When I interviewed Sinkhole I didn't talk to their email- impaired drummer Chris Pierce. So this time I was able to talk to Chris about his other band, Doc Hopper, who won a 1995 battle of the bands contest sponsored by a Boston "modern rock" radio station (who, incidentally, would never play Doc Hopper). There's no moral to that story, and no point to this intro, so I'll just get on with it...

(L-R) Greg Hoffman (drums, vocals), Jon Madden (bass), Chris Pierce (vocals, guitar)

Is it tough to live in New Jersey and be in two Boston bands?
No, `cause the other guys in Sinkhole have serious jobs, so Sinkhole doesn't take up too much time, and Doc Hopper's not doing too much over this summer because Greg broke his wrist skateboarding, so we're not going to be playing for the next couple of months.

If I can bring up an old topic right away, that WBCN thing last year...
Oh, the Rumble.

Right. Did you go in expecting to win or just kinda wing it?
Oh not at all. In fact, our original intention was to go in and play the whole thing just Black Flag's "My War." And we were gonna do that until about two days before it.

So what happened? I didn't go to any of the shows but you guys obviously ended up winning the whole thing. Were you surprised to go as far as you did?
Oh yeah. We got a lot of free stuff out of it. The best part was that we got paid $3,000, and it put us out of debt. Because for a long time we were really in debt for t-shirts and stuff, and we had a huge phone bill hanging over our heads.

So did you get any offers from any other labels after that?
Nope, not a single one. (laughter)

Really?
I guess they just didn't want us. (laughter)

So how does a kid stuck in the middle of Maine get into punk?
Um, well I had a friend who had moved to Maine from Rhode Island and he was really into stuff. By the time I met him I had stumbled upon like, Misfits, Dead Kennedys, and kinda like entry-level punk rock stuff. And this kid was really into skateboarding and the whole straight-edge thing, so I started getting more into the hardcore kind of bands. Once I started seeing more of the DIY scene I realized that that was where it's at.

What bands have influenced you over the years, besides the obvious ones?
When I was growing up I was really into the Monkees, that was one of the first bands that I had records by. So I was really into early Monkees stuff. I always liked, like Credence (laughs)-it's hard to avoid listening to classic rock sort of stuff up in Maine, `cause it's everywhere (laughter). So a lot of just generic classic rock.

Well, that kind of explains my next question: Doc Hopper has covered some odd bands for a punk band to cover, like Simon & Garfunkel, the Monkees, John Cougar and stuff. I was gonna ask is these were people you listened to or are you just goofing on them or are they just cool songs you grew up with...
Oh, I think they're just good songs. A good song transcends any genre line. But, it's kind of fun to see people's faces when they realize what song we're playing, and they're like "Oh yeah, I know that song."

Do you guys enjoy being on tour? Have you been cross country?
Oh yeah.

What are some of the best cities to play?
We always have a lot of fun around the Midwest, like Minnesota and Wisconsin. We always spend at least a week around that area `cause we have lots of friends up there. Chicago's been really good for us recently `cause we've become friends with the Bollweevils, and they're one of the biggest bands out there. So we lucked out; we never had the chance to play in Chicago before, then we played two big shows with the Bollweevils-that was definitely a plus. We always have a lot of fun in Florida, we always play about five or six cities down there.

What are some of the worst experiences you've had on tour?
Um...well, there's not really a lot; after a while it all tends to blend together. But we've never really had good luck on the West Coast. I remember on the first big tour that we did, we were getting ready to play a show at the Hong Kong Cafe in L.A. and we were completely broke. We had just enough money to get us to Nevada, which was our next show, but none of us had any money to eat. And we had sold a record or something, so we took the money and went outside in the middle of Chinatown and bought this bag of, like, Chinese biscuits. And all four of us just sat there in silence eating these biscuits in L.A. just thinking "This is what it's like starving and being in a punk band, I guess."

Is it worth it?
Yeah. In retrospect it's always worth it. At the time it seems like it's the worst thing in the world. But we always take the attitude that no matter what happens to us on tour, at least we're not at home (laughter). We all realize that being in a band lets us go off and kinda fuck off in other places.

Do you have a new album coming out?
We're going to have a new split single with the Bollweevils-two songs-and then we're having two songs come out on a Lookout comp that Joe King from the Queers is putting together, and that should be out sometime before the summer. And we have a song coming out on a comp from Montreal of all bands doing songs of this old Canadian band called the Nils, and Sinkhole's gonna be on that, also. We have tons of new songs, but now that Greg has broken his wrist...we recorded those songs at a studio in Portsmouth, NH called Fish Tracks to see if we liked it. And we had planned on going right back in after some shows in Canada, and we were hoping to come back and record sometime in June, but now it's been pushed back with Greg breaking his wrist, and...the other little bit of gossip is that our bass player Jon is in Europe right now playing bass for Slapshot for about 2 1/2 weeks. So it'll be a while before we finally get it done.