Zakk Wylde is and has always been a busy man. With over eighteen albums under his belt in the last twelve years or so, it would be easy to expect the bearded guitar wizard to ease off just a little bit. But Covid allowed Wylde to spend an extended amount of time with his family, as well as create another Black Label Society studio masterpiece, this time in the form of ‘Doom Crew Inc.’, a twelve track collection of wonderful compositions which sees Zakk share guitar duties with Dario Lorina to push the boundaries of his playing once more.
The band also managed to rack up a host of US shows before Christmas (The Rockpit managed to get to one of them) which has only whetted the appetite of a man who is as much at ease on stage as he is relaxing at home. With Europe firmly set in Black Label Society’s sights and with hopes of returning to Australia & New Zealand later this year, the world is once again Zakk Wylde’s oyster.
The Rockpit’s Sean Bennett tried to have a deep and meaningful conversation but soon realised that is a difficult thing to do with the extremely humorous Mr Wylde, as they discussed ‘Doom Crew Inc.’, the evolution of Dario’s contributions to the band and the incredible sexual superpowers Zakk’s kilts give him in the bedroom…
Sean: Hey Zakk.
Zakk: What’s happening Bro?
Sean: All good here. How are you doing today?
Zakk: All good brother, all good.
Sean: Thank you for taking the time to take my call. Hope you’ve had a great start to the new year?
Zakk: I sure have man. We’re just chilling before we head back out on the road in a couple of months from now, but we had such a great time on the last run we did.
Sean: We had one of our reviewers cover one of your shows in New Jersey in November and the photos & review made me very jealous – it looked a fantastic show.
Zakk: Yeah, totally man. We had a great time with Obituary and Prong, you know they are old friends of ours, so it was a great time for everybody.
Sean: Congratulations on the latest album Doom Crew Inc. too. It’s a superb album. I bet the fans were chomping at the bit to hear some of the new material in the set. Did you manage to unleash any of it on them?
Zakk: Yeah, they were but we only got to play ‘Set You Free’ because that was the only single we had released at the time so we are definitely looking forward to heading back out this time so we can play some of the stuff off the record now everyone has had a chance to listen to it and digest some of it.
Sean: I’m a bit of a sucker for a good rock ballad and I have to say that some of the guitar work on those three slower songs really tingle the spine – incredible stuff.
Zakk: Thanks Bro.
Sean: You mentioned ‘Set You Free’ and I can’t not ask you about the video that went with it. That looked like such a lot of fun to put together.
Zakk: Yeah, without a doubt. There was ‘Set You Free’ then obviously the second single ‘End of Days’… we had a blast making that one too. The next single is going to probably be ‘You Made Me Want to Live’ but to be honest I’ve got plans to make a video to every song on the record at this point because once everything opens back up again, I plan to tour behind this record for two years. That’s the game plan.
Sean: Well, it will be great to see you back down here in Australia because its an album that is certainly resonating around the country and one that I’m sure your very proud of.
Zakk: Thanks brother. I really appreciate it man.
Sean: One thing I’ve learnt from the ‘Set You Free’ video is not to drink any punch at one of your parties [laughs]
Zakk: [laughs] Yeah, exactly. I told Justin Reich, he’s our Stanley Kubrick of our Black Label videos, I told him I wanted us to try to recreate my High School Prom from 1985 at Jackson Memorial High School in New York. You know between the guy getting his arms & testicles ripped off, the band and the dancing, it’s pretty much exactly how it went down at my High School Prom [laughs]
Sean: I can’t get the image of you with that hair style out of my head now [laughs]
Zakk: The band on the night actually had that hair style so we were just trying to replicate the band. Its was kind of like a mix of Sha La La and a rock band. It was good.
Sean: One song that has really stood out for me on Doom Crew Inc. and one I keep playing over again is the re-imaging of ‘Love Reign Down’. What an absolutely stunning, stripped back version that is.
Zakk: I appreciate that brother. That was the original way that song was written actually.
Sean: Oh wow.
Zakk: Yeah, I wrote that one back in 1999 when my mother passed away. I was at A & M Studios when I wrote it… it was actually probably at the same time as when I was writing the piano bit for ‘No More Tears’. I was just alone in the studio with a grand piano, and I just ended up writing that song. We recorded the heavier version on ‘Stronger Than Death’ but that’s the way it was written with the piano.
Sean: That’s so good to hear. When you get to hear a song stripped back and now you’ve explained what it was written about it really makes sense. It’s such a powerful & emotional song.
Zakk: Thanks man.
Sean: One thing that really sits forward on this album is the dual guitar work with Dario Lorina. There are notes hit in some of these solos that make every hair stand up on end. How did if feel for you to share the load so-to-speak.
Zakk: Yeah, it was great. It’s the evolution of the band to hear Dario shredding on the record. You know, he’s an amazing player – he’s an amazing guitarist, he can play piano, he sings, he makes an amazing Chicken Piccata…he does it all so having him on the record is just great. It has been kind of like an evolution because the more that Dario has been in the band… Dario has doubled with me on solos for songs like ‘Suicide Messiah’, ‘Stillborn’, you know the whole catalogue and then with doing the live shows we go out to the crowd and we fire it up with by duelling banjos, soloing back and forth and now its kind of spilled over on to the record. I couldn’t be happier. Dario is an amazing player and I love showing him off. He’s great.
Sean: I see the album was once again recorded in your home studio. Did you find you still had many challenges with the fact the world was struggling with the pandemic?
Zakk: Even though we didn’t do live shows for two years, I just used those two years spending time with my family. You know, I’m never home for two years. Usually, I’m always out touring so when I’m home, I’m home for like ten days tops and then I’m back out on the road. I’m normally doing two hundred plus shows a year and when I am home, I’m normally recording or doing something. I’m not just sitting around the house so to have that quality time with my family was amazing.
Sean: Being someone who is so active with so many live shows you must have been itching to get back out there after two years of no performing.
Zakk: Yeah, for sure. I’m happy when I’m on the road and I cherish that, and I’ve never been one of those guys who says he wants to go home at any time. I love, every night, getting up on stage. When we are on the road, I love it and when I’m home I love being at home with my family. I love both sides of its man.
Sean: I saw from the photos from our review that you were once again donning your wonderful kilt.
Zakk: Ah yes, the Black Label kilt again! When I wear the kilt, it makes me feel like I’m doing something normal like when I’m doing the dishes, when I’m making my bed, when I’ve got to clean the dog run, protecting the world [laughs], when I’m saving people from the bad people… you know, I do enjoy wearing my kilt.
Sean: So, your telling me its almost like a Super-Hero’s cape? [laughs]
Zakk: Yean man. When I go into the bedroom to have relations with the immortal beloved, I definitely wear the kilt to give me some superpowers because I know I need all the help I can possibly get [laughs].
Sean: And of course, easy access [laughs]
Zakk: Exactly. And I’m also hoping I can last more than eighteen to twenty seconds… I’m hoping to one day break the thirty second Black Label barrier [laughs]
Sean: What? Are you doing it twice? [laughs]
Zakk: [laughs] Yes! Also, when she tells me I only lasted eight seconds I always say to her, “Yes, but it was the greatest eight seconds you’ve ever had in your life!” [laughs] She’s looking at me and shaking her head at me right now [laughs]. And I’m saying this while wearing my kilt as well.
Sean: Is it winter with you right now?
Zakk: It is but I’m out in California so its never too bad here. Gets a bit chilly at night but nice in the day.
Sean: Just make sure you wear something under that kilt in the evening then.
Zakk: [laughs] Yes, I always make sure I have my fishnets and my stilettos.
Sean: I can’t get that thought out of my head now. [laughs] Anyway, we digress. I was looking at your discography and it’s incredible to see that over the last twelve or thirteen years you’ve been involved in or released eighteen or nineteen albums including working with Ozzy and your solo material too. It’s an incredible amount of work in such a short space of time.
Zakk: It’s only because I have a very large outstanding Black Label bar tab I’m still paying off and will probably be paying off for quite some time [laughs]. It feels like a massive student loan! I’ll be working for quite a while yet.
Sean: Does the luxury of having that home studio give you more of an opportunity to jump in there to write as and when you can?
Zakk: I guess but I’m not Jimi Hendrix or Prince who were recording all the time. For me, when its time to make the record then we go into writing mode. It’s like if I wrote ‘Jaws’ and I’m done with that, I’m not picking up a book until I’m inspired to write another book and then I come up with ‘The Exorcist’ or something like that. I’m not constantly in the studio recording. We had like thirty song ideas down and then we whittled then down… I mean originally, we wanted to put ten songs down on the record but then I ended up writing ‘Forever And A Day’ and I think… what came after that? There was ‘Shelter Me’ and then ‘Farewell Ballad’ and I wanted to make sure they were all on the record so that why we came up to twelve songs on the final record. After I’m done with a record, I’m done writing.
Sean: It always amazes me how many songs some artists take into the studio for an album. I remember Ben Wells from Black Stone Cherry saying they took around thirty songs in for ‘Family Tree’. That’s an incredible amount of writing.
Zakk: Yeah, I mean when you think about Zeppelin, Jimmy Page was saying when they did ‘Led Zeppelin IV’ and they were at Headley Grange and they started tracking all that stuff, they had so many ideas coming out that they went from ‘Led Zeppelin IV’ to ‘Houses of the Holy’ to ‘Physical Graffiti’ so there were songs that just spilled over those three records. Its just an implosion of writing. When you get inspired, you track it but for me its kind of like if your preparing for a fight and you’ve trained for this fight your like “I’m done hitting this bag for now” and you still stay in shape but then when its time to get ready to start to fight again then you put the pedal to the metal and your back up at four o’clock in the morning running fifteen miles every day… you know what I mean? You’re getting ready for the fight again. For me, its just a matter of recharging the batteries.
Sean: So, when are the next run of shows?
Zakk: We’re probably looking around four or five months to be getting ready to head over to Europe then once we have done Europe, we will be heading back to the States then hopefully in eight or nine months from now we could be heading back down to Australia, New Zealand and Asia.
Sean: We can’t wait to have you back down here. I was looking through my little box of ticket stubs and memorabilia and it suddenly dawned on me I still haven’t seen Black Label Society live yet. The last time I saw you up on stage was in 1994 when you were in Pride & Glory at Donington’s Monsters of Rock Festival. I remember that day vividly.
Zakk: Wow! I remember it too. We did ‘War Pigs’, ‘Sweet Home Alabama’, ‘Losin’ Your Mind’, all that stuff. It was a lot of fun.
Sean: Great memories Zakk. I would love to finish with a couple of my more regular questions, if I may.
Zakk: Sure.
Sean: If I booked you a restaurant table and you could invite three people from the music world, past or present, who would you have join you?
Zakk: I’d probably just have the guys in the band, man. JD, Jeff and Dario. They are all good fellas, but they would probably ask if they really had to sit down and have dinner with me [laughs]. They would probably ask to sit in a booth a bit further from me, but I’d be like “Hey guys, please. Come and have dinner with me!”
Sean: And what would your food of choice be?
Zakk: We would probably have to go to a steakhouse.
Sean: A man after my own heart.
Zakk: The guys would hope I would get mad and then that would be the end of the band [laughs].
Sean: They can’t get out of it that easily [laughs] and they would probably try to sneak out to make you pay the bill anyway!
Zakk: But of course, but we always try to take it out JD’s money anyway [laughs].
Sean: JD has the food bill; you have the bar bill…
Zakk: We’re always putting things on his tab… people are always thanking him for stuff, and he keeps saying, “Why are they thanking me?” and we keep saying to him, “Don’t worry about it!” [laughs]
Sean: He’ll know now! What was the last album you listened to?
Zakk: I haven’t really listened to a lot lately. I’ve been listening to Allan Holdsworth lately. Been listening to a bit of yacht rock too. I also listen to your normal staple new wave. I listen to a bit of everything. I listen to Pat Martino, he’s another amazing jazz guitarist. Obviously Classic Rock too – your staple like Zeppelin, Bad Company, Allmans, Sabbath, you know.
Sean: Wow, no stone unturned. Finally, if you could be credited for writing any song ever written, which song would you choose?
Zakk: Well, you’ve either got to go with ‘White Christmas’, ‘Stairway to Heaven’, ‘Freebird’… let me see. What song is just going to give me massive publishing rights then I can retire and never have to worry about anything ever again. Maybe the ‘Happy Birthday’ song – I’ll take that one [laughs].
Sean: You can fight it out with Chris Jericho because he picked that one too [laughs]
Zakk: There you go [laughs]
Sean: Zakk, thank you so much for your time. We wish you continued success with the fantastic ‘Doom Crew Inc.’ album and we wish you all the best when you get back out on the road, when we hope to get to see you back down here in Australia in the very near future.
Zakk: Without a doubt man. You know we did around forty-four shows in fifty-something days on that last run, and they all were great. Nobody got Covid, nobody got sick, it was great. So, hopefully the rest of the world will be like that, and we can get back out there.
Sean: Well, it was 1994 since I last saw you play so I will be front and centre. Thanks again Zakk.
Zakk: Without a doubt my brother. Tell everybody I say “Hi, stay strong and keep believing in Black Label, man”.
Sean: Stay safe and best wishes to the family, Zakk.
Zakk: Right back at you brother.
Grab your copy of DOOM CREW INC. HERE
Check out The Official Zakk Wylde YouTube Channel HERE