The Pharmacy

By Bob Ham

Photo by Justin Vela

Any band that has toured the U.S. at least once probably has a batch of funny anecdotes or horror stories to recount to their friends and family. Rest assured, they couldn’t hold a candle to the kinds of things that the quartet known as The Pharmacy has seen and done.

Over the course of a pair of cross-country tours and many more trips up and down the West Coast, this punk-with-a-new-wave-heart band has seen a fatal knife fight, had their equipment stolen (along with their van), seen singer/guitarist Scottie Yoder cut his toe down to the bone while swimming (only to have it stitched up by a drunk veterinarian), and been arrested while driving through Arizona.

“Technically, we’re still fugitives,” says Yoder, who, with drummer Brendhan Bowers, attempted to raise money to fly back to Tucson for their court appearance. “We had about four benefit shows,” says Bowers, “but we didn’t make any money. The most it did was get us a little bit out of debt.”

The flipside of The Pharmacy’s hard times on the road has been the palpable rapport that Yoder, Bowers, bassist Ryan Thompson, and keyboardist Stefan Rubicz have with one another. The four young men constantly finish each other’s sentences and riff on the kind of inside jokes that grow out of spending countless hours packed into a van together. The constant touring has also turned the group into a vicious live act, held together by Bowers’ animalistic drumming and the warped synthesizer arpeggios played by Rubicz.

In fact, Rubicz, who has only been in the band for a few months, has quickly become The Pharmacy’s secret weapon, adding a great deal of color to the group’s older material and helping hone the attack on the songs that will comprise their second full-length. This added level of musicality should come as no surprise considering his musical pedigree. “I have been playing piano since I was three and had lessons for about nine years,” Rubicz explains. “Until I was in high school, I only ever listened to classical music, and even in high school I was mostly listening to jazz.”

The core of the group, however, is Yoder and Bowers, who have been friends since their school days and freely admit to be cut from the same cloth. “When Brendhan was in 7th grade and I was in the 9th grade, we basically had the exact same yearbook photos,” says Yoder. “We had the exact same Kurt Cobain t-shirts and the same haircut.”

The two started playing music together in 2000, recording noisy four-track punk influenced by The Ramones and Guitar Wolf. Their rough recordings and early live performances caught the ear of The Pharmacy’s first keyboardist, Joey Seward. Says Yoder, “The ska band he was in just broke up. He did some recording for us and it sounded way better than anything we had ever done. We said, ‘Hey, since you’re not doing anything, you should join our band!’“

Seward did just that, helping the group craft their first album B.F.F., out on Don’t Stop Believin’ Records, and make preparations for another West Coast tour. In keeping with the group’s history of hard luck, Seward never made it into the van for the tour. A week before they were to hit the road, Seward got into a serious bicycle accident, rupturing his spleen and breaking three ribs. The Pharmacy was forced to take on the U.S. as a two-piece and when they returned, according to Yoder, “Joey decided that he was sick of the whole touring thing and went off and started a death metal band.”

Currently, The Pharmacy is putting the finishing touches on its second full-length album as well as its 7-inch due out soon. And, despite all the broken engines and broken bones that have come out of The Pharmacy’s many hours on the road, they are already gearing up for more shows in the States and planning on heading to Mexico and Europe at some point this year. “We just want to be on tour all the time,” says Bowers. “It’s all we really know how to do.”

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