ATHEIST's Kelly Shaefer Takes BraveWords.com To Jupiter - "We Are Really Trying To Just Rip Heads Off And Have A Great Time"
November 23, 2010, 13 years ago
That's ATHEIST frontman Kelly Shaefer on the phone from Florida. The last time we spoke for an official interview was in the early '90s when Unquestionable Presence (1991) and Elements (1993) were rising well above most metalhead's noggins. Today extreme prog-metal is a staple genre in any iPod. Whether it be the masterworks of OPETH, ENSLAVED or lighter fare such as DREAM THEATER, RUSH, YES or PINK FLOYD, the community is vast and open-minded. And growing each day. A challenge to some, an escape for most, bands like Atheist were years ahead of their time with top-notch musicianship and over-the-top vision in the '80s. The band were virtually forgotten when they broke up for good in 1993 - yes, the grunge era killed off another scene. Seven years later, Shaefer was approached by Relapse to re-release and remaster Piece Of Time (1989), Unquestionable Presence (1991) and Elements (1993) with bonus material. The can of worms was opened. Relapse did an "amazing job" at celebrating Atheist's legacy says Shaefer who actually never had the band's material on CD!
Jupiter emerges as a tastefully challenging record to wrap your head around, reminiscent of the band's legendary catalog, but pushing the boundaries into the next millennium.
"The thing that’s unique about this record to me is that I almost have a third person’s perspective about it, which is actually about what that song ('Third Person') on the album is actually about. But for the first time I wasn’t close to every song, because I would go up to Atlanta and bring my guitar parts up and introduce them to the band, and we would connect and me and Steve (Flynn; drums) would arrange them. It was like they had developed now, and they had toes and fingers and they were standing on their own two feet. And then I would go home and come back again and they would develop even more. And so it’s almost like I brought all the supplies and those guys sort of worked out the blueprint. And there were no vocals until a couple of weeks before when we went in to record, and that’s what really set it off for us. As soon as the vocals were in place, they became songs. It gave them eyes and the ears and a mouth, and they became really identifiable individually. Yeah, just a really weird experience. So listening to it, it reminds me of Roger (Patterson; late bassist) a lot. It just brings me back to a time ... there’s just certain riffs on the album that just remind me, I just know that he would love it. I think he’d be like, 'yeah, that’s totally us.' And it’s weird to actually hear yourself in that perspective as well, because 17 years goes by and you forget the process of making those songs to some extent. And you just kind of listen to them like everybody else listens to them. And so when listening to Unquestionable Presence, I can kind of just listen to it without thinking about what it was like to write it or any of that. And so now with this album it’s just kind of like the same way. It just reminds me of a different era, but what I love about it is the production quality that we have available to us today. And I guess there’s been some people have had some things to say about the production on the album, but what do they want us to do, record in a shitty eight-track studio just to keep it real.”
BraveWords.com: I believe it needs to be pristine given the material that you’re dealing with, because really at the end of the day you helped create this sub-genre of extreme prog. And within that genre the bar is set really high when it comes to production, so I don’t know why you’d hear that kind of negativity.
Kelly: “I was really shocked by that because I thought if anything they’d love the production. And it’s not really in Europe, it’s just in America. And I think what the problem with this scene here—and I hate to say this—but I mean when people, Jason Suecof (TRIVIUM, CHIMAIRA, DEVILDRIVER) has worked with some bands that are kind of synonymous with this new metal, not new metal but sort of...”
BraveWords.com: “Metalcore.”
Kelly: “Metalcore. And so that scene and being involved in it and us coming along from a totally different era, I think that makes people angry for some reason and I think that’s an American thing. I think that’s just kids being trendy and thinking, 'oh, you know, metalcore production.' It’s like, 'do you know what you are talking about?' At the end of the day we record that shit clear and crisp and loud, and this is the first time we really wanted the guitars to really crush, and so no matter who played bass on this album, it was gonna be placed alongside of all the other instruments, and the emphasis was going to be about songs for the first time. In order to create a new branch on the technical metal tree, the next evolution of this music is good songs, songs that actually you can remember to some extent, while the chaos is going on underneath. And that was really something, if there was anything intentional it was that this time around. And that seems like the next step, because you can’t play any more notes, you can’t play any faster, and you can’t play any heavier, you can’t scream any louder - what now? So we really wanted to try to take the complexity and give it something that you can actually grab onto and ride for four minutes.”
BraveWords.com: In the last few years previous to the reformation, you have been in that kind of comfort zone of more rock stuff, more song-oriented material. Were you able to bring that to the table?
Kelly: “From a guitar perception, no. I spent eight months getting my chops back up to that level of picking and to be able to write stuff like that. So guitar-wise I was still approaching it from being 17 years old and not being influenced. Now vocally, absolutely. I think it inadvertently just came in. I mean, I’ve written probably 300 songs since then. Atheist never wrote a lot of songs. We used every little last bit of everything we ever had to make each one of the records and there was never any leftover stuff. With NEUROTICA there’s probably three albums worth of stuff that never made it on a record and we made three albums. So I’ve just been writing a lot of different music over the last 20 years, and I think I just got a little better at structuring things. And plus not having to play guitar while I’m singing is a huge deal that I’ve mentioned several times through the course of doing press for this, that I can now write freely knowing that I don’t have to play this complex guitar line while I’m trying to sing this other line that’s going in the opposite direction, which is really, really hard, and which gave me carpal tunnel in my hand to begin with. Just having to do that in the stance that I have while playing guitar is what really messed up my thumb. I can sit down and play guitar all day long, but I don’t want to sit down on stage on a stool and play this music. So I thought it’d be better for me to let somebody else play the guitar. I can still write a lot of the parts and it’s still going to be authentic Atheist. I’m just going to have this young, fiery 25-year old kid, Jonathan Thompson, and Chris Baker busted out. And then I can be out front and it kind of adds a new live dimension to the band. One that’s not always embraced, but I think it’s good to have a frontman in this extreme, furious sort of music, and I think that makes us a really different, unique live band that people don’t expect to get; this crazy music flying out of ‘em and there’s somebody out front sort of leading the charge and pulling the people in and making them a part of each one of the songs. I think that’s really important.”
BraveWords.com: So will we see you with a guitar on stage or not at all?
Kelly: “You know, I really just don’t see any need. I think I’ve got it, I made my statement in the course. I just don’t need that, it’s such a nightmare to bring another rig in to deal with the guitar. And me being left-handed, if something happens to one of my guitars I’m screwed. I haven’t found a place yet where I really feel like I want to play guitar here. If there was a special part that I felt like I needed to play in a unique way, then I would. Now I probably will play acoustic guitar in the beginning of ‘Incarnation’s Dream.’ I would like to set that out, you know. Have it on a stand and be able to go over and do that. So I guess maybe, yeah, I guess at some point I might end up with a guitar on stage. I think that would be epic and fun, but other than that I’ve got two great book-ended guitar players to crush it for me, and we have a blast playing in this capacity, and it allows me to just kind of be a cheerleader out front and just really make it fun instead of so fucking serious. People are always like, 'you guys look like you’re having a fucking blast' and we are. It is fun to be up there and it should be fun for everybody else, too. We don’t take ourselves so seriously, just the music may sound that way, but we are really trying to just rip heads off and really have a great time. A different approach than people have anticipated.”
BraveWords.com: Don’t take this as an insult, but I can say this because we’re both the same age! Did you ever look in the mirror and go, you know what, I’m just too bloody old to pull this off again...
Kelly: “Not at all.”
BraveWords.com: The opposite?
Kelly: “Yeah, absolutely. I feel like the only part of me that feels 42, I guess, are the corners of my eyes. There’s no getting around getting physically older. In so many ways I absolutely live every aspect of my life in the same way that I did when I was 19 years old. Steve will tell you, Steve’s life is a lot different. You know what, some parts of my life are different. I’m a daddy now, I’m a single father, so I have a lot of responsibility now that I probably never had when I was a young man, but the rest of me I still party like it’s 1989, you know. I still like to burn both ends of the fucking candle, I really do, but I don’t ache or anything. I mean there’s nothing physically that makes me feel any different. I feel a lot sharper and smarter and actually better. Just a better performer, a better artist now than I ever could have been at 19, and I learned how to appreciate things a lot differently than then. So actually touring is easier now because there were a lot of conflicting personalities when we were younger, and we had a lot to prove individually and I think us all shooting for the same piece of pizza or only one piece of pizza there and we’re all sort of going for it. And a lot of strong personalities and we’ve learned to now appreciate the individuality that we each have. When we pull it all together, especially me and Steve, our chemistry is just so much more appreciated now that we’re older, so it’s kind of good to be this age. There’s times I get pissed about it, just physically looking older sucks.”
BraveWords.com: Well it must be an uplifting experience knowing that you have a generation of kids staring in awe at your catalog, and in the meantime you are creating forward-thinking, riveting new material.
Kelly: “If that’s the case then man we’re very lucky guys. And I’ve often said we’re hard-pressed to find a group of guys more appreciative to have a second opportunity to do what we originally meant to do. And it sustains the life of our really good friend Roger Patterson (who died in a car accident on February 12, 1991), it fulfills our dreams that we had when we were 16, 17 years old. It’s kind of unique. And we’d be really, really grateful for it. And at the end of the day as an artist you want to leave a mark, and typically you have to die before that happens, before you get that kind of notoriety or appreciation for your art, and it’s just nice to still be alive and see it. To not have to die to make it happen, like painters and such have made work and they have to die and people appreciate their shit on a different level. Yeah, it’s kind of weird to witness it unfold the way it has, and we’ll certainly never take it for granted. We wanted people to really know that we didn’t take this album lightly and we were really trying to make a new statement. And at the same time we weren’t really trying, we were just really trying to recreate where we left off. You know, me and Steve had a lot of unfinished stuff we wanted to do, and it is really gratifying to have it done now and to hear back from people like yourself that it wasn’t a mistake to make this record.”
BraveWords.com: So what is the age of some of this material? Is some of it 17 years old?
Kelly: “None of it. None of it’s even a year old. It’s complete spontaneous combustion of where we’re at today. It took a year and a half to put together only because logistically it was hard to get Tony Choy (bass) to Atlanta and me in Atlanta at the same time. Tony made a Latin pop record right in the middle of all of this that kind of messed everything up schedule-wise. It was hard for us to get up there together, and finally I just started flying up there without him and that’s when everything started falling into place really quickly. So really just so much spontaneous stuff, just like on Elements really. I really like that process on Elements. For me Steve wasn’t there, so he was a little unsure that it would move that quickly, but he’s such a better and smarter player now. Once you take away the arguments and the tantrums that used to happen when we were kids, shit moves along really smoothly. Steve knows what to do whenever I play a certain kind of riff. Before I even play it I’ll tell Chris and Jonathan, listen try to find a harmony in a third or a fifth and just follow around me, or if Jonathan has something that he wrote that he felt was like Atheist-inspired, I would hear that and I write an accompanying guitar part to go with it, or Chris would write something and I would write something to go along with it, like the beginning of ‘When The Beast.’ Chris Baker wrote that first guitar riff from the beginning and I wrote the underlying part to go with it. So we kind of orchestrate things and it worked so smoothly that it just kind of came together quickly and we actually look forward to making another record after this. We really have a lot more to say. We really were just kind of getting in a groove when we got to the end of this record, so it’s like starting over again. It’s really fun. It’s legitimate, and it’s not contrived in any way. We’re spontaneously combusting on songs and that’s what you’re hearing on Jupiter. Those are live drum takes. It’s a completely organic record. You’ll hear mistakes on there and times where we speed up and slow down. That’s just the way we’ve always done it, man. We don’t do things to a click track without parameters. We will set the parameters; this is the first time we ever set parameters on the drums in recording them. But there’s times where Steve will go past the click track and he’ll fall behind the click track, but we always catch up and we always meet up at the finish line, so to speak. I think it makes music breathe that way. It doesn’t sound clinical and too perfect. So many bands fix all the mistakes and sometimes the mistakes are the charm. Even if you don’t hear them, you just subconsciously hear them and you don’t realize what makes this band so different. Me and Steve have our own clock in our head. It really is the thing that we have together and the guys in the band now understand that clock, they’ve played with us long enough to know that when we play that kind of song you can’t put a click track to that. It kind of breathes on its own and I think it makes it more organic that way. It’s too easy to be perfect in 2010. You can ProTools things up, but when you get onstage you fall apart. But if you have that clock in your head with each other, and you have that chemistry, then you don’t have to depend on technology in any way.”
BraveWords.com: Now you mentioned that the tantrums are a thing of the past, and I hate using the word maturity, but what do you think it is, respect possibly?
Kelly: “Absolutely. I think that we appreciate each other in a whole different way than we used to, and everybody’s individual talents. Even in the course of not having Rand Burkey (former guitarist) on these records, I miss his guitar playing but I don’t miss the person. He was an incredible player that unfortunately didn’t follow the same paths that we all did, but it still doesn’t take away from his genius and just the way he plays guitar. So I miss some of my paintbrushes, so to speak. I really liked painting with those guys and making different things, but I learned from my appreciation from what everybody contributed to those old records and took those influences into this new record. And so I always wanted people to know that if we were going to make a new record, me and Steve knew exactly what made Atheist interesting and we weren’t going to sway from that template at all. So Jonathan Thompson is a young kid who grew up on our music and knows really a lot more about us sometimes than we do about ourselves. And having that fresh sort of mind broadens the equation. He’s capable of playing whatever we need him to play. He’s really just one of those players – very smooth and technically proficient and really just amazing. So he knew the Rand-isms, and Chris Baker really has handled the role of Rand Burkey in the course of maintaining the integrity of our sound. But there is only one Rand Burkey and he carries the unique tone that I wish we could have had him involved. We actually tried to pull him into the studio to do Jupiter, to do a couple solos on the album. He was supposed to show up to the studio and he never showed up, never called. We’ve reached out to him on many levels along this path of the last 15 years or so, to try to involve him in things, and he continues to do things to keep himself from being involved, so I want people to know, purists, to know that we’ve tried to keep everybody involved in the alumnae, so to speak, but Jonathan and Chris at this point, this is the new era of Atheist. And we’re going to move forward with this team and make some good music hopefully in the next five to ten years.”
BraveWords.com: Do you have much of a relationship with Roger’s family? Did you have much contact during this whole reformation?
Kelly: “Absolutely.”
BraveWords.com: What are they thinking? They must be proud of the fact you've resurrected the band.
Kelly: “Yeah, I just talked to Ronnie (Patterson - Roger's brother) on the phone just last week and we’ve maintained a really close relationship. It’s obviously a tough thing for him, he’s a twin. Roger had a twin brother and they’re identical twins, and so we’ve always had his blessing. He just told us what we already knew, that Roger would definitely want this to happen and just make him proud. When I sent him Jupiter and he listened to the songs, he’s been nothing but supportive, and that really helps a lot. Roger’s grandma is 94 years old now, and just a really cool woman who just refuses to pass. We always had his spirit through all the reunion shows and everything. I wish he could be here to enjoy it, but what’s interesting is that Ronnie being a twin it’s almost like I’m talking to him on the phone, you know. Almost like I’m talking to Roger. There’s no better channel to get somebody’s spiritual sort of go-ahead than his twin brother. If ever he was going to speak through somebody it would be through him, so it’s great just to have that relationship with him and the internet’s really made it convenient to keep in contact with all of our old friends."
BraveWords.com: What has the digital generation done with your head? Are you happy with the way the music business is going? Has it treated you fairly, or are you like most musicians that are trying to find your way through this?
Kelly: “I mean, to the contrary. With the Relapse deal it did work out. They were really good about accounting and Relapse was amazing. Being fair and treating us well, so perhaps it might be that we’re an older band and we got a different situation going on, but we sell records we make money. We’re getting paid for digital downloads. Is it being accounted properly, who knows? That’s the thing, it’s so out of reach but you have a choice: you can either play the game or not. To not play the game is whatever, is kind of boring. Why not have the distribution, play the game, see how it goes? Make good deals, I think we have an appreciation. Certainly all the people we’ve dealt with at Relapse and Season Of Mist - it’s not like there’s a suit-and-tie guy that’s running the thing. Michael Berberian at Season Of Mist is a fan of this music who grew up just like we did. He just happens to now have the money to be able to run his label and he’s done a fantastic job of going out and getting the bands that he loves, and signing a bunch of other bands as well and playing the numbers game and being a label. If you sign with the right people and you sign the right deal, you will get paid and do well. But it’s tough to keep things from leaking and being stolen. I do try to tell people, like please, understand that if you want to listen to an MP3 or download it that’s great, but then go out and buy it if you dig it. Or at least make sure somebody else does, because you really are crushing music. You’re crushing the ability for us to play music, and we have to borrow money just like from a bank to buy a house, and you wouldn’t borrow money to buy a house and then have everybody else live in it for free. We had to pay the money back, and if you’re going to pay that money back people have to go out and buy records. So we really appreciate the underground quality. Europe has really maintained that integrity a lot, and kids really do show up at everything we sell. They buy shirts and they really keep us going and we’re able to tour over there. It’s a little different in America, and I would like to see Americans be a little less stingy about it and understand you’re hurting the musicians, you’re not teaching the label guy a lesson. You’re crushing the ability for us to be able to make records and borrow money to make albums. It is a little easier to make albums these days. You can make them a lot cheaper because of the technology, so it’s give and take, just like anything. If you’re going to be in this business you’re probably going to get ripped off along the way. So that’s almost par for the course. You make the best deals that you can make, and you hope that you’re getting the right accounting and that everything has been accounted for. Thus far we’ve had nothing but a great experience. Now, when we first signed back in the day, that’s an entirely different story. We never got statements, we never got anything, we were completely ripped off. We’re much smarter men now and we’ve made better deals, and so we feel secure. And we want our label to do well, too. We want everybody to do well, anybody involved with helping us get our music out there we want them to do well. So if everybody does well then certainly we’ll be happy.”
(Photos by Amanda Vouglas)
