One of the greatest voices in rock n roll, Jack Russell from the band Great White was recently interviewed by Knarly Charlie over at KNAC.com. I think most people have forgotten that about Great White…they have a great singer. What most people think about these days when they hear the name Great White is the tragic Station night club fire in Rhode Island that killed 100 people. Yes, that was a tragedy, but I’m starting to remember the awesome voice of Jack Russell.
While Great White never had huge hits like Bon Jovi or Def Leppard, they made solid albums (platinum and double platinum) with a Grammy nomination. Their albums and their sound would sneak up on you. What I mean by that is that they had some pretty cool videos for the time (remember Bobbie Brown?) so you bought the album. Listening to the album for a while you suddenly realized that this dude can sing like a mother. He might be the only guy other than Robert Plant that I can tolerate singing Led Zeppelin songs.
Here’s a few things that Jack Russell had to say in the interview:
KNAC.COM: Great White just released a new album, Rising, and you have a new bass player, Scott Snyder. Where did you find him?
RUSSELL: Actually, he subbed for Sean [McNabb] one night. He’s a friend of Audie’s. He subbed for Sean one night when Sean was doing some acting thing. And when it came down to wanting to get a bass player we decided this guy was perfect, because he’s got a real great attitude, a great player, always in a good mood. It’s just the perfect fit.
KNAC.COM: Let’s talk about the new album. “I Don’t Mind” is a great song, and it kind of touches on some past things and moving on into the future, and also friendship.
RUSSELL: Oddly, that song was written like, 10 years ago. It was the one song we resurrected. I had wanted to do that song for years and for some reason we never recorded it. We couldn’t even find it. We did a demo of it years ago and I couldn’t find the demo! We had played it one time live, and this friend of ours recorded it on a DVD. We tracked him down and he mailed out the DVD, so we got to relearn the song from that. It came out really good. Yeah, I love that tune a lot.
KNAC.COM: Did you pull out any other songs out of the vault for the new record?
RUSSELL: I don’t write like that. I’ll generally wait until the last minute. And for me that’s cool. It keeps it fresh. We used to spend months in pre-production, rehearsing the songs, making sure every little kick pattern was exactly right. We just got sick of that. A lot of times you lose the spontaneity of the song, because you’veplayed it so many times, it gets over-rehearsed. It starts to sound kind of homogenized and pasteurized. Now when we’re recording, we walk in, we teach it to the guys, and once it goes down we record it and boom! If it comes out good we keep it. If it doesn’t we do it again. But it keeps that live feeling and it has that excitement level.
KNAC.COM: I don’t hear you singing about “sweet little sister” and boffing chicks like you did in the old days. I loved that era, but I guess everybody grows and grows up.
RUSSELL: Well, that’s the thing. For me records have been nothing more than a snapshot of where I’m at emotionally at that time. I’m as honest as I can be, I write about what’s going on in my life, where I’m at right in that moment. And this album is as introspective and as honest as I’ve ever been in my lyrics. I really dug down deep for some of this stuff and this other stuff I’ll just bawl and go “God, do I really want to tell the world about this?” It’s very cathartic for me as well as therapeutic.
KNAC.COM: So do you think you got another “Rock Me’ or another “Stick It” in you?
RUSSELL: As far as that goes, I don’t know. “Rock Me” –I love that tune. That’s one of those classic songs. I think that’s the quintessential Great White song. When we wrote that song it was like “Okay, we finally know where this band should be at musically. No we start from here and kind of grow out.” I hope so. For me, this album is my favorite, as far as the whole record is concerned. Not just because it’s our newest album, but I have really good emotions about this record. There’s some stuff we hadn’t done before like “Danger Zone” and “Situation”. Just different styles of what we do that we’ve never touched on. Or, “My Sanctuary.” I’ve never done a blues track like that, like a “gospelly” blues.
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I like Great White and I can’t wait to buy the Jack Russell’s CD (although I don’t think its as high quality as Great White).