Dopethrone: Chaos, Riffs, and Revelry on The West Coast

Dopethrone’s first West Coast tour has been an exhilarating experience for the band, as they’ve ventured into new territories and connected with their fans. In an interview with Frozen Moon Promotion’s J. Donovan Malley, the band members expressed their excitement about playing in unfamiliar cities and bringing together fans from all walks of life. They also share a few insane stories from the road and tease that the best Dopethrone is still yet to come, as they are in the midst of writing new material.

J. Donovan Malley (FMP): This is the band's first West Coast tour. Talk to me about what it's like doing a tour like that where you know that you're going to be hitting places that you've never played before. Is it interesting rolling into a town without knowing what it's going to be like?

Shawn Ellingham (Drums): It's going to be super exciting to play in places where we've never been. I'm always curious to see what will be the response and the hype and meet new people and make new friends. So for me, that's very exciting.

Vincent “Vince” Houde (Vox & Guitar): America's very divided right now. It's like we're a band that truly likes to bring people together and include all kinds of scenes, whether old, young, or anyone in between. You'll see all sorts of people at our shows, and that's what we aim to do. That's kind of our mission—our goal is to accomplish just that. The States are interesting in that each state feels like a different country with its own laws. You get a bit of that, you know? So, it's intriguing.

Shawn: Driving across the country really shows how different each state can be, right? The changes from state to state can be drastic sometimes. In some places in the U.S., you can still go to jail for having weed, which is ridiculous. It's the same for something like a pocket knife.

FMP: You crossed the border during a tense time. How was it handling visas?

Vince: Well, we first tried to build this big drone, and we had a lot of duct tape. The band was supposed to attach themselves to the drone and then fly over (laughs).

Shawn: Like you say, things have changed obviously because of the new presidency and stuff like that. And I think that's the reason why I actually had an issue or almost had an issue getting into the States this time.

FMP: What happened?

Shawn: Twenty years ago, my girlfriend and I were driving near Lacolle, which is south of Montreal and close to the New York State border. We were actually heading to a friend's place on the Canadian side. Since it's in the woods, you can easily get lost if you’re not paying attention. We accidentally ended up at the border.

Here I am half naked because we just went fucking swimming and I had this joint in my hand and I'm rolling it. I'm looking at this fucking border and like my girlfriend's like, “Well, let's just turn around.” I was like, “No, we're going to get chased by both sides. Let's just be completely honest.” 

The border guards noticed the weed right away because we didn’t hide it. We were upfront about what happened. I believe they appreciated my being completely candid and transparent. They mentioned they would just say that the “evidence” got destroyed during testing, so it was merely a suspicion of possession. No big deal. When we toured the East Coast, we crossed the border into Vermont without any issues. We got through there as quick as a bunny.

But this time, I think it's because of Trump and everything; they really started to look into us at the border and all our records. Basically, the border said, “Oh, you were stopped for marijuana once.” I was thinking, wait a minute, that's not even supposed to be there. Things were really tense and took a long time. Something from twenty years ago popped up. We eventually got in, but we weren’t sure for a while.

Mike Riopel (Bass): It was touch and go there for a second. Yeah.

Vince: So, the visas ended up costing a lot for the two tours. If you had to guess a number, what would it be? I can ask you questions, right?

FMP: That's absolutely fine. A thousand bucks a piece?

Vince: HA!, It cost us 10k. And the thing is, it's like, if they refuse you, if one of us doesn't get through the border, then you don't get your money back either. It's a fucking lot of money.

It's kind of like a gamble. The band could have gone bankrupt. So it's no wonder a lot of bands are, you know, iffy about trying to get through anymore. Its a good topic that I’m really glad you brought up. I think Americans don't get how hard it is. Canada is like –  if you have a DUI maybe – but it's usually way easier to get to Canada to play a show than, you know, unless you're like, you know, you don't murder a bunch of people or something. But in Europe, piece of cake.

So Americans, they're like, come to America, come to America, come to America. They don't get it. We tried it many times, and there are always issues with stuff like that, but now we finally made it, so we're happy about it.

Mike: If I can just put a note on the price – it should not cost this much. We did everything on time, but they are short on staff, and so they just sent us an email in September – two months before the tour fucking starts – saying we had been caught in a backlog and our file would be sent to California for processing, where it's a six-month delay. So the only solution they offered was to go “premium,” and premium is like $6,000 each.

Shawn: They trick people. It's a fucking scam.

Vince: They tricked us at Amazon… laughs…Thank you for buying with us…laughs…Order premium, please.

Shawn: I think they’re doing it on purpose. After COVID, a lot of bands are not even bands anymore. And it's like, they're trying to bleed us dry. It's like, a small business. And it's like, now it's like we're forced to just try to fucking keep the train going.

Vince: It was their mistake. They should be saying sorry because we have to do what we should. They should be like, “I'm so sorry. We fucked up.” I don't want to get into politics, but it's just a fact. Everybody's going to eat a giant fucking shit sandwich to quote Bill Burr here.

Mike: One of the things that I'm super excited about is discovering all these bands we get to play with and tour with. Kadabra is fucking insane stuff – a fucking awesome band. Great musicianship, great sound, great tone, great stage presence.

FMP: Are they with you for the entire run?

Shawn: Yeah. Another band that we're going to play with that I'm super stoked about is Chrch. I'm super excited about that, too.

Vince: They've been there for almost 15 years I think. They're female-fronted. Very, very heavy. Very fucking hard. Super drone-y but there's a groove to it. Super slow. It swallows you alive.

Shawn: And the sonic textures are really nice.

Vince: I think they got sued because their name was “Church.” And now their name is C-H-R-C-H. They had to take out the U. I was like, why don't you just put two dots on the top? Like Motorhead does. That would have been fucking awesome. Then it would have been the same. But they were just like, nah, if I just take the U out. So it's like CHRCH, but they pronounced it “Church.” That's why there's no U. That's the reason.

Mike: There’s another thing I'm super excited about. Traveling is something I really enjoy. Back when I was a bit younger, some years ago, for a while there, I was homeless. But back in the day, since I had no responsibilities or anything, I would just travel as much as I could. You know, bus or panhandle. And I hitchhiked all over. One of the things that I'm super glad about the situation right now is I feel like after all these years, I get to do the same thing, but better. I get to actually travel.

Shawn: Plus, you don't get chased by anybody. No stabbing. You actually get a lot of free booze.

Vince: And you get to jam out every night.

Mike: To me, that's kind of an upgrade. I enjoy the whole travel aspect a lot.

Shawn: It feels like home, you know, to travel. Sometimes, when you've been traveling a lot and stagnate at the same place for too long, it feels like... You get depression, you know? It feels like you're not moving forward.

When you're on tour, you get that feeling where your cells regrow or some shit. So far, one of the things that I find that I look forward to of touring the States, of traveling in the States, compared to Canada, there are some different types of ecosystems, but in the States, so far, it seems like you have a lot of different types of landscapes, you know?

FMP: What has been the biggest challenge for the band?

Vince: Wait, I want to bring up something. I was remembering this the other day. It's a fun story. Is that cool for you?

FMP: Absolutely!

Vince: So, it all really kicked into gear for the band when Voivod curated Roadburn (2012). They had to choose a band from Montreal that was really not known at all, and that was us, Dopethrone. To be honest, we started the band as a joke. It was kind of just a bunch of guys barbecuing and just having fun. Just fucking around, you know? The next thing you know, we get an email from Voivod and Walter from Roadburn saying we were invited to play Roadburn. And it went from there (he holds his hand to the ground) to boom, like way up there (he holds his hands above his head).

It was kind of like, for us, we just played little squats and all that shit, like little shows. That's kind of like the scene we came from. So it's our first show overseas. I didn’t really get nervous. I didn’t care, really. We take the plane, and we get there in the morning. We get to the airport, and we wait for the oversize where they put our guitars, right?

THEY DIDN’T HAVE MY GUITAR!

I'm supposed to play the biggest show in my life and my guitar wasn't there, and now I'm just fucking losing it. I got my other luggage and I'm kicking it, and, you know, the security starts fucking freaking out – they don't fuck around over there. It's my stuff, I can kick it if I want to. The people at the airport were like, “Don't worry, you'll get it tomorrow.” But, I’m fucking playing a show in like five hours, so I'm fucking losing my tits. I'm just like, what are we gonna do? Let's just go on site, let's just go, and we'll figure it out. You know?

Things are pieces of a puzzle, you know, like the Tetris game. You just need to fit things into place. We're gonna trust the universe on this one because what else can we gonna do? We're not just gonna cry in the airport. So we fucking go to the fest. I couldn't find a guitar that worked. They had a guitar at the fest, like a spare one, but we tuned in B-standard and It wasn't set up for that kind of stuff. I couldn't fucking use that, so I thought, well, I guess we're fucked.

So I just started fucking chugging whiskey. Nobody told us we had a green room, so we just found a building near the fest, and we went in and got wasted. We didn't break in, the door was open, so it was fine. The bassist and I ended up on the fire escape. Carl, our drummer back then, passed out somewhere. We went all the way up to the top of the building and we're gonna nap for a little bit because we're tired.

Then we get woken up by security yelling at us, “YOU CAN’T BE HERE!”

 I'm like, oh, my bad, we're playing at the festival. He's like, “You guys should be in your green room then.” At this time, when the band started, we didn't even know about anything like a green room. We didn't have a rider, we didn't have anything like that, we didn't have management, it was just three guys, and just being totally wasted. The security guy got in touch with someone, and they picked us up and brought us up to our green room. I was like, “We have a room just for us?” We're like, “What the fuck, a fridge full of beer? For us?”

So by that time, I'm drunk as shit. I started telling people about my guitar and someone had one that would work in B Standard. We're supposed to be almost going on at that point. The clock is ticking down. It's like 10 minutes. I go downstairs and I'm like, we're doing it. Let's go boys. But I'm fucking plastered – shit-faced. But we did it, you know, but it was that close. It was all meant to be, I think. It was weird. “Coincidence” is just a word for those who don't understand that there's a bigger scheme at times, you know? Yeah. Like we're all living in a similar situation. I tell you what, I get goosebumps just talking about it.

FMP: I can imagine. Did you ever get your guitar back?

Vince: Yeah, but they didn't even send it to me. I had to drive all the way to get it in Montreal. What the fuck, man? And they wanted me to pay something for a fee for some fucking shit. I was like, “Hell no,” and I started freaking out again. My friend was like, don't freak out at the airport. You’ll get fucked. I'm like, yeah, you’re right. I should have just walked in with duct tape on my face at this point.

I was like, “What do you mean I have to pay? You almost fucked up my entire fucking show at Roadburn.”

Shawn: I wanted to say something about the challenges we face as a band. In some ways, because we are sort of these shithead punks, we like to party. We're very anti-establishment. We're like flipping the bird to everything and everything.

The challenge is not to get too fucked up, you know, because we drink all the time. Like, we wake up and have a beer, you know. It's just a question of learning to pace yourself – to know when is a good time to start. If I don't drink a little bit – any of us, for that matter – before we get on stage, it's not a question of being nervous, it's a question of withdrawing.

Vince: Yeah, you're going to shake so much, you're going to do blast beats constantly.

Shawn: Well, that's true – that's another thing, too. I'll be off. And it's like, as a band, you're only as good as the drummer. If I'm fucking up it's a harder job for everybody. I don't like holding that on my shoulder. And I do have, you know, I do have issues with saying “no.” I’ll just say I'm the personality type where if you throw something – anything–  on the table or, ultimately, I might want to go at it, right? So the challenge has been learning a bit of restraint because there's always a party.

Vince: Yeah. That's something I still have to learn. But it's the hardest time, a lot of times. We'll hang out in the green room, not because we're snobby, just because we'll hang out in the club and people will be like, you want a shot? Do you want a little bit of this? A little bit of that? You know, you want a small boost? We have crazy stories, dude.  It's like a tsunami of drugs. I love it, though.

Shawn: I'm not sure that we don't like to hang out with everyone. But, like, it was like we try to get fucked up just enough. The challenge is you want to perform. Then, after the set, you can go really crazy. At the same time, you also know that you have another show to play. You know, it's a balance – It’s a challenge.

Like the 24 hours it took to get here. Right? From Montreal. You know, like planes and automobiles and trains, you name it, and all that. I probably went through it. 48 beers. Because it's just nothing else to do. And you realize, like, wait a minute. I don't have to play tonight. Yahoo. And then you're like, oh, I play tomorrow. And then you wake up. And I'm like, fucking, you know, shaking like bacon and stuff. So next thing you know, you have to have a couple of beers. And then you're like, oh, now I'm too drunk. And you're like, oh, OK.

Then I have to do this. Or, you know, have coffee or do some other, you know, stuff. You find a balance at some point.

Vince: We can get too excited at the first. The first shows where we're so excited to play and party. You know, and then it's kind of like, we find our balance. And the way it's organized now, it's way better than before. Imagine you're partying and you're playing and you're not getting sleep on top of it. And if you do get sleep, it's in a shitty fucking like a corridor. I had no problem with that. We come from fucking that kind of grassroots. But at the same time, just to be able to play at some point, like to literally function. 

Shawn: Check this out. Last night, I should have probably gotten stitches. Like I can practically lift this finger. I hit the cymbal and it clipped it right here. I almost need more room than I have because I kind of go into Animal mode from the Muppets. I get so excited and then eventually I almost lose control.

Vince (after picking up a fat ounce of Washington State bud from the table in the green room): Wherever we go, everywhere we go, we're gonna get free weed from people. But we can't smoke all of it. So I'm gonna wrap it up and throw little bags into the audience so they can all have some.

Shawn: On the last show of the last tour we bought too much beer yeah we just at the end of the show – actually during the show it was pretty fucking insane. There's constant stage diving and body-surfing. It wasn't ballistic in the sense of like you know let's say some of the crowd-killing hardcore shows. It was just a lot of fun and everyone had a smile.

Vince: We're gonna enjoy every fucking show, that's kind of a general consensus. Back home, when things started getting back to what we'll call so-called normal (post-COVID), people were way more enthused and way more attentive.

Shawn: Another challenge for me, personally, is just post-tour depression. Every time we leave and we go on tour, up in the van, up in the plane – when we start rolling I just feel like I’m home. I get used to not getting used to things – constantly adapting. That's kind of how I evolved as a young adult. So, to me, it kind of feels like what I was meant to do. 

Going back home and having to be a normal human, watching what you do, avoid being late because I’m in party mode all the time. 

FMP: How long does it take to kind of decompress after a tour and get back to a place where it's like okay now I’m back to some kind of baseline?

Shawn: Sometimes it takes less than a week but I would say…

Vince: I was just actually going to interject or explain – when we had the prior management tours were booked at like around 30 days, a month at a time, 130 shows a year and it was like 44 shows in a row once. No days off, maybe one at the most. So here’s the thing: It takes about a week to get used to the flow of the tour. Then for two weeks or three weeks, you're like “I'm done with this but then something happens by the end of the month like the month you're like I don't want to go home.”  You get used to this living this way and so when you get home your body's in shock it's like, “Ah shit this again?”

But now that our tours are less lengthy – they're like two weeks give or take –  it takes half the tour to get used to it. Then you can accept going back home more easily.  We're touring more instead of just doing two tours or something a year. This way, two weeks go by, and then you'll be home for about a month. Before we were kind of pushed to the limit at some point and so we would end the tour and literally not jam or talk to each other for two months because everybody's got to their breaking point.  Even the quiet chill people, at some point, will lose it, you end up not even being yourself really. Not like, “Did you call me Vince? I’m not Vince!!” Just that sometimes we're at each other and like, “That escalated quickly.” It was not really so productive because we'd be sick of each other all the time. You know, every little fucking fart because you ended up eating the chili at the club again. To a bunch of dudes stuck in a van, that's great, farts everywhere.

Mike: You can’t even light a cigarette without exploding.

Shawn: Put this in perspective. You have your routine at home, right? And now you're getting into a vehicle and whoever you're on tour with, those are your new roommates. And you don't know what their habits are, and they don't know yours. So you are trying to co-exist without pissing each other off because, I mean, I know a lot of bands that break up after touring because they can't deal with their shit. A lot of bands actually break up after their tours, especially after a Montreal show.

Vince: That’s because nobody tells bands that when they play Montreal, they should have a day off after. There’s this stand-up comedian, Doug Stanhope, right? He said one time he came and me and my buddy, we got him really fucked up, and he's like, he said, “When you go to Montreal and you're a performer, make sure you have a day off. Because people will get you fucked up.”

Shawn: It has a really strong culture that likes partying.

Vince: Montreal used to be like Las Vegas.

Shawn: I mean when I was a kid I would go buy milk for my parents, you get them their smokes, you get them they’re beer, and now you're smoking and getting drunk yourself as a kid. So it's very – I don't want to say loose – but it's definitely easy to get stuff.

Vince: And it's affordable and always something going on. Like I said, I remember buying a lottery ticket once and I was like 12 and like winning, and then I couldn't just keep the money. Right.

FMP: What's something in 2025 that you're looking forward to kind of further on down the year? What's something that you're really pumped for?

Vince: We got a new bassist. Not too long ago. This fucker over here (points to Mike). So we're really looking forward to writing new stuff because it's a new element.

Shawn: That's going to be fun. I'm super excited about that. Plus, he's more involved in the writing than the previous bassist was.

Vince: It's cool because now when we sit down to jam, we’re keeping our sound but breaking out of it. I’m like, “Oh, we're going this way? Cool!”. It's really exciting. Most of the time, Shawn and I were writing. The last album, Broke Sabbath, was me and Shawn who wrote it all. Now, this next one – we already have one song that's almost done – A song and a half maybe – we've got some really great stuff fired up.

FMP: Are there plans in terms of like, you want to hit the studio by the end of the year maybe or earlier?

Vince: Sometimes you can compose three songs in a week, and sometimes you can spend three months with them. It all really depends.

Shawn: When I joined, the band was kind of already going in a certain direction in terms of style and sound – like an evolution of sorts. I kind of helped that progression. I've known Vince for 20 years – if not more – and we already had a connection musically speaking. So, as soon as we started getting to writing, it just came out really easy. We wrote the album in a couple of months.

Vince: Yeah, we just got fucked up and just wrote it.

FMP: Do you find that a tour like this will kind of lead to that inspiration for new material?

Vince: Oh, sure.

Shawn: Sometimes, just like, you know, the party at the end of the night, there are just riffs that come to mind. Sometimes, doing a soundcheck, a new riff will pop up. Sometimes we don't even talk about it.

Vince:  We just start a beat out of nowhere while doing a soundcheck. And I'll just kind of go off like this (plays air guitar furiously). Then we’re like, we should use that.

FMP: Who's the one who makes sure that they remember what the fucking riff was?

Vince: No one really. That’s why there are so many lost riffs (laughs). But most of the time it's my phone. Sometimes I go, hey, this is good. I'm going to record this. That's kind of our recording process. I just kind of go “boom” and record different things.

In the past with some of the other albums, I remember going back on my phone and there were just hours of riffs.

FMP: So do you go through and mine it?

Shawn: Exactly, you listen to it and you're like, okay, then you kind of want to tweak it, improve it, and you see where it can go. It's kind of like pre-production.

Mike: If I can add slightly on this – as the new person. I'm super excited to write with these guys. It’s funny because Dopethrone was actually one of the first bands that I discovered. It was one of my super early inspirations. I listened to them so much and I loved them so much.

Back then, I started my own band for a while. So I've been playing this style of music for a bit more than 10 years now. At first, when I was trying to compose songs, it was actually super fucking hard for me to just not come up with a riff that didn’t sound too much like Dopethrone. I had to force myself, I had to force myself to NOT make a Dopethrone riff.

Vince: And now, and now, oh my God. It's crazy because we just met randomly on the street and I just invited him to my house.

FMP: Last question, tell me more about how you met.

Mike: I was super hungover, and I was going to the corner store to try to buy something to eat to recover from the hangover. When I was walking down the street, Vince just ended up walking past me, you know, and we ended up at the corner store together. My card just got declined, and I didn't have enough money to pick up whatever I was trying to buy. Vince was like, “I'm good for it. You want to grab a beer by the lake on top of that?”

Shawn: He didn't even know the guy.

Mike: He ended up buying me, I think it was like a six-pack and smokes. And I didn't have breakfast, I just ended up going to this place and we drank the whole afternoon and he was showing me his guitar and stuff like that. And that's how we met. It was right before they released Trans-Canadian Anger. Which is a fucking insanely awesome album.

Actually, the band I had at the time, the direction that I wanted to go was different from a lot of sludge – you know, punk riffs and then like slow riffs – next to each other. My vision was that instead of doing these types of riffs next to each other, what if the two styles are kind of blended in the same riff, you know? I was like working on that, you know, and this is exactly at the point where I met these guys. And when I first heard this song from Trans-Canadian Anger before they released it, I was like, God damn, this is exactly what I had in mind, you know. Not only did they do it before, but they also did it even better than I was envisioning, you know. It was like we were supposed to meet up.

Vince: Yeah, it was really insane.

You can check out the band’s music and support the band at their Bandcamp.