Chris ''OJ'' Ojeda:  Vocals & Guitars
Tony Rohrbough:  Guitars
Matt Wolfe:  Drums
Michael "Skip" Cromer:  Bass

Formed: 2000
Charleston, West Virginia  USA 
Label: Prosthetic Records
Genre: Post-Thrash/Groove Metal

CURRENT LINE-UP:

When I got to Pleasant Street in Morgantown half the band was not at the venue because they were arranging their hotel accommodations.  This left me with Byzantine’s very cooperative and giving bassist Michael “Skip” Cromer.  We interviewed in his car for nearly an hour, here are some snippets of our incredibly in depth dialogue.

Lynora: How was the reception of the shows?

Skip: “It’s been overwhelmingly wonderful…The things that stand out in my mind about it seems to be the reception of the new songs cause I always look out at the crowd and see if people are singing and see if people are having fun. There was [a lot] of people singing the new songs with OJ and it was a very neat feeling, especially on the songs I wrote, it’s a totally different animal when your looking at a crowd and you’re like their singing my song, it’s a very cool feeling.”

Lynora: “Awesome. Was your 'roadie for the day', the best roadie ever?”

Skip: [laugh] “Um! Yes. Alex Milanese is his name, A-LEX Milanese is the best roadie ever.”

Lynora: “The best roadie ever? Is it-is it cause he’s your only fan, apparently?”

Skip: “Yes… He’s the only guy who entered the contest.  But hey, guy got free Byzantine tickets and we Shwagged him out! Guy got a free batch of everything, so if anyone thought they were too good or silly to enter the contest, HAHA! He got hooked up.”

Lynora: “What songs were you most excited about debuting and playing again?”

Skip: “When this ball was rolling, each of us came up with a set list that we wanted to do and then we kind of took the average between everyone else’s respective set list. The songs I really wanted to do off of the …new record, basically we’re playing everything that I wanted to do.  …Now, as far as the old stuff nobody wants to play what I want to play. Cause I want all the abstract stuff. [Like] “God’s Shame!” It’s never even been on an official release… “Killchain” …”Stoning Judas!”… I wanted to do the Devils Arithmetic very bad…we got to the point where, well we have to make a decision, cause we’re not gonna please everyone. And somebody’s gonna come up to us and say “Why didn’t you play “Killchain,” What the fuck? That’s my track man!”

Lynora: “Real quick, if it’s possible to do it real quick, what is your writing process?”

Skip: “Oh me personally, I’ll generally sit down with a keyboard and a metronome, usually I like to work with a drummer machine, and I’ll just press play on something and then I’ll just sit there doddle and whatever good bits come out I’ll just keep and the rest I just discard.  …I wrote “Oblivion Beckons” in 5 minutes… I was just down in the basement because we were just writing for the new album.  …I was trying to program this god awful drum machine to play a beat and the fucking thing kept screwing up and finally I was just like,” [he flails his hands against his steering wheel] “And I hit play and that drumbeat that’s in the chorus came out, it was a mistake! So that rhythm, I was sitting there like ‘That would be cool if the bass is playing what the kick drum is playing and then the guitars were playing big chords so then I just hit G and then I hit F,’ and then all the sudden it just popped in there, literally after that mistake happened then,” [he started singing the chorus] “I was like hurry up and record this hurry up and record this before you forget it!  …The writing process, a lot of it is a fluke; you just take the good bits out of it and use what you can.”

Lynora: “I know before the shows you said you wouldn’t want to tour or continue, now that you’ve done these shows how do you feel about that.”

Skip: “That’s a very good question and it’s not an easy one to answer, but I will.  This weekend of shows has reminded me of how much I miss this, and how much I loved doing it, and if you believe in destiny or something like that I believe this was the thing I was meant to do but it just didn’t work out.  Would I like to go on tour again?  Yes, but I won’t.  Few reasons for that, my responsibilities at home to my son, um and the… music business is dead.”

Lynora: “Why do you say that?”

Skip: “Well, you can’t sell CD’s anymore.”

Lynora: “True well don’t you primarily make your money from shows anyway?”

Skip: “Yes here’s the problem. How you get tours is based on how many CDs you sell.”

Lynora: “Which you can’t sell, because everyone’s just picking them up.”

Skip: “And the industry standard is for every 1 album that you sell, 10 people have it burned for free, we sold I think 25,000 copies roughly, times that by 10. I wouldn’t be driving a Kia, I might bump myself up to a Toyota.  And that’s the problem, and you know we got overlooked for a lot of great tours because, you know, “these guys haven’t pushed albums.”  …Meanwhile bands like Messuggah they’ll sell 6 thousand albums their first week we sold, 500, 600 something like that… If you use that same ratio for Meshuggah, those guys should be quadruple platinum, but people aren’t buying the CD’s anymore -we were actually supposed to get a Meshuggah tour."

Lynora: “That would have made so much sense too.”

Skip: “It would of!” [slaps knee] “Byzantine and Meshuggah on tour? …But ‘these guys haven’t sold the albums they’re not gonna draw.’  That’s the problem with it, at least on that front.  Now, musicians are very adaptive people, and bands are figuring out that the only way to make any money off the CD’s that you actually do sell is to release them yourself.  And that’s something that we talked about doing but didn’t materialize.  Between what I have to do at home, with my regular day job, with my son, and the fact of the matter is: it’s not like any of us are 18 and we have nothing to lose you know we all got houses and stuff like that.  I wouldn’t--” [he pauses]

“The romantic side of touring is what appeals to me, playing in front of people who appreciate what you do, playing in a different city every night, traveling.  Here’s what doesn’t appeal to me: making no money, being hungry all the time, freezing cold out in the middle of some field in Alabama because the gig got canceled or something, and unfortunately that side of the spectrum isn’t worth it to me to go out to do it anymore and I think the other guys would agree with me on that.”

Lynora: “In regards to the split can you tell me if it was in regards to personal or financial reasons?”

Skip: “Both… it was some personal issues and I don’t think it’d be out of line to discuss it.  OJ wanted to move on, he wanted to raise a family.  And I felt that we could do both.  And that’s primarily where our disagreement was.  He was right in hindsight and I gotta hand it to the guy as pissed of as I was at him at the time.  So I really have to commend him and this is something I never told him.  At the time I was really upset with him, but in hindsight he really made the right decision based on what he wanted to do. 

Now as far as the label is concerned…They’d never give us tour support; we’d go out for weeks on end - no tour support.  We expect to have enough money fronted to us to cover our home expenses so we can go and do what we have to do. …But! Contractually the band had to be out x amount of days to get tour support.  And I think it was 21 days or 28.  So, all of our tours were a week behind that date.  Every [tour] we got. So contractually, they were never obligated to give us any tour support.  …We never knew going out if we would make enough money to eat, let alone cover what we had to cover at home.  …It was like c’mon man we want to do this.  You need to front us some dough so we can be better performers and be better musicians and create a better product for the label!  And they never got behind us for any of the good tours… I think the reason is we would not play ball with any of their bullshit.

The original “Jeremiad” video idea-- This one really stick out in my mind cause this has stuck in my craw all these years-- They wanted to put us in the middle of a garbage dump in New York and film us playing Jeremiad with trash flowing around us.  …That’s not what the song is about at all!  …They were gonna give us 10 thousand dollars to do this and we said, well, shit, we know this guy in West Virginia whose got all pro gear, he’ll do it for 4.  And they were like, no; we don’t want to do that.  We want to fly you guys to New York spend all this money and here’s the thing-- all that money you have to pay back with sales.  So before we see any money from CD’s we have to pay back the cost to produce them in the first place, then [pay] back the video.  I mean we would never get out of the red!

We finally managed to squeeze a thousand dollars out.  That DVD that we put out, cost a thousand bucks and they sold a ton of them and we never saw a check...  So it was a lot of things like that went on with the record label.  They’d be like oh let’s fly you to L.A.   Ok what for?  Oh we’ll do a photo shoot.   Ok, but why don’t we just do it.  And that’s why I feel that Prosthetic they were kind of like ‘well these guys are hard heads’ and we weren’t necessarily trying to be hardheads.  It’s just everything that they wanted us to do was very impractical…”

Lynora: “Oblivion Beckons has an ominous feel to it as if you knew it was coming to a close how long into recording it did you know that it was over?”

Skip: “Dammmmn.  Wow, you thought that one out big time.  We started production …wow I’m gonna answer this question, we started production in January, production wrapped up I think the end of June early July, we knew that this was over the August before.”

Lynora: “What? Wait, now go over that again.”

Skip: “It was January to July of 07.”

Lynora: “You knew in 06?”

Skip: “Yes.”

Lynora: “…Why did you know that it was over in 06?”

Skip: “OJ told us that he had a year left in him and then he wanted to be done with it.”

Lynora: “So, then you went out there knowing, this is my last thing, I have to go straight to the wall here?”

Skip: “No, I thought he was full of shit.  …My mentality on it was: let’s really kick it up a notch.  His reasons for wanting to stop doing this were very good reasons, I mean, you don’t make any money.  He was getting married he wanted to start a family.  If we were out making some money to cover the bills then we could keep doing this and that would be his job.  So Wolfe said the same thing, ‘then why the fuck are we gonna tour or do anything then?’  My whole thing was let’s calm the fuck down, let’s just do it… So we took shitty tour, after shitty fucking tour.  And then we got a couple of breaks.  The Kittie tour was a big break, God Forbid… and Shadows Fall… and it was like yea its coming together its coming together and then the label went shit on us, we didn’t get ANY tour support …  We didn’t even get an article written in a magazine on it… I think we made a hundred a night, that didn’t even cover the gas to make it to the next show.  We had to squeeze money out of the merch.  We had to pull money out of our collective pockets. …After the production we were supposed to tour that whole summer, and April came around… we were doing a tri state market kind of thing we ended up being here …on the drive down there this conversation came up again and OJ said ‘No man, August comes around and I’m done.’  And it was at that point that Tony said, well, cancel the tour, if we’re done then I’m getting the fuck outta town and the last time we played at Pleasant Street we were all cursing each other out. 

I was pissed cause I felt that, in a way, I felt betrayed.  It was definitely displaced, I was dealing with a lot of issues at the time, my father had cancer, and he was dying and I’m out here touring, cause its what I do, and he understood that.  …It wasn’t so much that I was mad at OJ; it was that I was mad at the shit situation I was in.  I think I had I had well enough reason to be upset but not to the degree that I was.  I felt that we could of done this, I was wrong, knowing what I know now.  I thought we could still tour.  My concern was we have to keep the band together… but unfortunately between our arguments in turned into an all or nothing thing.  And I think we forced that on OJ.  I think if I had have been a bit more calm, cause I was just panicking.  Haily, my son’s mother, was pregnant, my dad was on his deathbed, I was freaking the fuck out, and it was like ‘we gotta do this we gotta do this.’  I can’t lose dad and I can’t lose the band too.  And I was just enraged at him.  And granted I’ve said this to him, so I don’t have a problem saying it now… I felt we should of at least put out the record and did one more tour that’s how I felt about it… It was but if were all gonna be honest its every bit of Tony’s fault too cause he said no to the tour.  …His plan was if Byzantine wasn’t gonna do this then I’m getting out of here and that’s what he did… OJ was willing to do that tour over the summer time… I felt that we should of finished it out and unfortunately I pinned OJ into a corner where he had to pick.” His phone rings and he says, “It’s OJ! …I’m in my car.”

Lynora: “WITH LYNORA?!”

Skip: “Yea with Lynora from New York; Seat belts!”

Byzantine

Interview and Photos: Lynora

DISCOGRAPHY:

Byzantine (2002)
Pieces of The Empire (Demo - 2002)
Byzantine (Demo - 2003)
Broadmoor EP (2003)
Sampler: Nearfest Edition
                                         (Demo - 2003)
The Fundamental Component (2004)
...And They Shall Take Up
                                      Serpents (2005)
Jeremiad DVD (2006)
Salvation DVD (2007)
Oblivion Beckons (2008)

Part I:
“Riding in Cars with Boys”

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March 8, 2010 / April 24, 2010

1 2 3

Lynora with Byzantine
(Click on Photo to Enlarge)