Author Archives : Dana

GEOFF TATE SAYS HIS FORMER QUEENSRYCHE BANDMATES WERE “NEVER CLOSE”

Geoff Tate says Queensryche were never a close group of friends – but he’s denied the title of his album is a dig at his former colleagues.

He released his record Frequency Unknown in April, while the other Queensryche, fronted by Todd La Torre, launch their self-titled work in June. A court hearing in November will decide which of the two bands get to keep the name.

The artwork on Frequency Unknown features a fist bearing the initials FU, which La Torre recently slammed as a “cheap shot” – but Tate says that’s not the case.

He tells Jam Magazine “It’s an abbreviation of the album title. It’s a metal thing. I’ve seen tens of thousands of fists punching the air at Queensryche shows. There is nothing out of the ordinary about it. I get criticized because I’m not metal enough – now I do an obvious metal album cover and I get criticized for that!”

Soon after the acrimonious split last year, Tate said he’d always imagined the band still together as a group of old men, sharing stories about a long and successful career. Since then his attitude has changed – he now says, “It never was a brotherhood. It was a bunch of kids that got together and achieved success at an early age. We got used to that success and continued doing the things we did to get that success. We found comfort in our way of working. It’s just that simple. We were never close. We never hung out doing stuff and sharing life. It was always just, ‘Hey, we have another record to make. Anyone have any ideas? Let’s try to make a record. Here we go.’”

But he still regrets the way the split came about, saying, “I wish it would have been handled with a lot more privacy and decorum. I wish we could have settled it like gentlemen and moved on with our lives without stretching it out for a year and playing it out on the Internet like some sick drama.”

Frequency Unknown – which was remixed and offered to fans for free after complaints about the original version – features new recordings of four classic Queensryche songs. But Tate says it wasn’t an attempt to claim them for himself. “The record company asked us to do it,” he explains. “They said, ‘We really want to give you a lot of money to make this record, but we don’t want to give it to you unless you include the re-recordings.’

“I tried to wriggle out of it; I said, ‘I’ve already recorded these songs. How about I do those with a different arrangement and make them really special?’ The record company said, ‘No. We want them to be as close to the originals as possible.’

“These days economics plays a big role in decision making when people offer you a large sum of money for something you like to do.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

additional source: classicrockmagazine.com

GUITARIST SCOTT GORHAM ON WHY THIN LIZZY DECIDED TO CHANGE THIER NAME TO BLACK STAR RIDERS: “IT WAS GUILT”

Greg Prato of Songfacts spoke to Black Star Riders and Thin Lizzy guitarist Scott Gorham about the BSR and their album All Hell Breaks Loose. Portions of the interview appear below.

Songfacts: Let’s start by talking about Black Star Riders and also the new album All Hell Breaks Loose.

Scott Gorham: Well, it’s totally different recording a BSR album to any Thin Lizzy album that I’ve ever done. One of the main differences was in the time that we didn’t take to do it. This was literally twelve songs in twelve days.

Songfacts: Wow.

Scott: No kidding. And that’s because that’s how Kevin Shirley likes to work. He doesn’t like to sit there and put the microscope on this note or that note or this passage or this guitar tone. So it was kind of a pressurized situation. It was really a fun thing to do it that way. I’m not sure that any of us are going to do it that way again, but he did catch a lot of what we were all about on stage, especially for the last year and a half. He got some good stuff.

Songfacts: Something I was impressed with, especially with the first single, Bound For Glory, was how successfully the band was able to recreate the vintage Thin Lizzy vibe.

Scott: Yeah. I think a lot of that was because we had just come off of basically three years of heavy Thin Lizzy touring. So obviously that’s going to rub off somewhere along the lines onto the next thing you’re going to do. So I don’t think it was on purpose that it panned out that way. It’s just there were a lot of subliminal things that were going on and it just kind of turned out that way.

Songfacts: What made you decide to drop the Thin Lizzy name and go with Black Star Riders?

Scott: Well, I think it was more guilt than anything else. We started to write the album just a little over a year ago, and after about three months of us thinking, “Okay, the next album is going to be the next Thin Lizzy album,” I started to feel uncomfortable about the whole thing – about writing and recording an album under the name Thin Lizzy and Phil Lynott not being there. It just didn’t sit right with me after a while.

I went to Brian Downey (Drums) and explained the situation, how I was feeling. He said he was feeling the same way. We went to both Ricky and Damon and they were feeling it. So independently, without anybody wanting to say anything, we were all thinking the same thing, feeling the same thing.

So now that we’ve come to the conclusion that this, in fact, will not be the next Thin Lizzy album, what do we do with these songs? Because we really loved this start that we had on writing this new material. That’s when one of the management said, “Well, the only thing you guys can really do, what we have to do at this point, is find a date on the calendar, X that off, that will be the last Thin Lizzy show, and that will be the beginning of the new band.” And that’s what we did.

We had our last tour with Kiss in Australia, we saw the last date was in Brisbane, and that was it, that was the date.

Songfacts: What are the future plans for Black Star Riders? And also from what I hear there’s a Thin Lizzy book coming out, right?

Scott: It’s already out. It’s a book that myself and Harry Doherty did Thin Lizzy: The Boys Are Back in Town. It’s already into its fourth reprint in the UK, it’s being released in Germany in a translated version. Hopefully it’s going to be released over here at some point. That’s down to Omnibus, but I think you can actually order it on Amazon, if people in America want this thing. It got great reviews, there are great pictures in there. There are pictures that I hadn’t seen for years that really describe visually what went on back then.

Schedule wise, we start rehearsing May 25th to do our first festival in Germany on June 1st, 2nd, and then we go to the Sweden Rock Festival. And then there are festivals dotted around throughout the summer. But the BSR UK tour starts in earnest in October. That’ll take us all the way through the UK, Ireland, and Europe.

Songfacts: And are there any plans to hit the US as well?

Scott: Yes. We’re talking about that now. A friend who’s in management is talking to the agencies and seeing what tour we can jump on. Absolutely. Everybody wants us to come out there. So if it happens, I’m on the airplane. I’m ready to go.

Read more at Songfacts.

Watch Black Star Rider’s lyric video for Bound for Glory below.

source: songfacts.com

FOREIGNER’S MICK JONES DISCUSSES THE ‘CRAZY S—” HE WENT THROUGH PRODUCING VAN HALEN’S “5150”

Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones spoke with Matt Wardlaw of Ultimate Classic Rock about producing Van Halen’s 5150, the band’s first album with Sammy Hagar on vocals. Portions of the interview appear below.

UCR: Walking into the Van Halen situation, what was that like? Because obviously, they had [been] working up until that point with Ted Templeman for all of the previous records. Besides knowing you as a songwriter, how comfortable was that to walk into that situation where you were the new guy?

Jones: I go a long way back with Sammy Hagar, since he was in Montrose. He picked me up at the hotel and we were driving up to Eddie’s studio and we were talking about the old days and finally he said, “I’ve got to tell you Mick, all of that was wild and crazy and all of that sort of thing,” but he said, “We are just about to walk into another dimension of that.” [Laughs] And I said, “What?”

He said, “I wasn’t going to tell you earlier, but you’d better get ready for some crazy sh– now.” I went, “Whoa . . . ” and I’d been around and seen a lot, you know. But it was pretty crazy up there. It lived up to its title. It was a challenge, because they had a lot of the stuff that they had been writing and it was a new writing partnership with Sammy and Eddie and they were just coming down from the split with David Lee Roth. It was a big time . . . a lot of different things were happening and a lot of emotions were flying around. It was kind of exciting [but] it was [also] scary, thinking, ‘Well, what can I do for this band?’

As you said, Ted Templeman had done all of the albums up to that point, and Donn Landee was the engineer who was running Eddie’s studio and he’d done every album they had done and here was I, walking in from a completely different place in a way and stepping in [with a] “Who’s this guy?” kind of thing. I got that feeling at the beginning from Donn Landee. He wasn’t particularly thrilled to see me, I don’t think. Granted, I got into the thing and I started to really listen to the songs, and I helped with the arrangements and I helped with the structure of the songs, and I worked a lot with Sammy on his vocals.

I think that’s if anything, one of my specialties in production is working with vocalists. I was able to bring him up to where he needed to be to front that band. We went through some crazy times. The engineer locked himself in the studio for a day and threatened to burn the tapes. It was a real standoff, you know? It was touch and go whether the tapes were going to survive. It all ended up great and everybody ended up [being] really cool and happy with what had happened, but it was pretty exhausting. It all paid off in the end.

UCR: Did your influence help on some of the tracks like Love Walks In or Dreams that were on the power ballad territory side of things that they hadn’t done before?

Jones: Yeah, I worked a lot on the arrangements and the vocal performances and helping [them] just to find the melodies a bit, especially on Dreams and Love Walks In. I put my advice and my suggestions in where I felt they merited them. I don’t know if you could have gone in with an approach of, “Oh, I want to change all of this,” which I think would have been disastrous. But I worked on the sound quite a bit with and eventually ended up being good friends with Donn Landee, who is a great engineer.

I think we improved the sound of the drums for example. I think it’s probably one of the best sounds that they’ve had on an album, on that album. And as I said, [I focused on] just using my suggestions where I thought they were needed and useful, not trying to just sit there and constantly coming out with ideas. I think it was a balance of letting the band do its thing and then just putting the glue in there a bit to make it coherent and to make it as good as it could be.

Read more at Ultimate Classic Rock.

source: ultimateclassicrock.com

OZZY OSBOURNE SAYS THAT BLACK SABBATH’S “13” IS “ONE OF THE BEST THINGS I’VE DONE IN MY ENTIRE LIFE”

Ozzy Osbourne tells Metal Hammer that he is very proud of Black Sabbath’s new album, 13.

“I’ve not been this happy about an album in years,” says Osbourne. “I’m not trying to sell my home – if this record was just OK, I’d fucking say it. But honestly, hand on heart, it’s one of the best things I’ve done in my entire life.”

Ozzy also offers some thoughts on the situation surrounding original Sabbath drummer Bill Ward, who ruled himself out of the band’s reunion last year.

“It would have been great to have Bill – all of us said that,” adds Ozzy. “But you can’t expect someone of Bill’s age to be as agile as he used to be. He’s had heart attacks. If he’d turned up and played like he used to, or nearly as well, maybe we’d have worked something out…But we decided that if we were ever going to do this fucking album, you’ve got to be on the case. It got to the point where we said, ‘Are we just going to sit and wait for him to get off his fucking arse or what?’ We had to decide – we couldn’t just keep the fans waiting any fucking longer.”

source: metalhammer.co.uk