Shame on me for not getting this posted online sooner, but here it is. Being that it's an enjoyable and not overly time-sensitive interview, I think fans will still get a lot from it. This time however, it's not me doing the interview, but rather my Ohio buds Ron and Don Higgins, who help out transcribing interviews for the site. Their turn to sit down and chat away to one of the great guitarists from the last 20 years.

Mark: We were going to a dinner and then we cancelled it and now I'm home. We were going to go with Joe, my singer, but they cancelled so we cancelled too.

Ron: That's cool.
Don: Not a big deal at all.
Ron: Every time we do one of these interviews something happens, so that's just par for the course. So that's great.
Mark: <Laughs>

Ron: I explained to him, Don, about Melodicrock and that we're taping the interview, we're going to transcribe it and then have Andrew post it to the site.
Mark: It's a cool site. I actually went to it to check it out and it's pretty happening. I like it.

Ron: So we said, “Why don't you let us do a couple of these interviews now?” and he said, “Sure.” So now we've done a host of them. In fact, we just talked with Troy Lucketta from Tesla last week.
Mark: Excellent, man.

Ron: They were getting ready to do that benefit show up in Rhode Island.
Mark: Oh, cool. Did Tesla do theirs?

Ron: Yeah, Tesla. They were doing that Wake Up To Love thing.
Mark: Yeah, I heard they did one.

Don: Wake Up To Love is the Foundation that Troy is involved with and in cooperation with the Station Family Fund. They did a concert where Tesla performed and Shinedown and some members of Vanilla Fudge -- Carmine Appice and Pat Travers. It was on Feb. 25, I believe.
Mark: Yeah, I'm supposed to call Troy but I haven't called him yet.

Ron: The night we talked to him was a few days before the benefit concert and the night after Tesla kicked off their new acoustic tour.
Mark: Oh, okay.

Ron: So that was pretty cool, he was giving us some info about that.
Mark: Yeah, those guys are great.

Ron: Yeah, they really are. They're going to be in town here in a couple of weeks. We're calling by the way from Cincinnati, Ohio.
Mark: Oh, okay.

Ron: Which is kind of funny because we just heard you on our local radio station yesterday.
Mark: Oh, really?

Ron: Yeah, you had called in to WEBN.
Mark: Oh, yeah!

Ron: And talked to Mr. K and Wendy.
Mark: What a trip. It's freaky because it's a total coincidence because that's something that my publicist got.

Ron: Is that what it was?
Mark: Yeah, and I hooked up with you guys through Todd. That's just a freak thing.

Ron: Imagine, we're sitting there, we knew that this – this was yesterday – and we knew that we were going to be talking with you tonight and we're listening to that show and they say, “We're going to be talking with Mark Kendall,” and I'm going, “No, way.”
Mark: That's so weird.

Ron: It was a riot but it was so cool because they did play one of the new tracks off of your new solo album, which I thought was cool.
Mark: Oh, cool.

Ron: They played “Hail To The Kitty”
Mark: Oh, “Hail To The Kitty”. Okay.

Ron: Yeah. So that was kind of cool that they did that.
Mark: Did you guys get a copy of the album?

Ron: No, we didn't but I'll tell you what we did, both of us, we went out to cdbaby.com, which is where you can buy it and they've' got some pretty lengthy sound clips of everything.
Mark: Okay, good.

Ron: So we listened to every one of them and I think got a pretty good feel for most of the album.
Mark: There's supposed to be a tape on the way. I thought it was going to be overnighted.

Ron: Well, they might've sent it to Andrew. I don't know because we did this with Todd, not through a publicist.
Mark: Got it. I know what you mean.

Ron: I had asked Todd when he set it up if he had a copy of it and he didn't say whether or not he did, and Andrew is down in Australia.
Mark: Well before you guys go, I'll get your information and… do I have your address in any of the emails, or no?

Ron: Probably not, but I can just send it to you. I've still got your email obviously.
Mark: Yeah, just email me your address and I'll make sure you guys get a copy.

Ron: That's great.
Don: That's cool.
Ron: It's funny because Todd highly recommended it. I think his quote was, “The guy sings as well as he plays guitar.”
Mark: <laughs>

Ron: I'm thinking, “Well, the guy can play a guitar so…!”
Mark: Awesome

Ron: But I didn't know what to expect. Of course, what am I expecting? Something that sounds a bit like Great White, and it really doesn't.
Mark: Right

Ron: And that's not a bad thing. I love Great White but I always like when solo projects don't sound like the bands, because if it did, then why bother?
Mark: Yeah, well it's hard for me to sound like Jack Russell when I sing! <laughs>

Ron: <laughs> Well, you know what's funny? When I was listening to “Hail To The Kitty”, and I hope you take this as a compliment, but I thought you sounded a heck of a lot like David Lee Roth. Have you ever been told that?
Mark: I think somebody had said that they kind of hear those overtones.

Ron: Yeah. And I'm a huge Van Halen fan.
Mark: I'm kind of in his range. In fact, his range might be a little higher than mine with his squealing and that. When you don't have a high range you have to deliver with a lot of attitude. That's the way I make people believe me, I have to just give it maximum attitude.

Ron: Well, Todd was right. You can sing.
Don: I thought “Lift Me Up” definitely had a lot of DLR sound to it.
Mark: In the very early days of Van Halen, I used to really… because I saw them when I was in the 8th grade in a backyard party.

Ron: You're kidding.
Mark: They were playing like 3 blocks away from my house.

Ron: Wow.
Mark: I lived in El Monte, CA. They played mostly all covers. They were like the backyard party band. I just thought that they were a little better than everybody else. I was pretty young and everything, but there were a lot of bands around and we used to go see them play and a lot of people were playing in people's backyards.

Ron: Wow.
Don: Is that when they were still calling themselves Mammoth?
Mark: No they were called Van Halen when I saw them and them my friend we used to go see them, they were playing a few bigger venues like little basketball arenas, you know, high school arenas. They were the best band around. Their whole following was like mostly musicians, you know. There were mostly guitar players in the crowd, because of Eddie, how he played the guitar. But back then, he didn't have the whammy bar and he didn't use his right hand a lot on the finger board or anything, but he played a little bit outside of where most people were playing.

Ron: I had heard, I don't know if this is true, maybe I read it in David Lee Roth's autobiography, but it said that he used to play, when he played live in front of a crowd, he would turn around so people couldn't see what he was doing. He was kind of trying to protect his trade secrets or something.
Mark: I never saw him do that, but I heard that George Lynch used to do that.

Ron: Really?
Mark: George Lynch, when he used to play in The Boyz, he was doing that right hand thing on the finger board before Eddie was.

Ron: You're kidding?
Mark: No. So he would face his amp when he did that part.

Ron: Wow.
Mark: What they say is, now this is just the rumor, but Eddie knew what he was doing, kind of took that idea, now he probably wouldn't admit to it, but this is just what I heard because I grew up around all those guys, I know a lot of other guitar players too, and what they said is Eddie just turned it more into a musical thing, where Lynch made it more of a noise maker.

Ron: Yeah.
Mark: Like he used to do the hammer-offs but he also did a lot of sliding with his right hand and stuff.

Ron: Yeah.
Mark: And when he would hammer with his left hand, instead of alternating fingers, he said he had a hard time doing that so he would slide his finger back and forth.

Ron: Okay.
Mark: Lynch. You know.

Ron: That's cool.
Mark: Eddie just turned it into more of an orchestrated thing, like with “Eruption”.

Ron: Sure.
Mark: He would literally, you know, put beautiful melodies together incorporating that right-hand.

Ron: That's funny, because they're both phenomenal guitarists, but they definitely have distinctive styles.
Don: Yeah, with George Lynch I don't think of him as much of doing the hammer-ons and tapping but he always seemed to be more efficient at very fast plucking. He really sort of perfected that.
Mark: Yeah, he definitely has his own kind of thing. I just went and saw him the other day. This guy came down from this radio station called WMMT and he did a couple of shows with me. I can't think of where it was…

Ron: George Lynch did some shows with you?
Mark: No, no. he was playing in town out here, going to the NAM show and stuff like that and I guess he'd done some things with Lynch too and told me that he was playing so I went and saw him the other night at the House of Blues in Anaheim.

Ron: That would've been great.
Mark: I hadn't seen him in a long time. He was playing with kind of unknown guys, I guess, but it was good. It was cool.

Ron: Have you seen Dokken with their new guitar player? I thought he was pretty good -- Jon Levin.
Mark: Yeah. In fact, we did a show with him last year, we did a few shows with Dokken last year, some festivals, and that guitar player, Don said, I've known Don since 1975, so he's like, “Yeah, but the guy's too much like Lynch. He's exactly.” Yeah, but that guy is good.

Ron: Well yeah, and then you find out that in his spare time he's a lawyer. Its like, “Wait a minute!”
Mark: Oh, really?

Ron: Yeah, he was their lawyer.
Mark: I think somebody told me something about that!

Ron: Yeah, he was their lawyer and doing stuff for them and he obviously plays and he still does a lot of stuff for the band.
Mark: The guitar playing lawyer!

Ron: Yeah. He even said, he couldn't get in too much trouble and stuff because he's married and he's always doing paperwork on the bus. <laughs>
Mark: Oh, my goodness.

Ron: I told him, “You're kind of killing the whole rock and roll sort of image here, buddy!”
Mark: <laughs>

Ron: He was great. He was one of the other guys we were fortunate enough to interview.
Mark: Talk about something to fall back on!

Ron: Yeah <laughs> If the whole guitar thing doesn't work out…
Mark: <laughs>

Ron: But he was phenomenal. We saw Dokken last year with him when they came to Annies, that's the place down here in Cincinnati, and we were really impressed. Actually, the last time I saw Great White was at that same place, called Annies, down on the river.
Mark: Oh, yeah! I remember that. And a couple of guys from Cinderella played?

Ron: I don't remember that but, gosh, it's probably been 7 or 8 years when I saw that.
Mark: Oh, you're talking a way long time ago.

Ron: Yeah.
Mark: Oh, I thought you were talking about last year or something.

Ron: No. Did you guys come to Cincinnati last year? You were close. Maybe you did.
Mark: Oh, no. It might've been St. Louis.

Ron: I know you came close because either you or Jack, I think it was Jack, called that same radio station, and they were talking up the gig, but I think it was up closer to Dayton, Ohio, which is only about an hour and a half away.
Mark: Yeah, it probably was Dayton. That sounds familiar.

Ron: There's two things that I remember about that show. One, you guys were phenomenal live…
Mark: Annies?

Ron: Yeah.
Mark: I think we did… didn't we play there last year?

Ron: I don't remember. If you did I'm mad because I missed it! You might have.
Mark: It's like a large club? I think we played there with Warrant.

Ron: You know what, you might've. Warrant's been through town a lot.
Mark: It holds about 900 people?

Don: Yeah, it's got an outdoor area.
Mark: Yeah, it's got an outdoor thing that wraps around and then there's a lot of wood on the inside and stuff.

Ron: Yeah.
Mark: Yeah, we definitely played there last year.

Ron: Wow. Cool.
Mark: We played one show with Warrant last year. And the opening act was… oh, no, no. It wasn't Warrant. It was the guitar player who used to play in Warrant. Billy something. Billy Martin. That's where I met this radio station guy. It's WMMT, he was down there in Arkansas Mountain Radio, or something like that. Anyway, he was just out there and it was a freak kind of thing.

Ron: That's cool. Well the other thing that I remember about the show, other than it was a great show, was that after the show, every person in the band came out and met the fans and signed autographs.
Mark: Oh, yeah. We always do that. I don't leave until the last little pick is signed.

Ron: That is awesome. I've been to so many shows where…
Mark: Everybody tells me that, “Oh, so and so band didn't even stay - they all went and rushed off like they were The Beatles or something, and I get so sick of hearing that. When you're playing the big places, like all those years when we played the big arenas, it was hard for us to get to the fans, you know. You really can't go out and sign 20,000 autographs, you know?

Ron: Yeah.
Mark: Or you wouldn't even make it to the next show. Since we are playing the smaller venues, why not take advantage to meet some of the people and hear the stories, or whatever.

Ron: Well, I'll tell you, as a fan, I really appreciate that and I think all of the fans do.
Mark: That's awesome. I'm a fan myself and I know that seeing Johnny Winter, well he's pretty sick right now, but when I saw him a few years ago I got to go on his bus and got the full treatment. I saw him in a small venue, which was really cool. When I used to see him as a teenager, you know, I was like always in the last row of an arena and he was like the size of a B.B., or whatever?

Ron: Right.
Mark: To see your favorite artist in a smaller place is awesome.

Ron: It really is.
Don: Yep, yep. Because like you said, sometimes…
Mark: From a fan's point of view. Of course, we all want to be playing stadiums! <laughs>

Ron: Right, right.
Don: It's fun to go to the big shows, you know, I've been to the big stadium concerts and it's cool when you've got 40,000 people, but then again, like you said, usually the artist is so small, unless you get really lucky and get really good tickets. I pulled that off once. I saw the Billy Joel/Elton John combined tour, they were up at Ohio State University and they had the whole Horseshoe sold out and we ended up in the 10th row on the floor and we're like, “These are great seats, but look at all those people behind us!”
Mark: <laughs> Right.

Don: It's still a fun atmosphere.
Ron: Yeah, but we've been on the other side too. The Monsters of Rock tour in the late 80s.
Don: Oh, with Van Halen.
Ron: It was at the Hoosier Dome and I swear Eddie Van Halen was the size of an ant, we had the worst seats. I think our ticket stub actually said “Worst Seat In House”.
Mark: <laughs>

Don: I remember that. We were so far away, that you would watch the drummer and he would hit his cymbal and then you would hear the sound like a half a second later.
Mark: I know, I know.

Don: You were so far away that the audio and video…
Mark: Yeah, we played some of those kind of shows with Iron Maiden in Germany and I can't imagine being…I mean, they had two sets of delay towers, they were so far away.

Ron: Wow.
Mark: Because we would play with like Iron Maiden, David Lee Roth, KISS…

Ron: I'd pay good money to see that.
Mark: And I think Anthrax and a couple of other bands, one from up North like a Metallica like thing, but they were just really heavy. They guy sang through an Echoplex, like a hundred octaves low and stuff.

Ron: Geez.
Mark: Yeah <laughs>. One of those kinds of gigs, you know. It was cool. It was fun to play for so many people but.

Don: It's almost like you're not even there to see a band. You're just there at a really big party with really good music on the radio.
Ron: Right. With really expensive beer.
Mark: I went to a concert, the last really big concert that I went to because my manager was managing Guns and Roses, is we went and saw Aerosmith. Now this is after they cleaned up and were all kick ass and everything. We went and saw them at the Universal Amphitheater here in California and I had my wife with me and we got the full treatment and everything and we got these great seats right by the board, like we were going to have these real awesome seats, and these two huge bikers were in my seat and I showed them my ticket stub and they ripped them up and said, “What tickets?”

Ron: Oh, no!
Mark: I said, “I'm not going to deal with this,” so I just hung by the board for a couple of songs and then went backstage. <laughs>

Ron: That must've been the same two cats that were at the Aerosmith show in Cincinnati one year. A buddy of ours had to go to the hospital because it was the same thing, we were in the pavilion, this was down at Riverbend, which is an outdoor amphitheater and he came back with a couple of beers and there were two big biker guys in his seat. He decided he was going to get tough with them and they put him in the hospital.
Don: Yeah, he came back during the opening act, which was Jackyl, and the biker said, “We'll move when Aerosmith come,” and I'm thinking, “yeah, sure they're going to move when the headliner comes.” And he believed them.
Mark: <laughs>

Don: Well, they didn't and they all started swinging and like a fool, I put one of these biker guys in a headlock, I don't know what possessed me, but I was yelling, “Get off of him!” I guess they thought I was like a worker or some sort of security…
Mark: Oh, a security guard or something.

Ron: Lucky for you!
Don: Yeah, but my friend got knocked about two rows back and we had to carry him out and take him to the hospital.
Ron: Yeah, so it must've been the same two cats that were in your seat.
Mark: Yeah, I didn't go that far. I figured that they wanted to see them worse than me.

Don: Well, my friend was arguing with them and I'm just thinking, we can scoot down and squeeze you guys into our seats. I'm not going to tangle with those guys, but they had other ideas. Aerosmith, drawing in the ruffians, I suppose.
Mark: Right.

Don: Of the half of the concert I saw, it was very good.
Mark: Yeah. Right on. They sounded amazing. I couldn't believe it. I saw them like probably 1978 at the U.S. concert. I don't know what it was but it was a long time ago and they sounded kind of sloppy and the sound was really bad.

Don: Yeah, they had a rough time there in the late 70's when they were fighting between each other.
Mark: They were all fighting and drinking and all drugged up.

Ron: They put on a good show now though.
Don: They turned it around quite a bit.
Mark: Oh, man.

Ron: I saw them last year with KISS and boy that was a double bill.
Mark: Oh, yeah.

Ron: That was fantastic.
Don: it's good to see when bands have been around for a while and can maintain and come back.
Mark: KISS. It's amazing, because their makeup must be worth a lot. We played with them in like 1994 and we weren't really filling arenas and we had some actual thin nights, you know, when they didn't have the makeup or anything. Attendance was good some nights, but we did have some weak nights.

Ron: Yeah.
Mark: It was amazing. They put the makeup back on and they're playing stadiums again.

Ron: Yeah. The first time I saw them was without makeup. This was about '86. They had just come out with an album and had a few videos and just when they start to lose their fan base, they put the makeup back on and boom, it's craziness.
Mark: Yeah, right back to the bubblegum cards and everything.

Ron: Gene Simmons is, if nothing else, a marketing genius.
Mark: Oh, definitely. No doubt about that!

Ron: Dude, say what you want, but.
Mark: Oh, yeah. He's definitely a smart guy. A friend of mine was in the band, I think he was only in for a month or so…

Ron: Who was that?
Mark: It was New York, about 1984.

Ron: Mark St. John?
Mark: I was in this club called The Limelight and I was screaming, “Mark, Mark,” and he, I thought was saying, “I'm on KISS” but he was saying, “I'm in KISS!”. I finally got a hold of him outside and he said, “Dude, I'm in the band KISS,” and I'm like, “No way!” and he goes, “Yeah. We're doing this record and this video and they've got this apartment for me in New York here and all this stuff,” and I went and saw him the next day and we're jamming and stuff and it was just a trip. And then he got tendonitis -- woke up one morning and his hand was swollen to the bone. He couldn't play his guitar or anything. I guess he went and got it treated and was fine but when he went back they said they had found this guy Bruce Kulick.

Don: Is that Mark St. John?
Mark: Yeah. Mark St. John.

Don: He played on one album.
Mark: Yeah, he played on one album and a few videos.

Don: That was Animalize wasn't it?
Mark: Yeah, yeah. He was so bummed. That was his big break.

Don: I knew he had something medical but never found exactly what ever happened to him after that.
Mark: he basically disappeared. It broke his heart to be up there with a big band like that.

Ron: do you still talk to him?
Mark: He never really got going again. It was kind of strange because he played really laid-back, I mean, that guy could rip licks. On that KISS album he barely played at all. He really kept it tame. I think they told him to play a certain way or something

Don: yeah I always got the impression that Paul and Gene really control that kind of thing quite a bit.
Mark: I sat down with the guy before and I've seen him play live before. We kind of grew up in the same area. He can do “Flight of the Bumble Bee” backwards and all of that. The guy can play like Paul Gilbert and all of those guys. He played really laid back. I don't think he wanted to out-shine anybody.

Don: Yeah and like you said, if he grew up he was probably a fan and just so happy to be in KISS. As a fan, you're probably just so impressed that you're standing on stage with the guys.
Mark: Absolutely.

Ron: Do you ever talk to him any more?
Mark: Oh, Mark?

Ron: Yeah.
Mark: No, I lost touch with him. I moved around so much. We were just friends in passing and we were playing the same clubs and that was quite a long time ago

Ron: I was just curious what ever happened to him?
Mark: He was in the band called White Tiger or something like that.

Ron: Really?
Mark: yeah it was a band that didn't quite get there and I'm not sure whatever became of him.

Ron: I'll have to go check on the internet; I'm sure it's out there somewhere.
Mark: Yeah you can probably just go to the internet.

Ron: That's cool. Well, we definitely wanted to talk about this new solo CD because it's pretty fresh and like I said we both went through and listened to the sound clips of everything. I really kind of like “Hail to the Kitty” but “I'm The Man”, I thought was a really good ballad.
Mark: Oh thanks, man.

Ron: It's kind of got a country feel.
Mark: What happened was, I was at the music awards, at this LA music awards, and I was talking to George Lynch and stuff and I was just toying with the idea at that time. I had just done a couple of demos. I go, “What are you up to? I'm doing a solo thing.” He said, “Oh, cool”, and then I went upstairs and I met this girl that was… we were just talking and stuff, you know, she looked like somebody out of the '40s like she was out of her era, you know.

Ron: Yeah.
Mark: But she was really pretty, you know? And I go, “I'm just here with some friends and we were just checking it out. A friend of mine's band won some local band award thing, and I was just there for that. She said that she was a piano player and her husband was a producer for the Temptations and all of this stuff and I go, “I have this song, you're a piano player? Because I have this song.” I was working with this guy Douglas Day Stewart who was a movie producer who had done An Officer And a Gentleman he had won awards and stuff, anyway he had this new movie called Tanner's Wish and he had given me the script for it and I wrote this song but I hadn't recorded it or anything. She said her husband had this studio and I go, “I'd love to show you this song and I would like to check you out.” So anyways, I have this song pretty much finished but she added some touches to it that made it stronger and so when it came down to do my record… and then when I worked with her I brought musicians over and we recorded it and it turned out killer. I actually ended up having Jack sing on it because it was for a movie sound track.

Ron: OK
Mark: It didn't really matter. I tried another singer but the guy was way too much drama, the way this guy was singing.

Ron: Right
Mark: I couldn't handle it so I just got Jack and he knocked it out in about an hour or so. So we're building this songwriting relationship deal. Anyway, we were screwing around one day and I had some lyrics and I was showing her this piece of music I had and we did the same thing. That was “I'm the Man”. I actually co-wrote it with her.

Ron: Oh, great.
Mark: She came up with a couple of parts and we put it together and I go, “Hey, maybe I can put this on my solo album.” At first I thought that it might be too mellow but I thought that I would go ahead and record it anyway and when I put it up against the other songs it seemed to be fine, you know?

Ron: Yeah, it fits.
Mark: It didn't really matter that it was coming out of a really heavy song. It was almost a welcomed dynamic.

Ron: Exactly
Mark: So it really didn't bother me. Some people responded to it and stuff so it's cool.

Ron: Yeah it was sort of a nice change. Obviously the record has a very bluesy feel to it. Great White is obviously kind of bluesy.
Mark: The reason that I think Great White is a lot different, it's because especially with all of the original members and everything, a lot of people had a lot of input so you're going to hear a lot of their influences, everybody's idea getting into the soup, and then you get more of a band sound, you know what I mean? Michael Lardie, the keyboard player, was into Elton John and Billy Joel.

Ron: OK
Mark: …and people like that, you know?

Ron: Yeah
Mark: Jack was like the Zeppelin guy. He liked Aerosmith and all of the modern day rock stuff like that and I was kind of like Ten Years After, Alvin Lee, Billy Gibbons, Hendricks, Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughn and all of the big gunslinger type straight-ahead blues guys. I like the real stinky blues and heavy rock and stuff too but I was always more of the edge part of the band so when you've got those keyboard layers and all that stuff you can hear it in there somewhere but when you strip that all away and I just do something and especially with me singing it's going to be hard to sound just like Great White.

Ron: Right. Like I said, that's a good thing.
Mark: Sure, why do a solo album if it is going to sound just like Great White?

Ron: Right.
Don: Exactly. It's also cool because everyone knows that you're a good guitar player but since it's the solo album, and if you have some singing ability--as you obviously do although much different than the way Jack sings, it adds a whole other personal level to the whole project and it really comes across as, this is really Mark's solo album and a piece of who you are.
Mark: Right. Well, people say that I played way more guitar which is kind of true but you know I don't sing like Jack and also when I'm singing myself, when I'm not singing I automatically play in between the parts, you know what I mean. Whereas Jack sings a lot more and that leaves less space for me to play so I just have to insert the solo in that spot. To where, when I'm playing it's like, “Hey, yeah! < makes guitar sounds>”. It's a little different, plus it feels way different when your singing because when you're not singing you want to insert some music, you want to have some breath and hear the band play and stuff like that.

Ron: Yeah.
Mark: Instead of judging people's phrases like especially when you're playing live, well, I know how Jack sings now, of course, I've played with him so long but, it feels way different when you're playing guitar and singing, you know?

Ron: Sure.
Mark: You squeeze it into different spots because you can feel when you're going to stop singing you know what I mean? It's a whole different thing.

Don: I thought it was interesting because obviously as Ron had just said the Great White stuff is obviously hard rock/heavy metal with a blues influence. This album is definitely blues with a little bit of rock.
Mark: Right

Don: It's more of a blues album. But your vocals, if someone didn't know any better they would've thought that somebody went out and got this great blues singer to match this blues music. Your voice so fits the music. I mean, even if Jack was doing it… you voice fits it better than even if Jack was singing it. If that makes any sense.
Mark: Yeah, it is funny. The way Great White writes is a lot different than the way I put this together. Almost everything stems from jams, like I jammed for like a month with two guys who didn't play on the record but who would really lay it down for me very simple to where I can just try riffs and screw around and play for hours and I would just go home and listen to the tapes and I mean I have so many CDs full of music and I was kind of listening to things and I would go, “I really like that riff right there and I want to try and make that into something.” To where, Great White wouldn't jam for hours and hours and have things come out of that, you know what I mean? I would get together with Jack and show him a riff I have and then he would start writing lyrics and stuff.

Ron: OK
Mark: So it was like all of the music was written and then we would go rehearse it. That's usually the way they wrote, for the most part. Of course there were flashes of things that would happen when we were playing together and stuff like that. I always like to jam with a band. Things just come out of that. It just seems to have a different energy to it.

Ron : That's cool.
Don: That's the fun thing about, I'm sure, as an artist, for you to do a solo album is, you can approach the entire music project in a different way. You've got the freedom that once you step outside the band it just gives you a whole different approach to the music itself. It's got to be a little bit more fun and liberating.
Mark: Absolutely. Being in a band format, sometimes I'm afraid to tell them stuff because I'm afraid they're going to shoot it down or something. Whereas doing a solo project, there's very little compromise <laughs>.

Ron: Right. It's your baby.
Mark: It's my baby, man. These guys came up with some great ideas and I welcomed them. There's definitely a lot of compromise. 100% of your ideas don't get in there.

Ron: Right.
Mark: And that's really the whole reason for doing one, I think. Just to be able to express yourself 100% or 110%.

Don: Have you wanted to do a solo album for a long time and just finally got a chance to?
Mark: Yeah, I just finally got a chance. Actually, it wasn't that I've never had an opportunity to do it, but I was over a friend's house and he had a recording studio in his garage, you know, a pretty good little Pro Tools setup.

Ron: Okay.
Mark: He told me that if I ever had a little guitar riff or a little song that I wanted to lay down, feel free to come over and stuff. This guy went to my church and stuff. A great guy. He was a bass player. He plays in like the heaviest, believe it or not, full on death metal.

Ron: <laughs>
Mark: But the guy is as religious as they come.

Ron: Oh, yeah?
Mark: Yeah. But anyway, I go, "Believe it or not Shane, I have a riff right now that I would love to lay down because I don't want to lose it. I just want to put it away. And he goes, "Come on over right now." He had a guitar out there, a bass, everything, you know. I was just going to put the guitar riff. So we lay down this quick track and I did "Buckle Down".

Ron: Oh, you're kidding?
Mark: All the way through from front to finish. I already had the whole thing together. All of a sudden, he had these drums and we laid down a beat and he had a bass so I asked if I could play the bass riff and so I played the bass riff and before I know it, I'm in the singing booth and everything, doing the full thing. I go, "That doesn't sound bad does it? My voice isn't, like, horrible." He's going, “No, dude. You sound great!" So that just sparked me to realize, hey, wait a minute. I could put a whole collection of songs together and really do a record with me singing."

Ron: So "Buckle Down" was the first song?
Mark: Yeah, that was the first idea that I ever laid down.

Ron: That's got a really cool funky beat to it as well. It's got a good funky vibe.
Don: How long ago was that?
Mark: That was actually about, probably, at the beginning of last year. Right around January or something.

Ron: So that was pretty quick.
Mark: One night my wife and I went over there for dinner, there was no big plan to jam or anything, he's the one that came with it. It was just one of those freak things. Great White had a little time off so I went and just jammed with these guys for almost four weeks, putting all of these ideas down. And then I was in writing mode. When I was at home I was constantly writing on my acoustic and stuff. Laying things down. Grabbing riffs off of jam tapes and trying to come up with ideas. And then I was pretty much just scatting and I didn't really have any lyrics so I was just kind of scatting, you know how you're just kind of feeling the words and stuff, and then I came up and put it all together with some stories and things.

Ron: I've got to add, one of my favorite songs, and it is die-hard blues, is the last one "Kill That Red Rooster".
Mark: Oh, yeah. That's funny.

Ron: You sound like a 90 year old black guy.
Mark: The way I heard that, a friend of my wife about three years ago, she hooked up with this guy, he came over and was doing some work at our house or something and he goes, "Hey, I have a CD too. I have a band. Let me go out to my truck and you can give it to your husband and see what he thinks and stuff." Well, it was just like, these guys were really, really, good. They had an upright bass and harmonica and a wailing recording. It was really good. They did that song “Red Rooster” and I always wanted to do it so I just kind of took the opportunity to do it. I just wanted to do anything that I felt like doing. <laughs>.

Ron: Sure. It came out great.
Mark: Yeah, and the drummer and bass player were just phenomenal. These guys play on every project known to man, they're always recording and they're always playing somewhere, you know. They laid it down really good.

Ron: It's got a nice piano track in it too.
Mark: Yeah, that's the piano player I was telling you about. Her name is Jane Getz.

Ron: Yeah?
Mark: Yeah, what happened was, this guy has this huge, giant garage up in West Hollywood.

Ron: Okay.
Mark: And he just converted the whole thing into this big, giant studio. They live in this full mansion and his wife would come down 4 flights of stairs and play the piano. We'd call her on the intercom and say, “Come on down, Jane,” and she'd come down. I'd say, “I want you to play on this song.” She'd listen to it once and then play it. This music is like so simple for her it's stupid, you know?

Ron: You're kidding.
Mark: Oh, yeah. She plays all of this jazz stuff. She jammed with like John Lennon and she's a little older than we are. She actually played live with Hendrix before.

Ron: No way.
Mark: I cannot imagine. Yeah, it was like a few weeks before he died or something. Some little festival or something. I've never even heard him with piano.

Ron: Wow. How cool.
Mark: She's phenomenal. She did sessions with John Lennon and did some recordings and stuff. So anyway, she'd come down and I would just kind of produce her you know, come up with some little lines and stuff. If I wanted a little strings or something I'd come up with a little line of strings, but we didn't really over do, I didn't want it to be too keyboardy. I didn't want a lot of keyboards on the records so I did strip it down a little bit. There would be some spots for a little bit of keyboards, so I think I got some on some songs. I wanted that real Honky Tonkish, it's almost a jazzy but more in a blues…

Don: It's like an old Chicago blues.
Mark: Yeah, exactly. I'm just kind of wailing in the background.

Don: It's different than the rest of the tracks on there but it's a blues album and it certainly makes it fit. It's a cool way to end it, I thought.
Mark: Yeah, I always thought that the lyrics were really funny. “Don't ever mess with my old lady or I'm going to cut your head.” It's just awesome, take him out to the tree stump…” The lyrics are brilliant. That's why I did it, just a funny little song.

Don: It's fun.
Ron: But your voice was awesome in that. I don't know if you heard me before, but you sound like you're like an old 90 year old black guy.
Mark: <laughs> Right on , dude. Well I love those old singers. I'm sure it's a big influence, and you say I've got a little David Lee Roth or whatever, I'm sure he's influenced by them too because he used to do all those old songs. I never saw him but I heard that he used to do all those old standards. He used to go out to the Ice House in Pasadena with his acoustic and do all those old standards. Have you ever heard them do that old song that Eddie's dad plays on?

Don: “Big Bad Bill”?
Mark: Yeah, “Big Bad Bill” and the way he sings and stuff. <Mark sings: Just a gigolo>

Don: He's definitely got that kind of voice and he's good in that style. Van Halen is always known as a big arena hard rock band, but his voice fits that style of music very well. He was performing out in Las Vegas for a while.
Mark: Yeah, he was doing a Vegas things and…

Don: I think a lot of people didn't get it.
Mark: No, they way didn't get it. In fact, a good friend of mine, he actually married the daughter of the Imperial Palace, well they all went and saw David Lee Roth and he was playing out by a big pool or something.

Ron: <laughs>
Mark: He said that nobody was even paying attention to him, it was just like background music, like the David Letterman band. He's doing a big show and nobody is even watching. He felt really bad because, you know, those guys were our heroes when we were growing up. This was the friend that took me to see him when I was a young teenager for the very first time I had seen him.

Don: I think he had some good blues guys with him when he was doing that stuff. I think he had Edgar Winter playing with him.
Mark: Well I have tapes of Van Halen playing, like, “Rock and Roll Hootchie Koo”, they did “Tobacco Road”. They used to have like over 200 cover songs.

Ron: Well Roth did “Tobacco Road” on his first solo album with Steve Vai doing the guitar stuff, and it was great.
Mark: Oh, really?

Ron: Yeah, it was one of the best tracks.
Mark: Well, they used to do that with Van Halen, years ago. They used to play that and there was a big jam in it and everything.

Ron: It's a great song.
Mark: Most of the covers they did, Eddie would do some of the signature licks, but most of it would be his own trip. Even in Trower, they would play Robin Trower, and in the solos he would play a couple of signature Trower licks but it was mostly his trip. It was good when they started doing their originals, because a lot of times I liked the way the songs were, and even though he was just brilliant, I was like, “I like the Trower version”. But when they started playing more originals then I was like, “Okay, now his leads really fit.”

Ron: Right. Now I get it.
Mark: Now I get it.

Don: He was just warming up.
Mark: Yeah, absolutely. It was his own style. No one else played that way. It would just make you go home and work harder on your guitar and then you go and see him again and he improves from there. We all keep getting better. Refreshingly.

Don: They just came around here finally, after all of the trouble they had, they put a small tour together a few months ago and I know that he had been a little bit ill and they had some problems and so forth, but I was still impressed with his guitar playing.
Mark: Well I went and saw him in Dallas, just at sound check because I'm friends with Michael Anthony.

Don: Oh, okay.
Mark: Years ago we played at a wedding for a friend of ours, he actually worked for Tesla, he used to work for Michael in the off-season and stuff, but anyways.

Ron: How cool would that be?
Mark: Yeah, I stayed friends with him, he's really down to earth, a cool guy, and I know that Eddie was drinking a little bit. At the sound check they had 200 people from the radio station come down and he walked down and said, “My name is Bill W.” <laughs>

Ron: Oh, no. Bill Wyman, how are you doing?
Mark: But he played good. It was great, for the radio station crowd they were playing “Running With the Devil” and “Somebody Get Me a Doctor” and Michael Anthony sang. Sammy didn't come down to the sound check. But it sounded great. Michael, he's got pipes, man.

Ron: He does.
Mark: He can even sound like Roth a little bit.

Don: The first time that I ever saw Michael sing, and it's funny because on this last tour, he sang “Somebody Get Me a Doctor”, but the first time I saw him sing lead was back when they were touring with Gary Cherone singing and, when that album came out I wasn't a terribly big fan of that album itself, it just didn't work, in my opinion…
Mark: Yeah, it didn't work.

Don: But I saw the tour that summer with Gary Cherone and I thought that it was one of the best Van Halen tours because they were having so much fun and they were playing the complete catalog and Gary wasn't afraid to do his own stuff, Sammy's stuff, or Dave's stuff.
Mark: Oh, good.

Don: So they had a great set list. And that's the one where Michael comes out and sings lead.
Mark: Well he was a lead singer, years ago before Van Halen. I had never seen him, but he was in some band called Snake or something. They all met at Pasadena College.

Ron: Really?
Mark: He was in a little rival band so he decided to play bass when they got Roth because they had a singer. But he was a lead singer. He could sing Zeppelin or anything.

Ron: Wow.
Mark: He's got a high voice. He could sing anything.

Don: Maybe that's Van Halen's answer to all of their troubles with lead singers. They just need to make it a three man band and carry on.
Mark: <laughs>

Ron: Hey, it worked for Genesis, right?
Mark: I think they like that front man thing, you know.

Ron: I know.
Mark: Basically, Michael doesn't walk around and say, “How are you people feeling tonight?” you know? He doesn't want to do that.

Don: Dave and Sammy aren't only good singers; they're good show people.
Mark: If you notice, over the years with Van Halen, their background vocals are really strong?

Ron: Yes.
Mark: He's a big part of that.

Ron: And he seems like he's just a great guy. Is he?
Mark: He's the most down to earth dude I've ever met in my life in rock, period.

Ron: Wow. That's the way he comes across.
Mark: And he's got this huge house with 12 garages with 2 vehicles in them, and there's no ego vehicles, I mean, he uses these cars.

Ron: Really?
Mark: He has his brother fully hired just to clean the cars.

Don: Yeah I saw him on TV on one of those shows about cars.
Mark: He is kind of a collector, but he doesn't have tons of Lamborghini's or ego-trip cars.

Don: No, they were more like classic cars.
Mark: Show cars.

Don: Yeah, that had been fixed up. Something like from the 60's or something. Not all of the Lamborghinis and Porches, although he may have some of those.
Mark: He didn't have the “dig me I'm a rich rock star” cars. He actually goes to car shows and stuff.

Ron: Do you still talk to him a lot?
Mark: I saw him at the Dallas thing. Not a lot. He says, “Call me, man” and I'm like, “Yeah, I'll call you,” but then we never do, of course. Every time we see each other it's like high-five city. The guy is just a full bro. He dances at the house with my wife all drunk and shit. He's just cool. He's a down-homer.

Ron: He just seems to be one of those rock guys that you'd like to meet.
Mark: No doubt. He'll go to the picnic. He's a family man. He's a cool dude.

Don: It' s funny with the media, because they're such a huge band, and of course they've had so much drama and everybody wants to talk to Eddie, talk to Alex, talk to Sammy, talk to Dave… all of these people need to talk to Michael. He's the one that's been there the whole time. He keeps quiet but he's seen it all. He's down to earth so someone needs to sit down and talk to him.
Mark: Every time I go to see Eddie there's always something wrong. I think I was born not to meet the guy. I've seen him all these years and I can never meet him.

Ron: Really?
Mark: Michael invited me down and I went and saw them when Hagar first hooked up with them when they did the “Poundcake” video.

Ron: Yep.
Mark: He invites me down. It's in LA at the Olympic Auditorium, and I'm down there and he's like, “Well, Mark, today's not a good day. He's been drinking, he's kind of being an asshole.” <laughs> I said, “It's okay. It's cool, man.” Hagar's all, “Hey, you can come in my trailer, man. There ain't no rock star egos here, man. Anything you guys want…” He's all cool.

Ron: Is he a cool guy?
Mark: Oh, yeah. He's like the old teenager. He's like full energy boy. He's the life of the party, always jumping around. Big energy guy. Really nice.

Ron: Excellent. Well, listen. We've talked about your CD, but I'm curious, are you touring on it at all?
Mark: What I'm doing is, right now obviously networking, trying to get a little airplay, trying to get it to some ears. I've been talking to a few companies about distribution. I want to get it out there. Try to get some airplay. I've got it on a few stations, XM radio and stuff like that. Getting a little attention. There's a couple of labels that I'm talking to that are interested in doing something and then I'm going to play this year in between when Great White plays, all I can, and then when, we'll probably play up until September or so, and then I was going to go out for a couple of months and maybe even 3 or 4 months if I can, and do a proper tour. I've been kind of doing it with a publicist and networking but I've got more people helping me.

Ron: Okay.
Mark: A couple of record company guys are helping me and I'm talking to a couple of other labels. Just trying to do something that makes sense. I want it to be in stores and all of this stuff. Right now it's just on my web site, bigfinmusic.com. My whole thing is, oh I don't want to go triple platinum or whatever, that's never been my concern. Oh yeah, that would be great, but I want a lot of people to hear it. That's the main thing. I want a lot of people to say “Oh, I hate it” or “It's good” or something. But to just not hear it… I hate that, when you do a record, even the one we did for Sony, because I don't really think, John Kalodner is brilliant, he's a rock and roll guru, he is a really brilliant guy, but I think that the mistake he made, this is just my opinion, was he signed too many bands at once when he tried to revive the '80s. He signed Cinderella, Ratt, Great White, you know. I wouldn't have cared if he had just singed Ratt and put a bunch of money into them and try to make that happen. But to sign all of the bands without the proper amount of money. I mean, we were doing in-stores with Ratt.

Ron: Really?
Mark: They were promoting both records at the same time. It was a little goofy. Stephen Pearcy said, “Let's sign each others names.”

Ron: <laughs>
Mark: Don't these guys have any money? God Bless him for trying to do that, but it was hard because the budget he had wasn't the kind of budget you need to promote eight bands at once.

Ron: And it's a shame because when I first read that John Kalodner was coming back and signed all of these bands, which were my favorite types of music, I thought, “Finally, we're going to get something,” and it just didn't go anywhere.
Mark: It was a great idea because he feels the same way I do. It ended before it really needed to. When Great White got signed and then Ratt or something and Motley Crue got signed like a year before we did there weren't like 55 bands. There were a few and then towards the end of the 80s it was like everyone was writing the same song or something. Is it Slaughter, Dokken, Warrant. It almost sounded like everyone had the same production and the same predictable big hook. So I think when the Nirvana thing happened it was almost refreshing to hear that trashy guitar, at least something different.

Don: You're exactly right. I think that's exactly what happened. And you had some good bands like you guys and Motley Crue when heavy metal was underground a little bit, but as soon as it hit the mainstream on MTV and radio, all these record executives said, “Hey, we can make money with this,” and they started signing anybody who even looked the part or sounded the part.”
Mark: That's why I don't really blame the bands. If something works, every record company wants theirs. It's just like new music comes in. Hey guys, that's not enough Pendleton's. The singer has got to wear a Pendleton.

Don: That's what happened to Nirvana. Grunge rock was still hard and bluesy. I thought it all could've worked together but it was a new generation.
Mark: Oh, I saw it coming. I go, “Okay, here's the next Nirvana coming out.” Here's a new style of music. Grunge rock. But even some good bands came out of that. Alice and Chains, I thought that was a viable band. So some good music came out of that. They always say it comes full circle so eventually the rock will come back.

Ron: And I think it's starting to. Look how well the Motley Crue tour is selling.
Mark: And, if you realize it, it's the record companies that force you and burn it out. That's why we sound fresh again. Everybody's ears have been burned out to the sludge mania, kill your parents, sludge, sludge, sludge, and now you hear “Rock Me” or something and it sounds cool.

Don: Every generation has their own thing but then when Grunge was big everything had to look grunge and they didn't want anything to do with metal, and then that goes away and now nobody wants that anymore.
Mark: Well I love it that bands like Motley Crue are back together and bands like Velvet Revolver and stuff. Anything like that, I love it that that's doing well.

Don: And of course Aerosmith has weathered the storm and continue to do well.
Ron: And you've got Judas Priest with Halford back. And Iron Maiden…
Mark: Right! That was one of the original big tours that we did, in fact, that was the 2nd tour we did was with Judas Priest. Way back in '84. We did a tour with Whitesnake in '83 in Europe for 4 months in England, Ireland, and Scotland and stuff. And then our first show in the States was in Niagara Falls with Judas Priest on their Defenders of the Faith tour.

Ron: Wow.
Don: That would've been a good one.
Mark: Oh, it was awesome, man. I was scared to death. <Laughs> I go, “We're going to play in front of that?” They had monsters and a big arm that came down and they were filming a video and we're like, “No way, man”. Where do I put my amp and stuff. <laughs>

Ron: When you called in to our local radio station, you mentioned that Great White was going to be playing some festivals this summer?
Mark: Yeah. I just saw one with ZZ Top and Cheap Trick. There's a ton of them. We're playing a few shows with Dokken and they're putting a little package together. There will be a lot of outdoor stuff, festivals and stuff.

Don: Those kind of tours seem to go over pretty well because some of those bands aren't getting a lot of radio play these days but now that the fans are in their 20's, 30's and 40's, they've got family's now and don't have as much money as they used to but they say, “Now I can see Ratt and Dokken and Great White and all of these bands together…”
Mark: Oh, right. It's funny, when we used to play there would only be 3 bands and we'd fill arenas and then these bands came out in the early '90s and there would be like 7 bands on the package. But they all sold like 2 or 3 million records. It was like, doesn't anyone go to these shows? They're selling millions of records but… it was weird. We would play a tour and be the center band and there would be an opening act and like Whitesnake or the Scorpions would headline and there would be 20,000 people. It's really weird that they had to put such strong packages together to fill arenas. Who could figure?

Ron: Who knows?
Don: It gets weird about what people will go to because the other thing I think is weird is you get a new band like Creed and then they're headlining tours and selling millions of records on their debut album.
Mark: Right. <laughs>

Don: I remember back in the day you'd have like Dokken, I'm a big Dokken fan, but you'd have them touring on Under Lock and Key, which is like their 3rd album, and I was still waiting for them to headline. They were still opening for people.
Mark: Yeah, that was hard. We headlined for like 5000 seat venues but we did a co-headlining tour where we flip-flopped with Tesla for like 13 months where we were both in our heyday of our success. One night we would close the show and the next night they would and we had an opening act. That was working out pretty good.

Ron: That was the same as the Aerosmith/KISS show I saw where they flip-flopped every night, which was kind of interesting.
Mark: That was a fun way to do it. We called it the Double Header tour. We had 2 girls holding a baseball bat. <laughs>

Don: I seem to remember that.
Mark: Oh, man.

Ron: Tesla's a good band too. I saw them about a year ago and they're coming back in about a week to do their acoustic thing. I'm not sure if I'm going to make it our not.
Mark: We just did an album for VH-1.

Ron: Yeah, the Metal Mania Stripped.
Mark: Yeah. They're thinking about putting a few shows together for that.

Ron: Oh, really?
Mark: All of the bands would go out and play 4 or 5 songs each.

Ron: That would be cool.
Mark: We just did it in Los Angeles. Not all of them, like the Scorpions weren't there, but most of the bands were there that played on the record. We played on KLOS, a local radio station here in LA and then we played over at the Key Club in LA. It was pretty fun to see all of those guys you haven't seen in so long.

Ron: Who are we talking about? Who was there?
Mark: Night Ranger, Kip Winger, the singer for Warrant.

Ron: Jani Lane
Mark: Yeah, Jani Lane. Slaughter. A band called Alias.

Ron: Oh, yeah. Alias.
Mark: Yeah, Alias played. Who else?

Ron: Yeah, they've got a song in a commercial now.
Mark: Oh, really?

Don: Yeah. “I Need You Now”
Ron: I think it's a Subway commercial.
Mark: That's so funny because we were offered so many commercials like McDonald's and this and that and our manager would always say, “Oh this isn't that kind of band”. We're not commercial. We're not going to sell cars with our songs. I was kidding around with Jack, I said that if they offered us a McDonald's commercial now, well, McDonald's is the greatest hamburgers in the world! <laughs>

Ron: That's funny. I don't know if you remember this, but back in the '80s Neil Young did a song, “This Note's For You”. It was totally making fun of people that were selling out and doing the commercial thing, but now, you've got bands doing commercials when they've had one album. It's like the first thing you do.
Mark: That's mind-blowing. You know, there's not too much wrong with that, I don't think.

Ron: Nah
Mark: I don't think it's a career stopper or anything. More people are going to hear your music but fans might say, “They're selling Subway, what are they doing?”

As long as it works lyrically, I think.
Mark: More people are going to hear your music.

Don: I think it's better for a band to actually write a song for a project, as opposed to taking a song that…
Mark: Right. Taking a song that's already on the record. Yeah. I'd rather see that too. I know that Aerosmith sure has a lot of music in car commercials and stuff. There's one chick, I don't know who it is, but we have one cable station out here, I don't know if it's nationwide or not, it's called Time Warner.

Ron: Sure. We've got that.
Mark: Have you seen that girl that sings “Time….” What is it?

Ron: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Rolling Stones song.
Mark: Yeah, the Rolling Stone.

Ron: Is it Mandy Moore?
Mark: No, it looks like her. It's some new artist. I forget her name.

Ron: Yeah, she sings “Time Is On My Side”.
Mark: Yeah, and it's got her album posted on the screen. But it's the only time I've ever seen this chick.

Ron: I know exactly what you're talking about. We have the same commercial here.
Mark: Talk about promotion. A lot of people are seeing that. I would think that she's singing it because “time” and Time Warner. I don't think that she does that song on her record; I don't think but I don't know. <Mark starts signing the song> It's cool.

Ron: I thought it was Mandy Moore, but I think you're right, it's another young girl.
Mark: Yeah. It's a new artist.

Don: If it's a new artist and nobody knows who you are, then you can't fault them. Any exposure you can get, go for it.
Mark: Yeah, the selling out bit, I remember when the bass player for Metallica, he's no longer with the band, but he said, “Yeah, we sell out. Every place we play.” <laughs>

Ron: Yeah. Gene Simmons likes to say that too. It's a classic line. But Miller Lite had a commercial a while back, it was a Buffalo Springfield tune, a Vietnam protest song. The whole song was about protesting the war, and they turned it into a beer, let's get drunk commercial.
Mark: <laughs> A friend of mine, it's the same guy I was telling you about who lived in Vegas, now he lives in Santa Rosa, but they were out to dinner and his wife that he's with now, knows a lot of stars, you know, and they were out with this guy that wrote “Spirit in the Sky”. <starts signing>. You know that song?

Ron: Absolutely.
Don: Yeah.
Mark: He said that everyone thought that that was such a spiritual song, but it never was and they've done that in commercials that were kind of Godly, but he didn't write it about that.

Ron: Oh, really?
Mark: No. It wasn't a spiritual song. It was just a trippy song. The hippies, you know.

Ron: I didn't know that. Somebody covered that song in the '80s and had somewhat of a hit with it.
Mark: Oh, really. Oh, it was a big song.

Ron: Like you said, it was a big hit in the 60s, and I can't for the life of me remember who it was.
Mark: Yeah, I could call the guy right now and he'd tell me. I just don't remember the guy's name. We're all old now, you know. <laughs>

Ron: Yeah. <laughs> And we've got kids. That sucks all of the brain out of you. I remember that somebody re-did it and had a somewhat successful run with it in the mid to late '80s.
Mark: This same guy, he just did.

Don: Norman Greenbaum?
Ron: Yeah, Greenbaum.
Mark: Oh, that's it! Greenbaum. You've got it. That's his last name. Anyway, this same guy just played with a guitar player named Johnny Hiland. Have you guys heard of him?

Ron: No.
Mark: This guy's like the best guitar player known to man right now. He's really a Nashville kind of dude but he's really breaking out. Every guitar magazine you get now has him in it. Fender made him his own guitar. Steve Vai saw this guy and goes, “You're the only guy that I've ever said is like a million times better than me.”

Ron: Wow.
Mark: He's like frighteningly good. It's kind of that country picking thing, but he can rip leads, he'll rip your face off with soloing. His name is Johnny Hiland. Steve Vai signed him to his own label. This guy is frightening if you ever hear the guy play. He was just playing me some stuff on the phone, because my friend, he plays bass, he went and played on one song for a jingle or something because he knows this guy named Tom Finn who got him the gig. Now he's really good friends with Johnny Hiland. But Tom Finn used to be in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. He writes for a lot of Nashville people. He writes some trippy, folksy stuff too. He's kind of a trippy writer and stuff. Anyway, listen up for that guy.

Ron: Okay.
Mark: He was playing me some stuff on the phone today and it was just scary.

Ron: I've got to hear this stuff with an endorsement like that from you.
Mark: Oh, you've got to hear it. He's in every guitar magazine right now. He's just getting noticed. He's only like 29. He's kind of a heavyset dude; he weighs like 300 and supposedly he's all religious and stuff but his leads will scare you. You've heard some of these guys, almost banjo style?

Ron: Yeah.
Mark: But he plays rock stuff that he kind of throws in. It's wild. It's unbelievable that somebody would take that much time to practice! <laughs>

Ron: So Steve Vai signed him?
Mark: Yeah. I guess he's got a label or something.

Ron: I'll definitely have to keep an eye out for him.
Mark: Yeah, his name is Johnny Hiland. He's probably got a web site.

Ron: Sure.
Mark: It's amazing because this guy, my friend, gave him my solo and they just played a show up in San Francisco and he had it in his pocket the whole gig.

Ron: Cool.
Mark: <laughs> And he called Jim and he said he really liked it. It's so insane because this guy was a fan of Great White. He liked 80's rock and all this stuff, but the way he plays you'd never think that he was into anything like that.

Ron: Gotcha.
Mark: But he's a young guy. I think he's 29 or 30 or something. He's totally frightening.

Ron: Well I look forward to hearing his stuff. Well, what to you guys have going on with Great White? You're starting a tour hear in a couple of days up in Canada, right?
Mark: Yeah, we're going to Canada for like 3 weeks and then we're going to do 1 show in Pittsburg and then come home for a little bit and then we're going to go to Europe for about 3 or 4 weeks. Then we've got a lot of festivals coming up. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to playing with ZZ Top, because I've never done a gig with those guys.

Ron: Yeah, that would be fun.
Mark: I was at a casino about 2 months ago, just hanging out. Actually it was with Jack's mom. Jack was out of town and his mom lives up here. She's like 75 years old and she likes to go to the casino so I took her so she could play all of the machines and everything. So I was just hanging out, playing a little poker and stuff and I was just kind of hanging out and having a smoke and this guy walks by with this big ol' beard and all of this ZZ Top garb and wearing a Levi vest, and I go, “That guy looks like he wants to be Billy Gibbons.” I didn't think it was him because he kind of looked old and stuff and it didn't look like him. I know what Billy Gibbons looks like and stuff and it didn't look like him. Anyway, I was talking to this chick at this restaurant called Low's or something and she overheard me talking about it and she said, “Oh, yeah. He's in town. He's an outpatient. My mom works over at Betty Ford and he's an outpatient there.”

Ron: Really?
Mark: He's just there for a little temporary help with a miniature alcohol problem or something. He goes in and out.

Ron: For a little refresher course or something?
Mark: He doesn't stay confined or anything. He was just talking with some counselors or whatever. So he was hanging out in town and I could've been hanging out with the dude.

Ron: On, no.
Mark: It pissed me off because he's my hero.

Ron: Well you'll get to hang out with him soon, I guess.
Mark: Yeah, we'll do a couple of shows with them.

Don: That'll be a lot of fun.
Mark: People don't realize that ZZ Top have had about 4 or 5 albums in the past few years that just haven't been heard because of the way radio is and no MTV. They have an album they put out about 5 years ago called Rhythmeen that just smokes.

Ron: Yeah?
Mark: And then they have another album called Deguello that's killer.

Don: I remember that one.
Mark: But that album Rhythmeen is really, really good. There's probably no big “Tush” kind of songs on it or anything but there's some good songs and incredible lyrics. It's amazing how good Frank Beard is on drums.

Ron: Yeah.
Mark: I never knew how good he was. That guy, over the years, always kept it kind of solid and straight, and I didn't know that he could just riff out so outrageously. There was one song where he just goes crazy. I said, “My God, is he that good?” I always thought that he was kind of drum machine guy.

Ron: Charlie Watts kind of.
Mark: One dude who really plays well played on my record. This guy won like Buddy Rich drum-off contests.

Ron: Yeah, I read that.
Mark: He's like insane on drums, right? And he said that Frank Beard is hot. He goes, “Nobody's ever played 'La Grange' right. Everybody just plays it kind of how they think it is but here's how the beat really was,” and he's playing me the beat and there's a little tricky stuff going on with the kick drum and stuff that people don't catch. Stock drummers that just play straight, they don't catch the way that he was playing that. It's got a really cool beat.

Don: It's funny, that's the kind of thing that other musicians will pick up on because you'll hear musicians rave about other musicians that maybe people don't always think of at first because they're not that flashy. Like with drumming, a lot of people rave about Steve Smith, the drummer for Journey, but when you think about Journey the first thing that pops into your mind isn't, “Wow what a great drummer they've got.”
Mark: He was a big school of outrageous… like, he played jazz and all that stuff. So people that knew that said, “Yeah, he's upper echelon.” But when they get a big gig like Journey they've got to strip it down. You can't be noodling out.

Don: You've got to be in a band like Yes before you can get away with that kind of stuff.
Mark: Exactly! <laughs>

Ron: Well, we don't want to keep you all night because this has probably been the funnest interview we've ever done.
Mark: Well, thank you.

Ron: And we could talk all night.
Mark: No doubt. No doubt.

Ron: You'd better stop us.
Mark: When I talk about music I could talk forever.

Don: Well I'll warn you, we may end up paraphrasing a bit of this interview or it'll take forever to transcribe.
Ron: Don, I've done longer ones. I'm transcribing one for Andrew right now of him with Joe Lynn Turner…
Mark: Yeah, just paraphrase; otherwise, it'll be kind of like us just talking, which basically it's been like that, you know?

Ron: In a way, that's one thing that's kind of nice about the interviews on Melodicrock.com. It is more conversational because so many people do interviews and it's 10 stock questions.
Mark: It's the same questions.

Ron: Exactly. And it's like, we already know that. We can go to the internet and we can read that.
Mark: I totally agree. I like this format of just talking because I don't really think it's the artists fault to kind of fall into being scripted when asked the same questions all the time. You're not going to have different answers every time.

Ron: Right.
Mark: You're going to answer what's on your head, but it's going to come out similar each time if you keep getting the same questions. How did the band get together? What am I going to say, something different this time?

Ron: Right.
Mark: <laughs> What should I tell them this time? Maybe I should tell them that my birthday is this week.

Ron: Yeah, I have 5 kids tonight and last night I had 3.
Mark: Right <laughs> Exactly. When are their birthdays? Give a different answer every time.

Ron: The other thing that I think is different is a lot of the guys that are asking these questions, they're getting paid to do this and it's their job. They may not even necessarily know you or the band.
Mark: Right.

Ron: Don and I, on the other hand, are fans first and foremost. We're not getting paid anything to do this. We're doing it just out of the love of the music.
Mark: That's awesome. I know that, being a fan myself, I know some kind of behind the scenes type stuff with musicians and stuff and we kind of touched on that. We've even talked about doing a book called Backstage or something just to talk about all of the musicians we've met and all of the behind the scenes stuff.

Ron: To me that's fascinating stuff.
Mark: I love that stuff. I always wanted to know, what does Billy Gibbon do on the weekend and stuff. What about Jimmy Page? Do they have a life off of the stage. That was my thinking when I was like 15. Are they like real human beings?

Ron: Do they eat…
Mark: Yeah, do they drive through McDonalds or do they just pop out of the stage, jam, and then disappear? When I was a teenager I always thought that bands were larger than life. I couldn't picture them doing regular stuff.

Ron: It's kind of cool having that mystery because when Ozzy came out with this TV show, there's stuff about Ozzy that I don't care to ever know. It should've stayed hidden.
Mark: Yeah, a little too much exposure.

Ron: Right.
Mark: They must've written some big checks to get him to do that.

Ron: Absolutely.
Mark: I wouldn't want to have a TV show at my house, man. Where that guy was then and where he is now, before Sharon Osbourne met him, I'm really happy for the guy for all of his success.

Don: He met a good woman, that's for sure.
Mark: Really good.

Ron: I'll tell you, if we could put Sharon Osbourne with Gene Simmons, now they might be able to solve the Middle East peace crisis.
Mark: <Laughs> That's good.

Ron: Those two…
Don: They're always thinking aren't they?
Ron: Well listen, is there anything else that you want to talk about? I know that you guys are still donating a lot of your proceeds to the Station Family Fund.
Mark: Yeah, we're still doing that.

Don: Very cool.
Mark: We're too glad to help out any way we can.
I've gone through so much with the therapy and everything. I'm starting to move on. The fellowship with the families and everything and some of the victims. We're all healing together but to relive that night, I don't want those thoughts or those visions. But I want to keep the awareness of the Station Family Fund. I don't want that to go away.

Ron: Exactly.
Mark: I know that these people still need help and we're going to keep that going forever.

Don: That's great. That's a good attitude.
Ron: That's exactly why we didn't want to focus our interview on that. It's about the music. We wanted to talk about the music but we wanted to make sure that people are aware that you guys are donating proceeds from albums and tours to raise the awareness.
Mark: The music is part of the healing process.

Ron: Absolutely.
Mark: Music. That's what we do. It's the only way we knew how to help. After that, I didn't even touch the guitar for so many months until I found out I could help. Once I found out I could help, then it was time to get busy and create some awareness.

Don: Sure. That's how you can help because that's what you are—a musician.
Mark: When Jack and I first got together, one of our main things was, we were pretty young guys, but we go, let's do this for our lives, nothing to fall back on, because everybody always said you've got to have something to fall back on but here we have nothing to fall back on. The only thing we have to fall back on is our music.

Ron: Yeah.
Mark: So we gave ourselves no outs whatsoever. <laughs>

Ron: That's cool.
Don: I've never heard anybody say that.
Mark: Yeah. You better get there dude. I swear, we fought. Even though it seems like it happened overnight, we played around for a few years and we played like 6 nights a week. We played all the time. We'd play anywhere. We literally played anywhere that had a stage, I don't care if it had 10 people in front of us.

Don: As a fan, and I first heard of you guys right when you first started making some more national noise when you came out with Once Bitten and you got a little bit of radio play, and actually at the same time there was a local band—they're actually still together—who played at Annies where you guys played called Prizoner, and they used to play “Street Killer” and “Stick It”.
Mark: Oh, cool.

Don: At first I didn't know who sang them and then I talked with them and they said Great White. That was right about the same time that you guys came out with this album and then you also had the Recovery Live album so I ran out and got that.
Mark: That was our first album, with “Stick It” and all of that.

Don: That's how I became a Great White fan, by listening to some other band cover your songs.
Mark: Back then when we had those songs, it was the early part of our writing, you know, and we were young. We didn't have keyboards or another guitar or anything. It was one guitar, a bass and drums and a lead singer. Everything we wrote was pretty much in the heavier vain.

Ron: That's the other thing that I remember about the concert when I saw you guys, was after the show when you were meeting everybody, as I was going through the line and getting autographs or whatever, I said to, I think it was you and Jack, I said, “Yeah I kept waiting to hear 'Stick It' or 'Street Killer'”, because it wasn't on your set that night, I remember Jack looking over at you and saying, “That's the 2nd person to say that tonight. We're going to have to add that to our set.” I was blown away.
Mark: We do play “On Your Knees” and we kind of do it a little different, we try to change the set around a little bit. You've got to do that to make it exciting. For us. You know, we keep playing the same set. I mean, there's a few songs that we have to play obviously but it's cool to play ones that… I always hated that, we record albums and then we never play some of the songs live ever. It's like, why do we even put that music on the tape if we're never going to play it. What, you just play it once and then that's it? You have to re-learn the song just to play it.

Ron: I always thought it would be cool if bands did a tour and they called it For the Fans and they didn't have any hits.
Mark: Well, we had an idea for our web site to have a fan write what his greatest hits would be, and we'll make him a CD like that.

Ron: Yeah! You know, Iron Maiden did something like that.
Mark: That's a good idea.

Ron: That's a great idea.
Mark: You tell us your greatest hits, I don't care if it's a live version or any song off of the first album, we'll make you a CD and create our own artwork and stuff.

Ron: That would be cool.
Mark: <Laughs> You know what I mean?

Don: With the digital revolution that certainly seems doable.
Mark: We should have like 500 fans pick their greatest hits album. Because the people that put out the Great White Greatest Hits just did it without us even knowing that it was coming out. We go, “We would never put those songs on there,” or I would've done it different or Jack would've done it different. You usually talk to the artist at least a little bit.

Don: That would make sense.
Mark: That's our greatest hits?

Ron: The greatest hits according to who?
Mark: Right. Well, whatever. OK, man. Thank you guys. I'll check out Melodicrock.
I'll keep you updated on my site. We're getting it built right now. It's been kind of frustrating. We went through a guy that's slower than a snail.
I want to make a really, really good site because we're doing a band Great White site right now and it's turning out really, really good.

Ron: Cool. Because it's mistabone.com right now, right?
Mark: This mistabone site is good for the fans to chat or whatever, but we need to get a proper site. I've been to some sites for like Van Halen and George Lynch and I go, “These guys have some really good web sites.” We need to get a good one going. So we're having one built right now and this guy's an expert. Even the first page is amazing. It's got this shark swimming at the bottom and then it comes out and there's stuff moving around. It looks awesome. It's a really good site. It'll keep people really updated on what's going on. Have somebody just doing that, constantly feeding people information. Don't have things from 3 years ago, you know. Come on! Tell these people what we're doing now, you know.

Ron: Right. Well, we'll keep an eye out for it. We'll just keep checking it.
Mark: This guy is going to work fast. We just had a meeting, we did a photo shoot in Hollywood a couple of days ago and then we had a meeting at the office with the web site guy and put a lot of ideas around and he's got a lot of ideas and we put it all together and he's going to build us a really good site. It's going to be called Greatwhite.com.

Ron: Okay.
Mark: And then I've got mine. I've been having a really hard time with my domain name. That's why it's bigfinmusic.com right now. I want it to be markkendall.com but some other guy has my name and stuff and wants like a million dollars for it, so we're bugging the guy and we're trying to figure it out. I want it to be markkendall.com not bigfinmusic.com, because I just kind of came up with it. Jack's going to have his little site and then I'm going to have my site and then we'll have the Great White site.

Ron: That'll be great.
Mark: Okay, great, fellas. Thanks for calling.

Ron: Well we didn't mean to keep you so long.
Mark: Well, Rock On! And thank you guys.

Ron: Thank you!
Mark: It was great talking to you.

Don: It was a lot of fun.
Mark: See you guys in Ohio. I'm sure we'll be playing there this year.

Ron: Well, good luck with your album and with your tour.
Mark: Thank you, guys.

Ron: Take care, Mark
Talk to you later. Bye.
Mark: OK. Bye, bye.

Stu, I guess the main objective of this interview is to promote the re-issue of the debut Heaven & Earth release…itself a bit of a classic.
Now, why the need for a new version - especially as it's already been released in Asia and Europe separately?
As you know we started our own label Black Star Records that, for the time being, is focusing on the States. The worldwide rights to the first Heaven & Earth album have finally reverted back to me and we felt that this would be an ideal first release as it's never been brought out officially over here.

Did copies of the initial release make it through to the USA at the time, or are you finding fans are picking it up now?
There were copies of this album in the States as the companies that released it in other territories had exported it over here, which was expressly against the contractual agreements we had with them but it's no use blaming a shark for being a shark. The sales have been going really well and things seem to be taking off so I guess we made the right choice.

The bonus tracks are an obvious attraction, but there will be a few annoyed that a CD they like is available again with extra tracks. What can you say to those?
I saw the comments on the Noticeboard and wanted to address them at the time but was so busy I never got round to it so now things are relaxed a bit I can answer the critics.

Firstly, nowadays every record company throughout the world asks for a bonus track for their own territory. It started with the Japanese companies and now I believe the European labels have jumped on the bandwagon. I personally don't like the idea as I feel the fans get the short end of the deal as they have to pay anything up to $40.00 for an import but when you're a new band struggling to survive, in a position of having a record label say they won't give you a deal without the bonus track, there's not much you can do about it. With our Black Star Records releases I'd love to find a way around this and would certainly be open to suggestions any of the Melodicrock.com readers have on this subject.

Secondly, apart from the original advances from the above mentioned record labels, which were very small, we have seen no money whatsoever and in some cases are still to this day trying to get our publishing money from them from when it was originally released back in 1997. For those of you that are unfamiliar with what publishing is, on every CD pressed 8.5 cents per song has by international law to be paid to the writers of the songs. This is how musicians survive. Now I know most people think that because someone has a record deal they're rolling in money but this is not the case. Generally you're lucky if the advance you get covers the cost of recording the CD and you have to survive on that and what you can make on gigs, which until you achieve superstar status, is not very much. I still play for the love of it but I also don't want to have to starve while I do it.

Next, the first Heaven & Earth album was never released and in the States and was never given the chance to do what I feel it could have done given the publicity and promotion that the labels that released it abroad did. Our release was targeted at the States and some distribution companies throughout the world wanted to purchase copies that we, at least, had the legal right to do. We did everything we could to make it up to the loyal fans that wanted the extra tracks to complete their collections like making them available on iTunes, etc. Re-releasing albums with bonus tracks is not something we plan to make a habit of and as I said before if any of the readers out there have any realistic ideas on how to overcome this bonus track issue I'd be glad to hear them.

Lastly, regarding the comments made on our launch party I'd like to say, “Thank you” to those of you who were supportive and to those of you that weren't, “Shut the hell up!!”
I assume you're participating in this forum because you love melodic Rock & Roll and want to see it come back in a big way. We at least are trying to do something about bringing good songs and well played music back to the forefront again as opposed to just talking about it and whining about what's out there. We spent a year of our lives putting together a business plan to get some investors to back us in our ventures as well as putting a lot of our own money into it and we made it happen. There has never been a better time than right now for the Classic Rock sound to re-emerge and all it takes is money behind it to get it there. You don't seriously think someone like Ashlee Simpson is where she is right now because of her staggering talent do you? All it takes is money and we are putting the kind of finances and effort behind all our releases that a major label would for a successful rap artist. We have hired a full time publicist, a full time radio promoter, a full time distribution consultant and we pay for listening stations and end caps in Tower Records, Boarders and all the independent chains throughout the country as well as internet advertising and full page color ads in magazines and we'll do the same for all our artists, not just Heaven & Earth. Some of you may not like me or like Heaven & Earth's music, I don't really care, but surely we're all on the same side here and want some changes in what we hear on the radio and television. The way I see it is that if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem. When nearly every commercial on television in the States is featuring Classic Rock music and Heaven & Earth is picking up radio play over here and being one of the few bands ever to be invited to be on the nationally syndicated Rockline on our first album and seeing a standing room only crowd at our show last Saturday with Blue Oyster Cult I believe with all my heart that this music is coming back and thank God because I'm sure I'm not alone in being sick and tired of the same 200 songs being played on Classic Rock Radio. Everyone right now needs to work together and that means supporting the bands you like by actually buying their albums as opposed to burning a copy from a friend, calling and e-mailing your local radio stations and asking them to play a song you like. Do something to make a difference!!!

Something a little unusual with these bonus tracks too - they were actually recorded recently and have been added to the CD, not tracks that weren't used originally as is the normal case with bonus tracks. What was the thinking behind that?
The backing track for “Life on the Line” was originally written and recorded during the original Heaven & Earth sessions but “Still Got The Blues” was recorded especially for this release.

Ok, let's go thru those couple of tracks:
Life On The Line, featuring the brilliant Bobby Kimball –
“Life on the Line” was a song that Joe Lynn Turner and I wrote for the original Heaven & Earth sessions and it was recorded back then but didn't have any vocals, guitar solos or keyboards on so we brought in Arlan Schierbaum to add the Hammond organ again. Richie Onori had played with Bobby Kimball in the past and called him up to come in and add vocals. I think both of these guys did an incredible job. I added the solo afterwards, which, for once, I was really happy with.

An inspired cover of Gary Moore's Still Got The Blues with Joe Lynn Turner -
“Still Got The Blues” is a song that I have always loved and have played with various people over the years. Back in 93 Joe Lynn Turner and I had a band called Midnight and we did a show at the China Club in Chicago that somebody bootlegged and a version we played of this song made the rounds. After Heaven & Earth came out I had so many people e-mail me asking us to do a version of it so we did. We recorded the tracks at our Wine Cellar Studios here in Woodland Hills where we've just installed the new Pro-Tools system and sent it to Joe Lynn on the East Coast where he added the vocals.

We decided to make this track our first single as a way of getting into the Classic Rock stations in America. They won't add songs by new bands but we took a calculated risk and pressed 1,000 copies that we had our radio promoter send out to all the program directors. We felt that as it was a familiar song with a known “Classic Rock” voice they might be more inclined to add it to their play lists or at least give it a few spins. The gamble paid off and we had program directors wanting to hear the full album.

When the Blues Catch Up with You featuring Al Mirikitani –
When Frontiers signed Heaven & Earth they wanted a few bonus tracks as the original Samsung release had already been exported, again, against my agreement with them so we went in Al Mirikitani's Dog House Studios with Howard Leese producing and added Howard's and my guitar to an existing track Al had already recorded and sung.

Howlin' at the Moon featuring Paul Shortino –
Same deal with this one except we added Paul's voice as well as my guitar.

That makes for a very complete album now doesn't it?!
I'm not sure. Perhaps we should release it again next year with two more bonus tracks.J

For those that are new to the album and yourself as a performer - let's go back just a little bit. First off, you are English - how did you end up in LA?
In 1983 I got tired of the British rock scene which was not really going anywhere at the time and on one of his English tours with Rainbow, Ritchie Blackmore suggested I move out to the States as you could at least make a living there. I took him up on the suggestion and packed up my guitars and moved to Long Island, New York where I formed the first version of a band called Midnight. In 1984 Ritchie reformed Deep Purple to record the Perfect Strangers album and when they went on tour for that he invited me along with him for the Australian tour dates. On the way back we stopped in LA and Ritchie introduced me to a friend of his called Anna Fraley who was one of the Penthouse Pets. I ended up going out with her and she came and visited me when I was back in Long Island. I'd been offered a deal to do some recording back in England so I flew back out there and she joined me. It turned out to be an incredibly tempestuous relationship with Anna, every 3-4 months we'd break up and she'd fly back to LA. and I'd fly back and get her and she'd come back to England again and then after the 3-4 months we'd have the usual break up. On one of these stays back in England we got the crazy idea that things would work out better if we were in LA so in 1986 we packed up and moved there. Of course the location changed nothing and after 3 months we broke up again. She ended up leaving L.A. but I liked it so I stayed here till this day.

That wasn't an answer I was expecting, but thanks anyway! You made a lot of big name friends along the way - how did you rope those guys into being a part of the album, which turns out to feature an amazing line-up?
Well I had pictures and videos of them all in compromising situations and threatened to make them public if they didn't come and sing on my album. Also, its amazing how agreeable people can be if you send a couple of big lads round to have a chat with them. Seriously I had called Joe Lynn and Richie Sambora and once they'd said yes it was sort of like a domino effect, everyone wanted to get involved.

And the album sounds a million bucks and features some amazing names. The story of how it got made and it's original release it another great tale - can you run through that briefly.
Richie Onori & I were playing with Keith Emerson in a band called the “Aliens of Extraordinary Ability” and the guys from Samsung, the Korean electronics giant, had opened a record label that was going to be distributed worldwide through WEA were at one of our live shows and offered us a deal for an album. We couldn't do it as Keith was going to go off to do the ELP reunion tour with Jethro Tull and I was slated to be the guitarist for the reformed Sweet. Sadly Brian Connelly died so that didn't happen and then about 2 months later the top guys from Samsung heard me jamming at the Baked Potato with Teddy Andreas and the “Screaming Cocktail Hour”. They came up and talked to me afterwards and then came to my house for a late night drink where they heard the material I'd written over the years. They offered me a deal on the spot but it took 3 months to finally get it signed. Half way through the recording of the album the Asian economy collapsed and Samsung lost their distribution deal so when the album was finished it was only released in Korea. I bought 8,000 copies off them myself and sent about 300 of them off to anyone I knew in the business and the rest I sold off my web site, which I'd just started. After them seeing the review on your page I got the offer from Frontiers for Europe and after Richie Sambora had mentioned the CD in an interview in Burrn Magazine in Japan I got offered the deal from Pony Canyon for Japan.

I remember getting a package from you and reviewing an advance tape for the site - not even a CDR, an advance tape!
I know, it was all that I had at the time, as the Samsung copies weren't even pressed then.

And now it's back in your hands - Black Star Records is your own label. Who else is involved in it with you?
Apart from myself there's Richie Onori and Kelly Hansen dealing with the day to day running of the company and we have our publicist, Kathy Arnold, radio promoter, Kim Langbecker, artwork co-coordinator, German Arbelaez, producer/engineer, Dave Jenkins and distribution consultant, Clay Pasternack. We also have a few ancillary office staff.

You touched on this briefly before, but let's talk why you would want to start your own label.
There were a number of reasons but mainly it's because we were not happy with the amount of money the record companies make in relation to the artist. Record labels today are still working off a business model that's over 60 years old when records were made on vinyl and there wasn't the Internet to help with publicity. Manufacturing, publicity and shipping costs have gone way down yet the record companies out there are still taking a huge percentage of income, which we feel is grossly unfair to the artist. Also, once the labels have made about three times their money back they don't put much effort into further promotion such as live touring etc. We intend to change that.

Now, this just isn't a vanity project to get your own record into the market place is it? You have definite plans to develop the label and create
a roster of artists don't you?
Most certainly. We originally had a two year business plan with Black Star Records to release this first Heaven & Earth album, record and release the next one, “Screaming for Redemption” and do the same for Howard Leese's solo album but since we're gotten this label started and generated as much press as we have we've been approached by quite a number of artists, both well known and not so well known, to sign them so we're in the process of talking to investors right now so that we can expand earlier that we anticipated.

Can you reveal any of those plans yet? You have already announced Howard Leese's solo album....
Unfortunately I can't reveal anything new at the moment as we're still in negotiations but you'll be the first to know Andrew.

You just played a few live shows too…
We just played our first official show last month opening for Blue Oyster Cult at The Canyon Club that went really well. As we brought in a good crowd they asked us back so we're co-headlining with Mountain on May 21st which should be quite an interesting show as after we did Rockline last week we went out with Bob Coburn for a drink afterwards at our local hangout the White Harte British Pub and when he told us he was going to come to the show, our manager John Malta asked him if he would agree to M.C. it. He said he'd love to so I suggested that they should have a monthly “Bob Coburn's Rock Night” at the Canyon Club where it could be promoted on Rockline and KLOS. We talked to the club and they went for it so this gig on the 21st May is actually going to be the first one. We're also playing at Paladinos in Reseda on April 23rd and opening up for Europe at the Los Angeles House of Blues the day after, April 24th. Alice Cooper is interviewing us for his radio show this week as well so I feel we're on the right rack with this “New Classic Rock” idea.

Who's in the band for the show and is that the same for the next album?
For these shows at least the band will consist of Kelly Hansen (Vocals),
Me (Guitar), Richie Onori (Drums), Joe Petro (Bass), Stu Simone (Keyboards). As most of you already know, Kelly has the gig with Foreigner and we're in the process of looking for a replacement so it doesn't look like he'll be with us on the next album. It's come at an awkward time as everything seems to be finally moving for Heaven & Earth but I'm very happy for Kelly. I can't really be mad at him, as I know it's every singers dream gig and we'll still be working together with Black Star Records. If we can't find another singer I've got a hit man set up to pick Mick Jones off at one of their shows.

Any other live shows in the pipeline?
There are quite a few being offered as we have a new manager in John Malta who manages Pat Benatar but we don't want to commit to too many shows until we've sorted out the new singer as we're going to be running into conflicts with the Foreigner shows.

You have recorded and released one other album after this debut and last
year released a new 4 track EP. Featured on that EP, as he is on one of the new bonus tracks here was Paul Shortino. He was announced as the new singer for Heaven & Earth, but it didn't work out. Can you explain what happened?
That EP was really put together for a July 4th show we had out here playing to 40,000 people so we thought it would be good to have something to sell there. We brought in Paul to record the songs and sing at the show and wanted to try to work with him but it turned into the usual nightmare. Paul and I have tried to work together many times in the past and it always blows up but this will be the last time. I guess you could call it personality conflicts.

Kelly's a very versatile singer – can you two still plan new material?
Although Kelly is in Foreigner now I'm sure we'll be doing some writing together at some point and there's some tracks we wrote in the past like “Everybody's Girl” that we may use on the next Heaven & Earth album.

And what is the timetable for a new album?
I would really like to get recording it soon but we have to wait till we've sorted out the singer situation. I'd also like to get out and play the songs live a few times before committing them to tape as I feel you get a lot more magic down that way. I do hope to have it out sometime this year though.

Tell us about Richie Onori's involvement with yourself, the band and the label.
Richie has been my long time friend, drummer and business partner. We first met back in the 80's when I was asked to come and audition for a band he was playing in with a singer named Larry Greene. We remained friends to this day and he is really the behind the scenes driving force with Black Star Records. As well as being a great drummer he has a fine business mind. You should interview him one day; he has a lot of interesting things to say about the music industry.

You have done a bunch of press in recent weeks - what else have you got
coming up where folks can read more?
We keep the Heaven & Earth and Black Star Records websites pretty well updated so people can see what's going on there. We also have a One-list which people can subscribe to by putting in their e-mail address on the H&E website which automatically updates members as to what's new and exciting.

Recent times have seen three more rock stations switch format in the USA. Although the underground following for rock music seems to be building, the powers behind the money, or the corporations seem intent on continuing their quick fix/instant payoff policy. How can you get around that?
Probably by doing what we're doing right now. We find that having a good publicist and drawing everyone's attention to this “New Classic Rock” idea is paying off. There are a lot of people out there that are tired of the same old crap and want to hear some new well-played guitar driven rock. For the last 10 years we've had to put up with Alternative, Rap, Hip Hop and whiney Female singers and they come out with nothing more musically substantial than a hot dog. Now it's our turn!

Outside the current line-up, you did start working with a female singer and previewed one track on my site year or so ago. What did happen with you and that singer Doah?
Ahh Doah, the wild elemental force. What can I say? I first saw Doah when I was actually out on a date and went to a bar where they had Karaoke. As I came out of the restroom I heard this absolutely amazing voice singing “My Heart Will Go On” from the Titanic movie and I was completely stunned. When I turned the corner and saw who was singing I was even more blown away. I ended up going back to the same bar every night for about a week but never saw her again then one night when they had karaoke there again, the guy who ran it came up to me and told me he was a big fan of mine.
I told him that I was a big fan of the girl with the long curly red hair and amazing voice and he knew exactly who it was and told me he'd call me and let me know when she was in again. A few days later I was in a recording session when he called and told me she was there so I dropped my guitars, drove down to the bar, walked right up to her and introduced myself. We started working together writing songs with Howard Leese who loved her voice and recording them. Within a few weeks we stared going out together and she eventually moved in with me. We had this incredible chemistry going together and wrote some really great songs, which just came out naturally. The material we wrote was a cross between Bad Company and Heart, very bluesy and melodic but after a while it became obvious that that was not where she was coming from musically although she could pull it off incredibly. We then started working on new material, which was still very good but it wasn't happening fast enough for her and we eventually parted ways. There was a lot of personal drama that went down as well but I'm not going to get into that and although there's still some good songs we wrote together that I'd like to rework and possibly use with the new Heaven & Earth album, I can't help feeling I got a bit used on this one but as the saying goes “There's only one thing better than the love of a good woman and that's the love of a bad one” and Doah was a bad one. J

Is there anything else you are working on Stu, either for the label, Heaven
& Earth or outside projects?
There are a few other things and one great idea that we have in the pipeline but as usual I can't talk about them just yet. Of course I may not have absolutely anything going on at all and am just saying that to keep you all guessing.

Anything you would like to add Stu?
Yes, I'd like to say thanks to all the MelodicRock.com readers who've supported us and hope we get to see you out on tour soon and to the bands out there, make an effort to write songs that the everyday people can connect with so we can bring the music we love back to the forefront. Unless your stage act depends on it like Dio, stop singing about wizards and dragons, they're not the kind of thing people run into in the everyday course of their lives.
I'm going to shoot the next person I hear using the words “River of destiny” in a song.

And there you have it – thanks Stu!

Hey Joe, Nice to talk to you.
Right. I appreciate your time.

No, I appreciate your time. I mean, what took us so long to get on the phone and do an interview? I'm not sure.
I don't know, because I love your site. I'm always on it.

Thank you.
I'm always checking things and checking new releases and who's doing what to whom. Honestly I am because I really do appreciate your take on what's good, what's not good, and so on.

Well, hopefully I get it right most of the time.
Oh, I think you do. That's what I mean, most people get it wrong most of the time, so you're on the other end of the spectrum.

Thank you, Joe. I appreciate that.
I mean that. No kidding. I'm not just kissing your ass. I'm not. I'm just saying, I check and see what you do. I listen to sound bytes and I go, “Hmm, I think Andrew's on it.” You're really a music person, so that's why it's great to talk to you.

Thank you, Joe. I appreciate it. I've been a fan for a long time, so the feeling's mutual. I have to say as someone who's bought your records from the word go, I'm very pleased to say that I think The Usual Suspects is up there with some of your best ever.
Well, I appreciate that. I was holding my breath, waiting to hear what you were going to say about it. I do appreciate that, Andrew. I thank you. I didn't try to make it my best or worst, I just got something else kicked into me and I said, “Let me get back to some commercial rock some melodic stuff. Melodicrock.com, huh?

Exactly.
I belong on that site for sure. No, honestly, that's what happened. I had about 4 or 5 different tracks suited and I just said, “All I'm doing is making another blues rock record and I said, “Nobody gives a shit, you know?”
I said, let me write some songs that have some structure and that's when I got into it and I think the body of that combined with some of the older sounding, more bluesier sounding stuff works.

I like what you've got. You've got a rocking start. A little soulful sort of blues ballady sort of middle section and then you rock again at the end, so it flows well.
Exactly. It's a quilt.

It does. It flows well and I don't think the record is a great departure from anything you've done before but I think the songs are just spot on.
I appreciate that because that's really what I wanted to do, I wanted to get back into crafting some songwriting that I know I'm capable of that I've been writing for other people here trying to get deals and what not, and I said, “I should use this songwriting talent on myself again. This blues thing, people are getting the wrong idea. Oh, just another album from Joe. Oh there he is swimming in circles. I read it all, you know.

Yeah.
And I try to be above it, but it's difficult.

I'm much the same. People give me some stick sometimes with the things I do. And it's hard to take criticism sometimes when you feel so passionately about it. How do you handle it?
Well, Ritchie, I've got to give Ritchie credit again. When I was a young thing coming up, well I wasn't all that young, but I was immature that's for sure. I didn't know the ropes and Blackmore taught me the ropes. He always said one thing to me and it stuck.
We were in Germany at the time and I was reading a review and somebody had said, “Sure Joe Lynn Turner can sing, but can he sing for Rainbow… and he's a bit on the gay side,” and all of this. And in the meanwhile, I'm not gay at all, I'm the furthest thing from that and some of my best friends are gay so I have no problem with gayness or homosexuality or any of that. It was just like, “What the fuck does that have to do with music?” And I started to go off and Ritchie said, “Settle down. He said look. If you believe a good review, then you've got to believe a bad review so henceforth, don't believe any fuckin' review. You know exactly what you've done. You know if it was good or bad of if you challenged yourself in any way. So throw the paper away.

That's an interesting take.
I never forgot that. If you believe a good review, then you've got to believe a bad review. Don't believe any reviews. He said, “What do you care for? Ritchie is a true… Voltaire the French revolutionist, I'll share this with you, he said that he had contempt for his audiences because he said that audiences are like cattle. They bring you up, they bring you down, they push you around, they criticize you, they adore you and then they leave you flat. When you get too old they kick you to the side. And this was coming from Voltaire and I said, “Wow, that's pretty deep stuff.” And I try to look at the public as just people who…they're much like relatives, you know, they're always telling you, “When are you going to get a job, you're not doing this right, you're not doing that right <laughs>. So you've got to take them with a large block of salt. When they don't like something that you've put up or something you've said or you've quoted or you've given certain things to, you're going to get a lot of that because, first of all, it's your site.

Yeah.
So fuck 'em! <laughs> That's what Ritchie would say. It's you doing it. But secondly you take into consideration how they feel, but at the same time, if you did that, it wouldn't be your site. And it's the same with the music, it wouldn't be my music. Do I write… I always credit the fans for this. I say look, “Without you guys, I'm unnecessary. If you didn't want to hear me sing, if you didn't want to hear me do this, who the hell am I making records for? I'm certainly not making them for me. You don't. If I were to do this for myself, I'd make completely different types of albums.

Yeah.
If it was just for me. I know where I've come from, I know where I've been and I think you've said something before, which I will interject here, you said in an oblique way, they don't want you to really get outside of that corner, out of that pocket. They want you to be the same.

And you've got to try and be the same.
Yeah. They remember you a certain way so they want to remember you that way. If you depart from that, then they say, “What in the fuck are you doing?” You, know? <laughs> It's almost like the mafia. The more they let you out they try to pull you back in. That's an old phrase around here. It's hilarious because that's the one I use, “They pull me back in. Here's the melodic song.” I love all this stuff, but you just can't do what you want to do. It's impossible.

And you've got to try to be different while being the same as well.
Isn't that strange?

It is. It is.
Do they call that a dichotomy of sorts?

It is. You're absolutely right. It's always a popular topic of debate on the message boards. When somebody tries to do something different. Should they have? You know.
Well, here's the thing that I don't agree with, and I must share this with you, I don't agree with people like, and it's happened in the past with good friends of mine like Skid Row, they went completely over to like this whole grunge thing or some other bands that have tried to not be themselves. That is something that I don't agree with. That is unauthentic. You're not that. You didn't start as that, but now you're trying to be that. No matter how you cut your hair, no matter how many piercings you get, that's really not you.

I couldn't agree more. Something I quite often bring up myself, I'm all for everybody sounding and moving forward, and I hope bands do, but name me one band that's been successful changing their stripes.
Look, I look at AC/DC. They never change, and they never will.

Exactly.
And that's them, and fuck everybody. I love them. Everybody loves them. You know what I mean? They're just it. They're just a hard rocking band, and they don't give a shit. No frills. They're not going to do stuff just because you like it. I say stick to your guns, and they do. That's the only thing that I disagree with. They say, “You could've been more modern.” Modern how? Copy Pearl Jam? Oh, they're not modern. Let me think. Linkin Park? You want me to rap?

Yeah <laughs>
You know what I mean? It's very obvious when you depart from yourself.

I think you've been very true to yourself on Usual Suspects.
Thank you.
You know, someone likened it to a quilt, “I hear Fandango, I hear Rainbow, I hear…” You know, it's all you but yet it all works, whether it's “Jacknife” which is the old slammin', blistering rock and roll thing, or if it's the sort of melodic “Rest of My Life” with the R&B, you know, it's all me.

Yeah.
So, it's a quilt. It's a patchwork quilt. I think, and I hope, Andrew, and you can benefit me by this, I hope when people listen to it, it's an eclectic album, but yet at the same time there's a thread running through it.

Oh yeah. Definitely. I can hear little bits of everything and I was really pleased with that. I just thought that the song quality was extremely high.
Thank you.

I'm looking forward to reviewing it.
I appreciate it. It's about time I got a good review, well I haven't got a bad review, but it's been a long time since I've got an excellent review, anyway.
You know, it pissed me off because I know what I can do. I think, between you and I, I've dropped the ball a few times in the past and I didn't quite come up to the goal line. I'd be all around it but never quite cross it and it was kind of because I just went “fuck it”, you know. I'm not trying to… what do I have to prove and all this kind of crap. But I said that's not it. My attitude was wrong, Andrew. I admit that and I say to myself, this time I just said, “You know what I've got to do? I've got to write a record that I like.”

Yeah.
If I like it, other people will like it because I like music. Hello. And stand back from it. And also, I got nudged by people like yourself and journalists and managers and record companies and even Serafino got in my face about it. He says, “People love you as a melodic rock singer. That's what you're known for.” I said, “But I was always blues based. With Ritchie I was always blues based. That was the magic of Rainbow. We had a hard rock sound with a blues kind of singer who could transcend all of that and people just sort of go, “Well, that's different, but yet the same, but not.” And that was the magic about it. So they said, “Look, come back a little bit to center.” And I said, “You're right. So I scrapped 3 or 4 songs and I wrote 3 or 4 new ones and that's when the songwriting quality came up and I must admit I was tickled just doing this. This is great. I don't care if the songs are too sappy. Fuck it.

You've done well. Stuff like, “Power of Love” I think will be a fan favorite. Nice little anthems. Good strong vocals. Some great melodies.
Great.
You know, I was really wanting to hear what you had to say out of everybody. I've talked to journalists before, but I really keep abreast of what you're doing and I respect what you're doing so therefore I respect what you say.

Thank you, Joe!
I mean that, Andrew. You've put up one of the best sites. It's in my bookmarks, I refer to it constantly. I check out new things and I read what you have to say and your reviews and I get the sound bytes and all of that and I use the site as a meter of my music, of what I'm going to buy and what I'm not.

Well, I get a lot of great feedback, and that's all that I can ask for.
You've done marvelous things.

I had no idea where this site would go when I first started it. I'm still amazed that it is what it is. <laughs>
Well, I think that you're authentic. That's what really touches people.

Well, I don't hide behind the site... I want to talk to others that love the music too. You try to make yourself available, don't you?
I sure try to. I really do. There's nothing worse than being inaccessible. I don't mean that about like Ritchie because I thought that he was a very accessible person, but just misunderstood.

Ok.
I mean that. I mean, he's always accessible when you want him. But at the same time he just didn't like many peoples approach to him.
So he backed off because he felt that he didn't really want to put himself through this.

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
It does. I'm totally accessible. A journalist asked me the other day, he said, “What do you think of this album. I think it's the best of your best. Have you reached the mountain and the top,” and all of that, and I went, “What? Mountain top? Best of the best? I don't know. Yeah, I think it's a good CD and I like it, but they're like children. I love them all but differently. Maybe this is a special child.” He said, “What's your quote?” I said, “It's not for me to quote.” It's up to you to quote. That's why you're calling me, right? It's my opinion but if you want me to say, “It's the best fuckin' think I've ever done,” I read other artists quotes about their own stuff and I have to laugh. You know, “…Now I can die happy, it's the best fuckin' thing I've ever done and it'll blow you away,” or something crazy and I go, “Really? Can you say that about your own stuff?”

I'm glad you said that because that does kind of annoy me too, because then they say that the next interview you do.
That's what they always say, “It's the best thing I've ever done, I've reached the pinnacle of my profession,” and I'm always like, “Look, I don't know,” I said, “You listen to it. You tell me.” I'll respect your opinion and your critique and I'll keep it as just that, an opinion and a critique. We all know what opinions are, so…but anyway it's just great to talk to somebody who actually knows what they're talking about <laughs>.

I hope so. I hope I can bluff my way through it.
It's like they say, “If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”

It works for me sometimes!
It works for me as well. <laughs> I've been sliding by for years on that. Seriously though, getting down to it, putting the accolades aside for both of us, I'm glad you liked the record, I really put some time into this one. I did the vocals at my house, so I've got the dog running around and phone calls interrupting me and everything. So I think that's part of the magic of it, because I felt so comfortable at my house in the studio here as opposed to being in a clinical studio. It makes a big difference to me because I was doing most of them barefoot and my wife talking to me and I'm going, “Yeah, honey, I'm doing a vocal.” You, know. Normal. Natural.

xx

You've got your long time buddy Bob Held there with you. How important is he to the process?
Well I'll tell you, I answered this question once before this weekend, it was in a different manner, but Bob Held knows who I am. He likes the polished product. I could get many different types of producers or produce it myself but Bob gives me a hard time. For example, “Power of Love” had a completely different lyric. Similar melodies, but a whole other song. He said, “This is not up to your par.” I said, “What are you talking about? It's my favorite song on the album.” He goes, “No. We need something that's going to reach, that's going to give hope, he says, you don't have that on the record and I kind of resented it for two days, I'm coming down to the end of the album, it's the last vocal I did and I'm like, “you always put me in this position,” but I always respect what he says.

Yeah.
Again I knew that if I pushed myself it's like you said, it's an anthem and I like it much better. That's one of the sparkling traits that Bob has He can push me to the point where I want to punch him yet he's right about me reaching more of my fulfillment of purpose. You don't find many people that (a) you can trust, and (b) that can stir you to the point of long time friendship violence. You know, best friends can say anything to each other and that's what Bob fills the role. He'll say, “I don't like that vocal there,” and I'll say, “But I love that line. That was a great line. Lou Gramm could have that line, Paul Rodgers could have that line,” all of my favorite singers you know, I'll bring them up. I'm bringing up Elvis, I'll bring up everyone from the dead if I can to support my argument and he'll go, “Nope. I want one more,” and I go “You're killing me here! I fuckin' sung it 12 times,” and he goes, “I need one more I need it to have that thing,” and I go, “What thing?” “That Joe Lynn Turner thing.” He goes, “I don't believe it,” I go, “You don't believe it? All right, well, believe this,” and I'll sing something and he'll go, “That's it. Next” And I'll go, “You mother f…you cock sucker…” <laughs> That's the importance of Bob Held. He knows how to push my buttons the right way so that I don't settle.

Is that the same as working with Ritchie.
Yeah, Ritchie was like that. He'd just raise his eyebrows at me and go, “Is that it?” and I'd go, “You're right.” And then I'd go in and realize what I had done. I might have sang it better, but I didn't believe it when I sang it and he can always pick up on that. He was the first one to come in, I'll never forget, with “Street Of Dreams”, we were in Copenhagen and, first of all, the song evolved mythically because the music was 4 different jams, and I put these 4 pieces together because I sat with the tapes and said, “All right, let's put this piece with that piece and this piece with that piece,” and he goes, “Okay.” And then I come up with the title and melody and hook and sang, I might say, one of my better moments and he came in to the kitchen of the studio… hang on a second…..so Ritchie came up to me and he says, “I can't play. I can't play the solo.” And I said, “What do you mean?” and he goes, “The vocals are intimidating me.” And I go, “What?”

Really?
This is a true story. I said, “What do you mean?” He goes, “Shining moment for you.” I went, “Well, thanks,” but I go, “But Ritch, come on.” He goes, “I don't know where to start, I don't know where to go, I'm all confused.” I went to the refrigerator and grabbed 2 Heinekens and said, “Sit down mother fucker let's get into this. You've just got to go in there and be an extension to the song. You know you're a song man, you know you're not full of guitar pyrotechnics, you don't give a shit about that, you can do it, but you don't care about all of that.” He played the most melodic solo after that.

Yeah.
I can still sing it to this day. And that's what it's about. He was like that with me and I think at that moment I was like that for him. They say the greatest gift you can give someone is that self revelation, you know? I think I at least gave it back to him a few times.

Absolutely. You're whole history is sort of linked back to where you started.
That's true.

You guys did the best, his work as well. It still acclaimed as some of the best stuff that was ever done, isn't it?
Well, I think we had a magic and chemistry. Look, I love all the other singers, Dio was great, all the Dungeons and Dragons themes and all that stuff is great, but I think we came into a modern age that elevated Rainbow, whatever was between us, the tension, the mutual respect, whatever it was, we had it and it worked and I still believe it could work today.

Do you think that you would ever try it again for old time's sake?
If he was up for it, I'd be there in a heartbeat. It's really up to him because I know what we had and I miss that. That's like a hole in you soul. There was the eternal partner, there was my match. That was like a soul mate. We were also very connected on other dimensions such as all of the supernatural and paranormal stuff. We both loved that, it was incredible that ran through our lives. I just knew that we had this connection. The blues and so on and so forth. And perfectionism. Not settling and besides I had a real affection for him as a mate because he really took me under his wing and grew me up. He protected me, he was always on my side if somebody was coming down at me. He threw himself in the way of critics and band members. You've got to love somebody like that if they'd do that for you.

I'd like to see it happen, but obviously Ritchie's in his own spot isn't he?
God bless him because I know he's doing what he wants to do.

He's making records for himself isn't he?
He really is. And he couldn't give a damn about anything…I gave a little bit of a tribute for his birthday on I guess it was the other day an e-mail, somebody that's got blacker than purple. I think the last comment I said was, “I just want to say, Cheers mate,” I'll paraphrase it, “To many years of great music, to a man who follows no one and nothing but his heart.” That's true. He follows no one and nothing but his heart. He loves to do that Renaissance music. So be it far from me to say you've got to come out and do this. But you know what? It's not that I want to take him away; I just want to add to it. I'm lucky enough, I hope they… Candice and himself, they offered me a duet on the next record.

I did hear that. Yeah.
That was fabulous. That came out of Carol Stevens, they wrote me an email and said, “We always liked you, Joe. The rest of them we couldn't give a hoot for.” <laughs> I was very impressed with that. I just wrote back and said, “Well, we've never had problems.” Really. Ritchie and I never had problems.

That's something to look forward to then, isn't it?
Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I told Carol Stevens, I said, “Look, when you get ready for the material if they want me to co-write, if they just want me to sing, I'm available because I like to stretch out as well. I find it difficult that people allow you to stretch out, and I think this would be an educational process for everyone including me. So yeah, that would be great. I'd love to get back together. I don't care if it would be for just one album or what, but I think we could write some great songs.

I do too.
In the meantime, I try to be reminiscent. In my own material, I try to say, “Well this is where I come from, and it was a large part of my life. How would Blackmore approach this and how would we do it if we were in Rainbow?”

Yeah, I think you've definitely got some of that in the new record.
Yeah, it's definitely got some Rainbow-esque stuff on there.

For sure. Someone also mentioned that your work with Yngwie is probably regarded as probably his best album ever.
I think so.

That's 2 for 2 then, isn't it? You must be proud at least of the legacy of that.
I am, Andrew. Honest to God. Again you can't talk about my life without Yngwie. Odyssey is a pinnacle. I love it.

It's my favorite album that he ever did.
It's one of my favorite albums that I ever did. Again it came together and I think that when I get together with these ornery guitar players – I used to be an ornery guitar player, I am one – I was a guitar player first and a singer second so I think I understand these guys. I don't know, I just get a whip and a chair and I go in there like a lion tamer and I try to bring something else to the table. One thing I must mention to you, a journalist I spoke with this morning from France or somewhere, they said “Crystal Ball” sounds so reminiscent of Joe Lynn Turner yet there's no credits of you. And I said, “Oh no. He's at it again because there was a time there when Yngwie was taking my name off of all of the publishing credits.

Oh, really?
Fuck yeah. I was like going, “What? Where is this happening? What is this about?” I said, “You better go and check the original credits because you'll see that I am co-writer of Crystal Ball. Melody and lyrics. Hello. That's probably why you hear me. So I think he's up to his old tricks that Ying Yang.

That's sad.
I don't know what's up with him. I mean, I saved this guy's life. I was there. I was the elder in a mass of confusion when he wrecked up that Jaguar.

I only vaguely recall that. What happened?
Oh, well geez, Andrew. I was there getting ready to do the Odyssey record and I flew back to New York to get 6 months worth of clothes to fly back to LA to do the record, and by the time I got back, it was May Day weekend, May 7, or something like that, it's a big weekend in Sweden. They were drinking and doing all kinds of cheese and the drugs and all of that. He went out about 8:00 in the morning when the 7-11's would sell beer again, I suppose there was a curfew on it or something. He was coming back with oodles of beer to continue the partying and he wrecked his Jaguar with Thomas his good friend and a friend of mine as well that I became friendly with, and they both ended up pretty banged up.

Wow.
Here is the thing, I'll just give you the highlights. His manager Andy Truman, he used to manage the Bay City Rollers, was taking all of Yngwie's money, he was taking all of the advances so Polygram put me in as a spy and said look you've got to get involved in this. Now, here's a guy that's doing tons of cocaine he's got guns all over the house, he carries guns with him, he's out of his fuckin' mind, he talks in the third person every time he said something it was like, "Well Andy says," because his name is Andy Truman, and I said, "Well, aren't you Andy?" and it was really freaky because, you know, you hear somebody talking in third person, you think, this guy's a wing nut.

Yeah, what's up with that?
You fuel that with cocaine and booze and everything else and guns. He tells me, "Yngwie, he's going to be all right, and he's had a bit of an accident.” He picks me up at the airport, right, so I go, "All right." I dress up a bit and shave and put on a jacket and say, “I'll go to the hospital a little later.” So when I get to the hospital, he's straight up to the ICU. I said, "He's in the ICU? The intensive care unit?" And they go, yeah. And I'm like, man, he's in a bad way. I look in through the glass and his head is 5 times the size.

Oh, wow.
And he just looks like some beast. He's not responding. He's not talking and the doctors say he's in a coma. I go, “Coma?” Andy Truman never told me he was in a coma! He said he was a little banged up. That was it. So a couple of days later the administration -- I'm there every day, of course with Jens Johansson and Anders Johansson and everything, and I'm sorting out, because these poor guys, Yngwie wasn't paying them really well, or at all, and they were living on the floor in a one bedroom apartment. They didn't even have enough money to buy any underwear. It was unbelievable.

Yeah.
So I'm trying to sort them out and get them a living space that's more humane and also trying to deal with the hospital and the administration and stuff because I was the older of the bunch and had more experience and they needed $80,000 or they were going to pull Yngwie out of ICU. Andy Truman is all in favor of this because he doesn't want to spend any money, does he? And I said, "Andy, if you pull him out of ICU and you bring him down to LA Country which is where the "common” people go, because Northridge was a very select hospital and he lived close to Northridge so they flew him in on a chopper. That's how bad he was. They had to use Jaws of Death to get him out of the car and fly him in because he was going to die right there.

Wow.
So this is really serious, right? So Andy doesn't want to do this because he's full of advances and out of his mind and doesn't even realize that if Yngwie dies, there goes his meal ticket. So this is all just absolutely surreal to me and absurd. So I get $80,000 from Polygram wired to the administration to keep him in Northridge. Meanwhile, Andy is trying to get me to go down to County Hospital to say, "Oh, it's nice down here, everybody down here is great." And I'm like, "Andy, its death down there. You walk in and you smell death. I've been there. I know what it's about. No, he can't leave. Even the doctor said that if he leaves for an inferior institution he's going to die.” So meanwhile, Polygram's got me watching Andy Truman, they're trying to get rid of Andy. Andy doesn't know that I'm a spy reporting back to Polygram. I could've been shot. This is real intrigue. This was 007 shit.

Haha…
To make a long story short, Yngwie comes out of the coma, I don't know how many weeks it is, but he finally comes out. We were there every day. He had bleeding in the brain which could've been retardation. Sometimes I think maybe he did bleed in the brain. So he actually recovers from this, now he's on powerful medication, and of course I'm trying to monitor him and he goes out one night and starts doing cocaine and shit so, as big as he is, I grab him and slam him up against a wall and said, "Look, you fuckin' die on your own 24 hours, not on my watch!" I said, "I'm just so sick of this bullshit." I threw him up against the wall and jumped back in the car and sped off. I was livid that he would actually do this. So he got the message and he's kind of straightened out a bit but other than that he was going to die without anybody caring for him.

That's amazing. Whatever happened to the manager?
They got him. They finally pulled all of his power away from him, they didn't give him another nickel, they re-routed Yngwie's funds, I think that's when Jim Lewis was still with Polygram and became Yngwie's manager (and that's a whole other story, the way they broke up) and really Jim went to bat for Yngwie and the last I heard was that Andy's wife left him and stole everything, including the Roller, she took the Rolls Royce, everything, and he was trying to track her down. At one point, Andrew, I must interject, we had a 24 hour security guard, fully armed in front of Yngwie's house, this was for over 2 months because we were afraid of Truman. He would drive by and some of his other compadres would drive by and we would see them peering into the house trying to see what was going on. We were afraid that they were just going to come in blasting away one day. And, of course, Yngwie's got guns, so he's like, "I'll shoot them and kill them," and I'm just like, "Just calm down, man. You're not going to shoot anyone."

No wonder you only did the one record! <laughs>
Well, yeah. And the other thing was, originally, we were supposed to have Eric Singer as the drummer, Bob Daisley as the bass player. It was going to be a super group. It was all looking really good. As you can see, Bob did play on a few tracks, but Eric unfortunately got pushed out, but he did all right for himself.

Absolutely.
And he's a fabulous drummer and a wonderful guy. A very funny guy. We're friends to this day. What I'm trying to say is that Yngwie just wanted to have full control of everything. I think, personally, he could've gone much, much further in his art and music if he would've just let other people in. Yeah, but he was going to die. Like the doctor said, if he does not come up from this coma, and he was bleeding from the brain, in 3 days, they said if it didn't stop and it stopped now, they said it's over for him.

Wow.
He will be brain dead and we will keep him on the respirator but he will be a vegetable.

That's awful.
So I kept him in that hospital, made sure the administration was paid, because hospitals have no heart, they just have money, money is where it all comes from, at least here in the states. To make a long story short, that's why I claim, quite humbly really, that I was instrumental in saving his ass. That's why I can't understand why he's got this bone of contention about me.

That's probably why, isn't it?
It might be. That seems very psychologically normal. Love and hate's a fine line. But anyway, I wish him well but I wish he's stop taking my name off these songs.

Well, we won't hold out for a reunion then. <laughs>
<Laughs> No, I don't think so. I told him last time I talked to him, I emailed him, "Good fuckin' luck, mate." But apparently he seems to be doing all right.

Yeah, not too much bad press from recent times.
So that's the story.

You went on to work with Bob not long after that, so what's the story?
Right. We did Mother's Army.

What a great set of albums. I love the first one.
You know what? I got an email from Jeff Watson who emailed Aynsley Dunbar, and I emailed Bob and we're all starting to think about maybe putting that all back together.

Yeah, do it because Jeff's a wonderful, wonderful guitar player, isn't he?
He is, a wonderful writer, guitar player, a great guy. Bob is too. Lyrically Bob and I, those albums were hard rock, man. They were really deep profound stuff.

Not commercial at all were they?
No. they were meant to be a Pink Floyd twist to them.

I still love the first one the most.
Yeah, “By Your Side” and all those great songs, yeah.

You changed your voice somewhat for the first album, didn't you? There were some comments that, “Oh, Joe's voice is shot,” but that was never the case, was it?
No, I can be a lot of different characters really.

Yeah, when you listen to The Usual Suspects, you're as soulful as ever, but your voice was really raspy on that one, wasn't it?
Yeah, we kind of tried to want it to be, during that period of time the raspy vocal was sort of in. To be honest, there was a lot of pressure to try and at least make this stuff fit in. I said, “Well, if that's the case I'm going to sing a bit gritty.” Maybe the grit button was up too much.

Oh, I love it. I thought it was great.
Yeah. Here's the thing. That's what Ritchie always liked. Ritchie always liked that I could do this operatic shit, pointed, clear as a bell, but then I could growl at the bottom.

I love the growl. I hope you do another record. That would be really interesting.
Well, we're toying around with the idea now. It's in the e-mail stages.

That's great I do talk to Jeff every now and then. We've done a couple of interviews and stuff. A longtime fan of Night Ranger. That would be great.
Did I ever tell you about the time JLT toured with Night Ranger?

No, I don't believe I've heard that.
We got kicked out of Tyler, Texas. It was nasty. It was the Joe Lynn Turner band. My bass player was going out with a stripper and he decides to bring her out on the road. She decided to try a designer drug one night in Tyler, Texas and we were opening for Night Ranger. Well, my set was relatively free of incident, but I guess she was getting off during Night Ranger and right in the middle of “Sister Christian” she comes out and does her act.

Oh, no.
She took this huge flashlight and did preposterous things with it. The cops came. There were children at the concert. They surrounded us and made us sign disclaimers that we would never come back to Tyler, Texas. So we got kicked out.

Terrific. The life of a rock and roller.
Yeah.

That's great.
It was really funny because Kelly was throwing sticks at her and Brad was coming over to the side of the stage to me and saying, “You better get her off the fuckin' stage and I'm saying, “What do you want me to do? Walk out and pull her off? Get one of your roadies to get her off”. So finally Jeff just gets frustrated and picks her up and walks about 20-30 feet and dumps her on the side of the stage.

Now if only somebody would've bootlegged that on video. That would've been great.
I wish we had it. It was hysterical. Yeah, I hope we get that thing back together. We had no luck with that band. What I mean by that is we had no apparent management. Carmine's manager Warren Wyatt, I have nothing nice to say about this guy.

Yeah, I've had some dealings with this guy too.
I don't know what your experience was like.

Not great.
Ours was terrible. He actually took the money for the record. We couldn't finish the record. By the time we got the lawyers on it and found the money. He gave it all back minus his commission, like he was owed a commission! What balls does that take? He takes all the money and he kept saying, “Well the Japanese don't like what they've heard so far so they haven't given me the rest of the money,” but he had the rest of the money in his bank account. So if we do it, I'm not going to do it without proper management and a record label and all of that. Because that's when it goes awry. Everyone's got an uncle in the business. Carmine brought Warren in and we wouldn't even talk to Carmine after that because Carmine sided with Warren and that's when Aynsley came in.

Yeah, Aynsley's a great drummer. That's a good pick.
He just emailed back and said, “I'm up for it. That's great. Let's do it. I can't wait to see everybody again.” We'll see.

That would be awesome. I should also mention while we're here the Hughes/Turner was a couple of pretty nice albums for you. I talked to Glenn a few months back. Are you done with that for now?
I haven't talked to Glenn for a month of two but I know that he's doing the Iommi thing and he's got Soul Mover out now, which is a great album, I'm happy for him. So HTP has to be in hiatus. I would never say that we wouldn't get back together for another album or two and I hope he feels the same way.

Yeah, you two, your voices are just a great match for each other.
Thank you for your words. It had never been done to my knowledge and never quite that good.

Yeah, especially the first album, I really still enjoy it.
Me too. I have to tell you. It was quality stuff. I think we both sort of raised the bar. Together we gained inspiration in our own solo careers.

I agree. I think it gave you new momentum to your solo career. You were just doing an album for Japan but it's really shifted to the European side now hasn't it?
Yeah, I just signed with Yamaha in Japan as well. That's a good label there. They're going to try to do other things with me over there like bring me into their sound products and their commercials for their motorbikes and things like that.

Excellent.
Yes, so I was and now I'm full blow into Europe and looking towards this record release in the US.

Yeah, Stu [Stuart Smith] mentioned that, he was going to talk to you about that.
I appreciate your thoughts on that. I think we're going to do it. Getting back to Glenn. I love him like a brother. We just put a couple of years together, it was phenomenal, now it's time to sit back, breathe, and do other things.

Well that's cool. In a couple of years time you can get back together again and hopefully there will be a third album.
You know, somewhere down the line I do too because it was magic. I'm just so fortunate to be hooked up with such wonderful people in my career, for the most part anyway, including Malmsteen, the guy's brilliant regardless if he can be an asshole sometimes.

He makes some great music, no doubt.
He's brilliant. I'll always give that to Yngwie. He was a forerunner. The guy's just crazy good. But I would love to do it with Glenn, but I wish him all the best with the Iommi thing and he's got Sanctuary here for the Soul Mover and I hope they can do something with that. He really deserves it, he's such a fantastic singer and he's a great person.

Absolutely. I love talking with him. He's always full of life.
He sure is. He's one of the funniest guys I know.

You've recently, you've probably seen it, but Rescue You got a CD released in America, that was a good move.
Can you believe that Wounded Bird?
I can't. So many people told me, “You've got to re-release Rescue You and all this stuff, and I'm like, “Do you know what that entails?” You've got to go there and wrestle the people at Mercury and Electra and they're not going to press this record if it's 20,000 copies.” They won't. That's the reality of it, isn't it?

Yep.
So then this Terry goes along and whatever he did, I love him for it, because now you can actually buy Rescue You on CD and it's a damn good record.

Yeah, I've got the original Japanese release but I think that even that was only out for a short time wasn't it?
Absolutely. It was never meant to be released for much longer. I've got 2 copies of that one that's still in the packaging and I'm not even touching them.

I don't blame you.
Because that's the only place that you could buy the CD -- Japan. And vinyl, of course. I still see vinyl popping up every now and again. Regardless. I think that Wounded Bird thing is a great outlet for stuff, he's got some Yes things on there and Allman Brothers.

Some old acts. A lot of great stuff.
You can't get it on CD.

There should be more of it. There should be less resistance from the majors to license it off for someone else to do it because they're not going to do it, are they?
No, it's just collecting dust.

Exactly.
You know what. My manager had gone back a few years ago and looked into it and they just laughed and said, “If it's not going to sell 150,000 albums, then we don't give a shit.”

Yeah. Isn't that sad?
He said, “I know it's not Joe's day anymore but at the same time there are plenty of fans in the US and everywhere that would love to hear this record. It's not going to be crap, but no, we don't expect to sell 150,000 records. They just laughed and said, “It's not worth it.” However he did it, and whatever he did, and whom he paid to get this… some day I'm going to email him and just say, “Terry, give me the low-down.”

And based on what you've said there, I guess you do have one unreleased album still in the vaults, don't you? The follow-up to Rescue You.
Oh, yeah.

Is that right? That's never been released anywhere, has it?
Well, no. You know what's happening though. One of those drunken nights on the road, somebody must've been in my party room and nicked one of the tapes.

Uh, oh.
Serafino had it for years. He's been getting different artists to do different songs of mine from that era. <laughs> And I find it really funny because I never got to record them properly myself. And he's always, can I get Terry Brock to do this song, and somebody else to do that song. And I go, “Sure, go ahead if you want.” And then he wanted me to do those songs on this album and I said, “No, no, no.” Look, that's a different time. If you want me to do an album like that from that time then I'll do that album. Now's a different time. Really, yeah, there's an album there, but I'd do it as an album.

Yeah.
Because you can't just put “Forever Now” the song in the mix with the stuff I've just done. I don't know, maybe you could, I just hear it. Yeah, that was strange because the tape got around and the next thing you know, people are all going, “When are you going to do this song? What about that song?”

You're like, “Where did you hear that from?”
Yeah, I'm just amazed and then I go, drunken stupor, that was it. Somebody nicked the tape.

You'll have to release it officially now then won't you?
It wouldn't be a bad idea if I at least got commissioned to go and do these 8 or 10 songs and call it Demos.

Yeah, exactly.
Call it Demos.

Absolutely.
I'll look and see what I've got in the can. I'll see what I've got on the 24 track. That's almost ancient, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly. You could put an album out in between and just say here's a collection, or compilation. That would be great.
Yeah. I think so. I might just have to do something like that because I love those songs and all. They're a real big part of me.

Exactly. And just like people want to hear Rescue You, they want to hear anything, don't they?
Yeah, they want to hear what it was once, what it was then. A return to their youth, or a return to the good times, whatever you want to call it and I can't blame them because that's what I do. My daughter is 15 so I'm up on all the new stuff.

Oh, great.
Forget about it. Thankfully, she was brought up on Beatles and Hendrix. She's got a great ear, plays classical piano, and now she's learning guitar. And she's bitching at me because I don't have time to teach her so she's learning on her own and she's humiliating me. I go, “Where are you learning from?” She goes, “The internet.” So I'm like the absent father. I'm going, “How about on Monday?” but then Monday comes and I'm like, “I'm too busy right now.” But to make a long story short, I'm up on all the new stuff but I go back to all the old stuff because it just makes me feel good.

Of course.
Plus, it was great fuckin' music! I mean, what am I supposed to listen to? Ashlee Simpson?

Please. Arrghh.
<laughs> What they call talent is unbelievable.

I know. It's sad isn't it?
It really, really is. I mean, hello. And this is, she sold 3.5 to 4 million records.

I know. It's depressing isn't it?
It is. We're all struggling to sell 20,000 records. It's absurd.
This classic rock thing is sort of returning though.

I think so, yeah.
I hope you see it on your end. Because I'm feeling it with the little feelers that I put out. But who's to say. Everybody's been saying that for the last 10 years. I think this time it really starts to feel like people are getting sick and tired of the crap. All we want to do is just get a bit of nostalgia and look back and say, “Ah, that is when people could play and sing and write songs.”

Yep. Exactly.
You're doing a lot for that with the site and all because there's a place to go, like a haven. You're almost like a shelter for me because nowadays it's like just go to Melodicrock and you'll find out. All of your buddies are over there.

I'm just happy it's working…I've had some really crappy visions in my years! <laughs>
<laughs> Haven't we all. I've written some pretty shitty songs as well. It's splendid to talk to you, really...

Thank you, Joe. Look I've really enjoyed this time on the phone.
My pleasure Andrew!