By Andrew Bansal
Known for his involvement with Ozzy Osbourne in the mid-80s and subsequently with Badlands, guitarist Jake E. Lee has made a return to the world of hard rock and heavy metal, with his new band Red Dragon Cartel, which comprises of Darren James Smith on vocals, Ronnie Mancuso on bass and Jonas Fairley on drums. The band made their live debut at the Whisky A Go Go in West Hollywood on December 10th and followed it up with a couple more shows in San Diego and Las Vegas. Their self-titled debut album is set for a January 28 release via Frontiers Records. Yesterday, I spoke to Jake over the phone to discuss this new band and he also openly addressed the band’s mishaps at that Whisky show, among other things. Read the conversation below.
Jake, it’s good to finally have you on Metal Assault. I’m going to mainly talk to you about your new band Red Dragon Cartel. You’ve played a few shows this month. How are you feeling about the band at this point?
Well, right now I feel good. You must have heard about the first show ..
Yes, I was there.
Oh you were there! Then you know everything about it (laughs). But yeah, we just weren’t ready, and it’s my fault. I should have cancelled, or I should have done something along those lines because I knew it wouldn’t be ready. But the second show went a lot better. I would say the first show was, if I had to grade it, a ‘D’, and then the second show in San Diego we managed to get to a ‘C’ or a ‘C+’. By the third show in Vegas I would say it was definitely a ‘B’ and if we had a couple more shows lined up around that time we could get up to a good grade A. So the band is there, it’s going to be a great band live, but we just need to get a couple of shows under our belt. It’s too bad that our very first show had to be .. such a big deal (laughs).
So you were aware of all the feedback that was happening around that first show, then.
Oh yeah. I had a lot of fun reading it actually (laughs). Some of them were just out-and-out mean, but most of them had valid points about everything, really. I mean, obviously the singer that appeared on stage that night was not the one I hired, you know. So people that are saying, ‘What was Jake thinking?’ obviously he didn’t show up to the audition like that. And like I said, until you have your first gig, you never know how a band is going to be on stage. You can rehearse, but it’s not the same thing. Everything that could have gone wrong at that first show, did go wrong. It’s not even like I played at my best either, but fortunately for me I had somebody who was going to take the spotlight as far as mistakes went (laughs).
You’re right, because I talked to people who attended your soundcheck at that Whisky show and they said that the singer sounded great at soundcheck but for some reason he just didn’t really show up for the actual gig. I guess it was a case of nerves or something like that.
Yeah. Most singers are cocky sons of bitches, so I figured he was just another cocky singer because they all are, or most of them are. And I didn’t give him any reassurance before the show, which this being my band I guess I should have (laughs). But I just didn’t say anything and afterwards he told me that he was really, really nervous. So he drank to get over his nervousness and he drank too much. So yeah, he was nervous. I didn’t think he would be, but he said that following in Ray Gillen’s footsteps, playing at the Whisky for the first time and debuting as a lead singer instead of a drummer which is what he was, and with everybody there in attendance, he got really nervous. But, shit happens.
If you had played the San Diego and Vegas shows first and then the Whisky show, it might have been a different story.
Yeah, or if we could have just done a couple of sneak gigs somewhere, not using the band name. But the management was insistent that the first show should be a big deal, and in retrospect, it was may be not such a good idea, although we got a ton of press (laughs). If we had done a good first show we would have gotten a certain amount of press, but because it was such an epic failure, we got a lot more press. So if you look at it on the other side, any press is good press, and we did really well.
Exactly. Certain websites were writing reviews of the show based on YouTube clips, and they weren’t even there! I found it to be a bit ridiculous but it definitely got your band some press.
Yeah (laughs). So I just look at it on the good side. We got a ton of press and there’s no way we’re ever going to be that bad again. We got our worst ever show out of the way right off the bat.
How is Darren taking it? Has he been able to take it head on? You said he improved in the next couple of shows.
He was brutalized for everything. He was upset, not at anybody other than himself. I stayed back in LA and he drove with the rest of the band to Vegas after that Whisky show, but from the reports I heard, he was beating himself up pretty good for how he blew it and how he disappointed everybody. As bad as everybody was on the web, nobody was beating himself up more than he was. So I didn’t even have to say anything to him, and I didn’t criticize him or anything. I tried to support him as much as possible because he’s a good singer, and hey, everybody screws up but it’s a shame he had to do it at that point.
So, moving on from that whole episode, obviously you were absent from the scene for a very long time. How did this band come about and before this happened did you ever imagine you would play guitar in the public again?
Well, I was content at really not doing anything. I didn’t want to be one of those guys that continually push themselves onto the music-buying public, because I didn’t need that. I don’t really like the spotlight, I don’t need the attention. I’m pretty good all by myself, and I had a good run with Badlands and Ozzy. I made my art, so I didn’t feel the need to do anything more. But at one point I moved to Vegas and reconnected with Ron Mancuso who I had known in LA in the 80s, and he was doing a Beggars & Thieves video. He asked me if I would do a cameo in it, and I said, ‘Sure, why not? It’s not like I’m doing anything.’ So I did the cameo in this video and afterwards he asked me to check out the video and read the comments. I did, and there was a lot of excitement about me being in this video. A lot of people were asking if this meant I was coming back, and I wasn’t planning on it. I was just doing a silly little video for a friend. But because of all that attention, Ron and Kevin Churko whose studio is right next to Ron’s, got together and approached me, asking me if I would be interested in doing something since there seemed to be so much interest. I was still hesitant. I didn’t see how that many people would care after that length of time. But they asked me to get together in a casual environment, write some songs and see how it goes, no pressure. Since there was no pressure, I agreed and we started writing some songs. The first song we wrote was ‘Feeder’. It all worked out to where Robin Zander agreed to sing on it which surprised me, and once it all came together and I heard that song with Jeremy Spencer from Five Finger Death Punch who graciously played drums on it, and Tom Peterson on bass, it was the first song I had written with somebody in such a long time, listening back to that song, that’s when I realized how much I missed it and how good it made me feel to make music again. That’s why I decided, ‘Yes, I’m in! Let’s do something.’
That’s awesome, man. So when you decided to write that song and get back into it, in terms of guitar playing, were you worried in that aspect as to how challenging that would be to play after such a long time and getting back to the old level again?
Not really. I’m not a worrying type, because basically to worry means you give a shit, and I really don’t give a shit (laughs). I play guitar and write music because I love it. I do it for me. It’s a very personal thing, and if there happens to be an audience for it, that’s great. If everybody hates everything I do, I don’t really give a shit. It’s what I need to do and I don’t do it for other people. So, no I wasn’t worried about my guitar playing. Technically in the 80s I was at the top of my game. Now, because I didn’t play that much guitar while I was gone, I’m still getting my chops back together. With every gig and every rehearsal I’m getting closer and closer to what I used to be, but I still think I’m pretty good (laughs). As far as I’m concerned, I’m still better than 90 per cent of the guitar players out there, even if I’m not at the top of my game. So if I get critiques about my abilities, I don’t care!
That’s well put. As for your guitar setup, have you changed anything since back in the day or are you using the same guitars, amps and all that?
No, it’s all pretty new. Guitar-wise I’ve retired the original one because I beat the shit out of it for so many years. But Charvel got a hold of me and asked if I’d be interested in working with them again, so they made me basically a replica of my old guitar. So I’m using that and it’s pretty familiar for me, but as far as the amp setup, I’m using the EVHs. It’s not what I used in the studio because for that I just went back and used a lot of my old heads. I have at least a dozen varying amplifiers and they each do something very well, so I would use whatever amp worked best for the song I was working on, but it’s not particularly versatile, specially when you’re talking about old amps. Old Marshalls, one day you plug into it and they sound God-like, the next day you plug in and they sound like a piece of shit. They’re not consistent, whereas the EVH head is very consistent. It might not be the absolute best-sounding amp I’ve ever played, but it’s a really good-sounding amp and it sounds the same every time I plug it in, so I like using that live. And this time around I’ve done a variation on the speaker cabinet setup where I do it in a ‘V’, so I don’t have a cabinet actually facing me, because guitar-wise it never sounds good when you’re standing right in front of the speakers. It always sounds better when you’re standing off-center a little. So I’m going into two cabinets and they’re both off-center from where I’m standing, so it forms a kind of a V-shape. I don’t know why I never thought of that before (laughs), but I like the sound I’m getting out of that setup right now.
In terms of your new material with Red Dragon Cartel, would you say it’s more metal than what you’ve done with Badlands and Ozzy, or how would you describe it?
Well, in the live show the songs we concentrated on were the rock songs. Nobody has heard the record so we’re not going to play the ballad live and put everybody to sleep (laughs). But yeah, it is more metal than Badlands, that’s for sure. I don’t know if it’s more metal than Ozzy, but it’s may be a little more, and I hate using these words, but may be more modern-sounding than what I did in Ozzy. But obviously that was 30 years ago. If I were to do ‘Bark At The Moon’ today in the studio, it would probably sound more metal just because of the way production has come along in the last 30 years. So yeah, it’s more metal but it was never pre-conceived to be that way. During the 15 years that I was gone, I was still writing songs and I still had music I wanted to play, I just didn’t think I would have an audience. So I would just record into the computer and I would have little bits of ideas, sometimes even finished songs that I had compiled for all those years. I had them on my computer and I brought the hard drive to Ron. He went through them and picked what he liked, and even though I had quite a variance of musical styles on that hard drive, I think Ronnie veered towards the heavier stuff and those are the songs we worked on. So this is definitely a rock album, and probably even a metal album. I wouldn’t say it’s ‘new metal’ or anything like that, but it’s Jake E. Lee in 2013 playing heavy.
Yeah, it does have a lot of variety to it, so I guess it cannot be just described as one thing or the other.
Yeah, I hate being stuck in any one kind of mode. In fact, when I was in Ozzy, if anything, after four years with Ozzy and two albums of music, I was feeling a little limited as far as what I could write for Ozzy. Badlands helped me break out of that strictly metal kind of style but it was still fairly heavy. After Badlands, one of the reasons I just decided to go ahead and bow out was, I didn’t want to repeat what I had already done with rock and metal. I wanted to try and veer towards a more exploratory side of music and nobody was willing to do that with an old hair metal guy. So yeah, I like trying to mix up styles. It makes things interesting for me.
You mentioned Ozzy, ‘Bark At The Moon’ and Badlands during this interview. In these Red Dragon Cartel shows you’ve played a few covers as well. What did you feel about that? Obviously it’s something you have to do in order to launch this band and you’d hope you can play less and less number of covers in the future.
It would be nice if we could eventually just do all Red Dragon Cartel, and may be just as a fun thing, one Ozzy song or one Badlands song. But right now it is fun to play those songs. I hadn’t played ‘Bark At The Moon’ in 25 years! So it’s fun to play it again, and the Badlands songs are fun to play as well. It’s been such a long time that they’re fun now, although they’re not going to be fun forever.
Finally, I want to ask you about the band’s plans for the coming year. I think you already have a couple of European festivals booked, so are you looking to tour actively in 2014?
Yeah, those were the first ones that were booked and I was happy about that, because I saw on your website that they’re booking us a whole bunch of shows in hillbilly country in the US (laughs). One of them is in a town called Hazzard in Kentucky, and that’s not what I signed on for. I’m 56, and part of me agreeing to come back would be, touring could be fun as long as it’s not six shows in a row and driving 14 hours in between. I’m not some kid that lives for that. I mean, I was once and it was fun then, but I’m too old for that now. We’re doing Europe because it’s a different culture and it’s fun to be immersed in that, but, and you’re getting the scoop on this, I’m not real good on just touring non-stop and working hard. I worked hard a long time ago and I don’t want to work hard again (laughs). So we’re going to be doing some shows, yes, but probably not as many as one would think by looking at our website. We’re still going to have a little meeting about that.
Those are some big words and I’m glad I got the scoop on that. But yeah, it was good talking to you. I’m glad we got this interview done and I’ll let you carry on with your other stuff. Hopefully next time you play in LA it will be a much better experience for everybody.
(Laughs) When we play LA again, I’m sure it will be a lot better.
Visit Red Dragon Cartel on the web:
RedDragonCartel.com
facebook.com/RedDragonCartel
twitter.com/RedDragonCartel