Post: What was the music scene like where you grew up?
Kristopher Roe: There are so many good places with consistent music scenes around where I grew up in Indiana, like Chicago and Cincinnati. Small towns give you the passion to go out and find music, and it's a good word-of-mouth community. The other guys (of the band) are from a small town close to New York City and could always go see bands play there.
Post: How did the band start?
Roe: I just used to record music in my bedroom, and the only thing I knew how to do was write songs. I moved to California (after signing with Kung Fu Records) to record and tour, and we started to find a good following, but the band is always evolving and becoming more daring.
Post: How did Blue Skies, Broken Hearts, Next 12 Exits, and So Long, Astoria gain such wide acclaim and break you into the mainstream?
John Collura: It all involves a bit of luck no matter what you do, but the band had toured so much, and started touring overseas after Blue Skies G? then the major labels started to sniff around.
Post: Do you still dislike the fact that The Boys Of Summer
a Don Henley cover, is one of your most famous songs?
Collura: It got us in trouble a little bit at first because it was never intended to be a single, but Columbia forced us to play it for awhile and so we did G?then we stopped playing it for awhile, and we just started to play it again.
Post: Why did you have such a falling out with Columbia Records?
Collura: The people that we worked with at Columbia that made So Long, Astoria a success were fired from Columbia, and we had built a relationship from them, so no one we knew was left to work with us. Plus, (Columbia felt) their one rock band was System Of A Down and tried to make everyone else pop, which just isn't our sound. Now RED Distribution distributes our records, and we're working on creating our own label as a financial outlet.
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With the popularity of their cover of the Don Henley song The Boys of Summer and an appearance on the [i]Spiderman 2[/i] sound track, The Ataris are climbing their way up the punk-rock ladder. Started by singer/songwriter/guitarist Kristopher Roe in 199
