by Daniel Hinds
The melding of hardcore and thrash metal, aka 'crossover,' was the hot ticket
back in the mid to late 80s. Bands like the Crumbsuckers, S.O.D., D.R.I.,
Agnostic Front and The Accused all had ties to both metal and hardcore and
managed to really bridge both fan bases. After an early departure from
Anthrax, bassist Dan Lilker joined up with three other guys with similar
tastes and formed Nuclear Assault, a hard-hitting band that could rock out
the most serious political topics one second and then fire off a total goof
the next. Speed and concrete heaviness were the foundation, but it
was the keen songwriting and human anger that really gave Nuclear Assault
its unique voice. Vocalist John Connelly explains the whys and hows
of this seemingly unlikely reunion…
How's the tour going?
Aside from the fact that everyone caught the flu on the warm-up tour, pretty
good. (laughs) Yeah, it's novel. That's the difference between
traveling in a van and traveling in a tour bus. In a tour bus, you
get to watch the flu go from person to person gradually over the course of
a week or so. In a van, it kind of hits everyone at once.
What made you decide to get back together now?
I think just enough time had passed that we were all ready to do this again.
Being in a band is kind of like being married to three or four other people.
You know how many marriages work out these days - not many. People
who stay in a band long enough to do anything, you tend to be talking about
some pretty determined people. So after ten or twelve years, everybody's
like, we're not getting along well anymore, let's pack it in and shut it
down. Enough time had gone by, everybody was ready to get back to work.
I read an interview from 1999 where you
said there was no chance of a Nuclear Assault reunion, that you just weren't
interested in playing that kind of music anymore.
I tried a few other things and had a lot of fun with other projects.
Unfortunately, this is what I'm really good at writing. I can either
do something else half-assed or I can do something well and if I'm going
to do anything, I'd rather do it well.
How is writing going for the new album?
We're having a lot of fun with that. Danny and I were getting together
before he moved up to Rochester once a week and it was just like the old
days. Back in the day, we'd get together on his front porch and write
music over a twelve-pack of Meister-Brau. Except we can afford something
a little better now, like Budweiser (laughs).
Are you handling the lyrics?
More or less I have to. Because I'm singing and playing at the same
time, I have to be really conscious of coordinating the two. Some things
I cannot do at the same time. I cannot do a really complicated vocal
riff while I'm doing a really complicated guitar riff. Or sometimes
I can, it depends on the pattern of the picking or how the syllables of the
words are laid down. They've got to interlock in a way that is compatible
for me to do. So the guys generally leave the lyrics up to me because
it's part of the melody situation and they go hand in hand.
Will you keep the socio-political bent to the lyrics from the old days?
Absolutely. That's always been one of our trademarks. That's a Nuclear thing.
Where was the live album [Alive Again] recorded?
It's a little complicated. We did a show at a place called Jared's
in Massachusetts or Rhode Island, I'm really not exactly sure which state.
Apparently there is a thing called adult-onset asthma which I was acquainted
with that night. So about an hour before I go on stage, I all of a
sudden can't breathe, so the music was recorded then but we couldn't use
a lot of the vocal tracks. So those had to be redone at a later date.
On the plus side, we did try to keep things as close to reality as possible.
The vocal tracks were recorded in one pass, song to song, the same way we
do a live gig. At the end of a work day, at the end of a work week,
after a four-hour train ride to get to where we were recording. So
you had all those same factors going - you had fatigue, you had not stopping
and re-recording. Just do the tracks and make it as close to a live
recording as you can.
Why did you release it on Screaming Ferret?
I don't know. (laughs) I honestly don't know. They just showed
up and said, 'Hey, we're going to do this,' and we're like, 'Okay.'
I can't say much more about that. (laughs)
Do you have a label yet for the studio album?
Not yet. We still have to do a demo tape and see what if any interest
there still is for this kind of stuff. Without sitting down and talking
with the other guys, I know there are definitely some people that we DON'T
want to work with, because they are the same people who in the past screwed
up what we were trying to do.
Are you getting a lot of younger kids at the shows or mostly fans from the old days?
Right now, we're seeing a lot of older people. Let me rephrase that
- right now we're seeing a lot of our contemporaries. (laughs) Young
kids, yeah, there are some. For some strange, bizarre reason, that
kind of music is coming back wit the kids these days. They are going
back and discovering where the nu-metal bands got their influences from.
It's more prevalent over in Europe, but it seems the crowds in Europe have
always been more open-minded and aggressive in listening to stuff.
In America, I hate to say this, the kids I see at shows when I work as a
bouncer or tour with other bands, they don't know anything. Their knowledge
doesn't go much further back than Green Day. The crowds in Europe do
seem to be more knowledgeable about where stuff comes from. Some 17-year-old
at the Wacken festival over the summer was asking me about all the old bands
- not just the big names like Exodus, Overkill and Anthrax, but like pretty
obscure stuff that kids these days in America don't know anything about.
Seems like you have always kept busy, recording
and touring. What keeps you going after all these years to keep making
and playing music?
Just this dogged, stubborn determination that I can actually, possibly someday
write a decent album. I don't know, it's just something I enjoy doing.
It's a bizarre way to make a living, if you can even make a living at all.
(pause) I think it's some kind of mental defect.
Do you have any other new projects coming up?
Musically, it's just Nuclear Assault. I've always thought it was a
bad idea to more than one thing at once. It creates a lot of tension
inside the group. You have people wondering if you are contributing
everything you should be contributing to this or are you being distracted
by your side-project.
Seems within the last decade, the metal
scene has grown quite a bit and become a lot more diverse, yet the individual
bands seem to be a lot more limited in their scope. Would you agree?
What do you see as metal's future?
There was a time when a thrash metal band could walk on stage and do a speed
metal song, do a ballady type of song that was still heavy, do something
technical and nobody batted an eye. After a while though, bands tried
to chase down that heaviest sound. There's nothing wrong with that
for one or two songs out of three or four, but when you had bands walking
on stage and tuning down to D or C# and doing the fast flurry drum beats
through an entire ten-song set, there's absolutely no variation in texture
to what you're doing. You're slamming the throttle to the firewall
from the moment you start to the moment you end. I don't remember who
started doing that but other bands started doing it also and it was like
a dog chasing its own tail. There's a limit to how far you can take
that before (1) you realize that every song sounds the same as the rest of
the stuff that you're doing and (2) every band in that genre sounds virtually
like every other band in that genre. So it has a very homogenizing
effect on the music, much in the same way that with mainstream pop music,
you have one band hitting big for a record label, so the other labels go
out and hire people to do the same type of music. They hire songwriters
to write the same kind of music and before you know it, you've got Britney
Spears, Christina Aguivv-v-v-v-wuh and whoever else is the blonde bimbo of
the day. You listen to the music back to back and tell me what the
difference is - I can't hear it. Except maybe that Shakira is the one
that occasionally lapses into Spanish. As far as heavy metal is concerned,
there was a time when you had Anthrax, you had Overkill, you had Slayer,
you had Megadeth, you had Metallica, us, all these classic bands, and it
was no problem telling one from the others. They had their own sound,
even if the writing style on given songs was similar, the way that they handled
that particular style was totally different from the others. That diversity
started to go away and personally I think that's when the scene started to
die.
Do you see any hope for the future?
I don't see how it can get much worse. With the Internet and downloading
of music, in a lot of ways it's the death knell of independent music.
Everybody is saying, 'Oh well this way, you can put your music on the Internet
and billions of people can hear your music!' Yeah, they can hear it
and download it, but there's no financial incentive for somebody to do that.
It's one thing for Courtney Love to say, 'Oh the music should be free, let's
put it all on the Internet' - she already made her money off the music business,
working for mainstream major labels who have marketed your records the traditional
way. It's a little hypocritical for her to say that music should be
free on the Internet now, isn't it? As far as people pointing fingers
at the record companies and saying that they are bloated and they gouge the
musicians and they gouge the people listen to music - yes, all these things
are very true. It's indefensible, there are still lawsuits pending
on some of this stuff, in regards to what are called 'slavery contracts'
and price setting by the major labels. But the thing is when the record
companies were making a lot of money and didn't have to worry about a piracy
rate that approaches something like 40% of their business, they were able
to be a little more experimental and a little more aggressive in terms of
hunting down something new and something different. They didn't mind
taking 50 or 100 grand and sinking it into a band that nobody had ever heard
of, that didn't sound like anything anybody had ever head of, and throwing
it against the wall and seeing if it stuck. Whereas now, with the 40%
rate piracy, their thinking is, 'We're only going to put out the stuff we
know is going to sell millions of records.' And again this has a very
homogenizing effect on the music. From an artist's viewpoint, I have
a problem with my stuff being downloaded without my permission, without so
much as a by-your-leave, especially because, you know what? I'm not
one of the big artists. Every once in a blue moon, I'll get a check
from somewhere, whether it's ASCAP or god forbid one of the record companies
remembering that they're supposed to pay us now and again. And it's
never a big check, it's like maybe $100, but it always seems to come at a
time when I'm looking at a bill and trying to figure out how to pay it.
Or I have to take one of the cats to the vet or maybe I want to take my wife
out to a nice dinner somewhere. If anything, all this stuff contributes
to hurting the smaller acts, the smaller musicians, the guys who don't sell
millions of records. This is just going to contribute to an environment
where the only stuff that's getting put out is stuff they know is going to
sell huge. And that's the world I don't want to live in! "And
now, the next O-Town clone band, following the next N'Sync clone band, and
next we'll have the new Madonna." Yay, great... Someone please slit
my wrists now. (laughs)
I always think of bands like Blue Oyster
Cult, who didn't even have a hit until their fourth album. In today's
climate, they would never be allowed to stick around that long.
They would have maybe put out their first album. Maybe. Actually
it's good that you mention that because classic rock is the other field where
band's were allowed to sound independent of each other. Blue Oyster
Cult, Led Zeppelin, Yes, Kansa, Bob Seger, all these guys, Jethro Tull -
you couldn't mistake any of these bands for the others. That was a
really diverse and exciting time. It was cool to find out somebody
was putting out a new album because you knew you'd be getting something new
and different.
Do you have the rights back to the early Nuclear Assault albums yet?
Not yet. This all gets very complicated and to be honest I don't know
all the ins and outs. I know some of our albums got sold to a third
party, again without involving us in the process at all, and we don't know
how to get a hold of these guys. Our attitude is, well, if you've been
selling these records, don't you kind of owe us a paycheck at some point?
(laughs) They're supposed to pay us for that, technically and theoretically,
although of course no record label ever does. Tim from Screaming Ferret
is looking into it because I know he'd like to release a lot of the back
catalog. If he can pull it off, great.
Looking back on the early records, my favorite is still Game Over. What your feelings about the albums these days?
Well, I know that my voice has gotten a lot better over the years.
Live, it's a lot stronger and in the studio, it's a lot stronger. A
lot of that has to do with the fact that for a while I was doing a blues
band. It really reinforces your basics. If your basics aren't
solid, then you don't have anything. It's like anything else - you
listen back to it and hear certain things that you would have loved to have
done differently or fixed. On the whole, there are some albums that
I like a lot and I liked them a lot at the time. There are some albums
that I'm not crazy about that I wasn't crazy about at the time.
How involved are you with the production side of things?
Very heavily. Everybody in the band is very much involved with the
sound that their instrument is making on the album. When the time comes
to mix the record, everybody is there giving input. It's not the case
of the four of us sitting back and listening to a producer and going, 'Uh-huh,
yeah, okay, we'll do it your way.' Not at all. And that has driven
a couple guys crazy until they got used to working with us. Hey, when
this goes out, we're the ones whose name is on it.
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