Author: Rok Klemše
Location: Paranoid Open Air 2009, Avtopoligon Ljubečna, Slovenia
Interview date: 08/13/2009
Sometimes you just have to dust off the shelves, clear the skeletons out of the closet and drag out an interview that laziness kept you from typing up on time (yep, music journalists are only flesh and blood too :P). Luckily, an old interview can become relevant again. And this one is exactly that… Atheist are a cult American technical death metal band who set the standard for the genre with their three records. On their comeback tour they played here for the first time, at Paranoid Open Air 2009, and I got the chance to sit down with two founding members, Kelly Shaefer (guitar, vocals) and Scott Flynn (drums). So why is the interview relevant again? Atheist recently announced the title of their new record, Jupiter, which will be their first since Elements, released in 1993. At the same time, they parted ways (sadly not on the best of terms, you can read more on Blabbermouth.net) with bassist Tony Choy, who played bass on the cult record Unquestionable Presence (on parts already written by the sadly far-too-early departed, brilliant Roger Patterson) and on Elements, and who also rejoined the band for the “reunion” shows. So here’s what Kelly and Scott told us a good year ago…
RockLine: Let’s start at the beginning. After a long time away, Atheist are back on the music scene. What’s the real reason behind your return?
Kelly: It was a mix of things. After we played the first “reunion” shows I realized that playing with my good old friend (drummer Steve Flynn, ed. note) is incredibly fun. We enjoyed each other’s company and we had the chance to keep doing something we both love… and on our own terms.
Scott: There was actually a huge demand for the old records, and the band reached a kind of cult status without us really contributing anything. People started looking at us as pioneers of the genre. All that demand first brought reissues of our albums, then people asking if we’d play a few shows, and then why not record another album too. It totally surprised us as well, we had a few shows and mostly just having fun in mind…
RockLine: So that was the real reason for coming back, at least at the start?
Kelly: Yeah, exactly. We said there was no way we’d record a new album. But after a few shows everything changed, we sat down in a room and started writing. Shit, I thought, here’s new material after I don’t know how many years. These are the new Atheist! It sounds like Atheist and I was really surprised. When you’ve been completely out of the music scene for a while, you look at all of it from the outside, and we didn’t approach writing the new material methodically. When we wrote the new riffs and then listened back to them, it was unbelievable to hear that what we were listening to was the new Atheist.
RockLine: So you’re writing a new record right now. Do you already know when you’ll start recording, when you’ll release it?
Scott: As soon as possible.
Kelly: We’ll release it when it’s done. It has to be a really good record.
RockLine: The expectations are big, after all.
Kelly: Exactly. We won’t release it until it’s ready down to the last detail. We’re in great musical shape right now, so in theory the album should be incredible. I don’t know yet how it’ll sound, I just know it’ll be us.
RockLine: Do you think it’ll still be a kind of continuation of the first three records? Even though the first three records differed from each other, they all had an unmistakable Atheist stamp.
Kelly: Steve didn’t play on the third record, so I think there’ll be elements of the third record too, mostly because of Tony. But for Steve and me it’s clearly a continuation of Unquestionable Presence. Steve and I always wrote songs together and in a similar way. If you put the songs in the order we wrote them, you’d see the progression, that they keep getting heavier and more complex. So in theory this should be a continuation of Unquestionable for Steve and me, with Tony Choy on bass instead of Roger. The record will definitely be fast and heavy, we haven’t lost touch with our roots.
RockLine: When you started out as a young band, you’d already mapped out a path of extremely technical music, music heavily influenced by jazz. Did that happen naturally?
Scott: Yeah, it happened totally organically, we wrote whatever we felt was good…
Kelly: Technical, at least in connection with music, death metal wasn’t even a term back then…
RockLine: You must have been among the first to give the genre its name.
Kelly: Yeah, we looked up to bands like Rush and how they wove music that gave you a feeling of traveling, but at the same time we loved heavy music like Slayer.
RockLine: And you fused two worlds.
Scott: Yeah, like Kelly said, I was heavily influenced by Rush and Neil Peart’s drumming, but I also loved Dave Lombardo’s drumming. When Reign in Blood came out I was speechless. Many people also don’t realize how much influence Gene Hoglan brought to metal drumming. What he played on the Dark Angel album Darkness Descends is insane. Every drummer who uses syncopated drumming today, like Thomas Haake (Meshuggah, ed. note), can thank Hoglan. He was first. I kind of blended Lombardo, Hoglan and Peart.
RockLine: Listening to Piece of Time today, its rawness, almost primitiveness, is really audible, while Unquestionable Presence is much more progressive and polished.
Kelly: Yeah, Piece of Time was our first record, we were still kids.
Scott: We just wanted speed!!! You know, Anthrax, Metallica, S.O.D., we wanted to be like those bands, and we wanted to be fast! Then we grew up and matured, and I think that shows in our ideas.
Kelly: Bands like Iron Maiden started influencing us too. Our harmonies largely come from what Iron Maiden and Judas Priest were doing.
RockLine: Roger especially was a huge Steve Harris fan.
Kelly: Oh yeah!
RockLine: After his death it must have been incredibly hard for Atheist. Did you think about calling it quits altogether…
Kelly: Of course…
RockLine: …and how hard was it to find a replacement for such a unique talent?
Scott: Extremely, because there was no real replacement for him. He was one of a kind, and in 1991 especially there weren’t many people who could play bass at his level. Today there are tons of them, but back then we really wondered where we could even find someone at Roger’s level. There was Tony, Doug Keyser from Watchtower and maybe a couple of other people.
Kelly: Dave (Bizzigotti, ed. note), the bassist of Ripping Corpse, was also extremely good, but that was about it. The record was already written, we already had the studio booked and Tony jumped in for the recording. We miss Roger terribly, and writing Atheist material without him will never be the same, but we understand his style so well that we can kind of emulate it and keep the band’s style and sound the way he wanted it. Either way, we write with him in mind.
RockLine: How do you look at the Florida death metal scene today? After all, you were one of the first and most original bands of that scene.
Kelly: When you’re part of a scene like that you don’t even realize it. It was all happening around us and we were enjoying it. In our eyes, something like that was going on in Germany with bands like Sodom, Destruction, Kreator. We had no idea anything similar was happening in our backyard. Today, years later, when you look at the list of bands from that environment, it’s all pretty incredible. It’s great to be part of something like that, definitely better than being some obscure band from Nebraska.
RockLine: Are you still in touch with the members of those bands, bands like Monstrosity,…
Kelly: Yeah, we see each other often. I see Lee (Harrison, drums, ed. note) from Monstrosity regularly, and Phil (Fasciana, guitar, ed. note) from Malevolent Creation too. We were never particularly close with the guys from Deicide and Morbid Angel. We played with Obituary in LA a lot and we’re good friends. In Tampa there’s a bar called The Brass Mug where we often run into guys from the scene.
RockLine: It’s well known, though, that you didn’t have a particularly good relationship with Death, or rather with Chuck Schuldiner…
Kelly: Yeah, we definitely had different views on things. In the early days he tried to hurt our career. Our manager was a guy who was a good friend of Chuck’s…
RockLine: Was that Borivoj (Krgin, manager of many American bands in the eighties, founder of the website Blabbermouth.net, ed. note)?
Kelly: Yeah. Borivoj was an extremely important person on the scene in the eighties and he’s largely responsible for our recognition. He was the guy who understood us. We played with Death for the first time in 1986 at the Sunset Club, and Chuck called Borivoj and told him we were awful live. That was a big shock for us, Bori was the only person in the world who understood us, and then his best friend started telling him we were awful live.
Scott: Borivoj called us and said he’d heard we were terrible. But we talked it out and we played the show.
Kelly: It might sound pompous, but in the early days Chuck said things about us like that we were bringing jazz into metal and that we didn’t even listen to metal. That wasn’t true, and it’s well known that after working with Paul and Sean (the founders of Cynic, Paul Masvidal and Sean Reinert played on the cult Death record Human) he became a lot more technical.
Scott: He even became a big fan of ours.
Kelly: The philosophy of our music is: play your instrument well, write interesting and good music. That was always the essence of what we did. It was never about writing softer music, we wanted to knock people’s heads off with our ideas. In later years Chuck came to understand us too, and the year before he died we even got stoned together. He was still a bit bitter, death metal was his baby and he was very protective of it, he didn’t want to change it or let anyone mess with it. In one way I totally understand him, he was very passionate. Like I am.
Scott: He didn’t only have beef with us, but with other bands too. He was an incredibly warm person, but at the same time incredibly paranoid and aggressive in his dealings with other bands.
Kelly: He had a huge influence too. If he said something bad about your band, it was very hard to get a gig or make any kind of deal.
RockLine: The reason was probably that you were writing and playing music nobody had played before you, maybe only Cynic, and that’s why you weren’t understood.
Kelly: Yeah, although Cynic came after us. In that sense we were completely alone at the start.
RockLine: Yeah, nobody combined death metal with jazz techniques like you did. I personally hear a lot of influence from people like Allan Holdsworth in your music.
Kelly: Definitely. At the start we weren’t directly influenced by those bands, but we appreciate the comparison. Later we started going to jazz classes.
Scott: I had music classes at school and some of the material that ended up on Unquestionable Presence comes directly from that. One day, for example, we were doing bossa nova at school, and the next day at rehearsal I suggested a part like that, which we put into the song Incarnations Dream.
Kelly: That was a direct result of those jazz classes, and as a result we started listening to even more of that kind of music.
Scott: Paul and Sean and the other guys from Cynic, who listened to that kind of music, also left a big mark on us. Sean definitely rubbed off on me with his drumming.
RockLine: Tony surely left his mark on Atheist too, clearly on Elements above all, most likely with the song Samba Briza.
Kelly: Yeah, Tony wrote that song and he definitely brought a big Latin music influence. We had very little time to write Elements and Tony helped hugely with his instrumental know-how. Steve hasn’t had that experience with him yet, so I can’t wait to see how the two of them work in the studio, pushing each other to the extreme. It’s going to be insane! I’m a fan of both and I can’t wait to hear what comes out of it, I’ll play some guitar myself, write the lyrics and do a bit of screaming. It’ll be interesting to hear completely new songs.
Scott: We’ve been playing the songs from the first records for so long that I can’t wait to play something fresh. Although the old songs still sound new and fresh and I love playing them.
Kelly: We’ve been playing On They Slay for 24 years! It was great to meet Cynic so long ago, we were kindred spirits, we were very close and together we spread our disease all over the world. Back then we both had to fight for our existence because of how unique we were, but we got up and organically took over like weeds. So many years later it’s incredible to see how many bands have sprung up. There’s no way to prepare for something like that.
Scott: One such band is Obscura, who I met four months ago when my band Gnostic played with them. They’re incredibly talented musicians, we talked about Atheist and they told me they’re huge, huge fans. To be an influence on a band like them… Stefan, their guitarist, told me that a song on their album Cosmogenesis is a complete “rip-off” of one of our songs from Piece of Time (laughs). It’s an incredible compliment to hear from bands like that that you were the one who influenced them. That’s what makes it all worth it.
RockLine: A while ago I talked to Sean and Paul from Cynic and they said that smoking weed hugely influenced their lyrics. If I’m not mistaken, the same goes for you?
Kelly: Absolutely. I don’t think there’s a single Atheist song lyric I wrote without being stoned. Weed opens different doors and “highlights” me. I think weed influenced our music too, Steve doesn’t smoke it, but Roger smoked a lot of it. When it comes to lyrics it’s very important. My choice of words and phrases is totally different when I’m stoned. People who don’t smoke weed look at us as ordinary stoners, but people who smoke weed on that level understand. It has a very calming effect on me.
Scott: It’s definitely better than drinking without alcohol.
RockLine: If you don’t mix it with tobacco it’s even pretty healthy (laughs).
Kelly: Which of course it isn’t (laughs). It’s been my lyric-writing partner for years and years. Maybe people are disappointed, since many expect romantic stories about writing lyrics, like me sitting by a freaking little candle with a cup of coffee on the side. With Elements it was especially important, since I had to write all the lyrics in a very short time. For the first time, for example, I had the song titles before the lyrics themselves, which is very atypical for me. I usually write the lyrics first and then pick a title. But here, looking at the words Air, Water, Mineral, I was horrified, how the hell was I going to write lyrics that wouldn’t sound stupid? I wrote every song in the third person about the element. So the lyrics came out of the incredibly good weed River Phoenix gave us.
RockLine: Seriously?
Kelly: Yeah, he lived right across from our studio, we became friends and then he’d visit us in the studio every day and bring us fruit, weed and cheeseless pizza (laughs). Those were good times. Josh Greenbaum was actually his drummer. He flew in two weeks before the recording and helped us with writing and finishing up. The song Mineral, for example, was written the day before recording started. That’s just not how it’s done. When you’ve written a song you listen to it for a while, play it, to see if you even like it.
RockLine: If I’m not mistaken, it was the label that forced you to rush out Elements like that?
Kelly: It wasn’t quite like that. They did tell us that if we didn’t record another record they’d sue us. I’d already started a new band, Neurotica, Steve was in college and I was basically without a band. Once I’d seen a band with a guitarist named Randy (Burkey, guitar on Elements, ed. note), and just in case I wrote down his phone number. I also called Frank (Emmi, guitar on Elements, ed. note) and we started writing. We wrote the first songs together, then I called Josh and Tony as well, and then we wrote day and night… and smoked, and wrote and smoked.
RockLine: In your free time you also paint. I looked at some of your paintings on your MySpace and they seem great to me. From what I could see, you paint a ton of portraits of actors and musicians?
Kelly: Thanks. Not by choice, I paint them because people buy them. I’m an artist and I have to earn something too. I painted Marilyn Monroe on canvas, for example, and people liked it. I’d actually rather paint weirder stuff like drops and splotches. Thanks for noticing.
RockLine: You also had a little daughter a while back. She must have changed your life quite a bit.
Kelly: Oof, yeah! Both of us, Steve has two kids too. But she’s changed it only and solely for the better. She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. It’s scary to be responsible for a human being, especially as a single dad. But I love her and I’m happy. She came right at a time in my life when I was extremely selfish, and she completely changed me.
RockLine: It’s probably harder to go on tour now, especially in Europe?
Kelly: Yeah, of course, very hard! When we were kids it was a totally different story.
Scott: Traveling and touring is really hard. Long drives, nights in dreadful hotels…
Kelly: That hour on stage is priceless, but everything else is exhausting.
Scott: You really need a kind of calm passion and love for it. Because we’re older, we have a healthier relationship with the band, we enjoy what you’re supposed to enjoy. When we were kids we didn’t. Now it’s really incredible to realize, shit, we’re in Slovenia, we’re in Austria… And we’re truly grateful to everyone who comes to the shows. When we were younger everything else mattered – we have to sell enough records, we’re fighting with this guy and that guy, Chuck is saying nasty things about us, Morbid Angel are unfriendly…
Kelly: Today what matters is good old friends traveling the world and playing metal. And having fun doing it! We like two-week tours best, it’s easier for us and our families.
RockLine: So between tours you fly home?
Scott, Kelly: Right.
RockLine: And do you prefer playing in Europe or in the US?
Kelly: Europe!
Scott: Definitely Europe!
RockLine: Because of the fans?
Scott: Yeah, that too, and apparently you just can’t organize festivals like these in the US.
RockLine: There are more one-day festivals.
Scott: Yeah, and festivals like Wacken, where we played a while back, aren’t possible either. In one day they had Aerosmith and Morbid Angel. In the US that’s just unthinkable. Every time Kelly’s on stage at a festival like that he stresses how lucky you guys are to have festivals like these. And he’s totally sincere about it. In the US they don’t let you pitch tents and drink beer, logistically there’s no way to run festivals like that. Europe is also more relaxed when it comes to venues and the promoters’ attitude toward the band.
Kelly: The fans are more nostalgic.
Scott: And smart! We did just finish a tour of the US and had some great shows, we played in front of a packed Times Square in New York. But Europe is different, better. And we get the chance to visit places like Slovenia.
RockLine: You also recorded a live album at Wacken.
Scott: We actually didn’t record the show on purpose for a live release, it just happened that way. But we put it out and it’s a pretty raw recording, with no polish or processing. We just mixed it.
Kelly: Playing in front of 60,000 people was incredible and it’s a moment of Atheist’s career we’ll all remember.
RockLine: If I remember right, that was a pretty funny show for you. If my memory serves, didn’t Tony fall through the stage at that gig?
Scott: Haha, no, that happened two weeks earlier in Italy. The stage broke and suddenly Tony was gone from the stage. Pretty dangerous, but luckily it all turned out fine.
RockLine: Was it hard for you when you were diagnosed with carpal tunnel and couldn’t play guitar on stage anymore? You had to take on a strictly frontman role.
Kelly: No, not at all. I think what led me into the role of a rock band frontman was my spot in Neurotica, with whom we had some success in the US. Playing guitar is an ego thing, and I don’t have one. I have no problem writing a riff and handing it to someone else to play. As a frontman I enjoy being on stage. I think metal lacks that, there are too few real showmen.
Scott: Kelly steps into the frontman role in a way that’s very atypical for technical death metal. I think people respond well to that.
Kelly: I think my performance is very rock ‘n’ roll in nature.
RockLine: Is that why you auditioned for the Velvet Revolver vocalist spot?
Kelly: Yeah, but if they’d known where I come from they’d have been terrified. There’s a really funny story behind it that I’ll probably write a book about someday. I almost got the Velvet Revolver gig, though. But it was insane sitting in a small room with Slash, since I’m a huge Guns ‘n Roses fan.
RockLine: What’s going on with Neurotica right now?
Kelly: Nothing, absolutely nothing. I’d like to rerelease the records, since there are tons of good songs on them and I’m really proud of both. I’d like to offer the records to people once more, since the business side of the music business totally screwed us over. Mainstream rock is an ugly world, since they make music for all the wrong reasons. I have to love the music first, but I gave it a try and it was fun. We played Ozzfest in 2002, for instance. But at times I felt like I was cheating on my wife.
Scott: Bastard (laughs).
RockLine: Kelly, if I’m not mistaken, you also had your own label?
Kelly: Not anymore. It’s just too much work, although I still want to help bands, produce records.
RockLine: If I’m not mistaken, Gnostic’s debut Engineering the Rule was supposed to come out on your label too?
Scott: Yeah, that was the original idea, and Kelly mostly helped us by producing. The record just came out on Seasons of Mist. I hadn’t played at all for 13 years, so I started Gnostic. That was before the reissues of the Atheist records, and Gnostic are actually kind of indirectly to blame for us coming back with Atheist at all. Our first demo wasn’t really good, the second showed big progress, Kelly’s Starfactory financed half the record, which Seasons of Mist ended up picking up. It got pretty good reviews and we’re very happy the label put in so much effort for us. I think the second record will show a lot more.
RockLine: Okay, a totally cliché question to finish. What does the future hold for Atheist and for Gnostic?
Scott: A new record, touring, and we’ll see what the future brings.
Kelly: We’re having a blast right now, and if we stop having fun, we’ll call it quits. We’re looking forward to the new record when it comes out and to playing places where we haven’t been yet.
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