Off the Record: Get to know Dane Pieper of Classless Act

The Get to Know Classless Act interviews were done in 2023 via Tuonela Magazine, with transcripts now found here

Check out the other interviews with Griffin Tucker (guitars), Chuck McKissock (drums), Franco Gravante (bass), and Derek Day (vocals)!

Hello everyone, I’m Bear Wiseman and I am here once again to help you get to know Dane Pieper, one of the two guitarists from Classless Act.

Hello, I’m Dane Pieper, one of the two guitarsts from Classless Act. [laughter]

So, I’ve been reading everyone’s bios and first thing that shows up with you is that you were born in Honolulu, in Hawaii, but you were adopted and raised in California. So I don’t know if there’s a, “what was that like question,” but I suppose… have you ever been able to actually go to Hawaii?

Yeah, yeah, I’ve definitely been to Hawaii, that’s a really dope place to go, you know, in the past through school trips, but then in recent years, I’ve gone to meet the further side of my family. So I’ve got two families, two amazing moms and dads, and yeah, it’s like a whole world of explanation. So it’s cool finding out about yourself. I found out through genealogy tests that I’m like 25% Asian or Chinese, because a lot of Hawaiian people are Chinese, and I actually have royal Hawaiian blood in me, because one of my ancestors was a mistress for King Kamehameha, one of the kings from Hawaii. So I’ve been dreaming of exploring my past and it’s cool. So I kind of grew up like a beach rat. I was born in Hawaii, I grew up in San Diego, and now I live in LA and on the side, on occasion, I coach beach volleyball. And I surf. So I talk like a beach rat too. [laughs] It’s a part of my personality, I can’t help it.

Do you know how to surf? [ed: I hadn’t caught him comment that he surfs]

I do know how to surf. I still have a longboard and you know, just catch a left or catch a right and have a good time with it. I don’t do any of the crazy… like helicopter stuff, but yeah, I love going out. One of my favorite Zen moments is just being out there past the break and you get to look up and down the coastline. And no phones, no BS, you’re just out there and in an environment that you’re not conducive to, so you’re just bobbing up and down on water. It’s one of my favorite moments ever.

It sounds [from your bio] like you have pretty like good-natured and easygoing parents. So with that old-school fear of, you know, “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll,” how do they feel about you being a rockstar?

Yeah, I’d like to say that I have amazing parents around the board. Yeah, ’cause just for them to be open to showing me rock ‘n’ roll and stuff like that, showed that they were understanding… And the music, performing, when I was a kid they wanted to make sure that there weren’t too many unnecessary filters, like biased filters. They’re very… I don’t know if “cool” is the right word, but they’re cool parents and at very least they were supportive of everything I was doing. Because when I went to school, first at a community college and then transferred to USC – the University of Southern California – and when I first got into Classless Act, if the band needed to tour or travel or anything like that, they were 100% supportive, and the fact that if I needed to drop out, they said that, “oh, you can always go back to school. Being in this band is a once in a lifetime opportunity.” But with all that being said, I graduated without needing to take any time off school, but they were supportive if I needed to. So I think that I’m very lucky in that sense.

I understand also that you’re pretty into sports and fitness and, do I remember correctly hearing that you’ve studied personal training, or something like that?

Yeah, I am a certified personal trainer, I got my certification in NASM [National Academy of Sports Medicine], one of the hardest ones to get. Yeah, I got that last year before… I passed the test in January last year and then I was thinking, okay, you know, the Dorothy tour is starting in 3 months, awesome, I’ll get started on this personal training thing. And I hadn’t gotten started on it at all, but a lot of places, you know, they want the trainers to be there for a while and work with clients. They don’t want someone who’s there for like, you know, a month and then has to leave for the tour. So I did all the work and all the study, I studied for like 3 months straight, that I haven’t used them once, but I have to look into how to get it renewed. You have to do it like every 2 years because, you know, money and stuff.

But I am a certified personal trainer, so fitness is a part of my life. I picked up a job as a running coach for a recovery women’s facility close by, and we actually had a 5k last week! It’s cool, I just run 3 miles, because they needed someone to kind of facilitate the outdoors portion of it, someone to lead the pack and keep up with everyone. So it’s a fulfilling, once-a-week part-time gig amongst some other part-time gigs I have. So yeah, being active is definitely a big part of my life.

You kind of touched on this already, but is it hard then to balance sports and music, what with the touring life and everything?

I feel a little bit that if you have a passion for something, you’ll find like a way to incorporate it in your life. I guess the best example is, whenever we were on tour and all that, we’d be bouncing from motel room to motel room, and because in my head, a day is not complete until you have a good workout in, after the show in the corner, you know, when everyone’s winding down, playing on their phones, I’ll be like shirtless in the corner doing push-ups and crunches – you know, like a prison workout, doing push-ups and crunches in the corner for an hour. So, you find a way to make work, go on walks, and stuff like that. But coaching beach volleyball has allowed me to incorporate sports in my life and have it still be there. But even if it’s small stuff, I appreciate it, like walking down to the basketball court or the running coach thing is a perfect gig to be active and be paid to be outside, and it’s a great cause. So yeah, I’m lucky to have my focus on music but then still be able to pursue sports in a decent capacity on the side.

You guys were obviously on tour a whole lot last year. So was it all just kind of “prison workouts,” as you said? Did you get any chance to do any sports or stop at any gyms or anything like that, or was it all just work-work-music, go-go-go?

Well, it was a lot of traveling, as you said. We traveled 50,000 miles last year! More than that, it was like 52,000 miles in 7 months last year. The odometer thing has a little meter for time. It was like more than like 1200 hours in the van too. So a lot of time traveling, just doing laps around the US. Most of the time the schedule was that we’d travel, and then 11 p.m. would roll around and I’d just have the inclination to work out and just make the room smell like sweat for an hour. [laughs] It was definitely… we traveled a lot. We traveled a lot, but it was paying-your-dues kind of stuff, where you look back and say, “oh, I remember when we were in that Motel Six in Jacksonville…” and the AC sounds like a helicopter because there was something broken and then we kept kicking and trying to fix it, and then it was never fixed. So it’s just experiences like that, that… y’all commiserate at the time, but then you look back with rose colored glasses of nostalgia and appreciate it.

It sounds like such an experience to go from being a house band to being on a local tour to being on this gigantic stadium tour. So what was the transition between these like for you guys?

It was cool being all over the gamut. Because before that, we’d play from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. in a small bar close by, then go from that to some opportunities, like on The Stadium Tour, with like 25 thousand people, and playing theaters with Dorothy, and that was all in our first year of touring, so it was amazing to get a taste of what the upper echelon is and what everyone experiences. So it was it was very much a humbling experience, especially because, with things like The Stadium Tour and Dorothy and the Giovanni [And The Hired Guns] tours, it was incredible coming across a first-hand experience in seeing how these grandiose operations work. On the face of the ticket, you see Dorothy and Mötley Crüe and all these people, but under the giant umbrella, it takes a real village to put on an operation like that. On The Stadium Tour, there were like two hundred stage hands or something in any given city, and they’d be making like hammocks under under the stage, so they’d have their break and their nap time during the stage while everyone’s rockin’, so we’d walk by and see like, ten hammocks under and I’m like, “man these people are working hard!” They’re there from like 6 to 2 in the morning. So it definitely opened our eyes to really appreciating all the work that people put in.

Did you guys get to spend a lot of time with the other bands on these tours, both on the small tours and on The Stadium Tour? Did you get to know the other musicians at all or was it all, again, very work-to-the-point, go -> play -> hotel?

Actually, for us, it was cool because we did get some opportunities to hang out with some other bands. We’ll start in order of the tours. So on the Dorothy tour, we’d see Dorothy’s band all the time: Sam [Koltun, guitars], Eliot [Lorango, bass], Dorothy [Martin, vocals] herself, were all great people, really casual. They brought us on and thought that we were awesome guys, same with the second band, Joyous Wolf, and on the Mötley Crüe tour, we got to hang out with everyone, which is awesome. Catering was kinda like the mutual hub, because everyone needs to eat, so they went to catering to hang out with everyone, so the guys from Poison would hang out with us, you know, I’d see Nikki Sixx there, or Tommy [Lee]. And yeah, funny enough, side-stage… Whenever we’d go on, you know, there’ll be some wings on the side of the stage where a lot of the personnel would be, and then every once a while, I’ll peek over and I’m like, “holy shit, Tommy Lee’s watching me perform!” I’m like, “never in a million years!” Like 20 feet over, I’m looking over and Tommy Lee‘s like, headbanging and stuff. But you know, things like that, and like, Joan Jett would soundcheck after us, and so after our soundcheck – or soundcheck before us, she would perform after us – so we’d watch her soundcheck and we’d have our small talk before she goes on like, “How’s the show?” “Oh, show’s great, a little hot, but you’re gonna kill out there,” and Joan was like, “thanks guys, you guys did good.” And Def Leppard are awesome. We went over to Phil Collen’s place – we went over to his place close by – and he treated us like family, after the tour when, you know, he didn’t have to do anything with us. He was just like, “you guys are dope. You want to come over the house and order some food and just jam?” and we were there for the whole day. Yeah, so pretty much experiences that you’ll never forget. And no one had to be nice to us, but they were. So that was really cool.

I love that. I love that you guys kind of crammed both the starter tours and the huge tour all into 1 year. It sounds like a wild experience.

I kept a tour journal, just to keep track of stuff. Oh, but the Giovanni boys! I can’t forget Giovanni And The Hired Guns. They were awesome. They were just like, bros. We would be hanging out and getting fist-bumps, and they’re definitely bros, they’re there for the hang. And we hung out with them a few times after the show and… awesome times! We all vibed together. So we’re very lucky to be put on tour with bands that enjoyed us and were open to having a new band.

How did you get picked up for both of these tours? You were the opening act for [all] of them, so how did you guys get on the roster for them?

The Mötley Crüe tour was probably the easiest one. So we recorded at Tommy Lee‘s home studio; it was an opportunity that we heard about and we were lucky to have. So for the first half of our album, part of it was recorded at his place. So then, I never expected that the Tommy Lee… I was just like, “oh hey, that’s nice,” you know, resource available, and stuff like that. But then, once a while he’d come down and peek his head in and say “what’s up?” and then I’d be recording guitars and turning around and, same thing with The Stadium Tour, I’d be like, “holy shit, that’s Tommy Lee, this is cool.” And then you know, he’d come in and headbang or air drum to the songs and peek in, and it was kind of surreal moments, like, this is kind of insane. And then, after a little bit, our music started to circulate around the Mötley camp, they’re like, “Oh, there’s this band recording at our place, Classless Act, but they’re a new band, pretty dope,” and kind of the same way that Ozzy Osbourne took Mötley Crüe under their wings for that ’81 tour. That’s kind of what happened to us. So we’re lucky to be in good hands and just the fact that a lot of these bands, like Dorothy or Giovanni, and obviously Mötley Crüe, Def Leppard, Poison, Joan Jett… their bands are killing it right now and they don’t have to take on a new band. They could have put some other band there, but they believed in us and they want to see new bands succeed. So we’re fortunate in the sense that we’re just surrounded by good people that really care for us.

It reminds me a bit of how Metallica likes to pick up… usually one of, I don’t know, Lars’ [Ulrich] favorite small bands somewhere, that is usually one of their opening bands. Kind of sounds like the same idea.

Yeah, taking them under their wings and… it’s good to have a professional friend that’s on your side, you know?

So what about the other tours, with Giovanni And The Hired Guns and Dorothy, how did you get picked up?

So pretty much, there are the powers that be that circulate music and, on the Dorothy tour, there was a slot available, and then our album was being processed, I think mastering and all that, so we pitched it out to be on tours, and Dorothy thought it was dope and allowed us to be on the tour. And then with Giovanni, we were stoked to be on that tour. It was the same things, where we pitched it, they heard the album, and a bunch of bands applied for these tours. It’s kind of like a job/resume thing. You know, we’re like, “oh, we’re in this band, this is what we’ve done, here’s our album.” And yeah, it just worked! You know, we got selected, they thought we were dope, and it’s cool to see someone who’s killing it in the game be… it’s almost like a little nod of respect, or like… approval, in a way? I don’t know if “validation” is the right word, but it’s like, you know, like, “I’m killing it right now and I think you’re a solid band, [that can improve] with what I’ve got going on.” So it’s cool to be in that zeitgeist.

Talking about your album then, I understood that at least two of the songs were largely written by you; one of them is “Walking Contradiction,” and we kind of already talked about that when in our Instagram interview before, and the other one I heard was “The Storm Before the Calm,” which is… maybe my favorite song (it changes every once in a while). So tell me a little bit about that, like what inspired it and how did it get written?

Oh, very cool! Well, “Walking Contradiction” is one that I have the heavier hand in, but for “Storm Before the Calm,” I think it was mainly Derek and Franco‘s kind of thing, but that was just the song that we rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed, and it’s one of those that we wanted to lock in. We felt the potential power of that song, you know, right before that second chorus, Derek has that long note where he just belts it out, so we knew that there were some really cool moments and we wanted to lock it in. Yeah, it just came with rehearsing and practicing, just running it and seeing what felt right over time, because we felt that, the more we play it, the more we, ourselves, will shine through. And that’s pretty much it! Yeah, and fact that DMC came out at Sofi to play, that was special, that was cool. We were proud of the song and a very influential person, someone we all looked up to, was there to perform at our hometown live – pretty insane! It was definitely a journal entry that I was writing, I was like, “did this really happen?” and it did.

I know you’re a big fan of My Chemical Romance and I definitely get some of those vibes in “Walking Contradiction,” like really strong “Helena” vibes in that chorus, which I really love. So was that intentional?

Yeah, well, I don’t know if it was intentional. Like, a lot of your influences and things you’re into bleed through, like any work you do or anything that’s influenced by it. Yeah, the power and… it’s a self-reflective kind of song and I think MCR are great at stuff that’s self-reflective and almost… allowing your unapologetic personality to just burst through the door. So it was not the plan, but I’m glad that people are receptive to that.

I heard online that you guys are all pretty varied in what instruments you can play. You’re all not, you know, just a guitarist or whatever. So what other instruments do you play and have you gotten any lessons in any of them, or are you self taught?

So aside from guitar – I’ve played that the most. I started playing when I was like 9 or 10 and then I just did sports and music my whole life. But I was playing that for a little while, until it felt pretty comfortable. But aside from that, I can play a little piano, bass, and then some drums.

Yeah, to answer your question if I’m self-taught, it’s the kind of thing to where you just love the whole encompassing thing that is music and songwriting, so then I just wanted to learn, and that’s what I think anyone that has a passion for anything, has this craving to learn, and that’s what I felt for the bass, the drums, and the piano. I want to learn whatever kind of song. When I was a kid, I was super into Green Day. I had a Green Day party when I was 8. So I was like, “Oh my God, ‘St. Jimmy’ was so cool,” or learn piano to… whatever kind of song. So I really just had this hunger for seeing how this was done, because I wanted to do it too. I was just acquiring stuff and trying to mesh it into my memory bank.

Who was the first person in Classless Act that you met when you joined the band? Or how did you discover Classless Act?

So, it’s kind of a funny story. It was by happenstance, I guess that’s the best way to say it. The start of the story was, when I first got to LA, I didn’t know anybody in music, I was just playing volleyball for Santa Monica College, though I didn’t know anybody in music. So I just wanted to build a social media following, so I posted every day on Instagram for like 9 months, like a guitar cover of a song I knew. Every day for 9 months, and then I got a small following of a couple thousand followers, all over the world, like Europe, South America, blah, blah. And then I remember, after I transferred to USC, I was studying for a final and then my phone started blowing up because this one follower of mine… It was one sweet lady all the way in Ireland – I will always remember her name from it, Claire Walsh, she’s from Dublin, Ireland – she tagged… at the time, some band, in like twenty of my posts, saying, “Oh, this guy is awesome. You guys need a new guitar player, Classless Act, I think this guy’s dope, check out this guitar cover, check this out.” So I had no idea who they were at the time, they didn’t release any music. So then I was like, “who’s this band, Classless Act?” and then after, the band DMed me and they asked me to come out to an audition. I took a metro out because I didn’t have a car at the time, so I took a metro out like an hour north of Hollywood from South Central downtown area. And I got in! So someone in Ireland saw that the band had an ad, and then tagged me in it, knowing that I live in LA. And yeah, that’s interesting, the butterfly web effect and how my life is completely different because someone in Ireland saw an ad that Classless Act happened to post. So I always think how different my life would be if her phone died, or she forgot to tag me, or she didn’t see the ad, or Classless Act posted it 2 days later and Claire didn’t see it. So yeah, my life is just an interesting series of events.

So who of your “final form” was actually in the band at that point?

I guess I’m the most original member of Classless Act, of the current lineup. So yeah, Franco came in like a month after me, and then, as you know, lineups evolved based on interests and personnel and whatnot. But it’s almost like a team that just keeps on getting better. It’s like an all-star team of people. You know, we finally locked in our lineup and it’s with people that we’re passionate with and vibe with. So, we’re coming for that championship, baby, 82-0!

Well, I’m running out of time already and I feel like we’ve only been talking for 2 minutes. I suppose… if you wanted to try and make the world a better place by passing on one message, something that’s really affected you, what would that be?

What I think is that some problems today are just from a lack of understanding or at very least awareness, so I think, if there was a meaning to life, it’s just new experiences. Because at the very least, with new experiences, you take in new points of view, even new perspectives. You might not throw yourselves into these new perspectives, but at least being aware of it and it’s in your consciousness, you can make more conscious decisions and have another point of view to take in mind. So yeah, new experiences! And even small new experiences, like, I dunno, going exploring and being adventurous, shaking up the average everyday life.

Well, I’m almost exactly out of time now, so thank you so much for taking the time to do this, this was incredible. I love getting the chance to talk to you guys individually, this was wonderful.

Yeah, no, this is awesome! You know, Bear, we love that you’re very interactive with us. So it’s cool to talk with you. I was very much looking forward when I hear that! I love to have an interview with you!

Amazing, thanks so much!

Thank you, Bear! Have an awesome… night. It’s nighttime!