Music

Q & A: Bruise Cruise founders find love, garage rock at sea

by Sam Sutherland

It’s a winning combination — booze, music, and the open water of the Caribbean. In the past, sea and tune enthusiasts were mostly treated to big-name, mainstream acts on cruises staged by bands like Weezer and the Barenaked Ladies. Which made last year’s debut of the Bruise Cruise, a floating music festival featuring acts like Black Lips, Vivian Girls, The Strange Boys, Surfer Blood, Thee Oh Sees, and Ty Segall such an exciting anomaly. It was a chance to see bands that normally play the dingiest dives of your town amidst the sun and surf of a friggin’ cruise ship.

Founded by Turbo Fruits vocalist and guitarist Jonas Stein (formerly of Be Your Own Pet) and Panache Booking’s Michelle Cable, the Bruise Cruise’s second year features headliners Fucked Up alongside King Khan and the Shrines, the Softpack, the Dirtbombs, and more. Plus comedy from Neil Hamburger, weirdness from Jello Biafra, puppet shows, fine dining, and a bunch more madness. Naturally, it’s a pretty intense undertaking, so we caught up with Cable and Stein to discuss the process of putting it all together.

AUX: It’s such a great idea for an event. What was the specific genesis of the concept?

Jonas Stein: My pops used to work for an artist by the name of Vince Neil, who played in Mötley Crüe. A few years ago, they put on something called Vince Neil’s Motely Cruise, and I had the option of going. I got to go two years in a row, and it was a real blast seeing a musical event on a cruise ship. Just being on that ship, even when my friends and peers weren’t there with me, I was having a good time. I’ve been playing rock and roll around the country since I was 17, and I’ve been exposed to a lot of garage rock and young rock and roll, and the idea lingered in the back of my mind, doing a similar thing but with bands like ours. A few years went by, and Michelle and I started working together. We were in Florida at the end of a tour, and the idea came up. We put our heads together, and Michelle has really been able to take the idea and maximize its potential. It’s in her nature. She’s a great booking agent, and working together, we’ve been able to turn this little idea into the epic Bruise Cruise.

Michelle Cable: I go to festivals all the time. I found myself getting kind of bored with how festivals were. Jonas brought up this idea of doing a rock and roll festival on a boat with bands we like, and it seemed like an opportunity to do something fresh and interesting. We wanted to put the best elements of a festival and a vacation together and create this surreal experience. Music cruises have been going on for a long time, but never with this young an audience. Most of the people who came on the boat never go on vacations. They maybe do work-related travel, but they never take that next step for themselves.

You mentioned that there are other musical cruises like Mötley Crüe, the Barenaked Ladies, Weezer —

Cable: Yeah, Weezer started a cruise after ours.

Rip-off artists.

Cable: Yeah.

But what you said makes a lot of sense. I’ve never been on vacation since I became an adult, so it appeals to me. Is that a concern, though, when you’re marketing to a smaller demographic?

Cable: Definitely. We’re picking bands that are weirder, and not everyone knows who they are. We’re working with a niche type of music. The biggest problem is that people aren’t going on vacation because they can’t afford it. So that was a big thing for us, making it as inexpensive as possible, and making sure that the people who paid for it got everything they paid for and more. We give you a ton of free stuff. This year we’re doing tons of stuff beyond just music. We have a dating game, we’re doing a Q&A with this soul artist Blowfly, we’re going to have lectures, multiple dance parties, comedy hours, karaoke, and other stuff in addition to regular concerts. We started a record label, so now everyone gets free vinyl. You get a tote bag with t-shirts and koozies and a ton of free stuff. We’re trying to give people, besides the experience, a ton of mementos. You get a bottle of wine in your room, and we have open bar hours. We wanted to make sure it was well-organized and executed, so no one could say it wasn’t worth it.

Stein: We wanted to go over the top with everything.

Cable: We were told by everyone that trying to market an event nine months in advance when people are used to doing things last minute would be impossible. And it’s difficult.

Do you guys get a chance to enjoy it at all?

Stein: It’s intense. I think last year Michelle got eight hours of sleep over three days, and I got nine, because I accidentally slept in. It’s a lot of work, but at the same time, it’s really stimulating, because you get to see something you’ve been working on for months and months and months and months happen. You see things go well, and you see people have the time of their lives.

Cable: This year, we know what to expect, and we have a larger staff. My hope is that we’ll be able to enjoy ourselves a little more. But it’s rewarding seeing something come to life that was just this random idea we had. To see all this weird happiness – last year, a couple got engaged on the boat during a Ty Segall set. There’s 10 or 12 couples that are still together from meeting on the cruise. We have people from Australia, Europe, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, and we want to create this platform for people to meet and exchange ideas. I feel like I got more hugs than I ever got in my entire life on that ship.

I feel like it’s one thing to have an idea like this, but taking the extra step of finding a fucking boat… How hard is that first step?

Stein: I had a little bit of insight from my dad. His first thing was ‘Call Carnival Cruise Lines.’ We called, and said that this was what we wanted to do. We probably talked to five of the wrong people before we got someone who could figure out how to do it. Michelle has a lot of followers on Twitter for her booking agency, so she was able to say, ‘Does anyone know a promoter in the Bahamas?

Cable: Someone responded. He connected us with Senior Frogs, which is the most ridiculous venue to be doing this at. But it’s kind of appropriate for how weird having all these bands in the Bahamas is.