Riot
Mortal Souls

18.05.2012

The news that Riot was coming back with the line-up that recorded fantastic albums “Thundersteel” and “The Privilege Of Power” in the late 1980s, caused a stir in the metal community back in 2008. However it took the band nearly three years to settle all disagreements and come up with a new album. Over that period Riot went through several ups and downs, with singer Tony Moore leaving the band and then coming back to the fold. Thus, “Immortal Soul” (2011) was a pretty painstaking effort. Sometimes it seemed that the album would never come out. And shortly after it finally did, becoming Riot’s best effort in many years, the world got shocked by the news of the band’s mainman, Mark Reale, becoming seriously ill and then ultimately passing. However, when we spoke to Tony Moore by phone, Mark’s condition had not yet deteriorated, and Tony was full of hopes and excited to talk about the band’s ambitions …

Recently you went through a dental surgery. How do you feel at the moment?

During the initial examination, my doctor gave me a puzzled look and then asked the question that put fear in my heart, “Are you in a lot of pain?” I was then informed that I would be if this procedure was not performed. They said I had to have a surgery right away. I asked them if I can wait because we were supposed to go on tour in Europe, and they said, “No, because something bad will happen in Europe and you’ll have to cancel”. So I ended up having a surgery – they had to do a bone graft and remove part of my jaw and put new bon tissue in there. It meant that the healing process turned into months instead of weeks. And I wasn’t allowed to sing. I was in bed for a week, and I still can’t eat certain things. Of course, it was right at the time when I was supposed to start practicing to go out and tour with Hammerfall, and the doctor said, “You absolutely can’t do that”. (laughs) We were hoping to try and do half of European shows like the last ten shows and maybe do a less difficult set but in the end everybody decided that there’s no point going out unless everybody is at 100%. We were very upset about it but we thought that the smartest thing to do was just cancel rather than go out and end up with emergency situation in Europe trying to find an oral surgeon – this was too crazy, so…

You mentioned the tour with Hammerfall which you were forced to cancel. So what are your nearest plans? Are you planning to do another tour?

Yes, it all will be fine in a few more weeks – the whole healing process takes about four months – but I can start singing again in a few weeks from now. We’re gonna do some shows in the United States in January, we’re gonna do this cruise, “70.000 Tons of Metal”, which will be fun, and Hammerfall are actually gonna be on that boat as well with the whole bunch of other bands. Then we’ll probably go in Japan and our management right now is working on when we’re gonna come to Europe next, we’re not sure. We’ll certainly do festivals in Europe next summer in June and July – all the big festivals starting with Sweden Rock. We’re probably gonna do some shows in Europe before then, we just don’t know when.

My next question is about bands like Hammerfall. Back in the 80’s Riot was a big name on the metal scene and for your die-hard fans it still is the name but what do you fell playing shows before Hammerfall and bands like that?

We have no problem with that because first of all they are really, really nice guys – I’ve been in touch with Joacim and I can’t wait to meet him. They are a terrific band and it’s a really, really good opportunity, so we have no problem playing before them. We respect each other, and it was going to be a good opportunity to get us to Europe quickly. Unfortunately it didn’t work out. But yeah – we have no problem opening up for other bands who are doing some other stuff.

Let’s speak about your latest album “Immortal Soul”. Can you tell me about the working process? Was it difficult to work with Mark, Don (Van Stavern, bass), Mike (Flintz, guitar) and Bobby (Jarzombek, drums) once again after all these years?

No, not at all! We went back to the exact same formula which we used on “The Privilege Of Power” - those guys got together and wrote all the riffs and all the heavy licks and the music and the arrangements, and they would sending me Mp3s and I would just start working on the lyrics and the melodies and the vocal arrangements. This time around, because the technological changes in recording over the last 20 years have been so dramatic, we were never all in the same room at the same time, we recorded the album in five studios in three different cities. Bobby and Don were going to a studio in Texas, in the central part of the U.S. They laid down the drum and bass tracks and they would send those to us in New York. Mark and Mike would add some rhythm guitars and see if this was enough. The arrangements were done as soon as there was enough tracks on there for me to hear what the song was about. I’m in Los Angeles, so I would take the stuff to the studio and start doing vocal demos, writing and sending them Mp3s. We just kept sending stuff back and fourth until we were all happy with it. I did some recording in New York, I did a lot of vocal recording here in California, but, like I said, the whole thing was recorded in so many different studios and then we just sent the music files back to our main engineer – Bruno (Ravel) from Danger Danger in New York, and it was his job – and a huge job! – to put them all together and start mixing the stuff. The writing process was a little more difficult for me personally this time but in terms of the overall process was exactly the same as if it were 20 years ago.

I heard some new tracks like “Still Your Man” or “Sins Of Your Father” and I must admit that they are really amazing! How could you describe the rest of the songs?

Of course we wanted to go back to our strong points which is the heavy and really fast, really technical kind of stuff that Don likes to write. It was a really fun process and I think the music demonstrates it. First of all, all the guys like Don and Mike and Bobby are playing even better than they were 20 years ago. Everybody has grown and matured as an artist. On the one hand, we were doing a lot of stuff that sounds like it came right after “The Privilege Of Power”. But there is another element to it, particularly with me - my voice has changed considerably over the years. Everybody has been through 20 years of life and it changes the way you play, it changes the way you think. I think all the other songs - first of all, it sounds like us, it sounds like the “Thundersteel” line-up, but it’s that plus everything that we’ve been through in 20 years: maturing as people. We are not kids anymore, we have lives and families and life habits, too. I think the album has enough of the old feeling and certainly the energy, but it also has been written by much more matured artists.

Can you comment on the lyrics for the song “Still Your Man”? Is it about you personally and the fact that you still good enough for Riot? Or is it about the band in general?

(laughs) When they first sent me the music, a sort of the working title was “Johnny II” because it has the same sort of feeling as “Johnny’s Back” (a song from “Thundersteel”; Johnny is the Riot mascot that appears on many of their covers – ed.). But I thought, “I can’t write “Johnny’s Back” number two, let me try something else”. I wrote that song three or four different times and I hated everything. Finally I was having so much trouble with it, and I was talking to Mike, and I said: “Mike, what do I do with that song? I don’t know. I’ve been trying not to write “Johnny II” He said, “OK, why don’t you just try to write “Johnny II”. I said, “Ok, I’ve tried everything else, what the hell?” So that’s what I did. I went straight back to that story and wrote the sequel, and it came really naturally. After a couple of demos, I said, “Yeah! This is gonna work!”

Can you also comment on the opener track “Riot”? Do you believe it’s the right time for revolution or something like that?

(Without any doubts) Yes, I do. This country, the United States, is in a very very dangerous place right now. Our political climate is terrible, our democracy is broken. The government no longer has any regard for the well-being of the American people. This is something that has been echoed around the world. It happened in the Middle East with the Arab Spring, it’s happening in Europe. People feel abandoned by their leaders, and right now I am - and so many people in this country - are completely disgusted and feel betrayed by our government. We have people in Washington whom we are used to dismiss as fringe elements, but now they are in power -  I don’t know if you heard about these people called “ The Tea Party” in American Congress. They are controlling the American democracy right now and they have brought it to a complete halt. They are willing to let the economy collapse before they will do anything for the good of the American people because all they wanna do is defeat President Obama. They will vote against their own ideas. If our Democratic Party wants something for the good of the American people, and the Republican party, even if they think it’s a good idea, they will stand and vote against it just so that Obama loses, and they don’t care about the people of the United States anymore. That’s why we have this phenomenon called “Occupy Wall Street” where people are have gone and camped out in front of the offices of the banks who have wrecked the world economy and are demanding to be heard. I think it’s long past time for the American people to realize that we’ve been sold, we’ve been abandoned and our government is bankrupt. The George Bush government set this all in motion by starting two useless wars. We are sending our children to die in Afghanistan and Iraq for nothing, it’s accomplished nothing. That was all just a scheme so that Vice President Dick Cheney’s company Halliburton could make money on war contracts. People don’t see it, half of this country really believes the propaganda. The message of the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters is that 99% of the people in this country, who are the ones who generate all the money, are the ones who have lost their jobs, while the one percent who are the owners of corporations are making record profits, and they have put millions and millions people out of work. They’ve sent jobs overseas, they’ve abandoned the American worker, they’ve abandoned the American family and now the registered 400 families in the United States control more wealth than the bottom 50 million people in the United States. And yes, I’m saying that it’s time for a revolution.

You did the cover artwork for the album. Why did you decide to do it by yourself and not to hire an artist?

Because that’s what I do professionally. Since “The Privilege Of Power” I went back to school for graphics, you know, for Macintosh graphics. I studied art at college. I’ve been doing Photoshop for a living for 15 years. Actually Don had an idea for the cover and sent me kind of a sketch and I decided to illustrate the whole thing myself , that’s something I really enjoy doing and that’s a lot of fun.

Can I ask you a couple of questions about your departure from Riot in late 2009?

Sure! When we first got back together we did Sweden Rock, we did Spain, we went to Japan, and it was a lot of fun. We sort of had some disagreements about how to proceed in the future. I thought for a while that because I’ve been out of the scene for so long, maybe this was not for me anymore, and I said, “Guys, I don’t know, maybe you should find somebody younger who can really do this”. They said, “Yeah, OK, maybe we will”. Then we thought about it, and it occurred to us that there was no point in doing this unless it was all five of us. The talk of an actual break-up wasn’t really quite accurate, we were all just taking a little time to try and figure out what to do, but we all agreed that the reason that anyone was interested at all was because it was all the five of the guys who did those two studio albums. We just all got back together and said, “Yeah, OK. What were we thinking? We have to do this”. (laughs)

After your departure you said that you were going to work on the second album of your own project Faith And Fire. What happened to this project? Did you use any of those ideas on the “Immortal Soul” album?

No. As soon as we decided to get Riot back together, Mike (Mike Flintz was also a member of Faith And Fire – ed.) and I knew that we had to devote all of our time to Riot. I hadn’t written anything yet, all the stuff that I wrote was strictly for “Immortal Soul”.

Don’t you want to release a live album? In 1992 Riot put out “Riot - Live In Japan” but it doesn’t sound that great. Don’t you want to capture the magic of this line-up once again?

The interesting thing about that live album is in that the band had nothing to do with it. Our producer had come to our second Japanese tour and he brought a DAT recorder, in old fashion, and took a recording straight from the mixing console. He didn’t tell us, and we had no idea that he recorded the entire show. Then he brought it back to the studio, added some reverb and made a deal on his own with a Japanese label to release it. The band had no idea and it was without our knowledge, without our consent, we had nothing to do with it. I’ve found it by chance in record stores several years later and yes, it sounds terrible. You can tell that performances are good but the sound is very poor quality. It was essentially our producer who created a bootleg of us and released it for his own personal gain. The band had no knowledge of it, we would not have consented to it. and we certainly never made any money from it. So yeah, we actually recorded the entire Sweden Rock show back in 2009 and the album will have bonus live tracks. There will be two of them, plus the Japanese release will have another one. What we are planning to do - since they also did a professional video shot of the entire show, we’re gonna do a DVD with some live footage and an entire pretty substantial portion of the live show.

By the way, which songs from early Riot albums do you enjoy singing?

I enjoy singing them all… Let me put it this way – I love it when they’re over, if I hit all the notes. (laughs) The stuff is so hard, but it’s so exciting! I love singing that stuff, there’s so much energy. I’m older now, but I can still hit the notes. I still love singing “Thundersteel”, I love singing “Dance Of Death”, “Storming The Gates Of Hell”, all that stuff. It’s incredibly difficult, but when my voice is on, it’s so exciting. I love doing that stuff.

And what about the albums before you joined the band, such as “Narita” or “Rock City”?

Yeah, I love doing “Swords and Tequila”, “Outlaw”, stuff from those days, first of all, because it’s a lot easier! (laughs) Those songs are just kind of fun straight-ahead rock’n’roll songs, it’s a nice break from the really super-technical “Thundersteel” and “Privilege of Power” stuff. The crowd likes it, it’s fun to sing, it’s just a nice break in the show for me to relax and have fun as a songer.

If you don’t mind let’s speak about your earlier career. As far as I know before you joined Riot for the very first time you were a bass player and did session work for jazz bands…

That’s true, I was just a working bass player in New York.

Why did you decide to become a proper singer and stop playing bass?

Well, I never stopped, I still play it, but I was asked to audition for Riot by a good friend of mine, Dave Harrington, who was a studio manager at Greene Street where Riot recorded everything. He knew they were looking for a singer, he knew I liked hard rock kind of stuff, he knew my voice, so he gave me a cassette and said, “Listen, I’ve arranged an audition for you with this band, I know you can sing this kind of stuff”. I said, “Right, let me check it out”. This was in 1985, I took the cassette home, I still don’t know who the singer was, and I nearly wet my pants! I said, “Oh, my God! I don’t know if I can do this”. So I went to my voice teacher – I was studying opera at that time – and I said, “Catherine, what do we do with this song? I have to audition.” We worked on trying to help me navigate the range above the tenor range, the very high register. We developed the mechanics of singing, so that I could do it. Then I went in to the audition, and to be honest, I thought that I didn’t do a very good job. I just went to the studio and sang along with the tracks. But I guess Mark heard enough, he liked the quality of my voice, he knew that I could hit the notes even though I was struggling a little bit with how fast everything was. I sung high stuff when I was a kid, stuff like Deep Purple, Boston, stuff by lots of great singers who could hit really high notes, and I could do it, but I never had to sing anything that fast that was that high the whole time. It was crazy! But I learned how to do it. Essentially I learned while we were recording “Thundersteel”, I developed that whole technique.

Was your jazz experience a reason to invite the horn section of Tower Of Power for making the album “The Privilege Of Power”? Was it your idea or Mark’s idea?

That was actually the idea of our producer, Steve Loeb. Steve and I were very close friends at that time and had similar musical tastes. When I played bass in college, I played in a Tower Of Power cover band and I knew every note of all their songs. So when those guys came to the studio, it was like I’d died and gone to heaven, I couldn’t believe it, they were my heroes. They were in New York, I think they were doing “The Tonight Show” or “The David Letterman Show”, one of those late night TV shows, and they wrote the horn arrangement for “Killer” in a taxi on the way to the studio. When I walked into the studio and all those guys, my heroes, were sitting there, I just couldn’t believe it. And then when they brought in the Brecker brothers to do “On Your Knees”… These guys are my heroes, I studied this kind of music, jazz rock / fusion music, in college as a bass player. It was amazing!

“The Privilege Of Power” shows your negative attitude towards mass media. What do you think about the role of the Internet nowadays?

Hm, I’m not sure why you would think this. There’s someone who has asked me a similar question. Before I answer, let me ask you what song gives you this impression.

First of all, it’s the cover artwork, and some elements of “On Your Knees”. This gives me the impression that the album is intended against the way how mass media control the people.

That was actually not my intention. Maybe on “The Privilege Of Power” you might have got the idea from a lot of the stuff that’s in between the songs, but... Yeah, I have to accept that mass media have its negative elements in terms of their effect on the society, but I wasn’t really trying to communicate that in particular. I think that came more from the cover art, which I didn’t have anything to do with, and from the stuff that was added in between the songs, which the band had nothing to do with. That was all our producer Steve Loeb, we still don’t understand what any of that stuff is. If it were up to us, we would have released the album without it. While I may have certain opinions about the media, I wasn’t trying to express them in the songs. I’m still a little confused as to why people kept up on that, but I guess it’s a more common question that I thought.

I think the Internet is a very important tool for social change, and I embrace it, I think social media is a good thing. I think the popular entertainment always will have a base element that’s not artistic and may even be detrimental to the society’s progress, but that’s not something I was trying to communicate.

This album contains an absolutely amazing song called “Dance Of Death”. What influenced you to write these lyrics?

Let me think about it… (pause) Oh, I remember! That song was written about the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. Back in the 70s and 80s there was a huge ethnic cleansing, and the song was about a village that was destroyed during this terrible purge. It was just something that was in the news while we were writing, and I had read the story about some soldiers who were there during that horrible time in Cambodia.

What did you do right after your departure from Riot? It took you a lot of time to come back with Faith And Fire.

I didn’t do much, I sort of disappeared from the whole scene. I went back to being a working bass player in New Work. I tried to write some hard rock stuff, I tried to get some stuff recorded, but really couldn’t get a deal, so I just sort of fell out of it. Then I went back to school for computer graphics and started doing work. I kept playing music on the side, but I wasn’t a working musician anymore. We were talking about a Riot reunion right before Faith And Fire, but it didn’t really come about, but it put Mike and I back in touch, and we started working with Danny Miranda and John Miceli, who are great guys, and we became really good friends. We had so much fun writing that stuff, it was just a labor of love, it was something that we wanted to do, we had so much creative freedom. I think there are some really great moments on that album, there are some spots that are a little rough, some production values I’m not happy with. But some of the songs are just great, especially the stuff that Danny wrote. That was really fun, we just did that for ourselves.

In the lyrics for Faith And Fire songs “Ready” or “Radio Superstar” you express your opinion very clearly and it’s very different to what other bands do nowadays. Do you believe you can change anything singing your songs or is it just a way to express yourself?

That is a very good question. Yes, I do think that music can change things, because I grew up in the 1960s, in a time when popular music was very closely linked with extreme social change. When I did “Radio Superstar”, I was reacting to the fact that radio in the United States is dead. There are still radio stations, but in terms of rock, they’re all owned by conglomerates. You can go from one end of this country to another and keep changing stations, and you will hear the same 100 songs that everybody else is playing. Radio DJs used to be able to play stuff according to their musical tastes, now it’s all completely programmed by the corporations. Yes, I think that music can be a very important part of social change, it helps people unite around simple ideas, which is why, as we were speaking about earlier, I wrote “Riot. Yes, I have no problem expressing my opinion because theoretically we have free speech in this country, and that being the case, I’m gonna take advantage of it. I hope to associate Riot in particular with some of the people who are trying to make change happen in this country.

Many years ago Mike Flintz saved your life – can you tell me exactly what happened to you?

(cracks) It’s true, it’s 100 percent true! We were doing the second U.S. tour for “The Privilege Of Power”, we had no money, we had no tour support, it was a terrible tour. We would show up at clubs who weren’t even sure if we were coming, because the record label hadn’t done any promotion. We were broke, we were angry. Towards the end of the tour, when we were heading back home, we all got really drunk. We were in a truck stop, in a big restaurant somewhere in the middle of the country, I don’t even remember where it was. We were eating, and I was really drunk. I laughed, and I inhaled a piece of food, and I was choking. I knew that I only had a very short time before I lost consciousness. Mike was sitting next to me, and I stood up, I grabbed him, and I pointed to my throat. I grabbed his hands and put them around my waist asking him to do a Heimlich maneuver, which he did, and I was fine. But if Mike hadn’t done it, I probably wouldn’t be here right now.

Do you know anything about your fans in Russia, about your popularity in Russia?

No, I don’t. Really even with the Internet there’s a language barrier here. I didn’t even know that people knew of us in Russia.

Your fans are not numerous, but they are very dedicated, and we would love to see you in Moscow or St. Petersburg!

That would be amazing! I love to travel, and I’ve been to many of the world’s most beautiful cities, but that would be a dream come true.

Then please say a few words for your Russian fans.

Well, first of all, thank you! This is what I say to all our fans – thank you so much for believing in us for so long. Without the support of fans like you for the last 20 years we literally would not exist… My God, this is very moving for me to know that I’m speaking to fans in Russia. I love Russian art, I love Russian literature, and it’s affected my whole life as an artist. Thank you for believing in us, and I really hope that we can come and visit soon.  

Riot on MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/officialriotnyc

Special thanks to Maxim Bylkin (Soyuz Music) for arranging this interview

Konstantin “Hirax” Chilikin
October 19, 2011
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