Die On Stage: A Farewell To Hostage Calm

All photos by Derek Scancarelli Hostage Calm laid a final rose on the casket last night after performing their closing farewell show at Toad’s Place in New Haven, CT. Just a week earlier, vocalist Chris “Cmar” Martin traded in his jeans for Army fatigues before storming the stage in New York City, although he didn’t do push-ups to get the blood flowing like he did in Connecticut. “Dude, I’m about to go to war,” Martin said. “All I need is to drop out of a helicopter.”

New Haven was the band’s true last stand. It left behind blood, sweat, bruises and the remains of thirty-dozen thorny red roses. After a career-encompassing set of stage dives and glistening eyes, just like that, Hostage Calm was over. Those were two of five farewell concerts in the Northeast, along with Boston, Philly, and Chicago. The gigs were scheduled in the wake of an untimely and unexpected breakup. In October, just 20 days after releasing their newest record, Die On Stage, Hostage Calm announced that they’d broken up and dropped off the remainder of their U.S. tour with Citizen.

“It’s definitely poetry in motion,” Martin said. “It’s a very fitting end in the sense of eeriness and discomfort that goes along with the fact that we just put out a record called Die On Stage and then the band imploded. I think for us it’s the fatalistic side of punk we always celebrated, so it was only fitting that we went into the wall at 1,000 miles per hour.”

Hostage Calm never told the public why they’d parted ways, and Martin declined to get into detail about it in our interview. But, regardless of the circumstances behind the band’s demise, he understood the value in playing goodbye shows. “It’s an important ritual in punk music, some shitty detached rock band might just break up and go into hibernation,” he said. “But if you’re in this community, you play your final shows and give the kids a chance to lay a rose on the casket.”

Coming up, the Wallingford American Legion was the band’s rented world. Hostage Calm booked their first show in that very legion, the same space in which its walls showcased the veterans of World War II. It was symbolic for them; displaying the stark contrast between the lives they were living and the “Idealized America.” The legion was part of the Connecticut youths’ “Other America.” They’d play hardcore punk amidst the grandeur and history of the men who lived on into Golden Age.

Although the guys in Hostage Calm weren’t part of The Greatest Generation, they had their own battles to fight. They were warriors for social justice, and the fans who held them close to their hearts were part of their battalion. They took on the harsh realities of their own “Other America,” a generation of children who were a product of divorce and facing an ever-narrowing economic future.

The band’s breakthrough record, Please Remain Calm (2012), was what Martin once called the anthem of the disenfranchised youth. It observed a culture of young adults inundated with student debt and the improbability of making your dreams come true, much less paying rent or making love last. But before the heralded record was actualized, the members of Hostage Calm earned their stripes helping to cultivate the Connecticut punk community.

Ambitious and inspired, the members of Hostage Calm were all actively involved in creating and ingesting music by the time they were early teenagers. At 13, Martin saw the Circle Jerks play for the first time. Moving forward, they would go see bands like With Honor, The Flaming Tsunamis or American Nightmare, really any sort of hardcore, punk, or ska show they could get themselves into. In those days, Connecticut had a well-established history of heavy music; Hatebreed, 100 Demons, and Death Threat, would be a few good examples. But what the guys in Hostage Calm were truly inspired by was the youth crew hardcore movement, as they grew up romanticizing the NYHC, East Bay, and DC scenes.

Before Hostage Calm was born, Tim Casey, Tom Chiari, and Chris Martin were members of At All Costs. The band was the product of the 16-17 year olds’ passion; imagine hardcore with horns. The band would serve as the foundation and guts of what would later transform into Hostage Calm, but not before shaping the local music scene. The teens had never expected their next venture would travel much farther and wider than a Hungarian hall in central Connecticut. Ed Goodfriend booked the band’s final hometown show and used to play trombone in At All Costs. He remembers bassist Tim Casey playing violin on the cover of the New Haven Advocate, equipped with a Mohawk and Casualties t-shirt.

It may be an age-old cliché when discussing music, but Hostage Calm genuinely and continually re-invented themselves over the course of seven years and four full-length albums. Their 2008 release, Lens, was indisputably hardcore-punk inspired and sounding. By the time Die On Stage was released in 2014, the band’s Facebook page touted it as having “60s pop melody, 70s punk energy and 80s new wave panache.” The peaks and valleys of surviving as band were often apparent, recalled Martin, discussing the process of finding a label to release their 2010 self-titled album. Just when the guys were beginning to lose hope, they sent a track over to Run For Cover Records, who signed them 45-minutes later.

“Looking back, it’s crazy to think about how they didn’t all just jump ship at any of the million other turns,” Martin said. “If this were some day job, everyone would’ve said ‘Fuck this, I quit,’ years ago.” It sure as hell is a good thing they didn’t. Had the band jumped ship, they never would’ve had the chance to tour with some of guitarist Tom Chiari’s favorite bands: Rival Schools, I Am The Avalanche, and Anti-Flag.

“I had to pinch myself,” Chiari said, reminiscing on partying in Amsterdam with I Am The Avalanche, whose frontman, Vinnie Caruana recently reunited (again) with The Movielife. Caruana described their latest release as their cosmic and crowning achievement. “I think it’s a shame they weren’t recognized more heavily by the masses, but a lot of the times the best bands are not the ones that become massively successful, but remain important, Hostage Calm will always be a band that people love and respect,” Caruana said. “They are never going to not be relevant in punk.”

Run For Cover labelmate and Citizen guitarist Nick Hamm said that when it came to picking bands for their most recent headlining tour, the decision was obvious. He was a sophomore in high school when he first discovered Hostage Calm. He never imagined he’d be playing disc golf in Alabama with guitarist Nick Balzano, much less watching the band “put him to shame” every night. For him, their beginnings shined through to the end. “I’ve seen people take aim at them for abandoning being a hardcore band,” Hamm said. “But the message that they were screaming out was always hardcore to me.”

Indiana-based songwriter Grey Gordon first saw the band at a basement show in Monsey. He sees them as an amalgamation of their influences; their invigorating approach to writing music rooted in tradition enabled them to permeate the nooks and crannies of the DIY culture. “They’re political without being preachy,” Gordon said. “They’re passionate without being corny.”

More importantly than playing with or earning the praise of their heroes and cohorts, or the fact that every kid in town started copying their haircuts in a cult-like fashion, was the way they always regarded punk as a platform. Hostage Calm used their songs as a medium for spreading awareness and social change. Champions for the equality of the LGBTQ community, their efforts far exceeded their t-shirts that said “I Support Same-Sex Marriage,” or protesting venues like Nashville’s Rocketown who fired an employee for wearing the same shirt. Tracks like “Ballots/Stones” or “May Love Prevail” sent a clear and honest message, but their calls to action are the source of most of their pride.

In 2011, they created an online petition to accompany a letter urging NYS senators to pass the Marriage Equality Act. In return for a signature, fans received a free download of their album. The petition received thousands of signatures practically overnight. “I remember watching the actual legislative session as it was going down, and watching the senators we had sent it to. They didn’t say they’d received hundreds of thousands of emails, they said they received thousands,” said Martin. “And those thousands were from the international punk community.”

For the guys looking back, the band’s totality holds tremendous value. In the future, Chiari wants the band to be remembered by being rediscovered. “I think that’s a hallmark of a legacy band, they continue to gain fans after they finish being one,” he said.

For Martin, the band’s completion has certainly been emotionally charged. All the years of stage diving and sweat led to the last five shows. For Hostage Calm, the goal was never to imitate The Smiths or The Clash, but to achieve the greatness and timelessness those heroes were able to.

I asked Martin to describe the journey of Hostage Calm. “I think it’s one long struggle to articulate and realize the enormity of your own life,” he said, projecting the reassured vulnerability he’d become so proud of. For him, songwriting was the social responsibility of dredging up personal pain, and using his own epiphanies to write songs that speak to a generation. “It was about trying to figure out what our place was in this world and realizing a broader vision of social change, the kind which we came in contact when we were first in punk.”

I asked Martin what advice he would have for aspiring young punks. “Double-down on who you are. I believe that people really appreciate that depth of introspection, self-understanding and honesty,” he said, choosing his next words carefully. “I would say to pursue that which documents the time you live in, and is great within your own context, but do what is also timeless. Pursue timelessness.”

In Martin’s own words, c’est la vie. Die on stage.

Derek Scancarelli is scattering ashes on Twitter.