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But, as we grew it, we were interactive with our fans. We posted tour videos and pictures of what we had going on. It quickly grew within just a couple of years to 180,000. I think that close fan interaction and constantly sharing content (pictures, videos, up- dates), it’s keeping people locked in and following what we’re doing. It definitely helps. Motograter CONTINUED Have we lost that rock and roll mystique? Have we lost that bigger than life thing that just sells records and makes people buy into the brand of the band, i.e. VH, KISS? SHARK: I don’t know. I guess some of the mystique is gone. If you notice, any of the bands that even had that value to their band has kind of gone away. Like Tool, we all know who those guys are and what they look like now. Slipknot, they’ve all been unmasked. I think a lot of it is due to social media, you know? I’m going to go back to my phrase back in the day. Back in the day, they didn’t have all of this social media and everything. Your whole life is on the internet. It was hard to find out about bands. Now it’s just so accessible and readily available. You can look them up on their Instagram, or their Twitter or Facebook, and kind of see what their life is like. I don’t know. The mystique seems to be gone a little bit but it’s still out there. Do you think that there is too much over saturation that comes from social media which hurts overall sales? Does it increase the brand and increases propensity to buy? SJARK: It helps. It definitely helps. You can’t argue with that. When I started in this band, Motograter, it definitely wasn’t do- ing that much. They were just making a comeback and they had 4,000 likes on Facebook but there wasn’t a big fan interaction. RTFX is the host of THE RTFX RADIO SHOW on NEUE REGEL RADIO every Weds night at 9PM EST. Submit music or contact him at: [email protected]. Even though your part came in around 2013-2014, but what does it mean to you when you think about it. “Hey, I’m part of a band that was groundbreak- ing. It was genre creating. It created a sound that people were duplicat- ing. Now you hear a ton of that sound in a hell of a lot of bands today. SHARK: Yeah, it’s interesting. I did a tour recently with Hed PE and Jeremiah, the drummer, he’s really cool. One of the weird things about his situation was he had no idea who Hed PE was before he joined. He never listened to them. Nothing. He wasn’t a fan. He accidentally kind of stumbled into that gig. It was inter- esting for me because my situation was so much different. I was a huge Motograter fan. I saw Motograter on Ozzfest in 2003 and they blew my mind. I bought the CD and I ran it into the ground. I worshipped the band and I had their posters on my wall. I sat in my room and tried to play along. I’ve always been a huge fan. Anybody that knows me, knows that I bled Motograter forever. So, when I saw that the band was reforming, I hit them up and just told them about myself. It just kind of snowballed from there and I became a member of the band. It’s been surreal to join a band that I grew up loving and to help them make this resurgence and come back. To be the guy that’s on the next album is really cool. It’s awesome. People really need to listen to this re- cord because it has such a fresh vibe to it. When you finally joined, did that make any more passion than you had into the band? SHARK: Oh, yeah. It was like full force. Like I mentioned, when I first joined, the band didn’t really have much going on. The band was trying to make a comeback. A lot of people had forgotten about the band so we were in a weird position. I’m going to be Continued on page 60: TAKE ME THERE NOW! Page 57