Over the years, Red Fang has built a well-deserved reputation for their excellent music videos. Funny and witty, it is such a strong calling card that it would be easy to write-off the band as a gimmick. The thing is, the music holds up. Far from being overshadowed, it can be argued that the music stands even greater than the videos. Beyond the chuckle at the sight of a beer-can-armored knight, it’s the driven groove and emotional intensity of Prehistoric Dog that got me hooked on the band and would become their true calling card. Album after album, they have yet to disappoint me and so their upcoming 2020 (we hope!) record makes it to the top of my most anticipated releases of the year. Will it also be the year that I finally scratch them off the incomprehensible top spot they hold on my bucket list of bands to see? I sure hope so.
I phoned the band’s guitarist and vocalist Bryan Giles in the fall of 2019 to discuss his favorite music; here’s what he had say.
What have you been listening to the most lately?
Well, we were just camping and we listened to a lot of WAYLON JENNINGS. Otherwise, I’m a big fan of Goth music, some of the bigger names I guess like BAUHAUS, that kind of thing. But really all kinds of music. I try not to pigeonhole myself into one thing. Different music for different moods.
What are some examples of different type of music that you would be drawn to, given the mood?
Well, we put together mixes on our music devices for road trips. For example, a mix titled “Night Drive” with more contemplative songs, maybe more instrumental stuff, that match the mood of a lonely late night drive.
My favorite Sunday morning album is Stardust by WILLIE NELSON. I love that record and it’s a great way to slowly ease into your Sunday.
So Waylon, Willie Nelson…are you big on the so-called Outlaw Country?
Well, I like the older, less complicated stuff. Modern Country, I don’t really follow it. Although sometimes, we’re on a road trip and we just listen to the radio and all you can get is a modern Country station. Some of it is pretty darn clever but I think the thing that bothers me about modern Country is the production. I mean, this is a real blanket statement, but it seems like they’re a little overproduced. Country to me is Americana and it’s supposed to lay emotions barren and it should be simple. It shouldn’t have crazy synthesizers and stuff. I guess that’s not always the case but I just prefer it doesn’t so that’s why I gravitate towards the older Country, because it was so stripped down. Good songwriting, and the least amount of instruments it takes to get that song across.
What would you say is the album that you’ve listened to most in your life?
That’s a tough one. Ride The Lightning, METALLICA, once I heard that record, I pretty much burned that thing up. BLACK FLAG, My War, for years, I listened to that all the time. SIMON AND GARFUNKEL, Bridge Over Troubled Water, I’ve probably played that record a million times.
As a kid, I think we listened to the Xanadu soundtrack (OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN & ELO) quite a bit, my mom played it. I recently found that on vinyl for $1 at a local record store and I’ve been listening to that again, and it’s pretty amazing. It holds up.
Going way back, do you remember the first time music really had an impact on you?
I think that music has always been there. My mother is a very musical person; she sang and continues to sing in choir and played piano throughout my childhood, and she would play music. I remember playing with little toy cars or whatever and listen to things like JAMES TAYLOR or LINDA RONSTADT, just immersing myself into music and feeling it from a really young age. I guess my first musical behavior, I was probably six or seven years old and I remember my mother would run the dishwasher late at night before she would go to bed and I would fall asleep listening to the dishwasher. It was random noises, it didn’t have any kind of real beat or something but I would make up melodies and I would sort of sing along with the washing machine. *Haha* It helped me to bed a bit too, like counting sheeps.
From there, what’s been your progression like, in terms of musical taste?
In elementary school, we were given those plastic recorders or three-hole flutes and we would probably make god-awful noise blowing into these things. Through my whole education, music was a strong part of the curriculum, which is nice because it seems to get the backseat more and more these days, with more of an emphasis on academics. So I was lucky in that way. I started playing piano when I was seven or eight, I took piano lessons for several years. Not very good at it but I enjoyed it. Then I started playing the trumpet when I was 10 or 11 and I played for about three years in band. I really enjoyed that. My best friend at the time, he also played trumpet and he and I were the first and second chair in the trumpet section. Every week we would sit with the conductor and she would sit backwards and go “Player one, play the passage. Player two, play the passage. Okay, player two is now the number one chair.” So he and I would switch seats every week and it was a really fun competition. I really enjoyed trumpet. I wish that I’d been exposed to more expressive trumpet players or music. One of the pitfalls of public education is there’s a fear that you don’t want to have kids learning “radical” music. We would learn the soundtrack to Goonies or to Gremlins, for the holiday it would be like Good King Wenceslas…they wouldn’t have a lot of swing or be really dynamics, you were just shown to play the notes like you’re playing a keyboard or something. So I kind of lost interest in trumpet because I didn’t think it was cool or whatever but then, as an adult, you realize there’s so many beautiful things you can play on the trumpet.
Right around that same time I fell out of it, a friend of mine had started playing electric guitar with distorsion and I was pretty impressed by that because at the same time, my brother exposed me to Eliminator by ZZ TOP and Fair Warning by VAN HALEN. Those are the two first Hard Rock records I ever heard. I was really taken by that, I loved the sort of power and menace that it had. “Wow, that’s crazy. I want to try playing the guitar too.” So I started playing guitar, my mother got me a Road Star Two I think, Ibanez or something, and it was really difficult, it’s not an easy instrument to just start. But around that time, I heard BLACK FLAG for the first time and don’t get me wrong, Greg Ginn is an incredible guitar player but a lot of what he did musically really was just power chords. You didn’t have to be good to do it, you know? I’ve kept that philosophy…although if I didn’t keep that philosophy, I wouldn’t be doing it anymore because, I feel like I’m a pretty C-average guitar player. I just sort of grit my teeth and do the best that I can get my hands to do. The idea of the Punk Rock aesthetic is you don’t have to be a virtuoso to get the point across in your songwriting. So hearing Punk Rock was really revelatory for me and it made me feel free to just to do whatever I wanted. “There’s no rules, man! No parents. No rules.”
Right around that time, I was into MOTLEY CRÜE Shout At The Devil and I really liked these Hair Metal bands, as they’re called, like RATT Out Of The Cellar. They came out with these really hard hitting records and I got really excited about that but then it seemed like every one of those bands, their subsequent albums were all ballads and they really lost their teeth. I thought the entire genre had abandoned me or all the reasons that I enjoyed it so I got more into harder Metal. You know, early METALLICA is really razor sharp, nasty stuff and you can go along for the ride but it’s not going to slow down for you. Between that and Punk Rock, the rebellious spirit were a great escape from what I felt Hair Metal had abandoned me. Now, it doesn’t really bother me but when you’re a kid, I think music means a lot to your identity. The bands that you like is who you are, which is ridiculous, of course. But when you’re a kid, you’re trying to individuate, to develop a personality of some kind and music was a big part of that for me. I kind of related to the sort of isolationist sort of vibe and angst that teenagers will go through.
These days, what’s your favorite means of discovering new music? Is it live? On records? Through friends’ recommendation? Dumb luck?
Luckily, I’m in a band with some pretty music savvy guys. I personally don’t discover a whole lot of new stuff on my own. David Sullivan, the guitar player, he’ll go down rabbit holes on the internet and figure a band he likes and then look up past members and bands they used to be in and he’ll spend hours so I get the benefits of that without all the work. He brings in a lot of new stuff. I mean, all three of those guys do. I have to admit, I’m pretty lazy about seeking out new music. I tend to just listen to the things that I already know I like and there’s quite a bit of that. Every once in a while, you hear something new that perk your ears up and that’s pretty exciting to have that feeling.
There’s two bands actually, one is YOUNG WIDOWS and the other is TRUE WIDOW. Not the modern one, the older but, in any case, I’d never heard of them before. Then, I heard a song or two and I was hooked. I thought they were fantastic and it turns out, they had five albums. I was like, “Wow, there’s this band I like and there’s hours of material to listen to.” That was pretty exciting, that doesn’t happen every day. So yeah, I would say mostly through friends and also, we do play a lot of shows, festivals, that kind of thing so I’ll see bands I would have never thought to go see live. Discovering a band by seeing them live, when that’s your first exposure to them, I think that’s a great way to get it. You get a feel for them a lot better from a live show than you do a recorded album. You get the vibe of their body language and how they carry themselves and you can see what’s going on. That’s one of the perks of playing music as much as we do. We see probably hundreds of bands a year.
What would be a recent example of a band that you stumble upon on the road and just blew you away?
Well, I’ll tell you one band. A friend of ours, Steve Andrew, he used to play guitar in TORCHE, he’s a great musician. Anyway, he asked if his band could open for us, we were going to play in Atlanta and so I said sure. We were all into it because he’s a real nice guy but we didn’t hear any music. We had no idea what it was gonna sound like, we just knew that he was a good guitar player. Of course, we come play the show and I was coming back from dinner and I walked in just as they were starting. Generally, when I’m getting ready for a show, I’m sort of too antsy to watch a band but I watched that whole set and they were just fantastic. Their band’s called DEAD NOW and now, I’m a huge fan. You know, I expected something good because I’ve seen him play in other bands but it’s super creative and that was just really exciting. I’m glad that the first time I’ve ever heard a note from them was watching it live because it was mesmerizing.
What would you say is the band that you’ve toured with that impressed you the most? The one that, night after night, you had to watch their set no matter what?
I would have to say BIG BUSINESS probably. We toured with them way back, in my old band Party Time, we did some West Coast coast days and I thought they were just incredible. I continue to be totally amazed by them because they keep changing. They keep evolving and it’s really exciting. They are a band that never gotten stuck in whatever image or style that they’ve created. They allow themselves to grow musically and they don’t seem to care whether anyone likes it or not, they play music for themselves and I love that about their band.
Then the other band that we toured with it and I really loved was the band called ALL NIGHT from North Carolina. They’re old friends. They came out on the West coast, we did a tour with them. I watched their entire set every night and on the way to the next show, we listened to their CD every day. So we listened to their whole recorded album and then the whole set every night for like nine days. It just made you feel good. That was really unique because no matter how good something is, I’m not sure you really want to listen to it twice a day but not in that case. I pretty much listen to something once and then I need something else.
What strikes you first when you listen the new music? What generally gets you into a band or an artist?
That’s a good question, I don’t really know. You can have two bands and they both do almost exactly the same thing but there’s some kind of…I hesitate to say magic but there’s some kind of intangible to one of the bands that you can’t really touch it. Now I’m rambling…but you know what I mean? Things that grab me about bands is not one thing over another, it’s the culmination of all the elements and then there’s that…mystery thing that really grab me. I couldn’t tell you what that is, except that when I hear it, I know it and I’m excited.
Is there anything though that you typically look for a band, say good drumming or something, and yet, you can overlook that if the overall vibe and the energy is right?
Yeah. I mean, I think there’s no such thing as poor musicianship. If you have good taste and you can hardly fret a guitar but you can get an idea across, then that’s great. It doesn’t have to be really technically good drums, or technically good guitar playing or something like that. Honestly, sometimes, the really technical stuff is something that will make me dislike something. It’s too cerebral. You know, the poor guy gets beat up a lot, but YNGWIE MALMSTEEN -well, I’m not playing the violin for him. He’s doing fine!- he’s an incredible player but there’s no emotion. It just feels like a robot and I don’t have any interest in listening to robots. Hopefully in my lifetime, it will continue to be human beings making music. Although apparently, there are already computers being programmed that can generate music, like if you say “I want an EDM song, I want this many BPM, I want to have a female vocalist and I want the vocal theme to be about heartbreak”, then the computer will spit out a song. That’s real gross to me. But, I mean, whatever, I’m pretty old, I hope I never see the day.
Well, I mean, we already have that Pop star hologram in Japan. Whatever “her” name is. It’s huge out there. Have you heard of that?
No, I’ve never heard of this. This is crazy. Really?
Yeah, it is. You should look it up. She plays huge venues. People will go see this hologram and be blown away by it. As if they’re going to see Ariana Grande or something. It’s mind boggling.
Wow. Is it any good?
Well, not to my ears but I’m not a Pop fan. I guess people enjoy it. There may be writers behind this but it could as well be a computer, like you said, applying a formula where the song needs to be this long, with that progression, etc. Just a formula that they know will work.
Ah! Yeah, I’ll have to look at it. I don’t know! *Haha*
Yeah, as far as discovering new music, I’ve been listening to the local Hip Hop radio stations because I’m really uneducated in the Hip Hop realm. I listen to stuff and I don’t even have any idea who they are. Sometimes it’s Pop music. My wife likes a lot of Pop stuff so we listen to that and I find there’s stuff to be taken away from it. It doesn’t really convey the emotions that I would, as a musician but just listening to how they do it is interesting to me. So even a giant holographic robot might actually hold something for me, I don’t know!
Maybe I just turned you on to your next favorite thing, who knows?
Yeah, maybe I’ll just send a hologram of me out there! I’m not getting any younger. “Just turn on the hologram!”
Is there any artist that you absolutely love, in a genre that typically doesn’t do much for you?
One that comes to mind first, probably the band YOB. They have songs that stretch as long as 15 minutes, these Doomy, heavy ruminations on Blues themes and that sort of thing just does not usually hold my interest. I’m a little too A.D.D. to sit still and experience songs longer than five or six minutes, that’s really slow and not really going all that many places. But YOB, the way they do it just floors me. Talking about that magic things, you don’t know really what it is, well, that’s it. Mike’s got an incredible voice and his guitar playing is fantastic. I mean, the whole band is great. I’ll gladly listen to a whole YOB album, and intently listen to it, even after listening 30-40 times. Then, there’ll be another band doing almost exactly the same thing, but that almost doesn’t do anything for me at all.
Can you name three songs that you consider to be perfect and explain what they mean to you?
We were talking about METALLICA, I would say that For Whom the Bell Tolls, for me is a fairly perfect song. I think that the bass melody at the beginning creates a great mood. It’s unsettling and is a great harbinger of what’s to come. Of all the songs on the album, that one in particular is my favorite one. It’s just very succinct. There’s nothing in that song that it could do without and it doesn’t need anything else. It’s, you know, a perfect song. I’ve listened to that song at least 500 times, if not more than that, and it never gets old. When I first got that cassette, as a kid, I played the first two tracks and they were great but then that track came on and it just sent chills up my spine. Like I said, that bass melody at the beginning is just so great. I remember getting to the end of that song and loving it so much, I rewinded it and listened to that song three times before I even got into the rest of the record. I think that was probably one of those moments where I think I decided I wanted to be musician.
White Rabbit (JEFFERSON AIRPLANE) I think is a pretty amazing song. It feels to me like it could go in an endless loop forever. It’s such a strange psychedelic ride and the pacing of it, the way it swells, it’s pretty epic. It’s not obnoxious, like someone’s trying to get the symphony out to play it or something like that, but it has that sort of epic feel. I love that song ever since I heard it.
Then, maybe a combination of two songs which I think are amazing is a Sunday Afternoon In The Park off VAN HALEN’s Fair Warning going into One Foot Out The Door. Sunday Afternoon, I love that mood with the keyboard. Everyone has used keyboards in Heavy Metal and it’s like putting, I don’t know, salt on your cake or something like that but that keyboard part is just so incredible. We actually used that for walkout music for a while, for a couple of tours but then I started wondering, if this was cooler than anything in our set, then maybe we shouldn’t do that! *haha* But the way that segways into One Foot Out The Door, it goes from this ominous, really sparse scary keyboard and it transfers into this super aggressive Rock and Roll tune. It kills me when it’s on a playlist and it’s on shuffle and you hear one without the other. It’s unacceptable to me.
What are some of the most memorable shows that you’ve seen?
The first time I saw the MELVINS, I didn’t know anything about them. They played in Tucson in ’89 or ’90, and the guy that ran the local music spaces called Downtown Performance Center, he said “Are you coming to see the Melvins?” I was like, “I don’t know anything about them.” “Oh, they’re great. They do amazing BLACK SABBATH covers.” I was a huge Black Sabbath fan so it was, “All right, let’s give this a shot.” Anyway, I was not prepared for that. Speaking of discovering a band for the first time by seeing them live, holy cow, it was just incredible. What a great live experience. I wish I could have that feeling on a regular basis. It probably helped that I was younger, and now maybe I’m a little more jaded, so even if something’s great, maybe I’ll try to look for some chinks in the armor but there was none that I could tell when I saw those guys play for the first time. They did Your Blessened, I think it’s on Bullhead, where there’s this vocal line “When man’s only distant relative has descended on his own, you will know” and it goes into a single note guitar part that goes on for a fairly long time on the record, but the first time I’d ever heard that song was live and he did that single note for way longer and walked off stage. You couldn’t see him, it was just that one note going for, I don’t know, three minutes. It was ridiculous. When he came back out and kicked back into the song, I mean, the crowd was crazy. It was such an exciting live moment.
Then, the first time my band that I was in high school ever played outside of my hometown Tucson, Arizona, we went to San Diego and we played a Moose Lodge with some local bands. We were supposed to open but the band that was supposed to headline, one of them was ill and so they wanted to play first so that he could go home. That band ended up being DRIVE LIKE JEHU. I’d never heard of them and holy shit, I’d never heard any music like that in my life. I had no idea what they were doing, it was so beautiful to be experiencing. It was tough knowing that I was gonna have to get up there after them and play but that was another amazing live experience. They’re the greatest, most frenetic Punk band. I love them.
Is there any bands that you’ve always wanted to see but never got a chance to catch them?
Sure. KING CRIMSON, I would really love to see someday. I think I’m really blowing it by not seeing WILLIE NELSON. He’s getting up there in years and I missed an opportunity about five years ago and maybe that was my window. I would love to see TOM WAITS. I think he rarely plays shows but I love his style and I hear his live shows are really theatrical and cool. I’m sure there’s a lot more. At least, all the gigantic bands in the rock world, I’ve gotten to see because we play these festivals that are just jam packed with bands. First time we played Hellfest, it was JUDAS PRIEST and OZZY OSBOURNE. Check those off the list, you know. That’s kind of the great thing about touring, you get to see all the bands. I would love to see MISSING PERSONS but I don’t think they’re a band anymore. That would have been pretty cool.
Is there any classic or universally acclaimed artists that you missed out on when they first came out and discovered way later? Or maybe an artist that you didn’t like at first and learn to appreciate over time?
The BEE GEES, I didn’t get that at all. Now, as an adult, I love Disco, especially the Bee Gees. Their vocal harmonies are incredible. Disco gets a bad rep because of the culture that it is associated with but I love it. I don’t know, I probably missed out on a lot. There’s probably a laundry list of things I missed out on.
To some degree, I feel like I was born two years too young for all the stuff that I really wanted to see, like BLACK FLAG, I never got to see them. If I was 49 instead of 47, I think I could have caught a lot more of those bands. I got to see some of them. I saw CIRCLE JERKS when they were touring on their fourth album but even still, I felt like I was kind of missing the heydays of the LA Punk explosion. I still am a huge fan of most of the SST discography. I would love to have seen X, I have yet to see them. Speaking of vocal harmonies, they’ve got great vocal harmonies and I would love to see them do that live. It’s just surprising to me, some of the intervals they sing are so weird. I think they harmonize sometimes in a major second, which is so close that it sounds like it would be horrible but maybe it’s because the timber of their voices are different enough but it’s just so eerie. It’s so cool and unique. Anyway, seeing that live would be great.
Yeah, you should definitely catch them if you get a chance. I saw them two years ago and they’re still amazing.
No kidding. Is it still Billy Zoom as well?
Yes, he’s still there. Might be an all-OG lineup actually.
No shit? Wow. Well, yeah, I need to do that. I gotta pay more close attention to the local listings.
At the same time, it needs to fit your touring schedule so…good luck!
For every band that I get to see because I’m on tour, I’m missing one because I’m on tour so it’s a mixed bag.
Do you have any unpopular music opinion that you’d like to defend? Something that you love and yet can hardly find anyone to agree with you?
Not unpopular as in “someone wants to beat me up if I say it” but unpopular as in not common, right?
Either or! *Haha*
I don’t feel like getting beat up for this man! *Haha* Well, I mean, the My War record, they made tshirts that said side A or side B and I don’t know how many they sold but I’m a big fan of the really slow drawn out side B. I don’t know if that’s a very popular opinion because My War has these really adrenaline pumping songs like My War actually. That whole first side is blasting and then the second side is really morose and I really enjoy that. I mean, that’s probably not that common, especially back then when that came out, Punk Rock was about the speed and the aggression and for them to do these sort of songs, I guess it was weird at the time but I loved it.
Any long standing musical argument within the band? Which album from a band is the best, or stuff like that?
We don’t really argue. I think we all pretty much accept each other’s different taste. I know John and I disagree on -I mean this is years ago but maybe he’s listen to it more- SUN CITY GIRLS. It’s a band that I really like and I think they’re really off putting for a lot of people. They have this Southern Asian…these weird vocal pieces, it’s a really cool juxtaposition of musical styles. Anyway, that’s definitely not for everybody.
Is there any up and coming artists that you’d like to recommend?
There’s a couple of new bands in Portland that are picking up steam and I’ve been really enjoying. Maybe people haven’t heard, I’m not sure they even have records out of this point, but there’s a band called ILS. Actually, this is a little bit of nepotism because our front of house had just joined that band to play bass but it’s really not just that. They’re really, really great. It’s really aggressive and Screamo vocals -the singer is Tom Glose from BLACK ELK- That kind of screaming vocals and super fast stuff, generally I can’t stand it, but it’s like Screamo with hooks. It’s weird. Anyway, I was really pleasantly surprised.
There’s a great band out of here, just starting out, called STRESS POSITION. They have a really cool take, sort of Post-Rock but unsettling and really aggressive and unique. I think they’re going to go far and people should do themselves a favor and check them out.
I’m not even sure if they’re a band anymore, but there’s MAXIMUM MAD out of here, which is very Math. They have really sort of convoluted guitar riffs, but they repeat them in such a way that they are memorable. You know, when I was a kid, I played in Math Rock but it was pretty inscrutable, our theme was so weird and it didn’t really repeat. Whereas Maximum Mad is doing it right. Anyway, so they’re my plugs.
In closing, is there anything specific you’d like to promote? I know you’re working on new album, when is that expected?
We’re about halfway through the recording process. We have recorded six songs, we go back into the studio next week and to complete the album, hopefully we’ll have a minimum of 12 songs to work with. If all goes well, we will have that out by May of 2020. (Note: Release date has been postponed indefinitely, because of the COVID-19 crisis.) It’s going well, it’s interesting where we go as songwriters because we don’t go into an album with a concept or an intention like, “this is going to be a slow album” or “this is going to be a Dub album.” It’s just going to be what comes out of our brains and ends up on tape. I’m enjoying that we’re doing some different things on it and so I’m excited about it and hopefully people won’t think that we’ve gone too far off the Red Fang beaten path. I think people will be pleasantly surprised.
No Comments