Greetings from Los Angeles. Here for a couple more days to host the Golden Gods Awards with Don & Jim tomorrow. Just came from rehearsal at Club Nokia. Should be a great night tomorrow with many stars from rock music as well as TV and movies in attendance. Looks like Nick Cage is giving Axl Rose his award tomorrow and Duff McKagan is going to play once again witb GnR. Duff is not fully in Guns, just filling in while Tommy Stinson performs with The Replacements. Should be cool to see Duff on stage with Guns once again though. They are going to play up to as many as eight songs tomorrow night I’m told. Zakk Wylde and Joan Jett are among the other performers scheduled. Tons of artists attending and giving or getting awards. Me, Don and Jim will host and also do some backstage interviews that will be seen during the TV telecast. Many have asked me how this can all be seen? It will be streamed live tomorrow as it happens on www.vh1classic.com starting at 8PM Pacific/11 ET (pre show 1 hour before). Then an edited version of the event will air on VH1C May 24th at 8PM ET. I’m sure many repeat airings after that on both VH1C and Palladia. I’ll keep you guys posted best I can via my Twitter as the night unfolds @EddieTrunk I’ve attended this show several times since it happened but this is my first time as a host for it and it should be a blast and hopefully a great celebration of hard rock and metal! More soon.
Jeb Wright of Classic Rock Revisited spoke with former Skid Row frontman Sebastian Bach. Excerpts appear below.
Classic Rock Revisited: There a lot of people on the internet that love to hate you. I think your solo career has been hit and miss. Some I like better than others. On Give ‘Em Hell I admit your voice is stronger than ever. This sounds as good as the Skid Row days, man.
Sebastian: That’s cool man. You’re not hurting my feelings. A lot of people have different opinions. Some journalists tell me they like Angel Down the best and some of them tell me they like Kicking & Screaming the best. If I have different journalist telling me they like different albums as the best one, then I win.
Classic Rock Revisited: The haters are going to say, “Bach sounds too good. He’s got to be doctoring his voice.”
Sebastian: If somebody thinks it’s an expression of hate to tell me that I sound too good then they have got to do better than that. That is my voice. If you’ve been listening to me since my first album…I wasn’t doing anything on my first album in the studio. I am not sure what ‘doctoring up my voice’ even means. What do they think I am going to do to it?
Classic Rock Revisited: One of your strengths is that you a have a unique sound to your voice in a genre and a time period that does not have a lot of unique sounding vocalists.
Sebastian: The way I sing is not the typical heavy metal way. I don’t shout and yell. I save all of my power for those high screams. I know how to focus my energy into those high screams. Sometimes, if you watch me on YouTube and I am yelling at the monitor man, it is because it is frustrating, on a rock and roll stage, for me, because, if I am in a situation where I am yelling over the drum kit, or the bass amp, then I am not singing. If I come off like I am mad at the fucking monitor man it’s because when I am doing a record like Give ‘Em Hell, I am singing in the studio and I am not shouting over the cymbals or the drum kit. You know what I’m saying?
When you say I have a unique sound, then I have to remind you that the sound on a song like I’ll Remember You is not yelling, its singing and it is different than shouting at the top of your lungs. It is a totally different style, and that is how I got to do Broadway. I know how to do that, but when I listen to Give ‘Em Hell, I could not be more proud of my voice. If somebody wants to put me down by telling me I sound too good, then the jokes on you (laughter).
Classic Rock Revisited: You are a genuine person. The good, or the bad, you are genuine about who you are. Has that hurt you at times in your career? You are honest to a fault.
Sebastian: That is the reason my old band isn’t together with me. You just hit it on the head; that’s the reason. If you listen to the records that I do without them, and the records that they do without me, which, honest to God, would you rather fucking listen to? I am not saying I am better than anybody else. I know that my solo records sound more like classic Skid Row records than the Skid Row records that I am not on. That is a fact.
When somebody comes to me with a song and it is not as good as I Remember You or 18 and Life and I am expected to sing it, but I don’t feel it, and I am the guy that has to tell somebody that I am not going to sing their song, then they hate my guts. They hate me.
I have no choice. I really don’t have a choice. I don’t know how to sing a song that I don’t like. I don’t do that. I didn’t get into rock and roll to sing songs that I don’t like. I don’t. I can’t. I can’t do that. I have to love it. I have to fucking believe in it with all of my heart, or I am not going to show up. It is not going to be me; it is going to be somebody else. So, in that way, that has hurt me, but when all is said and done, and you put the CDs on, and you listen to them, it has helped me.
Classic Rock Revisited: Is there a tour coming up?
Sebastian: I am about to announce forty tour dates all across Europe, Canada and America. I am playing in London at Sonisphere with Metallica, Alice in Chains and Iron Maiden. That will be a big show. That is huge.
Classic Rock Revisited: Last one: Do you still collect signed memorabilia? I know you had a lot of weather damage to your house and wondered if that survived.
Sebastian: Yeah, I do. The house…I am still kind of dealing with my living situation, so I don’t collect as much as I used to. The weirdest thing was that I didn’t cry so much when I was at the house…it’s a five acre property. The time that I cried is when I was walking on the paths in the woods that I had cut. I am a runner, and over twenty years of living there, I had all my own paths throughout the whole woods that were all mine. I knew every rock, every tree, every leaf and every little piece of dirt…I knew where everything was in those woods. That’s what fucking hit me. When I was alone in the woods, walking through my paths, that is when I cried. That is kind of crazy because I still own the land and I can go walk on them anytime (laughter).
Sebastian Bach has released a video for the song, All My Friends Are Dead from his new album, Give’Em Hell, which was released today (April 22nd) on Frontiers Records. Watch it below.
Greg Prato of Songfacts spoke with Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott. Excerpts from the interview below.
Songfacts: How do you write your best songs?
Joe Elliott: To be quite honest, songs percolate in your head first, and normally when you’re too far away from an instrument to get to one. You’re in an airplane or you’re on the back of a bus, or you’re in bed. “Never go to bed without [a] pen and paper” is my motto, or these days an iPhone. Sometimes you get up in the morning and there’s a melody going around annoying you like a bee in a jam jar.
Now, most people, Phil [Collen – Def Leppard guitarist], for example, would just pick up a guitar, because that’s all he knows. He doesn’t play the piano. Sometimes I just sit at a piano and I’ll start trying something and go, “Well, this is a piano song.” And I might try and do it on the guitar and go, “Hmm, could work both ways, but it sounds better as a piano song.” And I will leave it that way.
Two Steps Behind, for example, I wrote on a guitar. Obviously, because that’s what it is. But other stuff that I’ve written, like Undefeated off the Mirrorball album, was all written on guitar. But the new Down ‘n’ Outz material for album three – God willing it gets made – was all pretty much written on piano. But there’s going to loads of guitars all over it, as well.
It’s horses for courses. It really is that varied. Angus Young you wouldn’t need to ask that question to, because you know exactly how he writes all his songs. But with somebody that’s a bit more varied, like a Bowie or a Freddie Mercury or Ian Hunter, will write on both. I like the idea of being able to do that because it gives you a broader scope.
Songfacts: One of my favorite Def Leppard songs is Too Late for Love, and I was surprised that it was released as a single but never as a video, which I think prevented it from being a true hit in the US. (The song didn’t chart on the American Hot 100 and made just #86 in the UK.)
Joe: Here’s why: because Photograph is the first single off Pyromania, and it went through the roof because of MTV. Once people started getting cable all over the States, this fledgling MTV thing took off. We got fantastic bounce-back from people watching it on MTV and then asking the radio stations to play it. The two started bouncing back from each other request-wise, and the song just went crazy.
It was in the middle of that year that I think we released Rock of Ages, and then towards the end of the summer maybe I think Foolin’ came out. And we’d shot the video for Foolin’. I remember doing it – I think we did it in August of ’83. So that kind of covered the end of the tour, which finished in September.
By the time we went back to Europe to do the end of the world tour, they decided they wanted to go to radio with Too Late for Love, but we weren’t really in any kind of a position to make a video for it. Plus, there was this feeling amongst us like, “It’s a fourth single, but it’s just being put out there for the sake of it. It’s only being released because of the success of the first three.”
It was never a game plan in January of that year. It was a on the spur-of-the-moment decision made maybe in August or September that we would go with a full single, to which we responded, “Well, okay, fine, whatever you want. But there won’t be a video, because we’re too busy touring.” It was just the record company trying to prolong the length of the album and see if that song was going to fly.
But as great a song as it is, I believe that any success that it achieved was based on the fact that the first three did so well. It’s a fantastic album track, but it’s not a single. To me. You know what I mean? To me, it’s like putting Kashmir out as a single. [Many of Led Zeppelin’s most famous songs, Kashmir and Stairway To Heaven among them, were not released as singles.]
It’s like, “Are you kidding me?” It’s just a great album track. It’s not a single. It doesn’t have the hook. It’s a brilliant piece of arrangement, it’s a good bit of writing, it’s a great lyric, it’s a brilliant piece of music. But it’s a rock track. It’s never going to challenge Thriller or Billie Jean. Whereas, Photograph and Rock of Ages were, because they were anthemic in a lyrical and a vocal way. They were a call to arms. And Too Late for Love is a bit more “lamentable,” if you like.
California Breed, the powerful new rock trio featuring legendary vocalist-bassist Glenn Hughes, drummer extraordinaire Jason Bonham and 23-year-old newcomer guitarist-singer-songwriter Andrew Watt, have premiered the first in a series of “making of” clips from the recording of their self-titled debut album, out May 19th on Frontiers Records. Watch the first clip today from Guitarworld.com below and tune into Guitarworld.com every Tuesday for the next five weeks for another interview with the band.
Mixing massive riffs, gutsy vocals and gale force rhythms, the hard-hitting trio’s first single Sweet Tea has hit number seven on the Classic Rock chart and continues to climb. The band also recently debuted an animated lyric video for the new song Midnight Oil. Midnight Oil and Sweet Tea are available as instant tracks by pre-ordering the album exclusively from iTunes.
California Breed will be available as a CD, digital download and a Deluxe Edition CD + DVD featuring the bonus song Solo, two video clips and a documentary. Fans that pre-order the digital download on iTunes will receive an instant download of the first single, Sweet Tea upon ordering. The iTunes and Amazon pre-order links are as follows: iTunes, Amazon CD and CD Deluxe Edition CD + DVD.
Following their highly successful US/UK tours in support of their most recent Shoot EP, Minneapolis industrial mob American Head Charge announce their long-‐awaited fourth full length studio album, set for release in 2014. In connection with the new record, the band have announced an Indiegogo campaign to give fans the chance to contribute to their first studio album in nine years,and the band are offering some incredible incentives.
The incentives include signed CD’s, guitar lessons, a night out on the town in Las Vegas with the band, band members coming to your house to cook you dinner and even the chance to have the band play a show just for you.
The link to the Indiegogo campaign and a list of the brilliant offers can be found here.
Vocalist Cameron Heacock commented: “We are more than excited to get into the studio and work with producer Dave Fortman (Slipknot, Mudvayne) on our upcoming crowd-‐funded record. The music industry is such a different place these days, and we’d much rather have our fans in charge of the record as opposed to a bunch of suits whose only interest is the bottom line. Indiegogo, and crowd-‐funding options, have made this a possibility, and we’re taking full advantage of it.” American Head Charge were formed in 1998 by bassist, Chad Hanks and vocalist, Cameron Heacock and since their formation they’ve released three records, one compilation/DVD, and one EP, the most successful being the Rick Rubin produced The War Of Art. They’ve shared stages with the likes of Slipknot, Rammstein, Ministry, System Of A Down and Slayer, headlined sell-‐out tours across the world and played as part of countless high profile festivals, and will be appearing at Download 2014.
 on Frontiers Records. Watch it below. Bach had ... )
