interviewer mentioned a show in London where a fight broke out and they said you just stopped playing, you walked off stage, and you didn’t come back out. I am just imagining how confused everyone must have been and I fucking love that.
SCOTT: I wish I could remember that show! I mean, you’ve gotta keep in mind. With Terror, we’ve been a band for 23 years, so there are so many shows and I don’t have the greatest memory. But even just recently we played a festival in the Netherlands called Revolution Calling. It was an amazing show for a lot of bands, and the Terror set was over-the-top great; it was like a couple thousand people going crazy. But someone stagedove, and I don’t know exactly what happened, but I could see everyone in the crowd saying, “Stop! Stop!” So we stopped. The person was brought up on stage, and the paramedics came, and I’m just trying to give him space, but in my head, I’m dying inside. I was in such high spirits of what a wonderful experience this was, and it just dipped into what had just happened. I became very emotional. Eventually, they took him away on a stretcher, but it was our second to last song and people wanted us to play one more song. I went out there and said, “That set was great, but the momentum of that set is over”—and we just didn’t play anymore. We got word the next day that [the stagediver] was totally fine, but I just thought that was the correct thing to do.
Let’s go back to your early life in Buffalo. You’ve talked about getting “passed around” a little bit between your mom and dad growing up, and you’ve related that to your discovery of hardcore, and specifically your need for hardcore. I wanted to see if you could flesh out that connection for me a little bit.
SCOTT: In my earliest memories of life, I don’t remember my mom and dad together. I can remember living in the middle of nowhere with my mom and my two sisters. My father had left to be with a woman he later married. We were ultra-poor and on food stamps. I’m sure there will be a couple of parts in here where I don’t say such great things about my mom, but overall, she was amazing. She did everything she could to put herself through. She was a dental hygienist, she was very loving, but she must have been lonely. My father on the other hand, who I don’t want to talk too badly about because he’s no longer alive, had a rough life. I would stay with my father on the weekends and he was… I don’t know the right word. I want to be respectful to him.
A little cold?
SCOTT: Cold is a good one. And I think my mom knew this more than anyone because she married him and had three children with him and then left him or whatever happened with them. So maybe I was bluffing, but one day I put my foot down and said, “I wanna go live with my dad.” And my mom said, “OK.” So in my head, one day she dropped me off my father’s house and then took off to Texas with my sister. One beautiful thing about this is that I was now with my stepbrother Jay, who is the person that got me into hip-hop and hardcore and everything. But also, now I went from a really open, loving house to a cold house. Every time I tell this story people think Jay is older than me, but he’s not. He’s eight months younger than me. But he lived more in the city and he knew more about what was going on. I was from the woods of Buffalo, knowing nothing.
So with hardcore, the energy and the aggression is what first sucked me in. And then… I don't want to say that I never had friends—I always had friends—but I never had deep connections with people because I was always moving. So hardcore filled that void of, “Where’s my mom?” A lot of people in hardcore came from broken homes and abusive places, so it was a way to connect with people and have a place to go.
Do you feel like you ever resolved that “where’s my mom?” void?
SCOTT: Much later, after going to therapy for many things in my brain, I realized that when I moved to California and I was touring so much, it was a perfect excuse to never see either of my parents for years and years at a time. I could just be totally distant, and I knew that wasn’t good. My therapist would always encourage me to tell my mom what her dropping me off and going away did to me, and I was too weak to do that. But one day, Terror was playing in Buffalo and I went out to lunch with my mom. We were driving, and she pulled the car over and just looked me in the eye and said, “I really want to apologize to you for what I did to you.” And I just froze. Again, I was just too weak to say anything. I was like, “Oh, it’s fine. It’s fine.” But it was something I’ve been dying to hear for thirty years. And in that conversation, she told me that she battled with my dad in court to not let go of me, which is something I never knew. Like, I don’t know if I was too young to remember that or I didn’t want to know that; I wanted to pretend she just dropped me off. So it was a double revelation.
OK, let’s move forward. There was a period of time between living in Buffalo and moving to LA to start Terror where you moved to Arizona and you seemed committed to leaving the band life behind. What was going through your head at that time?
SCOTT: I had done Slugfest. Then I did Despair, went to Europe, put out some records on Trustkill, and then two people quit and that was the end of that. Then Buried Alive started up, we were on Victory immediately, and we were playing more shows than any of my other bands. We were doing more and we were bigger than anything I’d done before. I actually quit that band because, musically, we weren’t seeing eye to eye. But you’re right, at the time I was like, “I’m just done with doing bands.” I put everything into it. I’m sure I knew in the back of my mind that I was an asshole, but I probably blamed other people for being lazy or not caring enough or not wanting to give their life to a band that made $150 a night.
At the time, my girlfriend lived in Chicago and I lived in Buffalo. A friend of mine from Buffalo had moved to Arizona and invited us to stay there. Our plan was always to end up in California, but moving across the country was kind of a big thing, so we went and lived with him for eight months. We were still figuring out what we were going to do, but I knew I had no intentions of playing music. So I got a job as a telemarketer because I used to do that in Buffalo. A lot of hardcore kids did that; [Buried Alive guitarist] Scott Sprigg worked there with me. Buffalo was so cheap back then you could work for four hours a day telemarketing and have the weekends off. If we ever had a tour, you could just go do it and they would hire you back. They would hire anyone. It was just a way to make a little bit of money to live and be able to do your band and not really have a future—just stay young.
So when I got to Arizona, telemarketing was in my blood. I got a job with Sears Home Improvements, and I would call people and be like, “We’re going to have someone out there doing free estimates on siding, kitchen cabinets, and… I don’t know, roofs. Would you like a free estimate?” [laughs]. And I don’t know how, but I was fucking great at it. They had a thing where if you made ten appointments, you could go home and get paid for the day. That would happen all the time. I was so good at it that at the end of the year, I won a Caribbean cruise [from the company]. So for as much as I loved being in a band, it was so great not to have any of the stress or the pressure or the competitive bullshit or anything like that for a year. I actually really liked not being in a band. But then I got the call about Terror, and they asked me to sing, and here we are.
So it’s fair to say you don’t have a ton of practical job experience then.
SCOTT: Do you want a list of the things I’ve done in my life? These are in Buffalo: I drove a taxi cab. I washed dishes at a country club. I worked at a pizza place with Garrett [Klahn from Texas is the Reason] and Joe Lucca [from Copper]; that was Picasso’s Pizza. I also worked at a toy store, which is the worst job I ever had. I walked around and straightened up the toys that people touched. Being a dishwasher was brutal, but at least the time went. Walking around a toy store for an hour felt like five hours. And then telemarketing. That’s it. I am a highly sought-after 50-year-old.
OK, but being in a band is work, right? If you’re going to do this for real, it’s work. Like, when you signed to Victory they even put out a press release that essentially bragged about your, quote, “nihilistic approach to touring.”
SCOTT: Touring is a double-edged sword. I think when your band starts out, you need to hit the ground and get in people’s faces. There’s a beauty to playing small cities that are off the beaten path for your band, as well as for yourself to see every corner of the world. I’ve met so many people touring, and I’ve had some of the greatest times in my life touring, but you can also drive yourself into the ground by being overexposed. No one needs to see your band every month. Mentally and physically, it can burn you out. There needs to be a balance.
I think I bring it up because it made me think about how hardcore has been, at least nominally, this working class culture with a real sense of valor that we put on having a strong work ethic, but then I also have this instinct to push back when we romanticize this idea of a “nihilistic approach to touring”—as if there’s a heightened sense of realness to that. Because the reality is that this kind of thinking could literally kill you.
SCOTT: Please don’t say that!
You know what I mean.
SCOTT: Yes. And thinking of how you just talked about all the jobs I’ve had, I’ve obviously backed myself into this corner where I live off of Terror now. It’s due to a lot of hard work and some planning, but it’s also due to the fact that I think we are very genuine. I think people respect Terror in a lot of different ways. I think that we are still putting out music that is really energetic and honest. And somehow we’ve been able to stay relevant with younger kids, which is really hard to do. So it’s a dirty word in hardcore, but we still live off the band—and that's the biggest blessing in the world. But don’t think for a minute that I don’t sometimes think that it could end at any time due to a million things: health issues, the band, we could put out a terrible record and no one cares. There are so many things that could end Terror. And it scares me sometimes.
I’ve never told anyone this, but somewhat recently in the last month, when we’ve been flying places, I started a note section in my phone that says, “Résumé.” And I’ve started to make a list of things that I’ve learned—mostly from music and life experience, the business experience, and the way of running a band and all the little things that go into it—to where if I ever really need to make a résumé, I have that. It would be a very unconventional résumé, but for the job I would be looking for, I think it would be the right type of information that they would need to see some of the skills I have.
Another aspect of touring that I wanted to approach is how it felt very much like there was a period of time where your drinking became problematic.
SCOTT: Yes.
Did you feel that way at the time?
SCOTT: Oh yes. Everyone that knows me well knows that. I’ve done 30-day tours where I was blackout drunk for 20 of those days, I was just drunk for eight of those other days, and two of those days I couldn’t drink because I would die if I did. That’s a little extreme, but it was close to that. Terror has been a band for 23 years, and there’s probably a good seventeen years in the middle of Terror where I drank on tour—and I am not a good drinker. I don’t just have a few drinks and laugh and do sweet things. I go on stage and black out and fuck up the set. I text people things that are very nasty and I wake up the next day and I can’t believe I said them. I break things. I break other people’s things. I am loud and annoying and obnoxious. And it could also be 20 nights in a row where we’re just listening to music and singing and having fun. But on the 21st day, I will do all this stuff and have to say sorry to everyone, and for the next week, everyone will shake their heads at me like, “What a fucking piece of shit.” I tried to stop drinking so many times.
How did that remain sustainable for so long?
SCOTT: I guess the other members of the band had some understanding and also at the same time accepted some of the shit that I did. Some of the other members were doing the same exact thing. Some of the other members had different vices that other members accepted. We burned a lot of bridges, and I don’t want to say we made a lot of enemies, but we probably made a lot of people think we were drunk assholes. The ship kept sailing though. I don’t know. Somehow we’ve only had one member change in the last fourteen years.
How is touring sober different for you?
SCOTT: Well, one part of it is that I was beating myself up physically. I was always hung over, energy low, and in a bad mood. Like, you know, my gut was big. But it’s funny because now I’m on the other side of the spectrum—and everyone in Terror much prefers this—but now I’m, like, up in the morning. I wake up at like seven or eight o’clock and I’m ready to go. I have a list of things to do and I’m getting them done. Go, go, go. Like, we’ve been fortunate enough to be on a BandWagon [RV] on the last U.S. tours, and I clean it every day. I clean the toilet, I clean the sink, I sweep or borrow a vacuum cleaner from the venue. I do my laundry every couple of days. I’m getting a haircut every couple of days. I compensate for the lack of hangovers with over-energy. I do yoga every day now. It’s a completely different world, but I still don’t have that sweet spot where I can just relax. I don’t know how to relax.
It’s also been a hard adjustment to go out on stage sober. After 20 years of seeing all social interactions with people through blurred eyes that were coated in some liquor, it’s really hard for me to be social now. Sometimes I get up on stage now and I have… I guess the word is stagefright. Like, I look out and I’m like, “I can’t do this.” Whereas before I’d be a half a bottle deep in vodka being like, “I’m gonna do this so good” [laughs]. But my band is like, “You are so much better now. You have so much more energy. You connect with the crowd so much more.” And part of me is like, “You’re just saying that because you don’t want me to drink”—but I don’t think they would lie to me, you know? So it’s been a challenge, but at least now it’s doing yoga and cleaning the BandWagon rather than apologizing to people for breaking their iPad because I didn’t like the song they put on. It’s a much more positive challenge.
It’s interesting because as you’re talking about this, I’ve been thinking about the fact that you once had an entire website dedicated to your stage banter—called “Vogelisms”…
SCOTT: Lucky me [laughs].
…But I’m also thinking now that a lot of these things that were on the website were essentially the ramblings of a drunk man.
SCOTT: There can be Terror shows that are like “tough-guy mosh fests,” but we’ve also been known to have Terror shows that are really more of a vibe of a Murphy’s Law show—so some of the things I might have said were maybe semi-sober, in clear focus, and just being goofy. But the thing about that website is that I just know some of those things are things I’ve never said. They might be a variation, but there are words that aren’t in my vocabulary that people have put on there. Some of them I’ve definitely said and some of them I’ve said many times.
I have to force myself to be social. I’m not really a social person. And I think a lot of people maybe perceive me as stand-offish, but I’m just kind of shy. So when that website came up, I was just like, “Oh God, I don’t want this focus on me.” I’m not computer-savvy, but someone I knew found out it was someone in Toronto, and I reached out to her and I was like, “You have to take this website down. It’s embarrassing to me and I just don’t want it.” And she was like, “I love your band.” She just expressed to me that she was a super-fan and asked if she could keep it up, so I was like, OK. I just kind of rolled with it.
The site is gone, but there are still pieces of it that are on the Internet Archive, so I picked out three Vogelisms and I wanted to know the likelihood of whether or not you said them—at least according to your memory.
SCOTT: [Laughs] OK!
The first one: “If a Nazi walks through that door, beat the shit out of him.”
SCOTT: Hmm. I’m gonna go with no, but there’s probably a variation… I don’t think I talk that directly, but also, that one isn’t so embarrassing, so I’m OK with it. But I don’t think I would have said it so directly.
OK, this one is a little wild: “Come up here and sing with me. If you don’t know the words, kill the motherfucker next to you.”
SCOTT: Maybe. I’ll give myself a yes on that one [laughs]. You said, “Kill the motherfucker,” right? Yeah, why not.
I actually really want this last one to be true because I feel like this is something a lot of bands say behind closed doors: “We probably won’t play that. What a stupid song. We have too many stupid songs at this point as a band.”
SCOTT: Yeah. I’m self-deprecating a lot and we do have a lot of stupid songs [laughs]. That’s probably true.
OK, there’s another story I wanted to ask you about. You told this story in 2007, I think, and as the story goes, you were hanging out on tour with the guys in Stick To Your Guns, and you were listening to Bad Brains, and you find out that they’d never heard Bad Brains. They didn’t know them. This was kind of wild to me! [laughs]. But OK. That’s fine. I’m not a gatekeeper. But it did bring up a question for me: Earlier we talked about how you discovered hardcore and how hardcore filled a specific need for you. But the version of hardcore that you needed—is that the version kids are discovering today? And if not, does it even matter?
SCOTT: That’s a very interesting question. I remember after I said that—I think it was in Lambgoat, or a very visible publication—those guys were like, “Thanks a lot for putting it out there that we don’t know Bad Brains” [laughs]. But I mean, yeah, it went down like that. And to be honest, I love Stick To Your Guns. They’re probably the band I’ve toured with most in my life and people I respect across the board. But to answer your question, no. I don’t think the version of hardcore that younger kids are finding now is the same version that I found. I think it’s so different in so many ways. And that’s not to say that it’s better or worse. If they’re getting out of it things that impact their life, that’s really important. But it’s a tough question. They’re also being born into a whole new world.
But is it still important for newer kids to know the history of this community? For me, the answer is yes. But some people might think that now is all that matters.
SCOTT: I think it would be really important and beneficial for people to know the history, but I don’t think you can force it on them. They want to have to find it themselves. Like the band Magnitude. Whenever I see them, all we talk about is, like, Turning Point and all this old stuff. I love finding younger kids like that and I will be the first to spark up a conversation with them. But there are other people who want nothing to do with that, and I have to respect it. I think you should want to know the roots and where this comes from, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with focusing more on what’s going right now either. That’s a really valid point, too. I just couldn’t imagine not knowing Victim In Pain and saying I’m a hardcore kid. But if they go as far back as Trapped Under Ice, and they really believe in the scene and respect and support it, then I support that… Well, actually, they should go as far back as Terror. That should be the only cutoff point [laughs].
Oh wait. You actually just named another job you once had! You were a manager.
SCOTT: I managed Trapped Under Ice and Stick To Your Guns, yes. It wasn’t for me, though. I didn’t like being that middle-man. And maybe I didn’t have the skill either. Those two bands were destined to rise and maybe I wasn’t the right person to aid that rise.
We started this conversation talking a little bit about perceptions, so I wanted to end by giving you an opportunity to talk about how you perceive yourself. Specifically, what do you think everyone is missing about who Scott Vogel is that maybe drives you a little crazy?
SCOTT: Honestly? One thing that people don’t know unless they’re closer to me is that I am very, very, very giving. Like, when it comes to my birthday, I hate getting gifts. But when it’s the holidays or Christmas or whatever, I love giving presents to people. I’ve had people come to my house where I’ll be like, “Please take this shirt that I know is worth $300. Take it. Take it, I want you to wear it.” I have people asking me things all the time: Can I do this for them? Can I do that for them? And I am always giving, giving, giving. That’s not a perception that a lot of people have about me, and sometimes I question it. Sometimes I think it’s very stupid that I just give things away and give my time for free. Things like charging for a guest spot or doing signings—so many bands charge for that stuff and I would never even consider it. I just do it. I don’t know if that’s the answer you thought you were going to get, but that’s the first thing that comes to mind: I would rather give something to someone that makes them happy than have something that’s worth something just sitting there.
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Here for the Norm/Vogel/Split Lip overlap.
This is, outstanding. Thank you both. I love hardcore.