To me Donnie Vie is one of the greatest song-writers of his generation. When I listen to the music he has made over the years it’s still never fails to connect, and still to this day raises the hairs on the back of my neck. That’s a connection in music that happens so infrequently I can only name a handful of artists who can do that. When I started the Rockpit 11 years ago, it was music like his that I made it my mission to tell people about and over those years we have reviewed everything Donnie has put out.
I’ve seen Donnie play just a handful of times over the years both with the original Enuff Z’Nuff and also with later versions of the band (the last at Rocklahoma in 2008) but in all those years I’ve never had the chance to chat. And when he released ‘Beautiful Things’ last year, arguably the best album of his career to date, I knew that had to change. What I hadn’t expected was one of my favourite interviews of the 1100 I’ve done over the years and here it is in two parts. In this first part we start by taking things all the way back to where it all began… its 2a.m. in Perth when I dial. The phone rings…
Donnie: Hello.
Mark: Hello, is that Donnie?
Donnie: I guess so it’s my phone! (laughs)
Mark: (laughs) what a great opening, it’s Mark calling from Australia’s The Rockpit, how are you today Sir?
Donnie: I’m pretty good for my age, throw a shrimp on the barbie for me!
Mark: We certainly will do. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk today, I’ve been a huge fan of your music for many years and when I started this site 10 years ago you were actually one of the ten bucket list interviews I drew up.
Donnie: (laughs) I’m usually someone’s ‘Fuck it list’ but the bucket list is working. It’s my pleasure brother thank you very much.
Mark: There’s so much to talk about, how long have we got?
Donnie: As long as you want man
Mark: That’s so cool. First I have to get this off my chest, I actually think that your last two albums are my favourite music you have ever put out. Especially ‘Beautiful Things’ so we’ll get to that later. But before we get into the wonderful music you’ve recorded over the years I have to ask you where do you feel it all started for you? When did you really feel that music would be your life? How early was that for you?
Donnie: Probably as old as I was aware, and thinking back I can’t ever remember when it didn’t strike a nerve. It did something for me when I first heard it. I wasn’t like a very happy kid, you know, I didn’t have a very happy young childhood. So when I first heard music I thought, man I love this stuff, that sounds like a good job for me. So probably like five or six.
Mark: So what was it for you? Can you remember what you were listening to or what you heard? What set off that spark?
Donnie: The record was ‘Ticket to Ride’
Mark: Wow, what a great place to start.
Donnie: The Beatles, that just fucking captivated me. I was like ‘Holy shit’ the melodies and the harmonies, the whole cool thing, you know the guitars, every nuance I studied it like I was in school. Every little thing. Everything else became not important anymore when I heard that shit.
Mark: When did that start translating into you wanting to make music? Can you remember the first time you wrote?
Donnie: Yeah I can, you know writing only starts when you got your first fucked up girlfriend. When that happens then come the songs. So that was it, it was actually pretty good, I was just playing it the other day for somebody and I told them this was my first song. I’ve sort of vamped it out now, but it wasn’t a bad song at all. I was maybe 14, 15.
Mark: One of the things I always loved about your writing was not just your melodies but also your lyrics, and in my opinion you are one of the great song-writers of my time
Donnie: You think so? (sounds genuinely surprised)
Mark: Some of the songs you wrote are just absolutely sublime, they just touch a chord with me like I imagine ‘Ticket to Ride; did with you.
Donnie: You know what, that’s like my dream come true to have people say that, I never wanted to be a rock star, I never cared about being rich and famous. All I wanted to do, my goal, was to write something that could be classified in the same book as my heroes, but in my generation and in my genre. And I think I did that. Without tooting my own horn I think I did that, and I’ve gotten a lot better through the years, the first couple of records (with Enuff Z’Nuff) and my baby, my ‘Baby Pictures’ I feel I just grew from there you know?
Mark: And I was one of the guys back in the day who was on your website buying things like ‘Baby Pictures’ and all those that followed!
Donnie: Oh you’re the guy! (laughs)
Mark: (laughs) I’m the one. (laughs) I think over the years you’ve been one of the very few artists that has never disappointed me as far as music is concerned.
Donnie: You know what I actually tried to write a bad song about a month and a half ago to show some guy the difference between a good song and a bad song so he could see what he was doing wrong. So I tried to write a bad song and when I was done it was still better than his song.
Mark: (laughs)
Donnie: (laughs) I tried and I can’t do it!
Mark: I was talking to some musician friends the other day when they knew I was going to be talking to you and they had so many questions we’ll never have the time to get through them all, but one funny thing cropped up when we were talking about listening to early Enuff Z’Nuff in those pre-internet days and that was this mythical place that cropped up in the lyrics called ‘Blue Island’…
Donnie: (laughs) I’m sure that after what you’d imagined you’d be very disappointed! It’s a lot prettier sounding place than what it was you know, I have some happy memories there, but that was where I grew up.
Mark: One of the things I’ve always wanted to ask you, is about the songs. Listening to the early Enuff Z’Nuff albums I sit there and think “this sounds just like Donnie”, there’s a place where the songs are coming from that is so heartfelt, and I always imagined you wrote them all despite the credits. But at times some of the songs, mainly on later releases sound a little compromised?
Donnie: Do you want the truth or do you want the illusion?
Mark: No I think I want the truth, because I suspect I might be part way there.
Donnie: Well the truth is I’m very honest, I don’t lie and what you see is what you get, and it all comes from my heart and all of those songs were, and by copyright law, I think there’s probably only three or four percent that weren’t written entirely by me. Some days I had good days, usually when I was feeling it, they were the good ones. But when I was having to sit and compromise and play games and do other stupid shit that I won’t go in to, that’s when I had a tendency to… you know the bigger mouse gets the bigger bite of food and things would get compromised, you know. It wasn’t the band I envisaged myself being in when I was you know ‘envisioning myself.’ But who walks away from a 12 million dollar deal and stuff? So I had to cater to the other guys, but like I said, it was ‘Baby Pictures’ and I lived and learned and I grew, and all the songs that you hear on the records are basically what I was going through in my life. And the biggest thing that I ever wanted was just to hear people telling me it touched them. I’d been feeling around in the dark for lost souls like me and trying…looking for some company you know? So I’d send them out there and when they find somebody my mission is accomplished, you know?
Mark: I do. The first album for me was remarkable because despite the trappings I did feel it was very different to what was being done at the time. And whilst people gravitated towards the MTV singles the song that really made me sit up and pay attention was ‘I Can Never Be Without You’ that beautiful ballad.
Donnie: Oh yeah, and you know we never played that song live either.
Mark: I know you didn’t when I first saw you on the ‘Strength’ tour in the UK which was the first time I saw you, and I caught you on the ‘Animals’ tour too, but for the life of me I can’t remember who you played with on that tour?
Donnie: I think on the Animals tour we opened for Poison.
Mark: That explains it! (laughs) I loved all those early records but to me the Enuff Z’Nuff album I most love and the one I thought was going to take you to the top was ‘Strength’ it’s hard to believe that is thirty years old next year, it’s passed the test of time and has to be one of my favourite albums ever.
Donnie: There’s a group of guys out there right now celebrating my 30th Anniversary of writing songs without me. It intrigues me that people cite that record as one of the first records where (80’s) hard rock bands used strings and different instruments at that time, but those bands at the time weren’t really my bag, and I wasn’t really into them, I liked classic stuff from The Beatles to Led Zeppelin, all the cool stuff and I learnt all that I knew about arrangements and stuff from listening to those records. A lot of people refer to ‘Strength’ as one of the best records but I think that a lot of those people haven’t heard anything past ‘Strength,’ not even ‘Animals’ I guess they think that we died in a plane crash or something? Whatever happened to them! You know?
Mark: And that’s the heartbreaking thing for me about it and the frustration, there’s not a person I know, who I’ve played the later Enuff Z’Nuff material or a Donnie Vie record to who hasn’t loved it, and most have them have gone out to actively grab a copy. I guess it’s one of the great ironies of life in that some of the best music is still ‘under heard’ or underappreciated?
Donnie: Well you know what the deal is with that, everyone’s first record is like their greatest hits until then, so that’s what the first record is, and then there were a bunch of songs later on, that ended up on records, like there’s only one that I though was busy, and that was ‘Baby Loves You’ but a lot of those songs like ‘Superstitious’ and things like that were older stuff. But I always had a policy with myself that I needed to evolve and to better my writing and develop my character of singing and production skills and learn with each record, and if I felt like my next venture wasn’t as good or better that my last one, then that’s the time where I thought I definitely wouldn’t put it out.
Mark: And there have been some great releases over the years and when you read the liner notes you realise that some of that later material was actually earlier material from say the ‘Animals’ sessions like ‘Peach Fuzz’ was – it had a few tracks from those sessions. That’s all well and good but how does it feel when you see an album like ‘Clown Lounge’ released, which, and I’m not sure how you consider it, is almost outtakes from many years ago?
Donnie: It’s not my fault. (laughs) It’s one of those where there was absolutely no consideration given to me and it was basically coming out with or without my approval. A lot of records have come out of that, besides the studio albums and stuff, have come out and surfaced without my knowledge or consideration or approval. But ‘Clown’s Lounge’ was our demos.
Mark: Yeah.
Donnie: Excluding the songs that made the first record. We had a manager that had owned a recording studio, so we went from 8-track demoing with Chip and I sat in the bedroom, to going in and polishing them up with the band in a recording studio. And there were a lot of them, but I guess that they were the only ones that Chip had his hands on. So he put that out, and I got involved in coming up with the title because he was gonna call it something stupid and I remembered at the time when those songs were written and recorded, that there was nothing to do in Lake Geneva so we used to go and hang out at this strip club, it was raunchy! It was called the Clown’s Lounge and we’d go hang out in there and look at chick’s nasty butt-holes and stuff it was disgusting, but I thought it was a great title. But it was all demos.
Mark: Let’s bring it all right up to date though now. I loved ‘The White Album’ when that came out, an album wringing with heartbreak and emotion.
Donnie: (laughs) really?
Mark: It was something that was very different. What were you going through at that time?
Donnie: That was um, I had just, I don’t know if I had quit the band or what, but after the last tour in the UK it was kinda like the band quit me. And they went on without me, and things just took their toll. But ‘The White Album’ It was probably the darkest point in my life and there have been a lot of them. And I was by myself and I wanted to finally do exactly what I felt like doing the way I wanted to do it, and it lacks in quality and it lacks sonically, but it was my first attempt to get away from the ‘buzz-saw guitars’ and the cookie-cutter production that we’d always used and try some other things. And I had all the time and everything to do it with, so I only laid the tracks down and sent them to some other guy to mix. I was clearing out the cobwebs. My plan was that after that record I was done, I wasn’t gonna do it anymore, I figured there was no point in this, it was killing me. The second disc is basically ones that wouldn’t have made a record. If you were to put all the good ones on one disc I would have considered it a really good record. And after I finished it I kinda vanished off the radar for quite a while, I didn’t even bother to put pictures of lyrics in the record.
Mark: So in retrospect how do you see that? Was it all about as you say ‘blowing away the cobwebs’ and getting ready for what was to come next? And is ‘Beautiful Things’ a kind of rebirth?
Donnie: The irony of it was that it was the beginning of something for me. I originally started with one song and that was ‘Unforsaken’ and that was going to be my farewell.
Mark: One of my favourites the final track on that first disc.
Donnie: But one thing led to another and then came (Donnie hums the harmony line) ‘The Sun Don’t Shine Anymore’ or whatever that one’s called, and then things just started to flow. Then there was ‘You’re My Favourite Thing To Do’ and all those other ones, so what started from one song – a farewell song, turned out to be a double record! (laughs)
Mark: (laughs)
Donnie: But it was like the end meets the beginning, or something else and it was quite a while before I did anything after that.
Mark: It was a good few years till we heard you again – that (The White Album) was back in 2014 and then you got caught up like a lot of people did in the whole Pledge Music debacle that delayed ‘Beautiful Things.’ So many people lost money to those guys, I was down hundreds in projects I’d backed and it was only you and Danny Vaughn that still delivered the package despite presumably getting shafted too. There’s a few bands out there who did nothing, and even though I agree it wasn’t their fault could have done something for the fans that support them. Did you see any money at all from those guys, were you one of the lucky ones?
Donnie: Man I lost a lot of money doing that.
Donnie: First of all in the lead up to that record Beautiful Things, nothing was happening. After The White Album I went through another year where all the trap doors were bottoming out. They kept opening till I really hit the bottom, then I ended up in a program with legal incentive to finish it, a big sobriety and self-improvement program. It was like a re-do, a re-start and I completed that and finished it but up until the point I left that program it was like my spirit left my body, and whatever it was that drove the skills that I had, had gone. Not one song idea came to me through all that time of like two and a half or three years which was very unusual for me – I could always come up with something. But nothing.
Mark: So what happened to change that?
Donnie: When I finished the program I was thinking to myself and talking to god and saying “what now? Now I’ve got it together and got my head together are we still gonna do this anymore?” and the next day “I Could Save The World” popped into my head. Just like that…
‘PART TWO’ CAN BE READ HERE – MORE ABOUT ‘BEAUTIFUL THINGS’ AND DONNIE’S FAVORITE ENUFF Z’NUFF ALBUM
