"Here's an official statement from Kris Roe, guitar player/singer of The Ataris regarding Columbia records. It was posted on The Ataris message board on their website, as Kris frequently does…." Interesting. Click below to read it.
"Hello everyone, today is Monday July 30th and we're in Washington D.C. (tomorrow's warped show) It's our day off so I actually had a few minutes to get online and thought I would post a message regarding your various questions about Columbia records… Since our contract with Kung fu was completed this year we have had talks with many labels both indie and majors. The main goal we want to achieve as the ataris is to be a band that will forever exist completely for our fans, our way of achieving that goal is by doing all of the following things… writing our fans back, running our own website and posting and replying on it ourselves, opening a record store so we could do special shows occasionally and when you are in our town you can actually come by and say hi, going out before and after we play every night and taking the time to meet as many of you as we can, making and controlling our own merchandise 100%, inviting fans every night to get onstage and play a song with us, always playing low priced/ all-ages/ general admission shows, all of this we will always continue to do no matter what label we are on cause this is who we are and no one can change that and that is 100% straight from the heart. Our main factor in chosing who would be our new home was that we want as many people to have access to our band as possible, wether you want to face it or not punk rock music has never been an elitist art form, look at the bands who started punk music such as the clash, the ramones… etc. do you think it made them any less true to what they were that they were all on major labels?
The bottom line is that we chose Columbia over everyone else we talked to for no other reason than this, we want to continue to grow as a band and this for us we feel at this time is the next gradiual step for us as the ataris, everyone at columbia completely understand how we have operated our band and how we want to continue to operate our band and have no intention on destroying or changing anything that we have built, they actually encouraged us to continue putting out 7 inches and other special releases on kung fu while we're on their label, one final note to clear up…
our signing to columbia had absolutely 100% nothing to do with marco leaving or with money, We made plenty of money on an indie. No matter what we know that our real fans know that we are true in our words and will always grow with us as a band, to everyone else, we understand what it is like to call something your own and not want new people to discover it but there comes a time where you have to realize that it's only rock and roll. Anyways all things aside we will be taking the rest of the year off other than some scattered shows to rehearse and record a new record due out next summer, so far all of the songs are a step back in the more simple upbeat style of "Blue skies…" I'm sure it will defintely be our best record yet. We will be doing an extensive small club headlining tour again early spring before the record's release so keep checking our tour dates. Take care and as always thanks for listening.
-sincerely your friends, the ataris. kris, john, mike and chris."