An Interview with Jayson Green (Orchid)
Some post-game analysis on the reunion tour that almost wasn't.
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Jayson Green has a cold. “Just a warning, I might be doing this a lot,” he says while blowing his nose. It’s been a long time since the 47-year-old vocalist has put himself through a week as taxing as the one he just survived, and the wear and tear have caught up with him. His beloved cult hardcore band, Orchid, came out of retirement after two decades away to play a run of sold-out shows on the East Coast. “When I got home, I thought, how could I not get sick? Kids are spitting in my mouth and grabbing me and sweating on me and sharing a microphone. But I tested negative for COVID. I think it's just being worn down.”
Orchid formed in Amherst, MA, in 1997 and wrapped up their run in the summer of 2002. The members went on to start a deep list of other projects—some with each other and some with other musicians. Panthers, Ritual Mess, Violent Bullshit, Ampere, and Bucket Full of Teeth, to name a few. All packed a punch, but there was clearly something special about Orchid. The band existed in that internet sweet spot, just before the explosion of social media. Without much documentation online, a mythical lore began forming around them. The longer the band remained dormant, the deeper the lore grew. Orchid tattoos proliferated, and the band’s vinyl releases became highly sought after items on Discogs.
Meanwhile, screamo, the hardcore subgenre Orchid begrudgingly became the progenitors of, experienced a revival. A new generation began discovering screamo’s seminal acts and putting their own spin on it, even redubbing the genre “skramz” much to the confusion of anyone who experienced the scene firsthand. Sensing the renewed interest, a number of influential acts associated with the genre—Saetia, pg.99, Jeromes Dream, Majority Rule—dusted off their guitars and reunited over the last few years, but Orchid remained the last holdout. And then, finally, some activity at the end of 2023—a few ominous posts on their Instagram account, followed by a huge announcement. Orchid, arguably the most influential band of their scene, was making their return to the stage.
I caught up with Green two days after the tour ended to get his thoughts on the reunion many thought would never happen.
I've been very eager to talk to someone who also shares my favorite hobby, which is trolling John Joseph on the internet. Are you still blocked by him?
Jayson Green: [Laughs] Yeah, I'm still blocked by him. Actually, it was one of the main impetuses—or is it impeti—of why I got a Twitter account. It was the Harley/John beef. It was at a peak at that point of Twitter. If you remember, Harley got a picture of John Joseph walking out of a McDonald's, and John Joseph was like, “I was only taking a shit there!” And then I was like, “Well, now I have to get on Twitter.”
It was weirdly validating to see you clowning on him, for me. I think because when I got into hardcore as a kid, I was so turned off by the macho stuff, and I was more drawn to bands like Orchid. I didn't want to feel like a singer was going to beat me up; I wanted to feel like they read more books than me.
[Laughs] That's a good way to look at it.
But I'm curious to know, was there a period in your evolution of music fandom where you were into those sorts of tougher bands?
Yeah. I grew up mostly in Connecticut. So that sentence should kind of explain it all. In the 90s, every show was booked by Jamie from Hatebreed. 25 to Life played three times a week. The shows were scary. There were lots of fights. I didn't know that there was anything else. It took me forever to figure out that there was a place where you could go to a show and there wouldn't be a fistfight that broke out. That was a big change for me, and it was basically when I got to college. I grew up on youth crew stuff and tough-guy hardcore stuff. I loved it and I loved Cro-Mags when I was 14, 15. Age of Quarrel is a record that's always held a soft spot in my heart.
What in college opened your eyes to the fact that there was a different way of doing hardcore?
Well, I started realizing it towards the end of high school. A band like Deadguy, who were on Victory Records, would get on these bills sometimes. Or a band like Coalesce would get on bills. It was a broader depth of performers. I remember Still Life ended up on a crazy tough-guy hardcore show in New Milford, Connecticut. And I was like, what is this? I don't think they're good, but it was giving me some perspective that there was more stuff out there. I grew up in a pretty rural town in Connecticut. And then I went to college in western Mass and everybody my age was like, “I've already read Marx and Freud.” Everybody was into the Makeup and Pavement. And I'm like, “What is this stuff?” I'd never heard of any of it.
All that stuff started blending together. And then being friends with Will [Killingsworth], who's coming from this crusty grindcore background, he was booking shows. And I’d go into any show that was on campus and see people like Blonde Redhead, just different things. That's how I discovered Nation of Ulysses, which you may believe had some influence on what Orchid was doing. [Laughs] I also discovered Bikini Kill and Los Crudos in high school, and that really opened my eyes. I knew there was more out there. I just didn't know how to get access to it.
Since you're fresh off the Orchid reunion shows, I'd love to talk to you about how you thought they went. But first off, I know that you had gotten offers in the past. Why was now the time?
That's a really good question, Dan. We never wanted to do it. I've never seen a truly great reunion show. I think the best one I saw was maybe Jesus Lizard, but still, they were old, you know? And [Orchid’s] music feels like a young person's thing, and maybe it’s nice to leave things alone, either to people's imagination if they weren't there or their memory if they were.
I've never had a careerist attitude about music or art. I just wanted to go on to the next thing that I was interested in. But a couple of things happened. I moved to Toronto and I left behind my entire social circle and my work. The one person I knew up here was Damian Abraham from Fucked Up. I love Damian. He kept asking me about it, and I was like, “No, I don't want to do that.” And he said, “Well, do you like the guys?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Do you like the songs?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he goes, “Then what's the problem?” And then [Orchid] got an offer to do Roadburn, I think, and it was the largest thing that had come across our table. I had been getting [offers] and not telling anybody. I would get a lot of messages from people offering us stuff, and then I started to feel like maybe some of the other guys [in the band] would be very upset with me.
At the same time, there was a retrospective on Chaos Is Me that we did a Zoom call for. I think it was Will, Brad [Wallace], and I. We hadn't really talked in a long time, and it was just fun. We were all laughing and having a great time. So then I said, “Listen, we're getting these offers. I just want you guys to know. I don't really know how I feel about it.” Will was like, “I definitely don't want to do that.” But we kept talking about it. Brad had a good line where he said, “I'm not sure about this, but I don't think on my deathbed I'm going to say, ‘I'm glad we never reunited.’” We basically said, “Maybe we'll do something in western Mass and just walk away.” And then the whole machine started moving along. We were working with my friend, Michael Berdan, who's in Uniform. He was doing some management stuff and he was really encouraging it. Will took the most convincing. We felt like if we could have control over the entire bill of every show we played, if we could top-to-bottom be able to curate how things felt and where we played and how it was presented and all that kind of stuff, that it could be something that would be interesting to us.
And what happened next, on a practical level? Did you have to relearn those songs?
We got on a Slack-type message board. We had a logistics channel, a practice channel, all this stuff. Will had madman tablature that he wrote out. So there'd be discussion between Will and Geoff Garlock on how these parts were actually played. And then we were adding our old bass player, Brad, on second guitar, because we wanted to include everybody. It didn't really feel right to not have him involved as well. People were practicing on their own and sending notes back and forth about how they thought the songs went. I mean, you listen to those records and good fucking luck trying to figure out how those songs went. But Will is a savant, so he was able to pull it together. I hadn't listened to those records in a long time. The biggest concern was: could I physically do it? And could Jeff Salane, our drummer, physically do it?
Right, it's a physically draining type of music. The songs are short, but they're very intense.
Yeah, and we're talking about playing for an hour, when we used to play, max, for 30 minutes, oftentimes 15 minutes. I turned 47 before this tour started, so it was a big ask. But once we all got in the room together and we played, I was like, “We can do this.”
When you were going into the first show, were you nervous about it?
Yeah, of course I was nervous. I think if you were to put me in a time machine and, knowing everything I know now about what's happening in my life, I would probably have said no to doing these shows, although it was great. But yeah, once the machinery started moving, we had to, you know? It was a lot of planning for getting merch together, who are we working with for sound, how do we want things to look, what's going to be the interstitial music? And then once it all started happening, I got really nervous.
Because you couldn’t back out.
Yeah, I couldn't back out of it. And if I could have, I would have, I think. Because I was so scared. My whole thing was: if it wasn't at least as good as we used to be, then it would be a total failure in my mind.
That's interesting, because up until you did these reunion shows, if you searched for Orchid on YouTube or wherever, all you'd get were a few old grainy videos or early digicam photos, and now you're putting yourself out there 20 years later and everybody's recording with an iPhone 15 and everything is in HD. Did you fear that being documented in 2024 might ruin the mystique of Orchid at all?
That was a huge concern I had. I felt like we could be doing a lot of damage to—not to self-aggrandize—but the legacy of the band by reviving this and having it be a bunch of old guys dragging these songs back out and being shot in HD every night from 100 different angles. So we just had to do something we felt really strongly about and comfortable about. But yeah, I was really worried about that part of it. I don't want to turn into Gorilla Biscuits, where you're just dragging this thing around, you know?
I've definitely seen a lot of reunited hardcore bands overstay their welcome and go past the expiration date of the good will behind it.
Yeah, I kind of wanted to do something and then walk away again and have that be the end of it.
Being a band that existed pre-social media, I feel like you got the benefit of this lore building around you that was passed down orally. But watching it from afar, were there any misconceptions about Orchid that developed over the time that you'd been gone?
That's interesting. I don't know. There were message boards and stuff when we were a band, but I never did any of that. And I know that I, specifically, would be talked about on some of these message boards, and it's rarely great. [Laughs] Now, everything is everywhere, and it's almost impossible not to see because they're tagging my name or there's been Orchid memes. They’re mostly involving me to some degree and they're not all great. Some of the memes were about how I looked as a young man versus how I look now. Photos pulled off of a Google search of someone's Flickr page in 2003, you know?
I think the misconception was that people were really surprised when I started doing stuff with LCD and they were surprised when I did comedy stuff. It was as if they wanted [me] to be frozen in amber or something. The fact that I didn't still have a Spock haircut as a 45-year-old man really bugged them.
Right. I feel like that would have been the much more depressing route, to see a singer come back after 20 years and they’re dyeing their hair black.
Well, that was a big thing I thought about, too. I don't look the same, obviously. It's two decades later. I don't feel the same. How do I want to present myself to the audience now, in a way that still makes sense with the art we made and won't get me laughed off the internet?
I always think of that documentary about punk dads, and there’s that scene with Jim from Pennywise and he's packing for tour and he's bringing Just for Men. Having to try to present as your 19-year-old self forever and ever, it just seems like a curse.
Yeah, and that would have been the biggest mistake we could make. We're playing venues that we would never have played back then, capacity-wise. We're presenting ourselves in a way that we never would have then. We can't play on the floor at ABC No Rio now, as much as I'd like to do that. So yeah, it was about: how are we authentically being ourselves and still really appreciating this music that we did, not taking that part for granted, and putting on a show that people can enjoy?
Why do you think Orchid stayed relevant over the last two decades, despite having done nothing in that time?
[Laughs] I don't know! By the time we ended, there was interest in the band, but it was not overwhelming. I mean, our final show in Philly was at the Church. So it wasn't crazy. But I did always have this thought: if we could end up being one of those bands that you listen to to get into a certain kind of music, that would be amazing. Every kid has a Minor Threat record who gets into that style of music. If we could do that for whatever it is that we did, that would have been great. I don't know why it happened. I think so much of it is mystical, this sort of stuff. There's no real rhyme or reason beyond the fact I'm really happy with the stuff that we put out and I'm proud of the content of the records. I can't say why people latch onto stuff. I don't know. So much of it is about context of when you hear a record, who you're with. All that stuff is very—I hate to keep saying it—but it is very mystical. Who knows? I have no idea.
In watching hardcore from afar over the last 20 years, have you noticed Orchid's footprint in it at all? Do you think you were influential?
Well, we loved Union of Uranus and these German hardcore bands, and we wanted to sound like One Eyed God Prophecy. We were weird guys and we couldn't quite pull it off exactly like that. So I didn't really see us as being an original project when we were doing it. People say that to me, that we have influence, and that's great. One time, my niece-in-law, she had a Silverstein record…
Oh right, they covered one of your songs.
Yeah, but I didn't know, one, who they were, or two, that they covered the song. And I was like, “What are you listening to?” She showed me, and I was like, “That's me! That's my song!” And she was like, “They're covering your song?” She was totally annoyed by it. [Laughs] Or those weird muscle guys on the beach. Did you ever see that video? It's almost like pop Warped Tour rock…
Was it Fight Amp? [Correction: I meant Fight Fair.]
I don't know. But they held up the Jeromes Dream skull split and it’s part of the lyrics.
Yes, but if I'm not mistaken, those were hardcore guys who were almost trolling. Like, wouldn’t it be funny if we played in a band like this?
It's very plausible. I had no context for it when it was sent to me. I was aware of a lot of that kind of stuff, and I'm aware of the re-terming of what we thought we were doing to “screamo” and “skramz.” At the Amherst show, there was a local screamo band from Hampshire College that we had open. They said when they were trying to get members, their flyers said, “Must listen to Orchid.” And that’s cool.
You mentioned wanting to be a gateway band into a type of music. There is a popular Instagram account I follow called screamomiscellany, and the image that they use as their profile photo is the Gatefold LP artwork, which I think speaks to how seminal your records are to that scene. But I’ve heard in the past you were not super gung-ho on the screamo term. Is that wrong?
No, that's true. We were called a lot of weird stuff. There's that band from South Carolina called In/humanity. They called themselves emoviolence. So we got called that for a while, and I was like, “I kind of like that.” Other than that, we just called ourselves a hardcore band. That [screamo] label wasn't happening then, unless I'm remembering it wrong. Skramz, I hate. It sounds like a sneaker or something.
I will disagree with your first point, because I do remember bands like Neil Perry and Joshua Fit for Battle and Saetia being called screamo at the time, but I do agree that skramz is a word that this next generation, who has gotten into this genre retroactively, has given it. It seems like historical revisionism.
Every generation wants to define their own terms and everyone wants to create their own way to speak to each other so you know a person's in the same tribe as you. So I get wanting to take it and make it your own thing. Speaking of the memes, years ago when it was just Facebook, I got a message from a kid and it said, “You used to be skramz as fuq but now you're old and soft. What happened to you?” I showed my friend Zachary Lipez, who's a music writer, and he said, “You should write him back!” So I wrote him back and of course I didn't even think about it. The kid screenshotted it, and now that's another thing that still shows up.
I’ve seen that. Was that a lesson for you in internet permanence?
Yeah, that was my first lesson. [Laughs]
What did you learn about your audience from doing these recent shows? Specifically, from an age perspective.
Well, before we did the shows, based on just the internet, I had this feeling that there was a lot of young people that were interested in seeing us. But I wasn't exactly sure if that's what was going to happen with these shows, especially when we were doing the Amherst show. It was very small, and my fear was that it was going to be all these guys that we knew from back in our time period, just doing this [folds arms] while watching us play. I had a panic attack. I was like, I don't want that. So that's when I gave the opening band a presale code and was like, “Bring all your friends.” But they didn't have to, because it was like 70 percent young people. I'm talking, like, 14-, 15-, 16-year-old kids. There were definitely people my age and in their 30s and 40s, but it was really young, especially up front.
That's what I wanted out of it. I never wanted to do any Monsters of Screamo kind of show. I wanted it to be with bands that I find interesting and compelling that exist now and that are representative of a more diverse crowd than hardcore allows for sometimes.
That must have been a cool feeling, having these openers who—and I know you won’t take credit for this but I’ll say it—were influenced by Orchid.
Well, some of these bands… Like, GEL could probably play most of the rooms we were playing. This is a band that does not need to open for anybody. Uniform doesn't need to us to do shows. None of these bands did. So it was nice that people were excited to play, and do it for free because we weren't going to pay any of them. [Laughs] No I’m just kidding.
Now that you’ve had some time to sit with it all, how did the shows feel?
The short answer is: I'm very happy. We went to Amherst early and rehearsed for three days before the first show. We hammered out all the little details and we were really, really well rehearsed. There's a lot of things that can go sideways that you can't control. So I was still very, very nervous. The first show was pretty much a blur. We were really prepared and we had a really strong idea about how we wanted to do the shows. And I would say for the most part, it worked. We had two guys run sound for us that are really great. And we're confident in those sized rooms. That's hard music to do in a big room.
For sure. Even on a stage that's higher than a foot, it feels weird. And you guys had the banner and everything. It was like an official band.
Yeah, and for the places that allowed for it, we had video projections with walk-on tunes. The whole idea was that I was going to speak very little or none and keep it very mysterious and keep the lighting dark with no flashing lights, and just be loud. It seemed like it worked. A lot of people have had very nice things to say, more than negative, on Instagram, which is usually a metric that you did pretty good.
Do any shows or any moments stand out as a favorite?
We did Amherst and it was kind of crazy, and then we went to Boston and went from a 250-cap room to something like 1,300 or 1,400 people. Orchid had never played in a room like that before. Walking in was very overwhelming. But they let us do the show with no barricade, it was all-ages, so kids were stagediving left and right. Kids were up front singing along. After we did that room, I was like “We're good. We can pull this off.” So that was a really memorable show to me. I realized it while we were playing on stage, looking out and just seeing all these kids singing along. That song we have, “Lights Out,” where it's me just saying, “you are, you are, you are…,” when we played it at Amherst, I didn't even have to sing it. And then it was the same for every single venue. It was very memorable, very gratifying and crazy. I can picture many scenes in my mind's eye now that were pretty incredible.
That's nice. Keep those somewhere safe inside you. Do you have any more perspective about Orchid now than before you set up these shows?
Well, I think there was always this kind of nebulous idea that people like the band. Like you said, there’s meme accounts, there's Spotify streaming numbers, we're still re-pressing records. But my day-to-day is not affected by that. People would sometimes come up to me and say something nice, but not that often. So I didn’t think about it on a regular basis and I didn't really have this sense of how much people cared to see it again. Even when we were finding out the room sizes and when the shows started selling out, it still didn't feel real. But then to actually be in the room with all these people, it's very different. I went to walk down to give my friend a bracelet to get in and I couldn't get back to the dressing room, with all the people wanting photos and wanting me to sign records. It's a completely different experience than we had before.
Speaking of records, I know that you're a collector of vinyl. What have you made of Orchid being a hot Discogs band over the years?
I've always had such mixed feelings about it because I like to collect weird records, but the internet kind of messed it up a little bit, because the art of finding stuff is much more gratifying that way. I remember being angry when people were buying multiple copies of the skull split at shows and then just flipping them. I hate that. But I do love that people still search it out and they care about having those records in their collection. If your intentions are good, I think it's fun, but if you're just looking to make money, I don't love it.
I was just listening to your episode of Jeremy Bolm’s podcast, and on it, you described yourself as a contrarian. I know that you opened your Philadelphia show by giving a shout-out to Steve Albini, who had passed that morning. I was just curious if, as a self-described contrarian, you had followed the things that Albini wrote later in life about learning and evolving from that mentality. It was something that resonated with me on a personal level.
When I was younger, I was not into his attitude about music and the world and interacting with people. Then I got older and I started working pretty closely with Bob Weston on different music. He mastered a lot of records that I did. I remember thinking, “I love Bob, Bob loves Steve, so Steve's got to be good.” And then this stuff started happening with Steve recently, where he was saying, “You know what? I made a mistake. I said these things and I wouldn't do that now. I don't like that I did that at the time.” It felt very earnest. I just watched an interview with Ian MacKaye and he's like, “Yeah, every lyric I ever wrote, I still 100-percent believe in.” I was like, “What are you, psychotic? ‘Guilty of Being White?’ You still 100-percent think that's a great song?”
A thing I've learned over my life is that being sorry goes a long way. It's hard for people to admit they're wrong about something and you dig your heels in and just make it worse for yourself. And I think, yes, the way Steve handled himself with that stuff, I really appreciated that.
I liked that Albini still maintained the righteousness that he had in his youth, but he turned it towards more deserving targets, like transphobia and Steely Dan.
Yeah, he never gave up on this ethos that he had inside of him. As you get older, if you're not evolving… this is why people get conservative when they get old. It's so much less work than being progressive. You have to constantly be reevaluating how you interact with the world, the way you treat people, you have to be thinking about it all the time. And being conservative is essentially being like, “I don't want to deal with that shit. I'm happy with the way I was. I'm happy with the way things used to be and fuck off.” That's why I always appreciate it when someone, especially at Steve's age, is like, “You know what? That shit's dumb, this shit's better.” It shows a curious mind, which is maybe the most important thing on Earth. If you're not curious and you're just living in fear, that's bad.
Unlearning things is difficult for people. And as you said, as people get older and get more conservative, they just don't want to do it. But it's especially frustrating with punks, particularly in regards to gender, where they refuse to do the work of unlearning, so they dismiss it entirely. Like, did you not learn anything from the songs you grew up on? It's very weird and frustrating.
It's incredibly frustrating. When we were doing Chaos, I was purposely using gender in a very fluid way with how the lyrics worked, and I was playing around with sexuality, playing with ideas as simple as homosexuality or bisexuality, which is the thing you didn't see talked about that much in hardcore. At the time, I thought, “I don't see this and I want this to be out there.” But I didn't think much more of it than that. And I think part of the reason why we have such interesting and thoughtful people following us now is because when you make decisions like that, you're creating a space where everything's on the table and you're not shutting people down. I didn't phrase that very well, but I think it's a wild thing to grow up as a punk and then you want to tell people what they can't do, that they can't do certain things because you’re uncomfortable.
So what’s next for Orchid?
Oh, I can’t tell you that. The one thing on the books is we're playing a festival in Toronto on June 1. We were able to curate our day, so we're playing with Tomb Mold and this great Hamilton two-piece metal hardcore band called Greber and old friends that I reunited with up here called North of America. So we're doing that and then we'll see.
We talked about the fear of overstaying your welcome. With anything that you're planning now, is that something that is pressing in the back of your mind?
Well, we haven't agreed to anything else. That, I will say. We have made no commitments to do anything else. I think we all wanted to finish this and think about what we want and if we want to do something else. So it's weighing on my mind only in the sense that if we agree, I want to be very selective and very cautious about what it is.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
A tremendous thank you to Adam Gerhold for lending me the photo above. See more of Adam’s Orchid shots here.
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"I didn't want to feel like a singer was going to beat me up; I wanted to feel like they read more books than me." -> this is one of the main reasons I've become so invested in Thursday lol
Great (and understandable) to read the apprehensions they had about reuniting. I kinda expected an old guy crossed arm show too, but it was so much better in part because of the youths. It easily topped the list of HC reunions I've seen (with Botch) because they got it all right and didn't take it TOO seriously. 10/10, don't need to see again.