Kalamazoo and KROKUS, too!

The security man in the red jacket was adamant about it.

“No, ya can’t go back to see Crockus,” he said, shaking his head.

“It’s Croak-us,” I corrected, “and I’m supposed to do an interview with ’em.”

“Crock-us, Croak-us, whatever, ya ain’t gettin’ back cuz yer not laminated,” he informed me, fingering the plastic-coated pass on his jacket.

No, I thought, and I’m not lubricated, either, unlike about 88 percent of these headknockers out there. I’d just come from a harrowing foray in the men’s room at Kalamazoo’s Wings Stadium— normally a mild-mannered hocky rink— where a groggy horde of tanked-up guys were using as receptacles the sinks, trash cans, ash trays and just about anything sitting still that wouldn’t spit back. I remembered ruefully the way I’d sidestepped over a minefield of empty beer cans and bottles en route to this SQld-out show, pondering with distaste at what consequences might be brought that evening. Had I known, I’d have pissed in the bushes.

But it was, after all, part of The Ritual, of gearing up and numbing down the senses to a level, commensurate vyith what promised to be an agonizing aUral onslaught of a Sammy Hagar/Krokus double-head (bang)er.

And loud it was. What with the amps set on “stun,” Krokus leveled the old hammer-and-anvil treatment on the willing noggins of these heavy-metal hinterlanders. After an extravagant pumpup the band was called back for an encore, in which Krokus croaker Marc Storace reeled off a succession of highpitched emissions that sounded sort of like the big cat in the Mercury Cougar commercial. And I gotta talk to this guy!

And so I did, finally, after Krokus’s physically-formidable tour manager cleared the way with the stadium security. Laminated or not, I found myself in a backstage room where Krokus was involved in their post-show feeding frenzy. So with loud smacking and masticating all about, I hung back and tried to be inconspicuous, chewing my fingernails and looking at the cheapo decoy guitar that had been ceremoniously smashed at set’s end. It took Marc about eight full-arc slams to the drum riser to do it, but finally the bad axe (!) had relented for the sake of show-biz; it lay there before me with a broken neck, embossed in black Magic Marker—KALAMAZOO KILLS!!

“Now Led Zeppelin, to me, are not heavy metal.”

Marc Storace

Dinner over, the band cheesed it to their warm and waiting tour bus. There I interviewed Krokus singer Marc Storace.

MEETING THE POPE AND RATING THE RAVERS

That was quite an audience response out there.

On a one-to-ten scale, I’d given it a seven.

Yeah? Who rated a ten?

Springfield, Missouri was a ten. Don’t be surprised just because it’s in Missouri. The age group was right, they were students. You know, when they’re all standing on the seats and every time the lights go out between songs and it’s all applause and all the lighters going, it looks like outside the Vatican before the Pope comes out. You think, my God, where are we? It’s the whole atmosphere, the response and everything. It’s just a little town in the middle of nowhere, but it’s full of college students from all over and they came out—armed to the teeth! Maybe it’s just the habit. Some crowds don’t have the habit of responding in the same way. Some crowds may be used to sticking their hands up all night, and that’s their way of being with you and showing appreciation. Some others are just quiet and you just see heads out there, staring at you and you think, well, they’re listening, they haven’t seen us before, they’re learning the songs, they maybe haven’t got the new album yet or all of them, but they’re watching. Their brain is absorbing it. We don’t expect that every crowd stands on their chair and beats hell out of the guy in front of him. I was told that the word around the biz is that you guys are going to be big-time.

Our biggest problem was to find a headlining act to go out and warm up for. It was difficult this year finding an act because nobody wanted us, we were too strong and too dangerous to their career. Luckily, Sammy and us have had a good relationship since I960. We met in Germany the first time. The same year we started touring the West Coast, our first American tour ever, with Sammy as his guest, getting to know the American public. We didn’t tour with him after that, but I met him with our tour manager in London while they were there doing preproduction and we jammed a little onstage. He wanted to take us out on the road because we have good rapport. If I stay through his whole show some nights, he comes offstage—I’ll go onstage with him and jam on “Whole Lotta Love.” It’s a great working relationship.

METAL ROOTS AND ALL THAT JAZZ

Krokus has been around awhile, doing metal. How do you feel about all these young upstart metal bands now making noise?

It’s a hard question to answer off the top of the head. There are things we do feel about it. We’ve been around a long time. Krokus—wherever that name came from, we don’t know since there are no original members left—has been around for seven years. There are three albums which are imports here on Phonogram, and another five on Arista, two on the

"Bands like Motley Crue and Ratt have a simple three-chord mentality and nonsensical lyrics.”

-Marc Storace British label and three with U.S. Arista, which shows the progression of how the band evolved from being a local Swiss band to being totally U.S.A. oriented, even as far as having two American musicians in the band. Jeff Klaven, our drummer, has been with us since January ’84 and he’s on the Blitz album and also helped me with some lyric writing, and Andy Tanas is our new bass player from California.

But I’d like to go back to the root of that question. I’d like to first go way back to when I bought my first Led Zeppelin album. Now Led Zeppelin, to me, are not heavy metal, they are a hard rock band with roots in blues and jazz. Then we go to a band like Judas Priest, who have their roots in blues and even some classical music, believe it or not. Judas Priest was, from the very beginning, a heavy metal band. They had that squareblock style of playing, which has no jazz in it. It’s very straight-forward, with the screaming and everything. I mean, Ian Gillan screamed with Deep Purple and they had some songs which sounded heavy metal but they had a mish-mash of everything in their music. The Who had some metal in their music, even. So bands like the Scorpions and Judas Priest carried on with that stuff, while Zeppelin ended up playing South American rock or whatever that was [note to readers: maybe he means Southern American rock, i.e., rockabilly, I never heard of South American rock before. Could this be a craze?] and the Who just mellowed out after Keith Moon died and lost that energy. But bands like Scorpions and Judas Priest kept on. And Krokus was going on seven years ago with it.

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So over the years, metal was becoming refined? It was becoming simplified. You see, albums are not made to be sold to musicians, they’re made to be sold to kids. So that’s why bands like Motley Crue and Ratt have such a simple three-chord mentality and nonsensical lyrics, which makes them easily accessible. But I don't see any future in bands of that style, which cannot broaden their horizon. You can only give the same thing for one to three years, then people burn out. How many melodies can you find on the same two chords? So in that respect, that’s where I find that Krokus has excelled. We held our ground and kept putting the melody into the music, never losing any balls, going for a more refined sound, especially on this new album. I think we achieved the best sound on this Blitz LP.

BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL

So what's your theory of why metal is so appealing to kids?

To me, it’s tribal. And primal—old jungle rhythms, that boom-boom-boom. It’s tribal and it’s a ritual that has—believe it or not—a spiritual context to it. For me, the ritual starts in the dressing room. It’s like a psyching up process to be clear, straightforward and simple in the way one talks to the audience and to get that to-and-for rapport the way the music is played. If you play too fast, you play over their heads. If you play too slow, it drags. And if you play right where it should be, in the middle, you reach them in their crotch, and that’s why I say it's like sex. I’m not saying it IS sex, but it’s like sex, the feelings you can compare. We’re talking psychology and I’m no psychiatrist, but this is the tribal thing. And there is good and bad. There’s the voodoo, the ju-ju shit, that evil stuff playing with people’s minds and that’s something that we don’t want to be part of. Hopefully the kids know that— and we are stressing that this year, the positive attitude'. There are enough bands dealing with that demonic stuff.

As a performer, do you sense that there are good and evil powers at your command?

If you bring them in, if you allow them entrance. If you allow yourself to meditate with the dark powers and, through yourself, let them be seen, they will be seen and people will react to them. There is a part of us that’s good and evil and hopefully most of the time it’s good and positive. That’s what we want to bring out in them, because day-to-day we are fighting this. We are human beings just like him and her. What we do out there, our job, is to create this escapism, without it leading to Darth Vader. You can feel much better when you’re headed in the other direction where it’s positive and the sun shines. There are times during the day that you need to see and imagine. When your fantasy takes over your reality, if you’ve played around with a positive one, then when you’re weak and your fantasy takes over you’re going to have all those positive cells stored inside of you, like a barricade against evil. That’s what I say is the spiritual side of what we do and what makes us do it.

EIGHTY-PROOF THROUGH THE NIGHT

How about the lifestyle of heavy metal fans? They’ve got a rap for being a bunch of boozedup zoners.

Yeah, well, I think there's a time of day to work, to be dedicated to something in life, to have a goal, to want to achieve something and have that physical energy, fit and strong in body and soul to deal with the day-to-day things. That does not mean you party and stay awake all night every night. We take it for granted that they have their life planned that way, so when we go onstage and say “Are you ready to stay awake all night?,” they’re ready to party. That’s the right direction. But not the self-destructive way, ever. A good time to work, a good time to play.