Stereo Warning

You asked, and Wolfmother answered. Thanks to all who posted questions for the boys in the comments on Stereo Warning, we wish we could have ran all of those great queries by the Aussies, but unfortunately time was limited. But still got to a few. And, as a bonus, we posted some exclusive pics from a recent Wolfmother show.

Here are bassist Chris Ross' answers to your questions and his view on other topics, such as the Mike Patton "controversy." Enjoy!

Stereo Warning: Hey Chris, how's it going?
Chris Ross: I'm alright, I've been on the Internet all day, looking stuff up and writing email. I hate when you do that...

On Myspace?
Nah, not me. Everyone else on the tour bus does it all the time. I just read some books and listen to music. I just never really got into it.

Have you heard of Wolfmother.net?
I know about it, but not very well.

Does anyone in the band ever post there? (question from Ben, chimaera and Justin)
I don't know about the rest, but I can tell you that I haven't.

What are you listening to nowadays?
Wolf & Cub, who we were just touring with. The Presets from Australia, they’re great. Vangelis, the Blade Runner soundtrack. It's pretty cool. Jean Michel Jarre, the Oxygene album, with the spacey synths and stuff. Your taste really changes. Sometimes I feel like throwing on some Slayer or Godflesh, something really heavy, and then the next day I'm gonna listen to some tripped out Vangelis.

You live in Australia now. Do you have any thoughts of moving to the U.S.? (question from Jess)
Not to the States, no, maybe to Berlin. I really like Berlin. I really like Amsterdam too. I like a lot of Europe, I'd be more inclined to move there than in the U.S. I'm not a big fan of the States. I like New York, that's pretty cool, it's more culturally diverse than the rest of America.

So far you guys are more popular in the States than in Europe...
Yeah, I guess it would make more sense business-wise to move to the States, huh? I don't make a lot of life decisions based on sensible business practice anyway, so... I really like Japan too actually. I'd really like to try to live in Japan some day, that would be really weird. That's where we started our tour. I loved it, it's so culturally different from Australia. You just totally feel lost in translation, like the movie.

Are you tired of being compared with Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath? (question from Matt)
No, obviously they're definitely an influence in our sound. There are other influences. I grew up listening to stoner rock stuff and that was my starting point to my style of music. Black Sabbath, that's where stoner rock started. I've never had a problem with it. You obviously start there and then you take your own direction.

What about Mike Patton?
He's totally entitled to his opinion. I think it's kind of cool that we generate a response in people. And I love the conditions in which he said that as well. Being at that festival, the way it was set up was every time you did an interview you were directly in the line of fire of the stage. You're trying to do this interview and all you hear is this band banging and playing really loud. Apart from his taste in music, I could tell that that was a factor too. I was there doing interviews that day too. I think it's cool that he has an opinion like that and he voices it, it's great. I love Faith No More. I went to their shows. I think Myles (the drummer) was a bit hurt cuz he's a big Mike Patton fan. He was like, "oh, he didn't like us!" But it's just people being individuals and having different opinions. Not everything appeals to everyone, I think that's healthy.

How has success changed your life? (question from jordan311)
I don't know that it's changed me that much. It made me a bit more confident in what I've been doing musically. I was always doing stuff for myself, mucking around and someone would say that sounds like shit. But now we're writing stuff and people dig it, and it's cool. Things that are important to me are the same. I love playing music and having a good time, hanging with my friends and family and I don't know that any of that has changed. It's changed the fact that we're working so hard and we're not really at home so much anymore. I ended up with two worlds, the band and the rest of my life at home, but this time I brought my family on tour, so it's felling like I have one life again, it's really cool.

What's the most rock 'n roll thing you've done today? (question from Jess)
What's a rock 'n roll thing, throwing your TV out of the window or driving you car into a pool? I haven't done that... I guess playing shows and jumping around and rolling on the ground and kicking ass is pretty rock 'n roll. Quite a lot of times when we play at home with friends we storm each others' stage and muck around.

What's your relationship with Pearl Jam? (question from Matt)
We played half a dozen shows with them and got along really well and had a good time. They're really approachable, down to earth guys.

Will you stay in touch?
Sure, if the opportunity came to play with them I'd definitely do it again. Playing with a really cool band in a really cool venue makes it easier to have a good show.

What's your favourite beer?
Corona. Because you can put a lime in it.

What would you like to be remembered for? (question from Jess... again!)
Being a good musician, I guess. Just really being me and creating stuff that's not contrived and doing something I believed in and wanted to do.

(c) Stereo Warning 2007. All Rights Reserved. Be nice and don't reproduce this content without prior written approval. Thanks.

Tags: peeping tom faith no more mike patton wolfmother mr bungle interview stoner rock wolf cub black sabbath led zeppelin presets jean michel jarre slayer godflesh

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Posted by lusson at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's part II of our interview with Chuck D from Public Enemy about useless hip-hop, useful snitches, good and bad cops, self-centered journalists and how to improve life in the black community.

Stereo Warning: What role does police play in this?
Chuck D: I never collectively looked at police as being the bad guys.

But there is a lot of distrust and they've made some mistakes...
But we've made some mistakes too as a community. I'm a firm believer that officers who are out there to protect and serve at least they should be able to come from our neighborhood. If they come from there, there might be some tactics that might be a little bit rougher to protect us, but at least let it come from people in our neighborhood that would be able to give people a chance before running the law on them. Yes, you have bad police, but in the general sense of the matter, people from our community should be in law enforcement and they should be able to judge in a courtroom as opposed to us being in front of somebody else that might not consider us family.

Since the start of your career, how have you seen your community evolve and are you hopeful that things are getting better?
I've seen the community go from thinking that it should do for itself and demand things to getting in a comfort zone and thinking that it should be fed through some kind of virtual umbilical chord of government support. When you rely on that you have what happened in New Orleans. You have to demand the support and you have to see the problems before they unfold. You have to aspire to greater heights as a community even when the odds are against you. Thinking that everybody's gonna become rich without education, to me is stupid. And thinking that black people can go forward in this country without having some international state of mind connecting ourselves to places where people of color and people with understanding for people of color are around the world, to me is limiting and stupid. The black community has a sense of it's only about where I'm at now and I can't name 15 countries in the world 'cause I don't feel that they give a damn about me and I don't give a damn about them, then you're mapping out your downfall, your collective doom.

A lot of people haven't left their neighborhood, let alone the country.
That's why even when they get locked up it's almost like a suite because you're amongst your family, your friends. If you were sent out to go to a place where you could live and support yourself but it's in Utah, a lot of people feel that that's more jail than being incarcerated in their own area, and that's troubling. Because that means that you accept slavery and slave-like conditions, which is not how they treat you, but how they keep you from being a citizen of the world.

What's needed to change? New leaders?
If you got leaders and people don't recognize them, than what good is that? Education has to collectively bring it up to make people be able to see the things that they want to see changed or see the people that can give a collective ideas to go forward.

But usually the worst schools are in minority neighborhoods.
That's because they have less pressure to keep those schools right. If you have an ill-sense of structure and working together, then you can't provide the pressure on institutions to be responsible for you. You don't have the collective movement to make sure that the schools are clean, that they're properly secured that the government be on their job to make sure that things are right for children. If you don't fight to keep it at a normal level, through each generation it falls further, almost into anarchy and chaos.

Do hip-hop artists who made it have the responsibility to go back and fight for some of these things in the community?
Only if they have the mentality to understand. One thing that might change for them is the financial status, but so what. A person who's limited intellectually at $10, you give them a $1 million and it doesn't make them smarter.

What about the hip-hop press -- most of them are college educated...
They're figuring out ways to maintain their job. There's a lot of deceit in those ranks because they look at all these people that they're writing about and to keep their job they have to perpetuate the reality in it. But I tell people all the time, the reality in much of this is created. You can try to do the balanced cover of it all. You can't worry about standards that the business operates on, like sales. If T.I. sells 800,000 records and The Roots sell 300,000 records, you have to talk about the quality of those numbers. Three hundred thousand Roots CDs are probably worth more than 800,000 T.I. CDs to the society's uplifting. When they measure art and movements coming from the black community it's quantified in numbers instead of quality. Such is the case of the Millions More movement. Who gives a damn if there's a million people in DC or 200,000 people, especially now when people are wired into technology and satellite with C-SPAN, the Internet and wireless phones. You can't do a quantitaive impact on the Millions More movement the same way you did in 1995.

(c) Stereo Warning 2007. All Rights Reserved. Be nice and don't reproduce this content without prior written approval. Thanks.

Tags: rap hip hop hip-hop akon public enemy chuck d snitch

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Posted by lusson at 09:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(c) Stereo Warning 2007. All Rights Reserved. Be nice and don't reproduce this content without prior written approval. Thanks.

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Posted by lusson at 06:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Chuck D is one of the best rappers of all time. As the frontman of Public Enemy, he turned heads in the 80's with brilliant and politically astute albums like "Fear of a Black Planet" and "It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back." Chuck D did it with a message of community empowerment, self-awareness and political activism, but that stuff doesn't sell nowadays. Most of today's successful hip-hop artists make a living out of glamorizing gang banging, drug dealing, getting-rich-quick obsessions or just by singing plain inane lines like Akon's "I wanna fuck you/You already know."

Speaking of Akon, he's the latest to propagate the stop snitching message in a shameful video in which three guys kill their friend for cooperating with the police in a bank robbery case. We spoke to Chuck D a while back about such issues and we'll be presenting his views here. This is the first of two parts of our conversation about the state of rap music today, the state of the black community, and the state of American society. Your comments are welcome. Check back for part II of the interview, and catch Public Enemy on a worldwide tour right now.

Stereo Warning: What's your opinion on today's hip-hop and hip-hop press?
Chuck D: Today's hip hop is corporate-dictated. A lot of the artists are very talented but in order to have one of those nice big contracts it behooves them to be similar to what makes a hit record and a hit artist, as opposed to carving their own niche from an art standpoint. In the 1980's, the ceiling was so high that people felt it was unreachable, so artists felt like "hey, I just want to be noticed so I'm gonna do this thing that's different from the status quo.” Everybody strove to be different to get their identity across. When some rappers started to actually have the same life-style as Bon Jovi or Springsteen and The Beatles then people said "wow, you can really aspire to great heights." So they said "I have to throw art to the side and I have to figure out how I can actually get this big contract and be rich." Before there weren’t any takers, now there are takers to the pot of gold that the major labels offer and everybody follows them.

So for a shot at that a young rapper today would have to glorify violence and spending time in jail?
It seems like that's the pattern that happens to work. A lot of artists will say 'hey, I'll go to jail and get more publicity off of that move rather than doing something beneficial to the community.' And that's a reflection of the media, who cover somebody for shooting somebody or getting shot more that someone who's feeding people with turkeys at Thanksgiving. That's why a younger artist will follow that dollar.

What do you think of hip-hop magazines that glorify rappers convicted of violent crimes, such as the magazine XXL, which publishes a "jail issue"?
Every issue of a lot of magazines might as well be called the jail issue because they uphold the quantity of what's happening instead of the quality of the art. Yes, there's gangsterism that takes place, but there are also people that graduate from college, but they are not reflected into the mainstream, while somebody who might want to play gangster or thug is being reflected every minute as being the guideline for the culture. To me that's wrong. The imbalance is wrong.

What about the stop snitching message and rap's glorification of this code of silence that makes it tough for inner-city neighborhoods to get rid of crime?

It's the jail mentality, which has been backed by some kind of corporate cosignature that says that the thug life is the way to go and to snitch on somebody is wrong. The bottom line is somebody is actually selling drugs in your community and decimating your community and that's not held under the magnifying glass as being fucked up or wrong. All of a sudden, what appears to be wrong seems to be right, without any kind of judgment coming to the front.

Some judges say that community support is crucial for people to be able to come forward and talk to the police.
I support snitches. If the person is cancerous to the society, then a snitch sometimes is the best solution, with an army behind him. Because the person who's cancerous to the society, they have no army. That's why i encourage education for people. But when we don't encourage people to be doctors or lawyers, who's gonna fix your people? I don't understand the anti-intellectualism and the dumbassification of it all, when hip-hop could aspire that we have to be balanced on all ends in order to go forward as a community and as a nation.

(c) Stereo Warning 2007. All Rights Reserved. Be nice and don't reproduce this content without prior written approval. Thanks.

Tags: rap hip hop hip-hop akon public enemy chuck d snitch

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Posted by lusson at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post your questions to the boys in a comment here on Stereo Warning and watch the blog in the next two weeks to read your query and their answer.

By the way, it looks like we have a little controversy brewing, with Mike Patton of Faith No More, Mr. Bungle and Peeping Tom fame sniping back and forth with Wolfmother. We're not gonna say whose side we're on, but you make sure and ask those Aussie dudes some clever questions about that. Fire away!

Tags: peeping tom faith no more mike patton wolfmother mr bungle interview

Posted by lusson at 09:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

The Roots are the best live group in hip-hop right now. The only other performer that comes close is Kanye West. So when we talked to Roots drummer ?uestlove recently, we had to ask him why so many hip-hop acts suck so bad on stage. He also told us most hip-hop artists are broke, both financially and when it comes to meaningful lyrics, which of course we know is at least party caused by a rotten attitude of "sell big or get out" at major record labels. On the lighter side, we discussed his former bandmate and current in-demand producer Scott Storch's recent propensity for fast cars, thick gold chains and appearances in tabloid pages alongside various starlets. So, check it out, and catch The Roots world tour, coming soon somewhere near you.

Stereo Warning: Many people thought that signing with Def Jam would mean your big commercial break. But you stuck to your guns. Were you ever tempted to get Jay-Z to guest-star on Game Theory or do anything that would draw mainstream attention?
?uestlove: We kinda knew that people were gonna overestimate the situation. And I love playing people for a loop. I knew everyone expected us to break open the bottle of Cristal, hop on a yacht, have an iced-out chain and holler 'we're partying now.' That would've been a dreadful mistake. The look on people's faces when they heard the record and said 'oh shit, they didn't sell out' was great. How strange is it that Def Jam is a label that once overflowed with artistic merit? In the 80's, if it said Def Jam you knew that the album was an instant classic. And now it has almost the opposite meaning.

Still, there's nothing wrong with being successful. Do you ever wonder 'hey, when are we really gonna be rich?'
Hip-hop is a strange story, man. The lesson that I learned in the past two years is that hip-hop is full of tall tales. Eighty percent of those people that we thought were living the life, I'm living better than them. And that's real. I didn't know that Bentley was leased, that house was rented. You sit at home and watch MTV Cribs and you're like 'man, what's going on here?' But then the truth starts to reveal itself. I know a very high profile person in the hip-hop nation that only has $1,000 to their name. I won't say who it is...

But you cannot survive on record sales alone. There's two ways to making money. Either you're ubiquitous, or you tour. A person like Jay Z, he has to have the clothing line. I'm the king of touring in hip hop. But half the hip-hop nation, they don't even have a good show. So you deal with people that depend on radio sales, publishing checks, advances for the next record. Unless they're doing commercials or endorsing a clothing line, they're not getting paid.

It used to irk me, but then I looked at my life, and said wait a minute, my life is fine. My definition of success is having a comfortable home for me. I'm on the road 200 days out of the year so I'm not even at home to enjoy my home. I bought my mom her dream house, I'm taking care of my father and my siblings, I feel like this is success. If this were to stop tomorrow, I'd still be cool for 10 years.

Your former band mate Scott Storch seems to be cultivating an image quite different from yours, all about money and flash. Is that the Scott you know or has he changed?
He's Scott playing dress-up. Even back in the day, if Scott had only $500, he'd spend $800. He now has $17 million, but he spends $30 million. Scott is addicted to making music. Scott won't let 10 minutes go by unless there's an idea in his head. The fact that all this music can flow out of him is amazing to me. Do you ever see little girls play dress-up in their mom's closet? That's how Scott is. Scott is still a little kid, but he's got his big brother's Gucci glasses and all these links.

You've been going counter to mainstream hip-hop for a long time now, but still you have dedicated fans and support from critics. To what do you owe your success and longevity?
Even though hip-hop is a genre, it's just an amalgamation of all types of music. That's something the godfather of hip-hop, Afrika Bambaataa taught me. He would DJ a party in the Bronx and he could play the Commodores in one moment and then turn around and play Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones. You do that today at a hip-hop party, you're liable to get beat up. But Afrika Bambaataa felt there was hip-hop in that song because there is a long percussion break in the beginning. That's how I approach my music now when I present it live. There is rock stuff that we can do that can still have a hip-hop feel to it, as in something that you feel in your soul. There's a way to talk to different audiences. By day I can do a song with Mobb Deep and then by night I can do a song with Bob Dylan and it will still all make sense.

I read somewhere that for the album before this you tried hard to please your boss at Interscope, Jimmy Iovine, and make a more commercial album. Is that true and how did you approach Game Theory differently?
Tipping Point was the closest I've ever gotten to trying to approximate what he wanted to hear. And that's only because I misjudged the situation. When we first met him, he thought that Phrenology was our first record and we were like 'wait, you don't know that we have five albums before this and that we actually have a Grammy and we went plantinum before?'. He didn't know any of that, he though we were a hip-hop rock group. Then it hit me that he probably just put the CD on and skipped through the songs for two minutes before we walked into his office. As a result, we were very cautious with making that record. That's something we've never been before, cautious. We decided to keep the record dry. It wasn't necessarily our commercial attempt, but it was as risk-free as The Roots have ever been. I took out all the experimentation. I still think there are moments of brilliance on that record, Star is one of the best songs in our career. So with this album, the one thing that Jay-Z guaranteed us was absolute freedom for our vision.

You're one of the few artists in hip-hop now to still have a socially conscious message. I was talking to Chuck D recently and he was saying that as much as he hates the cash, cars & bitches lyrics of many successful rappers, he understands the kind of pressure they are under. They see that stuff sells and they feel like they have to copy it. Do you ever feel that pressure? Do you think artists have a responsibility with their message to their fans and the community?
If we were to start now and talk about our boat in Miami, people would look at us like, 'you ain't got no boat in Miami, get out of here!' For us, it's just more believable to be ourselves. I know we're frustrated, I know that Bush is the worst president we've ever had, I know you feel like they stole the election and nothing I'm going to say is going to start a revolution, but for 2006 to go by and nobody to talk about how messed up society is, it's amazing to me. I just can't believe that no one is touching upon political subjects. So I felt like it was our responsibility.

(c) Stereo Warning 2007. All Rights Reserved. Be nice and don't reproduce this content without prior written approval. Thanks.

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Posted by lusson at 11:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Stereo Warning: You guys took three years to make this record and almost broke up because of it. What happened?
Abe: I didn’t expect this album to ever be completed. It was difficult. It took three years to make, a ridiculous amount of time. There was no communication. We were very burned out after White Pony and the self-titled record. We came very close to being over with. This is what I do, music was my dream, and so I was uncomfortable to think that it could be over. I took a deep breath and it got pretty heavy, but things work in strange ways and we’re better now for it. We’re best friends and we’re brothers and we needed to tell each other that.

SW: What took Chino so long to do the vocals? Where you worried when he went on tour with Team Sleep?
Abe: Team Sleep are very dear friends of all of us so it shouldn’t have been anything competitive but it became very threatening when Chino decided to go on tour with them right when he was doing his vocals. We were like, ‘finish your vocals before you leave’ and he didn’t so that’s when it got extra tense. He went away and we didn’t know what was going on. We had put so much into this and we just left it floating and sinking. But looking back now it was necessary for him to leave and get away from this project and come back with a clear head and dive into it.

Chino: I had only a few good vocal ideas at the time. A lot had to do with my personal life, but I didn’t like what I was coming up with vocally, it was too dark and too personal. I wasn’t enjoying singing. I wanted to hide behind the guitar and I didn’t feel like writing words. Everybody was like ‘can you just finish the record’ and they were forgetting the quality. After stepping away and coming back everything started to open up. It probably took a whole another year, but to me it was really worth it. I didn’t want to be the person holding everyone up, but what’s the use of making anything if it’s just for the sake of making it. We came really close to a breakup ‘cause no one was communicating that well about it. Once I got back from that tour we met up and sat down and I had to ask them, ‘do you really want to do this, do you want to invest the time of your life to make this music?’ I needed to hear that everyone was really into it. They asked me the same question. They figured I didn’t care and I figured they didn’t care. Once those doors opened up, everyone started communicating.

SW: Sounds like Metallica in therapy in Some Kind of Monster.
Chino: I watched that movie when we were making the record and my jaw dropped! It was exactly what we were going through. They were making music, but they weren’t happy, just for the sake of making another Metallica record. You could tell it was a dark time for them. And we were going thru the same thing. Sometimes you gotta fall to your lowest point to realize where you’re at and then climb out of it and it can be one of the most therapeutic things.

SW: What music do you listen to on your own time?
Chino: Old classic standards, Perry Cuomo, singers and vocalists, really mellow stuff from the 40s and 50s. I listen to it now and I appreciate it. Not too much aggressive music, I listen to that when we make it. I wanted to make a diverse record, were every song was coming from a different place. It is a rollercoaster ride of different sounds moods and emotions. The dynamics are one of our favorite things. From quiet to loud, from hard to soft, from very intense to very relaxed. I wanted to bring that in but do it tastefully, to have all these different dynamics present in each song.

SW: Lyrically, what did you want to accomplish? Where did you get your inspiration?
Chino: There were but a lot of things I went through – divorce, a lot of personal things that I didn’t want to bring in and make a sad or pissed-off record. I wanted to escape my every day life so I tried to fantasize a bit more. It’s a lot more metaphoric. Beware the Water is about temptations about drugs or anything that’s not good for you. Cherry Waves is asking about the devotion to another person. I tried not to be so dry but paint it up a little bit.

SW: Explain the album title, please.
Chino: It’s not something sexual, or about suicide, actually it’s just a loose term for when you get drunk and fall asleep on your arm. Just simple and lighthearted, nothing too deep. Our record kinda needed that.

SW: What does KimDracula mean?
Chino: It’s a moniker that I was using as my email name for a while. At the beginning of making the record I was getting a little crazy and experimenting with drugs a bit, seeing how whacked out I could get. That’s my split personality I guess. It didn’t work out too well.

SW: You started working with Bob Ezrin, but finished the record yourselves. Why?
Chino: Bob started rearranging stuff right there on the spot. That was good for us ‘cause we’ll keep screwing around with things and we need someone to give us a regimen and show us a different perspective. But at the same time we wanted a Deftones record, not a watered down Deftones record. In the end it started to sound that way. Bob was trying to simplify things to make it more pop-oriented and that wasn’t good for us. Weirder is more interesting to me. It didn’t work out in the end. When we ended up finishing it ourselves, it was a really smart thing.

SW: What are you looking for in your career? So far are you satisfied? Would you care if Saturday Night Wrist hit #1 on the Billboard chart?
Abe: I don’t think we’re done yet, I can’t wait to make the next record. I don’t care if this one gets to #1. It would be neat. It would make sense, but the industry is such a strange business… Our whole premise was to go rock and it pretty much still is. We’re tangled in a strange business, but it’s exciting to do well and to be here after all these years and be relevant. We’re just happy to be doing it.

Chino: I hope the record does well but I just hope that when they hear it people think it’s a progression from what we’ve done in the past. Every record we make is harder ‘cause we don’t want to repeat ourselves so much and get lazy and fall into formulas we figured out before. That’s easy to do. It makes it less potent. If we keep on trying to push ourselves forward and a little bit left of where we went last time, I just want to be recognized for that. It would be good to sell a lot, but we were never a band that made a living out of selling records. We’re a touring band, it’s more of a live experience and that’s our main thing.

SW: Do you think this is your best studio work yet?
Abe: I was out running some errands and I was listening to it in my car. I hadn’t heard it in a long time, there’s been so many versions and different arrangements that it was driving me insane so I stopped listening to it. But now I put in the mastered version and it’s really cool, I think it’s our best record. I always thought that White Pony was our best example of our sound in terms of mix and balance of hard-soft, but I think this is the new best at this point.

Chino: I’m starting to think that just recently. I’m actually getting really excited about it. It sounds like something that wasn’t really expected. It’s not like our last record. Our greatest up to now… well, it’s hard to say that. My favorite record had been Around the Fur, because we didn’t put too much overanalysis into it, we wrote and recorded it really fast and there something really genuine about that. I hope we can do that again, I’m not too fond of spending years of making records.

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Posted by lusson at 12:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich told me recently that the hard rock band will finally start working with producer Rick Rubin on their ninth original studio album in January. Then I read here about how Velvet Revolver were upset that they felt Rubin didn't give their project enough time since he was so busy with other records (including Metallica's) so I started to feel like maybe my first instincts about this Rubin-Metallica marriage were right.

I know a lot of people think Bob Rock screwed up Metallica, made them too poppy, etc, but I think the Black Album is a masterpiece, and anyone that watched Some Kind of Monster saw how Bob managed to craft some decent songs out of what began as pretty average starting ideas.

So I figured I'd post here a conversation I had with Lars, Kirk and James a while back, during the last tour, about Bob Rock, recording and generally being a band again. This is not new material, in the sense that we didn't have this chat yesterday, but it's new because it has never been published before. So, enjoy, and look keep checking this site for a brand new interview with the boys closer to the time when the record will be finished.

Kirk Hammett
-- On former producer Bob Rock: I can't picture us doing an album without Bob Rock. If there's anyone who deserves the title of fifth member of the band, it's definitely him. 

-- On relationships between band members: I've always been the buffer between Lars and James. When James went into rehab, it really felt like Metallica might not be what it ever was. It felt like we might lose James. Now that we’re back together, in retrospect, Metallica is not what it was, but we're in a healthier place because of it.

James Hetfield
-- On his relationship with Lars: We're two personalities that are very driven. We've got visions and as long as we share that vision... usually we don't. The friction creates an energy and as long as we take that energy in the right direction and not let it turn on us, which it certainly does at times, it's good.
-- On being sober: You go from being a completely one man show to being a father of three kids and having a wife and plus doing your job. It's tough to adjust at times, but I'm not resorting to the drink. I know there are other ways of filling that hole, connecting with people music is certainly a gift. For me and I found the real reason I'm out on the road is connecting with people and enjoying that 2.5 hours that we're on the stage.

-- On writing music as a band instead of only with Lars: There's no going back. It's an awesome way to record and it's taken us 20 years to figure it out.

Lars Ulrich
-- On fans' expectations: We don’t think much about things like image and what the fans are gonna think. We love our fans and we respect them, but they know that we are the best Metallica for them when we’re are given a chance to do what we do for ourselves and not consider them so much and cater to them in a contrived way.
-- On his relationship with James: We have the best relationship we’ve ever had. It’s great. There is respect, openness, space. Metallica is now four people that are having the best time of their lives. We’re psyched that the people still give a shit.

 (c) Stereo Warning 2007. All Rights Reserved. Please be nice and don't reproduce this content without prior written approval. Thanks.

Tags: metallica james hetfield lars ulrich kirk hammett rick rubin

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Mike Patton: the man, the screams, the wacky on and off stage antics, the Epic rap-rock smash hit single, the legend. After Faith No More broke up, he set up one of the most creatively exciting indie labels, Ipecac, and produced some crazy avant-garde music with Fantomas, Tomahawk and others, as well as discovering some real gems like ISIS. Still, we gotta admit, most of the songs he was himself singing on were pretty hard to digest, with the exception of Get Up Punk from the album General Patton vs. The X-ecutioners.

Last year though, Mike brought us Peeping Tom -- music the masses and us poor chaps at Stereo Warning can understand. A bunch of awesome songs set to trip-hop beats and grooves and featuring cool cats like Rahzel, Kool Keith, Massive Attack, Dub Trio and even Norah Jones (her track is the weakest, though). Download Five Seconds, Mojo, Don't Even Trip and We're Not Alone.

Here's a conversation we had with Mike about Peeping Tom, about why Faith No More broke up and about how much money it would take to get them to reunite. Enjoy!

Stereo Warning: After Faith No More, your music has been very avant-garde and not very accessible. What brought the more mainstream music of Peeping Tom about?
Mike Patton: It's more song-oriented. Balance. I really felt stimulated to embark on these adventures and a lot of the time I don't know where they're going, and some of them ended up taking a lot more time than I thought. Fantomas, for instance, started out as kind of a studio experiment and it turned into a band, which is great. I'm gonna keep it on that path. But as a result, a lot of melodic song ideas were seeping up and I had no outlet for them. I remember looking over on my desk and seeing a pile of these tunes and I thought I really gotta focus and start to take note of other adventures and bring them to life. How much of it was it you telling the guest artists what to do and how much leeway did they have?
I knew what I wanted. The songs had very specific deficiencies. There's nothing worse than saying 'hey I want you to guest on my record, do whatever you want.' You want direction, you want to be put on a path, and I feel like as a band leader it was my job to help them see my vision. Once they saw it and I trusted them, usually I'd send out the files and say here's what I want. In the case of Massive Attack, they felt more comfortable remixing the whole tune, doing a cover version of my version. I'm glad they did cuz it's fantastic. It's about figuring out how your collaborators work most comfortably and then working your vision around that.

What contribution surprised you most?
They all did. This was a learning experience for me. I was pretty open with deadlines but saying 'get to it when you get to it' was a big mistake. Sometimes so much time had elapsed that I'd almost forgotten about a particular song. One day something in the mail would show up and I'd go 'oh God, I forgot all about this!' It was like fucking Christmas or something. 
The Kool Keith (collaboration) was maybe the most surprising of all cuz I had myself set up for this huge dramatic nightmare having heard how difficult he is to work with. We all know he is slightly off-kilter. I didn't expect to get that one back, ever. But I'm a big fan of his and I thought that he had a lot to contribute to this project so I said to myself I'll go above and beyond to make this happen. How wrong I was! He was one of the most responsible, professional collaborators on the whole record. I had one phone conversation with him and three days later I had the track and I didn't have to do anything to it, it was perfect. Goes to show, you never fuckin now.
    
How do you see the music biz today vs. the days when you, GNR and Metallica were playing stadiums together in America's biggest rock tour?
The climate changes a little bit here and there but the way I see it there's a vast majority of shit out there, the way it's always been, but if you look hard enough there's always good stuff. As an artist and as a fan of music I feel like it's my job to look between the cracks and find that stuff. Gnarls Barkley is brilliant. Bjork is consistently interesting. The amount of people that listen to it has nothing to do with whether it's bad or good. 
    
Are fans more fickle now with the internet?
Maybe. Maybe the LP format is suffering a little bit, but it's still the format I'm working in and I'm comfortable with. For the most part, I'm a fetishist, I wanna hold the damn thing, I wanna have it, that's why I do packages like this. (Peeping Tom has a cool package where you pull on one end of the cover to reveal the CD coming out on the other side, like a drawer) 
    
It's more expensive to do that...
Oh god, are you kidding? Yeah! And who pays for it? Me! But I think it's important and I think that it helps the music. It makes it less abstract, less weird, and more seductive. I don't know about you, but if I saw this in a record store I'd go oh my god I gotta hear this. I'd buy it on a whim even if I didn't know any of these names. But you know, I'm easy. I'm a sucker for this kind of shit. 
     
Do you ever look back and say 'ah, the good old days...'?
Yeah, sometimes. But they're good because they ended. If they were still going, they'd be the sad new days. 
    
Will there ever be a Faith No More reunion?
Well, not with me. I feel like when something's really done you have to have the courage and the strength to walk away from it and admit that it's done. We ended it at the right time and everyone's moved on and they're happy. In some strange way I'm busier than I was when I was doing that stuff. I'm in a really comfortable place, especially having my label and having created a bit of my own universe, it's pretty satisfying. But that was a great decade or so in my life and it's all a journey, I wouldn't be doing this now if I wasn't doing that then. I'm happy to still have something to say and have an outlet to do it. 
    
Anyone ever suggests getting back together?
There's some guys in the band who would love to do that and then there's me. Everyone understands where I'm coming from and generally I think they agree. But every 3-4-5 years some brain surgeon in Scotland has an idea, some Svengali who thinks he can change the world, comes with a briefcase full of cash and makes a crazy offer. And it's not easy to go, 'eh, fuck it.' It would be very easy for some of us to rehearse for a couple of days, smile and cash the check. I'm not at that point. I got enough things to worry about, enough problems and enough things on my plate. Maybe if he comes with two briefcases full of money... (laughs)
    
What exactly did happen, you guys were still coming out with some great music, Album of the Year was awesome?
That was it though, I felt like we were slowing down. It was really hard to spit that record out. it took a long selection process with the music, I thought it was getting a little too scattered and it wasn't quite up my alley and I was ready to do some other things. I was happy with that record, I think it stands up to any of our others, but I was looking in the crystal ball and I could see where we were going with it. To me I felt like the best thing to do was to end on a good note, not walk away with a bad taste in my mouth. Surprisingly enough, everyone else agreed at that point. 
    
So it was your idea?
Yeah, I think I brought it up first, but everyone really agreed. It was a very mutual decision, not teary-eyed. It was our time. 

Your vocal range is amazing. How can you go from screaming your lungs out to whispering to singing all kinds of high notes without destroying your vocal chords? 
I don't know, I don't have a good answer. I guess over the years I tried to put myself in situations where I exercise it. It's just a muscle and the more you do it the more you put yourself in situations where you gotta rise up. it's like learning a foreign language, total immersion you sink or swim. I've been lucky enough to tread water in some cases, in other cases I feel like I've learned a lot and done pretty well. I learned by doing and you have to be willing to fall on your face sometimes. I don't do it correctly, I don't do it classically, I just kind of do it. 

Man, Axl Rose should have a chat with you... 
No one can teach that guy anything. He's a perfect prick.

(c) Stereo Warning 2006-2007. All Rights Reserved. Be nice and don't reproduce this content without prior written approval. Thanks.

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