"Make a left, Rob. This left right here onto 101 south. Left turn, 101 south. Left!"
I've obviously caught Max Bernstein at a bad time.
"I'm sorry," says the lead singer/guitarist of the pop-punk outfit The Actual during a recent phone interview. "We gotta make sure we're going the right way here."
Bernstein, in a van with bandmates Ben Flanagan, Jeremy Bonsall, and Rob Obee, is calling from a Los Angeles freeway, en route to a gig in Phoenix. And every few minutes, he interrupts our conversation - always apologetically - to help facilitate the group's escape from L.A.
"Yeah, keep going straight," I hear Bernstein say at one point. "I dunno, wherever the Hollywood freeway is ... keep going straight ... fuck, this is totally wrong. We're going in the wrong direction right now."
Ironic, considering that - at least career-wise - the group seems to be going in the absolute right direction.
The Actual, recently seen on the covers of Encore and Music Connection magazines, will perform at Lumpy's in Davenport on September 17, the 11th stop on a 20-venue fall tour alongside Tokyo Rose and Peachcake. Having just come off August's Van Warped Tour, the band is actively promoting its 2007 CD In Stitches, the debut release from Scott Weiland's Softdrive Records label. The Dallas Morning News' Mike Daniel wrote that "the strong and memorably motley songs ramble on a pop-punk chassis with new-wave, arena-rock, and British-pop paneling," and the CD features a single - "This is the Worst Day of My Life (Do You Want to Come Over?)" - that recently won a spot on MTVu's Freshman Video lineup.
A native New Yorker now living in Los Angeles, the 27-year-old Bernstein received his first guitar - a gift from his father - at age five, says he played "pretty much nonstop" as a child, and spent his formative years listening to the music he'd eventually play professionally.
"It was just awesome," he says. "There were so many great bands when I was growing up in New York, like a lot of great hardcore bands that were really interesting. Like Helmet and Quicksand and Jawbreaker - a lot of that early '90s stuff that made me realize that there was non-self-indulgent music. It was great just to be immersed in all of that." (Sometimes quite literally immersed; the 13-year-old Bernstein was known to sneak into the city's CBGB club by hiding in bands' bass-drum cases and being carried inside.)
Bernstein's parents, it should be noted, are hardly unused to the limelight themselves; his mother is best-selling author Nora Ephron, who has also written and directed such movies as Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail, and his father is author and former Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein, who helped expose President Nixon's Watergate cover-up.
Yet beginning with the Actual's 2001 debut in Los Angeles, Max has been adamant about not using his parents' celebrity as clout. Instead, Bernstein himself booked the band's concert appearances - both in L.A. and in small clubs across the country - by passing himself off as a legitimate booking agent representing a legitimate booking agency.
"I dunno, I just kind of realized that that would work pretty well," Bernstein says of the ruse, "and I came up with this guy's name - Caleb Rochester. And it totally worked. We booked our own tours for quite a few years, and just kept plugging away."
In 2005, though, Bernstein's group was introduced to Weiland, former frontman for the Stone Temple Pilots and current lead singer for Velvet Underground. Years before, Bernstein had worked for Weiland's manager, Dana Dufine, in the publicity department at Immortal Records, "and she always liked what I was doing" musically, he says. "She hooked us up with Scott's engineer [Doug Grean] and with Scott, and it all just kind of came together."
Based on demos and the band's debut CD - 2003's Songs on Radio Idaho - Weiland signed the Actual to his nascent Softdrive Records label. The group proceeded to record songs for In Stitches, a process decelerated by their touring schedule, and by the hiring of additional guitarist Flanagan midway through the recording process.
"We did it really slowly," says Bernstein of the CD's near-two-year gestation. "We'd record a bit, then we'd be on tour for a bit, then we'd record, then we'd go on tour for a bit, then we'd record a bit ... ."
In Stitches was finally released on May 29, and in its July 14 issue, Billboard magazine noted that one of its singles - "Lindsay Never Gets Lonely" - was named "Coolest Song in the World This Week" on the syndicated radio program Little Steven's Underground Garage. The album has also inspired an online contest sponsored by Fuse-TV, wherein fans can make their own "This is the Worst Day of My Life (Do You Want to Come Over?)" video; the winning work will be shown, and introduced by Scott Weiland, on Fuse-TV.
"We haven't gotten to see any of the submissions yet," says Bernstein. "We're not gonna get to see them until the [September 28] contest deadline. But we heard that there's one with a puppet of me that's getting abused. So I'm excited to see that."
Despite increasing awareness of the group, though, the Actual are traveling their Southwestern and Midwestern tour sites the way they have for the past six years: by van.
"We finally got a different one," Bernstein says. "Finally. It's still used, but we just got one that runs on vegetable oil. We had the first one up until, like, '06. It was an old '82 with, like, this blue shag carpeting. And a heart of steel."
Plus, apparently, a familiarity with Iowa. "We've played Iowa over 20 times," he says of the group's return. "We've played [Iowa City's] Gabe's Oasis - and now the Picador - over 10 times. We've played at Reverb in Cedar Falls far more times than I'd care to admit. We played at Hairy Mary's in Des Moines a couple of times. Never played in the Quad Cities."
And following their Lumpy's performance, the band will take their van to Minnesota, then Wisconsin, then Illinois, then Ohio, and then Pennsylvania, all in the span of a week. A relentless schedule, but one they're probably happy to embark on, at least if Bernstein's tongue-in-cheek response to "How's the album selling?" is to be trusted.
"I think that the record has gone corduroy," he says. "We've sold enough records to be certified corduroy. We're hoping for chenille. Maybe velour."
The Actual plays Lumpy's (1509 Harrison Street in Davenport) alongside Tokyo Rose, Peachcake, and A.J. Haut & the Sickies on Monday, September 17. Tickets are $5, and more information is available by calling (563) 323-5500.
