Out Cold interview from 1998
Like the previous post below, this Out Cold interview was also done for my teenage punk zine called Who Cares? fanzine (Issue #7). As noted in the A Global Threat interview below, I was 16 years old at the time and into UK punk and US HC. When I discovered that Out Cold were from the suburbs from Boston and living only 10 minutes away, I remember it blowing my teenage mind. How could these guys live so close and be this great, and I didn't even know them? Turns out the members of Out Cold were a lot older than me and had formed in the late '80s, put out a bunch of records, and been virtually ignored outside of Europe for most of their career to that point. But I LOVED this band from the moment I first heard them, and having them be so local only raised my interest in them.
I wrote them for an interview in the summer of 1998, if my memory serves correct. A few months went by, and i never heard anything back. Then one day, I came home from school and my mom said there was a weird message on my family's answering machine for me. I played it and heard "Hi, Erik, this is Mark from Out Cold calling you about that interview you sent to us a while back. Call me at [phone number], and we can schedule a time to do that if you're still interested." First off, my parents didn't know I did a zine. Like anybody who grew up as a teenage punk in the '90s, your parents thought punk was weird, so i always just found it best to keep everything a secret. The less they knew, the better. So how was I going to justify this? I don't remember. Secondly, I'd never conducted an in person interview in my life and was really not that assertive and was awkward as fuck. Nor did I have the means to tape record an interview. Still I called Mark back, and he must have realized I was very young by my voice. He said he hoped it was alright he'd left a message and said he'd gotten my number by looking it up in the phone book (back when people used phone books), and we managed to arrange a time to meet him at a bagel shop near his house in Dracut. I was so nervous. Scared to death is more like it. I remember I used an old answering machine found in my attic to record the interview on, and I still have the tape today. The interview went well enough, and Mark and a bit later on John (Out Cold drummer) became friendly with me. I really looked up to them, and they always treated me very well. A short time later, Mark called me again to ask me to conduct an interview for Out Cold that MRR had requested. I think I was 17 years old by that time, and I was being asked to interview my favorite local band for the mighty MRR. I thought I'd topped out in life. I'd peaked.
Mark Sheehan unfortunately passed away in 2010. It was very sad. He was always very kind to me, and I always appreciated how he treated me as a human being and not like some idiot when I was 16. But I think it showed the type of person he was deep down. When Mark passed, Out Cold effectively ended, although some material was released posthumously. So here is the interview. It's not great, but it does show some improvement over the A Global Threat interview below. Hope folks enjoy.
