It was really KISS that did it; zapping all those young boys between the eyes with bloody tongues and spaceman guitar solos, sparking in them dreams of being a rock star, singing or playing guitar in front of thousands of screaming fans. KISS is to blame for over half the rock & roll musicians walking the earth today. They are their spawn. So blame KISS for Skid Row. Blame KISS for putting out such a kick ass live album that guitar player Snake Sabo wanted to do that too.
The New Jersey born and bred Dave Sabo has had music in his life forever, what with older brothers always playing music in their house. And once that KISS record hit him, that was it, that was his beacon, and there was nothing else he wanted to do. After forming Skid Row with his friend Rachel Bolan around 1986, they took off with a jolt following the release of their self-titled debut album. With catchy pulsating songs and cool hair and even better lyrics, Skid Row became the prom king rockers of the late eighties and early nineties – playing shows with their idols, hanging out at all the cool Sunset Strip clubs, going to Moscow with Ozzy Osbourne and Motley Crue to play a Peace Festival, their faces all over MTV twenty-four/seven. If you wanted to know what it was like to be a young rock & roller with a hit record, then you had to look no further than Skid Row.
They followed up that initial burst of success with an even better, grittier, more realistic Slave To The Grind. But problems with lead singer Sebastian Bach began to bubble over and the band began to spin in the gravel going a hundred miles an hour. But they didn’t tuck tail and slump away in the darkness of what-had-been. They hooked up with singer Johnny Solinger and kept making music. Solinger brings a grittiness to the Skid Row music that wasn’t always there with Bach. Solinger brought them back to the real world, away from the hairspray, away from selfies with Axl Rose, and back to the basics of what Skid Row always was: a rock band.
Today’s music world is a different animal than when Skid Row was born. ProTools rule the school and any Joe can pluck a three-string, post it on YouTube and become a star overnight. You can also fade away faster than a Facebook post. But good songs are still good songs and taking them out on the road, whether it be to small hot box clubs or thousand-seaters, playing those songs for real people is still where the music comes alive the most. And that is where you can find Skid Row. “I don’t even know where we’re at, Honey,” Snake Sabo says with a laugh when I ask his location.
So as he kicks back following a show near Chicago, as his tour bus rolls towards another destination somewhere in the mid-west, Glide talked with Snake about his rock & roll days – from being a kid in Jersey, to ruling the charts with Skid Row, to launching a new record this week, the second volume in a planned trilogy, titled Rise Of The Damnation Army: United World Rebellion Chapter Two.
The first thing I noticed when I listened to the new EP was that it doesn’t sound like a band that has been together almost thirty years. It’s fresh, it has a lot of energy and fight to it.
Thank you. Making this EP, first of all, at least for me, was the most fun I had making a record since we started Skid Row. And that’s for a number of reasons. We pretty much started out the writing process with a conversation. You know, we just start talking about things that are affecting us in life on a personal level, professionally or whatever. We’ve known each other for twenty-eight years and we’ve talked to each other virtually every day, if we’re not with each other every day, so we know each other probably better than we know anybody else in our lives. And to be able to remain best friends after all this time, after everything we’ve gone through, is an incredible thing. It’s a testimony to mutual respect and admiration as well.
So when we got together and started talking about this EP, we started thinking about why we do this in the first place and at the end of the day we go right back to being this sixteen or seventeen year old kid who stood in front of the mirror wanting to be Gene Simmons or Ace Frehley or Eddie Van Halen and taking that essence and allowing that to come through. You have to strip a lot of life away to get back to that point and that’s what we did. We realized why we do this in the first place, because it’s our purest and sincerest form of expression that we know. And that’s the reason we started doing it in the first place back in the day, because of that. We might have been socially awkward (laughs) and might not have been the greatest at articulating our thoughts and our feelings, and that’s where music came in. It allowed us to do that, that was our release, that was the pressure valve with everything. Cause when we found music, we started writing songs. That was the way we were able to express ourselves, through that process. And that’s always remained the same.
A lot of times to a lot of people that gets convoluted because of life. The layers of life get piled on top of that and then you might lose that essence. You never lose it, per se, forever. It’s there somewhere. You just have to go find it. And that’s what we did. We just shut the phones off and locked the doors and got a bunch of beers and a couple of guitars and just started jamming and talking and writing about things that were important to us. And enjoying the process, enjoying what we were doing. That was the big thing. It didn’t feel like a job at all. It felt really important but it was joyful and the end result, I think, articulates all of that really, really well. When I listen back to it, I can hear how much fun it was to make and the excitement in everybody’s playing, the sense of urgency in the performances. And I am really, really proud of that and really, really proud to be a part of that.
The fact that it was an EP, we were concentrating on seven songs, we knew that we weren’t going to spend two months in the studio. Spend a couple of weeks, if that, made it even more exciting. It kept everything really fresh. It forced us to live directly in the moment and that was probably the greatest thing that could happen to us because we were doing things on a shorter scale: less songs, less pressure to write more songs. We knew we wouldn’t be touring for fourteen months at a time. We’d go out and do eight months and come back and do another EP and then go back out again. There’s something really beneficial to that in that it keeps everything really, really fresh and there’s not really any monotony that goes along with that. People don’t get sick and bored and tired of each other (laughs). It just seems to work on every level. Economically as well as it costs less to make an EP, so it costs less to sell it. It’s not badgering people over the head with fifteen or twenty songs where people just don’t have the time anymore to dedicate themselves to sitting down and spending an hour with an album. Our society isn’t like that anymore. So we wanted to give people something that hopefully will leave them wanting more.
I remember when I was a teenager and would put on something like The Wall or Quadrophenia or Tommy and listen to all four sides at one sitting. You can’t do that anymore.
Yeah, it’s a shame too. I lament that because I feel that people who are coming of age now are missing out on such an amazing experience. I’m sure it’s been replaced by other things and that happens with life but there is a certain smell that goes along with opening up KISS Alive and staring at the middle of the album and listening to those four sides. There is just a certain essence that you can’t capture any other way than to open up the packaging and stare at those letters and the back cover of those kids with the KISS sign. Those are memories that helped shape me and direct me to doing this for a living. I just think that so many people will never share those experiences and that part of it is a shame cause those moments were such a huge part of the fabric of my upbringing.
And some of those albums would have the big fold-out posters.
Oh yeah, absolutely (laughs). The walls of my room, I was so proud of them with all the pictures I cut out of Creem Magazine and Circus Magazine, even like Kerrang and all the import mags that I used to get. I was proud of it, you know. Those are things that you will never, ever forget and it’s such a huge part of our upbringing.
I’m glad to see vinyl is still alive and breathing.
Yeah, I love it too and it will always be a big part of my life. It’s that experience of being able to open up that packaging. I remember when we released our first record and it was vinyl and it was the most amazing experience. I’m just so thankful I got the chance to have that.
This EP is the second in a trilogy. Have all the songs been written and recorded or are you doing them fresh each time?
We’re doing everything fresh and that’s on purpose because we want everything to be indicative and reflective of that particular moment in our lives, being very much in the moment, being very much in the here and now with what we’re writing about and experiencing. So instead of having something that is a year and a half old, we’d rather have it be a month old.
What can you tell us about the song “Zero Day?”
The title of it Rachel came up with and if you look up what it means, it’s really interesting and it’s supposed to be about the moment when all the computers in the world and everything just kind of stop working. It refers to when in the new millennium when they didn’t know what was going to happen with the changing over to the year 2000 from the 1900’s. So he came up with this title and he’s like, “Let’s find out what it means cause it’s a really cool title.” And we just built something around that title. We had some of the music written and stuff like that and the title seemed to fit with the vibe of the music and everything and just had this starkness to it, if you will, and it’s just one of those things where it very much contains a lot of metaphors and it’s not so much black & white. With a lot of lyrics that we write, which is predominately Rachel, it’s very much based on metaphors. A lot of it we like to leave the interpretation of the lyrics to the listener. We think it’s important that people make these songs their own. So whatever conclusions people come to, as far as what a particular song means, that’s the right conclusion what it means to them.
“We Are The Damned” is the first single and it’s a great way to lead this EP off.
Thank You. Again, it’s like there’s a common theme that is running through every record we’ve done and it’s basically we’ve always felt that we’ve always been the underdogs in one way or another. From the very beginning, to going out and getting a record deal, to the tours that we’ve been on, we’ve always felt that we have been the underdogs and the way you survive is you just fight and you fight and you fight and you fight for all of the right reasons. That’s kind of the strength in numbers, our individuality yet being a community and a force. We’re up there for a reason and that’s to show people that you have earned the right to be on that stage. And that’s no small thing in our eyes and we’ve very aware of what we get to do on a nightly basis is not a birthright but a privilege. You have to earn that privilege. We take all of what we do really, really seriously. The songs we put in our set, our live show, everything centers around that. Our day is nothing more than to get to that stage and perform to the best of our ability.
Are you playing most of these songs while you are out on the road?
No, because it’s not released yet. It doesn’t come out till the first week of August [August 5th). But we’ve been working on “We Are The Damned” at soundchecks and stuff like that. We’re playing in Europe on July 31 at a Polish Woodstock, which is like 450,000 people and we’re headlining one of the nights so we’re going to play one or two things from it there.
I thought it was very cool that you covered “Rats In The Cellar” cause there are so many other Aerosmith songs you could have chosen.
That’s one of my all-time favorites. For us, that’s the hardest part of this process is choosing what cover songs we’re going to do. That’s the part of making an EP that proves the most angst because there’s so many songs that we all are interested in doing and want to play and we just go back and forth and back and forth until we finally come across a couple songs that everyone just goes, “YEAH!” Luckily, that and “Sheer Heart Attack” were the two for this record that worked out well for us but it took a while to get there. But for me personally, that’s one of those songs that I first remembered when I got turned onto Aerosmith back in the day. That was one of the songs I heard even before “Walk This Way” or anything like that. I got turned on to that particular album first before Toys In The Attic and that’s what began my love affair with Aerosmith. So for me it was an honor to be able to do that song.
And you do it just a little bit different, putting your own spin on it, making it a Skid Row song instead of a complete copy of the Aerosmith version.
Oh thanks. I don’t know if that was on purpose or what but I’m glad that we got there.
How has your creative process changed over the years? Do you guys still write songs the same way that you always have?
Yeah, which is there’s no formula to it (laughs). Someone will play a riff during soundcheck or someone comes up with an idea at their house and then all of a sudden we’re sitting around, “Hey, check this out. What do you think?” Or, “I wrote these lyrics,” and Rachel writes these lyrics and he’s like, “What do you think?” And it comes at you from so many different angles. It’s not like, “We’re blocking out 9:00 am to 5:00 pm today.” But that’s not to say that we don’t sit there and go, “Okay, you know what, why don’t I fly down to Atlanta for a week and see what we can come up with,” cause that’s where Rachel lives and I live in New York. So we’ll do that and see what we come up with. Then I’ll go back home and he’ll stay home and then get together somewhere else down the line. We have to carve out times in our lives cause we’re not living down the street from each other anymore. In that sense, it’s probably the only aspect of it that’s pre-planned. Everything else is basically just two people sitting in a room with a few beers in their hands and a couple guitars and going back and forth and throwing ideas at each other; thoughts and different scenarios and interpretations of life, if you will. And then it just goes from there. Certain things happen that you can’t explain: an amazing lyric will come, and nine times out of ten Rachel will come up with it, and you go, “Holy shit, wow.” Then hopefully we come up with some great melodies and things like that. But we pay equal amounts of attention to every part of it – the chord structures and the melody, the lyrics. They’re all just as viable and valuable to the song. So to answer your question, nothing’s changed. It’s half-hazard as it’s always been (laughs)
You grew up in New Jersey. What were you like as a kid?
Oh man, I had an awesome childhood. I was in a household where I was the youngest of five boys so I was in a house where there was music constantly being played. A couple of my brothers, when they were still living at home, were upstairs and a giant stereo system and had everything from Elvis Presley to Beach Boys to the surf music to the sixties to Motown and Otis Redding and Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, Booker T & The MG’s and Janis Joplin and Hendrix and the first Sabbath record and Procol Harem, Humble Pie, Montrose. I mean, Jesus, it just goes on and on and on and on. And that was my education and I had no idea I was being educated. Later on in life it certainly came into play, all those influences. It was great too because it was an education of appreciating music. There were no genres, there was no heavy metal or whatever. It was just music. If a song was great and affected you then it did it’s job. That’s the attitude I’ve always had. I’m not one to sit there and say, “I don’t like a particular song because it’s sung by so-and-so.” If it’s a great song it’s a great song.
I love the art of songwriting and as I got older and I started getting into music, then I went back to rediscover all that stuff I grew up on just to sort of educate myself on the way those songs were written – the chord progressions and the melodies and how things worked with one another. There was a good reason why those songs had such an impact on me, cause they were just brilliant, brilliant songwriters who composed them. Elton John’s records, my gosh, early Springsteen, the early new wave of British heavy metal, all these things had such, and still do, such a huge, huge impact on me. So my childhood was amazing, being able to grow up with that.
There was a wealth of talent in our area, from entertainers to sports figures and stuff. Just this little town of Sayreville had a lot of stuff come out of it. I don’t know why but it was pretty incredible. I mean, guys who were acting in movies and on television and people who were in the Olympics and people who went on to like super-mega rock stardom and stuff. It’s just pretty crazy but it was an awesome childhood to grow up where I did. I was in such close proximity to New York City that that had a huge influence too. I started going to New York City when I was thirteen years old and that experience you can’t equate that on any level what an impact that had.
When you picked up a guitar and you started playing, what song was the hardest for you to learn to play?
Well, when you first pick up a guitar everything is hard to play (laughs). I mean everything. But I remember the first thing I was really working on was “Show Me The Way” by Peter Frampton and I was playing it on one string, you know, one finger type of thing. I was so not even close (laughs). But as I got older, well, the beauty about playing guitar is that the first six months of playing guitar you grow by leaps and bounds on a daily basis. It’s an incredible feeling. So as I moved on and started to learn bar chords, the hardest thing for me to play was “Hotel California.” My mother loved it so much that I had to play it for her, even though it was terrible. I played it terrible but she was so sweet. That was just her song for me to play for her.
What was your dream guitar?
The first real guitar I ever bought was an Ibanez Iceman that Paul Stanley played on the Love Gun and the Alive II tour and the Dynasty tour. It was just the most original design I had ever seen and I saw him play it on the tour, which was the Love Gun tour. I was like, I have to have that guitar. I have to, someday, I have to. I saved up every penny I had and there’s a music store in New Jersey that is about forty-five minutes to an hour north of where I lived and they had one there. I think it was like $450 or something like that. And I had like $425 in cash and another $25 in quarters and I went up there with all of it and I didn’t even have a license yet. I think I was like fifteen or sixteen at the time. So a friend of mine drove me up there and I bought it and I still have it to this day. I‘ll be buried with that (laughs)
What do you remember most about going into a studio and recording that first Skid Row album?
The sheer enormity of the fact that we were actually getting the opportunity to make an album. It had been a dream for so long and the fact that we’re actually getting the opportunity to do this. There were no expectations on sales or anything like that. We flew out to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and showed up at this resort area, if you will, a place called the Americana Hotel, which had the recording studio in the back end of the hotel situated right next to like a convention hall where they’d have like car shows and auctions and things like that. We had no clue. We had no idea. Our management suggested it would be a good idea for us to just get out of Jersey and we were like, absolutely. You know, we had never really been anywhere so the idea of going into Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, we might as well have been in Los Angeles or anywhere. It didn’t matter to us. It was the biggest city in the world at that particular point, you know. And we were embarking on this journey that we had only dreamed of. And the fact that it was becoming a reality was something that was incomprehensible. But it wasn’t so overwhelming that we didn’t have a very clear focus of what we wanted to create.
Michael Wagener [the producer] was a huge, huge part of that, keeping all these little kids rounded up and in one place and on a schedule, adhering to the dedication of making a great record. We were there for a reason and we were never a band that did drugs or anything like that. We would drink and some people would smoke some pot but that was the extent of it. We weren’t out trying to score dope and none of those things came into play. You went and you drank a beer or wine or a Jack Daniels or whatever AFTER you were done recording – never during and never before. That was just the way it was, which was apparently a lot different than a lot of bands (laughs). It was just the way we ran our shit. We have to be 100% in the moment and present of mind before going to do this and everyone was on board. That wasn’t even a question. That’s just the way we were. So it served us very, very well.
So we went in there and we played our asses off and we worked very hard but it was a great experience for a bunch of young kids who were in their early, early twenties. And again, our manager and Michael Wagener had a huge, huge part in just keeping our heads focused and in the game, cause there were a lot of distractions there. Had we had no discipline with the way we constructed music and made music and the way we put the band together, we could have easily been distracted and it could have been a horrible experience for everybody. Regardless of everything happening around us, the main thing was in that studio every day and making great music.
When you guys hit big, what was your first big indulgence?
A used Jeep (laughs). I didn’t have a car so I bought a used Jeep. I didn’t know. I mean, I didn’t know how much money we were going to make, if at all, so I was just like, okay, that’d be cool. Then after a while, our business manager was going, “Guys, you got to buy a house or something because you’re going to get the shit taxed out of you.” So we all went and bought a nice house and I remember I closed on my house on like May 1st and on May 2nd I flew to Australia. My furniture was cardboard boxes for a good year. I’d been living in one bedroom apartments for so long so what did I know. It was quite an adjustment but it was also so exciting. It was just great for everybody to share in that and partake in that process.
But also it all depends on what you let define you, how you’re going to exist when that stuff starts slowing down and success isn’t what it was at one point; what part of your character is revealed. And that’s the true test of an individual, is how you get through that. You know, I was fortunate and this was how I was raised by someone who explained to me to be humble and respectful of the good things that come to you in life. Again, it’s not a birthright. It’s a privilege. So when you look at it from that standpoint it doesn’t destroy you when the success you once had is not there anymore. It doesn’t devastate you. You get through it and you’re thankful for everything you’ve been given on every level. I’m thankful that we got to play Giants Stadium and I’m also thankful that we get to play tonight. I get to make music for a living and it’s the most incredible thing in the world.
I was going to ask you if there was a time when you thought that was the highest you were going to go and what would happen if and when it wasn’t there anymore.
I never looked at it like that. I never looked at it like, “Oh shit, it’s never going to get any better than this.” I don’t let the amount of people in the audience define my goals that I set for myself. It’s not the amount of people that you get to play in front of, per se, it’s the affect you HAVE on the people that you play in front of. If I look down into the audience and I see 70,000 people singing back one of our songs or I look out in a club and I see a hundred people singing our songs, it’s just as important to me. It means that we’ve had an effect on people’s lives. And that never gets lost on me, ever. I walk away from that going, “Man, you did good, Kid.” And that happens every night and I’m so thankful for the opportunity to be able to do that on a nightly basis. It’s an amazing thing. You know, I’m very much aware how many people out there wish they could do what we do. I mean, we’re not U2 or anything like that and we don’t play stadiums or anything like that, but we make a living playing music and that’s all I ever wanted to do. And I get to do that. So my life is pretty good.
Do you have children?
My girlfriend has twins, a boy and a girl, who are eight years old and that’s the greatest kids in the history of life. I never had children of my own and I never felt that I will but these kids are my own and they’re the most phenomenal children on the face of the earth. It blows my mind that I’ve been blessed with being able to be a part of their lives cause they have made my life complete. And I didn’t realize there was something missing in my life and now I realize that there was.
You have the life a lot of people wish they had: being able to have a job/career that they love and having a family that they love. Cause sometimes you have to sacrifice one for the other.
That was forever for me. I did, I sacrificed. But I’ve met someone who understands it and can deal with it and the bonus is that the kids are phenomenal. They give me something that I never, ever in my life thought I would have. Like I said, it’s just all the things that you go through in your life to get to this point makes it all worth it when you can have this.
You work on the other side of the music business as well. How has doing that helped you be a smarter musician and vice versa?
I think that the artists and the people that I work with know that everything that they’ve gone through or will go through, I’ve been through. So I can always relate to it from an artist standpoint. So when I go in and I’m negotiating a record deal or whatever, I’m always negotiating it from an artist’s standpoint. Not a manager who is representing an artist but an artist, so I get it. There’s certain things that unless you’ve lived this life, you won’t understand. You won’t understand the emotion that can go with certain things. A manager who might be putting together a tour and putting all these dates together might not take into consideration the impact it’s going to have on people, not only their health but home life, so you got to be really careful and creative and you always have to remember that these people are out there on this stage five nights a week, traveling to different cities and stuff like that. Your mental capacity has to be in check as much as your physicality does. So you have to do things in order to make it work to everybody’s benefit, whether or not their mind or emotions are getting destroyed because they are missing their families so much or they are beating themselves into the ground just to play a show. There are so many things that come into play that you can’t just sit there and understand through reading it on a computer screen, the routing of a tour. I will always be on the side of the artist regardless and I think that the people that work with me and I work with understand that and it gives them a sense of trust and a sense of security cause they know I will always have their back.
You’re still working with Down. What are they up to?
Phil [Anselmo] just got finished up with a solo European tour and then they are going back to Europe the first week of August. They’re going to be back there for three weeks doing a bunch of festivals, things like that, Eastern Bloc countries and whatnot. Then they come back and we’re going to do some stuff in the States. I think they’re going to be in Japan in October. They’ve got a lot on the horizon and then they will be back in the States, I believe, in January with Black Label Society again. That’s the way it looks right now. So they are going to be busy for a while.
Who was the first real rock star you ever met?
Well, by default, Jon Bon Jovi cause we grew up together (laughs). So I guess he’d be the first one.
He was just Jon back then.
Yeah, I mean, he still is but (laughs) … Oh, I know who. I was seventeen years old. It was Mick Jagger. I met him in a recording studio in Manhattan when I was seventeen. That’s where Jon was working at the time, his cousin’s studio, The Power Station in New York. I had been up there hanging out with him but I talked to Mick for a second, as you do cause what do you say? “Hey Dude, good band.” (laughs)
What was your most nerve-wracking experience on stage?
Oh man, there’s been a few. I’ve gotten cut open a few times. I got my ear kind of sliced in half on stage once during the first song of the set and that was kind of nerve-wracking going through the set bleeding all over myself. My ear caught on the mic clip and it ripped my ear in half and yeah, that sucked. I got my head busted open one time. I remember we played a place in, I want to say Belo Horizonte in Brazil, a long time ago and the place was like a concrete egg and the sound was indiscernible and you couldn’t understand it because it was just bouncing all over the place and it was like an eight second delay. I remember we were doing soundcheck and I couldn’t understand anything. It was absolutely impossible to understand anything and I remember being so frustrated at that show because it didn’t sound like music. It sounded like a bunch of people throwing pots and pans down like a metal scaffolding or something. It was not music and that sucked. THAT was nerve-wracking, for sure.
When you went to Russia in 1989 for the Moscow Peace Festival, were you nervous being there or did you feel safe because you were in that bubble?
I wasn’t nervous, per se, but there was also that thing in the back of your mind that, yeah, you got to be smart because you could easily get into some trouble here, you know. It was 1989 so you’re sitting there and it’s the end of the Cold War but you don’t really know it’s the end of the Cold War or not. We were raised our whole lives that they were the bad guys and you’re not supposed to associate with the bad guys. But yet the people were awesome. The coolest experience I had the whole time, besides the enormity of everything and being able to play on stage with those other bands and whatnot, was 2:00 in the morning and we were in Red Square and there was a Russian kid playing acoustic guitar and he couldn’t speak a word of English but he was singing “Yesterday” by The Beatles. And I was looking around and all these people from other bands and just people who were roaming around the Square are just enraptured by this guy. And that’s when it clicked. Like, Oh my God, music is the great communicator. It supersedes all boundaries – geographical, political, religious boundaries. It’s just amazing. Just by watching that Russian kid sing “Yesterday,” it was like, that dude is speaking to me right now and we couldn’t even have a conversation with words but through this, I’m like, I get it. That was a pretty monumental experience for me.
Did you have anything interesting to eat over there?
(laughs) We didn’t eat very much but I’ll tell you what, we drank our faces off, that’s for sure. The only thing that I remembered eating was when we arrived and they had like a reception for us at the Moscow version of the Hard Rock, which was a knock-off. We ate some food there but that was really the only food I remember eating.
As a guitar player who has been playing for thirty years, do you find yourself going back MORE to your influences for inspiration or less?
Oh more. I love that I can go on YouTube and I can pull up Michael Schenker videos or Randy Rhoads or Van Halen; Stevie Ray Vaughan, Lynyrd Skynyrd videos. I will sit there at like 4:00 in the morning and just be jamming along to it and learning stuff. It’s still really exciting to me and there’s still a passion in it and a desire to get better at the instrument, to be a better guitar player. It’s still incredibly important to me. So I continually go back and relearn stuff that maybe I learned when I was a teenager and have since forgotten. Those things are a part of what brought you to this point so you always have to sharpen your skills as well. They’re not just going to stay fine-tuned on their own. So I’m like a huge fan of YouTube simply because of that.
And before you get home from a concert, somebody has already posted something from that concert.
(laughs) It’s funny, I was thinking about that last night because there was a guy at the side of the stage that was basically filming the whole show. Back in the day you’d be like, “No, no, no,” and now it’s just part of the fabric of what makes the music the way it is today and it’s just accepted and that’s fine. I think if more people are aware of it maybe the more bands will pay attention to being better on stage cause it’s out there, out there for the world to see whether you want it to be or not. There’s nothing you can do about it. But I was thinking about that last night. I was like, man, this is going to be up online before I can even turn my computer on (laughs)
Some musicians feel that if you’re so busy filming, you miss the actual experience of the concert with the people in the audience and with you guys on stage.
Absolutely, I agree with that whole-heartedly. I totally agree with that. But I can’t tell people what to do. If that’s the way they want to spend their time at the show then that’s the way they want to spend their time. I do agree with them and I do feel like they are missing out on something, missing out on connection. You know, the whole idea about being at a concert is that you’re in that thing together. You’re interacting with the audience and it’s an experience that you share.
Tell us what Skid Row is doing for the rest of the year?
Touring. We’re booked till pretty much the end of December, so we’re touring for the rest of the year in the States and in Europe and all points in between.
Live photos by Jo Anna Jackson
