How did we get here?: Dino Bravo

While Dino Bravo, a heavy metal wrestling-inspired band, prepares to play at the Pygmalion Music Festival on Saturday, Sept. 28, the two pizza lovers, Jake Mott and Ivan Catron, sat down to talk about their journey within the C-U music scene since 2009.MJ: What is the main foundation of the band as far as influences?IC: I guess initially it started with the bass guitar and the drums. There were a couple of bands like Lightning Bolt and Big Business that focused on playing with just two guys. I guess the idea for instrumentation went from there and stylistically we take some cues from Big Business, The Melvins, Harvey Milk, and obviously-- Black Sabbath. At least we were told Sabbath worship is what we sounded like, so we are not going to deny that we love Black Sabbath.MJ: What music projects have you previously been in?JM: We were in a band together two years ago called Bad Catman, a folk punk band. That was the first time we ever played “together together,” and growing up we were in some pretty cruddy bands that played together.IC: Yeah, in high school our bands played together and I was in TV’s Patrick Duffy, a short lived power violence band.JM: I was in the Diamond Stretch as well.MJ: What’s your favorite part about being involved in the music scene?JM: Oh, man. There’s so many different things. I just like going to shows and being with like-minded people.IC: You get to meet a lot of cool new people and characters. I guess the best example for me was when I got to see Wabeno Rock Farm. It was a very relatively unknown band from Milwaukee who came down and played one show at the Dude Ranch when that was still around back in 2010. They came down and played and it was just the weirdest stuff I’ve ever heard and I never would have even thought any of that existed and I heard bands that they took cues from that I never really checked out. I’ve heard of The Wipers, but I never really checked them out until I heard Wabeno do their cover. One little event can snowball a whole bunch of new things.MJ: If you had to chose only a few words to describe the band, what would they be?JM: Sludgy wrestle rock is pretty much what we go by.MJ: What do you mean by “wrestle rock”?IC: Our band name is taken from an obscure wrestler from the ‘80s. We write some of our songs either directly about wrestling or at least give our song titles wrestling reference.JM: That range from very obvious to very obscure.IC: I’m sure people see the song, “I’m sorry I love you,” and think “aw, what’s this song about?” But it’s about wrestling.MJ: Do you watch a lot of wrestling?IC: We watch the Monday night show almost every week and we usually try to catch most of the pay-per-views if we can. Collectively, we have a very large collection of DVDS from all forms of wrestling from really independent wrestling scenes like PWG and Ring of Honor to stuff from Japan.MJ: If you had to chose your favorite wrestler, who would it be?JM: Of all time or currently?IC: That’s tough. I’d have to say as a kid, I was always about Mick Foley, now there’s so much I know that it’s hard to compare. I’ll go for my first love.JM: My first favorite wrestler was The Rock, but he betrayed us all by going Hollywood.IC: But if we had to go current, I would go with Daniel Bryan for WWE and on the Indies, Davey Richards.MJ: How did you originally met each other?JM: I met Ivan the day before I graduated high school, so around 2005.IC: We played a lot of shows in high school because our bands would play together a lot. We played around 50 to 60 shows together, and then I went to school for a while when he played for the Diamond Stretch. I’d come to some Diamond Stretch shows to hangout and somewhere around 2009 we started hanging out almost exclusively and watching wrestling together. I think we found out we were such an art in wrestling friends that no one else in the world even mattered.JM: Then we started playing in Bad Catman in 2010 and we started Dino Bravo in March of 2011. We were having a Bad Catman practice and our singer/guitar player was running late, so we jammed on some ideas and stuck with it.MJ: Is there anything else you’d want the readers from Pizza FM to know?JM: Monday Night Raw is on every Monday from 9 to 10 p.m.IC: Our solo projects are playing a show at Error Records on Sept. 16 with some cool guys, namely Bill Tucker.JM: I have a pizza tattoo! I love pizza. More pizza and more wrestling in everyone’s lives is the main point I would like to drive home.IC: I don’t want to shamelessly plug local pizza, but Jet’s Pizza is the bomb. There are so many empty boxes from Jet’s that go in and out of our apartment. There’s lots of great pizza in town, but Jet’s….