Live From The Tour Bus:
Gravity Kills chats with Rock Around The World
Universal Amphitheater, 22 August, 1996

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We did a couple ID's and then headed into an interview that turned more in to a rap session between regular people that have the love of music in common.

Doug (Keyboards) is a Rabid fan of the Sex Pistols and he kind of exited in order to catch that band which was just about to go on as I entered GK's tour bus. Matt, GK's outstanding guitarist, secured 2 broken ribs and was battling a cold, so I never got to meet him. By the time I got to the tour bus, Matt was back at the Rock and Roll Hyatt on Sunset.

So Jeff (Lead Vocals) and Kurt (Drums) covered for the rest of the band for this interview.

EC: What possessed you guys to get into Music as opposed to something else?

K: Boredom. I don't know, man. I started banging on tinker toy cans and lincoln log cans when I was 3 or 4 years old, so I had that in me from the beginning.
J: I used to make these really weird radio shows when I was in 4th grade...I had this little tape recorder...and I'd do these radio programs and I'd do the music...so I was like doing original music, but they were really horrible songs...One of the songs was called "I Love Tennessee" (Kurt laughs)
K: I've never heard this!

J: Yeah, so I was the DJ, and I was the music as well. So I think I was interested in the Whole Thing. We're from a small town and we got Casey Kasem's Top 40 every week, and I was really enamored by that.
K: I played for a 7th grade talent show with two other guys that I don't think have anything to do with music anymore...it was like in front of 500 or 600 people and after I played, just to hear that applause...after you hear that applause,it's your blood then and you just never quit, you just fall into that romantic notion of being able to get up in front of people and play something and see them react to it.

How did you get that name, Gravity Kills?

K: It was actually a misread from a long winded political article...Doug thought he read 'gravity kills' and it didn't make sense, but he thought , wow, that's pretty cool. So he called me up, and that was one of the first things we agreed upon and it kind of matched some of the philosophies that we were talking about. There's an architect out of NY named Libious Woods who writes a lot about how buildings and people take on more character with age and that entropion decay can actually be beautiful if looked at in the right light. What causes people and buildings to age is Gravity. So, Gravity Kills. That's kind of what it's about.

Where do you guys--What's your musical goal?

J: To keep working.
K: Keep exploring. Never be complacent.
J: Yeah! We've never really written two songs from the same perspective yet...The same...There hasn't been a formula yet...and
K: If there is a formula, we'll quit!
J: We want to keep exploring and try to keep everything fresh. We've been able to do that--yeah, we've only written one album so far, but...
K: Four or five albums into it, we'll be wracking our brains!
J: How do we do it now? Right...but I think that's our goal.

You guys seem to be one of the best bands at combining technology with organically derived tones, you dig what I'm saying?

J: Yeah!
K: That's a very, very good statement, thank you very much! Someone actually catches on.

When I got turned on to you in February, I had no clue who the fuck you were...and then when I heard you, I was like, whoa, what the fuck is this? I could hear a lot of industrial and technological shit, but then there's this whole beautiful organicness to what you're about, you know...it's just not all electricity.

J: It's very funny, because we don't really use any keyboards on the album...there's two keyboard bass parts on the whole album, other than that everything--all the weird sounds are mostly manipulated guitar.

K: What we do a lot is just take guitar and process it and fart around with it and like get a six pack of beer and start messing around with the guitar processor--
J: A lot of things are happy mistakes.
K: And that's the key to what we do, is just being intuitive enough to know whenever we've made a really good mistake and go, whoa, that's cool and then stick with that. In that way you're not limited to your own imagination, at that point, your limited to your intuition.

So when you guys write, you always keep tape running.

J: Oh, yeah.
K: Tape is always running.

What do you prefer to use?

J&K: Hard disk recorder.
J: Six track Sonic Solutions System. But what we did to warm it up--give it that organicness when we mixed the album down in New York, we retracked everything to two inch analog tape to warm it back up.

Yeah, right!

K: Too much digital is so sterile and cold--
J: Especially for guitars and vocals
K: And drums, too.
J: And I don't like the bottom end, either, off of those pure digital recordings. We recut most of the vocals, with the exception of "Blame"--cause we couldn't reproduce the vocal sound we had in St. Louis, and "Guilty"
K: Because we didn't want to jinx it.
J: But everything else, we retracked direct down to tape, as opposed to computer.

While I'm still thinking of it, you use this really kool, vintage---

J: Well it's actually, you can buy those new still. It's a Shure SM 555 and--
K: Our sound engineer hotwired it.
J: Yeah, the coil's jacked up a little bit...he's added wire to the coil, so it's a little hotter...then we also--when we come through town in the Fall, we have another one that has a 100 Watt halogen in the front of it, so it actually lights UP.

So you're going to be even more Teutonic in effect on the crowd.

J: Right, and it's also run through a preamp of dead batteries and we get this really natural distortion out of it as well.
K: Before, were trying a distortion pedal, we tried an exciter, and it just didn't work, and what we came to was a dead battery in the preamp box is the best way to get a natural distortion.
J: And the frequency response is not as compressed and so we don't have a feedback problem.

Where did you guys find the guitar player?

J&K: Matt?
K: Where did we find Matt? I found him next door to me as a child. (Laughter)
J: They've known each other since the second grade.
K: Actually, since first grade.

He's got quite an array of guitars, I noticed he has some Fenders--

J: Guilds, Gibsons, Ibanez

Prefers Marshall--

J&K: Yeah.

What's his amplification, 100 Watt?

K: He uses two Marshall 100 Watts that are British Tubes, that are British built and they're awesome like that, and then he uses Greenback Celestions in his cabinets.

And his strings? Light gauge/heavy gauge?

K: He uses a really heavy gauge actually, he uses 10s.

That's the other thing I recognized about you guys....The other band that really shook me up last year was Filter, because they use Heavy Metal tones with this technology, and the only other guy that really shook me up was Matt, when I heard him in May [at DragonFly] I was like , what the fuck!, Man this guy could play in a Heavy Metal band.

J: Yeah, and he's got such an interesting style, too, because he doesn't play...like, if you listen to the album--
K: There's no solos--
J: There's no stride, and not only that , but his--he plays chords in very weird positions sometimes and so, sometimes I think some of the harmonic tones he gets are quite different...and it comes off being a bit dissonant at times, but it's like--
K: He's real good about coming in and going, hey man, look at this new chord!--
J: Right, and somehow he'll get it in a song, eventually through tenacity he'll work it into a song somewhere--
K: He has this huge rolodex of like bizarre chords that I think he's invented himself, and it's just like, we'll be working on a song and he'll go, oh, and he'll pop it out...and we'll go dude, that's horrible, let's use it!
J: And he doesn't always think like a guitar player, too, which is pretty interesting, but he is, he likes to play...if you walk on to his side of the stage, all you'll hear is fucking guitar!

He doesn't seem to be too much in to pedals

K: He uses a GP16 Roland processor.
J: He uses really about 4 sounds, and a little extra compression, a little distortion.

Now let's shift over to drums

K: I play Yamaha right now, but I've been looking at Sonor and DW...a lot of different drums. I really like my Yamaha kit, it's a real nice wood sound, I mean a great, great, great studio kit...What I've learned from touring is that it's a whole different story...I've always sworn by a wooden snare, but now I've toured for a while and I realize that a metal snare is less temperamental according to temperature in rooms than a wood snare is...
J: He's in the middle of negotiating endorsements, so--
K: It'll either be Sonor or DW.

Your skinheads, what do you use?

K: Right now I'm using pinstripes on my toms...snare is always coated.

How did you come about--I noticed that you like to align your cymbals like flat plates.

J: Because he's a freakin' architect.
K: Because I'm a sphincter boy! Actually, it's more technically correct, like drums, do you ever notice how flat my drums are?

Like Ginger Baker

K: If you read anything about drums, the images make sense, if your stick is hitting the head like this [motions angled head] you're not going to get as much out of it if the stick is hitting it like this[motions flat drum head], so however you like to set, whatever your natural angle of the stick on the drum is, it should be just barely missing the rim of the drum as you're coming down on it. Also, cymbals too...I never break cymbals, you read about these drummers that break cymbals all the time, well that's because they don't know how to fuckin' hit them right, and they set them up wrong. Have you ever seen how Hard I hit a cymbal?

You chime them

K: They'll just go to town, but you've got to know how to hit them right. You've got to hit them more straight on. If you come down on them like that [motions improper angle of attack] you're going to bend your cymbal and that's what breaks them and cracks them.

Speaking of cymbals, which do you prefer?

K: Zildjian,never will play anything else.

Are you like a friend of mine, we'll go to 48th street to Sam Ash and he'll be up there for like two hours chiming the cymbals , plate after plate just to find the right tones.

K: Totally, yeah. I've got this same pair of Quick Beats that I've had for 14 years and I can't find another pair of cymbals to replace them for my high hats, I'm going to wind up playing to same pair of cymbals forever and ever on my high hats...If I ever lost them, I'd be depressed.

Pedal wise?

K: I use double kick pedal, you don't really hear it a lot now on what we're doing.

Is there any triggering off of your kit, with any of the sounds?

J: It's all live, he's going to start doing that.
K: It's all live, I think I might start triggering some 808 sounds and stuff like that ...Terry, our sound engineer has this effects rack, and he's almost like the 5th member of the band as far as like the sound goes...like in "Blame", he knows when to slide stuff up and down.

This is Terry...

J&K: Terry Welte, he's our sound engineer.
K: He's like irreplaceable, if he ever got sick or anything, we'd just wouldn't tour.

This is interesting, I was backstage here yesterday congratulating this band that was here for this whole 70's thing, and ...I walked up to the drummer, right, and I said man, you have great tone, and the keyboard player went, Tone?, A drummer?, Tone? You know, and I looked at him like, this is not the forum for me to debate with you the tone of a drummer. ...Do you agree that drummers have a tone?

K: Oh, you've got to have tone. I mean, we use--to tune my drums [walks back inside the tour bus to get something] I'm so particular about my set being in the right tune and everything--have you ever seen this? This is called a tension watch, and you set it next to each lug, and I know what I want each lug to be exactly, and it measures the tension on the head by each lug and you get the exact, proper tension.

I like my floor tom to be more like a Billy Idol's "White Wedding", I like that cannon floor tom sound so I use an 18 inch floor tom...I like my kick to be real punchy, and at the same time deep, so I like a 22 inch--I used to play with a 24 inch, but it was just too boomy--I like the punch of a 22, but I like the depth so the bass frequency wave has enough time to develop--I like a long bass drum, my new one's going to be a 20, this one's 18, but it's just not long enough...Snare-wise I like just a really good cack--It's got to cut your head off...for live, so I'm gonna go with a 4 inch brass snare it's gonna be thin.

Now we shift to vocals, any vocal training in your past?

J: Yeah, but that all sort of goes out the window with what we're doing. (Laughter) Actually it doesn't all go out the window because your survival skills as a vocalist come into play as we've touring now for 7 months, coming on 8 months, 150 shows plus into it this year--we're getting ready to do our own 64 city tour after we're done touring with the [Sex] Pistols. 64 cities, plus we've got one-offs with these big, major radio festivals.

So, I mean breathing--there's a great exercise that I do before I go on, where I take a towel and I basically pull my tongue out as far as I can while I go ahh, and I stretch everything out, cause the way I sing, doing vocal exercises--If I were singing well within my range all the time that would be fine, but what I do is sort of like--I don't have like...I'm not Kevin, from Candlebox--I don't have that kind of range, but I'm singing for the most part about the highest notes that I can reach on a consistent basis and so it's sort of like sprinting, you've got to stretch out...and then afterwards you've got to do the same thing, you've got to re-stretch out and cool down.

Actually, I'll sing better on the eighth night out, as opposed to like having three days off-- and I was rough tonight, but tomorrow I'll be better and the day after that, and so on. At six weeks I sort of hit a wall there where I thought I'd have to see a Doctor, and then miraculously, I just worked through it. I've got my falsetto...all the indications of not having any damage--

K: I went through the same thing with my wrists when we started out--the first, like four months into it, I'd wake up and I couldn't even move my wrists from the tendinitis and everything, but then around the 5th month it started getting better and now at seven months it doesn't even bother me. [Kurt starts interviewing Jeff] Do you work out on your days off, or do vocal exercises on your days off?
J: No, and that's the problem, so when I come back I'm rough, because I'm not at home stretching out--It's like being a gymnast or something; If you took a week off and didn't stretch, and then stretched out before a meet, you'd be fucked!
K: I go workout, I went and lifted weights for about an hour and then did about 45 minutes worth of cardiovascular activity, and it helps me when I come back, I can feel it--
J: Rest is always good for my vocals.

Any...do you smoke at all?

J: Occasionally, if I have a day off [Kurt snickers, And a bottle of tequila] I'll have a cigarette or two, but if I'm singing the next day, No cigarettes, No alcohol, I don't drink anything carbonated--

Why's that?

J: Because the carbonation is abrasive. No coffee...coffee is the same way.

Any ginger tea or anything, you ever chew on a ginger root?

J: I do--I'll show you what I do [reaches into drawer an pulls out boxes of herbal teas] I have cases of this shit, it's a slippery elm bark tea, and actually I had some on stage tonight because I knew I'd be a bit rough. It sort of protects your throat a little bit at the same time, if you have a sore throat from having the flu, it helps too--doesn't taste very good, ...you can get this at a GNC, right now, I get a box every night because it's on my rider, so I'll have this stuff til the year 2020. Normally, it's much tougher in the Winter...starting a tour...Summer's not so bad.
K: You know, what that might be is something with my wrists, too--I'm not going hot /cold, hot/cold with my wrists.

Do you ever use like bowling alley wrist things?

K: I used to sleep with those on so I wouldn't do this kind of thing[gestures curled wrists], but lately I haven't been wearing them.

So let's get back to the athletic nature of vocals, because I believe a vocalist is an athlete with their throat--

J: Oh, absolutely!

I interviewed this guy with a Heavy Metal background...he's got an incredibly strong voice...and I asked him if he were a weightlifter with his voice how much could he lift, so how much weight could your voice lift?

J: Probably the strongest muscle in my body, if it were a muscle. I can't believe the resiliency at this point, I'm absolutely amazed. I'm just not tired anymore, I mean after a show it'll be a bit rough, but I'll wake up in the morning, and it'll be completely fresh--and that is from not drinking, not smoking, and getting lots of sleep--sleep's the kicker, I can do the not smoke and not drink, but if I don't get enough sleep, none of it matters.

Well how do you guys get sleep on the road, man?

J: I just jump in my bunk.

You can actually sleep on a truck?

J: You learn.
K: Yeah, you learn.
J: It's not always the best sleep, because you may be on the shittiest highway--
K: You've got to lay in the bunk for http://www.ratw.com/hours to get 7 or 8 hours of sleep--
J: Right, normally I'll end up sleeping for 11 or 12 hours, but it's not like 11 hours in your bed at home. And some nights you don't.

I read somewhere in a press release that you guys played an opening and got there from this bizarre location at the other end--

J: Oh, we were in D.C. And we flew out here for "Escape From L.A.", played the show, and then flew out that night to play a show in NY the next day.
K: We caught the red eye back, I mean that was the wors--I mean, it wasn't a bad gig, but it was a tough night...we got back and maybe we had a total of 3 hours sleep. The only sleep we got is what we got on the plane...We get to New York, and we have PRESS all day--right up to the gig.
J: It's NY, it's just like here in L.A.
K: And then we play...and I was so tired, literally, that I was slurring my words, it was if I'd been doing shots of vodka...people would come back and meet us and I was like, zlblah, dah, bla, dub, da--
J: Just fried.
K: I was getting muscle cramps, my stick control was just horrible.

What's your stick?

K: Vic Firth, 5B Nylon

What's it made out of?

K: Hickory.
J: Oak's expensive, man.
K: Oaks, what I don't like about oaks is that they're too unpredictable--they'll hold up and hold up, and then all of the sudden they'll just fuckin' break on you, where like a hickory stick, you can feel it start to give before--you know when to chuck it and get a new one, sometimes you can't tell, but you can tell a lot more with them than you can with an oak stick.

Who are the vocalists out there in the present and in the past, coming up as a youngster, that inspired you?

J: Bowie...Ronnie [James] Dio, on the other side...I think currently Sarah McLaghlin is an incredible vocalist--

How did you get turned on to her?

J: Years ago, I think '92 was her first major label release...Kevin from Candlebox is an incredible vocalist...I was really into Billy Idol as well--He was a major influence for both Kurt and I. Yeah, Dio though, I think is the most powerful vocalist, I think, Ever... Robert Plant...a great vocalist...there's just so many...Christopher from Stabbing Westward, what an incredible range...

Who were your influences for drumming, that you really, totally dig?

K: Tony Thompson--I always thought that a drummer's job is to lay the foundation down and just be that: be rock solid, be rock steady and don't--it's not about, hey everybody, look at me--I love Neil Peart, and I went through the whole Neil Peart phase and all, but I don't think it has any place in Music today, especially in what we do. So I've always thought that Tony Thompson just lays the shit down and is just solid as a rock--I've always wanted to be like that...John Bonham, too--Bonham as far as the early days, and then Thompson. I've been watching Paul [Cook, Sex Pistol Drummer] every night--Paul is a lot like me, he's not the riff guy at all, he's really solid every night and he holds that band in line whenever they play.

How did Doug come up with this whole...thing?

J: You're actually talking to the right guy because Kurt actually designed the keyboard stand.

That thing looks like an anti-aircraft gun thing!

K: He came to me and he wanted to buy an antique desk to put his keyboard on so he could jump up on it...he wanted something different than the typical keyboard stand--and I said, Doug, I've got a bunch of ideas--because I build a lot of furniture--I do a lot of furniture design--So I told Doug that I had a great idea for him--I was sitting on the pot across from the studio we were working in Doug's house looking at his keyboard, the Matrix 12, and I realized it's got wood panels--Why not custom mill metal panels on the side, weld a tube together to it, and then it would be able to pivot, lift down and stuff and then I brought in my roommate who's an architect as well--that was my training, I was an architect for three years and then I decided it sucked--practising it did, I still love architecture still--so we got together and then took the drawings and sketches to his dad's shop, Architectural Bronze, in St. Louis--he went in to his dad's shop and a lot of it was like building a sculpture--we tried to have as many drawings as many drawings as we could, but you discover a lot of things as you go along, like the weight of the springs- -

Is it made out of Monel?

K: It's steel. We talked about aluminum in the beginning to keep down weight, but the reality is it wouldn't hold up the way--
J: Doug crushed one--
K: If it was aluminum, Doug would fuckin' ruin it--

He abuses the shit out of that thing!

K: That's the second one, the first one he already fuckin' ruined.
J: The first one's back at that fabrication shop getting worked on--that's actually going to be the spare--this one right now actually weighs more because it's chromed.

Do you guys ...find that this has happened so fuckin' fast for you?

K: It's hard for us to see it as fast because we've lived it. I know a lot of bands get signed, it takes them a while to get up to there, but I think there's a lot of bands that try equally as much before they get signed, it's just at the point where you get signed, and where people hear about you nationally--We tried for 8 to http://www.ratw.com/years.
J: I can't forget about the http://www.ratw.com/years that I worked in bands before I was with Gravity Kills--
K: I can't forget about the 8 years I was in bands and the hundreds of songs that we wrote before--
J: So that's, you're right, Gravity Kills didn't have a history before that--so no one recognizes that even occurred--
K: You look at when you start out and whenever you become--at some level--
J: Right, we're sitting on a nice tour bus, at the Universal Amphitheater with you--
K: And it's like, well if you get signed here, you've really earned it, and then if you get signed more at the top of the scale, well then you're an overnight sensation, and I just don't get that.

See, that question that I just asked you is more of a rhetorical question, because I realize that there has to be some sort of years of struggle before--all the public ever sees from the PRESS point of view is : A New Band!, ...But you guys put in at least a fucking decade before you made it...When Phil Collins got big, he had 20 years in the background!

J: And that's no one's fault, and I don't slight anybody for that--We're definitely not Silverchair, we didn't just like--I mean that's overnight...They weren't working the club circuit in Australia--(Laughter)
K: They weren't kicking it when they were six!
J: So that's definitely overnight.
K: I'm 27, and I'm the young one in the band, so I mean, we're not spring chickens anymore.

It's all Media Hype, and it's like: They had 30 seconds to get this Demo tape in, when it really was http://www.ratw.com/years in the process.

J: Kinda, right, we happened to write this song, and this thing came together very quickly for Gravity Kills, but man, you know--
K: What it took to be able to do that, to get to that point--
J: Right, it took us years to work on our craft, develop songwriting skills--
K: We have been, both bands--Jeff's group and our group--at separate times had been so close and thought we had got it and thought, this is it, we're going all the way, we're the next thing, well, we'd get a small label deal--
J: Passed on by a major--after a while--
K: You get jaded, you're just like what ever--and when we were doing "Guilty", Doug actually said, If we can't get signed from this song, then I fucking quit! And Jeff looked at him and thought, he's so naive! (Laughter)
J: You know, what are you thinking? I've been writing songs for years, but that's really what happened. Now, when he says something, I just listen to him and shut up.

Let's talk about the years before your big break. What did you guys do for Day Gigs?

J: Man, I did everything...I had the most interesting jobs I think, because I went to college and to Graduate School, and actually drove a school bus, and delivered pizza, I sold embroidered patches for a living (laughter), I sold camera equipment...I had an education, but I didn't really care to use it formally (laughter).

Did you ever get talks from your parents and shit, you know, like, You're this educated guy, why can't you go do the 40, 40 , 40 plan?

J: Oh, every day. I think, looking back--I'm not the biggest believer in fate, but had I got caught up in some super corporate job, for one, the night that Kurt called me to come up, if I'd a been working in some super corporate job, maybe I wouldn't have been able to get off that day--so I sort of look at it now like it was all for the best. But when I was going through it, no one understood, I was a Slacker, man--all I wanted to do was this and I couldn't get it up to like--I couldn't expend that kind of energy on anything I didn't feel that passionately about, so now I'm actually working harder than I've ever worked in my whole life. (Laughter)

Now that you've been rewarded with being able to do what you love, now that you're here, and you're doing what you love...Do you still love it?

J: Oh, absolutely!

And it's worth schlepping around in a nice bus, being really tired as you are right now, dealing with the Press...It's all worth it.

J: Yeah, absolutely.
K: What it is--
J: The taste of Ramen is still very fresh in my mouth, put it that way

(Emery Howls)
What's your favorite Ramen, Top Ramen?

J: Yeah, chicken flavor.
K: What are you talking about, I've got a couple of those in my bunk right now!

(Emery laughs and claps)

J: That's perspective.

Yeah, Right On...

K: I think for Matt and I, it's very much about--He's an Industrial Engineer with an MBA and I'm an Architect, and we both thought that this was what you had to do...I think that we had that ingrained in our head.
J: I think Matt would say though more so, if he were here. I think Matt followed the rules, because he thought that's what he was supposed to do, and then he woke up one day and said, I don't want to follow the rules anymore.
K: We worked for like three years and he and I were like going, this is such a fucking rut and I'm only three years in to this, I've got to do this til I'm 65? And it was like, I can't do this, I Can Not Do This, I Will Die If I Have To Do THIS. And I think that's really what put the fire in our belly to start writing again, even before we called Jeff...We got to do something, we were looking for singers in St. Louis and it just wasn't working out--

Doug, for all intents and purposes, hasn't had a job in his whole life, he had one job after he got out of school, which he fucked up so much! (Laughter)

J: He was like paying off his boss for a big mistake. (laughter)

He left a digital phone patch off the hook over night, ran up like a $2,000 phone bill, (laughter), this was like two years ago, and we just paid for it a month ago. Doug was like, guys you got to help me, we got to do this, we've got to make this work, I'm gonna live in the streets...you know, this was it for him.

K: Everybody says, when they come to Matt and I, yeah, but you've got those jobs to fall back on--you know--If this doesn't work out for you...And I'm like going, You Do Not Understand, I can't Go Back to THAT, this has to work, because if this doesn't work, I will live in Depression for the rest of my life.

A lot of people from the 40, 40, 40 World don't understand that at all. They're like, what is this dream that you're pursuing, Why can't you get down to Reality? Who's to say what shapes your Reality?

J: True...For some people, reality kind of has a way of shaping their reality...I f you get a girl pregnant when you're 18, or, and you're married, at that point , you don't have choices anymore--We were all lucky enough, we hadn't made, had those kind of things-- I can't say mistakes--that you can't control. I've had some friends that have had that happen to, and it wasn't necessarily a mistake, but those kind of variables, if you can keep them out of your life, and keep choices for as long as possible, I'm mean we still had choices in our late 20's where a lot of people don't have those options.

[Ed. Note: We ran out of tape on side one and Jeff and Kurt tell me that it's cool to keep asking questions, they've just got to go to a Virgin Records party after the Sex Pistols get off stage , I flip the tape and keep rollin']

J: Yeah, we're on TVT in America, and the rest of the World is Virgin.

Yeah! Really? Great! That's good to know, I didn't know.

J: We didn't know until like 3 weeks ago.

It' s a good company...

J: So we hear, but anyway we were just lucky to have choices that we could make that didn't affect a lot of people...I f this didn't work out , I didn't have kids that weren't going to eat--

There's a certain other freedom that you have when you do pursue your dreams, if you don't get tied up to a family- a career, and shit--

J: It just makes it harder, I think people can still do it, but you just have things that have to be taken care of --If I don't eat, that's one thing, but if I have two kids and they don't eat, that's a whole different story--I can live on Ramen for--In fact, at one point, I would eat popcorn for lunch, and every night I had enough money to go to Taco Bell and have a taco and a bean burrito with water--

I can dig it, yeah...yeah...My favorite is 89 cent spaghetti with olive oil and pecorino romano cheese, I can live on that for a whole week, and then shift gears to tuna fish.

K: That's hilarious, Doug and I went through this spell where we were like living off of tuna, and we actually did this taste test where we went to the store and we were going to find out which was the best kind of tuna-- (the laughter of shared experience)

What's your favorite tuna, Bumble Bee?

K: No, It's actually Star Kist.

In vegetable oil?

K: It's one of the cheaper kinds, is what we liked

Chunk Light.

K: Yeah, chunk light, and it ended up a lot of the more expensive ones ended up tasting kind of aluminy and stuff, so we taste tested this stuff, because we figured, well, we're eating the fuck out of this stuff, we might as well figure out which one's the best. We were just eating the shit right out of the can. (Laughter)

Did you ever save up a $1.60 and go get steamed rice just to give the tuna some variety?

K: We were straight tuna guys.
J: Actually, well shit, for a $1.60, you could buy like a whole bag of rice at the store, if you had the patience to actually cook it, then you would have it for a good while. Yeah, spaghetti, Lipton, the whole thing, the Standard Artist bullshit thing.

One more question, because I think you guys have to go--Are you guys going to take a break from recording?

J: I don't know how it's going to work out, I mean we're writing now, but we do need to record--
K: Hopefully, around December/January we're going to be able to take a few weeks and get some new tunes done.
J: We're hoping to have a couple actually for the Fall, one's going to be a cover, and then we're going to have another, and then maybe we can stretch our set and make it a palatable hour and ten minutes as opposed to going our and playing 50 minutes.
K: I'd say after the New Year, I'd say a lot of European, Australia, and Japan, getting out and around, you know and the U.S. Too, maybe like pick up a high profile tour like a U2 tour or something like that.

Oh yeah, you never know, cause I think you guys have got the shit, and it's nice to meet you guys and hear all these stories and see that you guys are on the level and you're not all fucked up by fame.

J: I don't know what that is at this point.

It's coming, believe me, you guys, I'm telling you, I told Mike [At Susan Blond, Inc.] these guys are gonna be the motherfuckers, man.

K: You know what, though--
J: Next time we talk to you though, if we are the motherfuckers, and we act like it, then kick our ass, stick those boots up my ass [points to my Tony Lama boots with custom logger heels and Vibram soles]. Seriously, we're not all about that--
K: Yeah, if we ever start taking ourselves seriously, it would be a problem--
J: I take the music very seriously, but I don't take my persona of what I do--it's very temporal...I'm on stage and I'm into it, but I can walk off stage and leave that there. I can just be...I can hang out and have a beer.

Gravity Kills appears to be a band on the verge of considerable fame and fortune. The standard fare for this sort of ride is paid for with the toll of sacrifice and dedication to one's craft that this band's adhered to long before video games were grist for Motion Picture Films. What's vindicating for me is to see, and hear the clarity of intelligence of this band, who in the face of what seems logical to people in the 40,40, 40 world, flew in the face of that logic and pursued their dreams. No mid-life crisis in the future for these guys. Rock On, GK, Rock On.

Emery Columna
LaCrescenta, CA

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