Not Used up
Utah-based emo group overcomes addiction, homelessness to sell millions of records




Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison and Cobain. They all cashed out at 27.

Bert McCracken was on the path to join them — but he was taking the fast track and looking to beat that famous quartet by six years.

At only 21, the singer for screamo outfit The Used collapsed onstage in Cincinnati, Ohio. He had been vomiting before the incident, but no one thought anything of it at the time, as McCracken often puked onstage when he got all worked up. It wasn’t until after he collapsed that he was diagnosed with acute pancreatitis, a condition usually brought on by alcoholism of the Hunter S. Thompson or Duff McKagan variety (McKagan’s pancreas actually burst on him).

Despite his relative youth, McCracken’s personal history reads like Mötley Crüe’s autobriography, The Dirt.

Born into a Mormon family in Orem, Utah, in 1982, McCracken was kicked out of the house and became addicted to drugs at 17. On Valentine’s Day 2003, he famously dumped Kelly Osbourne over the phone, breaking her heart and landing him a prime spot on Ozzy’s shit list. On New Year’s Eve 2004, he had his ass kicked by thugs on Sunset Strip (and no, Ozzy didn’t hire them). On July 4, 2004, his ex-girlfriend died from a drug overdose, taking Bert’s unborn child with her. Then McCracken’s dog, David Bowie, got run over by a car.

Just as the guys in the Crüe seemed to come from similar, lower middle-class, crash ’n’ burn backgrounds, McCracken’s bandmates in The Used, Jeph Howard (bass), Quinn Allman (guitar) and Branden Steineckert (drums) have all endured poverty and homelessness. They’ve had to panhandle just to make ends meet, even after they started their band.

Things changed pretty quickly for The Used in 2002, however, when they attracted the attention of Reprise Records and producer John Feldmann (also frontman for Goldfinger) despite having played but 20 shows — and only in Utah. On the strength of its eponymous debut, the band experienced a rather meteoric rise from obscurity to the ranks of screamo stardom. The Used has now sold over a million copies, and the group is currently riding the follow-up In Love and Death.

Furthermore, McCracken is clean and sober.

To some, it might seem as if the pressure is off and the angst that gave The Used its edge has disappeared.

“It’s more pressure, actually,” Howard says of making albums in the post-poverty days. “It’s a lot different. Before, there wasn’t that much pressure, as far as writing goes, because what do we have to write for? We were just writing for ourselves. It was just our own music. Pressure? There was no pressure.”

And what if people think the band will go soft and lose the edge it had when it was — literally — hungry?

“People can fuck off,” Howard says. “We’re writing what we want to write and how we want to write, and if people have a problem with that, then don’t listen to us. If somebody doesn’t like it, they can just fuckin’ whatever, drown themself, and that’s cool.”

Howard is obviously as outspoken as his frontman — who reportedly told Osbourne flat out that he wasn’t taken seriously because he was dating her — and explains that the band will continue to do its own thing.

“It’s mostly our own self-pressure, you know what I mean?” Howard says. “We want to write a good album. We want to write a better record. We want to be true to ourselves and not write for other people. We want to write for ourselves.”

That was the approach The Used took with In Love and Death (released in September 2004), a 12-song catharsis that explores lack of communication, grief and personal growth.

It’s this growth Howard wants to focus on musically. He believes The Used is constantly evolving and hopes the new songs the band plans to write after this tour will represent the changes it has weathered.

“It will be different because it has to be,” he says of to-be-written new material. “We’re not a band that tries to cover up and hide who we are, and the last record was different than the first because we change — and you have to change. You can’t just stay the same kind of person and the same kind of band. You’d be lying to yourself and lying to the people who like your band. We definitely have changed since the last record came out, and we’re going to show it.”

That said, Howard explains that The Used doesn’t write on the road, so he can’t put his finger on any changes just yet.

“It’s one of those things when you just sit down and start writing and see how the music comes out,” he says. “It’s not like we sit down and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to write a hard song ’cos I’m angry.’ It’s like we sit down and the music kind of writes itself.”

To that end, the band is backed by a recording contract that ensures it has total artistic freedom.

When asked if he could handle making music any other way — even if it meant a return to life on the streets — Howard is blunt:

“No. Would you want to draw a picture and have somebody change all the colours on it? It just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

He adds: “I really don’t care about selling a million records or selling two million records. I just want to keep playing and writing and touring. That’s it.”

But of course it must be easier to do those things now that The Used has sold a million records.

“Yeah, that works,” he allows. “It makes it a lot easier.”

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