Earlier this year, photographer Ash Newell posted a link to one of Richie Kotzen’s videos on his Facebook. I don’t remember why, maybe it was for his birthday or maybe just because he wanted to remind people what a talented musician Kotzen was. For whatever reason, it worked, at least for me, as I went back and reacquainted myself with his over twenty albums worth of compositions, guitar playing and singing. What wonderful delights were found rummaging through his oeuvre: speed demon heroics from his Shrapnel Records days, his there-for-a-minute stint with Poison on Native Tongue, his more confident and exploratory solo work on albums such as The Inner Galatic Fusion Experience, his brotherly symbiosis with Billy Sheehan during Mr Big, his step into the blues on Bi-Polar Blues. His catalog is a bottomless well of undiscovered gems for any palette. At whatever point you discovered him, you have stayed with him, waiting for his next treasure to be unwrapped.
Kotzen and I had talked about doing an interview last year but it sadly never materialized due to schedules. After Newell’s thump between the eyes, I contacted Kotzen once again and this time we were able to have quite an interview. The unknown treat at the time, I found out, was that Kotzen was about to unleash a new power trio with his former bandmate Billy Sheehan and Adrenaline Mob’s Mike Portnoy, a band they were calling The Winery Dogs; a band that has now exploded, even before the official release of their self-titled debut last week on July 23.
The Winery Dogs are probably the hottest act on the scene at the moment and I was lucky enough to catch Kotzen before all the hoopla, all the requests for his time, the tour, the publicity. We talked for about an hour, uninterrupted by time restraints which usually come when someone is hot, and he shared how The Winery Dogs was formed, named and what direction the music was going in. We decided to wait to run this interview until the album’s release so it’s with great pleasure that I finally get to share with everyone this wonderful interview with a truly talented man, whose star is sure to burn brighter with this magnificent new album.
Richie, why don’t you start off by telling us everything you have going on right now.
Yeah, well, the newest thing is that I just finished a new record with a new band called The Winery Dogs and it’s me, Billy Sheehan on bass and Mike Portnoy on drums. We were working on this record last year and finally now got everything finished. It’s a really cool record. I’ve known Billy for about twenty years and obviously we played together in Mr Big, so we have a history of writing and recording and touring together. Mike is a new relationship for me but he’s an amazing person and a great drummer and also has a lot of great ideas with writing. So I think we made a really cool record together.
How would you describe your sound?
It’s a power trio and it’s a record where we’re just really playing together. It’s not a technology-oriented record. There’s no auto-tuning, there’s no programing. It’s really a true band effort in the sense of the old school rock bands like Cream or any of those top power trios from that era. You know, the music isn’t that far off from what I’ve done in the past. It’s a bit more aggressive at times and there’s some really intense moments interacting with the three of us, cause those guys are very stylized musicians. So it definitely has their stamp on it. But on a songwriting level, it’s not too far off from where I left off on the 24 Hours CD [2011].
Were the three of you together in a room recording or did you have to kind of do it separately because of schedules?
No, we were actually together and when we had the idea of doing the band we had gotten together early last year and went into my studio and really just kind of played together and improvised on a few ideas. And through that session we ended up with about six or seven ideas for songs and we had recorded them, very raw, just one microphone in the room, just to document the ideas. Then we all left and did our things, you know. I did my tour for the 24 Hours record. Then when we got together the second time, we kind of finalized those original tracks that we had worked on. I had some other ideas for songs that I brought into the project as well so we worked on those. Then on the third meeting we hadn’t set a date for recording so we got together again and recorded the entire record at my studio.
Whose idea was it to get together?
Actually, this all came through Eddie Trunk, who is a popular DJ in New York and of course has the VH-1 program That Metal Show. And I guess, originally, Billy and Mike were looking to do something together and they had started working with John Sykes and I’m not sure how far along that actually got but for whatever reasons they didn’t continue that but they still wanted to work together. So Eddie had suggested that Mike call me, so Mike and I had a conversation about doing it and we really kind of let nature take it’s course. Like I said, we got together that first initial time and there felt like there was some chemistry there with the three of us so we decided to pursue it and now we have a record.
Where did the name of the band come from?
We had a long, long list of names that we were throwing around and we kept kind of emailing names to each other and some of them were cool sounding and some of them were kind of silly and we were just kind of having fun with it. Then we finally settled on The Winery Dogs. In my mind, you know, I think the winery dogs were basically the dogs that guarded the vineyards for many years. In a way, you got to look at it like, we’re known as musicians’ musicians, so in a way you could say we’re kind of guarding the music. If you look at the trends in music where they’ve went from in the 70’s to guys really playing and really singing, you know, bands like the Eagles and those kinds of bands where you really needed to know the instrument in order to make a record, it’s almost like we’re kind of guarding the music, that aspect of it. So we kind of thought that name was fitting for the band.
Are you planning on any new solo projects as well?
Well, there’s something that always seems to happen. I’m always writing songs and recording them. My process is very relaxed. I don’t have a standard record deal in the sense that you have a label pressuring you to put out a release. So the way I kind of approach it, over the course of a year, I write music just by nature, it’s what I do. When I get to a point that I feel like I have written enough songs that I like, I usually choose my favorites out of that group and start recording them and eventually that becomes a record. I would think that eventually I will make another solo record but having just finished a project and sort of exhausted myself creatively on that, I don’t really know when another solo record will happen. But if you look at my history, it’s probably likely that by next year there will be something coming out for me.
Will The Winery Dogs tour?
Yeah, we’re making plans for that. I think our first spot will be Japan and then we’re hoping to follow that up with South America as well as the United States. So the plan is to tour on the music, which I think is going to be a lot of fun with those guys.
Are there any instrumentals on the album?
No, there’re no instrumentals. Of course, there’s instrumental sections to the songs where we kind of trade off and do that whole thing, but it’s a vocal record and it really, in my opinion, kind of falls into a classic rock sounding format. Like I said earlier, it’s not a technology record in the sense where we’re sampling and doing that. It’s really just three guys playing together.
That must have felt good to do it that way
Well, that’s the kind of musician I am. I’ve experimented in the past with loops and samples and that sort of thing, and it’s a cool sound and I like it, but given our histories and our styles, it really made sense to go in there and just play together and interact.
You have a huge catalog. Do you know how many actual solo albums you’ve made? Have you lost count by now?
You know I have. I don’t really sit around and dwell on my previous releases. I mean, there’s actually songs that I’ve written that are on solo records that I forgot about (laughs) so when you make a record, a lot of times you think, oh, this is the best thing I’ve ever done, and you’re excited about it. Then as time goes on, you come up with new ideas and you forget about the previous record and then you’re excited about the newest thing you’re doing. So I don’t really know. I think it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty solo records, there’s some collaborative records in there as well.
You were like nineteen when you made your first record. What do you remember most about that experience?
I was pretty nervous back then because I was doing a very specific kind of record. It wasn’t really about the songs as much as it was the guitar performance. Back then there was a whole movement happening in the guitar community where there were a bunch of guys putting records out and everyone was kind of trying to outdo the other with crazy, impossible guitar playing and wild solos and that sort of thing and techniques that hadn’t really been done before. So there was a lot of pressure that way to kind of live up to the other guitar players that were putting records out at that time.
And it was all revolving around Shrapnel Records back then. So to get on Shrapnel Records, even getting signed to Shrapnel Records back then, was like a sort of validation for the guitar players that were playing in that style. So although it was educational, I was also very nervous because I didn’t want to not live up to the standard that was set by some of the previous records put out by the other guitar players.
You’ve seen the technology progress – the equipment, the process of actual recording – do you like the way it has changed?
The technology has made it much easier for people to be creative, so ultimately that’s the main objective, to express yourself through the art of music. And technology has created a situation where more people are able to do that. In the past, you really had to depend on someone that knew how to run a tape machine, so you were forced to go into a recording studio with an engineer. And you had to actually play the instrument, to some degree, to get your idea across, and also singing. So now you have a situation where there’re still guys that have those qualifications as musicians but there’s a whole other group of people that really, by that standard, would not be considered musicians that are making music because technology is allowing them to do that. I think that’s great for those people because they have a creative outlet. So I guess the answer is yeah, I think it’s good the way it’s progressed. But it’s all about taste. So if somebody can have very little skill in playing an instrument but through technology, they may be able to put together a piece of music that is interesting and inspiring to people. So it’s really opened up a new door for people to experience the art of making music.
You seem like a no-nonsense type of guy. Has that helped you not be blindsided by the music business over the years?
I’ve been in the music business for a very long time and when I made that first record, that kind of opened a lot of doors for me. When I made my second record, I was really doing more of what I pictured myself doing because I was singing and playing actual songs. And that record led me to a major recording contract with Interscope. And once I signed that deal, I was moved to LA and I kind of came in the business at the top of the food chain at that point. I was signed by one of the most powerful people in the business and suddenly I’m hanging out at the executive house playing football with Bruce Springsteen in Malibu. It was a whole crazy time. And that year I was writing for what was going to be my debut record on a major label and there was a big struggle for me then because I really wanted to make more of an R&B/rock record, not a hard rock record. They had seen me as a hard rock artist and I remember fighting the entire year writing songs with people and doing all this work and at the end of it, they finally agreed to let me do what I wanted and we were about to hire Danny Kortchmar, who had just produced Don Henley’s record and was writing a bunch of songs with him. And I really wanted to go in that direction.
In the final hour, the label pulled the plug and said, “We don’t want you to make this kind of record. We see you as a hard rock guitar player and that’s what we want you to make.” And at that point, being barely twenty-one, I really kind of flipped out because I had spent all this time working, this whole year, and finally I figure I got what I wanted and I ended up getting dropped from the label because we just could not agree upon the direction of the record. So at that point it was kind of a learning experience of how the music business really works. Back then, it wasn’t really about letting the artist be who they are. It was more about, how can we market this guy, and I think to a certain degree it’s still like that. So that was definitely a learning experience and I ended up not making a record and joining Poison, which was a complete left turn from what I wanted to be doing.
But all those things become an education experience, so when you talk about technology and the way the business has changed, once things started to change to the point where an artist didn’t need a label to get their music heard, that’s when things started going really well for me as a solo artist and I was able to make my own records, put them out myself and really do what I wanted to do. I think the first record that really fell into that category where I had no influence from a label telling me any kind of direction, that record was Into The Black [2006], where I just really wasn’t even thinking I was making a record. I just recorded my music and I put it out and to this day, that’s one of the favorite records amongst the people that follow me, which goes to show that not all artists are like this but some are. If you really let someone do what they do naturally, you can get a good result from it.
What do you think is the most important thing when playing guitar live on stage?
I guess being comfortable and that’s a good question because a lot of people don’t realize what goes on when you step on stage. There are so many variables – the audience, the sound, what the conditions were when you arrived to the show, whether you had a hard travel day – and then suddenly you have to do a show. It’s really about the conditions being optimal for you that allow you to really be able to perform to your best. As you play for years and years, you learn all these situations and you learn how to adapt to them. That’s very tricky and can actually make someone not want to play. You get on stage and you can’t hear your voice and that sort of thing, it can make it impossible to do a good show. So it’s really about that. When I tour, a lot of times I end up picking up a crew in a foreign country. Like for example, if I go to Brazil I usually go just with my band and I have to put together a crew down there. But sometimes when you go from city to city, you end up in a situation to where you have different people running sound and that can be very frustrating. So you have to learn how to communicate with these people so that they create a situation that you’re able to really be at your best and making sure that you can hear what you’re doing and hear the other players that you’re playing with.
What makes a guitar a great guitar to play?
For me, it’s really the specifics of it. There are specific things in an instrument for me that I look for but ultimately it’s what it feels like when you pick it up. Does it inspire you to want to play it? Then, how it sounds and all those things. In general, a musician that has their own voice, their own style, can sound relatively the same on any instrument. So if I were to play, I play Telecasters, but if I picked up a Les Paul, I’m still going to play in the way that I play. It’ll still sound like me but the difference is it may not be as easy for me to do what I do because the guitar that I play connects with my style of playing. Then there are specifics. I have my own model Fender and I basically took a standard Telecaster and completely modified the details, down to the kind of wood that’s on the guitar, the fret size, the pick-ups that are in the guitar. All those things are subtle but when you add them together, it really becomes a different instrument than a guitar that doesn’t have those specifications.
What was your first guitar?
The guitar that I started learning on was actually a Gibson. It was called a Gibson Marauder and it was a relatively inexpensive guitar at the time and I was learning on that. Once it became clear that I was serious about playing the guitar my parents, I remember, had gone to buy me a Les Paul for Christmas and the guy at the store convinced them to buy this Yamaha guitar, it was called a Yamaha SG, which is very much modeled after a Les Paul, but it has a slightly different body shape. It’s a double cutaway. So they convinced them to buy that and they were saying Santana was playing this guitar and this was the new great thing. So that guitar became my main guitar for a very long time.
You grew up in Pennsylvania. What was it like growing up there and what were you like as a kid before music took you over?
Music took me over pretty quick (laughs). I remember I was five when someone suggested I take piano lessons, which I really didn’t take to. Then two years later I started learning the guitar. Music was definitely the thing for me. It kept me focused and where I grew up was pretty much an area where there was a lot of farmland there. So there wasn’t really a lot of distraction and that enabled me to really focus on music. At the time, there was obviously no internet so you really had to rely on learning by ear off of records or through reading magazines. There really was a great music scene in that area at the time. We were very close to Philadelphia and New Jersey so there were a lot of clubs to play in. So once I got to a point where I was good enough to be in a band, I ended up getting into a full-time cover band and we traveled in the area playing in Delaware and New Jersey and that was very good for me because it exposed me to the whole live situation. Back then, live music was a real big deal. So if we played on a weekend it was always packed.
So when you moved out to LA, it wasn’t really a big culture shock then.
Oh yeah, it was a big culture shock. I mean, I actually went to San Francisco to make my first record when I was eighteen. I didn’t even know what sushi was. I remember someone going, “We’re going for sushi” and I’m going, “What’s that?” (laughs) And I had never eaten a burrito before. So it was very different and I spent some time going back and forth to San Francisco, cause that’s where the label was and that’s where I was recording, and I think the longest time I spent there was maybe three months. My cousin also lived there so I was staying with her. Then when my contract got bought out by Interscope, they moved me to Los Angeles and that was a total shock (laughs), very different kind of lifestyle environment. But that’s where I wanted to be. I was ready for it and it was a very exciting time.
You’ve gone through a lot of highs. How did you keep from falling under the spell of all the sex, drugs, rock & roll?
I think it was just that I have one of those compulsive personalities, so my focus was really on music and trying to better myself and learn my craft. So it was by nature of my personality, I was just so focused on that that at that age I didn’t really care about anything else other than just getting at the point I wanted to get to with my music. It wasn’t really a temptation or anything like that. It was just built into my personality at that time to focus on what it was I wanted to do.
Your daughter is singing. What is stronger: the fatherly instinct to protect her or the musician’s instinct to help her?
You know, my attitude with her and her music is that she should do it because she enjoys it. I think when you start doing music for any other reason, it becomes insincere and can become very frustrating. But if you’re just doing music because it’s what you do and it’s what you enjoy, then you’re doing it for the right reason. If it becomes a hassle or unpleasant then move on and do something else. And that’s kind of the mindset she has. I mean, she’s not thinking that she wants to be famous or popular. She likes to play the piano, she likes to write songs and she likes to sing so that’s what she’s doing. If it’s something that’s going to become a career, my outlook is if it’s something she really needs to do on her own, I don’t want to be involved in telling her how and what to do. If she asked me for advice, of course I’d give it. And I have helped with her band. We did record some songs at my studio. But now they’re on their own doing their own recording. And something that’s important that young, I think, is to learn stuff from someone else; that’s what makes it exciting than if it’s somebody older than you and trying to tell you what to do. Then it doesn’t become creative and it’s not really fun.
Speaking of learning, what did you learn from playing with Stanley Clarke?
That I don’t really know much about music (laughs). Stanley is by far the deepest musician that I’ve played with. He really knows every aspect of music and when he plays the upright bass, there’s just nothing like it. I remember going to a show and he was playing at the Hollywood Bowl and he did a solo on the upright bass and it was unbelievable how someone can get on stage with an instrument like that, which is really difficult to play in the first place, and just totally blow you away. I’ve learned a lot from him, his approach to music and harmony and all that sort of stuff.
You have R&B DNA and it’s come out in a lot of your songs, and as you were saying earlier, it was kind of the direction you wanted to head. How did that get into your system?
I think that came from where I grew up because living just outside Philadelphia, we were listening to Philadelphia radio back then in the 70’s and obviously there was a lot of classic rock being played. But the rock that was being played back then had that blues/R&B influence. Also, being in that area, there was a lot of soul music and you had bands like the Spinners and the O’Jays. So there was a real sound back then and all of us were exposed to that so a lot of people that grew up around there have that in their DNA, so to speak. Something that always appealed to me, and once I started singing, is I really preferred the singing in R&B music. So I started listening to more singers of that nature. As a guitar player I tended to gravitate more towards the rock guys. So that’s kind of been the foundation of me as an artist and as a writer, that era of rock and also that era of soul music.
Have you ever written a song that was so intricate and so complicated that you’ve never attempted to play it live?
Yeah, I’ve got a lot of songs like that that I’ve done (laughs). I wrote them, I did them in the studio and I never played them live. Most of the songs were instrumental pieces that I had done. In 1995, there was a record I did, The Inner Galatic Fusion Experience, and Jeff Berlin played on it and Gregg Bissonette played drums and I didn’t think about live at all when I was making the record. I just wanted to make a cool record. But now when I go back and listen to it, it’s like, Oh my God, to play that live would be so much work to go back and figure out what I was doing. The thing is, I’m such a different kind of player now that it wouldn’t be inspiring for me to go back in time and try to figure that out. It’s like, this moment has already happened, they exist, I did it and I’m looking forward to what I’m going to do next more so than reliving what I did then.
You’ve talked about how when you write songs you don’t force them. Do you ever worry that one day you’re just going to be all dried up?
You know, I kind of have a theory on that because people that write do end up in the position where they are dried up, and to be perfectly honest, I haven’t written a song now since maybe five months. I have some ideas that eventually will probably turn into songs but I have no ideas as to really finishing them. It’s a real simple thing for me. I mean, some people would freak out and think, “Oh my God, I have writer’s block.” Well, it’s just that right now I don’t have anything to say so I’m not going to force that cause then I’ll just write something without meaning. So when the time comes that I feel like I have something to say then that’s when the song will be written and that’s the most basic approach to that. It kind of eliminates the notion of writer’s block. I don’t really believe I’ll have writer’s block, it’s just right now I’ve exhausted myself and I’ve said all I have to say. At some point, I’ll have some more life experiences and some things will happen and then that’ll feed into wherever the creativity comes from and at that point I’ll write something.
Does it usually just pop in your head or do you pick up the guitar one day and start noodling around and the ideas come from that?
Sometimes I pick up an instrument, be it the guitar or sit at the piano and start playing something and I’ll hear a song around it and that’s when I’ll work on it and try to develop it. Other times you hear a title or even a lyric or there’s been times where I’ve been woken out of a sleep where I’ve heard a song and I have songs I wrote that way. So if I have a little recorder by my bed I can reach over and document an idea. The trick with that is forcing yourself to wake up. I’ve actually lost what I thought could have been great song ideas cause I was too tired to get out of bed and I figured, I’ll remember it tomorrow, and then tomorrow came and I never remembered it.
This has been quite a big year for the Rolling Stones and you actually opened for them in 2006. What was that experience like for you?
It was pretty incredible. It was one of those situations where I was so worried that it wasn’t going to happen. Even when I was on the plane going to Japan and I really didn’t talk about it till after I played the first show cause I didn’t know. Maybe I’d get there and something goes wrong and they decide, ok, no opening act, because up until that point, it was told to me that in Japan they had never had an opening act. And that’s typical in Japan, where if you’re going to see a band, that’s the band that plays. Oftentimes, there’s no opening act. So I was very nervous that maybe something could go wrong and it wouldn’t happen. But after the first show, then I was relaxed and I did the remaining five or six shows total.
But it was a great thing for me because I did have a base in Japan, a fan base, and it was something that was cool to say that I did. And they’re very cool as far as the stage. They said you could go anywhere on the stage except for the ramps, stay off of there, and that’s what I did. At the end of the tour they take a group photograph with the opening band and everybody in the Stones so we did that. And I got to talk a little bit to Ron and he paid me a very nice compliment about my voice. In my set I had done “Shapes Of Things” and he compared me to Rod Stewart, which I thought was great cause that’s one of my idols. It was really a great thing for me to have done.
You participated in the Jason Becker documentary, Not Dead Yet. What can you share with us about him?
When I made my first record, Jason co-produced that record with Mike Varney and he was in the studio with me every day and he had already done three records and I hadn’t done any. At that time, I really learned a lot from him about the recording process and just getting guitar sounds and all that sort of thing. But we were very close in age, six months apart, so just as two teenagers, we had a lot in common and we were like two typical silly kids, you know. So there’s a lot of great memories of that time for me and he’s just someone that kind of guided me when I was first trying to do what I’m doing. It was a very important relationship for me and seeing him is very difficult because I have all those memories of us when we were kids and when he was healthy and stuff. So it’s a pretty heavy situation for me to see him. It’s hard to put into words and kind of uncomfortable to talk about but very, very close to me and someone that I really view in a high regard.
Is there anything left for you to learn as a guitar player?
Oh my God, yes, tons. I mean, I’m really the kind of guitar player that’s really good at doing MY music. That’s what I do. I’m not one of these guitar players that plays every style and plays every stringed instrument. I really use the guitar solely as a tool to deliver my musical thoughts. So there is always something to learn and there are so many styles that I don’t know about and don’t play and would love to learn. But at the same time, by playing the way that I do, I’ve sort of created a situation where I feel like I sound like me, which has really been my objective, to be myself and allow my music to come through the instruments. On that regard, I’m really doing what it is that I set out to do. At the same time, I like to learn some other things that I don’t have so then I have more facility and more of a creative vocabulary when I’m trying to play a song.
Last question: Who did Richie Kotzen turn out to be?
Well, I think I’m pretty much the same person I’ve always been, just a little more educated. And as time goes on you learn things that are really important and a lot of things that I would obsess over years ago, now I realize aren’t important. So I’m pretty much a more evolved version of who I’ve always been. I’m thankful I’m in a position where my whole life I’ve really existed through playing my music, and not playing in fifteen different bands and playing music I didn’t write. That’s always been my focus, if I’m going to play music, I want to play music that I was involved in creating; whether that’s with a band like Poison where I’m writing for an album or if it’s on my own. I’m happy about the way things have went.
