Ho ho ho. Have you been a good child? Because this month Santa is bringing you a sack full of mini-festivals that have Christmasy names like "Holiday Hootenanny." The best of these cold-weather fests is tomorrow. The level of credibility for the bands runs the gamut from high indie-cred bands like Helmet to the inconceivable headliners, Deep Purple.
"We're playing with Deep Purple?" asked a stunned John Stanier, drummer for Helmet, in a telephone interview with The Michigan Daily. The nearly flat tone of the question underlined his complete shock at the fact. Moments before he had referred to the idea as "absurd. That's completely made up." But unless WRIF is pulling an extremely elaborate and expensive joke, it is true.
"I remember when I was in high school, (Deep Purple) had a record out in '85 or '86. That was like the big comeback record. It was horrible," Stanier reminisced. He has better feelings toward some others on the bill, though: "I bet Danzig is pretty funny. Underneath all that tough guy stuff, I bet he's kinda kooky."
Helmet has some pretty exciting things going on for themselves now. They've just been remixing their record again, and after two delays and an extra eight or nine months, their new album "Aftertaste" should be coming out in late February. Dave Sardy, who is in the band Barkmarket and has produced bands from Slayer to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, was at the sound board for "Aftertaste."
"(Sardy) pushed us. Made us do things we wouldn't normally do. He was kinda mean. So it was good," Stanier said about the album, recorded in Los Angeles at Capital Studios.
Stanier also spoke about the types of songs on the album. "Half the record is a natural progression for us, as far as a next record is concerned. The other half of it is pretty raw. There're some faster songs on it. More 'Strap it On'-ish kinda songs. It's a pretty cool thing, I think." "Strap It On" was Helmet's first album, a noisy and energetic affair on indie label Amphetamine Reptile. It was the album that instilled money lust in record companies and started a small war over acquiring the band. Interscope, the band's current label, is probably happy to hear about this return home.
Helmet has also experienced its second guitarist loss in as many albums. "Towards the end of our gigantic tour for the 'Betty' album, it just kind of fizzled out between us and Rob (Echeverria)," Stanier explained. "And we had a split. But it was a good split, I still talk to him all the time and hang out with him. ... And now we have Chris Traynor from Orange 9mm. And he's really cool. He's a really good player. He's exactly what we needed. He's really young. Really obnoxious." Traynor didn't come in until after the basic recording for "Aftertaste" was done, however, and doesn't appear on the record. The band had been invited to play the Olympics, so they asked Traynor to fill in on guitar.
"The funny thing about the Olympic show was that it was canceled at the last minute but it was on the same day as when the bomb went off that supposedly was at some concert. So that was really weird. I heard it in a cab at like four in the morning that night, just a little blurb like 'bomb goes off at rock concert at the Olympics' and it was the night we were supposed to have played there. ... I think it was a different stage than we were supposed to play. It's not like we missed multiple deaths. But that would have been kind of cool. I would have loved to have played the Olympics and gotten bombed. ... Maybe we could have caught the bomber, been heroes," he said with a laugh.
Well, Helmet are at least rock heroes. Go sample some "Aftertaste" and see for yourself.
These are the scary men of Helmet.