Mitch Perry has been working alongside some of the world’s most renowned musicians for over 25 years now. He has toured with the The Sweet, Michael Schenker Group, Lita Ford, David Lee Roth and Cher and recorded with Glenn Hughes, Talas, Faster Pussycat, Keel, Frankie Miller, Heaven and Graham Nash – to name but a few! And now he has a new album out, and it’s an amazing listen. We caught up with Mitch to skim the surface of what has been an amazing career so far a few days after the sad passing of The Sweet’s Steve Priest.
Mark: Hi, Mitch, its Mark from The Rockpit, how are you? I’ll start be saying The Sweet were one of those huge bands who never really made it big outside of Europe, but, what a wonderful legacy.
Mitch: Yeah, you probably don’t know but I lived in London at the time when Sweet had broken, and I remember seeing them on Top of the Pops in 1971, and I remember calling my parents in to the room to see the “freaks” on TV (laughs), little did I know I’d wind up playing with those freaks!!
Mark: I was looking through your bio, and you’ve played with so many people that I actually know, that I’ve spoken to over the years. For example Paul Shortino is a lovely guy, last time I was in Vegas he invited me down to Raiding the Rock Vault, and I had a chat with him there which was great, but you played with the band Bad Boys, how did that come about?
Mitch: Bad Boys came about because at the time I wanted to start a band with a singer, it was right after MSG, I was gigging with Cher at the time, but I wanted to get my something rolling with my own rock band, and so I wanted to play with Paul. He had Bad Boys together, and said he wanted to play with me and why didn’t I come and join Bad Boys. I came and rehearsed with his line-up which included another guitarist whose name escapes me, and eventually we narrowed it down to just me and Paul, and Sean McNabb and our drummer Rich Carlson, and we recorded about 4,5, or 6 songs, I’m trying to remember, I don’t know how many we finished mixed. And so we made a master quality album ready to go out, and unfortunately it didn’t get a deal, and so everybody’s attentions wandered and went elsewhere! And that band actually it’s funny we morphed from Bad Boys in to Seven Percent Solution, and it was basically me and Sean McNabb staying together, but I had seen Ralph Saenz, who’s Michael Starr from Steel Panther, I’d seen him in a band called Long Gone, and I went “that’s our singer” and so we basically replaced Paul with Ralph, and had Seven percent Solution, which was another kick ass band!!
Mark: Well Ralph should’ve been here now in Australia, and I last caught up with Sean when he was here with Steven Adler a couple of years ago. You played with Glenn Hughes as well?
Mitch: Oh, yeah that was when I first came out to LA, the end of 1980; I’d just done a few gigs with Kevin DuBrow, I’d done the first gigs that Kevin did without Randy, and basically bailed from that to go and play with Glenn.
Mark: It’s incredible! You also played with anther one of my heroes, Graham Nash!
Mitch: Yeah, it was another being in the right place at the right time! One of my good friends from Florida, which is where I grew up “musically” when we left London we relocated to Florida and my friend was an engineer/producer from Criteria records called Steve Gursky and he and I became roommates out here, and he was producing the “Daylight Again” Crosby, Stills and Nash record. And when they were doing that song, Graham was originally going to play a harmonica solo which wasn’t working out, so Steve said “Hey, my roommate’s at home I’ll call him down and we’ll put a guitar solo on!” And so me and Sean Penn made our debuts on that movie!
Mark: Let’s talk now about this Corona Virus, which is making life tough for a lot of people out there, we’ve been pretty lucky here in Australia, that we’ve managed, to keep it under control, but I know you’re having it tough over there, and in the UK too.
Mitch: It is absolutely horrendous, but it’s really weird because sometimes it’s really easy to forget how horrendous it really is when it’s not touching you personally, and you see so many people acting like nothing is wrong, and nothing is going on! But, as you know, nothing could be further from the truth! It really is a baffling place to find ourselves right now.
Mark: It certainly is, and it leads to a lot of reflection as well. It’s strange here because we locked down early, and so we were able to have our first live rock show last Saturday, we got back to having live music and it was the first live show I’d seen for 66 days! Kip Winger was the last person I saw play, and then we just had some local bands play live, which was weird having people sat down, socially distanced, but the music was still there!
Mitch: You know, I’ve got a way to beat these seating regulations, let’s just turn all rock concerts in to a protest!!
Mark: That’s right!! That’s the crazy thing, we’ve had protests here too over the weekend!
Mitch: I totally get the protests, but, I mean, timing?!! It’s a little crazy; I’m trying to wrap my head around why we can social distance for some things and not others.
Mark: Recently we had ANZAC Day in Australia, which I guess is like Remembrance Day in the UK, or Veterans Day in the US and gives thanks and remembers the soldiers who have served their country, and normally there’s a big dawn service where the bugle plays, and thousands of people get up early to go to a dawn service to pay respects, but this year everyone had to stand at the end of their driveways to do this, so there are different ways of doing this as well as other things.
Mark: I was looking through my record collection earlier, because I knew there was more about you than I’d been reading, and I found a copy of the Mitch Perry Projects!
Mitch: Wow! Mitch Perry projects, do you know that company Z Records?
Mark: Yes.
Mitch: Well everything you probably heard about them is true and then some!! Let’s put it this way I’ve never even seen a copy of the Mitch Perry Projects, and I’ve certainly never seen any money from them!!
Mark: That’s what everyone tells me, people I’ve interviewed, who’ve been involved with them!
Mitch: Here’s the thing, I wasn’t even involved with them. I was in Liverpool and did a gig at The Cavern Club with Jeff Pilson’s band War and Peace, this was done for Z Records and whilst I was there I talked to whatever the name of that “shyster” was, I can’t remember his name, and we talked about putting the record out, I sent him the stuff and he sent me a contract, and I said to him shouldn’t the contract have your signature on it? And basically I just got e mails from them for the next 6 months, so our record never saw anything, and that was it, we never even signed a contract for it!!
Mark: I don’t think I paid for it, I think they just sent me it, so I can’t pass on the royalties!!
Mitch: No worries!! (laughs)
Mark: The main reason I wanted to talk to you and bringing it up to date, there were two things, we played your track on our last podcast, and we had more reaction to it than anything we’ve played in our 18 podcasts so far, people were asking when was this recorded, it must be a lost classic!! It went down really, really well, when did you write it? It’s a beautiful song “Believe”.
Mitch: I actually started the links in 2003, I came up with the piano riff, and I tightened up the song over the next year or so. I did a couple of sessions where I used some really good people, and a good producer, and then tried recording it around 2008 I believe and didn’t like what I got, so I basically shelved it. And when we were doing this new batch of songs, a friend of mine said “you should record Believe”, and I said,” No I want new stuff”, and he said “Dude, Believe is a great song!”, he said you need to put it on there. That never left my head, and the more I thought about it, led us to where we’re at right now! It’s really neat to hear about those reactions to it.
Mark: It’s a wonderful song, we’ve done 18 episodes of the podcast so far, we had about 20 people listening to start with and now we’re up to about 3000! I think we had round about 50 people say wow, that’s a great song, where can we get hold of it? So, that’s my next question, I haven’t even heard the album yet, is it more like that??
Mitch: Oh, you need to hear the record! We need to hang up right now, let you listen to the record, and resume the call in about 45 minutes!! I will make sure when we’re done you’ll get a link to the record, and if your liking Believe then you’re going to love the album! The whole record, it’s meant to, I wanted a band playing live and we did that, through this whole record everything’s tracked with the band playing, what I mean by that is that we didn’t just do drums, and get rid of the guitars, and redo them and redo the bass. You know when you hear the songs you know there are overdubs there, the original performance is a live track by the band, and that’s on every track of the album, there’s no clicks or anything, so it gives you a more real feel, for me it’s just the way to capture the magic of the music better. I’m really proud of how we did it.
Mark: Yeah, that’s something a few people are doing now, and it really does bring back that sound from when I started listening to music, the stuff that was analogue and it’s that live sound that when you capture that, that’s what it’s all about.
Mitch: All the guitars on this record, pretty much almost every single guitar is my black Les Paul Pro with P90 pickups and it’s straight through my Marshall amp. Sometimes I’ll add a little tube screamer and a couple of times I’ll add some lock, but apart from that that is it, everything else is hands on the instrument. All the keyboards on the record are real pianos; I wanted that organic, real, authentic feel.
Mark: Fantastic! I’d love to hear it, and review it. Take it all the way back for us, and one of the questions I was dying to ask you was when did it all start for you? Was there a defining moment, or did you slowly become a musician?
Mitch: Well, it depends what you really define as the start, because I remember very specifically when I first started making noise on the guitar, and again this goes back to Top of the Pops back in London. I remember it was when 10CC were on, and they were doing a song called “Rubber Bullets”, and I picked up the guitar that my mum had, she played songs like “500 Miles” and “Puff the Magic Dragon”, and so I picked up the guitar and I was able to kind of jam along to “Rubber Bullets”, and my parents were like “how are you doing that?”! So, the next day there was a present from my parents, it was a “50 Songs from Lennon and McCartney”, and I started to teach myself guitar chords out of that book, and the rest is history!
Mark: What a great way to start!
Mitch: I remember to this day I still hate that B flat chord!!
Mark: Was that one of Lennon’s banjo chords??
Mitch: Exactly!! It’s right on the part that Lennon threw in to the songs!
Mark: He did like those didn’t he?!
Mitch: I really did love that stuff.
Mark: It truly is timeless.
Mitch: The first album that I ever owned, this was when I was seven years old, was a copy of “Magical Mystery Tour”. It was the second one my parents had, and so they didn’t need two of them, so I got it!
Mark: OK, now to the three questions we ask everyone for our podcast, and I am particularly interested in your answers to these. 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 have loved to be there for?
Mitch: Are we going for fun, or are we going for learning?? I bet there are some things we would’ve got from The Rolling Stones sessions that we didn’t get from the Pink Floyd sessions!!
Mark: Definitely!!
Mitch: So, it depends what kind of mood I’m in to answer this question. It’d have to be Hendrix, can you imagine being there at that time, hearing him doing that stuff on the guitar where it was truly brand new!
Mark: The first album?
Mitch: Oh, yeah. “Are You Experienced” definitely. From the song point of view I immediately leave that album and I’d go to “Pet Sounds” by Brian Wilson, or “Peppers” or “Magical Mystery Tour”, any of those things from the Beatles, anything from “Rubber Soul” on from the Beatles, they really wrote the book on how to record, from the use of feedback on the guitars to doing songs like “Helter Skelter” right back to songs like “When I’m Sixty-Four”.
Mark: It was ground breaking, and it’s so hard to do stuff like that now, the way that digital technology these days has come so far, it’s not as exciting, it’s not as ground breaking.
Mitch: No, there was an art to do what they were doing, it was truly magic, and even though you were using the technology to create stuff, you were using the technology like an instrument, you had to figure out the creative ways to take advantage of technology then, whereas now, it’s all relative, now it’s just hit a button and go, but there’s got to be someone to figure out how to take it to the next level.
Mark: That’s right. Now, the next question, and I must say I’ve had some of the most interesting answers to this question since we’ve been in lock-down, because I think people are listening to a lot more music. There are a lot of musicians who haven’t been able to play live, so they’ve been either very creative, or been bored, or as someone told me yesterday, just getting “fat and lazy”!! But, also they’ve been visiting a lot of great music; I put on an old Hollies album the other day from the 60’s that I’d never heard before, and it was amazing! What five albums would you recommend to people to take in to lock-down?
Mitch: Let’s come up with some good stuff! You absolutely need one Beatles album, you’d have to pick your own, but mine would have to be “Mystery Tour” it was my first album so I guess I’m partial to it. We’ve got to have some rock and roll, so there’d be some Van Halen, it’d have to be the first record, and by the same token we need rock and roll, so some AC/DC.
Mark: Now this will be interesting because I always disagree with people when they’re choosing their AC/DC albums!
Mitch: Well, I love all the AC/DC stuff, but for me it has to be a Bon record. I was really fortunate to meet those guys when they recorded it; I was there during “Highway to Hell” because they were recording at Criteria, which was in Florida where I lived, and they would come in to the club where our band played at 2 in the morning, or Bon would, we never saw the brothers but we’d see Bon and Cliff. They would come in fairly regularly, it would’ve been the summer of ’79, it was cool, looking back you don’t even realise you were that close to rock and roll history!
Mark: That is the album for me, I can’t go past it, I loved “Touch Too Much” and they never played it live! How crazy is that?!
Mitch: I didn’t know that. It’s funny, you find out all sorts of weird things. I played with Edgar Winter for a long time, and there was a song he had, off “They Only Come Out at Night” called “Autumn”, which is a really soft, sappy love song. I happened to know it, and one day when I first joined the band, I’m doing my guitar solo, and I got to the part in my solo where I break down to this quiet, soft bit, and instead of going in to that I went in to the intro part of “Autumn”, and the place went completely nuts, and Edgar came out and started singing, and he tells me afterwards it’s the first time he’s ever played it on stage because they thought it was too sappy to ever play it live!
Mark: That’s a great story!
Mitch: And that blew my mind because that song was on the radio every two minutes in 1973!
Mark: The question we always leave till last is what is the meaning of life?
Mitch: It’s a great movie by Monty python!
Mark: I’ll let you get away with that one! There’s so much more, we need to talk again, we’ve been talking for half an hour and I haven’t even asked you half the stuff I wanted to talk to you about!!
Mitch: Yeah, we have a lot of things, I’m sure you know, I can tell by just talking to you, you’ve got to be a fan of Frankie Miller?
Mark: Yes!
Mitch: You know I played on one of his records?
Mark: What a great voice.
Mitch: And speaking of great voices we’ve got Alan Fryer from Heaven, we have a lot of things still to discuss, plus of course the new album! I can’t wait for you to hear it.
Mark: Exactly and when I hear that we’ll catch up again and talk about all the things we didn’t talk about this time.
Mitch: Awesome, I will be looking forward to it, it’s been a pleasure.
Mark: It has, and at such a sad time with Steve’s (Priest) passing. You were going to be playing The Golden Nugget in Vegas, and I wasn’t sure if it was cancelled due to the virus?
Mitch: I just spoke to Dave from the Nugget the other day as a matter of fact after Steve passed. Right now it’s too soon to be figuring out what’s going to happen with that stuff, I think about the fact that I’m not going to get to play with him anymore, and it totally bums me out, I loved it, it’s been so much fun. It’s very rare you can find people you can communicate with, we all know how to play and hit the right notes in the right place, but it’s very, very rare when you find somebody and you speak to them during the show with your instrument back and forth, and he was one of the few people I could do that with. I’ve lost so much weight; I’ve been crying so many tears about not being able to play with him again.
Mark: It’s a very sad time. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk, it’s been absolutely wonderful take care, and I’ll listen to the album as soon as I get it!
Mitch: Thank you, it’ll be coming to you as soon as I hang up! Take care, bye.
