Author Archives : Dana

RATT DRUMMER BOBBY BLOZTER SAYS THAT GUITARIST WARREN DIMARTINI’S EFFORTS TO ISSUE A TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER AGAINST USING THE BAND’S NAME HAS BEEN DENIED

Ratt drummer Bobby Blotzer has just issued the following statement exclusively to Bravewords.com:

“Hi Ratt n Rollers:

Just popping in with a tad bit of Ratt news, for my brain’s own release.

On Sept. 30th, Warren Deanmartin filed a request for a temporary restraining order to keep his 50% business partner and co-owner of WBS, INC. (Ratt) from taking the business out of the red and into the black, while bringing the fans a great show, to preclude me from taking the reins in the corporation, and touring under the Ratt banner.

On October 2nd, we were downtown in Los Angeles County Superior Court for the hearing that Mr. WD filed for a T.R.O. (temporary restraining order) which was denied on all issues.

Although this is just the appetizer, as Mr WD will seek an order for an injunction on the same issues based on the same laws and using the same evidence as he used in his unsuccessful attempt at the restraining order.

In my positive quest to keep business doors open wide, we believe the same outcome will prevail regarding the injunction request.

Oddly, Warren’s claim that the musicians in Ratt are as he put it ‘imposters and a tribute band.’ Well then Warren, answer this question, what does that make you after touring with an array of non original musicians including Robbie Crane on bass, Jizzy Pearl on lead vocals, and John Crabby on rhythm Guitar for 7 years as Ratt? Not to mention other temporary musicians including Keri Kelli & Michael Schenker not withstanding.

In the wake of our recent ‘Ratt’ fan filmed performances that have been widely viewed on YouTube & every major rock website, our current singer Josh & the entire band have been welcomed by the fans with open arms. Most comments state that after seeing the videos Josh is better than Pearcy now or even in his prime. Ratt fronted by lead singer Josh Alan along with the entire band including Doc Ellis, Blaze, Scotty Griffin & myself yours truly, have a 99% approval rating from commenters on rock sites where they are known to bash anyone and anything.

Just like a gum drop from the Candy King himself ‘what goes around, comes around.’

First Battle won, I like the odds. Best to all, even Warren!

Robert John Blotzer

October 5th 2015.”

source: bravewords.com

DEF LEPPARD GUITARIST PHIL COLLEN SAYS THE BAND HAS MORE IN COMMON WITH DURAN DURAN THAN IRON MAIDEN

Jamie Blaine of Salon spoke with Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen. Portions of the interview appear below.

Salon: So what’s the key to playing guitar with your shirt off at age 57 & still looking great?

Phil Collen: It’s a really easy fix but no one’s prepared to do it, y’know? Eating right and not drinking alcohol. Or if you are drinking, not much of it. And being a bit active. Honestly, it’s that simple. It amazes me no one will do that!

Salon: Yeah, but you’re not just fit, you’re jacked.

Phil Collen: When I was lifting heavy I would have a vegan protein powder, and I still do occasionally but I try to balance it out. I’ve always done a lot of martial arts and I take a kick bag on tour and do a lot of drills so that keeps me loose and supple and basically young. That’s the fountain of youth part. I actually screwed my back up a few months ago and I could only do two things that didn’t hurt — push-ups and pull-ups on a bar. So that’s all I did with some really light crunches. I’ve been doing this a lot of years so I’ve been able to figure out what works and what does not. You can get away with a lot less, just by tweaking it here and there.

Salon: My wife and I watched the In the Round DVD recently. How were multi-tracked masterpieces likePyromania and Hysteriarecreated so faithfully? I heard you didn’t use tracks.

Phil Collen: Ah, In the Round! No [recorded] backing vocals, no tracks. Every member of this band is a bad-ass singer and we thought it was a cop out out to rely on tracks.

Salon: You guys are working double up, every song on that show. Rick Savage is singing harmony, playing bass, guitar, keyboards, samples….

Phil Collen: Here’s a fun story for you. When we recorded Love Bites we were never in the same room at the same time. We all sang on it but most of the backing vocals were Mutt Lange, he’s the one you hear more than anyone else and Mutt’s an amazing singer.

So we release the album and Love Bites goes to Number One. We’d never played it! It was so hard to work out how to play guitar and sing those parts at the same time. We had to come up with hybrid parts because before, where there had been eight guitar parts — you had to choose the most prominent ones and make a collage of sorts. Same thing with the vocals. I remember we had two days off but instead of taking the downtime we actually went into a studio just to practice that song and try to work it out. Again, it goes back to that thing: you want to be proud of your work. We were and we are.

Salon: After In the Round, we watched Duran Duran’s Arena. I always thought you two were similar: because you were considered teen idols, no one realized what incredibly adept musicians both bands were. So it was very interesting that there was talk of a Duran Duran / Def Leppard supergroup.

Phil Collen: That was when I used to drink so it was one drunken night in Tokyo, but absolutely I do think we had a lot more in common with Duran Duran than a lot of the other rock groups. I think that’s the thing, being open to different styles of music. When people ask me what Def Leppard sounds like I say, imagine a rock version of Earth, Wind & Fire with all their melodies and grooves. So yeah, I’d say we had more in common with them than say, Iron Maiden.

Salon: Iron Maiden’s Adrian Smith was nearly the guitarist in Def Leppard. What would that have been like?

Phil Collen: Well, he’s coming into our house so it’s still gonna be the Def Leppard sound. When Vivian Campbell joined, a lot of people asked how he would change our style. What Viv brought was some really killer vocals. I think that’s more noticeable than the guitars.

Salon: I was talking with Eddie Trunk recently and we got on the subject of Def Leppard teaming with Mutt Lange again. Eddie’s opinion was that you guys probably didn’t want to go through that rigorous of a recording process in this day and age. But you did some tracks with Mutt recently, right?

Phil Collen: About two years ago, yeah, but they haven’t come out yet. Mutt is even more talented now than he was back when we were all working together. The guy is just amazing. Hopefully those songs we did will come out soon. I think Def Leppard could work together with Mutt again. Maybe a song or something. Mutt brings out things in you that you didn’t even know were there. Totally inspiring.

Salon: I’ve been listening to Let’s Go [click here to listen] this week. What can you tell us about the new LP?

Phil Collen: For the first time ever in our career we don’t have a record company or anyone to please but ourselves. Let’s make a record for us. Initially we went in to just make a single but the ideas started flying and we really felt we had something to say. We didn’t even know we were making an album. It was shocking to us. One song sounds Top 40, another sounds like the Sex Pistols and then another very classic Def Leppard. I think it’s the best thing since Hysteria.

Read more at Salon.

source: salon.com

MEMBERS OF SEVENDUST AND CANDLEBOX RAISE MONEY FOR FUND FOR BULLIED TEEN WHO COMMITTED SUICIDE

October is National Bullying Awareness Prevention month and to help raise awareness for this epidemic, Le Projet, the band featuring members of Candlebox, Sevendust and The Infinite Staircase, has launched a multi-tiered anti-bullying initiative to support the Brandon Bitner Memorial Scholarship.

Brandon Bitner committed suicide at the age of 14 after being bullied for four years and was an avid music lover.

As part of the campaign, Le Projet and Candlebox lead singer Kevin Martin has filmed a personal PSA about his own experience with bullying and explains why he wrote Le Projet’s ultimate anti- bullying song “Little Sh#ts”.

The band has also partnered with Event Hustler to develop T-shirts with the hash tag #WHATYOUSAY?, which is the chorus to Little Sh#ts reminding everyone that what they say has an impact on others, to support the scholarship fund. Portions of every sale will be donated directly to the Brandon Bitner Memorial Scholarship.

According to Martin, he felt compelled to write “Little Sh#ts” after learning of another tragic suicide like Bitner’s.

“I was inspired by a story I had read about a young girl who committed suicide because she had been emotionally bullied via social networking sites and her cell phone by several kids in her school. I remember feeling such sadness not only for her family but for every kid that I began to read about that was dealing with the same thing,” said Martin. “My first thought was ‘how can people be so cruel to one another?’ My second thought was ‘You have to write a song about this!’ I tried to put a face to these bullies but all I could give them was a name. ‘Little Sh#ts!’I think it fits.”

To order a T-shirt, please click here. For more information about the Brandon Bitner Memorial Scholarship, please visit brandonbitner.org/scholarship.

Little Sh#ts is available for digital download on all major online retailers, including iTunes. Additionally, a special limited edition 7 Inch Split Single Vinyl is now available through the band’s Facebook Page.

In addition to Martin, Le Projet comprises Adam Kury and Brian Quinn from Candlebox, Morgan Rose from Sevendust and Lenny Cerzosie from The Infinite Staircase. To learn more about Le Projet visit, leprojetband.com.

KISS FRONTMAN PAUL STANLEY SAYS THAT ACE FREHLEY AND PETER CRISS SOLD THE RIGHTS TO THEIR MAKEUP FOR “NOT A WHOLE LOT”

As the controversy rages among KISS fans over whether Tommy Thayer and Eric Singer should wear the makeup made famous by Ace Frehley and Peter Criss, Paul Stanley defended his band by saying that the answer is simple. In a new interview, he said KISS own the rights to their “Spaceman” and “Catman” characters, which they bought from the former members for a song.

Speaking to Australia’s 4KQ, Stanley said, “The guys basically sold it off for, you know, not a whole lot, because they didn’t think it was worth anything. Quite honestly, I’ve always thought our image and what we represent is priceless. It didn’t matter to some people — it truly matters to me.”

Stanley added that being in a band is no different from being an athlete on a team, where lineup changes are natural with the passage of time. “If somebody is out, somebody else comes along,” he said. “I don’t think that when you go to see your favorite team, you’re yelling that you want to see somebody who was in the team 20 years ago. Time moves on, but the team lives on. … I didn’t invent the wheel. Somebody is out there who can come in and take my place. … I don’t see a reason for the band to fold, any more than I can see a reason for a team to fold.”

additional source: ultimateclassicrock.com

TOOL FRONT MAN MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN DISCUSSES FORTHCOMING BOOK

Hank Shteamer of Rolling Stone spoke with Tool vocalist Maynard James Keenan about his forthcoming semi-autobiography. Excerpts from the interview appear below.

RS: Can you give me the backstory on this book? How did it come about?

MK: One of my best friends in high school, we’re still close, his sister’s a writer, she’s 10 years older than we are; she’s kind of been around for a while, of course, seeing everything that went on pre–high school, high school, etc. So I approached her, because she’s a writer, to see if she was interested in helping me work on a semi-autobiography. Because I didn’t really want to write it as an autobiography, first-person — I’d rather have it be more in story form, like you’re kind of along for the journey, with sidebars by me throughout, in my voice, kind of expanding on particular instances or anecdotes. But for the most part, it’s just she and I on the phone a couple times a week, just going over timelines, going over stories, etc.

RS: You’ve obviously talked about your life a million times in interviews and in the documentary that you did, Blood Into Wine. Were there particular things that you wanted to share with people that you felt hadn’t been dealt with in previous accounts of your life?

MK: I guess so. I mean there’s always that perception that whatever you’ve done that’s the largest media-friendly thing in your life, where the world came to know of you, there’s a perception that there was no life before, and that you were nothing before. There’s a lot of stuff that went on in my life that nobody really knows about. So I feel like this is the chance to show the patterns, tell a story.

RS: Did you learn anything about yourself or your family in the course of this process?

MK: Absolutely, because you start seeing patterns. And I think that’s part of the exercise, as well. When you get to a certain age, you think you’ve learned everything, and when you start really putting these patterns together, you start seeing your own patterns of behavior, and it’s an opportunity to fix them, you know?

RS: Presumably you’ve read your share of artist memoirs or biographies. What do you think makes a good or bad one?

MK: It all depends on the reader, I suppose. Most people want to hear the kiss-and-tell crap, the garbage on the bus. That’s boring to me. “We threw a piano out a window!” That’s been done a million times before even Buddy Rich was around. Just a lot of things that you read in biographies, I feel like they’re just kiss-and-tell war stories. The ones I prefer are when they get more into the psychology and the decision-making process, not really who you know and “… then I met the president.” Those are boring. I’m more concerned about or more interested in crossroads, where the person in their story comes to a crossroads, and they make a decision, and you see the effects, the cause-and-effect process of those decisions.

RS: Can you think of a particular biography you’ve read that had what you’re aiming for with your own?

MK: Bowie, he had some solid memoirs. That’s the only one that comes to mind at the moment. But again, we’re trying to write this a little bit more, almost like you’re following a character through a story. If you’ve ever read John Crowley’s Little, Big, it’s quite a brain-teaser, a fantastic fantasy novel with multiple dimensional layers of story. So if I had to kind of put the book in perspective, it would be something like that.

RS: So there was a conversation you had a couple weeks back with one of our writers, and he asked about the progress of the new Tool album, and you mentioned that there was no music to work with. And last year, another Rolling Stone writer talked to Danny and Adam, and they said that there was some new material. Can you help us get to the bottom of where you’re at with the new record?

MK: Do I seem like a lazy person to you?

RS: Of course not.

MK:OK — that’s all I can really say.

RS: So …

MK: They’re working hard in their own way; I’m working hard in my own way, and I’ve got nothin’ for ya.

Read Maynard Keenan’s entire interview with Rolling Stone, here.

source: rollingstone.com

DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER, HALESTORM POSTPONE TOMORROW NIGHT’ SHOW IN NEW YORK CITY’S CENTRAL PARK

Halestrom has released the following statement:

“Due to Saturdy’s weather forecast of heavy rain and high winds, SummerStage’s outdoor Central Park show with Halestrom, previously scheduled for Saturday, October 3rd has been POSTPONED to our 2016 season. In a statement from the band, Halestorm says, “We’re seriously bummed about the NYC show being postponed and already look forward to coming back in 2016 and rocking the park. We hope to see you all then.” We appreciate your understanding on this regrettable change; stay safe and dry this weekend!”

The band will be performing in Camden, NJ tonight at Susquehanna Bank Center if fans would like to to attend that show. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. and show begins 8:30 p.m..