INTERVIEW: Kane Roberts is blazing his own trail
Image courtesy of Chokehold / Provided by Adrenaline PR with permission.
Kane Roberts, the celebrated guitarist whose time with Alice Cooper is still beloved by fans, has a new project out called Chokehold. This band, featuring the singer Anja on vocals, recently released the single “Don’t Wanna Rockstar” and a bloody-vampire music video to accompany the tune. Roberts, speaking with Hollywood Soapbox, said he’s sitting on an album’s worth of material, but Chokehold will be something different in his professional life. He’s not following any rules, chasing any dollars or caring too much about past precedent. He’s trailblazing.
“First of all, it started with me,” Roberts said with a laugh in a recent phone interview. “Think of where our music started and musicians how they got jobs. I guess we were standing on a side of a street with those shoes with little bells on them, the curly shoes, playing a mandolin, and rich people would drive by and throw food at us. It’s still the same. It hasn’t changed.”
Roberts, known for his aggressive guitar playing and stellar songwriting, wants to change that model, of busking on the corner and hoping for some sustenance. He’s attuned to the music business and how it has changed from his early days of playing in the 1980s to the completely different world musicians find themselves in 45 years later.
“We’re so excited and so exuberant when we’re younger,” he said. “I’ll sign a bad contract, yeah, whatever. I just want to do this. It’s so great. As time goes on, you just feel like there’s sort of an ignorant, bumbling, greedy bunch of people that just dumb down the whole process just for their benefit, so I started thinking of this music that I want to do. I’m not interested in looking for a record company. There’s no reason to do that anymore.”
Instead of looking for a record deal, Roberts searched for colleagues who share his values, and he began attracting people who felt the same way about how music should be delivered to the fans. He cited Anja as one of those fellow musicians.
“We started talking about music, and as we started playing and singing over the last year, we began to connect creatively,” Roberts said. “So you know I’ve got Ken Mary; he’s a drummer. He played with Alice, and he plays with Flotsam and Jetsam now. He plays drums on that song, and rather than forming a band and saying, ‘Oh hey, I’m going to try to get on this social platform and do this or do that and get a record deal, whatever,’ we decided to not to follow any rules with that and just make the music totally as a system by which we only did what we wanted. It sort of cleared the table of any other motivation.”
Roberts said the beginnings of writing and recording “Don’t Wanna Rockstar” were a little rough, which was expected, but the group coalesced. And that continued with the making of the music video.
“With the video that we made, we decided to delve into the whole AI thing, but in such a way that there’s actually allegory to the images as they go by,” he said. “I know it’s very extreme with the vampires and all the blood and everything, but that’s what we like. We wanted to do that.”
Roberts said he’s interested in surrounding himself with players who have an “altruistic sense” of what they’re doing in the so-called music business. He remembers the days when a band would put out an album, and it didn’t sell that well. The companies behind the bands wouldn’t pull the plug right away; instead, they would cut more singles and make more music videos. Groups would have two or three albums to get their name out there. Today’s Spotify world is not like that at all. Roberts called 2025 a “very cloistered, completely financially incentivized realm.”
So the guitarist created Chokehold and is seeing where this trip takes him.
“We have a full album worth of stuff,” Roberts said. “The next video we’re struggling with whether to make it actual footage or do another AI video. We’ll figure it out, maybe a blend of something. We have a script and everything, so we’ve started working on it. There’s a lot more to come. It really is going to be a group of people that are completely committed to the creative aspect of it. That’s all that we’re doing. We didn’t drop $10,000 anywhere to get extra views or do any of that shit. We’re just here to create. If anything monetary takes place, it’ll be a surprise and a pleasant one, but that’s not why we’re doing this.”
Many fans of Roberts’ playing came to his style of music thanks to his time with Cooper. He was with the rock ‘n’ roll legend for the Constrictor and Raise Your Fist and Yell albums. Songs that he co-wrote are numerous and still adored by fans: “He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask),” “Teenage Frankenstein,” “Roses on White Lace” and “Lock Me Up.” Later on, he also co-wrote “Bed of Nails,” perhaps his best tune with Cooper.
“It was unusual now that I look back,” Roberts said of his time with Cooper. “There are very few situations I could walk into that had such a vibrant and deep history. The first time I went to New York, to Manhattan, at Alive Enterprises was this office, a very big office. I went in there, and I met Bob Ezra. He was the first guy to talk to me, and he was at this big black desk. He had this chair behind him. There was a massive window of the skyline of New York. I think he put me in a lawn chair, you know what I mean. I was looking way up at the wizard of Oz. He basically said to me, ‘Look, Kane, I listen to your music. You’re 50 percent of a great writing team.’ So he was prepping me to go in and work with Alice.”
Roberts said after meeting Cooper the two became the best of friends — in approximately 10 minutes.
“It was very weird,” he said. “We just maintained that. We’ve just been best friends through all this. Add to that the sort of creative opportunities and what I was learning from working with these people. I thought I was a great guitar player, the best, and I moved to California. It was like, oh boy, there were so many great players there. It wasn’t until after the first tour that I think I really became … a real guitar player where all the elements came into place. It was a reality check. So the Alice thing was nothing but positive.”
Roberts and Cooper had a reunion a few years ago when Cooper’s current lead guitarist, Nita Strauss, left the band for a limited time. Roberts received the call, and he was back on tour with the Prince of Darkness. Fans were able to hear his guitar playing once again, and he added to his many memories.
For example, Roberts remembers the time he received the nickname Rambo. When playing guitar, it’s impossible not to notice that Roberts works out and has massive, muscled arms that curl their way around the guitar. Heck, he even leans into the nickname by bringing out a guitar that looks like a Rambo-style gun.
“[Manager] Shep Gordon, people don’t give him credit because he stays in the background purposely,” Roberts said. “That gun guitar … [Gordon] heard about something, and he said, ‘Hey, come on in and show this to Kane.’ That’s how his mind works, and that sort of became my stamp with that whole Rambo thing, which I never put together. I never figured it out. When I saw that in Creem magazine, ‘Kane Rambo Roberts, underrated guitar player with Alice Cooper,’ I said to Alice, ‘Rambo? Where are they getting that?’ He goes, ‘Have you looked in the mirror?’ It was pretty funny.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Kane Roberts’ new band is called Chokehold, and their new single is “Don’t Wanna Rockstar.” Click here for more information.
