Credit: Dove ShoreDirty Heads begin their tour with Slightly Stoopid tonight, July 8, in Simsbury, Connecticut. Even though both bands trace their sound back to Sublime, this summer trek will be the first time Dirty Heads and Slightly Stoopid have embarked on a full tour together.
"Surprisingly I think a lot of the fans in the reggae-rock world have thought they we'd gone out with Slightly Stoopid before, but we haven't," Dirty Heads frontman Jared "Dirty J" Watson tells ABC Radio.
The bands did play a few one-off shows together and they quickly became friends, an element that Watson thinks will make this tour extra special.
"It's always nice to have a tour come organically and be friends with the band before rather than just having it be some strategic industry-type tour," Watson says. "So when they asked us to go out with them, it was a huge honor for us as a band that grew up with Sublime, and then it went from Sublime to Slightly Stoopid."
Being that they're fans of Slightly Stoopid as well as friends with them, touring together is giving Dirty Heads the extra motivation to put on a great show.
"We look at it as a band like, 'Oh, OK, we gotta step our game up if we're going to go out with Slightly Stoopid,'" Watson tells ABC Radio. "They're really f**king good, if you haven't seen them live, they're amazing. So it made us be like, 'All right, let's go start rehearsing and we gotta get our chops up and make sure that we're on point when we go out with these guys, make sure that they're stoked and the fans are happy with the shows.'"
Even without that extra motivation, Dirty Heads have always had fire in their bellies when it comes to live shows.
"I think our live show is one of the most important things, if not the most important thing, when we think about the Dirty Heads," Watson says. "People going to our show and leaving saying, 'Holy s**t, I'm going to remember that night for the rest of my life,' that's what we literally strive to do every time we play a show."
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