They are the band that would not die. Panned by critics but loved by fans and musicians alike, Anvil has had the last laugh in all the naysayers’ faces. After forty years and sixteen albums, they are still out there playing and recording and doing interviews and having a grand old time the whole way. And now in 2018, the Canadian trio are releasing album #17, Pounding The Pavement, and hitting the road to bring it’s loud, charged-up sonics to those fans who have fist-pumped with them since 1981’s Hard N Heavy.
Granted, Anvil has not always had it easy. Formed in 1973 before Steve Kudlow got his nom de plume of Lips, when he and his high school friend Robb Reiner were just two kids itching to play music. A band grew out of that and by the seventies, they were ready to rock & roll on a bigger level. They were on a high during the metal days of Headbanger’s Ball and too much hairspray, bringing to the atmosphere some snarling but fun songs such as “Mothra,” “Metal On Metal” and “Forged In Fire,” all from albums produced by Chris Tsangarides, who just passed away on January 6th.
In 2008, they were the subject of a documentary, Anvil! The Story Of Anvil, which sparked a revitalization of the band and it’s music before things started cooling down once again. But to the band, it was all the same. They kept touring, they kept recording. Through grunge, pop and Lady Gaga, Anvil held to their guns and kept firing. “Despite all adversities that the life of a musician entails, we still find ourselves in a very privileged position,” said Lips recently.“We can basically do what we want to do. Nobody interferes, nobody tries to steer us in one direction or the other. Which other artists can say that of themselves? Even the biggest bands in the world envy us and tell us, ‘You damn bastards have always been able to do what you want.’”
With Pounding The Pavement officially coming out this Friday, January 19th, Anvil, which also includes bass player Chris Robertson, are wound up and ready to forge ahead. Glide had a quick chat with Lips a few days ago about the new album and the fundamentals of how Anvil creates their music.
The new album is ready to come out but when did you actually start working on it?
Oh immediately after recording the last album, much the same way we are working on new songs for the next album. It’s a process.People go, “Jeeze, you just finished an album and you’re writing already?!” Well, yes, I just finished an album but I was finished writing that album six months ago, seven months ago. You rehearse it and get it all honed, go in and record it and it’s finished. Now you move on (laughs). That’s basically and fundamentally how it works.
We are on somewhat of a track, you know what I mean. You get a momentum going and it becomes a schedule and a thing that you do and I think it’s put us in a really, really great place in the mental fashion, where you know what tomorrow is going to bring and you know what you have to do for tomorrow. It’s a great place to be mentally.
Are all the songs on Pounding The Pavement new songs or did you have any left over from the last record [Anvil Is Anvil, 2016]?
No, whatever we do is always brand new. The only reason I’d pull something out is because it was either suggested or I relooked at it. But it’s usually stuff from many years ago rather than the last albums. I mean, by the general rule, if I remember a riff that I wrote when I was seventeen, then there’s probably a reason that I remember it so maybe I should be looking at it. But truth be told, most of those things have been used (laughs). After forty years, I think you use that stuff up. So I’m always looking for new stuff.
Do you remember the first song you worked on for this record?
It was actually the bonus track, “Don’t Tell Me.” It was the first song that we put together for the new album. And the last song that we put together was “I’m Just Doing What I Want.” That was the last song that we put together. Songs appear when they appear, however they appear. That’s about it. There is no real rhyme or reason, you know.They have little to do with each other as far as their sort of feeling, because it was a different day that I wrote it or a different week or a different month.So every song has it’s own identity on this record.There are no two that are really the same.
“Don’t Tell Me” seems very timely to today, lyric-wise.
The thing is, what happens lyrically is that whatever is in your environment has kind of seeped into my brain and then comes out. So a lot of external influences of the moment make their way into the lyrics; whether I want them to or not, they always do. That also goes for the general mood and character of the era in which it’s written.
As an example, with the media and everything that’s been going on, and sayings like “fake news,” I would put it in the lyrics and I didn’t realize till after. Like, “Oh jeeze, it kind of makes it relevant for the times.” I wasn’t thinking I could use “fake news” cause it will be relevant for the time. I thought, I just used the lyric because it needed to be (laughs). I don’t know, you do things and you’re not really conscious as to why. You’re just doing it. You’re doing it to get it done and it’s a goal: “I’m going to get these lyrics done and sing about this and write it.” You write and then afterwards you kind of reflect, Oh what did I write? (laughs)
To a great degree, I don’t look at the lyrics. I don’t look at them until it’s time to sing. I learned very early on that for me, my best work is when I can improvise, when I’m actually in a creative environment. The way that I discovered this is from lead guitar overdubs. Years ago and up until many, many solos I generally planned because I’d begin playing them during rehearsal of the song after they were written. Now lead guitar is an overdub. You don’t generally play the lead guitar parts at the same time that you record the actual song. The songs are done in layers. So in my earlier years I would actually begin writing the solo as I wrote the song. Then of course I’d get to the studio and have to perform that solo and it’s interesting because what I discovered was that when you learned the solo from playing live off the floor you get regimented into parts and they don’t grow. They get to where they’re the same every time and that’s what the problem is. They’re not growing. They’ve got to a certain point because you never, until you get to the studio, you’re never hearing it back without playing it. You can listen to it after you played it and then you go, oh wait a minute, maybe I should have done this, maybe I should have done that. When you set your solo and you do it, you struggle to get it exactly the way you want it, because it’s completely written, that’s the first aspect. Then it doesn’t surprise you and doesn’t move you afterwards because it’s just doing what you expected it to do. And I felt after that experience, I’ve lost excitement, lost excitement for myself.
When you over-rehearse things, there’s no excitement and I could have broken those parameters given another chance. Then you are left with that feeling of, I could have done way better if I just made up a whole new thing. Why did I do that? Afterwards you’re thinking, shit, I could have done this! Why? And the reason you didn’t was because you locked yourself into something without going in there with an open mind.
On the Metal On Metal album, one of the solos in particular was in the song “Tag Team” and I hadn’t written a solo for it. I think it was like the last song that we wrote for the Metal On Metal album and I hadn’t gotten that far with rehearsal and written a solo for it yet. So here I was with the whole track and Chris Tsangarides, rest his soul, he goes, “Okay, play me the solo.” And I go, “I don’t know what to play. I didn’t plan anything.” (laughs). He says, “Just go for it.” And in one take, it was the best solo I’d recorded on the entire album, for me personally. I went, “Oh shit, why didn’t I do this with the whole album? Listen to what I just did there!” I would never have done this.And that’s the thing, the improvisation at the moment and the excitement of having to do it at the moment spurred something that would not normally have come out.
So then, and because I learned that, now I’m not going to rehearse my solos and that way I can create them and shape them and form them in the studio and then learn them afterwards (laughs). That’s the way to really do it. Don’t do it before, do it after. Go the other way.
Do you feel that same way about the vocals?
Yeah, if you do that with guitar then you should do the same thing with the vocals. You just write all the songs but then you don’t choose the notes and you don’t choose the rhythm; you don’t completely choose the rhythm in which you sing the beats in the lyrics so they can be scatted and broken up. You can do a lot of different things with lyrics, right. So that one lyric, when you go to sing, you’ve got a huge parameter.Even though you’ve written the lyrics, you still got huge parameters that you can experiment with. And that’s a good thing because then you can do really interesting stuff that you wouldn’t do if you couldn’t hear yourself back immediately. You can get it through a much, much, much higher level of idea because you’ve got the technology, basically. You’ve got the independence of not having to perform two parts at once. You can actually create each part one part at a time and you utilize that to it’s fullest extreme, because when you try to rehearse everything, you’re doing all of the layers at once.
Like, if I’m dropping out to play lead guitar, I’m not playing the rhythm that is supposed to be there. If I’m singing, I’m playing guitar at the same time so you’re kind of strapped into the feel of whatever the guitar is, and it’s harder to disperse your vocal on that. It’s harder to separate your vocal and guitar playing when you’re doing it at the same time. So you’re playing with timing and melody and harmony. You have to learn those things and it’s better to learn them after at the higher level that you recorded it at and then apply it to your playing, your guitar playing, rather than being locked into your guitar playing and not being able to expand because you’re locked into your guitar playing. You need to separate them to have a really close look at the possibilities of what can be done with a piece of music.These are the aspects of songwriting, how I approach recording. I don’t know, it’s unusual (laughs).
But it’s interesting to see how you do it cause everybody is different
Yeah, everybody is different and I would never criticize anybody for their approach. The approach that I found the most comfortable and the most gratifying and the most creative, that’s what I like to do. So when I go into the studio, I have no solos prepared and I have no melodies prepared. I got all the lyrics and all the riffs and all the bed tracks are completely tight.You can’t be tighter! (laughs). It takes us virtually three days to record the actual main tracks of a record, which that is a lot of work (laughs). And they’re played by a band. These are all full performances, not edited together. These are the band playing as a band without click tracks, because click tracks ruin the feel of what we are about. We have our own sense of timing. It’s our own natural way of being and we believe that that’s keeping the essence of the band real, is if you go in and you play it natural as if it’s really live and you feel the song rather than play it to a machine.
The song “Rock That Shit” almost sounds like a 1950’s sock hop run through a meat grinder. Did that come from your earliest influences in music?
Absolutely! And part of that is, I was born in the fifties so it’s part of my fabric. I can’t help it. These are the things I had in common with Lemmy.Although Lemmy was ten years older, I think he was quite shocked to hear some of the things, the music, that I listened to because he was going, “How did you know about that?” And the reason that I knew about things like I’m talking about is because I had an older brother and sister. So by the time I was two or three years old, I’m hearing this stuff on their record player and on the radio. My first conscious song that I can remember is “All Shook Up,” Elvis Presley. I loved that song, really loved that song, and that’s my first recollection of music and I just don’t know why. It was like I was just attracted to it and I can recall that.
My life has run simultaneously to basically the coming trend out of the forties of big bands into electric guitar. So my life runs simultaneously to the electric guitar. I lived through and learned through its infancy to today. It’s not like I discovered Jimi Hendrix twenty years after the fact. I discovered Jimi Hendrix in the winter of 1967. I was playing guitar by the Summer Of Love (laughs).
What guitar were you playing back then?
You know, the first guitar I ever got was an electric guitar and I didn’t own my own acoustic guitar until I was well into my thirties. It’s kind of funny. I never owned an acoustic guitar and I was only attracted to electric guitar. The first album that I bought was in 1965, something like that, which was the Rolling Stones December’s Children. That’s like for a nine-year-old, or whatever, it’s like, what the hell! (laughs)
And you put “Paint It Black” on your first record
Yeah, first album, we did a Rolling Stones song and it’s because, like I said, it’s my lifeline and there are many things in my lifeline that I love that the world also loves. Trust me (laughs). I watched the whole genre grow. I saw the very beginnings of rock music and the electric guitar playing. I was attracted to electric guitar playing and any place and anywhere that I could find that commodity, that’s where I went looking. And where did that bring me? It brought me all the way to today.
Chris Tsangarides (passed away 1/6/18) produced three of your albums. What did he do best for Anvil as a producer?
What’s great about Chris is that if we had a crazy idea, he’d love it (laughs). And that was very attractive to us because we were almost photographic in some of our pieces of music so they needed good sound effects, some of the songs. They were written specifically to take in those sound effects and the sound effects become part of the music. And CT was amazing at creating those kinds of things. Going back to a song like “Mothra.” When we first did the demo we tried to simulate or create the middle section of the song and of course we only came close in the demo, right. We knew what we were TRYING to do; we were trying to create these kind of abstract sound effects and CT came in and did the song and said, “No, we’ve got to get a vocoder and let’s record the sound of your Fender Twins being smashed.” It was really cool working with CT and what can I tell you, I’m heartbroken. I loved him with all my heart. He was a really, really dear friend and I’m going to miss him very bad.
Second Photo by Rudy De Doncker
