On pourrait dire qu'une chanson est heavy à cause de la façon dont elle sonne

pour moi cela vient plus de l'expérience des personnes qui la composent

"je préfèrerai planer ou mourir", ce genre de trucs

On peut n'avoir qu'une guitare acoustique et une voix

et avoir la chose la plus heavy au monde

Etre heavy c'est être énervé, être un seigneur de guerre

comme quelqu'un en pleine bataille

qui aurait une hache et couperait la tête d'un gars

si vous avez un riff qui sonne comme ça, c'est ça être heavy

La première fois que les Beatles sont venus en Amérique

ils avaient ces amplis minuscules, on n'entendait rien d'autre que les filles qui hurlaient

Tout ça a changé quand Marshall, Laney et Orange

ont commencé à faire ces énormes amplis

d'un coup on n'entendait plus la foule

Pour les premiers groupes de hard rock,

le principal était de trouver quoi faire de toute cette distorsion et ce volume

On peut faire des choses avec un son clean et un peu de réverb

qui sont si sombres qu'elles feraient passer Black Sabbath pour Peggy Lee

moving away from that idea

it's just being like headbanging whatever devil horn heavy rock we're making weird shit

"comment on pourrait avoir ce son ?"

"on pourrait le mettre dans un placard, ou dans un endroit confiné"

"allez, on va le mettre dans un cercueil et voir quelle genre de performance vocale on peut avoir"

une quinte diminuée est beaucoup plus heavy que...

tu vois ce que je veux dire ?

c'est terre à terre, c'est souvent brut

et c'est réel

whan you get really technically proficient, that sucks the soul out of rock'n'roll

when somebody really has something to say

and i'm not saying verbally necessarily but emotionally

it comes out of the music and it just hits you

that's heavy music to me, ti doesn't necessarily has to be all about loud guitars

even though i love loud guitars !

It seems like, heavy, the modern idiom is always like something with distortion and a lot of volume

some sort of reference to the first heavy bands you know

Black Sabbath, Blue Cheer and Led Zeppelin

The whole experience of coming of age in the early 1970s

it was very tense and rife with problems that mainsteam enterntainment was'nt adressing

and definitely not even mainstream pop music

i would love to go back to the 70s and relive it

because, i mean, you had Black Sabbath at their peak

you had captain beyond, you had , you had Deep Purple in rock

you had Mountain, you had, you had the stooges, you had atomic rooster, dust, groundhog, stray

all these incredible bands

since 72 it's actually been done - downhill - yeah, after volume 4 was released

sabbath, unnecessary to point the discussion

i keep referring back to hawkwind because they were a really really big influence on me back in the day

Someone in the green river days discovered hawkwind and i've been in love with those

four or five records ever since

zeppeling, free

like all kids our age i mean, kiss

we had all of dick taylor's records

james gang

neil young

leafhound or

mahavishnu orchestra

alioce cooper, aloice cooper was like the first cool record i ever got

of course i like sabbath, i mean, that's the obvious

they know sabbath nand it's great, but sabbath is played out

a lot of bands we were into bobby and i specifically were into

is what i call like, b level bands or c level bands, like

dust, baltimore

baltimore i mean i did'nt know these until a couple years ago and i heard it

and i juste started cracking up cause it's fucking gnarly

you play these recorrds

it's not barracuda it's not supertramp

in a way, black sabbath was nzever on the radio, but people went to gigs,

and i think thats' why there was more moeny for these bands touring

making platinum without getting on the radio

in the 70s there was a lot more regional hard rock

there were bands like pentagram in washington dc that were a part of the major label system

pentagram formed in the late 71

bobby was the first

i would tell you that

bobby liebling was the first

literally, one night bobby and i were sitting at a frined's house

getting stoned like we did, just about every night

we said you know, why don't we put together a band that does exactly what we both wanna do

during the time i was in the band, 71 to 76, i'd say we were a hard rock band

maybe a heavy hard rock band, but we weren't a heavy metal band

we didn't wanna play clubs, because clubs didn't want us to play them

because we doidn't do covers

if you listen to bobby's songs, they werecreative, incredibly inventive songs,

with weird beat changes, weird chord progressions, weird time signtures and stuff

but the labels would say this isn't radio , we can't sell this, we don't hear a single

we waned to just, record our own material and og straight to getting signed

so we had various managerswho stuck with us for various perdios time

that would take us to the studio, pay for the stessions, and try to get us a record label deal

and each time they failed

crabs in columbia, the wanted bobby

and that's were bobby got some kind of big audition in new york city at a big studio

thats was the straw that definitely caused a lot of damage to the camel's back

because, bobby basically blew our columbia record deal

we wanted to do better vocals, but the guy paying for our session, columbia records,

said don't worry about it and that should be the end of the subject

and bobby wanted his way and so there you go, that was the end of columbia records

the problem really became the drugs

and bobby got

and bobby sat on the edge of being a fucking legendary rockstar his entire life

pentagram i missed the first time around

i thing their records were almost impossible to find

and i didnt even hear about pentagram until the records started getting reissued

bobby had all this stuff and believe it or not even back then

this stuff was even of those 8 tracks sometimes 4 tracks, it was amazing quality

bobby worked out a deal with relapse

and they wanted to pull out a compilation of a lot of our 70s demo

the studio demoes we had done we several managers

i loved it, i loved the pentagram stuff of the 80s

and i'm really proud of bobby for keeping pentagram going for all these years

becauseif he hadnt kept the band going

you wouldnt be talking to me roight now

we just got like a basic structure

you know, we got the skeleton but then theres so much space

you know those parts lasts maybe 5-10 minutes in a run

and then we just like go off for 20 minutesand its always gonna be different

its always playing off each other

i always call it the cosmic nod

i think that its a very spiritual thing

especially i mean like for us when we play definitely at length

that way we can maybe ride a note for 5 minutes

and just kinda noodle over it

it does give you to think

just kinda explore whats in your head whenyou drift off

we talk about it and we were like "shoulod we try to write some songs or should weget a singer"

just kinda said "we kinda like it how it is"

metal in the 80s became very formula (?)

lokk at judas priest turbo album

and compare that to things like stain glass or sin after sin and you cans see what happened to music

in the 80s

early psychedelic hard rock

ened when the drug of choice became cocaine

all of the negative aspects of studio recording

are amplified by cocaine used by the engineers the musicians the producers

i wanna be hinged on production sounding just exactly like in the studio

and then you had your weird underground stuff

venom, metallica was kinda stradling the pumpkin metal thing

i wasnt really part of the wholde ozzy osbourne

judas priest crap

you didnt really have punks going to metal shows

and metal people going to punk shows

and then around84 85

the line started to get blurred a litlle bit

it was actually a defining moment

when the obsessed was accepted by the punk community

its like when, we play ths little bar and the pa went out

and instead of stopping we just played the whole set without pa

screaming in ,playing things like twice as fast

afer that, sam said"ok, i gotta throw up"

i thuink a lot of the dc hardcore bands

were kind of what got me into doing

bands like sping, void ,

somebody told me if you think is fast, you should check dri and coc

hardcore bands from the early 80s

the very first time we saw the melvins

i realised a band could completely clear a room

or completely change somebody's life

faster faser faster, and then the melvins came along

and we were like "awesome"

motorhyead doesnt get enough credit i would say that

they were the real first punk metal hybrdi

was na perfect exemple of

even black flag was so popular fans were willing to go anywhee

just sit nhere

black flag played in the desert

probably like in 1981

ou konw the desrert, even so now, but more so 15 20 years ago

was primarilly a retirement community

its like a vaccum of like you know musiuc culture

there was no question of going to la

i never went to la

i mean if i went to palm springs it was like a day thing

there was no record store

it was all about the desert and

it wasnt something we cdlebrated

maybe like it might be today

the desert is a place for the newly wed and the nearly dead

i mean its that place

the bands were coming and they were like punk rocj bands

they were developing out there

the earlier ones were like dead issue

and skabies babies

there was a band called dead issue i was a paret of

that became across the river with marlow raollali

alfredo hernandez was also in tha band

he played in kyuss for a xwhile

queens of the stone age

they were few other people but

i would say like

the earliest if you wanna say across the river

was klike one of the ones that

i just remeber so vividly that was like a moment of change

the whole sstc that was like our idols

black flag, meat puppets, minute me,

october faction

here are hot pepper sear

these are some bana pepper saer

these are ta mere dragons

when these turn red these are hotterthan hekll

what is doom

first of all, what ly understanding of the styke of music

that we want to call doom

is kinda jut like i said before a gut, a real visceral

emotional

pull

something that will make you cry

what i think

when i really moved into like a concrete form of

i'm in a doom band

definitely the same

we played a few shows with st vitus

when they had their old singer, scott

then they got the new guy

wino

his first show was on ly 21st birthday in 1986

at this little community center in palm desert

dri, st vitus and across the river

it always felt like across the river was onto something really special

we have albums by, everything from mountin to black sabbath

early metallica

all kinds of stuff

we were kinda combining that swith the feelings we got from punk rock

soeakers just fucking melting in front of you

i love that sound

so we started going back and instead of (poum poum tchak tchakl prrllrllrll)

it was just slower, slow down, voilume, saturation, blues

they like, just alienated themselvres from that whole game of like

playing fast and riffing around, the whole punk metal thing

they just bypassed that straight to nrock

noone was really dpoing i

towards the end of across the river

soundgarden was starting to make waes in seattle

and they were actually part of sst

same kind of stuff was brewing up there that was brewing out here

nobody... everybody knew me as the singer of st vitus

but nobody knew i played guitar

kind of interesting situation where i think it aws

scott mars from band across he river

we jammed at a partu near ventura, by the beach

i was playing drums, he was playing guitar

i didnt know he could play guitar

mario lally was playing bass

and we did this crazy jam

afterwards it was like "man what kind of fucking band is this"

caught up scott, and we agreed to forge ahaed as the obsessed

thats what we did it was me, scott reeder and greg rogers

after struggling a little bit here and there

scott reeder left to join kyuss

thats when kyuss basically exploded

they were like the only band in the desert touring

they were the ones, they were the ones that basically stared perpetuated our univers out there

it was like a blueprint for desert rock i guess it would be it

guys like mario lally and kyuss really took it

to the next step by not only saying

you know were ? so maybe we dont know what the hip thing is

but they actually embraced that instead

not only "were gonna reject the hip thing" but "were gonna reject tje lmasses at the same time"

i mean i hate to say it but a lot of it had to do with we just started smoking grass

you tzke a group of kids

digging aggressive music and certainly like hardcore punk

and they start smoking dub, interesting things happen

thats an interesting music

what happened with the obessed was thrash it

slayer and that type of music is just too big

that was it thats what the 80s became

either you were a hair band

or you were a thrash band

anybody deserve to be a rock star, be that guy

its like heaven

youre cursed to be the underdog, theres no way out

you just gotta be there

but people love you because you stayed that way

because you stuck to your guns

and never stopped playing what you play

we formed comets in 1999

ben machin and i formed the group in santa cruz california

youn know he and i were in the just like anthemic rock lmusic

grand funk and some punk rock

just kinda old favorites and stuff like that

and we were just getting in further out stuff like

coltrane and free jazz stuff

its not just a synth that makes fun sound

no it s a

so tyou can put the scene effects on your