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Salli: How long did you rehearse before you actually started looking for a contract?
Rhino: I´d say three or four months, five days a week, six hours a day, but we kept rehearsing past that. I´d say a total of eight months really.
Lee: As soon as the word got out about Captain Beyond starting to form, Phil Walden, President of Capri-corn Records, called Rhino and asked what was happening. At that particular point we didn´t have anything to sell, so we just passed on it. We wanted to be prepared when we went to people, to knock them out enough to get the right and fair contract.
Rhino: We were involved with some other people at that time and so we really had to sort it out in our minds about what we wanted to do. I was for the whole thing from the beginning, but within the group there was a little wariness as to what was happening. We debated over it for a couple of weeks time and meanwhile the friendship thing was building between us and Phil. Then we sat down at the table with the contracts. It took two or three weeks to make sure the contracts were right. The day after we signed we were in the studio recording. It took about four and a half weeks to record the whole thing. Three weeks to cut and about a week to mix.
Salli: With the debating over contracts and the amount of rehearsal you´ve put into it all, it sounds like this whole thing is more of a business to you than a star trip. You sound much more pragmatic than artist are supposed to sound.
Lee: If you´re going to be a star, you are a star because you do something well, whatever it is. We want to be important to the people who are musically knowledgeable, as well as those who aren´t. First of all we´re trying to deliver our music, hope that people can understand what we´re doing and dig it. We´re trying to to bring a little bit more entertainment into music. There was a series of groups in the early sixties who had flash and looked like entertainers. For the past five or six years everything´s turned around and it´s all earth. The dirtier you looked the more people related you. We´re just swinging back out of that. We want to have the right lights, the right clothes, the right PA and give people a good show.
Rhino: You´ve got to look like your gig. A businessman doesn´t go into Standard Oil in a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. He´s there for business, not to fix his car. That´s the way we feel about Rock music. That´s our business. We´re there to entertain. If somebody pays five bucks they don´t want to see someone who looks just like them, or the guy sitting in the next chair. What kind of entertainment is that? I can sit on sunset and get entertained if that´s all it is.
Salli: Your music seems to have a jazz influence to it.
Lee: Bobby´s been into jazz drumming for years and a lot of the learned techniques he has are incorporated from the jazz drummer greats. Maybe he´ll play a two bar riff of 7/4 which is something he learned from someone who´s been blowing for thirty years and we´ll hear it and see what we can put on it. Maybe we´ll put 3/4 on it and Rod´ll sing 4/4, but the way the line is played you don´t loose it. It´s not all stumbling and crashing around. There is a 4/4 feel to a lot of our music, but the actual vocal and guitar lines are not 4/4. It´s a different approach. It´s saying we play good music so why don´t we play it and to hell with this other stuff. We can play blues. We could go in a week and have a double album of blues, but that´s not where we´re at. We´ve been playing that for ten years everyone´s been in there and experimented. Iron Butterfly was an experiment and so was Deep Purple. They experimented with the classical aspects and Butterfly experimented with sound.
Salli: Yet you´re still playing music with a semblance of rock, instead of exploring the further dimensions of jazz.
Lee: We would be doing that right now if we didn´t want to continue playing rock and that to me is not rock in the sense that we mean it. Like Herbie Hancock can play 7/4 and we can play 7/4 and people who are into rock music are going to hear ours before they hear Herbie´s because Herbie´s isn´t as dynamic as ours. He doesn´t play volume music. Unfortunately seventy percent of the record buying public doesn´t want to know about that if they can´t beat in time to the music, thump, thump.
Salli: In spite of the fact that you are all playing a different form of music from that of the past, people seem to tag all of you with your past lables. How is that affecting you?
Lee: We are trying desperately to stop the write-ups where the first two paragraphes are about Iron Butterfly, Deep Purple and Johnny Winter. We feel that the obvious reaction to that kind of publicity will be, "They sound just like Deep Purple, etc." We did the Golden Rose Festival in Montreux, Switzerland, and we saw a poster that had us all listed as X´s and everything was mispelled horribly. It advertized us publically as check us out because we used to be cool five years ago. We´d rather have everybody´s name there without all that jive, because we´re not trying to hype the past. We just want to get on with what we´re do-ing musically now.
(Interview by Salli Stevenson) |
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