Jason Kendall of The Amazing Royal Crowns
Here, Jason "King" Kendall of The Amazing Royal Crowns was nice enough to answer some goofy questions about what it's like to be in a cramped van as a touring musician, how he got his start in a kitchen, and why he wanted to sing for a living. I'm trying not to be too much of a fanboy here, but I've loved the Crowns since I first heard 'em circa 1997, so bear with me. Also, make sure to click around some of the links below, and don't forget to get tickets for next year's St. Patrick's Day show at Boston's House of Blues with the frickin' Dropkick Murphys! Get yo' tix HERE.
HÜSKER FOÖD ZINE: I often have difficulty explaining what this zine is all about. People will either get the link between music and food, or they won't. I can't explain it. Something about being on the line, or cooking a great meal in your kitchen for the fam, with that perfect soundtrack blaring too loud in the background? It's like magic. There's so much to unpack here. Is making a meal with fewer ingredients the same as punk rock? Simple is better? Stripped down? Let the handful of ingredients shine? Here's the actual question: Can you help me explain to folks why music and food complement each other so well?
JASON: The delicate dance of cooks in a kitchen plating food while getting out of the weeds is very comparable to the dance of hard touring band members on stage. Bands and a kitchen crew being able to speak through feel, telepathy, practice and passion. In a flow state essentially.
I realized that a kitchen crew and band were similar while I was out on endless tours, you eventually just know how to move together and make something with each person doing their part, whether it's a meal or music. After being on the road for a bit you get your sea legs, and it’s the same thing with a kitchen crew that’s been together a while handling a lot of busy shifts.
As far as simple being better, I think you have something there, unless of course you’re Phil Spector. Incredible music production but I’d hate to see what kind of over seasoned crazy ass dish he’d make for dinner.
HFZ: Did you have a favorite OG Iron Chef? Mine was Iron Chef Morimoto. Dude was/is a bad motherfucker. If you didn't watch the OG Iron Chef, did you ever watch any other '90s food TV? JASON: I watched Iron Chef during the 90’s too! Morimoto was a complete badass. In the early nineties I was managing the night shift of a kitchen in Providence, RI and not watching a huge amount of food TV. I do remember watching Sarah Moulton in the mid to late nineties though. I find her to be a really open and skilled chef (she studied under Julia Child), and you can still hear her on the Milk Street podcast, she’s my favorite part of that one (Sorry Chistopher Kimball). Nowadays, I watch a lot of Great British Baking show on the streaming, plus Thee Burger Dude, Isa Chandra Moskowitz/ Post Punk Kitchen, Mississippi Vegan, Bodegacat, V for Vegan and a bunch of other chef/food accounts on the socials.
HFZ: Did you have a favorite MRE while serving in the Army? I have a theory that former soldiers and Marines might make good bandmates because they were trained to embrace the suck of not showering, eating, or grooming for long periods in the field. Does that sneak peek into the unique experience of smelly barbarity lend itself to better survival in tour life in a cramped van? Also, at one point, I read you were a 19K—which would seem to be the perfect training for the aforementioned tour life in a foot & butt-smelling sardine can. Is that true? If not, what was your MOS? What made you join the Army? JASON: My MOS in the Army was actually 94B, Food Service Specialist. But I served on active duty as part of The 4th Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment (4-8 INF) at Coleman Barracks, in Mannheim, Germany. Our battalion was a mechanized unit so we had armored personnel carriers and tanks in our motor pool. So I can see why you might have heard that.
MRE Faves: Chicken Ala King, Meatballs in BBQ Sauce, Beef Patty (only because this one came with the Chocolate Brownie!), Beef Slices in BBQ. Also we would trade ingredients and come up with custom meals in the field, it got to be a game, could you make a weird sandwich or totally different meal by trading parts of your MRE? Sometimes when you’re living in a pup tent in -20 below in Grafenwoehr, Germany, you look for something to do to take your mind off not feeling your toes for days.
The Suck: Yeah, I think my time in an infantry unit prepared me for hard touring for sure! I was used to sleeping anywhere in the Army. Getting some shuteye on top of a bunch of weapons boxes in a Deuce and Half truck is very similar to sleeping on an amp in the back of a van for 10 hours.
HFZ: How long were you a chef, and did you ever go into the walk-in and forget why you went in there?
JASON: This happened to me a bunch! Especially after a crazy rush. Professional kitchens can get so stressful and the walk-in is such an escape from everything, including the heat!
HFZ: What made you want to cook?
JASON: I started in kitchens when I was 15 or 16. Started as a pot scrubber at a seafood restaurant in Stonington, CT. I worked with a friend and we used to take LSD before our shifts and time the trip to when we’d get slammed. Nothing like reality folding in on itself while your knee deep in sudsy water and grease! I had multiple dishwashing and bussing jobs before I started manning the grill at my family's truckstop in CT. I would work the overnight shift, making hangover breakfast for the bar-goers, overnight truckers, WWF wrestlers, the occasional rockstar that stopped in for a bite and a chance to stretch their legs. I guess that's where my interest started. When I joined the Army (the day I graduated high school, but that's another story), I worked as a cook in a lot of different situations, giving me a ton of experience. When I did my time and got my honorable discharge back to the states, I used the GI bill to help me get my degrees at Johnson & Wales in Providence, RI. It felt comfortable as I grew up driving to Providence from my hometown for punk rock shows at the Living Room, Rocket, Lupos, Blue Pelican in Newport and other spaces. I worked in various kitchens as I went to school, spending some time in Brooklyn at an italian restaurant when I had time off. I also started a catering company for a bit. All these experiences fed my love of cooking.
HFZ: As I have aged, I have run into some health concerns, and I know you've had your own struggles as well. Have you had to change your diet in recent years? If so, any advice for folks (like me) who struggle with changing their diets?
JASON: Well, first off, I hope you're ok. As for my health concerns, I never had any problems healthwise throughout most of my life, I had my appendix out, AC separation of my shoulder after getting hit by a car on my bicycle, lots of broken bones from motorcycle and stage shenanigans, etc but in 2017 my luck ran out.
Basically I went for an annual checkup and my doctor called me after the blood tests came back and put me in the hospital. My kidneys were failing, and no-one knew what was up. We still have no idea why this happened. I went through a period where they gave me lots of drugs (not the fun ones) as they tried to slow things down. Ultimately I got on the kidney transplant list and started waiting for a kidney as my remaining ones failed. A bit of a death race if you will.
It gets even darker.. Unbeknownst to me, my brother Mathew, who had an aversion to doctors, had started testing to see if he was a match for me. It’s a bit of a process, blood draws, psych eval, measuring and testing your urine output, and more. Basically my brother’s nightmare, but he was willing to do it to try to save me. One day I was coming home from work and got the call that Mat had a heart attack and was on life support at a hospital up in New Hampshire. So my parents and I waited at his bedside until we were told there was no brain function and we had to say goodbye to my brother. At that moment my mom and dad told me that Mat had been in the process of testing to be a donor for me. So I went back to Mass General (MA) to discuss the process of transplanting my brother’s kidney with the kidney transplant team. Mat had not completed the testing so we didn’t know for sure if this would work. As I sat in the surgeon's office, I got a text from my longtime friend Jen, telling me she was a match, (she had been testing without letting me know). At the same time the Dr. across from me got a notification alerting him to the match.
So I had to make an educated choice, even though I had a romantic notion of my brother living inside of me, I made the non-emotional decision to go with my friend’s kidney after learning about the benefits of live donor donation and the understanding that Mat had not been fully tested for a match. In the end I was lucky I went with Jen’s kidney, my brother was apparently very sick and his kidney was not transplantable.
I know this was long, and you asked about diet changes due to health, apologies. In a way, my diet was already changed, I’ve been vegan for around 12 years. Once you learn to make vegan cheese and meat substitutes, It’s a lot healthier and MUCH easier on my donated kidney.
HFZ: Any fall-time favorite comfort foods? JASON: I cook a lot, so I'm always making meals for my wife and son. In the fall time I love making bread, Pesto bread, Garlic & Rosemary bread, lots of bread. I also like to make pot pies with homemade crusts, various soups (they go well with the bread), I make a mean vegan shepherds pie, I found an incredible recipe for vegan meatloaf from Isa Chandra, highly recommended. I also make burnt ends and pulled pork style meals with Soy Curls! Love em. I make pancakes with various toppings almost every Sunday. Fall is also fun for baking apple breads, cinnamon & cardamon rolls, Apple cider cake, Ginger apple pie, and so much more. I could go on for a while.
HFZ: What made you want to sing? Why rockabilly/rock ' n ' roll? JASON: I grew up singing in the car with my mom, I have so many memories that go back to before I can remember them, from when I was a kid, my mom and I would always sing in the car together. We still do. When I was 10-12 years old, I went through some serious abuse at the hands of some neo nazi kids (literally), and finding punk rock completely changed my life. All of a sudden I was part of a community that actually stood for something, going to shows with friends seeing Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, and local bands like SSD & 76% Uncertain drove home the idea that any of us could get up on that stage and play, plus a sense of belonging and fighting for what was right. I was all in. When I joined the Army and went to serve in Germany, I ended up hanging with a wide variety of the local Mannheim punk subculture, including something that I had never heard of in the states, Psychobilly. I ended up spending all my spare time with the Mannheim and Heidelberg punks, goths, and psychos at a Mannheim Club we all hung out at. I went to all these psycho shows in the mid eighties in Germany (Guanabatz, Demented Are Go, etc) that totally influenced the Crowns. When I got back to the states, I knew what I wanted to do. Interestingly enough, I ended up in some brawls with some nazi skins in Germany that had a very different outcome from when I was a little boy. I considered it karma.
HFZ: Folks might not know, but you’re partly responsible for bringing the Guitar Hero games to life? How have you managed to wear so many hats in your life?
JASON: Back when the Crowns broke up in 2001, a friend of mine invited me up to Cambridge, MA to test a video game his team was working on. The company was Harmonix Music systems and they made music video games. At the time I just went up to play a game called Amplitude, but I got to know everyone (there were only about 15 people there) and in time I became an artist making 3D objects, doing animation etc for games like Antigrav and the Karaoke Revolution series.
One day, the CEO gathered us all during lunch to pose a question to us. The studio had the opportunity to make a game based off Disney’s “Duck Tales”, or we could create a music game based on guitar. Most of us were musicians, so we obviously said yes to the music game, which became Guitar Hero and completely blew up.
I did a lot of different things in Guitar Hero, I 3D modeled the guitars, worked with the music instrument companies on branding, did voiceover work (I’m the tutorial voice), did motion capture modeling, and more. I remember making the ”Guitar Hero Army” Myspace page! When we started developing Guitar Hero II, I became a Producer, working with all sorts of outsourced art companies doing cinematics, 2ds and 3d art, animations, etc. I still did voiceover work at this point as well.
Guitar Hero became such a success at this point that Activision (huge video game corporation) came calling to the studio. I remember when they showed up, everyone was sending an emails around with “suits in the building, heading your way!” type messages. Anyways, long story short, they wanted to buy the IP and our studio, so they could own Guitar Hero. We had already begun working on a band based game, and they didn’t want any of that, communicating to us that they were going to create a bunch of Guitar Hero releases. This is what they used to do, just pummel the audience with a million releases. We wanted to innovate and were ready for a full band game. So we politely declined.
They went ahead and bought our publisher, Red Octane, kicking off lots of legal battles and competition. They went on to produce more Guitar Hero releases, and we took that band game idea and created the Rock Band franchise.
I stayed at that company for about 10 years, and got to do so much fun work on the Rock Band franchise, including the release I’m most proud of, The Beatles Rock Band. Throughout my career there, I got to work with tons of music instrument brands, curate and art direct the creation of instruments, worked with 100’s of artists like the Beatles, Green Day and so many more. I was also able to get the bands I was in into Guitar Hero! The metal band I’m in, Megasus, had a song in Guitar Hero, and I got the Crowns song “Mr. Fixit” into Guitar Hero II.
From there I went on to work at other music or audio based companies and start ups, I’ve been very lucky. So, yeah, a lot of hats worn, but I just take the opportunities as they come you know?
HFZ: The Amazing Crowns are back. Why now? And is an extended tour possible? JASON: I guess we’re back? But really in a limited capacity, as I don’t foresee us doing the hard touring we used to do. We wanted to reunite, as we’re still alive and able to have fun making music. And we missed our fans very much. It’s been incredibly gratifying to play these shows and see everyone. We were out in LA and Orange County for a couple shows last March and the response was insane, it's like they never forgot about us. I spent hours and hours after those shows, just talking to our fans and hearing what they’ve been up to, meeting their families, and just being so happy to be alive to do this. We’ve got some unfinished business to attend to in the form of songs we never got to record in the studio at the time of our breakup. We realized that we have an album’s worth of material that we played in our sets for a couple years that never made it to the studio or our albums. There are a couple on our live album “Payback Live” that we want to record in the studio, and a bunch more. Ultimately we want to release this as an album and maybe include some new material. We’ll see where we’re at after that. As for now, we’re playing some festivals, playing specific shows in specific places as they come up, and exhuming the yearly series of shows we used to put on in our hometown, called “The Providence Payback”. I also created a new website for the band’s archives, as well as merch, lyrics, gigography, and tour dates here.
HFZ: I was a trucker for 15 years. When I first started in ‘05, an old timer said to me, “It gets in yer blood.” At the time, I didn’t really believe him. But looking back, especially now that I've been off the road for the past five or so years, I realize I do miss it. There’s something about life on the road that is hard to shake. Is any of that at play here for you or the rest of the ‘Crowns?
JASON: YES. Even after all these years, I’m a total night owl, I get my best work done at night. It’s been difficult now that I’m a dad, as parenthood has a lot of early morning drop offs and appointments, but I’m dealing ok. The thing about the endless road that I very much miss is the freedom it brings through a schedule. What I mean is, you know what you’re doing at all times of the day or night, each time slot is filled up and the days just go by. The military is a lot like this as well. The Crowns did a little over 1,000 gigs in our 8 year career, there were years where I spent maybe 3 weeks total back home in Providence, RI. It was a truly nomadic lifestyle that I gave every bit of myself to. I both miss it and do not miss it you know?
HFZ: What else should folks know about you and/or The Amazing “Royal” Crowns?
JASON: Regarding me, you can learn about me at my site: https://www.jasonskendall.com
Regarding the Crowns:
We’re not, and never were, a swing band.
After all this time, we’re not angry at the Royal Crown Revue for suing us (this is a whole other interview). It’s water under the bridge. If anything, it’s strengthened our resolve that major labels don’t care about independent or small artists.
We ARE playing shows again, just reach out to our booking agent HERE if you want us to play your town or festival.
We recently got back in the studio after 25 years and recorded our version of Social Distortion’s “Prison Bound” for an SD tribute album. You can listen HERE
The usual social media links: Instagram, Facebook, Threads (fuck twitter, though to be honest meta is no better)
Please go to www.royaltotheloyal.com and if you see a gig missing from our gigography, reach out to us, or if you want to send us a digitized version of a flyer, picture, ticket stub, set list, recording (anything really), from one of our shows or tours, we’ll credit you if we use it in the archive. Send to amazingroyalcrowns@gmail.com
NOTE: All band-related photos were provided by Jason Kendall (thanks again, dude!). Everything else was stolen.
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