Listen to an audio interview with Split Lip

The trash and kids and cars are long gone from the India Community Center on West 56th Street. There’s no sign that the unassuming rental hall
played host to crowds nearly a thousand who came to watch a local band flail about in the early 1990s. “I remember having to park so far from the venue to walk to the show and thinking, ‘Where are these kids coming from?’” said Split Lip vocalist David Moore. “I couldn’t figure it out. We had spent the better part of three years prior to that playing in
basements.”

Split Lip had been playing the Midwestern hardcore punk circuit, developing a small following on the strength of a song, “Evolution,” that was featured on a nationally distributed compilation and a 7-inch single released by a Toledo, Ohio-based record label. Then Seattle happened.

“Kids were seeing Eddie Vedder (of Pearl Jam) jump off a PA speaker in a music video and were trying to find the quickest way to emulate that,” said guitarist Adam Rubenstein. Accustomed to drawing 100 or fewer to shows, Split Lip now pulled 10 times that number at the ICC.

But the band was more than a local novelty. The five core members managed to tour the U.S. several times and release an album before graduating from high school. Split Lip was on the verge of inevitablesuccess.

But in 1998, those core members broke up without reaching what many fans and record label reps thought was their true potential. Now, a little more than a decade after it started to unravel, Split Lip finds itself on the eve of a trio of reunion shows, and the former bandmates — all in their 30s — reflect on what was and what could have been.

The band was formed in Carmel in 1990 by guitarist Clay Snyder, bassist Curtis Mead, and vocalist Steve Duginske. (Moore and Rubenstein would join later.) The trio of 14-year-olds wrote and practiced songs for months without a drummer until Snyder’s girlfriend set them up with a guy she knew in Noblesville.

Getting from Carmel to Noblesville to try out 13-year-old Charlie Walker would have been a major problem if not for the fact that Snyder began driving when he was 12. “His mom would lend him the Mercedes to run to the store and stuff,” said Mead. The guitarist and bassist drove to old town Noblesville and knocked on Walker’s door. “We met him cold, like a blind date. The second we started playing, there was just something about him that fit perfectly,” Mead said.

Later that afternoon, Mead, Snyder, and Walker jacked around on the trampoline in Walker’s back yard. The drummer fell and split his lip, and Mead and Snyder left Noblesville that night with a full lineup and a name for their band. Split Lip quickly recorded a four-track demo tape and began making connections with like-minded kids all over the metropolitan area at shows and through the classified section of national fanzine Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll.

“I remember going to see Split Lip play a show at the Carmel Lions Club, I believe it was. This is before Adam joined the band. Adam was in another band that also played that same show,” said Moore.

Just 13 years old, Adam Rubenstein began playing guitar at age of 9 and had become enamored of heavy metal while living with his family in Belgium. Familiar with Rubenstein from their days at Clay Junior High, Mead recruited him for Split Lip. Soon after Rubenstein joined, the band kicked Duginske out and replaced him with Moore, solidifying the lineup that would remain intact from 1991 to 1998.

With Rubenstein taking the songwriting lead, Split Lip quickly made new material. They recorded a second demo, which landed them a track on a nationally distributed animal-rights benefit compilation, “Voice of the Voiceless,” originally released Smorgasbord RecordsThe band, whose average age hovered around 15, began playing weekend shows in St. Louis, Louisville, Dayton, and Columbus, Ohio.

“We were all living, probably, vastly different lifestyles than your typical kid at school,” said Moore. “You’d come back and you’d feel like you’d come back from an alternate universe.”

It was on one of these road trips to Dayton that the band met Dirk Hemsath. The punk rock entrepreneur had started Doghouse Records to release material by his band, Majority of One. He offered to release a record for the band, and soon after, Split Lip spent a day in a Carmel studio tracking the four songs that would become the “Soul Kill” 7-inch

The record’s distorted thrash metal guitars, unorthodox bass riffs, and hyperactive drumming starkly contrasted with Moore’s raspy melodic delivery. Unlike nearly every other hardcore band of that era, the singer eschewed overtly ideological subject matter like substance abuse, human, animal and environmental rights, in favor of introspective poetry inspired by Dylan Thomas and Ezra Pound. “Do we think we’re brave,” Moore asked in "Crestfallen, “If this is bravery, I don’t like the taste.” There was no band quite like Split Lip and the national scene took notice.

“The tempos are all over the place, there’s so much angst, so much reverb, some of it’s kinda comical to me now when I listen to it,” Rubenstein said. “But at the same time I see why people find the charm in those records. They’re played live for the most part and there’s mistakes all over. There’s a certain authenticity about those recordings…it’s pretty much dead today.”

By the time “Soul Kill” was released in1992, bored, frustrated and alienated teens across the country had begun looking for places to ape the stage dives and slam dancing they’d seen on MTV, and crowds began to swell into the hundreds when Split Lip played venues like the Brebeuf High School cafeteria and Northside Knights of Columbus. The band continued to write and travel on weekends, playing infrequent local shows to large crowds at the ICC.

In the winter of 1993, Split Lip traveled to Detroit to record its first full-length album, “For the Love of the Wounded.” That summer, while waiting for the records to be pressed, the band embarked on its first 30-day national tour.

“Going on tour was something that none of us were mature enough to undertake…I was a sophomore in high school and I was driving in a van all the way around the circumference of the country.

“God bless my parents for allowing me the opportunity to do that because that’s how I grew up. It forced us to grow up pretty fast, too, being on our own and staying in weird places and drivin’ through the night,” Rubenstein said.

“For the Love…” was released in fall of 1993 and it represented a major advancement in the band’s technical abilities and song craft. The music was still rooted in metal-influenced hardcore but the band was reaching farther out into their range of music influences and looking further inward for emotional inspiration.

“I don’t remember any formal discussions about what kind of songs we were gonna write,” Moore said. “I remember Adam, at 15, wanting to pull a Sting-like riff or chord progression and me starting to incorporate Dylan-esque type influences, some of the other guys pulling more from the punk rock side of things…Maybe it’s revisionist history but I don’t remember being self-conscious about the kind of songs we were writing.”

By 1993, major labels were in a feeding frenzy looking for the next Nirvana, Pearl Jam or Green Day. Split Lip began receiving contact from majors but brushed the attention aside. “And we got off on how much we weren’t interested in it,” Moore said. “In hindsight after years of writing my own stuff and getting out there it’s just crazy that we took it with that sense of entitlement.”

The band’s stylistic changes, coupled with the attitude displayed by some of its members, led many of Split Lip’s long-time supporters to turn their backs on the band. “We were very self-involved, that’s the thing, and I think it was apparent that we were self-involved and I think that ended up being negative for the band’s local legacy and keeping long-term fans,” Rubenstein said.

The band toured again in 1994 and recorded its second album, “Fate’s Got A Driver” the following year. By this time the band had sifted out the most aggressive elements of its songs and “Fate’s…” eight songs were a blend of up-tempo rock, Dischord-inspired indie pop and alt-country. At the time it marked a clean break from the punk world and a concerted effort on the band’s part to reach a more mainstream audience. But more than a decade after its release, the listener is struck but how raw and aggressive the band’s early stab at rock really was.

“We didn’t know what we were doing half the time and I think that’s the charm and it takes a while to realize that’s what makes bands unique, that you’re clawing your way through the darkness and figuring out how you’re supposed to do things,” said Rubenstein.

“What I think is so fascinating about “Fates Got A Driver,” is that it’s five guys trying to make a rock and roll record that really know nothing about rock and roll and really have no idea how to play rock and roll."

While on tour in 1995, Split Lip decided to ditch its aggressive-sounding name in favor of the more neutral Chamberlain.“Fate’s Got A Driver” was re-released with new vocal tracks under the new name. Marked by U.S. and European tours and active courtship by major record labels, this era is remembered most fondly by the members of the band. “I feel like that was the point when everything came together and it was a good mix of everything. I feel like that’s the first time that all the ingredients mixed together right,” Mead said.

But the lightning that Split Lip, now Chamberlain, had bottled as teens began to fade as they entered their 20s. The band began to listen to publicists and major label reps and it began to concern itself with writing radio-ready singles. Chamberlain spent 1997 writing the songs that would become “The Moon My Saddle” in Brown County, and recorded it in Bloomington. The band’s long-time patron, Dirk Hemsath, agreed to help the band shop the album to major labels but ended up releasing it himself.

“I think we thought were destined to be successful in this sort of lassaiz faire mode because it all happened so fast. Everything was happening without trying and because of that — once reality set in and we actually wanted to do it for a living — that upward trajectory had dissipated and we had to try to make it as a working band,” Rubenstein said.

One contemporary of the band agrees that the band’s momentum went to waste but thinks it was due to the band’s ambition. “Split Lip and Chamberlain experienced too many phases too quickly,” said Ryan Downey. Now working in artist management and media production in southern California, Downey was the vocalist for an Indianapolis band that shared stages with Split Lip early on. “I certainlt don’t begrudge them their evolution as musicians, as people, as a band. I think it was too quick,” he said.

For Mead it was more a matter of too far. He began to lose interest when the band went too far down the Americana rock rabbit hole and he and Snyder were kicked out of the band around the time “The Mood My Saddle” was released. Walker left the following year. Rubenstein continued playing with a reconstituted band for a couple of years before he tired of spinning his wheels in sports bars across the Midwest. “We could sense that we didn’t quite strike when the iron was hot. It just didn’t feel right anymore,” the guitarist said.

The singer pushed on a few more years, releasing “Exit 263” in 2003 but it was a Chamberlain record in name only. The band fizzled out long after most of the original members had moved on to other things: Rubenstein moved to New York City in 2001 and released a solo album under the name Adam Dove. Several years later he joined Doghouse Records when Hemsath relocated his offices to NYC.

Mead moved to California where he produced motion graphics and played bass in several bands including Model/Actress, which features Walker on drums. The drummer has also played with a number of bands since leaving Chamberlain including New End Original, Institute, and Oslo.

Snyder disappeared into Midwestern adulthood along with Moore, who appeared sporadically around Indianapolis with the alt-country band Chevy Downs.

In 2008, Mead, Moore, Rubenstein, and Walker found themselves in Austin, Texas, for the South By Southwest music festival — Mead and Walker on behalf of their bands, Moore to showcase his new solo material, Rubenstein an envoy of a now-thriving indie imprint. The four took the stage at Rio for an impromptu reunion and laughed their way through a passable rendition of “Uniontown.” Moore sang of “living lifetimes in day,” recalling a time when he and his band mates evolved as people and artists too fast to be self-aware, too focused on “thinking thoughts that shake the world.”

Several years ago the band was interviewed for “Burning Fight,” a book about the early 1990s hardcore punk scene. Author Brian Peterson asked them, and a host of other bands from the era, to reunite for a weekend-long party at the Metro in Chicago to celebrate the book’s release. Chamberlain took the opportunity to book shows in Louisville and Indianapolis the same weekend.

The shows have given theformer band mates a chance to make peace with the past and reconcile with their legacy in a community they actively distanced themselves from.

“I think we all look back and see some of the mistakes that we made and we see, you know, like, if we’d have done that maybe this would have happened but you don’t know, you know,” said Mead. “Let’s celebrate what we had when we know it was great.”

Split Lip/Chamberlain

When: 7:30 p.m. May 2.

Where: Birdy’s, 2131 E. 71st St.

Tickets: $7.

Info: (317) 239-5151,

www.ticketmaster.com