4 years ago today: Interview ā€“ Robert Garven media was published šŸ“°ļø
Zine Ride Into Glory • Published Fri 03 Dec 2021
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Introduction
With live shows ramping back up worldwide, the time was right to take a look back at the West Coastā€™s premiere traditional metal festival, Frost and Fire. Coinciding with the announcement of next Juneā€™s Irish installment of the fest Frost and Fireland, we sat down with festival founder, Night Demon frontman and Cirith Ungol bassist Jarvis Leatherby to talk about the festivalā€™s history, as well as what he has in the works for next year.

Tickets to the latest installment of the festival series, Frost and Fireland 2022, can be purchased here: https://irongriprecords.bandcamp.com/

While reading the interview, enjoy this playlist featuring dozens of bands that have played at Frost and Fire!

Interview
While festivals are so enmeshed in European heavy metal culture you could catch dozens in a year without having to travel far (ā€¦ pre-2020, obviously), in the USA, however, itā€™s a vastly different situation for traditional metal.

By the 2010s, only a few traditional metal fests were occurring regularly in the country, and out of those only a few are continuing presently ā€“ Legions of Metal in Chicago (spun off from the longer-running Ragnarokkr), and the newer Hellā€™s Heroes in Houston.

Weā€™re going to take a look back at the premiere festival operating on the West Coast during that time, Frost and Fire. Frost and Fire occurred in Ventura, California each year from 2016 through 2019, with a second 2018 installment in London. The festivalā€™s history entwines with the two traditional metal bands from Ventura who made a name for themselves outside of just their home area: Cirith Ungol and Night Demon.

We sat down with Night Demon frontman, Cirith Ungol bassist and festival founder Jarvis Leatherby recently for a look back at the festivalā€™s history, as well as the launch of Frost and Fireland, the festivalā€™s triumphant return in Derry, Ireland next June.

RIG: Letā€™s go back a bit before the first Frost and Fire. When did the idea originally come about?

Jarvis: I was promoting concerts from the time I was like 16 years old out here. I dropped out of high school my senior year to go tour with a band, and at the time I was working at the Ventura Theater booking shows and just doing everything I could. Every night was a late night. As a 17 year old I would just show up to school with like an hour or two of sleep, and I just said, ā€œFuck this.ā€ I was flunking out of school anyway. Looking back, I wish I wouldā€™ve finished, just because I think school teaches you discipline to do and complete things, and it may not seem like it on the outside but discipline is something that I struggle with my whole life.

So I had a background promoting concerts and I did that for a few years on a pretty high level. I started out doing punk shows at the laser tag place or the bowling alley or skating rink, stuff like that, and then I graduated to doing bigger stuff. I started to bring bands over from overseas when I was 18. I helped to do Dark Funeralā€™s first U.S. tour, The Gathering, The Jesus and Mary Chain ā€¦ various bands from the U.K. and Europe. I was a metalhead and was doing a lot of things that I thought were amazing, but it was a weird time in the late ā€˜90s and early ā€˜00s. It was before high speed internet, the vinyl world was dead, T.R.L. was big ā€¦ if you werenā€™t mainstream you didnā€™t really have much of a voice.

I would book bands like King Diamond, W.A.S.P., The Damned, The Dickies, Bad Brains, D.R.I., and every show that I did I would get no more than like one hundred or two hundred people. At that time that stuff was dead. I did a Fear Factory show and drew a thousand people. I did Motorhead and Dio and got five hundred people. Together. Think about that, right?

So I had that background already, and I got out of it for a little while and started doing some other things, and really wanted to start playing again. In 2013 I put on an event here called Nardfest. Oxnard is the next town over, and Nardcore is their hardcore scene from the ā€˜80s. Bands like Ill Repute, Dr. Know, Agression, Stalag 13, etc. Thatā€™s what this area is really known for, the metal scene here was always kind of non-existent and pretty much still is. So I put on this festival there and it did pretty well and I thought, oh cool, I can do this, but I didnā€™t want that to be an annual thing.

RIG: Was 2014 when Night Demon started touring regionally?

Jarvis: Yeah. Night Demon started to really take off and hit the road. We were just a hungry band, we would take what we could get and we toured in my car.

RIG: And that same year was when you played Ragnarokkr in Chicago and Keep it True in Germany?

Jarvis: Ragnarokkr was our very first fest, that was about a month before Keep it True. We got like a hundred bucks to do it but we said fuck it, letā€™s go do this, and we flew out to Chicago and we lost money doing it. But it was great because we had been so isolated out here, we didnā€™t know that there was any kind of metal scene in the USA, and thatā€™s where we met a lot of these bands and a lot of the fans. People knew what the fuck we were doing even though we just had an EP out at the time. That was really awesome, and it was a big catalyst for us.

We were traveling to all of these festivals all over the world and there was something good about each of them, but there was also something that lacked with each of them, too. I thought to myself, thereā€™s small traditional heavy metal festivals in Chicago and New York, but thereā€™s really nothing else and thereā€™s definitely nothing on the West Coast, how can that be? So I thought I could do this in our town, and instead of shying away from it because thereā€™s no scene, I looked at it like, in the States with these other metal festivals going on you have to go to these big cities where youā€™re just another face in the crowd, and you have to navigate your way through that and itā€™s expensive. And itā€™s just like any other show to any of these venues, theyā€™re turnkey and doing concerts all the time. Maybe you get a show poster or something like that, but youā€™re just looking at a bunch of show posters on the wall including whatā€™s happening tomorrow night and what happened last night.

And I thought that Ventura was a really special place, and it offered the environment and surroundings, not just the music. People could come into town here and not just really have a good time, but have a vacation and be by the ocean with nice weather. You can see the bands anywhere, so you gotta create some magic around it. So I thought, letā€™s do this, letā€™s put something together, letā€™s start this thing.

Jarvis: So I did a one-day event in 2015. I reached out to some of the guys from Cirith Ungol who I had already known for years. I had spent years trying to reunite them and they were just like, ā€œNo way.ā€ But what happened is Night Demon started touring a lot and I would just send them photos from all over the world, ā€œLook at all these people wearing Cirith Ungol shirts, thereā€™s tattoos, thereā€™s patches. Thatā€™s the bootleg market making money, Iā€™m just here to tell you guys that people do care about you.ā€

They never thought that, because the band never toured, even though they were in the band for twenty-five years. So I said, ā€œIā€™m going to put on this thing, itā€™s a one day event, Iā€™d like to call it Frost and Fire in honor of your first recordā€ ā€“ thatā€™s kind of like the history of this town, and I thought it was a cool name for a fest ā€“ ā€œand I would like you guys to just come and sign autographs.ā€ So they agreed to that.

I had been talking to the guys in Manilla Road and they were trying to book a tour, and I said, ā€œLet me help you out with some dates. Also, could you come to Ventura to play my fest?ā€ And they said, ā€œYeah, great, letā€™s do it.ā€ Then I got a hold of the Ashbury guys in Arizona, I got those two to come out and theyā€™re kind of like the two headliners. Night Demon, weā€™re in town so weā€™ll play. There were a bunch of great L.A. bands, and before I knew it I had a killer lineup. Savage Master was on tour, there were these other bands on tour, and it just all lined up so I said keep this as like the anchor date for this thing.

So I did it in a small club, the Bombay Bar and Grill, about 300 capacity and with $15-$20 tickets. It was amazing, people had such a good time and a lot of people flew in internationally just to meet the guys in Cirith Ungol. It was great to see Rob Garven, Tim Baker, Jim Barraza, Greg Lindstrom and even Mike ā€œFlintā€ Vujeja, so we had five living members of this band there.

Attendance was about 90% people not from here. They were just like, ā€œThis place is incredible,ā€ and they told everybody when they went home about how cool the fest was, how intimate it was, how the environment was, and how we just treated everybody well. So it was like, okay, we have a sold out, small, one day fest. We managed to make it work, financially it worked ā€¦ okay, letā€™s see what we can do.

There wasnā€™t much time to bask in the success of the festival, though.

Jarvis: We run ourselves ragged all the time as Night Demon. The night before this fest we played San Francisco with Manilla Road and Savage Master, and the day after the fest we played in Tucson, Arizona for the Southwest Terror Fest. So we played San Francisco, we drove through the night and we went straight to the venue and it was all hands on deck, letā€™s set this up. The presentation was good too, we had a logo with the Frost and Fire praying skeletons, and we had lights, custom signs on the walls, banners ā€¦ we scouted everything out at the venue to design an environment where itā€™s almost like going to like some big corporationā€™s event at a ballroom at a hotel. So we just always wanted to go the extra mile with it, at the same time keeping it small and affordable and intimate. We thought it was a perfect marriage of all those things and ultimately we pulled that off.

The eventā€™s meet-and-greet with the five former Cirith Ungol members would also set things in motion for future years.

Jarvis: Oliver Weinsheimer, who organizes the Keep it True festival in Germany, he had been talking to Rob Garven for about 15 years about playing. Saying, ā€œWhatever the money is, reunite the band, weā€™ll bring you guys out.ā€ Cirith Ungol played a show in Mexico in 1982, but besides that they never played out of state, and theyā€™d never been to Europe even personally. So Oliver flew out here, I got him a hotel room, and he said, ā€œI really want to reunite this band,ā€ and he was telling me for a long time like thereā€™s no way, itā€™s impossible, and, ā€œIf it would;ve happened I wouldā€™ve been the guy.ā€

And I was like nah, these guys are my friends, I know I can do this ā€¦ but I need you to come out here and make them an offer in person. I need them to see what the scene is like, I want to bring the scene here and I want them to bask in this a little bit. So when the signing session was done, the band members, Oliver and myself went across the street to a sushi restaurant. Oliver brought them a financial offer for the band to reunite, and I told them. ā€œIā€™ll help you guys get going, with equipment and whatnot.ā€ And keep in mind other than Greg Lindstrom with Falcon these guys hadnā€™t played music for twenty-five years, not in other bands or anything. In ā€˜92 Tim and Rob sold their shit and that was it, they were done with the music industry. Theyā€™d been a band for twenty-five years and were just disenchanted with the whole thing.

But at the restaurant, this time they said, ā€œā€¦ maybe.ā€

With the first step towards a reunion finally complete, it was time for step two.

Jarvis: In November of 2015 I started pressing Rob Garven, whatā€™s going on with this? Letā€™s just try. And he was like, ā€œMan. I swore I would never touch a pair of drumsticks as long as I live.ā€ And he hadnā€™t actually touched a pair of drumsticks for almost twenty-five years. I think it was eleven years prior to that, his wife got him a pair of drumsticks for Christmas as a stocking stuffer, and he got so pissed he wouldnā€™t even touch them. She put them up in the closet and theyā€™d been sitting there ever since.

So I said why donā€™t you come down to the Night Demon rehearsal space, bring those drumsticks, you can sit on Dustyā€™s kit and just get reacquainted. So I let him do that and he jammed for about an hour. I went outside the room, and it was terrible. It wasnā€™t like riding a bike, it sounded like Animal from The Muppets ā€¦ but he got a lot of enjoyment from doing it. So I said, ā€œWhy donā€™t you come back next week, learn the songs ā€˜Frost and Fireā€™ and ā€˜Iā€™m Alive,ā€™ and me and Brent, our guitar player at the time, weā€™ll play the songs with you, weā€™ll just jam.ā€

So he said yeah, and we had a good time doing it, and I said all right. come back again next week. Weā€™ll try that and ā€œJoin the Legion,ā€ letā€™s just build this up and see how you feel playing. At the time I had called Jim Barraza, the guitar player on the Paradise Lost record, and I said, ā€œHowā€™d you feel about coming down and jamming with Night Demon to play some Cirith Ungol songs?ā€ He said, ā€œIā€™d really like that, but I donā€™t have a guitar anymore.ā€ Weā€™re like, weā€™ll get you a guitar, and I didnā€™t tell him or Rob that either one of them would be there ā€” and I didnā€™t know that they had beef. There was some crazy shit I wonā€™t get into, but they kinda both went like, ā€œOh hey ā€¦ youā€™re here.ā€ (laughs)

But we played and it went fucking great, And so from there it was Brent, Jim, Rob and I, and we would kinda do this every week and then we convinced Greg Lindstrom to start coming down, so he was the second guitarist in the fold and Brent stepped out. Tim Baker would come to every rehearsal, but he would still adamantly deny wanting to do this, and he hadnā€™t sung in so long. But he always wanted to be at the rehearsals, ā€œI just want to hang out,ā€ you know? Sp heā€™d always sit in the back of the room, and what I would do was have a microphone always on in the back. So one day we were playing ā€œFrost and Fireā€ and all of a sudden he just started singing, and we heard that voice and we were like, ā€œOh my God, this dude still has it.ā€

In December 2015, Tim, Rob and I were down in Orange County at a Metal Blade Christmas party. Brian Slagel said something along the lines of, ā€œYou guys really need to go to Europe, you really need to get the band back together.ā€ And then a little later it ended up just being TIm and I at one point, and he told me, ā€œIā€™m in.ā€ Ah dude, it was the greatest day of my life.

So thatā€™s kind of where it started and then we started fully rehearsing to get the band ready to play the following October, 2016, and thatā€™s when we were going to do Frost and Fire again.

Jarvis: I put a lineup together which was I think was a whoā€™s-who of metal, especially at the time. You look at that lineup, it was one of the greatest lineups I can imagine, you know? And my thing was I always just announced the show and said, hereā€™s the lineup, itā€™s full, here are the dates, tickets are on sale now.

I donā€™t like to tease things because when you have dreams and aspirations and you tell people about them it hurts you, because thereā€™re so many people that want to see you fail, or theyā€™ll tell you why you canā€™t do it, theyā€™ll give you all the downsides of things. And itā€™s like, I obviously know the downsides, but the upside ā€¦ it far outweighs that, right? So yeah, in February 2016, I announced the lineup and the Cirith Ungol reunion and people went nuts.

RIG: Was there ever a possibility of having the first night also at the Ventura Theater?

Jarvis: There was, but the last show Cirith Ungol ever played was at that venue. So I wanted that to be special for them, for their night, you know? Another thing is, one thing I dislike about a lot of festivals ā€” and I havenā€™t been able to pull this off every year by any means ā€” is you show up and youā€™re pumped, and youā€™re like, ā€œAll right, Iā€™m here, Iā€™m in this city, my people are here, Iā€™m going to see my bands,ā€ ā€¦ and then you party a little too hard the first night, the second night youā€™re hungover and youā€™re in the same spot, and youā€™re seeing everybody set up the same, the same vendors, itā€™s the same everything, the same vibe, but youā€™re hungover and youā€™re not having as good of a time and then you gotta go do it a third day.

I like to move things around and give people a different environment, but all within walking distance and all within our beautiful town. Youā€™re in the same vicinity, but youā€™re able to move it along and get a whole new vibe and a whole new feel and it changes the attitudes of the audience, and the bands deserve that. Youā€™re going to close it out strong on day three with the big headliner, and everybodyā€™s burnt out, thereā€™s no mystery, thereā€™s no whimsical magic to the environment that theyā€™re in.

So I wanted to bring it into the small club the first night, bring it to the big venue the second night, especially because we were always going to have more people doing a single-day pass for that one, especially local people and people from L.A. that really just wanted to see Cirith Ungol, and then bring it back to the small place again for a daytime thing, have Ashbury play, and kind of have a wind-down. And that worked out really well.

RIG: That was a really nice change of pace, to have the final day be more condensed and earlier in the day, rather than like a third twelve-hour day in a row.

Jarvis: Yeah. We had Ashbury for two hours, then we had Black Death Resurrected and Grim Reaper, it was great. You can get musiced out, you can get burned out, and you want the festival-goers to be able to go, ā€œHey, I need a break on this third day,ā€ or maybe, ā€œI just want to go to the beach,ā€ itā€™s like people canā€™t always spend an entire week here, so we always have that in mind. Weā€™re always thinking about the fans and weā€™re fans, so itā€™s like what do we want to see? What do we want to go to? So if we can answer those questions, we can facilitate this for everybody else.

RIG: So the decision to do it again, was that primarily spurred on by the reaction to the 2016 installment?

Jarvis: Yeah, it was purely pressure. We did the pre-fest at the Ventura Theater, which was our annual Night Demon hometown show, and that went really well, and then we sold the following days out with bands playing Bombay Bar and Grill. And we donā€™t hire a lot of outside people, so not only am I the festival organizer, but weā€™re running around, Iā€™m picking people up from hotels, weā€™re doing all the backline, weā€™re doing the catering, I played in Cirith Ungol, Night Demon and Jaguar, and I donā€™t know how I have the energy for this. Sometimes I think I donā€™t anymore these days but I look at it now and itā€™s like, wow, it actually happened. Again, I felt like I was able to put together a really good lineup, and bring it to the small club.

Originally we were going a permit to do an outdoor stage at the Bombay Bar and Grill, but that ended up being pulled by the city, because they heard the words ā€œheavy metal,ā€ so weā€™re still in that phase where this music is fifty years old, but the people running shit, who arenā€™t even that old ā€¦ a square is a square, and the mainstream is always going to fear this stuff, because they donā€™t understand it. Yet theyā€™ll put on these beer festivals in the park all the time, and they run them from like 11am to 8pm, and at 8pm they just shut it down and dump everybody out drunk onto the streets, and thatā€™s when shit happens. So Iā€™m always waiting for hard rock to be like the next Frank Sinatra, where itā€™s like weā€™re on PBS, like how old does it need to be?

But maybe thatā€™s part of why Iā€™m attracted to it, and maybe thereā€™s still a rebelliousness about it and I like that, but you couldnā€™t find any more smart and educated and good-willed people than in the heavy metal scene. And while we donā€™t need the approval of people on the outside, itā€™s still disheartening to be shut down by them ā€¦ ultimately, though, we donā€™t need them anyway.

RIG: Was Fist the first time you had a band drop out after the announcement had been made?

Jarvis: That was the first time.

RIG: Thatā€™s not a bad ratio, honestly.

Jarvis: Yeah. It was supposed to be three U.K. bands, Fist, Jaguar and Mythra. Raven I consider an American band at this point. And it ended up with having to sell less tickets than I wanted to, and it was what I didnā€™t want with the same venue each day instead of an outdoor thing, but you have to do what you have to do and people still had a great time.

RIG: So 2018, you did two fests. The first one was in England.

Jarvis: Frost and Fire: London, yeah. Cirith Ungol and Night Demon were both asked to play the Rock Hard Festival in Germany, and Ungol had never been to England, and I thought, ā€œWell this needs to happen.ā€ So I said letā€™s do a Frost and Fire in London, letā€™s do it at a couple of venues there that are across the street from each other. I called my buddies in Angel Witch and asked if they were into it, they were, so it was those two bands, Night Demon, Wytch Hazel and Amulet. Five band bill at a five hundred person club. The night before I did a New Wave of British Heavy Metal thing with Jaguar, Bashful Alley and Mythra.

We oversold the show a bit, and the second night was pretty rough, because Cirith Ungolā€™s about to go on stage and the venue almost shuts down the show, there were so many people in there that the condensation from everyone started to drip from the ceiling and it shorted out the lights onstage. They had a backup generator and we were able to get things going, but they were like, ā€œAll right, nobody else can leave and come back in.ā€ We pulled it off, it was just a quick in and out thing, and then we went off to play Germany the following week.

RIG: After the London one, was there any plan to continue on with an overseas installment?

Jarvis: Yeah, and they wanted to keep doing it, but one of the cool things about Frost and Fire was it had never been in a major city. We did it in London and it was successful, but thatā€™s not hard to do. And I realized about 80% of our ticket sales came from out of the U.K., so we need to have a destination to get U.K. fans out. Maybe in the English countryside, but I never pursued it again, and at that point my focus was on the fourth edition of what we were doing here in California.

Jarvis: So Frost and Five IV was going to be back in Ventura, and it was going to be our last run here. I felt like I was kind of running out of bands a little bit. I hate to say that because thereā€™s always so many new bands, but I just like the bands that I like and there are only a certain amount of bands that I think are worth the entertainment value of doing something like this. And I started to kind of run out of ideas, and the passion started to leave a little bit, and I felt like I was mainly doing it out of obligation for the fans because they loved the festival so much it almost didnā€™t matter who was playing. But it started to take a toll because every October Night Demon seemingly would get offered an amazing tour that we couldnā€™t do, and I see festivals that have gone on for decades, and not every year is a slam dunk, you canā€™t be. You need contrast.

But I went all guns blazing, and I did do this three nights at the Ventura Theater, and I thought we have enough of an audience now where people can be comfortable in that venue the whole time. And I would place bands in the lineup where I thought it was deserved. Most other festivals, especially in Europe, they have this kind of seniority rule, where if youā€™re an old school band you gotta pay respect to that. So I got a lot of flack from a lot of the older bands that I would book, the quote unquote legacy bands, stuff like, ā€œIā€™m not opening for Visigoth, Iā€™m not opening for Eternal Champion, Iā€™m not opening for Night Demon,ā€ you know, ā€œShow some respect.ā€ And Iā€™m like, hereā€™s the reality, man, these bands, theyā€™re big, theyā€™re going to draw more people than you, and theyā€™re going to fucking rip it up, theyā€™re playing at the next level, so this is good for you.

So that was year three and I just thought letā€™s go out with a bang, letā€™s do one more, and a lot of people were sad, a lot of people in the industry thought I was crazy, a lot of people wanted to take it over for me, I refused that, I wouldnā€™t sell the name and itā€™s ours. Just start your own thing, you know?

And people have, thatā€™s how Hellā€™s Heroes started. Christian the organizer was in Venomous Maximus and plays in Night Cobra and Necrofier, heā€™s one of my best friends. I had them come out here and he was like, ā€œThis is amazing, I want to do something like this in Texas.ā€ And Iā€™m not competitive like all these other festival promoters, Iā€™m like, ā€œDo it, Iā€™ll help you. Whatever you need, man, letā€™s do this.ā€ And now itā€™s become an awesome thing that we really need, and besides Legions of Metal itā€™s the only thing of its kind here in the states which is ridiculous, itā€™s crazy.

But another thing too is you always gotta trust your instincts and my instincts told me you gotta stop this here right now, and again everybody thought I was crazy and then the pandemic hit and every promoter lost their ass, they canā€™t get their money back. We would have been fucked. It costs twenty to thirty thousand dollars just to get one of these festivals started, just to say, here it is, thatā€™s it. Before anybody buys a ticket.

And it was Night Demon spending all our band money, we were homeless. From 2015 all through 2019, none of us had places to live, our drummer was sleeping in his car. We would take the money we made on tour and front it for a festival that would happen ten months later, with hopes that something would happen.

So weā€™ve sacrificed a lot for the scene and for these bands and for these people, and I donā€™t regret a single moment of it.

RIG: In the run up to the fourth one, it was, ā€œThis is the final one, this is the final one,ā€ and then at the end of Saturday, after Satanā€™s headlining Court in the Act set, you got up there and said, ā€œWeā€™re going to continue.ā€ Was that just a spur of the moment thing?

Jarvis: Yeah. I think I was drunk. (laughs) I had a very serious promoter last week say, ā€œI think you need to do Frost and Fire in L.A., Iā€™ll help you out,ā€ and I was just like, no. Heā€™s like, ā€œBut it would do so well out here,ā€ and Iā€™m like, I know, but what do you consider well? Financially well? Thatā€™s not success to me, obviously people get paid what theyā€™re worth and thereā€™s a responsibility with putting on a show. A lot of first time promoters make excuses and blame a lot of external circumstances for their lack of success, but with any event Iā€™ve ever put on, I can look around the room and know how hard I worked. Thatā€™s easy ā€“ how many people are here, are they having a good time, is everything running smoothly. Thatā€™s a mirror, you know, and you gotta look at yourself in those situations. You have to take responsibility when things go wrong, out of your control, you still have to take responsibility for it. A lot of people donā€™t do that. So do, but a lot donā€™t. So that was our thing, we always wanted to be the responsible party, And since thatā€™s been the case, we have the right to do it or not

RIG: If you did it in L.A., itā€™d probably just be like Strike Fest.

Jarvis: Exactly, and that was based on Frost and Fire II. The promoter of that fest, heā€™s a great guy, he had never done a festival before and he was like, ā€œI want to do this, and I want you to play,ā€ and I was like, great!

RIG: It was fun, but itā€™s a gig at The Regent.

Jarvis: Thatā€™s exactly the way I see it, and no discredit, Iā€™m glad people step up to put that kind of thing on. I donā€™t expect everybody to do what we do, I expect us to do what we do and Iā€™m okay with that. But thereā€™s definitely a hole in peoplesā€™ hearts that have been out here, and Iā€™ve never filmed any of the shows, Iā€™ve never live-streamed it, people have always wanted us to do that but you have to be there, you have to experience it, and thatā€™s why people have those memories. If they have a YouTube video to look back on theyā€™d probably go, ā€œOh, that wasnā€™t so cool.ā€ Because it doesnā€™t translate.

I had somebody text me the other day and say ā€œMan, Iā€™m really missing Frost and Fire in California.ā€ The memories that people created here have been lasting, and that means a lot to me. But it doesnā€™t take away what we did because we havenā€™t done it the last few years, if I would have kept going and it would have been uninspired and it would have changed, I donā€™t think people would have had that memory. If we have the inspiration and the passion to do it, thatā€™s how the memories happen, if we execute.

I mean itā€™s not something that I havenā€™t explored, but ā€¦

Jarvis: ā€¦ weā€™re doing one in Ireland in June 2022, Frost and Fireland. And people are gonna complain because itā€™s not in Dublin. Itā€™s four hours north in Derry. Itā€™s the oldest walled city in the world thatā€™s still intact, itā€™s got a ton of history, thatā€™s where The Troubles sparked, thatā€™s where Bloody Sunday happened, and itā€™s got amazing scenery. And thatā€™s a destination. I donā€™t want people to be in Dublin, where youā€™re just another face in the crowd on the street, I want them to be in a town that has some history.

So weā€™re going to do that next year in June, itā€™s going to be a two day event, So there is a Frost and Fire happening in Ireland and thatā€™s fucking awesome.

RIG: Are there any bands you want to announce for Frost and Fire Ireland?

Jarvis: Itā€™s going to be Cirith Ungol, Brain Downeyā€™s Alive and Dangerous, Gama Bomb, Satan, Night Demon, Midnight, Mythra, Wytch Hazel, Darkest Era and Dread Sovereign. So itā€™ll be a smaller thing, five bands each night, and weā€™ll have an afterparty. Usual suspects. And if people want to complain they can, but the people that love these bands, they will be there. And most of those bands have never played Ireland. With the exception of Night Demon, Wycth Hazel and Midnight I donā€™t think any of them have, besides the Irish bands obviously.

RIG: Glad to hear itā€™s going to continue, whether itā€™s in California or overseas. Is there anything else you want to put out there?

Jarvis: I would just say to anyone who actually takes the time to read things anymore, never underestimate your own dreams. No matter what they are. But keep them to yourself, keep them close to your heart, and every day work on it, inch towards it. Consistency is the key, doing something every day, because if you look at it from the end itā€™s too daunting. People just get scared and they think itā€™s not possible, but everything is possible. You need to feel from the end, but think from the moment. If you close your eyes and feel what the feelingā€™s like from the end, just being there, it propels you. But donā€™t think of how youā€™ll get there, just know that youā€™ll get there. And right in front of you is another step.

Thatā€™s my advice to everybody, just follow the passion, youā€™ll know what it is, sometimes when things feel forced itā€™s because theyā€™re things you think you want to do, you gotta look deeper because you probably donā€™t want to do them as badly as you think you do.

Tales That Speak of Frost and Fire: An Interview with Jarvis Leatherby (Cirith Ungol, Night Demon)

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