Dokken guitarist Jon Levin talks in detail about the new Dokken album Hell To Pay and about life in the band in general. Jon talked to Ron & Don Higgins, good friends of mine, who put their hands up for the interview and conducted it with enthusiasm. Thanks guys...

Ron: How are you doing, Jon?
Jon: I'm doing great.

Don: There's two of us on the line. I'm not sure if they told you that when they set this up but, I'm Don and then there's my brother, Ron. We're twins.
Jon: Hey, guys. What's going on?

Ron: Not much.
Don: We'll be doing this together. In fact, we met you on Friday night; you may or may not remember.
Jon: Oh, okay.

Don: At the show in Cincinnati.
Jon: Awesome.

Don: And by the way, that was a really good show. I was really impressed with the way the whole band sounded and, in particular, with the way that you really seemed to match all of George Lynch's notes. You did an outstanding job.
Jon: Thank you very much.

Don: It was really good. I liked the new song that you played, “Escape”.
Jon: Oh, you did like it?

Don: Yeah, I kind of wish you would've played more off of the new album, to be quite honest.
Jon: Well, we're going to be. Don had to do press in Europe so we're now going to be getting new songs worked into the set. We have to rehearse, you know.

Ron: Is this pretty early in the tour?
Jon: Oh, yeah. This is really early. In fact tonight we're opening with “Unchain The Night”.

Ron: Oh, great!
Jon: And we're going to have “Haunted” and “Prozac Nation” in the set within the week.

Ron: I love “Prozac Nation”
Jon: Awesome. And we're going to add “Dream Warriors”.

Ron: Oh, you're kidding?
Jon: So yeah, the whole set is really going to be overhauled within the next week. Like I said, Don had to do press so we lost our rehearsal time.

Ron: Gotcha.
Jon: Actually, after the show last night we all got in the back of the bus and rehearsed.

Ron: That's great. It's funny because my brother and I have both seen Dokken probably 6 or 7 times and, yes, we've seen every guitarist <laughs>, but we were trying to debate on what would be the opening song and the last few times we saw you they opened with “Erase The Slate”, which is interesting because it wasn't even in the set, at least here.
Jon: Yeah.

Ron: So I was thinking it might be something new off of the album, possibly “Don't Bring Me Down”.
Jon: We were thinking about that. You know, it's never really a great idea to open up with a song that nobody knows yet, though.

Ron: Well, yeah, that's what I was going to say. I was pleasantly surprised because I was kind of expecting that since that's what's being featured on Dokken Central right now and it's got that killer guitar riff, and that, by the way, is my favorite song on the album.
Jon: Oh, cool.

Ron: It's just great, with that opening and then that killer lead in the middle. Unbelievable.
Jon: Thanks so much, man. Which show did you say you were at?

Don: Friday night at Annies.
Ron: In Cincinnati, Ohio.
Jon: At Annies. Cool.

Ron: It was unbelievable, but when you kicked off with…
Jon: “Kiss of Death”

Ron: Yeah, “Kiss of Death”, which is a great song that is so up-tempo, it sort of grabs you by the jugular and doesn't let go, you know?
Jon: Yeah.

Ron: I thought that was an excellent way to start.
Jon: Well thanks. We'll see how it goes tonight because, like I said, we're changing it because we've done “Kiss of Death” so many times. We thought people might want a change, but we'll see.

Don: Well “Don't Bring Me Down” is, if you could incorporate that into your set, I would say that that song is definitely the most up-tempo song on the new album.
Jon: Yeah.

Don: And it is also the one that I would say stands out the most as being the most like the old classic stuff like from Tooth and Nail through Back from the Attack. It could almost be straight from one of those albums.
Jon: Yeah, I know what you're saying. I agree.

Don: The other stuff is more reminiscent of Dysfunctional through Long Way Home.
Jon: Do you guys like the album?

Ron: Oh, I love it.
Don: Yeah, I think it's very good.
Jon: Great.

Ron: I've actually liked the last few albums. I actually liked Erase the Slate a little more than the last one, but I'm seeing a lot of comparisons to this being like the older stuff, and I'd have to agree. I think it really is. We're doing this for Melodicrock.com which is for the most part a one man show with Andrew McNeice out of Australia, so he's the one that wrote up the review of the album.
Jon: Yeah, he's the gentleman I spoke to once. He's a real nice guy.

Ron: He is a heck of a guy. It's funny because he's in Australia so I've never met him, but I've transcribed so many of his interviews and sent him so many emails that I feel like I really know him.
Jon: You guys are going to do this interview and send it to him?

Ron: Yes. Well, I should mention this too, we're taping it.
Jon: Go ahead. That's fine.

Ron: And then we'll go ahead and transcribe it and then we'll send it to him and he'll upload it whenever he can. And, of course, this is with his blessing; in fact, he told me when I asked him if that would be okay, he said that he had a note to try and interview you, so when you say you talked with him, that makes sense.
Jon: I spoke to him a long time ago. We had a brief conversation, but he's a real nice guy.

Ron: Yeah, and he was happy to have us do it. Because he runs the site by himself, he is so swamped with work. We're very appreciative to him. He had a great quote in his review. He does this thing called The Bottom Line and it says, “It's certainly the band's most consistent and traditional sounding release from their recent history. This album will please the majority of the band's long time fans.” And I couldn't sum it up any better. I think that's exactly right.
Jon: Well, that's nice to hear. That's awesome.

Ron: I'll tell you something else that he said and I'm hearing this a lot too. You're going to love this quote if you haven't hear it, it's talking about you specifically. “His part in this album is not to be undervalued in any way – he rules this record.
Jon: Oh, wow. That's nice.

Ron: Yeah, and he goes on. He says that this is very comparable to the last album, and he says, “So if Don hasn't changed – why is this album so much better and why will fans be very happy with the result? The answer is Jon Levin.”
Jon: Oh, wow. That's very nice.

Ron: And again, I have to agree. Like I said, we've seen Dokken with all 5 guitar players and for the first time I didn't feel like here's the guy filling in for George Lynch, it's like, here is Dokken's new guitar player.
Jon: <laughs> Oh, that's awesome. Thanks!

Ron: Seriously.
Don: Some people may or may not know, but you played in Warlock for a while.
Jon: Yeah.

Don: I'm wondering, was George Lynch, perhaps one of your influences?
Jon: Yeah, definitely. He's older than me so I was just a kid but he was definitely one of my guitar influences, not my only one, but certainly one, you know.

Ron: Sure.
Jon: And Eddie Van Halen was a huge one. And Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix. All those guys. For myself, a lot of the guys who played in Dokken were great guitar players but for me the style didn't make sense. I sort of missed this type of style and I just happened to have his influence, being from the younger generation, and it seems to work. We get along really well, everyone in the band, which is really nice too.

Ron: Yeah. Well, you always hear so many stories about this and that and the wars between George and Don and yet, when I got to meet him at the show, he was extremely nice.
Jon: He always is. Don't listen to all the BS that people say, you know? You know what it is with bands, especially when you play together for long periods of time, not every two personalities match well together.

Ron: Right.
Jon: And just for some reason, I've never met George so I know anything about him, but for some reason his personality and Don's didn't go well together.

Ron: Yeah.
Jon: But ours, my personality and Don's, we go great together and we were friends long before I ever played in this band.

Ron: Really?
Jon: Yeah. <laughs>. So it's actually cool to be in it and have someone that's a friend in it too.

Ron: Sure.
Don: Well, you guys are all older now than they were back then so you live and learn.
Jon: Yeah, I don't know how everyone was back in the '80s, I'm sure there were probably some egos going around, but look, everyone's grown up now and we're all in this because we love to do it and that's why we're here, you know.

Don: Exactly.
Ron: Well, it shows because it looked like you guys were having an absolute blast on stage.
Jon: Yeah, we all get along really well, you know? There's no tension. We're all just enjoying ourselves and we're all really grateful and happy that we're able to do what we like to do, and that's play music for a living.

Ron: And I guess if you're going to be around Mick Brown for too long, you can't be too unhappy.
Jon: <laughs>

Ron: Because that guy, he is always up. He's like Mr. Life of the Party.
Jon: Yeah, he really is, you know. That's his role. He does it well.

Ron: Is he like that always?
Jon: That's how he always is, yeah.

Ron: That was my sense because, like I said, the two times I've had a chance to meet him and just the way he is onstage, you can just tell. It kind of reminds me when I saw Van Halen back in the day with David Lee Roth and it was a great show, but the next year when they came with Sammy Hagar for the 1st time, you could just tell that they were more relaxed and just having a blast. And it does make a difference, you know?
Jon: Yeah.

Ron: The fans can really tell.
Jon: Yeah, when everybody is getting along it's much better than when people hate each other. I mean, if it ever got to that point I'm sure nobody would do it anymore, at least I know I wouldn't. I'm an attorney; I don't need to be away from home and losing a lot of money from my law practice to do something that I hate.

Ron: Sure.
Jon: That doesn't make sense.

Don: And when the band is having fun it comes through the music and then the fans can pick up on that, I think.
Jon: Yeah, we're really enjoying it on this tour. I can't speak for anyone else; I'm fairly short because it's going really well.

Don: Now how long is this tour going to last? I know you've got dates scheduled through July.
Jon: Oh, man. We're scheduled through August 21, that's the last show of the 1st leg of the American tour and then from there I think we're going to do Europe for 4 or 5 weeks and then after that hopefully come back and get an arena tour with someone.

Ron: That would be great.
Jon: Yeah.

Don: If you come back around, especially if you incorporate some new songs, I'd like to check out the show again if it comes anywhere near.
Jon: Oh, yes. Please come again. Like I said, we're in the process of renovating the set. We've already got “Escape” now in it. Tonight we've got “Unchain the Night” in it and, like I said, one week from now there's going to be two more new songs off of the new album, probably “Prozac Nation”, and “Haunted” and it looks like we're going to try “Dream Warriors” too, so we're really trying to switch things around, make it fresh. We're rearranging things.

Ron: That's awesome.
Don: As a fan, I would even like to personally hear one or two of the ballads that you have. I think there's two or three on this album and then on Long Way Home there were like three of them and I think that's kind of a gamble because a lot of fans really want to hear the hard rock, up-tempo stuff.
Jon: Yeah, it's a little tough thing, I mean, we get by with “Alone Again” but I don't know how they'd react if we did more than one.

Don: Maybe if you did one right after the encore or something. Those songs are really good, they really showcase Don's voice when he sings in that mid range. You can really tell that he's a very good singer and I think those songs are pretty radio friendly. I think that if those were ever pushed by Clear Channel or somebody that you guys could legitimately be on the radio and hit it big with this album.
Jon: Well, thanks.

Don: A lot of people just don't know those songs.
Jon: Well, “Escape” is the first single off of the new album.

Don: I thought it might be because that's the new one you played.
Jon: Yeah, “Escape” is the new one and it went to radio two days ago.

Ron: Okay.
Jon: And the album comes out July 13, so hopefully we'll get some action on “Escape” as the single before the record comes out.

Ron: It's a very good song. I like “Escape” a lot. I noticed here that Andrew noted that that was one of his four favorites. He mentioned “Don't Bring Me Down”, which, like I said, is my absolute favorite, “Prozac Nation” and then “I Surrender”. So I think that's a good pick.
Jon: Yeah, that's a good one too.

Ron: See, even though my brother and I are identical twins, we're not entirely identical. I'm the guy that wants to go to the concert and hear all of the up-tempo stuff. So when he wants to hear the ballad, I want to hear “Don't Bring Me Down” <laughs>.
Don: Now I didn't say I didn't want to hear that.
Jon: That's funny.

Don: I think that's probably my favorite one on there as well. I would love to hear that one but yeah, I did like the show that we did see, but it was more like the Greatest Hits kind of thing, but all of the songs were certainly crowd pleasers, I would say.
Jon: Oh, good.

Ron: Well, here's the other thing, most people anymore that go to a show like Dokken really want to hear a lot of the older stuff. And you guys, gosh, I think you played five off of Tooth and Nail, at least three off of Under Lock and Key, so people that do want to hear the classic stuff, were not disappointed.
Jon: We're giving them a good mix. I mean, we have stuff from all the… basically, we've got a Greatest Hits show going now.

Ron: Yep.
Jon: However, we went ahead and substituted out some of the old ones now that we're going to refresh the set with what I was telling you and hopefully in one week from now approximately we're going to have three new ones off of the new album and have a whole new show going.

Don: That'll be great. And if you keep one of the old songs, I would definitely say keep “Paris is Burning”.
Ron: No doubt.
Jon: “Paris is Burning”? Unfortunately that's the one we might cut <laughs>.

Don: Well, again, not as many people know that because it's off of the first album but that's the one you guys played that I think you closed with.
Jon: Yeah.

Don: I was really surprised.
Ron: Well, the question is: If you drop that song, what are the 10 year old kids that get pulled onstage going to sing? Do you remember that?
Jon: Oh, no. What happened?

Ron: From the Cincinnati show when Don pulled up the kid onstage?
Jon: Oh, wait. That's right. I have a vague recollection.

Ron: Yeah, there was a kid right in front, and Don kept saying, “Man, how old are you?” And he was right up front and the kid said, “I'm 10”. So Don reaches over and pulls him up onstage and the kid starts singing, at least the chorus, to “Paris is Burning”. It was hilarious.
Jon: That's amazing.

Ron: And Mick was dying. After the show, he was talking about it because basically, Don just gave him the microphone…
Jon: I've got to tell you, I guess I'm so in my own world when I'm playing that I don't even have much of a recollection of it happening, but I believe you when you tell me it happened <laughs>.

Ron: Oh, it was great. And the funny part was, here's this kid who's 10, right, he's onstage and has no idea what he's supposed to do, so he starts saying, “Thank you, thank you all, thank you.”
Don: Like he was a temporary member of the band.
Ron: Mick was absolutely in tears laughing about that after the show.
Jon: That's great.

Ron: But it was great. See, that showed a side of Don that most people don't get a chance to see. He was so impressed that there was a kid that young that was into, not only Dokken, but stuff from the earliest album, that he pulled him onstage. That's classy stuff right there.
Jon: That's great. It's exciting for us to see a new young fan that's into what we're doing.

Ron: Absolutely.
Jon: Especially somebody that's that young.

Ron: No kidding.
Don: Obviously his parents were big fans.
Jon: Yeah.

Don: Speaking of the younger generation, I thought it was interesting, I know that Don talked about it in concert, and I think that I read about it on the website, where you guys did a show with some of the newer bands like Stained and Eve 6.
Jon: Oh, yeah. I remember that show. It was in North Carolina, I think.

Don: That must've been interesting.
Jon: Yeah, that was a good show. It was good that we went over really well that night. It was nice with all of the young crowd that's into all the new bands, they liked us too.

Don: That's good because I think a lot of times when it comes to bands that have been around for a while, it's not like they suddenly become bad, it's just a generation of people just don't know about them.
Jon: Yeah, things are very different today. Dokken has always been a band about musicianship and songs. And a lot of the bands today, I don't even know when the last time I heard a guitar solo in a new song in recent history.

Ron: Exactly.
Jon: So, things have changed a lot, especially in the past 10 years.

Don: Yeah, through the '90s with the whole grunge movement, the guitar solo kind of went away.
Jon: There were none. Now, we'll see. It seems like some of it is starting to come back.

Ron: It is. It's kind of a shame that more of the Clear Channels, the Infinity Broadcastings, the MTV's don't pick up on that because, you know, some of the stuff coming out, I don't know if you've heard The Scorpions new album, it's just great stuff.
Jon: Yeah, I heard it was supposed to be really good.

Ron: I was reading your bio on the Dokken web site and it was kind of funny that you mention how you went to LA and then when the grunge scene came, that's when you decided to become a lawyer!
Jon: Yeah.

Ron: I was not a fan of that; it's hard rock, yes, but it was missing some of the key elements that I like and anymore it's the same way.
Jon: I liked it, but it wasn't anything that I wanted to play. Hey, do you guys have a specific set of questions that you want to ask me?

Ron: We've got a few more, but mainly, we wanted to talk about the tour and get your reactions to it, which we've kind of done and get your comments on the new album because that is what people are really interested in right now, the new tour and the new album.
Jon: Okay, cool. I just wanted to make sure that I cover everything that you guys want to know.

Ron: We always tell people, we only want 15 or 20 minutes of your time, because we know you guys are busy.
Jon: Hey, I'm not that busy today, man. I'm in the middle of North Dakota. We're in a bus waiting to play 4 hours from now.

Ron: Oh, wow. Yeah, it looks like you're off tomorrow.
Jon: Yeah, we drive back to Minnesota from here and then we have a day off here.

Ron: Okay.
Don: If we could just ask a couple more things…
Jon: Yeah, sure. I've got time. Shoot.

Don: Do you have a favorite song off of the new album?
Jon: Ooh. I have to pick one?

Don: A couple. What are some of your favorites?
Jon: I can give you a couple of my favorites. I like “Don't Bring Me Down”, I like “Escape”, I like “Letter to Home”, I like “Haunted”, and “The Last Goodbye”.

Ron: “Letter From Home” was interesting. It does sort of have that sort of Beatleesque feel to it and just a little different than what you would normally expect from Dokken, which is a good thing. It shows the musicianship.
Jon: Yeah, we took some chances and that was one of the ones that paid off nicely.

Ron: I agree. Definitely.
Don: You took a chance on another song “The Last Goodbye”. I thought that was interesting. It had almost like an Eastern sounding influence.
Jon: Yeah, I like that one a lot. That's one of my favorite ones as well.

Don: Yeah, that one's very different, but different can be good. I did like that one as well, but the vocals and the guitar have that real Eastern sound to it, for lack of a better term.
Jon: Yeah, it's also got that sitar in the background.

Ron: Was that an actual sitar?
Jon: Yeah.

Don: I didn't know if it was a guitar made to sound like a sitar or if it actually was one.
Jon: Yeah, that was a sitar. Don actually played the sitar on that.

Ron: Really? That's cool.
Don: That's very cool. I didn't realize that.
Jon: Yeah.

Ron: See, it's funny, as you were going down the list and saying the ones you like, to me, it just reinforces how good this album is because I'm thinking, “Yep, that's a good one, that's a good one.” It is a solid album.
Jon: Oh, thanks. There's not really any that I don't like, you know? But those are the ones that stood out more.

Ron: Sure.
Don: That's understandable.
Ron: Now from what I understand, you were actually a fan of Dokken before you were in Dokken and that's why you were sort of shocked and surprised that you were asked to join. Is that true?
Jon: Yeah, I was always a big fan and I saw Dokken probably three or four times when I was younger, in the '80s.

Ron: In the day, as we like to say.
Jon: Yeah, I was like 21 years old or something. I always thought that Dokken were a big cut above all those other bands that were going on with the big hair and the nonsense, you know. Because they could play and they had good songs <laughs>.

Don: I loved a lot of those bands, and even some of the cheesier ones, but Dokken has always been one of my favorites from that era because I thought their songs were a little better and the musicianship was a little better. In some regards it was a shame that they didn't get as big as some of the other bands who I thought were lesser bands.
Jon: I agree.

Don: I don't know if it came down to image or luck.
Jon: It was on its way and I just think they sort of self destructed right when they were on the verge of exploding.

Ron: And they were huge, you've got to remember that by the time they did Back for the Attack and were doing the video for Dream Warriors they were at the top of their game.
Jon: Yeah.

Don: Yeah, that album and the two previous ones all went platinum, I believe.
Jon: We're hoping to bring it back, you know.

Ron: Well we're doing our part and that's why we wanted to interview you and get the word out because it's really a great album and people need to know about it.
Jon: Thanks very much. I mean, especially when two young guys like you like it, man, it means a lot.

Ron: I think we're about a year younger than you so…
Jon: Oh, yeah? You guys sound like you're real young.

Ron: Oh, great! I appreciate that because we just had our 37th birthday two weeks ago.
Jon: Well, Happy Birthday!

Ron: Thanks <laughs>. Anything to make me feel younger is outstanding <laughs>.
Jon: That's awesome.

Don: I've asked you about your own work, which is kind of unfair, but do you have some favorites from the Dokken catalog?
Jon: Songs?

Ron: Yeah, what would be some of your favorite songs or albums from when you were a Dokken fan before you joined the band?
Jon: My favorite three albums are Under Lock and Key, Back for the Attack and Tooth and Nail,

Ron: Yep. Absolutely.
Jon: And my favorite songs are… pretty much everything we've done in our set would encompass my favorites. There are a few that we didn't do; I like “Heaven Sent”, “Lost Behind The Wall”; I like “Prisoner”.

Don: I always liked “Bullets to Spare”.
Jon: Yeah, that's a cool one. That's about it, everything else we seem to be playing. I like “Unchain the Night” which we're going to be doing tonight for the first time so we'll see how that goes.

Ron: That's a great song.
Jon: Yeah, we're going to open with that one tonight.

Don: Oh, really? That'll be a crowd pleaser for sure.
Ron: I agree with you. It's nice to start off with something that people know that's full throttle and you don't let them go for the rest of the night.
Jon: Do you guys think that will be strong enough to lead off? We're still going to play “Kiss of Death”, but we're going to move it down a little.

Ron: I think it will be.
Don: I think that “Unchain the Night” is maybe… I personally like that song better than “Kiss of Death”, although I like “Kiss of Death”.
Jon: As fans, do you guys think that it will be as strong of an opener as “Kiss of Death” will be?

Ron: I think it will be. Do you, Don?
Don: I do, actually.
Ron: That was actually one of my favorite songs off of that album.
Jon: I like it a lot, but I'm just wondering if the tempo is fast enough to get it going or if it's too slow.

Ron: Hmm. “Kiss of Death” is definitely faster. “Tooth and Nail”, that might be something interesting to kick off with.
Jon: Yeah, we've tried that before. We did that once in the past.

Ron: How did that go?
Jon: It sort of works better a little later in the set. We're going to try this tonight and if we speak again I'll let you know how it goes. [Note: in a follow-up email, he noted that they decided to switch back to opening with “Kiss of Death”]

Ron: Yeah, I'd be curious because, like I said, it's one of my favorites, but you bring up a good point. It's not quite as fast as “Kiss of Death”, but it's a great song.
Jon: Yeah, it still rocks, so we'll see. It also matches with our intro tape too so…

Ron: Well, that's always important.
Jon: We'll give that a shot tonight and see what happens.

Ron: I do have another question and I'm not even sure if you would be able to answer it, but the one thing I've noticed with at least the last three albums, is there's a real spiritual aspect, at least with the album covers, and when we met Don after the show, he was talking a bit about it, saying that he felt blessed by God to be able to do this kind of stuff. He just comes across as being a real spiritual guy. Is that true?
Jon: Yeah, Don is definitely a spiritual guy. I am too actually.

Ron: That's great. Sometimes there's a misconception that people in rock and roll are all about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Of course, that's one of the things I liked about Dokken because, lyrically, they were much more than that. It's good to know, that spiritually…
Jon: From my own perspective, when I say spiritually, I'm not religious, but I am spiritual. For me, as far as the sex, drugs, and rock and roll thing: I don't do any drugs, I'm married, so I don't fool around at all <laughs>, so all that's left for me is the rock and roll.

Don: Well, that means you get to focus all of you attention on the rock and roll, which is good for a musician.
Ron: Well, the other thing is, the guys who were into the sex, drugs, and rock and roll, where are they now? You can't live that lifestyle for long.
Jon: No, you can't.

Ron: Aerosmith found that out.
Jon: For me, it is and it always has been about the music.

Ron: That's great. I agree 100%. I think some of these guys realize that they can actually play better when they're sober.
Jon: Yeah. That's right.

Ron: So you're a lawyer, you're married and you don't do drugs. Man, you're killing the whole rock and roll image. <laughs>
Jon: I still rock out as hard as I can.

Ron: Phenomenal. I can see some kind of lawyer convention where you get onstage and kind of freak everyone out. That would be kind of cool.
Jon: <laughs> That's pretty funny, huh?

Ron: That's what's great about heavy metal, it doesn't appeal to just one type of fan, you know, the drunken bozo. Although, there were a few of those standing around to meet you guys the other night, which was interesting because either you or Don kept saying, “You're not driving home are you?”
Jon: Oh, it was probably Don.

Ron: There was one guy who was just way out of control.
Jon: Was he?

Ron: He wasn't starting trouble or anything, at least he was a happy drunk but he won't remember meeting you guys, I'll put it that way! I just thought it was interesting that Don kept rehashing, “Hey, I don't want to be on the road with you even though I'm on a tour bus.”
Jon: We're all over that at this point, you know?

Ron: Yeah. I'm married as well and so is my brother. Do you have any kids?
Jon: No. I don't have any kids.

Ron: That's what you need to do right there. That'll shake things up a bit.
Jon: Oh, really? Yeah, probably. When we're ready. My wife's very young, and I'm on tour right now so it's not the right time for me, but maybe one day.

Ron: It's great. I've got three of them and they're a blast. I've got friends that tell me they're not ready and I tell them, “Well, you're never ready.” <laughs>
Jon: I guess not. It just comes when it comes, huh?

Ron: That's right.
Don: I just have another quick music question.
Jon: Sure.

Don: I know from reading how you got together with Dokken, that really it started off because you were friends with Jeff Pilson first.
Jon: Right.

Don: I'm just wondering, now that he's not in the band and they've got Barry [Sparks], are you still close with him or know what he's been doing?
Jon: I think he actually just had a baby.

Ron: Really?
Jon: Yeah. He did. He just had a baby. Yeah, Jeff's a friend of mine. I haven't spoken to him in a while just because I've been busy.

Don: I know that he just had that album with George Lynch.
Jon: How was that? I haven't heard it. Is it any good?

Don: Yeah, I thought it was pretty good. Actually, I think Jeff does all of the lead vocals on it.
Jon: Oh, I think I did hear one song, actually, from that.

Don: It was pretty good, I thought.
Ron: It was a little slower tempo than I kind of expected, but it was a good album. With George Lynch, you always want to hear something really burning and rocking.
Jon: Yep.

Ron: Of course, his interests and styles vary all over anyway so depending on what mood he's in that day determines what he'll put down.
Don: It's great that everyone can still be friends and just try to make good music together. That's what it's all about.
Jon: Well, that's what we're trying to do

Don: I think you've done it with the new album and a lot of it just comes to exposure.
Jon: Well we appreciate you guys taking the time to get us some. Hey, by the way. If you guys need any photos or anything, I'll give you my email address and you can ask me and I'll send some to you.

Ron: That would be great.
Jon: It's <email address>. I've got to run right now, but if you have something else that you wanted to ask, feel free to holler and give me a call back.

Ron: We appreciate it. Maybe the next time you come through town, especially if you're doing the arena thing, we'll try to hook back up with you. All I can say is it was a great concert, the album is awesome, and I can't wait for it to come out on July 13. I hope you guys have great success with it.
Jon: Thank you very much, guys. Man, I really appreciate it.

Ron: It was our absolute pleasure talking with you;
Jon: Awesome

Don: Congratulations on the new album. It was a pleasure as well.
Jon: Speak to you soon.

Ron: Take care. Thanks a lot.
Don: Thanks a lot.
Jon: You're welcome. Take care.

Ron: Bye
Don: Bye
Jon: Bye.
 

Steve Lukather, the legendary Toto guitarist and phenomenally popular session man lays it all on the line in this exclusive interview conducted a couple of months back. Steve and Toto have both had illustrious careers and Toto continues to tour heavily throughout Europe and beyond. Their work schedule is at time grueling and life on the road can take its toll. Steve talks candidly about the life of a rocker on the road and the ups and downs of the loss of a stable routine.
That's here in the now - Steve also delves into the past for some more brutally honest and at times, hilarious insights into his career and life with Toto. We talk about the singers, the record labels, the current musical climate and plenty more. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I did conducting it.
Special thanks to Don and Ron Higgins for their tireless work in transcribing the interview.


What's up!
Steve!
You there you old bag?

(laughs) How are you mate?
We finally, actually talk on the telephone. I hear the voice now.

Yeah, exactly. Yours too, how are you?
Good to talk to you mate. I'm fucking great. Top of the world actually.

Fantastic! I can't believe that we… I don't think we've ever done an interview have we?
No never.

How did we let that oversight happen? [Well, in fact, it turns out I did do a shorter Feature-Interview some time back. Check it out.]
You know what man, I guess the timing's right now.

Absolutely!
I've been looking forward to it!

Yeah, me too!
I don't usually look forward to interviews. I figure you're not going to ask me where'd I get the name Toto.

I'll skip over the basics.
Yeah, please. It's boring and everybody already knows the answer to it anyway. Let's get into the nitty gritty shit that you want to get into.

Yeah, absolutely.
No subject is taboo. Just bring it on.

Ok, ok, we'll do that. Tell me though, what are you doing right this moment?
I'm walking through my home, I have a glass of good Italian Chianti, waiting for my wife to bring home dinner so I can eat after we're done. My daughter's got her mother's dog staying here at the house. My son's in rehearsal with his band. My wife's out and I'm just chillin'.

Great! How old is your son now?
Sixteen.

Wow! What music is he playing?
I would say modern melodic rock. He just joined another heavy band so he's got a couple of things going.

Good on him.
He's going to play with me at the NAMM show Thursday night at the Guitar Player Magazine event Steve Vai is hosting.

Oh great!
I'm going to play a tune and he's going to get to play one of his tunes. Bissonette, Dave Garfield and Larry Carlton... You know that's going to be fun. And then get back into rehearsals and go back on the road again. Now that Simon and Dave are back again.

How's Simon doing?
He's doing much better. He's still recovering, a really tough year for him.

What happened to him? What exactly happened to him?
You know he has a pre-existing condition in his lower intestinal area. He got an infection in his body and other shit started to go wrong and the genetic thing his mom had he has to watch himself. He gets stressed, overworked, undersleep. Undersleep is not a word is but if he doesn't catch up with his rest he'll come down with something. And it kicked his ass. He had to stop working.

You're looking forward to NAMM. Is that a good thing to go to - is it still the #1 event?
Well you know we do it every year, it's the National Association of Musical Merchants. It's the guys they pick up from around the world and everybody shows off the new gear for 2004. And all the endorsees and different companies make their appearance. So I get paid, get royalties off like my guitar and I have a lot of other people that I support. And it's a big event, everybody shows up. People from around the world come and there are a lot of different shows, concerts at night. During the day you can't walk three feet without somebody wanting a picture or autograph or something. People come from around the world just to kind of stare at you. It's kind of unnerving really.

Yeah I'd love to go onetime….
Yeah it's going to be great. Steve Vai hosting, Satriani's on it, John Schofield, Vernon Reid. Pretty eclectic rockers. Everybody gets up and does their tunes and the house band is really killer. It's always a good hang.

Yeah, and everyone speculates whether Eddie's going to turn up or not.
Eddie was at my house last night he's not turning up at the NAMM show. The last time he did that it was a disaster.

Yeah, last year. It didn't go too well did it?
I didn't see him. I tried to go find him and he had left 'cause he got all freaked out. You've got to ask Eddie, Eddie questions. I'm privy to stuff I'm not supposed to talk about.

I understand.
All I know is, he's in great shape and I've heard the new music and it's incredible. What they're going to plug into that & who they're going to plug into that I'll let him answer.

I'm not going to ask you any stuff on the record.
That's cool. He's my bro. I'm just making a comment that it's not for me to be the one that lets it all out.

Absolutely mate, I agree.
But I know that, like I said, I've heard the music, it's incredible.

Can't wait to hear it.
You will, soon enough.

So when are we going to hear some new Toto stuff? What's the plan?
Well we worked really hard last year and we're going back out again. See the thing is, it's the world that we live in now. The world is not waiting for the next Toto record as far as a massive scale. We make our living on tour. You know the days of getting three million dollars to do a record are way behind. Nobody gets that anymore unless you're Bruce Springsteen. Even Bruce's sales are down. I mean overall compared to what he normally does …usual ten million. We live in a world where, face it, downloading and DVD copying, people don't have the money to spend. They don't have the disposable income. And now we are looking at concerts that cost fifty to one hundred bucks. In some cases, two hundred dollars a ticket. I mean people don't have that kind of money so they're very careful how they spend it. And you know the world economy is all fucked up.

Very much so.
So we're going to do a record assuming that we all get along. We had a little bit of a falling out in recent years and it looked rather dire for a minute there.

You did! Did you really?
Yeah but without getting into the gruesome details of it, you spend enough time on the road, people get sick and money's involved. We had a meeting last week and we aired all of our differences, so not do this anymore?
Get all of our shit out and talk about it. Start the year fresh or we could walk. We decided to hang in there. There were some miscommunications, and the right hand not talking to the left hand and bad feelings erupted out of lack of communication, as it often does. You know we needed to, as brothers, sit down in a room, in a neutral area and get it all out. We realized most of this shit both sides were pissed off about were misunderstandings on reality.

OK, that's good.
We all hugged and kissed and said we're going to go out, you know, I'm writing songs. I mean I got eight or nine pieces myself. I know Dave's got some stuff. We haven't really gotten into the crux of mean writing. And that requires time. We don't want to just throw out another fucking record, go out and tour again. Like we did last time. Shit, I'll never understand why everybody was so mad at us for doing that.

Which is this?
It wasn't greeted universally as a positive thing.

Is this the covers record?
Uh huh. Did that for fun.
Everybody's done a covers record. We didn't think we'd get more intense negative feedback. They said we couldn't write songs anymore, we sold out. I find it hard to read all this stuff. I don't really go onto the message boards and stuff; I don't have the time to do it. People send me snippets. Maybe I'll sneak in and have a look. See what people are saying. Sometimes I scratch my head and sometimes I say, well, I can see their point, I can did it. I can dig negative criticism.
But when it just gets mean spirited. It's not really…it's destructive more than anything.

There's a difference isn't there?
There is a total difference. You can make your point without being an asshole. Sometimes it gets like that. One over zealous fan can trash a message board. Somebody told me that they closed down our message board because some lunatic was on there. I don't know much about that, I check in to see what the news is, to see what's going on. I don't necessarily go through like a 900 page message board thing. I don't really…sometimes it pisses me off and makes me feel like shit. There's no point in me feeling like that. Everybody has a right to their opinion, good or bad but some people start slamming each other and it has nothing to do with the band. You know that's not good, that's not what it's all about. I'm sure you've had to deal with that on your website.

Sadly so, actually yeah….more than I'd like.
It only takes one asshole to keep lots of people out.
Some people love the attention. The internet is an anonymous thing. You can make up some silly name for yourself and go on there and just fuck with anybody just for the sake it. We're not supposed to universally love bands…..There's been a lot of misunderstanding about who and what we are, and what kind of people we are. We're just humans like everybody else and we have feelings. If somebody says, you're a fucking c***, you're an asshole, I hate your shit, you're the worst guitar player in the world, your band is gay, you should stop playing. You go, hey, that's one guy's opinion…you know what I'm saying…It's like, OK, fine, don't listen to the shit. There's plenty of music out there.

I was going to ask you, about Toto and the perception by…, not the fans but some of the wider public.
They hate us.

Why do you think… you guys as individual people are such accomplished musicians.
You know what it is… That's the problem. You never see any mainstream rock critics, never give anyone with a speck of proficiency any good reviews because they're all failed musicians. All of us remind them that they'll never be able to play like that, ever. That's why they like the White Stripes, the Strokes and all that.

The White Stripes (laughs).
And then they go for the lyrical angle, which is cool. Because some people are poets, they're not accomplished musicians for lack of a better term. And you know it's always been that way. But you know they can't hurt us, 27 years later, we're still going on the road doing arenas. We go where people like us. In the United States, and basically every English speaking country we do terrible. And the perception is that we're dead or we're not selling. But we had the 7th biggest grossing tour in the world last year, much to most people's chagrin. 600,000 tickets sold in 3 months. We were up there with the Stones, Springsteen, Simon & Garfunkle and people are scratching their heads going, “How the fuck did these guys sell that many tickets?” And so we were scratching our heads going, “Damn!” There's nothing wrong with being attached to something that's successful.

Absolutely.
So some people thought, well that's kind of gay, you guys, you didn't really go out and play your set or whatever. It wasn't our audience. It was an overall audience. So we got to play in front of a lot of people that dug our shit and now will go out and buy our records. We've seen a spike in catalogue sales.

Have you really?
Yeah! And then people come back and dig the shows. Like they'll come back… We came out and we kicked ass at those shows under the face of intense subversion. With Page going down, Simon going down. I was out there with half a band, but we hung in there, never missed a show. And we made some of the greatest friends I've ever made in my life.

Really?
I mean like the INXS guys are like my soul brothers. Man I love them. I've become an honorary Australian. They did some voodoo ceremony. I love those guys. Every single one of them. And we're the most unlikely… I remember Timmy Farris like doing an interview in the UK while we were out. They go, “Why would you play with Toto?” Really great guys, we have a lot in common. Three brothers in the band, they lost one of their key guys, we lost one of ours. And we come from the same era. They've been together since they were kids, we've been together since we were kids. We have so much in common it was scary.

Yeah.
We don't play the same kind of music but we appreciate each other. Hold on a second, my phone's dying here, hold on.

Yes.
Hello. Hello. Are you there?

Yes.
OK, good, sorry. Fucking phone died instantly, I don't know why. Anyway, where was I? Talking about the INXS guys, we had so much in common. And then there are people that you think you wouldn't have…Huey [Lewis] came out, he's an old friend from like 1980. And you know it was just a love-fest out there. John Miles, I mean there was great bands, we hung every night. Everybody had a big hang after the show. It became a family it has to be. One bad apple out there can spoil the groove for everybody. There were 400 people on that tour.

Wow!
I mean that was… an 80 piece orchestra and shit, it was intense. The production was over the top. I look at it as a very positive experience. Not to mention lucrative.

Yeah, you were saying…
You know we had a lot of time to sit around and shoot the shit. We were supposed to really write out there. But since Simon and Dave went down, what the fuck am I supposed to do? You can't write a record without the key guys. And our intention is to write a really…a great record. Now what that is, has yet to be determined.
Don't expect a record real soon, but we are working on it. I mean we're all writing with our old writing partners. Randy Goodrum is coming over tomorrow. He's in town.

Randy's cool.
We're going to try to write…we've already got a couple of things in the can that are really good. But you know, I think we might want to stretch out a little bit, be a little bit more musical, a little more experimental. Because top-40 radio ain't going to play our music anyway, we could write fucking Sgt. Peppers and they wouldn't play it. Just because it's Toto and we're middle-age guys.

Yep.
You know if you're over 30 you can't get on the radio. If you're over 40 forget it. Andrew I wish I could tell you the kind of record we're going to make. I mean, everybody has their own idea of what we should make. People expect Toto IV or whatever. How can you go back and recreate that? If I could do that, I would have done it. It's very difficult to just magically conjure up images. We've touched upon things, there's a style that we have when we really put our minds to it but I don't know what that's…I know we want to make the big production.

Good.
The big production. All the percussion instruments, the big vocals, really cool solo sections and stuff and really go to our strongest suit. I've gone back and started listening to little bits and pieces of some of our records to try... and my son has become obsessed with Toto.

Oh, Really!?
I mean he's playing…I'm getting into his car, he's driving along all the sudden he whips Hydra on or Isolation. I'm going, I haven't heard this shit in 20 years. He's like, “No Dad, me and all my pals are really into this shit.” Come on. To the point where he calls one of his bands Hydra.

Oh Really?
Oh yeah. I go, “Dude, you don't want to associate yourself so close. “ He goes, “Dad, do you think anybody my age knows what the Hydra album is?” I had to go, “Well I guess your right there.” So but you know, I mean it's just a matter of…the record business doesn't want to promote music like that. They want disposable shit they can hail and discard and then get onto the next.
Now we're looking at the conglomerate, there's only going to be 2 record companies and they're going to fold because all the retail chains are going down. Tower Records went under for God's sake! That was like part of my life, you can't go into any place and find any old records, they don't stock them anymore. They don't stock like CD versions of my favorite '70s records. You have to go to Amazon.com or itunes is stating to get hip to a lot of it. They have a lot of our stuff on there. But we're going through a transitional period in the business where the whole scene is going to change. We're just in the middle of it. Back in the '20s when radio came out all the sheet music publishers freaked out. Well there goes our business, nobody is going to buy sheet music, they can hear it on the radio and learn it.

Yeah.
And then when cassettes came out, it was the same thing. You can record any song on a cassette you want to, they said people won't by records anymore, but they did. It's on a new media. We're in a transitional period and people are going to have to be patient. And we're very lucky to be free agents right now rather than hooked up with some major label. Although Sony has been courting us to come back and do a record, they made a pretty decent offer.

Is that right! Now why would…?
It's ironic that there's only 2 labels left, EMI and Sony. That's it. EMI wasn't good to us so what the fuck. Where you gonna go, it's a one off deal.

Two questions. I want to ask you about EMI but why would Sony come back to you guys?
Our back catalogue is ripping. I mean they put these 'Greatest Hits Part 9' records out we have nothing to do with. Dodgy album covers and whatever selection of songs they want to put on it. They own the masters so the can reconfigure them any way they want. They still have to pay us but we have no say in it. What they're finding is that, like, you know, they're released, they still…it goes gold here, it goes platinum here and we're just on the road. We're not even on the label anymore. And the thing about these 1 hit artists is that there's no back catalogue. Their back catalogue is 50 to 60% of their income. So us old farts as the like to refer to us are making them a lot of money.

xx

Yeah, OK. So they've got all these new artists but basically they come and go overnight.
They come and…one song. Rap artists. One hit. One record. I mean there's a few standouts, I mean Eminem. I dig Eminem, I thought that shit's cool. You know, I have teenage kids, how can I not…, I'm more aware than most people that are 46 years old about what's happening now musically because I got teenagers and I listen to their music, they listen to mine. For that it's a positive thing. I can't sit there and go like, “Well that sucks, that sucks.” Because I'm not supposed to like that music. I'm the bad… I'm the anti-Christ, I'm the old guy. Their music is supposed to piss me off just like rock and roll pissed off my parents. It wouldn't be…so that's why I've let go of all that “fuck everybody else.” I had so much anger and so much bitterness in me at one point.
I was anesthetizing myself, I wouldn't feel anything. Started to suffer in a lot of different areas. Had a little health scare that fucking woke my ass back up.

Yeah, tell us about that.
A little bit, well you stay on the road long enough, 9 months a year for 27 years.

Can't be good for you.
It's not that. Trying to live a life like you're still 22 years old and you're 46, 45 years old and you get depressed and shit. It's very lonely. You go from 10,000 people screaming for you to an empty hotel room and you're away from home and things happen. My doctor started putting me on anti-depressants, you get Zanex, you get tweaked. I was drinking hard liquor, way too much of it and I started to suffer.
My playing. I didn't even realize it, but you never fucking know. You think everything's cool until you have to take a hard look at yourself. I had problems with my playing on the Live from Amsterdam record. I saw it for the first time at a friend's house over New Year's. Hadn't seen it in 6 months. I refused to watch it because it was painful for me to watch because I could see that I wasn't 100% there, knowing myself.

It wasn't as horrible as I beat myself up for when I first saw it but it's certainly not my best work. They caught us on a bad night, it was the end of a long tour; they made us rehearse all day long. I was burnt and I was really sick. I had like a flu. It wasn't the flu but I was just sick, puffy and weird looking. I wasn't there.
You can look at yourself and go, I'm not there. I'm not in that moment. Where there were like 100 other shows that were great. When you only record one show, you're stuck with it. You can't fix it live. You can fix a note, you can't fix it live. It wasn't a strong night for any of us, but least of all me. But, you know, sometimes you got to live with that shit. It was a wake up call.
Then I got really sick. I got hepatitis A from eating bad food somewhere in Europe. I was in Tahiti and it became full blown. My eyes were orange, my piss was orange, I was sick, I lost like 24 pounds. And I still had to work. And I became really depressed because I had to stop everything. I just cleaned my whole self out, I was fucked up. I started to lose sight of why I do this. The love for it, the fire. I came back to finding out that I really do love it and I really do care about it. I'm the luckiest mother fucker in the world and I cannot blow this like most people do.
I was just gonna…I just felt like my foot was nailed to the floor and I was running around in circles. It's real easy to lose sight. People don't understand this life. They think it's all limousines, the beautiful people life and everybody wipes their ass with hundred dollar bills. That's not the case. It's hard work. And it really stresses you out. The loneliness. You go from the highest highs to the lowest lows. You can't just go back to your room after a show, read a book, go to bed. There has to be a wind down. And with the traveling on the bus all night long, interrupted sleep.
You wake up at four in the morning, you get off the bus, you go to the hotel, the hotel rooms aren't ready, you can't get any food because the restaurant's not open. Or you miss breakfast completely and then they don't have food until like dinner. You just kind of lose yourself. Some people are better at it that others.
I was always, Mr. Party after the gig, woo-hoo, let's hang. How may shots I can do before I pass out. I'm just too old for it now. You're 20 years old, you can go out and party. When you're fucking 45 years old, that's it.
So I had to catch myself in the ugliness of what could be. Find my heart and soul and my passion for it all over again. And after a couple of months of complete cleanliness, getting together, getting healthy, man, I kept my weight off, practicing guitar again and finding my writing thing again. I'm excited about it. I'm appreciating all the people around me that matter, my family, the kids, wife, my friends.
People I know are dropping, man they're getting sick and dying. It's a myth that you can keep going and keep going. I mean nobody has the constitution of my man Keith [Richards], you know what I mean?

Yeah.
That's a tough one to chase after. I love to hang, you know, and I still have a couple of beers now and then. I'm not like a fucking saint. I didn't have to go to rehab or nothing like that. I just didn't realize that I was a mess. I kept anesthetizing myself and I'd feel fine, or so I thought. I'm human man.
It's a rock and roll cliché but there's a reason why people keep going down the same path. If you're lucky enough to catch yourself then you can hang in and fix it without having to go through all the big announcements. “Oh, I'm never going to have a drink again.” Just don't need to be doing tequila shots, taking pills and all this other shit.
I found myself thinking that if my doctor was giving it to me, it must be cool. But that's a big myth. I wasn't a big pill freak, I wasn't taking handfuls of the shit. I was never clean, I always had something coursing through my veins.

Yep.
So at my age you have to get a grip on that, before it completely destroys you. My attitude was fucked up. I wasn't an asshole but just like, didn't have time for anybody. Wanted to be by myself.

I can understand that though…
Well, you know. I apologize to anyone if they saw me at a bad time. Like I said, it's not that uncommon for cats like me that have been on the road for as long as I had, 27 years on the road, man.
I stopped a lot of real bad shit but then I thought, well this isn't bad, my doctor gave it to me. I can still drink a lot. I'm cool. Realizing that if you take a pill in the morning makes the hang over go away so you think you're OK. So it's a big lie. But basically I'm healthy, I feel good, I got the gleam back in my eyes, I'm motivated and I want to do personal best from here out. In the studio I wasn't too bad but on the road.
At home I wasn't like that, but it was just on the road. I'd come home and be a completely different person. Because I was up early…But you get on the road, you wake up at four, you take a shower, you eat, you go to the gig and it's on again. Every day. Every day, for like a year at a time.

That's got to be hard.
You wake up in a hotel room you don't even know what city you're in, you don't even know in some cases, what country am I in? Really, you can't get a hold of anybody because of the time differences. While you're still crawling to the mini bar, it's a dangerous thing.

So this tour coming up, you're doing things a little bit differently, or…
Well dude, we're going to places we haven't been. So basically we're pulling stuff, we're adding stuff but we don't have a lot of time to rehearse because we're implementing these new technical people. So that makes it a little more difficult and plus people are dealing with some other issues that they're dealing with, not me. And we're going to do some gigs, we're going to some really out of the way places.

Cool.
In the meantime we're, everybody's writing and pulling it together and I figure we're just going to be… what we want to do is like, Ok, book us a couple of weeks worth of gigs here and there so we make the pay and then we said we'd write for a couple of weeks and then we go and record for a month and then we would take a look at what we got. We are going to really scrutinize the material. We're going to write like 50 tunes and go, “Is this really the best shit we got?” And you know, stylistically we're going to pay tribute to our past but with keeping it in the present. I'd like to see us do longer, more adventurous pieces of music than just the 4-minute extravaganza.

Yeah, OK.
I mean, there will be some of that, of course. A good tune is a good tune. It'll get cut. But we're really going to scrutinize ourselves, each other. And play stuff for people and say, “What do you think?” You know. We're never going to please everybody. No matter what the fuck we do we're never going to please them. And so we have to please, we have to look at ourselves and go, “I think this is really a great record.”
You know the whole thing about, like, OK we got four months to do a great record and then we have tours booked. This is as long as we got to do it, this is the budget we have, well now everybody's got home studios and stuff like that, and we're not signed to a label per se. There's no pressure for us to do that. We can't go back and just keep going back to the same places without a new record. We're not going to do that.
We're going to take this tour to places we've never been before. Who haven't seen it yet. And in the meantime get our chops back up with like who's really in the fucking band and who's not. We're going to have those issues too. It becomes very difficult for me because I'm the only guy that's never missed a gig and been there from day 1.
See, and I got to front the band. And I'm fine with that but I need to be frosty in my head, my heart and my soul and body to do that job the best I can. And to play my ass off.
I always try to play the best I could but inspiration's inspiration. I can play good but it doesn't necessarily mean it's inspired.
I have harsh critics, people who think, ah man the catalogues faded, Luke doesn't have the shit anymore. My answer to them is fuck you man, why don't you fucking do what I do, for this long and be under the hammer, and under the gun and under the criticism.
A lot of cats are armchair guys. They sit in the room, they make records and they're very critical of everybody else. In some cases, I'm sure many people go, “I can play better than that guy. Why don't I have that gig?” But they don't understand the politics of it all. And the actual physicality of it all. And just the wear and tear, the stress.
My skin's real thick. They told me I suck from the first record to now. Other musicians that I respect, my peer group, people that are really my friends, some are the best musicians in the world, the give us a lot of props. They give us a lot of support and they come to town when they can, they come to the shows. I play records for them, “What do you think of this, what do you think of that?” They'll tell me.

You've only got to look at the list of albums you've played on over the years to look at how many people want you involved.
Well, you know, that's the thing of our band. It's so funny, they say that we suck but if you look at the discography, how come those great artists wanted us to play on their records? Because we suck? I don't think so.
I mean, we became the poster boys for 'this is a band you're supposed to hate.' If there was a critic's school, the first thing you'd learn on day 1 is, 'this is a band you have to hate.' Years and years and years ago during the Toto IV tour we had a guy come out, he was writing for Rolling Stone… Timothy Schmidt was out with us singing background after he left the Eagles. He came to check out what Timothy was doing and I ended up getting high with him…and I got it out of him… “Like what is it about you guys. I'm a nice guy, we're hanging out in my room, fucking getting drunk and doing whatever”.
The guy's now the president of a major label. Now I'm not going to say who it is because it'll get me in trouble. But he's the president of a major label, he started out as a little puke writing for Rolling Stone, he started telling me, “Look to be honest with you, I think some of your stuff's cool but we're not allowed to write good stuff about you. You're the band to hate.” Because we're really good musicians they thought that we were put together by some corporate people.
They didn't realize that we were a high school band, we just happened to be really good players that could actually, …that were schooled enough to read and be able to do stuff. To be able to create on the spot and play really well in an era when that actually mattered. And we had hit records that they were mystified by. They thought that we had no soul because our records were slick and polished. Well we actually sat there and played that. There was no computers to fix shit back then.
You had to get a performer. So if it was played well and it was in tune, we layered the vocals. We sounded so good they hated us. That was when the punk thing was just happening: The Clash, The Sex Pistols. We were at the end of the '70s. We were holding on to what we dug. People we wanted to sound like was like Steely Dan except with a harder edge. From that point 'till now…
Then we won the Grammy. That was great but we told Rolling Stone magazine to fuck off. They wanted to put us on the cover.
They had been trashing us for so long we said OK this is our chance to get even. Fuck you Juan Leonard, he's just going to trash us anyway. And the guy tweaked into the sun. No one had ever turned down the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Which by hindsight I wish we hadn't done. But at the same time, we made our statement and then we won the Grammy and they didn't even write about it.

Really?
Oh yeah. We're banned from that magazine forever. Now they put Britny Spears and the American Idols on the cover. I mean they used to be this big convert, underground magazine. Now it's like fucking teen magazine.

I haven't bought a copy in years.
They have no clout, nothing. It don't mean anything anymore.

Now I know this will get you fired up, but their top 100 guitarists of al time list was an absolute embarrassment wasn't it?
Well, you know, that was a joke. I think they just did that to piss everybody off. Because look at the people…Eddie Van Halen was #70.

I know…Hello!!
Jack White is #12. I've got nothing against the White Stripes, they are…he's got some talent. The drummer's bad, just bad. It's hard for me to criticize guys like that. They're making their statement, they're doing what they're doing now. I have no idea if the guy's a nice guy, he's an asshole, that he can actually, really play.
He plays some interesting stuff. But they need a bass player desperately. That's not for me to criticize. I'm only going to talk about myself because that I know. That's just…we made some errors along the way. But we were very misunderstood and we'll never be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you know what I mean? It's run by all those people. You'd be really surprised who actually makes the choice. You have to pay to get into that thing. It's like having a star on Hollywood Boulevard: 50 grand.

Really?
So it's not really based on merit. That's why you see so many people being overlooked, that really should be there.

Van Halen this year didn't get a …
No because they refused to play it again. They're not going to play with Roth again. I can't speak for them but I'm saying they want it all tied up into a nice, neat little package. They'll eventually get in. They deserve to get in.

Of course they do.
But, you know, it'll be when they have another hit record. And there is a Van Halen band attack. That's probably another reason, there's not another Van Halen band attack right now. Let's face it, the name of the band is Van Halen. That means Eddie and Alex. The singers have come and gone, hopefully they'll pull it back together again. It's not fair, there's a lot of bands…once…I know they're thinking, once they let a Journey or a band like that in, who deserves to be in it, they'll have to let all the rest of us in. You know what I mean?

Yeah.
Come on, we won album of the year, I've got 5 Grammys on my shelf, 2 are outside of the band, one was two years ago so I'm still relevant in the 2000's. But guys like us, if I live to be 80 they might say, well he's a good guitar player and give me some little dodgy, posthumous award after I kack!

Great! (laughing)
But I don't need that to pat me on the back because it's not based on any reality, it's based on a popularity contest by the same assholes that write and say shit about us and hail the other stuff.
Let's face it, the famous David Lee Roth quote about Elvis Costello, it's like the critics love him because they all look like him. He said that in the '70s, which I thought was one of the most brilliant statements I've ever heard. It's like if one of those mother fuckers come up and pick up my guitar and play better than me, then I'll take their criticism with some sort of value.
But they're not musicians, that's what's wrong with the music business, it's not run by musicians. Its run by fucking lawyers and promotion people that wouldn't know…It's like the famous quote from Amadeus. A music critic goes, “There's too many notes in this.” And Mozart goes, “Which notes don't you like?” You know? They don't have any credibility. They can have their, Kurt Loder's of the world. The guy writes about what other people do. He calls himself a rock writer. Anybody can write the Tina Turner story if you sit down with Tina and clock it all and write it down. I guarantee I could write a better book than he could make a record. But there's no point in throwing shit at anybody because it bounces off and ends up sticking to me.
I'm the asshole for calling everybody out on it. I don't think I'm the best guitar player, matter of fact, I'm very self deprecating. I don't think I'm that good at all, I think that my best shit is yet to come. That's what keeps you motivated. As a musician you never wake up one day and go, OK now I know everything, I don't have to do it anymore. Les Paul is eighty something years old, he's still out there kicking it. I hope I get to be like him.

Absolutely! Why not?
Nobody's the best at anything. They're just insane. Ask a blind person who the best looking chick in the room is, he'll tell you the one that feels the best. You know what I mean? It's not based on face value.

That's a good quote.
It's the truth. They listen on another level. They feel on a different level. People just want everything black or white. There is a gray area. And most people base their opinions on what other people think, not what they think. If so and so says this is cool, what kid doesn't want to wear the coolest clothing, be into the coolest music? They learn to like what everybody else likes.

Exactly.
When we were kids we were listening to everything man. How many radio stations… there's top-40 radio… there is no alternative, real alternative music. When I was a kid, FM radio was like they played Aretha, they played Miles, they played Hendrix, they played like, a Led Zeppelin album came out, they'd play the longest cut on the record. You'd sit around, you'd really get some schooling about what's happening out there. Now it's just, maybe there's some underground radio stations here and there but it's not mainstream. Because it doesn't sell units.
I mean, music is an art form, now it's just business. You don't have to be good. We can fix it. I own a recording studio, some of the biggest artists in the last 10 years have been in there. All these new young people…They just go in there and play it the best they can, they go home, and it magically sounds incredible the next day. Cat stays up all night and makes it all right. And they have an attitude about it. “Well man that's old school shit”. I still believe in sitting in a room and playing until you get the shit right. That's the way I am, that's the way we all are.

A lot of what you said is mirrored by the guys in Journey – they feel the same way.
We all came up together. I have nothing but extreme respect. Neal Schon is a brilliant guitar player. Great writer. And a really cool guy. We've been friends, we don't hang out all the time but I'm always glad to see Neal, man we've always got big hugs for each other. He's always been very cool to me, said nice things about me and, you know, I admire him as a musician. He doesn't get enough love. You know what I mean?

They're in the same position aren't they? As are a lot of other bands.
Somewhat, yeah. They kill it in the United States but they don't mean anything anywhere else. We don't sell shit in the United States but we cook and mean something in Asia and Europe. So I mean, you can't always have it all. I'm really happy to be working though. I'm a working musician, I working, I'm hooked up man, I'm happy. People out there dig it or they don't. I mean your site, look at your site. It's an alternative site for people that like the kind of music that we all like.

Yeah.
I mean, I have a jazz/fusion side of me that put some people out but like, you know, I love that part. And then I come back to the other side with Toto and I'm fresh, I got new ideas and I got that shit out of my system. I'll always be that way. I enjoy it. It makes me feel good. It's not going to sell a million units but I don't give a shit. It's still music from my soul. Can't, like once again, can't please everybody. Some people think that's the only shit I should be doing. Ask one person, ask anybody, you're going to get a different opinion. So I just have to follow my heart, you know why? Because it's cool. Is it the best thing I've ever done? I don't think I've ever tried anything I've done, is the best thing I've ever done.

Ok.
It's all hind-site. If something's really successful people think it's great. It doesn't mean it's great it means the perception is, it must be great if millions of people are buying it. Millions of people buy shit too, doesn't mean it's great. And that shit is subjective.

What happened with the deal with EMI?
I was a one off deal.

Ok
We were looking to license the record. We wanted to do something for our 25th anniversary and we didn't have... You know I was out on the road with Larry Carlton for a year. Paich was producing Bob's record. Simon was doing fusion records with Derek Sherinian, doing his jazz stuff. Mike was doing sessions.
Bobby was out doing whatever Bobby does. Classic rock stuff. Makes appearances with other people and stuff like that. Which is Ok to me as long as he doesn't use the name Toto. We kind of got that shit straightened out.
And then there's other assholes out there. Fergie, he's out there fucking booking like he's the lead singer of Toto. Singing 'Rosanna', 'Africa', 'Hold the Line'. Like he actually had something to do with that. In the United States he's burning opportunities for us because they go, 'Well we already have Toto'. What do you mean? You didn't have Toto. 'No we had Toto, the guy, the singer was here.' It was Fergie. He's not just out there singing the songs off of Isolation. He was passing himself off as something he is not. And that fucking pisses me off.

That must be frustrating.
And when Bobby was doing it before, when he was out of the band, we had like a restraining order against the guy and shit.

I never knew that.
Joe never did that. Joseph was way cool. I'm really happy for his success. I haven't heard his new record yet but I heard it's pretty good.

Yeah, it is actually.
And you know, I have nothing but respect for Joe. He really got his life together again, he's happy, he's doing [film] scores. It's what he wants to do, he wants to be around the kids, he doesn't want to go on the road anymore. Steve Porcaro doesn't want to go on the road anymore but he's doing scores, TV scores, I had lunch with him today.

Oh did you?
Played me some great shit. He's got an album's worth of material I told him, play the shit for people man. He's got different singers on it and stuff but it's still Steve Porcaro. It's really melodic, almost Gabriel-esque with his flare to it you know. Should put this fucking shit out, people would eat it up bro.

He's a great singer.
He didn't get any of us to come in and do a solo or just doll it up a little bit, it's there. Like I said, I'm not enemies with everybody's that's not in our band anymore but I only get pissed off at guys that used us in a wrong way. I was always cool with Fergie until he started going out and being Mr. Toto. Pissed me right the fuck off. Anybody can go out and sing our songs but don't pass yourself off as Mr. Toto. Because people don't really know what we look like and they believe, you know, face value. Like he did this big TV show in America, Regis morning show, like millions of people, and they introduced him as Toto.

Really!?
And then he comes out and sings 'Hold the Line'. Badly.

Oh, no.
Yeah, so you know, there's a reason. I not just like some kind of guy that flies off the handle hating people. It's not in my nature, I'm really a nice guy. Ask anybody that really knows me. There's people that don't really know me, that maybe met me and asked me a stupid question and I flew off the handle. You know, I'm sorry about that. I apologize to anybody that I was a drag to. Like, you know, I take this shit seriously. They've been my bros for 30 years. We put a lot of time and effort into this.

Absolutely.
We still keep this shit close to home. When I go on my solo tours I don't do Toto songs. And I have every right to if I wanted to. But why would I go sing 'Hold The Line'? I didn't sing it. I played on it. I could legally and in my heart go out and sing any song that I wrote and sang. But I don't do that because that takes away from what the Toto thing is when we go on the road. Why pay for the arena when you can fucking see it in the club?
My solo tours are you know, 1000 seats a night. And now he's passing himself off, that's not right. I wish him well with his solo project, I wish him well with his stuff, you know. I don't hate him as a person. I think he's jive for pulling that one off. And you know he has no right to do that.

No, I agree. That's fair enough.
That one album he did with you is still one of my favourites though!
It was the most painful thing we've ever done in the world.

Really?
I mean we were mixing the tracks while he was still trying to gag out a vocal. It was painful, punching one word in at a time. I wish we had Pro Tools back then bro.
You know, and like he was good for like two nights in a row and then he'd get sick, he's get sores all over his face, he was so nervous and he'd get all freaked out and shit. Just doing the back flips and shit. You know, once we lost Bobby, we lost the integrity of the band and we were trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. That's why we kept going through them and going through them.
Joseph was great until he got fucked up and he'll be the first one to tell you that. Love Joe, funny guy. The first tour, the Fahrenheit tour he was brilliant. Sang great every night. And then, you know, you can't be a lead singer and get high. Like freezing your vocal chords and eventually, you know, you fuck yourself up. I mean, I'm not trying to go back and dig up some old shit that he's already gone way past, 15 years ago. He's not like that at all anymore. It was a rough spot in the road and in that era everybody was doing it. I was doing it too. Not make it seem like I'm some innocent guy in all of this. We were all fucking getting high. It was the thing to do in the '80s. But you can't be the lead singer of a band, staying up all night doing that shit, destroying …It would be like me taking a sand blaster to my fingers every night and then trying to play. You can't do it.

You've gone through a few vocalists but I still don't understand what happened with that other…the dude you did 2 tracks with on the greatest hits album.
Oh that was the record company's idea. We were out a singer. We actually…check this out. This is a real story. When Joseph left, we went, what the fuck are we going to do? So we started writing some tunes. Dave came up with, Dave and Joseph actually wrote 'Going Home'. So we said, we could pop you back in. See what happens. Singing somewhere on the road. So we get him to come in and he sang but it was a struggle. It was a struggle to get going. And we got what we could out which is on the Toto XX record, that's the version you hear. And we turned it into the record company and they said 'Nah, that's shit. We need to…we got a guy for you'.
And so I'm like, Oh I can't wait. And this is what they came up with for us. Jeff Porcaro was a very strong force. Jeff really had more to do with choosing our alternative lead singers than Dave and I or Mike did, you know what I mean? Jeff was like… When Bobby left, I wanted Eric Martin.

Is that right?
Me and Paich wanted to get Eric Martin to be our singer. I thought he'd be perfect. I loved his voice. Jeff didn't dig his vibe for some reason. I think he got drunk and he was a little silly and Jeff was like, this super cool guy, didn't dig the silliness of it all.
It's not Eric's fault, the guy got a fucking buzz on, was not his fault. And there was one thing. We tried to get him to sing their song, 'Could you be love'…not you be love, 'Could this be Love?' that was on the Fahrenheit record. And that was like his audition song and there was a very specific way that Dave wanted to sing it, since he wrote the song.
And he just didn't hear it that way. So he kept trying to change it, he wouldn't sing what Dave was singing. Jeff was there and was like, nah, he isn't the right guy.
He kept pretty much backing to Fergie. So we said OK, Jeff, he was always our spiritual guru and our big brother. To all of us. So we went with that. As it turned out, he was very difficult but we made a pretty good record.
But all of our shit was done, we were trying to implement him into this, and it was very nerve-racking for him. The myth about Bobby singing the whole record and then replacing every song with Fergie, is just that, a myth. Bobby sang on about 3 or 4 things and it was really hard because he wasn't in good health, and then he wouldn't show up, he was in a bad way. Like I said, he's nothing like that anymore either or he wouldn't be in the band.
People have these crazy ideas, it's like hearsay, myths about our band. I'd love to clear some of that shit up too man you can ask me any of that. But anyway, long story short…the Byron bummer.

The record company brings this guy in. The same scenario. Actually, let me go chronologically.
After Fergie, we went on tour and the cat, we got through the tour, we were writing the next record and he started to come in and try to sing the record that would become Fahrenheit, he just couldn't sing in the studio. He just could not sing in tune to save his life. Freaking himself out because he knew he wasn't cutting it, so he'd psyche himself out that much more.
And we finally said, look, this isn't working, we can't do this anymore, we got to have somebody that's at least half way as good as we are at playing our own instruments.
My vocals didn't take that long, even Dave's vocals didn't take long. Dave was singing more than he wanted to. Now he doesn't sing, he doesn't want to. It's too much work. But so, he left and once again Eric Martin came back up again. We didn't call him but me and Dave were going, remember this cat, Eric Martin?
I think it was right before Mr. Big happened. We didn't call him, but me and Dave were going, Eric Martin, he's the right guy. Because he can sing his ass off, he didn't understand some of our phrases but that's not to say that the one time he's going to be like that every time. So me and Dave kept trying to sell Jeff on him again. He said we've got to do this guy Joseph Williams. And I had worked with Joseph. I grew up with him and his brother. Used to play in bands together with Landau and all these guys when we were kids. So I knew the William's brothers. I thought they were incredibly talented. Mark's really talented too, his brother. And obviously they come from good stock, John Williams is the father. Joe came in and Jeff goes, this is the guy.
So we said OK great. He brought in some cool tunes, he was a funny guy. He came in, skinny, looked the part, way into it. Sang his dick off on the record. Painless, it was fun. Go on tour, killer fucking tour. Just ripped it a new ass-hole, he was great every night.

Awesome!
And then, you know, we came back and that was really successful. The album did really well. We had a hit. And we started on The Seventh One record.
Writing was going great. Did the record. The record turned out really good. I really like that record, I'm proud of it. Did really well with it. And then we went on tour, and drug problems crept in.
The first gig we were doing was in Rotterdam for live radio broadcast in front of God knows how many millions of people all across Germany. We were going Joe, don't do that shit until after the gig's over. Sure enough, he did. Came out and sang first song, second song was 'Stop Loving Me'. He started singing it and pipes went. Couldn't even make it utter a sound. It was like…I'm looking at Jeff and I'm going, 'I can't sing that high, think of something. This is going out live.' The beginning of a fucking six month tour and the cat lost his voice. And it never really came back.

Yeah, Ok.
And then he was ostracized. It was a drag. It was a bad vibe.
I felt bad…looking back I feel bad for him now. I love the cat, he's not anything like that, you know he made some poor choices. And he got himself into some trouble with the law and stuff.
So we had to cut him loose. And then we come to the point where like, now what the fuck are we going to do?
So then we tried Bobby in the record. We didn't dig that. That wasn't really feeling right at that time anyway. Because he wasn't really all the way there. He hadn't reached his full bottom yet. As far as like, you know, you hear about somebody who just finally gets it together because he can't get any worse.
And so they go, look we got a guy. Use this guy, we'll stick a ton of money into you, we'll promise you the world. He's a little off the beaten path, maybe you guys need a change of image, blah, blah, blah. Music is changing, you guys aren't being accepted as a hard rock band because radio won't play it anymore because Sony kept putting out nothing but ballads for the radio. We were perceived as some Air Supply kind of band. Which is really a fucking drag. Nothing against those guys. You know, they're soft rock and people that saw us live knew that we were a lot more than that.

Absolutely!
Their albums do real well. Radio just would not accept them. Maybe you should get into this dance, whatever the shit that was happening in 1989 to '90.
Well they get this guy and there was like this ridiculous image, over the top. Completely off beat what I would ever think would be right. Jeff was like, maybe we need to do this. We got nothing to lose. They're making us all these promises. We're doing a greatest hits record, we only have to do a couple of songs.
So we wrote a couple of songs.
Dave had a few, I wrote a couple and we got in the studio. We were having a great time, and then you start to find out about what people are really like. The guy never listened to Hendrix or Zeppelin or anything - pretty much the George Michael story. Wearing a little glove, let me get to that later…
Singing in the studio was really hard. I never heard anybody with louder headphones in my life. He had a real pitch problem too.
We worked with James Guthrie who worked with Pink Floyd, and we got these great tracks for what that kind of music was and stuff. Killed the tracks and did what we were supposed to do. We tried to implement this guy into our scene. We'd never seen him perform live. We go to rehearsals and we're going on this tour, the 'Greatest Hits' tour. And he wasn't belting out Bobby's stuff, very few people can. So the guy, he's sitting on his stool in rehearsals, getting through it, it was OK. Singing better in the rehearsal room, as far as pitch and all that stuff. We'd never seen him perform.
So we do all this rehearsal and we go on tour, the first fucking gig and we see the guy putting on his fucking clothes. A little sheriff's badge on, he puts one golf glove on. We're thinking, man that's fucking funny, that's great, man that's a great joke. Hey says, “What are you talking about?” I go, “You're not going to go out there with a fucking glove, that's Michael Jackson's shit.” He said, “No it's not, it's my stuff.” I'm going, you've got to be fucking kidding me. We get on stage and we start the first tune, 'Love Has the Power' and he starts dancing around like fucking Richard Simmons on acid. Some fucking fruity shit going on man. And the crowd is like looking at me and going, something's up. They're looking at him and flipping him the bird telling him to get off the stage. And I'm looking at Jeff Porcaro and he's looking at me going, what the fuck is that? I mean is was unbelievable…He thought he'd come to save the day. Like Christ had come down and blessed us. We get off the gig and we're like, what the fuck is that? We're nuts, we're psycho. You can't do that. He goes, “I'm going to make you all very famous.”
He thought he was the shit, he was hysterical. And I was single, newly single at the time after my first divorce and I was out there for the chicks and every time I got with a chick, he'd try to get with her.

Oh really?
Like cock blocking. I was like dude, you don't do that, you don't even know the rules of the road. Things you do and things you don't do. Me and him didn't get on at all. And it got to the point where it was excruciating. The whole tour was excruciating, to be around him. It was a drag. I'm not saying he's an evil guy, but his ego. He thought he was the shit. He thought he was going to be the biggest star in the world. We were lucky to have him.

Well after Toto he really went on to big things didn't he? (laughs)
Didn't he!

He's probably working in a car wash somewhere.
I don't know what he's doing but obviously it proved wrong. It was disastrous. We basically phased him…as the tour went on he was doing less and less and less to the point where he was basically…That Live in Paris video in 1990, I think he is in for like a half a tune or something like that. We threw all his shit out. It just wasn't right. And then we were like really, what the fuck do we do? I ended up singing so much of the show. Jeff and the cats were, let's fucking do this, let's go make a rock and roll record. Kingdom of Desire.

Man I love that record.
I do too. And a lot of people didn't dig that record.

Nah, it's great.
Fine you lost all the…Seventh One Toto, what does Luke thinks he's running the band. Like it was my choice. Like I was trying to take over or something like that. Like I said, lot's of misinformation. We didn't want to go through putting a 5th guy in.

Yeah, yeah.
It became ridiculous. So we did that. Very proud of that record. Especially because it was Jeffrey's last record.

It's a killer record.
'91 was our last tour, the ship was going down. Before the record even came out. Then brother Jeffery died on us. That was another, what the fuck are we going to do?
We were in a tailspin. We lost our fucking mentor, we lost our guy. The heart and soul of the band. But we had to carry on; we didn't know what to do. We had a tour booked, 40 people on the payroll, 50 people on payroll expecting their families to eat during Christmas. Had we not had the tour already booked, we probably would have broken up right then.

Yeah, really?
Something kept us together, Simon Phillips was the only guy that we called. Couldn't get somebody that tried to sound like Jeff, we needed somebody with a name, and someone Jeff dug. Would bring some integrity and something else to the gig. Simon, Jeff I knew, dug. And he was going to move to L.A. There was a lot of serendipity there. He was going to come here anyway but he never thought, you know he had just gotten divorced, he wanted to leave London and come here and join our band. Do studio shit.

Yeah.
Me and him already had a relationship through playing with Jeff Beck and Santana in 1986. Became friends. And then he came on the gig, we did like 5 months on the road, decided at the end of it all, did a wonder tribute concert in L.A. at the amphitheater. Henley was there, Eddie Van Halen, we got Donald Fagan out of retirement before they reformed Steely Dan. We had Boz, we had David Crosby, Michael McDonald, George Harrison came out and played with us, Sheryl Crow before she was famous, she was singing background for Henley.

Wow!
We had all the cats. At the end of that, Jeff's wife was there and Jeff's family, mother and father. You guys got to keep doing this. You're not going to bring Jeffrey back by quitting. And the fans, we get all these letters saying, look, it's never going to be the same without Jeff but you've still got something there. Hang tough. And so we did. Now you can ask me whatever you want. That's pretty much up to Tambu.

That's pretty cool.
Like I said, if you want to get the real information, don't go by hearsay, go to the source.

Yeah, absolutely. You did Tambu again yourself didn't you?
Yeah, because at that point we said well, let's see what this would really be like doing it without Jeff. In the studio, Dave and I and all the guys, you know, the first time we've written with Simon. We went in the studio, Elliot Scheiner wanted to work with us. And that's somebody Jeff always wanted to work with. We all worked with Elliot outside. We thought that was the right thing to do. We went in and wrote more of an organic sounding record. But once again, I'm saying there's no point in you guys doing a hard rock record because Kingdom of Desire whereas by today's standards it sold a lot, by those standards at that time, it didn't. Rock radio wouldn't touch us. We figured, well, maybe we should go explore the mellower side and the more world music side or whatever it is, or acoustic. You know, acoustic guitars, acoustic piano, I play a lot of keyboards on that record.

Ok.
And we just did that record. We had the semi hit 'I Will Remember' and the tour was very successful. We implemented a couple of background singers that would sing the Bobby parts or Joseph parts. It was more like the Toto review and those guys were great. Jenny and John were fantastic. They really came at a great time. It was something completely different. That tour was very successful. Very successful.

Was the record successful?
Considering, and we came back and at that point we were going like, you know, well what are we going to do?
What do you want to do here? And then the 20th anniversary came around and we hooked up with Bobby again and he'd gotten himself together. And me and Dave started putting the record together, digging through the archives trying to find some shit from day 1 up until that point when we made that record, of salvageable tracks that were in the can that we never released...that were done, from all the different eras. There's some interesting stuff in there. I mean it's for the most staunch Toto fans of course.

Yeah.
But you realize how young some of this shit was and how there are reasons why they didn't make the real big records, but there's still some music in there worth putting out and it's a way for us to find our way back to the original concepts. Which was when Bobby came back in the band we did a couple gigs with Joseph and Bobby, Joseph really wasn't up for the task and Steve Porcaro came out and we did like 5 gigs. Had we actually rehearsed and done it right, it would have been a lot better. Because it was a little rough, vocally. And we decided Bobby was singing so good we were going to keep Bobby. Let's go explore this possibility and that leads us to Mindfields.

Yeah. I really, really like some parts of Mindfields, it's an album that took a long time to grow on me.
You know, I listened to a couple of tracks the other night, I was putting, my wife was putting stuff into my I-pod, my new favorite toy.

Yeah, great.
5000 songs in a fucking little box, you don't have to carry any CDs on the road with you. You got to love that. I've got to give my wife al the props on that one. She's going, “Yeah me!” It kind of brings me back, because I don't sit around listening to old Toto records. But I sort of wanted to get back to writing this new album. People wanted me, they said go back and listen to your old records. Remember the spirit of it. We're not going to write the same record, there's no point. It's not possible. Get back in the spirit. I thought there was some really good stuff on that record.

Yeah, yeah, there was. There's still a few songs I don't dig today…
Listen, nobody loves every song of every record. Nobody. I don't.

I mean stuff like 'Caught in the Balance' is just magical.
Yeah, that was a great song.

Melanie was cool...
Yeah, I mean that was a little light for me. It was a little fluffy for me.

What a video clip though!
Oh I hated that video. I didn't want to do it. I refused to be in it.
If you look at my face, you can see I'm about as happy as getting a prostrate check.

LOL! How much money did you spend on that clip?
Nothing. A French company did it for free.

Are you serious?
Yep.

Because it looks like a million dollar clip.
(laughing) It depends on what kind of glasses you're looking through. It was like a million dollars worth of shit to me. David Paich floating around, I mean who wants to see that? I love David, I don't want to mean anything like that but they wanted to tie me up and to this blue screen shit. I said no fucking way I'm doing Peter Pan with you bro. Ain't going to happen. And I pissed everybody off.

Did you?
Oh man, I was fucking going, man you don't have enough booze in this place to make me do that. I will not do it.

What was the concept behind the clip?
Just like, the computer thing had just started happening. The images were cool. Doug Brown who did our album cover, brilliant, fucking great. Really great concept. Really psychedelic, old school. But they wanted to implement us in that and …our videos suck ass, they always have. We're not actors, we're not pretty boys. They implement us and I always look like I'm wearing my Mom's clothes in the fucking videos. I mean the hair and the fucking…stupid, awful. I mean, shit man, videos. MTV ruined everything.

So there won't be a video clip DVD released.
There will never be another video unless it's liver ever again. Live, fine. That's live, that's different. Concert videos are great. Love concert videos. But a fucking bunch of middle-aged guys trying to be…their hair poofed back, wind blowing their face, about the saddest concept I could ever think of.

I always enjoyed, still to this day, the Van Halen videos are great for that reason.
Yeah but they were funny. They were fun. They were rock stars. They looked the part and you believed it. I never believed it when I saw myself trying to be like that.

They never did the sort of clips…
So if you don't believe it yourself, how can you expect anybody else to believe?

Yeah.
It looks uncomfortable. It's like, somebody can be outrageous and look outrageous if they really sell it, they really believe it and they live it. But when you try to put clothes and hair dressers and stuff on people that don't feel it, who aren't feeling it, it's just comes off as really fake. Really bogus. It's like bad acting. We're not a video band. We never were. Never wanted to be. We wanted to be in a band to play music. Then MTV came along, changed everything. They fucked everything up. They turned it into a fucking McDonald's commercial. Music selling Coca Cola and t-shirts and now it's the reality TV. Music was an art when we started. I may die trying to keep that concept alive.

God bless you for that. When you got the guy starring on the Batchelor making records you've got to…
Well you know what I'm saying, come on. Any, look at fucking Kelly Osbourne's record.

Oh dear.
Oh my God.

How sad. How sad that Ozzy actually wanted to do a duet with her now.
Well I don't think that was probably Ozzy's idea. I don't know. I love Ozzy. Zakk Wilde is a great friend of mine, one of the greatest guitar players in the fucking world.

I couldn't agree more.
And a sweetheart. He gives these late night phone calls where he calls up and pretends to be Jimmy Page. Fucking hysterical. Me and Zakk have a great relationship. We don't really see each other much, but we talk all the time.
And I think he's one of the most brilliant, committed. This is the last of the great rock and roll heroes. He lives and breathes it. There's nothing fake about him at all. That is the real cat. He lives and breathes the guitar. And music and his family…a committed husband, a committed father, a committed psychopath. I love him. One of my favorite fucking humans on the planet.

Really?
Oh God bless him.

I love his work with Ozzy.
I consider him, I've know him since the '80s. It was just like the first couple of Ozzy records and stuff, he was a great kid. He's like a little brother to me. He's the coolest man. And I love, we played on Derek Sherinian's record together and stuff, you know.

That's right. I've got that. It's a great album.
It's great. I love that shit.

Derek's a good guy too.
Derek's a great guy. Very, very talented. I love… he just wants to make it as out as humanly possible. I love anybody with that kind of commitment. It's like Petrucci, same thing. He was actually in John's band for a while. John's like another one of those alien creatures who lives and breathes it. Also one of the nicest guys you'll meet.

Really, that's cool.
Music Man, we're all Music Man guys. Their endorsement roster is one hand. Me, John, Albert Lee, Steve Morse, Vinnie Moore and I think that's it. They had Eddie for a while but that's a whole other thing. I don't even want to talk about that.
It has nothing to do with me. But what I'm saying is, he only endorses cats he really feels are really great players and he ends up getting us all together to play together which is really wild, because everyone comes from a different world. But I'm a huge fan of Dream Theater. Dream Theater are awesome.

They're a cool band.
A great band with a committed bunch of musicians. All of them are great virtuosos. And they have a vision and they stuck to their vision, now it's paying off. They're bringing back a whole genre of music that I thought was dead. Yet it's uniquely their own. I could sit and talk about music with them like from the '70s when we grew up. And I'm older than those guys so. We talk about records like Genesis' old Selling England by the Pound, all that stuff like, you know, John's one of most unbelievable musicians. Just scary. I just feel like, Jesus, why bother when you hear a cat like him and Morse and shit.
But these are my bros. I'm always inspired by greatness. When you hear greatness it makes you want to practice more.

Yeah! That's cool. That's very cool. Do you think in hindsight the covers record was the best thing to do?
It certainly wasn't the worst thing to do. I mean we could have gone out with no product.

Yeah.
It takes us a long time to make records the way we like to make them. We thought, wouldn't it be a kick if we played a bunch of songs from our childhood and redid them in our own style. And, you know, just the whole concept got bad to people. What's the matter with you guys, we don't want you to do that stuff. Paich was all up into the…. Paich is like our resident rap guy. It cracks me up. We don't have any business going into that world. That was Dave's thing. My wife chose the song… let me look into your record collection. She's 14 years younger than me. So she's listening to… when I went out with her she had everything form the Grateful Dead to like you know, what was that band, the industrial band?

Nine Inch Nails?
Then she'd have like the Carpenters. What kind of a…she's got very interesting…I dig her record collection. Bob Marley and all this really weird off the cuff stuff. I go, let's go look at your record collection because I'm sure you have a very different one than mine. And we just went…we didn't have a lot of time to think about it. We just went in and stated playing shit and if it felt good we cut it. We cut it really fast and we did it fun, it was cut live in Simon's fucking living room. Except for the vocals and a few bits and pieces here and there. We just thought we'd have something different to do and go on the road with some new product. And just to buy us time to do the tour and for our 25th anniversary officially and then we'll write a record after that. We thought it would be fun. Everybody in the world's done a covers record. We do one and we take a bunch of shit for it. Come on now, there's some really good stuff on that record.
Maybe it's not everyone's cup of tea but not the worst fucking record of the year. I mean just from a musician's stand point there's stuff on there to listen to. Song selections on there are everything '70s. Everything that we were playing in high school. 'Bodhisattva' was the first song I ever played with Steve Porcaro and Jeff Porcaro.

Yeah, Ok.
You know, there's a story behind each song. We didn't randomly pick stupid songs. There was a reason why, emotionally for some people.
Everyone got to pick their own, you know, wish list and we sat around and whittled it down and said, let's try this one, let's try that one, let's try the arrangement on this, blah, blah, blah. It was fun man. We weren't trying to save the world and go like, this is our greatest record ever. This is an interim period record. Much like a greatest hits record. People go, why don't you just put out a new album? Why don't you put out another greatest hits record? Why does anybody do anything? I think we were taken to the whipping post a little too hard on that one. Because we went on the road, we did like three songs off the record and the whole rest of it was our catalogue. And some people loved the record and some people absolutely hated it. I'm sorry. That's pretty much the same vibe with any record we put out.

It must get frustrating.
You know what? If I believed everything I read, good, bad or indifferent, I'd never play again.

Yeah, really?
Because I'd be so depressed. I'm going like, what if I do this and that guy's not going to like it or this person or these people won't like it. You've got to throw the dice, you know? You don't get a seven every time sometimes you crap out. As the years go by, in ten years time people go back and listen to that record with a different point of view, they go, well I don't love all of it but there's some good stuff on there. And I will stick to this. I don't love every thing on it but I think there's some really good stuff on there. Interesting reworking of old arrangements. I thought my fucking Elvis Costello impression was awesome.

I do admire that.
I mean that was done as a piss-take, unbelievable. I just hope the cat got to here it. Because he certainly got a royalty check.

I was going to ask you whether he ever got to hear it.
I don't know but he's with Diana Krall who's actually peripherally a friend. Elvis takes himself way too seriously.

Yeah, I agree.
But I don't really know him. Just reading what he says about himself and other people. Dude, you're not God's gift, I hate to tell you. Look at your record sales compared to mine. Kiss my ass.

(laughing) I like it.
And I'm a fan. I think he's great. I mean I think he's written some great songs. Wasn't such a c*** about it, I would by all his records.

What about your solo records Steve, you got a favorite?
Candyman is my favorite.

Really? That's the most diverse isn't it?
That's the most perfect representation of who I really am. I mean its ten years old now so obviously it's now who I am right now, but back then, I was really proud of that record. I think that one really holds up better than all the rest of them.

Is that right?
There's good stuff on the other ones but my first solo record is very dated sounding. There's like 3 or 4 things on there I think are really cool, some of my pop/metal/rock stuff sounds really forced.
But the stuff I did with Eddie and the stuff I did with Steve Stevens and things I did with Kortch and that ballad 'Turns To Stone' I wrote with Randy Goodrum, I'm really proud of that song.

I love that whole album.
There's a couple, I was trying too hard. In that era, you have to remember it was like the hair days.
I was trying to put the music into the hair music and try to jump off the Toto bandwagon. Like I actually thought I might be accepted. It wasn't. People that like my shit they thought, they can look back on it, there's some good stuff on there. Out of all my solo records that's the one that sounds like I was trying too hard, to try to be too many things to too many different people all on the same record.

Right, OK. I love it, I must admit, I'm a big fan. I paid like 38 bucks for the album. For a CD.
I wish I got my percentage of that royalty. I think I made a $1.25 on that one myself.

I had to get it on import down here, it cost like 38 bucks.
As usual. Our strong Australian presence.

Yeah, I know, I know!
I mean, we can't even get a gig down there. We can get a gig, but they don't want to pay any money.

I'm so frustrated about that.
We're not going to go down there and fucking suck. We've been trying to get in there. Keep trying. The INXS guys are trying to get us in there. I want to come to Australia. I mean, I may just have to come down there just as a solo artist. It's not over 'till the fat man sings. We're still working it, there's a little bit of interest. It's a shame because we're going down that way, coming through it would have been nice to actually have played a gig or two.

You go to Japan?
Yeah, I'm going to Japan. I'll be in Japan a couple of times.

I would love to see you down here. That's for sure.
Well hey man, tell a friend. You never know, like this next record deal if it works out that way. We're going to make some very strong points about going, well if you're going to want us, you're going to make this happen everywhere. At lease try.

So what do you do? You going to shop to the labels or you going to try and do it yourself?
Well, there's only 2 labels now. You either do it independent, which is really difficult. The distribution is so fucking hard to deal with.

Yes!
We can't get in there. You can sell it on your website but you'll never... You need that big machine behind you. For promotion and all the rest of the stuff. It's a question of, who's going to give us the better shot. I would never have thought in a million years that … I hesitate to mention this kind of thing because I don't want to blow it before it happens, but there's some offers on the tables. We had a great relationship in a lot of countries and horrible ones in others.

Yeah.
So in order for us to get back to it, we need to say, well what about these troubled areas? We can come back to that and use that as a deal for you, rather than give you more money.

Yeah, like actually get the record released in Australia.
Well they were released but they just, nobody ever knew it and they bought like 100 pieces. In all of Australia. Because we were considered not hip. The record companies are being run by 20 year-old kids. 25/27 year-old kids. They don't want to be associated with something their mom listened to. You know what I mean. It's the hip factor. It's funny, we get sampled and stuff like that and that's cool. Ja Rule has a hit with 'Africa'. And like, you know, I had that big huge hit with Roger Sanchez for 'I Won't Hold You Back'. That thing sold fucking 15 million copies. Man I'm laughing. I'm laughing. I'm just going, thank you God for that taste.

So without getting into…
And yet the name Toto doesn't appear anywhere. Usually it's like sampled by this or featuring so and so and 85 names. Our name is never mentioned.

Yeah, why is that?
It's my voice, my song. I mean grant it, the first in line's the song. I never thought that was going to be a hit. But our music, Toto IV has been raped as far as fucking samples go. I mean six of those songs. We were doing hip-hop before they had a name for it. 'Waiting for Your Love', listen to that groove. That's a little more up-tempo hip-hop record. We used to call them funk a shunk. We didn't have a name for hip-hop. Hip-hop is a black thing man. Or I should say, it's not just a black thing but it's an urban thing.

Yes.
A bunch of white kids in the valley can't, you know, talking about, kill the white man, kill the white man. It's a joke. It's like, once again, it's like videos bro. We can't fit ourselves into someplace we don't belong. But I can see the art form. When I saw the move 8-Mile, that's when I got into rap. I figured this is a really interesting concept. Even though it was fictitious, I still kind of saw where it was coming from. How difficult it is to come up with them rhymes. No melody involved. There's no melody involved at all. The saddest thing in the world is to see a rap guy try to sing. That's pathetic. It sounds like your grandpa's getting a prostrate check. (makes horrible noise) Those guys can't sing. Don't sing bro. Get somebody who sings. But rap. I give them all the props in the world for that. That's an art form all its own.

Yeah, 8-Mile was enjoyable for sure.
Yeah, it was great. I really understood the whole concept, even though it's a small version of that. I dig the old school. I see where it all comes from. It's nothing I can do myself, because I'm just not qualified to do that but I can appreciate how hard it is to write those lyrics.

Now, you made the headlines last year. You knew I was going to do this.
Davita?
Best press we ever had. One of the great publicity stunts of all time.
Never thinking any of it would get past our website. That anybody would actually believe that without even calling our office and seeing if it was true. But we got more press out of that. Front page all over the world.
It was hysterical when we started getting thank you notes from the Transgender Society. Then I started to feel really bad. Now these people are hailing Dave like he's going to be their new poster boy. Dave and his family thought it was hysterical. Then we had to come back and retract it. Sorry, didn't mean to offend anybody, I never thought it was going to go this far. And we basically took this…makes you stop and think about the bullshit they put in newspapers without corroborating any of it. Not one person called our office to see if it was true.

Is that right?
They took it at face value.

And Dave really didn't mind?
Dave thought it was hysterical. He still signs his e-mail Davita.

Oh does he?
Oh yeah. His daughter thought it was absolutely brilliant. His wife was laughing her ass off. We all thought…we couldn't believe that anybody would actually take that serious. Please. I can't wait to see what my next one is going to be.

Well that was what I was going to ask you, what's next?
I don't know, I think people will be a little more gun shy next time. It'll have to be a really good one.

We'll put some thought into that then will we?
Yeah, well, you never know. They say any press is good press.

Yeah, absolutely. What else do you…, let me change tape here. What's that?
I've got to eat some dinner here in a minute. We've been going for an hour and a half.

Yeah, we've talked about enough.
You better give me more than a paragraph after an hour and a half.

(laughing) Exactly. What did you want to say? Is there something you want to say?
I've said too much already (laughs).

Yes, you've said plenty!
I'm just saying, like you know, we're going to so our thing, be patient. Hopefully you'll dig it once it comes out. It's not going to come out until we all look at each other and go, it's time to put this out. In the meantime we're going to work and do what we're going to do and take some time off and do some other projects ourselves. And take our time with making a brilliant record. Or what we think is a brilliant record. It will be up to you guys to figure out if you like it or not.

Yeah.
Once again, I say, you can't please everybody.

Yeah, well exactly, you can't.
You've got to please yourself. I want to make a statement as a musician myself and as a songwriter. Don't know 100% what that's going to be. I've got some ideas. I've got CDs, demos, ideas I've been dicking around with. I won't know what makes the final cut because we haven't really, really gotten into it yet.

Yeah.
I think I'm ahead of the game more than the other guys as far as having material. But like once we start taking it real seriously then it will become a much more serious thing. You can check in with me another time.

Yeah, definitely.
I'll let you know what the progress is.

Definitely, definitely. I just want to quickly mention, one of my favorite records of yours is Fee Waybill's Read My Lips.
That was a great record, and it didn't happen. Which really surprised me. Considering it was coming off the new hit single that me and Bobby wrote together with Fee [Waybill]. We thought we made a really great record.

It was. I love it. You know, coming out on CD?
The big machine didn't get behind it. And that's what it takes man. You can sell anybody anything if you have enough money behind it. But we live in an era now where record company people…In the old days, if somebody was passionate about something they would make it happen. They would get everybody in the company excited about it. Now it's like, the famous story, Andy Johns tells this story. He fixed the record and turns it in to the A&R people. In the club he's telling the A&R guys, Andy goes, what do you think of the record? He goes, I don't know, I'm the only one that's heard it. The guy's afraid to make any opinion he might get fired for.

Yeah, isn't that sad.
And it's even worse now. I don't need some snot-nosed, twenty year-old kid telling me he doesn't like my music. I'll kick his ass. What do you got mother fucker? It's a young man's game. For guys like us, guys our age, we just make records for people that dig what we do and we've been around so long we can still go out and people will come see us. No matter what it is. They know they're going to see a good show with really good players, that are actually up there playing, and have a sense of humor about all of this.

Yeah.
We're not trying to change the world, we're not capable. That's somebody else' job now. I'm just trying to live and have a good time, have a laugh and play music. I'm very lucky, very honored, very humble about it and I'm just trying to do the best I can. It doesn't always come up to what everybody's standards think I should be doing or what we should be doing.
That's a very difficult thing. Because everybody thinks, well fuck this, that record's no good, this song's no good. They lost it. They don't have their thing anymore. But other people go, that's so much better than what you used to do. So, who do you listen to? You have to listen to the little voice inside.
He goes, like, I think this is good, I hope people dig it. As far as us having a # 1 hit single again: probably not unless we're sampled again. But who knows, who knows. Tomorrow's another day. You never know. Having teenagers…MTV is not roasting in my house like it used to be. They don't even play music on MTV anymore. I think people are more interested in live DVDs and going to see live shows.
Because that's the only thing that's actually real anymore.

Yep. I agree.
Even some of the live shows aren't real. There's like 5 Pro Tools guys behind the stage and they're up there just faking the whole thing.

I know. I can imagine.
So that's why people, like we can still sell concert tickets and maybe today with the exception of some of the great bands that are out there like Coldplay and Radiohead. Making brilliant music. Melodic, soulful and played by real guys. The run of the mill pop groups…it's like eating too much candy.
You're going to barf after a while. Too sweet, too…And they still rail on us. Put that on the cover of a magazine that they still think Toto is the worst fucking band that ever happened. You just kind of shake your head, scratch your head and go well, 600,000 people just bought tickets to see us and our record sales are happening, I'm booked up this year, I'm 46 years old, I'm happy to be alive, I'm happy to be playing music, honored to have an audience. Who doesn't always love every thing we do but loves us in spite of ourselves.

That's awesome.
Be patient with us. Be gentle. We're old guys.

That's awesome. I can't imagine a better note to finish grilling you on.
I think we've said it all.

I think you've said it all.
I can't wait to see how you put this on the site.

Well, it's going to take a little while to type up obviously.
I'm sure.

But I'll talk to you before I post it.
Maybe in a couple of months I'll check it out.

Let's hope I get it done quicker than that.
If you need me to do anything for you, that I can do, promotion wise or anything like that. You've been very kind to me. I appreciate that more than you fucking know.

Oh no, thanks man, I appreciate it.
I'm not the c*** that everybody thinks I am.

And what better way to end the interview! I'd add the goodbyes, but the tape ran out. I thank Steve for an awesome and open chat and hope to do it again sometime down the track.

Famed record producer Keith Olsen talks in detail about the life of a producer and some of his experiences working with such artists as Sammy Hagar, Rick Springfield, Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner, Pat Benatar, Kingdom Come, Eddie Money and more. He also talks about the record industry's battle with file sharing and much more.
A very special thanks to Ron and Don Higgins for transcribing the 90 minute+ interview for me. Cheers guys.


Hi Keith, many thanks for your time and your willingness to talk to me about your career. I gather you're on the West Coast?
Yes, I'm up here in Seattle.

How long have you been there?
I've been here 3 and a half years.

OK, OK, and previously in LA?
Yeah. LA for 27 years before that.
I got head-hunted by this company called Mackie Designs (www.mackiedesigns.com).
I had to go to their office in Seattle.

Yes….
And I ran their professional products division. And we have parted ways. When they were purchased, Greg Mackie was bought out, and I thought it would be time for me to go too.

And you'll stay up there, do you think?
No, actually I sold my house and we bought one in Kauai in Hawaii.
It's the island of Kauai.

Right. Nice for some.
In fact, it's about 6 or 8 doors down from Todd Rundgren.

Oh is it really!? There's a few guys over there now isn't there?
Yeah, David Tickle is over there, and then ah, Gram Nash, Nathaniel Kunkel, Pankow from Chicago. Let's see, Phil Lesh from Grateful Dead. You know, too many.

I was surprised to hear you've been using my site, I was more than pleased to hear that.
Yeah, I took a look at it. Saw what you are doing, and it's cool. You know, there's a gazillion websites out there for every band and every member of a lot, of some of the bands that I've worked on have their own sites. It's good to see somebody's keeping some of that alive down there.
How many hits do you get a day?

About 10 or 11,000 at day.
Wow, that's amazing. That's great.

Yeah, there's a bunch of old rockers still out there.
Oh yeah. I can tell. They still buy my records.

Absolutely. You still get a check in the mail then?
Yeah. Still get the check in the mail. Twice a year.

I was going to ask you about that later on but I'll jump straight in now that you've mentioned it. I don't really want to ask what you're earning or whatever.
Well I won't tell you (laughs).

Exactly, that's your business. But a lot of people that read the site love the industry side of things. And how does a producer earn his living apart from just being hired to work the record?
Well you're hired to produce an album and when you produce the album you get a chunk of money, but the chunk of money is an advance against your portion of the royalties.

Oh, ok. So like the artist, you get an advance as well.
Yeah. And it's the strength of your production skills that is directly proportionate to how much of an advance you get to go into a studio with an act. When I was really, really hot, and having gold, you know albums in the top ten all the time, I had a 1 in 4 ratio of albums that I did that went gold or better.

That's pretty amazing.
And so record companies would look at it as hedging their bet. If I did the record, they had a 1 in 4 chance, instead of a 1 in who knows chance of making the album work. Now because of that, I was able to get more priority projects. And the priority projects are the ones that really work.
That is when the record company is so committed to promotion and videos and everything else it takes to market a record and make it sell. So it was mainly because of getting those priority projects. And then the other thing it's, a lot of it's timing. Getting the right song at the right time for the marketplace. Where they actually say, 'well this is unique or this cool or this rocks, whatever' enough to make it really work.

Have you had instances where you really struggle to make the record work?
Oh yeah. It wouldn't be the record business… Ah let's see.
There are times when, ah gee, you know it was a struggle with Whitesnake. On the Whitesnake '87 album. Whitesnake '85 [Slide It In] was really a snap. It was great, and easy to do. Whitesnake '89 [Slip Of The Tongue] was even more of a struggle because you're coming off of a record that sold 15 million copies. So everything that you do is checked, double-checked, thought about. You delve into every possible idiosyncrasy of what you're doing verses where you think the record, the band should go.

You got half way through that, or someone else was brought in, weren't they?
No, actually, it was a record company decision to bring in somebody at the beginning of the Whitesnake '89 album. Because this guy was… Let's go back to record companies for a minute. Record companies have guys that are A&R directors. Vice president, head of A&R. They put their life on the line every time they sign an act. Because if it doesn't happen, they're relieved of duty. And if it does happen, then the record company looks to them to make sure it happens again.

Yeah, ok.
Mike Clink is an old buddy of mine. And he just had a huge album with Guns and Roses. And so, Mr. Kalodner, bless his soul, decided that, you know, the best thing for Whitesnake would be to go into the studio and cut some tracks with the guy who did Guns and Roses - because it would be a much more heavy rock album. And, you know, they have total control.
And so they had booked me 18 months before and then I was put on hold for 6 months while they went and dicked around cutting the record. And so I remember going up and listening to the tracks for the first time, and listening to it and said, 'Wow, all these tracks are in the key of A. Don't you have any other songs in any other keys? It's going to be a little, kind of worrying isn't it?'
You know Mike is a good engineer and a good producer but he's not a musician of sorts. And so he uses his ears more than his brain, which is really cool. And he's really good at it, and he's done really well since, because of that. He has great ears and he knows what he's doing. But when it comes to things like, gee this song is in A and this song's in F sharp minor. Gee that's really just A. This song's in A minor, OK, that's A. And this song's in C. Which is a relevant major. And it starts getting where there's a common tone, common tones everywhere and it became where they were speeding up, slowing down, changing keys, re-cutting tracks and doing this just to get rid of all that stuff. And so we basically cut the album twice. And I came in, we cut it again, fixed everything, worked with, along side Mike which was fun because he's a good guy.

Yep.
And then there were other problems during that album. You know, a guitar player that got carpal tunnel syndrome, and he couldn't play [Adrian Vandenberg]. And so we had to bring in Steve Vai, which is always a real treat because when you have a player that's that good, then everything gets changed again because you have a guitar player that's so good you want to arrange things around that good a guitar player. And so the album was cut a few times.

Yeah. It does sound it too. It's a little bit…It didn't work as well as the 1987 album.
Right. A long time ago, a real good writer then, was good friend of mine, a long time ago. You can't use her name but I'll tell you who it is. But you can't use her name. It was ___ ___. I'm walking on the beach, in Malibu with her. And I went out to her beach house. It was July 4th, it was the afternoon. She was having a Barbeque. Her and I are walking along the beach, I'd had quite a disastrous summer, three days earlier my house caught on fire because of fireworks in the neighborhood. All this stuff.
But, so she made me come out to this party, and shoot off a bunch of fireworks. She just said, we're going to get you un-depressed. So as we're walking along the beach, she says, you know Keith, all your life you take these life experiences, you stick them in this bag that you carry on your shoulder. We'll call it the 'Life Experience Bag'. And every time you write a song, you reach into this bag and you pull out something and you write about it. And you tell the story. But don't get too comfortable, because when you get too comfortable, you're not putting anything in the bag, you're only taking stuff out of it. And then one day, you stick your arm in the bag and there's nothing left except an old, rotten apple core. And you know, nobody wants to hear a song about an old, rotten apple core. And you know, if you start looking at that, and look at the quality of songs from a lot of artists, the more comfortable they get. They're not struggling - they're not putting those stories in the bag. And they're not writing the quality of song that they did on their 'breakthrough' album that comes right out of some horrific time in their life. Because it's all about the song. The strength of an album is about the strength of the songs. The strength of the stories that are told, it's the strength of the melodies, and it's the strength finally of the performance of those great songs. You can have a hit record with a great song, you can have an even bigger hit record with a great performance of that great song. And you know, the very final thing is sound. And if you have a great song, that has a great performance and it's recorded on some piece of junk recorder that barely records, you still have a hit record. But if you can put all three together, you have those giant records. Where you have song, performance and sound.

Right, that's a great story to hear – absolutely right. And putting that together is where you come in.
Well, you know, a lot of the times I'm there in the beginning. Identifying which are the great songs. Getting the great performance, that's my job. That's a producer's job. To get the performance on tape in an accessible manner to the marketplace, to who your customer is. That listener out there. The guy or the girl that really wants to have…captures that feeling, the same feeling who can claim their song in that performance as their own. That's what a producer's job really is. That may sound too flowery. Bottom line is, that's what you do.

How did you get started? Did you always envision being a producer?
No, I was semi-classically trained. And that means that my parents made me study. And I kept shifting and shifting things where I really liked stringed instruments, I like cello, I like guitar, I like upright bass. I liked the classics, I loved Stravinsky. And I got good enough to play in the Minneapolis symphony. Studied under Stanaslav Strovashevski (sp). And let me tell you, that man know how to control 120 musicians.
And it was one of those things where you just, you went, and everybody is warming up and the concert master has you run through the piece once. And then Strovashevski comes walking in and everything is different. It is so much better, I mean everything just, everything changes. And it was my first experience of hearing that, and hearing that thing about how you get musicians to play tight, how you get musicians to play together. And right after that, I went on the road and started playing bass for, at the time it was folk acts.
And started writing songs with artists, arranging things, and then the next thing I knew, I was in the studio working with some act here and some act there. And then got a deal to go in the studio and work with The Association. With Curt Boettcher, Tommy Roe, and Curt Boettcher and just kind of crept into it, where I was never making a living at it.
Put together a rock band called The Music Machine. Had a hit record called 'Talk Talk'. Back in 1966. And then put together a band called The Millennium on CBS. And co-produced that, and got to be a staff producer at CBS when Clive Davis was running the show there.
That's when I first met Clive. But it all kind of started when I met Jerry Wexler and he said to me, he said, 'Keith, here at Atlantic records when we mix records we put a lot of middle and a lot of top on it. Call me when it's done.' (laughs). Ok. I called him when it was done. And I said, yep. And he asked me the same thing again. 'Did you use a lot of bottom?' Yep. 'A lot of middle?' Yep. 'A lot of top?' Yep. 'Must be done then.'
Bring me a copy, I'll send you a plane ticket. And I started getting more and more into the inner workings of Atlantic and CBS and all those companies. And I realized that you could actually make a living at this. But you have to go out and find your own acts to break through.

Yes, OK. You become an A&R guy as well.
Yeah, you have to find your own acts. So I found this band called Fritz up in the Bay area. Said wow this band is terrible. But that bass player can sure sing and that chick can play the tambourine OK and she has a real unique voice. And put this little duo together, it's called Buckingham/Nicks. It was Lindsey Buckingham and Stephanie Nicks.

Right!
Did an album for Polydor at the time.

Yes I remember that.
And it was different. It was unique. We really arranged a really unique vocal sound. It was different. It sold bupkis (laughs). You know what bupkis is don't ya?

Yes! But some readers may not!
Bupkis is baby shit. It sold a baby shit. It didn't sell.
It didn't sell worth a damn. It was certified bupkis on release.

Diddly-squat is what we call it in Australia.
That's Yiddish for baby shit. Anyway, I was working on some band that I can't remember what it was. Then I met Mick Fleetwood and he wanted to hear… because he was looking for some place he could make an album really cheap. And so I said, well you know there's this studio called Silent City. You can make pretty cheap albums out there, we'll make a deal with them. And he asked me to produce the record. And on New Year's Eve he called me and says, 'Well Keith I got some good news and bad news. The bad news is, Bob Welch has left the band so we won't be starting that album in February'. And I went, 'Here we go.' (laughs). 'But the good news is, you know those two kids, who were they? Lindsey and Stevie? Do you think they'd want to join my band? Could you go and find out?' And I took 12 hours of constant pounding on them to try to convince them to join Fleetwood Mac on a trial basis only. And they joined Fleetwood Mac as a trial basis and they said they'd do it just for 6 weeks. Then they got better, then they found out that they were making money, just because her brother's paying their salary at 500 bucks a week. They said, well this is great. We went into the studio, 3 months later we came out with that album.

And a legend was born.
And a legend was born.
I worked with them on that album. And then I really don't want to say what happened. I'm still friends with Lindsey and Stevie to this day. But I don't really speak very much to the rest of them. There was, just a nasty lawsuit. Just wanted to get paid, that's all I wanted to do is get my percentage. And so anyway…

So it goes.
So they went and decided to go and hire this kid who was my second engineer to be their 'engineer' because they could save money. A million and a half dollars later they finished. But it was hard to work with somebody when you're in a lawsuit with them.

OK, and so from there you just sort of, well you built a reputation from that album obviously.
Well it started with that album and then I remember my lawyer telling me you're the luckiest guy…. Then I went and did Foreigner. Produced Foreigner. And he said, 'Luckiest guy I ever met.' And then right after that I did Santana, Rick Springfield, Benatar. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And he said, he was telling me that, it might not be luck (laughs).

Yeah, it may not be.
And all I said to him, I'm just picking these really cool songs that these people have and recording them in a way that I really enjoy. And trying to give everybody a bit of their own sound. Instead of doing a lot of what was going on at the time where a producer's sound would carry over from act to act to act to act.

Absolutely.
Everybody…if the producer was doing…you know Mike Chapman is a great guy…But he had a little while there where he was using the same guys as players on a lot of records and he had the same techniques on a lot of records. And there were three albums in a row that sounded very similar. But it was exactly what radio wanted. And every single thing he did was getting tons of airplay. And I was like, Mike, this is amazing. I'm going to call you air hog from now on, you know? But…it caught up with him.

It didn't last did it.
Because sounds change and that is something that you always have to do and I stayed the course and kept making sure that everything sounded different. It's those things that you do. Boy, Mike Chapman writes good songs though, doesn't he?

Oh, absolutely, he's a fantastic songwriter. Worked with a lot of good female artists didn't he?
Yeah.

Absolutely, in fact I was going…, funny you should bring up that producers take their sound with them, you know you only have to listen to Shania Twain and Mutt to know that it's more him than anyone else isn't it?
Don't short-change Shania.

Oh no?
Shania has a lot of stories to tell. And she looks at her stories from a very female point of view and that's definitely not the way Mutt wrote. You know Mutt used to write everything definitely from a guy's point of view. I mean look at songs like 'Heaven in the Back Seat' [Eddie Money] and stuff like that (laughs). And Shania comes up with really great stories. I mean it's really, it's really good. Now, Mutt does have a way of making her sound absolutely fabulous.

Oh absolutely.
His arrangement and concept for a song is spectacular. How it crosses over from genre to genre is totally spectacular.

Yeah, well he brought Def Leppard to the masses didn't he? And AC/DC.
And he almost went crazy doing Foreigner (laughs).

Yeah, Foreigner and The Cars…
But you know, it's one of those things where Mutt is absolutely brilliant.

On this subject - out of your catalogue, there are 2 records that you produced which I think sound exactly the same. They have a really funny sound and I was going to ask you about that, and one of them was the Magnum's Goodnight L.A. album and the other one was Dare's Blood from Stone.
Dare's Blood from Stone?

Yeah. They're both about the same era. They both have the sound…not a muddy guitar sound but a…
It was that time…Magnum Goodnight L.A. and Blood from Stone, Dare was… they were projects where you had a very limited budget, limited time to do. And so a lot of it was, you had to whip it out. And those two particular projects were that way where you really had to cut to the chase on everything. I'll call them marginal record deals.

Yes, OK.
And marginal record deals when they want to record in America, they're traveling, you know, 6000 miles, putting them up. There's airfare, transportation, all of their gear and equipment and then you have this little bit left to go into the studio and try and get an album cut in six weeks. You end up doing things that are not…totally out of the ordinary because there just isn't enough time or on a budget. And those were two albums that were kind of in the same general time frame. There was just no time to do anything different.

In the heyday era like late '87 to '93 kind of time frame, or even earlier, even during the '80s: two questions. Not your personal cut or whatever, but what was the biggest and the smallest production budget you were given by a label?
You now, the band was given. Because I've heard of bands spending millions in the studio making a record then you've heard of other bands doing it on a dime.
The biggest…I always put in for about $150,000 for studio time and I always figured that ought to be able to cover it.

Ok.
Because that's 150 days in the studio. That's six months. Now if you have to have a bunch of outside musicians and stuff like that. You know, budgets usually ended up being about…usually under that. Right around a hundred is what it would end up you'd spend. I mean like Joe Walsh, The Confessor. Are you familiar with that album?

Not that album.
It's a really classic, unique, very creative album where everything is a different approach on every song. And it's really… we took our time, we got incredibly creative with big guitar, small voice. Everything had, every line, every bass line, every drum fill, every part figured out exactly how we wanted to play it, put it in. But it took us three and a half months to do it. Half a million dollar budgets were getting to be quite normal towards the end of, in the early '90s. And I was totally flabbergasted to find out what European studios were charging and getting away with it.
But you know, it's really amazing, all of those studios that were charging that much. Where a band would go in for 8 weeks and get a quarter of a million dollar bill. They're all out of business (laughs). It was the studios that worked with artists and producers and said…where you went in and said, this is how much money I got, take my money. I don't want to have that sort of stuff hanging in my head. Work with me on the budget. You could always do it. And, you'd say that to a studio and then you'd go back and keep going back to them, and over time…Like the hit factory. The hit factory was never about the money, it was about the record.

That's cool.
My own, you know, Goodnight L.A. studios - we would go broke letting a band finish a record. We would profit just one way. That's what happens with those things. The smallest budget, boy I think it was probably Sammy Hagar.

Really!? Which album?
Standing Hampton. I think we cut that album in 37 days. Cut it, overdubbed it, vocalled it and mixed it. That album was pretty low, I think it was like 40 grand or something like that.

Wow. It still was a classic album. So it's not always the budget, it's the songs.
You can do… the Kingdom Come record was done in 21 days.

Really! Tell us about that, I've got that album right here, because that album really caused a stir didn't it?
Yeah (laughs), of course it did.

Was it designed to cause a stir? I mean there was a lot of hype about the Led Zeppelin riff's and the rest of it.
That's all Lenny can do. Lenny can do one thing and one thing only, and that's sing that way.

Well he's never done it better than on that debut, he's never come close if you ask me.
Yeah, anyway, that's all he can do. And his band, geez, James Kottak might as well have been John Bonham. Plays the same way. I don't know if you've ever heard any of James Kottak's solo-project, Krunk.

Yeah, I have actually.
Yeah, it's cool isn't it?
When they go out live, Krunk, he has his wife playing drums, and he's the world's best rock drummer. I mean he really is. And now he's still…, he goes on the road with the Scorpions now.

Yes, Scorpions. But the Kingdom Come album was a pretty amazing record wasn't it?
Yeah, 21 days. Move 'em in, move 'em out. And one of the reasons it was so short was because of Lanny - he was impossible to deal with.

Really? So the sooner the better?
He put down his musicians every minute of every session. “You guys suck! You don't know how to rock and roll.” You know, he was German and he had a very limited vocabulary and he thought he was God.

Really!? Even then he had no track record.
Oh, no. He thought he was God.

It's a great album.
It really rocked.

They had journalists picking apart the album, picking out how may Led Zeppelin riffs were in each song.
I know. You know, there's had never been a really great Zeppelin rip-off band. And here they come! And Kottak was a drummer that I'd known from L.A. because he was just too good, I'd just run into him in clubs and all this stuff. You know he would just blow me away and so I really wanted to work with Kottak more than anything. He was just the best! I mean talk about a guy who can just twist and turn what he's doing and, you know, and he was a total student of Bonham, he just knew everything he ever did, how he played.
But the guy was a great drummer for sessions too. Cause you always need to have a great rock drummer around.

Now you've worked with Rick Springfield...
Yeah, I did a few projects with Rick.

The biggest one obviously being his break-through album.
Yeah I did all of but two songs on that first record.

And then what, the Whole of Success… wasn't it?
The whole of Success… and then Rock of Life. And Rock of Life, I hear is going to be released on CD soon.

Oh really? It's been out of print for a long time.
Yeah, I hear it's going to be re-released.

Great! Re-mastered I hope.
I have no idea. They don't bother talking to any producer because once you deliver it, when you call the producer, it just means it's going to cost more money (laughs).

Fair enough. How did you find working with Rick?
Oh Rick was always really fun to work with. He was always fun and I'd known him, remember Speak to the Sky?

Yes, very much so. Classic Australian.
Well what I did, I worked on that with Robert Jeffrey Campbell and who was the producer?

Robbie Porter?
Yeah, Robbie Porter. And I was brought in by Crystal Studios because I was the only guy in town that knew that desk and could cut anything with a razor blade. Because when they worked up some of it at a studio in London, every track there was a click. And they couldn't get them out. They couldn't get all these clicks out. So I said let's just mix the thing and we'll take out the clicks with a razor blade. And everybody thought I was crazy so I showed them (laughs).

Literally?
Literally how you can take out slivers 1/16 of an inch wide and the click's gone. So I sat in the master room and de-clicked it after working on the mixes. That's when I first met Rick. And Robbie and I said, well this guy's good.

We're talking about a lot of years to break through though.
Yeah, in this country, Rick Springfield got caught up in that whole payola scandal.

Really?!
Well it was with Capital records denying that they ever tried to manipulate charts, manipulate radio. And he was just getting on the scene and was just starting to become a hit.

When was this, '72, '73? I mean you're talking about Speak to the Sky here, right?
Yes. I'm talking about Speak to the Sky. And it was right at that time that they were firing everybody at Capital because they were in the middle of this huge drama that all started when Grand Funk Railroad, when they decided to make the album go gold by pressing up 300,000 units and sticking them in a warehouse. Pretty amazing but they did it! Made the album a smash. Grand Funk Railroad, and they got caught. Al Corey was the guy that got caught. And they were running everybody out of town on a rail. Including Rick Springfield. And so Rick was…

Man that guy…, so sorry to cut in, but he's had some shitty luck with labels (laughs).
Welcome to the record business!
He had this manager named Joe Godfried that said, you know, Rick you got a good looking face, maybe you can act. Sent him off, paid for his rent, bought him some junky car, got him some acting lessons and started taking him to auditions and casting calls. And got him the job on the soap opera, General Hospital. And he became so popular on that thing that all of the sudden he was making money, he was buying a new car and his manager, Joe Godfried, was cool. But Rick always wanted to be a recording artist. Always wanted to be a singer and writer. And so he'd been working on this album at Sound City and the other studio for months and months on the weekends…
I was helping him and he said you've got to do something for me. You've got to build me a studio next door at the radiator shop. And he said OK. And so I went in and it was right around the time I was in the middle of cutting Pat Benatar's first record. In fact it was about two weeks after cutting 'You Better Run' and 'Hit Me With Your Best Shot'.
And on weekends, I would go in. And in two weekends we cut 'Jessie's Girl' and 'I've Done Everything For You' - which I found on an old Sammy Hagar live album. And I thought, well this would be a good song and I said, “Rick, why don't we do this one?” He said, “OK, but I want this other song, one that I wrote.” So I said OK and so we worked on it, came up with the arrangement. I had great players and we cut it in...cut the basics in one day, did all the instrumental overdubs the next day, did all the vocals the third day and mixed it on the fourth day. Two songs and they were both hits.

Yeah, absolutely. And continually played on radio today, still. In fact some press seem reluctant to recognize he's even had more that one hit.
Well yeah, you know…….he had a bunch.

What was the change in working with him maybe ten years later on Rock of Life?
Oh it was great. Rick lived down the block from me in Malibu and we'd run into each other with Liam and my kids at the park. And Barbie and my ex-wife were friends. So it was just one of those things where he thought well maybe I should do it. And did this album and the record company came out and heard the track and they loved it. They were in love with this record.

Really!
And then they listened to the lyrics.

(laughs) Not exactly teen friendly stuff was it?
Well you know, 'Honeymoon in Beirut'….

(laughs) Pretty brutal isn't it?
Well, similar to the same story like with Foreigner with Head Games. They're coming off the Double Vision album, the one I did and we sold seven or eight million copies. They were primed and ready to be superstars. Super-superstars, and they come up with this album with every song basically saying, [off the record!]. 'Women and Fast Cars', 'Head Games'. Look at every one of those songs on that record was so anti-chick. And 75% of Foreigner's audience is female. So you know, I think that album returned gold.

Funny stuff. So the label were listening to the Rock of Life?
Right, well, they heard 'Rock of Life' and thought it was really cool and then they heard the rest of the songs on the record were so depressing. It wasn't 'Jessie's Girl', it wasn't 'Don't Talk to Strangers', it wasn't about teen love, it wasn't about, I love you so much I could die, you know? It was about relationship trouble. Fighting, anger and no passion. Some great arrangements and great playing of some really great melodies and stories that would curl your hair on the back of your neck. They were real good stories, cleverly said. But it takes a chick like Benatar to be able to pull that stuff off, the negativity.

The label didn't really support it, did they?
Well no. The label heard the record and realized that well, he's been on the label now for 10 years, we're done with him.
It was at the point where it cost too much to keep him on the label.

Sad. You hooked up with Lou Gramm again for the Shadow King record, didn't you?
Yeah.

That was a misunderstood record. Even now, any time anybody mentions it on my message board there's like a huge debate. Like 10 people hate it and 10 people love it with a passion.
Well you know what's really good on that record? There's one song in that record that is the most miraculous performance that Lou Gramm has ever given.

Really? What track?
Last track, 'Russia'. That is a reference vocal track I would not let him sing it again. 'Russia' is so good.

A really moody track isn't it?
Oh yeah. Now that's written by Vivian Campbell and Lou. And it's just…will take you away the next time you listen to it. Just let the lyrics take you away.
Listen to how he just, you know…He walked out. After just finishing the lyrics, he walked out. He said, 'I just got to try this once'. And he wanted to sing it again and I wouldn't let him (laughs).

Really?
Yeah. I said 'Oh no. Oh no. There's too much passion in the vocals. He was so relaxed. And he just told the story. It was fabulous.

Fantastic. Do you think… the album really didn't do a lot.
First off, anytime…if you're Lou Gramm, you do a record, you call it Lou Gramm. You don't…He got into this whole thing about wanting to be part of a band. And then the other thing is that he wanted to leave Foreigner. Now, at that time…and he left Foreigner. Now Atlantic is never going to let that album happen. If it had twenty hits on it, they weren't going to let it happen. Because where did they want Lou Gramm? Back in the band. Because Foreigner was a staple for them. Who's that kid that they put in the band?
Johnny something or other.

Johnny Edwards, yeah.
Johnny Edwards.

Didn't work did it?
No. Talented kid. Real talented kid.

So did Shadow King fail because it wasn't called Lou Gramm?
I think that's one reason.
And the other reason is that there were problems within the band. There were emotional hardships going on. Lou was having a really hard time with his wife during it. He was on the West Coast, she was on the East Coast. And Vivian Campbell was just this great player and the rest of the guys in the band were good players, real good players but it really wasn't a band. A bunch of guys playing star. So it didn't come off as a band. So there's a lot of little reasons. A lot of them were about performance. There's that one song on there that just makes hair stand up on your arms, 'Russia'.

You've been a part of Night Ranger's Man in Motion, another under rated classic.
Yes, you know, I always thought that one was going to work better. But it was on Camel Records/MCA and I think they didn't really have enough money to promote it right. It was at the time of independent promotion getting really expensive. Not as expensive as it is today but expensive. Kelly is a real good singer, you know, and I really liked the way he performed and the bass player of…I'm brain dead…, the other singer…

Jack Blades.
Yeah. Yeah, Blades was real good too. I mean they're both really good, and great guitar players, great guitar players. They did, they played so well together. It was great. I really enjoyed playing with that record because they would just walk into the studio and they performed this stuff. It was a band. Oh well. That's the one of the three that didn't go gold.

Yeah, exactly.
One in four so you have to do three others.

I talked to another producer, Eddie Kramer a while back who was sort of in with Eddie Money for a long time and he just had some great, screaming funny stories about Eddie Money to tell. Did you have fun working with him?
Eddie Money, at the time it wasn't fun because he was trying to decide what he wanted to do. He was totally being controlled by PGP Program Presents and he wasn't the crazy man he was. Like when I was working with Santana he was the other act on PGP that was making money. So he was the crazy man and on all the tours. So it was kind of fun.

I think when Kramer worked with him he had some drug stories. Pretty terrible.
Yeah, well you know, I'm trying to stay away from all the drug stories because, you know it was the '70s and '80s. Drugs were a way of life for the entire industry.

Was it really was as pronounced as… drugs were just everywhere?
Oh yeah. Yeah, it was everywhere. I mean it was in… it was how records were promoted, it was how record deals were signed, it was…
When record company presidents, the artists came in town, the record company president would score the drugs for the artists you know (laughs). It was some of the most amazing, amazingly stupid thing you could ever possibly imagine. It has taken its toll. I think the funniest thing though is what I call the Bic syndrome. You do an album with an act and it does really, really well. And this act is out there playing in front of 18,000 people a night. And you know that one time during that concert. Usually right as they're getting ready to leave the stage. 18,000 people flick those Bic lighters and start to scream 'You are the Greatest.' And they walk off stage and then they come back and play a couple more songs and they scream it again. 'You really are the greatest!' And you know, they play 18 months of concerts of which they're playing four days on, three days off. Whew! That's a lot of concerts.

Yeah.
In front of millions of people that are all screaming you are the greatest. And then you get back to the studio to cut your next record and they write some song about this old rotten apple core (laughs). And you suggest that maybe they rewrite that song. And they actually physically and mentally look at me and say 'No, because I am the greatest. How could all those people be wrong?' (laughs)

You came across that a lot?
I think every single act I came across said that one time or another. It happened to them. Because it's human nature. You just have to some how be patient enough. And as you work with artists you find a way where you can say, 'You know, you played that thing when you were tuning up yesterday. Why don't you try putting that line in?' 'Ah, what line?' 'You know it kind of went like this.' (sings some notes). 'Right there, right there. You played it yesterday. It's your line.' 'Ah, how did I play it? Sing that again.' (laughs).

So you have to have a tape rolling at all times then? (laughs)
No, I had my brain tape running. Running at all times. You know, they never played that line when they were tuning up or warming up. But you get them to say, where they can claim it as their own.

Oh Ok, Ok.
You're getting it now.

I'm getting it!
And all of the sudden you get past all of the B.S. I am the greatest syndrome and where they think that it's theirs. They claim it as theirs, they play it. And if it works, great, and if it doesn't work. 'I was wrong. It doesn't go there.' And I take the blame instead of the artist. And you start massaging it. You massage the tunes.

You honestly don't get paid enough for what you do. (laughs)
Oh believe me, I can tell you that, in the immortal words of Don Henley, you can never make enough money. But it is one of those things where I look back today, it was fond memories of some really great times doing what love doing more that anything and that's making music.

Yeah, yeah, fantastic!
So when this buddy of mine, Mark Hopkins, who I met when I was at Mackie, says that he has this friend of his, Paul Bonrud

Oh yeah, yeah.
And he tells me, you know, he's a pretty good guitarist and he asked if I would come over and mentor him through a couple of mixes. What are you going to do? Of course you got to. They're working on an analog non-, no memory, no automation, little analog, cheapo console. Real inexpensive gear. And you know, I'm having the time of my life. It's taking me back to a time when I had to build up every effect, I had to come up with things. I had to… I call it manual-omation. Instead of automation it's manual-omation. And you know, I'm really having a good time. All I'm doing is just mixing this and helping him out. And it's much better than it was before, it's not great. There are some great ideas, really good singer and that makes it fun. But there…it's stuff that they all cut at home. And I've never been involved in a record that's cut at home, ever. So I'm really having fun.

What caused you to stop producing? Did the grunge scene wipe you out as well?
No, I was convinced to record this album with Emerson, Lake and Palmer. And I signed on the dotted line and I had to deliver. Six months later and I was ready to kill myself (laughs). It was the hardest, most involved, most uninspired record that I had ever been on and it totally burned me out and I said, I don't want to do this anymore.

Stress, depression, pressure. Everything that works against you. And so I got a phone call from a guy named Greg Mackie, and I'd heard a little bit about him. And he wanted me to come down and talk. I met him at the studio and we're talking about consoles and so he brought this little tiny 1202 mixer to me and handed it to me. He said, 'Here. Hi, really great to meet you. Here. And I said, 'What's this?' And he said, 'That's the mixer.' And I said, 'No it isn't! That's the mixer.' And I pointed at my 96 track Diad. He laughed and it was kind of tongue in cheek and joking and we spent all afternoon talking about consoles and professional quality components and professional stuff and he dug around in my brain about where I'm not just a user but I know a lot about how they operate, what you want to have. And I know about marketing and I know about… because producing records and producing a product for a manufacturer is pretty much the same. You do your research, you try to get something that the user wants. You do that for a record. You find something that the user wants or the listener wants.

Yeah.
Same thing, so what we did is, he brought me in on the development of the DAB and then he pushed this piece of paper across the table and he said, 'I really want you to come work for me.' I said, 'Get out of here, you can't afford me.' Then I opened up the piece of paper. (laughs)

Yes you can? (laughs)
Well I guess you can, can't you? And he was really used to getting his way. So like a small version of a Bill Gates, getting his way. And he put together this team of super talented people and he wanted to come up with a professional product. Soundscape, IO8, 96, STR, HTR, NDR, Mackie Control, Mackie Control Extender, C4, Baby Huey and a bunch of new stuff that I left there halfway done. But it was stuff that I'd find, stuff that I came up with, did my research, prepared the marketing and the rest.

Fantastic.
So the whole time I'm up here doing it, I'm thinking to myself, “Why am I up here doing this?” Because I know what to do in the studio, I know how to make this stuff synch. This is really fun and I thought it would be a lot less pressure because… I went up as just a consultant and they made me a project manager, then they made me a supervisor then they made me a director and then they made me corporate director of the corporation. And I'm going, I'm not doing what I came up here to do, I'm doing corporate junk. And it was one of those things where I was just another corporate cheese. And I didn't enjoy it so we parted ways. Greg Mackie and I are still very good friends, he was bought out of the company just recently and that's when I decided to leave, because the reason I came up here was for Greg Mackie and Peter Was. So it was time to leave. So for the last two months I've been trying to decide what I want to do and I've been very active here with N.A.R.A.S., National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

Yes.
Grammy people. And I've been voted onto the board of governors up here and was voted to be a national trustee along with Phil Ramone and Al Schmidt and Jimmy Douglas and Jimmy Jam. You know, the guys. The Guys. And so I started becoming more involved in advocacy against illegal downloading and archival and standardization and stuff like that. I became…I've become more and more involved in it. To the point where I'm really involved. I may be going…they may be put me back there and to work full time at N.A.R.A.S.

Where are they based, in L.A.?
In LA, yeah. So you know, keeping me out of the studio is hard to do. But yet at the same time somebody has to look out for all of the guys who are coming up. And the new artists, somebody has to look out for them because for the last 10 years, all of the earlier works, of this generation of new artists that are out there are lost. Gone forever. Because they were done on some computer that won't boot anymore, was saved on an old SCSI drive or the drive won't even turn anymore or it was a single wide, slow SCSI that operating systems don't even touch yet, you know. I know personally that Pro Tools is going to stop supporting any project that was done in Pro Tools 3.0 or earlier.

Right.
And so all these projects, all these songs are lost forever. So it's…who knows when the next person turns on Pro Tools and starts doing their project, is going to be the next big thing that it's going to be, that is going to change our lives. Who's going to be the next Nirvana? And all of the early works are going to not be there. Unless somebody at least knows enough technically, steps up to the plate and somehow protects that music, protecting that art from being lost.

Right.
You know, so it's my advocacy position and it seems like that's where I'm headed. I don't know, I'm so…I'm very passionate about it because I know what has happened to my early works that I did. My God, it's still selling. And it's all still there because it was all on an analog tape and here it is thirty years later and they can still play the analog tape. My God, let me tell you, a CDR, if it's a green CDR…4 to 5 years and that's it.

Really?
Oh yeah. Gone. Because the hydrocarbons are attacking the pits on the green ones. The gold ones they now know that they last seven years. But they still don't know if it's going to last 50 years. I mean look at our heritage, our musical heritage. On analog. It's still there. But if it's on anything…I mean stuff that's being done today on a G-4. In ten years do you think a G-4 will be around?

No, no.
No, there'll be on G-8s and the G-4s will be in the computer junk pile. You know,
look all the stuff that was done on 8-Ms, BA-88s, those things won't synch up or play those tapes in a matter of years from now they will be unplayable. And you know, it's… those are all the works, the early works of some of the best writers out today. All of their early works are on 8-M. They're all going to be in the computer junk pile.

So you're basically trying to get publicity and fix these problems.
Actually what I'm trying to do is …for instance, did you know that if you take all of the unauthorized sites ad add them together (for illegal downloading), and you add up how many songs are downloaded per year and attach a retail price on that, do you know what it is?

It's hard to imagine.
It's 41 billion dollars.

Wow!
Right, this industry today is 26 billion dollars legally. 41 billion dollars of it is…

A lot of money.
Not only is it a lot of money, but anybody I know in the record business, every record company that I've ever dealt with, the people that are in them. By June of this year, 35% of them will be gone.

You know, I've heard about downsizing Sony. Already at work doing it aren't they?

Well how about Time-Warner? Here's AOL/Time-Warner, they had to take a 1.5 billion dollar loss. When they took that loss, they put it on their quarterly statement…big cut back.

Is there a solution to the whole mess?
Yeah, there's many solutions. There are many solutions and part of it is education. Because if a kid on his computer at night, sitting up in his room downloading all of this special, best music that he wants. He doesn't care that it's illegal, he knows it's illegal because he's heard enough about it. But he doesn't care. But you know, it's the law in America that if you download a song for free you are stealing and it's punishable by five years in jail and $250,000 dollars per song. So yes there will have to be some enforcement done, there will have to be some examples made. Too bad but you know, it's out of hand. There are encryption methods that everybody's afraid of doing because they say you're going to piss off the listen. Well the only listener you're going to piss off is the one that can't download for free. But DVD-A is definitively a… you know the DVD-A two sided disc is a way of doing it because you can put a standard CD on one side and the DVD-A on the other side and the DVD-A sounds 5 times better than the CD and it has all this extra stuff on it and DVD players are as cheap as CD players now. And what it will do is it will…OK we're going to be totally compatible but then in three years we're going to stop making the dual sided disc and only have it the single sided disc, the DVD-A. And by doing that every single song, every song is tied to…first off the file size is 5 times bigger and when you tie it within the bit stream to video clips, all these extras, the file size for an album is 5 gigabyte so you have this 40 gigabyte drive in your computer. A gig is your operating system, a bunch of games is another 4 gig so you only have 35 gig left. Oh gee you can have 7 albums.

Not 700 as it is.
Not 7000 like it is now. And you can not, there's just physical file size is one thing, the other thing is the watermarking technologies. The challenge response software that can be put on the front edge of the bit stream. Where for it to play it challenges you to put in a pass code. Your computer can put it in automatically if you got it. If you don't have it, it throws the file away. Unrecoverable data. All sorts of things. There is search tools that the government has been using to scan the internet for keywords like MP3. Bang! Or any song title you can scan them and find the files. The internet is not anonymous. There's an IP address to everybody.

Let's talk about something just briefly, I've been on the phone here a while so I'll let you go, you've been great, but let's talk about something that I'm doing for example on my site, I put 1 minute edits up on just about everything and people love that, you know, to sample it. But every month I do 6 full songs. Not new releases, I just do sort of revisiting the classic tunes to promote the artists and folks love it.
Do you have the licenses for those songs?

No I don't. I've been doing it since I've started so in essence that's, what I'm doing is obviously…
You're pirating.

Yeah.
If you enable somebody else to download it and keep it. Now is it just being able to be heard or is it able to be downloaded?

No, it's an MP3 downloadable. And I basically…
Why don't you make it something that can just be heard but not downloaded?

I might have to, I might have to. I basically put it there saying, hey, here's a song off this classic album, it you like it, go buy the album.
Well you know, the thing is, is that a song or a part of a song or something like that, you know that's not the problem. The problem is the file sharing. Kazza. Kazza has 2.8 million people on their file sharing at any one time.
Are file sharing at any one time, at any instance of any day. Isn't that amazing.
1.6 million copies of their software is downloaded every week.
And what are they getting out of it? Banner ads. And let me tell you, they're selling those banner ads like crazy. And they're killing the music business.
For the price of a banner ad.

The purpose of my site is to generate interest in albums so people go out and buy them.
And that's what you're doing. And you know, there are ways that… We need to embrace what you're doing and the record industry on a whole needs to embrace what you're doing.

Unfortunately I talk to…, it's great talking with indie labels and independents but I talk to a major label and it's like, 'internet, no sorry.' And they hang up on me (laughs).
Well yeah, the reason why is because it's stealing their jobs. The internet today is taking their jobs.

Right.
See, the only sales channel that the…Where does the record industry get the 28 billion dollars worldwide that they get today? Where do they generate that money?
Believe it or not, most of it is in the record store. Their retail channel. That sales channel is what they're paying themselves, they're paying their infrastructure, their admin. costs and they're paying signing costs, their legal costs, manufacturing costs. Everything is all from retail purchase. Now in this day and age, if you want a record that is only available in Southern California, you can't hop into your car and go down and get it, you're a little bit too far away. But you can download it because it's convenient. It's easy. You can also download the cover, print it and get the jewel box. Put together the whole package. But the record companies don't want to do that because they're so scared of rocking the old apple cart. Because their retail channel is 27 billion dollars strong.

Yeah.
If they start selling it on the internet themselves, their retail channel gets upset. So the retail channel then says well I want special deals. I want to be able to sell this record for $11 instead of $17.98 so I can keep the customers coming in here. Because when you buy the real thing, you're buying the experience, you're buying an event. You want to buy the whole album. You want to have the proper printing, the same sequence, all that stuff and the higher quality that you get on CD than for MP3s. And you get a glass stamped mass product instead of a CDR that the first time you scratch it, it will never play again.

Yeah.
But you can't afford the real thing and it costs you a dollar to download it and fake it on us. It costs you a buck. But if you buy the real thing, $17.98. So we have to figure out how to pull in margins and get a lower price retail product. We're starting to like $11.00, $10.99.

That would be great.
Because kids today know that they can make their own for a buck.

Yeah.
So the record companies are making it for a buck so how can they mark it up ten times? Just because it has some ink on the top.

It's a complex issue isn't it?
It's a very complex issue that is going to take a lot of work. And that is why Bill Portnau has spent a bunch of time talking with me this last week. He and I had a meeting talking about how we can do this. Bill Portnau, president and CEO of N.A.R.A.S.

Right.
Because Hillary Rose has stepped down from the RIAA. And so who is going to take up the fight? And it looks like it's gong to be N.A.R.A.S. And so there's a lot of issues, there's a lot of remedies. A lot of them and it's…, got to look at the remedies that the film industry is doing and apply it to records. Because it's keeping the film industry in business. Not too many people downloading a DVD movie. Which they're all available on Kazza or Morpheus. Everything's available. You can just download it. But who wants to have that movie? Because it's a bigger fine. It's a $100,000 and ten years in jail. Or no it's $250,000 and ten years I think. But there's a big FBI warning on the front (laughs). In red ink.

That's always alarming!
Yeah, you push play on any VCR and there it is. FBI warning. Now on a record, you know where it says anything about it? In very small print at the bottom it says, 'all rights reserved'.

Yeah (laughs). What does that mean?
That's it! You know that's the first problem. Let's start and… you know how we've trying to teach kids to not do drugs, not to smoke. But it takes a generation. Record industry doesn't have a whole generation.

Yeah. Well this has sprung up in like 4 years hasn't it? Three years or five years.
Well we put Napster out of business and as soon as Napster went out of business, then there was Morpheus, Kazza and so it was over the last 3 years that they've all come in. And I know that I see my royalties going down.

Really?
Drastically.

Seriously?
Yep. And it's not as bad as the new artists. New artists, because kids that are downloading stuff are downloading new product. They aren't really downloading classics. But I've seen an 18% reduction.

Wow! Ok.
You know, when Napster was happening I saw 18% less. Napster went under, the royalties rose again.

It's interesting to hear 1st hand the experience of somebody who's been involved in different eras – and different sides of the great machinery of the industry.
There's so many things that can be done and not any 1 will solve the problem.

Yeah, but a whole bunch will.
It will be all of them. Look at what Microsoft does on a daily basis. It's unbelievable.

Really?
It's unbelievable what they do. They have a whole department, a whole building - that's all they do. The record industry doesn't have that. They have a Chief Technology Officer and a couple of lawyers. That is not going to get it done. You've got to approach it the same way, because we're talking computers here. The person I would team up with and make this thing work... I would go down to Redmond. I'd get in my car and drive to Redmond and have a meeting with Bill Gates. That would be the first place I'd go, and I'd become aggressive about it. But I would also team up with the person in the company that operates the operating system for 98% of the computers in the world.

Ok…that's what the music's getting played on and downloaded on.
Yeah, it's all working on Windows. That's where I'd go first and I'd start having a forum, because they have a whole division of their company that protects them. They're losing billions too. But it's a lot better now and that's why they started this thing up. It costs a lot of money to do it and that's what they're doing.

Well, look, that's probably a pretty good point to leave it where I sort of had stuff to ask you about. Can I ask you a favor?
Yeah.

You've touched on a lot of really interesting stuff that I know will get some people thinking and some conversations going. Maybe we could do a follow-up Q&A for those that have questions arising from what we have discussed here today.
Yes, happy to.
I've got a book happening too by the way.

Fantastic. Tell me about it.
It's not a "Tell All" book, it's not a "How To" book, it's a book about just thoughts on how to create music. It's a production series and this is Volume 1. It starts from the beginning of the elements that are in hit records and the song and performance and sound like we talked about here. But it does it in great length and great detail.

Right.
And it talks a bit about the recording process. Recording at home, and can you do it and what's going on. Scenarios that seem to happen more than not. And then it goes into, okay so now you're going to record it at home, let's start at the beginning and talk about the source. Then it talks about microphones and placement and what do you record on, what are you doing, how are you going to record the most important element, what hat are you going to wear. And it goes on and on and on. And then it goes through the competition. The competition is fierce and collaboration is cool and how to protect yourself with copyrights and how to protect yourself against downloading -- which you really can't today, but people hopefully will by the time the book comes out.

That's going to be an interesting read.
It's a real interesting read. It's a fun read. It's not... it doesn't get too boring when it comes to technical stuff. It's more about trying to plant the seed in people's minds of how to do it their way. Not telling them that there are any rules, but giving them the rules to start of to because if you know the rules then you can break them.

Yes.
It's an entertaining book, but very informative for a someone before he goes out and spends $20,000 to record an album. It's almost done. I'm in my second re-write right now.

I look forward to that, because I do know a lot of young bands would probably find that handy.
It will be incredibly handy for anybody who's thinking about getting into this business or wants to have a home studio or record at home or record his own album or anything. It's going to be so handy before he spends a bunch of time and energy to learn a little bit about the stuff.
Where to get help, where you can do it yourself, where you don't need help. It's fun. It's a fun read and a good read.
I'm going to do that little bit of that self promotion and when it comes out I'll make sure you get a copy and you read it. If you like it, you can start sticking stuff up on your web site.

Awesome. You can count on it.
I would love to get a quarter of a million knowing about it a month.

Thank you, Keith. I appreciate it. I could talk to you endlessly and I could probably go on all day but this has been great.
Thanks again and we'll do that follow up if any questions come back.
That would be great. Well thank you very much.


If you have any questions arising from this interview - e-mail them in, or just let me know how you enjoyed the read!

More information:

Keith Olsen Bio:
Keith Olsen is an industry celebrated producer of such notable artists as: Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner, Pat Benatar, Rick Springfield, Santana, The Babys, Sammy Hagar, Whitesnake, Ozzy Osborne, The Scorpions, Heart, just to mention a few. His many soundtrack albums include: Footloose, Flashdance, Tron, Vision Quest, Top Gun, That Was Then-This Is Now and many more. See:
He produced and engineered more than 125 full albums garnering a 1 in 4 gold album ratio and was awarded 6 Grammy's. He has sold over 100 million units at retail.
During the late 90's he was headhunted by Mackie Designs, a pro audio equipment manufacturer, to design, develop, and define higher end very professional products for their newly started Mackie Broadcast Professional Division.
Being an advocate on issues concerning the industry, its problems and challenges, he ran for the Board of Governors for the Pacific Northwest Branch of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. He was elected to the post of National Trustee of NARAS in 2001. From this position he has had ever increasing visibility is areas of Intellectual Property Rights, Illegal Copyright Theft, and archival of past works. Being in close communication with noted alliances for the structuring and preservation of these rights, Olsen has worked tirelessly toward solutions to benefit all property rights owners. The purpose of archival so as to not lose the early works of the current generation of artists is currently the focus of Mr. Olsen's work.

Keith Olsen Discography @ All Music Guide: www.allmusic.com

Heartland's Steve Morris and Chris Ousey discuss the band's cracking new studio album Move On. Steve is highlighted in green and Chris in blue.

G'Day Chris and Steve,
Great to take this opportunity to talk to you about the smashing new Heartland album - one which I have a lot of enthusiasm for.

Chris - to you first - not too many people are still in the business closing in on 20 years since their debut album. We all know this business doesn't work on talent alone - how have you managed to stay in it for so long?
Has it been that long? That's truly scary, but I don't think a passion for music can ever be discarded. I also class myself as very lucky that there's always been people interested enough in what I do, to want to help and encourage me to continue.

I know I certainly hold this opinion, but do you consider yourself unlucky not to have broken into a wider audience and acclaim? You have a great standing within the melodic rock community, but with a voice such as yours, I think you are unlucky not to be a household name.
It's nice of you to put it like that, and it can be a little frustrating at times not to reach a wider audience. However it's impossible to be in control of that side of things, so you soldier on and hope the ripples will continue to spread outwards.

Steve - you have had an equally colourful career working with major labels and also major names such as Ian Gillan. You have also tasted success - do you prefer life as you have it now - busy always on different projects, but somewhat less intense than life under the pressure of a major label or artist?
I really enjoy working with Ian Gillan. I have written 3 albums with him, and a fourth is ongoing. Recently I played some guitar on a project with him, that looks back on his 40 years on the road. ['Gillan's Inn'] He's re-recording his old classics with such people as Joe Satriani, Jeff Healy, Ian Paice, Jon Lord, Don Airey and a host of other names, so it was an honour to be asked.
I re-recorded 'Loving on Borrowed Time', a number I co-wrote with him on the
'Naked Thunder' record. And also played 'Smoke', as did all the guitarists.
It's gonna be a killer record.

Or do I have it wrong - is it equally as pressurized no matter who you are creating for?
There is no pressure at all doing things like that, as all the people are so cool to work with. With 'Heartland' it's a different thing as not so many people will hear it.
Which is a shame as it's such a good record. So any positive vibes from it is a bonus.

Chris, you started out with Virginia Wolf on Atlantic and then Heartland on A&M Records in 1991, do you think your career and perhaps even your sanity were saved by the advent of the Independent label?
When Heartland parted company with A&M I did consider going to college to study psychology. At that time Khalil from Escape Music approached me and it seems I didn't need much persuading to get back in the saddle again.

What do you think might have been an alternative path for you after Heartland were dropped from A&M?
There's no way I'd still be writing and recording this style of music, if I'd had to continually rely on the support of a major record company. It's made it more possible for writers to have a greater say in their direction.

You have been with Khalil since Wide Open on Long Island Records and with Escape Music since Heartland 3. It's obviously a very strong relationship. I love sparring with Khalil, he is one of the most passionate music lovers in this business - what about you - do you creatively spar and argue over the direction of the band?
Steve and I have worked with Escape for a long time now, and though there are always going to be differences of opinions, I'm always right!....only kidding. The main thing is we always put the interests of the band first.

How about you Steve? You work with Khalil on several projects for Escape - you also seem to have a good understanding of what is required and/or desired by the label.
I have to say I prefer working at the very top, because of that fact. But playing guitar and recording music is no problem at all. Whoever it is with.
I enjoy working with Khalil, because he is so enthusiastic about our music. Sometimes we have to rope him in a bit as his passion obscures things particularly if he doesn't like the sound of some of the demos. But on the whole he sees the broad picture, a lot more than a regular A&R guy at a major.

Chris, you have been working with Steve for some time now - how would you describe what he brings to the band?
Steve is a truly accomplished musician and is the more organized side of the writing duo. When he sends me a backing track there's rarely any need to juggle the thing around. It's usually all there musically. I hope I then bring emotion to the proceedings and I like to think I've a good ear for a lyrical and melodic hook. After working together for this length of time, we have a good idea from the start where a song is heading.

What is the song writing process for you guys - separately or collaborative?
Steve sends me a few musical ideas and I work at my place to try and flesh out the tunes lyrically. Then I'll travel up to the studio and we'll rough out a demo. If it's working at that stage Steve will refine things and then it's into the main studio for drums, bass, vocals and guitar overdubs.

I always come up with the initial musical idea, which Chris will then add a rough lyric to We will then record a demo, to see how it is shaping up. If it looks promising we will then arrange it and polish it before re-recording a master.

To jump forward, I think each album has shown slight improvements each time, with Communication Down a highlight - but Move On seems to be a major jump forward again.
As regards 'Move On', we didn't set out to record anything in a different way, but the sound of the record changed when Tommy Hansen mixed it. He brought a freshness to the sound. But I also think the songs are stronger.

When formulating a plan for this album - what did you guys discuss?
We wanted some strong band sounds and heavier grooves on this record. I wanted to sing out a little more and we where looking for some gritty, ampy guitar sounds. Other than that I think an album kind of has a life of its own.

I must give huge props for the energy of the record. It seems the band gets a little heavier each release, but this one seems tight as hell. Credit to whom for that?
I'd say a lot of the credit for this being a tight album has to go to Steve for setting up some very strong guitar grooves from the outset. Also Mathias really holds down the bottom end on bass.

And best of all I think - some of the best songs ever on this album. And choruses!! Great choruses, which is something I have previously mentioned you guys could improve on. But this album has some killer choruses. What's your secret? :)
I tried to keep verses and bridges simpler on this record, leaving the strongest melodies for the main chorus lines. I think the contrast between the two make the songs work.

Something that stands out for me is the delivery of the choruses - the vocal arrangements and the extra pomp and harmonies surrounding all the vocals on the album. I'm told the guys from Grand Illusion helped out in this regard. Can you walk us through that?
Had a lot of fun recording the backing vocals in Sweden with Peter and Per (Grand Illusion boys). I'd finished all my lead tracks which always brings a sense of relief, so the sessions were very relaxed. In the past I've tended to do most of my own harmonies, and maybe not always given them the attention they've maybe deserved.
Anders did a great job directing and arranging.

I mentioned that the band has got increasingly heavier - or at least tighter on recent albums. Do you envisage yourselves getting any heavier?
There may be a limit to how far you can go and still pack a lot of melody into a song. Don't think I'd want to compromise on melody just to heavy things up. Having said that, if the two things can walk hand in hand then there would be no problem.

This is a myth. I have this argument with Khalil all the time. I don't care about getting heavier, but I do care about writing good songs, and if the song requires a bit of beef, all well and good. But not for the sake of making a 'heavy' record.

Chris, your vocals on the new album are some of your best and most powerful ever. Especially the extended high notes towards the end of several tracks. How did you warm up for this album?
I recorded all my lead vocals in just over four days, so I had to be careful to warm up well before heading off to the studio. I use a warm up tape which takes me around half an hour and usually freaks out the maids cleaning the adjoining rooms.

Have you Chris ever thought of returning to the style of the Heartland debut, which remains the only album you have recorded in that lush keyboard drenched AOR style?
I'm pretty happy with where the band are right now musically and don't really see the point in trying to recreate the first record.

Now...Heartland HAVE to perform live...this album is too good not to at least give it an airing via a few shows...is there any possibility of this happening? Perhaps a live CD/DVD at some stage?
I miss live work a lot and I for one would love to get out and gig. I'm going to be pushing hard for some live dates to promote this album.

Chris, what do you work on in the down time between Heartland albums? Do you have anything coming up in 2005 or even next year?
I'm working at the moment on what may end up going out as a solo record towards the autumn. It's early days with it but I'm enjoying getting the material together.

What are the chances of a new Distance album? Kenny has been locked away for far too long...time for him to get out again.
Well I'm going to be busy getting songs together for my record for a little while…I hope to be able to confirm some live work in the not too distant future also.

Steve - you are always busy...tell us about your current work on the new Change Of Heart album. I'm told it's going to be a good one!
I am in the middle of writing the new Shadowman record with Steve Overland. It's sounding really good. Strong songs with a different approach than the last one. A bit more rockier. I am also finishing off the 'Change of Heart' production of their new album which is sounding very good indeed.

What are the immediate plans for Heartland and the long term plans?
Heartland is always my major project so Steve and I will continue to write together, and look towards our next release.

Does it frustrate you both at all to see such great music ignored by mainstream media? There are so many great albums in this genre that you just know so many people would dig - but never get the chance to hear.
Do you just accept that and do what you can, or does it still bug you? (It bugs me!! haha)
I think I've probably accepted that there's always going to be a lot of great music out there that won't always get the airing it may well deserve.
On the other hand it's gratifying to get feed back from fans. It's what makes the effort involved in writing and recording worth while.

I don't get frustrated at all about mainstream media neglecting melodic rock. Why should they. People who buy CD's (10-18 yr olds) aren't interested in a form of music that has had it's heyday. So I accept that if we can reach anybody under the age of 20, we're doing bloody well.
But what bugs me is England. Its so fashion oriented. I was talking to Birgitt from 'Rock it' [German rock mag], and she says the German charts are much more objective. Now that really annoyed me.

It's been great catching up again and I appreciate your time to do the interview. Look forward to doing this again!
Thanks for your interest

Jeff Northrup talks over his recent work on the MR.com CD, plus Shortino/Northrup, working with Johnny Edwards and much more...

So Jeff, you have just finished mastering my own CD Compilation - after doing a great job on Volume 1. Thanks again. Can you walk us through the mastering process?
First of all, thanks for letting me be a part of such a great collection of songs and artists!!
Mastering is definitely the icing on the cake so to speak, of making a good mix sound even better. After a song has been mixed, there are usually some frequencies that are fighting each other for their space in a song. i.e, the bass guitar may be in the same frequency as the kick drum, or there might be too much low end from the guitars fighting with the bass. What this causes is the song to sound a bit muffled in the low end of sound.
By isolating these unwanted frequencies, you can sort of weed out the ones that are less desirable which makes that part of the mix sound clearer. The same goes for the high frequencies. There may too much high end or not enough.
It is also possible to make in instrument such a guitar that was mixed to low to stand out more by boosting only a narrow bandwidth that enhances it and therefore makes it perceived to be louder. Then there comes the compression. By compressing the entire mix and or certain frequencies, everything becomes not only louder, but makes the mix sound more even. The kick drum and bass will get punchier, the guitars get crunchier and everything finds its place in the mix. However, it is just as easy to make a good mix sound bad if there is too much re-equing or too much compression/limiting. It is truly an art to make a good mix sound great and compete with the CDs that we all purchase in stores, or online.

What are the most challenging aspects of this aspect of recording and why is it so important to get it right?
The most challenging part is not to add or take away too many frequencies because the mix will become either too bottom heavy and blow out your speakers, or too thin and make the mix weak. Same with the high end. Too much and it rips out your ear drums, too little and the mix won't shine. It's very important to get it right because this is the final product going to the masses. Or if it's a demo you want to get the best sound before it hits the ears of the Record Labels.

To those that may not be as familiar with this process, when a label talks of having the original music re-mastered, what does that mean and how can it improve the quality of the recording?
Labels that want something re-mastered usually do it because it was mastered a while ago and today's mastering is a bit more advanced. Generally, you want to get the original mixes (pre-mastered) and work with those. Because most older mastering sounds a little duller than today's and that they mastered records at lower levels than today, by re-mastering you get a punchier, clearer and superior sound.

You are also an accomplished producer - do you find it hard to "produce" yourself, or wouldn't you have it any other way?
Actually, producing myself is too easy. I wouldn't mind having a co-producer or a great producer step in and take over. A lot of magic happens that way and others will often times have ideas that enhance a song that I might not have thought about.

You also have a song included on my new Compilation release, another cracking rocker featuring vocalist Johnny Edwards. You were working with Johnny on an album - what happened to that and is there any chance some tracks will be released? Or maybe the album will be finished one day?
Johnny is one of the greatest and relatively unknown singers. A few years back he moved back to Kentucky with his wife and kids to really start over and get away from the music biz.
I talked to him about doing a record and he was excited. After recording some songs (one of which is the song on MR.com V2), we had a deal and contract on the table. Johnny decided shortly after this that he just didn't have the time or desire to continue. It is a shame, but I have to respect where he is coming from. There a few songs from these recordings that are on the Shortino/Northrup "Afterlife" CD. And no, there probably will not be any future CD with Johnny.

Was the from the archives release of the original Northrup album with Johnny a success? It was certainly met with favorable reviews.
It was a success in that it got a lot of attention and brought me back into the minds of those who knew of me and into the CD players of those who hadn't. I gained a lot of new fans from it.

Let's talk about the new Shortino/Northrup release. It's second time around for you and Paul. How did you get started on this release? And why was it 10 long years since the last album together?
Well, Paul and I had been in touch for quite a while and we always talked about another record. I had just finished recording the XYZ "Letter To God" CD with Terry Ilous. We recorded drums at Paul's studio. Again we talked some more. After Johnny Edwards bowed out of doing the record.....whalah! It was the perfect situation and the timing was right. I started writing a lot of new songs and we incorporated the songs I wrote with Johnny and it wasn't long before we had the songs for the album. It did take ten years due to timing and the fact we both were doing other projects.

The original Shortino/Northrup was also recently re-released. That's a very nice little package, with the bonus tracks etc...Afterlife is a very moody and lyrically dark and descriptive album. Where did the songwriting influence come from for this album?
Well, except for the songs that were lyrically written by Johnny, I wrote everything else. Unfortunately I was going through a divorce after 18 years and was very depressed. Therefore a few of the songs are specifically about that. Kind of a healing process. The song "Like A Stone" was written as a goodbye song to my ex.
I try not make my lyrics generic, so I put things more metaphorically and poetically. However, there are a few songs that have nothing to do with that subject. Until the album was finished, I didn't really realize that it was as dark as it turned out. But I have to admit that the final result is something we are all proud of!!! There are some kick ass jams on too.

Do you plan on starting work on the next album any time soon? What do you have in mind for the next album, when it comes?
Oh yeah!! I have already begun the writing process. The next record is gonna be a mother F*&^%r. I am going to let it all hang out with some killer rock. I haven't decided who to work yet. Hey, if there are any singers, bassists etc. that are interested in being a part of it and collaborating, I would love to hear from you!!! Any suggestions anyone???

You also hooked up with Terry Ilous several years back. How did you originally get started?
I was originally being set up to replace Marc Diglio back in 1993 when he first left the group XYZ, but they had just found someone else. When they finished the tour, Terry contacted me and we still together today on various things.

The Cage album is rather underrated I think. Any chance that could be re-issued?
Yes. Terry and I have discussed re-mastering and re-releasing Cage with some bonus songs.

As XYZ, you managed to record a great hard rock record that was also quite contemporary. Were you happy with the results from that album and the fan response?
I am very happy with the record "Letter To God". There are some fantastic tracks on it. Everyone played and sang their asses off. Terry wanted it to be a little more modern than the previous XYZ and it is. As far as fan response, it was about what I thought it would be. Very mixed. Some loved it, some thought it was a bit too different.

Might you do another XYZ album soon - and if so, what have you discussed with Terry as far as style for this album?
We have discussed doing another album soon. I'm not sure he wants it to another XYZ record though. We'll have to see. What do you fans out there think????

You are right in the middle of this melodic rock scene as it stands today - complete with the challenges of corporate changes and file sharing etc....where do you see things going?
I really believe that the Melodic Rock scene will always be around. I do see a slight shift in music here in the states with bands that actually incorporating some of that sound! A lot of people just prefer to hear great music, vocals and guitar playing. As far as where it's going, boy even the record companies are still trying to figure this out. Perhaps a lot more bands will be trying release there stuff from there web sites and get independent distribution!

Is it important for the artist to remain in ownership of their own music?
Definitely. Especially if an occasion such as getting one or more songs placed movies, television etc. Without retaining your rights you are screwing yourself. We artists get screwed enough as it is.
XYZ for example did their own release of the album for the USA.

What about the other project you are working on - the 11:11 project. Can you describe that to us?
The 11:11 Project is a little bit different than what people are used to hearing from me. It's balls out music, but it's definitely more modern. Sort of Nine Inch Nails meets the Beatles. A bit psychedelic even. It's the only recording I have done where I am singing and playing all of the instruments. I am very proud of it. It was signed and ready to be released here in the states, but the label went bankrupt just before.

Outside of music you have some interesting hobbies...tell us about the dinosaur bone hunts!
I have been infatuated by dinosaurs since I was 5. I studied them and learned about paleontology and digging bones. I did my first dig about a year ago and am going on my third dig this month!! I have quite a collection now.

Anything else in the back of your mind you would like to tell us about Jeff?
As long as there people all over the world that appreciates and is buying killer music, I will continue putting out great product. I don't see an end to it in the near future!!

And is there anything you would care to add?
Yes. Thanks to everyone who supports Rock music!! Without you, you wouldn't be reading this now. Also, thank you Andrew for having this great web site for people to come to and be able to not only find great bands and read the latest on Melodic Rock and other styles of music, but also be able to discuss it (and have interesting posts) amongst each other. It is also a huge benefit to us artists!!

Plug your web site Jeff - where do we find you?
Please visit my web site at www.jknorthrup.com. Drop me an e-mail, sign the guestbook and find out a little more about me. I also have a page where you can reach me about Mastering, mixing and recording. To all the musicians out there, if you would like to contact me about collaborating (writing/recording/mastering etc.) on a record, I would to hear from you too!!!!

Thanks again for taking the time out to "chat"!
Peace!