INTERVIEW: Alcatrazz are back, and they’re taking no prisoners
Photo: Alcatrazz’s new album is called Take No Prisoners. Photo courtesy of the band / Provided by Earsplit PR with permission.
Alcatrazz, the legendary heavy metal band, recently released their new album, Take No Prisoners, and they cannot wait to take these new tunes out on the road for their adoring fans. The new recording features songs like “Little Viper,” “Don’t Get Mad … Get Even,” “Battlelines” and even a tune called “Alcatrazz.”
Today’s Alcatrazz features Jimmy Waldo on keyboards, Gary Shea on bass, Doogie White on lead vocals, Joe Stump on guitar and Larry Paterson on drums. Waldo and Shea, of course, are original members, going back decades to the earliest Alcatrazz days. In recent years, the band has remained extremely active, releasing new music and touring around the world.
Recently Waldo spoke with Hollywood Soapbox about the new record and what fans can expect. Here’s a sample of what he said …
On when work on Take No Prisoners began …
“It started about a year ago. We were always writing and stuff, and we were on the road. … We had some time off in England on tour, and we put together a couple things as demos. But I carry my recording rig with me, so things happen just whenever they happen. I can record vocals or guitars or whatever we need to do for demos anywhere. Probably a year ago I would guesstimate that it started. It was broken up by the tour in the middle of it, [but] we did keep writing. We cut a couple demos on the road. I went to Scotland to record Doogie’s vocals and then went to Italy after that to cut drums with Larry. He lives in southern Italy.”
On how the songwriting and recording sessions evolved …
“Joe Stump [is the] main writer. Joe is always writing, and Joe will sit down and play a riff. He just comes up with stuff. He’s a very prolific writer. Man, that’s a great riff, so he’ll expand on that very quickly. So he and I got guitars in Boston at his studio, and some of the stuff that he did was off the cuff. We would be playing in a song, and we’d get to the bridge. And we’d lay down the first track of rhythm guitars, and he would be playing this really cool thing. And it would kind of evolve as the bridge went along. It would not repeat or didn’t sound like something that he had worked out. I went, ‘Wow, that was really cool.’ He goes, ‘It just hit me as I was playing.’ So there are things from the record that literally, by the seat of our pants, we were just like, ‘OK, this sounds good, let’s keep going.'”
On how Joe Stump’s solos are usually captured in one or two takes …
“His solos are usually one or two takes. He doesn’t work things out too much. There are a few melodic sections that he does work out, and the harmonies and things, but generally speaking, a lot of this stuff is one take. And he’ll go through, and we’ll do maybe a second one just to see if he could outdo that one. But invariably we ended up going back to the first take. That seems to be the one.”
On how the band members don’t dwell or argue during the recording process …
“We do work kind of fast. We don’t dwell on things, and we don’t argue about songs or ideas. We’ll discuss them. When Doogie may say, ‘Gosh, guys, that verse should be twice as long or half as long,’ that’s an easy one. So I’ll edit down the demo, just do a quick edit, and then send it to Doogie. And Doogie’ll go, ‘Yeah, that’s it. That’s it, perfect.’ And then somebody else might say, ‘But we need a little section to get us into the chorus.’ So that happens quick. We don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on things, and we don’t argue about stuff. I don’t know how that is, but we just don’t. Everybody’s on the same page.”
On how the song “Alcatrazz” came to be …
“It was Giles Lavery, our manager, who has co-written some of the record. Giles just asked me one day. He goes, ‘Hey, I got this idea for doing a song and calling it ‘Alcatrazz.’ It would be about the prison.’ And “Island in the Sun” was about Alcatrazz, but it was about … a prisoner, what the prisoner’s thinking. Giles just wrote it from a different perspective. He said, ‘I’d like to call it ‘Alcatrazz.’” I said, ‘Yeah, why not?’ I thought it was kind of cool, after all these years, to have a song on the record called ‘Alcatrazz’ that was actually about Alcatrazz. But that was Giles, our manager, who came up with that idea.”
On whether the plan is to tour these new songs …
“We’re playing ‘Don’t Get Mad … Get Even.’ We did that at our last UK tour, and that really kicks ass. That goes over great. And when we tour with Girlschool, they sing the chorus with us, which is really fun, and we’ll be playing ‘Battle Lines’ this time and ‘Little Viper’ off this record and maybe one more. I don’t know. We’re tossing around a couple other ones, but we’re always trying to add newer material off new records into the set. We will be doing stuff off this record in the future.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Alcatrazz’s new album is called Take No Prisoners. Click here for more information.
