Drown – Product of a Two Faced World – Interview

Drown

Product of a Two Faced World (Slipdisc)
An interview with Lauren Boquette
by Scott Hefflon

Where are you calling from?
Huntington Beach, CA. Land of many, many bands these days. I actually grew up in Long Beach, then I moved to Hollywood for quite some time, but after we got off touring our first album, I moved to Orange County. The music scene was really inspiring, and it’s nice to see “the masses” exposed to a lot of the music coming out of this area.

So you don’t look at it like, “Damn, everyone who lives here is in a fuckin’ band!”
Naw, I’ve grown up like this my whole life. If I were a plumber, I bet everyone I knew would know something about plumbing.

You don’t get all competitive, like, “Oh man, why did those guys get signed?”
Well, we were signed back in ’93, so we were ahead of a lot of these guys…

To a major and everything… ‘Course, look what it got you…
Well, we were offered an indie deal in ’91, but we turned it down. They wanted us do an album, an EP, and a tour, for a certain amount of money. And I didn’t want to cheapen what I wanted our first release to sound like. On the budget they were offering, it woulda been impossible to do what I wanted to do.

Is that a documented story? I’ve never heard about it…
No, I don’t really talk about it too much. I don’t know why I brought it up…

What label was it?
World Domination. That’s when they were going through Capitol.

Do you think you made the right decision, passing on that deal and waiting ’til ’93 for the Elektra deal?
At the time, yeah, but looking back, I realize we definitely shoulda put an album out before we did. I don’t know if it shoulda been on that label, but when I think about how long I’d been doing this before I put my first record out, I think it woulda been nice to’ve put out something prior to when we did.

Hold on to the Hollow came out mid-’94, right?
Yeah. In May or June.

It got pushed pretty hard at the time.
Yeah, it was pretty interesting. We got signed by Michael Alago, the guy who brought Metallica to Elektra, so he had pretty much free reign with what he wanted to do. He brought us in and told everyone, “OK, this is the new cool shit.”

To get radio play for the style of music you were playing took either a small miracle or some heavy muscle.
When I think back on it – there was no Filter, Marilyn Manson was nothing, Nine Inch Nails were fairly successful but had yet to really explode, Ministry was relatively popular, and while I don’t lump us in with those bands… I mean, there was no Deftones, no Korn, no Limp Bizkit – there was no “new metal.” All those bands, they’re all our age. To me, we were part of the first wave to help open up eyes and minds to what else was going on. While I’m proud to be one of those people, a lot of others reaped the benefits.

Your careers got put on hold when…
It’s safe to say we got fucked. We had the ball rolling, and every night we’d play with Prong and Clutch…

I saw that tour. Fucking amazing. One of the wildest, most aggressive shows I’d seen in years…
Thanks, man. The kids were so appreciative, I knew this weird little monster we’d created was what we’d hoped it would be. The Elektra thing heated up, thanks to the head of East/West who took over Elektra – it’s a well-known fact she doesn’t like heavy music – we got screwed, and so did Clutch, For Love Not Lisa, and even Ednaswap, one of the coolest bands that’s come out in quite some time.

Pantera seems to’ve made it out unscathed…
Well, they’ve sold a couple million records. It’s kind of an insurance policy – if you sell a million records, no one’s going to fuck with you. We weren’t in that kind of situation. This was our first record. Because of all that, our manager washed his hands of the band, one of the band members got scared and washed his hands of the band and became a bass player for hire, like a little weak bastard. He was really insecure anyway. Every time something happened he was like, “oh shit, I guess the band’s over.” Seeing as I started this thing is ’87, I never gave a shit what record companies thought. He put a lot of faith in the system, and when the system let him down, he lost faith in everything else. Whatever. Fuck him. And our keyboard player did other stuff, like he produced a record with Glenn Danzig. They just decided, “Hey, we can make money cuz we made this cool album.” So they worked for other people instead of focusing on the band.

They can claim “ex-member of Drown,” or some shit like that.
Right. And while both of them have been relatively successful financially, they’ve become faceless members of rock’n’roll. There’s no identity, no art, no substance. You’re a part of someone else’s vision. But together, we were a vision. But when they lost faith, the vision was only mine, so I took the power back and refocused. Our drummer, Marco, who’d just joined the band right after we finished the first album, he enjoyed the whole rollercoaster of being on tour, and then it all came to an end. But he believed in the vision, he stayed down, and we rebuilt together.

Where’d you meet Marco?
He lived in Orange County. He didn’t play on the first album, but he was there to take the pictures and do the tour and everything else. I wanted it to look like he played on the album because he was so aligned with what I felt, he was definitely the missing member of our band.

Your new bassist used to be the bassist of The Ex-Idols?
Yeah, there’s an interesting little story here… Completely broke, completely fucked by the industry – but we didn’t care – Marco and I moved into this tiny, shitty one-bedroom apartment in Huntington Beach, right on the beach. We had some gear left over from the Elektra era, so we started writing and recording in our house. Right up the alley from us was our friend Duke, who was the guitarist in The Ex-Idols. So we’d all hang out at our house and get completely shitty for days on end, just to deal with the bullshit. The Ex-Idols were getting screwed by Relativity, so we all started making music just for the good time of it. None of us had record deals, none of us had money, none of us had shit. But we were friends and we started making music together.

The Ex-Idols were a lot more punk, but punk in a grimy, metal kinda way.
They were dirty, New York, Dead Boys-kinda punk. Sean E., our bass player (who used to be in The Ex-Idols), hung out in the studio with us while we were making our first album. He moved in, so then it was the three of us living in this tiny one-bedroom apartment.

How’d you hook up with Patrick, your new guitarist?
Again, he was in the studio when we recorded our first album. He was friends with Dave Ogilvie. He’s Canadian. He was in Dead Surf Kiss, and I was a fan of the band. We became friends when we were in the studio. He became a touring member of Pigface and Sister Machine Gun, kind of a hired guy for a while. When we were looking for guitarists, he was the first that came to mind, but he was always busy. So we auditioned a whole bunch of idiots. I realized it isn’t about how well you play, it’s more of who you are as an individual, and as an artist.

What is the Drown way of using guitar? A band like Ministry, and a slew of other industrial bands, use guitars as simply another sound to repeat, yet there’s plenty of metal in your songs – where the riff comes first and all the programmed electronics are merely accessories.
It all depends on the vibe of the song. I come from old metal and old punk rock. I worshipped Judas Priest and GBH. When metal got really gay in ’88, I got into more experimental, underground punk, and whatever.

That was about the time thrash and speedmetal took over because hard rock had turned into prima donna pop.
I was so bored by that point, I’d rather go see the Circle Jerks fuck shit up than listen to some speedmetal band talk about how scary they were. There was no emotion behind it, and punk rock was always passionate. That’s also when I got into the underground L.A. art rock scene. The scene Jane’s Addiction came out of. There was a band called Lions and Ghost that I really liked, just really wacky bands like Thelonious Monster, and a bunch of others. That scene, between ’87 and ’90, really inspired me. It was real, it was art, it was creative, it was special, and it mattered. It was a scene of misfits who hated everything. It was exciting and different, and there were no rules.

What are some other bands besides Jane’s Addiction that came out of that scene?
A lot of bands never made it out, so you’ve probably never heard of them. Guns N’ Roses came out of that scene, believe it or not, but then they went in more of a glam direction. But they were always kind of both. Jane’s were the kings of it, though. Bulldozer came outta that, and Junkyard, whose album came out lame, but live was never like that. Everything from AC/DC to the Velvet Underground were the heavy influences. Who else… Human Drama – they were one of my favorite bands. Back then, they were way more rock with a Goth angle. They were furious and dark and intense. That’s what was missing in everything else I saw.

You just mentioned a shitload of bands who’ve influenced you, yet many of them don’t surface in your music. We’ve talked industrial and metal, how do you feel about Goth now?
I don’t think there is a Goth now. Just like I don’t think there’s a metal now or a punk now. I think we just need names for things, so we call them what they were. To me, the Goth scene is completely done, but if you put on a Christian Death record, it’s intense. If you listen to some band trying to sound like that, they sound stupid and silly. Punk sounds silly to me, metal sounds silly. They all take themselves way too seriously. In a way, 1998 is 1988 all over again. Hear me out… There’s been a great trend jump and a great image jump, and there’s the whole idea that, “Well, if I do what they do, then I’ll get where they are.”

Perhaps it’s just that I have the misfortune of knowing far too much about the inner workings of this industry, but so much music, so many bands, seem so intentional these days…
Completely.

I have the idealistic notion that at one point in time, things just were. Bands were signed cuz they were fuckin’ good, not because they’d trimmed all the edges and catered to whatever new trend happened to be selling the most records at the time.
It’s pathetic. Look at 1988, when all the buttrock bands, as I refer to them, were coming out – Winger, Firehouse, and all that…

Poofy-haired, frilly-shirted, falsetto-shrieking…
Third generation Poison, and even Poison was never all that good.

Hanoi Rocks was good, even though Michael Monroe couldn’t hold a tune to pay his eyeliner bill.
Hanoi Rocks was good, and Poison did their best to emulate it, and I’ll give them credit because they knew how to write good pop songs.

Hanoi Rocks started it, Guns N’ Roses popularized it, and Poison made it safe for mass consumption.
I look at “new metal” the same way; bands like Korn and the Deftones have been around a long time and worked really, really hard, and now they’re successful. Now you’ve got every band on the block trying to sound and look like them. You listen to Korn and you know they like Faith No More. You listen to Coal Chamber and you know they like Korn.

I picked up on some Rage Against the Machine on your new record…
Rage? Yeah, they came out of the same scene we did.

That’s one of the things about Product of a Two Faced World – it was supposed to come out a coupla years ago, and not on Slipdisc.
Right, it was supposed to come out on Geffen. After the Elektra thing got screwed, Michael Alago, an angel from heaven, continued to believe in what I was doing. He kept hyping us to people, and we almost put a record out on The Medicine Label…

Oh God…
Well, we had a whole bunch of new songs, and we wanted to put something out. Our fans were rabid, writing in to us… The fans we got from the first album have been so incredible. They really got me through the worst fucking times of my life. I wanted to give ’em something, but right about that time, Geffen called Michael and asked him to come back to work for them. They asked him to bring them one of those crazy, heavy bands cuz White Zombie wasn’t going to do anything for a while.

Isn’t it great the way these weasels make their decisions?
Yeah, so we went with it. They wanted a crazy record, instead of us trying to jock them. So we made the record, but then they decided to restructure. They got some guy to head up the A&R department who hates hard rock. He told me straight up he didn’t like the music and he didn’t know what to do with it. I might as well’ve kept the East/West bitch’s conversation in my head cuz it was the same fucking thing. She signed En Vogue so she probably makes millions and doesn’t give a fuck what people like me have to say. Whatever. So now we’re getting fucked by Geffen, who’d asked us to be there, and we’ve spent a year of our lives writing and recording this album that was supposed to come out in January of ’97. The whole thing was done, recorded, with artwork and photos, done. And then they said they didn’t think they could put it out. By this point, Korn and Deftones and Marilyn Manson were all huge, and I was like, “You don’t have to understand it. Just look at the numbers.” I gave him the examples and figures his stupid, corporate brain could understand, but he said, “Ah, I just don’t like this kind of music.” The people that don’t understand, that’s not my fault. The people that do understand, the fans, the A&R people, the writers, the DJs… they’re the ones that matter. Some idiot corporate guy who doesn’t know shit about rock’n’roll is going to make the decision for what our culture is all about? They don’t have a clue. It was so frustrating to deal with another of those people. And he had this snobbish, rich, shitty attitude… So here we are, broke and struggling, and this is our lives and my soul on this record, and he doesn’t want to do anything with it because he doesn’t understand it.

And they just “gave” you the record back?
They dicked us around a little, but all these labels go through restructuring because they don’t have a fucking clue what people want. All the while, indie guys are kicking their asses cuz they live it everyday. It’s not something you have to understand, it’s what you are.

We call it instinct. We don’t need board meetings to figure out how we feel or what we think.
Right, so we got the album back because Geffen was busy restructuring. We were able to sneak the album out because they didn’t really care anyway. But now that we have a label that’s going to put it out, suddenly they want points on it. Everything from the title on down is due to the fact that every time we turned around, someone was trying to fuck us. And all the while, all we’re trying to do is be a band. We were just trying to do the best we could. We wrote 32 songs, 12 of which are on …Two Faced World. We still have two records’ worth of music.

There’s a bonus track here, too. What’s that called?
“Demon Food.” OK, there’re 13 songs on the album.

What’s the story behind it?
Each voice on there is a different demon I’ve had in my head, some I’ve heard since I was a kid. We had people come in and play out different nightmares I’ve had, different memories that have stuck with me.

That’s probably my favorite song.
You’ve got problems…
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