Interview: Jake E. Lee, Badlands

BAD FOR GOOD

It may be 7 o'clock in the evening here in the UK. Across the pond in LA, the time is an unearthly (in a rock musician's eyes) 11am and BADLAND's six-string supremo, Jake E. Lee, is sitting in the office of his record company press rep, whilst pumping himself full of caffeine in an effort to keep his sleep-starved brain functioning. At the time of our conversation, Badlands are busy rehearsing for a Stateside club tour to promote their new LP, Voodoo Highway, and slurping on his third cup of coffee, Jake informs me that the band were in rehearsal until 3am...

Let's get down to the serious business of talking about the new album. Voodoo Highway has been critically acclaimed here in the UK. How has it been received in the States?

"I've only seen three reviews and they've all liked the record, which really surprised us because, going with the raw sound and less production, we thought we would get slaughtered for not knowing how to produce ourselves. As it was," Jake continues, after checking for eavesdropping Atlantic officials, "we fought very hard to make this record the way we wanted."

Atlantic weren't very happy at all when they first got it. 

"When we were finishing up after three months in the studio last year, they pulled us out and said: 'this isn't working, you don't have a hit single. We want you to work with DESMOND CHILD. We said, 'no way!  We hate Desmond Child and everything he does.' Then they suggested Holly Knight and we said 'No!' again. So they started sending us tapes to listen to of all these commercial corporate hit single type songs. We said 'No' again and started writing more songs which Atlantic still rejected because they weren't potential hit singles. We were out of the studio for about four months and eventually the record company said they couldn't release our record as it was. They were ready to shove us to one side until they could work out what to do with us. But we're absolutely opposed to going along with what somebody else wants to do with our music, and now that we've stuck by our guns and convinced the record company to let us finish the album our way, they're happy with it."

The album does have a far earthier and bluesier quality to it than its predecessor, as if you have moved into a style that you feel more at home with as a band.

"Yeah, I think with the first record, with me coming out of OZZY and Ray (Gillen, vocals) coming out of SABBATH, we knew what people expected from us, even though we weren't prepared to play that sort of music. Maybe we stepped in a little cautiously. We wanted to play a bluesy kind of music, and I think we were a lot bluesier than people thought we were going to be. But I don't think we dived into it fully because of the realisation that people were going to be expecting an Ozzy Sabbath thing."

Now that you've gained the confidence to dive in, as you say, a definite Badlands sound is emerging, particularly in the case of Ray, whose voice does have a far more individual quality to it now. Has his singing improved a lot since you began working with him?

"Improvement isn't the word I would use. It's more focused and I agree with you, it is a little more Ray now. On the first record, he was drawing upon his influences saying, I'm going to give it a little ROBERT PLANT on this song or a little IAN GILLAN here. Whereas on this record, I don't really recall him saying that too much. He just sang whatever came into his head without having to dig back into the catalogue in his head for old licks. If anyone in the band in particular was conscious of trying to do real good on the first record, it was Ray, because he had something of a reputation of being a good singer to live up to without having been on record."

Over the two Badlands albums, your own playing has opened up from the techno flash of your time with Ozzy to a far grittier, much more natural style. Yet, most of the tracks on Voodoo Highway do appear to involve more guitar work than you'd be able to reproduce in a live situation. Did you use more than one guitar per song during recording?

"You do whatever is going to make the most of the song. That's the way we did this record. On some songs, there's just one guitar through it all. Basically, 'Heaven's Train' and 'Fire and Rain.' Then there's songs like 'Silver Horses,' where there's probably four or five guitars in places to create that swirling, undulating, psychedelic effect. Live, we'll just have to do it differently, which we'll be interesting. For instance, the way we've been rehearsing 'Soul Stealer,' it's about a 10-minute song now, and we have different sections in the songs where we're going to take off and we don't even know where we're going to go. Sometimes it doesn't work right, but that doesn't matter because for every time it doesn't work, there's a time when it does, and that's the magic of playing live. That's why I play - for those moments when you spontaneously go somewhere else and everybody's on the same level and it works." 

"I don't believe," he continues, "in the philosophy of only putting down on record what you can produce live. I mean, a record's gonna outlast whatever you do live. Twenty years from now, no one's going to remember how we played a song live unless it's recorded. Like ZEPPELIN, they had a lot of crummy shows, but you remember them mostly for their recorded work."

Since you obviously didn't blast forth a series of one-take tracks, with the exceptions of the title track and "In A Dream," which were recorded live in the studio, how did you lay down the other 11 tracks on show?

"We put down the bass and drums at the same time with the whole band there. Ray sang and I played guitar, but we concentrated on getting the bass and the drums right, because for us all to play in the same room, everybody can't get a good sound. So we were all playing live, and when we felt we'd got a good track as far as the bass and drums went, that was one we'd keep. So basically the drums and bass are live, with the guitar and vocals overdubbed, which isn't exactly live, but it is a lot more live than most bands do."

Finally, the choice of an acoustic blues jam for the title track does seem odd.

"We actually had the album title Voodoo Highway before we wrote that song. You see, I'm a gearhead, so I have all these old hot rod magazines, and I'd been reading all these ads for a car company whose slogan was, 'It must be Voodoo, baby.'  It stuck in my head, and that was my slogan for the week, part of the vernacular. We were still looking for a title for the record, and every time anyone came up with an idea for a name, I'd throw Voodoo in there for a joke. Then someone said something about a highway, and I said, 'Yeah, Voodoo Highway.' It sounded cool. So that's how the title came about. As for the song, we wrote it in the studio when we went back in to finish the record, and I was kind of goofin' around on the guitar. We have been thinking of working up an electric version to play live."

Lyn Guy
Riff Raff
November 1991

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