Q & A WITH Y & T: It Only Figures

Q & A WITH Y & T: It Only Figures

JANUARY '84-They started out as Yesterday & Today and now they're just Y&T, but what the heck! Sylvie Sim-mons finds out all there is to know about these California rockers and then-get this-writes it down! Surpris-ingly, here it is!

Sylvie Simmons

If happiness is a warm gun, Y&T must be on the point of gleeful delirium, straddled across a cannon in the hot California sun. It’s what we in the business call a photo session; it’s what a bunch of bums suckling on generic liquor on the grass call “hey waddafuck you doin’ up there man”; it’s what Y&T call meeting the press an hour before their show down the road at the Santa Monica Civic. “Eyyy, ” a couple of kids passing by scream out, “It’s the Ramones!" No, children; all leather jackets were not created equal in the eyes of the Lord. A more knowledgeable trio screech their wagon to attention and hightail it over to shuffle on the spot and go ‘awlriiiiite. ’ A teenage girl tiptoes over to Leonard Haze. “Excuse me sir. What kind of music do you play?” Good question; give the woman a job. Answers the drummer and founding member: “Heavy rock.” What else?

Heavy rock. They used to call them the Oakland Raiders of rock and it had nothing to do with their choice of pants. They had a reputation for being so goddam physical onstage, energetic, aggressive underdogs, beating their war in spite of the odds up into the top division. While all around them in the blissed-out Bay Area bands like (those of a sensitive disposition/are advised to look away) Journey were playing so-called heavy rock that’s so clean you could perform openheart surgery on it, so safe you could let your little sister sit on its face. Y&T were spinning out what they call “face-melting music.” H.M. crunchers and kickers and straightforward heaviness, sounds to bash your brains out to.

They’d been doing it for over 10 years. And for most of those years, except in their native East Bay area, if they’d have caught a cold it would probably have run in the opposite direction. When they were a rock ’n’ roll covers band, they got hired for country and western gigs. When they teamed up with Journey’s management—Lou Bramy and Herbie Herbert—the two split up and Journey got Herbie. When they got a record deal—with London—the company decided

to spend its time nurturing the Moody Blues’ back catalogue. You get the idea. But they kept plugging—playing navy bases and slotting original songs in between the Led Zep covers, renting halls and putting on their own headlining gigs—until they got a deal with A&M and stuck out an album. The only thing they changed was their monicker— “Yesterday and Today,” as they were known, wouldn’t fit on the billboards.

So they built up a following in California; they’ve even been known to drool over them in New York; and in England they’re definitely big time. But they haven’t reached that platinum plateau in the States that all record co. execs diddle with their rosaries and pray for every night.

Not yet. Mean Streak, their latest opus, could be the one to break them wide open. Funnily enough, it’s probably the least mean-sounding record they’ve made—with strong songs, melodic stuff, and a production number they’ve otherwise shunned like a leprous iguana. It’s a record in fact that would sound mighty fine on American airwaves. It’s a record that some heathens would call—as we say in the businessdoing a Journey.

“Not at all,” Dave Meniketti, Y&T’s lead singer and guitarist (drummer Leonard Haze, bassist Phil Kennemore and rhythm guitarist Joey Alves make up the rest), shakes his curly head. “Absolutely not. I can’t say we set out to make a slick record. We just put in a little extra...

“We said to our label, ‘You know what you’ve got here. You know you can break us here because we’re breaking everywhere else. Heavy Metal is happening in the States. We want to keep doing what we’re doing because we know our music is right for the States too. Everybody likes heavy stuff. It’s unfortunate that everybody here tries to judge you on what’s happening on the American radio sound.

“Everybody knows how sad that is, this pre-programmed crap. All of those HM bands that are trying to keep going, they feel they do have to compromise and sound just like everybody else that’s being played on American radio; and then everybody compromises and after a while everybody sounds the same. Right now I swear to you, in the last year-and-a-half I can't tell you one band from another when I listen to radio in America. I don’t know if it’s Journey or Uriah Heep. Even bands that used to be heavy bands, they’ve come down to a middle-of-the-road sound. That’s why we’ve got to keep our own style and not cop out. And that’s what we’re making sure of.

“We weren’t going to do anything on record that we can’t do live, by a long shot. We wanted to have a shot at doing a few extra things where the tune needed it, and adding an extra harmony part or whatever. But we know who we are and what type of band we are. and we don't want to go completely over the top. We’re not trying to be a Styx or Loverboy or any of those type of bands.”

Not hungry enough yet?

“Well, we’re hungry enough." says Dave. “We realize that we have to make it in the States to survive along with the rest Being big in Britain is after all, financially, a bit like being massive in Montana. "But we feel the sound the band has is good enough for American radio. I know from our record company standpoint, they thought that the production wasn’t always up to par. We thought it was good enough, but I don’t think there’s any question that the record company is extremely happy with this record.” (A quick aside to note that producer Chris Tsangarides did the honors, and they recorded it back home in the Bay Area, in Journey’s studio no less, a nice leisurely, family process instead of the usual whip-itout in England.)

“Now I don’t think we got super slick and sound like Journey by any means, thank God!—no offense to Journey, but that’s not our bag. The whole thing about Y&T is we’re a live band and always have been. We’re not a cop-out band. We’ve always known what we wanted to do. People say, you don’t sound American, you sound more British or European —and that’s obviously because we got our influence from those type of bands, the British Invasion, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, the Who. The thing that makes us different is that we also have our own individual personalities that we put into it instead of trying to just copy. We play what we like.”

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So do they like spending hours getting harmonies right? I mean, is that a proper thing for any self-respecting HM band to do?

“It’s a funny thing and I still can’t understand it, but some people think that just because you sing harmonies, then it’s not heavy. I don’t believe that. If the tune calls for it to make it sound right, put harmonies on it. That has nothing to do with being a wimp or not being heavy. I remember an old producer of ours saying, ‘You can’t do harmonies. Led Zeppelin didn’t have harmonies.’ So what? They didn’t have three people singing. Listen to AC/DC. Even though AC/DC have got very little harmony, you listen to those songs and even so it’s still there.

“It’s all heavy and it’s all music and it’s all Y&T and it all means something. I think it’s very boring when you see a band that’s in one style and stays in that groove all night long. I think even for our own sanity we couldn’t do stuff like that. To get heavy you’ve got to get mellow sometimes.” Hmrri; tell that to Lemmy.

Anyway when this band gets heavy it gets heauy; don’t let those perms fool you into thinking you’re dealing with Loverboy here. And talking of heavy, “When all these things started happening at once, it was getting kind of heavy on us. and 1 guess we approached it really seriously like man, this is too much. But 1 think it gets that way with everybody who gets to the point where you’re starting to get some success. Then everybody's on your case, everybody wants to make sure you don't make any mistakes, and it starts to get too calculated, too much like a job.

“But we keep our sanity by just playing live. That's our main thing. We make sure our tunes are happening live and we're having a good time live.

“We realize that the rest has got to be there—you've got to do interviews, photo sessions, whatever the hell you have to do. But we’re starting to loosen up now and not worry about it so much and have a good time as much as possible. We don't want to be so calculated on the tunes we write, the way we act. We want to be ourselves as much as possible and keep our identity and have fun doing it. And we do. We've got the handle on it now."