So back in the beginning, how did you get into metal in the first
place? You ended up moving from Oklahoma to L.A.
I grew up in Oklahoma. My best friend was a bass
player, and we’d work stuff up together. I don’t know if we were quite full-on
metal…we were maybe somewhere between Rush and Thin Lizzy and early Maiden, a
little bit more technical kind of stuff. We worked up a pretty good following,
and we’d written a ton of originals and opened for some big bands that came
through. I was like, "I want more." And everybody else said they wanted more,
but when it came time to move, I ended up being the only one. And Jody (Henry,
original Omen bassist) had actually played in a cover band with my brother. So
Jody actually went out to L.A. to be the rhythm guitarist, but I couldn’t find
a bass player that I was comfortable playing with. Basically, I don’t really
have a good time playing with a second guitar player, with the exception of my
son, who played exactly like me. I mean, sometimes I couldn’t tell whether it
was me playing the part or him playing the part, and I’d have to really
concentrate on which one of us was playing. But other than that, I think I have
a little bit of a different, distinct picking style, and it’s always been tough
for me, it’s always felt like a train wreck for me when I had a second guitar
player that I couldn’t really lock in tight with. So I couldn’t really find a bass
player, so I convinced Jody to play bass and went from there.
And Steve (Wittig, original Omen drummer) had gone out to L.A.
with you guys, too?
Yeah, Steve had been out there before and he went back
out there with us. I had played off and on with Steve from my learning days in
the cover bands in Oklahoma, five sets a night in the bars. I had played with
Steve several times, and he’d gone to L.A. for a while. He came back to
Oklahoma and said, "Man, you gotta go out there. All the bands play one-hour sets
and it’s all originals and you don’t have to play covers." And when we got
there and were trying to put something together, and Jody was going to be a
rhythm guitar player and we were looking for a bass player and looking for a
singer, and nothing was really clicking. There was a lot of straight-up rock
stuff going on there, Poison-type stuff, and I couldn’t really find players
that I thought were technical enough or good enough to do what we really wanted
to do. Then I got the invitation to join Savage Grace, so I did that. And while
I was working on that stuff, Steve had hooked up with some band that J.D. was
putting together, or they had been together for a while. They never really got
out of the garage, and they had some really good tunes too, it was a shame.
When I decided I was going to do my own thing, Steve told me he was playing
with this band and to come and hear them. J.D. was singing and he was perfect
for what we were doing, so we kind of stole him out of that band and went from
there.
You mentioned that you’d written some Omen tunes that were
actually performed by Savage Grace for a while...
Yeah, "Battle Cry" and "Die by the Blade" were both
Savage Grace songs for a while. Then I was asked if we could drop those songs
from the set, and that’s when I decided it was time for me to move on. And it
had been a struggle, because I had joined the band with the deal that I would
play half of the leads and get three or four songs each record. And I kept
writing songs and they kept getting turned down, and I kind of forced those two
songs in. We started playing them out and they were really going over well, and
so it got to where I needed to go back to what I originally started out to do.
 Well, Omen is a pretty different style from Savage Grace. When you
compare the Master of Disguise stuff to the Battle Cry stuff that
came out at the same time, it’s a very different sound.
It is a different sound, and me and Chris (Logue,
Savage Grace’s guitarist) didn’t really click as guitar players that well
together. I’m a very staccato, Randy Rhoads kind of player, and he was kind of
a Jimmy Page, "all over the place" kind of player. It just wasn’t really fun
for me.
Did you have a hand in writing anything on The Dominatress EP?
That was all pretty much written when I got there. I
think in "Fight for Your Life," I think I wrote the bridge for that song. They
were about halfway through that song when I joined, and I think if you listen
to the CD you can tell exactly the part I wrote, because it goes into a
distinctly different style of picking and everything.
Did you leave on bad terms? Did you still see those guys?
No no, I didn’t consider it bad terms. Me and Brian
East (Savage Grace’s bass player) were good friends until I left L.A. I mean,
it was time for me to move on, and I didn’t hold anything against anybody and I
hope they didn’t hold anything against me. It just got to the point where I
felt like I was being constricted and it was time for me to go do my thing.
I’m glad it happened. We got Omen out of it, and Savage Grace put
out a couple of good ones. For the metal fan in me, it’s the best thing that
could’ve happened.
Yeah, it was. I wanted to have my own band, but
[joining Savage Grace] it was an opportunity that I couldn’t turn down. And it
turned out good for me, because I met Brian Slagel (owner of Metal Blade
Records), and we hooked up and started hanging out. I told him about the two
songs that I had, and that Savage Grace didn’t want to play them anymore. He
was like, "I love those songs. Why don’t you put a band together?" So pretty
much, we had a deal before we had a full band together. So, no, I have no hard
feelings, I don’t have any hard feelings toward anybody I’ve played with. And
me and Brian East were friends for a long time. In fact, at a couple of Omen shows
in L.A., he got up and played bass on "Battle Cry" a couple of times, and it
was a blast.
Do you know what those Savage Grace guys are doing these days?
No, I haven’t talked to anybody. I know that a couple
of years ago some version of Savage Grace came through here, and I know Chris
was in it. I stopped by and said hi to him. I had a gig myself that night. So I
assume they’re still doing something. I know Brian hasn’t been in the band
forever, and he was the one who asked me to join the band and we were always
the tightest.
 So after Slagel told you to get a band together, you ended up on Metal
Massacre 5 with the song "Torture Me."
We went and grabbed J.D. out of that garage band and
wrote that song probably in one night’s rehearsal, rehearsed it a couple of
days and went in and recorded it. It was a pretty much a whirlwind from there
into the whole Battle Cry thing. I think from the time we
solidified the lineup to when we recorded was only about five weeks. I wish I
could write like that with that enthusiasm and that whirlwind kind of thing
again, but that probably happens once or twice in your lifetime...
Plus you have a lot more responsibilities now, so you can’t go 24
hours straight writing songs.
Exactly. I used to stay in the studio for days on end.
Now I have a wife and kid to take care of, and everybody in the band has kids.
You can’t really put in the kind of time that I could back at that point in my
life.
So Omen never actually demoed anything, really. Your demo was
actually on Metal Massacre 5.
Exactly right. We never demoed much of anything.
Did you get to do much touring after Battle Cry was
released? It sounds like everything happened very quickly.
We did a lot of short little shots. We went up the
West coast two or three different times, and we came across as far as Texas a
couple of times. We did some touring, but it wasn’t anything hardcore. We’d
shoot out for five or six days and nail some shows, and then whatever else we
could latch onto we’d go out again. I think probably with Warning of
Danger we started doing a little more touring. We did some stuff with
Metal Church, we did some stuff with Lizzy Borden. We were out with Motorhead a
couple of times, for short jaunts, not for the whole tours but for a few dates.
We played out a bit, not nearly as much as I would’ve liked to, but we played
with some very cool guys, some very fun shows.
 What are your favorite tunes off of Battle Cry?
Ahhhh, probably my three favorite songs off that
record are "Battle Cry," "Die by the Blade," and "In the Arena." I love that
song.
Do you play those live now?
We play "Battle Cry" full on, and we play "Die by the
Blade" as part of a medley of old stuff. We’re going to stick it on the new
record as a little treat, a bonus track for the old fans. It’s got "Make Me Your
King," "Dragon’s Breath," "Die by the Blade," and a little bit of "Nightmares."
It’s so much fun to play; it’s awesome to play it.
Was there any material left over after Battle Cry?
There was nothing, absolutely nothing.
So you had to start from scratch for the second record, Warning
of Danger?
Yeah, started from scratch. And it’s a little bit more
difficult to write every time, because you don’t want to repeat yourself, and
it’s not the super adrenaline rush like it originally was. You know, I still think
to this day, and I’ve always thought, that Warning was an
underrated record. I thought it was a really good record, and I never really
got that feeling from the label that the record was very successful. Then when
we started cranking the band back up again, and we got to Europe and I started
seeing all this stuff, "Warning is a great record" and charts of
magazines saying "What are your all-time favorite metal records?" and Warning
of Danger would be right up there in the Top 10. It really reiterated what
I thought. I just don’t think the timing was right, and when that record came
out, we didn’t really get to tour that much for it. I think that record
could’ve been and should’ve been a much bigger record for us than it was. And
actually I listened to it when we started getting ready to go to Europe. I came
home and I stuck it in because we had to figure out what songs we were going to
play off of it. Stuck the cassette in the tape player, just to listen to it
while I was going to sleep, and about halfway through it I jumped up and turned
on the light. I was thinking, "Damn! This is a really good record!"
 I completely agree that the album is underrated. Actually, in the
last issue of HMF, each writer turned in a review of five records we thought
were underrated, and I chose Warning of Danger because it just never got
out there as much as I thought it should.
You know, I don’t remember exactly what was going on
at the time, but we just didn’t really end up touring for it. I just don’t
remember there being that much push around it, and I kind of got the feeling
that the record wasn’t that well liked. And I knew at the time we were making
it [that it was a good record]. It may not have had the energy of Battle
Cry, but the playing was a lot tighter. We’d been playing together a
while, and it wasn’t quite so rushed, and I just thought it was a good record.
I did too!
Now when I listen to it, it’s easier for me to listen
to Warning than to Battle Cry, because Battle
Cry was really rushed and it sounds sloppy to me, it doesn’t sound
really tight. I can sit down and listen to Warning a lot easier
than Battle Cry.
But Battle Cry has that classic sound, though. It sounds
exactly like it’s supposed to sound.
Yeah, Battle Cry had that aura. And it
didn’t matter that it was recoded in four days, and it didn’t matter that we’d
only been playing together for four or five weeks. Like I said, there was just
this energy to it, and an excitement that kind of overshadowed everything that
was wrong with it. I know it’s a lot of people’s favorite record, and I’m
certainly not gonna knock that. Those are great songs.
And the deluxe gatefold vinyl LP is rather collectible in some
circles.
I think I still have two of the covers but I don’t
have the vinyl that goes in `em! [laughs] It’s pretty bad that I can never seem
to hang on to my own stuff. When we got ready to go to Europe, I had to go out
and buy the CDs so I could sit down and relearn the songs.
That’s harsh, though [laughs]...you could walk up to the record
counter and say, "This is my record. I’m on this!"
Actually, I didn’t have The Dominatress
either, the Savage Grace record. I saw it in a used record store and ended up
having to pay $15 for it! The guy wanted $30 for it, so I was like, "Dude! I
played on this record! Come on, cut me some slack, I don’t have a copy of it
anymore…" [laughs]
It’s amazing to me that guys from so many classic bands will say things
like, "Yeah, I don’t have my first record anymore."
Yeah, I moved around the country so much, moved here
and moved there, and I can guarantee that if you have a party at your house,
your stuff tends to disappear! [laughs] I just can’t seem to hang on to my own
stuff! I don’t think I have everything right now...
 So what were your favorite tunes off of Warning of Danger?
I love "Hell’s Gates." I’d love to do another song
like that. I’ve tried to write another song in that vein two or three different
times, but it’s such a feeling thing. There’s so much space in it, and you
really have to get the feeling of it. I just think that was an excellent song.
I love the title track too. Actually, John (J.D.) had written a song called
"Warning of Danger" with the band he was with right before I got him, but the
music wasn’t really that good. He played me the tape, so I took his melodies
and stuff and wrote new music to it, so that’s what happened with that. I
thought "Make Me Your King" was a cool song too.
I thought everything on there was cool.
Yeah, I thought so. "Ruby Eyes" was a good song...it was
just a good record.
What was the reason for the instrumental?
Well, I love doing instrumentals! If time
permits, I’m going to do one on the new record. Sometimes I just like to get
everything out of the way and stretch out and do some guitar playing, stack up
some harmonies, get some cool different feelings in…I just love doing
instrumentals.
I’m not even going to ask what the song title "V.B.P." stands for,
because I think I already know..."Vibrating Butt Plug"?
Yeah, it took people a long time to figure it out. We had a little contest after the record came out for somebody to
guess what it meant. Girls would call me up every day and say, "Does it mean
this? Does it mean that?" It took about three months before somebody finally
got it. It had nothing to do with the song whatsoever; it was just some
off-the-cuff remark.
Just something funny and cryptic, huh? You know that you’ve had
metal fans wondering for 16 years, saying "What the hell does V.B.P. stand for?"
It was kind of like, "Well, what the hell are we
going to call this song?" Then "I don’t know...Vibrating Butt Plug!" [laughs] It
was an off-the-cuff remark that just stuck, you know. S.R.B. [instrumental
track on The Curse], on the other hand, did have a meaning behind
it.
That was about the Space Shuttle, correct?
Correct. I dreamed that the thing blew up the night
before it actually blew up.
That’s eerie.
Yeah, it was really eerie. We were on tour with Metal
Church at the time, and we were down in south Texas. I think we played in San
Antonio, and that night I dreamed that the Space Shuttle blew up. It wasn’t the
exact same scenario, but I dreamed that it blew up. And then we went on down to
play Corpus Christi or someplace, and we were driving back out the next day
when the news came on the radio, and I literally ran the truck of the road. I
was driving the equipment truck at the time, and I just had to stop. It tripped
me out really hard, so that song was kind of dedicated to that event.
 What do the initials actually stand for?
Shuttle Rocket Booster.
So did you take your freaked-out feelings afterward and write the
instrumental, or did you already have the tune and you just gave it the name?
No, I wrote the song afterwards.
So the song was inspired by and then dedicated to...
Correct. That’s not something that’s happened to me a
bunch of times in my life, to have some sort of premonition like that. Forgive
the pun! [laughs]
To me there’s a pretty big jump, in terms of sonic quality and the
amount of time spent, between Warning of Danger and The Curse. The
Curse is really clean, and it feels like you were able to spend longer on
the record.
Yeah, like I said, Battle Cry was a
rushed record. Warning of Danger was probably about a two-week
record, and that was mostly done on nights and weekends because everybody in
the band was working then. For The Curse, I wasn’t working, so I
was able to totally concentrate on it. And we had a budget, what wouldn’t
really be considered by a major label as a "big" budget, but for us it was a
windfall budget. It was three or four times what we’d had to work with before.
We did everything on 48 tracks; we worked on it at Capitol Records and at a
bunch of really nice studios. I could get up in the morning and get to the
studio at 10 or 11 o’clock, play until 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning, then go
home and sleep. It wasn’t like having to play (only) at night, and a lot more
time was spent on it. As far as quality of the recording, The Curse
is by far my favorite record. I mean, we spent more money for the drums on The
Curse than we did on the whole Reopening the Gates
record!
Wow, that kind of puts it all in perspective.
It was just a lot of fun for me, because I’d always
been pinched [with budgets]…we’d done stuff on 24 tracks, we’d done it in a
hurry. There were a lot of guitar things, ideas and stuff, and vocal harmony
ideas that I wanted to work on that we just didn’t have the time or tracks for.
It [recording The Curse] was a very enjoyable
experience for me.
And I’m sure it’s more satisfying when you can hear something on
tape that sounds like what you hear in your head.
Exactly! And that record got the closest to what I was
hearing in my head, that one out of anything we had done. I think if we could
have had that kind of time and money to work with on Battle Cry,
there’s just no telling how great a record it would have been.
Well, I still believe that it sounds exactly like it’s supposed to
sound...
Yeah, to you, because that’s the way you’ve
always heard it. But to me, there was all this stuff that was like, "Oh,
that’s sloppy, but we don’t have time to mess with it..."
 Do you feel the temptation sometimes to tweak those tunes a little
bit? Say you’re playing "Battle Cry" in the live set now, do you feel tempted
to add in some of those little parts or ideas?
You know, I’m a big improvising live player and seldom
will ever play a song the same way twice. Not to say that I don’t pay homage to
what it’s supposed to be, but I’m always slipping little stuff in and out or
changing something a little. I’m more of an inspired player live. You’re not
going to come to an Omen show and just hear the record. You’re gonna hear the
songs, but...[they might sound a little different] but you’re not gonna be like
"Hey what the hell is that part doing there?" Live, I’m much more of an
improviser, so if I’m really into it that night, I might slip some extra licks
in.
Oh, I love that, when a band kind of gives a song new life. It’s
much more interesting.
Right. If I want to hear the song perfectly, I’ll put
in the CD. Especially since most of the time I’ve been in a one-guitar-player band,
and in the recording process I like to stack some guitars up. It’s sometimes
hard to duplicate that live, so maybe you play something that’s a little bit
different, that adds something to the song. I love playing live; I love to
improvise. You know, most of my straight-out, non-multitracked solos on all the
records were one- or two-take things that I did off the cuff. I’ll sit down and
rehearse my rhythm tracks and rehearse the harmony parts I want to do, but I
never, ever rehearse a lead solo. Just play the tape a couple of times, let me
warm up to it, then hit the record button and see what comes out.
That’s almost a live feeling to the whole lead section.
Exactly.
Speaking of live recordings, you put the one live track on the Nightmares EP. It was the AC/DC cover.
Yeah, but that was "studio live," it wasn’t "live
live."
That's what I was going to ask: Are there any live Omen
recordings from that era?
No. There was one live recording from when we had
Coburn [Pharr, vocals] in the band, and the quality of it really sucked. I was
afraid it was going to get out, so I destroyed the tapes so it could never get
out. There was a radio station that was really big down in the Southwest,
Z-Rock, and we did a live concert with them and the tape from that sounded
really good. Nobody ever really ended up putting it out. I think Metal Blade
talked about it at one time, but it was a good recording and it was a good
energetic show.
So this was during the J.D. era or the Coburn era?
This was during the Coburn era. There’s no live stuff with J.D., unfortunately. I wish there was.
 So what was the reason for the EP? Was that toward the end of J.D.
and Steve’s tenure with the band, and it just worked out to be an EP?
Actually, the reason for the EP was that we didn’t get
to tour like we had wanted for The Curse. There was
some tour stuff coming up and The Curse had been
out for over a year, so we wanted to have some new material out. That thing was
done in about two days...we went into the studio, cut all the stuff in pretty much
one take, slapped some vocals on there, and mixed it. I’ll tell you what we
spent on that EP: $2,500 in recording costs.
What?! You’ve got to be kidding me!
Nope.
That’s got to be some sort of record for the quickest recording!
Well, we did it because we had waited to get some
stuff to tour for behind The Curse, and we weren’t
[doing any touring]. And then we got some tour stuff, and The Curse
was really old. We thought, "We probably need something new to be selling out
here." So we just threw that thing out. At that point, there were no plans to
change any members. Actually, the touring that we were doing after the EP came
out was unfortunately where the member changes started coming in.
Continued...
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