Interview: Keith St. John
I sat down with Keith St. John for an in-depth discussion on the history of Ronnie Montrose as a figure of guitar excellence and innovation in the rock world, more on Keith’s own background as a musician and as the point person for the Ronnie Montrose Remembered event, growing up on Long Island, some rock and radio history, and even a bit of John 5 and Randy Jackson, as well as music and life overall.
So Keith, we’re kind of cooling down after NAMM right now, and the majority of NAMM for you, I feel like, must consist of Ronnie Montrose Remembered and everything surrounding that. I want to ask you first, how was your NAMM outside of Ronnie Montrose Remembered? Was there any such thing?
Well, for me, everybody’s going so crazy getting ready for NAMM and everyone’s schedules are changing so much, I really have to stay glued to my communication devices in the days leading up to NAMM to make sure I can still keep everybody on the show who originally booked it, because they have a lot of other irons in the fire. Things come up, other shows come up, their companies take them to dinner, and they’ve got to do that stuff, so I’ve got to be as accommodating, flexible, and understanding as possible. And sometimes, the only way to keep people on who might potentially have to cut their slot is by getting the message right away and working it out quickly. So yeah, it’s a little bit…it’s not really nail-biting, but it’s just staying on it real tight in a healthy way to make sure everybody’s accommodated.
You put on a good event, so I think you do a good job of keeping everybody tight together.
I do what I can. It’s different every year, and this year, we had a really good turnout, really good crowd. I was able to afford to give the VIPs T-shirts, which was fun. At the same time, I did add another charity organization to the event, the American Cancer Society, in addition to Sweet Relief Musicians’ Fund, that we’ve had all the way through. And the American Cancer Society, along with a new company of mine, called Helping Hands of Rock, which is developing, they want to get together with me and that company and create a platform for the American Cancer Society to have a division, so to speak, that is dedicated to musicians as well. So I’ve been working with some of their staff this year and things are going well.
That’s awesome! I actually didn’t know about your own charity that you had started, but that’s really good.
Yeah, well, I haven’t really rolled it out, it’s been behind the scenes, I kind of got it going in conjunction with an event I did with the Epilepsy Foundation down here in Southern California, which raised some money, a good amount of money for, it was juvenile myoclonic epilepsy we were focusing on…you guys can look that up, because it’s a lot to explain.
No need to go into the depths of it, but it sounds like you were doing stuff for good causes, and the Ronnie Montrose Remembered event always does. You’ve always got some connection with charity there, which is something really cool about events like that, even other events in the area, like for the Ronnie James Dio Stand Up And Shout Cancer Fund. Not only are you remembering a musician that was loved so dearly, and get everybody together to celebrate them, but then you also get to do something for, let’s say, the current state of humanity.
Oh, absolutely. And the entertainment community, you hear about actors who are really well-off and making, you know, $40 million a film, giving a lot of money to great causes, and the same thing in music. The “music business” has changed a lot for the mid-level people, like if you didn’t have huge Platinum records in the 70’s and 80’s, early 90’s or whatnot, you know, before the business started changing, then you’ve got to earn your living still. You might not quite have extra millions to donate, but it just seems like people that are into the arts or into the philosophies of life, that’s kind of what art stems from. When you’re into that sort of thing, it seems like it lends itself to being thoughtful and trying to help out your fellow human beings. Not that anybody else in any profession isn’t just as charitable, I’m not saying that, but it’s like a general community thing. Through music that people love, that often brings them back to a time capsule, to someplace earlier in their life, and makes them feel a certain way, a lot of times, let’s say, people are more in the mood…*laughs*
*laughs* That’s true, too.
For example, I mean, I auctioned a vinyl record the other day, I think I asked the audience for a hundred bucks, and someone gave us $1100 for it! Sometimes I say, “Gosh, I wish we had time for more of that!”, because there’s so many charitable people that come to the event. I would love to just do whatever we can for those charities. But I’m also trying outside our event to do more events with American Cancer Society and Sweet Relief, so we’ll see what happens.
Good for you! And I understand what you’re saying, it’s not that just anybody can’t come together and do charitable things, but there is something of a sense of community in music, and I feel like the Rock/Metal community are a pretty tight-knit world, and like you said, there’s a lot of hints of time capsules in that kind of music too. A lot of people have specific memories where they’re like, “This event happened in my life while I was listening to that Montrose record, and I want to celebrate that”, or for me, it’s like, I wasn’t necessarily here when that Montrose record came out, but I love it anyway, and I have strong feelings toward it too.
Well, you could have been somewhere. You might not have been in this body yet…*makes a sci-fi-esque “woo” sound, then laughs*
Maybe that’s why I feel such a strong connection to the 70’s and 80’s music and culture, maybe I was there and I feel like I need to be back there again *laughs*.
A lot of us do feel that, and it’s funny because I feel like we all feel those things a little bit more when we’re children, and we’re still open and our brains haven’t gone into complete organizational mode yet, into what I call “the box”. Some of us, some people who are lucky, I think, retain a lot of that youthful empathy for the spiritual world around them, and maybe see and feel more things from, I don’t want to say the beyond and sound all spooky, but…from that realm of, maybe, what we’re all part of, which may be a bigger spiritual or soul connection between us all. Who knows…Ronnie Montrose Remembered. 2020.
*laughs* That got deep. This was actually the fifth year anniversary of this event that you celebrated, so I do want to get into what was the initial spark to create this as a regular, yearly event that you’ve put on for the past five years?
Okay, well, let me back up and answer that, but it will take a minute. Ronnie Montrose was like, first of all, he was a great friend of mine, and one of the best music business/artist/band/co-band member/mentors that I’ve ever had. I learned a lot from watching him do what he does, and how he approached doing live shows, when we recorded, I really got to see a genius at work a lot, and it was cool. When he went, he went suddenly. Nobody expected that…nobody ever expects it, and none of us had time to say goodbye. But anyway, during Ronnie’s entire career from the early 70’s once he started Montrose, he changed directions a lot. He put different bands together with different lineups, doing instrumental work, doing more fusion stuff, and then coming back to Montrose sometimes, and in all that, he worked with a lot of great musicians, engineers, producers, and he knew a boatload of people. In the time that I worked with him from about ’99 until just before he passed, I was always his go-to guy, I was always his singer, but we went through five or six different lineups of rhythm sections, drummers and bassists. And we also did other projects with other people and there were a lot of people that played with Ronnie and knew him on some level, musically, and right after he passed, there was a memorial concert for him, maybe eight days later, up in San Francisco at The Warfield. And it was a good production, for as fast as it was put together, a lot of people showed up, but there was still a lot of people missing from that celebration. People were on the road, people were too far away or whatever to get to San Francisco right away and attend, and I kind of was there at that event paying my respects and getting together in a real heartfelt event that it was with other musicians and artists and stuff, but there were a lot of people missing that I kind of felt bad that they weren’t there at that time. I just kind of let that slide for a while, and time was just going on, and also, when somebody like that who has multiple camps, passes suddenly and it’s tragic and everybody’s searching for answers of “why?”, when something is ruled a suicide, there’s all these people going, “I just talked to Ronnie 48 hours ago and he was in perfect spirits”, and other people are all, “Maybe it wasn’t a suicide”, this or that…everyone kind of gets weird with each other from the different camps. So, there was that. There was sort of a division of different people that were close to him, friends from personal life, or business connections, or family, so it was all weird for a while. And then a few years later, somebody asked me just randomly, if I wanted to throw an event around the NAMM festival, because one of the big theater rooms was open and available to do something. And I just, in those ten seconds on the phone, I just thought, yeah, I do have something I’d like to do, I’d love to revisit a Ronnie Montrose memorial and get all those people back together, and more people that never got to be there, pay their respects and celebrate Ronnie, and come up and play “Bad Motor Scooter” and “Rock Candy” with us and just get into the whole celebration thing. So we threw the event that year, it was at the Observatory, which was the old Galaxy Theatre, which coincidentally, like ten years before that, I hosted a Guitar Players’ Ball, and invited Ronnie to come down because we were already playing together and I was like, “You’ve got to come down to this!”, and I got to introduce him to some guitar players from L.A. that were also famous that he had never even met before. So it was a cool place to start because it had some nostalgic value for me from doing that there. And I expected it to just be a one-time event, and I got into the fall before the next NAMM coming around after that, and everybody was like, “You’re doing that again, we really want to do another Ronnie Montrose Remembered”, there’s fans emailing, and however else, and musicians were asking, “Are you going to do it again”? So I found another concert hall to book it in and went through the learning curve of learning how to be a concert promoter, and I had a lot of help, I had a lot of friends pitch in and show me what to do, and how to put these kind of things together. Part of doing an event like this is knowing how to get the word out to places where people are going to see it and actually buy tickets to come down. Because these rooms are expensive, and renting all the equipment and getting the musicians there, and paying a lot of people to do whatever, so we’ve got to sell tickets just to break even, and raise some extra for charity. After the second year, then people were like, “you going to do it next year?”, I was like, “yeah, we’re going to do it next year!” *laughs*
And next year, next year, and next year, right? *laughs*
It just keeps on going, I never thought it would go five years and still be this strong, you know? It was really strong this year, a lot of people came out, we had a packed house, you saw it. And even though some of these musicians have played it before, some of them have played it two or three times before, something about that music brings the players that come to our event back to their youth. And I feel that there’s a difference in how you play something and how you feel, if it’s the songs you first grew up learning to play. Like, I have certain songs I learned how to play, I started out playing drums and I was always singing in the basement bands back east, but…I first learned simple songs, like, I remember learning “Calling Dr. Love” by Kiss, if I play drums or sing that right now, I kind of go nuts while I’m doing it, because it brings me right back to when I was in fifth grade or whenever I started playing, and got a hold of that or any of those songs that I first learned. “Good Times Bad Times” by Led Zeppelin is just…
Hell yeah!
Yeah! For me, personally, if it’s something that I learned and cut my chops on when I was young, it’s a different dig in when I get on stage and play that song, and I think that’s what happens with these guys. There weren’t a lot of hard rock guitar pioneers when Brad Gillis was growing up and learning and cutting his chops, and George Lynch, Frank Hannon, Dave Rude, all these guys, I want to say, from the 80’s, a lot of guys are known for these big 80’s metal, hair, or hard rock bands, and they grew up learning Montrose. Even Van Halen was trying in some ways to follow in the Montrose footsteps when they first got started. Of course, they blew up and just became the model for rock bands, but Ronnie had really grabbed a lot of guitar players’ ears all over the world, I think, without even knowing it. And it’s interesting that because of his sort of…I want to say it’s no fear, he had no fear that he had to continue on with a successful band that looked like they had this great horizon in front of them, because their fame was building and growing right off the bat, but Ronnie was just the kind of guy that was like, “Yeah, maybe I don’t want to do this kind of music right now, I’ll get back to it, I’m going to go do this”, you know? And I think it pissed a lot of people off back then, and maybe disappointed some fans, but that’s the way it was. My point is, though he didn’t become a household name like Van Halen and a lot of other contemporaries back then, he was a household name with guitar players and musicians. And of course, with the up-and-coming guitar players of the next generation. So, like I mentioned Frank Hannon, when he comes up and plays the gig, he’s like a kid in a candy store, I mean, Ronnie produced Frank when Frank was 15, he produced Tesla’s demo, he brought them “Little Suzi”, he had a lot to do, a lot of hands in a lot of people’s pies. George Lynch told me in his first band in school, he was a singer and he used to sing “Space Station #5”, which is a Montrose tune. Almost everybody who comes has a connection, then you have the guys from earlier bands, like Derek St. Holmes, who was in early Ted Nugent, who’s more of Ronnie’s contemporary, and Brad Whitford from Aerosmith, they were around in the 70’s, and the thing about those guys, is they were side-by-side with Montrose when they first came out, in their heyday. So they get the style, they had the same kind of technology going at the time, so they played the same type of amps, if there was somebody modding their guitars and the amps, they all had that guy, whoever was the big guy in the business at that time. So you get a guy like Derek St. Holmes, who just came and played at Ronnie Montrose Remembered, it doesn’t matter what amp’s up there, he plugs into it and it just sounds right. You know, it sounds like he’s got the perfect tone for that stuff every time.
You brought up something interesting, because I mean, obviously Ronnie Montrose had tons of fans, that’s evident from the attendance of something like Ronnie Montrose Remembered, but there’s a little extra something that resonates with musicians. Even though he’s not the household name of Eddie Van Halen, when somebody says, “guitar player”, “Eddie Van Halen”, maybe Ronnie’s not the very first name that comes out of the everyday person’s mouth, but for a musician, there’s something there, there is something that resonates, and his name might be more likely to come out of the mouth of a guitarist saying, “Ronnie Montrose, fantastic guitar player, fantastic influence”. I feel like a lot of musicians, whether it’s guitar or any instrument, if there’s a musician that you like, you’ll track back to, “who were their influences?”, and if you’re a fan of Dokken, or Van Halen, or 80’s bands, you can track that back. Eddie Van Halen? “Inspired by Ronnie Montrose!”, “George Lynch? Influenced by Ronnie Montrose”, like you were just saying. So it’s something that resonates with musicians.
Absolutely, you’re 100% right. But it’s also the same time capsule for the fans. Because there’s definitely a certain percentage that come out that will say, “Hey, man, I saw Montrose back in ’74 with Hagar”, and all that stuff, and they’ll talk about it. And they were also super young at that time, and going to their first concerts with their older brother or whatever, and for them, it’s the same thing, it also brings them back to that time. It’s like me going out to see the artists who were the first concerts I went to, it’s kind of an extra rush because it brings you back to that place in life. And like I say, when Montrose first came out in the early days, they were very positively reviewed and the Rolling Stone magazine was calling them “The American Led Zeppelin”, guitar aficionados were referring to Ronnie as “The American Jeff Beck”, etc. In a time period when, not too long before that, Led Zeppelin kind of changed the map, because a lot of things people were saying was, up until that generation, people were going out to watch shows just to see what the people looked like on stage, just to see them live, and it was more about a visual. And then what people started realizing, and record companies started changing their approach to signing bands, is that the new generation was actually listening. Listening to the musicians and how they were playing, and those four guys in Zeppelin were so strong that all of a sudden, there was this new reason to be listening to rock ’n’ roll in a hip, young, rocker generation. It wasn’t just, “Let’s go out to see Herman’s Hermits so we can see how cool they look in their outfits”, it was really changing things. And when the generation was listening and getting into that type of orientation, that’s when all of a sudden Edgar Winter got popular, and Ronnie was a part of that band, They Only Come Out At Night with “Free Ride” and “Frankenstein”, and other delights. And that was a time that somebody like Ronnie, who was a really strong musical force with strong classical or jazz elements or what have you, in his playing, really great groove, timing, intonation, all these things, who didn’t really — I don’t want to say he didn’t care about his look, but he was just really anal about his music being top notch in his approach, and a lot of people respected him for that.
Of course, and I didn’t mean to imply that there was no fanbase, but I just meant a little extra something that hits musicians, and that aligns with what you’re saying – of course there was a visual, there was a look, there was that “cool 70’s rock” vibe, but at the same time, he was hyper-focused on music.
Absolutely, and you know, for the Ronnie Montrose Remembered, my only point was, the fans that are in the room were actually in that same mode. They’re all kids in the old candy store, and the musicians on stage, and the time capsule that it creates is probably what makes that a repeat event. That’s not happening anywhere else with that music. I do have some spot gigs with promoters in different parts of the country who want some faction of Ronnie Montrose Remembered, but we can’t bring 22 guitar players to those, it’s not possible, and they’re all on tour during the year. So I can bring two or three, depending on the city, and if the timing works out, and we do some, but the one at NAMM is the one.
*laughs* Of course, NAMM is prime time to get a bunch of musicians together, especially of that genre, that scene and everything. And it’s funny, you mentioned earlier about being from the East Coast, growing up on Long Island, but it seems as of right now, you have a strong connection with the L.A. scene in general.
Well, I would say California. Because there’s a really long and very full history of bands and artists and musicians coming out of the Bay Area, including Montrose. And those bands I was mentioning, Tesla…Santana was out of the Bay Area, and part of Santana became Journey, so you’ve got all the Journey guys up there, Hagar was up there doing his own solo stuff for a long time after Montrose, Eddie Money, Metallica, Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship, the list goes on, tons and tons of people. And the interesting thing for me is after I met Ronnie and he decided after I was working with him for a while, on a completely different note, had nothing to do with Montrose, he asked me if I wanted to do a new Montrose band with him. Once we started doing that, I started going up to the Bay Area a lot, and I started getting into those circles, and learning so much from all those people I was just mentioning, and just realizing how big of an epicenter for music and art the Bay Area was, and how influential it was over the years. (((I really didn’t realize, perhaps in some ways bigger than L.A., L.A. had its big, big time in the 80’s, but San Francisco in the 60’s and 70’s really had a lot going on.)))
Now, on another note, I want to ask you more about your John 5 Sun King story you started to tell me before.
Well, I personally think that as the visual communications devices have gotten more and more elaborate, and even as people got computers and started becoming more and more visual, and started looking at things outside of their body to communicate and to occupy their minds, a lot began to get lost with the depth that an artist will be dedicated to a certain craft or to their art. For example, I feel like people like Itzhak Perlman, or Pavarotti, or QiGong masters who mediate all the time, harnessing the energy of the earth, or Eddie Van Halen. Even if you spent only a half an hour on your smart device or on a computer every day, you’ve already lost focus. If you have a smart device or you’re looking at anything outside your body as a kid, nobody — I couldn’t do it as hard as I tried, even the most dedicated person to learning, say, the fiddle, if they’re spending time on their smart phone…you’re not going to have another Eddie Van Halen, I’m sorry, it’s not going to happen. I use computers and I communicate with a smartphone, and I know when I was a kid and those things weren’t around, I wrote a lot more stories and poetry and music, because that’s all inside you. But I do know one guy, there’s only one person I would say I’ve ever seen have that much dedication to an instrument, and no offense to anybody else, but John 5 is the only guy I know who, when I met him I think he was about 20, and he was literally sleeping with his guitar. And at that time, I had a band that was called Sun King, with Rudy Sarzo and John, and it was signed to a deal on Giant Records, and you could tell this guy lived and breathed guitar 24/7 all the time. You look at him on Instagram now, and while he’s Instagramming, he’s not even looking at the camera, he’s just still playing away, doing his chicken pickin’ and all that beautiful guitar playing in so many different genres, the guitar playing that he’s so good at, and I know that’s just him and that’s real. He’s just on it that much and it never stops. I don’t really know anybody else, personally, in music that is that single-focused, but before this modern day and age, I would imagine that it was much easier to be single-focused, because there wasn’t anything to do *laughs*.
Exactly, you could spend 10 hours straight playing the guitar. *laughs*
So you’re from Long Island.
Yes!
Which is interesting, because I don’t meet a lot of people in California from Long Island, almost nobody. I don’t really know anybody in any of my circles. I see people at NAMM or I see some Long Islanders on tour, but not here. So, my high school used to do marching band competitions at Hofstra [University, on Long Island] every year. Hofstra University was the big hub for these high schools in New York State to come down and do competitions. I was a drummer, and I wore the big tall furry hat with the feather plume coming out, and we had these gigantic drums on what they call high-steppers, you had a fork coming out of your waist, and then straps over your shoulders to hold the drum up, and you’d be marching and playing, and it was military, man. But it was a fierce competition, and that was a big part of growing up for me, marching band, playing drums. An interesting Long Island fact for Ronnie Montrose Remembered, there was a gentleman who played the other day named Randy Jackson, from a band called Zebra.
Celebrity status on Long Island, Randy Jackson.
Absolutely. He was celebrity status when I played my first club on Long Island, Zebra, they were a legend in those clubs back in the day, and people talked about them and Twisted Sister and said, “Back in the day, those guys built up followings in the clubs and then Atlantic Records signed them”, you know, I never got to meet Zebra or even see them back then, but there was a radio station, it might still be running, the big rock station called WBAB, out of Babylon.
Alive and well!
So back in the day, when I was growing up, there was a DJ out there named Bob Buchmann, a legend. A few years ago, there was an event and somebody that knew Bob, knew me, and mentioned to me that Bob was out here, working at KGB in San Diego. And he was coming to an event with them, and she was asking me to get them on the list. I was like, “Bob Buchmann? Can you ask him if he’s from Long Island?” and that’s how it kind of started, I hadn’t heard these names in forever. Turns out, he was out here in L.A. while I was here, he was Program Director at KLOS before he went down to KGB. So, I got them in the show, put them on the list, and I met Bob and said, “Hey, man, I’m from Long Island”, and all this stuff, and he was really friendly and personable, and we touched on Zebra and Twisted Sister a little bit. Maybe a year or two later, I got a message from Bob saying, “Hey, Zebra’s coming out to the west coast for the first time in 25 years, and I’m good friends with the band, you want to go?”. He set me up on the list, that night, we all hung out, Randy, Felix and Guy from Zebra, Bob and his wife, and me, we made a bond and became friends. The next time I saw Randy, I walked into a show he was doing, and he invited me up on stage, and they knew “Rock Candy”, so we did that! Zebra in their club days, used to play a lot of Zeppelin songs before they did their own record, famously. So then, as “Rock Candy” was ending, he whispered in my ear, “Do you know ‘Whole Lotta Love’?” and just segued into that! And as that one was ending, “What Is And What Should Never Be”, and we jammed and played a whole set. It was here in California, so I had fans there amongst the Zebra fans and they were very happy, and then I asked him to play last year at the Ronnie Montrose event because he was going to be at NAMM. So now we have that connection, he played last year and this year, and it’s almost surreal for me to be friends with both of these guys.
Yeah, it’s something you grew up around.
Around but not…East Coast is not like Los Angeles, people in Los Angeles could go down to Sunset Boulevard and go, “Oh, there’s Geffen Records, Atlantic’s in that building”…when I first got out here, the A&R guys, they kind of made themselves known and they hung out in the clubs. Back east, everything was hidden, nobody really knew where anything was.
A couple of things, I mean for clubs, places like Sundance —
Is Sundance still there?
No. Long gone, but everybody still talks about it though, going “I remember when I saw this band and that band there, it was amazing”, and I’m over here like, “Man, wish I had been there to see that!”
*laughs* Right on, right on. I played at Sundance, it was still around when I was coming up in the world in the beginning. But yeah, the guy that led to my initial foray into the behind-the-scenes business, he wound up pulling into my driveway on Eastern Long Island somewhere two hours away from New York, opened up the limo window, gave me a business card and said, “Hey, can you get yourself up to 75 Rockefeller Center tomorrow”? *laughs* I was like, yeah! It wound up being Atlantic Records, and I’d been to Rockefeller Center a million times, I didn’t know Atlantic Records was there, and nobody would know! Because they just don’t advertise themselves like that in New York, or anywhere on the East Coast.
You know, the more you’re saying it, the more I recognize that. In L.A., even if it’s something that’s not there or at least active anymore like, the Tower Records, you can look at it and say, “That’s where this happened”, say, Axl Rose used to work there, such-and-such band was there, and then you have the Whisky, the Rainbow, all the traditional Sunset Strip sights. But it’s true, in New York City, you’ve got hella skyscrapers and you don’t always know who’s who and what’s what. And for some things like, yes, Rockefeller Center – that’s a landmark and you’ll go see it, but you won’t necessarily say, “Rockefeller Center, that’s where Atlantic Records was and so-and-so got signed there”.
Yeah, it’s a different mentality as far as the makings-of and the behind-the-scenes stuff. When you’re out here, you’re going, “There’s CBS, and they’re filming ‘Friends’ right now, there it is”. Want to be on the set? Just go walk in over there – that’s L.A.!
More openness and visibility. Now, I want to ask you more about yourself as a musician, more of your roots in music and what drove you in that direction? I know that you played drums and sang, and obviously you loved Zeppelin, but on a deeper level, what was the pull that had you saying “Yes, I’m going to do this”?
So it seems like I’ve always been into music. My mom had made tapes of me, and I guess she must have taught me some songs at a young age, for something to do when I was a kid, there weren’t any iPads, we were probably spinning tops and banging sticks together and digging into dirt with spoons or something. *laughs* But, she taped me at two years old and did an interview, and it’s interesting because I think I probably had better pitch and a pretty damn good delivery at two, singing songs, it’s like “Wow!”. When your brain is that young, there’s no interference.
No inhibition, either, you just do it.
And that’s pretty good, listening back to it, I never realized. And my parents, they were good parents, they were just super busy when I was a kid, but, I hate to say it, they were also squares. They always had regular jobs and great retirement and all that stuff, they went to Graduate school and got multiple Doctorates while I was growing up, so they weren’t in the house a lot, and I was an only kid. Because of that, I had the chance to be internal a lot, a lot of my thoughts were internal, they told me that I never cried as a baby but I always looked like I was examining everything. And I guess I was and maybe that’s why I went to school for Engineering. I was this math/science kid, madness. I was a teacher’s pet, not because I did homework, but because I was kind of ahead of the curve on the comprehension when it came to math and science. I was drawing my cartoons on my desk and half eavesdropping on whatever the teacher was saying, just enough to go, “21.5”, when they tried to stump me *laughs*, I was that kid. But on the other side of that coin, my mom and dad didn’t play it, but there was a piano in the house. And I would just go up there myself and sit there, and at first, I was just hearing my own stuff in my own head, self-taught myself on how to find the notes that I was hearing. I was left on my own a lot to invent and create those kind of things and connect with the beyond, so to speak, and feel a lot more things that I might not have felt if I was more structured and, “Do your homework! Take these lessons! You must read this music”, and all that stuff. You know, Paul McCartney will tell you flat out he doesn’t read music – it comes to you by ear, so I get that, that’s the way I’ve always felt about music. But, growing up on the East Coast, any parent on the East Coast will tell you 100%, “Music is not a career”. *laughs* Anything to do with music or entertainment or anything like that, “Sounds like a good hobby, but what are you really going to do with your life?”, that’s just the way it is. Really, I just said that and it resonated with that old Twisted Sister video that starts out with…
“What are you going to do with your life?!”
Right?! That’s the reality of growing up on Long Island. Now, growing up out there is great, because you learn the value of neighbors and close friends, and people that would do anything for you. You grow up on Long Island, I have a hundred people that would do anything at any time of day or night for me…never going to happen in California. No offense, California, but it’s true, and anyone from L.A. knows what I mean. Think about how many neighbors that you know, even right next to your house that you’ve been in for ten years. It’s a big difference between L.A. and New York. On the flip side, those people that are in the neighborhood that all know you, they’re all judging at the same time. “I heard you did this”, “Hey, what are you doing, you should go back to school!”, it’s a nurturing thing but it’s got an assertiveness to it…
And a nosiness, perhaps.
Exactly, so it’s endearing and feels like family and it’s really great and supportive, but at the same time, it’s also on the borderline of caging sometimes in a way, because you feel all this pressure in a way, just to get the acceptance of all the people you’re growing up with, you kind of want to do a thing that everyone says is okay. And if you didn’t grow up out there, you can’t really understand what I’m saying.
I feel like it’s other places too, maybe small towns and rural places, or just anywhere with that suburb life.
I guess so, and I love it. I love it out there for a lot of reasons, and I love it out here for a lot of reasons, and they’re different reasons.
Same!
Right? Sorry, I went on a tangent, but…because of all those East Coast ideas and expectations floating around from their grandparents and the cousins and all that, although I kept hinting to my parents I wanted to go to music school and be a music major, they couldn’t see it. And their parents were still alive and it’s not like they said no, but it was in a roundabout way, they made it sound like it would be really hard for me to do that without their support. *laughs* So I did what everybody thought I should do, including my teachers and including me, and I went to engineering school. I was really good at it, I was honor society, without being a real studious student, I just had a batshit mathematical mind that could just twist that stuff and ace my SATs.
Do you still have it?
I doubt it! *laughs* But maybe, maybe that’s how I schedule all these musicians, maybe that’s what it’s helping me do.
*laughs* Engineering school was worth it.
If a cable comes out of the wall, hey, I can plug that back in. What I can say is, what I learned from is, seeing in action throughout life how the universe works and everything you need and want, it always brings to you, it’s always on your doorstep, even if it’s the side door, you just have to look to the side and see that it’s there. And if you’re all stubborn and stoic like I was, and say, I’m going to finish this and get the degree…in hindsight, that’s the one thing I probably wouldn’t have done. I didn’t realize music was going to become a career, I just didn’t. All throughout high school, I was playing in bands, having fun, not really thinking about, “What kind of job do I really want with all this engineering stuff?”, and then out of the blue, I got connected up with some guys and a deal on Atlantic Records, and when that happened, other music industry people started hearing about me while we were in studio making the record. That band was called Big Trouble, with another Long Island hero, Bobby Rondinelli on the drums, he was in Rainbow, and another guy by the name of Tommy Henriksen, who was a bass player in a band from Long Island called Rough Cutt. Now, they were a cover band, but they were a very popular cover band for a while, and they were the cover band that came out and popularized covering the 80’s metal stuff. That was probably the first band I ever saw in a club, and Tommy wound up being part of this band and record deal, and a guitar player by the name of Jon Levin, who’s now in Dokken, great personal friend of mine. So while we were in this band, deciding what was going on, I started getting other offers. And one of them was to come to L.A., which, I was an artsy kid, I was all in my head, so I wasn’t reading what was going on in magazines, in the business, I didn’t know what was happening in L.A., so when they said they were sending me to Los Angeles, I didn’t know what to expect. Got on a plane, back in the day the business was still healthy money-wise, they hired someone to drive my car and all my stuff out, put me on a First Class jet, had someone pick me up, had an apartment all set up when I arrived, all that kind of stuff. I got to L.A., and I had a good work ethic but I landed in a party. I landed in the Wizard of Oz, I landed on a Saturday night, came to the Sunset Strip, Mario Maglieri, who’s passed now but was the long-time owner of the Rainbow, he was sitting outside the door of the Rainbow with Bill Gazzari when I walked in, my first time, just getting out of the van and somebody said “go there”, both of those guys got up because they thought they knew me, and it was just meant to be. They both gave me giant hugs and said, “So good to see you!”, I’m like, who do they think I am, you know? Girls were just wearing lingerie, there was a zillion of them on the street everywhere, bands were on the sidewalk handing out stacks and stacks of flyers, giving out whatever they had, all kinds of swag, it was a crazy scene, man. It was still spinning off the 80’s. L.A. held onto that for a while. So that was an interesting wakeup to the L.A. that was here, and of course, there was the band scene, we put the band together that I came out to put together, and we started off doing these big showcases at the Roxy and the Troubadour and Gazzari’s. And the labels, I knew everybody from every label right away, I already had business acquaintances from Atlantic who were out here, and I was like, “Man. I wish I knew this was here before”. *laughs* But I was happy to be here and somewhere down the road from there, I eventually ran into Ronnie Montrose and we started working together. I always had an artsy head, if I liked somebody and I thought it was really cool jamming together, I was like, this is great. I wasn’t the guy to be thinking about the business aspect of it. I’m a triple fire sign, I’m an Aries, Leo, Sag, and you’re born feeling indestructible. So I never felt that need to go, “I better do this because this will pay more money than that”, I just, I would have fit in at Woodstock, kind of had a very hippie mentality, and when I met Ronnie, he was like, “Man, this feels great to jam”. And I stopped doing some of the things I was doing, and just did that. It’s like the same thing when I met Rudy and John 5, and we started that band, I was like, “Wow, these guys are two of the coolest guys I’ve ever met in my life, it’s such a good hang”. You know, there are a lot of bigger artists who’ve sold millions of records that will tell you, in some way, it is all about the hang. Certain guys, sometimes they’ll lose a member for whatever reason, maybe they’ll retire from music or they’ll join a different band, and when it’s time to get another guy to be with them on tour and maybe making new records, most people would say it’s 90% hang, and 10% perfectly fitting the role music-wise.
It makes sense, being in a band, you’ve got to spend a lot of time with that person or those people, and there’s got to be a chemistry that works and clicks. There are some where you can tell that it doesn’t work or click, and some where it flows so naturally that you know it does.
Absolutely. I can put it this way, any of these people that I’ve felt this way about and have had a serious run with in a band, if some big, huge tragedy happened in either of our lives, we could hug each other and it would be 100% real, without even 1% of weirdness or doubt to the chemistry of the relationship. And that, to me, is more important than anything. There’s a lot of people that you work with in a lot of circles all the time, and you may really like them and have a good time working with them, but there’s a certain depth in your life that you can only go with certain people. To me, humanity is the main point while we’re here, and Ronnie Montrose really taught me to wear that, and not to feel like you had to subscribe to these superficialities that you had to uphold in front of everybody all the time in the music business and with the fans. I saw him just go up on stage, and whatever he had been going through, just get up there and wear it and talk to people calmly, and let them know different things, even it wasn’t the prettiest thing in the world. I can’t always do that, and I can’t always remember to do that, but when I do remember to do it, it makes the whole experience feel a lot better. I don’t fear it, but I think it’s a shame and I wonder if these really important parts of what our beings are are kind of getting buried and lost in the shuffle with the technological age. If collectively, the whole world is more and more not connecting with our spiritual connections, there’s an issue. Another good friend of mine and wonderful guitar player by the name of Mitch Perry, who played at Ronnie Montrose Remembered, and when I met him he was in the Edgar Winter Group, and I’ve met Edgar through Ronnie as well, who’s a fabulous guy, but Mitch likes to do this song, and wanted to do it with me that night, called “Spaceage Sacrifice”, and that song is all about what you and I have touched on talking about a lot here. “Everyone knew, but most didn’t care. Well, everyone thought they were going somewhere…but it was nowhere”, you know, when they were writing this stuff in ’72, they were already thinking about technology as kind of, not necessarily an evil, but something that was blocking our humanity. And technology wasn’t anything compared to what it is now!
Oh my god, not even comparable! *laughs*
And they didn’t even have cell phones, they didn’t even have those big walkie-talkie military things. Cell phones started as car phones, and they weren’t even close to that yet.
And now here we are recording an interview into a cell phone, such a different world.
So I was up at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame many years ago, and they still had the Elvis wing, and one thing that was really cool was, Elvis had a communications device that was military. So he had something that he could call people from that was like a cell phone. And it had this long string of like 32 characters, numbers and letters, he had to punch it, whatever it was, and he handwrote it. There was a lot of revealing things about Elvis in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame wing, and I think that closed unfortunately, after a while, but maybe it was too much information, I don’t know. But Elvis had a cell phone! The beginning of the end! *laughs*
So we can blame it all on Elvis, that’s what we’re getting at here. *laughs* So this has been a wonderful time, we’ve said so much and had great conversation, but as we are going to have to wrap things up here, let’s close it off with the future of Ronnie Montrose Remembered, and how you want to see it expand and continue into Year 6 and beyond.
Well, one of the new things I did for Ronnie Montrose Remembered this year, because I wanted to find some change-ups, and I’ll just share one of them for those that weren’t there, I’ve been singing this song, “Connection”, which is the ballad from the second Montrose record of the early Montrose stuff. You can just tell by the title, “Connection”, it’s an endearing moment in the show because, of course, now the connection that we wish we could get back to is Ronnie. So about a month and a half ago, I was producing a session for a band, and it had some Eastern influences, and a violin player showed up to play on the session, and he turned out to be an Egyptian guy who was the leader of the Egyptian Orchestra that was out with Page/Plant in the 90’s. I was like, “Wow, man, this is magic, I’ve got to get this guy to come and play Ronnie Montrose Remembered”. So I got him and the cello player that was at the session to come over to my house, like four days before the event, and we made a new arrangement with different key changes for “Connection”. And I turned some things to the proper minor keys in certain areas, where he could go off and do those crazy quarter-tones and stuff, and add all that into the show. So that was one thing that was different this year. I try to bring some new energy to the fold each year. I did speak to certain people this year, I spoke to Steve Vai and his manager backstage at the Metal Hall of Fame this year, they’re talking about coming next year, and there’s a bunch of people like that that are big “maybe”’s right now. Steve Vai, another Long Island guy, right, from our ‘hood? So, we’ll see what surprises there are next year, if Steve comes, maybe Joe Satriani, I saw him that night as well, he’s another Long Island guy! I don’t know if people know – you probably know, because you’re in the business – that Steve took lessons from Joe, famously. I have a super excellent sound mixer who mixes one of the biggest bands in the world on tour, who said “You’ve got me next year”, that’s coming. American Cancer Society will be back with us next year, and they’ll probably be bigger and bring more to the event. It’s about different players, different ways of treating some of the songs. So next year, expect more from us, more better, more better.
Awesome, thank you so much for everything, looking forward to next year!
Thank you!
You can see Metal Magnitude’s coverage of the Ronnie Montrose Remembered event here, and follow the event and Keith St. John on social media via: