In-person Roll of the Dice: 7 questions with the Smoking Popes

On Thursday 04 Sep 2024 I had the opportunity to catch The Get Up Kids with Smoking Popes in support on the second of two nights in San Francisco. At the show I was able to catch a few minutes with the Popes, Josh Caterer (guitar, vocals) Mike Felumlee (drums) and long-time touring bassist Reuben Baird for a quick, impromptu Roll of the Dice. We rolled a SEVEN. (and although RotD interviews really aren’t supposed to have follow-ups, well… kinda hard not to do when it’s in person! This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

Jeff Hi, Everyone! This is Jeff from thatsgoodenoughforme.com, and I am here at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco with the Smoking Popes. Hi, everyone! How are you doing today?

Josh We just played a show. It was fun. So we’ve got that post-show glow. (laughter)

Jeff …and what a sheen it is! So this is the second night you’ve been playing here with The Get Up Kids on their tour, and which is the better night?

Mike I think tonight was better.

Josh I agree. I like tonight better.

Mike Yeah. Better crowd tonight. More enthusiastic.

Jeff There was a nice vibe, and a lot of people seemed to be getting into it. I took some photos from the back of the room, and there were a couple of people just on their phone but, you know, there’s always that person.

Josh We’re the opening band so you get that.

Jeff So, we did a Roll of the Dice and I rolled a four and three via a virtual website that does this for you, so we have seven questions here and I’m going to start with: How is the tour going?

Josh The tour is great. It’s cool, I mean the shows… most of them have been sold out so far. Everyone’s excited because The Get Up Kids are doing their 25^th anniversary of their album Something to Write Home About. They’re playing the whole album every night. Their crowds are stoked, and their crowds seem to like us. So it’s good vibes.

Mike We don’t do a lot of tours where you have a sold out Tuesday and Wednesday night. This is Wednesday night and it’s sold out, so… it’s much larger crowds than we typically play to headlining across the country, so it’s been really good.

Jeff How many nights, or how many weeks are you into the tour?

Mike This is show number ten. There’s been a few days off, so probably a full two weeks into it?

Josh Yeah, this is Wednesday right? We left on a Thursday…

Mike Tomorrow will be day fourteen.

Jeff You tour around for it bit back to their hometown, then take a break. Then you have an east coast leg, as well. So pretty exciting time for you. You played this song tonight, you played “Golden Moments,” a new song from this year, and you also said there’s the new album coming out next year. What can you tell us about that, and what can’t you tell us about that?

(Josh and Mike look at each other)

Josh We can say whatever we want…?

Mike It’s got ten songs.

Josh It’s got ten songs. 

(laughter)

Josh Do we want to reveal the title yet?

Mike We haven’t revealed the title yet. We have a title. It’s mixed by Jamie Wolford who mixed our last record, as well.

Josh Yeah, he’s great. The mixes sound amazing.

Mike The mixes I think sound better. Jamie’s upped his game a little bit over the last record.

Josh He’s getting more and more locked into our style, and so the stuff sounds great. It’s got new songs on it, there’s one cover song on it.

Jeff You probably don’t want to reveal the cover song and you probably don’t want to reveal the title, but can you give us the name of one of the new songs? Just the name?

Josh Sure. Aside from the two singles we’ve released so far, which are “Golden Moment” and “Madison,” there’s a song called “Fox River Dream.”

Jeff For those who don’t know, the Fox River passes through pretty much just about everyone’s home town in the room in some way or another… (laughter) I don’t know about you Reuben?

Reuben Not through my home town. It’s near… somewhat near.

Mike (to Reuben): But you’ve been on a boat. You’re no stranger to the Fox River (laughter). We’ve all floated upon the Fox River.

Josh So that’s going to be meaningful to anybody from the northwest suburbs of Chicago. I fell it was time the Fox River needed a shout out! (laughter)

Jeff It’s always maligned most of the time when people talk about it. You know Elgin people are always railing on the Fox River.

Josh I love it. It’s always been good to me. And now it’s immortalized in song.

Jeff Did you know that river is like, super long? It goes all the way through Wisconsin and up into Minnesota. (author’s note- here is where I conflated the Fox River and US Route 14. A common mistake, I know. US Route 14 does cross multiple states. There are two Fox Rivers in the Wisconsin/Illinois area, which might have lead to the further confusion. Whoops!)

Josh The Fox River? That I did not know.

Jeff Yeah recently we were up in Minnesota and then into Wisconsin and we passed over the Fox River and I was like “is this the same one?”

Mike Yeah, it’s a lot cleaner up there.

Josh Picks up some debris along the way. (laughter)

Jeff Who’ll be putting out that album? Do we have a label yet?

Mike It’ll be out on Anxious and Angry.

Jeff Same as the 30^th anniversary of Born to Quit. You seem to be getting along pretty well with them.

Mike Ryan (Young)’s a really good friend of ours, and does all of our merch. He’s really great to work with. This tour we’re in a Sprinter van, we can’t hold that much, so he’s printing merch as we go and shipping it to all these venues. So it’s great to have a partner like that. He text’s me every day like “how’d you do?” He’s sending a box to San Francisco, sending one to Portland, to Denver. The shipment’s already set up, so a pretty great guy to work with on that stuff.

Jeff With the tour, which city that you’ve visited so far has been your favorite, if you had the chance to go out and see. Not specifically the show itself, but which city did you get to enjoy their offerings?

Josh We might have different answers here, but when we were in Los Angeles I got to go to the Universal Studios Hollywood tour, and our guitar player Jack came with me. That was pretty great. I loved that a lot.

Jeff What did you see on the tour? I’ve never been, but I know there’s a lot of Universal Studios stuff.

Josh You get on this tram that takes you through the backlot where everything is filmed, so you’re driving through these big warehouses where everything is filmed. They’ll be like “that’s the building where they shoot such and such a show” and “that’s the building over there where Alfred Hitchcock wrote the script for The Birds!” (laughter)

But then they take you through these exhibits, and the one I was excited about… they have the house from Psycho. They have the Bates Motel, I guess it’s not the original, it’s the one they made for Psycho II. But they have the original house from the movie, part I. That was pretty cool, and they have an exhibit for all of the stuff from the movie NOPE. They’ve got Jupiter’s Claim with the inflatable cowboy…

Jeff I like that movie.

Josh I love that movie. So we got to see a lot of that stuff.

Jeff This isn’t the tour where the velociraptor jumps out at you, right? I see that on the commercials…

Josh There was part of the tram tour where you put on 3D glasses and, probably, velociraptors jumped out at you, but I closed my eyes. (extended laughter) I cannot confirm nor deny…

Reuben Did you really?

Josh I did! (more laughter) Well, I got a thing about heights and our friend who was taking us on the tour, Johnathan, and I said “there isn’t any height stuff on this tour” and he said “they don’t actually take you up high, but anything they tell you to put the 3D glasses on for, it’ll probably trigger you.”

Jeff So virtually it looks like you’re up in the air?

Josh Yeah, they’re jostling the car around and it’s bouncing, there’s stuff jumping out at you. So I took his advice: I closed my eyes and missed out on the velociraptors. But yeah, so that was my thing. LA was my favorite so far. How about you, Mike?

Mike I haven’t got to see too much, but I got to the Pacific Pinball Museum today in Alameda. I only had about an hour and half there. I played about fifteen games, and so that was fun. 

Jeff What was your favorite machine, have you played on any you haven’t played on before?

Mike I hadn’t played the Metallica machine. Everyone raves about that, so I got to play that one. Ghostbusters I had not played, that’s a good one. And then they have a really nice Twilight Zone. I’ve played that game, but it was working really well. Those older games, they’re not super-playable depending on how well-maintained they are. 

I played the Centaur game, which is like an old 60s or 70s one. I really liked that, it’s really hard. I watch a lot of pinball tournaments on YouTube, and that’s one that always gets people because it’s super hard. I did OK.

Jeff In the same vein, is there a city you think you’re going to have some time in that you’re really interested to check out? Maybe one you haven’t seen before?

Mike I’m excited for two days in Lawrence, Kansas. We’ve been there a bunch, but it’s nice and chill. We had three days in LA, two days here in San Francisco… Not chill cities, right? Megacities. So Lawrence, we’re staying downtown. Everything’s walkable.

Josh We’ve played Lawrence a whole bunch, but we’ve never spent multiple days there where we just get to hang out in Lawrence.

Mike So it would be like a day off that second show day. In LA and here both it’s like 30-40 minutes to get from the hotel to where they show is.

Jeff We have Rueben!

Reuben HI!

Jeff Reuben is playing bass with the Smoking Popes on tour, he’s been doing it for a while. Where might some of our readers know you from?

Reuben If readers are Popes fans, I’ve been playing with Mike in one form or another on various projects for nearly twenty years now. We became friends when I was recording one of his solo EPs back in…

Mike probably around 2006… 2007? It came out in 2008.

Reuben It’s funny: he and a couple of my friends formed this band for Mike’s solo records, and maybe a half hour or so into tracking the bass for it I kinda took over. I was like “why don’t you hand that over to me…” (laughter) “…I’ll play that and we’ll go from there.” And from that point Mike and I became friends pretty quickly…

Josh You were like “I think what you meant to play was…” (laughter)

Reuben Yeah… “so that was great. Let’s try it differently now.” (laughter) But Mike and I became pretty fast friends after that. We’ve been playing a lot together on Mike’s solo stuff, and then the band The Bigger Empty that we kind of formed in the studio while tracking one of the solo records. I’ve also been a recording engineer for several years. I engineered the Into the Agony record, which is how I became acquainted with the whole proper band the Smoking Popes.

And then if you’ve seen the Popes on the road the last six years, you’ve seen me. I think during the tracking on Into the Agony is when Matt decided he didn’t want to be on the road, and he said “why don’t you have Reuben do it” and I said “yeah! I can do that. I have all the stuff right here.” (laughter)

Jeff At the beginning when you got up on stage people are all like “He’s much taller than I thought he was in the photos…” (laughter)

Reuben We’ve had several versions of this conversation before. (laughter)

Josh Everybody gives Jack a hard time for being the “fill in” guy. They know that’s not Eli. But most people don’t give Reuben a hard time, because most people think he’s just a Caterer. (laughter)

Jeff Yeah, a bald guy playing bass. They just think he took the hat off, because Matt’s always in pictures with the hat on.

Reuben “He looks so much shorter with the hat on.”

Jeff Then he takes the hat off and shoots up like a foot! (laughter) Question #7: a bit self-serving. People may or may not know that I drew the very first Smoking Pope, and I did the Nintendo Popes most recently. Mike: Which is your favorite Smoking Pope that I’ve drawn?

Mike I love the Nintendo Popes. I had that idea in my head and I though Jeff is the perfect guy to make this come to life. You’re the guy I thought of when I thought of this Nintendo thing. I asked if it could be the Mario guy with the Nintendo logo and you were like “can it be Mega Man?” The online merch sales, that’s like our best seller.

But the very first original Pope is pretty awesome, he’s hard to top.

Jeff Yeah the very first one was the three Popes on the shirt.

Mike Yeah, it was the second guy. The one with the guitar on the 7” cover (2).

Josh That guy’s became a bit of the mascot for the Smoking Popes.

The tour continues tonight in Kansas City, MO, the penultimate show of the first leg A brief restorative break and then it fires up again east of the Mississippi River, ending in October. Tickets for many dates are still available at this link, but act quick as many gigs have been selling out closer to the date.

*full disclosure: I’ve known the Smoking Popes since their formation, and am also the artist of the Smoking Pope character.