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(Spring 2004) by George Dionne
The classic line-up of Quiet Riot hit the big time with their 1983 album
Metal Health. Fueled by the cover song that will follow them forever, “Cum
on Feel the Noize”, it was the first time a heavy metal album reached
number one on the pop charts. Between the clashing of egos and the pressures
of success, Quiet Riot fired Kevin Dubrow in 1986. It wasn’t until
1999 that the classic line-up was back in place. Two albums and months and
months of touring followed. Sadly in 2003, the Riot was silenced once again.
However, that didn’t stop frontman Kevin Dubrow. He hit the studio
in early 2004 to work on his first ever solo album. The result is In For
the Kill, (read CD review) a
collection of unconventional cover tracks. Instead of performing familiar rock
and roll standards, Dubrow selected his favorite
rare
and B-side
cuts from his vast record collection. With more than twenty years is the
business, the charismatic vocalist is still full of all the energy, cockiness,
and egotism that you expect in a good frontman.
RIL: You have a new covers CD out entitled In For The Kill; is there
any
reason you chose to do a covers CD instead of new material?
KD: When Quiet Riot split, I didn't know what was going on. I needed some
sort of break from all of it for a little while. Mike Varney called me
from Shrapnel Records about doing a covers tune record. Frankie Banali
and I had
talked about doing a covers tune record for ten years. So much seriously,
to the point that I had a list of songs already selected. So I pulled the
list out, and me and Mike Varney went through the list. I would say 80%
of what I selected, he approved. Then we had to change a few things. We
agreed
on a budget, and within five days we were recording. We had some small
issues in regards to the drummer, but then Jeff Martin came aboard. He
played just
unbelievable. To do an album of originals, I would have had to demo everything.
I have a lot of demos. I would have had to shop for a label to do it. Mike
wasn't really interested in doing an originals record this time. This is
more or less of a way for me to do a stop-gap. In other words, I can have
my name out there with my first solo record, without having to wait to
put originals out. At the same time, I can tour and work on an originals
record.
The idea for the originals record was actually in the works for a long
time also. That's gonna be something I'm doing with Glenn Hughes. I think
Glenn's
going to produce it and probably play bass on it. We're still working it
out. He's going to contribute some songwriting too. He's got such a busy
schedule, and I'm booked until July.
RIL: Is the material on the new disc stuff you listened to when you were
younger, or stuff you grew to appreciate as a musician?
KD: This is stuff I grew up with. It's not the hits;
it's more album tracks and B-sides. There are only one or two songs that
people are going to be
familiar with, unless they are real record collectors. I was a big record
collector when I was a kid. I used to shop at Aaron's Records in Hollywood;
they used to have all kinds of obscure stuff. I used to send away for imports
and stuff too. I was a big collector of strange things. For example, on the
record there's a song called "Black Sheep of the Family" by a band
called Quatermass. Rainbow ended up cover the song later, but the original
is the one I'm linked to. Humble Pie's "Red Light Mama, Red Hot";
definitely not a radio song from Humble Pie. Everybody's recorded "30
days in the Hole", which is fine, but I picked something that was a
deep album track. It's one of my all time favorite Humble Pie songs. I don't
know if you're familiar with the band Silverhead, but there's a guy in that
band named Michael Des Barres; he's also a singer, he's a great singer. I
grew up with him also. [I cover] "Roll it by Me" by Silverhead.
I don't know if you're familiar with Michael Des Barres, but his ex-wife
wrote that book about groupies, Pamela Des Barres I'm with the Band. Let's
see, we did Deep Purple's "Speed King, which I'm sure you're familiar
with. We did a Montrose song, which was an accident, because it wasn't on
the list. Jeff Martin knew it, and we just started playing. We did a song
by The Sweet, but it was a B-side that wasn't even on an album. So in essence
all we did was, except for "Stay with Me” by The Faces, we did
an album that I didn't write, but for all people know it's an original record.
For a lot of people it's obscure stuff. Of course some people would have
heard of it before, but for the average person that's not a record collector
of British stuff from the seventies, it's going to be new to them.
RIL: You're no stranger to recording cover songs. You've done a
lot of the Cleopatra/Deadline tribute records; AC/DC, Guns & Roses,
Van Halen, and stuff like that.
KD: The AC/DC one was nice. The rest of them......garbage!
RIL: Thank God you said that Kevin, because I was going to ask if you really
heard them.
KD: Oh they're crap! Let me explain the genesis of how that shit comes about
so you'll understand. When I do the vocals for those records, I don't hear
what's going to be around my vocals at all. They have me sing with the original
record. So they put my voice on one track, and then fly my voice into whatever
they do after I'm long gone. I don't hear anything of what it's going to
sound like until they send me a copy of it; then I just want to puke. I did
it because I was buying a new computer set up at the time, so I could record
my own stuff. This gave me the finances to just go out and buy a new computer,
instead of taking my normal road money. It seemed like a good idea at the
time. Now I hear them, especially the Scorpions and the Led Zeppelin one,
and their just God fucking awful!
RIL: On the Zeppelin one it was just one line, and then they looped it.
KD: That was the best vocal that I did out of all of them, and they didn't
use any of it. The AC/DC one was played with Quiet Riot, so that's the
only one that's decent to me; we added our own bridge to it, and it sounds
fine. That one doesn't bother me, I think it turned out okay.
RIL: I think there are two different versions. The one you're talking about,
and a remixed one.
KD: That was done later. I never heard that one, I'm sure it's garbage.
RIL: I've heard the remixed one....it's bad.
KD: I'm sure it's garbage. The one we did with [Quiet Riot] I was quite found
of. It was done in one day, and it was fun. It's a little more Quiet Riot
than AC/DC. The rest of them are all shit! I won't do anymore of them.
I did the Van Halen one with Bob Kulick, it was an industrial version,
and he wanted to release a rock version of it too, and I said no. We got
into a big argument about it. So from that point on, I said done doing
these tribute records.
RIL: How's the solo tour going?
KD: We just started. We did some shows last week and we had to fire the drummer.
This week we're out with Jeff Martin on drums, and he's just fucking great.
He's a great personality, and a great drummer. So far, I'm having a good
time. I'm having more fun singing now than I've had in years. The volume
is totally workable, the playing is good, everybody's positive, everyone
wants to make me happy, which makes them happy; I have no complaints.
RIL: It was reported that you were compiling material for a future Quiet
Riot/Randy Rhodes DVD. How's that progressing?
KD: I have the material, but once this In for the Kill (Read
the review) thing started to take
over, and doing dates as a solo artist, it's been on the back burner. There's
a label that wants to put it out. They're very slow at getting back to me;
about once every three months. Since I only have so many hours in the day,
and now I'm back doing my own business, as opposed to Frankie Banali doing
it before, my time is really locked up for a while. I just have to get to
it. My next priority is to do the album with Glenn. I just want to do anything
with Glen. He's such an inspiration to me. Not to say that I'm ever going
to do anything as good as Glenn Hughes, but I just want to have some of his
musical influence in my songs. Because everything I write sounds like Quiet
Riot, I can't get away from that. I don't think that there's anything wrong
with that, but it is what it is. With Glenn I want to do more riff oriented
stuff, and things that are a little more funky. I want to make an album that's
like Humble Pie or Free, and I think Glenn can really add a lot to that song
writing. Sooner or later the Randy Rhodes stuff will come out. I've got some
great stuff. I've got twenty minutes of super-8 home movies with sound. It's
pretty neat. If you're a fan of Randy's, it really neat to watch him in the
studio messing around with his pedals, complaining about his sound. 'I don't
like my tone', he says.
RIL: Quiet Riot released a DVD not too long ago; Quiet Riot: Live in the
21st Century. The release was delayed several times, do you know why?
KD: Yeah, it was the mixing, but let me try to put
it in a diplomatic way. We they got the audio....Quiet Riot was a band that
played too loud live.
No two ways about it. One band member in particular [Rudy Sarzo] decided
to play as loud as he wanted to, no matter where we were. You've got one
guy turned up, everyone else turns up. Banali starts to turn his monitors
up; he can only have so much, and I have no control over it at all. We you
play in clubs and you play at the volume you should play in an arena, they
base the guitar feed into the drum mikes. So when you turn the drums up,
you're turning the bass of the guitar up, because they're all in those mikes.
So to mix it was a nightmare for Frankie. It took forever. After the first
song, the bass turned up immediately. That's what he used to do. Before "Slick
Black Cadillac" he turned up, and boom; it made the mix ridiculous.
There were a lot of audio problems.
RIL: Do you think that the DVD is a good representation of Quiet Riot?
KD: No. I think it shows one of the reasons Quiet Riot broke up. I think
if you would have caught us about four years earlier, it might have been
a better representation. Everybody's over playing, and because they overplay,
the songs tend to be off tempo. It makes it hard for me to keep up tempo
wise. I think that Frankie Banali is one of the best drummers in rock and
roll, and I don't think that he is represented as good as he is on that
thing. I think that the other two are over-play. I don't think it's good.
RIL: Were you happy with the re-union album Alive and Well?
KD: Part of it. The re-makes are garbage. They're about
as good as those tribute CDs we were just talking about. I don't think you
can capture a
moment in time, then go back and try to re-create it. The original song "Bang
Your Head" from Metal Health, was when we were just getting our sea
legs, so to speak. Our guitar tones improved over time, my vocal ability
improved over time, but the fact that it was so raw back then; we've gotten
so polished that we didn't capture the spirit of the original. Those re-makes
are garbage. It wasn't our idea to do it. I've never even listened to them.
Not only that, but the bass on the re-make of "Bang Your Head";
Chuck Wright played on the original "Bang Your Head". The bass
on the re-make is like a samba. I don't know what that's about. It's a
rock song, like an AC/DC song, not a Latin song. There are some nice things
on the studio tracks, and I like the production. [I like] "I Don't
Know What I Want", which I play with my solo band, and I love "The
Ritual". There are a couple of good things on there. It gets counteracted
by the re-makes.
RIL: The last time I saw Quiet Riot was on the Poison Tour in 2000. You
were supporting your current album at the time, Guilty Pleasures. When you
performed songs from that album, I thought they were really good. I went
out and bought CD shortly thereafter. I think that CD is one of the best
that Quiet Riot has put out. Do you think that if you released it fifteen
years earlier it would have been as big as Metal Health?
KD: Oh yeah, because the song writing is really good
on it. This is going to sound like the same old Kevin Dubrow tooting his
own horn, but let me
just say what work about Metal Health; those were the best songs that I had
written in the past five years prior to that. I had probably about thirty
songs. Spencer Proffer picked the stuff that he wanted to use. Combine that
with Carlos having "Don't Want to Let You Go" and the main riff
to "Bang Your Head", and you have a monster record. Then as the
band progressed as a band, everybody put their song writing contributions
in there; which is not good because the bass player is no songwriter. Alright?
Not at all. After the experience of Alive and Well, where we tried to write
with all of us together; which was a huge mistake because, some people are
just not song writers. It's just a fact. I'm not a tuba player, so I don't
try to play tuba. With Guilty Pleasures, I said I'm not going to do it that
way again. I went and did the songs the way I did them for Metal Health,
I did them alone. Banali wrote the song "Guilty Pleasures", that's
his song. He wrote another one too, I just can't think of it right now. There's
twelve songs, and I think I wrote eight on my own. I demo-ed them at home.
I had Kelly Garni from the original Quiet Riot play bass on them. That way
the bass parts would be the way that I wanted. I let Banali play the way
he wanted because he's the greatest. That's why the material's good. Not
because I'm a great songwriter, but because I had a vision of what I wanted
and it wasn't diluted by other people sticking their fingers in it; who aren't
songwriters.
RIL: Well, my next question was about why Quiet Riot broke up, but based
on your answers to my previous questions, I guessing it had something to
do with the bass volume.
KD: [Rudy Sarzo] was playing louder, not playing the
songs the way they were written, not playing anything to do with the song,
and trying to make a solo
instrument out of an instrument that's not a solo instrument in Quiet Riot.
It's a band. It's about four people trying to play songs, not about somebody
trying to solo from the beginning of the song to the end of the song. Some
people are great performers, and they should be great performers. It doesn't
mean they should try to be great bass players when they're not; or great
guitar players when they're not. Carlos for example, is really good at what
he does. He sticks to what he does, and doesn’t try to go beyond it.
He's not Steve Vai. He's not Randy Rhodes. He's Carlos Cavazo, and he does
Carlos Cavazo very well. So don't try to be John Entwistle when you’re
Bobby Dall. Bobby Dall knows that. He plays what he can play, and he does
it really well. Some people don't get it.
RIL: Why not eliminate the problem and continue on?
KD: Quiet Riot's under an agreement, because of when they left a plane ticket
under my door in Hawaii back in '86; when they fired me. I didn't want
to take the chance of this happening to me again. I said we all have to
sign an agreement that says we all have to be in the line-up, or none of
us can use the name. My dumb idea. For now all four of us have to use it,
or we have to do some sort of financial compensation to anybody that's
not in the group. My own fault.
RIL: That's a bitch. It sounds like you were covering your own ass back
then.
KD: I thought I was covering my own ass.
RIL: Do you keep in touch with anyone from Quiet Riot?
KD: Frankie, I talk to him five times a day. I've already talked to him three
times today. He's one of my dearest friends. In my career as a solo artist,
Frankie has been advising me and helping me. He's a great manager; he gives
me all kinds of input. We have a lot in common on a personal level. I love
his personality. He's one of my best friends besides the musical thing.
I talk to him all the time. I haven't spoken to Carlos.
RIL: Going back a bit, what was your reaction when Metal Health went number
one on the pop chart?
KD: It was just great, I couldn't believe it. It was disbelief more than
anything else. I was surprised when it started climbing into the top thirty.
We knew we had a chance to be number one. I was spoiled because I didn't
want to be number two. I also knew it was the beginning of the end because,
where do you go from there? I never thought the quality of the record was
a number one record. It was of it's time; it hit a groove marketing wise.
I think it was a classic for the genre, but was it a number one record? It
stayed on the charts forever. Guilty Pleasures is a better record. It has
better songs.
RIL: Yeah, when I picked it up I could believe how good it was.
KD: There's no filler on it, all the songs are good. We recorded a couple
more that didn't make the record; nothing I wrote. (If a wink wink could
be heard over the phone, that was the tone of that remark)
RIL: What was the deal with the big metal mask? How did that come about?
KD: That was the bass player's idea. We were all contributing ideas for the
cover, and calling it Metal Health was based on the idea of a kid going
crazy from listening to music. So they stuck him in a straight jacket and
a metal mask to stop him from banging his head. The idea was originally
based on The Man in the Iron Mask; the Vincent Price film.
RIL: Did the guys from Slade give you any feedback for the covers
you did of their songs ("Cum On Feel the Noize" & "Mama Weer All
Crazee Now")?
KD: No. I spoke with Naughty Holder once, after "Come Feel the Noize" was
a hit. Slade got the chance to be signed to the same label as us; Sony. He
was kind of distant when I spoke to him. I don't know what that was all about,
but I never had a contact with him in person. We asked them to come on stage
with us in London and they passed. Later, their bass player got sick and
they wanted me to join them doing something in San Francisco. So I returned
the favor, and I passed. I think he's got a great voice, but that was my
only contact with him.
RIL: You guys kind of sound alike. I heard Quiet Riot before I heard Slade;
I thought it was almost uncanny.
KD: Really? I never really saw it. I was always trying
to sound like Steve Marriott.
RIL: Their stuff sounds a little dated when you listen to it. Your vocals
register higher.
KD: He's got a cool tone though. I can imitate him
sometimes. I saw Slade two times when they opened for Humble Pie. I was there
for Humble Pie. He
used to say this thing to the audience, "You paid your money, now you're
gonna move!" Me and my friends used to come out of the concerts and
I'd just start screaming that. They'd say, "You sound just like him".
I said, 'get out of here, it's a joke'.
RIL: Do you have anything else you want to talk about?
KD: I want people to check my record out. I think it's a really fun and cool
record to listen to. The cover of the CD came out really cool too. You
know Kelly Garni, the original Quiet Riot bass player during the Randy
Rhodes-era, did all the photographs and his wife did the cover.
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KEVIN
DUBROW
