INTERVIEW: Neil Daniels
How and where did you get your start writing about music?
Well, I first started writing about music after I left Uni back in 2003. I started writing for websites like musicOMH and other lesser known sites and then I moved onto fanzines like Fireworks and Powerplay. I’ve contributed to Record Collector, Big Cheese and Rock Sound over here in the UK. I write mostly for Fireworks and Powerplay though. They’re great to write for and very lenient with the word count. It’s becoming a joke now in some magazines. I mean, how can you possibly say what you think about an album in 100 words? There’s hardly much point in listening to the whole album. It’s the same with music books. I read 100 word reviews of my books and wonder if the reviewers have actually read it or just skimmed through and looked at the pictures!
I then had an idea for a book which became ‘Defenders Of The Faith: The Story Of Judas Priest’ and from there the books have rolled on, thankfully. The Priest one was fortuitous timing because of the reunion and the new album ‘Angel Of Retribution.’ Since then of course there have been more books on them (some very good ones!) as well as my second book on the band ‘Dawn Of The Metal Gods,’ written with ex-singer Al Atkins. It is his life story. I really don’t think there is need for an official book. The time has passed. They’ll have to wait a few more years.
Who are your favourite music journalists?
That’s a good question and one that ties in with the publication of my new book ‘All Pens Blazing: A Heavy Metal Writer’s Handbook.’ It’s my first print on demand book – which seems to be the way to go for music/non-fic writers at the moment because of the recession – and is available from Amazon and Authorsonline.co.uk as well as other online book stores. OK, so now the book plugging is out of the way (ha!) I’ll directly answer your question: I like the ex-Kerrang scribes like Derek Oliver, Paul Suter and Dave Reynolds. I’m not old enough to have read them back in the eighties but have discovered their writings through back issues. They were/are very, very passionate about music and have encyclopaedic knowledges of rock and metal. That kind of enthusiasm comes across better than a few well written sentences, if you know what I mean. Some writers try to be too clever and are more interested in themselves than the music, but with those guys you could tell it was the music that matters. They’re interviewed in ‘All Pens Blazing’ along with fellow ex-Kerrang scribes Neil Jeffries, Dante Bonutto, Dave Dickson, Malcolm Dome and Howard Johnson. There are 65 writers in total. Roll on volume 2!
I also like Martin Popoff – as every other metal writer does – because he is also very passionate and knowledgable and, with Martin, he intellectualises a style of music (classic rock/metal) that has been derided for years and that, I think, is very admirable. There should be more writers like him.
Have you had any mentors who showed you the ropes?
When I first started (even now) Joel McIver has been very helpful. He’s given me some advice and given me email addys of some publishers and told me what to do and not to do in a world where there are lots of people trying to screw you over. He is one of the good guys. He is, of course, very successful now and rightly so. Joel is a very good writer and is also passionate and committed. I’ve also learned about music writing and publishing from reading interviews with other writers online or in magazines which is the whole reason behind ‘All Pens Blazing.’ This book will tell you what you need to know!
Any eye-opening moments (that are printable!) with your interview subjects? Surprising revelations?
Surprisingly not. The heady days of getting drunk and flying first class with rocks stars is (mostly) long gone. Besides, if I did all that I wouldn’t have written six books in just under four years! I’m quite shy and reserved and prefer to stay here and write and speak to rock stars on the phone. Sounds kinda sad, but that’s what works for me. I suppose getting a hand written letter from ex-priest drummer Dave Holland – who is now in prison – is quite extraordinary. It’s in the book.
A lot of music journalists are musicians as well – do you play?
Nope. I did try back in High School but sucked badly. I didn’t have the drive to actually succeed. Looking back, I really should have stuck to it but truth be told I’d rather be a piano player and songwriter like Billy Joel than a rock star in a band. There’s more freedom and in the end, reverence. (Money too!) But no, I’ll stick to the writing. It seems to be working out OK at the moment.
I imagine you must have a pretty extensive archive, both of your own work and others for research?
It’s getting bigger, that’s for sure. It’s certainly not as big as some other writers but then I have only been doing this since 2003. The past year has been pretty insane in terms of music books and CDs, especially since I set up the website neildaniels.com. I try to review as much a possible but it really isn’t totally possible because there is just too much out there. I’ve asked this question to a lot of the writers interviewed in ‘All Pens Blazing’ and their collections sound like heaven for rock fans. I’m not really a collector, mostly a fan, but what I have is getting bigger week by week. I don’t throw anything away.
I not only like music but films and have a massive DVD collection. I also love comics and sci-fi/fantasy/horror and have loads of books all over my place. I have a very understanding and generous partner and I tell her it’s all for research but we both know it really isn’t. I’m obsessive about keeping everything in order because when you have so much stuff you need to know where everything is hence A-Z order, generic order, etc…
If you could beam back to any time in music history and cover a particular band’s early days, who would it be and why?
You’re working on a book about Linkin Park, and even though they’ve been around for quite a while now, your other books tend to be about classic rock/metal acts. Why Linkin Park, and are there other similarly recent acts on your horizon?
Yeah, I guessed some people would pick up on that. My main area of interest is the older bands, more classic rock/early heavy metal orientated bands, but I’m not prejudiced and love a lot of new bands. Linkin Park have been around for over a decade and there’s not a book on them so the publisher approached me and I agreed. I don’t like the ‘Reanimation’ album and hate the Jay-Z stuff but love their three studio albums and they’re great live. I’d like to move between books on bands that have had massive success like LP and Bon Jovi to artists like Priest that have had lots of success but also, the books have an historical meaning however small. Same with ‘All Pens Blazing.’ I think it’s a really cool reference book.
INTERVIEW: Bumblefoot
Ron Thal, better known as Bumblefoot, is a busy dude right about now. In addition to his solo career – including his latest album Abnormal, now distributed here in Australia by Riot Entertainment – he finds time for projects such as playing guitar for metal queen Lita Ford and being lead guitarist in a little band you may have heard of, Guns ‘N’ Roses. Thal’s workaholism verges on the humbling, and when I first called for our interview he was baled up in band rehearsal. When I called back later it was pretty late for Bumblefoot but I found him as animated and excitable as his playing.
How ya been?
Good, good! Been insanely busy, but I always seem to be like that. I never know how to say no to things, at the sacrifice of sleep and sanity.
Who were you rehearsing with today?
I have a new band that I’m starting up. I don’t want to say anything about it until the line-up is exact. We’re just waiting to see who our bass player is definitely going to be, but it’s going to be heavier than a lot of the other stuff I’ve done. It’s gonna be interesting. A lot of fretless guitar. I’m really looking forward to recording and touring and getting it out there really quick.
Is it going to be under your name, or are you gonna do a Chickenfoot?
It’s gonna be a different one. Actually I saw Chickenfoot last night. I got to hang out with Joe Satriani a little bit and catch up. They have such a great vibe, so down to earth and just having fun. Picture the Hagar-era Van Halen with Chad Smith, Chilli Pepper grooves and impeccable, ass-kicking guitar every time. It’s just a great thing.
Now, my first question was submitted by my mate and fellow Aussie guitarist Chris Szkup (www.cs-songs.com)
Chris Szkup! Wonderful guy!
Oh man, let’s start off with the flight to Australia. At first I was dreading the flight because it was a good 14 hours, but it was the most comfortable flight I’ve ever been on. It was the first time I actually had a full comfortable night’s sleep on an airplane in my entire life, so it’s the first time I ever experienced that. So it was off to a good start. I think we landed in Sydney then shot all the way over to Perth. Then we drove up to Fremantle and visited Bon Scott’s grave, paid our respects. Just the little things you remember. I remember being on a train and there was a young girl who had part of her face painted – she was going to a football game and the way it looked was something different to what you see in America. She had a little flag painted under her eye. It’s the little things like that. I remember those things more than the shows. Just the normal, human moments. Those are the things that really stand out. Y’know, the view from the hotel in Sydney overlooking the Opera House and the bridge and everything. Walking around with my wife, Sebastian Bach and a couple of guys from his band, and suddenly some guy in a trenchcoat comes running up to us going “Hey! Hey! Hey!” and he opens his coat up and pulls out Axl’s microphone. It turns out that the night before, when Axl through his microphone out, that’s the guy that caught it. Oh what else… I remember also in Sydney eating in a really nice restaurant along the water at night… just the nice moments like that. The shows are always… how do you even describe a show? It starts and your brain is in this other mode, and next thing you know the show is over and it’s more like one of those hazish dreams: “Did I just play, or didn’t I?” So unless something very significant happens in the show, I don’t really remember the show in a very clear way. But it’s everything after. Going back afterwards and meeting Chris Szkup and his girl, hanging with them. I can still picture seeing them and this nice drawing they gave me in a frame, which is hanging in my living room right now. It’s hanging over my wife’s head as she’s sitting on the couch right now watching Hell’s Kitchen on TiVo. So it’s little things like that. No matter what happens, good or bad, those are the fond memories that make it an endearing experience you cherish. The dinners, the hanging out.
One thing I thought was really cool was the bio on your site. I’m so tired of reading really stuffy bios. Yours is more like a real autobiography. You started playing from a pretty early age?
Yeah. It was the whole KISS thing. A lot of people from my generation heard the KISS Alive album for the first time and it got them so psyched up that they felt like they needed to experience that themselves – then spent the next 20 or 30 years working towards it. It’s the same kind of story. I was 5 years old and all the older kids in the neighbourhood got KISS Alive. Where I grew up there seemed to be two ages of kids: all the kids that were my age, and all the kids that were two or three years older. And the younger ones seemed to get exposed to a lot of the culture of the ones who were a little bit older. So I was five, six, seven years old and going out buying Boston’s first album, Yes’s ‘Going For The One.’ Blondie’s ‘Parallel Lines.’ Ramones’ ‘Rocket To Russia.’ Really getting exposed at a much younger and maybe even more impressionable age. And KISS and the Beatles, those were my two favourites that made me really wanna make music. KISS made me wanna get up on a big loud stage and put on a crazy show, but the Beatles made me truly love music. That’s what made me want to lock myself up in a studio, splice up tape, turn it backwards. All that kind of stuff. That was the creative inspiration.
That’s cool! For me my first hero was Mark Knopfler and I started playing when I was about 7, but then I saw Steve Vai in David Lee Roth’s ‘Just Like Paradise’ video when I was 10 and I was like, ‘That’s so cool! I’ve gotta do that!’
Yeah! The whole Van Halen, Steve Vai, Satriani thing, all those guys, they’re the ones that took everyone into guitar and showed them a whole other realm out there. They just make you rethink everything and start challenging yourself.
Let’s talk about Abnormal. It sounds so energetic and powerful and freaking awesome.
About five years ago I got an old house. I don’t live there, I just use the place to make a lot of noise and piss off the neighbours. When I got this house I started slowly renovating it and turning it into more of a studio than a house. That’s the Batcave, a place to get away from home and just have a place where there’s no internet, no phones, no cable, no TV, no anything. All you can do there is make music. And that’s where I go when I’m producing, if I’m working on my own stuff, whatever it is, that’s my Batcave.
What do you use to record?
It’s a combination of things. Way back when, everything I had was reel-to-reel, just little Mackie boards. After that ADATs and DA88s, then a Mac with Logic, then a PC with Cubase. For the longest time it was just digital, then last year I went and got a whole bunch of crazy analog gear, like the really expensive stuff that makes you really question if you should have spend that much. The tube EQs, the compressors that you just can’t hear any artefacts no matter how much you squash. I think people always have this ‘or’ mentality instead of ‘and.’ They don’t realise it’s meant to be analog and digital. Each one has something the other has and the other hasn’t, and together you get everything.
One thing I really like about Abnormal is the power of the rhythm guitars, and just how animated the vocal takes are. You can just tell you really mean it.
On this album I dug really deep and you can hear everything I was into at that primal, youthful… Sex Pistols, Ramones, AC/DC. Just a culmination of life up to that point. Like at moments you can probably pick out Van Halen, even Allan Holdsworth, maybe Yngwie, maybe Ace Frehley. All kinds of things. I think that album is a pretty good culmination. It’s sort of the score card adding up everything. It’s like ‘Here’s where your life is at up to this point.’ When I do these albums, that’s what they are. They’re as biographical as the bio on the website. I just put it all out there and spill my guts.
The energy almost makes it feel like a live album.
I definitely wanted that feel. Very natural, not studio-processed, not ‘Let’s do it again and make sure we got the right take.’ It was like, ‘That take is all screwed up but it’s honest and pure and human as you can get, so let’s go with that one.’ So if there’s a screw-up in there, if the voice cracks, keep it! That’s being real! Those are the things you rewind, like, ‘Listen to the way his voice broke up!’ Those are things that can’t be repeated. You caught a real human moment. It’s so easy to get obsessed and start just over-magnifying all the little things, I guess getting microscopically immersed in it to the point that you’re counting the tiniest little things, driving yourself crazy for an hour comparing two different takes. Don’t overthink it. If it’s right, trust your instincts and move on. If you were to take Robert Plant’s vocal takes and nothing else, you’d hear all these little noises and things that sort of get eaten up by the music, yet if they weren’t there, there would be something very sterile about it. On some level that stuff just gets into your soul. When the true spirit is there, you feel it. I think that’s the mistake people make these days. Because of the ability to edit so much, we’re editing away our spirit in the music.
One of my favourites is on David Bowie’s ‘Thru These Architect’s Eyes’ from ‘Outside.’ His voice cracks in the most awesome way. He’s trying to reach the notes and he’s pushing too hard but it’s perfect.
Yeah! The vulnerability, the strength when you’re just willing to let yourself be imperfect. It’s touching, it really is.
Are you much of a gearhead?
In some ways I am and then I tend to reel myself in. If it sounds good and it’s workin’, don’t overthink it. Find myself starting to get too geeky, then I just say, ‘Screw it, just give me an amp and I’ll plug in and play.’ With G’n’R the rig is an ENGL setup that I sort of modified. There’s an E580 MIDI II preamp. I can change the patches as well as anything else MIDI just from foot pedals. I had it modified so it’s even smoother when you go from one channel to another. I had them come up with some kind of circuitry to make it even less of a gap. That’s going into an ENGL 100 watt E850 power amp. That one, I had tried one with EL34s which I personally prefer, but with G’n’R where you have drums, loops, bass, keyboards, another set of keyboards, two other guitar players, vocals and backing vocals, it was getting a little bit lost. The EL34s weren’t cutting through and I found that the 6L6s in the power amp were very biting and very tight and they would just cut through everything.The tone was very pointy and stuck out. But it wasn’t as warm and comfortable as the EL34s. So what I have is, the left channel is 6L6s and the right channel is EL34s, and the front-of-house engineer can blend the two to get exactly what’s needed that’s gonna work best.
Can we talk for a moment about Les Paul?
I met his son a good handful of times at different events with Gibson. One thing that I’m so pissed about is that there are a lot of times when people said to me, ‘Man you’ve gotta come down and see Les Paul, he plays in the city every week and you could probably get up and jam with the guy. And I was like, ‘definitely wanna do that one of these days, definitely wanna do that one of these days.’ And now I can’t. But god, that guy, talk about the Thomas Edison of music. From multitrack recording to effects to the Les Paul. But all other things aside, we all remember him as the guitarist and the inventor and the innovator, but he was a member of a family and a person, and I think of it more as a personal loss for them, and I just wish his family the best.
Let’s talk about Chinese Democracy. Production-wise I think that was one of the best-sounding albums to come out last year.
Mastering was such a big issue and they were so meticulous about everything about it to make sure it stayed clear and the vision was realised. Mastering was a big part of making that happen. I think it was the first album of hopefully a lot more to follow that decided that quality was more important than the volume war – it would rather be not as loud and in-your-face, but something that keeps its dynamics and bandwidth. It’s such a full recording. There’s so much going on in it, so much information to be processed as you listen, that it needs to be clear and pulled back so you can really get it without it being just this giant square wave. So I’m hoping that with other albums that follow, people will start realising, ‘Hey, we can just turn up our stereo, turn up our iPod…’
What are your favourite moments on Chinese Democracy? For instance, my favourite track is ‘Better.’ What’s going on there?
There are little things I added to it. Besides the rhythm track I put in, there were some little bluesy riffs at the end of the second verse, just little things like a five-beat break after the Buckethead solo, then there’s the loud, screaming part going on… after all of that there was a break that was just keyboards and I just put in a simple thing with my fretless guitar. Just little things where, knowing I contributed something of value. But there are so many little things where you can go through it and find something that’s so interesting about the production, or musically, or performance-wise?
Are there any plans for more G’n’R touring?
There have been a lot of plans, it’s just that when it comes to battling the economy… there are so many variables that could make it not work. I’m guessing at this point that if something is confirmed, management would let everyone know. So at this point if I said anything it would be premature, so I should just wait for them to say anything.
CLICK HERE to buy Abnormal from Riot Entertainment
www.bumblefoot.com
BLOG POST: I just interviewed Dave Mustaine!
First off, I’m going to try to do more regular blog-type posts in addition to the news, review and interview stuff. So here’s the first.
I just interviewed Dave Mustaine! Dave’s been a huge hero of mine ever since I was 12 or 13 years old and first heard Rust In Peace. I always dug the level of detail and precision in his rhythm guitar playing, as well as the fire and outright angriness of his lead stuff. And I also liked that he was unrepentently intelligent and also a bit grouchy at times. As a rather bookish lad and a budding metalhead at the same time, I liked having a hero who embodied both extremes.
So today finally, at age 31 and after seeing Megadeth live 5 times so far, I finally got to interview Dave! There were a few hiccups regarding a wrong phone number and stuff but eventually it got sorted and the interview happened a few hours after the scheduled time. The interview will be in the next issue of Mixdown and will also be here in extended form soon. Originally I thought I’d publish it tonight but I might sit on it til Tuesday cos I’m publishing my Bumblefoot interview this week.
I’ve done a lot of interviews over the years with some of my heroes – Joe Satriani, Zakk Wylde, Devin Townsend, Steve Lukather – and I’m not usually that fazed but I was kinda nervous talking to Dave – fanboy geek alert. But the dude is such a slick interviewee after many many years of doing it, that it seemed to go really well and he overlooked my geekdom. I think he got a bit bored when I asked one too many questions about Chris Broderick (sorry Dave!) but everything quickly got back on track when we both nerded out over Marshall and Dean.
It was a great chat and I can’t wait for everyone to read it.
NEW GEAR DAY: Jim Dunlop Buddy Guy wah
Woohoo! My new wah just arrived! My busted old Crybaby must now make room for my shiny new Jim Dunlop Buddy Guy wah. I reviewed one of these a while back (read that review here) and was impressed enough to put one on my wishlist. Well here it is!
LESSON: How to sound like John Petrucci
There are certain aspects of John Petrucci’s tone that have remained relatively consistent over the years: a flutey, rounded neck pickup soloing voice and a zingy, almost acoustic-like clean sound. His rhythm tone, however, has jumped all over the shop: thick and warm on Images & Words, Falling Into Infinity, Scenes From A Memory and Black Clouds & Silver Linings; somewhat scooped and harsh on Awake, 6 Degrees of Inner Turbulence and Train Of Thought; and somewhere in between for the rest.
Hi! I'm Peter Hodgson. I write for Gibson.com, Australian Guitar, Australian Musician, Mixdown Magazine (including my instructional column, 'Unleash Your Inner Rock God,' which has been running since 2007), guitarworld.com, Tone Deaf, Beat (including their weekly hard rock/metal column Crunch) and The Brag. And I'm Assistant Social Coordinator with Seymour Duncan.
I've been playing guitar since I was 8 years old, and I've been writing for magazines since I was 18. I've also worked as a guitar teacher (up to 50 students a week), a setup tech, a newspaper editor, and I've also dabbled in radio a little bit. I live in Melbourne, Australia, and my hobbies include drinking way too much coffee, and eating way too much Mexican food.
You can check out my guitar playing at Reverbnation or on YouTube, and feel free to email me at iheartguitarblog@gmail.com