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