Flotsam And Jetsam
Metal Drumming is Where Progress is Being Made

31.08.2024

U.S. thrashers Flotsam and Jetsam have been a fixture of our interview section for the past few years. The reason is simple: they keep putting out great albums, and they have something interesting to share every time they put out an album. This time we got in touch with drummer Ken Mary, a relatively new person to the band, but a prominent contributor to the music and lyrics and a man with a storied prior career. Many of our readers might have seen him bashing the drums on the legendary “Nightmare Returns” video by Alice Cooper or heard him sessioning for Bonfire (“Fireworks”, 1987), House Of Lords or Impellitteri, while his own band Fifth Angel enjoys a cult status among the fans of 80s U.S. heavy metal and has recently made a comeback. It was not possible to cover Ken’s entire career in mere 30 minutes of a Zoom conversation, so we focused on Flotsam and Jetsam’s upcoming album “I Am The Weapon” (to be released in mid-September), but also addressed a few other interesting topics.

For the past decade or something, to me Flotsam And Jetsam seem to be getting more and more diverse and varied with each album. Is it something you do intentionally, or is it just the natural course of things for the band?

I’m not sure it’s really incredibly diverse. I mean, the band has always been pretty diverse over its career, and there’s definitely a lot of experimentation that’s gone on over the course of Flotsam’s career. In terms of what we’re doing, we don’t intentionally set out to be experimental, the only thing we set out to do, and we’ve always done this, and as a producer I’ve done this with many of the bands that I produce as well - I always tell them, “Work on music that moves you. Make sure that you make songs that are exciting to you, that you want to listen to”. Sometimes I’ve worked with bands in the past where they go like, “Well, we’re gonna have to record this song, we don’t really like it”.  And I’m like, “Wait! Time out! If you don’t like it, why should anybody else like it?” The only thing we really try to do with Flotsam is we try to make music that we really like, and if we really like it, then hopefully everybody else will like it too.

I remember Eric (Knutson, singer) saying in an interview a couple of years ago that the band wrote about 40 songs for “Blood In The Water” (2021), but ended up using only 12. Are there any older songs on “I Am The Weapon”, or did you scrap the leftovers and write completely new material?

We mostly scrapped everything. On the new record we have probably six songs that we really like that we didn’t get to include in this album. We’ll use those for the next record. I’m trying to think if there’s anything we have that was left over - I don’t think it was, I think this is all new material. For the next record we’ll see, because you never know what’s gonna happen when you start writing. We had a lot of songs to choose from for this album too. I don’t know if we had 40, but we probably had 25 or 30. We don’t know how many of those will make it. It depends on what’s exciting to you when you start the writing process, and a lot of times with us, if we’ve moved on from a song, we tend to just move on from it, we tend to not really think about it again. If we need something else, we just tend to write more material. That’s sort of the way it works, I guess. We’ll see. I feel like we have half of the material for the next record, we had some great songs that we didn’t have time to include on this album. Those are sitting there, maybe we’ll use them next time, who knows, or maybe we won’t. (laughs)

How much do you contribute as a songwriter to Flotsam and Jetsam? Does your input change from album to album?

It’s kind of been pretty similar on all these records. In terms of production I’m probably the main guy that assembles everything and sort of determines what’s needed, and if something is at the level that we need to redo it, and that kind of thing. As for the production reins, I’m pretty tied into that process. When something is right or not right, I kind of know. Well, we all kind of know. That’s the interesting thing about Flotsam - everybody in the band is very experienced. These aren’t younger musicians that haven’t done records before, everybody has done a lot of records, and everybody has a good sense of when something is right, and when something is wrong. As far as the songwriting, I’ve definitely had some great input in the songwriting, I feel like my contributions are very valuable and helping Flotsam, and I think everybody’s contributions are really valuable. If you look at the current line-up, there’s definitely, in my opinion, a great chemistry that makes it very easy to write with these musicians. The process is very quick, and it’s a very painless process. I’ve been in bands where it’s very difficult to get things written that everybody likes and is excited about. In Flotsam, there’s a lot of material that gets written, and a lot of exciting material. It seems like it’s a really easy process. I do feel like I’ve made very valuable contribution in terms of what we’ve been doing on the last three records. I don’t think it’s really changed all that much, it’s a very similar process, I think, for the last three records.  

Why did you call the new album “I Am The Weapon”? I know there’s a song with that name on the album, but is there any specific meaning that you attach to this title?

We actually looked at the last three titles - “Blood In The Water”, “The End Of Chaos”, and “I Am The Weapon”, and when you say all those together, it speaks. “I Am The Weapon” is the song title that I came up with, that was the song that Steve (Conley, guitar) and I did, he wrote the music, and I wrote most of the melody and lyrics. What happened was that when we were picking the title of the album, we were on tour, and we were telling our road crew some of the titles of the songs. We were originally gonna call the album “Black Wings”, and somehow this title didn’t really seem to speak to people. That’s another great song on this album, “Black Wings” is another great track, and we were gonna call the album “Black Wings”, but it’s harder to describe what “black wings” means to anybody. And “I Am The Weapon” in conjunction with Flotzilla (the band's mascot appearing on many of their cover artworks - ed.) - it’s like he is the weapon. We felt like it was a cool title, and our road crew, when they heard the song title “I Am The Weapon”, they were like, “Oh man that’s cool, that’s gonna be the title!” Also a friend of mine that works at another label - I don’t wanna say what label and what his name is, he is one of the main guys at another major record company in Europe - when he heard the song title “I Am The Weapon”, he was like, “Man that’s a great title, I love that title!” Thanks to the energy of everybody that heard that title and were saying, “Wow, that’s a great title”, we decided to name the album “I Am The Weapon”.   

The title track features some intense, almost death metal-like drumming in the intro. Where do such influences come from? Are you personally into more extreme metal genres than what Flotsam and Jetsam are playing? Do you listen to death metal or black metal, for example?

I listen a little bit. I actually am a big proponent of metal drumming, and even death metal drumming, because that’s where the cutting edge is in music in terms of drumming. If you look at drumming over the last 20 years, if you look at prog music, jazz, pop, fusion, obviously rap and hip hop, if you look at different styles, drumming has stayed the same. It’s at the same level that it’s always been at. But if you look at metal… I started in metal back in the late 80s, when I was touring with artists like Alice Cooper, or Fifth Angel, or House Of Lords, and if you look at where metal drumming was back then, and you look at where metal drumming is now, it’s leaps and bounds. Metal drumming has gone hugely into the future. I do think that metal drumming is where progress is being made. There’s not a lot of progress in other drumming. And I’m a drummer that loves to push the envelope, I wanna always be better, I wanna be better than what I am, I wanna play faster, I wanna play more intense stuff, I wanna do different time signatures, I wanna always be growing and changing and getting better every time I play or every time I do a record. For me metal drumming is where the cutting edge is.

How do you choose songs for your setlists? It must be a nightmare when you have 15 full-length records…

Well, you’re right, it is kind of a nightmare. Obviously there’s certain Flotsam songs that the audience has to hear: “Dreams Of Death”, “I Live You Die”, “Hammerhead”. These are songs that have millions and millions of streams. There’s certain songs that we have to play, that’s just the way it is. And then there’s other songs where we can kind of choose - “OK, we’re gonna play “Primal”, or we’re gonna play “I Am The Weapon”, or we’re gonna play “Blood In The Water”, or whatever. It is difficult, and you do have to make choices. What we do a lot of times now is we look and see which songs have the most activity on streaming services on YouTube, the most fan interaction, and we try to play the songs that are actually impacting people the most. That’s what we try to do with our live setlist.

Flotsam and Jetsam haven’t had a live album or a live DVD for about 20 years. Don’t you think that it’s time to do anything like that especially as you’re playing live a lot?

I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s that necessary, and the reason is that there’s so much live footage online. Everybody’s recording a concert on their phone, and a lot of time they post clips online - on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and all these different formats. In the old days, in the 70s, 80s, and even 90s a live album would be something that would have a unique energy to it, that would be something unique and different. I’m not so sure that really holds as much today, because if you look up Flotsam on YouTube, you can find all kinds of live performance clips. It would be nice to do something that actually sounds really good, where we could be mixed, and mixed properly, so it’s a cool idea, but I don’t know how people would respond to it. Maybe they will respond very well, I don’t know.  

There were reports on the internet that some Flotsam and Jetsam shows in 2021 were canceled because somebody in the band was not vaccinated. Was that indeed the case, or did the media get it wrong?

There was only one show that we’ve ever canceled due to non-vaccination. That wasn’t because all the guys weren’t vaccinated. There was a club in San Francisco that required everyone - the crew, the band, everybody had to be vaccinated, and they hadn’t told us that until a week before the show. We canceled that show to be honoring what their requirements were. We have since played there, so everything’s fine. I think people were a little wacky about the whole “vaccinated” thing, they really went nuts on that, and it didn’t help anybody, everybody that got vaccinated still got it, so the stupid thing anyway. Everybody I know that was vaccinated got COVID, I got COVID three times, everybody got COVID. In our crew and our band, some people were vaccinated, and some people weren’t, and we said, “Well, we will abide by your wishes, we’re gonna cancel that show”. I think it was the right thing to do.

Apart from Flotsam and Jetsam, you are playing in several other bands, for example, Fifth Angel and Jack Russell’s Great White, and you also run your own studio. How do you manage to do so many things when there are just 24 hours a day? Is there a secret that you have?

Well, I will tell you this: there are times when it gets very tiring, when you’re doing a little too much. As far as the “secret”, I think the secret for me is that I love playing, and I love writing, and I love recording, and I love music, and I love listening to music, and I love fans and meeting fans and signing stuff… I love everything about the music business except for the business, the business end of it is not that much fun, but everything else - writing and recording and playing and performing and meeting fans - I love all of that stuff. To me it’s not work. Does that make sense?

I apologize, but my next question is about the business end of it. Flotsam and Jetsam are signed to AFM Records, while Fifth Angel are with Nuclear Blast, and Jack Russell’s Great White are with Cleopatra, if I’m not mistaken. Is there a significant difference in the way these bands treat their artists? Are you satisfied with what AFM are doing for Flotsam and Jetsam?

That’s a tough question. In terms of differences - yeah, every label is a slightly different machine, they might have more or less staff, they might have more or less money to invest in promotion. I think if you ask any musician on any label, “Is there anything more than your label could do?”, they’re gonna say “yeah”, a label could always do more. It’s a tough position when you’re the label, because people would have you endlessly work just on their record and nobody else’s, and that’s not very practical for a record company to do. Overall AFM has done a nice job for us, they’ve gotten the records out there, they’ve put some solid promotion into the records. Do we wish there’s more finance that could go into promotion? Of course, you always wish that there would be more money, more promotion, more people being reached with your music. But I feel the companies that you’ve mentioned do a very good job in general. We’re certainly happy to be affiliated with those labels.

You started in the state of Washington, and Fifth Angel is a Seattle-based band, while Flotsam and Jetsam are from Phoenix, AZ, and your studio is also in Phoenix. When and how did you end up moving to Arizona? And why not to Los Angeles or New York, for example?

Well, I did live in Los Angeles for quite a while, from 1987 to 1990. I was always on tour, and I’d be back, on tour and back, but I did live in Los Angeles, and I didn’t like some of the things that happened out there. At the time it was getting kind of violent, gangsta rap had taken off… I lived in a nice area called Toluca Lake, and there were people getting shot at, and car hijackings… I wanted to be somewhere that would be more relaxed, and Phoenix at that time had definitely a more relaxed vibe, a little bit more on the outskirts. Phoenix is about the same size as Los Angeles geographically, and it’s about half the people. I think we have about four to five million roughly in the whole Phoenix area, we’re the fifth largest city in the United States now. And it’s a beautiful place, the desert has its own kind of beauty. I always loved Phoenix when I was on tour, and it was close enough to L.A. so I could just fly in, do my studio work and fly out. That was the main reason why I moved to Phoenix, and I’ve been here for many many years now. The summer is a little but too much (laughs), the summer is a little too hot here, but other than that, it’s a wonderful place to live.

Being from Seattle, how did it happen that you haven’t played in any grunge bands? What do you think of grunge looking back at that movement?

The grunge movement… To be honest with you, I was not happy with how some of the artists and some of the bands behaved. First of all, I don’t insult or mock any other type of music. And with grunge, if was like - if you weren’t grunge, they hated you. Bands like Fifth Angel were laughed at, bands like Queensryche and even Metallica had a tough time in the United States during that era. They were making fun of Ozzy and Kiss and Iron Maiden. These are the bands that are still huge today, and all those bands are pretty much gone with the exception of Pearl Jam, who are still goning and selling out arenas. But all the main guys are dead - Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Kurt Cobain… I think they had a few great songs, but for the most part it was an era that didn’t last very long. The majority of the songs were not great, I think there’s a lot of very average material from that era that I wouldn’t listen to, but all that being said, there are some brilliant songs from that era as well.

As long as we’ve mentioned Fifth Angel a few times during this interview, what are the future plans for this band? Do you intend to continue writing and releasing albums with Fifth Angel?

I don’t know, that’s a hard thing to say. To be honest with you, we really felt like we’d made a great effort on the last album, “When Angels Kill” (2023). It was a double album, and it was a very long process, a lot of energy went into making that record. Maybe there’s gonna be a time when people go, “Hey, it’s time to make another one”, but that time hasn’t happened yet. I’m not really sure what the future is going to be. Really for any band it’s hard to say the future now because the difference is: years ago, when you’re 20 years old, you’ve got your whole career in front of you, you’ve got your whole life in front of you, and we’re not young people anymore. I’m not gonna day we’re old, but we’re older men, and we probably have less years in front of us than we do behind us now. I think we’ll just have to see if everybody has the drive to do something else. I think we’re very happy with the last album, we’ve been really with all of our albums, and that’s the main thing: if you can make music that you’re happy with, then I think you’ve done something special, and it will probably stand the test of time, and people will look back and go, “Oh yeah, those are great albums”. That’s what we want to do - we want to make albums that we feel have held up to standards of what the band was known for.

I hear that musicians, especially those who also do sound production or recording, find it difficult to listen to other people’s music just for enjoyment, because they tend to analyze everything they hear. Is it something that also happens to you, and if yes, what do you do about it?

That’s a really great question. Yes, there are times when it is very difficult to enjoy listening to music. I recently have discovered something that really works for me. I found a very old power amp from the 70s, Kenwood, and some old Infinity speakers. I remember when I was a kid, man, music used to sound so great, and as you get older, everybody’s listening to it on their earbuds, on their computer, on their phone, and it’s just not the same thing. I went back and I cleaned up the power amp, I cleaned out all the volume knobs and everything so that it doesn’t make noise when you turn it on, I hooked it to speakers and started playing a bunch of music, including Flotsam, and Fifth Angel, and even old stuff from the 70s: Van Halen, Pink Floyd, and all these types of artists - and it was amazing to me that when you hear it on a system that makes it sound fun to listen to, then I stopped analyzing the music. I started listening to the music for the fun of listening to the music, and I was listening to Rush and all these old bands, the stuff that had been done on analogue tape, and listening to some early recordings that I had done on analogue tape, and it was a really enjoyable process. I really love listening to the music that sounds really good. That’s one thing I think we’re missing today. Today we’re listening to everything on our phone, on our earbuds, on our computers, and it’s not the same thing. It does not sound anywhere near as good as a real power amp, real speakers, it’s a whole different animal.

For my last question, let’s come back to Flotsam and Jetsam. What shall we expect from the band in the immediate future apart from the new record?

Yes, the new record is coming out September 13th, which is Friday the 13th, we’re all gonna wear hockey masks for that. (everybody laughs) We’ve got two new singles out, we’ve got three more coming, we’ve got a new video that’s gonna be coming out near Wacken, because we’re playing in Wacken. We’re playing some festivals and some additional shows coming up, so that’s happening. As far as future music, I think we’ve got half of the next album done. We’ll see what’s going to transpire. As I said, nobody can see the future with these bands now, because we’re not kids anymore. We plan on doing it as long as we can, but as long as we can do it at a level that is what you would say the top level. I feel like our last records are really the best records, and as long as we can continue functioning at that level, I think we’ll function.

Flotsam and Jetsam on the Internet: https://www.flotstildeath.com/

Special thanks to Irina Ivanova (AFM Records) for arranging this interview

Interview by Roman Patrashov
Photos courtesy of AFM Records
June 27, 2024
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