That’s what I was wondering when looking back at the setlist of the Sparks at The Hollywood Bowl, their final U.S. date before heading to Tokyo. You can’t exactly call it a comeback, as LL Cool J once rapped, they’ve been here for years. In fact, while most legacy acts have some dips in their careers, the brothers Ron and Russell Mael have been on an upswing for the last two decades of their five-decade span, and they’ve been absolutely prolific in the last couple of years; with their musical film, Annette, their 25^th album (The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte), their Edgar Wright directed, glowing documentary, The Sparks Brothers, which may be a big reason why they are playing their biggest and most prestigious venues ever, like Royal Albert Hall across the pond, and here in their hometown, nestled within the hills at The Hollywood Bowl. If it’s not a comeback, maybe it’s best to describe it as a Renaissance, because when most other artists their age are getting ready for gold watches and early bird specials, the Brothers Sparks are flourishing, and showing no signs of slowing down.

Which brings us back to their spectacular show and surprising setlist, which instead of a retrospective of their biggest hits (whatever that means for this band that never really set out to make hits), consisted of a handful of songs from their new album and was rounded out with songs from records that most people wouldn’t know anything about, or that only forgiving completists would have interest in. Don’t get me wrong, some of these songs did chart when they came out, but for the most part, instead of playing that big retrospective show at the big Hollywood Bowl, the set showcased deep cuts and obscurities. If you read my cover story/interview with them in this magazine a few months ago, you may understand how it happened. First, when rehearsing for their huge undertaking of performing 21 albums in 21 days in London back in 2008, Ron told me how they had found a new respect for some of these lesser-known songs/albums. He reasoned that they were overlooked, not because they weren’t good, but because of other reasons like lack of promotion for example. That series of shows was a good time to reintroduce them into the sets, it was a good time to celebrate them as part of the canon. Also, since the Sparks Brothers documentary brought in a new wave of fans who have no sacred cows or blind spots regarding the catalog, they can more easily accept these songs in a set without pre-judgement. Lastly, aside from this exercise in paying tribute to their full catalog for those 21 days, they are not a retro/greatest hits band, they may play old cuts because whenever they play them they are still new cuts, not because they are prone to wax nostalgic. Thus, they play more songs from their new albums than they do their classic stuff. And, unlike other bands who are afraid to present the new stuff, lest you go take a leak, Sparks expect you to come along for the ride or get left behind.

And for the most part, I think it works for them. After opening with the hype-building, and appropriately titled “So May We Start,” from Annette, they went right into the title track of their latest. A Gen Z girl sitting next to me turned to me and raved, “Isn’t this awesome! I love their new album.” It was proof that this band, that could sometimes be a quirky little secret, is still making new fans and making new music that “the kids” (even) like.

“Angst in My Pants,” made me leap out of my seat. The song represents Sparks’ New Wave period, but let me put that in a little context with a quick recap of their origin story: Ron and Russell are Angelinos, having grown up in the Pacific Palisades and educated at UCLA (Go Bruins!). Obsessed with the British Invasion (of course, The Beatles, but mostly The Who, The Kinks and the Move) buying all those records as imports as soon as they became available, until they actually became British Imports. Talk about visualization. You see, despite Cali’s tendency to quake, there was no seismic activity upon the release of Sparks’ first two albums, so they went over to London where they found opportunity-cum-stardom as a British glitter/glam, band starting with their breakout album, Kimono My House, for Island. As such, many (if not most) American fans didn’t know they were buying records by expatriates; they thought they were buying British imports from a British band that was part of the Bowie, T. Rex, Roxy Music, Sweet, Slade, and Queen zeitgeist.

That POV continued even when they came home and domesticated themselves as a sort-of punk/new wave (as in stripped down rock), playing places like Whisky a Go Go in L.A. and The Bottom Line in N.Y.C. Then, after hearing Donna Summer’s futuristic disco hit, “I Feel Love,” they hooked up with its producer, Giorgio Moroder, with whom they collaborated on a string of albums that would have much more influence than actual sales. The first of which, No. 1 in Heaven, was a proto-trance/eurodisco masterpiece that, like Kraftwerk and Moroder’s other albums, would have a profound effect on the emerging synth-pop/new wave bands from the U.K. (think Joy Division/New Order, Pet Shop Boys, Duran Duran, OMD, and you’re only getting started) that, when they all scored hits via MTV, would be described as the Second British Invasion. “Angst in My Pants” came out this period, and “Cool Places” (with Jane Wiedlin of the Go Go’s) capped off this period that when after hearing them on KROQ (Rodney On The ROQ or Richard Blade’s shows) Valley Girls shopping at the Sherman Oaks Galleria would/could assume, once again, that Sparks were a British band that were part of the same scene as those other U.K. synth-pop bands.

Personally, I was hoping that the Maels would part from this tour’s usual setlist and celebrate this era for the Hollywood Bowl show, being that it was such a special time for them and their L.A. fans. But, as I said, they’re not a nostalgic band, despite being sentimental about the moment. Taking in the moment, Russell reflected, “It’s an absolute thrill to be here tonight. Our hometown. And our mother took us to this very venue in 1964 when The Beatles played, and I think that was some good education from our mom, and it led to this, our being on the stage right now, so thank you all.”

They did go back to their beginnings again, for “Beaver O’Lindy,” from their sophomore album, A Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing. The stage was sparse but striking, with letters in lights that would spell out the song’s title. This was also perhaps the most hard-rocking song of the night, true power pop dynamics ala Keith Moon, Pete Townsend and The Who. Though the audience couldn’t help but be titillated by this old-school deep cut, I have to complain, not about the band but the crowd––I kept waiting for the audience to wake up. They were half asleep there for a while. It was me and a handful of others who were elated to hear “When I’m With You.” The song comes from their second Moroder record, Terminal Jive, an album that’s even maligned by Sparks fans, but some of us think it’s the buried treasure of their discography. Like 10CC’s “I’m Not in Love” the song goes meta in deconstructing the very notion of a love song. It’s smart pop perfection, that was played a bit slower tonight than on the album. Terminal Jive went unnoticed here in The States but was huge in France, where the Maels lived, off promoting its success for a year.

Actually, Sparks had a lot of balls to play this setlist––literally, they did their song “Balls” off the album title of the same name. “Balls” had them keeping up with the then current sounds of electronica at the new Millennium, specifically The Prodigy. I’m not sure if most of the crowd new the track, but they seemed to enjoy it. Ron took the spotlight to deliver his hilarious, deadpan musings of modern love circa 1986. From the album, Music That You Can Dance To, it sounds much better today than it did when it was first released. It aged well, despite sounding dated, especially when you consider it a continuation of their pioneering electronica starting with No. 1 In Heaven and continuing to that point in ‘86. I think when it came out the majority of Sparks fans were not dance pop fans, so the record had a better audience with the club music crowd than it did their own fans. But time is a great equalizer and looking back, when you listen in context to their other rock and new wave albums, you can see how it is no different a brilliant Sparks album than the other greats. The title track, which they performed a couple songs later, was the beginning of what can be described as the “dance” portion of the set, where they did “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way’” as well as No. 1’s “The Number One Song in Heaven.” And this is where the crowd was finally alive and on their feet, giving Sparks back that explosive energy they were receiving.

I don’t want to come off as ageist, but I reminded myself a couple times that these brothers are no spring chickens, and yet there was Russell dancing and jumping around like Jack Be Nimble, and there was Ron doing his signature dance with the same zeal he did decades ago. And vocally? It’s not every day we get to report that the lead singer sounds as good as he ever did, where aside from running circles around his contemporaries, Russell can still hit the highs and has the breath power to pull-off those acrobatic and chromatic tongue twisters. And the band that backs them up are tight. While I’m always curious in how a band approaches the live representation of electronic dance music––I tend to wish that the electronic stuff was presented more electronically live––I have to admit, the live translation of the electronic music was powerful and impressive coming from a “band” setting.  

With the crowd up on its feet and dancing the night away, the boys topped it all off with their most famous number, “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us,” from 1974’s Kimono My House. The audience erupted, and it was every bit as climactic as the fans and the brothers would have wanted. Which set up the final song (before encores) perfectly. “Gee, That Was Fun” with its lyrics, “Gee, that was fun, being with you all this time.” Sparks is a band known for their quirky humor, their social commentary, their satire. But that should not be mistaken for detachment or coldness. Many of these songs are more sincere than you would initially give them credit for, and hearing the brothers talk, the emotion in their voices about how honored and humbled they were about achieving such a career milestone, to be hometown heroes playing the Hollywood Bowl––there is no way not to become emotional with them.

Their last of two encores was “All That,” from Covid era’s (2020) A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip. A song Russell intro’d by saying, “It encapsulates how we feel emotionally about an evening like tonight. It’s so amazing, the bond that we have with you guys is something extra special.” It’s a song that my wife would cry tears of joy to as we listened in the car, because it fills you with the feels of mindful gratitude. And the brothers were saturated with gratitude as the Bowl lit up with cell phone lights the way Bic lighters would light up arenas back in the day. You could tell they were overwhelmed by it, “It looks absolutely beautiful up there, thank you,” Russell said as he led us in the night’s final singalong.

It may have taken their whole career to get to this point of playing The Hollywood Bowl, but this fan can’t wait for them to make it just another stop on their next tour, so we can appreciate whatever setlist this legendary duo offers. Because any night with Sparks is a once in a lifetime night that we hope we can experience at least twice! •

Photo by Edgar Wright

Often labeled, lazily, as an Industrial band from Chicago, that’s just the tip of the Lake Michigan-sized iceberg. Thrill Kill Kult (or TKK, as they are more colloquially called) are not only multi-genre; back in the day they were a multimedia extravaganza that was the cyberage’s version of Andy Warhol’s (with The Velvet Underground) Exploding Plastic Inevitable; their show was a sensory overload of music (full band augmented by more keyboards, more drums, and background singers), projected footage/visuals, outrageous, and controversial (like church groups outside protesting and trying to get them banned) performance art. But the music alone was much more than music…it was cinema!

Maybe cinema is too pretentious a word, we will elaborate in a little, but literally the band name is the same as the film project the founding duo of Groovie Mann (Frankie Nardiello) and Buzz McCoy (Marston Daley) were going to make. As the origin story goes, what began as a soundtrack for a film they intended to make was so freakin’ cool they decided to make it a band instead. Releasing 12-inches and eventually full-lengths for legendary local label Wax Trax!, home of post-punk/new wave/electronic/industrial mainstays like Ministry and Front 242, they eventually became one of the stable’s most popular acts. It’s probably because TKK offered such an exciting concoction of sounds that brought horror to the dancefloor in a way not heard since Claudio Simonetti (of prog group Goblin) was making Giallo-Italo-disco scorchers simultaneously for Italian film master Dario Argento’s soundtracks, the nightclubs, and the radio; but even more thrilling and chilling because of the inclusion of movie samples from said genre. I will mention many of their samples in this review, and that is because their samples are such a huge part of their music, and chronicling the different samples is almost to chronicle their evolution. Thrill Kill didn’t invent the idea of mashing up music with horror movie samples, but their brand of conspicuous devil worship had more of a wink and a smile (more Corman less Crowley). They were spooky, but also sexy and spunky. Theirs was an evil kitsch that got even more kitschy as they went.

36 years later and Thrill Kill still throw one hell of a sex magick party. And on their Evil Eye Tour they play the hits, some album cuts, and a sprinkle of this and that. Back to the Teragram Ballroom where Detroit’s dark wave/electro-punk duo Adult. more than warmed the stage, they forged it, the crowd was now clamoring for Thrill Kill. Out of the darkness, into the fog and blue light, they kicked off their set, which celebrates the first ten years of their career. The first ominous sample of the night came in the opening number, “Burning Dirt” from their sophomore album Confession of a Knife…, from 1990. The diabolical refrain, “Tonight, we murder,” comes from a song of the same name, that was the flipside of the “Stigmata” single by Al Jourgensen’s Ministry. According to Groovie, he co-wrote and laid down the vocals for a side project they were working on, not knowing that Jourgensen would release it as a Ministry song. So TKK reclaim the song, and it perfectly sets the mood for the show.

The stage is minimally dressed but full of vibe. The band, a taut 4-piece (long gone are the Bomb Gang Girlz, the back-up singers that spun off, Mary Jane Girls/Vanity 6 style), with Justin Bennett on drums, Mimi Star on bass, Buzz on all the keys and backing tracks/samples, and our frontman, Groovie, on vocals. The second track is a fan favorite (obviously, as are most songs in the mostly-greatest hits set), “A Daisy Chain 4 Satan,” where they delve into a topic they are much more obsessed with than Satan. Drugs! More specifically, naughty girls doing drugs. “I live for drugs,” is the kind of line you just don’t hear anymore. It’s as if the celebration of drug-addled debauchery is so 90s. Today rappers talk about being hooked on anti-depressants/anti-anxiety meds, cough syrup, and opioids, but they don’t make drug dependency sound nearly as exhilarating as the Thrill Kill Kult do. Theirs is the “superlative high” (as Edie Sedgwick described her amphetamine-feuled bliss in Ciao! Manhattan), even if they are sending-up health class PSA films; cautionary tales of lost little girls like the one “A Daisy Chain 4 Satan” finds in (the reoccurring, provocative yet troubling, “I live for Drug” tagline) “A Child, Again,” a 1967 public service piece from WNEW’s Public Affairs Department.

Forget Compton, the next number comes straight outta hell (as the sample shouts), harkening back to their debut, 1988’s, I See Good Spirits and I See Bad Spirit. “Do You Fear (For Your Child),” goes against almost everything I wrote before about TKK being kitschy and campy. Groovie plays the terror trip straight, no irony, pretty scary. And yes, I would probably react like the televangelists and the puritan and paranoid parents and actually fear for my child. The fear is less them being sacrificed to Satan and more losing them to this sanctum, this hypothetical musical druggy sex cult and their seductive leader.

Soon, Groovie and gang would move on to the next phase of their career of evil (fans of both C/Kults?), but not before stabbing out another two songs from Confessions…, “Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness,” and “Days of Swine and Roses” The latter could have benefitted from the presence of the Bomb Gang Girlz or at least one female back-up singer. Groovie does a great job delivering the goods, but many of their songs were originally recorded with a female side-kick and back-up singers, and in “Days of Swine…” the girls make that “Christian, Zombie, Vampires” nursery rhyme/cheer is that much more delicious and mischievous. Not to worry, the fans came to participate, and they sang along to that part better than Rocky Horror regulars. The former song, “Rivers of Blood…” offered a taste of the sonic transition about to come on Confessions... Changes that would become much more prominent on the next two albums: From the slinky, cocktail loungy, tickled ivories that would populate Sexplosion! (1991) and 13 Above the Night (1993), to the psychedelic 60s guitar-licks (this one courtesy of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What it’s Worth”) that would rave-up their retro road trip album, Hit & Run Holiday (1995).

Sexplosion! is to TKK’s pissing off their Industrial following as Dylan’s “going electric” was to his folk flock, or KISS’ going disco (just as a disco records were being set ablaze in Chicago) was to the KISS Army. Fans were devastated, they felt betrayed. They were trepidatious about their favorite Chicago industrial group now doing Chicago house, with its requisite wailing divas?  Instead of chanting “Death to Disco” TKK was trading their death for disco? These first gen fans weren’t wrong about the changes, but for pseudo satanists to find the new disco direction so shocking and blasphemous meant they weren’t really paying attention to the disco that had already been part of TKK’s sound almost from the beginning. “Do you Fear (For Your Child)” had sampled Alec R. Costandinos’ Golden Tears and the titular “Theme” for Confessions of a Knife looped Giorgio Moroder’s “Oh L’ Amour” for the entire track. If homage to these two Casablanca Records disco maestros wasn’t enough, it doesn’t get much more blatantly disco than “Waiting for Mommie”’s “borrowing” of Chic’s iconic “Le Freak” bassline. I mean the “Le Freak” bassline is on the second album and you’re gonna’ be mad at them for “going disco?” It’s OK, they said the same thing about Bowie when he was about to lay the groundwork for some of the darkest shit ever with the Berlin Trilogy. . . but again, we digress.

It was still too much disco for former keyboardist Thomas Thorn. If Thrill Kill’s foray into Satanism was closer to Satan’s Cheerleaders, then he wanted to be more like the ritual scene in Faces of Death; and so he would exit to form Electric Hellfire Club (though he’d eventually loosen up and get more kitsch fun like TKK). But for now, on Sexplosion!, TKK were venturing out of their own hell club for the sex club. Not just one sex club, all kinds of sex clubs, as if we the audience (whether here at the show or at home on wax) were part of this exclusive and mysterious International Sin Set and this record their polyamorous/pansexual travelogue of sex; from the first Playboy Club in Chicago, to the peep shows of The Deuce-era Times Square, to the Betty Page-era burlesque shows/stag reels to the LA Confidential-like pulp rags, to the soldier in Full Metal Jacket’s Vietnam looking for some female R&R and whatever he can get for five dollars, to “Leathersex” (which they played tonight), where TKK take us to the S&M gay club, where the muscle men bulge out of their biker leathers like Tom of Finland and shared sniffs of poppers from amyl nitrate-doused bandanas. On this song, bassist Mimi Star eases the minds of those who could not imagine a replacement for the ailing Levi Levi. I marvel at how Mimi Star could do it, but she does it and she did it again. She’s not a slapper like Levi, but she picks her grooves with such precision it’s hypnotic.

Truth be told, Sexplosion! was when I first discovered My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. I walked into NYC’s now lost but legendary record store, Bleeker Bob’s, and I heard a James Bond sample (from Thunderball’s “Switching the Body”) on a song I later learned was “Mood No. 6.” I was born and bred on James Bond, and by this point I was already an OG hip-hop fan who’d become obsessed with trainspotting samples and crate-digging to find them, as well as a voracious film student who would rent several movies a day, couldn’t get enough. Here was an album that was made for club kids and cinephiles alike? My mind was blown. I immediately bought Sexplosion! and their back catalog on CD as soon as I could. More than their music, I loved the mystery and mystique around them, the P-Funk-like characters and alter-egos of core and extended members. I tried to piece it all together but they were elusive and larger than life. Higher than you can ever be, and more glamorous than you can ever dream.  When TKK rolled out “Sex On Wheels” (the band’s biggest single was also featured in the film and on the soundtrack to Ralph Bakshi’s, Cool World) tonight as an encore, I remembered how it didn’t leave the CD player in my car. It was my personal soundtracks, as I drove around the city, ala Taxi Driver’s “Travis Bickle,” (hopefully not as sociopathic) taking in the seediness and the sleaze, imagining what was going on behind the dark windows and closed doors of places like Show World, Scores, The Vault, or The Limelight.

Before moving ahead to the next album in the set, TKK bounced back again to another classic single. Remember when I confessed that I was in a K-K-K-K KULT? I was referencing a song with a long title, but more simply known as “Cuz It’s Hot.” Another dancefloor burner with hard driving bass drum kick and the self-referencing vocal (and an uncredited vocal by punk rock poet, Lydia Lunch), “THRILL! KILL! K-K-K-K KULT!” Because every band worth their weight in K-K-K-K KOKE should have their own theme song, right? It’s anthems like these that really stir up the crowd. Also, back to the “disco” thing, “Cuz It’s Hot” uses “Do You Wanna Get Funky With Me” (where, among other sections, the “Cuz It’s Hot” comes from) by Chicago disco daredevil, Peter Brown, and it seems to me that there are cosmic connections between him and TKK’s producer/performer extraordinaire, Buzz McCoy.

There’s a throughline there between the two, as if McCoy was the Wax Traxed version of Brown, updating his disco into industrialized disco house. The Brown connection wouldn’t end here, TKK didn’t just sample, they do their own cover version of “Do You Wanna Get Funky With Me” that kicks off 2005’s Gay, Black and Married (an instant classic which I must admit I regretfully slept on until a few years ago). Actually, there’s a video on YouTube that shows Peter Brown in the studio creating a track I imagine wouldn’t be so different than McCoy’s approach years later. A man with a vision putting whatever he can put down on tape by himself but getting the best performances out of the others. Which is where I want say how overlooked a producer/performer Buzz McCoy is. He writes the tunes with Groovie but even Groovie said he basically watches Buzz do his magic. The guy is on a Phil Spector level with his vision and capacity to build a wall of sound with attention to detail for immaculate, if dirty, arrangements. He is the mothership of sounds not only in the studio, but live, because aside from the lead vocals, drums and bass, he is doing everything up there on stage. It doesn’t look like there’s much going on, but if you know what’s going on then you know what he does is more than a handful.

With the demise of Wax Trax! Thrill Kill leveled up to Interscope Records where the sacrificial offer was 13 Above the Night. It was 1993, and by this time a lot of the shocking subjects they were singing about had become mainstreamed in pop culture. Their once semi-secret world of satanism and hedonism had become just another day of neo-pagan Americana. Trent Reznor had replaced Bon Jovi as the new sex symbol/rock god (singing the words damaged lovers long to hear, like “I want to Fuck You like an Animal”), AOL chatrooms and a little shop called Hot Topic was the great subculture equalizer: even if you lived far away from a metropolis’ underground scene you could get “alternative” fashion (hair dye, goth clothes and accessories) at the local mall in Idaho. Hip-hop and rave cultures celebrated and encouraged mind-bending recreational drug use, and teen girls, inspired by, among other things, films like The Craft, were forming covens and calling themselves witches. It’s as if the Satanic Panic of the 80s wasn’t just parental paranoia, forget “Sex On Wheelz,” their kids were going to hell on wheelz.  And if Sexplosion! told their scandalous tales ala sleazy vintage tabloid magazines, then the youth of 13 Above the Night were dishing their dalliances of depravity on sleazy tabloid television shows like Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake, and Jenny Jones (remember her?), even Bill O’Reilly, who is sampled on the album talking about the pros and cons of teenage individuality and rebellion. The lyrics of the album perfectly matched the times and themes, so did the then novel computer graphic album art, which went along with the cyberdelic aesthetic of rave flyers that were all the rage that year. Sonically, like their new beat/acid-house counterparts Lords of Acid, the band was going harder, with heavy guitars, techno/trance, and electro-lounge. For me, 13 is like Cheap Trick’s Heaven Tonight in the way that the Goldilocks had found the bed that was just right by combining the hard rock edge of the self-titled debut album with the power pop perfection of the second, In Color. In 13, TKK brought back their sympathies for the devil yet doubled down on the disco. Perfect! Tonight, they played that CD’s first track, “The Velvet Edge,” which casts Groovie as a remarkable ringer for Daniel Ash on a Love and Rockets song if backed by Steppenwolf, with 60s throwback grinding organ. Actually, TKK doing “Magic Carpet Ride” or “Born to be Wild” isn’t a bad idea. Another band that covered “Born to be Wild” is that other Cult of the Blue Öyster kind, as we mentioned in the beginning. The K/Cults share some vibes, like the mysterious occultic biker gang thing, but also all that evil kitsch, which at times could be intimidating until you realize how tongue-in-cheek it actually is. But “Velvet Edge” in particular reminds me of “This Ain’t the Summer of Love” from BOC’s breakthrough record Agents of Fortune (with that other song that could be an obvious TKK cover, “Don’t Fear the Reaper). They aren’t alike in chords or melody but both of them have their lead singer’s (with BOC it’s Eric Bloom) growly voice begin the record in an almost Alice Cooper “Welcome to My Nightmare” way --  a way that invites you to take off your rose-colored glasses that sees whatever Summer of Love you think you’re seeing so you can see what dirty dangers lurk in the dark underbelly of it all.

It may seem a little late to offer this disclaimer but there’s no time like the present: the references to samples are fact, but please take my band/movie references at your own risk, because it’s obviously all subjective, and these are just hunches that I get about music/pop culture sometimes. We all bring our own notions to the party, some of my notions are no brainers but sometimes they are more obscure, and I love it when I get any kind of confirmation that I was right, like that time I messaged Groovie to ask him if he was influenced by The Tubes and their singer Fee Waybill/his outrageous and flamboyant alter ego, Quay Lewd, and he confirmed it! He said “White Punks on Dope was another break the rules character. Yes!” I mean, think about it, you can say TKK’s been doing their own versions of “White Punk’s on Dope” throughout their career.  Back again to the Teragram show, they would play two more songs from 13 Above The Night, “Bad Life,” a mid-tempo, mostly hard rocker with distorted guitars (on backing tracks) and “Final Blindness,” a hard industrial house banger with more wailing diva vocal on top.

While “Sex On Wheels” was a mighty fine introduction for TKK into the world of soundtracks (a Cool World, that is), they were more than ready for their close-up with a performance in the beloved yet ill-fated film and on the soundtrack for The Crow. It was a marriage of goth and grunge and TKK’s contribution, “After The Flesh,” was so incendiary that you would think it was TKK not DJ Steve Dahl that blew up those disco records at Comiskey Park, much less sold out to disco. Tonight, was no different, they banged out the song like a hammer to the anvil, extra credit going to Justin Bennet for beating the living hell out of the drums.

In the summer of 1995 TKK were about to enter another musical phase, but again, it’s nothing that they didn’t already give us a tease of on the previous albums. Hit & Run Holiday ditched the industrial sound even more and hitched a ride on a retro road trip from Hollywood’s Sunset Strip to Las Vegas’ Golden Strip. What if the Faster Pussycats were The B-52’s back-up girls. If it was any other group I’d almost argue that Hit & Run could be their best album, at least a record you didn’t have to be a TKK fan to get into. Sans the industrial baggage it was a electro-lounge/psychedelic-disco/surf-rock/garage-pop masterpiece, and maybe their most cinematic sounding concept album to date. The B&W album art comes to life in your head: palm trees and pills, and the hot rod our star-crossed lovers (Supervixen Krystal Starlust and the dark and dangerous drifter, Apollo) hop into for their David Lynch-meets-Russ Meyers-like joyride on a lost highway just beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Sadly, “Apollo 69,” was the only song they played from this epic album I’m describing, but it still burns rubber like a race car driver’s theme song.

I think in the big picture Hit & Run Holiday may have been even more polarizing and off-putting to some of the original fans than Sexplosion!.  Even if I disagree with them, I can understand how they could feel that TKK changed too much.  But what, they were supposed to stay the same like AC/DC? I suspect for all the new fans they were picking up, that there was some drop-off too. Some of it could have been due to Thrill Kill going through another label change, now with the short-lived Red Ant Entertainment, also, industrial’s (as TKK were still lumped into) popularity waned in the latter part of the decade, which is a shame because those that jumped ship missed out on one of the most underrated discs in the discography. A Crime for All Seasons is perhaps is perhaps the film noir side of Hit & Run Holiday, still retro, but the girls on this album were less vixen and more femme fatale. The album still runs the gamut from the rock to house to disco to even some Prodigy/Chemical Brothers-like breakbeats, but there’s much less samples, which contributes to some songs having more of that gritty live band sound, as they did in “After the Flesh,” which in some ways had them returning to the darkness of the first album. I remember catching them at Club Lingerie in Hollywood at this time and thinking it was one of best performances I had ever seen. Much like tonight, they were a stripped-down unit and they had everyone in a sweat. And tonight they revisited Crime’s “Blondes With Lobotomy Eyes.”

You know, when I was getting ready to see My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult back in 2017, also at the Teragram Ballroom, I admit to being a bit nervous if they would “age” well. I thought maybe TKK’s sound, which is so distinctively 90s would be too stuck in the 90s to sound fresh today.  Something that relied on a nostalgia for the 90s, which, of course, I have, but I have changed from those times, too. Would I relate to their vibe again? Would I have flashbacks or withdrawal symptoms the second I hear them? Sure, sometimes I still am up late at night watching TV or writing, but I’m not the recreational drug user I was back then, I’m not the nocturnal nightclubber I was back then, I was worried I would open all my shades and let the sunshine in, take a shower, or check into rehab after just one toe-dip into their hot tub time machine. But that show proved me wrong, and so I couldn’t have been more pumped to see them this time at the same venue. And that’s because thank god they are still the same band (who have developed their sound and image) while still knowing how to throw a throwback party, as they are doing now on this tour.  The creatures of the night came out tonight, so many old-school L.A. goths resurrected, and those nostalgic “feels” felt just right for everyone.  Groovie and Buzz may have started their cult at the end of the 80s, but it wasn’t just a fad cult from another era, these classic-era (and some later surprises) songs are still alive, making Thrill Kill more than a cult, they are still one helluva band.

The next leg of the Evil Eye Tour resumes on August 13 at The Ritz in San Jose, California. •

mylifewiththethrillkillkult.com

Photos by Munachi Osegbu

Just a few years ago, being a Sparks fan was like being in a cult.  Like Jonestown without the Kool-Aid and mass suicide, Sparks attracted different types of fans for different reasons. It depended on when (as in what period of their long and increasingly illustrious career) and where (as in the geographic location ranging from couldn’t get arrested to being all the rage) the listener discovered them, but once initiated, Sparks was everything to all of them. 

The Los Angeles born and raised, UCLA-schooled brothers Ron and Russell Mael were discovered by Todd Rundgren (with whom they still collaborate, just check his last album for “My Fandango”), who in 1972 signed them to the Bearsville label where they put out two records that didn’t exactly make them hometown heroes. Maybe their Cali flavors of post-Beach Boys meets Zappa-adjacent avant-garde meets their Anglophile love of post-British Invasion power pop/psychedelia was too quirky? So, they fled failure and anonymity, went across the Pond, and Being There’d their way into the U.K. glam/glitter scene of Marc Bolan/T-Rex, Sweet, Slade, Queen (and according to MOJO magazine, tried to poach Brian May) and experienced their own version of a Ziggy-meets-Bay City Rollers mania. This is why, back home in L.A., fanatics like Jane Wiedlin of The Go-Go’s, and so many others, thought they were a British band when she established her own Sparks fan club. (A few years later she’d be singing “Cool Places” with them.) 

Sparks’ glitter period is also when future punk rockers like Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols and Siouxsie Sioux of the Banshees fell in love with them. The brothers’ euro-disco/proto-trance/synth-pop records would, uh, spark Joy Division and Depeche Mode and Pet Shop Boys and Duran Duran and a slew of other Second British Invasion bands. Next, their sojourn in France obviously captivated a young Daft Punk, Air, and they gave hit songs to national favorites, Les Rita Mitsouko. Actually, like Bowie, each of their incarnations yielded another groundswell of future groundbreakers and hitmakers to the point where their impact on rock and pop music is almost incalculable. It’s as if the number of bands Sparks’ve incited outnumbers the people who have even heard of them. 

And the inspiration has never stopped, they surpassed 50 years of their family business as each decade begat new disciples. There is something Rundgren-ish or Zappa-esque about them. On the one hand, an acquired taste, but also so catchy they’re too infectious to dismiss. Yes, they’ve been different things to different people, but more and more they are all things to an increasingly larger group of people who have become obsessed completists. And that probably has much to do with the wild success of Edgar Wright’s 2021 documentary, The Sparks Brothers, where the director was, almost miraculously, able to celebrate the Maels’ eccentricities while emphasizing their accessibility and ubiquity. 

Sparks are not nostalgic, they don’t look back at milestones and accolades. In fact, they are still outdoing themselves at a rate that can almost make them blush. They have wowed audiences at Cannes with their musical film, Annette, and are now back with their 25th album, a serving of art-pop perfection, The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte, the video for the title track featuring Oscar winner and Sparks fan, Cate Blanchett. This month Sparks embark on a world tour which sees them playing prestigious venues like the Royal Albert Hall in the U.K. and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles where they will, undoubtedly, be greeted as the hometown heroes they always were. Who knows, maybe a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction isn’t too much to ask for next?

Music Connection: The Girl is Crying in Her Latte offers new palettes of sounds. Can you talk about how discovering new toys, new gear, new software, new plug-ins, etc. yields new works for Sparks?

Ron Mael: We don’t have to worry about the clock and the time in the studio, because it’s our own time, our own place. Also, we are able to accumulate new sounds through software. In some circumstances we still write the songs in a traditional way–you know, piano and singing–but we are also writing it from an inspiration, from a sound, or something with new software. Russell in particular is always seeking out new software, and it isn’t only to just color a thing after the fact; sometimes it’s something that will inspire you to actually create something new. 

Russell Mael: The most important thing is the song. We had a small studio set up in my place, but we were always dependent on an engineer to come in and use it. At a certain point I thought, I have this equipment sitting here, I should learn how to use it. Over time, I became more self-sufficient, and I became more interested in what’s out there sonically. There’s lots of companies now that have amazing software and sound libraries in all different styles. There are amazing orchestral and synthesizer libraries. 

We’re not purists, either, with synthesizers. We don’t think in terms like “Oh, I’m going analog.” If you can get a sound that is virtually indistinguishable from the hardware version of an instrument, then we don’t see that as cheating. Sonically, when you have to be so purist as to say that it has to be coming from a real Moog as opposed to a real Moog that has been sampled to be used for software, then it becomes a real strange argument as to what is really necessary or better. Also, it’s how you use any of that stuff, whether it’s hardware or software. Because I know some bands using great vintage gear, and in the end it’s “eh uh eh uh” and you go, “Okay, it’s vintage, but so what?”  

Ron: We’ve kept a lot of those old pieces of equipment just because they’re cool. We have the RMI [Electra-Piano] and the Echoplex that we used on the recordings of the first island albums, Kimono My House and Propaganda, and then we have the Roland Jupiter 8’s and the early drum machines, just because you hate to get rid of that stuff, it’s so beautiful and cool. But we like to work fast, and you know there’s tuning and reliability and space issues that makes us think, “Let’s just save those for the museum tour.” 

MC: You’re not hung up on nostalgia, sometimes performing an entire new album before offering the greatest hits. Many bands are afraid of losing the audience to the bathroom break, but it’s like you have the confidence to say, “This is what we’re doing now, come along or get left behind.” 

Russell: We agree totally. If you are shying away from your new material, then there must be some issue with it. There are obviously certain songs that we want to do from the past, that fans expect and enjoy, but we like to balance that with what we are doing now because we’re proud of our new material. I think people come away from Sparks shows, especially new or younger fans who don’t have a reference point of the past, as all of a piece. As opposed to, “Oh I want to hear songs from…” whatever golden era they may think is Sparks’ golden era. 

MC: It’s obvious that the success of Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers doc made the tent bigger for people with no previous reference/access point? 

Russell: He kind of emphasized that Sparks’ history is equally valid throughout our entire career. That there are even albums that went under the radar, but now when you go back to inspect those albums, there were circumstances as to why they were under the radar, as opposed to quality issues. And now we even enjoy doing some of the more obscure songs live, because now in the context of a whole show people have even more difficulty distinguishing what period something is from, because it all sounds like it’s of a piece. 

MC: In a very Bowie-like way you have many incarnations, which at first glance can seem drastic and incongruent, but there’s stuff on the new album that still evokes your first record, so can you talk about that throughline?

Ron: We are fortunate enough that through all things where we kind of soaked up influences, our sensibilities are strong enough, that it’s always going to be us. For better or worse, it’s always going to be the Sparks sensibility in whatever we do, so we’re not afraid of moving in a different direction where we ever lose our way, because we know that the way we think of music and lyrics is always going to be there, in a general sense, and those other things are just a shell around all of those things that we are. 

MC: Can you talk about the astounding feat of performing 21 albums in 21 nights that you did in England back in 2008? 

Russell: It was something that our manager Sue [Harris] had the audacity to come up with.  The concept that was “What could you do for the release of the next album?” Which was Exotic Creatures from the Deep, our 21st album. So, she thought of this idea, what if you do every one of your albums from start to finish—and in order—as kind of a statement. At first, we said, “Oh yeah, it sounds real cool,” but then we got down to the brass tacks about how we were actually going to do that. 

We ended up rehearsing for four months to do those shows, but it’s something we think was an amazing achievement that no other band will ever do—or that even has that many albums—because the amount of focus that you have to have to do that is pretty intense.  It was a really special event, and was also a great leveler, in a way: when you hear all those songs done live, taken away from their recorded versions, it does become like it’s all of a piece, and you see how some albums have slipped by at the time. We thought some of those albums were lesser, just because they didn’t have a massive hit off them, but we heard them again and thought, “There’s nothing wrong with this album at all!” And the people who came to all those shows kind of realized the same thing. There are songs on albums like Introducing Sparks that went under the radar at the time. 

MC: You are with a major label again, Island Records, but have been operating for years as something like The House of Sparks, a boutique production company putting out high-end, curated music, videos, films, collectables, apparel and other merch with a fierce DIY spirit. Can you enlighten us about taking control of your art and brand. 

Russell: In the end, it’s always the first choice to control and present what you’re doing 100 percent the way you want to present it. We, along with Sue our manager, have a pure vision of what Sparks is and should be, and that way you can have things in your own hands. The downside is that sometimes you might not have the infrastructure to get it out to the rest of the world in the way, let’s say, that Island or Universal can do, with their reach. But as far as the actual material that you have and the way you present it, from the packaging and even the videos that we ended up doing on our own, there’s something to be said for having your own autonomy. Then your fate is in your own hands, and it’s something that you can be proud of. Having to be dependent on huge budgets to be able to move is paralyzing, so if you can avoid that there are more ways to work in the music field. 

MC: Sparks also has an impressive social media presence, yes?

Ron: You have to be active in giving people things. Even if it’s not your music. Something. During the pandemic, for better or worse, once a week I did a reading of a song lyric. It wasn’t like we had 10 million people watching it, but it’s trying to maintain a connection with people in a non-traditional way. We are always aware of making albums in the same way that we made albums all through the time, but there has been a huge change in the way that people hear things, and you have to be aware of that and adapt to it. 

MC: Can you talk about signing with Island again after so many years?

Russell: It’s pretty amazing that we signed with Island, who signed Sparks for what became Kimono My House in 1974, the album that really put us on the international scene. They signed a band that was uncompromising in 1974, and now, getting close to a half-century later, they signed Sparks again. But it wasn’t based on nostalgia or “Weren’t they wonderful? Wouldn’t it be nice to have their name around our label?” They responded to what Sparks is doing now musically, and they really love the new album, and that, for us, makes the whole story of being back with Island the most satisfying. It’s that they see the same spirit and adventure that Sparks had in ‘74 now applied in a fresh and new way in 2023 on the new album, so I think it is an amazing story to be back with them. 

MC: Sparks will play the historic Hollywood Bowl in July. As born-and-raised Angelinos, how does it feel to play such a large, legendary venue? 

Russell: Touring has been going up and up for Sparks in the last several years because of this real awareness of the band, due in large part to Edgar Wright and the documentary. And the Annette film was well received around the world. We’ve been able to play to bigger and bigger audiences, so now to be able to play the Hollywood Bowl, especially being from Los Angeles. . . it’s the most iconic venue you can possibly play in L.A., so we’re really excited about that. 

MC: This may be more of an observation, but I’ve noticed about how in the beginning Sparks was a music group that dabbled in art, but by now you’ve become a complete art project that uses music as the vehicle. You are more than a band, you are art.

Ron: When we first started off, we were attempting to emulate bands like The Who and The Kinks, bands that were bands, but ones that had a theatricality that wasn’t present in the L.A. bands. The personalities of the people in the bands gave it a theatricality that’s only there in rock music. Through the years we’ve always felt that the visual side of things is something that is incredibly important. It doesn’t diminish what we were doing musically; to us it’s all part of a piece. 

We’ve always been aware that what we’re doing is not just a traditional rock band, and that we are kinda both in and out of the role of rock musicians. But we’re not doing music from a distance, I mean, we’re totally invested in the kind of music that we like, and we can’t really work in a way that isn’t in some way at least adjacent to rock and pop. We are also aware that we bring additional elements to what we’re doing. You don’t have to be one thing, and that sometimes it causes problems as far as some critics being unable to pigeonhole us with, “What is it?” or “I don’t get it.”  

MC: I’ve heard you talk about being dada, and I see you like musical dada. And with your obsession with cinema, I also see you as being musical cinema, does that make sense?

Ron: We kind of see the songs when we write them in a cinematic way. That doesn’t mean you’re using soundtrack sounds or anything, but they are cinematic in that they are somehow larger than life, and we always felt that that was an essential part of the bands we always started off really admiring early on, and hoping we could kind of continue in that tradition. 

MC: Russell?...

Russell: Ditto. Everything he said. 

Contact Ken Weinstein, Big Hassle Media

weinstein@bighassle.com

Visit allsparks.com; bighassle.com

Music Connection: It seems congratulations are in order, your new album Once Upon a Time (released on April 21 on Cleopatra Records & Tapes) was #1 on Amazon’s CD & Vinyl Pre-orders list, and was also on their top Movers & Shakers list, which tracks their biggest “gainers” of the past 24 hours.

Punky Meadows: When Risen [their previous album] came out it did the same thing. It would be nice if we can get it into the 100 because that would be a game changer for us. It would help get bigger shows, too.

Frank DiMino: At this point it’s a whole different world from when we first started. To have a great response to what we are doing is a great feeling.

MC: Once Upon a Time…is the second release since 2019’s Risen, the long awaited “reunion” album. There must’ve been a lot pressure to rise (pun intended) to the occasion and deliver a new album that lives up to the classic catalog. But how do you do you do it again?

DiMino:  A lot of the original Angel albums are different sounding, so I think the key here was to write songs that we felt good about, and hopefully the fans would go along with us.  There were times back in the day where there was pressure to “do the same thing you did the last album.” But we were always moving forward musically and developing with each other musically. We never stayed in one kind of pocket.

Meadows: I’m really proud of this album. I never want to give people the same record over and over again. What I like about this alum is that it’s deep. It has everything that Angel fans expect: The epic songs like “The Torch” and power pop songs like “It’s Alright.”  It’s got the hard rock and roll, but also songs like “Blood of my Blood [Bone of my Bone],” which is more of a soul kind of song. It’s very sophisticated and I wasn’t even sure if Angel could do that kind of song, but Frank did such an amazing job on it; as he did with “Let it Rain,” a song that when I first wrote it, I imagined Elton John singing, because it’s a beautiful ballad. But when I heard Frank’s vocal it was so good it brought a tear to my eye.

MC: Danny, you were an Angel fanatic and now a bandmate, you are in a unique position to collaborate with the band but also know what a “good” Angel song “should” sound like from a fan’s perspective.

Danny Farrow:  You nailed it. When we work together it’s easier for me as a fan to step out of the box and say “what would I want to hear if Angel came back and I wasn’t a part of it.”

Song like “Turn the Record Over” or “It’s Alright,” I would write some of the choruses and say “wow, that really hits the Angel sound!” Then I would call Frank and Punky and work it out with them. When I came up with “The Torch” [opening track on new album] I was like “there’s not too many songs like ‘The Tower,’ you know those epic songs from those first two albums. One thing I wanted to bring back was the dueling solos between the keyboards and guitars. 

MC: Punky, you mention Frank’s impressive vocals. His voice is spectacular, especially when compared to other legacy bands whose singers can’t deliver without backing tracks these days. And your guitar playing is on fire, your tone makes me feel stoned! How did you guys get better than ever?

Meadows: I hope that you put that in print! That’s really cool, that’s a compliment because it’s saying that my guitar playing is taking you somewhere else, which is cool. I like to let the solos breathe more. It’s what you do with the notes that is more impactful, more of a statement. I’m an emotional player, it’s all about feeling and soul.  And I still love playing. Every night, it’s like sitting down with an old friend.

DiMino: Thank you. When I started teaching, I was doing all those exercises I used to do when I was taking lessons very young. Hopefully it helped and I think it kept me going for as long as I am now. I guess it’s technique.

MC: You’ve still got the showmanship, and flashy outfits too. Doing moves and posing like your larger-than-life photos. How important is it to you that to you maintain that pomp of a rock star?

Meadows: I always liked that, from back when was a kid and I first saw Elvis doing the gyrating thing. I loved watching Jimi Hendrix, and the Rolling Stones perform on stage. It looks so cool and it’s fun to do, but more importantly, if you’re going to be a rock star then be a rock star, don’t put a business suit on in the day time and then put your rock clothes at night; you have to be a rock star 24/7. Whenever I go anywhere out in public people know that I’m a musician. I always said that Keith Richards is always a rock star no matter what. He lives it. From Elvis to the Beatles to Frank Sinatra, it’s not just a music business, it’s an image business. That’s why the girls rule the charts these days, because they’re all fucking hot and wear great clothes, they look glamorous. And that’s what we did in the ‘70s. People who came to our concerts were all fucking chicks, because girls loved all that kind of stuff, and the guys followed the chicks. Today it's a bunch of goofy guys, or they look like they’re in prison; wearing baggy shorts and baggy shirts, or have big scary tattoos on their necks.

MC: Your makeup, big hair, and flashy outfits led to the glam metal/or hair metal era. What do you recall about that time, did you see your influence, and did you guys get testimonials from other bands?

DiMino:  When you look at what we did, [inventing hair metal] wasn’t our intention but that’s what we were doing, yeah, absolutely. I do a lot of the Fantasy camps, and meeting up with the guys that I played with in the ‘70s and ‘80s was a good time to talk with each other, and there’s always been a lot of gratitude for us. it’s always nice to hear. Especially from the ‘80s guys that we were an influence on.

Meadows: We started the whole hair metal thing. Before that, people were pretty much playing in jeans and t-shirts. Of course, you had David Bowie and Mott The Hoople, and bands like that. But then bands like Queen, KISS, and us picked up on the whole glitter thing, then of course it evolved from that to the ‘80s hair metal scene. Marty Freidman came and saw me one time when I was a DJ and he came in and said he was a big fan. In fact he sent me a message because we were playing in Japan and he wanted to know if he could come on stage and play an Angel song. He said he knows all the Angel songs. Paul Gilbert is also a big Punky Meadows/Angel fan. There’s a picture of him all dressed in white, with hair like mine, holding up two Angel albums. And, of course, Nikki Sixx was a big fan. We used to rehearse at the same facility, SIR. I remember Vince and Tommy came inside the studio and they would punch each other on the shoulder like school kids, because I showed them how to play an Angel song, and they were all excited and impressed. I know that they were all inspired by it. We inspired a lot of people, but I didn’t realize that until many years later when Facebook came out.

MC: It’s kind of a shame that the band broke up before MTV, because bands like Styxx were making the transition from the ‘70s into the ‘80s. And you guys were really setting the stage for all those hair bands that were huge on MTV. It’s hard not to think “What if” Angel stuck it out, right?

Meadows: It’s all about timing, you know, Daniel? The thing is, when MTV came out every band was like Angel, and it all became hair metal and that whole thing, and, unfortunately, we weren’t around for that. I think if we had been on MTV it would have busted right open. It would have been a different story, we would be talking a whole different ballgame right now, because we were primed for that, but unfortunately the band split up just before that came in. That’s just the way things happen.

MC: I loved “1975” from Risen, and nostalgia for the glory days of the glam rock era. Do you miss those times?

Meadows: It was the golden age, it was huge. Music is what everything was about. It wasn’t about video games. It was the concerts, the whole rock scene. Everybody wanted to be a part of it and it was just so fucking cool. Everybody was able to express themselves and be different, and the music was so good. It was exciting, all the chicks and the dope, smoking joints. It was a party. It’s funny when you look back at it now, because it was such an innocent time, it gives me butterflies when I talk about it. Back then we had billboards for every Angel record that came out. Now they have movies. Back then rock stars were bigger than movie stars. Every movie star chick wanted the rock star boyfriend. If you walked out on the street with a guitar case all the girls dug you. Music was the coolest, hippest thing ever. And it was all so diverse, everyone had their own sound. Unfortunately, it kind of started to get where everything sounded the same in the ‘80s, with oversaturated guitars and everyone tapping like Eddie Van Halen.  But in the ‘60s and ‘70s everything had its own sound: Styxx didn’t sounded anything like Blue Oyster Cult, Angel sounded nothing like KISS, and KISS sounded nothing like Cheap Trick. All these bands had their own sound their own styles. And that’s what made it so great and unique, you never got tired of anything because everything was different. And the musicians were so good too.

MC: I also love the lyrics on “It’s Alright” [the first single from Once Upon A Time]: “It’s been a long time, we’re back again, hope it never ends.” Frank, that line seems like a theme to the record, but it’s not about just being back as a band, are you also trying to evoke and bring back those glory days of rock and roll?

DiMino: Yeah, you know a lot of people say rock is dead. But rock is there, it’s never going to go away because it’s there. It’s just people have to point out where it is for them to find it, and enjoy it. Like when we do live shows, I tell everyone to forget about yesterday and tomorrow and enjoy what we’re doing now because we’re having a great experience. I want people to enjoy the band, enjoy themselves, enjoy the music and have a good time. That’s always been the case with Angel, we always wanted to present good songs and a good show.

MC: About the show, you guys once said that you wouldn’t do an Angel show again if you couldn’t do it with the big budget and big show. Can you talk about making an Angel show work on a smaller budget and scale?

DiMino: I don’t think the big show would work in the smaller places that we are playing. We use fog on “Fortune,” and maybe as we go forward we’ll add a few things here and there, but I don’t think we’ll be going back to the old Angel show where we have the disappearing and appearing and the big logo rising and talking to the audience any time soon. When we did that show it kind of ran by a stopwatch, certain things had to come up at a certain time. It was kind of nerve wracking, and there were a lot of people involved. Now, the main thing is playing. The one thing that you understand when you come to see the band now is that you really realize how much Punky and I enjoy playing our songs to an audience.

MC: Who do you see in the audience now?

DiMino: I see a lot of younger people now, people that never got a chance to see Angel live, especially over in Europe and the UK. We never played the UK before and it was great to see the mixture of people out there. I think we’re seeing the same thing out here. We did some shows with Starz, which was a lot of fun because we have a lot of history together, and those shows brought out a lot of people from back in the day and a lot of new kids as well.

MC: Angel is in kind of a reverse Hot Tub Time Machine situation, a classic band in a new world. How do you navigate that world, where streams and clicks are as important as charts and sales?

DiMino: You are absolutely right. We always hear “you gotta get on Tik-Tok” and “you gotta get on this platform and that platform.” We just push forward. We try to do the things we know will work and we try to do the things we’ve done in the past. Hopefully some of it works, even though some of it won’t. You just try to be true to what you’re doing. It’s a matter of going out there and try to play to as many people as possible. That is one of the keys for us, to try to get to as many people as we possibly can. And it’s always a battle. The social media thing is a tough thing to negotiate. It’s like a time bomb sometimes, you have to do crazy things to get people aware that you’re even on it, and that’s not something that’s in our DNA.

Meadows: It’s changed a lot. Obviously streaming and stuff like that destroyed the music business. There were some down sides with the big record companies, but there were a lot of up sides to it too. I miss those days. I’d like to have a big company behind me, sticking behind a band through thick and thin. Neil Bogart was like that, he was a great cat. That’s just the nature of the beast. I just wish we could make music and have it be that the artist can make money doing it. People say music should be free and I say when you work for a living do you think your salary should be free? I mean c’mon. People have to make money. But the business has changed. Most of the money now is touring and playing. But we do pretty good on record sales.

MC: Are you paying attention to stream counts and things like that?

DiMino: Yeah, sure, you have to. It’s so different from when we first started, when the album drops it goes to Spotify, it goes to YouTube and we’re going, “What do you mean? Shouldn’t we wait until some of the sales come in before we go to a service like that? And they go “No, no, no, this is the way you do it.” So, we’re learning as we’re doing things and trying to figure out the right way and the right path to do it.

MC: You are signed to a pretty big label now. Tell us about the deal with Cleopatra Records that Danny hooked up?

Meadows: Cleopatra is a real good company. They’re kind of old-school in a way, you know, they get behind us if we need money for videos, they gave us a pretty good record advance, and they put the record out on gatefold vinyl, CD, and even cassette!  When we first signed with Cleopatra it was a one-record deal, but when Covid hit we couldn’t tour, so we decided let’s do another album and see if Cleopatra were interested. Right away they were interested and they said “definitely.” I think they would do a third, too, because they liked Risen, and Once Upon A Time is starting to do well for them too. They are the ones who got us the album cover artist. They said we don’t mind spending money for a good album cover, because it’s collectable art work and more people will buy it because of the cover.

DiMino: The relationship is great. They’ve done everything that we’ve asked them to do, so they’ve been great to us. It’s true that they’ve also been generous. They let us do what we have to do artistically and we left marketing and a lot of the way they do things to them. We are close collaborators on how we released the album and who we went with for publicity. So yeah, this version of Angel and Cleopatra has been a great relationship so far, which I’m really happy about.

MC: The Casablanca Records biopic is coming out soon. You were there for all that ‘70s excess. What do want to share about Neil Bogart and those wild nights and crazy days?

DiMino: The Village People used to rehearse, working on dance routines, at the same place as us. Donna Summer’s band, Smoke, used to rehearse with us at this overdubbing studio that Casablanca owned. We were originally going to sign with Capitol but we decided against that. Our manager David Joseph from the Toby Organization asked, “what about Neil Bogart’s new label?” We brought our self-produced first album down to Neil’s office and he called everyone in and had someone roll up a big fat joint. A whole lot of food would come later, but first he put on the album, lit up the joint, and we sat there and listened to the whole album. Everyone was smoking this big fatty, and when it was over everyone was quiet, and Neil said, “Now that’s what I want to hear!” And that’s why we ended up signing with him. He was generous. He gave us what we wanted. He gave us recognition and told us that we had a great album.

Meadows: It’s true, Neil would always light up a joint, and he had a big bowl of cocaine out there too. It was just like that show Vinyl on HBO. He loved it, and then we would have after-parties after we would record something. He started off with nothing and became the Golden Boy of Hollywood. We were into him for a 1.5 million because he would give us tour support or whatever we needed. And the last conversation I had with him he said “I’m going to write this off, and you guys are going to win the war.” Then a couple months later he wound up getting fired for misappropriation of funds or something weird like that. After that happened Casablanca fell apart. We were still under contract, so we couldn’t to record with anybody else or get another record deal, and that’s kind of what broke Angel up, actually. We ended up splitting up because we couldn’t do anything under the name Angel.

MC: Can you talk about the ups and downs of that time? You had just done Live Without a Net, appeared in Foxes, and were playing arenas before it all came tumbling down.

DiMino: It was a very exciting time. We played two nights at the Budokan and two nights in Osaka when we did the Japanese tour. We came back and started headlining here, and then to go into do a movie with Jodie Foster was like “ok, we’re there! Everything is moving forward very nicely.” But like I said, things always have a way of evening out. The band always delivered, but when it came time for Casablanca to do things near the end it started to fall apart. We felt like we gave them everything they needed and they didn’t deliver.

Meadows: What happened was, we did Live Without a Net as Neil Bogart was nearing his end with Casablanca. He pretty much got the axe, unfortunately, because Neil really loved Angel and was behind us. The live album came out and it wasn’t really promoted the way it should have been. Without Neil there it was just a bunch of college kids working there. The live album just sat on somebody’s desk, I guess. It’s unfortunate because Angel was really progressing and growing as a band before it all ended. We were just getting better and better at it, you know?

MC: Do you think that there was other baggage that came along with Casablanca, like the stigma from snobby the rock-journo intelligentsia when it came to Neil Bogart and how they perceived KISS and all his promotional gimmicks?

DiMino: Absolutely, sure. Of course, they thought, “Oh, here comes another thing they’re gonna try to sell us.”

MC: Angel put on a huge show, even as openers, which created some problems. Can you talk about some of those bands you opened for?

Meadows: The problem with us is that when we would go on tour as a supporting act, we’d wind up getting thrown off the tour because we were blowing the headliners away. People would come to see the headliners, but then we’d come on and just rip the stage and people left talking about Angel. The headliners would always try to sabotage us. We were too much of a threat. We opened up for Roxy Music and they had no room up in front of the stage for us. I asked the guy if he would mind moving his saxophone stand a little and they wouldn’t do it. They wouldn’t move the damned saxophone stage because they hated us. We did four shows for Aerosmith that David Krebs got for us: The first night we were on stage and we had 5 Super Trouper spotlights on each guy. The second night we had four, the third night we had two and the last night we only had one. I asked David, how come they keep taking spotlights away from us, and he said “Listen, Punky, when you play with a headliner you play by the headliner’s rules and you’re blowing them away and they don’t like it.” What happened was, we were forced to headline prematurely in the Midwest where we were big, but those were places that were theaters, like 3,000 - 4000 seat theaters and we still couldn’t do our whole show. But the thing is, even if we only came out in all white, we were effective just like that. That was an effect itself that separated us from everybody else. All the kids would rush the stage and scream. We got kicked off most of the tours, except Styxx were cool, and Blue Oyster Cult and Rush were cool, too.

Meadows: It was a battle that I think we won every night. Most bands weren’t comfortable with us and why would they? The big thing is to get to play in front of a lot of people and that’s why you go through the hassle of opening up for bigger bands, because you want lot of people to see you. No matter if we had the full show or not, we were still a visual band, so it was key for us to play in front of a lot of people, but it was difficult as well.

MC: Obviously there’s been highs and lows, and now you’re back and still navigating through it all. Can you give our readers some cautionary tales, or some advice?

Meadows: We’ve parted ways with our recent manager, because that didn’t work out. You know, people asked where I was for all those years, and I say I love music but I hate the music industry. I hate the music business, because it’s just a bunch of sharks and people riding on your coattails and stealing everything you got. And it hasn’t changed. We had this other manager and he promised us all these things and he didn’t do anything, and in the meantime he was trying to take money from us. And he tried to do it in a sneaky way. I read an article with Steve Lukather where he said he doesn’t need a manager, all he needs is a good booking agent. We’re artists, we’re not really business people. I want to play stuff and create. I would just say watch, read everything, and if you are going to get a manager try to do it on a trial basis.

DiMino: Those are very hard things to figure out, because what happens usually, even with a producer sometimes, you don’t realize you made a wrong step until you made it. You gotta figure out how much of a commitment you are making to each thing you do, and if you do make a full commitment you gotta really feel comfortable with the person you are making a full commitment to, because there are always drawbacks to things, you have to understand that. It’s not always just because you like someone and just because you think it’s going to happen, it’s not always going to be roses and a great pathway to things. You gotta really soul search and do some diligence, fact finding, to figure out how much of a commitment to make to each thing/person.

Contact:

Billy James Glass Onyon PR

glassonyonpr@gmail.com

Visit angelbandofficial.com

Thanks to Casablanca’s Larry Harris and Ken Sharp for some additional info

And celebrate his fans did, at the Belasco in Downtown, Los Angeles, where the multi-hyphenate (multi-instrumentalist, writer, producer, video artist, music video producer, software developer, author, professor and philanthropist, etc.) rock star gave one of the most accessible-yet-unpredictable setlists in years. There were plenty of welcome surprises on this continuation of his Individualist a True Star tour (which was put on hold last year for obvious pandemic reasons), but there was also a stacked playlist of greatest hits, followed by a second set of the first side of his cult concept album A Wizard, A True Star. That little cult album from 1973 was massively influential to acts like Tame Impala, Daft Punk, and Ariel Pink (among many others who geeked-out on synths and gear in studios), and was the even more quirky and bizarre left-turn after his breakthrough solo release Something/Anything the year prior. That record, which was very well represented tonight (though some of us would have died for a “Wolfman Jack!”), solidified his reputation as a power pop pioneer (as he established in his first band Nazz), as well as boasted his ability to churn out hits with Brill Building perfection, but it also laid the ground work for the more progressive/synthesized offerings of the future.

He followed that muse to the max with A Wizard, because as Todd told us when Music Connection interviewed him for our April 2020 cover story, and as he reiterated again to the audience tonight, he already proved that he could make well-crafted, singer-songwriter hits and was tired of all the Carole King comparisons (as fate would have it, he entered the Hall of Fame class of 2021 with none other than Carole King). Been there, done that, but could he make a Synthesizer tribute to Peter Pan with some Philly Soul on mescaline? Actually, yes.

Playing one side or the other of A Wizard each night means that depending on which night you catch the show you’re either getting the more synth, hard rock-meets psychedelic pop of side one (what we got), or side two, which features a fantastic Philly Soul-doo-wop medley, a la Frank Zappa’s Cruising with Reuben and the Jets, (which they get tomorrow).

The Belasco is a beautiful venue just a couple doors down from the Mayan, another Live Nation joint built in Spanish Renaissance style at the same time by the same architect. The walls and ceilings are ornate and plush, and it’s got a capacity of about 1500, so the setting was both intimate and inviting. The show opened up with a little fanfare. Literally. With “How About a Little Fanfare” and “I Think You Know,” the opening two tracks from 1974’s self-titled Todd, his fifth album, and the one that came after A Wizard. While the setlist was eclectic, it was not all over the place as Todd performed several songs from several albums, which by no means covered or even tried to represent his catalog. Aside from the opening numbers from Todd, he went into a couple Nazz songs (“Open My Eyes” and “Hello it’s Me”) then tracks from about ten LP’s from his discography, including “Everybody” from his most recent, Global. 

Highlights for me was a blistering performance of “Black Maria” (from Something/Anything) and the cuts from 1975’s Initiation, which was revived in 2019 but laid dormant for several decades if not more. Absent from the setlist were any from his side band, Utopia, although his trusted friends from Utopia (plus one, Bobby Strickland on sax and keys) kicked some serious ass tonight. We’re talking about the one and only Kasim Sulton (bass), Prairie Prince (on drums, who Todd also produced when Prince was with The Tubes. They were also bandmates along with Sulton in The New Cars), Jesse Gress (incredibly tasty and shredadelic on guitar), and Gil Assayas (the youngest of the gang, who hails from Israel and is a wunderkind on synth).

The tour could have been called “An Evening with Todd Rundgren” as instead of stage show banter, Todd was a raconteur, telling us the stories behind the music, sometimes through song and visuals as he took us through his journey as a prodigy solo artist, prolific producer for hire, and other career highlights. But for me, perhaps the music performance was a reminder that he truly is a sonic wizard, it was his performance and his abundance of costume changes (maybe ten or so!) and his committed theatricality that leaves no doubt, that he is also a star. This is a man who was right there with classic Peter Gabriel, David Bowie, Elton John, and Alice Cooper, and he’s still doing it today! Still putting on a larger-than-life show (with the intimacy of cabaret/vaudeville) that could project to the nosebleeds at the Staples for a theater size crowd at the Belasco. It reminded you that not only is he a bonafide (should have been in first round) Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, but that Todd Rundgren is a living legend, and anyone is lucky to catch him, and should make a point to catch him, while he’s still out there doing it at this level.

Set 1:

How About a Little Fanfare?

I Think You Know

Open My Eyes

Hello Its Me

We Gotta Get You a Woman

I Saw the Light.

It Wouldn't Have Made Any Difference

Black Maria

An Elpee’s Wirth of Toons

Too Far Gone

A Dream Goes on Forever

The Death of Rock and Roll

Can We Still Be Friends

Real Man

Love of the Common Man

Compassion

Couldn’t I Just Tell You

Fair Warning

Set 2:

International Feel

Never Never Land

Tic Tic Tic It Wears Off

You Need Your Head

Rock and Roll Pussy

Dogfight Giggle

You Don't Have to Camp Around

Flamingo

Zen Archer

Just Another Onionhead / Dada Dali

When the Shit Hits the Fan / Sunset Blvd.

Le Feel Internacionale

Encore:

Everybody

Music Connection: Soul Station painstakingly and authentically approaches these wonderful songs with a big band. It reminds me of a time when handclaps and cowbells weren’t just pads on a drum machine, not that there’s anything wrong with drum machines.

Courtesy of UMe

Paul Stanley: There really is some brilliant production and songwriting going on currently, it’s just a different animal than a live band, and particularly a 17-piece band. This music was unmistakably made by human beings. Flesh and blood. The fact is that this music has become relegated to being samples in rap tunes, and that’s okay, but we deserve and we should hear these songs in their entirety because they’re awesome, they’re timeless, they’re brilliant. They’re as good today as ever. Back in the day where this music originated nobody was going for perfection, they were going for passion. It wasn’t a matter of every note being perfect, it was a matter of how it felt. And that’s been replaced by a lot of people looking at computers rather than listening to see if it feels good. So, we wanted to go back to that without doing a paint by numbers project, without doing an impersonation or mimicry or karaoke. We wanted to impart our own personality on it but that doesn’t mean changing the character of what it is, it means respecting it and boosting the vitality. You know, the bloodlines of everybody in this band has been with a lot of the greats, and we weren’t trying to reinvent the wheel, maybe we wanted to polish it up some.

MC: You more than polished it up, you’ve added new songs to the soul canon that are hard to distinguish from the classics. Can you talk about how you approached making new old-school style songs?

Stanley: Most people have used the word seamless and that’s great because I didn’t want new and improved, I just wanted new. It doesn’t get any better than it was, so I just wanted more coming off the same tree as those other songs. I pretty much have a pretty good handle on what makes those songs tick, and I wasn’t trying to put on a different hat and say “let me write in this style,” it was more that I was immersed in it. I was in the studio, we were doing live shows, we were hanging out and socializing, so it wasn’t changing anything, it was just me going, “I’ll write some songs for Soul Station.” There were no second thoughts on my part on what they should be as far as structure, they just wrote themselves.

MC: What do you tell soul/R&B fans surprised to hear soul from a rocker, and Kiss fans who may be surprised that their Starchild has gone soul man?

Stanley: There’s two kinds of music, and that’s good and bad. I think that people do themselves a disservice when they might say, “I only listen to” and then you fill in the blank with whatever kind of music. It’s kind of like saying. “I only eat pizza.” It’s so limiting, forget about nourishment. The first music I heard was classical music, then Italian opera, then bluegrass and R&B, and the music that preceded Motown and Philly Soul. I love Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and as a kid I saw Otis Redding and Solomon Burke. So, all this music is really part of the foundation of what I do and where I wound up, so, for me it’s not strange at all. But I can understand somebody who has only been exposed to the majority of what I do in public. I‘ve been singing these songs since they came out. I’ve been singing Smokey Robinson since Smokey was with the Miracles. It’s part of my wheelhouse, it’s my passion, it’s not a lark, and it’s not a vanity project, it’s a passion project

MC: Some soul/R&B fans and Kiss fans alike may not know how much soul went into some of those Kiss songs. For example, you told veteran Kiss-scribe, Ken Sharp, that your rap on “100,000 Years” was influenced by Stevie Wonder. Can you tell us some more?

Stanley: I think the idea of listening to different kinds of music is key, and it finds its way into music that you write. A song like “Shout It Out Loud” is so much the Four Tops, it’s just not arranged like that. The idea of the call and response of the lead vocal, and the backgrounds on the verses is “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch).” [Chuckles] It’s classic Four Tops. Obviously, or not so obviously, the melody in the chorus of “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” is not far off from “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” again by Four Tops. There’s a song on Unmasked called “What Makes the World Go Round.” Although it’s not at all arranged or played in that form, but The Spinners could do that song. I think what makes music interesting is what you bring to it from outside of what you wind up sounding like, whether it’s Led Zeppelin or the Beatles, they were proud of and explored their influences.

MC: You reveal the soul influences on some Kiss songs, wouldn’t it be cool to hear soul artists do their versions of Kiss songs, the way Lenny Kravitz and Stevie Wonder did “Deuce” on the Kiss My Ass tribute record?

Stanley: Yeah, well, I don’t go knocking on doors to peddle songs, but if there is something that they like, well god bless them.

MC: Where did you write the new songs?

Stanley: I wrote them at home. Then Alex Alessandroni (who is just brilliant, and kind of the glue for this whole project; he was musical director for Whitney Houston, Natalie Cole, Cher, Christina Aguilera, and on and on), would come over and I would sing him the horn parts and then I would sing him the string parts and he would transcribe everything.

MC: Where did you record Soul Station?

Stanley: There is a great studio in the Valley, which is as old school and vibey as you could ever want, it is called Dave’s Room, and it is just a gem. I would say we did 98% of it there, and it just felt like home. It was originally owned by Freddie Piro. Back then it was called Mama Jo's, taken over by Dave Bianco who did {Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, Lucinda Williams, Alan Parsons, Ambrosia among others were recorded there}. When he passed away it was taken over by David Spreng & Paul Fig, who retains everything that made it what it was. It’s just an amazing room to record in. I want my buddy there to do great, but just want to make sure I can always get time there.

MC: The band is top-shelf, having played for the biggest names in the biz. And there’s a more familiar face on drums, Kiss bandmate Eric Singer. Was the shorthand that you share or comfort level that you have that were factors in having him join?

Stanley: From the day that I thought about putting this together, I hoped that Eric would want to be a part of it because he is just a consummate drummer and musician, and grew up playing in big bands with his dad. I just knew that he would be the first choice, because the idea of taking a “rock drummer” and putting him into this kind of music would be a disaster. Eric is so much more. It’s not about comfort level, because that would lead to complacency, but that’s not the case with him. No, the comfort with Eric comes from knowing just how good he is and what he’s capable of doing.

MC: Going back to the Casablanca Records days, you were on the same label as a #1 charting R&B supergroup with George Clinton, Bootsy Collins and Parliament Funkadelic. They also had a huge show, a “Starchild” character, and also wore costumes by Larry LeGaspi. Did you bump into them back then? What was your take on them?

Stanley: Larry LeGaspi did all of Labelle’s clothes, too. I thought [P-Funk] were terrific. From Parliament becoming Parliament-Funkadelic? That was awesome. Actually, in one of their early videos, Clinton is wearing Gene’s boots. [this can be seen in the TV commercial for Parliament’s 1974 album Up for the Downstroke].

MC: And Rick James was heavily influenced by P-Funk and Kiss. He wore similar stage clothes, poses with Gene’s axe bass on one of the album covers, and aren’t there more connections?

Stanley: I would say that is on record, and happily so from Rick James, that he was totally inspired by what we were doing. We were staying at the same hotel near Washington, D.C. and we invited him to the show, which is when he wrote a song called “Love Gun” and basically came up with his whole look, and that’s coming from him. I’m certainly proud of that. In its finest form, when politics and everything is put aside, music crosses all boundaries.

MC: That reminds me of how Kiss crossed over with a disco hit, “I Was Made for Lovin’ You,” but it’s ironic that the rock band that went disco was also, as your friend Nile Rogers has talked about, a huge influence on Chic, one of the greatest disco acts. Who would have thought?

Stanley: I would think it because it works both ways. And because Kiss as a band and I individually owe so much to music without any color lines. So, it doesn’t surprise me, it may surprise someone else, but if you are a musician and if you are in the music, you clearly understand that music has no color.

MC: Can you clear up a story about “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” and your other label-mate, Donna Summer producer/solo artist, Giorgio Moroder? The story goes that there were talks about him producing a Kiss record [on 1979’s Dynasty, which featured the song]. Gene told us that after it didn’t work out Giorgio did “Call Me” with Blondie. He hummed me both melodies, and I never realized how similar they were. But when we featured Giorgo a few years ago he told us that he had no recollection whatsoever of the similarity or that he was ever slated to work with Kiss. What say you?

Stanley: [chuckles] One of the beauties of Gene and I is that we’ve been on the same journey and sometimes we may have been looking out different windows, but Giorgio definitely was asked to produce one of our albums, and I do remember, absolutely, that Giorgio called us through our manager Bill Aucoin and had us clear “Call Me” because he was aware that it was basically “I Was Made for Lovin’ You.” And we really had no problem with it and gave him our blessing.

MC: Congrats on getting your second COVID vaccination shot. This shouldn’t be a political issue, but you haven’t backed down from fans who give the old “I don’t want my rock star getting all political” complaint.

Stanley: Well, all I can say about that is that it’s not a surprise that the people who want you to be quiet are the ones who don’t agree. It’s just as a citizen and as a human being my right is to voice my opinion as much as it is anyone else’s. Just take it for what it is. It’s one opinion. Clearly everybody doesn’t agree. I would hope that good sense prevails and that people realize that even if there is some doubt about it the possibility of creating safer environment for everyone is worth taking that chance.

MC: Everyone’s had to adjust their ways of doing business to get through the pandemic. There’s been drive-thru experiences, drive-in experiences, virtual experiences. Do you think some adjustments to the pandemic may become permanent fixtures to the entertainment industry going forward?

Stanley: No. I think bigger than that, hopefully people during the pandemic realize how much we all need each other and how important we are to each other’s well-being and our security. It’s a sobering lesson but perhaps the silver lining is that it can bring us all closer.

MC: Lastly, what advice do you have for the new artist today. Your son Evan started his career before COVID-19 but I wonder about the kind of lessons you imparted to him about making it?

Stanley: It’s simple. If you’re not compelled to do this, if it’s not something that you have to do because it’s your calling? Then don’t do it. The person who is undeterred is the person who must do this because they can’t imagine not doing it. If somebody has doubts about whether they should do it, then they shouldn’t, because the chances of succeeding and the chances of it being financially rewarding are so slim that it almost seems an irrational choice. But it shouldn’t be a choice it, should be something that you have no choice, it’s something that you must do.

Contact Kelsey Lewis Full Coverage Communications: press@fullcoveragecommunications.com

paulstanley.com

Haim’s second album, Something to Tell You, was by no means a sophomore slump. It was a charting success, the songs were catchy and superbly crafted, but while it moved the ball forward from their debut, it didn’t move their needle. Personally, I think it warms up with repeated listening, but one critic called it hermetically sealed, and fan Tim White complained in the comment section of AllMusicGuide.com that it was “way too slick.” He optimistically added, “Hopefully a maverick streak can prevail on album 3.”

Well, Tim, your wish came true!  Women in Music Part III (Columbia Records) is by far Haim’s best record. No surprise, it has made many year-end Top-10 lists. It’s the band’s Exile on Main St. (or Exile in Guyville to turn the phrase in a girl power direction a la Liz Phair). The debut may have formerly introduced their sound, but this baby is their wild child, it can’t be stifled and you can’t put a bow on it. There’s an impressive, relaxed confidence, moments of dark, deep introspection and others with thrilling reckless abandonment. The lead single, “Summer Girl,” is as if Lou Reed (who they co-credit for the inspiration) was an Angeleno with Annie Lennox guesting on a Sheryl Crow record. “Los Angeles” is classic Trojan Records but straight outta Silver Lake.

And then there’s “Man from the Magazine,” an ode to Joni Mitchell, which reminds you that WIMPIII may have a tongue-in-cheek acronym (like “wimpy”), but it tackles serious issues like the misogyny they constantly battle in their workplace, which happens to be showbiz. Case in point, that well publicized time in 2018 when they fired their booking agent for paying them 10 times less than a male artist they shared a festival bill with. This album is sweet revenge for all of it, the only downside is (for some reason) rock radio still has an unexplainable blind spot for Haim. Is it because they are too genre-fluid or because they are women?

We caught up with Danielle and Este on the phone, and later with their youngest sister Alana “Baby Haim” who wrapped her role on Paul Thomas Anderson’s upcoming San Fernando Valley opus. Their relationship with PTA as collaborator and muse is a story in itself; Godard and the Stones could only wish to have such a prolific relationship; he’s made a documentary on the band, directed almost all their music videos and shot their latest album cover as well. He’s the Nicolas Cage to their ultimate Valley Girls, a match made in heaven.

Haim may not be getting their deserved rock radio play, but they get the last laugh, because as we celebrate the GRAMMY edition of the magazine (and if you are one of the elites to be reading this magazine in a $10,000 swag bag, you’ll by now know) our Valley Girls, our Cover girls, have been nominated for the 2021 GRAMMY’s for Best Album and Best Rock Performance.

Music Connection: Congratulations on the Grammy nomination, and good luck. How does it feel so far?

Este: It feels great! Very unexpected.

MC: It’s well deserved. On this third record you’ve outdone yourself. There’s a more relaxed confidence, do you agree?

Danielle: Definitely. With our first and second albums we were kind of on the same wavelength. With our first album, we had from 2007 to 2012 just writing songs, trying them out at local venues, opening up for friends, just really grinding them out and coming upon what we thought were our best 11 songs at that time. We didn’t have any songs left over, but our second album was definitely a continuation of what we were trying to do with our first album.

With our new album we were all pretty burnt out from touring for the last like eight years, and I think we had the idea of being looser, and being more live exciting. And the process that really started that was “Summer Girl.” It was all these things coming together, that roomy drum sound, and then just the process in general of making it and putting it out. That really kind of informed the rest of the album.

The idea of just being like, “We just did this. Let’s put it out” is kind of the vibe of the album. And I think in doing that we really kind of touched on something cool, and something that we hadn’t really sounded like before. Does that make sense?

MC: Absolutely. That’s why I say this is your Exile on Main St. The Stones established their sound and their hits on the early records, but on Exile they really got into a very authentic, loose, amazing groove.

Danielle: That was a lesson for us, because when we were coming out with our first album, it was such a big deal to us that we were making even our first album on a label, we really used a microscope, and we went in there and made sure that everything, to our ears, was exactly the way we wanted it, just because it meant so much to us, and we had been working so hard, and we really wanted to make sure what we were putting out there represented. But on this album, I think for sure, we let our Haim hair down.

MC: The title of the record itself suggests that you’ve been dealing with a lot of heavy things in the industry. But the record is even more raw, personal, emotional and moving at times, especially on songs like “Hallelujah” [an almost Dixie Chicks-esqe folk-country song]. Would you say there was a collective catharsis going on?

Danielle: I think during our second album there were a lot of trials and tribulations just having to do with us being burnt out of stuff within the business that we’ve been open about. Just being a woman in music can get difficult. Thank god we have each other, because I don’t know what it would be like to be a solo artist, because it can get really hard trying to understand the business side of things.

Este: Navigating the business in general is a constant battle, full of forks in the road, and self-doubt. All the things that go along with being an artist. I think a lot of the songs were definitely cathartic to write. We all decided that therapy was integral to our well-being, so we started unpacking everything that was happening in our lives. There were so many magical things that we have and that we‘re so blessed and so thankful for, but we talked about how post-tour depression is a real thing.

After our second record and touring our second record, I think at first all three of us were going through it separately, silently. I didn’t want to bother Danielle and Alana with this. Danielle didn’t want to bother me or Alana with it, but at some point, all three of us were like, “Are we okay? Like, what’s going on?” And I think that kind of opened the floodgates. We got our journals out and our diaries and we recognized that all three of us were going through different levels of depression. Once the floodgates were open it was kind of like we were off to the races.

The best part about music, for me at least, I always look at music as the thing that makes you feel less alone. And that you’re not on an island by yourself looking around like “I’m the only person who feels this way.” And so that’s part of what we were doing. Because we were feeling so isolated and alone in our feelings, we wanted to make something that didn’t make people feel so alone. The way that we try to craft lyrics is to be really truthful and honest and open, because we don’t know how to write any other way, And I think that also comes from listening to a healthy heaping of Joni Mitchell as kids.

MC: “Man from the Magazine” is so Joni Mitchell. You wear your influences on your sleeves, but does it get annoying when people project all these classic artists names on you?

Danielle: No! If anything, it’s intimidating. We’re talking about fucking Joni Mitchell, man, and I bow at the temple of Joni Mitchell. To me she is the rubric for songwriting. To hear our band’s name and her in the same sentence feels surreal, I’ll be completely honest. Because we’re still students. I still go back and listen to Blue at least once a week.

Este: Especially with Joni, it’s humbling to hear, that people reference such incredible, amazing musicians with us? Because we’re still three girls from the Valley sitting in front of our stereo listening to K-EARTH 101, KIIS FM. That we’re getting comparisons to those people, who we look up to still to this day, is so surreal that the 14-year-old Este Haim is truly not well when they say things like that!

MC: Do you think that when a legend like Stevie Nicks anoints you it’s because she feels the rare authenticity in your vintage vibes?

Este: Back in the day 101.3 was the college rock station at the time, and we would just put each song under a microscope and really try to understand what made them work and made them special. “What was the mixing like on this?” I remember the first time we really listened to “Bohemian Rhapsody” on headphones as kids, because it was on the Wayne’s World soundtrack. And even as a 5-year-old, recognizing that there was panning going on, I was like, “that’s really cool!” There are different ways to make the person experience the music.

Danielle: We’re just such music fans. At the heart of it, we’re just music fans and we love all types of music. We’re just students of Stevie Nicks. She was our teacher when we would just sit around and listen to her music and study it and learn it. And we had a family band with our parents, so it’s just where we come from and who we are.

MC: You still demo in GarageBand?

Danielle: GarageBand was the best tool for us as songwriters. The fact that you can make something all day in the program and then listen to it in your car right after is still mind blowing to us. We write to drums mostly, so it’s such a great tool. I think we start with drums really, we start to formulate what our sonic landscape is going to be when we think about drums, because our dad’s a drummer.

MC: Where are you laying down the tracks these days?

Danielle: Vox Studio is where we did a lot of basic tracking. What’s cool about that studio is that it’s filled with vintage gear and it’s my favorite-sounding room. All linoleum, no warm wood in sight. Not ‘70s sounding, but very live sounding. I think it was built in the ‘40s for jazz sessions. It’s very special and we got some great roomy drums sounds.

MC: The first album was mostly you three and a couple of bandmates/collaborators, but since then you have assembled your own Wrecking Crew of sorts.

Alana: We’re very lucky to be friends with some of the best musicians who are truly unique. Cass McCombs plays guitar like no one else, so it was really an honor for him to play on “The Steps.” 

MC: You’ve been headlining for years now, but what are some lessons you learned as an opening act that you can pass on to bands opening for you?

Danielle: We’ve opened for everyone [laughs]. We still have opener mentality. We always just play loud and rough and play up to the crowd as much as we can, as if we’re the opener trying to get attention from the guy ordering drinks at the bar in the back. I think that’s why we’re so aggressive on stage. It was the best experience for us. It especially got us ready for festivals. 

MC: Danielle might be the lead vocalist, but your band is unique in the way you trade vocals, almost finishing each other’s sentences within the song. Is that a “sister thing?”

Este: Not only in song, but in real life. There’s this weird sister telepathy that we possess. I can see with my eyes, I can feel it, when Danielle or Alana are uncomfortable or they’re feeling like they’re embarrassed or whatever. Maybe it’s the older sister in me, but I know when to swoop in and when not to swoop in to help.

MC: Can you tell us how the band’s been dealing with COVID?

Alana: I think we just try not to get overwhelmed! We’re taking it day by day.

MC: There was the “Deli Tour” [that included an appearance at Canter’s Delicatessen] that was interrupted by the pandemic, but there’s been other ways that you interacted with your fans through social media, like cooking classes [they made potato latkes with their mom] and some other fun things, right?

Este: We really wanted to do the Deli Tour, to be out there with the people who like our music, to share it with them and experience it with them, because the dialectical relationship we have with our audience is really magical. Feeding off an audience and giving energy and receiving energy is the main reason why we really love performing live.

The Deli Tour is going to happen once everything is safe, because the two dates that we got to do were so much fun. But once COVID hit and everyone went into quarantine we kind of had to get creative, and we would do these Zoom dance classes. And when we had the seven-year anniversary of Days Are Gone, I heard through the grapevine that there was going to be a group listening, like a bunch of fans had gotten together, and I still have the outfit that I wore on the cover, so I found the Zoom link and I jumped on. Which was really fun and really cool.

MC: Danielle, tell us about your YouTube guitar tutorial for your song, “FUBT.”

Danielle: It was important to me, you know? I was like “what’s the easiest way for everyone to do this? So I put up a GarageBand sound, cuz I feel like most people can have GarageBand on their computer or their iPad, and they can plug their guitars and have a pretty good-sounding amp. It was fun to show people the “Fucked Up But True” guitar solo. I really wanted to show and encourage people to pick up their guitars and learn it, because it’s not that difficult but there’s some cool things like sustain and vibrato and stuff that I feel really adds to the solo. I was like, “Hey, show me if you guys know it,” and I got hundreds of messages back with a lot of girls showing how they did it, which was so insane to me! We’re still figuring out how to really utilize social media. I need to get into the TikTok thing more.

MC: Este, congrats on the Fender campaign. Can you talk about that?

Este: I have always been a Fender girl; my first bass was a Fender Precision that my dad found in the Recycler for like 80 bucks. I was super-appreciative that he got it for me, and I’ve been a Fender fan ever since. I mean, I’ve gone off the beaten path when I got into [The Band’s] Rick Danko, but I realized that I would have to learn how to play with a pick and that wasn’t really my journey, so I went back to playing my Precision. I feel really lucky that they wanted me to be to be a part of it, and again, if you would have told this 16-year-old that that she would be in a Fender campaign she would have burst into tears. I knew how much I loved playing bass and how much fun it was and how much joy that that it brought me, but to be recognized by the company of the instrument that I’ve been playing for so long is overwhelming, truly. And so yeah, to be a part of it was unreal. I don’t even think it hit me until they interviewed me.

MC: You’ve expressed frustration at not being played by rock radio stations. “Forever” [from Haim’s debut] was a pop radio hit. Are you too eclectic for them? What do you think it is?

Danielle: We don’t know why rock radio won’t play us! But we don’t care anymore. They should play more women, though.

MC: That said, I still hear you every time I go to Ralph’s supermarket, or places like Marshall’s. It’s like you’re ubiquitous on the streaming services. How does it feel when you hear your music coming from the overhead speakers of a store?

Alana: Marshall’s is where we grew up. Still love it. It’s totally crazy when we hear our music out in the wild!

MC: Haim has appeared on several soundtracks now, the most recent being The Croods: A New Age. As eclectic as you are, it was still surprising to hear you go into “Welcome to the Jungle” territory.

Danielle: It’s so fun. It was pitched to us like “Hey do you want to work with Mark Mothersbaugh on this song, and we were like, no brainer. I still watch [Devo’s] SNL performance probably once a week. Talk about a band that changed the course of music. I’m like fully obsessed with Devo. You know, they wanted something like Guns N’ Roses and we never thought about doing something like that, but instead of being like “That’s not our thing,” I think we just kind of went fully into it. We were just like, “You know what? We’ve never done that and it could be fun.” Croods is such a fun movie and Ariel [Rechsthaid] helped produce it and he’s the biggest Guns N’ Roses fan. And it all came together pretty quickly.

MC: COVID aside, what’s your take on the state of rock bands in this industry in 2020?

Danielle: We feel so fortunate and we feel so lucky that we even get to do this, because we know how fucking crazy and difficult it is to navigate. I remember in 2012 everyone was like “Band’s don’t exist. Rock music’s dead.” I mean that was kind of the thing that we got the most back then. NME loved saying “ROCK IS BACK NOW WITH HAIM,” but how many “ROCK IS BACK” issues did they put out without it actually being real? I feel like EDM was at its height and people didn’t understand where guitars fit in the music industry.
 

What’s really cool about right now is that we’re seeing a lot of girls with guitars, we’re seeing a lot of guitars in bands, we’re hearing more live instruments, I think. That’s really cool for us. We love to see it and we love to be a part of that community. I think that’s what’s really exciting about this time.

Este: I echo everything Danielle is saying. That’s definitely been nice to hear. When we were playing shows before COVID, it made me really happy to meet people who said, “Man, I just started playing guitar,” “I just started playing bass,” or “You know, I’m learning how to record live instruments.” I think that really made us happy. And it still makes me happy.

Photos by Reto Schmid 

Contact Benny Tarantini, BT PR, Benny@btpr.biz, 646-405-7010

The Philly soul boy started his career fronting America’s psychedelic garage rock answer to The Beatles and other British Invasion bands, The Who, The Yardbirds, and The Move. Their single “Open My Eyes” is considered Nuggets gold, but was the B-side of that single, “Hello It’s Me,” that became AM gold when re-recorded for his ambitious, double-album, Something/Anything? That landmark release, aside from providing power-pop disciples one of their sonic commandments in “Couldn’t I Just Tell You,” proved that he was capable of pulling a Beatles White Album, showcasing a perfect balance between Brill Building-caliber hits and Stockhausen/Zappa-esque sound-collage. It also delivered avant garde experiments that had him breaking the fourth wall like Bugs Bunny to the audience (going meta, if you will) with reflexive commentary on how he not only employs record making techniques (such as “punching in” and “white noise”) but describes them while challenging the listener to notice them as if they were Easter eggs in a video game.

Photo by Richard Kerris.

It was this command of songcraft and studio wizardry that would earn Rundgren the reputation as the highest-paid producer at one point, having helmed and/or contributed to albums by Grand Funk Railroad, New York Dolls, Badfinger, Meatloaf, Patti Smith, Daryl Hall & John Oates, Cheap Trick, The Psychedelic Furs, and we’ve hardly scratched the surface of his staggering and illustrious resume. But even while on the precipice of stardom, he went out of his way to sabotage it by choosing art over commerce. Shortly after refusing to release more singles and halting the hype machine behind Something/Anything?, Rundgren took listeners to Never Neverland with a magical, mysterious, mind-blowing, mescaline-fueled adventure into his vision of Utopia, the pseudo-concept album A Wizard, A True Star. Reaching for the stars instead of stardom, he quickly approached the outer limits of the recording medium, cramming songs and sound to the very edge of the vinyl LP. Eschewing singles, the record was largely dismissed, though they “got it” in England where the NME’s Nick Kent praised it.

To be fair, Stateside, Patti Smith wrote a prescient review for Creem musing that “Todd Rundgren is preparing us for a generation of frenzied children who will dream of animation.” The quote can give you the chills, when you think of how Rundgren would not only go on to pitch his graphics software to the founders of Pixar and ILM, but also how as the years passed a veritable cult of musicians from Prince to Trent Reznor to Tame Impala and others have incorporated A Wizard’s lessons or copped to its influence. More to Patti’s point, new generations of artists, from Gen X to Gen Z (multiple genres and several electronic subgenres alone, from Daft Punk to Com Truise), have not only attested to the record’s legacy but have given it a whole new life through their music.

Which is to say that as much as these plague times call for a nostalgic diversion, and we do indulge to be sure, this interview isn’t just flashback with a legend, it’s a testament to how one artist couldn’t be pinned down to one style or genre of music and ended up putting his imprint on a myriad of them, becoming one of the most prolific around. But if you want to about his impact on rock and pop, you’ll only scratch your head wondering why he’s not already in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This interview, however, isn’t meant to only appeal to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-geared geezers, Todd knows, he’s made plenty of music (still does) to drive this fan base crazy; having always had a penchant for the cutting edge and no interest whatsoever in just being a “classic” rocker, he’s tried his hands at pop, punk, new age, lounge, even cyber- techno-grunge-rap––It was the 90s, kids, and for No World Order, he beat Prince to the name-change punch (he also played a symbol guitar before the Purple One) going by TR-i, the “i” for interactive, since it was the first interactive music release on a Phillips CD-i.

And Rundgren hasn’t confined himself to creating music: he’s also a video artist, music video producer, software developer, author, professor and philanthropist, to name a few of his side-gigs. And yes, while this tour and this interview does look back at his now celebrated 1973 album (and other career highlights), Rundgren isn’t content to just collect royalty checks from the artists who have sampled him (like Frank Ocean, Neon Indian, J Dilla, Fetty Wap, Slum Village, Charlie XCX, Simian Mobile Disco, and about 10 more pages of examples on whosampled.com), he’s out there collaborating with them or covering them (like Post Malone, for instance). And when he’s not fronting his own bands, he still finds time to play in other people’s bands, such as The New Cars (which was actually an amalgam of The Cars and Utopia), Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band, and his recent participation in A Tribute to The Beatles’ White Album, with Mickey Dolenz, Christopher Cross, and more. And now, without further delay, here’s our spirited chat with the wizard and true star.

Music Connection: What can you tell us about the new tour?

Todd Rundgren: In many ways it’s similar to the tour I did a year ago last May. The only difference is on this particular tour instead of doing a random selection of material for the second set we will be doing either side A or side B of A Wizard, A True Star. It’s going to be a bit more work than last time. The last time I came up with a list of maybe ten or eleven tunes and A Wizard, A True Star. I did twelve costume changes in an hour. Since we’re only doing one side each night, but I’ll still average out to about a half a dozen costume changes during the course of it.

MC: Twelve costume changes, that’s a lot of showmanship.

Rundgren: There used to be an expectation of showmanship, and I’m going back to the Beatles, even. If you were Frank Sinatra, at least you wore a suit. When the Beatles first came out, of course, they were all wearing tailored suits and stuff like that. They evolved and their wardrobe changed over the years, from Indian clothes to Nehru jackets, that kind of piqued everyone’s interest in what could be done in terms of other ways to dress. But it wasn’t street clothes. When grunge became a popular format, it was considered arty to wear anything but the normal street clothes, like baggy shorts and a lumberjack shirt. I can see how that worked, but in the end it sort of annoyed me that it was essentially fashionable to make no effort. And there’s always the sort of middle thing, like Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips, where he gets inside a big ball and rolls around. Essentially, they put on a big spectacle, which is unpredictable. It’s just like craziness for the sake of craziness and that’s, to me, maybe some sort of ideal. Because it’s not slick in the way a Vegas show is and it isn’t blasé like walking on in your street clothes is, it’s kind of spectacle but with spontaneity and fun to it.

MC: About the “spectacle,” in the 70s Utopia had productions that rivaled ELP, ELO, Earth Wind & Fire, and P-Funk.

Rundgren: You’ve seen the videos of the Beatles (again we use them as a reference point of almost everything) playing in Washington, DC, when they didn’t even have roadies. They had to rotate the drum kit around themselves. And all they had was a couple of amps and people screaming. No fancy lighting, no special effects, nothing like that.

Then as time went on, and live performance became so much larger and more popular, to the point where you are filling Masonic centers, basketball arenas, and eventually stadiums, you had to do something, because otherwise you’re just like this little tiny speck off in the distance. So, in order to engage a larger and larger crowd you started doing larger and larger sorts of effects. Utopia certainly went through that phase when we had a pyramid and a sphinx on stage. And that style of thing was a precursor to the hip-hop thing now, which is lots of special effects and dancers and essentially something like a Vegas show. Something very highly choreographed, exactly the same every night.

MC: Talking about Vegas, on that Ra Tour (1977) you scaled a pyramid that seemed as high as the Luxor, and the drum solo even featured waterworks that predated the fountain show at the Bellagio! We’re talking big!

Rundgren: It was the sheer sizes of the audiences as well. In rock it used to be that if you could fill a high school auditorium you knew you were a serious act. And nobody thought about it, until the hysterical sort of fame and demand for the Beatles that eventually led them to Shea Stadium. People didn’t think in those terms, people didn’t think they could even sell out such a venue, but that was because we didn’t know how popular that kind of music could become. And they were essentially going through the public address system, which [game announcers] would call the balls and strikes on. The Beatles realized that was no fun at all, so they quit playing. The senseless thing is that they missed the opportunity to be able to drown out the audiences so that they could hear themselves, and who knows? They might have gone back to playing live, and stayed together as a group, but unfortunately they broke up before technology evolved.

MC: How do you explain being part of this group of rock stars, such as Alice Cooper, David Bowie, and Peter Gabriel, who all put on a show and experimented with make-up and theatrics?

Rundgren: Perhaps the kids today are not as familiar with Cab Calloway, so to cite a more familiar example, the Beatles were known for shaking their hair and going “woo” in, “She Loves You.” George would do a little two-step, but that was it for the most part. I think the first time I became aware of showmanship in rock was seeing The Who live. It was their first performances in the United States, it was a Murray the K show that also included the premiere American performances of Cream. It was the first time you saw a band and said, “I don’t know who to look at.” Because everybody is a show onto themselves; Keith Moon is back there flailing away like an octopus, you’ve never seen anybody wail on the drums like that before, and mugging the audience, and clowning around with the rest of the band. Pete Townsend is windmilling away, jumping, and jamming his guitar into the amplifier. And Roger is swinging the microphone like twenty feet out and over the top of the audience, and you’re wondering whether he’s going to hit somebody, and he never does. And even John Entwistle is over there with his completely deadpan expression, while his fingers are flying a mile a minute! And the way they dressed, like turn of the century foppery. I’d never seen anyone put so much energy into a performance up until that point, and I thought “Wow! I want my band to be able to do that.” To be able to spellbind in that way, you don’t know who to look at. It was the first time I thought about the showmanship, the showbizzy aspects of the presentation.

Then later came the more theatrical aspects: I remember seeing Genesis for the first time, I think it was Avery Fisher Hall, the first dates they did in the US. Peter Gabriel had this little podium in the middle of the stage, and he would duck down behind it and come up as a different character. Then he’d duck down and come up again as a new character. And it wasn’t elaborate, but giving us a different character to each song influenced me, I guess. The idea that you get into character, you don’t just sing. It’s more like musical theater. And I really sort of appreciated that because growing up my dad was very much into the musical theater and we used to go to summer stock and see Kismet and The Music Man, and stuff like that, where you’re in character for the whole thing.

MC: I found Intersection, the 1972 short film you’re featured in, on YouTube, and it captures the time perfectly. It even has Wolfman Jack in make-up and costume that has him looking as if a future Gene Simmons joined the cast of Cats.

Rundgren: Well, that was one of the high points of my experience around that time. I moved to LA for the year that I recorded Something/Anything? The record made a big splash, and I had a song about Wolfman Jack on it and so I got to meet him, and that was great. And we became really good friends. I would visit him at his home where he had his studio, and I got to watch him actually do a couple of shows. Of course, it got sent down to a transmitter in Tijuana, it wasn’t broadcast from Bel-Air or where he lived. Then Brian Wilson heard the record and I was contacted by his people who told me he wanted to meet, so I met Brian at the height of his craziness. [Laughs] It’s all in my book. [Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations]

MC: You’ve been compared to Brian Wilson. Both of you described as musical geniuses, studio wizards, and Wall of Sound-man wunderkinds a la Phil Spector. Something/Anything? and A Wizard, A True Star are reminiscent of Pet Sounds and Smiley Smile or Smile [Rundgren covered “Good Vibrations” in 1976. He’d almost repay the favor in 1995, when his New World Order disc––the first interactive CD release––would inspire its producer, Don Was, to pitch Wilson the idea of releasing a three-disc interactive version of the ambitious, yet scrapped, Smile]. What’s your take on the similarities?

Rundgren: I imagine it had to do with a lot to do with the same things that were affecting Brian.

MC: You mean LSD?

Rundgren: [Chuckles]. Yeah. Maybe. Brian also had other psychological issues that fortunately I have not experienced. Apparently, the drugs exacerbated that, and the result was when I met Brian he had no attention span. First thing he said when I got to his house was, “I have the new Roy Wood single!” And he would put it on and play 15 seconds of it. Then he took it off, ran over to the piano and started tinkling out something, and then 20 seconds after that he was off doing another thing. Whatever the diagnosis, one symptom of it was a really short attention span. And I always had that issue. It was one of the reasons why I always did so poorly in school. But the realization that I had as a result of my mental experiments and stuff was that I was doing things according to a perceived formula. I was doing it the way I thought everybody did it, and likely the way everybody usually did do it.

You always write songs about relationships, and the form is verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, chorus, chorus. A lot of my influences up to that point were professional songwriters, like Carole King, and on Something/Anything? I wrote “I Saw the Light” in like 30-minutes flat. At the time, I hadn’t intended for Something/Anything? to be a double album, it’s just that once I started writing I fell into this formula and the songs started coming out. People were literally comparing me to Carole King, and I just didn’t want to be compared to other people. I said, “What’s the point of me doing something so familiar that it’s like duplicating someone else? I want to do something nobody else would or could do. It has to be unique to me somehow.” And that’s when I realized that there were all these other kinds of musical ideas floating around in my head and I hadn’t necessarily figured out how to express them, but I wasn’t going to worry about that, I was just going to start getting stuff out of my head.

I was about to start my next record, and that’s how the stream of consciousness-effect of A Wizard, A True Star came about. My attitude was, “If I don’t have a bridge for this song, then the hell with it I’ll just use what I have, and then I’ll just hop into another musical idea until I’ve exhausted that one.” And so, there were songs that were less than a minute and some went on for seven minutes, I just kind of threw out all of the formula aspects, the verse chorus verse chorus bullshit, and that became more of the character of how I would write after that. I would try and find something that other people were less likely to do and try and figure out a way that I could and try and express something that was not just a typical insincere “I love you, you broke my heart,” especially if I wasn’t in a relationship where I wasn’t getting my heart broken. That was part of my inspiration for all these songs was the one relationship that I had in high school. Here I was five years out of high school and I’m still writing about it.

MC: Daft Punk used Wizard’s “International Feel” for their 2006 film, Electroma. Do you remember that?

Photo by Rich Levine.

Rundgren: I do. I have a weird Daft Punk-related story: A couple of years ago, “Get Lucky” was the Number One song of the year, and I got invited to the Grammys by a Japanese satellite TV company. Ringo [Starr] was getting an honorary lifetime Grammy, and since I had been touring with him they wanted me to do some color commentary on the whole thing, especially the Ringo part. I was on site, and got to watch some of the live performances, then I got invited by Daft Punk to go to their afterparty, and that was also the evening that I realized what a terrible person Paul McCartney is. I had my suspicions before. I was there with my wife and youngest son, and after a while we realized that this is going to be one of those celebrity hangs and I don’t really fit in to that stuff very well, so I decided, okay, it’s time to leave.

Then I see one of the guys from Daft Punk, and he’s talking to Paul McCartney. Paul is facing me, the guy from Daft Punk has his back to me, and I just wanna go over and say goodbye and thank him for inviting us to the party, but there’s a security guard standing next to Paul off to the side, while he and the guy from Daft Punk were talking. I’m just waiting for them to take a break so I could say goodbye, and the security guy starts giving me a real hard time. He doesn’t’ know who I am. Paul knows who I am, because his wife [Linda] took pictures of me, and I saw his wife and him at the gallery show, plus I’ve also spent time with them; I’ve hung around with them at the Plaza Hotel one time for a couple of hours, and oddly he seemed like he had no sense of humor. Like he doesn’t understand irony or anything or sarcasm. But in any case, he just stood there watching the guy hassle me the whole time and did nothing, just did nothing. And after they were done with their conversation, I told the security guy, “I don’t want to talk to THAT guy [Paul], I know who that guy is, and I don’t want to talk to him.” And after they ended their conversation, I got to say goodbye to the Daft Punk guy. But I realized that night that Paul was going to let the guy kick me out, when he knew who I was. All I’m saying is, I’ve known this about him. It was just an interesting anecdote, I guess.

MC: It sure is. I bring up Daft Punk, because you are as influential to the electronic world as you are to the rock world. Something/Anything? and A Wizard, A True Star are seen as blueprints for auteur producers.

Rundgren: I do know that there is a connection with Daft Punk and also some younger artists. There’s a Norwegian DJ named Hans-Peter Lindstrøm [producer known for his space disco track “I Feel Space”] who asked me to do a remix for him a couple of years ago, and then a few years ago we did a whole collaborative project [Runddans, from 2015, recalls elements of Rundgren’s 1975, album Initiation] with another guy, Emil Nikolaisen, and it was a three-year project of us just sending stuff around to each other. When it came out, it created something of a stir because it was a big long sort of chunk of

music that is spread over four sides of a double LP, with no breaks, other than the sides.

I went into the studio with them and they had acquired a piece of equipment [and EMS Synthi Hi-Fli] that I had back when I was doing A Wizard, A True Star and the album after that. It was a thing you plugged the guitar into, and it was a pitch-to-voltage converter that made synth sounds come out. And they actually found one, and they said “We want you to reproduce the sounds you made on that record,” which I actually attempted to do. We recorded a couple of sessions: One session they told me all the things they wanted me to do, and a lot of it was things that I’ve done before, and the next session I told them what to do. I said “Here I want you to go out there and just play the piano, but I want you to play in key around this and then I’m going to double the speed up real fast.” And so we were just trading tricks and stuff and messing around and it tuned into a three-year international collaborative project.

It’s funny, I’ve also got something of a relationship with Tame Impala [who are obsessed with A Wizard] because they asked me to do a remix as well. And I’m trying to talk [band leader] Kevin Parker into doing a collab for my new record, if I could just get him to open up a little time.

MC: To what do you attribute all these electronic, pop, and hip-hop artists diving into your
old records and either emulating or directly sampling you?

Rundgren: I think a lot of it also is when you get to the point, kind of, where I got to, which is you realize you’re making the music that other people are making and you know a lot of it is sort of imitative and formulaic, and you want to do something different. So you go out looking for influences. And since you can’t look into the future you start looking into the past. And that’s the great thing about YouTube and the internet, all that stuff is archived somewhere in there, you just have to have the motivation to go out looking for it. I think a lot of these younger artists get to a crossroads for themselves and they say “I need new influences and I’m not getting it from my contemporaries, because everybody’s trying to do the same thing.” So they go back and look for unusual artifacts of the past to find new influences, and I think that’s the phenomenon, because I have experienced that myself.

MC: What did you find yourself going back and “rediscovering?”

Rundgren: When we transitioned from vinyl to CD, the Japanese really jumped on that whole thing, they would go back and find any obscure record they could possibly find and turn it into a limited run CD. There used to be a record store in Tokyo and it was essentially seven stories of CDs, and you would find music there that you wouldn’t find anywhere else in the world. I remember getting really interested not only in all the obscure records that you would never find in a record store anymore, but getting into what became known as bossa nova again, and that’s what inspired me to do the With a Twist record. I started buying all this cocktail music. All of Frank Sinatra’s records from the Capitol years, Esquivel, Martin Denny [the “Father of Exotica”], and Arthur Lyman. All of this exotica music and Space Age bachelor pad stuff.

Esquivel was really great because he would also do technological things that no one else would attempt. When he was in the midst of his recording career, stereo came about and he said “I’m going to make the most stereophonic records anyone has ever heard,” and instead of putting the orchestra all in one room and miking them up and trying to get separation, he put them in separate studios. I don’t know how he got them to sync-up, because he wouldn’t even have the musicians playing in the same room, but he would get the most ridiculous stereo separations. Some of his records, when you listen to them on headphones, are just mind-bending. And that’s what influenced me to take all my old material and do it in a bossa nova and exotica style for With a Twist.

MC: You’re also an inventor and software developer. What is the synergy between being an inventor and a musician?

Rundgren: I got involved in the computer community, as it were, in mid ‘80s. I was living in Woodstock and I taught myself how to program the computer. I was very much into video, and the first thing I did with my computer when I learned how to program was make a Paintbox program. I have seen one at a place called the New York Institute of Technology. The professors there were spearheading computer graphic development with people like Alby Ray Smith, who went on to found Pixar, and Ed Catmull, and names that went on to found ILM. All of these people went on to essentially develop the computer graphics industry that we know today.

I met all these people really early on, and after I finished making my own Paintbox program for the Apple II Plus I was out in California and I thought why don’t I show it to them to see if there’s any interest? It was one single-story building in Cupertino that took up a half a block. I was in the room full of their head engineers; Andy Hartsfield was from Philadelphia and knew who I was and knew I was a musician. I started my demo for him, and Steve Jobs came in and looked at it for a while, and he said, “We’ve got this software distribution program we're thinking of starting for third-party software developers called Special Delivery Software. And we’re going to come out with a graphics tablet of our own (essentially a big square thing with a pen and you draw on the surface of the pad and it comes up on the screen).” And so Apple distributed the program that I wrote. Unfortunately, their hardware device that it ran on failed its FCC emissions test and, essentially, they never sold a device that the software ran for. [chuckles]

That’s how I first got involved with computers. And I became something of a personality in Silicon Valley and started getting invited to hackers conferences and things like that. And through this I discovered that almost every computer programmer was either a music fan or played a musical instrument. And that a lot of them had bands of their own that they would do in their spare time when they weren’t computer programming. I had a band, and when I wasn’t playing with the band I would program for the computer, and they would program computers, and when they didn’t have to do that they would play in a band, so there’s something about that. There’s a connection. The mathematical mind drifts toward solving numerical problems and listening to music while writing programs is a way to draw on the same part of the brain in a way, over time. We learned a lot more about how the brain works and how music affects it.

MC: On the topic of how music affects the brain, maybe this is a good segue to talk about your passion as a philanthropist?

Rundgren: I started a foundation called the Spirit of Harmony. Essentially my fans goaded me into it, but I decided that the purpose of the foundation should be to bring a formal musical education back into elementary schools. When I was growing up, they actually had musical instrument programs. You could rent an instrument and then once a week someone would come to the school and give the kids lessons. But, over time, as funding has dried up for extracurricular programs, usually music programs were the first to go.

In doing the research while establishing the foundation, I learned of a professor at Northwestern University outside of Chicago named Nina Kraus, and she took it upon herself to start doing empirical research on the effect of music education on plastic minds––in other words, brains that are still developing. And she generated a lot of empirical evidence that musical training while the brain in still developing actually changes the way you process sounds. You hear sounds differently than other people do. And it’s something that comes naturally to musicians and possibly people who are into numbers and math and computer programming concepts.

When a normal person, let’s say a musically uneducated person, listens to a record of a band playing they hear the whole thing. It all comes at them at once. And they may be able to say, “That’s a drum” or “That’s a piano,” but they can’t pick out what the separate things are doing musically. What happens when you get formal musical education is that you learn how to focus on those individual components that go into the sound, and that essentially gives you the ability to process sound differently than the average person does in a beneficial way and in a permanent way and so that it will affect you for the rest of your life.

For instance, if you are in a crowded room full of people and you are trying to listen to one person in a room full of people who are all talking at once, the change in the way that you process sound enables you to process that person’s voice and separate it out from the background noise. There’s something that goes on in the brain that understands music and potentially the person that understands the mathematics underlining and it could be trained. You can learn to do that. For me, and probably for some other people (and some of them will go into music and some will go into mathematics), it’s already there. It’s already built-in. Because that was something that my parents noticed about me in the very beginning, I could pick out melodies by ear.

MC: This connection between music and math and science reminds me how Boston’s Tom Scholz went to MIT, Gary Numan is into aviation, and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter worked on ballistic missiles. . .

Rundgren: Now he’s CIA. Also, there’s Brian May, who is an astronomer.

MC: Your upcoming tour also has a technology angle, too––you’re going to let fans decide the setlist via an app?

Rundgren: We’ll play mostly two nights in each city, so obviously we’ll do one side one night and the other side the next night. But in some cities, we play three nights and there’s cities where we only play only night, so we are developing an app so that the audience can vote on which side they want to hear on that particular evening. And then it will also allow them to chat with each other about the question of what they what to hear or anything else they want to chat about and also be able to do some shopping or something like that for some limited-edition items. So it’ll be an app that works only within the confines of the gig, because we will be running the network that you have to connect to in order to vote or to chat or any of that stuff. Right now I’m developing the app, and we’ll get somebody to do the porting of it and ideally everyone will have enough lead-time so they can download the app.

MC: Can you talk about some of the great records you did as a producer and for Bearsville Records at Bearsville Studios near Woodstock, New York?

Rundgren: I did some recording in Bearsville Studios, but most of the acts I would do in my own studio, which was up in nearby Lake Hill, in a small barn on my property. One significant exception to that was Bat Out of Hell for Meatloaf. We did that in Bearsville Studios, and it was recorded all live.

MC: Sparks are a unique and eclectic band that you produced. Did you find a kinship with them or what did you see in them?

Rundgren: They were just different from what everyone else was doing, and if you go back and listen to that first record, it’s very quirky. [Chuckles] It’s just a very quirky record. The first Sparks album, which was actually Half Nelson, we recorded at I.D. Sound in LA, where I did my first three records and both Nazz records. But a happy postscript to that is that I’m doing another collab record and I’ve got a Sparks song on it. So there will be new Sparks featuring me.

MC: What about Steve Hillage, a name that might be a bit obscure to some? Hillage, you, and Utopia were really pushing the envelope of synthesizers, technology, proto-electronica/EDM, and new age concepts. And some members of Utopia appear on L, the 1976 Hillage album you produced.

Rundgren: Well, we did that up at the studio at my house. He actually slept in the studio, because there was a bed in the control room, and he rearranged all the furniture in the studio, because he was into this “the head of the bed had to face north” or something like that. So, he was moving the furniture around so the bed would face the right way. That made things a little less convenient in terms of working. But he had to record things on certain days, like when there was a full moon. It was a very mystical experience. In fact, I don’t think he’s that mystical anymore, but that was back when he was aligned with Hawkwind, Gong and other sorts of hippie musical collectives. The record was really successful and critically well received, and the funny thing is that Steve eventually evolved into an EDM producer.

MC: A personal favorite The Tubes’ Remote Control, 1979. There you not only produced but wrote. Can you talk about that bleed-over where you sometimes go from producer to co-artist?

Rundgren: My style as a producer was not to Svengali somebody into a sound that I had, you know? A lot of producers were more noteworthy for the sound they got. My style is generally to just provide what’s missing. If the band has great songs and lyrics and everything like that, fine, I’ll just worry about the performance, and keeping an ear on the performance and the sound. But if they’ve got issues with the material, like they don’t have enough of it, or they haven’t finished the words to it, and we’re already in the studio, then I would essentially step in and start writing and things like that. And the problem with that is more of my fingerprints would appear on the final product then were supposed to be there.

It’s really supposed to be about the act themselves and not about me. So it was actually after that record that I changed the way that I work and

said, “I have to stop writing for the artist,” and so instead of doing that, I always insisted that the artist demo all of the material that they intended on having on the record. And that I hear it first before we schedule time in the studio. So that essentially got me out of writing too much on behalf of the act that I was working on and therefore making a record sound like their own.

MC: You don’t hear a distinct Rundgren sound on the New York Dolls’ debut record you produced. It’s a masterpiece of proto-punk/glitter rock, and yet, it’s much maligned, with the band and critics saying that they only got it right on the second release. So, what happened there? [Todd would be vindicated as he was asked to produce their 2009 comeback album Cause I Said So]

Rundgren: You know, it’s only what you could make. That experience was like herding cats. You were just trying to catch moments when everyone was focused long enough to get through a whole take, because the studio was always like a circus. There was always groupies, people bringing drugs in. Rock critics saw the band as the saviors of old fashioned rock & roll, but it was more or less chaos all the time, and just trying to get a take where everyone was focused was the most difficult part about it.

What you’re hearing in terms of the record is fleeting moments, it wasn’t like we would do, like, eight takes of a song, we’d be lucky to get through a whole take. When they got to the second record they were very much influenced by the milieu that they grew up in and that’s why they wanted Shadow Morton to do the second record because he had done the Shangri-Las and they wanted the record to sound like the Shangri-Las, but apparently he was in the throes of some sort of addiction and they would often find him passed out on the console, so I’m not even sure how they finished the second record. And then after the second record, of course, they all started dropping like flies.

MC: You talked about trying to enlist Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker for a new collaboration, but I read an interview with you where you said something to the effect that you wouldn’t be making anymore records because of the state of the music business today. Did you change your mind?

Rundgren: By “records” I was referring to LPs. Listening habits have evolved past the long-form. It’s like going back to when most artists focused on singles and then compiled them into “albums.”

MC: The first time you graced the cover of Music Connection was in November ’85. Obviously so much changed in the industry since then, so what would tell a new artist today?

Rundgren: For a musician, things haven’t changed too much in 20 years: Make music on your laptop and distribute it on the net, and build up and audience that will show up live or pay for a stream. It’s hard to monetize the recordings themselves, unless you land a commercial, which is why you have to design your own shoes or smell.

Contact Paul Maloney, paul@panacea-ent.com

Cover photo by Hiroki Nishioka.

Part of a breed of over-emotional rappers (emo rap), just a couple of days before his Music Connection interview and following the death of his friend and collaborator Juice WRLD (who appears on Love Letter 4, and is the latest in a string of emo rap pharmaceutical deaths) Trippie Redd took to Instagram to implore followers of the genre to stay off the pills and the lean (aka purple drank aka sizzurp, basically promethazine or codeine, hard candy and soda).

Though Redd can be seen sipping out of a typical Styrofoam cup associated with lean in his recent video for “Love Me More,” he swears off all drugs, telling fans to stick to weed.

We caught up with him on the way to a movie set, and getting ready for his upcoming European tour.

Music Connection: Where are you and what are you doing right now?

Trippie Redd: I’m in LA, I live here, and I’m on my way to do a movie scene right now. It’s always been about being versatile with everything in my life, and I’m trying to accomplish everything I can while I’m alive and well.

MC: You are from Ohio, you made it out of Atlanta but now you live in Los Angeles. Did moving to Los Angeles influence your writing, with songs such as “Topanga” [from the last mixtape in the series, A Love Letter to You 3]?

Trippie Redd: With “Topanga” I was out here and I was riding through the hills before I got famous out here, and it just came up in my head out of nowhere. There’s a Charles Manson reference, which was what I was trying to do with the video. That’s why the video is so dark, because it’s on some Charles Manson shit.

MC: Rappers like Kid Cudi made it while based in Ohio. Why did you go to Atlanta to find your success? And was it a welcoming city for you?

Trippie Redd: Atlanta was fun. I loved it. It was a good time to go work in Atlanta. There was a whole new era going up, a lot of stuff going on to where I could do what I needed to do.

MC: Your new release debuted at #1 on the hip-hop charts and just went #1 on the Billboard Top 200 albums chart. How does that feel? And is it important for you to achieve such goals?

Trippie Redd: That feels amazing, super amazing. What makes me happy is just making music and actually getting to put it out, more so than going number one. But I feel like it’s a long-term goal that my fans have for themselves, and I ultimately reached that goal, but I’m more nostalgic for when the older hip-hop records went gold and platinum. Going number one helps that go faster.

MC:What are some of those early influences on you?

Trippie Redd: I listened to a lot of hip-hop and R&B, like the older stuff that my parents would listen to, like Tupac, Ja Rule, Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey and Missy Elliot. Just a whole lot of stuff. I love that whole era, I’m so nostalgic for it and I try to bring the older shit to my newer shit that I put out.

MC: I read that you also listened to KISS. Did their characters and theatricality influence your having a “persona” and a stage show, as well?

Trippie Redd: I love KISS. “Psycho Circus” [from the 1998 album of same name] is my favorite song by them. They actually wanted to meet me. I’ve been influenced by them for sure. I’m even going all out for my upcoming Love Letter to You 4 Tour. It’s definitely going to be like a forest vibe on the stage and it’s going to look like, how can I put this…? Almost very blissful and beautiful and airy, almost like a play. There’s a lot going on. I think we are going to make it rain on stage and have confetti and shit. I’m trying to go all out with my performances, because I want the fans to experience the music like I do in my head.

MC: How does A Love Letter to You 4 connect to the previous releases, if at all?

Trippie Redd: A Love Letter to You itself is a mixtape, and basically the concept behind this mixtape is all aspects of love. The grunginess and the heart and the music together make it a work of art. It makes it sound like an album. They all end up coming out different, but there is also something about what I always put in them that makes them the same too. Something like Life’s a Trip is an album, I was trying to be more alternative. When I work on an album, I pick a goal, I pick a specific thing to focus on with that album. And I really have been thinking about making Life’s a Trip 2, honestly, because I want to go for a more alternative feel and do more ambient guitar stuff and bring back the little rapping shit I was doing. But with this one I was trying to do everything

MC: Speaking of ambient guitar stuff, your music is very song-oriented, with verses and choruses and lots of guitar textures [courtesy of producer FrankieOnTheGuitar] that sometimes resembles an alternative rock album more than a rap album.

Trippie Redd: Like how it’s so musical, the way it all comes together? And that comes with that nostalgia for music that I would listen to back in the day. The shit they would put in the background and the artsy shit that you would hear certain people do that nobody else would do. It blows my mind to hear people do different things and not just stay in one pocket, so that’s what I try to do. Everything I listen to I learn from. It’s like homework.

MC: Can you walk us through making a track like your lead single, “Who Needs Love”?

Trippie Redd: On that one, I was really into my feelings, so I went to the studio and I listened to a beat that my engineer Igor had pulled up. I thought it was amazing, so I went into the booth and I started freestyling. I get the chorus done, and I get the verses done, then I do the ending and the beginning, and I add the sound effects and all that good stuff last.

MC: And what about your vocal performances. You sing quite a bit. Do you know when you are going to sing or when you are going to rap?

Trippie Redd: I don’t know anything; I just do. It just comes from my head, it’s like a gift. A lot of people don’t do that, a lot of people write. I really look up to Lil Wayne, and he’s always just said what was on his mind at the moment. Nothing I’ve ever done has been written. I’m just spitting from my head and it’s written from the brain.

MC: Who are your most trusted music
collaborators?

Trippie Redd: Mamet, since A Love Letter to You 1. The vibe we have is different. He just knows what I like. I mean, there’s other people that can record me, but it would never be what my engineer does for me. He cares. It’s not like a burden to record me. He’s not expecting to go anywhere else.

MC: Who is your most important advisor or confidant? Any advice on who to trust?

Trippie Redd: My friends and my mom, that’s pretty much it! When it comes to business stuff you need to get yourself a good lawyer and you need to make sure you have a great relationship. I got to sit back and analyze and talk to people and not say too much. People will go through things and remember what I said and go, “Oh yeah that’s what he meant.” So sit back pay attention to what people say, and don’t be too anxious to say things. Choose what you say wisely, because every word matters.

MC: If luck or success happens when opportunity meets preparation, how did you prepare for that opportunity when you met Lil Wop and eventually got your record deal?

Trippie Redd: I sat back and watched everybody do what I wanted to do and waited my turn. And when you sit back watching people do things you learn a lot. I’ve been around people that were doing a lot, and just being around them and analyzing the right people, you will get yourself by. And just say no to drugs. For sure.

MC: Which leads us to the Instagram post you made the other day. First of all, RIP to your friend and collaborator Juice WRLD. We’re sorry for your loss. You took to Instagram and made a plea for your scene to stop doing drugs. Can you go into that a little more?

Trippie Redd: It’s just honestly fucking stupid. Drugs are just ridiculous. It’s dumb, and a lot of people are doing them ‘cause they look up to people like me or people that were before me, mainly people from five to 10 years ago that were saying they should. And we were just looking up to them and reciting what they say. But honestly, I’ve never done anything besides smoke weed, for real, for real. That’s just how I’m coming and I think the world should come that way too.

We don’t need to be popping hella percs, we don’t need to do xans, we don’t need to be sipping lean. We’re young. We need to be getting our bodies together by working out, we need to be taking ginger shots. Let’s go to Jamba Juice to get us a sour gummy off the secret menu. We’re healthy, let’s live and breathe fresh air, let’s not die, you know what I’m saying? We should keep ourselves together, that’s the best thing to do.

MC: Many artists are reluctant to identify themselves as part of a genre or subgenre, but in the Instagram post you are speaking to and labeling your scene as “emo rap.” Does that put you in a box?

Trippie Redd: When you look at an artist like me, and you think of an artist like Lil Peep [who like Juice WRLD died of a fentanyl overdose, and xanax was also found in his system], you think of an artist like XXXTentacion, and Lil Uzi Vert. You don’t think of a lot of other people. So that’s the box I’m put in, and we definitely do have the emo world on smash. I wear all black, I make a lot of sad music, so you know, that’s just how it goes.

MC: Along with the pharmaceutical drugs, it seems emo rap also deals a lot with mental health issues.

Trippie Redd: There’s definitely a lot of people dealing with mental health issues just from the way they grew up. You can’t be too mad at the person, but you gotta be on their ass. You gotta act like you are that mad because they just can’t be doing that shit. We lost too many people to drugs.
   And if you’re depressed, there’s so many ways to deal with it other than taking drugs. [Taking drugs] is not going to get your mind away from it for too long, because you’re going to have to do those drugs every day, and they aren’t going to do anything but kill you slowly––and that’s the sad part about it.

MC: Every generation of music has had it’s own drug scene. Do you think the drugs associated with emo rap are an aid in the creative process other than just all the mentions that they get in the songs?

Trippie Redd: You don’t have to do the drugs. Let it just be words to a song, you know?  Let’s not just do everything somebody says. If I told you to jump off a bridge, I hope you wouldn’t fucking do that shit. I don’t care how big my influence is, no one should ever harm themselves for somebody else. People use it to get in their creative space or whatever, but what’s wrong with taking weed to get into your creative space? A lot of those drugs aren’t good, and when you do them while doing your music, you ain’t really saying shit.

Management:  Charlene Bryant email: charlene@trippieredd.com

Booker: Cara Lewis caralewis.net email: team@clewisgroup.com

Music Attorney:  Hector Baldonado thebaldonadogroup.com

Contact Jennie.Boddy@umusic.com