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August 8, 2001
Though they may not be household names in the vein of Glassjaw, Vision of Disorder, or Mind Over Matter, for a certain type of Long Island hardcore fan, there’s no beating Oral Fixation. If you can get past the sophomoric name and the infamous live shows, you’ll be rewarded with a brilliant kind of chaos. Frontman Jake Craig howls like a wild animal, while his string section — guitarists Mallory Roessler and Mitch Gosling, alongside bassist Robin Reynolds — thrash their fretboards into oblivion.
Holding it down behind the kit is the true prodigy. Sam Loveless slams blast beats and gallops with all the precision of a military bandleader — a feat made all the more impressive by her own admission that she gets drunk before every show. Equal parts frenetic and glassy-eyed, Loveless is the arrhythmic pulse of Oral Fixation. More than that, she has become a phenomenon in her own right. Alternative Press sat down with the drummer to find out what goes on inside her (often bruised) head.
When I arrived at Loveless’s home, I was greeted by the sound of barking and a sharp admonition for Bailey to get away from the door, dude. Bailey is to Oral Fixation as Lou Dog was to Sublime: the cross between a Border Collie and a German Shepherd has made it into all the band’s promotional material, and fans show their love with patches and shirts depicting her mottled gray fur and singular floppy ear.
But, as Loveless is quick to clarify, Bailey is not her dog. “She’s the Crash house mascot,” the drummer says, referring to the Crash Landing punk house in which she and her bandmates got their start. Loveless is the only member of Oral Fixation who still lives in the house, and she admits that Bailey is a major factor in her decision not to move out. “She may not be my dog, but I’m pretty sure she likes me the best. I’m not leaving her here to mope.”
Crash Landing lives up to its name. The four-story house has holes in the drywall, a fireplace full of crushed beer cans, and multiple pieces of the molding propped up in corners, waiting to be reattached. Those who pay rent are assigned a bedroom on the second or third floor, but at any given time, a handful of touring punks are crashing on stained first-floor couches. Shows take place in an unfinished basement, where cases of lukewarm beer are stored in the rafters and the sound table blocks a head-sized hole in the wall. At multiple points over the course of our interview, Loveless jumps up onto the couch to avoid a centipede the size of her forearm skittering across the floor. When asked if she has taken any measures to stop the infestation, Loveless screws up her nose at me. “I’m not the only one who lives here. I clean up my own mess.”
That’s exactly who Sam Loveless is: blunt and self-sufficient. Her hands are never still for more than a moment or two. When she speaks, she punctuates her point with shadowboxing gestures. While waiting her turn to answer, she taps her fingers on her knees like she’s practicing the drums.
It’s rare, in the hardcore scene, to find somebody born to be a rockstar. Most are allergic to the concept, their ineptitude reflected in the baggy, nondescript work clothes they wear or their mumbling, slump-shouldered stage presence. It’s even rarer to find a drummer with such a casual gravitational pull. Loveless occupies this space with ease, even sprawling across an ironically-named loveseat in her living room. The longer that she speaks, the more she draws you in. You’re on the edge of your seat and you don’t even realize it.
It starts with her name. Loveless laughs off any speculation that she altered it for the stage, and even offers to show me her birth certificate as proof. I politely decline, to her relief. “Good. I don’t even know where it went. But I have a passport and a driver’s license if you need it.”
According to her, the Loveless appellation is a misnomer. Originally derived from the Old English laweles, it was a nickname for an outlaw: somebody uncontrolled or unrestrained, which describes the drummer to a T. “Just because I’m unlucky with love doesn’t mean I’m without it,” she says with a crooked smile. As for her first name, it’s not short for Samantha. Only three letters were printed on her birth certificate.
“My parents agreed: Samuel if I were a boy, Samantha for a girl, so they just called me baby Sam. By the time that I was born, the short version had stuck.” Loveless admits that, in her early days as a freelance musician, the infamously chauvinistic hardcore scene was surprised to find that a woman was auditioning. Fortunately, Oral Fixation had no such qualms. They wanted the best person for the part, and they came away with a Columbia-educated jazz musician.
That Loveless has no East Coast roots makes her even more of a diamond in the rough. She came to New York for college, but the first eighteen years of her life were spent in the New Mexico town of Deep Lake. With fewer than 5,000 people, Deep Lake is known for two things. First, the eponymous lake brings thousands of tourists to the American Southwest every summer. Second, their public access television station, TV Odyssey, burned to the ground in 1992, at the end of Loveless’s freshman year of high school. Loveless, a self-proclaimed cartoon aficionado, waxed poetic about the television station, and the Calamity Raccoon children’s program that got her invested in music in the first place. [Editor’s note: if anyone remembers a television show about a raccoon puppet in a band and possibly operating a pizza farm, please email us!]
Like so many disgruntled teenagers in her age group, Loveless fell hard into the scene as a teenager. She frequented Deep Lake’s one record store with crumpled looseleaf paper listing new releases from Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Sleater-Kinney, and would practice those songs in her bedroom on the weekends. Loveless sheepishly admitted that her top choice for college was Evergreen State, the alma mater of her favorite pissed-off chicks, but that her parents had insisted she head east to the Ivies.
New York was not her first taste of hardcore. Despite its size, Deep Lake had its own punk rock community, and Loveless remembers sneaking out to catch local band performing in VFW halls and church basements. Larger touring bands only came as far as Albuquerque or Santa Fe, but groups like Titty Pocket were tearing up basements on a Monday night. “Most of them were pretty terrible,” Loveless told me with a laugh, “but I think that’s what I needed. Permission to make bad music. I knew that people would show up just to drink and mosh, and that let me get out of my own head.”
Long before her audition with Oral Fixation, Loveless played her first gig at a Deep Lake Legion hall, filling in for Titty Pocket’s ill drummer. “Mono. Everyone in the scene has had mono.” And the show? “It was awful. I was sweating so hard that my drum sticks kept flying out of my hands. Somebody jumped onto the stage and took out my hi-hat. It was one of the greatest days of my life.”
The idea of joining — or even starting — her own band floated across Loveless’s mind throughout her tenure at Columbia, but by her own admission, classes came first. She filled in once or twice as illnesses and skateboarding injuries decimated the scene, but music did not become her priority until after graduation. Despite her parents’ insistence that she go directly to law school, Loveless had no plans to settle down so early. She moved into Crash Landing, took the smallest and cheapest room, and waited for her moment to come.
Enter Jake Craig, a longtime Crash Landing resident whose dream project was put on hold until they could find the perfect drummer. Craig is, in many ways, Loveless’s opposite. Born in the Bronx, he has spent all 28 years of his life entangled with the greater New York hardcore scene. His father John was a touring guitarist for outfits like Agnostic Front, the Cro-Mags, and Murphy’s Law, and Craig spent more time on the road than he did in school. In the months before Loveless moved into the house, he claims to have auditioned over 50 drummers. All were talented in their own rights, but none could match his energy or fit his vision.
“Sam didn’t even audition for us. I heard her practicing one day, and my first thought was just, who the hell are you and where did you come from?” The answer, it turned out, was a tourist town in New Mexico.
Craig may be the voice of the band, but Loveless is its face. Nowhere is that more obvious than at one of Oral Fixation’s live performances, where the drummer strides to the stage and sits down a minute before everyone else. While this gives the perfectionist a chance to fiddle with her equipment and make sure everything is in place, it also gives the assorted punks a look at her, both like and unlike the stringy-haired shirtless men who dominate her instrument. Her dark brown hair is pulled back into a low ponytail that she inevitably shakes loose during a drum break, allowing it to fall in her face like Animal from The Muppet Show. Her eyes are so dark they appear almost black, flanked by constellations of freckles across her nose and cheeks.
She wears the same thing to every gig: a black tank top, old skinny jeans, and a pair of purple Converse low-tops with duct tape wrapped around the left toe. She walks onstage with an unbuttoned red flannel shirt, which she promptly strips and discards to the side, abandoned until it becomes a sweat rag. Rosin on her hands keeps the sweat away well enough that she stopped losing her sticks in the crowd (although breaking them is a different story, as she claims to go through six or seven a night). A long dog-tag necklace is tucked underneath her shirt collar, but it cannot be contained for long as she slams her entire weight into the bass drum. The details are inscrutable from a distance, but she showed me the pair. Her name is engraved on one, while the other is for her brother Mark, who died in a car crash when Sam was sixteen years old.
“It’s a way of keeping him close to my heart — literally.”
Mark Loveless was more interested in baseball than music, spending hours in the backyard after school imitating Sandy Koufax, but Loveless knows that her brother was her greatest supporter. He even accompanied her to some of those basement shows when their parents insisted she go with a friend. “He hated most of it,” Loveless laughed. “I told him once that he could hang out outside and play hackeysack with his friends, but he said that he liked watching me watch the music.”
While Craig writes most of Oral Fixation’s lyrics, Loveless and the other members have contributed as much as they desire. The penultimate track on their debut LP, Hit the Concrete, is “Mark of the Beast,” a tribute to Loveless’s brother with an extended drum solo. The snare hits, she says, are meant to simulate the sound of a baseball hitting a glove, just like the way he practiced. The song released to college radio stations on April 10 — what would have been Mark’s 25th birthday.
More than her talent, her name, her attitude, or even her clothing, what defines Loveless and her place in the Long Island hardcore scene is her face. She shows up to every performance with a black eye, a split lip, or a bandage to fix a broken nose.
The trend started with Oral Fixation’s first EP, Dropout Valedictorian. On the day that the band had scheduled their cover photoshoot, Loveless had arrived late and covered in bruises, citing “a miscommunication amplified by alcohol and other drugs.” With no time or budget to push back the shoot, the band instead incorporated her bruises and scrapes into their iconography. The deluxe edition, due later this year, is a close-up of her eye, with a broken blood vessel next to her iris and a mottled blue around the socket.
Although the exact details of her injuries vary from show to show, Loveless never sits in front of the kit with at least one cut, bruise, or other wound. When asked if she ever uses makeup to simulate the aftermath of a bar fight, Loveless seemed offended at the concept. “Maybe nine times out of ten, I get into some stupid shit on the way to a gig. Mouth off at the wrong person, get between a couple of drunks, something like that.” And the other ten percent? “If I’m really struggling, I’ll get Ryan to punch me in the face as hard as he can a couple hours before the show. Give everything a chance to swell up. We don’t half-ass anything over in Oral Fixation.”
The rough-and-tumble life has its drawbacks. Loveless’s knuckles have permanent scars from where scrapes open back up mid-performance, spraying blood over her kit. She drinks heavily before going onstage, numbing the pain enough that she can focus on her performance. She struggles to sleep as the vertigo and nausea catch up to her. At one point, Loveless lifted the hem of her shirt to reveal a six-inch laceration scar across her rib cage. “Broken beer bottle,” she explained. “I’m not proud of that one.”
To her credit, Loveless is aware that most people in her position burn out bright. “I’m not trying to go out like Keith Moon did. I stay away from the hard stuff. I try to eat right and exercise on weekends. The Sam who sits behind the kit is not the Sam sitting on this couch.” From where I sat, they looked about the same, but I’m willing to take her word for it. Only 23 years old, she has ample time to grow — as a musician and as a person.
Still an underground name, expect Oral Fixation to be on everyone’s lips. They have a fall tour coming up with the Movielife, during which they’ll introduce their brand of Dillinger-adjacent chaos to hordes of impressionable young pop punk fans. From there, it’s only a matter of time before Loveless is scouted for something greater. She acknowledges that many drummers in her position take jobs as touring technicians, giving them inroads to bigger and better things. Craig joked that the band is already mentally preparing to lose her. “Once Daryl [Palumbo of Glassjaw] gets a good look at her? Forget it. She’ll be selling out arenas while we’re still stuck in basements.”
Loveless didn’t exactly agree. “He always says that. I’m happy where I am. If I really cared about moving up, I would have gotten a real apartment by now.” Maybe one without a centipede infestation. As for Oral Fixation? She offers another smile, and I start to suspect that one too many blows to the face might have broken her jaw. “I’m riding with these guys until the wheels come off.”