By Ray Van Horn, Jr.

HOUSE OF HAIR ONLINE: The concert on this Velvet Revolver: Live in Houston DVD we’re talking about actually happened five years ago, but it’s wild to see from the fan’s perspective. You guys are kicking out a lot of Contraband material and showing immediate glue at this point in the band. As you remember taking the stage for this particular gig in Houston and any of the others around that time, did it feel like instant magic onstage?

MATT SORUM: Well, the way I’d explain it is, that was sort of the reason we put the DVD out. It was probably the best time for the band, physically, mentally and professionally. We had a hit record, we had a couple of hit songs on the radio, we’d really come back and pulled the fat. (Scott) Weiland had cleaned up his act. We were probably in better physical shape than we’ve ever been in, especially myself. That’s just like looking back at some of the Guns n’ Roses years. I was drinking too much, getting a little out of shape. We were finally on all cylinders, if you will. We had a lot of excitement around the band and the fans were up for it. When we were approached to do this video, we were like, ‘You know, that kind of makes sense now,’ because for the future we’re getting ready to pull out the Velvet Revolver again—no pun intended—and fire it back up. We’re going to pick a different singer and we’re confident we’re going to be able to do that. So this video is a way for us to say we’ve got nothing to be ashamed of with that lineup of the band. It was a good band and that was the best phase of that band. We were in better shape early in its incarnation.

HOH: On the video, you guys allude to the painstaking process getting to where Weiland joined the band. You guys had so many audition tapes to whittle through. I imagine you were stuck with a thousand Axl clones and Perry Farrell wannabes?

MS: Well, yeah, we had fans trying to come into Velvet Revolver. At the time, we didn’t have a name. I think a lot of guys were thinking, ‘What do they want? Who knows what they want? Do they want someone to sound like Axl or Ian Astbury?’ So I think people, God bless them, they did the best possible take on what they thought we might be interested in. The fact of the matter is, years and years went by after the Guns n’ Roses demise of that lineup, and we were creating a new band. The times had changed, fashion changed, culture changed, music had changed. We’ve been through quite a few metamorphoses of change in music, so while we were looking for the singer, we were thinking subconsciously, ‘How are we going to put out something that’s perceived as a new band?’ We were trying not to recreate Guns n’ Roses with a new singer, because that’s what a small core of it was. Only until Scott Weiland came along did we actually hear a sound through his voice, because we were more aggressive than Stone Temple Pilots. We liked what was coming out of Scott’s voice. Stone Temple Pilots came more from a grunge era of bands like Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, so it was a different musical background that he came from. Scott left his imprint upon ours and somehow it was perceived as a current rollout. That’s why we had a modern rock hit. We were taken as a new band, and obviously considered a supergroup. In our eyes, it was the best guys we could find for the job. It wasn’t really a supergroup; it just so happened we all came from other bands.

We tried finding another singer. It wasn’t possible. He came in and spoke to us and we and we thought, ‘God, this guy is the next fucking Jim Morrison!’ But when it went down like that, if someone else came in and we felt that, we would’ve done it. We didn’t pick Scott Weiland because it was the obvious supergroup choice. He was a guy who had talent and was a proven entity. When I watch the video, I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re actually going to use this guy?’ We’d been through a two-year process where I was definitely the most frustrated, if you watch the video. I’m the one who’s like, ‘Is this a fucking hobby for you guys? Are you going to play “Sweet Child ‘O Mine” or are we going to get going here?’ Then I say something like, ‘God, I wish I was still getting checks off of “Sweet Child ‘O Mine,” but I didn’t write the fucking song, so let’s rock! Pick the fucking guy, put him in some fucking tights and let’s go!’ That was totally my thing and the guys love me and hate me for it, you know, having that kind of outspoken voice in the band. I was like that for Guns n’ Roses too. I was a little bit of a kick in the pants.

HOH: In making the transition between both bands, if you were that outspoken in Guns n’ Roses, do you think if they’d let you speak up a bit more, that particular lineup might’ve stayed together longer? I don’t want to speculate or anything, but there’s a severance point with what you’re alluding to here. I think it makes part of the difference between the Use Your Illusion era down to Axl’s Chinese Democracy era. I often wonder if everybody had spoken up in the interest of preserving what Guns had then, then who knows what might’ve been?

MS: The problem with that band is, it was too big for its own good. The demonic animal had taken over an animal that was something that grooved, something that was Rolling Stones level. It was a massive entity and there was a lot going on, let me put it to you that way. I always thought from an outside perspective, here I was, a guy who’d replaced Steven Adler, the guy who had created the sound of the first album, along with the collective of the band. I was only brought in because they were already starting to lose it. The only saving grace to me, coming in, was we were able to make another album. If I hadn’t, then who knows? I always tell Steven this because he kind of jumps on me all the time and he’s bitter about it. I would say, ‘Look, if it wasn’t me, it would’ve been someone else. It definitely wasn’t going to be you, though.’ Here’s the thing: Keith Richards fucking shot heroin in a chandelier and he still made the music, you know what I mean? If you’re given that opportunity to be in a rock ‘n roll band and you don’t have a lot of other qualifications for any other job identification, the least you could do is do a good job being in a rock ‘n roll band. Do your fucking drugs, drink your alcohol, bang as many chicks as you want, but show up on fucking time and rock! That’s it, period. There’s no ifs, ands or buts about it. If you’re going to fuck that up too, well, you’re a real idiot! (laughs) Right?

HOH: (laughs) Regarding the set list for this Velvet Revolver DVD, was it strange for you having to throw in a couple of Guns n’ Roses and Stone Temple Pilots songs into the mix? Was it surreal at that beginning point of the band or was it like, hey, let’s just get ourselves identified to the fans and let it roll from there?

MS: We only had one album and we were going to be headlining. Right out of the box, we were a headlining band. We were like, ‘Fuck, now we’re going to have to put together a show?’ We had 45 minutes of recorded music, and when we picked the songs from Guns n’ Roses, I remember having a conversation with Duff (McKagen). I’m like, ‘Dude, let’s try not to do songs like “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Sweet Child ‘O Mine.” I’ll back Axl in telling the world: those are his songs, you know? That’s a little bit sacrilegious to tackle that beast! I’ve had that conversation with Slash, since he’s been out doing them with his band. I’d say, ‘Dude, is that necessary? Let’s do some B-sides, stuff that Duff wrote, something Duff sang.’ “It’s So Easy” was a song that was written by Duff with West Arkeen, and he doubled the vocal with Axl, so that makes sense. The song has something for the vocal ability of Weiland that’s different than Axl’s.

HOH: Scott nailed that one.

MS: Yeah, because on that particular song, Axl’s vocal is the low vocal. Duff sang above that, and it wasn’t your typical Axl high-end yell. He was down in that baritone range. Scott said, ‘That song really inspired me a lot as a singer for Stone Temple Pilots,’ to sing in that baritone, Ian Astbury-Axl kind of vibe, which he’s got. Then “Mr. Brownstone” is the same kind of thing. Izzy (Stradlin) and Axl sang “Brownstone” together, you know, it was a lower register. For Axl to hit the high end like “Welcome to the Jungle,” that didn’t work, and we weren’t going to try and make it work, either.

HOH: You watch five guys in Velvet Revolver on this DVD, they’re all pros of their positions and it’s hard for the audience to key in on one particular artist. There’s chemistry between the five of you onstage that creates a sensory feast. It helps not to have something too over-the-top, vocally.

MS: I think that’s kind of the genre of rock ‘n roll that we came from, you know? We’ve all sort of created our own identity that is visually captivating and entertaining. If you think back to the original lineup of Guns n’ Roses, you look at a band with Steven and Izzy included, they were all these characters. If you were a fan in the early days of Hollywood (hard rock scene), they used to run around with fliers, saying ‘Izzy, Axl, Slash, Duff, Steven,’ you know? It’s almost like they could’ve made them G.I. Joe characters! I love that, because that’s great rock ‘n roll. They had a little bit of presage about their reputation. When we went to do Velvet Revolver, that was the tradition of the kind of rock ‘n roll band we were going to present ourselves as.

The grunge era had kind of watered down the rock star, so to speak. (Kurt) Cobain was the anti-rock star. Here was this guy who said let’s kibosh all rock stars, I’m going to come out wearing a flannel shirt, be depressed, write songs with a whole different take, right? That era came along and kiboshed it. The rap movement came over and picked up where all the rock stars had left off and all of a sudden, rappers were the ones drinking champagne in the strip bars. We were like, ‘What just happened? What happened to rock ‘n roll?’ When we came back, obviously we’d gone through a lot, most of us had sobered up, but we still had that sort of drive that spoke rock ‘n roll as a lifestyle, which had created all of us as individuals. I think that’s what’s represented when you watch the band. You go ‘Wow, maybe these guys are the real deal! This isn’t completely put on.’ And it wasn’t.

HOH: The era of “big” rock has been sorely missing for a long time now, and Velvet Revolver is still a band I believe in to carry that forward. Buckcherry’s another one, yet there’s not many “big” rock ‘n roll bands staking a claim in this market today. You guys have two albums with monster hit after monster hit. Whether they were successful on the radio or not, they’re played with the attitude they’re monster hits. I miss that, dude. I grew up in the eighties and while I’m an underground hound, I do miss that era of fun and footloose rock. Now, even with heavy metal returning in America, most of it is so structured, so perfect, less from the hip, you know? It’s so serious. As a drummer, I’m sure it has to be frustrating to you that today’s metal and rock is mandated drumming-wise by bpms. I personally would rather have groove instead, you know?

MS: Right, but the metal world is whole different animal of its own. If people have grown up in that genre, then that’s all they know. They haven’t gone further back to steady the grade. I grew up in the seventies, so I came from Led Zeppelin and Sabbath, Hendrix, the Stones, Aerosmith and Cheap Trick, so they’re a part of who I am. They’re who I represent. If you look at the era of music with Limp Bizkit and all those bands, that rap metal kind of thing, they grew up listening to Rage Against the Machine. Actually, if you listen to Rage Against the Machine, the core of that band is Led Zeppelin-meets-Jimi Hendrix. On top of that band is the whole political thing, but if you listen to the music, it’s not that at all! Yet somehow that was translated into rap rock—which came from bands like Faith No More—you mix it with all the shit that created bands like Limp Bizkit and Korn. I heard that shit and thought, ‘What is this?’ I didn’t get it at all. I didn’t understand it, but those guys grew up with Metallica, guys playing Jackson guitars and Fender Deville amps. Where did the Les Pauls go? That’s the greatest sound ever created! One guy stuck to his guns and kept playing it. His name’s Slash. He says, ‘I’m going to play fucking Les Paul through a Marshall!’ It’s the greatest guitar ever made and it has the classic rock ‘n roll sound. I do think it’s cool that people feel they always have to push the envelope. You can’t rest on your laurels and hope that rock ‘n roll adjusts.

HOH: Another thing I appreciate watching the DVD, you guys get to jam a lot like on “Illegal I Song.” Unless you’re The Black Crowes or Phish, there’s not a lot of freewheeling jam in rock today like the old days with Deep Purple, Emerson, Lake and Palmer or Rainbow with all those jam fests. Back then, the jam was welcome in rock; it was so much a part of the live experience. I was glad to see Velvet Revolver take a chance and jam onstage.

MS: I think that middle section of “Illegal I Song” and on “Slither” a bit, I remember telling the band, ‘Let’s kick it out there a little bit.’ I’d gone to see Lenny Kravitz and his thing was like a superjam. A little bit too much, you know, but I like that. When you’re doing a set and you’ve been on the road for a year, you’re pretty much bringing down the shit every night. It’s kind of cool, because you get to take a section where everyone is kind of in freeform and you have some fun for yourself. It’s not fun playing songs correctly in their sound form. As a musician, you need some kind of outlet to look forward to when you’re on a gig every night. It keeps you fresh, you know? It’s fun to take some chances. That’s something I’d want to do again in the new lineup when we go out again.

HOH: Let me get your impressions of playing those dates with Motorhead for Mikkey Dee.

MS: Well, the fact they even asked me was a great honor. I have no idea why that transpired. I’m not a Mikkey Dee kind of drummer, but Lemmy asked me because he always claims Motorhead isn’t a metal band. Metal is something that was attached to Motorhead. Motorhead is more of a punk rock band mixed with fifties and sixties elements, which came from Lemmy’s background playing hippie music. If you listen to his music, it’s real rhythm and blues. When I came in to play, I tried to do my best to give an interpretation between Mikkey Dee and “Philthy” Phil Taylor. “Philthy” Taylor was like a Steven Adler kind of drummer. He was not a technically-proficient drummer by any means, but he had a vibe and a soul to his drumming that helped create a sound that was the original Motorhead. It was kind of a sloppy boogie rock thing, right? I’m the kind of guy who’s a real steady drummer. Some people claim that’s maybe a little too steady for their liking, but most bands that I’m in like it because I don’t fucking drop the beat. I keep it pretty much together and when I played with Motorhead, Lemmy really liked it, because I played it a little more rock ‘n roll than metal.

HOH: Yeah, I was concerned about that, since Mikkey is primarily a double-hammer kind of guy, one of the best at it, actually.

MS: I used a double bass drum pedal. Before I joined The Cult, I auditioned for David Lee Roth years ago, right after he was out of Van Halen. I didn’t play double bass drum at all, and after I didn’t get the gig with David Lee Roth, I found out Gregg Bissonette got the gig and he was getting $8,000.00 a week. I just about killed myself, because at the time I was broke, I didn’t have anything, so I went out in a woodshed and got a double bass drum. I sat there and I played double bass drum for like, ten years. I was fucking flying; I could play (Motorhead’s) “Bomber” for two hours or “Overkill.” Then when I auditioned for The Cult, they were like, ‘Why do you have the other bass drum?’ (laughs) ‘Get rid of the other bass drum, we don’t ever want to hear you do that!’ They wanted more of that AC/DC groove, you know? So when it came time to go out for Motorhead, Lemmy had asked Dave Grohl to play, but Dave doesn’t play double bass drum. Lemmy asked me if I could play “Overkill,” and I said, ‘No problem.’ I played “Bomber” and “Overkill” and I played a few songs off the new record with double bass. That was fun! It was good workout! I’m not claiming to be any Dave Lombardo, but I’ve got the double bass drum chops! Lemmy’s interesting to talk to; he always has funny anecdotes.

HOH: Tell me about you, Slash and Duff collaborating with Macy Gray on “Kiss It.” Man, I’m sure that was a blast.

MS: Yeah, Macy’s a friend. I had her up at my studio and she asked me, ‘Matt, can you call Slash and Duff?’ I said, ‘Well, yeah, baby!’ That’s pretty much how it went down. I think it’s a good track and a good song. Slash is a funk master. He’s got that soulful kind of style, anyway. I love Macy. I think she’s a super talent.

HOH: So, everybody’s reporting about the current Velvet Revolver vocalist auditions. How’re things going to this point? Any front runners?

MS: We’ve had more guys in the studio last month than we’ve had in the last two-and-a-half years, so we’re going to make a point of getting back out there in 2011. That’s the plan. We’ve been saying it awhile and people are probably like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever,’ but we haven’t given up hope. It’s a big animal to fill those shoes. We want to make the right decision. We don’t want to come out half-cocked and let people down, and let ourselves down. We’re taking our time, but we’re not going to take much more time, I can tell you that. We’re ready to crank up again.

By Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Writer’s Note: In 2003 I was working on a personal project related to the music industry when I was graciously steered towards former Kiss, Billy Idol and Billy Squier manager Bill Aucoin. As a young fan of Kiss in the seventies, the recurring name of Bill Aucoin rang to my eyes on the album credits as an orchestrator of the magic in league with Gene, Paul, Peter and Ace. Little did I know back then Bill was THE orchestrator. Having the opportunity to speak with Bill was a milestone in my journalism career. His gentle candor reminded me of Mr. True Believer himself, Stan Lee, yet in the case of Bill Aucoin, no truer believer existed in his time ushering the hottest band in the world to the masses.

Upon receiving the news of Bill Aucoin’s recent passing, I was initially mortified. During the same interview sessions for this 2003 venture, I’d spoken with Quiet Riot vocalist Kevin Dubrow and Enuff Z’nuff drummer Ricky Parent, both of whom have likewise passed on. This interview with Mr. Aucoin was conducted at the height of a business day. Bill was multitasking with a headset on as we spoke and I was in awe he conveyed such a detailed and poignant interview. Given recent anecdotes by those close to him, we can assume Bill Aucoin’s principles in the music industry are unparalleled. Proof positive given in the interview you’re about to read, presented for the first time as a House of Hair Online exclusive.

I’d like to thank both Lisa Walker and Carol Kaye for their roles in making this fabulous event in my writing life happen.

RAY VAN HORN, JR.: Easily the story that fascinates me the most about you in relation to Kiss is how you financed the Dressed to Kill tour on an American Express card!

BILL AUCOIN: (laughs)

RVH: It seems like you went on a leap of faith with Kiss that you would use a credit card like AMEX, which usually demands payment in full of the balance at the end of the month. Were you sweating any bullets at the time?

BA: Well, at that time we were kind of in an awkward situation, though. The record company was going independent. Initially Casablanca Records was being financed by Warner Brothers, and there’s an interesting story there where Warners didn’t believe in Kiss and they didn’t think a band in makeup would make it at all. So they sent a private memo around saying that “Although we believe in Neil Bogart and we back Casablanca, our feelings are that we won’t back the Kiss group.” So basically they were saying “Let it come out and die and let’s go to the next artist.” Neil got a hold of the memo and of course it was one of his first acts out, and he just felt it was horrible. First of all, this was a private internal memo that he didn’t know about and they went against him on a group that he wanted to try to make happen. It got to be such uproar that he went in to talk to the co-presidents of Warners. Neil had decided he didn’t want to work that way and was going to leave Warners. So that was at the same time we were getting ready to do a tour, so effectively what happened was the money stopped and Neil had to mortgage his house just to keep the record label going; it certainly wasn’t money for touring.

RVH: Amazing.

BA: At that point, I was totally committed to Kiss. I just said I was going to put it on my American Express card thinking somehow a miracle would happen. To be honest with you, I don’t think I had put any more than $150 on my American Express card before that, and this month it was going to be $25,000 with all the bills that were coming in and bills we were trying to take care of so we could continue touring. In any case, I went and did it and of course at the end of the month, American Express called me and said “Mr. Aucoin, what do you think you’re going to do? Do you believe you’re going to pay this bill? After all, you haven’t ever spent this kind of money before!” I said “Oh, yes, I definitely think I’m going to pay the bill,” and they really let me get away with it effectively for another week or two. They called back and I said, “Unfortunately, the money we expected to come in didn’t come in.” In those days, which it wouldn’t be the same today, American Express allowed me to keep the card. I said to them I wouldn’t spend any more money until I paid it off, and I think it took me another couple of months. Today they just cancel the card and your credit goes right down the tubes. In those days it wasn’t quite as bad as it is today, and they actually allowed me to spend a couple of months paying it off and in due enough time, we finally got more money than we didn’t, but it was really just one of those situations where you hope somehow you would make it happen.

RVH: So in those early days, it was more about breaking even.

BA: If you’re lucky, yeah. Most of the time we didn’t break even because we put a pretty good-sized stage show together even at the beginning of their career, and with the road crew, the effects and everything else, it was a little tortuous for everyone involved. Like anything else, when you have a lot of people working together that really believe, that makes it a lot easier and a lot more exciting.

RVH: The big money started coming in for Kiss around ’77, ’78…

BA: Right.

RVH: How did you overcome those dry years as a manager?

BA: Well, it’s funny, your determination and belief carries you through an awful lot. I’ll tell you a couple of stories. One, a lot of my friends thought that because I came out of television and film that I had just gone off-the-wall, and this group with makeup was a little foolish. They knew I had spent all the money from my production company on the group and they started to be concerned that maybe I wasn’t even eating because there wasn’t enough money and they had secretly talked to each other and said “Look at him, we’d better take him out to dinner and at least make sure he’s eating because he’s so involved with this Kiss group.” So they would plan to take me out two or three times a week. Some would take me out on Tuesdays, some would take me out on Thursdays and some would take me out over the weekend to make sure I would get a complete meal! I had some good friends (laughs), even though they had doubts about the whole Kiss thing.

RVH: (laughs)

BA: It got so bad I remember one time when Paul Stanley came into my office and he was coming in to borrow five dollars. He didn’t want to come and ask me right away, so he came in and started talking to me and as he was talking, he noticed that I had a hole in sweater. This was in the winter. So he started to get a little nervous and as he kept talking I couldn’t quite understand what he wanted to talk about, but we were just chatting. So I leaned back in my chair and I put my feet up on the desk and he saw that I had a hole in my shoe! (laughs) When he saw the hole in my shoe, he said he couldn’t ask for the five dollars! (laughs) He made some excuse and left the office. So that’s how bad it got, and we were all in the same boat. Sometimes when you have a team that’s all in the same boat fighting for the same thing, you can get through almost anything.

RVH: You obviously had a lot of faith that Kiss would take over the world as they did!

BA: Yeah, I always had that faith. In fact, I very seldom work with artists that don’t have that determination backing them, whether it was Billy Squier or Billy Idol. The idea is really to make it all work and to think that you’re going to take over the world, because it’s exciting to travel and to meet and play for people around the world. I think any artist should feel that way.

RVH: Like many of us fans, I grew up on Kiss. They were my absolute favorites at the time, and for merchandising, that’s the be all, end all for any band’s success, I think. You yourself had a flair for getting the Kiss marketing machine going with the t.v. specials, the Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park movie, trading cards, action figures, even the Kiss Marvel comic book. Licensing was so important, and I remember there was an episode of the original Incredible Hulk and Scooby Doo with villains wearing something similar to Gene Simmons’ demon makeup.

BA: A little bit, yeah. That was close, but we had a love/hate affair with all of that. It was a big part of the whole Kiss organization and in 1978. We did about 119 million dollars of which 55 million was from merchandising. If you translate that today, that would be like doing half a billion dollars a year. So it was significant in one respect, and we had a lot of breakthroughs that most bands weren’t doing at the time. Everything for stage shows you were using pyrotechnics in different ways that people weren’t. Certainly the blood and the spitting of the fire and everything else, no bands were doing at that point, and along the way we did an incredible amount of merchandising.

When Kiss and I decided to break up, that became a bone of contention, because they felt that it was too kiddie-like and it wasn’t quite what they wanted to do, and they were thinking about taking off the makeup and everything else. Of course, after developing all of this with them for many years, it was really a trauma to me. Significantly trying to protect all of this from people who would use their logo and/or use their merchandising was just as tough. It took me four years to get their faces in the Library of Congress, and they were thinking about taking all of that off, so that became a bone of contention later on, but it was certainly exciting while we were doing it.

RVH: What was it like nurturing a band where Gene and Paul were the general spokespeople, whereas Ace and Peter did their press in increments?

BA: It’s not unusual that one or two people in a band are a little more outspoken than others. That came to a head ironically on the Tom Snyder Show on NBC where Ace and Peter got their just due, and we were all kind of turned around because Tom liked Ace’s sense of humor and so he kind of went to Ace and Peter, but it didn’t always work for Gene. It worked all the time for Paul, but Gene at the beginning we actually forbade him to talk. The reason was he came across way too intelligent, and he came across as a school teacher as opposed to this monster. So we actually forbade Gene to talk to the press for a few years because we didn’t want him to talk like a school teacher. He had to be the monster and fit the image of Kiss, so it didn’t always work out.

RVH: All part of the mystique.

BA: Mmm hmm.

RVH: Let’s talk about later seventies-early eighties era of Kiss: the solo albums, Dynasty, The Elder and Unmasked. They came out in such a blitz like the mid-seventies work, but they weren’t received by listeners in the same light. How did this constant movement play into your role as manager?

BA: It had to do with the fact these guys were working day and night. When we weren’t on the road, we were in the studio. They didn’t have much time. They started making money, they started feeling a little more independent, and we had to give them a break of some sort. The idea then came up that they would love the opportunity to do solo albums—and not necessarily all at once—but solo albums and they loved that idea. They could go off on their own and do what they wanted to do and get away from each other for awhile, then come back and do another Kiss album and tour.

Well, they all started doing it and we came up with the idea of each solo album and they were all going to be ready about the same time…how about putting out four solo albums? That was kind of a bone of contention until Neil had actually gotten some feedback from distributors and the distributors thought “Well, they’re so popular, why not? We’ll just make that much more money.” As the orders started coming in for the potential albums, Neil felt that he could do it and of course we were all excited about it. All of a sudden we get more albums out than we’d ever seen in our lives, and that fell through to everyone else. You could walk into a store and see so many Kiss albums that never looked like anyone was ever buying them and that statement came back. The Kiss solo albums went out gold and they returned platinum, but the truth of the matter is, all of them went multi-platinum, and in due time it was a little much to do it all at once. I’m not sure anyone else is going to try it! (laughs) But that’s what happened.

RVH: (laughs) Do you think there was a control issue on behalf of Casablanca with the handling of the solo albums?

BA: Well, yeah, it was a couple of things. One was they pressed way too many albums, and it happens. The Hamlin Group, which was a major distributor in those days, ordered a million units! Well, God, one distributor ordering a million units! We’d better press up another couple of million! (laughs) So it was kind of one those things, everyone got carried away. Then our advertising agency made a mistake and sent out the wrong ad! We had done three ads: one, the announcement of the solo records, two, going gold and three, going platinum. They sent out the gold ad first, which kind of got everyone nuts. “Oh my God, is it really?” So now people are thinking we should press more! (laughs) It was a mistake that it even went out that way! We were just supposed to have an ad to announce the fact that the albums were coming, so there were little screw-ups along the way, but ultimately they all sold what we thought they would sell. It just got very complicated in-between.

RVH: Kind of an overt sense of giddiness in getting them out.

BA: Yeah, you got it.

RVH: You had some trouble marketing Kiss in Britain for awhile. In your eyes, what is it like marketing a band domestically versus abroad?

BA: Well, it depends. I think the British market felt the same as initially the American market: “What the hell is this band doing with this makeup, and why and how,” and it certainly didn’t fit a lot of the British artists who were making it at the time, so we were kind of out-of-step. It really took us many years for us to keep going back and forth, back and forth between Britain and the States before it all kind of sunk in. But yeah, I don’t think they could see that type of a band working in England, especially when you had a lot of the English groups making it here in the U.S. Kiss certainly didn’t follow that routine at all.

RVH: What I find ironic in today’s market for hard rock and heavy metal is that it’s kind of flip-flopped. It’s like a half and half market in America but it seems to be doing really well in Europe, Japan and South America.

BA: Yeah, it is, but you know, the heavy metal market is a strong market. It always has been. It’s a niche market. The fans are very loyal, and I think certainly for heavy metal it’s getting better and better. If anything, I think it’s probably going to be a little more industrial in the years to come, but it’s still strong, and I think it’s getting stronger every day.

RVH: Eric Carr was my idol when I was learning to play drums. At least in the beginning he appeared to be the odd man out in Kiss though later portrayals show him as one of the family. Happens in transition periods, I’d assume. What are your impressions?

BA: Well, he’s terrific. Eric was one of my favorites because he’s a sweetheart. When I tell you he’s a sweetheart, he’s absolutely a sweetheart! He cared so much for the fans. I mean Eric would spend hours with the fans. He just loved it and he was a real precious item, I think, with Kiss when we needed him. Unfortunately he was the odd man out because both Gene and Paul had decided at the time there was not going to be another true member. He really was a true rock ‘n roller and he cared so much about the idea of being that rock ‘n roller. Mostly he cared about the fans. He was just terrific. I mean, did you ever have a chance to meet him?

RVH: Wish I could say yes.

BA: He was just an incredible human being, and there’s a story behind that. When we finally picked Eric out of 70 drummers, we had to come up with new makeup and a new costume and all that stuff. We’re going on a European tour, but we’re going to do one show in New York and announce Eric as the new drummer. We’re rehearsing the show and things aren’t coming together. Paul and Gene got so frustrated because this was the night before we’re going to do the show. The costume isn’t quite ready, we haven’t really decided totally on the makeup although we’re almost there, and Gene and Paul in the dressing room after rehearsal turned around to me and said “You are the manager, you’ve got to get it together!” and they walked out. Literally, man, and it wasn’t because they were mad at me or anything else; they were just so frustrated like, “Oh my God, what are we going to do? Tomorrow we’re going to present Eric as the drummer and we still have all these loose ends!”

RVH: Zero hour.

BA: Eric and I literally stayed up all night, finished everything, got his costume, got his makeup, and when Gene and Paul came in the next day, it was done. But it was really tense because here we are changing a member of the group and no one ever really thought that would happen! And then all these loose little ends that were still loose the night before we’re going to announce and play…but Eric turned out to be just the best. He really was.

RVH: You eventually created Dreamscape Entertainment and as you mentioned, you were managing Billy Idol and Billy Squier for awhile. What was on your mind during this post-Kiss transition? Did you feel it was important for you to put Kiss behind you, at least professionally?

BA: Professionally, yeah, because you had to go on, there’s no question. Actually, we’re doing some work together now again, but it’s a whole different thing. Everything mellows over the years and you get to know each other again on a different level, and so it’s kind of exciting to be working and talking to them again.

I think especially when I asked Billy Idol to come to the States I had actually managed him on the last Generation X album. I had said “Look, if this doesn’t work, would you leave the group and come to the United States?” That was a little more difficult than I had originally thought, because when I brought him over to the United States, the label didn’t want him. They kind of said “Oh boy, I know it’s the sister label and we’re part of Chrysalis, but punk never worked in the United States and his career wasn’t working in the U.S. The company was going to let Generation X go after this album and now you’re forcing him on us!” So we went through all of that, which I never told Billy, but I said “Look, he’s a star in his own right. Let me have a chance to work this out,” and fortunately because the owners of the company had the power to force some issues, it happened.

RVH: Right, right.

BA: But you always run into some sort of roadblock along the way. If you think about whether it’s a heavy metal artist or any other artist, generally speaking, a label comes around with the same thoughts for every artist: “We need a marketing plan,” so they call the marketing guy and say “Come up with a plan!” Well, after you do a few hundred of them, what the hell are you going to come up with? (laughs)

RVH: (laughs)

BA: So it tends to pretty much be the same thing, and okay, you call the p.r. guy and it’s like “Okay, I have to make sure everyone knows this artist,” or “What am I going to say about this artist that I haven’t said before about some other artist?” So I think it really behooves any artist to get together with their own team and management that hopefully has some foresight. One that can work out some ideas that work specifically for them and come up with ideas for the record label along with ideas the label may already have. That makes it more exciting. It focuses on what they need and it also helps the people at the label because they’re so used to “Here’s another act, here’s another, here’s another,” and it all becomes the same thing.

RVH: As far as the day-to-day operations of being a manager is concerned, how would you describe the typical manager’s role in interacting with bands, labels and publicists?

BA: It depends. I love that interaction. I think a manager has to be involved with every part of it, assuming that they understand it and can deal with it without being frustrated. A lot of managers think of their role as more of the business side. If I make the deal and everything at the label works, I kind of sit back and make sure the band’s happy. Well, I think that’s part of it, but the real energy of a manager has got to be that communication between the label and the p.r., the marketing and touring. I mean real communication, even to the point where even if you’re bright enough to understand it, then shut up and listen. Get to know what you should know about it and then be able to communicate with it, because everyone’s doing so much and everyone is expected to do so much.

They’re working with so many artists, and your job really is to not only communicate but to get them excited about your artist, and also come up with ideas to help them. No one’s going to come up with that great idea. You do it so they don’t feel they’re out there by themselves having to show you that they can do everything. They need inspiration and help as well and basically we’re all not only working for the artists, we’re also being inspired by the artists. The artists can’t just sit back and hope that it’s all going to happen. The artists should be giving managers and everybody else their ideas that should really flow through the manager so that the manager is excited and then can go bring that excitement to everyone else. No one should be left out of the creative process, no matter who they are.

RVH: You’ve had so many personalities to deal with as a rock ‘n roll manager that you’ve probably had to act as a mentor or paternal figure. Would that be a safe assumption?

BA: Yeah, I think so. You become the mentor and paternal figure all the time and sometimes it changes minute-to-minute! (laughs) That’s just something I think you have to accept and almost let it roll off your back because it can be frustrating. You can’t let it get to you because it’s just part of the norm of the human way. Everyone has different problems at different times and different personalities. Whether it’s a personal or a band problem or record problem or whatever it is, it might even be a photo problem! How do you tell an artist that the photo session is going the wrong way or they look terrible or they’re wearing the wrong clothes or whatever it is, and get through it? Kiss in particular. I never let anything go out unless I saw it first and they agreed to it and we all knew we had the same approach. You can’t always do that, but if you can, then work it out so everyone’s on the same page.

RVH: How frustrating is it to see so many bands come and go over the years? Tastes and preferences—particularly in America—are so cyclical, and I’m sure it plays havoc on one’s marketing plan especially with changing demographics.

BA: I don’t think that’s so much the case. I think we haven’t had really good artist development, you know? What I mean by that is that someone from a label sees an artist for one purpose or for one idea and they run with it, probably more so in the pop market than anything. It’s like, “Oh my God, they have a hit single we can get played on the radio!” Well, are there any other songs? (laughs)

RVH: (laughs)

BA: We have a generation that’s grown up on one part that, okay, they’ve learned a little more about music and so forth and that’s great. On the other hand, they don’t see a CD as being anything unique because a lot of times if they’ve bought a CD there’s one song that they like and the rest of it doesn’t work! So we have two problems. One is artist development and knowing how to develop an artist and teach them what they need to know musically as much as anything else. The other side is to make sure that they have things together before you just throw them to the wolves and that’s basically it. A lot of artists you see come and go for one album have just been thrown out there. Where is the artist development, along with the A&R? I mean, A&R is damn important and a lot of times that’s not done because everyone just wants to get out that song they can get radio airplay on. The other side of it is how about some artist development so they can actually tour, and they know what to do and how to develop the artist over a period of years? That has kind of gone too, you know? Everyone’s out for the quick buck! Unfortunately that quick buck can go as quickly as it comes.

RVH: You’ve probably had to keep a stiff upper lip as far as promoting new talent, because as you’re mentioning, there’s a lot of potential pitfalls associated with developing an artist. Of course, the scene changes and many record labels expect instant success like people in general today expect instant gratification.

BA: Well, the record labels have really changed. When I first began, record labels used to sign an artist for five albums and you used to feel they’d give them at least three albums maybe four, before they might decide to let them go from the label if it didn’t work. Today, if they don’t see if happen on the first album, there’s a big question mark. They may go to the second album, but their hearts aren’t even into the second album because the first album didn’t do what they expected. A lot of times they may even pay the artist to do the second album knowing they’re not even going to work it, just to kind of fulfill their contract. I still think there’s a way to develop artists that you’ll have a better percentage of artists that’ll last for many years if you know how to handle them. You have to know how to teach them development, or help them through that time where they think “Wow, I got the contract, I’m set now!” because that isn’t the case. I’ve always told every artist that I’ve worked with where I said “Look, at this point, you’re minus something. When we finally get a record deal, we’ve finally made it to zero.” When you start your record deal, you’re trying to work from zero to a hundred, so if you think the record contract is the end-all, it really isn’t. In my mind, you’ve just finally made it to zero.

RVH: What would you consider some of the good things to being a band manager and some of the bad?

BA: Well, there’s two ways of looking at it: I’m going to be a rock ‘n roll manager so I can get rich or I’m going to be a rock n’ roll manager because I love the industry and I love to make something happen that’s creative and exciting. To me, the latter was always my motivation. If there’s a chance to make a lot of money, hey, that’s wonderful, but if that’s the only thing, then my God, you could be just as broke so quickly! It’s unbelievable! (laughs)

RVH: (laughs)

BA: It’s much easier to be broke in this market than it is to make money. I think first of all, you need to have a real positive outlook about wanting to be around the artist, enjoying the artist, enjoying their music, enjoying the concept of what they want to achieve. That’s got to the basis for it all. Then you’ve got to realize you have to take a part in some way, shape or form. You can’t just sit back, hoping everybody else is going to do the job. It just doesn’t work that way, and the communication between the artist and the manager has really got to be true. The minute that’s falling apart, it’s pretty much over. I think one of your jobs is to make sure that communication is there, because if it is, you’re going to find out faster when things are going right or when things are going wrong. Probably the most exciting time in my life has always been the few weeks of a month or so that you know everything is happening before anyone else, where people are still questioning your comments and questioning what you’re doing with this artist or that artist, but you know you’re starting to really sell. The shows are selling out, and so those few weeks before it’s known that you have a hit, before you know that you have a great artist that’s breaking, everyone is still questioning it. You’re like, “I don’t know if I’m going to do it,” those few weeks that the band and the manager have an inside clue. Those are the most exciting times because it’s like you’re grinning inside while people are still telling you it’s not happening and you know it’s happening! It’s really very exciting.

RVH: If a band really wants to catch your attention, what are some of the criteria you’d be looking for?

BA: Obviously there’s a visual content. My background comes from being a film and video cameraman into directing and producing, so I generally want to see some sort of image that I believe in. My next criterion, other than music obviously, is determination. I’ve met many brilliant artists who are so frustrated they give up, even though they may be more talented than a lot of other artists I’ve seen. So determination through the ups and downs is probably the strongest element.

You have to really want to make it so much, and it has to really be a team effort if it’s a band. It can’t be one person who wants to make it and everyone else wants to toddle along. It’s got to be “We’ve got to make it, no matter what!” And it doesn’t just stop when you have a hit record. A lot of times when a band has a hit record, they then wind up competing with themselves, which is even harder, you know? You’ve got a hit record; well, what are you going to do next time? You’re not so much competing against someone else in the industry; you start competing with yourself, which is kind of tough! The thought process is “What am I going to do so I can have another hit album the next time around? And if that CD doesn’t work, what do I do now?” In the heavy metal market, I think you’re a little bit luckier because heavy metal fans are loyal fans in general and they stick by their artists. So if you’re a heavy metal band, I think you’ve got a leg up on a lot of other artists.

By Ray Van Horn, Jr.

HOUSE OF HAIR ONLINE: You have your son Michael out on the road teching for you. You’ve been on the scene for quite some time and now your boy’s following in your footsteps. What a thrill, huh?

BOBBY BLOTZER: Yeah, he’s been around the scene too. He’s been out touring with me since he was four years old. He’s been coming out on the road and climbing all over the tour bus, that kind of stuff, so it’s really like home to him. It always has been and he loves being on the bus. Michael’s a drummer as well; he’s been playing since he was ten and of course he’s looking for his break. He’s a great player. It’s a tough business and world out there, you know? I’d love to see him make his way, but in the meantime he comes out and techs for me on the road and he gets to play, do sound checks, play Ratt stuff, cruise the bus and be on the road. I love having him here.

HOH: One of the things that’s always been with me since the early eighties is how my stepfather hated heavy metal and hard rock, but he got interested in Ratt because of the Milton Berle connection. I was raised on ‘50s t.v. shows through him so I understood his excitement. What are some of your favorite memories with Uncle Miltie?

BB: Well, first of all, I’m going to touch on when you talked about your Pop. Funny story…my real dad died when I was six, but my mom remarried to this guy named Pete who was my stepdad. He bought me my first guitar since I started out as a guitarist. I remember sitting and looking at him watching The Midnight Special and Foghat was on one night. We were watching Foghat and he had a few beers in him and he let me drink a few beers; I was only 14 then and he was like, ‘You really like this shit, huh?’ (laughs) I go, ‘They’re great, yeah! It’s Foghat!’ So he says, ‘I don’t get it. Elvis, man, The Beatles bow to Elvis Presley!’ Jump a few years ahead and it’s 1985, we’re headlining in Pittsburgh where he used to live and he comes out to the show and he says, ‘You know, I’ll tell ya, I’m really proud of you. I can’t believe you’re making money with that noise!’ (laughs)

HOH: (laughs)

BB: I love it when the old school dads are like that! They’re set in their ways in the rock shit and they really don’t care. Now Milton, he used to invite the band to The Friar’s Club. He was the president in Beverly Hills and we used to go with him. First it was at the actual Friar’s Club; they did the roasts every couple months on somebody famous and they’d have a whole panel of famous people, guys who were Friar members who’d get up there and be involved. Milton always had cue cards, so we used to do these on tour with our manager who was his nephew, Marshall. He would put together cue cards for all of us to get up at the end of a tour and we’d roast each other. We were using the same kind of jokes they were using, but then they moved to the Beverly Hilton Hotel into the ballroom, which was just huge. We would always get the table right in front of the podium. We’d be sitting there watching all these guys you’d seen as a kid, actors and such all smoking. It reminded me of when you’d walk by the teachers’ lounge and you’d glimpse in there and see them all smoking; you could do that when I was a kid! I was like, ‘Oh my God, they’re eating and smoking? They’re humans!’ So it was always a trip to be that close to Milton and that movie star crowd he ran around with, watching them talk about the dirtiest shit! It was really entertaining. He was an interesting guy. He was a legend and I always felt honored to be in his presence. We all did.

HOH: Well, that was some kind of special having Milton sponsor Ratt, much less appear in your videos.

BB: Yeah, he was in “Back for More” and “Round and Round.” The funny thing was, he was doing Marshall a favor by doing this, and that’s what really launched this band. The people at MTV at the time were my age—I’m 51 now—they were around my age or older, and to them it was like a big thing Milton Berle was in a heavy metal band’s video! So they cranked “Round and Round” every half hour, man. That’s what really broke this band, that song. Another thing funny about him doing us that favor, we paid him to do it. He used to like to go to the horse track. He wanted to be paid in cash, so I think we gave him $20-25,000 and he’d just use it for his track money! (laughs) I thought that was pretty funny.

HOH: (laughs) I want go back to the original Ratt EP from ’83 a minute. I can let that one play five or six times in a row, not just because of the time duration, but to me it still has an urgent sound like Motley Crue’s Too Fast for Love and all of the early-eighties L.A. stuff. You guys and Motley put out these edgy albums before the whole scene broke. What was it like back then? Did you guys actually have a vision of how it was all going to happen?

BB: Sure, it was a dream, but the key word that you hit was it sounded “urgent.” It really was. We were in the studio on a shoestring budget, no time to fuck around. We were hungry, broke, visions of stars in our eyes, you know? We were trying to keep up with the Motleys and trying to keep up with each other and make our own way. I just think the thing that’s great about the EP and Too Fast for Love is certain records like those, you sense the hunger. You sense the hostility we put into the tunes. We meant business and that EP was done in a five day period: done, recorded, overdubbed. We walked out of the studio on Thanksgiving Day in 1982 and I remember we mixed all night long and when I walked out it was just light out. We’d been up all night and drinking beer the whole time between ourselves, the producers and the engineers, and I had to go to my mother-in-law’s for Thanksgiving. I remember being so tired. I just got in the car, stuck my feet up and went to sleep! (laughs) Then I played everybody the tape and I was all proud of it.

HOH: Were you guys ever involved in the notorious flyer wars on Sunset?

BB: I don’t think it was really a war. (Stephen) Pearcy was like that. He was the master of self-promotion. I never did it. I lived in Redondo and I just wasn’t the flyer-putter-up kind of guy. I’d been in a lot of bands before and that just wasn’t my thing, personally, but Stephen was always promoting Ratt. He was putting up flyers everywhere for our gigs and then we started getting chicks and some other band hanger-on people who were friends and could help out with that. I don’t remember anything like having a war with other bands like, ‘What the fuck, they covered our flyer with their name!’ I don’t remember any of that, but I’m sure it went on!

HOH: L.A. today has to feel different to you. I’ve talked to some other bands in the area, many of them younger groups coming up, and they tell me the L.A. rock scene has a dead feel to it unlike the golden years. How do you feel about it?

BB: I think it’s faceless. I don’t go out anymore to clubs, because I don’t know any bands, not one. I don’t know any of them other than my son’s band he plays with. In those days, there were so many of our bands that we all knew each other and we all hung out. If one band was playing, the rest of them were hanging out, getting drunk, rocking and carousing. You knew all the bands, you knew their songs and it was scene. Now you have the pay-to-play thing, they do these Key Club and Club Vodka shows and shit where literally 30 bands will play in a night! That’s a fucking joke! They charge them all, these guys who promote and I can respect that, but it’s rough on an artist or musician who’s trying to make his bones and get a following. How do you get a following, you know what I mean?

Even the Rainbow, man, we’ve gotten older, and it just doesn’t have the star power that it did then. I started going to the Rainbow when I was 17 and I was seeing Deep Purple, The Who, Alice Cooper and Zeppelin. Hanging out there as a kid, it was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is amazing!’ So when we started getting famous and stuff, there were a lot of other bands who were famous and they’d be there any given night. We’d all be there and it would be the same thing we saw in ’81 and ’82, but then we were multi-platinum, we had lots of money, and we’re in there sniffing coke off the tables! (laughs) I still occasionally go to the Rainbow to eat and see Tony and Michael, who are the two managers and door guys along with Mario, the owner. They’re really like father figures for a lot of us.

HOH: Getting into Ratt’s latest album, Infestation, to my ears, this is the first album since Detonator where it has a real band of brothers feel to it. I don’t know if it’s the presence of Carlos (Cavazo) or whatever, but this album has that old kick to it. How does this album and lineup feel to you?

BB: I think having Carlos brings it back to a dual guitar-driven band and that’s a good thing. I love Carlos and he’s always been a good friend. I was not, however, one of the supporters of him joining the band because I was used to John Corabi and his rhythm and him not having a lead player type of approach. When we first started playing with Carlos we no longer had a rhythm player, we now had two lead players. He adapted quickly, though, we got along, and he started picking up right where Warren (DiMartini) and Robbin Crosby) left off. So it guided the sound back to a grass roots level, I think.

This record, man, it’s come out to be something that wasn’t derived. We didn’t contrive it and try to make it like we needed to write “Round and Round” again. It was more like, ‘Hey, we’re doing this record, everybody write your shit,’ and everyone went and wrote their songs keeping in mind we wanted to make it more aggressive and a little more up-tempo. You know, back to the hungrier side. That was the only thing that was contrived. We wanted to get back to a younger, rowdier, less-polished thing. To me it came out like a record which would’ve been a great predecessor to Out of the Cellar. It somehow fits between the EP, Out of the Cellar and Invasion of Your Privacy. It fits in there snugly, you know? The songs are very catchy. I think people have resoundingly said they don’t have one song they skip through, which is always a good thing to hear. We all know what that’s about, when you’re on a record and you’re like, ‘Ehh,’ then stop on one that’s good, then you skip again, ‘Ehh,’ move past three or four songs. But gosh, everybody’s just digging this record. I think if this record would’ve come out in ’85—not that Invasion wasn’t a good record—maybe even ’87 or ’89, it would’ve been our Dr. Feelgood. So right now it’s been hopping up the charts around the world. In Japan it entered number five, Canada at number six, here in the United States it was number 30. I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist, so in my mind if we can hit 150,000, you know? Right now we’re over 85,000 in the first month, so it’s really amazing. The label’s doing backflips! They’re like, ‘Start writing some checks!’ (laughs) They’re talking about writing the next record already.

HH: I enjoy a good rapport with Roadrunner Records and I was stoked to learn they’d signed Ratt. What’s the vibe like working with Roadrunner, who is one of today’s metal industry leaders, versus the Atlantic days?

BB: It’s funny, because I haven’t had daily updates and of course they weren’t done email-wise back then, but it’s still the same words, whether you get an email or phone call from the label, and you’re seeing the excitement of them pushing us to do this and that, keeping the machine going to promote. I’m completely all about that, so it’s exciting to have that feeling again. We didn’t have that with John Koladner and with the label when we did the self-titled Sony record that came out in ’99. It was like reporting to the fucking principal with John Koladner. We went every two weeks with a batch of songs and sit in the office with him in that raised chair and he had this big giant panel of all this electronic shit. He would sit there and put the CD in and listen. Sometimes he’d stop 30 seconds in of the song and go ‘I don’t like it.’ It was like, ‘Can you fucking listen to the rest of the song, John, please?’ I agreed with him on some of the stuff, but nonetheless we busted ass on that thing. We worked for over a year on that record. Stephen wasn’t into it and it just didn’t have that vibe. This album, everybody’s excited, the label, the band, the family, the fans, and it’s a pretty good feeling. I’ll be 28 years in this band, now, and nothing would be sweeter than a gold record or a platinum record right now. I’d just love it, but I totally appreciate what we’ve sold even compared to 18 million records. It’s sort of like The Wrestler, when Mickey Rourke couldn’t get arrested. Now he’s resurging in the movies and anytime you see people like that where you get popular again…you know what I mean.

It’s not like we were down and kicked to the curb since we’re making a good living touring, but I think there’s been some tarnish on the name thanks to Stephen and myself. You know, Stephen quitting, myself bickering with him in the internet press and the public forum, which I was not in a good state of mind at that time. I regret we did that. I think it kind of hurt the integrity of the band from both of us doing that and the lawsuit and all that. So getting him back in the band and taking these steps towards where we’re at now is great. Even though this particular show we’re doing tonight isn’t a great big venue, we have a long list of stuff we’re playing this year with the Scorps. We have two weeks playing with Steve Miller, Peter Frampton, .38 Special, Starship and Edgar Winter, which should be interesting. I’m really looking forward to that. We have a few shows in Europe too. Right now we have this two-week CD release smaller room set-up for the rest of the tour. I’m glad to be working anywhere, man! (laughs)

HH: Let me ask you this; when I hear Infestation, I think it could’ve come between Invasion and Dancing Undercover, actually. Do you think the critics tomahawked Dancing Undercover a little too much back then?

BB: I agree with them. While there’s some songs I really like on that record, there’s stuff on there I can’t even listen to. We weren’t prepared for that record, and it’s common knowledge. Our manager put a $50,000 deposit on a studio and it wasn’t refundable, which is what he told us. We didn’t have shit written at all! We weren’t ready. We were in a very costly recording studio writing songs and working them out. I just think there’s stuff on there that’s really sub-par, but then again, that record sold $1.8 million, so I can’t snub my nose at it. I just think we could’ve done better, obviously.

HH: But then there’s redemption all over with Reach for the Sky thereafter. You guys tore it up sales-wise and so did MTV with loads of airplay.

BB: I like Reach for the Sky a lot. Mike Stone did a really good job engineering that, God rest his soul. It was a costly record and we ended up going in and redoing just about all the lyrics, melodies and lead vocal tracks. There was a problem with the bass track where it was out of tune and I was like, ‘You’re just figuring this out now? How is that?’ That cost us another two or three weeks and in those days, I don’t know if we didn’t care, but you’d spend fortunes on the records and videos, God, man. This record here, I did my drum tracks in four days. For how good it sounds and how good it is, it’s less than a third of what we spent on the other records.

HH: That’s a good stat and I’ll add to it by mentioning you guys sound relaxed on Infestation.

BB: We were recording in Virginia Beach and in the tracking room, I’d look to my right and there was sliding glass and windows. It was all blue ocean and white sand. I was very relaxed. On a break you could just go out and kick it on the beach. It was a really pleasant setting. I loved it.

HH: You just wrote a Ratt memoir. Tell us about it.

BB: Yeah, I started this book, Tales of a Ratt: Things You Shouldn’t Know in January of 2008. I wanted to tell my story and to tell an honest story, to bring people on the ride that I’ve had through my life with Ratt. I’ve had the urging of friends over the years saying how they love to hear the old stories. You get a few beers in me I can just start rambling off stories and people love to hear them. I’ve heard so many times, ‘Bro, you should do a book!’ In my mind I was thinking, ‘Who’s going to care? I’m not a writer.’ But after some time I decided it was something I wanted to do and I started it. I got a guy involved with me, his name is Jim Clayton. He’s a screenwriter and I wrote a couple chapters, he helped assemble them not to make sense, but to read better and he added a few accents here and there. He was very instrumental in making this book.

It has a lot of stories about my famous counterpart buddies in different bands like Def Leppard, Motley, on-and-on-and-on. There are stories of us boating on my boat, drinking, hanging out at clubs, hanging out with Keith Richards at his listening party, a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff. There’s a lot of good, fun stuff, but of course there’s highs and lows everybody has and I had in my life, but generally there’s nothing that’s going to embarrass anybody, I don’t think. Maybe one or two people. I had to be honest in certain stories that involve people where this was the reality of what we were doing in this band together. I wasn’t going to be telling any stories that would embarrass anyone’s family. It wasn’t going to be one of those tabloid tell-all books.

HH: That’s good, because a lot of people automatically assume you have to live up to The Dirt if you want to write a rock bio these days.

BB: I enjoyed The Dirt. I read that and I read Nikki’s (Sixx) book (The Heroin Diaries) and I only got through three chapters because it was so dark. Cold, brutal. Just brutal. I was around those guys when all that shit was happening. He was telling the story and it was taking me back to a dark time, not that all the time in Motley was dark, but his trip and what he and Robbin used to do, I don’t want to really conjure that up in my brain. All the stuff about me and Tommy Lee…at one time we were dirtbike riding buddies, golfing buddies, we did all kinds of boating. We did the fun shit. We had our share of getting drunk and stuff, but the dark heroin thing, that wasn’t my thing. I’ve never seen it, never tried it.

My book has a lot of fun stories. It’s available at bobbyblotzer.com and through Amazon.com. It’s a good book and I’m getting rave reviews. I’ve sold hundreds of them just on my own. Everybody digs reading it. It definitely tells the Ratt story.

By Ray Van Horn, Jr.

HOUSE OF HAIR: I’d like to start by talking about you growing up on Staten Island. There are so many notable musicians from the area I feel like there ought to a book written on it! Maybe it’s the across-the-pond element from Manhattan…

BLACKIE LAWLESS: That’s exactly what it is. It’s the redheaded stepchild of New York City. When you talk to people there and ask where they’re from, you hear ‘Oh, I’m from Staten Island…’ Well, it’s almost New York City! (laughs) I mean, it’s all so biased, man! The folks in New York City are far more provincial than they even realize! I didn’t realize that until I moved away. They’ve got their own ideas.

HOH: I’m sure you get this asked this frequently, but how many scars do you have from those sawblades in the old days? I’m happy your identity today is more about being a respected metal songwriter, but how intense was it trying to make a mark with WASP in the eighties? Did you reach a point where you might’ve been thinking along the way, ‘Man, I can’t wait until we make it so I don’t have to bleed to death onstage?’

BL: You know, the old joke was when I had the exploding codpiece. It blew up on me on opening night in Dublin, Ireland in ’86. We had tested that thing for months and it came off without a hitch. What happened was the explosives were flown over for the show and they became compressed because of the altitude. All this we figured out later once we pieced it back together like an air disaster, trying to figure out what went wrong! When it went off that night, it literally picked me up about 4 to 6 inches. I was airborne and it burned all the hair off my legs! The hair never grew back to this day! I remember being in the dressing room—and you’ve got to remember, this was opening night—and everybody’s thinking the tour’s all over. I was in pretty bad shape; I was burned pretty bad. I had to do something to break the tension, and that’s when I made the famous statement, ‘If we wrote better songs, I wouldn’t have to do stuff like this!’ (laughs) And everybody realized by me cracking a joke like that, I was okay and everything was going to be alright. It was one of those kinds of things where the whole room erupted with laughter, but it was nervous laughter! Plus I’ve got a couple of gouges on me from the subways!

HOH: I’ll tell you what; I used to have WASP: Live at the Lyceum on VHS back in the day and I spotted some of that footage on YouTube recently. As a teenager watching that video, you just got sucked into it and you don’t realize the full impact of performers dicing themselves up to entertain their audiences!

BL: Yeah, somebody asked me what I thought about Mark McGwire and I said, ‘Well, you’ve also got to understand that we’ve got a pretty good basis of knowledge of that type of medication!’ (laughs) There’s more rock bands using that stuff than you might think. We’ve definitely used it over the years. It’s not like you’re trying to get bigger or anything, it’s just the road will kick your butt over a period of time. You go out on tour for a year, year-and-a-half and the only way you can keep going sometimes is through some help! People don’t understand, when you’re doing a tour that lasts a year-and-a-half and people find out months ago that you’re coming into their area and they’ve got it circled on the calendar waiting day after day after day, they don’t understand that’s just one show of what may be 150 to 200 shows on that tour. To continue on night after night like that, sometimes you need a little bit of help!

HOH: That’s a good point, and after reading Nikki Sixx’s Heroin Diaries, which presents a crash ‘n burn aspect from the other end of the spectrum, I can imagine the physical hell you all collectively went through given metal became such an in-demand commodity.

BL: Yeah, but even now people walk in to one of the dressing rooms, you see guys taping themselves up. You smell liniment (laughs), you see guys injecting themselves with B12 or other stuff. It’s a part of being out there and it’s a side of rock ‘n roll nobody ever talks about.

HOH: What’s your ritual these days to get prepped for a live gig?

BL: It depends on how long you’ve been out. The best form of maintenance is to take care of yourself in the first place. Don’t let yourself get too far down. People ask me ‘How do you keep your voice in shape for so long a period of time?’ Well, you’ve got to maintenance it. It’s a muscle like anything else. You take care of it, it’ll take care of you, so you’ve got to really pay attention to what you’re doing. There’s a big myth about the whole sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll thing. Bands who are doing it, a lot of them don’t last very long. The object of having a long career is kind of looking at a circle; everything starts at zero and the object is to get back around a full 360 to go again. In the middle of it is a big swamp. The problem is, a lot of guys go down that swamp and never come out again. You’ve got to really pay attention to what’s going on. Rock ‘n roll is full of casualties.

HOH: Some of the younger bands I’ve interviewed, if a lot of them aren’t sick in the regular sense from colds or stomach flus, they’re not talking about what’s making them sick. I haven’t seen a more tight-lipped bunch in a long time. They keep most of it behind closed doors, but what I think you’re pointing out is accurate. They’re all just trying to keep themselves psyched to go—whatever it takes—before they burn out.

BL: We just did three months in Europe and we were doing six nights a week. Occasionally you’ll get into a stint where you’ll do 20, maybe 25 in a row. Those are long hauls. Doing a show’s kind of like running a basketball game. You’re out there for an hour-and-a-half and you’re really humping it while you’re there, but it’s not so much the shows; it’s the travel. Ray Charles used to say ‘I don’t get paid for performing, I get paid for traveling.’ If you’re going to do 25 shows, you’re not doing them all in the same place. That represents 25 different towns, and so you’re going to do that in a three-to-four week period. By the time you get from Point A to Point B, your brains are like scrambled eggs! Then you realize why bands get punchy and singers walk out onstage and say ‘Hello, Idaho!’ when they’re in Baltimore. It happens man.

HOH: What’s your rogue’s gallery pestering you to play live lately? If I was there, I’d be yelling for “Chainsaw Charlie” or “The Titanic Overture.”

BL: Well, “Charlie’s” part of the set, because what we’ve been doing on this tour is a combination of the old promo videos. We have a giant movie screen and it creates kind of a 3-D effect which is pretty cool, because we’re playing in-sync to those films. So what you see is me singing in the video, but you also see me standing in front of you singing. It’s pretty neat to watch the audience while the show’s going on because they’ll watch the video for a few seconds then they’ll look at me, then look up at the video screen then back at me. It kind of turns them into the RCA dog, you know? (laughs) There’s a look on their faces saying something like, ‘How are they doing this?’ It really does create a cool effect.

Somebody says ‘You’re doing 150 shows on this tour; how do you go out and do that night after night, doing the same old show?’ I’ll tell them it’s never the same! The object is to get your head and your butt wired together at the same time to make that the best show it can be. If you’re singing live and you’re playing, the object is to try to be perfect. There’s only been twice in my life where I was actually perfect. The rest of the time is that constant quest to get it perfect, to be the best you can be. To me, that’s the challenge.

HOH: Are there still any moments for you during a set where you’re thinking ‘Crap, man, I tanked that one!’?

BL: Oh yeah, everybody does, but here’s the thing: you know what I was talking about trying to be perfect? You can actually achieve that and nobody knows it. In a professional forum of anybody that’s doing this, if they’ve been doing it for awhile and they’re actually professionals, they’re going to average through 100 percent of what they’re capable of doing on any given night maybe 92 or 93 percent. On a really good night, they’re going to get maybe 95, 96 percent and on a really horrible night, they’re going to hit maybe 88 or 89, where they’ll just want to quit and walk away. Because that little 5 or 6 percent is so minute, the average person will never notice the difference! So that’s the reason you can have a really horrible show and you come off with people patting you on the back telling you how great it was, and you’re thinking to yourself ‘What show were you watching?’ All performers will tell you that. They can’t understand why people are doing that. The differential of that point spread is so minute that you can think you’re great but nobody sees the difference, because you’re going to be consistent. I don’t care how bad or how good you feel you are, it’s going to be consistent.

HOH: Instead of asking the tried and true question of how you perceive today’s metal scene, I’m more curious to know how you view today’s scene’s appreciation of you and WASP. These kids are really starting to get what’s going on, the old school bands are rising up together. For me, I’m loving the hell out of getting to see all the bands I grew up with coming out with strong albums and better yet, today’s kids getting it.

BL: Well, I think just by virtue of attrition of sustaining yourself, lasting as long as you have, a newer generation of fans come along and go, ‘Hmm, where’s the roots of this stuff?’ They look at it and it’s pretty easy to decipher after awhile. If you’re one of those 20 bands who’ve sustained themselves for 25 years, you start becoming an endangered species. It’s also because the industry has changed so much—the record companies have imploded. Those things we referred to as ‘evil empires,’ they’re all gone, man. But the one thing they did really, really well was delivering new music to the people and in the process gave bands a chance to develop. They gave frontmen a chance to develop. I had someone ask me in an interview, ‘Where are all the great new frontmen coming from?’ I said, ‘There ain’t no more, man! There ain’t going to be no more!’ What you’re seeing right now is what it is. You want to see Lemmy, you’ve got to buy a ticket to Motorhead. You want to see Geoff Tate, you’ve got to buy a ticket to Queensryche. When those bands are gone, they’re not coming back! There is no delivery method out there anymore that was like the major record companies who gave their bands the chance to develop. These frontmen or any of these bands who are capable of headlining festivals or filling up stadiums, you’d better go see them now, man, because then you won’t see that again! It’ll all be over and it’s sad to say that, but it’s a fact. I’m not making this up. It is what it is and I wish it wasn’t that way! Unfortunately that’s the nature of what this business is.

HOH: Absolutely, and what’s sad to me is a lot of bands I may touch base with on one tour and one album cycle, the following year I’ll get press releases indicating they’re on a different label, under different management, the whole nine yards. A lot of today’s bands aren’t given the chance to develop as you’re saying. It’s like they’re rope-skipping to different labels to the point some may burn out altogether, some may keep putting out music and lose members in the process, but none of it is the same.

BL: The industry feeds on itself. You’ve always heard the expression that ‘one in a million get a record deal…’

HOH: Right.

BL: It’s actually about one in twenty million ever did get a record deal. I’ll give you an even more alarming statistic; of all those one in twenty millions that ever got a record deal, less than two percent of all of those will actually make any real money. What I’m talking about is degrees of success now. The things consumers focus on as to what’s really happening out there is such a small amount of the people who are actually trying to do it. It’s staggering! If I would’ve known then what I know now, I probably would’ve done it anyway because I discovered as my life went along that I didn’t choose it; it chose me. I was going to have to do it no matter what. It was just part of my destiny, but I would’ve been a lot more afraid, I’ll put it that way.

If I had a kid now who came to me and said he wanted to be a ballplayer or he wanted to be a musician, I think one of the mistakes people make with young kids is they try to browbeat them down into taking their dream away from them, saying ‘No, you can’t do this’ or ‘The chances of success are so slim,’ or ‘You’re never going to make it.’ I don’t think that’s the way to approach it. What you should do is tell them, ‘You know what? If you want to get out there and work harder than everybody else, you have a chance where you might be able to get your foot in the door.’ But here’s the problem: even though you may be successful, how long then can you sustain yourself in that forum? That’s where the test of attrition comes. If you cannot sustain yourself for 20 or 30 years doing it, you’re not going to make any money! You will eventually be back in the place where you were before you started doing it to begin with. Again, you don’t want to try and strip them of their dream, but you do want to show them the reality of ‘even if you do get there, then what are you going to do?’ That’s where the rubber meets the rug. That’s where the trick lies. It’s a daunting task.

HOH: A lot of WASP’s albums from the late nineties on like The Headless Cross, The Crimson Idol, Unholy Terror, The Neon God couplet and now your latest album Babylon have received good press. I’m sure it’s had to have been a little frustrating trying to maintain an audience in this climate of apathy before metal broke out again in North America.

BL: That goes back to the test of attrition. That’s a lot of it, but you don’t do it because you’re necessarily looking for that pat on the back. You’re doing it because it’s something you have to do. Here’s the thing: when it comes to show business, show business is not looking for people who want to do this; it’s looking for people who must do this. There’s a quantum divide between want and must. Everybody wants, but few are willing to pay that gargantuan price that accompanies must, because must is a monster! If you do this, your life isn’t going to be your own. It will end up belonging to the business and whatever your creative process is. If you’re the kind of person who’s okay with that and you understand to check your soul at the door when you come in, it’s okay. Kids ask me all the time, ‘Hey, man, give me some advice! What do I have to do to get from where I’m at to where you’re at?’ Well, can you live without this? Depending on what their answer is depends on what I tell them. If they tell me that no, they can’t live without it, then I go, ‘Okay, fine, go for it. Give it a shot. Better to try and fail than look at yourself in the mirror at age 40 and say you didn’t have the guts and that’s why you failed.’ But if you have the slightest inkling even for one moment that you can live without this, I strongly encourage you to seek another line of employment, because you will not make it. They look at you like you’re being cruel, but I’m doing it for a reason, to tell them that show business doesn’t want people who want to do it; it’s the people who must do it. That’s how it weeds out what should be there versus what only thinks it wants to be there. So that’s how you answer the question of ‘How do you keep cranking out music?’ It’s because of that. What do you believe in? Are you writing something that you believe in? If you do that and it’s good, then it’ll eventually find an audience.

HOH: I want to touch on The Who for a minute. Obviously you’ve always had an affinity for The Who given WASP’s cover songs over the years, but one thing I always look forward to on your albums is where you’ll have one, maybe two Tommy or Quadrophenia build-up moments. What is your fondest Who experience live?

BL: I was friendly with John Entwhistle when he was alive and I remember one night standing on his side of the stage behind the PA and just watching him. He was probably the best on any instrument I’ve seen from anybody. The guy was unbelievable. He’d get both hands going and it was like typing a letter! I remember standing on the side stage and I just started laughing at him because he was so good I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was comical. You didn’t think anybody could play any instrument like that, he was so good. He was a real treasure to watch. I hate he’s gone.

HOH: I agree, man. Getting into Babylon, this really isn’t so much a concept album as it bonding glue between songs. Is that correct?

BL: I would say, yeah.

HOH: You have the Babylonian times referenced on the project, but I also draw what’s been going on in Iraq on this album. There’s been a lot of damage done over there, like the Ishtar Gate and a lot of archeological digs were messed up through the war. Whether it was intentional or not, it sounds like WASP is taking a swipe at this new-day torching of Babylon…

BL: Well, I’d say really where the idea of “Babylon’s Burning” came from was me watching t.v. at the end of the last year Bush was in office and this whole supposed global financial crisis was going on. You hear that word ‘crisis’ that’s a politician code word for ‘we’re getting ready to take some sort of freedom away from you in some way because we’re going to scare you into allowing us to do whatever we want.’ I was also watching what was going on in Europe at the time. The guys in the EU in Brussels were talking about what they said was this meltdown we were having and they thought, ‘Well, maybe it’s time we thought about a one world system,’ like a one world government. Then another guy says ‘If we’re going to have a one world government, then we should have a one world currency.’ Then the third guy speaks up and he says ‘In addition to all of that, we believe if we had that one world system, we could have the EU and all the people in the European Union microchipped by the year 2017.’ I’m sitting there and I’m listening to this guy and my jaw’s hanging open. I’m thinking to myself, ‘Do these guys understand what they’re saying?’ I mean, this is potential 666 this guy’s talking about, you know?

So I went on the internet and I Googled microchipping in humans… Don’t take my word for it; just take five minutes and look this up! You will be astonished at what is actually going on out there right now. It’s more widespread than even I had any idea. It’s really frightening. It’s knocking on our door right now. 20 years ago when I wrote “Headless Children,” there’s a line in the song that says ‘Four Horsemen sit high up in the saddle and waiting and ride the bloody trail of no return.’ I’m listening to these guys in the EU talking and I’m thinking to myself, ‘We’re closer to that Armageddon type of concept now than we were then when I wrote that song.’ So that was really the basis of “Babylon’s Burning.” I went back and did a detailed study of the Book of Revelations in the bible and some other parts of the bible as well. It was astonishingly accurate in describing what these guys were talking about in the EU. That was really the foundation of this.

HOH: Since WASP has always played in a trademark galloping tempo, I think songs like “Babylon’s Burning,” “Live to Die Another Day” and “Into the Fire” roll perfectly as soundtrack to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Do you see this primary tempo roll WASP utilizes perfect for Babylon’s creation from cover to its contents?

BL: You know, I had a guy ask me awhile back, he says ‘Are you Irish?’ I said ‘No, why do you ask?’ So he says, ‘Just by the music that you do. You guys have that gallop too; it’s like an Irish jig on steroids!’

HOH: (laughs)

BL: I thought about it for awhile and I said, ‘Hey, he’s right!’ (laughs) I’d never thought about that, but who knows?

HOH: Babylon is thought to be the biggest city of its time from 1770 to 1670 BC and 612 to 320 BC, I believe. You’ve lived in New York and Los Angeles, so you’re naturally familiar with the big metropolis. Given what Babylon was in its day, do you see a parallel between the mindset of the big cities you’ve lived in and that which is historically reported to be the one-time biggest city in the world? Speaking in terms of this album’s primary inspiration, I mean.

BL: It’s a metaphor. When you look at the original Babylon, it was like you’re saying, the New York City of its time. In biblical reference when it talks about the new Babylon, it talks about what will come out of that whole scenario before an Armageddon type scenario occurs. It talks about the rise of the new Babylon as the city on the Seven Hills, and there’s only one city fitting that description, which is Rome. Take all that and you put it all together, that’s a lot of what went into my thinking, of what the lyrics are.

HOH: Let’s talk about the two cover tunes on Babylon, Deep Purple’s “Burn” and Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land.” I especially thought “Burn” was an interesting choice to cover. You guys nailed it to the sheets, but I’m not sure if it was supposed to intentionally fit in with the underlying themes other songs or if it was a chance cover. What’s the story?

BL: I’d love to take credit and say it was part of the master plan (laughs) but it wasn’t until we got into mastering—which is like a last chance gas station to repair any sonic things you might want to do before it goes to the factory where they make CDs—and I was sitting there. While we were making the record, I hadn’t looked at the album as a whole. I hadn’t thought about all the songs as a complete piece of work because we made the record so fast I basically didn’t have time to do that. It wasn’t until I got to mastering when I started looking at all the titles of the songs. As I looked at the titles I went ‘Wow, there’s a lot of fire on this record!’ (laughs) We had played around with the idea of “Burn” on the Dominator album but didn’t get too serious about it. I thought it would work perfectly on this one, so we went back and finished it off real quick and put it on the record.

HOH: On the other side, you have “Promised Land” following all of this intensity throughout Babylon. For me, the vibe was a light closer, kind of your “Blind in Texas” for this album. I like the duality it presents; you have all of this blazing power and drama, then it’s like, ‘let’s check out with a cool little ditty.’ Was that the intention?

BL: That’s precisely what it was. Again, I would love to take credit to tell you that it was part of this big master plan when we started it, but I’m not that good! (laughs) “Promised Land” was the first song we did for this record and I honestly didn’t even think it would make it on the record, because we hadn’t been in the studio for awhile. For people who don’t know, being in the studio and playing live are two completely different universes. They don’t have anything to do with each other. If you haven’t been in the studio awhile you think, ‘Okay, let’s just do something to ease us back into things. Let’s put on the training wheels and get ourselves acclimated to it. So that was the first song we recorded and I just put it aside and didn’t think much more about it. When we got to the end of the record, I looked at it as a whole and I thought ‘This is taking you to this very dark place. Why don’t we do something at the end that’s got a little glimmer of hope? I know what we’ll do; we’ll take you to the Promised Land!’ Like I said, I would love to tell you that was the master plan from the beginning, but it wasn’t. It ended up being a mistake, but it was perfect. I thought, ‘Man, this is a gift and I’ll take it!’

HOH: I used to play the first two WASP albums on my Walkman on the train tracks home from work. I was the pinhead teenager screaming “Widowmaker” and “Jack Action” to nobody and everybody, but we’re talking cassette version, man! You’ve been around to see all of the different music formats from the eighties-on and Babylon to my ears has that classic analog sound. What’s your take on this digital age of MP3s and downloads?

BL: I couldn’t tell you! I have no clue! I’m one of those guys that is in the stone age when it comes to that kind of stuff. The way I write is extremely primitive. When people see the way I do it, they’re stunned because I still use a mono cassette player. I use it because it’s very fast and the only thing I’m trying to do is to capture ideas. I’m not interested in technology. I have a recording studio for that. So when it comes time to doing things for real, fine, we’ll get into the bigger stuff, but for the moment, when I’m writing, I’m looking for the simplest, the most direct way that I can capture that idea. For me, that’s the way I do it. I have a cassette deck that I bought new for the beginning of The Headless Children record and I’ve used it ever since. All of The Headless Children was written on it, all of The Crimson Idol was written on it and everything thereafter. This thing was a $39.00 cassette deck! It ought to be in the hall of fame.

It’ll be 20 years ago this June when we started building this studio together. We built it right as we were getting ready to doThe Crimson Idol record. When we built it, it was state-of-the-art, but it was a tape-based analog system. As we went through the next ten years, we started getting into digital and things like that. It was only about six or seven years ago I got rid of all the digital stuff and we record in a very old school way now, all on tape. It’s more expensive to work like that but tape gives you a sound and a thump that you just cannot get on digital. If you want to make a really expensive-sounding record, there’s only one way to do it, so when you listen to what we do, you can hear it on those records. When somebody says ‘Oh, that’s a lot of money to do it,’ well you know what? I’m doing these for me, not for anybody else! It sounds good to me and that’s what I want. Everybody says ‘Why don’t you do it on Pro Tools? Kids can’t tell the difference!’ Yeah, well, I can tell the difference. There’s a dimension and a thump that comes out of those records you just don’t get any other way.

By Ray Van Horn, Jr.

House of Hair Online: I’ve always said you can’t necessarily teach the old school way of playing heavy metal to other generations; it’s up those generations to find the chemistry of eighties metal on their own and they either have it inside them to replicate or they don’t. You guys have a remarkably large percentage of it nailed to the sheets. Coming out of your teens with a full-length album Living a Sick Dream from 2007 and now your Get Dead EP, have you felt Age of Evil has naturally assimilated the classic metal sound in what you’re hoping to achieve for your band?

Jeremy Goldberg: Yeah, absolutely, man. It is definitely not a type of music that can just be taught. You have to love it and feel a connection to it and bust your ass every waking moment. Shit, sometimes we feel we were born in the wrong decade, but hey, at least we can learn from some bands’ mistakes and hopefully won’t end up on Sunset selling guitars for coke! (laughs) But I definitely think we have achieved a sound that is modern, yet has an 80’s edge to it. It is very natural for us and we don’t do it because we are purposefully trying to revive what seems to be lost in metal or because some label thinks it would be a selling gimmick, but rather because we enjoy it and write what we ourselves would want to hear.

HOH: Putting the entire population of the world together, it’s appropriate to say only a handful of musicians coming up in their teens can claim to have already put out their first album, much less done the extensive touring Age of Evil has done to this point, including Europe. I don’t see you guys having sat in your studio trying to dub yourselves as young prodigies, but it’s undeniable Age of Evil is ahead of the curve with its proficiency, both on an individual and collective level. Still, you guys have to feel a little proud of what you’ve accomplished already to this point, yes?

JG: Yes, we feel proud of what we have done and accomplished and feel that if anything, because we are young, it means a longer career. It seems that most people mention our age when reviewing us or interviewing us which is cool, but to me it seems a little weird. Was anyone back in the 80’s always mentioning how young Tommy Lee was when he was in Motley Crue, or James Hetfield, or Dimebag Darrell, or Def Leppard? Kinda seems as though it was normal and no big deal. I don’t see why it should be any different from today—maybe the lack of these kinds of bands popping up? Who knows. All I know is music and live performances come first, not age.

HOH: How about the makeup of your band, a quartet featuring a pair of brothers and you’ve all been friends since childhood? Jeremy, last time we spoke, you mentionedbriefly about you guys doing Jackass stunts and stuff like that together before getting serious and putting Age of Evil together…

JG: Oh, if only you could see the Jackass videos! After we got all of that out of our system, Jordan (Ziff) and Garrett (Ziff) starting playing guitar and drums at age 7 and 9. Naturally, all of us being best friends, me and my brother Jacob followed and we formed a band. We actually jammed in Garrett’s room with little 12 inch amps when were just starting out and eventually moved it in to my garage. The garage is where the magic happened.

HOH: Let’s talk about what it took to get Living a Sick Dream written, recorded and mastered. You guys were what, seniors in high school or thereabouts at the time? Give us a bit of a journal of your lives while getting Living a Sick Dream under your belts.

JG: Well, I was probably about a freshman or sophomore in high school when we wrote and recorded the album. We basically had been working with this guy Slate since we were maybe 13 or 14 years old and he really whipped us into shape with our live shows and how we came across to people. He knew the producer we used, John Herrera, and when John heard our tracks, he saw potential. So we did pre-production in the garage during the summer in Arizona. Now, these pre-production days could sometimes last 6 to 8 hours per day in a garage with no air conditioning in the hottest time of the year in Arizona. Brutal! But we worked our asses off and made sure we would be ready to record a full-length album. We recorded the music from the album in three days. All four of us in a room for 12 to 14 hours a day playing the songs live, like a show. Since we were not seasoned professionals yet, we wanted to get that aggression and energy and so we did it that way recording analog. We were not allowed to jerk off or have sex for a week prior so that we would be on edge.

HOH: (laughs) Willpower!

JG: Our producer was even nice enough to bring some lovely ladies in to tease us, which for Garrett worked very well. The boxing gloves eventually broke out at the end of the session (laughs). The whole experience was awesome and really taught us a lot.

HOH: (laughs) Was the whole process of finishing Living a Sick Dream what you’d expected it to be like or not? What was on your minds while creating your debut album?

JG: I was basically going to John’s house after school every week to do the vocals. A lot of the songs that we thought were going be the best ended up still being really good, but not the ones that stood out. The songs that we thought would be less popular did quite the opposite. You never know what a song sounds like until it is recorded and done. We were getting roughs of the tracks every week and I’d be sitting in class not paying attention to the teacher but instead analyzing and critiquing everything about the songs: the mix, the master, and all that stuff. The album got pushed back a bit because we didn’t have a name, and once we figured it out, then we had to wait for artwork. Eventually we had the final product in our hands and it was really exciting for all of us. The first thing we did was send a bunch of them to Europe and that is how we started playing over there.

HOH: You have two new recordings for the Get Dead EP, the title track and “Cruel Intentions,” plus the Skid Row and Priest covers and two live tracks. Pretty shrewd package! The marketing angle—whether it was intentional or not—is ahead of your years. Tell us about your scheme and reasoning for this EP.

JG: We toured in Europe for two months this past summer and knew that we had some studio time. All we had prepared for was the two new songs, the Judas Priest cover and a few other fun ones. After we got the live recordings back from the shows in Germany, it all started to make sense. With the addition of the Skid Row cover, we were certain we had a slamming EP on our hands. Then when we teamed up with Chipster PR—who is one of the best in the business—we felt that an EP was actually a better decision than a full-length. The goal was to get everyone’s attention, build up a bigger fan base, tour, and then nail everyone with a full-length album. And we plan on doing just that. We already have a ton of material for a full-length and it’s just about doing it with the right people.

HOH: Both of the new songs are polished face-slammers with a good bit of thrash and toxic waltzing going on. What feels different to you guys on these songs versus Living a Sick Dream and is the Exodus and Overkill-like vibe of “Get Dead” the direction you feel Age of Evil should comfortably pursue?

JG: Overall, everything is just much more mature. I mean, especially my voice, and the composition, and the riffs, and every aspect that goes in to writing and playing songs. But live, they don’t sound as distant from each other because we play the Living a Sick Dream material better live than it is on the album and even made some changes that translate better live. I don’t necessarily seeing us going a whole lot heavier than this EP because it is already so heavy, but I do see us expanding our sound and style. We are writing new material now and some of the songs are like “Get Dead,” on steroids and others are a bit more of mixing heavy metal and rock n roll. We don’t like to limit ourselves by putting one or two genres on our music and the future of our music, and so I think we will probably do a melting pot of all that is metal and hard rock.

HOH: Jeremy, you once laid out the story behind the “Slave to the Grind” cover for me, but this being Dee Snider’s House of Hair Online, I feel we need to cover it again, if you’d please.

JG: Well, we had one day off in the studio while we were recording the EP and our engineer said that we should use the time to record another song. We didn’t know what to do and we were not that sober, but Garrett had the brilliant idea to add another cover to the mix and record “Slave to the Grind.” Because we only do something if it has melody, groove, and attitude, we knew that this cover would be a perfect marriage. But the problem was we didn’t know how to play it and didn’t have the lyrics. So my trusty iPhone got to work and we pulled up the song and the lyrics. We listened to it, played it on the guitar a few times, and then all watched eagerly as Garrett went in the isolation room to record his first take. It was so good, that he didn’t need to continue. Once we heard Garrett beat the shit out of the drums like that, we just knew. Next up, guitars. Me and Jordan recorded the guitars in a few takes all the way through and Jordanwrote his own solo kinda on the spot. After guitars and bass were done, it was my turn to finish up with the vocals. I didn’t really know the lyrics that well so it was very new to me. But I said fuck it and just went balls-out. I think all of this adds up and makes the song undeniably intense and raw, and that’s sometimes how things work in the studio. Something unexpected becomes great and then we play the song live.

HOH: You’ve had some seriously enviable gigs so far in your career with a couple coming up this month opening for Hail! What’s it been like from your perspectives getting booked for shows? Was it ever a pain in the ass getting taken seriously until the venues heard you play? Did you ever get hit with the dreaded pay-to-play demand from a venue?

JG: It doesn’t matter where we play or who we play with or how many people because we give it 150% every time. With that attitude, if you got the chops, you’re bound to get recognized someday. We have definitely played our fair share of shows that weren’t always in our favor, especially in LA. Once we had two sets in one night a place that was 21 and over. We were still in the middle of high school and definitely looked it, so we were kicked out of the venue for three hours in-between sets once they finally allowed us to even play. Again in LA, we paid to play, and were booked as a headliner before an all-star band with some of the guys from W.A.S.P., including Chris Holmes. Our time slot was running late because the first band didn’t show up on time and we ended up playing at the same time as the all-star band on a separate stage, who by the way had pole dancers and all kinds of cool shit. I mean, how do you compete with that? It was even on Jordan’s birthday. I could go on about shitty circumstances with shitty promoters and shitty venue (owners)who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing and only see green money signs in their minds. Anyways, we’ve paid a good percentage of our dues, we don’t complain, we learn from it, and it’s nice to know that it is starting to pay off.

HOH: I’d like to know more about the European leg you guys did, which we get to hear live cuts of “Eye For An Eye” and “Glimpse of Light” from that tour on the Get Dead EP. I mean, seriously, not everyone playing in a band gets to travel overseas! Put us into your minds, first to be invited over to Europe to play and two, what it must’ve felt like being a relatively new band getting a shot of a lifetime other groups never get.

JG: When we got word that we would be playing the Bang Your Head festival, a festival that we dreamed of, you can only imagine how crazy we were going. Our first album came out a few months before and here we would already be playing with bands like Heaven and Hell, W.A.S.P., Nazareth, Hammerfall, and many more. We obviously knew that it was a once in a lifetime opportunity and had two weeks to gear up for the most important shows of our lives. We worked with Tom Gattis (Deuce, Tension, Wardog, Ballistic) on stuff like stage sound, stage presence, translation of songs in a live setting, and a lot more so that we would stand out, and it paid off. Getting in to Germany was a trip. Dildo shops in the airport, no speed limit, BEER (legally), and great metal. It felt awesome to be there but we also knew that just because we were there, it didn’t really mean anything. We had to prove ourselves and win them over. Right after our set on this massive stage in front of tons of metalheads, the owner of the festival came up onstage, and announced us as the first confirmed band for 2008. If only you could have seen our faces. Grins all around. We knew it was just the start.

HOH: Any crazy war stories from the European trip you could share with us?

JG: The start of our tour this past summer kicked off with Jon Oliva’s Pain which has many war stories, but in summary, it was a lot of partying and car rides that were made longer due to excessive puking. At another show, a few girls traveled 9 hours to see us and so we felt like we owed it to them. Took them back to the apartment and you know how it goes. Then sent them on their way at 4:00 in the morning when the trains started back up.

Jacob switched beds that night with Garrett because of some foul play on the sheets with the girls. But you’ll never know who did what! If I had to guess, it was probably Garrett or Jordan. I don’t wanna give too many war stories away but at least you guys can get a taste of stuff that’s clean enough to get published.

HOH: (laughs) Woot! Things are different in today’s metal society—from my observations anyway—where I don’t see so much of the old band hazing and flier wars, particularly made famous on the Sunset Strip when west coast metal bands would be slugging it out on the streets to get people to their shows. Have you experienced any type of band rivalry or insane moments in putting your band out there?

JG: Even on the Atrip now there’s not a ton of that going on like it did. I was just at NAMM in Anaheim but went to the Rainbow one of the nights and it’s pretty sad. Gone are the days where you could walk in to that place and see Warrant in one booth, Van Halen in another, and Ratt right next to them. Now you pretty much just see Lemmy playing his video game at the bar, but he’s badass, so it’s all good. But there’s not a ton of real rockstars out there these days. We plan to change that, anyway. To answer your question, we never did a lot of passing out fliers and stuff like that. I mean yeah, we have done it and still do sometimes, but not like you’re talking about, especially in Arizona. There is no Sunset strip or a Times Square or anything like that, so it’s almost pointless to waste your gas money driving around this huge place. The money is better spent on gear or stage props. One time though, a band wanted to fight us because Garrett had done something with one of the guys’ sister, but the band backed off pretty quickly when our friends got wind of it.

HOH: Wowzers! Tell us about getting hooked up with these Hail! gigs. I interviewed Andreas Kisser last month and we talked about Hail! a bit, so it ought to be a few rad evenings of traditional power metal with you guys opening!

JG: Yeah dude, it’s gonna be an amazing show and anyone who lives in New York and Massachusetts that chooses not to come out is just lame! Basically I have to give praise to David Ellefson for opening the door for these shows. We’ve known him for a little while but he had never seen us live and finally came to one of our shows in December. He really enjoyed it and thought that we would be a perfect fit for the first ever HAIL! dates. We got to see HAIL! play a secret show at NAMM and it was so awesome and got us even more excited for these east coast dates.

HOH: There are many albums and artists which shape new musicians, but since Age of Evil’s lineup enjoys a unique bond I can picture there being a music listening session in your history together where a certain album solidified the glue, shall we say. Which album is it?

JG: It’s hard to say but a few come to mind: Blizzard of Ozz, Number of the Beast and Rust in Peace. I think these albums definitely helped solidify our love for metal and great music. Many came after these, but let’s just say that these were some of the first.

By Ray Van Horn, Jr.

House of Hair Online: You were, of course, a part of the Big ‘80s resurrection of Kiss. It’s one thing Kiss was able to come back strong in the decade, but you all were a part of that Big ‘80s thing of rock and entertainment. I saw a different and larger stage presentation than Kiss during the ‘70s since I was in the front row for the Crazy Nights tour, but put us up there with you during this timeframe on those massive stages.

Bruce Kulick: We definitely had some really huge stage shows. People would always think of Kiss during the seventies as being the biggest shows around, but for Hot in the Shade there was the sphinx and laser beams right down to the Revenge tour with the giant Statue of Liberty/Terminator thing. It was always very, very cool stuff. Although I loved it when we were doing the club tour; a little weird being in clubs with them, but it wasn’t weird blowing everyone away!

HOH: You came in during a hot transition period of guitarists for Kiss with Vinnie Vincent and Mark St. John preceding you. How intimidated were you—if at all—first coming into the gig? The story goes your brother Bob introduced you to the band, is that correct? Naturally you made the position stick for more than a decade.

BK: Yeah, that’s how I met them. It was unusual how I walked into the band. My brother always did tell Gene and Paul about me and I got to meet them a few times, but it took the hardship with Mark St. John and then Paul was having some health problems. They hired my brother before as the ghost guitar guy and instead they wound up asking me, which was really cool. I didn’t realize at the time they said ‘Don’t cut your hair,’ that there was going to be the opportunity for me to fill in. At first it was something for them to maybe take me for a couple weeks, but it turned into 12 years, so that’s quite exciting.

HOH: For me, one of the most meaningful moments as a Kiss fan was the MTV Unplugged reunion show. Just to have a chance to see Eric (Singer) play next to Peter (Criss), then you next to Ace (Frehley), for me, it didn’t get any better than that! It was cool watching that show again on Kissology Volume 3 since there’s now the opportunity to see the entire performance versus what MTV had to previously cut. How do you remember that show going from your experience?

BK: There’s no doubt that MTV would shoot it really beautiful, and it was. It came off very, very attractive. At the time it was a real honor to be involved with one of their Unplugged shows. It was a little awkward with the Ace and Peter thing, but I was so proud of the fact that the band—which was Gene, Paul, Eric Singer and myself as a non-makeup band—it gave us a chance to showcase what we were able to do playing those Kiss songs acoustically, which is a challenge enough. We held our own in a big way. We were getting some comments from the diehard people like Scott Ian of Anthrax, who was much more a fan of the makeup era; here he is watching the show because there was an event happening—which was the reunion—and he was like, ‘You guys played great!’ So I really enjoyed that. I didn’t realize it would be my last gig with the band (laughs), but ultimately it gave a certain exposure and it certainly was also the catalyst to the reunion tour, but it still had its place and I was proud to be a part of it.

HOH: I rank that show as high as anything as the ‘70s spectacles largely for the craft of the playing. You know, I don’t know which album I would pick from your era in Kiss as the best, but I always think Asylum or Revengeis my favorite. What rings happiest to your ears if you go back and listen to the albums you played on?

BK: Well, there are highlights on all of them, but I’ll still always feel like Revenge was the best record. Everything on it was really strong, but if you look at Asylum, “Tears Are Falling” stands out to me. If you look at Crazy Nights, there’s a couple songs that are really cool on there; they mixed my guitar playing where it was out there, forward, and really sounding great. Certainly by the time you get into Hot in the Shade, there was “Forever” and “Hide Your Heart,” which were very popular. There’s highlights on each record, no doubt. Of course Revenge has killer tracks from top-to-bottom, and I’m still proud of Carnival of Souls. It’s considered a little bit of an odd Kiss record in some ways since it’s heavier than the others. I’m really proud of all the stuff I did through the Kiss years. Certain songs feature me more, but I really did have a great opportunity to be showcased in that band.

HOH: I was on your website taking a look at those pictures of you backstage at a recent Kiss show, and listening to your new solo album BK3, you have Gene and Eric contributing. I’d say it’s safe to assume you’re still a part of the brotherhood, no matter the paths that unfolded after your tenure in the band.

BK: Yeah, it was great to get the overall access pass and that’s why I wanted to share that with the fans. You know, here’s me holding Paul’s guitar backstage and Gene’s. It was really fun, it was wonderful. I even got to catch some of the sound check, which was a lot of fun. Those guys have always been really cool to me. You know, I miss being in the band and all, but the truth is it makes sense for Tommy (Thayer) to do the Ace stuff. Honestly, they know what I contributed to the band. It’s not a case of was I good enough or smart enough to be in the band; they wanted to do the makeup thing and that’s certainly a very comfortable role for Tommy to be Ace. I had my own era to be proud of.

HOH: In the event that things were different and you were asked to be the Spaceman, would you have done it?

BK: Well, look, I don’t want to lie and say absolutely not, no way, but everybody has a price sometimes! (laughs) I’m kind of relieved I didn’t have the choice. It just made sense for me to represent my era of Kiss. I’m very proud of the guys to get the new music out there because of the fact the band acted like they would never do it; why bother spending the time do that, you know? Still, I think it’s very cool.

HOH: I want to touch on Northern Lights Orchestra a minute. To me, this is one of the biggest gatherings of eighties rockers and metal artists since Hear ‘n Aid! How’d you get involved with this project?

BK: It was Chuck Wright who threw me into the mix. I’ve known Chuck a long time and he was the bass player on most of the tracks. Next thing I know, Ken Mary, the drummer guy, sent me some tracks and said ‘Hey, here’s these couple of songs we’d like you to play on.’ You know, any session I do I take very seriously. I took them into the studio and really worked hard on them. I used Jeremy (Rubolino), my producer for BK3, and we banged it out. I’m really happy with it. The tracks came out great and they were a bit of a challenge; they were symphonic in nature, these songs.

HOH: I think that element might’ve spilled over just a bit into the last song of BK3, “Life.” That finale, man, wow…

BK: You know, the ending on that song is supposed to be a celebration of life. That’s why I bring in all of those instruments played together. It had a very cool vibe.

HOH: To me, it was almost a Beatles vibe…

BK: Yeah, I was certainly going for a Beatles sort of thing, so I’ll say thank you.

HOH: (laughs) Nice! Back to Northern Lights for a second, naturally there are comparables to Trans-Siberian Orchestra with the holiday slant and big theater aspect. From your perspective of the Northern Lights group, what does this ensemble bring to the table the other group might not?

BK: The holiday time is a good time for people to celebrate, and if you’re going to rock out, there’s no harm in rocking out to some songs that are inspired by the season, you know? I think there’s a place for both bands. Trans-Siberian has been around for quite awhile; it’s very huge and they put on an unbelievable show. Northern Lights, I know they did a show and a DVD of it. I was busy overseas, so that’s why I wasn’t involved with it, though of course I played on the regular CD, so it’s hard for me to do an exact comparison, but the real point of it—especially with the NLO—is there’s a charity involved with it. It’s for people who have had drug issues and stuff like that, to help them stay on the right path. I was proud to be a part of it in that way.

HOH: Moving into BK3, I feel one of the album’s big highlights is all the guests you have on it. You have John Carabi, Tobias Sommet, of course Eric Singer plus Gene and Nick Simmons. I would imagine this was something of like throwing your own private party in the studio having these guests come on board for the album.

BK: Well, I’d like to be candid and say it wasn’t always a party because it was very hard to schedule everybody as you can imagine. Ultimately everybody did a really wonderful job and I think each song that fell in their laps fit them well. I think they really did them justice. I was actually very proud of everyone’s contributions.

HOH: You know, I have to give Gene a ton of credit on “Ain’t Gonna Die.” He really saved some of his best vocals for you!

BK: When Jeremy and I heard him open up his mouth we were like, ‘Oh shit, this is great!’ Look, he’s pro in the studio and it didn’t take him long. We knew what we had and what it could sound like, which is why I hired a real string section to do the bridge parts and the ending. It was quite an interesting day. I had a wonderful time.

HOH: He’s definitely a large part of the groove on that track, and it sounds to me like Nick is working out to be a mirror of Gene, judging by his vocals on “Hand of the King.”

BK: Yeah, he was like a mini-Gene there; in his own way, though.

HOH: I like this generation bridge you got between Gene, yourself and Nick! Nice unity.

BK: Yeah, that track worked out really well. I loved the whole vibe that Nick created. He comes from a more sci-fi, comic book world type of thing. Those lyrics were really, really inspiring once I read them and saw how creative he was. He just handled it. I mean, the studio was new to him, of course, but he’s a smart guy, he’s a classy kid and he’s very talented. He could probably do whatever he wants, you know?

HOH: I especially love the variety of BK3. You have the feelgood toe-tappers like “And I Know” and “Dirty Girl,” you have the heavy stuff like “I’m the Animal” and you have some Hendrix funk on “Between the Lines.” How much does diversity trigger your songwriting through three solo albums to this point?

BK: I do like a lot of different styles of stuff. It really wasn’t that hard to keep the diversity. Jeremy and I changed the formula a bit once we realized that we had the Gene track finished, and we had some heavy stuff; we needed things to compliment those, if you get what I’m saying. There has to be that recipe for the record you’re making and I feel really comfortable with the way we had to keep evolving along with it. It was all for the right reasons, you know? I like that the record has a lot of different elements. There’s no way you’ll get bored with it, that’s for sure!

HOH: (laughs) Going back to “Dirty Girl,” you have Doug Fieger from The Knack on what I thought was a very appropriate idling-away kind of jam. I’ve heard a lot of groups covering “My Sharona” over the years, but there were a lot of cool songs by The Knack such as “Good Girls Don’t” or “Let Me Out.” Was it your intention to bring a little more attention to The Knack by bringing Doug in for “Dirty Girl?”

BK: You know, what happened with that song is, it’s a power pop tune. I knew I wouldn’t sing it, that it wasn’t going to be strong enough for me. “And I Know” would be a better power pop song for me to sing. Jeremy and I had to look at the choices, you know? It was like, ‘Alright, who could do this well?’ Then it just turned out that I met Doug at a fantasy camp about a year prior to the track being ready. It was that point where I was very excited and I thought, ‘You know what? He’d be great for it!’ I went ahead and asked him and sure enough he loved the track and he did a killer job on it.

HOH: I think “Fate” is one of my favorite songs on BK3 because it has such a great grinding rock sound to it. Just looking at your schedule these days, “Fate” is kind of reflective of what’s going in your life. You have Grand Funk, the Eric Singer Project, Northern Lights, the rock clinics, and of course BK3. Is that basic drive of “Fate” symbolic of the rapid pace Bruce Kulick’s been keeping 2009 and ’10?

BK: Yeah, I guess I have been keeping the rapid pace! You know, I just do what I do and I’m very fortunate that I’ve had this career keeping me busy as heck. I don’t over-think it, if you know what I mean. It’s hard to keep it all together thinking about it too much. Ultimately I like to just do as much quality work as I can and I do feel that this record is a real testament to what I think is part of my goals in my career. This record is taking me there, which I’m really happy about. I can’t wait for all the fans to really dig into it!

HOH: (laughs) Right on. What’re you listening to these days?

BK: You know, I just got that Crooked Vultures album. I like some unusual stuff you wouldn’t think I like. I do like Coldplay, Muse and Radiohead, but I was told I need to check out the new Wolfmother! I really like them; I have their first record. From what I hear, the new record is good. I’m always looking for interesting things, but I’ve got a lot of long plane flights and I’ll end up listening to Hendrix or The Beatles, stuff that’s almost like comfort food. It like when you go back to Led Zeppelin. I’ll also take a little left turn and listen to some Stevie Wonder or Steely Dan or something. Music’s great to pass the time with!

By Ray Van Horn, Jr.

House of Hair: Tell us a little bit about this show you’ve got going on in Washington, DC tonight. Living Colour are guest performers on the “Afro Punk” show. I guess it’s been awhile since you guys were the openers instead of headliners, eh?

Corey Glover: This is what we need to do. We’ve got to get out there and play in front of different people. They need to see it, you know? A lot of folks don’t even know we’re back together! We’ve been together for a very long time, and we’ve been playing mostly in Europe and South America lately, so we have to re-establish ourselves. If it means we have to go down to DC and do a 40-minute set, we’re going to do it.

HOH: How about your experience of late playing Judas in the road ensemble of Jesus Christ Superstar? What drew you to this traveling production and how much different would you say it is being in that type of road show versus being in a band on the road?

CG: This is a show I really wanted to do. Jesus Christ Superstar has been an inspiration to me, literally, to keep doing what I do. When I got the opportunity to do the show, I said, ‘Aww, I’ve really got to do this!’ It was really great. It’s like being in a band, sort of. It is and it isn’t. You’re on the road, you’re working constantly, but the difference is, with a traveling show like Superstar, you’re working eight days a week! Not so with a band, where you’re working Thursday, Friday, Saturday and maybe Sunday. This is Monday through Sunday and two extra shows on the weekend! So, it’s a lot more work! (laughs) It’s maybe the same work spread out over a longer period, but it’s a lot more work.

HOH: Did being in Superstar give you a bit more preparation for Living Colour’s latest album, The Chair in the Doorway in your opinion? I think your chops on this album are as polished as they were coming out of the late eighties, man.

CG: Superstar did help me because I was constantly singing, though I wasn’t singing as much as I do in the band. It’s just spread out over the same period of time, so I have to keep my chops up to a certain degree. What it really did to me was give me inspiration plus aspiration too. I had all these ideas on the road for songs because I’m singing constantly and I’m hearing my own voice. It was like, ‘What would work here may work in the other!’ That was very, very helpful.

HOH: I want to touch on Collideoscope for a second. I know a lot of journalists are asking what you think might’ve gone right or wrong with that album, since we’re mostly unified in thought it’s a real solid album. I’m wondering if the climate in which Collideoscopewas released was still sensitive in a post 9/11 existence. The album certainly touches hard on the subject. Do you think that was the right time for Living Colour to come back or were you guys mainly victims of circumstance?

CG: I think it was time for us to do something. We’re a band from New York and September 11th and the days subsequent to that affected us very deeply. It was something that needed to be said. We needed to say something. It so happened we were in the middle of being on the road when 9/11 occurred, and we kind of got numbness having been off for so long by the time we made this record. We made the record in 2002, which was a year after the attacks and all of those things were still fresh in our minds, so we wanted to talk about that.

HOH: Do you feel the album was treated fairly by the label, the critics or the listeners?

CG: I don’t think anybody got a chance to hear that record. I think if anybody really got the chance to hear that record, they’d appreciate it on its own merits. There’s no way you can gauge what somebody’s going to like or what they’re not going to like, really. We knew there wasn’t going to be a hit song, but we knew it was going to be special. It was going to do what it would do but we knew it wasn’t going to last us for 20 years.

HOH: The first three albums you guys did really challenged the rock and metal scenes by introducing funk, soul, hip hop and blues into this style of music, but Living Colour’s social awareness I think has always been your calling card. We’re now in a slightly more progressive society with a change in presidency, but do you still feel that raw angst instigating your performance in Living Colour today?

CG: Absolutely! You know, don’t think just because things have changed in the White House that things have changed. Don’t think that there aren’t injustices in the world just because Obama’s in the White House. That’s not going to change anything, and there’s others things that need to be talked about. It’s been four years since Katrina; what’s changed there? What normal society is there? What’s really changing? What’s really going on? Not to say there haven’t been some changes; it’s been absolutely amazing to watch those changes going on the world. We’ve always tried to put the mirror up front to the life and times that we’re in, and as long as we have that perspective, that’s what we’re going to do.

HOH: I have to touch on the Bad Brains a second. These guys are one of my all-time favorite bands, and you guys have always been well-known for your Bad Brains covers. I remember when I heard I Against I for the first time, I literally fell to my knees! I was so shattered when I heard that album. They rightly get their due in the punk and sometimes reggae scenes, but from an overall rock perspective, do you think they’ve been slighted over the years?

CG: I think they’re like a hidden gem. It’s almost as if in secret people know about them. It’s like ‘Oh that’s really good, but I’ve got this in my secret little box I keep in the back and pull out on special occasions.’ I don’t know what there would be if everybody knew about the Bad Brains. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing, but that’s what makes it special, as far as I’m concerned. It’s hard, because I don’t really listen to a lot of new music. I listen to some new music, but even if I think something is new, it’s already two years old! I always turn back to that older stuff. I always turn back to (King’s X’s) Gretchen Goes to Nebraska, I always turn back to the old (Bad Brains) ROIR tapes and listen to that stuff. King’s X, Bad Brains and Fishbone, they’re all my comfort zone. I love that stuff!

HOH: Getting into The Chair in the Doorway, I want to start off with “Burned Bridges.” I just love the anticipatory build-up structures you guys have on this song. It just layers itself until Vernon (Reid) pulls off a tempered solo then goes berserk. It climaxes so good! There’s also a confessional feel to those brilliant lyrics. What do you feel was the motivating factor prompting Living Colour to write this one?

CG: It really came out of a conversation Vernon and I had where the questions were What do you want to say? What do you want to talk about? What do you think about things right now? He said ‘I’ve had this line in my head forever since the band broke up in the nineties where I’ve never had anywhere to put it: ‘I toss my keys in the river, now I can’t go home again.’ I said, ‘Alright, that’s a great starting point! Let’s go from there.’ In the way he and I and the band wrote it, we sort of just piled things on top of each other and that’s just how the production went as well. We’d come up with something and then all of sudden things would start to pile on top of each other. That’s sort of the way the song structured itself.

HOH: “The Chair” and “DecaDance” are two your band’s toughest songs since the Stain album, yet there’s nowhere near the amount of pure anger in these songs as on Stain. That was one angry album! How do you differentiate the songwriting mindset between Stain and these songs in terms of conveying aggression?

CG: Hmm, I don’t know. These are all moments in time. Our songs happen as they occur. That’s the cool thing about The Chair in the Doorway in general; that the title of the record came up first. We knew that was the title and we kept writing songs coming up a step until it congealed on its own.

HOH: What presented the hypothetical chair in the doorway that motivated this album?

CG: As the story goes, Vernon and I were talking during the making of Collideoscope, and we were waging over what was going on about this, that and the other thing, what was going on, who wasn’t doing what, typical band shit. I said to him, ‘The problem is, the chair’s in the doorway!’ He gave me a quizzical look and I tried to explain to him what I meant by the chair in the doorway. I don’t think he really got it at first, but after awhile things went by, we finished Collideoscope, and then we’re talking again about a new album and he was like, ‘You know what we should call the new album? The Chair in the Doorway!’ I was like, ‘Yeah, whatever, alright, let’s move on.’ When it came time to make the new record, he again said, ‘Let’s call it The Chair in the Doorway! Let’s do it!’ The songs sort of formed a marriage out of that. A song like “The Chair” was us trying to deal with the emotional aspect of what the song was, and it came about. “DecaDance” was a song about excess. While we were making this record, we were writing the songs and we were watching television and talking about the downturn and the economic crash that was happening. What we were thinking about was, it all came about because of greed, because you all wanted more! It was never enough for anybody. The sky was the limit! From that idea, the emotional aspect came about from it, and that’s why the song is as hard as it is.

HOH: I want to touch on “Method.” I know it probably wasn’t written to be a James Bond theme, but man, I’ll tell you what; it really ought to be one! Let’s have your mindset on how you wrote “Method.”

CG: We tried to do something very atmospheric. All of these songs came out of grooves that we made up during sound check or if we happened to pop into a studio or something. We’d had these grooves which Doug (Wimbish) held onto and kept recording. Out of one of these grooves we said ‘Let’s try to do something real atmospheric and very airy.’ Other times we’ve tried to do something light and it never works. Hats off to one of the guys, Milan Cimfe, who helped engineer this thing in the Czech Republic. He heard certain things and he sort of tweaked certain things in the studio and then a song emerged! It terms of writing lyrics, we tried to do a social commentary thing where it sort of connects to the next thing then the next thing then the next. It’s that connect-connect thing by the lyrics and then the melody came about.

HOH: I’m sure that was something recording this album in Prague. Did it make things tenser or more relaxed being in such a different environment?

CG: I think it was a little more relaxed. Maybe a little more relaxed and a little tenser because we couldn’t go home until we finished it! (laughs) It was like, ‘You want to go home? You want to see your family? You want to eat some real food?’ At the same time, it was a lot more relaxed. It wasn’t really in Prague; it was like Exit 14 on the Jersey Turnpike! It was near Prague, but it wasn’t inPrague. It was even a trek just to go into a simple town. We were pretty much holed up in this place but we had the luxury of waking up and the studio was right there! If you had an idea, you could get to it immediately. It wasn’t like you went home and fussed over it and thought about it and tweaked it and then it turns into something you don’t like after all that. What it was is the raw idea as it turned out and as it came out of your head. You put it down and recorded it conveniently.

HOH: I’m sure that’s a lot more refreshing to work with than say, your traditional studio where you might have time constraints to battle.

CG: Right. It was a great studio, an amazing studio. We had some amazing engineers;Milanis an amazing engineer. He really had an ear for songs and he heard a lot of stuff in our music before we actually heard it. It was great.

HOH: I really dig the Robert Johnson/Leadbelly trad blues you guys have with “Not Tomorrow” and “Bless Those (Annie’s Prayer).” Vernon’s insane on “Bless Those” but I also like the way he lays back on “Not Tomorrow” and lets the rest of the band become a rhythm section unto itself as he plays quietly in the background. Savvy stuff!

CG: Right, right, right! “Bless Those” is the only song on this record which we would consider a cover, because it was originally recorded by Doug as “Little Annie” and all that stuff, but it gave us a chance to do the barroom stuff that we do, since that’s who we are. In a real interesting sort of way, we’re like a barroom band in clubs all around the world. This is our chance to play some real bluesy stuff and really get back into our comfort zone.

HOH: Sounds like a vibe very much like your CBGB’s live album that came out not too long ago. Would you say you took that vibe into the recording of The Chair in the Doorway?

CG: Yeah, I think we did and that’s what we wanted to do. We changed that song several times. Sometimes we do all kinds of different things with a song, but it always works as just what it is: a raw, gutbucket, woodchip sawdust on the floor vibe. This is stomp blues sort of thing and that’s the way it works.

HOH: “Young Man” really cracked me up with your sarcastic step-calling amidst the funk rhythm. To me it comes off as a song about the zombies shuffling around in our dead society.

CG: Yeah, I see that with the call and response thing. We just thought it’s about us. Everybody keeps talking about this is such a young society of individuals, but is it really? Everybody wants to be the same thing!

HOH: Does that make “Young Man” your “Glamour Boys” for this generation, then?

CG: I guess, yeah!

HOH: You know, I caught you guys on the Time’s Up tour, one of my favorite tours of the time, but what I saw then and what I see on your New Morning: The Paris Concert DVD is you guys have become a real jam-based group now. You guys look so relaxed up there versus the flashpoint intensity of your late eighties gigs.

CG: Yeah, that show in Paris, at that point in the tour we were really trying to stretch out the songs. We’ve had these songs for 20 years, so now it’s time to see where they go, and we were afforded the luxury of doing that. That’s what you’re seeing on that DVD.

HOH: I just have to commend you guys for never selling out. You guys could’ve tried to replicate “Cult of Personality,” but you guys have always stuck to your guns doing what you want to do. Whether that has played into your scheme or not or whether it’s benefitted you or not, I think it’s been a fabulous part of your existence. Still did you at one point ever think, ‘Maybe we should’ve tried for something else big like that?’ Or is it the fact we’re in a society where today’s rock band simply can’t do “the big hit” anymore with current public tastes?

CG: Well, yeah, because then you become a victim of the songs you sing, and then you become ‘Oh, you’re that band that does that song!’ We’ve tried really hard not to be the band that does that song. “Cult of Personality” was one song of many songs that we’ve done. You can’t stop people from feeling that way; we’re never not going to live down “Cult of Personality.” It’s never going to happen, but when you come to a show and see us live, what’s interesting is you forget you remembered some of the stuff! I was talking to a friend of mine and he was like, ‘Dude, I forgot you guys did “Glamour Boys!” I forgot you did “Open Letter to a Landlord!”’ They might not have been “hits,” but they’re still part of the consciousness to our band. When you listen to them and you’re getting a new idea of what Living Colour is, you can go back and say, ‘You know, there’s a lot more diversity to this band than just “Cult of Personality.”’ Yeah, it’s a hard rock tune, and that’s great, but if you listen to something like “Broken Hearts,” it’s the same thing! It may not be exactly the same, but it’s still the same band. Or “Solace of You” or “This is the Life,” and your whole perspective on what you’re listening to changes. The whole idea of this band was to never be pigeonholed. We never wanted to be pigeonholed and we never tried to be pigeonholed. That was most important to us.

By Ray Van Horn, Jr.

HOH: Thank God about Peter, eh? That’s dodging a bullet.

AF: Yeah, that was a shock, but everything seems to be okay.

HOH: Since your self-created label is called “Bronx Born,” I wanted go back to your early days before there was such a thing as Kiss when you were growing up in the Bronx. How did you see your potential career going as a youngster once you’d picked up the guitar?

AF: Going back to when I was 15 or 16, I kind of knew I was destined for the big stage. I just knew. Don’t ask me how I knew; I just knew. A friend of mine who was a few years older than me, “Peppy” Thielhelm, he was in a band called the Blues Magoos and they had a big hit on the radio once when I was a young kid called “We Ain’t Got Nothing Yet.” This guy grew up two blocks from me and all of a sudden when I’d hung out with him a few times and then listened to his song on the radio, I said to myself, ‘You know, if this guy from the neighborhood can make it, why can’t I?’ It didn’t seem that far-fetched anymore, you know?

HOH: I dig how your new albumAnomaly kicks off with “Foxy and Free” and then “Outer Space.” They rock, they have a lot of bite and they’re as memorable as anything you’ve ever written. I’d say if you’re looking to get our attention out the gate with this album, you did it!

AF: I just wanted to make the very best possible album. I took a lot of time in the studio and with the mixing process. It came out pretty much the way I envisioned it. I don’t really have any regrets about the way the record sounds.

HOH: No matter what’s happened to you on the outside, you’re still the Spaceman to all of us, and on this album you have “Outer Space,” “Space Bear,” “Sister” and of course “Fractured Quantum.” What keeps you in tune with the universe to keep writing in such a cosmic vibe?

AF: You never forget about it. I’ve always been involved with extraterrestrial stuff and staying in touch with the other side helps me stay in tune with this side, if you can get that! (laughs) Everything isn’t as it seems sometimes and that’s because it usually isn’t! (laughs)

HOH: (laughs) I’m so glad to see Anton Fig lend you hand again on this album. That has to be special since he has the Paul Schafer/David Letterman gig. You’ve had Anton as a constant since ’78, and you know, he’s still one of the hardest hitters on the scene, pick your genre!

AF: One of Anton’s secrets—if you really study his playing—is he just makes a track swing and very rarely does he play on top of the beat. He’s usually playing just a little behind the beat, which is what John Bonham of Led Zeppelin gave to them, that plodding, heavy sound. I wish more drummers today would play that way, because it gives more heaviness and it just gives a better groove. Some drummers are always playing on the beat or a little ahead, especially speed metal. They should take note of the way Anton and guys like John Bonham play drums a little behind the beat, which gives it more of a swing—from my vantage point, anyway.

HOH: How special was it doing “A Little Below the Angels?” I think that song is just adorable and I thought that was gutsy of you to have that chat session with your daughter in the middle. Tell us about how you put this song together.

AF: That song evolved after I rewrote it twice. I recorded it once with a drum machine, I recorded it with Anton and I ended up rewriting the lyrics and the verses completely. In the final version I ended up scrapping the drums pretty much during the verse and the chorus and then popping them in during the bridge. I’m happy with the way it came out. I may release another version down the road so people can hear what it was like hearing the drums from beginning-to-end. With Pro Tools you have many different options how you edit a song. I think there’s a positive message on it and it’s pretty autobiographical too, you know?

HOH: (laughs) No doubt! That’s some of your heaviest bloodletting since “Rock Soldiers” and maybe even “Hard Times” before that!

AF: (laughs) Yeah, well, hopefully that means I’m growing! (laughs)

HOH: (laughs) On the flipside, you have your cover of Sweet’s “Fox On the Run.” You always nail your cover tunes, man, whether you’re talking “Do Ya” or “New York Groove” and I thought this one was on the dime as well. I’ve always thought the vocals on Sweet’s version run very parallel to your own so much to me it’s a natural thing you’d cover “Fox.”

AF: This gal that does my makeup sometimes for photo sessions, Pam, she came up with the idea to do that song. I mentioned it to a couple of friends of mine and one of my friend’s wives—who isn’t that knowledgeable about music—he was playing the original version by Sweet and he said his wife thought it was me! So I guess that’s maybe where Pam got the idea. I was always a fan of Sweet, but I hadn’t listened to their records in awhile. It just seemed like the right song at the right time.

HOH: I’ve always felt glam rock has figured into your sound, both in a Kiss and solo capacity. At times I feel like Anomaly might be your glammiest-sounding album to-date. What’s it about the glam sound that’s figured into a lot of your work?

AF: Well, you know, glam rock was a big part of the inspiration of Kiss, so it’s always been with me if you’re going to talk about my influences. Yet I have so many other influences too, which I guess is all mixed together. I don’t particularly see the glam rock sticking out that much, but maybe certain people perceive things differently.

HOH: To me, you put the exact care into “Fractured Quantum” on this album as you did the original “Fractured Mirror” from the ’78 solo album. This “Fractured” series on all of your solo albums has really become an extensive part of you.

AF: I originally did a bass guitar track and Anton played a live drum track on that one, but I ended up scrapping it. Marti Frederiksen programmed some drums, bass and guitar and that’s why the melody breathes; I’m real happy with the way that one turned out. It came out a little less complicated than it originally was but I think the melody shines through.

HOH: “Too Many Faces” along with some of the other songs on Anomaly are very personal, and given all that you’ve experienced in life leading into this album, do you feel tormented by too many faces or do you feel the reflection is actually bringing you some peace these days?

AF: I’m not really tormented. People sometimes read a lot more into my lyrics than they should. To me, “Too Many Faces” is a lighthearted song! (laughs) I didn’t really think too much about the lyrics; I just wrote them. There’s no torment. When I wrote the chorus, I thought about the way I used to look in the mirror when I was putting the Kiss makeup on. Mostly I thought about how a lot of different people wear different faces, when some of those faces create different personalities. To me, it’s all of the above! Plus, you’ve heard the term how some people can be two-faced? It happens.

By Ray Van Horn, Jr.

HOH: This is great stuff having the two of you together on Wicked Wonderland. Naturally everyone knows you two have been married for quite some time, but it’s a bit special to see you working synonymously on this record.

JG: We did all of this and we had no idea what’s going on in America. We’ve been on a damn island for so long! (laughs) We just wrote from the heart, man. We couldn’t tell you what’s popular, what’s the flavor of the month, what’s doing good now. We have no freaking idea! It’s pretty cool because we sort of explored it when we started writing. When you’re creative people and you don’t do something that you love for 15 years, boom, something just comes out like a hurricane, I guess. Man, we wrote a lot of songs; we wrote about 25 songs!

HOH: Then I’d say you probably have a nice chunk of material for another album!

JG: You know what? We won’t use it! (laughs) We’ll start all over again. If it wasn’t good enough for this album, then we won’t use it for another one. Or we might revisit it and re-tweak it, you know? Out of ten songs we’ll probably have seven or eight half-songs.

HOH: Well, that’s interesting because both Lita’s past work and what you did with Nitro and Tuff, none of it creeps into Wicked Wonderland. This album really is a fresh, clean slate!

JG: It is and it isn’t. Obviously it came from us, so there has to be some of that in there, but you’re right, it is like a clean slate. We mainly sat there and wrote from the heart; that’s all I can say. The lyrics for both of us are very personal. It’s kind of weird; we actually had to talk about it and whether we really wanted to let people know what our love life was all about. A lot of this album is about us! It’s about our love, our sex, our chemistry. Sex is a huge part of our marriage. I think if it was to more married couples, there’d be a lot less divorces! (laughs) What do you think?

HOH: (laughs) I can’t argue with that, brother! Apply that theory to politicians and we’d have fewer wars!

JG: I’ve got buddies who cheat on their wives and they end up getting divorced and they’ll tell me, ‘Yeah, she didn’t want to do this or that,’ you know, the wacky sex stuff. Here these guys are embarrassed to ask their wives to do freaky stuff! What are you, nuts? You marry the girl, you have kids with her, you sleep next to her every day and you’re afraid to tell her you like to be spanked or anything weird? They’ll hook up with someone they don’t know for a one-night-stand and ask the girl to bark like a dog, but they won’t ask their wives to do that? That’s insane to me! Why’s it okay to find that with someone else but not your wife? I just don’t get it, man.

HOH: Well,to my ears Wicked Wonderland is essentially your Eyes Wide Shut moment on album where you make your sexual encounters with one another widely public. You guys just put it all out there…

JG: But this is real life! (laughs) This ain’t a trip, you know? The big decision was ‘Hey, do we put this out there?’ Hell yeah! This is us, this is who we are and maybe somebody’ll get a little freaky with their husband or wife because of this and maybe it’ll save a damn marriage!

HOH: I understand this album is catching on with the bondage underground…

JG: Well, if it does, we’re happy, because we’re a part of it, you know? I mean, we don’t frequent the clubs or gatherings in that kind of subculture, but I think we’re the first rock ‘n roll couple to ever be endorsed by a bondage company! (laughs) How cool is that, man? We’re endorsed by Stockroom.com and they have the coolest adult toys and clothes. Man, it’s awesome! Our bedroom looks like a freaking factory! (laughs) We wear some of that stuff onstage. Did you see the video for “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” from A Twisted Christmas?

HOH: You bet.

JG: You know that suit Lita’s wearing that looks like freaking spray paint? That’s from Stockroom, and then we’ve got something called The Slave Harness with the black straps. It’s pretty wicked, all that stuff.

HOH: So you guys literally have a playground!

JG: (laughs) Yes, literally, we do!

LF: Stockroom has beautiful stuff! It’s nice stuff to use with your girlfriend or wife or your lover; it’s wonderful stuff. Even my 12-year-old wears the bracelets! They’re big, hunky leather bracelets, so there’s something for everybody in there. Beautiful clothes, silky and sexy; really nice stuff.

HOH: When you two were going through the process of writing Wicked Wonderland, was there anything that got pushed too far in your minds?

JG: No, no, not really. In the beginning we were wondering if that was so, but we had a talk and once we decided we were cool with putting it all out, there was no turning back. What else is there? We’ve got two rules: no animals and no other people! (laughs) If it doesn’t involve anybody but us and if it doesn’t hurt anybody, we’re good.

LF: You know when you start talking about barnyard animals, it’s time to turn it over to Lita! (laughs)

HOH: (laughs) Jim with the quick bailout! How’ve you been, lady? Great to have you back on the scene!

LF: I miss you guys! I miss everybody! I’m so excited to get out there and rock.

HOH: So fill in the gaps behind Jim; what’s been happening all these years? We know the basics: you two moved to the Caribbean, you’re raising your family and obviously you’re having a lot of sex!

LF: Yeah! We just wrote this wonderful album, we’re going out and doing some shows with Queensryche, who is an awesome band! We’re featured on an X-Box game coming out and I’m the voice of the queen…how awesome! We have Jack Black in it, Rob Halford, Lemmy, Ozzy, a whole bunch of rock ‘n roll tunes, about 100 tunes, something insane like that. It’s really going to be their largest-selling game of the year, so check it out! If you go on Brutal Legend.com, we have one of our songs from Wicked Wonderland, “Betrayal” there. So it’s like Lita year, man! Everything is happening! We’ve got a comic book coming out with our kids beating up zombies, but that’s nothing new since they do that every day! We’ve got all kinds of goodies coming this year.

HOH: Let’s go back to the early eighties for just a moment before you released Out for Blood. What was circulating through your mind in preparation of your solo career?

LF: Well, I did the Runaways of course from 1975 to 1980, and then my first solo project. I went out as myself with a bass player and drummer. I really wanted to get the point across that I was a guitar player and yes, I am female, yes, I’m into hard rock. You know, people looked at us onstage and the band’s jamming, then the solo comes up…all the cameras go on the guy! It’s like, wait a minute! He’s not playing the solo, you moron! I am! So I really wanted to come up with a way to get the point across I’m a guitar player and the only way to do that was to just go solo. It’s like Hendrix; Jimi Hendrix is my idol.

HOH: You had a short gap of time between Dancin’ On the Edge before you broke out with the Lita album. I’m sure you went through a bit of a mental challenge between records. What do you remember being your biggest motivating factor back then, considering Lita went on to enjoy huge success?

LF: Finding the right management, the right record producer, the right songs, you know, being in the right place at the right time. At that point in time in the music industry, you really had to be. It wasn’t like I had my own record company! It was pretty much unheard of back then. You had to get everything approved through the label and back then it was like, ‘Can we use this record producer?’ ‘What do you think about Lita’s makeup?’ ‘What do you think about Lita’s nail polish?’ right down to stupid stuff like that. That’s where I was at with them. To be able to get the label on your side meant you weren’t going to get shelved, that your album was going to get some credibility, that somebody was going to help push you. Otherwise you get shelved if they don’t like you or if they don’t know what to do with you…and that happens all the time, them not knowing what to do with you. Why? Because you’re a chick and you’re singing heavy metal and you’re playing guitar… ‘What do we do with you?’ Then there was the thing with censoring the music; don’t say this, don’t talk about that. I was like, ‘Goddamn, what the hell do you want from me?’ That was a battle! Then I got lucky because I got Sharon Osbourne and I got Mike Chapman, one of the greatest record producers and songwriters ever. Sharon Osbourne just kicked butt! I really nailed it with them helping me out, and the record label was so excited, so I had everybody on my team.

HOH: You know, Lita was a good-time record for a good-time year in 1988. For you, I’m sure it was a little Dickensian with a lot of great times and perhaps some not-so-great times during that period. What was it like?

LF: Yeah, I did go through a lot during that time. Things were right and things weren’t quite right. I had a lot going on in my life, but I think musically I had a lot of great success with that album. I think today, other than Wicked Wonderland, it really remains my favorite album. I’m very happy with Wicked Wonderland; it really kicks butt! Lita also kicks butt for that time. You know, my father died during that time, but at the same time I had a gold and platinum-selling album. I had something really great going on and something really messed up going on, but now for some reason, thank God I’ve got all of my eggs in a row here. Nobody’s sick, everybody’s healthy, everybody’s happy and everything’s going good for me. I’m really excited to get out there and tour!

HOH: If you don’t mind my saying, Wicked Wonderland is one of the most sexed-up albums I’ve heard all year and we’re still waiting for the new Genitorturers album to drop! Life is good in the Caribbean, eh?

LF: Oh, yeah! Life is great in the Caribbean. It’s not for everybody, but we enjoy our privacy. We like to run around with no clothes on…

JG: That’s what I’m talking about!

LF: (laughs) As a matter of fact, my first son Rocco didn’t wear his first socks until he was two! He screamed whole bloody murder when I had to put a sock on him. We came back to the United States and it was winter, so I had to get him some socks and shoes. In the Caribbean, it’s hot all year round so you hardly need to get dressed, but I put a sock on him and he was freaking out screaming, ‘Get it off, Mom! Get it ooooooooffff!” I was like, ‘Rocco, it’s a sock, for God’s sake! You’re gonna survive it!’ God bless him, I love him! Kids are great; kids rule! They rock the world. I have a wacky family; we need to do a reality show!

HOH: What do the boys think finally getting to see their parents in action onstage?

LF: Oh, they’re really excited! They love it. How cool is it for my kids to be traveling cross-country or looking out of the plane and seeing the tips of the Swiss Alps? Flying overseas…it’s something money just can’t buy. I remember when I was in school I was really bad at history and geography; I hated it! I sucked at it; I got D’s and I was begging my teacher not to give me an F, for God’s sake! I kind of wormed my way through those, but I really showed my colors and I graduated from school and was able to go out and tour. To see these countries in person and meet the people, see their cultures, learn about their money, the way they drive, the things they eat, the things they wear, it’s all very interesting! For my kids, it’s saved me a lot of home school! They actually get to go there and see these things themselves and I think it’s a wonderful life experience.

HOH: There’s a very unique balance in having you and Jim work together on Wicked Wonderland. You get to really amp up and turn your guitars loose without anyone really pressing a thumb down on you, while Jim doesn’t have to necessarily hit the highest octaves as he was well-known for in the eighties. A lot of the songs are playful and sexual like “Bed,” “Crave,” “Inside” and “Scream for Me.” On the other end of the spectrum, you have that serious love letter between you and Jim with “Sacred.” When going through the playbacks of these songs together, tell us what that experience was like…

LF: We had a good time making the record. I can’t wait to make the next one. We would mess around with each other; you can hear us moaning and groaning on a few songs if you listen carefully! We’ll be talking to each other and then you’ll hear some music. We were able to record when we felt like recording, not because we had studio time booked or anything like that. We just did it when we felt the mood was right or when we got an idea. It would be like, ‘Oh, I know how that should go! Let’s go the studio right now!’ and we’d run out to the studio and record it. So that was really nice. Then we had Greg Hampton from California, who was one of our producers,on drums, so it was just the three of us. He would lay down the drum tracks and zap it over to us through email. Having Pro Tools is nice to be able to do that so quickly. It really got finished quickly; it was easy and it was a lot of fun. It was very sensual at the same time, as well as us just having a good ol’ time. Jim had a good bit to do with the album’s recording…

JG: For us, this was honestly the only way Wicked Wonderland would’ve happened. Technology where it was at 20 years ago, we would’ve had to have gone into a big studio and we just never would’ve done it. We’ve kind of been able to ease back into this because we were such a family unit. We don’t go anywhere without the kids and they’re a part of everything. They’re with us all the time. I mean, how do you keep a couple of maniacs like our kids locked up in a studio for 12 hours a day? We’ve got an octagon in our house! They’d work out, they’d be training and watching movies, get on their computers and finishtheir homework, all right next to us in and out of the room where we’d record. They’re right next to us, you know? They’d be playing and going nuts on their video games, pinball machines, monkey bars and rock walls. It’s a good environment, you know? They couldn’t have been locked in a studio. Doing it at home kind of kept it to what we’re used to. No pressure, no stress. When you go into those big studios, they’re two grand a day, or at least back in the day they were; it’s probably not that way today since so many people have home studios. Back in the day they cost two thousand bucks a day and you’d lock the kids out! What would happen was, if you were sick, too bad, buddy! If you’re not in there to record, you’re losing two grand! So a lot of your performances weren’t as good as they would’ve been.

At the house we’d record when we felt good and if we didn’t feel good or if we didn’t feel the mood was right, we wouldn’t. Sometimes you’re just not feeling it, so we’d be like ‘Screw it, we’ll work on it tomorrow!’ and it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re going to lose $2000.00!’ It was cool. I was the engineer over here, so it’s just me and Lita. Especially when your songs are like these, it makes things more convenient! (laughs) She’d wonder why it was so hot in there! (laughs)

HOH: No urban myths with you guys similar to the reported Axl Rose show on “Rocket Queen,” if you get me…

JG: (laughs) No, this is the real thing, buddy! In the song “Indulge,” you’ll have to listen really carefully (laughs) and you’ll hear some actual stuff going on there! In the breakdown section of the song, we didn’t exactly turn it down! Plus, we’ve got the “real sex” version, as we call it! In a little while, we’ll probably stream it on the website for a couple of days and then yank it, but it’s just filthy! (laughs)

HOH: It sounds like you both had so much fun doing Wicked Wonderland, but can you pick one standout song overtop the others?

JG: Each song has its own life, you know? “Sacred” is very special to us. I actually wrote that for Lita and she got to sing it to me, so that’s pretty cool. That’s a very special song to us, but it’s also a very different animal than say, “Crave” or “Patriotic” or “Scream.” It’s way to the left while most of them are way to the right because we weren’t worried about time and because we didn’t have a producer reigning over us.

LF: The whole album ties in together. It’s not like one song or one part of the movie; it’s the whole thing together. It’s our own wicked wonderland.

HOH: Man, brother, Priest has been road-dogging quite extensively in support of Nostradamus and now A Touch of Evil…Live, plus you have a theme to this leg with Whitesnake, as in you guys playing British Steel in its entirety. I probably needn’t ask, but how’s this retro-flavored tour been going in your opinion?

KK: Yeah, it’s been really, really good! I’ve been reading on the internet the fans just love it and I do read bits where people are saying we’ve blown them away. Time has been moving on for us, but now has been the right time to do this. It’s just great to be out here doing it. Who’d have thought it; thirty years on-end? British Steel was far from our first album, but it’s still amazing to be playing all of these songs live from way back when.

HOH: Let’s go back a minute to 1979 and the days of British Steel for Judas Priest. Heavy metal was obviously just being cultivated around the world with a large concentration in England. What stands in your mind as memorable in ’79 for Priest and yourself individually?

KK: Priest had been going on for almost a decade as a band at that point. We had good songs, we had an image that was working for us, but there was something missing before the British Steel record. We then got the songs and the album cover, but the thing is, the image of the band was leather and studs, which is why it was so successful, because suddenly something new was happening and people wanted to be a part of it. That’s why British Steel was such a success. People say by and large it was responsible for the whole metal movement that became such a success in the eighties.

HOH: I read on your personal website you recently attended the Download Festival as a fan and got away with it. What was that experience like, mingling in a crowd oblivious to a guitar legend in their midst?

KK: I had to keep my head down quite a bit! (laughs) So that bit was kind of tough, but I did go into the arena the day long to see Def Leppard, Whitesnake, Journey, Dream Theater and a bunch of bands. That for me was like turning the clock back because I used to go to every music festival coming through Great Britain, even before I started in Priest, even before I ever gigged in a band. It was a realization I’d missed a lot over the years, not continuing to have the enjoyment of being that fan again, you know?

HOH: Just those Isle of Wight Festivals from ’67 to ’70, my God, you saw the cream of the crop of the day! Which of those artists left the most impact upon you as a musician to make you want to just get up there and play?

KK: I always say when I saw the great Jimi Hendrix, it was a turning point for me, really. I only had an old guitar and an acoustic, and I was struggling along with that. I was already eating through blues-based guitar like (Eric Clapton and) Cream. When I first saw the great Jimi Hendrix, at that particular time I wasn’t intent on being a guitar player or a successful guitar player; I just wanted to get more of him really, because when he wanted to turn it on, he was magic. There was nobody else, and I’ve seen everybody, I’ve seen every other band. He was the man ahead of everyone. Obviously later in life when I was able to play, I was always remembering that magic he had, you know, the ingredients. Without him, maybe I wouldn’t be here talking to you today.

Henrdix was the type of performer—and I’ve experienced it with my very own eyes—where he sometimes had to tone it down. People would go absolutely crazy! I’ve been in Coventry Theatre where people would rush the stage, each and every one them, because he could literally send people into a frenzy. I was at the Royal Albert Hall where people were literally jumpingfrom the second floor balconies and landing on other people below! Obviously there were some times where he had to tone it down a little bit. The first time I saw him, things got quite a bit out of hand during “Foxy Lady,” where it was just mayhem from there. The second night I saw him in Bristol, England, he opened up with a Beatles song, “Sgt. Peppers,” so he’d toned things down just a bit. He had to do that sometimes, because when he wanted to turn it on, people would just go mad.

HOH: Intense. I’d like to get into A Touch of Evil…Live next. You guys feature 11 songs, most of which haven’t really appeared on previous Priest live albums. I think the approach is real novel and something the fans can get behind. What made you guys decide to choose, for lack of a better term, a non-monster hit set list for this album?

KK: We decided a lot of stuff had been missing from our other live albums, songs we’ll go out and play live like “The Rage” and “Steeler” and “Don’t Have to Be Old to Be Wise.” These are fantastic songs and some go down really, really well live. It’s about giving these songs a chance but at the same time giving the fans something they don’t already have in their collection. I think that’s the criteria we set for ourselves with A Touch of Evil…Live. So many of our songs have been around and around and around, either on live albums, bootlegs, DVDs or best-ofs, so we just wanted to give our fans something a little bit more unique and it’s not to say that every fan considers the most popular songs the band perform the ones they like most. Like the British Steel tour we’ve been playing, some of these songs have never been played live at all before; they’ve been in the closet for so long. We’d like to think everything we’ve done is valid anyway, so a second chance I think is well-deserved for a lot of these songs.

HOH: I agree, and I’d say minus the small handful of Angel of Retribution and Nostradamus songs appearing on A Touch of Evil…Live, these songs are long in your blood, from a fan’s perspective as well as yourselves in the band. They’ve been there regardless of what year they came out, but which song sounds the freshest to your ears on this album? For me, it’s “Dissident Aggressor,” hands-down.

KK: Yeah, I would have to agree. I thoroughly enjoyed playing that song earlier in the year and I think a lot of the fans have wanted it for a very long time. So maybe that song in particular stands out a little bit, though it’s pretty cool how “Judas Rising” kicks off the album. I’ve always loved that song as well. I hope everybody enjoys the whole album; I think it all works together well, I’d like to say. Some of those songs have spread over three, even four decades, but on the record it all sounds pretty energized. Then you have a great rendition of “Beyond the Realms of Death” as well, so we’re pretty pleased with this package.

HOH: I’d have to say A Touch of Evil…Live is much heavier than the other live Priest albums, Unleashed in the East notwithstanding. I love the sound capture and for me it just shows how you and Glenn (Tipton) and the Iron Maiden line are still the best in the business. Opinionated of me to say, but…

KK: I thank you very much. Yeah, it is a heavier album and Judas Priest is a heavy band. I mean, we’ve had a lot of light and shade going on through our careers and with our music, but we’ve never been afraid to push the boundaries of metal as far as we possibly can, nor the audience as far as we possibly can. It just goes to show you, really, from one end of the spectrum to the other, there’s a hell of a lot in-between and that hopefully gives a lot of encouragement and motivation to lots of new bands and tomorrow’s undiscovered icons. There’ll be lots of great people and bands emerging in the future.