Fozzy: Interview

In-person interview with Rich Ward, Sean Delson and Frank Fontsere of Fozzy

By Aniruddh "Andrew" Bansal

April 7th 2010, Club Nokia, Los Angeles CA

Andrew: A couple of things about the latest album 'Chasing The Grail' fascinate me. One is the balled 'Broken Soul' and the other is the 14-minute song 'Wormwood'. What were your thoughts when you went in to record those tracks?
Rich: We actually wrote and recorded those songs separately. That's what happens when I live two hours away from Sean and Sean lives eight hours away from Chris Jerico (laughs). We're so spread all over that basically what ends up happening is we'll write the skeletal structure of the songs and then mp3s get passed around. Everyone has their own home studios and everyone works on their little parts. Then Sean and I would go down to Florida to our studio where we've recorded all of Chris's vocals and Sean's bass. All the guitars and drums were done up in Atlanta. So it was a bit of a piece-together. It's part of the compromise of being in Fozzy. The main focus of our lives has been Stuck Mojo for 20 years, that's been our main band. And then Chris is a wrestler. So we really have to work hard at our Fozzy quality time. Schedules are hard to make things work together because you can imagine how hard it is to work around Chris's schedule. He's on the road five days a week and then he has a family at home. Sometimes he's gone for two to three weeks on overseas tours. So it's hard to make it work and you've just got to be willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done.
Sean: It's a formula that I think has evolved that works. We've done like six records now including the live record with the same formula. So we've got it down now. Just listen to how great this record sounds now, thanks to Rich's production mastery. It's a formula I think we should stick with.

Andrew: What is the reason for the long gap since the previous album 'All That Remains' [2005]?
Sean: I think we've been doing records in cycles, in stages, like we had the Duke record in 2005. Then we had 'All That Remains' come out and we had Stuck Mojo records. We toured the world for both those releases and then the cycle came around for a new Fozzy record. Here we are!
Rich: It is true that we probably would have done a Fozzy record sooner, but someone just has to say we are going to do it. It's kind of like, your favorite movie is in the movie theatre but you won't go see it unless someone just says, 'We need to go and see the movie'. That's the problem with having multiple projects. You get so caught up in the momentum of one that you need to be able to say, ok it's time to slow this down but one day you wake up and it's five years later because you've toured so much and worked on all these other projects. But we finally said that we have to make the time to do this Fozzy record, or it's never going to get done. 'All That Remains' took about seven months to write and record while 'Chasing The Grail' took nine months to write and record. In order to do it you have to able to put everything aside and prioritize it. That's what we did for Stuck Mojo. We put Fozzy aside and really worked on it. The other thing too is that Chris had twin daughters. So his family was growing, so not only did he have a crazy wrestling career, all of a sudden his family life is flourishing and becoming more complex. So we had so many things going and like I said, sometimes you just have to take the flag and say 'Time Out! We need to do this, and lets set the time aside for everyone and make a conscious effort to do it'.

Andrew: You [Rich] produced this album yourself. How did that whole process go and what difference do you think it makes when a band member is also the producer?
Rich: Because I recorded so many albums with other producers, I had the benefit of looking over Andy Sneap's shoulder for five or six albums. We've been close friends for years. Then we did Shinedown and a few other bands. It's a learning process like anything else. It's like when you pick up a guitar and learn to play it, there has to be somebody in your neighbourhood who can play good and you go like, 'How do you do that?' So I started learning and part of the process for Fozzy is, because we can't do a traditional album where we all get into a studio for a month and record, it's impossible to hire a producer. If I wanted to hire Andy Sneap to produce the new album, how would that be possible? It's not that I'm insecure about my producing abilities. It's just that I became the producer of the band based on necessity. It's like when Stuck Mojo first formed, the only bands I had ever played in were two-guitar bands and then I met these guys. We said ok let's do this really cool rap/rock/metal band. The other two guys in the band said, 'I don't want to have two guitar players!' I said I'm not a lead guitar player and it was like 'Oh you are now then!' Sometimes life is best when you are forced into it like the mama bird kicking the little baby out of the nest. That's the best way to say I'm going to do this. 'Have to' is a good thing in life. Otherwise we'd just sit in bed all day long, eat pizza and watch crap TV.
Sean: I think his production is the best really. I've watched him over these records. I've watched him work with Sneap and steal from all these guys he just mentioned! But you know it's a learning process. You can't do album after album year after year and not learn these things. One thing I always said about Rich is I don't know how he does it, but he sits in front of those amps and recording machines for 10 plus hours at a sitting. How can you stand it? You do it though, and just like anything you get better and better! This has been a great evolution. Objectively I've watched it over the past four or five years and I think it's a great achievement. It's just an amazing sounding record. I'm just throwing in the fact that I didn't really turn the bass up.
Rich: Which is the success of the record! It's the selling point of the album (laughs).

Andrew: I knew about your friendship with Andy [Sneap] and I was actually expecting to see his name in the production credits. But it's good that this worked out well for you guys.
Rich: Yeah. I talked to Andy yesterday on the phone for a while. We're going to the UK to do a tour in May and he's going to ride with us the whole time and come to play all of the encores on the guitar and stuff. Again, I feel kind of weird about it because we're such good friends. He was such a big part of my early music career, it feels weird not doing records with him but at the same time I think he recognizes that the music industry has changed so much. Record companies don't give big advances to make albums like they used to. If the band is going to make a living, you're going to decide. You're going to give every dime to the producer and everybody else makes nothing? In the old days the band made some money, the producer made some and everything was good. The advances are so small now because the sales are down, the downloading and a million other reasons. That's why Andy built his own studio. In the old days Andy would come to your studio. It's easier for him to make a living knowing that he has apartments there and bands come to stay there. We were just laughing about how awesome it is that Andy and I both worship Wolf Hoffman [Accept] who's one of our favorite guitar players of all time. Having Wolf stay at Andy's house, him getting a chance to record that is a dream come true. That's why we are a lot alike. We do it just because we love it.

Andrew: The band definitely gets attention because of the fact that Chris [Jerico, vocalist] is a wrestler. How good or bad do you think that is?
Rich: Sure man, it's a good thing. If you think about it, Marilyn Manson wears a Nazi outfit on stage, or check out Rob Zombie, he directs movies and stuff. Every band has something that somebody says. But if the band's no good, no one will care! So for me every band has a gimmick. Kurt Cobain had a gimmick. His was he didn't act like he cared. He looked dirty and was anti-cultured. That was his thing, but it still was a gimmick. Everybody does it. Lemmy has a gimmick. People are like, 'No, Lemmy doesn't have a gimmick!' Sure he does. He has the Jack Daniels, he doesn't cut the big tumours off his face, that's his gimmick! We all do it. We're in the music business. Even with your website, you can probably name five reasons why people should come to your website over other websites. That's your gimmick. But if your website is not good and there's not good content, no one will come back to it. For us, I don't care if people check out the band because they love Stuck Mojo or Chris Jerico. It all boils down to this. If the album's good, people will support it. If the album stinks, people will not.

Andrew: I see that you don't have any gigs coming up other than one in New York and four in the UK. Is the band planning a full tour to promote the album proper?
Sean: Well the album just got released and we played the first show for it not so long ago.
Rich: Yeah the album came out in January in the States but everywhere else just two weeks ago. It was a weird staggered release. We'd love to go and tour. But our singer happens to, you know. He'll probably take some time off for us to go and tour in the fall. We talked about it. He is not going to quit wrestling to play in a rock band, just like I'm not going to quite a rock band to go and be in wrestling. That's the beauty of Fozzy. There is no illusion. None of us have these ideas of how this band is going to be able to do nine months of touring around the world. We know what this band is. We make great albums and we play great shows. But we have to be creative on when to make those shows happen and we have to work around Chris's schedule. When we do, we have a lot of fun!

Andrew: Fozzy started out as more of a fun band, as 'Fozzy Osbourne' ...
Rich: And it will finish as a fun band, trust me! It never hadn't been fun. It was just that we didn't take it seriously. You would have never convinced us at our first gig that someone will come and say, 'Hey, we're going to give you 100,000 dollars to make an album'. To make covers? Why would anybody pay us money to make covers? Why would anybody go into the studio and hire Andy Sneap to do Iron Maiden covers? We thought that was just ridiculous. When it boiled down to it, we said ok we'll make the record but still at that point, Stuck Mojo was our band. This was just an avenue for us to have a good time and have fun with it. It wasn't until probably 'All That Remains' in 2005 that we said, may be there's something here. It wasn't like we didn't make a great effort on the albums. The albums sounded great, we played well and we put a lot of pride and energy and effort into those albums. The live shows were always great. But it's like you know when you've dated a girl for a long time but you never saw yourself having a relationship with her beyond the movies and dinner? All of a sudden, the light switches and says hey may be there's something there. Because of we never thought of the band as our main musical avenue or vehicle, it took so long for us to wrap our heads around the fact that this could be something that we could really look at as an equal to the rest of our bands. Ultimately, part of our hesitation was that we knew as musicians we want to be creatively satisfied but we also have to make a living. Our landlord doesn't go, 'Oh don't worry about it, you can stay here as long as you want'. On the first of every month, they need their money. So for us we knew that Chris's availability is going to be limited so we couldn't count on Fozzy to make a career. So it was always that tampering of having to know that we have to work outside of Fozzy to pay the bills. It's nice to be able to have a balance now. We have a few different projects that we can all be really creatively happy with and at the same time make a living.

Andrew: You've had guest musicians on your songs, like Jeff Waters and Mike Martin on this album. How does that actually come about and how do you decide on whom to pick?
Sean: A lot of the times we talk about who would be cool to have on the record and then Chris tells us who's going to be on it (laughs).
Rich: Yeah the thing is, we've made friends from touring and then Chris has friends because rockstars like him as a wrestler. So he has different types of relationships. Jeff is Canadian and Chris is too, so they have that Canadian bond there. We had a lot of guest musicians on the last record and Chris just said let's not get crazy with five or six guests on it. Or it would be like making a hip-hop record where every song has three guests, featuring Vince Neil on Cowbell. He wanted to not be so over the top with that. So we thought it'll be kind of cool. Mike Martin was our touring guitar player and he co-wrote with Chris the Wormwood song, the 15-minute extravaganza. Then Jeff Waters played a couple of guitar solos because his playing is ridiculous. Listening to him play is like watching a cow carcass be devoured by ants in a time lapse kind of video.
Frank: Now that you've said it, we've got to have Vince Neil on Cowbell on the next record!
Rich: We just have to spell his name differently. N-E-A-L.
Sean: Or K-N-E-E-L.

Andrew: Fozzy have sort of kept changing the sound over the years. Now with this album, where do you think your musical transition stands?
Rich: The biggest thing is this. Think about who your favorite bands are right now. Think of your favorite bands six years ago and who you were six years ago versus who you are at a person now, what your personal relationships are and where you are in life. That's really what records are. It's a record of who you are the moment you wrote that album. It captures the spirit of the people that do the album at that point in time. That's the problem with having gaps between albums. We change as people. We all grow so much, we experience the highs and lows of life. We are going through these different periods emotionally. There are some people who don't have an emotional connection to their music and it's just an exercise of riffs, unlike when I'm writing. I'll use the last Stuck Mojo record 'The Great Revival' as an example. I was really in a good spot in my life. I was really happy. I got married, I bought a house and things were good. I wasn't really having anything I was mad about. I couldn't write an angry record. I couldn't find anything to be angry about. I just didn't want to do it, so instead of faking it I just wrote a record I wanted to write and sometimes people are like, 'No, you can't do that!' What do you mean I can't? You don't have to like it but I can really do whatever I want. That's why I've always been hesitant to be critical of Metallica for certain albums. It's so hard in life as musicians to try to live up to expectations. Life is full of challenges and it's how you adapt to those challenges. That defines who you are. You take Mustaine for example. He's a troubled dude. He has his own demons and stuff. His albums over the years have changed quite a bit. I'm not sure it's because of the line-up or who he is or changes in his life. Some records I like more than others but I respect him for what he does. If we do another Fozzy record. I think we'll do within a year. Let's try to do a follow up. I would imagine it to be along the same kind of musical vibe as now because there's not this huge gap in the evolution of how we are as people. The song 'Broken Soul' is a Southern rock ballad on the album. As musicians you want to try different things because it entertains you. But this album defines who we are as a band right now. As long as something drastically change in our lives, we'll try it to keep it along the same lines (laughs). We won't do a Grateful Dead hippie jam band record, I hope.

Andrew: When you just talked about how 'angry' records shouldn't be made when you don't have that anger in you, the one record that came to my mind was Metallica's Death Magnetic. It's great and all, but I don't think they were angry or frustrated in life.
Rich: Yeah. It's not real anger. You don't feel it. I mean, I like the record, love the riffs and stuff. Sometimes when people write heavy records, it's an exercise in riffing instead of it being from some tortured place. I hear that in a lot of older records. If you listen to 'Diary Of A Madman', you could tell there is some stuff there. That album has something. It's like a peep hole into the window of Ozzy and the guys in the band and it's special. Then you listen to 'Ozzmosis' and its kind of like fluff to me. There are great songs, Zakk plays awesome but it doesn't say anything to me. I want someone to punch me. That's why I love Peter Gabriel and David Gilmour. There was this DVD that David did. I watched it and I felt like getting crushed because it was so heavy. The vibe was just thick. There was something about it that just connected. It was face-melting stuff. If you're a real fan of music you would want that. Like the first time you heard 'Angel of Death' or 'Electric Eye' or the intro to 'Number of The Beast', those are the moments you want.
Frank: And also the first time I heard the intro to 'Shout At The Devil'. As a kid hearing it late at night, it actually scared me.
Rich: Sometimes when you're such a huge band like Metallica, you have different pressures than the guys in Stuck Mojo and Fozzy because there is not this huge machine and apparatus. There's our manager and there are people in record labels and our press agents that depend on us to make good albums. But there are probably just 50 people under the Fozzy/Stuck Mojo umbrella. The Metallica umbrella is massive. They probably have over 50 people working in the warehouse and doing merch! The pressure for them to make albums that meet expectations is enormous. Those guys are multi-millionaires. So they no longer have those same things that they derived from. They didn't have the struggle. We all want to climb up the mountain but not once you've been sitting up there for a while with a flag. Then you've to think of where you are deriving all the creative energy from. For them I guess it's the input of all this noise from people who are like you should do this and this. I think if left to their own devices, Metallica can make amazing albums that are angry and cool. I think they just stop listening to everybody. When we make records no one tells us anything. Our managers never told me anything. He started managing us in 92 and never once gave me a suggestion. I'd be mad if he did because that would mean that he doesn't have confidence in what I'm doing. When someone comes up to you and says, 'You know what?' and all of a sudden you'll be like 'What! What did I do wrong?' Trust is important. There's trust with your musical partners and your management. We've been on tour with a million different bands. We've supported Pantera in their heyday, not on a multi band package. It was Stuck Mojo and Pantera in Europe. They are one of my favorite bands. We've become friends with Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden and some of these people we really look up to. We see them the same way they see us, as flawed humans and no different from anybody else. In reality, Chris Jerico, Frank Fontsere, James Hetfield or James Lomenzo, none of them cured cancer. We've not done anything special in life that has done something to humankind and left this world a better place. We play music and offer a glimpse into moments of energy and entertainment. We value that because we know there are fans that look to us for that. At the same time, seeing the flaws, opening for Type-O-Negative and seeing those inter personal relationships, seeing Phil Anselmo not even talk with the brothers on the Pantera tour and have separate tour buses, we were like what happened? That's not a band! But we didn't know any different because we were fans too like everybody else. The funny thing for us was we became the same way in Stuck Mojo. Three of us and then always the singer who travelled separately with the other bands because he was on drugs, he was unhappy and it was always that way. It's all human!

Andrew: What are you doing at the Golden Gods event tomorrow?
Rich: We'll be sitting with you! They asked Fozzy to play but Chris is also the host with Andrew W.K. So we felt like it would be a bit awkward for Chris to be the host, for us to set up on the side and then him jumping over with us. He is nominated for 'best athlete as a musician' award, which I wanted to be 'best musician as an athlete'.

Andrew: The best 'musician as an athlete' is surely Bruce Dickinson [Iron Maiden]. Don't you agree?
Rich: Oh yeah, sure man!! When I saw that Rock in Rio DVD, it was amazing. In 96 when we played in NYC, Bruce came on stage with Stuck Mojo and played Wrathchild with us! Everyone on stage was like, 'I want to stand next to you!'
Frank: He slapped my cymbals. That was an honor!
Rich: We met him earlier in the day as we are good friends, talked to him and told that we are playing this sold out show. We play the Wrathchild cover every once in a while. We know it's a DiAnno song but we would love for you to come and jam with us. We never thought he'd show up. He said, 'Well, may be if I have time'. We kept looking over the side of the stage. There was nothing, and then all of a sudden 'Oh you've got to be kidding me!' We could all have retired at that point!
Frank: It was over far too quickly for us. But he had a problem with the tuning. The Stuck Mojo tuning is a lot lower than the Iron Maiden stuff.
Rich: Yeah! We could tell when he looked over at us as if to say 'You guys are assholes!' But the coolest thing was when we did a festival in Austria two years later. We were in catering and Bruce walks up saying 'Hey Rich!' I was like he knows me by name. This is the best day of my life!
Frank: It's very strange that when there's somebody you've been in awe of since you were a kid, all of a sudden you are talking to him as a peer.
Rich: We never really feel like we've 'arrived' and we still feel like we're looking at the Killers album cover going 'Yeaahhh!'

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