In 2019, we got to see a new side of Ron Thal, aka Bumblefoot. Known for his rock metal guitar riffs and gruff punkish vocals, Thal took on a project that took him back to his youth, to a time when he was attempting to learn all he could on guitar from a variety of musical genres. An unapologetic KISS kid, Thal found there was more to riffing than Ace Frehley. So when someone approached him years later about taking on lead vocals, and some guitar, to tour with the band Asia, alongside the iconic Yes, on what was being dubbed the Royal Affair Tour, Thal was willing and able to take on something new, even though he knew there would be doubters, himself maybe amongst them. He knew it would be hard work to get his vocal cords to adjust to an alternate universe sound. But when he said yes to the offer, that was it, he was 100% into doing it the best he could do.
Growing up in Brooklyn, Thal could be a bit mischievous, admitting to having a “vandalism kit,” as he told me during a 2014 interview for Glide. But music was at his core from an early age. “By the time I was six, I had a band with the older kids in the neighborhood. We were writing songs. I couldn’t play yet but it doesn’t matter cause from day one I realized I only have to be good enough to play your own songs.” At thirteen, he started playing bars, describing the sound as, “Loudness meets Iron Maiden meets Manowar meets Yes meets Rush. It was interesting stuff.”
Thal spent almost ten years with Guns N Roses, playing at the band’s two Vegas residencies in 2012 and 2014. He recorded two albums with Art Of Anarchy and is currently working on his second album with Sons Of Apollo, who are set to release a live DVD at the end of the month. Thal also travels all over the world as a solo artist, participates in guitar clinics and is about to launch into his second annual Bumblefoot Music Camp in September.
But taking on something as diversified and technically ingenious as Prog was a big step for Thal. Although Asia had more leanings toward the pop flavors of the day, the musicianship was undeniably resplendent, with Steve Howe on guitar, John Wetton on vocals, Geoff Downes on keyboards and Carl Palmer on drums. They had several hits coming off their first couple of albums – “Heat Of The Moment,” “Only Time Will Tell” and “Wildest Dreams” – and kept going despite the departures of Howe and Wetton, who passed away in 2017 from cancer.
Glide spoke with Thal near the end of the tour about his involvement with Asia, his love for the double-neck guitar, upcoming projects and his current philosophy of music.
You’ve been involved in a lot of things since you left Guns N Roses, most currently being on tour with Asia. Tell us how that gig came about.
Yes! It was about three years ago and it was a bunch of musicians and we all got together and played all these different songs from our backgrounds. It was Carmine Appice from Vanilla Fudge on drums, it was Rudy Sarzo on bass, Geoff Downes of Asia and Yes on keyboards, Phil Naro on vocals from Talas, Billy Sheehan’s band – everyone is connected somehow (laughs) – and on the second guitar was Gene Cornish of the band the Rascals. It was an interesting mix and we had a blast. We did shows in Toronto and Chicago, and then someone from the Asia camp reached out to me and said, “Hey, would you want to play in the Asia band? We have a tour coming up next year.” But I knew I was going to be busy with getting other bands off of the ground so I told them that it just wasn’t a good time for me to do it.
Then when this tour came about, they asked me again, and I said, “Yeah, you know what, let’s do it. Let’s go out there and have some fun.” It just sounded like it’d be a great tour and it definitely is. I was just going to be playing guitar in that and there was going to be a different singer. Then that singer, like a few months before, said that he wouldn’t be able to pull it off; he wasn’t going to be able to do the tour. So Carl and Geoff said, “Why not have Bumble sing, he can sing this.” So I said yes. And it goes against everything I was planning for my life, cause I’m not a hired gun kind of guy. I’m not the person that saw myself joining other bands and filling iconic shoes. It’s not something I wanted to do again.
I was very happy with everything else I’ve been doing where I form a band with other people or I’m a partner in that band and we build it from the ground up together: we write songs, we record together, we do shows together and we’re equals and it’s OUR band. I’m not just someone that is brought in as a utility – and when I say utility, that’s how it feels to me if I’m just brought in as a hired gun. That’s not me, cause my heart is in it and I start feeling like I’m more of a part of it than I really am, and that’s not a healthy relationship.
And John Wetton, who fronted Asia, definitely made it unique with his style and his singing
Oh yeah, to go in and fill the shoes of the irreplaceable John Wetton, I mean, that’s big shoes to fill. But I said yes and I decided if I’m going to do this, I’ve got to make sure that I do this the best I can with the utmost respect to John Wetton – not as a tribute act but to try and capture the spirit that he had, the sound that he had, the feeling that he made people feel.
How did you do it?
I went and started doing my homework. I spent about two months first just changing the way I sing, rebuilding my approach to how I sing, and getting to where my brain will default to a new physical way of singing, where I’m vibrating and resonating different parts of the body and relaxing different parts and pushing different parts so I can comfortably sing the way John Wetton sounded. I started watching old live videos from the first Asia tour to the last, just getting to know his approach and getting to know him vocally.
Then also doing the same with Steve Howe’s guitar parts. I’ve always been a huge Yes fan so I was very familiar with both Yes and Asia, guitar-wise. I went back and found out what gear he used for that album and tried to match the sounds. And then to coordinate doing two different people’s parts at once, because John Wetton, when he sang, it would anchor down his bass parts so they would go together. Steve Howe, different person playing to different accents of the music and having to find a way to coordinate those vocal parts with someone else’s guitar parts, so getting that down. Learning to sing like someone else while playing two different people’s parts at once and then switching it on my double-neck, the fretless neck, where all the slide parts that Steve Howe would do, doing them on the fretless.
So now I’m playing on two necks, playing two different people’s parts and singing like someone else, and then changing guitar patches for different sounds that match the album with my left foot and changing vocal sounds with my right foot on two different pieces of gear. That’s what I do up there and just did it enough so that it became comfortable and I could do it effortless and really focus on not thinking about all of it and giving as much as I can to the audience. That was my task in taking this on (laughs).
You know, I wondered when I first heard you would be singing with Asia, I kind of did a double-take because I didn’t really see their music in your wheelhouse. I knew you were a KISS kid but Yes and Asia?
Yeah, I was into KISS and into classic rock and everything but I listened to Prog. I was into UK, which had John Wetton in it, and Bill Bruford was also in Yes, I believe on the Fragile album. The first Yes album I heard was when I was seven years old, Going For The One, and to this day it’s one of my most favorite albums, probably the most beautiful songs and most incredibly arranged songs that you can ever hear in rock music. So when the Asia album first came out I, of course, got it. Everybody had that album and knew it well. It was interesting how it just seemed like a progression, like when the Drama album came out, “Does It Really Happen?” “Tempus Fugit,” all of those songs, then from there only a couple of years later hearing Asia and how their British Prog personnel would all just mix and match and always do something amazing.
But I was definitely an Asia fan. It’s not one of the bands that I would go and say, “Who were your favorite bands growing up?” But I was a fan. It’s not like I didn’t know the music at all. The same thing with Guns N Roses or with any other band, everybody was a fan, especially if you were a guitar player. If you’re a musician, you’re absolutely a fan, and those first albums of both of those bands were so legendary. If a guitar player doesn’t know those albums back-to-back, then he needs to hang it up (laughs).
Was there one song in particular from the Asia catalog that was a little more difficult to get down the way you wanted?
Oh there were a few. There was “Wildest Dreams.” It had so many interesting key changes and the guitar parts were really busy over the vocal parts. There’d be times when the guitar is pretty much taking a solo while you’re singing vocal lines so getting all those down plus some of the higher notes that he would hold, those kind of things and holding those while playing the guitar. So that one. Really, some of those hit songs from the first album, until you play them and sing them, you don’t realize how tough they really are. Even “Sole Survivor,” that one vocally, all those high notes that he sings, like in the second verse (singing) “When I saw it, I was amazed, One-time glory,” and he holds it, “right in my gaze,” like the way he moves down the scale so quick and sings with no vibrato, he just nails the pitch exact and holds it just so steadily and perfectly. Getting that kind of stuff down and getting comfortable with that and learning how to do it like him, that took work.
Even “Only Time Will Tell,” (singing) “You’re leaving now, It’s in your eyes,” just to do it in the way that he did it, because I was more of an old-school metal singer where it was the open vowels like ah, eh, oh in a higher range that I was belting from the front of my mouth. With John Wetton, Greg Lake, people like that, it’s more like the chin is forward, it’s a chesty, full sound and you resonate in the upper back of your throat with an almost French-speaking type open nasal thing that’s just subtle, that doesn’t come to the forefront, just in part of the resonation and they would hold eh’s and ooh’s high up, which is the opposite sounds that I would usually be able to hold. And they do it all without vibrato! So it was complete opposite singing of how I always sang and it made me a much better singer I think, because it made me develop, all the holes in my voice got filled by learning how to sing like them.
Did you wonder how the Prog crowd would react to you, especially the ones who did know of you from before and wondered if you could pull this off?
Oh yes! I was bracing for a storm of hate, cause I’ve been through that before. And I couldn’t believe it, people were so positive, so kind, so encouraging. It was a relief (laughs). I didn’t feel like I was going to war. I felt like I was coming home and I’m grateful for it. The fans have been absolutely wonderful and it’s been such a pleasure getting to know more people in the Yes/Asia world and they’ve been wonderful people.
Let me also ask you this, throughout this tour with Asia, have you gotten distracted by Geoff’s sparkly shoes?
(laughs) Geoff is the best-dressed man in the band. His jackets, his shoes. He is a rock star! I have to take some clothing lessons from him (laughs).
Ron, I have seen you perform solo, just you and a guitar, and I have seen you perform with a big band, and you never falter, you always appear completely comfortable. Do you look at each situation differently or overall the same?
I actually look at them differently. You feel like you have different roles and there are different things the audience wants from you. Like with Asia, what’s really interesting is that I’m doing something for the first time on a big stage where I’m taking the guitar off and just fronting the band. When Steve Howe comes out for the last four songs, I’m taking off my guitar and I’m just the lead singer. That was some new territory for me. But at the first rehearsal, I was going to keep my guitar on and just back him up in certain spots when there is two guitars on the recording, and Steve said to me, “No, authentically, the band was always just one guitar. Would you be okay if we just keep it one guitar and you just sing?” And before I had a chance to overthink or doubt anything, I said, “Sure, let’s do it.” So I just jumped right into the water without knowing how to swim and halfway through it I was like, you know what, this is fun, screw the guitar! (laughs). And it’s been great and I’ve been loving it.
A whole new aspect of Bumblefoot
Yeah, I can’t be screaming like Paul Stanley and going into all kinds of banter. I’m not going to be cussing, “How you motherfuckers doing?!” (laughs) I’m not going to be stage-diving. It’s a different audience that wants something different. They want a sing-a-long and they’ll stand up and clap but they’re not looking to start a mosh pit and I’m not looking to try and get them to start one. Whereas, say Sons Of Apollo, that one is all about just exploding outward and of course you want to play solid and do everything solid but it’s more of a high-energy hard rock/metalish kind of show.
With my own shows, I treat it more like, okay, this is all us hanging out and I’m just going to be myself 100%, where I’m just talking and telling stories and doing whatever and having fun with friends. That’s how it feels. With my own shows, it’ll be an acoustic show or it’ll be an electric version of that where I call it a storyteller’s show, where I might play to some backing tracks as well. It could be a clinic where it’s almost similar to a storyteller show but we just get into more technical aspects of things. Or it could be a full band show or it could just be an open jam. There are so many different things and I love doing it all.
Now, I’m playing a lot of arenas and ampitheatres with Asia, and I will still do that solo show once in a while. But I can go from playing Mohegan Sun, where there is almost 8000 people there, to doing a guitar clinic where there might be eighty people there. And neither one defines you. One doesn’t mean you’re a rock star and the other doesn’t mean that you don’t have an audience. It’s all about you doing what you do and if you’re affecting one person in a good way then you’re doing the right thing. And that is what I realized, from doing big and small and everything in-between, is that there is no shame in any of it! Just do what you do and as long as you’re being who you are, the only shame is if you’re being a fraud to who you are, you’re not being the real you. That’s the only thing that wouldn’t be good, if you’re not being authentically yourself.
But I love that it’s at a point where there’s such variety and diversity musically and also it’s good because it keeps you on your toes. If you’re only doing big shows, there’s nothing scarier than being face-to-face in a small room where you have to look everyone in the eye, cause there is safety in distance. When you are on a big stage and people are thirty feet away from you, if you do nothing but smaller shows and then you get on a big stage and you have all this room to run around, you don’t know what to do with all this space. So it’s good to do it all and have that expanded comfort zone and always try to be at the very edge of that comfort zone where you are about to step out of it. Keep one foot in and one foot out.
When you played your very first concert when you were a kid, what frightened you the most about that first gig?
I was seven years old and I was not frightened because I was too young to be self-aware. That’s all that stage fright and all that stuff is, is that once you start getting into puberty, that’s when you start to become self-analytical and you start to question yourself or doubt yourself and compare yourself and judge yourself. And that’s the mistake, that’s when you’re looking in the wrong direction and that’s when people start getting stage fright or getting miserable about what they do, cause they start to think it’s about themselves or they’re just looking at themselves and they forget, oh wait, this is not about me, this is about everyone else, this is about them, I’m doing this to give something to the audience. If all I’m thinking about is myself then I’m being selfish and I don’t belong on this stage. If this is what I’m going to do, then I should play to a mirror and not to an audience.
So getting past all that, which you’ve got to hit thirty and then that starts to change. The older you get, the more you just get that I live unapologetically and I don’t answer to anybody attitude and it gives you the freedom where you can just be on stage, be comfortable with your good, your bad, your humanity, your imperfections, which makes you beautiful. Just be you and have fun and that’s what the audience is there for. They’re not there for perfection. They want to get energized and lifted and have a great experience. They want to get a true high out of being there. And that should be the goal. It shouldn’t be looking at yourself saying, “Am I doing this right? Me this, me that, me, me, me.” That’s looking in the wrong direction and you’ve got to grow past that. It’s a natural thing that starts in pre-teenage and you’ve just got to grow the fuck up.
You told me in our previous interview that you were a realistic lyricist, that you wanted to share all of you from the stupid fun stuff to the more serious stuff in your lyrics. Is that still your core?
Oh yeah, yeah. That is the most primary thing. I mean, sure, you can be a storyteller and not all the stories need to be about yourself, like (singing), “A little ditty bout Jack & Diane.” We all do storytelling but in your core you have to be real, you got to be you, or you’re going to slowly resent what you do and hate yourself and feel like you’ve lost yourself and that’s not a good feeling.
Do you ever overthink or second-guess your lyrics when you’re writing them?
Oh God yeah. It’s easy to fall into that trap where you just spiral into that place where, it could be mixing a song and obsessing over a little EQ move or it could be lyrics or it could be a solo; it could be anything. It could be artwork for the album where it’s very easy to obsess over the tiny details that may not mean anything to anyone else. I always ask myself one question: in 4.5 billion years, when the earth is burnt to a crisp as the sun keeps growing, will this problem matter? And if the answer is no, don’t sweat it.
You probably love your double-neck guitar more than any other guitarist out there today. What is your fascination with it?
(laughs) It does everything I want it to do! A lot of people need to switch from one guitar to another guitar, switch to a fretless maybe, but I have it all in one and during a song I can go from fretless to fretted and get all the sounds I want and all the styles of playing that I want to play all in the one guitar. It’s my everything guitar. It has the fretless neck, it has my little thimble holder so I can pull out the thimble that I use as a technique to expand the range of notes you get on a string. It’s my go-to guitar.
When was the first time you actually played a fretless?
It was about a little over twenty years ago and the company Vigier were making fretless guitars. At that point, the company had been around about eighteen years and we were at a NAMM show together and I saw it hanging up and I said to the owners, “Why didn’t you tell me you make these?” And it was, “Cause nobody plays them, nobody buys them. We sold three of them in the last eighteen years.” I was like, “Give me one! I’ll take it home and I will play this thing day and night.” And I did. He gave me one to get comfortable with and I started writing music with it and doing everything with it. In fact, one of the first things I wrote with it was a song called “Day To Remember,” which ended up being the theme song for That Metal Show on VH-1. That was one of the first things I did when I’d just got the fretless guitar.
When you first started playing guitar, what was the hardest thing for you to get the hang of?
The F chord. I could not get my first finger to curl the knuckle down and flatten against two strings while keeping the other knuckles curled outward to hit just one string each. I remember I kept going to my guitar lesson and I would put all four fingers down instead of three fingers with one of them flattened on two strings. They’d say, “No, you’ve got to learn it right. You’ve got to learn how to do it.” And it took me a year before I could comfortably do that. I remember I’d throw the guitar on my bed, my soft bed so it wouldn’t hurt it (laughs), and go, “Now I know why they call it the F chord! I fucking hate this chord!” (laughs)
You released an instrumental single back in the spring
I did. In April, I released an instrumental guitar song. In fact, I’m going to be putting out a little play through video I made in all the hotel rooms on this tour where it’s all these different windows where I filmed the guitar and played all the parts that are recorded. When rhythm guitars come in, you see these two little tiny windows in the corners fade in and the guitars. It’s definitely something for guitar players to watch and check out and see the guitar parts being played. The song is called “Cintaku.” It’s an Indonesian word, although people from Malaysia will argue with me and say it’s a Malay word, but it means “my love” and the song reminds me of that euphoric, elated, ecstatic feeling that you get when you lose yourself in something and you feel this pure love.
And Sons Of Apollo have a new DVD coming out
Yes, yes. In September of last year we played at this ancient Roman amphitheatre in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, with an orchestra and a choir and we played two sets that included all the songs from the album plus a bunch of covers. It was filmed and mixed and we’re putting it out on DVD and Blu-Ray, plus an audio CD, and that will be out next month in August.
Are you guys planning to make some more music together?
We are finishing up the second album now. Jeff Scott Soto and Mike Portnoy and Derek Sherinian and I have been texting all day, as we do every day, a hundred texts a day, going through vocals and, “Hey, what if we try this?” It’ll be out in January. That’s the plan as long as we stay on schedule.
Everybody’s got their own projects you have to work around
Yes, Jeff has his own solo album that he just put out recently and he’s been touring with that. It’s a great album. And he does Trans-Siberian Orchestra every November and December. Everybody has very musical lives but we find a way to come together when we need to come together. It’s all a big juggling act.
I understand you have a music camp coming up in a few months
Oh yes! It’s in Ireland, September 15-20. We did the first Bumblefoot Music Camp last year and that one was in the north of Ireland, in Donegal County, and it was classes and a whole camp concert that we did that raised funds for a local charity. We did sight-seeing and had guest lecturers and the last night someone taught us Irish dancing and a local harp player played all this Irish music on this beautiful harp. We work out the food so all the vegans and people with food allergies get special food made for them. It went so perfectly, just wonderful. And everybody is still in touch and good friends and we just want to keep it going. So we are doing another one right in the center of Ireland, in the town of Athlone. It’s all coming together and I’ll start blasting out the promo and letting everyone know it exists and hopefully we can get a nice crowd there and relive what we did last year and have a great time.
Do you have any Irish in you at all?
I don’t, no; at least not that I know of. But you travel all over the world and you meet so many people and what you do realize is that it’s a beautiful world out there, it really is, and it just touches you. I’m looking to do this in the US and I was thinking of doing one in Bali, which I think would be beautiful and people would really enjoy that. It’d be a nice place for a musical getaway. And that’s the idea: you want to find places that are going to be interesting for other people, that they’d want to go to, not just for a music camp but as a great excuse to go to Bali and to vacation and bring their family and all they have to do is put up with me torturing them for hours a day on the guitar (laughs).
Ron, something we have never talked about is the blues. Was the old blues ever an influence on you?
When I was taking some Jazz lessons as a kid, I had this great Jazz teacher who turned me on to the oldest blues, which at that point blues and Jazz were sort of one and the same in a way. Like Jazz was starting to evolve out of blues and he had me checking out old Charlie Christian records. Then from there as it went on things branched out more and you had different types of Jazz, you had big band and you had country music and you had blues that was continuing more into rock & roll and rockabilly. The tree just kept growing and growing. But yeah, I listened to it along the way for sure, a lot of the old blues guys I would check out. I was never the hugest blues fan, I was more of a metalhead, but I do love it, even more so now I think.
How has your philosophy towards your music and your career changed since you were that kid in your room with nothing more than a dream to be a professional musician?
Well, when you’re a kid, you don’t know all the moving parts. All you know is you see your favorite bands playing onstage or you hear their albums and you don’t really know how to get from point A to point B, so you just play. You write songs, you play, you make demos. But as time goes on and you learn all the workings of the music business, the recording business, the touring business, all the different aspects, you realize that it’s not just about eating the cake; it’s about making the cake and that requires 90% of other things before you see that cake appear and you can cut into it. There is 90% other stuff that happens before that cake is made. You get a recipe, you go to the store, you get the ingredients, you take them home, you sift the flour, you start putting them all together, you’re whisking this, you’re doing that and you put it in the oven and then you let it cool down and then you put the icing on. It’s all of that and that’s what it takes to make an album or a concert happen. There is all this other stuff, that 90% of other actions that has to take place before anyone can see that cake and eat it. Now, I just have that broad big picture view of everything and I don’t shy away from that other 90%, where I think a lot of musicians might be like, “I just want to play;” which is fine but for me I like being part of the 90% and a big part of organizing it all. That’s where producing comes in as well. I love producing and I love the building aspect of it all. I love making the cake.
How long did it take you to realize all this?
It happened slowly. It happens when you first start doing gigs in bars when you’re a teenager and start getting into promo, when you’re out at 3:00 in the morning where one person is driving and the other is hanging out the window with a staple gun tacking posters onto the telephone poles, which we used to do that thirty years ago. That was before the internet and Facebook and we just papered the neighborhood. You start slowly turning up the temperature of that water to where eventually you’re boiling it. So it’s a little at a time. The first time you get a record deal and you learn all the ways you’re getting screwed (laughs).
Who is Ron Thal the producer? What is that guy like?
One thing I feel is important as a producer, and I fight for it, is that you don’t want the artist that you’re producing to sound like you. You want to make them sound more like them. It’s about bringing out their best, about bringing out their personality. It’s all about them. You should be invisible. You should be there to motivate and find the little diamond within the song that they are writing and just doing everything so that in the end that artist sounds their best and they’ve done their best and you’ve helped them get to the best place that they are at.
Do you have anything production-wise coming up?
Yes, there is a band in Israel called Dodies. A very interesting band. It’s two kids, one of them is a guitarist/singer and he’s like a reincarnation of Kurt Cobain. Then the drummer plays his drum kit with only one arm, with his right arm, and with his left hand he’s playing bass on a keyboard. They play this music that is kind of grungy/garage-y, a really cool band. We did three songs together out in Texas last year and hit it off well and they want to do a full album now. So rather than bring them out here, I’m going to go out there and we’re going to do it very grass roots and very comfortable, set them up in a studio, no click tracks, none of that stuff. Just the two guys in a room together, looking right at each other, playing it like it’s a gig, doing a couple of takes of each song and we’ll grab the one that feels most magical.
Then we’ll go back to their house so we don’t have to watch the clock and have gear set up there and start doing all the vocals. They are very particular about what they want. They have ideas about production, about what kind of effects and distortion and delay. I’m going to have them do a bunch of the mixing and then when they have all those ideas to where they want it, then they hand it over to me and I take it to the next step of tweaking and making it sound just more of a good mix, the next level of it, then do the mastering.
But I want them to be a very strong part of everything. There are some producers that will just call the artist in, have them do a take and then they leave the room for ten hours while the producer is editing their vocal and putting it in tune and chopping things and moving things and cutting and pasting. It’s like the artist just submitted a DNA sample and the producer does the rest. No, these guys, this means the world to them and I respect that and they have to be part of every step. My job is to keep the boat going in the right direction as it happens and keep it as a team effort. Every band, every artist, is different and you can’t fight their personality. You have to do what works for them and makes them most comfortable and brings out their best. Sure, you try to push people a little out of their comfort zone and make them grow but they have to stay them and you have to do it in a way that works for them. So this is the plan and we’re going to spend a good two weeks out in Israel doing that.
Be careful over there
You know, anything can happen anywhere and you can’t worry about that. You have to live your life as if it might be your last day. But don’t live it for fear that it could be your last day but in celebration that it might be your last day and go out there and do it all.
Sons Of Apollo photo by Hristo Shindov; live photos by Leslie Michele Derrough
