If you want to hang out with any rock star then Todd Kerns is the rocker for you. Slash’s bass player loves to talk about music, especially KISS or the Ramones or his own band, the Sin City Sinners. He also loves to talk about Star Trek and Star Wars. In fact, when I called him to do our interview just prior to his trek to Los Angeles to start working on the new Slash record, he was watching an episode of the classic TV series and looking forward to some Jedi adventures with a friend. “He’s getting the blu-ray of all six films with extra scenes,” Kerns told me happily. “So I’m going over to his place for a full-on marathon before I go to LA. That’s my big rock & roll day” (laughs)
No doubt one of the most anticipated albums of the coming year, Kerns will be bringing his amazing bass lines to the Slash opus. “I think it’s going to take about a month of work here,” he explained. “Then we take a break cause Myles [Kennedy] has to go back out [with Alter Bridge] and then we come back out and finish the record”. Plus, he is also recording a Christmas album with his Sinners that features some special guests like George Lynch.
So with his favorite TV show playing in the background, and his beloved KISS pinball machine by his side, Todd Kerns took me through his rock & roll journey from a nerdy Canadian boy to the most energetic musician running across the lighted stage, and loving every single minute of it.
Todd, where did you grow up, what kind of kid were you and what did you think you might grow up to be before music kind of took over your life?
I grew up in a really small town in Canada, fifteen hundred people, and it’s called Lanigan, Saskatchewan, Canada. We didn’t have a 7-Eleven and we didn’t have a McDonald’s either. It was a real small little town. I always wanted to be a musician, rock & roll specifically. I liked comic books and I liked science-fiction and I liked rock & roll and that was pretty much it. It’s pretty much how I am today. I don’t know if that’s a state of arrested development or what but it’s sort of a peter pan syndrome. I think the never growing up scenario, as we were just speaking of watching an all day Star Wars marathon, probably isn’t one of the most quote-unquote mature thing to do but it sure is a hell of a lot of fun (laughs).
I was talking to Slash one day and I go, “It must be so weird to have grown up in Los Angeles”, and like he still lives in Los Angeles, so it’s kind of like he lives probably twenty minutes from where he grew up, you know what I mean. It’s a similar thing to growing up in a small town, marrying your high school sweetheart, working at the mine or something and dying in that small town. The difference is that Los Angeles is sort of the center, as is New York City or say London, England, or one of those cities where everything happened. So to me, Hollywood was like another planet, New York City was a different star system and London, England, was not even on the map, know what I mean (laughs). So these were places I didn’t think I would ever see let alone become quite familiar with. So now it’s like Los Angeles is like a second home and New York City, I’ve been there a lot, and literally coming from a little tiny town where the only other guys who go on to do anything else go on to play hockey. And some of them go on to play in the NHL and do very well. So to me it couldn’t have been a loftier goal. But here I am (laughs).
What was it like growing up in Canada?
Canada and the US aren’t that different. I think that there’s a real sort of stereotype of over-politeness in Canadians, which I think is somewhat true. There’s a lot of like, “Oh I’m sorry”, “After You”. It’s sort of pounded into us, well not pounded into us, it wouldn’t be polite to pound anything into us (laughs) but it’s sort of very laid back, a great place to have grown up, a very casual place. But I had two brothers who were both younger than me and I wasn’t really sort of scholarly, didn’t really get into school too much and as soon as I picked up the guitar it all went to hell, unfortunately for my parents. I had it figured out pretty early on. I always loved music. I loved the Beatles and I loved KISS and I wanted to play rock & roll music and I finally picked up a guitar and it was all over. That sort of decided everything for me. I was like, this is what I’m going to do.
How old were you?
I was eleven when I first picked up a guitar. My father played a little bit of guitar so he showed me a couple chords and then within a week or two, I was already sort of past where he was at. And then my brothers both sort of fell in line behind me so that was kind of both a blessing and a curse, I suppose, cause none of us went on to be university material. We just all went into the trenches of rock & roll music and touring in a band. And we toured together for a long time. My next younger brother John and I had a band together from about 1989 for about ten years, and we did really well in Canada and then we called in our youngest brother to do another project after that. And that went on for about four or five years and then I did a solo run. I have Static In Stereo tattooed on my arm, which is the band all three of us were in together, so it felt like a fairly important thing. We’re a real tight family. The funniest thing about it is I’ve got a brother in Vancouver and I’ve got a brother in Toronto and my parents are in Saskatchewan, so we’re like so spread out all over North America but we’re all very tight and we have that common ground of playing music and playing the kind we all like to listen to, we all grew up on together. So that’s one of those bonds that never goes away.
So what was the first band that really blew you away and why them?
That’s probably a multi-tiered question. I’ll put it to you this way: the Beatles was the first one, cause my parents had the main food groups of music, I call it. They had the Beatles, they had Elvis, they had whatever else, so I was kind of like brought up on that stuff. But the Beatles were my first sort of awakening into music. But KISS, that was ours, know what I mean (laughs). The Beatles was everybody’s, the Beatles was my parents, my aunt and uncles, even my grandparents could appreciate the Beatles. And that’s been a long lasting thing to this day and has been a big part of my life. But when KISS came along, or when we found KISS, me and my brother, my youngest brother was too young, but the other two of us were like, What?! (laughs). And it seemed like a disease that everybody at school caught at the same time. A lot of my friends talk about how, “Well, I remember when I was a kid and people would say KISS sucks and they’d pick on us for listening to KISS”. And I was like, I don’t remember that at all. I remember like all of my friends and everybody I knew were like, this is our life now (laughs). So that was the biggest thing at that time that really kind of blew our minds.
I can so relate. We’re like the same age and my parents hated KISS. Maybe they were like scared.
Of course and that was the best thing too. When you’re a kid, the Beatles was like everybody’s and then KISS comes along and your parents do NOT get it. “What is this?” (laughs). And that’s the best thing about rock & roll, and always will be: it’s YOUR music, it’s not your parents. You’re supposed to be divided, just as their parents didn’t understand Elvis Presley or the Beatles for that matter. “That’s just noise, long-haired noise” (laughs). We look back on it now and it just seems silly but it’s true.
Did you ever dress up like KISS for Halloween?
You know what, a friend of mine is actually talking about writing a book about how KISS influenced his life and everybody around him who are KISS fans, which is basically the same thing as being a Star Trek fan or a Star Wars fan or even an extreme sports fan where you go to his house and he has Green Bay Packers everything (laughs). KISS fans are kind of like that. They’re fully into it, even when they don’t like something, it’s like, “fuck those guys”, this new album is terrible and blah blah blah, but they will still go out and buy it and still go to the concert and still support. And that’s the best thing about KISS fans. But I never dressed up as a kid. I was Alice Cooper one Halloween. I guess I never wanted to half-ass it. But as an adult years later, me and my friends here in Vegas started doing like a KISS tribute for fun every Halloween. We did it like three years in a row or something like that. It was like out of control with fire and everything but it’s like you get a bunch of KISS fans together and it’s not even about rehearsing; you kind of know all the songs and you get together and you play. It’s the beauty of that particular band.
What do you think it was about KISS that first captured your attention? Was it the costumes or the actual sound of the music?
I have this argument with people all the time. People always say that without the visuals they’d be nothing and I’m like, I suppose so but I think that’s probably true of many acts. But I think there’s a longevity there that goes a lot longer than it could have on just image. I personally really enjoy their music. I think it’s just something that is in my DNA. When I play, it’s always going to have a little bit of KISS in there, know what I mean. A little bit of Paul Stanley, a little bit of Gene Simmons in there when I’m playing what I play. Maybe it’s simplistic, maybe beneath certain players, but to me I was never all that interested in like, wow, look at how fast that guy can play the guitar. It actually just sounded like white noise to me most of the time. I was always kind of more into what’s being said not HOW it’s being said. So I think that’s the beauty of KISS. As a comic book fan and a science-fiction fan, they were basically superheroes playing music. You bought it, hook-line-and-sinker. If you were the right age, it all made sense to you.
But on the heels of that was like Cheap Trick and things like that. But to be honest with you, we were so young that the idea of picking up a guitar was still kind of bizarre to me. We all kind of air-banded to KISS songs and ran around like idiots but I think the idea that they were like spacemen and demons and things like that kind of really didn’t say to me that I can play this music, I can do what they’re doing. I was a kid and they were superheroes from another planet. It was actually The Who that was the first band. I saw the movie The Kids Are Alright when I was a kid. Keith Moon was already dead by this point so it’s kind of like one of those bizarre things. I was young and I sort of looked at this band that was full of fury and anger; the music was very pop-oriented but the band live was just a whirling dervish of mad energy. And I looked at Pete Townshend, who was this tall, skinny, big nosed, not what you would call a matinee idol looking rock & roll star. Certainly when you grew up on like Elvis and stuff like that where everybody was like perfect and polished, and there I was a tall, gangly, nerdy kid who liked comic books and Star Trek, you know. I sort of related to this. And that was when I really kind of dove into playing guitar and stuff like that. It was The Who that really kind of made me believe that I could do this.
From there I think I became enlightened to The Clash and the Sex Pistols and The Ramones and The Stooges. But I felt like The Who really kicked into a lot of the punk rock bands. It kind of really opened up a new world for me. I’d see Pete Townshend playing like three chords and tearing it up and I’d see Johnny Ramone laying down like the simplest of things but it was so affective and that was something that spoke to me.
When you picked up a guitar, do you remember the first song that you learned?
The funny thing is, me and a bunch of my friends around that time were all sort of getting into music and picking up guitars and things like that. And because we really didn’t know how to play any songs we started making stuff up so it became creative right away. It wasn’t really about let’s learn other people’s songs as it was “here’s a little thing I made up, listen to this”. We kind of started a band, just like three guys sitting around on acoustic guitars making stuff up. So that was kind of an important part of it too cause we could barely play but it really kind of opened up this whole other world of creativity. Starting to learn other people’s music came much later, a couple years later. We could play a high school dance if we could play like twenty songs by other people. So it was like, “Oh ok, we can do that”, and that’s pretty much how that happened.
I was like fourteen, I think; thirteen or fourteen. I joined this band of guys that were already out of high school. They needed a bass player and I could barely play, honestly, but I owned a Gibson bass and they were very impressed by that. I just came in and fumbled along until I kind of caught up. The band was called Buzz and it had a marijuana leaf on the logo (laughs) and I was like thirteen years old so my mother was like, “Ok”. They were just like small town long-haired rock & roll guys but they were all like eighteen, nineteen years old and I was like thirteen or fourteen. Maybe I was almost fifteen by that time; I don’t really remember, the math is all kind of wacky on me. But I was probably about fourteen. They’d play all these high school dances and stuff like that so on Friday nights we would go to some town and play Friday and Saturday, play two different high school dances, and then come back Sunday. But sometimes the drive would be really long on a Friday so I would leave half-days and we wouldn’t get back until Monday.
It got worse and worse as time went on. My parents became very concerned because suddenly I was missing a bunch of school, playing these high schools, and all these girls at the high schools started to get our addresses and we started getting fan mail at our houses (laughs). It was so funny, cause my mother would be like, “Who the hell is all these girls writing to you?” And I’m like, “I don’t know”. But you know back in the day in a small town you could easily find people’s addresses and write to them and whatnot. It was pretty funny.
It was originally a girl singer and I was just a bass player, and it slowly became just the three of us, the drummer and one of the guitar players and me. Back in those days they usually tried to figure out who was the least worst singer, the least bad singer. “Ok, he can kind of sing so make him sing it”. So slowly I became the singer. Then we just kind of pared down to a three piece. And that band actually went on the road after high school. We were called The Infants, originally called The Wicked Infants, kind of like a glam punk rock band. We kind of looked like girls and we’d show up in these towns and we’d be setting up in this little bar in a little town and we’d sent ahead these posters as promo. And I remember we were setting up one day and this lady bartender said to us, “When are the girls showing up?” And we went, “huh?” And she goes, “The band” and points at the poster, which is us, the three of us all glammed out, and we were like, “Oh shit” (laughs) Oh great, there’s going to be a bunch of these redneck cats waiting for this girl band to show up, this cute little girl band, and meanwhile it’s a bunch of dudes and we’re going to get killed”. But it actually ended up being a really cool gig.
When you first had to sing in front of an audience, what did it feel like? Were you nervous or was it like second-nature?
You know what, I have never really been nervous, and I say that sort of sparingly cause I remember as a kid it was more like, I imagine it is the same as not being like confident or cocky but more kind of like I know I can do this, I’ve got this. It’s like going out and playing whatever sport you played: I can play this game, I know how to do this. So you just go out and play it. For me, it was the same thing. Of course, there was a lot of getting out there and peacocking around and getting a reaction out of the audience and that whole thing is very addictive. I think that’s what most of us keep doing it for or otherwise we would have stopped years ago. You know, the whole sort of give and take of a live performance.
You are very well at it. You connect immediately with everyone out there.
Well, I appreciate that. To me, and I have said this before and I have probably said this to you before, it’s never really a case of over thinking it or I’m going to do this and I run over there. It’s like you get up there and you enjoy it so much it just comes out through the music. And I think that that’s the whole thing, that these people have paid money and they’re having a great time and they’re rocking out, so how can I not be rocking out at the same intensity level. Of course I should. It’s just sort of this electricity in the room that you just kind of get off on. That’s the way it’s always been, really. The only time I kind of get nervous is more just the alien experience where I force myself to do these acoustic shows every once in awhile, and even those aren’t really about being nervous, it’s more kind of like it’s just me, no drums and loud guitars to hide behind. It’s like an acoustic guitar and me and I can fall flat on my ass here. But I always sort of push myself into those things.
Do you remember the first concert that you went to?
The first concert that I went to my parents took me to see Beatlemania, which was not really a concert; it was like a show where these dudes were dressed up like the Beatles and they did like the young Beatles in the suits and then did the Sgt Peppers and did the later Abbey Road long-haired bearded version. I vaguely remember that. But the first real concert that I went to, which is the height of Canadianism, Canadiana I suppose, I went to see Loverboy with Bryan Adams opening (laughs). I was just a kid too. It was in the big city of Saskatoon, about an hour and a half from the town I grew up in. It was a pretty big deal for us, for me anyway, cause this was the band you’d seen the videos for and you’ve heard the record and now you’re going to go see them play. I wasn’t a massive fan necessarily but at that age where every single concert that comes to town you go and see pretty much. And that was pretty much the beginning of it. I can’t even remember how it happened. Somebody was going and, “You want to go?” “Of course”. And off we went. Bryan Adams was pretty new at that time. I mean, he was high energy. I remember him being like really impressive cause he was opening for Loverboy and he was full of that he had to prove something kind of thing. Of course in a couple of years he was much bigger than Loverboy actually.
Do you remember the first real rock star that you got to meet?
In a much smaller sense, there was a band from my neck of the woods called The Queen City Kids; Regina, Saskatchewan is called the Queen City cause it’s named after the Queen, but this band was called The Queen City Kids and were signed to CBS, I believe, or Columbia, some kind of Canadian deal, know what I mean, and we fucking loved them. We still love them … They were like the local heroes to us; they were from our neck of the woods and they had a record deal and had records out. It’s probably the same thing in any town in the USA I’m sure, where a band from like Biloxi it’s like wow, cause they’re from here. I remember meeting Alex the singer out front of a club one day and being pretty blown away by that. I was like, “Hey man” just chilling and chatting with him. So that was the initial one.
By the time we started Age Of Electric, we got to meet all kinds of prominent Canadian artists. But I remember Aerosmith was a big one. I remember meeting Aerosmith at a mall in Edmonton. There’s this giant mall, the biggest mall in the world or something, and Aerosmith was there. I missed the show cause I was always playing and they were just at the mall like on some free pass to go and ride the rollercoaster and all this stuff that they had in the mall. And I remember walking by Joe Perry and being shocked by how small he was. Well, I’m a giant, you know (laughs). I go, “Hey Joe” and he goes “Hey” and keeps walking (laughs). So I wouldn’t call that meeting him but it was still like, “whoa”. And Joey Kramer was there but he was really stand-offish but Tom Hamilton was really friendly. He came up and said, “Hey man, did you see the show last night” or whatever. I had an Aerosmith shirt on just by chance and I happened to walk into this mall and it turns out they’re at the mall. I go, “No, dude, I was playing” and he goes, “Oh that was too bad” or whatever. We just had like a quick chat. And then last year I met Tom Hamilton at Download again and he was equally as nice. I wanted to say to him, “I met you like twenty years ago and you were really cool” but I didn’t. It’s all been mind-blowing for me.
We were recording in Vancouver and Aerosmith was recording in the next studio so we had seen them every day and that was kind of weird. One day I was sitting on the couch in the front lobby just playing a Gretsch White Falcon guitar that Billy Duffy from the Cult had given to Bob Rock; Bob Rock was the producer and he was working with us. I’m just playing this guitar and Joe Perry walks in and he goes, “That’s a nice guitar. Is that one of Bob’s?” and I go, “Yeah” and he sits down like right beside me and starts playing guitar and I’m like, this is JOE PERRY, dude. It’s like Joe Perry and then Jimmy Page is the only guy bigger than him above that, and then it gets into Keith Richards and all those kind of people. Steven Tyler would just walk into our studio like out of nowhere, like you’d be sitting there kind of in the middle of listening to a playback and he comes in at like two in the afternoon dressed head to toe AS Steven Tyler. He never shows up like in a baseball cap and sweats. He’s like Steven Tyler all day long. He’d burst in, “Hey you guys got any shakers and tambourines?” And we’d be like, Oh my God, it’s Steven Tyler. We’d go, “Yeah, here you go”. Those kind of experiences were pretty heavy but it’s heavy for me all the time.
Meeting Alice Cooper with Slash, meeting Rick Nielsen with Slash, meeting Brad Whitford with Slash. I’ve met a million people now with Slash that have been huge. Even Slash was pretty heavy originally. As cool as you try to play it, Guns N Roses was a major influence on me. My top three favorite bands are KISS, the Ramones and Guns N Roses. Now Slash is a friend and a very cool, wonderful guy and these are all major things. And I never want to lose that thing, never want to lose that sort of like being blown away by, wow this is that person.
Like Lemmy is this really normal guy sometimes. I mean, he’s not but now that I kind of know him he’s like recommending books and things like that (laughs). Very normal things you wouldn’t expect to be hearing from Lemmy. “You got to read Game Of Thrones. There’s five books and they’re great”. Meeting Steven Tyler officially last year was a big deal. Bobby [Schneck] introduced me. He comes over and gives Bobby a hug cause they know each other from Bobby filling in for Brad and he goes, “This is Todd, he plays bass” and he goes, “Give me a hug” and Steven Tyler gives me a hug (laughs). He’s in the mode of hugging people and I’m like, oh my God. Again, cause it’s Steven Tyler, it doesn’t get much bigger than him. It does, yes, but in my world Aerosmith was like, for a good chunk of my life Aerosmith was a prototype, so to be sitting there talking to him and asking me where I’m from. “I’m from Vancouver” and he’s like, “I think we recorded some records up there”. “Yeah, you recorded like three or four records up there” (laughs). But I mean I’m having a regular conversation with this dude. And this was just before the American Idol thing was aired. So now his world is even bigger than it was then. I think that that’s kind of the beauty of playing music.
What has been your most memorable time on stage so far?
Well, there’s been several. There’s been some memorable shows with Slash obviously, all those massive audiences that we’ve played, those are always memorable. Playing with Alice Cooper onstage was massive. Playing with Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick onstage was memorable for me. I’ve fallen on stage a couple of times, those are pretty memorable (laughs). It’s a full contact sport, I always say. I remember the final show we ever did in my band Age Of Electric cause it was quite an emotional thing, to actually come to the decision that this was going to end. But I do remember playing this hockey arena in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and we were opening for Our Lady Peace, that’s very Canadian right there, and I distinctly remember that I was going to make a point of taking this all in and seeing the pockets of people who were there for us with their signs. I remember that very well.
It’s funny, people sometimes will say, “Remember that show blah-blah-blah?” Absolutely not (laughs) cause you’ve played so many shows in your life it’s like one big blur of stuff … It’s hard to really kind of put it out there as this was the most memorable cause I’ve gotten to do so many amazing things and when your favorite thing in the world to do is to play music live then pretty much every single time is the best time I’ve ever had in my life.
I love to go to concerts. Always have. I don’t care who it is I love it.
It’s people like you that keep it going. You ever meet those people who are like, “I saw Phil Collins back in 1983 but I haven’t been to a show since” and you’re like, “You don’t go to shows? What are you talking about? What do you do with your life?” (laughs). But some people aren’t as passionate about music as we are. That’s the way it goes.
What is your all-time favorite album and what makes it so special?
That is so tough. I can never give you one word answers because for one there’d be so many different versions of that. I will say Appetite For Destruction is definitely up there. It has so many elements of it that shouldn’t have made it as popular as it is because when we first heard it as kids, we were floored by how raw it was; floored by how he was swearing on the record. It was definitely the kind of record your parents were never going to understand. But for about a year there, for quite awhile there, it was our record. I’m not saying that because I play with the guy, it really was a big deal. Beyond that KISS Alive I was a massive one for me. I think that might have been the first KISS record we ever had cause we were too young to really kind of understand but that one definitely changed everything. Cheap Trick Live At Budukon is a big one. At that time it opened up a whole other world. You don’t have to be a superhero to play rock & roll music. You can be just a normal dude. Many of The Who records, maybe Who’s Next or something like that, I was so deeply into all of the records. The same can be said for the Beatles. It’s hard to really pinpoint one album. I suppose if I had to put a gun to my head I would say Abbey Road just because for whatever reason, is the one I keep going back to. With KISS records it’s the same thing but KISS Alive I is an amalgamation of all three first albums into one live presentation and that sort of presented that thing live and that sort of stuff. Then Never Mind The Bullocks by the Sex Pistols, the first Ramones album, those were both massive records for me that will always be on my ipod.
Who has been your biggest influence as a musician and why them?
Well, I think it would go back to Pete Townshend. Keith Richards is always a constant one. The Ramones, KISS, Guns N Roses. Yeah, Keith Richards is definitely the one I always go back to, I think because we’re only sort of now watching the first generation of rock & roll bands get old. It’s different to watch Muddy Waters or BB King or blues guys getting old cause it’s an older music form. But to actually watch a rock band get old is, we’re witnessing that for the first time. It didn’t happen before. The Rolling Stones are retirement age guys playing in a band together. What’s the example before them? Nobody really. The Stones, The Who, the older bands they just keep going and going and going and going. I kind of look at Keith as sort of like this example of, what am I going to be doing at his age? I think to myself, probably the same damn thing (laughs). I’ll be playing rock & roll music and reading comic books and watching sci-fi.
In next week’s column to close out the month of October is Great White’s Mark Kendall, in a continuation of an interview I did with the guitar player a few months ago. Then it’s Myles Kennedy of Alter Bridge to start off November.
