Article from 7Ball Magazine
"It was just this crazy idea we had," bassist Keith Hoerig explains. "At the end of any studio session if we had extra tape, we used it. So we were like, Let's do a rock opera and call it 'These Are Not My Pants!'" "We should have recorded it on video and then released that, because that would have been even funnier," adds saxophonist Leanor "Jeff the Girl" Ortega. "The faces that people were making in the studio were amazing." Meet Five Iron Frenzy. It should come as no surprise the same eight-member ska-punk unit from Denver that conceived Upbeats And Beatdowns and Our Newest Album Ever! would feature an impromptu "rock opera" on its current release, the EP Quantity Is Job 1. "We each had only one shot in the studio and whatever you sang was kept, so we were all on adrenaline kicks," Ortega says. "It was awesome." "All the music for 'Pants‚' came off a computer," Hoerig explains. "We were each assigned a musical style--for instance, I was assigned heavy metal--and you went into the booth and that was it. It was totally improv; nothing was written in advance. You just went in and sang." FIF has seen its popularity grow beyond anything any of the members anticipated three-and-a-half years ago when the group formed. "For me personally, this [success] wasn't even a goal," Hoerig says. "My original goal for Five Iron was just to be a good local band--to be able to go as a Christian band and open for non-Christian bands at clubs in the Colorado area, just to do ministry there." "I don't think any of us saw this coming," says Reese Roper, the group's lead vocalist and chief lyricist. "We were surprised we could make money at this--you know, that we could actually get money to pay for our equipment." Five Iron Frenzy was born out of a foursome consisting of Roper, Hoerig and guitarists Micah Ortega and Scott Kerr, who were a thrash band called Exhumator (you can't make stuff like this up, kids). "We got kind of bored," Hoerig says. "We had a sampler and drum machine and sounded like Circle of Dust, Mortal and early Nine Inch Nails." In spring of 1995 they started FIF as a simple side project, picking up drummer Andrew Verdecchio and trumpeter Brad Dunham. "It started out as punk with very little ska," Roper says, "but we liked the ska sound so we decided to go more for it." The band derived its name from an incident with a friend who, on a particular night, was going out and decided to take a golf club to protect himself from attack. When he remarked that it would be a case of "putter mayhem," Kerr noted the kind of club the friend was holding and retorted, "No, more like a five iron frenzy." There are stories about those early gigs, including the time they crashed the Cornerstone Festival. "They had a generator and set up at the skateboard ramp," trombonist Dennis Culp says. "It was totally illegal." By the end of that summer, Ortega's cousin, Leanor (who picked up the nickname "Jeff" from a role she played in a church camp play in sixth grade) and Culp joined, and the 8-piece ska band was on its way, playing some 60 shows in eight months and opening for all sorts of ska and punk bands. It was at a Halloween 1995 show that they got the attention of 5 Minute Walk's Frank Tate, when they opened for his bands Dime Store Prophets and Black Eyed Sceva. He signed 'em pronto. Since then, FIF's raucous brand of ska-pop hasn't just taken Christian kids by storm, it's also plugged the band into the mainstream, including an appearance on the general market sampler Cheap Ska (alongside several popular ska bands, as well as fellow Christian ska band The O.C. Supertones). It's noteworthy that Cheap Ska also included the band Jeffries Fan Club, whose Sonnie Johnston recently joined FIF to replace the exiting Kerr on guitar. FIF was the only Christian band on last year's "Ska Against Racism" tour, which included Reel Big Fish, Less Than Jake and The Toasters, among others. "That tour was a good opportunity," Hoerig says. "The tour was seven weeks long and pretty much hit the whole country. It was a blast." "This band can cross over to the secular market," Tate told Billboard, "but not only because they're amazing musicians whom I'd put on stage with anybody, They're Christian to the core, but the focus is to show that being Christian isn't weird--it's just having a friendship with Christ. It's like Michael Jackson--people say he's a performer, not a Jehovah's Witness performer." Roper says that while their message may not be readily accepted, the music should be good enough to overcome whatever prejudice. "We just have to work hard and sell people on the music." Even with the attention of the secular marketplace, the members of FIF refuse to dance around the fact they are Christians. "I'm so tired of reading interviews about bands and they're like, Don't call us a Christian band," Roper told True Tunes News. "We are who we are and God has given us this truth and it's changed our lives and we cannot be silent. We have to go out and tell people about it."