The Knockturnal sat down with the god fathers of Emo. Creators of Emo Nite and CD Burners podcast hosts, Morgan Freed and T.J. Petracca.
Morgan Freed and T.J. Petracca met at work, then, got to work. We found out how a random evening at a bar, turned into Emo Nite. A monthly Emo party with celebrity guest DJ’s playing, you guest it, emo music. The parties are hosted in different cities across America and have been, consistent, for the last ten years. They have a monthly residency at Avalon, Los Angeles, among many other iconic venues. You name it, they have likely played there.
Petracca and Freed have since started multiple businesses across music and entertainment spaces. They recently launched their podcast CD Burners where they listen to and break down records from back in the day and even have musicians from those albums come on and discuss the ins and outs of that album. Petracca and Freed also started Ride Or Cry, a production company and creative agency, since they both worked in these spaces for years prior to Emo Nite.
Emo Nite has been so successful, that Morgan and TJ created an off shoot party called, Grave Rave in collaboration with Insomniac. One of the biggest electronic music festival production companies. Grave Rave is party that plays a mix of house music and emo music. If that wasn’t enough to fill their plates, they also started a record label called Graveboy Records, because that is what you do, when you love music this much. You support it and promote and help create it.
It has been ten years since Emo Nite began and they are about to celebrate their big ten year anniversary. They are calling it Emo Nite Day and will be a full weekend of festivities starting at the place it all began The Echoplex Los Angeles on December 7. Then Emo Nite Day is on December 8 at The Hollywood Palladium. It will be indoors and outdoors and there will be a carnival, rides, performances and more. To top the weekend off, they will be hosting a Grave Rave party at Academy La.
The Knockturnal: What keeps you Emo ?
TJ: I don’t know. It’s a weird thing. People have such a strong attachment to the word emo. It means something so different, to so many different people. Some people will be like, I’m emo right now. Saying I’m emo, means they are part of a certain sub culture to me. I don’t know if it necessarily means either one of those things. I’m not very sad right now. I’m very happy and in a good mood most of the time. I think when you grow up listening to this kind of music and being part of this community, it’s like something that never really goes away for you. This morning at the gym, I was listening to Thursday and getting ready for our podcast, where we get to talk about these albums that we grew up listening to. I don’t know what keeps me emo. It’s just something that doesn’t really go away.
Morgan: I listen to so much different shit. There will be weeks where like, I don’t listen to anything that comes close to being in the emo genre and I’ll listen to something that’s new, that a newer artist put out and I’ll be like, all of this is awesome and thats who I am. If you grew up in that scene. You just are that and you get transported back to that, no matter where you are. You can be 90 years old and you hear some of that shit and you can be like hell yeh.
TJ Petracca and Morgan Freed
The Knockturnal: What was the first concert you ever went to?
TJ: The First one, I don’t remember. My parents brought me to Fleetwood Mac and they had me in the front row as a little baby. As soon as the music started I guess I just started crying and they went to the very back and traded their front row tickets and they were like here have a good time. The first concert I went to on my own I went to Fallout Boy, Bayside and Armor For Sleep at a club in Salt Lake City called In The Venue
Morgan: I ldon’t know but I think it was like Limp Biscuit opening up for like Primus but I went to a lot of local shows Tuscon.
The Knockturnal: What was the last concert you went to?
Morgan: I just saw Blink 182 and Pierce The Veil in Los Angeles
TJ: I can’t remember but I’m going to see Underneath and Static Dress tonight and they’ll be with us tomorrow night at Webster Hall for Emo Nite.
The Knockturnal: How do you think Emo Nite affected the rise of Emo bands coming back on tour after so many years?
TJ: Look at where the emo scene was and what the word emo meant in 2014 versus what it means now. We started Emo Nite in 2014. Being emo was not cool. It wasn’t something that people were proud of. Emo music wasn’t what you listened to when you hung out with your friends. It was almost a very solitary experience. Until you went to the shows. Then you were like, these are my people, friends. We wanted to bring that experience. Bring back the feeling of how it was when we grew up. We try to make emo feel current and cool. Like something people would want to be a part of. Looking now, 10 years later. I feel like it has had a pretty big hand in it and not to tune my own horn, but I feel like when you are throwing a party, every single month, in one of the largest epicenters of pop culture in the world. It’s going to reach a point where it starts becoming mainstream. I can’t think of another party that has lasted as long
Morgan: What TJ said.
Tj Petracca and Morgan Freed
The Knockturnal: How do you guys think Emo Nite has helped the emo generation and the current generation Gen z, that is just discovering the music and getting on the bandwagon. / What are your thoughts on the term Elder Emo.
TJ: The way we try to make our parties feel, is how shows used to feel. Concert etiquette is so different now. People just, aren’t really looking out for each other the same way. Or there to get sweaty and party and sing and enjoy themselves. They are there to grab instagram stories and videos. Just to say that they were there. If somebody pushes you, you go on Tick Tock the next day like “this person was so mean to me.” It’s missing the point of the live music experience. It’s interesting too because of our demographic. When we started this party I was 24 years old and now I’m 34 years old. There’s certainly still a few people that were there ten years ago, that come out every month. For the most part, though, the people there are like 21 to 25 you know. I think a lot of that is due to how we try to treat the parties. It’s not really a nostalgia night and not really a come back and relive your youth night. We want our parties to be the coolest spot to go, tonight, this year. I think that helps to keep the people discovering this music and this scene.
Morgan: We have a wonderful lady that works with us and her handle is the elder emo but I could not hate a term more. I think it absolutely does the thing for certain people. Where you know, there’s a reason for it. Maybe the good thing about it, is, maybe people wouldn’t discover something if it wasn’t for that baseline. That thing needed for their entrance. Their barrier for entrance. like I need that thing that is office humor to lead me into a world where I can discover things that I really really like. the fact that the term is in mainstream at all is shocking so I think like, fuck it, its all cool. I just think personally why would you (use that term) that would just be like I’m an old guy. That’s cool I guess. That’s cool to some people. Not to knock anybody’s shit
TJ: If that’s a label you want to take on, then that’s great. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with identifying with that term
Morgan Freed and Tj Petracca
The Knockturnal: Describe the beginning of Emo Nite to where it has gotten today.
TJ: It was never supposed to be anything. I def didn’t think we would be doing this ten years later. I literally just thought that we were doing like a fun bar night once a month in LA.b Some of our friends would come out and like maybe a few more would come out the next month. We originally just walked into this bar that Morgan had a friend who was a bartender at. We hooked up an iPad to an aux cable and Spotify and that was how we started it. Now, here we are. Ten years later and we eventually learned how to dj. That was a big step up. It took us a while. Webster hall is an amazing venue. It’s huge. It’s really fun. We do it four times a year there. I never thought in a million years that we would basically have a residency at Webster hall
Morgan: We didn’t plan for anything. I still think there’s going to be a lot of stuff that we do in the future and in a few years that we are not really planning for. We take the next right at the gate. Especially with this scene. We are really careful with it. We always take that into consideration. That’s why I think we’re round ten years later.
TJ: We’ve had a lot of different people from all different genres be a part of emo nite. That goes back to the journey of emo nite. Emo, the genre, going from not cool, into like mainstream. We’ve always tried to accept literally anybody who likes this kind of music and wether that’s Post Malone who at the time was making hip hop and now is making country or Machine Gun Kelly who was making rap but has put out two amazing punk records. Halsey, last week, at the VMA’s, played rock music. Some people would be like why are The Chainsmokers at Emo Nite. It doesn’t really matter what they are making now. They love this music and care about it. Thery grew up listening to it the same way that we did and we really like blending that sort of thing.
Tj Petracca and Morgan Freed
The Knockturnal: take us back to Emo Nite 2022 with MGK and Oliver Sykes from Bring Me The Horizon. What was that night like.
TJ: That was prob MGK’s fifth or sixth time at Emo Nite at that point. He’s a really great guy. He’s been such a big supporter of what we do. I think he would come pre pandemic. He would come to Emo Nite, not even to perform or dj or anything, he was just like, I like being here. This is the music that I like. He was going to Warped Tour and stuff when he was younger. There’s this famous video of him on youtube where he’s meets Travis Barker for the first time. In 2019 MGK and Travis perform together for the first time, I think at Emo Nite
Morgan: He’s shockingly authentic and really just a good guy. It’s strange to see some of the stuff that we see on social media and some of the bullshit that he gets. Our experience with hm has been very much 100 percent positive and Olli Sykes is a kick ass dude too .. I just don’t understand a gd damn thing he says.
TJ: That wasn’t planned. That one night you are referencing was not planned. MGK called Morgan that day and was like yo me and Ollie just left the studio we want to come play at Emo Nite.
The Knockturnal: How was the experience producing the Happy Days music video for Blink 182 during covid?
Morgan: When we first started Emo Nite, T.J. and I met at a company. I was doing music videos. He was at a company within that company that did digital. So we came from that space when we started Emo Nite. We didn’t know it would be Emo Nite so we started a company that was already what we did as our day jobs. Before that music video we had done so many before. Then during the pandemic, we had gotten to know those guys before hand. They knew that were scrappy and Tj could do computer shit and digital well. Figuring out how to do shit during the pandemic was difficult and you know I think we were in lock down and didn’t know how to use twitch or how to stream. We had to figure it all out and get everybody together. I think it has always been right there in a sense. How do we make things possible? How do we make a music video if we can’t make a music video? So it was cool to figure it out
Morgan Freed and TJ Petracca
The Knockturnal: Given where you started to where you are today, could you have imagined how big Emo Nite has become and all the people you have worked with over the last ten years?
TJ: No. This morning when I was listening to Thursday, I was like, oh yeh, I remembered we had Geoff Rickly, the lead singer from Thursday, at Webster Hall. We are doing this podcast we just started, (CD Burners) where we go back and listen to all these albums and do a deep dive on them. We reach out to people from the bands and get them on, get their stories and find out more about it. It’s been so interesting, coordinating those interviews because, we know all those people now. They’ve been in our phone. It’s this super easy phone call or text to make those interviews happen. Driving in (to NYC) we were like, oh yeh Underoath is doing shows, we should go to them. Within 5 minutes we got on the guest list and were treated so nicely. Growing up being such a huge Underneath fan, it’s crazy that they are our friends now. It’s also our third year doing a show at Zouks Night Club at Resorts World in Las Vegas which is super fun. It’s typically a dance club where Zed plays but we get to go in there. Something Emo Nite is, is just going into spaces Emo music is not normally played or considered. Playing at the Sahara tent at Coachella a few years ago which is typically the dance music tent, where Daft Punk performed. That was a crazy thing playing at Zouk Night Club has been awesome. We have a really good show and the club is fuckin sick. There’s lights and screens and things you wouldn’t find at a rock concert.
Morgan: Yeh its a way different experience than what you would get during the day
The Knockturnal: What does Emo Nite look like in 20 years?
TJ: I don’t know. I literally don’t know. I can’t even believe that its been 10.
Morgan: We don’t know what its going to look like in one year.
The Knockturnal: Any big plans for Emo Nite?
TJ: We’re def always dreaming and trying to keep pushing things.
Morgan: I think in 20 years is interesting that you say that. I feel like, when you think in your head of what the 70’s looks like, you can picture it. The 80’s too. I think that you know, after 2010 we started to lose the plot. We just did it all. There’s nothing left. Emo was the last one of the things that defines a generation and so I think it’s really a stamp in history. I don’t think its going away at all. I mean if you can picture what an 80s movie looks like you can picture what an emo movie would look like.
TJ: Have you seen the movie DIDI ? Its him as a child. and I’ve never seen adolescence of our age captured so perfectly. I like that on his myspace page he has Hello Goodbye and he goes to this girls myspace page and he sees that she likes Paramore so he wears a Paramore shirt to the party. The way that they talk on AOL and messenger and put things in their profile. I think that that’s generation defining.
Morgan: You just can’t see it when you are in it.
TJ and Morgan also support many local organizations through Emo Nite Fives a F*CK where one dollar from every ticket purchased at a particular event goes to a list of organizations they work with and help support.
In a case where the influence of something as big as Emo Nite, that has generated off shoot after off shoot of copycats, credit needs to be paid. It can easily be traced, that the start of Emo Nite has helped bring back so many of our favorite emo bands and even a few festivals dedicated to them. So many bands have started touring again, over the last ten years after major hiatus. Emo Nite, had a huge hand in that and in bringing back emo music and introducing it to new wave emo kids. That is what makes Morgan Freed and TJ Petracca the God Fathers of emo. For helping its rebirth, championing its comeback and hopefully keeping it alive and well for the long haul. It was never a phase.
Tj Petracca and Morgan Freed