CULT HEROES
DRIVEN POST-HARDCORE ROCKETMAN SWAMI JOHN REIS GOES IT ALONE
Scream team captain: John Reis, AKA Speedo, at the helm of Rocket From The Crypt in 1996; Reis today.
Corbis
“I’VE SEEN myself as a cult hero since the age of five,” smiles John Reis, amid his San Diego home studio. “It’s nice to finally be acknowledged as someone who gets no acknowledgement!”
Beneath the humour, Reis characteristically makes a serious point. Even in Rocket From The Crypt, the horn-handed sextet which delivered his one taste of mainstream success, it wasn’t the name ‘John Reis’ that mid-’90s audiences chanted but ‘Speedo’, the alias he took to become the extrovert frontman for that band’s bar-busting fusion of greaser punk and ’50s rock’n’roll. Now, after over 30 years at the post-hardcore blast furnace in myriad ensembles – most notably Drive Like Jehu, Rocket FTC and Hot Snakes – he’s finally releasing an album under his own name, or thereabouts: Ride The Wild Night by Swami John Reis. “It’s probably the most autobiographical record I’ve made,” he says. “Even when I’m joking about something, it’s something that happened.”