Queensryche
Home Again (Building Empires Tour)
Coming home. A lovely thought for road weary travelers. After spending the past year+ on the road, Queensryche returns to the Jet City to wind down the final leg of the Building Empires tour. When we last spoke to the ‘Ryche (Nov. 1990), they were about to venture forth on their first European leg. Guitarist/songwriter/spokeman extraordinaire Chris DeGarmo fills in the blanks of the year between.
“Last year, when you spoke with Michael (Wilton), we were doing our first headlining tour there, which was very successful for us. We brought our own production and headlined our own shows all throughout Europe and you know? It’s great to show up in a place like Zurich, Switzerland and sell the place out.”
I can imagine. Any other old world tour stops that you articularly enjoyed or care to discuss?
“Hungary. We played Budapest, which was beautiful, just an amazing city.” Any political viewpoints to share if we perhaps draw back the iron curtain a bit?
“Yeah, it was very exciting to play Poland, but certainly an eye opener (I think) to see the place and meet the people. We played a coal mining town there that was really behind in environemntal protection. It was one of the most polluted cities in Europe. Really pretty tragic in that respect, but the crowd was great!”
Offering more personal insight in relation to the other side of the Atlantic he continues, “It’s quite interesting, Europe was initially our strongest market as a whole, but since then the states has become the strongest. It’s definitely a little tougher over there. There’s not the rock radio network like we have in the U.S. and although MTV’s pretty thoroughly received  throughout Europe now, it’s a very different programming schedule and different music that you see. A lot of European artists.”
On their initial headline tour last fall, the boys were extremely fortunate in the fashion that they traveled and how the tour itself was orchestrated.
“First, we were flying and there were, like, four days off between gigs. So we had time to thoroughly check out every city and do a lot of sight seeing and getting to [truly] meet people. It was great. It was actually like a paid vacation and we were playing huge rock gigs at the same time. It was, by far, the best way I can think of to see Europe.”
They finished that leg in early December with a show in Madrid, Spain. Then, “We were home for a little while last Christmas before going to Japan, but wasn’t really very long.”
The break was spent tweaking out the stage production and enjoying home life (ever so briefly) before placating their legion of loyal Asian fans.
This summer gave them their “first real taste of the whole festival experience. Really the first time we’ve played with more than two other bands.,” and sent them across the Atlantic yet again. This latest visit was spent building empires in the best of company.  On the legendary Monsters Of Rock Castle Donnington stop they, along with AC/DC, Motley Crue, Metallica and The Black Crowes, played to an audience of 75,000 British fans. A few festivals later at an air base in West Germany attendance approached 90,000. But of course, the most phenomenal gig this year had to be the Hard Rock day at Rock In Rio when they shared the bill with the likes of GnR and Judas Priest in front of 130,000 screaming tanned faces.
All this excitement, which has included appearances and accolades at most every year-end music or video award show is due (forgive me for stating the obvious) to the incredible success of their fourth studio album.
“What happened with Empire has been just the latest pillar in an ongoing foundation that we’ve been building really. Operation: Mindcrime opened a lot of doors for us. What happened musically with Empire is a result of us continuing to try to push the chemistry of the band and do something a little different.”
“We were very happy with Operation: Mindcrime as an album but to do something like that again would just be too predictable. I think trying to take a different turn with Empire is what led to the songs on there.”
“With our songwriting this time, we focused very strongly on melody, streamlining the arrangements a bit. We were trying to make an album that was completely different yet still very much like Queensryche and something we felt good about.”
Obviously there are a lot of people, the world over, who also felt good about Empire, judging by it’s multi-multi-platinum status.
Now, with the conquering completed, it’s time for a well deserved rest.
“Everyone’s really excited to just come home and not do Queensryche for a while. Off the road, at home, is really my only private time. I just kind of disappear.”
With the winter off, they won’t begin writing for the new LP until the ground thaws, leaving time for family and personal pursuits. It’s pretty well known around here that Geoff is an avid sailor, but what sort of avocations puts the wind in your sails, Chris?
“I’m a pilot. I enjoy flying. I guess if I had a hobby, that’s what I enjoy doing.”
So now that time schedules and worldly success collide favorably, is there a plane in the plan for the DeGarmo’s Christmas?
“You know, I am working on that. So far, there hasn’t been a lot of time to justify my owning a plane yet, but with this time coming off, I’m considering it pretty strongly. My biggest thing is that I’m just so psyched to be home. I get to be with my wife and pet the cat and stay at home for a while and just be in Seattle, you know? It’s been a long time.”
After a heartfelt endorsement like that, I thought it might be a good time to inquire on a subject that has long been lingering in the minds of many Seattle citizenry, “Why is it we haven’t been treated to a local ‘Ryche performance for about three years or so?”
“It’s not so much that we haven’t wanted to play Seattle, it just that on some of those other tours, when we were opening for bands, we had to go according to their schedules. We had to just accept the tour for the sake of getting exposure across the country and unfortunately, on those tours we just didn’t get to Seattle very often. At home we’ve had time constraints, pressure to write or whatever, so that we couldn’t really put together a show that we felt good about. We didn’t want to just go and jam in a club or something. We feel a real strong attachment, from this standpoint, and I’m just so glad that now we can finally bring the show that we want to bring to Seattle.”
“We’re getting to play multiple shows [in advance, as primers] and our home town’s really gonna see us the way that we want to be seen. It feels really good. Just seeing the response when the tickets went on sale really makes the band know that we’ve got our home town behind us. It’s gonna be great.”
I wasn’t able to pry any particulars from Chris but he did admit that they are, “…organizing a bit of a special performance for Seattle, although it’s, in most respects, certainly the same show but we’re adding some extras in for Seattle which I won’t really go into. It’s our home and we’re finishing up the tour there [there’s actually one more ‘final’ show on the roster for Spokane] so we’ve got some special things in store. We’re really looking forward to it.” And why shouldn’t they be?
Queensryche (and we) are fortunate enough to be from the thriving Northwest Pugetropolis that plays host to a seemingly endless spring of cultural diversity and natural talent.
“Seattle’s always been a great rock mecca although there hasn’t [before] been a time like this where you see so many bands doing well with record deals and such. But I think even before all this was happening, concerts were always really well attended here, there’s always been a strong rock radio station support felt in Seattle. It’s just a great rock city!”
Amen to that, brother, and one final, lucid word from one of the great rock city’s great rock legends.
“I think, as far as the band’s concerned, we’ve got a good friendship with everybody here and we [work well as] a big team. We enjoy writing music together and we’ve brought it, with a lot of hard work, up to the particular stage we’re at now. I think we’ve got a lot of albums left in us. We’re all pretty young and are feeling like we’ve got a lot of material left, so I’m sure we’ll stay at it for quite some time.” Good, and we’ll keep listening. See you at the Coliseum!

Love On Ice
Nude
Interscope
What a nice little package we have here outta Portland. Nude is a tight set of tunes (13, all under 5 minutes per) that captures a quality I like to see, and that’s a band’s ability to create different moods within their songs. Or even, as on Mine, different moods within one song.
Live, this band has already long proven itself amidst the elite of our city and hence has many devoted fans up here. They won’t be let down at all by this sorta major label debut with the full-on Don’t Leave Me as the lead-off ingle and the funky backbeat, quiet voices and mellow strum that starts the whiningly aggressive Leave Me Alone, the head-bobbing scamper of Goodbye and the perpetually crowd-pleasing Foot In The Grave.
In addition to these great straight-aheads, they also side-step nicely with the hopeless emotion of Gone Away and the knee-slappin’ hoedown, Country Boy. Self In Blue is a good indicator of their 70’s ‘Smithish roots. I get a vibe from these guys and with their early Van Halen style eccentricities, this just may be the next hugely successful arena band from the Northwest. See what you think.

Foundations Forum coverage: Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, War Babies, Temple of the Dog

Hot Flashes
Neverland – Neverland
Sonics Wailers & Galaxies – Merry Christmas
Jupiter – Demo

DiVinyls & Neverland at The Moore
Guns N Roses & Skid Row at The Tacoma Dome interview
War Babies & Red Platinum at Mad Dogs/Farside
Best Kissers In The World & Hammerbox at RKCNDY
The Bogeymen – There’s No Such Thing As…
Ed-E Roland – Ed-E Roland (soon to be Collective Soul)
Peter Fosso – Peter Fosso

As the latest band on this fair city’s “signed” roster to release an album (Epidemic) delightfully devoid of trademark grunge, Panic readies for the headlong plunge into the mosh pit that is “thrash metal” with the intent to ride out the set by adding their own little twist to an already twisted genre. That twist is a blues groove undercurrent to the heavy metal rapids above, flowing into an ocean of sound and power that fluctuates with each listen.

Birthed a half dozen years ago between vocalist Jeff Braimes and bassist George Hernandez, they first called the band Cold Steel. About the same time, guitarist Martin Chandler and drummer Jack Coy were playing in Strychnine. When Strychnine disbanded, Marty joined Cold Steel and they changed the name to Panic. A demo or two later, Jack Coy came in to complete the Panic debut lineup.
Before their series of good breaks, Panic pounded the pavement and starved like most hard rock bands. Even with Some serious interest in their demo, they were too broke to dub any copies. With the financial backing of Lance Goodwin from Bubble Records, they did a run of cassette tapes and began mailing them out to labels but as many musicians know and Jeff indicates, “without representation or connections…it’s not really talent or songs or any of that. It’s timing, who you know and maybe, how you look.”
Well they apparently had something or other in their favor for shortly thereafter, with a demo called Sex And Violence, they began making some very influential friends. People like the original Metal Shop mistress, KISW’s Kathy Faulkner and Lora Porter of Combat Records. Lora was such a good friend that she got Panic’s cut Morbid Curiosities on the Z-Rock national network, where it became a regular on Mike Paine’s Headbanger’s Heaven. Not bad for a song off an unsigned band’s demo tape. Unprecedented, in fact.
Then came N.A.M.A. 1990. Panic scored not only a nighttime club showcase but even a 20 minute slot at the actual convention (which didn’t go quite like imagined).
“It was just a really dry, weird thing. Here we thought this was our big break and we played first of all these bands in this really dry room full of people sitting on chairs. We thought we were going to knock ’em out and we died. It was terrible,” Jeff cries. As fortune would have it tho, the nighttime showcase at The Central is where ‘it’ happened.
Exodus guitarist Gary Holt came up to them after the set and told the sweaty crew, “I wanna produce you guys’ record!” Gary was in town for N.A.M.A., traveling with his manager, Toni Isabella of the legendary Bill Graham agency. Toni quickly took on a similar enthusiasm for the quartet and signed them up with BGA. Next assignment: get signed to a label.
Having the benefit of established management and their producer selected for a debut, Panic was pretty well able to take their business wherever they wanted. After six full months of label shopping plus negotiations, they ultimately penned their deal with Metal Blade. With as sweet a package as they had going, you might wonder, ‘why not a major label’? By choice.
Afraid of being swept aside within a corporate mechanism, they chose the intimacy of an independent, Jeff tells why. “The thing with Metal Blade is that they were offering the money that we needed. We had Rick (Hunolt, another Exodus guitarist) and Gary lined up to produce the record so that was going to cost us. It was going to cost us to do it in San Francisco because they had a room picked out to do it in and they wanted to do it with their engineer. [Exodus] being on Capital, they have major label standards and all [these costs] came with those connections so we had to have more money than independents usually give their bands, but we got enough [from them] to do it the way we wanted it.”
As Marty explains, “The more it evolved, the more it became a family type situation, everybody was real tight knit. We didn’t have to go thru a bunch of fuckin’ red tape to get things done. We didn’t even have to go thru an A&R rep, Toni just went straight to Brian [Slagel, of Metal Blade] who is the president. So we didn’t have to go thru any of that bullshit and it saved us a lot of time.”
After that, things just fell into place. Before they knew it, they were in a Bay City studio. Now they had to choose the songs for the big plunge, “For any band that’s been together for any length of time, a debut album usually represents a long period of time writing songs,” Jeff relates. “911 is a three year old song, and the newest on the album, High Strung, I mean, I was putting finishing touches on it while the tape was running. I hope that the newer songs aren’t any less heavy, but they probably are a little more diverse.”
Marty describes their style of song structuring, “Me and George come up with riffs and we compile them and make songs then give Jeff a tape and he writes lyrics to them. It’s a chemistry and concept that works real well…and it’s just always worked [that way] for us.” He goes on to describe Braimes’ lyrics as “anonymous observations of a world gone wrong.”
However, this doesn’t mean they’re bringing out the soap box. “So many metal lyrics are just thrown away to ‘whatever works,” Jeff laments. “I think lyrics are really important and I don’t [just] mean in terms of a message or anything political.” To which he adds, “I don’t have the time at this point to get too tied up about what’s going on in the world. It’s not that we don’t ever hope to have a social or political conscience, it’s just that I hope to grow into it honestly. I also think anybody in rock and roll deserves to have a period of time where they can just do it and not have the responsibility of raising someone else’s children. I realize that entertainer do, or can, have a big influence and even tho I think there’s a lot of fucked up things happening in the world and young people probably do need guidance right now. I’m still one of those young people.” Now there’s a shot of honesty for ya.
In fact, they’re pretty adamant about two things; their music and the honesty of same. “We don’t put ourselves in any category, we just do what we do and if people think that’s a cop out or sellout, they can pretty much fuck off. Music’s supposed to be a sea of change, you’re supposed to do what you want to do.” Marty, obviously proud of his surrounding mates, continues, “Seattle’s based on honesty. Queensryche do what they wanna do, Alice In Chains do what they wanna do, we do what we want, still everybody seems to have a different identifiable sound. In L.A. you’ve got a bunch of glam bands that look and sound the same. It’s not even like that here. Everybody’s doing their own thing and that’s what people respect you for. We don’t go too far out of our little sphere of our style on this album but we’re not afraid to try different stuff with our music. That’s the way it’s gonna be, that’s what this band is about.”
This band is also about the full frontal assault of their live show. With relatively scant touring under their belt (a few CA dates with Pantera) it will be interesting to see how they hold up when they join Reverend on tour at month’s end.
Can they maintain the in-your-face intensity night in and night out?
I do know one thing: they’ll give it their best.
Next week they’ll be filming the vid for Blackfeather Shake with Tom Ensign on the roof of The Paramount. Should make a good vantage point for watching the epidemic spread.
Hellfire Club
PO Box 80042
Seattle, WA 98108