Meet Bill Conway of The Hard Times in Silver Lake

Today we’d like to introduce you to Bill Conway.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Bill. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
My long and rambling story starts in a warehouse in San Francisco. Since I was 19, I worked selling electrical supplies. I moved to San Francisco from Boston when I was 24 and worked loading pallets and just general manual labor. Around this time podcasts where just starting to break into public consciousness and since I had lots of time to myself in a large warehouse I dove in fully. There was an episode of WTF where Marc Maron was talking with comedian Brendon Walsh about how Brendon had been loading trucks in Austin and started doing comedy and after listening to that, I signed up for my first open mic at legendary Brainwash Cafe. I had been doing stand up for two years before my wife and I moved up to Portland and once there I started a podcast called Edgeland. This was a podcast that focused on the straight edge subculture. I talked with a lot of people that played in punk and hardcore bands and one of those people was Matt Saincome. We got along well and stayed in touch a little but nothing really happened.

Later that year, he made a post on Facebook talking about how he wanted to start a satire site like The Onion but for punks. I commented on the post, messaged him, said I wanted in, and then we started collaborating on what we wanted it to be. Matt had a journalism background, I was doing comedy, it was a good pairing. When we launched The Hard Times in December 2014 it immediately began to get traction. People either loved it or hated it. For the first four years of The Hard Times, I had a full-time day job, working in a warehouse, trying to find time to do Hard Times work and still pursue standup. I didn’t take any money from the site for the first couple of years. All the money we made went to paying our great team of freelance contributors. In 2018 my wife and I moved to Los Angeles and settled in Silver Lake. I was now making some money from The Hard Times but I still needed a day job and worked at Baller Hardware on Hyperion for about four months. In April 2019, I was able to quit that job and have been doing The Hard Times full time ever since. We run a monthly stand up comedy showcase at the Improv Lab and it’s a literal dream come true.

Has it been a smooth road?
The road is never smooth in the world of online publishing. The world has shifted in how they consume media so drastically that online traffic can often depend on whether or not Facebook has a favorable algorithm for you. We started on a budget of $800 and we scraped and clawed our way to where we are now. We have had people want to fight us over things we wrote, but for the most part people have a good sense of humor about things. Aside from dealing with Facebook and the occasional threat of bodily harm it’s just the struggle of the daily grind, coming up with new content that is also original, and not losing what turned people on to us to begin with.

So, as you know, we’re impressed with The Hard Times – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of and what sets you apart from others.
The Hard Times is a satire site for punks by punks. We have often been referred to as “the punk Onion” which is a great compliment. We specialize in satirical news about “the scene”. The hypocrisies of the punk scene, the hardcore frontman preaching on stage, the punk who works a day job in an office and plays in bands at night and hopes their coworkers never find out. My co-founder Matt and I both grew up going to shows. I came up in the early 2000s Boston hardcore scene, and he came up in the Bay Area punk scene. Our managing editor Krissy Howard is more punk than Matt and I combined and she came up in the upstate New York punk/hardcore scene. In 2019, we released our first book called The Hard Times: The First Forty Years. It chronicles the fake history of our publication as a zine that started in a Lower East Side squat documenting the early punk bands and how we evolved over the years. The first half of the book is all new material covering decade specific stories, and the back half of the book is a “best of” collection from our website. This was a big moment for us as a company. Matt, Krissy, and myself along with our contributors and the books editor Kate Napolitano put in a lot of hours to make it the best it could be and we are very proud of the finished product. As far as what sets us apart, I think it comes down to our vision for the site. We have a certain voice and we lean into that heavily and it resonates with our readers.

Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
I’m a lifelong skateboarder. I got my first skateboard at age 12 and I always dreamed about Los Angeles. So moving to LA and then seeing the schoolyards where so much skate footage was shot and the legendary skate spots just sprinkled throughout the city. You can’t beat that. It’s the best.

People talk so much shit about LA and that’s what bothers me the most. Newsflash, traffic is bad in every city. Yes, there are a lot of people here just out for themselves and you could say they are “fake,” those people exist everywhere else too. I’ve loved my LA experience so far, everyone who doesn’t like LA can leave and that would make things a lot easier to deal with.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thehardtimes.net
• Email: bill@thehardtimes.net
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/thehardtimesnews
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/thehardtimesnews
• Twitter: twitter.com/REALpunknews
• Other: shop.thehardtimes.net

Image Credit:
Stefan Vleming, Senny Mau

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