Kings of Dust is an intriguing mix of musicians from two of Jake. E. Lee bands (Badlands and Red Dragon Cartel) as well as 2000’s glam rock heroes Crash Street Kids and late 80s / early 90s heavy hitters Surgical Steel. Their debut recorded throughout the spring and summer of 2019 and mixed throughout the fall at SoundVision Recording in Mesa in Mesa, AZ was produced by Greg Chaisson, mixed by Michael Thomas Beck and mastered by Brad Vance (Rainbow, Graham Bonnet, Ritchie Blackmore, Warrant, etc) at Red Mastering in Newbury Park, CA. It’s a damn fine album with a real ‘live in the studio’ feel. We caught up with Greg to talk about the new album as well of tales of his Badlands days and of course ‘the meaning of life’ in these strange times.
Mark: How are you today Greg in these strange days we’re having?
Greg: I’m doing OK I guess. We’re trying to get through with the rules they put in place and get to the other side I guess.
Mark: Yes unusual times for everyone I guess, especially if you’re in the music industry. I worked out the other day it’s been 21 days since my last live show – I saw Kip Winger play an acoustic set – it’s the longest time in my adult life I’ve been without a live show!
Greg: It’s weird isn’t it? We had to cancel all of our shows that we had pending and booked, and we haven’t rescheduled anything we just need to try and wait to see what happens!
Mark: Well congratulations on a great album, I loved it, and Kings of Dust is an interesting name, it’s almost a biblical sounding name, one with a philosophical edge to it. Is there a deep meaning behind it or is it just a cool name?
Greg: It’s ironic I guess that we would have a band called ’Kings of Dust’ in these times. With everyone sitting around wondering if it’s the end of days and all that, and are we all going to be returning to dust (laughs) but that really had nothing to do with the concept of the name. Though I guess I could be real controversial and say “Yes that’s exactly what I was thinking!”
Mark: (laughs)
Greg: I just always wanted to have something with the word ‘dust’ in it when we first got the band together! We went through all kinds of ideas – at one point it was almost called ‘Heavy Dust’ and umm, that kind of went by the wayside. Then I woke up one morning and I called Michael the singer and said “I got the name” and he liked it so it’s been the name for almost five years now.
Mark: Let’s get a niggle out of the way before we look at the album, I hate it when bands from a certain era irrespective of what they sounded like get tagged with the ‘Hair Metal’ tag. Your old band ‘Badlands’ get that on occasion and when I look at the reviews and interviews that are coming out for Kings of Dust there’s always that comment name-checking Badlands and Hair Metal in the same breath. Badlands to me was all that was great and wonderful about Bluesy 70’s style rock surely?
Greg: Well I think you’re exactly right. Badlands definitely had that 70’s vibe to it – that’s the idea Jake had from the very beginning as far as what musical direction we would be going in. Kings of Dust also has that but in no way is it me trying to channel Badlands. Badlands was it’s own band, it was a great band and I couldn’t even possibly even try and copy that, I don’t think it could ever be duplicated. What I try to do in Kings of Dust is to just do the kind of music that I like and the similarities, and a lot of people have commented on this is that Jake’s influences and mine are very similar and also that Jake writes with a lot of different parts, it’s not just a cookie-cutter style of song-writing and I write the same way, I like a lot of moving parts and that’s what makes music interesting to me. I’m just one of those people that thinks you can have hooky music that is fairly complicated as well. And I’m pretty happy with it. You mentioned something earlier about the Hair Metal thing – I read in a book one time that Badlands was the worst Hair Metal band of the 80’s.
Mark: (laughs).
Greg: And I was so happy to read that, I sent it over to Jake and we were both so happy to not be lumped in with the whole Hair Metal thing. I mean nothing against that, I did live in L.A. at the time but to us that was not our M.O. at all, we were not interested in being a Hair Metal band, you know the whole Pop Metal thing with the crazy stage show and crazy clothes and all that kind of stuff. We just wanted to go out and be a rock band and play what we felt, kind of jam it out a little bit and that also is very similar to Kings of Dust.
Mark: I think that organic feel is definitely there and that feeling that the music could take you anywhere gives it a nice edge. It gets funky in places and jazzy in others and sometimes like on ‘My Piece of Mind’ there’s almost a jammed or improvised feel to it. How did you capture that in the studio, was there any ad-libbing going on or was it all mapped out?
Greg: Well we rehearsed and did pre-production and all that but when we got in the studio we did go off the playbook at times and not follow it too closely so Jimmy the drummer, he might want to change a fill or change the beat up and it all made sense while we were in the actual act of recording it. And I changed a few things up for him, so there is a lot of improvisational feel to it. And the other thing is all of the songs were done in less than three takes, and there are songs on the record that were done in one or two takes. So there is a very live, or as I call it a ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ feel and we didn’t really want to follow any rules, we just wanted to see what would happen, and I’m pretty happy with the outcome. It think it came out really good for how we did it off the cuff.
Mark: So many great songs, my favourite changes all the time but at the moment I think is ‘Ya That’s Me’ which has a wonderful almost Van Halen vibe to it.
Greg: You know it’s funny if you picked a hundred people and asked them, 50 would say different things – it might be ‘Like an Ocean’ or ‘Reflection’ or ‘Devil’ or whatever but the other 5 would say ‘Ya That’s Me’ we were really kind of surprised how popular that song is because it was a different approach – I wanted a kind of Stones meets Mountain sort of thing, and Michael had some really dark lyrics over the top of it and Ryan’s slide playing is really the icing on the top of the cake. It’s also my daughter’s favourite track, that’s when I realised that we might be onto something – when my 21 year old daughter said it was her favourite song.
Mark: (laughs) I was actually playing an album called ‘It’s About Time’ earlier.
Greg: Oh yeah, where did you get that?
Mark: I’ve actually had it for a very long time so it was nice to give it a spin after a few years. I didn’t get round to digging out any ‘Surgical Steel’ though. Is that where it all began for you? Where did you get into this crazy business?
Greg: Before Surgical Steel I started playing right out of High School in like 1971, and I played in a really popular local band originally called ‘Ghost Road’ and then we changed the name to ‘Saint Michael’ and then in the late 70’s I left that band which had been the only band I had ever been in and I just started playing in a whole bunch of different bands and along the way me and Jim Keeler the guitar player started ‘Surgical Steel’ and I stayed in that band till they kicked me out (laughs). And then I moved to L.A. and played in a number of bands there. My career runs a log span of 40 some odd years. 49 I think.
Mark: So what was it that inspired you in the first place, when did you know that you had to be a musician?
Greg: It was a weird way, I was one of the neighborhood tough guys where I grew up and I had just got out of High School and I was supposed to go to college and play baseball. And I didn’t want to go to college, I didn’t mind playing baseball but I didn’t want to have to go to college. So when I graduated from High School some of the other guys that were about three years younger than me had long hair and they were just picked on by some of the other guys and they thought that if they asked me to be in their band that would keep the other guys from bullying them. So they kind of approached me without telling me why and said “Hey if you buy a bass you can be in our band” and I’d never even considered it, but I went to the pawn shop and bought a bass and on the very first day that I was trying to figure out how to play a note I just thought “This is what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna be a musician.” But I didn’t find out until six months later when I asked the why they’d asked me to be in the band, and they said “We figured with you in the band it would keep the other guys from picking on us”. And I said “Did that work?” and they said “Yeah.” So that’s how I became a musician, and I don’t know anyone else who has that story!
Mark: Neither do I. I’ve been asking people that question for ten years and I love to hear stories like that, that’s so cool. It’s 31 years now since the first Badlands album and it must be about 29 since ‘Voodoo Highway’, how do you look back on those days with that sort of distance now?
Greg: Well it’s kind of weird to think it’s been that long since those records came out because in some ways it just seems like yesterday. But the fact that they still resonate with a lot of people is very gratifying. People still really seem to like it. Had we had better record company support and better initial management from our first manager who knows what would have happened? But it kind of is what it is. I’m very proud of the three records that we made, even the demos that made up “Dusk” I like all three of them, I think that basically they have stood the test of time and I couldn’t have been any happier to have been part of it.
Mark: ‘Dusk’ always intrigued me in that I think I read somewhere that on that album Ray was just scatting some of the lyrics?
Greg: Yeah, he was, we went in there and he hadn’t even done writing the songs. Ray had actually arranged the studio, we didn’t even know we were going in. We got a call to say you’ve got to go to the studio and do these demos and we were gonna go on the road in a couple of days so we didn’t want to go but we went down there and we recorded each song one time. No overdubs, no nothing. I think that Jake and I were probably there for an hour and a half total and Ray sang them all live, there’s no vocals added later, he just sang it live. Some of the songs like ‘Walking Attitude’ and there’s a couple of other ones – he’s just kinda making it up as he goes along.
Mark: That’s crazy!
Greg: But it came out good, it’s my favourite of the three.
Mark: I love it too, it gets overlooked I guess because it is the demos, but I love the feel of it and who know what would have happened if the label had got behind it.
Greg: It kind of shows what direction we were headed in, each record is different from the previous one, I think it shows our progression and had Ray stayed alive and had we stayed together I’m sure every record would have been different. I like it because it has a very live feel, and I tried to hit that feel with the Kings of Dust stuff, that was actually my model when I was explaining to the other guys in the band what I wanted to do in the recording process. So that was kind of our template as far as the sonic approach to it.
Mark: It reminded me of that when you mentioned that the Kings of Dust record was just a few takes.
Greg: Well obviously the guitar solos and vocals are added on after but all the rhythm tracks, bass and drums and most of the rhythm guitars are just one of those takes. There’s no punches on the bass, no fixes on the drums and the rhythm guitars are probably 80 percent recorded live.
Mark: We’ve just a few questions now we like to ask everyone we interview.
Greg: OK.
Mark: If you could have been a ‘fly on the wall’ for the creation of any great album, just to see how the magic happened what would you like to have been there to witness?
Greg: That’s a tough one, I’m going to go off the page here and say I would have like to have been there for the live recording of The Who – ‘Live at Leeds’ that’s my favourite record, or maybe Humble Pie- ‘(Performance) Rockin’ The Fillmore’ now if I could have been there when they were recorded at the side of the stage – oh yeah! That would have been a dream come true. But I must admit if I could have been in the studio and seen an album recorded I would have liked to have been there for the first Captain Beyond album.
Mark: Oh really, not a band that gets talked about a lot these days.
Greg: That’s one of my favourite records and I find it intriguing how they managed to piece that together. I think it’s very well done.
Mark: If you could invite four guests to a table in a restaurant when this crazy thing is over – who would you like to sit down with and talk music?
Greg: Man, I’ve met a lot of the people that I’d thought I’d like to meet and some of them weren’t very nice when I met them (laughs) so I don’t think I would invite them to my table. I mean obviously if you could sit down and talk to Jimi Hendrix that would be interesting. OK I would like to have a conversation with Jimi Hendrix, Felix Pappalardi the bass player from Mountain, and Johnny Winter. And you know what, I’d invite Jake too because I think Jake would have some of the same questions I would have (laughs).
Mark: I think I’d wait the table if you had those guys there!
Greg: (laughs) You’d have to join us too then. I’m inviting you along with us.
Mark: You’re the first person ever to ask me Greg, that’s a very special moment for me.
Greg: (laughs).
Mark: And just to take us out on an easy one. What is the meaning of life?
Greg: (laughs) Oh boy. I don’t know I think good answer would be with what’s going on right now with the pandemic worldwide is to help your fellow man and if this pandemic shows anything it shows that we’re not immune as Countries, racially, religiously, socially – this disease affects us all. I think we maybe need to learn from that and just try to be better human beings.
Mark: A great way to leave things Greg, thank you so much for taking the time today. I love the album and hope that after all this blows over we get to see you play this where we should really hear it – live.
Greg: Thank you Mark I hope so too.
Greg and I chatted on at the end of the interview about some of my favourite songs from his career and the day he met Steve Marriott,my personal musical hero. So look out for more from Greg in the coming weeks.
Album available here: https://kod.band/merch