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Split Lip/Chamberlain Not Looking for Money With Reunion Shows

Split Lip/Chamberlain

I was lucky enough to see Split Lip/Chamberlain during one of their three initial reunion shows a few months back. It really was one of those evenings where you come away from a show in awe.

And tonight the band has decided to make at least one more foray into live shows at New York’s Bowery Ballroom with freaking Walter Schreifels opening.

Even though Split Lip got back together a little bit before the recent rash of reunions, it’s easy to lump them into that group. It’s also easy to feel like plenty of those folks are just trying to make a grab at some cash (which is exactly what Cedric Bixler-Zavala said an At the Drive-in reunion would be, if it ever happened).

Not so for the boys from Indiana who called Doghouse Records their label home. “We were very careful about those things. We all always thought about the way things could be perceived or seen,” frontman David Moore recently told Buzzgrinder when discussing the appearance of insincerity on the part of bands getting back together.

In fact, meeting back up with the rest of the band wasn’t even a consideration for Moore when what ended up being the groundwork for a reunion was laid. As it happens, the band members — which also included Adam Rubenstein, Curtis Mead, Clay Snyder and Charlie Walker — weren’t exactly palling around.

“It was sort of a comedy of errors. I hadn’t talked to those guys forever,” Moore admitted. “Except for Adam, of course, since we continued to work together musically. But everyone else, we were out of one another’s lives entirely.”

As it happens, the guys didn’t even plan to get back in touch when Brian Peterson contacted them to do interviews for his book about the hardcore scene in the ’90s, Burning Fight.

“Part of his book entailed him interviewing each of us separately,” he said. “And he sent back our responses to his questions, but he sent back the answers to all of us — even though had done our own interviews separately. So that was my first contact with them, was reading the answers to those questions.”

Perusing the statements from his former bandmates, Moore said that the camaraderie they once shared was reinvigorated. Only it felt even more pronounced after the passage of time. “I realized that we all shared that same spirit of gratitude and thankfulness for having that time,” he intimated. “I think it’s natural for people to start to recognize there’s so much beauty there, when you get older and things start to have less of an impact

“And I don’t know if you could ever fully appreciate it when you’re in the midst of it. I think I thought there was maybe more animosity or regret than there was. But we all had the same reverence for that time.”

With that connection rekindled, jokes began to fly about the inevitable reunion. But when Peterson asked Split Lip to play a show for the book’s release, it became a reality. “We said, ‘Alright, let’s see what happens. So it was really as genuine as it could be. We were never even big enough to think we could make any money off this in the first place.

“We had a devoted following, and it has been a huge blessing. But we were so scared of cheapening it, forget about the money. The more talked, though, the more we thought, ‘You know, this about us. We’ve got plenty of shit we can repair by doing this. We can make amends with the past and celebrate it as well.’ And that’s how we approached it.”