The Flys

“Just being in a band is so lame. You gotta do something with your life,” Flys frontman Adam Paskowitz joked with POLLSTAR. “I wear a cowboy hat all the time because I want people to think that I’m a cowboy. I mean, really.”

Having the hit song that’s stuck in everyone’s head lately, “Got You (Where I Want You),” is suddenly making life even more interesting for The Flys. Their Trauma Records release, Holiday Man, is selling more in a week than their debut did in a year and crowds are packing venues in places the band has never played.

Not that The Flys haven’t paid their dues. Paskowitz, his rappin’ brother Josh, guitarist Peter Perdichizzi, bassist James Book and drummer Nick Lucero toured independently for more than four years. “We’ve played every dump on our own,” Paskowitz said. “I mean, the worst dumps you could imagine.”

The mystique behind The Flys’ active pursuit of life in conjunction with the drudgery of the road is better understood through the Paskowitz brothers’ upbringing. They were two of nine siblings raised in a camper described by Paskowitz as “a dirty soup kitchen on wheels.”

“So being in this big ol’ brand new bus is like an easy ride, comparatively,” he said.

Their father is a Stanford-educated medical doctor who chose to travel around the world helping the less fortunate. Dorian Paskowitz also happens to be an avid surfer — even at age 78 — always searching for the best waves. His kids traveled the world, were home schooled and taught to surf by their father, and were inspired by their mother the opera singer. In addition, the family owns one of the most famous surf camps in the world and the band’s frontman was once a professional surfer.

Though the Paskowitz brothers have been to every state in the union and beyond with their family, touring with The Flys is a bit different. Since the band hooked up with Trauma’s Rob Kahane, “it’s been like four or five months of just absolute and total craziness,” Paskowitz said.

When The Flys recorded their latest album, they thought they were making an independent record for Mike Ross at Delicious Vinyl. “And the next thing you know, it’s like every major record label in the whole world called us,” he said.

But Trauma had a keen understanding of the band. “It’s like we’re semi-heavy metal as sort of a joke, but we’re like a rock band with a certain soul edge and my brother Josh raps. So it would be very easy to lose the message in all this. And they found some sort of common thread that you can say, ‘OK, this is who they are.'”

After trying to convince POLLSTAR that The Flys are managed by a couple of rodeo clowns they picked up on the street, Paskowitz confessed that the band tapped Delicious Vinyl’s Ross as manager.

He said though Ross hasn’t played this role before, he’s a very clever cat. “When we went to Trauma, there was nothing for him to do so he got like a boo boo face and we’re like, ‘All right. You can be the manager.'”

An on-the-ball business team, rounded out by William Morris agent John Marx, seems to be the ingredient that has brought the band this sudden, unexpected rise toward stardom. It’s been “totally wacky,” Paskowitz said, especially looking at the band’s huge teenage fan base.

The 29-year-old singer doesn’t understand why The Flys are such teen sensations but for some reason, the youngsters just get it. “It wasn’t designed for teens. It wasn’t invented for teens,” he said. “But I will say this … at the surf camp, me and my brothers, we’ve related to those 18 and under so well our whole lives [with] surfers and the sports and the relationship between all that. I think that has something to do with it.”

The only thing about playing for kids is that the audience can get more radical than the band. The Flys’ live shows are “absolute bedlam,” Paskowitz said. “These mosh pits, they start to break out and I just want to jump in. It makes you feel like it’s so soft and fuzzy in there but it’s not soft and fuzzy. Those guys are insane!”

He said he worries about the fans. “I’m constantly saying, ‘Hey, this girl, this girl, this girl,’ and I’m pointing to some little girl, a 12-year-old, that looks like she’s gonna die. And nobody seems to care except me. I don’t know how these kids don’t kill themselves.”

But as long as kids (and adults) get that excited over the band, The Flys will ride the wave of their touring success. And they expect this to be the beginning of a long career.

“There’s a bigger story to this than just four white lame rockers dancing around the country trying to promote some faceless single,” Paskowitz said. “It’s like these guys have been around the world, they’re real young men, they’ve had gnarly experiences, there’s a family issue here, they’ve been together for 10 years and lived in their car with their dog. This is just the beginning. Get to know them. They’re gonna be around awhile.”