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Interview during European Tour
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Author ("SB"?), publication and date (aside from year '97) unknown
If anyone knows where this came from, please email me.



Music is ever-changing, you either adapt to this or vanish in this business.
Alternatively you could try being the ones who change it, and if you're very
lucky you get signed and get to play your music across the world. Although
their album has been out for a while in the States, Gravity Kills with their
strange mix of metal, techno and sheer energy have arrived on tour in the UK.
I caught up with them on their own headline show at Nottingham Rock City,
prior to touring a support slot with Skunk Anansie.

SB: - How's this touring been going anyway? Because it's been what nine weeks
now?

Matt - It's been great. Like I was saying before to be able to play every
night to a thousand people. We were quite fortunate to be out with a band as
big as Skunk Anansie, so it's been great.

SB: - How long have you all been together?

Doug - Well in this configuration two years but actually Kurt and Matt and I
have been together for twelve years, ever since high school. There's been a
lot of people in and out of the band, many people we've gone through.

Matt - Mostly a lot of singers we've gone through.

Doug - So after we all graduated high school we got rid of our bass player
and our singer and it was just us three again. So we decided let's start
writing some music and we started writing for this local compilation a week
before it was due and we didn't have a singer. Right at the last moment we
called Jeff and he flew up and sang on it, turned it in and got on the
compilation, it kinda went from there. The cool thing is Jeff is Kurt's
cousin so we've all known each other for years. That's how we get along so
friendly because basically we all grew up together.

SB: - It does help, particularly when you're stuck in a tour bus in the
middle of nowhere. I've seen many a band fall apart. They're fine until they
get out on the road.

Doug - There was over a week on this tour when we had no internal power on
the bus. No VCR, no music. There was no heat on the bus.

Matt - And then our bus broke down and the transmission dropped out of it
and we had to get another bus for two days. And now we're back on the
original bus so that's been a nightmare.

Doug - Pretty tough.

SB: - If you can live through that you can live through anything I suppose.

Doug - And everyone was running out of batteries on their walkmans so it was
getting pretty desperate. And the refrigerator never worked forever, it
heated things up. So for the first half of the tour we didn't even have a
cooler and then the Bus Company said we're going to buy a little one and
stick it in the back. I haven't seen Skunk Anansie's bus but theirs is pretty
nice.

Matt - Their bus is pretty nice. They had problems with theirs too.

Doug - Their bus they couldn't turn off for fear of it not starting up again
so it's been running for weeks now.

Matt - Anyway, back on how long we've been together, like you say we've been
writing and recording the four of us for a very long time, but when the four
of us got together as Gravity Kills which has been for about two years now
things took off pretty quick. Relatively quick in the United States anyway.

SB: - It's a real mixture of sounds in the music, where do you personally
see yourselves as coming from?

Matt - All over the place. We each have our individual influences. When we
were growing up, Kurt and I were along the same lines, we were neighbours
and good friends since second grade so we always listening to the same stuff.
We were listening and playing a lot of punk stuff; The Sex Pistols - even
early industrial stuff, which could be considered as Killing Joke. At the
same time I was listening to bands like U2 and Depeche Mode and then
Doug......

Doug - I never liked American music so I was always into more European music.
Started off with Gary Numan, Human League, New Order, Erasure, you know
everything up through the eighties. Stuff I'm into now like Skinny Puppy and
stuff like that so I think what ended up happening in the band was we ended
up getting the punk influence, the heavy guitar influence the European techno
and you marry the European and the American together. Then Jeff comes in with
his vocals on top.

Matt - What's interesting is that lately on the bus we're either listening to
Korn, Tool, Prong. Bands like that who we really like. Then we also listen to
The Chemical Brothers, Underworld and all these techno bands like that so if
you think about Gravity Kills we're somewhere in between those two worlds.
We've got the heaviness of a Korn or a Prong and then we've got the techno
influences like The Chemical Brothers and Underworld, along those lines.

SB: - How long did it actually take to refine and develop the sound, given
that you've had along time to come up with the influences and sounds, when
did it start becoming a direction?

Doug - What ended up happening would have been in early '94. '95 we did the
album, '96 we toured, this is '97 so it would have been early '94, February
'94. We all stayed up in St. Louis and we sat around one evening and we were
talking about production ideas and the idea came up that was like here's
something that maybe hasn't been tried before. Why don't we try exploring why
don't we take rave and strip all the keyboards out of it and add really heavy
guitars and then have a strong song structure, wouldn't that be interesting?
We just sort of talked about it for a long time. Then we sort of started
working on this little piece of music. This dance piece of music which was
actually the early beginnings of 'Guilty' - the song that we did for that
compilation. Then when we heard that the local radio station wanted local
bands for this compilation, we refined it and added just vocals to it. Then
we explored further avenues on the album. We approach every song a little bit
differently but that's where the original idea came from.

SB: - So the album has actually been kicking around for a while?

Matt - It's been out since March '96 in the States.

Doug - And 'Guilty' was actually written in September 27th '94 in it's
original version.

Matt - And we released it on the radio in the States in December of '94.

SB: - What's all this about a riot in Boston?

Doug - Well actually we got banned in Boston so they didn't even allow one to
happen.

Matt - That was New York actually. Doug - What happened was we sort of have
this reputation in the United States for really rowdy crowds. Not unsafe
crowds, just...

Matt - Moshing, crowd surfing, stage diving.

Doug - So Boston had trouble the year prior at the same festival with Green
Day and because we were coming into this with this reputation they said
'alright well we don't even want to risk anything, the other bands can play,
Gravity Kills can't play'. So New York City caught hold of that we were going
to be in New York City a week later. They said 'OK well we're going to let
you play but we're going to lay down a couple of rules. We going to have
police officers there, the crowd isn't going to be allowed to move - like
even bob their heads and you can't encourage them to move or do anything like
that. If you do we'll arrest you for inciting a riot and shut the PA off'. So
we said OK, whatever. So we get up and we play and they were dead serious
about it. They were watching and somebody would start nodding their heads and
a police officer would go over and say 'Hey calm down, stop doing that' so we
get about thirty five minutes of the set and we're frustrated, they're
frustrated and Jeff said 'Everyone go f***g crazy and they exploded which was
great and the police officers freaked out and jumped into the crowd. The PA
got shut off but the monitors were left on so everyone could still hear us so
we just kept playing. The more the police officers got in there...once the PA
went down it was even worse but still there were three/four hundred people
and they were just dancing it's not like these people were ganging up.

Matt - They weren't even moshing really.

Doug - It's not like they were actually going to proceed into Manhatten and
riot through the city. Then they threatened to arrest Jeff so our manager was
there and she calmed the whole thing down and we just got out of there. So
that's the whole story. Then they said well fine you can't come back here and
you can't play on City property.

Matt - It's not like we're banned from the cities playing we can still play
music venues we just can't play an outdoor venue because the city has a
liability issue. We've played Boston probably another four times since then
and we played New York another three times.

Doug - So pretty much in both cities any outdoor gigs on city property they
don't want us there.

Matt - Well a show we had in New York, a sold out show where we had Republica
opening up for us and that was a really good show.

SB: - They're just starting to break over here.

Matt - Which is good to see.

SB: - I'm curious to know where you're coming from lyrically really because I
find a mixture of things in there.

Matt - The majority of the lyrics are written by Jeff and the lyrics usually
come last after all the music is written. His lyrics are usually initially an
emotional response to whatever comes out of the music but there all over the
place; there's love songs on the album songs about making the album, a song
about Doug on the album. Most of them are dealing with everyday emotions that
everyone has. But the lyrics are also written quite deliberately to take on
multiple meanings so it's not necessarily important what we think they mean
as it is n audience to interpret what they mean and they can get something
for themselves.

Doug - Have you heard something in particular in the lyrics?

SB: - I was sitting looking through the lyric sheet earlier on and there was
one or two that struck me as being very relationship orientated. I was
sitting there thinking 'hang on Stabbing Westward', particularly with the
techno sound that you have. It's curious because I did an interview with them
not long ago.

Doug - Their big friends of ours, we did quite a few shows with them last
year in the States. We kept crossing paths, we played a lot of radio
festivals together and did the Sex Pistols tour together.

SB: - They haven't really hit it big time over here.

Doug - They came over on their tour and they were really frustrated.

SB: - Have you found it the same in America with getting noticed over there
or was it a different process.

Matt - It's a long process kind of.

Doug - Just because, well here in Europe it's very media driven or in America
if you've got radio air play you can pretty much get really well known. But
it's limited because of state run radio, especially on the Continent. People
find out more through press and in the United States they do but mostly
through the radio and MTV but what we've found out is just because you have
a radio hit in the Unites States doesn't mean you're going to sell records or
sell tickets. You could have a number ten alternative or say modern rock
radio hit, you know top ten hit and you can't do more than two hundred people
in any one city in the United States, including New York or LA. So really you
have to have the reputation of touring so you have to have both. You really
have to have radio airplay and a hell of a touring reputation and unrelenting
touring. Like we went round the United States five times, two hundred and
twenty shows in the United States. Because the first time you go through it's
a hundred people. The second time they bring a friend, two hundred people.
Two hundred turns into four hundred turns into eight hundred turns into
twelve hundred. Really it's almost the same thing here, we're talking to
people, this is the first time through, and you just kind of get a buzz
going. Second time though some more people come, third time through so we
figure bthe time we come fourth time through. We'll do some festivals this
summer and we'll probably come back and open up for somebody one more time
and them maybe we can headline.

Matt - By the end of our touring in the States it was a damn rare thing not
have sold out the show, it would be like bummer it's not sold out tonight.
Which didn't really happen towards the end.

Doug -We're doing eleven to fourteen hundred seaters.

Matt -And radio and MTV treated us very well over there too.

Doug - And the press hates us. The smaller press doesn't but the alternative
press..it's not so much they hate us but they ignore us. To them we don't
exist. How they feel is you have Trent Reznor in one camp and then it's
everybody else; Stabbing Westward, us, Filter, Tool, and if you're not with
Trent Reznor then you're just copying him. Which doesn't really make mush
sense because Trent Reznor wrote three songs on Marilyn Manson's album and
at least he didn't have anything to do with our album let alone with writing
songs on it.

SB: - Did it actually take a long time to get a record company interested?

Doug -Well once it started happening it went really quick but once 'Guilty'
got on that local radio compilation, to help sell the CD they'd have weekends
where they'd just play songs off the CD. So we started getting all these
phone requests and so other bands were out there going, you know other bands
were out there playing gigs and saying 'be sure to call in the point and
request our song'. They knew that people were doing that but what they found
out with us was we weren't out playing live - because we only had one song
and we didn't know anybody in St. Louis since we were new there and they just
by taking the phone calls, so we ended up getting a lot of requests. And they
knew they were genuine requests because people would call and say 'Can you
play that song by that one Gravity band' or 'that 'Guilty' band' so they knew
it was really genuine. They got so many requests in the month of December
that they finally decided to add it to their play list and that play list
went subsequently to every radio staon in the country.

Matt - We never even expected to hear it get played on the radio. I'd get a
phone call from a friend saying 'hey your songs on' and I'd be like 'no way!'

Doug -So when they decided to add it we actually entered the charts at number
twenty-four, and Matt called me and said 'Turn on the radio, turn on the
radio!' because it was Friday top twenty-five countdown and 'Guilty' was just
finishing. They said 'and that was Gravity Kills at number twenty four'

Matt -And we were like 'Holy s**t we're on the countdown'

Doug -Then record companies started looking at the point radio show and
saying 'Who's Gravity Kills, I've never heard of them before and they're
charting at St.Louis corporate radio station, I don't understand'. 'Oh it's
this local band they've got a local radio hit'; ' Oh can you send me a
CD'.... And Tom Sarig at 'TVT' was the first one to fly out and see us. And
next thing I know I get this phone call at work 'Hi this is Tom Sarig at TVT
records, I want to come up and see you this weekend.' 'Come on upTommy'.
Called up the guys and said 'Holy s**t Tom Sarig from TVT is coming up'. And
he came up and then other record companies started coming in also 'cause they
all read, everyone hears what's going on. 'There's a band in St. Louis', 'St.
Louis what's going on in St. Louis?'. So word got around and he came in that
weekend and said 'Well get an attorney and I'll send you a contract'. We were
like 'We've only got three songs, it's too soon.' We'd never played out live,
we'd never taken a band photo and hereas a record company totally trusting
us. 

Matt -So it did happen fast from that point but at the same time we had tried
you know, kind of half-ass tried to get a record deal for the last ten years
and nothing ever happened and then when we least expected it, when it did...

Doug -When we stopped caring, or stopped trying to follow trends...

Matt -And wrote music that we just liked....

Doug -Something that we would go out to a store and buy....

Matt -That's when it happened first. Let's just do something we want to do.

Doug -Also we didn't have the other people in the band, like for instance
before in the band, our bass player wrote all of the songs.

Matt -He wrote more mellow stuff.

Doug -He wrote stuff like Ocean Blue so we were doing that. We really weren't
happy doing it but it was easy to have him writing all the music. So with him
gone and the singer gone, we were freed up to do what we always wanted to do
so it was a combination of those things. But then it happened quick, Jesus
Christ the next thing I know we're flying and we've got this...

Matt -...Deadline to get the record done and soundtracks and all this other
stuff so its pretty much non-stop really. A year and a half after we got
signed in St. Louis, they signed another six bands from St. Louis. Not TVT
but various record companies. So St. Louis all of a sudden, after we got
signed became a hot spot.

SB: - Back to the record company side of it, I'm always hearing horror
stories about record companies, the way they try and take control over an
act. How do you feel about the way these bands get?

Doug -This is something we were very scared about because we read horror
stories for ten years of course and TVT assured us that if we signed with
them that our project would be completely hands off. We could do everything
ourselves and have complete creative control. And they assured us of all
theses things. Of course you're kind of suspicious at first and they didn't,
they didn't really mess with stuff at all. We really have a really good,
healthy mature relationship with our record label where we look at each other
as equal business partners. They have their job and we go out and tour and we
write. And their job is to sell the record.

Matt -It's a small label. I mean we talk to the president of the label a lot.

Doug -And from having heard only those three songs they always felt
comfortable in letting us do our own thing and having faith in us. And that
was very very important to us to have that and I think another thing that
helps, one thing that helped us was that we had multiple offers so we were
able to play people off of each other. I think that what happens to bands
sometimes is that they have one deal and there's no other offers and they're
like 'oh s**t, it's take it or leave it' and that's all they've got. Then
they get a producer in and the producer tells them what to do, they don't get
the album thing they want to do, they have to go out and tour an album they
can't stand and labels dicking them around, and f****d them around on the art
work and stuff like that. All that nonsense.

SB: - Did getting a song onto the 'Seven' soundtrack help your profile at all
do you think?

Doug -That and 'Mortal Kombat' because they both came out at the same time;
and there is one on 'Escape from LA' as well. 'Mortal Kombat' came out first
and that was a demo version of 'Goodbye' that came out six months before the
album came out. We had no story really, we had the St. Louis thing that
happened which was kind of interesting. We wanted to get our name out there
more and so we managed to get on 'Mortal Kombat' soundtrack, which went
platinum in the States. Then there was 'Seven', which came out even four
months before and it just helped us a little bit. 'Gravity Kills, I don't
know the band but I think I've heard of them before'.

Matt -It was cool to be associated with such a great movie.

Doug -It just kind of got us off the ground a little bit and then the album
came out and it just gave people something to talk about on the radio. 'You
might have heard them on the 'Seven' soundtrack this is 'Guilty' by Gravity
Kills'.

Matt -Here's an interesting piece of information, speaking of 'Seven'. They
filmed part of that at the Alexandria Hotel, some scenes of that, which is in
Hollywood and so we filmed part of out 'Guilty' video at the Alexandria hotel
and there's some shots that you can see in a ballroom with this real
intricate ceiling and some pipes and stuff and you can see Jeff our singer
hanging from the pipes. And I just saw the brand new Bush video...

Doug -Did they shoot it there?

Matt -It's shot in Alexandria ball room, same thing it's like two years after
we did our 'Guilty' video and they're in that same ball room, same ceiling.
Almost some of the same shots, it was like in dark greens and blues like our
video was. It's shot in the same place.

SB: - Are you planning on doing any of the festivals this year then?

Doug -It looks like we're going to be over here in June and July.

Matt -The end of June and first part of July we'll be here. For two to three
weeks of festivals.

Doug -And then maybe do some headlining. The cool thing about festivals is
that it's like a family reunion. We did that all last summer, with bands,
like Stabbing Westward, Korn, us, No Doubt and we just all hang out and it's
good to see everybody again. We'll start on the album right away when we go
back.

SB: - Another album coming up then?

Doug -Looks like we'll probably have it done by November and it'll be out the
beginning of next year.

SB: - Or it'll be a year later over here.

Doug -It'll probably come out simultaneously.

Matt -Because we can now.

SB: - Because you've got the profile now.

Doug -Well before we didn't have....

Matt -A record label over here.

Doug - We weren't licensed in Europe and it took a long time to get it all
done and squared away so that's why the album was really delayed. Just to
hammer out all the details with Virgin....

SB: - It's strange because it's a very fresh sound over here and you'd think
that for an album that's been out in the States for a year and a half...

Matt -Well what they wanted to do was wait and see if we got big in the
States then we were worth more to a record company over here to be licensed
to so that's essentially what they did. They let us get big and then we could
get a good deal over here licensed through somebody like Virgin which is what
happened and so it worked out well really. We might not have got such a good
deal.


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