The Death of Perceptions: An Interview with Chris Jericho

Vocals

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Over the last twelve years Fozzy have gone from intentional Spinal Tap-ish joke to genuine, original heavy metal outfit, struggling against the preconceived notions many people have that a rock band fronted by a wrestler, especially one from the lucrative American entertainment promotion WWE, couldn’t possibly be anything other than a joke or just plain bad.

Slowly but surely Fozzy, the creative coming together of Chris Jericho on vocals and Stuck Mojo‘s Rich Ward on guitar, are changing perceptions. The key barrier is getting people to listen in the first place. Once they do, the hope is they realise the band is real and not just a gimmick. Jericho himself sees the band’s evolution in the same way; “You know I think maybe like the first time Audioslave was together you went to see it because Cornell was singing with Rage Against The Machine and you wanted to see what it was like, and then you make the decision whether you like the music or you don’t from that point forward, and I think that’s what happened basically, people at first came to see us because Jericho’s in the band and the Stuck Mojo guys are in the band, and then as the band continues to unfold and continues to release music people realise that they like the band itself and it doesn’t really matter who’s singing. That’s why I think for most people it could be the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, who gives a shit?”

The first UK shows back in 2005, first at the Mean Fiddler and then at the Astoria, both now deceased as venues, saw crowds comprising an overwhelming majority of curious WWE fans who, if nothing else, wanted the chance to get that little bit closer to their wrestling hero than they ever could at a WWE event. But each time the band have come back, the balance has shifted. Either those fans became bona fide Fozzy fans, or weren’t really metal fans to begin with and didn’t bother coming back, to be replaced by actual metal fans. “There’s always people who come to see the show who are wrestling fans or Chris Jericho fans or whatever and that’s not necessarily a bad thing because whatever it is that gets them in there they will always leave Fozzy fans. It’s evidenced by the fact that we’re able to continue to keep coming over here, and continue to expand. I mean, the shows we’ve done on this tour have been amazing and we’re coming back again in November, and it’s just one of those things where I think people just dig the music that we play. Like I always say, Bruce Dickinson is a pilot but it’s not like Iron Maiden are always singing songs about lavatories and sitting in seat 3-D, it’s just something that he does when he’s not in Iron Maiden and that’s what wrestling was like for me, and now I don’t even do that anymore so it’s just about the band.”

Of course initially Fozzy started out with the gimmick of all gimmicks, a set of character identities and a back-story worthy of any Jack Black spoof movie, but over time it was clear they’d out-grown that idea. “The only reason we did it in the first place was we got signed as a cover band by Jonny Zazula for Megaforce Records, he’s the guy that signed Metallica and Anthrax back in ’83, and for whatever reason he saw us play or heard about us playing and wanted to sign this cover band. So I was like OK and like any self-respecting musician we took the money and went with it but we wanted to make it more than just that, and that’s why I came up with the whole Blues Brothers, Travelling Wilburys, Spinal Tap back-story just to make it something a little bit different and unique.”

“ some of the biggest bands of all time have some of the weirdest names ”
- Chris Jericho

The first tentative steps were actually taken on that first self-titled album, which included two original songs alongside eight covers. The second album went further, with a near 50/50 split of originals and covers. And there was no looking back from then on. “When you start a band you want to play your own stuff, and the gimmick was fun while it lasted and then it was time to move forward and do our own thing and that’s when we decided to just go with our own stuff. And ‘Fozzy’ came from ‘Fozzy Osbourne’ and we were like do we change the name of the band? I was like you know what, some of the biggest bands of all time have some of the weirdest names. Pink Floyd, Lynyrd Skynyrd, KISS, Helloween, Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers. Def Leppard! Gotta be the worst one! When you think about it just on its own it’s a deaf – can’t hear – leopard. But you hear it so many times it becomes part of pop culture and it doesn’t matter anymore and I think that’s kind of where we’re at too.”

The third album, All That Remains, was entirely original material and comfortably proved to be the band’s most successful record so far. That progress took another huge step forward with latest CD Chasing The Grail (a metaphor for life as a band, perhaps?). In particular, closing epic Wormwood which, a few years ago, is the kind of song no one would ever have imagined could come from the pen of Chris Jericho, never mind it actually being any good. “That’s one of the reasons why I wanted that on there. One of the reasons why people are getting into Fozzy and feel good about it is they know this is real, this is part of who I am, this is the passion I have for music. I can go toe-to-toe with metal trivia with anybody. I love Helloween, I love Iron Maiden, I love their long songs, and I always wanted to do a long song on one of our albums. And the story of The Rapture was perfect; I thought ‘I can’t believe Steve Harris has never covered this before’, and I just started writing lyrics and the next thing you know I had eight pages of lyrics and it was like ‘I want a 14-minute song on this album’, so people almost say ‘What?! Isn’t that supposed to be the gimmick wrestling thing?’ And then they hear it and it’s good. Priest did an eleven-minute song on Angel of Retribution and it was shit, it’s not easy to do a long song, but we did it and we did it damn good.”

Chasing The Grail‘s success has enabled the band to break new personal ground in terms of touring, taking them to areas of Europe they’ve previously not been able to play. The UK has always been a touring haven for them, and with most of Europe and other parts of the world now following suit, Japan (“That’s the place we’d really like to go but we just can’t seem to crack that market. Maybe they’re still stuck up on the wrestling thing, who knows, but it’s fine, it’ll come”) and surprisingly the United States remain the two major untapped markets. It turns out that’s not entirely been down to chance. “It’s weird because from the first time we ever came here, the first show, I think it was 2005, it was at Nottingham Rock City and I remember walking on stage and I couldn’t believe how many people were there. From the moment we first came here people got into our band. And that was really like this was a market right off the bat I knew we really had to crack it because you could see that there was a little bit of a door opening. Next thing you know Ireland follows, then Scotland follows, then Wales is there. Then we did it in Australia. Then we’re doing it in France now. Canada’s like that. Germany really opened up for us on this tour. So why would I want to go and do shows in the States?”

“We played the Whiskey which was great, we almost sold it out,” he continues, “We played BB Kings in New York, it was great, but to do a full tour there, if I’m going to take the time to do a two/three week tour I’d rather do it over here where you can see this buzz. I don’t care about the States. If it follows through and it does good, I’m happy. We sell a lot of records in the States, but the live experience, it’s different over there. People still like going to rock shows here, big ones, little ones; in the States it’s more about the trendiness of what’s going on. I really feel that. And I’m not going to beg people to come to our gig. If we come over here people come and they have a great time, they know what they’re gonna get. The States is still very hard. If we crack it eventually then I’m happy, but if not then I’m just as happy being over here. I really am. I’m probably the biggest one that says we’re not doing the States. I know some the guys in the band want to but I want to concentrate it over here.”

“ I’m not going to beg people to come to our gig ”
- Chris Jericho

But it’s probably safe to say that the touring wouldn’t have grown the way it has without the evolution of their material so far, and the honing of their style and skills. Chris explained how he in particular has worked very hard to find his way as a singer. “After we recorded the All That Remains record I went to a vocal coach. And we did a lot of touring on All That Remains, which helped a lot too. What that did was help me find who I was as a singer, where I felt comfortable. And Rich writes great melodies, very challenging melodies. They’re not easy. Especially when you’re recording, they’re very intricate, lots of details. And so to take the vocal lessons, doing all the touring that we did, and then to have Rich knowing that there was more there in my voice to write really cool melody lines, it really made a difference. The other big thing is that we took our time recording. The other albums it was like ‘you’ve got ten days to get all your vocals done’. With this one it was like ‘you come to Florida for a day or two’, we do two songs, three songs. I go to Atlanta for maybe a week or two, we do a song. So it was a long drawn-out process of maybe two or three months where we didn’t have to rush and that’s really made a difference. Because you’ve got two or three good hours of singing a day. That’s it. You can’t sing seven, eight, nine hours a day because by the end of that time you’re done. Or you might still be hitting the notes, but it doesn’t have the same power or quality. I really found that out on this album.”

With the wrestling, for now at least, behind him, and his second book finished and on the shelves, Chris is now full speed ahead with Fozzy. So much so that he’s already written the lyrics for the next album. This approach to writing an album is very uncommon, and confuses a lot of fans who expect the more typical approach of writing the music and contructing the vocal melodies and lyrics to fit afterwards, or at least at the same time. Chris therefore explains how it works for Fozzy; “…Grail [was] the first time we ever wrote that way. And the reason why it works is when I give Rich the lyrics he has feelings about the songs. He gets inspired in different ways. It’s funny because, on the last album when I gave him a song like Broken Soul for example, it was a heavy, dark kind of thing. I don’t even remember what I wrote about, something evil and murderous. But he came back with this beautiful piece of music for it and I thought ‘well, I guess I need to kind of rewrite the lyrics to fit the style of the song now’. It’s not just here it is, it’s done. He’ll chop off some stuff, like … Friday The 13th, there was something like eight different verses for that that he cut down to four and I was like ‘oh fuck, those other four verses were so cool’. But you write what’s best for the song. There might be like a couple of different parts he’s added where he’s written lyrics for it or added another verse. So we just kind of throw back and forth. And the way that modern technology is, he can write a snippet, email it to me, and I check it out, call him five minutes later and say “well that was coolâ€� and even though he’s in Atlanta and I’m in Tampa, you can write your whole album that way. But it does start with him getting the lyrics and going “well I feel this one should be thisâ€�. Unless it’s something like Storm The Beaches where I’ll say ‘this is a long song’.”

That title might be unfamiliar to some Fozzy fans, and that is because Storm The Beaches, about the D-Day landings, is one of the song titles which will be on the next album (revealed during interviews on their Canadian tour in June); “That’s going to be the long song for this album. On Wormwood Mike Martin wrote it all, our old guitar player, but on Storm The Beaches Rich is going to write it, so it’s gonna be his first long tune.” Chris ellaborates on his writing for the new album a little more; “I always write based on the song titles, and work backwards from there. Actually there’s one that I just re-read, because I wrote them about three months ago now, the song’s called Death Perception. The idea is that all these different religions have different theories about what happens to you when you die. So I just found out a whole lot about six or seven religions and just wrote this whole long piece on theories of what happens when you die. And I just read it back and thought ‘wow, that’s really fucking good!’”.

“ when I give Rich the lyrics he has feelings about the songs ”
- Chris Jericho

With that little exclusive tidbit dropped Chris moves on to the final component of the last couple of Fozzy records, the special guests. Several illustrious names from rock and metal have leant their considerable skill to Fozzy songs on both All That Remains and Chasing The Grail, usually in the guitar solo and backing vocal department, but the next album may not see the same level of metal celebrity involvement; “For All That Remains we put the guests on there because we really wanted to get people to look at the band in a different way. It was the first all-original album, the first no-costume one, and that’s why I wanted Zakk [Wylde] on there, and Marty Friedman, Mark Tremonti, Myles Kennedy; people will then go ‘oh, these guys are involved with it, well I’d better check this out,’ especially when Zakk’s name carries such weight. If this was some kind of joke they would know that fuck, he wouldn’t be on it if it was. And then for Chasing The Grail we wanted some really fast solos, and Rich doesn’t play that style, and I said ‘well Jeff Waters is perfect for it’. This one, well we just got Billy Gray, our new guitar player, who’s a great player. There’s one guy in mind who I think I’m gonna call to do a solo. He’s offered in the past and I think it’d be a lot of fun because he’s a great player, a little bit underrated as a player, and he’s from one of the biggest bands, in England especially. They just played Sonisphere, but I’m not going to say who it is.”

Our money is on Motörhead‘s Phil Campbell. And so Fozzy finished their Summer 2011 touring later that night at Dingwalls in London, with another tour in November (sadly not including a return to London), more writing and perhaps some recording for the next album (although that will have to fit around Rich Ward’s Adrenaline Mob schedule a little bit), Jericho and the band aren’t going to sit still for long; plenty more is to come.

Written by Andy Lye
More: Interviews, Fozzy