DICK
WAGNERPART TWO
G: Tell me about "Only Women Bleed." Has it really been covered by over 20 artists? Did Etta James really record it?
D: Yeah, that was totally cool. There's been a lot of people who have covered it. Tina Turner, Carmen McRae, Mary Travers and Lita Ford, to name a few.
G: It's interesting that it's been covered mostly by female artists.
D: Actually John Farnham had a hit with it in Australia a few years ago.
G: There's a song on the box that you will definitely want to listen to called, "For Britain Only."
D: "For Britain Only," no, I don't know that one.
G: It says on the box that it was just released in England as a single, after Alice went over there, sort of "Special Forces" era. And people actually cared, which I guess meant a lot to him at that point. So he wrote this song "For Britain Only." In the middle of the tune there is an excerpt from "Guilty." Maybe two or three seconds worth.
D: Really? Well that's cool.
G: Call your lawyer, man.
D: Yeah man, if they use enough of it, I will. [more laughter]
G: I mean, it's pretty minor, but since the exclusion of "Guilty," (from "Alice Cooper Goes To Hell") is one of my few complaints about the programming of the box, at least they fit it in there somehow, you know? What was it like working with the old Alice Cooper Group, I mean the guys in the band rather than Alice himself, who you worked with for many years after that?
D: I didn't really have a lot of involvement with them. They would have tracks cut, and I'd come in and basically do overdubs. But I knew the guys, and you know, hung out with them a bit in Connecticut, at the mansion, and I really liked those guys. We got along fine. I think they saw me as sort of an interloper, but on the other hand, there I was.
G: I guess my first exposure to you and your music was the "Welcome To My Nightmare" movie as a 14-year-old: that guitar duel scene.
D: Right, with the spiders going up the net!
G: Forget the spiders - it was the guitars that got me. And, that totally holds up.
D: I think so, too. You know, the Nightmare tour was so innovative theatrically, and it was also the biggest rock and roll tour of all time, at that point.
G: In terms of trucks and gear and...
D: And in dollars made, and the whole thing. That was a $9 million tour. Nobody had ever made nine million before on tour before that. And now they make a hundred million so...well at least some people do.
G: I heard the Eagles are doing a New Years Eve [2000] show at a 20,000 seat arena –- ticket price $1,500.
D: You're not serious? How do they have the nerve to do that? I mean, you know, wow!
G: They're looking at a $10,000,000 payday for one night.
D: That's a hell of a New Year's Eve paycheck. I'll tell you what. You know, money is nice, but my God! I guess if people will pay it it's alright to do. I don't know. We live in a capitalist society, and that's supposed to be OK, but it would take a lot of nerve to say, "How much am I going to charge for tickets to this show? Ah, 15 hundred dollars, that sounds good. We charged a hundred on the last tour. Let's charge 15 hundred and see what they do."
G:
Back to Nightmare... How many tours had a movie at that point?D: Right. Well you know Alice was at the forefront of a lot of things. Especially in theatrics in rock and roll music. He really started the trend, opened up the door for everyone. I think he's under-acknowledged for that.
G: At this point his legacy is basically as shock-rock king. The guy with a snake who paved the way for Marilyn Manson.
D: It's so much more than that, and it's so much more classy. And if you actually listen to the Alice Cooper albums, you hear a lot of really great music in there, stuff that a lot of people have never actually listened to.
G: Regarding the recent tragic school shooting at Columbine, Marilyn Manson is catching a ton of hell (no pun intended) for corrupting the nation's youth.
D: Yes, I see that.
G: Back in the day, Alice Cooper was catching the same kind of hell - everywhere he went there were protests, city councils were passing legislation to ban Alice from their towns. Are there any parallels to be drawn between Cooper and Manson? Is Manson more hateful than Alice and therefore more deserving of the criticism?
D: Well, I think there's no doubt that he's a lot more hateful. I don't think Alice was ever hateful. I mean, the things he did about violence and so on weren't all caricatures, but they were definitely "anti-" in their message. I think Marilyn Manson's message is much more "pro-." And Manson, thrown in the middle of the era of gangsta rap and stuff, I mean, what you have is just a complete change in the culture. You've got, you know, people who really just want to hear that stuff because they want negativity. They feed on it.
G: I think that's mainstream society at this point.
D: Yeah, they feed on it. It's amazing to me. I could just never understand it. I took in my nephew when he was 17. When I lived in Nashville, he was getting into a lot of trouble down in Florida. His dad asked me if I would take him in, so he lived with me at my house, you know. All he listened to was gangsta rap. All he would talk about was how cool it was to go to prison. You know, how cool it would be to be one of those guys. Now he's in prison for like six years, and I don't think he thinks it's so cool now that he's actually there. But, I mean, just feeding on it. When I took a listen to what he was listening to, I couldn't believe it. It was like, I knew rap music was "out there," but I had no idea how really violent some of this stuff is. And God, it just amazed me. Why the culture has made such a shift? I don't know.
I think it started with that group in Florida, 2 Live Crew, and their whole deal with the girls, you know, sucking their dicks on stage. And it was like a novelty, and you could almost see it in a way if it's a novelty and it's the first time something like that has happened. But that sort of opened the floodgates, I think. And then it became more than a curiosity, it became something kids could be rebellious with. And today, God knows what's in these kids' minds.
G: So when you were touring with Alice in the '70's, was he still catching a lot of that stuff, or had the Muppets thing sort of tempered it? [Alice appeared on the Muppets TV show]
D: Oh, I think Alice's whole thing got tempered there, you know, when he started playing golf with President Ford. I mean, it kind of took the edge off anything people might have thought about him as being violent. Alice was on television saying, "Well, it's just a character I developed." And probably for his career, it was a bad thing to allow that to happen. He should have kept his underground mystique going.
G: Oh, absolutely. That was the thing. Once you've built up an audience with that kind of persona, then going Muppets, you're bound to lose a lot of that base. The good news is that he continued to make some good music. But I guess those albums, each one sold a little less than the one before it.
D: Yeah, they did start dropping off, because the image was kind of spoiled in a way. But people still enjoyed seeing it live, as a live show, because it was still really theatrical. Whether the message was exactly the same or not, didn't really matter. People wanted to come see that show. But I think it's a choice that Alice had to make, in a sense, because he's really a guy who's got his family, goes to church, and plays golf. Aside from the fact that he's able to think of and create this bizarre stuff, he's not really that person. And that's what he was trying to say, that he didn't want to have his entire life, everything about him, thought of as that character.
G: Back to the music...In the song "Wish You Were Here," from Alice Cooper Goes To Hell, there's one part of the song that was taken from the Ursa Major song, "Stage Door Queen," which is definitely one of your greatest riffs. You had the whole drum part and everything in the arrangement on there. Were you thinking, "That's so good, I've just gotta use it somewhere" ?
D: Bob Ezrin and I were talking. We decided we wanted to use it because we loved it on Ursa Major, and Ursa Major hadn't been a hit record. So we thought we'd put it in and see how many people would actually recognize it. And you're one of them. You know, how many people would actually say, "I heard that before from Ursa Major." So it was kind of just for the fun of it. But it fit. It worked. I have a tape here somewhere of the songwriting sessions that Alice and I did in Hawaii for the Goes To Hell album. I guess I should've given them that for the box set. They're mostly just the process of writing, but I actually have sort of a finished demo, just acoustic guitar and me and Alice singing. It was done at Cherokee Studios in L.A., just before the record was made. It was basically us putting them down in the studio to let Ezrin hear them.
G: Of the records that are represented on the box, AC Goes To Hell seems to have gotten the short shrift. There are only two songs from it, "Go To Hell," and "I Never Cry." If you added "Guilty" and "Wish You Were Here," you've basically got the whole story in there. All four of those songs deserve to be on the box.
D: Yeah, I think so too. "Guilty" is cool. If I went down the list I could pick out some other songs to put in there, too. But I'm glad they used "I Love America," because that song is hilarious.
G: We were listening to the box set in the office the other day and "I Love America" had us rolling on the floor laughing. It's so goofy.
D: I love that song. I think I'm going to perform it with my band. I just think it's a funny tune and a cool song for the summer. [Sings] "I Love A-mer-ica". Have you ever heard the "Dada" album?
G: Actually no, not in its entirety. It's impossible to find now.
D: If you wanna hear a really hilarious song, listen to "No Man's Land." You gotta check out "No Man's Land"! That should be on this record too. There's some stuff [on "Dada"] that is totally obscure and really cool. Dada's a great record, I think. The songs are really weird, and really good. We had a lot of fun writing that record.
G: Did that sell at all, or was it too....
D: No, it was a complete failure. It just didn't sell AT ALL. It was the last record he did for Warner Brothers.
G: So what was Alice's state of mind like around then, when he'd had several major flops in a row, really?
D: He was completely depressed, drunk. It was a really bizarre scene. But we actually had fun because we were in Toronto and were staying at this hotel, and we'd go down to the bar every night and play piano all night, singing songs for all these people who were hanging out at the bar, and everybody was lovin' it. We were having a good time, you know? And we wrote a lot of really great songs. They're some of the best songs from the whole Cooper history, I think. It's really interesting stuff. One of those is on the box, "Formerly Warmer." The idea was Formerly Warner's, like Formerly Warner Brothers.
G: I was listening to "How You Gonna See Me Now" (off "From The Inside"), and even though Bernie Taupin co-wrote the whole album with you guys, I was surprised to hear a song that actually sounded like Elton John. I was like, "Whooooaa Baby! What's going on?"
D: Yeah, I think "From The Inside" is a fine record, worth going back and listening to.
G: Let me ask you a couple of technical questions. What set-ups did you and Steve Hunter use back in the day?
D: We were both playing Les Paul Special guitars. Steve's was a TV model, and mine was just a regular Les Paul Special. We played through Marshall stacks, with an MXR phase-90 phaser, and an echoplex. You know, a tape loop echoplex. Real basic.
G: Yeah, the tone on those guitars is so sweet. I guess only a Les Paul is going to get you that kind of tone.
D: The Les Paul and the Marshall together, when it goes through that echoplex, for some reason it just smoothes it out and makes it really nice. It's just basic, fundamental guitar playing. That's my philosophy anyway, and I think Steve's the same way. You try to get as close to the natural sound of the guitar as you can. All this processing that's going on today--a lot of the stuff is not that good. A lot of the new processing is good, too--on record. But live you hear some people and it just sounds all washed out. So if you can have that fundamental, great guitar tone, you're way ahead of the game. When you get that fundamental tone, it's harder to play, because you have to actually be able to play, really play, and you can't do things that are just slop that get dissolved into noise, and make it sound like it was something cool. You can't get away with that. You've got to actually play notes.
G: How has your playing changed over the years, and what is a Dick Wagner guitar solo all about?
D: My playing has gotten better, technically as well as musically. I've learned how to edit myself and play with a concise sense of structure, as opposed to throwing in the whole book of knowledge on each song. My solos are about supporting and elevating the song, and providing a release for the listener.
G: By the way, what ever happened to the guitar hero? At one time that was the most highly valued thing in rock. Now it's barely a consideration.
D: Well, as far as young people today, the whole thing has changed. It's a different kind of focus. It's more on the kind of songs, and the image of the lead singer, and the image of the band. As opposed to whether or not they are actually great musicians. The kids don't really care. From grunge on up, nobody really cared if anybody could play or not. That's bound to change, and bound to go through phases, because eventually people have to come around to wanting to hear good musicianship. You know, as you get older, you just start to reach that point where you want to know if these people can actually play. It's not enough to just pound you over the head.
G: A great song is a great song. But when it's really played well, all the better.
D: I think what you are saying is true, but I wonder if that's more of a concern with records than with live playing. I wonder if live, people can still appreciate a great guitar player. I think they can; otherwise Stevie Ray Vaughn would never have made it. When you stop and think about it, he's not a likely candidate, because he's a guitar player, to become a big star. But because he was a great player, he did become a star. So he's one of the guitar heroes, and an example of how a musician can break through.
G:
Did you and Hunter play on each other's solo albums that came out in the '70's,
the Richard Wagner album, and Hunter's Swept Away?D: Steve played a little bit of rhythm guitar on mine. I did not play on his records. I wasn't around when he was recording it in California.
G: Had you moved to New York? Is that the deal?
D: I was living in Connecticut, yeah.
G: The Burbs?
D: Yeah, the Burbs.
G: So throughout the late '70 and early '80's, Ezrin was really hot. I guess it was like 1975 when you worked on the Kiss album, "Destroyer"?
D: I did the Destroyer album, whenever that came out.
G: It came out in '76.
D: That's around the same time we were doing the Nightmare stuff. Yeah.
G: I read some stuff where members of Kiss acknowledged that Ezrin was really instrumental in that album sounding the way it did and being as good as it was. I guess some of those classic Ace Frehley guitar solos I grew up with were really you, huh?
D: Yeah, some of them were.
G: BOY, IS ACE FREHLEY GREAT!!!!! [mutual hysterical laughter]
D: Well, he's a good player, but Bob used to call me or Steve in for different projects. Usually depending on who was closest to where the sessions were going on. We would play, I don't know why, exactly. It's not that these bands couldn't play. Like Aerosmith: We did the "Get Your Wings" album, with "Train Kept A Rollin'." All those basic guitar tracks are Joe Perry and Brad Whitford, but when it came to the solos, it was Hunter and me. You know - Bob liked the way we played...
G: Interesting. I didn't know Ezrin did the "Get Your Wings" album.
D: Well, Jack Douglas produced it, but he was kind-of working for Bob. Bob was like, the big guy on all these.
G: Right. Douglas had been involved with most of the Alice Cooper albums.
D: Bob was overseeing all that stuff, you know, so he had Jack Douglas call us up. Bob was instrumental in an awful lot of stuff that I did.
G: So I guess you got a lot of session work over the years because he was producing all these hot bands.
D: Yeah, he'd call us in to play. Me or Steve. We both got a lot of work through Bob, which helped us, of course. I think we also helped Bob, because we had a sound, and a way of playing, and a way of understanding the stuff, and it just worked.
G: I guess it was around '85 that you played the Guitar Army benefit show for Vietnam Veterans [featuring, among others, Mitch Ryder AND The Detroit Wheels, Mark Farner from Grand Funk, MC5 singer Rob Tyner, Scott Morgan, and Dick Wagner & Donny Hartman]. I have a tape of that.
D: You do? Really? Is it good?
G: Is it good? It's outrageous!!
D: Really?
G: The first time I heard it I was stunned by how good it was. The version of "Rock And Roll Music" is fantastic. And "Motor City Showdown," from the Richard Wagner album is, like, ten times heavier than the original. It blew me away, the whole sledgehammer effect of it all. How did that show come together, and how did you get involved with it?
D: I think it was through Doug Podell. He's the program director at WRIF, in Detroit. He was at WLLZ (Wheels) at the time. I can't remember how I got invited to do it, but I think it was through Doug Podell. He put that thing together. They just asked us to do it and we wanted to help the Vietnam veterans. They had musicians available to back us up, so we went down there and just kind-of did it.
G: Was that the first time you'd played with Donny Hartman since the Frost?
D: Well, you know, over the years, even after Frost broke up, a couple of times a year I would travel from wherever I lived to Alpena [Michigan], and sit in with those guys. Bobby [Rigg] and Donny kept playing together in a band up there, you know, playing little clubs up North. [That's Northern Michigan for all you southern hemisphere readers.] So I'd go up and just sit in with them and spend a couple of days visiting my friends. And we'd play. So it isn't like we never, ever played together. That was just for fun, you know?
G: It sounds like fun.
D: Yeah, it was a kick.
G: 'Cause you're used to the whole L.A.-New York vibe...
D: Yeah, and all of a sudden I walk into Alpena and I'm a hero. Dick Wagner's here, yeah! It was a good ego boost, you know? It was real nice. No blase attitudes in Alpena.
G: Right. They were psyched to be seeing something REAL.
D: They were psyched. And I'd get on stage with these guys, and we did a lot of cover tunes, and a lot of good old rock and roll things, from Creedence to blues to whatever. So it gave me a chance to sit in with them and play songs that I normally didn't play. I'm used to playing my own music. Whenever I have bands I'm always playing something that's mine, unless I'm with Lou or Alice. And with Alice it's still my music. Most of the stuff we did live on the tours, a lot of it anyway, was my music. And I used to write all the segues. Like on the Nightmare Tour, we had some musical segues between songs. I wrote all that stuff.
G: I was looking at my old Alice Cooper records and you can sort of see the point where you're not playing on them anymore - there are some really bad records there.
D: That was right after "From The Inside". He started doing all this trash, I don't know why.
G: Yeah. And then I was surprised to see on one of the later really bad records, there you were again!!!!
D: Well, you know, we had a parting of the ways. Alice and I have always been friends, but his management and I kind of had a parting of the ways. So I left. During those years he did, like, three albums with this sort-of punk attitude and all that stuff. And I don't think they were such great records. But then they called me and asked me to come back and write with them again. And he and I wrote a record called "Zipper Catches Skin". [Geoff winces] That was during a very bad time for both of us, which I'd rather not go into. So it was a very neurotic record. And then we did "Dada", which as I said, has a lot of really creative stuff on it. We did that in Toronto, with Bob. I also wrote a song with him called "Might As Well Be On Mars," which is on the "Hey Stoopid" album from a few years ago. So I've done a little bit of work with him over the years. But it's never been like it was back then, when we were together every day.
G: Do you guys stay in touch?
D: Oh yeah. I saw him at Pine Knob [a summer music shed outside Detroit] last summer, and we talked about writing. He wants me to write with him on a new album. And he's promised to come up here and write in my studio, but he said he wouldn't come in the winter. So I'm hoping to get him up here in the summer. I don't know whether it will actually happen or not – Cooper's busy. He's down there in Phoenix. He's got a mansion, he's got family, he's got a restaurant, and he plays golf every day. So whether he'll actually get away and come up here, I don't know.
G: Why wouldn't he want to come to Michigan during the dead of winter, then?
D: Yeah, why would you want to be down in Arizona where it's hot, right?
G: He should be up here shoveling snow! So when did you move back to Saginaw, anyway?
D: I came back four years ago.
G: And what was it like coming home, so to speak?
D: Well, it was pretty cool. I found out that I have an awful lot of friends and fans here. I was living in Nashville; I'd been living there about three years and I was having a hard time. I moved from L.A. to Nashville because I thought Nashville was a really great songwriter's town, where I could really get some songs covered. What I found out was that if you're from the North and you played with Alice Cooper for years, they don't give a shit what you've done, and they don't even want to hear anything. They just give you that "Nashville Smile," and they're really nice to you, but they don't care and they don't listen. So I had a hard time in Nashville making things work the way I wanted them to.
In my heart what I always wanted to do was to have my own recording studio and be able to make records, make my own records and all of this. That was not going to happen in Nashville. Besides, there's too much competition there anyway. Too many studios and too many musicians. So I started coming back to Michigan to play a little bit. Play some live dates. I realized from the very beginning, 'cause we did a Bossmen reunion at the YMCA in Saginaw and we had, like, 1000 people. It was like, "Wow, people must remember." And I found out that people here in Michigan actually do remember me and were loyal, had listened to and followed my career, and it was very exciting. I still had fans and friends, and my family all live down in Pontiac. So moving back seemed like the logical thing to do. So I came back here and started putting this together. I got to play with the Saginaw Bay Orchestra –- we did an outdoor thing where they did all my music. It was my first chance to really play with a full orchestra, which I'd always wanted to do. I've done that with them a couple of times now, so I've had a chance to fulfill a few of my dreams. Now it's tough, because I'm here and I've got the studio, and I'm trying to make it run as a business, but basically, I use the studio more as a project studio for groups that I want to get involved with, and groups I want to help. Because I've got the years of experience and I can help younger groups reach a new plateau.
G: Tell me about a couple of the groups on the Wagner Music Group (WMG) label.
D: Well, the first record we did here was Matt Besey. He's a 24-year-old blues guitarist a la Stevie Ray, only different. Better than Jonny Lang and...what's the other guy's name?
G: Kenny Wayne?
D: Kenny Wayne! Better than Kenny Wayne [Shepherd]. Besey has something. I went to a party one night and down in the basement Matt Besey was playing. He was 19 at the time. I heard him play and I said "Jesus, man." So I got a guitar and he and I jammed. And I remembered him. When I came back to Michigan, actually moved back here, I put a band together here in town. At least I could get out and play live, play some clubs and just have some fun. I asked Matt to join up with me on second guitar. We did that for about a year and a half. During that time I wanted to make a record with him. I thought he was real good, real talented. So we ended up doing a record here at the studio, and that was the first release on WMG. I started a little label--not with the idea of becoming Sony Music or anything, but as a vehicle to be able to get records out and help these groups get an identity, get things started. Because for me, it's like, a group comes in and they have a lot of talent, but they don't know where to go, or what to do, so I try to help them at least get a foothold on how to build a career.
G: In all things, experience counts.
D: It does count in this case. What to look for, and what to avoid, and what you have to do, what sacrifices you have to make, and I really try and guide them a little bit. So I built this company as a multi faceted company. We offer advice and management, we have a label for the distribution of the records, we have a studio where we can make the records, and then at some point, if they can get their fan bases building so that they have actual potential for real success, then I can help them make deals, you know, push them on to where I can't really help them anymore, where somebody else can help them out. So that's my whole idea behind this. It's been working out. We've got some real good groups. My son has a band in Austin, Texas, called Brother Love. He started sending me tapes of their music and I couldn't believe it , it was so good. So I'm prejudiced because he's my son. On the other hand, if you just listen to the album, you know he's got what it takes. He's a singer, the front man. Mr. Charisma. He knows how to really grab an audience. He's amazing.
G: A lot of musicians don't realize that talent is only half the battle. Hard work is the other half. You can't just show up at rehearsal, play for 45 minutes and then go get high.
D: Exactly.
G: You know, work for a couple of hours, then go get high!
D: Well, we try and encourage these bands to avoid drugs, because it gives you a false sense of...I mean, I went through a whole thing in my life, heavy drug abuse for a lot of years. It gives you a false sense of what you're doing, in the end. It isn't that you can't be creative on it or anything, because you can. But there's a point of diminishing returns, where it catches up to you, and when it does you won't even know it. And it's devastating. We don't tell people what to do, but we encourage them to avoid it.
G: If you could, what would you change about the way the music industry works today?
D: I would free up radio to have a more expanded playlist that would include more local music, and I would put record labels back in the hands of real music people who actually care enough to develop and nurture the careers of their artists.
G: So you've put out a new Frost single?
D: We have a single that we just recorded, "This Band Can Rock and Roll Forever." It's really a throwback to the old Frost days. It sounds like a '60's or '70's song. It's really cool. Right now, it's just going to be for sale at the reunion concerts we're playing, but it's starting to get airplay in Saginaw, Kalamazoo, Flint, and Detroit. If it starts to get any kind of response, we'll put it in record stores too. But for now, it's a special thing available at the concerts.
G: I guess you guys are planning to do a bunch of shows?
D: Yeah, we have about 10 dates lined up.
G: How does it feel to be back with your old bandmates?
D: Man, it's great. It really is great. We rehearsed last night and it just sounded so good. It feels right, you know? It's interesting to me because before we had played, or anything, I was worried that "Gee, this music's from a long time ago. Is it going to be viable? Is anybody actually going to like it? Is it going to feel good to play it, or is it going to feel wimpy?" But this music still feels viable. It still feels great.
G: Trends can come and go, you can do all your techno loop sample crap, but in the end, you get a couple of guitars, bass, and drums, turn them up and lock in. There's nothing better.
D: I feel the same way. That's what moves me.
G: That's what's the most exciting thing.
D: Yeah, it is. The rest of it is kind-of fluff. Although it can be used in creative ways, but that fundamental rock and roll band: that's what the Frost is. It's fundamental, basic, right down to the hard-core rock and roll, but with intelligent songs, and good vocals and harmonies. So it's music. It isn't just bang bang bang. It's music, and so I love it. I wasn't sure at first, because when you think about records you made 30 years ago, you're wondering, "that was 30 years ago, how could it possibly...?" But once we started playing, it was like, "Oh yeah, I remember this! That's why this felt so good back in those days." Because it's legitimate.
G: And now all the angst is out of the equation.
D: Now we're just having fun. Working with these guys, they're my friends. They've been my friends for years, and it's just a kick. It really is. And Donny's singing better than he ever did. On some levels, it's even more amazing than it was. Knowing we've had all these years of experience to add to it. We're all still playing well and I think my playing is the best it's ever been. It's just a lot of fun for us...
