BraveWords had the honour to speak with legendary Trouble guitarists Bruce Franklin, Rick Wartell, along with bassist Rob Hultz and drummer Garry Naples (also Novembers Doom) on the recent 70000 Tons Of Metal cruise (the band are rounded off by Exhorder/Alabama Thunderpussy ferocious frontman Kyle Thomas). We cover numerous topics and round off with the always popular BraveWords Rapid Fire questions. This is doom-ilicious! Read on…
BraveWords: So, tell me about the cruise adventure.
Naples: “Having a good time!”
BraveWords: Can you handle this? This life?
Naples: “Oh yeah! You mean being on a ship all the time? Well, I’d like to get off it at some point. But it’s fun.”
BraveWords: How many of these have you done?
Wartell: “Three for us.”
Naples: “This is my fifth one, between bands. It’s always fun though.”
BraveWords: How do you find actually being among the public? And mingling? Like, do you get out?”
Wartell: “Some of it’s okay. Guys like you are cool.”
BraveWords: Oh, thank you.
Franklin: “People are respectful.”
Wartell: Yeah for the most part, they are respectful. It’s just sometimes I’m a more private person.”
BraveWords: When Anthrax was on, Scott Ian stayed in his room to finish his second book. I interviewed him, and the title of my story was Not Among The Living. No, my point is, do you really want to hang in your room for four days? Come on! It’s like house arrest, right?
Wartell: “Well, there’s the restaurant, the pool deck, there’s stuff to do. There’s bands to see. The beach.”
Franklin: “Yeah, there’s bands to see.”
BraveWords: Any bands that have really hit here (motioning to heart) for you?
Wartell: “Candlemass. I love that band. They’re going on in a couple of hours, right?”
Franklin: “I stayed up to see Candlemass at 1 AM”
BraveWords: We were there too. That’s kind of the same era. In terms of a band from Sweden and a band from the US, the whole doom thing, how does it connect?
Wartell: “We toured together.”
Franklin: “Leif (Edling) told me that we were an influence on them even starting. So, that’s the connect.”
Wartell: “Yeah, and we’ve known them forever now. Weren’t we on the same label at some point?”
Franklin: “Yeah, we were on Metal Blade. They were on Metal Blade.”
Wartell: “We just always admired one another. And then we got to tour together, get to know each other. Great guys.”
Naples: “Super great guys.”
(Trouble watching Candlemass on 70000 Tons Of Metal)
BraveWords: What was funny is that yesterday, they announced the Messiah show, in Greece.
Franklin: “I talked to Jan, the drummer, I talk to him last night about that, actually. We’ll leave it at that.”
BraveWords: Yeah we’ve been hanging out with them a lot, and that never came up.
Franklin: “That’s why I’m not going to say anything. Let them say whatever it is.”
BraveWords: Messiah has a voice that’s like none other in heavy metal.
Wartell: “But does he still have that voice? That’s the question.”
BraveWords: I have no idea. You’ll have to book your flight to Greece.
Wartell: “I’ll see it on YouTube.”
BraveWords: So you went from Metal Blade, to Trouble Trouble. That was a big step. What was your relationship with (Brian) Slagel back then. What are your memories?
Wartell: “He was cool. We had no issues with Slagel. And, as a matter of fact, when we talked to Rick Rubin, the first thing Slagel said was, ‘I’d never try to hold any of my bands back. If you guys wanna go to another label, you’re free to go’. Rick Rubin did have to buy the contract.”
Franklin: “Yeah, I was gonna say, it wasn’t for free.”
Wartell: “It wasn’t for free, but yeah, Brian and I, or us, we’re still on good terms. He’s a good guy. I mean, he gave us our start.”
BraveWords: “There’s so many great stories, there’s so many horror stories, about Rick Rubin – who I’ve never met. What were your dealings with Rick Rubin?
Wartell: “We had two different kinds, actually. Like, when we did the first record with him, Rick Rubin had just started Def American. So he was more hands-on. He was actually in the rehearsal studio with us during preproduction. He came to Chicago and did preproduction. And he was hands-on with helping us construct the songs. And then he was in the studio with us, recording the songs. The second time, for the Manic Frustration record, he walked into rehearsal once and he said, ‘You’re ready’. He left, and they recorded us, then he came back at the end and he did his thing. Two different versions of our time with him. Both of them were good.”
Franklin: “And two different experiences working with him also. So there was stuff where he really helped, and stuff where we had, you know, some arguments, where we did not agree. And there was back-and-forth. So we loved him, didn’t love him so much, loved him, you know.”
Wartell: “It was a work in progress. It was a collaboration, basically.”
BraveWords: I’m sure he probably admired a band that would stand up to him.
Franklin: “We did that, we did that.”
Wartell: “He understood that we had our opinions, and we knew what we wanted, as well. But he also saw something in us that we didn’t see, that he helped bring out of us, too. So I mean, I thought it was a really good collaboration. I think he put us on a path that we wanted to be on.”
BraveWords: But you have a history of jumping to a lot of different labels. How is that business-wise, and mentally?
Wartell: “Well it’s not easy. It takes its toll on the band. We had our ups and downs going from label to label. I don’t know if that particularly had an effect on the band, but we took our break from one another for sometime.”
Franklin: “You’re talking 45 years. How many people stay on the same label, or even two labels, over that time?”
Wartell: “Yeah, but I understand what he’s saying. Like, there’s been some effect of it. Sometimes, you know, it gets harder than others. I think just being in a band together as long as we have has an effect on our relationships, in the band. It is what it is.”
(Naples, excuses himself)
BraveWords: Are my questions that bad?
(Laughter)
Naples: “I have to go watch people belly flop.”
Wartell: “He’s one of the judges of the Belly Flop Contest.”
BraveWords: You know what I find wonderful is that bands like Trouble, Candlemass, I watched King Diamond, Mercyful Fate – there were times in the ‘90s where they could barely do club shows, and now they’re doing arenas.
Wartell: “It’s a good thing.”
BraveWords: It is. It’s unbelievable. It’s like a lottery win.
Wartell: “We were asked about this earlier. I think music is very cyclical. What goes around comes around in the music industry, and I think the younger generation is doing their due diligence and their history lesson when it comes to ‘Where did this come from?’. So they’re digging back into the history of metal and doom, and I think it’s great for the industry. It’s great for bands like us. It’s great for heavy bands, doom bands, bands that don’t get the radio play. I’m no complaining.”
BraveWords: It’s always a new release if you’ve never heard it.
Wartell: “Exactly. Yeah, exactly.”
BraveWords: Because there’s a lot of kids out there who weren’t lucky enough to grow up with Trouble, and then they hear it for the first time. How could you hear a record that’s 35 years old for the first time? It could be Black Sabbath it could be Cream. It could be whatever, right?
Franklin: “Last night when you saw us at that bar, over the course of an hour and a half, three different people came up to us and said they’d never heard Trouble before this cruise. One of them said we were their favourite band on the cruise, another said, ‘We loved it!’.”
BraveWords: Tell me about the guitar, the interaction, the brotherhood, the influences. Because everyone talks about the (Judas) Priest guitar players, and the (Iron) Maiden guitar players. So how do the Trouble guitar players kind of factor into all this stuff?
Wartell: “When I started Trouble, I was looking for a guitar player and a singer, and we put an ad in and one of the local little papers or whatever.”
(Photo credit above: Mark Gromen)
BraveWords: How much was it?
Wartell: “I don’t know. 20 bucks maybe? So Bruce and Eric (Wagner) showed up. Bruce walked in with a flying V and a stack of Marshalls and started crunching away. And I was like, “I don’t even care if that guy can sing. Come on in, you’re hired!’. And that was the start of it, basically.”
Franklin: “Judas Priest and Thin Lizzy were big influences, like on the guitars. I had a guy say to me last night Wishbone Ash – like he heard some Wishbone Ash.”
Wartell: “Yeah, that’s a little bit of my influence, for sure. Well, you know, Wishbone Ash were a big influence on Schenker, they played some of the same solos.”
Franklin: “So the reason Eric and I were so jazzed to join their band was because this was 1979, and everybody was playing New Wave. And we liked heavy music. They were playing Black Sabbath and UFO and Judas Priest and Thin Lizzy, and we were like, ‘This is the band we wanna be in’. Also, we had a similar mindset when it came to writing originals. We were already synced together on the cover stuff we were playing, you know?”
Wartell: “I remember we were having a conversation at one point, the band in the beginning, and I remember us saying we want to have the heavy guitars of Black Sabbath with the double leads of Judas Priest. That’s what our goal was. We wanted the big guitars of Sabbath with the double leads of Priest.”
BraveWords: What was the song or the band that you learned how to play guitar to? What was the first song you actually covered when you were a teenager?
Franklin: “I don’t know if I can tell you the first song, but for me one of the first records that I learned guitar to was Made In Japan. Ritchie Blackmore is like, my guy.”
BraveWords: That’s so cool. So, who’s your rock star then?”
Wartell: “Michael Schenker.”
Franklin: “Ritchie Blackmore.”
Hultz: “Oh man, I’ve got multiple. I was one of these failed guitar players. I play bass. But I was only 15 years old, so my local band in town, they were like closer to 20. And they needed a bass player, so I pawned some stuff from my girlfriend’s grandmother.”
BraveWords: You’re a pawn star, dude!
Hultz: “I bought a bass guitar and I joined. At the time I was listening to COC, so it would have been Mike Dean and those guys. But, I mean, (Steve) Harris, (Geezer) Butler, Cliff Burton, you know, for bass players. But I started out playing guitar, the same as these guys, but I couldn’t play as good as these two. I was a 15 year-old touring bass player.”
BraveWords: What do you think about the vinyl craze? What was your first vinyl?
Wartell: “My first vinyl was Yes. Fragile. I was like 12 years old, I think.”
BraveWords: Do you know the band Bachman-Turner Overdrive?
All: “Yep.”
BraveWords: Do you know the album Not Fragile?
All: “Oh yeah.”
BraveWords: They called it Not Fragile because of that Yes album.
All: (Laughing) “Right!”
BraveWords: That’s a true story. “We’re not fragile!”
Wartell: “Yeah, I get it! That’s pretty cool.”
Hultz: “I’m a huge vinyl collector. I have like 4500 records. So the first one I bought, I had gotten for Christmas, was Rush Exit Stage Left, which I begged for. But I had a series of hand-me-downs Dressed To Kill, Kiss Alive, AC/DC Back In Black. My sister went from rock to like, Adam Ant. She was like, ‘I don’t want these anymore. You can have them’.”
Franklin: “My first vinyl was The Monkees. I was six years old and then after that, I wanted to play the guitar. So The Monkees were responsible for me wanting to be a musician.”
BraveWords: Can I quote you?
Franklin: “You sure can. I’m not embarrassed of that.”
BraveWords: That might be the title of the story. Dudes, thank you! It’s been great. Thanks for the whole Cleveland 6-Pack Weekend thing, too. Seriously, that show is talked about all the time.
Wartell: “Yeah, it’s legendary. I remember Michael Denner came up to us, he was all drunk, and he was going, ‘I never saw anything like that in my fucking life! That was unbelievable!'”
Franklin: “He hugged me! I’d never met him before.”
(All live photos unless specified by Gonzalo Perkelainen courtesy of 70000 Tons Of Metal)
The post Doom Legend BRUCE FRANKLIN – “The Reason ERIC WAGNER And I Were So Jazzed To Join TROUBLE Was Because This Was 1979, And Everybody Was Playing New Wave” appeared first on BraveWords - Where Music Lives.
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BraveWords: So, tell me about the cruise adventure.
Naples: “Having a good time!”
BraveWords: Can you handle this? This life?
Naples: “Oh yeah! You mean being on a ship all the time? Well, I’d like to get off it at some point. But it’s fun.”
BraveWords: How many of these have you done?
Wartell: “Three for us.”
Naples: “This is my fifth one, between bands. It’s always fun though.”
BraveWords: How do you find actually being among the public? And mingling? Like, do you get out?”
Wartell: “Some of it’s okay. Guys like you are cool.”
BraveWords: Oh, thank you.
Franklin: “People are respectful.”
Wartell: Yeah for the most part, they are respectful. It’s just sometimes I’m a more private person.”
BraveWords: When Anthrax was on, Scott Ian stayed in his room to finish his second book. I interviewed him, and the title of my story was Not Among The Living. No, my point is, do you really want to hang in your room for four days? Come on! It’s like house arrest, right?
Wartell: “Well, there’s the restaurant, the pool deck, there’s stuff to do. There’s bands to see. The beach.”
Franklin: “Yeah, there’s bands to see.”
BraveWords: Any bands that have really hit here (motioning to heart) for you?
Wartell: “Candlemass. I love that band. They’re going on in a couple of hours, right?”
Franklin: “I stayed up to see Candlemass at 1 AM”
BraveWords: We were there too. That’s kind of the same era. In terms of a band from Sweden and a band from the US, the whole doom thing, how does it connect?
Wartell: “We toured together.”
Franklin: “Leif (Edling) told me that we were an influence on them even starting. So, that’s the connect.”
Wartell: “Yeah, and we’ve known them forever now. Weren’t we on the same label at some point?”
Franklin: “Yeah, we were on Metal Blade. They were on Metal Blade.”
Wartell: “We just always admired one another. And then we got to tour together, get to know each other. Great guys.”
Naples: “Super great guys.”
(Trouble watching Candlemass on 70000 Tons Of Metal)
BraveWords: What was funny is that yesterday, they announced the Messiah show, in Greece.
Franklin: “I talked to Jan, the drummer, I talk to him last night about that, actually. We’ll leave it at that.”
BraveWords: Yeah we’ve been hanging out with them a lot, and that never came up.
Franklin: “That’s why I’m not going to say anything. Let them say whatever it is.”
BraveWords: Messiah has a voice that’s like none other in heavy metal.
Wartell: “But does he still have that voice? That’s the question.”
BraveWords: I have no idea. You’ll have to book your flight to Greece.
Wartell: “I’ll see it on YouTube.”
BraveWords: So you went from Metal Blade, to Trouble Trouble. That was a big step. What was your relationship with (Brian) Slagel back then. What are your memories?
Wartell: “He was cool. We had no issues with Slagel. And, as a matter of fact, when we talked to Rick Rubin, the first thing Slagel said was, ‘I’d never try to hold any of my bands back. If you guys wanna go to another label, you’re free to go’. Rick Rubin did have to buy the contract.”
Franklin: “Yeah, I was gonna say, it wasn’t for free.”
Wartell: “It wasn’t for free, but yeah, Brian and I, or us, we’re still on good terms. He’s a good guy. I mean, he gave us our start.”
BraveWords: “There’s so many great stories, there’s so many horror stories, about Rick Rubin – who I’ve never met. What were your dealings with Rick Rubin?
Wartell: “We had two different kinds, actually. Like, when we did the first record with him, Rick Rubin had just started Def American. So he was more hands-on. He was actually in the rehearsal studio with us during preproduction. He came to Chicago and did preproduction. And he was hands-on with helping us construct the songs. And then he was in the studio with us, recording the songs. The second time, for the Manic Frustration record, he walked into rehearsal once and he said, ‘You’re ready’. He left, and they recorded us, then he came back at the end and he did his thing. Two different versions of our time with him. Both of them were good.”
Franklin: “And two different experiences working with him also. So there was stuff where he really helped, and stuff where we had, you know, some arguments, where we did not agree. And there was back-and-forth. So we loved him, didn’t love him so much, loved him, you know.”
Wartell: “It was a work in progress. It was a collaboration, basically.”
BraveWords: I’m sure he probably admired a band that would stand up to him.
Franklin: “We did that, we did that.”
Wartell: “He understood that we had our opinions, and we knew what we wanted, as well. But he also saw something in us that we didn’t see, that he helped bring out of us, too. So I mean, I thought it was a really good collaboration. I think he put us on a path that we wanted to be on.”
BraveWords: But you have a history of jumping to a lot of different labels. How is that business-wise, and mentally?
Wartell: “Well it’s not easy. It takes its toll on the band. We had our ups and downs going from label to label. I don’t know if that particularly had an effect on the band, but we took our break from one another for sometime.”
Franklin: “You’re talking 45 years. How many people stay on the same label, or even two labels, over that time?”
Wartell: “Yeah, but I understand what he’s saying. Like, there’s been some effect of it. Sometimes, you know, it gets harder than others. I think just being in a band together as long as we have has an effect on our relationships, in the band. It is what it is.”
(Naples, excuses himself)
BraveWords: Are my questions that bad?
(Laughter)
Naples: “I have to go watch people belly flop.”
Wartell: “He’s one of the judges of the Belly Flop Contest.”
BraveWords: You know what I find wonderful is that bands like Trouble, Candlemass, I watched King Diamond, Mercyful Fate – there were times in the ‘90s where they could barely do club shows, and now they’re doing arenas.
Wartell: “It’s a good thing.”
BraveWords: It is. It’s unbelievable. It’s like a lottery win.
Wartell: “We were asked about this earlier. I think music is very cyclical. What goes around comes around in the music industry, and I think the younger generation is doing their due diligence and their history lesson when it comes to ‘Where did this come from?’. So they’re digging back into the history of metal and doom, and I think it’s great for the industry. It’s great for bands like us. It’s great for heavy bands, doom bands, bands that don’t get the radio play. I’m no complaining.”
BraveWords: It’s always a new release if you’ve never heard it.
Wartell: “Exactly. Yeah, exactly.”
BraveWords: Because there’s a lot of kids out there who weren’t lucky enough to grow up with Trouble, and then they hear it for the first time. How could you hear a record that’s 35 years old for the first time? It could be Black Sabbath it could be Cream. It could be whatever, right?
Franklin: “Last night when you saw us at that bar, over the course of an hour and a half, three different people came up to us and said they’d never heard Trouble before this cruise. One of them said we were their favourite band on the cruise, another said, ‘We loved it!’.”
BraveWords: Tell me about the guitar, the interaction, the brotherhood, the influences. Because everyone talks about the (Judas) Priest guitar players, and the (Iron) Maiden guitar players. So how do the Trouble guitar players kind of factor into all this stuff?
Wartell: “When I started Trouble, I was looking for a guitar player and a singer, and we put an ad in and one of the local little papers or whatever.”
BraveWords: How much was it?
Wartell: “I don’t know. 20 bucks maybe? So Bruce and Eric (Wagner) showed up. Bruce walked in with a flying V and a stack of Marshalls and started crunching away. And I was like, “I don’t even care if that guy can sing. Come on in, you’re hired!’. And that was the start of it, basically.”
Franklin: “Judas Priest and Thin Lizzy were big influences, like on the guitars. I had a guy say to me last night Wishbone Ash – like he heard some Wishbone Ash.”
Wartell: “Yeah, that’s a little bit of my influence, for sure. Well, you know, Wishbone Ash were a big influence on Schenker, they played some of the same solos.”
Franklin: “So the reason Eric and I were so jazzed to join their band was because this was 1979, and everybody was playing New Wave. And we liked heavy music. They were playing Black Sabbath and UFO and Judas Priest and Thin Lizzy, and we were like, ‘This is the band we wanna be in’. Also, we had a similar mindset when it came to writing originals. We were already synced together on the cover stuff we were playing, you know?”
Wartell: “I remember we were having a conversation at one point, the band in the beginning, and I remember us saying we want to have the heavy guitars of Black Sabbath with the double leads of Judas Priest. That’s what our goal was. We wanted the big guitars of Sabbath with the double leads of Priest.”
BraveWords: What was the song or the band that you learned how to play guitar to? What was the first song you actually covered when you were a teenager?
Franklin: “I don’t know if I can tell you the first song, but for me one of the first records that I learned guitar to was Made In Japan. Ritchie Blackmore is like, my guy.”
BraveWords: That’s so cool. So, who’s your rock star then?”
Wartell: “Michael Schenker.”
Franklin: “Ritchie Blackmore.”
Hultz: “Oh man, I’ve got multiple. I was one of these failed guitar players. I play bass. But I was only 15 years old, so my local band in town, they were like closer to 20. And they needed a bass player, so I pawned some stuff from my girlfriend’s grandmother.”
BraveWords: You’re a pawn star, dude!
Hultz: “I bought a bass guitar and I joined. At the time I was listening to COC, so it would have been Mike Dean and those guys. But, I mean, (Steve) Harris, (Geezer) Butler, Cliff Burton, you know, for bass players. But I started out playing guitar, the same as these guys, but I couldn’t play as good as these two. I was a 15 year-old touring bass player.”
BraveWords: What do you think about the vinyl craze? What was your first vinyl?
Wartell: “My first vinyl was Yes. Fragile. I was like 12 years old, I think.”
BraveWords: Do you know the band Bachman-Turner Overdrive?
All: “Yep.”
BraveWords: Do you know the album Not Fragile?
All: “Oh yeah.”
BraveWords: They called it Not Fragile because of that Yes album.
All: (Laughing) “Right!”
BraveWords: That’s a true story. “We’re not fragile!”
Wartell: “Yeah, I get it! That’s pretty cool.”
Hultz: “I’m a huge vinyl collector. I have like 4500 records. So the first one I bought, I had gotten for Christmas, was Rush Exit Stage Left, which I begged for. But I had a series of hand-me-downs Dressed To Kill, Kiss Alive, AC/DC Back In Black. My sister went from rock to like, Adam Ant. She was like, ‘I don’t want these anymore. You can have them’.”
Franklin: “My first vinyl was The Monkees. I was six years old and then after that, I wanted to play the guitar. So The Monkees were responsible for me wanting to be a musician.”
BraveWords: Can I quote you?
Franklin: “You sure can. I’m not embarrassed of that.”
BraveWords: That might be the title of the story. Dudes, thank you! It’s been great. Thanks for the whole Cleveland 6-Pack Weekend thing, too. Seriously, that show is talked about all the time.
Wartell: “Yeah, it’s legendary. I remember Michael Denner came up to us, he was all drunk, and he was going, ‘I never saw anything like that in my fucking life! That was unbelievable!'”
Franklin: “He hugged me! I’d never met him before.”
(All live photos unless specified by Gonzalo Perkelainen courtesy of 70000 Tons Of Metal)
The post Doom Legend BRUCE FRANKLIN – “The Reason ERIC WAGNER And I Were So Jazzed To Join TROUBLE Was Because This Was 1979, And Everybody Was Playing New Wave” appeared first on BraveWords - Where Music Lives.
Continue reading...
