Revolutionary chemical warfare with Dave & Eddie
Paris (France), 25/11/98

Dave & Eddie getting ready for the Paris headbangers

You've been on the road with Bruce for a while now. What do you miss most about L.A.?
Dave: Sunshine!
Eddie: Yeah, the weather. My family...and Mexican food (laughs)!

Did you try Mexican food in Europe?
Eddie: Yeah, it wasn't bad, just not the same. Not spicy enough (laughs)!

The Chemical Wedding is your third album with Bruce and by far the heaviest...
Dave: And the best!

Yes! The joke is that it's the best Iron Maiden album since Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son...
Dave: Hahaha ! I don't think that Maiden think that it's a very funny joke. You'd get a black eye (laughs).

How difficult is it for you guys coming from a Latino band to play on such a heavy album?
Eddie: Actually, ten years ago I was in a band and we played Iron Maiden songs, so I know The Number Of The Beast, The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, Invaders, Run To The Hills, Flight Of Icarus, etc. It was kind of a preparation for Bruce. I didn't know I'd ever be in a band with Bruce. When I had this opportunity, I knew the lines already. I just had to learn them again.
Dave: I grew up listening to Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath... I never really listened much to Iron Maiden, but I definitely was into Heavy Rock at one time. So, even though Eddie and I nowadays listen to different styles of music, Hard Rock is still pretty much a part of our musical upbringing.

"Roy is pretty good at bass... But he's a shitty drummer!" (laughs)

How did you work with Roy to write the album?
Eddie: Roy and Bruce had already spent a lot of time on their own, developing the songs and then Roy brought in the original version of The Book Of Thel and...it wasn't happening! He wasn't happy with it, so he asked us if we had any ideas. I had some ideas from that band I used to do Iron Maiden stuff with, so I showed them to Roy and he liked them.
Dave: For the most part, the songs are presented to us written, but it's up to us to interpret them. Roy will have drum machine parts. I listen to those parts and make up my on based on that.

Roy plays bass too, so don't you ever clash with him?
Eddie: I have a different way to play it. But he's not bad, you know. He's pretty good!
Dave: He's a shitty drummer, though (laughs)!

Yes, Bruce and Roy did the Scorpions cover for the ECW compilation using a drum machine...
Dave: He's very good at programming drum machines. He can't sit down and play, but he thinks like a drummer.

On The Chemical Wedding, the bass and drum parts are much more elaborate.
Dave: We had a whole tour under our belt. We came straight off the road and we were much more confident. You can't possibly tour around the world and not come back a better player.
Eddie: There was more freedom also. We had done Accident Of Birth together and been on tour. We were more comfortable with the heavy style after that, so we could be more ourselves and be more open. And since this is a concept album, it probably helped as well.

Talking about the concept, what was your reaction when your first read Bruce's lyrics?
Dave: I still haven't read them!
Eddie: I read some of them and they're heavy! Bruce loves to learn things. He knows a lot about History and this is kind of new to me. He tends to express himself both on religious and mystical aspects. It's very interesting. But the first time I read them, I went : "Wow! Heavy!". The lyrics paint pictures in your mind.
Dave: Yeah, I don't necessarily relate to everything Bruce writes, but I think he's brilliant writing lyrics that just sound very cool, you know. Like Eddie said, they create visions in your head and under certain circumstances, they just stand out by themselves.

The obvious question : you play Iron Maiden songs on stage, so people have to compare you with Steve Harris and Nicko McBrain. How do you feel about that?
Dave: To be honest, I don't think about it much. When I'm learning a Maiden song, I listen to everything Nicko does and then I interpret it in my own way. I try not to change it too much, because I know the fans have heard it so many times, but at the same time, I'm a totally different drummer than Nicko. I'm not gonna try to copy him.
Eddie: I'm gonna take a risk here. I think that sometimes Steve and Nicko play too much. They're great players, I love Steve. I grew up listening to these guys. But when we were learning Two Minutes To Midnight, I asked Adrian : "Do you mind if I play it more like a bass player, more lower?", and he said : "Yes, thank you!". I guess we play more like a rhythm section, allowing the guitars and Bruce to breathe more. I love Iron Maiden's version, it's the original one. But at the same time, we interpret it more as a rhythm section. Many people have asked me about the Steve Harris comparison, for example when I do this thing on stage (the famous machine-gun pose). But I got that from Phil Lynott from Thin Lizzy! What else am I gonna do? Throw my bass around (laughs)? The latest comparison I had was with Gene Simmons.

I'm not sure... Do you have platform boots?
Eddie: No no no (laughs)!

What about the Guru? How is he doing?
Dave: He's doing better everyday. He had a very big challenge put on his shoulders : to try to fill Roy's shoes. He's doing a good job.
Eddie: He had about three weeks to learn 23 songs. Bruce, Dave and me got together to get him ready, because it had been around five years since he'd played with a band. He's an excellent guitar player but it's been a long time since he played with someone else. He didn't have a home either, he was living at his sister's place and sleeping on the couch! He learned the songs with a small cassette player, it was real difficult. But we were confident that he would do it.

"Gregg laid all the vocals in a week or so. He did a brilliant job!"

Let's talk about the Tribe now. The new album just came out in Japan...
Eddie: It did ? You probably know more than us about that (laughs)!

Tell us about the way it happened, having a new singer and knowing very little about him.
Dave: Actually, we played last year in New Mexico with Bruce and Gregg's band, Seventhsign, opened up. That was sort of like an audition. We checked him out and he was obviously very talented, but we all have different tastes in singers, so everyone had different mixed opinions. We travelled all around the world and met many singers.We had written and recorded the new album without having a singer. At the last minute, everything just fell into place. Gregg was sitting in New Mexico with nothing to do, his band had just broken up. We're sitting in LA with a record and no singer. So we flew him in and he laid all the vocals in a week or so. He did a brilliant job!
Eddie: If I remember correctly, Gregg was the first singer that we wanted for the Tribe. He had lived in LA but he hated Hollywood and went back to New Mexico. We then started with David (Young) and it didn't work out, then with Dean Ortega and it didn't work. We're back to Gregg and hopefully, we now have a singer for a while.

Gregg told me that during the recording process, you kept bringing him books and magazines to give him ideas for the lyrics. It's interesting that everyone in the Tribe gets a chance to contribute.
Eddie: Yes. Landslide, for example. Elvis found the title. It's a good one, because the song's got such a good groove. I found Mother's Cry : it's about the Earth, which brings forth water and life and we still continue to abuse it. In the middle section where Gregg goes "Please forgive them...", that's the mother's vision asking the creator to tell us to open our eyes. Anyway, we didn't have much time. I brought lots of stuff to Gregg not because he wasn't capable of writing but simply because I didn't know him and we had to get this record done!
Dave: Actually, Landslide is the only song that we wrote as a band, sitting in a room, jamming and writing the song. All the other songs were either more or less written by Eddie or Roy. I wrote Freedom...

Tell us about Freedom...
Dave: Roy came up with some of the lyrics and the name. Ironically, after I wrote the whole song, I listened to it and the melody is extremely similar to the beginning of We All Bleed Red. Call it coincidence, call it subliminal or plagiarism... The melody was so similar that I could not possibly include Roy a little bit for the credits, but for the most part I wrote it.

"My favorite Roy solos are when he doesn't think about it."

The guitar solo just never ends.
Dave: Yeah, we actually did that in Roy's appartment. I showed up with the chords and programmed the drum machine. He laid down the bass and everything and then he sat down and laid the solo. By the time he was done, he said that there was no way he could recreate that in the studio. So we took what he had done on his DAT recorder and flew it in, so to speak. I overdubbed  the drums, there's three drum tracks on that. We later brought down the percussion, Eddie did the bass and he even played some percussion.
Eddie: Yeah! Pa-ca pa-ca pa-ca (laughs)!
Dave: The end result is a combination of the demo we did in Roy's appartment and of what we did in the studio.

It came out fantastic!
Eddie: Yeah, my favorite Roy solos are when he doesn't think about it. But it's impossible to recreate it. He did that on Nothing Lasts Forever, that was the shit! He tried to do it again, but the first take was the one.
Dave: For the solo on Freedom, I told Roy : "Think Neil Schon meets Jimi Hendrix" because I wanted it to be melodic but also sound like Star Spangled Banner. That's why he's doing all that dive-bomb stuff with the whammy bar.

Yes! Hendrix was the first name that came to my mind. Everyone says Santana, but on this album, there's no Santana.
Dave: We intentionaly tried to stray from that, because we were getting compared too much. We have to admit that the first record was heavily Santana-influenced. We took the same concept, blending Rock music with latin rhythms, but we try to do it in our own style.
Eddie: Roy and I are heavy advocates of the early Santana stuff. My favorite Santana records are the first three and Moonflower. We're not taking sound ideas from Santana, but the concept of it. Anyway, it's Tribe now, especially with adding Gregg. the unit's complete. I wish that Gregg had been there when we wrote the record.

Dave, Graphixman and Eddie

We're about done. Any message for Tribe fans on the web and around the world?
Dave: Buy our records now, because one day, we're gonna be rich and famous (laughs)!
Eddie: I wanted to thank them for supporting the Tribe. Although it's hard to get the record, it's here and we hope we'll be able to do a proper tour soon. Merci !

 

Julien & Clem