He was the frontman for Kansas City band that toured the world. Now comes the memoir
Two years ago while Matt Pryor was embarking on a tour to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his Kansas City band’s first album, he found himself in a “weird headspace.”
Despite having launched the Get Up Kids, one of the pivotal acts to fuel rock’s “second-wave” emo scene, the frontman began to second guess what exactly that meant.
“I got into this strange depression spiral of reliving the late ’90s, and I started wondering, ‘What am I doing now? Was that the only thing I’ve ever done that’s any good?’ he recalls.
“I began to feel like Uncle Rico from ‘Napoleon Dynamite,’ who’s always talking about the big game from high school even though he’s in his 40s. I never wanted to be like that.”
Grappling with those emotions led Pryor to take up a new challenge: writing an autobiography. The resulting “Red Letter Days” published by Washed Up Books arrives in stores on Jan. 23. (The title is taken from his band’s 1997 EP “Red Letter Day.”) The book focuses on his formative stretch of 1990-2000, when Pryor went from attending all-ages shows as a punk-loving teen to touring the world during the alternative-rock heyday.
“My idea was to do a ‘memoir’ … but with a story arc to it,” says the Lawrence-based musician.
“In my mind, it was like, ‘Here’s this kid who all he ever wanted to do was be in a band and go on tour. Eventually, he works hard, gets to form a band and go everywhere he wants.’ But then at the end of it, he’s left with, ‘Well, now what?’”
Interviewed at a Lawrence coffee shop that also sells bikes, Pryor is dressed all in black and wields a surprisingly fleecy beard.
“Before I go on tour, I’ll get my beard trimmed so I don’t look like Gandalf,” he quips. “I’ll just look like a prospector, not a full-blown wizard.”
His upcoming tour to support “Red Letter Days” is advertised as “an evening of songs and stories.” His trek will start with four cities: Baltimore; Philadelphia; Hamden, Connecticut; and New York City. More will be announced later.
This adds another handful of dates to the touring inventory Pryor has amassed over three decades. The singer-guitarist speculates he’s racked-up several thousand live shows and performed in something like 40 countries, whether as a member of the influential Get Up Kids or in his post-Kids bands New Amsterdams, The Terrible Twos and Radar State.
Has writing a 228-page book about his extensive career proved cathartic?
“Well, I’ve been sober since February,” the 46-year-old musician admits. “So I feel like it’s cathartic after the fact. I enjoyed writing it. I got a similar feeling writing the book that I do writing music, and I thought that was really invigorating.”
Pryor’s favorite chapter is titled “It’s Dark Out Lately,” which was actually the first one he attempted. It proved a turning point when wondering if he had the skill and patience to pen a whole book.
“I was trying to kind of channel an almost Bukowski, noir-like thing about touring,” he says. “How that particular life sometimes feels like being out to sea.”
The irony of his publisher being named Washed Up is not lost on Pryor. He at first thought the company’s name was a bit “rude and condescending.” But now he’s embraced it in certain respects.
“During my kind of dark period, you can probably describe it like being washed up,” he says. “But it wasn’t that I felt washed up as much as I felt like maybe others perceived me that way. As much as you want to say, ‘I don’t care what people think,’ when you’re creating things for public consumption, it does creep into your brain. I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years. I’m pretty thick-skinned. But people can be mean.”
“When Matt first sent me some writing he had completed, I could hear his voice immediately,” says Tom Mullen, owner of Washed Up. “It was intimate with no punches pulled, and from my relationship with him through the years personally and professionally, I knew then it was going to be authentic and real.”
The Los Angeles-based Mullen started a website called Washed Up Emo in 2007 to highlight the mid-’90s/early 2000s emo and post-hardcore scene. This gave birth to a podcast, and in 2017, a publishing house.
“To see words written this way after reading his lyrics for years, there was a connection I knew other readers and fans of Matt’s work would love. Similar to his voice on record, this was his voice on paper, and it couldn’t have been more natural to read,” Mullen says.
The Get Up Kids were formed by Pryor, Jim Suptic and brothers Rob Pope and Ryan Pope in 1995 in Johnson County. Pryor had just graduated Bishop Miege High School before trying out University Missouri-Kansas City for a year. He would ultimately move to Lawrence in 1999.
Some of “Red Letter Days” is inspired by journal entries he made during this period. But he says very little is taken verbatim.
“I wrote a lot of journals when I was younger. When I started touring, I didn’t because I found it hard to write on tour,” he says.
“(My book) is in a different voice than that of a 16-year-old. Like, even looking back on lyrics I wrote — I was 19 when we made our first record — you just go, ‘Uuuuggghhh.’ It’s still a good record. But some of the lyrics, I think, ‘Oh, I’m glad I’m not that guy anymore.’”
Battling with alcohol was not the only health condition Pryor had to deal with. At the age of 13, he got diagnosed with type 1 diabetes (aka juvenile diabetes). The condition further complicated the already complicated process of touring.
“There’s nothing I can do about it,” he says. “Like, I can’t really control type 1 diabetes with diet and exercise. And it’s a lot harder to get in to see the doctor now. When I was first diagnosed, if I had to cancel an appointment with my endocrinologist, it would take two weeks to get back in. Now it’s six months.”
If there’s one unifying aspect to his autobiography, it involves all the relentless touring. In addition to crisscrossing the U.S. dozens of times, Pryor’s group performed in such far-flung locales as Japan, Croatia, Malaysia, Australia, Argentina and Chile.
“It’s just this collapsible life of set up, tear down, set up, tear down, unpack, pack up,” he says.
“A lot of times it’s a roller coaster of a day. I’m driving all day. I’m stopping at truck stops. No one knows who I am. I’m exhausted. I don’t get to sleep. Then for one hour, I’m like the king of the world. And then everything else just comes back down again. … When you have to get a microwave burrito at 2 a.m., you’re like, ‘OK, this is my life.’”
While writing the book, he realized he could relate his experiences in some respects to the Emmy-nominated TV series “The Bear.”
He says, “The way people react to the reality of that show who are in the restaurant industry, I would like people in the touring industry to feel that I did as accurate a job portraying what it’s like be in a band and do an all-night drive.”
Regarding why he chose to only document a 10-year period that ended with the new millennium, Pryor explains, “That’s when things really started to change for the band, and I got married and began having kids and all that kind of stuff.”
As Pryor prepares for his “evening of songs and stories” excursion, he can’t help but reflect on how the process of composing album cuts and book chapters bears a striking resemblance.
“People didn’t necessarily understand (the Get Up Kids’) creative decisions in real time. They understood it later. ‘We write the things we write. We make the music we like. And if you like the things that we like, in theory, you would like what we made.’ I feel the same thing applies to the book,” he says.
“But it is kind of weird to write a book when you’re still drinking, and then to get sober and have to edit it.”
Jon Niccum is a filmmaker, freelance writer and author. His new book is titled “Power Up: Leadership, Character and Conflict Beyond the Superhero Multiverse.”
An excerpt
The opening lines of the chapter “It’s Dark Out Lately” from Matt Pryor’s memoir, “Red Letter Days”:
It’s dark out lately, has been for a while now. It’s currently forty seven minutes past 3:00 a.m. and I am at the wheel. From now until sunrise I am the captain of this Black Mariah, its bowels filled with instruments, clothing and fools. They slumber now, getting whatever inebriated version of rest can be achieved at this velocity. We are, at this tired hour, long-haul truckers. We are bound to a book of maps conveniently titled Atlas. It is our bible, our guide, and our only clue to where in the ever-living (F---) we are. Somewhere in Idaho, hours past takeoff, and more hours shy of our destination.
We left town, if you can call it that, two hundred and forty minutes ago. Sleepy college hamlet, Mormon school. Lily white, free from crime and culture. A friend of a friend of The Brothers knows a student. Five grown men going into her dorm room got the authorities called. Expulsion was averted when inquires led not to lascivious carnal acts but rather the use of the toilet. We were off to a good start.
We are troubadours and these are our stages. We vacillate between the high altars and flooded basements. We welcome both with the same enthusiasm of fools who don’t know better. For we don’t know better, we are building the boat as it sails. This ship is barely held together, and honestly, so are we.
