Ozzy and Badlands legend Jake E. Lee has just fired up a new North American leg of tour dates in support of his fiercely unique, smartly metallic and self-titled Red Dragon Cartel album.

New to this jaunt however is the fact that Badlands mate Greg Chaisson has joined the band as their new bassist, resulting in half of RDC being Badlands alumni.

As well... “Greg is Canadian,” says Jake. “And so is the singer, Darren, and the drummer, Jonas. So I mean, basically, I’m in a Canadian band!”

This also means increased attention to the incomparable Badlands catalogue, in terms of subtle twists to the set list this time ‘round.

“I don’t know how much more Ozzy we’re gonna do,” explains Jake. “But, the bulk of the set that RDC has already been doing is really Badlands. It’s maybe, one portion Badlands, one portion RDC, and then a very small portion of Ozzy. And what we’re going to do this time around is continue with the set that we’ve been doing, but adding different Badlands songs. I don’t think we’re gonna do any more Ozzy. We do ‘Ultimate Sin’ and we do ‘Bark At The Moon,’ and I think pretty much that’s going to be it. And I think, actually, with the Red Dragon Cartel, that’s going to be it. But a major portion of the set that has been Badlands, we’re gonna learn more Badlands songs, so that the ratio is still the same, but it will be different Badlands songs. For example, we didn’t do ‘Dreams In The Dark,’ and we’re going to be doing that. We are going to continue doing ‘High Wire.’ But we’re going to explore different areas of Badlands songs to mix it up in the set. For the whole tour that we’ve been doing, it’s basically been the same set from the Whisky to the last show in Japan. And now we’re going to have options of different Badlands songs, and it’ll make it interesting. And it’ll be a lot cooler, because it will be me and Greg, and we have this connection musically that live was much more... it was just much more electric than with Ron. I mean, Ron... Ron isn’t a bass player. He was never a bass player before. And to be honest, he was in the band as the bass player as a favour. And he wanted to do Europe, he wanted to do Japan, we did that, so now I want somebody who’s going to help elevate the whole musicality of everything. And with Greg, I know that’s gonna happen. I think the shows are gonna be better than we’ve been.”

 

 

The Red Dragon Cartel album was well worth the wait, and in it, one could see much rumination and growth from Jake as a writer, as he moved through those disparate eras and kept thinking and positing in the interims.

“Well, yes, the sound of the CD is an accumulation of things that I’d written for 15, 20 years, and so I can’t say there is any one particular sound. It entails a big span of time, especially if you consider that the last song, the piano thing that I did, I wrote when I was 15. From there it spans a lot of years. So, I’ve heard people say that the album might not be cohesive or, it might be a little too spread-out musically. Most of it, I’d say the bulk of everything, actually everything other than that piano piece that I mentioned, was written after Badlands, on my own, and anywhere from 15 years ago to the present.”
“After Badlands, I was looking for a different direction,” continues Lee, asked about the intriguing industrial sheen on top of what is essentially classic heavy metal. “And I’d hooked up briefly with Mandy Lyon, and we had a band called Wicked Alliance, where we wrote at least half a dozen songs. And where I was—this would be about 1994, I think, ‘93, ’94—and what we were trying to do at that point was incorporate some industrial, because I loved Nine Inch Nails at that time. So industrial with the funkiness of Prince, and still be rock heavy. I just like to explore different areas of music. And at that time, in the early ‘90s, industrial was getting kind of big. There was some really good stuff that came out of it and there was some really bad stuff. But the sound that industrial lent itself to was an interesting idea to pursue. But at that time, the early ‘90s, I wasn’t considered to be a part of that. Although I reached out in trying to work with people in that area, I was sort of shot down, because I was a hair metal guitar player. But despite that, I still wrote stuff in that vein. And anything that sounded like that on the Red Dragon Cartel album would’ve come from the early to mid-‘90s, when I was just really going toward that.”

 

 

“Nothing so much after Badlands,” answers Jake in closing, asked whether he had gotten any high-profile auditions during his downtime, given his notoriety for Bark At The Moon and The Ultimate Sin. “After Ozzy, yeah, I got a couple of offers, probably the most notable being Whitesnake. And it was right after they did their big album, whatever it was called, the one that had ‘Still Of The Night.’ And they got Vivian, for the live shows. Because I don’t know if I’d say friends, but I was friendly with John at the time, and all through Ozzy. And Whitesnake’s management did call my management up, and asked if I’d be interested in being part of the touring band. And I turned it down because, well, John had already done the record, and he was a friend of mine, and I didn’t want to jump into another band where I wasn’t part of the initial process. You know, like with Ozzy. I mean, it was Randy Rhoads and then I joined the band. I didn’t want to be Whitesnake with John, and then I joined the band for the live part. It didn’t seem like a good move. Although, I guess I would’ve made a few bucks (laughs).”
“But it ended up, they got Vivian, and that worked out great, and other than that, Phil Mogg had called my management and asked me if I wanted to do something with him. But I knew at that point, after Ozzy, that I wanted to do something fresh. I didn’t want to… I hate to call them old—established; there, that’s the word I want to used—I didn’t want to do something with an established singer at that point. If I was ever going to do anything, it had to be fresh, and then of course, I ran into Ray Gillen. But yeah, that would be the ones that I remember from after Ozzy. And then after Badlands, there was a lot of offers from either metal bands or… I’m trying to remember. I think maybe Metal Church? I’m not sure. It was a long time ago. But there was some fairly big metal bands that wanted me to participate and I didn’t want to go back to that. And at the same time, there were other bands that were more blues rock-oriented, because of the Badlands thing. And I didn’t want to do that again either. I want to find something new to do, and so I turned it all down.”

For more on Red Dragon Cartel and their current tour visit Reddragoncartel.com.