Mr Big is in Australia this week and we caught up with Paul Gilbert to find out all about the tour, the likelihood of new music from the band and ‘rediscovering the Blues’ 40 years into a career as oneof Rock’s most respected gunslingers.
Mark: Hi Paul, how are you?
Paul: I’m good thanks Mark.
Mark: So you’re finally getting over to Australia with the band?
Paul: Yes I have been over to Australia several times as a ‘clinician’, but it’s the first time with the band that’s why I’m excited about it.
Mark: I remember seeing you back in 2012 at one of your guitar clinics, when you got a couple of local musicians up on stage and jammed around, it was great fun, I’ve seen you a couple of times before, but that was way back in 1991/1992 in the UK, and I actually saw one of the Aerosmith shows at Wembley as well!
Paul: Oh wow, the big hair days! (laughs)
Mark: I just want to talk about the tour first of all, we delve into some of your solo stuff which I’m particularly fond of, you are coming over in June so it’s only a short while away, but I guess the last show you played was quite an emotional one when you played tribute to Pat.
Paul: Oh yeah, we just did it a couple days ago, yeah it was really nice, and it wasn’t only Mr Big, there was a lot of other musicians who have played with Pat over the years, and back stage we saw many people who knew Pat, it was just a nice memory of how great he was and how cool he was.
Mark: So, it was a good night? Plenty of people there, packed to the rafters?
Paul: Yeah absolutely, it was great playing with Mr Big and a nice sort of transition to do a show as we are and we’ve had Matt working with us for years now because Pat was in Australia with his health, so even though Pat was on there on stage, Matt was there when Pat was unable to perform, so that worked out great for us because Matt has already been on the road with us for years, so it’s as smooth as a transition could be.
Mark: Thirty Years this year! Does it seem that long?
Paul: Ha ha, we’re all getting older! I just got to be careful when I get in and out of vehicles and up and down the stairs but the fingers are still working good. (laughs)
Mark: So, I guess an anniversary year, and as you’ve never been to Australia before, is the set-list going to be pretty much what you have been playing recently or are you going to play anything special for us due to the fact you haven’t been here before?
Paul: I think the stuff which is the most unpredictable is the stuff that is the more special. You know, we want to play the songs that the people of Australia are familiar with and I don’t want to put that in the category of ‘oh that’s the stuff we expected’ well that’s the good stuff and that’s what you want! I think the set list might not be as quite as long as it is normally, but I think we still have quite a long time to play, so we will do the hits and with Mr Big when they sing a balance, it’s a really good balance of the songs hopefully everyone has heard, but also we are a band where there is a lot of flexibility where every night is different even if it’s the same set list, every night is a unique thing, we have never played with pre recorded tracks in our lives, it is still a live band, our sound engineer when she first started working for us, she was like ‘ well everybody uses tracks, you don’t use them?’ we said ‘ no we don’t know how! It would mess us up!’ so I think its refreshing to get a band that’s a real band, Extreme is part of the same wire.
Mark: Yes it’s a fantastic double bill to get two fantastic bands like that, Extreme came over once, I think that was way back in the early nineties so they’ve not been over, although Nuno did come over with his solo band about ten years ago so its few and far between but will be wonderful to see so many bands, we have just had Europe over here and we are getting lots of bands from back in the day coming over to Australia. The last three Mr Big albums, ‘Defying Gravity,’ ‘….The Stories We Could Tell’ and ‘What If’ have been great, I think I actually prefer these albums to the earlier albums, people are calling me all kinds of strange things because of that, but there’s some great sounds on there.How do you guys write these days? Has it changed vastly since the early days?
Paul: All those three records were different, in those last three records, we were also dealing with Pat’s health, with the album ‘What if’ it was like the very beginnings of realising that something was ‘off’, and we didn’t release it because even though it was more of a struggle for him, the end result was that he was able to perform, but he was saying ‘this should be so easy for me but its really hard’ but like I say, the end result was great and the album was mostly live in the studio so it wasn’t like we were on the stage, the next one he really deteriorated quite a bit so we didn’t really know what to do so ended up putting it together a lot differently, so that was an experiment of what you can do in the studio, it wasn’t really the way we normally would have liked to do a record but we just had to deal with this new situation and make the best out of it we could, and by the time we got round to ‘Defying Gravity’ we had Matt solely in the band, writing can go anywhere as a combination, we all write, sometimes someone will have a tune rolled off on their own, sometimes someone will bring in an idea and someone finishes it, so there’s not just one method, its whatever works to make the song good,
Mark: And I suppose it’s easier than in the older days with modern technology, I imagine it’s so easy to record now to put a demo together and send files to each other and stuff like that?
Paul: Yes and at the same time its easier to get lost with modern technology, you spend all day animating and you think ‘what did I just do?’ it’s got to the point where I hate demo’s I just feel like I’m wasting my time, if you have a good band you don’t need the demo, you just play a rough version of the song and it becomes better than making everybody play parts that you wrote, especially a band like Mr Big, we have such a nice recognisable style, it’s silly of me to say ‘this is how the bass goes’ ‘no ‘this is how the song goes and you play what you want!’ I would do some evolved demo’s and get everyone to do exactly what I had sketched out, and then I realised it just frustrates musicians because they can’t do what they want to do, it’s a lot of work for me, its much easier for me for everyone to bring a basic structure in and let everyone do their thing, it turns out better that way and less work too.
Mark: You are someone who has put out a lot of great solo albums, I love the instrumental ones that you did a few years back now, but the one that really resonated , apart from the latest one was the strangely titled, and I wanted to ask you about that, was ‘Stone pushing uphill man’ that was wonderful, a great collection of cover songs where you almost transcribed the vocals into guitar sounds. I recommend it to anyone, there are so many wonderful songs on there, so the wording on the title of that album, why do the words come in that order? ‘Stone Pushing Uphill Man?’
Paul: I don’t remember! (laughs) I really don’t! I think it was a Greek myth of a guy (Sisyphus), I think it’s about punishment, it’s about a guy punishing him by pushing a stone up to the top and by the time it rolls back down he needs to do it again, it seemed to communicate what I wanted to communicate, and I’m a grammar stickler, when I have an email I make sure it’s punctuated properly and I’m very strict with words, but this album title is sort of its own thing, a poetic license, somehow it felt better.
Mark: It certainly sticks in the mind for that reason! About this album ‘I can Destroy’ I read an interview recently where you said that album had helped you or was the result of you learning to look at the fret board in a different way, now after forty years of playing guitar and playing on some wonderful albums, I guess being one of the very best guitarists out there, how does that feel now that you have this new way of looking at things?
Paul: Well it’s an ongoing journey but for anyone who plays rock guitar it’s a common language of the rock guitar and it’s a good language, you can have a whole career of what has been played before, and there’s just some certain tricks where you can take your hand and play something in minor for example and move it down three frets and like magic it becomes major, and like everybody else I do that trick but it works especially well if you play really fast and of course I’ve been known to do that but what was happening is as I slowed down wanting to play more melodically, even though the notes on paper were correct the effuses was different, the place where my finger would land as a habit in minor would have to be a strong note, was not a strong note, it wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t strong, the scale is not a democracy, they are not all equal, and that was the discovery if I wanted to emphasize in a musical way I would have to I would have to re-finger the scales and the shapes that came out of it were new to me and I don’t think many people use it, a little bit of it is because I have big hands and can manage it, and also listening to saxophone players, I’ve been listening to a lot of traditional blues and its not the stuff I chose to listen to, it’s very text book 50’s and 60’s jazz and I would figure out and realise if I wanted to play this I can’t use the fingerings that I would normally use, it just lays on the guitar differently than what I’m used to, there’s so many discoveries like that and its becoming a problem trying to imitate instruments that aren’t the guitar, we want everything to be easy of course,
Mark: It’s fantastic to hear someone who has been playing fantastic guitar for so long and still got that joy of the instrument, I take it you’re still playing every day, you still pick up the guitar every morning
Paul: I have actually got an online rock guitar school with a company called Artistworks, I have thousand students there, so every day I get up and check the videos that my students have sent in and make replies for them, its really inspiring to teach because I’m just in that world all the time.
Mark: It sounds like you’re quite collective as far as music is concerned, has what inspires you constantly change?
Paul: It does change, it feels like it’s taken a long time to change, listening to the same stuff for decades and then suddenly I have to sort of switch and I think that came from loving the blues in a way I haven’t before and really desire to play it well and realising that I could be so much better at it than I was and just being really angry at myself for being lousy at it as I was and so it was a mission to play one good blues song, there’s so many great players and a lot of them have gone now, but it’s starting to happen I think, I did a fantasy guitar thing called ‘The Gods of Metal’ and Zakk Wilde from Ozzy was there and Dave Mustaine from Megadeth and I played the way I played, I was much ‘bluesier’ than I was, and at the end of it a 15 year old kid came up to me and said ‘ I like the way you play, I’m gonna check out the blues!’ and that made me feel so good, that was exactly what I was gunning for, I want people to like it because they appreciate it and I want to turn them onto that stuff because ‘its cool’ and like ‘oh man, that moves me’ and that’s why I do it.
Mark: I feel an album coming out, sounds like you have that blues album up your sleeve,
Paul: It’s a combination of stuff and actually I do have a new album coming out September called ‘Beyond Electric Guitar’ this last week it launched.
Mark: Ok we will make sure we get the link in there, we have couple of questions we ask everyone, if you could have been a fly on the wall for the creation of any great album just to see how the magic happened in the studio, what’s the one for you?
Paul: Oh man, the first one that comes to mind is The Beatles, their early stuff when they were in a hurry, to be like on the help section that would be amazing, although I’d probably get sick of the cigarette smoke, but besides that probably the early Van Halen stuff or even the Jazz or Blues stuff early B.B. King sessions or Johnny Hodges with the Duke Ellington band
Mark: And the easy one that we close with, what is the meaning of life?
Paul: Oh man, the first thing that comes to mind is the spinal tap quote, ‘Have a good time for all of the time’ That’s my philosophy
Mark: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us, its been a pleasure, can’t wait to see you in June, it’s going to be great, take care
Paul: Thank you, bye.
