Catching Up with Jon "The Charn" Rice of Job For A Cowboy

BK: You're out in Minnesota tonight, right?

JR: Yeah, just hanging out in a coffee shop.

How's the weather out there?

It's not bad actually, sunny skies. Warm weather.

A good day for metal.

Yeah, something like that, haha.

You're out on the Metal Alliance Tour right now, how's that going?

It's been going very well, we're almost halfway through. Just playing shows and hanging out with the kids. Everyone is doing their thing and it's going very well so far.

There are a lot of cool, like minded bands on that tour, are you stoked to be out with DevilDriver?

Yeah, we had never met them before, but obviously we're all familiar with them. It's been really cool to get the opportunity to come out and tour with them. There are some other bands that we're friends with out here too, like the Faceless and Impending Doom, 3 Inches of Blood and Wretched too. They're all really cool dudes.

Have you guys played with Impending Doom before? They're of a little bit of a different mindset than the other bands on the tour.

Yeah, with the whole Christian bit. I have played a few shows with them before, filling in for a different band. They were just on a couple shows, and they're the nicest guys ever. They're very respectful of everyone else. There's no tiffs between any of the bands on the tour, it's just a bunch of dudes who wanna hang out and drink.

That's good to hear. Metal bands can get splintered into factions a little bit, and I imagine Jonny's lyrics might rub some of those bands the wrong way.

Yeah, haha.

It's good to heart they're not bummed out on the lyrical content.

Yeah, actually I've talked black metal with a couple of them, and they're completely into that style of music too. They're not completely shut off from the world of metal.

Are you a big black metal fan?

Big enough, I would say. I'm going out with 1349 in June, so I'm pretty stoked on black metal, you could say.

That's gonna be awesome, are you going to wear the corpse paint and do that whole bit?

Yeah, yeah. I'm stoked.

That's awesome. You've got a couple new members, are those guys pretty well acclimated at this point?

Yeah, this is their second big tour. Well, for Tony, it's his fourth big tour with us. With Nick, it's his second big tour with us. We gel very well with all the new guys, it's been very easy going.

Are they both on Demonocracy?

Yes, this same lineup did the Gloom EP as well.

Are you guys pretty stoked for Demonocracy to come out? On that first record, obviously you didn't play on it, but it got on the Billboard charts. The last one did just over 10,000 in the first week. Are numbers and sales things that you guys worry about at all?

Not really. We know how the record industry is, and we do very good numbers in terms of relativity when it comes to other bands in our genre. I mean, if fans are buying records that's great, but if not, it's not the be all, end all of how big a band is. We always get excited though. Getting above 50 on the Billboard charts is a mindblowing thing, especially for a dath metal band, and it's really  cool to see other death metal bands doing well. But we really don't put too much pressure on ourselves when it comes to record sales or anything like that.

Why do you think metal is as big as it is right now? You could say it's as big right now as it's ever been. There are a lot of bands like Suicide Silence and Whitechapel, all those bands do pretty well on Billboard and on the road. Do you think something happening culturally in America that has kind of sparked a widespread interest in metal?

Potentially. I think more of it has to do with the Internet and mp3 sharing, and more like minded people connecting through various sites, be It Myspace or Facebook. Obviously, there was a massive underground in the U.S. in the early 80's, but it's coming to the forefront right now because of the Internet, because of advertising, because of Hot Topics, because of Sirius XM and all of those different media outlets. Obviously, none of us are millionaires and none of us are going to be Top 40 stars, but to have kids come out to the shows and to have more and more kids coming out even though times are tough, it's really  cool to see that happen.

You guys went with Jason Suecof again to produce Demonocracy. Is he becoming kind of a 6^th member of Job For A Cowboy?

Yeah, in a weird way, definitely. He's an ideological machine with us. He works so well with us that its kind of like a no brainer to do our records with him at this point. As a producer and as a guitar player, he adds so much to our guitar players playing, from solos and riffs and everything. Even as a drummer he really adds to the idea category. Plus, he's just a really cool dude. Everybody down there at Audiohammer is really cool.

Did you try to do anything different this time out on the drums?

I try to do something a little different with every record that we put out. We're always gaining new influences as musicians, and as a drummer there's always guys coming out that are doing stuff differently. It's easy to incorporate a lot of different ideas. I think there's a little bit extra flavor on this one, when it comes to the drums.

Who are you drumming influences?

Well, they kind of run the gamut from John Bonham to Buddy Rich, George Kollias, Derek Roddy, JoJo Mayer. I mean to be able to play all of it, and play really fast, you have to have many different spectrums, whether it be technique or actual ideas when it comes to playing. You have to be able to take from a lot of different categories of percussion. I take influence from quite a few different people, for sure.

It's interesting that you didn't name a bunch of metal drummers right off the bat. Were you into a lot of metal growing up?

Yeah, my Dad is a massive metal head. He instilled that in me from the get go. I listen to metal every day. It's not like we go up and play and I go back to the van and listen to it all the time, we all need vacations from it.

I've heard some guys in touring metal bands say that when they're alone they tend to listen to pretty much everything but metal. You know, just from hearing six other metal bands play every night.

Yeah, I hear where they're coming from, but I'm just a metal fan. I don't know how else to put it.

You know when you Google your name, one of the first things that comes up is that you were intoxicated at a radio station and got a DJ fired, allegedly.

I did, yeah, haha. I forget when it happened exactly. But she failed to tell me that we were doing live radio and I said something inappropriate, well, a couple things that were inappropriate I guess, and she lost her job. So, who knows?

Good work. I also watched a YouTube video earlier where you were talking down about the term "deathcore" a little bit. That's a tag that has been applied to Job For A Cowboy pretty much the whoel time you've been a nationally touring act. Do you think that tag has gone away? Or do you still hear that word every day?

Well, it's unfortunate because I don't think everyone will ever disassociate that term from our band. As far as I see it, the second Genesis came out, that was erased, and people never should have called us that from that point on. The first EP is definitely a deathcore EP, I mean, that's just how it is. Everything past that has been completely different from that. It's just the metal elitists online that have a stick up their ass about our band that say that. They feel the need to corner us into a genre because they've never once checked out our music since the first EP. It's unfortunate, but it is what it is.

In terms of Metal Blade's roster, I'm sure some of your all time heroes are on that label, like Cannibal Corpse. What is it like to walk into your label's office and see all the history on the walls, and have to have Brian Slagel as your boss?

It's pretty astounding. Never once in my life did I think we'd be sharing a label with Cannibal Corpse. They're groundbreaking, and they are the best dudes, we've been on tour with them and just to share a label is mindblowing. Aside from them, the fact that Metal Blade has so many awesome bands on their roster like the Devil's Blood, Primordial, all these incredibly good bands. To share that label and that promotional tool is incredible.

I know on the Black Dahlia Murder DVD Trevor talks about talking with Brian about Slayer back in the day and how crazy it is just to have a conversation with the guy about the things he's been a part of.

It's weird, because I've never been able to sit down and pick his brain. I'm sure one day I'll be able to and then I'll go on and create my own label.

If a Job For A Cowboy fan were to get ahold of your iPod, what's a band that they would be really surprised to find on there?

Old Buddy Rich records, Adele, Lady Gaga. A couple John Mayer records. There's always weird stuff on our iPods that would throw people for a loop, for sure.

It's cool that you're so diverse, a lot of metal fans can be pretty elitist.

I can't say that I'm a saint in that category, because I do certainly listen to some ridiculous stuff as well, but I try to keep an open mind when it comes to anything music related. You can't gain new influences if you close your doors and say nothing new can come through.

That's an admirable viewpoint. Earlier, you kind of praised mp3 sharing as maybe having something to do with your success. But does it bum you out that kids can just download your records online for free?

I mean, in the very back of my head I'm thinking we put all this work into this, all of this time and effort and money, and for someone to steal it is kind of a bad thing. But, the other 99% of me thinks, the more people that hear this record, the more people that might come out to shows and buy merch. And that's pretty goddamn important. Bands nowadays don't make any money off their records, they make money on tour selling merch and interacting with fans and being with people that support you. So, I think as a group, as a whole, we're pretty much advocates of downloading music, but we're advocates in the way that if you download something, it would also be cool if you went out and picked up a t-shirt.

Do you purchase music on iTunes or on CD in your personal life?

Sometimes, yeah. But the life of the touring musician is quite hard.

Maybe if more people bought your record, you could afford to buy other people's.

Yeah, exactly. Unfortunately, that's the way of the music industry, to not really change with the times too much.

Alright man, that's all I got for you. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to chat with me.

Absolutely dude, it was a pleasure.