Rock in Detroit’s

December 2024

Band of the Month:

 

EKG

 

EKG has been said to be “Detroit’s Most Offensive Band,” and after 10 years of slaying Detroit venues with their stellar punk shows, they definitely deserve the label. But are they nothing more than raunchy and offensive? Let’s find out!

Not only have they been good, but they are good. Senior Editor Kevin J. Knupp, after checking out a recent EKG show at the Ghost Light bar in Hamtramck, stated that EKG has “not only one of the best shows in terms of quality of music, but EKG rocked me solid in the punkiest way possible and did it with a message.” Knupp also said that “EKG has been on so many recent flyers that they actually play more shows than I attend. It’s quite impressive, that kind of dedication.” These boys show up like it’s a show at Madison Square Garden even when it’s just a dive bar. They are committed. When it comes to what music is all about, EKG stands for it. Want a hint? It’s connection.

Witness some of the badassery as well as the authenticity when it comes to serious issues, with EKG and Rock in Detroit in this month’s Band of The Month interview!

ROCK IN DETROIT: Alright, so, let’s have everybody’s name . . . .

RICHIE: Richard Hanus

KEITH: Keith (King Pin 50k)

RICHIE: And then Josh and Jake. Jake is on drums and Josh is on bass, but they had to work today.

ROCK IN DETROIT: When did EKG form?

RICHIE: Actually our first show was December 6, 2015. We are coming up on a ten-year anniversary. We practiced for a couple of months before then, so we formed mid-2015. It’s a lot different–me and Keith are the only two original members left. It was originally my ex-girlfriend on drums and my friend Josh, a different Josh, on, . . . Well you [Keith] were playing bass . . . .

KEITH: I was playing bass.

RICHIE: Keith was playing bass originally, but different Josh was on guitar. But when me and my girlfriend broke up, she quit the band, and Josh had to take a step toward, like, he wanted to get sober.

ROCK IN DETROIT: What’s behind the name EKG?

RICHIE: We couldn’t agree on a name! And it was funny because Keith was like, “I don’t want to name it a 3-letter name,” and then you were the one that came up with EKG. <laughs>

KEITH: It was just stuff I always heard, like as a medical term, get an EKG, you know?

ROCK IN DETROIT: It’s a good name for a punk band!

<laughter>

RICHIE: So now the joke kind of has been “What does EKG stand for?” and the one that we’ve kind of settled on–it wasn’t by us, our fans came up with it–is “Everyone’s Kind-of Gay.” We actually have a logo for that that one of my friends did for us.

KEITH: It stood for nothing when we made it up.

RICHIE: Yeah, yeah we like to say, “We don’t stand for anything we said.”

KEITH: I’m just waiting for someone to sue us, which I think would be good. You know we could create a little popular controversy.

RICHIE: There’s a death metal band called EKG, there’s a grind-core band, there’s a noise band – I wanted to do like EKG Fest, get all the EKG’s together or something.

ROCK IN DETROIT: You guys consider yourself “punk,” or could you elaborate?

RICHIE: Yeah, I definitely would say we’re a punk band. That was like all the influences we had going into it. It was like – well, we all take from it differently. <looks at Keith> What would say your main influences are?

KEITH: I mean, I’m more of a hardcore punk–I come from a hardcore band, Death in Custody. So that’s it. I had been with them for ten years when we started this band. And I get a lot of my writing style from hardcore

RICHIE: A lot of my early influences were, you know, like the early Anarco Crust from the UK and like Crass, Flux of Pink Indians. It was all like heavily political, that stuff. And then like early 80s hardcore punk bands influenced me a lot. I don’t know–it’s definitely a punk band. I’d say we fit that like . . . .

KEITH: But we go through the spectrum. All of our songs are not one style, plus we have a bunch of different songwriters. I mean he [Richie] writes songs, I write some of songs. All the members wrote a song here or there. We have a lot of covers that we play which are kind of all over the place. We have a live show and it’s not like just 15 songs that sound the same. They go all over in style and tempo.

RICHIE: I like that, a lot too, because I’ve never liked only one style of music. I never wanted to just be like one exact pure sound. I love the diversity of it

ROCK IN DETROIT: Has your genre changed since 2015?

RICHIE: Yeah, so it definitely did, because originally, a lot of what we were doing was written by (different) Josh ‘cuz he was doing the guitar, and when he left, I kind of took over writing a lot, and so I’d say a lot the early stuff, a lot of the stuff we wrote originally, was a lot more “punk,” and then when I started writing, I had a lot more um . . . I always considered it poppy, but I don’t really know if it was. In contrast with most of our stuff, yeah.

KEITH: Yeah, his stuff is more poppy.

RICHIE: And then like, as we started playing, I started writing a lot of different styles of punk. I started getting better at guitar. And my whole thing was, I would write something and be like, “Here you guys, you should do something with this.” And then it’s definitely–a lot of our newer stuff is more hardcore, than what we were originally doing.

KEITH: When he writes, he has lyrics. I just write guitar stuff. All I write is guitar riffs and hooks. When he writes, he kind of writes the lyrics ahead of time so he kind of writes the music to the lyrics. That’s one of the reasons we have a lot of different styles.

ROCK IN DETROIT: I feel like the pop combined with the hardcore, maybe there’s something nice where those two worlds meet.

KEITH: Yeah, it definitely gives us a nice unique sound that not a lot of people are doing right now.

ROCK IN DETROIT: What is your favorite venue to play (including Ypsilanti)?

KEITH: Regal Beagle

RICHIE: I love the Beagle. The Regal Beagle’s like just a family spot. That place is great, where I feel at home. If you want the best spot where you’re gonna make a decent amount of money–The Old Miami. We’ve made the most money we’ve ever made in a night there, just because there’s a lot of foot-traffic, but it’s not a great place in terms of the crowd because it’s a lot of like, you know, hipster kids. And they look at you like “WTF’s going on here”? You know the sanctuary is always a cool spot.

KEITH: Outer Limits.

RICHIE: I love Outer Limits! That is a really cool spot. Hamtramck has a lot of really cool places.

KEITH: Small’s.

RICHIE: Small’s is a good one. What else? We’re trying to get into a few places like Bella’s Beatdown Bunker, we’d kind of like to get into that spot, it’s a unique spot. We haven’t been there yet.

KEITH: Gatekeepers.

RICHIE: Gatekeepers! Yeah!

KEITH: It’s in Royal Oak. Yeah it’s a cool spot, my other band’s played there a couple times. It’s kind of unusual, but it’s cool to play some different areas not just always in Detroit.

ROCK IN DETROIT: I’ve heard that at spots like Lansing, a band will get a better turnout because in Detroit there’s eight shows every night!

RICHIE/KEITH: Yeeeeh . . . .

RICHIE: No and it’s like you’re like competing. We haven’t got out to Lansing, but there’s a place called The Lama House. We’ve been trying to get out there, but we just haven’t for whatever reason yet.

KEITH: Grand Rapids.

RICHIE: We did play Grand Rapids, that was a really cool spot. The only problem I had with it is that they let you smoke inside, right but there’s no ventilation. So there’s just people chain-smoking in a small-ass room, and as someone who doesn’t smoke, it was just murderous. It was a DIY space.

KEITH: It was basically a three-story house. The upstairs was all kind of band crud.

ROCK IN DETROIT: Is there a song or two you could tell me about the significance of the lyrics?

RICHIE: Yeah, no! There’s a few that have . . . .

KEITH: A lot of songs are based on a true story.

RICHIE: So a lot of the approach I took to song writing was Lou Reed and Ice Cube. They told these stories about people and there’s a few . . . There’s one called “PCP Life” and I don’t if anyone really knows this or not, but that was about a guy who used to hang around and he was a horrible person. I’m glad he’s not around anymore. And I actually met one my close friends ‘cuz he was dating her. One time we were just hanging out I just wrote this song about him, kind of detailing the life of a piece of shit. And like the whole song is really based off of . . . like the lyrics are all modeled after stuff that he did. I can go into this a little bit. This was the thing that really bugged me about this dude cuz you wanted to like this dude, and then all of a sudden he was dating this girl and she was the same age as his daughter. No way you do that. And so there’s a line in PCP Life that says where it’s “always living in squalor, if he could, he’d f* his daughter.” That was like . . . I kind of shot at him hard on that one.

“Go for a Ride” is a song about going to the psyche ward and how it feels when you’re having like a really bad time in life. I really wanted to capture the darkness about what it’s like to have mental health issues. The song “Heroin” is largely based off a lot of people I’ve known personally and stuff like that. I would say a lot of the stuff we write . . . I mean there’s the stupider song . . . .

KEITH: “Green light.”

RICHIE: Yeah! Green Light is actually based off a real person too. I used to talk to this girl, and I could never tell if she was hitting on me, and my friends were like, “Bro, she’s giving you the green light. Blah, blah, blah.” But I wrote the song.

KEITH: It’s about going out with some girl that’s married.

RICHIE: So it did turn out that she was married. So that whole part at the end of the song was like “Red light, gotta dash.” Then there’s like the stupid songs like “Asshole,” I just wrote that like on a whim. I like to kind of mix up the real and just the absurdly stupid.

ROCK IN DETROIT: What about nonsense and stream of consciousness writing? Like John Lennon’s lyrics?

RICHIE: Yeah, that’s something I like to play around with.

KEITH: Like “Satanic Sex Party”?

RICHIE: Yeah.

KEITH: It’s made up. About going out in the woods and having like a satanic ritual or something.

ROCK IN DETROIT: Perfect topic for a punk song!

RICHIE: I wrote that one because I wanted to do something different. Every now and again I realize I’m writing too much about one subject. And so I’m like, “Ok, it’s time to throw a curveball and write a weird song.”

ROCK IN DETROIT: You mentioned mental health at your show. Can you tell us anything about that song and taking care of mental health?

RICHIE: Yeah, mental health is something that I struggle with a lot. There was a time in my life where I used to joke that the psyche ward is my vacation home because I was in and out of a lot of psyche wards. And as much as I like to talk the shit and have fun, it’s a real serious subject for me. I’ve lost a lot of friends who didn’t take care of their mental health. And it’s been a lifelong struggle of mine, and it’s something that I take extremely serious because I’ve learned that if you don’t take it kind of seriously, it can really get away from you. I don’t know. As much as I like to have fun, I believe that you should have a message. It’s important. What about that song spoke to you?

ROCK IN DETROIT: It was just the fact that you said, “this song is about mental health.” And then you said something either before or after the song like “we all have to take better care of our mental health.” It resonated right with me.

RICHIE: It’s a really important thing to me. Especially in punk and hardcore there’s a lot of that pseudo macho bullshit. We all cry, we all bleed, we all have bad days and we all get into that dark space and it’s important to be able to communicate that.

ROCK IN DETROIT: I think it’s something we don’t all talk about enough.

RICHIE: So true.

ROCK IN DETROIT: What does EKG stand for politically and socially?

RICHIE: Politically, we all come from a varying political spectrum. I would say on a lot of the harder issues, we all align pretty well. I, myself, am definitely a very left-leaning person. I believe in trans-gay rights, you know. I don’t believe in capitalism. Politics is to me something that I always saw as a dividing force. It was never meant to bring us together. It was always just a tool that was meant to drive us apart. And as much as I’d like to say, “Oh, we leave politics out of it,” it’s kind of impossible, right? The way we live in this day and age, you know, everything is very political. But me, personally, I say I’m more progressive left leaning.

KEITH: I don’t really have a–I mean I don’t like Democrats, Republicans, you know, they both suck. But I like a lot of conspiracy stuff, I don’t know if that’s political or not. There’s definitely a political side to 9/11 and stuff, but I don’t really pick a side. But everything does turn out to be political in a way.

RICHIE: I used to be heavily political. I would watch FOX news to get angry and come up with song ideas and stuff. Um. . . . <laughs> I don’t know. I got really burnt out on it because after Trump got elected the first time, I got really disillusioned, and I’m not really going to get in that whole thing. But it made me realize that Crass has a saying that I really love, it is, “No matter who you vote for, government wins.” You know, that’s really been a thing that I’ve seen a lot of. There’s all these promises made, but the only real thing that stays consistent is that, like, progressively, for the people on the bottom I gets worse, and the people on the top–it gets better, right? And you see that a lot and that is why I believe in coming together and building strong communities, rather than rallying around one person and being like, “this guy’s gonna . . . .” He doesn’t have . . . think the answer to our problems comes from a conversation we have collectively, rather than, “Well this guy’s gotta have it, right?”

ROCK IN DETROIT: Good stuff.

RICHIE: I don’t know, maybe I just kind of project this, but I get worried that we’re, well, we’re kind of that rowdy fun band, and we’ve got songs that are weird and stuff, but I never really wanted to be in the scene where people were . . . ok so I was in this band called SGS and we would have these people come up to us after shows, and how they took the song was very different than how I intended it to be written, and this one guy comes up to me and he says this shit that was–I’m not going to repeat it. It was racist. And I’m like, “That’s how you take the song?” So it really made me change how I approach it all. I wanted to write things where it wouldn’t be misconstrued as such.

ROCK IN DETROIT: You never know how people are going to take something, and it’s beyond our control too.

RICHIE: One of the things, I mean before EKG, our friend, someone who’s always been a big supporter of my music, he was kind of the reason EKG started. He’s black, and when that guy came up to me and said that racist shit, I thought about my friend and thought, “You know I wonder how he feels?” It really changed my perspective. Because I had this whole satire thing where I would say this shit, like, “Oh, yeah, I’m holdin ‘em.” And then you just realize, this is something that . . . it kind of ties back to something else you said about a message in the music, and if there’s one thing I can say, it’s that you might think you can be funny and cute when you say some stuff, but how other people hear it, they’re gonna get excited, and you’re going to draw the wrong people . . . .

KEITH: Outrageous on purpose. We’d say anything just to get a reaction. We didn’t really mean it, in our hearts, you know, but we’d saying stupid or controversial shit just to get a reaction. It started backfiring, where people think we’re racist or something, or we hate some kind of people. It was never about that–it was just to be funny.

RICHIE: Yeah

KEITH: It wasn’t anything like straight up racist shit. But it could be taken the wrong way. So we kind of started getting away from that. We used to call ourselves Detroit’s Most Offensive Band. That was our motto when we first came out.

RICHIE: I think we walk the line pretty well.

KEITH: Right.

RICHIE: If there’s one thing I want to say to people who are starting out and want to do the whole outrageous thing–be careful what you say because people are listening and you’ll attract the wrong people. And you’ll push away the people that you don’t want to–you know what I mean?

ROCK IN DETROIT: That was our last question.

KEITH: We’ve got this split/comp coming out. It has Sea Hag, LAVA, City Pleasure, and us. There’s six bands, one song for each band. Two sides, three bands per side. That’s coming out in January, I think, or maybe February. We’re gonna re-record our original demo–it was just me, him [Richie], and a bass player. Re-record that with the newer guys, now that we have a full band. We don’t have a [studio] date for that, but I’m thinking spring. It should be out by summer or fall. Maybe ten to fifteen songs on that. We just put out a split CD with a band called LAVA. Spring time last year, I think that’s when we put it out. We did a little bit of touring behind that. We’re probably going to do a lot of shows and maybe some touring this spring. We have a show on February 7 with Rawhide and Sea Hag, and then we have a show also in February with UDI. I don’t know who else is on that.

KEITH: Death in Custody

RICHIE: Yeah, Death in Custody is on it.

KEITH: Our bass player and our drummer are Mike Ratt’s sons. A lot people don’t know that. But, yeah, they’re his twin sons.

RICHIE: I don’t know, it’s been quite the ride for the last ten years. We like to say we’ve gone through more members than Black Flag. We’ve gone through a lot of them. But this lineup is really great, I love it.

KEITH: One of our drummers died. We saw him on Sunday night, and he was dead by Thursday and nobody found him.

RICHIE: That used to keep me up. He was in his apartment for three days before somebody found him. Now, I live alone, so I was like “what if I just . . . .” That’s sad. That whole thing fucked with me, and that was a whole other thing that taught me the lesson of we should look out for each other a little bit more. He tried to reach out, and I was in my own shell of misery. I kind of wish I had been there a little bit more.

ROCK IN DETROIT: Is there anything else you’d like to say while we’ve got you here?

RICHIE: Support your local bands, plug your DIY spots. And this whole thing– rt, music–it’s alive because we support each other, we have each other’s backs, and we don’t let people get away with shitty behavior. That’s really about it. Love each other, and all that fun stuff.