Interview с Mike Terrana : DARKSIDE.ru

You did two drum clinics in Moscow in 2003, which had a serious success, the venues were full every time. But how often do you play drum clinics in Germany? How much are they different from what we saw in Moscow?

In Germany they have a lot more drum clinics, it’s the same in America, and people are used to seeing a lot of great drummers, so when there’s a drum clinic, maybe 20 people show up. Sometimes more if it’s advertised properly. But I’ve seem some really great drummers in Germany and America playing to 10 or even five people. It’s really crazy, so for me to come to Moscow and play to a theater full of people is quite nice. I would say it’s a big difference. I played some other drum clinics where you play with a lot of different drummers, it’s a kind of drum festival, there’s more people there, and it’s always more fun. But I found that most of drum clinics, if I do them on my own, I play to 100 people, and that’s why Moscow was so exciting.

You used the recordings from the first Moscow show at your latest solo CD “Man Of The World”…

Yeah, I did, because the tracks were recorded good and sounded pretty good. And I had trouble getting the rest of the tracks for some reason, so I said, “OK, I’ve got these four tracks from the O’K company, so I’ll put them on my record.”

“Man Of The World” has been released a couple of months ago. Could you tell us a bit more about the recording of this album? Did you gather all the musicians in one studio, or did they all record their parts separately and then send you the CDs?

It’s pretty weird. It was done via the Internet, because my friend who plays in this band Taboo Voodoo, guitar player Cyril Archard, sends me material via the Internet in the mp3 format with click and music. I can practice the tracks, and we change some things, then I rehearse alone and record the drums alone, and the guitars and stuff are already done in separate files. The bass was tracked by a good friend of mine named Kevin Chown, he happened to be on tour with another guitar player, I can’t remember his name right now, but I asked him if he could play on my record, so he came in for one day and played all the bass. The studio tracks were done very separately, but there’s a kind of a live feel, because I just approached my playing from a live standpoint. There are large takes that were recorded on ADATs, not hard discs, it’s a kind of old-fashioned method of recording, I played the songs straight through, and if there were some little mistakes, I left them, I thought it was more real.

You said you like the sound of saxophone very much. Why didn’t you use it on the new album?

The reason I didn’t use a saxophone player on my new album is because saxophone players are hard to find. And if you do find one, he wants a lot of money to play on a record. These guys are not like metal musicians, metal musicians work together and do favors for each other, like Victor and I. I played on his record, did him a favor, and I said, “Why don’t you write a song for my record?” He wrote a song and gave it to me, it was like a friend’s thank you. But these guys who are playing jazz and stuff, I don’t know… The guy who played on my first record (“Shadows Of The Past”, 1998) was very cool, but the guys that I found in Germany and asked wanted a lot of money and were not so interested in jamming or moving. That was one reason for not using it, but I would like to do something in the future. I’ve actually got a weird project going right now with a French keyboard player, it will only be drums and keyboards, a pretty strange sounding record. This guy’s name is Vivien Laloul, he’s very good, but I don’t remember the name of the band he’s playing in. I met this guy over the Internet. Actually I ended up playing on one of his tracks two or three years ago with an Italian singer, but I didn’t know it was him. Someone just sent me the stuff via the Internet, transferred money to my bank account, I recorded it, sent the tracks to him, and never heard anything back. No one ever called me back saying it was a good job or anything, it was very strange. And much later it turned out that this guy was one of the composers. Strange how it works sometimes, someone just contacts you and says, “Here are the tracks, here is the money, here you go, play.” I don’t like it, I’d much rather play with people and see them.

The album contains a song called “Revenge Of The Cachaca”. What is Cachaca?

(laughs) Well, you’re gonna laugh when I tell you. I played on the solo CD of Kiko (guitarist Kiko Loureiro – ed.) from Angra, and he’s from South America. He was staying at my house, we were rehearsing for his record, he’s a really nice guy, very funny, very cool, a great sense of humor, easy-going, and actually a great musician. A great drummer, too! We had a lot of fun together, we rehearsed in my practice room for about a week, and we played a lot of drums, we jammed a lot and worked on his ideas. One night he came to my house and we started to make this drink called caprehenja (unsure about the spelling – ed.). The stuff that goes into the drink is a clear liquid made from sugar cane called cachaca (pronounced “casasha” – ed.). So I decided to write a song called “Revenge Of The Cachaca”, and he thought it was very funny. It’s a kind of inside joke, on every record I have something for the people in South America. Don’t ask me why, I just do.

Why did you incorporate Beethoven’s piano piece (“Sonata #9 Pathetique / Beethoven”) in the album? It’s quite different from the rest of the material…

Here’s one thing – everyone thinks that the drummer is just some monkey who beats on everything, and most drummers don’t compose anything. I’ve been playing keyboards for about three years, and I like Beethoven, and I like classical music, and I can play this piece. I taught it to myself, the piano lessons I was taking were way under that, but I started to play it, and it took me a couple of months to master the thing. I still don’t think I played it that well, but I heard one guy playing it on a classical CD, and I thought, “Mmm, I can record it too.” Did you like it?

Yeah, it’s interesting. And it comes out as a total surprise, you don’t expect to hear this on a drummer’s solo CD…

That’s why I did it. I really think it’s a beautiful piece. It was written for the king of Vienna, Beethoven was friends with this

guy, and I just enjoy this music. I had a computer program that taught you how to play piano, and that was one of the pieces. I wrote it down on paper, because it wouldn’t print out, so I wrote down all the notes and I learned them. My piano teacher thought I was crazy. (everybody laughs) It was a little more of a simplified score, the original score is a little more complicated, there are some tricky things, some throws and stuff that I’m technically not able to do. But the basic elements of the piece are there, and I tried to do it as best as I could. To be honest with you, it was the easiest thing to record. I’ve never recorded another instrument, only drums, and when you play drums, it’s very aggressive, your legs are shaking and you’re sweating. And when I played piano, it was very calm, I was able to fix some parts, it’s a whole different mindset.

By the way, how did it feel like playing the part of Bach on Victor’s solo album “Majesty And Passion” (2004)? And who came up with the idea that you should perform the spoken parts as Bach?

Victor likes my voice, likes my talking, so he asked me to narrate these parts. I kind of straightened out English and had a lot to do with the acting parts too, the dialogues, the conversations. I had to straighten that out, and I liked it a lot, it was a lot of fun. I really enjoy talking in the studio, I like to do this kind of voiceovers.

Shall we expect that you will one day do something like “Listen With Nicko” – the famous Iron Maiden series of tracks where their drummer Nicko McBrain is commenting on songs?

I don’t know. Is that what he did, is he commenting on the tracks?

Yes, when they re-released a bunch of old singles in 1990 each of them had an extra track called “Listen With Nicko”, where Nicko is commenting on what the listeners have just heard, telling the story of how the songs came into being and cracking jokes…

Yeah, he’s funny, he’s a friend of mine. I was thinking about doing a Frank Sinatra record, and I was thinking about having him play the drums on one track.

And you will be the singer, right?

Yeah, I will sing. But that will be way in the future.

Will you continue playing with your project Taboo Voodoo?

Well, I would like to. Unfortunately, this kind of music is really dead. It seems like people here in Russia like it, the Russian people I’ve run into in Europe like it, too, but… We did this record, I think it’s one of the nicest records I’ve ever made, Cyril is a great composer, he came up with nice stuff. Unfortunately it goes over the heads of most people who are into metal, and it’s not really jazz, so it doesn’t go into the jazz market. This kind of music kind of falls between two places, it can’t be categorized. We tried to do some touring, and I invested a lot of money in the tour to keep the band out there, but it didn’t work. It was very hard, it was actually a loss. I thought about bringing the band here and maybe doing some festivals in Denmark, because there’s a lot of fusion places there, but in Germany this is very difficult. We did little touring in Germany, it was very hard. People don’t understand this music, the fusion stuff was from the 1970s, and I grew up during that time, but I like metal, I like fusion, I like all kinds of music. Now people only like one kind of music. You have people going like, “I listen to techno or hip hop, and I won’t listen to metal!” I don’t understand that. It’s OK to be into one kind of music, but it’s like (imitates an angry stubborn voice), “I only eat chicken, I eat chicken every day! I’m only eating chicken, get away from me!” (everybody laughs) It’s so stupid, this is something I don’t understand. I have a problem sometimes with this closed-minded mentality, I don’t think it’s healthy, but I know a lot of musicians who are like this, too, they are only listening to one style of music. If you’re not getting influenced by other kinds of music, whether it’s jazz or rap music or something, I think you become stale, you start to repeat yourself…

And you get bored with it very quickly…

Well, here’s one thing, I don’t wanna sound arrogant, but… If someone doesn’t get bored of doing the same thing over and over again, I think this is the sign of lack of intelligence, lack of evolution. I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I’ve seen myself evolving. I’m always trying to practice and get a little better, to learn something, but I see a lot of people who are just happy to stay at one level. They’re not really thinking, they’re not really reading, they don’t wanna be challenged by a piece of art, whether it’s a painting or music or poetry. A lot of time people go, “I don’t like instrumental music.” And I go, “You don’t like instrumental music? OK, but what is the big deal about techno music?” Most techno music doesn’t have any lyrics, and if it does, it’s one or two words being repeated. Most of the times you go to a heavy metal concert, or especially a death metal concert, there’s a guy going, “Grrr, grrr, grrr, grrr…” (everybody laughs) I can ask someone, “What did he just say?” “I don’t know.” They just wanna hear some kind of yelling over the top of the music. This I also don’t understand.

That’s why I’m listening to guys like Frank Sinatra. He’s telling a story in the lyrics, I can hear every word, and it’s poetry, it’s clever, sometimes it’s funny, and there’s a reason for the lyrics. But I really see a lot of music where there is no real reason for the lyrics. Let’s take rap music, for instance. Some of it is cool, I’m open to all kinds of stuff, but some of it is such horribly adolescent poetry, such bad poetry! And these guys aren’t practicing, they’re writing these poems on their way to the toilet! “I saw the sky, I got high, I wanna eat a pie” – anybody can fucking rhyme these last three words! (everybody laughs) And they call it “the poetry of the hood, the neighborhood.” Really I don’t think so. It’s funny - I was talking to a young guy in my health club, in my gym, a couple of weeks ago. He asked me what kind of music I play, and I said that I’m playing heavy metal music. He said, “Oh, that’s not the kind of music I listen to.” “OK, what do you listen to?” He said Snoop Dog. OK, I like Snoop Dog, it’s pretty cool, I like his new single “Drop It Like It’s Hot.” But this guy goes like, “Snoop Dog is a great musician.” But Snoop Dog

doesn’t play an instrument, and this kid thinks he’s a great musician!

It all depends on what you’re exposed to. The thing is that when I was younger, I got exposed to all kinds of music – jazz, big bands, swing, Latin, fusion, metal, folk music, whatever. So when I heard other kinds of music I was able to enjoy it. People now are only exposed to very simple forms, and when they some day see something higher, they can’t appreciate it. And this all goes back to the reason why a band like Taboo Voodoo can’t be brought anywhere, because it’s expensive. It goes back to money and economics, too – if you want to bring a band somewhere, you gotta pay. I’m also very much involved in the business with Rage, on the last tour I was the road manager, so I see all the dollars and cents and expenses and stuff. This is a business, and that’s the other problem of being a musician – most musicians don’t wanna take care of business, the two worlds don’t really mix. You’ve got a kind of de-evolutionary scale of culture as it today. There’s more information out there than ever, and I fund people to becoming less intelligent. The Internet has lots of information, but most people are just downloading porn! (laughs) Myself included!

(everybody laughs) No, I’m just kidding. It’s just a combination of things that makes it difficult to go into this genre. But I like this kind of music. A lot of people accuse me of playing drums only to make money, but that’s not true, because I make a lot of artistic records that never get heard, never sell, never get promoted. When I try to go out on the road, I call my little record company and say, “Can you help me?”, and they offer me such small money, my mom could send me more. So to answer your question about Taboo Voodoo – I would like to do some more shows, but only if it’s economically feasible, and only if we can reach some people. It would be nice, because it’s a nice band, we play really good, it’s a lot of fun.

Let’s now pass on to Rage. You used to open your concerts at the anniversary tour with an acoustic set, but you didn’t include it in the DVD. What is the reason?

There are technical problems. The show was over three hours long with the acoustic set, but the problem was when we finally went to record the last show, the microphone inputs and stuff could not be changed. There were sound problems, we couldn’t actually capture the acoustic set on tape without destroying the electric microphone setup. We were recording it in a club, which was not exactly the best venue, but that’s where Rage played its first show, and Peavy wanted to play in this club, so we played and tried to make it look as good as possible. But it was not technically possible to record the acoustic show, although people seem to enjoy it. On our last tour, we tried to put the acoustic show in the middle of the set, after the drum solo, but it didn’t work. People are too fired up and couldn’t calm down, so we just dropped it. It’s better to open up with this, but then we had another opening band, and it was too difficult technically.

The covers of Rage’s latest studio albums were designed by Joacim Luetke, but for the live album “From The Cradle To The Stage” (2004) you chose Leo Hao. Why didn’t you continue with Joacim?

We chose this Russian guy, he was a friend of Victor’s. The reason we switched is that Joacim Luetke has his own vision of how he wants things, and it’s not really possible to change anything. When you’re a band, you hire somebody, you hire them for their vision, but you also wanna have some input. Like if someone hires me to play on their record, they hire me obviously because they like my style, but they’re also allowed to tell me what to do, because they’re paying me, and it’s their record, so I try to help them achieve their vision. But this was not happening with this art thing, so we decided to work with the Russian guy and have a little more influence.

But to be honest with you, I think the whole package turned out to be a horrible disaster, we are not happy with it. We went to SPV, we tried to use the SPV art directors, but they didn’t listen, they just slapped it together. I really think it’s not a good looking package. We’re gonna fix it though with the next record, we’ve just signed to Nuclear Blast, we switched labels, we’re gonna do a new record, and we’re gonna really take care of the merchandise motives and the packaging. It’s gonna be something cool, I tell you this. Sometimes you work with people, and they’re so arrogant. You’re paying them, and then there’s this level of arrogance – this is something I personally can’t deal with, I’m tired of it. We work hard on music and everything, and then our album cover comes down in the last minute, everyone’s scrambling, and the artist is like, “No, I see it like this!” Yeah, but what about how we see it? We are the band, we have to fucking sell this shit! And these guys are not working cheap.

It looks like there’s not sense asking you why you switched from SPV to Nuclear Blast, because you’ve already told us a lot about that…

Yeah, there was a variety of reasons. One of the things was that the A&R guy that was taking care of us originally has moved to a different job, product manager. There was a new guy installed, and he didn’t seem to know anything about Rage or care about Rage. We did our last tour basically with no tour support from SPV, we didn’t take any money, and we did good, we didn’t need it. We’re actually strong enough to go out and tour without using their money, the band can sustain itself, which is a difficult thing to do in this day and age. Most bands need to take money from the label, because it’s very expensive to pay for the bus and the crew and all the stuff. But we went out there, we supported our DVD, we did it on our own. We took business into our own hands, we don’t have a manager anymore, we got rid of our management last year. We have a new booking agent, we work directly with him, I’m basically handling this kind of stuff. We just found there was a complete lack of interest on the part of SPV. OK, we’re not the biggest band in the world, but we’re not the smallest band either. For instance, the DVD is not released here on the SPV affiliate in Russia, they don’t want it. We do two shows, they’re both sold out - why don’t you want the DVD? Why doesn’t SPV tell these guys to take the DVD? You have a lot of crazy things going on – you make this thing, you wanna sell this thing, and it just seems that ev

eryone’s like this: (produces a sound of indifference) It’s not like we’re in a room playing to four people, there’s people out there that are wanna buy it.

We still don’t have it ourselves…

I think it’s horrible, and we were talking about it on the flight in. Victor has some connections with people over here, he spoke with them, and as soon as the licensing is free, I guess a couple of months after six months to whatever time limit there is when the record is not released, it comes back to us, and we can put it out. It’s ridiculous, I don’t understand that.

We remember that when we went to the Wacken Open Air festival last year we requested from Nuclear Blast an interview with Manni Schmit, an ex-member of Rage, who is now with Grave Digger. And in our request we accidentally wrote “Manni of Rage.” The Nuclear Blast guys responded, saying, “Rage is not with us, which is a great pity.” And when we found out that you had signed a deal with Nuclear Blast, we were like, “Yeah, they finally got the band they wanted!”

Actually two or three years ago we were gonna get signed to Nuclear Blast. We had a manager involved at that time to do the negotiations, and we met with Nuclear Blast, and we met with SPV, but at that point in time the band had some economic turbulence, and we went with SPV, more based on economic reasons. Which, I think, in the end came back to kick us in the ass. We’re not always thinking about money, we also wanna work with people that like us, that have a feel for heavy metal, and I think Nuclear Blast does have that. But we were promised some things at SPV, our manager was very good friends with this A&R guy, and there was supposed to be this really tight communication, and the advance was good, which was gonna keep us able to keep going on. I don’t think a lot of fans understand this, but when the money stops, it’s very difficult to keep going. (laughs) Just for us to come here, someone had to take a chance, the promoter had to buy tickets, book hotels and blah blah blah, someone’s paying for this. These things are unfortunately coming to play, when you’re negotiating a deal or any kind of tour. But now we came back to Nuclear Blast, let’s see what happens, hopefully they can help us.

We’ve heard that the new Rage album will feature an orchestra again. But how are you going to play the new songs live? When Rage tried to tour with an orchestra in the past, it nearly ruined the band financially…

We’ve got a few ideas about it, we wanna do something different. There will be like a 20-minute suite with orchestra and maybe six or seven heavy songs. I don’t know if this orchestra thing is going to be based on a loose concept or whatever, but there’s gonna be sections, and the orchestra will be recorded here in Moscow or Minsk by Victor. Touring-wise, we’re thinking about maybe using some cellos, keeping it small and having most of the stuff on the playback. It’s kind of a visual thing. I think touring with orchestra at this stage of the game is completely out of the question, it’s not economically feasible. If you’re the Scorpions, if you’re Metallica, you can do it, but we’re just not at the point where we can do it. And to be honest with you, I don’t think sonically it really works well, I don’t think it carries over. I don’t see us doing anything with an orchestra live. Rage has toured in the past with an orchestra, and it cost a fortune, we had to get buses and hotels for these people, and it adds up.

(starts speaking with a bit of indignation) And these people, these classical people, they want their dengi, they really don’t move, they don’t care about jamming or heavy metal. They’re like, (imitates a high arrogant voice) “I play first violin, I went to college for violin, I make a hundred dollars a day.” They just want their money, it’s the same thing with the saxophone guys. It was funny – I was in Copenhagen about six months ago, and I saw a guy playing saxophone, really nice saxophone. I went up and I threw some money in his hat, and the guy was like, (imitates huge thankfulness) “Thank you!” The guy was a mess, he had no teeth , he was a street person, and this guy was playing. You have one of the extremes – there are guys who play horn in the street and there are guys who play horn only in the studio. OK, I don’t blame the guys, they’re getting their money, but really it’s a different world.

Shall we stop right now? It must be time for you to start getting ready for the show…

No, fine, ask me your questions, I’m enjoying it. I like to talk, I like to tell the truth. A lot of people don’t really come to talk to me, they come and talk to the other guys, and there’s always this mumbo jumbo about how these records are made and stuff, and a lot of that is really not true. And a lot of that is really boring, I have to say, some of the answers are quite boring. I just like to cut right through the shit. To be honest with you, I don’t really care if people really like me, I don’t go out of my way to try to make people like me, and I don’t go out of my way to disguise or mask the truth. I don’t wanna sugar-coat the truth. I think this is the problem with the world, and this is the problem with a lot of the fans.

I’ll just touch on one thing – I very seldom go to the Rage website and read the guestbook. To be honest with you, I’d like to take the fucking guestbook down, because I think it’s an invitation for lonely disturbed ignorant uneducated unaware people to express their stupid fucking opinion. There’s plenty of intelligent people that don’t get a chance to express their opinion. But these people that maybe don’t have a girlfriend or don’t have a wife, they go to the Rage concert, they don’t drink beer, they don’t have any fun, and then they go home and write all the stupid shit. “They took too long to come onstage, Mike Terrana plays a long drum solo, it’s very boring.” Hey, you know what? Go take a piss, go take a shit, go grab a girl’s ass, go get a beer, go fucking do something and come back, it’s 10 minutes.

I used to go to concerts when I was a kid, and I was really heavy metal fan when I was a kid. I used to go to jazz concerts, but not many. I still go to concerts, I still like them. There’s probably one reason why I became a musician, I don’t suggest that to people, but it was really weird – when I smoked marijuana, I could listen to the music and I could really hear every drum note. When I got ser

ious about music, I stopped, because I realized that it blocking me. But some kind of booze or drugs do relax you a little bit, they can open things up, but not too much. If you do too much, then the doors close again. But I found this really enjoyable, to relax and enjoy the concert I used to smoke a little dope, have a beer, look at the girls, watch the guys put the gear up on stage, and then the band was killer. If I didn’t like the band, I just moved to the back and drank a few more beers. But I never went up to the band saying, “You guys suck!” Maybe it was some particular style of music that I didn’t enjoy, in the 1970s I saw Robert Palmer play with Al DiMeola, Santana with Black Sabbath, there were all kinds of music mixed together. And we were like, “Oh, is Santana coming out? I’m gonna go back and wait for Ted Nugent.” But these people come to the show, they paid 15 or 20 euros and they think there’s some kind of consumer rights or something. It’s not what it is. This Internet shit is sometimes too much. I’m so tempted to write to some of these people, but my mommy told me once, “Sometimes the best response is no response.” But to be honest with you, sometimes I just wanna write to them, “You big-headed motherfuckers!”

I left my country, I left the United States with about 10,000 dollars to reinvent myself in Europe, because my style of drumming was considered out of fashioned. Every ten minutes in America I was hearing, (imitates an elderly housewife’s voice) “It’s unfashionable.” Everything is a trend, one minute you gotta have your hear this way, the next day you gotta have your fucking eye-brows going that way, the next day you gotta have a spike coming out of your ass, who could keep up with this? (everybody laughs) If you wanna be on MTV, it’s gonna be the flavor of the fucking minute. So I was kind of like, “OK, I’m out of my way, I’m breaking my ass out there.” And it was getting harder and harder, the Tony MacAlpine band broke up, so I went to Europe, because I knew the people over here could dig my style. Then I’m starting to play my solo, I’m starting to get my name around, I’m enjoying it, it seems that the people are enjoying it, and then I start reading this crap on the website. These are the same people that don’t like techno music, that don’t like rap music - well, there’s no drum solo in a techno solo, there’s no fucking drummer on a techno concert, there’s a guy with two fucking turntables and a headphone on. I know some DJs, they come with a box of records and CDs, and these guys make shitloads of money. I look at them and I go, “Wow! You don’t even do anything!” People pay to see them scratching records. I think the whole thing is completely ridiculous.
And these people who are complaining, they’re not really musician-friendly, are they? I’m a fucking musician, I wanna play when I get onstage, I wanna show that. And I think if you go to a show, a live show, and you cannot appreciate the art of performance, go the fuck off! (cracks) And please don’t write on the website! I told these guys, (points at Peavy and Victor talking with promoters in the other end of the room) “Take the fucking thing down, just take it down!” But sometimes they like to read it, because some people write, “Oh, you did a really good show!” (imitates the sound of kissing) I don’t care, I don’t need this. When I was a kid, I used to go to concerts, and I saw the show. I remember the first time I saw AC/DC, they opened up for Aerosmith in 1976. I went out the next day and bought the record. That’s my vote of approval, that’s how it should be, but things don’t work that way anymore.

At the same time, when someone’s telling you that everyone’s downloading and no one’s buying the CDs – for god’s sake! I was in a Saturn music store in Germany a couple of days ago, and I couldn’t even get near the CDs and DVDs, there’s people everywhere buying the stuff. People do buy the stuff, I don’t know what’s going on. When people are saying, “They don’t have money, they’re not buying CDs,” it’s bullshit. I think everyone’s flipping out over nothing.

But I also do think that technology is fucking things up a little bit. For instance, I get a people handing me CDs with finished artwork in a jewel case and everything, and they’re like, “Check this out! It’s actually a live rehearsal recorded with one microphone through my bass player’s ass, that’s why it’s somewhat muddy-sounding.” I’m like, “Finished artwork, credits, special thanks, a jewel case – for your fucking practice? Get outta here! Why put this on a CD? This belongs on a cassette tape, maybe not even there.” But that’s the problem – everyone is in the band, everyone’s got a demo, everyone’s got a video, everyone’s got a website. It wasn’t like that when I was a kid in the 1970s. If you wanted to make a record, you had to be good.

And you had to work for several years before you got a contract. It wasn’t like you recorded one demo and got a deal the next minute.

Do you know this guy called Billy Sheehan? (He played bass in Mr. Big and for David Lee Roth, among others – ed.) He’s from my hometown, he’s from New York. I watched this guy play in my high school. Billy Sheehan’s probably done more gigs in a month than most of these clown bands you see on MTV do in a year. I literally watched this guy evolve with his band called Talas. That band was together for almost 15 years, and then they got a record deal. That’s the way it was, and that’s the way it should be, I think. The problem is that you go and see new bands come out now, and I put it in a CD player, and it sounds like Helloween. Then there’s another band that sounds like Judas Priest. And I’m like, “So?! Where is something interesting?” For me, I like the new Slipknot record, I think this is interesting. I like Korn and a lot of this nu metal, but this is metal, this is interesting, this is fresh stuff. I like the new Green Day record, I like Blink 182. I like metal, I like pop rock, I like things that are kind of evolving. this point the promoter steps in and tells us to cut the conversation down, because the doors are opening in 10 minutes)

then one last question. It’s known that many drummers suffer from so-called professional diseases, such as arthritis or hearing problems. What do you do or what should be done not to cause such damages to your health?

In my particular case, it’s pretty much too late. My ears are ringing right now. It’s funny – I have a new girlfriend, and a female voice is very difficult for me to hear. I’m always like, “What? What?” I can’t hear her. And she’s very patient, she always answers back and repeats herself. Yeah, I’m losing my hearing, and as I get older, it’s getting worse. For young drummers, you gotta use earplugs and headphones and try to wear some ear protection live. But for me, it’s almost too late.

Special thanks to Eugene Silin (Alive Concerts) for arranging this interview.

Roman Patrashov, Natalie Khorina
April 3, 2005
20 май 2005 the End


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Mike Terrana

Nothing But The Truth

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