He goes by Moon. On stage, on the radio, among his friends, when approached by fans — he’s Moon. It’s a name Philip Sneed came up with as he formed the band Greek Fire while still a member of Story of the Year, the platinum-selling, emo-metal band he played guitar and bass in for 15 years.
Moon parted ways with Story of the Year in 2018, but Greek Fire is still going strong, and Moon has also been an official member of LA punk-rock mainstay Goldfinger since 2013. In addition, Moon recently started the Teenage Dirtbags, a tongue-in-cheek cover band specializing in ’90s nostalgia, and heads up Punk Rock Machine, a group that stages high-energy theme concerts, like last year’s Punk Rock Christmas and the upcoming Can You Feel the Punk Tonight, a night of Disney covers at Delmar Hall.
All of that points to the fact that the 42-year-old Moon is a seriously hard working dude. He also happens to be a highly affable guy, and what was originally intended to be an hour-long chat turned into two and a half hours, a testament to his loquacious style and action-packed life. That talkability has made Moon familiar with legions of fans outside of his musical life as a radio personality and member of the Rizzuto Show, the popular morning program on The Point (105.7 FM). We sat down at the studio for a conversation that ranged from Moon’s south county childhood, feeling like an outcast, a Garth Brooks epiphany, his love of Phantom of the Opera, his Christian-metal formative years, Story of the Year’s successes and hardships, his painful exit from that band and how he got into radio.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
St. Louis Magazine recently named you St. Louis’ Best Musician.
It’s a ridiculous honor. By all objective measures, I’m nowhere near the Top 50 of the best musicians in St. Louis. I’m crazy humbled by anybody in this community appreciating how much energy I put into just trying to make music, man. I’m not doing it for money. I’m not doing it for fame. I’m not doing it for cool points. I’m doing it because it’s really all I know as a base of communication for me.
Are you from St. Louis?
I grew up in South County. St. Louis all the way through. Graduated from Lindbergh High. I didn’t belong in any of it. I was kind of the invisible kid. I was really a delayed kid as far as knowing how to communicate with the world around me. I just wasn’t good at it. I was just befuddled by the way the world kept passing me up. In school, I was always a few years behind socially.
What kind of musical upbringing did you have?
That’s the crazy thing — I wasn’t raised around music. There was no music playing in my house. I don’t really remember music being played in the car. I remember the school bus rides because they would play pop radio. I was, like, ‘Whoa, the world is happy and sweet. There are a lot of weird sounds out there.’
When did you start taking music seriously?
In sixth grade, I had a music teacher who spent the entire semester on Phantom of the Opera. I had never really heard music like that. We had the scripts, and we would follow along and dissect the music, how and why it was written in that way. Before that, I had always tried to do that on my own. I had a good ear, but I didn’t have the language, and this was the first time somebody stripped the songs down using the right language. Dude, Phantom changed my life.
Would you like to perform in the role of the Phantom on stage?
I would love to. That’s a bucket list thing for me just because I love taking challenges. I think I can do anything. I hate to say that, but that’s the way I’ve lived since I was a child. It’s like, “Oh, you’d like to challenge me? I would love to take that challenge.” I don’t know my way around that [theatrical] world, which is why I’d love to be forced into it.
What made you want to perform popular music?
I was 10 years old. I saw Garth Brooks live on HBO. There was something that was planted that day. I had never seen a concert before. I had only known tapes and radio — I had no idea what live performance was. This Garth Brooks special came on, and I was a different person after that. People do this for a living? The door had opened. I remember turning around to my dad and saying, “I’m going to do that!”
Did you just start playing?
My parents had an old Casio keyboard player, and I would just mess with the keys until I did something familiar, like, that’s that Alabama song I heard at the neighbor’s house! So I started realizing that you could manipulate the same notes in different ways and move people in different ways. So the goal after that was trying to figure out why this song moves me. Is it the tone, is it the lyric, is it the vocals? And I would just sit there and dissect it. I just became this weird obsessive scientist when it came to music, and it wasn't the choice. I was just behind the curtain from then on out.
What was your first band?
At soccer tryouts going into high school, I met a kid who started singing a Silverchair riff, and I finished the line, and he gave me this weird look. I got a call that night, and he was, like, “This is John [Anthony Ingoldsby] from soccer. Do you want to hang out?” So I got a rental guitar from Mel Bay. He got drumsticks. He did not get drums. So we started banging out all of our favorite Filter and Green Day and Silverchair. Man, ’94 was the greatest year ever for alternative music. It just so happened that all this stuff was coming out right when I first got a guitar in my hands. We learned everything we could.
Did you two eventually start playing out?
Our only goal was to be in Lindbergh’s Battle of the Bands. We went to the Battle when we were freshmen, and suddenly, there were 100 kids in Rage Against the Machine shirts all in the same room, and I was, like, “Maybe I’m not as alone as I thought.” So we told ourselves that before we are out of this school, we were going to play the Battle of the Bands. That’s all we cared about. We played every day in his basement. He rented some drums, and we were just a two-piece called Next Level for three years, just ripping P.O.D. covers. We were super into the Christian metal scene.
Did you make it to the Battle of the Bands?
Senior year is about to start, and we still don't have a singer or a bass player. We’re running out of time. The first week of school, there’s this kid in our gym class wearing an MxPx shirt. He said he played the bass, and we were like, “Holy shit, brother! You’re in a band!” We had a three-piece now. We still didn’t have a singer. This kid who was in the madrigal group at the high school joined and we became Sound Advice. We did rapcore versions of our favorite bands, and we got second place at the Battle of the Bands.
How long did Sound Advice stay together?
We were pretty serious. We were touring regionally, playing different churches and coffee houses and skate parks, playing all originals. After the MxPx kid quit, we picked up this 15-year-old kid, just this wild ass-dude [Mark Joseph Roth] wearing a gas mask, ripping the bass, in this band that was opening for us at this coffee shop in Eureka. We were 18, and he was already a better musician than us. It was in this dude’s blood. We started getting respect. But at the Creepy Crawl, we would get threatened by fans because our lyrics were very faith based. Like, if we played this show they were gonna jump us. But then these dudes in the other bands started defending us against their own fans. So the hardcore scene took us in, and that changed the trajectory. The only people that we ever got robbed by were churches. The Creepy Crawl didn’t make any money off of us, but they paid us the $40 they promised us.
How else were you paying the bills after high school?
My high school girlfriend got pregnant, so I was a father at 17 and had another kid before I was 21. I worked four jobs. I drove a school bus for Special School District — I had this giant afro, so I looked like Otto, straight out of the <i>Simpson</i> — worked at the YMCA, Hot Topic, McMurray Music. At night, I would pass out flyers and stickers at Mississippi Nights for my band. I couldn't afford to get in, but I would pass out flyers for our show coming up at the Hi-Pointe trying to get 10 people to go. It was pure hustle. I didn’t hate it, but it was extremely difficult, and we were broke.
When did you start singing?
In 2001, our singer left the band. We had a couple of gigs booked, one opening for Taking Back Sunday at Rocket Bar. I’d never sung anything. But we were now a three-piece band, changed our name to Maybe Today and became really fusion-y, super-progressive, all over the place with really cool parts. There were four people at the show — two for us and two for Taking Back Sunday. I was just winging the vocals, and we were spinkicking, backflipping, throwing guitars. But after the show, they were telling me that my voice was so cool and unique. It gave me the confidence that I could do this. I was so hung up on my voice my entire life. Everyone from every grade and classroom had been making fun of it since I was in kindergarten. Started writing as a three-piece. I want to move people, and here’s how we do it.
How did Story of the Year come along?
By a weird twist of fate, the guy that beat us at Battle of the Bands in 1999, Greg Haupt, was in a band called Disturbing the Peace, all Webster and Lindbergh guys. They were fucking awesome. Greg then joined a band called Big Blue Monkey, and then Maybe Today opened for Big Blue Monkey at Mississippi Nights. It was a wild show. A couple of months later, the guitarist for Big Blue Monkey called me from LA and said they had fired Greg and that they needed someone who could learn songs really fast to help them get this deal they were showcasing for. I’d never been to California. I just thought I was helping out these other St. Louis musicians. I ripped five or six songs I learned in a day and came back home. Eventually, they said, "We need somebody to finish this record and asked me to join the band." They had just signed a deal with Maverick. I went home and had a long conversation with Greg. There was an honor barrier there. I couldn't just take his gig without talking to him. I’ve never said this publicly, but he gave me a lot of warnings, coming from someone who just got forced out of a band. But Greg knew a lot more than I thought he did. The conversation was way more relevant and poignant than I thought it would be. [Note: Haupt passed away from cancer last year.] Then the next big conversation I had was with my band Maybe Today. I asked for their blessing. There were tears shed from all of us. We were a family.
What were those early days like with Story of the Year?
I went from being broke with four jobs in St. Louis to broke with one job in LA. [Laughs.] We went from the studio after finishing our record in LA into a van, drove to St. Louis to see our families and then drove 10 hours to Rhode Island to start a tour with My Chemical Romance and the Used. This was April 2003. The record [Page Avenue] came out in September, and we didn't get off the road until 2005. We played shows every day in the U.S. and Canada in a van. It was wild.
Were you partying a lot?
No, brother. It was not a party band. We were working. Our whole goal was just to kick the shit out of anybody else that was playing. Our goal was that everybody needs to go home forgetting everything they saw except for us.
Did you still consider yourself a St. Louis band?
Not only that, we decided St. Louis was going to be a part of our brand. We wanted to put St. Louis on the map. Almost all of our merch had “314” and other St. Louis stuff on it. We said it from the stage. We had St. Louis tattoos. Evn the record is called Page Avenue. We definitely waved the St. Louis flag.
Were you finally seeing some money come in?
No, dude, we were living off the dollar menu. We would do what we called “band breakfast.” We’d go to a hotel with a continental breakfast. One person would go in, open the back door, let everyone in, and we’d stroll in one by one and eat breakfast. That’s how we survived. That and selling our promo samplers for three bucks. It was hard to leave your family for two months and come home with no money. On the surface and from the fan's perspective and other bands looking at you, it looks like a success, but there was a mismanagement of money and some other things, and it's kind of soul crushing. There were a lot of years, even our most lucrative years, when our crew was making more money than we were.
But Page Avenue ended up going Platinum.
Yeah, if we’d been born 10 years earlier, I think we’d be really rich folks, but we're not. Or at least I'm not. You have to remember, that was the beginning of the end for CDs. A lot of other newer bands were signing these 360 deals with labels (that gave the labels a revenue share of concerts, merchandise, etc.), and we were classic ’80s and ’90s kids, so we were like, “You can’t take our touring and our merch!” So we found ourselves in this weird no-man’s land. It was grueling. We had just come off a huge record cycle of success. People thought it was an overnight success, but it was years of grinding, grinding, grinding. That's what we knew how to do.
Was there another band that you toured with that you especially admired?
Linkin Park changed our life. As people, as a band, as business people. They were the perfect example of a perfect band. They were just exquisite people and characters. To this day, I love them, and we owe them a ton. Anybody who doesn't believe that wasn't there. Because that band kicks ass, man, in every way, mostly behind the scenes.
About this time, you started Greek Fire, right?
I started Greek Fire, which was basically Maybe Today plus our other guitar player from Story. There was just a lot of stuff in me and stuff being written that didn't really belong with Story.
And so Story were kind of on a break, and Greek Fire was kicking ass and gaining momentum, and we landed the Disney movie. (Greek Fire’s “Top of the World” was featured in the trailer for Disney’s Big Hero 6 in 2014.) It was interesting launching a band in a completely different way that we had launched before. We made sure we built it right and built it real.
Then you left Story of the Year?
I didn’t leave Story.
What happened?
We sold out two shows, Chicago and St Louis [in January 2018], and the next morning management fired me.
Why?
All I will say is that it's a super sad situation based truly on a misunderstanding. I don't want to say anything that sounds bad. It's just a very sad situation, especially how it went down
Have you talked to the members of Story of the Year since then?
Those guys have not talked to me since before that [St. Louis] show.
Have either you or anyone from Story gone public with what happened?
No. And we won't. Because it's just personal stuff. And what's really tragic about the whole thing is that a conversation was never had, and I think that would change everything, and I look forward to the day when that's even possible. It's always been possible for me. I'm open to anything. That's how I've always lived. I'd love to talk to those guys because the tragedy is that all of us sacrificed and risked so much. We put it all out on the line for that 15 solid years of true dedication and hard work and sacrifice. We went through some really gnarly struggles, and we always did it together. We did something so special, and it sucks that it's not all special. Listen, my dream came true if I did anything — writing, a performance, guitar, a lyric or a moment after a show — if I did anything as far as moving somebody, then my whole life has been worth it. All the efforts and all the sacrifice was worth it, and the majority of the opportunities that I have been given to move people have been because of the dedication of us five people for those 15 years. And to have it so tragically cut sucks, and for that reason and a hundred others, the door is always open for me.
How did the radio thing come about?
In 2011, I happened to be setting up a Greek Fire show with the program director for the Point, and he needed someone to babysit the station overnight for 10 bucks an hour. I was like, “You gotta be shitting me, but OK.” My gold records were on the wall when I’m babysitting the station for 10 bucks an hour, but I was willing to pay my dues because that’s what you do. So I did that on nights and weekends, and I wasn't really allowed on the air, but I started getting on the microphone anyway. Months went by, and nobody said anything, and the boss called me in and I was like, “Great, I'm getting ready to get fired.” But he said, “I heard you the other night. I liked what you did.” Since then I've never been airchecked. [Laughs.] Then in 2014, [Rizzuto Show host Scott] Rizzuto called me and said, “I'm taking over the morning show, and you're a creative dude — I like what you're doing on the weekends — I need a producer for the show. I was like, “Cool.” He said, “OK, you've got to be here at 4 a.m.” I was, like, “Fuuuck.” [Laughs.]
Now you’ve added another band, the Teenage Dirtbags.
It’s the same guys as in Greek Fire, but we play ’90s covers. We play about 10 shows a year. These are the songs that inspired me to play, and now I get to rip on these songs. It's so much fun. I've been pushing ’90s country on these guys since I've known them, like 20 years. We played Eureka Days last year and did two hours of alternative ’90s and then left and came back out in hats and boots and bolo ties and accents and did an hour of ’90s country. The country band was the party, man.
That’s a lot of musical projects.
That’s not all! Tim Convy from the band Ludo and the Morning Show [on 106.5 FM The Arch] came up to me in the hallway last year and told me he wanted to do a Christmas rock & roll show. I called John Pessoni [from The Urge and El Monstero] and got him in. We called it Punk Rock Christmas and sold it out and, dude, it was some of the most fun we’ve ever had. Clownvis emceed it. So now we’ve started Punk Rock Machine, and we’re taking all these different things, our favorites from whatever, and we're going to build these shows and have a big party and just let you know all are welcome.
When did you start going by Moon?
When Greek Fire started, I knew that it didn't sound like Story and didn't represent the same things, so I didn't want to go by the same name. I didn't want anybody to think it was a side project because it was a true passion that needed to stand on its own legs. I had a song called “I Am the Moon” about how I was affecting my world but was not part of my world. Again, it was about feeling really lost in my youth, so the song was about how I'm a satellite like the Moon. Also, I’m adopted, and right around this time I found my birth parents and got a wave of answers to questions that had never been answered before, and when you build 30 years of your identity on unanswered questions that becomes part of your identity, so when I was looking for a pseudonym, it just kind of made sense. And then I love the character arc of Jean Valjean from Les Mis, and nobody was really talking about Les Mis at the time, so I thought that would be a cool name. But then of course the giant movie came out a few years later, and I was, like, “Ugh, it seemed more obscure at the time!”
Catch Moon at Can You Feel the Punk Tonight at 8 p.m. on Saturday, August 26, at Delmar Hall (6133 Delmar Boulevard, 314-726-6161). Tickets are $25.
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