Immortal, Ironboss

Bad Obsessions

It's So Easy
"Like a serpent I am slithering, in a maze of sin and filth"- Dark Funeral

It's been 6 months of rock and shock since I last wrote a Bad Obsessions column, and if I catalogued all the hijinks and atrocities, the kicks and the sleazy thrills that have gone on, you'd never get to the next street-punk interview, and although that's just fine with me, the kids have got to have their say, so I'll make my intro as brief as possible. All I can say for certain, anyway, is that I got a Dio 'Holy Diver' t-shirt for Christmas, and in January, I launched Sleazegrinder.com, which has quickly turned into a fire breathing monster that eats up most of my staring at the walls time. It is, however, the greatest rock and roll website of all time, so I guess it's worth it. Oh yeah, and I've also discovered that black metal is the sleaze metal of the 21st century. Hardcore techno might be the punk rock of the 21st century as well, but I'll leave that weird scene for another time. The black metal thing I'm sure of, though. 

Sleaze metal is why I'm here, after all. Guns n' Roses, the Cult, Zodiac Mindwarp, Circus of Power - bands that represented all the things that rock and roll stood for, bands that made me grow my hair long and drop out of college to run drunk in the streets with a video camera, desperately trying to capture that lightning in a bottle and show it off to all the world as absolute truth made flesh and amplified through maximum volume. I'm still on that mission, pretty much, but many,many of the prime movers that sparked that flame just gave the fuck up, knuckling under the oppressive weight of a music scene that actually thinks Black Rebel Motorcycle Club are punk rock, and not some cheesy Jesus and the Mary Chain rip-off, that still likens heavy metal to date raping rap-rock, that is nothing but trend and disposable commodity eaten up in gulping fistfuls by a society that has no freak power left, unless you count the ones that explode in senseless violence; a society, and a people, with no groove left to give. It's no wonder, then, that the only people kicking up great dust clouds of authentic rock are the ones that have already dropped out of society completely, have declared an aesthetic war on it, even. 

I suspect Jeff Bale has known this all along, since the church burning stars of the 'Lords of Chaos' book were discussed at length in one of the first issues of Hitlist, so I might seem to be a bit behind the curve in all this, but you've got remember that, at the time, I was still a seedy enough character that I wanted to stay the fuck away from any form of rock and roll that people were getting arrested for. But now that I'm a citizen, happily married and one of the most well known broke ass rock writers in the business, seems like high time I got my hands bloody in all this satanic rock and roll nonsense. I quickly found that the similarities between sleaze rawk and black metal were pretty glaring. There's the element of style and glamour infused in both- although you could more accurately call the spikes and corpsepaint look of the devil rockers 'Bullet Belt Glam', they still look pretty fucking suave, just a cowboy hat away from sleaze metal's biker chic. More importantly, both genres represent the dangerous side of rock and roll. Guns n' Roses sparked riots and punched out the press. Mayhem burned down churches and stabbed each other in the head. And of course, both genres rock like fuck. Black Metal rocks in a different way, of course. It's gone a long way from Venom's triple speed Chuck Berry riffs, that's for sure, and some of it is as much psychotic screaming bitch music as some punked out flail-core, but if the more popular bands in the Black Metal universe- Cradle of Filth, Dimmu Borgir, and Immortal - are any indication, than the music is becoming more RAWK all the time. Hell with the lid off, indeed.

The only problem is that Black Metal isn't the province of rock and rollers, at least not yet. It's anti-social message and 'extreme' trappings mostly attract weird male teenagers, as far as I can tell, who all seem desperate to keep their little 'cult' circles intact and free from outside influence. Well, fuck all that. If bearded berserker kings in Supersuckers t-shirts want in on the Satan parties, well, rock and roll has always been an inclusive phenomenon, so the little brats are going to have to make room. They're not going to take to the cult busting too easily, though. "I hope this is a joke...if not, it just opened up a door into a part of the 'rock' scene I wish has been kept closed..."some anonymous jerk on the black metal.com message board recently wrote, when answering my request for 'Foxy satan metal chicks to interview corpsepaint bands' for my site (I'm still looking for some, by the way, if you know any). Oh, but I'll press on, brothers and sisters. That door is wide open now, because if there's one thing I know for sure, it's that the devil is on my side. I was hoping to officially release the bats with an Immortal interview for this issue, but it didn't quite work out. However, I made a go of it anyway. 

Noble Savages:
A theoretical interview with Immortal

Nordic blizzard metal beasts Immortal are so much more vital and important to the future of rock and roll than the Strokes or the White Stripes that I'm embarrassed to even mention them in the same sentence. After all, here's a band that met in a dark forest in Norway 12 years ago, and have really only ventured out of the dark tangle of trees and trolls to scorch the Earth with massive waves of frostbitten heavy metal thunder every couple of years, who dress like some unholy combination of KISS and Wrathchild UK, and who have zero aspirations of commercial success outside of their cloven hoofed legions, yet they've managed to release a Yeti worshipping record that quite clearly out fucking rocks everybody- their own Slatanic Wermacht, the aforementioned indie-darlings, even the Swedish sleaze contingency that make rocking their business. Sure, it took 5 albums and a dozen years, but their latest epic, 'Sons of Northern Darkness' (Nuclear Blast) is black metal's 'Appetite for Destruction', a fistful of rock and roll full of blast beats and churning cold metal and thrashing and bashing that absolutely means what it says, that digs deep into the blood and guts of it all and emerges triumphant, unbowed and unapologetic. If even half of the bands playing rock and roll these days did it with Immortal's conviction, you'd never have to suffer another phony rock summer blitz of Warped tours or Ozzfests ever again. If anybody knows how to wield the evil powers of rock and roll with efficiency, it's Immortal. 

Having already suffered a numbing 500 interviews worldwide to support the new album, I obviously wanted to add to the agony by hassling the band about hookers and drugs, see if they're as rock and roll as I suspect. However, since they're on tour with loincloth chic barbarian vaudeville act Manowar as we speak, getting Immortal on the phone for a Sleazegrinding interview proved impossible, but that's probably for the best, because it would have been a massacre. I can see it now. Abboth, the band's frontman, founding member, and chief visionary, greets me with one of those too polite Scandinavian hello's, and I plunge right in. 

Do you guys keep the corpsepaint on when you bang groupies? 

What? We have no groupies. We are grim and somewhat Hellish men.

All right, but what about the spikes? The spikes are the absolute tits, bro. Do you ever walk into a bar and think, 'Well, I've got all this fuckin' armor on, so...' and just, like, haul off and slug some fucker right in the mouth? I mean, what are they going to do? 

Our clothing and armor reflects are the mood of our depressive metal. We don't punch people in bars very much, sorry. We prefer taking long walks in the forest to reflect on our noble Nordic heritage, or perhaps cutting holes in the ice and fishing with a stick.

What's the very first line in Appetite for Destruction? 

I have no idea. I don't even understand the question.

Fair enough. Getting back to the make-up -

Why do you ask so many questions about our make up?

It's important. Do the individual styles represent different characters, like in KISS? Who's the demon in Immortal, and who's the space man? 

This is exactly the point where he would hang up on me. Obviously, the sleaze rock/ black metal connection has some kinks to work out, but believe me, it's more Dracula Vs. Frankenstein than cats and dogs. In the meantime, buy "Sons of Northern Darkness" and work on growling "Undending grimness this kingdom is mine" like a heavy metal werewolf. Then pick up some greasepaint and rock the fuck out with yourself. Ian Astbury was right- it's ok to rock again, even in the Arctic Circle. 


The Perils of Rock and Roll Decadence

"We were playing The "BURNING MAN FESTIVAL", 2000. It's an archaic arts festival in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada U.S.A. If you've never been there, it's impossible to describe the place to you. Just envision pure anarchy actually working. We got off to a bad start, leaving for the gig minus our guitar player. He opted to fly in and join us once we actually arrived at the festival. We have a bad feeling about this as he has begun to fuck up pretty bad and stiffed us a few shows already. His girlfriend of 15 years hollers, "he's not going" into the phone as I make arrangements with him. She's screaming some shit that he will never be a rock star and needs to give up his childish dreams of rock'n'roll. Much to our surprise, the limo delivers our guy from the airport at 6am of the day we're supposed to play. The limo was to have a dry bar as our guitarist is a wanna-be recovering alcoholic (chug a 5th of vodka kinda alcoholic). The moment the limo door opens I smell the booze. Contrary to our request, the limo bar had been fully stocked. The driver informs me "Lance Lucifer", our guitar guy, had been a one man happy hour for the entire 4 hour drive! 10 hours pass and Lance is still too inebriated too function. We continue pumping him with fluids. With only a few hours left until we play he finally begins to sober. Just as we begin to see hope, the sky darkens and threatens rain. The temperature drops to the 40s. We arrive at the stage we are scheduled to play. (there are numerous stages throughout the event. You might have a hardcore band playing one stage while an opera singer performs at the same time on a stage half a mile away. People of similar taste congregate to whatever stage has what they like.) We find a poppy, west coast reggae style band on stage and the place is packed full of dancing hippies. It's highly unlikely this crowd will appreciate our east coast anger. Seems whoever booked the stage order was having a laugh at us. We ready ourselves for the current crowd to leave when we play, which they do. Hundreds pour out of the place as if it's on fire. No biggy, we figure we'll attract our own element after a few songs and all will be well. Just as we end our second song it begins to rain, cold rain. The place becomes a slippery mud pit in an instant. The rain eases during our second song and we begin attracting a few people. Before the 3rd song ends the rain picks back up, sending people scurrying for shelter. I look over just in time to see 70's, my bass player slip on some mud and fall flat on his ass. The girls who dance with us cannot move due to the slippery stage. The rain continues to increase and we're playing for about 20 people. The mic keeps shocking me. The covering on the stage has a leak and is dripping directly onto my drummer's head. I try to do my fire act, seems my torch has been heavily soaked by rain and will not light. The guitar player breaks a string. We call it quits after the 4th song. I wish it ended here, but it doesn't. We sit with our equipment under tarps for 2 hours in the rain. People pass us by like we are invisible. We cannot find our ride to haul us and equipment back to our camp almost a mile away. The mud is more like clay. It clumps up on your shoes until you're walking on a 5 inch platform that weighs 20 pounds. Finally our karma shifts, some cool folks in a pick up drive us back to camp. Our equipment to this day, still bears traces of mud from that night." 
- Tom Waltemyer, El Destructo (www.eldestructo.com) 

"We're playing in Philly, and this guy comes to the show, and he looks pretty deranged. He's sort of this dumb fat kid, and he's got these scratch marks on his face, and I'm looking at Shane and saying, 'You know, those look like the scratch marks that people on TV who just raped somebody have.' Anyhow, this guy's parents had owned a children's clothing store in a mall. You know how, if you've ever worked retail, the last person's still in the store when you're closing up, so you just lock them in so nobody else can get in?" Yeah, unfortunately, I do. "So what this guy did, is, he killed the woman and the kid, then he raped their corpses, stuffed them in the car, went and dumped them in some field, and then came to our fuckin' show. And what he said to us, was, 'Can you help me?' And I thought it was just some guy who was whacked out on some serious drugs, so I said, 'I don't know, what kind of help do you need?' and he said, 'Well, I'm trying to form a more personal relationship with Satan. I've tried the Satanic rituals, and I've tried the Electronomicon, and I've tried everything, and it's just not working'. I was like, 'Whoa.' What he neglected to mention was that the last thing he tried was ritual sacrifice." - Thomas Thorn, Electric Hellfire Club (www.electrichell.com)

"Mercury Pusher headed out for a brief jaunt into Canadian waters last thanksgiving, but, as none of us are very strong swimmers, we decided to drive instead. After a night of fun at Flint Michigan's Local 432 (all ages club downtown Flint) we set our sites on the great northern wilderness (Toronto). Now, we'd done this before and we knew the drill: 
"Pull over, get out of the van. Got any guns? Drugs?" 
"Why, you want some?" 
An attitude like this never gets you anywhere and coupled with that fucking scarf Gary was wearing the ol' Pusher found ourselves in Customs, hot damn! It took nearly two hours for the Canadian kilted yaksman, or whatever they're called, to determine that we were a danger to the national economy and possibly to public safety (scarf-boy has a record) and we were flatly denied admittance. Three shows, a radio spot, and a magazine interview down the tubes. What's worse is that the American border patrol on the other side of the bridge were kind of suspicious seeing as how the Canadians obviously considered us a threat to national security and all. To their credit it only took them an hour to search the van and some nice lady gave us twenty dollars. We used it to buy a case of the Yeti (Milwaukee's Best Ice, swear by it) which is the only thing that was good about the six hour drive back to Dayton." -Dan Corcoran, Mercury Pusher 

"Portland , Maine, especially in our early days, had been rather good to Roadsaw. Whenever we played there , we pulled great rambunctious crowds, mostly of the hard drinking bored redneck and biker variety. Our people, as Craig would say. Erin, the red haired Irish Viking princess who booked us into Zoots where she bartended always made sure we had plenty to drink when ever we played. In addition to building a following in Portland, we'd also built a reputation as drunks and drug fiends and we partied like mad men whenever we came. Erin in particular seemed to enjoy keeping up with the boys, and boy, did she. After the bar closed hordes of riled up fans, freaks and females made their way over to Erin's loft where the drinking and drugging would continue into the wee hours. Every gig was like this. It was an event when we played there and the crowds got bigger. Over the months we grew more demanding of Zoots. We now required 2 cases of beer and a fifth of Jack Daniel's every time we played. And Erin, ever the hostess, obliged without hesitation. Once we arrived in Portland for one show much earlier than usual and decided to grab a bite to eat at an acquaintance of ours restaurant. Norm, who ran Norm's BBQ was at one time the loose cannon singer for a Boston band called Left Nut. He had since quit the rock biz, married and focused on his restaurant. It was a huge success and he had invited us to drop by anytime. He was more than happy to accommodate us. We walked in and were seated immediately. Before we ordered , pitchers of beer arrived. As we ate, more heapings of meat were piled onto our plates. It was delicious. We ate and drank until we neared bursting. 'On the house' Norm waved when we offered to pay. Because we were such poor bastards on tour, we left no act of generosity pass without fully taking advantage of it. This time we drank and ate more than our fill. By the time we had to play, we were groaning and moaning backstage, holding our straining guts and burping up the foul stench of a painful digestion process. We knew better about eating so much right before a gig. This is what Roadsaw referred to as a brown out similar to a black out, except it's an overload of meat in the system, not booze. It bogged us down while we played. It made us slow. Worse, it didn't leave much room for the beer we so desperately needed to pound down prior to the gig in order to play right. That night the set was ok, a little sluggish. But some one had the grand idea to bring the bottle of Jack Daniel's with us onstage and drink it as the set whizzed by. By the time we finished, we had polished off the whole fifth. Now we were fully bloated and stumbling. And as usual, once the gear was loaded, the party moved to Erin's place. Darryl, our guitarist at the time, declined and remained in the van, laying down on the futon in the back, holding his stomach and sweating profusely. " I think I'm just gonna stay here for a while. I don't feel too good." Fine, we left him and went inside to commence to drinking. When morning came, we pulled ourselves up off the floor and went outside to fetch toothbrushes and clean t-shirts from the van. With blinding hangovers, we stumbled outside toward where it was parked. As we approached, we squinted ahead, confused by what we saw. It like some one had dumped something on the windows. They appeared from a distance, to be smeared with mud or garbage. That's when we saw Darryl's head pop up into view, frantic and desperate. Shit, we had forgotten about him. As we got closer we could see that it wasn't mud smeared onto the van's exterior, but vomit splattered on the windows from the inside. In his sick and drunken state, Darryl had laid down and gotten the spins. All the meat and whiskey that had been consumed too quickly and in such large amounts apparently disagreed with D's stomach. We could hear Darryl screaming through the glass. " the alarm, the alarm!" Craig pulled the keys from his pocket and pressed the beeper button. The alarm chirped off and Darryl threw open the side door, his hair and clothes plastered with chunks of vomit. " I got sick and couldn't open any of the doors because I didn't want to set off the alarm! I didn't have the keys!" he gasped. " I went from window to window looking for an opening to throw up out of!" Craig and I looked inside. Sure enough, every square inch of the van's interior was sprayed with meat and whiskey. It looked like someone had thrown a lit stick of dynamite into a butcher's bag of leftover guts. Everything, seats, ceiling floor, windows...all smeared in vomit. I could see long finger streaks on the back window, as if he had been trying to claw his way out of a sinking ship. In his drunken panic, he must have run to every corner of the van, a brown spray leaping from his lips at every turn. The morning heat boiled the air into the van into a putrefying gas while Darryl lay huddled in a ball waiting for someone to rescue him. On the sidewalk, he stood there arms stretched out, red eyed and shaking not knowing what to do, unable to touch anything, looking up and down the front of his clothes, striped with half dried swipes. His eyes were wild, searching for a way, an answer. With raging hangovers, we nearly puked ourselves just from the sight and stench. " Why didn't you just roll down a window?" I asked. " I thought they were power windows! " D confessed. " I was drunk, man. I didn't know!" He hobbled inside, cleaned up best he could in Erin's kitchen sink and gathered a bucket and soap in an attempt to make the van drivable so we could get home. But it never really ever got clean again. Not really. Every once in a while, on our way to yet another show, someone would discover a mysterious brown chunk of something stuck somewhere under a seat or near a window. And we never really got the smell out either, especially on those long, hot summer tours through the South West. The heat brought it back to a steaming reminder of meat and whiskey and Portland, Maine. Tim Catz, Roadsaw (www.roadsaw.net)


No Blood For Oil:
Ironboss

A couple of years ago, I stumbled downstairs at the Middle East for the big rock show. Scissorfight were playing, I think, calling themselves 'Tit Foot' to throw off the scent of blood in the air, but everybody seemed to be there anyway, primed for total rock chaos. I was early, for once, and actually managed to catch the opening band. I'm still reeling from the experience. They looked straight out of a motorcycle rally in the Black Hills, and they had the sound to match it- biker metal, high octane and full throttle, sounding like some crazy hybrid of Circus of Power and the Four Horsemen. They called themselves Ironboss, and I worshipped accordingly. Turns out, they were as authentic as they seemed- fist fighting, Hell raising, bad ass motherfuckers that just happen to have a band that walks the walk like Sonny Barger himself got a rock and roll band together with his heaviest soldiers. As you would imagine, things ain't been easy for the mighty Boss, and if anybody knows the perils of rock and roll decadence first hand, it's these cats. I got their drummer Patrick Kennedy on the phone late last year, and he straightened me right the fuck out. 

So, when you guys played in Boston, you mentioned that you hadn't played together in a year...

I think we say that at every show. But actually, in that situation, we hadn't played live for awhile. Everyone had various things to attend to, and I had been mercenary drumming for another band on tour for the summer.

Well, I'm wondering, is Ironboss a full time rock machine? 

It is a full time thing, in that we practice regularly, we're on the phone to each other, e-mailing or whatever, almost daily. I don't know how much you know about the genesis of the band, but Chris (Rhoten)- he sings and plays guitar- started the band under the name Gearhead back in 1988. So, then Dave (Waugh)- he's a tattoo artist- he joined in '89. I joined in '95, and the band name changed to Ironboss, because I don't know if you remember, but there was another band around called Gearhead, that played some sort of industrial noise crap. Their manager called Dave at the tattoo shop and issued a 'cease and desist', and Chris and those guys don't accept orders like that particularly well. They all went down to the show in Baltimore, when this other Gearhead were playing and stood right in front of them during their set. The false Gearhead were apparently a bunch of posers, wearing cover-alls with somebody else's name on them. And there's Chris, who works at the county landfill, standing in human filth since age 6 or something, probably wearing coveralls with his actual name on it because he probably drove straight from work. After the show, those guys were like "Oh, we're really sorry about what happened, we didn't really want to do that to you guys', and Chris was like, "Well, after seeing what a bunch of pussies you guys are, I think we're gonna keep using the name Gearhead, what the fuck are you going to do about it?" But they didn't. I'm actually glad they changed the name anyway. I just wish I'd been there to witness that exchange.

Ironboss is such a perfect name for the band. 

I think it's a more enduring name. Gearhead is a bit cartoonish, even if it was fitting. That kind of name limits you - you'd have to remain a kitschy sort of band, a niche rock thing, like Nashville Pussy, or something clownish and one-dimensional.

But it's perfect, because it lets you know what's coming.

I hope so. (laughs) But yeah, we're fully operational. We have no plans of calling it quits. Also, we haven't been playing that much because- it's a frustrating thing being, in my opinion, one of the better rock bands out there, and not getting offered much dividend in return. Of course, this is nothing new. I mean, certainly the club circuit has changed considerably in the past few years. Back in the early to mid 90's, most of the bigger bands would come around, and they wouldn't always have packaged support from management and booking, so maybe you'd have the chance to open a bigger show - let's say you're a hard-working underground rock band, and you see that a bigger band is coming through town, and you get that support slot. Well that's 500 to 2,000 people there. Now, even in the smaller rooms, with 200 person cap, they've got three band package deals, guaranteed, and that's for the entire US, so it's tough. When you don't have any label funding, and you're selling t-shirts that you made yourself, it's just kind of a rough road. All show money goes to gas, to replenishing merchandise stock, to incidental gear repair, people ripping you off, and so on. So, we just wanted to lay off playing shows at any tremendous distance until we had a bunch of discs in our hands. I feel like we need to go on a Black Flag, 'put out as many albums as we can' rampage, and that's why we've got a ton of shit coming out. In the next 6 months alone, there will be no less than 3 cds. 

There's the remastered album...

With three bonus tracks, which comprises the rest of the session material. There's the live disc that Underdogma's putting out, a compilation of all of our singles and unreleased tracks called Roll Out the Rock, and maybe a few bootleg-style live discs. I invested in a mini-disc recorder, before we went to Europe. At first, it was just to make sure we demo'd our material properly at the practice, because that proved to be a little better than using Chris's Fisher Price style recorder, where you'd lay down some great song, and when you'd play it back, all you'd hear was this thunderous roar, or you'd tape over it, and then it was gone. This is better for archiving and retrieval. So we used it to demo songs, and then I thought I'd take it to Europe and document every show to see if it would work. There was a volume limiter on it, and we had a cheap condenser mic which would cut out almost immediately after we started playing, so we only got like two full shows. Steve Austin and I sat down for a week and mastered a show from Belgium and one from Italy. They sound like release quality to me, they sound even better than that old Aerosmith 'official live bootleg', and a lot of other shows I've heard on tape - the Cactus live bootlegs are amazing, by the way. 

I noticed that you guys don't sound that much different in the studio than you do live.

Really? Is that good?

Yeah. A lot of bands sound really overdubbed in the studio - you guys have maintained a raw sound in both places, and that's cool.

We take our cue from an older methodology - you know, 3 or 4 guys in a room- hell, I don't even care if David Geffen called us up and gave us a million bucks- which isn't happening anyway-I'd still patently refuse to record in separate booths, or each person tracking alone. We did it once, and it's absolutely awkward, and kills the spirit of what you are tracking to tape. A rock band needs the rock process. That's not the rock process. It's built on the foundation of drums and bass - the rhythm section, with guitar on top of that, and last thing, vocals. And I think that part of the reason why we sound half decent live, I mean comparatively live and in the studio, is because unlike a lot of bands - unlike almost every band I can think of that work in this sort of 'rock format', very few have a vocalist that can really sing, and I think we lucked out with Chris. He could've sung with any of the more soulful rock bands of the 70's that were worth their salt, Cactus, Rare Earth, Captain Beyond, Mountain, Skynyrd, Hatchet, James Gang, Steppenwolf, Atomic Rooster, to louder bands like AC/DC, Rose Tattoo, or Saxon. And that comes off pretty well live. In the studio, a lot of bands use pro-tools to adjust the pitch and tone of the vocals, but Chris just belts it out. He's an excellent musician, if that word applies to our situation.

Do you guys have a better time of it in Europe?

I think in some ways, yeah. The situation in Europe is that you don't quite have the entertainment glut that you have here, where in any given metropolitan area above 500,000 people you've got the opportunity to go see X number of bands, 20 million movies, and you've got 500 cable channels, and the internet, this and that, and everybody's pretty much seen everything. So, live music, like major league baseball, seems to be dying out - like we're kicking around in the dying embers. And that kind of sucks when it's your thing. But we're not going to stop doing it. However, in Europe- excluding someplace like London, which is just like playing in New York, there are more people truly devoted to hard rock. We had some real diehards, with like Saxon medallions and back patches, losing their minds when we played 'Motorcycle Man', which is never the case over here. Unless you're playing a small town in West Virginia or something, you just don't get that kind of visceral reaction in America. So, thus far, it's been better for us.

Don't you get treated better, as a touring band, in Europe as well? 

Our friend Jeff from Honky, who toured extensively as the Butthole Surfers bassist for over a decade, summed up the difference like this: here, the club owners are like, "What do you mean, you want a piece of pizza?!" That says it all. Over there, it's like "Oh, our daughter made you a full meal. Here's your heated room, and you all have your own beds." So, yeah, you get treated a lot better. I mean, people are used to some severe cold weather in places like northern England, Scotland, so a lot of places you sleep, you're fully clothed in your sleeping bag in some promoter's apartment, and you can see your breath, which is like, crystallized, so it can get pretty interesting. But I think, oddly enough, they have a higher regard gritty rock music in general.

I think you're right about the entertainment glut, but the thing is, live music is an experience, it's not a passive activity- do you really think it would ever die out? 

No, not really, because there's always going to be a human need- it's like Nietzsche said, 'Without music, life's a mistake'. That's a paraphrase, but I agree with that, and I don't think something that's generated by a computer that's absolutely, metronomically perfect, something designed specifically to pacify you, to soporifically put you in trance states, can address the human desire to hunt and kill and fuck and eat and live hard and laugh. I don't think it'll die out. People are always going to require an actual mode of experience through music, and one that's actually created in somewhat of an organic manner. I mean, you've got things on the radio that are obviously an attempt to sound like they were created organically, like Linkin Park, or something. And that's a case of- you know, the drummer goes in there, plays a few beats, the engineer realizes that the guy can't play the drums, so he takes it from there and completes all the drum tracks on his iMac - I don't know, that's too bizarre for me. I hope for our sake, and for all the genuine bands' sakes, there will be some sort of revitalization or return to essentials. Probably not, I'm certainly not an idealist. We'll continue to do what we do regardless. 

I think rock is tribal music. You need a gathering of the tribes. 

Yeah, but my concern lately, is that Rock, you know, with an upper case R, has become this massively hip and fashionable thing to do, where you get these people that are basically just junkie punk rockers, who are suddenly, like, "Rock. Hmmmm, that's what I'll be today, a rocker!." You see a lot of that in fashion cities like New York. All these trust-fund posers that should be smacked. Or MTV co-opting the term Rock with their Return of the Rock agenda, which was little more than this awful campaign to push the computer and DJ bands. Or finding t-shirts in places like Nordstrom with Rock On! written in glitter letters. That's a fashion industry imperative that deliberately obscures the facts, or turns it into some sort of double-speak. When that revolting industry of big money magazines, fashion, electronic culture, MTV, conspires to create these uninspired, insipid, glossy bands and their dramas and outfits, they are selling, wholesale, a cleanly packaged, safe "culture" for kids to mainline. Like, "Here's your shitty music, your clothing, your attitude, your needs, your wants, you don't have to do a damn thing, just sit back, absorb and complain, but don't you dare attempt an act of will!" I think that's two strikes against real music - the posers who mingle unnoticed by most as such in the underground club world, and the high-stakes big money falsehood of MTV. 

Exactly. They figured out all the pussy is in rock, and they went from being punks to long hairs in a day.

Yeah. And it's simple, 'Oh, there's uniform for this. Let's go out and get glitter 70's rock iron-on shirts, even though we only know the songs that were included in the movie Dazed and Confused. I think, not to malign a band like Nashville Pussy, because they obviously work hard, but I look at them as kind of an example of that. I mean, those two can play guitar, but they've got a massively lackluster rhythm section, and you read these reviews from absolute hack writers who should have their pens taken forcefully away, kids who are like, 'Hey, they're like the Allman Brothers!', and it's like, go listen to the Allman Brothers "Live at Ludlow Garage" or something, and then go back and listen to Nashville Pussy, and then tell me which one's just some fuckin' fast punk, and which one's actual heartfelt, well constructed rock. And that's a massive issue that is very damaging, because what's considered rock by these junkie posers at the clubs now is just copping a style, it's an affectation. Whether it's some worthless junkie in his T. Rex glam outfit, or his equally worthless junkie brother who thinks it's Detroit '71, whose only exposure to Radio Birdman was buying a bootleg t-shirt on ebay. Fuck those people. They'll be onto something else real soon. They will weed themselves out, and they wouldn't last outside of their tightly knit pussy-ass club scene. 

Meanwhile, Ironboss's sound is kind of timeless, like it's part of a continuum - AC/DC, the Cult, Ironboss...

Well, I first saw the band when they were Gearhead, this was in'92, '93. It was Chris X from Reptilian actually- I was down at this club in Baltimore called the Rev, and I didn't have any money, and he said, 'You gotta see this band', and I asked him, 'What do you mean?' and he said, 'Believe me, I know you, you will like this band, and I'll even pay your way in to see them.' And this was back in '92, so Chris was probably wearing a Motocross outfit, because he'd probably driven straight to the show from a race, and the set was just mind boggling, seeing these guys that looked like Mad Max outcasts, playing music that sounded like Molly Hatchet after a very bad day. And I was just mind-blown to witness something like that. At this point, I'd say that it was probably one of the best live shows I've ever seen in my life, and that's not just because I'm in the band, it's because they were just unreal. 

What was it like when you first joined the band?

Pretty intense. My experience at that point playing music was just jamming with people, just trying to create really loud and noisy rock. I'd grown up on hard rock, and gotten into hardcore and punk at the same time. I always liked Gearhead, and suddenly, they didn't have a drummer, so I said to Chris one night at an old club called Memory Lane, 'Hey, I'm a drummer', and he invited me up to jam with him. To most people, Chris seems like a caricature; he seems created, like a cartoon abstraction, or something, and at the time he did to me, too. And then I figured out that it's all the real deal. He was like, 'Ok, here's the directions to my house', and I'm driving way out to the sticks, in the middle of fucking nowhere, like, "Hmmmm, he said it was near some mountains, and I figured I must have made a wrong turn 500 miles ago, and then 10 minutes later, I finally get to the turn, and the directions start becoming, 'Ok, when you see the tree stump, take a left', and I finally get to this house up on a hill, and it's pretty creepy. It certainly affected me, as being in Frizzelburg, Maryland for extended time periods will affect anyone, and permanently. He's got a motocross track in his back yard. He's a hardcore mechanic, and he builds custom furniture and whatnot, and- you know, it's kind of funny, most other guys practice with a practice amp, and write music in their bedroom while smoking weed with the lights dimmed, I guess, and I go in there the first night, and he's just playing by himself, and he's got his head directly in front of his Laney 4X12 cabinet with his Marshall JCM800 cranked up as loud as it will go, just jamming these fast riffs by himself with his head in the speaker. It was like watching Ted Nugent. It was a revelation to me, because I had never really played with people of that caliber or intensity before. He is a completely self-taught anomaly, just a savant kind of character. The thing about him is that he's such a one of a kind weirdo; you couldn't create a character like him. He's a non-musician's musician. Technically, he doesn't even know how to play guitar, but he's an amazing guitarist anyway. And I've tried to play with other people. I played with the Candy Snatchers for a show- I was supposed to do a tour with them, but those guys are a bunch of fuck-ups and it didn't work out. Good guys, I got along with them, but their trip is just totally different. Speed Dealer I joined for one practice, but I just couldn't hang with Jeff's manner. He handles things in a very dictatorial way, whereas Ironboss has always functioned on equal footing. But I still think that Speed Dealer is a really great band. I just don't think that anybody out there has the balls to match up with Ironboss. Very, very fucking few bands I've ever heard can hold up in terms of the directness, truth, and feeling of the music being created, and I mean that - take me out of the picture, put in another drummer, and I'd still say that. Wouldn't be happy about it, but I'd still say it. 

When you joined up, did Chris present you with some kind of manifesto, like 'This is what Ironboss is ?

No, nothing like that. It's all implicit. We had an old guitar player who could be a pretty rough guy. Very big, tattooed and unafraid, most people would be at odds to deal with him. Well, there was a fight one night at a show where Ironboss played, again, just before my time. Some guy broke a bottle, and was going to attack somebody, and our old roadie - a red-bearded guy with a super hot temper just kind of flipped the bottle out of the guy's hand and began dismantling him and his pals. Chris had grabbed another guy by the ears, and slammed his nose into his knee, just devastating him. Our old guitar player was just battering this one guy endlessly, and as the guy was trying to crawl away, he stabbed him in the leg with a meat fork - one of those heavy two or three pronged barbeque forks, and dragged him back towards him, and continued to beat him. So, a lot of weird shit has occurred, a lot of very dangerous things. Believe me, very dangerous, and I'm not referring to the kind of indulgent danger that someone like Axl Rose might have been into. We're not talking about drugs or alcohol, or shoplifting, or pansy stuff like that, but real heavy duty things. Nothing that should be mentioned in the body of this article. To quote a new song title of ours, "Let it Not Be Known". I actually find it amusing when music people like wearing their junkie or alcoholic crown as some sort of indicator that they've really been through it, that they've lived it, and been hard. That's not hard. That's not tough. That's shit. Absolute shit. Drugs are a personal choice that requires no discipline, drive, courage, stamina, or will. So when people fall back on that as their method of becoming "authentic", I just have to laugh. What a joke. We give no quarter. But to answer you, no, Chris never said, 'Look, this is what we're about'. Ironboss is something you absorb slowly over time, because it is a strange kind of lifestyle, in addition to just being a band. It's kind of like that old quote, "You can't teach the blues, you're either born with it or you're not." That's Ironboss.

That's true- there seems to be a lot of extra-curricular activities going on.

Lots of them, and they all seem in some way to refer back to the band- Dave's tattooing, Chris's motocross racing and the furniture he builds. It's a crazy trip, I'll tell you that.

You have to be pretty rock to dig the Ironboss, I think.

We'll play a place like the Continental in New York, or just like a city in general like New York, where the people aren't that hardcore - many are, naturally, but you do get a lot of hipsters hanging out at the bar, where rock is a pleasant little phase for them at the moment, people like that will kind of get into the music, but only insofar as it may or may not relate to their fashion schematic. People like the trappings, and the illusion that this alleged resurgent rock is dangerous music, when in actuality, it's safely and falsely enshrined by the eyeliner bands. I don't really consider that rock music. But then you get something like Ironboss, or Spirit Caravan, or the now defunct Buzzov-en, which is like a bulldozer coming down on you, where the music is really fucking loud, louder than most bands, and the illusion is shattered, and you're confronted with the real thing. Most folks don't want the real thing; they want a sterile approximation they can share with their friends in their rock costumes. But if they are enjoying the music, then that's fine. I won't judge. At least at our shows, we end up with a lot of dirtballs. Being in Baltimore, which truly is a stridently blue collar, rough assed town, there's a lot of people like that here. Out in western Maryland, there's a lot of biker bars, and it seems that those kind of folks can relate to the music. Chris is a motocross racer first and foremost, but he also built his chopper from the ground up. Our crowd is a good cross section. I'd like to think that we can do on 1/100th a scale of Motorhead, or what Wino's done with the Obsessed and Spirit Caravan, kind of bridge the gap, and appeal to anyone that's for real about life and music. Whether it's some guy who looks like Johnny Thunders or some dude who thinks he's Ronnie James Dio, whoever. And I think it's a really broad spectrum of people who have come to like us musically. 

It seems to me that Ironboss would attract a lot of outlaws at your shows.

Oh, we do, but that all comes down to the way the clubs are - most clubs compartmentalize themselves, so we'll end up playing the old punk rock circuit, when we should probably be playing the clubs and bars that Pat Travers is playing at this point. But the two have become so mutually exclusive. You know, all the people that are going, "Where'd all the rock and roll go? AC/DC put out 'Flick of the Switch', and then what happened?' You know, those kind of people would really like a lot of what's happening in underground rock, but there's almost no exposure for them. There's more people like that in Europe- like a lot of the reviews that were coming back from Kerrang! and Metal Hammer were all up the biker alley, and we ended up playing this heavy-duty biker bar in Eindhoven, Holland, and it was a trip, it was totally insane, guys setting women's coats on fire, etc.. People were cool to us, though, and you get shit like, this big Viking guy coming up to us after the show, big 7 foot, beer bellied guy with matching silver bracelets up his arms, and I'm thinking the guy's gonna attack me or something, and he's like, "You guys are great, the best band I've ever seen! You come back and play here again!" and I'm like, 'Ok, we will, just don't kill me' That's something that Circus of Power had to deal with too- having a 100 bikers in front of you when your playing can be heavy, because there's some scary stuff happening out there. It goes back to what you were talking about earlier- Chris's manifesto manifests itself in action more than words. Stuff like Chris' continuing gripes about the EPA, or other government agencies. He'd rather be making his own fuel. He'll probably develop his own Gasahol using corn fuel, you watch. He'll buy some van for a dollar, put some massive diesel engine in it, and that's what we'll take on the road. We've got a school bus now, and we put it together ourselves- we've got a generator in the back, we put in our own air conditioning system. We'll go down the road with a 55 gallon drum full of diesel fuel, and it's like 'Fuck paying market prices for gas'. We've got our own fuel pump in the back, and we're leaning out the window pumping our own gas, and meanwhile, right next to that 55 gallon drum, we've got our own homemade pyrotechnics. So you know, the danger is there. Danger and stupidity. I guess they go hand in hand. The accepted risk is that you're in a band with hardcore people that don't really give a fuck about a lot of things, people that are into weaponry and running through life full throttle, who have a definite, proven disregard for human health, it's a heavy thing. I think there's a lot of dangerous people, crazy motherfuckers, that'll see that and say, 'Yeah, these guys are on the same wavelength', and that's fine with us. It's nothing worse than anything Chris would come up with anyway.

Chris is like MacGyver.

Yeah, crossed with Evel Knievel. One night, we were coming back from a show in Atlanta. Any other band, and you hear, 'Oh, our van broke down, our transmission went up, and we had to stay in a hotel for 5 days while Aamco fixed it'. But we pushed the thing off the road, we slept in the van at the Texaco station that night, and we wake up, and Chris calls up some local junkyards. We're in the middle of nowhere, and he arranges for this junkyard guy to bring us a transmission that's the same model as our vans'. Chris gives me his mountain bike and sends me to a Super K Mart up the road like 8 miles away to get the bare minimum of tools required. We pushed the van into the lot of a vacant home, broke into the house, pushed the car up on makeshift blocks, tore a rug out of the house and put it underneath, and swapped transmissions with only 3 people, two of which, myself included, had no idea what we were doing. We were using rocks as tools, and within 4 hours we were back on the road. There's a million stories like that, being in this band. All across Europe, Chris was fixing the driver's van. Without his assistance, we would have missed a lot of shows. We're very self-sufficient. 

Ironboss is bulletproof. You literally cannot stop Ironboss.

I should hope not. This is the middle of racing season for Chris. He's raced pro for years- not at any massive level, but enough that he can travel around on the pro circuit, and he's always breaking shit. He's left me messages like, "Ah, Pat, I cut off my finger, so I probably won't be able to play tonight." He lost a piece of his finger once, loading his bike, and didn't bother finding his fingertip until after he had finished loading his bike. He had his girlfriend at the time drive him to the hospital, and he said that he was flipping the tip of the finger around in his hand like a quarter to freak her out. They tried to sew it back on, but it didn't work, so now his finger looks like Tony Iommi's- he's missing a chunk of his finger on the same hand. He only plays guitar with one finger anyway, except for doing leads, when he uses two. Every weekend it's like, "Oh, I broke my shoulder, I broke my fuckin' neck, I broke this, I pulled this out." He had a hernia once, a massive hernia in the stomach where the handlebars went in, and what does he do? He stuffs it back in, and he takes a tennis ball, pushes it real hard where the hernia was, and wraps duct tape around himself as hard as he can, and just continues racing. Duct tape is the human soldering iron.

With the burgeoning heavy/stoner rock scene, you guys might finally have a place to go, a community, for once. 

Yeah, I agree with you in the sense that we've played a lot of shows with bands like that, in particular with Spirit Caravan- although I don't think Wino is too keen on that term; again, it compartmentalizes a band, and leaves it in that designated ghetto, and a lot of those bands can be pretty dippy too, just third rate Blue Cheer or Black Sabbath rip-offs. And the other thing is that Chris and I have never used alcohol or tobacco or drugs in our lives - we both grew up with the straight-edge, hardcore DC thing, listening to Dag Nasty, Scream, Ignition, Minor Threat, 7 Seconds, Youth Brigade (Chris has the emblem from the first Youth Brigade 7" tattooed on his right arm), all those kind of bands. But I definitely agree with you, and we've been fortunate enough to play with some of the better bands of that ilk, and I know there's a massive underground network there, and maybe it's just because our discs aren't out yet, but we haven't really been getting the exposure from that crowd. Honestly, I think that crowd can be just as cliquish as the glamour-puss Johnny Thunders stylers. We don't fit in with anybody, just like Motorhead never fully fit in with the metal crowd, or the punk community, or the rock community, but they were good enough that people from all those sectors embraced them.

But at least you know that there's an audience there for good, heavy assed rock and roll.

Yeah, and those are genuine people who don't have to skip to the next song on the cd when they find out it's 14 minutes long, you know, they're actually into the riffs, they're into the construction of the rhythm section, and I would hit the applause button endlessly for people like that. I hope those people dig us, because we'd sure as hell love to see more than 100 people out there when we play.

Besides the discs we mentioned earlier, what else do you have planned? 

We created our own minor label imprint, just because from now on, as much as possible, I want to license our material, because I hear stories of bands- I have friends in other bands a lot bigger than ourselves who've sold upwards of 20 to 70,000 albums, and toured relentlessly, and are still in debt to their labels- even indie labels- for 20 grand. I see how disheartened they are, and I think, that's fucking awful, it's atrocious when the terms of your life are dictated by accountants, and I think at this point, I'm going to try to be more savvy, so both the discs, the 'Guns Don't Kill People" disc, and the "Rides Again" disc with Reptilian, they're both licensed from us, so we've created Iron Empire Worldwide, which is our little record label, so to speak. So other than the singles comp called "Roll Out the Rock", which will be out in Europe and America in late Spring or Summer, we're going to record enough material for a few new studio albums soon. We'll see what happens with that.

Iron Empire Worldwide. Sounds majestic.

If we could be called that.

Since we spoke, Ironboss did everything they said they would. For proof, and further adventures in manliness, check them out at www.ironboss.com

Let Me Show You How It's Done

Nothing's free in this world, baby, and that includes rock CD's. Sure, they may arrive in huge clumps at my front door on a daily basis free of monetary charges, but the payment is still due, only it's words they're after. The hell of it all is that, such is my unwavering love for and faith in the Rock, I treat them all like what they really are- the result of much sweat, blood and money on the part of thousands of well meaning rock savages. Personally, I think I work too hard, doing my best to dredge up whatever emotion, half-baked philosophy, or visceral reaction any given record wrenches out of me. If you look at the back of this here magazine, you'll see cats skating on 30 words and a shrug, and sometimes they get away with extravagantly absurd statements, like calling Scissorfight a nu-metal band, or calling the quite obviously French TV Killers "English, very English". I bet that Jeff still has trouble getting that much out of some of his soldiers. Well, I want in on some of that action myself, and I bet I can do it without blinking. I'm just going to grab a bunch of random records off of the Sleazegrinder review pile, CD's that have already had their time in the mean machine, and lay out the heavy gospel in real time. I'm even going to try to keep them under 50 words a piece, in the spirit of the 'Shitlist'. Watch me go. 

Sabians - Beauty and Ashes
(Music Cartel) www.music-cartel.com

Comprised, as they are, of ex-members of stoner crawling epicus doomicus narco-mongers Sleep, you'd expect the Sabians to be chemical fried and prone to wandering off in a daze, and they certainly fit the profile on Beauty for Ashes. What you might not figure on is the lack of heavy assed slabbage on this disc, as the band have mostly abandoned the sludge and asthmatic murk of Sleep for what might actually be some kind of stone age folk, or something. Sabians sound like some kind of Viking metal Thin Lizzy sitting around the campfire in filthy wool tunics, warming their bones with the still smoldering fire left from a recently burned witch, telling morbid tales of battles lost and won. In other words, they've gone medieval on our asses, and although they constantly threaten to devolve into the indie rock Queensryche, it's a psychedelic, hairy and hoary ride deep inside the minds of drug addicted Serfs with a head full of Chaucer and a watchful eye on the ever encroaching bubonic plague. Heavy in a very left handed sense.

Centurian - Liber Zar Zax
(Olympic) www.olympicrecordings.com

Zar Zax is a demon spawn concept record - they all are on Olympic records, I know- but this one's even more neo-cryptic and over the top then usual. Centurian are flailing Dutchmen playing who play blackened death metal, a full Panzer attack of satanic growling and snapping teeth and brain melting thrash riffs that owe more than a pinch of brimstone to German thrash n' rollers of the 80's, like Sodom and Kreator, only they're 5 times faster, and a hundred times more brutal. The band uses none of the devil's newest tricks- no keyboards, no girl ghost background vocals- relying instead on the more prosaic kicking and fuckin' screaming to get their point across. As an added bonus, if you play Zar Zax backwards, Jesus will send you straight to Heaven when you die. 

Pouty Lips - Trash Me
(Their website got eaten up by porn but ask www.veglam.com, they'll know where to find them)

Pouty Lips are Italian sleaze rockers who seem to think that KISS are a punk band, and play their songs accordingly- cheap, fast, looser than the lug nuts on Satan's Cadillac, but with a lipstick savages' ear for primitive pop hooks. Ironically, their whole rubber legged delivery and spitting, cat scratch vocals are more 'punk' than half the bands that actually consider themselves punk rock, but that hardly seems their intention. Dressing up like Motley Crue and screaming like a banshee is, and they do it with thrift store style and ragged enthusiasm, if not originality.

The Catheters- Static Delusions and Stone Still Days
(Sub Pop) www.subpop.com
It's amusing to me that The Catheters, a band that the rock crit mafia are all touting as 'The New Stooges' have found a home at Sub Pop, the label that gained it's indie hipster cred by putting out Green River's records back in the late 80's, when they were wearing the New Stooges crown themselves. Very Zen, baby, very birth-death-rebirth cycle. It also shows to go that we really haven't gotten anywhere in the past 17 years or so of rock, not that I had my bags packed or anything, since the Catheters 'new' sound is patented Seattle brewed proto-grunge- Mudhoney stabbing wildly at Husker Du songs and loving it. Solid, but familiar, retro slabbage. Of course, if you paid attention to the album's title, you'd know that all along. 

Mortiis- The Smell of Rain
(Earache) www.earache.com

Former member of black metal pioneers Emperor and full time troll, Mortiis has left his metal thrashing mad days behind with this bubbling, thumping journey into 'progressive darkwave', a rather erudite way of saying that it sounds like Front 242. Industrial tinged electronica rules the day, as Mortiis spins an arid tale of a post -apocalyptic Road Warrior landscape where our elfin hero finds himself the reluctant messiah in a world gone mad. Long time fans expecting more of his usual black folk metal have been howling for Mortiis' blood since this album hit the streets, but those fuckers need to loosen up, because this is a slinky Armeggedon that you can dance to, filled with operatic choruses and machine gunning drum machines and wild invention in a genre that hasn't had any new ideas in years. 


Sleazegrinder's Top 10

Black Debbath - Welcome to Norway (EMI Norway)
Squashed up Fu Manchu riffs and authentic sounding 70's power rock propel the brilliant and hilarious lyrics, which are, quite literally, a tourist's guide to Norway. Who says heavy metal can't be informative? 

Three Years Down - Snakes Bite (www.3yearsdown.com)
Jesus, please don't confuse these riff rawk Frisco vipers with those Superman pussies on the radio. This is all sweat and swagger heavy ass rock and roll. 

King Khan and his Shrines - Three Hairs and You're Mine (Voodoo Rhythm) 
The Hindu Little Richard holds an endless sex party. Your attendance is mandatory.

Black Dawn - Blood For Satan (Necropolis)
Soul crushing black metal madness. Bonus points for actually sounding like it was recorded in Hell.

The Spitts- Cut the Circulation Off (People like You)
Not the Seattle pop punkers at all. These Spitts are fierce sleaze punks from Sweden that blaze like Eddie Cochran fronting KISS. 

Electric Hellfire Club - Electronomicon (Cleopatra)
Amazing display of Satanic electro-metal firepower. Evil and sexy all at once.

Generous Maria - Command of the New Rock (Luna Sound)
The Swedish Monster Magnet in a do or die battle for rock supremacy. Every wins.

Otto's Daughter - Renew (www.ottosdaughter.com)
Blindingly beautful cyber-erotic goth pop metal. The album and the chick singing, I mean. 

The Makers - Strangest Parade (Sub Pop)
The kings of thrift store retro glam rawk are back with a heaping blast of maximum super soul power.

Quitter - s/t (www.quittermusic.com) Ladies and gentlemen, the world's next most dangerous band. 

I smoke my cigarettes with style, Sleazegrinder 5.4.02