“…the power of now is really the theme of the songs.”
When Prong played the Slade Rooms on 3 April (reviewed here) in support of their upcoming album, Ruining Lives (released on 28 April and reviewed here), mainman Tommy Victor took time out to speak to Midlands Rocks’ Jason Guest.
Discussing everything from his days working the sound desk at CBGBs and the development of the Manhattan scene up to the new album, Tommy gives us an insight into his and the band’s influences, Prong’s first forays into electronics with 1991’s Prove You Wrong, dealing with the success of 1994’s Cleansing and then being dropped by a major label only weeks after the release of 1996’s Rude Awakening. As well as touching on his work with both Danzig and Ministry, Victor tells us about the writing, the lyrical inspiration, the recording, production, and release of Ruining Lives as well as the recent official bootleg, Unleashed In The West: Live in Berlin, the future of the band, and why those still alive mean an autobiography will be a long-time coming…
Hi Tommy. Congratulations on the new album, Ruining Lives. You said it’s the fastest writing and recording for a Prong album, because with Carved Into Stone (reviewed here) you said you spent a lot of time on that. So what was it that made you take a fast approach to this?
I didn’t want to. We got signed to a label finally after all these years and they had a window and they were pushing for that release date… and I think we benefited from that… a lot of times I have tendency, if I know I have a long time, there’s not really a deadline, I’ll sit around and watch baseball games and won’t do anything, so… it was good, it was good. It kicked me in the ass and erm, you know I just had to be focussed and I had to sort of get rid of everything else in my life and just focus on the record every day, work at it… Actually I started writing when I was playing with Danzig in October and that was when I originally started to write the record – when I was supposed to start writing for the record and the record was supposed to be out while we were doing this tour but it got pushed back a month… so, erm… it wasn’t my decision to make it, I would’ve liked to have a little bit more time… but it worked out really good.
So you produced it as well…
Yeah, I got a lot of help off other people, y’know. I wouldn’t get the executive producer realm on it but I sorta dialled in the method of how to do the record. I didn’t sit behind any desk or anything, so… I didn’t do any engineering… so, er, a lot of producers don’t. I probably did more that Rick Rubin has done, because that I heard he just calls on the phone every three weeks to see how things are going [laughs]. I was there every day, y’know, I got an engineer to do the basic tracks and then Steve Evetts produced the vocals and mixed it…
Because he produced Carved into Stone…
Yeah, he produced the whole thing, like the tracking… we started tracking then I felt wasn’t necessary… we got in touch with Steve and I just produced the basic tracks and guitars. Steve didn’t work on any of the arrangements like he did on Carved into Stone when Steve was there during pre-production and I didn’t have him around… I had fed him some stuff and he was like, “This sounds fine, I’ll just do the vocals on it.”
How about the songs though? I’ve had the album three weeks now and you can hear all eras of Prong all the way through it. It’s like a “Best of” without being a “Greatest Hits”; it’s like you’ve got the best parts of Prong. Is that what you were going for?
That was accidental [laughs]. Totally.
The pressure of the release date?
Yeah, it just had to be what it was. I mean, I think I’ve done enough Prong records now to learn from some mistakes that certain elements have to be covered, I think it’s subconscious in a way… and I think we covered all grounds, obviously a Prong record’s not gonna be a completely thrash record or a complete hardcore record, er, it’s not gonna be a complete post-punk industrial record, it just has to all collide into one record, so I know that much after all this if anything else.
We were listening to it on the way here and some of the older stuff too. Prove You Wrong has some basslines that could be from Primus – ‘Positively Blind’ for instance – they’ve got that Les Claypool feel and the guitars play against that…
I agree, yeah. I didn’t like the production on that record. I mean that was the first, that was the record we did with Troy Gregory and he was one of these GIT (contemporary music college in Hollywood) bass players and he was all over the place and he liked playing live and he had all these good ideas and stuff but in order to get the bass to cut through and he played with his fingers, that was the way that [producer Mark] Dodson approached it… We had a lot of problems recording that record and writing it was, erm… that was one of the sophomore jinx albums, I think, and I’m glad that Ruining Lives didn’t fall into that category because I was really stressed after Carved Into Stone to come up with something that would be comparable to it. So there you have it with Prove You Wrong…
Because that’s the album that you started experimenting with electronics…
Yeah, back in the day there wasn’t really any digital audio work stations at all so you had a sampler and a keyboard… that’s how Al [Jourgensen, Ministry] started too, y’know? With Al, he went the crazy route and strated throwing guitars in there, recording drums, putting them on tape – Jim Thirlwell was doing that – there was no MIDI, there was nothing…
You had to wind it up, it was that old, huh?
Yeah! [laughs] It was crazy, we just did that for certain sounds. We actually sampled stuff from a tape recorder… and we did the same sorta thing on Cleansing with John Bechdel. We thought that was cool. That was some of the things that Prong had to do to set ourselves apart from other regular thrash bands and hardcore bands ‘cause there was so many of ‘em and everyone was doing the same thing. We were into the same bands that were using industrial sounds and it was, like, how do we put that into a hardcore / punk / thrash metal thing, y’know? And apparently it worked out fairly well. It’s confused a lot of people…
The early 90s was an interesting time for music, I think…
Yeah it was… looking back…
There was Prong, Ministry, Faith No More, Primus, Jane’s Addiction, Helmet, etc, and you’d got all these bands producing very diverse stuff and in some way being put under the “metal” banner but at the same time was much more experimental. It was a huge melting pot…
Yeah – you’re quite educated in that period – and it’s quite true. One thing we were battling against was still the remnants of the hair metal scene which was really big, and especially getting signed to a major label, I think that hurt us a lot over in Europe, because they were like, “Who are these idiots?” It was more like a local east-coast phenomenon what Prong was doing, so the rest of America were, until ‘Snap Your Fingers…’ came out, they really didn’t get it. And Europe was hard because the label was busy promoting bands like ex-guys from WASP – I forget their name – they had all these hair bands that they were still throwing all their money at, so Prong was left in the dust in a lot of ways and they didn’t know how to approach it. I think if we had been on RoadRunner or something we’d have got more of the attention or street cred…
That was the label Epic?
Yeah.
What surprised me was that Rude Awakening sold 10,000 in its first week and they dropped you…
Yeah, they dropped us.
Because now, 10,000 record sales is an achievement…
Yeah, I know, it’s crazy…
You’d just toured with Sepultura and Pantera, and ‘Snap Your Fingers…’ and the Cleansing album had shifted you into an entirely different place…
It was a different place, yeah, that’s exactly what happened. The A&R guy and then the head guy at the label, I’d be getting calls, “What’s going on? What’s happening? We wanna hear new material, blah blah blah.” They were really concerned with that, they wanted to push Prong into… like, before Linkin Park came out or whatever, they wanted us to be the “new metal band”, and, erm… I was just writing songs.
I didn’t know how to treat the whole thing really, so they thought they’d get Terry Date, the Pantera producer… they said we’re gonna be the next top 20 record to come out. It was this whole big thing; they thought they had this thing that was new and cool, and it just didn’t work out this way. I was pushed off to the side. It was a bunch of chiefs running around; it was between the A&R guy and his boss; and then Terry Date and Charlie Clouser form Nine Inch Nails worked on the record; and then our managers too who were not getting along; and then the band guys definitely not getting along; so it was complete chaos.
That was your last record with Ted Parsons…
Yeah…
Phenomenal drummer. Are you still friends?
Yeah – fantastic drummer – I mean, he’s sorta settled down. He had some health problems and he’s settled down. I think he does some music on the side. He’s gotten to the age of semi-retirement, which is where I should probably be [laughs]… it’s hard for me to just jump into the whole domestic situation ‘cause I guess I’m just immature, stupid, self-centred…
It makes good records!
I do it for you! [laughs]
You joined Danzig soon after that and toured and you did a lot of work with Danzig, writing on Circle of Snakes…
Yeah, and I did Deth Red Saboath, and I’m on the record that’s coming out. And there’s a track on The Lost Tracks… that Danzig failed to credit me for because he was mad at me…
I can’t imagine Danzig being mad at anybody…
I know, it sounds crazy [laughs]. And then the Ministry thing… playing with Glenn’s cool, it’s like if Iggy called me up or Peter Murphy [Bauhaus]… I tried to get the Peter Murphy gig but he thought I was too “metal”… but stuff like that, it’s cool, y’know. If something happened with Geordie Walker from Killing Joke, I’d be happy to fill in, or Youth… time-permitting. But I’d like Prong to continue at the pace that we’ve been doing and put out periodic records and do what we’ve been doing in the past two years. The Ministry debacle, I felt like it was more necessary to focus on what I’m doing instead of writing records for other people and not getting any money or credit for.
I wanted to ask about the early days; you worked at CBGBs…
I was outta there by the 90s and I think everyone shoulda been outta there by the 90s. The scene was starting to die around ’89, it was starting to become a tourist trap and there really wasn’t anything going on. I mean, I heard there was potentially a resurgence after that but by the time 1990, a little after that rolled around I was out with Prong touring continually… and hanging ‘round in the 80s, early 80s as a kid….
You were doing the sound there, yes? You must have seen bands…
Tons!
…in their early days; White Zombie played their first gig there; and it’s just a legendary venue. You made Primitive Origins and Force Fed in the late 80s. Was being part of that scene what informed your sound? You listen to Primitive Origins, the tracks are a minute and a half, maybe two minutes long; you’ve got the hardcore, straight-to-the-point, no bullshit approach, and then you’ve got a few songs that are longer. Was it like a melting pot at the time?
It was, but there still was divisions where you had the so-called “noise New York” bands like Swans, Lifeskull, and actually at that time White Zombie was like that, because when they came out, they were like a noise band, it was Rob running around stage screaming, and they were fast and just making a whole bunch of noise and no one understood them. So then, there was the hardcore bands – of course, Agnostic Front – and some really good bands that people don’t know about too much like Breakdown and Rest In Pieces and Warzone and then… from the suburbs came the influence of the thrash metal, y’know like eventually came in on a bigger scale with Metallica and Slayer from the west coast…
Anthrax is a New York band…?
Yeah, but they weren’t really… I’m talking New York, I’m talking Manhattan really, so they were like a suburban… I really didn’t know that much about Anthrax; initially I wasn’t really that into them that much… so when everyone goes, “There’s this metal band, Anthrax, that have put this New York hardcore thing on it”, I was like, “Oh, that’s weird”, but Prong sorta was different because we crossed over on all those scenes so that was because of all the stuff that we were into. Ted, the drummer, was into Swans but he was also into thrash metal, y’know, we were into Celtic Frost and Voivod and Kreator and Destruction, and then mixed that with the Bad Brains – who were a huge influence on us – and then Killing Joke, and all that combined so it made Prong different. I think bands like Helmet and White Zombie looked to that and they may have stylised it a little bit better… everyone was watching each other and it was cool, like we’d play a show and all those guys were there – Page Hamilton and Rob and Vernon Reid from Living Colour – we knew all these guys, y’know. Vernon, actually, is a good friend of mine and he helped us a lot in those days… it was like everyone was hanging out there.
There was a lot of clubs too other than CBGBs… we played the basement in this bar and I mentioned Iggy before and he saw Prong back in the day… and Prong was doing weird shows. We’d do like ‘Something Must Break’ by Joy Division, we’d do ‘Third From The Sun’ by Chrome, and there was a lot of different things we did that regular bands from the suburbs didn’t know anything about; Killing Joke or Joy Division or Sisters of Mercy or anybody so we brought that in to the whole mix, y’know, which was, y’know, different.
Those bands – Killing Joke and Joy Division and Bauhaus as well – your approach to guitar is concentrated; everything is compacted into the riff; is that where it comes from?
Pretty much, yeah, I would think so. I was always attracted to that, I mean as a kid, like when I was growing up in high school and stuff, I didn’t play guitar, I played bass, so I was into that rudimentary parts rather than solos and trying to get too intricate with the guitar and so I treated it like a rhythm instrument, y’know, and just rhythm parts… and obviously when Metallica came around, and Anthrax – I look back on it and Scotty has some great chunky rhythms and that sort of attracted me to that, and the Bad Brains too, I mean there was staccato riffs and crunchy parts – this was what I liked, y’know? – and almost the only thing I could play really [laughs]. The first time we did Primitive Origins, it was without the solos – the demo has no solos on it – and then when we decided to release it as a record, I went back in and put solos on it to make it more metal, y’know…
So you had to practice for that?
Yeah, it was like, “so what do I do?”, and I just, like, “Oh, Slayer, they don’t really know what they’re doing!”, and I just sorted emulated [laughs], and it worked, y’know.
Lyrically, with the new album and with Carved Into Stone as well, you have a different approach to it. With Prove You Wrong, Beg To Differ, and Cleansing, it’s more reactionary; with Ruining Lives, rather than reactionary, it’s more responsive…
Yeah, absolutely. If I compare it to Rude Awakening which is a completely dark record – everything is horrible and that’s just the way it is – now, it’s like, that’s the way it is but if you look at the end result, y’know. I’m just searching, there’s doors opening, there’s progress, there’s definitely more of like a theme of like hope or faith in the songs now. I mean, that’s cool, and if I can put that in there, get that point across, that’s great in this style of music…
What prompted it?
Not to sound too pompous about it or anything, it goes back to Ecclesiastes in the Bible, like where, erm, Solomon and he’s… like there’s nothing new under the sun, you live all these things – sex, drugs, partying, y’know, some money in your pocket, family life – all this stuff and inevitably it’s like it doesn’t fill a hole, it’s a little empty, so it’s sorta questions that in a lotta ways: what is there left? Really it’s about the experience of the now and appreciating everything for what it is right this second, y’know, the past is gone and who knows what the future is. It’s the power of now is really the theme of the songs…
I don’t know how that last one came together; it’s a miracle… but sometimes it’s good to be active… I was out with Danzig and like in periods like now, I’d just grab a guitar and iPad and just lay stuff in there and…
…playing piano as well? (Note: there is a piano in room where the interview is taking place the Slade Rooms)
No, no, no! [laughs] That’s something I need to learn how to do, and I had so many opportunities, like, a really good friend of mine is a classically-trained guy and he’s like, “I’ll get it done with you!”, and I never have the time to do it, it’s like it’s so weird, so there is someone I can actually go to but I’m so wrapped up in other bullshit…
…I’m trying to imagine ‘Whose Fist Is This Anyway?’ on piano…
You know what? Okay, there’s this guy… a friend of mine, this lady, she edits music for movies – I live in L.A. and I know a few people who are successful – and she’s got this friend, he’s a music school teacher, I think it’s middle school, he’s an older guy, we were at a party – the guy can sing and play any Elton John song, plays Jethro Tull and all this stuff, it’s amazing. We actually jammed, we were just fucking around – and he’s a music teacher of all these kids – and he goes, “Oh, you’re a musician?”, and she gave him a copy off Carved Into Stone and this guy loved it. This guy is this trained musician, he’s like, “I can’t believe the songs. They’re great!” Like, ‘Put Myself To Sleep’, he thought that was a brilliant song, y’know? So he’s like, “I’m teaching the kids to do it and he plays it, he worked out this whole string arrangement and the kids, they sang the song and the kids loved it, but some of the parents were complaining because they thought it was about suicide.
I couldn’t get it on video but they had his school perform that song; it’s a really notable school, like… he taught Katy Perry and all these people go to this school. I was just completely flabbergasted and honoured about this whole thing, and this guy was like, he’s been on TV, he’s talked about the education system, and here’s this guy doing a song by Prong, teaching these kids a Carved Into Stone song – and he plays it all on piano too! He figured out ‘Rude Awakening’, he sings and plays… ‘Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck’… I mean, a trained musician, he got the lyrics online; crazy! He’s like, “We gotta do a project together!” and I’m like, “Maybe…” Y’know, he looks like a music school teacher – big white beard, hair out like this [spreads arms wide], and glasses and… [laughs]
So maybe the book and a classical album at the same time?
I have no idea how to write music or read music or anything but it’s something that’d be good to know, though. It’s hard to teach and old dog new tricks… maybe I could though…
It’s almost exactly two years since you released Carved Into Stone, so does that mean we’re going to see more of Prong in the future?
Oh absolutely!
You’re still working with Danzig?
I did cut the last two mini releases and that leads to the point where now I’m saying that because of, I was complaining to Steve about this, I was like going, “This song is so packed with good songs, they’re just gonna go to waste”, and he was like, “I know, it’s a waste” – because he’s done hundreds of records and he’s just like, “Yeah, a lot of the bands have two good songs and the rest are just filler”, y’know? And he respects me, and he says, “You try to get every song good and try to work it to the best for each song,” and a lot of guys don’t do that. The tendency now would be to put out smaller releases, like four-song EPs just to keep it going instead of having to put out full-length records; I think that’s what the future is like. That’s the next “fad”…
Is that because of the way the industry’s going?
Yeah, the way the industry’s going. Not to sound like a marketing guy here, y’know, you offer somebody four songs for $9.99, they’re gonna probably buy that in exactly the same way they’re gonna buy eleven or twelve songs…. It does take a lot of effort, time and money, and there’s not a helluva lot of money, so if you could get away with keeping the thing going with smaller releases of quality songs then that’s attractive to everybody – the artist, the industry in general.
If you look back in the 60s, it wasn’t album rock, bands like The Beatles eventually sold records but they were collections of singles; the impact of a song that’s good that gets around is a lot more important than the full album experience these days because people don’t have the patience for it neither… I zap through my own iPad now and I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah…” and we never had the ability to do that. You put a record on and finished the side and then you usually turned it over and you’d sit there and listen to it. That was album rock, and you experienced the whole thing back in the day when you were smoking weed, y’know, [Pink Floyd’s] Wish You Were Here had four songs on it but it was like this whole epic thing. I don’t know if those days… maybe that’ll come back but I doubt it. But with the impact of one song, Bam! it’s great.
You’ve also released an official bootleg – Unleashed In The West – available on Bandcamp. What gave you the idea for that?
It wasn’t really my idea…
And why now? you’ve got a new album, Ruining Lives, coming out soon…
I don’t know about the timing. The timing just is what it is, like, sometimes I can’t control those things because the record, Ruining Lives, was supposed to be out now too, so what’s good about it is, we were talking about the different types of production with Prove You Wrong an Rude Awakening, and, it’s almost we didn’t have to do all that. The songs are strong and even with one guitar, bass and drums, and one vocal, all those songs sound pretty powerful from all those older records and all these crazy production techniques, we really didn’t need to do it. If we went out and did it as a trio all along, just the way they were and recorded it that way I think that it woulda held up, so it was sorta like a concept of that and reflective of all those great Prong songs, all up to date and with the attitude we just played and sang and it all worked out well and I’m really happy with that Unleashed In The West official bootleg (available here).
Are they your favourite Prong tracks?
That’s the set; those are the ones we’re doing in the set. Tonight, it’s a little bit different with some more newer songs, but it’s the strongest ones, I think. There’s some that have been left out that I would have liked to put in there and other people have requested but I don’t think it would have fit on one CD [laughs], so yeah, I mean the set is long because of all those songs… looking at nine albums plus other EPs, I mean there’s a lot of songs. There’s songs from The Peel Session we don’t do anymore; there’s stuff form these other little releases we put out and, er… it’s crazy, I mean, but the ones that are on the Bandcamp Unleashed In The West, they’re pretty much the best ones, y’know? I mean there’s so many “Best” releases, y’know, like “The Best of Motorhead” or something, and they have, like, five of those and it’s like, “This isn’t the best of Motorhead!”, it’s like, “What are these other songs? I don’t know any of these!” [laughs] so we didn’t do that at all. This is all just the solid ones that anyone who’s followed Prong is familiar with.
You worked in CBGBs, you started Prong and your first release in ’86, you made it big, you did all these huge tours with Sepultura and Pantera and a bunch of other bands, you worked with Danzig, you worked with Ministry, after all this time, you’re still going, you’ve no doubt got no end of stories, have you thought about a book?
Yeah, I was approached a couple of times. Unfortunately the people that I have the funny stories about are still alive [laughs] and I don’t know of it’d be too flattering, some of the stories. It’d have to be this watered down version of it, so if I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it right, y’know…
You waiting for them to die, are you?
Possibly… [laughs]
So that’s where the title came from – Ruining Lives?
[laughing] The name of the book, yeah! “Ruining MY Life” would probably be the best…
Great! So, thanks for your time…
No problem. Thank you for doing it, and thank you for the review, it’s awesome.
It’s great to see you back and still writing great material…
Thanks man, appreciate it.
Fantastic interview Jason. Great work.
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