San Francisco’s Slough Feg, or perhaps more correctly, The Lord Weird Slough Feg, are no newcomers to the scene.  With a traditional NWOBHM style and strong similarities to early Iron Maiden and Thin Lizzy, the band has actually been around since about 1990.  The following conversation took place recently during Slough Feg’s mid-November tour stop in Salt Lake City, Utah.  Although all band members were present for the interview, including brand new drummer Harry Cantwell, it was founding member Mike Scalzi who seemed content to play the role of main spokesman for the band.  Slough Feg’s sixth full-length CD, Hardworlder, is out now on Cruz Del Sur Music.  A big thank you goes out to the band for taking the time to talk!

 

First off, I’m dying to have some official word on how to pronounce the band’s name.  I haven’t been able to find any info on the band’s website.

 

Adrian Maestas (bass): Sl-“ow” Feg, like “ouch.”

 

Maybe you guys should put that up on the internet.

 

Mike Scalzi (vocals/lead guitar): That’s actually a good point, with all the questions we get asked over and over, that one’s never been asked, or it’s been asked, but we’ve never thought about it phonetically.

 

And this name comes from a comic book, right?

 

Mike: Yeah, Slaine The Preserver.  It’s a British comic.

 

Are you a fan of comic books?  Was this the inspiration for the Hardworlder cover art?

 

Adrian: “Graphic novels” is the term we prefer. (Laughs)

 

Mike: No, I just kind of found it.  I’m not a big comic book guy at all.  The new album looks like a comic book, but I don’t read comic books at all.  I do like comic book art, like old Jack Kirby stuff, and when I was a kid, I read comic books.  I guess you could say I was a fan at that point.

 

So that didn’t have anything to do with the cover art for the new CD?

 

Mike: No.  The guy that we found to do the art, a sci-fi artist, it turned out he also did comic books, and it worked out pretty good.  A guy named James E. Lyle.

 

Now the new album is just listed under “Slough Feg.”  Did you officially shorten the name of the band from The Lord Weird Slough Feg?

 

Mike: No, we just kinda decided to take it off and maybe at some later time put it back on again.

 

And you have a brand new drummer.  I can ask a question about that.  But I don’t know if it would be a touchy subject at all.

 

Mike: Why?

 

Well, with your last drummer Antoine Rueben-Diavola leaving the band right before the tour was to begin . . .

 

Mike: It wasn’t like it was any big blow out or anything.  We just said to him “you wanna do this tour?” and he said “ehhh . . . .”  It was your basic, normal band bullshit.  You want people in the band who are going to want to be there.

 

How’s the new album doing?  Are people noticing it?

 

Mike: We don’t usually get too many bad reviews.  Our last one got a lot of buzz around Europe and the US, but I don’t know . . . in underground metal, it seems like almost every album that comes out receives a lot of praise.  The reviewers in these small magazines and websites are usually in bands of their own, so they’re not really objective.  I like to see what a really big magazine like Rolling Stone had to say.  But in the end, while I’d like to read the reviews and see what they have to say, I don’t know if any of these magazines are any more objective than any others.  It’s all a political move.  The small webzines never really have any reason to review you positively unless they like it, but with the bigger magazines, it seems like if your label buys ad space, then you get a good review.  I know specific cases where a reviewer will get pressure to not be honest because they’ll ruin their relationship with the label.  So reviews can’t really be trusted.  The press can’t really be trusted in a lot of ways.  The rule with anything else is pretty much follow a person’s interest.  Don’t trust people to be nice just for no reason.  If someone gives you a good review, a lot of times they have a reason outside of the music.  I personally don’t trust reviews a lot.

 

I wanted to compliment you on the new album, and especially on the lyrics.  They really stand alone like poems.  Who writes them?

 

Mike: I do.

 

Do the song titles connect up with the lyrics?

 

Mike: Not really.  A lot of people have thought that this is a concept album, but this isn’t a concept album.  There’s somewhat of a concept, but there’s no big overall concept.  I wrote almost a third of the lyrics while we were in the studio.  It’s mostly very vague, and I don’t really have any precise or cohesive idea of the album.  But there is somewhat of a spirit of the album centered around tough guys . . . maybe it’s a Charles Bronson concept album. (Laughs)

 

What about the song “Tiger! Tiger!”?

 

Mike: It’s interesting that you mention that because Tiger! Tiger! is a book.  It’s the original title to a very popular science fiction book by Alfred Bester called The Stars My Destination.  It’s probably the best fiction book I’ve ever read.  And some of the lyrics in the song are also based on a William Blake poem called “Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright.” So anyway, that’s why I called it “Tiger! Tiger!”

 

What about “Frankfurt-Hahn Airport Blues”?  Sounds like there’d be a story behind that one.

 

Mike: Yeah, we were at Frankfurt-Hahn Airport, which is like a European commuter airport with lots of inexpensive flights.  Seriously, some of these flights are like twenty bucks.  And they aren’t very courteous, the planes have hard seats like bus seats, because you aren’t on there very long, and the airports are like bus depots.  So if you get stuck in an airport, you don’t want to get stuck in one of those.  And if your flight gets delayed or cancelled, they don’t automatically book you for the next flight.  So we were in Europe for this festival in 2005, exactly about two years ago, our flight got cancelled, and all the flights for like the next twenty-four hours were full, so we had to wait and wait and wait.  So we were all lying around because we were all really beat.  We’d played like five shows in five days.  We were all lying on the floor in our sleeping bags, and kids were going past us on their way to the same festival because their flights weren’t cancelled.  Anyway, there was also this old guy there who went to all these concerts, he’d seen some of our shows, and he was on his way to Alice Cooper in England, and he said “are you sure you don’t want to get out your guitar and play the Frankfurt-Hahn airport blues?”  And that kinda stuck in my head, and that’s where I got the song title.

 

Ok, so Mike writes the lyrics.  Who writes the music?  Is that more of a collaborative effort?

 

Mike: If you look on the new album, I write most of the music.  But on every album, there’s like one or two songs that I don’t write.  On this new one, Angelo [Tringali, guitars] wrote “Whirling Vortex,” the instrumental at the end.  But even on the album when it says “Scalzi,” there’s often little ideas . . . Adrian for instance might come up with a chord change . . . so maybe it’s not right to say of any song that I wrote the whole song.  Usually I come up with all the parts and arrange most of them, but people throw in ideas.  But it’s not a situation where I don’t want to use anyone’s ideas.

 

What about all the Celtic influences in the music?  I thought “Scalzi” is an Italian name.

 

Mike: I’m half-Irish, but that doesn’t have anything to do with it.  When I started out, I was really super in to Maiden, Sabbath, Priest, St. Vitus . . . I think where it really comes from is the combination of Maiden and Sabbath which have kind of a churning element to them, and I started writing riffs like that.  By the time I started this band, I was writing Maiden-style groove riffs.  I didn’t know much about music theory, but I changed the music from minor key stuff to these like major key triplets, and people started saying “that sounds like Irish folk music.”  And of course, I had this comic book, and the band name was Irish, and people started saying you ought to look in to that.  It didn’t have anything to do with me being half-Irish, though.  But still to this day, I don’t know much about Irish folk music.  Maybe just like The Pogues, but they’re more like pop music.  I was in to heavy metal, and I just wrote things that sounded Irish somehow.

 

And I noticed that you did a Manilla Road cover on the new album.  I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s which is when they were around, and they seem like a pretty influential band right now.  I was wondering how I missed them.

 

Mike: Oh, I missed them back then, too.  I didn’t know anything about them until I came across them when I started writing songs and someone said “hey, you should listen to this because they sound like you.”  But they sound nothing like us, actually.

 

[At this point, the warm up band starts playing, which makes the interview impossible to continue where we are sitting inside the venue, so we are forced to move things outside to the band’s tour van.]

 

Ok, so I was asking about Manilla Road.

 

Mike: It’s funny, there’s a pattern here.  A lot of the questions we get have the same answer.  Somebody hears us and says “oh, you sound like these guys” or “oh, you sound Irish.”  It’s been happening for the entire period of this band.  And I guess the reason we keep answering that way is because I’m not a particularly knowledgeable person on the state of heavy metal or what’s going on in the underground.  I guess all I can say is that as a songwriter I was kind of involved in my own head and doing my own stuff.  And when someone says “oh, you must have listened to Cirith Ungol . . . you must have listened to Manilla Road . . . you must have listened to Irish folk music,” the truth is I have no idea about that stuff.  I only heard it after the fact, after someone else already made the connections and said this is what you’re about.  And actually, it does kind of piss me off.  I’m much less obscure than that.  I actually just like mainstream metal.  Often bands are like that.  People ask Black Sabbath how they came up with a certain idea, “did you study Satanism?” I don’t know if you’ve ever heard them say that, but Tony Iommi was like “we just got together and started fucking around, and you know . . .”

 

Well, I see a whole bunch of CDs down here on the floor of the van. Does that mean that, even though you say that you don’t listen to a lot of these bands that people tell you that you sound like, are you still music collectors?

 

Mike: I might not, but I’m not speaking for the whole band on that.

 

Are the rest of you guys music collectors?  I mean, what got me into heavy metal way back when was KISS and Alive II.  Do you have a favorite like that?

 

Angelo Tringali (lead guitar): The bands I grew up with and collected were just like everyone else: Scorpions, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath.  And the older I got, the more interested I got in collecting records, more obscure bands, and stuff like that.  I was fortunate to get a lot of things back in the days when they came out, which are hard to find now.  Like the early Pentagram albums, early St. Vitus stuff, you know?

 

Mike: One huge influence, to answer the question myself, which is actually one of the few underground metal bands that I was aware of as a teenager . . . well, Manowar, I guess, they were underground . . . I was particularly in to St. Vitus, and who were on a hardcore punk label.  And metalheads were just metalheads.  I was in to heavy metal, maybe Priest and Sabbath, and then I got in to American hardcore, and went back and forth.  St. Vitus were basically a metal band, a doom band, that no metalheads knew about.  And I was very influenced by them the whole way from teen age until this day.

 

Mike, you were saying that you don’t keep up with the state of metal.  Do you other guys keep up with it?  I think metal right now is as healthy as it’s ever been.  The technique and the musicianship are as good as they’ve ever been.  Stuff like “Eruption,” that’s where people start now.

 

Angelo: With time, things become more advanced.  But I think bands back in those days, to make up for a lack of musical technique, they were just more original.  Bands were kind of artsy in that sense.

 

And that’s a problem now with all of these metalcore bands and these death metal bands. One of them sounds like every other.

 

Angelo: Definitely.

 

Mike: One thing’s definitely true now, is back in those days stuff wasn’t as easily categorized, pigeonholed into a niche, you know?  Now, in order to really sell records at all, you gotta be like . . . if you’re a death metal band you have to sound just so, if you’re a power metal band you have to sound just so.  It’s really . . .

 

Angelo: Itemized.

 

Mike: Yeah, itemized in a sense.  It’s very, very regimented.  There are exceptions, but those aren’t the ones that are on the labels like Century Media, Nuclear Blast, and Metal Blade.  The ones that really sell.  The bands that are more creative and unique, I think, are the bands that are on smaller labels, like our label.

 

Mike, I was going to ask about Hammers Of Misfortune.  Why did you leave?  I really liked The Locust Years.  And I was kind of disappointed just a few months after that one came out when I found out . . . it looked like . . . the band was going to break up.

 

Mike: I just quit because I didn’t actually like The Locust Years as much as the other records.  I don’t dig it that much.  And then, there was just stuff with . . . one time we toured, and then it became apparent that we weren’t going to tour anymore.  We were just going to make records.  Things got more and more narrowed down.  What I enjoyed about the band was sort of chafing away to what I didn’t enjoy so much, so I quit.  Like “we’re not gonna tour now,” okay well, that takes one of the big motivations for me to do it.  Then we’re gonna make a certain kind of music that, most of which, was not really what I wanted to do.  So we’re just gonna make records, and we may make records that I’m not really interested in.  So at that point, it was kind of unfair to anybody to stay in it.  It became more of an experience where I was just . . . doing it out of obligation or loyalty to the band, which I was.  I did have a lot of loyalty, the spirit of what it once was.  I was doing it all based on the past.

 

Are you still friends with the people in the band?

 

Mike: Oh yeah.

 

I don’t want to leave Harry out of this.  You’re the new drummer.  How’s it going so far in this band?  You’re only about five dates in to the tour.

 

Mike: He’s really fresh because he’s only been in the band for two months.  And he’s never toured before.

 

Are you in shock from being on the road?

 

Harry Cantwell (drums): No, it’s been really fun so far, for sure.  I was a little worried that it would be stressful or whatever, but I’ve had a really good time.

 

You guys obviously have jobs that allow you to get away, right?

 

Mike: The band’s kind of a priority.  It’s kind of weird, I guess.  Especially for people like me who are getting into their thirties, mid-thirties.  The older you get, for some people at least, the more of a strain it gets to be.  Several of the people who’ve dropped off, been in the band before, it was because of that.  The stresses and responsibilities of having a family or having a full-time job.  We’ve all been pretty fortunate.  Ah, I wouldn’t say just fortunate.  We’ve prioritized music in our lives . . . in order to sort of mold what we do for work and where we live and how we live and what our relationships with people are like to the priority of touring and making records and playing music, so that it’s remained . . . worth it, actually.  At times it doesn’t seem like that, but it has for me.