KERRY KING SURPRISING RICK RUBIN WORKING WITH 'SINKING SHIP' METALLICA
AZNightBuzz.com has published a few assorted quotes from SLAYER guitarist Kerry King:
On President Bush:
Kerry King: "Everyone in the world's laughing at him. I don't really pay too much attention to politics, but I do know that."
On politics:
Kerry King: "I don't understand politics — and I like it that way."
On super-producer Rick Rubin, who worked with SLAYER on several albums in the 1980s and 1990s:
Kerry King: "I'm surprised he's going to be doing the (next) METALLICA record because I don't know how he's going to right that sinking ship."
On Dec. 8, the anniversary of the murder of PANTERA's Dimebag Darrell:
Kerry King: "From now on, that's going to be 'Drunk Day' for sure."
On the meaning of Christmas:
Kerry King: "Christmas isn't about religion. Christmas is about presents, if you ask me. I know originally it was supposed to be about the birth of Jesus, but anymore? It's about capitalism and hey, I'm all about getting presents."
LARS ULRICH ON NEW SONGS "WE'RE TRYING TO BE AS SELF-CRITICAL AS POSSIBLE"
Recently, Lars Ulrich spoke to Revolver Mag about writing process for the group's new album tentatively due before the end of the year via Warner Bros. Records.
"It's nice not to walk into the studio and all of sudden there's three cameras in your face and you have to sit down and talk for four hours about how you were feeling last night," he said, referring to the film crew that documented every detail of METALLICA's meltdown during the recording of 2003's "St. Anger". We're kind of past that phase. Everybody gets along now. These days, it's fun going down to the studio — it's actually something I look forward to instead of dreading it. And I think that's a reflection of how far we've come."
Ulrich says that the sessions for the new CD, which the band is planning on recording in Los Angeles with producer Rick Rubin (SYSTEM OF A DOWN, SLAYER, AUDIOSLAVE, RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS), actually remind him of METALLICA's early years.
"It's James [Hetfield] and me going through riff tapes and picking out the best riffs, and then molding songs around that," he explained. "There's two separate processes — a songwriting process and a recording process. 'St. Anger' was an experiment in writing and recording at the same time. But this is like what we used to do back in the day: sit down, write a bunch of songs, then uproot and go somewhere else and record them." Ulrich said that Rubin — whom the drummer remembers showing up backstage at METALLICA gigs in the mid-Eighties with rough mixes of SLAYER's "Reign in Blood", which producer — "doesn't want us to start recording until every song that we're gonna do is as close to 100 percent as we can get it."
The band has roughly 25 new songs, a large pool Ulrich credits to jamming in the tuning room every night before they went onstage on the "St. Anger" tour. They're intent on whittling the final tracklist down to 12 or 14 tunes.
"The amount of material is a little overwhelming," Ulrich admitted, "so we're trying to be as self-critical as possible. It's great with Rick, because he doesn't really have any baggage with us. He just comes in and says, 'That's great. That's not so great.' I think after 15 years with Bob [Rock], it was just time to kind of reinvent the wheel. I think what happened with Bob was it got to the point where we just knew each other too well. And we needed a different dynamic."
EX-SCORPIONS, FRANCIS BUCHHOLZ "IN EVERY BAND YOU SOMETIMES HAVE PROBLEM, YOU HAVE GOOD AND BAD TIMES"
Metal-Rules.com has issued an interview with former SCORPIONS bassist Francis Buchholz, currently touring with "old friend and fellow ex-Scorpions member" ULI JON ROTH. The following is an excerpt from the interview, conducted by Marko Syrjälä:
Q: Can you briefly tell the best and worst things about being in the Scorpions?
A: "We had so many great moments that I can not say that this was the greatest or that was the greatest. Of course the Peace Music Festival in Moscow was a great day, a great moment, but so were all the other shows, we did so many great shows, thousands of shows. Sometimes places in very small cities you play great shows and then again you play in a big place, which is very important and you have all these people and press and then you play not that good, you know. I'd rather play great and not worry about the business stuff, so I can not really say which is the best or the worst show."
Q: Do you have a favourite Scorpions tour?
A: "I'll tell you this, for me when I play good, I'm verry happy, I feel great. When I play shitty, this happens sometimes, or if I play 5% under what I can play, then I think it was not such a great gig even if everybody else is telling You played a great show!'"
Q: When you did the World Wide Live live album, you didn't play any of the old '70s stuff, why was that?
A: "Because, when Uli left the band, nobody could play the stuff that he had played, so we didn't play the songs."
Q: Speaking of Uli leaving the band, after he was gone the band's sound changed, was it a conscious decision to go into a new, I guess a heavier, direction or would it have happened anyway?
A: "I don't know. Uli left because he wanted to do his own thing, he didn't feel comfortable in the band anymore because he was too limited and he wanted to go in a different direction. So he felt that he should do his own thing and leave the band, I was very unhappy about that because I always respected him as a great musician and we lost a great guitar player and a wonderful human being. I put an ad in a London music magazine "A german heavy rock band looking for a lead guitar player", and we looked through over a hundred guitar players, auditions, you know. Sometimes the person open the door, comes in and you know right away that this is not the guy that we want even before he plays. So we ended up not finding anybody and I knew that there was a great guitar player in Hannover, Matthias Jabs, who I had helped with mathematics in school making some money on the side. We didn't make so much money at the time, so I though children and youngsters mathematics. So I told that I knew this guy who plays great guitar and that we should try him. The others though we should get someone from America or England, but he came to a rehearsal, he fit in and could play everything, so that's how Matthias came in. And because you have different chemistry, different people and then the sound of these different people, you hear on the album that you have groups. The same happened when I left the group, I listened to the next album Face The Heat and it's totally different, it sounds different."
Q: But that was not the first times that you had left the band, was it?
A: "I left for the first time. In every band you sometimes have problems, you have good times and you have bad times."
