IE: Hey Brian. Roll Call recently got back from a pretty crazy short run of shows in Southeast Asia. How did the idea to take Roll Call to four countries 8000 miles from home come about?

Brian: Kinda crazy that it all worked out to be honest. We’re a brand new band, so playing anything other than regional shows is already rather ambitious. I head out to Southeast Asia each year from January to April to escape the winter, and this year our bass player Cornell was gonna meet me out there. So since half the band was gonna be in SE Asia anyways, I asked Chad and James if they had any interest in coming out as well for a little tour, and they were all for it. It was my homie Riz in Hong Kong from King Ly Chee/UniteAsia.org that booked the tour for us. We let him know that since we were a new band, we had no expectations of getting paid, or even getting our flights and accommodations paid for. We were just stoked about hitting up these countries. It all worked out in the end, some promoters sorted out our accommodations, some promoters gave us a huge chunk of the doors, everyone we worked with was awesome… minus the whole Jakarta debacle, which I’m sure we’ll get into later, haha!

IE: As a collective unit what were you expecting as far as a response considering that Roll Call is essentially a new band with only 11 minutes of recorded material for people to wrap their heads around?

Brian: We didn’t have any expectations. We didn’t know whether there were only gonna be 20 kids at the shows, or 200. We were just happy to be there. One of my previous bands toured for 5 months straight thru 10 different countries off a 3 song demo years ago, so the fact that we had an EP out on Bridge 9 seemed plenty this time around.

IE: Yourself and Cornell traveled out before the rest of the band for Muay Thai training. What is your background with Muay Thai and can you tell us more about the training you were doing?

Brian: Cornell and I have both been training Muay Thai for over a decade. When I first started in the sport, Cornell had a fight at Madison Square Garden, so he came up in the scene before me. I’ve been taking these trips to Thailand for 10 years now, fighting and training out here (currently in Phuket at the moment). The training in Thailand is different to back home because you’re training with fighters from all over the world here for the same reason, and the skill set of the local Thais are on another level. Also, it’s hot as fuck here. There ain’t no air conditioning, we’re training under a tin roof in 90 degree weather. When I’m in NYC, I help coach the fight team and teach classes at Evolution Muay Thai in Manhattan, in air conditioning. 

IE: Bangkok Thailand was next followed by Jakarta in Indonesia where the shit hit the fan. Can you take us through the rest of the tour?

Brian: The Bangkok show was probably one of my favorite shows I’ve ever played, ever. These shows were with One Step Closer so they were bigger than our headlining shows. We have friends from the states that live in Thailand training Muay Thai that all came out, and also some friends that were coming for vacation that flew in for the show as well. So Bangkok was a happy reunion. Indonesia the next day was fucking wild. We were doing 2 shows there, and One Step Closer was doing 3. When we landed in Jakarta, it was a complete different vibe from all the other shows. This was a much bigger production. They had a film crew at the airport with us, and a big van with “One Step Closer” painted on the side. This show had sponsors from rather large clothing and shoe companies and a much bigger team bringing us around. Obviously it was all for One Step Closer, we were just guilty by association, which was sick cause that meant we all got free shoes too! But the only issue was, because it was such a large production, immigration officers went undercover and raided the show in Jakarta. They wanted to see if all members of the bands had work visas to be playing shows in Indonesia, which started the insane shit storm whirlwind that lasted 84 hours.

It turns out the promoters from the other cities in Indonesia all chipped in and sent the Jakarta promoter money to get working visas for the bands, but the Jakarta promoter pocketed the money. So when immigration raided the show, we were stuck in the green room trying to figure out if they just wanted to get paid off, or if any of this was legit as none of them had any ID visible since it was an undercover operation. One of the dudes even had an X swatch on, and another officer said he used to play in metal bands. Things got pretty tense, one of the local dudes with us squared up with one of the immigration officers at one point. The officers wanted us to get in their bus and go to their office to hand over our passports. At this point it was 1 in the morning, and we were convinced they were gonna lock us up there. After all, we’ve heard some horror stories about bands getting stuck here. Once we got to the immigration office, we were on the phone with the US embassy trying sort things out. We eventually made a deal with the immigration dudes where we didn’t get detained, but we had to hand in our passports, pay a few hundred dollars under the table, and then we would be able to get our passports back the next day when we bring in a few more hundred dollars.

That night, we kept the promoter with us so he couldn’t bail since we had just found out he pocketed the visa money and got everyone into this mess (He may or may not have had his eye split open… not by us…). We checked into the most rancid hotel I’ve ever seen in my life at 4 in the morning, and some dudes took turns staying up making sure the promoter didn’t split on us. Yo, this is actually a long ass story, I’m gonna skim over the next 3 days. When we showed up with the money to grab our passports the following morning, immigration changed the price on us. The price is now in the thousands. The local crew made a bunch of phone calls to collect funds, and we all went to the ATM and pulled out our personal money to meet this demand. At one point, a local company said that they would donate over $1000 if they could license the right to sell One Step Closer merch in Indonesia. After we got all the money together the immigration dudes ended up canceling the meeting that evening. Some of the Roll Call guys were meant to fly out the next morning, so we really needed our passports back. We ended up missing all of our flights over the next few days.

We kept getting assurance from the locals that they now have a connected person in government that was helping us, and that we were just one meeting away from getting our passports back, but it just kept falling through over and over and over again. In the meantime, we were hiding out in hotels because each time immigration canceled the meet up, we assumed they did so because they wanted us detained. We eventually went into the immigration office for an official interview and sentencing a few days later. But before we willingly walked ourselves into where they could detain us, we sent 2 band members to camp out at the US embassy in case things went south. To expedite the whole hearing process, there may or may not have been even more money exchanged under the table. Shout out to all the locals that helped out and put in money as well by setting up a benefit t-shirt sale and shit. So many people picked up the slack for that promoter that pocketed the money. Now, I’d like to add that if you are the Indonesian authorities and you’re reading this, I’d like to state for the record that I made every bit of this story up, and none of your officers took any bribes.