Four fresh-faced bands. Forty-one shows, sold out night after night. An epic Halloween concert. Sour Patch Kids shots onstage. Bowling pandemonium after shows. Golfing on days off ““ must be the Glamour Kills Tour.
Headlined by All Time Low, the Glamour Kills Tour is scheduled to come to the House of Blues in Los Angeles on Saturday. The tour touts relatively new but increasingly popular power punk-pop music groups Hey Monday and The Friday Night Boys as backing bands. We The Kings, one of the other bands on tour, will not play at the L.A. show due to prior commitments.
The 20th show in a series of 41, the performance on Saturday more or less marks the tour’s halfway point. All four bands expressed great excitement over their national tour together so far.
“This is my favorite tour that we’ve been on because everyone kind of knows everyone on the tour. It’s really fun,” said Alex Lipshaw, who provides rhythm guitar and backing vocals for Hey Monday. “All Time Low knows how to have fun with everything. Everyone in the show is involved in their set. Someone in every band sings with them or plays with them, so it’s really cool.”
In addition to getting along winningly among themselves, the bands are wooing their fans in a similar fashion. The groups play to sold-out shows almost every night.
“We played a show on Halloween. It was our tour, the All Time Low tour, combined with the Boys Like Girls tour in Dallas at the Nokia Theater, … like an all-day kind of festival sort of show. It was insane: like 4,500 kids. The great part was that everyone dressed up in different costumes,” said Andrew Goldstein, front man of The Friday Night Boys, who donned quadruple-XL sweat suits stuffed with pillows at Saturday’s show.
Alex Gaskarth, lead singer and rhythm guitarist of All Time Low, emphasized that the Glamour Kills Tour is about the live show. Each band creates a distinct sound, yet they are friends from across the same genre.
“Basically, what makes us stand out is that all four bands have a very different attitude in their music. Friday Night Boys are very much a pop-heavy band. The Kings sort of have more of a radio feel. Cassadee (Hey Monday’s front woman) is obviously a chick, so that’s a completely different dynamic for that band. We sort of bring the light-hearted pop-punk-inspired power pop that people reflect on from back in the earlier ’90s,” Gaskarth said.
The Glamour Kills Tour brings together these groups at a point in their careers when they are established artists but still very much in touch with their roots.
The Friday Night Boys all played in different Washington DC-area bands during and after college. It was not until they played together as a bowling team ““ meeting every Friday night ““ that they tried their hands at jamming together. Former Fall Out Boy label, Fueled By Ramen, picked up the outfit from Virginia in August 2008 and greatly facilitated their rise to stardom.
We The Kings started as a middle-school garage band six years ago in Bradenton, Florida. They went through a couple of names before deciding upon We The Kings in early 2007 ““ at which point the group began to see commercial success with its self-titled debut album.
Hey Monday formed more recently and released its first album, “Hold on Tight,” in October 2008. Out of all of the bands participating in the Glamour Kills Tour, Hey Monday perhaps faced the greatest adversity as the band’s original drummer, Elliot James, left the band on Oct. 9, 2009 just one week before the tour was slated to start.
“It just wasn’t for (Elliot). This is exactly what we’ve wanted. He may have thought that this is what he wanted and when he got it, he realized that it really wasn’t,” Lipshaw said. “It’s pretty brutal. It’s kind of like breaking up with a girlfriend, … breaking up a family, losing a brother or something like that. He was a pretty big part of this family. We kind of just have to pick up the pieces and everything. So far everything’s been going really well with the transition.”
All Time Low, from Baltimore, Maryland, formed in garage-band tradition while still in high school in 2003. Although they released their first studio album in 2005, it was not until their 2007 release of “So Right, It’s Wrong” that the band made its meteoric ascent through the pop charts.
All Time Low has already toured with all of its supporting acts and all the bands relish this opportunity to play together. Even though the bands have a lot of fun, the prolonged stress of being away from friends and family while on tour is taxing. The bands find that the other acts and everyone involved with the tour becomes family while on the road.
“Being away for so long without having a place to call your home is definitely the toughest thing. But the friends that you make on tour become your family and that sort of replaces it,” Clark said. “We’ve been home maybe a month in the past 12 months. So you kind of grow to miss the home you wanted to run away from when you were a kid.”
The mood of the Glamour Kills Tour is raucous at times, and the bands live for the live interaction with the audience. They try to be genuine and personal with their fans, always taking time after the show to talk to those in attendance.
“Success is a funny thing. It comes and goes in this industry. It’s one of those things you have to take with a grain of salt, and you have to take it in stride as well. We’re having fun while we can,” Gaskarth said.